Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

Who can say it was not due to our painter friend and the love affair I did not have? I am still humming a tune as I write these words to you….

‘Later: re-reading your letter, why do you go on so, I wonder, about Pursewarden’s death? It puzzles me, for in a way it is a sort of vulgarity to do so. I mean that surely it is not within your competence or mine to pass an open judgement on it? All we can say is that his art overleaps the barrier. For the rest, it seems to me to be his own private property. We should not only respect his privacy in such matters but help him to defend it against the unfeeling. They are his own secrets, after all, for what we actually saw in him was only the human disguise that the artist wore (as in his own character, old Parr, the hopeless sensualist of volume two who turns out in the end to be the one who painted the disputed fresco of the Last Supper — remember?)

‘In much the same sort of way, Pursewarden carried the secret of his everyday life over into the grave with him, leaving us only his books to marvel at and his epitaph to puzzle over: “Here lies an intruder from the East.”

‘No. No. The death of an artist is quite unassailable. One can only smile and bow.

‘As for Scobie, you are right in what you say. I was terribly upset when Balthazar told me that he had fallen down those stairs at the central Quism and killed himself. Yes, I took his parrot, which by the way was inhabited by the old man’s spirit for a long time afterwards. It reproduced with perfect fidelity the way he got up in the morning singing a snatch of “ Taisez-vous , petit babouin ” (do you remember) and even managed to imitate the dismal cracking of the old man’s bones as he got out of bed. But then the memory gradually wore out, like an old disc, and he seemed to do it less often and with less sureness of voice. It was like Scobie himself dying very gradually into silence: this is how I suppose one dies to one’s friends and to the world, wearing out like an old dance tune or a memorable conversation with a philosopher under a cherry-tree. Being refunded into silence. And finally the bird itself went into a decline and died with its head under its wing. I was so sorry, yet so glad.

‘For us, the living, the problem is of a totally different order: how to harness time in the cultivation of a style of heart — something like that? I am only trying to express it. Not to force time, as the weak do, for that spells self-injury and dismay, but to harness its rhythms and put them to our own use. Pursewarden used to say:

“God give us artists resolution and tact”; to which I myself would say a very hearty Amen.

‘But by now you will think that I have simply become an opinionated old shrew. Perhaps I have. What does it matter, provided one can get a single idea across to oneself?

‘There is so little time; with the news from Europe becoming worse every day I feel an autumnal quality in the days — as if they were settling towards an unpredictable future. And side by side with this feeling, I also feel the threads tightening in our sleeves, so to speak, drawing us slowly back towards the centre of the stage once more. Where could this be but to Alexandria? But perhaps it will prove to be a new city, different to the one which has for so long imposed itself on our dreams. I would like to think that, for the old one and all it symbolized is, if not dead, at least meaningless to the person I now feel myself to be. Perhaps you too have changed by the same token. Perhaps your book too has changed.

Or perhaps you, more than any of us, need to see the city again, need to see us again. We, for our part, very much need to see you again and refresh the friendship which we hope exists the other side of the writing — if indeed an author can ever be just a friend to his “characters”. I say “we”, writing in the Imperial Style as if I were a Queen, but you will guess that I mean, simply, both the old Clea and the new — for both have need of you in a future which….’ There are a few more lines and then the affectionate superscription.

* * * Some shorthand notes of Keats’s, recording the Obiter Dicta of Pursewarden in fragmentary fashion: ( a )

‘I know my prose is touched with plum pudding, but then all the prose belonging to the poetic continuum is; it is intended to give a stereoscopic effect to character. And events aren’t in serial form but collect here and there like quanta, like real life.’ ( b )

‘Nessim hasn’t got the resources we Anglo-Saxons have; all our women are nurses at heart. In order to secure the lifelong devotion of an Anglo-Saxon woman one has only to get one’s legs cut off above the waist. I’ve always thought Lady Chatterley weak in symbolism from this point of view. Nothing should have earned the devotion of his wife more surely than Clifford’s illness. AngloSaxons may not be interested in love like other Europeans but they can get just as ill. Characteristically, it is to his English Kate that Laforgue cries out: “ Une Garde-malade pour l ’ amour de l ’ art! ” He detected the nurse.’ ( c )

‘The classical in art is what marches by intention with the cosmology of the age.’ ( d )

‘A state-imposed metaphysic or religion should be opposed, if necessary at pistol-point. We must fight for variety if we fight at all. The uniform is as dull as a sculptured egg.’ ( e ) Of Da Capo: ‘Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.’ ( f )

‘Art like life is an open secret.’ ( g )

‘Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart’s affections.’ ( h )

‘Truth is independent of fact. It does not mind being disproved. It is already dispossessed in utterance.’ ( i )

‘I love the French edition with its uncut pages. I would not want a reader too lazy to use a knife on me.’ ( j ) In a book of poems: ‘One to be taken from time to time as needed and allowed to dissolve in the mind.’ ( k )

‘We must always defend Plato to Aristotle and vice versa because if they should lose touch with each other we should be lost. The dimorphism of the psyche produced them both.’ ( l )

‘To the medieval world-picture of the World, the Flesh and the Devil (each worth a book) we moderns have added Time: a fourth dimension.’ ( m )

‘New critical apparatus: le roman bifteck, guignol or cafard.’ ( n )

‘The real ruins of Europe are its great men.’ ( o )

‘I have always believed in letting my reader sink or skim.’ ( p ) On reading a long review of God is a Humorist : ‘Good God! At last they are beginning to take me seriously. This imposes a terrible burden on me. I must redouble my laughter.’ ( q )

‘Why do I always choose an epigraph from Sade? Because he demonstrates pure rationalism — the ages of sweet reason we have lived through in Europe since Descartes. He is the final flower of reason, and the typic of European behaviour. I hope to live to see him translated into Chinese. His books would bring the house down and would read as pure humour. But his spirit has already brought the house down around our ears.’ ( r )

‘Europe: a Logical Positivist trying to prove to himself by logical deduction that he exists.’ ( s )

‘My objects in the novels? To interrogate human values through an honest representation of the human passions. A desirable end, perhaps a hopeless objective.’ ( t )

‘My unkindest critics maintain that I am making lampshades out of human skin. This puzzles me. Perhaps at the bottom of the Anglo-Saxon soul there is a still small voice forever whispering: