INTRODUCTION

Durrell was born in Jullundur, British India, the

son of Indian-born British colonials Louisa and
Lawrence Samuel Durrell. His first school was St
Joseph's College, North Point, Darjeeling. At the
age of eleven, he was sent to England where he
briefly attended St Olave's Grammar School
before being sent to St Edmund's School,
Canterbury. He began seriously writing poetry at
the age of 15 and his first collection of poetry,
Quaint Fragment, was published in 1931.
On 22 January 1935, he married Nancy Isobel
Myers, the first of his four marriages. Durrell was
always unhappy in England and in March of that
year he persuaded his new wife, his mother, and
his siblings (including brother Gerald Durrell,
later to be a major British wildlife conservationist
and popular writer), to move to the Greek island
of

Corfu,

where

they

might

live

more

economically and escape both the English

weather and stultifying English culture - what
Durrell called "the English death"
In the same year, Durrell's first novel, Pied Piper
of Lovers, was published . Around this time, he
chanced upon a copy of Henry Miller's 1934
novel Tropic of Cancer, and wrote to Miller,
expressing intense admiration for his novel.
Durrell's letter sparked an enduring friendship
and mutually-critical relationship that spanned 45
years. The two got on well, as they were
exploring similar subjects, and Durrell's next
novel, Panic Spring was heavily influenced by
Miller's work. In Corfu, Lawrence and Nancy
lived together in a bohemian style in a number of
large houses, notably the 'White House' on the
coast at Kalami. Henry Miller was a guest in
1939. The period is somewhat fictionalized in
Durrell's lyrical account in Prospero's Cell,
which may be instructively compared with the
accounts of the Corfu experience published by
Gerald Durrell, notably in My Family and Other

Animals. Gerald describes Lawrence as living

with his mother and siblingsNancy is not
mentioned at allwhereas Lawrence's account
makes few references to the fact that his mother
and three siblings were also resident on Corfu.
The accounts do cover a few of the same topics;
for example, both Gerald and Lawrence describe
the role played by the Greek doctor, scientist and
poet Theodore Stephanides in their lives on
Corfu.
In August 1937, Lawrence and Nancy travelled to
the Villa Seurat in Paris, to meet Henry Miller
and Anas Nin. Together with Alfred Perles, Nin,
Miller, and Durrell "began a collaboration aimed
at founding their own literary movement. Their
projects included 'The Shame of the Morning'
and the 'Booster', a country club house organ that
the Villa Seurat group appropriated for their own
artistic...ends." They also started the Villa Seurat
Series in order to publish Durrell's Black Book,
Miller's Max and the White Phagocytes, and
Nin's Winter of Artifice, with Jack Kahane of the

Obelisk Press as publisher.

Durrell's first novel The Black Book: An Agon,
was heavily influenced by Miller and was
published

in

Paris

in

1938.

The

mildly

pornographic work only appeared in Britain in

1973. In the story, Lawrence Lucifer struggles to
escape the spiritual sterility of dying England,
and finds Greece's warmth and fertility.
At the outbreak of the Second World War,
Durrell's

mother

and siblings

returned

to

England, while he and Nancy remained on Corfu.

In 1940 he and his wife Nancy had a daughter,
Penelope Berengaria. After the fall of Greece,
Lawrence and Nancy escaped via Crete to
Alexandria in Egypt, where he described Corfu
and their life on "this brilliant little speck of an
island in the Ionian" in the poetic book
Prospero's Cell.
During the war, Durrell served as a press attach
to the British Embassies, first in Cairo and then
Alexandria. It was in Alexandria that he met Eve
(Yvette) Cohen, a Jewish woman and native

Alexandrian who was to become his model for

the character Justine in the Alexandria Quartet.
Durrell separated from Nancy in 1942. In 1947
he married Eve Cohen and in 1951 they had a
daughter, Sappho Jane, named after the legendary
Ancient Greek poetess Sappho. Sappho Durrell
committed suicide by hanging in 1985, leaving
behind writings that some interpret as implying
an incestuous relationship.
In 1947 Durrell was appointed director of the
British Council Institute in Crdoba, Argentina,
where for the next eighteen months he gave
lectures on cultural topics. He returned to London
in the summer of 1948, around the time that
Marshal Tito broke ties with Stalin's Cominform,
and Durrell was posted to Belgrade, Yugoslavia
where he was to remain until 1952. This sojourn
gave him material for his book White Eagles over
Serbia (1957). In 1952 he moved to Cyprus,
buying a house and taking a position teaching
English literature at the Pancyprian Gymnasium
to support his writing, followed by public

relations work for the British government there

during agitation for union with Greece. He wrote
about his time in Cyprus in Bitter Lemons, which
won the Duff Cooper Prize in 1957. In 1954, he
became a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature.
In 1957, he published Justine, the first part of
what was to become his most famous work, The
Alexandria Quartet. Justine, Balthazar (1958),
Mountolive (1959) and Clea (1960) deal with
events before and during the Second World War
in Alexandria. The first three books tell
essentially the same story but from different
perspectives, a technique Durrell described in his
introductory note to Balthazar as "relativistic".
Only in the final part, Clea, does the story
advance in time and reach a conclusion.
The Quartet impressed critics by the richness of
its style, the variety and vividness of its
characters, its movement between the personal
and the political, and its exotic locations in and
around the city which Durrell portrays as the

chief protagonist: "... the city which used us as its

flora - precipitated in us conflicts which were
hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved
Alexandria!" The Times Literary Supplement
review of the Quartet stated: "If ever a work bore
an instantly recognizable signature on every
sentence, this is it." Durrell separated from Eve
Cohen in 1955, and was married again in 1961 to
Claude-Marie Vincendon; she died of cancer in
1967. His fourth and final marriage was in 1973
to Ghislaine de Boysson, whom he divorced in
1979.
Durrell settled in Sommires, a small village in
Languedoc, France, where he purchased a large
house standing secluded in its own extensive
walled grounds on the edge of the village. Here
he wrote The Revolt of Aphrodite, comprising
Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970), and The
Avignon Quintet, which attempted to replicate
the success of The Alexandria Quartet and
revisited many of the same motifs and styles to
be found in the earlier work. Although it is

frequently described as a quintet, Durrell himself

referred to it as a "quincunx". The middle book of
the quincunx, Constance, or Solitary Practices,
which portrays France under the German
occupation, was nominated for the Booker Prize
in 1982 and the opening novel, Monsieur, or the
Prince of Darkness, received the 1974 James Tait
Black Memorial Prize. In 1974, Durrell was the
Andrew Mellon Visiting Professor of Humanities
at the California Institute of Technology.
Durrell suffered from emphysema for many
years. He died of a stroke at his house in
Sommires in November 1990.
Durrell's poetry has been overshadowed by his
novels. Peter Porter, in his introduction to a
Selected Poems, writes of Durrell as a poet: "one
of the best of the past hundred years. And one of
the most enjoyable." He goes on to describe
Durrell's poetry as "always beautiful as sound
and syntax. Its innovation lies in its refusal to be
more high-minded than the things it records,
together with its handling of the whole lexicon of

language."
Major works:
Pied Piper of Lovers (1935)
Panic Spring, under the pseudonym Charles
Norden (1937)
The Black Book (1938; republished in the UK on
January 1, 1977 by Faber and Faber)
Cefalu (1947; republished as The Dark Labyrinth
in 1958)
White Eagles Over Serbia (1957)
The Alexandria Quartet (1962)
Justine (1957)
Balthazar (1958)
Mountolive (1958)
Clea (1960)
The Revolt of Aphrodite (1974)
Tunc (1968)
Nunquam (1970)
The Avignon Quintet (1992)
Monsieur: or, The Prince of Darkness (1974)

Livia: or, Buried Alive (1978)

Constance: or, Solitary Practices (1982)

Durrells World in Alexandria

Quartet
When we speak of Prousts Paris, Joyces Dublin,
and Lawrence Durrells Alexandria, we are really
clearing a space in our minds where specific
happenings and feelings may be identified and
reconvened. It is these novelists pressing need to
set their narratives down in some palpable place,
almost as aliens colonizing a territory, rather than
a compulsion to celebrate their country or
fictionalize an already famous vicinity that leads
to their iconic inventions. In the novels Durrell
marshals his characters with the same ruthless
determination as the female lover in the poem.
Yet his method is an open one the reader
perceives that the way these people are dissected
reflects on the figure of Darley quite as much as

10

on them.
The major role of Alexandria Quartet may be the
city itself. Justine is the child of Alexandria and
she has no recollection of the past. She is only
living in actuality of the real city of human
desire. On the other hand, the tragedy of Blanche
Du Bois in The Streetcar named Desire is caused
by her retrospection of Belle Reve. She was
collapsed by the decline of Old South and her
familys harrowing and costly deaths. Though she
came to the city asking for her sisters help, she
was defeated by actual New Orleans, coarse and
untidy, defying her graceful past.
Lawrence Durrells The Alexandria Quartet
can be read as a variation of Jungian one and
four, a discourse where four elements strive
toward one specific, central point. The city
Alexandria is the center of Durrells quartet.
However, it is not static at all but always actively
metamorphosing and growing like a living
creature. In other words, the center itself is
almost like another flexibly changing, expanding

11

discourse, which means that the huge discourse

of The Alexandria Quartet has another complex,
dynamic discourserather than a simple, fixed
centerin it.
It is one of the most important quartets in the
twentieth century. Dealing mainly with the time
of World War II, it refers directly and indirectly
to Empedocles as well as various kinds of four
elements and presents the city Alexandria as the
highly inclusive and mysterious center of the
whole discourse. The city of Alexandria is a
highly suggestive and ambiguous symbol in The
Alexandria Quartet. The central idea behind
Durrell's exploration of the city appears to be that
it is the city-mother, more than the character
children, which is responsible for the events that
haunt Darley's mind. The city of Alexandria in
The Alexandria Quartet is more than a mere
geographical location for the interaction of the
characters in the novel. It is in fact the spirit that
pervades all the characters in the Quartet. It may
be suggested that the city represents the maternal

12

womb, in both its restricting as well as liberating

aspects and thereby plays a vital symbolic role in
the structural as well thematic framework of the
Quartet. It therefore follows that Durrell "sets
erotic myth of the quest within the framework of
the

political

myth

of

foundation

of

the

establishment of the city"(Fraser 118). Hence it is

suggested that Darley's exploration of the city
through its women-Melissa, Justine and Clea - is
on a symbolic plane the exploration of the
maternal womb itself. Darley thus makes a
journey from the pity-love of Melissa to the dark
puzzling love of Justine and finally comes to the
calm serenity of his affair with Clea which
qualifies both of them as artists and takes them to
France.
Alexandria becomes for the characters a guide to
personal revelation. Darley would see himself
either as an unmoved mover, the camera who
simply records or he might prefer to be the
suffering catalyst of the actions that bedevil them.
But the reader begins to appreciate the strategy;

13

Durrells personality can be filleted out of the

action,

leaving

huge

ground

plan

of

contradictory and bewildered people trapped by

history on a darkling plain.
Alexandria became the mise en scne of his
masterpiece, if not by accident, at least
fortuitously. To state this is not to question the
powerful presence of the city throughout the
novels. But Durrells creative instinct appears to
have hit on Alexandria as the right domain for his
long-anticipated magnum opus because it had
become highly familiar to him during his wartime
exile

and,

more

importantly,

because

an

Alexandrian woman had entered his life at a

critical point. Alexandria itself is treated as if it
were a player in the action. Time feels evasive,
and responsibility equivocal. What concerns the
dramatis personae is how interesting their
emotions are. Durrell maintains a dream-like
narrative fluidity, yet most of the events
described follow accurately the layout of the city
and its environs. Some of the details still shocks,

14

even in our own age of genocidal horrors the

child brothels; the terrible street deaths; the
vendettas acted out against formal balls and
hunts; the automatic cruelty to animals; the
meeting of secret societies and clubs of ridiculous
philosophers. An atmosphere of continuous
emergency supports the general message of the
impermanence of sexual love. We are reminded
that this is not just the city of the tragic queen
Cleopatra but also of Cavafys Waiting for the
Barbarians.
The first novel Justine is a melange of variations
in itself. The three further novels choose to
develop the material by opening up the action
as much simplification as elaboration. Each is
named after one of the major characters involved
most intensely with Justine. Though we are
informed at the end of the book that she leaves
Alexandria to become an Israeli pioneer, she
stays at the heart of the action to the end of the
sequence: time-shifts in the sequels keep her on
stage, and someone is always trying to explain

15

her fascination. Thus Balthazar writes to Darley

after he has left Egypt to inform him of events
and happenings he might not have known at the
time or might simply have misconstrued.
Balthazar is the explainer, the serpentine but
humorous commentator, a man outside the
passionate

participators

but

keeper

of

Alexandrias deepest secrets.

Mountolive is a prequel, and a chance for Durrell
to expand his portrait of Egypt. Nessim and his
brother Narouz come into their own as the only
native Egyptians among the cast of selfconscious Europeans and Levantines. They are
keepers of Egypts oldest flame the inheritance
of the Pharaohs. Nessim is a businessman and a
broker on the Cotton Exchange, but exhibits an
almost sacerdotal responsibility to his nation.
There is no escaping the sense that the novels
have been composed backwards and the story of
Mountolives love for Leila, Nessims mother,
gives Durrell the chance to comment on Britains
troubled presence in Egypt. Mountolive is the

16

most straightforward, traditional even, of the four

books, and the most consummately well written.
Clea is at a further remove from the hypnotic
frenzy of Justine. The real-life model for the
character was Clea Badaro, one of Durrells
closest friends when he lived in Alexandria. If
Justine is a dark night of the soul, enveloped in a
fog of betrayal and despair, then Clea, the last in
the quartet, is a despairing but cleansing dawn, a
clearing of pieces from the board.
In the end, perhaps, plot hardly matters, as the
Quartet swirls with life, if not as we have known
it in our more reasonable cities. Along with the
erotic and dramatic, much is bizarre and comic.
As well as his relationship with Justine, Darley
has an extended affair with an otherworldly waif,
Melissa, an unsuccessful nightclub dancer whose
purpose is to flit moth-like round Justine and
suffer the ignominy of Darleys pity. Then some
lesser lights cry out for their share of the fame
Pombal, the randy French diplomat who shares a
flat with Darley; Scobie, the seedy English

17

remittance man who is employed part-time by the

Egyptian secret police and who is a comical
transvestite; Pursewarden, a reincarnation of
Ronald Firbank with a touch of Baron Corvo,
who worked for a while with Mountolive, but
who has many walk-on parts as aphorist and
novelist; John Keats, the disreputable journalist
who is always on hand when any public nastiness
is in question, and whose name is another hint of
Durrells scepticism about the greats of English
Literature. When you enter Durrells world, you
forget about the presence of war, the action
captures you .

