His vehemence is terrifying. He is paralysed. He cannot speak. He cannot move. His tears are clotted in his mouth, his throat is full of rocks. As he speaks he goes across to the washbasin, turns on the tap, and begins to spit and spit, as if he would never be done with it.
In the night, when I watch him sitting at his piano, playing to his brain, I know that it is not the madness that counts, essentially counts. It is the ticking of the deathwatch which reminds me of the true focal sepsis. Death perhaps, the worm trailing its slime across this room, these books, this piano. I am so small myself, so utterly incapable of laying even my own ghosts, that I dare not take the responsibility of his. That is why it is so difficult to write about him — I am by implication mapping out my own scenario of despair when I see him standing at that white washbasin, spitting and spitting. And in a lesser degree the same is true of Lobo, of Perez, of all these antic maniacs who live like jiggers in the soles of my feet. That is why I am sometimes afraid of going mad. I have a blinding second’s revision of all that I know, believe, doubt, reverence, adore: your face, his face, the skull in the mirror, the knave, the jester, the fool — and I am afraid.
This idea is perhaps not unfamiliar to you. I have reached a dead reckoning somehow. Sunday follows Sunday like many crucifixions, and I have utterly no sense of progression. On the twelfth night of a year already ancient we have rain, rain in a long line of opening razors. It is threshing down the grain, raping the orchard where the apple trees stand like Caliban; where you are lying no doubt with your womb full of loam and the foxgloves touching your nipples. Nothing passing across the arena of smudged hills but the velveteen gamekeeper with the beaded steel gun. It is always the old year here: an old year—“a blind old bitch, gone in the teeth!” The bodies of the wise men sifting down their essence of action to apples and grain and cider; the green counties lifted up to me like the mouth of my girl. The churches solemn among the lichen graveyards. In Memoriam; on the grass the marble stumps, like a mouthful of rotten teeth.
In these days we are wild: a drunken, whoring, perilous crew, aimless as lunatics, racing our own magic from place to place, sinking and smiling among the dying bottles. Laugh and the world laughs with you, suffer and you suffer alone. I gather your face up like a goblet of brandy and drink it solemnly, mouth, eyes, hair, nose, lips, canines, lobes, dimples, tics — everything in a gulp. Tomorrow — what is that? Today there is an amputated centrum in which all activity is devoted to itself. Tomorrow there will be fresh air on my jowls, there will be children squealing, papers, ink, slovenly work meaning nothing. Madame About gathering her defensive guts round that knob in her womb. But tonight I am absolved, in a kind of paralysed way I am free. I can brighten my lips with spittle and shine forth like an ogre. I can choke you in images, who are only an image yourself; I can smile among the candles and the bottles that taste of sand. I can grovel in my own sick and devour my own dung. I can die — or sleep.
Page by page this noctuary gets completed. Images. clouds. Shadows in ink. Frankly, I know not what I do. There is Miss Smith, wearing a moth-eaten muff in midsummer, and Lobo in his natty suiting with the subdued stripe. They are going to Canterbury for the day. Blessings on you, my children. Behind the altar screen, the great resonant goth glooming over them, the Abbey with its blue greys, its tooth-white, curd-yellow. In this aura of prehistory he tries to kiss her. She stands solid all of a sudden, turned away, petrified. He is giving a few Peruvian groans and kissing her fingers. All of a sudden she starts hissing. Her mouth is open and vermilion. Flights of geese spit and whirl among the arches. She is closed up by an invisible spring. They go out in agitation and enter a tea-shop. He is afraid she is mad. She laughs incessantly all the way home, touching her shoulders with each ear, this black goose spitting in her own handbag. At night he sits in his room with dumb perplexity, asking why she laughed. Why? “Is she virgin, dear boy?” He is tremendously interested, angry, piqued, sore, puzzled, keen.… I can see that he plans to add her to the album. For fun I tell him a few lies. “Virgin?” I say with fine indignation. “What do you mean — virgin?” It is good to watch the interest, the exultation, drain out of his face like water out of a bath. His mouth is open. Everything is pouring into it, draining away. In that case, he says, she was trying to make a fool of him. Can you imagine it? The negress standing in the Abbey, a laughing logarithm, flapping her wings and laughing. Bah!
At night, perhaps, if there is nothing else to do, a visit to the corpse that inhabits Tarquin’s tea-green dressing gown. We sip Bovril with genteel affection, like a couple of spinsters, or play cards at the green folding table.
“You are grateful, you say, for being made to think, to weigh, to analyse?” asks the hero in carefully simulated surprise. “You thank me for the death I am transmitting? I assure you, my lad,” and so on. I accept these morsels humbly. Humility and divinity — are they not the same thing? Consolation! Courage! One day when you are a big boy you shall have a teddy to play with.
“Your trouble is that you are young. Your ideas are eoan — you see false dawns breaking all over the place. You actually hope. Until the Platonic poison is out of your system you cannot begin. Stop imagining an impanate Christ, first of all. Bread must become bread, nothing more or less. This tea tastes of urine, does it not? No, it’s your turn. Contemplate the world which has created you, my dear, and see where you stand.”
