A Smile in the Mind's Eye

  How eerie her arrival was; a light and wholly irrational snowstorm of light flakes had started. The snow melted as it touched ground. You could hear the train far away in the darkness somewhere, the mesh of wheels and its little apologetic foghorn. An answering bell somewhere in the station started to echo, started to throb. Then in the further darkness of the hinterland, upon the velvety screen of night, as if in response I saw a sudden line of yellow lights moving slowly across the skyline, softly tinkling as the whole chaplet came slowly and sinuously down to the level of the plain. The little station bell went mad now. It throbbed as if it had a high temperature. I waited on the dark platform with this very light snow – a mere swish-like spray – caressing my neck. The train arrived with a clamour and a final sprint, a rush. It came to rest in the station; it was apparently empty. There was not even a guard on board. In my disappointment I was about to turn away and set off back to Orta when at the very end a carriage door opened, a bar of light fell on the snowy platform, and Vega stepped out. She stood there smiling with the snow on her furs, on her blonde head, a little hesitant and questioning, but with the firm blue regard of happiness. Enfin! I ran forward, seized her bag and led her back to the car. She had not expected to be met and so was a little pleased and confused.

  The memory of those few days – the smooth lake at night, the polished mountains and the vernal hills where the nightingales sang night and day – has become a fused up continuum where the details have all melted into one overwhelming impression of divine attachment and friendship. The little chapels we explored were so extraordinary and so various, the hills so green, the wine so good, our hosts so tender and welcoming. There was nothing to mar the felicity of this intellectual adventure – not a false note or a false sentiment to break or bruise this calm and content, as of brother and sister meeting by the lake of Zarathustra. We recognized each other through Nietzsche and Lou, sharing like them an attachment which was as ardent as it was limpid. When it was time to part she said, somewhat maliciously, ‘Shall I sign all my letters Chantal De Legume so that you can identify me?’ But I had already mentally allocated to her the name of my protecting star, for her eyes were of the same fine colour. Vega it should be. All this came suddenly back to me now as I negotiated the green fields and sodden meadows of Montfavet and l’Isle-sur-Sorgue. I compiled those ancient memories with happiness and reserve, remembering also the long silences we shared, swimming at night in the lake. Once she went for a long walk alone. Our documents littered the floor of her room. I had brought photostats of the thunderous handwriting of Nietzsche’s letter to Strindberg, the mad declarations of his Godship. At night, late at night, the smoke of candles which had long expired drifted over our arguments and filled the room, with its high ceilings decorated by plaster nymphs and scrolls. She slept with her face on her arm and I watched her sleep, so contentedly, so thoroughly. She had found the chapel that she sought – but who would ever be able to prove her contention that it was here in Number 14 that Nietzsche had taken Lou’s hand in his and asked her to live with him? And why did Lou refuse? We will, I presume, never know the truth, for she has not deigned to tell us. But she was a fiery Slav and he was, after all, a timid German professor condemned by his health to premature retirement. And he lacked humour. What he sought for himself – he had recognized full well that Heraclitus and the early Greeks held the key he so frantically sought – was simply The Look, the equable look of the Tao which contains the salt of humour and complicity and irony in its depths. ‘Nobody trusts art any more,’ said Vega sadly.

  So the time came to part and I made my slow way home across the midriff of Italy, camping a night on the way in order to savour the delight and simplicity of this prime event. It was not the last; whenever I got a telegram signed Vega it offered me a landfall somewhere in Europe which concerned her steady search for the essence of Nietzsche’s thought. I got used to crossing Europe, slithering back and forth across the map, with the delightful knowledge that just for a few hours or a few days I would see her again. Meanwhile we exchanged books and documents and photos of our two subjects, Wagner and Cosima. And she introduced me to the marvellously sensitive trilogy of musical studies by Guy De Portalès – why isn’t his Nietzsche en Italie still available among the paperbacks? It’s a shame! And so at last we came to the end of our search and to say farewell we came here, to the Fontaine De Vaucluse. The years passed. We still met in this strange unbroken intimacy in far-away places – Salzburg, Silz Maria, Eze. But Orta had marked us both and it would be long before we managed to disentangle Nietzsche from our mental lives. Vega visited Russia, and then Greece, and though I was not there to show her round, friend Nietzsche was, and he did her the honours. The visit opened up another magic casement in the pre-Socratics, notably on Heraclitus and Empedocles about whom he had projected a book. Alas! only the notes he made for it remain for us, with here and there a typical thunderflash of thought which shows us in which direction it might have gone. Of Empedocles he says: ‘He looked for Art and only found science. Science creates Fausts!’ She now fully understood and approved my interpretation of Zarathustra’s struggle as well as the pity of his failure to grasp the Heraclitean quiddity; he saw it, he reached out his hand to grasp it, but … His art remained. But art is a second-best, however great, and he knew this now when it was too late! With him a whole epoch nose-dives into the bottomless pit of matter and is lost. It was in Orta that despite Lou’s kind and tender refusal, Nietzsche was able to swallow his mortification and go on to outline his coming work to her – including the theory of ‘eternal recurrence’ which he claimed to have developed upon an ancient Greek basis. What he sought however was much more like an eternal simultaneity – the continuous eternal and simultaneous presence of everything mortal or material or in essence, wrapped into a package with all Time included in it – and the whole of it present in every thought, in every drawn breath, an incandescent Now!

