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‘Why?’: the Question of Writing

‘Why?’ At three critical points in his work Durrell posed this unanswerable and, it seems, unaskable question, the most poignant occasion being the incomprehension of Blaise the carter at the suicide of Livia: ‘Mais pourquoi?’ – but for what? – the more poignant for the fact that Blaise, unlike Constance, the analytical sister, has only simple questions for these most complex of answers (Quintet 821). Previously the question had led, like a leitmotif, towards an interrogation of behaviour rather than of value. (When Drexel is prevented from seeing the headless corpse of Piers de Nogaret he asks ‘But why? ... what on earth could such a charade mean?’ - Quintet 74; the innocence of the question underlines its stupidity, its superfluity. Similarly, on another occasion robbed of its dignity by its ordinariness, Blanford’s one-night stand quite fortuitously kills herself next morning; ‘But why on earth?’ he exclaims ‘in an outburst of chagrin’ - Quintet 637). It is the chagrin, the bewilderment, the lack of an obvious explanation, that goads the conscience and interrupts the real storyline. Durrell saves his ‘why?’ for the crossroads where madness meets poetry, island meets city. In this chapter I shall take further the idea of the reader’s responsibility for making sense of something which is beyond the capacity of the characters.

In Quinx, as the Quintet nears its conclusion, the ‘purely imaginary’ Sabine says ‘the big question is always “Why?”’ (Quintet 1245). The answer is irrelevant in Livia’s case: there can be no answer except for those brave enough to follow the diktat of memory into subjective patterns of private madness – those wounded in both sex and psyche. ‘Indeed it was the capital question, but it had been asked of Livia since her birth, for nothing that she did or was[,] entered into the sphere of rational explanations ... The “why” extended in every direction, on all sides’ (Quintet 821-2). The question resonated in Durrell’s own conscience. One of his last notes says:

the Greek Cynic Philosopher Demonax has left us a single aphorism. It runs: ‘nobody really wants to be bad. So then why...?’ Why indeed, for wickedness which is so counter-productive in terms of human happiness seems quite involuntary like so much human behaviour. Why, when you want to write something does something quite different, quite unforseen [sic],

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intervene? Demonax was dreaming of an estate in which human consciousness behaved predictably. But when he tried to follow his own stream of free association the sky fell in.1

Let us therefore examine these previous pivots on which the question has turned. The first is located towards the close of the Quartet, when Darley returns, from island to city, to re-encounter Justine under house-arrest, locked into both the country mansion and her now meaningless marriage with Nessim:

She was holding up her wrists at me, her face carved into a grimace. She

held them joined together as if by invisible manacles. She exhibited these imaginary handcuffs for a long moment before dropping her hands back into her lap, and then, abruptly, swift as a snake, she crossed to the divan where I lay and sat down at my feet, uttering as she did so, in a voice vibrating with remorseful resentment, the words: ‘Why, Darley? Oh why?’ It was as if she were interrogating not merely destiny or fate but the very workings of the universe itself in these thrilling poignant tones (Quartet 692).

The second is by comparison a more tame, more domesticated occasion: Felix finds Benedicta in tears after love-making: ‘“Why, Benedicta?” ... “I don’t know”’ (Tunc 155). The question is connected as if by an umbilical cord to the issues raised by Freud, Bleuler, Einstein and now Joyce, nominator of the quark. Freud sought, from ‘Little Hans’, truths as important for the survival of both subject and reader as those elucidated by Dickens’s Pip or Lady Dedlock. But ‘why?’ is insufficient. It is qualitatively different from the ideas of ‘where did we come from and where are we going?’ because, however unpleasant the answers to these may be, they are ascertainable. ‘Why?’ is not so susceptible. It seems that, were there sufficient ‘if’ in the imagination, ‘why?’ might become unnecessary. But modernism, as Hugo von Hofmannsthal said, consists in both ‘analysis of life’ and ‘escape from life’.2

Durrell had pointed the hunt in such a direction that it is the penetrability of our identities, the fact that we are made up of others’ spare parts, not necessarily ever adding up to an integrated whole, which bedevils existence and makes of the imagination the devil’s tool. Durrell’s work has had a profound influence on the work of John 1 ‘The Asides of Demonax’, p. 4.2 H. von Hofmannsthal, Prose Works (Frankfurt, 1951-6) vol. 1, p. 149: quoted in J. Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras: Europe in 1900 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978) p. 528.

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Fowles, Thomas Pynchon and John Hawkes in this respect. He had become the griot of a community of writers whose chief signature was the confusion of identities, of meaning, of intention.

We already know that Pursewarden’s answer to the ‘question of writing’ would be unequivocal: ‘to recover a lost innocence’. But we also know that such an assertion is also an admission containing within itself the notion of atonement: that the lost innocent was pre-existent of the originality of sin, and that the originality of writing thus inheres within man’s pointlessness. Whether one accepts or rejects such a proposition probably hinges on the distinction between autism and schizophrenia, between the person who retreats into an imaginary world in order to escape the problem of confronting the fairy story and the person who remains, undecided, in the outer world, continually refusing to negotiate the folktale. Does the asylum exist to protect the madman from society or society from the madman? Our answer to this question decides the trajectory of both our politics and our madness: it separates, identifies and defines those whom we most fear and who most fear us. The ‘conjunction’ between committal and commitment is, once again, man.

In the Quintet, Durrell asked these questions more piercingly, more intensively, than before, adding to his battery of interrogation marks the new stringency of this, the most merciless and most uncompromising of monosyllables. The Quintet represented a conscious culmination of work begun as a young man: it is slow, consciously aged and constructed in such a way that, according to his preconceived plan, he achieved the anagnorisis, the recognition which constitutes the final part of ancient drama. Above all, the anagnorisis involves what Rank had called ‘the spiritual why’ and, as the pre-eminent Word, it had taken on a life of its own: it was there ‘in the beginning’ and it persists until the end. Those who possess it know how to manipulate it into poetry, into images of reality. In this regard, Durrell had perhaps remained more akin to what Anaïs Nin tried to locate in her novels than to the more extrovert, rumbustious and confessional work of Miller.

It is perhaps only by reading The Avignon Ouintet that we can detect the trail along which Durrell laid the elements of his ‘Tibetan novel’: while he explicitly brings eastern and western thought to an accouchement, a recognition, we now see that the man whose life had been a book ‘impregné de bouddhisme’ had never done other than to ‘put all ontology to the question’. It results in some strange problems for the reader, not least the difficulty in knowing what is being said, by whom and to whom. It shifts the epicentre by making magic once more new. The recognition is manifold and yet answers a single question about the writer’s own identity. In previous work, the author had spoken directly to us out of his madness (‘Asylum in the Snow’),

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his anger (Lawrence Lucifer in The Black Book), his poetry (‘Cities, Plains and People’), his perplexity (Darley in the Quartet) or his despair (Felix in The Revolt). But, in each phase, this rhetoric had been subverted whenever that hero had needed to comment on, or to question, his own voice: the different voices of the Quartet (Balthazar’s ‘Great Interlinear’, the ‘Conversations with Brother Ass’ with the alter ego Pursewarden), of The Revolt (Koepgen, his alter felix), the diaries of ‘Death Gregory’ in The Black Book. Here, the ‘Venetian Papers’ of Sutcliffe suggest the presence of death – once again, the helpful use of decadence.

