Workpoints #6, Balthazar Part II

by Adrian D’Ambra

Go to Workpoints #1

This from the prefatory note to Justine: Only the city is real. And this from the original prefatory note to Balthazar: Nor could the city be less unreal. I cannot tell if I am supposed to read the latter as an affirmation both of the former and of the actual reality of Alexandria as Durrell remembers it, or as a double negative deliberately negating the earlier claim. If the double negative, then between them lies all the fictive licence of the poet, especially a poet so sceptical about our modern notions of the personality as the foundation for a unique personal identity. And that licence explains what becomes the deliberate unlikelihood of so much that is described in the life of Alexandria. For example: a cartload of Egyptian prostitutes comprising part of the procession celebrating a religious festival at Eidh; or numerous members of the expatriate and diaspora communities wearing cowled black dominoes at night as they celebrate three days of Carnival; or Scobie’s deification. If only, the author seems to be tempting us, the fictive were factual or the factual fictive. If only . . .

1982:

‘He was at the time deeply immersed in the novel he was writing, and as always he found that his ordinary life, in a distorted sort of way, was beginning to follow the curvature of his book. He explained this by saying that any concentration of the will displaces life (Archimedes’ bath-water) and gives it bias in motion. Reality, he believed, was always trying to copy the imagination of man, from which it derived.’ [Balthazar’s Interlinear, p. 286]

Pursewarden speaks about the role of the artist in life. He says something like this: ‘Aware of every discord, of every calamity in the nature of man himself, he can do nothing to warn his friends, to point, to cry out in time and to try to save them. It would be useless. For they are the deliberate factors of their own unhappiness. All the artist can say is an imperative: “Reflect and weep.”’ [p. 305]

“I am ashamed of one thing only: because I have disregarded the first imperative of the artist, namely, create and starve. I have never starved, you know. Kept afloat doing little jobs of one sort or another: caused as much harm as you and more.” [Pursewarden to Justine, p. 311]

2017:

“These books have a curious and rather forbidding streak of cruelty – a lack of humanity which puzzled me at first. But it is simply the way the sentimentalist would disguise his weakness. Cruelty here is the obverse of sentimentality. He wounds because he is afraid of going all squashy.” [Pursewarden’s criticism of the narrator’s novels, quoted in Balthazar’s Interlinear, p. 281]

“The effective in art is what rapes the emotion of your audience without nourishing its values.” [Pursewarden, quoted in Balthazar’s Interlinear, p. 285]

‘Like all women, Justine hated anyone she could be certain of . . . Women are very stupid as well as very profound.’ [Balthazar’s Interlinear, p. 291]

‘But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket.’ [Balthazar’s Interlinear, p. 293]

‘. . . the little court of homosexuals . . . these neuters . . .’ [Balthazar’s Interlinear, p. 295]

Where must one look for justifications? Only I think to the facts themselves; for they might enable me to see now a little further into the central truth of this enigma called ‘love’. I see the image of it receding and curling away from me in an infinite series like the waves of the sea; or, colder than a dead moon, rising up over the dreams and illusions I fabricated from it – but like the real moon, always keeping one side of the truth hidden from me, the nether side of a beautiful dead star. [p. 297]

There are always a hundred ways of justifying oneself but the sophistries of paper logic cannot alter the fact that after this kind of information in the Interlinear, the memory of those days haunts me afresh, torments me with guilts which I might never have been aware of before! [p. 300]

And then lastly, before I bang the pages of my manuscript shut with anger and resentment, one last remark of Clea’s which burns like a hot iron: ‘Melissa said: “You have been my friend Clea, and I want you to love him after I am gone. Do it with him, will you, and think of me? Never mind all this beastly love business. Cannot a friend make love on another’s behalf? I ask you to sleep with him as I would ask the Panaghia to come down and bless him while he sleeps – like in the old ikons.”’ [p. 301]

‘He had odd ideas about the constitution of the psyche. For example, he said “I regard it as completely unsubstantial as a rainbow – it only coheres into identifiable states and attributes when attention is focused on it. The truest form of right attention is of course love. Thus ‘people’ are as much of an illusion to the mystic as ‘matter’ to the physicist when he is regarding it as a form of energy.”’ [Balthazar’s Interlinear, p. 306]

‘Truth is not what is uttered in full consciousness. It is always what “just slips out” – the typing error which gives the whole show away.’ [Balthazar’s Interlinear, p. 310]

‘Here again in judging him you trust too much to what your subjects say about themselves – the accounts they give of their own actions and their meaning. You would never make a good doctor. Patients have to be found out – for they always lie.’ [Balthazar’s Interlinear, p. 311]

