The Black Book (31 page)

In these damp winter days the first germ is sown in me, as we lie against the wall, shivering like addicts; the germ I shall take away southward with me; which in this act of tuism I am learning to control. The struggle has been medieval almost. Long winter nights, lying there while the sea drove up night-long over one's dreams, washing, forever washing and breaking up into one's thoughts, purifying, healing, destroying. This writing, then, is the projection of my battle with the dragon who disputed my entry into the heraldic baronies. For me, at any rate, it has been cardinal, for I have suddenly grown up in it. I am falling westward steadily, entering the region of the pneumatic gift! A latitude where even a lifeline is no good and the diving bell of the philosopher crumples with laughter.

And yet, at the other end of the telescope through which I can see my own pygmy history projected, is always for me Chamberlain's white face, its utter incomprehension a mere mask for ideal certainties and delusions, hanging above an obsolete billiard table, hungry for news in a world which has no news to offer. The summer went down at last in a hush of bows. That much is history. The rest, the winter for instance, is so much a part of us that we are unable to dissociate—to distinguish it from our other diseases. The empty stage on which we clown brilliantly under the audience of stars. A ballet of human beings rigid on our hooks, gently swinging, like frozen meat.

Hilda is lying in Bethlehem, dead drunk. This winter is eventful for her, veteran sportsman that she is. She has lost both ovaries. The season therefore is no longer closed, but open. There is no more the great enamel bowl by the bed swimming in used condoms and carbolic acid. The bowl to which Perez once wrote an ode of fruitfulness. The bowl against which Lobo held his racked forehead as he vomited. The wilderness is paradise enow. And in the great stallion's face there are new markings, new “fields” of experience, which show that the struggle is beginning again. The verb “to fuck” has become synonymous with the verb “to be”. It is as if this act were the one assurance of existence remaining to us still. Staring at the enlarged pupil of the old stallion's left eye, arriving in state in the plush corridor lined with stools, and going over the murderous details of a brilliant hysterectomy. All these things I go through blindfold. It is when the guitar begins to sing in Perez' fingers that it is all recalled to me. Lobo in the attitude of the billy-goat. A medieval scribble in his underpants. Or Perez rising suddenly out of the bushes, blind drunk, and huge in the moonlight, with the great bell tolling under his shirt.

The penis of the whale for instance! Or the book-lined walls of Tarquin's room. Everywhere books on the pathology of madness. How is it that we can be mad, and yet so saintly quiet, with hands folded in our laps like empty gloves? It is the persistent miracle. Out of this drug-addict shivering the face of Hilda forms, apocalyptically round as the bowl of the heavens, and scarlet as the dragon. Or Connie turning over on her side to let the tide sluice her out. The Indian Ocean propped open before Clare, and his delicate Levantine features hanging over her, pale and afraid. Turning over, for example, in a huge lather of foam, winnowing the poles with their great female flukes. Connie and Hilda. Dead blubber in a chaos of arctic lights, churning and moaning, until the pale Levantine face is broken up into its components and sent revolving down the gullet of the whirlpool. And to the question: “Who introduced you?” Tarquin now gives the answer, “My mother.” This is extremely significant. The wall is lined with books which are hardly ever opened. “A book”, says Chamberlain, “is a testimony of inefficient action. I shall live instead.”

Or the world of ElGreco, smoky, ill lighted, glowing like radium. (Take your choice, take your choice, but leave me in peace. Geology has no terminology for these fissures, schists, bosses, snags. Take you choice.)

Or the bit from Gregory's diary which I did not dare to quote. (“What can I do? What can I do? There is no action in me. The very sperm that runs from my penis is null. It is not virtue going out from me, but a dead loss to the body, the psyche, the will. My vitality runs out of me like pus, and there is no figure of grief strong enough to express it. Shall I pour my hair through my fingers? Shall I tie the grin of the madman round my face like a scarf?”)

