LAWRENCE DURRELL AND THE BAROQUE NOVEL

With the publication of Clea, Lawrence Durrell has completed his quartet of novels set in Alexandria. Few recent works of fiction have provoked fiercer disagreement. There are critics who assert that Durrell is a pompous charlatan; a mere word-spinner and gatherer of flamboyant clichés; a novelist whose angle of vision is grotesquely narrow; a late Victorian decadent and minor disciple of Henry Miller. Elsewhere, and particularly in France, it is held with equal vehemence that the Alexandria Quartet is the most vivid performance in the modern novel since Proust and Joyce, and that Durrell is a talent of the first rank. The main source of controversy is Durrell’s style. And that style is, in fact, the vital center of Durrell’s art. It meets the reader like a bristling hedge when he first enters the world of Justine; and when he has finished Clea, he will realize that that style is also the inward place of Durell’s meaning. It is, therefore, with the shape of the syntax and the rare glitter of the words that one must start. Let me cite two examples from Mount-olive:

The waters thickened to glue and silver bodies began to leap into the darkness only to fall back, glittering like coinage, into the shallows. The circles of light touched, overlapped, and the whole ceinture was complete, and from all around it there came the smash and crash of dark bodies leaping into the shallows, furling out the long hand-nets which were joined end to end and whose dark loops were already bulging like Christmas stockings with the squirming bodies of fish. The leapers had taken fright too and their panic-stricken leaps ripped up the whole surface of the pan, flashing back cold water upon the stuttering lamps, a shuddering harvest of cold scales and drumming tails. Their exciting death-struggles were as contagious as the drumming had been. Laughter shook the air as the nets closed. Mountolive could see Arabs with their long white robes tucked up to the waist pressing forward with steadying hands held to the dark prows beside them, pushing their linked nets slowly forward. The light gleamed upon their dark thighs. The darkness was full of their barbaric blitheness.

He entered the penumbra of the storm slowly, marvelling at the light, at the horizon drawn back like a bow. Odd gleams of sunshine scattered rubies upon the battleships in the basin (squatting under their guns like horned toads). It was the ancient city again … broken pavements made of tinfoil, snail-shells, cracked horn, mica; earth-brick buildings turned to the colour of oxblood; the lovers wandering in Mohammed Ali Square, disoriented by the unfamiliar rain, disconsolate as untuned instruments; the clicking of violet trams along the sea-front among the tatting of palm-fronds. The desuetude of an ancient city whose streets were plastered with the wet blown dust of the surrounding desert. He felt it all anew, letting it extend panoramically in his consciousness—the moan of a liner edging out towards the sunset bar, or the trains which flowed like a torrent of diamonds towards the interior, their wheels chattering among the shingle ravines and the powder of temples long since abandoned and silted up.…

The style is a mosaic. Each word is set in its precise and luminous place. Touch by touch, Durrell builds his array of sensuous, rare expressions into patterns of imagery and tactile suggestion so subtle and convoluted that the experience of reading becomes one of total sensual apprehension. Such paragraphs live to the touch of the reader’s hand; they have a complex aural music; and the light seems to play across the surface of the words in bright tracery. “The clicking of violet trams” is as complete a sensuous rendition as might be achieved by a pointilliste painter, breaking light into minute, precise flecks and reassembling the elements of vision into memorable design. No one else writing in English today has quite the same commitment to the light and music of language.

But this does not mean that this jeweled and coruscated style springs full-armed from Durrell’s personal gift. He stands in a firm tradition of baroque prose. In the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne built sentences into lofty arches and made words ring like sonorous bells. Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, used the same principal device as Durrell: richness through accumulation, the marshaling of nouns and epithets into great catalogues which the eye pursues in antiquarian delight. The feverish, brass-sounding prose of De Quincey is a direct ancestor to that of Justine. And more recently, there is the example of Conrad. In the later parts of Lord Jim and throughout The Rescue, Conrad uses words with the sumptuous exuberance of a jeweler showing off his rarest stones. Here also, language falls upon the reader’s senses like brocade.

