Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

Of course, the book is only a savage charcoal sketch of spiritual and sexual etiolation, but it is not lacking in a certain authority of its own despite the violence of its execution. Underneath the phantasmagoria real values are discussed, real problems of the anglo-saxon psyche articulated and canvassed. All this has nothing to do, of course, with purely literary merit, which is not for me to discuss. But The Black Book staked a slender claim for me and encouraged me to believe that I was perhaps a real writer, and not just a word spinner of skill.

I realized that the crudity and savagery of the book in many places would make its publication in England difficult. I did not wish for notoriety, and was content simply to have heard my own voice. I knew that a sensitive reader would find that the very excesses of the writing were an organic part of the experience described; and indeed a friendly critic of the book once wrote to me: “Yes, I admit that I was shocked and disgusted here and there, but I read it without prejudice and in the light of the central intention. The crudities match and belong. I have never understood why writers should not be regarded by the reader as enjoying much the same rights as doctors. You do not suspect indecency in a doctor who asks you to strip in order to examine you. Why shouldn’t you give the writer the same benefit of the doubt? As for your novel — you can’t have a birth without a good deal of mess and blood. The labour pains, the groans, sounded quite genuine to me; I suppose because I regard art as a serious business, and spiritual birth as something like the analogy of physical. No, you are not pretending! Hence the impact of the book, I think.”

LAWRENCE DURRELL

The agon, then. It begins. Today there is a gale blowing up from the Levant. The morning came like a yellow fog along a roll of developing film. From Bivarie, across the foaming channel I can see from the window, the river god has sent us his offering: mud, in a solid tawny line across the bay. The wind has scooped out the very bowels of the potamus across the way, like a mammoth evacuation, and bowled it across at us. The fishermen complain that they cannot see the fish any more to spear them. Well, the rufous sea scorpion and the octopus are safe from their carbide and tridents. Deep-water life utterly shut off, momentously obscure behind the membrane of mud. The winter Ionian has lapsed back into it original secrecy.

The slither of rain along the roof. It bubbles in along the chinks of the windows. It boils among the rock pools. Today, at dawn (for we could not sleep because of the thunder), the girl put on the gramophone in the gloom, and the competition of Bach strings, resinous and cordial as only gut and wood can be, climbed out along the murky panes. While the sea pushed up its shafts and coils under the house, we lay there in bed, dark as any dungeon, and mourned the loss of the Mediterranean. Lost, all lost; the fruiting of green figs, apricots. Lost the grapes, black, yellow, and dusky. Even the ones like pale nipples, delicately freckled and melodious, are forgotten in this morning, where our one reality is the Levantine wind, musty with the smell of Arabia, stirring the bay into a muddy broth. This is the winter of our discontent.

The air is full of the fine dust of the desert tombs — the Arabic idiom of death — and the panic world is quite done for, quite used up and lost. The cypresses are made of coal: their forms stipple the landscape, like heavy black brush strokes on a water colour whose vitality has been rinsed from it. Yes. Winter, winter everywhere in these nude, enervate symbols.

This is the day I have chosen to begin this writing, because today we are dead among the dead; and this is an agon for the dead, a chronicle for the living. There is no other way to put it. There is a correspondence between the present, this numbness, inertia, and that past reality of a death, whose meaning is symbolic, mythical, but real also in its symptom. As if, lying here, in this mimic death at morning, we were re-creating a bit from the past: a crumb of the death we have escaped. Yes, even though the wild ducks fall in a tangle of wings among the marshes of Bivarie, and all the elements are out of gear, out of control; even though the sea flogs the tough black button of rock on which this, our house, is built. The correspondence of deadness with deadness is complete.

I could not have begun this act in the summer, for example, because in the summer we sit along under the wall on our haunches, and listen to the figs bursting. The sun dries up what is fluid of agony in us, laps us in a carapace of heat, so that all we know is nothing, sunblack, Egyptian nothing. The membrane gathers over our eyes as they close, and only the black bubbles of torpor cross and recross the consciousness, as if born from lava. The milk of sentiment curdles in the veins; an astringency withers humanity; hair freezes along the scalp, or withers to soft gold shavings along the thighs. The very nipples turn hard and black on the breasts of women, while the figs roast. Teats like dark plugs of wood for the fisherman’s sons.

Well, one cannot help thinking this in such a dawn, when the wind is filling the room with the evocative smells of the dust, and the nascent fust of the tombs: the stale explosions of ancient life breathed coldly on us like leper’s breath. You are so pale and done for in the morning. Pale, the face on the pillow, as ancestral as effigies, while the rotten smell of the crusades blows damply in on us.

This is where I saw the girl get up from bed and brave the cold for a moment. Caryatid. A dance step among the sinews of the music. A miming gigue. For a moment the summer almost burst into bloom again: asphodel, with the brave white brush, pavane of the merry peacock. Or wild geese hanging across the moon, and the invisible archer somewhere watching, hand on his empty quiver. Ah! but here we have only the dregs of yellow smeared across the windowpanes, and the unclean sea, and the flesh that quails at the icy contact of bone. Then I knew all at one that we share that correspondence of death with the season, and with all those other seasons which oppress me when I begin to write of them. No mummies, chunks of tissue latched to bone; no pillars of salt, no cadavers, have ever been half so dead as we are today.

It is today at breakfast, while the yachts hound across the water, tear-stained and anxious, towards port, that I am dying again the little death which broods forever in the Regina Hotel: along the mouldering corridors, the geological strata of potted ferns, the mouse-chawed wainscoting which the deathwatch ticks. Do not ask me how. Do not ask me why, at this time, on a remote Greek headland in a storm, I should choose, for my first real book, a theatre which is not Mediterranean. It is part of us here, in the four damp walls of a damp house, under an enormous wind, under the sabres of rain. From this nervous music rise those others, no less spectres, who are my mimes. I mean Tarquin, walking along the iced suburban streets, his scarf drawn across his face, the disease growing in his womb; I mean Lobo, clambering his suburban girls like a powder monkey; I mean Perez, Chamberlain, Gregory, Grace, Peters, Hilda. Above all I mean this logic of personalities which this paper should exhibit, in all its beautiful mutilations.

Tarquin, for example, six-foot, frost-bound, jack-knifed, yellow with jaundice; Tarquin pinned to a slab of rufous cork, etherized, like a diseased butterfly; Tarquin in the bloodless dream of this Ionian morning, among the foam and uproar, extending his lax hand in greeting. Here we are, sitting in the hallowed fug of the lounge, wrapped in rugs, among the declining plants and statues. He is as ancient and exclusive as leprosy. I am afraid to shake hands with him, for fear that the skin will slip the bony structure of the hand and come away. It would take so little to produce the skeleton from this debile bundle of meat.