Dream of Fair to Middling Women (16 page)

Even our spaniels are on the gay side.

Next, in the interests of this virgin chronicle, we find ourselves obliged to hack through a most pitiless belt, a regular thicket as dense and stubborn and intolerant of penetration as that which confronted us some way back at the neck, if you remember, of the black blizzard corridor, and which we are shocked and pained to find cropping up like this at the very fringe of the clearing. It must now be our endeavour, no less, to pierce the shadows and tangles of Belacqua's behaviour. And we call the Book Society to witness that we do not propose, on the occasion of this enterprise, to concede ourselves conquered. The mind commands the mind, and it obeys. Oh miracle d'amour.

Much of what has been written concerning the reluctance
of our refractory constituents to bind together and give us a synthesis is true equally of Belacqua. Their movement is based on a principle of repulsion, their property not to combine but, like heavenly bodies, to scatter and stampede, astral straws on a time-strom, grit in the mistral. And not only to shrink from all that is not they, from all that is without and in its turn shrinks from them, but also to strain away from themselves. They are no good from the builder's point of view, firstly because they will not suffer their systems to be absorbed in the cluster of a greater system, and then, and chiefly, because they themselves tend to disappear as systems. Their centres are wasting, the strain away from the centre is not to be gainsaid, a little more and they explode. Then, to complicate things further, they have odd periods of recueillement, a kind of centripetal backwash that checks the rot. The procede that seems all falsity, that of Balzac, for example, and the divine Jane and many others, consists in dealing with the vicissitudes, or absence of vicissitudes, of character in this backwash, as though that were the whole story. Whereas, in reality, this is so little the story, this nervous recoil into composure, this has so little to do with the story, that one must be excessively concerned with a total precision to allude to it at all. To the item thus artificially immobilised in a backwash of composure precise value can be assigned. So all the novelist has to do is to bind his material in a spell, item after item, and juggle politely with irrefragable values, values that can assimilate other values like in kind and be assimilated by them, that can increase and decrease in virtue of an unreal permanence of quality. To read Balzac is to receive the impression of a chloroformed world. He is absolute master of his material, he can do what he likes with it, he can foresee and calculate its least vicissitude, he
can write the end of his book before he has finished the first paragraph, because he has turned all his creatures into clockwork cabbages and can rely on their staying put wherever needed or staying going at whatever speed in whatever direction he chooses. The whole thing, from beginning to end, takes place in a spellbound backwash. We all love and lick up Balzac, we lap it up and say it is wonderful, but why call a distillation of Euclid and Perrault
Scenes from Life?
Why
human
comedy?

Why anything? Why bother about it? It covers our good paper.

A great deal of the above marginalia covers Belacqua, or, better: Belacqua is in part covered by the above marginalia.

At his simplest he was trine. Just think of that. A trine man! Centripetal, centrifugal and… not. Phoebus chasing Daphne, Narcissus flying from Echo and… neither. Is that neat or is it not? The chase to Vienna, the flight to Paris, the slouch to Fulda, the relapse into Dublin and… immunity like hell from journeys and cities. The hand to Lucien and Liebert and the Syra-Cusa tendered and withdrawn and again tendered and again withdrawn and… hands forgotten. The dots are nice don't you think? Trine. Yessir. In cases of emergency, as when the Syra-Cusa became a saint or the Smeraldina-Daphne, that he might have her according to his God, a Smeraldina-Echo, the two first persons might sink their differences, the two main interests merge, the wings of flight to the centre be harnessed to flight thence. The same dirty confusion and neutralisation of needs when he wands her into a blue bird, wands whom, how the hell do we know, anybody, into a blue bird and lets fly a poem at her, immerging the
better to emerge. Almost a case of
reculer pour mieux enculer.

That was a dirty confusion. It stinks in his memory like the snuff of a cierge.

The third being was the dark gulf, when the glare of the will and the hammer-strokes of the brain doomed outside to take flight from its quarry were expunged, the Limbo and the wombtomb alive with the unanxious spirits of quiet cerebration, where there was no conflict of flight and flow and Eros was as null as Anteros and Night had no daughters. He was bogged in indolence, without identity, impervious alike to its pull and goading. The cities and forests and beings were also without identity, they were shadows, they exerted neither pull nor goad. His third being was without axis or contour, its centre everywhere and periphery nowhere, an unsurveyed marsh of sloth.

