[ilds] Durrell’s Characters

Fri May 15 23:27:35 PDT 2015

Michael Haag writes in Alexandria: City of Memory: 

"There was an innocence about Alexandria then, in those early days of the war, an innocence that some would say the city never really lost. 'It was unthought of for an unmarried girl, or even an unmarried boy', recalled Bernard de Zogheb, 'to leave the family house and have a flat of their own...Certainly most girls in Alexandria went to their weddings as virgins - girls of all communities. We were brought up to think that sex was a mortal sin.'..." (Haag, p.184)

Hag quotes Eve: 'I had a father who was very possessive and for very good reasons. He was also, I think infatuated with me... It was the closest he had been to any human being...And Larry understood this to mean, when I told him, that my father had interfered with me sexually, but he never did... he was an honest-to-God man; he just didn’t know what was happening to him...” (Haag, p.231).

How does this fit with Lawrence Durrell's broad claims about the Alexandrian people? For instance:

1. "The Orient cannot rejoice in the sweet anarchy of the body - for it has outstripped the body...Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets - I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex." (The Alexandria Quartet, Justine, Faber paperback, 1974, p.18).

2. "It is as if the preoccupations of this landscape were centred somewhere out of the reach of the average inhabitant - in a region where the flesh, stripped by over-indulgence of its final reticences, must yield to a preocccupation vastly more comprehensive..." (The Alexandria Quartet, Justine, Faber paperback, 1974, p.38). 

On the other hand these are Michael Haag's accounts about the British in Alexandria (Alexandria: City of Memory): 

1. "Who were Durrell's original Alexandrians? In fact their names read like the cast of characters in a Noel Coward play: Charles, Damien, Claudia, John, Hogarth, Baroness Irma, Tessa, Melissa, Corege. Almost all his characters are British; they turn out to be like Durrell and his friends, not true denizens of the cosmopolitan city but exiled in Alexandria by the war."(Haag, p.299). 

But Gwyn Willams ('Durrell in Egypt') is also quoted by Haag as referring to 'Zananiri, Sachs, Baddaro, Menasce, Zogueb, Suarez...'. and 'It was out of this varied and dying ferment that Larry invented his Alexandria Quartet'. (Haag p.259)

2. "Gwyn Williams would watch 'for as long as one cared to look' at British servicemen and women in 'a motionless clinch'...pressed against walls..." and "For Mario Colucci, ..he remembers seeing 'a Wren standing on the pavement...her skirt hitched up, one foot on the wall, having sex with a soldier.' " (Haag, pp.213-14)

This scene appears as follows in the novel Clea: 'The city was always perverse but it took its pleasures with style...never up against a wall or a tree or a truck!' (p.732, The Alexandria quartet)

3. Haag writes of the temporarily resident Englishwoman in Alexandria, Elizabeth Gwynne (Elizabeth David) - not a native citizen of Alexandria - who had the history of having been raped by a close relative: 'But it is not clear if eventually she herself or Cowan or a mutual friend told Durrell that at the age of fourteen she had been raped by a member of her family...' (Haag, p.274). , 

This incident of being raped by a relative in her adolescence has been transposed by Durrell in his novel, to the history of Justine created as a Jewish native of Alexandria.

4. "...for a time the navy itself operated a brothel...with a medical officer permanently on duty. 'It created a big scandal that the British should participate in such activity...' " (Haag, p.213)

5. In his novels, Durrell also underplays or ignores the life of cultivation among the elite of Alexandria, mentioned in Michael Haag's book:

"..Nuovo Teatro Alhambra on the Rue Missalla and the Mohammed Ali Theatre on the Rue Fuad, where Pavlova danced and Toscanini conducted, where the opera season was brightened by the stars of La Scala...' (Haag, p.136)

The British population in Alexandria appears to have provided material which Durrell generally used to describe native Alexandrians although the indigenous Alexandrians undoubtedly formed a part of the background as well.

A most curious contrast is between Durrell’s Alexandria (“ . . Alexandria was the great winepress of love . .”) and Haag’s description of the Alexandria covering the same period:  "There was an innocence about Alexandria then, in those early days of the war, an innocence that some would say the city never really lost.”  (Haag, p.184)

Sumantra

From: Sumantra Nag [mailto:sumantranag at gmail.com] 
Sent: Saturday, May 16, 2015 10:34 AM
To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca
Cc: Bruce Redwine
Subject: Re: [ilds] Durrell’s Characters

Bruce!

That's a lot of characters bearing some aspect of Lawrence Durrell's mental or physical makeup. 

Scobie?! Forgive me for sounding a bit bewildered. I read somewhere that Scobie's character was derived - partly at least - from an eccentric in Cairo whom Durrell was familiar with. And Da Capo appears to symbolise a predatory lecher in whom Durrell projects characteristics of familiar males in Alexandria. In Justine and the AQ, Da Capo is supposed to have raped Justine in her adolescence. But Haag's book describes a similar experience in the life of Elizabeth David, who, rightly perhaps, has been mentioned in these recent posts as a person on whom Durrell has drawn while creating Justine.

Based on references I made my from Michael Haag's book on Alexandria (City of Memory) I wrote at some length in The Guardian discussion of 2012 that Durrell seems to have transposed some of the conduct of British people resident in Alexandria during the 1940s and WWII on to the indigenous population of Alexandria. 

Sumantra

Sent from my Asus Zenfone

Charles Dickens is usually praised for the variety and profusion of his characterizations.  I don’t think of Durrell as another Dickens.  His many characterizations seem connected, seem to have a common origin.  So we have Count D.  Durrell once joked in an interview that he himself was Justine.  Was it entirely a joke?  Sappho Jane saw herself as the prototype for Livia.  Here we may have characterization by consanguinity.  I would argue (and have) that even subsidiary characters such as Da Capo, Toto de Brunel, and Memlik Pasha have aspects of their creator.  Perhaps the “old pirate” and his “tendencies” should also be included.  And maybe old LD is the “real Constance.”  That may have appealed to Sappho Jane.

Bruce

On May 13, 2015, at 7:09 PM, Kennedy Gammage <gammage.kennedy at gmail.com <mailto:gammage.kennedy at gmail.com> > wrote:

I’m not widely read in Saul Bellow (I enjoyed Humbolt’s Gift, which lead me to Delmore Schwartz) but I am reading a lot about Bellow now because of Leader’s new bio – and there are some contrasts or parallels we can make with our friend. Louis Menand’s YOUNG SAUL article in the May 11 issue of The New Yorker says “From the beginning, Bellow drew on people he knew, including his wives and girlfriends and the members of his own family, for his characters.” Maybe this statement applies to all writers (“write what you know”) – but I’m not sure it applies to Durrell so much.

How many characters are there in the Quartet, and how many can you draw a line to, linking a character to a person Durrell knew? We were just discussing Clea, Justine and Melissa – but Durrell had a finite number of wives, and there are literally dozens of characters. According to Menand’s review, ‘”Herzog” is a revenge novel.’ To a ridiculous extent! Not only are the characters directly linked to friends/wives/lovers – but many of these people favorably reviewed the novel, as if it didn’t apply to them.

I really think Durrell is a different animal: someone who conjured characters out of his head like Zeus! Who is the real Constance? Answer that and I’ll buy you a drink at the next OMG!

Cheers - Ken

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