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Authors: Lawrence Durrell
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portrait in that wretched diary of his. What a monument of unconscious humour and pathos!
The night I told him that Clare had been unfaithful to him, rather that Grace had been unfaithful to me, he was for beating the gigolo senseless. âThe worldâs not large enough for us both,â he admitted, starting to be sick. In the bathroom, falling on his knees, he clutched the tails of my dressing gown, and said: âHelp me, Gregory, for the love of God, help me, help me.â
I helped him to bed â¦
Here ends the extract from Gregoryâs diary.
That is a fragment of the tender id of this book: the secretive, wincing plasm of Gregory tangled in his own egoismus; tangled in the green lace of the writing. I do not pretend to interpret. It would be too much to expect of the interrogative ego, the other me, whose function is simply to take a sort of hieroglyphic dictation from space, and annotate it, punctuate, edit. Perhaps add a pert little introduction of my own, and an apparatus of variants.
If I reflect on our individual and collective funerals, here in the Regina Hotel, running side by side in the snow in a chronology which has nothing to do with timeâfor it has forfeited time for the living limboâthen I am forced back to a picture of Lobo sitting over his chart, his fingers busy, while Gregory watches from a chair. Always the Gregory who does not exist here, the Death Gregory of the green fable. As for the chart, it is the final symbol of this annihilation. At night I can see it on the wall. It contains every principle, every motive, every boundary to which our deaths are subject, in which they are consummated. Plot me a graph of the doom, in which the southern provinces lie! The tunnel of Lordship Lane where my feet have worn themselves down to marrowless stumps in my wanderings. The smoke and uproar of the tin tumbrils passing the eternal windows. The museum clock face is scourged by raindrops: it dies, like a pale face on the stalk of a tower, and reminds me of the death of time.â¦
When Gregory speaks out of the darkness I am wandering again in that insane system which is not solar but infernal. The fronds of the sickening trees from Green Lanes away to Champion Hill, where the travellers go at night with their bags and baggages. At Catford, where the blind men dance to the violins, while the wind blows their eyelids over them; and their hands are terrible soapy talons! Deliver me from the blind men of my childhood! Stand on the bridge and let the engines launch themselves at you. Heavy steel lances diving between your legs and the smoke chokes up between the arches. All the signals are set green as the evening shuts down, long rays of evening paralysis over the tenements. Lochia. The houses secret and prim. No sound, no sound of the rigours, tragedies, lamentations leaking from behind the shutters. The door knockers hanging on broken hinges waiting for the Host to lift them. Inside the kitchen ranges flaring, surrounded by steaming clotheshorses. Texts on the wall at an angle. Mantels blossoming out with a sudden soft pop. Letters with Indian stamps on them, Halma, Ludo, Baedeker, Old Moore, dripping, sequel, the green-house lit with a green rain from heaven, the haggard fingers stitching a winding cloth for the morning ⦠It is difficult to write it. There is a transition from that place to this, where I sit and watch Lobo work at the map he will never finish. But it is immediate. The connecting links have snapped, or been burst into pieces. I live only in my imagination which is timeless. Therefore the location of this world which I am trying to hammer out for you on a blunt typewriter, over the Ionian, is the location of space merely. I can only fix it with any certainty on the map.
From Peckham where the children sail their boats, where the lovers play with each other and go mad on the dark common after dark, away to the lairs of Lee Green, where you can smell Black-heath
The night I told him that Clare had been unfaithful to him, rather that Grace had been unfaithful to me, he was for beating the gigolo senseless. âThe worldâs not large enough for us both,â he admitted, starting to be sick. In the bathroom, falling on his knees, he clutched the tails of my dressing gown, and said: âHelp me, Gregory, for the love of God, help me, help me.â
I helped him to bed â¦
Here ends the extract from Gregoryâs diary.
That is a fragment of the tender id of this book: the secretive, wincing plasm of Gregory tangled in his own egoismus; tangled in the green lace of the writing. I do not pretend to interpret. It would be too much to expect of the interrogative ego, the other me, whose function is simply to take a sort of hieroglyphic dictation from space, and annotate it, punctuate, edit. Perhaps add a pert little introduction of my own, and an apparatus of variants.
If I reflect on our individual and collective funerals, here in the Regina Hotel, running side by side in the snow in a chronology which has nothing to do with timeâfor it has forfeited time for the living limboâthen I am forced back to a picture of Lobo sitting over his chart, his fingers busy, while Gregory watches from a chair. Always the Gregory who does not exist here, the Death Gregory of the green fable. As for the chart, it is the final symbol of this annihilation. At night I can see it on the wall. It contains every principle, every motive, every boundary to which our deaths are subject, in which they are consummated. Plot me a graph of the doom, in which the southern provinces lie! The tunnel of Lordship Lane where my feet have worn themselves down to marrowless stumps in my wanderings. The smoke and uproar of the tin tumbrils passing the eternal windows. The museum clock face is scourged by raindrops: it dies, like a pale face on the stalk of a tower, and reminds me of the death of time.â¦
When Gregory speaks out of the darkness I am wandering again in that insane system which is not solar but infernal. The fronds of the sickening trees from Green Lanes away to Champion Hill, where the travellers go at night with their bags and baggages. At Catford, where the blind men dance to the violins, while the wind blows their eyelids over them; and their hands are terrible soapy talons! Deliver me from the blind men of my childhood! Stand on the bridge and let the engines launch themselves at you. Heavy steel lances diving between your legs and the smoke chokes up between the arches. All the signals are set green as the evening shuts down, long rays of evening paralysis over the tenements. Lochia. The houses secret and prim. No sound, no sound of the rigours, tragedies, lamentations leaking from behind the shutters. The door knockers hanging on broken hinges waiting for the Host to lift them. Inside the kitchen ranges flaring, surrounded by steaming clotheshorses. Texts on the wall at an angle. Mantels blossoming out with a sudden soft pop. Letters with Indian stamps on them, Halma, Ludo, Baedeker, Old Moore, dripping, sequel, the green-house lit with a green rain from heaven, the haggard fingers stitching a winding cloth for the morning ⦠It is difficult to write it. There is a transition from that place to this, where I sit and watch Lobo work at the map he will never finish. But it is immediate. The connecting links have snapped, or been burst into pieces. I live only in my imagination which is timeless. Therefore the location of this world which I am trying to hammer out for you on a blunt typewriter, over the Ionian, is the location of space merely. I can only fix it with any certainty on the map.
From Peckham where the children sail their boats, where the lovers play with each other and go mad on the dark common after dark, away to the lairs of Lee Green, where you can smell Black-heath
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