The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  For they were the gateway, he knew that, these Berbers, and would bring him to this boy with the name that meant angel, in this land where angels live among you and can be seen as light, where sometimes everything is light, all and only light and seeing. And where, at the same time, there was this, the world he had entered now, where you smelled the perfume of wisteria on one side of the street and on the other side the stink of a dead dog. And where, later, he knew, you could smell the night smell of the desert that lay further to the south, which was always the smell of shit and dust and nothing else. The world that looks back at you without pity, when you try to see it. What could change that, how could that be transformed, redeemed? This is what I have come to find out, behind the gaze of these desert men and in this Amazigh boy who has taken my mahfaza and yet has led me here to find everything that is not money—

  On the third day of looking, miles from the bordj and towards the bottom of a salty incline whose ridge the mule had brought him to, and suddenly, the man found the boy. He was squatting with his back to him, his cloak over his head and his chalwar pulled down. He was doing his daily business. The glisten of it at his heels, coiling on the dry, lifeless soil of the Hodna.

  Hamilton pulled the mule’s head away from the brink. He knew it could be anyone, this figure down there, but he also knew that he’d found him at last. How could it have been so easy? He’d just taken possession of him again, of Anir, the angel. What do you do with another being, when you own him like this? What is there to stop you? What is there to be stopped? What is the thing you intend to do, and is it really the thing you are beginning to think of?

  He remembered the old saying. A ripe pomegranate on the ground. Whoever picks you up can have you.

  Lawrence, Raymond Thomas

  1933–2007

  Author, Nobel Prize winner

  By G. S. Trott

  Biography

  Raymond Thomas Lawrence was born on 11 October 1933 at Springfield, North Canterbury, to Adam Raymond Lawrence, a farmer, and Beryl née Adams, who taught at the local primary school. A twin brother died at birth; there were no other siblings. He was home-schooled by his mother and at the local primary school till early teenage, after which he experienced five unhappy years at an exclusive boys’ school in Christchurch. From 1952 a further, similar and academically fruitless time was spent at the local university college, followed by a period in southern and south-east Asia, Europe, the Middle East and, at greatest length, North Africa, where he took part in the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) in the wilayat of Rabah Bitat and, later, that of Larbi Ben M’Hidi, both of these men important resistance leaders. Claims that he was in fact in the French Foreign Legion at this time and a part of the brutal repression of the uprising, and claims that he overstated and even entirely invented this period of his life, have been convincingly dismissed.

  His first novel Miss Furie’s Treasure Hunt (1960) was begun in these years and completed in London; it has been described as a perversion of the Hansel and Gretel story cast in domestic terms, and received strong responses, both positive and negative, from readers and literary critics. His second novel, Frighten Me (1965), although more nearly conventional, had a similar, if slightly more negative, reception; together with Flatland (1966) it follows the growth and maturation of its protagonist, Thomas Hamilton, a recurring and autobiographical figure in Lawrence’s oeuvre, as he moves to North Africa and becomes involved in a local war of independence there.

  After ten years spent travelling and teaching in North Africa and Europe, Lawrence returned to his home country in 1971. Natural Light (1973), his first short story collection, alternates stories set locally with others set in North Africa, exploring similarities and contrasts, not without ironic emphasis. The Outer Circle Transport Service (1976) is generally agreed to be the work in which he marks his break with Europe and his first commitment to what, in the title of a later novel, he would refer to as the ‘other-people’ of the world. It follows the fortunes of Julia Perdue, an ingenue and possibly the most attractive character in Lawrence’s writing, in her journey away from Western values and towards an understanding of the lives of the dispossessed. This protagonist returns in Bisque (1980), where she moves through a series of adventures on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza that slowly darken as she becomes involved with a former Nazi sympathiser and Franco supporter. The Long Run (1982), his second volume of stories, was well received, as was the satire Nineteen Forty-Eight (1984), which renders Orwell’s dystopia in everyday and localised terms while still using and developing his characters; this novel is widely acknowledged to be an outlier, however, in what seems now to be the inevitable progression of his oeuvre.

  Starting with Bisque, Lawrence’s next three novels are now widely acknowledged as the core of his achievement and the basis of his Nobel award. Kerr (1988), acknowledged as his masterwork, takes its eponymous protagonist on a raft journey inspired by the author’s own solo raft trip from North Africa to Ibiza in 1962. Its visionary conclusion and the question whether its protagonist has indeed survived the voyage are still debated by scholars. The Long Run (1992) reintroduces the figure of the youth Anir from Flatland, in what has been seen as an unexpected return to the Algeria of Lawrence’s earlier fiction, a country now transformed into a universal theatre of conflict and suffering without a necessarily specific geography. These themes were continued in Other-people (1996), whose Christian connotations and the links made in it between its protagonist and the historical figure of Christ have been widely noted; its extremely provocative final scenes continue to prove contentious and the novel continues to be Lawrence’s most-debated work of fiction.

