Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

‘The desert!’ he said, as if in answer to my unspoken question.

‘The desert, Darley, old boy. That is something to be seen.’ From a capacious pocket he produced a copy of the Pickwick Papers. ‘Damn!’ he said. ‘I mustn’t forget to get this copy replaced. Or the crew will bloody well fry me.’ It was a sodden, dog-eared little book with a bullet hole in the cover, smeared with oil. ‘It’s our only library, and some bastard must have wiped himself on the middle third. I’ve sworn to replace it. Actually there’s a copy at the flat. I don’t suppose Pombal would mind my pinching it. It’s absurd. When there isn’t any action we he about reading it aloud to one another, under the stars! Absurd, my dear chap, but then everything is more absurd. More and more absurd every day.’

‘You sound so happy’ I said, not without a certain envy.

‘Yes’ he said in a smaller voice, and suddenly, for the first time, became relatively serious. ‘I am. Darley, let me make you a confidence. Promise not to groan.’

‘I promise.’ He leaned forward and said in a whisper, his eyes twinkling, ‘I’ve become a writer at last!’ Then suddenly he gave his ringing laugh. ‘You promised not to groan’ he said.

‘I didn’t groan.’

‘Well, you looked groany and supercilious. The proper response would have been to shout “Hurrah!” ’

‘Don’t shout so loud or they’ll ask us to leave.’

‘Sorry. It came over me.’ He drank a large bumper of champagne with the air of someone toasting himself and leaned back in his chair, gazing at me quizzically with the same mischievous sparkle in his blue eyes.

‘What have you written?’ I asked.

‘Nothing’ he said, smiling. ‘Not a word as yet. It’s all up here.’ He pointed a brown finger at his temple. ‘But now at least I know it is. Somehow whether I do or don’t actually write isn’t important — it isn’t, if you like, the whole point about becoming a writer at all, as I used to think.’ In the street outside a barrel organ began playing with its sad hollow iteration. It was a very ancient English barrel organ which old blind Arif had found on a scrap heap and had fixed up in a somewhat approximate manner. Whole notes misfired and several chords were hopelessly out of tune.

‘Listen’ said Keats, with deep emotion, ‘just listen to old Arif.’ He was in that delicious state of inspiration which only comes when champagne supervenes upon a state of fatigue — a melancholy tipsiness which is wholly inspiriting. ‘Gosh!’ he went on in rapture, and began to sing in a very soft husky whisper, marking time with his finger, ‘ Taisez-vous , petit babouin ’ . Then he gave a great sigh of repletion, and chose himself a cigar from Menotti’s great case of specimens, sauntering back to the table where he once more sat before me, smiling rapturously. ‘This war’ he said at last, ‘I really must tell you…. It is quite different to what I imagined it must be like.’ Under his champagne-bedizened tipsiness he had become relatively grave all at once. He said: ‘Nobody seeing it for the first time could help crying out with the whole of his rational mind in protest at it: crying out “It must stop!” My dear chap, to see the ethics of man at his norm you must see a battlefield. The general idea may be summed up in the expressive phrase: “If you can’t eat it or **** it, then **** on it.” Two thousand years of civilization! It peels off in a flash. Scratch with your little finger and you reach the woad or the ritual war paint under the varnish!

Just like that!’ He scratched the air between us languidly with his expensive cigar. ‘And yet — you know what? The most unaccountable and baffling thing. It has made a man of me, as the saying goes. More, a writer! My soul is quite clear, I suppose you could regard me as permanently disfigured! I have begun it at last, that bloody joyful book of mine. Chapter by chapter it is forming in my old journalist’s noodle — no, not a journalist’s any more, a writer ’ s. ’ He laughed again as if at the preposterous notion.

‘Darley, when I look around that … battlefield at night, I stand in an ecstasy of shame, revelling at the coloured lights, the flares wallpapering the sky, and I say: “All this had to be brought about so that poor Johnny Keats could grow into a man.” That’s what.

It is a complete enigma to me, yet I am absolutely certain of it.

No other way would have helped me because I was too damned stupid , do you see?’ He was silent for a while and somewhat distrait, drawing on his cigar. It was as if he were going over this last piece of conversation in his mind to consider its validity, word by word, as one tests a piece of machinery. Then he added, but with care and caution, and a certain expression of bemused concentration, like a man handling unfamiliar terms: ‘The man of action and the man of reflection are really the same man, operating on two different fields. But to the same end! Wait, this is beginning to sound silly.’ He tapped his temple reproachfully and frowned. After a moment’s thought he went on, still frowning:

‘Shall I tell you my notion about it … the war? What I have come to believe? I believe the desire for war was first lodged in the instincts as a biological shock-mechanism to precipitate a spiritual crisis which couldn’t be done any other how in limited people. The less sensitive among us can hardly visualize death, far less live joyfully with it. So the powers that arranged things for us felt they must concretize it, in order to lodge death in the actual present.

Purely helpfully, if you see what I mean!’ He laughed again, but ruefully this time. ‘Of course it is rather different now that the bystander is getting hit harder than the front-line bloke. It is unfair to the men of the tribe who would like to leave the wife and kids in relative safety before stumping off to this primitive ordination. For my part I think the instinct has somewhat atrophied, and may be on the way out altogether; but what will they put in its place — that’s what I wonder? As for me, Darley, I can only say that no half-dozen French mistresses, no travels round the globe, no adventures in the peacetime world we knew could have grown me up so thoroughly in half the time. You remember how I used to be? Look, I’m really an adult now — but of course ageing fast, altogether too fast! It will sound damn silly to you, but the presence of death out there as a normal feature of life — only in full acceleration so to speak — has given me an inkling of Life Everlasting! And there was no other way I could have grasped it, damn it. Ah! well, I’ll probably get bumped off up there in full possession of my imbecility, as you might say.’ He burst out laughing once more, and gave himself three noiseless cheers, raising his cigar-hand ceremoniously at each cheer.

Then he winked carefully at me and filled his glass once more, adding with an air of vagueness the coda: ‘Life only has its full meaning to those who co-opt death!’ I could see that he was rather drunk by now, for the soothing effects of the hot shower had worn off and the desert-fatigue had begun to reassert itself.

‘And Pursewarden?’ I said, divining the very moment at which to drop his name, like a hook, into the stream of our conversation.

‘Pursewarden!’ he echoed on a different note, which combined a melancholy sadness and affection. ‘But my dear Darley, it was something like this that he was trying to tell me, in his own rather bloody way. And I? I still blush with shame when I think of the questions I asked him. And yet his answers, which seemed so bloody enigmatic then, make perfect sense to me now. Truth is double-bladed, you see. There is no way to express it in terms of language, this strange bifurcated medium with its basic duality!