The Man Who Loved Islands by D.H. Lawrence, 1928
The magic trick:
Giving us an anti-hero
Today begins what is kind of an odd week of stories on SSMT. We’re not doing a set of stories by a certain author of from a certain country.
Nope.
We’re doing three stories set on islands. Why? I certainly didn’t brainstorm this concept out of thin air. It just so happens that I read three stories in a row from three different collections and realized, much to my surprise, that all three were set on islands.
Strange, right?
So here we are, and here we go.
We start with a story that is not only set on an island, it’s about islands. Or at least it’s about a man who loved islands.
This story gives us a kind of anti-hero. The protagonist – aka the guy in the title who loves islands – is very, very selfish. He uses people. He hurts people.
It’s not that he’s evil. He just wants what he wants and what he wants is to not think about anybody else.
(Is it odd that I pictured Thomas Jefferson in my mind the entire time I read this?)
Anyway, this kind of story presents an interesting scenario for the reader. On one hand, we are likely not going to sympathize with this character much. He is selfish and self-absorbed to a fault.
On the other hand, though, it’s not difficult at all to imagine D.H. Lawrence portraying much of himself in this character, so well does he seem to know this man and his most intricate motivations. Because it is such a well-drawn character, the reader can’t help but be intrigued and drawn in to the story.
What we wind up with is a beautiful story about an ugly character.
And that’s quite a trick on Lawrence’s part.
The selection:
Our islander was uneasy. He didn’t believe, in the daytime, in any of this nonsense. But at night it just was so. He had reduced himself to a single point in space, and, a point being that which has neither length nor breadth, he had to step off it into somewhere else. Just as you must step into the sea, if the waters wash your foothold away, so he had, at night, to step off into the otherworld of undying time.
He was uncannily aware, as he lay in the dark, that the blackthorn grove that seemed a bit uncanny even in the realm of space and day, at night was crying with old men of an invisible race, around the altar stone. What was a ruin under the hornbeam trees by day, was a moaning of bloodstained priests with crucifixes, on the ineffable night. What was a cave and hidden beach between coarse rocks, became in the invisible dark the purple-lipped imprecation of pirates.
To escape any more of this sort of awareness, our islander daily concentrated upon his material island. Why should it not be the Happy Isle at last? Why not the last small isle of the Hesperides, the perfect place, all filled with his own gracious, blossom-like spirit? A minute world of pure perfection, made by man, himself.
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