This baroque ideal of narrative style is, at present, in disfavor. The modern ear has been trained to the austere, deliberately impoverished cadence and vocabulary of Hemingway. Reacting against the excesses of the Victorian manner, the modern writer has made a cult of simplicity. He refines common speech but preserves its essential drabness. When comparing a page from the Alexandria novels to the practice of Hemingway or Graham Greene, one is setting a gold-spun and jeweled Byzantine mosaic next to a black-and-white photograph. One cannot fairly judge the one by the other. But that does not signify that Durrell is a decadent show-off or that his conception of English prose is erroneous. We may be grateful that Hemingway and his innumerable imitators have made the language colder and more astringent and that they have brought back into fiction the virtues of direct focus. But they have done so at a price. Contemporary English usage is often thin and unimaginative. The style of politics and factual communication verges on the illiterate. Having far fewer words at our reach than had the educated man of the seventeenth and even of the late nineteenth century, we say less or say it with a blurred vagueness. Whether in its advertisements, its comic books, or its television, our culture lives by the picture rather than the word. Hence a writer like Durrell, with his Shakespearean and Joycean delight in the sheer abundance and sensuous variety of speech, may strike one as mannered and precious. But the objection arises in part from our impoverished sensibility.

Who is to say, moreover, that the Alexandria Quartet will not lead to a new pleasure in narrative prose? A number of contemporary writers are beginning to return to the reserves of language. The enchantment of Lolita lies precisely in Nabokov’s rediscovery of the resources of style, of stylization as a mode of ironic perception. And the lineage, Conrad-Nabokov-Durrell, is suggestive. All three approach English from a certain distance. Conrad and Nabokov as foreigners who learned the language, Durrell as an Irishman born in India and steeped in the Greek and French legacy of the eastern Mediterranean. Their prose has the quality of marvel and surprise which comes with personal discovery. Unlike most current novelists, they use words as if they had lain buried in some treasure-trove.

But Durrell’s style is more than a formal instrument; it carries the heart of his meaning. Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea are founded on the axiom that the ultimate truths of conduct and the world cannot be penetrated by force of reason. Where truth can be apprehended at all, in brief spells of total illumination, the process of insight is one of total sensuous absorption. In a conceit which is the very crux of his argument, Durrell instructs us that the soul enters truth as man enters woman, in a possession at once sexual and spiritual. Again, this is a view which has existed before Durrell. It plays a vital role in oriental and medieval mysticism; it is at work in Dante and in the erotic metaphors of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets. Moreover, it is crucial in the theories of Gnosticism and the citadel of Gnosticism was Alexandria. And it is here that the example of D. H. Lawrence is relevant. The presence of Lawrence is felt through the four novels and one of the main characters is in personal touch with him. Like Lawrence, Durrell believes in a wisdom of the senses truer and subtler than that of the predatory mind. Both men see in the act of love the crucial affirmation of human identity and the only true bridge for the soul. Durrell’s personages pursue each other in an elaborate cross-weaving of sexual encounter, for only thus can the ghostliness of the human spirit be given the substance of life.

This mystique of sensual recognition encompasses more than individual identity. Our entire perception of reality depends on similar illuminations (Joyce called them “epiphanies”). It is by accumulating these moments of vision, touch by exact touch, that we arrive at a grasp of the surrounding world—in this instance, at a true image of Alexandria. The long, glittering arabesques of adjectives with which Durrell surrounds objects are not only exercises in verbal acrobatics. They are successive assaults on the inner mystery of things, attempts, often exasperated and histrionic, to trap reality inside a mesh of precise words. Being equipped with a superb apparatus of sensual receptivity, Durrell is aware of the myriad movements of light, scent, and sound. He sees the world reflected in waters which are never still and tries to capture the essence of a city from the kaleidoscope of changing seasons, colors, and moods. So far as Alexandria goes, he has succeeded magnificently. Durrell’s Alexandria (not, of course, the Egyptian harbor-city of our ordinary acquaintance) is one of the true monuments in the architecture of imagination. It compares in manifold coherence with the Paris of Proust and the Dublin of Joyce.

