Love in a Bottle

by Antal Szerb

“I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t be angry with me,” I said, struggling painfully to find the right voice for the occasion without betraying my deep emotion. “I’m willing to make any sacrifice for you. I’ll learn to play bridge, and I won’t go to the Bibliothèque nationale for a whole month.”

  “It’s still not possible,” she said sadly.

  “Never?”

  “Nevermore.”

  “But why?”

  “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “Where for?”

  “Home. Wellington. New Zealand.”

  New Zealand!

  The stupendous vastness of the planet, the immense oceans dividing its separate worlds, the journey that takes so long it seems to symbolise death, trains that we watch helplessly in our very worst dreams, and the terrible utterance of Ananke, Goddess of Fate, with her voice of brass, all plunged into my soul like the damned in Michelangelo’s paintings. The sense of universal malice that seconds before had been so doggedly asleep was now up on its hind legs, shrieking and dancing with impotent rage, while my neurotic fears stood by, whimpering. Love, like a trapped bird, hurled itself frantically around inside my breast, while pale-fingered Grief dropped tears in my eyes… producing the sort of orchestrated chaos inside me you would might expect if a disorderly adolescent male were left to wander freely in a girls’ hostel, at bathtime.

  And there was nothing to be done. As the cosmic void opened out before me I came face to face with the Not and the Never—all that was left of my imaginary paradise of love. I embraced her, for the first and last time; now it would have made no difference had I simply killed her.

  And then, at the very last moment, with the locomotive of fate already blowing its whistle, I remembered that none of this was true. I wasn’t embracing her for the first time, and more had happened between our bodies than just the present tearful moment. Every woman’s body, as I said, has a quite different feel in a man’s hand. These subtle differences cannot be approached through words, or at best, only through similes. There are women whose touch is like holding a flower in your hands; others are more like a solid mass that suddenly explodes; others seem to be on fire. There are those who remind you of ham on buttered bread, and others, the vast majority, who evoke nothing at all.

  The New Zealand girl was a vision of touch, if I might coin a phrase. She was entirely of a piece with the girl I had kissed in the depth of that night of song. She was the unknown goddess, the dark lady of the sonnet. She, whom, alas, I would never see again.

  Now I shall be silent for a while. The great poets convey the most truly significant moments with the fewest words. “And all my pretty ones?” cries Shakespeare’s Macduff, when he learns that, as was the practice of the time, his wife and babes have been murdered.

  A little later, I took Marcelle back through the Parc de St Cloud to Ville-d’Avray on the far side, where we all three (including Pilaszanovits) lived in the same boarding house. On the way I observed a bitter silence, but Marcelle rattled on about one of the waiters, from Cigogne, who had accidentally drunk some petrol instead of an aperitif, after which the poor fellow had to sound a horn if anyone crossed the road in front of him.

  In the ancient trees of the park the birds were waking up, thousands and thousands of them, birds of every kind, whose names one never knew, suddenly calling aloud as if in response to some secret alarm signal only they could hear. Every one of them was singing. In the whole of the sky there was not an inch of empty space—every atom of the fresh morning air was filled with birdsong. But what was there for them to shout about? Were they praising God, as St Francis taught, or demanding breakfast, or greeting their spouses, these precious little birds of the sky? And then they started to take off, in all their thousands and thousands, large wings and small flitting about with a freshness for which there are no words, every one soaring on wings… and it was as if the very next moment the trees themselves would fly up after their beloved inhabitants, along with the green marble basins, the slow-footed flights of marble steps, the pale statues of gods, the embankment and the whole park swathed in mist, and a great darkness would arise in its place, and the Earth itself would be completely alone, with only me left behind, and the mutual loneliness of the two of us. The utter, utter loneliness.

  At the door to their room I took my leave of Marcelle, with a formal kiss on the hand.

  “Tomorrow,” she said grandly.

  “Today,” I replied. “It’s been tomorrow for some time.”

