The Black Book

by Lawrence Durrell

  The night is hot with dust. I can think of nothing to do, nowhere to go. After an eternal walk among the bone-bare streets I drop in to Chamberlain’s flat. The dogs jump up and lick my hands. She is alone, sitting in the armchair reading. Chamberlain has gone to some musical festival or other in the north, will not be back until tomorrow. “I had a feeling you’d come,” she says. We sit together for a long time in the musty little flat without speaking. Something is happening: out of the hot summer inaction, the lethargy, some decision is shaping itself in us. I try not to think. Presently she switches off the light and turns on the wireless. The room is ringing with a symphony. I sit there in the dark, trembling, expecting I do not know what. Pitch darkness and the strings slamming away at some obsolete figure. Then I put out my arms and touch her. She is standing in front of me in the dark, and as I touch her she topples softly to the armchair, breathing shakily. The skull and crossbones goes slowly down to half-mast. “You won’t say anything, will you?” she whispers. “For Godsake, you won’t, will you?” I promise her faithfully, trying the effects of a sardonic grin on the darkness. I am filled with a profound weariness and disgust. I go through it, yes, but with this gnawing misery of disgust. I don’t know why. The whole room smells of Chamberlain. I am stifled in his musk. His books, his bed, his dogs … Even when she is whimpering like a crazy woman in the darkness I am so agitated that I force my hand over her mouth. Her breasts are rocking with tears. It is a beautiful, satirical ballet we are acting together, like gorgeous toads; the motive is hate in some obscure way. Afterwards I shut my eyes and try to forget that she exists. I will not speak to her, and this puts her in a rage. I suppose it is comfort and tenderness she wants—well, I just haven’t any. Not a scrap. “You’ve made use of me,” she whispers angrily. “Go on then, why don’t you go away? You’ve got what you wanted. Go away, go away, leave me alone.” She begins battering me with the pads of her fists until I fetch her a sharp slap on the cheek. It is so ludicrous now that I want to giggle. Scuffling like this, tearing the bed to pieces. We lie for a long time in silence, side by side. The air is hot and charged with weariness. I am afflicted with the thought of Chamberlain—this place is so charged with his personality. Even she, whatever she does, seems to carry his stamp about on her, as paper will retain the mark of print long after it is stiffened into ash. The wireless is playing in the other room, the dogs are whimpering softly. They do not know what to make of this situation, any more than we do. If I put out my arms and comfort her it is Chamberlain I am petting; to fuck her is like an act of sodomy with him. Finally I can stand it no longer. I get up in the dark and dress quietly. She does not move. I go into the other room, switch on the light and turn off the wireless. Then hesitate. Shall I go in and say good-bye? I am so overwhelmed by tenderness that I turn and open the door. She is lying there quite still, staring with glassy eyes at the ceiling. I begin to apologize, sitting down beside her on the bed, but she does not answer. If I touch her face with my fingers she turns aside. “Go on,” she says at last in a low voice. “Clear out of here.”

  I sit there silently, staring at the floor. I do not want to leave her like this, without something, some act of friendship. We are both consumed in this slow permeating hate on the summer night. The cars whirl by on the asphalt outside, the first street-lamps are being lighted. “Listen to me,” I say. “Come out and have dinner with me. Let’s have a post-mortem on this. I’m not trying to hurt you, genuinely.” She turns her face to me, and the light strikes it sharply from the outer room; hard white electric glare melting over her features. Her eyes are sunk back into her forehead; her skin is puffy, her mouth drawn up in disdain. I see she does not believe me. But there is such misery written on her expressions that I repeat it over again, more gently. I feel sorry for her. Looking at her face like this is like looking at the moon through a telescope for the first time: the craters, the light playing on the continents, the dry oceans, the deserts. If it were not for my feeling of tenderness I would leave her and go home. So long as I need not touch her … She says: “I loathe you,” without any real conviction, but because she is still not sure whether to trust me or not. “There isn’t any need,” I tell her. “Dress now, and let’s have dinner.”

