The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [150]
‘He believed, I think, that success was inherent in greatness. His own lack of financial success (he made very little money from his work, contrary to what you thought, and it all went to his wife and two children who lived in England) was inclined to make him
doubt his powers. Perhaps he should have been born an American?
I don’t know.
‘I remember going down to the dock to meet his boat with the panting Keats — who proposed to interview him. We were late and only caught up with him as he was filling in an immigration form. Against the column marked “religion” he had written
“Protestant — purely in the sense that I protest. ”
‘We took him for a drink so that Keats could interview him at leisure. The poor boy was absolutely nonplussed. Pursewarden had a particular smile for the Press. I still have the picture Keats took that morning. The sort of smile which might have hardened on the face of a dead baby. Later I got to know this smile and learned that it meant he was about to commit an outrage on ac-cepted good sense with an irony. He was trying to amuse no-one but himself, mind you. Keats panted and puffed, looked “sincere”
and probed, but all in vain. Later I asked him for a carbon copy of his interview which he typed out and gave me with his puzzled air, explaining that there was no “news” in the man. Pursewarden had said things like “It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively” and “England cries out for brothels”; this last somewhat shocked poor Keats who asked him if he felt that “un-bridled licence” would be a good thing in England. Did Purse-warden want to undermine religion?
‘I can see as I write the wicked air with which my friend replied in shocked tones: “Good Lord, no! I would simply like to put an end to the cruelty to children which is such a distressing feature of English life — as well as the slavish devotion to pets which borders on the obscene.” Keats must have gulped his way through all this, dotting and dashing in his shorthand book with rolling eye, while Pursewarden studied the further horizon. But if the journalist found this sort of exchange enigmatic, he was doubly puzzled by some of the answers to his political que stions. For example, when he asked Pursewarden what he thought of the Con-ference of the Arab Committee which was due to start in Cairo that day, he replied: “When the English feel they are in the wrong, their only recourse is to cant.” “Am I to understand that you are criticizing British policy?” “Of course not. Our statesmanship is impeccable.” Keats fanned himself all the harder and abandoned politics forthwith. In answer to the question “Are you planning to
write a novel while you are here?” Pursewarden said: “If I am denied every other means of self-gratification.”
‘Later Keats, poor fellow, still fanning that pink brow, said
“He’s a thorny bastard, isn’t he?” But the odd thing was that he wasn’t at all. Where can a man who really thinks take refuge in the so-called real world without defending himself against stup idity by the constant exercise of equivocation? Tell me that. Particularly a poet. He once said: “Poets are not really serious about ideas or people. They regard them much as a Pasha regards the members of an extensive harim. They are pretty, yes. They are for use. But there is no question of them being true or false, or having souls. In this way the poet preserves his freshness of vision, and finds every-thing miraculous. And this is what Napoleon meant when he des-cribed poetry as a science creuse. He was quite right from his own point of view.”
‘This robust mind was far from splenetic though its judgements were harsh. I have seen him so moved in describing Joyce’s en-croaching blindness and D. H. Lawrence’s illness that his hand shook and he turned pale. He showed me once a letter from the latter in which Lawrence had written: “In you I feel a sort of pro- fanity — almost a hate for the tender growing quick in things, the dark Gods…. ” He chuckled. He deeply loved Lawrence but had no hesitation in replying on a post-card: