Back to the Books

Vladimir Nabokov used to tell his literature classes that any novel worth reading was worth rereading; he must have faced the same distaste for reading endemic in college students today. His main point is unquestionable: one reading of a novel such as Bleak House by Charles Dickens will not reveal the patterns with which Dickens has interlaced his narrative. We read for story, initially; for style too, and for overall theme. We approach the depths only when we replunge into the work.

The interval between readings also matters. I would say that I read "The Alexandria Quartet" (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea) by Lawrence Durrell several times in my early twenties. I remember this because of the different editions. I first read the small Pocket Books paperbacks, then later the sturdier Dutton paperbacks (which I still have). At that time I read the work for its subject--love--its style--fervid and lush--and its experimental basis. The Quartet is not a roman fleuve like Galsworthy's Forstye Saga or Ford's Parade's End, that is, a series of novels treating the same basic group of characters, each novel a chronological advance.

No, Durrell's claims were much weightier, as he says in the Note to Balthazar: "Modern literature offers us no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition. Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern." This may sound pretentious, and it is, to a degree. The "three sides of space" are the first three novels, and the last novel advances the plot--it is a sequel to the first three.

Justine tells the story of the relationships among a group of lovers, friends, and acquaintances in Alexandria, Egypt, at an unspecified time soon after WWII, from the point of view of an English teacher and writer, Darley. X loves Y, who is afraid of Z's jealousy, but X also loves A, who might love B, and so on. The second novel, Balthazar, is again narrated by Darley, who learns from the title character that most of his assumptions--or at least the major ones--have been mistaken. Y actually loved C, and X was a kind of "beard." D, who was supposedly killed for raping Y when she was a young girl, is really alive and living in Syria. The third novel, Mountolive, is a conventional third-person narration, with some excursions into various first-person points of view via letters. Here Darley is a quite minor character, and readers learn that Balthazar was wrong, too, and that the underlying causes for many of the events in the first two novels were not personal but political.

I remember from my initial readings that I was disappointed to learn that everything devolved into politics; the explanation seemed reductive. Now as I reread Mountolive, I'm struck at how prescient Durrell was. He was a diplomat as well as a novelist, and he could foresee the effect that the clash of religions and nationalism would have in the Mideast. Also, I find that the political basis for personal attraction is not as far-fetched, or simple, as I thought then.

The relativity link that Durrell postulates seems overblown, because novels have been written for centuries based on the limited knowledge of their main characters, how wrong they are in their assumptions and conclusions: Don Quixote, Emma, and The Good Soldier spring to mind. The results can be comic (Emma) or tragic (The Good Soldier) or both (Don Quixote), and novels are often about the limits of humans' knowledge of each other, and the gulf that is often bridged on the flimsiest of evidence. Why does Bartleby "prefer not to"? Who can say for certain?

Durrell's metaphor for his "investigation of modern love," as he calls the subject of the Quartet in his Note, is, however, apt in that relativity implies the importance of the observer or measurer in making sense out of phenomena. And each successive novel in the spatial trio does seem to add another dimension; the second expands the narrative laterally, the third vertically. It is an astonishing achievement.

Clea awaits.