Prospero’s Cell

Reading Lawrence Durrell’s memoir Prospero’s Cell for the first time, I’ve come across something that I was not expecting. Written predominantly in 1937 and 1938 on and about the Greek Ionian island of Corfu, and concluded with an ‘Epilogue in Alexandria’ from the early 1940s, there are moments when you realise that you are reading something of an Ur-text, a precursor of so much to come in the fiction of The Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quintet: the lamentation for a fast-disappearing world that will be completely lost in the destruction of World War Two; the emblematic significance of friendships formed well before that war and their attempted factual and fictional resuscitations in the aftermath; the hint of Nazi espionage and the tangential reach of friendship across enemy lines; the last – following on D.H. Lawrence, absolutely the last – championing of a kind of hieratic, pre-industrial, enlightened-feudal set of class relations based on mutual respect and collective sympathies tied to the seasons, the landscape and agricultural production; the set piece of a simultaneously celebratory and valedictory gathering of friends about to be dispersed; the sense of mourning for a Europe becoming increasingly severed from its Hellenistic roots; the persistence and dilution of classical mythology and polytheistic spirituality across two millennia of Christianity in Europe.

         Reading Durrell’s undoubtedly fabulistic embroideries on the scenes of lived experience with his first wife Nancy Myers (cryptically ‘N.’ Miss Y. Cohen the prototype for Justine, the great protagonist and motive force in The Alexandria Quartet is thanked for her ‘invaluable aid’ in typing the manuscript) and their cosmopolitan friends in pre-war Corfu provides the reader with a welcome key to understanding the context within which his two major works – the Quartet and the Quintet – were written. From the hunting scenes on Lake Mareotis to the party on the Pont du Gard, from the esoterica of the Kabbalah in Alexandria to the death-map in Avignon and the gnostic heresy of Provence, from Count D. the philosopher-farmer of Prospero’s Cell to the simultaneously pornographic and heraldic tableau vivant of the Prince in the Quintet, we can see more easily what Durrell devoted his lifetime of writing to in the major works. A fabulism rooted in the pain and pleasure of nostalgia; the pleasure of recording and remembering and recording once again, and the pain of realising that those youthful pre-war moments of individual perfection, amicable equilibrium and sexual discovery will never be achieved again. Through it all, from the self-declared Euclidean intersection of humanity with geography in Prospero’s Cell, the supposedly Einsteinian formulation of a new science of love in The Alexandria Quartet, to the Freudian exposition of sex and violence in The Avignon Quintet, through it all, there is the same pain of separation and loss. All of Durrell, even the mad robotics of Tunc and Nunquam, is postcoital, the end of an era, an everlasting farewell. Strangely, this nostalgia reminds me of two writers who are so completely different from Durrell, Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig, whose lives and deaths were critically defined by the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the ascendance of Nazism.

         Just like one of his own characters, Durrell achieves the realisation before he is ready to receive it or at least before he could possibly have been aware of its full import. In the Alexandrian epilogue to Prospero’s Cell he conjures ‘a Greek universe’ in which ‘the whole defeated world of acts and thoughts’ can somehow be reconstituted. ‘Seen through the transforming lens of memory,’ their time in Greece ‘seemed so enchanted that even thought would be unworthy of it.’ That might be so in a world at war where, ‘History with her painful and unexpected changes cannot be made to pity or remember’. However, Durrell asserts, ‘that is our function.’ And this will become his function through the failed double-decker of The Revolt of Aphrodite and the nine novels of Alexandria and Avignon, to pity and remember and in doing so to endlessly reconstruct that lost world of acts and thoughts.

Go to ‘The Alexandria Quartet’ Workpoints #1

Go to ‘The Revolt of Aphrodite’

Hydra; artists on an island

by Adrian D’Ambra

The internal migrations and literary pilgrimages have been significant this year. They began with the publication by Monash University of ‘Half the Perfect World’ by Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell, an exploration of the lives and interconnections between a range of expatriate writers and artists who took up residence on the Greek island of Hydra from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties. The most notable of these in terms of ongoing international reputation and importance would have to have been the Canadian, Leonard Cohen, who arrived on the island as an emerging poet and novelist and who left with the incipient awareness that he might be able to reinvent himself as a singer-songwriter, a role he performed with grace and humility until his death in November 2016. Cohen’s sardonic humour, spiritual restlessness and poetic sensitivity to the erotic tensions of everyday life have been essential elements in the soundtrack of my life. I would have loved to have been able to read more about the actual process of his composition as a poet whilst living on the island. At the centre of the Euro-American expatriate community on Hydra were the first arrivals, the Australian couple Charmian Clift and George Johnston, both writers, who lived on the island through varying degrees of humiliation and penury for the better part of a decade.

Charmian Clift has recounted the first and probably the happiest year of their self-imposed exile on Hydra in the deceptively accessible memoir ‘Peel Me a Lotus’ and George Johnston’s Meredith trilogy of ‘My Brother Jack’, ‘Clean Straw for Nothing’ and ‘A Cartload of Clay’ are deeply engraved with the author’s impressions of those years in Greece. Of those four works, I had previously read only ‘My Brother Jack’ before this year. Clift’s ‘Peel Me a Lotus’ was a revelation. I fell in love with the narrative voice of a woman clearly trying to make the most of the difficult decisions that she and her husband had made in order to free themselves from the bondages of work and the conformity of belonging without yet having recognised the price that would have to be paid. And then, of course, one of Australia’s once most popular novels, ‘My Brother Jack’, was entirely written on the island, its publication providing Johnston with sufficient funds to enable his departure from Hydra and return to Australia. ‘Clean Straw for Nothing’ and ‘A Cartload of Clay’ are deeply imbued with an awareness of the ways in which the creative inclination is punished in the world once one allows it to determine one’s path: poverty, addiction, illness, betrayal and sickness unto suicide or death.

In the visual arts, the most interesting practitioners associated with the Hydra group appear to have been the Greek painter Nikos Ghika whose ancestral home on the island was his residence and studio during this period and Johnston’s Australian friend Sidney Nolan who stayed for a few months at Ghika’s studio. Amongst the illustrations in ‘Half the Perfect World’ there is a beautiful pairing of a black and white shot of Nolan on the roof of the Ghika house painting a landscape of the island alongside a colour plate of the actual painting. Moments like these as well as the James Burke photographs of Leonard Cohen serenading Charmian Clift and a handful of their other friends at Douskos taverna in 1960, described and reproduced in ‘Half the Perfect World’, brought me very close to the creative process of these gifted people.

Having now read the one volume of Clift and the three volumes of Johnston, I thought that the latest iteration of my own periodic islomania had come to an end and that I could close the book, at least for now, on Hydra. However, a chance mention of an earlier meeting on the island between Ghika and another writer drew me back.

Given my ongoing interest in Greece through marriage, friendship and travel and my lifelong interest in reading the work of Lawrence Durrell, it seems to me bizarre that I have somehow avoided until now The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller. Passing through Paris as a drifter in my early twenties a cousin of mine who was working there at the Institut Pasteur recommended that I follow up my reading of The Alexandria Quartet with the pre-war diaries of Anais Nin which revolve so much around the triumvirate of Nin, Durrell and Miller, and I subsequently also read the Tropics and The Rosy Crucifixion, almost all of which – with the exception of The Tropic of Cancer – I have since discarded. The two mottled paperback volumes of Nin have sat for decades in different shelves and different houses alongside the one volume of Miller, the quartet and the quincunx. But now I can add to them the Miller memoir of his 1939 visit to Greece on the invitation of Lawrence Durrell. Imagine my surprise when I read that two decades before the Sidney Nolan visit, Ghika had invited Miller to Hydra after meeting him in Athens where they shared the company of Lawrence Durrell and the two Greek poets George Seferis and George Katsimbalis, the latter of whom is Miller’s model for the Colossus. Even more, imagine my surprise at the nature and quality of Miller’s writing in this memoir which deserves to be recognised for its own kind of American transcendentalism. To leave the last word for the day with Miller himself:

To live creatively, I have discovered, means to live more and more unselfishly, to live more and more into the world, identifying oneself with it and thus influencing it at the core, so to speak. Art, like religion, it now seems to me, is only a preparation, an initiation into the way of life. The goal is liberation, freedom, which means assuming greater responsibility.

Go to Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell’s ‘Half the Perfect World’

Go to ‘Writers, Dreamers and Drifters’

Athena’s little owl drops two liquid notes… Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell’s ‘Half the Perfect World’

by Adrian D’Ambra

Something greatly to be hoped is that the 2018 publication of Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell’s ‘Half the Perfect World’ by Monash University Publishing might lead to the reissue of Charmian Clift’s island memoirs ‘Mermaid Singing’ and ‘Peel Me a Lotus’. Some thirty years ago I bought a copy of ‘Peel Me a Lotus’ along with the Meredith Trilogy by George Johnston, all four volumes published in Australia then by Flamingo/Fontana. I suppose I bought them because I had read the first of the Meredith volumes, ‘My Brother Jack’ fifteen years earlier at school but not only did I not re-read it, neither did I read ‘Clean Straw for Nothing’, ‘A Cartload of Clay’ or ‘Peel Me a Lotus’. ‘Half the Perfect World’ has prompted me to rectify this shortcoming. Whilst Johnston’s coming of age narrative about David Meredith may have appealed to earlier generations of serious readers on the basis of its literary earnestness, having just read ‘Peel Me a Lotus’ for the first time I can tell you that the lightness of touch and deftness of descriptive atmosphere of Clift’s memoir of their first year on Hydra have weathered the decades since the late-1950s very well indeed. Her ability to characterise without caricature sets her apart from both Johnston and Durrell.

Go to ‘Hydra’

Go to ‘Writers, Dreamers and Drifters’

the columned bronze, the missing lighthouse

Reflections

gliding into harbour on the surface of

an oil-skinned sea, a blue phosphorescence

and the eyes of gods and dolphins

gliding, as if in air, the sea unseaming

we are always watched, have always been by

the symbols of our own suspiciousness as

we go and come and go and come

entering the womb of a safely sea-walled harbour

and the salty lick of sea-sprayed lips

the columned bronze, the missing lighthouse

sing to me of a marine Venus but without

the wayward words and silly stories of

the men, their easy-going catalogues

their catastrophes of war and woundedness

give me the clearer unencumbered voice of

an Athena or an Aphrodite, Artemis, indeed

to sing the seaway still and still the winds when we arrive as

I embark again in dreams of

the burning, floating violin

and cast about for consciousness as

soft and safe and supple as the new skin of

an alter-ego who has lived, not lived, survived

this life, homunculus novitiate of the better self

and still the voice is singing, the singing voice is still

an echo of another world, a better place

a woman’s dispensation of courage, steadfastness and strength

I am reading a book, third hand at the least

a friend found it for me in an antique dealer’s between

two bays but enough of that for now for

surely history as chronology is woefully misleading

an earlier reader, Daphne, has scorched the first page with

a cigarette burn, leaning in the bed as

I imagine her, turning away from the boys’ own adventure characters

unlikeable survivors of a pre-war education in

an immediately post-war world, Rhodes, 1945

the captured German soldiers pressganged into reconstructing what they had earlier destroyed

the Italian waiters waiting, the Greeks and Turks starving

woefully bored and rightly irritated by the racial and the sexual stereotypes

she is leaning, instead, and reaching behind herself with

one free hand to guide her lover in

the cigarette in her other hand brushing

Reflections on a Marine Venus just long enough to

scorch a tiny pinprick in the terrestrial paradise of

an exile’s doom

or more likely, perhaps, or having thought it so, now

I will it to be true, a post-coital smoke, mid-twentieth century

a shuttered but otherwise sunlit afternoon in the late 1950s or early 1960s

the archaeology of a hidden hour, Daphne and her lover

their masks abandoned and, having devoured each other, no longer devoured by time

two women or one a man, it hardly matters now, it barely mattered then

the couple, satiated, disengaged, sharing a single cigarette

falling between them on the sex-crumpled sheets

and book, the tiny plume, the sharp sting of smoke

laughter between two lovers who do not want to read

by Adrian D’Ambra

Go to ‘Writers, Dreamers and Drifters’

Go to ‘Poetry from ancient places’

A Courageous Loyalty: Patti Smith’s ‘M Train’

by Adrian D’Ambra

We were staying in New York for six nights. It was our first visit and we had exhausted ourselves on the art and the essentials such as Liberty and Ellis islands and the Brooklyn Bridge. On the morning of our final full day – a Saturday – we made our way from our mid-town hotel on West 31^st Street to the Strand Book Store near Union Square. I grew up with the notions that bookshops were special places and that literature and the arts in general were the tools we used to make ourselves worthy of the Socratic proposition that the unexamined life is not worth living. Well, bookshops remain essential but they are also under siege from the online, digital onslaught. Especially the independents. When you walk into the welcoming shelter of a bookroom like The Twig in the Pearl district of San Antonio, Texas, or Fountain Bookstore on the Shockoe Slip in Richmond, Virginia, not only are you walking onto hallowed ground, you are entering a place of bravery, commitment and resistance. Their titles are always going to be more expensive than the identical editions online, their stock can never be as vast as the digital warehouses from which our online purchases are dispensed. These shops are meant to be shut, their owners bankrupt, either serving or receiving soup in the food lines of the post-industrial capitalist economy. But some of these people are hanging on. And we know why. Because sometimes you want to touch and feel both the actuality and the idea of the thing – the book, the author’s thoughts and deeds and words – simultaneously. To pick a book from amongst its companions on a shelf, to open it and wonder, to judge it by its cover and a glancing acquaintance with its contents; these remain essential elements in a reader’s experience of the world of books. These proprietors are survivors feeding the needs of readers and writers, the human need for the humanities in an increasingly dehumanised and technocratic world. And nowhere is this need captured more succinctly than in the Strand Book Store mantra which is repeated on posters, tee-shirts, badges and bags throughout the store: ‘If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!’ A necessary resistance, indeed, against hubris and narcissism, a defence against shallowness and disappointment.

It was our last morning in New York and Ellen wanted to buy us books. I was overwhelmed by the Strand’s four floors and concerned about the weight of our bags for the return flight to Melbourne. The shipping fees were also high, so I resolved to immerse myself in this place, to thoroughly enjoy the sensory overload of being surrounded by books for sale in a business devoted to the business of thinking and writing, publishing and reading, without choosing anything. Here were the writings of Thomas Jefferson whose Monticello we had recently visited in Charlottesville, Virginia, and whose memorial we had marvelled at in Washington DC. Here were James Baldwin’s novels and all the thus-far published volumes of Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Here were magisterial collections of the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and copies of virtually every title and author we have ever read or taught. And for the Australian browser, signed first editions by Peter Carey and David Malouf.

After nearly an hour, Ellen was disappointed that I had chosen nothing. I had been looking after almost all of our transactions during our five-week sojourn through these incredibly diverse United States and this was her opportunity to buy a gift for me. Instinctively, I sought out the literary non-fiction section in the basement, knowing exactly what I was looking for: a copy of Patti Smith’s M Train, a book I had looked at but not bought in Melbourne but which I knew would be the perfect companion to read while leaving New York, not knowing if, when or ever we will return.

M Train is all about memory, the intermingling of pleasure and pain occasioned by the experience of memory, regardless of whether or not the remembered experience was originally pleasurable or painful. And, from the point of view of someone in her mid-sixties M Train is also, inevitably, about loss. It is also extraordinarily honest. I don’t and can’t say this because I was there alongside her and can, therefore, measure the truthfulness of her account. I say it because – without ever appealing for the sympathy of her reader – you can feel her maladroitness in the world, the missteps that we all make for ourselves whether as children or as adults, making occasionally, apparently patently irrational adult decisions. Indeed, the most important decisions we make in the single short lifetime we have at our disposal are based far more on instinct and emotion, experience and desire, than they are on reason.

But the quality that stands out for me while reading Patti Smith’s M Train is loyalty and a kind of intellectual resilience. Smith personifies the constancy of the constant reader. Books – literary texts mostly – and their authors are constant points of reference in her experiences, dreams and memories. Like her, I see these books – literary fiction – as portals, ways into other worlds and other minds but, also, ways into oneself, into the great reservoir of one’s own interiority. Like her, I often feel a sense of dissatisfaction with myself as a reader because of my inexplicable failure to remember the surface details – plot especially – of so many of the literary texts I have read, no matter how deeply they have moved me. Why do so few readers admit to this? I think it actually reveals something very significant about the experience of literary fiction: that, through it, both the writer and the reader seek to go beyond storytelling and storyline, that these are merely the vehicles that take us somewhere else, somewhere beyond the reach of the social contract, the moral consensus, the political and economic status quo.

Despite these frustrations of an otherwise fine reader, though, I come back to Smith’s loyalty as a reader which has, I think, both moved and instructed me. In my youth and early adulthood, I loved many of the same books and authors that Smith loved at the same period of her life: Genet’s The Thief’s Journal and The Miracle of the Rose, Albert Camus, Wuthering Heights, Yukio Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Dawn tetralogy and Arthur Rimbaud for example. We have behaved similarly as readers. Smith, for example, took the opportunity of a trip to Tokyo to visit Mishima’s grave. I made sure that when I was in Egypt I went to the Cecil Hotel in Alexandria because of its associations with Lawrence Durrell and Justine. But, what Smith has done and what, I fear, I have not, is that she has kept her relationships with these texts open, she has kept the texts and the relationships alive for herself. Both of us own copies of what we have read and can name to a fault the ones we have lost, but whereas I tend to shelve, she clearly re-reads, dips in, returns to and annotates favourite passages, so as to keep these texts alive in her consciousness. Patti Smith has never abandoned her Romantic predisposition. Instead, she has allowed it to shape her life, demonstrating a courageous loyalty. For Smith, Honda’s journey through the reincarnations of his dead friend is living history, whereas for me it is dead history. Smith has kept the flames of her passion for literature not only lit but well-tended and for this we, her readers, must be thankful.

The Revolt of Aphrodite

by Adrian D’Ambra

The mental geography of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and Revolt of Aphrodite is a Panhellenic vision of the eastern Mediterranean in which Alexandria – despite the Egyptians – is a Judeo-Christian outpost, and Istanbul – despite the Turks – is the capital of a sensibility which is mapped racially and culturally if not historically and cartographically. How fortunate his readers are that he discovered Provence and was there able to free himself from the limitations of this worldview and write what may still yet come to be seen as his masterwork: The Avignon Quintet.

