Creating Feature Ideas for a Bulletin about a Mardy Bloke from Eastwood

When I worked on a magazine, the things I loved the most were generating new features and writing headlines. Features help break up a magazine into parts and introduce a bit of order. They also function to build up audience expectations. Done well, they can be the first thing you flick to. Done badly, they can bring down the tone and feel of the magazine and put readers off picking it up again. Therefore, know thyself: Know your audience and know what you stand for. This will help direct your energies. Likewise, there’s no better satisfaction than writing an intelligent pun. This is essentially wordplay – triggering extra meanings while also focusing the attention of the reader in a cleverly condensed phrase or expression.

For the past year, I’ve been publishing a monthly bulletin for the D.H. Lawrence Society. The purpose of the bulletin is to collate any information about Nottingham’s favourite Beardo into one place. Prior to this, emails were sent out as and when the secretary was sent information which created a distorted picture of Lawrencian studies as only one person used to send in information about his blog. By collating everything into one place, the bulletin acts an archive, cuts down on emails, and gives a broader picture of how, when and where Lawrence is being discussed. He remains more popular than I’d imagined and is currently having a bit of a resurgence due to radio adaptations of his novels, Francis Wilson’s innovative biography, and his popularizing through fiction such as Annabel Abbs’ historical fiction Frieda and Rachel Cusk’s Taos-inspired Second Place.

D.H. Lawrence didn’t just write fiction. He had a vision of how life should be lived. He enthralled, provoked and annoyed in equal measures. He is taken very seriously in academia and every utterance is dissected to within an inch of its life. But I didn’t want to create an overly formal bulletin as our membership is broad and ranges from esteemed professors to the casual reader. Instead, my tone is a bit more tongue-in-cheek. To ensure nobody is offended, I make it clear that all observations are ‘that of your editor’ rather than the D.H. Lawrence Society. This is an important distinction. Lawrence had a furious temper and invariably so to do some members of the Society who like to emulate this aspect of his personality, presumably to prove their loyalty to the chosen one. Framing the bulletin as the opinions of the editor helps negate this. The bulletin takes roughly three working days to produce, most of which is taken up swearing at the infuriating interface that is Mailchimp .

Here’s a breakdown of the features and a brief explanation as to why they are included.

The bulletin header is a tweak of the opening line to Sea and Sardinia (1921). ‘Comes over one an absolute necessity to move’.

Listings are always tricky in a magazine because they’re factual and so you’re limited with what you can do with them. The most important thing is to make sure the information is logical and that readers can find what they’re looking for. This apathetic Lawrence quote strikes the tone I’m after. In terms of ordering the events, I’ve gone for a football fixtures format using Home (Eastwood events) and Away (London group and others).

Clat-farting is Eastwood dialect for gossip and so used for monthly roundups. You can’t keep having a picture of Lawrence for each feature and so I went for this still from Women in Love. It’s full of grins and smirks and feels as if someone has been clat-farting. Or possibly farting – given Alan Bates flared nostrils and Glenda Jackson’s look of disgust.

Shelfie is a play on Selfie and so instead of having one of those annoying pictures where people stare at their phone and do that ‘I’m thick as fuck’ pose with pouty lips, they’re holding up a book that fills them with delight. The books selected all have some kind of explicit or implicit link to Lawrence.

Lawrence in Academia uses a panel from Dawn of the Unread which alludes to Lawrence’s brief spell as a teacher. These usually contain the abstract of a paper and a link. These are mainly sourced from Academia.edu.

The D.H. Lawrence Dialect Alphabet is one of the artefacts in the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre, a project that Paul Fillingham and I created in 2019 to mark the centenary of Lawrence’s self imposed exile. So this feature is about repurposing content (an essential skill in journalism) as well as ensuring our project gets coverage. Quite a few of our members are from Eastwood and have as much interest in Lawrence as local culture, so this feature will appeal to them.

On the Box provides links and information to any TV broadcasts or YouTube/Vimeo uploads about Lawrence. YouTube is a wonderful bag of randomness and has recently seen uploads of talks from Raymond Williams and Anthony Burgess as well as audio recordings of Frieda Lawrence and Aldous Huxley.

Lawrence and Me is a space for members to introduce themselves. This is probably the most important feature in the bulletin as our membership is global. A lot of people are unable to attend monthly meetings because of geography or age and so this is one way that they can feel connected. I also hope that it might bring about future projects or partnerships once common interests have been identified. I often get sent terrible images through and end up messing about in photoshop for ages to create something a bit more visually stimulating, such as this ‘you looking at me?’ feature with Carolyn Melbourne from the Birthplace Museum.

From the Archives does exactly what it says on the packet and is a space to share cuttings from previous newsletters (which started in 1975). Digitising the archives was the reason I originally got involved with the Society because I wanted this information to be more accessible to the public (rather than in a filing cabinet in Breach House). The old newsletters were typed up on yellow paper and are absolutely fascinating in terms of seeing heritage develop.

The JDHLS highlights a specific issue in the journal and is usually written by a guest author selected by the journal editor, Susan Reid. Again, this highlights the importance of digitising the archives and making these superb articles available.

Torpedo the Ark contains blogposts by philosopher Stephen Alexander. I might not always agree with what he says but I certainly enjoy how he says it. These are thoughtful provocations distilled into pithy prose. It would be great to see them published in book form one day.

