The Black Book

by Lawrence Durrell

  Chamberlain, when he called, was shocked by the knife edge of cruelty that cut down into our social relations. He did not realize the depths of her insensitiveness. He saw only what seemed to him the wilful cruelty of myself. He did not realize that my viper’s tongue would have withered in my mouth if set to pronounce a single conventional endearment, “my darling”, or “my dear”. No. I am that I am. The senex fornicator if you will. The lutin. Nanus or pumilo. Tourneur’s “juiceless luxur”, if you prefer it, but never the conventionalized gramophone-record lover. But I realize that even these weird colours are denied me by my acquaintances whose method is simply to reverse the romantic medallion and declare that what they see is the face of cynicism. “Dear Mr. Gregory,” as someone said, “you’re such a cynic,” whatever she meant.

  In a way this must be rather a pity, for Grace pines for romance, dimly in that numb soul of hers. Wistfully. Sometimes, on waking her from a trance, I have discovered that the object of her musing was only Gary Cooper. Soit. It has become imperative to present her with a substitute.

  Much pondering on the subject had evolued for me an elixir, which seems to do the trick. Thrice-weekly visits to the cinema seem to hack away most of the romantic whale blubber which would poison our relationship; the rest is dissipated by an occasional visit from Clare. He is, as it were, the practical side of romance.

  Saturday evenings she goes dancing at the Pally De Dance with him, glittering in a vulgar new evening frock which my charity has provided; baubled, painted, and with a swath of scent following her, a yard wide, like an invisible page. Radiant, one might almost say, were not her radiance the radiance of a rouged death mask.

  With me she is still a little uncomfortable, but once outside the flat door she takes on any romantic colour she chooses. Out of the weekday chrysalis steps the princess Gracie, owner of a tall dark partner and a latchkey of her own. I would be a fool to grudge her this. Yet it rankles. I grudge it. And again, so unfortunate in my way of showing my feelings that I force her to go, goad her, simply in the hope that she will revolt, renounce the role, and stay at home. “But you must go,” I say, when she shows the slightest disinclination. “Clare will be sad. He says you dance lovely.” Hoping of course that she will laugh, put her hands on my shoulders, perhaps, and stay. But a more literal-minded little jezebel you could not hope to find. In all obedience, she goes. If I had the courage to say to her, for instance: “Tonight you must stay. I don’t want to be left alone,” she would as obediently stay; but try as I might I cannot bring myself to say the formula. Poor Gracie. The female thaumaturge. Where anyone else would try perhaps to deduce what I was feeling from the ambiguities of what I say, Gracie accepts the literal rendering of the text and acts on it. In this way I have no one to blame but myself.

  Of course, there are solutions. But I am too much of the retiring violet ever to try them. I could, for instance, learn to dance. In fact I even bought a little manual of dance steps and trod a grave measure or two in front of my looking glass, wondering if it were possible to take clare’s place in the ballroom. Alas! I can see at once how fatal the attempt would be. The fallacy of the idea. Because what she wants is not a partner, but a romantic ally. Foxtrot I never so nimbly, I could not hope to oust Clare. For consider the disparity. Clare is tall, insolently cat-eyed, black-locked. The gigolo, in a word. His evening shoulders are padded to professional heavyweight size. Bigger than Grace, he hunches protectively over her, singing snatches of the tunes in her ears. He knows all the words to all the tunes, it seems. His movement is a lush, confident seal’s glide on the polished floor. Confronted by this picture of him for comparison with my own reflection in the mirror, I am at once disgusted by the fatuity of all this. No. Saturday evenings I sit virtuously alone, a-reading Gibbon, waiting for the clock to strike twelve.

