Book of the century
“The sky was covered with clouds. A thunderstorm was breaking over Alexandria. To the east upon the icy green waters of the lake poured a rainstorm - flights of glittering needles pocking the waters; [Montolive] could dimly hear the hush of the rain above the whispers of the car. He glimpsed the pearly city through the dark cloud-mat, its minarets poked up against the cloud bars of an early sunset; linen soaked in blood. A sea-wind chaffered and tugged at the sea-limits of the estuary. Higher still roamed packages of smoking, blood-stained cloud throwing down a strange radiance into the streets and squares of the white city. Rain was a rare and brief winter phenomenon in Alexandria. Presently the sea-wind would rise, alter inclination, and peel the sky clear in a matter of minutes, rolling up the heavy cumulus like a carpet. The glassy freshness of the winter sky would resume its light, polishing the city once more till it glittered against the desert like quartz, like some beautiful artifact”
My enrapture by this book has meant I’ve waited almost a year to write about it. But, now almost at the end of Clea, it fills me with a joy which is overwhelming in its scale and luminosity. It exceeds one’s capacity to hold it: an excess that simply needs to be expressed and shared, to keep it in and let it out. (It occurs to me, apart from works of art stumbled upon serendipitously oneself, how much that which we come to love, and which forms us, is a gift from others. I’ll always be grateful for example, to D. for Buffy, to teachers at school and at uni for specific poets [Anne Mc C for Keats and Hopkins, GW for Milton and Spenser] … for the gift of a book from a friend).
Like the character Julia in Jean McNeil’s short story ‘Monterey sun’, I first read The Alexandria Quartet for the colours. (McNeil herself’s pays tribute to Durrell: “In Oaxaca … it is the colours of the houses that most impress us as we walk around the town: shell-pink next to asparagus, banana, dried blood colour, like a line of melting cherry, lime, banana and chocolate popsicles”).
To the extent that such claims are useful or meaningful, for me, TAQ is the preeminent work of English literature of the 20th century. More so than Ulysses, more so than The Four Quartets even, more than all of Hemingway put together; it has more visceral urbanity than the best Patrick White, it’s better than Toni Morrison, than Catcher in the Rye, than To kill a Mockingbird, Catch 22. Other 20th century books which could claim the title of truly great and enduring literature (not counting biographies) for me include The Waves by Virginia Woolf, Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Salman Rushdie’s Shame, Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces, and The Passion by Jeanette Winterson (which just sneaks in), or Ben Okri’s Astonishing the Gods (specific and generic in its focus - but what a genre!). Of course there is much other worthy writing (Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex, some excellent academic writing, e.g Stanley Fish Self-consuming Artifacts, but of the first and finest order, with a range and depth to make a work endure, for me nothing beats TAQ … including in its flaws, its infelicities, the unevenness of the books - Justine versus Mountolive).
I can’t help loathing its aspects of misogyny and nihilism (however well expressed). As when Arnauti say of Justine: “Like women who think by biological precept and without the help of reason. To such women how fatal an error it is to give oneself; there is simply a small chewing noise, as when the cat reaches the backbone of the mouse”. Or Balthasar - on Man: “How stupid, how limited we are - mere vanities on legs!.” / “That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh"- on two lovers: “Outside in the darkness by the railway bridge the lover of the man waits for him with the same indescribable maggotry going on in her body and blood; wine swilling the conduits, the pylorus disgorging like a sucker, the incommensurable bacteriological works multiplying in every drop of semen, spittle, sputum, musk. He takes a spinal column in his arms, the ducts flooded with ammonia, the meninges excluding their pollen, the cornea glowing in its little crucible …”. Or Pursewarden: “’Baudelaire says that copulation is the lyric of the mob". One of the things I love/hate about Durrell is that he does misanthropy so well.
Yes I see the problems in setting up hierarchies, of ‘best’ and ‘better’, and I ask forgiveness. But with that disclaimer - why do I say TAQ is the best novel of the 20th century?
Its exploration of love … the fallings, the heights and the depths, the misperceptions, the seductions, the wrong-headedness of love as pain. It is, among other things, (and perhaps above all else) a book about sexual and romantic love. … In its one liners, in its relationships; from the episodic, scattered, encounters of a life bereft of lasting love - tipping the hat to Cavafy, ‘the poet of the city’, if not Marlowe - in Balthasar’s obsession with the young and vain Panagiotis; … to the narrative of Darley’s travails through the train wrecks, the slash-and-burn, the immolations of searching for love in all the wrong places which glues the plot.
