III
MY CONVERSATIONS WITH
BROTHER ASS
(being extracts from Pursewarden's Notebook)
With that
fearful compulsion we return to it again and again - like a tongue to a hollow
tooth - this question of writing! Can
writers talk nothing but shop then? No. But with old Darley
I am seized with a sort of convulsive vertigo for, while we have everything in
common, I find I cannot talk to him at all.
But wait. I mean that I do talk:
endlessly, passionately, hysterically without uttering a word aloud! There is no way to drive a wedge between his
ideas which, ma foi, are thoughtful, orderly,
the very essence of 'soundness'. Two men
propped on barstools thoughtfully gnawing at the universe as if at a stick of
sugarcane! The one speaks in a low,
modulated voice, using language with tact and intuition; the other shifts from
buttock to listless buttock shamefacedly shouting in his own mind, but only
answering with an occasional affirmative or negative to these well-rounded
propositions which are, for the most part, incontestably valuable and true! This would perhaps make the germ of a short
story? ('But Brother Ass, there is a
whole dimension lacking to what you say.
How is it possible for one to convey this in Oxford English?') Still with sad penitential frowns the man on
the high barstool proceeds with his exposition about the problem of the
creative act - I ask you! From time to
time he shoots a shyish sideways glance at his
tormentor - for in a funny sort of way I do seem to torment him; otherwise he
would not always be at me, aiming the button of his foil at the chinks in my
self-esteem, or at the place where he believes I must keep my heart. No, we would be content with simpler
conversational staples like the weather.
In me he scents an enigma, something crying out for the probe. ('But Brother Ass, I am as clear as a bell -
a dancing bell! The problem is there,
here, nowhere!') At times while he is
talking like this I have the sudden urge to jump on his back and ride him
frantically up and down Rue Ruad, thrashing him with
a Thesaurus and crying: 'Awake, moon-calf!
Let me take you by your long silken jackass's ears and drive you at a
gallop through the waxworks of our literature, among the clicking of Box
Brownies each taking its monochrome snapshots of so-called reality! Together we will circumvent the furies and
become celebrated for our depiction of the English scene, of English life which
moves to the stately rhythm of an autopsy!
Do you hear me, Brother Ass?'
He does not
hear, he will not hear. His voice comes
to me from a great way off, as if over a faulty land-line. 'Hello! Can you hear me?' I cry, shaking the
receiver. I hear his voice faintly
against the roaring of Niagara Falls.
'What is that? Did you say that
you wished to contribute to English literature?
What, to arrange a few sprigs of parsley over this dead turbot? To blow diligently into the nostrils of this
corpse? Have you mobilized your means,
Brother Ass? Have you managed to annul
your early pot-training? Can you climb
like a cat-burglar with loosened sphincters?
But then what will you say to people whose affective life is that of
hearty Swiss hoteliers? I will tell
you. I will say it and save all you
artists the trouble. A simple word. Edelweiss. Say it in a low well-modulated voice with a
refined accent, and lubricate it with a sigh!
The whole secret is here, in a word which grows above snowline! And then, having solved the problem of ends
and means, you will have to face another just as troublesome - for if by any
chance a work of art should cross the channel it would be sure to be turned
back at Dover on the grounds of being improperly dressed! It is not easy, Brother Ass. (Perhaps it would be wisest to ask the French
for intellectual asylum?) But I see you
will not heed me. You continue in the
same unfaltering tone to describe for me the literary scene which was summed up
once and for all by the poet Gray in the line "The lowing herd winds
slowly o'er the lea"! Here I cannot
deny the truth of what you say. It is
cogent, it is prescient, it is carefully studied. But I have taken my own precautions against a
nation of mental grannies. Each of my
books bears a scarlet wrapper with the legend: NOT TO BE OPENED BY OLD WOMEN
OF EITHER SEX. (Dear D.H.L. so
wrong, so right, so great, may his ghost breathe on us all!)'
He puts
down his glass with a little click and sighing runs his fingers through his
hair. Kindness is no excuse, I tell
myself. Disinterested goodness is no
exoneration from the basic demands of the artist's life. You see, Brother Ass, there is my life and then
the life of my life. They must belong as
fruit and rind. I am not being
cruel. It is simply that I am not
indulgent!
'How lucky
not to be interested in writing' says Darley with a
touch of plaintive despair in his tone.
'I envy you'. But he does not,
really, not at all. Brother Ass, I will
tell you a short story. A team of
Chinese anthropologists arrived in Europe to study our habits and beliefs. Within three weeks they were all dead. They died of uncontrollable laughter and were
buried with full military honours! What
do you make of that? We have turned
ideas into a paying form of tourism.
Darley talks on with slanting eye buried in his
gin-sling. I reply wordlessly. In truth I am deafened by the pomposity of my
own utterances. They echo in my skull
like the reverberating eructations of Zarathustra, like the wind whistling through Montaigne's beard.
At times I mentally seize him by the shoulders and shout: 'Should
literature be a path-finder or a bromide?
Decide! Decide!'
He does not
heed, does not hear me. He has just come
from the library, from the pot-house, or from a Bach concert (the gravy still
running down his chin). We have aligned
our shoes upon the polished brass rail below the bar. The evening has begun to yawn around us with
the wearisome promise of girls to be ploughed.
And here is Brother Ass discoursing upon the book he is writing and from
which he has been thrown, as from a horse, time and time again. It is not really art which is at issue, it is
ourselves. Shall we always be content
with the ancient tinned salad of the subsidized novel? Or the tired ice-cream of poems which cry
themselves to sleep in the refrigerators of the mind? If it were possible to adopt a bolder
scansion, a racier rhythm, we might all breathe more freely! Poor Darley's books
- will they always be such painstaking descriptions of the soul-states of ...
the human omelette? (Art occurs at the
point where a form is sincerely honoured by an awakened spirit.)
'This one's
on me.'
'No, old
man, on me.'
'No. It's my turn.'
This
amiable quibble allows me just the split second I need to jot down the salient
points for my self-portrait on a rather ragged cuff. I think it covers the whole scope of the
thing with admirable succinctness. Item
one. 'Like all fat me I tend to be my
own hero.' Item two. 'Like all young men I set out to be a genius,
but mercifully laughter intervened.' Item
three. 'I always hoped to achieve the
Elephant's Eye view.' Item four. 'I realized that to become an artist one must
shed the whole complex of egotisms which led to the choice of self-expression
as the only means of growth! This
because it is impossible I call The Whole Joke!'
