Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence

Geoff Dyer's study of D.H. Lawrence was conceived as a distraction. Dyer wanted to read Lawrence with a purpose. Preparation postponed the task. The Lawrence project was supposed to take him out of himself. Lawrence wasn't too keen on islands and Geoff Dyer isn't either. Dyer and Rilke both had difficulty doing nothing but work. To Dyer it seemed that making a start on the Lawrence book seemed more boring than doing nothing. After a moped accident and on the mend Dyer began to believe again in his Lawrence project. Huxley noted that Lawrence had a great responsiveness to the world. Dyer looked at pictures of Lawrence he had collected. The closer Lawrence came to dying, the more he looked like D.H. Lawrence. Dyer and his friend, Laura, traveled to Sicily, one of those touchy respect cultures. Geoff and Laura went to Villa Fontana Vecchia. There was a plaque. Dyer had driven to Eastwood. According to Lawrence the workers hungered for beauty. For Rilke the real work was to organize his existence, but not so for someone like John Updike who began his productive writing life early. Lawrence was untroubled by this sort of thing. His mature work was based upon his relationship with Frieda. Lawrence had found a home within himself as had Rodin. Reading Lawrence's letters was a perfect excuse for not writing the book. 'The Ship of Death' was written in autumn, 1929. The first intimation, though, came in 1913 in a letter to Edward Garnett. What we want years later is a Lawrence in the midst of his sensations. SEA AND SARDINIA has a note-like immediacy. The essence of Lawrence's writing and life moves in the opposite direction of achieving serenity. Lawrence wanted to turn his emotions into a philosophy. He shows it takes a daily effort to be free. For the writer work means the suspension of life. This postmodern treatment of Lawrence and the act of writing about him is very good.

This was simply the most entertaining book I have read in many a year! You should read it in private. Reading it in public, your uncontrollable laughter may cause you significant embarassment.

Art imitates life and Dyer tries to wrestle with both the need to write versus the need to experience; and by reflecting on both we simultaneously experience both. A wonderfully written, on the mark experience.

Out of Sheer Rage was a very entertaining. I heard the NPR interview with the author and went to find the book... It's not about Lawrence in the way that Watergate's not about Nixon. Mr. Dyer can document malaise like no other -- he has a strange obsessive way that puts him in sympathetic tandem with his subject. I still laugh when I think about Dyer's take on deconstruction early in the book, and his views of academia are dead on. Not to be forgotten, the travel aspect of this is great as well. The things that make Dyer funny and charming (or not, depending on your sense of humor) are also the reasons Dyer finds Lawrence funny and charming -- in his own cranky way. I too have no new desire to read Lawrence, but I can't wait to read more of Geoff Dyer.

Geoff Dyer has written a book that seems to create its own categories. Literary criticism, travellog, and a ranting confessional weave in and out, and the reader is swept into the writer's world. The minutae and day to day aggravations of the writer's life are given the spotlight, and one gets an intimate picture of how this incredibly creative mind can be frozen by the dizzying choices of the late 20th century world, grapple and struggle furiously and often compulsively with them, and ultimately produce something highly and hilariously original. I heard the author on a radio interview and went immediately to the nearest bookstore to pick up a copy. Before reading this book, ostensibly about D. H. Lawrence, it occurred to me that the fact that I had never read a word of D. H. Lawrence might detract from my enjoyment of the book. It didn't. Incidentally, I still have no inclination to read books by D.H.Lawrence, although I do want to read more books by Geoff Dyer.