The technique of accumulated nuance, the painter returning constantly to the same scene in the changes of the light, applies not only to the portrayal of the city but also the entire plot. As in the Japanese fable of Rashomon and in the plays of Pirandello, identical events are recounted from successive points of view. The narrator’s first impression of Justine, of the Coptic magnates in whose secretive life she becomes involved, of Melissa the golden tramp, and of the relations between Justine and Pursewarden, is submitted in Balthazar to ironic revision. The four volumes should be printed in the manner of loose-leaf notebooks allowing one to close earlier gaps with later disclosure. Nowhere in the Quartet are things what they seem to be. In Clea, the principal narrator is himself drawn into the vortex of action. Nothing is ever wholly explained; neither the murder of Narouz—one of the great set pieces of writing in recent fiction—nor Justine’s odd flight into Palestine, nor the true nature of the conspiratorial web which surrounds Nessim and Mountolive, keeping them entangled yet divided. To complicate matters further, there are three writers in the novel who are themselves characters, and even those personages who are not professional artisans of language, share something of their creator’s dazzling virtuosity of style and feeling. The novel closes in mid-course, on a series of tantalizing notations of what might be further developments. This too is essential to Durrell’s meaning. The true poet (and Durrell is a minor poet before being a novelist) knows that time and action flow like the Nile. He can show us the depth and rush of the water and throw stones into it to break the images of the moon; but he cannot arrest the river in his sieve of words.

Durrell says that “the central topic of the book is an investigation of modern love.” The reach of his inquiry is large; it draws on Sade and psychology at its most liberal. We find in this labyrinthine city not only the love of man and woman, but the more oblique byways of desire; no less than L’Astrée, the Quartet is a geography of eros. Clea contains, in miniature, as gross a tragedy of homosexual passion as any in Proust. Mountolive is lured into a house of wizened child-prostitutes who swarm at him like bats. Memlik, the police chief, is a delicate sadist. We encounter fetishists and transvestites, phallic rituals and private lubricities. The gravest love story in the entire novel, the unendurably intense love of Pursewarden and Liza, is a story of incest. Critics have seen in this profusion and variety of sexual concern a mark of decadence. Durrell has been accused of being a follower of Swinburne and Beardsley, a purveyor of ornate morsels of erotic lore. There are one or two instances in which such a charge can be sustained. But on the whole, it is wide of the mark. Durrell must explore the ambiguities and covertness of sensual lust precisely because he believes that it is only in the lambent or desperate contact of the flesh that we can gain access to the truth of life. In his treatment, moreover, there is little of prurience or the snigger of the eroticist. Love in Durrell has an ashen taste. When Liza burns her brother’s “immortal” letters (there is here a muffled echo of the Byron legend), she illustrates Durrell’s feeling that the extremity of passion brings with it utter rub. And our last vision of Justine, standing naked beside Darley’s bed, soliciting the empty gestures of spent ardor, is one of total defeat. As in so many dandies able to experience the fullness of sensuous life, there is in Durrell a touch of the Puritan.

But although its range of material and emotion is great, the Alexandria Quartet leaves one, at the last, with a suspicion of triviality. There lies the real problem for the critic. Why should there be at the center of this superbly contrived fable of life an undeniable hollowness? There are, I think, two reasons.

Durrell dramatizes a wide spectrum of sensibility; but his cast of characters is of an exceedingly special kind. All these fascinating and exotic beings share a high degree of nervous intelligence; they articulate their emotions with lyric power and unfailing subtlety; they live life at a constant pitch of awareness, more searching and vulnerable than that of ordinary men. They are cut from the same fragile and luminous stone and so they reflect each other like mirrors disposed in cunning perspectives. Mirrors play a crucial symbolic role throughout the action (as they do in Sade). And it is a dangerous role; for although they multiply vision and drive it inward, they also shut it off from the outside. In Durrell even the sea is a pool for Narcissus.