The city, inhabited by these memories of mine, moves not only backwards into our history, studded by the great names which mark every station of recorded time, but also back and forth in the living present, so to speak – among its contemporary faiths and races: the hundred little spheres which religion or lore creates and which cohere softly together like cells to form the great sprawling jellyfish which is Alexandria today. Joined in this fortuitous way by the city’s own act of will, isolated on a slate promontory over the sea, backed only by the moonstone mirror of Mareotis, the salt lake, and its further forevers of ragged desert (now dusted softly by the spring winds into satin dunes, patternless and beautiful as cloudscapes), the communities still live and communicate – Turks with Jews, Arabs and Copts and Syrians with Armenians and Italians and Greeks. The shudders of monetary transactions ripple through them like wind in a wheatfield; ceremonies, marriages and pacts join and divide them. Even the place-names on the old tram-routes with their sandy grooves of rail echo the unforgotten names of their founders – and the names of the dead captains who first landed here, from Alexander to Amr; founders of this anarchy of flesh and fever, of money-love and mysticism. Where else on earth will you find such a mixture? [p. 314]

Here came the Rifiya dervishes, who could in their trances walk upon embers or drink molten glass or eat live scorpions – or dance the turning measure of the universe out, until reality ran down like an overwound spring and they fell gasping to the earth, dazed like birds. [p. 317]

It was the time when the prostitutes came into their own, the black, bronze and citron women, impenitent seekers for the money-flesh of men; flesh of every colour, ivory or gold or black. Sudanese with mauve gums and tongues as blue as chows’. Waxen Egyptians. Circassians golden-haired and blue of eye. Earth-blue negresses, pungent as wood-smoke. Every variety of the name of flesh, old flesh quailing upon aged bones, or the unquenched flesh of boys and women on limbs infirm with the desires that could be represented in effigy but not be slaked except in mime – for they were the desires engendered in the forests of the mind, belonging not to themselves but to remote ancestors speaking through them. Lust belongs to the egg and its seat is below the level of the psyche. [pp. 324-325]

(Aphrodite permits every conjugation of the mind and sense in love.) [p. 326]

The telephone is a modern symbol for communications which never take place. [p. 328]

Go to Workpoints #7

Workpoints #5, Balthazar Part I

by Adrian D’Ambra

Go to Workpoints #1

Despite his own admission that it does in part sound pompous and immodest, it is a shame that the Note included in the original 1958 edition of Balthazar as a single, sibling novel has not been retained in the first 1962 single-volume edition of the Quartet.

Modern literature offers us no Unities, writes Durrell, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition. / Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern. . . . The subject-object relation is so important to relativity that I have tried to turn the novel through both subjective and objective modes. . . . This is not Proustian or Joycean method – for they illustrate Bergsonian “Duration” in my opinion, not “Space-Time”. . . . But it would be worth trying an experiment to see if we cannot discover a morphological form one might appropriately call “classical” – for our time. Even if the result proved to be a “science-fiction” in the true sense.

Durrell wrote this in Ascona on the shore of Lake Maggiore in the same year that I was born. a “science-fiction” in the true sense // a morphological form one might appropriately call “classical” – for our time. An attempt to create an applicable set of Unities in which Time is stayed and in which the four volumes of the Quartet, interlap, interweave, in a purely spatial relation. Sublime ambitions, a fluidity of form, I think.

1982:

And he quoted in Greek: ‘First the young, like vines, climb up the dull supports of their elders who feel their fingers on them, soft and tender; then the old climb down the lovely supporting bodies of the young into their proper deaths.’ I said nothing. It was the room itself which was breathing now – not our bodies. [p. 214]

(It is quite possible to love those you most wound.) [p.237]

. . . for we create our own misfortunes and they bear our own fingerprints. [p. 239]

Some people are born to bring good and evil in greater measure than the rest of us – the unconscious carriers of diseases they cannot cure. I think perhaps we must study them, for it is possible that they promote creation in the very degree of the apparent corruption and confusion they spread or seek. [p. 243]

Nothing except the act of physical love tells us the truth about one another. [p. 248]

2017:

‘We live’ writes Pursewarden somewhere ‘lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time – not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.’ Something of this order. . . . [p.210]

Real innocence can do nothing that is trivial, and when it is allied to generosity of heart, the combination makes it the most vulnerable of qualities under heaven. [p. 241]

The aetiology of love and madness are identical except in degree . . . [p. 242]

This sort of giving is really shocking because it is as simple as an Arab, without preconsciousness, unrefined as a drinking habit among peasants. It was born long before the idea of love was formed in the fragmented psyche of European man – the knowledge (or invention) of which was to make him the most vulnerable of creatures in the scale of being, subject to hungers which could only be killed by satiety, but never satisfied; which nourished a literature of affectation whose subject-matter would otherwise have belonged to religion – its true sphere of operation. How does one say these things? [p. 243]

