The Avignon Quintet (24 page)

It would be a charity to find one’s way through this labyrinth of concealed motives, and doubtless this is what Sutcliffe’s unfinished book first set out to do; but either the material proved too prolix and too contradictory for him, or the simple defection of Pia robbed him of the necessary emotional strength to create. The greater the artist the greater the emotional weakling, the greater the infantile dependence on love. Of course I am only paraphrasing in my own words what he himself has written over and over again. And now he has gone, leaving behind the Venetian notebooks and a hamper full of letters, both received and sent; for he always wrote in longhand, and always took copies of his own letters. That is how I know so much about his relationship with Pia. He kept all her shy hesitant and accidentally brutal letters in a velvet folder of bright green colour.

“In our age it is best to work from documents,” he used to say.

It has done me good to put so much down on paper, though I notice that in the very act of recording things one makes them submit to a kind of ordering which may be false, proceeding as if causality was the real culprit. Yet the element of chance, of accident, had so much to do with what became of us that it seems impossible to search out first causes – which is perhaps what led to the defeat of Rob in his fight with his last book. He was overwhelmed, he says, by realising to what degree accident had determined his life and actions. If he had never met Toby, he would never have heard of us, while it was an even stranger accident in Venice which led him to make the acquaintance of Akkad.

Meanwhile (I am quoting him) he had lost his “tone of voice” in writing, which he compared to the sudden loss of a higher register by a concert soprano. His voice had broken. This must have been after the failure of Pia’s analysis, and her defection with the negress. The great Sutcliffe found himself at last on his own with only his art for company, clanking across the Lombard Plain in the direction of Venice – all the nervous sadness of the violet rotting city. It had become clear to him that the salt had gone out of everything, but in order to stop the fountain of tears which burst like a whole Rome in his heart, he had to adopt a bristling flippancy, a note of Higher Unconcern, which gave literature one of the novels still regarded in the best circles as somewhat funny-peculiar; it was self-immolating that horrible laughter. Paradoxically he could not help thinking that had Pia
died
things would have been better for him, because clearer. But simply to desert him for darling Trash, the negress … To be sexually betrayed is to be rendered ridiculous, and if one is famous and marvellous in one’s own conceit, why it is only the sense of outrage which keeps one going. Of course these are more the sentiments of a woman than a man, and if one probed them one would reach the central chamber where the first dispositions were taken, the first complexes stored up. And how lovely Trash was with her deep rosined fiddle of a voice and her skin smelling of musk melons and her little stilted pointed accent of the deepest south; a lazy sensual toreador of the love-act, marvellously armoured against ideas like psychoanalysis or Romantic Love by the fact of falling asleep when one uttered a word of more than one syllable. “My, my,” she would croon, turning over lazily on her side and falling into a coma, “you slay me, honey.” To think that Sutcliffe never guessed, that it had been going on even before he had met Pia. It was infuriating. “I guess Robin’s sad to death, honey.”

Yes, Robin was sad to death all right, sitting bolt upright in his first-class compartment, writing another long whining letter to the pale girl – who to do her justice was suffering just as much as he was.
Pia loves Rob
, she had written it with her lipstick on the walls of the
vespasienne
in the Rue Colombe, waiting for him to finish, holding her pampered borzoi on the leash. Trash was taking an English lesson with a French whore who had the longest tongue in Christendom. What happiness he knew, in all his innocence, what pride in this girl with the slit of a mouth – so spoiled and gracile a slender body. Trash was simply a cultivated American friend from the University of I forget, who knew how to massage rheumatisms away, stiff neck, and all that. After he knew he developed a pain in the lumber region worthy of a lumberjack, but there was no Trash to help him with long coffee-coloured fingers so apt for ragtime on a piano late at night.

Thus Sutcliffe writing about himself; out of the inexplicable confusion of the Venice notebooks some sort of self-portrait does emerge; but he tried out several tones of voice and found none to fit his mood and theme. He was proposing to write about himself, to make himself the central character of his own book, but never quite found out how to situate the Sutcliffe of his invention squarely in the realm which his creator inhabited. The resulting manuscript is indeed something of a puzzle, for almost before he could get the book started his “characters”, that is to say Piers, Toby, Sylvie and myself started to look over his shoulder, so to speak, and talk for themselves. He felt at once elated by the thought that he had discovered a possible impressionistic form for his book, and depressed by the incoherence in which his subjects existed. They were not articulate about anything – and specially about love, the subject which occupied him most. As for our own trinity, he was disposed to regard it as a misfortune which, with a little forethought, we might have avoided. But then, on reflection, he remembered that for years now he himself had formed (without knowing it) the third in a trinity just as ill-starred, with Pia and pretty Trash as the other partners. How should he go about the book, then? How much latitude had he to alter facts? Perhaps like this? After much hesitation …

