Now the scene changed again and he fell into a more lucid vein. It was as if in the vast jungle of unreason we came upon clearings of sanity where he was emptied of his poetic illusions. Here he spoke of Melissa with feeling but coolly, like a husband or a king. It was as if now that the flesh was dying the whole funds of his inner self, so long dammed up behind the falsities of a life wrongly lived, burst through the dykes and flooded the foreground of his consciousness. It was not only Melissa either, for he spoke of his wife — and at times confused their names. There was also a third name, Rebecca, which he pronounced with a deeper reserve, a more passionate sorrow than either of the others. I took this to be his little daughter, for it is the children who deliver the final coup de grâce in all these terrible transactions of the heart.
Sitting there at his side, feeling our pulses ticking in unison and listening to him as he talked of my lover with a new magistral calm I could not help but see how much there was in the man which Melissa might have found to love. By what strange chance had she missed the real person? For far from being an object of contempt (as I had always taken him to be) he seemed to be now a dangerous rival whose powers I had been unaware of; and I was visited by a thought so ignoble that I am ashamed to write it down. I felt glad that Melissa had not come to see him die lest seeing him, as I saw him now, she might at a blow rediscover him. And by one of those paradoxes in which love delights I found myself more jealous of him in his dying than I had ever been during his life. These were horrible thoughts for one who had been so long a patient and attentive student of love, but I recognized once more in them the austere mindless primitive face of Aphrodite.
In a sense I recognized in him, in the very resonance of his voice when he spoke her name, a maturity which I lacked; for he had surmounted his love for her without damaging or hurting it, and allowed it to mature as all love should into a consuming and depersonalized friendship. So far from fearing to die, and importuning her for comfort, he wished only to offer her, from the inexhaustible treasury of his dying, a last gift.
The magnificent sable lay across a chair at the end of the bed wrapped in tissue paper; I could see at a glance that it was not the sort of gift for Melissa, for it would throw her scant and shabby wardrobe into confusion, outshining everything. ‘I was always worried about money’ he said felicitously ‘while I was alive. But when you are dying you suddenly find yourself in funds.’ He was able for the first time in his life to be almost light-hearted. Only the sickness was there like some patient and cruel monitor.
He passed from time to time into a short confused sleep and the darkness hummed about my tired ears like a hive of bees. It was getting late and yet I could not bring myself to leave him. A duty-nurse brought me a cup of coffee and we talked in whispers. It was restful to hear her talk, for to her illness was simply a profession which she had mastered and her attitude to it was that of a journeyman. In her cold voice she said: ‘He deserted his wife and child for une femme quelconque. Now neither the wife nor the woman who is his mistress wants to see him. Well!’ She shrugged her shoulders. These tangled loyalties evoked no feeling of compassion in her, for she saw them simply as despicable weaknesses. ‘Why doesn’t the child come? Has he not asked for her?’ She picked a front tooth with the nail of her little finger and said: ‘Yes. But he does not want to frighten her by letting her see him sick. It is, you understand, not pleasant for a child.’ She picked up an atomizer and languidly squirted some disinfectant into the air above us, reminding me sharply of Mnemjian. ‘It is late’ she added; ‘are you going to stay the night?’
I was about to make a move, but the sleeper awoke and clutched at my hand once more. ‘Don’t go’ he said in a deep fragmented but sane voice, as if he had overheard the last few phrases of our conversation. ‘Stay a little while. There is something else I have been thinking over and which I must reveal to you.’ Turning to the nurse he said quietly but distinctly, ‘Go!’ She smoothed the bed and left us alone once more. He gave a great sigh which, if one had not been watching his face, might have seemed a sigh of plenitude, happiness. ‘In the cupboard’ he said ‘you will find my clothes.’ There were two dark suits hanging up, and under his direction I detached a waistcoat from one of them, in the pockets of which I burrowed until my fingers came upon two rings. ‘I had decided to offer to marry Melissa now if she wished. That is why I sent for her. After all what use am I? My name?’ He smiled vaguely at the ceiling. ‘And the rings —’ he held them lightly, reverently in his fingers like a communion wafer. ‘These are rings she chose for herself long ago. So now she must have them. Perhaps.…’ He looked at me for a long moment with pained, searching eyes. ‘But no’ he said, ‘you will not marry her. Why should you? Never mind. Take them for her, and the coat.’
