or support, reaching from twenty until well after thirty, when I managed
to sell a scrap of prose. From then until forty the time had gone in a
flash, a scratching of the pen: it seemed incredible that the seven
books on a shelf bearing my name had been the result of so brief, so
immaterial, a time. Now, stranger still, I was in Cuba, gazing
peacefully into the dim expensive space of a room in the Hotel
Inglaterra, congratulating myself on the loss, the positive lapse, of
what was called men's most valuable possession.
No better place for the trying of my sincerity than Havana existed; no
other city in the world could so perfectly create the illusion of
complete irresponsibility, of happiness followed for its own sake, as an
end, or as the means of forgetfulness. Its gala walls and plazas and
promenades, its alternating sparkle and languor, like flags whipping in
the wind or drooping about their staffs, always conveyed a spirit of
holiday and of a whole absence of splenetic censure. At the bottom of
this the climate, eternally sunny, with close vivid days and nights
stirring with a breeze through the galleries, concentrated the mind and
body on pleasure.
Night had always been the time for gaiety, when the practical was veiled
in shade; and Havana responded with an inimitable grace to the stars.
It was constructed for night, like a lunar park of marble and palms and
open flooding radiance; with, against that, streets packed with darkness
and doors of mystery to which clung the faint breath of patchouli. The
air was instinct with seduction, faintly touched by the pungency of Ron
Bacardi and limes, and bland with the vapors of delightful cigars. The
clothes, too--the white linens and flannels and silks of the men; the
ruffled dresses on the balconies, the flowery laces, like white
carnations, in the automobiles; the wide hats of Paris and the satin
slippers tied about the ankles, with preposterous heels; the fluttering
fans--all, all were in the key of light sharp emotion, of challenge and
invitation and surrender.
Yes, any strictness of conduct in Havana, any philosophy in the face of
that charm, was unaffected beyond dispute. I had been, in a farther
development of this, tacitly left to my own devices and thoughts, as if
there were a general perception of my remoteness from the affair in
hand. I was suffered to come and go without notice; no one, much, spoke
to me; even those not unaware of the possibility of a book, of San
Cristobal de la Habana, in which their city would find praise, were
hardly stirred to interest. The moment to go to Havana was youth, the
moment for masked balls and infidelity and champagne: its potency for me
lay in its investment of memories; I regarded it as a spectacle set in
the tropics. I was an onlooker and not a participant. But I had, as I
have shown, no regret; I had become reconciled not only to the fleetness
of time, but equally to the fact that my role was necessarily a
spectator's. Hour after hour, year after year, I sat writing at the low
window which looked out over my green terrace and clipped hedge, to the
road, to life, beyond.
Above everything, then, I was satisfied with the Havana I knew. From the
standpoint of actuality my comprehension was limited--I was familiar
with only a certain narrow part of the city, for it was my habit to go
back to what I had found rather than discover the new--perhaps ten
streets and a handful of houses, parks, and cafes. Too much to get into
a score of books. What I had lost, I thought further--if, indeed, I had
ever possessed it--was a warm personal contact such as I should have had
dancing with a lovely girl. I never danced, but remained outside,
philosophically, gazing at the long bright whirling rectangles.
At the Inglaterra there were many men older than myself who danced
persistently and had the warmest sorts of contacts; they too, wore
flowers in their coats, but aggressive and not reminiscent blooms. They
formed most of the element of foreign gaiety; there wasn't much youth
among them, but I didn't envy them in the slightest. They were, if
possible, more absurd than the women unmindful of thickening waists and
dulled eyes. Their ardor was febrile and their power money; and every
time they escorted with a quickened step their charmers past young dark
men, the charmers glanced back appealingly. It was different with the
Cubans, who regarded such things more naturally, and did not,
practically, in consequence, get drunk.
