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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. He recognizes that in a brief essay such as his definitive support for either position is out of the question, but he also implies that we simply cannot have it both ways: no work of prose fiction can be simultaneously fake and genuine. The dispute about taste, when limited to a single consciousness, is surely more civil than a

shouting match. But the dilemma remains: the Quartet can

still be seen either as a cheap compendium of tricks shabbily wrought or as a brilliantly imaginative symphony.

Critical disagreement over a contemporary work of art

is, of course, not at all a unique state of affairs.

Green's and Lund's remarks were written within a year of the publication of Clea, the fourth volume of the Quartet.**

Glicksberg, writing three years.after Clea's appearance in

1960, was still in no position to reconsider his reading of the Quartet from a substantially later perspective in

time; indeed, the suspicion that he may have been wrong in

his praise produces more confusion than anything else,

since to be specifically confirmed or overcome the suspi­

cion would ideally have to be examined at a later date, when the spell o£ Durrell*s prose had lost its strong hold on him. That such detached re-examinations are not imme­ diately possible surely contributes to many o£ these criti­ cal disagreements. Time must pass, not only £or a work to stand (or fail) the test of time but also to make possible more detached, dispassionate analyses of one's original reactions. With The Alexandria Quartet, however, achieving detachment through time seems doubly important: there are not only these original strong reactions to be re-examined, but there is also what I have been calling "the spell of the writing" to be overcome. Durrell's lavish prose and his plethora of interwoven themes can— and does, if one does not resist determinedly— enchant the reader; once enchanted, one suspends his disbelief and with it his critical facilities. Afterwards the reader may sing hymns of praise, unless— or until— he suspects he has been taken, that it has all been done with mirrors, that there is less in the Quartet than meets the eye. But he may not, while so involved, trace the aesthetic effect of the work to its sources and show specifically how the euphoria was in­ duced, or conversely how disillusionment with the work as a whole was and remains inevitable. He can only deal with strong feelings and nagging suspicions in a general way.

Important objections to the Quartet were raised, how­ ever, in the two years following the publication of Clea, even though they were seldom fully documented. Certain broad reservations about such aspects of the work as its rather perfunctorary characterization, its basically melodramatic plot, its circumlocutious narrative method

and gaudy, epigrammatic style, and even a lack of conven­ tional moral attitudes on the part of Durrell himself are

held by more than one critic. And even when less than

fully developed, these are major reservations. If there are indeed fundamental flaws in the characterization, plot, narrative method, style, and values of the author himself

it would be difficult to view The Alexandria Quartet as a major work. It would not only have to be reduced to the

questionable status of an experiment, but also labeled

"experimentn in the sense of "experiment that failed."

This is roughly the view held by Bonamy Dobrde in 1960 in

his "Durrell's Alexandrian Series": . . . we might say of this striking experiment what Pursewarden said of Justine: "Justine and her city are alike in that they both have a strong flavour without having any real character."9

A brief look at the reservations held by Dobrde and four

other early critics of the Quartet should serve to give

some idea of the nature and scope of these immediate

objections.

Dobrde's main objection, as his view above implies, is

that Durrell's characterization is superficial} the charac­

ters and even Alexandria itself have no real substance.

He finds the main characters to be "fascinatingly and 8 surprisingly glossed,1,10 but the bulk of his remarks indi­ cate that fascination and surprise are, in the end, no substitute for characters who are not glossed, just as having a strong flavor is, finally, not enough to make up for having no real character. A major factor in the characters' lack of substance lies in their having no real values, according to Dobrde.

For whom in these volumes can we feel admiration, or even respect? Which of these people has any trace of nobility, even of that self-discipline, without which the bonds of society are loosed?11

Dobr6e finds, in addition to this lack of values which he finds threatening to the very fabric of society, a lack of sexual mores, just as widespread and, one assumes from the tone of his remarks, almost as irresponsibly destructive.

. . .’there is one thing that unites all the characters, large or small, in one common bond, and that is a complete lack of sexual continence, even, one might think, of selection.1*

For Dobrde the aesthetic effect of Durrell's having glossed his main characters is not satisfying. Indeed, this effect seems to have been a superficial one made up of fascination and surprise, which does not either disguise or counter­ balance the lack of values or mores in the characters that

Dobrde finds so disturbing) moreover, the glossing con­ tributes to the problem, since the characters are not

sharply differentiated from each Other, all finding a com­ mon bond in what to Dobr6e is a dangerous irresponsibility.

4 Indeed, his reservations go beyond characterization in the

Quartet, although his objections are mainly focused on this aspect of the work. He disagrees with the implied values of Durrell himself, as we can best see by his choice of the two male characters that he finds at all admirable:

Mountolive and Nessim.l3 Dobrde wants not only more pre­ cise delineation of character but also fundamentally dif­ ferent characters than he finds here. And he would prefer more responsible values in the author as well as in his characters. For Dobrde the spell of the writing, manifest­ ing itself as fascination and surprise, fades quickly, and fundamental flaws in the Quartet are left exposed.

John Arthos agrees with Dobrde that Durrell*s values leave much to be desired; in his "Lawrence Durrell*s

Gnosticism" Arthos objects to the Quartet on both intel­ lectual and moral grounds. The values he sees as forming a basis for the work— those of Durrell himself— he finds irrational, elitist, dangerous. Durrell's repeated refer­ ences to action as an enigma, according to Arthos, fit into a system of thought referred to in Justine as "pessimistic gnosticism*"14 Arthos, referring to Hans Jonas's Gnostic

Religion, says that in gnosticism the cosmos itself is seen as a demonic system, and thus

. . . it is the natural condition of man to be a prey of the alien forces which are yet so much of himself, and it requires the miraculous superven­ ing of gnosis from beyond to empower the imprisoned pneuma to come into its own.15 10

According to Arthos and Jonas, in gnostic thought the world • * itself is viewed in as pessimistic a way as the cosmos and

the individual: "the world takes the place of the tradi­ tional underworld, and is itself already the realm of the dead."*® Arthos finds this gnostic view of the world and the individual's plight expressed in the Quartet, where

Darley insists that only Alexandria is real and that

Alexandria herself is to be judged for what happens to her

inhabitants, although it is her inhabitants who must pay

the price of what happens (see especially Durrell's Note

to Justine and Justine, p. 13). For Arthos what happens

in the work (the action, the plot) is not as important as the way the consciousnesses of the characters are involved

in what happens, and this in turn is controlled by the

force of the city, Alexandria:

• . . the incidents— the desertions and flights and pursuits— are only the focal points for what is always presented as the main matter, the impinging of one consciousness upon another, all interpreted __ as the manipulation of the soul of the city itself. 7

What Durrell has done, according to Arthos, is to use gnostic thought, or something very like it, "to support this reduction of the world and all others in it to an internal miasma."*® Having Darley blame Alexandria for what happens

to its inhabitants is only a smoke screen used to disguise

Durrell's own values, as Arthos sees it. It is the mor­

ally as well as intellectually questionable technique of

« 11 calling the familiar by an unfamiliar name; as Arthos puts it, "Durrell calls it the soul of Alexandria, but it is in 1 A fact merely his own 'anonymous' self-consciousness.

Arthos*s intellectual objection to the Quartet lies

in the work's being based on gnostic thought; a view of the cosmos as demonic and the world as the traditional under­ world is not intellectually credible. But Arthos has

strong moral objections to the Quartet as well. In such

scenes as the domino ball described toward the end of

Balthazar where the characters, masked and draped in the

dominoes, are so freed of their identities that even their

sex is not apparent, Arthos finds Durrell seeking a per­

fect freedom in an elitist manner. But such a freedom, by

such means, is for Arthos morally hideous; it is really

"unlimited power uncontrolled by any distinction between

good and evil."2** Similarly, Durrell's treatment of sexual

relationships is morally unacceptable. There is no

hierarchy of moral values or, worse, the values of sex are

turned upside down, with sterility coming out on top.

Durrell treats on equal terms the love of man for wife, incest, pederasty, prostitution, and love within the family. This planification is not in the mere Freudian allegorizations, but in a mixture of sympathy and hostility. It is almost as if the real god is infecundity. (I suppose this might logically follow from the declaration that sex is not physical but psychic.)21

Durrell goes beyond Pursewarden's philosophies about sex and the psyche and Btandard Freudian types of abnormalities to a partial sympathy for those involved in this catalog of infecund sexual possibilities, a sympathy for the morally unsympathetic. Like Dobrde, Arthos finds this lack of sexual selection morally irresponsible, akin to the intel­ lectual irresponsibility evident in the gnosticism of the

Quartet. Throughout the work Arthos sees Durrell as preferring "travesty to rationality,"22 and it is only in

Clea, where Darley feels revulsion and not humor in the face of death, that "life is admitted to possess values which the philosophy [gnosticism] itself denies*"23 For

Arthos gnosticism, that ancient heresy, is not limited in time and space; "it can take hold wherever there is a * flight from reason, wherever there is a cult of the elite and the conviction of the positive power of evil."2* But wherever it takes hold, even in fictional Alexandria, it remains intellectually and morally reprehensible.

Benjamin DeMott finds fundamental flaws as well, although unlike Dobrde and Arthos his objection^ are more on aesthetic than moral grounds. The title of his unfav­ orable review, "Grading the Emanglons," refers to a fic­ tional tribe created by Henri Michaux who have, he tells us, "a passion for remoteness in a r t . " 2 ® This passion is obviously not shared by DeMott, who is not fond of Durrell narrative method either. He sees an unnecessary remote- * ness worthy of the Emanglons in Justine and Balthazar, the first two books of the Quartet, and finds the flaw not in the subject but in Durrell's handling of it, "a consequence less of matter than of manner."2® For DeMott Mountollve, the third novel in the Quartet and the only one to be narrated in the third person, is preferable sinoe "it does tell a story, rather than hide one."2? His objection to

Durrell'b narrative method is inseparable from an equally strong objection to the style of the Quartet; for him

"Durrell prefers to speak in the unreal idiom of ro­ mance,"2** and Durrell's narrative circumlocutions are no more unreally romantic than his impressionistic, multi­ syllabic prose. If DeMott is right, Durrell has indeed brought poetry back to the novel— but it is bad poetry.

Durrell is chockablock with imagery, indeed the principle of his employment of images is that of the saturation air raid of other times— but the reader, though given opportunities to admire flames and explosions in other neighborhoods, ultimately is numbered among the maimed.29

What for Dobr6e was a striking if seriously flawed experi­ ment is for DeMott no experiment at all; DeMott sees the use of the term "experiment" itself as only a covering up . on Durrell's part of his own ineptitude, much like Arthos sees Durrell trying, and failing, to disguise his own values. Unlike Arthos, however, DeMott is primarily con­ cerned with the aesthetic rather than the moral flaws of. the Quartet, and he remains severely sceptical of

Durrell's theories as they appear in the work. He is 14 especially critical of the theories appearing in the Note to Balthazar, where Durrell speaks directly as author and not through his characters.

. . . the prime use of the methodological pro­ nouncements seems to be that of encouraging in­ nocent readers to respect as an experiment what is actually no more than a mismanagement of an already familiar narrative method.30

DeMott finds Durrell innovative only in putting "his work

forward as a major literary experiment."31 on the other hand, his method of revealing characters and events from

several points of view, one glimpse at a time, represents not innovation but only ignorance on Durrell' b part,

an obliviousness, infrequent among true innova­ tors, to the whole line of investigation carried on by major novelists since the beginning of this century, few of whom have been satisfied with "one profile at a t i m e . " - 3 *

That DeMott is not at all caught up in the spell of the

Quartet is obvious. And he raises once again what

Glicksberg suspects and Green feels certain of: the

spectre of the Quartet as sham.

A fourth critic, Matthew N. Proser, also objects to

the aesthetics Durrell presents in the Note to Balthazar.

His essay, "Darley's Dilemma: The Problem of Structure in

Durrell's Alexandria Quartet," finds Einstein's Theory of

Relativity an inadequate structural basis for a novel.

Durrell, in the Note, explains his structural principle

as an effort to discover a "modern unity" for the novel: IS

Modern literature offers us no Unities', so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition. Three sides of space and one of time consti­ tute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern.

(Durrell, Note to Balthazar)

Proser's objection is that while Durrell tries to con­ vince us that we readers are being tricked by reality itself, that it is our misunderstanding of the true nature of reality which misleads us in the Quartet, it is actually Durrell the novelist who fools us, and not the nature of things. In Balthazar, where the reader must modify his understanding of the events described by

Justine'b narrator, Darley, in the light of new informa­ tion, the reader is as confused as Darley is: "like Darley, we have gone through the. entire love affair with Justine, 33 only to learn it really wasn't a love affair at all." J

But Proser does not find this additional information in

Balthazar to be, as Durrell insists it is, the result of a different point of view; it is "entirely new informa­ tion. "34 According to Proser the first design is oblit­ erated, not modified, and thus the reader is forced to

start over. All this talk about relativity simply allows

Durrell to do anything he wants, to take the easy way out: i * . . . probably the most trenchant criticism we can make of Durrell's technique concerns the freedom it allows the novelist. . . . [It is] far more difficult to give one's characters an inner core

i 16

of necessity which remains consistent until the novel's termination.35

Relativity, for Proser, offers no sound basis for charac­ terization in a novel.

While Proser is most interested in discussing struc­ tural problems in the Quartet, however, he finds an underlying aesthetic problem as well. The nature of the plot leads him to consider Durrell as a subscriber to an aesthetic philosophy that he calls the "School of Melo­ drama . . . but tempered to fit the modern taste."36

Durrell's characterization too, contains "an aesthetically philosophical defect, at least insofar as the writing of 37 novels is concerned."

The book is a kind of illustration of behaviorist psychology. The characters' personalities are not integrated} they are symptoms of the moment. We know this to be true because Darley, who is writ­ ing our book, tells us he does not believe in the integrated personality.38

Proser sees behaviorist psychology as inappropriate for the novel} the result is aesthetically unsound since it refuses to satisfy the reader's desire for completeness, for organic unity.

It [behaviorism] is dangerous both to structure and delineation of character because it allows, at least in Durrell's case, a permissiveness which countermands the whole concept of organic unity, and indeed, the idea upon which this con­ cept is in part constructed: that of the organic (as opposed to the unintegrated) personality.39

Proser remains fundamentally sceptical toward Durrell'a remarks about the form of the Quartet. Indeed, like DeMott, * 3

17 he finds these pronouncements more a kind of smoke screen used to disguise a hackneyed form than anything else.

In short, in this way can the author write a kind of melodramatic political thriller and ward off criticism by invoking "science" and "relativity" and scaring the pedantic traditionalists away.

Yet Proser does not feel, as DeMott does, that the Quartet is primarily a sham, that Durrell*s basic idea is to trick the reader. It is more that Durrell, in using an inappro­ priate aesthetic for the novel, has let his material get away from him: "in attempting to make as many facts as possible the faces of reality, and then in denying them, he has lost an integrated sense of the real in his novel."41 And Proser does see some value in the Quartet, which he finds "certainly better than ordinary melo­ drama"; indeed, Durrell's "facility with language is at moments amazing.Basic structural and aesthetic prob­ lems, however, keep the work from affecting the reader deeply.

George Steiner, in his "Lawrence Durrell: The Baroque

Novel," agrees with Proser that Durrell's facility with language is often breathtaking. Moreover, he sees this style itself as central to the strong critical disagree­ ment about the work of the Quartet.

No recent work of fiction has provoked fiercer disagreement. . . . The main source of contro­ versy is Durrell's style. And that style is, in fact, the vital center of Durrell's art.*3 18

He calls Durrell's style "baroque," and points to a tradi­ tion of baroque prose, mentioning Sir Thomas Browne,

Robert Burton, Thomas De Quincey and, more recently, Joseph

Conrad. Steiner sees the baroque prose style as being out of favor at the present time, but blames "our impoverished sensibility" and neither the tradition nor Durrell*s contribution to it.44

The long, glittering arabesques of adjectives with which Durrell surrounds objects are no mere exercise in verbal acrobatics. They are success- sive assaults upon the inner mystery of things, attempts often exasperated and desperate, to^ trap reality within a mesh of precise w o r d s . 4 5

But while Steiner rejects DeMott's position that the poetry in the Quartet is bad poetry, he is vaguely troubled by the overall effect of all this fine writing. He too, like

DeMott and Proser, has a suspicion of something gone wrong somewhere: "although its range of material and emotion is very great, the Alexandria Quartet leaves one, at the least, with a suspicion of triviality."46 Like Proser, and unlike DeMott, Steiner does not feel tricked by

Durrell. Still, he finds what seems to be a fundamental flaw all the same.

Steiner finds two possible sources for this basic * aesthetic flaw that leaves the reader of the Quartet dis­ satisfied, suspecting triviality. For one thing, the sensibilities of the characters, however varied, all seem to share a basic sameness. 19

Durrell dramatizes a wide spectrum of sensibil­ ity; but his cast of characters is of an exceed­ ingly 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.47

Then too, the scope of the work is restricted, perhaps in keeping with the special kind of sensibilities the charac­ ters possess, to individual consciousnesses and observa­ tions. This reinforces Steiner's suspicion of triviality; the social sweep and political power he would like to see here remain dimly in the background.

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. . . . All that Durrell touches is somehow diminished to the. scale of goldsmith's work.45

Steiner, then, has raised another spectre; the Quartet is trivial, due to deficiencies in characterization and in

scope. The baroque prose here finally adds up to little;

the overall plan, the plot, is less interesting than the

finely written digressions.

Because of its enclosedness and utter privacy, the Alexandria Quartet is more convincing in its details than in its broad design. . . . It is not so much the main plot which arrests the memory, but the digressions and minor episodes.4**

Thus Steiner accepts Durrell's controversial style (except

in Clea^°), but he finds deficiencies in characterization

and scope that make the overall effect of the work less 20

than satisfying. Like DeMott and Proser, Steiner has basic aesthetic objections to the Quartet.

The remarks of these five critics demonstrate that

important objections to the Quartet were raised, if not

fully documented, in the two years following the publica­

tion of Clea. Moral objections such as those of Dobr6e

and Arthos, objections that point to flaws in the values

of Durrell himself, are difficult to overcome in any

direct fashion. Arguments about the values of an author

as they are implied in his work are no more easily re­

solved than the circular arguments about taste outlined

earlier in this chapter. Yet such objections can be dealt

with insofar as they are directly related to such funda­

mental aspects of the theory of the novel as characteriza­

tion, plot, narrative method, and style.. '-The aesthetic

objections of critics such as DeMott, Proser, and Steiner,

of course, are primarily concerned with such aspects of

the Quartet as its plot and characterization, and may be

confronted more easily. Some critics interested in reply­

ing to early aesthetic objections to the Quartet, such as

Hilary Corke and John V. Hagopian, tried to reply to a

great number of specific objections or, in the case of

Hagopian especially, specific critics.others main­

tained that many objections to the Quartet were the result

of misreadings of Durrell's intentions and accomplishments, 21 and they sought both to give what they thought' to be more accurate readings of the work and to explain how such a large number of misreadings could have been generated by

Durrell's prose. Joseph E. Kruppa, Lee T. Lemon, and

Robert Scholes take Buch an approach.

Kruppa thinks that many misreadings of the Quartet are a result of critical misunderstandings of both

Durrell's intentions and accomplishments. In "Durrell*s

Alexandria Quartet and the 'Implosion' of the Modern Con­ sciousness" Kruppa sees the Quartet as being based on principles fundamentally different from those upon which the traditional English novel rests; for him Durrell

"stands outside the hiBtory of the English n o v e l , although his work may have roots in such French novels as i Andre Gide's Les Faux Monnayeurs. Kruppa.specifically mentions Debrde as one who, among others, has misunderstood

Durrell's Notes in the Quartet as a result of considering them only in the light of the traditional English novel:

"Debrde's mutterings are typical of the confusion of lit­ erate scholars when they confront a problem which does not correspond to old patterns."5^ The way out of such con­ fusion, Kruppa suggests, is first to examine the old patterns, and then to discover their relationship to the new. Briefly, he sees the concept of point of view as being an "inherent concern of the novel from its incep­ tion"^ because the novel was born with a world vision 22 dominated by Newtonian physics,

in which actions could be placed at determinate points; Locke and the philosophers after him examined the nature of consciousness, its rela­ tion to the world and to other consciousnesses.55

Although Durrell's emphasis on Einsteinian physics in his

Notes might mislead one into thinking that he is basically interested in breaking with the Newtonian basis of the traditional English novel, according to Kruppa "Durrell's attitudes depend, above all, on a changed model of human consciousness."5*’ Modern ideas in physics are analogous to those in modern psychology, and it is not modern prin­ ciples of physics themselves but their analogy to modern psychological principles that is important. Kruppa be­ lieves that "for Durrell contemporary psychology has done to the human consciousness what relativity physics did to matter— dissolved it," so that neither consciousness nor words can be treated like objects.5** Having thus explained the rationale behind the new patterns that he accuses

Dobr£e of misreading as old patterns ineffectively rendered,

Kruppa reacts positively to that characterization Dobr6e complained about in the Quartet.

. . . Durrell treats consciousness as a formless stream of which the characters are only arbitrary variations, slices cut out from the force that lives through them. . • . This obviates the idea of a unique consciousness which had been a con­ vention of the novel.58

Such a judgment of Durrell's characterization could serve

V 23 as a reply to one of Proser's objections as well, the objection that Durrell's behavlorlst theories do not allow for "organic" presentations of characters. For Kruppa,

Durrell does indeed break with such a convention, but such conventions are not indispensible to the novel but only to the critic who, having always found them, demands to be able to find them always.

Lee T. Lemon, in his "Alexandria Quartet: Form and

Fiction," also replies to such critics as Proser by viewing the Quartet as a new form— or more accurately as an exten­ sion of an old one. One major source of objections to the work, according to Lemon, is "Durrell1s ambitious claims for the series; it is to be at once the manifestation of the classic form of the 20th century novel and an 'inves­ tigation of modern love.'"5® Such puffed-up pronouncements can in themselves lead to uncharitable reactions; one can feel compelled to avoid suspending his disbelief and suc­ cessfully resist the spell Durrell's prose attempts to weave. Beyond this, Lemon finds objections such as Proser'b that Durrell's form allows too much freedom to the novel­ ist (see p. 15 above) to be widespread.

The most frequent and most obvious criticism of Durrell's conception of form is that anything goes; and, to compound the felony, there is the possibility that anything goes .anywhere.60

From this perspective Durrell's conception of form must be seen as closer to license than to liberty, not so much a 24 new form as no form at all. Yet Lemon finds.the form of the Quartet to have firm roots in, if not the English novel, at least its American cousin; the assumption in novels such as Faulkner's Sound and the Fury is that

"truth changes both as events surrounding the characters change and as the characters themselves change."6^ And thiB is, according to Lemon, the underlying assumption of the Quartet as well. Durrell's form differs from

Faulkner's not in kind, but only in degree.

Durrell's chief contribution to the form of the novel is his thorough exploration of the fact that both characters and scenes change: his explor­ ation, in other words, of a modified relativistic world view.62

Lemon, unlike Kruppa, views Durrell's form not as breaking with tradition of the novel in English but as extending concepts already present in the 20th century novel as well as contemporary psychology and physics.

Indeed, Lemon finds the Quartet to be a clear exten­ sion of the concepts found in such a traditional modern novelist as Henry James. Like Kruppa, he does not object to Durrell's characterization, although he praises just those aspects of characterization critics like Proser find inadequate and unsatisfying.

This relativistic form achieved in The Quartet permits the characters to be realized with rare completeness and sympathy because it imposes no predetermined standards for judging them. The reader is free to experience what the naive Darley of the first book experiences in much the 25

way he experiences it; as Darley matures, the reader— because of the fullness with which Durrell creates the implications of the change— must also develop a more mature view of the significance of the events.®3

These characters that Dobrde found to be surprisingly (and unsatisfyingly) glossed Lemon finds more fully developed than in most novels. Moreover, Durrell's concept of form is seen as a logical extension of the concept of one of the masters of form in the modern novel, Henry James.

While Darley of the Quartet might well function as the center of consciousness in a James novel,

. . . Durrell is able to make the technique work simultaneously for a large group of characters, and therein lies the difference. It is as if James had continued The Ambassadors tracing the effects of Chad Newsome's change upon Strether, Strother's subsequent change upon Miss Gostrey, Miss _ Gostrey's upon Madame de Vionnet, and so on.64

As these remarks suggest, Durrell's extension is a drastic one; Lemon is convinced that the Quartet is, finally, a different kind of novel from The Ambassadors.

It is as if James were aiming Strether at a stationary target, Durrell aiming Darley at a moving target and charting the moves of both man and target. The results are two different.kinds of novels, two different novelistic forms.65

Yet Lemon believes not only that Durrell's concept of form

is basically an extension of that of James, but also that

this extension enables Durrell to explore the motivation

of hiB characters more fully thari most modern novelists.

And because the "scene" against which Darley plays out his actions is really the interrela­ tionship of the characters, the exploration of 26

motivation is unusually thorough. Perhaps no other modern novel explores motivation so thor­ oughly, both in terms of levels of motivation and number of characters analyzed.

Far from dismissing Durrell's aesthetic theories of form as smokescreens intended to dazzle the reader into accepting what is actually a mishandling of a traditional form,

Lemon sees them as springing from long accepted traditional theories, and even as making good aesthetic sense within themselves. But although he has no reservations about

Durrell*s intentions, he is aware that "whether Durrell achieved the potentialities offered by the form is another matter.

Lemon, in contrast to Kruppa, tries to account for what he believes to be the many misreadings of the Quartet not in terms of modern psychology and physics but in terms of what are already accepted as sound aesthetic theories of the modern novel. Even though his perspective is differ­ ent, however, like Kruppa he praises those elements in

Durrell's characterization objected to by other critics.

Confident that Durrell's form does make sound aesthetic sense, he does not feel tricked by the narrative method of the Quartet, and he addresses, himself to objections such as Proser's (see above, p. IS) that Balthazar does not modify Justine but instead presents entirely new informa­ tion. Lemon agrees that withholding vital information as a narrative method is an old, ea3y, and effective 27

novelistic trick— effective, that is, "until the reader

realizes that he has been duped."6® But he remains uncon­

vinced that this is only a trick on Durrell*s part; he

finds instead in Balthazar an aesthetic coherence because

’£ere, as elsewhere, Durrell

does not depend upon the reader to rewrite the work in the light of the newly supplied informa­ tion. He takes it upon himself to provide the complete context in which the new data makes sense.69

Since Lemon is also convinced that Durrell*s form does not

allow him the complete freedom others have objected to, he

argues that Durrell is not free to play tricks, that he is

instead restricted by the development of his characters.

He avoids the complete confusion of situation of which he has been accused by making each change of perspective meaningful to the devel­ opment of the characters involved.70

Lemon would agree with Kruppa that the form of the Quartet

is closely related to modern scientific perspectives in

psychology and physics; he sees Durrell as dramatizing a

new mode of knowing, "not of essences (real or defini­

tional) but rather of relations."71 But Lemon goes beyond

Kruppa in showing how these new perspectives are related

to, and grow out of, established aesthetic theories of the

modern novel.

The result is the achievement of a classic con­ temporary form— a form that grows out of our way of viewing reality and by embodiment in an aesthetically complete pattern adds to our understanding.'2 28

Lemoh is not entirely convinced that Durrell has fulfilled all the potential of his form, and mentions some rela­ tively minor specific flaws.?3 But his approval of -the grand design of the work is clear and unequivocal.

Robert Scholes, in a study of modern novelists he calls The Fabulators, agrees with Kruppa and Lemon that a special perspective is needed from which to view the

Quartet. Indeed, he lists an entire group of modern writers whose works have produced baffled critical reactions, writers who have produced "strange new objects on the tree of narrative.Such writers as Durrell, Kurt Vonnegut,

Jr., John Hawkes, and Iris Murdoch he terms "fabulators,” pointing out that they all have in common a marked

"delight in design" with a "concurrent emphasis on the art of the designer.Furthermore, "of all narrative forms, fabuilation puts the highest premium on art and joy."^

Fabuiation, as Scholes defines it, is also marked by a movement away from realism; he finds this a valuable characteristic, since in his view modern cinema is much better equipped to convey realism than the modern novel.

The perspective from which he specifically views the

Quartet is, like Lemon's, based on the established aes­ thetic of the novel; unlike Lemon, however, he does not limi^: himself to the modern novel' but attempts to examine the entire history of prose fiction to discover where

Durrell fits, and where he does not. He finds the Quartet 29 to be, like Cervantes's Don Quixote, an "anti-novel"s "both men were faced with a constricting literary tradition and revolted against it."7** Ironically enough, it is exactly the tradition established by Cervantes's revolt that

Durrell now finds too confining.

The tradition he [Durrell] finds thin and con­ stricting is the very one started by Cervantes . . . the empirical tradition which in its theo­ retical formulations calls itself first realism and finally naturalism.7^

But Scholes sees a similarity in the reactions of Cervantes and Durrell: both revolt against an established form that had become, in its old age, more restrictive than anything else. To Scholes naturalism is feeble now, just as romanticism was feeble in the time of Cervantes.

Scholes sees Durrell, among others, as generating a

"renaissance of romance" through his fabulation.**^ And although hiB approach could not be farther from Kruppa's modern scientific one up to this point, he agrees that

Durrell has his roots not in the English but the French novel of the 20th centuryj Scholes finds that Durrell, by the time of the writing of the Quartet at least, has left the perspectives of D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller for

Marcel Proust— and Proust's concern with form.**-*’ It is

Proust who demonstrates most clearly "the artificiality of the real and the reality of the artificial," which in turn destroys that which is so important to Proser, "empirical 30 notions of characterization."82 Scholes makes an important observation on the source of critical confusion about

Durrell's characterization:

Appearance and reality are continually confused, and the line between life and art continually blurred. Darley feels like a character out of Moeurs. But Darley is, a character in Durrell's novel.83

This is not to say, however, that such an observation is capable of clearing up the critical disagreement about characterization in the Quartet, especially in the light of Scholes*s explanation that all this is done "in order

to make it harder for the reader to begin applying his disbelief, even if he refuses to suspend it."8^ Perhaps

it is just this frustrated, unapplied disbelief that pro- duces suspicions of triviality, or even convictions that

the Quartet is a sham. In any case, for Scholes the

Quartet is not a sham, nor is such a possibility even

relevant to his reading of it; from his perspective it is

a fabulation, a modern romance reacting against a worn-out

empirical tradition, albeit the very tradition that gave

birth to the novel. And from this historical perspective

the question of the extent of Durrell's innovations is

surely not central either. As Scholes puts it, "what is

new in Durrell . . . is neither the primitive nor the

sophisticated but his peculiar combination of the two."88

What I have intended to show in this brief survey of

criticism of The Alexandria Quartet is that there is nothing 31 close to a concensus of opinion about what Durrell has accomplished, or failed to accomplish. Indeed, it is some­ times difficult to remember that such disparate reactions are based on the same work. There is not even agreement about the specific source of all this fury over the

Quarteti is it from Durrell'a standing outside the tradi­ tion of the English novel altogether? from his having written highly ambitious if not sophomoric Notes in his own voice? from his aesthetic of the novel itself? his own implied values? In the realm of characterization, which has been treated more fully here than other aspects of the work, the more than usual space allotted to the topic has produced, perhaps, only more than usual confusion; those very aspects that Proser finds objectionable, Lemon finds to be particularly praiseworthy. It seems most reasonable, given this state of affairs, to ignore those disputes about taste and the moral objections of Dobrde and Arthos per se and deal with them only insofar as they are directly related to the fundamental aesthetic aspects of the work,

Durrell*s characterization, plot, narrative method, and style. To avoid the abrupt conclusion that, like taste, there is no disputing about aesthetics, it will be necessary to investigate the aesthetics of English prose fiction, formulate working definitions, arid see just where— if any­ where— Durrell touches the tradition critics such as Kruppa and Scholes think he has basically abandoned. With such an historical perspective I hope to show that Durrell has not so much abandoned the traditional novel in English as built upon and modified that tradition. It is my thesis that his primary modification is to replace both the classical emphasis on plot and the romantic focus on characterization with a sustained and extensive concentra­ tion on theme and thematic variation, and that such a modification does provide a sound and satisfying aesthetic effect comparable to that of the traditional novel in

English. 33

NOTES: CHAPTER I

Martin Green, "Lawrence Durrell: A Minority Report" in The Yale Review, 1960, reprinted in The World of Lawrence Durrell,' ed. Harry T. Moore, Carbondale, 1962, p. 134. Pagination refers to the E. P. Dutton paperback edition of Moore, New York, 1964.

3Mary Graham Lund, "Submerge for Reality: The New Novel Form of Lawrence Durrell" in Southwest Review (14:3), p. 234.

3Lund, "The Alexandrian Projection" in The Antioch Review (21:2), p. 201.

^Charles I. Glicksberg, "The Fictional World of Lawrence Durrell" in Bucknell Review (11:2), p. 128.

5Glicksberg, p. 126.

^Glocksberg, p. 133.

^Glicksberg, p. 132.

®Lund's "Submerge for Reality ..." was published in 1959, before the publication of Clea. She did not, how­ ever, subsequently change her position of almost unquali­ fied support in later essays, even when Clea came under particularly strong attack.

^Bonamy Dobrde, "Durrell's Alexandrian Series" in The Sewanee Review, 1960, reprinted in Moore, p. 204. Pagina- tion refers to the Dutton edition of Moore.

l^Dobrde, p. 192.

^Dobrde, pp. 199-200.

12Dobrde, p. 193.

*3Dobrde, p. 200. Surely Nountolive, ironically pre­ sented as the public success and the private failure, mother-dominated, at one point reduced to a sausage-dog for a companion in a work whose stated subject is an investi­ gation of modern love, could not be construed to be the object of Durrell's admiration.

**John Arthos, "Lawrence Durrell's Gnosticism"-in The Personalist (43:3), pi 364. 15Arthos, P- 368.

l€Arthos, P- 369.

17Arthos, P* 363.

18Arthos, P* 366.

18Arthos, P- 372.

28Arthos, P- 370.

21Arthos, P. 371.

22Arthos, P. 371.

23Arthos, P- 373.

24Arthos, P. 372. 25Benjamin DeMott, "Grading the Emanglons” in The Hudson Review (13s3),^p. 457. ---

26DeMott, p. 458.

27DeMott, p. 459.

28DeMott, p. 459.

28DeMott, p. 462.

30DeMott, p. 463.

31DeMott, p. 463.

32DeMott, p. 463. 33Matthew N. Proser, "Darley's Dilemmas The Problem of Structure in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet" in Critiques Studies in Modern Fiction (4:2), p. 20.

34Proser, P. 21. 35 Proser, P- 23.

38Proser, P* 18.

37Proser, P. 24.

38Proser, P* 24. 35 39Proser, pp. 24-25.

40Proser, p. 25.

41Proser, p. 27.

42Proser, p. 27.

43George Steiner, "Lawrence Durrell: The Baroque Novel" in The Yale Review, 1960, reprinted in Moore, p. 13. Pagination refers to the Dutton edition of Moore.

44Steiner, pp. 15-16.

45Steiner, p. 18.

46steiner, p. 20,

47Steiner, p. 20.

48Steiner, p. 21.

48Steiner, p. 22.

50Steiner, pp. 22-23. He sees Clea as "a drastic falling-off," "a distinct failure of nerve," because Durrell, fearing he might spoil a masterpiece, took no chances in the fourth novel and merely repeated what he had already successfully done in the first three.

51See Hillary Corke, "Mr. Durrell and Brother Criticus" in Encounter (14:5), pp. 65-70, and John V. Hagopian, "The Resolution of the Alexandria Quartet" in Critique: studies in Modern Fiction, V o X ^ 7, PP« 97-106. Corkers essay ap­ peared in i£(>0, Hagopian's in 1964,

52Joseph E. Kruppa, "Durrell.'s Alexandria Quartet and the 'Implosion' of the Modern Conciousness" in Modern Fic­ tion Studies (13:3), p. 412.

S^Kruppa, P» 413

54Kruppa, P* 402

®3Kruppa, P* 402

Kruppa, P* 405

5^Kruppa, P* 406

58Kruppa, P* 415 36

®8Lee T. Lemon, "The Alexandria Quartet; Form and Fic­ tion" in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature (4:3), p.STT.------“ ------;-

®°Lemon P* 327.

^Lemon P« 328.

82Lemon P- 329.

82Lemon P* 332.

Lemon P* 332.

65Lemon P- 332.

88Lemon P. 332.

8^Lemon P* 333.

88Lemon P* 330. 69 Lemon P* 331.

Lemon P* 334.

^Lemon P* 337.

^2Lemon P* 337. ^ 2 Lemon does not achievement is as great as his formal one. "Despite the magnificent range permitted by the form he has chosen, he omits any suggestion of the normal love of man and woman-- the love that leads to marriage, family, and the usual pleasures and sorrows" (p. 324). There may be an echo of' Dobrde's moral objections here (see above, p. 8), but while Dobrde seems to want different characters altogether, Lemon might well be satisfied with the addition of a typical middle-class family of four. Darley and Clea ap­ parently lack the necessary legal sanctions for having twins, and the concomitant desire for such dual offspring, that leads to the usual pleasures and sorrows beyond the customary superscription.

^Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (New York, 1967), p. 14. Most of what Scholes has to say about Durrell here on pp. 17-28 was originally published as "Return to Alex­ andria: Lawrence Durrell and Western Narrative Tradition" in The Virqinia Quarterly Review (40:3), pp. 411-420, in 1967T------37

^Scholes, p. 10.

7®Scholes# p. 10.

77Scholes, pp. 11-12.

78Scholes, p. 19.

7?Schole8, p. 19.

80Scholes, p. 27.

8lScholes, p. 26.

82Scholes, p. 20.

83Scholes# p. 22.

8^Sctiol68t p. 22.

85Scholes, p. 18. CHAPTER II

AESTHETIC THEORIES

Naming of Parts Theories of the Novel

The artist, as John Stuart Mill saw in a wonderful flash of critical insight, is not heard but over­ heard. The axiom of criticism must be, not that the poet does not know what he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what he knows. To defend the right of criticism to exist at all, therefore, is to assume that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right, with some measure of independence from the art it deals with. — Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. — D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

D. H. Lawrence adds an important insight to Northrop

Frye's axiom of criticisms even though the artist cannot talk about what he knows, he often tries to do just that.

This is not to say that Frye and Lawrence agree, or even that they are talking about the same thing, but that their pronouncements shed light on each other. Frye begins with an axiom from Mill, adds a longer yet neatly balanced one of his own, and concludes with a definition of criticism.

According to his theory, criticism exists because it has

38 39 the capacity to add to a work of art, from without, some­ thing the artist cannot add from within. Imperially imperative, Lawrence is more pithy. Yet his too is a. balanced, three-part argument, the first two parts of which- constitute the axiom, the third the conclusion from it. The difference in Lawrence's conclusion is that here it is the critic's function not to add to the work of art from without, but to keep the artist from destroying it from within. The difference in Lawrence's tone, also important, is that he treats his abstractions concretely, as if they were things, as a symbolist poet might.

There is nothing contemplative or defensive in his staccato sentences, unless one suspects that an outrage­ ous offense is the best defense. Frye, however, is defending the right of criticism to exist at all and, assuming this will be granted, contemplates a trap; once we grant this right, we must also agree that criticism must therefore be somewhat independent from the art it deals with. He does not even mention that singular abstraction, the individual critic, but deals exclusively with the vast and hazy job of work that occupies this individual critic:

0 in a word, criticism. It is criticism that must find a way to talk about what the poet knows but cannot say; it is

a matter of survival. And in finding this way to talk,

preparatory to anything else, we must abandon treating

abstractions as things and, leaving Lawrence's critic 40

disappearing into the brush, saving tales from artists, we must turn to various theories of the novel and. the names of the parts thereof.

The purpose in turning to such theories is, of

course, to gain a perspective from which to view Durrell's

Quartet. To start from the highest possible place, how**

ever, let us first turn to a perspective on theories of

the novel themselves, namely Frye's theory of criticism

expressed in what he calls his "Polemical Introduction"

to Anatomy of Criticism. This is, admittedly, only one

theory of criticism, and necessarily a highly abstract one, but it does represent a deeply serious modern attempt

to gain, at one point in time, an overview of criticism, which in turn strives for an overview of all forms of the

literary art. We have left Frye's theory at the point where criticism was seen as adding something to the work of art that the artist could not add from within, thus

possessing "some measure of independence from the art it deals with." As this definition of criticism is elabor­

ated, however, we find that this independence is far from

being complete; just as criticism as an entity is neither

4 identical to nor a subclass of the entity of literature,

so it cannot be a totally separate entity. The critic is

neither parasite nor poet.

The notion that the poet necessarily is- or could be the definitive interpreter of himself or of the theory of literature belongs to the conception of 41

the critic as a parasite or jackal. Once-we admit that the critic has his own field of activity, and that he has autonomy within that field, we have to concede that criticism deals with literature in terms of a specific conceptual framework. The framework is not that of literature itself, for this is the parasite theory again, but neither is it something outside literature, for in that case the autonomy of criticism would again disappear, and the whole subject would be assimilated to some­ thing else.1

It is this specific conceptual framework that gives crit­ icism its unique perspective on literature, moving toward objectivity in that it is not identical to literature yet retaining a special knowledgeability about literature by its not being a wholly separate entity, imposing entirely alien principles upon literature from without. It is a framework derived from but not identical to the object of its investigation, literature itself.

The first thing the literary critic has to do is to read literature, to make an inductive survey of his own field and let his critical principles shape themselves solely out of his knowledge of that field. Critical principles cannot be taken over ready-made from theology, philosophy, politics, science, or any combination of these.2

In other words, the proper study of criticism is litera­ ture. Furthermore, critical theories are not based on the ideal, on what literature might be like were it only perfect, but on the actual, on what literature actually is.

. . . criticism has to be based on what the whole of literature actually does: in its light, what­ ever any highly respected writer thinks litera­ ture in general ought to do will show up in its proper perspective.3 42

Thus this conceptual framework gives us not only a per­ spective on literature, but also a perspective on statements about what literature ought to do; if it does not allow us to judge such judgments, at least it provides a wide context in which to see them.

With the mention of "statements about what literature ought to do" we have come almost full circle, back to the dilemma of arguing about taste. To develop a new perspec­ tive on such statements, however, is to at least see the problem in a different light. Frye, viewing the problem historically, gives us such a perspective.

Value-judgements are subjective in the sense that they can be indirectly but not directly communicated. When they are fashionable or gen­ erally accepted, they look objective, but that is all. The demonstrable valuerjudgement is the donkey18 carrot of literary criticism, and every new critical fashion, such as the current fashion for elaborate rhetorical analysis, has been accompanied by a belief that criticism has finally devised a definitive technique for separating the excellent from the less excellent. But this always turns out to be an illusion of the history of taste. Value-judgements are founded on the study of literature; the study of literature can never be founded on value-judgements.4

Frye articulates the problem in balanced phrases. He does « not solve it; indeed, his technique in this work is more to avoid the problem altogether. He points out that his

Anatomy, "although it takes certain literary values for granted, . . . is not directly concerned with value- judgements."5 He does go on, perhaps as imperially as

Lawrence,^ to give what he insists are sound historical 43 reasons for being directly unconcerned about value- judgments.

All efforts of critics to discover rules or laws in the sense of moral mandates telling the artist what he ought to do, or have done, to be an authen­ tic artist, have failed. . . . The substitution of subordination and value-judgement for coordination and description, the substitution of "all poets should" for "some poets do," is only a sign that all the relevant facts have not yet been consid­ ered.7

The perspective that Frye is attempting to achieve, one of course that can only be approached as a limit, is one that does consider, without exception, all the relevant facts.

That one cannot achieve such a perspective does not pre­ vent the method employed to attain this impossible goal from allowing one to keep unwearied eyes on unwary state­ ments, and sounding the alarm when oversimplification threatens the critical precision the method demands. Frye does not pose a solution to this complex problem, but he does insist on its complexity, and does cry out against straw simpletons everywhere.

It is still possible for a critic to define as authentic art whatever he happens to like, and to go on to assert that what he happens not to like is, in terms of that definition, not authentic art. The argument has the great advantage of being irrefutable, as all circular arguments are, but it is shadow and not substance.8

Shouting matches between critics who argue in this fashion, then, need concern us no longer; it remains only to iden­ tify such argumentation for what it is, which is not quite so simple as Frye suggests. 44

I£ Frye rejects the universal statement o£ value found

in the phrase "all poets should," however, he finds the particular descriptive statement "some poets do" to be a particularly rewarding one. Indeed, it is the concept o£ method that is crucial in his investigation, and such particular descriptive statements apply not only to

specific critical investigations of specific works of

literature but also to general theories of criticism; in short, the statement "some poets do" lies at the founda­

tion of Frye's inductive method, which is "the first thing

the literary critic has to do (see above, p. 41). This

inductive method, Frye tells us, is the very method used by Aristotle in his "Poetics."

A theory of criticism whose principles apply to the whole of literature and account for every valid type of critical procedure is what I think Aristotle meant by poetics. Aristotle seems to me to approach poetry as a biologist would approach a system of organisms, picking out its genera and species, formulating the broad laws of literary experience, and in short writing as though he be­ lieved that there is a totally intelligible struc­ ture of knowledge attainable about poetry which is not poetry itself, or the experience of it, but poetics.9 The method is inductive; one observes specific character­

istics, whether they be of organisms or poems, and then * inductively formulates the broad laws that pertain to

these observed characteristics. One does not presume to

judge these characteristics while observing them, nor does he presume to speculate in what ways the organism (or 45 poem) could be improved if it possessed different charac­

teristics from what it now possesses. One deals with the

actual, as data— and not with the ideal, as speculation.

The observations are then co-ordinated; like character­

istics are grouped together, disparate characteristics are

separated. What one discovers in the grouping and separ­

ating are the broad laws, laws that are in no way imposed on the characteristics but that arise from them, and yet

laws in no way articulated by the phenomena (organisms, or poems) themselves. If the objects observed are organ­

isms, if the observation is accurate and the groupings are made rationally, the result is natural law in the truest

sense. These are the broad laws by which the organisms

operate; that the organisms cannot articulate these laws

only points to the need for the observer, who adds nothing

but a perspective and a way of stating it. If the objects

observed are poems, and once again if the observation is

accurate and the groupings are made rationally, the

result is, to paraphrase Frye, a theory of criticism whose

principles apply to the whole of poetry. There are, to be

sure, a good many "if's" in this theory, but the theory

* itself— above and beyond but not separate from the litera­

ture it observes— is sensible as a dictionary.

Frye does not often refer to specific works of liter­

ature in the four major essays that compose Anatomy of

« 46

Criticism. Some of his general insights, however, are pertinent to The Alexandria Quartet,10 primarily as an aid in comparing it to the centuries o£ literature that it chronologically, if not logically, follows. Frye separ­ ates fictions, for example, by differences in "the hero's power of action."H There are some basic similarities between Darley (if we can consider him the hero of the

Quartet for the moment) and Frye's description of the ironic hero.

If inferior in power or intelligence to our­ selves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode. This is still true when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation, as the situation is being Judged by the norms of a greater freedom.12

As Balthazar unfolds, if the reader feels that, since

Darley was mistaken, he iB somehow superior to this unreliable narrator, the Quartet seems to fit the ironic mode. If instead he feels that, like Darley, he too has been mistaken, he may feel that both himself and Darley are indeed in the same situation. But in this case the greater freedom by which the situation is judged is an illusory one, becoming in such a novel as Balthazar a real norm that is in some degree attained only in Clea. Such a combination, however, does seem to have a fundamental relationship to what Frye calls "true comic irony or satire*" 47

One pole o£ Ironic comedy is the recognition of the absurdity of naive melodrama, or, at least, of the absurdity of its attempt to define the enemy of society as a person outside that society. From there it develops toward the opposite pole, which is true comic irony or satire, and which defines the enemy of society as a Bpirit within that society.13

If we can draw a psychological parallel to Frye's social focus and say that in the Quartet the enemy of the mind is a spirit within that mind, one that can be conquered through a mixture of laughter and tenderness, the Quartet here seems classifiable according to Frye's system. We must remember, though, that naive melodrama in the Quartet is a real force, that people die melodramatically, and so we cannot at all say that the work is a full development of a concept beginning with the recognition that the melodramatic is absurd. It might well be said that

Durrell does present the attempt to define the enemy of society as a person outside that society as absurd, but the development from there is a curious one. The enemy may be defined as a spirit within the society, but this spirit remains a melodramatic one; the development is not what this particular overview would lead us to expect, although no particular work of art, just as no particular organism, can be expected to fit the general law in all its individual characteristics.

That the Quartet fits some additional general laws formulated by Frye, laws pertaining not to the novel but to 48 poetry and the essay# to the confession and the romance# becomes apparent if we consider the work as having a thematic basis# rather than one of the two traditional

foundations in plot or characterization, if we see the

Quartet as being basically concerned with theories about

love# art# and the psyche and with the expression of these

theories in balanced, aphoristic turns of phrase# we gain a new perspective: the Quartet as essay or lyric poem.

In such genres as novels and plays the internal fiction is usually of primary interest; in essays and lyrics the primary interest is in dianoia, the idea or poetic thought (something quite dif- ferent, of course# from other kinds of thought) that the reader gets from the writer. The best translation of dianoia is# perhaps, "theme," and literature with this ideal or conceptual interest may be called thematic.I-4

To call a work of art "thematic" is# as Frye points out#

not to deny its fictional aspect; it is a question of

emphasis, emphasis that may be supplied by the critic as well as the artist.

. . . every work of literature has both a fic­ tional and a thematic aspect# and the question of which is more important is often simply a matter of opinion or emphasis in interpretation.15

The change in perspective gained by such an emphasis#

however# may well prove valuable later on when we come to

consider the Quartet more fully. Other perspectives

derived from Frye's categories of literary types that

might also generate valuable insights are those gained by

considering the Quartet as a confession and as a romance# 49 both of which possess characteristics not normally empha­ sized in the novel. If we consider Durrell's work as a confession we find another rationale in the history of literature for the inclusion of a thematic emphasis, an emphasis on ideas; the Quartet can be said to share this emphasis with the confession, but not with the novel as it is normally conceived.

It is his success in integrating his mind on such subjects [religion, politics, or art] that makes the author of a confession feel that his life is worth writing about. But this interest in ideas and theoretical statements is alien to the genius of the novel proper, where the technical problem is to dissolve all theory into personal relation­ ships.16

If we view the Quartet as Darley*s confession, we come up with an interesting hybrid of form; Darley faces the problem, as a fictional character, of dissolving theories

(Arnauti's, Balthazar's, Pursewarden's, his own) into personal relationships. At this point we might even speculate that the Quartet might be a long lyric poem in prose about an originally ironic hero who endeavors, through the writing of his confessions, to grow a person­ ality that at once enriches his personal relationships and enables him to write not novels, his original goal, but romances beginning "once upon a time" (Clea, p. 282).