I put the rings into the shallow breast-pocket of my coat and said nothing. He sighed once more and then to my surprise, in a small gnome’s tenor muffled almost to inaudibility sang a few bars of a popular song which had once been the rage of Alexandria, Jamais de la vie, and to which Melissa still danced at the cabaret. ‘Listen to the music!’ he said, and I thought suddenly of the dying Antony in the poem of Cavafy — a poem he had never read, would never read. Sirens whooped suddenly from the harbour like planets in pain. Then once more I heard this gnome singing softly of chagrin and bonheur, and he was singing not to Melissa but to Rebecca. How different from the great heart-sundering choir that Antony heard — the rich poignance of strings and voices which in the dark street welled up — Alexandria’s last bequest to those who are her exemplars. Each man goes out to his own music, I thought, and remembered with shame and pain the clumsy movements that Melissa made when she danced.
He had drifted now to the very borders of sleep and I judged that it was time to leave him. I took the coat and put it in the bottom drawer of the cupboard before tip-toeing out and summoning the duty-nurse. ‘It is very late’ she said.
‘I will come in the morning’ I said. I meant to.
Walking slowly home through the dark avenue of trees, tasting the brackish harbour wind, I remembered Justine saying harshly as she lay in bed: ‘We use each other like axes to cut down the ones we really love.’
We have been told so often that history is indifferent, but we always take its parsimony or plenty as somehow planned; we never really listen.…
Now on this tenebrous peninsula shaped like a plane-leaf, fingers outstretched (where the winter rain crackles like straw among the rocks), I walk stiffly sheathed in wind by a sealine choked with groaning sponges hunting for the meaning to the pattern.
As a poet of the historic consciousness I suppose I am bound to see landscape as a field dominated by the human wish — tortured into farms and hamlets, ploughed into cities. A landscape scribbled with the signatures of men and epochs. Now, however, I am beginning to believe that the wish is inherited from the site; that man depends for the furniture of the will upon his location in place, tenant of fruitful acres or a perverted wood. It is not the impact of his freewill upon nature which I see (as I thought) but the irresistible growth, through him, of nature’s own blind unspecified doctrines of variation and torment. She has chosen this poor forked thing as an exemplar. Then how idle it seems for any man to say, as I once heard Balthazar say: ‘The mission of the Cabal, if it has one, is so to ennoble function that even eating and excreting will be raised to the rank of arts.’ You will see in all this the flower of a perfect scepticism which undermines the will to survive. Only love can sustain one a little longer.
I think, too, that something of this sort must have been in Arnauti’s mind when he wrote: ‘For the writer people as psychologies are finished. The contemporary psyche has exploded like a soap-bubble under the investigations of the mystagogues. What now remains to the writer?’
Perhaps it was the realization of this which made me select this empty place to live for the next few years — this sunburnt headland in the Cyclades. Surrounded by history on all sides, this empty island alone is free fro
m every reference. It has never been mentioned in the annals of the race which owns it. Its historic past is refunded, not into time, but into place — no temples, groves, amphitheatres, to corrupt ideas with their false comparisons. A shelf of coloured boats, a harbour over the hills, and a little town denuded by neglect. That is all. Once a month a steamer touches on its way to Smyrna.
These winter evenings the sea-tempests climb the cliffs and invade the grove of giant untended planes where I walk, talking a sudden wild slang, slopping and tilting the schooner trees.
