Editor’s Introduction :
We present here a short excerpt from Martin Caulder’s recently discovered pseudonymous work, first published by Olympia Press in 1964 in the “Traveller’s Companion” series of erotica for gentlemen. The original title, The Devil in a Woman’s Form, is believed to have been chosen at the last minute by Maurice Girodias himself. We have preferred to revert to the title page’s Unreal City, perhaps the orginal title chosen by Caulder, and published under the name of Florence de la Tour, alledgedly a series of found documents from the 1920s, published by her in French, and retranslated by Caulder in the 1960s; the orginals were said to have been lost in a fire.
The extract below is from near the beginning of the book, when William Crowe, of Crowe Hall County Limerick, has solicited a contribution from his erstwhile companion Stephen Devlin, who has been living in exile in Morocco some years, after faking his own death with Crowe’s help. The identity of Florence de la Tour, William Crowe, Stephen Devlin, and indeed all involved in the publication of this book, must remain in obscurity.
We do hope you enjoy this little échantillon of elixir from another age; it has been worked, it has been tried and tested; it has been transformed.
It is one of the jewels of our cellar …
Dear Crowe,
Pleased to receive your long letter, which I have attempted twice to read and let fall from limp fingers … it will provide a welcome challenge to occupy that dangerous twilight time between the last dregs of the morning coffee and the first sip of a cocktail before lunch. There are days when it’s all I can do to resist having Atem get the charcoal smoking on an enormous hookah at this point ; there are days when I do not resist.
The books you send – extremely thoughtfully, I’m sure – will be hawked by said Atem on his next trip into Biskra[1] (you remember him ? I had him over in London with me in 1913, the time we all got savagely trolleyed at your club and began blessing bread-rolls for people. He was prettier then, it’s true, but the little guttersnipe has become terribly fond of me, and I fear that years of my spoiling has unfitted him for any honest lifestyle. I am loath to part with him, I must say). He’ll buy some sherbet or hashish or some business to entertain himself with his ill-gotten pocket-money. Or a woman even, who am I to say ? It keeps him quiet, this tacit theft-and-blind-eye arrangement that we have. Besides, I salt it all out of the poor divil’s wages, and he’s none the wiser ! In any case, I would not have read them. What do I care for writers, or for the living now, in my posthumous condition ? It gives a man a desperately interesting perspective, being dead an’ all.
I see that you, as chief executor (and sole mourner !) of my estate, are managing the servicing of the debts, and the upkeep of the women and children as best you can. Bless you my boy, what I ever would have done without your clear head, I ignore entirely ! You gave me a most rare and strange gift : to attend one’s own funeral is wonderful enough (and such a eulogy you gave !), but to be sent reports on one’s posterity while one languishes in Purgatorio … Well, you are quite the Angel, my love, my laddie.
Ach, he’s back, is Atem, and sulking and skulking. He loves to make resentful noise when he hasn’t my full attention, as now. He was so terribly jealous of you always. I imagine he knows it’s to you I write. I imagine he reads most of my mail too, incoming and out-heading. Or at least he would, if he could make head nor tail of my English. He still attempts to teach me the Arabic script from time to time, but I must admit, it remains Greek to me.
What I did read, yes, I see it here, you speak about the affair of that poor boy in Paris in, what was it ? 1897 or thereabouts, no ? I don’t much understand this need you seem to have to examine, to pore over those long-gone days. Your current life as gentleman farmer, with your estates, your horses, your family … is it so intolerable that you must return to those bad old days, probe them like a sore tooth, reach for them like the phantom pains in a long-amputated gangrenous limb …? You torture yourself needlessly, dear lad. Take it from one who knows, from one who’s passed beyond the veil: there is nothing. There is no judgement, no sin, no retribution. There is only this long long gentle slide into dissolution, the body’s edges becoming vague, the mind’s memories diffusing gradually in a dark substrate of dreams, visions, imaginings. I no longer converse with shining beings, or the ghosts of the dead, or the Dukes of Hell, for I see no apparitions in this calm, silent desert. No visitations. Only my mind, unmoored sometimes, seems to drift in Time. The past is never over ; it is endlessly passing, endlessly with me, present, simultaneous, near and far. The voices which once came with vile promises or ringing annunciation, now, they seem dusty whispers from the corners of my own mind, echoes of my past, and I cannot remember who who was, is, becomes. My own mother’s face … I see more clearly the greenish face and dark-gold eyes of a nymph who stared at me from below the surface of the black river in the town where I lived as a child. I reached for her, I fell in. They said I would have drowned. She was the most beautiful, terrifying, melancholy thing. Perhaps all that happened after was the search for her, all my seeking, all the experiments and quests. I did not just want to touch her, child that I was, though her pale limbs, furred with flowing weed-tendrils … I wanted to save her. To take her hand, and help her break through that glassing surface that imprisoned –
