The Black Book

by Lawrence Durrell

  Imagination can depict continents, immense humid quags of matter where life pumps its lungs in a last spasm of being before passing down slowly, sponging away into its eternal type of mud. Things without souls which wander among the mossy stumps, hummingbirds, or pterodactyls with klaxon shrieks, blobs of sperm drying in crevices, or the nameless maculae lairing and clinching in mud to produce their types of solitariness. This in the realm of history when the children are sitting deafened by the silence, and the book empties itself out on the desk in many coloured pictures. The carbon forests buried in their weeds and marshes. Pithecanthropus striking fire from a cobble. The rhino calling. The enigmatic fan of planets plotting its graph on the night. The first spark of history struck from a cobble while the ashes of our campfires soften and wrinkle. The children’s faces like so many custards! The waters thawing, drawing back. The havoc of the ice ages set suddenly into gear. The earth begins its ablutions. The planets lick themselves clean. The mud of continents scraped, ploughed. Forests picked out and tossed into space like patches of fluff. Endless the migration of apes in little boats, with food and skins and nursery implements. Men with bronze and cattle paddling the Gulf Stream into chaos beside their dugged females. Oh, the terrible loneliness of the ape’s mind to see the dawn sweep up from the poles in a prismatic snow, shivering a fan of colours. The flakes settling and thawing on the blue water of oceans. Behind them, lost in a void which has no location, a world: before them—what? The rim of water seeking away into the seasons, consuming time. No hand or olive branch to guide them. The snow ices their hairy shanks and the skins in which they huddle.…

  It is like that, primordial in its loneliness, the mood in which I set out to meet you. The history is a sort of fake I invent all day among the children to nerve myself for our meetings. You are sitting out there, under the sweeping skyline of country, with time strapped to your wrist by a leather thong. At your back the aeroplane light swivels its reds and greens on to the grass in many hectic windmills. There is no object in life but to reach that lonely cigarette point in the darkness. All day my own movements struggle toward the darkness. Immense massive manoeuvres against time, so that I am like the underwater photos of a swimmer, parting the thick elements of gloom with slow hands toward the moment of meeting.

  I am alive only in the soft glitter of the snow, the turning of switches, the laboured churning of the self-starter. The engine coming awake under my slippered toe, the heavy metal personality of my partner. We are off on the murderous roads, the engine staggering, whining, hot with slipping from gear to accurate gear. The road opens like a throat at Elmers End. I huddle nervously and press down my foot. Bang! down into the suburban country, among a rain of falling tombstones. A hailstorm of masonry falling away to one side. I am immune from danger at last. The lights are passing and falling away, like lambent yellow cushions, always flung, always falling short. Everything is gone at last, our failures, our shabby quarrels, time, illusion, the night, the frenzy, the hysteria. I am in the dark here in a metal shell, blinding away across the earth, these infinite lanes toward her.

  Flesh robot with cold thighs and fingers of icicle gripping the wheel of the black car, everything is forgotten. It is no use telling me of her inadequacy, her limitations; no good saying her mouth is an ash tray crammed with the butts of reserve, funk, truism, revulsion. I admit it. I admit everything with a great grin of snow. But it is no use. If I can find her moist and open between two sheets anywhere among the seven winds, you can have everything that lives and agonizes between the twin poles. Seriously, I switch off the dashboard and let my soul ride out on to the dark, floating and quivering on the frosty air above the black car; my personality has been snipped from my body now, as if by scissors, to ride along the night wind against any cold star. Everything flows out of me in a long effortless catharsis, pours on to the darkness, licked by the airs. This is the meaning of freedom. My money has poured out of my pockets, my clothes fallen from me, every bit of tissue sloughed. Everything is clear in this struggle to reach her. The car humming like a top, stammering, banging round corners with its insane fixed eyes; the carpet of light racing along the dark arterial roads; the distance being patiently consumed. I am in a kind of fanatical imagery now, unreal, moving through this aquarium of feelings, conscious of nothing but the blood thinning in my veins, and the slow fearful heart.

