Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

18th . Fortune is never mentioned in Scripture. The girl loves me, and if the time was brief, the time was overcome. But I’d hear fortune. Be the devil’s advocate, diary.

DIARY: It’s thanks to the Romans we know the Greeks.

DARCONVILLE: So we know the Greeks. I can distinguish one from the other.

DIARY: But by the other.

DARCONVILLE: Who valued them.

DIARY: Say transvalued.

DARCONVILLE: Therefore, to the Romans they are no longer Greeks.

DIARY: Who couldn’t have valued them.

DARCONVILLE: Then let Greeks be known by a Roman mistake.

DIARY: The Romans endure.

DARCONVILLE: But the Greeks prevail.

21st . God is sitting on my pen. The pages during these five days seem to have filled themselves. How I love her! Isabel, she by reason of which the world below again becomes the world above! As I scribble away, my hand flashes avian shadowgraphs on the wall, falcons Spellvexit counts, his bottom wagging, pouncing upon each and all. We are both chasing our imaginations across spaces open for them. Enjoin me, joy! I am beside myself, and I also belong!

23rd . In love, my spirit, utterance, and invention are better. Must I, therefore, love for my wit’s sake? To conceive children of the word? Prophesy, some Melampus.

Worked all day in the V&A, no lunch, and on the way home mailed her letter (I mention the possibility of an engagement).

28th . Cold and windy. Two letters today. The important one, signed with the colophon of two familiar eyes — and a name as pure as morning prayer — a packet of sheets folded so tightly in the envelope that lateral incision is necessary and written on both sides in that spidery hand, dipped and backswept and full of question sparks and looped i’s: passionate apology, apologetic passion, and a colored feather. I hear the simple tender words of an oath-worthy, a white candle in a white hand. Its small companion, a letter in a monogrammed envelope the color of angelica, a declaration of some and similar consequence — were it consequential — and a photograph of the correspondent, supine, last summer, on a dune at Virginia Beach: Hypsipyle Poore, peering over her sunglasses. Cough on, Lady Malehaut.

Thynke and thanke God.

30th . I bolted breakfast, took a bus to central London, and mailed Isabel some gifts: a book, a bracelet, and a black velvet Russian dress, embroidered with flowers. Visited the National Gallery. There was a Fuseli exhibition. I saw his painting The Nightmare . It is said that this was a portrait of Anna Landolt, whom he loved. (He’d written: “Last night I had her in bed with me. . anyone who touches her now commits adultery.”) She tossed him aside and married a Mr. Schinz, a businessman; an enraged and hateful Fuseli then painted this canvas, an attempt to use black magic to give her frightening dreams. Desperation crutched out on the stilps of art. Was his hatred, I wonder, a function of preserving his dignity or an attempt to deploy self-pity by confronting resentment lest, nursing it, greater psychological imbalance ensue?

Any explication of the thing is less than approximate: perhaps hate loves to hate. It must, first. On the other hand, a man, thinking himself in love, may only be trying to understand that which is most strange to him; so strange, opposed; opposed, then, never to be had. The lover too often doesn’t realize he must make his contract with a degree of ease— disinvoltura —by which he can deceive himself, at least temporarily, of the real passion he feels and thus, that she may be free to choose, courteously allow the loved one to deny what of course he prays she won’t. More people drown from the torrential rains in the desert than die of thirst.

Do I sound smug? I confess to you, dear diary, dear double, I could still let Isabel go. I do love her, and desperately. But where, after all, was the trothplight? The commitment? There is nothing in bad art that good art doesn’t have; it’s all in the making — and what was done in the past was done in the doing, not in the making, whereas now what is hoped for will be made, not done. Isabel has decided ! Is it a miracle or a natural thing? Perhaps what we take sometimes for resurrections are only syntheses. The only way to come back is to go.

31st . Hallowe’en. I am still writing my grimoire of dark invocations, mystic runes, mantic spells. The Royal Library of Nineveh called my head is filled with books which are being read. I wonder, is some black-hatted Strix right now whistling on a pitchfork through the thick and thin of the world to put calamities and ligatures among men and women? (Thought of Mrs. DeCrow and her group of familiars! Quinsyburg=Thessaly. An uncharitable remark, I suppose. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” I’ve always wondered in this commandment which word was supposed to be accented.) I put up Isabel’s photograph on my bureau.

Later: I met Svarta at the Grove Pub where we drank and spoke of spooky things. Smiling, she swore, quoting Wierus, that the devil often married beautiful women by whom he had countless children — easily recognizable, as she’d have it, by their growing inexplicably fat, by their voracious appetites, and by some exceptional flaw.

November 1st . All Souls’ Day. I have mine still and so thanked the Author of it at a High Mass at the Brompton Oratory. Worked all day. Close on two. And so to bed.

5th . A penny for the guy, more sinned against than sinning. Fawkes’ Mountain, never built, perhaps should have been. I get around this anti-commemoration, not forgetting in the ruinous fires the increase of penalties against English Catholics thereafter as before, by contributing my coin to his memory. If a traitor betrays a trust, Guido’s had been stolen outright. A prayer to Our Lady of Ransom, for the conversion of England. Wrote all night into morning. The cock craw. The day daw.

7th . Letter from Isabel, who in a postscript — somehow, always the substantific of a girl’s letter — mentions she’s decided to return to Quinsy College for the Spring semester. The Caudine Forks! Will they take her back? Could she be happy there alone? Should I return, associate sole, or spend my life wandering from place to place like some gormless Holy Roman emperor in the fifteenth century? I can’t say what I think I mean.

8th . When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question. The use of language, however, compels me to measure my thoughts — so one’s journal becomes an examination-of-conscience: I rub my fears and worries through a sieve of days and up comes a pile of biography, brief as Solomon Grundy’s. Where will I be a year from now?

9th . Decided to find out.

Wind, cutting and visible. Ran down to the hotel to telephone Isabel. An hour lost for a connection, two pints of Tennant’s, then, lo! so soft, so gentle a voice, faint over the hornslate sea, asking, please, when she would see me again? I believe I printed my fingers into the very instrument, telling her how hopelessly I loved her and straining to hear over the quorks and quirks of an astonished cable the cento God alone heard in full but I can only approximate: “… so lonesome for (pause, crackles) ever at Christmastime before it’s too (clicks, delay) me especially, not worth anybody’s (delay, crackles) believe it, and that now Govert knows (clicks, pause) feel better. Can you hear what (crackles, clicks) love you forever and ever and ever?”

Dies creta notandus ! I’ve loved everyone and everything this day, everyway and everywhere. I realized suddenly I could have her over for Christmas for a fortnight but that, in doing so — after one last celebratory drink and an inquiring visit to Barclay’s — I might run out of money to stay on very long thereafter finishing the book. The decision made itself: I would both finish the book and invite her over. The second possibility was arranged on the spot. And the first? I invoke no foliots, no genii, no figures of augrim. I will but call on the ancient name of d’Arconville, heroic in the cause of altar, sword, and pen, and have done.