The Black Book (19 page)

At night, perhaps, if there is nothing else to do, a visit to the corpse that inhabits Tarquin's tea-green dressing gown. We sip Bovril with genteel affection, like a couple of spinsters, or play cards at the green folding table.

“You are grateful, you say, for being made to think, to weigh, to analyse?” asks the hero in carefully simulated surprise. “You thank me for the death I am transmitting? I assure you, my lad,” and so on. I accept these morsels humbly. Humility and divinity—are they not the same thing? Consolation! Courage! One day when you are a big boy
you
shall have a teddy to play with.

“Your trouble is that you are young. Your ideas are eoan—you see false dawns breaking all over the place. You actually hope. Until the Platonic poison is out of your system you cannot begin. Stop imagining an impanate Christ, first of all. Bread must become bread, nothing more or less. This tea tastes of urine, does it not? No, it's your turn. Contemplate the world which has created you, my dear, and see where you stand.”

There is no answer to this except that I know nothing of the world which created me. Nothing. I am a sort of ticker tape, through which life runs its ribbon of shabby pulp. What is written on it I cannot tell. A love letter perhaps, or a report of famine, or a poem, or a description of a new disease.

“Dear Puck,” you say, “the guest has come without warning, so that I am afraid the house isn't ready for him. Spring. By the lake you can hear the copulation of the frogs, like smooth pebbles being rubbed together. They are dying in quantities, their veins are shot with blood. It is good when we lie down together to keep remembering the death all around us, in the clouds, in the lake, in the woods where summer is chained up like a blind man. It is death that makes our love adult, the death of the grain. It is so bitter when we are together, but, like salt, really nourishing. Death is a wonderful discipline. Do you understand me? Good night.”

You are no longer afraid. The spring is your ally. The one season you properly understand, answer in your bones. But now that the blind man summer has broken his rusty chain and got free—what now? Shall we make some fine alkaline poems to neutralize this dust, this soma fever?

Dear Alan. I am alone again. This book is not a statement of a path, but a quarrel with destiny, that is why it is necessary for you to understand it. The summer is largely responsible—not to mention the little death. I was thinking tonight of those summer days in the shadow of the priory. They seem to belong to another world—a world of shapes which included such colours as warmth, charity, love, etc. A whole dormant Platonic principle which, in its essence, is England—the marrow and bone of England. This is a very necessary valediction, not only to England, but, if you like, to the world. It will hurt you, but it is the truth. I have looked into my account—the account that seemed so full and heavy with new cash—and found hardly a coin that will ring properly on wood. There was nothing for it but to empty my wallet into the dust and take the road again; without dramatics this time, without heroics—not to mention lymphatics. It is queer to remember that this decision was already shaping itself that afternoon, when we stood on the southern tower of the priory, hanging in the breeze, breathless and exulting like sea birds. All that was the island then, was represented in that humorous razored profile of yours—the predatory nose of the Middle Ages, the Goth singing in your blood, the music you gathered up in those nervous fingers and transmitted, crazy with your own enthusiasm. Southward, like a green beating heart, the flats stretched away into the mist. The myth weathering softly on the corbels, the fragile spines of the windows with their armorial bearings, the buttresses flying into an eternity of childish history. We were hanging up there, like flies, over the Saxon river, watching the tonsures cross the leads in meditation. Irrational thoughts and feelings wheeling up over me, whewing like gulls, sombre. It was in that time that I began dimly to see the equation which was finally printed in my brain here, over the Ionian. It was the temptation of the devil, the vision of the cities offered to me from an immense mountaintop. The devil! What should be more plausible than that you should be the Black Saint himself—panurgic, long-nosed, calculating bastard that you are! You were offering me, in your oblique way, the whole of England—the masques, the viols, the swans, the mists, the doom, the fogs: you were offering me a medieval death in which I could live for ever, stifled in the pollen of breviaries, noctuaries, bestiaries: split silk and tumbrils, aesthetic horses and ruined Abbeys. The lament for Dido opening up such pits of emotion in my brain that I fell upon my knees, and shattered in little pieces in the hearth. The forest opening its eyes of frost, the unborn morning of the world, the dew in a sheet, the trees stifled in feathers. The great orchestra hymning gruffly among its ants, gathering and breaking in time to the sea. The hot lick of the winter rain, blinding us all from coast to shabby coast. Or Pat going quietly mad among the sprained spires of Oxford. Your room, with the gramophone like a broken womb emptying Beethoven over us. This is the world which was implicit in our extravagant gust, our laughter, our tears, our poems. That is why, when I tell you I have rejected it, I want you to understand clearly the terms of that rejection. That is an England I am going to kill, because by giving it a quietus once and for all,
I can revive it!
This is not a flashy paradox, but something I have experienced, something that I have suffered. Understand me. It is not very difficult. The gulls are wheeling again, in their soft terror, the rooks are uneasy. In the gloom down below they light the candles and begin—the soft elegant litanies of religion. It is an apocalyptic moment, between heaven and earth. We are hanging over the minute, crawling town, while the bells open up. Under our feet the tower rocks at each impact of the vesper bell. A train snores outward, along the hills, into the past. The decision is made. I am no longer softened by tears or doubts. I have become as hard as a bronze medal. What it cost me to maintain this terrible equilibrium, to become responsible only to myself for what I am—that is not the important thing. The important thing is this: if I succeed, and I will succeed, then I shall become, in a sense,
the first Englishman.
I tell you this in confidence, because afterwards, when the great struggle is over, and the whole psyche of our nation—our world—is thrown back into gear, then there will be plenty of time for understanding, analysing, wondering. It is now, while the duel is on, that your understanding is valuable. This is all I can say. From that rare latitude, which I carry with me wherever I go, under the Equator or over the Poles, I write you this valediction
and greeting.
Affectionately Yours, Hamlet's little godchild.