And in exploring love, as in weaving the other plot elements, the novels’ structure is masterful. Compare the transition of experience from Justine to Clea:
Justine: “There are moments which possess the writer, not the lover, and which live on perpetually. […] I recover another such moment lying beside a sleeping woman in a cheap room near the mosque. In that early spring dawn, with its dense dew, sketched upon the silence which engulfs a whole city before the birds awaken it, I caught the sweet voice of the blind muezzin from the mosque reciting the Ebed - a voice hanging like a hair in the palm-cooled upper airs of Alexandria. ‘I praise the perfection of God, the Forever existing (this repeated thrice, ever more slowly, in a high sweet register). ‘The perfection of God, the Desired, the Existing, the Single, the Supreme; the Perfection of God, the One, the Sole’: the perfection of Him who taketh unto himself no male or female partner, nor any like Him, nor any that is disobedient, nor any deputy, equal or offspring. His perfection be extolled.’
The great prayer wound its way into my sleepy consciousness like a serpent, coil after shining coil of words - the voice of the muezzin sinking from register to register of gravity - until the whole morning seemed dense with its marvelous healing powers, the intimations of a grace undeserved and unexpected, impregnating the shabby room where Melissa lay, breathing as lightly as a gull, rocked upon the oceanic splendours of a language she would never know.”
versus Clea: “In the spring sunrise, with its dense dew, sketched upon the silence which engulfs a whole city before the birds awaken it, I caught the sweet voice of the blind muezzin from the mosque reciting the Ebed - a voice hanging like a hair in the palm-cooled upper airs of Alexandria. ‘I praise the perfection of God, the Forever existing; the perfection of God, the Desired, the Existing, the Single, the Supreme; the Perfection of God, the One, the Sole’ … the great prayer wound itself in shining coils across the city as I watched the grave and passionate intensity of her turned head where she stood to observe the climbing sun touch the minarets and palms with light; rapt and awake. And listening I smelt the warm odour of her hair upon the pillow beside me. The buoyancy of a new freedom possessed me like a draught from what the Cabal once called ‘the Fountain of All Existing Things’. I called ‘Clea’ softly, but she did not heed me; and so once more I slept. I know that Clea would share everything with me, withholding nothing - not even the look of complicity which women reserve only for their mirrors"
And (still only half way through Clea) I wonder which love endures, the apogee of earthly, companionable love or spiritual self love (“There is no Other; there is only oneself facing forever the problem of one’s self-discovery!”)? TAQ juggles both.
Though arguably the quartet is not, ultimately, teleological. It’s full of the mess and excess of episodes, of failed plots (Nessim and Justine’s prescient Middle Eastern solution), of characters: the gargantuan Narouz, in his preacher’s trance, whipping bats out of the sky; one-eyed Hamid, the professional mourners “… for whom death was something of a public competition in the poetry of mourning”.
Or the barber Mnemjian, who - amongst other incarnations - descends one Cretan morning on Darley, off a caique: “walking along the shingle beach with an air of grotesque perturbation, as if balancing on corkscrews […] He radiated a precarious and overbred finesse. He was clad in a dazzling silver suit, spats, a pearl tie-pin, and his fingers were heavily ringed. Only the smile, the infant smile was unchanged, and the oiled spitcurl was still aimed at the frontal lobe”
I love his fascinating comic vignettes (which are more than this, merely, in that they establish character), such as our introduction to Melissa:
“[Melissa] now began to sob in a voice which wore a beard and call for the police. Three sailors converged upon her with blunt fingers extended advising, exhorting, imploring her to desist. Nobody wanted a brush with the naval police. But neither did anyone relish a crack from that Promethean handbag, bulging with French letters and belladonna bottles. […] By now the fun had started, for the sailors had the roaring girl cornered - but unfortunately against the decorative Sheraton cupboard which housed Pombal’s cherished collection of pottery. Reaching behind her for support her hands encountered an almost inexhaustible supply of ammunition, and letting go her handbag with a hoarse cry of triumph she began to throw china with a single-mindedness and accuracy I have never seen equaled. The air was all at once full of Egyptian and Greek tear-bottles, Ushabti, and Sèvres. […] Pursewarden’s alarm was very marked indeed; as a resident and moreover a famous one he could hardly afford the sort of scandal which the Egyptian press might make out of an affray like this. He was relieved when I motioned to him and and started to wrap the by now insensible figure of Melissa in the soft Bukhara rug. Together we staggered with her down the corridor and into the blessed privacy of my box-room where, like Cleopatra. We unrolled her and placed her on the bed.
