Читать книгу The Other Shore - Michael Jackson - Страница 12

FIVE

A Typewriter Collecting Dust

I CAME BACK TO NEW ZEALAND FROM the Congo in the same frame of mind in which my literary heroes returned from their excursions to the ends of the earth—impatient to get away again. My plan was to pay my parents the money I owed them for my fare home then go to Vietnam as a war correspondent. That was before I met Pauline. At first, I was caught between the Scylla of being utterly free and the Charybdis of losing myself in love. Yet I knew from the moment I set eyes on her which imperative would win out. I recalled hitchhiking south of the Congolese border a week before Northern Rhodesia became Zambia, and the refusal of the Southern Rhodesian immigration officials to allow me to cross the Zambezi.

With my passport now bearing a stamp that gave me seven days to leave Northern Rhodesia, I began my long trek back to the Congo. For hours on end I sat in the dissembling shade of an acacia, waiting for a car to pass. The sun beat down. I was parched. Nothing moved in the stony landscape. I picked up a pebble and made it a talisman. Days later, in the last town before the border, looking for something to read, I bought a copy of Rider Haggard’s She in a local dairy. It nourished the idea that had taken root in my mind, that I was destined to meet someone who would change my life. Despite my many moves by plane, by train, or on foot, from the Congo to France, France to England, England to Greece, I kept the pebble and the book, and showed them to Pauline a few days after we met. I don’t think she believed in omens, and she was appalled that I should identify her with the mysterious white queen, Ayesha, the all-powerful “She who must be obeyed,” but the spirit of my story held true.

I took work as a relief teacher in a Wairarapa high school, hitchhiking back to Wellington every Friday to spend the weekend with Pauline. In my free time during the week, I tried to write. Poems about the Congo.¹ An essay on the Congolese painter, Albert Nkusu. An occasional piece of journalism, or a translation of something by Blaise Cendrars.² But I could make nothing substantial of these fragments, and confessed my frustration to my old mentor, Herman Gladwin.

Herman immediately threw three questions at me. “What is your aim in writing? Have you anything to say? Do you want to build or destroy?”

Feebly, I asked what he meant by “destroy.” “Masturbating,” he said. “Feeling sorry for yourself. Wishing you were somewhere else, or someone else.”

I recalled the fin-de-siècle Viennese poet Hugo Von Hofmannsthal whose “Letter to Lord Chandos” describes the despair of a writer who has become so disenchanted with language that he can longer write. In the late 1960s, something akin to Von Hofmannsthal’s “inexplicable condition” afflicted me. At first I suspected that my inability to write stemmed from a disenchantment with language that would only deepen in the years to come—a doubt that words could ever capture or convey a sense of the life one lived or the world one lived in but would only gesture pathetically and longingly toward experiences that remained forever beyond one’s grasp. Most writers are all too familiar with the sense of disillusionment and disgust that overwhelms them when they return to passages that they believed to have captured the vitality of an event only to find no trace of what had been so vividly in mind during the act of writing. Some, like T. S. Eliot, have likened the poet’s “intolerable wrestle with words and meanings”³ to the existential plight of humanity, waiting for God to reveal Himself, to illuminate the dark cold and the empty desolation⁴ of life on earth. The fictitious Lord Chandos, whose “inner stagnation” imposed on him “a life of barely believable vacuity,” admits to being able to keep his despair from his wife and servants, going about his business as if nothing untoward had occurred, “rebuilding a wing of his house” and “conversing occasionally with the architect.” But I was not sure how long I could pretend that I had not lost my way in Dante’s selva oscura.

That summer, I rented a house in the Wairarapa, and when Pauline had finished her exams in Wellington, she came to live with me.

The paddocks were dry, divided by dark green shelterbelts. The heat shimmered above the road, distorting the landscape as if it were behind molten glass.

Late one afternoon, we drove to the Tauherenikau River in a borrowed car. After swimming, we threw ourselves down in the long grass. Fantails flickered in the manuka. Red commas of flax flowers punctuated the bush. I confessed that I could not live with the thought that I could not write. Pauline consoled me with the words of Trollope. “They are most happy who have no story to tell.” She reminded me of the stories we don’t have a hand in making. How they affect us more deeply than the stories we tell ourselves.

I was not consoled. It would take me years to realize that writing must be allowed to come to us, like life itself, and not be hassled into answering our summons. And yet an immense happiness flooded through me in that arid landscape, dusk already falling on the ranges, the river out of earshot and the moon rising. I was in love. The past had no hold on me. There was nothing outside that moment.

When we returned to the car, the dark green world of night birds and foliage was tinged with the spilled milk of the moon. Pauline said she would like to walk into the night, to sleep under the stars, bathed by the moon.

“Bitten by mosquitoes,” I added.

I drove slowly along the darkened road. Once, our headlights startled a rabbit that bolted ahead before swerving suddenly into the grass.

I knew now that if I were to become a writer I would need something real to write about. My essay on Nkusu failed because I had known him only in passing. Like my other Congolese sketches, it went nowhere because the experiences that inspired it were fugitive and fragmentary.

I became convinced that ethnography would provide the depth of engagement that I had sought, but not found, in the Congo. Ethnography would give me a pretext for returning to Africa. It would give me the raw material with which to write. My “spoils,” as Conrad put it. In the meantime, I would turn to translation. I would attach myself to Blaise Cendrars as he had attached himself to Moravagine. “—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!”⁵ And I would begin by writing about not being able to write and the reasons why a writer might voluntarily desist from writing and prefer silence.

