In This Case, Writer’s Block Became a Conduit for Creativity

You just might wrestle a pig out of the mud, but it is quite as likely that the pig will wrestle you into the mud. Geoff Dyer, a writer of fine but jittery sensibility, found himself in a state of personal and literary breakdown. He was beyond blocked; he was splintered. Accordingly, in the hope of grounding his out-of-control fancifulness, he decided to attempt, or so he tells us, a sober academic study of D.H. Lawrence.

But, “conceived as a distraction, it immediately took on the distracted character of that from which it was intended to be a distraction, namely myself.” Dyer ended up applying himself “to pulling apart the thing, the book, that was intended to make me pull myself together.”

The Lawrence project was intended to rescue Dyer from the floating complexities of a novel he did not really want to write. For a while he juggled the two, but they canceled each other out. “I went from making notes on Lawrence to making notes for my novel, by which I mean I went from not working on my book on Lawrence to not working on my novel.” He kept switching back and forth between two computer files, both of which were empty.

Finally, he decided to concentrate on not writing about Lawrence. Immediately, he shifted the locus of indecision to deciding where he was going not to write it. We get a succession of moves and a close reasoning on why they were necessary and impossible.

Paris, for instance, was right as long as it seemed he would have to leave; once it seemed he could stay, it was wrong. A Greek island, whose peacefulness made it a perfect place to write, was, for that reason, an impossible place to write; accordingly, he raced around on a moped with his long-suffering girlfriend, Laura, riding behind and smashed them both into a wall. He bought a place in Oxford because in Rome he had hankered for British telly; once installed, he not only did not watch it but hankered for Rome.

At this point in a review that Dyer has all but spooked me into not writing, the reader may suspect that “Out of Sheer Rage” is about something other than Lawrence or Not Lawrence. (In fact, we get a fair amount of Lawrence, particularly his nervous irritability.)

Its real point is Dyer’s roundabout, tricky, discursive and often witty ramblings on what it means to make a work of art or even an artistic statement in a postmodern culture. The artist “I” of the aborted novel, and even the essayist “I” of the perpetually distracted Lawrence study, are subverted by a twitchy, self-absorbed mini-ego for whom the production of art and scholarship, like jogging, figures as an exercise that arrives nowhere but may make you feel better.

In the last of a succession of riffs and asides, he suggests, for example, that it is advisable to attempt something like the Lawrence project because it makes slacking off--in this case listening to CDs--guiltily enjoyable. Otherwise they cloy. Frequently, he says, he was tempted to give up the project but asked himself what he would do afterward.

Dyer arranges such thought around an amiable series of travels, encounters and reflections, each of which more or less sabotages itself. He does, indeed, admire Lawrence, though he doesn’t much care for his fiction; it is his letters, notebooks and travel pieces that he most admires. He wanted to touch not the art but the artist--a highbrow version of the celebrity cult--and he travels to track him. In Taos, he finds a broom on the porch of the house where Lawrence lived; he grabs it and sweeps. For him, sweeping is better than reading “Women in Love” and “The Rainbow” combined.

Dyer is a fine writer, and sometimes the writing digresses from his paradoxes. He invokes the stagnant griminess of Lawrence’s Midlands, where outdoors feels as cramped as indoors. In the shouted conversations between marketplace stalls in Sicily, he notes the roots of opera (addressing at a distance) and its contemporary version in the addiction to the cell phone. Envying painters their greater exposure to physical reality, he remarks that “the writer’s office or study will increasingly resemble the customer service desk of an ailing business. The artist’s studio, though, is what it has always been: an erotic space.”

As for the paradoxes, they flutter bravely for a while and lose altitude. A book about the impossibility of writing a book has a perilous quality, rather like sawing at the branch on which you are--or the reader is--sitting; especially when it grows out too long.