What comes between the Quartet and the Quintet is a double-decker novel made up of Tunc and Nunquam which features the preoccupations of the other two works – most notably, the provisional nature of character and experience – without the artistry. All of the bombast of the Quartet is there without the youthful exuberance. All of the orientalism of both the Quartet and the Quintet is there but stripped of its exoticism and beauty to reveal Durrell’s unmediated imperial racism and patriarchal sexism. All of Durrell’s reactionary political and social values are on display in The Revolt of Aphrodite without the wit, humour or self-deprecation of the other two texts. The two novels, Tunc and Nunquam, can be stripped down to a series of aphorisms. Unfortunately, the pleasure of finding them does not sufficiently reward the reading of an otherwise underwhelming book. By his own suggestion, Durrell seems to have realised that he did not achieve the total vision that would provide The Revolt of Aphrodite with the significance of his other sequences of novels. Were his novels ever subjected to judicious editorial oversight at Faber? It is hard to believe they were and Durrell’s reputation as a writer may very well be much the worse for it.

From Tunc (1968):

Reality is what is most conspicuous by its absence.

Causality is an attempt to mesmerise the world into some sort of significance. We cannot bear its indifference.

At what point does a man decide that life must be lived unhesitatingly? Presumably after exhausting every other field.

People deprived of a properly constituted childhood will always find something hollow in their responses to the world, something unfruitful.

Art is the real science.

What space is to matter, soul is to mind.

“There is no difference between truth and reality – ask any poet.”

To fulfil is to fill full.

CARADOC’S ACROPOLIS LECTURE: “Who were they, first of all, these ancestors of ours? Who? And how did they manage to actualise the potential in man’s notion of beauty, sidestep history, abbreviate eternity? . . . In our age the problem has not changed, only our responses are different. We have tried to purify insight with the aid of reason and its fruit in technics: and failed – our buildings show it. . . . But in an age of fragments, an age without a true cosmological notion of affect and its powers, what can we do but flounder, improvise, hesitate? . . . How to forbid oneself to elucidate reality – that is the problem, the difficulty. How to restore the wonder to human geometry – that is the crux of the matter.”

COUNT BANUBULA: “Haven’t you noticed Charlock that most things in life happen just outside one’s range of vision? One has to see them out of the corner of one’s eye. And any one thing could be the effect of any number of others? I mean there seem to be always a dozen perfectly appropriate explanations to every phenomenon. That is what makes our reasoning minds so unsatisfactory; and yet, they are all we’ve got, this shabby piece of equipment.”

. . . all this for me was mere pleasure which never exploded into insight, couldn’t disturb the egocentric flow of my hugged imaginings.

But then one can’t start loving retroactively – or can one?

. . . perhaps we are forced to choose as lovemates, shipmates, playmates those that best match our inward ugliness – the sum of our own shortcomings. No, I did not know that as yet. Not then.

The soul of modern man is made of galvanised iron.

The hero of the New Comedy will be the scientist in love, grappling with the androgynous shapes of his own desire.

Time is the only thing that doesn’t wear out.

Gentlemen of the jury, we should tackle reality in a slightly joky way, otherwise we miss its point. It isn’t solemn at all, it’s playing!

I realised that any explanation would do, and that all would forever remain merely provisional. Was this perhaps true for all of us, for all our actions? Yes, yes.

Try as you will, there is no explanation for madness, happiness or death.

We always think that we are thinking one thought at a time because we have to put them down one under the other, in a linguistic order; this is an illusion I suppose.

“The body dries up, the mind becomes toneless, the soul reverts to chrysalis; the only providing power lives on and on, independent of a dogmatic theology. The only thing that does not wear out is time.” Thus Koepgen.

IOLANTHE: “It’s a terrible thing to feel that one has come to the end of one’s life-experience – that there is nothing fundamentally new to look forward to: one must expect more and more combinations of the same sort of thing – the thing which has proven one a sort of failure. So then you start on the declining path, living a kind of posthumous life, your blood cool, your pulse steady.”

Human attention is fragile and finite; won’t be mastered; can’t be bribed; is always changing.

Ah, for one moment of that total vision which might reorder the whole field and make it significant.

From Nunquam (1970):

Is it imperative that the tragic sense should reside after all somewhere in laughter?

The more we know about knowing the less we feel about feeling.

Nature is an organism not a system, and will always punish those who try to strap her into a system. . . . Nature improvises out of pure joy, always with a miracle in hand; why can’t man?

MARCHANT: “While society is happily creating a slave-class of analphabetics, ‘les visuels’, who have forgotten how to read and who depend on a set of Pavlovian signals for their daily bread and other psychic needs – surely we have the right to build a model which will be at least as ‘human’ as these so-called human beings? . . . The old weakness is peeping out. You want to intrude metaphysical considerations into empirical science. It’s no go. You are tapping on a door which does not exist. The wall is solid.”

But I was thinking to myself about memory – is everything recorded in it from the first birth-cry to the death-rattle? Why not? Or does it simply wear out like an old disc?

Since earliest times a change of consciousness has been accredited with great healing power; this was recognised since the Eleusinian Mysteries and long before them.

ARIADNE: “No; it is just that we have all changed places, haven’t we? The pack has been shuffled. Everyone will be going round counter-clockwise now. I expect the good to get badder and the bad to get gooder; except in the exceptional cases – where one or other have got up enough momentum to stop the pendulum. . . .”

It is retrospectively that one marks up and weighs the value of experiences.

– you cannot console anyone against reality.

Workpoints #10, Clea

by Adrian D’Ambra

Go to Workpoints #1

I have just completed my re-reading of The Alexandria Quartet which remains, despite my newly-realised misgivings – how can it be otherwise – the single-most important novel of my life. And, what a devastating experience the last few sittings have been, as though an interrogation were taking place, to re-read this absolutely essential document from my own coming of age, my own loss, my own betrayal. For, when did I make the critical mistake and, indeed, what was it, the one that led to my expulsion from the heraldic universe, the constellations of the muses and the arts? When did I betray the company of lovers, the presence of the Real Ones, and the artist’s apprenticeship? What wrong turn did I make? When, as Durrell paraphrases Cavafy in one of the final adaptations of his poetry, did I offer up the Nay to art and life instead of Yea, the consequence of which has been to live the death-in-life of a dead writer? How did I deny myself access to the real life, never allowing it to begin? The final exchange of letters between Darley and Clea has been insupportable for me as we read of their emergence as real human beings, artists, inhabitants of the kingdoms of their imaginations. Why, instead, have I allowed my life to destroy my imagination? Why did I never allow myself to learn, as Pursewarden would say, to realise? When and how did I stop myself becoming? How did I facilitate the victory of fear over desire? When did I abandon the spinning of the Dervishes, spheres balancing on their axes, the potential symmetry of art and life? My heart aches with misgivings about the mistakes that I am unable to identify. When did I surrender to everyday despair? Why have I not allowed myself to live the real happiness of creative play? Why was I cursed with the original aspiration if my only achievement has been to fail? At what point does real life begin?

I could, as I have done in some of the previous workpoints, further interrogate Durrell’s novel – why, for example, must the female artistic principle, Clea, be mutilated before she can create? – but the final volume of the Quartet has, instead, interrogated me. And, to my further chagrin, Durrell has answered all of the above. Read with your eyes open!

1982:

If I have spoken of time it is because the writer I was becoming was learning at last to inhabit those deserted spaces which time misses – beginning to live between the ticks of the clock, so to speak. The continuous present, which is the real history of that collective anecdote, the human mind; when the past is dead and the future represented only by desire and fear, what of that adventive moment which can’t be measured, can’t be dismissed? For most of us the so-called Present is snatched away like some sumptuous repast, conjured up by fairies – before one can touch a mouthful. Like the dead Pursewarden I hoped I might soon be truthfully able to say: ‘I do not write for those who have never asked themselves this question: “at what point does real life begin?”’ [pp. 659-660]

. . . for once you become aware of the operation of a time which is not calendar-time you become in some sort a ghost. In this other domain I could hear the echoes of words uttered long since in the past by other voices. Balthazar saying: ‘This world represents the promise of a unique happiness which we are not well-enough equipped to grasp.’ [p. 667]

. . . I thought to myself, we are observing the fall of city man. [p. 668]

She walked with an air of bemused rapture, spellbound by the image rather than the reality. (Is poetry, then, more real than observed truth?) [p. 672]

‘One learns nothing from those who return our love.’ Words which burnt like surgical spirit on an open wound, but which cleansed, as all truth does. [p. 674]

Was she less now a scent or a flavour? Was she simply a nexus of literary cross-references scribbled in the margins of a minor poem? And had my love dissolved her in this strange fashion, or was it simply the literature I had tried to make out of her? Words, the acid-bath of words! I felt guilty. I even tried (with that lying self-deception so natural to sentimentalists) to force her to appear by an act of will, to re-evoke a single one of those afternoon kisses which had once been for me the sum of the city’s many meanings. [p. 681]

I saw now that my own Justine had indeed been an illusionist’s creation, raised upon the faulty armature of misinterpreted words, actions, gestures. Truly there was no blame here; the real culprit was my love which had invented an image on which to feed. Nor was there any question of dishonesty, for the picture was coloured after the necessities of the love which invented it. [p. 694]

