[ilds] Fw: DURRELL's ALEXANDRIA_http://www.crescentmoon.org.uk/cresmoalex

Thu Jun 18 13:22:05 PDT 2009

Scanning Amazon.co.uk recently I recall Robinson's book listed

peter baldwin

From: sumantranag at gmail.com
To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:24:25 +0530
Subject: [ilds] Fw: DURRELL's ALEXANDRIA_http://www.crescentmoon.org.uk/cresmoalex

Hello again!!

Have just found the article (ALEXANDRIA REVISITED, The Alexandria of Lawrence Durrell, C.P. Cavafy, Edmund Keeley and Others by Jeremy Robinson, [Extract from Lawrence Durrell: Between Love and Death, East and West, Crescent Moon, 1995]). 

Sumantra

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Sumantra Nag 
To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca 
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 2:29 PM
Subject: DURRELL's ALEXANDRIA_http://www.crescentmoon.org.uk/cresmoalex

Hello All!

It must have been more than a year ago, that I located an article on Durrell's Alexandria at the URL: http://www.crescentmoon.org.uk/cresmoalex. 

This site is not available any more in its totality, at least not the extension /cresmoalex, although the rest of the URL relating to the publishing house Crescent Moon is accessible. I can't locate the article after accessing the URL of Crescent Moon.

I probably received the reference from an ILDS discussion thread which it will now be difficult to identify. I can't recall the title of the article. I thought I had saved the article, but can't find it. Nor have I been successful with searches on Google. It was probably available through another link as well which I can no longer identify.

The article in question analysed the experience of expatriates (including Robert Liddell) and their wistful gaze towards their familiar lands! The article also reproduces Durrell's somewhat morbid reflections on Alexandria - perhaps in a letter - the ennui, and the dependence on drugs and sex which seemed to permeate the lives of the rich natives of the city. 

I wonder if anyone can possibly give me a reference or link through which I can locate this article again. 

Regards

Sumantra

--Forwarded Message Attachment--

CRESCENT MOON PUBLISHING
COMPLETE CATALOGUE

poetry - painting - sculpture - arts - literature - cinema - music - media - feminism - cultural studies  

ALEXANDRIA REVISITED        

ALEXANDRIA REVISITED

The Alexandria of Lawrence Durrell, C.P. Cavafy,

Edmund Keeley and Others

by Jeremy Robinson  

[Extract from Lawrence Durrell: Between Love and Death, East and West, Crescent Moon, 1995]  

...from Alexander to Amr; founders of this anarchy of flesh and fever, of money-love and mysticism. Where else one earth will you find such a mixture? And when night falls and the white city lights up the thousand candelabra of its parks and buildings, tunes in to the soft unearthly drum music of Morocco or Caucasus, it looks like some great crystal liner asleep there, anchored to the horn of Africa - her diamond and fire-opal reflections twisting downwards like polished bars into the oily harbour among the battleships. 
     Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar (127-8)  

Lawrence Durrell's relation with Alexandria was a love-hate one, as with his relation to England. In letters written at the time of living in Alexandria, Durrell expresses hatred: he speaks of 'an Alexandrian frenzy of apathy' (8 February 1941, Durrell, 1988, 159). Again and again, Durrell recommends excessive self-indulgence (boys, women or drugs) as a way of surviving Alexandria: 

