The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (Faber & Faber, 1957-60)
by Bolokovsky, guest contributor
When Lawrence Durrell published his teratology of novels The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60), he could hardly have been more out of step with the emerging new wave of British fiction.
For although Durrell was born a decade earlier than his near-contemporaries John Osborne, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe and Kinglsey Amis, the publication of the Quartet roughly coincided with Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and Amis’ Take a Girl Like You (1960).
For Durrell, this new generation of British writers – the so called ‘Angry Young Men’ whose kitchen sink realism eschewed any form of glamour or exotica – epitomized everything that he characterized as ‘The English Death’. As he explained: ‘English life is really like an autopsy. It is so, so dreary.”
By contrast, it’s impossible to understand Durrell without seeing him as he saw himself: a European. Durrell’s heroes were DH Lawrence, Richard Aldington, Robert Graves, Norman Douglas and T.S.Eliot – all writers who considered themselves Europeans first, and British citizens second.
Despite its unfashionable aestheticism, The Alexandria Quartet – comprised of Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958) and Clea (1960) – was a critical and commercial success. Set in Alexandria, Egypt, before and during World War II and taking modern love as their central subject, the four novels describe the same sequence of events from several points of view, allowing individual perspectives to change over time.
Durrell’s high art aesthetic makes no concessions to the reader, but the demands it makes are rewarded with writing which is superbly 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, Durrell’s 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.
Durrell’s prose, as he describes sexual couplings and political intrigues among the streets and cafe’s of Alexandria, and evokes the atmosphere of the surrounding countryside, sea, and islands, is startling visual, ornate and intricately worked. Particularly in the first novel Justine, Durrell allows his poetic sensibilities to flow unrestrained, saturating the text with beautiful imagery and an almost febrile intensity.
Durrell himself was critical of his ornate style. In an interview with The Paris Review in 1959, he said of his prose: ‘It’s too juicy…I always feel I am overwriting. I am conscious of the fact that it is one of my major difficulties.”
These self-acknowledged 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.
But to the appreciative reader, 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 unforgettable characters.
January 11, 2010 at 10:54 am
Hmm, Only heard of this set of novels for the first time today. I am a big fan of John Fowles, will I enjoy this book?
February 9, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Bolokovsky says:
I have read the following John Fowles books:- The Magus, The Collector, The French Lieutenant’s Woman and the Aristos a collection of pensees, which Fowles compares to Heraclitus, but to my mind is much more like a modern day slightly pretentious, and dotty Pascal.
All of these I have read over thirty years ago. It is a funny coincidence as I recently bought ‘The Magus’, as it is a book that I thought absolutely wonderful all those years ago, and wanted to reread it, to see if it was as iconic as I’d remembered.
Both writers could be loosely categorised as belonging to the school of European authors writing in English. In Fowles’ case, very much influenced by the French Existentialists of the fifties. Both their interests and subjects overlap and I would bet that Fowles was a Durell fan. The important point to note is the high seriousness of their intent; they saw themselves as writing in a European tradition, where philosophical, psychological and moral investigations were the business of the serious writer, vide Sartre, Camus, Thomas Mann and Proust etc.
I cannot comment on Fowles’ prose style (due to the lapse in time) and which in the case of Durrell is stunning and floridly poetic.
In short, yes, you will enjoy this book, or I’ll eat my shorts.
Robin