Lawrence Durrell - The Black Book

Little pieces of the drama have come to me in different places, on the great liners nosing southward, in the trains, between the trim spars of the sailing boat: all merging and flowing upward in me through the bugles and sheep and dancing. I thought I understood. But beginning this act with paper I can only say for certain that I am not responsible. It is transcription purely.

Here, it is real enough the stage on which I re-create this chronicle of the English death. There is Bach playing in the roars of the wind, the piercing slatterns of the rain. There is you dancing, and the million yous who persist in matter, echo, weep, cry, exult, in flower powder, smaragd, Italy, moon, veins of rock. There is the cadenza of flesh here naked, and the you who run to the conclusion of autumn, selfless and melancholy, or smoulder on the beach savagely. In all particulars of the body you are working, in the dark sump of the vagina, brewing vegetable history, sewing continents in whom I am the reaper; in the dusty sandals or the naked toes. It is forced upon me to write of you always in the gnomic aorist. For this is the new vocabulary which I am learning with ease. I am beginning my agony in the garden and there are too many words, and too many things to put into words. In the fantastic proscenium of the ego, when I begin my soliloquy, I shall not choose as Gregory chose. To be or not to be. It is in your capacity as Judas that you have chosen for me. The question has been decided. Art must no longer exist to depict man, but to invoke God. It is on the face of this chaos that I brood. And on the same chaos printed, across the faces of these hideous mimes of mine, your pale glyph. The white illusion of bone and tissue, the firm cheekbones set in soft plates of flesh, the pouting mouth, the soft jawless head of the snake, the lips as delicate as the biscuit. Lubra in the dark, and when the swords grow up from Constantinople, marmoreal, caryatid, pupa of flesh growing upward among the bones, carrying them upward from the hip, irresistible leaven. The hills snooze on with the liths of your fingers laid over them: the sensitive calyx of the pelvis like the dish of land which holds our sea, silent outside the house. All that is dying in me in this fatal landscape, your mine among active things, stone, shards, language, meteors, butter. Nothing but the punic body, our essential traitor, which stifles me with its pollens. Snore on, you winter sea, there is no more in here than the seven hectic elements can offer me: more than the fantasy of the third ocean, dipping its brush among the molten colours, leaking down to the hot magma of things. More. More.

It is morning. Born in an empty house, no zodiac; spawned by the fish, volatile, cunning, durable in passion. Boy in an ark on a black rock. Greece lies dead among the oak leaves, the bare mulch, the merdes, outside the window, littered in sails. There is nothing in this enormous six-foot bed but the eyelashes of God moving, delicate as talc; or the warm sticky gum, oozing from the lips of the trees. From between your legs leaking, the breathing yolk, the durable, the forever, the enormous Now.

This is how it ends.

THE END

The house of

Anastasius Athenaius, Koloura.

Corfu, 1937.

Always merry and bright! Always coming toward you with countenance a-gleam, the heraldic (his favorite word then) gleam of the blazoned escutcheon. The golden boy. Or a water sprite. Anyway, youth incarnate. Plus brains, plus an amazing critical acumen. Plus so many things. Il avait tout à gogo. Above all, he could laugh as no man has a right to laugh in a world so sick and troubled. “For all your ills, laughter!” Was there ever a Britisher who could laugh thus? I have never met one since. But then, could you really call him British?

If I remember rightly, The Black Book was already finished by the time we met up. All that remained was to find a publisher for it. And we found him — in the person of Jack Kahane (Obelisk Press). The same Jack who had published the Tropic of Cancer. The only man in Christendom who had the guts to take a chance on dubious works of genius. (Curious that today one can’t find a copy of the book anywhere except in the padlocked vaults of libraries or in the private archives of collectors.)

For all the bubble and laughter, he had his serious side too. A devil of a worker, for one thing. And, like Flaubert, a stickler for the right word, the precise image, the Gongora effect. A poet primarily, he could have become, like Claudel, a diplomat as well. I could make further analogies and comparisons. The bourlingueur , for example, à la John Paul Jones, Blaise Cendrars, Jack London. The man with a nose for “place”—who could write of Patmos, Corfu, Cyprus, Jerusalem, Alexandria and make you wonder what ancient god guided his footsteps, cleared his vision. An epistolary genius as well, tossing off his missives like so many banana peels: gems drenched in sunlight, tipped with Mediterranean blue and the gold of Mycenae.

Even then — how old was he? twenty-three perhaps? — he had everything one needs to make a name and a place for himself. How is it that it has taken so long for the world to recognize him? How fortunate, let me add, that he had one faithful publisher throughout the period of eclipse! (Faber and Faber). We should all be grateful to them, and especially to T. S. Eliot, his mentor.

In those early days the writing man took secondary place. It was the person who counted with us, the unquenchable, indomitable cock-o’-the-walk who, by a slight rearrangement of the personality, might just as well have made a name for himself on the vaudeville stage or in the Olympic tryouts. I say “us,” for we were usually three then, the musketeers of the rue de la Tombe-Issoire: alias Perlès, Durrell, and myself. Sometimes incremented by the company of Edgar, the beloved David Edgar, or by Hans Reichel who, alas, has just passed away. What were we up to? Fun. “It makes fun,” Reichel used to say. Everything made fun. (Perhaps that’s why it took so long for any of us to make the grade.)

Perlès, our editor-in-chief, has written about The Booster, which Durrell insisted we call The Delta, and which we recklessly ran into the ground. One ought to have a look, these days, at the contributors to this hilarious and most unorthodox review whose back cover we used as a vehicle for texts no one could decipher — in Chinese, Czech, Hungarian, Pali, and so on. We even included poets and poetesses then unknown, if they paid us to. Of course we had to give the copies away. But what matter? We had everything to lose. It was fun. Show me the editors today who permit themselves such luxury!

I said he was a hard worker, Durrell. He was, but he was always available when it came to a lark. He took his work seriously, not himself. Today it seems to be the other way round. With poets especially.

It was only a matter of months that we spent together in Paris. Looking back, it seems like years. On the other hand I don’t think of this period in the manner of Max Jacob writing of the rue Ravignan and of the Picasso then unknown. My worst days were already past when Durrell arrived; his were yet to come. Besides, the whole episode never faded into a past; it’s as much alive in my memory now as if it happened yesterday.

There’s another thing it seems important to stress. When Durrell knocked at my door at the Villa Seurat a quarter of a century ago— think of it! — I felt that I had known him all my life. We didn’t have to become acquainted first. He came with his aura, which was familiar to me. We spoke as if resuming a conversation broken off centuries ago.