The main gateway was flanked on each side by a pigeon-tower – those clumsy columns built of earthen pitchers pasted together anyhow with mud-cement: which are characteristic of country houses in Egypt and which supplied the choicest dish for the country squire’s table. A cloud of its inhabitants fluttered and crooned all day over the barrel-vaulted court. Here all was activity: the negro night-watchman, the ghaffirs, factors, stewards came forth one by one to salute the eldest brother, the heir. He was given a bowl of wine and a nosegay of flowers while Narouz stood by proudly smiling. [p. 257]

And then: the first pure draughts of desert air, and the nakedness of space, pure as a theorem, stretching away into the sky drenched in all its own silence and majesty, untenanted except by such figures as the imagination of man has invented to people landscapes which are inimical to his passions and whose purity flays the mind. [p. 266]

Go to Workpoints #6

Workpoints #4, Justine Part IV

by Adrian D’Ambra

Go to Workpoints #1

I cannot devote one more word to Lawrence Durrell and The Alexandria Quartet without addressing this issue: Egypt and the Egyptians. This novel, along with the David Lean film, Lawrence of Arabia (1962), made me a lifelong Orientalist in the positive sense that I was drawn to the deserts of Arabia and their peoples and to that part of the world that the Western powers have designated as the Middle East. I spent five years working in Turkey and Jordan, an expatriate yes, but always wanting more contact with my local colleagues and friends, not less. Indeed, also a keen reader of Edward Said and in sympathy with the cause of Palestinian statehood. What Durrell has produced is a piece of Orientalist writing in the negative sense in that it reads now as the work of an unrepentant expatriate. This writing is utterly steeped in the preconceived ideas of the British imperial project. First, there is the matter of class. The only people you can meet Outremer who can possible be of any interest must be wealthy. Nessim matters because he is an international financier. Justine matters because she has escaped the poverty of her birth, first via a marriage into European culture with the novelist Arnauti, then into wealth via a second marriage to Nessim. Melissa does not matter, she does not count. She is the lover’s guilty conscience, sure, but she can be sacrificed at any altar: Cohen’s, Nessim’s, Justine’s, the narrator’s. Second, there is the matter of ethnicity. Why on earth would an Englishman in Alexandria in the 1930s have any interest in meeting and mixing with the indigenous population and even – heaven forbid – conceiving of them as equal human beings? Not one positively conceived character of note in The Alexandria Quartet is an Egyptian or Arab Muslim. The Hosnani family – Nessim, Narouz and Leila – are Egyptian to be sure, but they are Coptic Christians. It seems inconceivable to the author of The Alexandria Quartet that Egyptian or Arab Muslims could achieve what the Hosnani’s have achieved, both on their ancestral lands in the Nile Delta and in the world of international finance. This is not simply a matter of judging the text by its omissions. Arabs are depicted by Durrell as animals, clowns and apes. Given Durrell’s exquisite evocation of place and his ideas about human personality and culture as the expression of place, Arabs and Muslims are products of the desert. Therefore, their sight is blighted, their minds are, apparently, empty. Their moral compass and mental geography are centred on Mecca and they are, therefore, close-minded. We have been here before, of course, with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and postcolonialism and we have also had in recent years an elegant response to Albert Camus’ The Outsider (1942) in the form of Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (2013). With Conrad, I would say in his defence that he was appalled by the treatment of the indigenous Congolese peoples by their Belgian overlords. Just as Marlow wanders through the grove of death, the narrator of The Alexandria Quartet wanders through the native quarter of the town without any moral consciousness of why these people have been reduced to the abject humiliation of poverty and prostitution. At best, they become part of the passing parade, at worst, the receiving end of some pretty vile humour. The fact that Alexandria is in Egypt is of little note to Durrell. What matters is that it is on the coast of the Mediterranean. It is, therefore, a Mediterranean city with a Mediterranean history, and its wealthier neighbourhoods are occupied by a Mediterranean mixture of European populations. That Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians and North Africans are also Mediterranean peoples does not seem to have registered. To the expatriate narrator, of course, the people who matter most – beyond the local wealthy elites and the sexual provender – are fellow expatriates: in this case, members of the Jewish and Greek diasporas and diplomats. What Durrell has really captured – despite his own disavowal of English mores – is the narrowness of the Englishman overseas.

Yes, The Alexandria Quartet will remain one of the most important novels in my life and one that I hope I will reread again, but tempered now by some mature reflection on the deep inadequacies of its sexual and racial politics. The only passage from this section of Justine that I underlined in 1982 and the first passage from 2017, present themselves as excellent arguments in its aesthetic defence.

