Give Me Everything You Have

Part II: Axes

But having brought the story to this point, I must now commit the cardinal narrative sin of going backward instead of plunging conventionally forward. I do this because, inexplicable as Nasreen’s actions ultimately seemed, I consider myself under an obligation to do everything in my power to account for them, and because I am aware that, in the interest of describing a complicated situation as quickly as possible, I have left things unsaid and failed to examine certain aspects of the situation as thoroughly as I should.

First of all, there is the question of the classroom.

I described Nasreen’s reaction to my praise of her writing as “unflustered,” and so it appeared at the time. But of course it could not have been anything of the kind. When you have as much at stake as students do in these expensive, highly competitive programs, you are not going to be “unflustered” by your teacher’s enthusiasm, however confident you may be in your abilities. I know this from my own experience. I studied English literature at university. There were no creative-writing classes on offer, but my tutor was a well-known poet and one day I plucked up the courage to hand him a sheaf of my poems. He was reluctant to take them, but a few weeks later I received a letter from him in which he praised them and encouraged me to go on writing. His words had a powerful, really almost a shattering, impact on me, one symptom of which was that for a very long time I was unable to relate to him as a normal human being. Having never been daunted by him before (or no more than any student is by their tutor), I suddenly found it hard to talk to him. I became nervous and awkward. Every exchange between us left me feeling anxious that I’d said something crass or offensive that would forfeit his good opinion. By giving me explicit authorization to think of myself as a writer, he had become entangled in my fate, which in turn had imbued him-or, more precisely, caused my mind to flood its image of him-with godlike powers.

So I have to assume, or at least admit the possibility, that Nasreen had in fact been highly flustered by my admiration and that, as with my tutor, the experience had transformed me from a teacher respected merely out of convention into a figure of heightened power, similarly implicated in her fate; similarly crowned, robed, and enthroned in her imagination. It’s hard, almost impossible, for me to accept that such a version of myself, so unlike my own version of myself, could really exist in anybody’s mind. But other than having to share the same physical appearance, there is no reason why other people’s versions of oneself should bear a complete or even a remote resemblance to one’s own. To repeat the words I myself quoted to Nasreen from George Eliot: “The last thing we learn in life is our effect on other people.”

Next, there is the question of the “fiancé.”

I had been struck by the word-the word itself-when she had used it, charmed by its old-fashioned aura, but I had given little thought to the drama of human embroilment it actually denoted. Even when the engagement ended, I had been more interested in her manner of disclosing the news (“I can’t marry A-”)-which had seemed to confirm my sense of her as someone who valued a certain reserve when it came to discussing personal matters-than in the news itself.

What I didn’t consider, and no doubt should have even though I wasn’t being invited to, was that she might have been traumatized by the breakup. As far as I understood, she had been the one to end it, but maybe she wasn’t, and even if she was, she might well have been experiencing feelings of disappointment, failure, even the anguish of sexual jealousy that can afflict jilter and jilted alike in any breakup. People are always in various stages of various different dramas when you encounter them: freshly embarked on some, halfway or more through others. One is always approaching the denouement of this or that subplot of one’s life. And you, the stranger, entering the picture in all your blundering innocence, may well be the catalyst for some long-awaited climax, or the last in a series of minor but incessantly accumulating, and finally backbreaking, straws. Especially if you have done something to engage the interest of that person. We are quick to incorporate other people into our dramas if they “interest” us. It happens without thinking.

So that I now have to place that enhanced, glamorized version of myself not in some otherwise calm and neutral context, but in a context of already intense emotional upheaval. Just as the fiancé disappears (whether banished or withdrawing), leaving behind a lover-shaped void in Nasreen’s psyche, so this semi-hallucinated image of myself reemerges in her life, already cloaked in the authority of his prior role as her approving teacher and now, as he deigns to enter into correspondence with her on equal terms, unwittingly making himself a natural target for the projection of further imaginary garlands and embellishments.

Pure conjecture, of course, and it feels very strange to be talking about myself as this supernatural figure, but it does go some way to explaining the early, relatively harmless phase of her interest in me. The flirting, the nervous self-commentary, the strange outburst of jealousy concerning her former classmate, all make a bit more sense in the light of this boosted, exaggerated version of reality.

And finally I must go back to that momentous yet oddly muted meeting of ours at the café-’sNice-where Nasreen came to give me her manuscript. Her subdued manner (in sharp contrast to the exuberant emails she had been sending) seems, in the light of these suppositions, less that of an innate “reticence” than of the tongue-tied devotee overwhelmed by the presence of the object of both her reverence and her desire. In which case, as I begin blathering on about my apartment and the problem of finding another subtenant to share it with, it becomes possible, just, to imagine her in a state of confusion in which the distorting forces of merciless self-doubt and groundless optimism (both of which, from my own experience, form part of the turbulent atmosphere of an infatuation) mingle in such a way as to make her believe I am hinting that I would like her to become my subtenant, my secret apartment-sharer, with all the erotic promise such a hint implies, and thereby confirming her strong wish, her determination one might almost say, that I should be as interested in her as she is in me.

Whether or not this in fact represents what she believed at the time, later emails indicate that she subsequently decided to interpret my words in this way. But I’m inclined to think it was what she believed at the time. A firm belief in the existence of a reciprocal erotic attraction between us would explain her curious insistence that I was in love with her and unhappily married, despite my very clear assurances to the contrary, and would further account for her jealousy of her classmate, not to mention her delirious reaction to my question about veils.

So much for Nasreen’s possible versions of me and the role these might have played in preparing the events that followed. But what of the role played by my versions of her? Did I bring nothing to the encounter, no half-finished narratives of my own, into which I might have knowingly or unknowingly incorporated her? Was I an objective, impartial observer, a purely neutral participant in those early months of our exchange?

I was not. Nobody ever is.

I mentioned a cross-country train ride that I took in the summer of 2006. This too was an event I perhaps glossed over a little hastily, especially given Nasreen’s suggestion that I smuggle her along for the ride in my “roomette.” Not that anything very dramatic happened on the journey, but it occurs to me that it might lend itself to the difficult task I now face of providing some kind of self-portrait, or at least an account of the various strivings and vexations that comprised my sense of who and what I was during that first phase of my encounter with Nasreen, and of what I myself brought to the encounter.

The purpose of my trip was to get to L.A., where I had a journalistic assignment. I could have flown, but I had some time on my hands and wanted to see some of the country. Originally I had planned to go by Greyhound bus, but then I found out about the much more comfortable-sounding Superliners and decided to go by train instead. I had also discovered that one of the routes I could choose from passed through Santa Fe, which would allow me to visit the Kiowa Ranch, where D. H. Lawrence lived on and off during the last years of his life and where his ashes were brought after he died. Lawrence’s novella St. Mawr, to which I had recently written an introduction, is partly set at the ranch, and I was curious to see the place.

The journey begins on June 8, which happens to be my forty-eighth birthday. The first night is on a regular train from Albany to Chicago (the Superliners don’t come east of Chicago). The train is full-reservations only and no double seats available. I find myself next to a man in a linen jacket, wearing strong cologne. For an hour or so I pore over The New York Times and the London Review of Books: an article about an ocean of sand spreading across western China; a profile of Abu al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq who was killed yesterday by American forces; a story about a British subject tortured by the CIA with the apparent consent of MI5 agents, who visited him in his cell but did nothing to help.

A cell phone starts flashing through the breast pocket of my neighbor’s jacket. He pulls it out and answers it, speaking at high speed in a language I don’t understand.

I wander up to the café car and eat dinner. Back in my seat I take out a notebook and start working on a poem. It’s about my father; one of several I have been trying to write since his death a few years ago, most of them in one way or another airing both my grief and my sense of the paltriness of my accomplishments compared with his (at my age he was designing, among other things, Britain’s National Theatre). In this one I am trying to do something with an image of the invasive red-berried vine called bittersweet that has come in under the fence of my vegetable garden. When I started pulling it out I saw that it had spread dense clusters of tiny red roots deep into the garden itself and was going to be extremely difficult to get rid of. The sight of these roots had made me think of the dark crimson capillaries in my father’s high-colored cheeks (he looked like a freshly shaved Father Christmas), which in turn made me think of his presence in my mind, as warmly vivid since his death as it was when he was alive, and in particular of the conviction he appears to have bequeathed me that the only thing worth doing in life is to create art: high, serious art, uncompromised by any conscious striving for worldly success (a conviction that would be a lot easier to live with if he had also passed on the genius necessary to put it into practice).