To consider the Quartet itself as a romance also yields a potentially valuable perspective, albeit one that may be ultimately confusing. The advantage lies in the 50 possibility of finding a new way of talking about what many critics have seen as defects in characterization in the

Quartet? according to Frye, the concept of characterization in a romance is essentially different from that in a novel.

The essential difference between novel and romance lies in the conception of characteriza­ tion. The romancer does not attempt to create "real people" so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes. It is in the romance that we find Jung's libido, anima, and shadow reflected in the hero, heroine, and villain respectively.

Bonamy Dobrde's objection, for example, that the main characters of the Quartet are "glossed," may not be such a strong one if we consider Durrell'4 intent to have been the creation of characters from the point of view of the romance. Still, can we say that Ourrell's characters are truly figures which expand into psychological archetypes?

Libido, anima, and shadow in the Quartet seem to apply, much more conventionally, to the individual psyches of the characters. Yet this perspective, if not carried too far and if used in combination with other ways of looking at the Quartet, may yield valuable insights in our fuller consideration of the work later on. It might be rewarding to consider Justine as a destructive anima and Clea as a constructive one with respect to Darley. As far as the libido is concerned, PurBewarden has the necessary energy but would have to be considered, at least in view of his suicide, as a self-destructive archetype, a strange kind SI of libido indeed. The shadow presents another problem; whom can we cast in this role? It might be said that

Capodistria casts himself in such a role, but he is primarily an archetypal shadow to Justine alone. The dark

Justine' herself might qualify, however, losing her control as Darley assumes the role of libidinous hero. In any case, the importance of pursuing these correspondences between characters in the Quartet and Jungian archetypes would not be to label characters as archetypes as an end in itself but to discover what part such correspondences play in the overall aesthetic effect of the work. These critical perspectives themselves must be kept in perspec­ tive; Darley may have become, by the end of the Quartet, a writer of romance, but the work in which he is a character seems to have little in common with the normal romance as Frye defines it.

The romance, which deals with heroes, is inter­ mediate between the novel, which deals with men, and the myth, which deals with gods .I**

If we must choose among men, heroes, and gods to describe the characters in the Quartet, we must choose men. Only

Pursewarden approaches the stature of the hero of romance, and then only after his death.To push the idea of the

Quartet as romance as defined by Frye too far is to end finally in confusion. Yet the Quartet may well be a romance in the sense of the term presented earlier by Scholes (see above, pp.28 -29), and in any case Scholes and Frye would 52 agree that Durrell's characterization has definite points in common with characterization in the romance.

Frye has helped us begin our discussion of theories of the novel on two levels. His overview of the function of criticism yields a basic critical method, and the method in turn yields specific perspectives based on the whole of literature from its beginnings. Indeed, our gain is principally in perspective, in being able to view various aspects of the Quartet in the context of the history of literature. To narrow the focus somewhat, let us turn to a more recent general investigation, Robert

Scholes and Robert Kellogg's Nature of Narrative, which deals not with all of literature but with narrative alone.

The Nature of Narrative has the additional specific advantage for us of placing the Quartet itself directly in the context it provides. This context, first of all, is one that sees the novel "as only one of a number of narrative possibilities,"2^ albeit the narrative form that represents "the new synthesis in narrative which has been the main development in post-Renaissance narrative liter­ ature."21 According to Scholes and Kellogg, the epic also represents a synthesis in form, one which breaks down into two antithetical forms that they choose to call the empir­ ical and the fictional. The most important aspect of the epic form, according to Aristotle, was the plot, or mythosi with the disintegration of the epic, empirical narrative replaced this emphasis on plot with an allegiance to reality, either historical or contemporary, while fictional narrative replaced the emphasis on plot with an allegiance to the ideal, either aesthetic or moral.22 The novel, the narrative form representing the new synthesis of empirical and fictional forms, "can be seen clearly in a writer like Cervantes, whose great work is an attempt to reconcile powerful empirical and fictional impulses."22

Scholes and Kellogg view this new synthesis as being no more stable than the old one found in the epic; indeed, they see it as about to break down into its two major components, the empirical and the fictional.

There are signs that in the twentieth century the grand dialectic is about to begin again, and that the novel must yield its plage to new forms just as the epic did in ancient times, for it is an unstable compound, inclining always to break down into its constituent elements.24

Zt is the empirical element that is beginning to be dis­ carded in modern narrative; "twentieth-century narrative has begun to break away from the aims, attitudes, and techniques of realism."25 Durrell's Quartet, seen in the history of narrative forms, is offered as an example of the "return to romance" that is one sign of the movement away from the empirical component of the novel and toward the aesthetically ideal.26

Scholes and Kellogg offer us a perspective to add to

Frye's concerning the romance and the confession. They point out that the novel is not the opposite o£ romance

"but a product of the reunion of the empirical and fic­ tional elements in narrative literature."27 Still, the use of the two terms in English implies a fundamental opposition in emphasis; the word romance passed "into

English usage as a term for non-realistic fiction as opposed to the realistic sort which acquired the name novel."28 Realistic fiction incorporates the concept that the connection between fiction and the real world is what

Scholes and Kellogg call a "representational" one, which

"seeks to duplicate reality," and not an "illustrative" one, which "seeks only to suggest an aspect of reality."29

Furthermore, the connection between realistic fiction and the representational concept of art has been soundly established since the beginnings of the novel.

It is of the essence of that century in which the novel came into its own that art should be seen as a representation rather than an illustration of life.30

The illustrative concept of art, on the other hand, seems more appropriate to the romance, our term for non-realistic fiction. Indeed, Scholes and Kellogg's description of illustrative characterization is very close if not identi­ cal to Frye's description of romantic characterization

(see above, p. 50). • • Illustrative characters are concepts in anthro­ poid shape or fragments of the human psyche mas­ querading as whole human beings. Thus we are not called upon to understand their motivation as if 55

they were whole human beings but to understand the principles they illustrate through their actions in a narrative framework.31

The illustrative character, like the romantic one, lies outside the traditional scope of the novel. But while

Frye emphasizes the differences between the confession and the novel as well in that the confession is much more concerned with ideas and theoretical statements, however,

Scholes and Kellogg point to the influence of the confes­ sion as conceived by Rousseau on later novelists.

One of the many lessons that Rousseau taught subsequent novelists was that even with the literal identity of subject and narrator, the mere span of time separating the two provides sufficient distance to allow for all the poten­ tially ironical divergence in point of view between character and narrator that a novelist could require. Time became a significant dimen­ sion in the conception of character. It wrought all the changes necessary for a genuine multi­ plicity of points of view toward the same facts and underlined the importance of defining the knower in order to interpret his telling. Reality was in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder's eye changes with the passage of time.32

The confession, then, may stand outside the tradition of the novel in its thematic emphasis, but in its handling of ironic distance between character and narrator and in its recognition of the importance of time in relation to point of view it has had a great influence on the novel, especially the modern novel.

Both Frye and Scholes and Kellogg are aware that such terms as characterization, plot, and point of view are applicable not only to the novel but to other established narrative forms. The concept of characterization, for example, changes as we move from the novel to the romance, or from representational to illustrative concepts of art.

Characterization, of course, remains basically the process by which a writer peoples his work, yet the characters themselves in a work based on an illustrative concept of art are rendered differently from those in a realistic, representational work. As Scholes and Kellogg point out, it is a question of emphasis. They agree with

E. H. Forster's idea in Aspects of the Novel that "in narrative only is the inward life of the characters really accessible.”33

The most essential element in characterization is this inward life. The less of it we have, the more other narrative elements such as plot, com­ mentary, description, allusion, and rhetoric must contribute to the work.34

Depiction of this inward life in the modern novel has be­ come in part associated with the phrase "stream of consciousness," which Scholes and Kellogg describe as "a method of narration in which action is reduced to impres­ sion and thought, and the language of thought is organized on psychological principles rather than rhetorical ones."33

Such a realistic emphasis, however, produces a problem; the representational concept of art is emphasized to such an extent that the potential advantages of the non-realistic, illustrative concept of art must be abandoned. 57

For modern writers, as the science of psychology has grown in vigor and influence, a great prob­ lem has been to employ the developing knowledge of the human psyche without losing all those literary effects which rhetoric alone can achieve.36

Scholes and Kellogg see a solution to this problem in

Benjy's monologue in William Faulkner's Sound and the Furyt

"the beginning of a retreat from a purely mimetic concept of characterization."37 This movement from a mimetic, representational concept of characterization to a more aesthetic, illustrative one is continued in As I Lay Dying.

The step from The Sound and the Fury to As I Lay Dying is only a short one; and in As I Lay'byinq Faulkner, simply as a matter of narrative conven- tion, heightens nearly all the characters' verbal patterns in monologue with his own rhetoric— the sane as well as the insane. Once realistic tenets are abandoned as the primary laws of narrative, the problem disappears.38

The movement from representational to illustrative concepts of characterization is a movement away from the empirical

facts of realism traditionally associated with the novel and toward the individual impressions of narrators who have no claim to omniscience.

One of the major trends in twentieth-century characterization is away from the attempt to penetrate the individual psyche and toward a focus on the apprehension of "impressions" which claim no absolute validity as facts. This is the dominant technique of characterization in such narrator-dominated novels as Lord Jim, The Good Soldier, A la recherche du temps perdu. Absalom, Absalom! and the Alexandria Quartet.

Scholes and Kellogg, then, see characterization in the

Quartet as moving away from the traditional empirical 58 concept of the novel, but they see such a movement as being by no means unique in twentieth century fiction.

The concept of plot, as well as characterization, varies according to the narrative form in which it is employed, although here the variation is basically in the realm of how important one considers the plot to be.

Scholes and Kellogg define plot as Hthe dynamic, sequen­ tial element in narrative literature."4® And they agree with Aristotle in that "in a temporal art form the dynamic and sequential element is the primary one," although they point out that "narrative art differs from dramatic in many ways, including some that Aristotle did not know."41

They view Forster's placing of plot below characteriza­ tion in importance as the result of his being an advocate of the traditional, realistic school of the novel.

E. M. Forster's assertion that despite Aristotle character must take precedence over plot is very much the assertion of a modern, mimetically oriented novelist.42

Scholes and Kellogg, however, think that mimetic theories of the novel are inadequate when one comes to discuss those twentieth century novels that have begun to break away from the aims, attitudes, and techniques of realism, and find a blind spot even in so widely respected a work as Erich Auerbach's Mimesis.

It is a great book, but Auerbach's single- minded devotion to realistic principles leaves him unwilling or unable to come to terms with twentieth-century fiction, and especially with such writers as Virginia Woolf, Proust, and Joyce.43 59

Modern novelists such as Proust— -and Durrell, for that matter--do indeed de-emphasize plot, but themes and the­ matic variations as well as character are extremely important in their works.

Proust's, [Anthony] Powell's, and Durrell's major works all nod at traditional plotting of the autobiographical and chronological kind, but they combine this with more serious attention to themes and variations. Where Galsworthy and Bennet gave most of their allegiance to time, these writers give theirs to music, having found in that art an esthetic principle which enables them to deal with time more creatively, as time is dealt with in music, and achieve beauty of form without sacrificing characterization to the resolution of a traditional plot.4*

Scholes and Kellogg do not finally believe that plot is the soul of narrative as Aristotle believed it to be the soul of drama. Since "in a plot-summary we often cannot tell a great work from a feeble one," the true soul of narra­ tive must lie elsewhere.45

Quality of mind (as expressed in the language of characterization, motivation, description, and commentary) not plot, is the soul of narrative. Plot is only the indispensable skeleton which, fleshed out with character and incident, pro­ vides the necessary clay into which life may be breathed.46

Plot is indispensable to the narrative art but, according to both Forster and Auerbach's mimetic concept of the novel and Scholes and Kellogg's less representational one, it does not lie at the heart of the matter. Indeed, if we believe Scholes and Kellogg's thesis that narrative is moving away from realism and toward more illustrative con­ cepts of art, plot is not likely, in the near future at

least, to regain the prominence Aristotle assigns to it.

According to them "the representational aspect of the myth is plot; its illustrative aspect . . . is theme."^

Durrell's emphasis on theme and thematic variation is,

from this perspective, precisely in step with the march of modern narrative.

We have noted that Scholes and Kellogg agree with

Forster that narrative is particularly suited to portraying

the "inward life" of its characters (see above, p. 56).

Narrative is also uniquely suited to complex points of view; according to Scholesand Kellogg, "the quality of

irony is built into the narrative form as it is into no other form of literature."48 This capacity has been an

inherent one since the beginnings of the narrative form, achieved by the addition to the oral tradition "not of narrators, but of authors.T h i s addition to the oral tradition, where story and author are identical,50 makes possible a fundamental disparity between author and narrator and since "irony is always the result of a dis­ parity of understanding" the narrative form is particu­

larly suited to irony.Complexity in point of view in

the twentieth century novel, however, is not limited to

this basic discrepancy between author and narrator. The complexity increases with the use of more than one narra­

tor in the same work, a method Scholes and Kellogg credit 61 to Joseph Conrad that leads once again away from the tra­ ditional realism o£ the novel toward the illustrative focus of romancet "as narrators are multiplied, evidence becomes 52 hearsay, empiricism becomes romance." They point out that the attempt "to circumvent the restrictions of empirical eye-witness narration11 is another twentieth century effort to move away from realism.53 The point of view in Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim affords a good example of this technique.

The story of the protagonist becomes the outward sign or symbol of the inward story of the narra­ tor, who learns from his imaginative participa­ tion in the other's experience. Since the imagination plays the central role, the factual or empirical aspect of the protagonist's life becomes subordinated to the narrator's under­ standing of it. Not what really happened but the meaning of what the narrator.believes to have happened becomes the central preoccupation in this kind of narrative.54

The point of view here itself values the personal impres­ sion over the empirical fact) the important disparity of understanding here, however, is not that between author and narrator so much as that between Marlow and Kurtz or

Jim— or, much more to the point, between what Marlow or any of us knows or can know and the ideal of omniscience, of

# knowing everything. Scholes and Kellogg disagree with

Henry James's idea that the narrator must be dramatized} the real twentieth century demand is that he be, like his readers, limited in perspective and understanding. 62

The narrator does not need to be dramatized for the modern audience so much as he needs to be relativized. A narrator who is not in some way suspect, who is not in some subject to ironic scrutiny is what the modern temper finds least bearable. It is not the narrator's narrating that disturbs the modern readeg* nor his employ­ ment of multiple perspectives

The point of view in such works as The Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim changes the location of the disparity of understanding} as Scholes and Kellogg point out, the author of such a work,

. . . by giving himself a fictional shape . . . has entered the ironic gap, which now lies not between author or narrator and characters but between limited understanding which is real, and an ideal of absolute truth which is itself suspect.5®

Thus our understanding of point of view, like that of characterization and plot, depends on our understanding of narrative forms other than the novel and artistic con­ cepts other than representational, empirical ones.

In placing the novel in the wider context of all the forms of the narrative art, Scholes and Kellogg give us both a general idea of the basic concepts behind what the novel has been and evidence that these concepts are now by no means universally accepted as the basis for all prose fiction. The offspring of an uneasy marriage between the empirical and the fictional, the novel in turning away from realiBm and representational theories‘of art threatens to break apart into its two basic elements, with its major thrust being toward the romance and illustrative theories of art. The importance of their work for us, however, lies not in the thesis that the novel is dying or dead but in the effect that basic changes in the concepts of such aspects of the novel as characterization, plot, and point of view have on longer works of prose fiction; whether one chooses to call works based on illustrative concepts of art novels or not is unimportant so long as one recognizes that there is a basic conceptual difference between an illustrative work such as the Quartet and a representational work such as

George Eliot's Middlemarch. Scholes and Kellogg find evidence of this retreat from realism in the works of such twentieth century masters of the novel as Conrad and

Faulkner. Their perspective, however, like Frye's, is a contemporary one. The tradition of the novel in English and the directions it was most likely to take appeared differently to those who considered theories of the novel ft in the 1920s. To consider major theorists of this period is both to see first hand what Scholes and Kellogg term representational concepts of art and to narrow our focus even more, from narrative forms to the form of the novel alone. Percy Lubbock and E. M. Forster afford reasoned and respected analyses of the novel and its theoretical foundations from the perspective of the 1920s*

Percy Lubbock's Craft of Fiction, first published in

1921, reveals the influence of Henry James on the theory 64 of the novel at the time.5? Lubbock has high praise for

James's Ambassadors and is concerned, like James, with the dramatic aspects of the writer's craft. He even goes so far as to echo James's particular critical attitude toward the subject of a novel in contending that

we judge the novelist's eye for a subject to be his cardinal gift, and we have nothing to say, whether by way of exhortation or of warning, till his subject be announced.58

Yet he attempts to articulate an aesthetic of the novel that applies to novels very different from those of James as well. His approach is basically a didactic one, al­ though some of his rules are so abstract that they would be of little use in a handbook explaining how to write the great novel of the 1920s. His definition of form in the novel, for example, reflects the organic influence of

English romantic theorists such as Coleridge but offers no specific prescription; it admits many kinds of forms, de­ manding only that the form be expressly suited to the subject.

The best form is that which makes the most of its subject— there is no other definition of the meaning of form in fiction. The well-made book is the book in which the subject and the form coincide and are indistinguishable— the book in which the matter is all used up in the form, in which the form expresses all the matter.55

In addition to this fundamental relationship between sub- ■ ject and form, Lubbock sees the alternation between what he calls the "scenic" and the "panoramic" as crucial to 65 the writer's art. The panoramic is the antithesis o£ the dramatic or the scenic; it is generally defined as descriptive narration in more or less the author's own voice. And the use of panorama or scene, Lubbock points out, also affects the writer's relationship to his audience.

It is a question . . . of the reader's relation to the writer; in one case [the panoramic] the reader faces towards the storyteller and listens to him, in the other [the scenic] he turns toward the story and watches it.60

The alternation between the two, "how the story is now overlooked from a height and now brought immediately to the level of the reader"***1 is important not only as a principle of contrast but also because the scene or drama

"is the novelist's highest light" and therefore must be conserved to be most effective when most necessary; "to * use it prodigally where it is not needed is to lessen its force where it is essential."62 with these aesthetic considerations in mind, plus "the most obvious point of method . . . the difficult question of the centre of vision, Lubbock examines various novels.

Lubbock, as I have pointed out, is highly concerned with the dramatic aspect of the writer's craft; he has little patience with novelists like William Makepeace

Thackeray who, in Vanity Fair, tends to neglect the scenic for the panoramic even at those points in the work that’ call for dramatic rendering.*** Lubbock makes a distinc­ tion akin to the now widespread antitheses between showing

N. and telling; to show is to dramatize, to make the reader

£ace the story itsel£, while to tell is to describe in a chatting fashion, to make a reader face the writer. In­ deed, the concept of showing is basic to literary cre­ ation itself: "the art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself."65 By a story's "telling itself" Lubbock means, of course, not the antitheses of showing but its equivalent; the writer does not tell the story, but somehow disappears in order for the story to tell itself without authorial intrusion.

And he finds that The Ambassadors exemplifies this dramatic principle: here "the author does not tell the story of Strother's mind; he makes it tell itself, he dramatizes it."66 This method, while indirect, has the advantage of emphasizing the scenic at the expense of the panoramic, or pictorial (Lubbock uses "panoramic" and

"pictorial" as synonyms).

It is indirect as a method; but it places the thing itself in view, instead of recalling and reflecting and picturing it.67

Lubbock extends Aristotle's concept of action on the stage;

4 in a Jamesian novel drama is presented not only in the interaction among characters but also in the interaction among elements in one character's mind.

Just as the writer of a play embodies his subject in visible action and audible speech, so the novelist, dealing with a situation like Strether's, 67

represents it by means of the movement that flick­ ers over the surface of his mind. The impulses and reactions of his mood are the players.upon the scene.68

This narrative drama remains true to the drama of the stage in that it remains focused on the visible and the audible; we do not have access to the whole of Strether's consciousness, but only that portion which James can show us.

Below the surface, behind the outer aspect of his mind, we do not penetrate; this is drama, and in drama the spectator must judge by appearances .69

Lubbock is careful to point out that all this dramatizing occurs in a work whose subject is "purely pictorial"; "it consists entirely of an impression received by a certain m a n . "70 The Ambassadors# like other novels, contains both pictorial and scenic elements. The difference here is that both the pictorial and the scenic have a dramatic basis. Everything in The Ambassadors is

dramatically rendered, whether it is a page of dialogue or a page of description, because even in the page of description nobody is addressing us, nobody is reporting his impression to the reader.71

Such overstatement of the .distinction between showing and telling as this has been recently debunked, especially by

Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. Scholes and

Kellogg, for example, point out that

in a Jamesian novel all the language is annihi­ lated to Jamesian thoughts in a Jamesian shade; The result of the disappearance of the narrator 68

is not the refining away of the artist but a continual reminder of his presence. . . .?2

Even though "nobody is addressing us" is obvious hyperbole, however, the concept of the novelist's art as dramatic remains a central one in the theory of the novel in this century.

Lubbock is also aware that the dramatic approach to fiction has its drawbacks. For one thing, one loses the means of relating the action to its surroundings; "where it is not only a matter of placing the action in view, but of relating it to its surroundings, strict drama is at once at a disadvantage «"?3 Another drawback in letting the story speak for itself is that "the story may then say too much to be reasonably credible."?*

Where the action, in short, is likely to seem harsh, over-charged, romantic, it is made to look Io b s so, less hazardous and more real, by recourse to the art of the picture-maker.'5

Lubbock points to Dickens for an example of this use of the pictorial.

The chief characteristic I take to be this careful introduction of violent drama into a scene already prepared to vouch for it— a scene so alive that it compels belief, so queer that almost anything might happen there naturally.?5 * This description might also serve us as a view of Durrell's

Alexandria as well as Dickens's London. If we willingly suspend our disbelief and accept Alexandria as a place so exotic that almost anything might happen there naturally, we will not be so put off when almost anything melodramatically does. We must remember, however, that for

Lubbock this particular use of the pictorial is one that compensates for a definite flaw: the inclusion of the. overcharged, the romantic. Lubbock's use of the term

"romantic" should not be confused with the term "romance"

as used by Frye and by Scholes and Kellogg; here the

romantic is not a distinct genre in the context of the history of literature but an unfortunate return, in terms of prose fiction, to the Gothic novel and its sentimental, melodramatic and incredible falsifying of experience for the purpose of diversionary titilation and, worse yet, financial gain. Lubbock's attitude toward Dickens— -and conceivably toward Durrell, had he only had the oppor­ tunity— -is that his method is not the less good for his only having used it "for comparatively trivial purposes,"?7 faint praise indeed. Lubbock has far more praise for

Balzac, whom he cites as an example of the pictorial genius, and admits that evidently the dramatic method is "not a form to which fiction can aspire in general."7** Yet in his discussion of point of view near the end of The Craft of

Fiction, that aspect which he considers to govern "the whole intricate question of method,"7® his preference for

James's circumlocutions is evident.

The question of point of view, for Lubbock, is "the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the story.The dramatic kind of novel operates under 70 strict limitations; it is "not only scenic, it is also limited to so much as the ear can hear and the eye see."82

The pictorial kind o£ novel, on the other hand, calls.for

"some narrator, somebody who knows, to contemplate the

facts and create an impression of them”; this produces ”a point of view which is not the reader's.”82 Such a point of view has an inherent weakness in that the reader faces the author and not the story itself; if the author com­ pounds this problem, as Lubbock thinks Thackeray does in

Vanity Fair by chatting with the reader, the aesthetic effect of the story itself is lost.82

If the spell is weakened at any moment, the listener is recalled from the scene to the mere author before him, and the story rests only upon the author's direct assertion.84

Lubbock sees James's oblique dramatic method as the best way of keeping the spell from weakening, as well as re­

turning the point of view to the reader himself.

The mind of the narrator becomes the stage, his voice is no longer heard. . . . In the drama of his mind there is no personal voice, for there is no narrator} the point of view becomes the reader's once more.82

Lubbock restates this concept somewhat later, relying less on hyperbole and more on a precise analysis of what actu­

ally happens to the sound of the narrator's voice; this

voice

is less insistent in oblique narration, even while it seems to be following the very same argument- that it would in*direct, because another voice [the author*8] is speedily mixed and blended with it.88 71

Such a point of view also avoids the inherent weakness present in the first-person, eye-witness narrator.

When one of the people who took part in it sets . out to report the scene, there is at once a mix­ ture and a confusion of effects.

Lubbock is quick to point out that the use of the first- person, eye-witness narrator "may become a positive and right effect in a particular story, for a particular pur­ pose, but his emphasis on the pictorial narrator who knows and is therefore omniscient, and his distrust of the confused eye-witness who is both narrator and partici­ pant, is a far cry from Scholes and Kellogg's idea that unreliability in a narrator is demanded by the modern audience (see above, pp. 61-62). For Lubbock, James's indirect method remains the touchstone and, as he ex­ plains, it is not entirely indirect; the centering of a story in the consciousness of one character has the dis­ tinct advantage of directly presenting a mind itself.

When you recall and picture an impression in words you give us, listeners and readers, no more than a sight of things in a mirror, not a direct view of them; but at the same time there is something of which you do indeed give ub a direct view, as we may say, and that is the mirror, your mind itself. Of the mirror, then, you may make a solid and defined and visible object; you may dramatize this thing at least, this mind, if the things that appear in it must remain as pictures only."?

Lubbock might well have, but does not, mention Conrad's

Marlow in this context; as for us, we might mention Darley as well. 72

Lubbock remains strongly influenced by, if not limited to, James's dramatic concept of the novel; unlike Frye, he is concerned with value judgments, and he places the high­ est value on James's method. But he does give us a reasoned analysis of how novels are made from the perspec­ tive of the early 1920s. Furthermore, the antithesis between the panoramic and the scenic which he outlines is a useful one, perhaps ultimately more useful than the one between showing and telling. E; M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, originally presented as a series of nine lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the spring of

1927, refers the reader to Lubbock's Craft should he desire an aesthetics of fiction.90 But this is misleading;

Forster, too, outlines an aesthetics of fiction, one that is less prescriptive than Lubbock's and less formally organized, but one that offers a coherent perspective all the same. Forster tells us that he chose the term

"aspects" to allow him to discuss the novel as it is seen by both reader and novelist,9^ and his instincts as a novelist himself caution him against any rigidly didactic approach. He is content with the vaguest of definitions of the genre itself, unlike Frye and Scholes and Kellogg;

"any fictitious prose work over 50,000 words" serves to define the limits of the novel,9^ But even though Scholes and Kellogg disagree with Forster's contention that.in a novel character takes precedence over plot, he is closer 73 to their concept of excellence in the form than to Lub­ bock's when he notes that "the novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject , 93 matter" (see above, p. 59 and p. 64). If Forster does betray, as Scholes and Kellogg believe, a mimetic bias,

Aspects of the Novel still represents a less prescriptive approach to the novel in the 1920s than Lubbock's while offering valuable distinctions and definitions.

Forster selects what he calls "the story" as the first aspect to be considered, and defines it as "a nar­ rative of events arranged in their time sequence— dinner coming after breakfast . . • and so on."9* The story is

"the fundamental aspect" of the novel, but Forster wishes this were not the case;95 his attitude toward the story is akin to Scholes and Kellogg's attitude toward the plot, which they see as an indispensable skeleton requiring flesh to become vital, yet indispensable all the same.

The story has only one virtue, to arouse curiosity, "mak­ ing the audience want to know what happens next," and its only fault lies in failing to make the audience read on.

In discussing how fundamental the story is to the novel,

Forster makes an important distinction between "the life in time and the life by values"; although the life by values lies at the heart of the novelist's concern, both are essential, since according to Forster "it is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel.The story, in short, represents a neces­ sary dullness, plodding inescapably along from breakfast to dinner, appealing to no higher quality in the reader than his curiosity and obeying no deeper impulse than the mindless chronological tick of the clock. Like the story, the plot is "also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality"unlike the story, however, the plot may either preserve or suspend the chronological time sequence, and it appeals not only to curiosity but to

"intelligence and memory" as well.**® Forster's disagree­ ment with Aristotle about the importance of plot is, he tells us, not a breaking away from the Greek philosopher's statement that "all human happiness and misery take the form of action"100 at all but a way of differentiating the drama, which Aristotle refers to, from the novel.

In the drama all human happiness and misery does and must take the form of action. Otherwise its existence remains unknown, and this is the oreat difference between the drama and the novel.101

In the novel, on the other hand, happiness and misery can be depicted below the level of action, in this inner realm of what Forster calls the "secret life" of the characters.

We believe that happiness and misery exist in the secret life, which each of us leads privately and to which (in his characters) the novelist has access. And by the secret life we mean the life for which there is no external evidence, not, as is vulgarly supposed, that which is revealed by a chance word or a s i g h .102

Forster places plot midway in importance between the story, 75 with its emphasis on the life in time, and the characters, with their emphasis on the life by values.

Forster points out, as Scholes and Kellogg have men­ tioned (see above, p. 56), that people in a novel are not only different from those in a drama but also different from those in the street in that their inner or secret lives are accessible, and thus "people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes."103 we can know more about the fictional person than the one in the street "because his creator and nar­ rator are one."104 While the appeal plot makes to the audience moves beyond mere curiosity to intelligence and memory, characterization makes a further appeal, to

imagination as well as intelligence.105 Forster claims that in a sense fiction is truer than history

because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of us knows from his own experience that there is something beyond the evidence, and even if the novelist has not got it correctly, well— ‘he has tried.106

This impulse to go beyond the evidence noted by Forster is

surely present in the Quartet, where the facts decidedly do not speak for themselves and require individual inter­ pretation, even if such interpretation is limited in scope and therefore less than entirely true. And even if

Forster might think that Durrell had not got it correctly he would at least give him credit for having tried, a kind of credit not available in Lubbock's more rigid if no less 76 abstract system. To be sure, Forster does systematically differentiate people in novels from each other as well as from the people in the street; some characters are "flat," others "round." Flat characters, as the term implies, are one-dimensional, and best according to Forster "when they are comic," since

it is only round people who are fit to perform tragically for any length of time and can move us to any.feelings except humour and appropri­ ateness.^-®'

Yet Forster, while admiring Lubbock's aesthetic system, distrusts systems themselves, and disagrees with Lubbock's contention that the question of point of view is central to the question of method;

. . . for me the whole intricate question of method resolves itself not into formulae but into the power of the writer to bounce the reader into accepting what he says— a power which Mr. Lubbock admits and admires, but locates at the edge of the problem instead of at the centre.!®®

Forster agrees that point of view is a problem peculiar to the novel, one that differentiates it from the drama, but he does not think it is "so important as a proper mixture of characters— a problem which the dramatist is up against also."1-®® He might well agree with Lubbock that the reader should face the story and not the author, but

Forster wants to make sure it is the story the reader faces— and not instead the question of the method of the story. He has this objection to Gide's Les Faux

Monnayeurs, a work often compared to the Quarteti 77

The novelist who betrays too much interest in his own method can never be more than interesting; he has given up the creation o£ character and sum­ moned us to help analyse his own mind, and a heavy drop in the emotional thermometer results.

Forster insists that it is, the characters themselves in novels— and the shadowy yet crucial ability to "bounce the reader"— ‘that are important, and not theoretical questions of method.

While characters are central to Forster's conception of the art of the novel, however, he points out that there are other important aspects of the craft:

. . . there are in the novel two forces: human beings and a bundle of various things not human beings, and . . . it is the novelist's business to adjust,these two forces and conciliate their claims.111

Forster divides these forces that are not human beings into

"fantasy" and "prophecy" when distinguished by tone, and into "pattern" and "rhythm" when distinguished by aesthetic effect. Fantasy, on the one hand, clashes with what

Forster sees as the normally realistic tone of the novel.

The general tone of novels is so literal that when the fantastic is introduced it produces a special effect: some readers are thrilled, others choked off.11*

Whether one likes fantasy or not, for Forster, is strictly a matter of taste, and he refuses to take sides and say that disliking fantasy is in bad taste; indeed, he insists that "to dislike the fantastic in literature is not to dislike literature."11^ What Scholes and Kellogg term 78

Forster's mimetic bias is apparent here; he classifies

James Joyce's Ulysses as "essentially fantastic" because it has neither the normal tone of realism nor the serious tone of prophecy.114 Achieving the tone of prophecy re­ quires "humility and the suspension of the sense of humour" it is

unlike fantasy because its face is toward unity, whereas fantasy glances about. Its confusion is incidental, whereas fantasy's is fundamental.118

Although both fantasy and prophecy strive for aesthetic effects, Forster distinguishes them by their distinctive tones; pattern and rhythm, however, are best distinguished by their aesthetic effects. The term pattern refers to an aesthetic effect produced by an entire novel, and "it 11.7 draws most of its nourishment from the plot.",LX' The pattern of The Ambassadors, for example, "is the shape of an hour-glass"; "Strether and Chad . . . change places, and it is the realization of this that makes the book so satisfying at the close."118 But Forster sees James's rigid pattern, finally, as a drawback.

It may externalize the atmosphere, spring nat­ urally from the plot, but it shuts the doors on life and leaves the novelist doing exercises, generally in the drawing-room. . . . To most readers of fiction the sensation from a pattern is not intense enough to justify the sacrifices that made it, and their verdict is "Beautifully done, but not worth doing."119

The interest in pattern, like the novelist's interest in his own method, is for Forster too far away from what should be the novelist's focus: the characters. Yet 7 9 rhythm, a kind of pattern that is not the shape of the en­ tire book but more a kind of "repetition plus varia- 120 tion," Forster sees as much more promising; it is his hope that the novel can become more like the symphony.

Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out. When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that?121

Perhaps it can. Scholes and Kellogg find such a basis in music in the works of both Durrell and Proust (see above, p. 59). Yet speculating from their remarks we can find evidence that neither Forster nor Lubbock would be recep­ tive to the Quartet.

For one thing, the two points of view that Lubbock finds effective— either the narrator who knows everything that happened and describes it in what he terms the pic­ torial novel, or the narrator who disappears and lets the story "tell itself" in James's dramatic approach— are both excluded from the Quartet. Durrell gives us instead what Lubbock finds confusing, unrealiable eye-witness narration, and compounds the problem by giving us more than one of these narrators. Darley, Arnauti, and Balthazar all suffer from a lack of knowing, of omniscience, suffer because they begin writing in the false hope that if only they can analyze enough facts they will attain a kind of omniscience. But it is, in Durrell, necessarily a false 80 hope. The omniscient perspective in the Quartet remains an unrewarding chimera# an impossible hope that yields only despair# and one thing Darley must learn is that.his point of view, like everyone else's, is limited in time

and place. As Pursewarden puts it#

"Our view of reality is conditioned by our posi­ tion in space and time— not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed" (Balthazar, pp. 14-15)•

Yet none of these narrators# faced with his necessary per­

sonal limitations# disappears; they all remain to tell

their tales# tenaciously unreliable to the end.

As for the unnamed narrator of Mountolive# Durrell carefully avoids making a claim of omniscience for him, although he does say in his Note to Balthazar that' Mount- olive "is a straight naturalistic novel in which the nar­ rator of Justine and Balthazar[Darley] becomes an object,

i.e., a character." So this narrator produces an objective work at least in the sense that he turns Darley, orig­ inally a subject, into an object; interestingly enough# this objectification of Darley is foreshadowed by an action of the very character the narrator concentrates on#

Mountolive# who in Balthazar is the first character to call

Darley by name (Balthazar. p. 206)# reminding the reader that Darley is an object represented by a noun as well as a subject signified'by the personal pronoun "I." Moreover# 81 as we find in Lubbock, omniscience is an accepted charac­ teristic of the narrators of "stright naturalistic novels." We might also view the narrator of Mountolive as one who disappears, since he does in a sense, revealing neither his name, his sources of information, nor his degree of participation in the action; although he does not always limit himself to Mountolive's perceptions (as in the final chapter), he follows the action of Mountolive'a mind closely. Indeed, he seems as if he might be an omnicient narrator who disappears throughout most of the novel, and the large quantity of hitherto unpresented facts in his possession do clear up many of the earlier discrepancies and enigmas, giving the impression that this third version is the "true" one.122 But after we have read Justine and

Balthazar we can accept neither his "omniscience" nor his

"disappearance"; both are, in the context of the Quartet, impossible points of view. To say that he is objective, that he puts his faith in facts unmindful of Balthazar's assertion that "fact is unstable by its very nature"

(Balthazar, p. 102), is only to say that his limitations are different from those of Darley, Arnauti, and Baltha- * zar, not to say that he has none. His approach, like theirs, is only one of many, all necessarily limited. To say that he disappears is to forget that, according to

Pursewarden, his view of reality, like everyone'else's, is based upon a unique view afforded by his position in space 82 and time, and this unique view asserts his presence, no matter how retiring he may wish to be. In short, the very points of view that Lubbock finds most effective are de­ bunked in the Quartet, first by their absence and then, in

Mountolive, by their ironic presence.

And Forster, despite his plea for the rhythmic, the musical in the novel, would surely be displeased with

Durrell*s interest in his own method. He objects, as we have seen, to a similar interest in Gide, an interest that he finds at the very center of Les Faux Monnayeura.

Edouard, a character in Gide's novel who is also writing a book called Les Faux Monnayeura, objects to the re­ strictions of the naturalistic novel in much the way

Arnauti, Pursewarden, and Darley do.

"A slice of life," the naturalistic school used to say. The mistake that school made was always to cut its slice in the same direction, always lengthwise, in the direction of time. Why not cut it up and down? Or across? As for me, I don't want to cut it at all. You see what X mean. I want to put everything into my novel and not snip off my material either here or there.123

Arnauti, who says "I would set my own book free to dream," is similarly searching for a freedom from naturalistic

* restrictions, in his case from the burden of plot; in set­ ting down a quick synopsis of the plot on the first page he hopes to achieve "drama freed from the burden of form"

(Justine, p. 75). what Forster finds in this passage from 83

Gide, and might well find in Durrell, is "the old thesis of truth in life versus truth in art."1-24 And what dis­ mays Forster, in part, is a new irresponsibility coming out of this old thesis, a refusal on Gide's part to assume control of his material.

What is new in it is the attempt to combine the two truths, the proposal that writers should mix themselves up in their material and be rolled over and over by it; they should not try to subdue any longer, they should hope to be sub­ dued, to be carried away.125

Even more central to Forster's objection is Gide's explicit interest in his own form; a concern with form is one thing, but to write reasoned prose about one's form as it evolves is another. Gide's mistake, for Forster, is not in writing what he calls "subconscious novels" but in reasoning, at the same time, "so lucidly and patiently about the subconscious."126 Durrell, however, citing the same passage from Gide in his Key to Modern British

Poetry, praises it as "a very good working credo for the stream-of-consciousness novel."127 In his Key, which con­ sists of lectures given in Argentina nine years before the publication of Justine. Durrell sees no drawback in Gide's having included his credo, essentially an aesthetic theory, in his novel. Yet in April of 1959 Durrell re­ marked to the editors of The Paris Review that indeed "my interest in form might be— I'm talking seriously, now, not modestly— an indication of a second-rate talent."I2® For 84

Forster, explicit discussion of form in one's own novel is an indication of less than a first-rate talent, or at least less than a first-rate novel. For Durrell, .who • like many authors is not entirely reliable when being inter- 129 viewed, 9 an interest in form may or may not detract from the novel's effect. In any event, Durrell in the Quartet has cast his lot with Gide, and not with the naturalistic novel praised by both Lubbock and Forster. Durrell has, as Forster says of Gide, accepted neither alternative, neither "tyranny by the plot" nor "tyranny by characters,"1^

Neither Lubbock nor Forster feels the need to define what Durrell calls the naturalistic novel. Indeed, from our perspective almost fifty years later, we can see that both of them accept some of the principles of naturalism as basic to the novel itself, and do not view the naturalistic as only one of many approaches to the art of the novel, or to the craft of narrative in general. A more contemporary critic like Frye is in a better temporal position to help us isolate naturalistic principles from other theories of the novel. For him naturalism is not the culmination of the craft of fiction but only

a phase of fiction which, rather like the detec­ tive story, though in a very different way, be­ gins as an intensification of low mimetic, an attempt to describe life exactly as it is, and ends, by the very logic of that attempt, in pure irony.131 85 With this in mind we might define the naturalistic theory of the novel as that which assumes that there is a per­

spective from which life can be described or shown exact­

ly# objectively# and truly in words# and that which views the novel as a vehicle for presenting life not as it might or should be but as it truly is. Naturalism empha­

sizes that aspect of the novel Scholes and Kellogg have

termed the "empirical#” aiming always at objective fact and away from what they call the "fictional" aspect of

the novel. Scholes and Kellogg see the contemporary novel as moving in the other direction# away from the realistic and the objective and toward fictional might-have-beens.

Frye's view, stated in terms of a movement from low mimetic

(where life is seen as it is) to ironic (where an inevit­ able discrepancy existB between life as it appears to be and life as it must be# insofar as we are able to tell)# affords a parallel description of the fate of the natural­

istic novel. The assumption upon which the theory rests,

that a perspective from which life can be described or

shown exactly exists# no longer seems valid; the attempt

to render life as it is in a mesh of factual prose brings

finally the conviction that it has only been an impossible quest based upon a most presumptuous presupposition. If

* • the photograph is finally more factually precise than the

painting# the result is not the glorification of the t

86 factual but the reverse--the distrust of the unaided, objective fact. The very success in rendering life as it appears to be only emphasizes the difference between life as it appears to be and life as it must be, again insofar as we are able to tell. Irony has crept in on the tem­ porarily forgotten little feet of the Cheshire cat, and naturalism at this stage of its life cycle cannot survive the enduring leer of discrepancy. As Forster has put it, without being able to see the extent of the implications in what he Bays, "there is something beyond the evidence"j the naturalistic web of facts, finally, comes only to represent the evidence, pointing not to the worth of the evidence itself but to the worth of that which is beyond the evidence. The perspective that was to describe life as it truly is winds up describing only the facts as they are, only life as it appears to be. The novel that was to contain life as it truly is moves paradoxically farther and farther from its goal; the more it insists on the truth of its perceptions the more it falsifies experience.

The truth turns out to be that the truth about life is elusive.

In trying to place the Quartet in the context of twentieth century theories about the novel I have pre­ sented many distinctions but have attempted only one definition, that of the naturalistic novel. Defining those aspects of the novel central to my investigation is 87 surely important in that the naming of parts will serve to clarify my basic assumptions. These definitions, however, depend somewhat on the context: as we have seen in Frye, for example, our concept of characterization must be modified as we move from mimetic to romantic fiction.

Thus to have arrived at definitions earlier in this chapter would have been precipitant. Now guided by the context that has now been established from the perspectives of

Frye, Scholes and Kellogg, Lubbock, and Forster, we may at this point name those parts of the novel which will con* cern us.

Plot and character are, of course, central aspects of the novel that must be defined. In the simplest sense plot is what happens and characters, in terms of the plot, are the representatives of the human race upon whom the effect of what happens is registered. From this basic definition it might appear that characters are more aesthetically important than the plot in that they register the effect of what happens, and it is chiefly in this effect that fiction differs from non-fiction. One might say that it is not with what happens that fiction, unlike

* journalism, is primarily concerned: it is the meaning, the value, of what happens that takes precedence. Yet in fiction the meaning of what happens springs from the plot as well as the characters; the plot itself is a*sequence of might-have-been events selected with care to produce

the desired effect on the characters. The sequence of action and reaction that makes up the plot is presented with more than usual order; indeed, what Forster calls

"pattern" results in an aesthetic effect that has its

source in the pattern of what happens, in the plot, and not in the characters. Thus even if the novel is primarily concerned with the meaning or value of what happens, this

is .achieved not only by the reaction of the characters to what happens but also by the order imposed on what hap­ pens by the novelist, by the patterns springing from the plot itself. Forster, as we have seen, is inclined to dismiss pattern in the novel as a complicated parlor game that is not worth the trouble and that leads the writer away from his true focus: the characters. Scholes and Kellogg, as we have also seen, go beyond Forster's emphasis on characters in insisting that it is finally

"quality of mind" (a phrase akin to "the value of what happens") that is paramount. Yet.they agree that plot is indispensable; the disagreement is over what is to be emphasized in the novel, and not about what is to be

* included.

Let us briefly consider three varying degrees of emphasis on the plot as illustrations of the relationship of plot to character in the novel. If what happens‘in a novel does not depend on the characters for its effect on 89

the audience, as in a detective story, the plot is empha­

sized more than the characters! we read to discover what

happens, and may be satisfied with familiar, stereotyped characters as long as discovering what happens remains our primary goal. On the other hand, if what happens in a novel is especially appropriate to whom it happens, the plot itself becomes a means of characterization and is

subordinate to it; as in a picaresque novel, we read to discover how the main character deals with what happens.

Finally, as in a logical extension of naturalistic theory

if not practice, the plot may have little significant relationship to the characters! in an extreme "slice of

life" the plot, aping life, contains no more than usual order. Plot, as we have defined it, is close to being

excluded, not merely deemphasized! the plot-maker has become the observer who knows from experience only that

anything might happen, and that something always does, although it is customarily of little significance. The

relationship of plot to character in these three examples might be best visualized as an interrelationship akin to

the gyres of William Butler Yeats, as inversely propor- * tional to one another. As one aspect is emphasized, the other is de-emphasized.

If characters, in terms of the plot, are the repre­

sentatives of the human race upon whom the effect of what

happens is registered, plot from the point of view of the 90 characters represents a force beyond the individual that must be dealt with because it is there and will not 90 away. It is simply a matter of dominate or be dominated.

This remains the case even in our naturalistic example where the plot has little significant relationship to the characters; as Frye points out, naturalism leads to pure irony, the irony produced by the dissociation of events from the individual. Nothing K. can do will unlock any of the secrets or the power of the Castle. The plot in Franz

Kafka's novel is cut free from K. to wander where it will; it serves not to characterize K. but his plight. But K. is not freed from having to come to terms with it, simply because it is there. Anything might happen; something always does. That K. chooses to demand that what happens must be significant serves to characterize him, but his demand does not render the events significant. Cut free from him, they go their own indomitable way, and irony is the result.

Where a vital interrelationship exists between plot and character, the struggle of the character to dominate is successful in romantic and comic fiction, unsuccessful in tragic and fatalistic fiction. In romantic fiction, per­ haps closest to our second example (see above, p. 89); in this case what happens is especially appropriate to whom it happens and thus the plot serves as a means of char­ acterization) , the plot continually tests the hero in 91 significant ways and the hero, by passing these tests, dominates the plot. In comic fiction the emphasis shifts; although the hero dominates the plot to the extent that he (and his co-heroes, if any) overcomes the obstacles the

9 plot sets in his way, it is most often not entirely through his own efforts that this victory is achieved.

Twists of the plot itself may play as great a role in his success as his own efforts; the interaction of many characters, even the fortuitous intrusion of chance, may well produce a happy solution that the hero either does not foresee or cannot achieve by his own actions. The empha­ sis in comic fiction, then, is less on the hero's individ­ ual ability to overcome adversity than we find in the romance. As in the romance, the comic hero faces tests imposed upon him by the plot; he does not have to pass all the tests while relying only on his own resources, how­ ever, to emerge victorious, generally signified by the happy marriage that marks the end of both his tribulations and the book itself. When we move to tragic fiction, we find that the hero is dominated by the plot. What happens predominates, and what happens is his downfall. In comedy the hero survives despite his faults; in tragedy he is destroyed despite his virtues. As in the romance, in tragedy what happens is especially appropriate to whom it happens, but here the plot is so arranged that the hero fails his individualized test, fails despite his virtues and his acute awareness of how things might have been, had they just been otherwise, in what I have termed fatalis­ tic fiction, however, the relationship between plot and character is much more tenuous than in tragedy. The plot not only dominates, but it dominates capriciously; char­ acters are destroyed right and left, not in ways especi­ ally appropriate to them at all but gratuitiously. The interrelationship between characters and plot remains inversely proportional. Where the interrelationship exists, where the ironic separation of character and plot is not complete, emphasis is all. Thus it is important in dealing with these two aspects of the novel not only to separate them neatly from each other but to see how, in various ways, they can be and are interdependent.

In addition to considering the interrelationship between plot and character in terms of modes, such as comic and tragic, we may view it from the perspective of the two basic critical poles of Western theories about literatures the classic and the romantic. The quarrel with Aristotle's contention that plot is the soul of drama begins in earnest with early romantic theorists. Indeed, as Walter

Jackson Bate points out in his introduction to modern criticism in his Criticism; the Major Texts, critics who developed the early romantic concepts applied the romantic emphasis upon character not, as Forster does, to the novel in an effort to differentiate it from the drama, but to 93 the drama itself, meeting the Greek classicist' squarely on his own grounds*

In nothing is this shift of attitude [from classic to romantic theory] so clearly apparent as in the altered approach to the drama, where character rather than plot became the primary concern of such men as Coleridge, the Schlegels, or Hazlitt. This concern was especially strong in late eighteenth- and in nineteenth-century Shakespear­ ian criticism*132

Shakespeare, long after the birth of romantic theory, con­ tinued to be seen in a new light; the classical emphasis was turned upside down, and the plot was seen as subor­ dinate to the characters,.as a means of presenting the characters to the audience. No longer were the characters primarily the means of reflecting the changes rendered by the movement of the action, the plot. The characters themselves, and not what happened to them, became the central aspect of the drama. As M. H. Abrams adds in The

Mirror and the Lamp, a similar shift in emphasis occurred in the critical theory of poetry in the nineteenth cen­ tury. John Stuart Mill turns the classic ranking of kinds of poetry upside down, preferring the lyric, with its emphasis on the narrator, to the epic, with its emphasis on the narrative.*33 m poetry too, plot is deemphasized. As

Abrams explains, "it serves as an index to the revolution in critical norms to notice that to Mill, plot becomes a kind of necessary evil."134 We have found Forster, in terms of the novel, arguing the same shift in emphasis in the twentieth century. Modern critical theory is still under the influence of, if not entirely dominated by, the romantic perspective that sees character as the primary

aspect of, really, all of literature, from drama to

poetry to the novel. And this influence is important to us not only in helping to define the interrelationship between plot and character but also, much more specifi­ cally, in understanding some of the objections to charac­

terization in the Quartet. Matthew Proser's objection

to Darley's (and Durrell's) concept of the unintegrated personality (see above, pi 16) rests squarely on its departure from romantic theories of organic, integrated personalities which hold the center stage in organic, unified novels. In short, many of the implicit assump­ tions we still make about literature are grounded firmly

in the romantic glorification of character at the rela­

tive expense of plot. And in any case we tend to see this

interrelationship between plot and character as funda­ mental; one may be emphasized at the relative expense of

the other, but either plot or character will dominate the work, either one— but nothing else— will be the central concern of both author and critic.

