[ilds] "Sink or Skim" (Michael Wood, LRB)

[Charles Sligh]

*The ILDS listserv welcomes responses to Michael Wood's LRB essay on 
Durrell's writing in /Clea/ and the /Quartet/.

Here follows the text of the essay.

Charles

***

LRB 1 January 2009 Michael Wood
Sink or Skim
Michael Wood
Clea by Lawrence Durrell*

‘At night,’ Roland Barthes once wrote, ‘the adjectives come back.’ It’s 
an eerie and
sobering thought for writers who have been trying to clean up their act 
during the
day, but for Lawrence Durrell as for Conrad adjectives don’t come back 
because
they never left. If there is a mystery in Conrad it’s inscrutable, if 
there’s a tangle
in Durrell it’s inextricable. And to stay with the latter: if there’s a 
treasury it’s
inexhaustible, creatures of habit are inveterate, dusk is blue, shadows 
and trams
are violet, dawn is mauve – but then so are voices and a mosque.
And yet these adjectival writers are anything but confident about the 
language
they lay out so lavishly. On the contrary, they seem to be caught between a
desperate hope that one more word will do the trick, catch the reality 
or name the
mystery, and the reluctant belief that nothing at all is going to work. 
Sometimes
we see them trapped between these stances, as when Marlow harangues his
listeners in Heart of Darkness (‘Do you see him? Do you see the story? 
Do you
see anything?’), or Durrell’s narrator in the third volume of the Alexandria
Quartet, with nearly 300 pages still to go, tells us that ‘words kill 
love as they kill
everything else.’ The different narrator of the fourth volume says 
‘words are the
mirrors of our discontents merely,’ but nevertheless goes on, in his phrase,
‘hunting for metaphors’. And at one point, hard at work describing ‘the very
failure of words’, the same narrator throws these deficient elements 
around with
such relish (‘words . . . sink one by one into the measureless caverns 
of the
imagination and gutter out’) that you wonder if he’s forgotten he’s 
supposed to be
failing.
It’s clear that the problem is not the adjectives, or even the purple 
(or mauve or
violet) prose more generally. A journalist explains to Durrell’s 
narrator what he
thinks Pursewarden, the Quartet’s great writer in residence, was trying 
to tell
him: ‘What is the writer’s struggle except a struggle to use a medium as 
precisely
as possible, but knowing fully its basic imprecision? A hopeless task, 
but none
the less rewarding for being hopeless.’ This is good Modernist doctrine, 
and a
whole slew of writers and critics from Mallarmé to Adorno would 
certainly sign
the manifesto. But the proposition doesn’t describe what happens in 
Durrell’s
fiction, or for that matter in Conrad’s. The goal is not precision but 
effect.
For this reason the adjectives are sometimes a solution, and our best 
clue to what
is going on. Retromingent, to my slight surprise, does appear in the 
OED, with a
use as early as 1646; but surely no one has done the word as proud as 
Durrell,
when he describes how a small dog ‘delivered itself of a retromingent 
puddle’ on
an ambassador’s carpet. This is perhaps the place to remember that the 
author of
the grandiose Quartet is also the author of the very funny Esprit de 
Corps and
Stiff Upper Lip. And what about the lovely word adventive, as in ‘the 
adventive
minute’ or ‘that adventive moment’? Durrell also uses the word in his 
fine poem
about Cavafy, written at the same time as the Quartet:

Never
To attempt a masterpiece of size –
You must leave life for that. No
But always to preserve the adventive
Minute . . .

