The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  Yes, Robin was sad to death all right, sitting bolt upright in his first-class compartment, writing another long whining letter to the pale girl – who to do her justice was suffering just as much as he was. Pia loves Rob, she had written it with her lipstick on the walls of the vespasienne in the Rue Colombe, waiting for him to finish, holding her pampered borzoi on the leash. Trash was taking an English lesson with a French whore who had the longest tongue in Christendom. What happiness he knew, in all his innocence, what pride in this girl with the slit of a mouth – so spoiled and gracile a slender body. Trash was simply a cultivated American friend from the University of I forget, who knew how to massage rheumatisms away, stiff neck, and all that. After he knew he developed a pain in the lumber region worthy of a lumberjack, but there was no Trash to help him with long coffee-coloured fingers so apt for ragtime on a piano late at night.

  Thus Sutcliffe writing about himself; out of the inexplicable confusion of the Venice notebooks some sort of self-portrait does emerge; but he tried out several tones of voice and found none to fit his mood and theme. He was proposing to write about himself, to make himself the central character of his own book, but never quite found out how to situate the Sutcliffe of his invention squarely in the realm which his creator inhabited. The resulting manuscript is indeed something of a puzzle, for almost before he could get the book started his “characters”, that is to say Piers, Toby, Sylvie and myself started to look over his shoulder, so to speak, and talk for themselves. He felt at once elated by the thought that he had discovered a possible impressionistic form for his book, and depressed by the incoherence in which his subjects existed. They were not articulate about anything – and specially about love, the subject which occupied him most. As for our own trinity, he was disposed to regard it as a misfortune which, with a little forethought, we might have avoided. But then, on reflection, he remembered that for years now he himself had formed (without knowing it) the third in a trinity just as ill-starred, with Pia and pretty Trash as the other partners. How should he go about the book, then? How much latitude had he to alter facts? Perhaps like this? After much hesitation …

  “Sutcliffe – there was no limit to his greatness – became celebrated and tolerably affluent the year his wife died, and immediately set about reorganising a life which had become staled with worry and illnesses. From now on, he thought, he would set off every spring on a visit to Venice. His best friend was a raffish Oxford don called Toby Goddard, who was working on the Crusades in a chateau near Avignon. After Venice he would join his friend there for the summer. That was the plan. It was indeed not merely the plan for this year, but the master-plan for the rest of his life. Why Venice? It was rather a vulgar choice – the mud smelt so strong, the water squirmed with rats. One dares to suppose that he was merely a romantic of the trashy kind. But no, his books attest to a greatness beyond question. Hurrah! Robin and Toby were both large shapeless men, according to their friends, who were known as Gog and Magog. (Sutcliffe had genius perhaps, but was no beauty.) They both dressed rather alike, in untidy tweeds, and were both tow haired with blonde eyelashes. They also shared a fearful myopia of identical dioptry, were apt to bump into inanimate objects, sit down on invisible chairs, or bounce off each other as they shambled about talking and gesticulating. Both could walk on their hands and once had a race round St. Peter’s in this way which Toby won by a short head. Venice, then, and genius … what more does one need? He proposed to rationalise these rather expensive journeys by telling himself that a writer needs more than a cork-lined room in which to work. Needs space, elegance and the compacted nostalgias of an ideal past expressed in stone and metal. And to hell with Ruskin. So the huge man, wrapped in his tweed overcoat which smelt like a wet animal, set forth in the year 19— to welcome a late spring on those legendary canals. Gog parted from Magog in Paris with many unsteady protestations of esteem and regret; soon this incomparable couple would be reunited in the south. In Avignon.

  “He always carried about with him a black leather despatch-case full of water paints, pens, and bottles of Chinese inks and Japanese sepia blocks. So it was that the pages of his lonely letters were brilliantly got up with drawings in mauve, scarlet, yellow, green. … It was his way of cheating a professional neurasthenia to sit on a balcony over the loop of a canal and write these letters which were afterwards illustrated in crayon or gouache.

