The City Of Memories: Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria
The city of memories: Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria
If one of the novels in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet were submitted to a publisher today, it probably wouldn’t make it past the receptionist. A great, sprawling meditation on the tangled loves and confusing lives of a group of wealthy, privileged eccentrics living in 1930s Alexandria, the two I’ve read (Balthazar and Justine) break just about every rule in the creative writing book. The plot, as much as there is one, meanders aimlessly, all the characters speak in an identical voice that exactly mirrors that of the narrator, the prose is laden with archaic terms and classical allusions, and the mood of relentless intensity never lets up. Yet the novels are captivating in a way other, better-written books are not, because even though they present us with one writer’s idiosyncratic version of reality, that reality is presented with utter conviction and sincerity. Durrell himself was fully aware of what he was doing, as the note at the beginning of Balthazar reveals. In it, he explains that ‘modern literature offers 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. These four novels follow this pattern.’ In the postmodern age, such grandiose ambition might seem incredible, but Durrell was not being an egomaniac – he was simply following the themes of early 20th century modernism, in all its forms, when many still believed that art and literature could change the world. He acknowledges himself the outdatedness of his ambition, even as early as the 1950s (Balthazar was published in 1957): ‘These considerations sound perhaps somewhat immodest or even pompous. But it would be worth trying an experiment’ I have always found that the greatest artists are the ones who succeed in drawing you absolutely into their world, who weave such a compelling spell with words or music or images that even the flaws in the work become an essential part of it. Other great artists can present you with a perfectly achieved idea or object, to be consumed in the exact moment it is seen in and executed with the flawless precision that comes from years of work. Paul Klee, Philip Larkin and Stevie Wonder are examples of this kind of artist, and they and their kind are essential and great. But there is an especial wonder in being drawn into a fully realised artistic world, and it take a very different kind of artist to do that – the kind that writes a four-volume novel about one city and a few of its inhabitants. Evoking place is a key obsession for many novelists, and Durrell succeeds magnificently. Alexandria – a long-disappeared Alexandria – seems to breath from the page as he lovingly describes the moods of its harbour waters, the smell of the streets, the faces of diplomats, policemen, Bedouin and barbers, the wind swelling the curtains of the narrator’s tiny room, the sweep of coast and silent deserts outside the city walls. The characters live vividly, even though they all speak in the narrator’s voice – in fact that is part of the spell, as the quartet is telling the story of one man’s experience of a place and time. Wordy, humourless and intense, the characters should be insufferable, but Durrell’s longing eye lights on a hundred and one idiosyncracies and tiny mysteries that makes them all live and makes you care what will become of them. I say ‘longing’ because though the central theme of the quartet may seem to be the course of a love affair, in fact it is about memory and the almost painful longing that writers have to preserve long-distant times and feelings in prose that will bring it all back to life, rather than condemning it to a dry death on the page. Many times throughout the books the narrator makes reference to the continual struggle of the artist to catch a place and a time, and the act of love required to hold that form permanently. It’s love that inspires this kind of writing, not just romantic love, but love of existence. The unequal city with its countless tales of poverty, misfortune and unhappiness is presented with a loving eye that doesn’t want any part of it to be forgotten. It’s this loving capture of a personal version of reality which brings the work of Henry Miller to mind. Durrell greatly admired Miller, but though they shared the same all-encompassing eye Miller’s approach was much more rough-and-ready, not just in his sexual explicitness, but in his harsher assessments of the people around him. However, in Tropic of Capricorn, he evokes New York in the early 1920s with the same vividness that Durrell does Alexandria, taking the same joy in every beautiful and hideous aspect of the city. This is the great value of fiction – when written by a person consumed with longing for a place and time, it gives us a kind of completeness of vision that could never be provided by a straight-up factual account. We read non-fiction to find ways to change the wrongness of the world, we read fiction to balance that quest and find a fully realised version of reality. Much of this is a matter of taste – plenty would find Durrell’s intensity impossible to read, and there’s no denying that the novels have pretentious passages. The focus on the lives of the rich and idle, and their various hangers-on, is not exactly all-encompassing, even though just about every part of Alexandrian society features in some way. But if Durrell had ever adapted any of his content to suit a greater number of readers, or provide a more fully-rounded version of the story, the spell would immediately have been broken, because the sincerity would be gone. For any who do start the novels and find the first few pages heavy going, my advice would be to give it time to work its magic. As a postscript, I generally am not very interested in books about fading aristocracy – ‘Big House’ novels leave me cold – but between this quartet and the wonderful, little-known novel Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali I have developed a compulsive fascination with the former aristocracy of Egypt: the French-speaking Coptic community. Perhaps the heterogenuity of the world they lived in, as opposed to that of the aristocracy of England and Ireland, has something to do with it.