To sum up our discussion of plot and character, a * • novel in which the plot dominates the characters empha­

sizes a rage for order. In a tragic or fatalistic novel

it is order alone that survives, and the reader's aesthetic pleasure from such a work is derived not from

the disturbing fact of the hero's appropriately or caprici­

ously necessary downfall but from the comforting fact of

the survival of the order itself, whether or not human

existence is compatible with this order. In a tragic novel the hero's destruction despite his virtues does not

rule out the possibility of human compatibility with the very order that destroys him, for his downfall is particu­

larly appropriate to his individual character. Yet, if we may take Moby-Dick as an imperfect example of a tragic novel, the aesthetic effect of the enduring order of the

sea rolling on as it rolled five thousand years ago is central to our aesthetic pleasure. It is not that Ahab has fallen so much as that the order endures. In a

fatalistic novel, on the other hand, the order not only endures but remains antagonistic to human existence; in

The Return of the Native Clym Yeobright's understanding of the order of things and insight into the indifference of this order toward paltry human existence is of no more advantage than Eustacia Vye's previous misunderstanding and subsequent destruction. It is a world where endurance alone has value, in other words a world created for heaths, not humans. But our rage for order is satisfied, even by

such an antagonistic order, to our aesthetic pleasure.

When we move to those novels in which character dominates the plot we move to an emphasis on a rage for freedom, not order; human freedom, the fulfillment of human desires,

and not the perception of enduring natural order is now a

source of our aesthetic pleasure. In the romance, the hero in successfully passing all the tests imposed on him by the plot satisfies the human desire to dominate, to not only be in harmony with natural order but also to rise to

such a position of power through individual ability and

virtue to be able to impose moral order for the good of all. In comic fiction, as we have seen, the hero does not have to depend solely on his own ability to satisfy his desires, and winds up most often not as he who imposes moral order but he who is fittingly included in a new, just order established at the end of the work. Our aesthe­ tic pleasure in the comic novel lies not so much in the creation of this order itself as in the hero's inclusion in that order, and in the modification of that order to • include him. His freedom is preserved; when he clashes with the established order, it is the order that is modified, not the comic hero. Thus those novels in which plot is emphasized more than character satisfy different desires than those in which character is emphasized; the former satisfy our demand for order, the latter for free­ dom. In both this satisfaction produces an aesthetic pleasure, a feeling of well-being as we put down the book.

To conclude, however, that only an emphasis on character or plot may produce the aesthetic effect we associate with the novel is to be hasty. As we have seen, while Forster emphasizes character he sees great promise in that aspect of fiction he terms "rhythm," or repetition plus variation. This aspect embraces both order and freedom; repetition plus variation represents an order in itself, although in scope it is an organization subordin­ ate to that of the entire book, yet simultaneously rhythm represents for Forster the freedom he finds in the symphony. As he puts it (see above, p. 79), "when the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes com­ posing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom." If we de­ fine theme and thematic variation in the novel with For­ ster's concept of rhythm in mind it is possible to see theme, too, as embracing both order and freedom. Like plot, theme also represents a range for order, but in terms of concepts, of ideas, and not of action. Like character, theme also represents a rage for freedom in that it fulfills the human desire for human, and not natural, endurance; here it is the human idea which sur­ vives, not the sea or the heath. Like plot and character, theme and thematic variation also represent a progression, a heightening and subsequent resolution of tension that produces a satisfying aesthetic effect on the reader; un­ like plot and character, thematic progression is in terms of concepts, and not in terms of action or personal development. Thus it would appear that a thematic empha­

sis might very well be a viable alternative to an emphasis

on either plot or character* Indeed, as we have seen,

according to Frye "every work of literature has both a

fictional and a thematic aspect, and the question of which

is more imporant is often simply a matter of opinion or emphasis in interpretationv (see above, p. 48). But we

must not forget that Frye considers those works of litera­

ture containing a primary thematic emphasis to be not the

novel but the essay or the lyric, and the thematic empha­

sis of the confession to lie outside the traditional realm of the novel (see above, pp. 48!?49).

But this interest in ideas and theoretical state­ ments is alien to the genius of the novel proper, where the technical problem is to dissolve all theory into personal relationships.

Concepts have no place in the novel per sey they are to

remain behind, not in, the work, so that the novel does

not so much present ideas about personal relationships as depict these personal relationships themselves. In other words, ideas yield to people and events, theme yields to

character and plot. Pursewarden of the Quartet, however,

goes Frye one better; Frye wo.uld subordinate concepts to

personal relationships in the novel, while Pursewarden would subordinate the novel itself to actual personal

relationships. "The object of writing," according to

Pursewarden, "is to grow a personality which in the end 99

enables man to transcend art" (Balthazar, p. 141). And It

seems to me that it is these pronouncements of Pursewarden, along with the conjectures of Clea and the early defen­

sive dogmas of Darley, that Durrell primarily emphasizes

in the Quartet.. Such an emphasis may indeed be so alien

to the novel that these four books will have to be viewed as standing outside the tradition of the novel itself.

The aesthetic effect of a primary emphasis on theme and thematic variation, however, may well be at the same time comparable to that of the novel. Given this state of affairs, we would have to agree with Robert Scholes that

the Quartet is indeed a strange new object on the tree of

narrative, and at least consider his case in The Tabula­

tors for this strangeness, derived as he sees it from a

peculiar combination of the primitive and the sophisti­

cated, as a strangeness to be welcomed for all that. 100.

NOTESt CHAPTER IX

^Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (New York, 1957), p. 6 . Pagination refers to the Atheneum paperback edition, New York, 1965.

2Frye, pp. 6-7.

3Frye, p. 6.

4Frye, p. 20.

5Frye, p. 20.

6There is a strong suggestion of Lawrence's manner here in that Frye doeB not attempt to prove, or even to argue, his assertion that all the moral mandates of all the critics have always failed. Admittedly, the documentation of such a statement would require a volume in itself, and the prospects of its being a valuable or even interesting volume are dim. Still, we have Frye speaking ex cathedra here, a phenomenon observable more than once in this brilliant, highly abstract work.

7Frye, p. 26.

®Frye, pp. 26-27.

dFrye, p. 14.

*®These insights are pertinent even though Frye's Anatomy was published in the same year as Justine (1957). 'thus Frye could not have referred specifically to the Quartet at the time 11_ Frye, P- 33.

^ F r y e , P- 34.

13Frye, P« 47.

14Frye, P* 52.

15Frye, P- 53.

16Frye, P* 308.

17Frye, P- 304. 101

18pryef p. 306.

^Scobie mistakenly is given, after his death, the status of a god. The spinner of outlandish yarns during his life, he even achieves, like Pursewarden, a kind of mythic immortality in the minds of his friends after death. Unlike Pursewarden, however, there is nothing about his life reminiscent of the hero of romance. He is much more the low-mimetic comic here, and would not be out of place in, say, The Pickwick Papers or David Copperfleld.

20Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York, 1966), 3.

21scholes and Kellogg, P* 15.

22Scholes and Kellogg, PP . il­

23Scholes and Kellogg, P* ls.

2^Scholes and Kellogg, P- 15.

25Scholes and Kellogg, P* 5.

26scholes and Kellogg, P« 16.

27scholes and Kellogg, P* 15.

28scholes and Kellogg, P- 67.

2®Scholes and Kellogg, P« 84.

30Scholes and Kellogg, P* 87.

31-Scholes and Kellogg, P* 88.

32Scholes and Kellogg, P* 157.

33Scholes and Kellogg, P* 171.

34Scholes and Kellogg, P» 171.

35Scholes and Kellogg, P« 181.

36Scholes and Kellogg, PP . 188

37scholes and Kellogg, P« 200.

38Scholes and Kellogg, P- 200.

38Scholes and Kellogg, P* 203. 102

40Scholes and Kellogg, P- 207.

4*Scholes and Kellogg, PP . 207

^^Scholes and Kellogg, P* 236.

4 Scholes and Kellogg, P. 5.

44Scholes and Kellogg, P. 238.

4 ^Scholes and Kellogg, P. 239.

46Scholes and Kellogg, P- 239.

47Scholes and Kellogg P* 28.

4®scholes and Kellogg$P- 240.

4®Scholes and Kellogg, P* 53.

50Scholes and Kellogg, P* 55.

51Scholes and Kellogg, P. 240.

52scholes and Kellogg, P* 262.

^^scholes and Kellogg PP . 262

54Scholes and Kellogg P* 261.

55Scholes and Kellogg PP . 276

56Scholes and Kellogg, P* 277. 5?Mark Schorer, in his Forward to the 1957 edition of The Craft of Fiction. calls Lubbock "more Jamesean than James," implying that he is one of those various disciples of various masters who organize the master's thought into a much more rigid system than the master's itself.

58Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (London, 1921), reprinted in a.Compass edition.(New York, 1957), p. 13. (Pagination refers to the Compass edition.) Compare this to what James says in his early essay "The Art of Fiction," revised in 1888: "We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn6e : our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.M

59Lubbock, p. 40. 60Lubbock, p. Ill*

6*Lubbock, p. 72.

82Lubbock, p. 120.

63Lubbock, p. 73.

84Lubbock, pp. 103-104.

65Lubbock, p. 62.

88Lubbock, p. 147.

87Lubbock, p. ISO.

88Lubbock, p. 157.

69Lubbock, p. 162.

70Lubbockr p. 159.

71Lubbock, p. 170.

72Scholes and Kellogg, p. 270.

73Lubbock, p. 201.

74Lubbock, p. 211.

7^Lubbock, p. 211.

78Lubbock, p. 214.

77Lubbock, p. 215.

78Lubbock, p. 254.

7^Lubbock, p. 251.

88Lubbock, p. 251.

4 83.Lubbock, p. 254.

82Lubbock, p. 255.

82Lubbock's attitude toward Thackeray is almost iden­ tical to that of James toward Trollope, and for the same reason. James says of Trollope in "The Art of Fiction" that "he admits that the events he narrates have not really 104 happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best. Such a betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, Z confess, a terrible crime. ..."

84Lubbock, p. 251.

8^Lubbock, p. 256.

88Lubbock, p. 259. ^Lubbock, p. 262.

88Lubbock, p. 262.

89Lubbock, p. 271.

88E. H. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London, 1927), reprinted in a Pocket Edition by Edward Arnold, Inc. (London, 1949), p. 75. Pagination refers to the Pocket Edition.

91Forater, P* 26. 03 9‘Forster, P- 9.

83Forster, P. 23.

9 Forster, P* 29. ^SForster, P. 27.

86Forster, P. 29.

97Forster, PP . 30-31

98Forster, P* 82.

8®Forster, P« 83. CD o 10Operator, P- .

lOlForster, P« 80.

102porster, P* 80.

103Forster, P* 46.

104porster, P« 55.

l°5Forster, P* 43;

108Forster, P* 62. 105

107Forster, P* 70. 10®Forster, pp. 75-76

109Forster, pp. 76-77

110Forster, P* 77.

***Forster, P* 99.

112Forster, P- 102.

113Forster, P- 102.

^14Forster, P- 115. : classify the Quartet as a fantasy. It is, from this per­ spective, neither Berious nor real; God is portrayed as a humorist, while homunculi appear in bottles.

115Forster, P* 117.

ilSporster, P* 126.

117Forster, P- 140.

118Forster, P- 140.

HSForster, P* 150.

120Forster, P* 140 and p. 154 121Forster, P- 155. *22Whether or not the narrator of Mountolive is able to present the "true" account of what has occurred in Alexandria during Darley's original period of residence in the city, his approach does signal the end to highly per­ sonal and thuB significantly limited speculations about what really happened. There will be no more Interlinears, no more disturbing individual analyses to throw Darley's view of the past into still more confusion. The end to this kind of speculation accomplished, we may now move to the present, to Clea.

*23Andre Gide, Lea Faux Monnayeurs, quoted in Forster, pp. 94-95.

124Forster, p. 96.

*23Forster, pp. 96-97. 106

128Forster, p. 97.

^^Lawrence Durrell, A Key to Modern British Poetry (Norman, Okla., 1952), p. 26.

^•38Writers at Worki The Paris Review Interviews, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (New York, 1963), re­ printed in a Viking Compass edition (New York, 1965), p. 282. Pagination refers to the Viking edition.

129ln Durrell's case it also seems to be question of con­ stantly evolving concepts of writing. After being inter­ viewed by Kenneth Young in Encounter he sent Young a postcard which cautioned "Next year I might believe the opposite of all Z believe todayl"— Encounter (13*6), p. 68.

130porflter, P* 98 • 131prye, p. 49. 132Walter Jackson Bate, ed., Criticism: the Major Texts (New York, 1952), p. 271.

133M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New YorK, 1953), reprinted in a Norton edition (New York, 1958), p. 23. Pagination refers to the Norton edition.

134Abrams, p. 24. CHAPTER III

CONRAD AND JAMES

Guardians of the Faith Conrad, James, and Narrative Method

The answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria. chapter 14

— And, as you remark, if it is thus I ask emphati­ cally whence comes this thusness.

--James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

If The Alexandria Quartet is not in harmony with the thusnesBes of the novel as defined by Percy Lubbock and

E. M. Forster in the 1920s, what might be termed the

"psychological realism" of the Quartet is far from being entirely out of phase with a similar realism of that period.

Indeed, such guardians of the early twentieth century faith as Joseph Conrad and Henry James strive for a kind of * psychological realism themselves, and this impetuB toward a new kind of realism is shared by many other novelists of this century. Conrad and James serve as good examples of novelists concerned with psychological realism because of

107 their recognized influence on the techniques of later

twentieth century fiction, but these developing concerns

with depicting the workings of the human mind are by no

means limited to them, or to their most obvious disciples.

It is rather that Conrad and James belong to a general

tradition of the novel in English that encompasses such

other writers as Virginia WOolf, James Joyce, and Aldous

Huxley. One must keep in mind that many techniques in the mainstream of this tradition that both predate and serve

as a basis for Durrell*s psychological realism and narra­

tive techniques in the Quartet can be found, to name only

a few of the obvious examples, in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

and To the Lighthouse, Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man and Ulysses, and Huxley's Point Counter Point, as well as in Conrad's Victory (1915) and James's

Ambassadors (1903)•

Durrell, as we have seen, has been accused of writing novels that have little in common with the tradition of the novel in English, and even little in common with the twentieth century novel in the west. For Joseph E.

Kruppa, Durrell "stands outside the history of the English novel" (see above, p. 21), while Benjamin DeMott finds in

Durrell even "an obliviousness, infrequent among true innovators, to the whole line of investigation carried on by major novelists since the beginning of this century*' 109

(see above, p. 14). Yet Durrell's narrative method is not so much arrogantly antagonistic toward or blissfully ignorant of those of Conrad, James, and others as it is an extension of these earlier methods, methods which surely are not regarded as standing outside the tradition of the

English novel, much less outside the modern Western novel.

As we have seen, Lee T. Lemon views the Quartet as specifically extending James's method in The Ambassadors:

"it is as if James were aiming Strether at a stationary target, Durrell aiming Darley at a moving target and chart­ ing the moves of both men and target." Although for

Lemon "the results are two different kinds of novels, two different novelistic forms" (see above, p. 25), the two novelists share the method of aiming characters at tar­ gets; Durrell's extension, for Lemon so great a one as to produce a different kind of novel, is to move the target.

Yet the narrative methods of both James and Conrad afford a basis to which Durrell adds his modifications; indeed, when one takes into account the interest of all three writers in psychological realism, one might argue that the difference is not in kind but in degree, not in the basic

$ design but in the elaboration and extension of this basic design. What 1 have been calling psychological realism in the twentieth century novel is basically an attempt' to render, 1 1 0 through the selection and arrangement of details, not human interaction as it is or ideally might be.but the operations of the human mind, as they are or ideally might be. The term "plot" encompasses demonstrable human actions; psychological realism, on the other hand, is concerned with mental operations that may well remain hidden from normal view, on that level which Forster has termed the "secret life." Plot is also generally con- ceived in terms of cause and effect; one action leads to another, one action grows out of a previous action. Such a sequence of events, of course, rarely works to every­ one's advantage and sometimes, as in a fatalistic novel, works to no one's advantage. Yet the sequence marches on, inexorably, as precisely sequential and consequential as the tick of the clock, and it is most often assumed that to move backward in time is to move toward causes, to move forward is to approach the effects of previous causes.

Such a sequence is capable of sensibly arranging human interaction as it is or ideally might be; this happens, then that, and as a result of these events the characters are finally joined and dispersed as we see them in the

* final chapter. But the operations of the human mind are not always so sensible, as is immediately apparent in the early psychol­ ogical realism of Laurence Sterne in TriBtram Shandy. The focus of Sterne's wandering novel is not on the sensible but on Tristram's sensibility, which just happbns to be irrational, muddled, yet true to many operations of the human mind; the sensible aspect of plot is important only in its absence as Tristram is reminded of first one thing and then another. In his burlesque of tracing effects to their causes Sterne begins nine months before the birth of his hero, but the results of Tristram's conception remain unclear*— beyond the result of Tristram, that is, in which case it causes everything while explaining, finally, nothing. Psychological realism differs from psychology in that it is concerned primarily not with how the human mind works but with how to render, in a work of prose fiction, the operations of the human mind to produce a satisfying aesthetic effect without falsifying the work* ings of that mind. To borrow Lubbock's terminology,

Tristram Shandy does not describe the human mind but pre­ sents its workings dramatically; we are not told how it works, facing the author, but shown it while it works, facing the character's mind itself. Still, we are not given the operations of the human mind as they really— or, more to the point, usually— are, but as they might be were they ideally suited to best demonstrate their fundamental aspects. As Leon Edel points out in his Psychological

Novell 1900-1950, the critics of the 1920s did not perceive the ideal nature of Joyce's psychological realism and found 112 him an inadequate scientist and not, as most of us do now, a consummate artist.

The critics, in the 1920's took a wrong turning (later amply rectified), when they said that James Joyce had not accurately given us the thoughts of his characters in Ulysses. They spoke as if Joyce had turned a motion-picture camera into the minds of Stephen and Leopold and Molly and was supposed to convey to us everything that it found there. . . . These critics failed to understand that Joyce was exercising close selec­ tion and arrangement even when he Beemed to dredge up a great deal of unrelated associational matter. His selection was addressed to the creating of an illusion that there had been no selection.1 If the critics of the Twenties found the psychological novel to be a strange, new, and inadequate branch on the tree of narrative, however, novelists before 1920 were already striving for psychological realism, and searching for narrative methods that would enable them to render accurate impressions of the human mind.

Narrative method, like characterization, is a term hav- more to do with the writing than with the reading of novels.

A novelist selects a narrative method suited to the effect he wants the novel to produce; the result is a point of view. Characterization is what the novelist does to pre-. sent and develop his characters; his narrative method is what a character does to tell the story. Characterization in a novel may be partially accomplished through the plot, if what a character does tells the reader something about what he is or is becoming, and through theme and thematic variation, if what a character thinks or believes tells the reader something about him. Similarly, narrative 1X3 method includes but is not limited to point of view; the rearrangement of chronological sequences of events to heighten suspense or deepen meaning is a narrative method, as is the inclusion of several disparate points of view.

If modern psychological realism can be said to have begun near the beginning of the twentieth century with, among others, James and Conrad, we may find one source of their innovations in point of view and narrative method. If the individual human mind was to become more important in fiction the omniscient narrator, whose limitless knowledge of a limited subject he shares with no actual person, was to become proportionately less important. The naturalis­ tic assumption that there exists some omniscient per­ spective from which life can be described or shown exactly is eventually overshadowed by a new assumption, that each human mind has a unique and uniquely limited perspective from which it views and ultimately wishes to judge what it has seen. In restricting himself more or less to a center of consciousness in his later novels, James moves toward the actual limitations of the individual mind; in present­ ing the story through the necessarily limited senses of a central character, James restricts the understanding of the reader to the understanding of this character, in effect placing the reader on the scene and letting him experience, with no greater perspective, what the character experi­ ences. James's innovation in narrative method, his care­ ful restricting of the point of view from which the story 114 is told, makes possible his shift in emphasis from the omniscient, naturalistic portrait of the reality of events to the individual human mind and the reality not only*of events but of that human mind itself. Similarly, in moving from describing events as they happen to.events as they are remembered and analyzed in tranquility by narrators such as Marlow, Conrad creates a narrative method that enables him to concentrate not on what happened but on the meaning of what happened— or more precisely on the meaning of what happened some time ago as it now appears to an individual, reflective consciousness. The rise of psy­ chological realism in the novel, then, goes hand in hand with innovations in narrative method that shift the focus of the novel from an external and universal reality to the internal, individual human mind.

Curiously enough, one of Conrad's innovations in narrative method that helps to shift the focus of the novel to the individual human mind is not to restrict the un­ limited perspective of the omniscient narrator (James's technique) but to combine the omniscient point of view with those of several limited, eye-witness narrators. In * Victory Conrad begins the saga of Axel Hayst from the per­ spective of a first-person narrator who is later assisted by one Captain Davidson, the figure in this novel who most resembles the Marlow of "Heart of Darkness," Chance; and

* 115

Lord Jim. This narrator busily occupies himself by col- lecting conflicting information about Heyst, the mysteri­ ous hermit-Swede, about whom everyone has a different- opinion. Long before the end of Part I, which constitutes less than one-sixth of the novel, it becomes apparent to the reader that, from this perspective, our knowledge about Heyst must remain contradictory, ambiguous, and even ephemeral. We discover all we need to know about the setting, and a good deal about what motivated various kinds of people to populate this setting; what we are pri­ marily reading to discover— and what Conrad has implicitly promised us we will discover— remains, nonetheless, beyond our view. We find in all this description every­ thing but what we seeks what Heyst is really like, what he is up to, and why he is up to it. We know bcith too much and too little, too much in that each new fa<|t only serves to contradict previously proffered facts, and too little in that we begin to suspect strongly that even an infinite collection of facts from people who, finally, know Heyst no better than we, would not be enough to paint an accurate portrait of him. # Heyst is described successively as "an inert body"

(p. 3), "not mad" but a "queer chap" (p. 4), "Enchanted

Heyst" (p. 7), "Hard Facts Heyst" (p. 7), "utopist" (p. 8),

"the spider" (p. 19), ^Naive Heyst" (p. 21), and* "Heyst the 116

Enemy” (p. 23);2 Davidson's assistance to the first-person narrator at this point is indeed welcome, but ironically his perspective is, like the narrator's, limited to hear­ say, speculation, and a few inconclusive observations of the Swede- in unrevealing, commonplace situations. Indeed, no one in the Archipelago, the narrator of Part I and

Davidson included, knows enough about Heyst to accurately characterize him; Morrison's dilemma, as described by the narrator, is shared by all: "Who the devil was he? What was he, Morrison, doing there, talking like this? Morri­ son knew no more of Heyst than the rest of us trading in the Archipelago did” (p. 14). In the whole of Part I

Heyst is described from an entirely external point of view. What Forster calls the "secret life” is beyond everyone's ken; the narrator and the other traders can only speculate, and their speculations are no more identical than the varied, personal symbolic interpretations of Ahab's nailed-to-the-mast doubloon in Moby-Dick. Part I is in one

sense a study in point of view, a practical application of an observation made explicitly later on in the novel that

"there is a quality in events which is appreciated dif­

ferently by different minds or even by the same mind at different times” (p. 234). After Part I Conrad shifts to

» omniscient narration, to a point of view that makes

Heyst's secret life accessible despite his isolation from others, thus overcoming the obstacle he himself has set up 117 by simply removing it. Such a narrative method of combin­ ing first-person with omniscient narration strikingly emphasizes the whole question of point of view and under­ lines the idea that an access to another person's true character is much more readily available in fiction than in life, whether in the Archipelago or in London.

In Part I of Victory, then, the reader is implicitly promised the facts about Heyst but is instead given facts about everything else; his view of Heyst is an external one, and the conflicting speculations about his mysterious

Swede who is at once fond of utopias and hard facts es­ tablishes him not as a fully-realized character but as an enigma. Justine, part one of The Alexandria Quartet, is in a sense the opposite of Victory in that all we see is

Darley, and we see him exclusively from the inside as he writes about the lover he has lost and the city he has left. In Victory we get everything but Heyst; in Justine we get Darley and nothing else. The narrative methods are similar, however, in that in both novels we are implicitly promised something that we do not get. In the Quartet we are led to assume that we are getting an accurate portrait of both Justine and her city, at least insofar as Darley is capable of painting them. It is only with Balthazar that we realize how inadequate Darley was to the task he had set himself in Justine, and how much Darley misreads 118

both his lover and her city as a result of his own roman­

tic myopia. At a slight remove of place and time Darley

sets out to recreate Justine and Alexandria, to become

them in order to make them live, more manageably than in

life, on paper. But his accomplishment is much more in

making woman and city into Darleys than in making himself

into woman and city; that he neither reveals his name nor

his initials in the whole of Justine serves to make him

anonymous, but it is his anonymous presence, and not his

absence, that dominates the novel. As we read for insight

into Justine and her Alexandria we find, beginning with

Balthazar, that we have been gaining insight into Darley

instead. Indeed, Justine is the central figure in only

the novel named after her, and she is the central figure

there only because of her importance to Darley as he writes

Justine. As far as the entire Quartet is concerned

Justine functions not as the central character but as a device used to introduce us to the central topic of modern

love and its abundant variations, variations due to the unstable nature of the human psyche itself. Victory and the Quartet share the narrative method of beginning by promising the reader one thing and giving him another; they also share an emphasis on the internal, enigmatic human psyche, an emphasis in part conveyed by this narrative method. At the beginning of Victory the importance of

Heyst's psyche is underlined as Conrad gives us conflicting 119 speculations that can only be resolved and amended with a direct view of the Swede's secret life; that he does not give us this direct view in Part I only whets our appetite for it. We read Justine for the first time under the mis­ conception that it is what Darley perceives, and not

Darley as perceiver, that is central to the Quartet; it is only in moving on to Balthazar that we realize that it is not the beauty but the eye of the beholder that is impor­ tant, that it is not Justine who is to be the central figure in the Quartet, nor even necessarily Darley, but the human mind itself in its many variations.

Victory and the Quartet also share an emphasis on theme and thematic variation, although Durrell's emphasis is greater and his handling of this aspect is more complex.

Such an emphasis on theme, on conceptual thought, produces a proportionate de-emphasis on physical action, and indeed it is the struggle between concept and action that is central to Victory. In an Author's Note added to

Victory in 1920 Conrad points to what he considers to be

Heyst's major flaw: "Thinking is the great enemy of per­ fection. The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man" (pp. x-xi). In terms of action, what

* happens in Victory is that Heyst does not act when he must; instead, he only reflects that he must act: "'If I want to 120 kill him [Jones], this is my time,' thought Heyst; but he did not move" (p. 362). It is the girl he names Lena who acts, the girl who unlike Heyst abandons the attempt to solve ontological riddles and trusts her instincts to pro­ tect— >to save— the Swede who once but not twice has acted to save her. Conrad ironically juxtaposes Heyst's walk­ ing (that signifies inaction) with Lena's momentary sit­ ting (that signifies action to come).

On his way back to the table, he crossed the path of the girl they had called Alma— she didn't know why— also Magdalen, whose mind had remained so long in doubt as to the reason of her own exist­ ence. She no longer wondered at that'bitter rid­ dle, since her heart found its solution in a blinding, hot glow of passionate purpose (p. 344).

Heyst has, Conrad tells us earlier, been raised as the son of his father, as one for whom the habit of profound re­ flection has become second nature.

The young man learned to reflect, which is a des­ tructive process, a reckoning of the cost. It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog, which the pitiless cold blasts of the father's analysis had blown away from the son (pp. 88-89).

In reckoning the cost himself, Heyst*s father had concluded that mankind was always being "paid in counterfeit money"

(p. 185), and thus his last words to his son were "look on— make no sound" (p. 165). Lena, having had an invalid * * instead of a philosopher for a father, is not so habitual­ ly handicapped, and begins to act in that "blessed, warm 1 2 1 mental fog"; as she confronts the Invader Ricardo she feels

* * "an awful mental tension which was like blank forgetful­ ness" (p. 280). Heyst, busily giving advice, does not understand what Lena tells him--until she has saved him, unable to save herself.

"Thought, action— so many snares1 If you begin to think you will be unhappy." "I wasn't thinking of myself," she declared with a simplicity which took Heyst aback somewhat (p. 183).

Heyst learns to act when he must only after Lena shows him how; she has died showing him arid his action is suicide, but it is an action that repudiates his father's advice, an action that finally signifies his victory over the habit of profound reflection. As the novel progresses

Conrad indicates changes in Heyst's thought through the­ matic variations; Heyst's "he who forms a tie is lost"

(p. 188) becomes, although Heyst does not yet understand the significance of his own mockery, "he who deliberates is lost" (p. 359). The Swede, always ready with a neatly phrased concept, remarks at one point "when one takes a hand one must play the game" (p. 190), yet he takes Lena's hand and incurs the senseless wrath of Schomberg (and as a

* result the visit from the uninvited Mr. Jones and his entourage) while still trying to look on and made no sound— in other words, while still refusing, even when he must, to play the game. Such themes and variations'are 122 important to Conrad's narrative method in Victory, yet since he explicitly sides with action in its struggle with reflection Conrad does not allow his themes to dominate his plot; the crass, unthinking actions of first Schomberg and then Jones and company cannot be reasoned away by

Heyst.

The struggle between concept and action that is cen­ tral to Victory exists in the Quartet but in Durrell it is a peripheral, if important, struggle. In the Quartet theme and thematic variation generally take precedence over plot; concepts are given more emphasis than actions. Not only '•

Darley but also Arnauti, Pursewarden, Balthazar, even

Justine and Clea, are often ready with a neatly phrased concept, an appropriate aphorism. Indeed, if one thinks of such novels in English as George Meridith's Ordeal of

Richard Feverel or Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, one can see that the use of the aphorism is perhaps the most obvious traditional way of emphasizing thematic aspects in an English novel. The. aphorism has a way, through its concisely balanced cadences, of temporarily upstaging plot and character; that Durrell goes farther * than Meredith or Huxley in making almost every major character into an aphorist is more an extension of tradi­ tional methods than a true innovation. If this struggle between concept and action is not central to the Quartet, 123 however, it is important, and the nature of the struggle itself is comparable to the one that lies at the heart of

Victory. Just as Heyst*s profound reflections are con­ fronted by the crass, unthinking actions of Schomberg and the unholy trinity of brutal invaders, so are Darley's ruminations (and those of the other aphorists in Alexan­ dria) broken in on by action so simplistic and so violent as to be melodramatic. Not only death but violent, capricious•death hangs over Alexandria, and Durrell par­ tially balances his aphoristic emphasis by placing a violent death (or at least the appearance of one) near the end of each of the first three books of the Quartet; in

Justine Capodistria is supposedly shot to death in a hunt­ ing accident, in Balthazar Toto de Brunei (mistaken for

Justine) is murdered with a hatpin, and in Mountolive

Narouz is assassinated. So those who seek salvation in the turn of a phrase find they must often describe the un­ beautiful— and the senseless— if they are to describe the true; as in Victory, although Darley makes progress in his thought he finds this development to be little protection against senseless violence. In the end Durrell, like

Conrad, resolves the struggle in terms of action; Clea does not end with the violent death of Clea because Darley, unlike Heyst, acts in time to save the life of his lover.

Darley's action is important in the context of the entire 124

Quartet but it is not, as Heyst's is, central in that it does not in itself stand for all that Darley has learned.

Darley may put his understanding of the uneasy inter­

relationship between art and life to use in another way, by

finally sitting down and writing not "it might have been" but "once upon a time."

For Heyst, as for Strether in The Ambassadors, might- have-beens and a profound consciousness of what has been

irrevocably lost are what is left; the avalanche is down, and he is left knowing only what he should have done.

Heyst puts it this way to Davidscnat the end of Victory x

"Ah, Davidson, woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love— and to put its trust in

lifel" (p. 383). Strether, in giving advice to little

Bilham, sees himself in the same situation; he has not learned to live while young, and now it is too late.

"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had? . . . I see it now. I haven't done so enough before— and now I'm old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh, I do see, at least; and more than you'd believe or I can express. It's too late"3 (pp. 149-150).

For Strether it is not so much*a question of action as it

is a process of understanding; there is little Strether can do with the knowledge he gains, and in the end he is

left not with something to do but only with the possession of his fine consciousness not to it with. If James strives 125 for a kind of psychological realism at roughly the same time as Conrad, his subject is different, and the narra­ tive method he chooses also differs from that of Victory.

Here the struggle is not between concept and action; it is a struggle to see things as they are, and beyond that a struggle to act, always taking into account things as one believes them to be at the time, in the most morally unimpeachable manner.

James's narrative method in The Ambassadors, unlike

Conrad's in Victory, is to filter all the information through a single consciousness, that of Lambert Strether.

The reader sees and hears only what Strether sees and hears, and he understands (and misunderstands) this in­ formation only as Strether realizes (and fails to realize) its importance. In short, the reader experiences, at the remove of art, what Strether experiences, and when Strether is misled so is the reader. Durrell's narrative method, except in Mountolive, is built on the same device; we are fooled when Darley is fooled, and. we learn as Darley learns. And that portion of Darley's unreallability that springs from his involvement in the events he describes * (e.g., his inability to see Justine clearly due to his emotional involvement with the person he would like most to think she is) is akin to Strether's unrealiability; detached as Strether may seem, it is his involvement with 126

the seemingly omnipresent Mrs. Newsomsthat makes him

look at information one way, his wish to be Chad that

gives him another perspective, his growing moral and emo­

tional commitment to Mme. de Vionnet that reveals this

information in a third light. Yet there are important

differences between the ways in which these two stories are

told. Strether's task is not to organize information from

the past to achieve peace of mind in the present (as

Darley attempts on his island in Justine), nor is it to

perform a specific, physical action in the present (as

Darley must finally do to save Clea's life in Clea). His duty is to perceive accurately, and this he must do above

all else, and even before all else. Strether keeps re­ minding himself of this duty: "He ‘ [Strether] must approach

Chad, must wait for him, deal with him, master him, but he must not dispossess himself of the faculty of seeing things

as they were" (p. 81)• Finally, it will be up to Strether

to judge, and he must judge everything and everyone: Chad,

Madame de Vionnet, Mrs. Newsome, Sarah Pocock, Maria

Gostrey, and even himself. It is this that makes accuracy of perception so necessary, and which justifies for James

a narrative method that is concerned, more than anything

else, with perception.

She had finally given him her hand, which he held a moment. "How much I have to judge1" 127

"Everything,** said Mme. de Vionnet; a remark that was indeed— -with the refined, disguised, suppressed passion of her face— what he most carried away (p. 293).

Passion in The Ambassadors, unlike the Quartet, seems to be

always a mental as opposed to a physical passion, a passion

finally to be shared in the case of Strether with himself

as he scurries away to analyze it in the solitude of his

rooms; even in the case of Chad and Mme. de Vionnet, who have scandalized Woollett, Massachusetts, with the uncon­

scionable introduction of the physical into the passion­

ate, the attraction insofar as James lets us imagine it

remains basically ethereal. To borrow a phrase from

Durrell, they have the power to fecundate each other's minds. It is such powers that Strether must finally

judge, and to be a compassionate, humane judge (is there

anyone who is more so, as it turns out, in the English novel?) he must perceive accurately. As for doing,

Strether judges. The rest is not doing: Strether does not

leave Paris in triumph, does not marry anyone at all, does not in the end get anything for himself.

As I have indicated, the action in The Ambassadors

takes place in the continuing, present, which represents

another difference in narrative method from the Quartet.

Darley, even in Clea, writes as he reflects, after that which he writes about has already happened. James gives

us Strether as things happen, and his method allows us to 128 be there as the action unfolds, to be there without having to swallow such an awkward convention as Pamela's writing, night after night, all that has happened only a few moments before. Indeed, James avoids two drawbacks pres­ ent in Samuel Richardson's early attempt to depict the mind realistically: Strether is not made to write an avalanche of letters to Miss Gostrey (here James avoids a farcical and incredible portrait of Strether writing con­ tinually, helped only by a bottomless supply of ink and paper and an endless number of hours per day in which to do the writing*), nor does James have to assume that

Strether has the rare ability to be exactly candid about himself as he writes. We have instead, in James's method, Strether's thoughts as they occur; moreover, if we assume that James's narrator is reliable, we have

Strether's thoughts apparently without rearrangement or emendation, although we must keep in mind that what Edel says about Joyce also applies to James here, that James's selection is "addressed to the creating of an illusion that there had been no selectiorf1 (see above, p. 112).

The events in The Ambassadors, then, are filtered through Strether's consciousness, but that fine conscious­ ness itself is presented directly; this is precisely what

Lubbock talks about when he says "you may dramatize this thing at least, this mind, if the things that appear in it 129 must remain as pictures only" (see above, p. 71). James is concerned with, above all, the development of this fine consciousness in Strether, and by presenting all that happens in the continuing present he not only emphasizes this development but lets us see the development as it happens, lets us watch Strether as he learns to see and, finally, after he has seen all there is to see, to judge.

In contrast, the Quartet, by presenting a view of the events from a recollection in tranquility, seems to have much more in common with the narrative method of Conrad in Lord Jim or "Heart of Darkness," where Marlow reflects on past events, knowing from the beginning, if not-the value of what has happened, at least what has happened itself. Yet if we believe that J.uatine, in the context of the entire Quartet, presents more a portrait of Darley than one of Justine or of Alexandria, then Lubbock's remark fits Justine as well. Major differences between the narrative methods of The Ambassadors and the Quartet remaint James's novel is told in the continuing present, and there is no hard evidence to cause us to suspect

James's narrator of being unreliable. Yet strether's involvement in the action, like Darley's, is a source of unreliability in both works, and Darley's mind, like

Strether's, is dramatized for us, even though in the case of the Quartet we are not at first aware that what we are 130 seeing is Darley's mind. Although Lemon sees the differ­ ence in narrative method between The Ambassadors and the

Quartet as being so great as to consider the two works as different kinds of novels, both works share, all the way down at the bottom of the wine funnel, a common method for depicting the human mind realistically.

Unlike Victory, The Ambassadors does not share a con­ cern with theme and thematic variation with the Quartet.

James's interest in the human mind is focused almost en­ tirely on Strether's mind, and since Strether is not an aphorist like Heyst and his father the pithy saying, with its commensurate stress upon concepts rather than actions, does not find its way into James's perplexingly prolonged sentences. The little golden nail of commitment twice driven into Strether's sensitive conscience by Mme. de Vionnet (p. 192 and p. 216) and the small Lambinet

Strether continues to admire long after he has lost his chance to buy it (p. 374) remain images or even symbols but not themes. The contrast between youth and age that per­ vades both Strether's consciousness and the entire novel is, on the other hand, more James's subject than his major theme or, as Forster has pointed out, more pattern than rhythm (see above, p. 78); as Strether gains in understand­ ing and a profound sense of the right thing, Chad falls from the heights of true sophistocation, in both Strether*s 131 eyes and— since he judges for us all— our own.

If The Ambassadors does not share an emphasis on

theme or the aphoristic emphasis on the conceptual, how­ ever* unlike Victory it does share with the Quartet charac­

ters who all seem to talk alike* whose conversation seems to have been polished to an identical degree in the same

finishing school. Indeed* the remark by Scholes and

Kellogg that "in a Jamesian novel all the language is annihilated to Jamesian thoughts in a Jamesian shade" (see above, p. 67) might be applied to the Quartet as well* where the voices of Darley* Balthazar, Pursewarden, and

Clea sound so much alike that they could all be described . as the voice of Durrell. As we have seen* in one of his hyperbolic statements Lubbock claims that the voice we hear in The Ambassadors is* because all is dramatically

rendered, no one's voice at all: "even in the page of description nobody is addressing us, nobody is reporting his impression to the reader" (see above* p. 67). But

this "nobody," in the Quartet as well as in The Ambassadors*

is a quite familiar non-entity; his tone and his patterns of speech are in both cases consistent enough for us to hear* throughout each novel, the rise and fall of this particular voice that Lubbock claims is attached to no body. Wayne Booth much more sensibly points out that an author's voice never disappears, and that it is just as 132 well that it doesn't:

whether an impersonal novelist hides behind a single narrator or observer, the multiple points of view of Ulysses or As I Lay Dying, or the ob­ jective surfaces of The Awkward Ageor Compton- Burnett's Parents and Children, tne author's voice is never really silenced, it is, in fact, one of the things we read fiction for . . ., and we are never troubled by it unless the author makes a great to-do about his own superior naturalness.5

The sound of the author's voice is more insistent in The

Ambassadors and in the Quartet than it is in Victory, where Conrad makes some attempt to differentiate between

Heyst's patterns of speech and those of, say, Hr. Gentle­ man Jones. James and Durrell make no sustained attempt

to separate their characters by individual mannerisms of

speech, although both do distinguish, reasonably enough,

between what separate characters have to say; it is what

Darley and Pursewarden have to say, and not how they say

it, that serves generally to characterize them as separate

and often unequal entities.

Victory and The Ambassadors represent two early

attempts at achieving psychological realism; that their

narrative methods differ serves as an example that more

than one approach to the fictional representation of the

human mind exists. Their subjects also differ, and beyond

that the differences in values implied in these two novels

are, in the end, as great if not greater than the differ­

ences in narrative method and subject. Conrad views the 133 habit of profound reflection as perhaps the most negative of human endeavors, while James (or the reliable narrator whose voice we take to be like James's) remarks that "it will have been sufficiently seen that he was not a man to neglect any good chance for reflection" (p. 62); the man is Strether, and there is no indication that James thinks of his habit as pernicious. On the other hand, Victory is not an ironic title; the novel ends with a positive action, even though that action is Heyst*s suicide, even though the price for this victory is as much as a mortal can pay. In

The Ambassadors human reflection is given a positive value but the novel ends with a moral "nay"; what Strether must . do is not do, give up, let go. It is this renunciation— of any marriage, of any personal gain whatsoever— that makes Strether morally, even spiritually, right, and right is what he must be. Passion in The Ambassadors is that which one shares with oneself in the solitude of one's rooms; magnificence, as Strether remarks long before his final magnificent gesture, is more a characteristic to have had than to have, what "I think I shall like to have been" (p. 232, italics mine).

Durrell borrows neither Conrad's nor James's attitude toward the habit of profound reflection. That Darley must act instead of theorize in order to save Clea's life at the end of Clea, that Pursewarden insists that the writing, finally, does not matter at all (see Balthazar, p. 239), 134 might be indications of an agreement with Conrad's values, yet theories of art and the psyche, of laughter and tender­ ness, remain central to the Quartet as well. That Durrell finally ends with a "yea" and not a "nay" is basically a result of his— or Darley's and Clea's— personal preference.

As C. P. Cavafy's poem included in the Notes to Clea indi­ cates, the final yea or nay is a matter of personal choice and not the external facts of the matter.

To some among us comes that implacable day Demanding that we stand our ground and utter By choice of will the great Yea or Nay. And whosoever has in him the affirming word Will straightway then be heard.

But he, the other who denies, No-one can say he lies; he would repeat His Nay in louder tones if pressed again. It is his right--yet by such little trifles, A 'No' instead of 'Yes' his whole life sinks and stifles. (Clea, p. 285)

It is not my intention to insist that Durrell borrows, if not their values, at least aspects of the narrative methods of Conrad and James. It is simply that the Quartet1s narrative method is, in some ways, comparable to those of

Conrad in Victory and James in The Ambassadors. Whether

Durrell consciously borrowed some early techniques of a psychological realism from Conrad and James is not the question. The point is that there are narrative methods in the works of two acknowledged masters of the novel in

English that are comparable, although far from identical. to Durrell's in the Quartet, and though it may be more obvious to point to his narrative similarities with con tinental authors such as Proust and Gide it is an over­ simplification to insist that Durrell and his Quartet stand outside the tradition of the novel in English. 136

NOTES: CHAPTER III

^Leon Edel, The Psychological Novel: 1900-1950 (New York, 1955), pp. 29- 30. ■

2A11 page references to Joseph Conrad, Victory (London, 1915) are taken from Random House's Modern Library Edition, published in New York.

2A11 page references to Henry James, The Ambassadors (New York, 1903) are taken from Harper's Modern Classics Edition, published in New York.

4Henry Fielding, of course, was quick to point out the improbable nature of Pamela's writing feats in Shamela, published within six months of the appearance o£ Richard- son's Pamela.

5Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), reprinted by The University of Chicago Press in a Phoenix Edition (Chicago, 1967), p. 60. Pagination refers to the Phoenix edition.

4 CHAPTER IV

LOVE

The Theme of Love Each Letter a Volume

The central topic of the book is an investigation of m o d e m love.

— Lawrence Durrell, Note to Balthazar

Our topic, Brother Ass, is the same, always and irremediably the same— I spell the word for you* 1-o-v-e. Four letters, each letter a volume1

— Pursewarden to Darley in Clea

In his Note to Balthazar Durrell tells us more or

less the truth; the Alexandria Quartet is concerned, among other things, with an extensive investigation of modern

love. But this is not the whole truth. The central topic

of the Quartet may be an investigation of modern love, yet

other topics seem to be as basic as modern love, in that

they are treated as recurrently and as thoroughly. To be

sure, the entire Quartet can be viewed from the perspec­

tive of love; each volume a letter, to paraphrase Purse­

warden. But each volume also deals extensively with the

topic of art, and with the introduction of the perspective

of politics in Mountolive we have a third point from which

137 to view and evaluate what happens in the Quartet. In Clea it might be said that the summum bonum is truly the health of the psyche, both the psyche of the individual and by extension the psyche of Western civilization, and that love, art, and politics are reduced to three of the means of attaining psychic health. I would like to discuss these four topics (or themes, to be consistent with my earlier terminology) at some length, each theme a chapter, to demonstrate what I believe to be the thematic struc­ tural basis of the Quartet. There are, to be sure, other themes in Durrell's tetralogy that would lend themselves to such a demonstration, and other labels that might be applied to those themes I have chosen to discuss.^ My

intention is not to insist that the Quartet is founded solely on the four specific themes that I have chosen; it is rather to suggest that the thematic, the aesthetically developed idea as opposed to the aesthetically developed characteristic (characterization) or action (plot), is basic to Durrell's structure.

The Alexandria Quartet contains an abundance of ideas about love, art, politics, psychic health, and even about

* ideas themselves. Pursewarden, like Durrell both novel­

ist and poet, has this to say about ideas as well as peoplei

"Poets are not really serious about ideas or people. They regard them much as a Pasha regards the members of an extensive harim. They are pretty, 139

yes. They are for use. But there Is no ques­ tion of them being true or false, or having souls. In this way the poet preserves his fresh­ ness of vision, and finds everything miraculous" (Balthazar, p. 113).

Durrell himself, in an interview with Kenneth Young in

Encounter prior to the publication of Clea, was asked if he were "essentially a writer of ideas"; his answer re­ calls Pursewarden's statement in that he seeks refuge in being a poet, but he does not demean the value of ideas

in the way his character seems to. "I would rather say

that I was a poet who had stumbled into prose, but of course ideas mean a great deal to me."2 As the interview continues, it becomes apparent not only that ideas are

important to Durrell, but also that there are a great number of interrelated ideas in the Quartet. Durrell re­ marks that "the whole business of the four books, apart

from other things, shows the way an artist grows up." Young wonders aloud if this doesn't contradict Durrell*s

statement in the Note to Balthazar that the central topic

is an investigation of modern love; Durrell*s explanation

is that

. . . it ties in in numerous ways. For ex­ ample, I am trying to illustrate the bi-sexual Eros which Freud disinterred after it had been lost, virtually since Plato. That is why I deal so freely with love in all its aspects. But in the last volume (Clea) I am trying to develop the idea that the sexual act is our "knowing" machine. It is the point d'appui of the psyche; and you can determine much about a' culture or a civilisation from its approach to 86X.3 14 0

"The association of ideas in a state of excitement"; this might describe Durrell's performance in this interview, provided we realize that the ideas are more the source than the result of his excitement. Western science, human per­ sonality, Eastern metaphysics are yoked by syntax to­ gether.

Raising questions like the Principle of Inde­ terminacy affects the whole basis of human per- . sonality— and you come out in Hindu metaphysicsI

The resulting excitement may be seen as the product of a fusion of ideas, depending more on synthesis than analy­ sis. Such excitement is perhaps what Pursewarden has in mind when he speaks of "freshness of vision," and in this way ideas become, for Durrell as well as for Pursewarden, not sources of truth but entities to be used. Both in this interview and in the Quartet Durrell is concerned more with the interrelationship of seemingly disparate ideas than with the explication of individual ideas. His characters are sometimes "mouthpieces" in that they pre­ sent views that are indistinguishable from those of

Durrell himself; at other times, however, these characters illustrate in their dramatic interrelationships the inter- # relationships of the ideas they hold, and these ideas may be seen as neither true nor false in relation to what

Durrell personally believes but as building blocks from which Durrell constructs his work. Durrell's apparent separation from Pursewarden's view of ideas being for use. 141 as utilitarian entities, proves to be only the appearance; the truth of the matter is that Pursewarden serves as a mouthpiece in this passage, and that ideaB mean a great deal to Durrell not because of their inherent truth but because of their utility. As for Pursewarden's apparently demeaning statement that poetB are not serious about ideas, this too should be read in the context of what Durrell most often feels about the value of being serious. In his Key to Modern British Poetry Durrell points out that

"above all one should never forget that poetry, like life, is altogether too serious not to be taken lightly."5

There is, then, a plethora of ideas about a great number of topics in the Quartet. The topic {or theme) of love affords a good place to begin, not only because

Durrell labels it as the central topic of the four books but also because it is so obviously important here, for the characters themselves as well as for Durrell. Dar­ ley's major impetus for writing Justine in the first place is his romantic obsession with both Justine and her

Alexandria, a city which has become a world because he has loved one of its inhabitants (Justine, p. 63). As in the

* subsequent books, there is a multitude of love relation­ ships that becomes almost at times bewildering in its com­ plexity; cancerously multiplying while incestuously cast­ ing back upon itself, this very multitude of relationships seems to be an organism with a will of its own. Darley abandons Melissa £or Justine, who by this time has appar- • # ently used up, among others, Arnauti and Nessim; that

Nessim and Melissa should finally produce the only off­ spring of this particular quadrangle comes to seem only logical, the logic of love. In Justine love is surely the central topic, that kind of love that is romantic, pos­ sessive, and highly cerebral. In Balthazar, however,

Darley begins to study the interlinear to revise his view of Alexandria, a view he considers to be "almost a monomania" as a result of his isolation (Balthazar, p.

