It is above all the silence which is remarkable. The last train to the world’s end has gone. The last bus skirts Croydon or Penge—what matter? In the tram terminus the deserted trams lie, their advertisements quenched in the smoky gloom. Corralled like horses they await the milk-can morning. Lochia. Rags of blown paper writhe among the snow. The dirty skeletons of the day’s news. There is not even a prostitute to brighten the cavernous roads. Hilda has gone. A real old-timer, the only one. Married a commercial traveller to give the foetus a name and status. Status! Extraordinary how sensitive she can be. Alas, poor Hilda. A raven of excellent jest, Horatio. The way she breathed beer and onions on one: the great cheesy whiffs of damp that blew among her clothes! As for the wretched foetus, if it could have spoken through its gills it would probably have dealt as curtly with its ancestry as Gregory. “My parentage is Scotch, if you must know. Well, northern. I am not sure, really. I am sure of so little. At any rate my soul wears tartan!”
Hilda, at any rate, swaggering up and down the bed in her pink cotton kilt—Hilda, with the great hanging sporran of red hair over her pelvis! A raven of excellent jest! Perez would take handsful of this rufous pelt up in one hand and blow on it playfully. “What have we here, Hilda? Feathers, my love?” Hilda with the great voice like a bass viol rasping out command and insinuation. Her gas-lit bed is a parade ground, a barrack square; her voice is all history rolled and boomed and rapped out in one’s ears.
Like a gaunt rat she lived between the pub and the tobacconist. In the snow she scuttled across the road splay-footed, ducking under the lights of snoring cars, to buy herself a packet of fags. Hilda, the fag end of the sentimental dreams I cherish! The memory of her is a sort of scarification, like wounds the aborigines keep open on their bodies, rubbing irritants into them, reopening them until the resulting ornament is something to make the whole tribe envious.
Hilda a-decorating Newcastle. I imagine vaguely docks. Hilda among the lights and tar-and-feather sailor boys: the whole fairyland of breathing steeples. Forsaken, a gaunt rat by the water. All night the lick and splash of inky silk. Pillowed on the flood’s broad back, the elastic steeples inhale and exhale their panorama. Morning. The child miscarried, and shortly after the legendary husband died. Perez, her only real friend, has got a letter from her, incoherent, blaring, tear-stained. A poem on violet paper with an anchor for a watermark. We still read it aloud when we want a good hysterical laugh. Hilda, and her rich pithecanthropoid contortions! Here, under white ceiling, planning an equipment of words to snare these hours which are so obviously secure from the dragnets of language: lying here, what sort of elegy can one compose for Hilda, for Connie, for the whole rabble of cinematic faces whose history is the black book? Shall we people a catacomb with their portraits? The last tram has gone. The epoch from which this chronicle is made flesh, when I think of it, is an explosion. My lovely people like so many fragments of an explosion already in flight—Hilda among them, flying like a heavy bomb, northward to Newcastle. Madame About died in 1929 of uterine cancer. I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow. Tarquin died quietly while he was pouring himself a cup of tea; and showed up for dinner without a trace of his death on his face. Scrase, the golden-haired son of a cash register, himself hard and tight as a fistful of blond cash, was emptied out of the autumn sky to keep company with Icarus. In the snow there is a hail and farewell for Perez, for Lobo, for Chamberlain.…
Am I the angel with shining wrists scraping out their microscopic beauties in God’s ink? The shirted cherubin! See, I take a mouthful of ink and blow it out in many colours at the sky. From that fragile column fall one or two figures—these my shining darlings!
On that portion of time that is a Saturday printed on paper, over a quotation from Genesis, I go and inflict myself on the Chamberlains. In his flat one could sit for centuries without anyone knowing you were there.
Chamberlain himself sits in the armchair with a lighted pipe in his mouth and tunes up his little ukulele. Very softly and nostalgically he sings the following ditty, in one of its numberless homemade variations.
Dinah!
Has a lovely vagina!
Why, it’s like an ocean liner,
And my Dinah’s keen on me.
Vodeo do do etc.
Dinah is his wife. She says, “Stop that.” He stops it. She says, “Make up the fire.” He makes it up. She says, “Begin toasting the muffins or we’ll never have tea.” He rests the toasting fork negligently on the fender, and returns to his art. Very softly he begins, in a queer voice, full of pipe and nostalgia:
Dinah!