The bulletin was originally intended to provide links to relevant articles but instead has grown into quite a different beast. Although I have lots of ideas for other features, I’m happy with its current state. If it puts on more weight, I won’t have time to do other stuff and there is so much other stuff that needs doing. Talking of which…

Further reading

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rick Gekoski, the pickle-eating baby, and D.H. Lawrence

Rick Gekoski’s Guarded by Dragons: Encounters with Rare Books and Rare People is an illuminating insight into his fifty years of experience buying and selling rare books. The opening chapter reveals how D.H. Lawrence kickstarted his habit…

Rick Gekoski published his first novel, Darke, at the age of 72. But he is perhaps best known for his half a century selling rare books. As the title of his memoir suggests, the treasure he seeks is scarce, carefully buried, and ferociously guarded. But is he himself a dragon, guarding rare books he’s accumulated, or a heroic slayer? It would seem the latter, because once you’ve got the treasure, you want to trade it in for more. His is a life very much focused on the journey rather than the destination.

A rare book dealer requires two basic skills: to know when a book is buyable and when to sell it for a higher price. The best way to accumulate this knowledge is to serve an apprenticeship in a bookshop. He didn’t. He entered the rare book world as an academic and a collector. Thus, he becomes frustrated at conferences when young collectors demand he pass down trade secrets. But there is no elixir. Knowledge can’t be passed down. All you can do is go slay your own dragons and see what happens.

This ethos of experience shapes his memoir. Over thirteen chapters we see him play ping pong with Salmon Rushdie, upset a Poet Laureate, and get dragged through the law courts on more than one occasion. But in terms of my own research, I was reading this for the opening chapter ‘On Sabbatical with D.H. Lawrence’.

It’s late 1974 and the Gekoski’s and their newborn baby are on a first-class plane to New York to see his ferocious mother who is dying of cancer. He’s taken a much-needed sabbatical and ‘wangled’ a contract with Methuen for a critical book on Lawrence. The problem is, he doesn’t have the energy for sustained academic research. What he enjoys more is collecting the first editions he’s been accumulating for the research he has no intention of finishing. It’s all very Dyeresque – something he alludes to.

Research, however, provides him with the excuse to leave his pickle-eating baby with his wife while he visits a secondhand bookseller called William Hauser. ‘Bill’ is nearing retirement and flogging off his books at bargain prices. He visits him five times and the books get cheaper on each visit. We learn that price is not just determined by the value of the object, there are other variables at play. He pays £41 for 12 books and sells most of them, over the coming years, for £333. This would make him a dealer. But as he invests this in more acquisitions, he is also a collector. The fact that he has the books shipped over to Blighty – so that his wife doesn’t find out what he’s been up to – suggests he is either a shrewd businessman or a bit deceitful.

In 1975 books were cheap but hard to find. For example, unable to procure his own copy of Warren Roberts’ Bibliography of D.H. Lawrence, he photocopies it from his university library and then annotates it with his acquisitions – who he bought from, who he sold on to. He explains that ‘unlike work on the putative critical book, which was glacially slow and unenthusiastic over these years, my collecting was focused, passionate and highly organized.’

He becomes obsessed with Lawrence, detailing all his books sold at auction. Later, he convinces his bank manager to allow his to go further into the red so that he can acquire a collection of Lawrence books from an antiques dealer in Wales that include some rarities, such as signed first editions of Lady Chatterley. The dealer insists on being paid in cash.

Allow me a quick digression. During lockdown, I went a year and a half without drawing out cash. Everything went on my card. Then I went to Yorkshire to visit some relatives. First a pizza take-away in Pateley Bridge refused to accept card and pointed to ‘machine across the road, mate’. Then the following evening, a Thai takeaway would only deliver if we had £42.32 in cash. As a sweetener, they threw in two free bottles of Singha beer and would deliver in 25 minutes.

Back to the dodgy dealer.

The dealer gives firm instructions to meet him at a train station at 12. He hangs up before checking if this is convenient. ‘He knew I was keen’ explains Gekoski ‘and may well have known that university lecturers have a lot of free time’. Of course, he can’t resist. But takes a friend along with him just in case. The meeting is fraught with danger, but it’s worth it as the dealer’s collection includes some proper treasure, such as Bay – A Book of Poems, published by The Beaumont Press in 1921 and sold in three issues: 500 copies, 50 signed copies, 25 signed copies bound in vellum.

It’s at this point, after he’s been bundled into the back of a car, that he confesses that writers, collectors, raconteurs make ‘our stories smoother, funnier, more revealing’ because it makes for a better story. He is guilty of ‘unconsciously constructing a faux narrative in which I braved dragons, confronted a dragon, returned safely from the hunt with my treasure: a hero, of a modest sort’.

Gekoski may be an unreliable narrator but he’s certainly a compelling one. I only intended to read the opening chapter to get my Lawrence fix but ended up devouring the entire book in one sitting. In doing this I’ve gone on to discover that John Fowles was anti-Semitic and that John Updike had to explain what a blowjob was to Victor Gollancz. All of which, to use an Alan Sillitoe quote, is ‘cheap gossip for retail later’. Wonderful stuff.

This book was kindly leant to me by David Belbin, Chair of Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature. David is also a writer and a collector of first edition books. This blog was originally published on The Digital Pilgrimage here

Guarded by Dragons is available in HB for £18.99 from Constable at hachette.co.uk

Further Reading

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