Something more, fully as engrossing: I also saw that lover and loved, observer and observed, throw down a field about each other (‘Perception is shaped like an embrace – the poison enters with the embrace’ as Pursewarden writes). They then infer the properties of their love, judging it from this narrow field with its huge margins of unknown (’the refraction’), and proceed to refer it to a generalized conception of something constant in its qualities and universal in its operation. How valuable a lesson this was, both to art and to life! I had only been attesting, in all I had written, to the power of an image which I had created involuntarily by the mere act of seeing Justine. There was no question of true or false. Nymph? Goddess? Vampire? Yes, she was all of these and none of them. She was, like every woman, everything that the mind of man (let us define ‘man’ as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself) – that the mind of man wished to imagine. She was there forever, and she had never existed! Under all these masks there was only another woman, every woman, like a lay figure in a dressmaker’s shop, waiting for the poet to clothe her, breathe life into her. In understanding all this for the first time I began to realize with awe the enormous reflexive power of woman – the fecund passivity with which, like the moon, she borrows her second-hand light from the male sun. How could I help but be grateful for such vital information? What did they matter, the lies, deceptions, follies, in comparison with the truth? [In my defence, there is a question mark in the margin alongside this offensive claptrap; p. 694]

This was the grim metamorphosis brought about by the acid-bath of truth – as Pursewarden might say. [p. 695]

‘When a sense of destiny consumes him he becomes truly splendid. It was as an actor that he magnetized me, illuminated me for myself. But as a fellow prisoner, in defeat – he predisposes to ennui, migraine, thoughts of utter banality like suicide!’ [Justine to Darley about Nessim, p. 696]

‘We are all in the grip of the emotional field which we throw down about one another – you yourself have said it. Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.’ [Justine to Darley, p. 698]

A mouthful of the darkness where we bleed. / The once magnificent image of my love lay now in the hollow of my arm, defenceless as a patient on an operating table, hardly breathing. It was useless even to repeat her name which once held so much fearful magic that it had the power to slow the blood in my veins. She had become a woman at last, lying there, soiled and tattered, like a dead bird in a gutter, her hands crumpled into claws. It was as if some huge iron door had closed forever in my heart. / I could hardly wait for that slow dawn to bring me release. I could hardly wait to be gone. [p. 699]

‘One makes love only to confirm one’s loneliness’ [Pursewarden, p. 700]

‘A woman’s best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying’ [Justine, p. 700]

‘Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine’ [p. 702]

‘. . . but what is one to say of this very approximate science which has carelessly overflowed into anthropology on one side, theology on the other? There is much they do not know as yet: for instance that one kneels in church because one kneels to enter a woman, or that circumcision is derived from the clipping of the vine, without which it will run to leaf and produce no fruit! . . . The most tender, the most tragic of illusions is perhaps to believe that our actions can add or subtract from the total quantity of good and evil in the world.’ [Balthazar, p. 706]

‘I mean about the mutability of all truth. Each fact can have a thousand motivations, all equally valid, and each fact a thousand faces. So many truths which have little to do with fact! Your duty is to hunt them down. At each moment of time all multiplicity waits at your elbow. Why, Darley, this should thrill you and give your writing the curves of a pregnant woman.’ [Balthazar, p. 708]

‘A novel should be an act of divination by entrails . . .’ [Pursewarden, p. 708]

Here, too, at last, on this memorable spot on the faded carpet, we embraced each other with – how to say it? – a momentous smiling calm, as if the cup of language had silently overflowed into these eloquent kisses which replaced words like rewards of silence itself, perfecting thought and gesture. They were like soft cloud-formations which had distilled themselves out of a novel innocence, the veritable ache of desirelessness. My steps had led me back again, I realized, remembering the night so long ago when we had slept dreamlessly in each other’s arms, to the locked door which had once refused me admission to her. Led me back once more to that point in time, that threshold, behind which the shade of Clea moved, smiling and irresponsible as a flower, after a huge arid detour in a desert of my own imaginings. I had not known then how to find the key to that door. Now of its own accord it was slowly opening. [The word ‘YES’ is written in pencil in capital letters in the margin beside this paragraph, p. 726]

Yes, improvisation upon reality itself, and for once devoid of the bitter impulses of the will. We had sailed into this calm water completely without premeditation, all canvas crowded on and for the first time it felt natural to be where I was, drifting into sleep with her calm body lying beside me. . . . ‘Did you ever imagine this?’ / ‘We must both have done. Otherwise it would not have happened.’ [p. 728]

I knew that Clea would share everything with me, withholding nothing – not even the look of complicity which women reserve only for their mirrors. [p. 730]

‘To be here, just the two of us, sitting by candlelight is almost a miracle in such a world. You can’t blame me for trying to hoard and protect it against the intrusive world outside, can you?’ [Clea to Darley, p. 733]

If the war did not mean a way of dying, it meant a way of ageing, of tasting the true staleness in human things, and of learning to confront change bravely. No-one could tell what lay beyond the closed chapter of every kiss. [p. 733]

‘There is not enough faith, charity or tenderness to furnish this world with a single ray of hope – yet so long as that strange sad cry rings out over the world, the birth-pangs of an artist – all cannot be lost! This sad little squeak of rebirth tells us that all still hangs in the balance.’ [Pursewarden, p. 744]

‘A puritan culture’s conception of art is something which will endorse its morality and flatter its patriotism. . . . Our topic, Brother Ass, is the same, always and irremediably the same – I spell the word for you: l-o-v-e. Four letters, each letter a volume! . . . It is a complete mystery to which the Jews hold the key unless my history is faulty. For this gifted and troublesome race which has never known art, but exhausted its creative processes purely in the construction of ethical systems, has fathered on us all, literally impregnated the Western European psyche with, the whole range of ideas based on ‘race’ and sexual containment in the furtherance of the race! . . . Keats, the word-drunk, searched for resonance among the vowel-sounds which might give him an echo of his inner self. . . . No, but seriously, if you wish to be – I do not say original but merely contemporary – you might try a four-card trick in the form of a novel; passing a common axis through four stories, say, and dedicating each to one of the four winds of heaven. A continuum, forsooth, embodying not a temps retrouvé but a temps delivré. The curvature of space itself would give you stereoscopic narrative, while human personality seen across a continuum would perhaps become prismatic? Who can say? I throw the idea out. I can imagine a form which, if satisfied, might raise in human terms the problems of causality or indeterminacy. . . . And nothing very recherché either. Just an ordinary Girl Meets Boy story. But tackled in this way you would not, like most of your contemporaries, be drowsily cutting along a dotted line! . . . A good writer should be able to write anything. But a great writer is the servant of compulsions which are ordained by the very structure of the psyche and cannot be disregarded. Where is he? Where is he? . . . The greatest thoughts are accessible to the least of men. Why do we have to struggle so? Because understanding is a function not of ratiocination but of the psyche’s stage of growth. . . . We artists are not interested in policies but in values – this is our field of battle! If once we could loosen up, relax the terrible grip of the so-called Kingdom of Heaven which has made the earth such a blood-soaked place, we might rediscover in sex the key to a metaphysical search which is our raison d’être here below! . . . Yes, to extend the range of physical sensuality to embrace mathematics and theology . . . The sexual and the creative energy go hand in hand. They convert into one another – the solar sexual and the lunar spiritual holding an eternal dialogue. They ride the spiral of time together. They embrace the whole of the human motive. The truth is only to be found in our own entrails – the truth is Time. . . . but woman will not accept time and the dictates of the death-divining second. . . Time is the catch! Space is a concrete idea, but Time is abstract. . . . Brother Ass, the so-called act of living is really an act of the imagination. The world – which we always visualise as ‘the outside’ World – yields only to self-exploration! Faced by this cruel, yet necessary paradox, the poet finds himself growing gills and a tail, the better to swim against the currents of unenlightenment. What appears to be perhaps an arbitrary act of violence is precisely the opposite, for by reversing process in this way, he unites the rushing, heedless stream of humanity to the still, tranquil, motionless, odourless, tasteless plenum from which its own motive essence is derived. (Yes, but it hurts to realize!) If he were to abandon his role all hope of gaining a purchase on the slippery surface of reality would be lost, and everything in nature would disappear! But this act, the poetic act, will cease to be necessary when everyone can perform it for himself. What hinders them, you ask? Well, we are all naturally afraid to surrender our own pitifully rationalized morality – and the poetic jump I’m predicating lies the other side of it. It is only terrifying because we refuse to recognize in ourselves the horrible gargoyles which decorate the totem poles of our churches – murderers, liars, adulterers and so on. (Once recognized, these papier-mâché masks fade.) Whoever makes this enigmatic leap into the heraldic reality of the poetic life discovers that truth has its own built-in morality! . . . But I am aware the test may come under any guise, perhaps even in the physical world by a blow between the eyes or a few lines scribbled in pencil on the back of an envelope left in a café. The heraldic reality can strike from any point, above or below: it is not particular. But without it the enigma will remain. You may travel round the world and colonize the end of the earth with your lines and yet never hear that singing yourself.’ [Pursewarden, MY CONVERSATIONS WITH BROTHER ASS, pp. 753, 754, 755-756, 757-758, 758, 759, 760, 762, 764, 772, 773]

‘And if you look beyond the immediate pain you will see how perfect the logic of love seems to one who is ready to die for it.’ [Pursewarden’s last letter to Liza, p. 787]

‘He always puzzled me – except when I had him in my arms.’ [Liza on Pursewarden, p. 789]