Can you show me something finer,
Than the portable vagina,
Which my Dinah keeps for me?
Vodeo do do etc.
A prediluvial world in which I can sit at rest and watch the whole pageant pass. The shadows in ink, the chart, the green diary, the mathematical cones of snow towering up to heaven, the desire, the kingcups opening between my toes. I wish the summer would come. The winter of my discontent prolongs itself into infinities of boredom, and this moment is the only radiant instant recorded on the spools of time. Here, in the pipe smoke and worn books with nothing but the great warm personality of the fire in the room. The muffins festering on the prongs, and the lionhearted coals. Outside on the steaming lawns St. Francis is picking the lice from the sparrows. It is all gone, I am saying to myself; it cannot last. She has gone away into the country of the frozen lakes and the stiffened hedges. Hilda wrote: “I don’t see what I done for God to treat me this way. Perhaps because I been a wicked woman. When the child was seven month on I felt in my bones that something might happen. Now God’s torn it properly for my sins.”
And the other letter which I carry about with me stiffly, like a withered limb: “It has been snowing and I am lonely. I wish I could cut you off and carry you with me wherever I go, inside me. I could be warm. I lie in bed and imagine it.”
Chamberlain reads the single page, puffing at his pipe. He gives it back without comment. Later on in the evening he says: “Other people’s love is a little disgusting, why is it?”
Or there is Tarquin, in the character of the great artist, tracing his history in literary cadences which are not bad, considering everything. Art is a disease, he is always saying. Massaging his shining cranium he will read strophe one of his great symphonic Bible to Peters. Thus:
“Where shall I trace those first parents of mine who generated all history by the first faulty contact of sperm and ovum? Where the faulty placenta, the first deviation of the foetus let down delicately on its cord to rock in the amniotic fluid? How shall they be celebrated? Where shall we see the first microscopic flaw in function which gave us the world of fire, of stone, of oxen, of numbers, of terrors—and of Gods? Perhaps I was swung between the loins of a troglodyte, natural as fruit though faulty, in the womb of blackness squeezed; my head out of shape, my cretin’s eyes pressed out under sweet sickly white lids like those of a fish; my limbs shoved out and shinbones bandied. I am sure my brain was jumbled in its sac, teased by bone pressure, until I laughed, lolling my head back, heavy, heavy, to protest that the sun was night-black …”
Ten years’ hard polishing have gone to shaping this opus. Polishing of prose, of spectacles, of the great bald cranium. He sits, like a polyp, and waits for applause. A little scared that there will be none. After all, ten years … Needless to say, this is the only piece of the symphonic Bible extant. He tries to pretend that there is more of it, but there is not. “It’s not in its final form,” he will say prettily if you ask. But one examination of his notebooks when he was out one day convinced me that this great artist never finishes anything. Even the diary has its off moments. On January the 3rd, 5th, and 19th occurs the sublime thought, “Nothing of note.”
Well, even I get hard up for material at times. That is what brings me to the snow. It has been snowing again. Again! It has never stopped. When I was small there was a fugitive summer at the seaside with Uncle Bob, and Wen
dy. Wendy now, the rugged little apple tree, with her soft bark, her solid knotted little stance, the heavy poised apples inside the green shirt. Wendy like a short sharp bite into a sour apple. Pippin-bright face and lips with the spittle shining on them forever. Holding her down in the corn while the yellow corn shuffled over her head and fell in her eyes. When I am lying touching the soft cornfield with my hand I am apt to wake up with an apple between my teeth. Wendy!
But this is a snowscape in indigo, nubian, cobalt, ash Wednesday, gothic, Fiume. I am walking in the dark streets with your letter in my hand. All that is coming from me is a sort of saga in answer to it. I can feel it coming from my body. I am so unhappy that I would like to spend my remaining money on a whore—if there were a whore to be found. Alas, poor Hilda.
It is in this area of the night that I come upon Morgan in the dark street. There is blood on his waistcoat, his hands. A strange agitation in his eyes. “There’s been an accident,” he says, licking the snow from his chin. “At the station.” Snow settling on his eyebrows, ears, lying in little drifts against his collar. “For Christsake.” He beckons me into a shop doorway. It happened tonight as he reached the station to meet Gwen. A sudden roar and a puff of black smoke. Terrified he was down there on the line, scavenging among the broken carriages before he knew what he was doing. “She’s O.K., sir. Missed the train. But what a mess, you never seen such a mess.” His hands are agitating themselves about a packet of cigarettes. One carriage copped it fair and square. Five people literally cut to bits. The doctor was sick. Arms, entrails, and etceteras lying about in the corridor. The doctor was young. His great body is restless, turning this way and that. He does not go back to the hotel at once. He wants to reminisce a bit about the war and the messes he has seen. “I’ve been close to it many times, sir. But never shook me like this.” He is quite voluble. “I thought of Gwen. By Jesus Christ, running down the stairs.” There is blood on his hands. He helped them gather up the loaves and fishes, the pieces of meat, and put them into sacks. We begin to walk as he tells me this. Then, walking down the huge corridors homeward he lifts his head into the white showers which fill the enigmatic space between us and the moon, and says, in an agony of surprise:
“Pieces of meat, sir. They was nothing but pieces of meat left. ’Ot and steaming, as true as I’m walking here.”
If it is not too late I shall go up to Tarquin’s room for a spell of mutual condolence and misery. Or he will be sitting there at his little piano curiously upright and military. It is as if the music were working him, not he the music. Like a man suffering an electric shock he sits there and watches his own big hands act. His technique is supposed to be flawless but satanically hard (vide Gregory). He loves the romantics, dwells on their long snotcurdling melodies with a resigned pathos hanging in his big eyes. Emotion only seems to reach him with difficulty, by osmosis. That is why his taste is so emotional. From the terrific shivers and orgasms of the music he draws some infinitely small private thrill. The rest pours over him. Wagner, now, that is his comfort. In flocks and shoals the heavy volumes pour down over him, filling the room; he sits under a waterfall of music, an icy douche. Like a flower his heavy head floats on the surface. “Wagner,” he says breathless, standing up with the music running off him, knuckling his eyes. “Wagner!” And smiling, “Wonderful,” panting hard from the coldness of the shower.
On such evenings I am too preoccupied to applaud the maestro, so, recalling that literature is my main interest, he will utter a few lines of the diary aloud, not looking at me, like an incantation. I will ask: “What is that?” I know quite well what it is. “Do you like it?” he will say archly. “Yes. What is it?”
Then we will have an interesting little session of reading aloud. A post-mortem on the psyche, that delicate butterfly which lives behind the pale walls of his abdomen. Or he will read me the famous last chapter of his immense (unwritten) work on Bach, which ends with the terrific epigram: “It remained for Bach to make mathematics humane!” He must really write the other chapters one day soon, he says meditatively, don’t I think? Of course I do. I am obliged to contribute some form of sociability to the session because, after all, it is his room. I cannot face my own. I cannot face the dead books, the stale sheets of poems, badly typed, the littered drawers. The bed, my six-foot tenement, the ceiling where the fantasies hang like bats, and squeak like a million slate pencils. If Lobo will come for a walk I am grateful, with a real humility, for his company. I do not speak much, but it is good to have a companion to walk beside.
On these cold nights Lobo is quite hysterical about Peru, waiting for him out there beyond the ocean. He tells me of the streets with the brothels, warmly lighted, the radios going, the guitars: the innumerable doors with their eye-vents hungry with black eyes. The dark men crossing the streets like ants to their assignations. “It is so easy,” he says mournfully, “so easy.” Compared with this arctic world he warms his hands at Lima.… Ah the Rimac twisting under the bridges, the shawls, the parrots (damn those parrots!), the family friends, so many bloodless hidalgos: the whole machine of traditional family life turning over, faultless. There was a girl friend of the family who used to go down to the seaside with him. Hot sand; his fingers easing out the creamy chords from the guitar, heavy as milk with romance. She was so ardent, so full of response that her kisses scorched a man—made him wriggle like sandworm. He stands under the loopy tower of the Christmas tree in a window to tell me this. Behind us the even more loopy tower of the Palace sweating a rank thaw from its million menstruous boils. His face is transfigured by the memory of her warmth. Tears in his eyes. “She was so hot,” he says suddenly, and shoots out his hand to my wrists, as if his own