Darley is talking of disappointments! But Brother Ass, disenchantment is the essence
of the game. With what high hopes we
invaded London from the provinces in those old dead days, our manuscripts
bagging our suitcases. Do you recall? With what emotion we gazed over Westminster
Bridge, reciting Wordsworth's indifferent sonnet and wondering if his daughter
grew up less beautiful for being French.
The metropolis seemed to quiver with the portent of our talent, our
skill, our discernment. Walking along
the Mall we wondered who all those men were - tall hawk-featured men perched on
balconies and high places, scanning the city with heavy binoculars. What were they seeking so earnestly? Who were they - so composed and
steely-eyed? Timidly we stopped a
policeman to ask him. 'They are
publishers,' he said mildly.
Publishers! Our hearts stopped
beating. 'They are on the look-out for
new talent.' Great God! It was for us they were waiting and
watching! Then the kindly policeman
lowered his voice confidentially and said in hollow and reverent tones: 'They
are waiting for the new Trollope to be born!' Do you remember, at these words, how heavy
our suitcases suddenly felt? How our
blood slowed, our footsteps lagged?
Brother Ass, we had been bashfully thinking of a kind of illumination
such as Rimbaud dreamed of - a nagging poem which was not didactic or
expository but which infected - was not simply a rationalized intuition,
I mean, clothed in isinglass! We had
come to the wrong shop, with the wrong change!
A chill struck us as we saw the mist falling in Trafalgar Square,
coiling around us its tendrils of ectoplasm!
A million muffin-eating moralists were waiting, not for us, Brother Ass,
but for the plucky and tedious Trollope!
(If you are dissatisfied with your form, reach for the curette.) Now do you wonder if I laugh a little off-key? Do you ask yourself what has turned me into
nature's bashful little aphorist?
Disguised
as an eiron, why who should it be
But
tuft-hunting, dram-drinking, toad-eating Me!
We who are, after all, simply poor co-workers in the
psyche of our nation, what can we expect but the natural automatic rejection
from a public which resents interference?
And quite right too. There is no
injustice in the matter, for I also resent interference, Brother Ass, just as
you do. No, it is not a question of
being aggrieved, it is a question of being unlucky. Of the ten thousand reasons for my books'
unpopularity I shall only bother to give you the first, for it includes all the
others. A puritan culture's conception
of art is something which will endorse its morality and flatter its
patriotism. Nothing else. I see you raise your eyebrows. Even you, Brother Ass, realize the basic
unreality of this proposition.
Nevertheless it explains everything.
A puritan culture, argal, does not know
what art is - how can it be expected to care?
(I leave religion to the bishops - there it can do most harm!)
No
croked legge, no blered eye,
no
part deformed out of kinde
Nor yet so onolye half can be
As
is the inward suspicious minde.
The
wheel is patience on to which I'm bound.
Time
is this nothingness within the round.
Gradually
we compile our own anthologies of misfortune, our dictionaries of verbs and
nouns, our copulas and gerundives. That
symptomatic policeman of the London dusk first breathed the message to us! That kindly father-figure put the truth in a
nutshell. And here we are both in a
foreign city built of smegmatinted crystal and tinsel
whose moeurs, if we described them, would be
regarded as the fantasies of our disordered brains. Brother Ass, we have the hardest lesson of
all to learn as yet - that truth cannot be forced but must be allowed to plead
for itself! Can you hear me? The line is faulty again, your voice has gone
far away. I hear the water rushing!
Be
bleak, young man, and let who will be sprightly,
And
honour Venus if you can twice nightly.
All
things being equal you should not refuse
To
ring the slow sad cowbell of the English muse!
Art's
Truth's Nonentity made quite explicit.
If
it ain't this then what the devil is it?
Writing in
my room last night I saw an ant upon the table.
It crossed near the inkwell, and I saw it hesitate at the whiteness of a
sheet of paper on which I had written the word 'Love'; my pen faltered, the ant
turned back, and suddenly my candle guttered and went out. Clear octaves of yellow light flickered
behind my eyeballs. I had wanted to
start a sentence with the words 'Proponents of love' - but the thought had
guttered out with the candle! Later on,
just before dropping off to sleep an idea struck me. On the wall above my bed I wrote in pencil
the words: 'What is to be done when one cannot share one's own opinions about
love?' I heard my own exasperated sigh
as I was dropping off to sleep. In the
morning I awoke, clear as a perforated appendix, and wrote my own epitaph on
the mirror with my shaving-stick:
'I
never knew which side my art was buttered'
Were
the Last Words that poor Pursewarden uttered!
As for the
proponents of love, I was glad they had vanished, for they would have led me
irresistibly in the direction of sex - that bad debt which hangs upon my
compatriots' consciences. The quiddity! The
veritable nub and quiddity of this disordered world,
and the only proper field for the deployment of our talents, Brother Ass. But one true, honest unemphatic
word in this department will immediately produce one of those neighing and
whinnying acts peculiar to our native intellectuals! For them sex is either a Gold Rush or a
Retreat from Moscow. And for us? No, but if we are to be a moment serious I
will explain what I mean. (Cuckow, Cuckow, a merry note,
unpleasing to the pigskin ear.) I mean
more than they think. (The strange sad
hermaphrodite figure of the London dusk - the Guardsman waiting in Ebury Street for the titled gent.) No, quite another region of enquiry which
cannot be reached without traversing this terrain vague of the partial
spirits. Our topic, Brother Ass, is the
same, always and irremediably the same - I spell the word for you:
l-o-v-e. Four letters, each letter a
volume! The point faible
of the human psyche, the very site of the carcinoma maxima! How, since the Greeks, has it got mixed up
with the cloaca maxima? It is a complete mystery to which the Jews
hold the key unless my history is faulty.
For this gifted and troublesome race which has never known art, but
exhausted its creative processes purely in the construction of ethical systems,
has fathered on us all, literally impregnated the Western European psyche with,
the whole range of ideas based on 'race'
and sexual containment in the furtherance of the race! I hear Balthazar growling and lashing his
tail! But where the devil do these
fantasies of purified bloodstreams come from?