1982:

An artist does not live a personal life as we do, he hides it, forcing us to go to his books if we wish to touch the true source of his feelings. Underneath all his preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions which allow the forebrain to chatter) there is, quite simply, a man tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world. [p. 194]

2017:

For a little while, however, life will carry its momentum forward by hours and days. The same streets and squares will burn in my imagination as the Pharos burns in history. Particular rooms in which I have made love, particular café tables where the pressure of fingers upon a wrist held me spellbound, feeling through the hot pavements the rhythms of Alexandria transmitted upwards into bodies which could only interpret them as famished kisses, or endearments uttered in voices hoarse with wonder. To the student of love these separations are a school, bitter yet necessary to one’s growth. They help one to strip oneself mentally of everything save the hunger for more life. [p. 182]

The sense of ghostly familiarity which was growing upon me now was due to the fact that we were approaching the little room in which I had visited Cohen when he was dying. Of course Melissa must be lying in the same narrow iron bed in the corner by the wall. It would be just like real life to imitate art at this point. [p.188]

It is hard to know how to behave with the dead; their enormous deafness and rigidity is so studied. . . . Then I lit a cigarette and sat down beside her on a chair to make a long study of her face, comparing it to all the other faces of Melissa which thronged my memory and had established their identity there. She bore no resemblance to any of them – and yet she set them off, concluded them. This white little face was the last term of a series. Beyond this point there was a locked door. / At such times one gropes about for a gesture which will match the terrible marble repose of the will which one reads on the faces of the dead. There is nothing in the whole ragbag of human emotions. . . . I suppose we writers are cruel people. The dead do not care. It is the living who might be spared if we could quarry the message which lies buried in the heart of all human experience. [p. 189]

‘I suppose events are simply a sort of annotation of our feelings – the one might be deduced from the other. Time carries us (boldly imagining that we are discrete egos modelling our own personal futures) – time carries us forward by the momentum of those feelings inside us of which we ourselves are least conscious. Too abstract for you? Then I have expressed the idea badly. . . . Lovers are never equally matched – do you think? One always overshadows the other and stunts his or her growth so that the overshadowed one must always be tormented by a desire to escape, to be free to grow. Surely this is the only tragic thing about love?’ [Clea, p. 192-193]

The cicadas are throbbing in the great planes, and the summer Mediterranean lies before me in all its magnetic blueness. Somewhere out there, beyond the mauve throbbing line of the horizon lies Africa, lies Alexandria, maintaining its tenuous grasp on one’s affections through memories which are already refunding themselves slowly into forgetfulness; memory of friends, of incidents long past. . . . Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us? [pp.194-195]

Pursewarden on the ‘n-dimensional novel’ trilogy: ‘The narrative momentum forward is counter-sprung by references backwards in time, giving the impression of a book which is not travelling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern. Things do not all lead forward to other things: some lead backwards to things which have passed. A marriage of past and present with the flying multiplicity of the future racing towards one. Anyway, that was my idea.’ [from Durrell’s Justine Workpoints, p. 198]

Go to Workpoints #5

Workpoints #3, Justine Part III

by Adrian D’Ambra

Go to Workpoints #1

Part Three of Justine revolves around the duck shooting scene on Lake Mareotis. Without even considering the contribution of this long passage to the narrative, Durrell’s descriptive language, his nature imagery and evocation of place are simply extraordinary. This is exquisite composition walking, surely, in the company of Tolstoy. Beside this, the continued investigations of the unnamed narrator into the nature of sex and the philosophy of love appear painfully trivial, banal almost, certainly immature.

1982:

. . . for the first time she had become reflective, thoughtful, and full of the echoes of a sweetness which a woman can always afford to spend upon the man she does not love. [p. 124]

‘. . . namely that he who broke the Check must keep her forever, since the peace he gave her was precisely that for which she was hunting so frantically through our bodies and fortunes.’ [Arnauti, p. 124]

I tasted, with the glowing pleasure of the colour in my brain, the warm guiltless pressure of her tongue upon mine, her arms upon mine. The magnitude of this happiness – we could not speak but gazed abundantly at each other with eyes full of unshed tears. [p. 150]

Uncommitted, I was free to circulate in the world of men and women like a guardian of the true rights of love – which is not passion, nor habit (they only qualify it) but which is the divine trespass of an immortal among mortals – Aphrodite-in-arms. [p. 160]

2017:

That second spring the khamseen was worse than I have ever known it before or since. Before sunrise the skies of the desert turned brown as buckram, and then slowly darkened, swelling like a bruise and at last releasing the outlines of cloud, giant octaves of ochre which massed up from the Delta like the drift of ashes under a volcano. The city has shuttered itself tightly, as if against a gale. A few gusts of air and a thin sour rain are the forerunners of the darkness which blots out the light of the sky. And now unseen in the darkness of shuttered rooms the sand is invading everything, appearing as if by magic in clothes long locked away, books, pictures and teaspoons. In the locks of doors, beneath fingernails. [p. 121]

Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie. [p. 121]

How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work. [p. 141]

. . . man is only an extension of the spirit of place. [p. 143]

. . . at each stage of development each man resumes the whole universe and makes it suitable to his own inner nature: while each thinker, each thought fecundates the whole universe anew. [p. 144]

‘Minds dismembered by their sexual part’ Balthazar had said once ‘never find peace until old age and failing powers persuade them that silence and quietness are not hostile.’ [p. 147]

‘I want to know what it really means’ I told myself in a mirror whose cracks had been pasted over with the trimmings of postage stamps. I meant of course the whole portentous scrimmage of sex itself, the act of penetration which could lead a man to despair for the sake of a creature with two breasts and le croissant as the picturesque Levant slang has it. [p. 151]

I began to walk slowly, deeply bemused, and to describe to myself in words this whole quarter of Alexandria for I knew that soon it would be forgotten and revisited only by those whose memories had been appropriated by the fevered city, clinging to the minds of old men like traces of perfume upon a sleeve: Alexandria, the capital of Memory. [p. 152]

I say that I thought it through, but strangely enough I thought of it not as a personal history with an individual accent so much as part of the historical fabric of the place. I described it to myself as part and parcel of the city’s behaviour, completely in keeping with everything that had gone before, and everything that would follow it. It was as if my imagination had become subtly drugged by the ambience of the place and could not respond to personal, individual assessments. [p. 154]

From among many sorts of failure each selects the one which least compromises his self-respect: which lets him down the lightest. Mine had been in art, in religion, and in people. In art I had failed . . . because I did not believe in the discrete human personality. . . . I lacked a belief in the true authenticity of people in order to successfully portray them. In religion? Well, I found no religion worth while which contained the faintest grain of propitiation – and which can escape the charge? Pace Balthazar it seemed to me that all churches, all sects, were at the best mere academies of self-instruction against fear. But the last, the worst failure . . . the failure with people: it had been brought about by a gradually increasing detachment of spirit which, while it freed me to sympathise, forbade me possession. [p. 159]

I saw that pain itself was the only food of memory: for pleasure ends in itself . . . [p. 160]

Autumn has settled at last into the clear winterset. High seas flogging the blank panels of stone along the Corniche. The migrants multiplying on the shallow reaches of Mareotis. Waters moving from gold to grey, the pigmentation of winter. [p. 168]

‘What is astonishing’ he says ‘is that he presents a series of spiritual problems as if they were commonplaces and illustrates them with his characters . . .’ [Capodistria on Pursewarden, p. 171]

With a lithe swing of the pole Faraj drives us out into the channel and suddenly we are scoring across the heart of a black diamond. The water is full of stars, Orion down, Capella tossing out its brilliant sparks. For a long while now we crawl upon this diamond-pointed star-floor in silence save for the suck and lisp of the pole in the mud. Then we turn abruptly into a wider channel to hear a string of wavelets pattering against our prow while draughts of wind fetch up from the invisible sea-line tasting of salt. [p. 172]

Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might surprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough. Will there be time? [p. 178]

Go to Workpoints #4

Workpoints #2, Justine Part II

by Adrian D’Ambra

Go to Workpoints #1

Subjecting The Alexandria Quartet to the slow perusal of an older less impatient reader, I find myself – quite naturally – appreciating and understanding more. First of all, the certainty of the unnamed narrator of Justine that he is maturing through the passage of time and the numerous relationships he recounts I can see now as a ruse. The closer he comes to thinking he has understood love or sex or women or himself, the more ludicrous he seems, the more outlandish his psychobabbling gibberish. Throughout the first novel of the Quartet, for example, Durrell’s narrator explicitly portrays women as passive consorts who devour their men, using the pseudo-jargon of psychoanalysis to justify his extraordinary and – frankly – offensive claims. Whilst tolerated morally, homosexuals are essentially categorised and dismissed as inverts. Meanwhile, the predatory attitudes and actions of his male characters in their sexual exploitation of women and children – Pursewarden, Capodistria, Scobie, Pombal and so on – goes either unremarked or for the most part humorously validated. Similar concerns regarding Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera were allayed for me by the realisation of just how brilliantly the author uses free indirect style to position the reader in relation to the narrative perspective, so that we can see just how ludicrous and reprehensible so many of the attitudes and behaviours are. One can only hope that we are, either, not intended to see the characterisation of the narrator of Justine as a positive and faithful representation of the author or that it is intended as a critique of his immaturity and prurience both as a writer and a lover.

One of the features of the narrative that I greatly admired as a younger reader was Durrell’s creation of a company of lovers as the lattice work upon which both the Quartet and the later Quintet are based. These are friends amongst whom the intimacy of both mind and body is shared in the pursuit of intellectual and sexual knowledge: gnosis. If I am understanding this any better now, it is in this: that in this company of lovers there is such a thing as fidelity; it is loyalty to love itself, fealty to the great pagan goddess Aphrodite.