The angle of vision, moreover, is rigorously private. The gusts of social and political life blow across the scene, but they are not accorded much importance. Nessim and his clan are involved in a tenebrous conspiracy to further Coptic independence and they run guns to Palestine. But we are given no clear account of what they are really up to. Between Mountolive and Clea falls the shadow of world war, and at the start of Clea there is an account of an air-raid on Alexandria. It is a memorable patch of writing; rockets empty on the sky “their brilliant clusters of stars and diamonds and smashed pearl snuff-boxes”; the German planes are like “silver moths” moving with “fatal languor” among the “strings of hot diamonds” which spout from the batteries below. But neither the terror nor the real meaning of the action comes through. It is merely one more jeweled miniature to treasure in the vault of style. All that Durrell touches is somehow diminished to the scale of goldsmith’s work.*

Now no one would be so absurd as to demand from him a novel of “social consciousness.” But by severing his imagined world from the intrusions of political and social fact he makes it even narrower and more fragile than it need be. Behind the intimacies and stylistic experiments of Joyce lies the stabilizing structure of the Homeric epic. Proust buttressed his singular and even perverse view of human conduct with a close, technical awareness of social, political, and military affairs. Charlus is no less eccentric than Nessim or Balthazar. But the Zeppelins which cruise above Paris during his nocturnal prowlings are grimly real and carry with them the weight of historical crisis. Similarly, D. H. Lawrence gave to his accounts of private experience a firm anchorage in social reality. The legend of Lady Chatterley is as narrow and private as that of Darley and Melissa; but Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a profoundly intelligent study of class relations.

Because of its enclosedness and utter privacy, the Alexandria Quartet is more convincing in its details than in its broad design. It is the marginal characters who spring most completely to life: Scobie, one of the finest examples of the grotesque in English fiction since Uncle Toby; and Narouz, in whom massive silence becomes a kind of rhetoric. It is not so much the main plot which sticks in one’s memory, as it is the digressions and minor episodes: the shadowy account of Mountolive’s childhood; the affair between Justine and Arnauti, who never even appears in the Quartet; the exquisite misadventures of Pombal, the French diplomat; Capodistria’s recital of his experiments in black magic. As in medieval illuminations, the fringe is often brighter than the center.

But there is also a particular failure. Clea marks a drastic falling-off. It is a brittle, self-conscious gloss on the three preceding volumes. The long extracts from Pursewarden’s notebooks are not only insufferably tedious, but they act as a parody of Durrell’s own style. The episode of Clea’s near-drowning is a classic exhibit of how symbolism should not be used. The ravages which time and the death of the heart have caused in Justine and Nessim are thrust before us as stark facts. There is no attempt to render them psychologically plausible. What happened, I imagine, is this: Durrell had completed the first three movements of his quartet and sensed that he had a major achievement in hand. When he turned to the finale, he seems to have been beset with the fear of spoiling the whole. He took no risks and wrote a series of narrow variations on earlier themes. Thus Clea represents a distinct failure of nerve.

Yet even when we make such reservations, there can be little question of the fascination of Durrell’s novel. Anyone caring about the energies of English prose and the forms of prose fiction will have to come to grips with this strange, irritating work. We are too near the fact to say what place the Alexandria Quartet will hold in future estimates of twentieth-century English literature. I would guess that it will stand somewhere above the range of Green Mansions, with the less complete but more central performance of Malcolm Lowry. That Durrell will have his place is almost certain.

[* It is surprising that Durrell has not been claimed as a predecessor or example by the proponents of Camp. Many of his stylistic attitudes and the tone of his personages have affinities with the insouciance, edgy elegance, bitchy camaraderie, verbal sophistication, and erotic coolness of the Camp world. Seen in this way, moreover, the Quartet suggests the links between Camp and the dandyism of the Edwardians.]