The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [446]
ironies due to his enigmatic knowledge whose field of operation was above, beyond that of the relative fact-finding sort. There was no answer to the questions I had raised in very truth. He had been quite right. Blind as a mole, I had been digging about in the graveyard of relative fact piling up data, more information, and completely missing the mythopoeic reference which underlies fact. I had called this searching for truth! Nor was there any way in which I might be instructed in the matter — save by the ironies I had found so wounding. For now I realized that his irony was really tenderness turned inside out like a glove! And seeing Purse-warden thus, for the first time, I saw that through his work he had been seeking for the very tenderness of logic itself, of the Way Things Are; not the logic of syllogism or the tide-marks of emotions, but the real essence of fact-finding, the naked truth, the Inkling … the whole pointless Joke. Yes, Joke! I woke up with a start and swore.
If two or more explanations of a single human action are as good as each other then what does action mean but an illusion
— a gesture made against the misty backcloth of a reality made palpable by the delusive nature of human division merely? Had any novelist before Pursewarden considered this question? I think not.
And in brooding over these terrible letters I also suddenly stumbled upon the true meaning of my own relationship to Pursewarden, and through him to all writers. I saw, in fact, that we artists form one of those pathetic human chains which human beings form to pass buckets of water up to a fire, or to bring in a lifeboat. An uninterrupted chain of humans born to explore the inward riches of the solitary life on behalf of the unheeding un-forgiving community; manacled together by the same gift. I began to see too that the real ‘fiction’ lay neither in Arnauti’s pages nor Pursewarden’s — nor even my own. It was life itself that was a fiction — we were all saying it in our different ways, each understanding it according to his nature and gift. It was now only that I began to see how mysteriously the con-figuration of my own life had taken its shape from the properties of those elements which lie outside the relative life — in the kingdom which Pursewarden calls the ‘heraldic universe’. We were three writers, I now saw, confided to a mythical city from which
we were to draw our nourishment, in which we were to confirm our gifts. Arnauti, Pursewarden, Darley — like Past, Present and Future tense! And in my own life (the staunchless stream flowing from the wounded side of Time!) the three women who also arranged themselves as if to represent the moods of the great verb, Love: Melissa, Justine and Clea.
And realizing this I was suddenly afflicted by a great melan-choly and despair at recognizing the completely limited nature of my own powers, hedged about as they were by the limitations of an intelligence too powerful for itself, and lacking in sheer word-magic, in propulsion, in passion, to achieve this other world of artistic fulfilment.
I had just locked those unbearable letters away and was sitting in melancholy realization of this fact when the door opened and Clea walked in, radiant and smiling. ‘Why, Darley, what are you doing sitting in the middle of the floor in that rueful attitude?
And my dear there are tears in your eyes.’ At once she was down beside me on her knees, all tenderness.
‘Tears of exasperation’ I said, and then, embracing her, ‘I have just realized that I am not an artist at all. There is not a shred of hope of my ever being one.’
‘What on earth have you been up to?’
‘Reading Pursewarden’s letters to Liza.’
‘Did you see her?’
‘Yes. Keats is writing some absurd book ——’
‘But I just ran into him. He’s back from the desert for the night.’
I struggled to my feet. It seemed to me imperative that I should find him and discover what I could