The Overstory By Richard Powers

 This is an ambitious novel. It is possible to feel the author’s frustration in not being able to express what ideally he would like to:

Page 383: 

“To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”

He comes close to his goal. But novels need these human characters that we can latch on to, that we can connect with, characters whose language and emotions we can understand.
Yet the main, dominant character in this novel is the trees. And not even any single tree. We do get introduced to single trees, mostly at the beginning part of this epic journey, but they themselves are part of a larger interconnective collective. We are told that they are together in this and that in fact it has been discovered, finally, that they communicate and interact in ways silent, and until recently, invisible to us. They are also attached to the ground, it is all connected, and we share 25% of our genes with the trees.
We come from the trees. Not in the sense of evolving from tree-dwelling primates, but that we are of the trees themself, a branch, a curious, isolated and lonely offshoot. A tree branch that takes itself as something else, something altogether separate without the empathy and intelligence to see that we are in fact IT.   

The first part of The Overstory comes on as separate stories. We are introduced to a character in each chapter most often with a tree involved and often in childhood. Is this in fact a novel at all or just a series of character studies calling itself one?

But like the humans who take themselves as separate from the trees, in the second and third sections of the book, these characters are brought together. They are brought together by the trees. We are among the people who see the trees, who feel the trees, who are vigilantly up in trees. They are people who care about the vanishing of the trees. The disappearance of beings hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years old. They want to help.

The question and the main dilemma for these good hearted characters is, how to help? Does defensive human action work in countering destructive human action? Or is there just too much human action?
What should we do or not do to be non-destructive. Is destroying ourselves, the beings who live via this industrial destruction, the answer. But if we are of the trees which are GOOD, how can we be BAD? This simple dualism can’t possibly point the way.

There is a certain open-endedness to these questions in this novel. Perhaps the spiritual mindset of the individual reader can only see it as they can. It could be read as “trees good, humans bad” and left at that.
But this is not the ultimate intention of the work. The intention is to show and call for connection, reconnection, by whatever means necessary. There might not be all that much to do right now other than stand down as much as possible and wait it out to a point when earth, trees, and humans can become one again, as they already are. The novel is never hopeless in regard to the resurgence of the trees, it’s just the humans who will blunder to doom and get themselves out of the way.

“. . . and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
The “lost people” do have compelling stories that make this a page turner at the same time as a lesson in the connectedness of everything.
While naturally missing the target that it is impossible for a novel to hit, it is an unusually and beautifully crafted great work.

Banjo by Claude McKay

I really enjoyed this novel. I felt close to the voice of the narrator. 
It was written in the late 1920s while the author was in Marseilles and Barcelona, two active port cities on the Meditranian Sea. The ports, the ships are critical to the action of the novel.

(I had a year of so myself in Barcelona in the mid-1980s playing the guitar and singing on the streets. The people were kind and supported me and my partner. This is a personal reason the novel worked so well for me, a certain nostalgia for the end of my wild youth and perhaps the beginning of my wild old age.)

The character, Banjo, is part of a loose network of traveling black street people, men. He plays the banjo and is a carefree somewhat wild character from America.
The novel is delightfully plotless. McKay apparently didn’t feel the need to contrive some through-story to carry the reader along.. That is a good thing. For me, that kind of thing, plot, in fiction and film has become increasingly annoying feeling so surprefulusly, artificial, as a cheap mechanism of wannabe popular commercial appeal.
In this novel, as in life, there is a series of episodes with a small cast of characters who move through and in and out. In this way, the book feels more real as if it is a fictionalized memoir and there is something very appealing about that over the plot/story thing that we are so often faced with in these fiction forms.

Among the international cast of black man characters there is one who we come closer to. He is another American and a writer. The novel is written in the third person voice, yet it is Ray, the writer and thinker whose thoughts and motivations we become privy to. It is certainly Ray who I felt close to. He is definitely a kindred spirit. Ray is a writer/intelectual. (I am caught in the modern bind of thought and ideas. This causes a constant measuring and distance, a position of observation, connected yet forever separate.) The novel is given its beautifully textured and deep philosophical and political detail through Ray.
He is part of this international gang of four or five, bums and panhandlers. But he gets a bit of money from the USA with a couple instances of selling a poem or two to some unstated publication.
Through clearly more “educated” and book smart than any of the others, he is legitimately egalitarian, he sees and feels the innocent human beauty and all of the others no matter how they might mess up in ways that might be seen as not beneficial to themselves.
He cherishes the uncivilised core in the others and traces that back to the African roots of them all. This is a philosophical rebellion against the enslaving machine of money profit getting ahead Euro-culture that is building the USA empire, it’s ultimate product. You call them savage, He calls them beautiful and naturally human. 

