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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North ZMto Road Am Arbor, Michigan 40100 J 1 I 74-3364 YOUNG, Thomas Beetham, 1942- THEHATIC EMPHASIS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM IN LAWRENCE BURRELL’S ALEXANDRIA QUARTET. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1973 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan © Copyright by Thomas Beetham Young 1973 THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. THEMATIC EMPHASIS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM IN LAWRENCE DURRELL'S ALEXANDRIA QUARTET * DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Thomas Beetham Young, A.B., M.F.A The Ohio State University 1973 Reading Committee: Approved by Ernest Lockridge Arnold Shapiro Adviser John M. Muste Department of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I especially wish to acknowledge the patient help and helpful patience of my adviser, Professor John M. v Muete, and my wife, Jane T. Young. ii VITA July 16, 1942 • • • Born— Hartford, Connecticut 1964 .... A.B., Princeton University, Prince­ ton, New Jersey 1967 . M.F.A., The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 1967-1969 Instructor of English, The Univer­ sity of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 1969-1973 Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Twentieth Century British and American Literature Studies in Twentieth Century Literature. Professor John M. Muste Studies in Nineteenth Century British Literature. Professor James R. Kincaid Studies in Nineteenth Century American Literature. Professor.Thomas Woodson Studies in the History of Literary Criticism. Professor Charles Wheeler iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............ T ..... ii VITA ................... iii Chapter I. CRITICAL BACKGROUND ........................... 1 II. AESTHETIC THEORIES ............................. 38 III. CONRAD AND JAMES .................................. 107 IV. L O V E ............... •............................... 137 V. A R T ............................................... 216 VI. POLITICS ...........................................258 VII. PSYCHIC H E A L T H .................................... 286 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................ 344 iv CHAPTER I CRITICAL BACKGROUND From Whence Did All This Fury Come? Critical Disagreement about The Alexandria Quartet . Proust did so magnificently, for France, what we want doing for us; Britain is hungry for the artist who will give her a world of mythical size, color, and complexity, which yet needn't be taken seriously. Durrell satisfies that hunger, however meretriciously. The American enthusiasm for him is more simple: a graduate-school vision of sin and subtlety in exotic old Alexandria, where you can forget you grew up in Ohio. — Martin Green, "Lawrence Durrell: A Minority Report" Not everyone agrees with Martin Green's assessment of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, as his title "A Minority Report" suggests. And not everyone who is inclined to view Durrell's work as a flashy prostitution of an honest, second-rate talent is so directly caustic in his criticism. Yet the critical debate centered around the Quartet often takes on many of the characteristics of a shouting match, in which a caustic turn of phrase serves as a rebuttal in kind to a gushy, wholehearted homage to the Quartet in long paragraphs of praise ending customar­ ily with an exclamation, appropriately punctuated. Even some critics who try to hold to the middle ground do so emotionally. They are of two minds--or rather two feel­ ings: the Quartet is a monumental work; the Quartet is a sham. Perhaps all this is so because it is difficult to read these four novels for the first time without being caught up in exotic Alexandria and in the complex inter­ relationships among the bodies and psyches of the characters who, maimed yet still curious, wander her streets. But when the journey is done and the reader has time to reflect on what it has all meant, he may well feel vaguely uneasy. With the spell of the writing faded and the cold facts of the melodramatic character of the plot and the undifferentiated nature of characters who all seem to talk alike left as residue-, he may feel tricked. But pinning down the source of this trickery, like pinning down the source of what he might have originally felt to be the genius of the work, is a slow and laborious critical process. An angry, general reaction can be the result. Mr. Green's is a good example: Complicatedness in place of complexity, violence in place of vigor, rhetoric in place of rendering; the whole thing bears all the marks of a daydream about a Great Novel.1 Those who gush praise, on the other hand, can be just as general, just as vague about the sources of their strong feeling in favor of the Quartet. Mary Graham Lund finds not sin and subtlety in old Alexandria but a religious quest in modern terms. In her "Submerge for Reality: The New Novel Form of Lawrence Durrell," she says Durell is concerned with the primary necessity of human life, belief. If men are mere psychic phenomena in the stream of time, manifestations of spiritual energy, still they all have to cry out in unison in their great temporal need, "Let there be G o d l " 2 Doth Lund and Green, to their credit, feel the need to be more specific about the sources of their reactions. Yet the tone of their more specific remarks remains emotional, their minds firmly made up as to whether to say yea or nay to the Quartet as a whole. It is hard for Lund, in "The Alexandrian Projection," to avoid either easy generali­ zation or wholehearted acceptance, even when ostensibly talking about the sub-category of characterization. Mr. Durrell*s characters meet the shocks of life with an audacious, sometimes flamboyant, courage and undertake the tedious and painful recoveries without complaints. Not that they understand what they are doing13 She is as awed by Durrell as Green is irritated. The spell of the writing has not faded for her, yet she has little more success in pinning down the source of what she feels to be Durrell's genius. Hers is a euphoric, general reac­ tion, of no more critical help, than Green's caustic remarks. Perhaps this is why it i6 often said that there can be no disputing about taste. This dispute is about taste, but about little else. And it is a seemingly end­ less, unproductive one. Where criticism of the Quartet is concerned, however, it is not always necessary to look at two critics to dis­ cover such a dispute; two points of view alone are neces­ sary, and they can sometimes be found within the attitude of a single critic. Charles I. Glicksberg*s "Fictional World of Lawrence Durrell" generally praises the Quartet without reservations, including such critically contro­ versial aspects as the. Mote to Balthazar in which Durrell cryptically applies Einstein's Theory of Relativity to the work he is in the process of writing.4 Glicksberg seems to be as fully caught up in the spell of Durrell's writing as Lund is. This is the aesthetic principle Durrell elaborates in his body of fiction. Mo revelation is final, no insight privileged. What we get is a symphonic multiplicity of interwoven themes, each of which is true when seen in relation to the rest but false when viewed in itself.5 Yet even though Glicksberg has no hard second thoughts about the viability of Durrell's basic aesthetic principle here, and although the conclusion he reaches is in accord with his generally unqualified praise ("Relativity of vision is the triumphant principle affirmed and imagina­ tively incarnated in The Alexandria Quartet ."**), he is nonetheless aware that his judgment of the work may be exactly wrong. He has a suspicion that he might have been tricked. And so he offers an earlier alternative "con­ clusion. " In conclusion, it is hard to determine whether Durrell's work, judged as a whole, represents a brilliantly original attempt to project the fourth dimension in the universe of fiction or the melodrama of eroticism dressed up in the "plotted" garments of profundity.? For Glicksberg the Quartet as sham remains a possibility even though he is much more inclined to view it as a monu­ mental work.