The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell

however shyly, in green blood. Of the humorous eternity which stole Gracie to add to its collection let me remind myself walking among the bazaar of white masonry, the many tombs, to the one hideous tomb, garish with cherubs and scrolls: I say over and over again to myself: “The real epitaph is with knobs on.”

    But I have anticipated cruelly. One of the unfortunate things about a personal style, a personal journal, is that one assumes one’s reader’s knowledge of all the facts. A journal, then, if written for oneself, would be all but meaningless to the world; for one turns, not to the spadework, the narrative, but to the most interesting points in it. Look at me. I am in such a hurry to finish the job that I blurt out the end before the beginning. It is going through me at such a pace that I cannot distinguish the various flavours of incident, in their chronological order. (I am a liar. It is artifice which dictates this form to me.) Or the word death, like the word finis. If you began Finis. “She died that I may live etc.” It makes no difference. It makes no difference. If the title-page were Finis she would still exist, amorphous, evocative, musky—a white kelpie luminous on the last page.
    (Think of Ion lapsing off the white rock into the sea, which gurgles over her like a solid blue myth. A sheath of water over the hips, the pectorals, the little plantagenet chin. Down, down, turning and bowing among the white chalk of defunct squids and the pedestrian deep water. Ion is death translated in sudden luminous terms by a live myth. Ion is dead, long live the myth. Write a large Finis with the keel of a liner. Ion lives, I say triumphantly, she lives. Here I can put my hands on the warm basalt and feel her breathing grass into my mouth. I am losing the thread.…)
    One assumes (if one must resort to ordered sanity) a complete knowledge in the reader, I repeat; and simply supplies a few twirls and flourishes—a cadenza in green—to ensure one’s personal fame. All diaries have been written for an audience. For the sake of posterity then, let me add a flower or two to Gracie’s public posy. Let me supply a few knobs, in all admitted vanity—which is humility.
    There is the business of Clare, who, like Blake’s stranger, came and took her with a sigh. Knowing Clare, I can imagine pretty well the form that seduction took. Gin the foundation, romance the actual rubble, and a fine tight cement of flattery and tinsel. How often have I seen the same dreary hook baited for the sentimental miss. Poor fellow, he was unhappy. He was misunderstood. There had been a great tragedy in his life—the expression of which was intensified by the gin and balloons. He would not openly talk about it, even when pressed; but as Gracie once said, “You could see it writ all over him!” Oil say! Under his carefree jazzing, his glittering façade of smile and insinuation, you could see vague hints of this secret misery: like patches of damp on an otherwise white ceiling. Poor Clare! It was love that had done this thing to him. The hang of his blue-black head proclaimed it. Singing as he leaned over his partner, the tears would come into his eyes at the stark pathos of the words, the curdy weeping of the saxophones. “Love,” he sang softly, caressingly, “Love” (with a four-beat rest) “brings out the gipsy in me.” Everything pivoted about love. And Gracie (this is the suburban princess, remember) danced, staring away over his shoulder like a blind cat, knowing only that her breathing was quickened by the pressure of his hand on her backbone.
    Sometimes in the spot dances he cupped her breast in his hand and pulled it with sentimental melancholia. The implication being that his own private tragedy made him a trifle abstracted—a remotely romantic playfellow on the lines of Jacques. For Clare even motley was ever so faintly tinged with a fetching