The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [426]
Ferocious, sulky, brilliant, profuse — the torrent of words in that close hand flowed on and on endlessly, studded with diamond-hard images, a wild self-analytical frenzy of despair, remorse and passion. I began to tremble as one must in the presence of a great master, to tremble and mutter. With an interior shock I realized that there was nothing in the whole length and breadth of our literature with which to compare them! Whatever other master-pieces Pursewarden may have written these letters outshone them all in their furious, unpremeditated brilliance and prolixity. Literature, I say! But these were life itself, not a studied repre-sentation of it in a form — life itself, the flowing undivided stream of life with all its pitiable will-intoxicated memories, its pains, terrors and submissions. Here illusion and reality were fused in one single blinding vision of a perfect incorruptible passion which hung over the writer’s mind like a dark star — the star of death!
The tremendous sorrow and beauty which this man expressed so easily — the terrifying abundance of his gifts — filled me with helpless despair and joy at once. The cruelty and the richness!
It was as if the words poured from every pore in his body —
execrations, groans, mixed tears of joy and despair — all welded to the fierce rapid musical notation of a language perfected by its purpose. Here at last the lovers confronted one another, stripped to the bone, stripped bare.
In this strange and frightening experience I caught a glimpse, for a moment, of the true Pursewarden — the man who had always eluded me. I thought with shame of the shabby passages in the Justine manuscript which I had devoted to him — to my image of him! I had, out of envy or unconscious jealousy, invented a Pursewarden to criticize. In everything I had written there I had accused him only of my own weaknesses — even down to com-pletely erroneous estimates of qualities like social inferiorities which were mine, had never been his. It was only now, tracing out the lines written by that rapid unfaltering pen, that I realized that poetic or transcendental knowledge somehow cancels out purely relative knowledge, and that his black humours were simply
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