The Black Book
Lawrence Durrell
“My dear fellow, you must come down to my rooms on Tuesday and meet Gracie. I’m giving a little party for her. You must come. I’m sure you will be great friends. She spits blood.”
Just as it would be hard to visit the Gaudí cathedral and write about stone, it’s impossible for me to write an academic introduction to The Black Book. Not that it shouldn’t be dissected—such a rich source of literary samples, it should—but I can’t get off the ride long enough to do it. If I knew where the button was to stop this book, I would try it. As it is, I can only sketch you a door, really a floodgate, to the most exhilarating surge of language, style, and sordid English manners you might ever see in literature.
I hope it doesn’t stain us to say, and I hope I don’t speak only for myself, that if we’ve opened this book we’re likely to have spent at least one teeming night trading starlight for squalor, or at least one romantic liaison failing badly to harmonise the truths of the flesh with songs about honey. That taste of joyful degradation is why the book you are about to enter was banned in Britain for nearly four decades; surely not helped by the glee with which Lawrence Durrell romped through such unspeakables of his time.
His time is the 1930’s, a pick-and-mix of modernism, surrealism and foxtrot; but you should barely notice, I say these characters and themes have only now found their time. Degradation is rich with foibles, few human things shine so colourfully as those seen from the back rooms of the mind; and it was this lens in Durrell’s hands that gave birth to his authorial voice. In 1959 he called The Black Book: ‘A two-fisted attack on literature by an angry young man of the thirties,’ adding: ‘With all its imperfections lying heavy on its head, I can’t help being attached to it because in the writing of it I first heard the sound of my own voice, lame and halting perhaps, but nevertheless my very own.’
Durrell was already a poet, you will feel it in these pages, and this wasn’t his first novel; but it was the novel that brought him out, and you can witness it happening first hand. The Black Book is a young work, by a twenty-four year old, that’s its essence; but if I take as a point of reference my twenty-fourth, smoking hash and watching the sea, feeling it quite important to do because I had thoughts that felt like art—then to find anyone near the subjects in this book who could write them down is remarkable in itself. As for the calibre of the work, the possible source of its energy…
‘It is a fancy of mine that each of us contains many lives, potential lives. They are laid up inside us, shall we say, like so many rows of shining metals—railway lines. Riding along one set toward the terminus, we can be aware of those other lines, alongside us, on which we might have travelled—on which we might yet travel if only we had the strength to change.’
… the man also glistens through these pages, and I don’t think it will hurt the reading to know where he felt he was. Lawrence Durrell had at best an ambivalent link with Britain, famously calling its drear setting and lack of perceived culture ‘The English death’. Born in British India, he was sent over to school as a child, staying through his teens and eventually marrying in 1935; he left England that same year and moved to the island of Corfu, where he began to write The Black Book. The work alternates two narrative voices—one Lawrence Lucifer on Corfu, the higher voice, a stream of lucid, poetic imagery; and one Death Gregory in London, sharing a hotel with a clique of wretched intellectuals in the grip of debauch. Between them they seem to describe Durrell’s struggle to escape the emasculation he felt in Britain, his spiritual flight to the fertility of the Greek isles. However it is, Durrell here seems to play out the hope and loathing of the year he left Blighty, and we can only laugh to imagine the impact such an outburst had at the time it was written. While it took thirty-six years for The Black Book to be published in Britain, it was nonetheless published: first in Paris by the Obelisk Press in 1938, and much later in the United States, where poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth wrote in 1957: ‘Nobody who ever read it ever quite got over it.’ It wasn’t until 1973, a dozen years after the successful defence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover against charges of obscenity, that The Black Book was made available to British readers. Of the influences informing the work, we need only acknowledge the one Durrell himself might name: his friend Henry Miller, instrumental not only through his writing, which peaked at that time—but also in feeding Durrell some of the surrealist material woven into the work, and much later in helping to have it published.
The words in this book paint a thousand lurid pictures, some clearer than you might hope to see. As a reader you will feel the passion for yourself, as a writer I can attest to the sense of flying, of sprinting on limbs that hardly touch the ground, we can picture Durrell in that state. But let’s be clear: a book like this can only succeed by being brilliant, no other place in the spectrum will save it—and The Black Book is.
I commend the ride to you with nothing more than this counsel, even starting to sound like the thing myself; and in returning from Durrell’s world to ours, by way of a bridge to everything it can throw up—I leave you with The Black Book itself, knowing it speaks for today:
‘Everything is plausible here, because nothing is real.’