The Alexandrian way of death is very Proustian and slow; a decomposition in greys and greens - by the hashish pipe or boys... First this steaming humid flatness - not a hill or mound anywhere - choked to bursting point with bones and the crummy deposits of wiped out cultures. Then this smashed up broken down shabby neapolitan town, with its Levantine mounds of houses peeling in the sun. A sea flat dirty brown and waveless rubbing the port. Arabic, Coptic, Greek, Levant French; no music, no art, no real gaiety. A saturated middle European boredom laced with drink and Packards and beach-cabins. NO SUBJECT OF CONVERSATION EXCEPT MONEY. Even love is thought of in money terms; "You are getting on with her? She has ten thousand a year of her own." Six hundred greaseball millionaires sweating in their tarbushes and waiting for the next shot of rot-hashish. And the shrieking personal unhappiness and loneliness showing in every face... Sexual provender of quality, but the atmosphere is damp, hysterical, sandy, with the wind off the desert fanning everything to mania. Love, hashish and boys is the obvious solution to anyone stuck here for more than a few years. (The Durrell-Miller Letters, 160, 168, 171) 
     It is interesting to compare the Alexandria conjured up by Durrell in his letters, and the Alexandria found in The Alexandria Quartet. In the letters, Durrell hates being in Alexandria, and that hatred and weariness comes over in the character Darley. The general atmosphere of The Alexandria Quartet is of an existential lassitude, but it is a fashionable and stylish weariness, cleverly shaped by the author into a baroque structure. The Alexandria in the letters is a place to be escaped as soon as possible - Durrell went back to Greece (to Rhodes) after the war. In the fiction, Alexandria is a place of extremes: opulent, decadent materialism is contrasted with flea-bitten poverty; a time-honoured contrast. The pageants of the ancient Ptolemy dynasty, which Durrell echoes in his over-the-top set-pieces, involved enormous spreads of pigeons, myrrh, sweetmeats, lions, elephants, gold and Indian princesses - verily over-blown ceremonies in the D.W. Griffith style, with a cast of thousands (Pinchin, 14). In the fictional Alexandria, as in all Durrell's fiction, there is much decadence, much partying and jewels and huge cars and money. 

The master-sensualists of history abandoning their bodies to mirrors, to poems, to the grazing flocks of boys and women, to the needle in the vein, to the opium-pipe, to the death-in-life kisses with appetite. (Clea, 12) 
     But the decay is everywhere in Durrell's Alexandria, and the premier hotel, the Cecil, has dust on its palms. Fin-de-si�cle decay permeates every aspect of Durrell's Alexandria - no one escapes it. The Alexandria Quartet is a novel of existential and societal decay, the decay of a culture into civilization, in the Splengerian manner. Alexandria embodies that decline, and the shabbiness of modern day Alexandria is an expression of the decay, as is the sexual promiscuity and 'perversions'. The Alexandria Quartet is Durrell's 'Book of the Dead', and is all about spiritual bankruptcy. 'We were fellow-bankrupts' admits Darley, referring to Melissa (Justine, 20). 
    Durrell finds in wartime Alexandria a suitably ruined place for his exploration of spiritual decay. In Alexandria he says in the letters 'the atmosphere of sex and death is staggering' (1988, 168). Sex and death are Durrell's chief concerns, and the two are fulfilled by art. Alexandria became for Durrell in many ways the 'capital of memory', as he called it, 'the hinge of our whole Christian culture' (Moore, 1962, 168). It was, and is, a city of the imagination, a city built on memories, a city that only poets, it seems, can really appreciate, because, today, Alexandria reveals very little of its former glory. The glories of Alexandria have to be imagined, and the artist is the best person to do this. Thus, the inhabitants of Durrell's Alexandria are creative people - not only the writers Darley, Arnauti and Pursewarden, but also Justine and Nessim. Justine, for instance, is not a writer, but she, like all Durrell's characters, sheds petals of insight as if she were a philosopher or artist. Durrell says that 'the novel is only half secretly about art, the great subject of modern artists' (in Cowley, 231). While writing his Book of Friends, and going back over his life, much as Durrell's Darley does, like any number of narrators do, Henry Miller wrote: '[t]he past is like an open book - rather, a cinerama spectacle. Nothing is ever lost, what!' (1988, 461) 
    Where is Alexandria? The city is made up of mythology and history, which lies not just below the surface, but deeply buried. The French and Greek city is built upon the ancient one, but for hundreds and hundreds of years Alexandria was a fishing village of some four thousand inhabitants. Nowadays, the city has been reclaimed by the Arabic Egyptians. The street names, once known in French, have been Egyptianized; the colonial glory of the 19th and early 20th century fades away. But it was fading fast even when Durrell lived there, in the war years. Robert Liddell writes of Alexandria: 

Unreal City - for all its materialism and its hideousness, yet one of the cities of the soul. There I have known the misery and nostalgia of other exiles, 'stretching out our hands with love for the other shore'. (211) 
     Edmund Keeley, also, like Robert Liddell, in search of Cavafy's Alexandria, was disappointed by the present day city: 

