The Alexandria Quartet

by Lawrence Durrell

  ‘We have both been eager to see you, and particularly Liza, because she felt that you might be able to help her. But we will talk about all that later.’ And with an abrupt smoothness he turned away from the real subject of my visit to enquire whether my post pleased me, and whether I was happy in it. An exchange of courteous pleasantries which provoked the neutral answers appropriate to them. Yet here and there were gleams of new information. ‘Liza was quite determined you should stay here; and so we got busy to arrange it!’ Why? Simply that I should submit to a catechism about her brother, who in truth I could hardly claim to have known, and who grew more and more mysterious to me every day — less important as a personage, more and more so as an artist? It was clear that I must wait until she chose to speak her mind. Yet it was baffling to idle away the time in the exchange of superficialities.

  Yet these smooth informalities reigned, and to my surprise the girl herself said nothing — not a word. She sat there on the sofa, softly and attentively, as if on a cloud. She wore, I noticed, a velvet ribbon on her throat. It occurred to me that her pallor, which had so much struck Clea, was probably due to not being able to make-up in the mirror. But Clea had been right about the shape of her mouth, for once or twice I caught an expression, cutting and sardonic, which was a replica of her brother’s.

  Dinner was wheeled in by a servant, and still exchanging small talk we sat down to eat it; Liza ate swiftly, as if she were hungry, and quite unerringly, from the plate which Mountolive filled for her. I noticed when she reached for her wineglass that her expressive fingers trembled slightly. At last, when the meal was over, Mountolive rose with an air of scarcely disguised relief and excused himself. ‘I’m going to leave you alone to talk shop to Liza. I shall have to do some work in the Chancery this evening. You will excuse me, won’t you?’ I saw an apprehensive frown shadow Liza’s face for a moment, but it vanished almost at once and was replaced by an expression which suggested something between despair and resignation. Her fingers picked softly, suggestively at the tassel of a cushion. When the door had closed behind him she still sat silent, but now preternaturally still, her head bent downwards as if she were trying to decipher a message written in the palm of her hand. At last she spoke in a small cold voice, pronouncing the words incisively as if to make her meaning plain.

  ‘I had no idea it would be difficult to explain when first I thought of asking your help. This book.…’

  There was a long silence. I saw that little drops of perspiration had come out on her upper lip and her temples looked as if they had tightened under stress. I felt a certain compassion for her distress and said: ‘I can’t claim to have known him well, though I saw him quite frequently. In truth, I don’t think we liked each other very much.’

  ‘Originally’ she said sharply, cutting across my vagueness with impatience ‘I thought I might persuade you to do the book about him. But now I see that you will have to know everything. It is not easy to know where to begin. I myself doubt whether the facts of his life are possible to put down and publish. But I have been driven to think about the matter, first because his publishers insist on it — they say there is a great public demand; but mostly because of the book which this shabby journalist is writing, or has written. Keats.’

  ‘Keats’ I echoed with surprise.

  ‘He is here somewhere I believe; but I do not know him. He has been put up to the idea by my brother’s wife. She hated him, you know, after she found out; she thought that my brother and I had between us ruined her life. Truthfully I am afraid of her. I do not know what she has told Keats, or what he will write. I see now that my original idea in having you brought here was to get you to write a book which would … disguise the truth somehow. It only became clear to me just now when I was confronted by you. It would be inexpressibly painful to me if anything got out which harmed my brother’s memory.’

  Somewhere to the east I heard a grumble of thunder. She stood up with an air of panic and after a moment’s hesitation crossed to the grand piano and struck a chord. Then she banged the cover down and turned once more to me, saying: ‘I am afraid of thunder. Please may I hold your hand in a firm grip.’ Her own was deathly cold. Then, shaking back her black hair she said: ‘We were lovers, you know. That is really the meaning of his story and mine. He tried to break away. His marriage foundered on this question. It was perhaps dishonest of him not to have told her the truth before he married her. Things fall out strangely. For many years we enjoyed a perfect happiness, he and I. That it ended tragically is nobody’s fault I suppose. He could not free himself from my inside hold on him, though he tried and struggled. I could not free myself from him, though truthfully I never wished to until… until the day arrived which he had predicted so many years before when the man he always called “the dark stranger” arrived. He saw him so clearly when he gazed into the fire. It was David Mountolive. For a little while I did not tell him that I had fallen in love, the fated love. (David would not let me. The only person we told was Nessim’s mother. David asked my permission.) But my brother knew it quite unerringly and wrote after a long silence asking me if the stranger had come. When he got my letter he seemed suddenly to realize that our relationship might be endangered or crushed in the way his had been with his wife — not by anything we did, no, but by the simple fact of my existence. So he committed suicide. He explained it all so clearly in his last letter to me. I can recite it by heart. He said: “For so many years I have waited in anguished expectation for your letter. Often, often I wrote it for you in my own head, spelling it out word by magical word. I knew that in your happiness you would at once turn to me to express a passionate gratitude for what I had given you — for learning the meaning of all love through mine: so that when the stranger came you were ready.… And today it came! this long-awaited message, saying that he had read the letters, and I knew for the first time a sense of inexpressible relief as I read the lines. And joy — such joy as I never hoped to experience in my life — to think of you suddenly plunging into the full richness of life at last, no longer tied, manacled to the image of your tormented brother! Blessings tumbled from my lips. But then, gradually, as the cloud lifted and dispersed I felt the leaden tug of another truth, quite unforeseen, quite unexpected. The fear that, so long as I was still alive, still somewhere existing in the world, you would find it impossible truly to escape from the chains in which I have so cruelly held you all these years. At this fear my blood has turned chill — for I know that truthfully something much more definitive is required of me if you are ever to renounce me and start living. I must really abandon you, really remove myself from the scene in a manner which would permit no further equivocation in our vacillating hearts. Yes, I had anticipated the joy, but not that it would bring with it such a clear representation of certain death. This was a huge novelty! Yet it is the completest gift I can offer you as a wedding present! And if you look beyond the immediate pain you will see how perfect the logic of love seems to one who is ready to die for it.”’

