Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

In this theatre it is all or nothing. Oneself is the hero, the clown, the chorus; there are no extras, and no doubles to accept the dangers. But more terrible still, in the incessant whine of the chorale, the words, words, words spraying from the stiff mouth of the masks, one becomes at last aware of the identity of the audience. It is my own face in its incessant reduplications which blazes back at me from the stone amphitheatre.… In the mirror there is no symptom whatever: take me, I am to be accepted or denied; not to be understood, but experienced; not to be touched, but a funnel of virtue; not a Christian, but an admirer of God in men. Do not inquire of the ingenuous mask, I say, it can tell you nothing.

In these damp winter days the first germ is sown in me, as we lie against the wall, shivering like addicts; the germ I shall take away southward with me; which in this act of tuism I am learning to control. The struggle has been medieval almost. Long winter nights, lying there while the sea drove up night-long over one’s dreams, washing, forever washing and breaking up into one’s thoughts, purifying, healing, destroying. This writing, then, is the projection of my battle with the dragon who disputed my entry into the heraldic baronies. For me, at any rate, it has been cardinal, for I have suddenly grown up in it. I am falling westward steadily, entering the region of the pneumatic gift! A latitude where even a lifeline is no good and the diving bell of the philosopher crumples with laughter.

And yet, at the other end of the telescope through which I can see my own pygmy history projected, is always for me Chamberlain’s white face, its utter incomprehension a mere mask for ideal certainties and delusions, hanging above an obsolete billiard table, hungry for news in a world which has no news to offer. The summer went down at last in a hush of bows. That much is history. The rest, the winter for instance, is so much a part of us that we are unable to dissociate — to distinguish it from our other diseases. The empty stage on which we clown brilliantly under the audience of stars. A ballet of human beings rigid on our hooks, gently swinging, like frozen meat.

Hilda is lying in Bethlehem, dead drunk. This winter is eventful for her, veteran sportsman that she is. She has lost both ovaries. The season therefore is no longer closed, but open. There is no more the great enamel bowl by the bed swimming in used condoms and carbolic acid. The bowl to which Perez once wrote an ode of fruitfulness. The bowl against which Lobo held his racked forehead as he vomited. The wilderness is paradise enow. And in the great stallion’s face there are new markings, new “fields” of experience, which show that the struggle is beginning again. The verb “to fuck” has become synonymous with the verb “to be”. It is as if this act were the one assurance of existence remaining to us still. Staring at the enlarged pupil of the old stallion’s left eye, arriving in state in the plush corridor lined with stools, and going over the murderous details of a brilliant hysterectomy. All these things I go through blindfold. It is when the guitar begins to sing in Perez’ fingers that it is all recalled to me. Lobo in the attitude of the billy-goat. A medieval scribble in his underpants. Or Perez rising suddenly out of the bushes, blind drunk, and huge in the moonlight, with the great bell tolling under his shirt.

The penis of the whale for instance! Or the book-lined walls of Tarquin’s room. Everywhere books on the pathology of madness. How is it that we can be mad, and yet so saintly quiet, with hands folded in our laps like empty gloves? It is the persistent miracle. Out of this drug-addict shivering the face of Hilda forms, apocalyptically round as the bowl of the heavens, and scarlet as the dragon. Or Connie turning over on her side to let the tide sluice her out. The Indian Ocean propped open before Clare, and his delicate Levantine features hanging over her, pale and afraid. Turning over, for example, in a huge lather of foam, winnowing the poles with their great female flukes. Connie and Hilda. Dead blubber in a chaos of arctic lights, churning and moaning, until the pale Levantine face is broken up into its components and sent revolving down the gullet of the whirlpool. And to the question: “Who introduced you?” Tarquin now gives the answer, “My mother.” This is extremely significant. The wall is lined with books which are hardly ever opened. “A book”, says Chamberlain, “is a testimony of inefficient action. I shall live instead.”

Or the world of ElGreco, smoky, ill lighted, glowing like radium. (Take your choice, take your choice, but leave me in peace. Geology has no terminology for these fissures, schists, bosses, snags. Take you choice.)

Or the bit from Gregory’s diary which I did not dare to quote. (“What can I do? What can I do? There is no action in me. The very sperm that runs from my penis is null. It is not virtue going out from me, but a dead loss to the body, the psyche, the will. My vitality runs out of me like pus, and there is no figure of grief strong enough to express it. Shall I pour my hair through my fingers? Shall I tie the grin of the madman round my face like a scarf?”)

In the deserted billiard room where the pockets hang like plundered scrotums Lobo dances the dance of the Incas, quite naked. He stops on tiptoe, whistles like a wren, and sneaks behind the curtains giggling. Chamberlain is talking about England, the Puritan Father of the world. His face is the face of a burnt-out duchess. The old Babylonian whore that is England, burnt out, gutted, with the disease melting her eyes in their sockets. Then Lobo appears again from behind the curtain with an erection almost twice as big as himself and we all stop in consternation. We are celebrating the second coming of Christ with a mammoth party. Rye whisky, rubber, and a coloured argosy of fine slang whores from the West End. Poppy and Ethel have already fought with Connie. And Clare in trying to intervene received a blow on the side of the head with a loaded handbag that nearly took his ear off. Poppy is pure litmus. Dip her in urine and she turns poppy-coloured, somnolent, drug-eyed, myopic, hayseed. Now the men’s trade union has intervened. It is, after all, the second day of the debauch, and we want a bit of male privacy. So in the billiard room we rearrange the cosmos according to a new pattern, while the women squabble in the lavatories and tear each other’s hair off. So much for the cosmos.

Incongruously Chamberlain and I construct the new idealism over the billiard table: an idealism more damning, more hysterical, more ruinous than any that has yet been known. Had I not written it out of my system already, I should be dead print today, instead of this macaronic poem which is designed to bore clean through the middle ear, and leaven the craniums of the wise. Enough. One should never write of accomplishment, because nothing is ever finally accomplished. That is the trauma of the ideal. It is the timeless action in its immediacy that I must concentrate on, here, now: this paper, this pen, this counterpoint along which the mimes carry, in a funeral measure, the corpse of the Theme. I have kept them rotating in me so long, like a prayer wheel. Like a great roaring merry-go-round of faces. The horse vermilion-nostrilled, the peeling unicorn, the dragon breathing acetylene. I am continually forced to stop and marvel at the incongruity of peopling the Ionian with such a ballet; as if, in a clear watery moonlight one night, while the shepherds on the lagoon piped their slow bubbling, curdling quartertones, a fleet of heraldic fish were to swim up under the house, and deploy flashing across the paper, across the bookshelf, the painted peasant woman at the well, the ships on the carpet and my wife asleep in the armchair.… Lobo, with the beak of the swordfish, performing watery acrobatics under the Albanian snows! It is very curious.