13 - Durrell Library of Corfu



13

The Unreadable Book

The train which, like the Ship of Fools, bears its passengers towards the labyrinth (DL 13), reiterates the quest: we are told at the opening of Monsieur that ‘the southbound train from Paris was the one we had always taken from time immemorial’ (Quintet 5); at the inconclusive conclusion to the fourth volume, Sebastian, nearly twelve hundred pages later ‘the train flew on’, bearing them ‘onwards and downwards’ (Quintet 1177); the events of Quinx have yet to unfold. Therefore, to what end?

It will have become clear to the reader that ‘what happens’ in the work of Lawrence Durrell is as much a matter for the reader as for the author. Approaching his novels chronologically, one will have noted the growing severity of Durrell’s struggle with faith – faith in the artist’s powers of production, in the nature of society, and even in relation to the question of existence. It may not seem so strange, therefore, to suggest that, in a further five-volume excursion into the same mystical territory, there was little more for Durrell to tell us about human nature or its manifestations. He was nevertheless able to present a new and deeper understanding of the debate on modern aesthetics, on the role of both writer and reader. In The Avignon Quintet there is a return to the situation outlined in Part 2: as with The Black Book, storyline is surrendered to the exploration of a state of ideas; atmosphere predominates over occasion. If we consider, for example, the very small nucleus of archetypal symbols from which all our myths derive, and the power which they nevertheless continue to exercise on our behaviour, we can readily appreciate that Durrell’s work, with its strong affinities to the mystical and quest literature of both east and west, can be expressed in a few simple but fundamental phrases, just as the elements in the Grail legends lend themselves so much more extensively to analysis than to exegesis.

In this chapter I shall suggest that in the ambition to achieve a ‘vantage point’ from which to realise the ‘new Age’, Durrell ran the risk of making The Avignon Quintet an ‘unreadable book’; it is not that the dream of a ‘Tibetan novel’ was inherently unappealing to a western audience, but that its stasis and circularity oblige the reader to concentrate not on any sequence or series of events but on the idea of thought itself. The Avignon Ouintet becomes unreadable in the sense that a symphony by Brahms becomes ‘unbearable’ or even ‘unplayable’, because, by placing too great a burden on the nature of a language which we have been taught to take for granted, it abandons us without signposts while we are still expecting to be conducted from start to finish by sequential narrative. In the following chapter, I shall take this argument a further step by asking what so troubled Durrell in addressing the question ‘Why?’, particularly in relation to his by now highly developed views on otherness.

Despite the many flamboyant and vivid scenes – the deaths of Sam, Livia, Ludo and Nancy Quiminal, the blinding of General von Esslin, the epiphany of Hitler and his quest for the Holy Grail, the sexual frolics and Prince Hassad’s ‘spree’ at the Pont du Gard – there is little impetus. ‘Onwards and downwards’, but ‘never landfall’. The book is cerebration, not celebration, a train of thought rather than of action. The Prince’s Petronian fête at which ‘no phantasy had been spared’, with ‘elderly rats in strange paper hats, waving their cigars at the universe’ (Quintet 556-7) – as fitting a way as any of celebrating the apocalypse of culture – cannot replicate the real banquet, the diner à deux (ironically, its title borrowed from Petronius himself)[1] at which Blanford converses with the absent (because deceased) Constance. And the only ‘real’ train is the model railway which so excites Imhof and Lord Galen in the garden of the asylum at Montfavet: ‘a couple of absorbed children, a perfectly mated couple’ (Quintet 536).

The train is not so much speeding to a destination – towards the imprévisible – as shunted onto a line where its passengers are set, as in the ‘dark labyrinth’, to examine their preoccupations, ‘the great empty gap’, by ‘re-living and re-digesting experience’ (DL 80-1) and awaiting this still undefined sense of the merveilleux: Constance and Sebastian by taking stock of the sexual and psychic perfection of their love-making; Drexel[2] reflecting on the nature of Livia/Sylvie’s madness; Blanford and Sutcliffe[3] on the inevitability of sexual deviance; Piers de Nogaret on the nature of betrayal; Quatrefages[4] on its place in history; Mnemidis on that of inherent evil; Sebastian on the faith that surpasses the love of woman (how ‘to interrogate death itself’ - Quintet 1051); and Sebastian’s autistic child - on what? - how to interrogate life, perhaps? Once more, the prevailing author (and we should no longer readily assume that Durrell is the author in the conventional sense) has thrown down a specific ‘gravitational field’ around us, and has returned us to the ‘capital of memory’.

There was in Durrell a child whose constant need for the wondrous, for the satisfaction of the bedtime story to set against the unknown qualities of the night, was never assuaged. Equally, Durrell knew that it could never be. The ‘treasure’, for those who represent the forces of capitalism and world mastery (Lords Galen and Banquo, General von Esslin) is indeed a hidden store of riches: for them the search, or game, aided by charts and folklore, is a real and thrilling pleasure. For those who adhere with Durrell to the refusal of such a world, the treasure is merely a state of mind. Maps there may still be: the snake-shaped death-chart of Piers de Nogaret is an echo of previous attempts (in Durrell’s books and in his own life)[5] to obtain a fix on some elusive state, whether or not we regard it as ‘reality’ – it is the child’s method of ‘making sense’, of exploring the interior, even if the only clues are those of fear and warning. Durrell the poet naturally sought the still point at the centre of all the flux caused by warfare and greed (after all, usury is merely another form of warfare). In this poetic sense he did believe that the quincunx, the epicentre, was a quint-essential place where antinomies might be resolved: not, as he emphasised in describing the ‘Heraldic Universe’, a state of mind, but none the less a place he would know when, like Eliot’s searcher, he arrived there ‘for the first time’.[6]

In the prosaic sense, nevertheless, he recognised that it was in events, transitions, the exchanges in which personae as well as viewpoints moved between the speakers, that, if there were any such possibility as the ‘miracle’, it might take place, because words are the only possible place of action and interpretation. Hence the importance of Durrell’s most successful ‘trick’, the annunciation, the act of naming. Naming, the consuetudo nominationum, is intimately connected with syntax, since it is ‘a figure of speech whereby a thing which has no name, or an unsuitable one, receives an appropriate name’.[7] The same source, the Ad Herennium, is the origin of modern theories of memory. The connection is obvious: we cannot remember an unnamed thing; and, if it is ‘unsuitably’ named, we remember it wrongly or unsuitably. All Darley’s confusion is based on that conjunction between the name of the beloved and the beloved herself; it is his legacy to Felix Charlock, author of the pogon which (like the quark) had to be named so that we could get on with the business of describing those things which keep us in a state of wonder.

For Durrell, the novel was merely a western method of incorporating metaphysical notions into a sequential narrative form, so that occidental time could make sense of the oriental timeless. Aquinas himself said that the Gnostics, uneasy with the notion that Christ could have been a human being, ‘reduced the whole mystery of the Incarnation to a work of fiction’.[8] The so-called ‘gnostic gospels’ are therefore minor mythologies seeking to subvert the great tradition of evangelism. We extract from their storyline only those details which appeal to our own susceptibilities, rejecting the arguments which fail to resonate in our psychic conscience.

As we have seen in the Quartet, all map-making in this metaphysical sense is a pre-failed attempt to find and touch otherness with the fingertips of the mind. Darley has sought it through the tenderness, fierceness and envy of passion. In The Revolt, Felix and Benedicta had jointly sought it in the flight to madness. In the Quintet Durrell abandoned this passionate braille. Recognition comes not through a narrative of search and discovery but by knowing what is. It is easy to see why such an exercise should sit uncomfortably with the tradition of the classical novel, and equally easy to see its affinities with the ideogram.