I had been digging about in the graveyard of relative fact piling up data, more information, and completely missing the mythopoeic reference which underlies fact. I had called this searching for truth! . . . for the first time, I saw that through his work he had been seeking for the very tenderness of logic itself, of the Way Things Are; not the logic of syllogism or the tide-marks of emotions, but the real; essence of fact-finding, the naked truth, the Inkling . . . the whole pointless Joke. Yes, Joke! I woke up with a start and swore. / If two or more explanations of a single human action are as good as each other then what does action mean but an illusion – a gesture made against the misty backcloth of a reality made palpable by the delusive nature of human division merely? . . . I saw, in fact, that we artists form one of those pathetic human chains which human beings form to pass buckets of water up to a fire, or to bring in a lifeboat. An uninterrupted chain of humans born to explore the inward riches of the solitary life on behalf of the unheeding unforgiving community; manacled together by the same gift. . . It was life itself that was a fiction – we were all saying it in our different ways, each understanding it according to his nature and gift. . . . We were three writers, I now saw, confided to a mythical city from which we were to draw our nourishment, in which we were to confirm our gifts. Arnauti, Pursewarden, Darley – like Past, Present and Future tense! And in my own life (the staunchless stream flowing from the wounded side of Time!) the three women who also arranged themselves as if to represent the moods of the great verb, Love: Melissa, Justine and Clea. [pp. 791-792]

‘. . . to see the ethics of man at his norm you must see a battlefield. The general idea may be summed up in the expressive phrase: “If you can’t eat it or **** it, then **** on it,”’ [Keats to Darley, p. 796]

I am hunting for metaphors which might convey something of the piercing happiness too seldom granted to those who love; but words, which were first invented against despair, are too crude to mirror the properties of something so profoundly at peace with itself, at one with itself. Words are the mirrors of our discontents merely; they contain all the huge unhatched eggs of the world’s sorrows. [p. 827]

The seeds of future events are carried within ourselves. They are implicit in us and unfold according to the laws of their own nature. [p. 828]

Yes, but the dead are everywhere. They cannot be so simply evaded. One feels them pressing their sad blind fingers in deprivation upon the panels of our secret lives, asking to be remembered and re-enacted once more in the life of the flesh – encamping among our heartbeats, invading our embraces. [p. 833]

I think I must have known that from this point onward everything would be subtly changed. That we had entered, so to speak, a new constellation of feelings which would alter our relationship. / One speaks of change, but in truth there was nothing abrupt, coherent, definitive about it. No, the metamorphosis came about with comparative slowness. It waxed and waned like a tide, now advancing, now retreating. [pp. 837-838]

It was as if I had tried to put my hand on a secret treasure which she was guarding with her life. [p. 839]

‘How this war has aged and staled us’ she said suddenly, as if to herself. ‘In the old days one would have thought of going away in order, as we said, to get away from oneself. But to get away from it. . . .’ [Clea to Darley, p. 842]

‘The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.’ [Pursewarden, p. 856]

2017:

Alexandria, the capital of memory! All the writing which I had borrowed from the living and the dead, until I myself had become a sort of postscript to a letter which was never ended, never posted. . . . I had set out once to store, to codify, to annotate the past before it was utterly lost – that at least was a task I had set myself. I had failed in it (perhaps it was hopeless?) for no sooner had I embalmed one aspect of it in words than the intrusion of new knowledge disrupted the frame of reference, everything flew asunder, only to reassemble again in unforeseen, unpredictable patterns. . . . I had now come face to face with the nature of time, that ailment of the human psyche. I had been forced to admit defeat on paper. Yet curiously enough the act of writing had in itself brought me another sort of increase; by the very failure of words, which sink one by one into the measureless caverns of the imagination and gutter out. An expensive way to begin living, yes; but then we artists are driven towards personal lives nourished in these strange techniques of self-pursuit. What had the city to do with all this – an Aegean spring hanging upon a thread between winter and the first white puffs of almond blossom? It was a word merely, and meant little, being scribbled on the margins of a dream, or being repeated in the mind to the colloquial music of time, which is only desire expressed in heartbeats. [pp. 657-659]

Rimbaud, student of the Abrupt Path, walked here with a belt full of gold coins. [p. 660]

But then is not life itself a fairy-tale which we lose the power of apprehending as we grow? [p. 661]

It had come so softly towards us over the waters, this war; gradually, as clouds which quietly fill in a horizon from end to end. But as yet it had not broken. Only the rumour of it gripped the heart with conflicting hopes and fears. At first it had seemed to portend the end of the so-called civilized world, but this hope soon proved vain. No, it was to be as always simply the end of kindness and safety and moderate ways; the end of the artist’s hopes, of nonchalance, of joy. Apart from this everything else about the human condition would be conformed and emphasized; perhaps even a certain truthfulness had already begun to emerge from behind appearances, for death heightens every tension and permits us fewer of the half-truths by which we normally live. [p. 665]

‘You see a different me’ she cried in a voice almost of triumph. ‘But once again the difference lies in you, in what you imagine you see! . . . I knew that you would always prefer your own mythical picture, framed by the five senses, to anything more truthful. But now, then, tell me – which of us was the greater liar? I cheated you, you cheated yourself.’ [Justine to Darley, pp. 692-693]

But in the meantime my straying footsteps had led me back to the narrow opening of the Rue Lepsius, to the worm-eaten room with the cane chair which creaked all night, and where once the old poet of the city had recited ‘The Barbarians’. I felt the stairs creak again under my tread. On the door was a notice in Arabic which said ‘Silence’. The latch was hooked back. [p. 702]

So we swayed down the long curving Corniche and back into the lighted area of the city where the blue street-lamps came up one by one to peer into the gharry at us as we talked; and all at once it seemed that past and present had joined again without any divisions in it, and that all my memories and impressions had ordered themselves into one complete pattern whose metaphor was always the shining city of the disinherited – a city now trying softly to spread the sticky prismatic wings of a new-born dragonfly on the night. [p. 723]

I thought of some words of Arnauti, written about another woman, in another context: ‘You tell yourself that it is a woman you hold in your arms, but watching the sleeper you see all her growth in time, the unerring unfolding of cells which group and dispose themselves into the beloved face which remains always and for ever mysterious – repeating to infinity the soft boss of the human nose, an ear borrowed from a sea-shell’s helix, an eyebrow thought-patterned from ferns, or lips invented by bivalves in their dreaming union. All this process is human, bears a name which pierces your heart, and offers the mad dream of an eternity which time disproves in every drawn breath. And if human personality is an illusion? And if, as biology tells us, every single cell in our bodies is replaced every seven years by another? At the most I hold in my arms something like a fountain of flesh, continuously playing, and in my mind a rainbow of dust.’ And like an echo from another point of the compass I heard the sharp voice of Pursewarden saying: ‘There is no Other; there is only oneself facing forever the problem of one’s self-discovery!’ [p. 729]

‘It is curious that an experience so wounding can also be recognised as good, as positively nourishing. . . . I had been immeasurably grown-up by the experience. I was full of gratitude and still am. . . . It is funny but I realized that precisely what wounded me most as a woman nourished me most as an artist. . . . But hurt or not, I learned to bear it and even to cherish it, for it allowed me to come to terms with another illusion. Or rather to see the link between body and spirit in a new way – for the physique is only the outer periphery, the contours of the spirit, its solid part. Through smell, taste, touch we apprehend each other, ignite each other’s minds; information conveyed by the body’s odours after orgasm, breath, tongue-taste – through these one “knows” in quite primeval fashion. . . . Paracelsus says that thoughts are acts. Of them all, I suppose, the sex act is the most important, the one in which our spirits most divulge themselves. . . . When a culture goes bad in its sex all knowledge is impeded. We women know that.’ [Clea, pp. 738-739]

‘(Art occurs at the point where a form is sincerely honoured by an awakened spirit.) . . . Genius which cannot be helped should be politely ignored. . . . How wonderful the death struggle of Lawrence: to realize his sexual nature fully, to break free from the manacles of the Old Testament; flashing down the firmament like a great white struggling man-fish, the last Christian martyr. His struggle is ours – to rescue Jesus from Moses. For a brief moment it looked possible, but St Paul restored the balance and the iron handcuffs of the Judaic prison closed about the growing soul forever. Yet in The Man Who Died he tells us plainly what must be, what the reawakening of Jesus should have meant – the true birth of free man. Where is he? What has happened to him? Will he ever come? . . . . We must learn to read between the lines, between the lives. . . . The struggle is always for greater consciousness. But alas! Civilizations die in the measure that they become conscious of themselves. They realize, they lose heart, the propulsion of the unconscious motive is no longer there. Desperately they begin to copy themselves in the mirror.’ [Pursewarden, MY CONVERSATIONS WITH BROTHER ASS, pp. 751, 758, 762, 763, 764]

In that quiet room, by the light of her candles, I began to read the private letters with a curious interior premonition, a stirring of something like fear – so dreadful a thing is it to explore the inmost secrets of another human being’s life. . . . And realizing this I was suddenly afflicted by a great melancholy and despair at recognizing the completely limited nature of my own powers, hedged about as they were by the limitations of an intelligence too powerful for itself, and lacking in sheer word-magic, in propulsion, in passion, to achieve this other world of artistic fulfilment. . . . ‘I have just realized that I am not an artist at all. There is not a shred of hope of my ever being one.’ [pp. 790-792]

What is the writer’s struggle except a struggle to use a medium as precisely as possible, but knowing fully its basic imprecision? [p. 798]

‘We get too certain of ourselves travelling backwards and forwards along the tramlines of empirical fact.’ [Balthazar, p. 813]

But if tragedy strikes suddenly the actual moment of its striking seems to vibrate on, extending into time like the sour echoes of some great gong, numbing the spirit, the comprehension. [p. 816]

