The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [163]
Paid more for perforations!’ He made a straight face for Melissa who came into the room at this moment. ‘Ah well’ he said, still shaking visibly at his own jest. ‘I must write to Budgie tonight and tell him all the news.’ Budgie was his oldest friend. ‘Lives in Hor-sham, old man, makes earth-closets. He’s collected a regular packet from them, has old Budgie. He’s an FRZS, I don’t quite know what it means, but he had it on his notepaper. Charles Donahue Budgeon FRZS. I write to him every week. Punctual. Always have done, always will do. Staunch, that’s me. Never give up a friend.’
It was to Budgie, I think, the unfinished letter which was found in his rooms after his death and which read as follows:
‘ Dear old pal, The whole world seems to have turned against me since I last wrote. I should have’
Scobie and Melissa! In the golden light of those Sundays they live on, bright still with the colours that memory gives to those who enrich our lives by tears or by laughter — unaware them-selves that they have given us anything. The really horrible thing is that the compulsive passion which Justine fit in me was quite as valuable as it would have been had it been ‘real’; Melissa’s gift was no less an enigma — what could she have offered me, in truth, this pale waif of the Alexandrian littoral? Was Clea enriched or beggared by her relations with Justine? Enriched — immeasurably enriched, I should say. Are we then nourished only by fictions, by lies? I recall the words Balthazar wrote down somewhere in his tall grammarian’s handwriting: ‘We live by selected fictions’ and also:
‘Everything is true of everybody….’ Were these words of Purse-warden’s quarried from his own experience of men and women, or simply from a careful observation of us, our behaviours and their result? I don’t know. A passage comes to mind from a novel in which Pursewarden speaks about the role of the artist in life. He
says something like this: ‘Aware of every discord, of every calamity in the nature of man himself, he can do nothing to warn his friends, to point, to cry out in time and to try to save them. It would be useless. For they are the deliberate factors of their own unhappi-ness. All the artist can say as an imperative is: “Reflect and weep.” ’
Was it consciousness of tragedy irremediable contained — not in the external world which we all blame — but in ourselves, in the human conditions, which finally dictated his unexpected suicide in that musty hotel-room? I like to think it was, but perhaps I am in danger of putting too much emphasis on the artist at the expense of the man. Balthazar writes: ‘Of all things his suicide has re-mained for me an extraordinary and quite inexplicable freak. Whatever stresses and strains he may have been subjected to I can-not quite bring myself to believe it. But then I suppose we live in the shallows of one another’s personalities and cannot really see into the depths beneath. Yet I should have said this was surpris-ingly out of character. You see, he was really at rest about his work which most torments the artists, I suppose, and really had begun to regard it as “divinely unimportant” — a characteristic phrase. I know this for certain because he once wrote me out on the back of an envelope an answer to the question “What is the object of writ-ing?” His answer was this: “The object of writing is to grow a personality which in the end enables man to transcend art.”
‘He had odd ideas about the constitution of the psyche. For example, he said “I regard it as completely unsubstantial as a rain-bow — it only coheres into identifiable states and attributes when attention is focused on it. The truest form of right attention is of course love. Thus