For the child in Durrell the merveilleux consisted in the ideogram, for the simple reason that it could never be explained – could never, that is, be damaged or deranged by words. It is not simply that Durrell had his own inherent, imperative agenda for reaching Tibet, for finding a place of meaning which could accommodate the ‘many negatives’, provide a focus, a home. It is that he felt, with all the force of a grieving conscience, that the dis-ease he had originally perceived and expressed in The Black Book could be undone by passing the four-sided western mentality into a fifth dimension. On several occasions while writing the Quintet (no doubt because he was anxious not to be misunderstood in what, for a western writer, was a daunting and possibly damaging exercise) he explained what this meant. Perhaps the clearest statement is the following:

the two philosophies are coming together in a head-on collision; the basic thing which differentiates them is determinism and materialism in the West and precisely this pentagram formation about human personality in the East. They say that psychology instead of being divided into male and female, conscious and unconscious, is divided into five groups - baskets - skandhas - so it is a sort of pentagram I envisaged instead of a Freudian square.[9]

And Durrell told Ian MacNiven that the Quintet's

personas are not wholes but collections of spare parts. They could be each other by a simple slip of contingency. As for death, which, like matter, rules the western novel, that doesn’t exist either ... Nor does reality itself have outlines, borders, because it is provisional and not fixed or demarcated.[10]

From notes made possibly as early as 1939 – and certainly either contemporaneous with, or written shortly after, those we encountered in Part 1 – we have direct evidence of Durrell’s determination to attempt a five-dimensional novel:

Scheme:

1. The Void lies outside our postulates - beyond predicates beyond even God. It is Reality as it is - not as we know it.

2. In order for us to be sensible of the Void it must contain an impurity: for each civilization this varies.

3. The Void demands an agent to be approached: as a nonfilterable virus demands a stain to be seen.

4. The East approached nearest the Void throug[h] Space: Therefore the impurity was Time.

5. The West approaches nearest the Void throug[h] Time: Therefore the impurity is Space.

6. Diety [sic] in East = Time + Void = Space[.] Diety in West = Space + Void -= Time.

7. This is the doctrine of the sinful God of Paradox.

8. Man’s aim is Unity - from which he can join the Void.

9. Man’s nature is dual.

10. His path is three-fold.

11. His vision is four fold.

12. The Invisible 5th heals all (Akasha)

13. Paradox= the Question contains the answer

the answer contains the question

Truth is mediate, lying between,

and silence + contemplation are its agents

The Search is for the Golden Negative.[11]

This is clearly a plan for neither the ‘Book of the Dead’ (the Quartet) nor The Revolt of Aphrodite: its ambitions are more teleological, more intensively theoretical, and point towards the idea of the ‘Book of Time’ or ‘Book of Miracles’ as a method of rapprochement between east and west in which the subject (man) achieves the object (knowledge of God) through entering the Void. We recall that Durrell had written ‘paradoxically to enter the Void we must knit time’.

The idea of ‘the Golden Negative’, which Durrell had always understood as the ideal of death, also points towards the Quintet's fascination with the central and dual question of death-in-life and life-in-death. Moreover, the preoccupation with number is evident: the central importance of ‘the invisible 5th’ – taken especially in the light of what we have discussed of the ‘fifth province’ in Irish thought and the theory of memory – had clearly directed Durrell’s previous geometric ideas, and coincided very correctly with the notion of the quincunx as expressed, for example, in the architecture of the temples of Angkor Wat or Bakheng.[12]

Naturally, there was always the artistic transition between reality and fiction, but Durrell removed the authorial signposts and put the onus on the reader first to establish the framework and then to extrapolate from that framework the ‘real’ question in the author’s mind. It was a conscious removal of the ‘predicates’ and ‘postulates’ which had been getting in the way since 1939. It was as if the rhetoric so obviously the author’s own in the Quartet had been transferred to the reader. This is an area where so-called post-modernists such as Derrida can be helpful, and in the next chapter I shall approach the question of whether, in these terms, writing itself has any innate worth.

MacNiven prefers to see Monsieur, rather than Constance, as the ‘central’ volume of the quincunx, in that it ‘spans everything’,[13] telling the whole story and involving all the philosophical elements. Certainly, in the sense that all the ingredients were assembled and the train started to rumble forwards (even if towards nowhere), Monsieur does recapitulate the preoccupations, and the basic questions are asked. Certainly, also, it would be strange, in considering Monsieur not as an isolated novel nor even as the opening of a self-contained series, if we did not find Durrell making a bilan, taking stock and setting out the by now familiar pieces before making them play once more on a field which continued to be imprévisible. But Monsieur does not contain - nor can it predict - the few elements which make Constance so poignant a volume in its own right – the deaths of Sam and Livia, the liberation of the asylum, the death of Nancy Quiminal; nor does it ‘contain’, even in embryo, the union of Constance and Sebastian in their two eponymous novels or the final recognition between the Doppelgängers, Blanford and Sutcliffe. ‘Constance’, as a literal statement of value, especially in relation to the ‘case’ of Livia, her ‘inconstant’ sister, stands in symbolic relation to Durrell’s view of history. As I shall show, the ‘Why?’ uttered at the death of Livia reiterates the central point of Durrell’s own career, the need to report the exploration of human meaning and relevance. Furthermore, we have Durrell’s own evidence that ‘all the characters are aspects of one character, Constance’, which he hoped would fuse into ‘an ideal concept’, while ‘the Trinities of lovers are all part of the essence of Constance in whom they are fused’. [14]

‘It will be my star-ypointed pyramid’ Durrell wrote twice in the quarry books for the Quintet.[15] The triple significance of the expression (which founds its explicit way into the text of the Quintet 1300) is remarkable: not only does it suggest a metaphysical conceit, since it echoes the ‘star y-pointing pyramid’ which Milton ordained for Shakespeare’s bones, but also reminds us of the initial memory on which Monsieur is predicated (‘I was reliving the plot and counterplot of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in my own life. I had found the master-mistress of my passion’ - Quintet 10); it also replicates the pyramidal force-field of the quincunx as exemplified in architecture from both east and west, including the Taj Mahal and the temple of Bakheng, of which Durrell had made particular note.[16]

These geometric notions gave Durrell the mechanistic encouragement he required to ‘build’ a structure of five novels which would then form a force-field in a truly scientific sense. Thus the quincunxial idea both provided the basis for what he was trying to achieve in the east-west entente and the vehicle for one of the oldest of grail themes, that of a square of four trees with a fifth planted at its centre, beneath which the treasure lay.

But the most significant fact is that Durrell believed that the ‘power of five’, when linked to his previously elucidated ‘rule of four’, would provide him with the means to negotiate the hitherto inaccessible, those ‘buried alive’. This would be the true meaning of anagnorisis, the moment of recognition between sisters; between lovers; between writers; between master and servant, creator and created; between the boy who left home and the man who returns. It would represent the point at which the man who, all his life, had told himself ‘he must not remember’, could regard himself in the mirror and, by submitting to memory, name himself. As Kundera observed, ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’.[17]

At the heart of the search is autism itself, ‘triumphant unreason’ as Felix had called it in the case of Benedicta (Tunc 289), since the ‘empty fortress’ of the child represents the difficulty within each of us – artist, tramp or brick-layer – to make relation, to find the right words: where the living mind and passion is screaming for that identity, for the chance to live rather than to be lived, the matter of death does indeed seem of small importance. At the centre of Sebastian is the chapter ‘Inner Worlds’ (Quintet 1029-75) which addresses the problem not only of ‘how to stop the terrible sobbing in the night’ which, we have seen, Durrell closely associated with the ‘inscape’ of Hamlet, but also that of Blanford’s relationship with Sutcliffe (‘the incorrigible and depraved shadow which hung over his life’ - Quintet 1065) and ‘the uprooting despair of the primal wound’ which ‘had been found if not identified’ (Quintet 1043, 1053). Equally, it was not so much the issue of homosexuality as that of trans-sexuality which made his interest in the possibilities of Ophelia as great as in those of Hamlet. In the notes for Quinx he returned to that unforgettable experience: ‘the mammoth shock of Other - the baby’s first inkling of society. The prehistoric experience all creatures have to learn. The primal code of otherness. The primal scene?’[18] while in a contemporaneous quarry book he wrote of Sylvie (originally envisaged as ‘Cosima’): ‘frozen into the total madness of insight’.[19]

These, then, are not isolated instances of Durrell’s own agenda: they are simultaneous equations which can only be satisfied by reference to the despotism of the Book itself. To this extent, Durrell himself was not the author of the book; its origin as a meeting-point of western narratives and eastern skandhas had assumed a life of its own.