In the Quintet it is not always possible to disentangle the identities of the narrators, Blanford and his creation Sutcliffe, or of Bruce Drexel (the putative author of both who, however, also attributes a great deal of his own tale to the fact that he exists in a book written by Sutcliffe). Durrell’s own envoi to Monsieur –

So D. begat Blanford

(who begat Tu and Sam and Livia)who begat Sutcliffe who begat Bloshford

Piers and Sylvie and Bruce who begat Akkad and Sabine and Banquo

who begat Pia who begat Trash who begat ... (Quintet 294)

- obfuscates more than it clarifies. In a draft note Durrell had referred to these creatures as ‘holy of their kind’: one can be sure that such tenderness indicated not merely his sense of responsibility for having begotten them, but also his empathy in their own search for a raison d’être. Durrell’s ‘politics’ in this respect would have been inclusive, embracing.

As we have seen, the central metaphor of the Quintet is Constance herself: she provides the bridge between Freud and the post-freudian world: she is the beauty which unites passionate men: she is strength capable of weakness, and the novelty of her womanhood gives her the vantage-point previously lacked by Durrell’s characters: she is capable of exploring the gap between the sexual and intellectual cultures of east and west, and, moreover, she can

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make that exploration and return in order to relate it. And yet, as we have also seen, Constance in herself is powerless, and knows, both as doctor and as woman, that her partner, man, is only truly capable of writing about love in the calamitous terms of bitterness, death and separation. Therefore, Constance turns to her own buried life, to her inverted self which can liberate her from such polarities as life/death.

On the face of it, detaching the ‘real’ author of these books, in which both the mirror principle and that of indeterminacy are taken to almost ludicrous lengths, is even more difficult than in deciphering the voices of the Quartet. But the fact that more than one writer within the fabric of the quincunx is playing God, and the parallel fact that characters cross the mirror to think thoughts and perform actions which belong theoretically to their counterparts, demonstrates that Durrell had arrived at the point where his idea of the western novel, in the tradition from Tristram Shandy to Death of a Hero, could meet and merge with the Tao-te Ching; on ‘the Roof of the World’ in The Dark Labyrinth Ruth Adams’s ‘I no longer prohibit and select. I include’ (DL 245) becomes a paraphrase of Lao Tzu: ‘It is because it never attempts itself to be great that it succeeds in becoming great’,3

or Alexandra David-Neel’s point that ‘psychoanalysis ... has been practised for centuries among Buddhists’.4

In the Quintet Durrell, in this oblique, implicit fashion answered so many of the questions which ‘modernism’ has asked of our century – questions which include the nature of the ‘-ism’ itself. Our capacity for giving names to literary movements or theories seems spurious in the light of the idea that the radical question is the problem of the human being in naming himself. The encyclopaedia fails the lovers in their quest for meaning, for identity without and within each other, because it cannot circle them with its knowledge. It cannot define, it cannot legislate for identities which might suddenly declaim a new word, a new signal weighted with meaning which is unique, specific and provisional.

The languages spoken in the Quintet are slow tongues. The slowness of the Quintet creates moments of great beauty. I mean this in the medieval sense in which atrocity and beauty could coexist in the same image and the same moment: ‘credo quia absurdum’. The death of Nancy Quiminal, however barbarous and seemingly pitiless, uncharitable, is nevertheless necessary and therefore of great beauty. When we consider that, as one commentator has put it, ‘the gnostics were aware that to the rational mind the incarnation was a fantasy, the crucifixion an offence, and the resurrection an absurdity’,5 the ability of medieval people to live within a world whose central axis

3 Lao Tzu, Tao-te Ching trans. D. Lau, book 1, xxxiv.4 A. David-Neel, Buddhism p. 72.5 Cf. E. Pagels, op. cit., pp. 48, 54, 94.

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seemed to be its inherent polyphonic instability was not the problem it would become with the advent of linear narrative.

The point can be underlined by returning to the issue raised in Part 1. Durrell’s disenchantment with contemporary literature and its sources, which drove him to find the intellectual, visceral and verbal vigour of the Elizabethans, was due not merely to the fact that writers were not, in his view, writing about the modern predicament. It was based on the facts stemming from his own childhood and adolescence, that there was no ‘modern’ condition that could not be encountered and satisfied by that Buddhist capacity for psychoanalysis. If life is indeed a book, then the book can - and must - also be found elsewhere. As Roland Barthes puts it:

I cannot write myself. What, after all, is this ‘I’ who would write himself? ... To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little ... To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not - this is the beginning of writing (Barthes’s emphasis).6

We therefore cross into each others’ conditions and thus into each others’ mental and emotional personae, but with the greatest apprehension. In the process of negotiating this philosophical minefield, Durrell had to make a new qualitative decision in asking himself whether people could ‘walk in and out of each other’s lives without damaging the quiddity of each other?’ (Quintet 123). How far can one know - let alone become - another person? This is the kind of question from which Darley and Felix had run.

It was in this way that Durrell succeeded in exploring simultaneously the politics of love and the politics of madness. The relationship of Blanford and Sutcliffe is that of two selves imprisoned in the single idea of ‘writer’ and it is also the master/servant nexus: running through the Quintet (as we have also seen it in the ‘Brother Ass’ section of the Quartet and Lucifer’s custodianship of Gregory’s diary in The Black Book) is the query ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ – an interrogation mark which includes the issue of psychiatry and asylum.

When, in Quinx, Blanford remarks to Sutcliffe, ‘reading your verse is like dragging a pond without ever finding the body’ (Quintet 1304) we have an answer to Durrell’s unpublished self-criticism: that he had been writing poems addressed to himself. The missing child and the poet are never properly united, atoned.

6 Barthes, Lover’s Discourse pp. 98-100.

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Four episodes, three of them in the quint-essential Constance, underline the notion that the miraculous and the horrific live in vertiginous proximity. Each points to the collective and yet emphasises the nature of the individual conscience. The first is the scene in which the bicycles of Avignon are destroyed by the authorities in order to prevent communication between the city and the resistance (Quintet 763-6); the second comes with the liberation of the city and the public exposure of collaborators, culminating in the execution of Nancy Quiminal who had been sleeping with a German officer to save French lives (this is immediately followed by the pathetic scene in which her daughters and invalid husband view her body in the morgue before it is committed to the fosse communale - Quintet 953-9; Durrell was always at his cruellest when he was most tender - to both subject and reader, that is). But between these two actions comes the liberation of the asylum itself (Quintet 943-52): here Durrell mixed the cordial with the grotesque, the meaning of the liberation being that, with the freedom of the city, there was no further need to distinguish between sane and mad, no political boundaries to stop the lunatics setting off, like Chaucerian pilgrims, on a mad, picaresque gallop of their own.