The noise from San Rafael Street never slackened, the clamor of the
mule-drivers and the emptying cans of refuse took the place of the motor
signals; the slats of my lowered shutters showed streaks of dawn. I
turned once, it appeared, and the room was filled with indirect
sunlight, the hands of my watch were at ten. It was eleven before I was
dressed, with the morning cup of black coffee empty on a table; at
twelve I had breakfast, and until five I idly read. The evening as well
was idle--a thoroughly wasted day, judged by obvious and active
standards. I thought, with no impulse to return, of the house near the
Arsenal, which had, in effect, been open for centuries and which, unless
life were purified, would never close. The purity I meant was not a
limitation of passion, but its release from obscene confines. It didn't
matter what I meant and, again, I was becoming too serious ... or not
serious about the correct things. There was perpetually the danger of
being overtaken, in spite of my impetuous early flight, by the
influences, the promptings, of my heredity and strong first
associations. What an amazing climax to my records of chiffon textures
and moods of chiffon that would be: shouting the creed of a bitter Scots
induration from the informal pulpits of the streets! Or I might publish,
to the dismay of every one intimately concerned, a denunciatory
sermonizing book. But what the subject was wouldn't matter, as it had
not mattered with Jeremy Taylor, if it were written with sufficient
beauty. Disagreeable books, too, in spite of the accepted contrary
belief, were always very highly esteemed.
* * * * *
It was easy enough to account for Jeremy Taylor by the vague
generalization of beauty, and I forced myself to a closer scrutiny of
that term and my meaning. The words beauty and love, and a dozen others,
like old shoes, had grown so shapeless through long mis-wear that they
would stay on no foot. I tried to isolate some quality indisputably
recognizable as beautiful and hit, to my surprise, on intellectual
courage. The thought of an undeviating mental integrity was as
exhilarating as the crash of massed marching bands. Then, searching for
another example, I recalled August nights at Dower House, with the
moonlight lying like water between the black shadows of the trees on the
lawn. There was a harsh interwoven shrilling of locusts and the
echo--almost the feel rather than the sound--of thunder below the
horizon. This, too, stirred me profoundly, brought about the glow
transmutable into creative effort.
Another excursion found nothing but a boy and a girl, any boy and any
girl, fired by shy uncomplicated passion.... A mental, a visual, and a
natural incentive, each with the same effect, the identical pinching of
the heart and thrust to a common hidden center. What had they each
alike? Perhaps it was this: that they were the three great facts of
existence, the primary earth, the act of creation, and the crowning
dignity, the superiority of men who, somehow, had transvalued the sum of
their awarded clay. Somehow! I had no intention of examining that. The
fact was, for me, enough.
There was, however, another phase of beauty still, one peculiarly the
property of novelists, which had to do not with life at all, but with
death, with vain longing and memories and failure. All the novels which
seemed to me of the first rank were constructed from these latter
qualities; and while painting and music and lyrical poetry were
affirmative, the novel was negative, built, where it was great, from
great indignations. Yet, while this was obvious truth, it failed to
include or satisfy me; for there were many passages not recognizable as
great in the broadest sense, both in literature and life, that filled me
with supreme pleasure--there were pages of Turgenev spun out of the
fragile melancholy of a girl, a girl with a soul in dusk, far more
enthralling than, for example, Thomas Hardy. It may have been that there
was the perception of a similitude between Turgenev's figure and myself;
certainly I was closer to her mood, her disease of modernity, than to a
sheep herder; and there was a possibility, for my own support, that the
finest-drawn sensibilities, not regarded as emotions in the grand key,
would turn out to be our most highly justified preoccupation.
I was, at present, in Havana, submerged in its fascination, and when I
came to write about it there would not be lacking those to say that I
had been better occupied with simpler things. Hugh Walpole had warned me
of the danger, to me, of parquetry and vermilion Chinese Chippendale;
and I was certain that he would speak to me again in the same tone about
idling in a mid-Victorian Pompeii, celebrating drink and marble touched
by the gilder's brush of late afternoon. Perhaps Walpole--and Henry
Mencken's keen friendly discernment--was right; but, damn it, my
experience was deficient in material essentials; I was dangerously
ignorant of current reality, and I doubted if my style was a suitable
instrument for rugged facts.