I walk here with those coveted intimations of a past which none can share with me; but which time itself cannot deprive me of. My hair is clenched back to my scalp and one hand guards the burning dottle of my pipe from the force of the wind. Above, the sky is set in a brilliant comb of stars. Antares guttering up there, buried in spray.… To have cheerfully laid down obedient books and friends, lighted rooms, fireplaces built for conversation — the whole parish of the civilized mind — is not something I regret but merely wonder at.
In this choice too I see something fortuitous, born of impulses which I am forced to regard as outside the range of my own nature. And yet, strangely enough, it is only here that I am at last able to re-enter, reinhabit the unburied city with my friends; to frame them in the heavy steel webs of metaphors which will last half as long as the city itself — or so I hope. Here at least I am able to see their history and the city’s as one and the same phenomenon.
But strangest of all: I owe this release to Pursewarden — the last person I should ever have considered a possible benefactor. That last meeting, for example, in the ugly and expensive hotel bedroom to which he always moved on Pombal’s return from leave… I did not recognize the heavy musty odour of the room as the odour of his impending suicide — how should I? I knew he was unhappy; even had he not been he would have felt obliged to simulate unhappiness. All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness. And being Anglo-Saxon there was a touch of maudlin self-pity and weakness which made him drink a bit. That evening he was savage, silly and witty by turns; and listening to him I remember thinking suddenly: ‘Here is someone who in farming his talent has neglected his sensibility, not by accident, but deliberately, for its self-expression might have brought him into conflict with the world, or his loneliness threatened his reason. He could not bear to be refused admittance, while he lived, to the halls of fame and recognition. Underneath it all he has been steadily putting up with an almost insupportable consciousness of his own mental poltroonery. And now his career has reached an interesting stage: I mean beautiful women, whom he always felt to be out of reach as a timid provincial would, are now glad to be seen out with him. In his presence they wear the air of faintly distracted Muses suffering from constipation. In public they are flattered if he holds a gloved hand for an instant longer than form permits. At first all this must have been balm to a lonely man’s vanity; but finally it has only furthered his sense of insecurity. His freedom, gained through a modest financial success, has begun to bore him. He has begun to feel more and more wanting in true greatness while his name has been daily swelling in size like some disgusting poster. He has realized that people are walking the street with a Reputation now and not a man. They see him no longer — and all his work was done in order to draw attention to the lonely, suffering figure he felt himself to be. His name has covered him like a tombstone. And now comes the terrifying thought perhaps there is no one left to see? Who, after all, is he?’
I am not proud of these thoughts, for they betray the envy that every failure feels for every success; but spite may often see as clearly as charity. And indeed, running as it were upon a parallel track in my mind went the words which Clea once used about him and which, for some reason, I remembered and reflected upon: ‘He is unlovely somewhere. Part of the secret is his physical un-gainliness. Being wizened his talent has a germ of shyness in it. Shyness has laws: you can only give yourself, tragically, to those who least understand. For to understand one would be to admit pity for one’s frailty. Hence the women he loves, the letters he writes to the women he loves, stand as ciphers in his mind for the women he thinks he wants, or at any rate deserves — cher ami.’ Clea’s sentences always broke in half and ended in that magical smile of tenderness — ‘am I my brother’s keeper?’…
(What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place — for that is history — but in the order in which they first became significant for me.)
What, then, could have been his motive in leaving me five hundred pounds with the sole stipulation that I should spend them with Melissa? I thought perhaps that he may have loved her himself but after deep reflection I have come to the conclusion that he loved, not her, but my love for her. Of all my qualities he envied me only my capacity to respond warmly to endearments whose value he recognized, perhaps even desired, but from which he would be forever barred by self-disgust. Indeed this itself was a blow to my pride for I would have liked him to admire — if not the work I have done — at least the promise it shows of what I have yet to do. How stupid, how limited we are — mere vanities on legs!
We had not met for weeks, for we did not habitually frequent each other, and when we did it was in the little tin pissotière in the main square by the tram-station. It was after dark and we would never have recognized each other had not the head-lights of a car occasionally drenched the foetid cubicle in white light like spray. ‘Ah!’ he said in recognition: unsteadily, thoughtfully, for he was drunk. (Some time, weeks before, he had left me five hundred pounds; in a sense he had summed me up, judged me — though that judgement was only to reach me from the other side of the grave.)
