First, then, black void, pure and unflawed by sensations. No heat, no cold, no pressure, no extent. What is there to do? Be. Being is all that can be done. But gradually a sensation does occur, the sensation of duration. We perceive that we have been for a long time, that we will be forever in this darkness unless we do something. The more we endure of our dark self the less we can bear it. We move from boredom to unease and then to panic-horror of an eternity like this. We are in Hell. So the cry “Let there be light” is not an order but a desperate prayer to our own unknown powers. It is also a scream rejecting everything we know by committing us to an unimaginable opposite. And there is light. And oh, what appalling vertigo we feel when eternity becomes infinity also and we find ourselves floating beside above beneath that dazzling blank bright breadth, height, depth with no content but ourselves. The light is too much for us, we turn to darkness again. And the evening and the morning are the first day.
Genesis says God saw the light, that it was good, but I cannot imagine him standing happily upon that boundless floor of light before he has peopled it with creatures. His first creature is water, a body compatible with his agitation and as formless as his thinking at this stage. Its sparkling movement reflects and refracts the light into every possible tone and tint, there is a rainbow in each drop of it. With this water he makes the sliding architecture of the sea and the steady, starry flood of the firmament. Unscientific? Good. I would have it so. I will skip most of the other stages. By the sixth day God is almost wholly incarnate. We taste earth and dew through a million roots, our leaves and blossoms sense and scent the air, we graze on our herbs and strike beaks into our squealing flesh while our unutterable doubt of the whole enterprise sneaks searchingly through sunlit grass in the body of the serpent. Our largest intellectual powers are almost (but not quite) realized in Adam, who kneels to study, in a puzzled way, his reflection in a quiet stream. The reflection causes a stiffening in his ureter which has to do with the attached seedballs, but the stiffening is not sufficient to impregnate the image in the water or the moist gravel under it. What other body do we need? Eve, of course, our last and most intricate creature. So Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bare Cain. And Cain knew his wife, who conceived and bare Enoch, who builded a city. And after more generations of knowing and conceiving, a Seventh-Day Adventist, Joseph Pollard, cleaved to his far more liberal wife Marie, who conceived and bare myself, the poet. If your education is adequate you already know I have been paraphrasing the start of my Sacred Sociology, printed privately at Dijon in 1934.
My infancy resembled that of God, my ancestor. I only dimly recall the dark time before I screamed into light, but I was in that dark, like all of us, and I screamed, and there was light. I may have found the light emptier than most. My mother once told me, in an amused voice, that as a baby I screamed continually until one day they sent for a doctor. He examined me minutely then said, “Madam, what you have here is a screaming baby.” Clearly she had never wondered what I was screaming for. Herself, probably. But soon my vocal chaos acquired the rhythm and colours of articulate speech and I named and commanded a child’s small universe. My command was not absolute. In my tenth year Marie Pollard eloped to Algiers with one of her husband’s business acquaintances. I sympathized with at least half the feelings which compelled her. Illness had made Joseph Pollard hard to live with. His fits of blinding rage destroyed a great deal of furniture and did not always spare the human body. But I am grateful to him. Paul Cezanne once said, “My father was the real genius. He left me a million francs.” Father Pollard was not such a genius as Father Cezanne, but in my eighteenth year he freed me from himself and the curse of earning my bread by succumbing to cancer of the spleen. The consequent income did not permit me to marry, or support a housekeeper, or to frequent respectable brothels; but I silenced the desperate hunger in my young heart by studying it, and the world containing it, and by learning to read all the great sacred books in their original tongues. And I depressed my professors at the Sorbonne by finally submitting no thesis. A poet need not truck with bureaucrats.
I am shy, fastidious and arrogant. I am unattractive, but do not need friends. I am a close reasoner, and love language. My poetic vision is deep, but lacks breadth. It is the drama of their infancy which makes men poets, but the writers of the greatest divine and human comedies are men of the world, they discover and represent that drama in commonplace streets, bedrooms and battlefields. I can only represent Gods, and lonely intelligences, and multitudes viewed from a very great distance. I will never be popular. To pay the printers of the Sacred Sociology and Child’s Dictionary of Abstractions* I went shabby and hungry for many days and these books made no great stir. An early act of folly cured me of seeking fame in the reviews. I sent Gide the Sacred Sociology with a letter indicating that his Protestant education had made him capable of appreciating it. He returned the copy with a seven-word comment: “Literature cannot be founded on Larousse Encyclopedias.” His rage, when his wife burned all his letters to her, still amuses me extremely. Bravo, Madame Gide! You hoarded these scribblings as long as you believed he had no other way of making love, but thrust them in the stove when you discovered he enjoyed that passion, physically, elsewhere. You refused to be a postbox through which the great man despatched himself to posterity, bravissimo. I am the opposite of Gide. I now address the public in order to be read by one woman I can reach in no other way. Love drives me to this. Gide was driven by vanity.
I am as old as my century. In the late sixties the respectable working men who frequent the café where I dine began to be ousted by students and other members of the lower intellectual classes. This led to an increase of prices and one day I told the manageress that I could no longer afford to patronize her establishment. A shade of unease came to her face and was instantly quelled. After a moment she indicated that, to a customer of long standing, a reduction of five per cent was permissible. She was not being friendly. She had been friendly twenty years earlier, but I then made certain detailed proposals which she construed as insults. She is one of those strict atheists who determine themselves far more completely than a priest determines a good Catholic. Over the years her splendid body had come to depend on the corset for its shape but I still found the sight of it entertaining; she knew this and cordially detested me. I told her that a fifteen per cent reduction might ensure my continued custom and, after quelling a distinct flicker of wrath, she agreed. I left the café proud to be a Frenchman. The change in clientele was due to myself. Though unpopular I had clearly become famous, and where else in the world would intellectual eminence receive such tactful regard? I remembered also that my mail had recently become abundant, though I only open envelopes from publishers and from the bank which manages my estate. I decided to give myself a holiday. I usually study in a small useful library containing no publications after 1765. Today, in a spirit of sheer caprice, I visited the Bibliothèque Nationale and investigated the history of my reputation.