The Alexandria Quartet (1958-1960; 1962)

Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) is a writer who was always there. Not there to return to, or there to rescue me, but there in that great cacophony of early-to-mid-20th century English fiction. Yes, I would get to him one day -- after Stein, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Beckett, Baldwin ....

For some reason I can recall the many occasions when Durrell's name came up, always with a stated appreciation of his genius and prose style, often in the name of "travel writing". Mostly it was women who mentioned him, writers like local "Giantesses" Judith Copithorne and Maxine Gadd. Marian Engel mentions him in Monodromos (1973; republished as One-Way Street), which had me wondering whether he was an influence. As Maxine once said, everyone was reading Durrell "back in the day," and Engel was in Cyprus in the early-1960s.

In late-November I found Durrell's 900 page The Alexandria Quartet in the curated book section of the BC SPCA Thrift Store. Like Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), Durrell's tetralogy tells a story from multiple points of view, with each carefully wrought -- if not exhausting -- sentence seemingly born from an afternoon's worth of musing. Presently I am on Page 54 of the first book, Justine (1958), on the heels of an impoverished Nick Caraway-like narrator as he is caught in the slipstream of 1930s bourgeois Alexandria, Egypt, carried along by his better-off friends (including Justine), while anchored to his Greek girlfriend, Melissa, with whom he lives, and cares for.

There is a paragraph on pages 46-47 that bears re-reading. According to Durrell's narrator,

"[t]here is a passage in one of Justine's diaries which comes to mind here. I translate it here because though it must have referred to incidents long preceding those which I have recounted yet nevertheless it almost exactly expresses the curiously ingrown quality of love which I have come to recognize as peculiar to the city rather than to ourselves. 'Idle' she writes 'to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, thoughts; it is a simultaneuos firing of two spirits engaged in an autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illusion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false. The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point -- for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.' How characteristic and how humourless a delineation of the magical gift; and yet how true ... of Justine!"