The rain cropped at the tin roof above us. I longed to go home, for I had had a very tiring day, but I feebly lingered, obstructed by the apologetic politeness I always feel with people I do not really like. The slightly wavering figure outlined itself upon the darkness before me. ‘Let me’ he said in a maudlin tone ‘confide in you the secret of my novelist’s trade. I am a success, you a failure. The answer, old man, is sex and plenty of it.’ He raised his voice and his chin as he said, or rather declaimed, the word ‘sex’: tilting his scraggy neck like a chicken drinking and biting off the word with a half-yelp like a drill-serjeant. ‘Lashings of sex’ he repeated more normally, ‘but remember’ and he allowed his voice to sink to a confidential mumble, ‘stay buttoned up tight. Eternal grandma strong to save. You must stay buttoned up and suffering. Try and look as if you had a stricture, a book society choice. What is not permissible is rude health, ordure, the natural and the funny. That was all right for Chaucer and the Elizabethans but it won’t make the grade today — buttoned up tightly with stout Presbyterian buttons.’ And in the very act of shaking himself off he turned to me a face composed to resemble a fly-button — tight, narrow and grotesque. I thanked him but he waved aside the thanks in a royal manner. ‘It’s all free’ he said, and leading me by the hand he piloted me out into the dark street. We walked towards the lighted centre of the town like bondsmen, fellow writers, heavy with a sense of different failures. He talked confidentially to himself of matters which interested him in a mumble which I could not interpret. Once as we turned into the Rue des Soeurs he stopped before the lighted door of a house of ill-fame and pronounced: ‘Baudelaire says that copulation is the lyric of the mob. Not any more, alas! For sex is dying. In another century we shall lie with our tongues in each other’s mouths, silent and passionless as sea-fruit. Oh yes! Indubitably so.’ And he quoted the Arabic proverb which he uses as an epigraph to his trilogy: ‘The world is like a cucumber — today it’s in your hand, tomorrow up your arse.’ We then resumed our stitching, crab-like advance in the direction of his hotel, he repeating the word ‘indubitably’ with obvious pleasure at the soft plosive sound of it.
He was unshaven and haggard, but in comparatively good spirits after the walk and we resorted to a bottle of gin which he kept in the commode by his bed
. I commented on the two bulging suitcases which stood by the dressing-table ready packed; over a chair lay his raincoat stuffed with newspapers, pyjamas, toothpaste, and so on. He was catching the night train for Gaza, he said. He wanted to slack off and pay a visit to Petra. The galley-proofs of his latest novel had already been corrected, wrapped up and addressed. They lay dead upon the marble top of the dressing-table. I recognized in his sour and dejected attitude the exhaustion which pursues the artist after he has brought a piece of work to completion. These are the low moments when the long flirtation with suicide begins afresh.
Unfortunately, though I have searched my mind, I can recall little of our actual conversation, though I have often tried to do so. The fact that this was our last meeting has invested it, in retrospect, with a significance which surely it cannot have possessed. Nor, for the purposes of this writing, has he ceased to exist; he has simply stepped into the quicksilver of a mirror as we all must — to leave our illnesses, or evil acts, the hornets’ nest of our desires, still operative for good or evil in the real world — which is the memory of our friends. Yet the presence of death always refreshes experience thus — that is its function to help us deliberate on the novelty of time. Yet at that moment we were both situated at points equidistant from death — or so I think. Perhaps some quiet premeditation blossomed in him even then — no matter. I cannot tell. It is not mysterious that any artist should desire to end a life which he has exhausted — (a character in the last volume exclaims: ‘For years one has to put up with the feeling that people do not care, really care, about one; then one day with growing alarm, one realizes that it is God who does not care: and not merely that he does not care, he does not care one way or the other’).
The Alexandria Quartet Page 11