posted on 24 Sep 2018

Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer

When I last wrote here about Geoff Dyer – reviewing his book The Missing of the Somme – I said that over the past thirty years he has earned himself a reputation as one of the most deceptively hard-working slackers in literature. He writes a sort of restrained gonzo journalism of a very English kind that frequently revolves around his own failures and pratfalls in tackling the subject in hand.

Recently I managed to find a book of his that I have hunted for for some time – Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with DH Lawrence, which was published in 1997. Reading it over the weekend was extremely enjoyable – but it also made me reconsider some of the weaknesses of Dyer’s approach.

The first thing to be said, is that almost irrespective of the subject Dyer tackles, the man himself is almost always in the foreground. Your tolerance for this will vary depending on your tolerance for or admiration of Dyer. I admire him – grudgingly – because almost everything I have so far read by him I have finished thinking, ‘That was brilliant – but I could have written it.’ I couldn’t, of course, because I don’t have the time, or a publisher, or the determination; but what I mean is, his books always turn out to be the kind of book I imagine I could write.

The other problem is that what Dyer does is essentially a ‘routine’ (what W S Burroughs called his prose pieces, I believe) – a riff, a schtick, a spiel: it is delivered on the page but it could equally be delivered almost as stand-up comedy, at the microphone; it is a performance as much as it is literature, and sometimes – especially in Dyer’s case – it is an impersonation, or perhaps more charitably a homage. In the case of Out of Sheer Rage, this is a book about failing to write a study of DH Lawrence (which of course nonetheless turns out to be a sort of study of DH Lawrence, but one that is distinctly non-academic, which is Dyer’s avowed aim – academic critics exist to kill literature, he believes), but for some strange reason, Lawrence is not really the presiding genius, the ghost in the machine: that role goes to the great Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard.

If you’ve never read any Bernhard he is something of an acquired taste – but once acquired, there is no one quite like him, although he does have (as with Dyer) dedicated followers (WG Sebald was greatly influenced by Bernhard, for example).

Bernhard writes bitter, ranting, repetitive monologues in which pet hates or grudges (Austria, cradle of Nazism, modern life, illness, the excluded loner) are rehearsed in harsh, long looping sentences full of brilliant detail. The effect is claustrophobic, disorientating – but, most importantly, and often not mentioned, very funny (albeit what one might call corrosively funny).

And this is precisely what Dyer does in his book. At first, I found myself thinking – or at least nursing the suspicion – ‘this, surely, is pure Bernhard – or am I imagining it?’ Until quite late on in the book, the homage is made plain: on p.122 Dyer ranks Bernhard amongst his favourite novelists, partly, as he explains, because he prefers novelists whose work least resembles the conventional novel; and then on p.158 he expands on this, spotting affinities between Lawrence and Bernhard, as well, of course, as numerous affinities between himself and Lawrence and Bernhard, of a kind that he has been spotting (only half tongue-in-cheek) throughout the book.

Anyway, imagine (if you can, or if you wish) a book written by a catastrophically indecisive man who, as well as being chronically unable to make decisions and stick to them, is also locked in a bitter, obsessive, contradictory argument with himself. That essentially is Bernhard, and it is Dyer too – for Out of Sheer Rage is a book-length self-argument about the central importance, the primacy, of the genius of DH Lawrence, coupled with a desire to complete a book about Lawrence and therefore be released from ever having to read Lawrence ever again, or indeed from ever having to think about Lawrence again.

Now I have hinted twice that there is a problem with this kind of method but I still haven’t quite explained what that problem is. The problem with any kind of routine or spiel or riff – with any writing that is essentially a performance by an alter ego – is that it wears thin pretty quickly. And I’m afraid this is a danger that Dyer doesn’t avoid, and indeed cannot avoid, the more of it he does.

But what I will say in Dyer’s defence is this: he writes books that are funny, accomplished, crammed with ideas, often exhilarating, and rarely less than entertaining. But the strange thing is, when he abandons this method for ‘serious’ works – his big book about photography, for example, The Ongoing Moment (2005) – he becomes portentous and stodgy, all the fun and the savagery and the nutty ideas stripped out.

But Out of Sheer Rage is really quite brilliant. If you are a reader who wants an almost-study of Lawrence written by a writer who is almost Thomas Bernhard, in which the very idea of writing a book about DH Lawrence is ridiculed, but ultimately emerges as as good a way as any of holding human futility at bay, and which along the way has more than its share of laugh-out-loud moments, then you’ll enjoy Out of Sheer Rage. I know I did.

 

Alun Severn

September 2018