  We leave the flat together, the best of friends, and take a bus northward. Dinner together does a great deal towards putting us back into our customary places. Afterwards, strolling in the dark part together among the whores and the lanterns and the policemen, she says: “You know I really didn’t want to. That’s why I hated you, do you see? It was something I had to do; I’ve been feeling sort of dead these days, from the hips upward. Now I’m happy again. Thanks for not leaving me. I should have been miserable. Now I’m glad it was you and not someone else.”

  The balance restored, we take the bus home, hardly speaking, but comfortable together, as if we were old lovers. This is an item: latterly in a moment of weakness it was confided to Tarquin. His amazement and delight were huge. “Chamberlain!” he kept repeating, as if he personally had scored some immense triumph over him. “My God, and she being fucked all the time! Stuprum in oestris, ha ha, stuprum in oestris.” Stuffing chocolates into his mouth, and sniggering.

  All this is an evasion of the true disease, the disease which I try to drown in books, in bright pictures. All day long I pace the museums, inspecting the relics of our history, all carefully laid out and labelled in scholarly hands on postcards. At night I meditate on the quantities of pure gold which we house so carelessly in glass cases, unaware that this same putrid stuff is decaying in our arteries. Is it possible to keep the vitality of the centuries in a bottle, with a postcard on it to hint at an identity long since lost! My own history, my present, is confused by the death which I see gathered around me, here a jawbone, there a femur, here a wedding ring, there a pickaxe. I cannot live because the decomposing bodies of my ancestors dog me at every turn. They are not living in their myth, but dead, influencing my dying, not my life. That is why action is so erratic, so full of extremes, because the hypaethral universes which should live in us today are dead, and behind glass. Instead of nourishing us they are the umpires of our defeat, our decline and fall.

  The circuit is complete. We have put our myths in the cellar and must start building again with new implements, a new tongue.

  Morgan was telling me last night how he had squeezed out the flaccid womb with his fingers and buried the etceteras in the yard. Little Peter, the Tsarina’s daughter, had a head like a melon with the sick, fish-like eyelids of the microcephalous idiot. That was the regal idiot who was more of an exile than she knew: not only from Russia but from the world. She spent all day with a pencil writing on the walls, the table, the floor, compiling, as she said, a history of her race. And what she didn’t know about history wasn’t worth knowing. She could explain with complete lucidity the diseases of the Norman barons in the tapestry. The arrow had fallen in his eye, and he was tugging at it, as if it were embedded in a log of wood. Harold, she meant. The whole saga was written on the floor. She strikes me as a beautiful symbol of our tactics: a true twentieth-century practitioner of fable, scribbling on the table with the wrong end of a fountain pen, the wall, the floor. The Normans took their women gently, she told him, in spite of their armour, very gently and regally. They sniffed them quietly, like a dog examining fruit; then very gently they bit, until the juice spurted. That is what made him trap her against the wall, and poleaxe her as he did. The value of these experiences is that he regrets nothing. He himself is always part of the phenomena which puzzle him. “Can you imagine”, he is always asking, “me doing it? Can you imagine me believing a thing like that?”

  When I think of Tibet lying out there among the snow craters, the Golgotha of the dead races, Minoa, Japan opening like the tail of a peacock, or Ethiopia where the lanterns swing darkly over pools of blood—then I know that the myth which hangs so heavily on us is not dead. It is coming back slowly into focus, its power is being restored; wherever we move we
knock against its shapes—permeations and diffusions so vast that there is not a square foot of earth without its compulsive magic. Dig where you please along the craters of this battlefield, and your spade strikes gold. The ground is stuffed with it, loaded, grape-heavy, waiting for some cancerous spring to release all this shot and shivered rubbish to burst into crazy bloom around us. It runs in the water from the taps; it stiffens and breeds in the columns of water standing in trees; it permeates the granaries, runs in the seed of the cornfields. It is everywhere. A shovelful of bones will uncover temples to Quetzalcoatl and the horrors breeding in them; the bathtub from which Nezahualcoyotl, the poet, stared out across the infant world. The tombs in which even the mummies are dead, and wait stiffly for the resurrection. Caves with the rufous bison dancing on them; the Aurignacian dipping his finger in electricity and tracing the fugitive phenomena of the heraldic universe; the Pekin wonder, the age of lithos, lithos, lithos. Apes with extosis, and the forty-foot dinosaur with toothache. Patrol of the serious mammoth between the ice ages. Sabre-tooth changing his diet; crows’ feet left on pitchers. Minos. Byzantium flowering drably in Athos, practising a tradition so formal that fifty years killed its novelty and after twelve hundred you can still smell it, like sardines gone bad in a tin. Faith, you are always saying to me, ultimately one must have faith—but what degree of it, of shining will, is necessary in order to give these relics a decent burial? And anyway, when you say “Faith”, how do I know it is not one of the defunct idealisms under whose banner you are crusading? If I am foreign, it is because I am trying to accept the world, not deny its positivity; or build it up on the shaky armature of an ethic. I have quarrelled on this subject not only with you, but with Alan, with Peters, with Lobo. I shall continue to quarrel until my own position becomes, not hypothetical, but definite. Then vale: the days are too empty and the nights too long. How can I spend the rest of my time here once I am convinced that life is really imagination?

