A Minute Meditation

All philosophy seems to lead me towards a perfect spiritual detachment- a divorce from the world, and therefore towards sterility and deadness.   Let me be content to say:  I am, and content to "be" as fully as possible.   

-- Lawrence Durrell --
Pied Piper of Lovers


Amen . . .       

Lawrence Durrell: is this poetry?

Two young men are talking.  One is Walsh, the main character of Lawrence Durrell's Pied Piper of Lovers and the other is a close friend.



"'Why,' said Walsh, turning his head, 'do you talk such a lot of rubbish?'

Gordon's eyes widened and he laughed silently, very merrily.  Then he explained, quite seriously.
'Partly because words are such lovely things.   The more you learn the more pity you feel for the ones that aren't used, and you get into the habit of using them, until what you say doesn't matter so much as how you say it.'"

-- Lawrence Durrell --
Pied Piper of Lovers 


what you say doesn't matter so much as how you say it.

Would it be a surprise to learn that Lawrence Durrell was also a poet?

Lawrence Durrell: sense of place, one last word

"One last word about the sense of place; I think that not enough attention is paid to it as a purely literary criterion.  What makes 'big' books is surely as much to do with their site as their characters and incidents.  I don't mean the books which are devoted  entirely to an elucidation of a given landscape like Thoreau's Walden is.  I mean ordinary novels  When they are well and truly anchored in nature they usually become classics.  One can detect this quality of 'bigness' in most books which are so sited from Huckleberry Finn to The Grapes of Wrath.  They are tuned in to the sense of place.  You could not transplant them without totally damaging their ambience and mood;  any more than you could transplant Typee.  This has nothing I think to do with the manners and habits of the human beings who populate them; for they exist in nature, as a function of place."

-- Lawrence Durrell --
from the essay: "Landscape and Character"
Spirit of  Place


This quality of "bigness" that Durrell speaks of seems to be dependent upon the significance, the importance of the landscape, the natural setting found in the novel.  I can see this in Huckleberry Finn,  where the Mississippi seems to me to be the most important character in the novel.  The same is true for Typee  or Moby Dick  or  The Hound of the Baskervilles.  I wonder, though, about The Grapes of Wrath, though I might suppose the dust bowl early in the novel might be significant, yet that is only a small part of the novel.  It seems to me that most of the novel takes place in California and the landscape doesn't seem to play that important of a role, or at least not as important as the human relationships there.


"This has nothing I think to do with the manners and habits of the human beings who populate them; for they exist in nature, as a function of place."

The above statement is, to me, the most controversial idea.  It is an extremely significant theme that appears again and again in Durrell's works.  This idea may be the reason why he was a very highly regarded travel writer before his novels overshadowed them.  

Lawrence Durrell: Spirit of Place

Lawrence Durrell
Spirit of Place:  Letters and Essays on Travel
426 pages
Alan G. Thomas, Editor



I am now embarked upon a project of reading and rereading everything I have and can find that Lawrence Durrell has written.  One of those works which I have is Spirit of Place:  Letters and Essays on Travel, which is slightly misleading because it also includes excerpts from some of his early novels. Normally I don't read letters written by and received by authors.  I don't know why I don't find them interesting, but that's a fact. However, I must say that I'm finding these letters to be engrossing, probably because Durrell frequently refers to the place where he is writing this letter and also to whatever he's working on at that time.  In addition, I'm also picking up references and clues to a number of the themes that permeate his works.  One of them, and an important one, is  what he calls "Spirit of Place." 

The following quotation is from his essay, "Landscape and Character," first published in the New York Times magazine section, (June 12, 1960).


"'You write,' says a friendly critic in Ohio, 'as if the landscape were more important than the characters.'  If not exactly true, this is near enough the mark, for I have evolved a private notion about the importance of landscape, and I willingly admit to seeing 'characters' almost as functions of a landscape.  This has only come about in recent years after a good deal of travel--though here again I doubt if this is quite the word, for I am not really a 'travel-writer' so much as a 'residence-writer.'    My books are always about living in places, not just rushing through them.  But as you get to know Europe slowly, tasting the wines, cheeses and characters of the different countries you begin to realize that the important determinant of any culture is after all--the spirit of place.   Just as one particular vineyard will always give you a special wine with discernible characteristics so a Spain, an Italy, a Greece will always give you the same type of culture--will express itself through the human being just as it does through its wild flowers.  We tend to see 'culture' as a sort of historic pattern dictated by the human will, but for me this is no longer absolutely true.  I don't believe the British character, for example, or the German has changed a jot since Tacitus first described it; and so long as people keep getting born Greek or French or Italian their culture-productions will bear the unmistakable signature of the place. "

Durrell, later in the essay,  makes this point even more clearly and emphatically.

"I believe you could exterminate the French at a blow and resettle the country with Tartars, and within two generations discover, to your astonishment, that the national characteristics were back at norm--the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness for good living and the passionate individualism: even though their noses were now flat."

The significance of the place and its control over the inhabitants occurs in several of Durrell's works.  For example, in Justine, we read

I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together:  the city which use us as its flora--precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!.  .  . I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past.  It is the city which should be judged though we, its children, must pay the price.

