The Black Book

by Lawrence Durrell

  Hush! We have fallen like statues on the grass, footsore, sundrunk, blind. Your face falls on my sleeve like a petal, the words empty themselves out of it into the silence. No continuity any more in the fable, but the warm naked statue under the dress. Heraldic? Time shut off, as sure as the invisible hand in the charnel house shuts off the breath of the dead. As the bee hangs, softly trembling above a flower, then lapses between the lips, a furry torpedo, so the fingers of their unique dream of logic follow the dumb curve of the statue downward, moist, to the final terminus of dream. Gently your body rides out and hangs above the lacquered river: an image not sponged out, or carried downstream among the Ophelias. They say we love only our own reflection in the faces of others, like cattle drinking from their own faces in a river. The heraldic Narcissus in your face has learned something at last. The true meaning of chastity is knowledge.

  The long planes of water run through us like seed or spears. Here is a beautiful pupa stiffened in the crook of an arm, overlooked by a cloud of amazed corn. The music? What has the music to do with this moment in an old world? Nothing. We are as if dead. Death, but there is something left behind, which blows in and out of the nostrils, washes from the throat in a soft wave of invisible ashes; there is something here which dims candles in churches, evanescent—suds or spores or smoke. You have three sets of lips superimposed on one another softly. Such a thing as a kiss would melt, falling from dimension to delicate dimension of sense; the bland face in its surprise could play no part in it. Queer to think that we, who are here on a playing card, fixed for ever in an exclusive memory of desire, now share the “necrobiosis” (Tarquin) of the age. It is so easy to burst through the temporal stuff and delude ourselves. You are warm and ripe under the garish dress. I have entered you quietly without fever. The rain rattles among the leaves like dust-shot; the unwinking river is flowing at your head. An instant’s vision of the underwater girl, thighs drawn back in an arch to admit rape, tangled in the flowing weeds and fucus. I am with you to the hilt now, Excalibur bedded in the warm stone flesh, pushing open new continents, new vistas of emotion. The inexorable reaping penis stiffened in a field of parched corn. The trees are dragging their heads, caught in the wind. The river is glacid. The kingcups shine and shine, and scent of the crushed marshflower enters us. You are weeping now with delight, and everything is washed away in this effortless, happy weeping. The river has sponged away the dust, the recriminations, the platitudes, the agonies. We are caught in a loom of feeling, woven to water, to rock, to plant by this action. The axle of the world wavers, trembles, and begins a faster, a more nervous rotation: we are spun round with rocks and hills and chimneys. It is all so effortless; a warm plural moan—and the long still entry, shut off, drifting to harbour, home. The womb emptied like a bucket of musk into silence. The river flows. The kingcups shine and shine.

  Now that our accidental separation is over I walk for whole days at a time in the aura of the life you carry under your dress. I rub my throat on it like a cat. I caress it. It is like a small baffling centre of blackness, of magic, among days and ways too easily understood. That is only one of the reasons I went across to the piano, snatched up the score of To England and slung it into the fire. Let us have done with all this once and for all. Let us stop all these corpses drinking their own pus like this. I am tired of Tarquin, sitting there in his rubber gloves, playing the wet modulations of the music. If this is an epitome of the English death, then I can make a better one: as an umpire, an onlooker, not a participant. If I find all this difficult to justify, it is because I am young, miserable, and looking for the way out. “My score,” moans Tarquin. “My beautiful score, you little vandal.” Whereupon there is nothing to do but sink into the armchair, and go into a sulk. I could kill you for the look of surprise on your face. No compris? No speek English, eh? Well, let us talk Lettish. “Fuck? What is fuck?” I remember you saying. Now you have the same puzzled look on your face. O.K. then, I deny it all, I revoke it, every ounce of it: the corn, the dust-shot, the river. You can take the music and stuff it up that windpipe anus of yours …

  But you have resumed flesh: into the black car we stumble like coal miners, hot and dazed. Absolute silence over the bridge, like a dialogue of the Holy Ghost. The night is thickening.

