Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

I smile because I can feel nothing. I suspend judgement on everything because so little exists. I am strangled by the days that pass through me, by the human beings I am forced to meet. Nothing, nothing, across these acres of snow and ice, this arctic season, except occasional rages, occasional fits of weeping.

In the drab picture gallery I come upon Chamberlain suddenly. He is sitting under the faded Nat Field, dishevelled, untidy, miserable. I recall that he has been missing for three whole days; no one knows where he vanished to, or why. There was some talk a few days ago in Lobo’s room, but I did not pay much attention to it. The suburban mythology was beginning to bore me. Now it is a pure fluke I have run across him in this deserted gallery, dropping with fatigue and wild-footed. I go up silently to him, fearful that he might try to escape me. His face is very ancient and sleepy-looking; hair matted; his eyes are surrounded in huge developing marks. He does not attempt even to speak, when he first sees me, let alone run away. We sit side by side and stare at the snowy gardens, the loaded hedges, the icicles on the gutters. He says at last he has been walking all day and sleeping in the parks at night. In such weather! He must have lost his job too. The whole gamut of theatre has been running through his mind like a strip of film: himself dying, himself being noble, himself weeping, himself lifting the revolver. All false, false, false. He admits it hoarsely. As for his wife, God knows what she’s doing. “I loathe her,” he says, “but the break-up is terribly painful. You can’t understand that unless you’ve lived with a woman, old man. I adore her.” And so on. Slowly it all comes out — their quarrels, her gradual settling apathy. He is almost composed as he talks, his fingers latch together firmly. “It’s not theatre entirely. I feel half mad. If I had the strength to go mad it would be wonderful, the responsibility, I mean. I would all be out of my hands. They could put me away. But here I am, answerable for my life, don’t you see, damn it? I’m culpable, I’m responsible — I don’t know what to do.”

His curious fatigue-lined face chopping up the syllables. “There are no more theories for me from now. Fuck the illusions and the flourishes. From now on there are only people.” He gets up and starts to walk away. Then he comes back. “Listen, you don’t know where Gregory is by any chance?”

“I never met him,” I say.

He turns and runs lightly down the steps, faunlike, graceful, into the snow, turning up his coat collar. At the gate he gives one furtive look back and begins to run. And all of a sudden it is as if I am bleeding into the snow myself when I face the break-up of that world. Across this sun-blind Adriatic landscape Chamberlain is running blind, cat-foot across the snow to his conclusion. A weird crooked light on the walls of Lobo’s room, on the farmland, the frosty turrets, the land of lakes where you are lying. What is all this misery beside the misery of the hills, the immense agony of the rain, the thaw, the new fruit buried in the earth? There is a spirit outside us all which is affecting me, inciting me to join its poignance, its suffering. I do not know what to call it. I open a book at any place in any weather and begin reading, because I do not want to concern myself with this thing, this …

Death. Death of the bone, the tissue, the thigh, the femur. In the same deep snow a year later at Marble Arch I run upon a face like Chamberlain’s mouthing from a wooden pulpit. A terrible strained shouting in the void of self, and outside — actually outside — a dancing gesticulating leader of the new masses. New styles in the soul’s architecture, new change of heart. Yes, but ideal for ideal. Compensatory action for action. In that shabby arena, surrounded by the lousy, damp, bored, frozen people of Merrie England the speaker offered them an England that was ideally Merrie. We hurried aside in the snow, too involved in each other to bother the blond beaky face: the satyr led captive in his red halter. “Shall the hammer and the sickle take note of a few tears and cherished bottles?”

From this to that other circus where Tarquin plies the fluted drinking glass and carves himself Pan pipes. Let us escape together, you and I, he is always saying. We need not move. Look, here is Knossos, under the blue craters of mountains. Here is de Mandeville’s world. Here is a stone age of the spirit, taciturn as the mammoth. Here is the Egyptian with his palms turned outwards, softly dancing and hymning. The Etruscan treading his delicate invisible rhythms into the earth. Escape! (In a small cardboard box on the mantelpiece, wrapped in cotton wool, he keeps a renal calculus and a bit of dry brown umbilical cord!)