  Our visit to the country of Petrarch was more fortuitous though Vega was after all an Avignon girl with relations in the town whom she wished to see before going on a long journey which would take her far from France for several years. Happily, I lived so close by that I was able to profit from this descent into the Vaucluse, and we spent some time travelling together to the smaller villages, the more evocative corners of Provence. I personally would not have risked such a tourist spot as the fountain of Vaucluse but she insisted, and the trip as it turned out was delightful; it was in mid-winter. There was not a soul – not even the ghost of Laura rising from the foam. Was it Vega’s local patriotism that made her put up such an effective plaidoyer for Petrarch? I had been rather inclined to see in him one of the cry-babies of love-poetry. But thanks to her I now saw beneath the trappings of romance and realized him as the great and deeply responsible humanist, fully aware that he had stirred a whole culture to its roots and struck chords deeper than any poet before him. She rounded out the portrait in some detail – the courtier, the diplomat, the dispirited lover of another’s wife. Then all the sudden excursions into the neighbouring countries, followed always by a retreat to this sunless ravine where he could polish his verses to the rushing of the waters. The great poem on Africa, and the essay on solitude, the passion for St Augustine … I had no idea he was an artist of such stature – I owe the knowledge to Vega. Moreover, it was due to her that I hunted down texts of his little autobiographical dialogues entitled Secretum Meum as well as the touching and poetic statements in De Vita Solitaria in which he deals with the heralidic solitude of the artist. This last document was sent to me some months later from Geneva as a Christmas present. It was beautifully bound in scarlet vellum – a fitting setting for a great poet’s confession.

  Well, all this was in the past now, but my memories of these episodes were still fresh, and the time of day I had chosen to descend on the sacred fountain was appropriate to the theme of my reflections. Moreover it was snowing, and heavily snowing at that. Ice crunched under my wheels. The villagers were
shuttered and huddled upon themselves with only plumes of smoke from cottage chimneys to suggest human habitation. I could hear the roar of the distant fountain as it crashed out of the rock-face into the great circular pool where it lashed and writhed, for all the world as if it were boiling hot. The town was in darkness save for a glim here and there; one point of light shone from the little hotel where we had once stayed. I laid the car up in the snowy park and with my nose well tucked into my scarf ran down the pathways by the racing river to the glassfronted door of the place where I knocked once or twice rather sharply, in order to be heard above the roaring water. The madam of the establishment who was busy somewhere in the depths came short-sightedly towards me with a torch. Who could it be at such a time, on such a night? She did not at first recognize me but, good trusting soul, came towards me to parley through the glass door. It did not take long to recall who I was and she let me into the bar where I drank a welcome hot grog while she sat and kept me company. The place had not yet opened for the tourist season but she had come over for the weekend to test the heating and water systems; and indeed the heating was on and the whole place cosy. She offered to lodge me for the night but I preferred to sleep high up by the fountain in my little camper; but I would not say no to a sandwich. ‘A sandwich!’ she cried indignantly. ‘You shall dine properly in my hotel.’ It did not take long to prepare; she served me a trout with almonds – the trout grows à domicile here – followed by a good cheese with a bottle of Côte de Ventoux. And while I ate she came to talk to me in her kind and desultory fashion. Where was the blonde lady, she wanted to know? She was in Africa. ‘Once after your visit she came back here alone.’ I knew this for Vega had written to me from here, and in the same sort of season, for she described the heavy snow falling and being smoothed away in the racing water – and then an unusual touch which I had just come upon myself; the great trout were rising to the snowflakes and taking them as if they were bait! ‘A strange place to bring an unhealed love-affair.’ That was how she had once put it, referring to Petrarch. After dinner I ploughed my way up into the ravine as far as the macadam goes, and then turned off with my nose to the cliff to doss down. The intense white glare of the snow reflected so much light that one had the illusion that there was still a lingering twilight. The roar of the water was deafening; it was like being in the engine-room of some great ship, sleeping between the pulsing sweating turbines as they drove one rushing through the sea. What a lapidary’s wheel on which to polish the first elegaic poems of an entire epoch! One’s whole consciousness was quite engulfed in this steady drumming – as if upon a heavy vellum drumhead. The snow was falling in great meshes and wreaths and chaplets, and the water was swirling and polishing the black cliffs as it streaked for the sea. The river hereabouts is too fast for the fish, but a little lower down it is dark and pithy with trout. I made up my bed, heated up and then switched prudently off before turning in. It was wonderfully healing, the boom of the river – the dense cocoon of sound swaddled every nerve. Old conversations came back to mind, lazily, as if projected upon the darkness, wrestling with the desire to sleep.

  ‘And Laura, was she real?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘If invented she was still as real as any of his readers – as you or I are.’

  ‘And if real she was only the ghost of an echo of a mood. In the book she dies, remember?’