Am I wrong to turn to the fearful prohibitions listed in Leviticus for
an explanation of the manic depressive fury of Plymouth Brethren and a host of
other dismal sectarians? We have had our
testicles pinched for centuries by the Mosaic Law; hence the wan and pollarded look of our young girls and boys. Hence the mincing effrontery of adults willed
to perpetual adolescence! Speak, Brother
Ass! Do you heed me? If I am wrong you have only to say so! But in my conception of the four-letter word
- which I am surprised has not been blacklisted with the other three by the
English printer - I am somewhat bold and sweeping. I mean the whole bloody range - from
the little greenstick fractures of the human heart right up to its higher spiritual
connivance with the ... well, the absolute ways of nature, if you like. Surely, Brother Ass, this is the improper
study of man? The main drainage of the
soul? We could make an atlas of our
sighs!
Zeus gets Hera on her back
But
finds that she has lost the knack.
Extenuated by
excesses
She
is unable, she confesses.
Nothing
daunted Zeus, who wise is,
Tries
a dozen good disguises.
Eagle, ram, and
bull and bear
Quickly
answer Hera's prayer.
One
knows a God should be prolix,
But
... think of all those different ******!
But I break
off here in some confusion, for I see that I am in danger of not taking myself
as seriously as I should! And this is an
unpardonable offence. Moreover, I missed
your last remark which was something about the choice of a style. Yes, Brother Ass, the choice of a style is
most important; in the market garden of our domestic culture you will find
strange and terrible blooms with every stamen standing erect. Oh, to write like Ruskin! When poor Effie Grey tried to get to his bed,
he shoo'd the girl away! Oh, to write like Carlyle! Haggis of the mind. When a Scotsman comes to toun
Can Spring be far behind? No. Everything you say is truthful and full of
point; relative truth, and somewhat pointless point, but nevertheless I will
try and think about this invention of the scholiasts, for clearly style is as
important to you as matter to me.
How shall
we go about it? Keats, the word-drunk,
searched for resonance among vowel-sounds which might give him an echo of his
inner self. He sounded the empty coffin
of his early death with patient knuckles, listening to the dull resonances
given off by his certain immortality.
Byron was off-hand with English, treating it as master to servant; but
the language, being no lackey, grew up like tropic lianas between the cracks of
his verses, almost strangling the man.
He really lived, his life was truly imaginary; under the figment of the passional self there is a mage, though he himself was not
aware of the fact. Donne stopped upon
the exposed nerve, jangling the whole cranium.
Truth should make one wince, he thought.
He hurts us, fearing his own facility; despite the pain of the stopping
his verse must be chewed to rags. Shakespeare
makes all Nature hang its head. Pope, in
the anguish of method, like a constipated child, sandpapers his surfaces to
make them slippery for our feet. Great
stylists are those who are least certain of their effects. The secret lack in their matter haunts them
without knowing it! Eliot puts a cool
chloroform pad upon a spirit too tightly braced by the information it has
gathered. His honesty of measure and his
resolute bravery to return to the herdsman's axe is a challenge to us all; but
where is the smile? He induces awkward
sprains at a moment when we are trying to dance! He has chosen greyness rather than light, and
he shares his portion with Rembrandt.
Blake and Whitman are awkward brown paper parcels full of vessels
borrowed from the temple which tumble all over the place when the string
breaks. Longfellow heralds the age of
invention, for he first thought out the mechanical piano. You pedal, it recites. Lawrence was a limb of the genuine oak-tree,
with the needed girth and span. Why did
he show them that it mattered, and so make himself vulnerable to their
arrows? Auden
also always talks. He has manumitted the
colloquial....
But here,
Brother Ass, I break off; for clearly this is not higher or even lower
criticism! I do not see this sort of
fustian going down at our older universities where they are still painfully
trying to extract from art some shadow of justification for their way of
life. Surely there must be a grain of
hope, they ask anxiously? After all,
there must be a grain of hope for decent honest Christian folk in all this
rigmarole which is poured out by our tribe from generation to generation. Or is art simply the little white stick which
is given to the blind man and by the help of which he tap tap
taps along a road he cannot see but which he is certain is there? Brother Ass, it is for you to decide!
When I was
chided by Balthazar for being equivocal I replied, without a moment's conscious
thought: 'Words being what they are, people being what they are, perhaps it would
be better always to say the opposite of what one means?' Afterwards, when I reflected on this view
(which I did not know that I held) it seemed to me really eminently sage! So much for conscious thought: you see, we
Anglo-Saxons are incapable of thinking for ourselves; about,
yes. In thinking about ourselves
we put up every kind of pretty performance in every sort of voice, from cracked
Yorkshire to the hot-potato-in-the-mouth voice of the BBC. There we excel, for we see ourselves at one
remove from reality, as a subject under a microscope. This idea of objectivity is really a
flattering extension of our sense of humbug.
When you start to think for yourself it is impossible to cant
- and we live by cant! Ah! I hear you
say with a sigh, another of those English writers, eminent jailors of the
soul! How they weary and disturb
us! Very true and very sad.
Hail! Albion drear, fond home of cant!
Pursewarden sends thee greetings scant.
Thy notions he's
turned back to front
Abhorring
cant, adoring ****
But if you wish to enlarge the image turn to Europe,
the Europe which spans, say, Rabelais to de Sade. A progress from the belly-consciousness to
the head-consciousness, from flesh and food to sweet (sweet!) reason. Accompanied by all the interchanging ills
which mock us. A progress from religious
ecstasy to duodenal ulcer! (It is
probably healthier to be entirely brainless.)
But, Brother Ass, this is something which you did not take into account
when you chose to compete for the Heavyweight Belt for Artists of the
Millennium. It is too late to
complain. You thought you would somehow
sneak by the penalties without being called upon to do more than demonstrate
your skill with words. But words ...
they are only an Aeolian harp, or a cheap xylophone. Even a sealion can
learn to balance a football on its nose or to play the slide trombone in a
circus. What lies beyond...?
No, but
seriously, if you wished to be - I do not say original but merely contemporary
- you might try a four-card trick in the form of a novel; passing a common axis
through four stories, say, and dedicating each to one of the four winds of
heaven. A continuum, forsooth, embodying
not a temps retrouvé but a temps délivré. The
curvature of space itself would give you stereoscopic narrative, while human
personality seen across a continuum would perhaps become prismatic? Who can say?
