The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  SUT: What a dilemma! I am simply symbolic you might say. Symbolic merely, like a teddy bear full of caviar? The people who say this seem unaware that they only camp temporally in their body as in a chrysalis. Then pouf! a moth dedicated to eating cloth. One day I shall acquire a meaning. As in the average novel, “A careful analysis of Nothing reveals that … Ambulances bleating for blood all night, flesh and blood. Who can sleep?”

  BLAN: Wake then and write our book – a new Ulysses dying of a liturgical elephantiasis. Or dream of a girl on long thirsty legs but as shy as glue. Art has a stance but no specific creed.

  SUT: It could borrow one if need be. A smother of girls would be better. You see, we only live in the instant between inhalation and ex-. This point in yoga time is the only history. But suppose we refine and purge and strengthen this small glimpse of truthful time, why, we would redeem eternity, the heraldic vision, the panoramic insight!

  BLAN: Oh well, so what then?

  SUT: You have me there. What then indeed?

  BLAN: Philosophâtre or Psycholope

  Come and join the Bank of Hope

  Like royal swans in helpless rut

  Or dirty ducks in hopeless goose

  Wake Psyche from her trance

  Lest she should die of self-abuse

  And take a lesson from the dead

  For history is a running noose.

  SUT: So I really mean nothing? Symbol without translation?

  BLAN: All symbols start like that. Happily meaning has a tendency to accrete in time around an enigma. I don’t know why. As if nature could not rest without offering a gloss. In poetry the obscure becomes slowly invested with meaning as if by natural law. The big enigmas of art, simply by dint of continuing to exist, finally accumulate their own explanations by the force of critical projection. Mozart’s Commendatore, for example, is regarded as so mysterious, yet because he still lives, thanks to the electric charge conferred on him by his maker, he becomes daily more significant. One day soon the “meaning” will burst upon us.

  SUT: Agreed. But this information is available to the woman from the resources of her female intuition. It may remain unformulated but somewhere she knows that she is the custodian of his poetry, her role is to recognise and release the rare moth which can be housed in the most loathsome caterpillar’s form. The act of sex bursts through the container of the flesh in an act of recognition. Presto! Liberation of poet-moth!

  BLAN: Wow!

  SUT: As you say, wow!

  BLAN: Touche-partout, couche-partout,

  Bon à rien, prêt à tout.

  What about love?

  A girl in grey with one dark note,

  Pitched somewhere between fox and dove,

  Soft as the driven television must

  Like all our lovers come to dust.

  Think of others who have passed this way. Lust for a comprehensive vision which death repays in. dust. Nicholas De S. Better to become a best seller and spend your life fingering the moister parts of the Goddess of Pelf! E.A.P. his brain burst on the job. The perilous ascension of artistic ichor in the bloodstream, the panoramic vision – it was too much for him. It swallowed him. He was dragged by the hair into the cave of the oceanic consciousness, the Grendel’s cave of art’s origins; drink drank him.

  (Sutcliffe pours out a drink.)

  And K? As his mind ran down he grew more yellow and wasted, blooming now like a waxlight, a Jewish taper burning inside a coffin. His hands grew covered with warts which suppurated. Staring into the maw of the Jewish superego.

  Tolle lege, tolle lege. Voices that St Augustine heard, of children in some forsaken garden singing for the birthday of an angel. The imperative of the poet. Hush, can you hear them?

  The doomboat of our culture filling up, the ship of fools. But it only looks like that. Actually if you believe, as I do, that all people are slowly becoming the same person, and that all countries are merging into one country, one world, you will be bound to see all these so-called characters as illustrations of a trend. They may be studied through their weaknesses of which the greatest and most revealing is their disposition to love and produce copies in flesh of their psychic needs. Do you see?

  B. thinks: Death seems various and quite particular because our friends die in scattered fashion, one by one, slipping out of the decor and leaving holes in it. But as a principle it is as universal as all becoming is – semper ubique, old boy – though the effect is slow-motion. The ship shakes itself and settles with a shiver before she dives. Experienced sailors notice the premonitory quiver and cry, “She’s settling!” long before the cry goes up, “There she goes!” The spring will seem endless once back in Avignon. Constance: I love you and I want to die.