The skandha is not esoteric: like the mandala, it must represent to the eastern mind, and in the same form, what the image of life in the controlling pattern of the mappa mundi would have meant to medieval man. Durrell made this explicit in the vision experienced by the historian Toby Goddard during the ‘initiation scene’ at Macabru[20] when he combined two of his longest-standing symbols: looking into the eyes of the mesmeric snake (the ‘caduceus’ which represented his earliest poems) he saw the vizor of the Black Prince (a revenant from his schooldays) and – he is told – ‘you got scared when you stared into the black hole of the armoured head because you thought you saw the glitter of snake-eyes where the face should have been’ (Quintet 127). Ophitism – the mesmerism of the dethroned dragon of Eden – is one sign of the end of the world. It underlines the fact that for each of us, whether we believe it or not, it represents ‘a Thing of particular consequence ... the sort of significance which we cannot render clear by words, a deep symbolic significance of something which by-passed causality’ (Quintet 122, my emphasis). Here, we realise, was Durrell’s strategy in solving his lifelong paradox: to present to himself, his characters and his readers an enigma which they know to be innately true and yet which is not susceptible of proof except in terms of the non-truthfulness of included middle – ‘a perfect conviction of the truth of being which would be independent of arguable proof’ (Quintet 111).

To Durrell himself, this combination of ‘the two philosophies’ was nothing more complex than the natural introduction of the congeries or aggregates of the novel with those of the tantric path: those elements which we expect to meet in, say, the biography of Tristram Shandy – material effects, sensations, abstractions, tendencies and potentialities and, finally, reasoning – which constitute the five skandhas.[21] Since ‘the notion of matter was an illusion’ and ‘the notion of the discrete and separate ego was also an illusion’;[22] since these had been self-evident truths in the social philosophy within which the colonialist Durrell had first drawn the conclusion that ‘the universe had become a huge incomprehensible machine from which the only philosophy to be drawn was one of cosmic pointlessness’,[23] then the only possibility would be the evolution of the quartet, ‘four-square man’, ‘the rule of four’, into a pentateuch.

With his deeply traditional respect for both sides of his upbringing, Durrell’s devout wish – and I use the word advisedly, with its implication of fervency – was ‘to plant this quintet at the point of tangence between [the] two cultural principles’ where relativity meets the unpredictable: reiterating Shelley, he hoped that the Quintet would be underpinned by ‘the Asiatic notion of a world renewed afresh with each thought; therefore man as a Total Newcomer to each moment of time’,[24] themes which he had first publicly expressed in the Key in preparation for the Quartet.

The opening themes of the Quintet take up the strands of disillusion and suspicion remaining at the close of The Revolt: the initial revelation of the ‘Prince of Darkness’ to the potential neophytes (Piers, Bruce, Toby, Sabine, Sylvie) occurs in the earliest flashback, recalling their youthful experience in Egypt (when they were symbolically starting their lives ‘outremer’) and in which the lives of Piers de Nogaret and his sister, Sylvie, are transformed. Everything else is a commentary on the way that such an experience, a revelation, can pervade the force field in which it operates.

Carrying within it the notion of intellectual as well as sexual incest and homosexuality, which are predicates of this initial flashback, The Avignon Quintet thus returns us to the organic connection between sexual and intellectual intercourse, of which the pogon, the ‘word which does not exist’, might be regarded as both ‘the compact and the seed’. In a post-modernist world, where not the quality but the very existence of imagination is in question,[25] it is imperative that the capacity for expression should be seen as contesserate between the sexual and intellectual powers. Durrell’s insistence at several points that the culture of an age is only as good as the quality of its sperm (Quintet 838) enjoys a highly developed semiotic formulation in the Cabbalism which had influenced his earliest reading: individual elements in the alphabets and hieroglyphs, representing both philosophical propositions and bodily functions, are the building-blocks of culture and also its ultimate edifice. The womb is both our hatch and our quarry. If, as Eco has argued, ‘a general semiotics is nothing else but a philosophy of language’,[26] then the importance of the sign, as ‘correlation between a signifier and a signified (or between expression and content)’[27] is reinforced: ‘classical issues such as meaning, reference, truth, context, communicational acts’[28] become relevant to post-modernism insofar as they continue to stand in their own right as ‘inferential processes’.[29] Interfere with such processes, Durrell tells us, interrupt periodicity, and you not merely disturb the universe but you derange it.

As if to underline this, Durrell noted in one of the earlier quarry books for the Quintet: ‘Piers de Nogaret - the components of the human personality in a set of cards - CAN - CANT [sic] – WANT AM - IS - WAS - WONT - WILL SHOULD - COULD – MIGHT YES – NO’.[30] Thus not only do the ‘characters’ consist of a set pattern of Tarot types, but they also have within their grasp only a small number of attitudes to volition and locomotion: this is the breviary of their imagination.

Durrell thus made explicit the previously implicit nature of the way in which consent, or assent, is given and withheld, and, as its concomitant, the active nature of dissent. The nature of belief and disbelief, and the mutual commerce between the two, between the real and the imagined, the true and the untrue, the absurd and the logical, is administered to the reader in the test given to Piers shortly after the events at ‘Macabru’, when the apparent initiation is firstly revealed to have been a fraud and then confirmed as a ‘real’ or ‘true’ experience (Quintet 158-69): the question being, whether Piers was ‘able to go on believing something which [he] knew to be untrue’ - the difference between reality and truth being thus cruelly underlined: ‘we are treading a very narrow path between reality and illusions’ (Quintet 163-4). The central tenet of gnosticism, for Durrell at least, is not the conflict between the powers of light and dark, but a different kind of balance, that between what inheres in the universe and what is irrelevant to and destructive of it. Akkad (the source of initiation) says:

the stability of the gnostic universe is quite inadvertent; the conformity of matter to models or modes is very precarious and not subject to causality... Once this dawns on you the notion of death is born and gathers force so that you start, not to live according to a prearranged plan or model, but to improvise. It is another sort of existence, at once extremely precarious, vertiginous, hesitant - but truthful in a way that you never thought you could be (Quintet 165; Durrell’s ellipsis and emphasis).

The genesis of the Quintet (apart, that is, from Durrell’s lifelong intention to write the anagnorisis, the putative ‘Book of Miracles’) is further suggested by his brief foreword to Arthur Guirdham’s The Cathars and Reincarnation, which concerns ‘a case-history or is it all true’ in which a patient’s dream life

became invaded by a perplexing panorama of intimations concerning a far distant life which she had lived long ago in twelfth century Provence, as a member of that small dissenting sect of heretics known as Cathars ... Many of these dreams seemed susceptible of verification by scholars who were working on Cathar history ... Dr Guirdham had the good fortune and the good sense to involve them in the business of commenting upon his patient’s other life[31] (my emphasis).