  Out there the familiar world running away towards that playground of concrete where the lights bloom. Hang on my weary arms. Faint line drawing of a face against the window. We are being drawn homeward on the long thread of the music into the meaningless circus peopled with fanatics, fairies, and clergymen. See! Trains running out into the night. The world is bleeding trains. Soft bars of maniac jazz pant from the doorways. The face of the people is a great grinning disc, revolving meaningless as a record. The domes stacked up over our heads. Laughing moustaches in bar-rooms sucking the stacked froth on the glasses. Did you see Anselm come out of the doors of the Lock Hospital, collar turned up, hat over his eyes, fugitive and disguised?

  The advertisements warm to life. A bulbed Scotchman drinking a stiff rain of bulbs and winking. Anselm has disappeared down the street, rapt in a player’s hide. In the bar they are lining up at the trough. Come, we will sit in a café over cups of coffee and eat each other alive. Your wrists incandesce when I touch them. Burn a strange white: molten filaments. Eyes mad and meaningless, turning here and there, burning in their little crucibles. Is there a temperature chart to record the rise and declension of this fever? In the hollow station Hilda is waiting, as in the tomb, for the door to be rolled back, and her man to step from the train. The engines whinny, and there is a fire between her legs now, for the signals glow. In a little while Morgan will gather up the pieces, steaming. In the meantime let us try to forget that the bacilli are creeping up on Camden Town. Red-eyed scavengers in millions. Here, devour my fingers one by one. The fingers of buttered toast taste like ashes. There is a drama being played out in our bodies, but what it is I cannot tell. A fury has distorted that white face of yours, which will end in tears. Take my handkerchief. When you weep your nose is drawn back to your skull like a bowstring. Tears burst from nothing. Your mouth hobbles with reproaches. Eyes like rock crystal. I do not have to strike you to make you gush. This is the beginning of my power. My knees are loosened and my ankles are bathed in your blood. Forgive me, I enjoyed it so much.

  The music has led us at last back to the very door of the hotel. Tarquin is sitting with the predatory hands, melting his piano down to treacle under the sign of the swinging spirochete. Let us open a nice fat vein and relax in a bathtub to watch the filaments of blood hang between our ribs. You can still hear the cars screaming along the black road outside? The ring of the postman in the empty house? The wires alive with news from all over the world? The housemaids bulging from blind windows? We follow them like dogs, Lobo and I. The salt bitches! At eleven they hang about the letter-boxes in slippers. Yes, as Tarquin says, the only letters they seem to post are french letters. On Saturdays you can see Perez standing up against the wall in the shadow like a dog. On Tuesdays you can see him on all fours, on a table among the rubber-gloved élite of the hospital, whining like a dog. All this is a little remote from your white sleeping face, whether I lie on your breast like a sleeping dragon, or whether I tongue you into surgical shudders, it does not matter much. Admit it. When you look into my eyes are you not appalled by the little meaning there is in them? The double-barrelled microscope offers nothing but a minute iris-image of yourself.

  “This is a new beginning,” says Tarquin. “Up to now I have been floundering, I did not know my direction. Now it is all quite different.”

  He has discovered that he is a homosexual. After examining his diary, having his horoscope cast, his palm read, his prostate fingered, and the bumps on his great bald cranium interpreted.

  “From now on it is going to be different. I am going to sleep with whom I want and not let my conditioned self interfere with me. I have finished with morals, don’t you think? I am that I am, and all that kind of stuff. One mu
st be bold enough to face up to oneself, eh? I am grateful for Science having made it possible. I shall let my female half come out in full view. Untrammelled, what do you say?”

  He has bought himself a few cheap powders and face creams, had a false tooth put in where the canine was missing, even wonders whether a wig … Well, we do not discourage him. There is something frightening in the idea of the skinny, epicene man parading about his room with a little rouge on the cheekbone, a touch of eye pencil, and a composition tooth. It is the beginning of the disintegration which he has been announcing for so long. The nymph is bursting from the wrappings. The dance is on! He has already learned a few conventional gestures of the hand, a turkey-like movement of the head and shoulders. He minces down to dinner very prettily these days.