I throw the idea out. I can
imagine a form which, if satisfied, might raise in human terms the problems of
causality or indeterminacy.... And nothing very recherché either. Just an ordinary Girl Meets Boy story. But tackled in this way you would not, like
most of your contemporaries, be drowsily cutting along a dotted line!
That is the
sort of question which you will one day be forced to ask yourself ('We will
never get to Mecca!' as the Tchekhov sisters remarked
in a play, the title of which I have forgotten.)
Nature
he loved, and next to nature nudes,
He
strove with every woman worth the strife,
Warming
both cheeks before the fire of life,
And
fell, doing battle with a million prudes.
Who dares
to dream of capturing the fleeting image of truth in all its gruesome
multiplicity? (No, no, let us dine
cheerfully off scraps of ancient discarded poultice and allow ourselves to be
classified by science as wet and dry bobs.)
Whose are
the figures I see before me, fishing the brackish reaches of the C. of E.?
One writes,
Brother Ass, for the spiritually starving, the castaways of the soul! They will always be a majority even when
everyone is a state-owned millionaire.
Have courage, for here you will always be master of your audience! Genius which cannot be helped should be
politely ignored.
Nor do I
mean that it is useless to master and continuously practise your craft. No. A
good writer should be able to write anything.
But a great writer is the servant of compulsions which are ordained by
the very structure of the psyche and cannot be disregarded. Where is he?
Where is he?
Come, let
us collaborate on a four- or five-decker job, shall
we? 'Why the Curate Slipped' would be a
good title. Quick, they are waiting,
those hypnogogic figures among the London minarets,
the muezzin of the trade. 'Does
Curate get girl as well as stipend, or only stipend? Read the next thousand pages and find
out!' English life in the raw - like
some pious melodrama acted by criminal churchwardens sentenced to a lifetime of
sexual misgivings! In this way we can
put a tea-cosy over reality to our mutual advantage, writing it all in the
plain prose which is only just distinguishable from galvanized iron. In this way we will put a lid on a box with
no sides! Brother Ass, let us conciliate
a world of listless curmudgeons who read to verify, not their intuitions, but
their prejudices!
I remember
old Da Capo saying one afternoon: 'Today I had five
girls. I know it will seem excessive to
you. I was not trying to prove anything
to myself. But if I said that I had
merely blended five teas to suit my palate or five tobaccos to suit my pipe,
you would not give the matter a second thought.
You would, on the contrary, admire my eclecticism, would you not?'
The
belly-furbished Kenilworth at the F.O. once told me plaintively that he had
'just dropped in' on James Joyce out of curiosity, and was surprised and pained
to find him rude, arrogant and short-tempered.
'But,' I said, 'he was paying for his privacy by giving lessons to
niggers at one and six an hour! He might
have been entitled to feel safe from ineffables like
yourself who imagine that art is something to which a good education
automatically entitles you; that it is a part of a social equipment, class
aptitude, like painting water-colours was for a Victorian gentlewoman! I can imagine his poor heart sinking as he
studied your face, with its expression of wayward condescension - the
fathomless self-esteem which one sees occasionally flit across the face of a
goldfish with a hereditary title!' After
this we never spoke, which was what I wanted.
The art of making necessary enemies!
Yet one thing I liked in him: he pronounced the word 'Civilization' as
if it had an S-bend in it.
(Brother
Ass is on symbolism now, and really talking good sense, I must admit.) Symbolism!
The abbreviation of language into poem.
the heraldic aspect of reality!
Symbolism is the great repair-outfit of the psyche, Brother Ass, the fond
de pouvoir of the soul. The sphincter-loosening music which copies
the ripples of the soul's progress through human flesh, playing in us like
electricity! (Old Parr, when he was
drunk, said once: 'Yes, but it hurts to realize!')
Of course
it does. But we know that the history of
literature is the history of laughter and pain.
The imperatives from which there is no escape are: Laugh till it
hurts, and hurt till you laugh!
The
greatest thoughts are accessible to the least of men. Why do we have to struggle so? Because understanding is a function not of
ratiocination but of the psyche's stage of growth. There, Brother Ass, is the point at which we
are at variance. No amount of explanation
can close the gap. Only
realization! One day you are going to
wake from your sleep shouting with laughter.
Ecco!
About Art I
always tell myself: while they are watching the firework display, yclept
Beauty, you must smuggle the truth into their veins like a filter-passing
virus! This is easier said than
done. How slowly one learns to embrace
the paradox! Even I am not there as yet;
nevertheless, like that little party of explorers, 'Though we were still two
days' march from the falls we suddenly heard their thunder growing up in the
distance'! Ah! those who merit it may
one day be granted a rebirth-certificate by a kindly Government
Department. This will entitle them to
receive everything free of charge - a prize reserved for those who want nothing. Celestial economics, about which Lenin is
strangely silent! Ah! the gaunt faces of
the English muses! Pale distressed
gentlewomen in smocks and beads, dispensing tea and drop-scones to the unwary!
The foxy
faces
Of
Edwardian Graces
Horse-faces
full of charm
With
strings of beads
And
a packet of seeds
And
an ape-tuft under each arm!
Society! Let us complicate existence to the point of
drudgery so that it acts as a drug against reality. Unfair!
Unfair! But, my dear Brother Ass,
the sort of book I have in mind will be characterized by the desired quality
which will make us rich and famous: it will be characterized by a total lack
of codpiece!
When I want
to infuriate Balthazar I say: 'Now if the Jews would only assimilate they would
give us a valuable lead in the matter of breaking down puritanism
everywhere. For they are the
licence-holders and patentees of the closed system, the ethical response! Even our absurd food prohibitions and
inhibitions are copied from their melancholy priest-ridden rigmarole about
flesh and fowl. Aye! We artists are not interested in policies but
in values - this is our field of battle!
If once we could loosen up, relax the terrible grip of the so-called
Kingdom of Heaven which has made the earth such a blood-soaked place, we might
rediscover in sex the key to a metaphysical search which is our raison
d'être here below! If the closed
system and the moral exclusiveness on divine right were relaxed a little what
could we not do?' What indeed? But the good Balthazar smokes his Lakadif gloomily and shakes his shaggy head. I think of the black velvety sighs of Juliet
and fall silent. I think of the soft
white knosps - unopened flower-shapes - which
decorate the tombs of Moslem women! The
slack, soft insipid mansuetude of these females of
the mind! No, clearly my history is
pretty weak. Islam also libs as the Pope does.