They party and form a little band that plays music in cafes. They drink. They share their windfalls. They eat and get by this way and that. Ships come into port and the cooks share food with this band of beach boys. Some of them have worked on boats themselves and know other sailors who come to port, feed, and party them all. 

Toward the end of the novel we see that things are changing. There is a tightening up. The English boats are not hiring black crewmen any longer. Only whites. A couple of them are arrested and kicked out of the country on the next boat. Passage paid for by the government. But sometimes they remain free, slip away. 

Some  of these changes are mirrored in B Traven’s novel written around the same time The Death Ship.That novel points out that a lot of this clampdown stuff is new. This need to produce “papers” to move freely around the globe. A fact we take as a given now, but according to Traven it is a ghastly new feature of the Industrial age. Before if you could manage to get somewhere, there you were. Free to walk across Europe and enter and leave at will. But these novels are written on the cusp of nationalistic control that is not all too familiar and continues to be on the rise. 

This novel remains powerful and relevant now, a century later because it so clearly sets the case for uncivilization. For the core hunter-gatherer human spirit of the ages that is being wiped out by civilisation’s necessities brought about by one of its major and troubling manifestations. Perhaps over-population contributes to a vicious circle of machine controls and one form or another of enslavement.  

The novel is a sort of “Fuck you modernity. I don’t owe you a damn thing and I will live wild and free on whatever fringe I can find and whatever handout and scam I can come up with without shame for this is the world I have been given to operate in.” It’s more of “I prefer not to” than a hostile tone.   
It is beautiful, wholesome and true in that.
This is a powerful graceful and beautiful piece of work of universal human relevance now and for all time.

All that said it is a man’s a male story. This is acknowledged in the final dialogue, the last paragraph. Banjo states that it’s also part of the current situation that the men can move and live on the fringes: “And theah’s things we can get away with all the time and she just can’t.”
Claude McKay saw things as they were and as they sadly yet also happily still remain 100 years on. How to set it all right? Hell if I know. We play it as it lies. There is no other choice.  
         

Dreamwatcher By Theodore Roszak

This novel is about dreams. The setting is a psychiatric clinic built around a doctor’s research into dream states. He has stumbled upon people who can tap into the dreams of others. He can help guide them into doing this. He can train people with these innate abilities. He can develop them into tools, “instruments”, to explore and indeed, effect, the dreamscapes of others. But early on in his career, some years ago, the potentially good doctor has fallen for the sick bargain of generous funding, a clinic in his name, but the cost is secrecy and control of a government intelligence agency.
The doctor’s instruments, his dreamwatchers are used by the mind control MK-ULTRA wing of intelligence to enter the dreams of people on their hit list and neutralize, discredit them by psychiatric manipulation. 
Roszak humainizes his big story with Deirdre, a dreamwatcher, who we come to know and gain sympathy for. She and the doctor, Devane, are the main players in the story. The doctor is a good guy but is trapped in a devil’s bargain. He wants the world to know and benefit from his work, but it must be kept secret as it has been bought and weaponized by ruthless power. The critical point comes when the doctor is ordered to destroy the serenity, and public stature of a radical Catholic nun from Central America. The CIA just doesn’t want her to get the Nobel Peace Prize.
The character of the nun brings in with her a childhood connection to indiginous  spirituality. She was taken off as a child and initiated by an aunt who was connected to that stream of ancient female shamanic energy, and training; this magic.

The novel tells an exciting suspenseful story around all this.
Is this just a fun fantasy read? Is it just a spy mind control adventure?
Dreams are so important. Are our dreams manipulated by power above us. In the novel to mess with people the dreamwatchers take them to a place of dark emptiness. At this writing Senator Bernie Sanders has just withdrawn from competition for a presidential nomination. In the address that contained his announcement he said something realated to the power of a dream:

"The greatest obstacle to real social change has everything to do with the power of the corporate and political establishment to limit our vision,” he said.

Are we watching over our power to dream? Are we keeping it clear from less than wholesome influence? What dreams, or nightmares, would come from power if it actually could influence our thoughts and mental well being?  Where are the borders between awake and dreaming? Are our stories related to dreams? Do they influence dreams? When we hear a story well told around a campfire, how does part of us enter that story, feel with it? What type of stories attract us? Do the most frightening ones draw us in because we are fragile and must be aware of environmental hazards?  Do we instinctively know we have to look out for danger? Is this being exploited for nothing more than commercial interest? 

This writer is aware of mass media influencing his own dreams. 

This happened just the other night after watching a good movie on a 13” computer screen for picture and stereo headphones for audio. 

The movie was Seberg about actor/activist Jean Seberg. The movie was not so much about her but, not so distant to the theme of Dreamwatcher, about government intelligence operatives messing with her business. They spy on her and ultimately try to destroy her by spreading lies about her. 

It is brought up here, not to review the movie itself but as an example of this powerful medium to enter into dreams. 

That night this viewer had a vivid dream of being with the character of Seberg in the movie in an apartment. This was not his first experience of this sort. In this case the movie was very good and the dream benign. This dream was about fitting into the environment of the lavish new all white NYC tower apartment setting, maybe class anxiety but not with longing, greed, or lust triggered by the movie. 

Yet the movie had the power to enter the dream in this way. An expensive mass media entertainment had the power to do that little trick. It wasn’t the first time and this dreamer is a fully developed elder adult far from the relatively open vessels of children who are increasingly exposed to screen dreams direct from powerful corporations who’s only goal is to manipulate them to increase their profit and power. 

Beyond that militant intelligence is also involved with the CIA using a massive portion of their budget to direct mass media in lines with their interests. 

This is not so from the melodrama of the plot line of Roszak’s very fine and thought provoking novel from the relatively innocent times of the 1980s.

The Tale (2018)

The Tale
Written and directed by Jennifer Fox

This is a complex, well krafted and very effective autobiography movie of a young girl, age 13, who is raped and pulled into an ongoing exploitative association by a male running coach age 40.
Personally, the movie was not an easy entertainment at all.
It is like being inside someone else's nightmare dream, which also parallels one's own.

So much of the movie and these actual situations is reconstructing memory, verifying memory, and discarding memories that have been softened and made more manageable, less horrible. The abuse can be seen as one’s conscious act of righteous rebellion which is natural in a child who can see the flaws in their parent’s troubled relationship and imperfect lives. The child can be alienated by that and seek light and hope by looking up to and following a handy and charismatic, in a child’s eyes, mentor. These memories are dealt with, placated, and reconfigured as a matter of choice by the victim when the reality is far from that. This is well represented in The Tale.

The Jennifer character now, at age 48, is played by Laura Dern. Jenny at age 13 is played by Isabella Nélisse. There is a brilliant and very effective moment involving memory and the casting of the young girl. When Jennifer starts to remember, and we see her past depicted, Jenny is older, played by a 15 year old. But then in a scene looking at old photographs with her mother she is shocked and has to reset the age and the extremity of her innocence at the time of the abusive calamity when she sees a photo of how she really looked when this occurred, at age 13.. From then on young memory Jenny is played by a much younger girl who’s childlike look and contenance of innocence and inexperience cannot be denied.
(This moment really sold the movie to me personally because there is something that went on with me during childhood that I am unable to place without question on the blurry timeline of childhood. Was I 10? Younger? Older? I have reconstructed the age of the boy at 5 years older. Does that make the ratio 10 to 15, 9 to 14, 12 to 17? None of these ratios look good for him and his buddies, but I would like to know what it is for sure.)

The movie deals with this sensitive subject quite explicitly. There is no question of the totality of the phsyical rape. Yet there is not a hint of erotism or gray area in the sexual scenes reenacted. There is text at the end that states that an adult body double is used for these horrible scenes that would not be proper to put a child actor through for the sake of a movie. I wish I could say that for some other films that involve children crisis sexually or otherwise. 

The viewer might want a “trigger” warning for this one. And although a difficult ride, it is so well done and carefully thought through that one can also come out of it with personal insight to the ongoing damage that such an experience causes throughout life even into old age. Is that the reason for one's addictive behavior, lack of a wholesome fulfillment in social life, or spoty career? The reason one hid out wishing not to be noticed?

The Coldest Warrior by Paul Vidich

This is a CIA spy genre novel which steals its plot from the Frank Olson “fell or jumped” story. 

The reader coming to this because of interest in the Olson story might be better off just reading some other account of it. But if they want a heavy dosage of a hero's journey spy story along with pieces of Olson, then maybe read this. The Coldest Warrior doesn’t really work for me because I’m no longer interested in spy novels and that is the book’s main function. The conclusion was quite dramatic in a cinema spy story sort of way. Maybe some filmmaker has already grabbed this one. It has a nice heroic male lead. Righteous story.

