“Life”, said the little tedious priest, “is always pointing in the right direction, it is always bliss-side up if only we know how to take it.” Perhaps. Perhaps. But to take it you must begin by giving, and this is hard to learn.
Ah the specialised kindness of taut Christian pharisees, les pince-fesses who fart like tent-pegs.
Pia, that last Christmas, the tree with its withered finery. Trash in her fur cape looked like the back legs of a pantomime bear, and Pia like a small lioness in spurs. That night a necro-spasm – a unique depression follows, based on reproof, rebuke, self-reproach. Yet when I was ill she looked after me like an investment. Tenderness of a gun-dog.
There is mystery in the fact that if you repeat something meaningless long enough it begins slowly to gather significance and meaning as a needle on the disc gathers fluff. It becomes a mantram.
I tell everyone that Bloshford was operated on for hernia by a French doctor who left a pair of gardening-gloves inside him – or at least that is how he looks. Alternatively in certain lights he looks like a stage policeman who has swallowed the pea in his whistle.
The long suit of literature? Think of the impact of Melville’s years of massive silence.
Bloshford does something quite hard to do – he trivialises reality. He does not feel the need for the monotony so essential to the creative spirit. I must be very jealous of him to go on like this. Bloshford! Gr … Gr … Woof! Woof!
In the Merchant Navy an expression signifying “to go mad” is wonderfully expressive. “Riding a corkscrew” it is called.
Tall and willowy, she was one of those pretty Swedish tubes into which one empties oneself in the desperate hope of getting a good night’s sleep. (Régine.)
On gazing at my reflection in a mirror: “Even a God can be the victim of binocular vision.”
Flesh-hating zealots avaunt! I am for all the soft collisions I can get. I have been decocted. Soft as a boxing-glove by moonlight. Houris! Hear my call to prayer!
Roheim tells us that the Central Australian Mother eats every second child, sharing it with the older baby. He adds that they are “all heroes” and “as happy as wolves” and goes on to attribute their idyllic characters to the fact that they have suffered no weaning period and no sex-repression (latency period). A link with gnostics? Hum. “We are born mad,” writes Dr. Eder. “We acquire morality and become stupid and unhappy. Then we die.”
The deliberate practice of helplessness in saints and women elicits sympathy and wonder.
Toby, in a flash of sincerity, said: “I have never spoken a truthful word in my life and I have always given several conflicting accounts of the same incident – so aware am I of the relativity of knowledge and the distortion of human vision. I am a born historian, so to speak.”
Trapped between conflicting notions of rest and motion, man panics his way into the tomb, rest never bringing him the peace and reassurance he needs, motion only sterile change and ideal sorrow. O! Time the great Howler!
Mille baisers, Trash, gelatineuses et patibulaires. Va caresser un chameau, Garce. I am an old elephant and my back legs need polishing.
They were actually connected by the empty space between them, the interstices between feelings so to speak, which set up this electrical impulse called desire.
SUPPOSED POEM FOR PIA
Sweet valves, in breath you will correct
The soft ellipses of my husband’s sleep,
And the dull Quand? Quand? Repeat the
Chink-Chink of the French town’s little clocks
In bogus belfries on a sour note of final
Twang. Clang! Was that someone at the door?
Today he drank pints of decorated wine,
Rods of gold wine all prizewinners.
Could one presuppose that the death
Of an ageing writer somewhere alters
Reality, diminishing a space the size of him?
It is not possible to contrast man’s view
Of himself with the reality he presents
And not to feel sick unto death at such
Pretensions of a complacent little ape.
And we who say we love – how much the worse
For us and for those who possess us. Think.
Rain on my fingers, the smoke of Ithaca,
An old blind dog waiting at a garden gate.
Last night he dreamed a negress for me, another Trash,
Took her in a thicket of whispers with a smile
That smelt of freshly turned earth, the open grave.
Pia writes: “The old Asian doctor had the face of a wistful cobra, but the mind was worn like the coping-stone of an ancient well; the ropes had grooved the stone. The well of knowledge is deep and the thirst of men is endless. But they know that the wells are drying out, the levels falling.”
“Mirrors were originally invented to capture the reflection of flying swallows.” Sylvie. She had read it somewhere no doubt.
As Thoreau nearly said: “Most wives live lives of quiet disapprobation.” A well-furnished mind in an ill-starred codpiece. (Toby.)
The wind whistles in my crows-nest of bones
In the conning tower of the skull
The sharpshooters ambush of the eyeball
Death will be only a change of code, of zones.
The python sadness shuffles in to claim … etc., etc.
A kid I fell into milk. I married and was a coq en pute. A writer big with book I hurried to Orta like a harvest in peril. To salvage a general principle from a mass of conflicting evidence can be both science and poetry.
Toby gorged on corybantic Cambridge Sausages. Marsupial dons bellying out like sails. Galleons of furry gowns.
Les grands sensuels agrés comme moi, Robin
Les sensuelles es Amour comme elle
Dans des jardins d’agrément jouant
Comme des poules dans les basses cours
Sont plutôt agronomiquement acariatres
Selon les pédérastes, les putains et les pâtres.
