World Within The Word Read online

  at South Kent turned up at Clare, one of the last let out of Madrid.

  He designed the Chapel the School later built

  & killed himself, I never heard why

  or just how, it was something to do with a bridge.

  (Berryman: “Transit”)

  or seemed like chilling scenarios—

  We have come so far, it is over.

  Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,

  One at each little

  Pitcher of milk, now empty.

  (Plath: “Edge”)

  so that the line between literature and life appears underdrawn (before she killed herself, Sylvia Plath put out two mugs of milk for her children); or if he has fallen for a romantic comparison like Camus’s “An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art,” then at least he will suffer no further disappointment dead, because, of course, acts aren’t language, and there’s no poetry at all in suicide, only in some accounts of it … significance, value in this sense, belongs solely to sentences. Actions, and other similar events, have meaning only secondarily, as we impute it to them, and so may mean many things to many people. Words are acts only secondarily. They principally exist in the systems which establish and define them (as numbers do in mathematics), so while feasting may mean one thing to a Jew and quite another to a Samoan, the word “Traum,” uttered anywhere by anybody, remains irrevocably German.

  Death will not fill up an empty life and in a line of verse it occupies only five letters of space.

  Choron’s readable little handbook, with its capsule summaries of speculation, its few tables of statistics, brief histories of opinions, merely provokes its questions, instead of asking them, and touches so lightly on all its subjects, they never feel it. Totally porous, the data are simply slowed down a trifle in seeping through. It resembles Choron’s earlier Death and Modern Man in being a kind of easy introductory text.

  Alvarez, observing the immense diversity of his material, wisely offers no solutions. Yet because he does not rigorously differentiate sorts, define terms, regulate interpretations, exclude kinds, but is content to report, reflect, admonish, and look on, his “study” turns out to be gossipy and anecdotal, though sometimes splendidly so, as his account of the suicide of Sylvia Plath is, because Alvarez is sensitive and sympathetic, knows how to handle a text, and writes with conscience and skill about a subject which is close enough to his own personal concerns (he is himself a “failed” suicide) that one could reasonably expect it to shake both skill and conscience as though they were rags in a gale.

  It must have seemed like a good idea to sandwich his historical and literary studies of suicide between two kinds of direct acquaintance with it, all the more so when Alvarez’s dissatisfaction with most theoretical investigations lies in their natural lack of contact with inner feeling, although much the same might be said of the physical laws for falling bodies, especially when the falling body is your own. The result of this division has not been entirely happy, however. Natural reticence, moral restraint, and simple lack of knowledge make his accounts of suicide from the inside-side seriously deficient in essential data, and therefore reduce them to sensitively told and frequently moving stories, although with less excuse Choron manages to make even the expounding of a theory sound like gossip (in effect: “Do you know what Plato said? Well—you won’t believe this—but he said …”).

  Throughout The Savage God, too, again because it has no ruling principle, details fly out like sparks from every point that’s struck, to fade without a purpose. The conditions surrounding Chatterton’s suicide, for example, are certainly interesting, and Alvarez recites them nicely enough, but which ones really count, and which ones don’t, and how do they count if they do, and if they do by how much? Vivid details, picturesque circumstances … my mother’s copterlike bathroom posture, her gap-pinned robe, miscolored toes … well, their relevance isn’t clear. Perhaps they have mainly a vaudeville function—to enliven without enlightening. Throughout, my mention of my mother merely mimics the problem.

  The value of The Savage God, and it is high, lies mainly in the humanity of the mind which composed it, in the literary excellence of its composition, and the suggestiveness of many of its passages—the moment-by-moment thoughtfulness of its author as a reader.

  The world of the suicidal is, in a certain sense (for all its familiar elements: pain, grief, confusion, failure, loss …), a private and impenetrable one, hence the frustration of those who are trying to help, and whose offers to do so, as raps on the glass disturb fish, often simply insult the suicide immersed in his situation. It is a consciousness trapped, enclosed by a bell jar, in the image which encloses Plath’s novel, and Alvarez’s book should do a great deal to correct the sentimentalist’s happy thought that art is a kind of therapy for the sick, trapped, homeless, and world-weary, and that through it, deep personal problems get worked benignly out.

