Tag Archives: Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell & The Doll People

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Some of us like dolls, some of us do not.  My mother loved dolls.  We had Suzy Smart (she came with her own desk and blackboard), and Tammy and Pepper, my favorites, who seemed to be just about my own age, so I could  imagine stories about them, and act them out with the dolls. Tammy had her own soda fountain in her cardboard Tammy house!  Pepper had a plastic treehouse!

Tammy and Pepper

Of course we had Barbie, but Barbie never had adventures, because we didn’t have the faintest idea who this adult doll was. She didn’t have a soda fountain in her cardboard Dream House; she had a vanity table (that says it all). We preferred Barbie’s freckled best friend, Midge, Barbie’s sister, Skipper, and Skipper’s best friend, Scooter. Again, it was not much fun to play with any of them. It defied our imagination.

Barbie’s Little Theater drove a friend of mine mad.  My crazy-funny best friend laughingly lynched Skipper from the proscenium arch,  which was shocking at the time and, in retrospect, disturbing. But it never happened again. That was the end of Barbies for all of us. 

Lawrence Durrell seems to have been as disturbed by dolls as my friend was.  When I was writing about Lawrence Durrell’s Monsieur, the first novel in The Avignon Quintet,  I forgot to mention the doll scene. It is violent and disturbing.

One of the main characters in Monsieur, Rob Sutcliffe, a sardonic novelist, is obsessed with a box his wife Pia takes with her everywhere, even when they travel.  Rob has promised Pia not to look in the box, but one day he sneaks back early, hoping to open the lid and find the secret. In the hotel room he  finds Pia happily having a tea party with dozens of dolls in international costumes.

For some reason, the dolls drive him insane.  He screams, he pulls off their limbs, he throws them in the fire.  Poor Pia!  Why didn’t she protect her dolls?  And so how can we be surprised that this sad soul  runs away with a “negress” named Trash.  Pia had issues, and so did violent Rob. 

P.S.   When I was middle-aged, a well-traveled relative gave me an “international”  doll who wore a Japanese kimono and carried an umbrella. Not knowing what else to do with it, I stuck the doll on a shelf in the closet.  Every time I reach up to that high shelf, the doll falls on my head.   

Lawrence Durrell’s “The Avignon Quintet”

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No one reads Lawrence Durrell anymore. 

And yet his sultry postmodern masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet, is still read by angel-headed hipsters.  Set in Alexandria, Egypt,  these four novels, written in a lush, lyrical style, describe life in the late 1930s and early 1940s in Alexandria through the eyes of an English writer, Darley.

Durrell’s The Avignon Quintet, a later, darker series of novels, is completely unlike The Alexandria Quartet.  The first volume,  Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness, won the James Tait Black award in 1974, but even the Durrell fan may wonder why. The novel seems dated, the style is awkward, and though there are many comic scenes, it is wildly incoherent and pretentious, veering from dreamy descriptions of Avignon to repulsive meditations on death, suicide, and gnosticism, a religious philosophy of the 2nd century A.D. that those of us who read about it in The Alexandria Quartet hoped never to hear about again.

 The novel Monsieur begins with a violent death. The narrator (or apparent narrator: we’re in postmodern territory) is Bruce, a doctor who returns to Avignon when he learns of his best friend Piers’ death. Bruce is a nice chap: he organizes the funeral. He and Piers were not only close, they were in an incestuous ménage à trois with Bruce’s mad wife, Piers’ sister.

Bruce believed that Piers committed suicide, until during the funeral he learns that the corpse is headless.   Bruce and Toby, a shaggy history professor, believe that the  cause of death was rooted in gnosticism, a religious philosophy of the 2nd century A.D.  PIers joined a gnostic cult after attending a lecture in Alexandria, then eating mummia (bits of mummies) and hallucinating about snakes.

Anyway, headless corpses, snakes, incest. And then there’s Rob Sutcliffe, a character who wrote a satiric novel about the ménage à trois, who is also haunted by sex and death.  He was obsessed with his wife, Pia, Bruce’s sister, who left him to have a lesbian relationship with a Negress named,,, Trash.  Eventually, he commits suicide.

That said, this novel is not only incoherent but is actually disgusting.

I do love Durrell and recommend his other books, espeically The Complete Antrobus, a Wodehouse-ian collection of satiric stories about a diplomat.

Lawrence Durrell’s Discrete Voices:  “The Alexandria Quartet” & “White Eagles over Serbia”

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It is hot, it is muggy, it is dusty, and if it is not quite Alexandria, the smouldering summer in the Midwest post-Climate Change prepares you for Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quarter.  This neglected 20th century masterpiece is told in four novels, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea, each named for a titular character.

Durrell was a brilliant poet, a translator of Cavafy, a humor writer, and a novelist.  His mesmeric style in The Alexandria Quartet is lush and poetic.  He intended the quartet to be read as one novel, though it can also be spaced over a long period of time. For a satisfying Durrell reading experience, head for that cafe with whirling fans on the ceiling and order an espresso.  No, air conditioning would be cheating.