I write the following lines (and I permit myself the bad form of quoting my own words because they too are in due course to become exhibits in my antagonist’s indictment against me, her fugue of hatred, though it may be puzzling, just now, for the reader to understand how they could ever lend themselves to such a use):

In your book, success

was a dirty word, wealth

even dirtier, fame

not to be uttered;

the work was all that mattered.

I took that to heart I guess,

in my own monkish fashion:

“So much to say no to

before you can start to say yes”

having long been my motto.

No, for instance,

to the bittersweet

I’m trying to extirpate

from under the garden fence…

At which point, having been fairly pleased with my progress, I succumb to doubts. Why should anyone but me be interested in these intimate, personal matters? Shouldn’t I be addressing the kinds of self-evidently important subjects I was reading about in the papers earlier on?

It is a recurrent anxiety of mine, this fear of irrelevance, and I have no argument against it other than the fact, hardly an argument, that sometimes the urge to write these very private things is stronger than the doubts about whether they are worth writing. Right now, the doubts have become stronger than the urge and I close my notebook. Gazing out past my cologne-scented neighbor at twilit pastures, I try to salvage the wasted time by cooking up a story in my head that will involve terrorists, CIA torturers, MI5 observers, and a showdown in the sand-drowned landscapes of western China. It seems to me that if I was to make a concerted effort-read some books, maybe take a research trip-I could possibly come up with something. But for reasons I don’t fully understand I have a strong private taboo against such exercises: stories that owe their existence to an act of will rather than an irresistible internal necessity. What I would like ideally (embarrassing as it is to admit to such yearnings) would be for precisely that force, that “irresistible internal necessity,” to compel me to write about those large subjects instead of the subjects it does compel me to write about, though for this to happen, an event from that larger world would have to impinge directly on my life, and for that to happen I must either venture out of my fortress in the hope of something befalling me, or else wait patiently for someone or something to burst in through my door. The latter seems to me the more honorable option, but it requires more faith than I possess (why should any large subject come to my door?), and so I go out from time to time, as I am now: reluctantly, and full of misgivings about the validity of even so passive an exercise in self-exposure.

My neighbor glances at me. Seeing that I am doing nothing, he strikes up conversation. He is traveling to Toledo, he tells me, where he owns a men’s clothing store. His voice, now that he is speaking English, is deep and mellifluous. Memory wants to place a mustache on his lip, but I took notes about his appearance and there is no record of a mustache. He is square-shouldered with large, square-tipped, well-manicured hands and neatly brushed black hair. A faintly dissatisfied expression hovers over him as we talk, the ghost of a frown at his dark brow, as if he is contemplating some vague, constant grievance while simultaneously trying to dismiss it.

He was born in Egypt, he tells me, and lived for several years in Europe-Belgium, Germany, Romania-before moving to the States. I remark that it must be hard, right now, being an Egyptian in America. He shrugs, not disagreeing but not, apparently, regarding the matter as of any great importance. But then he nods. Yes, it can be hard, sometimes, but it’s still a better life here than anywhere else. In Europe, he says, people wouldn’t speak to him. His phrase has a dignified pathos about it: “They did not want to speak to me.”

Darkness has fallen and the passengers in the seats around us are preparing for sleep: spreading coats on their knees, turning off overhead lights. Suddenly a blue blaze flashes from my neighbor’s chest: the phone in his breast pocket pulsating again, brighter now, in the dimming carriage-a strange sight, as if his heart were throbbing with light. He answers it, speaking again at high speed in that harsh tongue-Egyptian Arabic presumably-that sounds to me like some plectrumed instrument being played with sudden, savage virtuosity. Listening, noting my own reactions, I remember the words of Frantz Fanon, drilled into me by an idealistic schoolteacher: “It is necessary at all times and in all places to make explicit, to demystify, and to harry the insult to mankind that exists in oneself.” Well, I have made explicit to the best of my ability, I have demystified and diligently harried, but there are still things that evade my precautions, and the sounds of certain languages appear to be among them. I don’t think I am alone in this. My own language, the Queen’s English, is well-known to strike the ear of many people as intrinsically offensive; the aural essence of officiousness and pomposity. And it isn’t that I find my neighbor’s language offensive; as a matter of fact I find it enviably expressive, but try as I might I cannot dispel the impression it arouses in me of violent emotion, as if in switching to it the man has jumped from the bland, have-a-nice-day conventions of American social interaction into a world of operatic amazements and outrages, every word its own little melodrama. Or as if the language were a force in itself, expressing its character through the man, making him its instrument. And at a certain point my mind, acting in that solicitously associative manner mimicked so cleverly by online shopping sites (“since you looked at this you may also be interested in this”), calls up for consideration the stories I was reading earlier, about Abu al-Zarqawi, killed yesterday with his wife and child, and before I can catch myself (the mind has a mind of its own) I am back in the nightmarish aura of this figure who kidnapped and cut off the head of the American businessman Nicholas Berg with a knife while he-al-Zarqawi-and his four cohorts in ski masks and shemaghs shouted Allahu Akbar, God is Great, after which they posted a video online of the butchering, complete with the victim’s screams, bearing the title “Abu Musa’b al-Zarqawi Slaughters an American.” It isn’t difficult to understand how a person becomes a terrorist: how, under what conditions, one might contemplate killing the representatives, military or even civilian, of forces fundamentally opposed to one’s own existence. But to fall on the neck of a captive human being and hack off his head with a knife while he screams; to make yourself into the throat-ripping fiend of primeval nightmare, the crouching, leaping enemy of man, and then blazon images of the deed across the Internet; that would seem to shift the terms of conflict altogether out of the plane of human meaning-politics or even war-into some non-human dimension, bestial but also demonological, something like that realm of frenzied encounter imagined by medieval painters in their depictions of hell, the sinners torn apart by devils, the devils no less tormented-looking than their victims.

The phone call ends. We resume our conversation for a while, and then he yawns and closes his eyes and falls asleep.

In the small hours of the night we are woken-he and I-by federal agents carrying long black flashlights. They want our IDs, just his and mine. We hand them our driver’s licenses. After inspecting them and asking some cursory questions about our respective journeys, they leave. It is no big deal and neither of us makes any comment. But someone in our compartment must have alerted the guard to the presence of suspicious Middle Easterners on the train, presumably after hearing the man talk on the phone. Whoever it was apparently considered me just as suspicious as him, and I am glad of this, but even so I feel implicated: embarrassed and a little ashamed of what was going on in my mind while he was talking, the feverish drift of my thoughts, and as he returns his driver’s license to his wallet and buttons up his linen jacket again, I find myself attributing that restless, faintly injured look of his to an intuition about the nature of those thoughts, the way I mingled his image with that of the terrorist al-Zarqawi. One has no control over the use other people make of one’s image or the sound of one’s voice or any other outward manifestation of oneself. It is purely a matter of trust, and I feel, vaguely, that I have betrayed that trust. And I find myself wondering about some of the attitudes that survive in my mind: ruins of ancient prejudices, inactive but disturbing to encounter, like the decommissioned artillery emplacements we came across the following year in France, steel and concrete structures left behind by Mussolini’s army in the woods above the Roya Valley in Provence, ilex growing out of the gun embrasures, earth silting up the inner chambers.

At 5:00 a.m. we pass oil refineries glittering in the dawn light, their domed tanks and flaring towers filigreed over in silver pipes, and then cross the Maumee River into Toledo, where my neighbor gets off, frowning again as he nods goodbye.

A woman takes his place. Fifties, puffy-eyed, eager to talk. She’s on her way to a blues festival in Grant Park, tremendously excited about it. She works in a Michelin factory, also a source of great excitement (she’s a type I’ve encountered before in America: the exuberant self-spokesperson who addresses you as if from an inner press conference in which you are the horde of journalists besieging her with questions). “I used to build tires,” she informs me. “Anymore I mainly just balance ’em.” She has two years to retirement, after which she plans to move somewhere with a better climate, “somewhere you don’t can get sunburnt and frostbit on the same day.” Noting her way with words, and mindful of my professional obligation to be interested in such things, I try to keep up a conversation with her, but I am still drowsy and there is something encroaching on my thoughts, some presence drawing them toward it, and I begin to feel my attention drifting.