  Sutcliffe had a friend who died in action but continued his erection into rigor mortis. This was quite a sight and caused an admiring crowd of nurses who had been on short commons for some time and were anxious for novelties. A thing like this mauve member could satisfy an army of them, they thought, and kept coming back to look and exult. But it faded with the sunset when they came to lay him out.

  Blan said grumpily: “But we shall end like some old bow-wow and toddle off to Doggy Heaven in Disneyland or Forest Lawns where telegrams are delivered to Little Fido when he has crossed the Styx. Charon delivers them without a word, pocketing the dollar with a grin as he rows away.

  To each his tuffet

  And so some Miss Muffet.

  (Many are called but most are frigid.

  Some need theosophy to keep them rigid.)

  Deep in its death-muse Europe lay.

  Boys and girls come out to play.

  Fruit de mer beyond compare,

  Suck a sweeter if you dare.

  Ashes to ashes, lust to lust,

  Their married bliss a certain must.

  He storied urn, she animated bust.

  The day when Aristotle decided (malgré lui) that the reign of the magician-shaman was over (Empedocles), was the soul’s D-Day. The paths of the mind had become overgrown. From that moment the hunt for the measurable certainties was on. Death became a constant, the ego was born. Monsieur came down to preside over the human condition:

  To kill to eat was nature’s earlier law.

  To kill to kill created a furore.

  Such abstract murder could not come amiss

  So Christians sublimated with The Kiss

  And drunk on blood they broke the body’s bread

  To make a cold collation for the dead!

  Listen, nothing that SUT has to say about BLAN should be taken too seriously, for he is only a creation of the latter, his Tu Quoque, existing by proxy. Is BLAN then King? Yes, in a way, but his powers are somewhat diminished, he can’t see very far, whereas SUT is the third eye, so to speak. His belly-button pierces the future, the all-seeing eye of time. Is this what has poisoned the life of the solitary author as he files his nails and watches the snow falling eternally over Bland-shire? Why the devil had he chosen a profession which involved him in the manufacture of these paper artefacts – characters which drained him of so much life that he often felt quite one-dimensional, himself equally a fiction of his fictions? Eh? After the publication of SUT’S autobiography, in which he figured, fame was not long in coming, though both men had begun to feel wholly posthumous. But SUT became slowly so popular that he became detached like a retina, or else loosed like a soap-bubble to float about in the public consciousness like a sort of myth. He had made the English language, had the old Ripper, while Blanford had hardly made Who’s Who.

  “O Anax– the Big Boss, whose shrine is at Delphi, neither hides nor reveals, but simply signifies or hints!”

  Similarly all writers are the same one, Blake scribbles Nietzsche’s notes on the same experience … Trickling through the great dam of the human sensibility, charting the depths and the shallows. Sometimes imperfect texts give off the authentic radium, like the shattered lines of Heraclitus, O Skotinos, the Darkling One! It still vibrates in the mind
like a drum-beat.

  Rozanov whose originality lay in his truth, capturing thought just as it was about to burst like a bubble upon the surface of human consciousness, of meaning. Neither good nor bad, simply what is. Just inkling. A highly pathological and precarious art flowed from this practice in Western terms: in Eastern terms he was writing entirely in koans, not in epigrams. To be thought of as the start of a religious quest – doubt, anxiety, stress. The soul’s traction!

  SUT receives a postcard from Toby who is lecturing in Sweden: “Come north at once! The Swedes are quite marvellous. They have souls like soft buttocks and buttocks like hard soles.”

  He has caused considerable annoyance by describing the nouveau roman, of which they stand in superstitious awe as: “Les abats surgelés des écrivains qui refusent toute jouissance.”