  I never saw her again. While she slept off her exhaustion after the party, I moved out of the house. After some searching I went to live in La Varenne, beside the Marne, at the other end of the Paris conurbation. At first I had a lot of difficulty: every change of line unnerved me. I had to cross the metro system from right to left, and Vincennes now stood for the way home—previously it had been Maillot, in the opposite direction. For an absent-minded person it was truly horrible. But after a while I got used to it.

  1932

  FIN DE SIÈCLE

  THE CHESHIRE CHEESE PUB in London is famous for having remained exactly as it was when the great Dr Johnson, that commanding figure of eighteenth-century English literature, sat there and delivered his immortal banalities, so faithfully recorded for posterity by the assiduous Boswell. The most distinguished poets of the age have met there ever since. Towards the end of the last century, for example, it was here that Tyrconnel, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson and John Davidson held their weekly reunions.

  On this particular occasion only three of the quartet were present, Tyrconnel, Dowson and Johnson. Tyrconnel was holding forth. He was a languorous, deeply unconventional Irish poet, as signified by the single curl of silky black hair that strayed so casually over his forehead. Hardly a week went by without his having made some new mystical discovery, some fresh instance of telepathy, perhaps, or some interesting notes he had come across inserted by an archangel into a piece of Old Irish prose. He chatted away about such things with the easy familiarity and volubility with which others might discuss a football match. This was in marked contrast to Lionel Johnson, who would deliver his observations about the weather in the manner of a revelation: “There was a thick fog in Chelsea this morning,” he would regularly announce, and glare balefully around the room, his hand clapped on some invisible sword.

  “You deal out a pack of cards marked with mystical symbols,” Tyrconnel was saying. “The important thing is the square grid on the back of the card. It gives you the matrix in which the secret meaning is contained. Then, if an adept studies the cards at a particular hour of the night, his visions will correspond directly with the symbols. If the card stands for Public Esteem, he will be looking at his future career. If he draws the symbol for Heaven, he will learn the nature of the greatest happiness that lies in store for him…”

  “Very interesting,” observed Lionel Johnson, with his customary decisiveness.

  Tyrconnel’s face reddened slightly.

  “I wouldn’t be telling you all this, Johnson, if I hadn’t seen some extremely convincing experiments carried out in our little group.”

  “In our little group” was a regular saying of his, though it was never quite clear in what species of secret institution or laboratory these improbable researches were conducted. Johnson and Dowson never asked. They were afraid that he might already have told them, only they hadn’t been listening at the time.

  After this, Johnson spoke about his new Tractatus, in which he would show once and for all that Bloody Mary had been quite right to send the Protestant martyrs to the stake. Tyrconnel listened with great interest. He did not for a moment believe in Johnson’s Catholicism, any more than Johnson did in his mystical anecdotes. He knew that it was all part of the business of being a poet, the licensed eccentricity of the poet’s view of the world. The precise nature of the world view didn’t matter—what did was the burdensome honour of the vocation, in which verse forms amounted to dogma and symbols represented political affilia
tions.

  Then came that memorable business with the Scots.

  Davidson, the one Scottish member of the group, finally arrived. Without a word of forewarning he had brought along two of his fellow Scots—tall, thin, badly dressed young men with grey, baldly staring eyes. They sat themselves down with an air of embittered arrogance, the way Scots often do, and proceeded without the slightest inhibition to pour scorn on Tyrconnel’s mystical revelations. This did not particularly bother Tyrconnel—he was not a man who took himself seriously—but then one of the newcomers suddenly barked at Lionel Johnson:

  “And why aren’t you drinking?”

  “I never do,” Johnson replied coldly. “You know, when I was still quite young I once fell on my head…”

  But his interlocutor was not going to let him digress. He made his contempt for Johnson’s asceticism abundantly clear. He poured scorn on everything he considered unhealthy, decadent, over-refined and self-consciously crafted. In his opinion only the Scottish peasantry were worth anything in this world, and no serious writer could get by without drawing on the ancient, undiluted wisdom of the Gaelic people and the primordial power of the ballad tradition.

