The Alexandria Quartet

by Lawrence Durrell

  But something in all this must be decided for me; I have a feeling, I mean, that it is not I who shall decide.

  Please forgive me my silence for which I cannot offer any excuse and write me a line.

  Last Saturday I found myself with a free day and a half, so I walked across the island with a pack to spend a night in the little house where I lived on my previous visit. What a contrast to this verdant highland it was to strike that wild and windy promontory once more, the acid green seas and fretted coastlines of the past. It was indeed another island — I suppose the past always is. Here for a night and a day I lived the life of an echo, thinking much about the past and about us all moving in it, the ‘selective fictions’ which life shuffles out like a pack of cards, mixing and dividing, withdrawing and restoring. It did not seem to me that I had the right to feel so calm and happy: a sense of Plenitude in which the only unanswered question was the one which arose with each memory of your name.

  Yes, a different island, harsher and more beautiful of aspect. One held the night-silence in one’s hands; feeling it slowly melting — as a child holds a piece of ice! At noon a dolphin rising from the ocean. Earthquake vapours on the sea-line. The great grove of plane trees with their black elephant hides which the wind strips off in great scrolls revealing the soft grey ashen skin within.… Much of the detail I had forgotten.

  It is rather off the beaten track this little promontory; only olive-pickers might come here in season. Otherwise the only visitants are the charcoal burners who ride through the grove before light every day with a characteristic jingle of stirrups. They have built long narrow trenches on the hill. They crouch over them all day, black as demons.

  But for the most part one might be living on the moon. Slightly noise of sea, the patient stridulation of cigales in the sunlight. One day I caught a tortoise at my front door; on the beach was a smashed turtle’s egg. Small items which plant themselves in the speculative mind like single notes of music belonging to some larger composition which I suppose one will never hear. The tortoise makes a charming and undemanding pet. I can hear P say: ‘Brother Ass and his tortoise. The marriage of true minds!’

  For the rest: the picture of a man skimming flat stones upon the still water of the lagoon at evening, waiting for a letter out of silence.

  But I had hardly confided this letter to the muleteer-postman who took our mail down to the town before I received a letter with an Egyptian stamp, addressed to me in an unknown hand. It read as follows:

  ‘You did not recognize it, did you? I mean the handwriting on the envelope? I confess that I chuckled as I addressed it to you, before beginning this letter: I could see your face all of a sudden with its expression of perplexity. I saw you turn the letter over in your fingers for a moment trying to guess who had sent it!

  ‘It is the first serious letter I have attempted, apart from short notes, with my new hand: this strange accessory-after-the-fact with which the good Amaril has equipped me! I wanted it to become word-perfect before I wrote to you. Of course I was frightened and disgusted by it at first, as you can imagine. But I have come to respect it very much, this delicate and beautiful steel contrivance which lies beside me so quietly on the table in its green velvet glove! Nothing falls out as one imagines it. I could not have believed myself accepting it so completely — steel and rubber seem such strange allies for human flesh. But the hand has proved itself almost more competent even than an ordinary flesh-and-blood member! In fact its powers are so comprehensive that I am a little frightened of it. I can undertake the most delicate of tasks, even turning the pages of a book, as well as the coarser ones. But most important of all — ah! Darley I tremble as I write the words — IT can paint!

  ‘I have crossed the border and entered into the possession of my kingdom, thanks to the Hand. Nothing about this was premeditated. One day it took up a brush and lo! pictures of truly troubling originality and authority were born. I have five of them now. I stare at them with reverent wonder. Where did they come from? But I know that the Hand was responsible. And this new handwriting is also one of its new inventions, tall and purposeful and tender. Don’t think I boast. I am speaking with the utmost objectivity, for I know that I am not responsible. It is the Hand alone which has contrived to slip me through the barriers into the company of the Real Ones as Pursewarden used to say. Yet it is a bit frightening; the elegant velvet glove guards its secret perfectly. If I wear both gloves a perfect anonymity is preserved! I watch with wonder and a certain distrust, as one might a beautiful and dangerous pet like a panther, say. There is nothing, it seems, that it cannot do impressively better than I can. This will explain my silence and I hope excuse it. I have been totally absorbed in this new hand-language and the interior metamorphosis it has brought about. All the roads have opened before me, everything seems now possible for the first time.

  ‘On the table beside me as I write lies my steamship ticket to France; yesterday I knew with absolute certainty that I must go there. Do you remember how Pursewarden used to say that artists, like sick cats, knew by instinct exactly which herb they needed to effect a cure: and that the bitter-sweet herb of their self-discovery only grew in one place, France? Within ten days I shall be gone! And among so many new certainties there is one which has raised its head — the certainty that you will follow me there in your own good time. I speak of certainty not prophecy — I have done with fortune-tellers once and for all!

