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The city of memories: Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria

If one of the novels in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet were submitted to a publisher today, it probably wouldn’t make it past the receptionist. A great, sprawling meditation on the tangled loves and confusing lives of a group of wealthy, privileged eccentrics living in 1930s Alexandria, the two I’ve read (Balthazar and Justine) break just about every rule in the creative writing book. The plot, as much as there is one, meanders aimlessly, all the characters speak in an identical voice that exactly mirrors that of the narrator, the prose is laden with archaic terms and classical allusions, and the mood of relentless intensity never lets up. Yet the novels are captivating in a way other, better-written books are not, because even though they present us with one writer’s idiosyncratic version of reality, that reality is presented with utter conviction and sincerity. Durrell himself was fully aware of what he was doing, as the note at the beginning of Balthazar reveals. In it, he explains that ‘modern literature offers no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition. Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. These four novels follow this pattern.’ In the postmodern age, such grandiose ambition might seem incredible, but Durrell was not being an egomaniac – he was simply following the themes of early 20th century modernism, in all its forms, when many still believed that art and literature could change the world. He acknowledges himself the outdatedness of his ambition, even as early as the 1950s (Balthazar was published in 1957): ‘These considerations sound perhaps somewhat immodest or even pompous. But it would be worth trying an experiment’ I have always found that the greatest artists are the ones who succeed in drawing you absolutely into their world, who weave such a compelling spell with words or music or images that even the flaws in the work become an essential part of it. Other great artists can present you with a perfectly achieved idea or object, to be consumed in the exact moment it is seen in and executed with the flawless precision that comes from years of work. Paul Klee, Philip Larkin and Stevie Wonder are examples of this kind of artist, and they and their kind are essential and great. But there is an especial wonder in being drawn into a fully realised artistic world, and it take a very different kind of artist to do that – the kind that writes a four-volume novel about one city and a few of its inhabitants. Evoking place is a key obsession for many novelists, and Durrell succeeds magnificently. Alexandria – a long-disappeared Alexandria – seems to breath from the page as he lovingly describes the moods of its harbour waters, the smell of the streets, the faces of diplomats, policemen, Bedouin and barbers, the wind swelling the curtains of the narrator’s tiny room, the sweep of coast and silent deserts outside the city walls. The characters live vividly, even though they all speak in the narrator’s voice – in fact that is part of the spell, as the quartet is telling the story of one man’s experience of a place and time. Wordy, humourless and intense, the characters should be insufferable, but Durrell’s longing eye lights on a hundred and one idiosyncracies and tiny mysteries that makes them all live and makes you care what will become of them. I say ‘longing’ because though the central theme of the quartet may seem to be the course of a love affair, in fact it is about memory and the almost painful longing that writers have to preserve long-distant times and feelings in prose that will bring it all back to life, rather than condemning it to a dry death on the page. Many times throughout the books the narrator makes reference to the continual struggle of the artist to catch a place and a time, and the act of love required to hold that form permanently. It’s love that inspires this kind of writing, not just romantic love, but love of existence. The unequal city with its countless tales of poverty, misfortune and unhappiness is presented with a loving eye that doesn’t want any part of it to be forgotten. It’s this loving capture of a personal version of reality which brings the work of Henry Miller to mind. Durrell greatly admired Miller, but though they shared the same all-encompassing eye Miller’s approach was much more rough-and-ready, not just in his sexual explicitness, but in his harsher assessments of the people around him. However, in Tropic of Capricorn, he evokes New York in the early 1920s with the same vividness that Durrell does Alexandria, taking the same joy in every beautiful and hideous aspect of the city. This is the great value of fiction – when written by a person consumed with longing for a place and time, it gives us a kind of completeness of vision that could never be provided by a straight-up factual account. We read non-fiction to find ways to change the wrongness of the world, we read fiction to balance that quest and find a fully realised version of reality. Much of this is a matter of taste – plenty would find Durrell’s intensity impossible to read, and there’s no denying that the novels have pretentious passages. The focus on the lives of the rich and idle, and their various hangers-on, is not exactly all-encompassing, even though just about every part of Alexandrian society features in some way. But if Durrell had ever adapted any of his content to suit a greater number of readers, or provide a more fully-rounded version of the story, the spell would immediately have been broken, because the sincerity would be gone. For any who do start the novels and find the first few pages heavy going, my advice would be to give it time to work its magic. As a postscript, I generally am not very interested in books about fading aristocracy – ‘Big House’ novels leave me cold – but between this quartet and the wonderful, little-known novel Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali I have developed a compulsive fascination with the former aristocracy of Egypt: the French-speaking Coptic community. Perhaps the heterogenuity of the world they lived in, as opposed to that of the aristocracy of England and Ireland, has something to do with it.

Towers on the cusp of something

From the Irish Times, May 2008:

//PLANNERS IN Dublin City Council have rejected a proposal to preserve the Pigeon House chimneys at Poolbeg by adding them to the Record of Protected Structures (RPS), on the basis that they are not of sufficient architectural, social or historical value.