18

CHAPTER I
LAWRENCE DURRELLS COMPLEX
PERSONALITY

India, Ireland, England marked

Durrells personality but it is hard to establish which
of them influenced him most. It is also hard to
believe the fact that his non - conformism is due to
his heredity; the contact of all English people with
India did not generate a dissatisfaction towards
England whose air has a "smack of mould and
death" as the young Durrell said with a sort of anger
never calmed entirely: returned from India, Kipling
had projected a miraculous light over the far - off
landscapes and over the people from there but he
kept an anachronistic trust in the destiny of the
Victorian colonialism. Durrell's profile as it is
drawn in his own work projects him on the
background of a time of dramatic experiences which
produced a "lost generation" in England too.
19

A generation whose representatives did not have

to suffer any pain of the tragic war as the young
American

writers

of

his

age

did,

Scott

Fitzgerald, E. Hemingway or J. Dos Passos. The

skepticism, the opposition to the values officially
recognized, to the Philistinism and the rigid
conservatism was interpreted in a statement: the
British writers had been exiled as the Romantics
in a century ago. Joyce was thirty years older
than Durrell and his attitude of hostility against
a dominating culture which refused to accept
the news before the war, at Joyce, D. H.
Lawrence will continue with Durrell, Lowry,
Auden, etc. Thus the listless Durrell presents
himself from a less favorable perspective to the
psychological speculation. He corresponds to
the portrait of an English intellectual in the '30s
outlined in an essay by a known poet. Nobody
knows what would have happened to Durrell if
he hadn't had met Henry Miller's prose. Anyway
the detail is not interpreted as a simple
occurrence which interests only the biography

20

of the author; it explains the evolution of his

ideas and his attitude towards the problem of
human existence never overlooked. It is a sign
full of significance which is revealed in this
early relationship with one of the very disputed
personalities in the 20th century, disputed by the
most of the advocate of the traditional literature.
Durrells relationships to the Millerian model
will be complex. They will never express a
total adhesion to the aesthetic and moral
principles of the American writer. On the
contrary there will be a lot of examples which
illustrate a cutting disapproval with Miller's
books' solutions, a hesitation sincerely confessed
regarding

the

feature

of

one

or

another

conclusion of his old friend. But the critics

insisted upon some of Durrell's declarations who
recognized himself to be the first writer who had
been inspired by Henry Miller's influence which
is not exact but does not reflect the whole
significance of the English writer's work.
It is obvious that Durrell's vision had been

21

structured under the action of a literature in which a

lost generation painfully aspirating to a affirmation,
found its own problems formulated brutally and
without any complex, but the endeavour to discover
in Durrell just a specific reflex to the Millerian
prose did not lead to any conclusion.
When

Durrell's

perspective

on

reality

is

considered, the reader must first take into account

his origins in India. Throughout his life, Durrell
recalled his "childhood dream of Tibet" with
great nostalgia:
If you live in a Buddhist country, it is so
extraordinary. You wake up without being afraid
of your neighbor, as you do in the countries we
inhabit. The whole of nature seems permeated by
a sense of harmless good will, and it opens a field
for self development which is not accessible in a
country where you have very rigid, theologically
oriented people with a national ethos that's
repressive or restrictive in any way.
Drawing on these childhood memories and his
readings in contemporary physics, Durrell claims

22

that the cosmology of the mid-twentieth century

can be found in a blend of Western physics with
Eastern metaphysics, which he says "are coming
to a point of continence." These notions are
explained in A Key to Modern British Poetry,
which Durrell published in 1952.
In A Key to Modern British Poetry, Durrell
begins by looking at Albert Einstein and Sigmund
Freud, whom he calls the two major architects of
modem Western consciousness. Einstein is
significant because he "torpedoed the old
Victorian material universe" and Freud because
he "torpedoed the idea of the stable ego." The
discoveries of Einstein and Freud, occurring at
nearly the same time period, unlocked the secrets
of the "universe outside man, and the universe
inside." Einstein, and the physicists who followed
him, in exploring the universe outside humankind
discarded the notion that the smallest unit of
matter is the particle. They proved, instead, that
"particles" sometimes are better thought of as
waves. Durrell translates this discovery into

23

human terms: At times people are conscious of

themselves as individuals, but if they accept the
fact of the continuum that exists in the melding of
time and space, then people "may perhaps form
ingredients of a single continuous stream of life."
In Durrell's view, Freud's discovery of the
universe inside humankind parallels Einstein's
investigations into the world outside. Studying
hysterics in the 1890's, Freud noticed how under
hypnosis they were able to recall painful
experiences of which their waking, conscious
minds were unaware. Freud hypothesized that
there was an area of the mind beyond
consciousness; he called it the unconscious, and,
according to Durrell, that is "how the idea of the
splitting of the psyche first started." Durrell, like
D. H. Lawrence before him, rejected "the old
stable

ego

of

character"

in

favor

of

characterization that is more amorphous and

ambiguous. As Balthazar in The Alexandria
Quartet says: "Each psyche is really an ant-hill of
opposing

predispositions.

Personality

as

24

something with fixed attributes is an illusion."

If space and time are relative and the human
personality is not fixed, the cosmology of the age
needs to reflect these uncertainties. The closest
equivalent philosophical system, in Durrell's
view, can be found in Eastern philosophies.
According to Buddhism, once the ego stops its
selfish cravings, it enters a state of oneness with
the universe. Durrell calls this state a "field,"
which is the spiritual equivalent of the field
concept in physics. Durrell believes that the unity
and interrelatedness of matter in the physical
world can be applied to the spiritual realm as
well: "Phenomena may be individuals carrying
on separate existences in space and time, but in
the deeper reality beyond space and time we may
be all members of one body." Durrell has a name
for this deeper reality; he calls it the Heraldic
Reality. Durrell's entire literary output--his
poetry, novels, travel writings--can be seen as a
quest to enter this exalted realm.
Beginning with his novel "The Black Book"

25

and continuing (in the period of the Quartet's

process of writing) with "Cefalu", Durrellian prose
establishes the platform for a beginning based on a
genre celebrated between the two World Wars by
Proust, Joyce, Lawrence and H. Miller with the
stamp of exotism brought by Charles Morgan and
Kazantzakis in the epic of the atmosphere. "Cefalu"
already indicates the obedience of the bourgeois
novel of adventures and meditation round of a news
- in - brief with a rich plot and a simply style.
Perhaps for a good understanding of the ideas in the
Quartet a foray in the works conceived at the end
of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s is useful.
Most of them make part from the domain of poetry
and realize to point out the features of the
creator's portrait, of Durrell's sensitivity and some
theoretical aspects in a territory which will not be
strange at all.
In 1948 when this restless pilgrim reaches
Argentina he holds many university lectures which
will be gathered in a volume "A Key to Modern
British Poetry". "The new Voices" were explained

26

with a declared simplicity without pretending a

specific method of analysis; the aim was that of
convincing

people

to

become

their

own

contemporaries.
Those people that Durrell recognizes to
have influenced his lyrical vision are paradoxically
Wyndhamm, the theoretician of vorticism, Edmund
Wilson and Groddenek.
Durrell was conscious of Auden's and
Eliot's poetry values but he joined them to the
examples of Huxley, Maugham, etc, in the name
of the principle that time and the ego are the
two points of every contemporary poet who
wants to send a message. There are some
recurrent images which characterize Durrells
poetic universe: the broken mirror, the dry ink pot,

metaphors of frustration and futility.

Sometimes

Durrell

"walks"

through

the

"negatives" of his own poetical declaration

explaining how difficult the expressing is how
much he would like to express himself stopping
in front of the ruins. The poet's horizon is full of

27

the ruins of Greece and Levant, of Egeean

islands over which "beautiful twilights fly",
an

atmosphere

of

refined

nostalgias,

of

paroxysm of the senses wraps the whole

landscape. The volume of "Chosen Verses"
was published in 1956. A year later appeared
"Justine" the first novel of the work, "one of
the most significant cases at an equal distance
from the traditional prose and the new novel the
Alexandria Quartet".
In the context of the angry 50s
Durrell's novel bridges the gap between the
great period of experimentalism (Joyce, Woolf)
and such developments in the British novel of
the 60s and after as illustrated by J. Fowles. His
indebtedness
tradition

to the 19 century realistic

resides

in

rejection rather than

acceptance of its certitudes regarding the idea of

reality, the nature of fictional form and the
relationship between them.
Durrells images are paralleled by the
relativity of his work which underlines the focus

28

on the alteration of reality through the process of

creation. His well - known The Alexandria
Quartet is a successful outcome of his theory
offering different perspectives of the same story as
he states in the Preface to the Quartet; "I'm trying
to work out my form I adopted, as a rough
analogy, the relativity proposition. The first three
were related in an intercalary fashion, being
'siblings' of each other and not 'sequels'; only the
last novel was intended to be a true sequel and to
unleash the time dimension. The whole was
intended as a challenge to the serial form of the
conventional novel: the time - saturated novel of
the day".
The Alexandria Quartet consists of four
volumes, each of which could be read as an
independent novel, but can be fully understood
only as a part of a larger pattern . The key to his
work is the concept of individual consciousnesses
as so many separate mirrors , each producing
different images of the phenomena they reflect.
In the very first pages of The Quartet, Durrell

29

uses the symbolism of mirrors to alert the reader

to his method of character portrayal. As she
looks at her reflection in the multiple mirrors in
a lobby of an Alexandria hotel, Justine , the
main character in the novel, becomes the
writer's mouthpiece -sightedness. Before any
reference to Alexandria Quartet the reader should
brood on the last sentence of the quotation. First of
all the author warns the reader that he is aware of
his responsibility as a "modernist" writer and
considers his gesture a "challenge" - therefore a
progressive step of English literature. From his
point of view progress consists of the discovering
of something new, different, opposite to everything
that has already been written. The first three novels
so - called 'siblings' suggest similarity and
difference; different views of the same story.
The concept of "conventional novel" is
synonymous with the "traditional novel" with its
fluent running of the events that assures its
linearity. Durrell's "challenge" proposes an
annihilation of the limitation between spatial arts

30

- painting, sculpture - and linear arts -music,

literature.
Alexandria Quartet can be interpreted as a
"panorama of sexual experience". "To the many
gradations of heterosexual eroticism - from
romantic - idealistic to the pure physical - are
added

rape,

lesbianism,

incest,
child

travesty"(Twentieth

male

homosexuality,

prostitution

and

Century Writing,184). By

adding erotic experiences the author widens the

horizon of the work without alternating the idea
of formation, education, preparation of the
character and also of building a modem novel.
The structure of the novel can bear an
obvious resemblance to Gerard Genette's theory
concerning the narrative voice. The evidence is
increased by the great, even shocking, difference
between the versions. It seems that each and every
character produces his own novel and all the
stories are united by Darley who does not miss
any novel, in order to achieve wholeness or
truth. This time Alexandria Quartet does not

31

look like concentric circles but like intersecting

circles since only certain elements of the stories are
common. The story told by the characters makes
the author of the Quartet disappear somewhere
behind or within the text. Darley's initials can lead
to confusion but even if it is possible this confusion
does not sustain the existence of an omniscient
author since Darley himself is seeking the truth.
Actually the work would be a novel about the
writer's formation.
The constant presence of the pool is like
a vivid awareness of the novel itself. By placing it
inside the house the author respects the reality of
the muslin world suggesting that there is an
opposition between the inside world and the
outside one. The water within the house could be a
symbol of life, freshness, activity and it could be
considered antonymous with the sun outside
associated with heat, sand, death, therefore the
desert.
The depth of the water invites the
reader to a more careful interpretation of it

32

meanings. Its stillness is generally associated with

its depth - its calmness with the coming storm.
The surface of the pool resembles a mirror, a
reflecting surface that implies duality: life and
death, light and darkness. Therefore an image
reflected in the pool suppose alternation, a
change of plan, difference and identity at the same
time. The mirror is a symbol of the coexistence of
good and evil in a single person.
With Durrell the mirror / pool acquires
another value being a bridge between past and
present. When Mountolive sees the meeting
between a strange girl and Amaril reflected in the
pool, he is sent back to his memory of his strange
love for Leila, Pursewarden's sister. This
accidental look which replaces the present with
the past leads the reader to Proust's method of
writing his novel based on similar associations that
makes his novel go on as if it were written by itself.
The memory that appears first on the surface of the
pool then in the text for the reader is similar to
those memories activated by the taste of the cake

33

soap in the tea. Although both methods imply

annihilation of chronological time, different
senses were stimulated; taste with Marcel Proust
and the sense of the sight with Mountolive. With
Proust time is not successive, it depends on the
intensity of the person's mood that establishes
time's duration and the successiveness of the events.
Durrell does not neglect Brgson's philosophy
concerning time and memory. This feature
contributes to Durrell s modernism.
On the other hand the mirror / pool is an
obvious reference to the self - reflexive novel, the
story of itself. In his essay "L'Universe
reversible" Genette refers to the similarities
between flight and swimming. They both propose
the same ideal of an essay propulsion, of a raving
and marvelous happiness (Genette,10). This
approach makes possible a comparison between
birds - which are challenging the heights of the sky
- and fish that are holy symbols. Thinking of
Icarus' flight the reader can interpret his fall as
necessary for the achievement of his work, his fall

34

is not a failure but a sacrifice, which assures the

uniqueness of the work. From that point of view the
pool becomes a necessary element in a modernist
novel which describes its own process of creation.
In 1963 R. Grillet noticed "we are more and more
moving towards an age of fiction in which the
problems of writing will be lucidly envisaged by
the novelist, and in which his concern with critical
matters, far from sterilizing his creative faculties,
will on the contrary supply him with motive power..
."(R. GrilIet,46-7).
The idea of double vision suggested by the
pool and the mirror is emphasized by the double
presentation of the characters. Their personalities
are complex since they are the result of an external
presentation - the other characters point of view and of their own confession. Their inner aspects
offered to the reader through direct confessions,
journals or letters which instead of helping the
reader to clarify the characters' image, make it
even more ambiguous and spread. This makes
Darley's journey towards truth futile since truth

35

cannot be reached by anyone as Durrell himself

says: "he was like a man seeking to marry the twin
images in a camera periscope in order to lay his
lens in true focus".
The characters' quality of changing, as they
are perceived by different eyes is similar to the
"magical landscape", the frame of their actions.
Alexandria itself which is able to adjust to the
onlooker, like the chameleon that transforms itself
always hiding something. From that point of view
Alexandria

remains

mystery

and

an

inappropriate town to dwell for an outsider since

it influences his behaviour and life. The
characters are presented in consonance with the
town, which is a place where both past and present
associate

with

one

another

creating

the

overwhelming atmosphere of two coexistent

civilizations.

