The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [49]
I think, too, that something of this sort must have been in Arnauti’s mind when he wrote: ‘For the writer people as psycho-logies are finished. The contemporary psyche has exploded like a soap-bubble under the investigations of the mystagogues. What now remains to the writer?’
Perhaps it was the realization of this which made me select this empty place to live for the next few years — this sunburnt head-land in the Cyclades. Surrounded by history on all sides, this empty island alone is free from every reference. It has never been mentioned in the annals of the race which owns it. Its historic past is refunded, not into time, but into place — no temples, groves, amphitheatres, to corrupt ideas with their false comparisons. A shelf of coloured boats, a harbour over the hills, and a little town denuded by neglect. That is all. Once a month a steamer touches on its way to Smyrna.
These winter evenings the sea-tempests climb the cliffs and invade the grove of giant untended planes where I walk, talking a sudden wild slang, slopping and tilting the schooner trees.
I walk here with those coveted intimations of a past which none can share with me; but which time itself cannot deprive me of. My hair is clenched back to my scalp and one hand guards the burning dottle of my pipe from the force of the wind. Above, the sky is set in a brilliant comb of stars. Antares guttering up there, buried in spray…. To have cheerfully laid down obedient books and friends, lighted rooms, fireplaces built for conversation — the whole parish of the civilized mind — is not something I regret but merely wonder at.
In this choice too I see something fortuitous, born of impulses which I am forced to regard as outside the range of my own nature. And yet, strangely enough, it is only here that I am at last able to re-enter, reinhabit the unburied city with my friends; to frame them in the heavy steel webs of metaphors which will last half as long as the city itself — or so I hope. Here at least I am able to see their history and the city’s as one and the same phenomenon. But strangest of all: I owe this release to Pursewarden — the last person I should ever have considered a possible benefactor. That last meeting, for example, in the ugly and expensive hotel bedroom to which he always moved on Pombal’s return from leave … I did not recognize the heavy musty odour of the room as the odour of his impending suicide — how should I? I knew he was unhappy; even had he not been he would have felt obliged to simulate unhappiness. All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness. And being Anglo-Saxon there was a touch of maudlin self-pity and weakness which made him drink a bit. That evening he was savage, silly and witty by turns; and listening to him I remember thinking suddenly: ‘Here is someone who in farming his talent has neglected his sensibility, not by acci-dent, but deliberately, for its self-expression might have brought him into conflict with the world, or his loneliness threatened his reason. He could not bear to be refused admittance, while he lived, to the halls of fame and recognition. Underneath it all he has been steadily putting up with an