Will memory clutch it – that incomparable pattern of days, I wonder? In the dense violet shadow of white sails, under the dark noon-lantern of figs, on the renowned desert roads where the spice caravans march and the dunes soothe themselves away to the sky, to catch in their dazed sleep the drumming of gulls’ wings turning in spray? [p. 827]

Its beauty was spell-binding. It was like diving into the nave of a cathedral whose stained-glass windows filtered the sunlight through a dozen rainbows. The side of the amphitheatre – for it opened gradually towards the deep sea – seemed as if carved by some heartsick artist of the Romantic Age into a dozen half-finished galleries lined with statues. Some of these were so like real statuary that I thought for a moment that I had made an archaeological find. But these blurred caryatids were wave-born, pressed and moulded by the hazard of the tides into goddesses and dwarfs and clowns. [p. 830]

When you are in love with one of its inhabitants a city can become a world. A whole new geography of Alexandria was born through Clea, reviving old meanings, renewing ambiences half forgotten, laying down like a rich wash of colour a new history, a new biography to replace the old one. [p. 832]

In every death there is the grain of something to be learned. [pp. 835-836]

In truth I now knew, or thought I did, that I would never become a writer. The whole impulse to confide in the world in this way had foundered, had guttered out. [p. 839]

(Yes, but it hurts to realize.) [p. 852]

(‘It would be just like real life to imitate art at this point.’) [p. 854]

And as the chanters moved forward to recite the holy texts six Mevlevi dervishes suddenly took the centre of the stage, expanding in a slow fan of movement until they had formed a semicircle. They wore brilliant white robes reaching to their green slippered feet and tall brown hats shaped like huge bombes glacées. Calmly, beautifully, they began to whirl, these ‘tops spun by God’, while the music of the flutes haunted them with their piercing quibbles. As they gathered momentum their arms, which at first they hugged fast to their shoulders, unfolded as if by centrifugal force and stretched out to full reach, the right palm turned upward to heaven, the left downward to the ground. So, with heads and tall rounded hats tilted slightly, like the axis of the earth, they stayed there miraculously spinning, their feet hardly seeming to touch the floor, in this wonderful parody of the heavenly bodies in their perpetual motion. On and on they went, faster and faster, until the mind wearied of trying to keep pace with them. [p. 866]

‘Things alter their focus on this little island. You called it a metaphor once, I remember, but it is very much a reality to me – though of course vastly changed from the little haven I knew before. It is our own invasion which has changed it. You could hardly imagine that ten technicians could make such a change. But we have imported money, and with it are slowly altering the economy of the place, displacing labour at inflated prices, creating all sorts of new needs of which the lucky inhabitants were not conscious before. Needs which in the last analysis will destroy the tightly woven fabric of this feudal village with its tense blood-relationships, its feuds and archaic festivals. Its wholeness will dissolve under these alien pressures. It was so tightly woven, so beautiful and symmetrical like a swallow’s nest. We are picking it apart like idle boys, unaware of the damage we inflict. It seems inescapable the death we bring to the old order without wishing it. . . . And while we are harvesting steel to raise, membrane by membrane, this delicate mysterious ex-voto to the sky – why the vines are ripening too with their reminder that long after man has stopped his neurotic fiddling with the death-bringing tools with which he expresses his fear of life, the old dark gods are there, underground, buried in the moist humus of the cthonian world . . . They are forever sited in the human wish. They will never capitulate! . . . Were it not to see you again I doubt if I could return again to Alexandria. I feel it fade inside me, in my thoughts, like some valedictory mirage – like the sad history of some great queen whose fortunes have foundered among the ruins of armies and the sands of time! My mind had been turning more and more westward, towards the old inheritance of Italy or France. Surely there is still some worthwhile work to be done among their ruins – something which we can cherish, perhaps even revise? . . . It was indeed another island – I suppose the past always is.’ [Darley’s letter to Clea, pp. 869-872]

‘As for you, wise one, I have a feeling that you too perhaps have stepped across the threshold into the kingdom of your imagination, to take possession of it once and for all. . . . I wait, quite serene and happy, a real human being, an artist at last.’ [Clea’s letter to Darley, p. 877]

Yes, one day I found myself writing down with trembling fingers the four words (four letters! four faces!) with which every story-teller since the world began has staked his slender claim to the attention of his fellow-men. Words which presage simply the old story of an artist coming of age. I wrote: ‘Once upon a time. . . .’ / And I felt as if the whole universe had given me a nudge! [p. 877]

Go to Workpoints #1

Go to ‘The Revolt of Aphrodite’

Workpoints #9, Mountolive

by Adrian D’Ambra

Go to Workpoints #1

And at last we see, hearing it in their own words as they initiate the terms of their marriage; that Nessim and Justine are bound to one another not by mutual love but by a common bond, their commitment to the Zionist expulsion of the British from Palestine; that Justine has taken Darley and Pursewarden as her lovers, neither to betray Nessim, nor to ease the pain of the lost child, but because her husband fears that one of them might uncover their political and military conspiracy. Justine is spying on them at her husband’s instigation. One of the central focal points of The Alexandria Quartet’s exploration of modern love has been the Hosnani marriage, this exceptional couple who are seen by others and who see themselves and each other in a myriad of reflective surfaces, like icons. Mountolive reveals the political extremism which is the foundation of their relationship. Because theirs is political and secular, Nessim is unable to understand or recognise the parallel in his brother Narouz’s developing religious fanaticism in support of a Coptic coup in Egypt.

At the age of twenty-five, I greatly admired Justine and Balthazar for what appeared to me to be their experimental structures and stylistic brilliance, and Clea as the key that opened the door on the Quartet as the bildungsroman it was always supposed to be, that coming of age of the artist, Darley, from mawkish and immature ingénue to self-assured writer. The third volume of the series, Mountolive, featured little in my estimation of the Quartet. I found it stolid, even starchy, by comparison with its siblings. Its political intrigue was either unconvincing or uninteresting, its portrayal of diplomatic life a far cry from the evocation of sensual and sexual experience – no matter how misguided and misinterpreted, no matter how misunderstood by Darley himself – in the other three. At fifty-nine, the scales are readjusting themselves. As noted in an earlier workpoint, it is impossible to read the Quartet now without realising its parochial Englishness, its Eurocentrism and colonial colour-blindness; its misfortune in just having missed out on the challenges to sexism, homophobia and gender-conformity that would emerge half a decade after the publication of Justine, rendering much of Durrell’s exploration of modern love redundant. The style, structure and dissimulation of Justine and Balthazar still dazzle – particularly in relation to the descriptive writing about the city and the characterisation of Darley as the all-seeing, all-telling, no-knowing narrator – but much of the content less so. And as they ebb just a little in my estimation, Mountolive reveals itself as a more assured and purposeful piece of writing; indeed, a passage of Alexandria from which Darley is entirely absent on his unnamed Aegean island retreat, this volume serving as a finely made antechamber to his emergence into adulthood and artistry in Clea. And Clea? I was going to say that it remains for me the key to the Quartet, but if Clea is the open door then the key is Mountolive.

1982:

Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds. [p. 403]

. . . he was learning the two most important lessons in life: to make love honestly and to reflect. [p. 415]

‘The artist’s work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow-men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn.’ [Pursewarden, recounted by Mountolive to Leila, p. 439]

‘For those of us who stand upon the margins of the world, as yet unsolicited by any God, the only truth is that work itself is Love.’ [Mountolive’s father, in a scholarly preface to a Pali text, p. 467]

‘For the artist, I think, as for the public, no such thing as art exists; it only exists for the critics and those who live in the forebrain. Artist and public simply register, like a seismograph, an electromagnetic charge which can’t be rationalized.’ [Pursewarden, p.482]

‘Your reappearance in Egypt – you perhaps have guessed? – has upset me somehow: upset my apple-cart. I am all over the place and cannot pick up the pieces as yet. It puzzles me, I admit. I have been living with you so long in my imagination – quite alone there – that now I must almost reinvent you to bring you back to life. Perhaps I have been traducing you all these years, painting your picture to myself? You may be now simply a figment instead of a flesh and blood dignitary, moving among people and lights and policies. I can’t find the courage to compare the truth to reality as yet; I’m scared. Be patient with a silly headstrong woman who never seems to know her own mind. Of course, we should have met long since – but I shrank like a snail. Be patient. Somewhere inside me I must wait for a tide to turn. I was so angry when I heard you were coming that I cried with sheer rage. Or was it panic? I suppose that really I had managed to forget . . . my own face, all these years. Suddenly it came back over me like an Iron Mask. Bah! soon my courage will come back, never fear. Sooner or later we must meet and shock one another. When? I don’t know as yet. I don’t know.’ [Leila to Mountolive, p. 507]

. . . for she represented something like a second, almost mythical image of the reality which he was experiencing, expropriating day by day. [p. 510]

(‘I so much wanted to understand, but I could not.’) Good, this is where you break into a cold sweat; this is where you turn through three hundred and sixty-five degrees, a human earth, to bury your face in your pillow with a groan! . . . He watched them intently, almost lustfully, as if to surprise their most inward intentions, their basic designs in moving here, idle as fireflies, walking in and out of the bars of yellow light; a finger atwinkle with rings, a flashing ear, a gold tooth set firmly in the middle of an amorous smile. ‘Waiter, keman wahed, another please.’ And the half-formulated thoughts began to float once more across his mind . . . thoughts which might later dress up, masquerade as verses. . . . Visitants from other lives. [Pursewarden, p. 522]