The

characters'

fulfillment

is

impossible to be reached in such a magical town

and they are supposed to move as Clea and Darley
too.
The narrator of Justine, Darley, is a young

36

Irish schoolmaster who wants to understand the

real spirit of the city Alexandria. He therefore retires
to a Greek island to write his memories. "The sea is
high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind.
In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of
spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday,
crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind
unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great
planes...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 in that
way.. .At night when the wind roars and the child
sleeps quietly in this wooden cot by the echoing
chimney-piece I light a lamp and walkabout,
thinking of my friends - of Justine and Nessim, of
Melissa and Balthazar. I return link by link along
the iron chains of memory to the city which we
inhabited so briefly together: the city which used us
as its flora - precipitated in us conflicts which were

37

hears and which we mistook for own: beloved

Alexandria!
I have had to come so far away from it in
order to understand it all! Living on this bare
promontory, snatched every night from darkness
by Arcturus, far from the lime-laden dust of those
summer afternoons, 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.
Capitally, what is this city of ours? What is
resumed in the word Alexandria? In a flash my
mind's eye shows me a thousand dust-tormented
streets. Flies and beggars own it today - and
those who enjoy an intermediate existence
between either.
Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds:
five fleets turning through their greasy reflections
behind the bar in the harbour . But there are more
than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to
distinguish among them. The sexual provender
which lies to hand is staggering in its variety and

38

profusion. You would never mistake it for a happy

place. The symbolic lovers of the free Hellenic
world are replaced here by something different,
something subtly androgynous, inverted upon
itself. The Orient cannot rejoice in the sweet
anarchy of the body - for it has outstripped the
body. I remember Nessim once saying - I think
he was quoting - that Alexandria was the great
winepress of love; those who emerged from it
were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets -I
mean all who have been deeply wounded in their
sex."
The reader will later on be confronted with
alternative perspectives offered by the other
narrators of the novel. In general, the male
characters are by the other narrators of the novel.
In general, the male characters are variations on
the theme of the writer such as Darley,
Arnauti

Justine's

first

Pursewarden, and Nessim,

husband
while

women

characters represent modern hypostases of

Aphrodite. Justine - the Jewish wife of the

39

coptish

banker

and

merchant,

Nessim

Hosnani , Mellisa, the Greek cabaret dancer,

and Clea, the painter, are in the opinion of
Darley, who has been in love with all of them,
'''the primitive face of mindless Aphrodite".
Whether they are connected to politics, music,
or painting, their love is always a combination
of sensuality and mysticism, reality and
imagination.
Darley's prismatic technique underlines
the multiplicity, plurality, and richness of the
myths and of the people embodying them.
Darley notices the multiple facets of Justine,
her Picasso - like fragmentation which offers
alternative truths about her personality:
"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

40

show more than one profile at a time?>

Now she yawned and lit a cigarette; and
sitting up in bed clasped her slim ankles with
her hands; reciting slowly, wryly, those
marvelous lines of the old Greek poet about a
love - affair long since past - they are lost in
English. And hearing her speak his lines,
touching every syllable of the thoughtful
ironic Greek with tenderness, I felt once
more the strange equivocal power of the city its fiat alluvial landscape and exhausted airs
-and knew her for a true child of Alexandria;
which is neither Greek, Syrian nor Egyptian,
but a hybrid: a joint."
The principle of the indeterminacy,
based on incompleteness and inscrutability, is
a fundamental way of narrating stories in
the Quartet. Durrell mentions that "Justine
illustrates the principle of Indeterminacy. This
is deliberate. I deliberately scribbled down at
the end of Clea, for instance, five or six pieces
of data which themselves could make five or

41

six more

novels,

either

interpolated

or

extrapolated - this isn't to infuriate the reader,

but amply to indicate that it would be possible
to expand the Quartet without it becoming
roman fleuve." The stylistic effects also
imply arbitrariness, discontinuity, multiplicity,
and mirroring through alternative focalization,
multilayered

stories,

plural

and

parallel

structures, repetitions with slight variations.

They are meant to underline a profound and
alterable otherness.

CHAPTER II

42

LITERARY VISION IN ALEXANDRIA

QUARTET

By

applying

Einstein

relativity

principle to the subject -object relation, Durrell

faces the reader with a prismatic multifaced
reality, the truth of which depends not only on
the multiplicity of points of view, but also on
such variable elements as time and space, since
the world he creates is a "Space - Time"
continuum.

Two

examples

illustrate

this

particular view of reality. In the first one,

Darley, the narrator remembers Justine the
beautiful, rich and mysterious wife of a
powerful and successful Coptic aristocrat as
sitting before the multiple mirrors at the
dressmaker's and saying: "Look! five different
pictures of the same subject. Now, if I wrote, I
would try for a multidimensional effect in
character, a sort of prism -sightedness why
should not people show more than one profile at a

43

time?"1
In the second Darley quotes from
Pursewarden, a sarcastic novelist highly placed
but inefficient British Inteligence spy, the writer
Darley looks up to a kind of theorist of the
novel. 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 faces east or west and the whole
picture is changed."2
In fact Pursewarden is only one of the three
writers who make of "The Alexandria Quartet" a
book about novel - writing rather than "an
investigation of modern love" as claimed by
Durrell. His theories on art and novel - writing are
to a certain extent those of a realist who longs for
the "enigmatic leap into the heraldic reality of
the poetic life."3Another novelist, a shadoway
1

Justine, Alexandria Quartet, Durrell, L., Cartea

Romaneasca, 1991
2
Balthazar, Alexandria Quartet, Durrell, L., Cartea
Romaneasca, 1991
3
Durrell, L, Clea, C.R., 1991,p.72

44

presence is Jacob Arnauti, Justine's first husband

whose novel "Moeurs" a book about Justine and
Alexandria, the third piece in the Chinese - boxes,
trick of a novel within novel, within a novel avoids
realism altogether for purely artistic purpose. For
him "real people can only exist in the imagination
of an artist strong enough to contain them and give
them form."

Finally there is Darley, young and

inexperienced yet striving to write a book about

Alexandria and Justine. Wavering between
Pursewarden's

"impartial

but

poetically

unsatisfying objectivity and Arnauti's subjectivity

he takes Balthazar's advice: "to intercalate realities
<as the only way> to be faithful to Time for at
every moment in Time the possibilities are endless
in their multiplicity."5Therefore Darley resorts to
memory. The plot of The Alexandria Quartet
develops linearly. It can be easily
However, the unsophisticated encoding is
only apparent. The deeper you enter the world of
Alexandria the better you
4
5

understand that

Durrell, L, Justine, C.R., 1991, P.56.

L.Durrell, Balthazar, C.R., 1991, P.72

45

everything is permanently subverted by Durrell's

game of sliding panels and multiple distancing.
Truth, deformed by alternative viewpoints but not
entirely annihilated, cannot be grasped because it
hides beneath overlapping narrative levels and
fake discourses of unreliable narrators.
As for Durrell, the author of "The
Alexandria Quartet" he actually contains this
continuum of units without identifying himself
with any of them in particular. Not even with
Darley who represents at best only "a portrait of
the artist as a young man." Approaching reality like
Laurence, through
Durrell

doesn't

sensuous
render

it

apprehension
mainly

by

accumulation of nuances, but by changing vision

for "each person can only claim one aspect of our
character as part of his knowledge. To every one
we turn a different face of the prism. 6We and
reality are trapped in space and affected by chance,
that is time. It is impossible for us to see all the
faces of the prism from all angles and all distances
6

L.Durrell, Justine, C.R.,1991, P.35

46

simultaneously.
Durrell rejected the tenants of the
conventional realistic novel and placed himself
in the tradition of modern experimental fiction .
According to Erich Auerbach, "One of the major
trends in twentieth-century characterization is
away from the attempt to penetrate the
individual psyche and toward a focus on the
apprehension of 'impressions' which claim no
absolute validity as facts". This approach
"dissolves reality into multiple and multivalent
reflections

of

consciousness"

Hum an

character ? A sort of rainbow, I should

say, which includes the whole range of
the spectrum. I imagine that what you
call personality may be an illusion,
and t h i n k i n g o f i t a s a s t a b l e t h i n g
we are tr ying to put the lid on a box
w i t h n o sides. L.Durrell It follows that we
cannot reach any certitude or exactitude about
reality. With Durrell as the focus of observation
changes reality itself changes.

47

The technique of shifting focuses which the

complexity of reality can be appropriately
revealed. Significantly, reality is seen either
through the lenses of memory or in mirrors.
Consequently, the subject - object relation is
permanently distorted: in the first case the
distortion refers of the space - time continuum.
Indeed the story is written up in retrospect by
Darley, who has taken solitary refuge on a
Greek island. In the very first page of "Justine",
Darley warns the reader that the distance in time
(memory) and distance in space (the Greek island)
have

been

absolutely

necessary

for

his

apprehension of reality: "At night when the wind

roars and the child sleeps quietly in its wooden cot
by the echoing chimney - piece I light a lamp and
limp about thinking of my friends - of Justine and
Nessim, of Melissa and Balthazar. I return link by
link along the iron chains of memory to the city
which we have
inhabited so briefly together, the city which used us
as a flora - precipitated in us conflicts which were

48

hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved

Alexandria! I have had to come so far away from it
in order to understand it all!" 7The metaphor of the
"iron chains of memory" is resumed and further
developed at the end of "Justine". Memory
preserves reality but it also transforms it, sorts it
out and makes it live again in moments of
greater intensity which as Darley says "are not
calculable and cannot he 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 oceans. Darley
details the function of memory in the creative
process. Memory allows for imagination. The role
played by imagination in the subject - object
relations divided by the inexperienced Draley:
"Imagination alters the dialectic relation between
subject and object to the point where the subject
becomes the creator of the object" 8. Durrells
Alexandria, the most outstanding character of the
Quartet is a city which grows out of imagination,
7
8

L.Durrell, Justine, C.R.,1991,p.1

L.Durrell, Justine, C.R.,1991, p.92.

49

a city where the so - called act of living is really

an act of imagination, the capital of memory as
Durrell calls it comparable to Joyce's Dublin. In
"The Alexandria Quartet" everything is seen in its
"double", in the "intercalation of fact and fancy"
and in re - reading, re - working reality the subject
changes himself and grows his self- awareness
deepens. The whole cognitive process in ultimately
reversed, turned from an outward into an inward
one. The hidden emphasis on the reality of the self
in best illustrated by the great number of mirrors in
the novel. As a modernist writer, Durrell tries to
offer a text able to answer the twentieth century
reader's expectation. Alexandria Quartet succeeds
in focusing upon the "word" which acquires the
same self- reflexive qualities as the novel. Durrell
is one of the authors who "have expanded the
self -consciousness of modernist art" as Stevenson
states (197).Like so many modern works "The
Alexandria Quartet" is a portrait of the artist, a
sort of "kunstherroman" about a character in a
book who is writing a book in which he is a

50

character. Durrell combines in his art the

primitive and sophisticated. Appearance and
reality are continuously confused and the line
between life and art is continuously blurred.
Durrell seeks to confuse and bewilder the reader,
to separate him from his habitual reliance on
probability and verisimilitude, so as to offer him
something better.

CHAPTER III

51

THE NOVEL AS MYTH

The basic myth of the novel refers to the
city Alexandria. and it illustrates a new urban
experience, a cosmic process that transcends the
mind and the body.
Located on the Mediterranean coast
of Egypt, Alexandria has achieved a symbolic
resonance far beyond its size and economic
importance. Its iconic status is assured, not
simply because of the decadent sensibility
consistently attributed to it, but also because
numerous writers, both gay and straight, have
paid it warm tribute, naming it as their city of
cities. More often than not they cite the
archetypal homosexual poet Constantine P.
Cavafy (1863-1933) as its principal muse and
presiding spirit.
Cavafy came to be identified with
Alexandria through his poetry, which presents
readers with a myriad of classical, historical, and
scholarly allusions, along with a hedonistic,
52

sensual, cynical, and modern outlook. These

mingled
embodied

influences
in

and

Alexandria's

perspectives
culture,

are
which

combines elegance and ennui. For writers, such

as E.M. Forster and Lawrence Durrell, the
mythic, imaginary, and real-life city all converge
on the streets and in the cafes. In his poem "The
City" (1910), Cavafy embraces the paradox of the
city: it is both a prison and one's means of escape
through art. "The city will follow you. In the
same streets, you'll wa Alexandria's history
continues to fascinate many. Founded in 333
B.C.E. by Alexander the Great, whose body was
returned there after his death, the history of the
city is a long one, encompassing numerous
religions and dynasties.
From the Ptolemaic dynasty, Cleopatra,
who lost the city, is endlessly intriguing as a
female who embodied sexual allure with political
astuteness. The famous university library gardens
of Mouseion, alleged to have been burned by
invading Arabs, were in fact burned by fourth-

53

century Christian zealots, who also murdered

Greek philospher and mathematician Hypatia.
Alexandria, home to Euclid, the mathematician,
witnessed the rise to prominence of new and
hybrid schools of philosophy: the Gnostics, NeoPythagoreans, Neo-Platonists, Monophysites, and
Judaists.
That the city underwent shifts of religious
allegiance, also meant that it experienced both
dialogue and sectarian clashes of belief. It was
conquered by both Romans and Moslems, and in
the early twentieth century had a European
outlook, housing enclaves of Greeks, Jews,
Coptics, and Syro-Lebanesender endlessly."
Lawrence

Durrell's

The

Alexandria

Quartet, initiated by Justine (1957), has also

created a distinctive impression of parallel but
disjunctive aspects, revolving around the sexual
ambivalence of Alexandria's inhabitants. "Only
the city is real," Durrell declared, meaning that in
Alexandria personalities were subsumed to the
city's larger influence. The character of Balthazar

54

is said to have been modelled directly on Cavafy.

