Two major sequences of novels taking modern Egypt as their theme began to appear in the mid-1950s.
Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz published the first novel in his Cairo Trilogy, Between the Palaces, in 1956, followed by Palace of Desire and Sugar Street in 1957. British novelist Lawrence Durrell, never the recipient of the Nobel Prize but considered for it at the height of his fame, published Justine, the first novel in his Alexandria Quartet, in 1957, followed in quick succession by Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea in 1958 and 1960.
There, however, the similarity ends. Whereas Mahfouz famously described the lives of three generations of the same family against the backdrop of major social change in Cairo between the First and the Second World Wars, Durrell’s version of Alexandria was both more focused and more diffuse. His subject was the lives of individuals from the different foreign communities living in the city before and during the Second World War while at the same time gesturing towards its more than 2,000-year history.
The result, in Mahfouz’s case, is a trilogy of novels recognised today as underpinning his reputation as a keen observer and analyst of modern Egyptian life. In the case of Durrell, the situation is more ambiguous, since while it was recognised as a major achievement on publication and is still responsible for influential ideas about Alexandria even today, the Quartet’s gloss has probably faded over the past half century together with its author’s reputation.
Durrell arrived in Alexandria early in the Second World War as a refugee driven out of Greece, where he had worked at an English school in the Peloponnese, by German troops following their invasion of the country in 1941. He was thus a reluctant visitor to Egypt, and though he lived at different times in both Cairo and Alexandria and travelled widely in the country, he never lost the habit of thinking of Egypt as a stopover before he could return to Greece. This he did as soon as the War ended in 1945.
However, in the meantime Durrell’s debt to Egypt was greater than he was often prepared to let on. While he had laid the groundwork for his career as a novelist when working in Greece and living in Paris, which he did at the invitation of the American writer Henry Miller, he had published little before arriving, a refugee, on Egypt’s shores. His first glimpse of Alexandria was not promising: he arrived late at night as the boat he was travelling in had been trying to avoid German planes. The city seemed more dead than alive, with the port stilled for fear of bombs and the rest of the urban area swaddled up behind black-out curtains for the same reason.
Durrell and his wife travelled straight to Cairo, where they found themselves in a foreign city, knowing no one and having nothing with them aside from what they had been able to grab before the advancing troops. They must have been concerned at what life might have in store for them.
Nevertheless, the War did not come at a bad time for Durrell. In his late twenties when he arrived in Egypt, with a first novel appearing in London in 1938 and the determination to follow a literary career, he needed material for his writing and the stimulation of a different set of circumstances to those he had found in Greece. Paris of course had already been memorialised in the works of a good half dozen expatriate English-language writers in previous decades, among them American residents like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.
While he would probably never have visited Egypt had it not been for the Second World War, once in the country and forced to make a go of things Durrell threw himself into the storied layers of expatriate life, with its extensive and varied national communities. He studied Egypt’s history and the country’s Hellenistic past. There was also its wartime role as the centre of British military operations in the Middle East.
All these things turn up in the Alexandria Quartet that he began writing a decade later when he was living in the south of France. While it might be too much to say that Egypt made Durrell a writer, since that was a path he was already on, it certainly helped to make him the kind of writer that he became. It gave him not only a subject-matter – Alexandria – but also a cast of characters in the individuals of different backgrounds that the War had washed up in Egypt.
While Durrell wrote other books, some of which may still be finding audiences today, his name is more closely linked to Egypt and Alexandria than to any of the other places in which he lived. All his other books, whether novels or the memoirs he wrote of life in Greece, exist in the shadow of the Alexandria Quartet, the thousand pages of which are likely to remain as closely associated with Alexandria as Mahfouz’s trilogy of novels are with Cairo.
Orientalism: Looking through the four novels of the Alexandria Quartet today, what may strike readers most is their evident orientalism.
For Durrell, perhaps like some other foreign residents of Egypt at the time, the country and its population served as an exotic backdrop, by turns fascinating and disturbing, for their own mostly psychological trials. While this may be a familiar characteristic of much expatriate writing, and possibly all travel writing, it seems especially marked in Durrell’s case.
