DD24 – The Alexandria Quartet
Back in the early 1970s, Alan Ayckbourn brought a series of three plays to the stage. Under the umbrella title of The Normal Conquests, the three plays followed the same six characters over the same weekend, with the action taking place in three different areas of a house. Table Manners was set in the dining room, Living Together in the living room, and Round and Round the Garden, well I suppose you guessed, that took place in the garden. Each play explored various relationships among the six characters. The idea was stunning (typical Alan Ayckbourn). The plays were self-contained, and the three could be watched in any order. However, some scenes overlapped, so that a character’s exit from one play corresponded with an entrance in another. In the same way, noise and commotion in one room could sometimes be heard by characters in another. To watch one alone would be to miss a considerable amount of insight – and fun!
The underlying story concerns Annie, who lives in the country looking after her demanding mother. She has decided that she needs a weekend off. Reg, her brother, and Sarah, Roger’s wife, agree to come and take care of Annie & Reg’s mother for a weekend while Annie goes off a short trip. However, Annie is secretly planning to meet up with her sister Ruth’s charming, rakish husband Norman for an illicit weekend together. Inevitable, things go wrong when Norman shows up to meet Annie early and everybody ends up at the house for the entire weekend. Arguments develop, while the characters have differing degrees of understanding about what’s actually happening. The results were hilarious, and occasionally tear-jerking. The plays saw some of the UK’s leading actors in their earlier manifestations, including Tom Courtenay (who was Norman), Felicity Kendall (famous in Genevieve, as Annie), Penelope Keith (as Sarah and so many other roles since), and the wonderful Michael Gambon as Tom, along with Bridget Turner and Mark Kingston rounding out the sextet.
The idea for a series of alternatives perspectives has been used before, of course, possibly most famously in Rashömon, Kurosawa’s brilliant film about the murder of a samurai, and the rape of his wife. That film was based on a Japanese short story. However, when I think about this approach I turn to Lawrence Durrell and his Alexandria Quartet for another example of alternative accounts of inter-related events.
In this series of novels, the first three books (Justine, Balthazar and Mountolive) present three perspectives on a single set of events affecting the key characters in Alexandria in the years immediately before the beginning of the Second World War. The fourth book, Clea, is set six years later. As Ayckbourn has done in many of his later plays, Durrell wanted to explore contemporary ideas about science, perspective and time. In a 1959 Paris Review interview, Durrell described the ideas behind the Alexandria Quartet in terms of a convergence of Eastern and Western metaphysics, based on Einstein’s overturning of the old view of the material universe, and Freud’s doing the same for the concept of stable personalities, yielding a new concept of reality. Modest intentions?
When you start reading Justine, one thing is certain. Traditional linear time is set aside, and episodes, many of them very brief, appear without dates. Every so often you’ll read one chapter immediately after another which must have taken place later. It is as if we are reading the reminiscences of the author, and they appear as they do often in real life, somewhat randomly and often without any linking logic. That’s not to say you can’t put together a timeline – indeed that’s one of the challenges and satisfactions of the novel – but sequence isn’t central. Another oddity is that there is a narrator, not named in Justine, although later in the series we discover it was Darley, a struggling writer and schoolmaster, whose life story seems to replicate much of Durrell’s. Darley explains the episodic text because it was important for him to describe events not “in the order in which they took place – for that is history – but in the order in which they first became significant for me.”
In a sense, this first novel is something of a confessional. The unnamed Darley is relating his life in Alexandria in the 1930s, “an exotic city of constant interactions between cultures and religions”, as Durrell explains to a writer for the Wall Street Journal twenty years after the book appeared. It was, he felt, a place combining sophistication and sordidness. The novel is centred around Darley’s tragic affair with Justine, a beautiful and mysterious Jewish woman, born poor but now married to a wealthy Egyptian, Nessim. Alexandria offers a festival of multiculturalism, its ancient Arab ways co-mingling with modern European mores, where Europeans exist alongside Egyptians, and Jews and Christians live alongside Muslims, the diversity of characters, reflecting the diversity of the city. In that Financial Review article Durrell explains he saw Justine as the essence of Alexandria, its “true child…neither Greek, Syrian, nor Egyptian, but a hybrid”, alluring, seductive, and yet mournful.