The human residents in essence were puppets acting out Alexandria's conflicts, deluded into thinking they were responsible, that they were in control.  It is the spirit of the place which controls them.  I can't help but think of the following quatrain from the Rubaiyat of  Omar Khayyam:

Quatrain XLIX

'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
   Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays.
And one by one back in the Closet lays.  



I find this a fascinating concept, one that intrigues me, but I wonder if Durrell hasn't gone a bit too far.  Would the second generation of Tartars exhibit those same national characteristics-- "the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness for good living and the passionate individualism: even though their noses were now flat"?

I believe the environment does play a role in our lives, making some things possible and others impossible or at least highly unlikely, influencing our behavior to some extent, but just how much is the question.

Cavafy: "Desires"

Cavafy is the poet celebrated by Lawrence Durrell in his "The Alexandria Quartet."  It was those frequent references to him and his poetry that got me interested in him. 



DESIRES

Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old
and they shut them, with tears, in a magnificent mausoleum,,
with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet--
that is how desires look that have passed
without fulfillment; without one of them having achieved
a night of sensual delight, or a moon lit morn. 

-- Cavafy --
The Complete Poems of Cavafy 



A very sad poem, or so it seems to me.  It's also a strange one, primarily because I don't react the same way as Cavafy.   For me, an unfulfilled desire simply withers away over time.  There is no everlasting body in state nor any long-lasting feeling of regret.   Perhaps there's something wrong with me?    

Lawrence Durrell: Pope Joan

Lawrence Durrell:  Pope Joan
translated and adapted from the Greek of Emmanuel Royidis. 



Brief  quotation from the Wikipedia article on Pope Joan

"Pope Joan (Ioannes Anglicus) was, according to popular legend, a woman who reigned as pope for a few years during the Middle Ages. Her story first appeared in chronicles in the 13th century and subsequently spread throughout Europe. The story was widely believed for centuries, but most modern scholars regard it as fictional.

Most versions of her story describe her as a talented and learned woman who disguised herself as a man, often at the behest of a lover. In the most common accounts, due to her abilities, she rose through the church hierarchy and was eventually elected pope. Her sex was revealed when she gave birth during a procession, and she died shortly after, either through murder or natural causes. The accounts state that later church processions avoided this spot, and that the Vatican removed the female pope from its official lists and crafted a ritual to ensure that future popes were male.  In the 16th century, Sienna Cathedral featured a bust of Joan among other pontiffs; this was removed after protests in 1600."



From the Catholic Encyclopedia: 
 
The fable about a female pope, who afterwards bore the name of Johanna (Joan), is first noticed in the middle of the thirteenth century.The Catholic Encyclopedia lists a number of variations on this legend at this address:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08407a.htm



From the Wikipedia article on Emmanuel Royidis:

"In 1866 Rhoides published a controversial novel, The Papess Joanne ( Ἡ Πάπισσα Ἰωάννα), an exploration of the legend of Pope Joan, a supposed female pope who reigned some time in the ninth or tenth century (which was in fact a time of great turmoil for the papacy). Though a romantic novel with satirical overtones, Rhoides asserted it contained conclusive evidence that Pope Joan truly existed and that the Catholic Church had been attempting to cover up the fact for centuries.
The book's scathing attacks on what he viewed as an uneducated, uncultured, superstitious and backward clergy were controversial, and led to Rhoides's excommunication from the Greek Orthodox Church which perceived that its own clergy was the real target of those attacks."


Now, to the novel:

The narrator at the beginning of Part Three, approximately half way through the work states that "good Christians loathe those who mix religion  for the sake of profit, with the various inventions of their shaven or sprouting heads; the miracles of irons, pagan gods disguised as saints, genuflections, tickets for Paradise, holy relics, rosaries. . ."  Yet, this is what is found in this work, which is supposed to provide conclusive proof of its claim of a female pope.  Should good Christians, therefore, loathe this work?

The first three parts of the novel tell of her early life, her wanderings with her father,  an itinerant  monk, and the miraculous escapes and events of that time of her life.  This includes a long period in Athens, after she and her lover (a monk) had escaped from the monastery.  At the beginning of Part Four, about 3/4 through the work, the narrator now tells us that everything up to this point has been the product of his imagination, but from this point on everything is based "on the works of eminent chroniclers."

At this point, we are told of her career in Rome, prior to becoming pope, "She also studied medicine and according to some evil tongues she was well acquainted with the principles of witchcraft; it is said that she could force the evil spirits of the day (the former gods Bacchus, Hera, Pan and Aphrodite to leave the gates of darkness and run to do her bidding."  No source is given for this statement, as for most of the other claims in this part of the tale.

We are told of the fabulous natural wonders that followed Joan's election as pope.  Though it was still midsummer, heavy snow fell and blocked the streets of Rome, earthquakes shook Europe, while a rain of blood fell in Bresse and a hail of dead locusts in Normandy.  "Even the owls and night-jars which infested the roofs of the Vatican hooted for three successive nights in the most ominous manner. . ."

Part of the chroniclers's account includes wonders that occurred on her ascension to the throne of Peter, but even here, a footnote suggests that these were borrowed from other accounts of miraculous occurrences at the selection of various popes.  For the most part, this part tells mostly of her love affair with her secretary and personal assistant and little about her activities as pope.