Like the world uncovered by Le Roy Ladurie in works such as Montaillou, where Durrell would no doubt have felt completely at home, this ‘other life’ can be read as a novel in the same sense as the case-histories of Freud (of which ‘Little Hans’ and ‘Dora’ were particularly admired by Durrell).[32] The recognition which is the essence of anagnorisis was problematic because although Durrell knew that it had to do with the nature and status of the child he had left behind, it had also, and equally, to do with the child whom, like Piers de Nogaret, he continued to carry within him: ‘an only child is doomed to nostalgia and uncertainty’ (Quintet 321). The historical novel (written in the sense that ‘history was not past but was something which was always just about to happen. It was the part of reality that was poised’ - Quintet 1182) becomes a way of exploring other homelands, other ways of examining the idea of root, of method, of meaning. It gives Toby Goddard the opportunity to engage the Templars and their Cathar associates, across the mere historical centuries, in an otherwise impossible conversation, and thereby to grant to Piers the intercourse with his ancestors so important if, like Stephen Dedalus, history (and its madness) is a nightmare from which he is (or was) trying to awake.[33]

In this sense, therefore, the travellers in the Quintet, with their elaborate geometrical stratagems and strappados for the near-misses of regular fate, become a singular journeyman, the teller of one Chaucerian tale, preparing for that meeting in the mirror: Constance with Sebastian, Blanford with Sutcliffe. When, in 1950, Durrell wrote to Miller that Stendhal, by ‘creating an n-dimensional character in a single phrase: then letting the action develop the character without further interruption’, had ‘demonstrated a rationale for fiction ... of the next fifty years’ (DML 244), he had in mind not only Pursewarden’s method but also the creation of a new Everyman, of whom, in sexual terms, Constance and Sebastian and, in metaphysical terms, Blanford and Sutcliffe, were to be the progenitors.

The Quintet embraces both the classicism of the Quartet and the medievalism of The Revolt. The perennial issues are, as previously, expressed in terms of the kind of movement – wandering, madness, the search for meaning – which involves nothing more than standing still; and the author (whoever he may have been) makes it evident that in pursuing a question embedded in the nature of childhood he regards autism as both symbolising a question and containing its own answer. Spengler, again, provided an example:

classical culture possessed no memory, no organ of history ... The ‘pure Present’ ... fills [classical] life with an intensity that to us is perfectly unknown ... [which] in itself predicates the negation of time ... What the Greek called Kosmos was the image of a world that is not continuous but complete.[34]

The circularity of Durrell’s argument is best explained by the banker’s daughter who becomes yet another ‘missing child’, the gypsy, dromomane Sabine:

A child anyone can make, but one must round off or perfect its regard (faut parfaire le regard). This hints at the inner vision which will give the child a pithy heart and mind on the condition that the dual orgasm is experienced simultaneously (Quintet 1335, Durrell’s emphasis).

It is the ‘regard’ within the vizor of the Prince, within the smile of the ophite, the regard which can be at once ‘dérisoire’ (Quartet 38) and full of tendresse - without defence. It is the signature by which the child informs the world ‘I, per se I, I sing on’ (CP 56). It receives meaning from Durrell’s meniscal reference to the Quintet that ‘tous ces livres sont la biographie d’un regard’.[35] What that ‘regard’ will mean is profoundly and inalienably personal to the reader. For the present writer, conscious of Durrell’s equivocation between the foyer and the route, the way in which the book became a biography of that unspecified regard runs parallel to the method by which science excludes middle by its binary rule and yet includes it according to the analogic principle. Both the death principle of ((((((( (thanatos), symbolised by the letter (, and the ( symbolising the serpent, have been or might be suggested as sources for the quincunxial design,[36] but equally Durrell’s own fascination with the Q itself, combining in an ambiguous fashion the circularity of the female principle both enclosing, and penetrated by, the straight line of the male, must have contributed to whatever weight he gave the geometric appearance of the work.

We have seen Durrell (pace the Theaetetus) doubting the question of process. Inference and intuition, as philosophical processes, have the power to change the world.[37] But where our inferential capacity is diminished, power itself becomes less manageable; to adopt Forster’s image of a detumescent culture, gradually ‘the machine stops’.[38] Where inference and intuition retract their antennae, irony, or at least its possibility, will have been pushed into a background without context. This is an exceptionally risky position for the novelist to occupy, unless he has other strategies available: as we shall see in the following chapter, the potential death of irony (through the attrition of the imaginative faculty) impoverishes narratives which depend solely on narrative for their raison d’être; few novelists have the Cervantean capacity demanded by Kundera to pay their way in the post-imaginative world.[39] In Durrell’s case, however, we can readily understand what Elaine Pagels refers to as the creative writer living ‘at the edges of orthodoxy’.[40]

The idea of living, as inseparable from the description of living, becomes extremely complex as well as painful in these books. One of their themes is the excitement and yet the paucity of psychoanalysis, that it arouses the emotions by means of the intellect, and yet fails to satisfy them. ‘The subconscious is fished out’, Sutcliffe admonishes the analyst Schwartz. ‘Driven back to base’, the scientist is faced with the truth known to the poet, that ‘the basic illness is the ego which, when it swells, engenders stress, dislocating reality. Then the unbeknownst steps in with its gnomes and Doppelgängers’ (Quintet 703). By this simple device Durrell encapsulated the raison d’être of both folktale and fairy story, and connected it with the issue of angst. The ‘gnomes and Doppelgängers’ who proliferate in the Quintet add to, rather than diminish, the dislocation of reality, emphasising the fragile, ‘vertiginous’ nature of existence, disrupting a causality, a sequential narration of life which is predicated on a misreading of human values.

In drawing us back to poetry – ‘that highly aberrant act of nature!’ (Quintet 703) – Durrell was suggesting a method of ‘read[ing] new meaning into things’ (Quintet 703) in which one recedes into ‘the One I really was all along’. It is the reverse of the process announced a lifetime ago, in working ‘through many negatives to what I am’. If history is the failure to accept ‘the freedom offered by choice’ (Quintet 850), a retreat from history into ‘reality prime’ is the only course available. It enables one to take into account what would otherwise be obscured by the continuation of that ‘history’. Durrell called this ‘the principle of entropy... the death-drift of the world ... the point at which East and West were still at loggerheads’ (Quintet 145) and which he proposed to illuminate by means of the ‘sexual curiosity and metaphysical speculation’ between Constance and Sebastian, both in their physical love-making and in the way he brought Sebastian’s gnosticism, with its acceptance of ‘voluntary death’, to an accouchement with Constance’s acquired knowledge of the psyche. An imploding universe, one in which all places were becoming the same, and all people merely aspects of the same personality, exercised a fascination for Durrell because it not only tended to confirm the poet’s idea of ‘correspondance’ but also highlighted the fact that if there is good and bad in the world it is in each of us, and therefore it is foolish to deny that which we know to be ‘true’.

Once again, it is important to emphasise the long gestation of this deeply philosophical work, one which is deceptive in that the seductiveness of its situations too often obscures the profundity of its construction. In 1938, at the behest of Nin and Miller, Durrell had read Rank’s Art and Artist; we have seen its influence particularly on The Revolt. But its Spenglerian tone extended also to this new work, in which Durrell attempted something quite new; the creation, in western narrative terms, of a perennial culture. Rank spoke of a ‘decisive crisis, in the midst of which we stand’, but it is clear from the fact that he went on to refer to ‘a new structure of personality’ that he had much more far-reaching considerations in mind than the merely contemporaneous problems of totalitarianism: ‘in order to create the new it will have to give up much that has been received from tradition and become dear to it’.[41] ‘Our immediate problem’, Durrell noted in his copy of the book, was that, in Rank’s terms, ‘modern art ... stands opposed to life ... its compelling motive is fear of life and experience’.[42] Perhaps here, at last, modern man had begun to understand what was involved in the ‘battlefield’: not merely a new relation of man to art, a new way of narrating, but a qualitative change in the nature of relation itself, one conceived on the ‘winding stair’[43] of the Elizabethan mind and brought to bed by the baroque. It is easy to see why Keith Brown has called Durrell’s explanation of the preface to Balthazar as ‘equivalent to a conceit in a Metaphysical poem’.[44] The motive for The Avignon Quintet came from what Durrell called ‘the biography of fear’, where Rank had referred to ‘inward fear of the unreal... precisely because of its intangibility’.[45] ‘The urge to externalize oneself in one’s work’ was, for Rank, the expression of this fear, ‘the individual’s fear of losing himself in life’ and for Durrell this was ‘the core of the matter’.[46] It was not a path of which ‘un vrai enfant de Kim’, his life ‘impregné de bouddhisme’, would be unduly anxious, but it could be radically disturbing for his readers.