Durrell mines his experience in Alexandria for the colorful characters, the derealization in the shimmering heat, and the intricate politics and conspiracies. The narrator, Darley, a novelist, is Durrell’s alter ego: he has “escaped” Alexandria and is living on an island, where he is writing about Alexandria. In the first volume,  Justine, Darley describes his love affair with Justine, a siren with a tragic past who sleeps with everybody. The other titular characters in the quartet are Balthazar, a doctor and a mystic, Mountolive, a diplomat who becomes Ambassador of Egypt, and Clea, an artist who is a shrewd observer of humanity.

If you don’t like luxuriant prose, you might want to try Durrell’s White Eagles over Serbia, a taut thriller set in the Balkans. Metuan, a spy, burned-out after an assignment in Malay,  is determined to retire and spend his leisure going fishing.  But Dombey, his boss,  entices him to accept the assignment: he can go fishing in the mountains of Serbia, where he is needed to investigate the murder of the former agent. Metuan, who knows the Serbian languages, will impersonate a peasant. And he takes his fishing rod.

Beautiful, spare writing and a good spy novel. It reminded me slightly of the actor Anthony Quayle’s Eight Hours from England, a brilliant novel set in the Balkans during World War II.

N.B. Peter Stothard, former editor of the TLS, is the author of a fascinating book called Alexandria. He visited the city, looking for traces of the past, but no Cleopatra, and certainly no Lawrence Durrell.

Lawrence Durrell’s Comic Sketches: “Antrobus Complete”

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Lawrence Durrell, best-known for The Alexandria Quartet, a tetralogy consisting of the novels Justine, Balthazar, Mount olive, and Clea, is an entrancing, lyrical stylist.  He is one of my favorite writers; he is also, in my opinion, one of the best writers of the 20th century.  Members of the anti-Durrell contingent claim  they were “going through a phase” when they read half of Justine and cast it aside. But it is unfair to judge a writer on the basis of half a novel.  Durrell was versatile: a novelist, poet, humor writer, and travel writer.

I am a fan of  Antrobus Complete, a collection of his comic short stories (really sketches, I think). It is  irresistibly funny, a bit like Saki crossed with Betty MacDonald.  Antrobus, a fussy retired diplomat, often has lunch with the narrator, presumably Durrell: they had served together in foreign capitals before Durrell quit to become a writer.  The narrator is fond of  Antrobus, who glumly tells stories about diplomatic faux pas and hair-raising misadventures that could have precipitated political crises. 

Title page, with illustration of Antrobus by Marc

I chortled and snickered over these stories. Durrell’s style here is  unlike the lyrical writing of The Alexandria Quartet.  It is spare and witty, gently satiric and charming.  I could have read these stories all day, if only there were more of them.

There is a cast of recurring characters, among them Polk-Mowbray, the chief of several embassies (later the Ambassador of a country called Vulgaria).  In one story, he adopts a devil cat who speaks English, sends malicious telegrams, and smokes cigars.  (I was reminded of The Master and Margarita),  Everyone at the office loves Smoke the cat, but he or she – they don’t quite know – causes trouble and scandals.  Polk-Mowbray is devastated when he must part with Smoke, who is sent to cat rehab and thence to a luxurious cat home.

 Antrobus does not altogether approve of Polk-Mowbray.  In Athens in 1937, Polk-Mowbray still “wrote good English,” according to Antrobus. (This was akin to Middle English, the narrator notes.)  But  Polk-Mowbray’s use of  language deteriorated after a brief stint in America, where he fell in love with  Carrie Potts, a  majorette in a Stars and Stripes parade. Upon his return to Athens, he adopted  American spellings, American slang, and loud American fashion.

Antrobus grieves, “I noticed that  he dropped the Latin tag in his drafts. Then he began to leave the ‘u’ out of words like ‘colour’ and ‘valour.’  … I found a novel by Damon Runyan in his desk-drawer one day.  I admit that he had the good taste to blush when he saw I’d found it… “ One day he came upon Polk-Mowbray dressed in “check plus-fours with a green bush cap with a peak.”  Worse, he drank a Coca-Cola with a straw. 

Antrobus’s other lugubrious musings are equally comic.  In “Frying the Flag,” he glumly reminisces about the Grope sisters, Bessie and Enid, two old women who were editors of the Central Balkan Herald.   The newspaper was riddled with typos and errors:  THE BALKAN HERALD KEEPS THE BRITISH FLAG FRYING, MINISTER FINED FOR KISSING IN PUBIC, QUEEN OF HOLLAND GIVES BIG PANTY FOR EX-SERVICEMEN.  At one point Antrobus, who is a bit of a misogynist,  grudgingly admits that the typos are not the fault of the sisters, but of the Balkan typesetters, who could not read English. Still, he fumes and scapegoats the sisters. Polk-Mowbrary finally gets rid of them by a clever yet humane scheme, which involves match-making.