  At night I dream. It is a queer sensation. I am killing everything around me, the ages I have visited, the epochs I have endured, the pilgrimages I have been making—lonelier than any Jew could be, more lonely in race. I give up and let everything pass through me from the age of Bronze to the age of Demons. I ride the wave to the height of a million light-waves, skimming the vertebrae of the canon, articulating the skeletons of old systems to examine them, and destroying them again. This fiendish activity has left me alone in a treasure of images, so barren in their value, that just to write them makes me weary: the filter, the pentacle, the necromance. Everything. The mild faces of the astrologers charting the planets. The stark equation of Good and Evil worn like a halter. The tympana writhing with little horned fellows—myctyres, oxyrhincus, cirripedes, holothurians. In my imagination I follow the myth wherever it burst forth, in Tuscany, Sparta; where you can still see it living in the stiff green candles of the cypress, the contorted silver of Byzance. The robes crusted stiff with apostles, jewels, and fossils. Metamorphic beards sharded in limestone. It is a form of escape. I identify myself with anyone and anything who has escaped death for a vivid history. I tell myself that I am an alien, a foreigner, a pyknic from Mars. I say this, not because I am lonely but because I know it will come true sooner or later. I establish my ancestry as greedily as any suburban householder, grabbing at the lost men, the scourgers, the writers who ate whips and breathed scorpions. In the severest extremity too, even the brothers among the caves, the troglodytes, the men with the green-stick backbones, the murderous syllables that were not words but spoken actions. At such times I might be God for all the world does to me. If my head were larger I might adopt a skullcap like Gregory and a feeling for language equal to Tarquin’s feeling for piano method. (‘Touch?’ I say to him. ‘Yes. So delicate my dear Tarquin as almost to be rectal!’ I offer him brandy before he has time to flinch. Gregory.)

  Well, at night I decide it is no use. Escape is the endless theme of our contemplation, escape, escape. The city is beating around me like a foetus, chromium, steel, turbines, rubber, chimneys. The nights are dizzy with the fog, and the trains run amok. After twelve, there is an approximate stillness during which I begin my journeys in Time: the only anodyne, the only specific. I wander from house to ruined house of the Zodiac, or else narrow travel down to an abstraction which can gag the nerves and spread soma along the vertebrae. The world is speaking outside me, in the night, luminous with snouts of vomiting steel and chimneys. The new world, whose choice is strangling the fragile flame of the psyche. Chamberlain is asking for a mythology: no new mythologies, I thank you, we are insulated against the myth. The arteries are stiff with machinery, the spine is folding up like an umbrella. Across the fatal pantheon of the panic world, so irrationally mourned—not for its own sake, but because we have no pantheon of our own—slides the figure of Mickey Mouse, top-hatted maniac with the rubber pelvis, as blithe as the gonococcus in the veins of Dives. Because I tell myself I adore you, because when we fuck such vivid abstractions seem to jump from our bodies, I would like to offer you the traditional silver lining. But it is no good. When I hear the great chorus of the common people singing the nostalgic hopeless songs of the silver lining, I know it. It is no use. There is no way out. The inky slit between the legs of Miss Smith tells the same tale as you tell me, lying drawn down like a dog or leopard, vulnerable. Remote as the moon craters, the plumes of sunspot, I can only tell you that your fertility is going bad while you sit there, smoking, or reading the paper; it is falling away into the limbo of all this beautiful useless stuff which I am fighting, in order to try and break free from: in order to re-create and re-enter as a new gnosis.