I had remembered the existence of an old doctor, Greek, who lived down the street, and it was not long before I managed to fetch him up the dark staircase, stumbling and swearing in a transpontine demotic, dropping catheters and stethoscopes all the way. He pronounced Melissa very ill indeed but his diagnosis was ample and vague - in the tradition of the city. ‘It is everything’ he said ‘ malnutrition, hysteria, alcohol, hashish, tuberculosis, Spanish fly … help yourself’ and he made the gesture of putting his hand in his pocket and fetching it out full of imaginary diseases which he offered us to choose from. But he was also practical, and proposed to have a bed ready for her in the Greek Hospital next day”
Or Scobie’s story, which keeps popping up like a troubling and persistent boil. Yet his is, in the end, an apotheosis, which, with all its comedy, is a down-to-earth mystical triumph when he reincarnates as El Scoub. And Durrell sets this up brilliantly, from when Scobie first appears:
“ … like a patron saint he has left little pieces of his flesh all over the world, in Zanzibar, Colombo, Togoland, Wu Fu; the little deciduous morsels which he has been shedding for so long now, old antlers, cuff-links, teeth, hair … […] Origins he has none - his past proliferates through a dozen continents like a true subject of myth […] His exiguous nautical pension is hardly enough to pay for the one cockroach-infested room which he inhabits in the slum-area behind Tatwig st. […] He lives in his sloping little attic like an anchorite. ‘An Anchorite!’ that is another favourite phrase; he will pop his cheek vulgarly with his finger as he utters it, allowing his rolling eye to insinuate all the feminine indulgences he permits himself in secret.”
Or when Mountolive goes home to England, to mother: “He groped again for the old Yale key and smiled again as he felt it turn, admitting him to an unforgotten warmth which smelt of apricots and old books, polish and flowers; all the memories which led him back unerringly towards Piers Plowman, the pony, the fishing-rod, the stamp album. He stood in the hall and called her name softly.”
Durrel is, above all, a brilliant observer and raconteur, capable of the most evocative poetry
“In his memory’s memory …”
“… God. I speak to the person I always imagine inhabiting a green and quiet place like the 23rd Psalm”
“Indeed, one was conscious of the desert here although one could not see it - melodramatically tasteless as a communion wafer”
“The smile upon Kenilworth’s face was one in which his eyes played no part”
“ … the dry snap of champagne corks”
“ Squeak of the brass screws as the lid went down”
“… the blind cattle turning the slow globe of their waterwheels. blind-folded against monotony - how small cab a world become?”
... and TAQ is also travelogue of the very first order:
“ … women churning butter in goatskins suspended from bamboo tripods or walking in single file down to the river with their pots. Men in robes of blue cotton at the waterwheels, singing, matrons swathed from crown to ankle in the light dusty black robes which custom demanded, blue-beaded against the evil eye. And then all the primeval courtesies of the road exchanged between passers by [..] ‘Naharak Said’ […] ‘Said Embarak!’ […] ‘May your day be blessed’ thought Nessin in remembered translation as he smiled and nodded, overcome at the splendour of these old-fashioned greetings one never heard except in the Arab Quarter of the city; ‘may today be as blessed as yesterday’.”
“A basket of quail burst open in the bazaar. They did not try to escape but spread out slowly like spilt honey. Easily recaptured.”
One reason TAQ stands for me an exemplary work of literature is because the book itself evokes so many other authors. Whether as homage or pastiche, deliberately or unconsciously, Durrell quarries key ideas and idioms of Western literature (in the best literary tradition):
The opening lines themselves have a Shelleyan flavour: “The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of spring”.
The book is full of Homeric lists (even, allowing for anachronism, in a lesser far-Eastern story of love and war, Ondaatje’s catalogue of winds in The English Patient);
· “The very names of the tram stops echoed the poetry of these journeys; Chatby, camp de César, Laurens, Mazarita, Glymenopoulis, Sidi Bishir …”
· “Alexandria, the unconsciously poetical mother-city exemplified in the names and faces which made up its history. Listen. Tony Umbaba, Baldassaro Trivizani, Claude Amaril, Paul Capodistria, Dmitri Randidi, Onouphrious Papas, Count Banubula, […] Athena Trasha, Djamboulat Bey, Delphine de Francueil, General Cervoni […]”
· The litany of street-names: “Rue Bab-el-Mandeb, Rue Abou-el-Dardar, Minet-el-Bassal (streets slippery with discarded floss from the cotton marts) Nouzha (the rose-garden, some remembered kisses or bus stops with haunted names like Saba Pacha, Mazloum, Zizinia Bacos, Schutz, Gianaclis. A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants” This one of the ways Durrell creates worlds.