Since I don't read Greek, I have no idea of how much of the book is Royidis and how much is Durrell.  The scathing attacks on the monks and clergy is commented on by critics who were reviewing Royidis's  novel and not Durrell's.  So, that part of the book is probably Royidis' work.

Overall, the tone of the work does not inspire me with great confidence in the argument of a female pope back in the ninth century.  Could there have been a female pope back then?   It's possible, but the complete lack of anything documenting such an event, which should have been shocking, from that time and only appearing some four hundred years later, suggests it's a myth. 

I suspect Lawrence Durrell had as much fun translating and adapting this work as I had in reading it.

Lawrence Durrell: The Black Book

Lawrence Durrell
The Black Book


The Black Book is the novel that gained Lawrence Durrell notice in the literary world.   T. S. Eliot called it "the first piece of work by a new English writer to give me any hope for the future of prose fiction."  Henry Miller worked to get a private edition printed in Paris when Durrell had difficulty finding a publisher.

I find some interesting parallels between The Black Book and the Alexandria Quartet  (AQ).  It's almost as if this was a first attempt which gave him the experience to produce the much larger work, four novels in the Alexandria Quartet, instead of one. 

Both novels are 1st person narratives,  and the narrators of both are now on islands in the Mediterranean, writing of  their experiences of the past year or two.   While the narrator in the AQ writes of his experiences in Alexandria just before WWII, the narrator of The Black Book tells the reader in the past year he has spent in a tired, rundown  hotel in London.  Both narrators struggle as they are in the process of learning their craft.

We don't find out the narrator's name in the AQ until the second novel, Balthazar.  And then, it's only his last name, Darley.  However we do get a clue in the first novel when Darley is told that he's referred to as Lineaments of Gratified Desire.  These are his initials, which coincidentally happen to be the same as the author's: Lawrence George Durrell.   The narrator in The Black Book jokingly refers to himself several times as Lawrence Lucifer. 
 
Those are not the only parallels.   As in the AQ, various forms of love or lust are portrayed in The Black Book, although limited in comparison to the AQ. Another is that at least one other writer is featured prominently in both works.  Journals and diaries also play an important role in both works.  One last commonality is the broken narrative structure in both works wherein the time line is fractured.  Characters are brought into the narrative, and we learn that they are dead or have left before we find out anything about them, including their relationship to the narrator.  It is only later that we learn their significance

Of course, differences exist.  Aside from the size of the two works, one major difference is tone.  The AQ seems to be, to me anyway, a celebration of Alexandria, with all its marvelous characters, its romantic and tragic tales, and its history.  On the other hand, The Black Book is a bitter, biting satire on England between the two world wars.  The narrator refers to "the English death" frequently when speaking of the England of the 1930's.  In the AQ, the golden, if sometimes harsh, light of the sun is an important characteristic of the natural world, while England is usually portrayed as dark, gloomy, and rainy. 

I had first read The Black Book only after reading The Alexandria Quartet, so it is difficult, if not impossible, to judge it on its own merits.  How much of my interest in the work is the result of having read it after The Alexandria Quartet and, therefore, seeing the relationship of this work to the larger work is debatable. I just don't know.  What my feelings toward this work would be if I had read it first is difficult to say right now.

Lawrence Durrell's The Avignon Quintet: an overall view (my view anyway)

The Avignon Quintet  (five novels)


Monsieur
Livia
Constance
Sebastian
Quinx  


The following quotation from Constance provides a glimpse into the workings of  The Avignon Quintet. 

"If real people could cohabit with the creatures of their imagination--say, in a novel--then what sort of children would be the fruit of their union: changelings?"


Lawrence Durrell
"The Avignon Quintet" (aka The Quincunx)

The following is my reading of the structure of  "The Avignon Quintet."  I don't know if it will make sense to anybody else, but it helps me keep the characters and events of the Quintet straight.    FL is the abbreviation for Fiction Level.


FL0:  Lawrence Durrell, the Person.

FL1:  Lawrence Durrell, the Novelist.   I read somewhere that the Person creates a fictional construct who is the writer, sometimes referred to as the second self or the implied author.  So, Lawrence Durrell, the Novelist, is a creation of of Lawrence Durrell, the Person, and it is this fictional construct who wrote  "The Avignon Quintet."   One might wonder about the common practice of pseudonyms or aliases adopted by many writers in this context.


FL2:  The Avignon Quintet:

Monsieur, the first novel, has a unique structure. It has five parts.  These five parts constitute the external or the Durrell Monsieur.   I call the first four parts the internal or Blanford Monsieur.  These four parts  contain the story of  Piers, Sylvia, and Bruce.  The fifth part of the Durrell or external Monsieur introduces the reader to Aubrey Blanford, who has "written" the internal Monsieur. 


The remaining four novels tell the reader of the lives of Aubrey Blanford and those around him.  As the readers go through these four novels, they see how Blanford has modified and combined the personalities of the people he knows and the events of their lives to create the characters in the first four parts of Monsieur.  
  
