Remembering
Lawrence Durrell, Predictor of our Postmodern World
Not Joyce, not Kafka, not Proust, not Pasternak, not
Garcia Marquez, not Bellow. The most important 20th-century novelist for a
21st-century reader could well be Lawrence Durrell. This year celebrates the
centenary of his birth. Next to nothing is taking place to celebrate it. But
Durrell, whose best work came in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was the first
to explore the poetry and puzzles of life in an era of globalization (a clunky
term Durrell would have improved on), hyphenated identities, perpetual
movement. “I think the world is coming together very rapidly,” he said in an
interview in 1983, “so that within the next fifty years one world of some sort
is going to be created. What sort of world will it be? It’s worth trying to see
if I can’t find the first universal novel. I shall probably make a mess of
it—but we shall see.”
The city at the
center of his masterpiece, The
Alexandria Quartet, is the prototype of the global village, of the
smudged meta-city we increasingly inhabit. Published between 1957 and 1960, the Quartet is a series of
interlinked novels set in Alexandria preceding and during World War II, but
it’s uncanny how its political disorder anticipates our own. The Alexandria of
the Quartet is run with an
ever-weaker hand by Western powers losing their will to rule, and is ever-more
dominated by ambitious but corrupt emerging nations, influenced by deracinated
tycoon financiers, stirred on the streets by Islamic “nightmare-mystics,
shooting out the thunderbolts of hypnotic personal-ity.” The state of Israel,
off-stage but central to the plot, divides loyalties to the point of death and
tragedy. The Quartet is an exceptional
political thriller: imagine John Grisham rewritten by Joyce.
“Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five
fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbor bar,” writes
Durrell. “Turks with Jews, Arabs and Copts and Syrians with Armenians and
Italians and Greeks. The shudders of monetary transactions ripple through them
like wind in a wheat-field ... this anarchy of flesh and fever, money-love and
mysticism. Where on earth will you find such a mixture!”
The prophetic Quartet is a way to look
at something fundamental: love and identity in a world that is, on the one
hand, unified to an unrivaled degree (all those races, creeds, and languages
stuffed together in one space), but as a consequence utterly fractured: how can
you have a single truth when, to quote the Quartet, “there are as
many realities as you care to imagine”? Durrell’s way to find a form that
reflects this world is what he called his “stereoscopic” approach: instead of a
linear narrative, the same story is revisited again and again through different
characters, utterly changed every time from their perspectives, which are
themselves broken up in the prism of their multiple personalities. “A series of
novels with sliding panels, like some medieval palimpsest where different sorts
of truth are thrown down one upon the other, the one oblit-erating or perhaps
supplementing the other,” says a character in the novel, describing the work
itself. But this is no postmodern pastiche. Durrell’s characters suffer as they
try to negotiate their multiverse, twisting themselves painfully to reconcile
the impossible and dying in the contortions. It’s a crisis Durrell went through
himself, growing up a third-generation Anglo-Irish colonial in India.
“I have an Indian heart and an English skin,”
he said. “I realized this very late, when I was twenty-one, twenty-two. It
created a sort of psychological crisis. I nearly had a nervous breakdown. I
realized suddenly that I was not English really, I was not European. There was
something going on underneath and I realized that it was the effect of India on
my thinking.”
Though “a patriot of the English language,” he was
turned off by the “long toothache of English life” and moved constantly, drawn
toward the Mediterranean: “I’m a professional refugee. Even here I could pack
essential things in twenty minutes and leave. I am traumatized by travel.”
Nor did England think very highly of him. While at
first a commercial hit, The
Alexandria Quartetwas damned for being “experimental”: that most caustic
term in Anglo-Saxon criticism. Until the Quartet was republished this year, I
struggled to find a copy in London. Durrell would often suffer the ignominy of
being mistaken for his better-known brother, Gerald Durrell, who wrote
bestsellers about animals. Even the interview quoted from earlier in this
article was not given to some august Anglo-Saxon journal but was first
published, in Russian, in Syntaksis: a Cold War–era Russian refugee
magazine based in Paris; the interview appeared in English three years ago in
Zeitzug, an online literary magazine created by an Austrian poet living in
Prague. It is always the “cross-patriates,” the hyphenated, who are drawn to
Durrell.
In June, I visited a lecture at the British Library to
commemorate Durrell, part of the whimper of events around the centenary. I came
in a day early to book a seat: “No need, it’ll be pretty empty,” says the
Afro-Irish girl at the ticket desk. Of the sad sprinkle of attendees I am only
one of two people under 60. “Durrell has influenced every writer I know,” says
the speaker, “but they would never admit it.”
Leaving the lecture I walk past St. Pancras
International, where trains rush between Paris and London, the border between
the two becoming blurred. I pick up a newspaper full of praise for the new
German national football team, a team full of players with names like -Mario
Gómez and Mesut Özil, subverting the idea of the national entirely. I pass
through once-dull Clerkenwell, the twitter of half-a-dozen languages around me:
Arab and Polish, Urdu, and Turkish. That combination of smells: wet, warm
English rain and spices from India and Lebanon. Durrell would have been at ease
in this new London, a city that has completely lost its moorings: with its
wines, halal butchers, Russian oligarchs, identity crises, religious
terrorists.
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