Dan Jacobson

The Möbius strip is well-known to topologists and to those fond of performing simple party tricks. By twisting a strip of paper through 180° before pasting its ends together, you can produce a hollow shape with only one surface and one edge. To convince the on-lookers that the shape has only one side, you can start drawing a line down the middle of it at any point and continue the line without lifting the pencil from the paper, until you return to your starting-point. You will then have shown that the single line has passed through what were, before the strip was pasted together, the two sides of the original strip of paper. The trick is both elementary and confusing: obvious and yet an irresolvable affront to one’s sense of order and logic.

Poetic intensity, concentration upon a single incident or event – these seem to be the defining characteristics of the short story for both V.S. Pritchett, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Short Stories, and Walter Allen, in his critical survey, The Short Story in English. ‘The short story,’ writes Allen, is ‘rooted in a single incident or perception’; its effect ‘is nearer to that of lyric poetry than the novel’. And Pritchett: ‘The novel tends to tell us everything whereas the short story tells us only one thing, and that, intensely … the short story springs from a spontaneously poetic as distinct from a prosaic impulse.’

Lawrence on the Revelation which was vouchsafed to the Biblical John of Patmos? Those who know both writers can only fear the worst. Woozy metaphysics. Wild history. Blood-stained theology. Vituperation galore. Promises of chaos to come. Even more dismaying glimpses of redemption to follow.

One of the functions that took place during the recent D. H. Lawrence Festival in Santa Fe was a procession to the shrine on the Lawrence ranch, outside Taos. A few hundred people must have taken part in the ceremony. After listening to a string quartet play Schubert everyone formed up in a line. A drum was beaten somewhere ahead, girls in white robes scattered flowers, and we all went zig-zagging up a path to the little concrete structure in which Lawrence’s ashes are reputedly incorporated. In front of it is the tombstone of Frieda Lawrence, and of her third husband, Angelo Ravagli; above it is the phoenix symbol, in stone or cement, which Lawrence had adopted as his own.

The last time I had visited the Newtown Market in Johannesburg was during my final year at the local university. I went to the market as a member of a group collecting food for the families of African strikers: others in the party included a man who is now a professor of sociology at an English university (he was the one of us who had a motor-car), and a girl with a wonderfully clear, fine brow for whose sake I had become involved in the whole undertaking. Amid the usual disorder of porters, hawkers and shoppers, of crates and wood-shavings from crates, of spoiled fruit and the smell of spoiled fruit, we went from stall to stall, soliciting contributions. Many of the stallholders were Indians; they were not noticeably more responsive to our requests than their white competitors. We managed to get together a few bags of potatoes, a sack of oranges and a basket or two of cabbages, which we carried back to the car. Later, we delivered the stuff to a piece of wasteland behind a corrugated-iron fence, grandlosely entitled the Bantu Athletic Club, where some sporting and educational activities, and much illegal drinking, used to take place.