1982:

‘We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.’ [Balthazar, p. 79]

‘Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.’ [Justine, p. 83]

‘It is hard to fight with one’s heart’s desire; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of the soul.’ [Justine, p. 87]

I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong to the constructions of society and habit. But she herself – austere and merciless Aphrodite – is a pagan. It is not our brains or instincts which she picks – but our very bones. [p. 89]

We have been told so often that history is indifferent, but we always take its parsimony or plenty as somehow planned; we never really listen. . . . [p. 94]

I recognise in his sour and dejected attitude the exhaustion which pursues the artist after he has brought a piece of work to completion. These are the low moments when the long flirtation with suicide begins afresh. [p. 99]

2017:

He had been a fellow-student and close friend of the old poet, and of him he spoke with such warmth and penetration that what he had to say always moved me. [p. 79]

He spoke of Nessim, saying: ‘Of all of us he is the most happy in a way because he has no preconceived idea of what he wants in return for his love. And to love in such an unpremeditated way is something that most people have to re-learn after fifty. Children have it. So has he. I am serious.’ [Balthazar, p. 81]

‘Sex has left the body and entered the imagination now . . .’ [Balthazar, p. 82]

I went to Pastroudi and ordered a double whisky which I drank slowly and thoughtfully. [p. 89]

As a poet of the historic consciousness I suppose I am bound to see landscape as a field dominated by the human wish – tortured into farms and hamlets, ploughed into cities. A landscape scribbled with the signatures of men and epochs. Now, however, I am beginning to believe that the wish is inherited from the site; that man depends for the furniture of the will upon his location in place, tenant of fruitful acres or a perverted wood. It is not the impact of his freewill upon nature which I see (as I thought) but the irresistible growth, through him, of nature’s own blind unspecified doctrines of variation and torment. She has chosen this poor forked thing as an exemplar. [p. 95]

(What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place – for that is history – but in the order in which they first became significant for me.) [p. 97]

Yet the presence of death always refreshes experience thus – that is its function to help us deliberate on the novelty of time. [p. 99]

A mania for self-justification is common both to those whose consciences are uneasy and to those who seek a philosophic rationale for their actions: but in either case it leads to strange forms of thinking. The idea is not spontaneous, but voulue. . . . There are some characters in this world who are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal. [p. 111]

These fugitive memories explain nothing, illuminate nothing: yet they return again and again when I think of my friends as if the very circumstances of our habits had become impregnated with what we then felt, the parts we then acted. The slither of tyres across the waves of the desert under a sky blue and frost-bound in winter; or in summer a fearful lunar bombardment which turned the sea to phosphorus – bodies shining like tin, crushed in electric bubbles; or walking to the last spit of sand near Montaza, sneaking through the dense green darkness of the King’s gardens, past the drowsy sentry, to where the force of the sea was suddenly crippled and the waves hobbled over the sand-bar. Or walking arm-in-arm down the long gallery, already gloomy with an unusual yellow winter fog. Her hand is cold so she has slipped it in my pocket. Today because she has no emotion whatsoever she tells me that she is in love with me – something she has always refused to do. At the long windows the rain hisses down suddenly. The dark eyes are cool and amused. A centre of blackness in things which trembles and changes shape. [p. 118]

Go to Workpoints #3

Workpoints #1, Justine Part I

by Adrian D’Ambra

Go to Workpoints #2

What I want to do is to record the passages from Part I of Justine that I underlined or otherwise marked up in 1982, alongside those I have highlighted this week in 2017. I can’t immediately divine any significance, any key to myself to tell me something about the first time reader who was midway between twenty and thirty years of age and the same but very different reader returning to it just before the age of sixty, or to the text. I can only do this, of course, because I still possess the same copy now that I read then, the paperback one-volume edition of The Alexandria Quartet, reprinted in 1969. My father bought it second-hand for a dollar sixty when he was on holiday on the Gold Coast, and then gave it to me as a gift, thinking that I might enjoy it. On the title page, I have scrawled my name and beneath it these annotations, which I will not enlarge upon: ‘Gift from Lewis D’Ambra. First read early 1982. Carried that year by Anne to Holland. Second reading – Spring 1983. Taken by Alan Lopez to North America 1987/88’. Names, echoes, memory, pain. Guilt.

1982:

I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past. It is the city which should be judged though we, its children, must pay the price. [p. 17]

The solace of such work as I do with brain and heart lies in this – that only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold – the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential. [p. 20]

‘There are only three things to be done with a woman’ said Clea once. ‘You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.’ [p. 25]

He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare – the first requisite of a practitioner. [re Nessim, p. 30]

‘It will puzzle you when I tell you that I thought Justine great, in a sort of way. There are forms of greatness, you know, which when not applied in art or religion make havoc of ordinary life. Her gift was misapplied in being directed towards love. Certainly she was bad in many ways, but they were small ways. Nor can I say that she harmed nobody. But those she harmed most she made fruitful. She expelled people from their old selves. It was bound to hurt, and many mistook the nature of the pain she inflicted. Not I.’ and smiling his well-known smile, in which sweetness was mixed with an inexpressible bitterness, he repeated softly under his breath the words: ‘Not I.’ [Nessim, p. 33]

