Lawrence Durrell's undervalued master-work
Robin Rook
Apart from being a synonym for mas- terpiece, master-work can also mean a main drain or channel, and many are the tributaries which flow — or flush — into Lawrence Durrell's great novel sequence, The Avignon Quintet (Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian and Quinx, pub- lished in paperback by Faber). He delights in the irreverent and wittily obscene; on the other hand, he embraces the topographical, philosophical and mystic. It is something of a paradox. This is height- ened by the complexity of the narrative which ranges from passages of traditional dialogue and description to flashes of poetic insight and epigrammatic comment; chronology is disrupted and characters are protean: it is a maze with only one exit — the last line of the last book. He says in The Mediterranean Shore (Paul Hogarth's travels in Lawrence Durrell country) re- cently published by Pavilion Books, 'The structure of the Quintet is very carefully conceived because it has to be strong enough to carry "the voltage" of the ideas — like an electric cable conducting the massive force of electricity.' This can only be fully appreciated if the five novels are read as one. They were published over a period of ten years and perhaps for this reason have not yet received in this country the critical appreciation they merit. An omnibus edition is overdue.
The polarity of the Quintet lies in Blan- ford, a novelist, and Constance, a psychiat- rist. At the end of Monsieur, the first novel, Durrell appends an Envoi:
So D.
begat Blanford (who begat Tu and Sam and Livia) who begat Sutcliffe who begat Bloshford . . .
This is cryptic to say the least and only becomes decipherable as the Quintet un- folds. In simple terms, Durrell has created a novelist, Blanford, who is the putative author of Monsieur, which becomes a novel within a novel or a blue-print for what is to follow. Tu and Sam and Livia — one of the many trinities which obsess Durrell throughout the Quintet — form the nuclear family of the succeeding novels. Tu is Constance, the central character, the eponymous heroine of the central novel and, according to Durrell, the core from which all the other characters radiate. The consummation of the Quintet is the recog- nition by Blanford of his love for Const- ance: With every orgasm you drown a little in the future, taste a little immortality despite yourself. And here I was hoping not only to tell the truth but also to free the novel a bit from the shackles of causality with a narra- tive apparently dislocated and disjointed yet informed by mutually contradictory insights — love at first sight, so to speak, between Constance and myself. (Quinx).
This love at first sight is only fulfilled in the fifth book, and were it possible for all the characters to be fused into one character, Constance, then there would be an ideal concept. But the curtain never falls on the final novel; the characters are left sus- pended in time.
The lovers gave a shiver of premonition and Blanford thought that if ever he wTote the scene he would say: 'It was at this precise moment that reality prime rushed to the aid of fiction and the totally unpredictable began to take place!
Durrell obscures his authorship in one of the most elaborate conceits to be found in fiction. The D. of the Envoi might not stand for himself for even Blanford begins to doubt his identity. 'And what of me, he thought? Am I possibly an invention of someone like old D — the devil,at large?' He had decided to give the devil his due by calling his novel Le Monsieur and 'he had chosen for his epigraph the well-known quotation from Shagbag: "The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman." ' A similar irony underlies his relationship with Sut- cliffe, another novelist, whom he has in- vented. According to Bruce, the narrator of Monsieur, Blanford has been commis- sioned to write a biography of Sutcliffe. Blanford's creation has taken on a life of his own and can even think of his author as a different person, his arch-enemy Blosh- ford.
If ever the great Sutcliffe was in a bad temper his thoughts turned to Bloshford and the oaths mounted to his lips. Ah that bald pear-shaped conundrum of a best-seller — that apotheosis of the British artist, the animated tea-cosy! . . When the man approached you with his bone- setter's grin you had to bite hard on the bullet.
Blanford is fully aware of Sutcliffe's emer- gent independence:
That blasted Sutcliffe — he had grown fond of him; he had enjoyed being pilloried by him under the disgusting name of Bloshford. Perhaps he should sue himself for libel?
This bizarre double act continues through- out the Quintet. In Livia, the second novel, Blanford communes at length with his 'alter ego'. Their exchanges are poetic, philosophical, proverbial, fanciful and hilariously ribald. The pretentiously se- rious is constantly mocked. Not content with this interchange at a distance, Durrell slowly draws the doppelgangers together through the magnet of Constance. Blan- ford says, 'I invented a man I called Sutcliffe — for lack of anything better — and he became altogether too real.' Const- ance confronts Sutcliffe himself, 'So after all you are real', to which he replies, 'Everyone is real.' In Sebastian, the fourth novel, this ambiguity is heightened rather than defused when Blanford is brought face to face with Sutcliffe in a Swiss clinic. Durrell poses the question, 'How real is reality?' This relative reality is derived from the thinking of Einstein. The spirit of place, which means so much to Durrell, is all-pervasive. The central location is Provence and it is seen as home, a haven, precarious but enduring. The characters who settle there are touched by ambivalent feelings, by an awareness of the Pagan past overlaid by an ailing Christian present — the great Roman aqueduct of the Pont du Gard and the mediaeval Palace of the Popes cast long shadows.
And so at long last to reach home, to clatter softly and wearily into the empty station — • that historic point of return and departure . . . It never changes; it looks so homely, so provisional, so grubby-provincial. You could never deduce from it the existence of the cruel and famous town to which it belongs. (Monsieur).
Provence has been Durrell's home for the last 30 years. The Alexandria Quartet was completed there, the Quintet con- ceived. His life there has not been un- touched by tragedy, and the characters in the Quintet are violently dispersed from their idyll by the outbreak of war. Avignon Is 'occupied': Egypt and Switzerland be- come places of exile. The location of Egypt forms an inevitable link with the Quartet from which many characters pass like Shadows across the unfolding scene, but it is Switzerland where Constance is put to trial by ordeal in a conflict between west- ern science and eastern mysticism embo- died in her love affair with Affad, the Sebastian of the fourth novel. He becomes m a martyr by accident when he is killed Mistake for her by one of her psychopathic Patients. It is, in a sense, a double death, the death of mysticism and the failure of science. Freud dominates this novel, even Constance's boat on Lake Geneva is named after him. Impulse and inhibition govern the characters' behaviour. The atmosphere is bleak and unrelenting. It nearly destroys Constance. Switzerland be- comes the eye of the storm. When the war ends, Avignon beckons once more. Such characters as survive return there, and in the final volume, Quinx, Constance finds a renewal of life. She has passed through the fire, losing husband, brother, sister and lovers in the Process, but is purified by the experience. Throughout, she has been both doctor and patient. In a final act of regeneration, she effects the cure of Blanford who has been nearly mortally wounded in the accident Which killed her husband, Sam. .According to Durrell, the thinking of Einstein and Freud underlies and informs the Quintet. It is what makes the novels essentially modern and separates them from the classical tradition. It would be quite wrong to give the impression that they are a philosophical tract. The vitality and multiplicity of the characters, the excitement and sense of mystery evoked by the situations are as strong as in the Quartet, perhaps even stronger. But to appreciate this, they need only to be read. They speak for themselves.
Previous page