In the deserted billiard room where the pockets hang like plundered scrotums Lobo dances the dance of the Incas, quite naked. He stops on tiptoe, whistles like a wren, and sneaks behind the curtains giggling. Chamberlain is talking about England, the Puritan Father of the world. His face is the face of a burnt-out duchess. The old Babylonian whore that is England, burnt out, gutted, with the disease melting her eyes in their sockets. Then Lobo appears again from behind the curtain with an erection almost twice as big as himself and we all stop in consternation. We are celebrating the second coming of Christ with a mammoth party. Rye whisky, rubber, and a coloured argosy of fine slang whores from the West End. Poppy and Ethel have already fought with Connie. And Clare in trying to intervene received a blow on the side of the head with a loaded handbag that nearly took his ear off. Poppy is pure litmus. Dip her in urine and she turns poppy-coloured, somnolent, drug-eyed, myopic, hayseed. Now the men's trade union has intervened. It is, after all, the second day of the debauch, and we want a bit of male privacy. So in the billiard room we rearrange the cosmos according to a new pattern, while the women squabble in the lavatories and tear each other's hair off. So much for the cosmos.

Incongruously Chamberlain and I construct the new idealism over the billiard table: an idealism more damning, more hysterical, more ruinous than any that has yet been known. Had I not written it out of my system already, I should be dead print today, instead of this macaronic poem which is designed to bore clean through the middle ear, and leaven the craniums of the wise. Enough. One should never write of accomplishment, because nothing is ever finally accomplished. That is the trauma of the ideal. It is the timeless action in its immediacy that I must concentrate on, here, now: this paper, this pen, this counterpoint along which the mimes carry, in a funeral measure, the corpse of the Theme. I have kept them rotating in me so long, like a prayer wheel. Like a great roaring merry-go-round of faces. The horse vermilion-nostrilled, the peeling unicorn, the dragon breathing acetylene. I am continually forced to stop and marvel at the incongruity of peopling the Ionian with such a ballet; as if, in a clear watery moonlight one night, while the shepherds on the lagoon piped their slow bubbling, curdling quartertones, a fleet of heraldic fish were to swim up under the house, and deploy flashing across the paper, across the bookshelf, the painted peasant woman at the well, the ships on the carpet and my wife asleep in the armchair.… Lobo, with the beak of the swordfish, performing watery acrobatics under the Albanian snows! It is very curious.

Perhaps it is our loneliness here, on the bare rocks of a rocky coastline that makes my connection with these subjects tenuous enough across the foam, the rock pools, the little lighthouse-shrine where St. Barbara on wood broods forever on a smashed lamp and a pool of oil—that makes this connection be love: even for Tarquin a love—
a humour
—which is all friendly. Diving from the lowest scarp into the green teatime water I recall suddenly that Tarquin, in his dressing gown, is writing a letter to his lover beginning, “Dear dear Dick”; or under water, painfully swimming with webbed feet and hands, see Chamberlain's body, bullet wounds and all, dragged up under the river lights, celebrating a suicide that he was too timid ever to commit. He is often with us: in the morning when the sails slip down towards Crete, red, yellow, green; in the afternoons dancing the old dances on the empty rocks with Theodore; at night when the apocalypse of moonrise shivers up into one's throat and the lone fishermen light their buds of flame and put out; when the man and his wife swim noiselessly under the house like dogs, quietly talking, towards the open sea.

Sitting here, on the prophetic black rock, where the Ionian comes in and touches, stealthy elastic, like a blue cat's-paw, I have seen Chamberlain lift that gun to his mouth a dozen times, always to drop it again. I have seen more than ever the modern disease looming in the world outside this sea, rock, water the terrible disintegration of action under the hideous pressure of the ideal; the disease of a world every day more accurately portrayed by Hamlet; the disease which made Gregory label the remaining days of life left to him, his death. The disease which … I examine my own face carefully in the mirror, finger the battered skull, consult the sunken orbits. It is not the first time in history that the gulf has opened up between the people and their makers—the artists. But the chasm has never been so vast, so uncrossable. The creator, terribly mauled and disfigured, has become the audience instead of the prime actor. He can do nothing. In the subterranean Hades of the self, on the wet marsh flowering in great festering lilies and poppies, the delusions gather and hang, miasmic. The curative virtue is being turned to black bile, to poison, to corrosive. It is the Dark Ages opening again. We are going down, in a supreme Dance of Death to the terminus, among the extreme unctions of the violins. This is the going down into the tomb which Gregory experienced as a unit. “Ended. It is all ended. I realize that now, living here on the green carpet and living there in the mirror. So profound is the conviction that there is nothing I can do to reassure myself. I am a little aging man, gone bald on top, with not even a thumbed season ticket to salvation. What shall I do? I am falling apart, the delicate zygon of my brain is opened. I am rusting, my knees are rusting, the fillings in my teeth, the plate in my jaw is rusting. If I were only Roman enough to own a sword we should see some fine conclusions to this malady. Alas! Are there only the dead
left
to bury the dead? It is the question not of the moment, but of all time. This is my eternal topic, I, Gregory Stylites, destroyed by the problem of personal action.”

