Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990)

To hell with reviews! Who needs 'em! I have written eloquently (if, in retrospect naively) about these books in the individual volumes. Here instead, I offer a collection of quotes from the books, a 'commonplace book' if you will. Set in Alexandria and Greece throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Quartet is the story of an impoverished British writer, Darley, and his love for the married, ambiguous Justine. The characters who spiral around this pair are all of them fascinating, multi-faceted, and hopelessly lost. It's tale of memory, of love, and the fallibility of humankind.

Justine (1957)
"What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place- for that is history - but in the order in which they first become significant for me."
"A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants".
"It is idle to go over all this in a medium as unstable as words."
Clea: "There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature."
"Our friendship had ripened to a point where we had already become in a way part-owners of each other."
The only response to life is "ironic tenderness and silence".
"[Capodistria] impregnates things. At table I have seen a water-melon become conscious under his gaze so that it felt the seeds inside it stirring with life."
Arabic proverb: "The world is like a cucumber - today it's in your hand, tomorrow up your arse."
"These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be 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 ocean."
Balthazar: "We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd."

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Darley's description of a great dust storm (khamseen) over Alexandria:
"That second spring the khamseen was worse than I have ever known it before or since.Before sunrise the skies of the desert turned brown as buckram, and then slowly darkened, swelling like a bruise and at last releasing the outlines of cloud, giant octaves of ochre which massed up from the Delta like the drift of ashes under a volcano.The city has shuttered itself tightly, as if against a gale. A few gusts of air and a thin sour rain are the forerunners of the darkness which blots out the light of the sky. And now unseen in the darkness of shuttered rooms the sand is invading everything, appearing as if by magic in clothes long locked away, books, pictures and teaspoons.In the locks of doors, beneath fingernails. The harsh sobbing air dries the membranes of throats and noses, and makes eyes raw with the configurations of conjunctivitis. Clouds of dried blood walk the streets like prophecies; the sand is settling into the sea like powder into the curls of a stale wig. Choked fountain-pens, dry lips- and along the slats of the Venetian shutters thin white drifts as of young snow.The ghostly feluccas passing along the canal are crewed by ghouls with wrapped heads. From time to time a cracked wind arrives from directly above and stirs the whole city round and round so that one has the illusion that everything-trees, minarets,monuments and people - have been caught in the final eddy of some great whirlpool and will pour softly back at last into the desert from which they rose, reverting once more to the anonymous wave-sculptured floor of dunes..."
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Justine: "Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then then show me the place where he was hanged."
Scobie: "When he speaks of the past it is in a series of short dim telegrams - as if already communications were poor, the weather inimical to transmission."
"Man is only an extension of the spirit of place."
"Alexandria, the capital of memory."
"Each man goes out to his own music."
Justine: "I have always thought that the dead think of us as dead. They have rejoined the living after this trifling excursion into quasi life."
"The city was smiling with a heartbreaking indifference."

Balthazar (1958)
"Great souls require nourishment."
Pursewarden: "If things were always what they seemed, how impoverished would be the imagination of man!"
[Clea] "suddenly [felt] herself becoming breathlessly insubstantial, as if she were a figure painted on a canvas."
Justine: "There are whole parts of my character I do not understand."
"The most dangerous thing in the world is a love founded on pity"
"Her letters had become her very life, and in the writing of them she had begun to suffer from that curious sense of distorted reality which writers have when they are dealing with real people; in the years of writing to Mountolive, for example, she had so to speak re-invented him so successfully that he existed for her now not so much as a real human being but as a character out of her own imagination. She had even almost forgotten what he looked like, what to expect of his physical presence, and when his telegram came to say that he expected to be in Egypt again within a few months, she felt at first nothing but irritation that he should intrude, bodily as it were, upon the picture projected by her imagination."