Brother
Ass, let us trace the progress of the European artist from problem-child to
case-history, from case-history to cry-baby!
He has kept the psyche of Europe alive by his ability to be wrong, by
his continual cowardice - this is his function!
Cry-baby of the Western World!
Cry-babies of the world unite!
But let me hasten to add, lest this sounds cynical or despairing, that I
am full of hope. For always, at every
moment of time, there is a chance that the artist will stumble upon what I can
only call the Great Inkling! Whenever
this happens he is at once free to enjoy his fecundating rôle;
but it can never really happen as fully and completely as it deserves until the
miracle comes about - the miracle of Pursewarden's
Ideal Commonwealth! Yes, I believe in
this miracle. Our very existence as
artists affirms it! It is the act of
yea-saying about which the old poet of the city speaks in a poem you once
showed me in translation. [C.P. Cavafy] The fact of an artist being born affirms and
reaffirms this in every generation. The
miracle is there, on ice so to speak.
One fine day it will blossom: then the artist suddenly grows up and accepts
the full responsibility for his origins in the people, and when simultaneously
the people recognize his peculiar significance and value, and greet him as the
unborn child in themselves, the infant Joy!
I am certain it will come. At the
moment they are like wrestlers nervously circling one another, looking for the
hold. But when it comes, this great
blinding second of illumination - only then shall we be able to dispense with
hierarchy as a social form. The new
society - so different from anything we can imagine now - will be born around
the small strict white temple of the Infant Joy! Men and women will group themselves around
it, the proptoplasmic growth of the village, the
town, the capital! Nothing stands in the
way of this Ideal Commonwealth, save that in every generation the vanity and
laziness of the artist has always matched the self-indulgent blindness of the
people. But prepare, prepare! It is on the way. It is here, there, nowhere!
The great
schools of love will arise, and sensual and intellectual knowledge will draw
their impetus from each other. The human
animal will be uncaged, all his dirty cultural straw
and coprolitic refuge of belief cleaned out. And the human spirit, radiating light and
laughter, will softly tread the green grass like a dancer; will emerge to
cohabit with the time-forms and give children to the world of the elementaries - undines and salamanders, sylphs and sylvestres, Gnomi and Vulcani, angels and gnomes.
Yes, to
extend the range of physical sensuality to embrace mathematics and theology: to
nourish, not to stunt, the intuitions.
For culture means sex, the root-knowledge, and where the faculty is
derailed or crippled, its derivatives like religion come up dwarfed or contorted
- instead of the emblematic mystic rose you get Judaic cauliflowers like Morons
or Vegetarians, instead of artists you get cry-babies, instead of philosophy
semantics.
The sexual
and the creative energy go hand in hand.
They convert into one another - the solar sexual and the lunar spiritual
holding an eternal dialogue. They ride
the spiral of time together. They
embrace the whole of the human motive.
The truth is only to be found in our own entrails - the truth of Time.
'Copulation
is the lyric of the mob!' Aye, and also the
university of the soul: but a university at present without endowments, without
books or even students. No, there are a
few.
How
wonderful the death-struggle of Lawrence: to realize his sexual nature fully,
to break free from the manacles of the Old Testament; flashing down the
firmament like a great white struggling man-fish, the last Christian
martyr. His struggle is ours - to rescue
Jesus from Moses. For a brief moment it
looked possible, but St Paul restored the balance and the iron handcuffs of the
Judaic prison closed about the growing soul forever. Yet in The Man Who Died he tells us
plainly what must be, what the reawakening of Jesus should have meant - the
true birth of free man. Where is
he? What has happened to him? Will he ever come?
My spirit
trembles with joy as I contemplate this city of light which a divine accident
might create before our very eyes at any moment! Here art will find its true form and place,
and the artist can play like a fountain without contention, without even trying. For I see art more and more clearly as a sort
of manuring of the psyche. It has no intention, that is to say no theology. By nourishing the psyche, by dunging it up,
it helps it to find its own level, like water.
That level is an original innocence - who invented the perversion of
Original Sin, that filthy obscenity of the West? Art, like a skilled masseur on a
playing-field, is always standing by to help deal with casualties; and just as
a masseur does, its ministrations ease up the tensions of the psyche's
musculature. That is why it always goes
for the sore places, its fingers pressing upon the knotted muscles, the tendon
afflicted with cramp - the sins, perversions, displeasing points which we are
reluctant to accept. Revealing them with
its harsh kindness it unravels the tensions, relaxes the psyche. The other part of the work, if there is any
other work, must belong to religion. Art
is the purifying factor merely. It
predicates nothing. It is the handmaid
of silent content, essential only to joy and to love! These strange beliefs, Brother Ass, you will
find lurking under my mordant humours, which may be described simply as a
technique of therapy. As Balthazar says:
'A good doctor, and in a special sense the psychologist, makes it quite
deliberately, slightly harder for the patient to recover too easily. You do this to see if his psyche has any real
bounce in it, for the secret of healing is in the patient and not the doctor. The only measure is the reaction!'
I was born
under Jupiter, Hero of the Comic Mode!
My poems, like soft music invading the encumbered senses of young lovers
left alone at night.... What was I saying?
Yes, the best thing to do with a great truth, as Rabelais discovered, is
to bury it in a mountain of follies where it can comfortably wait for the picks
and shovels of the elect.
Between
infinity and eternity stretches the thin hard tightrope human beings must walk,
joined at the waist! Do not let these unamiable propositions dismay you, Brother Ass. They are written down in pure joy,
uncontaminated by a desire to preach! I
am really writing for an audience of the blind - but aren't we all? Good art points, like a man too ill to speak,
like a baby! But if instead of following
the direction it indicates you take it for a thing in itself, having some sort
of absolute value, or as a thesis upon something which can be paraphrased,
surely you miss the point; you lose yourself at once among the barren
abstractions of the critic? Try to tell
yourself that its fundamental object was only to invoke the ultimate healing
silence - and that the symbolism contained in form and pattern is only a frame
of reference through which, as in a mirror, one may glimpse the idea of a
universe at rest, a universe in love with itself. Then like a babe in arms you will 'milk the
universe at every breath'! We must learn
to read between the lines, between the lives.
