In the corner by the fireplace Chamberlain laughs himself almost hysterical over the new magazine. Crouching down with one hand spread sideways in the blaze of the fire he flicks the pages, marvelling. Tarquin affects a huge detachment, lying there with his eyes shut. The little hoots of laughter electrocute him: “My dear old man,” says Chamberlain at last, leaning out towards him in the darkness, “my dear old man. This couldn’t have been written by men, but by plants. Plants, Tarquin!” Tarquin gobbles indistinctly. His chin dissolves and flows slowly down his dressing gown to the bed. The room is full of artificial yawns. “Come,” says Chamberlain, rallying his shock troops. “Come. My dear fellow. Come!”
We are all sitting there frozen by apathy. Chamberlain fires glances around the room, looking for sympathies. No one gives a damn. Tarquin snuffles something about “palpable literary ability”. “It’s not their ability one questions for a moment,” yells Chamberlain, “it’s their existence.” He pauses in mid leap as if struck by an expanding bullet. We avert our eyes and lie back in our corners sleeping and muttering. Two days since the feast of Saint someone or other, and we are still groggy from the celebrations. The gramophone pours itself endlessly into the room, record after record slung on by the new changing device which Tarquin has just bought. Bach throws out a long rope of counterpoint, but I am too weary to rise to the lure. The room is full of rope. It goes in at your mouth and comes out of your anus in a single long thong. Muttering and shivering we doze in the damp room, like drug addicts.
I recall an infinity of smoky evenings shared with him and since forgotten, the fumes of the pipes hanging in the stiff air of the obsolete billiard room. And the white face preposing axioms, dogma, amputating its own words to lean low over a shot; and the inflated symbols of our abstraction, love, death, desire, etc., clicking and crossing in their meaningless impacts. Chamberlain’s disease is the disease of the dog collar. Outside the accepted fence of ethics he finds himself face to face with his anonymity, and is unable to outstare it. His rhetoric, his stampeding, his fulminations represent an attempt to herd back into the enclosure again. And his discovery of this state of things only produces greater and greater efforts, more steam, more energy. Gregory I admire, though I do not understand him so well. His choice was the trap, because he could not stand the stratosphere. Chamberlain would like to take his own cage with him, and pitch it in the deserted stratosphere of life. He is nothing but a spiritual colonizer, to whom the wilderness is intolerable until it is cultivated, pruned, transformed into a replica of home. He does not respect its own positive laws. He would transplant his own. To such a man there is no meaning in the word “exile”. He will never be an inhabitant of that private pandemonium which Gregory peeped into once before closing the lid. The darkness which I myself am beginning to inhabit, to construct incongruously for myself on the rocky northern cliffs of this Ionian island (perhaps, who can tell, even interpret by the tapping of these metal pothooks on the paper you hold before your eyes).
In this theatre it is all or nothing. Oneself is the hero, the clown, the chorus; there are no extras, and no doubles to accept the dangers. But more terrible still, in the incessant whine of the chorale, the words, words, words spraying from the stiff mouth of the masks, one becomes at last aware of the identity of the audience. It is my own face in its incessant reduplications which blazes back at me from the stone amphitheatre.… In the mirror there is no symptom whatever: take me, I am to be accepted or denied; not to be understood, but experienced; not to be touched, but a funnel of virtue; not a Christian, but an admirer of God in men. Do not inquire of the ingenuous mask, I say, it can tell you nothing.
In these damp winter days the first germ is sown in me, as we lie against the wall, shivering like addicts; the germ I shall take away southward with me; which in this act of tuism I am learning to control. The struggle has been medieval almost. Long winter nights, lying there while the sea drove up night-long over one’s dreams, washing, forever washing and breaking up into one’s thoughts, purifying, healing, destroying. This writing, then, is the projection of my battle with the dragon who disputed my entry into the heraldic baronies. For me, at any rate, it has been cardinal, for I have suddenly grown up in it. I am falling westward steadily, entering the region of the pneumatic gift! A latitude where even a lifeline is no good and the diving bell of the philosopher crumples with laughter.
And yet, at the other end of the telescope through which I can see my own pygmy history projected, is always for me Chamberlain’s white face, its utter incomprehension a mere mask for ideal certainties and delusions, hanging above an obsolete billiard table, hungry for news in a world which has no news to offer. The summer went down at last in a hush of bows. That much is history. The rest, the winter for instance, is so much a part of us that we are unable to dissociate — to distinguish it from our other diseases. The empty stage on which we clown brilliantly under the audience of stars. A ballet of human beings rigid on our hooks, gently swinging, like frozen meat.
Hilda is lying in Bethlehem, dead drunk. This winter is eventful for her, veteran sportsman that she is. She has lost both ovaries. The season therefore is no longer closed, but open. There is no more the great enamel bowl by the bed swimming in used condoms and carbolic acid. The bowl to which Perez once wrote an ode of fruitfulness. The bowl against which Lobo held his racked forehead as he vomited. The wilderness is paradise enow. And in the great stallion’s face there are new markings, new “fields” of experience, which show that the struggle is beginning again. The verb “to fuck” has become synonymous with the verb “to be”. It is as if this act were the one assurance of existence remaining to us still. Staring at the enlarged pupil of the old stallion’s left eye, arriving in state in the plush corridor lined with stools, and going over the murderous details of a brilliant hysterectomy. All these things I go through blindfold. It is when the guitar begins to sing in Perez’ fingers that it is all recalled to me. Lobo in the attitude of the billy-goat. A medieval scribble in his underpants. Or Perez rising suddenly out of the bushes, blind drunk, and huge in the moonlight, with the great bell tolling under his shirt.
The penis of the whale for instance! Or the book-lined walls of Tarquin’s room. Everywhere books on the pathology of madness. How is it that we can be mad, and yet so saintly quiet, with hands folded in our laps like empty gloves? It is the persistent miracle. Out of this drug-addict shivering the face of Hilda forms, apocalyptically round as the bowl of the heavens, and scarlet as the dragon. Or Connie turning over on her side to let the tide sluice her out. The Indian Ocean propped open before Clare, and his delicate Levantine features hanging over her, pale and afraid. Turning over, for example, in a huge lather of foam, winnowing the poles with their great female flukes. Connie and Hilda. Dead blubber in a chaos of arctic lights, churning and moaning, until the pale Levantine face is broken up into its components and sent revolving down the gullet of the whirlpool. And to the question: “Who introduced you?” Tarquin now gives the answer, “My mother.” This is extremely significant. The wall is lined with books which are hardly ever opened. “A book”, says Chamberlain, “is a testimony of inefficient action. I shall live instead.”
Or the world of ElGreco, smoky, ill lighted, glowing like radium. (Take your choice, take your choice, but leave me in peace. Geology has no terminology for these fissures, schists, bosses, snags. Take you choice.)
Or the bit from Gregory’s diary which I did not dare to quote. (“What can I do? What can I do? There is no action in me. The very sperm that runs from my penis is null. It is not virtue going out from me, but a dead loss to the body, the psyche, the will. My vitality runs out of me like pus, and there is no figure of grief strong enough to express it. Shall I pour my hair through my fingers? Shall I tie the grin of the madman round my face like a scarf?”)