Find Page One on APPLE PODCASTS or STITCHER.
Episode image is a photograph of the spines of Justine (published 1963), Balthazar (published 1961), Mountolive (published 1961) and Clea (published 1961) by Lawrence Durrell, published by Faber and Faber.
For the 55th Page One, Charles Adrian goes back to the roots of the podcast. It’s just second hand books and a bit of good music. This week: an overview without plot-spoilers of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. There is also some hesitant discussion of current events.
Lawrence Durrell’s “poet of the city”, C. P. Cavafy, is discussed in Page One 81 and Page One 176.
Another book by Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons, is discussed in Page One 24.
Incidentally, it is unclear why Charles Adrian has not been able to find the publication date of these books. The publication history of each is printed clearly on the reverse side of the title page. The publication dates are included with the book listing on this page.
This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode released: 22nd October, 2013.
Book listing:
Justine by Lawrence Durrell (this edition pub. 1963)
Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell (this edition pub. 1961)
Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell (this edition pub. 1961)
Clea by Lawrence Durrell (this edition pub. 1961)
Links:
Episode transcript:
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 55th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this, for those of you who are new here, is something of a return to the roots of this podcast. There's no guest today and no book exchange. There's just going to be the first page of some second hand books and a bit of music. Today I have a theme though, which is not always the case. Now, anyone who's listened to last week's podcast, which was a Second Hand Book Factory with Catherine Payton, will know that I've just finished reading Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. So I've decided that I'm going to dedicate this episode of the podcast to those four books. I'm going to play some music first though. Here's something upbeat. It's Fatima Spar with Eyptian Ella.
Music
[Egyptian Ella by Fatima Spar]
Charles Adrian
So that was Egyptian Ella by Fatima Spar. And now to the books. Okay, let's start with some technical information. So, my copy of the Alexandria Quartet is in four separate clothbound hardback volumes. The original dust jackets have been removed but, with the exception of the second book, the front of each dust jacket has been carefully cut out and placed inside each book so that I have the front covers for Justine, Mountolive and Clea. I have no idea why somebody's done that. There's also no date anywhere that I can find so I can't be sure when they were printed but a quick Google search suggests that they may have been published by Faber And Faber between 1957 and 1960, which would make them super early editions. The covers were designed by Berthold Wolpe and they're beautiful. I recommend that you go and look up the original covers to the Alexandria Quartet.
The books cost me £35 - or £8.75 each - which slightly undermines my theory that these might be really early editions. In any case, I think of them as a bargain even if they're not. And, I don't know, perhaps I should say I'm not in any sense a collector. I don't hunt out rare or interesting editions of books. The only reason that I bought these is that I already had Justine in paperback and I was having trouble finding separate copies of the other books. It's really easy to find, you know, a single-volume Alexandria Quartet but I wanted to read each book separately. My boyfriend at the time tu tted when I bought these. I think he felt that I could probably spend £35 on something more worthwhile. But I'm very pleased with my choice. I think I did well.
I'm going to read you the first page of Justine before I go any further.
PART I
The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes....
I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child - Melissa's child. I do not know why I use the word ‘escape’. The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well, then, I've come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way....
At night when the wind roars and the child sleeps quietly in its wooden cot by the echoing chimney-piece I light a lamp and walk about, thinking of my friends - of Justine and Nessim, of Melissa and Baltazar. I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together: the city which used us as its flora - precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!
I have had to come so far away from it in order to understand it all! Living on this bare promontory, snatched every night from darkness by Arcturus, far from the lime-laden dust of those summer afternoons, I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past. It is the city which should be judged though we, its children, must pay the price.
* * * * *
Capitally, what is this city of ours? What is resumed in the word Alexandria? In a flash my mind's eye shows me a thousand dust-tormented streets. Flies and beggars own it today - and those who enjoy an intermediate existence between either.
Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbour bar. But there [...]
But there we come to the end of the first page. Justine, obviously, is the opening book of the Quartet and it's a love story, essentially. It's not about love that's easy in any way - or even particularly romantic - but it's about the loves that men and women feel for each other and for the city. It's passionate. And it's a little perplexing. I think it's meant to be. It's only with the second novel, Balthazar, that we start to understand that the Alexandria Quartet - the whole Alexandria Quartet - is a kind of palimpsest. In the second book, we go over exactly the same ground as in the first but this time the events are explained slightly differently - different motives are brought to light, we understand that things are a little more complicated than we first thought.
