Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  New paragraph. This is for the little one, whom I call Hamlet, because he knows quite well what he is doing. He is natural. It is other things which seem to ruin him. He is a litany in black. When the snow comes, as you can imagine, this is a very pretty sight. He has some goldfish in a bowl which we share. They are beautiful but unripe. He has a face like a fiddle and speaks utterly about her. On Wednesdays she arrives to worry him, and give the doctor dramatic gold. This is completely false because she does not exist. I will explain it perfectly, because he cannot write for himself. They were together in a house for a number of nights. It was an old house, and he was old. I do not mean his hair was grey. He was ancient to her, because he lived in many clever dimensions. He could do it at will, like a quick dream, but she could not follow him. For instance, he could go into tomorrow and bring her back presents, cake she had not yet made, shawls, bangles, and good news about her parents in a far country. This was strange because he could come back to the Now, having visited Tomorrow. She was afraid. Then one day he vanished. It was a hot day in August. Everything was silent. Cattle. Grass. Dogs. Everything except the crickets. I forgot the crickets. He was gone. It was quaint. He had done it in the night as usual, and reached tomorrow, but couldn’t get back. His hands are very white. Vasec touches them and says: “Snow. Snow. Snow,” over and over again. I do not know what this means, except that he couldn’t get back to her. He lived in the house, he didn’t move for fear of losing her, but they could not touch each other. Every day there was his pipe smoked from yesterday, his desk used, paper, ink, bed rumpled. It was acute pain. She would fill bowls of flowers from the fields and pray to the little weather ikons, but it was obsolete. The servants would find new money on the mantelpiece and tell her. They followed round the house, standing near the goldfish, because he loved them and had quiet thoughts standing by them every day. But they could not touch, or row the boat, or lie in the sun together. This was fatal. She gave the peasants many obols to find him, but they could not. He was there all the time, but acting in tomorrow. And they did not think of looking for him there. Vasec says if there is enough snow he will go back one day. Because it is cold living in the house alone, and the empty beds and isolated note-books, etc. Vasec is enormously in pain for him, he weeps. He says his womb is poured out for the little one’s sorrow. There is not ointment, of course. The old man said: “Time the great healer.” But Time is the great separator. I cannot bear Time. There is too much time here among the snows.

  He began to write to her. Many letters in black, and leave them about the house. But he had soon used up all the words. And she could not answer, because you cannot address a letter—MY HUSBAND, TOMORROW. Besides he was getting farther away. Soon it was a whole day. Then a week. Then so far that the ink faded, and he would carve it in the cliffs where she could find it when she went bathing to remember him. It was frantic. She would lie in the fields and let the flowers strangle her. Vasec is too copious to understand precisely, but he feels it all, like a bull. When the hunchback lies in the snow the little one has a pale face, but with great dignity. He runs solemnly to the goldfish. He is not embarrassed but contemplative.

  I say it is the snow, but I mean it is really a partition. The minutes are snow-flakes. One cannot stop to count them. All night, lying in the blond bed we see the snow-flakes marked up by the clock. When I think of little machines like clocks or waterclosets, or theories of the universe, or paper on the lawn, or the late final, I am puzzled by myself. It is so completely useless here, this territory where we speak through walls and fill our bowls with laughter. I am writing this with the most absolute precision, so do not be impatient. The men outside and the men inside, for example. There are five of us left to create the world—would you say the real world?—but they will not listen to us. They like the sound of the water rushing into the pan, the treacle lolling from the jar, the poets papering their souls in bad taste. Really. They sit beside their wives, who are names, and if I lift a femur to show them what it really is they are outraged. Moral indignation, they call it, but it is fear. It is the little nameless, shameless, timeless thing which has come into the house without its dress of words. It is naked and dangerous. We who speak through the wall have given over with words, because they destroy all this: snow falling on Vasec’s eyeballs, Fifi playing with herself and hymning, speeches through the wall. This banquet of quietness and communion. I am a writer. Yesterday I said to the old man: “It is getting towards Christmas. I have a confession to make. I am Lawrence Durrell, the writer, who wrote until one day the world came into terrible focus. I am the writer who never really wrote. Because the moment I became a real writer there was no partition of snow or minutes: and I had to come here for a long holiday from myself.” Whether you go to the slaughter-house or the monastery it makes very little difference. This is so much confidential paper for them to gather and puzzle over: for the coroner to put beside the hatchet and the other exhibits as he sends in the only verdict. The only possible comment of the world in which the watercloset is king.