“The physical world now,” says Tarquin, weighing his scrotum gravely in his right hand. “Take the physical world for instance.” He is gravely weighing the physical world in his right hand. Very well, then. Let us take the physical world. There is no charge. We confront that abject specimen, the modern physicist, and discover the shabby circus animal he owns, hidden away in the darker recesses of the metaphysical cage. A lousy, dejected, constipated American lion without so much as a healthy fart left in it. “The maternal instinct in mice can be aroused by subcutaneous injections of prolactin,” says Tarquin, weighing anchor at last. “This pushes your set of values sideways. Now take the thalamus. They are just doing some wonderful tricks with that. Or Bacot filling the intestines of lice with Rickettsia-infected blood. My dear fellow, can you seriously tell me whether the breath of the Holy Ghost enters from the navel, the thenar, the colon, the hip, or the lobe of the ear?”

Here is Tarquin, very excited by the new heresy, as he calls it, weighing his scrotum gravely in his right hand. Come, I say, in my pert way, separate the yolk from the white. In the hall I have a fine new cedarwood cross for you. I offer it to you free of charge. Exchange it for this dead preoccupation with components of the physical world. We are duelling now all day over this theme, and frankly it gets tiresome after a time. Tarquin has deluded himself for so long about his “psychic superiority” over me, that he is sad to see me escaping his clutches. “You’re a funny little bugger,” he says, lying on the bed while I chafe his toes and pour out the hot coffee. “I suppose you don’t understand me. You lack faith, that’s what it is. Dicky was here last night and he was saying that too.” Dicky, of course, has the brain of a newt and the dash of a sprat, so such an idea needs amplification. “He was saying that you were arrogant.”

I am pained by this; after all, it is only my abject humility which has created this omnipotent attitude in Tarquin, which he glorifies as a superiority.

“No, but you don’t understand me, really,” insists the hero. “You only see the façade: underneath there are enormous reserves of strength, withstanding crisis after crisis. If there weren’t I should be dead by now.”

I close down and sit at the desk, reading some of the latest love lyrics that the new mode of life has been hatching out for him. “The springtide of desire, my dear,” Tarquin said to me. “Positively a lyric vein running through me — a nerve of lyricism.”

There is no news. Day by day we are breaking down, boring down, into the pulp chamber of matter, and day by day the world becomes less integral, less whole; and the unison with it less pure. This is the ice age of components.

At night I fuel the car and set off on immense journeys of discovery, plotting my path across the icefields, the land of polarized light where everything is lunacy and lanterns, and the Ganges of the spirit flows between the banks of black sand. On the eastern shores the boats snub quietly at anchor. The snow pelts them, and rimes their rigging. All sorts of new languages seem to be coming within my grasp: the formulae of the sciences, the runes, the surds; I am such a vatful of broken, chaotic material that it will be a miracle if anything can ever reassemble this crude magma, detritus, gabbro, into a single organic whole — even a book. But the hunger, the ravening at the bottom of all this, I recognize at last. It is not a thirst for love or money or sex, but a thirst for living. The pulp chamber is desire, the principle a sort of mania, a love — in which you play almost no part whatsoever. I refer to you now as I refer to the moon, anoia, or sordes. In my journeys I puzzle over our relationship, our mutual acts, our occasional miseries; and find them always outside the mainspring of this principle, this progressive dementia, in which I am reaching out, forever reaching out with crooked arms and empty mind towards the inaccessible absolute. This is the theme of travel whether the towns whirl by me under the moon, or whether I am at my deal desk in the Commercial School. Thule, ultima Thule. There is a stepping-off place — a little Tibetan village, stuck like a springboard in the side of the mountains. There are no friends to see us off: our banners, our catchwords, our heroism — these things are not understood here. The natives have other criteria. Beyond us the passes open like flowers in the setting sun, the delicate gates of the unknown country’s body, the Yoni of the world, luteous, luteous, unbearably lonely. Is the journey plural or am I alone? It is a question only to be answered at the outposts. I will turn perhaps and find a shadow beside me. No tears can scald the snow, or the malevolence of the white peaks. I can invoke no help except the idiotic squeaking of the prayer wheel. We move softly down the white slopes, irresistible as a gathering landslide, towards the last gaunt limit of flesh. Now we have nothing in common but our clothes and our language. The priests have stolen the rest as gifts for God. The ice under our hoofs aches and screeches, murderous as the squeegee. This is the great beginning I planned for so long. How will it end?