Like the Romantics and their followers Durrell anthropomorphizes the physical world brilliantly, investing it with perspective and agency as well as metaphor (Ruskin’s ‘pathetic fallacy’):
“Now on this tenebrous peninsula shaped like a plane-leaf, fingers outstretched (where the winter rain crackles like straw among the rocks), I walk stiffly sheathed in wind by a sea-line choked with groaning sponges hunting for the meaning to the pattern”
It plays with 20th century constants, such as Fitzgerald-like themes of decadence and melancholy (and the possibility of transcendence): “We idled arm in arm by the sea that afternoon, our conversations full of the debris of lives lived without forethought, without architecture.”
It recalls Dickens, or de Maupassant: “… I thought that an involuntary groan was about to burst from his lips; but presently in its place came the mockery of a laugh, harsh, mindless and unmusical. As if directed at the dead carcass of a joke so rotten and threadbare that it could compel nothing beyond this ghastly rictus gouged out in his taut cheeks. ’I know she is here’ he said, and one of his hands came running over the counterpane like a frightened rat to grope for mine.”
Angela Carter: “He had crossed into Poland lying in his mother’s arms, knowing only that the jewels she wore in that snowlit landscape were icy cold to the touch”
There are shades of Tolstoy, or Pasternak: “The central heating in the Embassy ballroom gave out a thick furry warmth which made the air taste twice-used; but the warmth itself was a welcome contrast to the frigid pine-starred landscapes outside the tall windows where the snow fell steadily, not only over Russia, it seemed, but over the whole world. […] In the gardens the branches of the trees bowed lower and lower under the freight of falling whiteness until one by one they sprang back shedding their parcels of snow, in soundless explosions of glittering crystals; then the whole process began again, the soft white load of the tumbling snowflakes gathering upon them, pressing them down like springs until the weight became unendurable”
Of Graeme Green: “Granier was a clever, witty and good-tempered man with some of the mental agility and drive of a French grandmother. It was easy to like him. He spoke rapidly and confidently, marking his sentences with little motions of the ivory paper-weight. Mountolive fell in naturally with the charm of his language - the English of fine breeding and polish which carried those invisible diacritical narks, the expression of its caste”
Of Henry James: “’You say you will be in Zagreb next month. Please visit and describe it t me ..’ she would write, or ‘How lucky you will be in passing through Amsterdam; there is a retrospective Klee which has received tremendous notices in the French press. Please pay it a visit and describe your impressions honestly to me, even if unfavourable. I have never seen an original myself’. This was leila’s parody of love, a flirtation of minds, in which the roles were now reversed; for she was deprived of the richness of Europe and she fed upon his long letters and parcels of books with the double gluttony. The young man strained every nerve to meet these demands, and suddenly found the hitherto padlocked worlds of paint, architecture, music and writing opening in every side of him. So she gave him an almost gratuitous education in the world which he would never have been able to compass by himself. And where the old dependencies of his youth slowly foundered, the new one grew. Mountolive, in the strictest sense of the words, had now found a woman after his own heart”
Of Alan Paton (Cry the Beloved Country): “The power and the tension flooded out of him into the room; all of us were electrified […] The tone, the range and the bottled ferocity and tenderness his words conveyed hit us, sent us sprawling, like music […] At times the speaker closed his eyes, letting the torrent of words pour out unhindered. Once he set his head back smiling like a dog, still with eyes closed, until the light shone upon his back teeth. that voice! It went on autonomously, rising to a roar, sinking to a whisper, trembling and crooning and wailing. Suddenly snapping out words like chainshot, or rolling them softly about like honey. We were absolutely captured - the whole lot of us.”
And father back even, say, of Marvel, Bacon, Pope, the Romans writing on gardening, Anne Radcliffe:
“A summer palace for Justine …. shade created the prongy abstract shapes of cactus and the bushy exuberance of Indian corn … A windbreak of Junipers contributed a dull copper humus of leaf-mould which in time would become firm soil nourishing first bushes and later other and taller trees.”
.. and no doubt even Shakespeare (I leave that to someone else to compend …)
Durrell is self-reflexive, not only in his considerations of the nature of art, of writing, but in glancing at other authors in various ways, e.g.
in the novels within the novels of Anauti and Pursewarden
in the Modernist commentary of past fiction (“A novel should be an act of divination by entrails, not a careful record of a game of pat-ball on some vicarage lawn!”)
in ‘D.H. Lawrence’s’ correspondence with Pursewarden, in which P., e.g. writes to Lawrence: “My dear DHL. This side idolatry - I am simply trying not to copy your habit of building a Taj Mahal around anything as simple as a good f__k’.”