  The three lyric poets listened to this for some time, with polite smiles on their faces, much as St Sebastian had done on a similar occasion. They stroked and played with the dog under the table, then suddenly stood up and took their leave.

  All three knew, without a word being said, that it was the end of their weekly reunions for ever. They could never again return to the Cheshire Cheese without exposing themselves to the risk of a further meeting with the two Scottish representatives of the Primal Force. They themselves were gentlemen of far greater refinement, fin de siècle to the core and Englishmen to boot, and they could think of absolutely nowhere else they might meet, that is to say, without asking Davidson to dispense with his Highland friends. Thus these convivial gatherings, of such great significance in the history of English literature, came to an end.

  Having escorted Johnson home, Tyrconnel remained out in the fog, sensing the utter emptiness of his life. As he drifted from gas lamp to gas lamp a strange feeling gnawed away at him—the same sort of half-conscious preoccupation you get when a particularly attractive woman steps onto the train while you’re chatting to your friends: you hardly notice her, and no one quite realises why you all keep turning your heads in one direction, until eventually you spot her. But this particular concern, when he finally identified what it was, was not quite so appealing.

  “What would happen,” he asked himself, numb with horror, “if Johnson really were serious about his Catholicism? Might that also mean that those two Scotsmen genuinely believe in their Life Force? Then I’m the only one… the only one…”

  But he allowed the absurd idea to drop. His thoughts turned, rather more consolingly, to Dowson, the love poet of transcendent delicacy who, in real life, spent his time playing cards with the father of his beloved—a greengrocer—and chatting away, no doubt, in the lowest form of cockney. Such is human nature.

  Thus he arrived at a certain nightclub. Here, behind the sleeping back of the early-retiring Victoria, the nocturnal decadence of a highly moral age seethed and bubbled away like a virulent organism in a sealed bottle. Tyrconnel was well known in the place, not as a mystical poet but as the son of his eminent father, who sent him large remittances every month. His personal decadence found partial expression in telling dirty stories to the Alhambra chorus girls, who pulled their chairs into a ring around him because they enjoyed them so much. But this simply intensified his inner emptiness, and he drank steadily to fill the void, if only physically.

  Some time later he was joined by his countryman and fellow poet Oscar Wilde—devastatingly elegant, as always, in his tail-coat, and languidly witty as ever. He had just come from some place or other where he had been the life and soul of the party… but what frightfully hard work it was, keeping up his non-stop brilliance! With the audacity of an ageing voluptuary, and one eye on his audience, he set his hands to work on the chorus girls, all the while murmuring in Tyrconnel’s ear about his one great grief, his unrequited passion for a certain young earl, a blond to boot, to whom he penned sonnets of classical perfection the way Shakespeare once had. How mendacious are the ways of poets! Tyrconnel knew all about the seedy-looking stable boys and hotel flunkeys who hung around outside Wilde’s house, draining off his rapidly diminishing funds. That was the real truth about poor Oscar.

  A wave of alcoholic grief swept over him. He leant his head on Wilde’s shoulder and murmured through his tears:

  “Babylon and Nineveh…”

  Wilde stared at him in astonishment.

  “For God’s sake, not you too, old chap? You’re not starting on this religious nonsense yourself? They tell me our dear Lionel—”

  “I’ve come to realise,” Tyrconnel explained tremulously, “that I’m just as beastly a humbug as you, and those two… sons of the peasantry, with… with their Primal Force… and Lionel Johnson… who’s never had proper dealings with a woman in his life… But I… I happen to know a real human being… an itinerant tinker… drowned at sea off Inverary…”

  And he launched into the story of the tinker, knowing full well that, as with everything else in his life, there wasn’t a grain of truth in any of it.

  “I lie only when I speak, you lie even when you don’t—that is the difference between us,” Wilde declared aphoristically, and got up to go and repeat the witticism at several other tables.