To her surprise, to her chagrin and to her delight, she realised that she was not being asked merely to share his bed – but his whole life, the monomania upon which it was built. Normally, it is only the artist who can offer this strange and selfless contract – but it is one which no woman worth the name can ever refuse. [Justine and Nessim, p. 552; annotated with a question mark by me in 1982]

‘Palestine.’ [Nessim, p. 553]

‘How did you know that I only exist for those who believe in me?’ [Justine to Nessim, p. 555]

‘It is all that I am not as a man which she thinks she can love.’ [Nessim to himself, p. 555]

2017:

Mountolive sighed and stared down into the brown water, chin on his hands. He was unused to feeling so happy. Youth is the age of despairs. [p. 398]

He had been formally educated in England, educated not to wish to feel. All the other valuable lessons he had already mastered, despite his youth – to confront the problems of the drawing-room and the street with sang-froid; but towards personal emotions he could only oppose the nervous silence of a national sensibility almost anaesthetized into clumsy taciturnity: an education in selected reticences and shames. Breeding and sensibility seldom march together, though the breach can be carefully disguised in codes of manners, forms of address towards the world. [p. 403]

Illness invites contempt. A sick man knows it. [p. 406]

He felt as one always feels in such a case, namely the vertiginous pleasure of losing an old self and growing a new one to replace it. He felt he was slipping, losing so to speak the contours of himself. Is this the real meaning of education? [p. 406]

. . . for nobody can think or feel only in the dimensionless obsolescence of Arabic. [an appalling example of Durrell’s parochial Englishness, his colonial Orientalism; even if the free indirect intention at this moment is to capture the unfiltered inner thoughts of Leila Hosnani, the comment is so free and so unexamined or attributed as to appear to be endorsed by the author, p. 408]

It was unpleasant to be forced to grow. It was thrilling to grow. He gravitated between fear and grotesque elation. [p. 411]

And here his English education hampered him at every step. He could not even feel happy without feeling guilty. [p. 413]

The richest of human experiences is also the most limited in its range of expression. Words kill love as they kill everything else. [p. 427]

He telephoned him at once and was agreeably surprised by the pleasant, collected voice. He had half-expected someone aggressively underbred, and was relieved to hear a civilized note of self-collected humour in Pursewarden’s voice. [p. 437]

‘He is, for example, rather an old-fashioned reactionary in his outlook, and is consequently rather mal vu by his brother craftsmen who suspect him of Fascist sympathies; the prevailing temper of left-wing thought, indeed all radicalism is repugnant to him. But his views were expressed humorously and without heat. I could not, for example, rouse him on the Spanish issue. (“All those little beige people trooping off to die for the Left Book Club!”) . . . “Today it all looks to me like a silly shadow-play, for ruling is an art, not a science, just as a society is an organism, not a system. Its smallest unit is the family and really royalism is the right structure for it – for a Royal Family is a mirror image of the human, a legitimate idolatry. . . . He [the artist/writer] shouldn’t concern himself with these matters really. His one job is to learn how to submit to despair.”’ [Mountolive by letter to Leila, recounting his first meeting with Pursewarden; we know from other writings that the reactionary contempt for leftist politics accords with Durrell’s views, pp. 439-440]

He was unaware that quite soon he would once more find his way back to Egypt – the beloved country to which distance and exile lent a haunting brilliance as of tapestry. Could anything as rich as memory be a cheat? He never asked himself the question. [p. 444]

Berlin was also in the grip of snow, but here the sullen goaded helplessness of the Russias was replaced by a malignant euphoria hardly less dispiriting. The air was tonic with gloom and uncertainty. In the grey-green lamplight of the Embassy he listened thoughtfully to the latest evaluations of the new Attila . . . Was it really by now so obvious that this nation-wide exercise in political diabolism would end by plunging Europe into bloodshed? The case seemed overwhelming. But there was one hope – that Attila might turn eastwards and leave the cowering west to moulder away in peace. If the two dark angels which hovered over the European subconscious could only fight and destroy each other. . . . [p. 454]

‘The iron band that Cairo puts around one’s head (the consciousness of being completely surrounded by burning desert?) dissolved, relaxed – gave place to the expectation of an open sea, an open road leading one’s mind back to Europe. . . . Sorry. Off the point. . . . One only knows that a transmission of sorts goes on, true or false, successful or unsuccessful, according to chance. But to try to break down the elements and nose them over – one gets nowhere. (I suspect this approach to art is common to all those who cannot surrender themselves to it!) Paradox. Anyway. . . . God knows, this is the capital of superstition. Even Clea has her horoscope cast afresh every morning. Sects abound.’ [Pursewarden by letter to Mountolive, pp. 482-483]

Mountolive found himself liking him [Brigadier Maskelyne], despite the dry precarious manner. He suddenly seemed to see in him one who, like himself, had hesitated to ascribe any particular meaning to life. [p. 501]

Nessim had, so to speak, gone back into place like a picture into an alcove built for it, and the companionship of Justine – this dark-browed, queenly beauty at his side – enhanced rather than disturbed his relations with the outer world. [p. 506]

He visited Petra and the strange coral delta along the Red Sea coast with its swarming population of rainbow-coloured tropical fish. [p. 508]

The Alexandrians themselves were strangers and exiles to Egypt which existed below the glittering surface of their dreams, ringed by the hot deserts and fanned by the bleakness of a faith which renounced worldly pleasure: the Egypt of rags and sores, of beauty and desperation. Alexandria was still Europe – the capital of Asiatic Europe, if such a thing could exist. It could never be like Cairo where his whole life had an Egyptian cast, where he spoke ample Arabic; here French, Italian and Greek dominated the scene. The ambience, the social manner, everything was different, was cast in a European mould where somehow the camels and palm-trees and cloaked natives existed only as a brilliantly coloured frieze, a backcloth to a life divided in its origins. [p. 509]

‘Why not stay in and enjoy a nice little nocturnal emission on the short hairs?’ [Pombal, p. 518]

To escape – always to escape. . . . The desire of a writer to be alone with himself – ‘the writer, most solitary of human animals’; ‘I am quoting from the great Pursewarden himself’ he told his reflection in the mirror as he wrestled with his tie. [p. 519]

‘Are real human beings becoming simply extended humours capable of use, and does this cut one off from them a bit? Yes. For observation throws down a field about the observed person or object. Yes. Makes the unconditional response more difficult – the response to the common ties, affections, love and so on. But this is not only the writer’s problem – it is everyone’s problem. Growing up means separation in the interests of a better, more lucid joining up. . . . Bah!’ [Pursewarden, p. 520]

‘What meaneth Heaven by these diverse laws? / Eros, Agape – self-division’s cause?’ [Durrell is channelling Baron Brooke Fulke Greville’s Chorus Sacerdotum: ‘What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws? / Passion and reason, self-division cause.’ p. 533]

‘He [Cohen] was working with Nessim Hosnani . . . He is dead now. I think he was poisoned because he knew so much. He was helping to take arms into the Middle East, into Palestine, for Nessim Hosnani. Great quantities. He used to say “Pour faire sauter les Anglais!”’ [Melissa’s revelation to Pursewarden precipitates his suicide, p. 535]

‘Ach! what a boring world we have created around us. The slime of plot and counterplot. I have just recognised that it is not my world at all.’ [Pursewarden’s suicide letter to Mountolive, p. 540]

‘You know, we all know, that our days are numbered since the French and the British have lost control in the Middle East. We, the foreign communities, with all we have built up, are being gradually engulfed by the Arab tide, the Moslem tide. Some of us are trying to work against it; Armenians, Copts, Jews, and Greeks here in Egypt, while others elsewhere are organising themselves. Much of this work I have undertaken here. . . . To defend ourselves, that is all, defend our lives, defend the right to belong here only. You know this, everyone knows it. But those who see a little further into history. . . . know this to be but a shadow-play; we will never maintain our place in this world except it be by virtue of a nation strong and civilized enough to dominate the whole area. The day of France and England is over – much as we love them. Who, then, can take their place? . . . There is only one nation which can determine the future of everything in the Middle East. Everything – and by a paradox, even the standard of living of the miserable Moslems themselves depends upon it, its power and resources. Have you understood me, Justine? Must I utter its name? Perhaps you are not interested in these things? . . . Yes, Justine, Palestine. If only the Jews can win their freedom, we can all be at ease. It is the only hope for us . . . the dispossessed foreigners.’ He uttered the word with a slight twist of bitterness. They both slowly lit cigarettes now with shaking fingers and blew the smoke out towards each other, enwrapped by a new atmosphere of peace, of understanding. ‘The whole of our fortune has gone into the struggle which is about to break out there’ he said under his breath. ‘On that depends everything. Here, of course, we are doing other things which I will explain to you. The British and French help us, they see no harm. I am sorry for them. Their condition is pitiable because they have no longer the will to fight or even to think. . . . But with the Jews – there is something young there: the cockpit of Europe in these rotten marshes of a dying race.’ [Nessim Hosnani’s infernal proposal to Justine, pp. 552-553]