During a recent visit there, in the spring of 1973, I tried to make myself believe that the ugly reality I was seeing masked the presence of another city, more real in its way, a city open to those who could bring to it an imaginative vision, a mythical sensibility if you will, akin to Cavafy's and exemplified in recent English letters by E.M. Forster and Lawrence Durrell. But the mask, the surface reality, was so unlike the literary images I brought with me, so immediate and harsh in its effect, that it frustrated any imaginative projection. Today's Alexandria strikes one first of all as squalid. (Cavafy's Alexandria, 4) 
     The artist's job, then, is to recreate Alexandria, to make it anew. Yet each writer who has remade Alexandria - Durrell, Cavafy, Forster, Keeley, Mahfouz, Haag - has made it in their own image, and with dollops of irony. The three writers who have 'rewritten' Alexandria, so to speak - Durrell, Forster and Cavafy - have been markedly ironic artists. 'Alexandria goes on being Alexandria still', as Cavafy says, but in a very particular, aesthetic, philosophic way. Not the squalid contemporary city, or the shabby city of the 1930s, but an artistic creation, which, magpie-like, hordes bits of Alexandria picked up from any time in its history. The artists who have remade Alexandria have taken freely from 323 BC, Alexander the Great's epoch, or from Cleopatra's time, as mediated by Plutarch and Shakespeare, from Muhammad Ali's 19th century Alexandria, and from early 20th century cosmopolitan/ aristocratic/ bohemian Alexandria. 

"Alexandria goes on being Alexandria still": for those who see it for what it really is - a city of the imagination, a city that satisfies the mind's eye first of all. (Edmund Keeley, ib., 3) 
     Durrell's Alexandria is very much the cosmopolitan city, where Greek, French, Italian, British, Jewish, Arab and Egyptian people mix. Like Durrell's beloved Corfu Town, the Greeks, Italians, French and British each made their mark on Alexandria. It is this modern city that provides the background of The Alexandria Quartet. But it is the mythical, historic city, that lies deep underneath, that is the 'spirit' of Alexandria that infuses The Alexandria Quartet. It is the mythical, spiritual Alexandria that really excites Durrell. If Alexandria were merely LA or New York, a modern, mid-century city, the fascination would be much less for Durrell. Durrell's Alexandria, a distinctly fictional place, 'is completely faithful to the ancient spirit of the place'. (Robert Scholes, 1965, 24) The poet is excited by the ancient figures that still haunt Alexandria: Cleopatra, Antony, Amr and Alexander. To quote E.M. Forster on the mythic aspect of the city (here, Cleopatra) from his Alexandria guidebook: 

She was the last of a secluded and subtle race, she was a flower that Alexandria had taken three hundred years to produce and that eternity cannot wither, and she unfolded herself to a simple but intelligent Roman soldier. (28) 
     Alexandria was the capital of syncretic religion, where many faiths and creeds were discussed and formed, where Gnosticism and Neoplatonism was prominent. It is this philosophical richness that excites Durrell. The cosmopolitan/ colonial aspects of the city provide diverting scenes and people, but the themes of The Alexandria Quartet are carried on in figures such as Ptolemy and Cleopatra. The interweaving nature of the lives in The Alexandria Quartet, like crabs in a basket, as Balthazar puts it, is mirrored by the ancient beliefs that mingled in syncretic fashion around the time of Christ and in the first few centuries AD. The narrator of The Alexandria Quartet evokes the ancient city from time to time: it's more difficult to incorporate the ancient city into the present day one. But Durrell does find ways of integrating the ancient and modern: for instance, he will have a character walking down the 'Street of the Soma', even though no street in modern Alexandria bears that name (Rue Fuad appears most frequently in the Quartet). Or he will have characters meet near Pompey's Pillar, and he'll mention the ancient Park of Pan, in a manner that suggests E.M. Forster's historian style. Or he has Nessim undergo a series of dreams in Justine which include visions of the Mouseion, one of the splendours of classical Alexandria, or an army's shrine built to Aphrodite (Justine, 156f). Nessim's dreams are fearful expressions of the 'spirit of place': here the landscape is literally speaking through him. 
    Durrell's Alexandria and Egypt is the archetypal view of the 'Oriental' Middle East seen from the viewpoint of (white, affluent, imperialist) European society. Durrell espouses the traditional Western views of the Levant which have been prevalent from the Crusades onwards; the uncleanness of the people and landscape; the bestial, earthy, poor lifestyle; the internicene warfare; the many tribes, cuisines, costumes, crafts, languages, m�urs, beliefs; the violence; the ethnic, religious and social cross-fertilization; the beauty and mystery of the East, and so on. Durrell 'orientalizes' the East in that romantic, 'colonial' fashion analyzed in the works of Edward Said. However, notions of the 'East' and 'Occident' are inventions as much for the 'real' Orient as for the 'real' West. Even as writers such as T.E. Lawrence, Richard Burton, Norman Douglas, Rose Macaulay, and Durrell romanticized and orientalized the East, writers in the Orient also romanticized themselves. 
    The mythical Alexandria is described by visitors such as Durrell, Liddell, E.M. Forster, Edmund Keeley and Michael Haag as a city of dreams, in which one needs to dream hard to recapture its former radiance. Robert Liddell writes of ancient historic Alexandria: 