“Mos gus yod na
Khyl so od tung.”
(Tibetan Proverb)
“Where there is veneration,
Even a dog’s tooth emits light.”
PREFACE [1959]
This novel—after twenty-odd years—still has a special importance for me and may yet leave its mark upon the reader who can recognize it for what it is: a two-fisted attack on literature by an angry young man of the thirties.… With all its imperfections lying heavy on its head, I can’t help being attached to it because in the writing of it I first heard the sound of my own voice, lame and halting perhaps, but nevertheless my very own. This is an experience no artist ever forgets—the birth cry of a newly born baby of letters, the genuine article. The Black Book was truly an agon for me, a savage battle conducted in the interests of self-discovery. It built itself out of a long period of despair and frustration during which I knew that my work, though well contrived, was really derivative. It seemed to me that I would never discover myself, my private voice and vision. At the age of twenty-four things usually look black to one!
The very quality of this despair drove me to try and break the mummy wrappings—the cultural swaddling clothes which I symbolized here as “the English Death”; simply in order to see whether there was anything inside me worth expressing. I wanted to break free, to try my hand at a free book.…
I wrestled with the manuscript for over a year, until I was quite exhausted; like the youths of my time, I was able to take courage from my elders. Molly Bloom and Lady Chatterley had already opened a way toward self-explorations of a depth and honesty inconceivable to the writer of Hardy’s age or Shaw’s; Henry Miller’s Tropics had just come over the horizon. The reader will discern the influence of Tropic of Cancer in many passages of The Black Book.
I had no thought of publication; in fact I sent the only typescript of the novel to Henry Miller, asking for his opinion on it, and telling him to pitch the text into the Seine when he had read it. This he would not do, and it was due to his encouragement that the book was later published in Paris in a private edition. To my great astonishment and delight I found that others beside myself had heard the sound of my real voice. It was a turning point in my life as a writer to receive the praise of artists who at that time seemed so remote and out of reach—Eliot and Miller and Cyril Connolly. I had not hoped for such encouragement when I embarked on the adventure of writing.
Of course, the book is only a savage charcoal sketch of spiritual and sexual etiolation, but it is not lacking in a ce
rtain authority of its own despite the violence of its execution. Underneath the phantasmagoria real values are discussed, real problems of the anglo-saxon psyche articulated and canvassed. All this has nothing to do, of course, with purely literary merit, which is not for me to discuss. But The Black Book staked a slender claim for me and encouraged me to believe that I was perhaps a real writer, and not just a word spinner of skill.
I realized that the crudity and savagery of the book in many places would make its publication in England difficult. I did not wish for notoriety, and was content simply to have heard my own voice. I knew that a sensitive reader would find that the very excesses of the writing were an organic part of the experience described; and indeed a friendly critic of the book once wrote to me: “Yes, I admit that I was shocked and disgusted here and there, but I read it without prejudice and in the light of the central intention. The crudities match and belong. I have never understood why writers should not be regarded by the reader as enjoying much the same rights as doctors. You do not suspect indecency in a doctor who asks you to strip in order to examine you. Why shouldn’t you give the writer the same benefit of the doubt? As for your novel—you can’t have a birth without a good deal of mess and blood. The labour pains, the groans, sounded quite genuine to me; I suppose because I regard art as a serious business, and spiritual birth as something like the analogy of physical. No, you are not pretending! Hence the impact of the book, I think.”
LAWRENCE DURRELL
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO
BOOK THREE
BOOK ONE
The agon, then. It begins. Today there is a gale blowing up from the Levant. The morning came like a yellow fog along a roll of developing film. From Bivarie, across the foaming channel I can see from the window, the river god has sent us his offering: mud, in a solid tawny line across the bay. The wind has scooped out the very bowels of the potamus across the way, like a mammoth evacuation, and bowled it across at us. The fishermen complain that they cannot see the fish any more to spear them. Well, the rufous sea scorpion and the octopus are safe from their carbide and tridents. Deep-water life utterly shut off, momentously obscure behind the membrane of mud. The winter Ionian has lapsed back into it original secrecy.
The slither of rain along the roof. It bubbles in along the chinks of the windows. It boils among the rock pools. Today, at dawn (for we could not sleep because of the thunder), the girl put on the gramophone in the gloom, and the competition of Bach strings, resinous and cordial as only gut and wood can be, climbed out along the murky panes. While the sea pushed up its shafts and coils under the house, we lay there in bed, dark as any dungeon, and mourned the loss of the Mediterranean. Lost, all lost; the fruiting of green figs, apricots. Lost the grapes, black, yellow, and dusky. Even the ones like pale nipples, delicately freckled and melodious, are forgotten in this morning, where our one reality is the Levantine wind, musty with the smell of Arabia, stirring the bay into a muddy broth. This is the winter of our discontent.