The death damp is creeping in again. In the autumn we escape occasionally, like moles, into the upper air, and brood on the extinction settling down over England. This is chiefly to enable Tarquin to write his musical poem:
To England.
He is participating bravely, he tells me, in the death under the shield: the death which he swears is fattening itself on Our very bones. Go to the country, he tells me, and describe it all for me when you get back. He does not want to see it for himself; is happier in town. That is why you are beside me again, alive to the sweet particularities of the island's doom, warm of wrist and knee, ankle and elbow.…

Cornfields falling away from the thread of the road in dusty garrisons, leaning, gravid, heavy in the ear. Sunk in them almost submarine, among the gardens, the beautiful farmhouses with the beetle in the wood, churches with pointed windows, mellow stables. Tudor half-timbering, scribbled with creeper; ploughland and arable in jaundiced yellows, mould-browns and purples, spinning away under your fingers in gentle undulations. No, I am quiet and serious. It is all laid out like a page in Gregory's diary. See, from one end the pen begins to bite, you turn up a long furrow on the paper—a green furrow. The fingers tug slowly like a team of oxen. Behind the steel tooth green figures are coming alive, stretching their arms, and looking around. In this way everything was created.

I am recalling again the terms of our separation: the calendar lying there with the broken back, offering an infinity of smoky evenings. The oblique wishes and hopes of a lifetime gathered together and spent in the space of a few weeks. And now, it seems, I have no more hopes—only acceptance. I keep my mouth shut because my jaw would fall off if I tried to speak.

I am out walking again with Chamberlain in the long evenings: corridor upon stone corridor opening up before us until, for a breath of air and a personal glimpse of trees, we are forced to turn into the park gates. Or else peering at the faded portraits of the Elizabethans in the gallery, while my companion talked vehemently about Lawrence, and his prediluvial madhouse. (“Tut tut, Lawrence? Too vehemently eoan, my dear. Tarquin.”)

Rowing on the lake in the mist; or in the hot nights watching the shadows pass and repass on the walls of Hilda's bedroom, lighting the washstand, the shelves of belfries, the hanged man in the mirror. The glare of headlights withering her naked body. Reaching you at last over a café table, touching fingers, one's heart bruised and swollen with despair. The long stabbing waves of parting under the airplane light. The green mouth climbing away upward through my World like a torch, burning away the tissue, the bone and cartilage, nosing among the twittering nerves, annihilating me. Hilda's big toe, left over from the evening's entertainment, posted above the bedrail to rot away through eternity, like a traitor's head on London Bridge. Or Perez whimpering on the table among the students while the current ran like vinegar up his anus. (Rabelais's curse: May the fire of St. Anthony fly up thy fundament.) Beakers of urine turning milky, throwing up their white filaments. The catheter budding, blossoming. Chamberlain's drunken face, dazed with the myth he is creating around himself, asking impatiently for the new book of revelation.

All this has made me a little sombre, a little lunatic, to be with you again at last, shut up together in this moving shell of steel. There is an edge on laughter, or even the common topics. I am a little proud of my control. Soon I shall say something, and you will begin to tell me everything—the whole quavering saga of your life—the life which has just begun. You will begin asking those insane questions, where have I been, what have I done, what have I seen, why do I look at you like that, where will this all end? If I am honest with you now, if I give the impression of sincerity, it is because I want something. Inside I am weeping for my generation. I am devising in my mind a legend to convey the madness which created us in crookedness, in dislocation, in tort. We are a generation enwombed. A stillbirth. Like blind puppies we are seeking the way back to the womb, we are trying to wipe away the knowledge of our stillbirth, by a new, a more glorious, more pristine event. We have been expelled from the uterus blind and marrowless, and we grovel back towards it in a hysterical regression of panic. Look, I am burrowing in your lap with my mouth, like an animal. I am hammering down the doors of the womb. Screaming to get back. I would gather myself up like a snail and crawl back miraculously if I could, stuff myself up to your gullet for safety, anywhere, anyhow. This is at least honest. Do not accuse me. When I go mad, and rip the clothes off your trembling body, when I bite your nipples and groan, it is this expiatory half-death I am consummating. It is so necessary and so poignant to fuck you like that, when you are like a tumbled featherbed; when your mouth is clammy with stars, and your soft cunt breathing its velvet, musky pollen over the earth. Then even the trees, the hills, the towns, seem thrown into soft, perfectly defined focus for me. I am absolved. I have thrown up a support trench: a wall of the womb stands between me and the world. Let them probe, let them probe. Let them sound the walls of the belly, let them switch a searchlight on the vagina, I am secure. All my savagery, all my gust, has been thrown down in a little parcel of seed, emptied into this yawning throat of silk. Now I have recovered my control, I am masterful as a bantam, I am cruel. I am the monster you told me about. Very well. Turn your head away. I stand among the trees in my shirt, and smoke. I abhor you because you do not understand my weakness, though you see its symptom. Then you will turn with those stupid, uncomprehending eyes, and say why did I do this, what made me do that, etc. Your mouth hanging open on its hinges, your face shining with sweat and spittle and tears. I shake you off masterfully, disgusted by my love for you. I am hungry I tell you. Yes, when I act in this heartless way it is because I want to make use of you—or because it is teatime. Choose for yourself. Yes, if I have not given you syphilis it is a miracle. In the car I suddenly catch sight of that geological hammer. You brought it with you to do some fieldwork? I am laughing now as if my mind would snap. The whole country is waiting to be tapped with it, sounded for depths! Fieldwork! My humour is restored immediately, I am guiltless, free, the best of friends. And this puzzles you. You cannot make it out. There is not an atomic trace of the monster in me—not a trace. You try to hold out, be severe, austere, reserved, sulky, but I am infecting you, I am permeating you. I lean down over you, and in a breath I fill every artery in your body with psalms. We are shaken with a fit of hysterical weeping. The car wobbles from side to side. The country swings up and down among your breasts with magnificent lamentation. We are so happy that tears are running down our faces. You are given utterly now, captured and trodden and submissive, and if my hands would stop trembling I would light you a cigarette, I would talk sombrely; I would hang on your mouth like a broken jawbone … What a thin border between love and murder!