The fourth episode occurs in the chapter ‘Inner Worlds’ in Sebastian (Quintet 1029-75), when Constance begins to treat the child of Sebastian Affad. The child’s autism, and its potential solution, is the central event of the Quintet, because it epitomises Durrell’s own spiritual odyssey: the idea of a child lost to humanity, because he is frozen within himself serves to include the notion of madness as insight. The child is bound to one quest, that of his identity; the rest of the world to another, that of communicating with that identity. By means of ‘alienation and despair’ it is possible for the child’s heart to evolve. From the evidence of his notebooks it is clear that (in addition to the cathartic experience of weeping, to which he made explicit reference in the preface to Sebastian - Quintet 968) Durrell placed considerable emphasis on the point at which, during the funeral of his father, the child crosses the church from his grandmother to Constance, moving, one might think, from the minus side to the plus side of his own heraldic universe.

The ‘trap’, like the asylums of Montfavet and Geneva, applies both to those included and to those excluded: the child, like the man, is the ‘conjunction’ between interior and external realities, providing both the problem and its solution. He is both real and unreal, neither living nor dead. If he remains within the trap he becomes a doll, a thaumaturge, an image of fear and incomprehension: if he can evolve the heart, he can become a god.

Memory is a ‘trap’ from which we cannot escape, but entrapment itself is of several kinds. The first is the labyrinth, through which memory is pursued and in which we may become lost. The

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pursuit is to the starting-point, the place where the trauma began, where the message or riddle (and of course its answer or explanation) is to be found. The second is the trappe of silence which is depicted in the Quintet, the state of frozen muteness of the autist, not simply unable to communicate but also to be communicated per se and to be spoken to: those without address. The third trap is the oubliette, the drain of forgetfulness in which the unwanted children are thrown which, psychologically speaking, could be viewed as the uterine tract. In each case, the Quintet deepens our sense of the journey, and adds both to the ‘game’ of escape played out between parent and child, master and servant, author and character, and to the ‘quest’ for meaning and identity which underlies that game. We have seen Felix and Benedicta frozen into madness, and Darley, like the blind dray-horse of Verfeuille in Monsieur, encircling a treasure which he fails to identify or even locate, besieging the mouseion: the whole of The Black Book could indeed be read as a celebration of Lawrence Lucifer’s failure to escape the Regina Hotel. But in the Quintet all these strands are brought together. Madness, escape and trauma are combined in one family saga of rage and despair. (Stephanie Moore adds the point that we also, as reader/accomplice, need to learn how to step outside the text in order to avoid the traps Durrell sets for us. She also draws attention [pace Eco] to the fact that the urge, the motive to escape entrapment within the human body, is at the core of gnostic belief.)7

Madness both intensifies memory and is heightened by it. Sylvie’s derangement beckons her brother Piers towards her (Quintet 7-8), and, on the other side of the mirror, Blanford in pursuit of Livia declares ‘there is no way out except madness’ (Quintet 300). The train which gives the illusion of movement does not in fact move, except by circularity and almost without incident to and from the same terminus: this, too, is an arrest (of time) from which we can learn, not about the train itself, which has seemed so significant, but about the terminus of the tu quoque, the point of continual return.

The entrapment is expressed in every character: the consul, Felix Chatto, walks the city by night, trying, like Darley, to ‘make sense’, but in Avignon his circumambulation is emphasised by the medieval streetscape of the walled, circular city. The complicated scheme by which every character is mirrored in another, in which every resonance finds an echo, every intimation is executed both here and elsewhere, suggests the idea of parallel worlds in which all the humans are replicated. People are trapped within people – Livia and Constance in symbiotic motion; Sutcliffe within Blanford; Akkad as Affad as Hassad; von Esslin, the representative of the ‘master race’, within two Polish servants, the maid and the batman. 7 S. Moore, ‘Turning the Trap’, paper delivered to VIIth International Lawrence Durrell Conference, Avignon, 1992.

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The notion of accommodation, of containing or confining, is, as we have seen, the crux of the way we deal with the issue of otherness. The key is memory, and the difficulty of metonymy, of recalling and rewriting events at one and the same time (as Unamuno said, ‘History is to redream history’).8 History proves a poor substitute for the required record of naming, as we discussed it in the last chapter: history is a series of imperfect memories, because the imagination needs the living presence of metaphor, the reality of which will be immediately seizable. Again, this explains Durrell’s insistence on the importance of gnosticism as a route to apprehension. But the power of memory (Mnemosyne being the dominant Muse) means that everything takes place in the past tense – the fragile metaphor is already dissolved before the poem has been concluded: it would be more accurate to say that the problem of the lost child and the secret message was not cogito ergo sum but cogitavi ergo fui [I thought, therefore I was]. The ur-Felix looking down at his old self at the opening of ‘The Placebo’, the way in which Felix and Benedicta remember rather than enact their madness, the vignettes of the past lives of the folk of the Quintet, are all commanded by what cannot be forgotten. The attempt to escape the labyrinth, to live in the minute Now, is surrendered: memory breaks into this fragile moment, balanced between past and future, and sends the writer/reader down the painful rails of nostalgia. Is memory therefore the enemy, constantly imperilling the correct act of naming? Is man condemned to live solely in memory? Does life depend on recalling previous lives? And how can some items – a pair of clogs or a couch – have the power, denied to rational humans, to transcend memory: indeed, to control it through their sudden and startling epiphanies? The constant visitation on the present of the beloved who is absent, previous, deceased, living only in memory, is what keeps the story going: we have already seen what happens when love is happy and present (Darley and Clea almost bringing the book to an end); in the Quintet nothing happens, because it is seen through the long telescope of narrated vision. Memory is an imperative, a responsibility, a giver of life and style to the otherwise zero moment.

Like the future man, the past man is buried alive within and beneath these other, previous, lives, and it is his responsibility to find a new point of departure, to ‘come out’. But however much he tries to do so, he cannot forget. He can reorder experience, relate it, but in so far as it discomfits him he cannot leave it alone any more than it can leave him undisturbed. The most dangerous point in relation to the integrity of the book is that memory precedes the book. It is therefore possible that the book has no purpose because the tale has already been told by other means. The book impersonates experience rather than describing it. It represents only a fragment of the total memory 8 Unamuno, Mist p. 19.