This is a story people like to exploit or at least hope to profit from. 

It’s the same story as the Netflix Errol Morris documentary series Wormwood. 

Wormwood was frustrating because it took 6 hours to tell a story. The story ends up getting lost in the details and the reenactments. Six episodes!?! Errol Morris probably wanted to get the word out, but probably didn’t mind the hefty paycheck for a production on that level. 

Fell or jumped?

Tossed.

It’s not a spoiler of this novel. 

Murdered and tossed out the window. Then covered up for decades. 

But the story is about one spy guy trying to find out what other spies were involved with this. 

That’s the story, the mystery plot not to be revealed here. It doesn’t really matter that the Olson character was murdered because he was upset with the USA using biological and chemical weapons in Korea. Perhaps having this as a minor detail that is overshadowed by the main plot of the novel trivializes it as just part of the set for this play story. It might have even helped if it had spelled out exactly why using these things in Korea was so bad.

LSD is a missed opportunity. It is not explored at all. At least it is not to blame for anything. Maybe it makes one more empathetic for a time. Maybe that is part of what happened with Olson. He tripped and saw the error of the path he was following. Some people have that reaction to LSD, don’t they? Well, this is not the novel to discuss all that.

At any rate the book was not my cup of cheap entertainment brewed from something once living into a rather standard manly adventure saga.

Times Square Red Times Square Blue by Samuel R Delany

This one sometimes took me to the same place as reading about what can be a happier life for humans in a hunter-gatherer group. It is the place of emotional frustration for me. The feeling that things could, without a lot of effort, maybe even less effort, be a lot more pleasant. The restrictions of civilization when mixed up so deeply with global capitalism create a reality that we live in that we take to be normal. But who determines “normal”? The current situation, current meaning during my experience, does not feel normal to me. It feels empty and dark and lonely and without much hope of real human connection that is not somehow connected with money. 

This book is all about connection from the most basic to more complex. Much of it centers around sex. Sex with people in public situations and in places of business fexible enough to permit it or even have it somehow built into the business model. Delany describes these places. They were mostly movie theaters and most of them were old rundown places that had shown pornography. Delany describes himself as, for years, a frequenter of such places where he would engage in oral sex with other men. 

Delany is an urban man. Raised in Manhattan. He has the spirit of a city about him and love of the random encounter, sexual or otherwise. I can only report with a great deal of shame what this book clearly showed me about myself. I was already spoiled by the isolation of suburbia before arriving to live in NYC in my early 30s, over 30 years ago. I could just be a temperamentally shy awkward man or that could have been learned in the safety and isolation of suburban life, and this was in Ohio; a conservative place in a conservative time. I never even visited a major city until age 18 when I hitchhiked to NYC by myself. Being honest about my behavior in the city, I now see that I used it as more to escape, hide out, ti become anonymous, and not be looked at too closely since my social skills and impulses were so low. Maybe if I had grown up in the city with more variety of people about, I would not have developed such lonerism. Maybe I would have found a more welcoming community where my impulses could be channeled to play with like-minded individuals rather than half buried in shame, hiding out until it’s all over. Maybe I could have connected with others better. 

I had been to several of these movie theaters he writes about. I remember Variety Photoplays on 3rd ave and the Metropolitan a couple blocks away on 14th St.. Both sites have gone to demolition and new taller buildings some years ago. I mess them, as well as the Cameo on 8th Ave midtown. 

I wasn’t as into the scene as energetically as Delany but I’m not gay, but somewhere on the bisexual scale and from Ohio, etc.

So much of this is about The Enclosure. A major part of the story of modern civilization is about Enclosure, locking away, fencing off what was once collectively free and making it owned and somehow involving a fee of labor or currency for continued usage. First there is free land where plants, animals, and human animals roam free and live from this land the best they can. But then someone wants to own this land and the people end up having to pay some way or other to survive rather than scratch a living out of the land. Or they can still scratch a living but must give the owner a percentage of their efforts to be permitted to continue surviving.  

The sex in the book is to illustrate the varieties of connection. The prime theme is that connection is better than networking. He morns the destruction of the public sex venues in the renovation of Times Square, because they can facilitate “interclass connection” through basic human sexual interest. His stance is basically anti- big capitalism as destructive of small local business that has an intimate connection to the community and street life and that  brings the safety of people around a healthy and diverse street life. 

I think he is missing some big critical part of the Enclosure. He talks about the buildings, the difference between infrastructure and superstructure, which is the skyscrapers that replaced the small, the rundown and the local with big business national brands. 

