from Justine

LAWRENCE DURRELL

Although Henry Miller remains part of the constellation of stars in twentieth-century literature, Lawrence Durrell, his close friend, correspondent, occasional editor, and author of the great Alexandria Quartet,seems to be on the wane. Perhaps Miller’s legend endures because we associate him with brash and raucous sexuality; Durrell, meanwhile, is kinder, gentler, and considerably more modest than old Hank. Yet the two bear strong comparison in both life and work. Both set their principal novels in the sexual humus of squalid foreign cities (Alexandria, Paris); both write in a rambling first-person voice, almost memoir style; both loved and feared women and spent their lives, in Durrell’s narrator’s words, trying to “know what it really means . . . the whole portentous scrimmage of sex itself.” Sex, here, is clearly meant to stand for life, and Durrell and Miller consciously made writing careers on the fruits of that synecdoche.

Written in the late 1950s, the Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea) is truly a tour de force. The title characters are sculpted impeccably in the contradictions of Greek myth: they are as gods in form and substance, yet have fallen into the banal tragedies of real living. Durrell’s treatment is tender and thoughtful in a way Miller’s mind would have bulldozed over. Through him we negotiate a series of fantastic infatuations and aggrandized, empty loves to find, at the end, the heart of compassion. Where Miller teaches the irreducible sanctity of the moment, Durrell recites the sermon of long process, of brushing aside romantic delusions and finally embracing what is hard won but true.

The scene that follows is the narrator’s first encounter, in the bedroom of his reliable girlfriend, with the mysterious Justine, the femme fatale who, as in many novels if not in life, sets all the relationships in motion. Like Genet, Durrell chronicles the seductive power of the intractable and fierce, of those beyond or incapable of love, hardened, gemlike, in their beauty and resolve. It is hard not to love Justine, but you do so only with regret.

Across all this, as across the image of someone dearly loved, held in the magnification of a gigantic tear moved the brown harsh body of Justine naked. It would have been blind of me not to notice how deeply her resolution was mixed with sadness. We lay eye to eye for a long time, our bodies touching, hardly communicating more than the animal lassitude of the vanishing afternoon. I could not help thinking then as I held her lightly in the crook of an arm how little we own our bodies . . .

But she had closed her eyes—so soft and lustrous now, as if polished by the silence which lay so densely all around us . . . We turned to each other, closing like the two leaves of a door upon the past, shutting out everything, and I felt her happy spontaneous kisses begin to compose the darkness around us like successive washes of a colour. When we had made love and lay once more awake she said: “I am always so bad the first time, why is it?” . . .

. . . I held her, tasting the warmth and sweetness of her body, salt from the sea–her earlobes tasted of salt. . . .

It was as if the whole city had crashed about my ears . . . I felt . . . in the words of the dying Amr: “as if heaven lay close upon the earth and I between them both, breathing through the eye of a needle.”