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of the Heraldic Universe, the ‘great memory’ which we have seen Durrell sharing with Yeats. The point de crise of writing, therefore, is that we cannot arrest narration, and yet narration serves no purpose unless it can liberate the lives imprisoned in the Book.

The idea of responsibility is therefore clearly delineated in the Quintet: that of the analyst as doctor both to diagnose the condition and to create a prognosis, of the writer as analyst to describe the condition and its development. The idea that the child, too, admits his responsibilities, is suggested by the movement from grandmother to foster-mother, as important (we might think) as the quest-hero crossing water. It is also a profession of love, of the emergence of a buried self into the ‘real’ world. The evolution emancipates the locked-in child from the void at the centre of life, where the message should be, where the homecoming – to love, to truth, to self – should take place.

The question ‘why?’ thus touches the parent/guardian, the child/victim and the writer/doctor. It poses the difficulty of mapping and of explanation. First, to locate the site of the problem, to reconcile it with the site of memory, then to paint the portrait of the sufferer, to give an image to his condition, and finally to execute the duty of ‘finding happiness’, which might consist of nothing more or less than understanding, surrendering. It is a baroque question, because it involves the mirror in self-questioning, in seeking the true reflection of others, in explaining the performance of the three genders, ‘He She and It’. The mirror reflects an ‘other’ world, as the features of Drexel, Piers, Sylvie and Akkad are mirrored by those of Blanford, Constance, Livia and Affad.

The four episodes are the epitome of Durrell’s writing: cutting, lapidary images which will always trouble the conscience, whatever we may subsequently read – or indeed write:

From the window he saw them all emerge, walking with circumspection, on tiptoe, gazing about with wonder at ‘outside’ from their ‘inside’, being born again. The square was slowly filling up with them, each with his personal vocabulary, the triumph of his destiny over reason! (Quintet 944)

Yet it is this ‘personal vocabulary’ for which Durrell fought so passionately and so strenuously: in The Red Limbo Lingo - A Poetry Notebook (1971) he had written ‘we speak in puns and ellipses lest the computers, our children, overhear: but is there any blood left in the cut word?’9

Since so much of our belief about ourselves derives from literature, this leads directly to the matter of what a book should be, and whether our prime concern should be for literature or humanity: 9 Red Limbo Lingo p. 15.

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‘try to imagine a detective story in which the reader turns out to be the criminal’.10 If, for Durrell, life had become a book, because that was what life had always seemed to mean, if that was the way in which life could most suitably be lived, then a serious problem arose if the integrity, the quiddity, of the book itself was called into question. Why do we write? What darkness does the poet try to hold at bay with inadequate adjectives? What impossible metaphors does he seek to achieve? ‘The function of a university is to domesticate poetry and imperil reason’ said Durrell in a notebook for the Quintet.11 But education, which Durrell largely escaped, is only the excuse for some more menacing condition of acculturation. ‘To want only what happens - to co-operate wholly with the inevitable - that is bliss’ he said in the same notebook.

Durrell was attracted to The Ship of Fools because it told no story: it could have no consequence, no afterthought.12 The beauty and yet the danger of the gnosticism and the mandala/quincunx, which, together, provided the Quintet with its interdependent philosophy and structure, is that they afford the prepared reader (for which, read ‘pilgrim’) with an immediately accessible and apprehensible ideogram which, however, is capable of fundamentally undermining the modern conscience and its ability to justify itself to itself through its chosen media of writing and reading. To swim with the proteans, to avoid the shoreline and the antæan responsibilities, would be the ultimate ‘escape’. But, as Julian Pehlevi (reading Flaubert’s echo of Ovid) discovers, ‘c’est le passé qui nous dévore’ (Tunc 304) and it is to memory, to what might have been as much as to what has occurred, that the writer is addressed.

The Avignon Quintet is concerned with recognition, but it was also conceived as a ‘Book of Miracles’: the two themes are neither, necessarily, complementary nor exclusive. But for the recognition to be miraculous, some power must be generated from within the structure which will carry author, subject and reader (if we can still adhere to such categories) across a hermeneutic barrier. The difficulty – I return without apology to the word which characterised Durrell’s last years as a writer – resides, like a daimon, which is neither beneficent nor malignant, in the very concept of the idea of accessibility and apprehension. These are the questions which Freud and Jung could address but could not answer; questions posed by Cervantes but not of his making; alternatives undenied by the authors of the ‘gnostic gospels’; ideas which may or may not be complementary, mutually true or contradictory, ideas which, like Machiavelli’s The Prince and the Tao-te Ching themselves, revolve 10 CalTech notes.11 CERLD inv. 1344.12 Conversation with the author.

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around the business of how the way we see the world is to be discussed and ordered.

Durrell’s problem, as a successful novelist within the western narrative tradition, was to convince his ‘traditional’ readers that there was another ‘way’, another form of perennity. As Richard Kearney puts it succinctly:

In our quest for imagination, we find ourselves ... in a hermeneutic circle where the term we are seeking to define can only be defined by means of the search itself… we cannot know exactly what imagination is until we first narrate the genealogical tales of its becoming, the stories of its genesis.13

Part of Durrell’s strategy in dealing with this problem was to advocate, unequivocally as we have seen, the transitus to eastern methods of writing and reading: another part, not wholly dissociated with the first, was to become, in Unamuno’s terms, a ‘nivolist’.

The idea which, as we saw, had been explored by O’Brien in At Swim-Two-Birds, of an interplay between author and characters, had been established in the concept of the nivola by Miguel de Unamuno, with a French translation of whose Mist Durrell had been familiar in the 1930s.14 The idea of a society (let us call it a novel) in which people act as their own authors, taking - or refusing - responsibility for the situations they create (or in which they are created) is merely a world in which the intellectuals assume omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence. When they doubt these capacities, they articulate modern man’s doubt that God himself (or herself) is either all-knowing, all-reaching or all-powerful. Before O’Brien and Unamuno, it was already present in the timbre of the novel from Cervantes through Sterne to Woolf. Durrell’s originality lies in the explicit fashion in which he made the spare parts of his characters engage not only with each other but with the quiddity of the reader. There is no authorial address to the reader, as there is in Sterne or Smollett: no complicit embrace of the reader as with Austen or Eliot. At the same time, there is in this roman appareil no didacticism or morality; there is no heroic example or principle with which the reader might emulate or identify, not even a case of pathos to stimulate our pity. Instead, we are shown what would happen if we ourselves were to be given pen and paper and instructed to write. If there is a morality, it consists in the author suggesting the idea of a miracle which lies not in his hands or mind but in the reader’s – the idea of Eliot’s ‘work out your salvation with diligence’.15 13 Kearney, Wake of Imagination p. 17.14 Information to the author via Mary J. Byrne.15 Cf. Eliot The Cocktail Party: ‘work out your salvation with diligence’, Complete Poems and Plays p. 421, which itself is a play on Philippians 2:12, ‘Work out your

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The root of the idea is baroque and at the same time picaresque, and it is by no means fortuitous that it should have been a Spaniard who (after Cervantes and before Borges) thus precipitated the central issue – that of master and servant, of creator and created, cause and effect, provider and dependent, whose joint story is to be told. Its modern equivalent is Diderot’s Jaccques le fataliste and its contemporary experience is in Kundera’s version, Jacques and his Master,16 thus emphasising mittelEurop as the ‘battlefield’ on which modern man has been discussed (the French Revolution and its Encyclopaedia), defined (the Rights of Man) and fought over, but never given his own voice.