  In the Paris metro he caught sight of the new woman we have all been on edge to meet – the Rosetta Stone, fresh from the USA. “She wore an inflatable air jacket stolen from Air France. Trousers lined with newspaper – the Tribune. She carried a traffic sign torn living from the landscape around Fifth and Sixth, reading YIELD. She sucked her thumb when doing nothing – nails bitten down to the quick. And twitching with hemp smoke. A choice young cliterocrat.”

  The sperm does not age as man himself does. Even an old man can make a young baby.

  Envenomed by solitude and vanity,

  Created sound and yet forbidden sanity.

  SUT: (to his shaving mirror) “Ah! the dear old face, like a bony housing for the critical motor, eyes, nose, mouth, cruel uncial smiles, eyebrows cautious circumflex. Toughened by weather, roughened by thought, weathered by sighs so dearly bought. Needs repainting. The eyes shouting ‘Help!’ The eyes pleading diminished responsibility.”

  By hoping, wishing and foreseeing we are doing something contrary to nature. Cogito is okay but spero makes man out of the featureless animal of Aristotle: gone astray in the forebrain.

  SUT: “La femme en soi si récherchée par l’âme. La femme en soie, brave dame.

  Boule Quies d’aramanthe et camfre

  Une veuve de Cigue

  Trinquer avec la mort!

  Cliquot Cliquot Cliquot

  Trine trinc

  La Veuve Cliquot!”

  BLAN: “In the account I propose to give of your marriage I propose to heighten the colour in the interest of my fiction with additions gleaned from Constance who talked about it with sympathy and sorrow. Explaining with all the vivacity of my prose style how everything had been complicated and poisoned beyond endurance by this unlucky marriage to a captious little queen of the greatest charm and style who disguised her proclivities very cleverly, by sleeping with many men openly, and as many women secretly. It was easy, really, for you were a highly intelligent man – that is to say, a fool!”

  SUT: “I was inexperienced, I suppose, and of course when one falls in love one is simply ‘imprinted’ by the projection of one’s desire, like a duckling falling in love with its keeper’s shoe. Yet I should have known. Those dry airless kisses tasting of straw were puzzling, the caresses of the mantis. Then the dry marsupial pocket of the rarely used vagina should have drawn attention to the enormous and beautiful clitoris. She was a trifle painful to penetrate but in every other respect normal and valiant. It took some time to find out that she shammed her orgasms, or else (to judge by the few involuntary expressions that escaped her lips) thought of someone else while doing. She had avoided marriage all these years, why had she turned aside for me?”

  BLAN: “I don’t know. Perhaps the male gender of the tribe have a weakness for young married women and the ring excites them for they are at one and the same time both cheating and aping the man. Excalibur! How joyfully they humiliate hubby and betray him! Suddenly the whole business became clear to him, the meaning of that large circle of female friends, all very feminine and unsatisfied (if one were to believe them) in their married lives. As she said, they had ‘thrown themselves away’ on Tom, Dick and Harry. Then of course the conventions aided things. Nobody bothers about women kissing and hugging each other, a little conventional ‘mothering’ is quite in order, or trotting off to the powder room together while the husbands solemnly suck their pipes and talk about holy orders!”

  She was no larger than a pinch of snuff but she packed some sneeze! Une belle descente de lit.

  S: God, what dreadful French!

  B: I know. Showing off again. Go on.

  Well, he found himself gradually propelled into a sort of travesty of the female role. He did the washing up and stayed behind to watch the dinner cook while she hopped off with a friend to have her horoscope cast by another friend. The telephone went all the time with a susurrus of private jokes and social plans. He opened a private letter one day in error, having mistaken the handwriting (he would never have dared nor wished to spy on her) and at once interpreted all these ambiguities correctly. Thought suddenly of the so called “masculine protest” – the tiny moustache which was so painfully removed by wax depilatory or dabbed with peroxide. The green ink, and the wearing of charms and necklaces and one earring!

  Amo, amas, amat. Je brûle, chérie, comme une chapelle ardente! Baise-moi! Self-righteousness, hunger for propitiation, vainglory, sanctimoniousness – Sutcliffe: “At your service, old man: at your mercy.”

