Dream of Fair to Middling Women Read online

  How would it be then if we took to that end our bearing together and got an idea of just where we are? Supposing precisely as the true mountaineer, loving women, his pipe and wine, stalks, proud pioneer, into the oyster bar of the hallway hut, deposits his ice-axe, rucksack, ropes and other equipment, turns himself this way, reviewing the path he has trod, and that, estimating with a fairly expert eye the labours, not to mention the dangers, yet to be undergone and overcome ere he spurn the peak yet hidden from view in the cloudy, misty, snowy imbroglio, we, extenuate concensus of me, were to pause in our treacherous theme, take a quick look up and down, ponder what has taken place and what threatens to and renew, with the help of Apollo, the reduced circumstances of our naïveté? How would that be? Chi va piano, they say, va sano, and we lontano. Haply.

  Pride of place to our boys and girls. Ah these liûs and liūs! How have they stayed the course? Have they been doing their dope? The family, the Alba, the Polar Bear, Chas, that dear friend, and of course Nemo, ranging always from his bridge, seem almost as good as new, so little have they been plucked and blown and bowed, so little struck with the little hammer. But they will let us down, they will insist on being themselves, as soon as they are called on for a little strenuous collaboration. Ping! they will no doubt cry with a sneer, pure, permanent lius, we? We take leave to doubt that. And far be it from us to condemn them on that account. But observe what happens in that event, we mean of our being unable to keep those boys and girls up to their notes. The peak pierces the clouds like a sudden flower. We call the whole performance off, we call the book off, it tails off in a horrid manner. The whole fabric comes unstitched, it goes ungebunden, the wistful fabric. The music comes to pieces. The notes fly about all over the place, a cyclone of electrons. And then all we can do, if we are not too old and tired by that time to be interested in making the best of a bad job, is to deploy a curtain of silence as rapidly as possible.

  At the same time we are bound to admit, placing ourselves for the moment in the thick of the popular belief that there are two sides to every question, that the territorials may behave, at least to the extent of giving us some kind of a meagre codetta. May they. There is many a slip, we all know that, between pontem and fontem and gladium and jugulum. But what that consideration has to do with our counting on the members of the Dublin contingent to perform like decent indivisibilities is not clear. The fact of the matter is, we do not trust them. And why not? Because, firstly, of what has gone before; and, secondly, and here is the real hic, the taproot of the whole tangle, of our principal boy's precarious ipsissimosity.

  Consequently, we are rather anxious to dilate briefly of these two things: one, the lius that have let us down; two, Belacqua, who can scarcely fail to keep on doing so.

  Shall we consider then in the first instance that powerful vedette that we have been hearing so much about, the Smeraldina-Rima? Shall we? To begin with, then, there was the Dublin edition that bewitched Belacqua, the unopened edition, all visage and climate: the intact little cameo of a bird-face, so moving, and the gay zephyrs of Purgatory, slithering in across the blue tremolo of the ocean with a pinnace of souls, as good as saved, to the landing-stage, the reedy beach, bright and blue, merging into grass, not without laughter and old K'in music, rising demitonically, we almost said: diademitonically, to the butt of the emerald sugarloaf. When she went away, as go she did, across the wide waters Hesse to seek, again Hesse, unashamed in mind, and left him alone and inconsolable, then her face in the clouds and in the fire and wherever he looked or looked away and on the lining of his lids, such a callow wet he was then, and the thought or dream, sleeping and waking, in the morning dozing and the evening ditto, with the penny rapture, of the shining shore where underneath them the keel of their skiff would ground and grind and rasp and stay stuck for them, just the pair of them, to skip out on to the sand and gather reeds and bathe hands, faces and breasts and broach the foothills without any discussion, in the bright light with the keen music behind them—then that face and site preyed to such purpose on the poor fellow that he took steps to reintegrate the facts of the former and the skin of the zephyr, and so expelled her, for better or worse, from his eye and mind.

  Next the stuprum and illicit defloration, the raptus, frankly, violentiæ, and the ignoble scuffling that we want the stomach to go back on; he, still scullion to hope, putting his best… er… foot forward, because he loved her, or thought so, and thought too that in that case the right thing to do and his bounden duty as a penny boyo and expedient and experienced and so on was to step through the ropes of the alcove with the powerful diva and there acquit himself to the best of his ability.

  Paullo post, when he decided it would be wise to throw up the sponge, he had her, the third edition, her pages cut and clumsily cut and bespattered with the most imbecile marginalia, according to his God, i.e. the current Belacqua Jesus.

  So to the last scene, though of course she abides in his little heart, to allocate a convenient term to the repository for perilous garbage, the whole four of her and many another that have not been presented because they make us tired; the last scene, when they spring—zeep!—apart, as on collision bodies dowered with high coefficients of elasticity. Zeep!