The point at issue is man’s capacity to design and execute his own fate. In Cervantes’ own example (from which everything subsequently could be called an attempt to reflect on the ontological problem of a dubious creator), we are presented with images of servants and masters, of protagonists real and imagined, which create in the ‘hero’ the question as to whether his quest is or is not meaningful, since behind each image stands a philosophical proposition far greater than the image intended to contain it. It is the first modern question mark as far as a quest is concerned. (Before it, doubt had been expressed, had indeed been the pivot, of many quests, Beowulf, Gawain, Amadis and even the Roman itself) but doubt as an essential element of the quest was inherent: what might be around the corner? Here, the corner itself becomes problematical.

In Mist, the characters are permitted to doubt the validity of their own existence, and therefore that of their creator. All ontology is thus put to the question. In the Quintet this becomes cardinal: we see Durrell negating the central proposition of the Key, that ‘time and the ego are the two determinants’: with the negation of Time (the ‘impurity’ in the eastern quest for the Void), the ego ceases to exist. In the sense in which Durrell arrested time, there is no longer the isolation of ‘the enormous Now’ but, instead, the enormous ‘then’, with which one communicates intellectually, in static images which nevertheless give the impression of great locomotive power. Sartre suggested that we can never maintain a true indifference (Durrell’s Gleichgultigkeit) since human consciousness, by recalling the past and anticipating the future, ‘is condemned to imagine the possible presence of the other - even in his absence’.17 Durrell’s simple answer was to identify the other within oneself, but his later strategy was to fix the other in a place where their mutual regard was timeless. If the logos is ‘a silent dialogue of the soul with itself’, then the resultant writing is an autogenesis, an arrival at the moment of dénouement

salvation with fear and trembling’.16 Cf. Roman Polanski: ‘I think all relationships are based on the model of the master and servant’ Independent on Sunday 4 October 1992.17 Quoted by R. Kearney, The Wake p. 247.

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which has no dramatic impact because it has no audience. As Unamuno wrote in Mist: ‘[the] soul of a protagonist18 of a novel or drama or nivola has no inside except what’s given him by the ... ‘“Yes, by the author.” “No, the reader.” ... “The most liberating effect of art is that it makes one doubt of one’s own existence.”’19 Meta-fiction comes into existence once we grasp the principle that ‘the other world and the other life are in this world and in this life’ and that eternity ‘lies within time and not outside it, all of eternity in all time and all of it in each moment of time’:20 the source for Durrell’s Einsteinian statement in the Key will now be obvious.

We can also reliably assume that much of Durrell’s thinking in respect of self-determination and subjectivity was suggested by Schopenhauer, with whose Panerga and Paraligomena he became acquainted during the writing of the Quintet. In particular, Durrell was interested in Schopenhauer’s ‘negative’ view of causality, and noted his insistence that we recall the fuller version of Descartes’s proposition: ‘dubito, cogito, ergo sum’.21 ‘My propositions’, said Schopenhauer, ‘for the most part do not rest on claims of reasoning, but directly on the world of intuitive perception itself’.22 As Durrell himself had remarked as early as, perhaps, 1939, and certainly no later than the early 1950s, ‘madness is merely a revolution in behaviour, not an interior schism or disease’.23 Thirty years later he was to sketch the character of ‘Cosima’ (the original of Sylvie/Livia) as ‘frozen into the total madness of insight’.

We should recall that at the conclusion to Nunquam, Felix is about to prove that with a box of matches one can, at least symbolically, eliminate the nerve-centre of totalitarian power. In many points of the Quintet we are given the same wistful glimpses of an equilibrium of great beauty, distressing though it may be. In children’s terms, where artist and autist are as proximate as genius and solipsism can be, it is a strategy for ending the farce of communication and for simultaneously making a self-contained statement which receives no answer because it can command none. The monosyllabic poem of affirmation is the culmination of moving through those many negatives to what the poet really is. It is constantly undermined by the prose, which questions rather than affirms. Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the dubito had found its true lodging. 18 Cf. Anthony Kerrigan’s point that ‘Unamuno was a spiritual contender, his own antagonist, an agonist’, introduction to Unamuno, op. cit., p. xiv.19 Unamuno, Mist pp. 214-5.20 Ibid., pp. 17, 19.21 Schopenhauer, Panerga and Paraligomena: short philosophical essays trans E.J.F. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) vol. 1, p. 4. Durrell’s copy is in SIUC/LD/Accession II.22 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 130.23 CERLD Corfu/Egypt notes.

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In The Wake of Imagination Richard Kearney quotes Andy Warhol as saying of his role as an artist: ‘when I look into a mirror I see nothing. People call me a mirror, and if a mirror looks into a mirror what does it see?’24 Kearney goes on to refer to this ‘metaphor of an incessant play between inter-reflecting mirrors’ as ‘paradigmatic of postmodern culture’.25 The inference is obvious: that we continue to live in a decadent culture for which the baroque strategy assumes an ever-increasing significance. To regard it as any less than a strategy (as, for example, merely an affectation) would be to miss the fact that the ontological question raised by the mirror can only be answered by the mirror.

In the Quartet Durrell used the mirror to excess, not so much to reflect, or to encourage reflection, as to fracture, to insist on the fragmentation of the personality into its many facets. In the Quintet he hardly employed it; when he did, he used it (contemporaneously with Warhol) for this new ‘paradigmatic’ purpose: at the opening of the first volume, Monsieur, the ostensible narrator/writer, Bruce Drexel, literally employs his ‘reflections’ as so many previous railway travellers will have done: ‘in the tarnished mirror this man is watching himself. It had ever been thus in early spring he told himself’ (Quintet 5).

Its sequel, Livia, equally opens on a surrealist scene, enigmatically entitled ‘A Certain Silence’, in which another narrator/writer, Aubrey Blanford, looks into a mirror, seeing himself as a totally different person whom he calls ‘Tu’, a dead woman who, we eventually realise, is the central figure of the quincunx, Constance: ‘the writer stared on, imagining that he was Tu looking back at him. So this is what she saw, what she had always seen! Eye to eye and mind to mind’ (Quintet 299).

