Forty-Seventeen Read online

  ‘Let us drink to the discipline of indiscipline which must guide us all in every action,’ he said.

  ‘Pinch me, am I dreaming?’ said Robyn.

  ‘I drink to Cantwell who was an anarchist shot by the Viet Cong.’

  ‘An anarchist who worked for Time.’

  ‘There are many anarchist traditions.’

  Later he said to Barry that he had never quite understood all the ramifications of the ‘discipline of indiscipline’.

  ‘There is much to be said on that subject,’ Barry said but did not elaborate.

  The tide is high. He received a letter from her saying that in her final vacation she was working with the Elcho Island Aboriginal Crafts Centre. ‘I have been thinking of you big mobs – as they say up here – and the tide is high, as Deborah Harry says, and I have a feeling that it is getting close to that trip to Spain you talked so much and so often about. And you’ll be turning forty soon. I’m planning my Grand Tour now that I’m nearly finished.’

  He was deeply pleased that she had raised the trip to Spain. He wrote to her asking who was Deborah Harry?

  He joined her on Elcho Island and they fished for parrot fish and speared mud crabs and cooked on hot coals.

  In a motel in her home city after their return they’d made love. She had said that she had to go soon because her boyfriend was waiting. She had looked at him with her childlike eyes and said, ‘Will you want me again before I go?’

  ‘Yes, I will – now that you have asked me – it was the asking which aroused me.’

  ‘I thought it would arouse you,’ she said, smiling knowingly.

  Searching for Durruti. He wrote to Levine in California.

  I’m planning a pilgrimage to the Spanish Civil War and would like to include the anarchist pilgrimage. My own guess is that your poem ‘The Midget’ is set in a cafe that ‘could have been’ the cafe in which Durruti plotted? Or is it a well-known cafe? (I guess I sound like an MA student.)

  A curious day. He wrote to her.

  It looks as if our Spanish pilgrimage may then be shaping up. I had a curious day. I am writing again. Trying. I was working on the Buenaventura Durruti story (which is dedicated to you), my first story for years. It is a long way from finished but it is a collection of references to Durruti, Barcelona, The Passenger and you. Last night I (and my ex-wife, Robyn) met some old mates from my cadetship days at the Journalists’ Club and we argued about the Spanish Civil War – today your letter came saying that you might be ready to go to Spain with me. It would fit in with the General Conference of the IAEA1 and side business I have in Vienna and other places. I did not think you ever took the trip to Spain seriously …

  The discipline of indiscipline (I). The next week in the New York Review of Books he read a reference to the problems of Durruti and the discipline of indiscipline. Bernard Knox, who had been in the International Brigade, said:

  Madrid in the winter of 1936–7 was a remarkable place. The word epic has often been used of the events of that time but there was also a surrealist quality to it. I have often thought since that Luis Buñuel, if he had been there, would have felt quite at home.

  Knox said that Durruti created the idea of a ‘discipline of indiscipline’. He had once talked with the Durruti Column to discuss passwords and patrol routes. Knox said he was plied with cigars, chorizo sausage and wine:

  needless to say the passwords we had arranged were quickly forgotten and they fired on our supply column that night … and when Durruti led his men back into the line he was shot dead and the Column disintegrated … the Anarchist columns … had shown almost superhuman courage in the fight in Barcelona but facing experienced troops in the field they were soon outmanoeuvred and outflanked whereupon they ran like rabbits …

  William Herrick took issue in the next New York Review of Books. ‘There isn’t a fighting force on earth whether communist, anarchist, fascist or whatever that has not at one point or another run like rabbits.’

  Knox replied:

  Mr. Herrick is quite right about running like rabbits; as anyone who has lived through a war or two has done so more than once – sometimes it is the right thing to do. But only discipline, organisation and a proper chain of command will enable troops who have run like rabbits to reform and consolidate; the anarchists had none of these things, in fact they despised them.

  The People Armed. The book The People Armed, a biography of Durruti published by Black Rose Press, arrived from Cam.

  I have just had a real blockbuster of a paper accepted but the title was rejected. I thought the title ‘Dualistic Mental Processes in Hypnosis’ was quite couthful. Sorry to hear that you are not considered decadent enough. Any time you want a reference on the unmitigated squalor and depravity of your mind, let me know, I’d be delighted.

  The discipline of indiscipline (II). Durruti had about 6000 men in his Column. Each group of twenty-five had a delegate. Each four groups formed a Century. There was a Committee of Centuries made up of all delegates, a Committee of Sections made up of delegates from the Centuries and finally a Column War Committee consisting of all delegates of the Sections and the General-Delegate of the Column – Durruti.

  A Military Technical Council of experts made the strategic plans and submitted these to the War Committee.

  The War Committee had a bureaucracy for services such as statistics, propaganda, intelligence and so on.

  There were two Commando units known as the Sons of the Night and the Black Band.

  The Durruti Column refused to submit to military law imposed by the Republican and Communist forces.

  Orwell said that the Column was more reliable than one might have expected. Bullying and abuse were not tolerated. The normal military punishments existed but were only used for serious offences.

  Durruti wanted his army to be a model for the society it was fighting to create.