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Darley's letter to Clea:
"I think it better for us to steer clear of the big oblong words like Beauty and Truth and so on. Do you mind? We are all so silly and feeble-witted when it comes to living, but giants when it comes to pronouncing on the universe. Sufflaminandus erat. Like you, I have two problems which interconnect: my art and my life. Now in my life I am somewhat irresolute and shabby, but in my art I am free to be what I must desire to seem - someone who might bring resolution and harmony into the dying lives around me. In my art, indeed, through my art, I want really to achieve myself by shedding the work, which is of no importance, as a snake sheds its skin. Perhaps that's why writers are heart want to be loved for their work rather than for themselves - do you think?"
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Pursewarden: "It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively"
"We are all looking for someone lovely to be unfaithful to"
"I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket."
When a great scandal is happening secretly, everyone knows but "the truth is that nobody ever does breathe a word, nobody interferes, nobody whispers while the acrobat is on the tightrope. They just sit and watch the spectacle, waiting only to be wise after the event."
Balthazar: "Everything is true of everybody"

Mountolive (1958)
"All great books are excursions into pity"

Leila "appeared to be somehow fading, receding on the curvature of a world moving in time, detaching herself from his own memories of her."
Mountolive on Pursewarden: "The artist's work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow-men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn. That is why he can't dabble in politics; it isn't his job. He must concentrate on values rather than policies."
Pursewarden: "the writer, most solitary of animals"
"Monsieur, je suis devenue la solitude meme"
"Somehow his friendship for them had prevented him from thinking of them as people who might, like himself, be living on several different levels at once."
"'O want easily supplied by one who has trained himself to see men and women as flies.' So says the proverb."

Nessim: "If only we did not have to keep on acting a part, Justine."
Justine: "Ah, Nessim! Then I could not know who I was."

Clea (1960)
"When you are in love with one of its inhabitants, a city can become a world."

"The writer I was becoming was learning at last to inhabit those deserted spaces which time misses - beginning to live between the ticks of the clock, so to speak."
Justine to Nessim after many years: "You have escaped me somewhere."
Justine: "A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying."
Of psychoanalysis: "what can one say of this very approximate science which has carelessly overflowed into anthropology on one side, theology on the other?"
Balthazar: "The most tender, the most tragic of illusions is perhaps to believe that our actions can add or subtract from the total quality of good and evil in the world."
Liza "listens to one as if one were music, an extra intentness which makes one immediately aware of the banality of most of one's utterances."
Darley: "I saw that we artists form one of those pathetic human chains which human beings form to pass buckets of water up to a fire, or to bring in a lifeboat. An uninterrupted chain of humans born to explore the inward riches of the solitary life on behalf of the unheeding unforgiving community; manacled together by the same gift."
Liza: "One must try everything to recover memory. It has so many hiding-places."
Darley: "For a night and a day I lived the life of an echo, thinking much about the past and about us all moving in it, the "selective fictions" which life shuffles out like a pack of cards, mixing and dividing, withdrawing and restoring."

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The wisdom of Pursewarden:

On a self-absorbed dimwit: "He had a large, hand-illuminated sign hanging up on the front of his mind reading ON NO ACCOUNT DISTURB."
"My books bear scarlet wrappers with the legend NOT TO BE OPENED BY OLD WOMEN OF EITHER SEX."
"Like all young men I set out to be a genius but mercifully laughter intervened."
"Civilisations die in the measure that they become conscious of themselves. They realise, they lose heart, the propulsion of the unconscious motive is no longer there. Desperately they begin to copy themselves in the mirror. It is no use."
"Once a writer seldom a talker."
"Language! What is the writer's struggle except a struggle to use a medium as precisely as possible, but knowing full its basic imprecision/ A hopeless task, but none the less rewarding for being hopeless."
"A novel should be an act of divination by entrails, not a careful record of a game of pat-ball on some vicarage lawn!"
End of Pursewarden's notes: "You may travel round the world and colonise the ends of the earth with your lines and yet never hear the singing yourself."