The Quartet was, in Pursewarden’s words, an ‘n-dimensional novel... not travelling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern’ (Quartet 198); the Quintet takes that geodesic principle by adding the dictum of Capodistria: ‘the world is a biological phenomenon which will only come to an end when every single man has had all the women, every woman all the men’ (Quartet 706). The Heraldic Universe thus comes briefly into existence in that moment when ‘all time [is contained] in every moment of time’ (Key 29) and all time, and all people, are fecundated anew. This, one must assume, is the brief and unrepeatable moment of the merveilleux.

Let us therefore examine the simultaneity of the statements which coexist within the general proposition that the book is ‘full of spare parts of other books, of characters left over from other lives, all circulating in each other’s bloodstreams ... Be ye members of one another[47] ... Full of not completely discrete characters’ (Quintet 693), that one can at least sidestep the problem of ‘ergo’ by accepting that ‘the human personality... consists of a congeries of elements linked in a purely provisional way... moving from am-ness to isness, active to passive’.[48]

One might almost arrange them coterminously in the parallel fashion of the voice- cards stored by Abel (Tunc 254-5) or the simultaneous emissions of Blanford and Sutcliffe in Quinx (Quartet 1187-8, 1201), although, as we have seen, the quincunxial pattern is of the greater significance. They are intimately concerned with the relationship between language and the possibility of madness, and the way the difficulty of that relationship must be expressed verbally through the sex-act. Because man, to Durrell’s despair, adheres to duality, the ‘central dichotomy’ of ‘the basic brick, the word’ (Quintet 216) makes all communication between man and woman bifurcate and incapable of supporting the hermeneutic burden we nevertheless place on it – again, the expression is typically Durrellian in its vision of the problem and its empathy with the victim: ‘language is all very fine and we cannot do without it but it is at the same time the worst invention of man, corrupting silence, tearing petals off the whole mind’ (Quintet 87). The child, as the union of this damnation of words, retreats into a world of wonder, of inner, speechless images, because it sees inexpressible love as the cause of the unhappiness in both world and word: this is the destiny of Livia/Sylvie and the child of Sebastian, and possibly of countless others, not least the whores of Alexandria and the noblest of all, Nancy Quiminal of Avignon.[49] The division between all bondsmen, whether or not they are physical lovers such as Blanford, Pia and Trash,[50] or writers in symbiotic captivity like Blanford and Sutcliffe, is a division of adherence, a ‘tu quoque’ in which the old dialogic relation is resumed. ‘The theme of departure’ (Quintet 1167), which characterises the momentum of the unmoving train, is equally that of continual return, of those searching still for the ‘integrating principle’ which might in fact free them from the constituencies of others: ‘all broken up and fragmented, and in dispersion. A rebeginning of something, or an ending’ says Sutcliffe, ‘an exodus of refugees’ (Quintet 1167) among whom we have seen Durrell numbering himself. We should recall the collapse of mittelEurop as predicted in the ‘recitative for a radio play’: ‘We are getting the refugee habit’ (CP 36).

The constantly voiced aspiration is that, in order for people to become part of one another, ‘to melt into each other’s inner lifespace ... one must advance to the edge of the Provisional, to the very precipice’ (Quintet 1265-6). This becomes the somewhat naïve strategy of the Quintet's final page when ‘reality prime rushed to the aid of fiction and the totally unpredictable began to take place!’ (Quintet 1367). It is therefore no surprise that the penultimate chapter of Quinx (and therefore of the Quintet as a whole) should be a deliberate echo [aut… aut] of the thesis of The Revolt: ‘Whether or Not’ (Quintet 1331-46). But in order to satisfy this dualistic lust in the human imagination, the leap must be in the order of a truth, if only an unbelievable one. ‘By all means let us have the truth, since we have all suffered so much from it’ says Constance (Quintet 1286). The bitterness, the distrust, and yet the longing in that imprecation are the means by which the scientist in Durrell’s work fertilises the craving for poetry.

The ‘truth’ in the Quintet is something which, like Constance’s recognition of her homosexuality (in the closing pages of Sebastian - Quintet 1165-6), the reader is reluctant and no doubt ill-equipped to recognise, even though this ‘truth’ is announced in Monsieur:

How can Bruce, a so-called doctor, not be aware that he and Piers between them brought about Sylvie’s collapse, the downfall of her reason? The division of objectives in loving is something woman finds impossible to face; it threatens the fragile sense of her identity, the unity of her vision of things seen through the unique lens of human love. Once this sense of uniqueness is put in doubt or dispersed the self breaks up (itself the most fragile of illusions) and all the subsidiary larval selves, demons and angels, come to the surface to splinter and confuse the central ego (Quintet 280).

Sylvie, we learn at the opening of Monsieur is the beautiful, deranged poetic ward of Montfavet, gliding through its rooms as if presiding over the court of love in a specially bewitched island: we might almost call her its châtelaine, its archivist. In the chapter of Monsieur entitled ‘Life with Toby’ (Quintet 233-72), which elaborates on the central difficulty of the double, it is Sylvie who tells us (and it is typical that Durrell should have given to this unstable person an expression so poetic, so capable of bending to the ways of a world of contingency) ‘Mirrors were originally invented to capture the reflection of flying swallows’ (Quintet 265). And in the same sequence of notes (Sutcliffe’s ‘Green Notebook’, itself an echo of Gregory’s green diary in The Black Book) the ‘subsidiary larval selves’ (which a cruder novelist might have called ‘the can of worms’) are exploded with the statement which, for this critic, makes the book ‘unreadable’ in its profound, its abject accusation of all being: ‘though she has very distinct marks of madness in her look one always feels that to call her insane would be to put all ontology to the question’ (Quintet 271). Sylvie (and her mirror-image Livia) is ‘the great question mark’ about whom Bruce wonders, in direct recollection of the Quartet, whether she would ‘ever come to herself again enough to resume some sort of life with me’ (Quintet 17 - my emphasis). What are we to say to, or of, a child who confides

Everywhere I go I hear them whispering, whispering about love and I don’t know what it is - I only know its history. I am capable of feeling, yes; of devotion and faithfulness unto death towards another human being. But as for love the word is a blank domino. Someone would have to lead me, to teach me.[51]

It is only much later, in ‘this bereft world’, that we almost fortuitously discover the obvious and devastating ‘truth’ – that Sylvie is a writer (Quintet 1160).

Within two pages of Constance we are presented with a double enigma: firstly, that ‘the meaning of meaninglessness is the code of the Grail’ (a nice rephrasing of the final point of his ‘Scheme’ regarding paradox), and secondly that ‘children are abstract toys, representations of love, models of time, a resource against nothingness’ (Quintet 928-9). The two statements might seem discontinuous if it were not for the fact that between them Blanford muses on the role of memory and then asks ‘Suppose one wrote a book in which all the characters were omniscient, were God? What then? ... But this is what the artist does!’ All the books are the Book, which has the function of revealing to its author(s) the fact that it is merely a mirror for one’s onanism. The ‘child’ is the hostage to a fortune that already exists like a time-bomb on an as-yet undisclosed page number.

Even for the lovers Constance and Sebastian (for one of whom love-making is predetermined by her professional role as a psychiatrist, for the other by the prior claims of his gnosticism) the deep simultaneity – its only occurrence in all of Durrell’s work – of the longed-for and predicted ‘sexual curiosity and metaphysical speculation’, is vitiated by the duality not only of manhood and womanhood but also of east and west, of am-ness and is-ness. The pivotal event of their union is also the moment of their undoing:

at the heart of their exchanges was a calm sensuality of understanding such as only those lucky enough to feel married in the tantric fashion experience. They were squarely each to each with no fictions of lust needed to ignite them. Embraces were woven like a tissue (Quintet 1123).

Yet, as Constance realises, the expression ‘“je t’aime!”... had always represented to her a wholly unrealisable territory of the feelings, of the heart. But then, everyone alive is waiting for this experience, with impatience and despair’ (Quintet 1125) and, moreover, ‘she … knew, as a doctor, that man cannot do without calamity, nor can he ever circumscribe in language the inexpressible bitterness of death and separation. And love, if you wish. Love’ (Quintet 1169). We wait, somewhere between the idea of loving and the need to be loved; somewhere between knowing ourselves and wishing to be known, discovered, between the two birthplaces, not knowing in which direction lies anything other than ‘the refugee habit’.