Subconsciously he knew too, that the oriental woman is not a sensualist in the European sense; there is nothing mawkish in her constitution. Her true obsessions are power, politics and possessions – however much she might deny it. The sex ticks on in the mind, but its motions are warmed by the kinetic brutalities of money. In this response to a common field of action, Justine was truer to herself than she had ever been, responding as a flower responds to light. . . . He stared at her, thrilled and a little terrified, recognizing in her the perfect submissiveness of the oriental spirit – the absolute feminine submissiveness which is one of the strongest forces in the world. . . . Love is every sort of conspiracy. The power of riches and intrigue stirred within her now, the deputies of passion. Her face wore the brilliant look of innocence which comes only with conversion to a religious way of life! . . . He felt her on top of him, and in the plunge of her loins he felt the desire to add to him – to fecundate his actions; and to fructify him through these fatality-bearing instruments of his power, to give life to those death-burdening struggles of a truly barren woman. Her face was expressionless as a mask of Siva. It was neither ugly nor beautiful, but naked as power itself. It seemed coeval (this love) with the Faustian love of saints who had mastered the chilly art of seminal stoppage in order the more clearly to recognise themselves – for its blue fires conveyed not heat but cold to the body. But will and mind burned up as if they had been dipped in quicklime. It was a true sensuality with nothing of the civilized poisons about it to make it anodyne, palatable to a human society constructed upon a romantic idea of truth. Was it the less love for that? Paracelsus had described such relationships among the Caballi. In all this one may see the austere mindless primeval face of Aphrodite. [Justine accepts Nessim’s marriage proposal and becomes a fellow conspirator, pp. 554-558]

Can a single gesture from someone with whom one is familiar reveal an interior transformation? [p. 571]

He suddenly realized that the precious image which had inhabited his heart for so long had now been dissolved, completely wiped out! He was suddenly face to face with the meaning of love and time. They had lost forever the power to fecundate each other’s minds! He felt only self-pity and disgust where he should have felt love! [p. 621]

When you are in love you know that love is a beggar, shameless as a beggar; and the responses of merely human pity can console one where love is absent by a false travesty of an imagined happiness. [p. 645]

Truth is so bitter that the knowledge of it confers a kind of luxury. [p. 646]

Go to Workpoints #10

Workpoints #8, Balthazar Part IV

by Adrian D’Ambra

Go to Workpoints #1

Some of Durrell’s finest evocations of the city are to be found here and some of the finest writing both in Darley’s voice and the voices of his friends and fellow-artists, Pursewarden and Clea. I find myself particularly taken by Clea’s philosophical rumination about how one might make or perceive a meaning or pattern in one’s life, towards the end of her letter to Darley, when she thinks silently and yet as if it were aloud about harnessing time in ‘the cultivation of a style of heart . . . harness[ing] its rhythms and put[ting] them to our own use.’ As for Darley and Pursewarden, though, by this point in the Quartet it is so clear that they have been double-crossed and betrayed, not just by each other, but by their best friends, Justine and Nessim, and by Balthasar himself, that their failure to perceive anything remotely resembling the truth begins to fail the test of the suspension of momentary disbelief. We are in some need of the finely written revelations of Mountolive.

1982:

‘They looked at each other, aware that there was neither youth nor strength enough between them to prevent their separation.’ [Pursewarden, p. 368]

. . . perhaps buried in all this there lies the germ and substance of a truth – time’s usufruct – which, if I can accommodate it, will carry me a little further in what is really a search for my proper self. We shall see. [p. 370]

‘At first’ writes Pursewarden ‘we seek to supplement the emptiness of our individuality through love, and for a brief moment enjoy the illusion of completeness. But it is only an illusion. For this strange creature, which we thought would join us to the body of the world, succeeds at last in separating us most thoroughly from it. Love joins and then divides. How else would we be growing?’ [p. 377]

‘The whore is man’s true darling, as I once told you, and we are born to love those who most wound us. Am I wrong?’ [Clea, p. 379]

‘I must get them a little clearer before I tidy up the last volume in which I want above all to combine, resolve and harmonize the tensions so far created. I feel I want to sound a note of . . . affirmation – though not in the specific terms of a philosophy or religion. It should have the curvature of an embrace, the wordlessness of a lover’s code. . . . Like you, I have two problems which interconnect: my art and my life.’ [Pursewarden to Clea, pp. 380-381]

2017:

Despite the season the seafront of the city was gay with light – the long sloping lines of the Grande Corniche curving away to a low horizon; a thousand lighted panels of glass in which, like glorious tropical fish, the inhabitants of the European city sat at glittering tables stocked with glasses of mastic, aniseed or brandy. [p. 366]

I studied her harsh Semitic profile in the furry light flung back by the headlights from the common objects of the roadside. It belonged so much to the city which I now saw as a series of symbols stretching away from us on either side – minarets, pigeons, statues, ships, coins, camels and palms; it lived in a heraldic relation to the exhausted landscapes which enclosed it – the loops of the great lake: as proper to the scene as the Sphinx was to the desert. [p. 367]

We walked hand in hand across the soft sand-dunes, laboriously as insects, until we reached Taposiris with its rumble of shattered columns and capitals among the ancient weather-eroded sea-marks. (Reliques of sensation’ says Coleridge ‘may exist for an indefinite time in a latent state in the very same order in which they were impressed.’) Yes, but the order of the imagination is not that of memory. . . . I see all of us not as men and women any longer, identities swollen with their acts of forgetfulness, follies, and deceits – but as beings unconsciously made part of place, buried to the waist among the ruins of a single city, steeped in its values . . . [p. 369]

‘It should convey some feeling that the world we live in is founded in something too simple to be over-described as cosmic law – but as easy to grasp as, say, an act of tenderness in the primal relation between animal and plant, rain and soil, seed and trees, man and God. . . . I’d like to think of my work simply as a cradle in which philosophy could rock itself to sleep, thumb in mouth. . . . Of course, one must always remember that truth itself is always halved in utterance. Yet I must in this last book insist that there is hope for man, scope for man, within the boundaries of a simple law; and I seem to see mankind as gradually appropriating to itself the necessary information through mere attention, not reason, which may one day enable it to live within the terms of such an idea – the true meaning of “joy unconfined”. . . . I think it better for us to steer clear of the big oblong words like Beauty and Truth and so on. Do you mind? We are all so silly and feeble-witted when it comes to living, but giants when it comes to pronouncing on the universe.’ [Pursewarden to Clea, pp. 380-381]

‘. . . this is how I suppose one dies to one’s friends and to the world, wearing out like an old dance tune or a memorable conversation with a philosopher under a cherry-tree. Being refunded into silence. . . . for us, the living, the problem is of a totally different order: how to harness time in the cultivation of a style of heart – something like that? I am only trying to express it. Not to force time, as the weak do, for that spells self-injury and dismay, but to harness its rhythms and put them to our own use.’ [Clea to Darley, p. 383]

‘The classical in art is what marches by intention with the cosmology of the age.’ [Pursewarden as recorded in shorthand by Keats, p. 385]

Go to Workpoints #9

Workpoints #7, Balthazar Part III

by Adrian D’Ambra

Go to Workpoints #1

Why do so many of Durrell’s characters appear to others and to themselves in mirrors? Why do so many authors and writers contribute to The Alexandria Quartet: Darley, Arnauti, Pursewarden, Balthazar, Clea? Why are there so many texts: novels, letters, reports, fragments? Of course, the palimpsest, the wet crabs clambering over each other in the basket. But there is more to this than that. Because one of Durrell’s persistent challenges to the novel is in the area of character and characterisation which he relates to ideas about psychology and the individual. The argument seems to be that we are not the complex, integrated personalities we believe ourselves to be, that much of what we consider to be our unique individual identity is simply static and chatter in the forebrain, that, indeed, we go about so much of our lives in a state of self-delusion, convinced and attempting to convince the world that we add up to something more than the sum of our parts. The multiple mirrors, narrators and personae, the four and two and five slices of the Quartet, The Revolt of Aphrodite and the Quincunx are a testament to Durrell’s assault on what he perceives to be the artificial construction of the modern personality. This is the source of madness in Durrell’s fiction, the pain of pretence. Where we really are is in the lizard brain. His template of the modern soul is neither to be found in Freud nor Jung but – as he so often reminds us – in De Sade. I begin to perceive in Durrell that peculiar mid-twentieth century dalliance with and coalescence of fascism and Eastern mysticism. Their combination extinguishes the individual ego, neutralises moral restraint, and liberates the lizard brain. A nirvana or enlightenment of the animal senses, the primal instincts, a mind devoid of self in unison with its body. An interesting sexology, no doubt, but a pathologically dangerous sociology.

These ideas – in effect, Durrell’s own Bakhtinian Carnivalesque – are explored by him to great effect in the beautifully written but otherwise ridiculous set piece of the Cervoni ball in Part III of Balthazar, none of which I underlined in 1982.

2017:

All the best murders in the city, all the most tragic cases of mistaken identity, are the fruit of the yearly carnival; while most love affairs begin or end during these three days and nights during which we are delivered from the thrall of personality, from the bondage of ourselves. . . . The dark tides of Eros, which demand full secrecy if they are to overflow the human soul, burst out during carnival like something long damned up and raise the forms of strange primeval creatures – the perversions which are, I suppose, the psyche’s ailment – in forms which you would think belonged to the Brocken or to Eblis. Now hidden satyr and maenad can rediscover each other and unite. Yes, who can help but love carnival when in it all debts are paid, all crimes expiated or committed, all illicit desires sated – without guilt or premeditation, without the penalties which conscience or society exact? . . . the gift of lost identities. [pp. 343-345]

. . . they suddenly found themselves turned to ciphers, expelled into a formless world of adventitious meetings, mask to dark mask, like a new form of insect life. [p. 352]

‘Ah, Darley’ [Mountolive, p. 356]

And yet, surprises though they were, their reception was perfectly in keeping with the city – a city of resignation so deep as almost to be Moslem. [p. 359]

Go to Workpoints #8