They must be saying good nights now all over the world. I am saying good-bye to part of my life, no, part of my body. It is irrational. I do not know what to say. If I take your hand it is my own hand I am kissing. The aquarium again, with everything slowed down to the tempo of deep water. Good-bye to my own body under the windmill, weeping in the deep snow, nose, ankle, wrist made of frosty iron again. Help me. O eloquent, just and mighty death. The great anvil of the frost is pounding us. The cattle are afraid. Let me put my hand between your legs for warmth. Speak to my fingers with your delicate mouth, your pillow of flesh. I am a swimmer again, moving in a photograph with great, uncertain, plausible gestures towards you.
I have said good night and drawn the car out slowly homeward. There is no feeling in my hands or feet. As though the locomotive centres had been eaten away. Tired.
Hot scent of oil along the great arterial road. There is not a fraction of my life which is not left behind with you, back there, in the snows.
In the hotel the lights blaze. The stillness of the little death hangs along the corridors. Lobo is locked in his room, his heavy head bent over the chart. At his back the wireless gives out the barnyard orchestrations of jazz. From time to time he will raise his eyes and let them rest on his pencil box. Not thinking, numb, the iris of each eye focusing its dark vent on the Mayan eternity. He will let the tepid piddle of the music squirt coolly over him, without attending to it. He would like to cry. Next door Miss Venable wrestles with insomnia. Dial. Detective novels. Ovaltine. Teacups. The bed-lamp hangs its yellow membrane over her. The novel palls. How easy to pour herself out an overdose of Dial one of these fine winter nights, at the full moon. She tries to think of God. Three stories up Clare is lying in bed. Tarquin stands over him talking. The window is wide open and snow is blowing in on the floor. The yellow eyes are sardonic. Connie has entered into their drama suddenly and instituted a new order of things. To Clare’s salary an increase of three pounds a week; to Tarquin’s lorve a kind of internal strangulation, a hernia. However, he is talking largely. The new view of life etc. “Tell me about her,” he says bravely, his nose quivering. This pathetic pose of indifference amuses Clare. “Tell me!” He wants to be made to wriggle, to be stung, whipped by details. Nowadays he can feel so little, really. “I want us to be friends, Clare dear,” he says shyly. “Tell me everything. Confide in me.”
“Well,” says Clare in his croaking voice, saturnine, “if you must know, she’s a dirty bitch. When I’m not there it’s candles, or hot soap and water in a bottle. See? It’s a corridor, that’s what it is, see? She likes it from behind on Sundays to remind her of her old man Joseph, see?”
Tarquin has to leave before he vomits. In his room he walks about like a shy little girl; he will not speak to anyone. If I had the time and the energy I could be really sorry for him. Connie in that gas-lit flat with the blood running out of her as fast as the port runs down her throat: blood on the towels, the curtains, the bedcovers, the pillow. Blood everywhere — and his little Greek Clare cleaning his white teeth and helping himself from the bulging handbag. Or the night of the party when the gas went out, and you could see suddenly the sonata blotted out by the dark. The piano like a dumb buffalo there, and clare trying to mount her on the piano stool, with strange uncouth movements. Tarquin locks the door of his room every night now to feel safe from the blood. He plays David and Jonathan with his pillow these days but it is no good. It is no good at all.
It is so very silent here at night: my room amputated from the planet. A laboratory hanging in space where the white-coated intelligence I, clinical Holy Ghost, broods forever among the bottles and the pickled foetuses. Memory has many waiting rooms. The train for the end of space has been signalled. Shall we run out among the cavernous sheds to meet the monster? The truth is that I am writing my first book. It is difficult, because everything must be included: a kind of spiritual itinerary which will establish the novel once and for all as a mode which is already past its senium. I tell myself continually that this must be something without beginning, something which will never end, but conclude only when it has reached its own genesis again: very well, a piece of literary perpetual motion, balanced on a hair, maintaining its precarious equilibrium between life and heraldry. With the pathos of Tarquin’s diary I insist that everything must be included. It is difficult. For instance, there is no category of irrelevances. Everything chosen is relevant. There are no canons — should be none. It is a hypothetical prophecy I dream about in this area of the night, alone, chewing paper, or anchoring my hands fast until morning. The difficulties are so enormous that I am tempted to begin at once: to try and escape from the chaste seminary of literature in which I have been imprisoned too long. Everything must be accepted, including Tarquin, and transmuted into the stuff of poem. There is your body, for instance, which rises up over the unwritten book like a wall of snow: the component parts of the day ending in an agony of rebirth — unless you have your period! There are acres of hysteria when we weep together weakly for no reason at all; there is that moist, friendly target under your dress, so mysterious in its simplicity that I cannot keep away from it, returning each time to the heart of the enigma as one might return to a gnomic verse and find a new meaning in the snow each time. All this is such ripe matter for the book that I do not know how to begin it. I am serious. It is such a book as Gregory could not even imagine, could not even begin to plan. The little green snowman sitting in his own shadow, keeping the crows off his work with wild sweeps of the pen. Gregory and the monstrous behaviour of literature which he used as a cloak for his terrors and realities. Strange chaotic chords which fill the diary. I have been reading it again, puzzling over it, and the realities which it deals with.…
Here Gregory begins:
That I too have nursed literary pretensions, I will not disguise from myself; that I have now finally rejected them is proved by the airy nonchalance of this journal, ha, ha. By its very fragmentary character, which preserves only the most casual excursions among my memories. Yes. At one time I had accumulated every principle, every canon of art, which is necessary for the manufacture of a literary gentleman. Now I not only despise the canon, but more, the creature himself: the gent. I am a saurian, I thank you, but not wasp-waisted as yet.