In another mirror-scene Felix Chatto asks himself ‘Who was this familiar shadow? He felt completely disembodied as he looked, as he confronted his own anxious, unfamiliar face’ (Quintet 375). The point at issue, pursued extensively by Kearney, is that where the mirror has provided the pre-modern paradigm, the post-modern is ‘an interplay between multiple looking glasses which reflect each other interminably... a labyrinth of mirrors which extend infinitely in all directions’26 – a labyrinth where the image of the self (as a presence to itself) dissolves into self-parody.

We could of course trace the history of this metaphor from Narcissus to Alice’s looking-glass, with, in Durrell’s terms, its concomitant anxiety and unfamiliarity, to Nabokov’s Despair, where self-parody is taken to its ultimate conclusion. The idea of the double in fact depends on the mirror, not only for self-parody but also for the 24 R. Kearney, The Wake p. 5.25 Ibid.26 Ibid., pp. 5-6.

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process on which parody depends - verification. Yet there can be no verification in the sense of an ‘arrival’ at the other side, just as there has been no ‘truth’ from which we originally departed.

The mirror (and all the other tricks which science derives from nature) is certainly a metaphor, a tool of memory, but it is also (as Dodgson explained it to us) the index to the inner condition:

Mirrors will drink your image with intensity and bleed your spirit of its density, for they are thirsty for the inner man (Quintet 483).

On the private plane of individual existence, the baroque world is thus shown to be the place where we encounter ourselves by making a metaphor between ourself and the self in the mirror, and thus establish an identity to present when we go among others; on the public, political plane, it is the place where we negotiate with those others our similes for describing and ordering the world. Durrell perhaps took some of the description of Blanford’s and Sutcliffe’s dialogue on this point from Unamuno’s How to Make a Novel:

when I say I am here to enlighten myself, I do not mean, reader, by ‘myself’ myself lone, or refer merely to my I, but your I as well, to our mutual I. For our I is not the same as us, we is not the same as I in the plural.27

In this way he also gives some shape to Blake’s notion that ‘Opposition is true Friendship’.28 The ‘inner man’ (Lucifer’s Gregory, Darley’s Pursewarden, Drexel’s Blanford and Blanford’s Sutcliffe - even Sutcliffe’s Bloshford) must be found and engaged in dialogue; the history of novel-writing contains nothing other than this search and its alternative of madness: ‘the mad must be people without selves: their whole investment is in the other, the object’ (Quintet 1130).

In every case, the questioner is positing the fundamental question (really a set of simultaneous equations): is the image of western thought representational of some pre-existing reality, or creative of new realities?29 The image – and Durrell leaves us in considerable doubt as to who or what we see in the mirror – relates both to past time, as metaphorically conveyed by the glass, a history of our growth, and to future time, in that it can predict how we will turn out once we recognise ourselves. It is a means of affirmation, like the original poem addressed by Narcissus to himself, but it has at last found the level of cruelty on which it operates. 27 Unamuno, How to Make a Novel pp. 454-5.28 Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell p. xxv.29 Cf. Kearney, The Wake chapter 7, ‘The Parodic Imagination’.

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That the concept of the double is inextricably linked to that of the soul or ka or daimon, and to that of the doll; that it imputes into literature the instability of the psyche and that it bears witness to man’s basic fear of himself, is a commonplace of psychology which needs no rehearsal here. But we should, in concluding this discussion of our changing awareness of the mirror, bear in mind that, by destroying the reflection, the double, the one who questions and laughs in the next room, while still preserving our own integrity, still keeping the answers unspoken, it is our own salvation we crave, and that this is even more imperative than the need to love, because it demands that the ‘other’ should love us - whoever he, or we, may be. The fact that it is impossible to fulfil, that in attempting it we kill the vital part of ourselves which we variously call memory or conscience, that we almost inevitably bring about the destruction of the beloved at the same time, is the seedbed of tragic literature. In effect, Durrell was not distressed by the failure of western civilisation: if the Second World War had proved Spengler correct, it had also confirmed that the gold-lust reflected in all European literature from The Alchemist to King Solomon’s Mines and Raiders of the Lost Ark was part of our nature. It suggested that the mythologies were indiscriminately pursuing the wrong quest. Durrell’s distress stemmed from the fact that he saw western imagination impoverished by its divorce from the east and by its subjection to the gold standard.

Frederic Jameson’s idea, that ‘the schizophrenic ... does not know personal identity … since feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the “I” and the “me” over time’,30

diagnoses astonishingly well the central difficulty of all Durrell’s work, and of the Quintet in particular. This difficulty consists in his wishing to pull off the biggest ‘trick’ of all, by means of his earliest conceived strategy: side-stepping causality. It means subjecting the novel (for which in any case he had scant regard) to the risk of becoming unreadable: he wished to indicate to the reader that there is no longer a shared referential compact on the basis of which what Jameson calls ‘the “meaning-effect”’31 can be achieved. When Jameson asks ‘do we really need the concept of a postmodernism?’32 Durrell’s answer would be profoundly negative, because, in terms of an imaginative culture, he was suggesting that civilisation had already ceased to exist.

Durrell had become the negator of the ‘why?’ in the sense that, while he still wanted to know ‘whence we come’, he refused to ask, with Shelley, ‘why are we?’33 The two had become separated, one being a matter of causality which he had succeeded in sidestepping, 30 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ p. 119.31 Ibid.32 Ibid., p. 123.33 Shelley, ‘Adonais’ XXI.

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by the simple if lightfooted method of floating with the inevitable; the other having become unanswerable. In terms of anagnorisis, the recognitions in the Quintet are fourfold. The death of civilisation is not the death of culture, and the ‘dur désir de durer’ persisted in Durrell and his determination to encourage young people to ‘discover their own step-ladders’.34 It was Husserl, the father of phenomenology, who insisted that philosophy must ‘relocate that primary point of contact between man and world’,35 and although in the final chapter we shall see Durrell (like Felix at the opening of Tunc) ‘on the run again’, it was from a condition which he knew was inescapable and to which he knew he would continue to contribute, by rewriting the mythos of that contact between man and world in terms of our contemporary logos – reinventing man as the vital and unique conjunction. This is Durrell following Sartre’s (and by extension Rank’s) view that existentialism should be reinvented ex nihilo36 and for Durrell this would have meant the rediscovery of the uniqueness, the novelty of an Homeric dawn rather than the iteration of the same set of rosy fingers.37

In terms of contemporary philosophy, he would have agreed with Ricoeur that ‘there is a certain “degree zero” or emptiness which we may have to traverse in order to abandon our pretension to be the centre, our tendency to reduce all other discourses to our own totalizing schemas of thought’.38 The chief features of his final work are precisely those elements in which Jameson sees the impoverishment of contemporary culture – ‘the transformation of reality into images, the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents’ and ‘the nostalgia film’.39 As I have already suggested, the identity of image and reality was a fact of medieval life which enabled Durrell to make a book of life: the concurrence of different timescales allowed him to suspend sequential narrative so as to multiply the streams of consciousness; and the literality of nostalgia as the painfulness of the homeward journey – one which Durrell wanted and yet was afraid to make – hardly needs to be rehearsed at this point. It was the coincidence of all the ‘spots of time’,40 in one piqûre of memory that it was his task to accommodate.