  “Letters to whom, we may ask? Why, letters to the few friends he had in the world, like the brother of his wife who was rather a slowcoach of a doctor, distressingly sincere. He resembled his sister in nothing save the shape of his hands which were slender and delicate – but what was that to Sutcliffe? He wrote to his wife still – long chatty letters to keep her up to date with his sentiments and movements. These efforts he either destroyed by posting them down the lavatory or – if they contained fragments of marvellous writing, poignant and regrettable incidents remembered, he sent them to Toby, or to Pia’s brother, with instructions that they should be spared and put somewhere safe. One day, he thought, he would fish out all this disorderly material and light a bonfire among the olives in order to say a final Ave to this writing life so rich in promises and so fertile in disenchantments. Yes, one day he would be an old hack, gone in the tooth, broken of nerve and talentless – dried up like a river bed. What then? Why, then, the Far East perhaps, some little monastery in the Thai hills, a bald dome, silence. Or the Trappe at Marseille where he would sit all day wearing an air of petulance like a latter-day Huysmans. Sutcliffe didn’t see this part very clearly; one doesn’t as a rule. Like all narcissists he was convinced that old age and death were things which happened to others – and he made inadequate provision for them, though his mirror warned him repeatedly. His teeth were getting fewer and would soon have to take on reinforcements if he was to continue eating well. His sexual needs were sharper and yet far too quick, O ejaculatio! He couldn’t stand brothels and so was at the mercy of passing sentiments which did not often come his way. He rather saw himself as Sutcliffe accoucheur des dames, accoucheur d’ âmes. The ideal prostitute he dreamed of merely, seeing her as a postulant discharging her obligations to a God – through fornication the human shadow drinks, the eidolon of man or woman. No use asking him what that last phrase meant. Sometimes his wife suffocated under his clumsy tenderness and felt like a conscript. If you want to know how she died read on from here. In another country, among olive trees of steel grey. In some ways for a writer whose imaginary wife has just died, death has about as much reality as a painted dog. Sutcliffe thought to himself: life is only once, old boy. All that we think and write about death is fictitious. Theology is very old ice cream, very tame sausage. Best go on hoping pour l’amour à quatre pattes – love on all fours.

  “Affectivity, then, worn down like an old dog’s molars. What you have bitten off as reality you will be forced to spit out. Here in Venice, these thoughts hardly belong to a place which so confidingly trusted in the idea of civilisation. One was forced to reconsider the idea against one’s will. Sutcliffe tended to see it as some poor Penelope, trying to weave up the original couple on her loom, while she waited patiently for the return of you know who. But in this age the hero never comes, and now we know that he will never come. We must be content with l’amour vache and l’amour artichaut, he loves me, she loves me not … In default of a God we must be content with that. Maybe it is all to the good. When God existed such was the terrible radiance of the thing that the ancients only dared to gaze at his behind, fearing for their eyesight and perhaps for their reason. According to Freud this led later to an irrational fear of sausages, or of being run over from behind, or impaled by father. What else to record? Yes, Sutcliffe one day fell among cannibals and was masterfully abbreviated; later at Athos he was much troubled by the indiscriminate farting from the monks’ cells – love-calls of old Byzantium he supposed …”

  What a mysterious business.

  Wound up one day like a clockwork toy

  Set down
upon the dusty road

  I have walked ticking for so many years.

  While with the same sort of gait

  And fully wound up like me

  At times I meet other toys

  With the same sort of idea of being

  Tick tock, we nod stiffly as we pass.

  They do not seem as real to me as I do;

  We do not believe that one day it will end

  Somewhere on a mountain of rusting

  Automobiles in a rusty siding far from life.

  Pitted with age like a colander

  Part of the iron vegetation of tomorrow.

  THREE

  Sutcliffe, The Venetian Documents

  ARRIVED, THE GREAT MAN DUMPED HIS LUGGAGE AT THE hotel and putting on blue-tinted glasses set out to have a little walk and smell, deambulating with caution however because somewhere in this fateful town was Bloshford, the writer he hated most in the world because he was so rich, his books sold like pies; Sutcliffe’s superior product sold well enough, but Bloshford carried all before him, and had managed to buy a couple of Rollses! It was vexing that he too spent most of his time in Venice – it was the site of many of his infernal novels. If ever the great Sutcliffe was in a bad temper his thoughts turned to Bloshford and the oaths mounted to his lips. Ah that bald pear-shaped conundrum of a best-seller – that apotheosis of the British artist, the animated tea-cosy! “You just wait Bloshford!” he might murmur aloud. A man who seemed to be held up by the bags under his eyes – every time he saw a bank-statement he breathed in and they inflated. A man who didn’t drink and couldn’t think. A man who could not plant a corkscrew straight. A heavy-arsed archimandrite of British prose … When the man approached you with his bone-setter’s grin you had to bite hard on the bullet.