  We fall together like figures made of feathers, among the soft snowy dewlaps of the cattle, the steaming commotion of voices and cud. The loose black mouth with its voice of enormous volume. We are surrounded with friendly cattle like a Christmas card picture, on the ground, our bodies emptied out of their clothes. It is a new nativity when I enter her, the enormous city couched between her legs; or a frost-bound lake, absolutely aware of the adventurer, the pilgrim, the colonizer. The snow is falling in my mouth, my ears, my soaked clothes. This is a blunt voyage of the most exquisite reckoning. Enter. She has become an image in rubber, not the smallest bone which will not melt to snow under the steady friction of the penis. The hot thaw spreads raw patches of grass under us: every abstraction now is bleeding away into the snow—death, life, desire. It is so fatal, this act among the cattle. We are engrossed bobbins on a huge loom of terror, knowing nothing, wishing to know nothing of our universe, its machinery. When she comes it’s all pearls and icicles emptied from her womb into the snow. The penis like a dolphin with many muscles and black humour, lolling up to meet the sun. The fig suddenly broken into a sticky tip that is all female. She is laughing hideously. The car is standing among the cattle, no less intelligent than they. Under me is no personality any more but a composite type of all desire. Enter. I do not recognize my arctic sister. Under my heart the delicate tappets of a heart; my penis trapped in an inexorable valve, drawing these shapes and chords out of me inexhaustible, like toothpaste. The cattle are kindly and interested in a gentlemanly way; the car urbane as a metal butler. Under my thews, trapped in bracts and sphincters, a unique destruction. She is weeping. Her spine has been liquefied, drawn out of her. She is filleted, the jaw telescoped with language, eyes glassy. Under my mouth a rouged vagina speaking a barbaric laughter and nibbling my tongue. It is all warm and raw: a spiritual autumn with just that scent of corruption, that much death in it, to make it palatable. A meal of game well-hung pig-scented tangy. Such a venison, more delicate than the gums of babies or little fishes. Open to me once like that and the Poles are shaken out of their orbits, the sky falls down in a fan of planets. I am the owner of the million words, the ciphers, the dead vocabularies. In this immense ceiling of swan’s-down there is nothing left but a laughter that opens heaven: a half-life, running on the batteries. I am eating the snow and drinking your tears. Stand against the hedge to snivel and make water while the shivers run down your spine. You are beautiful all of a sudden. Your fear makes me merry. A very merry Christmas to you and yours. I am saying it insanely over and again. A very merry Christmas to you and yours. She runs at me suddenly with blunt fists raised, shouting wildly. Enormous dark eyes with the green and red lights growing from them. The cattle draw back softly on the carpet. Her tears punch little hot holes in the snow. I am happy. You will go about from now on with an overripe medlar hanging out between your legs, your womb burst like the tip of the Roman fig. But even this brutality goes when I feel the bones against me, malleable and tender as gum; the eager whimpering animal dressed in cloth opening up to me, wider and wider, softer than toffee, until the bland sky is heavy with falling feathers, angels, silk, and there is a sword softly broken off in my bowels. I am lying here quite ruined, like a basketful of spilt eggs, but happy. Vulnerable, but lying in you here, at peace with myself: the tides drawing back from me, gathering up the dirt and scurf of things, the thawed pus and venom, and purifying me. I am at peace. It is all falling away from me, the whole of my life emptied out in you like a pocketful of soiled pennies. The faces of the world, Lobo and Marney, the children, Peters, the car, Gracie, the enormous snow, statues, history, mice, divi
nity. It is for ever, you are saying wildly, with green lips, red lips, white lips, blue lips, green lips. It is for ever. Our lives stop here like a strip of cinema film. This is an eternal Still life, in the snow, two crooked bodies, eating the second of midnight and snivelling. We will die here in this raw agony of convalescence, by the icebound lake, the city lying quiet among its litter of whimpering, blind steeples.

  They must be saying good nights now all over the world. I am saying good-bye to part of my life, no, part of my body. It is irrational. I do not know what to say. If I take your hand it is my own hand I am kissing. The aquarium again, with everything slowed down to the tempo of deep water. Good-bye to my own body under the windmill, weeping in the deep snow, nose, ankle, wrist made of frosty iron again. Help me. O eloquent, just and mighty death. The great anvil of the frost is pounding us. The cattle are afraid. Let me put my hand between your legs for warmth. Speak to my fingers with your delicate mouth, your pillow of flesh. I am a swimmer again, moving in a photograph with great, uncertain, plausible gestures towards you.

  I have said good night and drawn the car out slowly homeward. There is no feeling in my hands or feet. As though the locomotive centres had been eaten away. Tired.

  Hot scent of oil along the great arterial road. There is not a fraction of my life which is not left behind with you, back there, in the snows.