Durrell also echoed Cavafy's notion of the
city, familiar to gay people, many of whom
relocated in order to discover and be themselves.
He stated that there are two cities, the one you are
born in and the one of your predilection. For him,
Alexandria was that city of mind and memory.
He believed that one relationship there could
make it become one's entire world.
Alexandria has little in the way of new
building,

its

now-faded

cosmopolitan

chic

looking ever more dusty and bedraggled. It

remains a good destination only for those intent
on

enjoying

its

between-the-World-Wars

atmosphere or for those who wish to savor its

history or to see the city through the lenses of
Cavafy, Forster, and Durrell. Unfortunately, the
city may never again recapture the particular
sensibility that so fascinated those writers.
In fact, the metamorphosis of the modern
novel consists in the new conscious perception of
the

time

and

space

parameters

which

55

circumscribe a distinct universe. It is no longer

the story of the characters' adventures, their
formation or sentimental life that interests the
reader, but the primordial relationship with the
world established in fiction. Actually, 20th
century fiction extended the traditional themes of
the village, the castle or the road with the topos
of the city as a result of the fact that urban
experience turned into a major paradigm of
modern consciousness. Dickens's London and
Balzac's Paris, James

Joyce's

Dublin and

Durrell's Alexandria are only a few examples of

cities seen as objects of knowledge, fascinating
the writers with their inner life, with new and
changing forms generated by "the dialectics of
the city wrestling with itself. While the traditional
world of the 19th and early 20th century
countryside had a continuous and complete
existence,

the

new

urban

space

appears

fragmentary, interrupted, unfinished. Durrell's

Alexandria

represents

the

epitome

of

disarticulation. It is lo longer the concrete entity,

56

waiting to be contemplated and described by the

careful eye of an observer undertaking long
journeys in the streets of the metropolis. Neither
is it enriched and completed while the story
unfolds. The progression of the text disarticulates
the space, showing ever changing facets of a
mysterious and illusive city.
The world of Alexandria has a plural and
parallel structure. The numerous metaphors used
by the author to emphasize the biological life of
the city imply that Alexandria breathes, sleeps,
rests. It grows to maturity and declines into old
age like any being that is alive. However, the
author

cannot

decide

whether

Alexandria

suggests a snake ("The city makes no answer to

such propositions. Unheeding it coils about the
sleeping lives like some great anaconda digesting
a meal. Among those shining coils the pitiable
human world goes its way, unaware and
unbelieving, repeating to infinity its gestures of
despair, repentance and love."), a tarantula ("
spreading their tentacles about to grasp my

57

sleeve"), a caterpillar ("the million legs of a

centipede carrying on with the body powerless to
do anything"), a tortoise ("the city unwrinkles
like an old tortoise and peers about it. For a
moment it relinquishes the torn rag of the
flesh...") or a hibernating animal ("the city seems
to uncurl like some hibernating animal dug out of
its winter earth").
Illusive

and

mysterious,

the

city

dominates its inhabitants with its profound and

alterable otherness. Within its multi - layered
structure truth can never be grasped entirely, it
slips between fingers to be found nowhere. The
kaleidoscopic vision it offers presupposes a
incessant alternation of realities which fail to
build a consistent image. Darley is puzzled by the
strange relationship between the city and
reality,

by

the

chaotic inconsistency of the

surrounding environment:
"How then am I to manipulate this mass of
crystallized data in order to work out the meaning
of it and so give a coherent picture of this

58

impossible city of love and obscenity?/.../ Now in

the light of all these new treasure - for truth,
though merciless as love, must always be a
treasure -what should I do? Extend the frontiers
of original truth, filling in with the rubble of this
new knowledge the foundations upon which to
build

new Alexandria?

Or

should

the

dispositions remain the same, the characters

remain the same - and is it only truth itself which
has changed in contradiction?"
The immediate reality is multiplied on a
transcendental

level

within

the

memories,

dreams, or fantasies of the character. For Darley,

truth consists of "coloured transfers of the mind",
for Balthazar it is "as inconsistent as the rainbow
it only coheres into identifiable states and
attributes when attention is focused on it" For
Pursewarden

truth

is

mysterious

and

incomprehensible, related to man's position in

time and space:
"We live, writes Pursewarden somewhere
'lives based on selected fictions. Our view of

59

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."
All the characters perceive the unstable
frame of the city shaped only in their minds:
"The city, half - imagined (yet wholly
real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our
memory. Why must I return to it night after night,
writing here by the fire of carob - wood while the
Aegean wind clutches at this island house,
clutching and realizing it, bending back the
cypresses like bows? Am I to be infected once
more by the dream of it and the memory of its
inhabitants? Dreams I had thought safely locked
up on paper, confided to the strong-rooms of our
memory!"
Alexandria appears devoured by the
obsessive antithesis real /unreal, fundamental for
the correct understanding of the city and its
inhabitants. The author himself attached a note to

60

Justine saying that characters in the story together

with the personality of the narrator are all
inventions and bear no resemblance to living
persons, while only the city is real. However,
most frequently the real physical dimensions of
the city are replaced by phantasm: Pursewarden
notices the inverted image of the city, luminous
and trembling, hanging in the sky. It remains
there half an hour before melting into the horizon
mist, allowing the real city appear to the size of
its mirage.
To underline the city's ambiguous nature,
the author counterpoints two contradictory
visions. On the one hand, he makes allusion to
the rich and modern districts of Alexandria with
their new metallic buildings, raising positive
expectations:
"The city looked to him as brilliant as a
precious stone. The shrill telephones whose
voices filled the great stone buildings in which
the financiers really lived, sounded to him like
the voices of great fruitful mechanical bird. They

61

glittered with youthfulness."

On the other hand, he switches to the dirty
and decayed slums of the oriental city, of
terrifying exoticism, as the house for child
prostitutes where Nessim and Darley find Justine,
in search of her kidnapped daughter:
"The scene upon which we intruded was
ferociously original, if for no other reason than
that the light, pushing up from the mud floor,
touched out the eyebrows and lips and cheekbones of the participants while it left great
patches of shadow on their faces so that they
looked as if they had been half-eaten by the rats
which one could hear scrambling among the
rafters of this wretched tenement. It was a house
of child prostitutes, and there in the dimness, clad
in ludicrous biblical night - shirts, with rouged
lips, arch bead fringes and cheap rings, stood a
dozen fuzzy - haired girls who could not have
been much above ten years of age; the peculiar
innocence of childhood which shone - out from
under the fancy - dress was in startling contrast to

62

the barbaric adult figure of the French sailor who

stood in the centre of the room on flexed calves,
his ravaged and tormented face thrust out from
the neck towards Justine who stood with her half
- profile turned towards us. What he had jut
shouted had expired on the silence but the force
with which the words had been uttered was still
visible in the jut of the chin and the black corded
muscles which held his head upon his shoulders.
As for Justine, her face was lit by a sort of
painful academic precision. She held a bottle
raised in one hand, and it was clear that she had
never thrown one before, for she held it the
wrong way.
On a rotting sofa in one corner of the
room, magnetically lit by the warm shadow
reflected from the walls, lay one of the children
horribly shrunk up in its nightshirt in an attitude
which suggested death. The wall above the sofa
was covered in the blue imprints of juvenile
hands - the talisman which in this part of the
world guards a house against the evil eye. It was

63

the only decoration in the room; indeed the

commonest decoration of the whole Arab quarter
of the city.
We stood there, Nessim and I, for a good
half- second, astonished by the scene which had a
sort of horrifying beauty- like some hideous
coloured engraving for a Victorian penny bible,
say, whose subject matter had somehow become
distorted and displaced. Justine was breathing
harshly in a manner which suggested that she was
on the point of tears."
The impression of unreality and disguise
is even more increased in the carnival period
when Alexandria turns into a symbol of
aberration and secret vice. Crime, adultery and
perversion are generated now by a freedom
which man had seldom dared to imagine to
himself. Under their masks and dominoes people
become face - and sexless, following their inner
impulses unrestrictedly. The city discloses one of
its hidden faces - its orgiastic, free, uninhibited,
and chaotic inadvertencies, equalizing people,

64

disinheriting them of their intellect and turning

them into anonymous and monstrous creatures.
Noisy and syncopated, Alexandria becomes a city
of irresolution, despondency, and nerves.
Under all circumstances, the inhabitants of
Alexandria are the children of the landscape. In
the measure in which they are responsive to it,
the landscape dictates them the behaviour and
thought.

Like

Joyce's

Dublin,

Durrellls

Alexandria defines the action of the characters

and makes them what they are. The author
himself comments that u the nationalism of the
Dubliners is transformed into the sensuality of
the Alexandrians the narrowness of the Irishman
into the flexibility, the sinister softness of the
Egyptian.'''' The artist must attend to "what the
land is saying", conform to "hidden magnetic
fields that the landscape is trying to communicate
to the personality" He says: "I have evolved a
private notion about the importance of lands, and
I willingly admit to seeing characters almost as
functions of landscape... My books are always

65

about living in places, not just rushing through

them''' Darley repeats the idea that not only the
landscape is dominated by human desires, but
man also depends on his location in space: "// is
not the impact of his free will 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"
The experience of space in the Quartet is
enriched by the experience of time. The three
dimensions of the space are interconnected with
the clock time which acts as a true sequence to
the first three. In the preface, Durrell confesses
that the whole was intended as a challenge to the
serial form of the conventional novel, to the time
saturated novel of the day. In an interview in The
Paris Review he adds: "This novel is a multi dimensional dance, a relativity poem. Of course,
ideally all four volumes should be read
simultaneously, as I say in my note at the end: but
as we lack four -dimensional spectacles the
reader will have to do it imaginatively, adding the

66

part of time to the other three and holding the

whole lot in his skull". For Darley Alexandria
has a spiritual centre and a temporal site: the
former symbolizes the great conquest of man in
realms of matter, space and time, while the latter
is the symbol of free will searching for
integration.

CHAPTER IV

67

ALEXANDRIA - A CITY OF CONTRASTS

Durrell's Alexandria is as much a country

of the mind as Poe's Virginia or Kafka's Germany.
Some of the place - names are real but beyond that
there is little ressemblance between the fictional
Alexandria of Durrell and the geographical owner.
Durrell's work is completely faithful to the ancient
spirit of the place.
As Forester pointed out the literature of
Alexandria was unlike the Greek one, a literature of
love. It was in Alexandria that love mode its way
into epic poetry in the Argonautica of the librarian
Apollonius the love of Medeea for Jason was
presented so dramatically that if left a mark on poetic
fiction. In the old literature characters are mainly
highly extremes of virtue and vice, and the plot
was always subservient to the decorum of poetic
justice. In "The Alexandria Quartet" the characters
and prevailing ethos are as elaborate and complicated
as the plot and the setting.
Durrell's novel has all the Qualities of a

68

symphonic poem, he knows intimately the city, he

gives us in every page its colour, its rhythm and
delirium. It is a city, an Alexandria which only an
English man, willingly exiled and who found his
maturity in Greece can revive. The city does not
play here the simple role of decorum, it is a vivid
entity, a terrible soul made of flesh, of stone, of
crime, of dream and mystery; a "heraldic" portrait
as Durrell said.
The characters that people Durrell's novel
have an extraordinary reality; the shock that they
produce over the European reader is more
hypnotic. Some of them are so amazing and
confusing as the landscapes in which they are living
and this is another virtue of the book - line through
them. There is inside them all the powder and the
delirium of the Proximate East and are accepted
implicitly. The reading of this book is an adventure
that works by its form, its sonority and colour. The
story does not make headway as usual, it sparkles in
this matter so rarely invoked by the author -the light.
A supernatural light stuffed with reminiscences of

69

the past.
Durrell's city is not only a space of the novel
it is a character itself, an omnipresent character which
with every retelling of people's destiny in the
Quartet projects itself more overwhelming, more
full of life, more manly. People in this city feel
themselves carried by a terrible stream which can
not be mastered, it is a world created by the
existence of the characters, continuously re imagined until it composes itself, detail by detail, like
an immense mozaique. There is a tragic double
nature that of the body's suffering and of the spirit's
joy. Durrell's Alexandria is the Hell and the Paradise
mixed together. It is an admirable labyrinth. In that
complex universe in which the image is always
reflected by mirrors and crossed prismas with
different

geometry

'

the

creation

becomes

transmutation'. An universe whose limits move

always, in which space and time become sizes of a
reality always surprising and mysterious. As long as
they keep their power and will act the people in
Alexandria are looking for their freedom. To them,

70

freedom means destiny itself. It is natural way of

mankind.
As the story goes on there are new sides
and new meanings of Alexandria, the epic
perspective is modified. Alexandria, the invented
city, starts and ends once with the people in it, those
who realize to escape from this city are sick, solitary
or visionaries that is why they are deeply wounded in
their sensuous existence. It is a city of absurdity. The
whole novel is full of beautiful descriptions of the
background, the colours that are frequent in this city
are brown and yellow. The author gives us a picture
where the light is filtrated , the atmosphere is full of
brick powder with a sweet smell and a reek of hot
pavement slaked with water. There are inconsistent
clouds on the sky travelling towards the Earth but
very rarely bringing rain (Justine). The author
describes the beautiful places, in Alexandria, but he
also introduces us in a sad atmosphere of the world
in which people of poor condition lived. The streets
over there are narrow, they look like going away, the
houses are ragged and rotten, they look like blowing

71

one to another and suddenly crush. "On the

balconies there are old women and rats, the walls are
dried, bounded like the drunk men, flies are all over
the places even in children's eyes". There is much
noise in the street, screams never heard by anyone
from here because nobody cared. The society in
Alexandria was like a cobweb.
Durrell describes also the women from
foreign communities in Alexandria, who are more
beautiful than in other parts of the world. They are
mastered by fear, by uncertainty. Alexandria was
built like a dyke that stops the stream of negro
Africans, but the negroes had already started to
infiltrate themselves in the European district.
There it happens a kind of racial osmosis. To know
happiness you must be the Muslim Egy, kind,
debauchee, attracted by everything representing
luxury. The women that make part from those last
communities have a desperate courage. They had
explored physical love so much that they became
completely strange. The characters in "Alexandria
Quartet" are they too at the same time actors and

72

spectators of the drama that develops. The

narration is complicated taking into account the
introduction of some pages full of confession, of
the projections towards a past which everyone
in it understands or remembers in a different way.
Four characters dominate the novel: Justine a
strange and passionate Jewess, Melissa the dancer,
Nessim and the narrator, an Irish. The main
character is Alexandria, the exotic and decadent
city, full of beauties and picturesque, symbol of a
world essentially erotic. Love, passion, jealousy
combine here and contribute to the creation of a
unique, intense, sensuous climate. Durrell' s
characters are tightly tied. They are all defined in one
way or another as depending on Justine: she is the
projection of the fatal woman, of the enigmatic and
unhappy woman, of the erotism, of the mysterious
beauty, of the sin and of the salvation through
love. The unidentified narrator in
'Justine' the first volume, will became
known in the next volume under the
name of

L. G. Darley, who for some

73

commentators will be L. Durrell himself.

He is a poor teacher, like the writer he will
be engaged in a military service
in Alexandria. But the writer and his hero
can not substitute each for the
other: "Durrell's voice always expresses
more than Darley's". 9As an agent
of the literary construction he observes and
relates the facts, the occurrences
without noticing the essence and without
establishing a relationship between
them; as a hero, he participates in the action to
which he is an audience, seek
the sense of things but he is not conscious
of the two notions 'good' and
'evil'. This does not mean that he is a skeptic
but he is placed in a universe in
which the values are relative. He also lives
in a closed world (an island in
Ciclade) like the characters of the other
Durrell's books (the action related by
9

J.A.WEIGE .op .cit.p. 57

74

him is composed by fragments).

Ludwig Pursewarden, an enigmatic novelist,
author of a strange trilogy - "God is a Humorist"
-whose friendship with Darley, Justine and Melissa
complicated so much the relation system from the
first novel and those suicide seemed so little
motivated, is presented in a more detailed portrait
which does not squander the mystery which wraps
him. His writings are complicated and hermetic; it is
mentioned Henry Miller's influence, Wyndham
Lewis', D. H. Lawrence's and of course Durrell's but
it is not clear in what consists this influence. His
erotic life is of a sickly frenzy, but Pursewarden is
capable of sincere love too, and of a certain purity.
Unlike Pursewarden, Pasadia., Darley is not as rich
as they are, they have in common only their culture,
their intelligence and the fact that they are all
writers. The action related by Darley is composed
by fragments of his memory returned by different
sources and apparently without any connection
between them. Sometimes the memories are so
blurred that they lose control and significance,

75

they overlap themselves. Justine's diary, which

Darley received from her husband Nessim constitutes
the main warehouse of the objective memory, with
the forgotten sensations brought again to light
through a mechanism of a striking simplicity.
Durrell does not believe that the episodes
of a love story written in a diary like Justine's
are more real than the ones always transformed
by the memory of that one who is removing
them. So are the memories of the pathetic love
between

Darley

and

Melissa,

delicate

embodiment of 'the lost woman', alighting from

Hardy's Tess and Dostoievsky's Sonia. "She is
one off the romantics paradoxes invented by
literature: the virtuous prostitute"13. Melissa and
Justine are two poles of the axe round which turn
all the images, all the states of mind. Both are
human beings who can be represented in a
complicated

geometry

of

the

multiplied

characters.
Justine is a woman of Levant, passionate,
cultivated. She identifies herself to Alexandria

76

in that both have a violent flavor without a true

individuality. Although the confession in her
diary seems to be complete, lacking of purity,
sometimes cynical, Justine recognizes all her
perversions. Married very young with a French
man (he author of a diary to whose implications
in the novel's texture complicates more the game
of multiple perspective) she has a child who was
kidnapped in mysterious circumstances. The
search for the lost child explored by Durrell at
different narrative levels motivates, partly at
least, Justine's behaviour. Maybe even her
marriage to Nessim is justified by the need of
money, the influence he has in the almighty
circles in Alexandria which could help her to find
her little girl. Finally nobody is sure of the
child's destiny, if he was really kidnapped or
not, which is Justine's real attitude regarding this
fact: maybe she is pushed by a permanent need
to search, maybe she hides some facts which
she knows very well only to be able to
accomplish that psychological necessity. Darley

77

seduces her after she had listened to him

talking about Canary's poetry. The relationship
between them establishes under the sign of
poetry and this circumstance will be reflected
over their whole love story, over Justine's
portrait

as

it

is

projected

in

Darley's

consciousness: a portrait of a strange purity who

drives away the traces of any vulgarity or as the
feminine character of D. H. Lawrence engrosses
them in a complex image in which it is
impossible to separate the beauty from the ugly.
But unlike the author of "Women in Love",
Durrell places Justine and Melissa at the
boundary of the fiction, human beings - like the
portraits of Leonardo Da Vinci - hide more than
express.
As to the relationship between Darley and
Melissa, he seemed not to much impressed by
the qualities one can find at his lover, charm,
beauty, intelligence, but he was impressed by
her power of feeling which Darley couldn't call
in another way but charity, in the Greek sense of

78

the word. With her hands of a consumptive

patient, with her indifferent beauty, she has
never impressed him. He never dreamt of
becoming her lover, he even thought that he
didn't deserve her love. He was a 'human
material lacking of perspectives' who Melissa
had chosen to brief, to make him more alive. She
made part from the low society, and besides she
was very ill and very poor and she would have
to add to those Darley's burdens. But she had a
lot of courage, courage of her despair, although
she wasn't so strong, so powerful as Justine.
She loved Darley sincerely and even she knew
about his relationship with Justine she never
became angry and this, because she was very
conscious of her state, of her illness and of the
fact that she didn't deserve him. She never
tried to ask him for help, she tried to win her
existence by her own power. Maybe it was
courage that impressed Darley mostly.
A strange character in Durrell's novel is
Nessim, a sort of mixture between the ridiculous

79

and mysterious. Nessim was a Copt, educated in

Germany and England. He combines the features
of Oriental temperament with the modernity of a
spirit appropriated in his whole substance. As the
story goes on, the levels of the plot and of the
ambiguity come to the light and from a certain
point of view, the construction of the novel
dovetail to this gradual revelation of Nessim's
psychological structure, an odd amalgam of
mystic devotion and shyness. He is full of
money and he even feel sick of them. The
people in Alexandria believed him to be a
strange man and that because of their trivial
discrimination, their law preoccupations, their
lack of education which made them incapable to
think of a style in the European sense of the
word. Nessim was like this ever since his birth.
His manners were not due to his education. In
that limited world "where money are earned with
a carnal intention"10 he couldn't find a place to
act for his spirit which was in fact a very delicate
10

L.Durrell, C.R. , 1991, p. 75

80

one and dreamy. He was not a man who wanted

to impose his point of view but his actions
made people comment on his personality.
People were tempted to say that his
education is due to Germany and England, the
countries where he has been, but these
countries had no influence on him they only
made him feel not feel well in Alexandria.
Germany has awaken in him the taste for
metaphysical speculation, Oxford tried to make
him pedantic but it succeeded only to develop
his vocation for philosophy so much that he
couldn't practice anymore the art that interested
him mostly, the painting. He used to meditate a
lot and suffered but he had not the power to
decide to act, to do something for his talent.
Nessim was in conflict with the city but his great
fortune made him to have many connections
with businessmen in the city. He also was an
excellent businessman. His kindness seemed
sometimes crossed by a wire of steel, his
subordinates were always amazed to find out

81

that however absent - minded he seemed he

didn't lose any detail of his affairs. Almost any
transaction he did proved to be based on a
final argument full of discrimination. He
was a kind of 'oracle' for his subordinates
although he seemed not to care about this
matter. "Not to care about profits was a real
madness' was Alexandria's opinion.
Round
characters

Nessim

Melissa,

gravitate
Cohen,

different

Mountolive,

Pursewarden, even Justine, but in the end he

will lose his halo of mystery and will became
almost a common man. , Durrell's Nessim had a
little more strange behaviour. In his great building
happened strange things, he was involved in the
actions of a spy center. He and his brother
Narouz plot against the British. The reasons were
not important and never appear very clearly in the
novel, we only know that Justine's marriage and her
love affairs are, most of them explained by the
necessity of shunting for the plotter's actions. In
"Balthazar" it is revealed that Nessim used to have

82

lunch with the king of industry and army. Round

Nessim and Justine there was a

cosmopolitan

world, of a certain picturesque but a very dangerous

one. Most of those people which Darley knew in
this mysterious atmosphere of Alexandria are
under the sign of sin, the erotism which becomes
obsessive to someone, frantic and cannot pull
out the other from his indolence. Most of them
gather at Mnemjian's, who is also a very vivid
character with a childish look.
Josua Scobie, character of a trivial
plasticity, is an old police officer who is
transformed from a suspicious, clumsy, ridiculous
policeman in a real saint surrounded by an
ambiguous mystic band. But even the cult of the
punished Scobie will be a sort of slapstick, the jokes
he told, the remembrance of his mistakes being
accompanied by proofs . His comrades, making
part from the underworld, made a group which
gives colour, a strong colour ; they look like the
jesters in the Renascentist dramas, bringing
with

them

the

fun

(deliberately

or

83

unintentional) and the ridiculous in an always

concentrated and full of mystery story. Scobie is
a sailor. He was almost 70 years old and he still
was afraid of death. "His big fear was that he
would wake in a morning and he would
discover that he was dead - Lieutenant
Commandor Scobie, officer of the British
Empire". Any mythology of the city wouldn't
be complete without Scobie, and Alexandria
would be poor the day when he will die. His
trifling retired pay was not enough to pay the
rent for a little room in the district of shanties
behind Tatwig street. Clea used to give him
tobacco and brandy. He used to drink very
much. Durrell describes him as a profile of
primitive animals in fog and rain because he
ressembles in a way to the English climate
and "his great happiness was to stay and chat in
winter near a microscopic fire". Durrell realizes
an impressing physical description of Scobie the
old pirate: "his skull seems blunted with only a
thin crust which separate his smile of the

84

skeleton's smile hidden under it"23. The old

Scobie was a small motor - pilot coming from
old times "an object as pathetic and friendly as
the first Stephenson's railway engine'. He used
to spend his afternoons sleeping or reading
some old newspapers which he barrowed from
a Greek seller, a friend of him. "Wisdom means
everything".11
The furniture in his room demonstrates
a perfect eclectic soul. The few objects which
made more beautiful his life had a personal
nuance of sobriety as if they were united to
compose the personality of their owner. There
are another three characters in Durrell's novel who
represent that world of moral degradation. One of
them is Paul Capodistria, a sexual obsessed coming
from a family of neuropathies, of suicides, all
cursed. It is not so well known his role in the plots
of Alexandria. It is only known the fact that he
makes part from a secret society, and that he
practices black witchcraft. He is a
11

bad guy, a

L.Durrell, Justine, C.R. p.174

85

double - dealer, "about who you can never know the

truth". 12 Even his death proves to be a mystification,
his dead body being substituted to an unknown one.
"Capodistria...what is the link between him and all
those things! He looks more like an elf rather than a
human being. He has a flat head, triangular, a
head of snake, with big frontal lobes. His hair
grows from the face, forming a crest. He has a
white tongue that trembles He is very rich
and he needn't to move a finger to be served.
All day long he sits on the balcony of Misit's
club looking at the women passing by"13. His
friends were calling him Da Capo because of his
sexual performances, famous as his richness or
his ugliness. He was a kind of relative with
Justine who was saying about him: "I feel pity
of him! His heart is wither about, he still has the
five senses like the broken pieces of a glass of
wine"28.
Georges Gaston Pombal, a small clerk is a
nice character of a lover of nature, a lazy boy
12
13

L.Durrell, Justine, C.R. p. 64

Idem

86

who participates with not to big enthusiasm

to the activities of espionage and who is always
entangled in love affairs. He used to go with
Darley at the "babilonean Mnemjian's barber a '
dwarf with a violet eye, which never lost his
look of a child. He is the memory - man the
archive of the city" 29. If anybody wanted to
know the past or the income of the last
passenger whatever important he would have
been, he could tell in every details. What he
didn't know he could find out in order to please
the one who was asking for a piece of
information. It was just a matter of time for him.
Toto de Brunel (whose participation at the
action will be defined more precisely in
"Balthazar") is one of the numerous psychopaths
whose sexual abnormalities make him to be
hated by everyone. His assassination, like the
numberless

episodes

of

this

kind

in

Alexandria before the war, is overwhelmed

by mystery; but the death of this person, weak
and unpleasant doesn't seem to afflict anybody.