  Thus Sutcliffe taking an evening prowl among the humpbacked bridges and curvilinear statuary, a bit soothed by the breathing beauty of so much lonely water. What would Bloshford be doing now? At the flea market probably, buying a clockwork pisspot that played “Auld Lang Syne”. Doubtless he had begun a new novel … La merde, la merde toujours recommencée as Valéry remarked, probably thinking of Bloshford. Enough of this.

  He bought some fruit from a stall, and furtively ate it as he walked. The other half of his mind dwelt in Anghor Wat.

  All that colossal winter breakdown, the nightmares, the sedatives. After nearly a decade of marriage you expect something to wear out, to blow a fuse. In this case he saw himself sitting beside the breathing slender figure of Pia like someone in an old engraving – a beastly old Rembrandt exhaling the perfervid gloom of Protestantism and a diet of turnips. He could think of nothing except her condition, and how she had got that way so suddenly. Of course, he knew it was something that had been held back, festering, and had suddenly exploded. But what? Neurology at that epoch was medieval except for its chemistry. So we were sent to a feast of psychiatry at Vienna where darling old Freud put his magnifying glass over their lives, their dreams, our hopes. It was a momentous meeting for Sutcliffe the husband, but even more so for the writer, for here was an old humble man who had given birth to an infant science. To see through his eyes was an experience like no other on earth. The writer rejoiced, for the old doctor treated all human behaviour as a symptom – the intellectual daring of this feat changed his whole life. Lucky, too, that the suicide of Pia had misfired, for thanks to this endearing old Jewish gentleman with his pocketful of dreams, the true nature of her breakdown was varnished and framed. He had not guessed that a bad attack of conscience could lead to a complete mental overthrow. This was the case, and the doctor insisted that she tell him the truth about Trash and herself. The crisis had been precipitated by Trash’s threat to leave her and set up house with another girl. But this wasn’t all. Standing pale before me in our hotel room, and wringing her white hands very slowly as if wringing out wet linen, she said: “This is a terrifying predicament, to realise the truth about inversion, because I really have come to love you, Rob. With all my heart and as much of my sex as I humanely can. Really love.”

  The great writer had to put that in his pipe and smoke it – there was nothing else to be done about the matter.

  A winter of walking about in the rain down snowlit streets; overheated hotel-rooms with the smell of furry moquette; and money pouring away down the drain, down the sink, down … dull opiates which offered no Lethe. It was the turn of Sutcliffe to become neurotic, sleepless. But instead of losing weight he put it on, for the same reasons; he could not resist the Vienna cafés with their extraordinary range of pastry. He began to look tearfully like the fat boy in Pickwick, and his eyes began to give trouble. But in order to play his part he had to turn priest and listen to the whole confession of the only woman he had really wholeheartedly loved; and in her brave tearful stammering realise that really, for the first time in his life, he was truly loved. It was only this malefic predicament that had unseated them. “Robin sure is sicker than a cat, honey.” Yes, Robin sure was sicker than a cat!

  I only saw the old man-in-the-moon a couple of times to talk about Pia. It was enough. He was full of endearing quirks of a strongly Jewish cast – after all, who else could rename love “an investment of libido”? It was marvellous. It kicked in the rear poor little Narcissus gaping into the stream. It was intellectually the most electrifying experience that Sutcliffe the writer had ever enjoyed. Reading up a bit of this extraordinary lore he began to see some of the reasons behind his own choice of an investment in Pia – the shadow of another comparable inversion. What he had admired sexually in her was that she looked so boyish. Abrupt gestures and hair tossed out of eyes. For all her daffodil fragility she was a boy. Then he remembered once that after a fancy-dress ball when she was dressed as a soldier she came to bed still in her military tunic and the result had been more than somewhat outstanding. Never had he been so excited! But this type of predisposition could not be cured by rushing out to a brothel and ordering a friend of Baron Corvo. It wasn’t sufficiently enracinated, sufficiently powerful, the strain; not as powerful as the corresponding strain in Pia. Meanwhile the great attachment had clarified itself as the genuine article … ahem, he coughed behind his hand, as Love.