  Journalists would sometimes question the men of the Durruti Column: ‘You claim to have no leaders yet you obey Durruti.’

  The militia men always replied, ‘We follow him because he behaves well.’

  She begins her Grand Tour. He received his first letter from her. ‘I am in Bangkok wishing you were here with a hip flask full of brandy and some crooked conversation … I will be an experienced traveller by the time we meet up in Spain …’

  It was fine cognac they’d drunk from his flask, not just brandy.

  There was a new articulate confidence in her letters.

  He remembered once chiding her for what he saw as her negativity and conversational passivity. He’d shouted at her. But then he’d read Henry James’ Watch and Ward – a novel about a thirty-year-old man who adopts a ten-year-old girl to raise as his wife. The narrator finds the adolescent girl ‘defiantly torpid’ but then realises that ‘her listless quietude covered a great deal of observation and that growing may be a soundless process’.

  The death of Durruti. There were a number of stories about the death of Durruti – that he accidentally shot himself with his own rifle, that he was shot by an ‘uncontrollable’ who resented any discipline including even the discipline of indiscipline. But his chauffeur said that he was hit by a stray bullet during the battle for the University of Madrid.

  Durruti was taken to the Ritz Hotel, then being used as an anarchist hospital, where he died on November 21, aged forty.

  An anarchist funeral. Before the funeral the sculptor Victoriano Macho came with other artists of the Intellectual Alliance to make a death mask of Durruti.

  Hans Kaminski, a German journalist, described the funeral.

  It is calculated that one inhabitant out of every four lined the streets. It was grandiose, sublime, and strange. Because no one led the crowds there was no order or organisation. Nothing worked and the chaos was indescribable … Durruti, covered by a red and black flag, left the house on the shoulders of the militia men from his Column. The masses raised their fists in a last salute. The anarchist song Son of the People was chanted. It was a mo
ving moment. But by mistake two orchestras had been asked to come … one played mutedly, the other very loud, and they didn’t manage to maintain the rhythm … the orchestras played again and again the same song; they played without paying attention to each other … the crowds were uncontrollable and the coffin couldn’t move … the musicians were dispersed but kept reforming, claiming the right to play. The cars carrying the wreaths could not go forward and were forced to drive in reverse … it was an anarchist burial – that was its majesty.

  The location of the graves. Levine wrote:

  the place to which I make my pilgrimage is the grave of Durruti which sits between the graves of Ferrer Guardia and Ascaso. How to find it? In the Great Cemetery behind the fortress is a small Protestant burial ground. Between the bulk of the Catholic Cemetery and this little annex is a spot at the edge of a hill and there three graves sit, the gravestones having been removed. But people come secretly and write on these dry concrete slabs ‘CNT’ and ‘FAI’, ‘Viva anarquista’ and the names. It was illegal to take photographs of the graves …

  Two old picnickers directed Levine to the graves.

  ‘Durruti,’ said the man, ‘I was on his side.’

  The old woman hushed him.

  Francisco, I’ll bring you red carnations. In Levine’s poem for Durruti’s closest friend, Ascaso, he says that Ascaso was a stone, Durruti a blade.

  … the first grinding and sharpening

  the other …

  in the last photograph

  taken less than an hour before

  he died, he stands in a dark

  suit, smoking, a rifle slung

  behind his shoulder, and glances

  sideways at the camera

  half smiling …

  The card, ‘I have fallen in love’. A card arrived from London showing Ulysses deriding Polyphemus by Turner. It showed Ulysses and his men escaping in their ships from the blinded Polyphemus who, silhouetted against the sky, is throwing rocks at them (see Book IX of the Odyssey). They were escaping from the land of the Cyclops, ‘a fierce uncivilised people who never lift a hand to plant or plough … have no assemblies for the making of laws, nor any settled customs …’

  She was now in London on her Grand Tour and the card said with irony, ‘I am sorry but I can’t go with you to Spain. I have fallen in love and decided to “settle down”. I am, after all, twenty-one now.’ She had written in as a second thought, ‘Please do not communicate for now.’

  Once he had bumblingly tried to describe their relationship to her, to give it shape. She had stopped him, saying, ‘It is a love without definition but not without art.’

  He studied the card. Was she escaping from him, a blinded Polyphemus?

  Spanish Refugee Aid. Anarchists fought not only in the armies of the Spanish Republic but also in the Second World War, some in the French resistance, others as regulars in the Division Le Clerc. Some of them are still refugees unable or unwilling to go back to Spain after all these years.

  How did the card affect him? He had often tried to describe to her the distinction between his attraction to her as a ‘person’ and his attraction to her as an ‘archetype’. She had been a perfect example of ‘the beautiful young girl’. And he had seen her growing as a person. She was probably right that the archetype was now left behind. She was right to have forebodings about him dying in the Hotel de la Gloria. They had talked about suicide. When he had discussed the pilgrimage with her he had thought, but not said, that he really might die there in the Hotel de la Gloria, that that might be a good point to conclude it.

  Now she had diverted him from that appointment with the Hotel de la Gloria.