  Poetry is cathartic only for the unserious, for in front of the rush of expressive need stands the barrier of form, and when the hurdler’s scissored legs and outstretched arms carry him over the bars, the limp in his life, the headache in his heart, the emptiness he’s full of, are as absent as his street-shoes, which will pinch and scrape his feet in all the old leathery ways once the race is over and he has to walk through the front door of his future like a brushman with some feckless patter and a chintzy plastic prize.

  Rilke sometimes took this therapeutic attitude toward the writing of Malte Laurids Brigge, but if writing kept him sane, as he thought, it was one of the chief sources of his misery as well. If life is hard, art is harder. Plath’s last poems, considered in this way, are announcements and warnings; they are promises; and their very excellence was a threat to the existence of their author, a woman whom success had always vanquished, and who was certainly defeated without it. Not only does the effort of creation often cultivate our problems at their roots, as Alvarez notes, the rich eloquence of their eventual formulation may give to some “solutions” an allure that is abnormal, one that art confers, not life. And if we have tried often enough, warned, performed and promised, must we not sometime keep that promise, if only to ensure that our sufferings have not been mockeries and showoffs, and succeed at failure one final time?

  Malcolm Lowry, that eminent drunk, perhaps put Plath’s particular case best when he wrote:

  When the doomed are most eloquent in their sinking,

  It seems that then we are least strong to save.

  Writing. Not writing. Twin terrors. Putting one’s mother into words … It may have been easier to put her in her grave.

  1 A. Alvarez, The Savage God (New York: Random House, 1972), and Jacques Choron, Suicide (New York: Scribner’s, 1972).

  2 S. E. Sprott, The English Debate on Suicide from Donne to Hume (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1961).

  Malcolm Lowry

  ¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN

  QUE ES SUYO?

  ¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!

  There is no o’clock in a cantina. They are dim as a church is dim, often candle-lit or momentarily illuminated by sudden dusts of light from slits in dirty unscheduled walls, and there is the frequent murmur of the priests at service or the worshippers who attend even at odd hours the shrine of this or that out-landish saint—the Virgin for those who have nobody with, for instance—sanctuaries with strange yet significant names: El Bosque or the Bella Vista Bar, the Salón Ofélia, El Petate, El Farolito (Lowry once shuffled up a book of poems called The Lighthouse Invites the Storm); and indeed one is drawn in out of the Mexican light or the English or Canadian, out of Paris, from dockside or the railroad station, out of a light like a fall of hail, in Haiti, in Vancouver, at the bus depot with its day-storms, the endless sterile walkwells of airports, neon night-times in New York, and there is a mirror—absolutamente necesario—behind the bar which reflects the door, a chloroformed square, the street beyond, and there are bottles which it multiplies, their labels too,
like the face of the drinker, names which, on the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and the day of his own demise, Malcolm Lowry’s alcoholic hero reads as one reads scripture: Tenampa, perhaps, and Barreteago, certainly the beautiful Oaxaqueñan gourd of mescal de olla from which the same British consul’s drink is measured, a flask of peppermint cordial, Tequila Añejo, AníiAs doble de Mallorca, a violet decanter of Henry Mallet’s delicioso licor, and that tall voluted column of AníiAs del Mono on which a devil brandishes a pitch-fork like a poster on a pillar, while in back of the bar there’s a barman called The Elephant, though in the Mexico of Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano, it may be a boy with an equally absurd name like A Few Fleas, or possibly it is a young man who is borrowing a puff of your cigarette while you stumble aloud after the slowing train of your thought; then there will usually be saucers of toothpicks laid about, salt, chilis, lemons, a tumblerful of straws, and crossed spoons in a glass tankard on the counter, or in the USA, soggy with bottle spill and the sweat of highballs, cash register receipts in a smear of purple print.