  Sometimes Tarquin comes down to see me, all nerves and nonchalance, and sits on the edge of a chair, talking wistfully, until they return. He resents her taking up clare’s time but dare not show it openly. He is scared that they will fall, as he puts it, in love with one another. “Aren’t you”, he says nervously, “in love with her enough to see the danger of all this?” Naturally, my viscera contract at this open statement of a fact which I haven’t ever wanted to examine closely. “Love?” I says to him I says, with my newly acquired Brixton aplomb. “Love, Tarquin?” This with all the chaste control I can muster. “Oh, it depends what you mean by the word.” I call up the Nelson touch and nail my pinafore to the mast. “What is love?” It is not myself I am asking, but Tarquin. I dissociate myself firmly from the question. Have I not already signalled my ignorance by a blank space where the word should have been? Nevertheless I am malicious now, because he should not try to smoke out the hornets’ nest in my brain. Shall we make him wriggle? “Do you love clare?” I say venomously. “Love,” he says, beginning to tremble. “Love!” The word is a sort of motor touched off inside him. His knees liquefy and dissolve inside the creased tubes of his trouser legs. “My dear fellow, what do you mean?”

  This is the seventh occasion of Clare’s visit to the Pally with Grace. By this time we are nearly drunk on claret. Tarquin is almost hysterical and I am seeking about for the right phrase with which to disembowel him. It would wipe out my anger at Grace’s desertion to see him break down. But he will not. We sit like a couple of aged schoolmarms and discuss “life”. Tarquin’s confidences are a little embarrassing because they are so out of proportion. When he was five, he assures me, his little sister pulled down his trousers before five of her girl friends. This he assures me is the cause of his curious psychology. All of which is vaguely reminiscent of a literary outing with one of the Powys brothers. “You can understand the shame that polluted my life?” he demands angrily. He insists on reading me his diary, at any rate those significant excerpts which scald his bowels. Bad prose and worse sentiment. There are little flourishes and bravura pieces which are waiting eagerly for posterity. Tarquin banks his hopes of immortality on this tome: these hypochondriac dribblings!

  “Do you keep a diary?” he wants to know; and contemptuously I tell him, “No.”

  A little disgusting on the whole, this soul-outpouring of his, because so trivial. “We must have sanity, don’t you think?” he says wistfully. “We must reduce our lives to some sort of order. I’m trying very hard to get to the bottom of myself. What do you think?”

  The anger, the hard bright anger in myself, when I consider Tarquin’s tram excursions down the one-way street of introspection and psychoanalysis. “It isn’t anything wrong,” he says, speaking of his love for Clare; “it isn’t a physical attachment. I had my prostate looked over. It’s quite normal. It’s purely a desire for some emotional relationship between us. Gregory, old fellow, you know what loneliness can be, without contact, don’t you? Sitting alone day after day, don’t you?”

  The claret is finished. Nodding with the stern kindness of a medico, I retire to the kitchen and unearth some bitter beer. Tarquin moults by the fire.

  “Ever since I was at school I felt the need for love. Ideal love, don’t you see? I’m not immoral. The law couldn’t touch me if it wanted to. Physically I’m chaste as … as … what’s very chaste? Tell me the chastest thing you know. Yes, that’s right. As chaste as a bloody eunuch … Ha … Ha …”

  A little spasm of mixed laughter and tears. The beer produces a series of diminishing reverberations in his bowels; a regurgitation. He spits in the fire.

  “I fixed my emotions on friends, on masters, anyone at all. I used to write poems to them. You see? Then afterwards … Oh, I don’t know, why am I telling you all this? I regret it. I’ll be ashamed to come again. Why can’t I shut up and be silent? Why? Is it something wrong with me? What do you think? But that damned war finished any control I might have had. I was happy in the line. Sounds funny, doesn’t it? But happy, old man, I’ve never been happier. Of course my nerves were shot to hell, but the lack of responsibility, just waiting like cows to be killed. You see one co
uldn’t think. My God, what a blessing to sit there in that noise, chewing mud, and trembling, unable to think. It’ll never be the same again. I try with music now but it’s no good. Only sometimes Wagner gives me the feeling, but it’s no good really.”

  Ach! but a truce to Tarquin. He has framed his own portrait in that wretched diary of his. What a monument of unconscious humour and pathos!

  The night I told him that Clare had been unfaithful to him, rather that Grace had been unfaithful to me, he was for beating the gigolo senseless. “The world’s not large enough for us both,” he admitted, starting to be sick. In the bathroom, falling on his knees, he clutched the tails of my dressing gown, and said: “Help me, Gregory, for the love of God, help me, help me.”

  I helped him to bed …

  Here ends the extract from Gregory’s diary.

