The Black Book (34 page)

And then there is you. You wait behind the faces and the signs which puzzle. A pale hieroglyph scribbled across these pages, across these faces, these whales, symbols, ideographs. You speak to me from the trees with the spirit of trees: the delicate human bark of the Eucalyptus, you are living among your green sickles. In bed it is a tree that grows upward from the scrotum, choking me, stuffing soft tentacles and flowers into my arms, into my throat, into my knees. I am a scarecrow filled by the trees which grow upward through me. When I speak of you my throat is lined like bark, and my tongue is soft rotten juniper-loam, cloying.

I cover you with my body and whole universes open silently for me, like a door into a sudden garden. Suddenly I am awake and standing in you like a turret, speaking to the elements, the dwarfs, the delicate nebulae, the circus which grows on you and stifles me in fleece. I am carried onward through you like angry water, like a plague, a ferment of agony for which there is no cross, no nailholes, no last act, no broken veil of the temple, no agony in the garden.

In the belly, the hips, the huge cathedral of the vagina, you shadow me, moving from statue to statue, seeking your death mask. In the amniotic fluid, the marrow, in the dark cunt you live, in the foetus jammed at the neck of the womb. In the clavicles, the tarsus, the sour anus. It is not words which grow in me when I see the tendrils of muscle climbing your trunk; it is not words at the fingers laid about your face and still: these delicate cartridges of flesh and bone. Not words but a vocabulary which goes through us both like the sea, devouring. A nameless, paralysed singing in the backbone. An interior mass, blacker than sacrilege. A dancing of fibres along the skin, a new action, a theme as fresh as seed, an agony, a revenge,
a universe!
God save the mark, it is I who am chosen to interpret these frantic syllables which rise up between us, apocalyptic, dazzling, clarion. Here are the pearls that were his eyes. I reach through you like a drunken man towards the million fathom universe, but it is difficult. I am entangled in your flesh. My footsteps are hampered by the rich mummy wrapping of flesh, by the delicate rupture of membranes, the quivering sockets from which the eyes have been torn. It is difficult to know my direction. I have no needle. Only this parcel of agonies which move in terrified recoil as the guts slide away from the surgeon's intruding fingers. Pity me, I was born old. Not dead, but old. Not dead, but old. Incredibly ancient and a martyr to the hereditary taint.

All that comes out of me is a landscape in which you are everything, tree, bee, flower, toast, salt; you are the hard bright stamen of the kingcup, the Greek asphodel, the nervous speaking calyx. This old Venetian fort dying, the flags, the soldiers like bluebells are your landscape, the hot gleet of summer, the fine mucus, or the brumal bear licking her culprits the baby dogfish. Sweet, it is not your decorations I am putting down here, your soft wagging cypresses, stoles, cathedrals, covenants, bones of dead saints. It is this new barony whose language I am taking at dictation, without even waiting to know whether we can decipher it with the help of a known hieroglyph!

In that last winter banquet, among the candles in the silences, the talk of Rome, of poetry, poor Johnny Keats spitting nightingales—that night with the whole safe aura of the English death around us, the ambiance of candles, masques, cottages, pewter, I saw that your face was utterly Judas. The piano was kicking in the Beethoven, and all of a sudden it was as if the ten ridiculous fingers were opening like umbrellas, pregnant with symphony. The room was a cathedral, massive, choked. And the review of faces was as expressive as the line of shadows on the roof. Connie so brazen, returning the stares of the newcomers like a mirror. Lobo, Perez, Anselm, Gracie—a company as various as a packet of stamps. Tarquin with the kiss of Judas branded on his sagging cheekbones, smiling with the Egyptian smile. Tarquin sitting there like an empty tomb, hollow, hollow, even the microbes dead in him. It was then that I knew the cycle was complete for him. The wheel had spun full circle. From now he's just powdering down like a thrashed flower. He sits all day alone, wrapped in rugs, afraid to walk, his bones are so brittle; afraid to talk, his tongue is so dry; afraid to piss, he is so scalded by the stale urine. The gramophone plays from morning to night, but he does not hear it. If I go to see how he is I find him there, abstractedly sitting in rugs with a sweet smile on his face. “Put on the laughing record,” he says; “it's in the album with the third piano.” This is terrifying. This insane disc is one that everyone must know. The crazy attempts to play a saxophone punctuated by a forest of terrible forced laughter. Female squeals, enormous tickling of the ovaries. And the terrifying male bellows. Only a world gone mad could issue a document like this. He plays it over perhaps forty times a day, sitting there in rugs, his vacant eyes on the black fent of the instrument, his skin held out on sparrow bones: a queer taut smile, answering the terrible squealing and roaring. This is his
vale
in my memory, before they take him away. In the immense stale corridors of the hotel, among the broken statuary and the views of the Parthenon, Tarquin. It is so elaborate this symbol, the Tarquin of the new vocabulary, that I am almost tempted to try and make a short
précis
of him: à la novel. To make him comprehensible enough for the reviewers. But I can't. I just don't know what the hell he is all about. Any more than I can “explain” the new myth which I am undoubtedly on the point of creating, or the double eagle, or the symbol of the fish. I have simply gathered up the little pieces and offered them to you on a plate: it is for others to decide at what date the explosion took place. At that last insane banquet I was on the point of discovering, I think, but am not sure. You were in the way with the lotus mask and the bangles gnashing on your arms. I had only half an eye for the piano simmering; for Connie swallowing the penis in a series of thirsty gulps. There was precisely you and this fertile vocabulary running out of you, rich, sappy, evocative as musk.

