Clea—Lawrence Durrell

The bucket brigade of artists

With Clea, published in 1960, Durrell concludes the Alexandria Quartet. He set the first three novels mostly in Alexandria, Egypt, during the buildup to the Second World War, but this concluding volume mostly takes place during the war. Darley resumes the narration, but this time from the vantage point of a later time. I had expected yet another completely different interpretation of the past, but Clea offers no such thing. Instead, we have a reunion of the scattered and damaged survivors from the earlier novels, like exhausted refugees from a sexually perverse Shangri-La. Everyone has aged; many have lost body parts: Nessim a finger, Balthazar his teeth, Justine’s eye sags from the aftereffect of a stroke. Time has taken a great toll.

Don’t get me wrong, this volume holds its own in terms of literary style alongside the others, and it serves as a fitting conclusion, but it did strike me as the most subdued of the four—some might call that a good thing—granting us a bit of relief from the Celtic knot of psychological, political, and literary imbroglios that fill the other books. Pursewarden, whom Darley treated somewhat dismissively in Justine, had committed suicide in Balthazar, but now has come to occupy an outsized place in the memories and respect of everyone including Darley. We break from the narrative at one point to read Pursewarden’s bizarre, somewhat ecstatic remarks on art that I confess I can’t make complete sense of. But Pursewarden’s ascendancy in importance balances the fall of Justine herself. She who seemed to embody the archetype of the feminine in all its aspects—seductress, wife, femme fatale, whore—Darley now sees through disillusioned eyes. Observing her asleep, he abandons her, thinking,

It was useless even to repeat her name which once held so much fearful magic that it had the power to slow the blood in my veins. She had become a woman at last, lying there soiled and tattered, like a dead bird in a gutter, her hands crumpled into claws. It was as if some huge iron door had closed forever in my heart.

The book consists of three parts. In part one, Darley visits with important figures from the past: Justine and Nessim, now under house arrest since their intrigue in Palestine had collapsed; Balthazar, whose body had deteriorated greatly from a wasted lifestyle; Pombal, his former flatmate now in the absurd throes of love; and finally Clea, who relates the transformation of Scoby, a comic figure from Mountolive, into a legend of the neighborhood, venerated as almost a saint. During Darley’s long absence Clea has turned her artistic talents from medical illustration to fine art, and now even dabbles in abstract art. Each character narrates his or her own story and the stories of others, bringing us up to date.

Durrell reserves part two for the full exposition of the inner life of Pursewarden, long since deceased. I see this part as the literary heart of the book, and maybe even of the Quartet. Clea shares with Darley the notebooks of Pursewarden, filled with much rambling and aphorisms, such as this one on T. S. Eliot.

Eliot puts a cool chloroform pad upon a spirit too tightly braced by the information it has gathered. His honesty of measure and his resolute bravery to return to the headsman’s axe is a challenge to us all; but where is the smile?

Darley recognizes the greatness of the dead man’s literary skill, but Pursewarden’s most brilliant and impassioned writing occurs in his letters to Liza, his blind sister. The two had lived for years in a secret, incestuous affair, so when Liza begs Darley to help her deal with her brother’s love letters, Darley reads them and together with Liza burns them.

And in brooding over these terrible letters I also suddenly stumbled upon the true meaning of my own relationship to Pursewarden, and through him to all writers. I saw, in fact, that we artists form one of those pathetic human chains which human beings form to pass buckets of water up to a fire, or to bring in a lifeboat. An uninterrupted chain of humans born to explore the inward riches of the solitary life on behalf of the unheeding unforgiving community; manacled together by the same gift.

Finally, part three continues with the love affair between Darley and Clea, an affair far more self-aware and mature than the former one with Justine, but also one spiced up by the danger of the war that then engulfed the world and made Alexandria a target for frequent bombing raids. All four novels, Clea included, end with a gripping and lovingly described set piece. Justine ended with what seemed like a murder at a duck hunt. Balthazar ends with a Saturnalian carnival in which a mistaken identity leads to an unintended murder. Mountolive ends with an intentional assassination, but of the wrong person. The climax at the end of Clea moves beyond simple murder and offers us horror instead, as apparently one may only enter the empyrean of Art at a great cost to one’s person.

Having finally read the entire Quartet, I agree with those who say one must judge it as a complete unit. Justine seemed complete and self-contained, but by the end of Balthazar’s first chapter we have already crossed a point of no return. Once we come to see Justine as only one surface of a trifold mirror, we can’t appreciate any single volume until we’ve enjoyed them all. Darley expresses it thus, not in terms of an overall achievement, but of individual failures.

I had set out at once to store, to codify, to annotate the past before it was utterly lost—that at least was a task I had set myself. I had failed in it (perhaps it was hopeless?)—for no sooner had I embalmed one aspect of it in words than the intrusion of new knowledge disrupted the frame of reference, everything flew asunder, only to reassemble again in unforeseen, unpredictable patterns....

The final book, more so than the others, cannot even pretend to stand alone, as it serves the function of bringing together all the characters and wrapping up all the plots we have meandered through in the earlier volumes. No new characters enter the scene, and any rethinking of a past character only makes sense as a modification of a view we have already formed.

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I’ve recently had my eyes opened to the value and pleasure of knowing more about the authors of great works of literature than simply their names and dates. So I will try (at least for a while) to supplement each future reading by also reading a biography. For next week, then, I plan to read Leo Tolstoy’s last work, Hadji Murat, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, together with A. N. Wilson’s biography of Tolstoy.

I want to express my appreciation for your interest in these reflections and encourage you to share them with others. Please also consider posting your own thoughts, comments, or questions on any of the reflections, and consider taking advantage of any of the links at the bottom of these posts.

Amazon links to works mentioned in this post.

Justine, by Lawrence Durrell (Volume 1 of the Alexandria Quartet)

Balthazar, by Lawrence Durrell (Volume 2 of the Alexandria Quartet)

Mountolive, by Lawrence Durrell (Volume 3 of the Alexandria Quartet)

Clea, by Lawrence Durrell (Volume 4 of the Alexandria Quartet)

The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell (all four volumes in one book)

Hadji Murat, by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy: A Biography, by A. N. Wilson

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