Mais ce soir si ce joli temps permet
Si l’equinoxe persiste
Nous allons entendre chanter tous les deux
La petite doxologie des toiles d’arraignés.
Éplucher le gros oignon de l’univers
Nous deux cachés par l’éventail de la nuit.
Écoute, c’est le temps qui coule
C’est la nuit qui fuit. A moi Bouboul!
I have shifted this huge weight
By only a hair in half a lifetime
Of dead breath and sinew, to somewhere else,
Merely a shift of weight, you’d say,
Though it might be heavier than air
But slow to grow as mammoth’s teeth or hate,
A lifetime of nails growing on after death;
Yes, I have moved this huge weight,
By less than a weightless breath
And with it the weight of my afterlife
And massive, the weight of your death.
Something has collected around this long silence, Pia, the pearl of silence formed round a grain of sand; the golden embryo of the inner mind promised to the gnostics. They say there is nothing like love to develop the spirit except grief, sweet grief. Ah! Ce beau temps où j’étais malheureuse, sighed Madame de Staël.
What would we not give for Byron’s ruthless charm?
Calm and fearlessness at birth should be the natural attributes of man, but entering the gear-box of process he has been twisted out of true, out of camber.
A wooden leg, a dimple filled with pus, a wart with an eye.
Ah! The milky bagpipes of the latent wish! Tonight Sylvie dragging and sucking at Chopin on the piano, while I read a book about India – the smoked dung of merchant enterprise.
Prose should have a gleam in it like mica. The glint of nervous insight. That moonlit night in the trenches the dead were hanging on the barbed wire like sperm in a girl’s bush. Today I have been working under high pressure weaving my neck
lace of suppositories. I have come to some conclusions, like sex is not an act but a thought: a Tip Toe Thought. (Toby in a high state of suppressed sincerity.)
Bruce told me that when the nurse walked on Sylvie’s right side she became invisible. Cranial hemiplegia? Apparently not however.
Pia said: “When Trash leaves me I run a temperature.” And I? And I?
I am forever writing her a letter in my head which I know will end in the Dead-Letter Office, will fall au rebut, en souffrance, that is why I suffer from a profuse loss of calcium. I am learning to see dreams as the expiatory device which voids the anti-social content of wishes and allows them to act themselves out harmlessly – not from civic conscience but from fear of punishment.
Later comes an embryology of boredom, we topple into the law of inertia. The sluggish foetus which won’t contract out of the cosy womb life. So process gets slowed down by cowardice and slowly ankyloses. Gangrene sets in. People are born with frozen affects, and stalk the planet like dead men. In cold blood. These are the faceless hominids who cause us so much trouble by acting out what we are repressing with such heroism.
Tobor the poet for example. His young wife fell into a volcano. He never married again, and the girl became dearer and dearer to him as she receded in time. He trailed his sorrow in poems which became as heavy as lead. Finally, having become world famous, he realised one day that what he owed to her was precisely this deliberate consciousness of her death. She could not have done this for his work by simply living on. It was her death which gave his poems pith. He felt so ashamed he stopped writing.
Trash’s body was a breathing bas-relief which might have appealed to a corkscrew on shore-leave. Her red mouth was a sabre-cut of laughter, like a duelling scar. Discussing me with Pia she said: “He’s the sort of guy always trying to make a silk purse out of a horse’s ass.”
If ever I said sex was funny it was only to emphasise the enormous fragility of the enterprise. Spare us this day our classical pruritus.
Have I no right to talk about it? Why, uxorious Raphael, how he loved the act which he did not find lonely – bathed in the candy-floss of women’s bodies. Nowadays all that is needed is the leaden sperm of some deteriorated schizophrenic in order to make people feel at home.
Accused by Toby of deplorable political cynicism, I asked: “What sort of social conscience and political awareness would you expect of Robinson Crusoe?” No answer. He just sat there working his finger in his ear and his foot in his shoe like a sexually aroused tomcat works its tail paddle-fashion. He told me about a friend who left everything and went to Peking where he lived with a girl called Persistent Mosquito Net, a lightly toasted concubine. He beat her till she sang like a lark.
The last word pronounced by Buddha was “diligence”. An uffish thought.
A Cinematograph Company has been pestering me for ideas and I have accordingly worked out an excellent subject: a film about the filming of the Crucifixion. The actual nail-up takes place away in the distance, like in an Italian painting. The three famous actresses who play the chief female parts are sitting under an olive tree playing poker on a collapsible green card-table. Like a scene transplanted from a maison close and dumped down here on the Mount of Olives. Their poor straw-rotted hair is tied up tight against dust in garish bandeaux. They have wrinkled skin like old elephants – years of make-up and whisky have made them patchy as a whitewashed wall in summer. They sit and grimly play, waiting for a cue. The world’s girl friends – for this is a super production. They grin yellow, their teeth have been planted in their gums by surgery, but the gums are giving out, and increasing softness has given them precarious grins (pun). Like unreformed whores, New Testament whores so to speak, they wearily play on waiting for a client to ring. In the far distance the whole sordid little Thing is taking place. A tiresome Jewish agitator is paying for his conceit. Judas sits under a tree nearby eating an apple. They have given him enormous canines and talons like Fu Manchu. The producer is a cripple, wheeled everywhere in a bathchair. He is epileptic and has frequent fits during the shooting. I promise to supply the subtitles later on.