Little pieces of the drama have come to me in different places, on the great liners nosing southward, in the trains, between the trim spars of the sailing boat: all merging and flowing upward in me through the bugles and sheep and dancing. I thought I understood. But beginning this act with paper I can only say for certain that I am not responsible. It is transcription purely.

Here, it is real enough the stage on which I re-create this chronicle of the English death. There is Bach playing in the roars of the wind, the piercing slatterns of the rain. There is you dancing, and the million yous who persist in matter, echo, weep, cry, exult, in flower powder, smaragd, Italy, moon, veins of rock. There is the cadenza of flesh here naked, and the you who run to the conclusion of autumn, selfless and melancholy, or smoulder on the beach savagely. In all particulars of the body you are working, in the dark sump of the vagina, brewing vegetable history, sewing continents in whom I am the reaper; in the dusty sandals or the naked toes. It is forced upon me to write of you always in the gnomic aorist. For this is the new vocabulary which I am learning with ease. I am beginning my agony in the garden and there are too many words, and too many things to put into words. In the fantastic proscenium of the ego, when I begin my soliloquy, I shall not choose as Gregory chose. To be or not to be. It is in your capacity as Judas that you have chosen for me. The question has been decided. Art must no longer exist to depict man, but to invoke God. It is on the face of this chaos that I brood. And on the same chaos printed, across the faces of these hideous mimes of mine, your pale glyph. The white illusion of bone and tissue, the firm cheekbones set in soft plates of flesh, the pouting mouth, the soft jawless head of the snake, the lips as delicate as the biscuit. Lubra in the dark, and when the swords grow up from Constantinople, marmoreal, caryatid, pupa of flesh growing upward among the bones, carrying them upward from the hip, irresistible leaven. The hills snooze on with the liths of your fingers laid over them: the sensitive calyx of the pelvis like the dish of land which holds our sea, silent outside the house. All that is dying in me in this fatal landscape, your mine among active things, stone, shards, language, meteors, butter. Nothing but the punic body, our essential traitor, which stifles me with its pollens. Snore on, you winter sea, there is no more in here than the seven hectic elements can offer me: more than the fantasy of the third ocean, dipping its brush among the molten colours, leaking down to the hot magma of things. More. More.

It is morning. Born in an empty house, no zodiac; spawned by the fish, volatile, cunning, durable in passion. Boy in an ark on a black rock. Greece lies dead among the oak leaves, the bare mulch, the
merdes,
outside the window, littered in sails. There is nothing in this enormous six-foot bed but the eyelashes of God moving, delicate as talc; or the warm sticky gum, oozing from the lips of the trees. From between your legs leaking, the breathing yolk, the durable, the forever, the enormous Now.

This is how it ends.

THE END

The house of
Anastasius Athenaius, Koloura.
Corfu, 1937.