  “I shall revise not only my moral but also my intellectual life. From now on I shall commune only with the great pure minds like Strachey, Murry, and Euclid.”

  But, as for physical communion, he can find nobody to help him out. Sunday morning is the only time off his Balham cinema attendant can get. He lies on his bed hopelessly and twiddles his thumbs dismally in the counterpane.

  “I say, why don’t you try it,” he asks, “why don’t you try being queer? How do you know you don’t need it? Don’t listen to that bloody little womanizer, Lobo. He’s just a damned fool. Look, do you think it would damage our relationship if I sucked you off?”

  The gramophone stops in amazement at this proposal. He sighs and feels his head, imagining a luxurious crop of hair that he could toss, my dear.

  “I had a lovely policeman on Thursday. Go on. Why don’t you let me? Shut your eyes, you won’t know anything’s happened. It’ll be like being confirmed. Go on. Christ! There’s nobody around here with any guts.”

  At other times he is lost in moods of contemplation which last for days. In this he is, as he says, gathering new phenomena. He has become a vast storehouse of scientific formulae, historical data, hieroglyphs, runes, dogma. His bookcase has become a library for the book which he says he may want to write one day.

  “One of these days I shall open a nice fat juicy vein, lie down in the bath, and begin the book. No. I don’t know what it’ll be about. I think a huge book of a new philosophy. My philosophy, what? No. I haven’t bothered to work it out. It’ll all come once I start. Sometimes I get all my ideas clear at night, and start to write them down, and then I think … O fuck, what’s the use of it all anyway? And I go to sleep. And next day I’ve got to get a shave, or my lover calls, or something. I never seem to have time.”

  He suffers, he says, from the expanding moment. It is always there, and always the same, and whatever he does he never has time to write anything but the vague notes in his diary.

  “Wednesday. Laid Dicky as usual. Three times a night is too much. I hold that Sainte-Beuve was blaspheming when he said: La prostate c’est une amygdale dont je ne vois pas la nécessité.”

  A part of his time, too, he spends in London these days, taking an interest in the literary life of his time, as exhibited by the goitred belles of Charlotte Street, and the flat-chested winnies of the Fitzroy Tavern. Occasionally he brings one of these conventionally epicene geniuses home with him. Toby is one of his catches. For us simple provincials he has a healthy disregard, being the only one among us to have heard of Hopkins. As a reviewer he is making a name for himself, having cultivated an analytical style tame enough to pass as brutal, and an infallible sense for literary dog-fighting. He stands in front of the fire like a young blowfly and rubs his hands together. There is some talk of a new paper. Yes, Tarquin must contribute; it is going to be devoted entirely to the study of genius in relation to the prostate. Claude will weigh in with a few of his camera studies of great big Nubians. Cyril will contribute line drawings if his hand can be persuaded to remain steady. Toby himself will attack everything in sight. And Tarquin will write an essay on the Flagellation Motif in Modern Poetry. “I’d get you some space,” says the hero, “if only your stuff weren’t so juvenile. The minute you strike a woman you start behaving like a chambermaid. You want more of the—the what is it?—what’s that book of Lewis? Yes, the hard male chastity of thought, or something. Emotion is vulgar, my dear.”

  Lobo is very impressed by these preparations. He sits attentively, his head on one side, and listens to Toby declaiming poetry. He has got the idea that the paper is going to be an obscene one: “Will it be full of hot things?” he inquires ingenuously. Tarquin is very annoyed with him.

  For a time it seems the expanding moment has become the expanding hour. Tarquin has bought a typewriter and has found something to do. Consequently he is happier. Also, as he says, it is nice meeting new people and so gradually having more and more people to have, my dear. His rouge smudges a bit, he is so engrossed in his new profession. He has bought a wig and an eyeglass but is too shy to wear them, although we do our best to encourage him. The wig he wears only while he is writing. It is a sort of symbol of his artistic personality, the new man who has emerged, “hard and clean as a statue”, from the old scarecrow of doubts and fears and remorses. He looks terrifyingly hideous, sitting at the machine, his pale face screwed into a knob under the too perfectly groomed wavy hair.