Writing and madness are co-determinants of themselves and of each other, as are their predecessors in the causal chain, writing and loving. The quest has everything to do with naming, with the image, with the precise location, with order. As Durrell would have known from Giordano Bruno’s Seals, the principal seal is the ‘field’ of memory;[52] others, of which we have plentiful evidence throughout Durrell’s work, include Heaven, Chain, Tree, Wood and Ladder. It is perhaps more vital that Bruno saw subsidiary images ‘organizing a cluster of meanings around a main image’,[53] and the idea of a fifth place as the centre of meaning would clearly have struck a chord in Durrell’s ‘Irish’ mind. Moreover, for someone who, as we have already noted, was constantly aware that ‘in the beginning was the word’, the equivalence, the synonymity, the id-entity of word and memory would have been paramount.

This all amounts to the fact that while Durrell may have intended to ‘hint’ rather than to make ideas explicit, and to suggest structures rather than to draw them in crude strokes, nothing he wrote was intended to deceive or to confuse. Nothing is symbolic for its own sake. The ‘genuinely symbolic nature’ of the Grail legend,[54] for example, is not simply a search for treasure, but for identity. It gives purpose to life: human existence could not bear its burden without the means of literature. The pursuit can be sexual, monetary, vengeful, speculative, but at its centre is the idea that unless we pursue it we have no other right to life. One leaves home in order to return: where that home might be, and who it is who seeks it, is a ‘given’ immediately forgotten once the first Lethe is crossed, and immediately re-encountered and re-acknowledged in the form of a question once the initial, primal clues are once more asserted.

For Durrell to incorporate the idea of the Grail treasure at this stage of his career was perfectly natural, since it enabled him to site much of the adventure in what must have come to seem to him like the graveyard of history, a place somewhere between Egypt and Provence. The countryside traversed in the quest must be a place apart, a place that is recognisably strange, enigmatic,[55] even irrational,[56] in which the feminine principle is predominant and the oriental is deeply suggested.[57] ‘How’ becomes mechanistic: it is a means of building bridges of words and deeds. After the homecoming and the elation of the ‘now’, the question ‘why?’ remains unanswered and, usually, unasked.

That the Nazi cult of religious symbolism provided Durrell with another dimension of the Second World War is confirmed by the study of the Grail legend by Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz when they identify ‘a psychological expression of an extraordinary stirring of the unconscious, such as does happen from time to time, especially in periods when the religious values of a culture are beginning to change’.[58] (The far deeper points made by Rank in the passages we have seen from Art and Artist, for example, underpin the idea that the cause of concern was far from merely contemporary.) That this points, in Jung’s and Franz’s view, ‘to the fact that [the legend] revolves around a difficult and apparently insoluble problem’[59] suggests that at the same time it can have real and imaginary applications – semantic in terms of contemporary history, yet mantic (and more enduringly so) in the way that history illuminates human nature. Even in the legend of the Golden Bough, as explained by Frazer, the ‘how?’, the ‘what will happen?’, which compels the priest of Nemi to anticipate and accept his fate, is a natural state: it creates an audience for the question. Yet the ‘Why?’ scarcely enters his consciousness because ‘Because’ is an inexplicable answer.

For Durrell himself the personal ironies cannot have been silent. The central figure in the Grail Quest, ‘Perceval’ – the formal version of the name he gave to his alter ego in the Quartet – grows up in a forest, is fatherless and develops a lonely, isolated existence.[60] For ‘Parsifal’ (as he became for Wagner) ‘Space and Time are One’,[61] which has a particular significance for the development of the Christian era. It had an even greater significance for the writer who saw the elimination of the impurities of time and space as the prerequisites for achieving the Void, the Golden Negative.

Jung and Franz placed great emphasis on the fact that it was through female guidance that Perceval is given the means of reconciling conscious and unconscious, and that ‘those weapons which are necessary to the mastery of life and of the world are presented by the anima, out of the maternal matrix of the unconscious’.[62]

That they also considered it ‘not inappropriate that the poets drew upon Oriental legends as amplifications’[63] would not have surprised Durrell, since he had in his own mind already made the connection between gnosticism and Buddhism, not merely in the build-up to the Quintet but in the very fabric of his early thought: the gradually deepening emphasis on the theme ‘be ye part of one another’ (Key 30) began in conceiving what Jung and Franz call ‘an archetypal image of polyvalent meaning’,[64] - a representation of the world through the eyes of a man seeking the inner security of quietism through the outer turmoil of the ‘battlefield’.

It might seem that in The Revolt Durrell had exhausted the symbolism of the quest – the hero crossing water, rescuing a distressed princess, overcoming the controlling monster of the dream. But, because he was driven to introduce much more explicitly the eastern concepts of love and death, he knew that it was necessary to enquire whether they would, in fact, live happily ever after. A hero cannot depart on a quest unless he accepts that unspecified areas of danger will challenge his implied and as yet untried heroism; that there is a path to be found in which magic, beauty and choice will all come into play; that there is a treasure to be identified, claimed and won; and that the return journey, which may prove equally perilous, must end with his re-entry into the community and the successful relating of his adventure.

That kind of quest has been strident in western literature since the Arthurian legends gathered momentum and reached their apogee in the Wagnerian epics. Behind and within it are the twin, complementary passions of fear and violence; fear of the unknown, and violence (of whatever order) as a means of making it known, of tearing the veil from the face of the mystery. Passion is its root.

The principal motive for the quest is not so much the disclosure of treasure as of personality; it is the quester himself who seeks a path of self-knowledge, and the relating of his discoveries provides us with the basis of anatomy, anthropology and psychology and of the meaning of history.

If anything ‘happens’ in the Quintet it occurs very much in the sense in which, in Vivian Mercier’s description of Waiting for Godot, ‘nothing happens twice’.[65] The structure of the five novels is designedly circular, their events reciprocated by the fact that there are two sets of mutually recognisable ‘families’ of characters, their incidents so sparse as to scarcely make one novel out of the material of the five. Whatever ‘happens’ happens very slowly, evolving with the slowness of a major philosophy circling a pivotal historical event. The notion of man circling a central question immediately gives the reader the idea of never having been away. As we saw on the occasion of Durrell’s own arrival in Greece in Prospero’s Cell, and his methods of annunciation, arrival inherently contains permanence, and yet we are never at home, never satisfied by whatever it is that the circling signifies. Clearly, the ‘hint’ of which the oracle is capable is to nod towards memory, not to define it.

The ‘meaning’ of the flashback which, in cinematic terms, constitutes the entire Quintet, is pitched not as an answer but as a question: can we, by revisiting any ‘Thing’, sufficiently remember it in order to relive the primal experience? If not, then the trauma of birth, on which modern psychology is based, becomes its most potent fallacy; autism is not a reaction to the trauma, nor is it the trauma itself; it is the revelation, the anagnorisis, of the fallacy. From the introduction to (and Piers’ initiation into) gnosticism at ‘Macabru’, to the revelation of its meaning during the love-affair of Constance and Sebastian, and the ending of the book(s) with the ritualistic deaths of Piers and Sebastian, the intellectual and psychic centre of the book remains Egypt, while its physical and emotional centre is Provence. In both, the prevailing atmosphere is decadence, of gently rotting palaces inhabited by moth-eaten exemplars of heresy. Decadence now becomes Durrell’s method of examining the state of the world.

More and more clearly, Durrell was guiding the reader towards a conclusion. The consciousness of the ‘artistic life’ made the idea of the quest increasingly explicit. It matched both the contemporary context in which he was writing and the historical framework in which he saw his own, and in general mankind’s, search for meaning as the only reason for existence. The footsteps which had led him inexorably both away from and towards the snow-valleys of Tibet were those of a man who knew himself to be a vagabond, to contain within himself, like Everyman, the legend which must be told.