THE DURRELL OF THE BLACK BOOK DAYS

Henry Miller

Always merry and bright!
Always coming toward you with countenance a-gleam, the
heraldic
(his favorite word then) gleam of the blazoned escutcheon. The golden boy. Or a water sprite. Anyway, youth incarnate. Plus brains, plus an amazing critical acumen. Plus so many things.
Il avait tout à gogo.
Above all, he could laugh as no man has a right to laugh in a world so sick and troubled. “For all your ills, laughter!” Was there ever a Britisher who could laugh thus? I have never met one since. But then, could you really call him British?

If I remember rightly,
The Black Book
was already finished by the time we met up. All that remained was to find a publisher for it. And we found him—in the person of Jack Kahane (Obelisk Press). The same Jack who had published the
Tropic of Cancer.
The only man in Christendom who had the guts to take a chance on dubious works of genius. (Curious that today one can't find a copy of the book anywhere except in the padlocked vaults of libraries or in the private archives of collectors.)

For all the bubble and laughter, he had his serious side too. A devil of a worker, for one thing. And, like Flaubert, a stickler for the right word, the precise image, the Gongora effect. A poet primarily, he could have become, like Claudel, a diplomat as well. I could make further analogies and comparisons. The
bourlingueur
, for example,
à la
John Paul Jones, Blaise Cendrars, Jack London. The man with a nose for “place”—who could write of Patmos, Corfu, Cyprus, Jerusalem, Alexandria and make you wonder what ancient god guided his footsteps, cleared his vision. An epistolary genius as well, tossing off his missives like so many banana peels: gems drenched in sunlight, tipped with Mediterranean blue and the gold of Mycenae.

Even then—how old was he? twenty-three perhaps?—he had everything one needs to make a name and a place for himself. How is it that it has taken so long for the world to recognize him? How fortunate, let me add, that he had one faithful publisher throughout the period of eclipse! (Faber and Faber). We should all be grateful to them, and especially to T. S. Eliot, his mentor.

In those early days the writing man took secondary place. It was the person who counted with us, the unquenchable, indomitable cock-o'-the-walk who, by a slight rearrangement of the personality, might just as well have made a name for himself on the vaudeville stage or in the Olympic tryouts. I say “us,” for we were usually three then, the musketeers of the rue de la Tombe-Issoire: alias Perlès, Durrell, and myself. Sometimes incremented by the company of Edgar, the beloved David Edgar, or by Hans Reichel who, alas, has just passed away. What were we up to? Fun. “It makes fun,” Reichel used to say. Everything made fun. (Perhaps that's why it took so long for any of us to make the grade.)

Perlès, our editor-in-chief, has written about
The Booster,
which Durrell insisted we call
The Delta,
and which we recklessly ran into the ground. One ought to have a look, these days, at the contributors to this hilarious and most unorthodox review whose back cover we used as a vehicle for texts no one could decipher—in Chinese, Czech, Hungarian, Pali, and so on. We even included poets and poetesses then unknown, if they paid us to. Of course we had to give the copies away. But what matter? We had everything to lose.
It was fun.
Show me the editors today who permit themselves such luxury!

I said he was a hard worker, Durrell. He was, but he was always available when it came to a lark. He took his work seriously, not himself. Today it seems to be the other way round. With poets especially.

It was only a matter of months that we spent together in Paris. Looking back, it seems like years. On the other hand I don't think of this period in the manner of Max Jacob writing of the rue Ravignan and of the Picasso then unknown. My worst days were already past when Durrell arrived; his were yet to come. Besides, the whole episode never faded into a past; it's as much alive in my memory now as if it happened yesterday.

There's another thing it seems important to stress. When Durrell knocked at my door at the Villa Seurat
a quarter of a century ago—
think of it!—I felt that I had known him all my life. We didn't have to become acquainted first. He came with his aura, which was familiar to me. We spoke as if resuming a conversation broken off centuries ago.

What different worlds we hailed from! Try to connect Brooklyn—the 14th Ward—and Darjeeling! Or the Ionian Sea and the East River! As well try to yoke Homer and Dostoevsky. Or Hannibal and Arthur. How well I remember his amazement when he learned that I had never read the
Odyssey
or the
Iliad.
Yes, there were roadblocks now and then. Stendhal was one; Laurence Sterne another. (I've never been able to read either to this day!) But we
could
share enthusiasm for Blavatsky, for Petronius, and for dear Knut Hamsun, among others. Not Shakespeare.