  I am adding an anecdote from someone else – Fatima, to be precise. “Let’s make love, it will be good for each other’s French.” It was not very satisfactory, she had all the desperation of a woman who knows she is too fat. But after all she was game and later she cried with a mixture of vexation and stark pleasure. What did I like in her? She was lush with worldliness and had a peach-vulgar face. But the smell of her thighs was rich with an instinctual sweat hinting of musk; wherever you licked her skin was dewy as a rose. I licked and licked like a drogué en état de manque! – her own expression.

  Toby, regarding himself in his shaving mirror, exclaims: “Mean-spirited gnome! If it were not for your beauty I would leave you!” His ad is still going in the Trib. It runs: “Elderly vampire (references) living in kind of doomed old mansion near Avignon seeks rational diversions.”

  He also said: “Other men drink to forget but I drink to remember!”

  The poetic substance detached from the narrative line, the sullen monorail of story and person. Rather to leave the undeveloped germs of anecdote to dissolve in the mind. Like the accident, the death in a snowdrift near Zagreb. The huge car buried in a snowy mountain. She was in full evening dress with her fur cape, and the little cat Smoke asleep in her sleeve. The headlights made a blaze of crystal so it seemed the snow was lit from within. But they forgot to turn the heaters off. A white Mercedes with buried lights. Why go on? They suffocated slowly while waiting for help which could not reach them much before dawn. Only Smoke remained. Her loud purring seemed to fill the car.

  A letter from faraway London. Grey skies. Pissing in the bull’s eye of a Twyford’s “Adamant”. BLAN was forced to write on a postcard: “Be warned that daydreaming is not meditating. Inquisitiveness is not curiosity. Beware of the brass rubbings of a demon culture. Identikit husbands and wives!”

  Eclair, who wrote the review, was a generous old French pedal, tightwad like most, burning with a hard bumlike flame. He wrote about the poet as if he were a sort of stair carpet wreathed in Scotch mist. He curled his hair with hot-smelling tongs and ate much convincing garlic with his choice high-flown game. Yet he understood all, revealed all! It was uncanny. “A good artist has every reason to enjoy his approaching death – his life would have proved to be a scandal of inattention otherwise!”

  B: Where do people end? Where do their imaginations begin? I have been a sleepwalker in literature. My books have happened to me en route. I am at a loss to account for them, to ascribe any special value to them. Perhaps they may be marvellous to other sleepwalkers, serving as maps? Who can tell? Socially I am a fig-eater. I have always believed in myself – credo quia absurdam! Given to baroque turns of s
peech, in writing I wished to substitute intricacy for podge.

  Go and catch a falling whore,

  That’s what she is waiting for.

  Ah! pretty frustrate pray unlatch

  And bid poor Jenkins down the hatch.

  A rose by any other name

  Would smell as good where’er it came.

  Great Lover, that involuntary clown

  Will always having his trousers falling down.

  To scrape a furtive living from the arts

  And keep intact his shrinking private parts …

  The lover now belongs to an endangered species for science threatens him with extinction. Maybe Stekel will have the last word on your marriage after all: “It is evident that a sadistic atmosphere was cultivated in this marriage. The fact that both parties were homosexual led to a peculiar sort of inversion. He played with the wife the role of a woman who has intercourse with a woman, and she that of a man having intercourse with a man. This bound them together. Those movements which excited him at coitus resembled the convulsive twitching of death. And surprisingly, in contrast to his fantasies of violence he was aware that potency disappeared if that woman moved. She must lie still, grow pale, resemble as much as possible a corpse. Thus he was aroused sadistically and restored to full potency.”

  For some reason this irritated Sutcliffe who said: “I often see us as a couple of old whores, dead drunk, who toddle off into the night towards Marble Arch, having emptied their bladders accidentally into each other’s handbag.”

  It was obvious that in common with most of us they were hunting a spontaneity which had once been innate, given, and to which the key had been mislaid.