But this didn’t happen just in the 1990s the process was already going on for decades. It seems to me that most these theaters themselves were an earlier manifestation of local live theater or whatever entertainment being destroyed by the products of the Hollywood movie business already connected to Wall Street investment dazzling us with its powerful superstructure of dreams. The theaters becoming redundant with television and later even porn theaters less in use when one could watch porn at home via VHS cassettes. By the 1980s the theaters were the realm of those interested is some same sex teasing or action or the men who situationally couldn’t watch tapes at home. Of course now this is all on the internet. 

This Enclosure was very late to the city. The suburbs were built that way, with the places the public could go almost entirely limited to commercial venues such as the shopping mall which became the only place for kids to hang out and try to connect. 

There are a lot of people now who have fled the suburbs for a better life in the revitalization cities. But they are pre-conditioned for the Enclosure that is part of the revitalization. Unaccustomed to and unaware of earlier city life, they are most comfortable with the Starbucks and other familiar brands and they bring this brand familiarity and loyalty with them. 

Delany discusses women a bit and how the open, anonymous sex venues are not used by them. He envisions a sort of hostel set up where women could bring strangers or acquaintances in a public setting safer than bringing someone into the privacy of a home. Some women can and do enjoy hookups with strangers, so perhaps that is possible some time in the future as the restrictions of the ideology of the patriarchy, and its women followers, continue to crumble. 

There is a big fat novel Delany wrote about the theater sex called The Mad Man. I read that some years ago. It is rather unique I think.

Lorenzo in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan

This is my first reading of Mabel Dodge Luhan. I first heard of her long ago, but I don’t know from where. It might have been something as silly as Dennis Hopper buying her Taos house with the money from Easy Rider. (It’s a really nice house. One can see photo on the internet. Historical sight now.). She was a rich lady. This might have been the most important thing about her. Even in democratic bootstrap USA, this put her is a position of privilege. This is not so unusual. What is unusual is that she was the type of rich person interested in participating in bohemian culture. There is usually a supply of rich people interested in the arts, after all, if one doesn’t have to work one must do SOMETHING for amusement, to fill the time. The book has some reference to this with people including Lawrence suggesting that she do something, anything, like her own house chores rather than having servants do it. This for her own good. Because she is bored?

 This memoir is of her relationship with novelist D H Lawrence. It was not a particular intimate relationship. It seems, by her account, that this was because of the emotional walls he built. They were not lovers or anything. It is a little unclear if she wanted him for a lover or not, but apparently this did not occur.
(I read this book after reading nonfiction book that has a lot of details in it about syphilis in the late 19th and early 20th century. That book How the Brain Lost Its Mind: Sex, Hysteria, and the Riddle of Mental Illness mentions some notable people who had syphillis and had to deal with the marginally effective to harmfull, treaments for it as well as the disturbing capasity for the disease to vanish in the body only to reapear more horribly later, maybe. The insane asylums of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were filled with people insane from syphilis. The book mentions her as a victim of the disease and it’s treatments without going into much detail. It says that she suppressed until later the memoir material that that struggle. Yet while reading in my mind, I knew that this was somewhere in the background on her text. Sexually transmitted disease in hard to eradicate since people have problem confronting sexuality directly.)

 
Her story is that she invited this famous English novelist to come live in New Mexico more or less as her guest. She is quite interested in the Indians. She wanted D H to be as well, to write a book about them so apparently the white Euro people would finally understand them. She wants him to be a sort of popularizer, in between interpreter, of the spiritual aspects of Indian culture. A rather tall order for an Englishman on his first trip to the USA. Did she think of this as a sort of commission? 

Frieda and DH Lawrence were a globetrotting couple when they showed up in Taos. Globetrotting then consisted of steamships, and railroads, these new 19th century travel technologies. This sped things up considerably beyond the capacities of sail powered ships and pre-railroad land travel. The Lawrences have traveled around the world before they arrive in Taos from the west. They had just gone to try to live in Australia where Lawrence produced the novel Kangaroo, which I have written about earlier. 
Mabel Dodge Luhan was married to an indian. She tells of how this occurred. She says he set up his tent outside her house and wouldn’t leave because he wanted her. And apparently he got her. So she has this kind of vague character of Tony, her husband, in the book, He the strong silent type so we never really know what he is thinking through all this. In a way, while acknowledging the cultural gap between the indigious, recently from basic hunter-gatherer, and the civilized white Euro types, she separates Tony enough from the others that he always seems remote and unknowable. We get her take on what Tony thinks of the Lawrences now and then and it’s usually that he doesn’t really like them around so much.