  That is a fragment of the tender id of this book: the secretive, wincing plasm of Gregory tangled in his own egoismus; tangled in the green lace of the writing. I do not pretend to interpret. It would be too much to expect of the interrogative ego, the other me, whose function is simply to take a sort of hieroglyphic dictation from space, and annotate it, punctuate, edit. Perhaps add a pert little introduction of my own, and an apparatus of variants.

  If I reflect on our individual and collective funerals, here in the Regina Hotel, running side by side in the snow in a chronology which has nothing to do with time—for it has forfeited time for the living limbo—then I am forced back to a picture of Lobo sitting over his chart, his fingers busy, while Gregory watches from a chair. Always the Gregory who does not exist here, the Death Gregory of the green fable. As for the chart, it is the final symbol of this annihilation. At night I can see it on the wall. It contains every principle, every motive, every boundary to which our deaths are subject, in which they are consummated. Plot me a graph of the doom, in which the southern provinces lie! The tunnel of Lordship Lane where my feet have worn themselves down to marrowless stumps in my wanderings. The smoke and uproar of the tin tumbrils passing the eternal windows. The museum clock face is scourged by raindrops: it dies, like a pale face on the stalk of a tower, and reminds me of the death of time.…

  When Gregory speaks out of the darkness I am wandering again in that insane system which is not solar but infernal. The fronds of the sickening trees from Green Lanes away to Champion Hill, where the travellers go at night with their bags and baggages. At Catford, where the blind men dance to the violins, while the wind blows their eyelids over them; and their hands are terrible soapy talons! Deliver me from the blind men of my childhood! Stand on the bridge and let the engines launch themselves at you. Heavy steel lances diving between your legs and the smoke chokes up between the arches. All the signals are set green as the evening shuts down, long rays of evening paralysis over the tenements. Lochia. The houses secret and prim. No sound, no sound of the rigours, tragedies, lamentations leaking from behind the shutters. The door knockers hanging on broken hinges waiting for the Host to lift them. Inside the kitchen ranges flaring, surrounded by steaming clotheshorses. Texts on the wall at an angle. Mantels blossoming out with a sudden soft pop. Letters with Indian stamps on them, Halma, Ludo, Baedeker, Old Moore, dripping, sequel, the green-house lit with a green rain from heaven, the haggard fingers stitching a winding cloth for the morning … It is difficult to write it. There is a transition from that place to this, where I sit and watch Lobo work at the map he will never finish. But it is immediate. The connecting links have snapped, or been burst into pieces. I live only in my imagination which is timeless. Therefore the location of this world which I am trying to hammer out for you on a blunt typewriter, over the Ionian, is the location of space merely. I can only fix it with any certainty on the map.

  From Peckham where the children sail their boats, where the lovers play with each other and go mad on the dark common after dark, away to the lairs of Lee Green, where you can smell Black-heath stalking upward into the darkness, leperlike, eaten by roads and villas. From the fag end of Anerley where the tramlines curve away above a wilderness of falling tombstones; Elmers End, a locality of white stumps in the snow; to the Crystal Palace stuck against the sky, dribbling softly, pricked with lamps. Lawrence knew this world. Look up suddenly into the night. O ponderous phalloi, you have impregnated the world, you are the hostage of these delicate girls whose virginities are hard as the iron rails of the beds on which they toss!