“Sutcliffe – there was no limit to his greatness – became celebrated and tolerably affluent the year his wife died, and immediately set about reorganising a life which had become staled with worry and illnesses. From now on, he thought, he would set off every spring on a visit to Venice. His best friend was a raffish Oxford don called Toby Goddard, who was working on the Crusades in a chateau near Avignon. After Venice he would join his friend there for the summer. That was the plan. It was indeed not merely the plan for this year, but the master-plan for the rest of his life. Why Venice? It was rather a vulgar choice – the mud smelt so strong, the water squirmed with rats. One dares to suppose that he was merely a romantic of the trashy kind. But no, his books attest to a greatness beyond question. Hurrah! Robin and Toby were both large shapeless men, according to their friends, who were known as Gog and Magog. (Sutcliffe had genius perhaps, but was no beauty.) They both dressed rather alike, in untidy tweeds, and were both tow haired with blonde eyelashes. They also shared a fearful myopia of identical dioptry, were apt to bump into inanimate objects, sit down on invisible chairs, or bounce off each other as they shambled about talking and gesticulating. Both could walk on their hands and once had a race round St. Peter’s in this way which Toby won by a short head. Venice, then, and genius … what more does one need? He proposed to rationalise these rather expensive journeys by telling himself that a writer needs more than a cork-lined room in which to work. Needs space, elegance and the compacted nostalgias of an ideal past expressed in stone and metal. And to hell with Ruskin. So the huge man, wrapped in his tweed overcoat which smelt like a wet animal, set forth in the year 19— to welcome a late spring on those legendary canals. Gog parted from Magog in Paris with many unsteady protestations of esteem and regret; soon this incomparable couple would be reunited in the south. In Avignon.

“He always carried about with him a black leather despatch-case full of water paints, pens, and bottles of Chinese inks and Japanese sepia blocks. So it was that the pages of his lonely letters were brilliantly got up with drawings in mauve, scarlet, yellow, green. … It was his way of cheating a professional neurasthenia to sit on a balcony over the loop of a canal and write these letters which were afterwards illustrated in crayon or gouache.

“Letters to whom, we may ask? Why, letters to the few friends he had in the world, like the brother of his wife who was rather a slowcoach of a doctor, distressingly sincere. He resembled his sister in nothing save the shape of his hands which were slender and delicate – but what was that to Sutcliffe? He wrote to his wife still – long chatty letters to keep her up to date with his sentiments and movements. These efforts he either destroyed by posting them down the lavatory or – if they contained fragments of marvellous writing, poignant and regrettable incidents remembered, he sent them to Toby, or to Pia’s brother, with instructions that they should be spared and put somewhere safe. One day, he thought, he would fish out all this disorderly material and light a bonfire among the olives in order to say a final
Ave
to this writing life so rich in promises and so fertile in disenchantments. Yes, one day he would be an old hack, gone in the tooth, broken of nerve and talentless – dried up like a river bed. What then? Why, then, the Far East perhaps, some little monastery in the Thai hills, a bald dome, silence. Or the Trappe at Marseille where he would sit all day wearing an air of petulance like a latter-day Huysmans. Sutcliffe didn’t see this part very clearly; one doesn’t as a rule. Like all narcissists he was convinced that old age and death were things which happened to others – and he made inadequate provision for them, though his mirror warned him repeatedly. His teeth were getting fewer and would soon have to take on reinforcements if he was to continue eating well. His sexual needs were sharper and yet far too quick,
O ejaculatio!
He couldn’t stand brothels and so was at the mercy of passing sentiments which did not often come his way. He rather saw himself as
Sutcliffe accoucheur des dames, accoucheur d’ âmes
. The ideal prostitute he dreamed of merely, seeing her as a postulant discharging her obligations to a God – through fornication the human shadow drinks, the eidolon of man or woman. No use asking him what that last phrase meant. Sometimes his wife suffocated under his clumsy tenderness and felt like a conscript. If you want to know how she died read on from here. In another country, among olive trees of steel grey. In some ways for a writer whose imaginary wife has just died, death has about as much reality as a painted dog. Sutcliffe thought to himself: life is only once, old boy. All that we think and write about death is fictitious. Theology is very old ice cream, very tame sausage. Best go on hoping
pour l’amour à quatre pattes
– love on all fours.

“Affectivity, then, worn down like an old dog’s molars. What you have bitten off as reality you will be forced to spit out. Here in Venice, these thoughts hardly belong to a place which so confidingly trusted in the idea of civilisation. One was forced to reconsider the idea against one’s will. Sutcliffe tended to see it as some poor Penelope, trying to weave up the original couple on her loom, while she waited patiently for the return of you know who. But in this age the hero never comes, and now we know that he will never come. We must be content with
l’amour vache
and
l’amour artichaut
, he loves me, she loves me not … In default of a God we must be content with that. Maybe it is all to the good. When God existed such was the terrible radiance of the thing that the ancients only dared to gaze at his behind, fearing for their eyesight and perhaps for their reason. According to Freud this led later to an irrational fear of sausages, or of being run over from behind, or impaled by father. What else to record? Yes, Sutcliffe one day fell among cannibals and was masterfully abbreviated; later at Athos he was much troubled by the indiscriminate farting from the monks’ cells – love-calls of old Byzantium he supposed …”