There is no answer to this except that I know nothing of the world which created me. Nothing. I am a sort of ticker tape, through which life runs its ribbon of shabby pulp. What is written on it I cannot tell. A love letter perhaps, or a report of famine, or a poem, or a description of a new disease.
“Dear Puck,” you say, “the guest has come without warning, so that I am afraid the house isn’t ready for him. Spring. By the lake you can hear the copulation of the frogs, like smooth pebbles being rubbed together. They are dying in quantities, their veins are shot with blood. It is good when we lie down together to keep remembering the death all around us, in the clouds, in the lake, in the woods where summer is chained up like a blind man. It is death that makes our love adult, the death of the grain. It is so bitter when we are together, but, like salt, really nourishing. Death is a wonderful discipline. Do you understand me? Good night.”
You are no longer afraid. The spring is your ally. The one season you properly understand, answer in your bones. But now that the blind man summer has broken his rusty chain and got free — what now? Shall we make some fine alkaline poems to neutralize this dust, this soma fever?
Dear Alan. I am alone again. This book is not a statement of a path, but a quarrel with destiny, that is why it is necessary for you to understand it. The summer is largely responsible — not to mention the little death. I was thinking tonight of those summer days in the shadow of the priory. They seem to belong to another world — a world of shapes which included such colours as warmth, charity, love, etc. A whole dormant Platonic principle which, in its essence, is England — the marrow and bone of England. This is a very necessary valediction, not only to England, but, if you like, to the world. It will hurt you, but it is the truth. I have looked into my account — the account that seemed so full and heavy with new cash — and found hardly a coin that will ring properly on wood. There was nothing for it but to empty my wallet into the dust and take the road again; without dramatics this time, without heroics — not to mention lymphatics. It is queer to remember that this decision was already shaping itself that afternoon, when we stood on the southern tower of the priory, hanging in the breeze, breathless and exulting like sea birds. All that was the island then, was represented in that humorous razored profile of yours — the predatory nose of the Middle Ages, the Goth singing in your blood, the music you gathered up in those nervous fingers and transmitted, crazy with your own enthusiasm. Southward, like a green beating heart, the flats stretched away into the mist. The myth weathering softly on the corbels, the fragile spines of the windows with their armorial bearings, the buttresses flying into an eternity of childish history. We were hanging up there, like flies, over the Saxon river, watching the tonsures cross the leads in meditation. Irrational thoughts and feelings wheeling up over me, whewing like gulls, sombre. It was in that time that I began dimly to see the equation which was finally printed in my brain here, over the Ionian. It was the temptation of the devil, the vision of the cities offered to me from an immense mountaintop. The devil! What should be more plausible than that you should be the Black Saint himself — panurgic, long-nosed, calculating bastard that you are! You were offering me, in your oblique way, the whole of England — the masques, the viols, the swans, the mists, the doom, the fogs: you were offering me a medieval death in which I could live for ever, stifled in the pollen of breviaries, noctuaries, bestiaries: split silk and tumbrils, aesthetic horses and ruined Abbeys. The lament for Dido opening up such pits of emotion in my brain that I fell upon my knees, and shattered in little pieces in the hearth. The forest opening its eyes of frost, the unborn morning of the world, the dew in a sheet, the trees stifled in feathers. The great orchestra hymning gruffly among its ants, gathering and breaking in time to the sea. The hot lick of the winter rain, blinding us all from coast to shabby coast. Or Pat going quietly mad among the sprained spires of Oxford. Your room, with the gramophone like a broken womb emptying Beethoven over us. This is the world which was implicit in our extravagant gust, our laughter, our tears, our poems. That is why, when I tell you I have rejected it, I want you to understand clearly the terms of that rejection. That is an England I am going to kill, because by giving it a quietus once and for all, I can revive it! This is not a flashy paradox, but something I have experienced, something that I have suffered. Understand me. It is not very difficult. The gulls are wheeling again, in their soft terror, the rooks are uneasy. In the gloom down below they light the candles and begin — the soft elegant litanies of religion. It is an apocalyptic moment, between heaven and earth. We are hanging over the minute, crawling town, while the bells open up. Under our feet the tower rocks at each impact of the vesper bell. A train snores outward, along the hills, into the past. The decision is made. I am no longer softened by tears or doubts. I have become as hard as a bronze medal. What it cost me to maintain this terrible equilibrium, to become responsible only to myself for what I am — that is not the important thing. The important thing is this: if I succeed, and I will succeed, then I shall become, in a sense, the first Englishman. I tell you this in confidence, because afterwards, when the great struggle is over, and the whole psyche of our nation — our world — is thrown back into gear, then there will be plenty of time for understanding, analysing, wondering. It is now, while the duel is on, that your understanding is valuable. This is all I can say. From that rare latitude, which I carry with me wherever I go, under the Equator or over the Poles, I write you this valediction and greeting. Affectionately Yours, Hamlet’s little godchild.