Justine

Justine (1957)

Lawrence Durrell

           

           

            Some writers I wouldn’t want to engage with socially. I just don’t like their books, or I find their politics repulsive, or I imagine that they were assholes, and then there are writers like Lawrence Durrell, who I would drop anything to spend an afternoon with, sitting on the balcony of some bar with dark beer and bread and cheese, shooting the shit, learning from him. He was kind of an old-fashioned sort of British world-traveller, the kind that they don’t make any more, a man with politics likely just as unbearable as Borges’ politics were but, like Borges, a writer whose writing is so good that I find myself unable to give a hoot, a man who wandered around the Mediterranean, started spontaneous and modern literary movements with Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, moving from government post to government post. Rhodes, Alexandria, Corfu, Yugoslavia…

             

          Justine is the first part of Durrell’s most famous and well-regarded work, The Alexandria Quartet (the other three books are Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea), a series of experimental modernist novels about a tormented love triangle (it’s sort of a love octopus, with a tentacle everywhere) viewed from different angles, a different angle in each book. In this book the angle is an unnamed narrator who is trapped between two women:  the simple, sweet and loyal Melissa, an impoverished dancer in a bar and the sort of woman a man should marry; and the magnetic and carnivorous Justine, a lodestone of sexuality, a cannibalistic man-eater that men would break their necks to get a glimpse of from across a crowded room. The book is achronological, it has the rhythm of a man sitting in the rubble of his life sifting through painful old memories; there isn’t any order or sense to when a memory surges up from your gut (that’s where an ugly or painful memory is, in your stomach), they just come when they come, one leading you to another. The tone is also pretty interesting, part romance novel and part travel guide, sort of like if a National Geographic met a Playboy though that isn’t entirely right.  It’s not pornographic. It’s not even racy at all, certainly not as racy as I was expecting from a man who had a deep and long-lasting friendship with Henry Miller, author of Crazy Cock. Though, as I understand it, some of his early books were banned for obscenity so maybe he just got it out of his system by the time he wrote Justine. It sort of reminds me of an old painting of a harem, like a Delacroix or something… one with tons of fine gilt detail where you can really smell the sweat, the musk and the hookah smoke, where bored dark-eyed girls sit on cushions fanning themselves and looking downward, waiting miserably and nervously for their turn.

             

          The book definitely fits in a genre that I think should be a genre but isn’t yet. I don’t know what you’d name it but it’s mostly about one thing: white Europeans in the Colonies doing ugly things to each other.  There are a million books like that… The Stranger, The Quiet American...

I’d say almost without hesitation that Justine is by far the most beautifully written book I’ve ever read. Very sensuous and emotionally rich, very luxurious and exotic. This is a book that has a smell (redolence), that has a sound (clanging weekend bazaar), I know where I am when I read this book; I’m in Alexandria. I used to live around the corner from this Ethiopian market. It was in the bottom floor of an apartment complex, and I’d go there sometimes for toilet paper or soap. It wasn’t really a convenience store, mostly what they sold were spices. Racks and racks of spices. Curries, dried peppers, tins of desiccated things I’d never seen before and were never a part of my cooking. It smelled like a wizard’s laboratory in this store, the smell was sometimes so overpowering it would wrack my nerves…it smelled like ancient secrets, and that’s what I imagine this book smells like. The prose in this book is very high quality, just the absolute finest stuff. Some prose is “workmanlike” and gets the job done (Steinbeck, say) but this is something else… this is loveliness.  I’d drag myself across the Mojave on broken legs to write a sentence like “…etiolated flowers of afternoons spent in anguish, tossing upon ugly beds, bandaged by dreams.” I'd staple my nutsack to a revolving door to write something extraordinary that Durrell could probably do without thinking in one afternoon on a Greek island on the beach with a beer and nothing else but the waves.

One thing I really loved about this book is how deep the characterization is. I don’t really have any clue what most of these characters look like, with a few exceptions, but I know exactly what they are like internally, in their souls. Durrell’s skill at forging metaphors really stands out when he’s describing someone’s essence, for example, something that really struck me was a line about the titular Justine: “She could not help but remind me of that race of terrific queens which left behind them the ammoniac smell of their incestuous loves to hover like a cloud over the Alexandrian subconscious. The giant man-eating cats like Arsinoe were her true siblings.” I don’t know if she’s tall or short or anything, but I know what she is (and goddamn what images Durrell uses) and what she is is elemental, tempestuous, amoral in the way that the ocean is amoral. The ocean calls to men like a siren, and it will kill a man as surely as anything, and has taken the lives of innumerable men, but there is no guiding force behind it. But what a way to go: death in the arms of the sea, maybe the only death worthy of manhood.

But, really, the main character of this story is the city of Alexandria. It’s where Durrell directs his most loving attention. Alexandria is an ancient, endless, eternal city like a dark dense jungle where age, rot, endless chaotic growth and decay build upon each other and the weight of history and timelessness enervates and entombs the inhabitants. History here is heavy, burdensome. In a lot of ways it reads like some made-up fantasy city from Borges or Calvino where time never passes, I mean to me a timeless city of minarets, labyrinthine rat warren ghettoes and spicy fumes on a narrow isthmus between the cold sea and a saline blood-colored lake sounds fantastical but it isn’t, Alexandria is a real place and it’s still there. Alexandria was there before any of us were, and it’ll be around after we’re all gone. I just looked up airplane tickets: a round trip is about thirteen hundred dollars at the cheapest. People spend at least that much to go to places that aren’t nearly as interesting: Hawaii, Japan, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Francisco. I think most of those places sound tedious and boring. Japan is where people go to fondle teenagers dressed up like cartoon characters, and Las Vegas is for blowing a life’s savings and pawning your old lady’s wedding ring but Alexandria, by contrast, is one of the most important cities in the history of mankind. I’m positive you could fondle a teenager or lose a lot of money in Alexandria, but it’s almost impossible to overstate how important that city has been to the development of Western Civilization, whereas it’s really easy to exaggerate the importance of Los Angeles or Dallas. Alexandria was a nexus of history for a long, long time. Celestial objects with massive gravitational fields distort space-time, forming a dip or a well around them in which smaller objects fall into and circle like around a drain. Significant cities are like that as well: they force history into orbit.

Unfortunately as pretty as this book is I’m not really sure what it’s about, what the deeper meaning is. That may be a failing on my part. It’s lyrical and metaphorical and richly executed but I don’t know to what end Durrell is working towards. Supposedly it’s an allegory for the Second World War but the novel is so internalized and solipsistic that I’m at a loss to tell you what Durrell is trying to say about it. Perhaps I have to read the other three books to find a resolution. I looked it up on good old Wikipedia and it says The Alexandria Quartet is an “exploration of relativity and the notions of continuum and subject–object relation, with modern love as the subject” but I’m not sure what that means, if it means anything at all. However, this book is pretty enough that I’m willing to accept it on its aesthetic value alone, and for that reason I would give it a hearty recommendation for anyone who is interested in scaling the magnificent heights that a true prose artist can lift you towards. Millions stampede to the Mona Lisa every year but as anyone knows it’s just a pretty picture.