  Cantina means cellar, means cave, but it sounds like a song, and it is Lowry’s favorite playground, with its teeters, slides, and roundabouts, its sandbox and its swings, although the Consul sits there like a bum on a bench, the beautiful ruin of a man, now as splendidly incompetent and out of place as a John in a junkyard. He shakes too badly to shave or to sign his name. He misplaces his Plymouth. He neglects to pull socks on his nephritic feet. His penis cannot stand, and he likewise falls down in the street.

  The drunk returns to childhood—in this case, babyboyhood. Innocence reclaims him. Since there is no o’clock in a cantina, he escapes his age. Lowry, like the Consul, drank himself back through his life: from the squatter he became, the failure he was, the writer, sailor, talker, Cantabrigian and momentary master of the uke, the unwilling English public-schoolboy he had been, to that rich man’s fourth and quite unnecessary son where he began; not quite to recover the past, part of which was painful as a burn, but to go over it again and get it right, and to reach the desired condition of helplessness. The alcoholic trance is not just a haze, as though the eyes were also unshaven. It is not a mere buzzing in the ears, a dizziness or disturbance of balance. One arrives in the garden again, at nursery time, when the gentle animals are fed and in all the world there are only toys.

  In such a state, like Lear’s fool, he has a license to speak the truth, let impulse loose, and not be blamed. He can lie, too, and not be blamed. He can play, can act—playact—and not be blamed. He is excused. Unable to fend—to eat, to dress, conduct affairs—unable to fuck: he is excused. If pleased, he laughs; if offended, he sulks; if disappointed, he throws himself wailing on the world like a mourner on a grave. Of course, he’ll be accused of being intoxicated, and of that charge it is absolutely necessary for him to be guilty, but he can’t be blamed for being impotent or ugly, for failing to face up, for losing heart or job or love or money, for fecklessness, for rage: that is the main thing, and he will happily accept this lesser charge in the place of all the others, since it is also true that he is, in the moment of deepest fuddle, mad, inhabited, possessed of prophetic powers, so perfectamente borracho that like the most naïve children of Christ, the fools of God, he makes with his dirty lying toper’s tongue the inspired speech of the Spirit, and on that ground, too, he is excused … excused.

  Let out. Let off. Excused. Not for long, though. Not for nearly long enough. Eventually the body fails. The chemical has forced it to concoct a consciousness it cannot care for or continue; it cannot support this basin of puke or endure the ringing of these poisonous bells, the reverberations of their stink. Frequently the victim sweats his pits sore as pain passes away through the pores, and the steel shutters of the cantina come down with a crash. Later, though not enough later, not an eternity after, after only a drugged snooze, the drinker awakes with a conscience ready to be reconsumed, and to a sort of soberness so physically wretched and an awareness so vengeful and spiritually cruel, that another species of hallucination takes possession of him. Kafka could not describe the transformations, or Sabbatai Zevi account for them. Thus rubbed from a bottle, the day begins again, even though it’s the moon that’s up, and a consciousness must reinvent the world.

  For the male … ah … nightly there advances toward him the body of his presumed beloved, since it will be clock-dark eventually; it will be lovetime; and it was better when he was a baby in his bed and he was hoping not to wet it or pass blood through his nose or be frightened into screaming by shadows representing the self holding a knife or a garrote; it was better then to lie down upon dreams which would be soon shaken by the hooves of dark horses, than it was now to be in bed with a body which expected passion, and his blood to be bottled in his penis simply because there were breasts nearby or viny hair like darkness creeping across a doorway; and so daily toward evening it becomes desperately necessary to have a drink, to sit in the cool of a cantina, the whole of him, as if he had already penetrated the fearful crease as easily as parting strings of fly-beads and was now conversing calmly in the quieting comfort of the cunt … warm womb of the world … whatever … because a cantina signifies the rich enticing inwardness of all things.