However, Durrell took this risk of doing exactly what, in Monsieur, he had advised against: of ‘putting all ontology to the question’, because there remained within him the autistic capacity for inner weeping which had cauterised The Black Book; it was the effort 34 Alyn, op. cit.35 Cf. R. Kearney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986) p. 13.36 Ibid., p. 52.37 Cf. Homer, [rosy-fingered dawn] Odyssey II:I.38 P. Ricoeur, in R. Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary European Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) p. 27.39 Jameson, op. cit., p. 116.40 Cf. Wordsworth, Prelude: ‘There are in our existence spots of times’.

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of an Irish Faustus to see what would happen ‘if’ ... one did succeed in side-stepping causality. Jameson, for example, underlines his view of cultural impoverishment, or ‘pastiche’41 by reference to the blurring between great (by which he means ‘original’) works of art and their minor imitators. Once again, Durrell had anticipated this in the paper ‘The Minor Mythologies’, where he extended his argument in favour of ‘the myth-making faculty ... at many different levels’ into a discussion of ‘class’ as between high and low literary planes.

He was clearly making a case against distinctions in text between ‘high culture’ and what Jameson calls ‘paraliterature’. Jameson complains that

airport categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery and the science fiction or fantasy novel... no longer ‘quote’ such ‘texts’ as a Joyce might have done, or a Mahler; they incorporate them, to the point where the line between high art and commercial forms seems increasingly difficult to draw.42

It is, ultimately, betrayal, both of oneself and of the other, whether that other is conceived as an external, loved one or an internal haunting presence. It makes us confront the fact that if writing is the condition of loving (in Barthes’ sense) and of sadness (in Simenon’s) then it is not loving itself that is the central difficulty, but the question of how to be loved, which simply cannot be solved by writing, but only by being written.

That process is evident in the work of John Fowles, particularly in the way his writing evolved between that of The Magus (1966) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). In the case of the former, one might be forgiven for suggesting that Fowles had almost slavishly followed Durrell’s lead, with his adherence to Sade (The Magus contains three epigrams from Sade’s Justine), the idea of human experience becoming a ‘meta-theatre’43 and, particularly, in the idea of homo absconditus, expressed by ‘the Magus’ as: ‘man has been saying what you have just said for the last ten thousand years. And the one common feature of all those gods he has said it to is that not one of them has ever returned an answer.’44 In the latter novel (contemporaneous with The Revolt), Fowles looks at the problem of alternative lives, of the meaning of existence especially as a character within a pre-determined storyline, which brings with it the conflict between sanity and madness. And, like Durrell, Fowles is thoroughly

41 Jameson, op. cit., p. 113.42 Ibid., p. 112.43 Cf. Fowles, The Magus (London: Cape, 1966) p. 371.44 Ibid., p. 178.

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nineteenth-century (in this tale of the nineteenth century) in indulging in dialogue of the ‘Conversations with Brother Ass’ variety:

This - the fact that every Victorian had two minds - is the one piece of equipment we must always take with us on our travels back to the nineteenth century. It is a schizophrenia seen at its clearest, its most notorious, in ... Tennyson, Clough, Arnold, Hardy ... in the ubiquitous neuroses and psychosomatic illnesses of intellectuals otherwise as different as Charles Kingsley and Darwin.45

At the centre of all this is what Durrell called ‘the culprit mind’ (Quartet 194) – the source of sexual curiosity and metaphysical speculation which, after a lifetime of writing, he had never been able to exonerate. Trace the evolution of this mind through the two Books of the Dead, through the most ancient myths, and there, ‘below the level of the psyche’, we will find the place where ontology can be put to the question.

We therefore reach the question of writing itself: Durrell devoted over seventy years to ‘une vie artistique’, a ‘long strip’ as clearly conceived on its first day as on its last. The intellectual exercise which began by explaining the nature of time in terms of a woman plying a skein of wool ended in Caesar’s Vast Ghost with the image of the poet:

He will cure his feelings of the world as threat Knitting poems from them (CVG xiii).

The knitting had been monolithic, monochrome, only punctuated with ‘purple panels’ when the writer’s conscience obliged him to be entertaining. The characters and situations, for all that they have been greeted as exotic and bizarre, are of a uniformity and permanence that fails either to surprise or to address the remaining problem of difficulty.

People do get trapped in tunnels; brothers and sisters do make love together; science does march slightly slower than the fiction which describes it. Durrell drew portraits of quite believable characters because he drew from life – his lovers, the islanders of Corfu, the diplomats of Cairo and Whitehall, the tramps of Provence – but something prevails within these characters that is not what I have called ‘unique, specific or provisional’, but informs (and informs on) Durrell’s own ‘culprit mind’.

45 J. Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1969) p. 288.

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In the Quintet, Sutcliffe puts most of Durrell’s autobiography (and Barthes’ negation of writing) into a few terse ideas which, he suggests, he was given by Freud:

He told me that I must sublimate the distress in a book, which God knows I have been trying to do from the beginning - even before I felt the distress, so to speak. I have from early adolescence suffered from Schmerz, Angst ... And this book which I have always had in deep soak, when will it be finished? ... that ideal book - the titanic do-it-yourself kit ... After all, why not a book full of spare parts of other books, of characters left over from other lives[?] (Quintet 692-3).

Once again, to parse such a confession would require its own volume. For example, does ‘to sublimate distress’ carry the same weight or meaning as ‘to recover a lost innocence’? Constance’s response is that ‘to be instructively wounded is the most one can ask of love’ (Quintet 123); has this any equation with Justine’s ‘we use each other like axes to cut down the ones we really love’ (Quartet 94)? Furthermore, Sappho’s question ‘Can one outgrow love altogether? If so/Our literature is nothing’ implies the further one, of what stands behind the relationship of literature and love: whether the acts of writing and of loving are not in some way complementary forms of betrayal. The questions pile up because Durrell’s ‘other lives’ had precipitated them. In particular, the persistent odour of decadence has a distinct purpose – on the sexual level, ‘all love-making to one less instructed than oneself has the added delicious thrill which comes from the consciousness of perverting, of pulling them down into the mud from which passions rise’ (Quartet 244); on the metaphysical, the idea of participating in the history of boredom (Laforgue’s ‘je m’ennuie natale’).

