From E. M. Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide

I can’t remember exactly when I read Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet for the first time, although it must have been sometime in the late 1970’s since I associate it with C, my girlfriend of that era. C had more catholic tastes in literature than I did; it was she who’d first picked up Fielding Dawson’s work, and some of Anne Waldman’s poetry. My own shelves were heavy with science fiction and fantasy paperbacks (Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frederick Pohl, Robert Silverberg, etc) and the digest-sized magazines (Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy, If) which I was then trying to collect in complete runs, and which now sit in my basement in boxes which have not been opened for a dozen years.

Lawrence Durrell would have been heady stuff by comparison: the sexual intrigue in an exotic locale, the world-weariness, the rather florid prose, and the elaborate psychological scaffolding with which Durrell supported and explained his characters’ actions. But I made it through — and I choose the phrase deliberately since endurance was definitely a requirement — the entire Quartet; it was a point of pride for me to be able to make that claim. My publicly stated opinion was that “Justine is the best novel of the four”, a pithy summation which I undoubtedly slipped into conversations at the slightest provocation, the judgement rendered with a worldy self-assurance and bravado that I hoped nobody would have the nerve to challenge, since it hid the fact that I’d retained very little of the work itself.

The truth was that I didn’t understand the Alexandria Quartet at all; I didn’t “get” what Durrell was up to. The mores of the characters, and the acts which the narrator recounts in Justine and its sibling novels, were so far from what I had experienced for myself that the characters might as well have been aliens, and the dramatic action taking place on another planet, rather than in a rather typical port city in the eastern Mediterranean on the eve of the Second World War (if anyone ever deserved the appellation “callow” it would have been myself, then: still in my early 20s; still with my first steady girlfriend, C; still living at home). I think that I saw them — Justine, Nessim, Balthazar, Pursewarden, Clea, Melissa — as sophisticated adults exhibiting typical grown-up behaviour, and I probably expected that my own life would one day come to resemble theirs, with all the accompanying neuroses and ennui, the emotional heights and depths that marked (I was convinced) a life truly begun.

The epigraphs with which Durrell introduces Justine (Freud: “I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which four persons are involved. We shall have a lot to discuss about that”; and de Sade: “There are two positions available to us — either crime which renders us happy, or the noose, which prevents us from being unhappy. I ask whether there can be any hesitation, lovely Thérèse, and where will your little mind find an argument able to combat that one?”) were further proof of sophistication: Sigmund Freud! The Marquis de Sade! I somehow managed to obtain copies of de Sade’s works in paperback and pored over them looking for guidance, stashing them away between readings in a secret cache which I’d built into the wall behind the baseboard of my bedroom in the family home (De Sade: more “worldly adults doing what worldly adults usually did together…”)

I’ve been rereading Justine recently as part of our current book group’s choices (a “Durrell duo”: Justine, paired with Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals) and it has been quite a different experience from that first encounter so long ago. I’ve been less absorbed in the action and the personalities; I’m no longer looking to the characters as models of “sophistication”. Instead I’ve been more interested in the way the four books work together; the way Durrell shows the characters from a variety of perspectives; the changes in “voice” (switching between first person and third) — the literary mechanics of the Quartet, in other words, as spelled out in part by these statements from Durrell’s note at the beginning of Balthazar:

Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern. The first three parts, however, are to be deployed spatially (hence the use of “sibling” not “sequel”) and are not linked in a serial form. They interlap, interweave, in a purely spatial relationship. Time is stayed. The fourth part alone will represent time and be a true sequel. […] The central topic of the book is an investigation of modern love.

“An investigation of modern love” it may have been in the late 1950s, but the sexual and psychological adventures of the narrator, Justine and Nessim et al now seem more tiresome than thrilling, the fumblings of jaded roués, rather than a deeply thought-through challenge to the constraints of a more conservative time. The characters feel like pawns being navigated by Durrell through the convolutions of his plot(s), dutifully acting as mouthpieces for epigrammatic expressions of various philosophies of love and life. Citing Freud may once have been an indication of the latest in modern thinking about human behavior, but now it pins the work firmly to the 1950s — homosexual characters are “inverts”; Justine herself is referred to more than once as a nymphomaniac; what author nowadays could seriously use such a term for a protagonist? — and makes rereading the Quartet more an exercise in nostalgia than a relevant exploration of the complications of love.

But for its time Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet was a daring and experimental literary achievement, and it is still astonishing to think that this long, complex work was a best seller in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a Book of the Month Club selection more than once.