87

In the same way these characters shows us by

their behavior and their state of being the
ugliest sides of Alexandria . Returning to
Durrells novel we can say that one of the central
axes of the action in the Quartet is doctor Balthazar,
he also a (client of) customer at Mnemjian's
barbershop that concise summary of the city's life.
Darley describes him as "one of those fortress",
as the platonician demon intermediary between
goods and the people of the city. With this doubtful
morality, he is a reflexive man, a mysterious
silhoutte projected against the strange background
of Alexandria, an embodiment of a legend about an
unreal hero, a prophet, a visionary, omniscient
and eternal. In the first volume of the quartet,
Durrell doesn't take advantage of his extraordinary
knowledge, of his amazing experience of a
veritable son of Alexandria, but the second
volume, which will have as title the name of
this strange doctor represents the form Darley's
narration. Corrected and amended by that one
who knows everything about everybody that

88

being his power and his agony. Darley has the

perspective of logical appearance, Baltazar
modifies it by introducing that one of the
fantastic truth. As a story goes on, the epic
perspective modifies. There are new sides and
understandings of Alexandria. Balthazar comes
to bring to Darley the manuscript in the island in
which he had spent a time with the child of the
unhappy Melissa. It is new form the manuscript
doesn't reveal the deep sense of the mysteries
of Alexandria because these are still unknown
to Balthazar too. But there are some characters
that become more important as for example
Narouz, Nessim's brother, very little mentioned
in the first volume, he becomes a fascinating
portrait, a passionate visionary, frantic, inclined
to demonism. His life very intensely lived
announces violence and death.(Otherwise he
will be assasinated in the end of the third
volume).
Durrell's piece of work is full of
romanticism although interrupted by some

89

ugly scenes . We encounter many beautiful

descriptions of the places, for example the
lake Mareotis is described in a very beautiful
manner. In autumn it becomes yellow - lilac,
and on its silky banks spring beds of brilliant
anemones like stars which come to the light
from the land. In the night the city is full of
new sounds, blown by the speed and the power
of the wind until it becomes like a boat, its
beams scream and creak at every new attack of
the bad weather. But Alexandria, so pacific
outside is not all safe for the Christians. In this
city one couldn't live without joining together the
two extremes of the behavior and of the habits
which are not due to the intellectual abilities of the
inhabitants but to the landscape in which they
lived. The

historians always presented the

syncretism as being a result of a mixture of

intellectual contradictory principles but this thing
doesn't explain the problem. There is not a
problem of the races and of the mixed languages, it
is about a national odd thing of those who live in

90

Alexandria that consists in looking for conciliation

between two psychological features, the people who
were thinking more profoundly were conscious of.
That is why people over there are hysteric and
extremists. Men like Balthazar

will never

understand that the biggest attention must be

accorded to God, that he exerts a strong attraction
over all that is meanly - feeling of inability, the
fear of the unknown, the failure and above all the
selfishness which believes that the crown of a
martyr is a medal for an athletic conquest very hard
to obtain. The real and subtle nature of God must
not have distinctive features: a glass of water from
an insipid and inodorous spring only refreshing
and it is for sure that it will attract only the few,
very few real contemplative ones. As concerning the
most of the people, it was included in that part of
their souls that they wish the less to know or to
research. Darley thinks that there is no system
which can make nothing than to pervert the
absolute idea. There is nothing capable to explain
everything, although everything can enlighten

91

something. "God I think I'm drunk, if God would be

something it would be art, sculpture or
medicine".

14

People in Alexandria used to

practice a kind of religion, Cabala, originated in

the Middle Ages. They used to gather in an old
house made by wood like those in which are
sitting the guards. It seems that they had chosen
that then because if the pathologic sensibility of
the

Egyptian

police

towards

the

politic

meetings. It is obviously a very beautiful

description of that place: "You passed a series
of digs and deserts parapets rised in a hurry by
the archaeologists and you kept your way on a
muddy street, entering the stone gate; then
suddenly taking the corner, in straight angles
you entered the big and rudimentary novel, one
of its walls being made by the embankment and
having the floor of trodden land. The interior
was strongly lighted by two lamps and
furnished by chairs of wickerwork"34. Every time
the meeting was composed by rather twenty
14

L.Durrell, Justine, C.R., 1991 p. 192

92

people coming from different parts of the city.

Even Capodistria and of course Nessim used to
attend the meeting. In a corner I was amazed to
notice the bored face of Capodistria. Nessim
was there of course but in general you couldn't
see too many persons belonging to the rich
society or to the educated people of the city.
Among the others you could see an old man, a
clock manufacturer who I knew very well - a
distinguished man whom austere features gave
me the feeling that they must be completed with
a violin under his chin'. 15 They weren't people
from the high society, they were mostly
common people. The study of Cabala was a
science as well as a religion. Cabala's structure
consisted in an inner circle of learned
composed by twelve members who were writing
to each other using the old form of writing
known under the name of "boustrophedon".
The letters used in their alphabet were
ideograms of some states of mind or states of
15

Idem.

93

soul. Balthazar was saying about Cabala: "the

mission of Cabala, if it has one, is to ennoble so
much the function, that even the act of eating was
put to the rank of an art. You will see in all these the
flower of a skepticism which undermine the instinct
of race maintenance. It is only love which can uphold
you"16. In the last volume, a hero says that years must
pass to agree with the idea that people don't care
they really don't care about the others than one day
you will realize that it is God who doesn't care. And
it is not the fact that he doesn't care but he doesn't
care at all. It was again Balthazar who said: "To
draw nearer to God you need a huge ignorance.
Perhaps I always knew too many things". 17In the
end of the novel, when returning to Alexandria
Darley meets Clea who he had known before they
become lovers. Clea was the painter of dr.
Balthazar's clinic. Darley avoided to present her
although he was thinking very much at her. As to
Clea I wonder if it is only my imagination that
makes me to seem difficult to make her portrait. I
16
17

L.Durrell, Justine, C.R., 1991 p. 159

L.Durrell, Justine, C.R., 1991 p.166

94

think a lot of her although I realized that in all I

wrote here I avoided to deal with her. Maybe it is in
that thing that the difficulty consists in: in the fact
that it doesn't seem to exist a natural concordance
between her habits and her real nature. If I
described the exterior structure of her life, very
simple graceful and reserved, I would like to make
her seem a nun in whose soul the whole row of
human passions made room for a fascinating
research of the sublime ego' 18Darley describes her
as being very attractive, not beautiful but attractive
in away. She has a candid face, her hair was blond,
her eyes grey -green. "Clea was the pretty and the
kind woman, Clea who one could never know, was
the best friend of Scobie and she was spending
most of her time with the old pirate. She used to
leave the studio, her cobweb to make tea for
him or to listen to his endless monologues
about a life which retired long time ago"19
As concerning the relationship with
Darley they were walking and talking about
18
19

L.Durrell, Justine, C.R., 1991 p.177

Idem.

95

many things, especially about love. In one of

their meditations she said: "Love is firmly
established once forever and to every of us it is
destined only a part of it. It is possible that love
appears under numerous forms but it is limited
as concerning its quantity, it can be exhausted, it
can be worn out and withered before reaching its
main and real aim".

20

This was the kind of

discussions that used to be prolonged till the

midnight that put together those two people,
Darley and Clea. Their friendship allowed them
to confess one to another.
"The Alexandria Quartet"", by its
characters and descriptions illustrates very well
the contrast between the high and the low
society, between the sublime and the grotesque,
between the civilization and the periphery of the
city. In "The Alexandria Quartet" the characters and
the prevailing

ethos

are as elaborate

and

complicated as the plot and the setting. Durrell and

the others are generating a renaissance of romance.
20

L.Durrell, Justine, C.R., 1991 p.179

96

In "Justine" the first novel all events and characters

are described through the eyes of a single person as
in any ordinary traditional novel. In "Balthazar" a
character of that name corrects the 'mistake' in
'Justine'. The "1" of the first novel misunderstood
most of that was happening because he had looked at
everything from his own' narrow and relative' point
of view. In the third novel "Mountolive" the reader
finds that Balthazar too had been speaking relatively
and the characters had all kind of motives and the
events all kind of causes which he never suspected.
In the fourth novel "Clea" the reader is told what
happens to the characters several years after the now
untangled events in the first three volumes took
place. This is the 'time dimension' added to the
three - space - dimension. "Once upon a time" the
first words of a story are the last words or almost
the last ones in Durrells Alexandria Quartet.
Durrell combines in his art the primitive and
the sophisticated. With his novel, Durrell opened
new ways in literature, painting with penmanship
the nature and the life of the city. Lawrence Durrell

97

is an artist singing the changing light of the seasons.

The naive idyllic and stir of life at periphery mix up
in a symphony orchestra , the landscape -darken and
bright- according to the states of mind and soul of the
characters, all these offer to the reader a piece of life.

CHAPTER V
THE ART OF CHARACTERIZATION

Many of Durrell's major characters, such as

Darley, Pursewarden, and Clea in The Alexandria

98

Quartet, Constance and Blanford in The Avignon

Quintet, and the narrator of Prospero's Cell
(1945), are heroes and heroines on a quest to
transform their lives. As they proceed in their
quest, they face obstacles. They sometimes
realize that they have set off in the wrong
direction.The narrator of The Black Book says:
"There is only trial and error on a journey like
this, and no signposts."
The people that Durrell's modern hero encounters
are no help, either. They have no recognizable
signposts to their personalities. When Justine in
The Alexandria Quartet looks at her multifaceted reflections in a dressmaker's mirror, she
asks: "Why should not people show more than
one profile at a time?"
The quests on which Durrell's characters embark
do not exactly follow the traditional pattern of the
Western hero. Instead, these journeys more
closely correspond to the movement of the soul
in reincarnation.
The reader is given multiple

99

'images' of his characters as seen from a number of

viewpoints. On some occasions it is not just the
interpretation of the characters' actions and motives
but the factual evidence itself that seems to differ
from one narrator to another, so that we can't tell
what really happened and what the narrator only
imagines might have happened. A good example
of this is the fate of Justine's daughter; we find
several conflicting accounts of her mysterious
disappearance and at some point it is even implied
that the child may have never existed.
Justine is a very vivid and satisfying novel in
itself. In its sequels, Balthazar and Mountolive,
we learn that Darley, though a perfectly
trustworthy narrator, had misinterpreted the
meaning of all the key events. Justine had never
been really in love with Darley, but, if with
anybody, with Pursewarden, who had thrust her
out of his hotel room shortly before she came to
Darley's flat. The marriage of Nessim and Justine
was not a love-match (though they are perfectly
sexually well adjusted to each other) but a

100

political alliance between the Egyptian Jews and

Copts, who are conspiring against the British
presence in Egypt and the Near East generally,
and smuggling arms (strangely, German Hitlerian
arms) into Palestine. Justine's affairs with Darley
and Pursewarden are partly genuinely sexual but
more fundamentally she is acting as a secret
agent, since, in addition to Darley's teaching and
Pursewarden's writing, both are British Embassy
intelligence agents, Darley a very minor and not
very efficient one, Pursewarden a highly placed
one.
Pursewarden is not an ideal man for this job, too
fundamentally intuitive and indiscreet, and from
Melissa, who is one of his many mistresses, he
learns that Nessim is at the centre of the
conspiracy. He kills

himself,

having

first

managed both to warn Nessim and to put the

Ambassador,

Mountolive,

in

the

picture.

Mountolive passes the information on to the more

or less puppet Egyptian government. Nessim
buys time and life from the head of this, the

101

loath-some Memlek, by lavish bribery, but

Memlek has to do something to keep the British
(and his own Egyptian rivals and colleagues)
quiet and arranges the assassination of Nessim's
brother, the hare-lipped fierce and tender country
squire, Narouz. One main motive, one might
mention in passing, of the Coptic conspiracy is
that under the British the Copts have been robbed
of

the

key

places

in

government

and

administration that they enjoyed under the Turks

and under the Egyptian kings of Turkish ancestry.
Narouz has been frankly rabble-rousing, which
makes his killing explicable.
Mountolive's position is complicated both by the
fact that in his youth, sent to Egypt by the
Foreign Office to learn Egyptian Arabic, he has
been the lover of the mother of Narouz and
Nessim, Leila, who might have left Egypt to join
him in Europe if she had not been suddenly
stricken with confluent small-pox. But his official
duties come first to him, and when Leila an old
woman now, drenched in perfume asks him to

102

protect her sons, he rejects her brutally.

He is punished indirectly by being trapped into
visiting a brother (Justine has already visited it in
a vain search for a lost child by her earlier
marriage) where the children tear his clothes, and
wound terribly his official image of himself.
Mountolive is the lover of Pursewarden's blind
sister, Liza. She has been her brother's lover, but
this is not what worries Mountolive; profoundly
conventional, he feels that it is eccentric for an
Ambassador to have a blind wife. one of the
multiple possible motives for Pursewarden's
suicide is to pave the way for this marriage; and
after Pursewarden's death Darley and Liza burn
Pursewardenss letters to Liza in which his genius
has perhaps (one thinks of D. H. Lawrence's
letters)

expressed

itself

more

fully

and

spontaneously than in his novels.