I close my eyes. The feeling of being able to go back to sleep in the morning, after you have woken up, is one I associate with being young, when it was followed by my most memorably pleasant dreams: dreams of flying and then, later, erotic dreams. Even now it is a time of unguarded semiconsciousness, and I am only half aware that the presence drawing me pleasantly toward itself is Nasreen’s.

A sexual overture, however firmly resisted, is registered in a part of the psyche that has no interest at all in propriety or fidelity or any other such considerations. If the person making the overture is attractive and interesting, then that part of the psyche regards it as a matter of course that you will go ahead and sleep with them, and in fact regards it as a deeply unnatural act to choose not to. Monogamous relationships require such unnatural acts to be committed from time to time, and so this is nothing new to me. But they have their reverberations nevertheless, and as daybreak rouses me out of this half sleep, a thought I have been reluctant to acknowledge comes to me with sharp clarity, which is that if I had not been married, or if I had been less than happily immured in my own domestic existence, things might have developed in a very different way between me and Nasreen. It makes me wince a little to acknowledge this. But now, as I disentangle myself from her image, or the image I have created of her, I realize that the offer implicit in her suggestion that I bring her along for this journey, however jokey its intent, has had other effects besides making me feel that the time has come to be, as I had put it to myself, “more explicitly discouraging.” It has made me susceptible to her as an object of fantasy.

I have three hours to kill in Chicago. I’ve never been here before, but I feel a connection to the place via my father’s enthusiasm for it (the same kind of half-real, half-spurious connection I feel toward Persian culture). He came here on a honeymoon tour of America with my mother and was smitten by Louis Sullivan’s skyscrapers, so much so that by the time I was born, the phrase “Louis Sullivan’s skyscrapers in Chicago” had become a permanent part of the verbal furniture of our household, and I grew up as familiar with it as I was with our sofas and chairs. At school or other places where I might want to impress people with my worldliness and culture I would casually utter it-Louis Sullivan’s skyscrapers in Chicago-as if I had a natural right to speak of these buildings with my father’s warmly proprietorial affection.

But in fact I have no idea which of these tall buildings surrounding me are Louis Sullivan’s skyscrapers, and anyway the truth is I am not at ease thinking about architecture at all. Though he was the soul of tolerance in most respects, my father was something of a tyrant when it came to the visual arts, and I am still afraid of liking things he might turn out to despise (I was under a cloud for several years as a small boy for liking the garden gnomes outside a suburban house in Surrey), so I tend to wander around towns and cities in a state of paralyzed judgment, aesthetically speaking, while other kinds of judgments and observations seethe inside me with a compensatory hyperactivity. To me, the half square mile of Chicago I explore feels much like other midwestern cities I have visited-Minneapolis, Pittsburgh-the same gleaming blocks and towers with their chain restaurants and stores and cafés, all glazed in the peculiar high polish of the contemporary American mainstream that elides the buildings with the food, the commercial music, the movies, the magazines, in a single expression of the collective human will at its most dazzlingly efficient, which also, alas, by some odd quirk in the laws of existence, appears to be its most spirit-numbing, a reflection that surprises me as it breaks to the surface inside me, though before I can pursue it any distance I find myself brought up short by the familiar downward slippage in the tenor of my thoughts, and instead begin to question why so much of what I experience these days takes on this negated aspect; why, as I had put it in the poem I was trying to write (before it too became a victim of the very tendency it was trying to articulate), there seems to me to be “so much to say no to / before you can start to say yes.” Or why, at least, this capacity for negation and rejection is not matched by an equal capacity for being gladdened and excited by things, as my father was, right to the end of his life. (The day he died, lying in hospital with pneumonia, he repeatedly asked his doctor if there was a chance, “a sporting chance,” that he might be able to take the trip he and my mother had arranged for the following week, to visit the castles of Oman.) I grew up expecting to be just like him, but I seem to be evolving in a different direction. In the past decade, especially, the spectrum of things capable of arousing a comparable enthusiasm in me seems to have narrowed steadily. Family, friends, a few books… not much else. And the things that do excite me tend to do so for reasons that seem vaguely pathological, morbid rather than uplifting; the interest itself more a state of passive enthrallment than a matching, reciprocal energy. All decompositional forms and textures fascinate me-ruins, fall foliage, corrosion patterns, freaks and excesses of collapsing societies, stories of self-destruction through alcohol, drugs, sex-and I have come to think that I belong to the category of creatures that have an innate, organic affinity with the downward stroke of nature, the implosive cycle. The Zoroastrian religion of ancient Persia divided all phenomena into those that belonged to the creator, Ormuzd, and those that belonged to the destroyer, Ahriman. Bulls and fresh water belonged to Ormuzd; vultures, crocodiles, and salt water to Ahriman. We grow up wanting to be creatures of Ormuzd, or I did: the writers I admired most at university, and still do-Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence-were celebrators of life, growth, vitality, and my ambition was to be their heir. But what I look at so admiringly through their eyes has a way of turning to ashes when I look at it through my own. While I am reading, for instance, Lawrence’s story “Sun,” in which a woman is liberated from the grayness of her domestic life in New York by a trip to Sicily, where she spends day after day lying naked in the sun, I am caught up unresistingly in the woman’s ecstatic inner awakening. But after I have finished, a weariness comes over me and all I can think of is UV rays and ozone depletion and skin cancer. Even without such obvious grounds for skepticism, I find, when it comes to it, a layer of indifference between myself and the things I too would like to celebrate; a barrier that requires more and more effort to surmount. In this respect I tell myself I am, if nothing else, authentically of my time. Because if we are entering an age of losses, extinctions, elemental poisonings, gigantic simplifications and erasures-an entire age of Ahriman, in fact-then indifference would seem to be a necessary adaptive trait.

(I record these meanderings purely for the sake of the self-portrait that I am trying to paint here. They were the things that preoccupied me at that particular time.)

My Superliner, the Southwest Chief, is ready to board when I get back to the station. The chain of double-decker carriages lies along the platform like a glittering, recumbent blue-and-silver dragon, snoring in its berth. Childishly, I hope I am on the upper floor, and I am. My roomette is about seven feet long and three feet deep, with two seats facing each other beside a large window. The ends of the seats slide together to form a bed, and there is another bunk that folds down from the ceiling. It is functional but snug, something between a ship’s cabin and a space capsule, with built-in drink holders and coat hangers and spotlights and a curtaining door that folds away into itself. I settle in with a feeling of pleasant loneliness and apprehension, as if I am embarking on something more unpredictable than a voyage along fixed steel rails.

We depart in the mid-afternoon, a slow grind through Chicago’s suburbs and exurbs: Naperville, Mendota-places with names but no gaps between them, only denser entanglements of highways curling like gigantic spilt film reels. Miles and miles of new housing flow by in different stages of development: skeletons of golden lumber, entire half-finished towns wrapped in Tyvek, spanking new McMansions with their turrets and buttresses freshly painted mint and strawberry. These in particular, these kingly existences-in-waiting, acquire in recollection a look of melancholy eagerness as they stand in readiness to be owned and entered (melancholy because they may still be waiting: four years later, as I write, the economy is in ruins and everywhere you see unbought constructions from that time fading together in disappointed groups, dust in their virginal windows, the old meadows, of which they were, as the phrase goes, the “last harvest,” springing back up as crabgrass and goldenrod through cracks in their unused driveways).

It takes two hours before intervals of undeveloped land begin to appear, odd-looking at first, like oversights on the part of local planners, until, slowly, it’s the factories and suburban houses that begin to look out of place, and then, as the evening comes in yellow and warm through the window, we curve out into the flat immensity of the prairie.

My phone rings: my son calling to say goodnight. Augustus (I’ll call him that) is six. Our relationship is largely physical: mainly he likes to hurl himself at me with flailing fists and then be turned upside down and swung around in circles. But he also likes to be read to, and for the past year I have been reading Tintin to him. I was a devoted reader of these books throughout my childhood and well into my adolescence, and even now my enjoyment of them is of a primary, rather than a nostalgic, nature. The line drawings seem richer every time I look at them, especially the night scenes with ocean liners or cars defined as solid blocks of black on midnight blue, backlit or shot through with yellow electric light, and the stories-comic, adventure-filled, but anchored in lovingly observed human behavior-still move me.