  ‘Africa! Sitting here in this roaring nautilus of sound he dreamed of Africa and read St Augustine.’

  ‘And so for Laura there were many candidates for the part.’

  ‘What names! What beauties!’

  ‘Laura di Audiberto [Hugo de Sade’s wife], Laura di Sabran, Laura di Chiabu, Laura Colonna …’

  ‘An all-star cast.’

  ‘All star-crossed women.’

  ‘The Happy Few rather.’

  Or are human beings just recordings made by some terrifying voice from elsewhere?

  In my half-sleep I was reminded of a story by Queba the Lebanese in which a famous writer manages to project his heroine to such good effect that the public believes her to be based on some real women. Scents are named after her, and streets, and newborn children. But the author himself has never been seen out with a woman. Always alone. Scenting a story, in the manner of journalists, a woman editor asks her newspaper to announce a ballot – the public must vote for a real or imagined original for the famous heroine. They vote overwhelmingly in favour of an imagined heroine. The auther is beside himself with anxiety and sorrow. ‘She is not real enough, then, and she will never arrive.’ So he goes home in despair and takes his own life, having at last realized the truth. Of his last story nothing remains save the enigmatic title it was to bear Death Has Blue Eyes.

  The water went on, rubbing and polishing its own echoes, drumming upon the darkness, upon the soft wadded walls lining the convolutions of some marvellous sea-shell. The thread which I held in my fingers I had first picked up – the clue, the inkling – from the great stone Gorgon in the island of Corfu – her cartoon of gay madness, ecstasy, hypomania – call it what you will. The clues led steadily on, and upon them I had threaded these experiences, all related and all congruent to a poetic life and practice. Where would it next lead me? I did not know, I did not care. Somewhere in Africa Vega would be writing me a letter, probably reproaching me for some un-Roman weakness, for she was a girl who did not spare her friends. I had written, saying: ‘I am beginning to feel like some very old and moulting penguin left upon a small and rapidly melting ice-floe – call it European culture. Lord God, send the bomb, I sometimes cry! Then I think of Vega, and, with a gesture, I stay the blow! Not yet, for Vega lives!’ In her last letter – so many months ago – she enclosed the French text of a Chinese poem called ‘Woman’ which I Englished for a friend in the following manner. She did not say where she got it, and I have hunted in every likely place and asked my friends to hunt in Paris. I apologize if I have broached a copyright.

  WOMAN

  How sad it is to be a woman!

  Nothing on earth is held so cheap;

  When boys stand leaning at the sill,

  Like Gods tumbled out of Heaven.

  Their hearts compass the Four Oceans,

  The dust and the wind of a thousand thousand miles.

  But no one is glad when a girl is born –

  By her the family sets no store.

  When she grows up she hides in her room

  Scared to look a man in the face.

  Nobody cries when she leaves her home, save she.

  As suddenly as clouds when rain pauses,

  She bows her head, composes her face, her teeth

  Are pressed into her red lips, she bows and kneels

  O! countless times. She must humble herself even to servants.

  His love is as distant as a star,

  Yet always the sunflower turns towards the sun.

  Her heart is more sundered than water from fire,

  A hundred ills are heaped on her; her face will follow

  The changes of the years, will wear its age.

  Her Lord will find new treasures.

  They that were once like substance and shadow

  Are now as distant as Hu from ch’in [two places]

  Or as Ts’an is from Ch’en [two stars].

  3rd Century Chinese

  How odd that these apparently disparate incidents were all held together in my mind by a slender chain of echoes, a predisposition which stretched back to my twenty-third year in the remote (then) island of Corfu where I had taken up residence with the intention of trying my hand at being a poet – or at least a writer of some sort. It seemed clear now, as I thought back to that prehistoric time, that the main inhibition against giving Chang’s book a conventional review (what I had promised) was the echoes it had set off in my memory. I could not bring a coolly critical intelligence to bear on his text. This sense of indecision had been helped by the fact that I had also been try
ing to compile some sketchy autobiographical notes for an American friend who was anxious to trace what he called ‘the inner autobiography’ of my poetry. It dawned on me in answering his letters that the central preoccupation of the then unfledged young poet of Corfu has been always somehow linked with childhood dreams of Tibet which had at last concretized themselves about the Tao – the great poem of Lao Tsu. In the Black Book written around 1936, I find a Tibetan epigraph. The novel was published in 1938, the year before the war; already my poems were gathered into a bouquet to present to this amor fati from Lhasa, the tantric dakini who had guided and inspired me. It was a life sentence and it helped me to put a calm face upon the despair of the war years with their wanton murders of time and talent and truth. When the war came I had just turned twenty-seven. Among my papers, long after it had ended, I found a forgotten article I had contributed to the Aryan Path, called ‘Tao and Its Glozes’. The old Aryan Path, published from 51 Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bombay, was even then the most distinguished journal of the day devoted to theosophy, and my amateur article was published as a sort of little preface to the issue of December 1939, by which time my island life had ended and I was adrift in Athens waiting upon fate, waiting upon the Axis.