The air is full of the fine dust of the desert tombs—the Arabic idiom of death—and the panic world is quite done for, quite used up and lost. The cypresses are made of coal: their forms stipple the landscape, like heavy black brush strokes on a water colour whose vitality has been rinsed from it. Yes. Winter, winter everywhere in these nude, enervate symbols.
This is the day I have chosen to begin this writing, because today we are dead among the dead; and this is an agon for the dead, a chronicle for the living. There is no other way to put it. There is a correspondence between the present, this numbness, inertia, and that past reality of a death, whose meaning is symbolic, mythical, but real also in its symptom. As if, lying here, in this mimic death at morning, we were re-creating a bit from the past: a crumb of the death we have escaped. Yes, even though the wild ducks fall in a tangle of wings among the marshes of Bivarie, and all the elements are out of gear, out of control; even though the sea flogs the tough black button of rock on which this, our house, is built. The correspondence of deadness with deadness is complete.
I could not have begun this act in the summer, for example, because in the summer we sit along under the wall on our haunches, and listen to the figs bursting. The sun dries up what is fluid of agony in us, laps us in a carapace of heat, so that all we know is nothing, sunblack, Egyptian nothing. The membrane gathers over our eyes as they close, and only the black bubbles of torpor cross and recross the consciousness, as if born from lava. The milk of sentiment curdles in the veins; an astringency withers humanity; hair freezes along the scalp, or withers to soft gold shavings along the thighs. The very nipples turn hard and black on the breasts of women, while the figs roast. Teats like dark plugs of wood for the fisherman’s sons.
Well, one cannot help thinking this in such a dawn, when the wind is filling the room with the evocative smells of the dust, and the nascent fust of the tombs: the stale explosions of ancient life breathed coldly on us like leper’s breath. You are so pale and done for in the morning. Pale, the face on the pillow, as ancestral as effigies, while the rotten smell of the crusades blows damply in on us.
This is where I saw the girl get up from bed and brave the cold for a moment. Caryatid. A dance step among the sinews of the music. A miming gigue. For a moment the summer almost burst into bloom again: asphodel, with the brave white brush, pavane of the merry peacock. Or wild geese hanging across the moon, and the invisible archer somewhere watching, hand on his empty quiver. Ah! but here we have only the dregs of yellow smeared across the windowpanes, and the unclean sea, and the flesh that quails at the icy contact of bone. Then I knew all at one that we share that correspondence of death with the season, and with all those other seasons which oppress me when I begin to write of them. No mummies, chunks of tissue latched to bone; no pillars of salt, no cadavers, have ever been half so dead as we are today.
It is today at breakfast, while the yachts hound across the water, tear-stained and anxious, towards port, that I am dying again the little death which broods forever in the Regina Hotel: along the mouldering corridors, the geological strata of potted ferns, the mouse-chawed wainscoting which the deathwatch ticks. Do not ask me how. Do not ask me why, at this time, on a remote Greek headland in a storm, I should choose, for my first real book, a theatre which is not Mediterranean. It is part of us here, in the four damp walls of a damp house, under an enormous wind, under the sabres of rain. From this nervous music rise those others, no less spectres, who are my mimes. I mean Tarquin, walking along the iced suburban streets, his scarf drawn across his face, the disease growing in his womb; I mean Lobo, clambering his suburban girls like a powder monkey; I mean Perez, Chamberlain, Gregory, Grace, Peters, Hilda. Above all I mean this logic of personalities which this paper should exhibit, in all its beautiful mutilations.
Tarquin, for example, six-foot, frost-bound, jack-knifed, yellow with jaundice; Tarquin pinned to a slab of rufous cork, etherized, like a diseased butterfly; Tarquin in the bloodless dream of this Ionian morning, among the foam and uproar, extending his lax hand in greeting. Here we are, sitting in the hallowed fug of the lounge, wrapped in rugs, among the declining plants and statues. He is as ancient and exclusive as leprosy. I am afraid to shake hands with him, for fear that the skin will slip the bony structure of the hand and come away. It would take so little to produce the skeleton from this debile bundle of meat.