More Posts from Slenderfire-blog and Others
16 year old Pauline Blackburn is queuing for tickets to see The Beatles at The Majestic Ballroom in Birkenhead, England | 17 April 1963
With The Chants (in all, comprised of Joe Ankrah, Eddie Ankrah, Edmund Amoo, Nat Smeda, and Alan Harding) and Little Richard, backstage at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton on October 12, 1962. Photos by Les Chadwick.
“[Joe Ankrah noted] ‘It was bad enough that the modern moods [racism] never gave a black group a chance, but if not for Paul and his friends, we would have never stayed together… In fact, I think that meeting the Beatles changed the direction of my life.’ Ankrah also makes it clear that, in a sea of intolerance, Paul and the Beatles stood out, and stood up for him and his bandmates. ‘They were very cool guys, and meeting them gave us a look at real opportunity.’ […] [T]he Beatles, surrounded by postwar racial and religious bigotry, went against the grain and gave a black group a break, even was they were pursuing their own dream. […] ‘Could I have imagined a future like that? Who could? But, looking back, I knew they had something special, and a level of compassion that was truly unusual for a band on the move.’ - Joe Ankrah [of The Chants], Beatles friend whose band was pushed through racial barriers by the boys” - When They Were Boys by Larry Kane “They went ‘apeshit’ when we started to sing. I can still see George and John racing up to the stage with their mouths stuffed with hot dogs or whatever. The invitation to make our Cavern debut was given as soon as we finished ‘A Thousand Stars’ for them. They insisted we perform that very night. Everything happened completely spontaneously from that point. The Beatles themselves offered to back us when we told them we’d never worked with a band before. We then rehearsed four songs with them and then we ran home to tell all and sundry that we had ‘made it’!” When Brian Epstein arrived at the Cavern that night he refused to allow the Beatles to back us, but they collectively persuaded him to change his mind – and when he heard us he invited us to appear on many subsequent appearances with them.” - Eddie Amoo, Mersey Beat via TriumphPC “When the Beatles became big they were great about us. They went round telling everyone we were great, and when they were on Juke Box Jury, they played our record ‘I Could Write A Book’ and the Beatles raved about it and voted us a hit!” - Alan Harding, Record Mirror, June 25, 1966
Beatsploitation
Here's my unreasonably long Goodreads review of Beatsploitation, a recent Irish novel - unreasonably long in that I didn't even like it all that much. But there was interesting stuff there.
It's good to read a novel about contemporary Ireland as it actually is, and it's a shame that that's still relatively rare. Beatsploitation is the story of Rob, a young secondary school teacher in Balbriggan and member of struggling band The Terrors, and his Angolan immigrant student, John/Kembo (the boy uses an English name alongside his given name in the belief that it'll ease his transition into Irish society).
Like something that looks very like something else.
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Builders of the future
‘Behind every great fortune is a great crime’. The old saying, traditionally attributed to Balzac, is as striking today as ever. In fact, in today’s atmosphere, it rings even more true. We may admire the wealthy, the powerful, the self-made, but deep down we can’t help but believe that a millionaire must be, if not quite a criminal, than at least criminally exploitative. It’s this assumption that fires the script of The Social Network, a movie about the events that led to the founding of Facebook and the gazillion-dollar lawsuits that followed. Mark Zuckerberg, the driving force behind the site, is the world’s youngest billionaire, and it is The Social Network‘s aim to uncover the crime(s) that led to those billions.
Based on the book The Accidental Billionaires, the movie portrays Zuckerberg as a Harvard-attending socially inept weirdo whose immense sense of entitlement causes him to react furiously to a girl’s rejection. After calling her a ‘bitch’ on his blog, he creates (with the help of his geeky roommates) a site called FaceMash that calls up random pairs of photos of female Harvard students with a ‘hot or not?’ button underneath. The site is an instant hit, and Zuckerberg is courted by uber-WASP twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss to help them build a Harvard dating site. Zuckerberg agrees, but after stringing them along for a few weeks, creates a more sophisticated version of the idea – the Harvard-based prototype for Facebook. The twins are furious and make the (frankly rather dubious) claim that he ‘stole their idea’. Meanwhile The Facebook (as it’s originally called) takes off like wildfire. Zuckerberg refuses to let co-founder Eduardo Saverin bring in advertising for the site, and on the encouragement of Napster founder Sean Parker, moves the operation to California. He freezes Eduardo out of the business altogether, leading to the second lawsuit that frames the story.