  The hotel is crowded with ghosts. Since Edwardian times no one has dusted this statuary, these carpets, these indestructible potted plants. I am thinking now of the Welshman. Morgan stooping along these corridors as if under invisible blows, with a mop in his hand. Or at night, seated by the humming iron boilers in a battered chair, draining his whisky at a gulp, and coughing up a bloodshot story. Morgan found drunk one night, twined round the figure of a Greek goddess, fearfully excited by its utter stillness. Or giving himself an erection solemnly, to show you exactly what the catheter did to him when he had the clap. The beautiful mutilations and barbarities of Wales, the valleys strung with sores, the religion. And to the seaboard of his world the eternal beating of the Atlantic, the white races. Morgan’s inheritance is a queer barbarity, a religious anger, which jumps from nothing along the dents of his face. I am fascinated by him, because to my own crude struggle against a protracted adolescence, he presents a bold and solid picture, in large round lively colours. He presents as nearly as he can the quality of an experience without dressing it up: puzzled, louring, hooking the writhing words from his vocabulary like octopods, as he sits there by the boiler, drinking and yarning. Look, one night I came down here to find the furnace doors open, the dirty linoleum bathed in flames. He was working, stripped to the waist, the liquid dust rolling down his body, the contours of chest and arm frilled in flame, tossing great mouthfuls of clinkers into the furnace. His dugs were a tangle of hair and dust. When he saw me he was suddenly leaning on the shovel in delighted agitation. (Gwen, of course. He has been shaping for Gwen for months now.) I could only guess at the reality through his imprecision. “She come down ’arf an hour ago. ’Ere. By the boiler.” His face was like a flower. “She come to me with nothing under her dress. She said: ‘Do you want it, Mister Morgan?’ Gor but it was surprising, like. I dint know what to say. Then she lies down here, in front of the bloody fire, as God’s truth, sir, in front of the fire ’ere.” He choked on his own spittle and produced a grin. Phenomenon. Then, turning aside, latched the boiler doors fast. In my role of echo I sat and waited. He was angry now, sort of resentful with me for being at all interested. Then he ended with terrific naturalness: “She was what you might call fruity. Draws it out of you, sir.” Then, as if a little bewildered by such a literary figure, he stared at his feet and blurted out, “Juicy as fruit, sir, and that’s no error.”

  From this epic to the minor myth of Gregory is a step that seems unbridgeable, to me at any rate. Morgan at one uncouth jump reaching beyond the boundaries of our idealism, our dilute passion, our effete aesthetic. I am helpless to do anything but move the green bishop to a new paragraph. Helpless.

  Here begins Gregory:

  The unbearable poignance of being inarticulate—or do I mean only too articulate?—for I have words enough. “Christ” she said to me once lying there covered by my body, “Say yer love me, why don’t you? You never says it, Gregory, you never says it. It’s not good without you saying it.”

  She had never cried out before; never tried to cross the forbidden territory which lies between us. For a half second it was as if, to descend to the stale phrase, my heart was broken. The pain of finding her almost within my reach, demanding comfortable familiarity and tenderness, was almost physical. Here, your romantics will tell you, under the left breast. I wondered all of a sudden what it must feel like to sleep with me, to miss the open reciprocation, the crude vulnerability of the passionate mammal: the warmth that Chamberlain revels in: the bowels of compassion.…

  Faugh! But I’m a saurian. Leave me my toadlike composu
re. I defend my own psychic property like the Devil himself. (“You never says it, Gregory, you never says it.”) Poor Gracie, and her lame performing toad! The distance was never crossed. Even now, putting this elegant ci-gît over her coffin I do not really regret it. I am that I am.

  Here ends Gregory.

  But it is true what he says before: a phrase as valid for us all now as it was for him when he wrote it.

  Everything is plausible here, because nothing is real. Nothing. The warm schoolrooms with their furniture of little round heads, the hunchback, the black car riding out on the midnight to meet you, the desire, the hours I spend at this desk in a vacant room, with only this diary to testify to Gregory’s life. The blank telephone which carries your scent into the room, among this literary bric-à-brac, these mouldering novels, poems, articles, the statues on the snow whose personality I can feel even in my dreams. To fall upon you in an elegy of frenzy, and feel the circles of snowy birds break from your white prison, burst open your breast and begin, falling across the stony body in prismatic regiments. Forgive me.

  We meet at night on the downland, in the last territory of the great arterial road. There is that figure which will break from the dark trees and dance into the glare of the headlights in all gaiety. Leather ankle boots, swished wet in the long grass of the fields. The woolly Cossack hat snuggled firmly to the head. Hair blue-black, smooth, brushed cleanly back over the icy lobes of the ears. Cold the fingers which burrow in the lighted dashboard for cigarettes; and the so faintly painted mouth cold in greeting like the friendly cold nose of an animal. Breath spouting a milky spume on the frozen air. This is the dimension I wander in at night, this and the dimension of history. It is hardly reasonable. The children are afraid to look at my face because they might learn something.