Free Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux Page A

few more.
      After his coffee, he smoked awhile, and then set to
work again, his desk cluttered with notebooks, pens, and piles of
paper. The skull,
norma frontalis
, was even smiling its
approval this morning, for before long Darconville was fully
re-engaged in that silent and solemn duel in which the mind sits
concentrated in the most fearless of disciplines, the tidiness of
which, he felt, life could never hope to emulate and the wonderful
and deep delight of which nothing whatsoever else could hope to
match. It was worth the loneliness. It was worth the time. And if
the blazing rockets of his imagination came whistling down mere
sticks, as occasionally they did, it was worth it still, for truth
indeed was fabulous and man, he’d always thought, best knew himself
by fable.
      Was truth, however, discovered or constructed?
Darconville, actually, was never really sure, and, of so-called
“experience,” well, when he thought of it he tended to believe that
it had to be
avoided
in order to write—a matter, in fact,
that couldn’t have been given clearer focus than during these last
few weeks in Quinsyburg when up in those rooms, conjugating the
games of speech and light, writing pages racily colloquial,
classically satirical, stinging and tender in robust and ardent
sequence, be had been interrupted with a frequency that almost
bordered on devotion: students-in-crisis; evangelists—two
ruby-nosed Baptanodons, especially, whose particular theory of
disputation was that one should aim, not to convince, but rather to
silence one’s opponent; and even several locals who knocked to
inquire, alas in vain, about the possibility of buying his car, the
black 1948 Mark VI Bentley in front of the house whose tires they
invariably kicked, crying, “What a mochine!” So he had his
telephone pulled out. He kept his shades pulled. He locked his
door. And the Lords of Pleroma stood by.
      When not teaching, Darconville worked very hard on
his manuscript and, in doing so, was entirely free from any feeling
of having committed sacrilege against the vow he had made with
himself before coming there. His was a kind of asceticism. The
writer was not a person, Darconville felt, rather an amanuensis of
verity, who would only corrupt what he wrote to the extent, that he
yielded to passion or shirked the discipline of objectivity.
      The noon bell sounded from the library clock, work
continued, and before too long it was midafternoon, reminding him
quite poignantly of how slow the imaginative struggle was—for were
not artists those few of us flung down from the heavens into mortal
garments?—and how difficult it was to return. To do, however, was
not necessarily to make, nor to shape, to shape correctly. A
maniacal stylist, Darconville worked to
shape
what he
wrote—contour of form with respect to beauty, coherence of matter
with respect to blend—and to dig in matter the furrows of the mind,
for in all creation matter sought form, form matter, and that was
as profound an exhortation to the artist as any: form matter! The
Greeks, he reminded himself, designated the world by a word that
means ornament,
koruos
[greek], and the Romans gave it the
name of
mundus
for its finish, its grace, its elegance.
And
caelum
? The word itself meant a tool to engrave!
      The horizontal sun, shooting its rays through great
dark banks of western clouds, sent a last coppery glow under the
shade, the fiery reflection of what was left of a good day.
Dareonville closed his eyes, strained from concentration, and
leaned back. With a furtive movement of his shoulders, he turned,
feeling suddenly a girl’s phantom presence in the room. But he
ignored it and continued working on into the night, his face a
shadow above the gooseneck lamp—the cat snoring—rewriting the pages
he’d spent the day on. It was abundance, to be alone, in the
solitude of night, watching what you fashioned and fashioning by
the miracle of art what was nothing less than giving