Now what's happened - and I love this - is that Darley, who's the narrator and the writer of the first book has sent his manuscript to Balthazar in Alexandria. He's one of the characters you've just heard mentioned. He's a doctor but you don't have to worry about that. And Balthazar, he reads it and he makes copious notes in the margins. And then he sends it back to him. So basically he's read Justine just as we have and then he's corrected it. He's said, “No, you've got all this wrong and this is what happened”. And so in the end, that's what the second book is. It's Balthazar's corrections, Balthazar's marginalia. Here's the first page. This is still Darley narrating, though.
I
Landscape-tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections. The lion-dust of desert: prophets' tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake. Its huge sand-faults like watermarks from the air; green and citron giving to gunmetal, to a single plum-dark sail, moist, palpitant: sticky-winged nymph. Taposiris is dead among its tumbling columns and seamarks, vanished the harpoon Men... Mareotis under a sky of hot lilac.
summer: buff sand, hot marble sky.
autumn: swollen bruise-greys.
winter: freezing snow, cool sand.
clear sky panels, glittering with mica.
washed delta greens.
magnificent starscapes.
And spring? Ah! there is no spring in the Delta, no sense of refreshment and renewal in things. One is plunged out of winter into: wax effigy of a summer too hot to breathe. But here, at least, in Alexandria, the sea-breaths save us from the tideless weight of summer nothingness, creeping over the bar among the warships, to flutter the striped awnings of the cafés upon the Grande Corniche. I would never have...° ° ° ° °
The city, half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory. Why must I return to it night after night, writing here by the fire of carob-wood while the Aegean wind clutches at this island house, clutching and releasing it, bending back the cypresses like bows? Have I not [...]
Now, I'm not sure that those first pages are representative because the texts themselves are much more graspable than they're made to seem by the beginning of the novels. So, essentially, if you do go out and buy a copy of the Quartet, just hang on in there, get through the first fifteen pages or so and it will start to make sense. All the same, I do think that this whirling confusion of places and colours and weathers and seasons is also a really important part of the palette of the novels and it's one of the things that makes them so beautiful and such a pleasure to read.
Now, I'm going to play some more music but before I do here's a note that Lawrence [sic] has put in the front of Balthazar. It's an explanation of what he's making and I think this is probably a good moment for it.
NOTE
The characters and situations in this novel, the second of a group - a sibling, not a sequel to JUSTINE - are entirely imaginary, as is the personality of the narrator. Nor could the city be less unreal.
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.
The three first parts, however, are to be deployed spatially (hence the use of “sibling” not “sequel”) and are not linked in a serial form. They interlap, interweave, in a purely spatial relation. Time is stayed. The fourth part alone will represent time and be a true sequel.
The subject-object relation is so important to relativity that I have tried to turn the novel through both subjective and objective modes. The third part, MOUNTOLIVE, is a straight naturalistic novel in which the narrator of JUSTINE and BALTHAZAR becomes an object, i.e. a character.
This is not Proustian or Joycean method - for they illustrate Bergsonian “Duration” in my opinion, not “Space-Time”.
The central topic of the book is an investigation of modern love.
These considerations sound perhaps somewhat immodest or even pompous. But it would be worth trying an experiment to see if we cannot discover a morphological form one might appropriately call “classical” - for our time. Even if the result proved to be a “science-fiction” in the true sense.
L.D.
Ascona, 1957
And here is Burial with Untrue.
Music
[Untrue by Burial]
So that was Burial with Untrue and by the time you get to the end of the second book, Balthazar, that track will make perfect sense. I chose it for more than that but let me just read you the first page of the third book before I explain. So this is Mountolive. [clears throat] Excuse me.
As a junior of exceptional promise, he had been sent to Egypt for a year in order to improve his Arabic and found himself attached to the high commission as a sort of scribe to await his first diplomatic posting; but he was already conducting himself as a young secretary of legation, fully aware of the responsibilities of future office. Only somehow today it was rather more difficult than usual to be reserved, so exciting had the fish drive become.