Major Characters in the Avignon Quintet:  Aubrey Blanford, Constance, Hillary, Sylvia,  Sam 



FL3:  Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness  (the internal or Blanford Monsieur)

This is the internal novel "written" by Aubrey Blanford.  It takes up the first four parts of the external or Durrell Monsieur.  The three most significant characters are Piers de Nogaret, his sister Sylvie, and Bruce Drexel, the narrator of the internal novel.  The three share a long, complex, and intimate relationship.  

Important characters:  Piers, Sylvie, Bruce, Sutcliffe, Pia, Toby,


What is most confusing is that the reader encounters FL3, the internal Monsieur, first and, moreover, doesn't realize what is going on until Part 5 when Aubrey Blanford is introduced.  At this point the reader then moves from FL3 to FL2.


But, these fiction levels are permeable.  Characters from FL3 frequently cross the line and interact with characters in FL2.  Some examples--

FL2:   Aubrey Blanford talks to Sutcliffe, the novelist he created in Monsieur, the internal novel.  At times it's difficult to determine whether Sutcliffe is only Blanford's sounding board, existing only in his mind, or whether Sutcliffe has  somehow become an independent person at Blanford's level. However, in Constance, the third novel in the Avignon Quintet,  Constance meets Sutcliffe and Pia, who have now  moved from FL3 to FL2. 

FL3:  Sutcliffe, a character in Blanford's internal novel,  says he wrote a novel about Bruce, Piers, and Sylvie.  His novel  begins with the same words that Blanford begins his novel, the internal Monsieur in FL2.

While reading the Quintet, I couldn't help thinking about Philip K. Dick, the SF writer who delights in creating works in which the boundary between reality and fantasy blurs and frequently disappears.

To add to the fun, Durrell sends several of his characters to Alexandria during WWII and also brings  in several characters from The Alexandria Quartet: Pursewarden and Melissa, while two members of the British military in Egypt, Maskelyne and Telford, make brief appearances. The two series, The Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quintet, overlap chronologically, both taking place during WWII.


Some of the themes and issues brought up in The Avignon Quintet

--the German occupation of France during WWII
--Gnosticism
--the Knights Templar and their lost treasure
--various forms of love
--Provence and Alexandria, although Provence is the place where most of the novels take place
--Freud and psychoanalytic theory

I find The Avignon Quintet a complex and, at times, a confusing work, which may account for much of my interest in it.  I've now read it at least twice, and possibly three times now.  No doubt, I shall reread it in the near future.

I hope I haven't confused you too much.

A Minute Meditation

"If real people could cohabit with the creatures of their imagination--say, in a novel--then what sort of children would be the fruit of their union: changelings?"

  -- Lawrence Durrell --
  Constance or Solitary Practices


One of the joys of rereading--discovering little gems anew. This is the germ of the idea that describes part of the charm of  "The Avignon Quintet,"  for several of the characters in Blanford's novel interact with Blanford and  his friends.  Constance, for example, remarks upon meeting Sutcliffe that she was surprised because she thought Sutcliffe was a fictional character.

I wonder how I would react if I met characters from a novel I had read. 

Lawrence Durrell: Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness

Lawrence Durrell
Monsieur or Prince of Darkness
Book 1 of  "The Avignon Quintet"  (aka The Quincunx)


Please do not expect an organized, coherent, illuminating post on this work; instead, you will find some random, chaotic ramblings about a work I am fascinated by.  It is probably this fascination that keeps me from stepping back and objectively looking at Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness.

I have now finished Lawrence Durrell's Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness, the first book in his "Avignon Quintet."  This is a reread, but it's been some time since I last read it, and therefore I remember little aside from the general overall structure of the Quintet.


The title can be misleading.  Monsieur is ambiguous for it could refer to any man, but the subtitle clarifies it.  There are those who believe that to say the devil's name out loud will act as a summons and the devil will appear.  Therefore, to prevent this, certain agreed upon circumlocutions are used, and  "Monsieur" is one of them.  However, the rest of the title, The Prince of Darkness, makes it very clear who is meant because that is one of the devil's titles, along with The Prince of Lies and The Lord of Flies. 

My overall reaction was that of meeting an old and familiar friend, one very comfortable to be with.  This, of course, is strange because I remember little of the book so far.  I think that familiar,  comfortable feeling comes from just having recently finished his "Alexandria Quartet.   As I turned the pages of Monsieur, certain similarities came to mind between it and Justine,  the first book in the "Alexandria Quartet."

To begin with, the first novels of the two sets, Monsieur and  Justine, are first person narratives, and, therefore, we will see all from that limited viewpoint.  Of course, one significant difference is that we don't learn the name of the narrator until the second book in the Quartet, while we learn the narrator's name on the first page of the first book in the Quintet.

Both works include considerable flashbacks, works involving memories as they intrude upon and influence the present.  Characters in both are mentioned with little or no introductory information as to who they are and why they are important.  That will be revealed later, sometimes much later.  In both, within the first three pages, the reader learns that someone has died, and that is all that the reader is told.  That this person must be important in some way is suggested by being mentioned so early in the work.

In Monsieur, several of the characters are members of the diplomatic corp of France and England, or are attached in some way to French and English embassies.  This is also true of characters in Justine.

Again, in each work, a novelist is mentioned and quoted frequently.  But, again, it is later that the reader is given more information about the writer and his relationship with the narrator.  And in both novels, that writer is dead at this point in the novel.

Alexandria, the City, is a significant character in the Quartet, so important that the human inhabitants seem to be only puppets controlled by the city.

                         " 'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
                           Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
                                Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
                            And one by one back in the Closet lays."
                                           -- The Rubaiyat:  Quatrain XLIX  
                   
In this case, read Alexandria for "Destiny."  I am only guessing about Avignon at this point, but the treatment of the city suggests that it too will be an important character throughout the work.


Because of the above, I wasn't too surprised to find myself, along with many of the characters, in Alexandria at the beginning of the second part of Monsieur.  




SPOILERS

However, there exists a complication which I haven't mentioned yet.  The structure of this, the first book, is a novel-within-a-novel.  And, this we don't find out until the last chapters, when we suddenly emerge out of the internal novel into the external novel, or the frame.  Actually, it isn't much of a frame as the frame only appears at the very end of this book.  The internal novel is also called Monsieur, which illustrates the link between the "two" novels. 

In the last few chapters, we meet Aubrey Blanford, who claims to have written  the internal Monsieur.  Future volumes will then tell the story of Blanford's life and his relationships with his wife, his friends, and relatives.  In those volumes we will see how Blanford changed and modified what he knows about the people and events of  his life into the characters of the internal novel.

After finishing the first volume, it appears as though this is a novel about writing a novel.  And no, it isn't dismal at all.  I dislike those sorts of novels, but Durrell does it so well that I really don't notice it.  Perhaps my dislike for this meta-fictional cliche is the result of finding that it is so often poorly done, and that may be my argument with it.

One more note:  sometimes "The Avignon Quintet" is called "The Quincunx."   A quincunx is a landscaping feature of five trees.  Four of the trees are placed at the corners of a square, while the fifth tree is placed exactly at the center.  The first book of the quintet, Monsieur, is placed at the center with the other four at the corners, a suggestion of the relationship among the five novels. 

I now regret only waiting so long to revisit "The Avignon Quintet."

A Minute Meditation

To really appreciate a place or time----to extract the poignant essence of it--one should see it in the light of a departure, a leavetaking.  

-- Lawrence Durrell --
from Livia, Book 2 of  The Avignon Quintet

Is this true?  If so, it's sad that one can only appreciate a time or a place when one leaves it. 

Lawrence Durrell: Justine, Pt. 3

Lawrence Durrell
Justine

As many have said before and many will repeat in the future, one of the joys and benefits of rereading some works is the discovery of the "new" or actually unnoticed elements in the work.  Sometimes the "new" brings out new themes or motifs in the work.  Sometimes it forces a re-thinking about of the work.  This is rare, but it does occur, and this is what has happened with this rereading. In spite of three? or four? readings, I never noticed this before or never realized the significance of it.

Justine is Darley's attempt to reconstruct the events of his life in Alexandria and make sense of it.  It is flashback, but with a very interrupted and convoluted narrative.  He does not go back and start with his arrival in Alexandria and move forward in a chronological straightforward  way to the present.  Instead, it is almost impossible to construct a chronology without considerable effort, and perhaps considerable guesswork by the reconstructor.  I had always taken this as an example of what many modern writers insist is the way that memories work--not in a chronological fashion, but somewhat randomly and those random memories bring up related memories. This is what it seemed was happening in Justine.   But, then I read this, seemingly for the first time.

(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 became significant for me.)

If this is so, then the events presented us are those which became significant in his reconstruction of his past life in Alexandria, and are not simply the random productions of memory.  I don't have time now, but I shall leave a note for my next rereading of Justine.  I wonder how this will affect my reading.  

Lawrence Durrell: Justine, Pt. 2

For some reason, the narrator neglected to introduce us to Balthazar, who will be a very important character, as suggested by his name given to the second book in the Quartet.

Balthazar's importance is considerable.  To be precise, Darley has sent the manuscript to Balthazar.  Balthazar then "corrects" or adds what he knows, from a different perspective,  about the events Darley has portrayed and returns the manuscript and the interlinear to Darley.  The second novel, Balthazar, Darley's attempt to rewrite Justine based on Balthazar's information. 


In Part II, the narrator recognizes this and quickly describes him and their strange meeting.

I see a tall man in a black hat with a narrow brim.  Pombal christened him, "the botanical goat".  He is thin, stoops slightly, and has a deep croaking voice of great beauty, particularly when he quotes or recites.  . . It is a mystery how he can have, suspended from his trunk, hands of such monstrous ugliness.  I would long since have cut them off and thrown them into the sea.  Under his chin he has one dark spur of hair growing, such as one sometimes sees upon the hoof of a sculptured Pan.
                                                  .     .     .      .     .
.  .  .  .  .

I remember meeting him, too , one bleak winter evening, walking along the rain-swept  Corniche, dodging the sudden gushes of salt water from the conduits which lined it.  .  .  . We had met before, it is true, but glancingly:  and would have perhaps passed each other with a nod had not his agitation made him stop me and take my arm.  "Ah! you can help me!" he cried, taking me by the arm.  "Please help me."  His pale face with its gleaming goat-eyes lowered itself toward mine in the approaching dusk.


