Book Report: Out of Sheer Rage

27. Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence (1997) (5/16/21)

I first read Geoff Dyer a few years ago (my report of that book, White Sands, is here) and thoroughly enjoyed him. He's really smart, a bit neurotic, curious, and a good traveling companion. Recently I reread that book report and was reminded that I have other of Dyer's books—so I pulled this one out. There is a gap of twenty years between the two, and you can see the difference. In Out of Sheer Rage, written when he was in his late 30s, Dyer is full-blown neurotic—ostensibly working on a study of D. H. Lawrence, but . . . not really. Really what he's doing is interrogating the human condition: our obsessions, our insecurities, our waywardness, our yearnings, our torments. He does this by following in Lawrence's footsteps, going to places where DHL himself spent time: his family home in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire; Taormina, Sicily; Oaxaca; and Taos, New Mexico, where DHL's ashes rest. In between, Dyer finds himself, somewhat happily, in Paris, and, very much unhappily, in Rome and Oxford—or simply en route somewhere, in between. So like White Sands, this book becomes something of a travel book—only again, not really. He also reads (or avoids reading) Lawrence, as well as Rilke, Philip Larkin, Thomas Bernhard, Milan Kundera, and others, trying to get a handle on Lawrence's essence. Which ends up always coming back around to Dyer himself. At times he's very funny, at other times fretfully wise. Here are a couple of excerpts (out of many, many that I dogeared—to keep the selection from being entirely random, these are the first and the last that I flagged):

Here he is on a train, on the way to Siciliy:

I read [Lawrence's] Sea and Sardinia. More accurately, I read the first paragraph of Sea and Sardinia over and over until I felt sleepy. I loved the first sentence, its urgency of intention: 'Comes over one an absolute desire to move.' The sentence had ended, left, moved on, almost as soon as it had begun, while I, the diligent reader, was still checking that it had everything it needed to leave, to be a sentence. The whole of the first paragraph was like that, I thought to myself: a train that was moving out fractionally ahead of its appointed time, doors still ajar, leaving the reader running along after it, unsure where it was heading, but convinced of the need to climb aboard before it gathered too much momentum: 'Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.' It was only with that quaint 'whither' that we had the chance to gather our senses and settle down comfortably in our seats. I love that first paragraph, I thought to myself, sleepily. I resolved to look at it more closely, to discuss it 'at length' in my study of Lawrence, the study I was going to Sicily to research. In Rome I'd had that idea of putting together an album of pictures of Lawrence. I still wanted to do that but now, after reading a paragraph of Sea and Sardinia, I also wanted to do a series of travel sketches of places Lawrence had been, an album of travel pictures, I thought, sleepily. Came over me an absolute desire to sleep . . . I opened my eyes once before falling asleep and saw that [his girlfriend] Laura had fallen asleep, in fact everyone in the compartment was sleeping so that it seemed I was standing guard, falling asleep when I was meant to be keeping watch.
     I woke up, other people woke up or slept. I read, looked out of the window, slept, read, or dreamed I read and looked out of the window.

And here he is ruminating about depression and the possibility of "calling it a day, giving up, abandoning any attempt not just at earning a living but at having a life." Ah, but what then? If (short of death) you stop living one way, he observes, "you have to start living in some other way." But is that true?

Should anyone flatter us by asking what we are looking for, what we are searching for, then we think immediately, almost instinctively, in vast terms—God, fulfilment, love—but our lives are actually made up of lots of tiny searches for things like a CD we are not sick of, an out-of-print edition of [DHL's] Phoenix, a picture of Lawrence that I saw when I was seventeen, another identical pair of suede shoes to the ones I am wearing now, even, I suppose, a [breakfast favorite] cornetto integrale, ideally, a place where they serve perfect cornetti integrali each day without fail. Add them together and these little things make up an epic quest, more than enough for one lifetime. 

The details here are a few of the things he's obsessed over in the course of the book. Including, in the end, working on the study of D. H. Lawrence itself: accepting that the quirky passions that drive each of us are what make us who we are and complete us.