· in fact and content of the “Consequential Data” section appended to Balthasar: “Some shorthand notes of Keats’s [a photographer], recording the Obiter Dicta of Pursewarden [a novelist] in fragmentary fashion: ‘I know my prose is touched with plum pudding, but then all the prose belonging to the poetic continuum is; it is untended to give a stereoscopic effect to character. And events aren’t in serial form but collect here and there like quanta, like real life’.”
So yes, in its preoccupations, as well as forms and language TAQ is also arguably a truly postmodern novel, but with its feel in the Canon, not merely so like so many other self-consciously postmodern novels (the retelling of stories from different perspectives is as reminiscent of, say, 19th century dramatic monologue e.g. Browning’s The Ring and the Book, it is as informed by 20th century physics’ theories of simultaneous universes and new ways of understanding time. Durrell’s representation of such ‘postmodern’ concepts is grounded in poetry, not theory: “What a marvellous jest! But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket”.
What I like best, perhaps, even above all this, is the sheer, evocative, poetry of his descriptions of place:
“In Autumn the female bays turn to uneasy phosphorous and after the long chafing days of dust one feels the first palpitations of the autumn, like the wings of a butterfly fluttering to unwrap themselves. Mareotis turns lemon-mauve and its muddy flanks are starred by sheets of radiant anemones, growing through the quickened plaster-mud of the shore. […] Here the open sea boomed upon the carpets of fresh sand the colour of oxidised mercury …”
Incredible extended descriptions like the duck shoot at Mareotis, or of the Hosnani’s lands, with their customs, and brutalities (the camel slaughter). Some snippets give an idea:
“The water is full of stars […] the suck and lisp of the pole in the mud […] And on all sides now comes the rich plural chuckle of duck […] If hit squarely a bird staggers and spins, pauses for a moment, and then sinks gracefully like a handkerchief from a lady’s hand […] The punts by now will be full of the sodden bodies of the victims, red blood running from the shattered beaks on to the floor boards, marvellous feathers dulled by death”
“… treading unwarily I came upon a grotesque scene which I would gladly have avoided if I had been able. The camels of Narouz were being cut up for the feast. poor things, they knelt there peacefully with their forelegs folded under them like cats while a horde of men attacked them with axes in the moonlight. My blood ran cold, yet I could not tear myself away from this extraordinaru spectacle. The animals made no move to avoid the blows, uttered no cries as they were dismembered. The axes bit into them, as if their great bodies were made of cork, sinking deep under every thrust, whole members were being hacked off as painlessly, it seemed, as when a tree is pruned. The children were dancing about in the moonlight picking up the fragments and running off with them into the lighted town, great gobbets of bloody meat. The camels stared hard at the moon and said nothing. Off came the legs, out came the entrails; lastly the heads would topple under the axe like statuary and lie there in the sand with open eyes, The men doing the axeing were shouting and bantering as they worked. A huge soft carpet of black blood spread into the dunes around the group and the barefoot boys carried the print of it back with them into the township”
I regard that as one of the most perfectly written pieces ever. Its cadences, its management of unimaginable horror, the way it conveys sadness, nobility, barbarity all together. Its imagery, the axes biting into the camels’ great bodies as if they were made of cork. The enduring picture of the desert sands being covered by a soft carpet of black blood. The cats simile, an epitome of defenceless-ness.
Durrell’s descriptions of landscape are unsurpassed:
“And then: the first pure draughts of desert air, and the nakedness of space, pure as a theorem, stretching away into the sky drenched in all its own silence and majesty, untenanted except by such figures as the imagination of man has invented to people landscapes which are inimical to his passions and whose purity flays the mind”
“The Mediterranean is an absurdly small sea; the length and greatness of its history make us dream it larger than it is”
“… a thousand dust-tormented streets.”
“ … the odour of hot pavements slaked with water”
“… the cherub-haunted ceiling”
“… the dark balcony above a city of coloured lights.”
“... falling snow as thick as meal …”
“…the sad velvet broth of the canal”
And the crowning glory, his evocations of Alexandria:
“ … the town which breaks open at sunset like a rose”
“The city looked to him as brilliant as a precious stone”
“ … a city which knew that pleasure was the only thing that made industry worthwhile …”
“Alexandria, the capital of memory”
… I could, of course, go on. I’m hoping anyone reading this is inspired to tread the waters for themselves.
(I realise I actually started my first LJ entry with a quote from Durrell)