Finding "The Alexandria Quartet" -- Peter Leyland

                                  Finding “The Alexandria Quartet"

One thing leads to another as they say. Today I was thinking about how we choose our reading books and as is often the case with me a story came to mind, so here goes. When my wife and I used to visit her aunt Joan in the lovely town of Sherborne in Dorset I was always intrigued by the Faber editions of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet residing in a corner of one of the many bookshelves in her large four-bedroom house. I always meant to ask if I could borrow them, but I never got round to it. However, after her death - she had had a long innings as the expression goes - and her funeral at Sherborne Abbey in October 2020, attended by just 30 mourners, the family was asked if they wanted anything from her house? Most people wanted one of the pictures that she had hanging on the walls, but I thought about it and decided it would be a fitting tribute if I asked for the set of Durrell’s books that I had long coveted.

 

For I enjoyed the company of my wife’s aunt. When she came to our wedding with her husband, along with my daughter, my best friend, and sundry other family members, I was really pleased that I had been welcomed into this family and made to feel as though I belonged. Through the years before her death, about twenty-five in all, my wife and I would visit Joan every six months and enjoy our time with her and she with us, for she had since become a widow. After our visits, before leaving, we would always sign The Visitors’ Book, which she kept on a chest of drawers in the bedroom where we slept. This was full of the names of the many friends that she and her husband had had, and the places where they lived. Egypt, the setting for Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, was one of them.

 

I got used to going to Sherborne to see Joan and I would visit the second-hand bookshop near where she lived which is run by a woman called Claire who sits behind a computer screen in the dimly lit entrance, surrounded by masses of books in every stage of preparation for their future sale. I would visit Claire’s shop to search out books for the novel courses that I taught and once, when I was looking for Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, Claire went along the corridor to one of the dusty rooms in the far reaches of her store, and came back with the whole trilogy, a wonderful read by the way, if you never have.

 

But I’m getting a little side-tracked here for, just like those post-modern novelists I teach, inspired by Tristram Shandy, I make a virtue of never getting to the point. Anyway, I was telling you all about Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Since Joan’s funeral the four novels, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea had sat on the shelf in our living room waiting to be read, not gathering dust exactly, more the weight of expectation. Another Durrell book from Joan’s house, Bitter Lemons, was added by my wife’s cousin Jo, and the growing pile began to reproach me. Would I ever get round to reading them, I wondered? 

People have mixed feelings about Twitter, I know. Some think it is a dreadful site to get hooked into and when I wrote a paper for a presentation in Norway I thought so too. Laura, my co-presenter, however, was a Twitter user and she posted selected slides from my presentation on the conference website. Seeing myself in lights encouraged me to use it and soon I began a massive sharing of books and ideas for writing. Last September I discovered that someone on Twitter was proposing an online group to follow a reading of the Alexandria Quartet, beginning on January 1st, and so I joined them.

We started with Justine and, reading assiduously the required 30 pages a day, I kept pace with the group, all sharing our thoughts on the novel by using the hashtag system. You indicate to others that you are posting comments on a particular book and they 'follow' you. Justine is not an easy book, but the sharing helps you to keep going over the difficult parts and Durrell uses the most beautiful language in his descriptions which is its own reading reward. Here in Part III of Justine, he describes a dust storm:

 

That second spring the khamseen was worse than I have ever known before or since. Before sunrise the skies of the desert turned as brown as buckram, and then slowly darkened, swelling like a bruise and at last releasing the outlines of cloud, giant octaves of ochre which massed up from the Delta like the drift of ashes under a volcano.

 

The art of friendship can be to have a shared interest in something.  As I read further in Justine, I learned that people in the Twitter group were from different parts of the world and as my reading of all the books progressed, I made a number of new online friends. These are necessarily of a short-term nature as it is unlikely that you will ever contact them again once the reason for the connection is over. It is a bit like having a pen friend as someone suggested to me, an idea that resonated as I recalled the pen friends that I had corresponded with when I was younger.

 

Eventually I reached Mountolive, the third book in the series. I had been intrigued by this book after I had read in Julian Barnes’s Metroland of how his character, Christopher, meets a girl in Paris. Christopher is in the café at The Biblioteque National and he notices Mountolive lying on a wicker chair at a nearby table. When its owner, Annick, returns they begin a conversation which leads to a further meeting, which leads to a visit to a film which leads to a rendezvous at his flat which leads to a relationship which leads to a break-up which leads to…Well, you know the story. Worth reading by the way, if like me you are a fan of coming-of-age novels.

 

But, to return to Durrell’s book itself, I realised as I read it why Julian Barnes had made Mountolive such a central motif in his first novel. In Mountolive we have the story of the poet Pursewarden’s intense relationship with Melissa. This is a stunning physical and emotional exchange which left me wide eyed and breathless, and which I found was much more real than D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, read secretly by the way at the age of 16. I could not stop reading until I reached the end of Durrell’s account of Pursewarden and Melissa's passionate night together.

 

However, passion aside, I am now at the end of the 1,000+ pages of the Alexandria Quartet, finishing with the final book, Clea, which is mainly the story of Darley, the book's  narrator, and of his uneven affair with the artist, Clea. They occasionally consummate their relationship underwater, chthonic you know, but the affair is interrupted when Clea is accidentally wounded by a harpoon fired by Balthazar. This pins her artist's hand to the submerged hull of a wooden boat upon which her friends are resting. Intrigued? You will have to read the book yourselves to find out more...

 

 

As my first reading choice of this year The Alexandria Quartet has been immensely stimulating: I have been to different places, the descriptions of Alexandria are at times breath-taking; I have made some interesting new friends; I have experienced an extended portrayal of a number of flawed relationships between men and women, something that always intrigues me as a reader and writer, and as a person. I have communicated through a book with my wife’s aunt, Joan, whom I liked, and who has now gone from us to somewhere beyond the grave. As I turn the final pages of Clea, this panegyric to her memory reaches its end.

                                                                                                                Peter Leyland 16/02/22

The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60) Lawrence Durrell

Metroland (1980) Julian Barnes

The Country Girls (1960) Edna O'Brien

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) Laurence Sterne

Norwegian Wood, the language of poetry and song (2018) Peter Leyland