  Now what kind of a liū is that? What is one to think of that for a liū? We assert that we think most poorly of it. Is there as much as the licked shadow of a note there that can be relied on for two minutes? Is there? There may be. No doubt great skill could wring her into some kind of a mean squawk that would do as well as anything else to represent her. We can't be bothered. A respectable overtone is one thing, but this irresponsible squawking bursting up our tune all along the line is quite another. From now on she can hold her bake altogether or damn well get off the platform, for good and all. She can please herself. We won't have her.

  Voice of Grock: Nicht möööögliccchhh…!

  Similarly for the others—Liebert, Lucien, the Syra-Cusa, Mammy and the Mandarin. Mammy, whom, by the way, we may need for our tableau mourant, was the best of them. Her letter, for example, and her little explosion on the night of Silvester, they hang together, they produce the desired monotony. The reason for that is, we never let ourselves loose on her, we never called on her to any large extent. So that in a sense she is in the position of the Alba and Co., she has had practically no occasion to be her-selves. Which does not prevent us from being of the opinion, having up our sleeve certain aspects of that amiable multipara that surprise even us, hardened and all as we are to this kind of work, that when and if we jerk her on for the terminal scena she will collaborate energetically in the general multiplication of tissue. We are of that opinion. Peace be with her, at all events, for a space.

  The case of Liebert (such a name!) is self-evident, and does not merit to be treated separately. Did not we marry him away to a professor's daughter? Requiescat.

  (Query: why do professors lack the gust to get sons? Elucidate.)

  We thought we had got rid of the Syra-Cusa. No such thing, here below, as riddance, good, bad or indifferent. Not having the stomach formally to disprove her let us merely, quickly, cite a circumstance of no importance to tickle our fauces. For days, whole days, she came not abroad, she stayed mewed up in her bedroom. What was she up to? Hold everything now. She was doing abstract drawing! Heavenly Father! Abstract drawing! Can you beat that one?

  It was crass ever to suppose that Lucien might play his part like a liû. Never yet have we come upon anybody, man, woman or child, so little concerned with abiding in being as our brave Lucien. He was a crucible of volatilisation (bravo!), an efflorescence at every moment, his contours in perpetual erosion. Formidable. Looking at his face you saw the features bloom, as in Rembrandt's portrait of his brother. (Mem.: develop.) His face surged forward at you, coming unstuck, coming to pieces, invading the airs, a red dehiscence of flesh in action. You warded it off. Jesus, you thought, it wants to dissolve. Then the gestures, the horrid gestures, of the little fat hands and the splendid words and the se
aweed smile, all coiling and uncoiling and unfolding and flowering into nothingness, his whole person a stew of disruption and flux. And that from the fresh miracle of coherence that he presented every time he turned up. How he kept himself together is one of those mysteries. By right he should have broken up into bits, he should have become a mist of dust in the airs. He was disintegrating bric-à-brac.

  Such a paraphrased abrégé would seem to indicate, unless there be some very serious flaw in our delirium, that the book is degenerating into a kind of Commedia dell'Arte, a form of literary statement to which we object particularly. The lius do just what they please, they just please themselves. They flower out and around into every kind of illicit ultra and infra and supra. Which is bad, because as long as they do that they can never meet. We are afraid to call for the simplest chord. Belacqua drifts about, it is true, doing his best to thicken the tune, but harmonic composition properly speaking, music in depth on the considerable scale is, and this is a terrible thing to have to say, ausgeschlossen.

  E.g: we were strongly tempted, some way back, to make the Syra-Cusa make Lucien a father. That was a very unsavoury plan. If new life in this case, with the Syra-Cusa and Lucien, could be the fruit of a collision, well and good. One can always organise a collision. It is to be hoped that we have not sunk quite so low as to be incapable of organising a collision. But how could it? How could it be anything but the fruit of a congruence of enormous improbability? We are too easily tired, we are neither Deus enough nor ex machina enough to go in for that class of hyperbolical exornation, as devoid of valour as it would be of value.

  Similarly for all other attractive combinations. We dare not beckon for a duo much less spread our wings amply for a tutti. We can only wander about vaguely, or send Belacqua wandering about vaguely, thickening the ruined melody here and there.

  Bearing now in mind the untractable behaviour of our material up to date, is it surprising that we should be unable to envisage without hurting of conscience (how seldom we approach home without that!) the imminent entrée en scène of its, so to speak, colleague? All that is necessary, it seems for the time being at least to us, in order that to the novel a whipped verisimilitude may be imparted, is a well-stocked gallery of Chesnels and Birot-teaux and Octaves and sposi manzoneschi whose names we forget and such like types, doing their dope from cover to cover without a waver, returning, you know, with commendable symmetry to the dust from which they sprung, or, perhaps better, were forcibly extracted. And we with not a single Chesnel in our whole bag of tricks! (You know Chesnel, one of Balzac's Old Curiosities.)

  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 swathe
d 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.