Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

Attempt it, I am always saying to that sallow bastard, attempt it. There is nothing to lose. All the hope in the world is here, between my legs, between the joints of my fingers, in the eye, the liver, the reins. Attempt it and become the symbol of failure, but only make the attempt. It is useless. He has not even the courage of Gregory’s death: that quaint suicide. Gregory who shot himself dead with the green pen. In this mythology, so fragmentary, with so many drops of feeling and expression, Gregory is almost a complete symbol. It was a gallant suicide. But Tarquin? He moulders away visibly, nerveless, blanched, waxen, into a kind of pus-drunk senility of his own. The stench that goes up from that decomposing cranium these days! I am forced to stand near an open window to speak to him. He is the living symbol of Mr. Valdemar, galvanically twitching in a sort of creaky life of his own. What is he, what are we all? I cannot tell with any clarity. Sometimes I puzzle over these pages, trying to work out for them this riddle of personality, but I am always too much inside them to see clearly. I am afraid, also, to inquire too closely into my own symbol here, alongside all these, because it seems foreign to me. A little frightening. What am I doing with this noisy machine and these sheets of linen paper? It is a kind of trap from which I cannot escape, not even by shooting myself dead with words as Gregory did, or said he did. When I think this I am too afraid to continue writing. There is an iron bar pressing down behind my eyes. A sensation of some filament in the brain, some fibre, some internal fuse wire, strained to breaking point. I am afraid it will snap and blind me. It is then that I get up in a panic and go to where you are sitting, working, and knitting, and put my hands on your hands. Then in a moment or two my courage is restored and I return to the pages, turning them over, reading them slowly, wondering: I am back in that menagerie again, shouting at Tarquin or following Hilda in her immense voyages from crater to crater of the Atlantic, gorging crustaceans. With Lobo rolling in the ditch on top of the blond shopgirl, he squeaking in copulation like a frog. Or listening to Chamberlain reading me the sonnets, and sniffing like a schoolgirl. Or Perez cherishing his clubbed penis, and handing it casually to Hilda, as one might give up one’s ticket at the terminus. Without a sigh or a word handing up his ticket and entering the cathedral on his knees. Or Connie impaled in her own dirty sheets, wriggling and pissing until the blood runs into her boots, and her eyes are as expressionless as handbags. It is all there, going round and round forever like a great Rabelaisian merry-go-round, faces flaring out at me.

And then there is you. You wait behind the faces and the signs which puzzle. A pale hieroglyph scribbled across these pages, across these faces, these whales, symbols, ideographs. You speak to me from the trees with the spirit of trees: the delicate human bark of the Eucalyptus, you are living among your green sickles. In bed it is a tree that grows upward from the scrotum, choking me, stuffing soft tentacles and flowers into my arms, into my throat, into my knees. I am a scarecrow filled by the trees which grow upward through me. When I speak of you my throat is lined like bark, and my tongue is soft rotten juniper-loam, cloying.

I cover you with my body and whole universes open silently for me, like a door into a sudden garden. Suddenly I am awake and standing in you like a turret, speaking to the elements, the dwarfs, the delicate nebulae, the circus which grows on you and stifles me in fleece. I am carried onward through you like angry water, like a plague, a ferment of agony for which there is no cross, no nailholes, no last act, no broken veil of the temple, no agony in the garden.

