Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

Perhaps it is our loneliness here, on the bare rocks of a rocky coastline that makes my connection with these subjects tenuous enough across the foam, the rock pools, the little lighthouse-shrine where St. Barbara on wood broods forever on a smashed lamp and a pool of oil — that makes this connection be love: even for Tarquin a love— a humour —which is all friendly. Diving from the lowest scarp into the green teatime water I recall suddenly that Tarquin, in his dressing gown, is writing a letter to his lover beginning, “Dear dear Dick”; or under water, painfully swimming with webbed feet and hands, see Chamberlain’s body, bullet wounds and all, dragged up under the river lights, celebrating a suicide that he was too timid ever to commit. He is often with us: in the morning when the sails slip down towards Crete, red, yellow, green; in the afternoons dancing the old dances on the empty rocks with Theodore; at night when the apocalypse of moonrise shivers up into one’s throat and the lone fishermen light their buds of flame and put out; when the man and his wife swim noiselessly under the house like dogs, quietly talking, towards the open sea.

Sitting here, on the prophetic black rock, where the Ionian comes in and touches, stealthy elastic, like a blue cat’s-paw, I have seen Chamberlain lift that gun to his mouth a dozen times, always to drop it again. I have seen more than ever the modern disease looming in the world outside this sea, rock, water the terrible disintegration of action under the hideous pressure of the ideal; the disease of a world every day more accurately portrayed by Hamlet; the disease which made Gregory label the remaining days of life left to him, his death. The disease which … I examine my own face carefully in the mirror, finger the battered skull, consult the sunken orbits. It is not the first time in history that the gulf has opened up between the people and their makers — the artists. But the chasm has never been so vast, so uncrossable. The creator, terribly mauled and disfigured, has become the audience instead of the prime actor. He can do nothing. In the subterranean Hades of the self, on the wet marsh flowering in great festering lilies and poppies, the delusions gather and hang, miasmic. The curative virtue is being turned to black bile, to poison, to corrosive. It is the Dark Ages opening again. We are going down, in a supreme Dance of Death to the terminus, among the extreme unctions of the violins. This is the going down into the tomb which Gregory experienced as a unit. “Ended. It is all ended. I realize that now, living here on the green carpet and living there in the mirror. So profound is the conviction that there is nothing I can do to reassure myself. I am a little aging man, gone bald on top, with not even a thumbed season ticket to salvation. What shall I do? I am falling apart, the delicate zygon of my brain is opened. I am rusting, my knees are rusting, the fillings in my teeth, the plate in my jaw is rusting. If I were only Roman enough to own a sword we should see some fine conclusions to this malady. Alas! Are there only the dead left to bury the dead? It is the question not of the moment, but of all time. This is my eternal topic, I, Gregory Stylites, destroyed by the problem of personal action.”

In the falling night of my Tibetan memories I sit by the bed lamp and read these lines over and over again. Once I was moved by them. But in this fatal third act, this last masque for which paper and words are inadequate, I have hardly any room for feeling; not that so much, but it is as if I have gone dead in the vital centres. I have become a puppet, without any volition of my own. When I am with Tarquin, I share his death, with Lobo his prejudices, with Chamberlain his ideals. For my own part I am falling into an utter anonymity. I accept everything and examine nothing. Dead, in a queer way. Amputated at the taproots. And inside me the suffocating misery which I associate with her body, though it is unjust to do so. I sit over my books like an insect these long nights, or walk the long cold streets, shaken with the torment of indecision and mania, whose cause I cannot fathom. I wake at night and find tears on my face, from laughter or sorrow, I do not know which. Tibet hangs like a sphinx over the revisited childhood which my dreams offer me: the craters crammed with jewelry; the hills curving up into their vertiginous flowers of snow; the dawn opening like a coral umbrella on Lhasa; the yak and the black bear the only visitors of that immense vista in time; the monasteries as remote as stars on the hills; everything has fallen upon me in this stuffy English room with a pathos that is beyond ink. Well, I am one of the generation which I would like to murder. I cannot escape. That is what comes of being born with an erection, and thrown for dead in the basket; perhaps we must end on the gibbet, under the levers of the hired butchers, with the same erection in death that we knew in birth. There is much to be done — work worthy of a man; and if there were the least chance of my being understood I would begin. Here, I have the dithyramb, here, in this very room, on the second shelf from the left. It is only the faith of audience which seems to be lacking. I have traced the germ of action to the poem, and it is the poem which I would like to embed in the personality: an everlasting spatial heraldry to burn across personal action like the brand of Cain. Forgive the arrogance. I am not even a Master of Arts. Simply a bastard child of the humanities. There is no distinguishing label. I realize this when I talk to someone like Bazain ( Doctor Bazain), that cockeyed idiot who has not the least idea of the meaning of the word “therapy”. His universe consists of the frontal lobe, the temporal lobe, and the occipital lobe; not to mention the parietal lobe, or the medulla. Any phenomena which exist outside this domain puzzle him. Even simple phenomena like Morgan, for instance. This morning we met him in the lounge, dressed in a blue serge suit and huge creaking brown shoes. It was his day off, he explained to us, and he was taking Gwen up to the West End. “Going to marry her?” I suggest playfully, whereupon he becomes very expansive and confidential, something quite unusual for him. “Marriage?” he says, bending down to us where we sit on the sofa (he pronounces it “merritch”), “well, I always said it’s not for me, sir, but if she wants if — well, I don’t want to disappoint her.” Then, leaning down, ever more confidentially, over us, he beams like a lighthouse and whispers, “She’s that good, sir, I could eat ’er shit, sir.” Whereupon Bazain nearly falls to the floor. When Morgan goes he begins to say angrily how outrageously disgusting the man is, and the idea of talking to residents in that way! Parading his sexual perversions like that … “But maybe it isn’t a perversion,” I say mildly. “Maybe it’s just a figure of speech.” Bazain coughs stiffly and says in his most Harley Street manner, “Well, it sounds like the frontal lobe to me!” In the beginning was the word; and the word was Bazain; and Bazain was an idiot. As for Morgan, any more honesty on his part and he will lose his job! The idea!

Well, all these incidents have the ring of immense triviality when I think of them, sitting here among the books at night, aware of the statues and the snow outside. Lobo complaining of his latest woman because she farts incessantly while they are in bed, and makes him “disgust”; Perez talking in his perfect demented English about Anne who was so beautiful and who has no teeth in her mouth — just two soft rows of gums. The first shock of kissing her, and finding everything pulp. What an experience, he repeats, for an English Sunday afternoon!

Sunday afternoon! Blinds drawn, snow falling, shops shut. The terrible cadenzas of the late buses under an ice-bound moon. A million miles of boredom stretched tight across the earth by the seventh day of the week. Fornication and lockjaw locked fast in the chilly bedrooms of the poor by the wallpaper, the china washstands, the frames of the pictures. Deliver us from the blind men of Catford. We have meetings in these chilly rooms, but it is a meeting of spectres, so withdrawn into his private pandemonium is each of us. The pelmets hang stiff, as if frozen. The fires are lighted, go out, are relighted. The snow opens lethargy in us like so many razors. Nowadays even the final stages of Tarquin’s disease seem significant of nothing. When he gambols or appears to gambol, when he tosses his head and makes a kittenish epigram there is nothing to do but to answer, “Tweet. Tweet.” This infuriates him. I tell him about Morgan’s conversation with Bazain and he is nearly sick. “Leave me,” he says stiffly, “since you do not share any decent feelings on such a subject. Pugh! Gwen, that dirty little skivvy, smelling of stale piss and grease from the sink! What an idyll, my dear, how can you smile?”