19). He is forced to go far beyond the facile observation that love is blind, to wrestle with the specific nature of his own blindness. Balthazar's additions, emendations, and corrections raise in Darley's mind a "central doubt"

(Balthazar, p. 101), which in the end results in the destruction of that private Alexandria constructed on his island and recorded in Justine; he now believes himself to be engaged in what is really a search for his "proper self" (Balthazar, p. 226). Love is still very much a central consideration in Balthazar, but by now Darley begins to have a new awareness of the importance of the

t pronoun "I"; in Justine the focus is on the other pronoun, the "you" on the other side of the verb in that deceptively simple phrase "I love you" on which two books have now been built. In Mountolive the particular "I" of Justihe and

Balthazar itself becomes a "you." Durrell has warned us in his Note to Balthazar that in this third book "the narrator of Justine and Balthazar becomes an object, i.e., a character"; what he fails to prepare us for is that in

Mountolive Darley becomes a minor object, a peripheral character whose primary function seems only to be to swell a scene or two. Love remains a central theme, but it is

Mountolive and not Darley at stage center, and this apprentioediplomat brings with him a new cast of love objects: Leila Hosnani, Grishkin the ballerina, and Liza

Pursewarden (whanhe will finally marry in Clea). And love remains an object of investigation, although it is not

Darley or Mountolive but the unnamed naturalistic narrator who is concerned with gathering the disparate facts and pronouncing judgment upon them. Justine is still an important character in Mountolive, but here her importance is not derived from her being the love-obsession of the central character; Nessim and Justine are politically * important, and indeed both their marriage and their love for each other are created out of a political bond, a shared allegiance to a political ideal.

He [Nessim] was asking, not for her hand in mar­ riage (here his lies had created the misunder­ standing) but for her partnership in allegiance to his ruling daimon (Mountolive, p. 199).

Neither Darley in Justine nor Balthazar in his Interlinear 144 has been able to discover or imagine the key to Justine and Nessim's relationship) the key supplied in Mountolive turns out to be an international plot instead of a psycho­ logical check, a lost child, or the vagaries of jealousy and despair.

When Darley returns as both central character and narrator in Clea, time moves forward (in contrast to the first three books, where each successive book plunges more deeply into the past6), and Justine becomes much less important as Darley's obsessive concern with her ends on their first meeting. Justine is replaced by Clea in her role as the primary "you" in Darley's investigation of modern love; love continues to be a central concern, but feelings toward previous lovers turn out to be as ephemeral as the quest for requited love is constant.

Melissa, as well as Justine, no longer means anything to

Darley's heart, no matter what his mind tells his lips to say.

Turning back to the wretched rack-like bed again I whispered her name softly. With surprise and chagrin I discovered that she had utterly vanished. The waters simply closed over her head. It was as if she had never existed, never inspired in me the pain and pity which (1 had always told myself) would live on, transmuted into other forms perhaps— but live triumphantly on forever. I had worn her out like an old pair of socks, and the utterness of this disappearance surprised and shocked me. Could "love" simply wear out like this? (Clea, pp. 40-41)

Lovers come and go; love, the central mystery, abides* Yet 144 has been able to discover or imagine the key to Justine and Nessim's relationship; the key supplied in Mountolive turns out to be an international plot instead of a psycho­ logical check, a lost child, or the vagaries of jealousy and despair.

When Darley returns as both central character and narrator in Clea, time moves forward (in contrast to the first three books, where each successive book plunges more deeply into the past*>), and Justine becomes much less important as Darley's obsessive concern with her ends on their first meeting. Justine is replaced by Clea in her role as the primary "you" in Darley's investigation of modern love; love continues to be a central concern, but feelings toward previous lovers turn out to be as ephemeral as the quest for requited love is constant.

Melissa, as well as Justine, no longer means anything to

Darley*s heart, no matter what his mind tells his lips to say.

Turning back to the wretched rack-like bed again I whispered her name softly. With surprise and chagrin I discovered that she had utterly vanished. The waters simply closed over her head. It waB as if she had never existed, never inspired in me the pain and pity which (I had always told myself) would live on, transmuted into other forms perhaps— but live triumphantly on forever. I had worn her out like an old pair of socks, and the utterness of this disappearance surprised and shocked me. Could "love" simplv wear out like this? (Clea, pp. 40-41)

Lovers come and go; love, the central mystery, abides. Yet 145 in the midst of war, the halcyon days Clea and'Darley share seem by contrast even more ideal--and even more precari- ous— than any they have shared with others. In the begin­ ning their love is spontaneous; its lack of premeditation, of being willed, and its concomitant abundance of laughter and a sense of mischief, both heighten and deepen the joy of the relationship. Later, when Darley intuitively realizes that he must will Clea back to life, however, he is prepared to overthrow the cosmos itself, if necessary, by willing it so (Clea, p. 251). They do not remain to­ gether in Alexandria, but the letters that cross in the mail at the conclusion of the Quartet indicate that each is now ready to meet the other, to the north and west, in

France. Their feelings for each other, if not consistent, have at least endured Alexandria; indeed, their love has grown and deepened, and neither is, for the time being in which the Quartet concludes, simply one more lover, one more costume of love to be of necessity discarded like an old pair of socks. They will emerge from the great wine­ press of love with their wounds healing, if not mended.

Darley begins Justine by focusing on Alexandria her­ self, on the city more than her inhabitants. Durrell's

Note to Justine reinforces this focus: the characters and

• the personality of the narrator are inventions, he insists, and "only the city is real" (Justine, p. 9). Darley has pushed the city away from himself in retreating to a small Mediterranean island with only Melissa's child-by Nessim for company, and he admits at once that he has come there

"to heal myself, if you like to put it that way" (Justine, p. 13). The city has also retreated from him, through time, so that he must "return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together" (Justine, p. 13). But Darley*s having removed himself in both place and time from Alexandria is only part of the healing process he has prescribed for himself; he has also come to the island "in order completely to rebuild this city in my brain" (Justine, p. 15). His writ­ ing, his art, is to be not only a rebuilding of Alexandria to show its significant side but also a therapeutic exer­ cise, a joyous compromise with all that once wounded him in that city, in that past.

The solace of such work as X 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 sig­ nificant side. . . • For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential— the imagination (JuBtine, p. 17).

Darley views his disease as being peculiar to Alexandria, and sees himself as only one of a multitude of exiles from this unhappy city, all sick men who alike have been wounded deeply, through their exposure to Oriental love there, in their sex. 147

You would never mistake it for a happy place. The symbolic lovers of the free Hellenic world are replaced here by something different, something subtly androgynous, inverted upon itself. . . . I remember Nessim once saying— I think he was quoting— that Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets— I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex (Justine* p. 14). ------

Despite Darley's insistence on the importance of this city

that has wounded him, however, and despite his historical

perspective that such wounds as his are commonplace in

Alexandria, his disease is new to him; his basic obsession

is not with the setting, however exotic, but with what

happened there, specifically his unsuccessful love affair with Justine. It is with,Justine that he must finally

come to terms. "A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants," and even though all the world has

become Alexandria, it is so because of Justine. His re­ building of Alexandria would serve no purpose, and heal

nothing, were he to fail to recreate that one inhabitant who first made that city the world for him.

Love as "something subtly androgynous, inverted upon

itself" surely applies most to love as Justine knows It, and as she teaches Darley to know it. Justine herself is described as androgynous, although more blatantly than

subtly so; when Darley first notices her, after his lecture on Cavafy, he tells us she has "her legs crossed in a mannish attitude, puffing a cigarette" (Justine, p. 30).

She later accosts him "with the air of authority that 148 Lesbians, or women with money, assume with the obviously indigent" (Justine, p. 31); she is wealthy, and more than latently homosexual, but she spends most of her time fend energy being outrageously heterosexual and bewilderingly confused in spirit. To this basic sexual contradiction in Justine's character Darley adds the opposition of pagan passion and moral responsibility.

. . . yet how touching, how pliantly feminine this most masculine and resourceful of women could be. She could not help but remind me of that race of terrific queens which left behind them the ammoniac smell of their incestuous loves to hover like a cloud over the Alexandrian subconscious. The giant man-eating cats like Arsinoe were her true siblings. Yet behind the acts of Justine lay something else, born of a later tragic philosophy in which morals must, be weighed in the balance against rogue personality. She was the victim of truly heroic doubts (Justine, p. 20).

For Darley Justine is the disastrous combination of two very different kinds of archetypal figures, the sleek man- eating cat queens who act powerfully without reflection, and the Jewish moral philosophers who reflect powerfully on actions; that the one figure is feminine and the other masculine again points to her androgynous character. As for love's being something "inverted upon itself," Jus­ tine as Alexandrian queen is just as inverted, left lick­ ing her cat-paws in aimless contemplation between bursts of incestuous love. And Justine in her role as the victim of purely heroic doubts, as moral philosopher, is as end­ lessly inverted upon herself as Byron's Childe Harold, 149

perpetually the wandering outlaw of her own dark mind. Of

these two Justines, the feminine actor and the masculine

thinker, it is to the thinker that Darley is first drawn.

"Our intimacy was of a Btrange mental order," Darley notes,

and then'adds * it was, if you like, the flirtation of minds pre­ maturely exhausted by experience which seemed so much more dangerous than a love founded in sexual attraction (Justine, p. 26)•

This flirtation of minds, the exchanging of pointed some­

things as well as sweet nothings, remains fundamental to

their intimacy. As Darley has discovered by the time he

begins writing Justine, such a mental intimacy i£ danger­

ous, and leads to wounds that are difficult to heal.

Darley assumes that this flirtation of minds is re­

inforced, is made more dangerous, by the similarity of his mental state and Justine's; their minds, to him, are both

"prematurely exhausted by experience." That this later

proves to be a delusion on Darley's part, that he is pre­

maturely exhausted by experience in the time honored sense

that sophomores are— and that he makes traditionally

sophomoric responses to this adolescent malaise— only

serves to underline the power of love to delude. This men­

tal flirtation, indeed, is precisely and accurately des­

cribed by Darley, although what he says is only true frojn

his own particular point of view; were Durrell to remove

Darley's blinders here, he would also remove a crucial 150 aspect of Parley's experience in his developing intimacy with Justine: his delusion that they are kindred spirits, jaded to the same extent and thus capable of understand* ing, finally, everything about the other. And Justine, for her part, feeds— or is it furnishes the raw material for?— Parley's theories about Alexandrian love.

nAhlH said Justine once, "that there should be something free, something Polynesian about the licence in which we live.*1 Or even Mediterranean, she might have added, for the connotation of every kiss would be different in Italy or Spain? here our bodies were chafed by the harsh desic­ cated winds blowing up out of the deserts of Africa and for love we were forced to substitute a wiser but crueller mental tenderness which em­ phasized loneliness rather than expurgated it (Justine, p. 39). # Thus "a wiser but crueller mental tenderness" is added to the mental flirtation that begins their relationship, a « kind of tenderness that emphasizes not their union but their separateness. And yet this awareness of loneliness, too, is something they share; it is a mental awareness, and as they discuss it, in flirtation or in tenderness, it feeds their mental intimacy. Then the flirtation and tenderness, an intimacy in which Nessim seems to share, progresses to a third stage of mental involvement. As

Parley puts it, the "gaiety and friendship" common to the three of them , 4 • . . disintegrated into something which was not love— how could it have been?— but into a sort of mental possession in which the bonds of a ravenous sexuality played the least part. How did we let 151

it come about— matched as we were so well'in ex­ perience, weathered and seasoned by the disap­ pointments of love in other places? (Justine, p. 45)

The only ravenous sexuality into which they descend imme­ diately consists entirely of a few kisses, a sexuality begun and ended by Justine (Justine, pp. 46-47). But their mental intimacy has disintegrated into a mental possession, and they both recognize from past experience

(or at least Darley recognizes, and supposes Justine does) possession as one of the signs of disappointment in love.

There is no help for it; "we had already become in a way part-owners of each other" (Justine, p. 48).

This ownership is neither willed nor desired on * Darley's part; he struggles ineffectually against this higher power and, being so caught up, presumes that Jus­ tine must be undergoing the same experience. Yet he is aware that, in her "diary" at least,? Justine theoreti­ cally presupposes no such thing.

"Idle," she writes, "to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts; it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded in­ side each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illu­ sion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false. The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the 1S2

first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point— -for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness (Justine, pp. 49-50).

But either way— ‘Whether Darley and Justine share a common

experience or whether they merely undergo similar but in­

communicable experiences at the same moment of time—

everything eventually degenerates into possession, and

then inexorably back to loneliness. And it is this complex mental awareness of doom, of the falling apart being an

integral part of the coming together, that gives Justine

its intensity as a love story. Indeed, what is important

is not how experienced Darley really is, not how much he

actually knows, but that he is sure he should know better.

The affair overcomes this fundamental inertia, and once it begins to move the momentum is irresistible— and irresist­ ibly destructive. As it appears in Justine the momentum has already swept them both toward joining and dividing when Justine appears in Darley's flat to seduce him directly, if harshly: M,I want to put an end to all this as soon as possible. I feel as if we've gone too far to go back" (Justine, p. 84). What she effectively puts an end to, of course, is the tension'of their physically uncon­ summated intimacy, replacing it immediately with the ten­ sion of their physically consummated intimacy. She is the terrific cat-queen not in Darley's bed (MI am always so 153

bad the first time, why is it?") but In letting the photos

and powder-boxes fall where they nay.

And getting out of bed she walked over to the dresBing-table with its row of photos and powder- boxes and with a single blow like that of a leopard's paw swept it clean. "That," she said, "is what I am doing to Nessim and you to Melissal It would be ignoble to try and pretend other­ wise" (Justine, p. 8 6 ).

Having thus demonstrated that nothing can justify what they

are doing, she proceeds in her guise as moral philsopher

to reflect on just how necessary justification is for her.

"It would be silly to spread so much harm as I have done and not to realize that it is. my role. . . . It isn't easy to be me. I so much want to be responsible for myself. Please never doubt that." (Justine, p. 87). i For Darley it is as if the whole city has crashed about his

ears. And as for their strange mental intimacy, it has

changed only in growing more intense, more demanding, "as

* if we wished to take up emplacements in each other's

minds forever" (Justine, p. 88; italics mine). What Jus­

tine has put an end to are their mortally possible expec­

tations; from now on without hope they live in desire of

forever.

Reproduction, for Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Portrait, # is the beginning of death; in Justine the coming together

is the beginning of the falling apart. This idea, first

explicitly stated in what Darley takes to be Justine's

diary, becomes a leitmotif in the Quartet; as Pursewarden

more calmly and more optimistically puts it in Balthazar. 154

"Love joins and then divides. How else would we be grow­ ing?" (Balthazar, p. 234). Yet Pursewarden is himself finally divided from lovers, love, and the world by his decisive if puzzling suicide. And the events Darley des­ cribes in Justine that lead to and include his separation from Justine are so personally catastrophic for him that he retires to his Mediterranean island, at least tempor­ arily out off from lovers, modern love, and the world as he has come to define it: Alexandria. His is an attempt to heal himself, to grow, but it is not an easy task, and he does not always come to it with an optimistic calm even in his remote retreat. After he feels the city crash

i about his ears for the first time in Justine he listens to

Pursewarden recite a few lines from "The City" by Cavafy, the Greek poet whose verses seem to reinforce many of the g basic concepts on which the Quartet is built, and as he listens these lines strike him with a new force (Justine, p. 88). We do not know what the specific lines are, but there is a clear, unequivocal vision throughout the poem: the city is ugly and bleak because you have made it so, and since you have, it will now always follow you every­ where .

There's no new land, my friend, no Hew sea; for the city will follow you, In the same streets you'll wander endlessly, The same mental suburbs slip from youth to age, In the same house go white at last— 155

AhI don't you see Just as you've ruined your ll£e in this One plot o£ ground you've ruined its worth Everywhere now--over the whole earth? (Justine, pp. 251-252)

This corollary adds intensity and pathos i£ not tragedy to

Darley's original love-struck comment, "a city becomes a

world when one loves one of its inhabitants"; the love will

ultimately fail, the city alone will abide, omnipresent and

- ruinous. And Cavafy's corollary, at the end o£ Justing

seems true enough. Justine is gone, leaving only a letter

for Darley, and the city crashes about his ears once more;

Darley's description of the feeling, one like that which

survivors of an earthquake must feel, is almost identical t to his first description of it after Justine has seduced

him. Then

it was as if the whole city had crashed about my ears; 1 walked about in it aimlessly as survi­ vors must walk about the streets of their native city after an earthquake, amazed to find how much that had been familiar was changed. (Justine, p. 88)

Now, with Justine gone, the feeling returns;

It is as if the whole city had crashed about my ears; I walk slowly to the flat, aimlessly as survivors must walk about the streets of their native city after an earthquake, surprised to find how much that had been familiar had changed. (Justine, p. 220)

There is, of course, a difference in the changes; the

potential falling apart in the first instance has now been

realized in the second. There is no possibility now of 156 clinging to the illusion that the coming together will last even a moment longer. And yet what has happened a£ter the duck shoot on Lake Mareotis has been implicitly a part of their intimacy since its beginning; Darley imagines the effect of Justine's customary behavior on

Nessim, whom after all she haB also left.

In my mind's eye I can see Nessim racing up the great staircase to her room to find a distraught Selim contemplating the empty cupboards and a dressing table swept clean as if by a blow from a leopard's paw (Justine, pp. 220-221).

The falling apart, as Justine had insisted from the begin­ ning, has separated not only Justine from Darley but also

Justine from Nessim and Darley from Melissa. Darley, who has the experience but misses the meaning, now searches for it on his island; he does not doubt that the meaning is there, but he is not at all so certain that there will be time to find it.

Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might surprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough. Will there be time? (Justine, p. 221)

And with the falling apart, Darley's relationship with

Justine changes fundamentally. Justine the person is

4 gone; he is now attached only to Justine the memory, a memory that must change with time.

There is, of course, a multitude of other love rela­ tionships in Justine, a multitude bewildering in its com­ plexity. While Darley's obsession with Justine lies at 1 5 7 the heart of this first novel, Darley observes, remembers, and records many other relationships (including two of his own, with Melissa and Clea) in his effort to rework reality to make it show its significant side, to come to termB with the wounds resulting from his unsuccessful passion for Justine. Darley describes Melissa in typ­ ically Alexandrian terms, finding her "washed up like a half-drowned bird . • . with her sex broken" (Justine, p. 24). She has given up the old furrier Cohen for Darley, who in turn gives Melissa up for Justine, who at the same time abandons her husband Nessim, of course the very per­ son who, after Pursewarden has been attracted to her, fathers Melissa's child. Although all this sounds complex enough in itself, however, it is not even so simple as this. Darley remains attached to Melissa, primarily through pity and guilt; after Justine leaves both Darley and Alexandria, he realizes that "what remains unresolved in my life is not the problem of Justine but the problem of Melissa" (Justine, p. 231). He thinks of going away somewhere with Melissa, spending the money Pursewarden has left him. indeed, he describes this plan itself as a

r "trust fund" (Justine, p. 236). Melissa's death returns him to bankruptcy, which is after all just where he and

Melissa had begun ("We were fellow bankrupts "— Justine, p. 23). At the time of their meeting Darley says he is experiencing, for the first time, "a real failure of the 158 will to survive" (Justine, p. 22), while Melissa suffers, according to the old Greek doctor who treats her, from everything: "Malnutrition, hysteria, alcohol, hashish» tuberculosis, Spanish fly . . . help yourself" (Justine, p. 57). It is Melissa's delightful laughter that per­ suades Darley to love her.

. . . she put out her hand and placed it on mine while she laughed, wrinkling up her nose: laugh­ ing with such candour, so lightly and effort­ lessly, that there and then I decided to love her (Justine, p. 60).

His love for Melissa is premeditated, not spontaneous and unwilled as it is for Justine. But despite Darley's praise for Mediterranean love, the Greek Melissa cannot compare to Justine and her powerful claws, truly heroic doubts, and mental intimacies. Sure of Melissa's love, Darley spurns it, feeling subconsciously all the while that she will be there, waiting faithfully, to take him back after his relationship with Justine has fallen apart. And

Darley's judgment of Melissa's steadfastness is correct; she leaves him not by an act of will, but by dying. The love Darley has felt for Melissa that began in pity and sustained itself through guilt ends in remorse. "What is

* the good of a fine metaphor for Melissa," Darley asks him­ self as he begins to write about Justine, "when she lies buried deep as any mummy in the shallow tepid sand of the black estuary?" (Justine, p. 15)• Or as Justine' puts it later, "one learns nothing from those who return our love" 159

(Clea, p. 32). If Darley learns anything from Melissa, he learns it too late; in this case, with this lover, there was not enough time to surprise the order and the coher­ ence hiding in the heart of their shared experience.

In Justine Clea remains a potential lover for Darley, but theirs is an unconsummated love, and Clea herself is, in comparison to Justine and even Melissa, a peripheral figure. She makes pronouncements from time to time

("There are only three things to be done with a woman.

. . . You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature"— Justine, p. 22; "The true whore is man's real darling— like Justine; she alone has the capacity to wound men"— Justine, p. 77) but remains apparently aloof from all the interchangeably coupling couples, and most often even her pronouncements seem to be uttered in the same tone of voice as those of other, more central charac­ ters, most noticeably Darley himself. The following description of Justine by Clea, for example, might well have come from Darley himself.

. . . of course our friend is only a shallow twentieth-century reproduction of the great Hetairae of the past, the type to which she be- longs without knowing it, Lais, Charis and the rest. . . . Justine's role has been taken from her and on her shoulders society has placed the burden of guilt to add to her troubles. It is a pity. For she is truly Alexandrian (Justine, p. 77).

Darley admits, far into Fart II of Justine, that he has been avoiding dealing with Clea. His description is, 160 finally, vague, flattering, enigmatic:

Z should say something like this: that she had been poured, while still warm, into the body of a young grace: that is to say, into a body born without instincts or desires (Justine, p. 128).

Her paintings are "full of a sense of play" (Justine, p.

129); she has had one significant, unidentified experience in love— with a woman. Beyond this, we still know little, and even her enigmatic nature pales in significance be­ side the central enigma that is Justine, or the broader enigma that is Alexandria. It is only when Darley comes to Clea in the thunderstorm after Justine has left

Alexandria that Clea begins to assume any real importance in Justine. Clea tells Darley that it is Justine who was once her lover, invites him to stay, but asks him not to make love to her. She is, as much as anything else

(would Darley only realize it), his rival for Justine's love; it is after all to Clea, and not to Darley or Nessim, that Justine writes from Palestine (Justine, p. 231).

And it is Clea who first meets the new Justine, and writes to the exiled Darley about the meeting (Justine, p. 241).

To be sure, Darley and Clea are friends, correspondents.

And yet Darley suspends their correspondence, and for the time their friendship, preferring to end Justine in re­ fusing "to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of » ^ life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants" (Jus­ tine, p. 245). It will be up to Clea to interpret his 161

silence "according to her own needs and desires" (Justine,

p. 245); as for Darley, he no longer wants to think or feel

in terms of covenants, whether they be made with Jew or

with Gentile. For the moment he has spoken his peace, or

at least defined the nature of his silence.

Z have discussed at some length only those relation­

ships in Justine that Darley himself participates in; as I

have mentioned, however, there is a plethora of lovers and

their particular and often peculiar predilections here

that forms the background to Darley's effort to construct

a hymn of praise to his Justine and her Alexandria. Cohen, who plays December to Melissa's May, becomes the first

lover to die in that single curtained bed reserved for critical caseB; Melissa dies in that same bed, uncom­

forted by Darley as Cohen dies uncomforted by Melissa. The dying lover who cries out to spend his last looks on the one person he considers to be his soul mate and who is

refused becomes a leitmotif in the Quartet, reaching its

apex in Narouz's desperate demand for Clea and her disgust Q at his impudent imposition. As for the lovers (and their predilections) while on the brink of living rather than of death, in Justine we have the ’sensualist (Capodistria, who

incidentally resembles Old Parr, the sensualist figure created by Pursewarden), the analyst (Arnauti), the homo­

sexual (Balthazar), the bisexual (Justine), the ludicrous 162

(melancholy Pombal, old, veined and later revealed to be homosexual Scoble), the cuckold (Nessim), the Lesbian (Clea

M for the time being), the deformed (Mnemjian), and finally the incestuous rapist (Capodistria)• Darley constructs this carnal catalogue in an effort to come to terms with

Alexandria, then with Justine, finally with himself. After all, his failures have been legion. At one point he re­ duces the list to three, yet these three failures surely encompass every significant arena he has entered.

From among many sorts of failure each selects the one which least compromises his self-respect; which lets him down the lightest. Mine had been in art, in religion, and in people (Justine, p. 196). ------

Having nothing significant left to bungle, he retires to his island with the child of his dead mistress by the man he has cuckolded to attempt, through his previous failure of art, to deal through memory and device with the people of Alexandria and the silences around him, striving in a genuine but not always successful attempt to be candid for that particularly pitiless eye of self-pity that will yield up the catharsis of autobiography.

But in Balthazar Darley runs head on into his limits- tions once more. He has written in Justine, to the best of his ability, what he knew; Balthazar's Interlinear, however, affords ample evidence that what he knew was far from being the whole story it had seemed to be. ‘ The ques­ tion of point of view, a complex enough one in art, becomes 163 devastating in its complexity when applied to life. Darley dutifully records Pursewarden1 s thoughts on the subjects

"He live . . . lives based upon selected fic­ tions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time— not by our personali­ ties as we like to think. Thus every interpreta­ tion of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed" (Balthazar# pp. 14-15).

Since no two people can occupy the same space at the same time, Balthazar's position has necessarily been two paces east or west of Darley*s, and the reality of the Inter­ linear, different from that of Justine, plunges Darley back into his memories and' recreations of Alexandria. The catharsis of autobiography has failed; Darley has been candid, but only from his own limited point of view, and the knowledge of new facts demands that he write it all out once more if he is to be delivered from his own per­ sonal Alexandria, his monomania. He feels his very sur­ vival depends on coming to terms with his past.

But in order to go on, it is necessary to go backi not that anything I wrote about them is untrue, far from it. Vet when I wrote, the full facts were not at my disposal. The picture I drew was a provisional one— like the picture of a lost civilisation deduced from a few fragmented vases, an- inscribed tablet, an amulet, some human bones, a gold smiling death-mask (Balthazar, p. 14).

He dreams about Balthazar, who asks him over and over how much he cares to know about Alexandria and her citizens;. his reply is finally "I must know everything in order to be at last delivered from the city" (Balthazar, p. 22). 164

This, of course, is an impossible dream. Darley is surely courageous in considering the new facts Balthazar pre­ sents, but his determination to now face them all headily ignores the impossibility of discovering them all. These facts Balthazar sends him seek him out, but more than anything else they point to the existence of all those facts that do not seek him out, and will remain hidden from him and from those he knows. Far from a solution, the Interlinear only raiseB the "central doubt," the antidote to which cannot be found in the accumulation of stockpiled facts.

Balthazar'8 Interlinear, then, poses an immediate ar­ tistic problem: to rework reality to make it show its significant side is all very well as a credo, but how is one to know "reality" in the first place, if position is all, and if no one's position can be the same as anyone else's? As for "the investigation of modern love,” the central topic of the entire Quartet according to Durrell and the main impetus for Darley's writing Justine, the

Interlinear curtly includes Darley's primary assumption in

Justine under the heading of "Some Fallacies and Misap­ prehensions" :

"Number 4. That Justine 'loved' you. She 'loved,' if anyone, Pursewarden. 'What does that mean?' She was forced to use you as a decoy in order to protect him from the jealousy of Nessim whom she had married. Pursewarden himself did not care for her at all— supreme logic of lovel" (Balthazar, p. 22) 165

This logic is familiar enough to Darley; is he not the one who, sure of Melissa's love, gave it up to chase Justine?

Is it not true that, at least in the Alexandria he has created in Justine, one learns nothing from those who return his love? But then the question becomes, what has

Darley learned from Justine? His previous investigation, based on the primary assumption that she had once loved him but no longer did, has ended in silence and exile, if not cunning. He must now begin again, stripped of the com­ forting cornerstone that Justine once loved him, go back again in order to go on, armed with a new perspective but haunted by the probability that the Alexandria he has con­ structed in Justine is nothing more than a might-have-been that never was. He is now forced to go beyond the facile if painfully candid observation that "love is blind" to consider the nature of his own blindness. In Justine his focus is on the loved one, the object of his emotion,

Justine; in Balthazar it must be on the lover himself,

Darley, the as-yet unnamed person on the other side of the verb "to love." Darley begins and ends Balthazar in this knowledge, realizing almost immediately that "I know that

* the key X am trying to turn is in myself" (Balthazar, p.

23) and seeing, after the destruction of his own private

Alexandria and after he has finally let Mountolive name him

"Darley" in the narrative he now writes, that this investi­ gation has all been "really a search for my proper self” 166

(Balthazar, p. 226). In Balthazar the theme of love is perhaps less central than the theme of art, yet it is through his developing art that Darley seeks to learn from his past experiences with love as a necessary precondition to his being able to love more successfully, more per- spicaciously, more fully in the future.

After reading Balthazar's Interlinear Darley begins to turn this key in himself by reconsidering those inhab­ itants of Alexandria whom he has already characterized in

Justine. He now assumes that his feelings for (and against) them have distorted his previous portrait of their actions.

I must, it seems, try to see a new Justine, a new Pursewarden, a new Clea. . . . I mean that I must try and strip the opaque membrane which stands between me and the reality of their actions— and which I suppose is composed of my own limitations of vision and temperament. My envy of Pursewarden, my passion for Justine, my pity for Melissa. Dis­ torting mirrors, all of them. . . . The way is through fact (Balthazar, p. 28).

Unlike the opening of Justine, which considers Melissa with pity and remorse, Justine with passion and despair, the first fully sketched portrait in Balthazar is of Scobie, no lover of Darley's but surely, in this reconsideration, a deeply loved friend all the same. If there are distorting mirrors present in Darley's portrait of Scobie they are

i * more softly, less intensely distorting. Scobie is not a remembered object of passion but a comic comrade, recalled with a warm tenderness that, far from being blind to his idiosyncracies, delights in them. The way into Alexandria this time is not through haunting and painful memories but through pleasant recollections of a whimsical, vibrant, tottering old man from whom Darley has sought not love but conversation, not deliverance but a way of passing the time. To be sure, Scobie is connected to Darley's inves­ tigation of Alexandrian love in his deformity (his glass eye) and in his deviant sexual behavior (his transvestism, his homosexuality), but Scobie is unmistakably comic. The androgynous Justine Darley describes at the beginning of

Justine, indeed the androgynous nature of all Alexandrian lovers, represents something intense, threatening, poten­ tially tragicj Scobie, on the other hand, seems to be comically wounded in his sex, and -Darley takes great delight in Scobie's sexual confusion as he confiscates the old man's "Dolly Varden" and accompanying female duds.

"Give them to me" I said firmly and he handed me the parcel meekly. As I went down the stairs he called after me to express relief and gratitude, adding the words: "I'll say a little prayer for you, son." I walked back slowly through the dock-area with the parcel under my arm, wondering whether I would ever dare to confide this wonder­ ful story to someone worth sharing it with (Baltha­ zar, p. 43).

Scobie's classical ancestry does not lie, like Justine's, in those man-eating cats like Arsinoe but in old Tiresias, and this is an old man with wrinkled dugs who is, more than anything else, free and easy; his is not the tragic, introspective dance but the soft shoe. Old Tiresias No-one half so breezy as, Half so free and easy as Old Tiresias. (Balthazar, p. 44)

Scobie's tune in the Alexandrian musical is the latest

jazz-hit to reach the city, and stands in marked contrast to "Jamais de la Vie," a tune also once the rage of

Alexandria but in Justine one danced to badly by Melissa at the cabaret (Justine, p. Ill), one associated with the heavy melancholy of Justine and with her perfume of the same name. Darley's tenderness toward Scobie, overlooked in the intense doomed passions of Justine, is readily apparent in Balthazar as he re-examines not just Alexan­ dria but himself as well.

It is not, however, the comic Scobie who dominates

Darley's writing of Balthazar. The impetus for writing

Justine has been provided by Justine herself; here it is

Balthazar's Interlinear in general, and his pointed com­ ments about just whom it was that Justine loved in par­ ticular, that set Darley to writing again. Memories of

Scobie are only briefly able to divert Darley's attention from all those other Alexandrian faces, and of course that one face that he cannot avoid in the light of this new knowledge: Justine's. A thousand faces whose reverberating expressions I do not understand ("We are*all racing under sealed handicaps" says a character in Pursewarden's book), and out of them all there is one only I am burning to see, the black stern face of Justine. I must learn to see even myself in a new context, 169

after reading those cold cruel words of Balthazar. (Balthazar, pp. 46-47)

Darley becomes painfully candid about himself as he once more looks for explanations, for the order and coherence in the heart of his experience. Deeply wounded by Baltha­ zar's perceptions, he can only strive to make use of them to explain actions that have up to this point remained enigmas from his own position in space and time.

What could I give her [Justine] that she could not get elsewhere? Does she want my bookish talk and amateurish lovemaking— she with the whole bargain-basement of male Alexandria in her grasp? "A decoy1" I find this very wounding to under­ stand, to swallow, yet it has all the authority of curt fact. Moreover, it explains several things which have been for me up to now inex­ plicable— such as the legacy Pursewarden left me. It was his guilt, X think, for what he knew Justine was doing to Melissa: in "loving" me. While she, for her part, was simply protecting him again the possible power of Nessim. • . . (Balthazar, p. 47)

Even as he reconsiders Darley finds himself, as it were, unraveling the same infinite sweater; the addition of

Pursewarden1s color to the yarn seems to explain the

i already unraveled but up to now inexplicable pattern of

Pursewarden's legacy, yet Darley seems no closer to un­ raveling the whole sweater nor even, for all his protes- * tations and determinations to the contrary, much more perceptive about that which he is unraveling. Pursewarden's guilt? What Justine was doing to Melissa? And what of

Darley's guilt, of what he does to Melissa? Just as he cannot long avoid Justine's dark face and the despair it 170

brings him, he is soon haunted by the same remorse he felt

for Melissa in Justine, In considering Clea's portrait of

Justine in the light of Balthazar's Interlinear, he is

suddenly struck by his duty toward Melissa, the obliga­

tions to her memory that he consistently ignores: "Kisses

and brush-strokes— I should be writing of poor MelissaI"

(Balthazar, p. 50). But duty, obligation, pity do not add

up to love; indeed, his remorse still springs from not

having loved Melissa, who both loved him and needed his

love, from having loved instead Justine, who more and

more obviously did not care for him at all, and needed

him for far different reasons than he had supposed.

Barley's two failures in love, with Justine and with

Melissa, are still at the heart of the theme of love in

Balthazar as they were in Justine, and these failures

remain imperfectly understood despite Balthazar's Inter­ linear additions and emendations.

With Balthazar's assertion that Justine "loved," if

anyone, Pursewarden, Darley is given a new perspective on

his failed love with Justine. Simultaneously, Pursewarden begins to play a real part in the theme of love in the

Quartet; in Justine his connection with love consists of making pronouncements about that abstraction, love, that is , * such a favorite topic of conversation in Alexandria. But

in Balthazar Pursewarden becomes a participant, the de­

tached lover of Justine; for Darley he is no longer only a 171

rival artist to be envied, but also a rival lover, and one

who both captivates and spurns Darley's loved one at

that. His calculatedly ironic remarks about Justine *("a

tiresome old sexual turnstile through which presumably we

all must pass"— Balthazar, p. 115; "a pious old sin-cush-

ion into Which we all have to stick the rusty pins o£ our

admiration"--Balthazar, p. 118) are an affront to Darley

as well as to Justine, for after all Darley feels judged

personally by these harsh assessments of his love choice.

Moreover, Balthazar reveals that Pursewarden begins his

liaison with Justine by being truly indifferent to her;

if Darley's involvement with Justine is neither willed nor desired, how much less so is Pursewarden's, who does not only not care but does not care one way or the other.10

"He never flitted, mind you; and if he started to approach Justine it was simply to try out a few speeches and attitudes, to verify certain conclu­ sions he had reached in the book before actually sending it to the printer, so to speak1 After­ wards, of course, he bitterly repented of this piece of self-indulgence. He was at that moment trying to escape from the absurd dictates of nar­ rative form in prose: 'He said' 'She said*. . . • Justine's thick black eyelashes were like . . • what? So it was that his kisses were really warm and wholehearted in an absent-minded way because they were in no way meant for her. (One of the great paradoxes of love. Concentration on the love-object and possession are the poisons.)" (Balthazar, pp. 116-117)

Pursewarden's indifference, then, succeeds where Dar- • » ley's passion fails; unlike Darley, he does not concentrate 172 on Justine as an individual love-object at all, instead examining her only as a rather tiresome face of love, examining her at all only to improve his narrative form in prose. Ironically enough, Pursewarden1s "success" (in

Darley's terms) is to him a failure resulting from self- indulgence. And when he tries to discourage Justine by being archly contemptuous of those same psychological problems that have led Arnauti to both take her to Freud himself and anlyze her Case in a novel (and led Darley to wander reverently through the same maze), his insults have the opposite effect. Balthazar writes:

". . . here was someone who set no store by jar­ gon and refused to regard her as a Case. Of course Pursewarden, the silly fool, was simply trying to get rid of her and this was not a very good way. Yet as a doctor I can testify to the therapeutic effects of insults in cases where medicine is at a loss to make any headwayI (Balthazar, p. 121)

Pursewarden*s irreverence, his mockery, his ironic con­ tempt are qualities Justine 1b surely unused to in her lovers; Balthazar underlines the attraction such novelty has for Justine, as well as the attraction Pursewarden's distance and self-possession presents.

"For her, the moiety which remained after love- making then was not disgust or dispair as it usually was, but laughter; and though furious with him she nevertheless found herself smiling at some absurdity of his even as she realised with a pang that he could never be achieved, attained as a man, nor would he even become a friend, ex­ cept on his own terms. . . . Like all women, Justine hated anyone she could be certain of. . . . Here at last was someone she could not

« 173

punish by her infidelities— >an intolerable but delightful novelty" (Balthazar, pp. 122-123),

Finally, Balthazar is convinced, Pursewarden gave

Justine "intellectual value for money" (Balthazar, p. 124).

Not always distant, mocking, or clowning, he dispenses

serious insights to Justine from time to time, such as his

conviction that sex is "a psychic and not a physical act"

(Balthazar, p. 124); Justine's problems with love, he

tells her, are a result of her having mistaken primitive

physical couplings for sex.

"'That is why all your dull repetitions of the same mistake are simpiy like a boring great multiplication table, and will remain so until you get your head out of the paper bag and start to think responsibly'" (Balthazar, p. 124).

This conversation in particular, according to Balthazar,

makes Justine realize that Pursewarden is a man whom she

could really love. But it is too late; Pursewarden has

"already withdrawn his favours" (Balthazar, p. 125).

Pursewarden, not daring to compromise his position with

Nessim (Balthazar, p. 119), and still not desiring the

"success" with Justine that Darley strove so mightily for .

and failed to get, tries to leave Justine as Darley has

left Melissa, as Justine has apparently left Nessim for

the time being at least, and so on into the Alexandrian

night. A bit later he does leave her, as finally and aa

irrevocably as Melissa leaves Darley, through his suicide.

Although both Balthazar and Justine are ultimately puz­

zled by his having taken cyanide, both react emotionally 174 as they are confronted with his corpse; Balthazar himself clips Pursewarden over the ear in exasperation, and his description of Justine's reactions captures both her - incredulity and her despair.

"Meanwhile Justine turned to the bed and leaning down said audibly: 'Pursewarden, wake up.' Then she put her palms to the top of her head and let out a long pure wail like an Arab woman--a sound abruptly shut off, confiscated by the night in that hot airless little room. Then she began to urinate in little squirts all over the carpet." (Balthazar, pp. 149-150)

In reading Balthazar's description of all this Darley has, painfully enough, learned something important about the nature of love: concentration on the love-object paradox­ ically repels, whereas a studied indifference also tends to produce an equally opposite reaction: attraction. As for the nature of his own blindness, he again must face the wounding assertions of the Interlinear: Justine does not leave Alexandria solely to end her love affair with

Darley. indeed, insofar as her departure is concerned with him at all, it is merely to protect this poor "decoy" with whom she has so unexpectedly been left.11

On the other hand, Balthazar's Interlinear reveals no unsuspected rival for Melissa's*love. Indeed, it is Dar­ ley himself who writes about Melissa; he reconsiders her more out of continuing remorse than additional knowledge.

He tries to be brutally frank about himself; his relation­ ship with Justine, even though founded on a lie just now 175 found out, truly enriched him, but "only to destroy

Melllsan (Balthazar, p. 130). He considers his treachery to Melissa-*-and Justine's to him, and Nessim's to

Mellssa— in trying to overcome his blindness, to formulate some general laws for this monster, love.

It is strange that there is not a biology of this monster which lives always among the odd numbers, though by all the romances we have built around it it should inhabit the evens:the perfect numbers the hermetics use to describe marriage1 (Balthazar, p. 131)

Such general laws, however, do not wipe away his remorse for having destroyed Melissa. Although "destroyed," Dar­ ley thinks, is perhaps too strong a term.

Of course, she was ill, indeed seriously ill, so that in a sense it is melodramatic in me to say that I killed her, or that Justine killed her. Nevertheless, nobody can measure the weight of the pain and neglect which I directly caused her. (Balthazar, pp. 131-132)

Yet Darley goes on, trying to measure it all the same.

Amaril, romantic gynecologist, has given Darley more to feed his guilt: a medical reason for loving Melissa.

"It is always . . . don't think I blame you . • . no, I envy you Justine . . . yet it is always in extremis that we doctors make the last desperate prescription for a woman patient--when all the resources of science have failed. Then we say 'If only she could be loved'"(Balthazar, p. 134).

Yet Darley cannot love Melissa— or at least does not, and since her death, of course, quite literally cannot. But. then the injustice of her demand strikes him. She had told Clea, when she was dying, that with Darley's 176 departure "everything in nature disappeared" (Balthazar* p. 135). But had he, he wonders, invited such dependency; had she— or anyone— the right to be so dependent? • .

Nobody has the right to occupy such a place in another's life, nobody" (Balthazar, p. 135). Yet Melissa insisted on occupying such a place, and to such a degree that she once asked Clea to sleep with Darley in her Btead.

"You have been my friend, Clea, and I want you to love him after I am gone. Do it with him, will you, and think of me? Never mind all this beastly love business. Cannot a friend make love on another's behalf?"(Balthazar, p. 135)

Clea's answer, already revealed in Justine, is "no."

Darley*s remorse continues, coupled with a sense of ir­ ritation, of injustice.

Clea herself is subjected to such an unjust, unin­ vited passion in Balthazar. to her even more unjust than

Melissa's for Darley in that it is entirely uninvited, unknowingly provoked, unintended. Narouz, Nessim*s brother, as much a man of the land as Nessim is of the city, has been secretly but passionately in love with

Clea for years; he has met her only twice, and never spoken to her, but this lack of contact with his beloved— and his guarding of the secret that he has a beloved, from Clea as well as everyone else— serves only to increase the inten­ sity of his feelings (Balthazar, pp. 94-95). Narouz ex­ periences orgasms while breaking in a white desert colt (Balthazar, pp. 90-91) and later, hearing the voice of

Clea from the hideous form of a Moslem prostitute, with this prostitute in her dirty bed12 (Balthazar, pp. 166-

167). Nftive, unsophisticated, superstitious, he believes

Pursewarden1s shaggy dog story about vampires (Balthazar, p. 198). But he is a powerful man, a lover to be reck­ oned with, as Clea discovers only when, thinking he has murdered Justine for making indiscreet advances to him

(he has murdered instead Toto de Brunei, who was wearing

Justine's ring), he comes to tell her he loves her before giving himself up to Nessim. Clea's reaction to all this is even stronger than Darldy's irritation at Melissa's dependence, as well it might be} Narouz has made of her an image to be loved, with neither her knowledge nor her con­ sent. As she complains to Darleyt

How disgusting, how unfair love isl Here I had been loved for goodness knows how long by a crea­ ture— 1 cannot say a fellow-creature— of whose very existence I had been unaware. Every breath X drew was unconsciously a form of his suffering, without my ever having been aware of it. . . . X was furious, disgusted and wounded in one and the same moment. X felt almost as if I owed him an apology; and yet I also felt insulted by the in­ trusiveness of a love which I had never asked him to owe me (Balthazar, p. 231).

As for Clea and Darley, their correspondence continues after Darley breaks his self-imposed silence, the silence upon which he was content to end Justine. They exchange, besides theories of love and theories of art, memories of

Scobie, who has been kicked to death in his female duds 178 by sailors from the H.M.S. Milton, his glass eye smashed.

Balthazar has told Clea that Scobie died from a fall;

Darley, knowing Clea's love for the old man, does not . correct this bowdlerized version of the Interlinear. In their shared fondness for Scobie they preserve their dis­ tant, fragile fondness for each other, not yet willing to share bodies as well as ideas, to risk love as well as friendship.

With Mountolive the perspective on Alexandria and the theme of love in the Quartet again shifts drastically. If

Balthazar provides new insights and information in his

Interlinear in Balthazar, at least it is still Darley who sorts through this new perspective, and it is still Darley upon whom the effects of love in Alexandria are primarily registered. In Mountolive, however, Darley is demoted to the role of peripheral character; insignificant politically in comparison to Mountolive (or even to Pursewarden),

Darley is far from stage center in this novel dominated by political figures, as is his passion for Justine. In­ stead, the loves of David Mountolive are central here, and it is the straight naturalistic narrator of Mountolive,

# neither Darley nor Mountolive himself, who gathers the dis­ parate facts in this novel and pronounces final judgment upon them. Mountolive, unlike Darley, is not a super­ ficially experienced lover "prematurely exhausted by- ex­ perience" but an overgrown British schoolboy in Egypt, 179 socially graceful but "educated not to wish to' feel"

(Mountolive, p. 18). Confronted with the experienced Leila

Hosnani who, as her invalid husband looks bn and makes no sound, seduces him, Mountolive finds himself, above all, confused.

Leila had turned him out as one might turn out an old trunk, throwing everything into confusion. He suspected himself now to be only a mawkish and callow youth, his reserves depleted. With indig­ nation almost, he realized that here at last there was something for which he might even be prepared to die— something whose very crudity carried with it a winged message which pierced to the quick of his mind. Even in the darkness he could feel him­ self wanting to blush. It was absurd. To love was absurd, like being knocked off the mantlepiece. He caught himself wondering what his mother would think. . . (Mountolive, pp. 18-19).

As the emotional man in Mountolive, that side of him that is mawkish and callow, begins to grow, to catch up with the social man produced by the British educational system, his confusion continues: "It was unpleasant to be forced to grow. It was thrilling to grow" (Mountolive, p. 28).

Indeed, when Leila first kisses him he is not at all sure whether he is being forced to grow, or growing, or how he feels about either one.

"wait" she said suddenly. "There is a crumb on your lip." And leaning forward she took it softly upon her own tongue. He felt the small warm tongue of an Egyptian cat upon his underlip for a moment. . . . At this he turned pale and felt as if he were about to faint. But she was there so close, harm- . lessly close, smiling and wrinkling up her nose, that he could only take her in his arms, stumbling forward like a man into a mirror. . . . The act of becoming lovers was so easy and was completed with 180

such apparent lack of premeditation, that- for a while he hardly knew himself what had happened (Mountolive. p. 28).

"Stumbling forward like a man into a mirror," an experi­ ence very like the one Justine describes in her "diary"t

The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcis- sistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first . . . simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors (Justine, p. 50).

And Mountolive discovers, through the callow question "why me?", that the experience Leila is having is far different

from what he supposed, wanted, or could have imagined: "It was clear that what she saw in him was something like a prototype of a nation which existed now only in her imag­ ination. She was kissing and cherishing a painted image of England" (Mountolive, p. 29). Yet it is a situation which forces him to grow, and one in which he grows. He takes copious notes on their long rides together, recording only the natural facts, never mentioning his feelings or even Leila's name. And, the narrator tells us, despite his British schooling and his youth, Mountolive does grow,

"learning the two most important lessons in life: to make love honestly, and to reflect" (Mountolive, p. 33).

So Mountolive is first educated not to wish to feel, then retrained by Leila to feel passion, to be troubled and thrilled by growing pains, to be confused by contrary emotions existing at the same time. As for Leila, she 181 hides her experience from Mountolive, becoming' for him

"almost a companion of his own age" (Mountolive, p. 31).

But this experience, however hidden, lends a very differ­ ent quality to her feelings, and when Mountolive leaves

Egypt the advantage, as the narrator in his omniscience tells us, is Leila's.

She would have to give him time to grow. She realized quite clearly that she both loved him dearly, and could resign herself to never seeing him again. Her love had already encompassed and mastered the object's disappearance— its own deathl This thought, defined so sharply in her own mind, gave her a stupendous advantage over him— for he was still, wallowing in the choppy sea of his own illogical and entangled emotions, desire, self regard, and all the other nursery troubles of a teething love, whereas she was al­ ready drawing strength and self-aBsurance from the very hopelessness of her own case (Mountolive, p. 48). The inexperienced Mountolive, caught up in his own tangled emotions but unable, in his youth, to view these confusing feelings from a distance and thus himself recognize them as "nursery troubles of a teething love," is far from

Darley's position in Justine. Darley is convinced that he ought to know better— and that he does know better— than to

"fall in love with" Justine. But Darley falls anyway,

falls the harder for being on guard and knowing the dangers of intense human interrelationships, and is finally no less blind for knowing that love is blinding and that lovers see only what they wish to. Like Darley in Justine,

Leila faces the problem of communicating only through the X82 medium of words on paper after Mountolive leaves Egypt; un­ like Darley, however, Leila plans to use this medium to sustain a relationship, and not to describe one that no longer exists. Indeed, she plans to go beyond writing about love altogether since, at least while the love it­ self exists, there is very little that can be said about it.

You cannot write more than a dozen love-letters without finding yourself gravelled for fresh mat­ ter. The richest of human experiences is also the most limited in its range of expression. Words kill love as they kill everything else. She had already planned to turn their intercourse away upon another plane, a richer one; but Mountolive was still too young to take advantage of what she might have to offer him— the treasures of the imagination (Mountolive, p. 48).

Thus she must give him time to grow* But she has an awe­ some advantage in having a plan for his growth, and in having a philosophy that enables her to deal with the hopelessness of her case, a hopelessness of which Mount­ olive, in his muddled self-concern, is unaware. Clea*a conviction that "lovers are never equally matched" (Jus­ tine, p. 243) seems an understatmenet here; who could be less equally matched than Leila and Mountolive?

But their intercourse does move to another plane, which is to say that they becqme engaged in an entirely different type of intercourse altogether. It is just as well, for as Leila has long realized "the difference in their age . . . [was] swiftly carrying their bodies out of reach of each other, out of touch" (Mountolive, p. 51). It 183 is just as well, that is, if theirs is a relationship to be preserved at all costs, for the costs involved in such a preservation are many. Indeed, this new intercourse is a parody of the old, one which increases Mountolive's dependence on his Egyptian woman as their mental intimacy increases.

