Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

“One of these days I shall open a nice fat juicy vein, lie down in the bath, and begin the book. No. I don’t know what it’ll be about. I think a huge book of a new philosophy. My philosophy, what? No. I haven’t bothered to work it out. It’ll all come once I start. Sometimes I get all my ideas clear at night, and start to write them down, and then I think … O fuck, what’s the use of it all anyway? And I go to sleep. And next day I’ve got to get a shave, or my lover calls, or something. I never seem to have time.”

He suffers, he says, from the expanding moment. It is always there, and always the same, and whatever he does he never has time to write anything but the vague notes in his diary.

“Wednesday. Laid Dicky as usual. Three times a night is too much. I hold that Sainte-Beuve was blaspheming when he said: La prostate c’est une amygdale dont je ne vois pas la nécessité. ”

A part of his time, too, he spends in London these days, taking an interest in the literary life of his time, as exhibited by the goitred belles of Charlotte Street, and the flat-chested winnies of the Fitzroy Tavern. Occasionally he brings one of these conventionally epicene geniuses home with him. Toby is one of his catches. For us simple provincials he has a healthy disregard, being the only one among us to have heard of Hopkins. As a reviewer he is making a name for himself, having cultivated an analytical style tame enough to pass as brutal, and an infallible sense for literary dog-fighting. He stands in front of the fire like a young blowfly and rubs his hands together. There is some talk of a new paper. Yes, Tarquin must contribute; it is going to be devoted entirely to the study of genius in relation to the prostate. Claude will weigh in with a few of his camera studies of great big Nubians. Cyril will contribute line drawings if his hand can be persuaded to remain steady. Toby himself will attack everything in sight. And Tarquin will write an essay on the Flagellation Motif in Modern Poetry. “I’d get you some space,” says the hero, “if only your stuff weren’t so juvenile. The minute you strike a woman you start behaving like a chambermaid. You want more of the — the what is it? — what’s that book of Lewis? Yes, the hard male chastity of thought, or something. Emotion is vulgar, my dear.”

Lobo is very impressed by these preparations. He sits attentively, his head on one side, and listens to Toby declaiming poetry. He has got the idea that the paper is going to be an obscene one: “Will it be full of hot things?” he inquires ingenuously. Tarquin is very annoyed with him.

For a time it seems the expanding moment has become the expanding hour. Tarquin has bought a typewriter and has found something to do. Consequently he is happier. Also, as he says, it is nice meeting new people and so gradually having more and more people to have, my dear. His rouge smudges a bit, he is so engrossed in his new profession. He has bought a wig and an eyeglass but is too shy to wear them, although we do our best to encourage him. The wig he wears only while he is writing. It is a sort of symbol of his artistic personality, the new man who has emerged, “hard and clean as a statue”, from the old scarecrow of doubts and fears and remorses. He looks terrifyingly hideous, sitting at the machine, his pale face screwed into a knob under the too perfectly groomed wavy hair.

The summer has gathered like an avalanche. I sit in the armchair watching Tarquin’s fingers at work, possessed by a dreadful agitation, why I do not know. In my mind I am composing my will and testament, arranging about the distribution of my few books and poems, planning the last vale in ink of a red colour. In the name of Beelzebub, Amen. Imprimis, I Lawrence Lucifer bequeath my soul to hell and my body to the earth among you all. Divide me and share me equally, but with as much wrangling as you can, I pray. And it will be the better if you go to law for me.… That is the dusty note of all testaments. Or perhaps: I Lawrence Lucifer, sick in soul but not in body, being in perfect health to wicked memory, do constitute and ordain this, my last will and testament irrevocable as long as the world shall be trampled on by villainy. The shadows are gathering in the inkwell, the dyes are rotating with the faces of my darlings, Lobo and Morgan, Anselm, Farnol, Goodwin, Peters, Scrase, Marney … I am not sure yet whether there is a postscript or a prelude lying in wait for me. I am uncertain what this colour holds, afraid of the faces that would appear if I started writing. Tarquin tells me to tell you that he is happy. Sexually mature, my dear, and fulfilled. How long it lasts I cannot predict. But we hope, dear reader, do we not?

This said, he departed to his molten kingdom, the wind rose, the bottom of the chair fell out, the scrivener fell flat upon his nose. And here is the end of a harmless moral.

There is a delicious impermanence about the days. We eat and sleep now carelessly, as if we were on a journey, expecting the ship to drop into port at any moment. The graph has curved up again into anguish which it would be easy to mistake for delight. The summer is retreating again and leaving us, stuck like monoliths, in the mud. This is the last fatal spasm before the body and mind are forced back into their autumn forms: the last haemorrhage. I can smell the chilly metaphysic of the winter approaching. The tidemarks of the old philosophies are our constant companions. But there is no nourishment to be found in them. “By space the universe encompasses and swallows me as an atom; by thought I encompass it.” In the asylums they are knitting, knitting, as if they too could smell the deciduous season. At the Blind School my body is laid out on the reading desk, while the blunt furtive fingers spell it out like ants. Pressing down the ball of the eye, learning the rib and femur, lifting and dropping the drugged penis. In the garret the douche bag hums and whirrs millions of potential personalities into an enamel slop pail. The eyes of the travellers are turned inward, becoming dimly aware of the visible chaos, the garbage heap of the soul. The problem of the personality grows like a stench in the air, infecting the town with man’s essential loneliness. Rib to rib, face to face with the absolute heraldic personality which wakes in each other’s eyes, even the lovers tremble, and become sick with horror and emptiness. The air is misty with the breath of cattle. The wayside pulpits erupt in a fresh crop of maxims. Christ! can you not smell annihilation breathing in at the orifices of the cracked personality? Madness is in the air. “I fuck and fuck and fuck,” says Perez, with the net of arteries standing drunkenly in his spine, “and it’s no good. I feel I can’t do enough to them. Women! Piss on, shit on, draw blood. ” His savagery infects the bony figure of our friend on the bed. I am afraid he will kill Hilda one of these nights, but the madness is contagious. We are being slowly suffocated now that the season is ending, being drawn down like decorous blinds in dead houses. In the hospitals they are working feverishly to keep the corpses fresh. Gay mummies stand in the living rooms of Americans. The white ambulance flutters from house to house, fuddled with blood. The clown draws back his trouser leg and lets fall a false cloud of raucous hair. Beds creak in a million rented rooms, loaded with immortality. Slowly the white principle of the body is melted down, softened into passivity. Chamberlain’s face is flushed with fever. He talks loudly and ever more loudly about being born again: so as not to hear the hearse draw up to the door, and the footsteps ascend the stairs. Morgan sponges the tidy limbs with cold water, shaves the slack jowls, trims down the black bush and fingernails. Where is the old woman who threw herself on the body and clutched the penis? Isis where are you? Had she never heard of the rigor ? Things might have been most inconvenient. The tablet shall be in the best of taste, yes, with a quotation from the Holy Writ.…