The core of Justine concerns her torrid and secret love affair with the narrator, which becomes increasingly dangerous as war approaches. There are many other subplots. While we are following the shifting relationships among the key characters, there are also passages from a fictional novel by a former husband of Justine’s, which the narrator reads obsessively to find clues about Justine’s past life. In doing so, he learns of her propensity for many lovers, her complex sexuality, and her perpetual angst. He also discovers Justine’s diary.
However, it would be a mistake to assume the novel is about Justine. While she is important, Alexandria is central, with the wild and diverse characters living there who we meet as we read along. Many of these characters practice at least one of the major religions of the region, but none are very religious in the more traditional sense of that notion. Durrell describes them as “all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.” In a further complication, we discover some of the characters are in a small group studying the Kabbalah. Finally, there are also some insights into the workings of the British secret service, an element that will become more important in the next two books, Balthazar and Mountolive.
Written 65 years ago, what seemed so clever then might read rather less successfully today. No, that’s unfair, but rather once you have read on to the second and third books, some of the complexities of the first are laid bare. It’s not a series to reread after a short time. It is a series to read, mull over and then leave, allowing it to settle. Some years later you can return with a distanced perspective and enjoy being drawn into its complications and mysteries.
Indeed, rereading Justine many years later I found it a very different experience. The book is like contemplating a vast stained-glass window. Initially, what you see are pieces of glass, some smooth and modern, some older, and some that look like shards from even earlier times, with scraps of Latin on them. From a distance, there is a whole, albeit rather unclear and uncertain. Close up, you see the dissonances and any sense of a coherent design disappears. You study each piece and wonder whether it might link up with another later on.
The first time around, I was engaged in the story because I was trying to make sense of what I was reading in terms of an unfolding calendar time, that this happened before that. A much later reading allows you to think about the elements, when it’s enough to know that some relationships are from early on, some come later. What you can’t see until you read Balthazar is that part of what Darley is telling you is untrue, or at the very least a distorted or inflated version of what had taken place.
Durrell is a good guide. Balthazar was published in 1958, a year after Justine. It has an Introductory Note which begins: “The characters and situations in this novel, the second of a group – a sibling, not a sequel to Justine… Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern. The three first parts, however, are to be deployed spatially…and are not linked in a serial form. They interlap, interweave, in a purely spatial relation. Time is stayed. The fourth part alone will represent time and be a true sequel …” It is just as well we are made aware of this, as the first part of Balthazar sets about systematic undermining of several of the ‘facts’ we’d read in Justine! That is made clear in Part 3 of Balthazar when we read about carnival time in Alexandria, and a murder that happened during the height of Darley’s affair with Justine – although it wasn’t even mentioned in the earlier novel.
Like Justine, Balthazar opens with Darley as the narrator. He has sent Balthazar a ‘loose-leafed Inter-Linear’, a narrative manuscript, now “seared and starred by a massive interlinear of sentences, paragraphs and question marks … It was cross-hatched, crabbed, starred with questions and answers in different coloured inks, in typescript.” Darley seems to be in a dark place, and reminisces about the past, touching on profligacy and sentimentality, on killing the vitality of love by taking things easy. It is a picture of Alexandria as a place of melded histories, rich, alluring and yet frustrating, a unique multicultural city.
Soon we change narrator, and the rest of the novel is mainly told by Balthazar. New key characters emerge. There’s Pursewarden, a novelist, and Scobie, an ageing homosexual who had been some kind of government agent for the British. We read about Scobie’s death: he’d gone in drag to the harbour and is beaten to death by sailors, whom he might have approached as potential pickups. It is claimed to be one of the first depictions of a hate crime against homosexuals in modern British literature. Durrell is confronting. We don’t just read about Scobie’s death but we are also told about the aftermath of his death. The others living in Scobie’s quarter ransack his house, steal his meagre possessions and drink all the bootleg liquer he had been distilling in his bathtub. The booze leads to two deaths and twenty-two severe poisonings: Durrell calls this “Scobie leaving a mark on the world”.