  This is a reflection of that night when Tarquin was sitting at the keyboard like a ghoul; and the music—the music flowing like bile into your small alert ears—was so rancid with the truth that I was almost ashamed to look at you. I knew then that the whole thing was a fake—the legend that Tarquin is trying to create, the myth which Chamberlain hourly expects to speak from his stomach like a devil. The Gadarene descent is so violent that most of us are still unaware that we are moving, so rapt is the illusion of stillness. Where is this new myth coming from? Where is the great heroic figure on which it is to be shaped? The causeways are sinking deeper into the marsh, the future is growing a heavier and heavier burden; the past is cut off like a gangrenous limb. Where and what is the avatar—giant or dwarf? Where is the sterilized paragon of the new epoch—the clinic worker and Holy Ghost combined? Give it time, give it time, Chamberlain is shouting. A few more hospitals, less hours of work, more time for the pursuit of higher things. We must clear the ground first. (He is celebrating his own febrile gust in a whirl of wishbone fantasies.) The door of the Lock Hospital is green. The door of the antenatal surgery is white. Green again for the door of the maternity clinic. The foetus is disgorged like a turd from the infinitely distended red rubber neck of the cervix. Let me breathe, I am dying for air. The mask fits very close to the mouth. Filter my food through the placenta and watch my mother devour it afterwards. Chamberlain says we must clear the ground. Chamberlain says we must be more humane. We must love our own guts. Above all we must exterminate the politicians who poison humanity, whose souls are as the toes of old boots. Very just. We must make the way straight for the appearance of Mickey Mouse, who will arrive together with his invisible penis which he is never allowed to pull or twang. Chamberlain says, castrate the man who knows too much and is too little; do not mistake the cultured man for the man who is merely well-informed. Grab at the treasures of the passional life. Chamberlain says we must be born again. Tarquin says we are all born dead. Friends, Romans, Countrymen, there were physiologists who did not believe that the hymen existed; and here the fishermen are ashamed to run about naked though the fish wear no clothes! Nothing but fracture, schism, madness remains. Imprimis, Lawrence Lucifer, I per se I, standing on a high tower over many delicate counties, feeling the arteries in my limbs stiffen with weeping and lamentation. We, who are sitting outside in the dar
k, the great unorganized body of creators, know for certain that it is our own tenderness that is poisoning us. The ingrowing cyst of the love which we dare not offer to the world. That is the germ from which the new martyrdom springs: the stripping of the body, fibre by fibre, the branding and cleaning of the soul. I am remembering Hilda’s great rufous vulva like a crowded marketpiece; the great conduit choked with blood and paper and cigar ends which we must accept before we can go any farther. The great luminous symbol of the cunt, glowing softly in history like the Grail, the genesis of the living, the blithe plush cushion of life. Hilda lying there like Tibet, glowing in her convalescent secrecy among the snow-bound craters and jewels. (There are so few of us left with the murderous gift of love, so few.) And in that music which Tarquin made, as he said, for us, there was no love; there was no hate even—that symptom of love. Only the terrible enervation, the dead loss, the recoiling of the spirit before truth. I said nothing to you then, because I could remember nothing to say; if I had begun to speak I might never have ended. I thought of Morgan, down by the boilers, with the marks of the catheter on him; Madame About and the smell of her womb; Lobo weeping over the knife; Gregory standing before the death squad, facing the green bullets of words: I thought of us wandering that day by the river, among the elegiac kingcups, busy with dreams so trivial and bright that we had no idea of the doom settling from heaven on us like a floor of soot. Yes, when I said we became heraldic I meant a painted annihilation which you are still constantly mistaking for life. The country was alive in the sense that a playing card is alive. We are entering into a fiction, and all this is merely the paraphernalia of ballet, the insignia of clowns or swans strutting before some too stylized backcloth. That is why this writing had to become ballet and ape it: not the emotion of personalities, but a theatre of the idea. Ourselves, if we still had “selves”, as the projection of an idea tossed under a spotlight to spin and dither like Japanese waltzing mice …