This was Leila's parody of love, a flirtation of minds, in which the roles were now reversed; for she was deprived of the riches of Europe and she fed upon his long letters and parcels of books with the double gluttony. The young man strained every nerve to meet these demands, and suddenly found the hitherto padlocked worlds of paint, architecture, music and writing opening on every side of him. So she gave him almost a gratuitous education in the world which he would never have . been able to compass by himself. And where the old dependence of his youth slowly foundered, the new one grew. Mountolive, in the strictest sense of the words, had now found a woman after his own heart (Mountolive, p. 52).

To put it another way, the costs involved in preserving this new (not to say better) intercourse are borne by

Mountolive. But the relationship "that could not have sur­ vived a twelvemonth" had it been possible "to indulge passion at will" (Mountolive, p. 51) survives the many years of Mountolive's apprenticeship in the Foreign Ser­ vice. Mountolive does receive an education in the world, one he would surely have missed were it not for Leila's demands by post, but it is a gratuitous one, thrown in for the price of his increasing dependence. He is eventu­ ally appointed Ambassador to Egypt and, true to his original social promise developed by his British education, he is at 184 once an immense success in his political role. But in his role as private person— one he plays far less than that of public person--he is still dependent upon Leila; his

Egyptian education that Leila began by teaching him pas­ sion has developed into one that has taught him not "not to wish to feel" but to feel only with reference to Leila.

Thus in the midst of his political successes, the private person is preoccupied with Leila's not writing to him

(Mountolive, p. 142); in the aftermath of Pursewarden's suicide and all its political implications he wonders if he will ever see her again (Mountolive, p. 192). Fin­ ally, with Nessim's life in danger, Leila asks to see him even though she has long been a recluse, her physical appearance altered drastically not only by age but by smallpox as well. When they do meet, Mountolive does not recognize her at all (Mountolive, p. 281). Vet his de­ pendence is such that, for a moment, he is convinced that he must appear equally as changed, and he feels, if not as mawkish and as callow as he did those many years before, at least as subservient.

Surely his ineffectuality, his unmanliness must be written all over his foolish, weak, good-look­ ing face? He eyed her mournfully, with a pitiful eagerness to see whether she indeed really recog­ nized him (Mountolive, p. 282).

But the meeting proves fatal. The new intercourse insti­ gated by Leila had been, after all, founded on the old and 185

Mountolive, sitting beside her once more in the flesh, realizes that neither intercourse is possible any longer.

"You have not changed by a day" said this unknown woman with the disagreeable perfume. "My beloved, my darling, my angel." Mountolive flushed in the darkness at such endearments coming from the lips of an unknown personage. And the known Leila? He suddenly realized that the precious image which had inhabited his heart for so long had now been dissolved, completely wiped outl He was suddenly face-to-face with the meaning of love and time. They had lost forever the power to fecundate each other's mindsI He felt only self- pity and disgust where he should have felt loveI And these feelings were simply not permissible (Mountolive. p. 282).

Once again, Mountolive wishes not to feel. Leila has taught him to feel only with reference to her, and only to feel love; self-pity and disgust are not to be felt under either system of education.

Although Leila is Mountolive's primary love partner in Mountolive. there are other loves in his life. The first of these, his mother, is a love that quite predict­ ably predates Leila, and the closeness between mother and son is intensified by the father's defection; Mountolive senior has spent most of his life in India studying Pali texts, and it is now clear that this work will last him the rest of his life (Mountolive. p. 98). No less pre­ dictable, given his dependence on Leila, is the power

Mountolive's mother continues to hold over him. They play little love games on his return home, games invented to combat the mother's loneliness, the son's long absences. 186

His mother was sitting by the fire, just as he had last left her, with a book open upon her knees, smiling. It had become a convention between them to disregard his disappearances and returns: to behave as if he had simply absented himself for a few moments from this companionable room where she spent her life, reading or painting or knit­ ting before the great fireplace (Mountolive, p. 96).

It is as if the son has no career, no home of his own— as if he is still a little boy. And he is still troubled by a childhood illness, an awesome earache that troubles him only when at home, only when Mother is there to comfort, to fuss, to offer her home remedy: hot salad oil.

He felt the warmth of the oil penetrate and em­ balm his brain, while' his mother's voice upon the darkness soothed him with its promises of re­ lief. In a little while the tide of agony receded to leave him, washed up so to speak, on the shores of sleep— a sleep stirred vaguely by those comforting memories of childhood illnesses which his mother had always shared— they fell ill to­ gether, as if by sympathy (Mountolive, p. 100).

In his relationship with Grishkin the ballerina, however,

Mountolive is much more loyal to Leila, to whom he tells everything. Grishkin is not the proper lover for such a public man, once or twice risking "a public familiarity" which freezes Mountolive'(Mountolive, p. 55); indeed, he writes to Leila, "Even her wretched pregnancy when it came seemed altogether too transparent a ruse" (Mountolive, p. 55). The public man is not a smiling one when propri­ ety is breached; he is simply cruel,,awesomely and indif­ ferently so. Leila consoles him from a distance, defend­ ing him against Grishkin's charge that he is "only a diplomat," without politics or religion (Mountolive, p.

55). Later he begins to date Liza, Pursewarden1s blind sister, whom he will eventually marry in Clea. Up until that £inal unfecund meeting with Leila, however, Liza trails Leila (and perhaps his mother as well) in Mount- olive* a affections. After the suicide of her brother, he refuses to notify Liza, leaving it to his Head of Chancery,

Errol. And although he feels "a pang as he saw Liza Purse- warden's face rise before him" (Mountolive, p. 190), he feels more than a pang as he considers the effect Purse­ warden *s suicide, and the damaging evidence against Nessim that seems to precipitate it, will have on his relationship with Nessim1s mother, Leila: "... Pursewarden had, he reflected, separated him forever from Leila. Yes, that

* also, and perhaps forever" (Mountolive, p. 190)• Indeed, even though Mountolive recognizes a need for compansion- ship, he does not turn to Liza; since Leila will not see him, he makes up his mind that a dog is the answer.

Somewhere in the link of cause and effect he de­ tected a hallow space which crystalized in his mind about the word "companionship." He repeated it to himself aloud in the mirror. Yes, that was where a lack lay. "I shall have to get myself a dog” he thought, somewhat pathetically, "to keep me company" (Mountolive, p. 239).

His quest for companionship, however, is hardly more satis­ factory than his quest for love. He has in mind a fox- ’ terrier, but instead the Chancery wives present him, after

Leila is lost forever, with a sausage dog named Fluke, who 188 wets his carpet in a mournfully inadequate parallel to

Justine's wetting of Pursewarden's in Balthazar. "He had alwayB loathed sausage-dogs" (Mountolive, p. 298), but here the public man must smile at Angela Errol, and smile somewhat successfully.

"Then I shall tell the wives that the gift has met with approval," she said briskly, and moved toward the door. "They will be delighted. There is no companionship like that of a dog, is there?" Mountolive shook his head seriously. "None," he said. He tried to look as if he meant it. (Mountolive, p. 298).

He does not want to have meant it, of course, but what other companionship has he, now that Leila is a door for­ ever closed to him? He dismisses letters from both his mother and Liza, along with "a few bills from his London tradesman" and "a note from his broker" as "nothing of any real importance" (Mountolive, p. 297). The compan­ ionship he has consists of this dog— the wrong kind of dog at that.

Thus in Mountolive it is not Justine but her mother- in-law, Leila, who is the main love interest of the central character. And in this third novel of the Quartet, where the theme of politics is more central than the theme of love, Justine's importance is more closely linked to politics than to love. Indeed, in Mountolive we find

i politics at the very heart of love; we view the action from the perspective of politically useful fact, and not ro­ mantically speculative imagination, and this perspective 189 offers still another explanation of the actions we have viewed in Justine and Balthazar. The narrator .here, ostensibly unlimited in his knowledge of the facts, goes to the heart of the enigmatic relationship between Nessim and Justine that has puzzled first Darley and then Baltha­ zar. We discover first what it is that Nessim offers

Justine, and why she accepts it.

To her surprise, to her chagrin and to her de­ light, she realized that she was not being asked merely to share his bed~but his whole life, the monomania upon which it was built. Normally, it is only the artist who can offer this strange and selfless contract— but it is one which no woman worth the name can ever refuse. He was asking, not for her hand in marriage . . . but for her partnership in allegiance to his ruling daimon (Mountolive. p. 199).

Nessim*s ruling daimon is to defend the Copts against the

Arabs, the Moslems, now that both the French and the

British "have lost control in the Middle East" (Mountolive. p. 199). The key to this defense is, in a word, Pales­ tine. Nessim offers a political pact, an extremely dan­ gerous one at that; paradoxically, it is this all-consum­ ing plan and its attendant dangers rather than any proposal of "love" that stirs desire within Justine.

This was a Faustian compact he was offering her. There was something more surprising: for the first time she felt desire stir within her, in the loins of that discarded,preempted body which she regarded only as a pleasure-seeker, a mirror- reference to reality. There came over her an un­ expected lust to sleep with him— no, with his plans, his dreams, his obsessions, his money, his death! (Mountolive. p. 201) 190

As for Nessim, marrying Justine is politically -important in that it will serve to overcome the objections of the secret committee that he is not a Jews will he not be married to one? (Mountolive, p. 203). For this, o£ course, any Jewess would do; he need not have chosen this par­ ticular tiresome and hysterical one. But then, he loves

Justine as well; this marriage will give him time to bind her to him forever.

And all the time he [Nessim] was thinking to himself: "When all this is over, when I have found her lost child— by that time we shall be so close that there will never be any question of leaving me." The passion of their embraces came from complicity, from something deeper, more wicked, than the wayward temptings of the flesh or the mind. He had conquered her in offering her a mar­ ried life which was both a pretence and yet at the same time informed by a purpose which-might lead them both to death! Thi.s was all that sex could mean to her now! How thrilling, sexually thrilling, was the expectation of their death! (Mountolive, p. 206)

Thus in Mountolive Justine is seen as getting from Nessim the strange and selfless contract one usually expects only from an artist; as for the artists she knows, she rejects them in turn (Arnauti, Pursewarden, Darley), using the latter two for political purposes.

The two other women in the Quartet closely linked to

Darley, Melissa and Clea, are connected with this Pales- tinean plot in Mountolive, although Clea's role is again as unprovoked love-object of Nessim's brother, Narouz,

Melissa, however, through her political knowledge gained 191 through love-making, precipitates Pursewarden's suicide by revealing that Nessim plans to blow up the British, thus playing a political role in addition to— or simultaneous with— her role as lover; indeed, since she conveys this information while showering with Pursewarden, Darley's rival in art who has become his rival for Justine in

Balthazar is now seemingly in a position to win Melissa's love as well. Yet Melissa, unlike Justine, unequivocally prefers Darley. She tells Pursewarden

"Your life is dead, closed up. Not like Darley's. His is wide • . . very wide . . . open." . . • She added with the tremendous unconscious force of veracity: "He still can love" (Mountolive, p. 174). — ------

Pursewarden, like parley, has found Melissa's laughter de­ lightful and unforced.^ upon learning that she is about sell herself to "a fat and expensive Syrian banker"

(Mountolive, p. 168) for the night, Pursewarden offers her twice the amount to come home with him. Melissa accepts;

Pursewarden is "dying to possess her, to cradle and anni­ hilate her with the disgusting kisses of a false compas­ sion" (Mountolive, p. 169). But this is the wrong tone, as is his later simulation of a comic drunkenness. A bit later, Pursewarden "would have liked to say some simple and concrete word" (Mountolive, p. 171), but this too eludes him. They give up making love, Melissa tells his fortune (and discovers to her surprise that he and his blind sister were lovers and "shall never be able to love

V 192 other people"--Mountolive# p. 174), they become closer now

"by the sensation o£ having shared something" (Mountolive, p. 175). But Pursewarden mentions Darley once too often and Melissa# in her jealousy and contempt for Justine

(with whom Darley is spending the night)# reveals Nes­ sim' s plot# a plot she had heard from her former lover# Cohen, as he talked in his sleep. It is now Pursewar- den's turn to have the city crash about his ears (Mount­ olive, p. 178)# not for the sake of love# requited or unrequited, as it has been for Darley# but for politics.

In trusting Nessim Pursewarden has made a fatal mistake! his response# after paying Melissa, is suicide. The com­ plicated snarl of love partners of the first two novels is joined in Mountolive by hidden political motives# and once again the narrator of this novel explains a previous enigma# in this case Pursewarden's suicide# in terms of political facts. Further, it is revealed that Nessim'a

"madness" that Darley in Justine attributes to jealousy is caused instead by the necessity of having to kill his brother# who has become too outspoken and threatens to call attention to the Palestinean plot. Narouz# however# is finally ordered shot by Melik Pasha, Minister of the

Interior# and as he lies dying the theme of love recurs in his uninvited, obsessive love for.Clea. Clea remains repulsed by this love without consent, yet agrees to come 193 to the deathbed; like Darley1s failure to get to the dy­ ing Melissa in time, however, Clea arrives too late.

Narouz is unable to live any longer by an act of the will alone; he must die, as he has lived, in the company not of

Clea but of his image of her, in the company of the sound of her name.

Then lastly there burst from the hairy throat of the dying man a single tremendous word, the name of Clea, uttered in the cavernous voice of a wounded lion; a voice which combined anger, reproof and an overwhelming sadness in its sudden roar. So nude - a word, her name, as simple as "God" or "Mother"— yet it sounded as if upon the lips of some dying conqueror, some lost king, conscious of the body and breath dissolving within him (Mountolive, p. 312). ------

So it is Narouz, the dangerously unsophisticated man of the land, and not the worldly and ironically tender Purse­ warden, who is able to say a simple and concrete word: the name of his loved one. Yet no one in the Quartet loves less successfully than Narou2; indeed, his love does not involve a relationship between two people at all, but instead an absolutedly faithful reverance that Narouz possesses toward that image of Clea he himself has created.

And Clea, unwilling to play the game that Justine has apparently played with Darley, ^refuses to serve silently as the mirror into which Narouz, searching for this- sacred, self-created image, can gaze.

In Clea Darley returns from his minor, peripheral

• ♦ role in Mountolive to become once again the central charac­ ter and narrator. Indeed, he has been so far from stage 194 center in Mountolive that he is introduced there as an aside on Pursewarden's part; his relationship with Jus­ tine , at the heart of Justine and Balthazar, has been reduced in Mountolive to the status of an unimportant enigma. As Pursewarden writes to Mountolive:

Well, Maskelyne says with his dry empty contempt: "No sooner does she [Justine] marry than she starts an affair with another man, and a foreigner to boot." This is [sic] course is Darley, the vaguely aimiable bespectacled creature who inhabits Pombal's box-room at certain times. . . . A fellow- romantic quothaI Looked at hard, he starts to stammar. But he's a good fellow, gentle and re­ signed . . . I confess that he seems unlikely material for someone .as dashing as Nessim's wife to work upon. Can it be benevolence in her, or simply a perverse taste for innocence? There is a small mystery here (Mountolive, p. 111).

"There is a small mystery here" indeed, one which has so far prompted the writing of Justine and Darley's reassess­ ments, in the light of Balthazar's additional perspec­ tive, in Balthazar. But in Clea this small mystery, which has been for Darley in exile an obsession, evaporates of its own accord. For the first time in the Quartet time moves forward, Darley revisits Alexandria and Justine, and his obsession, confronted by the changes time has wrought in both Justine and himself, finds no foothold in the person Justine has become. The mystery, and its attendant magic, are gone; like Mountolive and Leila, Darley and

* Justine have lost forever the power to fecundate each other's minds. Justine greets him with a drooping left 195 eyelid (the result of a small stroke) and the overpowering scent of split perfume. Admitting she has changed, she still attributes the difference Darley sees to his own vision.

"You see a different me" she cried in a voice al­ most of triumph. "But once again the difference lies in you, in what you imagine you seel" Her words rattled down like a hail of sods on an empty coffin. "How is it that you can feel no resentment against me? To forgive such treach­ ery so easily— why, it is unmanly. Not to hate such a vampire? It is unnatural" (Clea, pp. 53-54).

Yet it is Darley1s personality, as well as his point of view, that has changed. He listens impassively to Jus­ tine's obsessive monologue, his own obsession with his image of Justine unrelated to this rambling woman before him.

So she went on, hardly heeding me, arguing my life away, moving obsessively up and down the cobweb of her own devising, creating images and beheading them instantly before my eyes. What could she hope to prove? Then she placed her head briefly against my knee and said: "Now that I am free to hate or love it is comical to feel only fury at this new self-possession of yours. You have escaped me somewhere. But what else was I to expect?" In a curious sort of way this was true. To my surprise I now felt the power to wound her for the first time, even to subjugate her purely by my indifference1 (Clea, p. 54). * Barley's new self-possession does put him in a position of power, but now that the shoe is on the other foot he does not particularly feel like kicking; what he wants to do is to walk away. The mystery lies unsolved but in the past; as for the present, there simply is no mystery, and no 196 promise of one. Justine wants to lie with Darley in his * bed, only for comfort, as a stay against insomnia. For his part, Darley feels only disgust, the smell of her perfume— and of her body— being unbearable. The reunion is not at all what he might have imagined.

The once magnificent image of my love lay now in the hollow of my arm, defenceless as a patient on an operating table, hardly breathing. It was useless even to repeat her name which once held so much fearful magic that it had the power to slow the blood in my veins. She had become a woman at last, lying there, soiled and tattered, like a dead bird in a gutter, her hands crumpled into claws. It was if some huge iron door had closed forever in my heart. I would hardly wait for that slow down to bring me release. 1 could hardly wait to be gone (Clea, pp. 61-62)•

While Darley*s image of Justine has remained timeless,

Justine herself has not. And now, with their meeting,

Justine is no longer a magnificent image but a mere woman at last, a woman who no longer has any access to Darley's heart.

Darley1s love affair with Justine ends, in a sense, where his relationship with Melissa had begun. Justine is now "like a dead bird in a gutter," while in Justine he had described Melissa as being found "washed up like a half-drowned bird, on the dreary littorals of Alexandria, with her sex broken" (Justine, p. 24) (see above, p. 201).

But since Melissa is now literally dead, there can be no reunion, no indifferent exchange of gutturals while wait­ ing impatiently for a slow dawn. Yet even before his 197 meeting with Justine Darley recognizes the impossibility of continuing, through an imaginative fidelity, his feel­ ing of love (or pity, or guilt or remorse) for his image of Melissa. Hamid, now the occupant of the little box- room that Darley and Melissa had once shared, gives Dar­ ley an old photograph; Darley recognizes himself and

Melissa, but remembers nothing about this particular time, place, and conversation frozen by the camera.

It was a street-photograph and very faded. Melissa and I walked arm in arm talking down Rue Fuad. Her face was half turned away from me, smiling— dividing, her attention between what I was saying so earnestly and the lighted shop-windows we passed. It must have been taken, this snapshot, on a winter afternoon around the hour of four. What on earth could I have been telling her with such earnestness? For the life of me I could not recall the time and place; yet there it was, in black and white, as they say (Clea. p. 40).

Just as in Justine's unbearable presence it will be use­ less to repeat her name, Darley discovers that whispering

Melissa's name, even in the presence of the very bed they once shared,conjures up no magic, no feeling.

Turning back to the wretched rack-like bed again I whispered her name softly. With sur­ prise and chagrin I discovered that she had utterly vanished. The waters had simply closed over her head. It was as if she had never existed, never inspired in me the pain and pity which (I had always told myself) would live on, transmuted into other forms perhaps— but live triumphantly on forever. I had worn her out.like an old pair of socks, and the utterness of this disappearance surprised and shocked me. Could "love" simply wear out like this? (Clea, pp. 40-41)

Surprised and shocked at what he takes to be his own 198 callousness, Darley then tries to resurrect Melissa'and the meaning he is convinced her memory should have for him by an act of will; it is a sentimental experiment, and it yields not Melissa but only an unflattering view of his own sentimentality.

I even tried (with that lying self-deception so natural to sentimentalists) to force her to re­ appear by an act of will, to re-evoke a single one of those afternoon kisses which had once been for me the sum of the city's many meanings. X even tried deliberately to squeeze the tears into my eyes, to hypnotise memory by repeating her name like a charm. The experiment yielded nothing. Her name had been utterly worn out of useI It was truly shameful not to be able to evoke the faintest tribute to so all-engulfing an unhappiness (Clea, p. 41).

His attempt to evoke a facile excess of emotion senti­ mentally appropriate to the occasion utterly fails. Dar­ ley, forced to conclude that "Melissa had been simply one of the many costumes of love!" (Clea, p. 41), moves toward his meeting with Justine, wondering if this will be "a new point of departure or a return to the starting-point"

(Clea, p. 47).

It is, of course, to be Clea who marks a new point of departure, although their first meeting seems also a re­ turn to the starting-point. Melissa does not return to the rack-like bed on Darley's command, yet in one of those coincidences which dominate Durrell's Alexandria as they, do Dickens's London,he discovers Clea sitting where he had first met Melissa, gazing at a coffee cup. 199

My heart healed half-seas over for a moment, for she [Clea] was sitting where once (that first day) Melissa had been sitting, gazing at a coffee cup with a wry reflective air of amusement, with her hands supporting her chin. The exact sta­ tion in place and time where I had once found Melissa, and with such difficulty mustered enough courage to enter the place and speak to her. It gave me a strange sense of unreality to repeat this forgotten action at such a great remove of time, like unlocking a door which had remained closed and bolted for a generation. Yet it was in truth Clea and not Melissa. . . (Clea, pp. 76-77).

During his reunion with Justine an iron door has closed in

Darley's heart, but now a door swings open for Clea— and it is in truth Clea, and not Melissa, who marks this new point of departure. The immediately noticeable change in

Darley is not his new self-possession that was so appar­ ent to Justine but his loss of stoop and spectacles; hav­ ing broken his glasses long ago, Darley has discovered he is not so myopic as he had thought. As for Clea, she is more beautiful and has "grown a new laugh" (Clea, p. 77).

After a long afternoon and evening together, filled with fond memories of Scobie (now mysteriously transformed into

El Scob, complete with shrine) and mischievous laughter, they return to Clea's room. Once again, Darley is return­ ing to a starting-point, a starting-point that previously, after Justine's sudden departure from Alexandria, had led nowhere.

My steps had led me back again, I realised, re­ membering the night so long ago when we had slept dreamlessly in each other's arms, to the locked door which had once refused me admission to her. *

200

. . . I had not known then how to find the key to that door. Now of its own accord it was slowly opening. Whereas the other door which had once given me access to Justine had now locked ir­ revocably (Clea, p. 95).

So it is truly a new point of departure; without premedi­ tation or selfishness, their love seems timeless, un­ limited, unhurried.

So we lingered, so we might have stayed, like rapt figures in some forgotten painting, unhur­ riedly savouring the happiness given to those who set out to enjoy each other without reservations . or self-contempts, without the premeditated costumes of selfishness— the invented limitations of human love: but that suddenly the dark air of the night outside grew darker, swelled up with the ghastly tumescence of a sound which, like the fantic wing-beats of some prehistoric bird, swal­ lowed the whole room, the candles, the figures (Clea, pp. 95-96).

As much as they might like to be, however, they are not figures on a Grecian urn but lovers in the midst of a

World War II air raid. Yet at Clea's insistence ("Let us go to bed together and ignore the loutish reality of the world"--Clea, p. 96) they remain in her room. Just as for

Justine in Mountolive, love is intensified by impending death; unlike Justine and Nessim, however, Clea and Darley are not themselves political conspirators but conspirators in love who wish to ignore to the point of defiance the loutish reality of the world.

So it was that love-making itself became a kind of challenge to the whirlwind outside which beat and pounded like a thunder-storm of guns arid si­ rens, igniting .the pale skies of the city with the magnificence of its lightening-flashes. And 201

kisses themselves became charged with the de­ liberate affirmation which can come only from the foreknowledge and presence of death. - It would have been good to die at any moment then, for love and death had somewhere joined hands (Clea# p. 96).

Thus by the end of Book I in Clea, Darley has taken a new turn, toward Clea and away from both Justine and Melissa, the images of love who have dominated his memory in exile.

He calls Clea by name, as he has Justine and Melissa.

I called "Clea" softly, but she did not heed me; so once more I slept. I knew that Clea would share everything with me, withholding nothing— not even the look of complicity which women re­ serve only for their mirrors (Clea. p. 99).

That Clea heeds him no more than the dead Melissa might be ominous; it is not, however, that it is useless to repeat

Clea's name, as it has been to repeat Justine's. The feeling that Darley has tried to evoke without success and by an act of will by calling "Justine" and "Melissa" is present here, unbidden, of its own accord.

That Clea truly represents a new point of departure for Darley is emphasized in the contrasts between his previous experiences with Melissa and Justine and his cur­ rent relationship with Clea. Just as Clea is different from Melissa (even though he discovers her sitting in the same place Melissa had been) in that she provokes no sense of pity.no premeditated decision to love her on Darley*s part, so Clea is different from Justine in that .aft$r they make love for the first time, although their conversation 202 begins as a carbon copy of the prior one between Justine and Darley, it soon takes a different, more self-confident turn. Darley has described that earlier conversation 'be­ tween Justine and himself in Justine as follows *

When we had made love and lay once more awake she said: "I am always so bad the first time, why is it?" "Nerves perhaps, So am I." "You are a little afraid of me (Justine, p. 86). In Clea (if assuming that Clea, and not Darley, repeats

Justine's earlier statement^), the conversation takes a new turn.

"I am always so bad the first time, why is it?" "So am I." "Are you afraid of me?" "No. Nor of myself." "Did you ever imagine this?" "We muBt both have done. Otherwise it would not have happened." "Hushl Listen" (Clea, p. 97).

For her part, Clea is less imperative, more inquiring than accusing. As for Darley, he at least insists that he has learned something: that his attitude toward himself is important as well as his feelings toward his lover ("No.

Nor of myself."). The Clea closes this conversation, not by accusation but out of a preference for the sound of rain to the sound of theories about love and perhaps, by extension, the concomitant mental intimacy that such theories might lead to. Of course it is not only that

Clea's behavior contrasts with that of Melissa and Justine * ♦ which makes Darley's relationship with her different from 203 those of the past; Darley himself has a new perspective, one that goes beyond a new self-possession and a lack of spectacles. The ominous aphorisms of Arnauti, so dominant in Justine. no longer seem to apply.

"However near we would wish to be, so far exact­ ly do we remain from each other" wrote Arnauti. It seemed to be no longer true of our condition. Or was I simply deluding myself once more, re­ fracting truth by the disorders inherent in my own vision? Strangely enough I neither knew nor cared now; I had stopped rummaging through my own mind, had learned to take her [Clea] like a clear draught of spring water (Clea, pp. 106-107).

The question has become not so much whether or not Darley is once again deluding himself, misled by the disorders inherent in his own vision— he must be limited by his own position in time and space, must have only one of many possible visions of the truth— but more that he is no longer fascinated by rummaging through his own mind, no longer obsessed by the game of running, like a pack rat, back to his den with a bright new experience in love to be hoarded there with all the others previously collected, to be compared, studied, and rummaged through in miserly soli­ tude. If Darley is still necessarily limited by his own vision, he is at least now dreaming better dreams, no longer infatuated with a sense of doom at the heart of love.

« This is not to say that, after all his stormy changes,

Darley has found a changeless May. Indeed, despite his conviction that Clea will share "everything" with him 204

(see above, p. 201), it becomes more and more obvious that

she is hiding something, something important and disturb­

ing. Once, after a long, mischievous imitation of

Scobie, Clea's mood suddenly changes.

The recital ended, the laughter suddenly ex­ pired and a new expression appeared on Clea's face which I did not remember ever having seen before. . . . She added with a studied natural­ ness which was somehow strained: "Afterwards he [Scobie] told my fortune. I know you will laugh. . . • Will you believe me if I tell you he described with perfect fidelity and in complete detail the whole Syrian episode?" She turned her face to the wall with an abrupt movement and to my surprise Z saw her lips were trembling. I put my hand up her warm shoulder and said "Clea" very softly. "What is it?" Suddenly she cried out: "0 leave me alone. Can't you see I want to sleep?" (Clea, p. 124)

The mention of Syrian episode, in which Clea and an old

acquaintance whom she will not identify had fallen in love but, due to his being committed to someone else, her

pregnancy had resulted in a traumatic abortion, does not

entirely explain Clea's change of mood. Darley does not

call her name indifferently, nor is her reaction a de­

tached one, yet it is clear that something is wrong, and

clear to Darley that Clea will not share this shadow with

him. indeed, in the end it is not Clea but Balthazar who

♦ reveals this dark secret, clumsily betraying Clea's

confidence.

"What about Narouz?" I asked curiously, secretly piqued that Clea had confided things to Balthazar which she had kept from me. It was now that I noticed that Clea had turned quite 205 white and was looking away. But Balthazar ap­ peared to notice nothing himself and went plunging on. "It has the ingredients of a novelette— I mean about trying to drag you down into the grave with him. Eh, don't you think? And about* the weeping you would hear" (Clea, p. 206).

It seems that Scobie has predicted not only Clea's Syrian episode (which has already taken place) but something to do with Narouz, which still threatens Clea's future.

From the beginning of the Quartet Clea has been particu­ larly careful to lead an astrologically sound existence; in Justine we find, in the "Consequential Data," that

"Clea always has a horoscope cast before any decision reached" (Justine, p. 248), and in Mountolive "Clea has her horoscope cast afresh every morning" (Mountolive. p.

116). Scobie's dark prophecy, then, has had a very real effect on her, especially since his earlier prophecy, also dark, has "come true." Insisting that she has not told Darley about Scobie*s prediction because he, less superstitious, would have found her foolish, Clea now tells him the rest of Scobie's vision.

"He [Scobie) said what Balthazar has just told you, and he added a description of someone who suggested to me Nessim's brother. He said, mark­ ing the place with his thumbnail on his own lipst 'His lips are split here, and I see him covered in little wounds, lying on a table. There is a lake outside. He has made up his mind. He will try and drag you to him. You will be in a dark place, imprisoned, unable to resiBt him. Yes, there is one near at hand who might aid you if he could. But he will not be strong enough*" (Clea, p. 207). ----

« Darley Is enraged at "old Scobie*s self-importance in set­

ting up as a fortune teller" (Clea, p. 207), and for good

reason: his prophecy, however idiotic, has been disturb­

ing Clea ever since, and this discussion of it, far from

relieving Clea's anguish, has cast a pall over Darley and

Balthazar as well. But their love still has its brighter

moments, especially as they explore Narouz's island (which

Clea discovers) and its surrounding waters. Clea con­

cludes the island must be the unidentified Timonium, where

Antony, defeated, built a cell and waited for his inevit­

able death. Indeed, they spend a "halcyon summer . . •

free from omens" (Clea, p. 231), but thiB passes into a

melancholy, unstable autumn as Clea begins to hear the

weeping Scobie has described. Darley tries to comfort her

through both teasing and tenderness, but his tactics are

clumsy and inadequate. Finally, they agree to separate,

a separation viewed much more optimistically by Darley

than by Clea.

Now . . . I realise that she was really trying to say goodbye. • . . For me the future lay open, uncommitted; and there was no part of it which I could then visualise as not containing, somehow, Clea. This parting was . . . well, it was only like changing the bandages* until a wound should heal. . • . But for Clea the future had already closed, was already presenting a blank wall. The poor creature was afraid1 (Clea. p. 240)

That Darley is no longer infatuated with a sense of doom at

the heart of love proves to be no antidote to Clea's sense of impending death. 207

Things have fallen apart, and by the following summer

Darley has decided to return to his Mediterranean island.

Yet as they meet for one last time, Darley finds Clea-to be once more "precisely and unequivocally the Clea I should always have remembered; the mischievous tenderness was back in the eyes" (Clea, p. 242). The sense of mischief, of play, is infectious; they take advantage of the momentar­ ily phosphorescent pool to play among the dead men they have previously discovered anchored there.

So we played, glittering like comets, among the quiet mariners who sat, watching us perhaps in their thoughts, faintly echoing the twitching of the tide in their canvas sacks (Clea, pp. 246-247)•

Clea's dark obsession with death is momentarily forgotten as she and Darley play, glittering, among the dead. But

Balthazar, fumbling with Narouz's harpoon gun as he tells

Darley to take Clea with him (sensing that Darley will not return to Alexandria again), proves to be more seriously clumsy than usual; the gun goes off, pinning Clea's right hand to the sunken wreck in the pool. At first to Darley she appears to still be playing, "busy upon some childish underwater game of the kind we so often played together"

(Clea, p. 248). But as Darley realizes what has happened and that he cannot pull the harpoon from the wreck, the still contemplative if less obviously myopic man of re­ flection becomes, violently and beyond his volition, a man of action. 208

I cannot pretend that anything which followed belonged to my own volition— for the mad rage which now possessed me was not among the order of the emotions X would ever have recognised as be­ longing to my proper self. Xt exceeded, in blind violent rapacity, anything X had ever before ex­ perienced (Clea, p. 249).

Darley leaves her to return with a knife, cuts her hand free, and brings her to the surface. Now Darley*s auto­ matic, unwilled action is joined by an equally unfamiliar willed determination to force Clea to live as he squeezes her lungs "slowly but with great violence . . . in this pitiful simulacrum of the sexual act— life saving, life- giving" (Clea, p. 251).

. . . X would not accept the thought that she was dead, though X knew it with one part of my mind. X felt half mad with determination to disprove it, to overthrow, if necessary, the whole process of nature and by an act of will force her to live. . . . X had, X realised, decided to either bring her up alive or to stay down there at the bottom of the pool with her; but where, from which ter­ ritory of the will such a decision had come X could not guess1 (Clea, p. 251)

Clea does live, and is placed in the same bed in which

Cohen and Melissa have died, now the emergency casualty ward and not the bed reserved for patients whose death is imminent; Darley, confronted once again by Alexandrian coincidence, repeats the observation he makes in Justine as he pays his respects to Melissa's corpse: "Xt would be just like real life to imitate art at this point" (Justine, p.

237; Clea, p. 254). He has disproved Scobie's prophecy in being not only at hand but also strong enough to aid Clea, 209 to rescue her from Narouz. And, having driven off Clea's horror of the future forever, he discovers— as involuntar­ ily as he has acted to cut Clea free— that he knows who

Clea's Syrian lover was.

"It is Amaril you're in love with" I said— rather blurted out. The remark came as a great surprise to me. It was completely involuntary. . . . Between us we had never used this dreadful word love— this synonym for derangement or ill­ ness— and if I deliberately used it now it was to signify my recognition of the thing's autonomous nation (Clea, p. 256).

Darley is right— except that Clea is no longer in love with

Amaril. But both of them now need time to pause and to reflect, and Darley goes back to his island as he had planned, leaving Alexandria for the last time. They write letters that cross in the mail and, true to his fashion,

Darley gives Clea the last word, this time including those last few lines that he has meticulously omitted in Justine and Balthazar. Clea has abandoned astrology and is about to leave Alexandria, although she asksrhetorically "How can we but help love the places which have made us Buffer?"

(Clea, p. 279). But neither is back to the starting- point; Darley is to leave his island exile, which has served its purpose, and to meet Clea in Paris where, it is strongly implied, they will escape the city from which there has been no true escape, they will embark from a new point of departure. 210 In this discussion of Clea I have focused on only those relationships that Darley participates' in, as I did in discussing Justine (see above, pp. 145-161); as was the case in Justine, however, there is a plethora of other relationships in Clea which once again forms the back­ ground to Darley1s continuing investigation of modern love.

Amaril marries his virtuous Semira, the woman he has fallen in love with during the Carnival first described in

Balthazar (p. 191) who, finally seen without her domino, is discovered bo be without a nose as well. Clea sketches noses, Semira picks one, and Amaril completes the Pgy- malion-like procedure with modern surgical skill and

Arthurian romanticism. Pombal's constancy to the equally virtuous Fosca ends with her violent and senseless death.

Justine is last seen by Clea on the arm of an elegant

Memlick Pasha, scheming (with Nessim) grander interna­ tional political schemes, looking as happy and as young as she has ever looked. Pursewarden and Scobie, both dead, continue to comment on Alexandrian love through art, shrine, and personal recollection. Mountolive has married

Pursewarden's sister Liza and has been appointed Ambassa­ dor to France. Balthazar, himself continuing to recover from his disastrous homosexual love affair and his subse­ quent psychic collapse, mourns the death of Leila Hosnani while linking it to still another motive for Pursewarden's 211 suicide. Balthazar tells Darley that before her death

Leila had written to him:

"'I know I am dying, my dear Balthazar, but all too slowly. Do not believe the doctors and their diagnoses, you of all men. I am dying of heart­ sickness like a true Alexandrian.' . . . Yes" he said again, gravely, "what a word it is— 'heart- sickness'I And it seems to me that while (from what you tell me) Liza Pursewarden was administer- her death-warrant to her brother, Mountolive was giving the same back-hander to Leila. So we pass the loving-cup about, the poisoned loving-cupI . . . Yes, just as Liza's letter to Pursewarden telling him that at last the stranger had appeared was his coup de grace so to speak, so Leila re- - ceived, X suppose, exactly the same letter. Who knows how these things are arranged?" (Clea, p. 266)

This explanation of Pursewarden's suicide, the central enigma of the Quartet, does not definitively pinpoint his motivation, yet as the work comes to a close the balance comes to rest on love-more precisely on the impossibil­ ity of love since, as Pursewarden has told Melissa, he and

Liza have been lovers and "shall never be able to love other people" (Mountolive, p. 174)— on Pursewarden1s re­ moving himself from the scene to enable Liza to love

Mountolive. Thus in this particular quartet of lovers the marriage of two results in the death of the other two, still another example of the great dark Alexandrian wine­ press of love. Against this background, then, Darley con­ cludes his investigation of modern love in Alexandria. The multitude of love relationships continues to behave like an organism with a will of its own; indeed, Darley con- 212 eludes that love itself, that synonym for derangement or

illness, is a thing with an autonomous nature of its own

(see above, p. 209). His quest to recapture Justine and

her city that becomes a search for his "proper self" in

Balthazar has resulted, in Clea, in his discovering a

self he did not know existed. Moreover, he has reached

the point that, after his conviction throughout most of

Clea that he will not write fiction again, he can write

"once upon a time" and feel as if the whole universe has given him a nudge (Clea, p. 282). This, however, is an­ other story, best considered in the context of the theme of art. 213

NOTES: CHAPTER IV

^Consider the themes of laughter, language, isola­ tion, Eastern mysticism vs. Western technology and science, to name a few. The theme I have called "politics" might be termed "the individual in society," less economically indicating that this theme encompasses "love" but remains separate from "isolation." My choices are intended to demonstrate, not to exhaust or preclude.

^Kenneth Young, "A Dialogue with Durrell" in Encoun­ ter (13:6), p. 62.

3Young, p. 62.

*Young, p. 64.

^Lawrence Durrell, A Key to Modern British Poetry (Norman, Okla., 1952), p. 90.

6In Justine Nessim's marriage to Justine has already taken place, although there are numerous forays into Jus­ tine's past, notably through Darley's careful perusal of Jacob Arnauti's novel, Moeurs, which describes Justine as she appeared to Arnauti^-Tier first husband, in Balthazar, however, we see Nessim before his marriage, and in MounC^ olive we begin at a point in time when Nessim's father, the invalid Faltaus Hosnani, is still living. Much of Darley's puzzled speculation about the "true character" of Nessim may be seen as a result of his having arrived late on the Alexandrian scene (in comparison to both Balthazar and Mountolive) and thus being ignorant of the facts of Nessim's earlier experiences.

^We later learn that this manuscript presented to Darley as Justine's diary actually consists of Arnauti*s notes for Moeurs, copied by Justine after Arnauti had broken his wrist (Mountolive, pp. 208-209). Yet Darley is convinced, as was pernaps Arnauti, that this concept is especially appropriate to Justine and thus should be in her diary: both Darley and Arnauti subscribe to the Aristote- lian idea that art is not an evasion but a fulfillment of destiny, in its true potential (Justine, p. 17 and p. 75).

8In this connection see especially Christopher G. Katope, "Cavafy and Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet" in Comparative Literature (21:2), pp. 125-137. Katope sees "The City" and "The God Abandons Antony," two of*Cavafy's poems that both appear in Justine in translation, as 214

"touchstones which trace the emotional life of Darley and function as a measure of his artistic development" (p. 131). Katope points out that the pessimistic, nay-saying "The City" is referred to most frequently in Justine and not at all in Clea, while "The God Abandons Antony" Becomes "the dominant metaphor in Clea" (p. 131). He defines the "god" that abandons Darley as "sexual deviation" (p. 141),al­ though it seems at least as useful to me to view this god as the special genius of all those deeply wounded in their sex.

9And its reversal, of course, in Darley's rescue of the seemingly-doomed Clea in Clea. He visits her after­ ward as she recuperates in the same hospital bed that both Cohen and Melissa have died in.

*®In Justine Pursewarden remarks that one finally comes to the conclusion that "it is God who does not care: and not merely that he does not care, he does not care one . way or the otheiT (Justine, p. 118); The implication is, of course, that while this may be all very well for God, it is disconcerting to his created beings on earth. My using Pursewarden's dictum in this context is intended to emphasize the great degree of his indifference toward Justine, an indifference that has the effect of attract­ ing, and not of repulsing, this much sought-after sexual turnstile.

^See Balthazar, p. 147. This is, at any rate, Balthazar's explanation, based on what Justine tells him. He might have been closer to "the truth," however, had he taken his own advice to Darley: "you trust too much to what your subjects say about themselves. . . . You would never make a good doctor. Patients have to be found out— for they always lie" (Balthazar, p. 148).

i2jn Justine Darley, investigating modern love by peering at participants engaged in the act, interrupts a man he identifies positively as the hunchbacked Mnemjian (Justine, p. 190). Now, in Balthazar, he decides it must have been Narouz (Balthazar, p. 167). The conclusion reached from his voyeurism, that the participants "lay there like the victims of some terrible accident," in effect that the act of intercourse is grotesque or ludi­ crous to the unparticipating observer, remains unchanged in his reconsideration. Indeed, Darley quotes himself verbatum (Justine, pp. 186-187; Balthazar, p. 167).

^Mountolive suffers this acute earache only once outside the context of a return home to Mother (and an accompanying return to childhood illness and motherly 215 comfort): after Pursewarden's suicide (Mountolive, p. 192). "Outside the stockade of his mother's security," the attack alarms him; he overheats the salad oil, burns himself, and takes to his bed for three restless days. He does not attend Pursewarden's cremation; NesSim and Jus­ tine send him flowers.

l*For a discussion of the narration of Mountolive, see especially Alan Warren Friedman, Lawrence PurrelT*and The Alexandria Quartet; Art for Love1s Sake TNorman, Okla., 197o), pp. 111-135". in a chapter entitled "Mountolive and The Unreliable Narration of Facts" Friedman makes the point that the objective facts presented in Mountolive are true enough, yet inadequate as full, complete explana- tions all the same: Basically, it is proposed that what is offered as "truth" in Mountolive really is the truth— as lit­ eral and objective as any narrator can reveal it— but that truth abstracted from "felt reality" is neither beautiful, nor important, nor even very re­ liable. These lives truly were shaped to a great extent by the political events and forces enclosing and devitalizing them; yet, ultimately, who cares? Certainly not the artist (or the psychologist)— to whom such truth is little more than an uninterest­ ing footnote to the profounder reality (the great volume) of felt experience; single causes are com­ plete and accurate as far as they go, but they do not (and cannot) touch the essentials (Friedman, pp. 132-133).

15Compare Justine, p. 60 (and the above discussion, pp. 157-159) withYursewarden's reaction to Melissa's laughter: "an unforced laughter which, to his (Purse­ warden' s] surprise, he found deliqhtful" (Mountolive, p . 167). ;

l*>The most persistent of these coincidences of place . is, of course, the hospital bed first reserved for ter­ minal cases in which Clea later recuperates.

17In Clea the individual speakers are not identified; it may well be Darley who wonders "I am always so bad the first time, why is it?". That either of them might come up with this standard line is only to be expected in a novel that generally agrees with Pursewarden's assertion that "'in the end everything will be found to be true of everybody"' (Balthazar, p. 15). The general tone of the conversation m Clea7~however, is more positive and less critical than it is in Justine, indicating that even though they are playing the same old game they have gotten off to a better beginning. CHAPTER V

ART

The Theme of Art A Four-Card Trick in the Form of a Novel

No, but seriously, if you wiBhed to be— 1 do not say original but merely contemporary— you might try a four-card trick in the form of a novel; passing a common axis through our stories, say, and dedicat­ ing each to one of the four winds of heaven. A continuum, forsooth, embodying not a temps retrouyd but a temps ddlivrd. The curvature of space itself would give you stereoscopic narrative, while human personality seen across a continuum would perhaps become prismatic? Who can say? I throw the idea out. — Extract from Pursewarden's Note­ book intended for Darley in Clea

The object of writing is to grow a personality which in the end enables man to transcend art. — Pursewarden to Balthazar, written on the back of an envelope, in Balthazar As he begins writing Justine, Darley mentions first the uselessness of art and then contemplates its consola­ tions. A fine metaphor for Melissa, now dead, serves no useful function, yet the consolations of art are such that

"only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side" (Justine, p. 17). The constructions of art are powerless against "the indifference of the natural 216 217

world" (Justine, p. 15), yet Darley is convinced that, at the same time,

for us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfill it in its true potential--the imagination. (Justine, p. 17)

Darley1s conception of art here is at once grandly

Aristotelian (in that destiny is fulfilled in its true potential through art) and self-centeredly romantic (in that the artist, through his powers of imagination, is far removed from ordinary mortals, his capacity for fulfilling and not evading destiny being a special and rare talent)

By the beginning of Clea. however, Darley has reversed himself, admitting total defeat as far as his writings from his island exile are concerned.

"To re-work reality" I had written somewhere; temeritous, presumptuous words indeed— for it is reality which works and reworks us on its slow wheel. Yet if I had been enriched by the experi­ ence of this island interlude, it was perhaps be­ cause of this total failure to record the inner truth of the city. . . . I had been forced to admit defeat on paper (Clea. p. 12).

Darley's artistic path from the beginning of Justine to the beginning of Clea has truly been a difficult one; this simple reversal does not approach revealing all that he has learned, nor has he, as he leaves’ his island, learned all he is to need to know. Indeed, there is evidence for 218 saying that, despite such reversals in Darley*s artistic theories# his concept of art remains essentially the same# that his ideas about art at the end of Clea are basically those that he possesses at the beginning of Justine.

Durrell himself has said that he wanted to show# in

Darley# an example of an artist with first-class equipment who nevertheless was not a first-class artist.3 Yet

Darley does learn about art in the course of the Quartet? most of all# he learns the significance of the theories he already knows in Justine, a significance apparent only when he is able to view them in the context of his life, and place them in a more worthwhile# more useful perspec­ tive. And this change in perspective does represent at least one major change in Darley*s original theories themselves: by the end of the Quartet he no longer be­ lieves the artist to be basically different from ordin­ ary people. As Durrell, his maker# has put it:

The theme of art is the theme of life itself. This artificial distinction between artists and human beings is precisely what we are all suffer­ ing from. An artist is only someone unrolling and digging out and excavating the areas normally accessible to normal people everywhere# and ex­ hibiting them as a sort of scarecrow to fhow people what can be done with themselves.4

And this theme of art, the theme of life itself, is as basic to the structure of The Alexandria Quartet as is its stated topic, the investigation of modern love. With the arrival of Balthazar's Interlinear, after

Darley has written Justine and presumably, by this rework­

ing of reality, come to terms with all that has wounded

him in Alexandria, Darley begins to see his art, as well

as his life, as inadequate. The central doubt the Inter­

linear raises not only makes him reconsider the nature of

Justine's love for him in daily life, but also makes him

wonder whether art is even possible; if each person is so

limited in perspective that two paces east or west change

the whole picture, how is the artist to deal with whole

pictures, with anything more than his own narrowly limited

perspective? The more Darl^ becomes painfully aware of

his artistic limitations, the more he is inclined to trust

fact.

The way is through fact. I must record what more I know and attempt to render it comprehensible or plausible to myself, if necessary, by an act of the imagination. Or can facts be left to them­ selves? (Balthazar, p. 28)

Yet as the dichotomy between fact and imagination consid­

ered here becomes central to Darley's investigation of

modern art, and the more he ponders facts left to them-

'selves, the more he is disinclined to trust them alone.

Indeed, to Balthazar, self-defined third-rate doctor and

admittedly no artist himself, the unstable nature of facts

themselves seems to preclude any adequate search for the

truth. 220

"Fact is unstable by its very nature. Narouz once said to me that he loved the desert because there 'the wind blew out one's footsteps like candle flames'. So it seems to me does reality. How then can we hunt for the truth?" (Balthazar, p. 102)

Balthazar's suggested solution to this particular dilemma, one posed not so much by his Interlinear as by the nature of reality that it reflects, is to intercalate, to inter­ pose, in order to take into account the endless possibil­ ities which always exist.

"To intercalate realities" writes Balthazar, "is the only way to be faithful to Time, for at every moment in Time the possibilities are end­ less in their multiplicity. Life consists in the act of choice. The perpetual reservation of judgment and the perpetual choosing." (Balthazar, p. 226)

Balthazar's solution is one that attempts to render art faithful to life. If intercalation suggests to Darley a way of improving his art, however, he is still faced with the inadequacy of his daily life. But the two, as Purse- warden points out to Clea, are interrelated.

"Like you, I have two problems which intercon­ nects my art and my life. • . . In my art, in­ deed through my art, I want really to achieve myself shedding the work, which is of no impor­ tance, as a snake sheds its skin (Balthazar, p. 239).

For Pursewarden, then, it is life and not art that is im­ portant; indeed, art is only a means of achieving life for the artist, and has no value in itself. Darley is inclined to agree; he thinks that perhaps the destruction of his own private Alexandria was necessary to carry him "a little further in what is really a search for my proper self"

(Balthazarr p. 226). By the end of Balthazar Darley has not "solved" the central doubts raised about his art and his life by the Interlinear, but he has had to face them squarely. He can no longer evade the problems of his daily life through art, or vice versa; they are intercon­ nected, interdependent, of a piece, and cannot be dis­ missed with a wave of the hand and a proclamation that he is an artist and therefore both different from and better than "ordinary" people. That Darley'a artistic solution does not lie in collecting either more facts or more indi­ vidual points of view is signaled by Mountolive, which dismisses him as narrator altogether, gathers facts that

Darley never learns, and presents them from a point of view that seems to carry all the authority of curt omnis­ cience. The artistic assumptions on which Mountolive is apparently based, however, are contrary to those of the

Quartet as a whole, and to those that finally enable

Darley to write "once upon a time" at the end of Clea and to feel, now that his life and his art are harmonious, that the whole universe has given him a nudge (Clea# p. 282).

If love is the impetus that leads Darley to write Justine, it is a re-examination of art and its personal conse­ quences that spurs Darley to continue the Quartet in 222

Balthazar* And Clea, the third volume of the Quartet nar­

rated by Darley, represents a resolution of the theme of

art as well as the theme of love.

