The Black Book E-Book

Lawrence Durrell

• Herausgeber: Olympia Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Author's first novel, product of a lengthy correspondence with Henry Miller and published by the later for Jack Kahane in the late '30s. Laid the groundwork for Durrell's earth-shattering Alexandria Quartet decades later.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

The Black Book

book one

book two

The Black Book

Lawrence Durrell

This page copyright © 2004 Olympia Press.

http://www.olympiapress.com

Keats, Venice among its floating furniture, Severn, and that little cock teaser Shelley, like a blob of pus scribbling, scribbling. Or Hamlet with the incandescent father? “Listen,” he says, “do it just this once. I won't never ask you again. Just this once.”

I am glad, for the sake of this mythology, that Marney takes it into his head to come seesawing down the stairs at this precise moment, to contribute his gothic charade to the morning. Here, his hunchback figure, foreshortened, wagging down the stairs. First the legs and body, all splayed, then the little knot of the head; like one of those carnival figures they carry on poles in Italy. His nose hangs down like Notre Dame in gloom. As always when he sees the hunchback, Eustace finds a vein of broad jocular humor spring up in him. One has to be like this with him because he is so vain, so terrifying in his vanity. Quick, pretend that he is not deformed, that he is a great brisk normal man. We experience a panic of embarrassment; we become servile in the face of the gigantic egotism of this little East End Jew. “Ah ha!” yells Eustace, “so it's you is it, Mister Marney?”

Marney's head sits back on his hump, perpetually cocked up at the ceiling. In order to look at Eustace he makes some compensating mechanism hold him forward, stiffly, as if thrust out on an invisible stick. He is smiling his glittering self-satisfied smile, opening and shutting those little pale mushrooms under his nose. He is snicking amiably now, pulling down his waistcoat hard. “D'you notice the smell, then?” roars Eustace with incredible joviality; and Marney, scenting a joke, demands vot smell he means. “A smell I'm talking of, sir. A smell what's been bothering us today.” Marney is acting for all he is worth, sniffing and pouting, his vanity throwing up images of himself, now in this pose, now in that. “It's not me,” he admits at last, “it's not me vot's made it.” And from this piece of wit grows Eustace's deep false bassooning laughter, and the queer snickering of Marney— like someone swishing a cane. My cue. I contribute a modish snicker to the party, politely, as befits a secretary who can't help overhearing. We are both nervous of Marney.

The hunchback's dry knot of hair rides his scalp as if in the grip of a hurricane. His face becomes so taut with laughter that one fears it will suddenly fly into a dozen rough fragments, like a canvas mask. He is breathing right in the mouth of Eustace, leaning on the desk, offering his amusement to the blond man, who sits in utter disgust, laughing back at him. Once every twelve snicks or so Marney's body suffers a sort of tiny compensating convulsion. It is like watching a shirt pass through a wringer. His arms are tossed wide, his head comes down. Then the magazine of laughter is emptied snick snick snick. Shall he tell us what it is? he says at last, archly. Shall he? It's the girls' lavatory. They follow each other out into the hall; Eustace is driving him back deliberately now, laughing him back to his room. And Marney retreats with self-satisfied unction, snickering and louting. Projects himself uncouthly upstairs again like a crib, while Eustace keeps him on his way with little squirts of laughter. Then back to his desk, swearing under his breath, disgusted, outraged, humiliated. Marney! Eustace sitting there furious with Marney, in his little polished black hoofs, with his blond hair falling away on each side of his head.

The human comedy! The divine drama of a blocked shit-house all entangled with Marney, the little brown hoofs, the bucket of green ice and the canary setting out like Columbus every ten minutes and ending like Sir Walter Raleigh. The adventure of the ship, like a wooden body, and the spiritual adventure in the tower. I am not trying ,to muddle you. It is only that I myself am muddled by these phenomena—the snow, and Marney's raw Spanish tulip, Eustace and the impotence of being earnest. If I look at him now he will be a little ashamed, remembering his laughter. In order not to let me see this, he will turn aside to the little mirror on the wall and examine the cavities in his teeth. From the lavatory a boiled pudding; from the hall where the coats hang like the girls' playground selves, waiting for the clock, a whiff, human, sweaty, polluted with cheap scent and rice powder; from Eustace a pert fart—just to show that the equilibrium of his sunny temperament is restored.

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 fisherman complain that they cannot see the fish any more to spear them. Well, the rufus 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 its 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 color 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 recreating 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 fishermen's sons.