Of ancient Greek Alexandria nothing survives but the name and the site, and the Romans have only left inconsiderable remains behind them. The conquering Arabs, who were to build so magnificently elsewhere, here did nothing but destroy. A miserable village stood during the centuries where had been the city of Alexander and the Ptolemies; and of course the poets Theocritus, Callimachus and Apollonius Rhodius; of Antony and Cleopatra; of saints and heresiarchs such as St Athanasius and Arius; of learning and philosophy of the Mouseion, of Plotinus and Hypatia. The Venetians went off with the head of St Mark, the apostle of Egypt. (17) 
     Alexandria has to be invented to become fully satisfying. 'Art is what the artist invents' said Cavafy (Alithersis, 41), and this is precisely what Durrell does with Alexandria in The Alexandria Quartet, and what his characters do. All the time they are inventing - Balthazar invents, improvizing upon Darley's inventions, Arnauti's reinvents Justine, just as she invents herself. Alexandria is invented and re-invented throughout Durrell's work: it looms large also in The Avignon Quintet, as the place where the Oriental lover and would-be mage, Affad, lives. 
    Durrell's Alexandria is much more than a 'backdrop' for the action in The Alexandria Quartet. It is invoked continually in the tetralogy as more than a mere city, more than a collection of buildings and people and climate. It is a 'spirit', a presence, the 'It' of Groddeck, which moves through the characters, mobilizes them, limits them and shapes them. Alexandria is the guiding force behind the Quartet. Groddeck's 'It', which is expressed in Alexandria and her people, is associated by Durrell with the Tao, in that '[t]he It is a Way, not a Thing' (Key to Modern Poetry, 79), a manifestation or a process, but not a 'thing-in-itself'. Henry Miller wrote to Durrell: 

...the city itself, Alexandria, is the real hero. You've made it immortal. It communicates always by and through the senses. It also gives the impression of being inexhaustible - like a god... Alexandria < - your Alexandria - > is the whole pantheon of Homer's bloody, senseless gods - doing what they will, but conscious of what is done. The Homeric gods are more like blind forces, components of the now exposed psyche - atomic, in other words. Whereas Alexandria - thru and by her inhabitants, climate, odours, temperament, diversity, freaks, crimes, monstruous dreams and hallucinations (but why imitate you?) - gives the impression of living herself (her pantheonic self) out, of washing herself clean through complete enactment. Alexandria enacts (for us) - that's it. (1988, 345-7) 
     Justine is the embodiment of Alexandria, of the sensual, feverish, neurotic aspect of the city, of Alexandria as Cleopatra Incarnate (other mythic courtesans lie behind Justine: Salom�, Lais, Charis, and figures such as Judith who beheaded Holofernes). But the other spirit of the city is C.P. Cavafy, 'one of Alexandria's strangest figures' (Pinchin, 5), 'the genius loci' of the city (Liddell, 210), who is called by Durrell 'the old poet of the city' in Justine. Cavafy, E.M. Forster said, is 'the great Greek poet who so poignantly conveys the civilization of his chosen city (Alexandria, xxiii). Edmund Keeley writes: 

Aware of the poet's point of view, I find it difficult to move through the streets of today's Alexandria without feeling the presence of Cavafy's ghost, especially the threat of its mockery. (1977, 3) 
     The Cavafian nostalgia of the Quartet is to be found on every page, sometimes wistful, sometimes bitter, sometimes 'tragic', sometimes humorous. Memory itself becomes the 'school of love' for the young lover-poet. Towards the end of Justine the memory of 'particular rooms' in one which made love, or particular caf� tables, the site of romantic liaisons, or kisses, becomes a 'school' to the 'student of love' (Justine, 201). 
    It's inevitable that Durrell would use Cavafy in a novel set in Alexandria. Balthazar is a version of Cavafy, he has many of the poet's characteristics, and visits the poet in his flat. Cavafy's poems appear at the back of Justine, two of Cavafy's most famous poems: 'The City' and 'The God Abandons Antony'. For Durrell, Cavafy is one of the most sublime melders of the twin polarities of Alexandrian (therefore Western) life, the extreme asceticism and extreme sensuality, the poles of ecstasy and excrement, spirit and matter. In Justine, Balthazar, the most Cavafian of Durrell's creations, explains why Cavafy is of such importance: 

