The Alexandria Quartet

by Lawrence Durrell

  Darley is talking of disappointments! But Brother Ass, disenchantment is the essence of the game. With what high hopes we invaded London from the provinces in those old dead days, our manuscripts bagging our suitcases. Do you recall? With what emotion we gazed over Westminster Bridge, reciting Wordsworth’s indifferent sonnet and wondering if his daughter grew up less beautiful for being French. The metropolis seemed to quiver with the portent of our talent, our skill, our discernment. Walking along the Mall we wondered who all those men were — tall hawk-featured men perched on balconies and high places, scanning the city with heavy binoculars. What were they seeking so earnestly? Who were they — so composed and steely-eyed? Timidly we stopped a policeman to ask him. ‘They are publishers’ he said mildly. Publishers! Our hearts stopped beating. ‘They are on the look-out for new talent.’ Great God! It was for us they were waiting and watching! Then the kindly policemen lowered his voice confidentially and said in hollow and reverent tones: ‘They are waiting for the new Trollope to be born!’ Do you remember, at these words, how heavy our suitcases suddenly felt? How our blood slowed, our footsteps lagged? Brother Ass, we had been bashfully thinking of a kind of illumination such as Rimbaud dreamed of — a nagging poem which was not didactic or expository but which infected — was not simply a rationalized intuition, I mean, clothed in isinglass! We had come to the wrong shop, with the wrong change! A chill struck us as we saw the mist falling in Trafalgar Square, coiling around us its tendrils of ectoplasm! A million muffin-eating moralists were waiting, not for us, Brother Ass, but for the plucky and tedious Trollope! (If you are dissatisfied with your form, reach for the curette.) Now do you wonder if I laugh a little off-key? Do you ask yourself what has turned me into nature’s bashful little aphorist?

  Disguised as an eiron, why who should it be

  But tuft-hunting, dram-drinking, toad-eating Me!

  We who are, after all, simply poor co-workers in the psyche of our nation, what can we expect but the natural automatic rejection from a public which resents interference? And quite right too. There is no injustice in the matter, for I also resent interference, Brother Ass, just as you do. No, it is not a question of being aggrieved, it is a question of being unlucky. Of the ten thousand reasons for my books’ unpopularity I shall only bother to give you the first, for it includes all the others. A puritan culture’s conception of art is something which will endorse its morality and flatter its patriotism. Nothing else. I see you raise your eyebrows. Even you, Brother Ass, realize the basic unreality of this proposition. Nevertheless it explains everything. A puritan culture, argal, does not know what art is — how can it be expected to care? (I leave religion to the bishops — there it can do most harm!)

  No croked legge, no blered eye,

  no part deformed out of kinde

  Nor yet so onolye half can be

  As is the inward suspicious minde.

  The wheel is patience on to which I’m bound.

  Time is this nothingness within the round.

  Gradually we compile our own anthologies of misfortune, our dictionaries of verbs and nouns, our copulas and gerundives. That symptomatic policeman of the London dusk first breathed the message to us! That kindly father-figure put the truth in a nutshell. And here we are both in a foreign city built of smegmatinted crystal and tinsel whose moeurs, if we described them, would be regarded as the fantasies of our disordered brains. Brother Ass, we have the hardest lesson of all to learn as yet — that truth cannot be forced but must be allowed to plead for itself! Can you hear me? The line is faulty again, your voice has gone far away. I hear the water rushing!

  Be bleak, young man, and let who will be sprightly,

  And honour Venus if you can twice nightly.

  All things being equal you should not refuse

  To ring the slow sad cowbell of the English muse!

  Art’s Truth’s Nonentity made quite explicit.

  If it ain’t this then what the devil is it?

