Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

He got up and walked up and down, striking his knee with a rolled-up newspaper from time to time. Fearmax watched him curiously. It reminded him of his own years of anguish and questioning in Exeter before he found what he thought would become his true métier. There was something very appealing about Campion’s fierce and uncompromising forthrightness.

“Sit down,” he said slowly. “And if it doesn’t bore you I will tell you about my own life. You can ‘compare the experience, not the events, with your own. Perhaps we shall each see more clearly.”

Fearmax was a remarkable type of the provincial derailed by wide reading. An orphan, he had spent all the long years of a friendless youth working as a bookseller’s assistant in Exeter. His childhood, which was spent behind the rusting iron gates and faded shrubbery of a provincial orphanage, had been remarkable for nothing except a tendency to fits which were diagnosed as epileptic. He was a sickly child, and at the age of thirteen his wards were happy to be rid of him; the special food and treatment recommended for him by a humane district doctor was something that did not come into the terms of reference under which the institution worked. He suffered, indeed, not from any marked cruelty on the part of the guardians as from the neglect inseparable from the routine of all institutions. He never smiled during his childhood; the fact was borne upon him one day when he caught sight of his face in the long mirror of a Hastings hotel, after one of his early triumphs as a medium. He saw his face — parched and pale from those years of concentrated reading — twisted into a wolfish grin. It was a smile — a simulacrum of happiness — that he saw trying to break through the armature of lean skin and bone which was his face.

At thirteen the bookseller’s shop seemed an exciting place. The only book he had seen was the institution Bible, which was kept chained to a wooden eagle in the chapel, and out of which the Rev. Dohgerty read the children pejorative and declamatory extracts on Sunday. His voice raged like a toothache across the visions of John or the fearful lists of prohibitions shored up in Leviticus. They did not understand, but they trembled.

The bookshop was different. There were books full of drawings and engravings, books on history and science, on topography; there were children’s books and novels in bright wrappers. The bookseller was a kindly fattish man who disguised a sense of failure and depression, in a false Pickwickian benevolence and loquacity. He was kind to the boy, found him lodgings, trained him in the trade, and occasionally saw to it that he had somewhere to go on holidays and at Christmas. Fearmax was in heaven. Though he was so poor that his wages only just covered his board and lodging, the freedom of this new life stimulated him. He had no friends, but he had the streets of the town to explore, and as many books as he wished to read at his elbow. For five years he was contented with life; but by the time he had turned eighteen the restlessness of a delayed adolescence began to take possession of him. Was he to spend the whole of his life as a bookseller’s assistant in a provincial town? And yet he had no hopes, no plans, no shadow of a programme for a new life to replace this one which offered, it is true, few material difficulties. To a great degree it was the reading that had been responsible for this; his mind had begun to lead him down strange by-paths of literature, strange back-alleys of thought and speculation; tiring quickly of novels and romances, he had begun to feed upon the out-of-the-way, the speculative, the occult. Indeed, by the time he was twenty-one his reading was immense though sporadic. He had created around himself a jungle of ill-cultivated plants — philosophies, with their weird blooms and stunted systems, like Christian Science or Theosophy. It was a disinterested hunger for some illuminating text which would explain not only the mystery of the world around him, but also his existence in it. What was he doing on earth? Since he had no friends to ask these questions of, there remained only the dusty attics of the shop. Surely there among the thousand books there might be some product of illumination and reason mixed which would put him into focus with himself. It was at this time that he began to be conscious that he was lonely. All these years he had not recognized the numb anaesthetic feeling that filled so much of his life with an unexpressed — indeed an inarticulate — anguish. He walked about most of the night through the rainy streets of the town, wrapped in his old policeman’s cape and hood, absently trying empty cigarette-machines in shop-doors, or studying his own features reflected in the windows of shops. So great was the singleness of mind that moved him, that he never thought of wanting either money or a woman. His book-filled dusty lodging differed from his book-filled dusty office only in that it contained a hip-bath, a chamber-pot and an iron bedstead. Rising at five, he would sluice his lean body with the icy water from the jug, and be already taking down the shutters of the shop by seven o’clock, winter and summer. In his work he was punctual, diligent and uncommunicative. But every spare moment of his time was spent at the little desk under the grimy window, reading. He travelled into Tibet with Huc and Gabet; he tried to solve the puzzle of the Inca stone alphabet with Fédor; Froebenius excited him by his records of customs and parables; the raw images of Nostradamus assuaged and tantalized him with their beauties and half-concealed promises; the incunabula , the prophetic books, the books of ritual — everything promised, and everything disappointed. He sat absolutely motionless on his three-legged stool, his rounded shoulders letting his head rest upon the thin shank of an arm in its frayed cuffs, and read until he was dizzy. “Why”, said the bookseller one day, “are you reading so much? You don’t seem to enjoy it. It’s like you are studying for an exam. Books are for pleasure, you know.” The remark struck him. A pleasure! Did he get any pleasure, in the strict meaning of the term, from them? Did he, if it came to that, understand exactly what the word meant? What was pleasure? He read like a hungry animal. By his thirtieth year he seemed to have become a charnel house of blasted hopes and other men’s writings. What was he searching for? Neither pleasure nor instruction or even illumination seemed to be at the back of this hunger — but something that should combine, should synthesize all three; neither truth nor beauty, but a Something which would offer him a foothold. Something which would bridge the gap between the universe of light and matter, and the small circumscribed universe of the world he lived in — two book-filled rooms linked by streets ghostly with rain and mist.

It was at this time that the old Methodist preacher took to calling at the shop for books. Fearmax would hear the stairs creak under his heavy frame, and the rap of his wooden leg on the linoleum of the top landing. He would put his book away and wait for the door to open and admit the portly, silver-haired figure. Snowden was a strange choleric old man, but an excellent buyer. He would stand leaning on his stick and look across at Fearmax in silence for a moment, while he took out his silver snuff-box and grabbed up a pinch in his knotted rheumatism-twisted finger and thumb. “I want everything on the following subjects,” he would announce, consulting a list taken from his waistcoat-pocket. He seemed to have plenty of money, and was able to buy himself complete sets of the books he wanted, without any hesitation. He too, seemed filled with a wayward discontent that impressed Fearmax as bearing a likeness to his own. “Young man,” he said once, “you no doubt think me mad. I am not buying books for a library. I read them. Yes, even the ‘Golden Bough’ and suchlike dullness. Reading is like a worm in the marrow.” He came a few steps nearer, peering at the younger man through his light blue, innocent old eyes. “A worm in the marrow,” he repeated in a whisper. Fearmax put a chair for him, and taking his list from his hand, ran up a ladder and started to hunt. As usual there were out-of-the-way things. Budge’s “Egyptian Book of the Dead”, Evans-Wentz, Férier’s pamphlet on the Hero Cult, Pamfrey on Prayer, Donne’s Sermons. The old man in the chair suddenly began to talk. “You will be thinking”, he said, “that it’s my faith I’ve lost, hunting in all these books. Yes, and you won’t be wrong. After fifty years in the Ministry too, and me surely near the edge of the grave.” Fearmax turned round on his ladder and gazed at him with his mouth open. Snowden seemed half-asleep. His hair twinkled in silver points as the faint rays of spring sunlight touched it. He smiled.