  In the hotel the lights blaze. The stillness of the little death hangs along the corridors. Lobo is locked in his room, his heavy head bent over the chart. At his back the wireless gives out the barnyard orchestrations of jazz. From time to time he will raise his eyes and let them rest on his pencil box. Not thinking, numb, the iris of each eye focusing its dark vent on the Mayan eternity. He will let the tepid piddle of the music squirt coolly over him, without attending to it. He would like to cry. Next door Miss Venable wrestles with insomnia. Dial. Detective novels. Ovaltine. Teacups. The bed-lamp hangs its yellow membrane over her. The novel palls. How easy to pour herself out an overdose of Dial one of these fine winter nights, at the full moon. She tries to think of God. Three stories up Clare is lying in bed. Tarquin stands over him talking. The window is wide open and snow is blowing in on the floor. The yellow eyes are sardonic. Connie has entered into their drama suddenly and instituted a new order of things. To Clare’s salary an increase of three pounds a week; to Tarquin’s lorve a kind of internal strangulation, a hernia. However, he is talking largely. The new view of life etc. “Tell me about her,” he says bravely, his nose quivering. This pathetic pose of indifference amuses Clare. “Tell me!” He wants to be made to wriggle, to be stung, whipped by details. Nowadays he can feel so little, really. “I want us to be friends, Clare dear,” he says shyly. “Tell me everything. Confide in me.”

  “Well,” says Clare in his croaking voice, saturnine, “if you must know, she’s a dirty bitch. When I’m not there it’s candles, or hot soap and water in a bottle. See? It’s a corridor, that’s what it is, see? She likes it from behind on Sundays to remind her of her old man Joseph, see?”

  Tarquin has to leave before he vomits. In his room he walks about like a shy little girl; he will not speak to anyone. If I had the time and the energy I could be really sorry for him. Connie in that gas-lit flat with the blood running out of her as fast as the port runs down her throat: blood on the towels, the curtains, the bedcovers, the pillow. Blood everywhere—and his little Greek Clare cleaning his white teeth and helping himself from the bulging handbag. Or the night of the party when the gas went out, and you could see suddenly the sonata blotted out by the dark. The piano like a dumb buffalo there, and clare trying to mount her on the piano stool, with strange uncouth movements. Tarquin locks the door of his room every night now to feel safe from the blood. He plays David and Jonathan with his pillow these days but it is no good. It is no good at all.

  It is so very silent here at night: my room amputated from the planet. A laboratory hanging in space where the white-coated intelligence I, clinical Holy Ghost, broods forever among the bottles and the pickled foetuses. Memory has many waiting rooms. The train for the end of space has been signalled. Shall we run out among the cavernous sheds to meet the monster? The truth is that I am writing my first book. It is difficult, because everything must be included: a kind of spiritual itinerary which will establish the novel once and for all as a mode which is already past its senium. I tell myself continually that this must be something without beginning, something which will never end, but conclude only when it has reached its own genesis again: very well, a piece of literary perpetual motion, balanced on a hair, maintaining its precarious equilibrium between life and heraldry. With the pathos of Tarquin’s diary I insist that everything must be included. It is difficult. For instance, there is no category of irrelevances. Everything chosen is relevant. There are no canons—should be none. It is a hypothetical prophecy I dream about in this area of the night, alone, chewing paper, or anchoring my hands fast until morning. The difficulties are so enormous that I am tempted to begin at once: to try and escape from the chaste seminary of literature in which I have been imprisoned too long. Everything must be accepted, including Tarquin, and transmuted into the stuff of poem. There is your body, for instance, which rises up over the unwritten book like a wall of snow: the component parts of the day ending in an agony of rebirth—unless you have your period! There are acres of hysteria when we weep together weakly for no reason at all; there is that moist, friendly target under your dress, so mysterious in its simplicity that I cannot keep away from it, returning each time to the heart of the enigma as one might return to a gnomic verse and find a new meaning in the snow each time. All this is such ripe matter for the book that I do not know how to begin it. I am serious. It is such a book as Gregory could not even imagine, could not even begin to plan. The little green snowman sitting in his own shadow, keeping the crows off his work with wild sweeps of the pen. Gregory and the monstrous behaviour of literature which he used as a cloak for his terrors and realities. Strange chaotic chords which fill the diary. I have been reading it again, puzzling over it, and the realities which it deals with.…

  Here Gregory begins:

  That I too have nursed literary pretensions, I will not disguise from myself; that I have now finally rejected them is proved by the airy nonchalance of this journal, ha, ha. By its very fragmentary character, which preserves only the most casual excursions among my memories. Yes. At one time I had accumulated every principle, every canon of art, which is necessary for the manufacture of a literary gentleman. Now I not only despise the canon, but more, the creature himself: the gent. I am a saurian, I thank you, but not wasp-waisted as yet.

  The theme of my only book is one which even now occasionally entices me, insists on its formal excellence in a world of shapeless, inelegant mediocrities. I had planned this work as a profound synthesis of life—as an epitaph to the age. Its theme was revelry; its title—if I may make so bold with the sensibilities of the world—URINE. Simply the divinely organic word in gold Gill Sans on white paper. It was to be a small book, about the length of Remy de Gourmont’s A Night in the Luxembourg. Its simplicity would have delighted that delicate literary fencer. But let me explain.