When I am in the Regina I am dead again. Not with the complete mystery and passivity of the dead organism, but dead in the sense of the little death. With me I carry this little toy ark, with its little toy animals, Lobo, Miss Venable, etc. We are lit up in the signs of a new chaos. We are like patches of tissue, kept warm in sealed flasks, fed, washed, and commanded to multiply under the watchful supervision of a scientist. Our world is a world of strict boundaries, outside which we dare not wander, not even in our imagination; whose seasons come and go without any sense of change. It is medieval in its blindness, this existence. Only in winter,
when the snow falls, there is a strange dark light thrown on the walls of our hired rooms. The shadows in corners melt, flow, dissolve, and dwindle to black. This is the season we all hate so much. This carol of snow, when the red robin sits importantly on the rose bushes which line the deserted gardens, and the letter rack is crammed with tradesmen’s Xmas cards. A very merry Yuletide to you and yours! (Sweep on, ye fat and greasy citizens.)
The gardens have many mirrors, shining up on the drawn blinds, in a chaotic, withering flare of imbecility. In his little cubicle Lobo lies in bed, curled up like a foetus, and rings for his breakfast. The unearthly light of the snow sprawls on the green canvas blind. It is still snowing. It will doubtless continue snowing forever. One begins to disregard these things, such is the spiritual disease of this world. The ambience in which we pin decorations up, inflate balloons, or blacken the snow with our best friend’s funeral.
Winter morning. An elegy in swan’s-down, ferroconcrete, postmen, Lobo, foetus, halfpenny stamps. Four flights up, Tarquin is brooding on the immaculate conception, while the kettle snores on the hob. In the musical armchair, I smoke and watch Lobo’s vague movements in the gloom. It is pleasant to lie like this, somnolent, not daring to touch the cold parts of the bed with his toes. The mirror is arranged so that, by lifting himself on one elbow, he can take a good look at his own swart face, and decide whether the night’s sleep has refreshed his majesty, or whether the debauchery is gaining on him. There is also the question of his penis. He is catapulting it meditatively against his belly as he studies his features. We do not speak, for this is a solemn moment. He is checking up on his appearance. His face is a sort of diary on which every triviality of the daily life is written. He is convinced of this. “Every line here or there, dear boy, the nose or the mouth, has to mean something; when you do something there is a line; a woman taught me the lines but I don’t remember much now, except the virgin line: so.” It is impossible to do this without a phonetic system, his argot is so queer. The gloom is swelling with cigarette smoke. Next door Miss Venable is powdering her harelip. The gas fire is playing its mute jazz. The snow is falling. The elegiac morning is opening on the frozen rivers, ponds, eyeballs, wells, fingers, teeth. Not one of us is Canute enough to put his head out of the window and order it to stop. Dactyl, dactyl, the ducks are going to market. The vermilion postman fights his way through drifts of snow to bring me a letter from the white lady, yclept Pat. Lobo is catapulting, catapulting, with a kind of heavy Peruvian rhythm, and thinking over his conquests. The furnaces are being loaded. Chamberlain is letting out the dogs for their yellow morning piddle in the snow. The gorilla is grinning at himself in the mirror, putting on a gaudy tie. There is a seven-inch icicle in his urethra, put there by Jack Frost or Santa Claus. Someone will be made to suffer among the trampled bunting, the gin, the cigar smoke, and the petrified greeting cards on the mantelpiece. Winter morning, with the bacon thawing slowly, as Tarquin’s face on the pillow congeals back into sleeping fat. It is a profound moment, set aside for thinking over yesterday’s sins and preparing today’s. Lobo is cogitating heavily the eternal subject of woman. Particularly the tweed Englishwomen who wear padlocks between their legs. With a groan he is out of bed groping for his can of tepid water outside the door. From the chair one deduces the little ritual toilet he makes: his hairbrushing, tooth scouring, tie pulling. He is very fastidious, very dapper in his Continental-cut clothes. His dressing table is a mass of implements of various kinds, stocked up against the leather-framed exiles, his family. From time to time, when he can drag himself away from his face in the mirror, he pauses massively over the picture of his mother. Ah! that vague Latin sentiment. His mother! But he says nothing. When he is dressed he tidies up and gives a final glance round. The wireless is dusted. His red dressing gown hangs at the door. His tiny shoes lie along the rack in a sentimental Latin ballet. His trousers are pressed in the little wooden rack. Everything is neat and orderly. One glance outside the blind shows him the state of affairs in the outer world. So he turns to the wireless and switches it on.