There is no authority for supposing that this third Belacqua is the real Belacqua any more than that the Syra-Cusa of the abstract drawing was the real Syra-Cusa. There is no real Belacqua, it is to be hoped not indeed, there is no such person. All that can be said for certain is, that as far as he can judge for himself, the emancipation, in a slough of indifference and negligence and disinterest, from identity, his own and his neighbour's, suits his accursed complexion much better than the dreary fiasco of oscillation that presents itself as the only alternative. He is sorry it does not happen more often, that he does not go under more often. He finds it more pleasant to be altogether swathed in the black arras of his sloth than condemned to deploy same and inscribe it with the frivolous spirals, ascending like the little angels and descending, never coming to head or tail, never abutting. Whether squatting in the heart of his store,
sculpting with great care and chiselling the heads and necks of lutes and zithers, or sustaining in the doorway the girds of eminent poets, or coming out into the street for a bit of song and dance (aliquando etiam pulsabat), he was cheating and denying his native indolence, denying himself to the ground-swell of his indolence, holding himself clear, refusing to be sucked down and abolished. But when, as rarely happened, he was drawn down to the blessedly sunless depths, down and down to the slush of angels, clear of the pettifogging ebb and flow, then he knew, but retrospectively, after the furious divers had hauled him out like a crab to fry in the sun, because at the time he was not concerned with such niceties of perception, that if he were free he would take up his dwelling in that place. Nothing less exorbitant than that! If he were free he would take up his dwelling in that curious place, he would settle down there, you see, he would retire and settle down there, like La Fontaine's catawampus.

Excuse our mentioning it here, but it suddenly occurs to us that the real problem of waking hours is how soonest to become sleepy. Excuse our mentioning it here.

In this Kimmerea not of sleep Narcissus was obliterated and Phoebus (here names only, anything else would do as well, for the extremes of the pendulum) and all their ultra-violets. Sometimes he speaks of himself thus drowned and darkened as “restored to his heart”; and at other times as “sedendo
et
quiescendo” with the stress on the et and no extension of the thought into the spirit made wise. Squatting in the heart of the store he was not quiet. Cellineg-giava finickety scrolls and bosses, exposed to the fleers of uneasy poets.
If to be seated is to be wise, then no man is wiser than thee.
That class of cheap stinger.

But the wretched Belacqua was not free and therefore
could not at will go back into his heart, could not will and gain his enlargement from the gin-palace of willing. Convinced like a fool that it must be possible to induce at pleasure a state so desirable and necessary to himself he exhausted his ingenuity experimenting. He left no stone unturned. He trained his little brain to hold its breath, he made covenants of all kinds with his senses, he forced the lids of the little brain down against the flaring bric-à-brac, in every imaginable way he flogged on his cœnaesthesis to enwomb him, to exclude the bric-à-brac and expunge his consciousness. He learned how with his knuckles to press torrents of violet from his eyeballs, he lay in his skin on his belly on the bed, his face crushed grossly into the pillow, pressing down towards the bearings of the earth with all the pitiful little weight of his inertia, for hours and hours, until he would begin and all things to descend, ponderously and softly to lapse downwards through darkness, he and the bed and the room and the world. All for nothing. He was grotesque, wanting to “troglodyse” himself, worse than grotesque. It was impossible to switch off the inward glare, wilfully to suppress the bureaucratic mind. It was stupid to imagine that he could be organised as Limbo and wombtomb, worse than stupid. When he tried to mechanise what was a dispensation he was guilty of a no less abominable confusion than when he tried to plunge through himself to a cloud, when, for his sorrow, he tried to do that. How could the will be abolished in its own tension? or the mind appeased in paroxysms of disgust? Shameful spewing shall be his portion. He remains, for all his grand fidgeting and shuffling, bird or fish, or, worse still, a horrible border-creature, a submarine bird, flapping its wings under a press of water. The will and nill cannot suicide, they are not free to suicide. That is where the
wretched Belacqua jumps the rails. And that is his wretchedness, that he seeks a means whereby the will and nill may be enabled to suicide and refuses to understand that they cannot do it, that they are not free to do it. Which does as well as anything else, though no better, to explain, since it is always a question here below of explaining, why the temper of Belacqua is bad as a rule and his complexion saturnine. He remembers the pleasant gracious bountiful tunnel, and cannot get back. Not for the life of him. He keeps on chafing and scuffling and fidgeting about, scribbling bad spirals with an awful scowl on the “belle face carrèe”, instead of simply waiting until the thing happens. And we cannot do anything for him. How can you help people, unless it be on with their corsets or to a second or third helping?