Liza used to say: 'But its very perfection makes one sure
that it will come to an end.' She was
right; but women will not accept time and the dictates of the death-divining
second. They do not see that a
civilization is simply a great metaphor which describes the aspirations of the
individual soul in collective form - as perhaps a novel or a poem might
do. The struggle is always for greater
consciousness. But alas! Civilizations die in the measure that they
become conscious of themselves. They
realize, they lose heart, the propulsion of the unconscious motive is no longer
there. Desperately they begin to copy
themselves in the mirror. It is no
use. But surely there is a catch in all
this? Yes, Time is the catch! Space is a concrete idea, but Time is
abstract. In the scar tissue of Proust's great poem you see that so clearly; his work is
the great academy of the time-consciousness.
But being unwilling to mobilize the meaning of time he was driven to
fall back on memory, the ancestor of hope!
Ah! but
being a Jew he had hope - and with Hope comes the irresistible desire to
meddle. Now we Celts mate with despair
out of which alone grows laughter and the desperate romance of the eternally
hopeless. We hunt the unattainable, and
for us there is only a search unending.
For him it
would mean nothing, my phase 'the prolongation of childhood into art'. Brother Ass, the diving-board, the trapeze,
lie just to the eastward of this position!
A leap through the firmament to a new status - only don't miss the ring!
Why for
example don't they recognize in Jesus the great Ironist that he is, the
comedian? I am sure that two-thirds of
the Beatitudes are jokes or squibs in the manner of Chuang
Tzu. Generations of mystagogues
and pedants have lost the sense. I am
sure of it however because he must have known that Truth disappears with the
telling of it. It can only be conveyed, not
stated; irony alone is the weapon for such a task.
Or let us
turn to another aspect of the thing; it was you, just a moment ago, who
mentioned our poverty of observation in all that concerns each other - the
limitations of sight itself. Bravely
spoken! But translated spiritually you
get the picture of a man walking about the house, hunting for the spectacles
which are on his forehead. To see is to
imagine! And what, Brother Ass, could be
a better illustration than your manner of seeing Justine, fitfully lit up in
the electric signs of the imagination?
It is not the same woman evidently who set about besieging me and who
was finally driven off by my sardonic laughter.
What you saw as soft and appealing in her seemed to me a specially
calculated hardness, not which she invented, but which you evoked in her. All that throaty chatter, the compulsion to
exteriorize hysteria, reminded me of a feverish patient plucking at a
sheet! The violent necessity to
incriminate life, to explain her soul-states, reminded me of a mendicant
soliciting pity by a nice exhibition of sores.
Mentally she always had me scratching myself! Yet there was much to admire in her and I
indulged my curiosity in exploring the outlines of her character with some
sympathy - the configurations of an unhappiness which was genuine, though it
always smelt of grease paint! The child,
for example!
'I found
it, of course. Or rather Mnemjian did. In a
brothel. It died from something, perhaps
meningitis. Darley
and Nessim came and dragged me away. All of a sudden I realized that I could not
bear to find it; all the time I hunted I lived on the hope of finding it. But this thing, once dead, seemed suddenly to
deprive me of all purpose. I recognized
it, but my inner mind kept crying out that it was not true, refusing to let me
recognize it, even though I already had consciously done so!'
The mixture
of conflicting emotions was so interesting that I jotted them down in my
notebook between a poem and a recipe for angel bread which I got from El Kalef. Tabulated
thus:
1. Relief at end of search.
2. Despair at end of search; no further motive force in life.
3. Horror at death.
4. Relief at death. What
future possible for it?
5. Intense shame (don't understand this).
6. Sudden desire to continue search uselessly rather than admit
truth.
7. Preferred to continue to feed on false hopes!
A
bewildering collection of fragments to leave among the analects of a moribund
poet! But here was the point I was
trying to make. She said: 'Of course
neither Nessim nor Darley
noticed anything. Men are so stupid,
they never do. I would have been able to
forget it even perhaps, and dream that I had never really discovered it, but
for Mnemjian, who wanted the reward, and was so
convinced of the truth of his case that he made a great row. There was some talk of an autopsy by
Balthazar. I was foolish enough to go to
his clinic and offer to bribe him to say it was not my child. He was pretty astonished. I wanted him to deny a truth which I so perfectly
knew to be true, so that I should not have to change my outlook. I would not be deprived of my sorrow, if you
like; I wanted it to go on - to go on passionately searching for what I did not
dare to find. I even frightened Nessim and incurred his suspicions with my antics over his
private safe. So the matter passed off,
and for a long time I still went on automatically searching until underneath I
could stand the strain of the truth and come to terms with it. I see it so clearly, the divan, the
tenement.'
Here she
put on her most beautiful expression, which was one of intense sadness, and put
her hands upon her breasts. Shall I tell
you something? I suspected her of
lying; it was an unworthy thought but then ... I am an unworthy person.
I: 'Have you ever been back to the place?
She: 'No. I
have often wanted to, but did not dare.'
She shuddered a little. 'In my
memory I have become attached to that old divan. It must be knocking about somewhere. You see, I am still half convinced it was all
a dream.'
At once I
took up my pipe, violin and deerstalker like a veritable Sherlock. I have always been an X-marks-the-spot
man. 'Let us go and revisit it,' I said
briskly. At the worst, I thought, such a
visitation would be cathartic. It was in
fact a supremely practical thing to suggest, and to my surprise she at once
rose and put on her coat. We walked
silently down through the western edges of the town, arm in arm.
There was
some kind of festival going on in the Arab town which was blazing with electric
light and flags. Motionless sea, small
high clouds, and a moon like a disapproving archimandrite of another
faith. Smell of fish, cardamon seed and frying entrails packed with cummin and garlic.
The air was full of the noise of mandolines scratching
their little souls out on the night, as if afflicted with fleas - scratching
until the blood came on the lice-intoxicated night! The air was heavy. Each breath invisibly perforated it. You felt it come in and out of the lungs as
if in a leather bellows. Eheu! It was grisly
all that light and noise, I thought. And
they talk of the romance of the East!
Give me the Metropole at Brighton any
day! We traversed this sector of light
with quick deliberate step. She walked
unerringly, head bent, deep in thought.
Then gradually the streets grew darker, faded into the violet of
darkness, became narrower, twisted and turned.
