Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

One almost saw the cheap leather leash attached to his collar.

She greeted me with effusive warmth and introduced me to her captive who shuffled shyly and greeted me in a deep groaning voice like a bass saxophone. They were on their way to meet Nessim at the Select. Would I go too? Of course I would. You know how tirelessly curious I am. She kept shooting secret sparks of amusement at me without Memlik seeing. Her eyes were sparkling with delight, a sort of impish mockery. It was as if, like some powerful engine of destruction, she had suddenly switched on again. She has never looked happier or younger.

When we absented ourselves to powder our noses I could only gasp: “Justine! Memlik! What on earth?” She gave a peal of laughter and giving me a great hug said: “I have found his point faible. He is hungry for society. He wants to move in social circles in Alexandria and meet a lot of white women!” More laughter.

“But what is the object?” I said in bewilderment. Here all at once she became serious, though her eyes sparkled with clever malevolence. “We have started something, Nessim and I. We have made a break through at last. Clea, I am so happy, I could cry.

It is something much bigger this time, international. We will have to go to Switzerland next year, probably for good. Nessim’s luck has suddenly changed. I can’t tell you any details.”

‘When we reached the table upstairs Nessim had already arrived and was talking to Memlik. His appearance staggered me, he looked so much younger, and so elegant and self-possessed.

It gave me a queer pang, too, to see the passionate way they embraced, Nessim and Justine, as if oblivious to the rest of the world. Right there in the cafe, with such ecstatic passion that I did not know where to look.

‘Memlik sat there with his expensive gloves on his knee, smiling gently. It was clear that he enjoyed the life of high society, and I could see from the way he offered me an ice that he also enjoyed the company of white women!

‘Ah! it is getting tired, this miraculous hand. I must catch the evening post with this letter. There are a hundred things to attend to before I start the bore of packing. As for you, wise one, I have a feeling that you too perhaps have stepped across the threshold into the kingdom of your imagination, to take possession of it once and for all. Write and tell me — or save it for some small cafe under a chestnut-tree, in smoky autumn weather, by the Seine.

‘I wait, quite serene and happy, a real human being, an artist at last.

‘Clea.’

*******

But it was to be a little while yet before the clouds parted before me to reveal the secret landscape of which she was writing, and which she would henceforward appropriate, brushstroke by slow brushstroke. It had been so long in forming inside me, this precious image, that I too was as unprepared as she had been.

It came on a blue day, quite unpremeditated, quite unannounced, and with such ease I would not have believed it. I had been until then like some timid girl, scared of the birth of her first child.

Yes, one day I found myself writing down with trembling fingers the four words (four letters! four faces!) with which every storyteller since the world began has staked his slender claim to the attention of his fellow-men. Words which presage simply the old story of an artist coming of age. I wrote: ‘Once upon a time….’ And I felt as if the whole universe had given me a nudge!

*******

WORKPOINTS Hamid’s story of Darley and Melissa.

* * * Mountolive’s child by the dancer Grishkin. The result of the duel. The Russian letters. Her terror of Liza when after her mother’s death she is sent to her father.

* * * Memlik and Justine in Geneva. Nessim’s new ventures.

* * * Balthazar’s encounter with Arnauti in Venice. The violet sunglasses, the torn overcoat, pockets full of crumbs to feed the pigeons. The scene in Florian’s. The shuffling walk of general paralysis. Conversations on the balcony of the little pension over the rotting backwater of the canal. Was Justine actually Claudia?

He cannot be sure. ‘Time is memory, they say; the art however is to revive it and yet avoid remembering. You speak of Alexandria.

I can no longer even imagine it. It has dissolved. A work of art is something which is more like life than life itself!’ The slow death.

* * * The northern journey of Narouz, and the great battle of the sticks.

Smyrna. The manuscripts, The Annals of Time. The theft.

* Page 737 Big advances are not made by analytical procedures but by direct vision. Yes, but how ?

* * * Art is not art unless it threatens your very existence. Could you repeat that, please, more slowly?

* * * As you get older and want to die more a strange kind of happiness seizes you; you suddenly realize that all art must end in a celebration. This is what drives the impotent mad with rage. They cannot provoke that fruitful compulsion of the Present, even though their scrotums be as hairy as Cape Gooseberries.

* * * Peine dure! Would you rather read Henry James or be pressed to death by weights? I have made my choice. I believe in the Holy Boast and the Communion of Aints. I do not belong to the Stream-of-Pompousness school, nor that of the desert fathers — prickeaters of the void.

* * * Language is not an accident of poetry but the essence. The lingo is the nub.

* * * A devot of the Ophite sect, With member more or less erect, Snake-worship is the creed I hold And shall do till I get too old.

The saucy serpent symbolizes A hundred Freudian surprises; With mine, I do the Indian trick Though it’s become a shade too thick To stand up like an actual rope — I leave that to the Band of Hope.

Nor can I manage kundalini And play on it like Paganini …

Mere beanstalk with a tower atop I’m just like Jack, I cannot stop, Hand over curious hand I climb Until I hear the belfries chime And some companionable she Asks is there honey still for tea?

* * * Perhaps it would be better just to start rewriting La Rochefoucauld, beginning with some such aphorism as ‘ Jouir c ’ est pourrir un peu? ’

* * * You must put yourself into deep soak, psychologically speaking.

* * * A phrase from Bacon: ‘Prize bulls made fierce by dark keeping.’

* * * Ah, my compatriots! What shall it profit a man to become a utilitarian jujube — to go thrilling off each morning in his electric brougham to the offices of the Spectator ? How low can you rise?

* * * To become a poet is to take the whole field of human knowledge and human desire for one’s province; yes but, this field can only be covered by continual inner abdications.

* * * The more I read of those artists who have reached the bounds of human knowledge — and there is a permissible bound to the humanly knowable — the more it becomes apparent to me that statement becomes simpler as it becomes profounder.

Finally it becomes platitude. At this point one begins to understand the religious claim that only initiates can communicate with each other because they use, not concept but symbol.

For them all speech based on concept becomes an indiscretion; one can only really exchange what is mutually understood. In this sense every work of art is an indiscretion — but a calculated indiscretion.

* * * Death is a metaphor; nobody dies to himself.

* * * There must always be a breath of hope if you are to fully enjoy the quality of our despair; yes, and also remember that where there is faith there is doubt.

* * * Art is as unimportant as banking, unless it comes from a spirit in free play — then it really is banking.