  Tyrconnel made his way home, taking one of the chorus girls with him, and paying her about as much attention as he would to a bus ticket.

  Tyrconnel sat in the presence of the Great Publisher, having politely placed his newly purchased grey top hat on the floor beside him, and his snow-white gloves and ebony walking stick with the onyx handle on top of it.

  “I’ve been thinking about a weekly journal,” the Great Publisher announced, “the sort of thing they do in America, something a lady might hold in her hand on the train. The cost would be recovered through advertisements for spas, watering places, that sort of thing. But of course that side of it wouldn’t interest you, as a poet. Naturally, the paper would mostly carry puzzles, photographs of the Royal Family and stories about dogs. But I also want it to print sonnets and Platonic dialogues—in a word, literature.”

  “Indeed,” Tyrconnel murmured respectfully.

  “But not the sort of ‘literature’ you get in John o’ London’s Weekly and suchlike. Mine will carry only the best, the most refined writing of the day. Nothing but Symbolism and that French stuff that no one understands. Which is why I thought of you, Mr Tyrconnel. You will be in charge of the literary column. Your fellow workers you will naturally choose yourself.”

  Tyrconnel immediately thought of Lionel Johnson and Dowson. It was now a full month since he had seen them, and he had begun to miss them almost sincerely. It was not so much a case of the heart going out in friendship—that sort of thing was out of the question between them—rather, he missed the permanent but always stimulating sense of oppression that he felt in their company. What kept them together was a feeling of mutual fear. Tyrconnel was filled with pangs of genuine remorse every time he thought of Johnson’s immense Oxford-educatedness and the stubborn asceticism with which he worked, rewriting and polishing his verses until they were either absolutely perfect or consigned to the bin. He himself wrote swiftly and haphazardly, and then a kind of hysteria amounting almost to panic, or the simple fact that his cigarette had gone out, would be enough to stop him taking any sort of corrective action.

  Dowson was different again. He would produce no more than four or five poems a year, but it was precisely this indolence that the prolific Tyrconnel felt as a perpetual reproach. The man who writes very little always has the advantage over the one who writes a lot, since his every phrase is carefully constructed; just as the person who stays silent is always cleverer and wiser than the one speaking.

  Naturally,
Tyrconnel did not know the actual address of either of his friends. He had often accompanied Johnson home, but had never noticed the name of the street, let alone the number. In truth, the only things he did notice were either written or spoken: just words.

  The one positive thing he did know about was the gossip he so regularly repeated, both in his editorial capacity and at literary dinners—that Ernest Dowson spent every evening from eight onwards in a certain little pub the far side of London Bridge, playing cards with his beloved’s father, a greengrocer. Had Tyrconnel been English it would undoubtedly have restrained him from intruding on the hidden other half of his friend’s life. But his Irish soul was tormented by a mischievous delight in causing embarrassment. That evening he roused himself and set off in the direction of London Bridge.

  He quickly identified the little pub from its coat of arms. He went in, knocked back an Irish whiskey at the bar (he was a great patriot) and enquired after Dowson. Not a name anyone could recall. But when he wrote it out in large simple letters, and explained that the person regularly played cards with a gentleman who owned a greengrocer’s shop, the barmaid’s face lit up.

  “Oh, you must be thinking of Mr Ernest.” And she took him into a back room.

  In the thick haze beneath a paraffin lamp several people sat at cards. It took him some time to spot Dawson’s aristocratic profile. By then his friend had already noticed him. He jumped up, came over, and shook his hand vigorously. He was deeply embarrassed.

  “Hello, old chap. This really is kind of you… excessively kind… I’ll introduce you to my partners, if you like, but, please” (pulling him closer and whispering), “you won’t let on, will you, that… you know… I sometimes write verse. That sort of thing puts a chap in a rather difficult position here.”

  There were three people at the table: Mr Higgins the greengrocer, his shop assistant, and his daughter.