In the case of Fowles, the influence of Durrell is inferential; in that of John Hawkes, it is explicit, since Hawkes has said that The Blood Oranges (1971) could not have been written if Durrell’s Quartet, and especially Justine, had not preceded it.46 In both The Blood Oranges and his earlier Second Skin (1963) the ‘rule of four’, the Sadean notion of love-making requiring the participation of four persons, is evident:

we were a quartet of tall and large-boned lovers aged in the wood ... It was another left-hand right-hand day, as I had come to call them, another of those days when the four of us ... fit

46 J. Hawkes, ‘Lawrence Durrell and John Hawkes: passages from a dialogue at Pennsylvania State University’, TCL 33/3, p. 413.

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together like the shapely pieces of a perfectly understandable puzzle ... Each one of us was witness to the other three.47

Nowhere in this novel of intermingled identities is it clear that there are in fact four ‘real’ people, simply four non-discrete identities which add up to an ‘integrating principle’. Elsewhere, in Second Skin (which in itself provides a pre-echo of Durrell’s much later note: ‘a good wife is a man’s second skin’,48 and may indeed have influenced it) Hawkes emphasises the themes of incest and schizophrenia: ‘this double anatomy, this schizophrenic flesh ... accomplice, father, friend, traveling companion, yes, old chaperon, but lover and destroyer too’.49

Of course distress can be sublimated in books. That is the explanation of our culture – a ‘culture tied to a stake’. The ‘miracle’ in the writing of this definitive book – of all his work, that into which he put the most effort although not that for which he made the greatest aesthetic claim50 - is the meeting of ‘author’ and ‘other’: not of the lovers but of those who have the greatest suspicion of one another. To make this definitive – in the sense that Durrell went to great lengths to explain the ‘fifth dimension’ of the book as a personality in its own right – he took the idea of the ‘Semantic Disturbance’ out of the sphere of western thought and implanted it in the centre of the mandala where, because there were no predicates, its troublesome nature could be ignored while he concentrated on its practical significance.

As a young man, Durrell had written of the birth and development of a child seeking (for himself, his author, and his creation) a place of meaning. As an expatriate he had written with both affection and dismay of the idea of ‘England’, because it was not that place of meaning; he wrote with affectionate regret of ‘Tibet’ or ‘Ireland’ because they might have been that place. As a young poet in love he had written faithful love lyrics. As a junior diplomat he had written accurately and responsibly in the interests of his political masters. He was constantly applauded for the succinct and incisive lien which he purchased on the ‘spirit of place’, because all these 47 J. Hawkes, The Blood Oranges (New York: New Directions, 1971) pp. 17, 88, 184.48 CERLD inv. 134, p. 74.49 J. Hawkes, Second Skin (New York: New Directions, 1964) pp. 33, 175-6.50 In conversation with the author, Durrell was somewhat ambivalent about the relative merits of the Quintet, the Quartet and The Revolt: but while he acknowledged that the Quartet remained his most popular work, and The Revolt his least understood and least critically accepted, he maintained that The Revolt was his best work to date (1988) in terms of its intellectual thrust, and that the Quintet represented his magnum opus in terms of his commitment as writer to its evolution. He continued to nurture the (albeit tired) ambition to complete his work with a truly irresponsible book, ‘something with no afterthought’, which he had only partly suggested with the ‘Satyrikon’-type sections of Caesar’s Vast Ghost and Quinx. If he had lived to complete it, his final notebook, ‘The Asides of Demonax’, might have been translated into such a work.

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components – ‘cities, plains and peoples’ – seemed natural to their environment. What, then, remains, irreducible? What eludes the resumé?

The difficulty must lie in the way these components react, or fail to react, to this environment, this assumed place or topos of meaning. We have already seen, in Parts 3 and 4, the tragedies which occur when lovers translate inadequately, or when we hear mendacious voices or when we mistake the face in the mirror. In the Quintet, we see difficulty occurring at a much more grievous level, when its actors find it impossible to relate to themselves. It is as if the question asked of the child in Pied Piper of Lovers (‘You solitary little devil’ she thought. ‘I wonder what you’ve been doing with yourself all these years’ - PPL 129) is now being asked by the child of himself. Durrell brought us through his mindscape, quite openly admitting that he needed only a stock of identities who were aspects of himself, and, in his own definition, became ‘personalities embodied by experience’ rather than ‘characters’ who are merely ‘integer[s] in a temporal series’. The points at which they declare their similarity, the moments of recognition, are rare: Justine’s ‘it isn’t easy to be me’; Benedicta’s ‘our failure to ascribe value’; the dénouement between Blanford and Sutcliffe. But it is at these moments we realise that difficulty sets in when one starts to think of oneself in the third person. And here the ontology of writing, the exercise of the imagination, is the only remaining issue.

Here the connection between Durrell and Pynchon’s V (1962) is striking. The pursuit of the woman, of identity, of the psyche, which sees the central subject in terms of her absence, her elusive movement in and out of historical epochs, geographical continents and identities, in a sense epitomises the restlessness of the post-Victorian age, multiplying the double mind (narrated by Fowles) into a crowd of neurasthenic gamesmen. And where V may have been influenced by Durrell’s Quartet, in turn there may have been a cross-fertilisation in which the pursuits and metamorphoses of The Revolt and the Quintet may owe something to Pynchon.51

The novel, the play, the epic poem, the autobiography, the transcripts of criminal trials and psychiatric sessions, the drunken conversations in the closing moments of the public-house, the scrum of the football field, the view from the electron microscope, the history of the crusades, the exchange of lovers’ letters, even the dictionaries and the encyclopaedias themselves, are all, in their varying degrees,

51 It is a moot point whether Durrell had read Pynchon’s V (London: Cape, 1963); Carol Peirce (Pynchon Notes 1987) was unable to establish this in interview with Durrell, but there are several other striking parallels between the preoccupations of the two writers, including the notion of inescapable fragmentation and the dislocation of personality as a consequence and corollary of the loss of an ‘integrating principle’.

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testimony to the human need to confess that it has failed to find a means of ascribing value. It is a failure on the part of the writer – pen-man, explorer, boffin – to justify himself to himself.

When we begin to think of ourself in the third person, we become conscious of having just collaborated with the enemy. Sappho’s reputation rests in her poems, rather than in the stammering voice in which she reads them, and therefore they, as literature, acquire something of her persona, become her biography, because writing is memory, and memory is being. The dangerous part of difficulty is that one carries both affection for oneself and yet fear of the other person residing within one. The knowledge that there are two of you, and that there is nothing either can do about it, creates an impossible prison occupied by both madman and socialite. Durrell’s work took us through the varieties of experience – sexual, religious, emotional – in an attempt to encompass the varieties of relation, but cannot in fact give the characters - or the reader - a view of the whole pattern.

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