  The summer has gathered like an avalanche. I sit in the armchair watching Tarquin’s fingers at work, possessed by a dreadful agitation, why I do not know. In my mind I am composing my will and testament, arranging about the distribution of my few books and poems, planning the last vale in ink of a red colour. In the name of Beelzebub, Amen. Imprimis, I Lawrence Lucifer bequeath my soul to hell and my body to the earth among you all. Divide me and share me equally, but with as much wrangling as you can, I pray. And it will be the better if you go to law for me.… That is the dusty note of all testaments. Or perhaps: I Lawrence Lucifer, sick in soul but not in body, being in perfect health to wicked memory, do constitute and ordain this, my last will and testament irrevocable as long as the world shall be trampled on by villainy. The shadows are gathering in the inkwell, the dyes are rotating with the faces of my darlings, Lobo and Morgan, Anselm, Farnol, Goodwin, Peters, Scrase, Marney … I am not sure yet whether there is a postscript or a prelude lying in wait for me. I am uncertain what this colour holds, afraid of the faces that would appear if I started writing. Tarquin tells me to tell you that he is happy. Sexually mature, my dear, and fulfilled. How long it lasts I cannot predict. But we hope, dear reader, do we not?

  This said, he departed to his molten kingdom, the wind rose, the bottom of the chair fell out, the scrivener fell flat upon his nose. And here is the end of a harmless moral.

  There is a delicious impermanence about the days. We eat and sleep now carelessly, as if we were on a journey, expecting the ship to drop into port at any moment. The graph has curved up again into anguish which it would be easy to mistake for delight. The summer is retreating again and leaving us, stuck like monoliths, in the mud. This is the last fatal spasm before the body and mind are forced back into their autumn forms: the last haemorrhage. I can smell the chilly metaphysic of the winter approaching. The tidemarks of the old philosophies are our constant companions. But there is no nourishment to be found in them. “By space the universe encompasses and swallows me as an atom; by thought I encompass it.” In the asylums they are knitting, knitting, as if they too could smell the deciduous season. At the Blind School my body is laid out on the reading desk, while the blunt furtive fingers spell it out like ants. Pressing down the ball of the eye, learning the rib and femur, lifting and dropping the drugged penis. In the garret the douche bag hums and whirrs millions of potential personalities into an enamel slop pail. The eyes of the travellers are turned inward, becoming dimly aware of the visible chaos, the garbage heap of the soul. The problem of the personality grows like a stench in the air, infecting the town with man’s essential loneliness. Rib to rib, face to face with the absolute heraldic personality which wakes in each other’s eyes, even the lovers tremble, and become sick with horror and emptiness. Th
e air is misty with the breath of cattle. The wayside pulpits erupt in a fresh crop of maxims. Christ! can you not smell annihilation breathing in at the orifices of the cracked personality? Madness is in the air. “I fuck and fuck and fuck,” says Perez, with the net of arteries standing drunkenly in his spine, “and it’s no good. I feel I can’t do enough to them. Women! Piss on, shit on, draw blood.” His savagery infects the bony figure of our friend on the bed. I am afraid he will kill Hilda one of these nights, but the madness is contagious. We are being slowly suffocated now that the season is ending, being drawn down like decorous blinds in dead houses. In the hospitals they are working feverishly to keep the corpses fresh. Gay mummies stand in the living rooms of Americans. The white ambulance flutters from house to house, fuddled with blood. The clown draws back his trouser leg and lets fall a false cloud of raucous hair. Beds creak in a million rented rooms, loaded with immortality. Slowly the white principle of the body is melted down, softened into passivity. Chamberlain’s face is flushed with fever. He talks loudly and ever more loudly about being born again: so as not to hear the hearse draw up to the door, and the footsteps ascend the stairs. Morgan sponges the tidy limbs with cold water, shaves the slack jowls, trims down the black bush and fingernails. Where is the old woman who threw herself on the body and clutched the penis? Isis where are you? Had she never heard of the rigor? Things might have been most inconvenient. The tablet shall be in the best of taste, yes, with a quotation from the Holy Writ.…