The Alexandria Quartet – Lawrence Durrell
I shall soon real-time review THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durrell – the first challenging work of fiction that I experienced.In fact, I was still at school in the mid 1960s when I first read it…
My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
Covfefe permitting, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
5 thoughts on “The Alexandria Quartet – Lawrence Durrell”
“It may be imagined with what breathless, painful anxiety I first read this account of a love-affair with Justine; 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.”
And so, with genuine bated breath, I read more of Arnauti’s version of Justine…
“Later the hazards of one of those awful English dances, called the Paul Jones I believe, left me facing her for a waltz.”
“Later the hazards of one of those awful English dances, called the Paul Jones I believe, left me facing her for a waltz.”
Yet, I wonder still about the nature of this meta-fiction as a variety of otherwise unreachable truth, and Arnauti’s novel seems to briefly assume my own perspective not his…
“It is idle to go over all this in a medium as unstable as words. I remember the edges and corners of so many meetings, and I see a sort of composite Justine,..”
“It is idle to go over all this in a medium as unstable as words. I remember the edges and corners of so many meetings, and I see a sort of composite Justine,..”
That gestalt again as composite, I guess. That triangulation of coordinates I mentioned earlier above in this review as a phenomenon I have boringly kept going on about since starting these reviews in 2008!
Here Arnauti, meanwhile, has a singular clumsy surveillance of Justine (here, to remind you, she is known incognito … as Claudia) and he even mentions a possible “illicit” Sapphic affair and another man she kept seeing, too, but neither with any foundation in sex. Arnauti seems subsumed by ambiguities. A quest for requital while trying to resist a genuine love for Justine, a love that he calls an “evil genius”. Even ‘love’ backwards as the ‘evol’ in the choice of ‘revolt’ or ‘evolution’!
Here Arnauti, meanwhile, has a singular clumsy surveillance of Justine (here, to remind you, she is known incognito … as Claudia) and he even mentions a possible “illicit” Sapphic affair and another man she kept seeing, too, but neither with any foundation in sex. Arnauti seems subsumed by ambiguities. A quest for requital while trying to resist a genuine love for Justine, a love that he calls an “evil genius”. Even ‘love’ backwards as the ‘evol’ in the choice of ‘revolt’ or ‘evolution’!
Read up to (or thereabouts):
“…a sinking numbness such as one might feel on leaving a friend in hospital, to enter a lift and fall six floors in silence, standing beside a uniformed automaton whose breathing one could hear.”
“After all, somewhere in the world he must be now, his hair thinning and greying from business worries or excesses, wearing a black patch over one eye as he did always after an attack of ophthalmia.”
“…a sinking numbness such as one might feel on leaving a friend in hospital, to enter a lift and fall six floors in silence, standing beside a uniformed automaton whose breathing one could hear.”
“After all, somewhere in the world he must be now, his hair thinning and greying from business worries or excesses, wearing a black patch over one eye as he did always after an attack of ophthalmia.”
How did I already know that James Joyce commonly wore an eye patch? Well, most of my life, I have suffered sporadically from IRITIS in the left eye, just like him! But that Durrell (the freeholder of the narrative leaseholders here) might have placed this writer he was supposed to admire in the rôle of Arnauti’s Justine’s Freudian bugbear from her past, is at least arguable.
“I am puzzled indeed to remember how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at least understandable.”
The later scenes in this section have a perfectly couched scene of I, the narrator, throwing off the trammels of Melissa and Justine shedding similar ties of Nessim – Justine and I together.
READ UP TO END OF PART ONE OF ‘JUSTINE’
“— the long pull of the train into the silver light reminds me of the sudden long pull ot the vertebrae of her white back turning in bed. ‘Melissa’ I call out, but the giant sniffing of the engine blots out all sound.”
But does not blot out all memory…
“I write and relive that night which has taken its place in the enormous fund of the city’s memories.”
I see where I first learnt the lesson of the gestalt. THIS BOOK. Above is a photo of me dwelling on such deep thoughts in 1968! By then, they had already percolated in my mind for a few years?
“‘What a horrible disease’ he said under his breath,…”
Whatever the disease. We now have some more evocatively tactile scenes of Alexandria. But metaphorically, also scenes of me, as narrator, meeting me as an old man in an explicitly critical-care bed in hospital…
“It terrified me to think that this old man, at such a point in his life, had been unable to conjure up an instant’s tenderness by the memory of anything he had said or done:”
“But now confusion began to set in, and holding me gently by the hand he led me into the dense jungle of his illusions, walking among them with such surefootedness and acknowledging them so calmly that I almost found myself keeping company with them too.”