But what has made the books so enduringly appealing to me is, I think, a purely accidental quality: the way their apparent Englishness is overlaid on an ineradicable foreignness. I had no idea the books were translations when I first started reading them, and by the time I discovered they were, it was too late for me to stop thinking of Tintin and his companions as English: English in a way that was at once deeply strange and soothingly familiar. They spoke English; their streets and signposts had English names; the countryside around Captain Haddock’s home, Marlinspike Hall, looked just like the countryside around my parents’ cottage in Sussex with its spinneys and dovetailing fields. But of course they were all merely “passing” as English. Marlinspike Hall made a highly dubious English stately home, being, of course, a French château. The cars were on the wrong side of the road and as foreign-looking as the Citroën Safari my father drove through the lanes of Sussex, all curving proboscis. The policemen, when they arrived on the scene, wore odd, diminutive képis on their heads instead of proper bobbies’ helmets, and there were stripes down the sides of their trousers.

As the son of Jews who had joined the Church of England and then lapsed from that and now saw themselves as not quite English without being unimpeachably Jewish either, I was highly susceptible to these images of cheerfully imperfect assimilation. I felt at home in the not-quite-England they depicted, in a way that I never quite did in the real England, where, at the schools I attended, being of Jewish descent was more like a mild disability than something to be proud of or even indifferent toward.

None of which is of any consequence to Augustus, thank God, who likes the books for straightforward reasons, above all Captain Haddock’s torrents of invective, which he reproduces faithfully at the top of his voice all day as he runs around the house: Pockmark! Jellyfish! Bashi-bazouk! (Now, older, he does the same, only with rap lyrics, inserting a silent beat for the “fucker” part of “motherfucker” if he thinks an adult may be listening, so that the songs sound like strange, hiccuping incantations to his mother.)

Since I can’t read to him this evening, we talk about the books instead. I tell him I’ve just been in Chicago, the main setting for Tintin in America. It occurs to me that the developments I passed through earlier, with their look of having sprung up overnight, are just like the town Tintin passes through in that book, the one that springs up instantaneously around an oil prospector’s freshly discovered gusher: banks and hotels fully built by noon, traffic lights, cops, and zoning ordinances in place by mid-afternoon. But he is less interested in my analogy than I am and soon interrupts me, speaking in a Chinese accent, or at least his version of my version of a Chinese accent:

“I am going to cut off your head.”

The phrase startles me, though I recognize it at once. It comes from our favorite Tintin book, The Blue Lotus, or, as I have somehow permitted myself to call it, The Brue Rotus; regressing, in my son’s company, to the soft racism that pervaded the world of my own childhood, where nobody thought twice about mimicking foreign accents for a cheap laugh. The Tintin books, being all about encounters with foreigners, encourage this kind of low humor when it comes to reading them aloud. They contain a great deal of the comic racial stereotyping characteristic of their time. Being of my own time, I have felt obliged to talk about this with my son, explaining to him that the comedy is okay only because it is directed equally at all cultures, including Tintin’s own, and because it is also largely without malice.

I eat a dinner of roast chicken and green beans, then sit for a while in the Observation Lounge, a glass-walled car with seats angled along the sides for optimal viewing.

We have entered a realm of white clapboard farmhouses, each grouped with its barn and silos in a palisade of shade trees, each surrounded by flat, immaculately tended fields of crops. The image repeats itself for mile after mile: farmstead and fields, farmstead and fields, the conformity of the pattern almost as impressive as its extent, as if some gigantic roll of wallpaper were unfurling at the same speed as our train, imposing its slightly surreal pastoral vision over the world with a gently irresistible power, like the power of sleep.

I am going to cut off your head…

My son’s unabashed Oedipal exuberance comes back to me as I stare out. Something, some connected thought or memory, seems to be hovering behind the phrase, but I can’t immediately grasp it.

I do remember that the words are spoken by a pleasant, educated young man, the son of Tintin’s Chinese friend Mr. Wang, who has been sent by his father to protect Tintin in Shanghai but has been poisoned with Rajaijah juice on his way.

Rajaijah juice is the poison of madness. It releases impulses of a violent but also childish nature (victims are as likely to spout nonsense or tweet like a bird as attempt to behead someone), and it is irreversible. I recall the picture of the sword-wielding young man in his tunic and skullcap, grinning cheerfully as he grabs Tintin by the shoulder and tells him: I am going to cut off your head…

The phrase revolves in my mind, trailing various associations. Abu al-Zarqawi, of course, and the many other educated young men you read about all the time now who have drunk the poison of madness and slipped back into the realm of boyhood fantasy, no longer inhibited from speaking its elemental language of explosion and decapitation. I think of the trancelike dance my son calls “exploding,” in which he hurls himself up and down on our bed or on the trampoline out in the yard for hours at a time, flinging his arms in the air and tossing his head back with a rapturous expression while making sounds of bomb blasts, rattling gunfire, swishing light sabers, lost in an imaginary world of blissful, unending combat. I think of Osama Bin Laden’s favorite saying from the Prophet (so I read somewhere): “I wish I could raid and be slain, and then raid and be slain, and then raid and be slain”; its recognition of bodily ecstasy as the secret basis of terror, with even an infantile eroticism implicit in the lullaby rhythms (Bin Laden could be the dead man in my fable, my underworld double, born the same year as me, father a builder of monuments, himself a dreamy, retiring type, living for a time in his agrarian idyll with vague pretensions to poetry until he found his true vocation). But none of this quite brings me in reach of whatever it was I had felt hovering in the aura of that phrase, and I get up, walking back to my roomette with the thwarted feeling that comes when you fail to find your way into some glimpsed area of thought that had seemed to promise a spell of pleasurable contemplation.

Now it is twilight and again the landscape has changed. Different shades of green tinge the gray shadows, and the country has a gentle roll in it, with woods and streams curving down into pockets of darkness. It reminds me of England: an improbably unspoiled England, with shire-sized vistas stretching away like old ink-tinted maps of English hunting country. Only the strange bluish greens and the tall pewter towers of the grain silos (fewer and farther between now) strike a foreign note, though the effect of them, like the képis and peculiar cars in Tintin, isn’t so much to cancel the impression of Englishness as to suggest an Englishness under some interestingly sinister enchantment.

There is a knock at my door: one of the train conductors, come to prepare my bed for the night. I stand to the side, watching her fold the seats together.

“What state are we in?” I ask.

She turns to face me, a pleasant-looking woman in her thirties, with a lock of gold hair curling from under her gray Amtrak visor.

“Missouri,” she says.

She gives me a smile, as if ready to talk more if I would like to. I would like to, but I am distracted by something and she leaves before I can speak.

And then, as she disappears down the corridor, I catch hold of what was eluding me before. It was possibly the knock at the door that reminded me, because that is how the adventure begins: a disturbance in the doorway on New Year’s Eve as the stranger bursts into the castle, cantering into the banquet hall on a horse. In one hand he holds a branch of holly, in the other a massive ax. He himself is enormous, a giant of a man, and his beard is green.

It occurs to me as I write that even then, at this early, not yet hostile stage in Nasreen’s campaign, I was, after all, aware that some large subject had arrived at my own fortress door, despite my skepticism about the likelihood of such a thing ever happening. It was just that the nature of the challenge she represented hadn’t yet disclosed itself. The Green Knight’s challenge is of course immediate and unambiguous: the most bizarre challenge in all of literature, and also, in its sheer brazen irrationality, a radical summation of all other challenges. I will stake everything and lose everything if you will stake everything and lose everything and then perhaps one or both of us may gain something neither had ever imagined even existed.

You cut my head off, he says to Sir Gawain, offering him the ax, and in a year and a day’s time, seek me out and let me do the same to you.

I was thirteen, in my last year at boarding school, when I first read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was given to our class by our English and music teacher, an enthusiast for all things medieval. The school itself, a Gothic pile rising from the greensward of its golf course and games fields, had something medieval about it. All boys, its atmosphere was part monastery, part military outpost. Before meals we lined up in divisions for inspection, and then marched in formation into a dining hall frescoed from top to bottom in scenes from Arthurian legend, with castles, forests, jousting knights, and a gold-hilted sword in a stone.