Anything pressed too far becomes a sin. [p. 39]

‘Oh! Nessim, I have always been so strong. Has it prevented me from being truly loved?’ [Justine, p. 47]

These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean. [p. 50]

‘At first I mistook this for a devastating and self-consuming egotism, for she seemed so ignorant of the little prescribed loyalties which constitute the foundations of affection between men and women. This sounds pompous, but never mind . . . There was some unresolved inner knot which she wished to untie and which was quite beyond my skill as a lover or a friend . . . Women must attack writers – and from the moment she learned I was a writer she felt disposed to make herself interesting by dissecting me . . . Among the thousand discarded people, impressions, subjects of study – somewhere I see myself drifting, floating, reaching out arms . . . I dream of a book powerful enough to contain the elements of her – but it is not the sort of book to which we are accustomed these days. For example, on the first page a synopsis of the plot in a few lines. Thus we might dispense with the narrative articulation. What follows would be drama freed from the burden of form. I would set my own book free to dream.’ [Arnauti’s Moeurs, pp. 61, 63, 64, 66-67]

For some reason that is now entirely forgotten, I have written the date and marked the pages – 66 to 73 – that I first read on the 26^th of January 1982.

‘But to call her a nymphomaniac or to try and Freudianise her, my dear, takes away all her mythical substance – the only thing she really is. Like all amoral people she verges on the Goddess.’ [Clea re Justine, p. 68]

I could not visualise the act of love with her, for somehow the emotional web we had woven about each other stood between us; an invisible cobweb of loyalties, ideas, hesitations which I had not the courage to brush aside. [p. 74]

‘Balthazar says that the natural traitors – like you and I – are really Caballi. He says we are dead and live this life as a sort of limbo. Yet the living can’t do without us. We infect them with a desire to experience more, to grow.’ [Justine, p. 76]

2017:

This is the first time I have experienced a real failure of the will to survive. [p. 24]

. . . for she too had reached the dead level of things, as I myself had. We were fellow-bankrupts. [re Melissa, p. 25]

I remember her sitting before the multiple mirrors at the dressmaker’s, being fitted for a shark-skin costume, and saying: ‘Look! five different pictures of the same subject. Now if I wrote I would try for a multi-dimensional effect in character, a sort of prism-sightedness. Why should not people show more than one profile at a time?’ [Justine, p. 28]

We are children of our landscape; it dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it. I can think of no better identification. [p. 40]

It was curious in an objective sort way to notice how my hands trembled as I lit a cigarette and rose to follow her . . . It was as if some long-disused mineshaft in my own character had suddenly fallen in. I recognised that this barren traffic in ideas and feelings had driven a path through towards the denser jungles of the heart; and that here we became bondsmen in the body, possessors of an enigmatic knowledge which could only be passed on – received, deciphered, understood – by those rare complementaries of ours in the world. (How few they were, how seldom one found them!) [re Justine, p. 45]

We idled arm in arm by the sea that afternoon, our conversation full of the débris of lives lived without forethought, without architecture. We had not a taste in common. Our characters and predispositions were wholly different, and yet in the magical ease of this friendship we felt something promised us. I like, also, to remember that first kiss by the sea, the wind blowing up a flake of hair at each white temple – a kiss broken off by the laughter which beset her as she remembered my account of the trials I was enduring. It symbolized the passion we enjoyed, its humour and lack of intenseness: its charity. [re Melissa, p. 55]

A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants. [p. 57]

They met, where I had first seen her, in the gaunt vestibule of the Cecil, in a mirror. [re Justine and Arnauti, p. 58]

‘I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one’s glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity. She pretends to be a Greek, but she must be Jewish. It takes a Jew to smell out a Jew; and neither of us has the courage to confess our true race. I have told her I am French. Sooner or later we shall find one another out . . . I have already described how we met – in the long mirror of the Cecil, before the open door of the ballroom, on a  night of carnival. The first words we spoke were spoken, symbolically enough, in the mirror . . . Strangely enough it was never in the lover that I really met her but in the writer. Here we clasped hands – in that amoral world of suspended judgements where curiosity and wonder seem greater than order – the syllogistic order imposed by the mind. This is where one waits in silence, holding one’s breath, lest the pane should cloud over.’ [Arnauti’s Moeurs, pp. 59, 63, 64]

. . . and truly after many re-readings the book, which I now know almost by heart, has always remained for me a document, full of personal pain and astonishment. [p. 60]

