Talk at Leamington Literary Society

Last month, I visited Royal Leamington Spa to give a talk to the Leamington Literary Society on you know who. The Society was formed in 1912 to encourage philosophical and literary debate among men but is now open to anyone with an interest in reading. The talk was a success as only one person fell asleep, though he had the grace not to snore.

I took literary heritage as my theme and from this, explored different elements of Lawrence’s life. We started off with a map of Eastwood and a potted history of his childhood via key locations and buildings – most of which have either been flattened, sold off, or left to rot. From this I put forward arguments as to how we should celebrate Lawrence’s life and introduced the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre project. We finished off with a close reading of his endlessly quotable letters.

Lawrence’s popularity has waxed and waned over the decades, for a variety of reasons. But he is enjoying a resurgence at the moment, inspiring novels by Alison MacLeod and Rachel Cusk, as well as a poetry collection by Isobel Dixon. Leamington had also been on a long period of decline, thanks in part of John Betjeman’s “Death in Leamington,” but over the last twenty years has had a bit of a renaissance, due to the opening of the M40, the proximity of Warwick University and Jaguar Landrover.

I’d never been to Leamington before, so on arrival headed straight to the church. Not to absolve sins, of which there are – I am pleased to report – many, but to grab food from the Ukrainian café inside and help support the young people who run it. This immediately got me thinking about exile.

Lawrence lived in self-imposed exile from 1919. Sick of censorship and modernity, he travelled the globe in search of Rananim whereas the Ukrainians are here out of necessity. Later on I picked up a copy The New European, and the Great Lives section featured Stefan Zweig (1881 – 1942) who during the 1920s and 30s was one of the most popular and widely translated authors in the world. Zweig was an Austrian Jew who fled his home in the 1930s after the rise of fascism and lived in various countries and continents. Unlike Lawrence, who compared returning to Britain in 1923 as ‘like a dog returning to its vomit,’ Zweig was desperate to get home. He committed suicide in Petropolis, a Brazilian town in the hills of Rio de Janeiro, on 22 February 1942. His suicide note read, ‘it would require immense strength to reconstruct my life, and my energy is exhausted by long years of peregrination as one without a country.’

These three stories of travel – Ukrainians trying to make a living from cooking which evokes memories of home, Zweig’s enforced exile on ideological grounds, and Lawrence’s search for Rananim, left me feeling less angry at the train service for the various strikes that day that made getting back to Nottingham quite the endurance test.   

I’ve agreed to come back next year and do a talk on Sillitoe’s great anti-heroes of literature, Arthur Seaton and Colin Smith.

Leamington Literary Society website here and Facebook Group here.