  ‘This, then, is simply to give you the dispositions which the Hand has imposed on me, and which I accept with eagerness and gratitude — with resignation also. This last week I have been paying a round of good-bye visits, for I think it will be some long time before I see Alexandria again. It has become stale and profitless to me. And yet how can we but help love the places which have made us suffer? Leave-takings are in the air; it’s as if the whole composition of our lives were being suddenly drawn away by a new current. For I am not the only person who is leaving the place — far from it. Mountolive, for example, will be leaving in a couple of months; by a great stroke of luck he has been given the plum post of his profession, Paris! With this news all the old uncertainties seem to have vanished; last week he was secretly married! You will guess to whom.

  ‘Another deeply encouraging thing is the return and recovery of dear old Pombal. He is back at the Foreign Office now in a senior post and seems to have recovered much of his old form to judge by the long exuberant letter he sent me. “How could I have forgotten” he writes “that there are no women in the world except French women? It is quite mysterious. They are the most lovely creation of the Almighty. And yet… dear Clea, there are so very many of them, and each more perfect than the other. What is one poor man to do against so many, against such an army? For Godsake ask someone, anyone, to bring up reinforcements. Wouldn’t Darley like to help an old friend out for old times’ sake?”

  ‘I pass you the invitation for what it is worth. Amaril and Semira will have a child this month — a child with the nose I invented! He will spend a year in America on some job or other, taking them with him. Balthazar also is off on a visit to Smyrna and Venice. My most piquant piece of news, however, I have saved for the last. Justine!

  ‘This I do not expect you to believe. Nevertheless I must put it down. Walking down Rue Fuad at ten o’clock on a bright spring morning I saw her come towards me, radiant and beautifully turned out in a spring frock of eloquent design: and flop flop flop beside her on the dusty pavements, hopping like a toad, the detested Memlik! Clad in elastic-sided boots with spats. A cane with a gold knob. And a newly minted flower-pot on his fuzzy crown. I nearly collapsed. She was leading him along like a poodle. One almost saw the cheap leather leash attached to his collar. She greeted me with effusive warmth and introduced me to her captive who shuffled shyly and greeted me in a deep groaning voice like a bass saxophone. They were on their way to meet Nessim at the Select. Would I go too? Of course I would. You know how tirelessly curious I am. She kept shooting secret sparks of amus
ement at me without Memlik seeing. Her eyes were sparkling with delight, a sort of impish mockery. It was as if, like some powerful engine of destruction, she had suddenly switched on again. She has never looked happier or younger. When we absented ourselves to powder our noses I could only gasp: “Justine! Memlik! What on earth?” She gave a peal of laughter and giving me a great hug said: “I have found his point faible. He is hungry for society. He wants to move in social circles in Alexandria and meet a lot of white women!” More laughter. “But what is the object?” I said in bewilderment. Here all at once she became serious, though her eyes sparkled with clever malevolence. “We have started something, Nessim and I. We have made a break through at last. Clea, I am so happy, I could cry. It is something much bigger this time, international. We will have to go to Switzerland next year, probably for good. Nessim’s luck has suddenly changed. I can’t tell you any details.”

  ‘When we reached the table upstairs Nessim had already arrived and was talking to Memlik. His appearance staggered me, he looked so much younger, and so elegant and self-possessed. It gave me a queer pang, too, to see the passionate way they embraced, Nessim and Justine, as if oblivious to the rest of the world. Right there in the café, with such ecstatic passion that I did not know where to look.

  ‘Memlik sat there with his expensive gloves on his knee, smiling gently. It was clear that he enjoyed the life of high society, and I could see from the way he offered me an ice that he also enjoyed the company of white women!

  ‘Ah! it is getting tired, this miraculous hand. I must catch the evening post with this letter. There are a hundred things to attend to before I start the bore of packing. As for you, wise one, I have a feeling that you too perhaps have stepped across the threshold into the kingdom of your imagination, to take possession of it once and for all. Write and tell me — or save it for some small café under a chestnut-tree, in smoky autumn weather, by the Seine.

  ‘I wait, quite serene and happy, a real human being, an artist at last.

  ‘Clea.’

  But it was to be a little while yet before the clouds parted before me to reveal the secret landscape of which she was writing, and which she would henceforward appropriate, brushstroke by slow brushstroke. It had been so long in forming inside 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.

  Yes, one day I found myself writing down with trembling fingers the four words (four letters! four faces!) with which every story-teller since the world began has staked his slender claim to the attention of his fellow-men. Words which presage simply the old story of an artist coming of age. I wrote: ‘Once upon a time.…’

  And I felt as if the whole universe had given me a nudge!

  WORKPOINTS

  Hamid’s story of Darley and Melissa.