What remained for me, an accomplishment spacious enough for anyone, was
the effort to realize that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm
delicate consciousness of certain high pretensions, valors, maintained
in the face of imminent destruction. And in that category none was
sharper than the charm of a woman, so soon to perish, in a vanity of
array as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly. The thought of such a
woman, the essence, the distillation, of an art of life superimposed on
sheer economy, was more moving to me than the most heroic maternity. I
couldn't get it into my head that loveliness, which had a trick of
staying in the mind at points of death when all service was forgotten,
was rightly considered to be of less importance than the sweat of some
kitchen drudge.
The setting of a woman in a dress by Cheruit; a part of the bravery of
fragile soft paste Lowestoft china and square emeralds that would feed a
starving village, on fingers that had done no more than wave a fan; the
fan itself, on gold and ivory with tasselled silk--the things to which
the longing of men, elevated a degree above hard circumstances,
turned--were of equal weight with the whole; for it was not what the
woman had in common with a rabbit that was important, but her
difference. On one hand that difference was moral, but on the other
aesthetic; and I had been absorbed by the latter.
This, however wide apart it may seem, was closely bound to my presence
in Havana, to my delight and purpose there. It was nothing more than a
statement, a development, if not a final vindication, of my instant
sense of pleasure and familiarity--a place already alive in my
imagination. My special difficulty was the casting of it into a
recognizable, adequate medium. There, in the plaiting of cobwebs instead
of hemp rope, I particularly invited disaster. It wasn't necessary that
I should sustain anyone, but only that I should spread the illusion of
the buried associations and image of a brain. That, if it were true, I
held, would be beauty.
Here, at least, I was serious about the correct things, direct rather
than conventional; all that mattered was the spreading of the illusion,
the spectacle of what part of Havana I did know interpreted, realized,
not in the spirit of an architectural plan, but as sentient with
reflected emotions. Otherwise the most weighty charges against me were
absolutely justified. If I couldn't make Havana respond in the key of my
intrinsic feelings, if I had no authentic feeling with which to invest
it, my book, almost all my books, were a weariness and a mistake.
Novels of indignation or of melancholy, of a longing for the continuity
of individual passion confronted with the inevitable--it was that, the
perishability of all that was desirable, which gave to small things, a
flower in the hair, their importance as symbols. The love story, once
the exclusive province of fiction, had disappeared; it was now
practically impossible for the slightest talent to fill a book in that
manner. The romantic figment, like a confection of spun sugar with a
sprig of artificial orange blossoms, had been discarded; the beauty of
love, it had been discovered, wasn't the possession of a particular
heart, but the tenderness, the pity, that came from the realization of
its inescapable loss. No man could love a woman, no woman could love a
man, who was to live forever; a thousand years would be an insuperable
burden. The higher a cultivation, a delight, reached, the more tragic
was its breaking by death; the greater knowledge a mind held, the more
humiliating was the illimitable ignorance, the profound night pressing
in upon every feeble and temporary human lamp.
Yes, the novels, the books I wanted to write, were composed, now, not so
much from among the brasses, the tympani, as from the violins. The great
majority, like the great books, were dedicated to the primary chords;
but my reaching the former had been always hopeless. I didn't mind this,
for I told myself that, while the structure of approbation I had
gathered was comparatively modest, its stones and masonry were
admirable; it was, if not a mansion, a gratifying cottage firmly set on
earth--what was in England called, I believe, a freehold. It was mine,
and there was no lease dependent on the good will--or on my
subserviency--of any landlord.
* * * * *
Most of this went through my mind as I sat looking at my trunk, open on
end in an alcove near the door, for I was gathering my clothes and
thoughts in preparation for leaving Havana. One thing only that I wished
to see now remained--the danzon at the National Theatre. I kept out a
dark suit, one that would be inconspicuous in a lower spectator's box;
for I had been told that it was desirable to avoid unnecessary
attention. There was, briefly, an element of danger. This I doubted--I
had heard the same thing so often before without subsequent
justification--but I could believe it possible if there was any violent
discharge of primitive emotion. Here the spirit of Africa burned remote
and pale, but it was still a tropical incomprehensible flame.