At last we came to a great empty space with starlight. A dim great barrack of a building. She moved slowly now, with less certainty,
hunting for a door. In a whisper she
said 'This place is run by old Mettrawi. He is bedridden. The door is always open. But he hears everything from his bed. Take my hand.' I was never a great fire-eater and I must
confess to a certain uneasiness as we walked into this bandage of total
blackness. Her hand was firm and cool,
her voice precise, unmarked by any range of emphasis, betraying neither
excitement nor fear. I thought I heard
the scurrying of immense rats in the rotten structure around me, the very
rafters of night itself. (Once in a
thunderstorm among the ruins I had seen their fat wet glittering bodies flash
here and there as they feasted on garbage.)
'Please God, remember that even though I am an English poet I do not
deserve to be eaten by rats,' I prayed silently. We had started to walk down a long corridor
of blackness with the rotten wooden boards creaking under us; here and there
was one missing, and I wondered if we were not walking over the bottomless pit
itself! The air smelt of wet ashes and
that unmistakable odour of black flesh when it is sweating. It is quite different from white flesh. It is dense, foetid, like the lion's cage at
the Zoo. The Darkness itself was
sweating - and why not? The Darkness
must wear Othello's skin. Always a
timorous fellow, I suddenly wanted to go to the lavatory but I crushed the
thought like a blackbeetle. Let my bladder wait. On we went, and round two sides of a ...
piece of darkness floored with rotten boards.
Then suddenly she whispered: 'I think we are there!' and pushed open a
door upon another piece of impenetrable darkness. But it was a room of some size, for the air
was cool. One felt the space though one
could see nothing whatsoever. We both
inhaled deeply.
'Yes,' she
whispered thoughtfully and, groping in her velvet handbag for a box of matches,
hesitantly struck one. It was a tall
room, so tall that it was roofed by darkness despite the yellow flapping of the
match-flame; one huge shattered window faintly reflected sunlight. The walls were of verdigris,
the plaster peeling everywhere, and their only decoration was the imprint of
little blue hands which ran round the four walls in a haphazard pattern. As if a lot of pygmies had gone mad with blue
paint and then galloped all over the walls standing on their hands! To the left, a little off centre, reposed a
large gloomy divan, floating upon the gloom like a Viking catafalque; it was a
twice-chewed relic of some Ottoman calif, riddled
with holes. The match went out. 'There it is,' she said and, putting the box
into my hand, she left my side. When I
lit up again she was sitting beside the divan with her cheek resting upon it,
softly stroking it with the palm of her hand.
She was completely composed. She
stroked it with a calm voluptuous gesture and then crossed her paws on it,
reminding me of a lioness sitting astride its lunch. The moment had a kind of weird tension, but
this was not reflected on her face.
(Human beings are like pipe-organs, I thought. You pull out a stop marked 'Lover' or
'Mother' and the requisite emotions are unleashed - tears or sighs or
endearments. Sometimes I try and think of us all as habit-patterns
rather than human beings. I mean, wasn't
the idea of the individual soul grafted on us by the Greeks in the wild hope
that, by its sheer beauty, it would 'take' - as we say of vaccination? That we might grow up to the size of the
concept and grow the heavenly flame in each of our hearts? Has it taken or hasn't it? Who can say?
Some of us still have one, but how vestigial it seems. Perhaps....)
'They have
heard us.'
Somewhere
in the darkness there was a thin snarl of voice, and the silence became
suddenly padded out with the scamper of feet upon rotted woodwork. In the expiring flicker of the match I saw,
as if somewhere very far away, a bar of light - like a distant furnace door
opening in heaven. And voices now, the
voices of ants! The children came
through a sort of hatch or trapdoor made of darkness, in their cotton
nightgowns, absurdly faded. With rings
on their fingers and bells on their toes.
She shall have music wherever she goes!
One of them carried a waxlight floating in a
saucer. They twanged nasally about us,
interrogating our needs with blasting frankness - but they were surprised to
see Justine sitting beside the Viking catafalque, her head (now smiling) half
turned towards them.
'I think we
should leave,' I said in a low voice, for they smelt dreadfully, these tiny
apparitions, and they showed a disagreeable tendency to twine their skinny arms
about my waist as they wheedled and intoned.
But Justine turned to one and said: 'Bring the light here, where wee can
all see.' And when the light was brought
she suddenly turned herself, crossed her legs under her, and in the high
ringing tone of the street storyteller she intoned: 'Now gather about me, all
ye blessed of Allah, and hear the wonders of the story I shall tell you.' The effect was electric; they settled about
her like a pattern of dead leaves in a wind, crowding up close together. Some even climbed on to the old divan,
chuckling and nudging with delight. And
in the same rich triumphant voice, saturated with unshed tears, Justine began again
in the voice of the professional story-teller: 'Ah, listen to me, all ye true
believers, and I will unfold to you the story of Yuna
and Aziz, of their great many-petalled
love, and of the mishaps which befell them from the doing of Abu Ali Saraq el-Maza. In
those days of the great Califate, when many heads
fell and armies marched....'
It was a
wild sort of poetry for the place and the time - the little circle of wizened
faces, the divan, the flopping light; and the strangely captivating lilt of the
Arabic with its heavy damascened imagery, the thick brocade of alliterative repetitions,
the nasal twanging accents, gave it a laic splendour which brought tears to my
eyes - gluttonous tears! It was such a
rich diet for the soul! It made me aware
how thin the fare is which we moderns supply to our hungry readers. The epic contours, that is what her story
had! I was envious. How rich these beggar children were. And I was envious, too, of her audience. Talk of suspended judgement! They sank into the imagery of her story like
plummets. One saw, creeping out like
mice, their true souls - creeping out upon those painted masks in little
expressions of wonder, suspense and joy.
In that yellow gloaming they were expressions of a terrible truth. You saw how they would be in middle age - the
witch, the good wife, the gossip, the shrew.
The poetry had stripped them to the bone and left only their natural
selves to flower thus in expressions faithfully portraying their tiny stunted
spirits!
How could I
help but admire her for giving me one of the most significant and memorable
moments of a writer's life? I put my arm
about her shoulders and sat, as rapt as any of them, following the long sinuous
curves of the immortal story as it unfolded before our eyes.
They could
hardly bear to part with us when at last the story came to an end. They clung to her, pleading for more. Some picked the hem of her skirt and kissed
it in an agony of pleading. 'There is no
time,' she said, smiling calmly. 'But I
will come again, my little ones.' Then
hardly heeded the money she distributed, but thronged after us along the dark
corridors to the blackness of the square.