In the belly, the hips, the huge cathedral of the vagina, you shadow me, moving from statue to statue, seeking your death mask. In the amniotic fluid, the marrow, in the dark cunt you live, in the foetus jammed at the neck of the womb. In the clavicles, the tarsus, the sour anus. It is not words which grow in me when I see the tendrils of muscle climbing your trunk; it is not words at the fingers laid about your face and still: these delicate cartridges of flesh and bone. Not words but a vocabulary which goes through us both like the sea, devouring. A nameless, paralysed singing in the backbone. An interior mass, blacker than sacrilege. A dancing of fibres along the skin, a new action, a theme as fresh as seed, an agony, a revenge, a universe! God save the mark, it is I who am chosen to interpret these frantic syllables which rise up between us, apocalyptic, dazzling, clarion. Here are the pearls that were his eyes. I reach through you like a drunken man towards the million fathom universe, but it is difficult. I am entangled in your flesh. My footsteps are hampered by the rich mummy wrapping of flesh, by the delicate rupture of membranes, the quivering sockets from which the eyes have been torn. It is difficult to know my direction. I have no needle. Only this parcel of agonies which move in terrified recoil as the guts slide away from the surgeon’s intruding fingers. Pity me, I was born old. Not dead, but old. Not dead, but old. Incredibly ancient and a martyr to the hereditary taint.

All that comes out of me is a landscape in which you are everything, tree, bee, flower, toast, salt; you are the hard bright stamen of the kingcup, the Greek asphodel, the nervous speaking calyx. This old Venetian fort dying, the flags, the soldiers like bluebells are your landscape, the hot gleet of summer, the fine mucus, or the brumal bear licking her culprits the baby dogfish. Sweet, it is not your decorations I am putting down here, your soft wagging cypresses, stoles, cathedrals, covenants, bones of dead saints. It is this new barony whose language I am taking at dictation, without even waiting to know whether we can decipher it with the help of a known hieroglyph!

In that last winter banquet, among the candles in the silences, the talk of Rome, of poetry, poor Johnny Keats spitting nightingales — that night with the whole safe aura of the English death around us, the ambiance of candles, masques, cottages, pewter, I saw that your face was utterly Judas. The piano was kicking in the Beethoven, and all of a sudden it was as if the ten ridiculous fingers were opening like umbrellas, pregnant with symphony. The room was a cathedral, massive, choked. And the review of faces was as expressive as the line of shadows on the roof. Connie so brazen, returning the stares of the newcomers like a mirror. Lobo, Perez, Anselm, Gracie — a company as various as a packet of stamps. Tarquin with the kiss of Judas branded on his sagging cheekbones, smiling with the Egyptian smile. Tarquin sitting there like an empty tomb, hollow, hollow, even the microbes dead in him. It was then that I knew the cycle was complete for him. The wheel had spun full circle. From now he’s just powdering down like a thrashed flower. He sits all day alone, wrapped in rugs, afraid to walk, his bones are so brittle; afraid to talk, his tongue is so dry; afraid to piss, he is so scalded by the stale urine. The gramophone plays from morning to night, but he does not hear it. If I go to see how he is I find him there, abstractedly sitting in rugs with a sweet smile on his face. “Put on the laughing record,” he says; “it’s in the album with the third piano.” This is terrifying. This insane disc is one that everyone must know. The crazy attempts to play a saxophone punctuated by a forest of terrible forced laughter. Female squeals, enormous tickling of the ovaries. And the terrifying male bellows. Only a world gone mad could issue a document like this. He plays it over perhaps forty times a day, sitting there in rugs, his vacant eyes on the black fent of the instrument, his skin held out on sparrow bones: a queer taut smile, answering the terrible squealing and roaring. This is his vale in my memory, before they take him away. In the immense stale corridors of the hotel, among the broken statuary and the views of the Parthenon, Tarquin. It is so elaborate this symbol, the Tarquin of the new vocabulary, that I am almost tempted to try and make a short précis of him: à la novel. To make him comprehensible enough for the reviewers. But I can’t. I just don’t know what the hell he is all about. Any more than I can “explain” the new myth which I am undoubtedly on the point of creating, or the double eagle, or the symbol of the fish. I have simply gathered up the little pieces and offered them to you on a plate: it is for others to decide at what date the explosion took place. At that last insane banquet I was on the point of discovering, I think, but am not sure. You were in the way with the lotus mask and the bangles gnashing on your arms. I had only half an eye for the piano simmering; for Connie swallowing the penis in a series of thirsty gulps. There was precisely you and this fertile vocabulary running out of you, rich, sappy, evocative as musk.