Nor can it be said that the author’s intentions are not full of interest. He maintains for example that real people can only exist in the imagination of an artist strong enough to contain them and give them form. ‘Life, the raw material, is only lived in potential until the artist deploys it in his work.’ . . . What is missing in his work – but this is a criticism of all works which do not reach the front rank – is a sense of play. He bears down so hard upon his subject-matter; so hard that it infects his style with some of the unbalanced ferocity of Claudia herself. [p. 67]

‘It is our disease’ she said ‘to want to contain everything within the frame of reference of a psychology or a philosophy.’ [Clea, p. 68]

‘What a marvellous capacity for unhappiness we writers have! . . . “You live now among my imaginary intimacies. I was a fool to tell you everything, to be honest. Look at the way you question me now. Several days running the same questions. And at the slightest discrepancy you are on me. You know I never tell a story the same way twice. Does that mean that I am lying?”’ [Arnauti’s Moeurs, p. 72]

We turned to each other, closing like the two leaves of a door upon the past, shutting out everything, and I felt her happy spontaneous kisses begin to compose the darkness around us like successive washes of a colour. When we had made love and lay once more awake she said: ‘I am always so bad the first time, why is it?’ [p. 75]

Yes, some of the passages adjoin each other. Is there anything to make of their selection and their separation across time, of the reader then and the reader now?

Go to Workpoints #2

Go to ‘Image and Imagination’

Go to ‘A Box of Mirrors’

Go to ‘The First Great Fragmentation’

A Box of Mirrors

by Adrian D’Ambra

Rereading The Alexandria Quartet after all these years, I feel as though I am in the process of reassembling my head. Leafing through the fragments of Justine’s diary, Arnauti’s novel, fictive glances furtively seen in a deck of cards that functions like a box of mirrors.

Go to Workpoints #1

Go to ‘The First Great Fragmentation’

Go to ‘Image and Imagination’

The First Great Fragmentation

by Adrian D’Ambra

In the opening passages of Justine, which read like a series of deliberate false starts or notes scribbled over the wrapping papers covering a valuable memento, work points or fragments from a painter’s diary, I came across something this evening that I would not have noticed as a young reader when I first entered The Alexandria Quartet thirty-five years ago. Sequestered on his island retreat, where he can begin the process of reimagining and reassembling the fragments and memories of the past, the narrator contextualises the period of his life from which he has just been ejected as, ‘the first great fragmentation of my maturity.’ Yes, I echo down the decades now, yes. At last, I begin to understand why this multifaceted novel meant so much to me, resonated so truthfully within me, moved me so deeply, and why I wished – oh fool! – to write my own. Eventually we are all broken, most of us earlier in our lives than we care to realise. How fortunate I was to have avoided the awareness of my own disintegration into utter ordinariness until my early twenties. And at the age of twenty-five I read The Alexandria Quartet, inhabiting Lawrence Durrell’s mythical and imaginary city, hemmed in between the hot sands and the sea, the holy madness of the monotheistic desert and the desultory carelessness of its polyglot multiculturalism. In the pages of a novel, I peered into a hotel lobby filled with mirrors only to see myself reflected back in broken shards.

Go to ‘A Box of Mirrors’

Go to ‘Image and Imagination’

Go to ‘Workpoints #1’

Image and Imagination; Lawrence Durrell’s ‘Justine’

The foyer of the Cecil Hotel in Alexandria, Egypt. The mirror behind the staircase and lamp in this image is the glass in which Darley first sees the image of Justine. In other words, she enters his consciousness as a one-dimensional nothingness onto which he will project his own desires and inhibitions.

by Adrian D’Ambra

Go to Workpoints #1

Go to ‘The First Great Fragmentation’

Go to ‘A Box of Mirrors’

Love

by Adrian D’Ambra

The following tweet from ‘New York Times Books’ got me thinking: “What have books taught you about love? We’ll share answers on this week’s podcast.”

I found myself going back through my documents looking for a response I gave a couple of years ago to a questionnaire about my favourite book:

“The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell.  As a young reader I learned more about sensibility and sensuality from this novel than from any other source.  Along with the David Lean film, Lawrence of Arabia, Durrell’s Quartet is responsible for turning me into a lifelong and unrepentant Orientalist.  The novel is set in the polyglot, multiracial, expatriate communities living in the Egyptian Mediterranean city of Alexandria during World War Two.  Its predominant interests are its characters and their relationships.  Rather than concerning itself with the telling of a storyline narrative, the Quartet actually consists of four novels retelling a range of events held loosely together by their location in time and space from the different points of view of the four different characters after whom each of the novels is named.  This book determined decisions I made well after reading it; my attraction to the Middle East and my decisions to work abroad in Turkey and Jordan.  It also laid an obligation upon me to make a pilgrimage to Alexandria and to stay in the Cecil Hotel where significant moments of the story unfold such as our first viewing – for me an initiation – of the female protagonist Justine.  The love songs of Leonard Cohen strike me as a suitable artistic corollary to Durrell’s investigations of romantic entanglement.”