It makes us anxious, we are quite frank about it, with such material and such a demiurge. Belacqua cannot be petrified in the moment of recoil, of backwash into composure, any more than the rest of them.
He has turned out to be simply not that kind of person.
Only for the sake of convenience is he presented as a cubic unknown.
At his simplest trine,
we were at pains to say so, to save our bacon, save our face. He is no more satisfied by the three values, Apollo, Narcissus and the anonymous third person, than he would be by fifty values, or any number of values. And to know that he was would be precious cold comfort. For what are they themselves—Apollo, Narcissus and the inaccessible Limbese? Are they simple themselves? Like hell they are! Can we measure them once and for all and do sums with them like those impostors that they call mathematicians? We can not. We can state them as a succession of terms, but we can't sum them and we can't define them. They tail off vaguely at both ends and the intervals of their
series are demented. We give you one term of Apollo: chasing a bitch, the usual bitch. And one term of Narcissus: running away from one. But we took very good care not to mention the shepherd or the charioteer or the healer or the mourner or the arcitenens or the lyrist or the butcher or the crow; and very good care not to mention the hunter or the mocker or the boy howling for his pals or in tears or in love or testing the Stygian speculum. Because it did not suit us and would not have amused us and because the passage did not call for it. But if at any time it happen that a passage does call for a different term, for another Apollo or another Narcissus or another spirit from the wombtomb, and if it suit and amuse us (because if not the passage can call until it be blue in the face) to use it, then in it goes. Thus little by little Belacqua may be described, but not circumscribed; his terms stated, but not summed. And of course God's will be done should one description happen to cancel the next, or the terms appear crazily spaced. His will, never ours.

Belacqua, of all people, to be in such a hotch-potch! Something might yet be saved from the wreck if only he would have the goodness to fix his vibrations and be a liū on the grand scale. But he will not. It is all we can do, when we think of this incommensurate demiurge, not to get into a panic. What is needed of course is a tuning-fork, faithful unto death, that is to say the gasping codetta, to mix with the treacherous liûs and liūs and get a line on them. That is what we call being a liū on the grand scale. Someone like Watson or Figaro or Jane the Pale or Miss Flite or the Pio Goffredo, someone who could be always relied on for just the one little squawk, ping!, just right, the right squawk in the right place, just one pure permanent liū or liū, sex no bar, and all might yet be well. Just one,
only one, tuning-fork charlatan to move among the notes and size ‘em up and steady ‘em down and chain ‘em together in some kind of a nice little cantilena and then come along and consolidate the entire article with the ground-swell of its canto fermo. We picked Belacqua for the job, and now we find that he is not able for it. He is in marmalade. Like his feet.

It would scarcely be an exaggeration to maintain that the four-and-twenty letters make no more variety of words in divers languages than the days and nights of this hopeless man produce variety. Yet, various though he was, he epitomised nothing. Sallust would have made a dreadful hash of his portrait.

By them that knew him, by them that loved him and by them that hated him, he was not forgotten. By them also who when called upon could place him without any doubt subsisting in their own minds as to the correctness of their ascriptions but to whom he was not ordinarily very present, an unremarkable person at the best of times, he was not neglected. He was fatally recognisable and wilfully cut, so little capable even as a behaviourist of versatility did he appear. The hats of friends flew off spontaneously to him as he passed, their arms flared up on his passage, and very often, more often than not, because he waddled forward bowed to the ground or screwed inward to the stores, their kindly sheets of glass, he would not respond, and always he hastened to pass, that was a great need with him, to pass, not to halt in the street, even when the man was nice, or else they crossed over grossly like the Pharisee or if they saw the disaster coming too late put on a spurt and dashed past with faces most incompetently blank or broached a long complicated observation eagerly to their companion if
they had the good fortune to be accompanied. What was curious was that never, never by any chance at any time, did he mean anything at all to his inferiors. No, there we are wrong, there were exceptions to that, and one most charming. Yet it is not so very wide of the mark to say that day after day, year in and out, he could enter at the same hour the same store to make some trifling indispensable purchase, he could receive his coffee at the same hour in the same café from the hands of the same waiter, remain faithful to one particular kiosque for his newspaper and to one particular tobacconist for his tobacco, he could persist in eating at the same house and in taking his drink before and after in the same bar, and never know his assiduity to be recognised by as much as a smile or a kind word or the smallest additional attention, say a little more butter on his sandwich than would naturally fall to the share of the odd chance client, or a more generous part of curaçoa in his apéritif. Almost it seemed as though he were doomed to leave no trace, but none of any kind, on the popular sensibility. Is it not curious that he should be thus excluded from the ring of habitués and their legitimate benefits? He had no success with the people, and he suffered profoundly in consequence. The purchase of a stamp or a book of tram-tickets or a book on the quay or in a shop entailed without fail, notwithstanding the humility, the timorousness, almost the tenderness, of his approach, a disagreeable passage of arms with the vendor. Then he became furious, red in the face. To register and post a packet was out of the question. In the bank it was torture to present a cheque even amply provided for.