  Writing in my room last night I saw an ant upon the table. It crossed near the inkwell, and I saw it hesitate at the whiteness of a sheet of paper on which I had written the word ‘Love’; my pen faltered, the ant turned back, and suddenly my candle guttered and went out. Clear octaves of yellow light flickered behind my eyeballs. I had wanted to start a sentence with the words ‘Proponents of love’ — but the thought had guttered out with the candle! Later on, just before dropping off to sleep an idea struck me. On the wall above my bed I wrote in pencil the words: ‘What is to be done when one cannot share one’s own opinions about love?’ I heard my own exasperated sigh as I was dropping off to sleep. In the morning I awoke, clear as a perforated appendix, and wrote my own epitaph on the mirror with my shaving-stick:

  ‘I never knew which side my art was buttered’

  Were the Last Words that poor Pursewarden uttered!

  As for the proponents of love, I was glad they had vanished for they would have led me irresistibly in the direction of sex — that bad debt which hangs upon my compatriots’ consciences. The quiddity! The veritable nub and quiddity of this disordered world, and the only proper field for the deployment of our talents, Brother Ass. But one true, honest unemphatic word in this department will immediately produce one of those neighing and whinnying acts peculiar to our native intellectuals! For them sex is either a Gold Rush or a Retreat from Moscow. And for us? No, but if we are to be a moment serious I will explain what I mean. (Cuckow, Cuckow, a merry note, unpleasing to the pigskin ear.) I mean more than they think. (The strange sad hermaphrodite figure of the London dusk — the Guardsman waiting in Ebury Street for the titled gent.) No, quite another region of enquiry which cannot be reached without traversing this terrain vague of the partial spirits. Our topic, Brother Ass, is the same, always and irremediably the same — I spell the word for you: l-o-v-e. Four letters, each letter a volume! The point faible of the human psyche, the very site of the carcinoma maxima! How, since the Greeks, has it got mixed up with the cloaca maxima? It is a complete mystery to which the Jews hold the key unless my history is faulty. For this gifted and troublesome race which has never known art, but exhausted its creative processes purely in the construction of ethical systems, has fathered on us all, literally impregnated the Western European psyche with, the whole range of ideas based on ‘race’ and sexual containment in the furtherance of the race! I hear Balthazar growling and lashing his tail! But where the devil do these fantasies of purified bloodstreams come from? Am I wrong to turn to the fearful prohibitions listed in Leviticus for an explanation of the manic depressive fury of Plymouth Brethren and a host of other dismal sectarians? We have had our testicles pinched for centuries by the Mosaic Law; hence the wan and pollarded look of our young girls and boys. Hence the mincing effrontery of adults willed to perpetual adolescence! Speak, Brother Ass! Do you heed me? If I am wrong you have only to say so! But in my conception of the four-letter word — which I am surprised has not been blacklisted with the other three by the English printer — I am somewhat bold and sweeping. I mean the whole bloody range — from the little greenstick fractures of the human heart right up to its higher spiritual connivance with the … well, the absolute ways of nature, if you like. Surely, Brother Ass, this is the improper study of man? The main drainage of the soul? We could make an atlas of our sighs!

  Zeus gets Hera on her back

  But finds that she has lost the knack.

  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 ******!

  But 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. Moreover I missed your last remark which was something about the choice of a style. Y
es, Brother Ass, the choice of a style is most important; in the market garden of our domestic culture you will find strange and terrible blooms with every stamen standing erect. Oh, to write like Ruskin! When poor Effie Grey tried to get to his bed, he shoo’d the girl away! Oh, to write like Carlyle! Haggis of the mind. When a Scotsman comes to toun Can Spring be far behind? No. Everything you say is truthful and full of point; relative truth, and somewhat pointless point, but nevertheless I will try and think about this invention of the scholiasts, for clearly style is as important to you as matter to me.