I’m tempted to read ‘you must leave life for that’ as meaning we must 
leave such
things to life itself; but that is not what the phrase says. Durrell’s 
Quartet is an
attempt at a masterpiece of size (and shape and time), but he didn’t 
leave life for
it. He stayed with life’s jokes and discoveries, the pee on the carpet 
and the
Faustian moment; with life’s pretensions and flatnesses too. One of 
adventive’s
meanings is ‘imperfectly naturalised’. And it’s good to learn from G.S. 
Fraser’s
book on Durrell that however long the novelist thought about these works, he
wrote them, or at least the last three, very quickly: Balthazar in six 
weeks,
Mountolive in 12 and Clea in four. It’s good to know too that however 
portentous
he could sound about his ambitions (‘I . . . am trying to complete a 
four-decker
novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition’), he could also 
manage
another idiom: ‘You are uncomfortable about relativity? But my paper 
construct
is only a toy, a shape, like a kaleidoscope made for the child of a 
friend . . . It was
just an idea.’ This is the mode of Pursewarden saying he ‘always believed in
letting [his] reader sink or skim’.
Durrell was not trying to write precisely in an imprecise medium. He was 
trying,
sometimes precisely and sometimes with unbelievable slackness, to tell 
us, like
George Meredith in his day, what he knew about ‘modern love’, and to find
narrative forms that suited his slippery subject. The point is that the 
slackness
may be as important as the precision; and that there are whole reaches 
of the
novels that are neither slack nor precise but something else.
Durrell wrote a lot before and after the Quartet: poems, plays, a book about
Cyprus, other novels. T.S. Eliot greatly admired The Black Book, and two 
early
novels, Pied Piper of Lovers and Panic Spring, have recently been 
reissued by
ELS, a Canadian press. Still, so much of Durrell’s reputation rests, or 
fails to rest,
on the Quartet that this does seem a good place to start one’s second 
(or third)
look. The Folio Society’s handsome new edition, with its alternately 
haunting and
embarrassing photomontages and a fine introduction by Peter Porter, is a 
perfect
invitation to rereading.
There are many people who are sure the Quartet is a masterpiece of some 
sort,
however patchy; and there are people who are sure it’s not a masterpiece 
because
they find it unreadable. I have, at different times, belonged to both of 
these
groups. My dazed admiration for the first three novels, which I rushed 
to buy as
they came out, certainly suffered a blow when I got to Clea, which 
seemed to me
then (and seems to me now) just too full of bathos to do the noble 
literary work it
is supposed to do. ‘I found her extraordinarily beautiful at first 
sight, although a
little on the short side.’ ‘He always puzzled me – except when I had him 
in my
arms.’ But I do understand my old admiration, in a way I don’t understand my
later grumpiness, which set in towards the end of the 1960s, when I found
nothing but fakery in the Quartet and the later novels, as if Durrell 
had written
not books but simulations of books, long, allusive evocations of acts of 
writing
not quite taking place. There are certainly plenty of patches where he 
is doing
this; but nowhere is this the only thing he’s doing, and my second, solemn,
snippy view misses huge zones of serious and interesting achievement. The
Quartet has its own sharp view of criticism, good and bad. When our narrator
appears to have given up his rather clunky artistic ambitions (to frame 
his friends
‘in the heavy steel webs of metaphors which will last half as long as 
[Alexandria]
itself’) and says he is thinking of writing a book of criticism, his 
friend Clea, a
painter, hits him across the mouth so hard he has to go to the bathroom 
to mop
up the blood.
Among the considerable achievements of the Quartet are the large 
set-pieces: the
duck shoot on Lake Mareotis at the end of Justine; the carnival at the 
end of
Balthazar; the ecstatic Coptic wake at the end of Mountolive. All of 
these scenes
are patiently, lovingly described, for their own sake rather than for any
symbolism they may deliver – the prose is rich but not richer than the 
material.
And yet each of these scenes contains a twist or a mystery. In the first 
a body is
discovered and identified – wrongly. In the second the wrong person gets 
killed.
In the third the wrong person is killed too, but not by mistake. The 
ongoing and
often rather vapidly declared theme of multiple perspectives is here put 
to real
work. It is no longer a matter of whether Justine was betraying her 
husband with
Darley, the uncharismatic narrator of three of the four books, or with
Pursewarden, the novelist whose stature grows with every volume; whose
supposed stature, let’s say, since even Durrell’s friend Henry Miller 
had his
doubts about this character. ‘I never get the conviction that he was the 
great
writer you wish him to seem.’ I don’t think this shortfall weakens the 
Quartet as
much as it might, since we are not required to believe in Pursewarden’s
