Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

Gracie was my fate: IS dead. A sort of mirage, this word I cannot grasp. A tinsel moon on a garish back cloth. A circle of blackness which blots out all new horizons. A rent in the clean daylight of her yellow, peaky, little face. O.K. But if one were to start a quibble about temporal realities would the present tense justify itself? Is she behind me sitting in the chair, coughing over the latest Film Paper? I do not turn round, because I know at once that she is. In bed, worn out, languorous, aching with pleasure between starched sheets? Yes. But only when I am on that borderline of the realities when every abstraction has solidity, weight, volume. I can lift desire in my fingers like this small bud of a breast. I can see it, feel it. It enters my experience like a calamity.

Gracie and her merry tricks! Pranks for wet afternoons! The time we spend sticking pins in the fuses and putting the hotel in darkness. The solemn, wholesome enjoyment we derive from that humourless black telephone. Watch her sitting there naked, playing one of Bob’s hairy pranks on the local butchers. This is early morning, mind you.

“Is that ’Iggs the butcher?” she says, very ladylike in a voice like a pat of butter.

“Yus, madam, Hit his.” The porky assistant wiping his hands on his apron. Then Gracie, in a frightfully subtly accented voice:

“Do you keep dripping?”

“Dripping, ma’m? (say, Fred, do we keep drippin?). Yes, madam, we do.”

And Gracie slowly melting down into laughter, gripping her fist hard between her knees, the laughter gushing up in the wonky lung: “Then what are you going to do about it?” The click of the receiver and the endless soft whewing and crowing which was her laughter filling the little room. What a rich jest!

Against this medallion I offer you another, later, more puzzling picture; a Happy Snap taken when reality had at last closed down on us — myself in a black skullcap phoning for a five-by-two cedar-wood coffin. Ci-gît. Ci-gît.

To your romantic, whose mind is clouded over by his false values, the final tragedy of love is death. Not so. I protest immediately against this idea. Life is the one force which has power to suck tragedy from us — and however untimely the end, we may be sure it is not too soon. Life has always finished with us when we forsake it; death is merely the aesthetic convention which the sardonic playwright bows to. The final touch which shapes the piece — too absolute and perfect to have any relation to the play itself. What book is different for the word Finis on its last page? De Gourmont is right when he says that he who weeps for Ophelia has no aesthetic sense. True. What tears one has are stifled in the spectacle of her madness. Life had finished with her, poor wretch, before death dragged her downstream, a sopping lily among lilies. I leave Rimbaud to follow her downstream to the shallows, the white wretch among the lilies, with the white lily-face turned up pointless under a thatch of flowing hair. The imagination is shocked numb by this vision of her floating away. Analyse it, and you will see this is still the reflection of her madness.

Words. Words. So many words. All this, of course, to impress upon you the essential appropriateness of Gracie’s death; the absolute Tightness of her lying there, in strained white silence, covered by flowers. On her face, as I watched her amiable father screw her down, there seemed to be a strain; as if she were speechlessly interrogating the silence which had become her master. A pretty simile for a dead prostitute? Hush! We shall have James Douglas on us with his stainless battle-axe.

Death caught us on the upswing of events, before life had really staled. A good shove … a scuffle … an oath in the darkness … and Presto! the lantern breaks to pieces on the floor and goes out. I offer you a cedarwood Gracie, with lovely long brass handles, softly glowing, and — Ophelia did not do half as well— with knobs on. This is the real epitaph which she composed in one of those last drowsy moments of lucidity.

“Good night, bitch,” one had said heartily. “Sleep now and get up well tomorrow. I’m sick of your yellow face. Give us a sign of life.”

The light was switched off. She lay there in darkness picking the sheet quietly in long bluish fingers. Knowing her as you do, you do not expect any answer to my endearment as she lies there, do you? The light was off; otherwise the Gracie I have created would lie there and stare at me for an age, expressionless, saying nothing. Perhaps, standing there in the dark (literature! literature!) I write myself down as being aware of the impersonal stare of her eyes. Truth is more exciting than fiction. I will tell you the truth.

For a moment no sound. Weary, I stand at the door, about to leave the room. I expect nothing more. Instead I make up a dozen or so hypothetical scenes in which she realizes how soft and quivering the essential me is, inside the carapace of brutality. She says, for instance, “Come here, Gregory,” and rewards my obedience with a long kiss there in the darkness. Or she says, “Gregory, don’t leave me, I’m scared.” Dear me. This is becoming cinema.

Then, as I stand there, she gives a single husky chuckle and says, “ And the same to you with knobs on! ”

It is an immense comfort to imagine that in those last few days Gracie did find a clue to my conduct. I would like to protest this point with vehemence. If this were fiction I should describe how I stood there, my ankles turned to water with relief, seeing that at last she understood me, had found the perfect formula of reciprocation.

Perhaps, after all, truth is less exciting than fiction. This is the high spot of the tale, the crux of our relationship. “With knobs on” is the summing up of all our differences, the epitome of our love. The critical point, as when, in any Russian novel, the Christian protagonist, having speculated for pages on the properties of murder, actually does poleaxe his grandmother. Unfortunately I must renounce all those rotund literary effects which would give this nail paring the place it deserves in my history. Take it for what it is. I can only protest feebly, it is the truth. The one true touch of passionate banter which had been missing from the beginning. Perhaps, after all, it is I who am the romantic. Gracie’s epitaph and swan song, in one phrase, was this: WITH KNOBS ON.

In the West Norwood Cemetery where she lies, you will see nothing but the bare inscription above her. They would not let me write on the tombstone: Here lies Gracie, who died in 1927. WITH KNOBS ON.

With the final accurate banality of his class her father ordered the mason to engrave on the expensive marble the immortal jest: GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.

We sent her down with an armful of magnificent flowers, as sumptuous as any cinema star’s, and this vain promise of memory. What that frail decomposing husk demands from this, my life, is a pound of living flesh. I am paying here, however shyly, in green blood. Of the humorous eternity which stole Gracie to add to its collection let me remind myself walking among the bazaar of white masonry, the many tombs, to the one hideous tomb, garish with cherubs and scrolls: I say over and over again to myself: “The real epitaph is with knobs on.”

But I have anticipated cruelly. One of the unfortunate things about a personal style, a personal journal, is that one assumes one’s reader’s knowledge of all the facts. A journal, then, if written for oneself, would be all but meaningless to the world; for one turns, not to the spadework, the narrative, but to the most interesting points in it. Look at me. I am in such a hurry to finish the job that I blurt out the end before the beginning. It is going through me at such a pace that I cannot distinguish the various flavours of incident, in their chronological order. (I am a liar. It is artifice which dictates this form to me.) Or the word death, like the word finis. If you began Finis. “She died that I may live etc.” It makes no difference. It makes no difference. If the title-page were Finis she would still exist, amorphous, evocative, musky — a white kelpie luminous on the last page.