In the summer of 1938, Cendrars was planning to circumnavigate the world in a four-masted sailing ship when war intervened. Following the fall of France in May 1940, he retired to Aix-en-Provence and three “agonizing years of silence.”⁶

In Aix, he lived alone. In the kitchen of his small apartment, a portable Remington collected dust. His books remained unopened, though he immersed himself in the life of Joseph of Cupertino, the patron saint of aviators—probably because his two sons, Odilon and Rémy, were fliers. In his garden he grew some salad greens and medicinal herbs. Though editors and journalists implored him to write, he wrote nothing.

There are certain events and experiences of which we choose not to speak. Not because they hold us in thrall, stilling the tongue. Nor because we fear they might reveal our flaws or frailty. Still less because we feel our words can never do them justice. Silence is sometimes the only way we can honor the ineffability and privacy of certain experiences. And so, in silence, we dwell upon, rather than seek to override or alter, the way things are. This, said Miriam Cendrars, was why her father could never write his book on the life of Mary Magdalene.

Cendrars would always refer to this work as his “secret book.” Entitled La Carissima, it was a fictional life of Mary Magdalene, “the lover of Jesus Christ, the only woman who made our savior weep.”⁷ Though the book was never written, Cendrars considered it “the most beautiful love story and the greatest love that have ever been lived on earth.” But the same experiences that compelled Cendrars to write this book also demanded silence. “His silence was its truth,” writes Miriam Cendrars. “Had he written it, it would have been, for him, a negation of this truth. Its truth is preserved in his silence.”⁸ One thinks of Wittgenstein, who fought in the same war as Cendrars, though on the other side. “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent....”⁹

On August 21, 1943, Edouard Peisson, a friend (“une main amie”) and fellow writer, dropped in on a regular visit. The men chatted about mundane things, then fell to reminiscing about the war. It was the spark that touched off a fire, for that same day Cendrars dusted off his Remington and began the first of his three great autobiographical novels.

I read L’Homme Foudroyé¹⁰ in a Livre de Poche edition when I was living in the Congo in 1964. The novel begins with a letter to Edouard Peisson, who was also living in Aix. This letter, which explains how a visit from Peisson inspired Cendrars’ return to writing, would become a text to which I would return many times in the years ahead, for it was a touchstone, a luminous example—in its tone, phrasing, and evocations—of how I wanted to write. Translating it into English and mindful of how much of its beauty is tarnished and betrayed in this process, I am no longer in the Wairarapa but back in Elizabethville, recalling the spellbinding impression these paragraphs made on me when I first encountered them.

My dear Edouard Peisson—this morning, you told me that the German officer who has been billeted at your place in the country came looking for you in your kitchen last night so that you might observe a perfect eclipse of the moon, only to leave you lying flat on your back while he went up to his room with an unlikely-looking whore he’d picked up in Marseilles... and you had remained there, alone, on the terrace, long into the night, contemplating the defeat... and you ended by saying how outrageous it was, the night heavy with dew and silence, the moonlight, the silver and black olives, the warm air perfumed with grass and pines on the encompassing hills, this star-filled August night, so clear, so silent, so peaceful, and this guy screwing his whore in your house. What humiliation!

As soon as you left, my dear Peisson, for reasons I cannot fathom, I began mulling over what you had just told me, and moved by these nocturnal reflections I found myself recalling other nights, equally intense, that I have known in different latitudes, of which the most terrible was the one I lived through, alone, at the front in 1915.

It was also summer and a beautiful starry night, though not the translucent sky of Provence but outside Roye, on a northern plain, among fallow fields and rank grasses, untended for more than a year, from which a milky aroma arose... opaque, ethereal, frayed... with stars riddling the landscape like ink spots on a torn piece of blotting paper, and everything becoming ghostly... no longer a moon in the sky... I was chewing a blade of grass... and the eclipse that I observed then, as you will see, was an eclipse of my very identity, and it is a miracle that I am still alive... this fear, that I have never spoken of to anyone yet would have confided to you in an instant had you been still around. Indeed, I leaned out the window just as you turned the corner of the street, perched on your bicycle. But with no chance of calling you back, rather than run after you I dusted off my typewriter and impulsively began writing the present narrative for you, my dear Peisson. You will understand my feelings, knowing that since June 1940, and in spite of your warm and frequent encouragement, and the self-interested solicitations of newspaper and journal editors—not to mention the misery my inactivity caused me—I have never written a line.

My dear Peisson, because you are the unwitting cause of my return to writing, allow me not only to pay homage to you in my opening story, but to consider you from today the godfather of my future work. I very much hope that you will do me the honor of accepting this title that is neither honorary nor gratuitous since it carries so much of the responsibility.

Even though I wish you to assume this responsibility, I ask myself how your brief visit this morning could release in me such a shock wave that I set about writing without a moment’s hesitation, and why I returned to writing today of all days. I have no answer to this question. But everything you recounted, of the night, the sky, the moon, the landscape, the silence, stirred in me so many memories, including echoes of the war whose presence pervaded your bitter reflections and the invasion of your privacy by a German lieutenant who not only abused your hospitality, violating your house with a common whore, but robbing you of your refuge as a writer. Then I was fired, in my solitude, for to write is to be consumed by fire.

Writing ignites a welter of ideas and throws light on chains of images before reducing everything to flickering embers and crumbling ash. But though flames set off a fire alarm, spontaneous combustion is a mysterious process. For to write is to be burned alive as well as to be reborn from the ashes.