Balthazar had lost the key to his pocket-watch, which had belonged to his father.  While he could have had another key cut for it, it wouldn't be the same for that key--"It belonged to this watch.  It was part of it. They searched briefly, but it got too dark and they went to a cafe and got acquainted.
The key was found, but the circumstances surrounding it were strange and never fully explained, at least in Justine.  Perhaps we will learn more about the key and the mystery that enveloped it in the next volume, Balthazar.

 PS
We do find out later.

PPS
Balthazar has his counterpart in Durrell's "The Avignon Quintet,"  in Akkad, the leader of a cult of Gnostics who is also a very talented and convincing speaker/reader at the meetings.

A Minute Meditation

I realized then the truth about all love:  that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all.  The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong to the constructions of society and habit.  But she herself--austere and merciless Aphrodite--is a pagan.  It is not our brains or instincts which she picks--but our very bones.

-- Lawrence Durrell --
from Justine, Part II

I think that there are a number of examples of this in the novel:  Darley, Melissa, Justine, Nessim, Mountolive, Leila, although it is not clear just whom these characters are in love with. 

Lawrence Durrell: Justine, Part I

Lawrence Durrell
Justine:  the first book in the Alexandria Quartet

This is my fourth visit to Alexandria with the aid of Lawrence Durrell, my personal tour guide.  Isn't that what writers are, guides to their worlds?  It has been some time since my last visit, so I had only the vaguest ideas of what was coming.  However, once I started, I began recognize some of what I was reading.

What came first was the memory of the initial confusion I felt when I began to read the novel.  Durrell doesn't believe, at least in Justine, straightforward chronological narrative structure.  Instead, I was faced with short paragraphs and brief references to characters, without any help from Durrell.  Here and there characters were brought up briefly and then off to something else.  It was only I had gotten a way into Part I that I began finding introductions to the characters but in a disjointed fashion, though.

This time though I understood what Durrell was doing.  As the narrator explains very early in the novel, the first page or so, he was going to put down on paper the events of the past year.  If I had decided to do something similar, it would have been difficult to begin as I know that all I would have been able to come up with at first would be fragments, disjointed,  and randomly recalled without any chronological order.  However, the longer I worked at it, the more material I would be able to bring up, and each memory would be accompanied by other memories.  So, as I got deeper into Part 1, I found the fragments were now longer and more complete.  If it had been me, though, I wouldn't have had to courage to include those first brief  fragments in my work, for I would have edited them out and produced a standard commonplace traditional account.  That, no doubt, is why Durrell is a great writer, and I am not.

While Durrell introduces some seven or eight characters, he returns again and again to two of them:  Justine and Melissa.  But, at first I found it difficult to immediately know just which one the narrator was referring to.  It's as if  the narrator mistakenly believes we are as familiar with Justine and Melissa as he is, so he really doesn't have to identify them immediately.   The male characters are introduced without the confusion that surrounded the female characters.  The males are named and their relationship to the narrator is spelled out and occasionally brought back into the narrative. 

As I mentioned earlier, the narrator doesn't provide his reader with a chronological sequence.  When we first meet Justine and Melissa, it quickly becomes clear that he is intimately involved with both of them.  It is only much later in Part I that we are told of their first meeting.  Then comes their first sexual encounter, but not necessarily in that order.

The Quartet, I find, consists of a number of character and plot threads that are intertwined throughout the story. Because of this, at times I simply stop reading, go back to the beginning of the novel, and follow a particular thread, ignoring whatever else is going on at that time.  It is surprising what I find when I do this, even if I limit it just to Part 1.

For example, let's follow the Justine thread and stop when we reach when we reach the part when the narrator tells us how and when they first met.  We first meet, or hear of her actually, on the first page when she is mentioned by the narrator as one of his friends: "Justine and Nessim, of Melissa and Balthazar.".  Several pages later, the narrator tells us that he has Justine's diary, which he got from her husband, Nessim, who still hoped that Justine would come back to him.  The narrator tells us that he believes he will never see Justine for he and his friends have "taken different paths now."  However, the narrator does have Melissa's child with him and tells us that he "has not named it yet.  Of course it will be Justine--who else?"

Several pages later we read that he catches a glimpse of her from his balcony.  In fact he has seen her many times and knows who she is, even though they haven't met.  He now mentions their many meetings at the cafe, El Bab. Again, pages later, we get a much fuller description of her, and it is obvious they have just been intimate.

Later, the narrator tells us that  he had once agreed to give a lecture on the 'poet of the city,' Cavafy, which was attended by "a dignified semicircle of society ladies."   Justine was in the audience.   He recognizes her, but they do not speak because they have yet to meet.  After the lecture, the narrator, that evening,  stops at a small cafe.  Justine suddenly appears and asks a question about the lecture.  Then she says, "I want to take you to Nessim, my husband.  Will you come?"  She drives them to the house and searched "from room to room, fracturing the silences.  He (Nessim) answered at last from the great studio on the roof and racing to him like a gundog she metaphorically dropped me at his feet and stood back, wagging her tail.  She had achieved me.