“What interested me was the extraordinary fidelity with which he reproduced this whole conversation which obviously in his memory ranked as one of the great experiences of his life.”
I still talk, in this critique, to the old man in a critical-care bed, the man that is me, and other old men like me, as if today is the first chance to do so, under this book’s lockdown.
I have now read — or narrated — up to…
“Now neither the wife nor the woman who is his mistress wants to see him. […] ‘We use each other like axes to cut down the ones we really love.’ […] 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….[…] hunting for the meaning to the pattern.”
nullimmortalis April 20, 2020 at 9:22 am Edit
“Now neither the wife nor the woman who is his mistress wants to see him. […] ‘We use each other like axes to cut down the ones we really love.’ […] 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….[…] hunting for the meaning to the pattern.”
nullimmortalis April 20, 2020 at 9:22 am Edit
“, I walk stiffly sheathed in wind by a sealine choked with groaning sponges hunting for the meaning to the pattern.
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. Then how idle it seems for any man to say, as I once heard Balthazar say: ‘The mission of the Cabal, if it has one, is so to ennoble function that even eating and excreting will be raised to the rank of arts.’ You will see in all this the flower of a perfect scepticism which undermines the will to survive. Only love can sustain one a little longer.
I think, too, that something of this sort must have been in Arnauti’s mind when he wrote: ‘For the writer people as psychologies are finished. The contemporary psyche has exploded like a soap-bubble under the investigations of the mystagogues. What now remains to the writer?’”
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. Then how idle it seems for any man to say, as I once heard Balthazar say: ‘The mission of the Cabal, if it has one, is so to ennoble function that even eating and excreting will be raised to the rank of arts.’ You will see in all this the flower of a perfect scepticism which undermines the will to survive. Only love can sustain one a little longer.
I think, too, that something of this sort must have been in Arnauti’s mind when he wrote: ‘For the writer people as psychologies are finished. The contemporary psyche has exploded like a soap-bubble under the investigations of the mystagogues. What now remains to the writer?’”
Sorry to quote so much today. But I as pretentious reviewer AND I as the narrator seem encapsulated, in all our conflicts as selves. Also TODAY is encapsulated by this book’s then prophecy.
Repeat: “…the irresistible growth, through him, of nature’s own blind unspecified doctrines of variation and torment.”
Repeat: “…the irresistible growth, through him, of nature’s own blind unspecified doctrines of variation and torment.”
“And yet, strangely enough, it is only here that I am at last able to re-enter, reinhabit the unburied city with my friends; to frame them in the heavy steel webs of metaphors which will last half as long as the city itself — or so I hope.”
The city being a different metaphor for … for whom?
“(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.)”
And we learn more of my falteringly growing gestalt of Pursewarden, two writers or two old friends on the point of self-twilight, or worse. Meeting in a rained-upon ‘pissotière’ at night to discuss our love of women and erstwhile life. “…heavy with a sense of different failures.”
And with my own erstwhile cancer treatment as reviewer, if not narrator…
“For sex is dying. In another century we shall lie with our tongues in each other’s mouths, silent and passionless as sea-fruit. Oh yes! Indubitably so.”
And with my own erstwhile cancer treatment as reviewer, if not narrator…
“For sex is dying. In another century we shall lie with our tongues in each other’s mouths, silent and passionless as sea-fruit. Oh yes! Indubitably so.”
It’s the way you tell ‘em! Or at least the way you say ‘indubitably’. This is Pursewarden upon the point of death, I guess, but like all great books, he will live on in it, be lived through again, I recall. But I can never be certain. Memory is a false gift.
A Constructive Congeries of the Conceits, Coronas, COincidences, COinspirancies, Confirmation-Biases and Connections in Imaginative Fiction. In the pitiless passion of the reading-moment, often raw, often gnomic, often wordy, but always heartfelt. All books bought. (Now in the new light of Covid, there is some golden sphere in fey balance between clarity and confusion.)
I have read up to:
“These are the sort of fragments which tease the waking mind…”
“These are the sort of fragments which tease the waking mind…”
“The noise of her voice is jumbled in the back of his brain like the sound-track of an earthquake run backwards.”