The 207m (680ft) candy-striped twin chimney stacks at the ESB’s Poolbeg generating station have been one of the city’s most recognisable landmarks for more than 30 years, but have never had protection from demolition.

The situation has a greater than usual urgency due to the fact that the Poolbeg power station is to close in 2010. It seems likely that the site they are located on will undergo a change of function.

The ESB said no decision had been made on the future of the stacks and it was unlikely that any decision would be taken until the plant closed.

The company has also yet to decide whether it will sell the 90-acre site on which the stacks stand. The site is likely to become prime development land in the coming years with plans to move much of Dublin port’s activities outside the city and proposals to turn the Poolbeg area into a high-density urban quarter.//

The change in the economic landscape since 2008, along with scandals relating to inflated property values in the Docklands, means that the value of the ‘prime development land’ around Poolbeg may not rise any time soon. At the present time (August 2010) the generating station appears to be still operating and the alternators and drums are still standing, along with the towers. The station compound is run-down and looks semi-derelict, but is still protected by CCTV. The Shellybanks strand in front of the station is still far quieter than its neighbour Sandymount, the quiet broken only occasionally by hikers and wanderers. A foul smell in the area, possibly emanating from the gas used to power to combined cycle generators, puts off the dog-walkers and joggers of Sandymount. I haven’t been able to find any information as to whether the station will be closing in 2010, as announced by the ESB in 2007. The next change to happen in the area, in place of property development, will be the new incinerator which was under construction on a site just to the west of the generating station until 22 July, when work was stopped after the Department of the Environment failed to approve a licence for an outflow pipe.

The stop-and-start nature of industrial and commercial development in Ireland is frustrating from an economic point of view, but the upside it results in strange, intriguing half-derelict landscapes like that at Poolbeg and Pigeon House Road. This is a time for collecting images of industry winding down and the sense of poetry they evoke

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Stories from the city

In Our Time recently had a great two-part episode on the history of the city, charting the economic and political rise of cities from Ur to Bogota. Some of the information was familiar, and some quite unexpected. For example, after the fall of Rome heavily populated cities became a minority, and London didn’t reach first-century Roman population levels until the beginning of the 19th century. The political architecture of 18th century cities was illuminative – Hausmann’s wide boulevards were designed as much to prevent rebellious working classes from erecting barricades as they were for aesthetic reasons. The earliest ‘gated communities’ were the Georgian townhouses of 18th-century London and Dublin, where the mews at the back gave access to carriages, so that their inhabitants need never step on to the main street outside and encounter any of the ordinary inhabitants of the city. But cities were often reclaimed by the very people who they were designed to control – New Delhi was designed with Hausmann-esque boulevards after the Indian Rebellion of the 1850s in a concentrated effort to consolidate imperial power, however after independence in 1947 Lutyens’ architecture was celebrated and the city accepted as a key part of India’s history. Similar accomodations with the symbols of past conquest have occured in Dublin and Kingston. And there’s no doubt that a dense concentration of people, while often leading to poverty and disease, is a significant factor in the development of revolutionary ideals and a vision of a fairer society for all – Engels’ Manchester and early 20th century Paris and Moscow being key examples. Part of the second programme focused on the astonishing effect the development of the railways had on British cities, particularly London. One commentator referred to the light-speed adoption of railway travel as the equivalent of an ‘atomic age’ and the analogy is not exxagerated – within 30 years London and Paris had evolved from cities which relied on horse-drawn carriages to ones with mass under- and overground transit systems. This had the effect of finally bringing the rich into almost direct contact with the poor masses, as the engraving above by Dore reveals. Bridges ran directly over slum tenements, leaving the passengers in no doubt as to the conditions the inhabitants lived in. Many poor people were evicted from their homes without compensation in the early days of the railways, yet ironically it was the social mixture and opportunities for mobility brought about by those same railways that later helped increase employment opportunities, and subesequently, aspiration. Modern cities were analysed too, with a fascinating parallel drawn between the development of Los Angeles as a car city in the 1930s and its imitation by South American new cities like Mexico and Bogota. One contributor broke past the usual cliches about the relentless ugliness of modern cities – an argument that has been pitched against all new building since probably the days of Ur – and described how run-down slums in Bogota have evolved into respectable neighbourhoods after the introduction of good public transport. He seemed to be siding with the unfashionable but hopeful view that regeneration is always possible where people are concentrated together, even in desperate slums, and it is good planning, support and an understanding that millions in the developing world would rather live in cities than in the country that are needed to improve cities, not hand-wringing over their lack of beauty. Human life is messy and complex, therefore our cities are too, but that’s no excuse for neglect and doom-mongering. I would have liked more analysis of the cultural life of cities, and the greatest city of all, New York, was barely touched upon, but overall the series was extraordinarily comprehensive and informative. Above all, the history of cities is the history of humanity, a story in equal parts unequal, cruel, thrilling and wonderful. As Velutus says in Shakespeare’s Corialunus: ‘What is the city but the people?’ Listen to In Our Time: Cities here.