Making Up for Lost Time

Justine book one of the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell.  Faber.  884 pp.  $16.99

I’ve always been a book snob and have never read things when everyone else did.  I didn’t read The Way of Zen—which changed my life—until my late thirties, though everyone else I knew read it in college.  I read my wife’s copy, which she had left behind when we split up, after fifteen years of marriage.  I didn’t read The Lord of the Rings—another iconic book for my generation—until my early fifties, when an article convinced me it was one of the masterpieces of the 20^th century (I agree, though I’m not a big reader of fantasy).  And I never read The Alexandria Quartet, although the aforementioned ex-wife was reading it and raving about it when we met, in the late sixties.  She had that famous boxed set of paperbacks, which I would love to lay my hands on.

I was a Henry Miller enthusiast in those days, and thought of Lawrence Durrell as a much younger friend of Miller’s; there was already an edition of their correspondence.  Somehow the exotic locales of Durrell’s work didn’t attract me (though I’m sure that was what attracted many in my generation), and people didn’t speak of Durrell in the pantheon of twentieth-century British writers.

But under the lockdown I’m looking for substantial reading projects—Marcel Proust is waiting in the wings—and my brother recently read The Alexandria Quartet because a friend had not only recommended it, but given him her copy of the boxed paperbacks.  My brother is a book snob who makes me look like a reader of romance novels, and his comment about the AQ definitely got my attention.[1]

I soon bought the book, along with a new edition of the Durrell-Miller letters—and started reading.

The first thing to say is that the writing is stupendous.  Beautiful prose.  The Durrell I was familiar with—the 25 year old man who wrote Henry Miller a letter about Tropic of Cancer, which he had just discovered—seems to have talent, but he also seems to be simultaneously showing off and sucking up to the older man.  But this Lawrence Durrell is a mature writer who has published prose and poetry, lived in Alexandria during the Second World War, and is publishing these books in his forties.  I would say, actually, that he’s a better writer than Miller, and more genuinely a novelist.  Miller was always writing about his own life, whether he called it a novel, like the Tropics, or a memoir, like The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.  But Durrell is writing about a much larger world, though one suspects his narrator is autobiographical.

The other thing that struck me about Justine is that he not only begins the novel in the middle of things, right in the middle of the story and the situation, but he writes as if his reader already knows these people; there are no introductions to characters, as a more conventional novel might have done.  We eventually know everything we need to about the central characters, but it’s an oddly intimate situation.  He’s talking as if he knows us.

The narrator isn’t named in Justine, though he’s apparently called Darley in subsequent volumes.  He’s an Irishman who worked as a schoolteacher in Alexandria; as the novel opens he’s writing from a Greek island and has a young child with him.  He shares lodgings with a man named Pombal, whom he doesn’t tell us much about; he cohabits with a woman named Melissa, who has a nightclub act and seems to have had a difficult life.  And he becomes involved with a Jewess named Justine, who grew up in poverty but is now married to a Coptic Christian named Nessim, an extremely wealthy man.  Darley and Justine begin as friends, though he is obviously attracted to her, along with everyone else in Alexandria.  But it is she who seduces him, which makes us extremely uneasy.  It seems treacherous for an impoverished Irish schoolteacher to be having an affair with a wealthy Egyptian’s wife.  In Alexandria.

But he ain’t the only one.  He’s actually reading a novel written by Justine’s previous husband, entitled Moeurs¸ which he combs through looking for clues about her character.  He quotes liberally from this novel, a book within a book.  She’s had a number of affairs, actually began one with a woman artist named Clea (whose name gives the title to the last book in the series), and the word nymphomania occurs somewhere in the text, with reference to Justine (Durrell wrote this book in the fifties, after all).  But Justine reveals to Darley that she was sexually abused as a girl, and the man who abused her is still at large in Alexandria.  There is also a man named Balthazar who seems to be the guru of a group studying what they call the Cabala, and who knows a great deal about various characters.

Religious and spiritual concerns hover around the story, though they never get terribly explicit.  We’re in a city where, according to the narrator, it’s slightly dangerous to be a Christian, but people nevertheless seem to cohabit and interact in a liberal way.  There’s a worldly sophistication to this milieu that wouldn’t have impressed me when I was younger, but that now seems amazing.  And there’s obviously much more story to tell; there are fascinating characters waiting in the wings.

The obvious question is: what is Nessim’s feeling about this whole situation, about Darley in particular?  He’s outwardly civil toward him, but also obviously knows what’s going on.  He invites Darley to a duck shoot toward the end of the novel, and Justine, for one, urges him not to go (along with everyone reading the book).  But go he does.  What actually happens at the duck shoot comes out of left field, as far as I’m concerned.  It was stunning.

I’m glad I didn’t read this book until my later years, though I didn’t have to wait until I was 71.  I might have thought that, as I got older, I would get jaded and would not enjoy literature as much as I used to.  I’ve heard of men who moved to non-fiction in their dotage.  I also—this would be especially petty—thought I might resent people who had surpassed my own very modest career as a novelist.  But I find that I appreciate great literature more than ever.  I enjoyed two Michael Ondaatje novels so much that I read them again as soon as I had finished, and I had the same impulse with Justine when I got to the end.  But I figured I could always read it again when I finish the quartet.  It might be richer still with what I learn in the subsequent volumes.  Maybe I’ll want to read all four again.

Why not?  I’m isolated on the side of a mountain, and have nothing but time.

[1] “ . . . gave me her copy of the AQ some years ago and I have waited till now to read it. Actually I have been chomping at the bit to get to it because I could see, if only from the covers of the four vols., that here was a great work of Mediterranean literature and so it has been. Durrell began, I believe, as a poet, but even if he didn’t, the language of his tetralogy is so poetically charged as to stagger the mind with its beauty. I am awestruck by the world through which D. must have moved to gather the experience necessary for the writing of a book of this sophisticated kind. It’s enough to make this reader feel like what he is in fact, a hokey little provincial rube from the West Virginia panhandle [an allusion to our ancestry]. D. grew up in the midst of some legendary family on the island of Corfu—there’s been a series about the Durrells recently on British TV, I read an article about it in the TLS. Being from this bunch launched him I suppose. The reality of the characters is so great, so overpowering as to defy credence—I mean the way they live, move, and have their being on the page. Likewise the audacity of their morality which again makes this good little Presbyterian boy gasp [not all that good]. And the presence of Alexandria, the textures of it that D. has rendered. It fills me with despair that I will probably never see this place now that I have experienced it through D’s prose/poetry. I’m sure that the world of the novel has completely vanished, but it exists in the novel in such a way that you feel you’ll go mad if you can’t get on a plane tomorrow and go experience at least some residue of it, the exotic multi-cultural beauty of it. Did you have Van Clive for a teacher at Duke in English 55 or 56 or something? He was a Chaucer scholar of course but he once pronounced The AQ the greatest novel ever written. I am quite comfortable with such a statement. It is certainly a one of a kind masterwork that I feel an almost physical hunger to get to every day.