The Black Book (27 page)

I would give anything for it to have been as I wrote it. In spite of my defects the potential emotion is there, you must admit it. It should have been a mouth-to-mouth affair with an elegant epigraph and a cracker motto for an epilogue. Gracie died just at the time when I had no emotion whatsoever to spend on her: dingily, surrounded by nurses and heartless starched blouses, in a Bournemouth nursing home. What thoughts went through that silly little head at the last, one does not know. There was no movement in the room, except the prodigious movement of the sea. Mist, and the rain hissing along the concrete marine parade. In the silence you could hear the waves combing up across your thoughts, washing them, sucking back the impurities as they went back. Not even the fashionable numbness, I assure you. Lightheaded as a bell. The
rigor
had set the bashed face of my little tart in a Christ-like grin of pure imbecility. In my imagination I fell upon the corpse, and enacted a whole scene out of a Greek tragedy. There was nothing moving in the room except the gigantic sea licking the windowpanes, and my thoughts in their heroic mime. All my life I have done this—imagined my actions. I have never taken part in them. It is the catharsis of pure action which is so wounding an absolute to contemplate now. Invultuation! Daily I pierce the image of myself, and nothing happens.

(I am obsessed by the imaginary triviality of all this. Is this just another tic born of diffidence? Am I concerned, here, privately, standing on my own soul's ground, with the creation of literature?)

History is a study which has none of the venom of reality in it. Your protagonist, your chorus, your crowd: everything on the stage has no more personality than an old pack of cards. But autobiography is another matter altogether: if you are honest, a continual, a painful kinosis. If you are dishonest, an eternal fear.

I have been rereading these pages; a little weary and disgusted at the way I prey upon myself; a little horrified at the squeals which go up from them. Memories of De Profundis!

Since I returned from Bournemouth—alone, the very word is like a bell—I have had all my time to myself. I see no one, except occasionally Tarquin, occasionally Morgan. There is nothing to do, nothing to be done. Yet, this is a lie, because this time has been the most critical in my life; the most vital, as far as the making of decisions goes, I have ever known. I have been glad to be alone, to revise the vast catalogue of thoughts and actions which have been born in me. My body is here, like a vast unused library in which no one has interested himself for years. Aware all at once of the battered volumes around me, I have been indexing them, estimating the mental and spiritual calibre of their original collector. It is fearsome work. Here an Ella Wheeler Wilcox, there a Freud … further on an Old Moore's Almanac, a Baedeker. But where is the Black Book—that repository for all the uncut gems of creation? I grope along the shelves, blind.

This is my forty days in the wilderness. There has been time to revise, to annotate, to gloze.
Fiat voluntas.
On the manuscript I shall draw a Phoenix, with its feathers in flames; a raving piece of heraldry to insist on the eternal desire in me—to confess and be assoiled. Meanwhile, I wander along in my private wilderness, broken-mouthed with thirst, humming the Te Deum, envying everyone. Yes, the butcher, the baker, the nun and the candlestick maker. The porter who brings me my meals, and stands like a carving with the glass of beer held in his paw. Even Tarquin whose struggle is not with the Holy Ghost but with his own weakness.

Gracie's father, now. There is a subject for envy. My wire brought him down the following day. Small, muscular, with one of those fine ascetic heads you see in Renaissance frescoes: a helmet of small fine bones, pressing down in planes to the temples. His words were gnarled and twisted, it seemed, by the shelf of pearly false teeth which they had to pass. His first hoarse query as he stepped from the train was, “Is she still fresh?” Walking towards the waiting taxi I explained that she was. Silent he walked beside me, with a queer jauntiness, as if propelled not so much by the movement of his muscles as by an explosion in each foot as it touched the ground. In the taxi he undid his soiled grey muffler, and produced an old tin case with cigarettes in it. We smoked in silence. “I didn't bring her ma,” he said at last; “she's queer, you know. Yers, a little queer.”

In the silence of authority we were shown into a little room, where she lay, amused, like some obscene flower dragged out of the underworld.