She goes into her motivation to draw them there. First with a kind of stock disturbing view that sounds like she is well trained by the patriarchy:  “Only a man can change a woman from a devourer into a creator.” Really? Isn’t this kind of the other way around?
“Perhaps I had dimily and intuitively expected Larenzo to be the Transformer for me and had summoned him for that purpose from across the continents. Well, he had come. He had vivified my life and possibly I had done as much for him. But apparently nothing significant had come of it beyond the momentary illuminations that flashed between us and that always ended in the fretful and frustrating hours of bewilderment.”
This strikes me as an odd sort of buyer’s remorse. The man was an obsessed writer and in a complicated marriage in a forgien land, and he was a poor kid from the coal country in England. Way out of any familiar elements. Her expectations of him feel extreme.

As a reader of some of the novels of Lawrence I don’t think I would look at him at all as much of a savior or answer man for anyone really, not even for himself. He questions a lot and wonders about a better path. Yes, it seems spiritual in some way, and wonders about a connection to ancient ways of human association. He doesn’t provide a path to it. I can understand that Luhan would associate that with the world of the native Americans. I think she was trying to give insight from the indians to Lawrence and get something from him in return, become her “Transformer”.
He writes to her about some confused emotions he apparently thought she had between her feelings for Tony and DH.
“You need have no split between Tony and me: never: if you stick to what is real in your feeling in each direction. Your real feeling in two directions won’t cause any disharmony.--But don’t try to transfer to Tony feelings that don’t belong to him: admit all the limitations, simply. And never again try to transfer to me: admit the limitations there too.”

Included with the memoir are a number of letters Lawrence sent her. Some are part of the memoir itself, and several are dumped into the end. None of these at the end have any explanatory notes attached to them so it’s easy to be at a loss regarding some of things and people he refers to. These letters at the end of the book are all from after Frieda and DH left Taos for more traveling. (And seeing her children. Luhan does tell us that these two have a troubled relationship. Frieda had left a husband and three children to be with Lawrence who, according to this book, did not permit her to see the children. Yet in the letters from DH he talks about Frieda being off with her children and Frieda writes of this too. I don’t know the whole story. Luhan also mentions the hard time the Lawrences had with his fellow Brits and the government authorities during WWI because she was German. He writes about this extensively in Kangaroo.)

The end of the book letters are not really letters between close intimates. This whole book has the slight distaste of a woman trying to buy access to one of the great novelists of her day and that her plan just didn’t work out. After they leave Lawrence is more of less ill for the remainder of his life. He died very young, age 44. (I would like to think that he had a flash at the end of the eternal bonding with the basic at the very end as being maybe what he was searching for all along.) 
After they are gone from Taos Luhan sends him part of her memoirs that she intends to publish. He is supportive and gives her input repeating this in letters. He tells her to publish it herself in consecutive letters and strongly suggests that she ought to change all the names of others in the text. It seems that she is writing about her Greenwich Village artist bohemian socialist salon days when she had a relationship with famous journalist John Reed.
He shares his notions about writing with power and conviction:
“Heaven knows what it is to be honest in writing. One has to write from some point of view, to leave all other aspects, from all the remaining points of view, to be conjectured. One can’t write without feeling--and feeling is bias. The only thing to put down on paper is one’s own honest-to goodness feeling.”

In this end letter section it is clear that the searching wealthy Luhan has continued to search. From reading his letters it is clear that she is really into Gurdjeff and keep trying to get Lawrence to go sit with him or whatever one did with Gurdjeff. DH is resistant all the way. He doesn’t want Gurdjeff, and is tired of a certain type of searching, but she keeps on telling him to go. He never does, of course.
By 1928 he has written Lady Chatterley’s Lover and tells her he plans to publish it himself of an uncensored version and needs the money. He prints 1000 copies to sell for $10 each. This of course worked out well, and he died two years later.

A mere two years after his death she publishes this book. She claims in the beginning that she sent it to Frieda who was OK with it and said that DH was better at the end. I assume she meant different from the not that pleasant depiction of Luhan’s, but this is all rather vague.

Reading this with little other information is like hanging out with someone who complains about someone else unknown to the listener. It is impossible to discern the truth of the matter in other people’s complicated relationships.

This book quite interesting at the beginning, but it slowed since it wasn’t all that deep and felt a little too gossipy-celebrity in an old school literature culture sort of way.