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And finally, excerpts from the celebrated nighttime sequence near the start of Clea, as Darley and his ward re-enter the war-weary city:

At midnight we slipped out slantwise from the bay upon a high moonlight - the further darkness made more soft, more confiding, by the warm incoherent goodbyes which poured out across the white beeches towards us. We shuttled for a while along the ink-shadowed line of cliffs where the engine's heartbeats were puckered up and thrown back at us in volleys. And so at last outwards upon the main deep, feeling the soft unction of the water's rhythms begin to breast us up, cradle and release us, as if in play. The night was superlatively warm and fine. A dolphin broke once, twice at the bow. A course was set.
Exultation mixed with a profound sadness now possessed us; fatigue and happiness in one. I could taste the good salt upon my lips. We drank warm sage-tea without talking. The child was struck speechless by the beauties of this journey - the quivering phosphorescence of our wake, combed out behind us like a comet's hair, flowing and reviving. Above us, too, flowed the plumed branches of heaven, stars scattered as thick as almond-blossom on the enigmatic sky. …. An all-obliterating darkness reigned. Somewhere ahead of us lay the invisible coast of Africa, with its 'kiss of thorns' as the Arabs say… I could not see my own fingers before my face. The sea had become a vast empty anteroom, a hollow bubble of blackness.
Then suddenly there passed a sudden breath, a whiff like a wind passing across the bed of embers, and the nearer distance glowed pink as a seashell, deepening gradually into the rose-richness of a flower. A faint and terrible moaning came out across the water towards us, pulsing like the wing-beats of some fearful prehistoric bird - sirens which howled as the damned must howl in limbo. One's nerves were shaken like the branches of a tree. And as if in response to this sound lights began to prick out everywhere, sporadically at first, then in ribbons, bands, squares of crystal. The harbour suddenly outlined itself with complete clarity upon the dark panels of heaven, while long white fingers of powder-white light began to stalk about the sky in ungainly fashion, as if they were the legs of some awkward insect struggling to gain a purchase on the slippery black. A dense stream of coloured rockets now began to mount from the haze among the battleships, emptying on the sky their brilliant clusters of stars and diamonds and smashed pearl snuffboxes with a marvellous prodigality. The air shook in strokes. Clouds of pink and yellow dust arose with the maroons to shine upon the greasy buttocks of the barrage balloons which were flying everywhere. The very sea seemed to tremble. I had no idea that we were so near, or that the city could be so beautiful in the mere saturnalia of a war. It had begun to swell up, to expand like some mystical rose of the darkness, and the bombardment kept it company, overflowing the mind. To our surprise we found ourselves shouting at each other. We were staring at the burning embers of Augustine's Carthage, I thought to myself, we are observing the fall of city man…
… Then, almost as suddenly as it had started, the spectacle died away. The harbour vanished with theatrical suddenness, the string of precious stones was turned off, the sky emptied, the silence drenched us, only to be broken once more by that famished crying of the sirens which drilled at the nerves…. We waited thus for a long time in great indecision; but meanwhile from the east the dawn had begun to overtake the sky, the city and desert. Human voices, weighted like lead, came softly out, stirring curiosity and compassion. Children's voices - and in the west a sputum-coloured meniscus on the horizon… Shivering, we turned to one another, feeling suddenly orphaned in this benighted world between light and darkness.
But gradually it grew up from the eastern marches, this familiar dawn, the first overflow of citron and rose which would set the dead waters of Mareotis aglitter; and fine as a hair, yet so indistinct that one had to stop breathing to verify it, I heard (or thought I heard) the first call to prayer from some as yet invisible minaret. Were there, then, still gods left to invoke?
I gazed around me. It was all the same, yet at the same time unbelievably different… (How many times had we not put out from there, at this same hour, in Clea's small boat, loaded with bread and oranges and wicker-clothed wine?) How many old sailing-days spent upon this crumbling coast, landmarks of affection now forgotten?… (mehr)

"There are only two ways out of Avignon, the way up and the way down, and they are both the same."