In the falling night of my Tibetan memories I sit by the bed lamp and read these lines over and over again. Once I was moved by them. But in this fatal third act, this last masque for which paper and words are inadequate, I have hardly any room for feeling; not that so much, but it is as if I have gone dead in the vital centres. I have become a puppet, without any volition of my own. When I am with Tarquin, I share his death, with Lobo his prejudices, with Chamberlain his ideals. For my own part I am falling into an utter anonymity. I accept everything and examine nothing. Dead, in a queer way. Amputated at the taproots. And inside me the suffocating misery which I associate with her body, though it is unjust to do so. I sit over my books like an insect these long nights, or walk the long cold streets, shaken with the torment of indecision and mania, whose cause I cannot fathom. I wake at night and find tears on my face, from laughter or sorrow, I do not know which. Tibet hangs like a sphinx over the revisited childhood which my dreams offer me: the craters crammed with jewelry; the hills curving up into their vertiginous flowers of snow; the dawn opening like a coral umbrella on Lhasa; the yak and the black bear the only visitors of that immense vista in time; the monasteries as remote as stars on the hills; everything has fallen upon me in this stuffy English room with a pathos that is beyond ink. Well, I am one of the generation which I would like to murder. I cannot escape. That is what comes of being born with an erection, and thrown for dead in the basket; perhaps we must end on the gibbet, under the levers of the hired butchers, with the same erection in death that we knew in birth. There is much to be done—work worthy of a man; and if there were the least chance of my being understood I would begin. Here, I have the dithyramb, here, in this very room, on the second shelf from the left. It is only the
faith
of audience which seems to be lacking. I have traced the germ of action to the poem, and it is the poem which I would like to embed in the personality: an everlasting spatial heraldry to burn across personal action like the brand of Cain. Forgive the arrogance. I am not even a Master of Arts. Simply a bastard child of the humanities. There is no distinguishing label. I realize this when I talk to someone like Bazain (
Doctor
Bazain), that cockeyed idiot who has not the least idea of the meaning of the word “therapy”. His universe consists of the frontal lobe, the temporal lobe, and the occipital lobe; not to mention the parietal lobe, or the medulla. Any phenomena which exist outside this domain puzzle him. Even simple phenomena like Morgan, for instance. This morning we met him in the lounge, dressed in a blue serge suit and huge creaking brown shoes. It was his day off, he explained to us, and he was taking Gwen up to the West End. “Going to marry her?” I suggest playfully, whereupon he becomes very expansive and confidential, something quite unusual for him. “Marriage?” he says, bending down to us where we sit on the sofa (he pronounces it “merritch”), “well, I always said it's not for me, sir, but if she wants if—well, I don't want to disappoint her.” Then, leaning down, ever more confidentially, over us, he beams like a lighthouse and whispers, “She's that good, sir, I could eat 'er shit, sir.” Whereupon Bazain nearly falls to the floor. When Morgan goes he begins to say angrily how outrageously disgusting the man is, and the idea of talking to
residents
in that way! Parading his sexual perversions like that … “But maybe it isn't a perversion,” I say mildly. “Maybe it's just a figure of speech.” Bazain coughs stiffly and says in his most Harley Street manner, “Well, it sounds like the frontal lobe to me!” In the beginning was the word; and the word was Bazain; and Bazain was an idiot. As for Morgan, any more honesty on his part and he will lose his job! The idea!

Well, all these incidents have the ring of immense triviality when I think of them, sitting here among the books at night, aware of the statues and the snow outside. Lobo complaining of his latest woman because she farts incessantly while they are in bed, and makes him “disgust”; Perez talking in his perfect demented English about Anne who was so beautiful and who has no teeth in her mouth—just two soft rows of gums. The first shock of kissing her, and finding everything pulp. What an experience, he repeats, for an English Sunday afternoon!