Women who like furs like Pia show their hidden bent for rapine. A passion for tiger-skins reveals the father-eater. Women who train their hair back into their eyes in order to toss it back every now and then see themselves as ponies – they will ride their men. Pia painted her nails the colour of coagulated blood, Trash hers white.
A dry run for a love affair, a mock-up for a kiss, someone dying of post-operative shock. Love, the old corpse-reviver … Thoughts closely linked like chain-mail that arguments cannot pierce.
Once upon a time he had been much intrigued by the theories which have grown up around the idea of a “double”. Once it seemed proved when she entered his room while he was in bed with a fever and said: “Yesterday you had no fever when I came to you – now your forehead is burning.” But yesterday he had been away in another town. Someone had entered his skin during his absence. Who?
If man did not have his illnesses he would have nothing to shield him from reality – and who could stand that?
Dinner with Banquo in that run-down shadowy chateau in the hills. He appeared to live there alone on his holidays with one negro retainer. Sabine was due to attend but did not turn up which caused the old man some annoyance. “She has become less and less fun as she has grown older and more serious, and I can’t really count on her any more.” He recalled with nostalgia her silly period just after university: walking into Maxim’s with a young lion on the leash. Sitting beside the chauffeur of a Prime Minister dressed as a pantomime dog. Their love-affair created an international scandal. Perhaps it was as well that this period did not prolong itself unduly. “A little celebrity and one subsides into being a character.”
Said that Piers’ uncle has inherited the key to a large Templar treasure, and will not surrender it to Piers who does not know where to lay his hands upon it. He sighed when he spoke of the goodness and beauty of Sylvie, adding: “Though she has very distinct marks of madness in her look one always feels that to call her insane would be to put all ontology to the question.” Smiling in the firelight I saw his brave old face which seemed to have foundered on the reefs of success, the disappointment which money-power brings. He was courteous, he was weary, but he manfully entertained his daughter’s guest, rather pleased to have read one of my books. He offered me horses to ride. But he was very English, very London. I thought of the smoky old hotels where he lodged as a penniless boy from Manchester – they line the Cromwell Road today. Lighted all night. The same night-porters walk the dusty corridors distractedly waving enemas. Even today he slept with the same rueful smile on his face. “Come back,” he said. “I spend a lot of time alone here. Company is good for me.” I said I would. I meant to, but summer passed and the fireflies died and the harvest came and the rains started. I only had one wish by then:
to melt back into the faceless ground
without a sorrow sight or sound
or watch the rosy corpses play
in cinemas by night or day.
FIVE
Dinner at Quartila’s
BLANFORD THE NOVELIST SIGHED AS HE SEPARATED THE master copy of the typescript from the other two, and taking up a blank white sheet rapidly wrote down several provisional titles for this new and rather undisciplined departure from the ordinary product. After several faltering attempts he decided to give the devil his due, so to speak, and to call it Le Monsieur. Sunset had passed him by and now evening was falling in all its brilliant phosphorescence over the loops of the Grand Canal. He was filled with a vague sense of insufficiency at having at last decided to say goodbye to his creations – they had been together for a couple of years now and he had, inevitably, become fond of them and reluctant to part from them. Besides, had he said all that there was to say about them? There were so many corners he had left unexplored, so many potentialities undeveloped simply because he had firmly decided not to write “the ordinary sort of novel�
�.
That blasted Sutcliffe – he had grown fond of him; he had enjoyed even being pilloried by him under the disgusting name of Bloshford. Perhaps he should sue himself for libel?
Tonight he would have the first opinion on the book from the old duchess to whom he had sent the third carbon as well as many of the scenes from his notebooks which had not found their way into the definitive text. Never had he been more uncertain of a piece of writing, never had he needed advice and guidance more. Yet he implored her to say nothing until she received his telegram and the invitation to dinner at Quartila’s silk-lined cellar where he would listen to her in all humility, in order to discover what he had, in fact, done. Several beginnings and several endings buzzed around him like mosquitoes as he sat on his high balcony above the water and turned the pages of his notebooks. The suicide – was that right? And he felt that he should perhaps offer a final summing up from the diary of Bruce, let us say; something like this: “The year is on the wane, the month is already November. I have let a number of weeks slip by without making any entries in my diary. I have only a few pages left, just enough to summarise briefly the final history of Verfeuille and its owners. I have decided to cease keeping a diary altogether, to lapse into silence; too much paper has accumulated around us during this long history. ‘It is presumptuous to wish to record,’ writes Sutcliffe somewhere and goes on, ‘Anyway it is too late to alter anything; one has started to appear as a name on the death-map as if it were among the credit titles of some shoddy film.’ He is thinking of the map of Piers where death assumes the shape of a constellation hanging in the sky – the great Serpent Ophis we had once seen in old Macabru. How far away it seems now, watching the rain falling among the silver olives.”
The Avignon Quintet Page 27