warmth of feeling could give me an idea of hers … “So hot.” I always remember him like that: standing in his immaculate clothes under a leaning tower, while behind the street swirled away its drifts of snow and driven lamps in foam and emptiness. We are deserted in an ocean of lights. His face is varnished under the brim of his hat, his eyes superb. “Come with me,” he says impulsively. “Let us run away into the sun, dear boy, into the sun, my friend.” He flings his head back as if searching for new planets, new constellations. Transfigured. His walk lilts. Then, the snow begins to fall, insidious white soot, and his elation is quenched. His face sours. The melody has gone out of his footsteps. Sleek, the astronomical manna powders our eyebrows. The wind has driven a nail through my temples. I am stifling. The slow, cumulative concussion of a world of frost crowding upon our world. We get into step homeward. Lights burn dimly behind shutters, without festivity. Wax lights, floating in bowls of childish water, guarding the dead faces of sleeping infants. The snow howls and flutes among the immense concrete corridors, smothering volition, desire. A train scouts the uttermost outposts of the stars, tracing an invisible ambit. Venus and Uranus up there, winking like lighthouses across the white acres. The spiral nebulae spreading wider and wider, like pellets from a celestial shotgun. The earth under us, creaking and ancient, like a rotten apple in the teeth of an urchin. Wendy! A rotten green apple, decaying to the brown of a pierced molar under the snow. Wendy, with the heavy apples in her green shirt, the firm warm bullets of breasts in a snowstorm of reason, killing me. You will understand, lying out there among the ironed-out lakes and fields, you will understand this panic of separation that is hardening my arteries with tears.
Invisible behind this aura, which strikes our heads like a clown’s baton of feathers, trying to fell us, the red giants and the white dwarfs are at play. Galactic imbecility. It is a season of the spirit in which the idea even loses its meaning, loses the bright distinguishing edge, and falls back into its original type, sensation. Words are no good. If you were to die, for instance, it would mean snow. Palpable, luminous, a shadow in ink. And your dying too fatal to reach me when the wind is up among the trees and there is laughter inside the dark houses. When the telephone rings I say to myself: death. But it means nothing. Like a hot iron passed over a tablecloth—the white fabric o
f your face ironed suddenly into insensibility. I choose this word rather than any other, because in the past it had the most power over me. Now the idea itself is starched and stiffened back into a nothing of white. The elastic snowscape and this atmosphere which we breathe into our lungs like a rusty saw, is all. Is all. Is all …
These abstractions crossing and crossing the drunken mind; and we on a planet, buzzing in space across the alphabetical stars: the creak of the earth curling away into the night like a quoit, like the creak of cable and spar on a ship; and only this mushy carpet on which to tread out our footsteps towards the final wedding with loneliness.
Does the endless iteration of loneliness tire you? It is the one constant in our lives. Even when the night now is spotted with shadows whose dapple seems to present a graph of this emotion. Oh, behind it, I know—somehow behind it in a dimension which I cannot fathom, life still tumbles across the scenes smelling of pageantry, heroic, wet white, blue goitres, clowns, sopranos, fireeaters.… But we shall never reach it.
This is what must be known as a state of war for Lobo. Woman has at last become the focus for the hate and despair which dribble away, day in, day out, like a clap: in the red postman morning, in the afternoons over muffins and postcards, in the dusk with the returning schoolchildren:—at night in his private lair with only the monotony of the gas fire to suggest continuity in a life which seems to have stopped like a cheap clock.
Hilda is my only anodyne against the white leprosy of the frost. Like the fool of the Tarot, the crazy joker of the pack, I wander through the events of the way. The imbecile hangs on the mercy of time like a lily on the river. I have no being, strictly, except when I enter that musty little room, frosted softly at night, where Hilda, the giant cauliflower of my dreams, moves about her tasks. Between the artist I, and Hilda the prostitute, there is an immediate correspondence. We recognize and respect each other, as pariahs do; we love each other, but we do not understand each other. Nevertheless we have made a truce. We share the scraps which life pushes up among the flotsam on that bare beach where those other beachcombers like ourselves raven. This room, this four-poster bed is the Sargasso Sea, with the tides hourly pushing up the empty cans of ideas, desire, hunger with sharp edges, hopes, destinies; crowns, trumpets, hymnals, all tangled in the weeds which grope about our bodies in the long nights. Nothing to suggest tomorrow as a plausible reality except a snatch of midnight song leaking from the bulging pinions of a shutter. Nothing to tell us we will rise again on the third day. That we will be made flesh.
The Black Book Page 9