Ian MacNiven has examined the quincunxial nature of the novels in the light of Durell’s stated intention to write ‘a Tibetan novel’, one which would connect the western narrative form and its four dimensions with the pentagrammatic, five-form oriental ‘skandha’. This, more than any other potential reading of the Quintet, is the key to Durrell’s ultimate purpose. To a certain extent, as we saw in his explicit reference to the schema in ‘The Elephant’s Back’, it had been a growing part of the long strip, traceable in the reflectiveness of the early philosophical novels, the semiotics of the Quartet and the medieval, promethean playground of The Revolt. But, as MacNiven remarks, whether the Templar treasure is a tangible cache of gold or ‘a gem of spiritual knowledge, a gnosis’ is a question which Durrell ‘never resolves’. And that, as MacNiven goes on to remark, is because ‘Durrell’s treasures match the preoccupations of his characters ... in which “fiction” creates “reality”’.[66]

The characters and situations in the Quintet were literally a pre-text for that central idea. It was a return to the idea of the courts of love as a breeding-ground for both catharism and gnosticism, positing ‘a new freedom for woman ... a new role as Muse’ (Quintet 158), which saw a deepening and intensifying of the philosophical propositions of the Quartet and The Revolt, and a new direction in matters of sexual curiosity. The cast remained largely unchanged, but they had taken up ‘new dispositions’ within the field of enquiry. The story crosses and recrosses the conventional lines of life and death as easily and as purposefully as that of Gawain. The notion that the objective of the folktale is a homecoming and a storytelling about the journey outwards and the return, is more clearly acceptable, and provides a clearer view of the transformative experience which the Quintet achieves.

By inverting the relation of fiction and reality Durrell made the reader’s position untenable. He thus pinpointed the debate which Kundera had conducted throughout his Art of the Novel on the relation of the novel to poetry. It is in the novel that man recognises the gap between himself and his actions, between the world and the book in which it is narrated. The novel is the mirror of society. It replaces poetry in which man and life, the poet and his environment are, or can be, at one; romantic poetry, with its notion of love as an equation, was killed in Goethe’s Werther, by the very man with whose death, as The Revolt (pace Spengler) alleges, culture gave way to mere civilisation. The present moment is the sole reality of poetry, but, as Kundera says in relation to the elusiveness of the present moment in the novel, ‘all the sadness of life lies in that fact’.[67]

The further we tunnel into literature and history, the further we travel from the possibility of poetry, and this is elucidated (as we shall see in the following chapter) in the idea of the asylum: madhouse or prison? While therefore in Kundera’s words ‘a novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral’,[68] the imagistic quest for identifiable moments of time in which that existence is attested and celebrated cannot be reduced to narrative relation. Therefore life as a book becomes increasingly unreadable because it is increasingly unlivable; books (in Laing’s terms) are obliged to become schizophrenes in the new lingua franca; in this sense the apologia for literature as we have received it becomes untenable, because almost incapable of articulation. If we attempt to connect gnosis (knowing) with the creativity of relation (narration: the telling of things known), we clearly have a choice between poetry and prose. And so often, as I have shown in the case of Durrell’s early prose-poems and as I shall indicate again in relation to Caesar’s Vast Ghost, Durrell chose the route of poetry because it offered him less paradox, more creative freedom, than the ambiguities of prose. Prose is history. The Quintet is history, but a relation which bedevils the truth about relations, which behaves like a jackass putting on a show of tenderness. Its result is vertigo, a condition never experienced in truly metaphorical poetry.

Like the other major novelists of the century who realised that poetry was no longer adequate to address the problem of ontology (the future of the human race or at least of its imagination, its sense of creative responsibility) – Mann, Kafka, Canetti, Broch – Durrell made books which are both spaceless and timeless in the sense that, while they have relatively ascertainable locations and timescales, they might take place in any age and under any conditions. As we saw in the case of ‘The Sermon’ (CP 80-1), Everyman, assigning subsidiary roles to Faustus, Merlin, Aphrodite asks them to solve the problem of the presence of the irrational in his life. What exactly is it which causes us to think of life as elsewhere? Of the ‘otherness’ which we pursue into the next room only to hear him laughing behind us? Of the damnable daimon which tells us daily that we are outsiders, commuting between impossible notions of home? Why is life a riddle? Why is ‘Why?’ unanswerable?

Durrell’s concern was no longer the ‘investigation of modern love’, which he knew to have been overthrown by the forces manipulating ‘mob-ego’. It had become much more philanthropic, less costive, more tender; he was returning to the material of his earliest notebooks, which were filled with thoughts not of love or spent passion but of how and why the universe works and what – even why – man has a place in it.

In Part 4 we saw Durrell applying Spengler’s criteria to the modern west and finding them, if anything, over-optimistic. It would have been foolhardy and unrealistic of him to have expected any civilisation to maintain its greatness without periods of both growth and decay. The Greek world was proof of that: when he extolled its qualities he stood among its ruins. Yet he continued to extol them, even, in Sicilian Carousel, taking pains to elaborate the Greekness of the island’s most satisfying and more ancient features – and did so because he had stopped seeing time as an important element in civilisation. It was part of his elaborate ambition to re-establish the ubiquity of a state of mind which could transcend history and its incidentals such as religion and literature. He could not abandon the imagined world for the real, or the real for the imagined, because that would have been to release the affective hold which each exercised over him; while it would have removed the source of his anxiety, it would also have prevented him from being what that anxiety had made him - an artist.

The writer whose childhood provided images of a house ‘cernée de hautes montagnes enneigées’, which thenceforth passed from the status of real images to that of imagined realities, is one for whom art will always represent ‘triumph over the impossible’.[69] In Durrell’s case, the facts of his biography, the location of the ‘two birthplaces’, meant that the artistic journey was always ‘leading westward to Ireland and our childhood’, while the affective life always pointed eastward towards his ideas of death - the mystical route.

Whether he came finally to regard the source of his disturbance as mantic or semantic, whether he identified ‘the other’ as anima or shadow, double or twin, is less important than the question of whether he solved the problem of identity. If one parses the Quintet, if one analyses its arguments, its cadences, its storyline, its relation of game to quest, one is left with nothing; no result; zero. If we combine the acts of forgetting (the ‘trauma of birth’) and of remembering (giving names to things) we arrive at a curious autobiography; we reach a quincunxial notion which Jung and Franz cite from the Syrian Cave of Treasures: ‘when God created the world, his power went before him like the wind, from all the four quarters, and in the centre his power stood still’.[70] The Greek tragedies – Medea, Hecuba, Oedipus and especially Antigone – continue to haunt us because man has built cities on a hill which cannot be hid,[71] but which the tragedy of human experience can so easily destroy. When it does, ontology is put to the question, and the central issue of the Quintet, the one Durrell tried for so long to avoid, the question ‘Why?’, becomes not simply an enquiry into concrete cause and effect but into the abstract reason for our own being.

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[1] ‘Quartile’, ‘Priestess of Priapus’, is a character in Petronius’ Satyricon; other points on which Durrell may have consciously or subconsciously echoed Petronius include the atmosphere of the banquet chez Trimalchio which emerges both in the decadence of the Regina Hotel in The Black Book and the brothel scenes in Tunc (‘the ‘Nube’) and the Quintet.

[2] ‘Drexel’, like ‘Darley’, is suggestive of an anagrammatic or onomatopoeic corruption of ‘Durrell/Dixie’.

[3] While Durrell intended a deliberate reference to a French ‘Ripper’ in the translation of Quinx as Quinte: ou version Lande it is merely serendipitous that the protagonist, Sutcliffe, carries the same surname as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, a serial killer in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. Durrell had also employed the surname in a film treatment of his story ‘The Will-Power Man’.