At the corner I looked back but could only see the flicker of
shadows. They said farewell in voices of
heartbreaking sweetness. We talked in
deep contented silence across the shattered, time-corrupted town until we
reached the cool seafront; and stood a long time leaning upon the cold stone
piers above the sea, smoking and saying nothing! At last she turned to me a face of tremendous
weariness and whispered: 'Take me home, now.
I'm dead tired.' And so we hailed
a pottering gharry and swung along the Corniche as
sedately as bankers after a congress. 'I
suppose we are all hunting for the secrets of growth!' was all she said as we
parted.
It was a
strange remark to make at parting. I
watched her walk wearily up the steps to the great house groping for the
key. I still felt drunk with the story
of Yuna and Aziz!
Brother
Ass, it is a pity that you will never have a chance to read all this tedious
rigmarole; it would amuse me to study your puzzled expression as you did
so. Why should the artist always be
trying to saturate the world with his own anguish, you asked me once. Why indeed?
I will give you another phrase: emotional gongorism! I have always been good at polite phrase-making.
Loneliness
and desire,
Lord
of the Flies,
Are
thy unholy empire and
The
self's inmost surprise!
Come to these
arms, my dear old Dutch
And
firmly bar the door
I could not love
thee, dear, so much
Loved
I not ******** more!
And later, aimlessly
walking, who should I encounter but the slightly titubating
Pombal just back from the Casino with a chamber-pot
full of paper money and a raging thirst for a last beaker of champagne which we
took together at the Étoile. It was strange that I had no taste for a girl
that night; somehow Yuna and Aziz
had barred the way. Instead I struggled
back to Mount Vulture with a bottle in my mackintosh pocket, to confront once
more the ill-starred pages of my book which, twenty years from now, will be the
cause of many a thrashing among the lower forms of our schools. It seemed a disastrous sort of gift to be
offering to the generations as yet unborn; I would rather have left them
something like Yuna and Aziz,
but it hasn't been possible since Chaucer; the sophistication of the laic
audience is perhaps to blame? The
thought of all those smarting little bottoms made me close my notebooks with a
series of ill-tempered snaps.
In my sleep
I dug up a mummy with poppy-coloured lips, dressed in the long white wedding
dress of the Arab sugar-dolls. She
smiled but would not awake, though I kissed her and talked to her
persuasively. Once her eyes half opened;
but they closed again and she lapsed back into smiling sleep. I whispered her name which was Yuna, but which had unaccountably become Liza. And as it was
no use I interred her once more among the shifting dunes where (the wind-shapes
were changing fast) there would be no trace remaining of the spot. At dawn I woke early and took a gharry down
to the Rushdi beach to cleanse myself in the
dawn-sea. There was not a soul about at
that time save Clea, who was on the far beach in a
blue bathing-costume, here marvellous hair swinging about her like a blonde Botticelli. I waved
and she waved back, but showed no inclination to come and talk which made me
grateful. We lay, a thousand yards
apart, smoking and wet as seals. I
thought for an instant of the lovely burnt coffee of her summer flesh, with the
little hairs on her temples bleached to ash.
I inhaled her metaphorically, like a whiff of roasting coffee, dreaming
of the white thighs with those small blue veins in them! Well, well ... she would have been worth
taking trouble over had she not been so beautiful. That brilliant glance exposed everything and
forced me to take shelter from her.
One could
hardly ask her to bandage them in order to be made love to! And yet ... like the black silk stockings
some men insist on! Two sentences ending
with a preposition! What is poor Pursewarden coming to?
His prose
created grievous lusts
Among
the middle classes
His propositions
were decried
As
dangerous for the masses
His major works
were classified
Among
the noxious gases
England
awake!
Brother
Ass, the so-called act of living is really an act of the imagination. The world - which we always visualize as 'the
outside' World - yields only to self-exploration! Faced by this cruel, yet necessary paradox,
the poet finds himself growing gills and a tail, the better to swim against the
currents of unenlightenment. What appears to be perhaps an arbitrary act
of violence is precisely the opposite, for by reversing process in this way, he
united the rushing, heedless stream of humanity to the still, tranquil,
motionless, odourless, tasteless plenum from which its own motive essence is
derived. (Yes, but it hurts to
realize!) If he were to abandon his rôle all hope of gaining a purchase on the slippery surface
of reality would be lost, and everything in nature would disappear! But this act, the poetic act, will cease to
be necessary when everyone can perform it for himself. What hinders them, you ask? Well, we are all naturally afraid to
surrender our own pitifully rationalized morality - and the poetic jump I'm
predicating lies the other side of it.
It is only terrifying because we refuse to recognize in ourselves the
horrible gargoyles which decorate the totem poles of our churches - murderers,
liars, adulterers and so on. (Once
recognized, these papier-mâché masks fade.)
Whoever makes this enigmatic leap into the heraldic reality of the
poetic life discovers that truth has its own built-in morality! There is no need to wear a truss any
longer. Inside the penumbra of this sort
of truth morality can be disregarded because it is a donnée,
a part of the thing, and not simply a brake, an inhibition. It is there to be lived out and not thought
out! Ah, Brother Ass, this will seem a
far cry to the 'purely literary' preoccupations which beset you; yet unless you
tackle this corner of the field with your sickle you will never reap the
harvest in yourself, and so fulfil your true function here below.
But how?
you ask my plaintively. And truly here
you have me by the short hairs, for the thing operates differently with each
one of us. I am only suggesting that you
have not become desperate enough, determined enough. Somewhere at the heart of things you are
still lazy of spirit. But then, why
struggle? If it is to happen to you it
will happen of its own accord. You may
be quite right to hang about like this, waiting. I was too proud. I felt I must take it by the horns, this
vital question of my birthright. For me
it was grounded in an act of will. So
for people like me I would say: 'Force the lock, batter down the door. Outface, defy, disprove the Oracle in order
to become the poet, the darer!'
But I am
aware the test may come under any guise, perhaps even in the physical world by
a blow between the eyes or a few lines scribbled in pencil on the back of an
envelope left in a café. The heraldic
reality can strike from any point, above or below: it is not particular. But without it the enigma will remain. You may travel round the world and colonize
the ends of the earth with your lines and yet never hear the singing yourself.
* *
* * *