This is not to say that the topic of art is unimpor­

tant in Justine. Just as there is a plethora of lovers

here, there are more artists than one might expect to meet within the cover of a single novel. Three (Arnauti,

Pursewarden, and Darley) are novelists, two (Clea and

Nessim) paint (although art is an avocation for Nessim),

and the poet of the city, C. P. Cavafy, remains as omni­

present in the city's atmosphere as Pursewarden will prove

to be in later novels, long after his suicide. Indeed,

Cavafy's presence is felt immediately in Justine as Darley

refers to Alexandria as "melancholy provinces which the old man saw as full of the 'black ruins' of his life" (Justine, p. 15)j Alexandria has been full of black ruins for Darley as well, and he intends to use what he takes

to have been the poet's weapon, art, to deal with these ruins. He is not convinced that such a weapon, however, can be an effective one.

I have been looking through my papers tonight. Some have been converted to kitchen uses, some the child [Melissa's by Nessim] has destroyed. This form of censorship pleases me for it has the indifference of the natural world to the con­ structions of art— an indifference I am beginning to share. After all what is the good of a fine metaphor for Melissa when she lies buried deep as any mummy in the shallow tepid sand of the black estuary? (Justine1, p. 15) 223 For Darley, the separation between art and li£e seems ab­ solute; indeed, he is beginning to be so indifferent to his own art that the utility of the paper itself (to wrap a fish, to distract a bored child) seems to take prece­ dence over the words he has scratched there. Yet, he tells us, this is not the whole truth: "I spoke of the uselessness of art but added nothing truthful about its consolations" (Justine, pp. 16-17). The consolations of art, as presented in Darley's original credo, do seem worthwhile and noble, even though the natural world re­ mains indifferent.

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 sig­ nificant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold— the meaning of the pattern. For us artistB there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfill it in its true potential— the imagination. Otherwise why should we hurt one another? (Justine, p. 17).

Thus Darley begins Justine by considering art as a weapon, useless with reference to the natural world but consoling all the same, offering both a way into the meaning of the pattern and an explanation, if not an expurgation, of human hurt. Being an artist has its consolations as well; as a writer Darley belongs to a special fraternity removed from ordinary people, a club that, in Alexandria as 224

elsewhere, Is far more exclusive than the fraternal order

of lovers, which seems to include everyone in its member­

ship.

Darley's purpose in writing Justine is to console him­

self through art, to recover from his Alexandrian love wounds through words arranged to create an effect and an

autobiographical catharsis; that he believes art and life

to be entirely separate, of course, tends to doom his ef­

fort from the beginning. Yet he is drawn at once to

theories about art in Justine. Indeed, he is even in­ clined from time to time to view his relationship with

Justine, one so much founded on mental intimacy, as one based on his being a writer and not a lover: "it was never

in the lover that I really met her [Justine] but in the writer" (Justine, p. 72). And it is Justine who first C articulates the prismatic theory of art that becomes

fundamental to theories about the novel in the Quartet and

is championed by at least two of her artistic lovers,

Arnauti and Darley.

I remember her sitting before the multiple mirrors at the dressmaker's . . . and saying: "Look! five different pictures of the same sub­ ject. Now if I wrote I would try for a multi­ dimensional effect in character, a sort of prisra- sightedness. Why should people not show more than one profile at a time?" (Justine, p. 27).

Justine's ex-husband Arnauti, who is a writer, would not argue against such a fictional experiment. Indeed, for 225 him it would represent a way around the dilemma faced by the modern writer, brought about by the current perception that no one "true" profile of the psyche exists. Arnauti complains that "for the writer people as psychologies are finished. The contemporary psyche has exploded like a soap-bubble under the investigations of the mystagogues.

What now remains to the writer?" (Justine, p. 113). And

Darley, for his part, is aware that, in everyday life, one observes only one of many profiles of those he knows. In apologizing for his less than comprehensive portrait of

Pursewarden in prose, he points out that "each person can only claim one aspect of our character as part of his knowledge. To every one we turn a different face of the prism" (Justine, pp. 118-119). A prism-sighted fictional approach, however, might overcome this limitation by employing more than one perspective on each character;

Justine*8 theory seems an effective solution. That

Justine appeals to the artistic theorist in Darley al­ though she is not an artist herself is an important aspect of Darley's attraction to her, since he is fascinated by ideas about art as well as the act of writing itself, just as he is fond of theorizing about love as well as loving. Indeed, Darley's pessimism about the utility of art in Justine is matched by his pessimism about the nature of love; art is a poor consolation, love a chimera 226 whose nature remains unchanged by and indifferent to the representations made of it by the artist.

Clea, however, who offers a potential alternative to

Justine's dark love and final betrayal in Justine, also affords an additional principle of art, one with which

Darley agrees in theory but often forgets in practice.

This principle, the value of the sense of play, might well lead him away from his demand (or fervent wish) that art be useful. Yet Darley is inclined to think of the aspect of play in Clea's painting as a stroke of good fortune, brought about by luck and not design.

in her work, too, she [Clea] is lucky; for these bold yet elegant canvasses radiate clemency and humour. They are full of a sense of play— like children much-beloved (Justine, p. 129).

Darley himself is on record as being in favor of a sense of play in art and a sense of humor in all aspects of life. At the beginning of Justine he is convinced that

"one touch of humour" would have saved Nessim "from such dreadful comprehensive suffering" in his love for Justine

(Justine, p. 16). And Darley pinpoints a sense of play as that element most significantly missing from the work of his rival novelist, Arnauti.

What is missing in his [Arnauti*s] work— but this is a criticism of all works which do not reach the front rank— is a sense of play. He bears down so hard upon his subject-matter; so hard that it infects his style with some of the unbal­ anced ferocity of Claudia [the fictional name Arnauti has given Justine] herself. Then, too. 227

everything which is a fund of emotion becomes of equal importance to him • . . (Justine, p. 75).

Yet Arnauti himself insists in his novel that it is his sense of humor, above all else, that infuriates his

"Claudia": "my indifferent health and poor nerves— -but above all my European sense of humor— seemed at such times to goad her beyond endurance" (Justine, p. 69). It is easy, as Darley remarks while criticizing Nessim, to criticize; it seemB especially— and ironically— easy to criticize a lack of humor in such a pompous way that the criticism is reflected directly back to the critic. And * while Darley agrees, in theory, that a sense of play is a high virtue in art, in his writing of JuBtine, where few if any of his memories of Justine are a source of mirth to him, his style is also infected from time to time with the unbalanced ferocity of his Justine, and everything which is a fund of emotion becomes of equal importance to him now and then.6

The Darley who must later learn the nature of his own blindness in love must also come to terms with the dis­ crepancy between those artistic theories he espouses and the techniques he really uses. . He praises Arnauti's Moeurs but insists that the novel he writes is different.

Indeed so fascinating did I find his analysis of his subject, and so closely did our relationship echo the relationship he had enjoyed with Justine that at times I too felt like some paper character 228

out of Moeura. Moreover, here I am attempting to do the same sort of thing with her in words— though I lack his ability and have no preten­ sions to being an artist. I want to put things down simply and crudely, without style— the plaster and whitewash; for the portrait of Justine should be rough-cast, with the honest stonework of the predicament showing through (Justine, p . 83).

Darley may want to put things down simply and crudely, without style, but in fact this is hardly what he does.

As for his having no pretensions to being an artist, this is also highly suspect. Is not being an artist what sep­ arates him from all those "ordinary" people? And is it not Darley who hopes to capture Alexandria and its inhabitants in his prose, "to frame them in the heavy steel webs of metaphors which will last half as long as the city itself" (Justine, p. 114)? From the perspective of art two crucial discrepancies remain at the end of

Justinei the gulf between art and life is still unbridged, and Darley's writing has yet to conform to, or come to terms with, those theories of the novel he most professes.

It is through Balthazar's Interlinear, as I have said, that Darley is forced to face the inadequacies of his art as well as the nature of his blindness in love. The

0 personal implications of the prismatic theory of charac­ terization are immediately brought home to him; the mean­ ing in the pattern of Justine's behavior, for one thing, seems to be that she has turned that face of the prism that Darley assumed was turned in his direction toward 229

Pursewarden, that it was he whom she "loved," if anyone, and not Darley. in Justine Darley has supposed that the discovery of the meaning in the pattern, however non­ utilitarian with reference to the natural world, brings with it the comforting consolation of art. But in

Balthazar he discovers this "meaning" to be far from consoling, and to have been beyond the powers of his art to detect. Moreover, the gulf between Darley*s life and his art remains; that his failures in both areas are greater than he had supposed does nothing to unite them.

Indeed, the separation between life and art seems all the more absolute as Darley concludes that illusion is neces­ sary for love but prohibited to the artist who would tell the truth.

. . . as for human characters, whether real or invented, there are no such animals. Each psyche is really an ant-hill of opposing predisposi­ tions. Personality as something with fixed at­ tributes is an illusion— but a necessary illu­ sion if we are to love1 As for the something that remains constant .•. . the shy kiss of Melissa is predictable, for ex­ ample (amateurish as an early form of printing), or the frowns of Justine, which cast a shadow over those blazing dark eyes— orbits of the Sphinx at noon. "In the end," says Pursewarden, "every­ thing will be found to be true of everybody. Saint and Villain are co-sharers." He is right. I am making every attempt to be matter of fact . . . (Balthazar, p. 15).

If the prismatic theory of personality is to hold true in both life and art, the consequences for love are disas­ trous; one must embrace illusion if he is to love, one 230 must ignore the Sphinx in Melissa and the amateurish as­ pects of Justine, insisting on the illusion of the dis­ crete personality in order to create the constant love object necessary to receive one's blind devotion. On the other hand, if one is to be an artist he must banish illusion and be matter of fact. Yet this "solution," to quote Pursewarden again, seems to set an impossible task for the artist.

"We live . . . lives based upon selected fic­ tions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time— not be our personal­ ities as we like to think. Thus every interpre­ tation of reality is baBed upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed" (Balthazar, pp. 14-15)•

If the way is through fact, the fact itself must be lim­ ited to the position of the observer in space and time, a drastic limitation since each observer's position is unique. Thus Balthazar's Interlinear forces Darley to face shortcomings in both his life and his art, but it poses no way of overcoming them. The central doubts raised here plunge Darley into despair— and into the writ­ ing of Balthazar.

Of course for Darley writing and pain have been insep­ arable since he began to rework his memories in Justine, and even after he sends this manuscript to Balthazar he continues to write slowly and painfully. He recalls

Pursewarden's view of the pain of composition, that it springs from a fear of madness. 231

I write so slowly, with such pain. Pursewarden once, speaking about, writing, told me that the pain that accompanied composition was entirely due# in artists, to the fear of madness; "force it a bit and tell yourself that you don't give a damn if you do go mad, and you'll find it comes quicker, youTTl break the barrier." (I don't know how true this all is. But the money he left me in his will has served me well, and I still have a few pounds between me and the devils of debt and work.) (Balthazar# p. 17)

But before Balthazar arrives with his Interlinear Darley is basically less concerned with art and its attendant pain, whatever the source, than he is with the practical legacy Pursewarden has left him (a few pounds) and the usefulness of such a worldly gift (as a stay against pov­ erty and the bondage of having to be gainfully employed).

That his art makes nothing happen in the natural world leads him to continue his doubt of the value of art alto­ gether, and presumably in this state of mind he continues to commit that artistic sin he ascribes to Arnauti in

Moeurs: the lack of the sense of play. Indeed Balthazar, having read the manuscript of Justine# confronts Darley with the humorless aspect of his own work: "I am afraid you will have to make room in this for the essential comedy of human relations. You give it so little place" (Bal­ thazar# p. 126). Here Balthazar points to one of the major discrepancies remaining at the conclusions of Justine# that between Darley's artistic intentions and his accomplish­ ments. To be sure, a sense of humor is not identical to a 232 sense of play; humor is only one aspect of play and, as

Johan Huizinga points out, play is not simply the opposite of seriousness; "in all the wild imaginings of mythology a fanciful spirit is playing on the border-line between jest and earnest."7 And Darley*s prose does not always lack either humor or a sense of play. Yet Balthazar rightly points out that Parley's practice is not always up to his theory. The two crucial discrepancies that remained at the end of JuBtine, the separation between art and life and that between artistic intentions and accomplishments, are not solved by what Balthazar says but only emphasized, made even more painful than before.

Yet Darley does make progress as an artist in Baltha­ zar. The additional perspective provided by Balthazar's view of Alexandria and its inhabitants forces him to con­ front those discrepancies that he left unresolved at the end of Justine; he is also forced to face squarely some of the more painful implications of his own artistic theories.

And he discovers in the dichotomy between fact and imagin­ ation, as I have said, a central problem in his investiga­ tion of modern art. Fact and imagination become something * like the horns of his artistic dilemma as Darley seems to favor first one and then the other. His immediate impulse, having read the Interlinear and become painfully aware of the falsifying powers of his imagination, is to trust to 233 fact: "the way is through fact" (Balthazar, p. 28). Yet the answer to "can facts be left to themselves?" (Baltha­ zar . p. 28) becomes a resounding "no" in terms of the .en­ tire Quartet. and at least a qualified "no" in Balthazar itself. Indeed, Darley has looked on fact-hunting as a superficial activity even before he decides that his way will be through fact. He views the journalist John Keats as a failed artist who now, in an all-consuming quest for the trivial, must be considered a failed human being as well.

Once he had wanted to be a writer but took the wrong turning, and now his profession had so trained him to stay on the superficies of real life (acts and facts about acts) that he had developed the typical journalist'a neurosis (they drink to still it): namely that Something has happened, or is about to happen, in the next street, and that they will not know about it until it is too late to "send." . . . There was nothing wrong with John except the level on which he had chosen to live his life— but you could say the same about his famous namesake, could you not? (Balthazar, pp. 25-26)

The trivalities that Keats is forever seeking out, acts and facts about acts, are obviously not the stuff of fiction that Darley looks for. In theory it seems that Darley, like

Arnauti, would like to set his book free to dream by giving

0 a synopsis of the plot on the first page (Justine, p. 75), thus eliminating the bothersome concentration on acts

(plot) and their attendant, equally superficial facts. If

Darley would not like to set his book free from form alto­ gether, as Arnauti insists he does, he would at least like 234 to rework reality to such an extent as to limit himself to significant acts, and to those facts about these acts that shed real light on them, not the journalistic facts of middle initials, addresses, and dates of birth but those facts of real literary import such as those dealing with motivation, perception, and psychological effect. Yet

Darley finds himself checked in Balthazar, as he was not in Justine, by the central doubt raised by the Interlinear.

He can no longer trust his own powers of observation.

. . . if I were now to reveal all she [Justine] told me of Nessim in her own words I should be in danger, primo, of 'setting down material per­ haps distasteful to the reader and indeed unfair to Nessim himself. Secundo: I am not sure any more of its relative truth since it might have been part of the whole grand design of deceptionI In my own mind even those feelings ("important lessons learned" etc.) are all coloured by the central doubt which the Interlinear has raised in my mind (Balthazar, p. 101).

Like Prufrock, Darley no longer dares to presume. Given this state of affairs, the way must be through fact— not that fact is everything, but that everything must be achieved through fact.

But the uneasy balance between fact and imagination does not rest here. Balthazar's perspective is that of a doctor, a kind of biological engineer, and his point of view predictably favors a kind of scientific detachment.

Such a detachment, he insists, is necessary if the doctor is to succeed in his chosen profession. 235

"Don't mistake my tone for flippancy. Medicine has taught me to look on things with ironic de­ tachment and so conserve the powers of feeling which should by rights be directed toward those we love and which are wasted on those who die. Or so I think" (Balthazar, p. 175).

Balthazar's ironic detachment is surely related to an artistic as well as a scientific method; there is no par­ ticular need for the scientist to achieve a proper distance from that which he observes.through the specific power of irony. But Balthazar is not an artist, and he remains particularly suspicious not of the artist's detachment but of his insistence on imposing a pattern on that which he observes. In short, it is one thing to observe and re­ cord, quite another to impose and insist.

"What on earth, after all, is one to make of life with its grotesque twists and turns? And how, I wonder, has the artist the temerity to try and impose a pattern upon it which he infects with his own meanings? (This is aimed slightly in your direction) [sic] I suppose you would reply that it is the duty of the pilot to make compre­ hensible the shoals and quicksands, the joys and misfortunes, and so give the rest of us power over them. Yes, but ..." (Balthazar, p. 175).

This is still another way of Balthazar's asking Darley the same hard question: how can you, or any artist, presume to know what you're talking about, presume to superimpose your own vision on the facts as they are, if indeed you can discover those facts? Darley's answer, in part, is to con­ tinue to seek the way through fact by means of a scientific detachment that exceeds Balthazar's, not an ironic medical 236 detachment but the disinterested detachment of -the ento­ mologist, the "purer" scientist. Darley describes this distance as being one removed from will or artistic inten­ tion; it is one which he habitually experienced in Alexan­ dria, an emotional distance that followed too great an emotional involvement.

Once again, as always when the drama of external events altered the emotional pattern of things, I began to see the city through new eyes— to examine the shapes and contours made by human beings with the detachment of an entomologist studying a hitherto unknown species of insect. Here it was, the race, each member of it absorbed in the solution of individual preoccupations, loves, hates, and fears (Balthazar, p. 221).

Darley has described this kind of detachment previously in

Justine as he observed a man whom he then thought to be

Mnemjian and a prostitute engaged in a sexual coupling that in its indistinct movements of masses of flesh reminds

Darley of "an ant-heap" (Justine, p. 186). In this in­

stance Darley, in effect, tries to separate himself from himself, to distance himself from his own actions.

I advanced to the bed firmly, apologetically, and with what must have seemed a vaguely scientific air of detachment I took the rusty bed-rail in my hands and stared down, not upon them for I was hardly conscious of their existence, but upon my­ self and Melissa, myself and Justine (Justine. p. 186).

With Balthazar's haunting questions, such detachment be­ comes even more important to Darley, for in this way there

seems a chance of avoiding the imposition of purely per­

sonal patterns upon life. Detachment becomes, in other words, a way o£ achieving art through fact.

At the same time, however, as Darley writes Balthazar he is in the process of rediscovering that facts cannot be

left to themselves and that he must trust his imagination,

something he knew at the beginning of Justine (p. 17). The

shock of Balthazar's information, of how far from the

"truth" he was in Justine, makes Darley so wary of his own perspective, let alone his personal imagination, that he reconstructs more than half of Balthazar directly from

Balthazar's notes. Yet Balthazar himself grants a place to the imagination in art, although he is convinced that

imagination need not be invention, and dare not claim to hold the only "right" answers, as the stance of omniscience does.

So much have I reconstructed from the labyrinth of notes which Balthazar has left me. "To imagine is not necessarily to invent," he says elsewhere, "nor dares one make a claim for omniscience in interpreting people's actions. One assumes that they have grown out of their feelings as leaves grow out of a branch. But can one work backwards, deducing the one from the other? Perhaps a writer could if he were sufficiently brave to cement these apparent gaps in our actions with interpre­ tations of his own to bind them together? What was going on in Nessim's mind? This is really a question for you to put to yourself" (Balthazar, p. 98).

It takes Darley some time to become sufficiently brave to use his imagination as cement. Yet even in his "recon- * struction" of events from Balthazar's notes he must add his own interpretations} simply to make new patterns by 238

shifting blocks of Balthazar's prose here and there in

Balthazar and including* among them his own memories and

feelings of the moment is to make a kind of interpreta­

tion. And later Darley does screw up his courage and write

a chapter based primarily on neither Balthazar's notes nor his own memory but on his imaginative rendering of events neither he nor Balthazar has witnessed. Instead of tak­

ing Balthazar's advice to render what was going on in

Nessim's mind, he concentrates on the mind of Nessim's brother, Narouz.

I turn now to another part of the Interlinear, the passage which Balthazar marked: MSo Narouz decided to act,w underlining the last word twice. Shall I reconstruct it— the scene I see so clearly, and which his few crabbed words in green ink have detonated in my imagination? Yes, It will enable me to dream for a moment about an unfrequented quarter of Alexandria which I loved (Balthazar, p. 151). ------

So even while Darley tries to achieve art through fact,

then, he is relearning the place that imagination has in

art; despite the central doubt raised by the Interlinear,

only the imagination can be used as cement to bind actions

together, to make significant sense out of them.

As for Pursewarden in Balthazar, he is the artist who

has gotten beyond all the nagging problems Darley con­

tinues to wrestle with. Indeed, he is not at all con­

vinced that it is up to the imagination to faithfully copy

reality; he believes, to the contrary, that it is reality

that copies the imagination. As Balthazar reports it, 239

". . .as always he [Pursewarden) found that his ordinary life, in a distorted sort of way, was beginning to follow the curvature of his book. He explained this by saying that any concentra­ tion of the will displaces life (Archimedes' bath-water) and gives it bias in motion. Reality, he believed, was always trying to copy the imagi­ nation of man, from which it derived*1 (Balthazar, p. 116).

Here, of course, is another way in which, for Pursewarden, art and life interconnect. If "the object of writing is to grow a personality which in the end enables man to transcend art*1 (Balthazar, p. 141), if the work itself is of "no importance" (Balthazar, p. 239), art has its pri­ mary value in enabling the artist to learn how to live; learning the powers of the imagination, far from being a useless activity to which the natural world remains indif­ ferent, gives one the ability to assist reality itself, which is only waiting for its cues from the imagination of man. Darley finally agrees with Pursewarden as he real­ izes, at the end of Balthazar, that his writing is more than anything else "a search for my proper self" (Baltha­ zar, p. 226). Yet Darley1s accomplishments have not always

(if ever) matched his theories or intentions. And

Balthazar is a novel dominated not by the presumably suc­ cessful Pursewarden but by th6 revelations of the third- rate medical man who loves "to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket" (Balthazar, p. 125). The doctor's advice is to 240 intercalate realities, as I have pointed out, to be faith­

ful to Time and to the overlapping events that he loves.

And for Darley, on whom these revelations presumably.have their sole effect,® the writing of Balthazar is a continu­ al struggle from the time Balthazar's notes force him to begin his narrative yet once more.

And so, slowly, reluctantly, I have been driven back to my starting-point, like a man who at the end of the tremendous journey is told that he has been sleepwalking. "Truth," said Balthazar to me once, blowing his nose in an old tennis sock, "Truth is what most contradicts itself in time" (Balthazar, p. 23).

Art, too, has become a game of tennis for Darley, in

Balthazar, and the long volley between fact and imagina­

tion begun in earnest here does not end in this novel; each earnest serve insisting "the way is through fact" is returned by some backhand— or lob, or smash-convinced that

it is reality itself that copies the imagination of man, that Darley's personal and artistic problems are not due to his being a dreamer but to the rather pedestrian and

somewhat impoverished nature of his dreams.

As I have noted, Mountolive immediately signals that the solutions to Darley's artistic problems lie neither in gathering more hard facts nor*in seeking out more indi­ vidual points of view to add to those of Balthazar and to his own. In effect, the central doubt raised by the

Interlinear, its disturbing insistence that no one point of view can be accurate or even adequate, is dismissed as 241 a problem. Durrell changes the rules of his artistic game and, having demonstrated that omniscience is not a viable narrative technique since no artist, however perspica­ cious, can overcome the inherent limitations in his own point of view, he gives us what seems to be an omniscient- ly narrated novel. There could, in theory, be as many novels as Durrell chooses to give us which, like Balthazar, add still another individual perspective to those which have gone before. But Mountolive signals the end to such possibilities, much as Part II of Conrad's Victory signals an end to all the uninformed speculation about the real nature of Axel Heyst in Part I) we are, the tone and

scope of Mountolive seem to tell us, now going to be given

the hard facts— all the mysteries are to be cleared up by

a narrator who presumably knows, in Forster's words, the

"secret life" of all these Alexandrian characters. This assumption that omniscience is a viable narrative method occurs only in Mountolive and contradicts the assumption underlying the Quartet as a whole, summed up by Purse­ warden 's dictum that "every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and

the whole picture is changed." Mountolive is also the only novel in the Quartet in which an artist (Darley) is

not the central character; indeed-, Pursewarden is artist-

in-chief here, and his art is viewed roost often as not 242 only useless but often a real liability in the political­ ly-dominated world we find in this novel.

That Mountolive reverses the assumptions about art found in the Quartet as a whole, of course, gives this third novel an important role in the developing theme of art. And the assumptions about art found here are very like those the central character, David Mountolive, possesses.9 Mountolive, after all, is he who records only natural facts from his long rides with Leila Hosnani, mentioning neither his feelings nor Leila's name (Mount­ olive, p. 31). As a career diplomat he values the social graces in public and depends on the hard facts of his intelligence network in private. He prefers reports not to ramble but to get to the point in an orderly and decorous manner; that points might exist which could not be made in this fashion, or that the most important points might be those which most contradict themselves in time, are not considerations that make the slightest sense in

Mountolive*s world. The omnisciently narrated natural­ istic novel in which Mountolive moves seems to share his trust in a comfortable decorum, and to share his abhor­ rence of loose ends and "poetic falsification." Mount­ olive is a carefully pruned novel, moving from the "huge sacred tree hung with every manner of ex-voto by the childless or afflicted villagers" (Mountolive, pp. 34-35)■ 243 at its beginning to the intrigues that finally result in

Narouz*s assassination, at the same spot, at its end:

"here, long ago, he [Narouz] had stood and prayed with

Mountolive under the holy branches'* (Mountolive, p. 304).

It includes no "Workpoints," unlike the other three novels in the Quartet? here neatness counts, and loose ends would seem only unpleasant evidence that this narrator had sacrificed propriety to self-indulgence. And, of course, there is apparently no disturbingly individual point-of- view from which we view this world. This narrator knows what he's talking about, and talks about what he knows.

As Nessim talks with Clea, for example, the narrator moves directly from what can be observed in this conversation to what cannot be: the secret lives of both Nessim and Clea.

"How do you spell love in Alexandria?" he said at last, softly. "That is the question. Sleep­ lessness, loneliness, bonheur, chagrin— I do not want to harm or annoy her, Clea” But I feel that somehow, somewhere, she must need me as I need her. Speak, Clea." He knew he was lying. Clea did not (Mountolive, p. 194).

In the other novels Darley makes good progress toward solving some mysteries, while others elude him almost en­ tirely. In Mountolive. however, we have a narrator who betrays no fascination with unsolved enigmas, and one who, knowing everything as he does, clears everything up at once.*®

There was really no great mystery about the telegram which the sleepless Ambassador held in his hand and which he studied from time to time 244

as he walked slowly about in his own demesne, smoking a cigar. Once a week he played a game o£ chess with Balthasar by telegram. . . (Mountolive, p. 269).

In the world of Mountolive the truth is not always beauti­

ful nor, as in the case of this telegram, particularly significant. But there is none of the poetically falsify­

ing fiddle-faddle about truth's not being true that we

find in the other three novels.

In a novel based on such assumptions it is not sur­ prising that Pursewarden, in his role as innovative modern novelist, is treated somewhat peripherally and patroniz­ ingly. His official position here is in the role of "a junior in the Cultural Department" (Mountolive, p. 60) and his art, as first pointed out by Kenilworth, is more a liability than anything else; "*1 won't say that our friend isn't faithful to the firm— far from it. But I can say that he is opinionated and difficult. Well, soitl He's a writer, isn't he?*N (Mountolive, p. 90). Pursewarden, for his part, is also acutely aware of the discrepancy between art and politics, but in his opinionated and difficult way what he values is art.

"The artist's work constitutes the only satisfac­ tory relationship he can have with his fellow-men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn. This is why he can't dabble in politics, it isn't his job. He must concentrate on values rather than policies. Today it all looks to me like a silly shadow-play, for ruling is an art, not a science, just as society is an organism, not a system" (Mountolive, p. 63). 245 Such pronouncements are not only useless in the political world o£ Mountolive; they are also subversive in that they ridicule "the firm." But while Pursewarden carries this war between art and politics to the firm, the firm also carries the war to art, producing (in Pursewarden's view) the type of man like Maskelyne who, in being a kind of anti-artist, is for that very reason an extremely useful political being.

Well, since the Army discovered that imagine- ' tion is a major factor in producing cowardice they have trained the Maskelyne breed in the virtues of counter-imagination: a sort of amnesia which is almost Turkish. The contempt for death has been turned into a contempt for life and this type of man accepts life only on his own terms (Mountolive, pp. 105-106)•

Maskelyne, a man whose very name from Pursewarden1 a point of view suggests a perversion of "masculine," is a figure whom Pursewarden cannot philosophically or personally tol­ erate; his contempt for the imagination, for life itself, is one that the artist cannot share. And yet as an artist

Pursewarden is fascinated with Markelyne all the same, making extensive notes about his habits: "the writer some­ where treasured him while the man condemned him" (Mount­ olive, p. 160). Art and politigs pass like trains in the night once more; if Pursewarden, artist, can be nonetheless made to be politically useful in his position of junior in the Cultural Department, Maskelyne, political being par

* * excellance, can be made to be artistically useful as the 246 prototype for a character in a novel. The war between art and politica breaks out again. And it is a crucial war in

Mountolive, if not the central struggle in the Quartet, since both artist and politician seek the domination of the same constituency; they differ greatly, however, in that they strive to reach different aspects of that con­ stituency (which is nothing less than the human community) through different means for vastly different ends. Nessim, who.is himself sometimes more the artist and sometimes more the politician, finally recognizes the nature of this dichotomy in observing his brother, Narouz.

. . . Narouz was right in his desire to inflame the sleeping will— for he saw the world, not so much as a political chessboard but as a pulse beating within a greater will which only the poetry of the psalms could invoke and body forth. To awaken not merely the impulses of the fore­ brain with its limited formulations, but the sleeping beauty underneath— the poetic conscious­ ness which lay, coiled like a spring, in the heart of everyone (Mountolive, p. 231).

Zn this novel, though, politics wins its war with art.

Pursewarden insists that "it is only the artist who can make things really happen" (Mountolive, p. 216), but what really happens in terms of observed facts (where the values of Mountolive lie) is that Pursewarden commits suicide as a result of his political incompetence, and that his death finally leads to the death of his more primitive artistic ally, Narouz. Thus Mountolive not only reverses the assumptions about art found in the rest of the Quartet 247 but also rejects, finally, the hope of Pursewarden and

Narouz: to make everyone aware of the poetic consciousness within him, and to make the human community a better place

for all that.

With Clea we return to Darley as narrator, and to the values and assumptions about art set forth and developed in Justine and Balthazar. Clea, like Mountolive, marks a new point of departure; Darley returns to Alexandria, and time finally moves forward so that the past, complete with its enigmas,^ is finally brought into contact with the present. Darley still possesses his first-class equipment without being a first-class artist, but he gives immediate evidence that he has learned a few things during his island exile as he reverses the position he took in

Justine; he now believes that it is reality that reworks us, and not the other way around (Clea, p. 12). Moreover, he tells us, what he has learned is related not only to the problem of writing but also to the problem of living.

Yet if I had been enriched by the experience of this island interlude, it was perhaps because of this total failure to record the inner truth of the city. . . . Yet curiously enough the act of writing had in itself brought me another sort of increase; by the very .failure of words, which sink one by one into the measureless caverns of the imagination and gutter out. An expensive way to begin living, yes; but then we artists are driven towards personal lives nourished in these strange techniques of self-pursuit (Clea, p. 12)•

In a sense, Darley has attempted to wrestle with the two problems separately, leaving his active life behind him as he retreats to his island isolation to work on the prob­ lems of writing. But it has been an interlude, not a solu­ tion, and now he plunges back into Alexandrian life with the problems of his art unsolved. His awareness of the failure of words themselves, the foundations of his art, is an expensive awareness, but it has brought him back to the brink of living again.12 He now understands Pursewarden*s statements about the work's being of no importance, that the object is to grow a personality enabling the artist to transcend his art, to begin living. Darley has, however, missed an equally important series of Pursewardian dictums to the effect that nwe artists" are no different from other people, that all men face the same enduring problems the artist concerns himself with; as Pursewarden will say later in Cleat "heed me, reader, for the artist is you, all of us" (Clea, p. 119).13 At the beginning of Clea

Darley still clings egotistically to his membership in the exclusive club of artists, as yet unable, as Pursewarden will suggest to him, to "tell your ego to go to hell"

(Clea. p. 110) and thus circumvent the paradox Pursewarden finds at the bottom of the artistic impulse.

"Z realized that to become an artist one must shed the whole complex of egotisms which led to the choice of self-expression as the only means of growth1 This because it is impossible I call The Whole Jokel" (Clea. p. 128) In the course of Clea. however, Darley is to learn these theories— and more importantly, to learn their significance 249 in the context of his life, which he has now begun again in Alexandria.

Indeed, the bulk of Clea is concerned much more with the quality of Darley*s life than it is with that of his art. The discrepancy between art and life apparent in

Justine and Balthazar remains in Clea until the final two paragraphs. In this novel Darley unequivocally pursues life and ignores art, however, instead of trying to strike an uneasy balance between the two. And Pursewarden*s posthumous advice, offered from his Notebook, seems to support the waiting game that Darley now plays for the second time in Alexandria.

"... the thing operates differently with each one of us. I am only suggesting that you have not become desperate enough, determined enough. Some­ where at the heart of things you are still lazy of spirit. But then, why struggle? If it is to happen to you it will happen of its own accord. You may be quite right to hang about like this, waiting. I was too proud. I felt I must take it by the horns, this vital question of my birthright. For me it was grounded in an act of will." (Clea, p. 154) But as Clea progresses the waiting game seems to have a different effect on Darley's artistic progress. He makes no attempt to write in Alexandria and finally Clea, already exasperated with their relationship and greatly fearing the future, tries to blame herself for his not writing.

"I am no good for you, Darley. Since we have been together you haven't written a single line." . . . So stern those splendid eyes had become, and so troubled1 I was forced to laugh, however. 250

In truth I now knew, or thought I did, that I would never become a writer. . . • Yet I was not unhappy to feel that the urge had abandoned me. On the contrary I was full of relief— a relief from the bondage of these forms which seemed so inade­ quate an instrument to convey the truth of feel­ ings (Clea, pp. 236-237).

Parley's answer, beyond his laughter, is. "I have been actually meditating a book of criticism" (Clea, p. 237), an answer so outrageously unacceptable to Clea that she slaps him. But it is not an outrageous answer to Darley, whose relief at having escaped from what had become his twin obsessions (first Justine herself and then his attempt to turn her— and the city she inhabits— into art) is very real, and truly pleasant. As he leaves Alexandria he promises Clea he will try and write, yet even then he re­ marks, to himself, that "I knew I wouldn't" (Clea, p. 257).

The door separating Darley from Clea in Justine opens of its own accord in Clea (Clea, p. 95), giving him an unex­ pected if quite welcome chance to return to love and to life; the door separating him from becoming a first-rate artist, however, remains shut, and once Darley stops battering on it furiously he discovers that he is content to leave it shut, not just for the time being but forever. 9 He has chosen to live his life, not to ponder his art, and although his relationship with Clea as he leaves Alexandria remains strained and troubled he at least leaves freed of the burden of worrying, about artistic form. 251

Darley*a return to writing at the end of Clea, and hia discovery of not pain but joy in his art when he does, is an experience as unpremeditated and as welcome as his . relationship with Clea after his return to Alexandria.

Indeed, the experience closely parallels one of the laws of love that he has so painstakingly discovered: as Baltha­ zar has told him, one of the great paradoxes of love (see above, p. 171) is that "concentration on the love-object and possession are the poisons" (Balthazar, p. 117).

Darley has found this to be true of his art as well. Al­ though Pursewarden has been capable of writing through an act of the will, Darley has found that his concentration on his art (like his concentration on his love-object,

Justine) has been counterproductive, and that his posses­ siveness— his insistence on belonging to the exclusive club of writers and deep conviction that his own writing, since it belongs so personally to him, is of the greatest importance— has proven to be equally unfecund. Alone on his island once more, Darley receives a letter from Clea, who assures him that she has overcome the persistent gulf between life and art, that she is "a real human being, an

* artist at last" (Clea, p. 281). She remains convinced that Darley too is an artist, perhaps still waiting for his art to come of its own accord but an artist all the same; indeed, she hopes it has come already: ". •. . 1 have 252 a feeling that you too perhaps have stepped across the « m threshold into the kingdom of your imagination,, to take possession of it once and for all" (Clea, p. 281). And she is right, although Darley*s coming of age as an artist takes just a bit longer than she had hoped.

. . . it was to be a little while yet before the clouds parted before me to reveal the secret landscape of which she was writing [the kingdom of Darley's imagination], and which she would henceforward appropriate, brushstroke by slow brushstroke, it had been so long in forming in­ side 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 (Clea, p. 282).

What Darley writes, beginning "once upon a time," is not the Quartet; what has been traced here from the perspective of art is Darley*s development as an artist and not repre­ sentative samples of his mature, first-rate work. That such work is now possible, however, is evidenced by. his having learned the significance of those theories he al­ ready knows about as he begins writing Justine; they have now been incorporated into the context of his daily life, and he is no longer concerned about the apparent war between art and the natural world. In addition, in his coming into the kingdom of his own imagination he has finally resolved the struggle between facts and imagination which had become so crucial» and so painful, in Balthazar. The way out of this dilemma is not through fact but through 253

the imagination, as Darley realizes after reading Purse­ warden 's letters.

. . . I realized that poetic or transcendental knowledge somehow cancels out purely relative knowledge. . . . There was no answer to the ques­ tions I had raised in very truth. He had been quite right. Blind as a mole, 1 had been digging about in the graveyard of relative fact piling up data, more information, and completely missing the mythopoeic reference which underlies fact (Clea, p. 176). ----

By the end of Clea Darley is able to use what he has learned, to unite his theories about art with his actual writing, to become himself a real human being, artist at last. He is now aware of the nature of his former blindness in art as well as in love, and his prospects for success as both artist and lover are great. 254

NOTES: CHAPTER V

^According to Aristotle's Poetics, "it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but .what may happen— what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity" (Poetics, in Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. Walter Jackson Bate (New York, 1^52), p. tt). in other words, in relating what may happen according to the law of probability or necessity, tne artist may fulfill the potential of what has happened in daily life; such a fulfillment is not a falsification in that it obeys this law of probability, of what must happen were the action permitted to continue unhampered toward the out­ come inherent in it from the beginning. As for Darley's romanticism, it is akin to that of Lord Byron; the artist stands among the crowd of ordinary people, but is not of it.* As Byron's Childe Harold maintains, "I have not loved the world, nor the world me; I have not flatter'd its rank breath, nor bow'd To its idolatries a patient knee, • ••••!••• . . . in the crowd They could not deem me one of such; I stood Among them, but not of them;" (Lord Byron, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," H I , 113, 1-3; 5-7, in George Gordon, Lord Byron: Selected Poetry~and Letters7 ed. Edward E. bostetter (New York, 1951), p. 85.)

^Alan Warren Friedman, in his Lawrence Durrell and The Alexandria Quartet, believes that Darley, as he appears in Justine, still has something to learn about art. For one thing, "both Durrell and Darley hold the theory of multi­ faceted personalities; yet, unlike Durrell (who, after all, wrote subsequent interpretations of the Justine events), Darley is as yet incapable of understanding the nontheo- retical application of his hypothesis" (pp. 84-85). This is not to say, however, that Darley's ideas about art change fundamentally; the discrepancy here is between Darley's theories of art and his artistic achievements, a discrepancy that seems to disappear only as the Quartet ends. What Darley needs to learn, in other words, is not artistic theory but effective artistic practice. And this, we are told, comes only at the end of Clea as he begins his new work by writing "once upon a time.” 255

^Durrell to Kenneth Young in Encounter (1316), p. 62.

4Interview with Durrell in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (Mew York, 1963), pp. 276-277.

5In this connection see especially Ann Schwertfeger Johnson's unpublished doctoral dissertation, "Lawrence Durrell's 'Prism-Sightedness': The Structure of The Alexandria Quartet" (The University of Pennsylvania, l£47). Johnson contends that Durrell's achievement in the Quartet is his blending of the prismatic viewpoint with the sequential dramatic action of traditional storytelling.

*The excesses in Darley's style are, perhaps, not so pervasive as those he finds in Arnauti's. But Darley's style can be as ferocious as Justine's— especially so when one considers that, for all their bewildering variety in physical appearance, most of the characters in his novel talk alike, in noticeably similar tones of voice. Even the character Darley makes out of himself can be ferocious while insisting that thought is a game, as opposed to the broodingly serious approach to ideas taken by Justine. Darley begins: "'Your doubt, for example, which contains so much anxiety and such a thirst for an absolute truth, is so different from the scepticism of the Greek, from the mental play of the Mediterranean mind with its deliberate resort to sophistry as part of the game of thought; for your thought is a weapon, a theology. "'But how else can action be judged?" "It can­ not be judged comprehensively until thought itself can be judged, for our thoughts themselves are acts. It is an attempt to make partial judgements upon either that leads to misgivings.'" (Justine, p. 41) Similarly, the charge that "everything whicn is a fund of emotion becomes of equal importance to him" could be ap­ plied to Darley as well as to Arnauti. Is not everything connected with his memory of Justine highly important to him? It is true that some incidents seem perhaps more important to him than others (such as the two times when the city crashes about his ears, the first as he dis­ covers he has fallen in love with Justine and the second as he is told she has left Alexandria). But of course one cannot be sure that such a hierarchy does not indeed occur in Moeurs, that Darley does not overstate his case against Arnauti.' The point is that Darley's argument can be, ironically enough, used against his own writing.' 256 7 'JohanHuizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element In Culture (orig. pub. 1944, English translation New York and Evanston, 1970), p. 23.

®Both Justine and Balthazar's Interlinear, in fact, may be seen as "closet novels'* in that they are both explicitly not written for publication. Only Balthazar, at the beginning of Balthazar, presumably has read the manuscript of Justinel Anct Balthazar himself has the same wariness toward any audience, at one point deciding that even though what he is writing is for Darley's eyes alone, he will never be able to show these notes to anyone at all: "I shall never have the courage to give you [Darley] these papers, I can see. I shall finish the story for myself alone" (Balthazar, p. 147).

^Alan Warren Friedman, in his Lawrence Durrell and The Alexandria Quartet, speculates that Mountolive is written from a point of view very like that of its title character, David Mountolive; he finds the assumptions made by the unidentified narrator to be very like those Mountolive would make, were he to write a novel: "Possibly Durrell did not consciously intend his narrator to be taken for an older but no wiser Mountolive; nonetheless, this is pre­ cisely the kind of book we may assume such a man would write" (pp. 128-129).

10The juxtaposition between Darley*s frustratingly limited point of view and the powers of this plodding nar­ rator of Mountolive affords Durrell many opportunities to make light of both the reader's frustrations and Darley's artistic theories in Mountolive. That he takes advantage of such opportunities is evidence that Durrell, if not Darley, successfully incorporates a sense of play into the Quartet. How simple things would be for Darley were he only able to read concealed telegrams in this fashion.

^Ma n y of these enigmas, of course, have been "solved" by the omniscient narrator of Mountolive. Yet these solu­ tions through facts remain suspect, as nas been indicated. Moreover, Darley begins Clea ignorant of the explanations found in Mountolive, which he has obviously not read. As an example, he knows nothing about Mountolive's relation­ ship with Leila Hosnani: "it did not seem possible to imagine him [Mountolive] ever to have been in the grip of a passion strong enough to qualify the standard responses of an education so definitive as his" (Clea, p. 168). Darley learns about this relationship onlymuch later, from Balthazar, and he is then "at a loss to imagine" Mountolive's "secret relationship with the mother of Nessim" (Clea. p. 267). 257

^References to the inadequacies of words themselves abound in Clea: see pp. 12, 21, 41, 67, 106, 135, 184, 222, and 251. one might well make a case for there being a distinct echo of T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" here. As in "Burnt Norton," "Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not Btay in place, Will not stay still." (T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," in T.S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Elay 5~,~T 909-1937P (kew Vorlc" 1958)7 p.' VsiS ------And, as in Eliot's "Quartet," words are finally made to suffice in Clea, despite their shortcomings and Darley's pointed mistrust of them. 13Indeed, in such statements Pursewarden speaks so much like Durrell to the effect that the distinction be­ tween artists and "ordinary" human beings is entirely artificial (see above, p. 218) that he might be considered to be, in this context, a direct spokesman for Durrell himself. CHAPTER VZ

POLITICS

The Theme of Politics The Graveyard of Relative Policies

Of Messim's outer life— those immense and bor­ ing receptions, at first devoted to business colleagues but later to become devoted to obscure political ends— I do not wish to write. — Darley in Justine

"Then, all this must be kept from our well- wishers here, the British and the French. . . . among them all there are two people who particularly concern us. Darley's liaison with the little Melissa is one point ndvralgique: as I told you she was the mistress of old Cohen who died this year. He was our chief agent for arms shipments. Did he tell her anything? I don't know. Another person even more equivocal is Pursewardenj he clearly belongs to the political agency of the Embassy. . . . We must if necessary reassure him, try and sell him community movement among the Copts1 What else does he, might he, know or fear? You can help me here." — Nessim to Justine in Mount­ olive

The theme of politics becomes a major theme in the

Quartet only through the emphasis placed on the political world in Mountolive. Indeed, in Justine Darley considers political details to be obscure and unimportant, and he omits most of those details he is aware of in the inter­ ests of focusing his book on its stated subject: his love for Justine. Moreover, political details strike Darley as

258 259 belonging to that mass of unimportant observations that * • relates to a person's "outer life"; as a novelist, how­ ever unsuccessful, he agrees with Forster's dictum that in fiction it is the "secret life" of the character that matters. Even in Balthazar, where Balthazar's Interlinear forces Darley to re-examine both his reconstruction of his former life in Alexandria and the theories of art upon which this reconstruction has been based, he does not change his basic attitude toward either the value of poli­ tics or its relevance to his investigations. Balthazar does include political information previously unknown to

Darley in what he writes, yet this information appears to be insignificant in comparison to the "facts" in the

Interlinear about what really happened in Alexandria inso­ far as Darley1s love for Justine is concerned, and insofar as this new portrait of reality affects Darley's attitude toward his art.

In Mountolive, however, wholly different assumptions about the natures of both life and art prevail; Darley'a developing perspective, which dominates the Quartet as a whole, is replaced in Mountolive by a point of view in which policies are seen to be more crucial than values, and in which politics— not love or art— is assumed to lie at the heart of everything. Pursewarden, a kind of artistic code hero in the rest of the Quartet in the manner of Mark Ratnpion in Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, is in Mountolive an old-fashioned reactionary with royal contemptsj far from a success here, he commits suicide as the result of political incompetence. And Darley's love affair with Justine, so crucial to the entire scheme of things in both Justine and Balthazar, is in Mountolive only an obscure if prudent footnote to Nessim's plans for a Jewish Palestine sympathetic to and protective of the

Egyptian Christians, the Copts. Darley himself is two removes from any direct involvement in what is crucial in

Mountolive: it is Cohen who is involved, the furrier who is himself a dutiful footnote in Justine: Justine is assigned to keep an eye on Cohen's former mistress,

Melissa, and by extension her current lover, Darley. In

Clea the Quartet returns to Darley's perspective and assumptions, but time has moved forward and it is no longer possible for Darley to ignore politics altogether as he returns to Alexandria in the midst of World War II.

Indeed, he must decide, among other things, whether this war represents a failure of politics or some deep-seated failure in the psyche of western civilization, if politics is not simply the wrong place to look for solutions that must be finally rooted in values and not policies.

• As I have mentioned, Darley considers political de­ tails to be insignificant in Justine. His intention is to recapture Justine and her city, to rework the reality he remembers through his art to make it show its signif­ icant side. He explicitly dismisses those "obscure political ends" connected with Nessim's "outer life"

(Justine, p. 35), giving the distinct impression that he does not wish to write about them because they have no real significance, no lasting value. Love is the summum bonum in Justine, despite the overwhelming difficulties one faces in preserving a love relationship once it has begun; art is of lesser value, unable to affect the natural world, yet it has its consolations. Politics, however, belongs to the outer sphere of appearances, not the inner core of reality, in Justine politics functions only as an outer show designed to hide the secret life of

Nessim, and Darley is interested not in the disguise it­ self but in that which it hides; convinced that Nessim is jealous of his relationship with Justine, Darley fears that his lover's husband is being driven mad by Justine's infidelity, that Nessim may be plotting to kill him. But

Nissim's disguise, his outer life, remains intact; "it is astonishing for me," Darley writes, "• . .to recall how

* little of all this interior change was visible on the sur­ face of his life-even to those who knew him intimately"

(Justine, pp. 181-182). Indeed, Nessim's progression from boring social receptions to obscurely political-ones 262 appears to be a logical, if superficial, one; the polit­

ical gatherings seem designed only to raise his social

status while maintaining his disguise.

People felt that at least he (Nessim) had come into his own. This was how Bomeone of his place and fortune should live. Only the diplomatic corps smelt in this new prodigality a run of hid­ den motives, a plot perhaps to capture the King, and began to haunt his drawing-room with their studied politenesses. Under the slothful or fop­ pish faces one was conscious of curiosity stir­ ring, a desire to study Nessim's motives and designs, for nowadays the King was a frequent visitor to the great house. Meanwhile all this advanced the central situ­ ation not at all (Justine, p. 183).

Darley too, of course, has a desire to study Nessim's motives and designs, believing as he does that his life is

in danger. But he believes that he already knows Nessim*s motive— jealousy— and sees in these political gatherings only the design of the smoke screen. Politics is only a

part of NeBsim's disguise; the central situation, in

Justine the love triangle among Justine, Darley, and

Nessim, is advanced not at all by these political gather­

ings, nor can Darley determine the extent of Nessim's

psychological deterioration from his outer life, which

continues to mask his interior changes successfully.

4 There are, of course, many characters in Justine in

addition to Nessim who are involved in politics. Purse­ warden is a member of the British Embassy, Pombal an em­

ployee of the French Embassy, Scobie a Bimbashi in the Egyptian Police. Yet these characters, like Nessim, are

important for reasons other than their political inclina­

tions and duties: Pursewarden is a fellow (and rival) .

artist, Pombal a fellow lover, Scobie (in Justine) a lov­

able old enigma who functions chiefly as the best friend

of the equally enigmatic Clea.^ And there are still other

characters who are only later revealed to have been in­ volved in Alexandrian politics. Darley consistently describes Cohen, MelisBa's former lover, as "the old fur­

rier," even though later in Justine (when Darley himself

has gained political employment as a secret agent for Scobie, newly appointed to the secret police) he discovers

that Cohen was a French agent during a raid he himself has ordered on Pombal's apartment. The raid upsets Pombal, but

for Darley politics is an enjoyable game, far less serious

than the game of love. "Another interesting aspect of the work," Darley notes, "was that one had the power to order raids to be made on the house of one's friends. I enjoyed very much having Pombal's apartment raided" (Justine, p.