His exquisite balance of irony and tenderness would have put him among the saints had he been a religious man. He was by divine choice only a poet and often unhappy but with him one had the feeling that he was catching every minute as it flew and turning it upside down to expose its happy side. He was really using himself up, his inner self, in living. (Justine, 82-83) 
     In Cavafy, one finds the major Durrellian themes united by an extraordinary talent: art, religion, eroticism and memory/ time. In Cavafy, eroticism and art, spirituality and degradation merge in an ironic fashion, wholly in tune with Durrell's own hyper self-conscious sensibility. Cavafy is the poet Durrell might like to be, for Cavafy understands the primacy of the imagination and art. Cavafy, too, stylishly integrates Durrell's love of all things Greek, Egyptian, English and French; Cavafy is the multilingual, cosmopolitan poet, at home everywhere and nowhere, but at home only in Alexandria, the beloved city. Cavafy's poetic stance is the model for Durrell's new sense of exile, at its most piquant in the poem 'The City', one of Cavafy's great poems, here rendered by Durrell: 

You tell yourself: I'll be gone 
To some other land, some other sea, 
To a city lovelier far than this 
Could ever have been or hoped to be - 
Where every step now tightens the noose: 
A heart in a body buried and out of use: 
How long, how long must I be here 
Confined among these dreary purlieus 
Of the common mind? (Justine, 221) 
     The two key poems of Cavafy's which relate to the themes of the Quartet are 'The City' and 'In the Evening'. The following three poems, like so many of Cavafy's poems, also go to the heart of the Quartet. In 'One Night', Cavafy writes: 

now as I write, after so many years, 
in my lonely house, I'm drunk with passion again. (1983, 41) 
     This is precisely the psychic space in which Darley writes, on his lonely island in the Mediterranean, recreating the characters of 1930s Alexandria. It is also the basic situation of poets everywhere, from Sappho and the anonymous poets of the Greek Anthology onwards. 
    In 'Understanding' Cavafy writes of the shaping structure of love: 

In the loose living of my early years 
the impulses of my poetry were shaped, 
the boundaries of my art were plotted. (1983, 60) 
     Here Cavafy's narrator acknowledges how the trajectory and structure of his whole life after youth was formed in the (sensual) experiences of his youth. The erotic attachments of teenage and his twenties become his food and foundation of his later. mature years. It is to the years of late teenage and early twenties that Cavafy's narrators return, time after time. 
    In 'Half an Hour' Cavafy describes the shamanic power of the artist: 

I never had you nor, I suppose, 
will I ever have you. A few words, an approach, 
as in the bar yesterday - nothing more. 
It's sad, I admit. But we who serve Art, 
sometimes with the mind's intensity 
can create pleasure that seems almost physical - 
but of course only for a short time. (1983, 149) 
     Robert Liddell, in his biography of Cavafy, writes: 

When I returned a few months later to live and work in Alexandria, Cavafy seemed the genius loci... That same spring, walking between the splendid herbaceous borders of Nimr Pacha at Meadi, Sir Walter Smart had said to me: 'If you're going to write an Alexandrian novel, it must centre round Cavafy.' (210-1) 
     These days, one can go on literary pilgrimages in Alexandria not only to find the locations of Cleopatra's fabulous temple, or the Great Library, or the Gates of the Moon, or Alexander's tomb, but also places where Cavafy, Forster and others lived. Durrell himself has become another mythical Alexandria figure. You can find the tower Durrell built over the Italian garden at 19 Maahmoud Street, or Cavafy's flat, now the Cavafy Museum, or the cafe where characters from The Alexandria Quartet used to meet - Pastroudis. Already Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet has become integrated into the poetic-mythic fabric of modern day Alexandria. 
    The 'real' Alexandria, then, exists as an artistic/ cultural creation. It is not the 'actual' city in North Africa but the literary edifice created by Durrell, Cavafy, Forster, Mahfouz and other writers. Edmund Keeley writes: 