Free time was devoted largely to warfare. In the woods beyond the games fields we built fortified encampments over the craters left by fallen trees, digging trenches and tunnels between them to create ever-larger compounds, and charging out to attack other boys’ encampments (to raid and be slain, and then raid and be slain) with pinecone hand grenades and, when we could smuggle them past the matrons who checked our baggage on arrival every term, pea-shooting Sekiden guns.

There was the physical joy of fighting, but more intense and long-lasting was the glory that burned inside you when you had distinguished yourself by some bold act and been recognized for it. In the austere regime we lived under, with few possessions and no personal power, glory was what made us rich, and we attended to the correct remembrance of our own and one another’s deeds with the heraldic zeal of Arthur and his knights.

There was a chapel too, a small stone and stained-glass building, which you entered through a door in the gym, exchanging the thick sock-stink for the scent of candle wax. A portrait of Edmund the Martyr, for whom the school was named, was painted over the nave. The school motto-Per Manendo Vincimus, “Through perseverance we conquer”-was inscribed above the altar on a pennant with a stylized flutter in it rather like the one adopted after 9/11 for depictions of the American flag; that stirring, menacing, triple ripple suggestive of some violent agitation being stoutly withstood by its fabric. Every weekday morning we filed in for prayers, Christians and heathens alike (the king of Jordan’s son, Prince Abdullah, now king himself, sat in the pew behind me with his bodyguards), and on Sundays there was a full-length Communion service, also obligatory.

I didn’t mind this; in fact I liked it. I joined the choir and wore my white surplice with modest pride. I liked being part of the mood of gentle pathos created by the anthems we sang: “Ave Verum,” “O for the Wings of a Dove,” and I liked the religion too, or thought I did. When the chaplain commended us to the Peace of God which passeth all understanding I felt a soothing calm settle over me. If I was unhappy I said the Lord’s Prayer and felt happier. It seemed to me a natural progression from this to partaking in the Communion itself, and I signed up for confirmation classes so that I could join the other initiates at the altar, consuming the wafers and wine.

And yet almost from the beginning of these classes, a feeling of unease began mounting inside me. I tried to ignore it, but a few weeks before the Bishop of Chichester was due to arrive and perform the ceremony, it rose to a pitch of intense, if obscure, dread. Bracing myself for a unpleasant encounter, I told the chaplain I was having doubts, and after a surprisingly short conversation (he didn’t seem nearly as concerned or upset as I felt he should have been, or as I was myself), I pulled out. Sometimes, looking back, I have been tempted to see this episode as the sign of some authentic core of Jewishness in my soul, recoiling from the act of apostasy. But aside from the fact that none of those things mean very much to me anymore-souls, apostasy, authentic cores-the truth was that I experienced it as something purely negative; merely a kind of surging veto, unaccompanied by any more positive sense of who or what I might be if I was not this.

All of which-the medieval atmosphere, the strong group identity and my dawning sense of estrangement from it, also the near total absence of women (and its effect of investing the female sex with powers verging on the occult)-made me naturally inclined to be interested in a text like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Even so, I was unprepared for the force of its impact on me. Aside from anything else, it was the first piece of literature that made me want to write something myself. The speed and boldness of its opening moves excited me like nothing I had read before. There was something almost physically violent in the way the story accelerated into high gear through those first outrageous images-the green-bearded knight on his green horse, the beheading, the monstrous body seizing its own head and riding off-the alliterative lines slashing their way forward as if the act of creation were occurring over a simultaneous hidden act of destruction. I had noticed that when my father was pleased about the way his work was going, a look of savage glee (I think of it as his “Tartar” expression-his ancestors were Russian) would light up his face, and I connected that expression with this opening, each seeming to reveal something pleasurably violent at the core of the creative act: a sensation I was extremely interested in experiencing myself.

But even more stirring than this literary pleasure was my feeling of affinity with the figure of Gawain himself.

From his first moment of modest self-assertion as he asks King Arthur’s permission to accept the Green Knight’s challenge, I identified with him in a peculiarly intimate way. Even now, at different moments of my life, different junctures of the strange quest that follows (strange because it is the story of a man seeking his own destruction) seem to throw an uncanny light on my own existence.

Permission granted, he takes the ax and prepares to deal the blow. The knight bares his neck and Gawain strikes, cutting the great head clean from the massive shoulders.

Does he believe the affair is now over, that the decapitated knight, having made his foolish provocation and got what he asked for, is going to remain obligingly dead? If so, he is seriously mistaken. Blood spurting from the wound, the Green Knight picks up his rolling head by the hair and remounts his horse. “Find me at the Green Chapel,” he says, angling his disembodied face at Gawain. He gives no clue as to where, in all of England, this chapel might be, but warns Gawain that if he fails to come, he will be called a coward. (I want to write that as “a fucking faggot coward” but the text won’t quite bear me out.)

Life, death, honor, reputation. Such, at this point, are the terms and stakes of the challenge.

The story has been lighthearted up until now. Christmas festivities are in full swing and laughter pervades the court. But as the year passes and the time approaches for Gawain to set off on his mission, anxiety descends. For Gawain’s sake his comrades keep up the pretense that this is all a jolly adventure, but under their jokes they are already grieving for a doomed man.

There is an icily ironic scene of him putting on his sumptuous armor, the last word in sabots and greaves, all lavishly embossed and embroidered, with the pentangle, symbol of virtue and purity, painted in gold on the shield. The irony being that his mission is to receive a blow, not to ward one off, so that all of this extravagant protection is entirely pointless. This is a suicide mission.

Off he rides then, setting out into the wide reaches of prehistoric Britain. Loneliness assails him. Hunger sets in. Cold pierces through his armor, and as the appointed day approaches with him still having no clue as to the chapel’s whereabouts, he begins to reckon with the gravity of his situation. The isolation of the hero has begun. As he sleeps in his armor, near slain with sleet, night after night in the naked rocks with the cold creeks clattering around him, his severance from the easy, cozy, determinedly upbeat collective consciousness of the court is complete, and he begins to emerge as an individual human being, “a man all alone”: vulnerable, doubting, with failure and dishonor looming, and annihilation suddenly an encroaching reality.

In this condition, lost in a deep wood, he reverts, as people do, to the self-soothing formulas of religion. He says his Lord’s Prayer and his Ave Maria, then begins making the sign of the cross over himself, once, twice, three times…

A castle appears, shimmering through the oaks. I remember it as I remember the town that springs up instantaneously in Tintin, or the McMansion developments outside Chicago, with their look of improbable newness. To Gawain it resembles a paper ornament, with its shining white towers.

At the entrance he calls out and a porter comes, welcoming him as if he is expected. The lord of the castle, Sir Bertilak, another gigantic man, though with a red beard rather than a green one, greets him warmly and has his servants show him to a luxurious bedroom with all the latest conveniences, including a curtained four-poster bed. After he has washed and changed he is brought to a feast in a hall with a roaring fire. On learning his name, the assembled guests go into little ecstasies of flattery. He has a reputation, he discovers, for fine speech, and the guests declare themselves thrilled at the prospect of such a paragon joining them for their Christmas revels. He will tutor them, they chorus obsequiously, in the correct use of words, and by his example he will teach them love-talking, “luf-talkyng”: the language of flirtation and Courtly Love, in which he is also, so he learns to his surprise, a renowned expert. (I remember an early email from Nasreen in which she mentions she has heard I have a reputation as a ladies’ man, with lots of “wild girls” in my past. Since she knew nobody from my past, I understood this to be pure invention, part of her campaign of flirtatious ego massage. It didn’t occur to me to wonder whether her cavalier way with the concept of “reputation” might turn out to have a less benign side.)

No sooner is the theme of “luf” announced than Gawain glimpses an attractive young woman: his host’s wife, as it happens, on her way into midnight mass. He follows after her into the castle chapel. During the service she turns from her private pew to glance at him, and you can feel the electric jolt pass between them as she lets him gaze a moment on her delicate beauty.