Clea, the coda to this complex story, brings
Darley back to Egypt in the early years of the
Second World War, with Nessim's child by
Melissa. Nessim has been, and Justine still is,

103

under house arrest in one of their country estates,

but Nessim is working his passage by serving in
an ambulance unit in the often heavily bombed
docks. He has been injured, losing an eye and a
finger, and Justine herself has had a slight stroke,
leaving her with a drooping eye. Nessim leaves
Darley alone with Justine, and she comes naked
to his bed, stinking of a bottle of perfume which
she has nervously spilt over herself. Darley
rejects her (Leila was similarly stinking of
perfume when Mountolive so brutally rejected
her plea for help for Narouz and Nessim).
Darley now discovers that the cool blonde artist,
Clea, not poor little Melissa, not over-eager
Justine, is his true elective affinity: they have an
affair which is calm and idyllic, but its very
calmness seems to paralyse both as artists. She
becomes a true artist only when, at a picnic by
the sea, while she is swimming under water, a
harpoon is accidentally (but is anything in Durrell
accidental?) fired and her right hand is transfixed
to the sea-floor. Darley dives, and hacks her free,

104

a doctor, her former lover (whose wife is a girl

whose nose has been eaten away by lupus, but he
has built her a good new grafted-on nose)
reconstitutes a partly artificial hand and Clea
becomes a really good painter (one thinks of the
great painter Renoir, in old age, semi-paralytic,
painting with a long brush, the handle as long as
a broom handle, strapped to his wrist). True love
is not enough. Darley and Clea really love each
other when they are at a great distance (she in the
South of France, he in a Greek island) working
away on their stuff, and sending each other what
Auden calls 'long marvellous letters'. The practice
of art and the fulfillment of physical love are both
'stages on life's way' to something beyond
themselves. Darley hopes that from a distance in
time and space he can impose some meaningful
pattern on this strange and confusing period of his
life , and that reality can be "reordered, reworked
and made to show its significant side "(J ., p . 20)
In recording his reminiscences Darley shows no
concern for chronology or for cause-effect

105

sequence ; his narration ranges in an apparently

random way all over the period of his stay in
Alexandria and seems to follow the strange logic
of dream or reverie rather than that of conscious
recollection .
Even though Justine is basically a record of
Darley's personal experiences , he is not the only
voice heard in the novel. Other characters' points
of view are incorporated into the main stream of
narration in the form of excerpts from letters and
diaries that Darley apparently had access to,
passages from an autobiographical novel by
Arnauti, Justine's first husband and another
writer-character in the novel, as well as
conversations Darley claims to remember almost
ad literam . However, the interpretation of people
and events rests ultimately with Darley, who
selects and rearranges facts to fit into his version
of reality. Darley is an unreliable narrator, and
detect certain gaps and inconsistencies in his
story .
It is only in Balthazar , however, that the

106

full extent of Darley's bias is made obvious .

Durrell uses the following quotation from de Sade
as a motto to this second volume in the tetralogy :
"The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror
loves the man ; another mirror sees the man as
frightful and hates him and it is always the same
being who produces the impression". At the
beginning of the novel Balthazar, an Alexandria
doctor and a friend of most of the characters
introduced in Justine, reads Darley's account of
events and 'corrects' it by supplying his own
version of what really happened . Balthazar's
"Interlinear" shows the main actors of the drama in
a completely different light revealing their secret
motives and providing unexpected answers to
questions asked in Justine. Looking at an old
photograph which shows most of his Alexandrian
friends , Darley realizes that the familiar scene has
assumed an entirely different meaning for him . On
the surface , all the characters are still there , in the
same postures as before , but now Darley - and the
reader - can project upon the familiar figures the

107

new knowledge of their hidden motives and

complex relationships .
In trying to re-tell his story , Darley follows
Balthazar's advice : "I suppose ... that if you
wished somehow to incorporate all I am telling
you into your own Justine manuscript now , you
would find yourself with a curious sort of book...
the story would be told , so to speak , in layers ...
like some medieval palimpsest where different
sorts of truth are thrown down one upon another,
the one obliterating or perhaps supplementing
another..." (B . 388). Apart from Balthazar's
comments , the voices of other characters are again
heard through extracts from-their writings and
recalled

conversations

giving

us

different

interpretations of the same events and people ,

sometimes overlapping and complementing each
other, sometimes contradictory .
In a few phrases he can create a suggestive
image and capture the essence, the specific "aura",
of a given character. Some of Durrell's character
sketches are but brief impressions, more like

108

poet's notes than complete prose portraits; others

are more extended. The characters' dominant traits
are often suggested by means of startling
comparisons and metaphors. These first images or
'vignettes' have a haunting power and are
instruments in shaping the reader's response to a
given character. This is especially the case with
Durrell's portrayal of Alexandria's women, in
particular Justine, Melissa and Clea. The figure of
Justine dominates the Quartet, especially in the first
three volumes of the work. Justine is the character
that surprises us most as each successive novel
brings new revelations about her past and her
relations with several of the protagonists. However,
even though she plays different roles and wears
different masks, to use Durrell's phrase, she is a
well-defined character with certain constant
characteristics and patterns of behaviour.
In our first glimpse of Justine as she passes
below Darley's window, she is smiling to herself "as
if at some private satisfaction" (Justine, p. 22)
with a mischievous smile which reminds Darley of

109

the way she laughs, "showing these magnificent

white teeth" (Ibid). This apparently irrelevant
remark of the narrator takes on a somewhat
sinister and ominous meaning as we turn to the
next page and learn that Justine seemed to belong
to "that race of terrific queens which left behind
them the ammoniac smell of their incestuous loves
to hover like a cloud over the Alexandria
subconscious... The giant man-eating cats like
Arsinoe were her true siblings" (Justine, p. 23).
Thus from the very beginning of the
Quartet we are made to feel that Justine is
potentially a dangerous woman, a femme fatale, a
"man-eater". Our initial feelings about her are confirmed later as Justine proves to be a destructive
force in the lives of many of the Quartet
characters. The first description of Justine also
gives us a hint of her narcissism and her total
absorption in the private world of her feelings and
obsessions, while the mention of her mischievous
smile foreshadows later revelations about her
unlimited capacity for mischief, treachery and

110

intrigue. Destructiveness, mischief, narcissism these are the dominant traits of Justine's character.
They are still manifest in the last glimpse that we
have of her at the end of Clea. Here Justine is seen
in the full exercise of her power to charm and
subdue men. After a long period of imprisonment
and illness she triumphs again, leading the once
formidable Memlik Pascha "like a poodle on a
leash". We are told that she looked radiant and her
eyes sparkled with impish mockery and clever
malevolence. "It was as if, like some powerful
engine of destruction, she had suddenly switched
on again" (Clea, P. 876).
The predatory character of Justine is
underlined in The Quartet by means of figurative
language. Justine is several times compared to
birds and animals of prey, such as the eagle,
panther or leopard. We are told that she "looked and
seemed an eagle" (J., p. 46) and "gazed about her
like a half-trained panther" (J., p. 30). When Justine
decides to make use of Darley, she sets out to
destroy his love for Melissa and starts by

111

obliterating all traces of the girl's presence in

Darley'sflat: "She walked over to the dressing-table
with its row of photos and powder-boxes and with
a single blow like that of a leopard's paw swept it
clean" (J., p. 75). The bird imagery is used again in
the description of Justine in Clea. At that time
Justine is under house arrest, ill and broken down
by the failure of the political intrigue engineered by
her husband. Darley, now emotionally detached
and even faintly disgusted, watches his former love
"lying there, soiled and tattered, like a dead bird
in gutter, her hands crumpled into claws" . The
image is reminiscent of the earlier description of
Melissa as a "half-drowned bird" (J., p. 26), but it
does not call forth the same sympathy on the part of
the narrator and of the reader. Our pity for Justine is
tempered by the reminder that even in defeat and
misfortune she has retained some traces of her
predatory character - suggested in the quoted
passage by the use of the word "claws".
Apart from establishing certain dominant
character traits, Durrell's descriptions create in the

112

reader's mind an image of Justine as a beautiful

woman using her beauty to manipulate men. We
are told that she had "magnificent troubled eyes"
(J., p. 28), "glossy black hair" (J., p. 59), a "lovely
head" (J., p. 30), and beautifully shaped hands with
long fingers (p. 114). She is referred to as a "darkbrowed, queenly beauty" (M., p. 506), a "magical
dark mistress" (C, p. 691), and in the so-called
"Character-Squeezes" at the end of Justine as an
"arrow in darkness". Although in Clea Justine is
presented as looking less attractive as a result of
her long illness, she remains in the reader's
memory as a beautiful "femme fatale" surrounded
by admiring men.
The portrait of Melissa, another important
female figure in the Quartet, is drawn by similar
methods. Melissa is introduced to the reader at the
beginning of Justine, and the initial sketch of the
character comes again from Darley as he recalls his
first impressions of the girl: "I used to see her, I
remember, pale, rather on the slender side, dressed
in a shabby sealskin coat, leading her small dog

113

about the winter streets. Her blue-veined hands,

etc. Her eyebrows artificially pointed upwards to
enhance those fine dauntlessly candid eyes..." (J.,
p. 21). In the same paragraph we are told that
Melissa won Darley's affection "not by any
qualities one might enumerate in a lover - charm,
exceptional beauty, intelligence - no, but by the
force of what I can only call her charity, in the
Greek sense of the word" (Ibid.).
Thus

already

in

this

introductory

description of Melissa all her essential qualities

are suggested - her poverty, humility, courage,
honesty and charity. The desired effect is
achieved by a careful choice of adjectives and the
selection of significant details. Adjectives like
pale, slender, shabby are used to create the
impression of Melissa's fragility and poverty, while
the phrase "fine dauntlessly candid eyes" suggests
someone courageous and free from guile. These
features of Melissa remain unchanged throughout
the Quartet.
The initial sketch of her character is

114

confirmed by further descriptive passages and the

comments of different narrators. The delicacy of
her classical type of features is conveyed in a
number of lyrical descriptions - as when Darley
recalls her "long bereft Greek face, with its sane
pointed nose and candid eyes", her "pale
reflective fingers". (J., p. 50). Her child-like
qualities are also frequently hinted at: she has "the
satiny skin that is given only to the thymus dominated", a "slender stalk of the neck" (J., p.
50): and she is once described as a "pale waif of
the Alexandrian littoral" (B., p. 30). We also learn
that she had a light, effortless and candid laugh (J.,
p. 55).
Melissa's character is more fully revealed
by her behaviour, and especially in her relation
with Darley. She is always eager to help and she
never tries to assert her rights or fight for Dar-ley's
love when he neglects her. As Darley puts it "In
her there was a pliancy and resilience which was
Oriental - a passion to serve" (J., 48). Another
characteristic feature of Melissa is her sadness, her

115

"profound and consuming world-weariness" (M.,

p. 529), which occasionally drives her to hashishsmoking and leads to periods of complete lethargy
(J., p. 49). In the "Character Squeezes", she is
named a "patron of sorrow", and it is her
melancholy and passive acceptance of her fate that
makes her such a poignant figure.
Our overall impression of Melissa is also
greatly influenced by the use of flower and animal
imagery in connection with her. Thus, for instace,
Darley gives the following poetic description of his
mistress: "Melissa was a sad painting from a winter
landscape contained by a dark sky; a window box
with a few flowering geraniums lying forgotten on
the window-sill of a cement-factory" (J., p. 46).
The image conveys Melissa's humbleness and
sadness which is part of her attitude to life. Later in
the Quartet, Pursewarden defines her beauty as "the
soft bloom of phthisis" (M., p. 526) and describes
her "slender body with its slanting ribs ..."(M.,p.
529).
In addition to flower imagery, bird

116

imagery is repeatedly used to characterize

Melissa. Recalling his first meeting with the girl,
Darley reflects: "I found Melissa, washed up like a
half-drowned bird, on the dreary littorals of
Alexandria, with her sex broken..." (J., p. 26).
The image expresses the pathos and hopelessness
of Melissa's situation; it also emphasizes her
fragility and vulnerability. Melissa is also
compared to a gull - "... that shabby room where
Melissa lay, breathing as lightly as a gull" (J., p.
27) and a sparrow (M., p. 526). Finally, her
timidity and delicate charm, quite out of place in
the sordid night club where she has to work, are
evoked by the description of her dancing with "the
air of a gazelle harnessed to a water wheel" (J., p.
27).
Clea is not only the main female character
in the last volume of the work but has an
important role to play from the very beginning of
the Quartet. The other characters turn to her with
their problems, knowing that she is always ready to
help and give advice. She is, in effect, a kind of

117

"good spirit" of the city, warm-hearted and

generous. Her essential qualities are suggested in
the first description of her.
Everything about her person is honey-gold
and warm in tone; the fair, crisply-trimmed hair
which she wears rather long at the back, knotting it
simply at the downy nape of her neck. This focuses
the candid face of a minor muse with its smiling
grey-green eyes. The calmly disposed hands have a
deftness and shapeliness which one only notices
when one sees them at work, holding a paint-brush
perhaps or setting the broken leg of a sparrow in
splints made from match-ends. I should say
something like this: that she had been poured,
while still warm, into the body of a young grace:
that is to say into a body born without instincts or
desires (J., p. 107).
This passage summarizes all the dominant
features of Clea - her warm nature, good humour,
inner calm, innocence, and kindness towards all
living creatures. In fact Clea has all the qualities
required of the ideal nurse, and she is frequently

118

portrayed in situations where she brings comfort to

those physically or mentally ill. This association of
Clea with healing processes is enforced by the fact
that she is the clinic painter, employed by Balthazar
to record in paint certain medical anomalies. Darely
describes seeing her in the clinic garden, dressed in
a white medical smock and painting with her
"capable and innocent fingers" one of her "large
coloured drawings of terrifying lucidity and
tenderness"

(J.,

p.

109).

Clea's

"generous

innocence" (J., p. 239) is referred to repeatedly; it is

also evident in her behaviour towards others. The
predominant traits of her character are also expressed
in her artistic work.We are told that her "bold yet
elegant canvasses radiate clemency and humour (J.,
p. 108).
Apart

from

the

portraits

of

female

characters, we find in the Quartet several extended

character sketches of the male protagonists - for
instance Balthazar (J., pp. 78-79), Nessim (J., pp.
29-30) or Narouz (B p. 252). In most of these
portraits a similar technique is used: a brief

119

description of the character's external appearance in

which the most striking features are indicated (e.g.,
Balthazar's hypnotic eyes, or Narouz's hare-lip),
followed by the narrator's explicit statement
pointing to the character's dominant personality
traits. There is no essential difference between the
character sketches in the three novels narrated by
Darley and those in Mountolive, although Parley's
character sketches tend to be more impressionistic
than the ones in Mountolive. In this third volume of
the Quartet, there are a number of brief character
sketches of minor figures representing the
different ethnic communities of Alexandria, as
well as expatriates and diplomats connected with
various foreign missions. Several of the latter are
comic characters verging on caricatures, as Durrell
exaggerates national characteristics and eccentricities. Metaphoric language and animal imagery
one again used to suggest the characters' dominant
features, or often a single dominant trait. Most of
these secondary characters do indeed fit Forster's
category of 'flat' characters or types. Alexandria,

120

the true heroine of this novel, manifests itself in

many selves, in many roles, but is in the end the
single source: more real, more potent than her
various manifestations. She hurts, she can kill,
but she also resurrects. Justine, at first a kind of
goddess, then a clever and ruthless Levantine
conspirator, then a broken and rejected woman, is
resurrected in the end, smartly dressed, walking
along the Alexandria 'trottoir', on her high heels,
arm in arm, dreaming of newer and grander
conspiracies it is only danger and conspiracy that
sparks off her sexual eagerness! with the
abominable Memlek. While reading the Quartet
the reader is frequently warned off any attempt at
forming

moral

judgements,

however

unconventional and questionable the conduct of

some of the characters. In fact, the world created
by Durrell is in many ways strikingly amoral; there
is a marked absence of any moral judgements in
the narrative, and the characters seem to live
outside any system of accepted norms and values.
Most of them are uprooted people, living away

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from their original communities, in a city which is

a meeting-place of different cultures and religious
traditions, a city harbouring "communities cut
down like the branches of trees, lacking a parent
body, dreaming of Eden" (J., P. 57).

