Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

It is so very silent here at night: my room amputated from the planet. A laboratory hanging in space where the white-coated intelligence I, clinical Holy Ghost, broods forever among the bottles and the pickled foetuses. Memory has many waiting rooms. The train for the end of space has been signalled. Shall we run out among the cavernous sheds to meet the monster? The truth is that I am writing my first book. It is difficult, because everything must be included: a kind of spiritual itinerary which will establish the novel once and for all as a mode which is already past its senium. I tell myself continually that this must be something without beginning, something which will never end, but conclude only when it has reached its own genesis again: very well, a piece of literary perpetual motion, balanced on a hair, maintaining its precarious equilibrium between life and heraldry. With the pathos of Tarquin’s diary I insist that everything must be included. It is difficult. For instance, there is no category of irrelevances. Everything chosen is relevant. There are no canons — should be none. It is a hypothetical prophecy I dream about in this area of the night, alone, chewing paper, or anchoring my hands fast until morning. The difficulties are so enormous that I am tempted to begin at once: to try and escape from the chaste seminary of literature in which I have been imprisoned too long. Everything must be accepted, including Tarquin, and transmuted into the stuff of poem. There is your body, for instance, which rises up over the unwritten book like a wall of snow: the component parts of the day ending in an agony of rebirth — unless you have your period! There are acres of hysteria when we weep together weakly for no reason at all; there is that moist, friendly target under your dress, so mysterious in its simplicity that I cannot keep away from it, returning each time to the heart of the enigma as one might return to a gnomic verse and find a new meaning in the snow each time. All this is such ripe matter for the book that I do not know how to begin it. I am serious. It is such a book as Gregory could not even imagine, could not even begin to plan. The little green snowman sitting in his own shadow, keeping the crows off his work with wild sweeps of the pen. Gregory and the monstrous behaviour of literature which he used as a cloak for his terrors and realities. Strange chaotic chords which fill the diary. I have been reading it again, puzzling over it, and the realities which it deals with.…

Here Gregory begins:

That I too have nursed literary pretensions, I will not disguise from myself; that I have now finally rejected them is proved by the airy nonchalance of this journal, ha, ha. By its very fragmentary character, which preserves only the most casual excursions among my memories. Yes. At one time I had accumulated every principle, every canon of art, which is necessary for the manufacture of a literary gentleman. Now I not only despise the canon, but more, the creature himself: the gent. I am a saurian, I thank you, but not wasp-waisted as yet.

The theme of my only book is one which even now occasionally entices me, insists on its formal excellence in a world of shapeless, inelegant mediocrities. I had planned this work as a profound synthesis of life — as an epitaph to the age. Its theme was revelry; its title — if I may make so bold with the sensibilities of the world — URINE. Simply the divinely organic word in gold Gill Sans on white paper. It was to be a small book, about the length of Remy de Gourmont’s A Night in the Luxembourg. Its simplicity would have delighted that delicate literary fencer. But let me explain.

In Siberia, I have read, there is brewed a drink, whose name I do not recall, but whose potence is due to an infusion of muscarine — a poison obtained from the beautiful scarlet mushroom fly agaric. A regular toper’s tocsin. But more. The active principle in the brew, the muscarine, is eliminated by the kidneys, and passes into waste; into the fluid whose name (I am too fastidious to keep writing it down) forms the title of my opus. From this discovery dates a curious and delightful cult. Whenever there is feudal merrymaking abovestairs in the Siberian baronial halls, the servants avail themselves of the waste products of the festivity to do a bit of merrymaking on their own. You begin to see the satanic implications of the thing? Believe me, even now, Olympian as I am, I almost regret having rejected it. Its scope is perfect, leaving no room for those personal reflections of the author which provide the tedium of half the novels published. None of your vague moralizings or contemplative trances. Nothing but the bare anatomy of narrative — nude and pure as a winter landscape. Simply this:

A party above- and belowstairs. Man proposing the toasts, and the servants furtively disposing of the humiliating evidences of its ultimate waste. The link connecting the two planes is, simply, waste. The golden gains for which the furtive valet spoors the chamber pots is profoundly symbolic. Its significance I shall not dwell upon. Here is your answer to every homely commonplace. A carnival party in action. Sluts and sluttishness abovestairs and below. On either plane the so-called action is simply erotic formula — love toasted by the master, the kitchenmaid toasted by his man. The same tocsin warms a multitude of cockles.

Really, I tell myself, really some day soon I shall be enticed into beginning it. Until then, let me offer this title-page to your imaginations — what gonadal ecstasies shine beneath the simple symbol, what promises!

URINE

by Death Gregory, Esq.

Here Gregory ends.

It is so silent here at night. Above all, so silent, I lie awake: the essential I, that is, from whom I expect response to noise, to gesture. The other, the not-me, the figment, the embryo, the white something which lives behind my face in the mirror, is lulled underground, hibernating. The opulence of the snow steams down my eyeballs. I dare not sleep because I never dream about her. Instead I go to the window and communicate with the statues out there. The plaster outlaws on the grass. Their personalities are a match for me on such a December evening. Cadaverous the trees. A late train draws away across the indistinct haze of the moon, a bright nerve of colour. I am full of irrational ideas. I shall go up, perhaps, and speak to Tarquin. Disturb Lobo under the pretence of some important news. But having so lately left you it is as if I am in a suit of armour. Chain-mail reticence. I am lonely but I do not wish to see anyone. A poem, then? How about a fine choplicking poem about you, about the snow and the cattle? The pen is clogged with black ink. O eloquent, just and mighty death etc. I am too full of you. Let me digest. Let me digest. It is in such a mood that I slip down among the trees, across the derelict pond, to the grass-fringed garage, pausing for a second to count the lighted windows. Lobo still awake and Clare. All night now I will drive the black car under the moon in an agony of escape — I do not know from what. Escape, under a full moon, with the fields travelling away beside me, the silent farms and cottages, the facile ancient spires. If I could reach the sea I would be at rest. Its enormous breathing and sponging the dead body of the stones would quiet me. I would empty you into it without ceremony, the part of you which I carry about with me, living on me. I would dump you like a corpse and turn back to the city with refreshment. But there are only these metal roads along which we scream all night until the moon dissolves and the first stagnant eggs are poached on the snow. The streams are frozen over. I walk beside them on the grass, now stiff with rime, in a million priapic blades; I walk quickly, with a light step, as if to some important appointment. If I find a dead robin under the bushes I slip it in my pocket with a preoccupied air, as if I have no time to examine it. The cattle retreat from me with vague alarm, ducking their great heads and watching me out of the corner of their eyes. When I can stand it no longer the car draws out again, coughing and roaring down the roads in the ribboned snow. I have a sympathy with this tepid steel hull which I have learned to manage so deftly. I switch the lights on and off; I open the throttle with a sudden scream; I sing loudly out of the window. At nine Eustace Adams will be sitting with the poached sun balanced on his shaggy cranium. The children will be whispering and sniggering. Marney blowing his tulip and shuddering. Another day opening from the navel of my misery: from the moment when we fall, like figures made of feathers, in the snow. It is in this dawn, running down the long roads to the place I call home, that I begin again the enormous underwater gestures toward another night and you, spreading the gloom with slow vague hands towards you. Everything is plausible now because nothing is real. I am stretched like a violin string, to snapping point, until tonight.