Nessim was sitting on the top of the ladder reading, and he came slowly down to us, looking first at one and then at the other. . .for my part, I could offer no explanation of my presence, since I did not know for what purpose I had been brought here."


If I may cheat here, the narrator believes, later, that  he knows why she approached him, gathered him up, and brought him to her husband.  But that's in Justine.  In the second book, Balthazar, he will hear a different explanation, and the reader will find yet one more in Mountolive.   

It is said that a sign of great literature is that one discovers something new in every reading.  That is certainly true of Justine.  Even though this was at least the fourth reading, I was surprised to discover clues,  interspersed in Part 1, to future events, some that will take place in the other volumes of the quartet.   The narrator would make some offhand remark and then go on to something else and would never refer to it again. It meant nothing to the narrator and nothing to me until this the fourth reading.  I should have picked up on them on subsequent readings.


I wonder what I will find on my fifth reading. 

Lawrence Durrell: Justine

One of my New Year's resolutions was to read as much of Lawrence Durrell's works this year as I could.  Today I begin with Justine, which is only appropriate since my first introduction to his writings was this work.  Several decades ago, I was in grad school and on the reading list for a course in 20th century novels (or perhaps 20th century English novels) was Justine.  I had heard of Lawrence Durrell and the Alexandria Quartet, but I had never read anything by him before.

I started reading and was confused and bewildered by the first three or four pages as it seemed to be nothing but randomly placed paragraphs with no coherent plan to structure them.  I was a bit dismayed, a complete novel like this!   Then the following jumped out at me.  It wasn't the first sentence of a chapter, or even of a paragraph.  It was buried in a longish paragraph, but I had to stop and read it again, and again.  It told me what Durrell was up to.  I was hooked. I read Justine and then went on to read as much of Durrell as I could find.   Now, it's time to do it again.

The sentence:

"The solace of such work as I do with brain and heart lies in this--that only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side."



I doubt if it grabs others the way it grabbed me, and I can't explain why.  It just did. 

Resolutions for the New Year

Well, this is that time of the year again, so I thought I would post my few resolutions.  Making them public might encourage me to work more diligently in keeping them.



I will avoid bringing in politics as much as possible. In the past it's been difficult, but I think I succeeded.  However, this year I may find it harder.  I doubt that keeping politics out of my posts will deprive anybody for I'm sure that it will be almost impossible to escape political discussions, reports, haranguings, and tirades.  So, I hope to provide an oasis here.  For those curious about my position, check out my post BALANCE at        http://freds-ramblings.blogspot.com/2016/11/balance.html




My second resolution is to reduce Mount TBR to a molehill, or at least start on it.  That means reducing book purchases and relying more on the library.  I hope this doesn't cause a recession in the publishing industry, but it must be done.  I also need to redouble my efforts in encouraging the various discussion groups I'm a member of to select more books that I have at home.  This, of course, will reduce the number of books to purchase and help reduce Mount TBR.




Last year was the Year of Austen in which I read everything I had by Jane Austen, which includes all of her novels, her juvenalia, and uncompleted works.  It was one of the high points of the 2016 reading year.  I also saw an excellent film adaption of her short work "Lady Susan."  For some obscure reason the powers-that-be called it Love and Friendship.   I thought it one of the best adaptations of her works that I've seen and highly recommend it. 

 Since that worked out so well, I have decided that 2017 will be the Year of Lawrence Durrell, during which I will reread everything I have by him, which is close to his complete output--novels, travelogues, and poetry (that will be THE problem).  In addition,  I have just learned that an unfinished novel of his has been published, so I will have the pleasure of not only rereading him, but of reading something by him for the first time (even if it is unfinished).

I will begin with what has to be the obligatory starting point, The Alexandria Quartet.   After that, I may then revert to reading them in their publishing order,  or perhaps continue on to The Avignon Quintet or The Quincunx.

You are all welcome to join me.   

Lawrence Durrell: "A Bowl of Roses"

A Bowl of Roses

'Spring' says your Alexandrian poet
'Means time of the remission of the rose.'

Now here at this tattered old cafe',
By the sea-wall, where so many like us
Have felt the revengeful power of life,
Are roses trapped in blue tin bowls.
I think of you somewhere among them -
Other roses - outworn by our literature,
Made tenants of calf-love or else
The poet's portion, a black black rose
Coughed into the helpless lap of love,
Or fallen from a lapel -  a night-club rose.

It would take more than this loving imagination
To claim them for you out of time,
To make them dense and fecund so that
Snow would never pocket them, nor would
They travel under glass to great sanatoria
And like a sibling of the sickness thrust
Flushed faces up beside a dead man's plate.

No, you should have picked one from a poem
Being written softly with a brush -
The deathless ideogram for love we writers hunt.
Now alas the writing and the roses, Melissa,
Are nearly over:  who will next remember
Their spring remission in kept promises,

Or even the true ground of their invention
In some dry heart or earthen inkwell.