A strip of red carpet led from the outer steps, across a large
promenade, to the circular wall of the theatre; and though it was past
eleven, the ball hadn't yet assumed an appearance of life. But just
within the entrance a negro band began suddenly to play, and in the
music alone I immediately found the potent actuality of danger. I was
without the knowledge necessary to the disentangling of its elements:
there were fiddles and horns and unnatural kettle drums, and an
instrument made from a long gourd, with a parallel scoring for the
scrape of a stick. The music was first a shock, then an exasperation
hardly to be borne, but finally it assumed a rhythm maddening beyond
measure.
It was Africa and something else--notes taken from the Moors, splitting
quavers of Iberian traditions, shakes and cadences that might have been
the agonized voice of the first Cubenos; with an unspeakable distortion,
a crazy adaptation, of scraps of to-day. There was no pause, no
beginning or end, in its form; it went on and on and on, rising and
falling, fluctuating, now in a harsh droning and then a blasting
discord--the savage naked utterance of a naked savage lust; it was a
music not of passion, but of the frenzy of rape. Nothing like it would
have been possible in writing, allowed in painting; only music was free
to express, to sound, such depths. Nothing but music could have conveyed
the inarticulate cries of the stirred mire that flooded the marble space
of the opera house. It had lost the simplicity of its appropriate years,
the spring orgies in the clearings of early forests; time had made it
hideously menacing, cynical, and corrupt.
At an aisle to the boxes within, a negro woman with a wheedling tainted
manner tried to sell me a nosegay; and two others, younger and pale,
their faces coated with rice powder, went past in dragging satins. They
were chattering a rapid Spanish, and their whitened cheeks and
dead-looking mat-like hair, their coffee-colored breasts and white kid
gloves, gave them an extraordinary incongruity; and behind them, as
sharp as the whisper of their skirts, a stinging perfume lingered.
Leaning forward on the rail of my enclosure, I gazed down over the
floored expanse of the auditorium:
The stage was set with the backdrop and wings of a conventional operatic
design--a scene that would have served equally Aida or La Favorita: it
towered, like a faded dream of pseudo-classic Havana, into the
theatrical heavens, expanses of bistre and sepias and charcoal grey, of
loggias and peristyles and fountains; while in close order about its
three sides were ranged stiff chairs in a vivid live border of dancers.
They were of every color from absolute pallor, the opacity of plaster,
to utter blackness. The men, for the most part, were light, some purely
Spanish, the negritos, at least to me, conspicuous; but I could see no
indisputably white women. There was a girl in a mantone of bright
contrasting colors, a high comb and a rose in her hair, about whom there
was a question. However, her partner was one of the few full negroes
there; and, as they revolved below my box, it seemed that her skin had a
leaden cast.
The danzon itself had, at first, the appearance of a sustained gravity:
it was danced slowly, in very small space, following the music with
arbitrary reverses, and pausing. There might have been, to the
superficial view, a restraint almost approaching dignity had the dancers
been other. The men, without exception, wore their stiff straw hats and
smoked cigars through every evolution; and the dresses, the dressing, of
the women were fantastic: a small wasted girl, dryly black, had copied
the color and petals of a sunflower. As she revolved, her skirt flared
out from legs like bent bones, and a hat of raw yellow flapped across
her grotesque ebony countenance.
The danzon, for a moment, in spite of the music played continuously and
alternately by two orchestras occupying a box on either side of the
stage, seemed formal. Then, abruptly, a couple lost every restraint, and
their maddened spinning and furious hips tore the illusion to shreds.
And slowly I began to be conscious of a poisonous air, a fetid air as
palpable as the odors and scents--the breath, the premonition, of the
danger of which I had been warned. It lay in an ugly hysteria of rasped
emotions that at any illogical accident might burst into the shrillness
of a knife. It wasn't dangerous so much as it was abjectly wicked--the
deliberate calling up of sooty shapes that had better be kept buried. It
was unimportant that the men below me were, in the daytime, commonplace
clerks; the women could be anything chance had made them: here, to the
spoiled magic of Carabalie nights, they were evoking a ceremonial of
horror.