The plot is pacily executed, with the Winklevoss and Saverin trials against Zuckerberg used as a framing device. As the characters remember events the action jumps back in time and the story unfolds. There’s a lot of the kind of ‘lightbulb’ moments so beloved of film-makers trying to evoke a creative process, complete with shots of Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg dashing across Harvard towards the nearest computer to encode his latest revelation. Some of these revelations seem simplistic, but Zuckerberg’s assertion that Facebook is a viable idea because ‘anyone can look at pictures of hot girls on the internet – what they want is to look at pictures of people they know’ is bang on the money and exactly the reason Facebook took off in the way it did. What doesn’t ring true is the script’s constant assertions that Zuckerberg’s primary motivation in setting up the site was to impress girls and increase his social standing in Harvard, with its rigid hierarchies and elite clubs. The real Zuckerberg hasn’t said much about the film, but he did comment recently that he particularly disagreed with the script’s interpretation of his motives. As he put it: “They [the film's creators] just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things”.
I believe that that is the film’s key weakness. Plenty of people are motivated by emotional damage, but the current idea seems to be that any great acheivement must be underpinned by some terrible lack within the achiever. It’s almost as though the modern world is suspicious of anyone who achieves ‘too’ much, who uses their gifts to their absolute limit and attempts to be the best they can be. Single-mindedness is seen to be the same as destructive obsession, pride in doing well at something is seen as being interchangeable with grasping ambition. After efforts are made to understand those who do things for the wrong reasons, a dangerous assumption seems to be rising in storytelling that implies that no-one ever does anything just for the sake of it. This ties in well with an era in which university courses are rated only on their ‘practicality’, and hobbies are something to enhance a CV with. If you’re not emotionally damaged, you’re nakedly seeking profit; either way, high achievement is suspect.
I don’t know if Mark Zuckerberg is a nice person or not; certainly you don’t get to his position without a tough hide and a willingness to make enemies. What he undoubtedly is is a programming genius and a hard worker. Is he emotionally damaged? He could be, who knows? Whether he is or not, it’s not the reason he invented (or co-invented, depending on who you talk to) Facebook. His statement that he built it because he ‘likes building things’ is the simplest, and therefore most plausible explanation. All over the world, people are creating, inventing, building, designing and investigating all manner of things simply because they are interested in them. People are working day and night, going without food and sleep, not because they are damaged, but because they passionately care about what they do and want to do to the best of their ability.
Most of us are average in our skills and our abilities, and undoubtedly that leads to an easier, more balanced life. But we shouldn’t pathologise geniuses and grafters; they are the ones who take the ‘giant leaps’ that help us all walk faster. Facebook has its good and bad sides, but it can’t be denied that it has changed the world. Even if Zuckerberg is as unpleasant and odd as The Social Network suggests, that’s not relevant to his role as one of its creators.
White Feathers
My Amazon review for White Feathers, a super new WWI-set novel dealing with (among other things) the practice of shaming non-combatant men into joining up by encouraging the women in their lives to present them with a white feather, symbolising their supposed cowardice. I really enjoyed this novel - as I say in the review, it's that rare beast, a 'literary page-turner'.
It can be hard for historical novels to strike the balance between inhabiting the period in which they're written and fully engaging a broad range of modern readers. White Feathers pulls this off with a vibrancy and a lightness of touch that are all the more striking when you realise that this is a debut novel.
New fic: Under his carpet
Under his carpet: Linda Eastman McCartney reflects on the ups and downs her marriage to Paul in a series of snapshots between 1968 and 1990. Chapter 1 of 5 posted.
Plinda fans/Paul superfans dni (JOKING! No sugarcoating, but not a hatchet job on either. Most of it is based on fact, but plenty is invented - speculative fiction an' all that.)
While not shying away from the darker sides of the marriage, this story is primarily intended as a character study about flawed individuals, none of whom are villains. It also explores the tension between visually appearing liberated, as many Boomer women did, and the reality of their domestic lives. A tension which is still relevant today.
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Some writing and Beatlemania. The phrase 'slender fire' is a translation of a line in Fragment 31, the remains of a poem by the ancient Greek poet Sappho
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