Morning at last, like a fever. The ash trays are full, the lounges are being swept, the boots retrieved by their owners. The fires are lit. Tarquin is walking down avenues of cinders with bare feet. I have no patience with the diary today.
At the bare deal desk I shield myself behind my fists and pore on the green writing savagely. The children stretch away like a sea, into the womb and beyond it, like a huge garden planted with snotty-nosed turnips and bulging swedes. Gregory Stylites, help me through another submarine day or I shall die.
Here begins Gregory:
In the dog days there were long effortless phases, spent exclusively together, which make the core of most of my memories. Not factual—for what ever happens? But a kind of aromatic stretch, forgotten between the leaves of a book for centuries: the frail delicate veins of our adventure. The hotel was empty; everyone seemed to have gone away or died. It was this death of the outer world that gave our exclusiveness its flavour. Imagine it. Whole days in which no one came to see us; there was not even a ring at the front door. We rose late and lounged all day, half dressed, playing fantastic games with each other. Hide and seek, for example. Upon my honour, hide and seek in the empty corridors of the hotel. Or bandits and police. Or Ludo, a game which I have always detested.
Or, when I was exhausted by crawling on the floor lowing like a bull, while Gracie matadored me with a red dressing gown, I inflicted my literary garbage on her. My novel, my letters from the infernal regions, even the only poem I ever wrote, which begins: “The clouds are my enormous limbs, whose convalescent shape, Dawdles on beds of down, and yet, Invite a further rape.” And so on. This lame practice for a literary career, which if I had only pursued it, would have ended my life in the Abbey—or at least in all the popular anthologies. Then there was my diary, the little black book in which the green ink smokes like many jewels. Gracie is the only one who has ever had my diary read to her; she is the only one who has dared to signal this minor eclipse with a long solemn face and a look of utter puzzlement. Yet, sitting there in the armchair, she never lifted a finger, but listened with heartbreaking raptness to every word. Every word. Greater love hath no man etc.
“Look,” I say to her. “Why listen to all this stuff? Tell me about yourself. Let me immortalize you with polysyllabic taste.”
“No, honest, Gregory, I like it. What I understand. It’s not everything, but Rachel …”
“Ah, you like Rachel?”
“Was you married to her?”
“No.”
“Was she … a street woman, a bad one?”
“No. She was an art student.”
“Did she let you … I mean … she was a girl of goofambly wasn’t she?”
“Her father was a soap king.”
“Coo.”
“Yes.”
“You was married but not churched, eh?”
“Yes.”
“The other’s not interesting. Read me some more about Rachel. What kind of clothes did she wear?”
“Usually none.”
“Haven’t you no description of her clothes?”
“None. Look, Gracie, why listen to all this? Tell me your life and I’ll write it down in a story. That’s more interesting.”
“Ooer, my life? What are you talking about? I’m just ordinary. Nothing from the common, I am.”
“That’s why.”
“I’m a bad girl.”
“Good.”
“But I never took money for it unless I was stony broke, honest to God, cross my heart, may I die if I’m lying.”
“I’ll make a note of it.”
There was Bob. On these mild mornings, when the clouds are like enormous limbs sprawled in weariness after an orgasm (acknowledgements), we talk about Bob. Bob is a source of great misery to Grace because he done a flit on her. He was a fine upstanding boy, of a good family. His father owned a radio shop. He took a fancy to her, and she took a fancy to him. They fell. Marriage was on the cards, because in those days, and in spite of her father, Grace was a virgin, entirely educated by the cinema in which orange blossom is always depicted as the right true end of lerve. O.K. he had said, looking as much like a conquering gunman as possible. O.K. But there were conditions attached to this business which she would have to fulfil first.
He was poor, and she was honest. O.K. Then why wait for the mere cash to arrive? Where was the point of it all? Bob used to say, with fine buckishness, snorting cigarette smoke and lolling on his sumptuous elastic calves: “Listen, baby, you leave it to me, see?” And Grace would numbly leave him quite alone and puissant in the territory of ideas. “I know my stuff, baby.” He would continue, “’Ave no fear. It’ll all be swell. You see. Yes SIR. Oil say.” Rolling his small blue beads. “Oil say.” He was a patron of the Albany when he had the money; a strong supporter of that Swedish maneater, Greta Garbo; a banjo player of no mean calibre. Above all, a good businessman. Yes SIR. Oil say. Saturday nights he would feel her furtively in one of the various cinemas. And one reverberating Sunday afternoon he deflowered her clumsily on the golf links where they were “courting”. O.K. Or rather, not quite so O.K. Gracie wept a little bit, partly from surprise, but mostly from pain. But Bob soon soothed her with a fine line of talk, pleasantly salted with gunman slang. Was he a cheap skate, he asked indignantly? Was he a hoodlum? No. Then why all the fuss? “When I says something is O.K., kiddo, it’s O.K.,” he intoned.
