The Night Everything Changed

A Single Scene from the Alexandria Quartet

Even now that I’ve finished, I continue to be obsessed with the Alexandria Quartet. I would love to know how much Durrell envisioned when he began the work. He had supposedly been planning what he called his Book of the Dead (his early working title) for years, before he even went to Alexandria. So he had some kind of plan, and just needed a place, and a situation. Somehow Alexandria during World War Two provided those things. He tells a story from one point of view in the first volume, then adds a second viewpoint, which completely changes things, in the second. In the third he tells a widened version from the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator. And in the fourth volume our original narrator returns to Alexandria and moves the story forward.

Durrell is such a magician with words that by the time you’re in the middle of the Quartet you’ll accept anything. When we hear that Narouz is visiting a holy woman in the desert who has three breasts, we pause for a second, then shrug and keep going. When he visits a holy man at a kind of carnival, and the man draws a circle in the earth, then tells him to focus there, and he sees a vision of what happened to Justine’s daughter, who had disappeared, we accept that. Durrell has expanded our view of reality, at least within the confines of this work.

But there is one scene among all the others that really strikes me. It is central to the plot but also completely ordinary, a night out on the town for one of the characters. It is in that scene that I knew I was reading a true masterpiece. And I couldn’t help asking myself: was the point of the whole Quartet to reveal these details? Was this the heart of the narrative, twenty pages in volume three?

There are any number of spoilers in what I’m about to say. If you haven’t read the Quartet, you might want to stop reading now. On the other hand, if you don’t think you want to read such a mammoth work (884 pages of small print) what I’m about to say might convince you. I want to write about it just to explore it.

The novelist Pursewarden—it occurs to me that I have no idea what his full name is—is a minor character in volume one, but becomes more important in volume two, when our narrator Darley finds out not only that his illicit lover, Justine, was also carrying on with Pursewarden (though she was married to Nessim) but that it was Pursewarden she really loved. Darley was a blind for the real lover. There are three novelists in this narrative. There is Arnauti, Justine’s first husband, who wrote a novel about their relationship entitled Moeurs (Darley obsessively reads it and sometimes quotes from it, trying to understand the woman he loves). There is Darley himself, who by the time of the second volume is acknowledged as having written the first, which was apparently read by various characters. And then there is Pursewarden, the most notable novelist, who in Justine finishes the third volume in a trilogy that is apparently his masterwork, then, puzzlingly, takes his own life. It seems bizarre at the time. But he’s been a minor character, so we don’t really care.

By volume three, he’s become central.

He’s central because a member of the British foreign service named Maskelyne has told the British ambassador to Egypt, David Mountolive, that Nessim Hosnani—Justine’s husband—has been selling arms to Israelis in the Middle East. That doesn’t make sense on the face of it; he is a Coptic Christian. But what he’s doing is opposed to British and Egyptian interests at the time, and the British will inform the Egyptians if they know. But Pursewarden is also a member of the foreign service, and is a good friend of Nessim’s (and the lover of the man’s wife); he doesn’t believe Maskelyne, or chooses not to. Mountolive is friends with both Pursewarden and Nessim, so he chooses not to believe it too. As ambassador, he leaves Pursewarden in his post, and transfers Masekelyne elsewhere. That is where things stand on this evening when Pursewarden heads out on the town.

There’s something unsettling about the man. He is a novelist and poet of immense talent, supposedly the most talented and successful of the three. He’s hugely learned and attractive to both men and women. He obviously loves life; on this evening when he’s relaxing he sees and enjoys everything about the teeming international metropolis where he lives. But there is also something dark and cynical and cruel about him. On his way into town, he runs into Darley, whom he knows, and likes, and feels somewhat superior to. They have a brief friendly conversation. But Pursewarden is about to proposition Darley’s girlfriend.

Girlfriend might not be the word. Melissa is a dancer at a nightclub and a part-time prostitute. Of all the women in the novel, she seems the most beaten down. She knows Darley loves Justine and sleeps with her, but Melissa stays with him anyway. Partly that’s because she doesn’t make much money and needs a man to support her. She also really cares for him. Yet of all the women in the novel, Melissa is the least formed in my mind, until this scene. In this scene, and this one alone, she comes alive.

I had thought she was a dancer in some kind of small night club, a performer. But she also, apparently, will dance with the patrons, and that night Pursewarden (after he had stopped for drinks at one place, a seafood appetizer at another, and dinner at still another) kept asking her to dance. A Syrian showed up who was willing to pay her handsomely to sleep with him. She mentioned that to Pursewarden, explaining that she needed the money for a winter coat. A woman in her profession needed nice clothes. Pursewarden has some extra money on hand—as a poet, he had written an epitaph for a friend of Leila Hosnani, who had hired him to do the job—and doubles the offer of the Syrian. I have no idea how much money we’re talking about here, because I don’t know the currency. But Melissa jumps at the chance.

By now it is late evening, and they return to Pursewarden’s place; she walks so that her body is against his, a characteristic of women in her profession. They go into the apartment and almost immediately to bed; Durrell doesn’t describe the sex explicitly, but as a psychological encounter, and at first it doesn’t go well. (We’re puzzled by the ethics of the whole thing. Why choose this prostitute, who’s the girlfriend of one of your friends? It’s as if he’s trying to humiliate the man, as if he doesn’t believe in his own superiority.) From Melissa’s standpoint, if the act doesn’t happen, she might not get paid, so she begins to feel desperate. She takes his hand, and offers to read his palm. “You tell fortunes,” he says, and she says, “Everyone in the city tells fortunes.”