[4] ‘Quatrefages’ as a surname was, Durrell maintained, a commonplace: ‘you find it almost everywhere – a street name – it’s like Jones really’, but also, and much more significantly, agreed that it means ‘crossroads’ (R. Green, ‘Lawrence Durrell’, Aegean Review). The point should be made that Durrell seldom employed more than rudimentary originality when giving names to characters: ‘Toby’ might have been borrowed from either Tristram Shandy or Point Counter Point; ‘Vasec’ (in The Black Book) from Tarr, ‘Cade’ from Tristram Shandy, ‘Nessim’ from Gerard de Nerval; while his stock of classical and biblical names (Livia, Joshua, Sam) indicates his reluctance to go far afield for new names for old characters who in themselves would not necessarily add to the received characterisation of fact or fiction: ‘I have never been interested in human beings as realities but as metaphors or ideograms – their poetic quiddity so to speak. They are like the obscenely funny notions which might pass through the mind of an idle god lying sunbathing’ (SIUC 42/19/8).

[5] CERLD inv. 1349 (notebook) contains a list originally dated ‘Feb 68’ with later additions, headed: ‘Dead/Within the space of a few years’ which includes the names of many friends, among them ‘Claude, Bernard Spencer, Roy Campbell… Richard Aldington… Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin [these were two of the later additions]… Seferis, Auden… My mother, John Gawsworth’ and subscribed: ‘for the Avignon book! Nogaret’s death map – “all this winter I have lived with suicide – Terrified” (diary of Piers)’.

[6] Cf. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’ V: ‘The end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time’; Complete Poems and Plays p. 197.

[7] Rhetorica Ad Cornificius Herennium 4.31.

[8] Summa IV, 1, xxix.

[9] Fiction Magazine op. cit.

[10] Ian MacNiven, ‘The Quincunx Quiddified: Structure in Lawrence Durrell’ in L.B. Gamache and I. MacNiven (eds.) The Modernists: studies in a literary phenomenon (London: Associated University Presses, 1987) pp. 234-48.

[11] CERLD uncatalogued item, publisher’s dummy used as a notebook, dated ‘Egypt… 1940-44’ which also contains the notes for ‘The English Book of the Dead’ and ‘The Aquarians’.

[12] Cf. Paul Lorenz, ‘Angkor Wat, the Kundalini and the Quinx: the human architecture of divine renewal in the Quincunx’ (conference paper, International Lawrence Durrell Society conference, 1988).

[13] MacNiven, ‘The Quincunx’ op. cit.

[14] In P. Hogarth, The Mediterranean Shore pp. 110, 122; confirmed in conversation with the author. The centrality of Constance is underlined by the fact that the book opens with ‘Quatrefages’ – the crossroads by which Durrell recognised the city of Avignon as a vast sanatorium as well as a political crossroads (Quintet 722) and also by the fact that Constance is dedicated to ‘Anaïs [Nin], Henry [Miller], Joey [Alfred Perlès]’, his lifelong intellectual companions.

[15] CERLD inv. 1344 (notebook) pp. 83, 85; cf. Quintet 351.

[16] In a photopcopy (CERLD miscellaneous file) from pp. 82-90 (Chapter 3: Architectural Sanctuary: part 4: the quincunx) of an unidentified work.

[17] Kundera, op. cit., pp. 24-5.

[18] CERLD inv. 1347, notebook ‘Minisatyrikon. Pont du Gard’ p. 7.

[19] CERLD inv. 1349 (notebook) p. 4.

[20] ‘Macabru’: it cannot have been incidental that ‘Marcabru’ or ‘Marcabrun’ was one of the earliest Provençal troubadours (cf. Denis de Rougemont, op. cit., pp. 96, 114, 118, 119).

[21] Alexandra David-Neel referred to the individual as being ‘composed of five parts… skandhas: material form (the body), sensations, perceptions, mental formations (ideas, volitions etc.) and consciousness’, Buddhism pp. 126-7; also cf. J.H. Bateson, ‘Creeds and Articles’ in Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics vol. 4, p. 234: ‘the skandhas as aggregate elements consist of material properties, sensations, abstract ideas, tendencies and potentialities, and thought-reason’; L. Durrell, CERLD Moreau/Wagner: ‘les cinq skandas sont le corps physique, ou psychologique, le sentiment, la perception, les facultés mentales inconscientes, et la conscience’.

[22] Fiction Magazine p. 61.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid., p. 64.

[25] Cf. R. Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: ideas of creativity in western culture (London: Hutchinson, 1988).

[26] Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language p. 4.

[27] Ibid., p. 1.

[28] Ibid., p. 7.

[29] Ibid., p. 8.

[30] CERLD inv. 1349 p. 17.

[31] SIUC/LD/Accession II.

[32] Cf. my reference to Freud’s case-histories above; conversation with the author.

[33] Cf. J. Joyce: ‘History… is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ – Essential James Joyce p. 25.

[34] Spengler, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 9.

[35] CERLD Moreau/Wagner p. 9.

[36] ( (the ophite symbol) occurs (marked by Durrell in his copy) in Garnier, The Worship of the Dead pp. 222-4. The relationship of the circle to the straight line is discussed (again, as noted by Durrell: SIUC 42/8/1) by Barbara Haynes in ‘The Mundane Egg’, Occult Review January 1939; the term ‘mundane egg’ itself derives, as Durrell would no doubt have been aware, from Blake, ‘Jerusalem’ (Blake’s Poems and Prophecies p. 230). ( (thanatos) has been mentioned as a possible source of the quincunx by W. Godshalk, ‘Durrell: Death, Love and Art’ in OMG/2, pp. 105-7. We should also note that explicit mention of the ‘Q’ motif favoured by Durrell was inserted into the typescript of Livia (cf. p. 11: ‘Five Q novels written in a highly elliptical quincunxial style invented for the occasion’.) Evidence derived from corrected typescript of Livia in CERLD.

[37] Cf. Eco, Semiotics p. 12.

[38] E.M. Forster, ‘The Machine Stops’ in Collected Stories.

[39] Cf. Kundera, op. cit., pp. 3-22: ‘The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes’.

[40] E. Pagels, op. cit., p. 154.

[41] Rank, Art and Artist pp. 391-2.

[42] Ibid., p. 76 (Rank’s emphasis).

[43] Cf. Bacon, ‘Of Great Place’: all rising to great place is by a winding stair’, Essays.

[44] K. Brown, op. cit., p. 105.

[45] Rank, op. cit. p. 101.

[46] Ibid., pp. 386, 101.

[47] Cf. Ephesians, 4:25.

[48] ‘Asides of Demonax’ p. 68.

[49] ‘Quiminal’ was another surname which Durrell stated to be ubiquitous: here he said (perhaps mischievously) that a woman of this name had been an adjunct to his house in Sommières when he moved in: R. Green, op. cit.; it is also possible, given Durrell’s word-play, and especially in view of Nancy Quiminal’s role as a mistress to members of the Gestapo, that he may have been punning on a combination of the English colloquial term for the female genitalia, ‘quim’, and the Roman topos ‘Quirinal’. We should also note the use of the word ‘quim’ as an onomatopoeic presence of the Skops owl in ‘The Placebo’, p. 34.

[50] We should not overlook the fact that ‘Trash’ (and indeed ‘Grace’) appears in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair.

[51] CERLD inv. 1349, p. 45.

[52] Cf. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966) p. 243.

[53] Ibid., p. 245.

[54] Jung and von Franz, op. cit., p. 22.

[55] Ibid., p. 20.

[56] Ibid., p. 22.

[57] Ibid., p. 25.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Ibid., p. 35.

[60] Ibid., p. 39.

[61] Ibid., pp. 68-9.

[62] Ibid., p. 79.

[63] Ibid., p. 103.

[64] Ibid., p. 121.

[65] V. Mercier, Beckett/Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) p. xii.

[66] MacNiven, ‘The Quincunx’ p. 237.

[67] Kundera, op. cit., pp. 24-5.

[68] Ibid., pp. 5-6.

[69] Ivor Browne, ‘Tom Murphy: the madness of genius’, Irish University Review (Spring 1987) pp. 129-36.

[70] Jung and von Franz p. 328.

[71] Gospel of St. Matthew, 5:14.

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