  Vasec is here on holiday because he can still taste the blood, whatever he does. You can fill his mouth with snow or sand or balsam or merde, it makes no difference. In his mind’s eye (his enormous eye) he is hanging upside down over the slimy tiles, while they empty the blood out of him. Always. So he is feigning a sort of snow-blindness all day long. Pieter is rowing across the Jordan all day long. They are puzzled by the queer apparatus of the man: the hymn-books, the golden sand, the missionaries in the sago-palms, from pole to pole, etc. I fear nothing when there is snow, because the Lord of Hosts is moving in him, powerfully, like a heavy fish in a heavy-stream of flesh. Pieter’s twelve stone buttocks and hips so medieval a stuff for the electric Host. Yet it is there. Therefore I do not fear, but watch the unlucky ones running in the garden, like solitary arrows. For the others I will not answer. I will speak only for Fifi, Hamlet, Pieter, Vasec, and the Dancer. The last two we include from courtesy, as disciples. The Dancer is so fragile that his audience quivers with him, and becomes a membrane. He is blown like a trunk of silk in the wind. I must speak for these five because the disease of the little black words is my disease. In the night I wake up and see a great spirit opening above me: truth, or desire, or God. I take it eagerly to the table and open it. It is always full of these little black maggots which have eaten away its centre. That is why I have fallen into a long disuse and silence towards the new year. The doctors are puzzled and fearful at the mystical essence which is pouring from my exhausted body. They fear I may be sickening for an attack of influenza. But in the mirror I assure myself and close like a penknife with laughter. The secret. They will never discover, dull merdes that they are, for they have no faith. I no longer write on the pieces of paper they put for me. I take them instead to the watercloset with me, as a more appropriate symptom of what I feel. It is useless, you see, when a big free spirit like death or love is placed at the mercy of a coroner. Poor little mortal, he is so afraid of it that he micturates all over it, urinates on it with fear. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. All the writing the doctors will get out of me these days is the little daily parcel I leave for them. They are so droll with their machinery of language and spirits clothed in little black words that I fill my bowl with laughter at them. There is no other answer to them but this wobbling bowl which they must come and carry away from my room of snow.

  It is essential when it snows to keep a firm hold on your sense of laughter. Specially when the moon is born and the shadows of ink fall across Vasec wherever he moves. The Dancer swerves into a sort of illusion when he goes outside. His tremendous fingers conjure out of air, among the inky trees, and the soft liquid ink which melts on his boots. His body is an inky fluid, spinning in many madrigal worlds. His long face means nothing, but has been given him by the moon. In my disuse and silence I realize this: we have no firm friends, we five, but a catalogue of spirits to breathe through us. The little one, for example. His eyes are so blue, it is simpl
y the pieces of moon filling his empty cranium. With Vasec, when we are given the sun, you can see it shining through him, red his great hands of coral: in the lobes of his ears red. His voice is candent. He will empty his body into the scarlet shirt and stand upright, with his spirit touching the sun at all points. There are spikes of sun in his hair. At the window a private nimbus of darling silver. At night where does the sun go down but into his breast, softening him to peace, pressing him down to sleep in the ugly bed. Myself it is the sleek rain on the orchards, because my wife cries out like the pigeons in their soft purple throats, and the aristocracy of the rain gather about her. The guns are brutal but musical. And the compassionate blood trickles from the broken beaks on farm-land. Enough. Our spirits are all dour, crook-shanked as the apple or the olive. At night the dogs cry on the hills. And in the new year the bugles shadow the fox. The frolic red coats pass the windows and the horses are stifled in their own pollen. It is candid of me to write about the big fireplace where the logs crackle in eternal amusement, or the void bed in a room full of the lights of cars. If I speak to her in the language of the big spirit she will understand, but be too afraid to enter into it with me. Perhaps all this will change.

