Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

Am I the angel with shining wrists scraping out their microscopic beauties in God’s ink? The shirted cherubin! See, I take a mouthful of ink and blow it out in many colours at the sky. From that fragile column fall one or two figures — these my shining darlings!

On that portion of time that is a Saturday printed on paper, over a quotation from Genesis, I go and inflict myself on the Chamberlains. In his flat one could sit for centuries without anyone knowing you were there.

Chamberlain himself sits in the armchair with a lighted pipe in his mouth and tunes up his little ukulele. Very softly and nostalgically he sings the following ditty, in one of its numberless homemade variations.

Dinah!

Has a lovely vagina!

Why, it’s like an ocean liner,

And my Dinah’s keen on me.

Vodeo do do etc.

Dinah is his wife. She says, “Stop that.” He stops it. She says, “Make up the fire.” He makes it up. She says, “Begin toasting the muffins or we’ll never have tea.” He rests the toasting fork negligently on the fender, and returns to his art. Very softly he begins, in a queer voice, full of pipe and nostalgia:

Dinah!

Can you show me something finer,

Than the portable vagina,

Which my Dinah keeps for me?

Vodeo do do etc.

A prediluvial world in which I can sit at rest and watch the whole pageant pass. The shadows in ink, the chart, the green diary, the mathematical cones of snow towering up to heaven, the desire, the kingcups opening between my toes. I wish the summer would come. The winter of my discontent prolongs itself into infinities of boredom, and this moment is the only radiant instant recorded on the spools of time. Here, in the pipe smoke and worn books with nothing but the great warm personality of the fire in the room. The muffins festering on the prongs, and the lionhearted coals. Outside on the steaming lawns St. Francis is picking the lice from the sparrows. It is all gone, I am saying to myself; it cannot last. She has gone away into the country of the frozen lakes and the stiffened hedges. Hilda wrote: “I don’t see what I done for God to treat me this way. Perhaps because I been a wicked woman. When the child was seven month on I felt in my bones that something might happen. Now God’s torn it properly for my sins.”

And the other letter which I carry about with me stiffly, like a withered limb: “It has been snowing and I am lonely. I wish I could cut you off and carry you with me wherever I go, inside me. I could be warm. I lie in bed and imagine it.”

Chamberlain reads the single page, puffing at his pipe. He gives it back without comment. Later on in the evening he says: “Other people’s love is a little disgusting, why is it?”

Or there is Tarquin, in the character of the great artist, tracing his history in literary cadences which are not bad, considering everything. Art is a disease, he is always saying. Massaging his shining cranium he will read strophe one of his great symphonic Bible to Peters. Thus:

“Where shall I trace those first parents of mine who generated all history by the first faulty contact of sperm and ovum? Where the faulty placenta, the first deviation of the foetus let down delicately on its cord to rock in the amniotic fluid? How shall they be celebrated? Where shall we see the first microscopic flaw in function which gave us the world of fire, of stone, of oxen, of numbers, of terrors— and of Gods ? Perhaps I was swung between the loins of a troglodyte, natural as fruit though faulty, in the womb of blackness squeezed; my head out of shape, my cretin’s eyes pressed out under sweet sickly white lids like those of a fish; my limbs shoved out and shinbones bandied. I am sure my brain was jumbled in its sac, teased by bone pressure, until I laughed, lolling my head back, heavy, heavy, to protest that the sun was night-black …”

Ten years’ hard polishing have gone to shaping this opus. Polishing of prose, of spectacles, of the great bald cranium. He sits, like a polyp, and waits for applause. A little scared that there will be none. After all, ten years … Needless to say, this is the only piece of the symphonic Bible extant. He tries to pretend that there is more of it, but there is not. “It’s not in its final form,” he will say prettily if you ask. But one examination of his notebooks when he was out one day convinced me that this great artist never finishes anything. Even the diary has its off moments. On January the 3rd, 5th, and 19th occurs the sublime thought, “Nothing of note.”

Well, even I get hard up for material at times. That is what brings me to the snow. It has been snowing again. Again! It has never stopped. When I was small there was a fugitive summer at the seaside with Uncle Bob, and Wendy. Wendy now, the rugged little apple tree, with her soft bark, her solid knotted little stance, the heavy poised apples inside the green shirt. Wendy like a short sharp bite into a sour apple. Pippin-bright face and lips with the spittle shining on them forever. Holding her down in the corn while the yellow corn shuffled over her head and fell in her eyes. When I am lying touching the soft cornfield with my hand I am apt to wake up with an apple between my teeth. Wendy!

But this is a snowscape in indigo, nubian, cobalt, ash Wednesday, gothic, Fiume. I am walking in the dark streets with your letter in my hand. All that is coming from me is a sort of saga in answer to it. I can feel it coming from my body. I am so unhappy that I would like to spend my remaining money on a whore — if there were a whore to be found. Alas, poor Hilda.

It is in this area of the night that I come upon Morgan in the dark street. There is blood on his waistcoat, his hands. A strange agitation in his eyes. “There’s been an accident,” he says, licking the snow from his chin. “At the station.” Snow settling on his eyebrows, ears, lying in little drifts against his collar. “For Christsake.” He beckons me into a shop doorway. It happened tonight as he reached the station to meet Gwen. A sudden roar and a puff of black smoke. Terrified he was down there on the line, scavenging among the broken carriages before he knew what he was doing. “She’s O.K., sir. Missed the train. But what a mess, you never seen such a mess.” His hands are agitating themselves about a packet of cigarettes. One carriage copped it fair and square. Five people literally cut to bits. The doctor was sick. Arms, entrails, and etceteras lying about in the corridor. The doctor was young. His great body is restless, turning this way and that. He does not go back to the hotel at once. He wants to reminisce a bit about the war and the messes he has seen. “I’ve been close to it many times, sir. But never shook me like this.” He is quite voluble. “I thought of Gwen. By Jesus Christ, running down the stairs.” There is blood on his hands. He helped them gather up the loaves and fishes, the pieces of meat, and put them into sacks. We begin to walk as he tells me this. Then, walking down the huge corridors homeward he lifts his head into the white showers which fill the enigmatic space between us and the moon, and says, in an agony of surprise:

“Pieces of meat, sir. They was nothing but pieces of meat left. ’Ot and steaming, as true as I’m walking here.”

If it is not too late I shall go up to Tarquin’s room for a spell of mutual condolence and misery. Or he will be sitting there at his little piano curiously upright and military. It is as if the music were working him, not he the music. Like a man suffering an electric shock he sits there and watches his own big hands act. His technique is supposed to be flawless but satanically hard ( vide Gregory). He loves the romantics, dwells on their long snotcurdling melodies with a resigned pathos hanging in his big eyes. Emotion only seems to reach him with difficulty, by osmosis. That is why his taste is so emotional. From the terrific shivers and orgasms of the music he draws some infinitely small private thrill. The rest pours over him. Wagner, now, that is his comfort. In flocks and shoals the heavy volumes pour down over him, filling the room; he sits under a waterfall of music, an icy douche. Like a flower his heavy head floats on the surface. “Wagner,” he says breathless, standing up with the music running off him, knuckling his eyes. “Wagner!” And smiling, “Wonderful,” panting hard from the coldness of the shower.