The next day is Christmas, and he sits beside the young woman at the banquet. The two take a keen pleasure in each other’s company, talking quietly together in a private exchange that the author describes as a sweet dalliance, a “dere dalyaunce,” though he also assures us, with only the lightest touch of irony, that it is irreproachable: “closed fro fylthe”; a minor paradox that captures perfectly the ambiguous nature of any flirtation in its early stages, where nothing unequivocal has yet been said.

Courtly Love, that elaborate medieval attempt to reconcile raw desire with the smooth running of the social machine, is in fact a deliberate exercise in such ambiguities. Under its rules a young knight may fall in love with a married woman and enter into the steamiest of flirtations with her, in which everything is permitted except for the ultimate consummation. The beauty of the formula is that it appears to acknowledge both the force of lust and the virtue of fidelity. Like all codes of sexual conduct, it is fatally flawed, the state of deferred gratification being naturally unstable, and therefore highly likely to culminate in tragedy or farce. But it has an appealing realism about it, and at least tries to recognize the human psyche in all its contradictory totality.

The Green Chapel turns out to be just two miles from this castle, which means Gawain can stay on in comfort until New Year’s Day. To pass the time till then, Sir Bertilak suggests a game: he will go out hunting with his men every day while Gawain stays behind, relaxing at the castle, and every evening they will exchange whatever each has gained during the day.

And so now the story begins to close in on its true quarry, shifting its hero away from the familiar clarities of valor and physical action into the more treacherous realm of psychological and moral combat.

The first morning, while Sir Bertilak hunts deer, Gawain is woken by the sound of his bedroom door being quietly opened. Glancing through the curtains of his four-poster, he sees his host’s wife, lovely as ever, coming into the room. Locking the door behind her, she lifts the curtain of his bed and, to his great embarrassment, sits down beside him. A long, comically erotic scene of attempted seduction follows, in which the lady, full of jokes and teasing flattery (eshveh, kereshmeh, naz), tries to persuade Gawain to overcome his scruples and take advantage of her husband’s absence. In very candid language she offers him her body to “take his pleasure with” on the silk sheets of his bed. For all the lightheartedness, the stakes of the situation are high: declining a sexual advance requires great tact if you want to avoid giving mortal offense, while to accept it, however strong the temptation (and we can assume it is intense), would, in this instance, irreparably violate Gawain’s sense of himself as an honorable human being. He acquits himself well, maintaining impeccable charm while getting the lady out of his chamber without yielding anything more serious than a single, chaste kiss. This, as the game requires, he passes on to Sir Bertilak, in exchange for the venison his host has butchered that day.

But when an attractive person makes you an offer like this, she or he establishes a powerful link with your own psyche, and whether or not you are interested in pursuing it, a whole new world of erotic possibility has become, as I realized that morning, latently present in your imagination. Out of this virtual world arise the sweetest of dreams but also the succubi and demon-lovers of folklore and literature: Lilith and Lamia, Heathcliff and Peter Quint, all the phantasmal femmes fatales of Keats and Coleridge and the Pre-Raphaelites, and these visitants can be much harder to keep at bay than flesh-and-blood human beings, no doubt because their substance, such as it is, originates at least partly in oneself.

On the second day she comes again to his room, his roomette, her presence seeping in like a scent, only this time what is at stake is not just his self-regard, his image of himself as a Man of Honor, but something more like his soul; the author carefully recalibrating his description of the lady’s softly insistent verbal blandishments to usher in the suggestion of a motive beyond love or even lust, namely the graver mission of “winning him to wrong.”

And this time she seems stronger than before; bolder, more laughingly insistent, the labyrinths of her conversation as she begs him to take her on as his private student (“teach me,” she says, “while my husband is away”) more elaborately carnal, as if that single kiss the morning before, chaste as he had believed it to be, had provided her with some vital nourishment. Again he resists her, but you can feel his pleasure in her nearness working on him, filling him with a dangerous confidence in his ability to have it both ways: enjoy the situation (he is much more wittily poised in his repartee this time) while keeping it under control, which he does, though this time he rationalizes the yielding of not one but two kisses before the session comes to an end, and one knows, by the logic of trifold escalation common to all such stories, that something fateful is going to happen next time she comes to visit.

It is nighttime now, and we have just crossed the Kansas River. In Kansas I fall into a deep sleep, rocked by the rhythms of the train, and in the morning we are still (such is the scale of things here) in Kansas.

But the green has gone from the country and the plain looks seared brown. For a long time it is flat and absolutely featureless. I eat breakfast and wander on down to the Observation Lounge. It is crowded despite the early hour: people staring out of the windows, others hunched over electronic devices, the machines tweezling and winking alertly, the humans bleary and rumpled.

An industrial dairy operation goes by with thousands of Holstein cows penned into brown dirt feedlots. Some of the lots have artificial mounds in them, on which the cows lie curled up asleep like ungainly black-and-white cats. Soon after that we come to Dodge City, where a group of scouts boards the train. One of them sits next to me, a boy of sixteen or so, gray-eyed, round-faced, lividly acned. With a congeniality that seems precocious even in this land of easy openness, and downright defiant in one so incandescently spotty, he immediately strikes up conversation. He and his troop are on their way to New Mexico for a camping trip in the mountains. He himself has never left Kansas before and never seen a mountain. He speaks with a long-ago twang like a farm boy in an old movie:

“Ain’t never seen a mountain before…”

He’s adopted, grew up with his cousins, a family of nine kids.

“There’s a lot of us so we don’t have much money,” he informs me, another of these diligent self-spokespersons, strongly conscious of his place in the American epic. The family used to have a big farm where he would ride around all day on horseback. Now they have just fifteen acres and some livestock. He breaks the horses, a dangerous business.

“I lost count how many bones I’ve broke.”

Every time he finishes talking he purses his lips as though literally, thriftily, closing up some coin-filled purse.

A small rise appears in the distance. He turns to me.

“Would that be considered a mountain?”

“No.”

Farms glide by, with pale green irrigation circles on the brown dirt and trailers for the workers. We follow a creek, its banks lined with what I am guessing from the hairlike stuff in their branches must be cottonwoods. A wrecked barn stands alone, broken beams angling frenziedly skyward.

“Tornado done that,” the boy says, pursing his lips.

Long miles of empty sagebrush pass, then a squat, windowless building, surrounded by razor-wire fencing. The boy grins:

“Prison.”

One of his brothers is a prison guard. Not in this particular prison, but it would seem all prisons are looked on fondly as a result of the connection. The family likes to amuse itself by asking this brother what he is going to do when he has to lock up a relative.

“He says he’ll just slam the door on ’em a little harder than he usually does. Couple of our cousins might be landing there pretty soon I reckon.”

Another bump appears on the flat plain.

“Would that be considered a mountain?”

“Not really.”

“Highest thing I ever seen.”

I look at him, wondering if he’s putting me on, but he seems sincere.

Later in the day mountains do finally become visible in the distance, but by then he has gone off somewhere, so I miss his reaction. A person crosses your path; briefly their story intersects with yours and then diverges again, leaving something of itself with you and maybe taking something of yours in return, and they’re gone. These days I have to remind myself that encounters with other people can be both interesting and inconsequential.

Adobe churches and farm buildings appear. The train groans uphill to the Raton Pass, highest point of the trip. Soon after this we come to Lamy, the Santa Fe station, where I get off for my detour to D. H. Lawrence’s ranch.

In the old East Germany a person who helped others escape over the Wall was called a Fluchthelfer-“flight-helper.” If you read naïvely, as I mostly do, to make sense of your life, rather than for more sophisticated aesthetic or scholarly reasons, then certain writers inevitably become your own Fluchthelfer, helping you over your own walls, whether to escape reality or, as I prefer to see it, to find your way into it. For me D. H. Lawrence has always been such a writer. His best works, mainly the novellas and short stories, have the same imaginative audacity about them as Gawain, and give out the same exhilarating sense of old things-stale sentiments, defunct notions-being slashed and smashed as quickly as new things are being created. His statements about life and death, good and evil, men and women, all tossed out with a casually apocalyptic grandiosity, still stir me long after I have stopped “agreeing” with most of them. “Man must find a new expression, give a new value to life, or his women will reject him, and he must die.” “Man, as yet, is less than half grown.” Man this, man that… not the kind of language we appreciate anymore, and his reputation has accordingly suffered badly during the past decades. With my own recent interest in the processes by which reputations become tarnished (another of Nasreen’s many legacies), I have begun to find this aspect of Lawrence almost as fascinating as the writing itself, but back then, as I stepped out of the air-conditioned train into the furnace heat of the New Mexico June, it was simply as an admirer of his work.

