[ilds] "this is not a war book"

[slighcl]

On 5/23/2008 11:41 PM, James Gifford wrote:
>
> I believe (someone please check since I might have my dates wrong), 
> Durrell had already published a short piece in which he asserts the 
> White House has been bombed and the Shrine of Saint Arsenius blasted by 
> a mine.  That's not true, but it does show how we wished to portray the 
> war.  Adding to that "islands lie buried in smoke" and "cypresses spring 
> from the tombs," I don't think it's any interpretive intervention to 
> suggest Durrell is portraying the desolation of war in the most poetical 
> terms he can muster.  
I mentioned that for me the "Epilogue in Alexandria" in /Prospero's 
Cell/ seems to be the strongest "presage" or premonition of the 
prose-poem style and narrative attitude I find in those opening episodes 
of /Justine/.  A ruined house.  A smashed cutter.  I sit here like 
Odysseus on the sand, looking back there, where I am not.  Many things 
and many people lost, buried, amputated.  A loss that smarts like a 
phantom limb.  Melissa!

*****
> The war is never far from his writings at this 
> time, but it's never the point of the writings either -- the poetry 
> reflect the personal rather than enacting an intervention into the 
> social.  I think he tried the latter later in life (with some hesitation 
> and some revisions), but certainly not in the early years.
So at the question "where is the war in the books?" I recall now the 
opening lines of one of the Ur-Justines at the BL, one of those aborted 
notebooks that Durrell put into a drawer, setting it aside for discovery 
later:

> The concussions of a recent bombardment (this is not
>
> a war book) which had blackened the muzzles of
>
> the 15-inch guns, shattered crockery in its racks,
>
> and shaken down cockroaches from their hiding-
>
> places behind pipes and bulkheads, still hung about
>
> the airless ships' quarters in which Faber found
>
> himself.  The air was still full of dust.  Fragments of
>
> paper trembled in the corners of the room as the
>
> tepid gusts of the fan touched them.  It was
>
> remarkable to be feeling so ill.  The doctor, whose
>
> height gave him a stoop, looked not unlike
>
> an angle-shot from a German film, as he stood
>
> in the doorway of the cabin.  Like all naval men he
>
> gave the impression of having been sold into slavery
>
> as a boy.  Only the excessive probity of his professional
>
> status held his curiosity in check:  for a sick civilian
>
> aboard a warship in wartime is not a usual sight*.  *
>





-- 
**********************
Charles L. Sligh
Department of English
Wake Forest University
slighcl at wfu.edu
**********************

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