greatness, only in his friends’ eagerness to canonise him after his 
suicide, and
Darley’s reluctant identification with the man he used to patronise. It 
is true that
Pursewarden talks a lot, and left an extraordinary amount of aphoristic 
litter
behind him.
The story of the affair with Darley is told in Justine, of the affair with
Pursewarden in Balthazar. It’s fun to work through the corrected view, 
but hard
to care very much whom Justine preferred. After all, she’s named after a
character in Sade, she’s supposed to be sleeping around. But in the murder
scenes I’ve evoked, much more is at stake than a place in a bed. We 
think at first
that Capodistria, the man killed at the duck shoot, is the victim of a 
belated
revenge, finally paying for a rape he committed long ago. Since it’s not
Capodistria who is dead, but a nameless corpse transferred from the 
morgue, we
now need to know why Capodistria had to be spirited away. He was, it 
turns out,
part of the plot against the British Mandate in Palestine in which many 
of the
main characters are (inextricably) entangled, and which a diligent 
British officer
in Egypt has uncovered. Most of this story is told in Mountolive, and if the
switches of sexual partners seem a little ordinary, the thought that 
much of this
sexual activity is a cover-up for clandestine politics is pretty 
exhilarating.
Something of this view is lurking in Darley’s early, only half-understood
suggestion that what is called love is ‘a sort of mental possession in 
which the
bonds of a ravenous sexuality played the least part’.
Nessim, the Egyptian leader of the conspiracy, and the supposedly betrayed
husband, has married Justine because she is Jewish and disposed to help the
cause, and because her beauty and her unhappiness make her an ideal partner.
Nessim is a Copt, and explains that ‘for us there was no real war 
between Cross
and Crescent. That was entirely a Western European creation. So indeed 
was the
idea of a cruel Moslem infidel. The Moslem was never a persecutor of the 
Copts
on religious grounds.’ The accusation is that the British – the speech 
is addressed
to David Mountolive, later to be his majesty’s ambassador to Egypt – 
have never
understood any of this, and can’t tell one Arab from another. The person 
killed at
the carnival was mistaken for Justine, and the person whose funeral we 
witness
is Nessim’s brother, killed by the Egyptian government in a brilliant 
deliberate
error. With this murder they find a scapegoat, and satisfy the British, 
who are
complaining about Egyptian inaction with regard to the conspiracy. And 
they are
also able to leave Nessim alone, and keep receiving the handsome bribes 
he is
paying. It’s true that all this seems closer to the fiction of John le 
Carré than to
the theory of relativity, but a set of novels is surely none the worse 
for that.
And then there are the carefully rendered deaths, remarkable in their 
variety.
There is the dying of the furrier Cohen, former patron of Darley’s 
fragile mistress
Melissa, a man who lies in a hospital ‘among the migrating fragments of 
his old
body’, and whom Darley visits because Melissa won’t go to see him. A curious
intimacy, almost a tenderness arises between the two men. The old man begins
to sing a popular song, Darley recalls the Cavafy poem about the god 
abandoning
Antony, and thinks, ‘Each man goes out to his own music’ – an elegant 
untruth
but a fine epitaph. There is the death of love itself when Mountolive 
finally meets
up again with his once beautiful Egyptian mistress, Nessim’s mother. Here we
see the Gothic streak that marks the Quartet more and more as it goes 
on. It’s
not enough that she should have had smallpox and become completely 
disfigured
in the meantime. She is also desperate, a little drunk, and overweight. 
‘Her large
jowls shook with every vibration of the solid rubber tyres on the road’ 
– they are
in a horse-drawn cab. This is sheer authorial cruelty, but the shocked 
Mountolive
doesn’t fare any better. When she asks him to do something to protect 
Nessim,
he says: ‘I cannot discuss an official matter with a private person.’ 
Which is
worse, the jowls or the priggishness? And there is, best of all, the 
ludicrous,
horribly appropriate death of Scobie, the Englishman who works in the 
Egyptian
police force, and has what he calls Tendencies, among them the habit of 
dressing
up as a woman when the moon is full. Scobie is the best kind of 
Orientalist. He
walks like ‘a White Man at large’, and he loves the Egyptians. ‘You see, the
Egyptians are marvellous, old man,’ he tells Darley. ‘Kindly. They know 
me well.
 From some points of view they might look like felons, old man, but 
felons in a
state of grace, that’s what I always say.’ He is beaten to death by a 
crowd of
British sailors who don’t welcome his advances, and it is a weakness in the
always firm and lucid Clea that she, who is so fond of the old boy, will 
not be able
to bear this news. She is told that he fell down some stairs.
Durrell announces in a note that the first three novels are ‘siblings’, 
placed ‘in a
