Exeunt

Clea book four in the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. Dutton.  287 pp.  *****

It’s hard to know what to say at the end of the Alexandria Quartet, a “word continuum” that has occupied so much time during an intense period.  Reading is a vital part of my life, and for however many weeks it’s been, I’ve known that every night I would spend my time reading something that was utterly absorbing and immensely pleasurable.  I’ll miss it the way I would miss a great friend who had been visiting for weeks and decided to leave.  Of course, I can easily ask this friend back again.  Sometimes I have finished a masterpiece and sat down to read it again.  But now doesn’t seem the time.[1]

My overwhelming impression from the quartet was that it centered on the scene I mentioned in my last post, and came increasingly to focus on the novelist Pursewarden, who was a minor character in Justine.  The major characters from that novel, Nessim and Justine herself, are in this book under house arrest on their country estate, and though Darley visits Justine at the beginning of this novel, and hears her (not entirely coherent) explanation of what happened in the original narrative, she doesn’t figure in the rest of Clea.  Neither does Nessim.  These characters who dominated Justine and Balthazar have been put out to pasture.

Not only does Darley re-unite with the artist Clea, who in some ways always seemed the most interesting character in the Quartet, but they almost immediately—to my surprise, and perhaps to Darley’s—become lovers.  I had thought of Clea as almost asexual, though she showed interest in Justine in the first novel (as did practically everyone in Alexandria).  Their love affair seems partly just a function of the times.  Darley has returned to Alexandria while World War Two is still raging; bombs light up the city as he approaches.  He has in tow the child that had been born to his girlfriend Melissa, and whose father was Nessim; the deal apparently was that he would return the child to her father and take up his own life elsewhere.  The bombing in Alexandria is mostly just in the harbor, and the rest of the city is relatively safe.  But the whole city is on edge, and people are living as if there’s no tomorrow.  Clea and Darley fall into one another’s arms.

As do, apparently, Mountolive and Liza Pursewarden, though that happens behind the scenes.  She is acting as her brother’s literary executor, vaguely looking for a biographer, also concerned about rumors of a tawdry biography that is in the works.  She doesn’t want the scandalous nature of her relationship with her brother to be revealed, not only to preserve his reputation but also not to disturb her relationship—and prospective marriage—with Britain’s ambassador to Egypt.  She enlists Darley to help with these concerns.  She’d actually like him to write the biography, though he’s not interested.  But his involvement with Liza occupies the central part of this novel.

A major portion of that center is a selection from Pursewarden’s notebook entitled ”My Conversations with Brother Ass,” essentially about his relationship—and rivalry—with Darley.  This is our most sustained look at Pursewarden’s work, though of course it is just jottings from a notebook.  Not only does he not sound on the page like Darley, who has been our narrator for much of the Quartet, he doesn’t sound like Lawrence Durrell, who of course has created him and Darley and Arnaud, our trio of novelists.  This man is more unbridled and daring and just plain nasty than Darley.  We see the vastness of his talent and perceptions, which really are those of Durrell, of course.  In a sense Durrell has created a writer who writes differently than he does, and in a certain sense better (?).  It’s a remarkable performance.[2]

Even more stunning is a document that we never see, the collection of letters that Pursewarden wrote to his sister about their relationship.  (One interesting fact is that, since Liza is blind, Pursewarden knew that at least one other person would see those letters.  Yet he still wrote them.)  Mountolive has read the letters to Liza, and believes that, despite their scandalous nature, they should be published.  Darley reads them and, though he thinks they are by far the best thing Pursewarden ever wrote, and one of the great documents in all of British literature, he agrees with Liza that they can never be published, and the two of them burn the letters together (there is some suggestion that he was trying to hold out the last one, but she was counting as they did the job, and told him to hand it over).  That scene brings to an end the emotional center of the Quartet for me.

My brother  remarked in his first e-mail to me the strange amorality of this world, and I hadn’t known what he was talking about until the story centered on Pursewarden and his sister.  I think the implication is that the greatness of these letters has to do with the very amorality that they express, that they have knocked aside all traces of taboo, and something about Pursewarden’s greatness had to do with living that way and writing about it.  I don’t know that I agree (though I haven’t seen the letters!).  But I thought that was implied.

I’ve said all along that Durrell had created such an entrancing fictional world that nothing that happened seemed out of place, but I thought the accident that happened toward the end of the novel to Clea was an exception to that general rule.  I could see it coming a mile away, and thought, really?  Do you want to do that?  I understand the way it ultimately fits in to the aesthetic world Durrell has created.  I just didn’t quite believe it.[3]

The other thing that was odd, though it seemed apt, was that, at the end of Clea, though Alexandria had for so long been captivating and riveting, suddenly everyone is leaving.  Darley is headed to France (where I believe Durrell was actually living at the time); Mountolive has been named ambassador to—of all places—Paris, and Clea, unaware of Darley’s plans, is thinking of pursuing her artistic career in France.  Nessim and Justine have been released from their house arrest almost as if it never happened.  We’ve left some corpses strewn in our wake, to be sure, but the Quartet is verging on a happy ending.  Can that be?

Or was Alexandria just a stage set for the most important narrative of Durrell’s life, and now he’s ready to leave?

[1] One major factor in my reading experience was that, until Clea, I was reading a huge Faber omnibus paperback that had tiny print.  The used copies I could find online seemed too expensive, and of course I wasn’t sure what shape they were in.  But I wouldn’t read that edition again.

[2] I’ve been reading the correspondence between Durrell and Henry Miller, and Miller didn’t like Pursewarden and didn’t find him interesting.  I don’t believe Durrell reacts to that in the letters; the two men met in person not long after Miller wrote that.  I personally don’t agree with Miller at all.  My distinct feeling is that Durrell was trying to create, in his portrait of Pursewarden, a great novelist.

[3] I will also say that, throughout the Quartet, characters seemed to run into each other at the most opportune times for the plot.  I always accepted that, and I know a group of people can create a small world in a large place, but Alexandria seems to be a huge metropolis, and these people are always seeing each other.