The first thing she sees—though she claims she can just read character from a palm, not the future—is that death is near. Pursewarden laughs in apparent delight, which seems to reflect his darkness and cynicism. Then she says, “The blind one—not your wife.” Pursewarden apparently is married, to a woman back in England. The blind one—who has appeared in the novel earlier—is his beautiful sister Liza. Melissa would have no way of knowing that. She was reading it from his palm.

In case we haven’t noticed, this downtrodden woman, of questionable morals, who is sleeping with this man just to get a coat for the winter, has become a seer. She is a seer not in spite of who she is, but because of it. Her life has taught her about men, and about life. Sex, religion, and spirituality are all thrown together in this novel—they permeate it—but they don’t have much connection with morality. They’re the life force.

She then says the thing she has seen about him in his palm, that he is “all closed in. Your heart is closed in, completely so.” She brings her index fingers and thumbs together in a gesture that shows that. “Her eyes flashed with sympathy. ‘Your life is dead, closed up. Not like Darley’s. His is wide . . . very wide . . . open.’ She spread her arms out for a moment before dropping them to her knees once more.”

You might have thought the greater novelist would be the more wide open. But that isn’t what she’s saying. (Of course, Durrell created all three of these novelists, and he is the truly great novelist. But Darley stands in for him.)

He then tells her why he is so closed up, speaking of his sister. “She and I were lovers. We shall never be able to love other people.”

That’s about the most startling thing I’ve ever read in a novel, at least one that is a work of art. We had seen the two of them together briefly, somewhere earlier in the Quartet, and they seemed extremely close; at one point they danced around Trafalgar Square, celebrating the birthday of William Blake. But it never occurred to me that their relationship was sexual. I hadn’t crossed that line.

Melissa doesn’t judge him. She hardly seems surprised (one can only wonder at the things men have told her through the years). Probably there’s no one else in the world he would have told that to. But he could say it to Melissa.

Once he’s said that they do have sex. They have a wonderful connection. How much closer could they be, after all?

There’s still the question, in my mind, of why he’s doing this to Darley. Is it something about their rivalry with writers? Is there something so dark in him that it makes him want to piss on everybody and everything (he’s not necessarily nasty in person; at least we don’t see him that way. But his private opinions are often vicious). In any case, he asks a question that verges on being mean, and that he probably shouldn’t have asked. He asks if she’ll be going back to Darley that evening.

That’s the question he shouldn’t have asked.

She says no, Darley was with Justine the night before, he’s being a fool, the Hosnanis are taking advantage of him.

He asks what she means.

She says that she used to be the mistress of a man named Cohen who was a business partner of Nessim Hosnani. The two men were selling arms to the Israelis. Cohen told her that at the time.

“’Dress now,’ said Pursewarden in a small voice. He went into the other room and stood for a moment gazing distractedly at he wall above the bookshelf. It was as if the whole city had crashed down around his ears.”

This news means first of all that he was wrong in his argument with Maskelyne. The man had all kinds of evidence, but both he and Mountolive ignored it because of their friendship with Nessim (and their suspicion that the Egyptian government would have Nessim killed). It also means that he needs to tell this fact to Mountolive, and perhaps confront Nessim himself. He might have to stand up and be a man.

He’s unable to do that. He does get his things together the next day and inform Mountolive of the truth. That evening he takes his life.

At last we have a reason—hundreds of pages later—for the suicide that made so little sense in the first volume. Yet even this reason didn’t satisfy me. Pursewarden let his friendships blind him to the truth. He made a fatal mistake and perhaps ruined his career in the foreign service. Maybe he even disgraced himself. So what? He’s an artist. He’s one of the finest novelists of his day. What does he care?

In the final volume we hear another reason for his suicide. Liza has begun seeing Mountolive, the lover that Pursewarden and his sister always knew would show up sooner or later in her life, and Liza believes Pursewarden killed himself so that she would be free to love another. He wanted to eliminate the true love of her life, himself, so that she could move on and have a healthy relationship.

(In volume four, Liza is concerned that a biographer will reveal the truth about their relationship, especially in some tawdry way, and that it will diminish Pursewarden’s reputation and damage her relationship with Mountolive, the man she wants to marry. She enlists Darley to help her, and he finds out that the man who was contemplating such a biography has decided not to write it. But Darley also reads a series of letters that Pursewarden wrote about his incestuous relationship with his sister. Darley thinks these letters are the greatest thing he ever wrote, and one of the great documents in English literature. Mountolive agrees, and believes they need to be published, come what may. But Liza relies on Darley’s judgment, and he says that, however great they are, they can never see the light of day. She and Darley sit down one day before a fireplace and burn them together.)

I believe the real reason Pursewarden killed himself has to do with the essential darkness at the heart of him, which seems completely tied up with his vast talent, as if there has to be enough darkness to balance out the brightness, and that the darkness is intertwined with the taboo he violated: either he had sex with his sister because of that darkness or the darkness exists because he had sex with his sister. There is a secret to his life that he had not revealed to anyone except his wife (though he didn’t tell her before they married) and the last prostitute he ever slept with, who took in the news and did not judge him. She was like Jesus with the woman taken in adultery. But he couldn’t live with what he’d done. He couldn’t even write his way out of it, as great as Darley thought those letters were. He couldn’t face his moral weakness and his incest was at the heart of that. It would have killed him sooner or later. It killed him that night.