The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [423]
Who were they — so composed and steely-eyed? Timidly we stopped a policeman to ask him. ‘They are publishers’ he said mildly. Publishers! Our hearts stopped beating. ‘They are on the look-out for new talent.’ Great God! It was for us they were waiting and watching! Then the kindly policemen lowered his voice confidentially and said in hollow and reverent tones: ‘ They are waiting for the new Trollope to be born! ’ Do you remember, at these words, how heavy our suitcases suddenly felt? How our blood slowed, our footsteps lagged? Brother Ass, we had been bashfully thinking of a kind of illumination such as Rimbaud dreamed of — a nagging poem which was not didactic or ex-pository but which infected — was not simply a rationalized intuition, I mean, clothed in isinglass! We had come to the wrong shop, with the wrong change! A chill struck us as we saw the mist falling in Trafalgar Square, coiling around us its tendrils of ectoplasm! A million muffin-eating moralists were waiting, not for us, Brother Ass, but for the plucky and tedious Trollope! (If you are dissatisfied with your form, reach for the curette. ) Now do you wonder if I laugh a little off-key? Do you ask yourself what has turned me into nature’s bashful little aphorist?
Disguised as an eiron, why who should it be
But tuft-hunting, dram-drinking, toad-eating Me!
We who are, after all, simply poor co-workers in the psyche of our nation, what can we expect but the natural automatic re-jection from a public which resents interference? And quite right too. There is no injustice in the matter, for I also resent inter-ference, Brother Ass, just as you do. No, it is not a question of being aggrieved, it is a question of being unlucky. Of the ten thousand reasons for my books’ unpopularity I shall only bother to give you the first, for it includes all the others. A puritan culture’s conception of art is something which will endorse its morality and flatter its patriotism. Nothing else. I see you raise your eyebrows. Even you, Brother Ass, realize the basic unreality of this proposition. Nevertheless it explains everything. A puritan culture, argal, does not know what art is — how can it be expected to
care? (I leave religion to the bishops — there it can do most harm!) No croked legge, no blered eye,
no part deformed out of kinde
Nor yet so onolye half can be
As is the inward suspicious minde.
The wheel is patience on to which I’m bound.
Time is this nothingness within the round.
Gradually we compile our own anthologies of misfortune, our dictionaries of verbs and nouns, our copulas and gerundives. That symptomatic policeman of the London dusk first breathed the message to us! That kindly father-figure put the truth in a nutshell. And here we are both in a foreign city built of smegma-tinted crystal and tinsel whose moeurs, if we described them, would be regarded as the fantasies of our disordered brains. Brother Ass, we have the hardest lesson of all to learn as yet —
that truth cannot be forced but must be allowed to plead for itself!
Can you hear me? The line is faulty again, your voice has gone far away. I hear the water rushing!
Be bleak, young man, and let who will be sprightly, And honour Venus if you can twice nightly.
All things being equal you should not refuse
To ring the slow sad cowbell of the English muse!
Art’s Truth’s Nonentity made quite explicit.
If it ain’t this then what the devil is it?
Writing in my room last night I saw an ant upon the table. It crossed near the inkwell, and I saw it hesitate at the