  In Siberia, I have read, there is brewed a drink, whose name I do not recall, but whose potence is due to an infusion of muscarine—a poison obtained from the beautiful scarlet mushroom fly agaric. A regular toper’s tocsin. But more. The active principle in the brew, the muscarine, is eliminated by the kidneys, and passes into waste; into the fluid whose name (I am too fastidious to keep writing it down) forms the title of my opus. From this discovery dates a curious and delightful cult. Whenever there is feudal merrymaking abovestairs in the Siberian baronial halls, the servants avail themselves of the waste products of the festivity to do a bit of merrymaking on their own. You begin to see the satanic implications of the thing? Believe me, even now, Olympian as I am, I almost regret having rejected it. Its scope is perfect, leaving no room for those personal reflections of the aut
hor which provide the tedium of half the novels published. None of your vague moralizings or contemplative trances. Nothing but the bare anatomy of narrative—nude and pure as a winter landscape. Simply this:

  A party above- and belowstairs. Man proposing the toasts, and the servants furtively disposing of the humiliating evidences of its ultimate waste. The link connecting the two planes is, simply, waste. The golden gains for which the furtive valet spoors the chamber pots is profoundly symbolic. Its significance I shall not dwell upon. Here is your answer to every homely commonplace. A carnival party in action. Sluts and sluttishness abovestairs and below. On either plane the so-called action is simply erotic formula—love toasted by the master, the kitchenmaid toasted by his man. The same tocsin warms a multitude of cockles.

  Really, I tell myself, really some day soon I shall be enticed into beginning it. Until then, let me offer this title-page to your imaginations—what gonadal ecstasies shine beneath the simple symbol, what promises!

  URINE

  by Death Gregory, Esq.

  Here Gregory ends.

  It is so silent here at night. Above all, so silent, I lie awake: the essential I, that is, from whom I expect response to noise, to gesture. The other, the not-me, the figment, the embryo, the white something which lives behind my face in the mirror, is lulled underground, hibernating. The opulence of the snow steams down my eyeballs. I dare not sleep because I never dream about her. Instead I go to the window and communicate with the statues out there. The plaster outlaws on the grass. Their personalities are a match for me on such a December evening. Cadaverous the trees. A late train draws away across the indistinct haze of the moon, a bright nerve of colour. I am full of irrational ideas. I shall go up, perhaps, and speak to Tarquin. Disturb Lobo under the pretence of some important news. But having so lately left you it is as if I am in a suit of armour. Chain-mail reticence. I am lonely but I do not wish to see anyone. A poem, then? How about a fine choplicking poem about you, about the snow and the cattle? The pen is clogged with black ink. O eloquent, just and mighty death etc. I am too full of you. Let me digest. Let me digest. It is in such a mood that I slip down among the trees, across the derelict pond, to the grass-fringed garage, pausing for a second to count the lighted windows. Lobo still awake and Clare. All night now I will drive the black car under the moon in an agony of escape—I do not know from what. Escape, under a full moon, with the fields travelling away beside me, the silent farms and cottages, the facile ancient spires. If I could reach the sea I would be at rest. Its enormous breathing and sponging the dead body of the stones would quiet me. I would empty you into it without ceremony, the part of you which I carry about with me, living on me. I would dump you like a corpse and turn back to the city with refreshment. But there are only these metal roads along which we scream all night until the moon dissolves and the first stagnant eggs are poached on the snow. The streams are frozen over. I walk beside them on the grass, now stiff with rime, in a million priapic blades; I walk quickly, with a light step, as if to some important appointment. If I find a dead robin under the bushes I slip it in my pocket with a preoccupied air, as if I have no time to examine it. The cattle retreat from me with vague alarm, ducking their great heads and watching me out of the corner of their eyes. When I can stand it no longer the car draws out again, coughing and roaring down the roads in the ribboned snow. I have a sympathy with this tepid steel hull which I have learned to manage so deftly. I switch the lights on and off; I open the throttle with a sudden scream; I sing loudly out of the window. At nine Eustace Adams will be sitting with the poached sun balanced on his shaggy cranium. The children will be whispering and sniggering. Marney blowing his tulip and shuddering. Another day opening from the navel of my misery: from the moment when we fall, like figures made of feathers, in the snow. It is in this dawn, running down the long roads to the place I call home, that I begin again the enormous underwater gestures toward another night and you, spreading the gloom with slow vague hands towards you. Everything is plausible now because nothing is real. I am stretched like a violin string, to snapping point, until tonight.