Forgive me William, forgive me. Forgive my scrawl, my ramblings. No, there is no forgiveness, no need. I remember, I said that. No forgiveness, no expiation. No matter how you plumb those depths, you will never find the bottom, never get to the bottom of the Abyss. It never ends. And so you will not, I fear, find what you are looking for. I leave those last sheets there, which may or may not be legible … I broke off, to sweat and tremble, and weep, if we are to believe Atem, the foul-breathed little liar. He put me to bed, he says, finding me fallen on the flagstones in the roof-garden, away from the shade of the parasol he had installed above my table, staring at the sun, shaking, crying. He tells me these things, I think, to convince me I am ill, and that I need him, and his medicines, and his ridiculous little prayer-scrolls sewn into my clothes. I tear them out ; he sews them back in : another game we play. I shouted at him earlier, when I found myself in bed, and my letter smoothed out, dried out, the stains barely visible, as you see. Whatever they are. I told him I cannot be ill, for I am already dead. He muttered some sort of folk-charm against evil. I am sure he feeds me poison in my coffee, and laces my sweet tobacco with far fouler intoxicants than the ones I ask him for. My policy towards food is simple : I eat none now, for I am beyond the need for such base sustenance. I know he doesn’t wish to kill me. That would be easy, and he is also deathly afraid that I will haunt him, terrorise him, and be a disease in his family and his descendants to the seventh generation, as I have often promised him. He knows what I am capable of. Was capable of. No, he only wishes to keep me dependent on his kind ministrations.
No food, no, but the soul must eat, from time to time … I will ask Atem for a feast tonight. He will bring some of his many younger “brothers” and “sisters” to this place. The girls are delicious little things, fleet as gazelles, gluttonous as jackals, the boys dark angels, golden-skinned, eyes like midnight. They are of some depraved clan like the Ouled Naïl,[2] who consider prostitution and lewd dancing a holy calling. They will be fêted, feasted, drink their fill, smoke and incense will mingle, and the drums and wailing pipes will turn wild. I will descend among them, and they will writhe around me, tearing, scourging, fondling, devouring. I will pass like a phantom, for they will not see me, they will only feel the flush of my hungry eyes drive blood beneath their skin, and their frenzy will mount, their ecstasy. I will watch them, from my couch, and choose, perhaps, one or two, and point them out, and Atem will take them off to be prepared …
But I should leave off these reveries. You never had the taste I do for flesh and blood. I’m surprised you managed to father any spawn at all on that pale plump little heifer they married you to. You always disapproved. You never knew the pleasures, the pain, or that they are the same. Now that I may consume nothing, consummate nothing but flowing, fluid things, liquids, vapours, smokes … You might imagine that this floating world of mine, in my palace in the desert, is my punishment. Tantalus in his pool. But no, there is no justice, no damnation. And I have created an oasis here, and the little children come unto me, they do. In the central courtyard, there is a reflecting pool, and sometimes, under the surface, among the black feathery-finned fish, there is something, I think, something, and a mournful golden eye seems for a moment to stare back unblinking forever –
I close. Atem comes with a pipe prepared for me. He will lead me to my couch beside the Western balcony, for the sunset bends the desert air most interesting, most purple. I give you all the papers you ask for, I give you leave to do as you will with them. You saved me, after all, so many times. And this last time, you ferried me across, away from the painful shore, with all its wants and wounds, and miserable tiny weights of the everyday, and into nothingness, into the vast silence of the sands, into my own, private, personal ever-afterlife. You deserve to have your way with all the stories I can tell. After all, you do me the great favour of organising far more tedious affairs than these, for those I left behind, in the lurch, or otherwise. I hope that one day you will find what you are looking for, in sifting this mummy-dust and these putrescent remnants of our youth. I hope you may one day make your peace, for I fear you will never be able to do as I have, and simply let go. I have found it, that peace that passeth understanding. It is called
[Devlin’s last letter to me ended thus, with no signature, no date, and the papers out of sequence, folded haphazardly in an envelope on which an approximation of my address had been laboriously copied out, more drawn than written. I have not heard from him since. It would not surprise me, nonetheless, to find him on my doorstep tomorrow, hale and hearty, ready for adventure. – W. Crowe]
[1] Biskra is actually in Algeria. See André Gide’s The Immoralist (1902), and biographical accounts of his time there for possible sources for this section.
[2] I must protest, Mr Oates. I thought that this footnote was of true scholarly value. You say anyone who cares can look it up. If that’s the case, then what’s the point of my editing of this text at all? Since you will not reply to my emails, perhaps I can get your attention here.
Thomas Mulholland, MA, PhD
Aesthete, Semiologist, Decadent
Maître de conférences à l’Université de Paris – Nouvelle Athènes