And then we get one of those literary portraits, that all writers, of whatever skills, would envy should they ever read it and need to emulate it. The portrait in words of a real ‘character’, Scobie, nearly 70. Telling also of another portrait of him, this time in paint by Clea.
“And somehow in England one doesn’t feel free any more.”
In those days to be nearly 70 was of decrepit age. And those times are now due to come back. I already feel that, personally, for real!
“Frankly Scobie looks anybody’s age; older than the birth of tragedy, younger than the Athenian death. Spawned in the Ark by a chance meeting and mating of the bear and the ostrich;”
“For my part I remained always stupefied and mumchance at all the avenues opened up by these thoughts;”
My heartfelt thoughts on the precarious Justine and on our equally precarious relationship, cross-referenced, as I always cross-reference things, with Arnauti’s written views on her.
[We all have our own mumchance to be parented by the constraints of tongue-tied social non-distance but there is no damage done if we are not tongue-tied in the public print of literature…. Our way of talking as thinking thus crystallised, if crystallised sometimes, hopefully, with the gift of spontaneous flair.]
[We all have our own mumchance to be parented by the constraints of tongue-tied social non-distance but there is no damage done if we are not tongue-tied in the public print of literature…. Our way of talking as thinking thus crystallised, if crystallised sometimes, hopefully, with the gift of spontaneous flair.]
Read up to:
“Justine surrounded by her philosophers is like an invalid surrounded by medicines — empty capsules, bottles and syringes.”
“Justine surrounded by her philosophers is like an invalid surrounded by medicines — empty capsules, bottles and syringes.”
CONTINUED HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/03/31/the-alexandrian-quartet-lawrence-durrell/ and ALEXANDRIAN QUARTET (2) on this site
Part One
“, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes….”
I have only so far re-read up to…
“I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child — Melissa’s child. I do not know why I use the word ‘escape’. The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well, then, I have come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way….”
Unmissable opening paragraphs. Literally.
Or at least bits of those paragraphs shown above.
I shall try in future to experience more sweeping bouts of re-reading this book, before reviewing each of these lengthier sweeps in real-time.
“Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold — the meaning of the pattern.”
I had forgotten how inevitably inevitable the make-up of this text was ever meant to BE, each tactile and sensory and sexbomb word destined to be placed where it is in relation to each other from those distant times before destiny was even invented as a concept. The main character is of course Alexandria itself. The as yet nameless narrator and his Proustian memories so far merely woven together to serve that genius loci.
The character names he gives us are sacrosanct, too, even though — unless you have read it before (and remembered it properly!) or have instinctively guessed from some retrocausal gestalt — they have yet to gain that “meaning of the pattern”, that TRIANGULATION OF (narrative) COORDINATES (or viewpoints) that I have explicitly spoken to you about quite regularly in all my gestalt real-time reviewing since I started experimenting with this process in 2008.
I have now read this prehensile text up to:
“The shops filling and emptying like lungs in the Rue des Soeurs.”
This evocation so far is even better than I remember it, and needs to be eked out and savoured. The narrator on his balcony seeing Justine is a scene you will never forget. The description of his French housemate – which Rousseau? – is characterful beyond measure. As is his, the narrator’s, loss of confidence in his own writing! The latter phenomenon feels like my own watershed back earlier this century when I mostly gave up writing source works and began to create confirmation that there are new personal worlds to be found in others’ works, works judiciously chosen, as I am doing now…
Read up to: “Occasionally I turn over a bundle of manuscript or an old proof-copy of a novel or book of poems with disgusted inattention; with sadness, like someone studying an old passport.”
nullimmortalis April 3, 2020 at 3:11 pm Edit
And so the text has tantamount to changed, too!
You can’t think outside the box unless you are within that box when you do that thinking.
Brian Howell April 8, 2020 at 4:45 am Edit
My bold.
– from ‘The Avignon Quincunx’ by Lawrence Durrell (‘Constance’ 1982)
I shall in future refer to the narrator in shorthand as I and me for the purposes of this gestalt real-time review.
‘Spanish fly. He gave it to her.’
and, due to how I recall the nature of Melissa’s ailments, I wonder preternaturally whether this is a tellingly oblique reference (disguised as a typo) to Spanish FLU, which, as a global pandemic, was the forerunner of our Covid-19 today.