Her father advanced towards her with a series of noiseless explosions. “I must say,” he observed, “they made a fine job of it. A fine job.” Tap, tap, tap, went his fingernails against the wood. Yes there was no doubt. It was a first-rate job. As if contemplating some definite gesture he turned to me, then stopped and resumed his nonchalant assessment of things. I was somehow afraid he was going to shake hands with me over the body, and compliment me on the fine job I'd made of the whole business. He stared down with his watchful, slightly bloodshot eyes.

But it was when he lifted the sheets, and started to examine her more closely, that a spear entered my left side; there was a quality of curiosity in his pose whose meaning I could not guess, but which made me somehow curious of myself as an interloper, almost as if I were intruding in the unpleasant poignance of a private domestic scene. I turned to the window and lit a cigarette with profound embarrassment. It was all in extremely bad taste—Gracie giving up her ghost so easily, lying there so wan; and this little nut of a man running his blunt workman's thumbs over her body, as if he were touching marble, considering its smoothness. No movement in the room, but the sea. I was stifling slowly in my own cigarette smoke when he turned and said, with decision, “Well, that's that.”

If there were any private thoughts locked away in that bony skull of his, I did not get a glimpse of them. For the night he had taken lodgings, he said, in the commercial hotel—the Caledonia stern and wild—which was at the end of the road. Turned on his heel after a civil greeting, and left me staring after him, down the long rain-shining streets. I walked up and down the dark parade until nearly morning, trying to sort out those fragmentary impulses, emotions, which weighed me down, and put a fog across reality. Nothing echoing in my mind but the vast reports of the waves against the concrete, the drizzle of rain on my mouth. And her father? More than ever an enigma: self-contained, airtight, damp-proof; locked in silence under the shabby overcoat and soiled muffler; behind the fine plate of bones in his skull. One could beat against his personality again and again, with a sea of queries, advances, intimacies, and the stability of his position was unaltered. Over and above all this, like the very lunge and swing of the dark sea, there was the sad recognition of my failure to mix the real and the unreal, my failure to make imagination life. It was only then that I could have wept: for myself.

Turning away from the graveside, beginning to walk with that explosive action of his, he said, without any sort of emotion, “Well, what's done's done.” But the sigh he fetched from his very lungs expressed something more than he would ever be able to say.

We said good-bye in the sodden square of the town, somehow reluctant to part from each other. He had a train to catch, he said. There was no time even for a drink at the Plough. I think he was afraid of any sort of intimacy. So off he went in his wet muffler towards the station, like a little dancing master.

Retrospect! Retrospect! What a hive of memories I have become. There has been time, in this wilderness, to account for everything: to excuse my shortcomings, to re-enact my failures, to adjust my differences with destiny. Above all to make the great decision. To be or not to be has been the question for too long. I am determined to answer it in the negative.

Walking the streets of Bournemouth I came upon many faces I should know, many places I should remember, many mouldering old houses which my essence visited in the third cosmos. (Metaphysics is the last refuge of the actor.) Trees, shapes, smoke from a cigarette in the dark—strata by strata my memories were laid out across my dead body; wheeling and skirling with anguish like gulls across the nerves. Love me, I whispered, love me and take me from myself. I do not want the gift of freedom—it has become a prison. At night the sea beat like a hammer against my temples. The lights of cars wheeled across the bedroom walls. I had become an inhabitant of a private pandemonium.

On the hill, its garden hidden in spray, was the house in which I lived when I was a child. My mother lives there for eternity among the chipped statuary, the unweeded walks. “Herbert, will you ever sin?” The white round face of the woman above me, and my own voice, “Never, Mother.” She used to say: “We are such friends, aren't we, my darling? I know every little thought that passes in your head.” From that remark my life begins, a solid unbroken line of dependencies—at home, at school, at the university. Behind the bars, serenely unaware of the flood outside.

Regard me, I used to say to the world, I am the average Englishman. I have never left school and I am proud of it. I carry my virginity and my self-satisfaction on a string round my neck.