The book ends with Balthazar’s reminiscences of Clea. Balthazar tells Darley that while he had short-sightedly been caught up in his intrigue with Justine and had been finding solace from its emotional fall-out in the arms of Melissa – the person who ‘really loved’ him was Clea. Confused? Don’t be. You should be able to anticipate that Clea will return.
Durrell’s approach changes in Mountolive, published in 1958. The third book in the series, Mountolive offers the only third person narrative in the series. While the first two had been largely concerned with liaisons and affairs, this book is more concerned with political events. We are introduced to Mountolive’s background and early diplomatic career. Having been in Egypt before, he returns to country at the time of the first two novels, with Pursewarden as his senior political adviser. There’s evidence of gun-running, apparently in support of Zionism. In this complex story, Pursewarden kills himself; and Nessim is warned about his brother Narouz, who is regarded as a dangerous subversive. Narouz is murdered, and in a world of bribes and deceit Mountolive despairs and turns his back on Egypt, totally disillusioned. This volume is largely focussed on the realpolitik of Alexandria, and all the sexual escapades and indulgences of the first two books take second place.
The last of the four books, Clea, published in 1960, and it represents a return to the format of the first two. Our narrator, Darley, is back, and he is living on a remote Greek island with the illegitimate six-year-old daughter resulting from Nessim’s affair with Melissa. We are now some years past the events of the first three volumes. Darley has focussed on his writing (is he writing the first book?) drawing on £500 left him in Pursewarden’s will (who’d committed suicide). You have the sense some episodes from the past are being more clearly explained.
Discovering that Nessim and his family have fallen from grace, Darley and Nessim’s daughter return to Alexandria, now under nightly World War 2 bombing raids. Darley continues to reminisce about all the characters we have met in the previous books. He runs into Clea in the street, and they begin an affair, one Darley finds more satisfying than before, as he feels he is no longer under the shadow of his previous affairs with Justine and Melissa. This is, I think, the weakest of the four books, drawing stories and events to a close, but lacking the erotic punch of the first two books, and the political realism of the third.
Is The Alexandria Quartet still popular? It is exotic and erotic. It offers a challenge to the reader, as you sort out events and their consequences. Settings are beautifully described. Like any good novel, it is something of a roller-coaster as relationships flare up, disasters intervene, and you fret over the too closely involved characters and their activities. In terms of its form, it is outstanding. It is described as metafiction. For me, the episodic text, the reordering of time, and the overlaps and contradictions between the first three novels make it excitingly and invitingly ‘postmodern’.
Perhaps one limitation is in the setting. The Alexandria of the story was still quite real in the post-war years, as were the political shenanigans of the time. Sixty years ago, it was a world that was beginning to slip into the past, but close enough to resonate. Sixty years later, it describes a milieu that is less readily understood, giving the whole series of events a flavour of ‘history’. Yes, there was an Alexandria like that, a place of intrigues, seductions and spies from every region. However, we left that world once the war was over, or perhaps it was when Ingrid Bergman walked away from Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.
Later in his career, Lawrence Durrell wrote The Avignon Quintet. This was a five-volume series published between 1974 and 1985. Like the Alexandria Quartet, the novels are metafictional, and follow the same underlying structure, one which features multiple and contradictory narrators, often with each narrator writing about the other characters as if they were fictional creations in a novel (which, of course, they were).
If the Alexandria Quartet touched on various issues, this series was even more ambitious, , including commentaries on Gnosticism, Fascism, Nazism, wars, quantum mechanics and sexual identity! His own description of them was that they were:
“roped together like climbers on a rockface, but all independent… a series of books through which the same characters move for all the world as if to illustrate the notion of reincarnation.”
That description could have been equally well applied to The Alexandria Quartet. In the 21st Century we are no longer so impressed by writers simply because they manage to produce metafiction. However, Lawrence Durrell remains on my ‘great writers’ list because of his outstanding skills, not because of the literary style he adopted. I’ll just enjoy the novels and leave any judgements of his ‘style’ to academic literary critics.