  Compensation for angst. He had told her once on a beach during one of her depressions that he’d found a lot of good things in life which compensated for angst. She’d said, ‘Oh yeah, what are they?’

  He’d told her of the surprises and serendipity of the life of inquiry, the unimaginable twistings of sexuality, about the infinite imagination, endless storytelling and its works, about the weary exhilaration of negotiation, the lateral elegance of the deal, and about the revelations of hunting and of the camp.

  ‘But you once said volupté was the only solace!’ she said, laughing at him.

  ‘That too.’

  What would he be able to tell her now, now that he was forty?

  He’d have to say that, while all those things were still true, on some days it was only a tepid curiosity and a tired-hearted buccaneering which carried him on. But maybe they could explore the discipline of indiscipline together. And he could show her how their relationship had become two footnotes to a poem.

  The Great-Grandmother Replica

  ‘And what is a gutter slut?’ he asked her.

  Belle considered her reply, a frown of concentration coming to her face, the face of a woman in her late twenties but carrying still the pore-less baby face of a ten-year-old and the shining eyes of a teenager. And then she said, ‘A promiscuous person can sometimes be driven by a neurotic need for approval, for an affirmation through sexual contact that they are a “person” or that they are “a lovable person”. They are taking a poll of all the people of the world. I don’t knock that. A slut, though, is a person who enjoys – well, “enjoy” may be too insipid a word – who seeks with a curiosity and vigour powered by lust – seeks to be lost, if only momentarily, in the full reaches of their generalised sexuality, if you follow me, sexuality in all its darkest, anonymous parts. This can be approached by promiscuity but that is not the only route. A slut may begin from a number of starting points, from being an unhappily promiscuous boy or girl or a person seeking defilement as a way of self-punishment. But a true slut has passed from these needs, while still being able to enjoy the theatre of these needs – say, of self-defilement – but has moved on to the larger journey to which there is no end.’

  ‘But I asked about gutter sluts,’ he said.

  ‘I’m coming to that,’ she said, with a tutorial tone. ‘A gutter slut – nostalgie de la boue – is the slut who prefers – or is at that point of the journey – which involves sexual life at its lowest, the dirtiest, the poorest, the most physically disgusting – either people or situations or even maybe just ambience …’

  ‘But why?’ he broke in, ‘why is this part of the journey?’

  ‘… You are too impatient,’ she said, ‘and if you don’t understand it is because you have not yet reached this point. It is part of the journey because it is there. There are sexual ambiences which belong with social class and even with occupations. With butchers, for example. The slut is curious. The slut must go there.’

  ‘But didn’t Gertrude Stein say that when you get there there is no there there?’

  ‘Believe me, pet, when you are sluttishly there you know you are there.’

  Once after sex Belle began to cry and he was surprised.

  ‘Hey! I thought expeditioners didn’t cry.’

  ‘Even sluts get the blues,’ she said.

  Belle laughed and said, ‘Good one!’ when in the film Outrageous a white drag queen who picks up a black man in a bar says to the man, ‘I’m an equal opportunity slut.’ Belle commented that sluts were into equal opportunity before any of the political people. You could say that a gutter slut was into affirmative action.

  The drag queen in the film befriends a schizophrenic girl who wants to have a child by a Yellow Cab driver – any Yellow Cab driver.

  ‘For whatever reason,’ Belle said, after the film, ‘schizoids make good sluts – and I said schizoids not schizophrenics. And I’m not romanticising mental illness either. It’s a fact from my experience.’

  Once in bed they were playing with a Luger pistol (Navy, Second World War). Belle liked the feel of the cold metal on her flesh, the gun-oil smell, the lethality, the sinister aura of German pistols. It had belonged to Belle’s German father and she had given it to him. He asked about the Nazis and what she felt when she and he played Nazi games.

 
‘Oh,’ she said, choosing her words carefully, acknowledging the sensitivity of it, while, he thought, not wanting to leach away any of the game’s spirit, ‘oh Nazis are useful. They gave us a lot of good sadomasochistic imagery – they were good with costume, very good, they understood leather – but they didn’t invent the gothic. And they were into the barbaric – not the sensual – and therefore got it all very wrong.’

  ‘How does it fit with sluttishness?’

  ‘It fits with sluttishness because sluttishness steals from the Nazis. Sluttishness steals fantasies and paraphernalia from anywhere. It can take items of evil and make them accessories of sensuality, turn them to things of play.’

  ‘I am not a tart,’ Belle said, playfully, when he asked her about the difference between a tart and a slut, ‘I’m a flan.’ And added, ‘I also possess flâneur.’

  She did not bother with the question.

  ‘A slut can never betray another slut,’ Belle announced over dinner at the Hydro Majestic Hotel.

  They were searching for psychic traces of his great-grandmother in the depressed, run-down, turn-of-the-century health resort district around Katoomba, ‘because between two sluts all things are permitted. To revel in the recounting of one’s deeds is an act of sluttishness itself. In a close relationship between two sluts it must be expected that each will want to now and then go off on an adventure. But the adventure must be brought back into the lore of the relationship.’

  They were walking back along a Katoomba street past the once fashionable guest houses where his great-grandmother had operated. They saw a blonde woman checking her mail box.