The surface of Alexandria is now Arabic once again - Arabic and little else - and the mythical city beyond it is visible only to the inner eye of an Egyptian poet, one who can see the vital imaginative resources that remain hidden from those confined to a European perspective. but if the surface one sees today is unrecognizable to someone brought up on the images created by Cavafy, Forster, and the other literary "Alexandrias", this merely serves to reinforce the sense that the literal Alexandria is not the one that has counted most for the world of letters. The mystery of modern Alexandria seems to be not in what it actually is or was at any given moment but in its power to stimulate - as perhaps no other city in this century - the creation of poetic cities cast in its image, cities that imitate it as it can be, or even ought to be, in its essence. (ib, 5-6) 
     Durrell's Alexandria is thus one those mythical cities of imagination, one of those 'cities of the interior', as Ana�s Nin called them, which are found in much of literature. Michael Moorcock has his own version of a mythical London, as has Martin Amis, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Peter Ackroyd, Salman Rushdie - and even Spike Milligan's the Goons created their version of London. Henry Miller has his beloved Paris, while Woody Allen joyously mythicizes New York in his movies. Ana�s Nin's own mythical city was the ever-exotic Fez, one of the few cities that can vie with Cairo for extraordinary scenes and sensual overload. 
    People often confuse cities as they appear in fiction with real cities. Go to Alexandria now and one finds only fragments of Durrell's or Cavafy's Alexandria. People go to Thomas Hardy's Wessex and expect to be moved by, say, Tess's Cottage, or Michael Henchard's house (now a bank) in Dorchester. But Hardy's Wessex, like Gide's North Africa, Lawrence's Tuscany, V.S. Naipaul's India or Graham Greene's Brighton, is a literary, creative invention. Hardy's Wessex takes the county of Dorset and its environs as a point of departure merely: the rest is invention. In a similar fashion, the Oriental flavour of The Arabian Nights, with its labyrinthine bazaars, was based not on Baghdad, but Cairo. Go to Cairo today and the souks and casbahs are still astonishing, whereas Alexandria's history is disappointingly fragmented in the modern city. 
    Lawrence Durrell's Quartet is thus also an exploration of the Arabic world, and its relationship with and contrast to the Western (European) world. In contrasting Islam and Europe Durrell's references can be seen in the politically correct post-colonial world as racist and insensitive. Durrell does not reserve his scepticism just for Arabs or Jews, though: the French, the Germans, the Italians, the Greeks, and most obviously the English all receive a share of vehemence and bile. As landscapes, Durrell explores the contrasts between England and Egypt, how the social and personal space of Europe and Arabia are organized along different lines: how the Arabic/ Egyptian way of life is lived crowded in together, with few private spaces,[3] not in separate suburban homes as in England; the Arabic smellscape is rich and intoxicating, with its incense, live animals, leather, spices, while the European city is dominated by traffic fumes and air fresheners; the Arab souk is a maze of passageways, while the British and European town is a po-faced plastic High Street. Durrell's Arabia is an investigation of contrasts and differences, it is a world constructed on different cultural foundations from the 'air conditioned nightmare' (Henry Miller's title) of the West. Miller's title for his voyage around American culture describes the mechanized, saccharine sterility of the Occident. 
    Durrell's Alexandria is thus to be found not in the North African city, not in the text or words of The Alexandria Quartet, but in the interface between the reader and the text. In short, in the reader's mind. This is where mythical cities live, in the fantasizing brain.     As Michael Haag writes in his Egypt guidebook: 

A Roman theatre, Pompey's Pillar, the catacombs at Kom el Shogafa; these and a medieval fortress squatting on the foundations of the Pharos lighthouse are the principal but paltry remains of Alexandria's resplendent past. Some will see nothing in her. Others will voyage through the phantom city and listen to her voices and her music. (418) 
     Durrell's Alexandria is a ghost, which floats on the breath of long-buried glories. Alexandria relies on stories, comments, myths, historians' accounts, essays, intimations and shadowy figures for its resplendence. It is a city founded on hearsay, on narratives and inventions. Words and legends keep Alexandria buoyant. Without language and artistic invention, Alexandria, like any other mythical city - Carthage, Babylon, Atlantis, Antioch - might fade away to nothing. 