  There is the hunchback’s lake in the garden which remembers me, and my farm, and the attitudes of the cattle. We sit by the side of it on the benches and made handsome poems together when he is God. Towards Christmas now they are chopping the trees, which is a pity, because they are great linguists. St. John the Divine and other notable people walk on the ice. Little figures far off on the benches, obscene, because they blacken the action. Pieter is weeping because the Jordan is frozen and he cannot get a single baptismal drop. But we teach him to melt the snow in his mouth and he is soon merry again.

  At night it is like a wedding-cake lying there in motionless celebrations. The Dancer makes a silky entertainment on the ice without falling. His agony speaks to the trees who are supine, and he perpetuates them in his thin body and deft legs, and makes them durable for ever. It is necessary to catch him and the woods are full of lanterns and yuletide faces calling. But he is too nervous and explicit in his speed to be caught easily. He speaks a form of terror with his body, so they cannot hold him. They are in boots and sanity, and he is dressed in the spirit of bare feet. Therefore, as you imagine, he creates a whole method of ballet in his elusive fever: little scribbles of his action made with a pencil: how the legs bend at the joints, and the quivering tactual liths of the fingers. His wide feet slobber on the ice as he lifts them. It is Ariel they are subduing with lanterns. Poor cattle, they do not understand in their boots. I shout from the window to explain the logic of motion, but they do not hear. I shout but they turn aside. I shout and the morning star comes up in my throat over the wedding-cake, and I am by the fire, she sleeping in the armchair, warm, mammal; or warm, victorious, in the bed, cherished by pillows, mammal. It is a dark and warm-blooded seal, heavy and plangent, with whom I play these aquatic games in the forever. A seal in bed, when the morning star climbs my throat into the sunlight. It is too much sanity this bare room, with paper, blankets, and the tin bowl. It is so sane that in the morning my eyes grow icicles of pathos and I cannot see any more, only the seal’s heavy body broken through a prism of colours. This is an eclogue written with the icicles, which impinges only on my one unit here, safe, captive, among five captive units. Every day with the paper they give me I distil my spirit, and chop away the inessentials by writing them with the gaunt pen, and this little pot of black snow. Then, when I become really a writer, I sit all day with my hands pushed aside, useless. It is not making what goes on outside, I have discovered. It is what occurs in the inside spirits, where the great beings make their territory and the words cannot touch them. In this area everything is explosion, high tension, stand away, a million volts, you are warned not to touch. There are big notices to tell you that trespassers will be prosecuted and there are no paths where it is safe to walk. Consequently I talk to Fifi in the wall and pretend that I am not culpable. Or watch the sun shining on Vasec’s great golden thumbs. It is more a bare orchestra of silence, purer than icicles, when I exist this way. I am nearer home, without agony and the passion in the fingertips. Only I regret the warm blood of the seal, the eloquent bright storage battery, running under the tepid rubber skin of the animal. I have tried to explain this many times in words, from different altitudes, but it is useless. I am content now when they bring me flowers, because they see I am peaceful, and speaking after the manner of men. This is a joke! But the flowers make a parody of my childhood for me in this snow sanity, and I adore them as other creatures adore angels. They are so big and rich: the heavy ingots of the roses. Really. Take them to pieces and weigh them in your hand. Nothing at all. But just feel the great lolling heads and you are at loss. You are exceedingly amazed. You press yourself against them, you caress them as if you were a cat. You feed them with snow, etc. But they are destroyed. Ecstasy always leads to destruction. And in this destruction you can feel the bigger things, the spirits which run about the room on fire, like gases. And you are opened all of a sudden like an untenanted house, and the sun makes a progress through you, and the moon brightens your armour, and the nineteen winds chisel out the pure personality for you. You begin to exist. You begin to deserve action.

  When you are like that, purified, the logic of the watercloset compels you to take a long holiday from yourself, and your seals, apple-trees, farm-lands. You are surrounded by little machines, telephones, watches, gasworks, newspapers, chocolate, tiger’s milk, Lent, canned fruit, and buttons. The world makes a wry face at you because you are smiling, utterly and internally smiling, without fraud. When you are dancing you are surrounded by lanterns and men with mouths compressed like thimbles. Then there is nothing left but to make as much laughter as you can in honour of the occasion, and ask for flowers. Here, my bowl is full of green amusement. Take it away. That is all you are fit for.

  I am thoroughly heraldic when I say this, and it makes them furious. They take away my flowers and the blue man grips his jowls in his fist and wants to knock me down. I have given him many opportunities, because I am a writer, and have many languages on the tip of my tongue, ready for emergency. However, they go away and shut the door, and I communicate with Vasec, who is much worse recently. They can understand nearly everything he says, so they are pleased. The old man looks profoundly cautious, asking questions, and gathering the answers. When they understand everything they will take him to his shop where he is already hanging upside down, bleeding on to the tiles. He has been gutted and executed in the little tabernacle at the back of the shop, with the tiled floor. I suppose there is no hope of them understanding a single thing I say, it is so precise and flawless and immaculate and virginal. There is no hope.

  But Vasec was never as chosen as we were. He is included from courtesy, as a disciple more than anything else. There is so little sun in this country that one cannot wonder at it. In the south, among the oranges and the coloured peasants he would learn much more quickly than here: these dull Celtic seasons spinning on the axis of this white glass of milk, little bed, bowl of roses, paper, ink, pen. As for Hamlet, he is in a private act the whole time, so that the scenery is something beyond his book. He is the Black Prince winning his spurs in a stained glass window. At the altar keeping the dark vigil among his empty armour: blind morion, greaves, corselet. And the Grail growing in him, pouring into his arteries, stiffening and budding in his loins. Amen.

  Pieter speaks through the wall and tells me that Christmas is coming. In a million coloured windows, the holly season, on a million leaves of greeting, in the park the robin and the hautboy. I am expressionless as a button, because all the pictures he has are of poor quality. In mission houses the harmoniums are snoring. Cheap prints of the Saviour and maps of Damascus. In the hall the coats hang white. And from the front door oozes the mission fog.

  I prefer the soft vocal turkeys. The glib wines in the bottles. The archaic cake. The children s
houting in the rip of paper, etc. And from the front door oozing the old patriarch himself, the red riding-coated bearded senex, snuff-drunk and roaring, with his nose like a sabre. However. That is a story to be spoken to the seals only, where they spin in the ice floes in an arctic garden, among the commotion of many waters. For others we can only say: It is the dead season. The fires are low. And the black traveller goes across country like the wind, mailed in his suit of ice and terror. And in the old inns they have barred the doors against the spirits, and let the grates glow out. Make many crosses for the saints, for the twelve, for the lichened tombs in the graveyard and their geology of stirring bones. The quick father mounting for comfort, and the virginity like a circle of silver. The hard-mouthed lady of the manor in ice, and old ivy-clad parson with Bible at his hip. Make many crosses. They would rise if it were not for the curious lichens that entangle their craniums and fuddle speech. Make many crosses and a brief orison for the dead season when the sun is blood, and the moon ink.

  All this Pieter does not understand. It makes him reproving which is a sign that he is afraid of it. He prefers the sable sand, and the nigger-boys diving for pennies, and the sharks hymning, and the poles rotating to the tunes of Bishop Keble. Particularly those winsome harmoniums with yellow teeth and halitosis: from whose guts the maiden’s fingers plunder the sacerdotal farts and curvettes of tune. As I say, this is poor quality. Sometimes when I realize it I wonder whether Pieter is really one of us, or whether he too is included as a courtesy. Not as a disciple, because he believes he knows everything already. No one can teach him anything. Once or twice I have hinted that he has yet to exist, but it makes no difference at all to him. None. He sets the harmoniums playing in his waistcoat and that’s that. One can only fill one’s bowl and hope for the best.