CHAPTER VI
DURRELL AND HIS WRITING
TECHNIQUE

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Lawrence Durrell's goal in writing is to "sum up

in a sort of metaphor the cosmology of a
particular moment in which we are living." He is
a

metaphysical

writer

who,

through

his

characters, asks philosophical questions such as,

What is the nature of reality? How does the artist
describe it in words? What is the right way to live
as an artist and as a human being?
The Quartet impressed critics by the richness of
its style, the variety and vividness of its
characters, its movement between the personal
and the political, and its exotic locations in and
around the city which Durrell portrays as the
chief protagonist: "... the city which used us as its
flora - precipitated in us conflicts which were
hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved
Alexandria!" The Times Literary Supplement
review of the Quartet stated: "If ever a work bore
an instantly recognizable signature on every
sentence, this is it."
As space and time merge in modernism and
modern physics, subject and object come closer

123

together. Durrell notes that relativity theory has

had "a disruptive effect upon linguistic structure":
language "is now trying to render ... the impact of
all time crowded into one moment of time" . He
points to a "Semantic Disturbance" in literature,
which can no longer attempt a unified picture of
the world. It is Durrell's Einsteinian metaphysics
that inclines him to metonymic representation of
objects in space and time. For Durrell, the
principle of indeterminacy in physics means that
"there are no more 'facts' but simply 'point-events'
strung out in reality". The irregular placing of
these "point-events" parallels the modern writer's
serial focusing on objects and images. In
imagism and travel-writing particularly, ways of
seeing and constructing the world resist the
totalizing intellect once attributed to literature
and the author
Durrell connects his methods not only to modern
physics, but also to psychoanalysis. He quotes
Freud's statement that " dream always turns
temporal relations into spatial ones" . As various

124

scholars have suggested, Freud's condensation

and

displacement

in

dream

correspond to Jacobson's

psychology

syntagmatic and

paradigmatic axes in language. In Durrell's object

catalogues

and

spatial

connection

prevails

over

panoramas,
a

serial

paradigmatic

structuring that would organize items in relation

to an overall idea. In Durrell's method, the
physical density of objects and their spatial
relations become more important than "vertical"
relations of object and idea. A taste of black
olives can be the catalyst for a complex of
associated images, without short-circuiting the
system of concrete relations. By presenting
objects to the reader's sensory imagination,
metonymy stresses perception and "Is-ness" (29)
rather than meaning. And because the nature of
perception and unconscious selection leads one to
view objects from relativized angles within the
same field, subjectivity enters the picture. In
Durrell's method, the writer's psyche, like J.
Alfred Prufrock's, is obliquely projected into

125

objects, "as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in

patterns on a screen." Durrell's technique also
works in a temporal dimension through its
layering of memories or historical artifacts. As a
rhetorical device, metonymic arrangement such
as Durrell's displays in concrete form a writer's
cultural values and sensibilities.
Looking is an existential engagement of subject
with object: by a selective focus that comes with
experience, each viewer constructs his own
picture and in the process constructs himself.
"Greece" is not a concept to be learned through
history, myth, or geography: it is a certain
intensity of light and expansion of space that
maximizes perception and being. Intuitively
Platonist (as well as Einsteinian), Durrell
experiences the ethos of Greece as an energy or
"eternal delight" felt in a multiplicity of forms.
His "Greece" is at once a relativistic response in
space and time and a transcendent experience of
"Spirit of Place." Only a metonymic poiesis could
express such a polymorphic reality.

126

According to Friedman Durrells technique is

one of planned formlessness, a deploying of the
many pieces comprising the Rhodian mosaic,
rather than a straight-forward guide ..a
continuous narrative of events ... Durrell's Greece
functions

complexly

pervasive

motif

metaphorical

in the Quartet: as a

and

control,

atmosphere,
and

as

as

concrete

manifestation of his often shadowy figures. .

In "Landscape and Character," Durrell maintains
that "the important determinant of any culture is
after all--the spirit of place. ...Human beings are
expressions

of

their

landscape"

(156-57).

Cryptically he remarks: "You can extract the

essence of a place once you know how. If you
just get still as a needle you'll be there". His
"diviner's

art"

involves

observation,

concentration, and "a sort of science of

intuitions" .
Durrells high art aesthetic makes no concessions
to the reader, but the demands it makes are
rewarded

with

writing

which

is

superbly

127

evocative of its spirit of place, Alexandria. The

city, a favourite haunt of the Greek modernist
poet Cavafy whose unnamed presence pervades
these novels, is conjured up in all its extravagant
sensuality.
By comparison with the collection of dowdy
sparrows that inhabit the work of his peers,
Durrells characters are fabulous birds of
paradise, brilliantly placed in this exotic setting.
Alongside the central character/narrator Darley
(who seems to represent Durrell), at least three
other important figures in the Quartet are writers.
Of these, the most problematic is the novelist
Pursewarden, the high priest of aestheticism,
scattering aphorisms and philosophical and
artistic

pronouncements

whenever

he

appears. His portrayal borders on caricature, and

at times it is difficult to accept that his
pretensions are meant to be taken seriously;
nonetheless he, alongside the cross-dressing
rogue Scobie, and the alluring Jewess Justine,
remain wonderfully memorable characters.

128

In Justine, the first novel of the Quartet, the

erotics of writing is explored as thoroughly as
possible by a narrator (Darley) who is transfixed
equally by a woman and her city of Alexandria.
As a result, the reader is caught in an almost
infinitely expanding puzzle of identity and
narrative strategy that makes him or her
responsible for assembling his or her own
meaning from the scattered evidence.. Upon the
first reading, the disorientation is more constant
in Durrells text simply because he does not
frequently remind us of whom Darley is quoting
at such length. The quotation marks are
consistent, but after several paragraphs one takes
the narrative for granted, growing unconsciously
accustomed to the single quotes indicating what
is usually dialogue but could just as well be
interior commentary. This serves the technical
backdrop for the major problem - the personality
of Justine, which kicks back every time .
Darley has established a credible theory as to the
source of her mystery. Further, she has the

129

complementarily muddling trick of drawing hasty

ill-defined designs round my character, throwing
my critical faculties into disorder by her sharp
penetrating stabs: ascribing to me qualities which
she invented on the spur of the moment out of
that remorseless desire to capture my attention.
Women must attack writersand from the
moment she learned I was a writer she felt
disposed to make herself interesting by dissecting
me. (Js 71)
Contrary to Darleys accusation that she merely
invents the purport of her attacks, Darley admits
in the same paragraph that Justine is too acute
to grant him a reliable amount of delusions as to
his own importance in her life. This also
contributes

to

the

uneasiness

the

reader

experiences in Justine and Balthazar concerning

who or what this Justine character truly is,
whether she can be taken literally as she is
written or whether there is anything literal
whatsoever in her portrayal. The interpretative
task is further confounded by the many writers

130

who serve as key players in this narrative bazaar.

The intersection of expositions on lovewhether
they are centered on Justine, Claudia, Melissa or
Clea - is continuously rerouted back to the
problem of Justine, whose identity is initially not
to be trusted because Darley cannot take a linear
course

in

assembling

the

scenes

of

his

Alexandrian history. As a first-person narrative,

Justine is caught up in what could be termed an
imbroglio if the conflicts were more explicit; the
most direct statements about love and writing
tend to penetrate the characters consciences
while leaving the actual state of affairs in a
deliberate haze.
Thus no matter how devoted Darley is to
depicting Justine, the product will always be a
tortured departure from the real Justine that is all
the more piquant for the narrators selfconsciousness. In the Quartet, Pursewarden
presents an especially ripe opportunity for jealous
quandaries. As an established novelist, his
commentary on the act of writing is not the only

131

thorn that is stuck into the delusion that Darley

(and perhaps all writers) must maintain for the
sake of artistic creation. Within the first few
pages of Balthazar, that novels eponymous
teacher of mysticism gives it straight to Darley:
Darley may think Justine loved him above all, but
the truth is that he was only a decoy for her
more consuming passion for Pursewarden, a
means of forestalling her self-destruction or at
least self-betrayal at the feet of an artist who
responds to her effusions with unflinching,
insulting honesty. Take for instance the coldness
of the criteria Pursewarden supplies following
her

gushy

letter

about

his

monumental

significance: First nobody can own an artist so be

warned. Second what good is a faithful body
when the mind is by its very nature unfaithful?
Third stop whining like an Arab, you know
better. Fourth neurosis is no excuse. Health must
be won and earned by a battle. Lastly it is
honourable

if

you

cant

win

to

hang

yourself.( Durrell).

132

Durrells prose, as he describes sexual couplings

and political intrigues among the streets and
cafes of Alexandria, and evokes the atmosphere
of the surrounding countryside, sea, and islands,
is startling visual, ornate and intricately worked.
Durrell himself was critical of his ornate style. In
an interview with The Paris Review in 1959, he
said of his prose: Its too juicyI always feel I
am overwriting. I am conscious of the fact that it
is one of my major difficulties. These selfacknowledged weaknesses aside, at his best
Durrell can be compared to such supreme modern
prose stylists as Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike
and John Banville. Like them, Durrell may be
criticised as favouring style over substance, or
accused of being overly elitist and esoteric.

CONCLUSIONS

The Alexandria Quartet is the work of an artist

using the full palette of his genius to create an
intoxicating mixture of sensual imagery and

133

unforgettable characters.
In The Alexandria Quartet Durrell introduced
innovative narrative techniques to create, as he put
it, "prismatic" or "stereophonic" characters,
reflecting his view that personality as something
with fixed attributes is an illusion. Although the
writer rejected the notion of the "old stable ego of
the character", his protagonists remain throughout
the Quartet recognizable individuals with certain
constant attributes of personality as well as
appearance. This is mainly due to the use of the
method of characterization which consists in the
presentation

of

an

initial

portrait,

later

supplemented by other descriptions and confirmed by events.

Durrell is a writer endowed with a strong visual
imagination, as can be seen both in his
descriptions of landscapes and in his portraits of
people. Durrell's "portraits" are among the best
passages of his writing. There are two words
illustrated in this work, the world of intellectuals,
Darley, Pursewarden, Justine, Nessim and the world

134

of the poor ones, of the abjects, Scobie, Capodistria.

The description of the houses in which lived people
like Mellisa, Scobie, Pirgu shows once again the
contrast with the others places of luxury where
Pasadia for example or Nessim and Justine lived.
Mellisa's room, was very small with few objects,
cheap objects of toilette, cheap perfumes, all
showed her way of earning her existence. In Scobie's
room which he could hardly pay with his few money
represented him very well. The furniture in it
demonstrates a perfect electic spirit. The few objects
that made life more beautiful, had a personal
nuance of sobriety as if they were united to
compose the personality of their owner. There are in
Durrell's novel another characters as G. Pombal and
Toto de Brunei, who illustrate very well by their
minor preoccupations that they do not make part
from the elite, they only try but they rest at the
"periphery". Pombal was preoccupied with the
gossip in the city, he knew everything about
everyone, the other was one of the numerous
psychopaths whose sexual abnormalities make him

135

to be hated by everybody In Alexandria one

couldn't live without joining together the two
extremes of the behaviour and of the habits which
are not due to the intellectual abilities of the
inhabitants, but to the land, to the air and to the
landscape in which they lived : the extreme
sensuality . Alexandria is a city which only an
Englishman willingly exiled and who found his
maturity in Greece can revive. This city does not
play the simple role of decorum, it is a vivid
entity, a terrible soul made of flesh, of stone, of
crime, of dream and mystery.
Alexandria, the invented city starts and ends once
with the people in it, those who realize to escape from
this city are sick, solitary or visionary; that is why
they are deeply wounded in their sensuous existence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books :

136

1. Burdescu F., "Masters of 21 century

British Literature", Universal
Dalsi ,1998
2. Durrell, L.: "The Alexandria
Quartet", 4 vol, Bucuresti, Cartea
Romaneasca, 1991
3. Durrell .L., "Justine", Cartea Romaneasca,
1991
4. Durrell.L., ed. H.T. Moore, New York,
1964
5. Durrell L., "Balthazar", Alexandria
Quartet, Cartea Romaneasca 1991
6. Durrell L., "Clea ", C.R., 1991
7. G.S. Fraser, Lawrence Durrell, London,
1970
8. Pelican Guide to English Literature, VII
Boris Ford, London, 1964
9. V.S. Pritchett, "Alexandria Hothouse" in
The Working Novelist, London, 1965
10. George Steiner, "Lawrence Durrell: The

137

Baroque Novel" in The World of

Lawrence, 1964
11. Angus Wilson, "There's a Tyrant in the
Critic's Corner" in Opinions and
Perspectives, ed. Francis Brown,
Cambridge, Mass., 1964
Sites : www.culturecrammer.com
www.tititudorancea.com
www.lawrencedurrell.org
www.ourcivilisation.com
www.commons.emich.edu
www.glbtq.com

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