What one might call the Alexandrian mode is first of all to search for the hidden metaphoric possibilities, the mysterious invisible processions, of the reality one sees in the literal city outside one's window. (Edmund Keeley, 6) 
     Durrell's Egypt - chiefly Alexandria, Cairo and (excursions into) the desert - is a torment of conflicting desires, histories, politics and personalities. In The Alexandria Quartet one veers from extreme to extreme, from heat and dust to rain and mud; from exotic pantomime-like parties where the rich and famous cavort in black dominos, to camels being sliced up while still alive. In amongst the opulence there is brutality: a famous example is the death by a hat-pin being driven into the brain at the party (which is also the manner of the murder at the end of Paul Bowles' Let It Come Down). As with Paul Bowles' fictions - The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's Stratagem - violence is sudden and overwhelming when it occurs. The violence is seen as the natural outcome of the 'spirit of place', where the inhabitants are so profoundly bored, 'bored to death', to use a common phrase. The weariness of North Africa is so intense it produces outbreaks of violence, like a thunderstorm suddenly erupting. In the fictions of Andr� Gide, Paul Bowles and Durrell set in North Africa, violence is an occasional but inevitable outburst in a weary life. 
    Durrell's Egypt reproduces the Western traveller's impressions of a Third World environment: the dust, poverty, slums and flies. Egypt is summarized in Balthazar as a series of symbols, thus: 'minarets, pigeons, statues, ships, coins, camels and palms'. And one sentence sums up Egypt: '[a] woman counting money on a glass table, an old man feeding a dog, an Arab in a red flowerpot drawing a curtain' (Justine, 189-190). The times when a character returns to Alexandria is often the signal for landscape lyricism. When Mountolive goes to Alex on that fateful night when he meets a vastly changed Leila and ends up in a child brothel, he arrives during a storm. To presage Mountolive's crucifixion, the narrator keeps emphasizing the fact that it's winter, it's stormy, the clouds are 'blood-stained' (Mountolive, 248). In the stormlight, the city becomes spectral, like a fairy tale landscape with its minarets and mosques, brick buildings, dust, surrounding desert, liners groaning like animals in the harbour (Mountolive, 248-9). The two set-pieces at the end of Mountolive - Narouz' death and Mountolive's descent into hell, both involve lengthy evocations of the 'primitive' or 'native' aspects of Egypt and Alexandria. Mountolive ventures into the Arab quarter got up like a Syrian sheikh in flowerpot hat and shades. Durrell trots out the usual descriptions of the seedier side of Egypt: the dust, cafes, incense, card players, narguilehs, stenches, markets, and the inevitable pornography and prostitution. 
    When Darley returns to Alexandria, at the start of Clea, his home-coming is described in terms of artifice. The narrator emphasizes that the images of wartorn Alexandria which Darley sees from the boat as he arrives by sea by night are theatrical, cinematic, painterly. Allusions are constantly made to cinema, theatre, painting. Durrell doesn't simply write 'like a painter', he uses painting metaphors all the time, referring, for instance, to a sky looking like a painter has smashed his colourbox against it. And the chief protagonist of Clea, after Darley, is a painter (Clea). The 'set-piece' where Darley in the boat sees Alexandria in an air bombardment is a typical example of Durrell's literary, self-conscious style of description. It is a suitably 'dramatic' way of reviving Alexandria for the last time in the Quartet. To emphasize the unreality and noise of wartime Alexandria, Durrell contrasts it with the other key landscape of his life, island Greece. Darley is shown lying 'on a flat rock above the sea, eating an orange' (12). This Hellenic, Arcadian calm is shattered, in the best literary tradition, by the horror of war. It is not a gut-wrenching, nauseous horror, however. Durrell's narrators do not rub the reader's nose in the slime. Instead, the horror is highly stylized, as in all Durrell's work, and the aerial bombardment becomes for Darley a firework display on a colossal scale. 
    Alexandria provides Durrell with much 'local colour' as it's called, which he duly describes. As Durrell describes the squalor he inevitably romanticizes it, just as Shakespeare romanticized the 'primitives' in The Tempest.[4] Durrell treats the 'natives' of Egypt in a patronizing, colonial manner, which seems to be unavoidable. Shakespeare did it, Dickens did it, Greene did it, Huxley did it, Lawrence did it. 

