The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

by Lawrence Durrell

  * * * * *

  The days pass.

  “I, Felix Charlock, bound in mind and body!” You will see now why I had to bring all this up to date, in order to straighten the record—for now the whole responsibility of the firm has fallen on my shoulders. These last weeks have been full of boardroom conferences, votes of confidence, resolutions, and so on. I have not hesitated to shoulder the burden for the vanished Julian and Jocas. Outwardly nothing much has changed—or else I went through everything in a sort of dream. Baum fed the press some story of an advertising firm with a dummy, and successfully accounted for the accident, which satisfied the law. When Julian’s will was proved we found that he had agreed to let his body be taken to Polis to share the family mausoleum—probably the only concession he had ever made in his life to Jocas.

  For the rest, we have come to a great decision, Benedicta and I; it will not be hard to guess that the prophecy of Zeno has been occupying me, preoccupying me very much. Indeed I now feel it less as a prophecy than as a sort of command, from myself to myself, so to speak. I have hardly had to mention it to my wife, she knows full well what I am planning. The microfilm archives which house all our contracts—I have had a careful look at the small building. Fortunately all the stock is on nitro-cellulose film, so highly inflammable that a single time-pencil should be enough to set it off. This is a relief—I feared that we had transferred it to some new acetate which might be hard to dispose of. Marchant is in full agreement with me. The job is an easy one. It should burn fine in the archive vaults with their 118 degrees controlled temperature. I feel tremendously calm and composed, very much master of myself.

  We are already in the big house and preparing for Christmas; I have chosen Xmas Eve for the send-up. I have explained carefully to our guests that the fire will be lit while they are at dinner. The first reactions should come in within a day or so. The only one who has shown alarm is Baum who said “Either everything will disintegrate, the Firm will begin to dissolve; or else nothing, Mr. Felix, absolutely nothing. People will be afraid to take advantage of the fact that they have no contractual written obligations. They might stay put from funk or….” So it will be either/or once again; it will be now or never.

  I have been working all day and am enormously weary. Benedicta has had fires lit in the big ballroom where once she shattered all the mirrors. It has been transformed now into rather an elegant room. It is full of flowers. There is some fine black jazz playing and we have been dancing, dancing in complete happiness and accord. And we will keep on this way, dancing and dancing, even though Rome burn.

  THE END

  POSTFACE

  Dear C.-M. V.,

  Well, here it is, the second volume I promised you. As always I have tried to move from the preposterous to the sublime! It was you who said once that all my novels were inquests with open verdicts. This was true. But in this one I have tried to play about with the notion of culture—what is it? The provenance of the ideas will be familiar to you. It’s a sort of novel-libretto based on the preface to The Decline of the West. Freud is there too, very much there. I remember too that you remarked once about Spengler “He’s not pessimistic at all. He is a realist, that is all.” Well in its way this novel in two parts tries to take a culture-reading merely. Of course the poetic game is to try and put a lid on a box with no sides. But when you go on deck, for example, to find that the ship is out of sight of land you are pleased to see a map in the chart-room with a flag in it, stuck there by an invisible hand. It marks your position. By intention this is such a flag.

  For the rest, the form presents no singularities. A two-part novel of an oldfashioned sort; perhaps you might say an Ur-novel. Nor do the epigraphs present any mystery. It’s always now or never—since we are human and enjoy the fatality of choice. Indeed the moment of choice is always now. For the rest, the fabled two is the human couple, but it is also the basic brick out of which our culture is constructed—mathematics, measure, motion, poetry. And so cheers,

  ever thine

  LD

  P.S. To Ur is human to forgive divine.

  About the Author

  Lawrence Durrell was born in 1912 in India. He attended the Jesuit College at Darjeeling and St Edmund’s School, Canterbury. His first literary work, The Black Book, appeared in Paris in 1938. His first collection of poems, A Private Country, was published in 1943, followed by the three Island books: Prospero’s Cell, Reflections on a Marine Venus, about Rhodes, and Bitter Lemons, his account of life in Cyprus. Durrell’s wartime sojourn in Egypt led to his masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet, which he completed in southern France where he settled permanently in 1957. Between the Quartet and The Avignon Quintet he wrote the two-decker Tunc and Nunquam. His oeuvre includes plays, a book of criticism, translations, travel writing, and humorous stories about the diplomatic corps. Caesar’s Vast Ghost, his reflections on the history and culture of Provence, including a late flowering of poems, appeared a few days before his death in Sommières in 1990.

  Copyright

  Tunc first published in 1968

  Nunquam first published in 1970

  Tunc and Nunquam published together in one volume as The Revolt of Aphrodite 1974

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  Tunc © 1968 by Lawrence Durrell

  Nunquam © 1970 by Lawrence Durrell

  The right of Lawrence Durrell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–28872–4