  How shall we go about it? Keats, the word-drunk, searched for resonance among vowel-sounds which might give him an echo of his inner self. He sounded the empty coffin of his early death with patient knuckles, listening to the dull resonances given off by his certain immortality. Byron was off-hand with English, treating it as master to servant; but the language, being no lackey, grew up like tropic lianas between the cracks of his verses, almost strangling the man. He really lived, his life was truly imaginary; under the figment of the passional self there is a mage, though he himself was not aware of the fact. Donne stopped upon the exposed. nerve, jangling the whole cranium. Truth should make one wince, he thought. He hurts us, fearing his own facility; despite the pain of the stopping his verse must be chewed to rags. Shakespeare makes all Nature hang its head. Pope, in an anguish of method, like a constipated child, sandpapers his surfaces to make them slippery for our feet. Great stylists are those who are least certain of their effects. The secret lack in their matter haunts them without knowing it! Eliot puts a cool chloroform pad upon a spirit too tightly braced by the information it has gathered. His honesty of measure and his resolute bravery to return to the headsman’s axe is a challenge to us all; but where is the smile? He induces awkward sprains at a moment when we are trying to dance! He has chosen greyness rather than light, and he shares his portion with Rembrandt. Blake and Whitman are awkward brown paper parcels full of vessels borrowed from the temple which tumble all over the place when the string breaks. Longfellow heralds the age of invention for he first thought out the mechanical piano. You pedal, it recites. Lawrence was a limb of the genuine oak-tree, with the needed girth and span. Why did he show them that it mattered, and so make himself vulnerable to their arrows? Auden also always talks. He has manumitted the colloquial.…

  But here, Brother Ass, I break off; for clearly this is not higher or even lower criticism! I do not see this sort of fustian going down at our older universities where they are still painfully trying to extract from art some shadow of justification for their way of life. Surely there must be a grain of hope, they ask anxiously? After all, there must be a grain of hope for decent honest Christian folk in all this rigmarole which is poured out by our tribe from generation to generation. Or is art simply the little white stick which is given to the blind man and by the help of which he tap tap taps along a road he cannot see but which he is certain is there? Brother Ass, it is for you to decide!

  When I was chided by Balthazar for being equivocal I replied, without a moment’s conscious thought: ‘Words being what they are, people being what they are, perhaps it would be better always to say the opposite of what one means?’ Afterwards, when I reflected on this view (which I did not know that I held) it seemed to me really eminently sage! So much for conscious thought: you see, we Anglo-Saxons are incapable of thinking for ourselves; about, yes. In thinking about ourselves we put up every kind of pretty performance in every sort of voice, from cracked Yorkshire to the hot-potato-in-the-mouth voice of the BBC. There we excel, for we see ourselves at one remove from reality, as a subject under a microscope. This idea of objectivity is really a flattering extension of our sense of humbug. When you start to think for yourself it is impossible to cant — and we live by cant! Ah! I hear you say with a sigh, another of those English writers, eminent jailors of the soul! How they weary and disturb us! Very true and very sad.

  Hail! Albion drear, fond home of cant!

  Pursewarden sends thee greetings scant.

  Thy notions he’s turned back to front

  Abhorring cant, adoring ****

  But if you wish to enlarge the image turn to Europe, the Europe which spans, say, Rabelais to de Sade. A progress from the belly-consciousness to the head-consciousness, from flesh and food to sweet (sweet!) reason. Accompanied by all the interchanging ills which mock us. A progress from religious ecstasy to duodenal ulcer! (It is probably healthier to be entirely brainless.) But, Brother Ass, this is something which you did not take into account when you chose to compete for the Heavyweight Belt for Artists of the Millennium. It is too late to complain. You thought you would somehow sneak by the penalties without being called upon to do more than demonstrate your skill with words. But words … they are only an Aeolian harp, or a cheap xylophone. Even a sea-lion can learn to balance a football on its nose or to play the slide trombone in a circus. What lies beyond …?

  No, but seriously, if you wished to be — I 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 four stories, say, and dedicating each to one of the four winds of heaven. A continuum, forsooth, embodying not a temps retrouvé but a temps délivré. 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. I can imagine a form which, if satisfied, might raise in human terms the problems of causality or indeterminacy.… And nothing very recherché either. Just an ordinary Girl Meets Boy story. But tackled in this way you would not, like most of your contemporaries, be drowsily cutting along a dotted line!

