The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell

little room in the Rue Lepsius.… He says of his characters: ‘All bound by time in a dimension which is not reality as we would wish it to be — but is created by the needs of the work. For all drama creates bondage, and the actor is only significant to the degree that he is bound.’
    But setting these reservations aside, how graceful and accurate a portrait of Alexandria he manages to convey; Alexandria and its women. There are sketches here of Leonie, Gaby, Delphine — the pale rose-coloured one, the gold, the bitumen. Some one can identify quite easily from his pages. Clea, who still lives in that high studio, a swallow’s nest made of cobwebs and old cloth — he has her unmistakably. But for the most part these Alexandrian girls are distinguished from women in other places only by a terrifying honesty and world-weariness. He is enough of a writer to have isolated these true qualities in the city of the Soma. One could not expect more from an intruder of gifts who almost by mistake pierced the hard banausic shell of Alexandria and discovered himself.
    As for Justine herself, there are few if indeed any references to Arnauti in the heavily armoured pages of her diary. Here and there I have traced the letter A, but usually in passages abounding with the purest introspection. Here is one where the identification might seem plausible:
    â€˜What first attracted me in A was his room. There always seemed to me some sort of ferment going on there behind the heavy shutters. Books lay everywhere with their jackets turned inside out or covered in white drawing-paper — as if to hide their titles. A huge litter of newspapers with holes in them, as if a horde of mice had been feasting in them — A’s cuttings from “real life” as he called it, the abstraction which he felt to be so remote from his own. He would sit down to his newspapers as if to a meal in a patched dressing-gown and velvet slippers, snipping away with a pair of blunt nail-scissors. He puzzled over “reality” in the world outside his work like a child; it was presumably a place where people could be happy, laugh, bear children.’
    A few such sketches comprise the whole portrait of the author of Moeurs ; it seems a meagre and disappointing reward for so much painstaking and loving observation; nor can I trace one word about their separation after this brief and fruitless marriage But it was interesting to see from his book how he had made the same judgements upon her character as we were later to make, Nessim and I. The compliance she extorted from us all was the astonishing thing about her. It was as if men knew at once that they were in the presence of someone who could not be judged according to the standards they had hitherto employed in thinking about women. Clea once said of her (and her judgements were seldom if ever charitable): ‘The true whore is man’s real darling — like Justine; she alone has the capacity to wound men. But of course our friend is only a shallow twentieth-century reproduction of the great hetairae of the past, the type to which she belongs without knowing it, Lais, Charis and the rest.… Justine’s role has been taken from her and on her shoulders society has placed the burden of guilt to add to her troubles. It is a pity. For she is truly Alexandrian.’
    For Clea too the little book of Arnauti upon Justine seemed shallow and infected by the desire to explain everything. ‘It is our disease’ she said ‘to want to contain everything within the frame of reference of a psychology or a philosophy. After all Justine cannot be justified or excused. She simply and magnificently is ; we have to put up with her, like original sin. But to call her a nymphomaniac or to try and Freudianise her, my dear, takes away all her mythical substance — the only thing she really is. Like all amoral people she verges on the Goddess. If our world were a world