Hemingway in his Paris novels shows little knowledge of France, his subject being the lives of his American characters confronted by what to them was a challenging foreign environment. Something similar takes place in Durrell’s novels about Alexandria, where the city, though always present as a looming backdrop, is generally impenetrable and two-dimensional like something made of pasteboard before which his expatriate characters perform their lives.
The settings are often magnificently realised. Durrell’s search for verbal pictures, perhaps in this way providing his readers with images of the city that could outdo the black-and-white photography of his time, gives rise to descriptive passages that while they can hold up the narrative of events also provide them with much of their highly charged atmosphere.
It is easy to accuse Durrell of overwriting – purple passages abound – but his linguistic extravagance, ready to go against the rules of clipped good taste, seems deliberate, as if Alexandria, already providing Durrell with subject matter and a sense of place, had also provided him with the strength to strike out on his own in rejecting the standard English fare of the time.
Born in India and forced from an early age into a succession of expensive private schools, which he left without qualifications, Durrell had a distrust, even a distaste, for what he called “pudding island.” Island readers have sometimes repaid the compliment, considering Durrell’s novels to be an exotic foreign import and probably better read in French.
“I had to come here in order completely to rebuild this city in my brain – melancholy provinces which the old man saw as full of the ‘black ruins’ of his life,” the narrator says towards the beginning of Justine, referring to his need to go back over his memories of Alexandria, re-exploring them in literary form rather as another “old man” – the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy – had done in his poems.
“Clang of the trams shuddering in their metal veins as they pierce the iodine-coloured meidan of Mazarita. Gold, phosphorus, magnesium paper… Six o’clock. The shuffling of white-robed figures from the station yards. The shops filling and emptying like lungs in the Rue des Soeurs. The pale lengthening rays of the afternoon sun smear the long curves of the Esplanade [Corniche], and the dazzled pigeons, like rings of scattered paper, climb above the minarets to take the last rays of the waning light on their wings.”
“Ringing of silver on the money changers’ counters. The iron grille outside the bank still too hot to touch. Clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages carrying civil servants to cafes on the sea-front. This is the hour least easy to bear, when from my balcony I catch an unexpected glimpse of her walking idly towards the town in her white sandals, still half asleep, Justine.”
Other characters enter the narrator’s reverie in addition to Justine, an “Alexandrian society woman,” wife of a rich pasha called Nessim, his house a mass of “statues and palm loggias, Courbets and Bonnards,” canvases by 19th-century French painters. They include Melissa, Balthazar, a doctor in a government clinic, Pombal, a French consular employee, the English novelist Pursewarden, retired Major Scobie, honorary bimbashi of the police, and Clea, a painter “without lovers or family ties, without malices or pets, concentrating with single-mindedness on her painting.”
Their relationships are the novelist’s proper subject, the narrator says. Only in the work of “the painter and the writer can reality be reordered, reworked, and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth of gold – the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life… in this way not to evade destiny, but to fulfil it in its true potential – the imagination.”
Later novels in the series rework the material in Justine from other points of view, including those of Balthazar, Mountolive, a junior English diplomat, and Clea. Some threads are pulled out to extravagant length, notably the stories of Scobie, finally almost canonised in Clea, and Pursewarden, whose thoughts on novel-writing, kept within bounds in Justine, threaten to overwhelm Mountolive, while others disappear back into the texture of the whole.
Durrell can seem to forget his own romantic strictures on the novel in the later books, having said earlier that its aim is to re-imagine the world. Few readers are likely to wish Mountolive, the longest novel in the series, any longer than it is, not only because of Pursewarden’s almost interminable reflections, but also because of an incomprehensible political plot involving gunrunning in Palestine.
Durrell described himself as being first and foremost a poet, and he published an impressive corpus of poems during his lifetime. It is probably the language that carries the reader through the Alexandria Quartet, with its various narrators often being able to find the right image to pin down a scene. Balthazar in the second novel in the series describes Scobie’s arrest by saying that the police post was “packed with sweating policemen all showing the startled whites of their eyes like horses in the gloom.”
He was also an accomplished satirist, notably in describing diplomats like Mountolive and Pombal, Alexandrian envoy of the French Quai d’Orsay.
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, 1957-1960.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 18 July, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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