A very low 3 stars. Think basement level. For charitable purposes only.

Durrell's earlier Alexandria Quartet forms several peaks of the mountain range that towers through the country of my literary journey. Scaling them was an experience I shall never forget, and they will be destinations I return to often.

His Avignon Quintet, conversely, is a supreme example of the master craftsman in his dotage: heady with ideas, fascinated by both form and feature, deliciously iconoclastic 'til the end, but struggling with meaning and how to convey it, too. Freudians, if such still exist, will find much in it, and so will diehard acolytes of late modernism. Otherwise, unless you're - like me - helplessly in love with Durrell, stay away. And if you are, prepare to shift from passionate love to the kind of love reserved for ageing, slightly senile relatives. On a rough day, much must be forgiven. On a good day, what glories await us.

Or perhaps, to be less generous, I'll quote the books themselves: "The drunkard's word list is sometimes the sage's also".

My individual reviews of the books , as posted on Goodreads during my year of Avignon:
Monsieur, or the Prince of Darkness
Livia, or Buried Alive
Constance, or Solitary Practices
Sebastian, or Ruling Passions
Quinx, or the Ripper's Tale… (mehr)

What is Balthazar? It is certainly impossible to read without first devouring its 'sibling' [b:Justine|13037|Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)|Lawrence Durrell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1428544115l/13037._SY75_.jpg|45387]. The entire concept is that Balthazar - a supporting character from that book - read that book (the narrator Darley's memoirs) and is offering an annotation of them from a different point-of-view.

You could perhaps describe this book as a story about character, not plot, but that would be deceptive: the characters are the plot. The journeys they make, the changes of motivation and destination, the doubts and fears and sudden spasms of fate that occur, the small moments when their minds realise something heretofore unknown... those are what progress these books along.

In some ways, now that I'm accustomed to Durrell's style, I enjoy it more. Outwardly, he's pretentious - tossing in some French, Latin, Greek and just expecting you to understand it, making a discreet reference to a classic text or a philosophical doctrine in ways that are beyond mere literary references - but the fact is, he's not. Because, there's no pretense. This is genuinely who Durrell is and how he thinks. While one feels like he wrote this novel exclusively for the educated exiles from England of his era, it has a democratic way of looking at people that fits in with the American novels of earlier in that same century.

I can't wait to read [b:Mountolive|126710|Mountolive (The Alexandria Quartet #3)|Lawrence Durrell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347909368l/126710._SX50_.jpg|1849754] and [b:Clea|13039|Clea (The Alexandria Quartet #4)|Lawrence Durrell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440271623l/13039._SY75_.jpg|841968] now. The richly drawn characters of the first two books now exist in my memories like real people - loquacious Pombal, perverted and broken Scobie, pathetic Melissa, desperate Narouz, ethereal (yet somehow earthy) Clea, feeble Darley, bitter Pursewarden, rigid Nessim, sly Balthazar, charismatic Mountolive (as yet still reasonably underdeveloped) and of course the endlessly fascinating Justine. It is a testament to Durrell's skill that in two reasonably slim books, he has sketched not only these vast characters but the great and nuanced topography of their city, their Alexandria. Brilliant stuff.… (mehr)

As we gradually realise the scope of Durrell's literary experiment, in this, the third of the Alexandria novels, it becomes clear how no one human can ever truly know any other human, and it's heartbreaking. Durrell's prose is often too rich, veering into a purple so rich Caesar wouldn't wear it, but for every shot that misses, three hit their mark. Mountolive's drive through the storm is rivaled for beauty only by the dust-storm sequence in "Justine", and the final chapter is a slow, pulsing, vivid depiction of the last moments before death. I'll probably give myself a few weeks to cleanse the palate before reading the final volume in the series, but I'm a Durrell convert for life, I can tell.… (mehr)