170). As for Cohen, what matters in Justine is neither his being a furrier nor his acting as a French agentt he is

* important only as Melissa's ex-lover, a lover whom she will not visit while he lies dying. Indeed, since he is no longer important to Melissa, Darley concludes that he no longer has importance in the story he writes. 264

Cohen was in a sense already dead and buried. He had lost his place in our history, and an expendi­ ture of emotional energy on him seemed to me use­ less. It had no relation to the real man who lay among the migrating fragments of his old body in a whitewashed ward. For us he had become merely an historic figure. And yet here he was, ob­ stinately trying to insist on his identity, try­ ing to walk back into our lives at another point in the circumference (Justine, p. 104).

Darley's conclusion, of course, is premature in more than one respect. Cohen is to be only the first of many lovers to cry out for his beloved in extremis and not be heard, such a recurring lesson in love in the Quartet that it might be called, finally, the "Cohen syndrome." And

Cohen's importance as a French agent is later proven to be extremely important as well, accounting for (at least as the story goes in Mountolive) both Pursewarden*s suicide and, much to Darley*s dismay, Justine's interest in Darley himself. If those political details and motives Darley dismisses as insignificant in Justine are not to be, at the conclusion of the Quartet, the most important aspects of life in Alexandria, at least his judgment is extremely premature, and his ignorance of these details and motives will prove to be a nagging blind spot in his vision of the truth about Alexandria.

As he reads Balthazar's Interlinear, of course, Darley becomes acutely aware of having made other premature judgments. What he has had to say about love in Alexan­ dria— even the theories of art through which he has 265 attempted to rework remembered realities— now appears to have been disturbingly inadequate. That Balthazar pos­ sesses more political knowledge o£ Alexandria than Darley seems insignificant in comparison to his additional in­ sights into Justine's relationship with Darley and to the hard questions he raises about the nature of art itself.

Thus it is not surprising that Darley changes neither his basic attitude toward the value of politics nor his assumption that political details are irrelevant to his investigations. Indeed, the primary value of politics for

Darley at the beginning of Balthazar is that political activity and its suggestions of complicated plotting and intrigue can be used as a metaphor for Alexandrian love.

In my mind's eye the city rose once more against the flat mirror of the green lake and the broken loins of sandstone which marked the desert's edge. The politics of love, the in­ trigues of desire, good and evil, virtue and caprice, love and murder, moved obscurely in the dark corners of Alexandria's streets and squares, brothels and drawing-rooms— moved like a great congress of eels in the slime of plot and counterplot (Balthazar, p. 22).

Darley's investigation of modern love, as he conceives it, properly concerns itself with the melodramatic intrigues of this beast with two backs, the slime of plot and counter­ plot that is a chief characteristic of Alexandrian love.

What he does not realize, ironically enough, is that the connection between politics and love is far more basic than his use of the metaphor "the politics of love" would 266 indicate; while Darley busies himself with the perception

* of similitude in dissimilitude, the existence of politics at the very heart of love (insofar as Nessim, Justine, and

Justine's two British lovers, Darley and Pursewarden, are concerned) escapes him almost completely. And while he does reconstruct political conversations from Balthazar's notes, such as this one between Nessim and his mother

Leila, his interest remains in non-political characteriza­ tion rather than in political fact or theory.

• • . Nessim started to speak of political matters with those dark, clever, youthful eyes looking steadily into his. From time to time, Leila nod­ ded vigorously, with a determined sir, while the younger son watched them both hungrily, with a heavy admiration at the concise way Nessim abbre­ viated and expressed his ideas— the fruit of a long public life. Narouz felt these abstract words fall dully upon his ear, fraught with mean­ ings he only half-guessed, and though he knew that they concerned him as much as anyone, they seemed to him to belong to some rarer world inhab­ ited by sophists or mathematicians— creatures who would forge and give utterance to the vague long­ ings and incoherent desires he felt forming in­ side him whenever Egypt was mentioned or the family estates (Balthazar, pp. 75-76).

It is obvious, from what we know about Darley if not from this specific passage, that he does not share Narouz's dumb admiration for eloquent political abstractions. What is important to Darley is not what Nessim says at all (in­ deed, he gives us very little of the conversation itself),

« * but the effect his words have on the interrelationship among the two brothers and their mother. And in turn, the importance of the very interrelationship lies in Nessim*s 267 being Justine's husband, in his role as Alexandrian lover and not Coptic politician*

That lover and politician are not so separate as Dar­ ley supposes, that politics lies at the heart of Nessim's marriage to Justine, is something unknown to Balthazar as well* Like Darley, he too considers this marriage an enigma. The doctor has even gone so far as to talk to

Nessim and Justine privately, but his attempt at marital counselling has not (in his own view) proven successful:

. . i n all the long discussions 1 had with them sep­ arately, I could not find the key to a relationship which failed signally" (Balthazar, p. 98). what Balthazar does know, however, in addition to some of the details of

Nessim*s Coptic politics,^ is that politics does have a real effect on Pursewarden's relationship with Justine.

According to Balthazar, Pursewarden not only accuses him­ self of "self-indulgence" (Balthazar, p. 118) in entering into his intimate relationship with Justine; he also realizes that for good reasons he dare not be discovered sleeping with Nessim*s wife.

"Then in bed with her in a hotel crowded with Alexandrian acquaintances who might easily observe their rashness and carry their gossip back to the city they had left together that morning, he swore again. Pursewarden had much to hide, you know. He was. not all he seemed. And at this time he did * not dare to prejudice his relations with Nessim" (Balthazar, pp. 118-119). 268

It 1b not clear just how much Balthazar knows of what

Pursewarden has to hide. He goes on to tell Darley that

Pursewarden "had held a number of contract posts for some

political branch of the Foreign Office, largely, I gather,

connected with cultural relations" (Balthazar, p. 120), which is far from revealing that he knows anything about

Pursewarden*s specific investigation of Nessim*s political

activities for the British Embassy. In any event, Baltha­

zar's focus, like Darley*s, is on love and not politics; his point is that Pursewarden's efforts to break away

from Justine only make her'the more determined to have him.

"'There is something regarding Nessim which you cannot afford to compromisex I understand.' And she [Justine] heaved a great sigh. 'O Fool, why did you not tell me? Am I to forfeit your friend­ ship because of this? Of course not. I don't care whether you want to sleep with me or not. But you— that is different. Thank God I've dis­ covered what it was.'" (Balthazar, p. 127).

Thus the political aspects of life in Alexandria, for Baltha­

zar as well as Darley, remain subservient to Darley's original topic: modern love. Balthazar's reply to Justine is a reply in kind; although the perspective shifts, the subject matter is still love, and the art which tries to render it meaningful through a reworking of its disparate disguises.

With Mountolive, however, the subject matter itself. shifts toward the topic of politics. More importantly, * the assumptions on which the narrative is based change drastically; political fact is valued highly, while the worth of both love and art in comparison to politics is diminished significantly. Indeed, we find not love but politics at the heart of everything. The characters in

Mountolive are still not what they seem, but here their hidden desires, their motivations for their enigmatic ac­ tions, are not amorous but political. The summum bonum is political success, the ultimate failure one of political ignorance or incompetence. Mountolive himself, at the beginning of this novel, is shown to be politically as well as amorously naive; while Leila overlooks those blunders in love Mountolive makes that work to her advan­ tage, however, her invalid husband Faltaus becomes inde­ corously enraged at one of his political blunders.

Mountolive, although he knows that the Copts are Chris­ tians, has labeled them "Moslems," "committing one of those gaffes which diplomats, more than any other tribe, fear and dread; the memory of which can keep them awake at nights for years" (Mountolive , p. 39). Lelia smilingly protests, Nessim is overwhelmingly tactful, but Faltaus refuses to pass it off as a socially unfortunate remark by a green youth; for him it is the heart of the matter, and thus it matters greatly.

"I see nothing to smile at." His fingers plucked at the shiny arms of the chair. "Nothing at all. The slip exactly expresses the British point of view— the view with which we Copts have always had to contend. There were never any differences 270

between us and the Moslems in Egypt before they came. The British have taught the Moslems to hate the Copts and to discriminate against them. Yes, Mountolive, the British" (Mountolive, p. 40).

Mountolive has committed an error in political fact, an

error all the more intolerable due to its being a simple

factual error, in the world of political fact answers such

as these are entirely right or entirely wrong, as in the

world of simple arithmetic; the answer to two plus two is

four, that to Copt is Christian. Faltaus tolerates

Mountolive's being his wife's lover, but he finds his

British visitor'8 not being able to get his important

political facts straight intolerable.

Faltaus's outburst, provoked by Mountolive's blunder,

defines the post-British political position of the Copts

in Egypt, laying the foundation for Mountolive'a political

explanation of such heretofore enigmatic aspects of

Alexandria as Nessim's and Justine's marriage. Faltaus

speaks with passion and to Narouz his words, unlike those

concise abstractions spoken by Nessim in Balthazar, are

not to be admired for their obscurity but adored for their

fervor.

He (Faltaus] had . . . carried the whole of this conversation stacked up inside him, waiting for the moment to launch it. Narouz gazed at his father with sympathetic adoration, his features copying their expression from what was said— pride, at the words "Our Holy City", anger at the words "worse than infidels" (Mountolive, p. 41).

And unlike Balthazar, the narrator of Mountolive reports 271 not only the effect of the words but the words themselves, giving us for the first time a comprehensive insight into

Egyptian politics and the special political problems of the Copts, which Faltaus blames on British political ignorance. As he explains, the Copts were once in posi­ tions of great power, a situation that could have meant a great deal to the British had it been preserved.

"The public prosecutor in every province was a Copt. Do you realize what that means? The re­ posing of such a trust in a Christian minority? The Moslems knew us, they knew we were Egyptians first and Christians afterward. . . . It would be the dream of Germans to discover such a key to Egypt, would it not? Everywhere Christians in positions of trust. . ." (Mountolive, pp. 42-43).

Instead, Faltaus tells Mountolive, reading from a book by a British author to support his claims, the British have systematically removed almost all Copts from political office, resulting in the Coptic feeling that Britain hates us and wishes to stamp us out'" (Mountolive, p. 44).

Mountolive can only protest feeblyt NI don't think that that can be so" (Mountolive, p. 44). But Faltaus knows that it is, his frustration multiplied by the personal effect of all this on his eldest son as well as on all

Copts, as well as on himself..

"Nessim," he said, "look at him. A true Copt. Brilliant, reserved. What an ornament he would make to the Egyptian diplomatic service. Eh? As a diplomat-to-be you should judge better than I. But no. He will be a businessman because we Copts know that it is useless, useless" (Moutolive, p. 44).

Faltaus's tirade gives us the necessary political 272 background for the major actions that take place in

Mountolivet Nessim's political activity, Pursewarden's committing suicide after learning of the plot to establish a Jewish Palestine from Melissa, the long duel between

Mountolive and Nessim resolved finally by Memlik Pasha who, having grown rich by not acting, finally orders the death of Narouz as an illogical but effective compromise,

Mountolive soon learns to avoid such early political blunders, rising steadily in the Foreign Office. The callow lover, too, grows older if not wiser, learning to avoid the appearance of being inexperienced in love even though he remains dominated by two older women who are truly "after his heart," Leila and his mother. Yet from the first even his love affair with Leila is dominated by political overtones; indeed, Leila's initial attraction to him is, he discovers to his dismay, based to a great extent on her wholehearted admiration for an England that no longer exists, on an imperial, benevolently world-govern­ ing England preoccupied with honor and duty. As she quotes one of her favorite English authors, so eloquently out-of-date, Mountolive realizes that her love is directed first toward the England she imagines, second toward all those Englishmen she imagines inhabit this noble isle, and only third— because he is there— toward Mountolive himself.

Mountolive listened to her voice with aston­ ishment, pity and shame. It was clear that what she saw in him was something like a prototype of 273

a nation which existed now only in her imagina­ tion. She was kissing and*cherishing a painted image o£ England (Mountolive. p. 29).

Yet their love a££air continues £or many years, although

its nature becomes, after Mountolive leaves Egypt, a men­ tal flirtation carried on entirely by correspondence. And

while his original appeal to her seems based on a lie,

Leila's hold on Mountolive, first physically and then

mentally, is £irm and lasting. So firm and lasting, as it

turns out, that it a££ects Mountolive'8 political acumen

without his realizing it} as he berates Pursewarden for his

abrupt exit and the resulting political turmoil he must

now deal with, Leila's power over him slowly filters into

his consciousness.

Nessiml . . . He had trusted Nessiml ("Why?" said the inner voice. "There was no need to do so.") • . . Pursewarden had been able to transfer it all so easily— the enticing ease of such a deci­ sion; withdrawal! He added sadly: "I trusted Nessim because of Leila!" Vexation upon vexation. • • . And then, his very thoughts uttered them­ selves in whispers: "Perhaps after all Leila is at the bottom of everything" (Mountolive, pp. 186- 187). ------

For Mountolive, love (with Leila, at any rate) has proven

finally to be only a barrier to political success, a

blindness that threatens, above all, diplomacy and, by ex­

tension, political stability. Politics is valued more

highly than love in Mountolive. and David Mountolive, a major figure only in this novel which bears his name, helps

to emphasize this temporary shift in values in the Quartet

* 274 by his dominating presence here. His is the central story# and politics its central theme.

In contrast standB Pursewarden who# even though • steadily employed by the British Embassy in Alexandria# continues to train himself as an artist# not a diplomat# and as an artist believes he must concentrate on "values rather than policies" (Mountolive# p. 63). But Purse­ warden has his political views as well, and as Mountolive confesses to Leila in a letter after meeting him# the young diplomat does not feel he has "exactly placed him in any one category" (Mountolive, p. 63). To add to this confounding of Mountolive's orderly mind# Pursewarden'a

"pronounced views on a number of subjects" have "an oddly personal ring" (Mountolive> p. 62). Mountolive# in the habit of referring to himself impersonally as "one" and being much more the political than the personal animal# cannot fathom Pursewarden's not even sharing the prevail­ ing political views of his fellow artists.

"He is, for example# rather an old-fashioned re­ actionary in his outlook# and is consequently rather mal vu by his brother craftsmen who sus­ pect him of Fascist sympathies; the prevailing, distemper of left-wing thought# indeed all radicalism is repugnant to* him. But his views were expressed humourously and without heat" (Mountolive# p. 62)•

Categorizable or not# however# Pursewarden does turn out to have useful political information for Mountolive and# after

Mountolive is appointed Ambassador to Egypt# sends it to 275 him in a long letter eventually signed "Earwig van Beet- field." The new Ambassador finds "the tone annoying and the information mildly disturbing" (Mountolive, p. 129); for his part, Pursewarden combines some serious political judgments with his flippant dismissal of protocol.

"It is not my job to know these things, as an artist; as a political I am filled with misgiv­ ing. To encourage Arab unity while at the same time losing the power to use the poison-cup seems to me to be a very dubious thing: not policy but lunacy. And to add Arab unity to all the other currents which are running against us seems to me to be an engaging folly" (Mountolive, p. 103).

Pursewarden's solution is to "re-orient policy and build

Jewry into the power behind the scenes here" (Mountolive, p. 105), which is, ironically enough, Nessim's solution to the problems of the Copts. On the level of personal politics, Pursewarden tells Mountolive that he has fin­ ally been able, after a series of "calculated wicked­ nesses" (Mountolive, p. 101), to convince the Embassy that he should be transferred. But Mountolive decides Purse­ warden must remain at the Mission despite hiB personal wijsh to leave, not because of the artist's political abil­ ity nor because of their acquaintance but because "he should not at this stage show irresolution-even with

Kenilworth" (Mountolive, p. 130). That Pursewarden stays— and dies— thus depends on how Mountolive wishes to appear to Kenilworth, a man of breeding yet a failure all the

same, the one who has remembered, from years of paperwork, 276 Mountolive's knowledge of Arabic that has helped get him the appointment as Ambassador— *in short, a sadly less heroic figure than his namesake from the romantic visions of Sir Walter Scott. Pursewarden may well despise such a public school concentration on appearances, yet the conse­ quences for him of such superficiality are fatal all the same.

Pursewarden, of course, has a hand in his own des­ truction. He is deceived by Nessim, discovering too late through Melissa that Cohen had been smuggling arms into

Palestine "pour faire sauter les Anglais"to blow up the British" (Mountolive. p. 178). The chance for "build­ ing Jewry into the power behind the scenes" in the Middle

East as a British ally has vanished. He not only reports this information to Mountolive at the Embassy but also warns Nessim with a message in the mirror: "NESSIM. COHEN

PALESTINE ETC. ALL DISCOVERED AND REPORTED" (Mountolive, p. 215). Then, with his abrupt suicide, Pursewarden transfers all the pressure and responsibility, political and moral, to Mountolive.

. . . by this wicked somersault, Pursewarden had, in effect, transferred the whole weight of the moral problem to Mountolive's own shoulders. He had started up the hornets' nest: the old con­ flict between duty, reason and personal affection which every political man knows is his cross, the central weakness of his life! (Mountolive, pp. 186-187) By warning Nessim, Pursewarden has left him in a quandry 277 as well; neither principal in this duel is le£t free to act as he would like to.

Nessim too, so long self-deluded by the same dreams of a perfect finite action, free and heedless as the impulse of a directed will, now found himself, like his friend [Mountolive), a prey to the gravitational forces which lie in­ herent in the time-spring of our acts, making them spread, ramify and distort themselves; making them Bpread as a stain will spread upon a white ceiling. Indeed, now the masters were beginning to find that they were, after all, the servants of the very forces which they had set in play, and that nature is inherently ingovern- able (Mountolive, p. 214).

Moreover, neither is now free not to act; previous actions have set forces into play that must now be dealt with, if not controlled. Mountolive makes a formal complaint to

Memlik Pasha, Minister of the Interior for Egypt. Nessim counters by offering bribes, rare copies of the Koran laced with bank notes. Memlik himself sits in quiet potential judgment. Time is on the side of his growing riches; he makes it clear to Nessim that this blackmail guarantees him nothing, save its own perpetual nature.

"At some moments, I am not bound to commit myself to particular action. But at others, I may be so bound. Therefore, Nessim Hosnani, the wise man removes the grounds for complaints” (Mountolive, p. 262)•

0 In such a situation Memlik, in theory, can only be made to act by the King. But the King is ill, and meanwhile

Memlik grows richer. The impasse is finally resolved, to only Memlik's satisfaction, by his barber Rafael, who suggests action against Narouz instead: "the papers you

* 278 received £rom his Excellence were signed Hosnani— in the family name. Who is to say which brother signed them, which is guilty and which innocent?” (Mountolive, p. 274). It is a fine way out— for Memlik; the goose who provides the golden eggs will survive, while punishment will be meted out to satisfy the British. Nessim, long tormented by the possibility of his having to kill Narouz himself to protect the Palestinian plot,3 finds the assassination carried out successfully by Memlik*s agents.

Darley's love affair with Justine, around which both

Justine and Balthazar revolve, is only a footnote to this complex political activity that lies at the heart of

Mountolive. Indeed, Darley is connected to the central matter of Mountolive only through the innocuous Melissa, whom he pities but does not love, and she in turn has a role to play only through her former lover Cohen, the old furrier-French agent whom she abandons on his deathbed to more of Darley's misplaced pity. Thus Darley, from the perspective of Mountolive. owes Justine's attentions en­ tirely to Cohen's political importance. It is a part of

Nessim*s and Justine's Faustian compact; as he explains it to her,

”... all this must be kept from our well- wishers here, the British and the French. . . . As yet, I think they don't suspect. But among them all there are two people who particularly concern us. Darley's liaison with the little Melissa is one point ndvralgioue; as I told you 279

she was the mistress of old Cohen who died this year. He was our chief agent for arms shipments, and knew all about us. Did he tell her any­ thing?” (Mountolive« p. 204)

Pursewarden turns out to be the other person of concern;

it is thus no coincidence that, to Darley's dismay,

Pursewarden also turns out to be his "rival" for Justine's

"love." Pursewarden himself, of course, is deeply in­ volved in the central concerns of Mountolive; he repre­

sents a far greater threat to Nessim*s and Justine's plot

than does Darley, whose role becomes more and more peri­ pheral, paradoxically enough, as his involvement with

Justine increases. As Justine describes him to Nessim,

"he is a good person . . . though now he is very much

afraid of you and invents all sorts of bogies with which

to frighten himself. He makes me feel sad, he is so helpless" (Mountolive, p. 210). Justine finds Pursewarden,

in contrast, a different problem.

"Darley is so sentimental and so loyal to me that he constitutes no danger at all. Even if he came into the possession of information which might harm us, he would not use it, he would bury it. Not PursewardenI" Now her eyes glittered. "He is somehow cold and clever and self-centred. Completely amoral— like an Egyptian1 He would not deeply care if we died tomorrow" (Mountolive, p. 210).

Darley, in viewing Alexandria as a stage for love above all else, finds little else there; his omission of what little he knows about Nessim'8 "obscure political ends," however, turns out to have been an ignoring of the tip of a vast 280

iceberg that does have great bearing, if not on his rela- * tionship with Justine, Justine's relationship with him.

And it seems he has made still another miscalculation:

Nessim has been jealous of, if anyone, Pursewarden, "ter­

rified" that Justine "may be falling in love with him"

(Mountolive, p. 211). Darley, good person that he is, is only the more easily duped for all that in Mountolive: the

hard fact of the matter is that he is not competent in

this world of hard political facts where all revolves around power, not sex.

Like Mountolive. Clea opens in a political setting as

Darley returns to Alexandria in the midst of World War IX.

Indeed, the political aspect of the Quartet in Clea would

seem to be greatly expanded: stretching far beyond

Egyptian politics, this war is global, seemingly reducing

Nessim's and Justine's Palestinian plot to insignificance.

In Clea it is not simply a question of diplomatic policy as conceived by Mountolive or the King and as warped for per­ sonal gain by the likes of Memlik Pasha; everyone's diplo­ matic .policies everywhere are at stake, and everywhere, as evidenced by the war, these policies fail to the extent that they cannot replace the rear of guns with the discus­ sion of negotiations. Even Darley's island, haven from « * Alexandrian love, is threatened by this global failure of diplomacy. 281

It had come so softly towards us over the waters, this war; gradually, as clouds which quietly fill in a horizon from end to end. But as yet it had not broken. Only the rumour of it gripped the heart with conflicting hopes and fears. At first it had seemed to portend the end of the so-called civilised world, but this hope soon proved vain. No, it was to be as al­ ways simply the end of kindness and safety and moderate ways; the end of the artist's hopes, of nonchalance, of joy (Clea , p. 21).

Darley indicates that he would prefer the war's obliterat­ ing the "so-called civilised world," removing at least the inherent, entrenched disadvantages he has found to be so ironically uncivilized in the civilization he knows, to what it seems bent on doing: destroying only those values tolerated if not nurtured by civilization worth keeping, from kindness to the artist's hopes to joy. If this war is to be as other wars, stopping short of the final over­ throw of civilization from which survivors, if any, might start anew to make a better world, it has for Darley only one modest advantage, "a certain truthfulness," since

"death heightens every tension and permits us fewer of the half-truths by which we normally live" (Clea, p. 21).4

Later John Keats, the reporter whose obsession with the trivial fact has earlier drawn Darley's ire (see above, p. 233), goes even further in his own praise of living in close proximity to death; in his view, war is the response not to a political failure but to'a spiritual one.

"I believe the desire for war was first lodged in the instincts as a biological shock-mechanism to 282

precipitate a spiritual crisis which couldn't be done any other how in limited people. The less sensitive among us can hardly visualize death, far less live joyfully with it. So the powers that arranged things for us felt they must con­ cretise it, in order to lodge death in the actual present. Purely helpfully, if you see what I meant" (Clea, p. 183)

Moreover, according to this new Keats who bears "absolutely no resemblance" (Clea, p. 179) to the man Darley had re­ membered, if this war does not mean "the end of the so- called civilised world" it does mean, for him personally, the heady and liberating end of "civilized" behavior. As he tells Darley, "the general idea may be summed up in the expressive phrase: *If you can't eat it or **** it, then **** on it.' Two thousand years of civilisation! Xt peels off in a flash" (Clea, p. 182). So that although

Clea takes place in an ostensibly more politicized set­ ting than does Mountolive, it is a novel (like Justine and Balthazar) that agrees with Pursewarden's emphasis on values and not policies, one in which political solutions

— or failures— are not the ones that count.

Indeed, neither Darley nor Keats agrees with that fundamental political principle that the particular civ­ ilization— all human activity.in and governed by a partic­ ular political state— is that which must be preserved at all costs, even a world war. For Keats, wars represent not political but spiritual failures, and an effort to cor­ rect this failure on a spiritual plane: "... the presence 283 of death out there as a normal feature of life-only in full acceleration as to speak— has given me an inkling of

Life Everlasting1" (Clea, p. 183). For Darley, as he meets

Pombal on his return to Alexandria, the war seems also to be connected to a psychic failure: "... the silence we observed was one of pain for the fall of France, an event which symbolised all too clearly the psychic collapse of

Europe itself” (Clea, p. 36). Clea too sees the war in terms of a psychic problem, as the result of a devas- tatingly simple neurosis that lies at the heart of the political perspective; she cannot agree with Pombal that a political reaction to the fall of France will solve the real problem.

”1 cannot see these soldiers as Pombal does. He gloats on them like a child— as if they were bright lead soldiers— because he sees in them the only hope that France will be freed. I only feel ashamed for them, as one might to see friends in convict garb; out of shame and sympathy I feel like turning my face away. O Darley, it isn't very sensible and I know I am doing them a gro­ tesque injustice. . . . Curiously, what I hate most about it all is the sentimentality which spells violence in the endt” (Clea, p. 105).

Such a connection between sentimentality and violence has been noted previously by Melissa in Mountolive, as she listens to Pursewarden pontificate about love, sharing with her "treasures of that mysterious male world which oscillated always between sottish sentimentality and brutish violencel” (Mountolive. p. 176). But by the time 284

of Clea the treasures are suspended, the mad oscillation

between sentimentality and violence having entirely taken

over in the form of war. The effect of this war on

Darley1s narration of Clea is to lead him to widen the

field, of his vision, to investigate modern civilization as well as modern love. And as he begins to fulfill his

potential as both lover and artist he begins to see that

civilizations suffer from the same neuroses that make love

and art painful to their individual lovers and artists.

Hard political facts, which seemed to explain so much in

Mountolive. finally suggest no remedies for a civiliza­

tion or the individuals associated with it; indeed, they

obscure the nature of the problem, which Darley comes to

see as spiritual or psychic and not political at all. The

health of the psyche, to be sure, is an elusive and diffi­

cult goal for either a civilization or an individual, but

it is the one that matters, and the quest for it becomes

still another major theme in The Alexandria Quartet. 28S

NOTES: CHAPTER VI

^-Beginning with Balthazar, Scobie takes over most of the functions served by pombal in Justine, becoming the primary comic character in the Quartet, in Justine. how­ ever, Scobie is less prominently displayed than Pombal, who as parley's flat-mate provides a comic contrast to Darley's intensely serious approach to love.

2 a s an example of Balthazar's knowledge of Nessim's politics, see the conversation (reconstructed by Darley from Balthazar's notes) on pp. 93-94 of Balthazar. The doctor's knowledge is rudimentary: the British and the French are working at cross-purposes, Nessim intends to use them both in some unspecified way that requires the political meetings in the desert to appear to be non­ political in nature, the Egyptian government was informed immediately about Cohen's mission in Syria (according to Balthazar, a mission undertaken for the French). But this knowledge is beyond that which Darley possesses in Justine.

^The "madness" Darley has observed in Nessim in Justine, which he attributes to jealousy and thus leads him to fear Nessim greatly, is explained in Mountolive as re­ sulting from Narouz's evangelical insubordination. His younger brother has become a fanatic and powerful holy leader of the Copts in the desert, and his preaching has drawn too much attention to those desert meetings de­ signed to smuggle arms into Palestine. In other words, Narouz's religious solutions to the Coptic dilemma threaten Nessim's carefully plotted political ones. But Nessim, who loves Narouz, cannot act; he tells Justine that this is the cause of his apparent "madness," which may well be a state approaching psychosis: "I am faced with the terrible possibility of having to do away with Narouz. That is why I have been feeling half-mad. He has got com­ pletely out of hand. And I don't know what to do. I don't know what to dol'" (Mountolive, p. 213)

*Darley has earlier mentioned the advantages of living in the explicit presence of death. At the duck hunt on Lake Mareotis in Justine he remarks that "it is extraor­ dinary how the prospect of death closes down upon the free play of the mind, like a steel shutter, cutting off the future which alone is nourished by hopes and wishes" (Jus­ tine. p. 216). He is momentarily freed, parodixically enough, from his fears that Nessim might kill him out of jealousy. In Clea, of course, the awareness of the presence of death, springing as it does from a war rather than a duck shoot, is a continuing and not a momentary aspect of life. CHAPTER VII

PSYCHIC HEALTH

The Theme o£ Psychic Health Fourth, Neurosis is no Excuse

"And then (listen) I think that very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physi­ cal act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this . truth— a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them." — Pursewarden to Justine in Balthazar

"Sexual love is knowledge, both in etymology and in cold fact;“rheknew her* as the Bible says! Sex is the joint or coupling which unites the male and female ends of knowledge merely— a cloud of unknowing! When a culture goes bad in its sex all knowledge is impeded." — Clea to Darley in Clea

"One stumbles over it at every turn of the road, doesn't one; under every sofa the same corpse, in every cupboard the same skeleton? What one do but laugh?" — Justine to Darley in Clea

The Alexandria Quartet abounds in disfigured, maimed, even grotesque figures; a catalogue of missing parts of the body alone would be quite extensive, having to include eyes, a nose, a hand, a finger,* and a tongue as well as the usual concessions to time such as thinning hair and missing teeth. In some cases it is the hand of the potter that has shaken, as in Narouz's harelip; in others, disease (Semira's missing nose) or war (Nessim's missing finger and eye) are to blame. The doctors of Alexandria are sometimes successful in creating spare parts for the maimed (Semira's nose, Clea's hand), sometimes helpless

(none of the multitude of blind eyes is made to see again), and sometimes unfortunately unconsulted (the

Hosnanis do not bother to have Narouz's lip sewn in time).

In view of all this physical abnormality it might appear that the relative psychic health or mental illness of these

Alexandrians might be better treated as subordinate to the larger theme of physical health and disease in such a thematic study as this. It seems to me, however, that while the plethora of physical abnormalities is striking in the Quartet, the mental aberrations are those which matter, aberrations which are analogous not to the grave­ yard of relative facts which finally yield no significant answers but to the mythopoeic reference which underlies fact, which gives meaning, if not specific answers, to the patterns Darley investigates. It is not the obvious loss of a finger that matters about Nessim, then, but the nature and degree of his "madness," not Semira's missing * nose but how it affects her behavior. Moreover, there is an underlying assumption in the Quartet as a whole that both physical and mental health are dependent on the health of the psyche, an id

German psychologist Georg Groddeck.^ Then too, the major characters here are strikingly mental beings; from Dar­ ley's opening mental intimacy with Justine through the aphorisms of Arnauti, Pursewarden, and Balthazar as well as Darley himself to the book-lined shelves of Justine and

Leila, the Quartet pursues Pursewarden's quest for "some simple and concrete word" (Mountolive, p. 171). A mind in some way less than healthy is a matter of great concern to such mental beings, a far more serious defect than a missing organ or appendage. Finally, if sex itself is a psychic act, and if a failure in sex impedes all knowledge on a cultural as well as an individual level, the psyche itself must lie at the heart of the matter: love, art, and by extension culture itself all depends on the psyche's health.

A theme such as the health of the psyche might seem to demand a prescriptive treatment, although the required prescription must obviously be a bit more complex than

"take two aspirins and call me in the morning." He must remember, however, that the themes of love and art have also been treated prescriptively to a degree in that the nature of the aphorism itself is prescriptive in being a pithy solution to some human problem, a compact touchstone to human behavior differing from the clichd more in the freshness of its expression than in the scope or quality of its advice. Darley's investigations lead him to formulate a vast quantity of rules about both love and art, and to record a great number of similar prescriptions made by other Alexandrians. What saves his observations on love and art from finally adding up to simple (and simple minded) guidebooks implicitly entitled "How to Make Love" or "How to Make Art" are two aspects of these rules them­ selves: first, that the rules are not only abundant but also that they quarrel among themselves, often to the extent of being self-contradictory, so that one may not follow them all at any one time but must break some while following others, and second that a knowledge of the rules is no guarantee that one is capable of following them any­ way. The health of the psyche receives the same treat­ ment in the Quartett the advice is conflicting or contra­ dictory, and it is also difficult to follow. Zt is in this light that we must view advice about the health of the psyche such as Pursewarden'8; he tends to see the key to the well-tempered psyche in the power of laughter rather than in Justine's brooding side-trips through her own dark mind: "it is after all the serious who disturb the peace of the heart with their antics— like Justine" (Balthasar, p. 239). Here laughter is seen as the antidote to the modern distemper of self-consciousness; Pursewarden can represent "the effortless play of a mind which was no long-

• er conscious of itself" (Mountolive, p. 65), while Nessim represents the artistic impotency caused by self-con­ sciousness, which "like a poison" seems "to eat into the

very paint, making it sluggish and dead" (Justine, p. 160).

Self-consciousness is also an enemy of love in that it

inhibits the sense of play, most often referred to in the

context of love as a "sense of mischief" (Justine, p. 19;

Clea, p. 95), threatening to turn the experience of love

into an impossible, overserious confrontation with the

self, producing the state of things which Pursewarden most bemoans, "the lack of tenderness in the world" (Jus­

tine, p. 244). Pursewarden*s prescription for psychic health, one he also extends to the health of civiliza­

tions as well as that of individuals,^ is thus to conquer

self-consciousness through laughter to achieve tenderness.

Or, to use his own aphoristic touchstone, "the imperatives

from which there is no escape are: "Laugh till it hurts,

and hurt till you laugh!" (Clea, p. 138).

Pursewarden's prescription is basic to the theme of psychic health in the Quartet, yet as with the themes of

love and art the prescription is neither so basically log­

ical nor so easily followed as one might presume from one

fundamental turn of phrase. For one thing, the simple com­ mand "laugh," like the simple'command "love me," most always produces the opposite effect, so that "be serious" or "go away" would seem to be the- requisite imperatives one must elicit from others. It is not in those passages where Pursewarden drones on, logically and seriously, about 291 the power of laughter that we get any sense of laughter itself; indeed, Pursewarden seems to grow more and more self-conscious about the power of laughter, contradicting the very message he propounds.^ Then too, Pursewarden1s suicide, for whatever motive, does not argue convincingly for his own personal ability to follow his own program for psychic health. And even Justine, the prime represents** tive of "the serious who disturb the peace of the heart with their antics," comes finally to conclude "what can one do but laugh?" (Clea, p. 61) only to quickly behave in a diametrically opposed mariner, begging in serious suppli­ cation for Darley's comfort.

. . . I awoke to find her standing beside the bed naked, with her hands joined in supplication like an Arab mendicant, like some beggar-woman of the streets. I started up. "I ask nothing of you" she said, "nothing at all but only to lie in your arms for the comfort of it. My head is bursting tonight and the medicines won't bring sleep. I do not want to be left to the mercies of my own imagination. Only for the comfort, Darley. A few strokes and endearments, that is all I beg you" (Clea, p. 61)•

Neither Justine nor Pursewarden, it seems is capable of following the rules of psychic health, even though Purse­ warden has entrapped most of them in the mesh of his prose, even though he has taught most of them to Justine through his actions. This is not to say, however, that no pro­ gression is made in the Quartet toward psychic health.

Darley, who begins more blinded by than knowledgeable about love, who begins with first-class artistic equipment 292 without being a first-class artist, also begins despond­ ently enough, suffering from a fundamental malaise: "this is the first time I have experienced a real failure of the will to survive" (Justine, p. 22). His progress as lover and as artist in the course of the Quartet is paralleled by, perhaps even made possible by, his progress from de­ pression to a much more psychically healthy state. That

Clea also progresses in all three areas makes possible that final projected reunion in France, a reunion of two real human beings, two artists at last.

The depression in which Darley finds himself en­ meshed at the beginning of Justine precedes not only his relationship with Justine but also his relationship with

Melissa. A pervasive lack of interest in everything has continued for a year, and for Darley it is clear that such a state of affairs lies beyond the power of his now weak­ ened and ineffectual will to change.

In this last year I have reached a dead end in my­ self. I lack the will-power to do anything with my life, to better my position by hard work, to write: even to make love. . . . This is the first time I have experienced a real failure of the will to survive. Occasionally I turn over an old bundle of manuscripts or an old proof-copy of a novel or book of poems with disgusted inattention) with sadness, like someone studying an old pass- port (Justine, pp. 21-22).

Darley can no longer even pay attention to his own writing) the passport to his imagination, as it were, is no longer valid, having become only a melancholy reminder of his 293

travels in the past. He has no real interest in making

love either, although he points out that Nif necessary I

can even make love with relief, as one does not sleep very well here: but without passion, without attention" (Jus­

tine. p. 22). This is the state of mind in which he meets

Melissa and, since he himself is will-less and inatten­

tive, passively allows her to do what she can for him.

Z record this only to show the unpromising human material upon which Melissa elected to work, to blow some breath of life into my nos­ trils. Xt could not have been easy for her to bear the double burden to her own poor circum­ stances and illness. , To add my burdens to hers demanded real courage. Perhaps it was born of desperation, for she too had reached the dead level of things, as Z myself had. We were fellow- bankrupts (Justine, pp. 22-23).

Thus their relationship is from the first based on a common misfortune, on having reached "the dead level of things,” a love based more on the proposition that "misery loves company" than on the assertion "x love you." Xt is no wonder, then, that Justine has no difficulty in "winning"

Darley from Melissa; among other things, her actively

self-destructive behavior is much more alluring than

Melissa's patient adding of Darley's burdens to her own.

Justine herself, of course, is no epitome of psychic health, but in her active struggles against the Check, in her rage to know the truth about herself, she displays a> vitality far beyond either Melissa or Darley's meager attempts to recover from their bankruptcies. Paradoxically 294 enough, all reasonable attempts to help her regain her peace of mind fail} indeed, as Arnauti discovers while Jus­ tine is being treated by Freud himself, she willfully

Bcorns assistance, refusing to reveal the name of the re­ lation who had raped her.

"We carried her disease backwards and forwards over Europe like a baby in a cradle until I began to despair, and even to imagine that perhaps Jus­ tine did not wish to be cured of it. For to the involuntary check of the psyche she added another — of the will. Why thiB should be I cannot under­ stand; but she would tell no one his name, the shadow's name" (Justine, pp. 79-80).

As he continues to mull over the whole process of Justine's psychoanalysis in Moeurs, Arnauti begins to think that such a "reasonable" approach--to seek the best medical treatment possible— has been a mistake. The treatments themselves, the necessarily increased emphasis on the Check as a prob­ lem, seem to have further separated the operations of

Justine's psyche from her sexual behavior rather than inte­ grating the two.

"Perhaps we did wrong in speaking of it openly, of treating it as a problem, for this only invested her with a feeling of self-importance and moreover contributed a nervous hesitation to her which until then had been missing. In her passional life she was direct— like an axe falling" (Justine, p. 81).

The primary disease of the psyche, later to be defined by

Pursewarden as "self-consciousness," is represented here

• ♦ in Justine's "nervous hesitation" as well as in her in­ creasing self-importance, paradoxically a result of medical treatment itself; Pursewarden's cure of laughter, on the other hand, would be good advice but extremely difficult 295

for the humorless Justine to follow. In the end, the prob­

lem seems to be insoluble. The diseased psyche appears to

be much too complex to be treated, and the result must be,

besides exacerbation of the problem itself, a colossal

waste of time, time Arnauti now thinks cpuld have been better spent making love.

"The time we wasted upon futile researches into her likes and dislikes1 If Justine had been blessed with a sense of humour what fun she could have had with us. . . . It is a matter of deep regret to me now that I wasted this time when I should have been loving her as she deserved” (Jus­ tine, pp. 82-83).

Later, both Nessim and Parley are incorporated into Jus­ tine's endless, self-important quest for a cure to the

Check, also wasting time, also contributing to her sense of self-importance, which by this time has become her psychic albatross. In contrast to Justine's rage for brooding, which increases her allure as it diminishes her chances for peace of mind, stands the behavior of

Capodistria, her shadowy rapist,* whose laughter is to Par­ ley "the most natural and unfeigned of any I have ever heard" (Justine, p. 55).

Although Justine's neuroses'seem more exacerbated than

* anything else by medical treatment, however, she remains vital and functional, if desperately unhappy. But Nessim comes quite close to psychosis, to misreading commonplace occurrences to such a degree that he no longer agrees with the basic assumptions about reality which make functional 296 behavior in human society possible. He interprets the most disparate and mundane o£ sensory impressions as being linked in some supra-rational way, as signs o£ super- . natural forces rather than merely unconnected bits and pieces of sensory data. In this way "Balthazar's treatise lying withering in the window of a bookshop and the same day coming upon his father's grave in the Jewish cemetery" #»• ■ (Justine, p. 193) are yoked by supernatural significance together. Nessim's impressions then begin to enter a gray area in which even the sensory data itself ie suspect, although Nessim himself questions neither the data nor his interpretation of it.

Then the question of noises in the room next door: a sort of heavy breathing and the sudden simultaneous playing of three pianos. These, he knew, were not delusions but links in an occult chain, logical and persuasive only to the mind which had passed beyond the frame of causality. It was becoming harder and harder to pretend to be sane by the standards of ordinary behavior (Justine, p. 193).

He does recognize a problem in all this: his mind, in pass­ ing beyond the frame of causality, has passed beyond a fundamental assumption governing ordinary behavior, so that his insight is being purchased at the apparent cost of « his sanity. Then Nessim moves beyond this stage as well, to one in which the sensory data on which he bases his interpretations can be perceived only by himself.

Once his waistcoat started ticking as it hung on the back of a chair, as if inhabited by a colony 297

of foreign heartbeats. But when investigated it stopped and refused to continue for the bene­ fit of Selim whom he had called into the room (Justine» p. 194).

Nessim's psychic malfunctions during this period are more extreme than those of Justine, yet there is a definite characteristic common to both. At the beginning of his madness Nessim himself recognizes "fully . . . that suf­

fering, indeed all illness," is "itself an acute form of

self-importance" (Justine, p. 181). The alternative to this unhealthy self-importance of both Justine and Nessim

in Justine, and indeed to the self-conscious bankruptcy of

Darley and Melissa, is suggested by Clea as she insists

that each individual has only a finite ration of love:

". . . its [love's] destination lies somewhere in the deepest regions of the psyche where it will come to recognize itself as self-love, the ground upon which we build the sort of health of the psyche. I do not mean egotism or narcissism" (Justine, p. 130).

The true object of love, in other words, is not to achieve

love from another or even love for another, but a love for

and from the self, a love beyond both the egotism of self-

importance and the paralysis of self-consciousness.

Clea's insight is an important one, and continues to

be significant in Balthazar, where the relationship between

love and the health of the psyche is again emphasized.

Once more, egotism is described not as a sign of but as a

barrier to the kind of self-love that is love's true des­

tination, a prerequisite to both psychic health and 4

298 successful love relationships. As Darley transcribes it from Balthazar's notes, Clea discovers this basic egotism in Justine; her reaction is pity.

Yet even she [Clea], from her inexperience, could to little but pity Justine when she said things like "I am not much good, you know. I can only inflict sadness, Arnauti used to say. He brought me to my senses and taught me that nothinc matters except pleasure*—-which is the opposite of happi­ ness, its tragic part, I expect.*1 Clea was touched by this because it seemed clear to her that Justine had never really experienced pleas­ ure— one has to be generous for that. Egotism is a fortress in which the conscience de soi-meme, like a corrosive, eats everything away (Balthazar, pp. 52-53.) ------

There is surely little abiding self-love in Justine's self- important "I am not much good, you know." And Clea's pity, like Barley's for Melissa, represents no solid foundation for a love relationship. Yet as she kisses Justine out of an artistic admiration for Justine's magnificent sorrow, she finds herself using up some of her finite ration of love; Clea's "generous innocence" (Balthazar, p. 52) proves to be her own particular kind of bankruptcy, true to Bar­ ley's dictum that "we create our own misfortunes and they bear our own fingerprints" (Balthazar, p. 52).5

The kiss did not for a moment expect itself to be answered by another— to copy itself like the re­ flections of a moth in a 'looking-glass. That would have been too expensive a gesture had it been pre­ meditated. So it proved! Clea's own body simply struggled to disengage itself from the wrappings of its innocence as a baby or a statue struggles for life under the fingers or forcepts of its author. Her bankruptcy was one of extreme youth, Justine's ageless; her innocence was as defenceless 299

as memory itself. Seeking and admiring only the composure of Justine's sorrow she found herself left with all the bitter lye of an uninvited love (Balthazar, p. 52)•

Thus Clea is brought face-to-face with some underlying as­ pects of her own analysis of love in Justinei* to say that

"love is limited in quantity, can be used up, become shop­ worn and faded before it reaches its true object" (Just tine, p. 130) is not necessarily to possess either the will or the simple good fortune to preserve it for its true object. Moreover, even if the true object of love is the health of the psyche resulting from a self-love different from the self-importance of egotism, the experi­ ence of love, missing its true object, is most often akin to madness; as Darley puts it, "the aetiology of love and madness are identical except in degree" (Balthazar, p.

56). And Clea's madness in Balthazar, after kissing Jus­ tine, surely parallels Nessim's in Justine, even though it does not equal it in degree.*^

Clea, however, is not the chief spokesman for the relationship between love and the health of the psyche in the Quartet. It is Pursewarden who, beginning in Baltha­ zar. takes over this role, and who expands the relation- * ship between love and the psyche to include sex. Whereas

Clea's analysis in Justine deals primarily with attitudes towards the self which precede sexual activity, Pursewarden considers sex itself to be psychic and not physical in 300

nature. As Balthazar reports it, Pursewarden tells Justine

that

"'Very few people realize that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth— a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most peo­ ple are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach. That Is why all your dull repetitions of the same mistake are simply like a great boring multiplication table, and will remain so until you get your head out of the paper bag and start to think responsibly'" (Balthazar, p. 124).

This advice has an immediate and profound effect on Jus­

tine, who to Pursewarden's dismay now considers him "a man whom one could 'really love'" (Balthazar, pp. 124-125).

He flees to Cairo alone, she pursues him with a long

letter of thanks which he regards as an unwanted imposi­

tion, he replies with more advice, this time caustic and

short.

"' First nobody can own an artist so be warned. Second what good IfTaT faithful body when the mind is by its very' nature' unfaithful? Third stop whining like an Arab, you know better-! Fourth neurosis is no excuse. Health must Fe won a n d earned by a battle. Lastly^ it is honourable If you can't win to hang“"yourself'" (Balthazar, p. 125).

That "neurosis is no excuse" is particularly relevant to

Justine, who uses her neurosis as an excuse for her self-

important self-concern, a self-concern that of course feeds

her neurosis. It is not, however, the kind of advice that

is capable of bringing her to psychic health;8 she bat­

tles constantly for'health, which only increases her self- 301 concern. Like Pursewarden's command to laugh, it is a difficult prescription to follow. While Justine may be aware that for Pursewarden sex is "the nearest thing to laughter--quite free of particularity, neither sacred nor profane" (Balthazar# p. 118), it does not become so for her, nor does she really understand his point of view, since for Pursewarden sex is actually "comic and sinister and divine in one" (Balthazar# p. 118), both sacred and profane. As for laughter, she does not understand that either, considering the whole matter with a brooding seriousness, disturbing the peace of the heart with her antics. So while the nature of the diseased psyche becomes more and more apparent, the treatment that would achieve a cure, at least for Justine, remains as elusive as ever.

* What Balthazar does give us, instead of a cure for the diseased psyche, is a plethora of details concerning both major and minor characters that directly relates to the theme of psychic health. Analogous to the plethora of lovers and love relationships found in the Quartet as a whole, this accumulation of details furnisheB a vast and varied setting for this theme as the lovers do for the theme of love, suggesting the all-pervasive nature of the topic. The two most obvious kinds of such details in

» * Balthazar relate to two aspects of psychic health pre­ viously identified as belonging to this theme, laughter and madness) laughter, of course, is at least according to

Pursewarden the secret of curing psychic disease, while madness, beyond being an obvious sign of psychic illness, has been related specifically to the torments of unsuccessr ful loving. Discussions of both laughter and madness surely form an important part of Darley*s narration of

Justine; the difference in Balthazar is that many more references are made to minor as well as to major charac­ ters, that allusions to laughter and madness seem almost as prolific as references to love in Justine. Thus in

Balthazar almost everyone's laughter is described, from

Narouz's "curious hissing shy laugh which he always pointed downward into the groundto hide his lip" (Balthazar, p.

68) to the laughter of four of the Sheik's tall men,

"whose laughter was like fury unleashed" (Balthazar, p. 86)•

We never meet the Sheik again, let. alone his men, who are characterized almost entirely by their laughter. Yet by this point in the Quartet a person's laughter does serve to characterize him in giving a quick indication of the state of his psyche. Pursewarden's values now seem dominant, so that Justine's lack of a sense of humor becomes a sign of her relative illness, Narouz's self-conscious laugh be­ comes an indication of psychic distress, and even Baltha­ zar's instruction to Darley to "make room in this for the essential comedy of human relations" (Balthazar, p. 126) is more significant than it might otherwise be in a dif-' ferent context. 303

Similarly, allusions to madness abound, encompassing art and religion as well as love. At the beginning of

Balthazar Darley recalls Pursewarden's judgment that nthe pain that accompanied composition was entirely due in artists, to the fear of madness" (Balthazar, p. 17);

Darley himself remains unconvinced of the value of this judgment, preferring the concrete assistance of Purse­ warden' s legacy to him. In any case, Darley's madness, after the despondency he describes that makes both love and art impossible before he meets either Melissa or Jus­ tine, J.s related to his unsuccessful love relationship with Justine; it is this failure which not only leads him to write Justine but also to feel, as he begins Balthazar, that "his own personal Alexandria" has become "almost a monomania" (Balthazar, p. 19). And there is a strong suggestion, at least in Balthazar, that the madness of the artist springs from a different source from that of the lover.^ The madness that Clea feels as the bewildered lover of Justine is not the kind of illness that produces the pain of composition referred to by Pursewarden; to the contrary, "the distortions of reality were deeply interesting [to Clea] . . . who recognised that for the artist in herself some confusions of sensibility were valuable" (Balthazar, p. 55). Moreover, madness appears to have a positive value in the realm of religion as well. The Magzub, described as "mad," "a maniac," and "holy" at every turn,10 is no less holy for his madness;.indeed, for Narouz he is the more holy for it, since the Magzub has "sought the final truths of religion beneath the mask of madness" (Balthazar, p. 162). Thus madness may be used as a device for seeking religious truth, or as an experience from which to glean artistic expression. The fear of madness, however, and the self-importance it may convey, remain counterproductive, remain signs of the mal­ functioning psyche. The background details referring re­ peatedly to laughter and madness remind us only of the presence of this complex theme; they do not furnish a resolution- in terms of a prescription for psychic health.