He had in fact quite forgotten about his once-crisp tennis flannels and college blazer and the fact that the wash of bilge rising through the floor-boards had toe-capped his white plimsolls with a black stain. In Egypt one seemed to forget oneself continually like this. He blessed the chance letter of introduction which had brought him to the Hosnani lands, to the rambling old-fashioned house built upon a network of lakes and embankments near Alexandria. Yes.
The punt which now carried him, thrust by slow thrust across the turbid water, was turning slowly eastward to take up its position in the great semicircle of boats which was being gradually closed in upon a target-area marked out by the black reed spines of fish-pans. And as they closed in, stroke by stroke, the Egyptian night fell - the sudden reduction of all objects to bas-reliefs upon a screen of gold and violet. The land had become dense as tapestry in the lilac afterglow, quivering here and there with water mirages from the rising damps, expanding and contracting horizons, until one thought of the world as being mirrored in a soap-bubble trembling on the edge of disappearance. Voices too across the water sounded now loud, now soft and clear. His own cough fled across the lake in sudden wing-beats. Dusk, yet it was still hot, his shirt stuck [...]
That's a much more gripping beginning, no? And so in this book, Mountolive, we find out more about David Mountolive, who is the character described there. He's been a somewhat shadowy figure thus far and he comes centerstage. [It could] also, I think, have been called Pursewarden because it's also about a character called Pursewarden, who, again, we haven't known a lot about before.
Once again, in this book we go back over events that we already know about. And again we're given new explanations for things. This time, though, they're mostly religious and political explanations where before they've been sexual and... well, for want of a better word, romantic. Which brings me on to a really important question. And the reason that this podcast is going to be a little bit longer than normal. Namely, how can I possibly talk about these books now, in the summer and autumn of 2013, without talking about what's going on right now, in 2013, in Egypt. I have a bit of a dilemma here, because I don't feel at all qualified to talk about any of this. I don't think of myself as a particularly political person and I'm really not proud of the level of my engagement with the issues of the day. Added to which I can't pretend to know very much at all about what's happening and why. But I also don't think that I can pretend that nothing is happening.
Today, I did a political values test online and I discovered that, from my armchair as it were, I get a radicalism score of 91.25. Is that a percentage? I don't know. If it is, I also turn out to be 37.5% socialist and 56.25% tender, whatever that means. So these scores, I'm told, indicate that I'm a progressive. It's the political profile one might associate with a university professor, apparently. I'll quote now:
It appears that you are sceptical towards religion and have a pragmatic attitude towards humanity in general. Your attitudes towards economics appear capitalist and, combined with your social attitudes, this creates the picture of someone who would generally be described as a political centrist. To round out the picture, you appear to be - political preference aside - a devoted egalitarian with several strong opinions.
All of that may or may not be true, of course. I think it sounds like the result of a very sheltered upbringing. And one of the strong opinions at the survey clearly scented is that a two-minute-long click-box survey on the internet can't really tell me all that much about how I would think and behave in the real world. How, for example, would I respond to something like this? I'm going to read you something and all you have to know is that Zeinhom is the only morgue in Cairo.
From January 28, 2011, when journalists and activists were told that they were no bodies there, Zeinhom has been at the centre of our revolution, a dark constant casting its shadow on each of the various confrontations with our unreformed, bloodthirsty security forces. Even before this, wasn't one of the sparks of January 25 Khaled Saeed, who not only was brutally murdered and dumped in the street by police, but then abused again when medical examiners, in two separate investigations, ruled that he had died not of the gory wounds we all saw in his posthumous photo but of asphyxia from swallowing a packet of hashish? The brazen, self-serving nature of this supposedly scientific verdict tore cracks through the facade of the state; it was not enough to kill Khaled, the state had to use his death to try and distort his life, who he was. The same thing happened almost three years later, under President Mohamed Morsi, to Mohamed al-Guindy, who after disappearing from Tahrir Square reappeared four days later in a hospital with his ribs broken, bearing signs of strangulation with a cord. Guindy died from police torture, but in Zeinhom this torture became a car crash. There is no police torture, we are told, but accidents happen all the time in Egypt.
Now that the police feel free to admit that they are using live fire and automatic weapons against civilians in the streets, deaths are not accidents but suicides; the hundreds killed in Rabea, we are told, not only took their lives into their own hands standing up to the police raid but were intending to die, surely hoping the bullet would hit them. The morgue gives “scientific” justification to the official state narrative that the Brotherhood is a cult of death, that killing them is not a crime but is actually what they wanted, strengthening them, and if it was suicide as the medical examiner tells us, who can blame the police for merely facilitating?