I pick up a rental car in Santa Fe, and drive into the mountains toward Taos. It’s too late to get to the ranch today and I spend the night in Taos itself, at an inn that was once the home of Mabel Dodge Luhan.

It was Mabel Dodge Luhan who brought Lawrence to New Mexico in the first place. There are books about both of them on a shelf in the lobby. After dinner I look through them, and before I know it I seem to be seeing yet another version of my own circumstances unfolding before me, projected through their intertwining lives.

She was in her early forties then, a wealthy heiress and patron of Native American art, with a colorful past that included several husbands and an attempt to commit suicide by eating figs mingled with broken glass. Having read a few of Lawrence’s books, she had decided she needed him in her life-“I wanted Lawrence to understand things for me”-and she set about enticing him to Taos. The yearlong campaign featured letters filled with native American herbs, the gift of a supposedly enchanted necklace to Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, and a determined effort of telepathic attraction: “I’d sit there and draw him until he came” was how she remembered it. He resisted at first, traveling instead to Ceylon and Australia, but eventually the effort paid off, and he and Frieda arrived at Lamy station in September 1922.

Mabel, who had a husband of her own on the premises, immediately set about attempting to seduce her long-awaited visitor. She tried to convince him that his marriage had gone stale-“You need something new and different…”-and after a while she persuaded him to work with her on, yes, a novel that she was trying to write.

Was he attracted to her? The books don’t say, but by the time of this proposed collaboration he had committed the indiscretion of criticizing his wife to her, complaining about Frieda’s “heavy German hand,” and this sounds to me like a man declaring himself available, at least theoretically, for a lighter, non-Germanic touch. Add to this the aura of scandal surrounding his name ever since his elopement with Frieda, a married mother of three, not to mention the contents of the books themselves with their celebration of the senses and emphasis on spontaneity in human relations, and you can easily imagine how Mabel might have thought an affair was a possibility.

She arranged a meeting to discuss her novel. For the venue, she selected the sun roof outside her bedroom. On the appointed day she led him upstairs, naked under her soft white cashmere wrap. As they passed through the bedroom itself, the sight of the unmade bed seems to have stirred an awareness in Lawrence of the possible seriousness of the situation he was getting himself into. He hesitates, embarrassed, evidently realizing the moment has come to clarify his intentions-possibly as much to himself as to her. So once again we have the comical figure of the man in the bedroom, the boudoir, the roomette, being impinged on by the desires of a woman he is at least passingly attracted to, and making up his mind (perhaps a little culpably late in the proceedings) to keep her at arm’s length. Comical because, although we may commend him for being a good husband and model citizen, we find him a bit ridiculous as a man, because what kind of man other than a priest or a jihadi really cares, on his own account, about protecting his chastity?

Not being a fictional character, he doesn’t handle himself with quite the suaveness of Sir Gawain, but in his own way he seems, after all, to observe the same code of conduct as the virtuous knight:

“I don’t know how Frieda’s going to feel about this,” he mutters nervously.

Not exactly what you’d expect from the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover or the excoriator of Christianity who blamed Jesus for the calamitous ascendancy of the mind over the senses. I don’t know how Frieda’s going to feel about this… And yet one warms to him for it, or I do: a confused and conflicted human being like the rest of us. Future meetings are scheduled in his own quarters, with Frieda clumping noisily around close-by, and the collaboration soon fizzles out.

In the morning I head up into the San Cristobal mountains to the Kiowa Ranch. Mabel, evidently generous as well as a good sport, deeded this property to the Lawrences after she realized she wasn’t going to dislodge Frieda. The place, miles along a twisting red dirt road, is a jumble of modest wooden buildings with a disused corral below and Lawrence’s memorial chapel on a hill above. Two sparrows are building a nest in an elk skull nailed to the fence of an overgrown garden; otherwise there are no signs of life. Near the main house is an enormous pine, leaning toward the rickety porch in the strong, steady wind. A sign warns you not to steal any of the pinecones strewn on the ground below it, and I realize this must be the great Ponderosa pine Lawrence describes in the finale of St. Mawr, where the transfiguring description (his speciality was to describe something with vivid realism while at the same time transforming it into something else, basically whatever his argument at a given moment required it to be) turns the tree into an image of icy, swampy, pre-animal consciousness. I know the passage well: the tree standing like a demonish guardian, its pillar of flaky-ribbed copper rising in the shadows of the pre-sexual world, wind hissing in the needles, its cold sap surging and oozing gum, and the pinecones lying all over the yard, open in the sun like wooden roses.

There are hundreds of these “wooden roses” lying all over the grass now, golden and enormous, ten times the size of any pinecone I have ever seen. I’m not, by nature, a souvenir hunter or collector of relics, and probably if there weren’t the notice forbidding it, it wouldn’t cross my mind to take one. But under the circumstances it is irresistible, and I place one furtively in my canvas shoulder bag.

A woman appears, gray-haired and sunburned. She must have come out of one of the other buildings. In her hand is a raspberry-red ice cream. I nod at her and she nods back. I’m not sure if she saw me stealing the pinecone.

“Nice day,” I say, feeling awkward.

“Yep.”

“Are you the caretaker?”

“Yep.”

“Can I… go inside the house?”

“Nope.”

“Oh. I guess I’ll go see the chapel then.”

She says nothing. I walk up toward the chapel, feeling her eyes on me as I climb the zigzagging path up the hill.

The building is small and unpretentious, with a hand-hewn look that Lawrence would probably have approved of, the little rose window above the door just a truck wheel cemented into the whitewashed wall. A clunkily sculpted phoenix squats on the roof. Inside, on the gray-tiled floor, is an altar with Lawrence’s ashes mixed in the cement, also topped by a phoenix. The phoenix was Lawrence’s personal heraldic emblem, his equivalent of Gawain’s pentangle; fiery vitality being the principle he wished to live by, rather than Gawain’s Christian morality (though he seems to have been wearing a pentangle in Mabel’s bedroom). People have left small offerings on the altar-feathers, juniper berries, oak sprigs-which surprises me, imagining, as I somehow do, that I am the last living acolyte. I think of leaving the pinecone but find that I have already become too attached to the prospect of having it on my desk at home to contemplate sacrificing it.

On the wall is a framed official document from the U.S. Consulate in Marseille certifying that the ashes are those of David Herbert Lawrence, shipped to America aboard the SS Conte di Savoia along with the death certificate and cremation paperwork from the mayor’s office in Vence, where Lawrence died of TB. Something about the display of this document, right here in the chapel, strikes me as overemphatic. The effect is to raise doubts where none might have existed otherwise. And as I read it I remember a story I had forgotten, which is that these are possibly not Lawrence’s ashes in the altar here at all.

Frieda had a lover, an Italian infantry officer, Captain Ravagli, whom she married soon after Lawrence’s death and sent to Europe to bring back the remains. But Ravagli, so the story goes, managed to leave the urn behind on a station platform, and brought home a substitute, filled with God knows what rubbish.

I am trying to enter into a properly receptive state of mind as I stand here in the chapel, but it is hard with the cruel comedy of this little fiasco echoing in the background of my thoughts. There is an amazing photograph of Frieda later on in her widowhood, ample and gray, with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, flanked by Mabel Dodge Luhan and Dorothy Brett, all three of them laughing. Brett was an English artist who lived here at the ranch with the Lawrences. It wasn’t a ménage à trois, but she revered him and once, elsewhere, he did consent to go to bed with her, but couldn’t get an erection (Brett remembers him shouting childishly, “Your pubes are all wrong”), and I find myself thinking of that too, the photograph of the women who outlived their idol, joyous cackling survivor-laughs on their wrinkled faces, all of them no doubt glad, at some level, to be rid of this consumptive prophet with his spit and sputum and his everlasting exhortations and injunctions. Captain Ravagli probably would have suited them all much better: a robust, extrovert type, like the panther who takes the place of the tormented man starving himself to death in Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist.” Ravagli tried to read Sons and Lovers once, but didn’t care for it: “We don’t need literature to know what to do” was his comment.