REFERENCES 
1. See Peter Lamborn Wilson: "Orientalismo", in Sulfur, no. 35, Fall 1994, 233 
2. Jane Pinchin glosses Durrell's assertion that '[o]nly the city is real' with Nabokov's remark that 'real' is the only word that requires quotation marks. The quotation marks around 'real' chime with the postmodern critiques of society of Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Umberto Eco, Pierre Bordieu, Jacques Derrida et al, with their talk of the 'hyperspace' of global media. 
3. S. Bianca: "Traditional Muslim cities and Western planning ideology: an outline of structural conflict", in Serageldin 1982, 40; E. Hall: The Hidden Dimension, Bodley Head 1969. 
4. On Shakespeare and colonialism, see O. Mannoni: Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, Praeger, New York 1964; Paul Brown in Jonathan Dollimore & Alan Sinfield, eds: Political Shakespeare, Manchester University Press 1985; Leslie Fielder: The Stranger in Shakespeare, Croom Helm 1973; Thomas Carteli in Jean E. Howard & M.F. O'Connor, eds: Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, Methuen 1987, 99-115; Francis Barker & Peter Hulme in John Drakakis, ed: Alternative Shakespeares, Routledge 1985, 191-205; Charles Frey: "The Tempest and the New World", Shakespeare Quarterly, 30, 1979, 29-41. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

LAWRENCE DURRELL 
The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-80, ed. Ian MacNiven, Faber 1988 
Justine, Faber 1963 
Balthazar, Faber 1963 
Mountolive, Faber 1963 
Clea, Faber 1961 
Key to Modern Poetry, Peter Nevill 1952 
Spirit of Place, Faber 1971 
interview in Malcolm Cowley, ed: Writers At Work: The 'Paris Review' Interviews, 2nd series, Secker & Warburg 1963 

OTHERS 
Alithersis: Cavafy, Alexandria 1934 
C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, tr. Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard, Princeton University Press, New Jersey 1983 
-. The Complete Poems, tr. Rae Dalven, Hogarth Press 1968 
E.M. Forster: Alexandria: A History and a Guide, Michael Haag 1986 
Michael Haag: Egypt, Cadogan 1993 
Alfred Kazin: "Lawrence Durrell's Rosy-finger'd Egypt", in Contemporaries, Little, Brown, Boston 1962 
Edmund Keeley: "Lawrence Durrell and Modern Philhellenism", unpublished MS, Princeton University, New Jersey 1988 
-. Cavafy's Alexandria: Study of a Myth in Progress, Hogarth Press, 1977 
Robert Liddell: Cavafy: a critical biography, Duckworth 1974 
Harry T. Moore, ed: The World of Lawrence Durrell, Southern Illinois University Press 1962 
Jane Lagoudis Pinchin: Alexandria Still: Forster, Durrell and Cavafy, Princeton University Press, 1977 
Robert Scholes: The Fabulators, Oxford University Press 1967 

SELECTIONS FROM WRITERS AND POETS     

To read selections from other writers, poets and texts published by Crescent Moon, click on the names below:  

Alexendria Revisited: Durrell, Cavafy, Keeley and Others 
Elisabeth Bletsoe, poems 
Emily Dickinson, poems 
Lawrence Durrell 
D.J. Enright, poems 
H.W. Fawkner on John Cowper Powys 
Eric Gill and D.H. Lawrence 
Thomas Hardy, poems 
Thomas Hardy, from Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism 
Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles 
Spirit of Place in Hardy, Lawrence and Powys 
Robert Herrick, poems 
Friedrich H�lderlin, poems 
Wolfgang Iser, interview 
Julia Kristeva, life and work 
D.H. Lawrence and Lawrence Durrell 
D.H. Lawrence's The Escaped Cock 
D.H. Lawrence, poems 
Love poetry, a selection 
Nature poetry, a selection 
Pagan America: Anthology of New American Poetry 
John Cowper Powys by Joe Boulter 
John Cowper Powys, from Rethinking Powys 
Peter Redgrove, poems 
Jeremy Reed, poems 
Rainer Maria Rilke, life and work 
Rainer Maria Rilke, poems 
Arthur Rimbaud, poems 
Arthur Rimbaud, life and work 
Romantic poetry, a selection 
William Shakespeare: The Sonnets 
Arseny Tarkovsky, poems 
Sir Thomas Wyatt, poems   

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