Shall I outline it all with introspective precision? I am not a Powys. Shall I explore my garish literary life? Why, I have written disparagingly of Shakespeare in an advanced review—and then returned home to my guardian virgin as the snow and dressed in horn-rimmed spectacles. I have critically disposed of Pascal, Molinos, and Ronsard standing at the bar of a Red Lion Square pub. Once I even lectured on the sexual aberrations of Lawrence to an audience of vipers as learned as myself. In the final audit how heavily will these weigh against me? “You were born to spit on the delicate things,” said Chamberlain once in a fit of fury. And in my little cackle of laughter he added, “Because you have learned how to spit on yourself.”

Alas! in this personal limbo from which I letter out my fragmentary diary, I see that this observation is very just. It is not the world that is poisoned so much as the people in it. It is my world dying because I am dying—of an intolerable brain poisoning. Pity me, etc.

These nights are very long. I sit here in the laboratory which I have made of my ego, and listen for the familiar sounds, once foreign, now local. At two the boilers are stoked. I brew myself tea, light a cigarette, yawn, take a step, remember an anecdote of Lobo's, and laugh. I am always aware of myself as an actor on an empty stage, his only audience the critical self. I dramatize my least action, make it studied, calm. I have the eternal illusion of being watched; of being visible to an audience before whom I must be careful not to break down. The late trains drizzle outwards across the snowy landscapes, across the hills, the valleys, the dark blue bodies of the counties. I am alone, but no more alone in the spirit than I have ever been. Now that the moon has gone I am able to stand at the window, staring at a star of the third magnitude. I am acting my head off. I chuckle and scratch my head. I lift my cup to my mouth with the air of a dowager. Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime. In the corner lies the long svelte horn-gramophone. I select the most moving records of “the master's” Op. 61 and play them one after another, as fast as the turntable can rotate. The violin scamps like a cat, poops and squalls and gutters. It is a capital joke. “A violin in an empty house, remote in its meditations as a ghost.” That's what I wrote once. Now it micturates like a wombat, hurtles and squeals, winces and foams. I lie here in the chair, chuckling to myself, and let the discords play upon me like jets from a hose. I revel in the anguish of that quivering fiddle. Metaphorically I spit on Beethoven. Mentally, physically, from my very soul, I spit on his misery. I would like to take up those shelves of folio music, throw them in the grate and piss on them.… When it becomes intolerable I go and look at myself in the mirror. Standing there in my peacock dressing gown, with one of the smashed records in my hand. The revulsion sobers me. I light a cigarette, shrug my shoulders in infinite contempt, and sit down at my desk, to add the paragraph you have just read.

This morning I receive a visit from Perez. He is a little angry with himself for neglecting me. He says he is only just back from the country, which is a lie because he has been back a week. “A woman?” I say to him archly. It is almost our only subject of conversation. He diverts the conversation. Lobo has the flu. He lies in bed all day, like a little black imp, strumming on his big inlaid guitar. Perez is wondering how to condole with me in my sorrow. He is a little disgusted at having to show any sympathy over the loss of someone like Gracie. A little contemptuous, too, of me for getting entangled with such a one. I can see it all written in his eyes. At last he blurts out: “I say, Gregory, I'm sorry to hear …”

“Yes?” I say, demanding my pound of flesh.

“Grade … your wife … I've just heard,” he mumbles shamefacedly. “Very sorry for you.”

When he goes, I return to the piano, pour out a glass of sherry, and sit down to Mozart. My fingers ease the chords from the white soft jacks, like heavy bunches of grapes. The music wraps me in its ectoplasm of emotion. Really, if you forgive the precious litotes, I am an executant of no mean calibre. In my imagination the tears are running down my face, on to my fingers, on to the lush ivories. My bowels are running out of me like tap water. I am become a figure of sodden cardboard. The notes rap holes in me, smothering me in bullets of sound. Mozart claws my liver and nibbles my tongue like a woodpecker.…

It is the same when I sit down to write. The submarine profundities of my imagination are suggested by the florid sweep of my pen.

My intention is always to become the very paper on which I write. Alas! the rhythm is sadly uneven. My brain, like an engine, gives the first tug, which communicates a series of bangs to the carriages. Bang, bang, bang—all the way down the line. My teeth chatter, and my vertebrae clang together. Very slowly and stiffly we are off, puff, puff, puff. The nib squeaks at every level crossing. I am in mortal terror of a collision. All the signals are dead against me.… Pity me, etc.