The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [48]
I am not proud of these thoughts, for they betray the envy that every failure feels for every success; but spite may often see as clearly as charity. And indeed, running as it were upon a parallel track in my mind went the words which Clea once used about him and which, for some reason, I remembered and reflected upon:
‘He is unlovely somewhere. Part of the secret is his physical un-gainliness. Being wizened his talent has a germ of shyness in it. Shyness has laws: you can only give yourself, tragically, to those who least understand. For to understand one would be to admit pity for one’s frailty. Hence the women he loves, the letters he writes to the women he loves, stand as ciphers in his mind for the women he thinks he wants, or at any rate deserves — cher ami. ’ Clea’s sentences always broke in half and ended in that magical smile of tenderness — ‘am I my brother’s keeper?’…
(What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place — for that is history — but in the order in which they first became significant for me.) What, then, could have been his motive in leaving me five hundred pounds with the sole stipulation that I should spend them with Melissa? I thought perhaps that he may have loved her him-self but after deep reflection I have come to the conclusion that he loved, not her, but my love for her. Of all my qualities he envied me only my capacity to respond warmly to endearments whose value he recognized, perhaps even desired, but from which he would be forever barred by self-disgust. Indeed this itself was a blow to my pride for I would have liked him to admire — if not the work I have done — at least the promise it shows of what I have
yet to do. How stupid, how limited we are — mere vanities on legs!
We had not met for weeks, for we did not habitually frequent each other, and when we did it was in the little tin pissotière in the main square by the tram-station. It was after dark and we would never have recognized each other had not the head-lights of a car occasionally drenched the foetid cubicle in white fight like spray.
‘Ah!’ he said in recognition : unsteadily, thoughtfully, for he was drunk. (Some time, weeks before, he had left me five hundred pounds; in a sense he had summed me up, judged me — though that judgement was only to reach me from the other side of the grave.)
The rain cropped at the tin roof above us. I longed to go home, for I had had a very tiring day, but I feebly lingered, obstructed by the apologetic politeness I always feel with people I do not really like. The slightly wavering figure outlined itself upon the darkness before me. ‘Let me’ he said in a maudlin tone ‘confide in you the secret of my novelist’s trade. I am a success, you a failure. The answer, old man, is sex and plenty of it.’ He raised his voice and his chin as he said, or rather declaimed, the word ‘sex’: tilting his scraggy neck like a chicken drinking and biting off the word with a half-yelp like a drill-serjeant. ‘Lashings of sex’ he repeated more normally, ‘but remember’ and he allowed his voice to sink to a confidential mumble, ‘ stay buttoned up tight. Eternal grandma strong to save. You must stay buttoned up and suffering. Try and look as if you had a stricture, a book society choice. What is not permissible is rude health, ordure, the natural and the funny. That was all right for Chaucer and the Elizabethans but it won’t make the grade today — buttoned up tightly with stout Presbyterian buttons.’ And in the very act of shaking himself off he turned to me a face composed to resemble a fly-button — tight, narrow and grotesque. I thanked him but he waved aside the thanks in a royal manner. ‘It’s all free’ he said, and leading me by the hand he piloted me out into the dark street. We walked towards the lighted centre of the town like bondsmen, fellow writers, heavy with a sense of different failures. He talked confidentially to himself of matters which interested him in a mumble which I could not interpret. Once as we turned into the Rue des Soeurs he stopped before the lighted door of a house of ill-fame and pronounced: