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L.D.

France 1962

CONTENTS

page

Preface

7

JUSTINE: a novel

11

Note

13

Part I

17

Part II

78

Part III

121

Part IV

179

Workpoints

197

Notes in the Text

203

BALTHAZAR: a novel 205

Part I

209

Part II

281

Part III

338

Part IV

366

Consequential Data

385

Scobie’s Common Usage

388

Workpoints

389

Note in the Text

390

MOUNTOLIVE: a novel

391

Note

395

CLEA: a novel

653

Workpoints

878

Some Notes for Clea (by

Pursewarden)

879

Notes in the Text

882

JUSTINE

NOTE

The characters in this story, the first of a group, are all inventions together with the personality

of the narrator, and bear no resemblance to

living persons. Only the city is real.

I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding

every sexual act as a process in which four persons are involved. We shall have a lot to discuss about that.

S. FREUD : Letters

There are two positions available to us — either crime which renders us happy, or the noose, which prevents us from being unhappy. I ask whether there can be any hesitation, lovely Thérèse, and where will your little mind find an argument able to combat

that one?

D. A. F. DE SADE : Justine

To

EVE

these memorials of her native city

PART I

he sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of spring. T A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes….

I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child

— Melissa’s child. I do not know why I use the word ‘escape’. The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well, then, I have come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way….

At night when the wind roars and the child sleeps quietly in its wooden cot by the echoing chimney-piece I light a lamp and walk about, thinking of my friends — of Justine and Nessim, of Melissa and Balthazar. I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together: the city which used us as its flora — precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandr ia!

I have had to come so far away from it in order to understand it all! Living on this bare promontory, snatched every night from darkness by Arcturus, far from the lime-laden dust of those summer afternoons, I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past. It is the city which should be judged though we, its children, must pay the price.

* * * * *

Capitally, what is this city of ours? What is resumed in the word Alexandria? In a flash my mind’s eye shows me a thousand dust-tormented streets. Flies and beggars own it today — and those who enjoy an intermediate existence between either. Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbour bar. But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to dis-

tinguish among them. The sexual provender which lies to hand is staggering in its variety and profusion. You would never mistake it for a happy place. The symbolic lovers of the free Hellenic world are replaced here by something different, some-thing subtly androgynous, inverted upon itself. The Orient cannot rejoice in the sweet anarchy of the body — for it has outstripped the body. I remember Nessim once saying — I think he was quoting — that Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets — I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex.

* * * * *

Notes for landscape-tones…. Long sequences of tempera. Light filtered through the essence of lemons. An air full of brick-dust — sweet-smelling br ick-dust and the odour of hot pavements slaked with water. Light damp