The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [30]
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These later extracts I have taken from the section of the diary which is called Posthumous Life and is an attempt the author makes to sum up and evaluate these episodes. Pombal finds much of this banal and even dull; but who, knowing Justine, could fail to be moved by it? Nor can it be said that the author’s intentions are not full of interest. He maintains for example that real people can only exist in the imagination of an artist strong enough to contain them and give them form. ‘Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work. Would that I could do this service of love for poor Justine.’ (I mean, of course,
‘Claud ia’.) ‘I dream of a book powerful enough to contain the elements of her — but it is not the sort of book to which we are accustomed these days. For example, on the first page a synopsis of the plot in a few lines. Thus we might dispense with the nar-rative articulation. What follows would be drama freed from the burden of form. I would set my own book free to dream. ’
But of course one cannot escape so easily from the pattern which he regards as imposed but which in fact grows up organically within the work and appropriates it. What is missing in his work —
but this is a criticism of all works which do not reach the front rank — is a sense of play. He bears down so hard upon his subject-matter ; so hard that it infects his style with some of the unbalanced ferocity of Claudia herself. Then, too, everything which is a fund of emotion becomes of equal importance to him: a sign uttered by Claudia among the oleanders of Nouzha, the fireplace where she burnt the manuscript of his novel about her (‘For days she looked at me as if she were trying to read my book in me’), the little room in the Rue Lepsius…. He says of his characters: ‘All bound by time in a dimension which is not reality as we would wish it to be —
but is created by the needs of the work. For all drama creates bondage, and the actor is only significant to the degree that he is bound.’
But setting these reservations aside, how graceful and accurate a portrait of Alexandria he manages to convey; Alexandria and its women. There are sketches here of Leonie, Gaby, Delphine —
the pale rose-coloured one, the gold, the bitumen. Some one can identify quite easily from his pages. Clea, who still lives in that high studio, a swallow’s nest made of cobwebs and old cloth — he has her unmistakably. But for the most part these Alexandrian
girls are distinguished from women in other places only by a terrifying honesty and world-weariness. He is enough of a writer to have isolated these true qualities in the city of the Soma. One could not expect more from an intruder of gifts who almost by mistake pierced the hard banausic shell of Alexandria and dis-covered himself. As for Justine herself, there are few if indeed any references to Arnauti in the heavily armoured pages of her diary. Here and there I have traced the letter A, but usually in passages abounding with the purest introspection. Here is one where the identification might seem plaus ible:
‘What first attracted me in A was his room. There always seemed to me some sort of ferment going on there behind the heavy shut-ters. Books lay everywhere with their jackets turned inside out or covered in white drawing-paper — as if to hide their titles. A hu ge litter of newspapers with holes in them, as if a horde of mice had been feasting in them