purely spatial relation’. ‘The fourth part alone will represent time and 
be a true
sequel.’ This is grand, perhaps ‘somewhat immodest or even pompous’, he 
says in
the same note; but actually it flattens out and understates the 
intricacy of the
relations among the books. The second, Balthazar, has to do with time as 
well as
space, since it involves Darley’s rewriting, with the help of his friend 
Balthazar’s
copious notes, the story of the first novel. Even the first was full of 
alternative
readings of the same event or person, so it’s a little dim of Darley to 
have to wait
for the second volume to understand he’s in a perspectival work. The 
third novel
has an omniscient narrator, and is perhaps the most successful, although
formally the least inventive, of the three. But it too has flashbacks, 
and some
wonderful comedy set in Moscow, Mountolive’s posting before he returns to
Egypt. The chief place and time in all three are the same, Alexandria 
just before
the Second World War – the photomontages in the Folio Society edition 
showing
tight-permed hairdos and boxy suits catch the date for us, as perhaps 
does the
word ‘frocks’ in the novel – and Clea takes us into and through the war.
The last volume is, as Durrell says, a sequel, but a sequel, in one 
sense, is just
what these adventures can’t have. The set-pieces, the deaths, the love 
affairs, the
politics, all the running commentary on love and the city, the 
dream-images of
Alexandria as capital of memory and capital of superstition, none of 
this can go
anywhere. The elements can only talk to each other, sometimes 
beautifully and
sometimes foolishly, and then die. I think it is Durrell’s unacknowledged
perception of this problem that produces the proliferation of Gothic 
effects in the
last volume: Justine’s stroke and drooping eyes, Nessim’s losing one eye 
and one
finger in a bombing raid, the revelation of Pursewarden’s incest with 
his sister,
even if she was, as Darley says, a little on the short side, and the 
truly garish
ending in which Balthazar, playing with a harpoon gun while he and 
Darley and
Clea are out for a sail and a swim, manages to nail Clea’s arm to an 
underwater
wreck. There is nothing for it but to hack Clea’s hand off, which Darley 
duly,
roughly does. Elsewhere Clea herself says eloquently that ‘it is 
terrible to depend
so utterly on powers that do not wish you well,’ and much of the Quartet
convincingly shows us the power of love and other afflictions as what 
G.S. Fraser
calls unwilled events. But an accidental harpoon through the wrist is not a
representation of a hostile power, and not merely an unwilled event: it 
is the
narrative equivalent of the excessive adjective – too much, too fast, 
and trying
too hard. If I tell you that Clea’s artificial hand, once she gets used 
to it, allows
her to paint better than she has ever done before – to become a truly great
painter, the implication is – you will know where you are: somewhere between
Edmund Wilson’s theory of the necessarily damaged artist and the movie 
version
of Titus Andronicus.
There is also a shift over time – the time that runs through the first three
volumes and accelerates in the last – in the sense we are given of 
Alexandria,
which detaches itself more and more from the East, and more and more from
anyone’s affection. By the end of the Quartet all the Europeans we know 
have left
or are about to leave, and the Egyptians are abandoned to the 
pathologies that
were once supposed to be so fascinating. Scobie’s ‘felons in a state of 
grace’
become ‘the miasma of Egypt’. There is distanced talk of the ‘Oriental 
woman’
and the ‘Oriental spirit’ and we are reminded that Alexandria, unlike 
Cairo, is
‘still Europe’. But not, finally, European enough. Even the dusty 
glamour of the
city falls away – it grows jowls, so to speak, like the once-beautiful 
Leila. Darley
can conjure up a bit of lyrical prose for a farewell (‘I feel it fade 
inside me, in my
thoughts, like some valedictory mirage – like the sad history of some 
great queen
whose fortunes have foundered among the ruins of armies and the sands of
time’) but this rings a little hollow since he has already told us that 
he now sees
the city ‘as it must always have been – a shabby little seaport built upon a
sand-reef, a moribund and spiritless backwater’. We can accept the 
pathos of the
fabrication, the belated understanding that the dream-city was created 
by the
dreamer, and suspect the banality beneath the magical exotic lives 
evoked for us
throughout the Quartet. But the banality, however real it may be, is not 
truer
than the magic, and it’s a little disappointing that the sequence itself 
can’t remain
faithful to its old enthusiasm for the gleaming city and its complicated 
lovers.
Shabby, moribund, spiritless – not much chance of an adventive moment there.
Michael Wood teaches at Princeton. His most recent book is Literature and
the Taste of Knowledge.


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Charles L. Sligh
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
charles-sligh at utc.edu
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