Personally, since I had no hopes to save or plans to protect, I hadn't
the desire, like Sampson, to pull down the pillars of the roof on their
debased heads. I enjoyed it remarkably; the more because I saw,
scattered among the crowd, figures of unreal and detrimental beauty--a
creamy magnificence in creamy satin with a silver band on her forehead;
a yellow creature with oblique eyes in twenty white flounces and a
natural garland of purple flowers; a thing of ink, of basalt carved by
an opulent chisel, on whose body clothes were incidental; and corrupt
graces perfect in youth and figure weaving the patterns, the wisdom, of
Sodom.
One o'clock passed, then two and three, but there was no abatement in
the danzon. A middle-aged man, with an abstracted air, danced without
stopping for an hour and fifty minutes. His partner, flushing through
her dark skin, was expensively habited: her fingers and throat glittered
coldly with diamonds and her hat was swept with long dipping plumes. She
had a malignant mouth and eyes a thick muddy brown, and it was clear
that she hated the man in whose arms she was turning. I wondered about
her hatred and the patience, the indifference, of the other: how
revolting she would be in a few hours, livid and ghastly in the morning.
He, probably, would then be standing at a high desk, counting dollars
with integrity or adding columns of figures, precise and respectable in
an alpaca coat. An older man still was dancing by himself, intent on the
intricate stepping of his own feet. His agility soon won an admiring
circle, and his violence increased with the applause: he jumped in the
air, clapping his heels together, and his arms waved wildly--a
marionette pulled convulsively by wires in strange merciless hands.
I imagined a fetish, a large god, on the stage, drooping over his
swollen belly, with a hanging lip and hands set in his loins. His legs
were folded, lost in flesh ... a squatting smeared trunk of hideous
service. Around him were the seated rows of worshippers, on either hand
was his jangling praise; and before him revolved the dancers in his
rite. The music throbbed in my brain like a madness that would have
dragged me down to the floor. I speculated fleetly over such a
surrender, the drop, through countless ages, of that possible descent.
* * * * *
It was, however, only just to add that the idol of Guinea suffered
unduly from his surroundings and the age in which he was exposed; in his
place, his time, he had been neither a monster nor unnatural, but
nothing more than the current form of worship. He, Bongo, had had the
misfortune to be catapulted, together with his congregation, through
twenty, forty, centuries, in a breath, on the magic carpet of greed, and
put down in a day where he was not only obsolete, but repudiated. Men
saw him with the sense of horror generated by a blasting view of their
own very much earlier selves. For the difference between the negro, the
Carabalies, or Macua, and the Spaniards of the sixteenth century in Cuba
was, at heart, historical in time only. They were members--we were all
members--of one family. The innocence of a bare black, torn like a
creeper from the support of his native tree, tatooed with necessary
charms, medicines, against jungle fears and fevers, had more to dread
from Amador de Lares than any later Christians owed to an arbitrarily
imported savagery. What, in reality, occurred, was implied on the wide
floor of the opera house, was that the negroes, unable to change their
simplicity as easily as they superficially diluted their skins, kept
their innocent habits, their tastes in noise and religion and
misconduct; but, in the dress of civilization, these took on the aspect
of a grotesque defiled horror. With this, too, in an earnest effort to
assimilate as much as possible of their enforced land, they caught such
bright fragments of life as struck them--the glass beads and bits of gay
cloth--and copied them prodigiously. The confusion which followed was a
tragedy in the comic spirit--a discordant mingling that provoked
laughter, quickly stopped by a deeper understanding and by pity. The
past vital still: with the entrance of the African slave into the West,
it was exactly as though a figure in the paint and feathers of voodoo
had been thrust into a polite salon.
The spectacle had none of the comfortable features of a mere exhibition;
for the revulsion came from a spiritual shudder in the beings of the
onlookers; while the other injured individuals saw that, as clothes, the
crude partial imitation of a rooster was insufficient. They, the latter,
commendably hurried into trousers and pot hats, into satin trains and
pink tulle and white kid gloves; but the transition was too hurried, too
optimistic, and the resulting incongruity ... I was not a student of
ethnology, I had no theory of races, but, gazing down from my box, it
seemed to me that yesterday could not be instantly combined with to-day;
it was evident that there was no short way by a long and painful
business of evolution.