  There was plenty of time in this Venetian spring to go over all these scenes in his mind for the umpteenth time, his lips moving as he re-enacted them, as if he were reading the score of some strange symphony, as indeed he was. In the intervals he wrote a line to his ungovernable friend Toby – the accident-prone don – to cheer himself up with harmless sallies. Listen to the puttle of the vaporettos, finger that fine glass full of smoky grappa or sugary Strega with a meniscus left by the dying sunlight on the lagoon’s horizon. Sutcliffe, pull yourself together, man. What do you propose to do with the rest of your life? Surely somewhere there was a dusky Annamite girl to be found, softer than promises or cobwebs?

  Stirring his cold toes in his huge lace-up old-fashioned boots he admitted that he was lonely, that he really hated Venice on that first evening. He wondered whether he should not take the train south right away down to Provence which though less rhetorical and emphatic than Italy has its own lithe grace of a Mediterranean kind; as Toby used to say “something of Sicily mixed with something of Tuscany”. But in the final analysis it was not landscape that irked him by its presence or absence. It was lack of company, it was lack of love. See the great man then staring into the water from a lonely table; his cigar extinguished, his book closed against the twilight. Nightfall.

  But his real problem is to forget. The best way would be to let one passion cast out another. We see from this that he was rather disingenuous. He had come to Venice not only to cure his prose of words like chrysoprase and amethystine but also to cure his soul of its private hauntings. He had come here, in the last analysis, for peace of mind. There were still memories that made him moan in his sleep, or that when awake returned with such force that he dropped knife and fork and felt as if a ball of bloody rags was stuck in his throat. Such compulsive thoughts made the
tweed-clad mandarin stand up abruptly and take a turn up and down the balcony, whispering curses under his breath.

  To be more explicit still, it was here in Venice that she had elected to tell him everything, which explained the peculiar hold of the place. Those scenes had marked his mind as if with a branding iron. The old American duchess, for example, who entrained them into her circle. Pictorially alone the scene was extraordinary. Huge sides of oxen were delivered to the house in the Via Caravi, whole beefs split down the middle. In these bloody cradles they would lie and make love while the men in blood-stained aprons stood around and jeered. He could see the pale Pia like, Venus Anadyomene in a thoroughly contemporary version of Botticelli lying pale and exhausted in a crucible of red flesh with the black glossy body of Trash looming over her. … Once there had been a little blood in her footprint on the wet bathroom floor, but this was her period, or so she said.

  He was not to be blamed if therefore, for clinical reasons, he nursed some vague premonitory feelings about an adventure which might help him to forget a little. The image he had in mind was, as to flesh, something on the lines of Raphael – plenty of it, that is, and softer than cirrus. Vaguely he hoped for a cloud-shape but he wanted it more localised in association, more specially Venetian as to colouring. He pictured thick lustrous auburn hair, a little brush repellant, a little wayward, sweeping out at the nape into a veritable squirrel’s tail which one could not resist stroking. Then also a pure intellectual beauty, work of an ancient master, which would make the saliva start to the mouth. These, then, were some of the trusting demands he made upon life in that slow Venetian spring – but they were provisional and not final. At the end one finds that one has to take what one is given or go without altogether. Sutcliffe did not give up easily, but he was prepared to bow, to face reality, to accept surprises at face value. If only to get away from the poisonous nagging of his thoughts. He reflected often on one such strange adventure which befell him one year in Stresa, with a fair girl from Périgord whose kitten-clear eyes were full of the symmetrical renown of her inner mischief. Phew! Vega burned bright for a summer, blue star of the unprepared heart. Well, he had some of these counter-memories in hand that first evening as he smiled into his shaving mirror, remembering that she had said: “You have very nice teeth and a most intelligent smile.” He smiled at himself “intelligently” in order to savour the lady’s approbation which in his present gloom he found comforting. It was a pity that he had to hoist his spectacles in order to see himself at all. But there! It was springtime, and soon it would be warmish, a time for fleshy desires. Ah Pia!