The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [164]
‘He never failed to speak most slightingly of my own interests in the occult, and indeed in the work of the Cabal whose meetings you attended yourself. He said of this “Truth is a matter of direct apprehension — you can’t climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.”
‘I can’t get away from the feeling that he was at his most serious when he was most impudent. I heard him maintaining to Keats that the best lines of English poetry ever written were by Coventry Patmore. They were:
The truth is great and will prevail
When none care whether it prevail or not.
‘And then, having said this, he added: “And their true beauty resides in the fact that Patmore when he wrote them did not know what he meant. Sich lassen! ” You can imagine how this would annoy Keats. He also quoted with approval a mysterious phrase of Stendhal, namely: “The smile appears on the skin outside.”
‘Are we to assume from all this the existence of a serious person underneath the banter? I leave the question to you — your concern is a direct one.
‘At the time when we knew him he was reading hardly anything but science. This for some reason annoyed Justine who took him to task for wasting his time in these studies. He defended himself by saying that the Relativity proposition was directly respons ible for abstract painting, atonal music, and formless (or at any rate cyclic forms in) literature. Once it was grasped they were under-stood, too. He added: “In the Space and Time marriage we have the greatest Boy meets Girl story of the age. To our great-grand-children this will be as poetical a union as the ancient Greek mar-riage of Cupid and Psyche seems to us. You see, Cupid and Psyche were facts to the Greeks, not concepts. Analogical as against analytical thinking! But the true poetry of the age and its most fruitful poem is the mystery which begins and ends with an n. ”
‘ “Are you serious about all this?”
‘ “Not a bit.”
‘Justine protested: “The beast is up to all sorts of tricks, even in his books.” She was thinking of the famous page with the asterisk in the first volume which refers one to a page in the text which is mysteriously blank. Many people take this for a printer’s error. But Pursewarden himself assured me that it was deliberate.
“I refer the reader to a blank page in order to throw him back upon his own resources — which is where every reader ultimately belongs.”
‘You speak about the plausibility of our actions — and this does us an injustice, for we are all living people and have the right as such to take refuge in the suspended judgement of God if not the reader. So, while I think of it, let me tell you the story of Justine’s laughter! You will admit that you yourself never heard it, not once, I mean in a way that was not mordant, not wounded. But Purse-warden did — at the tombs in Saqarra! By moonlight, two days
after Sham el Nessim. They were there among a large party of sightseers, a crowd under cover of which they had managed to talk a little, like the conspirators they were: already at this time Purse-warden had put an end to her private visitations to his hotel-room. So it gave them a forbidden pleasure, this exchange of a few hoarded secret words; and at last this evening they came by chance to be alone, standing together in one of those overbearing and over-whelming mementoes to a specialized sense of death: the tombs.
‘Justine had laddered her stockings and filled her shoes with sand. She was emptying them, he was lighting matches and gazing about him, and sniffing. She whispered she had been terribly worried of late by a new suspicion that Nessim had discovered something about her lost child which he would not tell her. Purse-warden was absently listening when suddenly he snapped his fingers which he had burnt on a match and said: “Listen, Justine
— you know what? I re-read Moeurs again last week for fun and I had an idea; I mean if all the song and dance about Freud and your so-called childhood rape and so on are true