-- Lawrence Durrell --


"Alexandrian poet"   Cavafy

"a night-club rose"    Melissa

"sanatoria"                Melissa ends up in a TB sanatorium

"Melissa"                  a night-club singer  and prostitute in Justine who loves
                                  Darley

 

"A Bowl of  Roses" takes its inspiration from Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.   The "Alexandrian poet" is C. P. Cavafy, the 20th century Greek poet.  Durrell refers frequently to him throughout the Quartet and has written at least one poem celebrating Cavafy.  The title is "Cavafy" (of course) and the first stanza of the three stanza poem is as follows:

Cavafy

I like to see so much the old man's loves
Egregious if you like and often shabby
Protruding from the ass's skin of verse,
For better or for worse,
The bones of poems cultured by a thirst--
Dilapidated taverns, dark eyes washed
Now in the wry and loving brilliance
Of such barbaric memories
As held them when the dyes of passion ran.
No cant about the sottishness of man! 

-- Lawrence Durrell --



In one of his sonnets, Shakespeare claimed that his poem about her would make her immortal, long after everyone else would be forgotten.  Do you think the Poet/Narrator thinks the same way about Melissa?

It's been some time since I've last looked into any of Durrell's fiction.  Perhaps it's time to take another look.  

Lawrence Durrell: "Lesbos"

Another of Lawrence Durrell's enigmatic poems--I don't know why I read his poetry, but there's something there that fascinates me.  Perhaps it's that attraction of the unsolved puzzle, one whose meaning is just out of reach.


                                                             Lesbos

                                     The Pleiades are sinking calm as paint,
                                     And earth's huge camber follows out,
                                     Turning in sleep, the oceanic curve

                                      Defined in concave like a human eye
                                      Or cheek pressed warm in the dark's cheek,
                                       Like dancers to a music they deserve.

                                      This balcony, a moon-annointed shelf
                                      Above a silent garden holds my bed,
                                       I slept.  But the dispiriting autumn moon,

                                       In her slow expurgation of the sky
                                       Needs company:  is brooding on the dead,
                                       And so am I now, so am I.

-- Lawrence Durrell --
from Collected Poems: Lawrence Durrell

All seems well, he is comfortable but then the " dispiriting autumn moon" rises.  For him, autumn is a melancholy time for it reminds him of those who have died, and perhaps of his own mortality.

The second stanza poses a problem for me. especially the second and third lines. 

                                       "Or cheek pressed warm in the dark's cheek,
                                         Like dancers to a music they deserve."

 It seems to be a comforting situation, but I'm not sure about the "music they deserve."

Most interesting line is the first: "The Pleiades are sinking calm as paint."

Is there one that you find most interesting?


The title "Lesbos" refers to a Greek island and seems to have little to do with sexual preference. On the other hand, I may be missing something here, which is entirely possible. 

 Comments are welcomed and encouraged. 
                              

Lawrence Durrell: "Mneiae

I think I had mentioned before that Lawrence Durrell is one of my favorite novelists. His "Alexandria Quartet" and "The Avignon Quintet" are favorites of mine which I have read and reread several times.  It's been some time since I last read them, and I can hear them calling out from the bookcase as I pass by.  Perhaps. . . soon.

Durrell is also a poet, probably one of the most perplexing poets I've ever read.  His poetry is far more cerebral or intellectual than my favorite poets; in fact, his poetry strikes me as being even more intellectual than that of T. S. Eliot.  I can make some sense of parts of a Durrell poem, but I have trouble coming up with more than a few broken ideas or phrases when I try for an overall view.  Here is one of the simplest of his poems, or so I think.


Mneiae

Soft as puffs of smoke combining,
Mneiae--remembrance of past lives:

The shallow pigmentation of eternity
Upon the pouch of time and place existing,

I, the watcher, smoking at a table,
And I, my selves, observed by human choice,

A disinherited portion of the whole:
With you the sibling of my self-desire,

The carnal and the temporal voice,
The singing bird upon the spire:

And love, the grammar of that war
Which time's the only ointment for,

Which time's the only ointment for.

-- Lawrence Durrell --
from The Poetry of Lawrence Durrell
selected by  Lawrence Durrell
E. P. Dutton and Company


A touch of irony here, from a source that's unexpected--at least by me--the spell checker.  My spell checker coughed at Mneiae and, really, truly, suggested a better spelling would be amnesia.  The irony here is that Mneiae is a common name for the Muses, and means remembrance,  according to the Greek Mythology Index (http://tinyurl.com/kpjoltx).  The Greek muses were the nine goddess of inspiration for poets and writers who called upon them for help to present their work with beauty and gracefulness.


 While the narrator begins with what appears to be a merging of past lives,
 
"Soft as puffs of smoke combining,
Mneiae--remembrance of past lives:"


 the theme of separation soon appears--


"I, the watcher, smoking at a table,
And I, my selves, observed by human choice,

A disinherited portion of the whole:"


or does it? 

Are "I, my selves" that which make up "I, the watcher"?   

----------------------------


"And love, the grammar of that war
Which time's the only ointment for,"


 What war is he speaking of--the war between the sexes?  Grammar is defined as a set of rules relating to language.  Is love then, as "the grammar of that war" a set of rules for that war?   Of course, the second line brings up that old cliche--time heals all wounds, perhaps those wounds suffered because of love, "the grammar of war." 

Favorite line: "Soft as puffs of smoke combining"



Any observations--good, bad, or indifferent?