The following Saturday afternoon found her sitting numbly in the nearest free clinic for the teaching of contraception. Bob was a clever lad. A wise guy, see? On her finger she wore, with a frightened air, a five-bob wedding ring. A hefty circle of brass. She registered herself as Mrs. Smith, and was initiated into the priapic mysteries. Well, Bob had solved the one pressing problem, viz. How to keep her wind and water tight. His tenancy began, with an option on a ninety-year lease later on.
The option, however, was never claimed. Their affair dragged on for a year or so, through various vicissitudes. Then Bob was offered a traveller’s job in Manchester, which he took in his stride. Even then there was the vague understanding that if it turned out all right etc. etc. and prospects were good etc. etc. they would marry. Not so. A few months later she got a letter full of interesting Edwardian phrases (Bob was a user of Penfold’s Manual, The Gentleman’s Letter-Writer, sixpence at any bookstall), calling the whole deal off. Young people, the letter began, often do things on impulse, recking not the cost. And a lot more stuff about taking the gentleman’s way out, and quotes from Revelation. The letter she still keeps in her handbag, along, with less interesting mementos—sticky toffees, film photos, lipstick, and a cheap packet of condoms. Reading it aloud to me, she moons softly and sadly on the fate Bob left her to. In an elf’s voice she tells me how upright and honest he was in all money matters. What a card he was, always in demand at parties. Of course the letter, for all its tragic news (perhaps because of it), she considers a masterpiece of its kind.
But it is no use trying to solder this old stuff to the present, to make it topical. In these dog days nothing is (was?) topical except the fantasy which encircled us. The enormous nubians in the sky and Gracie airing her repertoire of games for boring afternoons. Let me drop the historic present. It is a device that looks a little shallow after a time: as the conjurer I am self-conscious, yes, there is the aorist. It was up my sleeve all the time.
Gracie was my fate: IS dead. A sort of mirage, this word I cannot grasp. A tinsel moon on a garish back cloth. A circle of blackness which blots out all new horizons. A rent in the clean daylight of her yellow, peaky, little face. O.K. But if one were to start a quibble about temporal realities would the present tense justify itself? Is she behind me sitting in the chair, coughing over the latest Film Paper? I do not turn round, because I know at once that she is. In bed, worn out, languorous, aching with pleasure between starched sheets? Yes. But only when I am on that borderline of the realities when every abstraction has solidity, weight, volume. I can lift desire in my fingers like t
his small bud of a breast. I can see it, feel it. It enters my experience like a calamity.
Gracie and her merry tricks! Pranks for wet afternoons! The time we spend sticking pins in the fuses and putting the hotel in darkness. The solemn, wholesome enjoyment we derive from that humourless black telephone. Watch her sitting there naked, playing one of Bob’s hairy pranks on the local butchers. This is early morning, mind you.
“Is that ’Iggs the butcher?” she says, very ladylike in a voice like a pat of butter.
“Yus, madam, Hit his.” The porky assistant wiping his hands on his apron. Then Gracie, in a frightfully subtly accented voice:
“Do you keep dripping?”
“Dripping, ma’m? (say, Fred, do we keep drippin?). Yes, madam, we do.”
And Gracie slowly melting down into laughter, gripping her fist hard between her knees, the laughter gushing up in the wonky lung: “Then what are you going to do about it?” The click of the receiver and the endless soft whewing and crowing which was her laughter filling the little room. What a rich jest!
Against this medallion I offer you another, later, more puzzling picture; a Happy Snap taken when reality had at last closed down on us—myself in a black skullcap phoning for a five-by-two cedar-wood coffin. Ci-gît. Ci-gît.
To your romantic, whose mind is clouded over by his false values, the final tragedy of love is death. Not so. I protest immediately against this idea. Life is the one force which has power to suck tragedy from us—and however untimely the end, we may be sure it is not too soon. Life has always finished with us when we forsake it; death is merely the aesthetic convention which the sardonic playwright bows to. The final touch which shapes the piece—too absolute and perfect to have any relation to the play itself. What book is different for the word Finis on its last page? De Gourmont is right when he says that he who weeps for Ophelia has no aesthetic sense. True. What tears one has are stifled in the spectacle of her madness. Life had finished with her, poor wretch, before death dragged her downstream, a sopping lily among lilies. I leave Rimbaud to follow her downstream to the shallows, the white wretch among the lilies, with the white lily-face turned up pointless under a thatch of flowing hair. The imagination is shocked numb by this vision of her floating away. Analyse it, and you will see this is still the reflection of her madness.