  The cantina is not, then, a complete calamity; it calms; it protects; it restores. It is the head itself, the container of consciousness too, and the bar which bisects it is the bar of judgment, where cases are argued; and in the cantina everything is beautiful, even when ugly; everything is significant, even when trivial; all is orderly, even when the drinker is deranged; all is known; and even if there are headaches and the eyes fall back in their sockets like stones; even if the saloon pitches like a ship in a storm; even if every word is a groan and sickness begs the stomach for something to flush through its throat the way turds whirl in a toilet, there is always tomorrow; there is always the hope of change, the fresh resolution, and the drink to celebrate it, for didn’t I just say that the container of consciousness was the brown pint, the clear quart, and haven’t whole cultures worshipped the spirit in the plant, the pulque which preserves, the life in the vine? because wine winters over in the vats, it defies time; and where better to celebrate this miracle than in the cantina? although it may be a morning so awash with moonlight the sidewalks are urine yellow, never mind, we have come round, we rebegin; let’s pawn—let’s drink—the typewriter, wedding ring, the clock, and have another round, a tick, another round, a tock, another round.

  But you see that we really do not lose our grip, we do not really repeat as if we’ve forgotten already what we’ve said, it is just that some of our commonest connectives have come undone, we swing back and forth into our thought now like a ball on the end of a string, the body must stumble so the mind may leap, or rather perhaps it would be better to say that we sink down softly into things as though they were laps.

  Some matters after all are magnified without alcohol and in the ordinary course of events for example when the sun falls asleep at midday there is a frightful darkness like Guinness in a glass and the bar mirror smears and the bar stool turns of itself with a squeak and we are free finally to let the mind pass into the space of its speaking, mescaleening, you might say, as over water waterskiers—such is the kind of excuse we’re seeking when we flip or twist or pull or pry or pop or tap the keg or cork or lid or cap or top—go like spray.

  What do you have against me in your files, Lowry asks the sub-chief of Migración. The sub-chief slaps the folder facing him: “Borracho, borracho, borracho. Here is your life.”

  Nightmare and madness fly up and down like shades. Figures emerge from the walls: customs officials, pimps, busdrivers, wives, police. Fear grows the wings of evil birds. What is this semen which runs from our nose? this hot blot on the bedclothes? loaf of red bread? There’s a nest of noisy ants in that canister of candy. Anxiety like light leaks—pip—from a pipe. Pip-a-dip. Pip. Flowers flattened in the wall’s paper puff like adders, but they’re orchid-mouthed, and at last we have someone to talk
to, someone who understands the initial pronoun of our speech the way a fine sentence does the design of its writer.

  It is ourselves, of course, or one member of that club, with whom we take communion in the cantina (part of us taking your part, perhaps, and playing it better, too, but remaining one of our own crowd still, leaning alone like a broom in a closet, apart from the pail and the mop as we must, because in this spiritless realm of matter, like a bar without booze, no cozy interpenetration of molecules is possible), and Lowry would hold extended conversations with empty corners and vacant chairs, but what is remarkable about that? each of us has seen street-talkers deep in quarrel with invisible companions; or he would, having passed out, nevertheless remember what had been said in the presence of his absent self, so one wonders if he might sometimes have been faking, but there is a fragment of us constantly awake, alert as a lantern, microphone: why should our ear sleep when our eyes close? pip! like insects we breathe with more than our nose; it is simply that the division which occurs when we’ve taken a sufficiently engrossing drink is almost complete, and we meet all elements as equals: the glass that holds the hand, the hand that is a bottle to the body, the body that wickedly wobbles the world, and the mirror which imagines this immense earthquaking to be merely the sea-crossing of a cloud.

  El espíritu

  Es una invención del cuerpo

  El cuerpo

  Es una invención del mundo

  El mundo

  Es una invención del espíritu

  (Octavio Paz, Blanco)

  In any case it becomes absolutamente necesario to have a drink. Easy for anyone whose entire intelligence and whose whole energy is bent upon it, because naturally the need has been foreseen and there is a bottle stashed under the sink or buried in the window box or hidden in the clothes hamper, and on the bad odd off chance that they have been emptied already, one mustn’t lose faith, heart, or hope, because there are other opportunities, some bars open early, there are friends … yes, con permiso, just a nip to steady the nerves, calm the stomach, dispel the demons, only a drop, amigos, a spot, a touch, and in addition …