The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [31]
A few such sketches comprise the whole portrait of the author of Moeurs; it seems a meagre and disappointing reward for so much painstaking and loving observation; nor can I trace one word about their separation after this brief and fruitless marriage But it was interesting to see from his book how he had made the same judgements upon her character as we were later to make, Nessim and I. The compliance she extorted from us all was the astonishing thing about her. It was as if men knew at once that they were in the presence of someone who could not be judged according to the standards they had hitherto employed in thinking about women. Clea once said of her (and her judgements were seldom if ever charitable): ‘The true whore is man’s real darling —
like Justine; she alone has the capacity to wound men. But of course our friend is only a shallow twentieth-century reproduction of the great hetairae of the past, the type to which she belongs without knowing it, Lais, Charis and the rest…. Justine’s role
has been taken from her and on her shoulders society has placed the burden of guilt to add to her troubles. It is a pity. For she is truly Alexandrian.’
For Clea too the little book of Arnauti upon Justine seemed shallow and infected by the desire to explain everything. ‘It is our disease’ she said ‘to want to contain everything within the frame of reference of a psychology or a philosophy. After all Justine can-not be justified or excused. She simply and magnificently is; we have to put up with her, like original sin. But to call her a nympho-maniac or to try and Freudianise her, my dear, takes away all her mythical substance — the only thing she really is. Like all amoral people she verges on the Goddess. If our world were a world there would be temples to accommodate her where she would find the peace she was seeking. Temples where one could outgrow the sort of inheritance she has: not these damn monasteries full of pimply little Catholic youths who have made a bicycle saddle of their sexual organs.’
She was thinking of the chapters which Arnauti has entitled Th e Check, and in which he thinks he has found the clue to Justine’s instability of heart. They may be, as Clea thinks, shallow, but since everything is susceptible of more than one explanation they are worth consideration. I myself do not feel that they explain Justine, but to a degree they do illuminate her actions — those im-mense journeys they undertook together across the length and breadth of Europe. ‘In the very heart of passion’ he writes, adding in parentheses ‘(passion which to her seemed the most facile of gifts) there was a check — some great impediment of feeling which I became aware of only after many months. It rose up between us like a shadow and I recognized, or thought I did, the true enemy of the happiness which we longed to share and from which we felt ourselves somehow excluded. What was it?
‘She told me one night as we lay in that ugly great bed in a rented room — a gaunt rectangular room of a vaguely French-Levantine shape and flavour: a stucco ceiling covered with de-composing cherubs and posies of vine-leaves. She told me and left me raging with a jealousy I struggled to hide — but a jealousy of an entirely novel sort. Its object was a man who though still alive, no longer existed. It is perhaps what the Freudians would call a screen-memory of incidents in her earliest youth. She had (and
there was no mistaking the force of this confession for it was ac-companied by floods of tears, and I have never seen her weep like that before or since) — she had been raped by one of her relations. One cannot help smiling at the commonplaceness of the thought. It was impossible to judge at what age. Nevertheless