Then, little by little, the demons of physical sickness smother with mountains of pain all kinds of thought, philosophy, surmise, memories, hope, regret. We stumble and crawl through hideous landscapes, nor do we mind where we go – because it is all anguish and nothing bur. anguish. The method is now reversed. Instead of those thought-images which radiated fainter and fainter, as we followed them down blind alleys, it is now the slow assault of horrible uncouth visions drawing upon us and hemming us in: the story of a tortured child; an exile’s account of life in the cruel country whence he fled; a meek lunatic with a black eye; a farmer kicking his dog – lustily, wickedly. Then the pain fades too. ‘Now he was left so exhausted that he failed to be interested in death.’ Thus ‘sweaty men snore in a crowded third-class carriage; thus a schoolboy falls asleep over his unfinished sum.’ ‘I am tired, tired… a tyre rolling and rolling by itself, now wobbling, now slowing down, now….
This is the moment when a wave of light suddenly floods the book: ‘…as if somebody had flung open the door and people in the room have started up, blinking, feverishly picking up parcels.’ We feel that we are on the brink of some absolute truth, dazzling in its splendour and at the same time almost homely in its perfect simplicity. By an incredible feat of suggestive wording, the author makes us believe that he knows the truth about death and that he is going to tell it. In a moment or two, at the end of this sentence, in the middle of the next, or perhaps a little further still, we shall learn something that will change all our concepts, as if we discovered that by moving our arms in some simple, but never yet attempted manner, we could fly. ‘The hardest knot is but a meandering string; tough to the finger nails, but really a matter of lazy and graceful loopings. The eye undoes it, while clumsy fingers bleed. He (the dying man) was that knot, and he would be untied at once, if he could manage to see and follow the thread. And hot only himself, everything would be unravelled – everything that he might imagine in our childish terms of space and time, both being riddles invented by man as riddles, and thus coming back to us: the boomerangs of nonsense…. Now he had caught something real, which had nothing to do with any of the thoughts or feelings, or experiences he might have had in the kindergarten of life….
The answer to all questions of life and death, ‘the absolute solution’ was written all over the world he had known: it was like a traveller realizing that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the con. sonant of a sibilant slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as clear as that of one’s father; trees conversing in dumb-show, making sense to one who has learnt the gestures of their language…. Thus the traveller spells the landscape and its sense is disclosed, and likewise, the intricate pattern of human life turns out to be monogrammatic, now quite clear to the inner eye disentangling the interwoven letters, And the word, the meaning which appears is astounding in its simplicity: the greatest surprise being perhaps that in the course of one’s earthly existence, with one’s brain encompassed by an iron ring, by the close-fitting dream of one’s own personality – one had not made by chance that simple mental jerk, which would have set free imprisoned thought and granted it the great understanding, Now the puzzle was solved, ‘And as the meaning of all things shone through their shapes, many ideas and events which had seemed of the utmost importance dwindled not to insignificance, for nothing could be insignificant now, but to the same size which other ideas and events, once denied any importance, now attained.’ Thus, such shining giants of our brain as science, art or religion fell out of the familiar scheme of their classification, and joining hands, were mixed and joyfully levelled. Thus, a cherry stone and its tiny shadow which lay on the painted wood of a tired bench, or a bit of tom paper, or any other such trifle out of millions and millions of trifles grew to a wonderful size, Remodelled and re-combined, the world yielded its sense to the soul as naturally as both breathed.
And now we shall know what exactly it is; the word will be uttered – and you, and I, and everyone in the world will slap himself on the forehead: What fools we have been! At this last bend of his book the author seems to pause for a minute, as if he were pondering whether it were wise to let the truth out. He seems to lift his head and to leave the dying man, whose thoughts he was following, and to turn away and to think: Shall we follow him to the end? Shall we whisper the word which will shatter the snug silence of our brains? We shall. We have gone too far as it is, and the word is being already formed, and will come out. And we turn and bend again over a hazy bed, over a grey, floating form – lower and lower…. But that minute of doubt was fatal: the man is dead.
The man is dead and we do not know. The asphodel on the other shore is as doubtful as ever. We hold a dead book in our hands. Or are we mistaken? I sometimes feel when I turn the pages of Sebastian’s masterpiece that the ‘absolute solution’ is there, somewhere, concealed in some passage I have read too hastily, or that it is intertwined with other words whose familiar guise deceived me. I don’t know any other book that gives one this special sensation, and perhaps this was the author’s special intention.
I recall vividly the day when I saw The Doubtful Asphodel announced in an English paper. I had come across a copy of that paper in the lobby of a hotel in Paris, where I was waiting for a man whom my firm wanted wheedled into settling a certain deal. I am not good at wheedling, and generally the business seemed to me less promising than it seemed to my employers. And as I sat there alone in the lugubriously comfortable hall, and read the publisher’s advertisement and Sebastian’s handsome black name in block letters, I envied his lot more acutely than I had ever envied it before. I did not know where he was at the time, I had not seen him for at least six years, nor did I know of his being so ill and so miserable. On the contrary, that announcement of his book seemed to me a token of happiness – and I imagined him standing in a warm cheerful room at some club, with his hands in his pockets, his ears glowing, his eyes moist and bright, a smile fluttering on his lips – and all the other people in the room standing round him, holding glasses of port, and laughing at his jokes. It was a silly picture, but it kept shining in its trembling pattern of white shirtfronts and black dinner jackets and mellow-coloured wine, and clear-cut faces, as one of those coloured photographs you see on the back of magazines. I decided to get that book as soon as it was published, I always used to get his books at once, but somehow I was particularly impatient to get this one. Presently the person I was waiting for came down. He was an Englishman, and fairly well-read. As we talked for a few moments about ordinary things before broaching the business in hand, I pointed casually to the advertisement in the paper and asked whether he had read any of Sebastian Knight’s books. He said he had read one or two – The Prismatic Something and Lost Property. I asked him whether he had liked them. He said he had in a way, but the author seemed to him a terrible snob, intellectually, at least. Asked to explain, he added that Knight seemed to him to be constantly playing some game of his own invention, without telling his partners its rules. He said he preferred books that