In “Noblesse Oblige,” the new Third Secretary, Anthony De Mandeville, arrives with his chauffeur, Dennis Purfitt-Purfitt, in  a flamboyant Rolls Royce with the De Mandeville arms stenciled on it.  The two are a gay couple, and Polk-Mowbray, now an ambassador, is startled to be called “darling boy.” Antrobus is delegated to rebuke De Mandeville, and does so with fervor.  

As you can imagine, De Mandeville proves to be an imaginative social planner (his main task as the Third Secretary).   For the Italian Ambassador’s daughter’s birthday party, De Mandeville dresses the waiters in Roman togas and at midnight releases a flock of doves.  “They flew disspiritedly round and round the room involuntarily bestowing the Order of the Drain Second Class on us all.”  The Roman waiters must clean up with sponges and cloths and “remove the rather unorthodox decorations we all appeared to be wearing.”

Even the anti-Durrell contingent will enjoy this delightful book, which is enhanced by drawings by Marc (Mark Boxer).

Modernist Moods & Cozy Mysteries: Lawrence Durrell’s “Balthazar” and Catherine Aird’s “Henrietta Who?”

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Life in the summer is different nowadays. There is less sitting on porch swings as Climate Change steals our creaky traditions.

The summers were always hot – I tossed and turned and sweated and was cranky for the duration of many past droughts and heat waves- but now the heat waves are longer, and air conditioning is a requisite of everyday life.

My reading has been lighter (and cooler?) this summer. I recommend turning on the AC and flinging yourself on the couch with a cozy mystery or something moody and poetic. We all need a portal to an exotic landscape or a different culture. Mine is usually through books.

So here are two novels I’ve recently enjoyed: Lawrence Durrell’s Balthazar, set in Alexandria, Egypt; and Catherine Aird’s cozy mystery, Henrietta Who?, set in Calleshire, an imaginary county in England.

LAWRENCE DURRELL’S BALTHAZAR. When I talk about Lawerence Durrell, I talk about The Alexandria Quartet, a masterly tetralogy which comprises Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea. After I finish one of these books, I cannot tell you “what it is about.” I absorb the mood, the heat and exoticism, the rich language, the absurd and grotesque characters, from the anemic exotic dancer to the transvestite cop, and the nearly psychedelic dissociation rendered by the steamy nature of Alexandria.

Our perceptions keep changing as we read these books: Durrell’s portrait of Alexandria is always in flux. In the first book, Justine, we meet the narrator, Darley, an English writer in Alexandria. He is madly in love with Justine, a beautiful, troubled, intelligent, promiscuous, canny, deceitful, exasperating woman who attracts men and women alike – and has sex with everybody, while deceiving her husband and lovers – and is not particularly concerned about the consequences. And at the same time we have compassion for her: she is a lost soul, searching for her missing daughter.

All men are in love with Justine, except the gay men, and she especially is attracted to writers . Justine’s first husband wrote a novel about her, which mostly centered on the Freudian analysis that did not work on her. Now Darley, living on an island, has written about her in the context of a portrait of the city of Alexandria.

I recently reread the second novel, Balthazar, which Durrell refers to as a “sibling novel” rather than a sequel to Justine. Darley learns that he has been mistaken about almost everything he thought he knew. Justine did not love him – she loved another writer (of course), and this writer adamantly did not love her, and told her so! Balthazar, a doctor with a mystic bent, has scribbled corrections and notes on Darley’s manuscript, which he refers to as “the Interlinear.” Darley has a sense of humor: the affair is over, and the new interlinear fascinates him. And the interlinear clarifies the story of Justine’s husband, Nessim, who is as haunted as Justine, and Nessim’s brother, Narouz, a very shy man with a harelip, who visits the city once a year during Carnival, always searching for Clea, a woman he has seen once. She has no idea who he is.

Steamy, surreal, tragicomic – it’s all there!

CATHERINE AIRD’S HENRIETTA WHO? is the second in Aird’s Inspector Sloan mystery series. It has all the elements of Golden Age Detective Series, except that it was published in 1968, which is perhaps too late for the Golden Age. Yet the crimes are committed off-stage, so we are spared the violence; Inspector Sloan stays calm and methodical, however ghastly the crime; and it turns out that the people of Calleshire have many secrets.

This thoroughly enjoyable mystery begins with the postman’s discovery of the corpse of Mrs. Jenkins, who was apparently killed in a hit-and-run accident on a country road. Nothing is as it seems: from the tire marks, the police realize that somebody deliberately killed Mrs. Jenkins, running over her twice. And when the post-mortem shows that Mrs. Jenkins never gave birth, the problem of her identity and that of her daughter Henrietta, about to turn 21, become the center of this quietly effective who-dun-it.