  Following the announcement of his Parkinson’s disease, in 1996, some argued for a slight decline in the quality of Lawrence’s work. Mastering (1994) and Mistresses (1999) are short story collections mingling earlier and later interests; the slight unevenness of these was remarked on by some critics, though others saw both volumes as demonstrating the stylistic and thematic development of his oeuvre over many years. Constanze (2001), the last of his work published in his lifetime, revives the character of Julia Perdue as an older woman reminiscing about her life and has been seen as having strong autobiographical undertones; critics have remarked on the sexual ambiguity of his protagonist and the re-emergence of cross-dressing themes from the earlier ‘Julia novels’ as well as some of his other earlier and middle-period fiction.

  In 1976 The Outer Circle Transport Service was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the National Book Award. In 1981 Bisque won the National Book Award and was regionally shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. In 1989 Kerr, too, won the National Book Award and was regionally shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and for the Booker McConnell Prize in that year. Constanze was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2002. In 1995 Raymond Lawrence was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, for (in the words of his Citation) ‘the spontaneity and integrity with which [he] has shown what happens to the European mind far from home, and for his holding before our collective gaze the wretched of the earth’. His development and popularisation of anti-realist modes were also mentioned. In 1996 Raymond Lawrence was awarded the Order of Merit.

  The Raymond Lawrence Trust has published two of the writer’s posthumous works. Understanding the Cardinal (2009) collected further stories from earlier in Lawrence’s life, including what is now seen as his juvenilia, while The Back of His Head (2015) is noted for a distinctive change in the tone of Lawrence’s writing and for raising questions as to its authorship. Questions about the quality of these works and the appropriateness of their publication have been convincingly dismissed. Further posthumous publication is planned.

  Raymond Lawrence died in controversial circumstances on 14 June 2007, in an explosion on the city campus of the University of Canterbury which destroyed a number of buildings, including the creative writing school that had been named for him; seven young people als
o died in this disaster. This event was thought for some time to have been the work of agents from his Algerian period or elsewhere in the Middle East bent on assassination or by agents of the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE). A subsequent coronial enquiry identified its cause, however, as a fault in a gas supply. Cultic reports of Lawrence’s reappearance after this date have been convincingly dismissed.

  Raymond Lawrence remained unmarried throughout his life and had no issue, though he adopted his nephew and literary executor Peter Or as his son in 1992. He was involved in a number of significant relationships, with the painter Phyllis Button, the novelist Marjorie Swindells and others. The nature of his long relationship, revealed in Constanze and elsewhere, with the artist and poet Driss Dris Batuta (1940–1990), whom he first met in 1953 and to whom he returned regularly in Tangier, Morocco, is not known. His home on the Kashmir Hills in Christchurch was for forty years the focus of a group of writers, artists and intellectuals known for their exclusiveness. Maintained by the Raymond Lawrence Trust, the Raymond Lawrence Residence is open to the public daily from 10:00 a.m. in summer and 1:00 p.m. in winter. An admission fee is charged.

  Suggestions and sources:

  Trott, G. Raymond Lawrence: Years of Lightning. Bumpkin Press, 1983?

  Trott, G. The Raymond Lawrence Story. Hazard Press, 2015.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This novel’s first epigraph was accessed from the Paris Review: The Art of Fiction No. 91, on 2 November 2014; and the second from the Paris Review: The Art of Fiction No. 164, on 27 March 2015. Both interviews are by Sasha Guppy. Enquiry into possible plagiarisms of these writers by Raymond Lawrence is ongoing.

  More about the Scottish artist Ian Stevenson’s solo raft journey from Darwin to Timor in the summer of 1952 is in Michael Stevenson, ‘The gift’ (from ‘Argonauts of the Timor Sea’, 2004–06, accessed on YouTube, 7 December 2014). It is likely that Lawrence came across the newspaper item reporting Fairweather’s journey in a Brisbane newspaper while on the way back to North Africa in early 1953. Peter Orr’s evident ignorance of Stevenson’s remarkable work is regretted.

  Lawrence’s unacknowledged borrowings from Isabelle Eberhardt may be seen in The Oblivion Seekers and other writings, translated by Paul Bowles (London: Peter Owen, 1988), a collection of eleven of her stories and some diary entries. The volume incinerated by Orr and Yuile was probably an edition of Dans l’Ombre Chaude d’Islam (1920), an earlier version of The Oblivion Seekers mentioned in the introduction to that book. Peter Orr’s failure to remember the name of this tragic figure is regretted.