This is from a blog called MadaMasr that one of my Facebook friends linked to recently. She's somebody who lives in Cairo and comments on the situation there. I don't understand much of what she writes, just as I didn't understand much of what was going on in Istanbul earlier this summer and don't understand much of what's been going on in Syria or, let's face it, any of the rest of the region for the last few years. And my ignorance is my fault, I accept that. I'm very comfortable where I am and I haven't tried to find out very much about why things have gone so disastrously wrong elsewhere and what if anything could be done about that. But I also think that it has to do with a curiously modern phenomenon, which is the combination of not enough information and too much information. There's no straightforward narrative. There are no goodies for us to cheer on. And that may not be a bad thing. It certainly isn't new. I realise that. Any of my contemporaries would have learnt this during the Yugoslavian conflict in the ’90s, for example - which I pick only because most of us would have discussed and debated it at school. But now information comes not just from reputable news sources - and, let's face it, one of the problems is that there often isn't news from reputable sources or that we can't trust what news there is - but from bloggers, from vloggers, from Instagramers, live streamers, tweeters, etc, etc, etc. I'm not going to say very much more about this because I'm not saying anything that any of my listeners don't already know but my point, I think, is that all of this has something to do with what Lawrence Durrell is trying to say in the Alexandria Quartet.
Now, the problem with the Quartet, in my opinion, is that at the end of the last novel we're left feeling as though we do understand. We feel as though we understand how everybody felt and why they did what they did. And I don't think that war works like that. I don't think the revolution works like that. I don't think that people work like that. Perhaps, I would say, go and read Hilary Mantel's A Place Of Greater Safety for a better description of the apparent order that comes out of the chaos of regime change. So I was left at the end of Clea the other day feeling as though there might be something almost decadent about reading this, this hymn to the vanished world written in the ’50s. And I don't know what to do about that. So I'm losing my way at the end of all of this... well, vomiting of my thoughts, I suppose is the way I would describe it... which perhaps isn't entirely a bad thing.
And maybe one of the things that the Alexandria Quartet does do well - I mean, it's a collection of wonderful characters and beautiful places - is that it is an attempt to describe the unknowableas [sic]... the unknowableness, sorry, of things without making us feel - as I do, which is why I'm in this position - that I should just curl up and stop trying to understand. I would say, go read it, make up your own minds. And follow my links to the blog I mentioned.
Here's the first page of Clea, which is the last novel of the Quartet. And then I'm going to go out with a semi ironic music choice. This is The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Gil Scott Heron. I'll leave you to make up your own minds about that. I've been Charles Adrian. This has been a slightly long Page One. Thank you very much for listening. I hope you've enjoyed yourselves.
I
The oranges were more plentiful than usual that year. They glowed in their arbours of burnished green leaf like lanterns, flickering up there among the sunny woods. It was as if they were eager to celebrate our departure from the little island - for at last the long-awaited message from Nessim had come, like a summons back to the Underworld. A message which was to draw me back inexorably to the one city which for me always hovered between illusion and reality, between the substance and the poetic images which its very name aroused in me. A memory, I told myself, which had been falsified by the desires and intuitions only as yet half-realised on paper. Alexandria, the capital of memory! All the writing which I had borrowed from the living and the dead, until I myself had become a sort of postscript to a letter which was never ended, never posted....
How long had I been away? I could hardly compute, though calendar-time gives little enough indication of the aeons which separate one self from another, one day from another; and all this time I had been living there, truly, in the Alexandria of my heart's mind. And page by page, heartbeat by heartbeat, I had been surrendering myself to the grotesque organism of which we had all once been part, victors and vanquished alike. An ancient city changing under the brush-strokes of thoughts which besieged meaning, clamouring for identity; somewhere there, on the black thorny promonteries of Africa the aromatic truth of the place lived on, the bitter unchewable herb of the past, the pith of memory. I had set out once to store, to codify, to annotate the past before it was utterly lost - that at least was a task I had set myself. I had failed in it (perhaps it was hopeless?) - for no sooner had I embalmed one aspect of it in words [...]
Music
[The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Gil Scott Heron]
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]