Alexandria, Mon Amour – Where Sex Left the Body and Entered the Imagination

The day after I finished reading Schiff’s prize-winning biography of Cleopatra, I wore my most Egyptian looking necklace to work: a ring of golden disks with images that could be Coptic, Roman, occult. I also wore my Greek Ionic column earrings -- capturing all the influences on Egypt. I wanted to be steeped in all things Mediterranean as I moved back to tackle Durrell’s Alexandria Quarter. I started over, having previously started with the last, Clea.

About 200 pages into Justine, I found what I think is Durrell’s focus (relying more as I will now on Pamuk’s lectures as to what the reader thinks is the author’s central focus); here namely, a study of how it is desirable to stay aloof and distanced from one’s fellow humans, no matter how sexually appealing or unique they might be.

To quote a section that illustrates this theme by the unnamed narrator: “From among many sorts of failure each selects the one which least compromises his self-respect – which lets him down the lightest. Mine had been in art, in religion and in people. In art I had failed ... because I did not believe in the discrete human personality … I lacked the belief in the true authenticity of people in order to successfully portray them.”

Alas, Durrell’s city of characters are all so superficially portrayed, devices only used to carry on his internalized dialogue on the nature of love and life. A bit farther, under the guise of interpreting a fellow author’s book, the narrator has his mistress’ husband, Nessim, say “What is astonishing … is that he presents a series of spiritual problems as if they were commonplaces and illustrates them with his characters … His apology for a voluptuary’s life is fantastically good – as in the passage where he says that people only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.” Durrell thus employs adultery and other sexual variations as steps to mental maturity.

Durrell portrays Justine as the female equivalent of a skirt chaser, Like John O’Hara, Durrell has her motivated from sexual abuse as a child: “Yet behind the acts of Justine lay something else born of a tragic philosophy in which morals must be weighed in the balance against rogue personality ... there are forms of greatness … which when not applied in art or religion make havoc of ordinary life. Her gift was misapplied in being directed towards love.” Her serial affairs are not an unquenchable sexual longing, but an intellectual thirst.

Justine becomes the vehicle for the narrator to gain insight into his own thoughts and actions: “… I see a sort of composite Justine, concealing a ravenous hunger for information, for power through self-knowledge, under a pretence of feeling.” As he ponders the unpleasant possession of lust turned to love, Durrell begins to tarnish the once goddess attributes of Justine: “… reflecting once more that in her there was nothing to control or modify the intuition which she had developed out of a nature gorged upon introspection: no education, no resources of intellection to battle against the imperatives of a violent heart. Her gift was the gift one finds occasionally in ignorant fortune-tellers. Whatever passed for thought in her was borrowed.” He cannot diminish her the allure of her body, so he makes repulsive what he wants even more -- a melding of intellects.

The affair between Justine and the narrator, or for that matter, his overlapping arrangement with Melissa the night club dancer, never ignites despite Durrell's almost randomly placed flashes of romance: “ .. to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts; it is simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside of each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience …” But the punch line to this line of fantasizing stresses his ultimate aloofness or disengagement: “… The love object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves …”

I wonder how Durrell will continue to portray these Alexandrians in subsequent novels since so many of the lead characters here seemed ignobly but conveniently dismissed: Justine runs away to work on a kibbutz; Nessim gets fat and lecherous; Justine’s rapist is shot by parties unknown; Melissa dies. Oops, I cheated. I peeked at the blurb to Balthazar and read that this novel is Justine 2.0 -- the time, setting, plot and characters rewritten from another perspective. It will be interesting to see if a focus on human disengagement remains the central theme.