Lawrence Durrell

Start Free Trial

Alexandria Revisited

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

In the following essay, Anatole Broyard revisits Lawrence Durrell's "The Alexandria Quartet," asserting that its depiction of the city as a moral landscape and its sophisticated portrayal of love remain compelling, though Durrell's characters may be seen as overly stylized, challenging traditional boundaries and inviting critical re-evaluation.

Is "The Alexandria Quartet" as good as we all thought it was when we first read it more than 20 years ago? I wondered about this when I saw that Lawrence Durrell has a new novel, "Constance," coming out. Since nothing he published after the "Quartet" seemed to be in the same class, it occurred to me that we may have overestimated the books for which he is famous.

So I went back to the "Quartet"—like novelists, we have to keep revising ourselves—and read "Justine," the first volume. I want to say immediately that it struck me as even better this time. It is, among other things, one of the great city novels, reminding us of Dickens's London, Balzac's Paris, Joyce's Dublin. Such books have a quality for which the Germans should have a word—something like "city-hunger," or "city-angst," a human tropism which makes us huddle or press together in the hope of intensifying our lives and crushing our loneliness. City-hunger is something like Freud's death instinct, an impatience to get to hell or purgatory, beyond the childish gratifications of the pleasure principle.

People are always saying—inaccurately—that something or another is like a dream, but Durrell's Alexandria is actually like the landscape of a dream. A hot, dry city, surrounded by desert, raked by winds and by contradictions. A relentless yet voluptuous city, beautiful and squalid, overcivilized and primitive. There comes a time in the life of a great city when the place and its people exist in a kind of collusion or symbiosis, when they are unimaginable without each other, and Durrell's Alexandria had reached that condition….

As I read … "Justine," it seemed to me that no city would ever again allow us to look at it in such an intimate way, with so much complicity. "Justine" leaves you feeling that from now on we might have to live without this haunting sense of the city as a moral landscape. And this would be, if it happened, rather like living without a conception of guilt and innocence.

And how very advanced Durrell was, in his treatment of love. While almost every modern writer behaves as if we'd come to understand love only with his particular generation, some of Durrell's sentences sound as if they were written yesterday….

Of course Durrell sometimes goes too far. Everyone in Alexandria is "exhausted," the canal is always "rotting." He keeps sniffing at death as if it were a bouquet and one suspects that he sees more colors and smells more odors than there actually are. But like Justine's sobs, his excesses have "a melodious density."…

A couple of years ago a critic named William Pritchard said of the characters in Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier" that they are storybook people, impossibly pure as types. The same charge might be brought against Durrell's characters in "The Alexandria Quartet"—that they are impossibly pure in their stylized corruption. But I think that's the kind of frustrated remark that a critic sometimes falls back on when an author has made him uneasy with characters who challenge his boundaries. In his own wordy, romantic way, Durrell too challenged our boundaries.

Anatole Broyard, "Alexandria Revisited," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1982 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), October 10, 1982, p. 39.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

All Told

Next

Stylishness

Loading...