All of which, jostling in my head, is proving a considerable distraction. Here I am in the chapel, the holy of holies, braced for some kind of momentous reckoning with the great man, my own bearded giant (though he was physically small and went by Bert rather than Bertilak), but allowing myself to be sidetracked by these demeaning, unsubstantiated stories. I am singularly failing to rise to the occasion. Not only that, but in entertaining these slurs I have become complicit, it seems to me, in the general mockery that these days habitually greets Lawrence’s name, even when there is a grudging acknowledgment of the acid brilliance of his prose. I, of all people, who unfailingly answer St. Mawr when asked my favorite novel, and even once taught a class on it, proposing it as the only book ever written that convincingly imagines a state of happiness based on the real conditions of life, in all its destructiveness as well as its wild energy (the class wasn’t a great success). And it hasn’t escaped me either that these gossipy stories have in common the theme of emasculation, or, shall we say, betailing, as if there is something about the very presumption of a man trying to imagine, without irony, the condition of total fulfillment, emotional as well as sexual, that incites a jeering desire to see him impotent, cuckolded, cheated even of his own ashes. And here I am, his last disciple, with my own hand, as it were, on the gelding knife! I leave the chapel, dissatisfied with myself. As the line goes in the poem where Lawrence berates himself for throwing a log at a snake instead of seizing a rare opportunity to watch such a creature close up: “I missed my chance with one of the lords of life.”

The caretaker is nowhere in sight as I drive off, and I take consolation in the thought that at least I have my wooden rose, my pinecone. Back on the train-a different train with different passengers but an identical roomette-I open my bag to gloat on it, thinking perhaps its talismanic powers will succeed where the chapel failed. Quite what form “success” might take, I am not sure. A surge of creativity perhaps; inspiration for a poem or story, or just some phoenix magic to burn off the heavy vapors of Ahriman from my shoulders. Perhaps also I am half remembering the little pinecone hand grenades we used to hurl into one another’s encampments at school, in which case there is possibly some idea of superior explosiveness attached to the object, of having got my hands on something incendiary enough to satisfy, once and for all, my desire to experience the pleasurable violence I have always felt to be present in the true creative act.

But whatever it may be I am not destined to find out. The pinecone isn’t there. It appears to have fallen out of my bag somewhere en route.

Not a serious loss, I tell myself; not like losing a phone or a wallet. But I feel upset, even a bit crushed, as if I have been judged-or rather have somehow judged myself-unworthy of having it in my possession.

Somewhere after Albuquerque I go into the Observation Lounge. There aren’t many free seats and without thinking I squeeze in next to a youngish guy, white, but dressed gangsta style in a filmy black do-rag, with a thin stirrup of beard around his jaw and chin. He mutters unpleasantly as I sit down, pointedly not moving his sprawled knee out of the space belonging to my seat. I try to ignore him but it is hard to concentrate on anything else in the presence of such open hostility. After a while he takes out a cell phone. I listen in while he arranges for a friend to wire him forty bucks to a Western Union in Los Angeles. In a quieter voice he jokes about having just got money out of a chick on the train who was hanging with him earlier.

He moves off after this but I see him again a few hours later at the bar, during a long wait at a station. He is talking with a girl who I noticed boarding the train just a few minutes ago. She looks about eighteen: denim forage cap on her dyed black hair, heavily mascaraed blue eyes, close-fitting belly shirt. They appear to be flirting and I can’t help feeling stunned at the speed with which he has moved in on her. While I watch them a voice comes over the PA: Would Michelle somebody or other please come down to the platform, where her dad would like to say goodbye to her? The girl gives a sour grin: “Shit.” “That you?” the guy asks her. “Yeah.” “You gonna go say goodbye?” “No fuckin’ way.” They laugh and go back to what they were talking about. After a couple more minutes the voice comes again: Would Michelle so-and-so please come down to the platform right away; her dad would really, really like to say goodbye to her. The girl rolls her eyes but again stands her ground, while the guy chuckles. I look at her, wanting to say something. She catches my eye. The guy turns, recognizing me. He juts his chin as if to ask what the fuck am I looking at. I give a silent snort to show that I am not intimidated, but he has already turned back to the girl.

As I go back to my roomette the train pulls out and I wonder which of the three or four solitary men standing on the platform is the girl’s father and what he could have done to deserve his daughter’s treatment. My own daughter is ten, still entirely sweet-natured, and I dread even the most amicable distance opening between us, so I was feeling an instinctive solidarity with the girl’s father and was wanting to urge her to say goodbye to him. Also as a father, I was feeling protective toward her, thinking I should warn her off this character who is apparently in the habit of fleecing unsuspecting girls on trains. But I was also-such is the riven nature of the psyche, or the male psyche, or anyway mine-looking at her with desires of my own, the soft clashing effect of nubile breasts aloft above a skeletal rib cage sharply alluring, and now, as I sit here back in my roomette, the awareness of this, mingling with the adrenaline still coursing through me from the man’s aggression, and the attendant contradictory feelings of relief at having evaded violence and frustration at having been too well behaved or cowardly to inflict it, together have brought me into a place of familiar jangling confusion.

We are in the desert now. Vast pink-and-white-striped rock formations rise out of the cactus scrub like nature’s own McMansions. I eat a solitary dinner, then turn in for the night. It takes me some time to fall asleep, and I sleep badly when I do.

On the third morning the mood shifts, ripening and sweetening, with a faint, premonitory sickliness about it: sin coming to fruition. She enters at dawn, naked under a fur robe, gems braided into her hair. Lying beside him in the curtained chamber, “hir brest bare,” she kisses him twice, bringing him into that state of arousal in which reason organizes itself on a new basis and the arguments against consummation become harder and harder to remember. Here is a beautiful woman who wants you to make love to her. To refuse, to offend her as well as deny yourself the pleasure, strikes you as perverse, doltish, “crathayn.” The ethical basis, the biblical idea of sin, asserts itself weakly in his mind, like the memory of a memory. She presses her advantage, gently twisting the moralistic language of his thoughts to promote her own gospel of love: “Blame ye disserve, yif ye luf not that lyf that ye lye nexte.” Shame on you if you love not the living body by your side. He is perilously close to capitulation. And yet, contrary to expectation, he holds out once again. And this time the lady, planting a final kiss on his lips, ruefully concedes defeat.

But of course that isn’t the end of the matter. Before she leaves, she unfastens her girdle, a cincture of green silk, and very touchingly asks her unyielding knight to accept it as a keepsake, a souvenir of their sweetly charged exchanges. Even this he attempts to refuse, but as he does so she plays her trump card, parrying him with the unexpected and, under the circumstances, extremely interesting information that this ghostly green shimmer, this near-virtual token of herself, happens to be endowed with magical properties, whereby no man who wears it may be cut down or killed. On learning this, our hero, who has spent a restless night dreaming of his imminent beheading, reveals at last a mortal flaw in his character: a willingness to cheat death. Sexual attraction alone may not have been powerful enough to win him to wrong, but that narrow form of desire is after all only a special instance of the desire for life itself (so the episode seems to be telling us), and this-the hope of warding off death, of arming himself with a talisman powerful enough to lift tomorrow’s heavy sentence from his shoulders-is irresistible. He accepts the gift-how could he not?-without further argument. As the lady presses it into his hand, she begs him not to mention it to her husband, and he agrees, enmeshed already in the swiftly escalating logic of deceit.

So resilient, however, is his image of himself as a paragon of virtue and honor that for a time he succeeds in inducing a state of complete denial concerning his own deed. Hiding the girdle in his room, he goes to the castle chapel to make confession in preparation for the next day’s ordeal, emerging as “clene”-so the glintingly deadpan narrator assures us-as a shriven soul on judgment day, even though he hasn’t said a word about his illicit possession of sorcerous materials or his intent to renege on the spirit, if not the letter, of his solemn covenant. And that evening, when he meets Sir Bertilak for the third exchange of spoils, he steps cheerfully forward to pass on his morning’s harvest of kisses (Judas kisses, they inevitably seem at this point) without a word, or even a thought, about the densely potent garment secreted in his chamber. He doesn’t, yet, seem to have any idea what he has done.

But then what has he done?