  Some of Raymond Lawrence’s taste in literary models is evident in his admiration of John Hopkins’s early fiction, The Attempt (1967) and Tangier Buzzless Flies (1972), which he first read in Tangier, where he knew Hopkins slightly. Interestingly, the ambiguously gendered character Hamid in the latter novel seems to be modelled on Eberhardt. Lawrence also recommended Hopkins’s The Tangier Diaries 1962–1979 (1995, 1998), which he greatly admired. Unacknowledged use of these and other Hopkins texts has been found in Kerr and other novels by Raymond Lawrence.

  Of Paul Bowles as a stylist Lawrence thought slightly more than he did of Hopkins, and as a humanist and diarist slightly less. He acknowledged Bowles’s influence in conveying something of North Africa to the page, and also in establishing, for the Westerner seeking ways to write about the Maghreb, a tactful respect for its invincible otherness. At the other end of the spectrum of style, Lawrence’s ongoing admiration for C.M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) is evident in the unacknowledged quotations from that work in his earlier writing.

  Lawrence’s attitude to violence and the dignity of the subaltern, expressed late in Orr’s account, suggests he knew Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963). His belief that a work of art conceals a crime suggests familiarity with Alain Robbe-Grillet’s theories of writing, while his account of his ‘birth’ at the hands of Berbers suggests a familiarity with the purported early life of the great German Bullshit Künstler Joseph Beuys, as well as with the film The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Lawrence’s claims about his Dodge suggest he might have seen Back to the Future (1985), too.

  Various artists have been obsessed with the colour blue over the years, and Orr names three of them late in this novel. Yves Klein’s obsession with devising a particular, ultramarine-based hue for his work led to the development of the colour International Klein Blue (Tanal Dukh, Klein: Internationaler coloriste, Cologne, 2001). Prior to Klein, the blue flower was a crucial symbol of the unattainable ideal in the German Romantic movement; it also appears in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem ‘Blue Hydrangea,’ in D.H. Lawrence’s novella The Fox (1922) and elsewhere. Raymond Lawrence was a great admirer of Penelope Fitzgerald’s extraordinary novel about Novalis and the German Romantics, The Blue Flower (1995), and deeply regretted that it appeared too late in his career to be fully appropriated by him. There are glimpses of it in his late novel Constanze, however, in the early description of washing drying on balconies and the theme of marrying into the ‘wrong’ class, as well as in occasional phrases.

  The cautionary tale of the turd and the orange peel was first heard by Raymond Lawrence in an academic paper delivered some years ago by Vincent O’Sullivan, who referred at the time to its origins in Robert Graves’s response, following a presentation at Oxford University, to a student who over-reached in the use of the word ‘we’ at question time. Elsewhere in the sentences of this novel about the provenance of writing in the written are the ghosts of many other writers, their themes, scenes, sentences and phrases dotted liberally throughout in a recurent hommage that awaits the reader’s delighted recognition. The vegetarian plight of the geriatric Lawrence and his meat-porn visits to the local butcher-shop, for example, echo Maurice Gee. The first reader to identify and report all such references will receive an autographed gift copy of Geneva Trott’s official biography The Raymond Lawrence Story (Hazard Press, 2015).

  The author has had much support in the writing of this book, including detailed feedback on drafts, and warmly thanks the following for their gifts to him: John Newton, Nicholas Wright, Mandala White, Andrew Dean, Simon Garrett, Jim Acheson, James Smithies, Nick Frost, Julia Allen, Robyn Toomath, Paul Millar, Nathan Evans, Reg Berry, and, for their early encouragement, Mark Williams, Carl Shuker and Carl Nixon. The author thanks Peter Steel for his advice on how to blow things up and Nicholas Wright for his advice on how to lift things up.

  There are special thanks due to Bruce Harding for introducing the author to the Ngaio Marsh Residence on the lower slopes of Christchurch’s Cashmere Hill. Anyone who has visited this beautifully preserved museum will realise that many of its details are appropriated in this novel, including the Japanese geisha screen that represents a brothel scene and the video-viewing session in the downstairs sunroom that begins the tour of each of the Residences, Marsh’s and Lawrence’s.

  Parts of The Back of His Head have been published, in SPORT 41 (2013) and Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, ‘Crime Across Cultures,’ vol. 13 No. 1 (2013), and acknowledgement is made to these publications. The author is grateful to Fergus Barrowman for getting the entire novel out of him through skilled use of the powers of suggestion, and to Ashleigh Young for her empathetic editing of the work. Once more, the process of publication has been a swift and pleasant experience for the author.

  Despite all this borrowing, The Back of His Head is not a roman à clef and all its characters are fully imagined and continue to lead private lives in cyberspace and the cultural imaginary alone. Had the author intended to refer to actual people past or present he would have made it evident that he was doing so. Those who think they see themselves in the novel’s pages can be assured they are taking themselves too seriously.

 

 

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