The Black Book (24 page)

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. The 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.…

Turn your face away, I am tired of looking at it. Open your legs and let me be sucked up into the bloodstream, poured from the aorta in a simple beat. I am weary. Do not speak to me, because you can only utter imbecilities. Shut up and function, you stale fucking block. Would you be happy if I went for your carotid with a razor, and showed you the nest of tubes and bladders which live disgustingly in your white throat? “Your poetry”, she says in the letter, “is wild and unformed. Concentrate on style. And I don't understand
how you can both love and hate the same woman at the same time.
”

Let us admit it frankly, then the summer is dying. Come, we will go, hand in hand, down the lighted streets and turn in at the doors of the cinema. I will let you stand me a one and three-penny dope. What a fine plush womb we have escaped into together, you and I. Yes, we are in time for the mob foetus to be born. Fancy the amnion having lighted walls and mock-Egyptian frescoes on it. We can send out to the clitoris for an ice. What fine strong whiffs of peppermint. But it is the plush walls of the womb I can't get over. They are so cosy, so homy. A lovely dim wombland where we can cheer Conchita, the maneater, and sweat together. Jesus, how that girl eats her lovers! Let us pretend I am your lover, honey; come, masticate me downwards. Chew each morsel thirty-two times. Like a heavy cat she eats her heavies heavily. Suck my blood, dearies, it's only ink. Christ! If you stretch those tongueless kisses out any more I'll go mad.…

“Desire is the great problem,” says Chamberlain. “It is the real absolute you hear these casuists mistaking themselves about, eh? The focal point of living is sex.”

I can hear the ink running in the veins of Miss Smith. The batteries running down under the print dress.

The imitation croc-skin handbag is getting heavier and heavier to lift. The problem of desire eats into us like a chancre.

I am obsessed with the fear of snow. Waking in the morning, I run to the window, though I know it is ridiculous, to see if it has fallen during the night. The insane geometry of the statues seems to breathe premonitions of the winter. The ghost of the black car haunts me, riding against the moon. The blood on the floors of the slaughterhouses has not congealed as yet. The winter of our discontent is delayed; I am so beside myself with apathy and self-pity that when I stand here beside the bed, my delectable platypus, and watch your feet reaching the ceiling, I have the sensation of being a bomb: the explosion of a crammed world reaching down over you, to cover you in splinters, fragments, thorns, ashes, peelings. There is such an urgency in the air we breathe that I am on the point of exploding and littering the room with a heap of plaster images … solicitations, condolences, comforts, desires. I am participating in a disintegration of the personality, he tells me. The soul is entering a delirious syzygy. Hilda, like a great moon, and you whose cancerous wrists turn white against the streetlamps with a voltage as yet to be scientifically described.

Forgive my imprecision,
*
but it is as if I were packing to go on a long journey. Hilda lies open like a trunk in the corner of the room. There is room for everything, the gramophone, the records, the cottage piano, the microscope, the hair restorer, seven sets of clean clothes, manuscripts, a typewriter, a dictionary, a pair of jackboots, skates, an ice pick, a crash helmet, a sheath knife, a fishing rod, and the latest Book Society Choice. There is even room for a portable God, if you rope it up among the canvases. With these labels to assure me of my distinct and unique personality, I step down into the red tunnel, to begin the journey. For the purposes of simplification, let me be known as Jonah. With Hilda as the whale, there are implications in the Bible story which have been altogether ignored until now. Very well! With that knowing look I always imagine the spermatozoa to wear on their faces, I slip down towards the womb, carrying my belongings with me. It has all been arranged, I am going to be walled in. Womb, then, the tomb in one! Plush walls, naturally, and a well-furnished house. All the genteel possessions of the cultured owl. Sherry on tap, Picasso on the wall over the piano, and the rockiest Latins in the bookcase, glossy with age. Presently the embalmer will call. It will be Morgan, dressed up as Santa Claus; with the sharpest of his kitchen knives he will open the abdominal wall, and extract the guts, cure them, wrap them in brown-paper parcels, label them—and put them back. Meanwhile I shall be swilled out with grape juice. The brains will be hooked out through the nose and the cranium stuffed with chewing gum. Then I shall be ready to partake of eternity, sitting in a chair, with the good Ezra open on my lap. I will be just in the mood to lend a stiff ear to the felicities of Cavalcanti. Meanwhile from outside the work will go on. I will be completely bricked in.… But what am I talking about? I
am
bricked in! There, by the door, lie the ice pick, crash helmet, and skates. If I had known beforehand I should never have brought them with me. It is always the way. They are quite useless. Such a thing as a motor-bike is unheard of in this limited plush world. In it there is room for one thing only—
pure thought
! Even memory is getting a little dim. Soon there will be no past. Already I have forgotten Madame About's face: I know only that she carries (
carried
?) a cancer about with her like a hand grenade. Gracie, Chamberlain?… A strange procession of symbols across the consciousness. I do not know any more what they mean. It is useless to interrogate my jailors—the mummies which line the corridor, the stiffbearded winged gentleman who guards the bookcase. They live in the dimension of thought which is space. To speak they would have to inhabit time. Soon, I too will lose the power of time-speech. I can feel the heavy bulk of barbaric words in my brain coiling up and dying for want of use: the maggots of a large vocabulary eating each other for want of brain tissue to live on.