Words. Words. So many words. All this, of course, to impress upon you the essential appropriateness of Gracie’s death; the absolute Tightness of her lying there, in strained white silence, covered by flowers. On her face, as I watched her amiable father screw her down, there seemed to be a strain; as if she were speechlessly interrogating the silence which had become her master. A pretty simile for a dead prostitute? Hush! We shall have James Douglas on us with his stainless battle-axe.
Death caught us on the upswing of events, before life had really staled. A good shove … a scuffle … an oath in the darkness … and Presto! the lantern breaks to pieces on the floor and goes out. I offer you a cedarwood Gracie, with lovely long brass handles, softly glowing, and—Ophelia did not do half as well—with knobs on. This is the real epitaph which she composed in one of those last drowsy moments of lucidity.
“Good night, bitch,” one had said heartily. “Sleep now and get up well tomorrow. I’m sick of your yellow face. Give us a sign of life.”
The light was switched off. She lay there in darkness picking the sheet quietly in long bluish fingers. Knowing her as you do, you do not expect any answer to my endearment as she lies there, do you? The light was off; otherwise the Gracie I have created would lie there and stare at me for an age, expressionless, saying nothing. Perhaps, standing there in the dark (literature! literature!) I write myself down as being aware of the impersonal stare of her eyes. Truth is more exciting than fiction. I will tell you the truth.
For a moment no sound. Weary, I stand at the door, about to leave the room. I expect nothing more. Instead I make up a dozen or so hypothetical scenes in which she realizes how soft and quivering the essential me is, inside the carapace of brutality. She says, for instance, “Come here, Gregory,” and rewards my obedience with a long kiss there in the darkness. Or she says, “Gregory, don’t leave me, I’m scared.” Dear me. This is becoming cinema.
Then, as I stand there, she gives a single husky chuckle and says, “And the same to you with knobs on!”
It is an immense comfort to imagine that in those last few days Gracie did find a clue to my conduct. I would like to protest this point with vehemence. If this were fiction I should describe how I stood there, my ankles turned to water with relief, seeing that at last she understood me, had found the perfect formula of reciprocation.
Perhaps, after all, truth is less exciting than fiction. This is the high spot of the tale, the crux of our relationship. “With knobs on” is the summing up of all our differences, the epitome of our love. The critical point, as when, in any Russian novel, the Christian protagonist, having speculated for pages on the properties of murder, actually does poleaxe his grandmother. Unfortunately I must renounce all those rotund literary effects which would give this nail paring the place it deserves in my history. Take it for what it is. I can only protest feebly, it is the truth. The one true touch of passionate banter which had been missing from the beginning. Perhaps, after all, it is I who am the romantic. Gracie’s epitaph and swan song, in one phrase, was this: WITH KNOBS ON.
In the West Norwood Cemetery where she lies, you will see nothing but the bare inscription above her. They would not let me write on the tombstone: Here lies Gracie, who died in 1927. WITH KNOBS ON.
With the final accurate banality of his class her father ordered the mason to engrave on the expensive marble the immortal jest: GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.
We sent her down with an armful of magnificent flowers, as sumptuous as any cinema star’s, and this vain promise of memory. What that frail decomposing husk demands from this, my life, is a pound of living flesh. I am paying here, however shyly, in green blood. Of the humorous eternity which stole Gracie to add to its collection let me remind myself walking among the bazaar of white masonry, the many tombs, to the one hideous tomb, garish with cherubs and scrolls: I say over and over again to myself: “The real epitaph is with knobs on.”
But I have anticipated cruelly. One of the unfortunate things about a personal style, a personal journal, is that one assumes one’s reader’s knowledge of all the facts. A journal, then, if written for oneself, would be all but meaningless to the world; for one turns, not to the spadework, the narrative, but to the most interesting points in it. Look at me. I am in such a hurry to finish the job that I blurt out the end before the beginning. It is going through me at such a pace that I cannot distinguish the various flavours of incident, in their chronological order. (I am a liar. It is artifice which dictates this form to me.) Or the word death, like the word finis. If you began Finis. “She died that I may live etc.” It makes no difference. It makes no difference. If the title-page were Finis she would still exist, amorphous, evocative, musky—a white kelpie luminous on the last page.
(Think of Ion lapsing off the white rock into the sea, which gurgles over her like a solid blue myth. A sheath of water over the hips, the pectorals, the little plantagenet chin. Down, down, turning and bowing among the white chalk of defunct squids and the pedestrian deep water. Ion is death translated in sudden luminous terms by a live myth. Ion is dead, long live the myth. Write a large Finis with the keel of a liner. Ion lives, I say triumphantly, she lives. Here I can put my hands on the warm basalt and feel her breathing grass into my mouth. I am losing the thread.…)
The Black Book Page 7