Lawrence Durrell - The Dark Labyrinth

“Here we are, in our old age, suddenly woken up with the feeling that there is something wrong. Suddenly it seems as if a whole tract of knowledge had been withheld from me; knowledge of the ordinary secular affairs of men. After all, what am I? What have I been preaching all these years? I am a doctor of souls, am I not? And therefore a specialist in sin? And do I know what sin is? Have I explored it? Have I entered into the real world at any point and transformed it, so that what I have is my own by right of experience, and not an algebraic incantation taught me when I was a child? These are the questions you’ll come to one day — I hope before you reach my age.” He stood up and tapped his way to the foot of the ladder. “Have you ever seen a Minister of God who discovered one day that prayer is useless?” he asked in a surprisingly gentle and naive voice. “Look upon him. Useless. Useless.” Fearmax came gently down his ladder with the books under his arm. He was too astonished to speak.

Snowden took them from him and examined the titles slowly and with care. Then he tapped his way downstairs again to pay for them, without saying good-bye. Some weeks later his death was announced in the paper. The obituary notice told Fearmax only that his wife had died the year before, and that he had been living in retirement in a country cottage outside the town.

It was at this period too that his own life took a turn for the better. During a sleepless summer night, when he was thirty-eight, his hand took up a pencil and began to write, he knew not what, in the margin of a book. In the morning he suddenly felt as he awoke that he had been granted, after all these years of searching, an outlet, a gift, a skill of his own.

The phenomenon of automatic writing he had read about; and had not believed in it, except as a form of wilful autointoxication. Yet he saw, with numb apprehension one night, that his hand, without dictation, was writing upon the flyleaf and margins of Isaac’s Bookseller a series of disconnected words and phrases. He had been particularly tired that day, having made a bus journey to the country to buy up a collection of books belonging to a deceased lawyer. The next day and the next there was no sign on the part of his hand to perform anything beyond its normally dictated functions. But he put a writing-pad and pencil beside his bed, and on the third day found the phenomenon repeated. He began to write fluently and copiously in the notebook; and what he wrote made sense. It was a long, rather disjointed message from a woman to her husband. He puzzled over it all that day. It was not written in his own handwriting, yet in a hand that was quite consistent and well-formed.

Fearmax experimented for several weeks before submitting his work to a neighbouring bookseller, who was a medium, together with a request for his advice. He was encouraged to renew his experiments and he did so gladly, with the wonderful feeling of someone who has found his true place in life. The fruit of these months is to be found in that little pamphlet now a bibliographical rarity, “New Essays by Goldsmith”. His heart had become lighter, his intelligence more alert. He began to attend the local psychic society which met every month, and whose members busied themselves with automatic writing, planchette-messages, and séances given by visiting mediums; it was during one of the latter performances that Fearmax surprised his hosts by falling into a deep sleep, preceded by a sort of seizure, in the course of which he found himself transmitting feverishly for a spirit guide called “French Marie”. Yes, her name should be familiar. It was she, the reader will remember, who predicted not only the date of Edward’s Abdication, but also the exact date and cause of the outbreak of war, among other things.

Her first message was of no particular importance save that it gave Fearmax exactly the focus he needed for all his nervous energy. His mind began to play upon these studies like a burning-glass. He found that concentration and solitude had given a remarkable command over himself, so that it was not long before he could induce the trance at will, and establish contact with the disembodied voice whose messages were to become of such interest to the public at large.

It was not long before his growing fame made it possible for him to free himself from the irksome hold of the bookshop. He travelled across England, giving lectures and séances by invitation in many towns. Wherever he went “French Marie” obediently followed, and as obediently answered his questions, however trivial. There was only one unaccountable failure and that was at Hastings. “French Marie” refused to appear, but sent instead an unsatisfactory deputy called “Raja Patma”, who informed him that “French Marie” could not stand the town ever since she spent her earthly honeymoon there. Fearmax, however, had developed into an impressive lecturer. He had studiously modelled his accent on that of the B.B.C. announcers, he had bought himself a velvet cape with a scarlet neck-cord, he had combed his already greying hair back across his head. His confidence in himself (a commodity the absence of which he had been unaware of) grew with every success. His energies were drained off once and for all from the stagnant reaches of aimless reading and speculation. To do him full justice it must be added that he felt for the first time that he had discovered the meaning of the lifelong tendency towards epilepsy. Surely it must have been the magnetic flow of this remarkable gift speaking to him across the dam of books he had erected to hem it in? His health improved with his self-assurance.

“Mr. Olaf Fearmax, the Exeter Medium.” The Press backed him up, printing almost every one of “French Marie’s” prophecies concerning Derby Winners, Conflagrations, Stock Exchange Slumps. Fearmax was tested by the Royal Society for Occult Studies and emerged unscathed despite his nervousness about the appearance of “French Marie”. But the spirit guide was in first-class form. “French Marie” not only transmitted messages from Edward Gibbon and Ramon Novarro to such of their descendants as might still be living; she also left the “materializations” of her plump hands with unerring accuracy in bubbles of liquid paraffin.

Walking across London afterwards, towards the Gray’s Inn Road where he lived (he had recently leased a small flat of his own there) Fearmax felt that all his ambitions had been realized. There was nothing more to strive for — except perhaps to preserve his nervous equilibrium under the strain of repeated séances. But he had a mission.

It was some time before the implications of that work began to hold any meaning for him; it came gradually at first — the dawning realization that “French Marie” and the terms under which she chose to present herself to the world, constituted a commentary on the nature of reality itself. What was a materialization? If there were flesh enough for her to be able to imprint it in paraffin, how was it that the hand he so often felt upon his shoulder should not possess bone and muscle enough to be touched, to be held? How was it that she could sometimes appear in the dim red light of the seance room — a stout, good-looking youngish woman, dressed in flowing evening dresses, and with her hands gathered in front of her, below the heart, after the manner of opera singers? How was it? Why could she not step down one day out of her dimension, rich in the knowledge of both worlds, and be his partner in this? He smiled dryly as he turned from the thought of other urgent considerations. There was his American tour. Would “French Marie” cross the Atlantic for the benefit of the citizens of Chicago and Detroit? Or perhaps, like some French wines, she “did not travel”? Sitting late over a glass of hot milk an idea came to him.