  That is the sort of question which you will one day be forced to ask yourself (‘We will never get to Mecca!’ as the Tchekhov sisters remarked in a play, the title of which I have forgotten.)

  Nature he loved, and next to nature nudes,

  He strove with every woman worth the strife,

  Warming both cheeks before the fire of life,

  And fell, doing battle with a million prudes.

  Who dares to dream of capturing the fleeting image of truth in all its gruesome multiplicity? (No, no, let us dine cheerfully off scraps of ancient discarded poultice and allow ourselves to be classified by science as wet and dry bobs.)

  Whose are the figures I see before me, fishing the brackish reaches of the C. of E.?

  One writes, Brother Ass, for the spiritually starving, the castaways of the soul! They will always be a majority even when everyone is a state-owned millionaire. Have courage, for here you will always be master of your audience! Genius which cannot be helped should be politely ignored.

  Nor do I mean that it is useless to master and continuously practise your craft. No. A good writer should be able to write anything. But a great writer is the servant of compulsions which are ordained by the very structure of the psyche and cannot be disregarded. Where is he? Where is he?

  Come, let us collaborate on a four or five-decker job, shall we? ‘Why the Curate Slipped’ would be a good title. Quick, they are waiting, those hypnagogic figures among the London minarets, the muezzin of the trade. ‘Does Curate get girl as well as stipend, or only stipend? Read the next thousand pages and find out!’ English life in the raw — like some pious melodrama acted by criminal churchwardens sentenced to a lifetime of sexual misgivings! In this way we can put a tea-cosy over reality to our mutual advantage, writing it all in the plain prose which is only just distinguishable from galvanized iron. In this way we will put a lid on a box with no sides! Brother Ass, let us conciliate a world of listless curmudgeons who read to verify, not their intuitions, but their prejudicies!

  I remember old Da Capo saying one afternoon: ‘Today I had five girls. I know it will seem excessive to you. I was not trying to prove anything to myself. But if I said that I had merely blended five teas to suit my palate or five tobaccos to suit my pipe, you would not give the matter a second thought. You would, on the contrary,
admire my eclecticism, would you not?’

  The belly-furbished Kenilworth at the F.O. once told me plaintively that he had ‘just dropped in’ on James Joyce out of curiosity, and was surprised and pained to find him rude, arrogant and short-tempered. ‘But’ I said ‘he was paying for his privacy by giving lessons to niggers at one and six an hour! He might have been entitled to feel safe from ineffables like yourself who imagine that art is something to which a good education automatically entitles you; that it is a part of a social equipment, class aptitude, like painting water-colours was for a Victorian gentlewoman! I can imagine his poor heart sinking as he studied your face, with its expression of wayward condescension — the fathomless self-esteem which one sees occasionally flit across the face of a goldfish with a hereditary title!’ After this we never spoke, which was what I wanted. The art of making necessary enemies! Yet one thing I liked in him: he pronounced the word ‘Civilization’ as if it had an S-bend in it.

  (Brother Ass is on symbolism now, and really talking good sense, I must admit.) Symbolism! The abbreviation of language into poem. The heraldic aspect of reality! Symbolism is the great repair-outfit of the psyche, Brother Ass, the fond de pouvoir of the soul. The sphincter-loosening music which copies the ripples of the soul’s progress through human flesh, playing in us like electricity! (Old Parr, when he was drunk, said once: ‘Yes, but it hurts to realize!’)

  Of course it does. But we know that the history of literature is the history of laughter and pain. The imperatives from which there is no escape are: Laugh till it hurts, and hurt till you laugh!

  The greatest thoughts are accessible to the least of men. Why do we have to struggle so? Because understanding is a function not of ratiocination but of the psyche’s stage of growth. There, Brother Ass, is the point at which we are at variance. No amount of explanation can close the gap. Only realization! One day you are going to wake from your sleep shouting with laughter. Ecco!