  Mountolive’s child by the dancer Grishkin. The result of the duel. The Russian letters. Her terror of Liza when after her mother’s death she is sent to her father.

  Memlik and Justine in Geneva. Nessim’s new ventures.

  Balthazar’s encounter with Arnauti in Venice. The violet sunglasses, the torn overcoat, pockets full of crumbs to feed the pigeons. The scene in Florian’s. The shuffling walk of general paralysis. Conversations on the balcony of the little pension over the rotting backwater of the canal. Was Justine actually Claudia? He cannot be sure. ‘Time is memory, they say; the art however is to revive it and yet avoid remembering. You speak of Alexandria. I can no longer even imagine it. It has dissolved. A work of art is something which is more like life than life itself!’ The slow death.

  The northern journey of Narouz, and the great battle of the sticks.

  Smyrna. The manuscripts, The Annals of Time. The theft.

  SOME NOTES FOR CLEA (by Pursewarden)

  * Page 737

  Big advances are not made by analytical procedures but by direct vision. Yes, but how?

  Art is not art unless it threatens your very existence. Could you repeat that, please, more slowly?

  As you get older and want to die more a strange kind of happiness seizes you; you suddenly realize that all art must end in a celebration. This is what drives the impotent mad with rage. They cannot provoke that fruitful compulsion of the Present, even though their scrotums be as hairy as Cape Gooseberries.

  Peine dure! Would you rather read Henry James or be pressed to death by weights? I have made my choice. I believe in the Holy Boast and the Communion of Aints. I do not belong to the Stream-of-Pompousness school, nor that of the desert fathers — prickeaters of the void.

  Language is not an accident of poetry but the essence. The lingo is the nub.

  A dévot of the Ophite sect,

  With member more or less erect,

  Snake-worship is the creed I hold

  And shall do till I get too old.

  The saucy serpent symbolizes

  A hundred Freudian surprises;

  With mine, I do the Indian trick

  Though it’s become a shade too thick

  To stand up like an actual rope —

  I leave that to the Band of Hope.

  Nor can I manage kundalini

  And play on it like Paganini…

  Mere beanstalk with a tower atop

  I’m just like Jack, I cannot stop,

  Hand over curious hand I climb

  Until I hear the belfries chime

  And some companionable she

  Asks is there honey still for tea?

  Perhaps it would be better just to start rewriting La Rochefoucauld, beginning with some such aphorism as ‘fouir c’est pourrir un peu?

  You must put yourself into deep soak, psychologically speaking.

  A phrase from Bacon: ‘Prize bulls made fierce by dark keeping.’

  Ah, my compatriots! What shall it profit a man to become a utilitarian jujube — to go thrilling off each morning in his electric brougham to the offices of the Spectator? How low can you rise?

  To become a poet is to take the whole field of human knowledge and human desire for one’s province; yes but, this field can only be covered by continual inner abdications.

  The more I read of those artists who have reached the bounds of human knowledge — and there is a permissible bound to the humanly knowable — the more it becomes apparent to me that statement becomes simpler as it becomes profounder. Finally it becomes platitude. At this point one begins to understand the religious claim that only initiates can communicate with each other because they use, not concept but symbol. For them all speech based on concept becomes an indiscretion; one can only really exchange what is mutually understood. In this sense every work of art is an indiscretion — but a calculated indiscretion.

  Death is a metaphor; nobody dies to himself.

  There must always be a breath of hope if you are to fully enjoy the quality of our despair; yes, and also remember that where there is faith there is doubt.

  Art is as unimportant as banking, unless it comes from a spirit in free play — then it really is banking.

  Vision is exorcism.

  NOTES IN THE TEXT

  * Page 680

  THE AFTERNOON SUN

  This little room, how well I know it!

  Now they’ve rented this and the next door one

  As business premises, the whole house

  Has been swallowed up by merchants’ offices,

  By limited companies and shipping agents …

  O how familiar it is, this little room!

  Once here, by the door, stood a sofa,

  And before it a little Turkish carpet,

  Exactly here. Then the shelf with the two

  Yellow vases, and on the right of them:

  No. Wait. Opposite them (how time passes)

  The shabby wardrobe and the little mirror.

  And here in the middle the table

&nbs
p; Where he always used to sit and write,

  And round it the three cane chairs.

  How many years … And by the window over there

  The bed we made love on so very often.

  Somewhere all these old sticks of furniture

  Must still be knocking about…

  And beside the window, yes, that bed.

  The afternoon sun climbed half way up it.

  We parted at four o’clock one afternoon,

  Just for a week, on just such an afternoon.

  I would have never

  Believed those seven days could last forever.

  free translation from C. P. Cavafy

  * Page 681

  FAR AWAY