Such a resolution is not reached in Mountolive either, which is no surprise when one considers the inclincation of both the title character and the narrator who replaces

Darley toward the world of external facts and the formula­ tion of policies to deal with these facts. Indeed, what is surprising is that Mountolive deals with the health of the psyche at all. But it does, in the same way that it in­ cludes the themes of love and of art: all three themes

# (love, art, the health of the psyche) are subordinate to the theme of politics, all three represent threats to the stable world of hard political facts championed only in this particular novel.In moving in the opposite direc­ tion from the values of the Quartet as a whole, the 305

assumptions that the narrator o£ Mountolive makes about the

nature of reality flatly contradict Pursewarden's observa­

tion that "with every advance from the known to the un­

known, the mystery increases" (Mountolive, p. 165); it makes no'sense to this narrator that the gathering of

additional data would only increase the scope of the prob­

lem, which is assumed to be both external and factual in

nature. In the Quartet as a whole, however, the problems

that must be solved are internal and ultimately psychic in

nature, whether they be Darley*s search for his "proper

self" in the context of Pursewarden's assertion that

"there is no Other; there is only oneself facing forever

the problem of one's self discoveryl" (Clea, pp. 98-99) or

Clea's idea that even love's destination is not external

but internal, toward a kind of self-love beyond egotism or

narcissism. Indeed, according to Pursewarden, sex itself

is psychic and not physical, an analysis Darley agrees

with in Balthazar as he describes the lust of the prosti­

tutes Narouz encounters.

It was the time when the prostitutes came into their own. . . . Every variety of the name of flesh, old flesh quailing upon aged bones, or the unquenched flesh of boys and women on limbs in­ firm with desires that could be represented in effigy but not be slaked except in mime— for they were desires engendered in the forests of the mind, belonging not to themselves but to remote ancestors speaking through them. Lust belongs to the egg and its seat is below the level of psyche (Balthazart pp. 164-165).

None of the apparent desires of the flesh here can be 306

satisfied by the flesh, since they are truly desires of the

mind instead; moreover, they are not even desires of the

individual psyche but those inherent in the species, de­

sires below and beyond the level of the personal psyche

satiable'only through such an archetypal exercise as

mime.^2 And such dilemmas do exist in Mountolive, al-

.though they remain both subordinate to its political world

and a potential threat to its view of reality.

The burden of being spokesman for the nature of the

psyche as well as the world of art in Mountolive naturally

falls *-o Pursewarden, whose position with the Foreign

Office and personal as well as professional contacts with

Mountolive allow him to play a significant role in the

world of politics that is central here. This, of course,

does not mean that Mountolive understands what Pursewarden

has to say about the nature of the psyche, any more than he

understands what he has to say about the world of art (see

above, pp. 244-247). To the intemperately temperate 13 Mountolive, J Pursewarden immediately represents not only

an attractive free spirit but a source of anxiety; as he

writes to Leila,

". . . I must confess that I was much taken by the effortless play of a mind which was no longer conscious of itself. Of course, here and there I stumbled against a coarseness of expression which was boorish, and looked anxiously at his sister, but she only smiled her blind smile, indulgent and uncritical" (Mountolive. p. 65).

Mountolive is neither so indulgent nor so uncritical as he 307

stumbles against "opinions as clear-cut as they were trench­

ant" about politics; he is, indeed, "rather shocked"

(Mountolive, p. 63). "'As for Communism, I can see that is

hopeless too; the analysis of man in terms of economic be­

haviorism takes all the fun out of living, and to divest

him of a personal psyche is madness'" (Mountolive, p. 63).

Trenchant opinions yoking politics and the personal psyche

by violence together are bad enough; those that connect

art to both the significant and the trivial regions of the

psyche in a letter purporting to deal with the political

state cf affairs in Egypt become irritatingly incomprehen­

sible, to say nothing of being irresponsible.

But this generalized sort of conversation [about art] puts me out of humour. For the artist, 1 think, as for the public, no such thing as art exists; it only exists for the critics and those who live in the forebrain. Artist and public simply register, like a seismograph, an electro­ magnetic charge which can't be rationalized. . . . To try to break down the elements and nose them over— one gets nowhere. (I suspect this approach to art is common to all those who cannot surren­ der themselves to itl) Paradox. Anyway (Mount­ olive, p. 115).

Those who live in the forebrain? Electromagnetic charges . which can't be rationalized? A paradox— no matter? All

this means nothing to Mountolive beyond contributing to a

general impression that Pursewarden's tone is "annoying"

(Mountolive, p. 129).

Indeed, Pursewarden's statement about "the forebrain"

remains enigmatic to the reader as well, until Nessim 308 defines the term much later in reflecting about his beloved

* problem brother, Narouz.

And then it slowly came upon him that in a para­ doxical sort of way Narouz was right in his de­ sire to inflame the sleeping will— for he saw the world, not so much as a political chessboard but as a pulse beating within a greater will which only the poetry of the psalms could invoke and body forth. To awaken not merely the impulses of the forebrain with its limited formulations, but the sleeping beauty underneath— the poetic conscious­ ness which lay, coiled like a spring, in the heart of everyone. This thought frightened him not a little; for he suddenly saw that his brother might be a religious leader, but for the prevail­ ing circumstances of time and place— these, at least, Nessim could judge (Mountolive, p. 231).

The fcjebrain, as described by Nessim, is the locus of superficial calculations or "limited formulations," where presumably collections of relative facts are moved from place to place in their graveyard. If we assume that this description of the "forebrain" agrees with Pursewarden*s use of the term, his point then has been that those who live in the forebrain (and we must presume, from his syn­ tax, that critics are to be included among those who at least act as if they lived in this realm of limited formu­ lations) , who insist on talking about "art," are those who miss the worth of art altogether through their superficial and calculated approach, one begun and concluded on the wrong level of the psyche. Be thfct as it may, however,

* Mountolive is a novel embracing the limited formulations of

4 the forebrain, and those who strive for more wind up with 309 proportionately less. Neither Pursewarden nor Narouz sur­ vives "the prevailing circumstances of time and place"; in this novel the forebrain is mightier than the poetic con­ sciousness beneath and, correctly seeing the poetic con­ sciousness as a threat, manages to destroy it capricously and crassly, through the awesome unreasoning power of cir­ cumstance. The iroiyof Pursewarden*s suicide's depending on, among other things, Mountolive's resolve not to show irresolution in front of Kenilworth (see above, p. 275), and the irony of Narouz's assassination's being the result of a barrier's advice (see above, p. 277) is lost on Mount­ olive, who may well be seen as the primary representative of those who live in the forebrain.

Although there is no ironic chuckle from the humor­ less Ambassador, however, there is a suggestion that he participates in the madness that surrounds him. His reply to Leila's madness ("These attacks only last a day or two at most. "— Mountolive, p. 59) is to patiently undertake to reassure her about her past by journeying here and there all over Europe.3,4 it is true that he has no knowledge of Nessim'8 madness, springing from the necessity of kill­ ing Narouz ("He [Nessim] had the sensation of things clos­ ing in upon him, of himself beginning slowly to suffocate under the weight of the cares he had himself invented.

Mountolive, pp. 219-220), knowing only the necessity of making formal complaints to Memlik Pasha about Nessim. 310

Nor is he aware of the madness of the lamentations for the dead Narouz, "an orgiastic frenzy which bordered on mad­ ness" (Mountolive, p. 314). Yet Mountolive has his own bout of madness after he refuses Leila's request to "save"

Nessim; "he felt as if somewhere inside himself a dam were threatened, a barrier was on the point of giving way"

(Mountolive, p. 285). As an antidote, he decides on going to the Arab quarter dressed in a red felt tarbush and dark glasses. He meets an old man there who, he first assumes, will reveal to him some vast religious insight.

They stepped into the street together; Mount­ olive1 s romantic heart was beating wildly--was he now to be vouchsafed some mystical vision of re­ ligious truth? He had so often heard stories of the bazaars and the religious men who lurked there, waiting to fulfill secret missions on behalf of that unseen world, the numinous, care­ fully guarded world of the hermetic doctors (Mountolive, pp. 289-290).

So pervasive is his romantic wonder that even as he reaches his destination he is reminded of "a girls' dormitory at school" (Mountolive, p. 291). It is, however, a house of child prostitutes that he had been led to, a kind of in­ ferno of the psyche in effect, where "fingers roved over him like ants" (Mountolive, p. 292); he emerges— how he does not know— without tarbush, dark glasses, money, or car keys, determined to ask for a transfer from Egypt. The request leaves him where he began: out of touch with his own feelings, to such an extent that the King's recovery and the probability that Memlik will finally have to act 311 makes no personal impression on him.

He no longer cared what was going to happen. His decision to ask for a transfer of post seemed to have absolved him in a curious way from any fur­ ther personal responsibility as regards his own feelings (Mountolive, p. 296).

As we leave Mountolive sadly contemplating his sausage dog,

the health of the psyche remains as elusive as ever. In­ deed, we leave him in approximately the state in which we meet Darley in Justine, surely lacking the will to feel

if not the will to survive. The political problem, on the other hand, is resolved. Someone must pay for Nessim*s

Palestinian plot, and Narouz pays, however illogically. It is only in Clea that the health of the psyche is

attained, primarily by Darley and Clea, to some signifi­ cant degree. This is not to say, however, that it is easily or simply attained; indeed, the customary barriers to psychic health are still present. Both love and art have been depicted as fundamentally related to the state of the psyche*s health, although in apparently different ways; the psychic pain Clea feels in Balthazar as a result of her unsuccessful love affair with Justine proves to be valuable for her as an artist, and the pain Darley suffers as one more of Justine's victims in love likewise leads him to write both Justine and Balthazar. In Clea. however, the relationship between art and the heaith of the psyche is

seen to be exactly analogous to, if not identical to, that 312 between love and the psyche. Once again, Pursewarden makes the major pronouncement, this time as an item in his note­ book intended for Darley.

"I realised that to become an artist one must shed the whole complex of egotisms which led to the choice of self-expression as the only means of growth! This because it is impossible Z call The Whole Joke!" (Clea, p. 128)

Just as egotism makes self-love impossible and thus di­ verts love, as Clea has put it in Justine, from its true object, so egotism is the fundamental barrier between the artist and his art. Pursewarden converts this dilemma into a "joke" as is his wont; the joke in this case is on mankind, but the author of the trilogy God is a Humourist is used to such cosmic chuckles. As he tells Clea after she has made a modest request, in French to avoid its sounding dirty, for him to rid her of her virginity, the problem in art lies in the self, specifically in one's own self-conception. '"The real obstacle is oneself. I believe that artists are composed of vanity, indolence and self-regard. Work-blocks are caused by the swelling-up of the ego on one or all of these fronts. You get a bit scared about the imaginary importance of what you are doing! Mirror-worship. My solution would be to slap a poultice on the in­ flamed parts— tell your ego to go to hell and not make a misery of what should be essentially fun, joy1" (Clea, p. 110). The real problem described here might well be that of love instead of art; love in the Quartet is perhaps described more frequently in terms of mirror-worship than in terms of 313

* anything else as each lover, gazing into the eyes of the beloved, finds himself--although he refuses to recognize the fact in his determined blindness— gazing at his own image mirrored there. Both love and art should be essen­ tially fun and joy. Yet neither is in the majority of cases in the Quartet; the ego swells painfully, the ex­ perience comes closer to being like that of "pressing a bruise" than like "slapping a poultice on the inflamed parts."

If Pursewarden puts his finger on a heretofore unde­ fined '.rtistic problem in clea (the barrier erected be­ tween the artist and his art by the ego), then the prob­ lem itself has been met before in the context of love.

Indeed, it is fundamentally a problem of the psyche, one that as yet has failed to yield a successful treatment leading to a cure, other familiar aspects of the theme of the health of the psyche appear in Clea as well. For one thing, as in Balthazar love itself remains a synonym for illness; Darley makes the connection once more as he in­ voluntarily remarks to Clea that "it is Amaril you're in love with" (Clea, p. 256).

Between us we had never used this dreadful word [love 1— this synonym for derangement or illness— and if I deliberately used it now it was to sig­ nify my recognition of the thing's autonomous nature. It was rather like saying "My poor child,* you have got cancerl" (Clea, p. 256).

This, of course, advances the central situation not at all, 3 1 4 not because Darley has the tense wrong {"'Past tense now,

alasI'" Clea reminds him— Cleat p. 256) but because there

is as yet no successful treatment for the malignancy of

love; not mentioning the word "love" has simply been an exercise in tact, like not mentioning the word "death"

to the dying* It is true that such "treatments" as Purse- warden's pointed advice to Justine have appeared to be

promising; she tells Darley that Pursewarden has helped her more with "The Check" than anyone else.

"*Clearly you enjoyed it, as any child would, and probably even invited it. . . . Try dropping this invented guilt and telling yourself that the thing was both pleasurable and meaningless. Every neurosis is made to measure11 It was curious that a few words like this, and an ironic chuckle, could do what all the others could not do for me" (Clea, p. 59).

But the advice does not seem to do enough for Justine, not nearly as much as she insists it does. "Every neurosis is made to measure" is a familiar aspect of the theme of psychic health, akin to Darley*s statement in Balthazar

that "we create our own misfortunes and they bear our own

fingerprints" (see above, p. 298). Furthermore, Justine

is still busily proving the truth of the adage.

So she went on, hardly heeding me, arguing my life away, moving obsessively up and down the cobweb of her own devising, creating images and beheading them instantly before my eyes. What could she hope to prove? (Clea, p. 54)

Justine may well hope to prove that Pursewarden has de- * 4 vised a successful treatment for her; her actions, however, 3X5

tell us that he has only pinpointed the problem, that she

is far from cured.

In short, these familiar aspects of the theme of the

health of the psyche yield a familiar result: the disease

is painstakingly defined, but the cure remains elusive.

Pursewarden's general prescription, "laugh till it hurts,

and hurt till you laugh!" (Clea, p. 138) does not in it­

self turn the general direction of this theme around in

Clea. It is good advice, as I have pointed out, but it is

also extremely difficult to follow as an imperative (see

above, pp. 290-291). Indeed, while laughter is truly an

enemy of self-consciousness as Pursewarden insists, the

enmity is mutual; as Clea points out to Darley after he begins a highly complimentary discussion of her new laugh,

self-consciousness is a natural enemy of laughter as well:

"'Don't make me self-conscious because I so much want to

laugh with you. You'll turn it into a croak" (Clea, p. 77).

Moreover, even Pursewarden himself finds laughter to be a

perplexingly difficult weapon to wield; after composing a particularly bawdy (and particularly funny) p o e m , ^5 he

immediately reconsiders the value of such verse: "I break off here in some confusion, for I see that I am in danger of not taking myself as seriously as I should! And this

is an unpardonable offence" (Clea, p. 133). If self-

importance is counter-productive, not taking oneself as

seriously as one deserves is no better. 316

Beyond this familiar failure to find a cure for the diseases of the psyche in Clea we find those same back­ ground details concerning laughter and madness that pro­

liferated in Balthazar. As Clea points out to Darley, Liza

Pursewarden herself is one of those persons who never

laughs, which contributes fundamentally to Clea's being

"startled and upset" by Liza's manner (Clea, p. 115).

"I think a cardinal factor in all this is that Liza lacks a sense of humour; when I said that in thinking of Pursewarden I found myself in­ stinctively smiling she put on a puzzled frown of interrogation merely. It is possible that they never laughed together, I told myBelf. • . (Clea, p. 116).

Characters are again being delineated by their ability to

laugh, and once more this type of characterization is used

for minor as well as major figures. Even Fosca, important much more for the effect her love and violent death have on

Pombal than in her own right, is described in terms of her

laughter; "she never laughed aloud, and her smile had a

touch of reflective sadness in it" (Clea, p. 161). As for madness, Darley discovers on his return to Alexandria that

none other than Balthazar has suffered a psychic collapse

and attempted suicide. It has been, as Balthazar explains

* it, a madness related not only to love but to the aging

process, not only to the specific act of sex but also to

the biological fact of sex and its effect upon the psyche;

"... the real culprits are these, I think, these false teeth in the glasB. Don't they glitter be- witchingly? I am sure it was the teeth which set 317

me off. When I found that I was about to lose my teeth I suddenly began to behave like a woman at the change of life. How else can 1 ex­ plain falling in love like a youth?" He cauter­ ised the question with a dazed laugh (Clea, p. 67).

There are, of course, other explanations; as we have seen, vanity, self-importance, and self-consciousness are not limited to yourths and older men about to lose their teeth.

But such explanations do not seem at all satisfactory to one while he is in love, nor do they— even if recognized as valid— prevent the psychic pain of a love actively seeking something other than its true object. Balthazar's madness, differing from his love only in degree, might as well be explained in terms of false teeth as anything else; it will do no harm, and no explanation seems to do any lasting good.

Yet the health of the psyche is attained in Clea, despite all these details that seem to indicate that such a goal represents an impossible dream, a chimera always necessary yet ever out of reach. The whole of Clea may be seen as the successful if difficult struggle of both

Darley and Clea to achieve psychic health; their eventual success is reflected in their increased capacities for both love and art by the end of the novel. Darley's return to

Alexandria at the beginning of Clea represents his first

step toward psychic health as he confronts once more that city where he was first deeply wounded in his sex; he has, it is true, confronted it both in his mind and on paper 318 since his departure, but his return to the actual city and its real inhabitants is a necessary test of his state of mind. His exile has removed the immediate pressures of having to live in Alexandria, but he has yet to disprove the dark prophecy of "The City," the poem by Cavafy trans­ lated in Justine that reflects the circumstances of his original departure.

The city is a cage No other places, always this Your earthly landfall, and no ship exists To take you from yourself. Ahl don't you see Just as you've ruined your life in this One plot of ground you've ruined its worth Everywhere now— ever the whole earth? (Justine, p. 252)

Upon his return, however, Darley discovers that he has changed, not by a successful re-working of reality on his island but by his inability to recapture Alexandria through art; "if 1 had been enriched by the experience of this island interlude, it was perhaps because of this total failure to record the inner truth of the city" (Clea, p. 12).

He does seem to have been enriched, yet two questions re­ main: how enriched, and for how long? Alexandria is the only place where Darley can find the answers.

As Darley stops his obsessive pursuit of Justine, and wins Clea without either premeditation or extensive self- analysis, we see that his exile has been, at least to some extent, a successful treatment. On his island he remains dominated by his image of Justine; once more in her 319

presence, however, this situation is reversed: it is Jus­

tine who is vulnerable, finding his indifference intoler­

able.

The she placed her head briefly against my knee and said: "Now that I am free to hate or love it is comical to feel only fury at this new self- possession of yours 1 You have escaped me some­ where. But what else was I to expect?" In a curious sort of way this was true. To my surprise I now felt the power to wound her for the first time, even to subjugate her purely by my indifference1 (Clea, p. 54)

This new self-possession of Darley's frees him to hate or

love as well, but in relation to Justine he chooses nei­

ther; he feels only disgust and pity, foundations upon which neither love nor hate may be built. Having rejected

Justine, he begins to reject many of the premises about

love in Justine too, moving still further from fulfilling

the dark prophecy of "The City." As he watches Clea

sleeping, those ideas about modern love based on his ex­

periences with Justine seem to lose their validity; in­ deed, he is no longer obsessed with investigating modern

love by imprisoning it in a butterfly net of anguished aphorisms.

"However near we would wish to be, so far exactly do we remain from each other" wrote Arnauti. It seemed to be no longer true of our condition. Or was I simply deluding myself once more, refracting truth by the disorders inherent in my own vision? Strangely enough I neither knew nor cared now; I had stopped rummaging through my own mind, had learned to take her like a clear draught of spring water (Clea, pp. 106-107). 320

Mountolive's reply to the central doubts raised by Baltha­ zar's Interlinear has been to answer them with hard facts;

Darley's reply, in Clea, is not to answer them at all, to accept his necessarily less-than-omniscient status. Hav­ ing learned to care, he has now learned not to care. As

Clea's mischievous new laughter replaces Justine's brood­ ing demand for justification, Darley's new self-possession appears to be founded upon a love that has found its true object; loving himself neither egotistically nor narcis- sistically, he is now able to love Clea as well.

£;:t Darley's final struggle for psychic health is only just now beginning. If Arnauti's insights from the past seem no longer to apply, Darley's refusal to rummage through his own mind is accompanied by an indifference to his own art; of the three authors whose insights once dominated the Quartet only Pursewarden continues to com­ ment on love, art, and the psyche, propounding wisdom from the grave. Darley reads Pursewarden's notes intended for him with great interest, including his comments linking art and the psyche.

. . . I see art more and more clearly as a sort of manuring of the psyche. It has no intention, that is to say no theology. By nourishing the psyche, by dunging it up, it helps it to find its own level, lik^ water. That level is an original innocence— who Invented the perversion of Original Sin, that . filthy obscenity of the West?. . . These strange beliefs, Brother Ass, you will find lurking under my mordant humours, which may be described simply as a technique of therapy. As Balthazar says: "A good doctor, and in a special sense the psycholo- 321

gist, makes it quite deliberately, slightly harder for the patient to recover too easily. You do this to see if his psyche has any real bounce in it, for the secret of healing is in the patient and not the doctor. The only measure is the re- * action!" (Clea, pp. 141-142)

But Darley and Pursewarden are not "simply poor co-workers in the psyche of our nation" (Clea, p. 129) as Pursewarden insists they are, offering therapy for civilizations through the manure of art. Darley is no longer a co­ worker, nor iis he disturbed at this turn of events: "Z was not unhappy to feel that the urge [to write] had abandoned me. On the contrary I was full of relief— a relief from the bondage of these forms which seemed so inadequate an

Instrument to convey the truth of feelings" (Clea, p. 237).

Yet Clea is disturbed, and slaps him for even considering turning to the writing of criticism. Indeed, his failure in art is now joined by a failure in love; his success in at least temporarily overcoming the dark prophecy of "The

City" is undercut by his inability to help Clea deal with

Scobie's dark prophecy for her. Once again, Pursewarden1s advice to "laugh till it hurts" proves ineffective.

Sometimes in my clumsy way I would try by some teasing remark to probe to the sources of this disruptive anxiety. "Clea, why are you always looking over your shoulder— for what?" But this was a fatal error of tactics. Her response was always one of ill-temper or pique, as if in every reference to her distemper, however obliqtye, I was in some way mocking her (Clea, p. 236).

If Darley has won a victory in attaining a degree of* psychic health, it must be seen at this point as a Pyrrhic victory; he is no longeir even interested in his former 322

goal of becoming an artist, nor can he nurse Clea's mal­

functioning psyche back to health in order to save their

relationship.

The way out of this impasse proves to be— much to

Darley's surprise— through impulsive action. His reac­

tion to Clea's being pinned under water by the harpoon

from Narouz's spear-gun shows that his psyche does have

some real bounce to it. Darley discovers his proper self,

the true object of his long guest, only when this object does not matter at all; what matters— all that matters—

is sav'ng Clea's life, and in this situation he is freed

from any shred of self-consciousness, freed from any at­

tempt by his mere ego to impose its will on this state of

affairs.

I cannot pretend that anything which followed belonged to my own volition— for the mad rage which now passessed me was not among the order of the emotions 1 would ever have recognised as be­ longing to my proper self. It exceeded, in blind violent rapacity, anything I had ever before ex­ perienced. . . . It was as if I were for the first time confronting myself— or perhaps an alter ego shaped after a man of action I had never realised, recognised (Clea, p. 249).

As he struggles to save Clea's life in this "warm mental

fog," to use Conrad's phrase, it turns out that the most

important sexual act in this long investigation of modern

love is a simulation of the act,*® that the violence of the masculine world that Clea has consistently condemned proves in this context to be on the side of life and not 323 on the side of death: "again and again, slowly but with great violence I began to squeeze them [Clea's lungs] in this pitiful simulacrum of the sexual act— life saving, life-giving" (Clea, p. 251). On this visit Darley does not once again ruin his life "in this one plot of ground" as "The City" has prophesied. In terms of another Cavafy poem, "Che Fece . . . II Gran Rifiuto," Darley's psyche is sufficiently healed to enable him to say Yea and not

May, "to overthrow, if necessary, the whole process of nature and by an act of will force her to live" (Clea, p.

251). e

To some among us comes that implacable day Demanding that we stand our ground and utter By choice of will the great Yea or Nay. And whosoever has in him the affirming word Will straightway then be heard.

But he, the other who denies, No-one can say he lies; he would repeat His Nay in louder tones if pressed again. It is his right— yet by such little trifles, A 'No' instead of 'Yes' his whole life sinks [and stifles. (Clea, p. 285)

It is a measure of the health of Darley's psyche that he is able to make the choice of "Yea"; it has obviously been the preferable choice all along, yet not one that his state of mind has up to this point allowed him to make unequivocally. As he knows at the beginning of Justine, the will to survive is not under the conscious control of the ego, not a simple matter of conscious volition at all.

Similarly, his decision to force Clea to live by an act of his own will does not in itself make this wish come true, or even give him the means for making it so; that his con­

scious decision reflects a decision made on a deeper level of his psyche is what is important, and that this deci­ sion beyond his volition is made in the affirmative is what makes all the difference, what reveals his psyche to be healthy at last. Clea too, freed from her own dark prophecy, is now able to love; the self-importance of being obsessively concerned with her own fate is no longer a necessary self-indulgence separating her from both the true object of her love and Darley. She is at the same time freed of the burden of self-important self-expres­ sion in her art, the dilemma Pursewarden has labeled "The

Whole Joke," by her artificial hand. She no longer paints; it paints, leaving her free to admire an art divorced from "the whole complex of egotisms which led to the choice of self-expression as the only means of growth."

And Darley joins her in becoming "a real human being, an artist at last" as he enters into the true world of art in a "quite unpremeditated, quite unannounced" way (Clea, p.

282); his psyche has made another decision below the level of his conscious will, a decision to write as well as to survive. With the personalities they have grown they no longer need to transcend art, and as real human beings at last they will be able to love, in France, in their own good time. 325

As I have said, the four themes of love, art, poli­ tics, and the health of the psyche are not the only ones which appear in the Quartet, nor do they afford the only major perspectives from which one may view what happens in this tetralogy (see above, p. 138)* Furthermore, the four themes are not clearly separated from each other; they interconnect and overlap continually. Indeed, if Durrell.'s stated topic, "an investigation of modern love," sounds

"immodest or even pompous," the real scope of the Quartet is even more extensive, and thus even less modest. Mot only dv/es Alexandria become a world for Darley, but the problems he faces there are basic to the human condition and are encountered not only by lovers but also by artists, politicians and indeed everyone possessing the enigmatic and too often self-destructive human psyche. Faced with the universal poisons of loneliness, despair, and madness, he tries love, art, and psychic health as antidotes; they seem to be the best treatments available, yet their ef­ fects are always uncertain and most often ineffective, even though they finally prove rewarding to Darley himself.

Darley does not at.empt to deal with the greater poisons such as social injustice which affect whole societies, cultures, and civilizations. Like Pursewarden, he is no politician; moreover, unlike Pursewarden, he is able to avoid those positions with the Foreign Office which re­ quire complex political decisions. Yet they are both 326 aware that those poisons which threaten individuals also threaten societies, and they agree that the effective antidotes must be found in the realm of art and not poli­ tics. And just as the bases of individual failures in love and art must finally be traced to malfunctions of the psyche, so solutions to social failures must be found there and transmitted not through the medium of politics but through the medium of art. In the end, not only is everything found to be true of everybody (and by exten­ sion of every society as well), but the solution to the basic problems posed by the nature of the human condition, problems inherent in the individual human psyche, lies in the attitude one takes toward first oneself, and then toward everything and everyone else. In the note of af­ firmation, the decision to say Yea instead of Nay, lies the key to love, art, and psychic health, a decision that must first be made by the psyche itself before it can be implemented by the conscious will and one that doeB not and cannot depend on the graveyard of relative facts upon which political decisions are made.

The central story in the Quartet, one that brings to- gether three of the themes I have discussed while reject­ ing the political approach to the human condition, is the story of Darley's coming of age as lover, artist, and human being. His topic, like Durrell's, goes beyond an investigation of modern love to an investigation of art 327 and they beyond both, to a search for his proper self.

Suspecting that the key to both love and art lies in the psyche yet being unable to turn it consciously by an act of will, he finally perseveres in ceasing to rummage through his own mind, in letting his psyche decide and then allowing both love and art to come unpremeditated, when they will. What finally nourishes him as an artist also nourishes him as a human being and as a lover. Yet remaining in sharp contrast to Darley's success story is

Pursewarden*8 suicide, the self-destruction of the chief spokesman for yea-saying, for laughter, and £>r the health of the psyche. The harsh fact of his suicide demands an explanation, but the proliferation of speculative explana­ tions only serves to increase the mystery, it is not that there is no motive, but that there are too many. The four themes 1 have been discussing intersect once more in an effort to pinpoint Pursewarden's "true motivation": explanations are offered from the perspectives of love, art, and politics, all of them in.an effort to delineate the self-destructive state of his psyche. No explanation is completely satisfactory; each contradicts in some way all of the others. Since Durrell's thematic technique is highly evident in these contradictory explanations, and since they reflect his emphasis on psychological realism in that no one omnisciently supplied "answer" is avail­ able, Pursewarden's suicide and the ensuing speculations 328 about it serve as a kind of touchstone to Durrell's basic narrative technique in the Quartet, and may serve as a final example of his thematic approach.

In Justine Darley explains the suicide in terms of art, which is only reasonable considering Darley's lim­ ited acquaintance with Pursewarden; they are fellow artists, Darley a failure, Pursewarden a success. Aware of the potentially distorting power of his envy, Darley is still convinced that it is Pursewarden1s artistic success, paradoxically enough, which has become the real source of great psychic pressures.

"He [Pursewarden] has begun to feel more and more wanting in true greatness while his name has been swelling daily in size like some disgusting poster. He has realized that people are walking the street with a Reputation now and not a man. They see him no longer— and all his work has done in order to draw attention to the lonely, suffer­ ing figure he felt himself to be. His name has covered him like a tombstone. And now comes the terrifying thought: perhaps there is no one left to see? Who, after all, is he?" I am not proud of these thoughts, for they be­ tray the envy that every failure feels for every success; but spite may often see as clearly as charity (Justine, p. 115).

According to this explanation, Pursewarden is suffering from that malady later faced by Mountolive after his t appointment as Ambassador, when he realizes that now "he must forever renounce the friendship of ordinary human beings in exchange for their deference" (Mountolive, p.

132). Given this general state of mind, Darley speculates, the immediate depression brought on by having corrected 329 the galley-proof8 of a new novel is a great enough impetus to push Pursewarden to suicide.

The galley-proofs of his latest novel had already been corrected, wrapped up and addressed. They lay dead upon the marble top of the dressing-table. I recognized in his sour and dejected attitude the exhaustion which pursues the artist after he has brought a piece of work to completion. These are the low moments when the long flirtation with suicide begins afresh (Justine, p. 117).

This explanation is credible at the time, yet Darley's knowledge is so rudimentary that he knows nothing about

Pur&ewarden's conversation with Melissa about both love and

Nessim's Palestinian plot, not to speak of his incestuous relationship with his sister Liza. In addition, Darley casts Pursewarden in his own romantic image of the artist who writes "to draw attention to the lonely, suffering figure he felt himself to be" and for whom, as a result, the finished work of art is everything, enabling him as it does to transcend his own personality.

According to Balthazar, this image of Pursewarden as romantic artist is exactly backwards, at least insofar as he is able to judges

". . . h e [Pursewarden] was really at rest about his work which most torments the artists, I suppose, and really had begun to regard it as 'divinely un­ important'— a characteristic phrase. I know this for certain because he once wrote me out on the back of an envelope an answer to the question 'What is the object of writing?' His answer was this* 'The object of writing is to grow a personality which in the end enables man to transcend art!” (Balthazar, p. 141). Here Darley continues to make artistic assumptions that

Pursewarden, at least in theory, does not share; the con­

sciousness of "tragedy irremediable" in "the human condi­ tion," for Darley, is the sole province of the artist, but for Pursewarden there is no necessary distinction be­ tween the consciousness of the artist and anyone else's:

"Heed me, reader, for the artist is you, all of us" (Clea, p. 119). In emphasizing this tragic consciousness Darley might well be emphasizing the man as well as the artist;

indeed, his explanation at this point might well be ex­ pressed in terms of the human psyche instead of the spe­ cial consciousness of the artist. Yet both these explana­ tions— both the one Darley offers here and the one he might have offered— are extremely vague and as such clarify little. There is, for one thing, no hint of a specific impetus for the suicide. Even what Balthazar knows "for certain" is suspect, violating as it does his own rules for gathering evidence. He tells Darley that

"you trust too much to what your subjects say about them­

selves" (Balthazar, p. 148), yet he accepts, in effect,

Pursewarden's analysis of his own state of mind without question; it is presumably true because Pursewarden has written it out on the back of an envelope in his own hand.

Clea's reaction to Darley's explanation is at least dif—

ferent from Balthazar's: "why do you go on so, I wonder, 331 about Pursewarden1a death? It puzzles me, for in a way it is a sort of vulgarity to do so" (Balthazar, p. 241). Yet this advances the central situation not at all. The enigma of Pursewarden's suicide remains, and speculation continues, vulgar or no.

Mountolive gives us, as we might expect, many more facts pertinent to Pursewarden's abrupt exit from Alexan­ dria. The facts Darley can give us, even in Clea, repre­ sent only those he has personally uncovered and those re­ ported to him, more or less reliably, by other characters equally limited to a personal perspective. Mountolive, however, is narrated omnisciently with respect to facts, and it is here for the first time that we discover that

Pursewarden and his sister Liza have been lovers, that in

Pursewarden's view at least neither will ever "be able to love other people" (Mountolive, p. 174). This information comes to have a direct bearing on his suicide when it is reported to Mountolive that Pursewarden had received a letter from Liza after spending his long night with

Melissa; he is seen by Balthazar, "extremely unshaven and haggard" (Mountolive, p. 185), gravely preoccupied with the letter which he quickly puts into his pocket as the doctor approaches him. At this point in the morning, according to the report, Pursewarden has already begun his final

* binge, which is followed by his request for a cyanide tablet "to poison a sick dog" (Mountolive, p. 181) in the 332

late afternoon, and by his suicide.

While the facts are present in Mountolive to a degree

unmatched by Darley in either quantity or accuracy, how­

ever , the interpretation of these facts is no more relia­

ble; indeed, since these facts are consistently interpreted

only from the perspective of politics, the conclusions

reached by the narrator of Mountolive are generally either

less reliable or much more superficial than those reached

by Darley in the other novels of the Quartet. This holds

true for the interpretations of Pursewarden's suicide pre-

sentedin Mountolive in that they are not entirely reliable

and smack of superficiality, although since Darley's

explanation of the suicide's being a result of artistic

depression has proven unconvincing as well in the light of

newly presented facts in both Balthazar and Mountolive the

interpretations in Mountolive seem at least no less reli­

able than his own. Mountolive immediately considers the

suicide "inconsiderate and underbred— as well as being mysterious" (Mountolive, p. 181) , a superficial explanation

revealing more about Mountolive'8 values than Pursewarden's

suicide. But his conviction that it was "the unexpected

discovery" of Nessim's Palestinian plot from Melissa that

supplied the immediate "motive, the mainspring of his

death" (Mountolive, p. 214), even though it discounts the

possible effects of Liza's letter, seems reasonable enough; it does not, however, supply an explanation for Pursewarden's 333 having been in such a state of mind that such an impetus would have resulted in suicide.^

Moreover, Mountolive disagrees with Maskelyne's obviously superficial, self-important analysis that Purse­ warden "could not look his duty in the face" (Mountolive, p. 242). In discussing the suicide with Balthazar, Mount­ olive insists that it was more than a question of duty, and even hints that Liza did, after all, play a part in Pursewarden's decision.

Balthazar spoke of Pursewarden. "It annoys me, his suicide. I feel I had somehow missed the point. I take it to have been an expression of contempt for the world, contempt for the con­ duct of the world." Mountolive glanced up quickly. "Mo, no. A conflict between duty and affection." Then, he added swiftly "But I can't tell you very much. When his sister comes, she will tell you more, perhaps, if she can." They were silent. Baltha­ zar sighed and said "Truth naked and unashamed. That's a splendid phrase. But we always see her as she seems, never as she is. Each man has his own interpretation" (Mountolive, p. 234).

Balthazar turns out to have, if not the most plausible ex­ planation of the suicide, at least the most credible posi­ tions that each man has his own interpretation, that there can be no one "true" explanation. Indeed, each man may have more than one, a different one at different times to

« suit his immediate needs. Originally, Mountolive does not consider the "central meaning" of Pursewarden's suicide to even refer to the motive of the act.

The accent of his [Mountolive's] apprehension was slowly transferring itself from the bare act of 334

Pursewarden (this inconvenient plunge into anony­ mity)— was transferring itself to the central meaning of the act— to the tidings it brought with it. Nessiml . . . He had trusted Nessiml (Mountolive, p. 186)

The immediate problem posed by the suicide, for Mountolive, is not discovering the motive but dealing with the polit­ ical problem Nessim's uncovered plot poses.

Clea adds a final explanation of Pursewarden's sui­ cide. According to Liza Pursewarden, her brother kills himself not for art or for politics but for love. Like

Darley's speculations in Justine, Liza's hypothesis accounts not only for the impetus that led Pursewarden to • commit suicide exactly when he did but also for the con­ tinued state of mind that, given this impetus, results in such a total overthrow as suicide rather than some tempor­ ary retreat through alcohol, women, or doggerel. Liza tells Darley, confirming what Pursewarden himself has told

Melissa in Mountolive, that she and her brother were once lovers. But she has additional information as well: that the issue of their incest was, biologically, a blind girl, and upon her death, psychologically, a deeply shared guilt.

"It was when she died that he [Pursewarden] was overcome with remorse for a situation which had brought us nothing but joy before. Her death suddenly made him guilty. Our relationship foundered there; and yet it became in another way even more intense, closer. We were united by our guilt from that moment. I have often asked myself why it should be so. Tremendous unbroken happiness 335

and then .,. . one day, like an iron shutter falling, quilt" (Clea, p. 174).

Pursewarden, far more intellectually curious than Liza, has presumably also asked himself often "why it should be so," but from what Liza says and from statements in his own letters to her it is evident that he finds no answers that relieve the psychic pressure brought about by all this guilt; his perspicacious nature only allows him to perceive his own guilt more clearly. It is in this state of mind, one that has continued for years, that he receives

Liza's letter telling him that she has finally met and fallen in love with the "dark stranger" whom Pursewarden has predicted many years before will come to replace him as Liza's lover. Pursewarden's own marriage, following the death of his blind child, has been unsuccessful, as

Liza puts it, because "he could not free himself from my in­ side hold on him, though he tried and struggled" (Clea, p. 170). To prevent the same kind of threat to Liza's impending marriage to Mountolive, Pursewarden explains his suicide to Liza as the only sure way to "really abandon you, really remove myself from the scene in a manner which would permit no further equivocation in our vascillating hearts" (Clea, p. 171). It is all very clear, if painful,

to Liza. * « "When he got my letter [acknowledging the arrival of the "dark stranger"] he seemed suddenly to realise that our relationship might be endangered or crushed 336

in the way his had been with his wife— not by any­ thing we did, no, but by the simple fact of my existence. So he committed suicide. He ex­ plained it all so clearly in his last letter to me" (Clea, pp. 170-171).

Zn this last explanation of the suicide, then, Liza's let­

ter furnishes the impetus for the act, an act whose motive

is ostensibly love (Pursewarden assures Liza that ifshe will "look beyond the immediate pain you will see how per­

fect the logic of love seems to one who is ready to die

for it"— Clea. p. 171) but which is at the same time made more attractive in that it affords a final escape from the psychic pressures of accumulated guilt.

This explanation, however, cannot be taken as the

final word on the matter, even though it is the final

speculation about the "true motive” of Pursewarden's

suicide. For one thing, like the other explanations, it

fails to account for apparently relevant facts lying out­

side its particular perspective, just as Darley's and

Mountolive's theories do. No mention is made of the cor­ rected galley-proofs nor— no doubt a more serious omis­ sion— the information Mellisa gives Pursewarden about

Nessim's political activities. Then too, like the other theorists, Liza has little understanding of what Purse­ warden was really like as a human being.As Keats puts

it,

"the bitter truth of the matter seems to me that the person old Pursewarden most loved [Liza]— I 337

mean purely spiritually— did not at all understand the state o£ his soul, so to speak, when he died: or even have the vaguest idea of the extent of his achievement" (Clea, p. 185).

Finally, we are again faced with having to take Pursewar- den's own explanation of his act at face value, which has proven to be a highly suspect method of gathering evidence since Balthazar. It is true that Darley is convinced that

Pursewarden's letters are absolutely genuine; there is no doubt in his mind that Pursewarden both loved Liza deeply and suffered immense guilt as a result. Yet due to Dar­ ley's delicacy, to his refusal (for once) to vulgarly contemplate, on paper, the state of Pursewarden's soul, we have only his judgment of the letters and not the letters themselves.And in any case, Pursewarden's explanation to Liza is even less credible when one considers that it is written to his lover, the person he perhaps most owes an explanation but surely, in the context of the Quartet, the person with whom he is least likely to share the truth, whether he would like to or not. As Balthazar says sen­ sibly, "each man has his own interpretation." Or, to put it another way as Conrad does in Victory, "there is a quality in events which is apprehended differently by different minds or even by the same mind at different times" (p. 234). In the Quartet this same quality in events is apparent; the balance does not quite rest with any one perception, or with any one perspective, be it that 338 of love, art, politics, or the health of the psyche. That this balance is an uneasy one reflects an interest in the kind--if not the degree— *of psychological realism begun at the beginning of this century by such novelists as Conrad and James. Durrell's thematic approach, in emphasizing the necessary diversity among human perceptions and per­ spectives, is an effective method of rendering visible the limitations of the human psyche. 339

NOTES: CHAPTER VZI

Indeed, Groddeck was convinced that the health of the psyche itself is in turn dependent on something still .more basic, which he terms the "It"; this makes Groddeck more interesting to Durrell than Freud, whom Groddeck revered but did not follow; "to Freud the psyche of man was made up of two halves, the conscious and the unconscious parts; but for Groddeck the whole psyche with its inevitable dual­ isms seemed merely a function of something else— an un­ known quantity— which he chose to discuss under the name of ’ It' "— Lawrence Durrell, "Studies in Genius: VI, Groddeck" *-n Horizon (17:102), London, 1948, p. 385 (all page refer- ences in this footnote, unless otherwise noted, refer to this article). Insisting that he knew "nothing" about either disease or cure, that treatment was his sole con­ cern (p. 395), Groddeck concluded that "disease as an entity did not exist, except inasmuch as it was an ex­ pression of a man's total personality, his It, expressing itself through him. Disease was a form of self-expres­ sion" (p. 387). Thus disease, like love or art, is a form of self-expression investigated by Darley in the Quartet.. Furthermore, disease has a central bearing on both love and art. Groddeck's influence on Durrell, which Durrell himself has openly admitted, has been discussed at length, notably by Eugene Lyons in his unpublished doc­ toral dissertation, "Thematic Problems in Lawrence Dur­ rell 's The Alexandria Quartet (University of Virginia, 1969), pp. 44-^9. it should be kept in mind, however, that with Groddeck's concept as well as many other ideas in the Quartet, it is not so much a question of its being true or false as its being pretty and for use (Bee above, pp. 138-141).

^Self-consciousness, according to Pursewarden, is a specific enemy of civilizations as well as individuals. In his notebook he remarks that "civilizations die in the measure that they become conscious of themselves" (Clea, p. 143).

^Pursewarden himself seems, to be aware of this dismal state of affairs. He once replies to Balthazar's charge of his being equivocal with "words being what they are, people being what they are, perhaps it would be better al­ ways to say the opposite of what one means" (Clea, p. 134), an insight that would surely apply to the dilemma posed by commands such as "laugh," which provoke opposite reac­ tions such as throughtful consideration. This insight, however, does not relieve him from the self-imposed burden 340 of treating laughter seriously, as the means to the best of all possible ways to live. Pursewarden's taking this stance does, on the other hand, leave Darley himself gen­ erally freed of the necessity to make such pronouncements and of the resulting necessity of being caught in such a trap.

4Capodistria is revealed to be the relative who raped Justine much later in Justine, on p. 210.

®This phrase serves as a good example of Groddock's influence on Durrell; indeed, it is a paraphrase of Groddock's theory that disease is a form of self-expres­ sion (see Note 1 above).

6Clea's analysis of love in Justine takes place after her love affair with Justine, as evidenced by her remark to Darley, earlier in the same conversation, that "the few, indeed the one, [love] experience which marked me was an experience with a woman" (Justine, p. 129). Indeed, the "bitter lye" of this "uninvited love" is no doubt the experience on which her analysis of love is founded.

*^To emphasize his point that "the aetiology of love and madness are identical except in degree," Darley records not only Clea's confused and. bewildered behavior but also adds, in conclusion, a description from the diary of a female patient of Balthazar, whom he is treating for "a nervous breakdown due to 'love'— requited or unrequited who can say?" (Balthazar, p. 55). Darley does not reveal the source of the description until he has presented it to the reader; it seems to fit Clea well. Darley insists, however, that the real point of all this is that the pas­ sage "could serve not only for Clea but indeed for all of us" (Balthazar, p. 56).

•®Nor is bringing Justine to psychic health Pursewar­ den' s intention here— the telegram is designed, albeit un­ successfully, to make her leave him alone.

®This assertion is repeated in Clea, with reference to Clea's affair with Amaril in. Syria. After submitting to an abortion, she says "I realised that precisely what wounded me most as a woman nourished me most as an artist" (Clea. p. 112). But the ultimate source, according to Pursewarden, is the same: "'The real obstacle is oneself, I believe that artists are composed of vanity, indolence and self-regard. . . . My solution would be to slap a poultice on the inflamed parts— tell your ego to go to hell and not make a misery of what should be essentially 341 fun, joy*" (Clea, p. 110). In art, as in love, the real obstacle is the ego1s self-important self-regard. See above, pp. 311-313.

10See, for example, Balthazar, p. 92 and p. 158.

1iconsider these examplest Mountolive's long love affair with Leila threatens his necessary political retal­ iation against Nessim's Palestinian plot, Pursewarden's artistic sensibility is a definite liability in the For­ eign Office, Mountolive's recurring ear-ache and his need for companionship that results in Fluke are evidence of psychic malfunctions that distract him from his duties.

^ T h e point at which lust does exist, "below the level of psyche," may be seen as Groddeck's "It," Carl Jung's "collective unconscious," or as some combination of the two. According to Groddeck, the "It" controls the development of the human being from the moment of con­ ception; "it must not be forgotten that the brain, and therefore the intellect, is itself created by the It" (quoted by Durrell in Horizon, 17:102, p. 393). For Jung, the "collective unconscious*' refers to a "deeper layer" upon which the personal unconscious rests "which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. . . . I have chosen the term 'collective' because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals" — C. G. Jung, "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" in The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung, ed. Violet Staub de Laszle (New York, 1959), p. 287. Both the "It" and the "collective unconscious" may be seen as existing "below the level of psyche" then, although the idea of "remote ancestors" speaking through the prostitutes seems to be­ long particularly to Jung's concept, as does the idea that these desires may be satiated "only in mime."

^Mountolive berates himself for this trait much later. "Yes, that was it! He had never been intemperate, never been natural, outward-going in his attitude to life" (Mountolive. pp. 284-285).

^Leila's "periods of mental instability lasting for weeks" is mentioned in Balthazar as well (p. 69), forming part of the background of madness, in that novel. 15The poem reads as follows: "Zeus gets Hera on her back But finds that she has lost the knack. 342

Extenuated by excesses She is unable, she confesses.

Nothing daunted Zeus, who wise is, Tries a dozen good disguises. Eagle, ram, and bull and bear Quickly answer Hera's prayer.

One knows a God should be prolix, But . . . think of all those different ******!" (Clea, pp. 132-133) Here something similar to Pursewarden's challenge to Dar­ ley— "'Should literature be path-finder or a bromide? Decidel Decide!'" (Clea, p. 127)— confronts the master aphorist himself. Is"this poem itself a path-finder or a bromide? The answer may well lie in whether such ditties render Pursewarden's mind no longer conscious of itself, effortlessly capable of path-finding in some more complex work of art, or whether he remains self-importantly sat­ isfied with the bromide of burlesque.

^bThis is not, of course, to say that the sexual act is unimportant in the Quartet. To the contrary, the act of sex, besides being psychic in nature as Pursewarden in­ sists, lies at the foundation of human knowledge. As Clea puts it, "sexual love is knowledge, both in etymology and in cold fact; 'he knew"T7er' as the Bible says1" (Clea, p. 113). ----

17Such an explanation is perhaps unnecessary, yet those explanations of Pursewarden's suicide that appear outside the context of Mountolive suggest that whatever the impetus that drove Pursewarden to suicide on the very day he took the cyanide, a comparatively long-standing state of psychic disturbance must have existed to make Pursewarden go through with his act of self-destruction given this impetus. If such is the case, two motives must then be found: the reason for his deep-seated depression must be discovered as well as the immediate reason for his having committed suicide when he did.

18Although Darley comes to understand a great deal about Pursewarden as artist, personality, and human being, his estimation of Pursewarden in Justine is far from the mark. Darley's explanation of Pursewarden's suicide in Justine, then, is made at a time when he has little under­ standing of the man.

18Darley's judgment is that there is '"nothing in the whole length and breadth of our literature with which to compare them [Pursewarden's letters]!. . . Literature, I 343 sayl But these were life itself, the flowing undivided stream of life with all its pitiable we11-intoxicated memories, its pains, terrors and submissions"' (Clea, p. 175). In Pursewarden, it seems to me, Durrell has created a credible portrait of the consummate artist of the twentieth century, a believable figure to whom other his­ torical artists such as D. H. Lawrence and William Blake, both often mentioned in the same breath, must be compared. Indeed, if we do not always believe in the superiority of his writing, we do believe in his presence, which is a significant achievement in itself. As G. S. Fraser notes in his Lawrence Durrell: A Study (London, 1968): "I notice that I display towards Pursewarden the irritation which one feels, not with a fictional character, but with an actual living person. My annoyance may be Durrell*8 triumph" (p. 152). But the omission of Pursewarden's incomparable letters in Clea, presumably intended as an indication that they are so magnificent as to be able to be rendered only in the imagination of the reader, strikes me as more sound in theory than in practice. One is left, in this instance, with the impression that these letters are not beyond our ability to comprehend, but beyond Durrell's ability to deliver. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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