  She gave a short clear sob and hung her head. She took the handkerchief from the breast pocket of my coat and pressed it to her trembling lip. I felt stupefied by the sad weight of all this calamitous information. I felt, in the ache of pity for Pursewarden, a new recognition of him growing up, a new enlightenment. So many things became clearer. Yet there were no words of consolation or commiseration which could do justice to so tragic a situation. She was talking again.

  ‘I will give you the private letters to read so that you can advise me. These are the letters which I was not to open but was to keep until David came. He would read them to me and we would destroy them — or so he said. Is it strange — his certainty? The other ordinary letters were of course read to me in the usual way; but these private letters, and they are very many, were all pierced with a pin in the top left-hand corner. So that I could recognize them and put them aside. They are in that suitcase over there. I would like you to take them away and study them. Oh, Darley, you have not said
a word. Are you prepared to help me in this dreadful predicament? I wish I could read your expression.’

  ‘Of course I will help you. But just how and in what sense?’

  ‘Advise me what to do! None of this would have arisen had not this shabby journalist intervened and been to see his wife.’

  ‘Did your brother appoint a literary executor?’

  ‘Yes. I am his executor.’

  ‘Then you have a right to refuse to allow any of his unsold writings to be published while they’re in copyright. Besides, I do not see how such facts could be made public without your own permission, even in an unauthorized biography. There is no cause whatsoever to worry. No writer in his senses could touch such material; no publisher in the world would undertake to print it if he did. I think the best thing I can do is to try and find out something about this book of Keats’s. Then at least you will know where you stand.’

  ‘Thank you, Darley. I could not approach Keats myself because I knew he was working for her. I hate and fear her — perhaps unjustly. I suppose too that I have a feeling of having wronged her without wishing it. It was a deplorable mistake on his part not to tell her before their marriage; I think he recognized it, too, for he was determined that I should not make the same mistake when at last David appeared. Hence the private letters, which leave no one in doubt. Yet it all fell out exactly as he had planned it, had prophesied it. That very first night when I told David I took him straight home to read them. We sat on the carpet in front of the gas-fire and he read them to me one by one in that unmistakable voice — the stranger’s voice.’

  She gave a queer blind smile at the memory and I had a sudden compassionate picture of Mountolive sitting before the fire, reading these letters in a slow faltering voice, stunned by the revelation of his own part in this weird masque, which had been planned for him years before, without his knowing. Liza sat beside me, lost in deep thought, her head hanging. Her lips moved slowly as if she were spelling something out in her own mind, following some interior recitation. I shook her hand softly as if to waken her. ‘I should leave you now’ I said softly. ‘And why should I see the private letters at all? There is no need.’

  ‘Now that you know the worst and best I would like you to advise me about destroying them. It was his wish. But David feels that they belong to his writings, and that we have a duty to preserve them. I cannot make up my mind about this. You are a writer. Try and read them as a writer, as if you had written them, and then tell me whether you would wish them preserved or not. They are all together in that suitcase. There are one or two other fragments which you might help me edit if you have time or if you think them suitable. He always puzzled me — except when I had him in my arms.’

  A sudden expression of savage resentment passed across her white face. As if she had been goaded by a sudden disagreeable memory. She passed her tongue over her dry lips and as we stood up together she added in a small husky voice: ‘There is one thing more. Since you have seen so far into our lives why should you not look right to the bottom? I always keep this close to me.’ Reaching down into her dress she took out a snapshot and handed it to me. It was faded and creased. A small child with long hair done up in ribbons sat upon a park bench, gazing with a melancholy and wistful smile at the camera and holding out a white stick. It took me a moment or so to identify those troubling lines of mouth and nose as the features of Pursewarden himself and to realize that the little girl was blind.

  ‘Do you see her?’ said Liza in a thrilling whisper that shook the nerves by its strange tension, its mixture of savagery, bitterness and triumphant anguish. ‘Do you see her? She was our child. It was when she died that he was overcome with remorse for a situation which had brought us nothing but joy before. Her death suddenly made him guilty. Our relationship foundered there; and yet it became in another way even more intense, closer. We were united by our guilt from that moment. I have often asked myself why it should be so. Tremendous unbroken happiness and then … one day, like an iron shutter falling, guilt.’

  The word dropped like a falling star and expired in the silence. I took this unhappiest of all relics and pressed it into her cold hands.

  ‘I will take the letters’ I said.

  ‘Thank you’ she replied with an air now of dazed exhaustion. ‘I knew we had a friend in you. I shall count on your help.’

  As I softly closed the front door behind me I heard a chord struck upon the piano — a single chord which hung in the silent air, its vibrations diminishing like an echo. As I crossed among the trees I caught a glimpse of Mountolive sneaking towards the side door of the house. I suddenly divined that he had been walking up and down outside the house in an agony of apprehension, with the air of a schoolboy waiting outside his housemaster’s study to receive a beating. I felt a pang of sympathy for him, for his weakness, for the dreadful entanglement in which he had found himself.

  I found to my surprise that it was still early. Clea had gone to Cairo for the day and was not expected back. I took the little suitcase to her flat and sitting on the floor unpacked it.

  In that quiet room, by the light of her candles, I began to read the private letters with a curious interior premonition, a stirring of something like fear — so dreadful a thing is it to explore the inmost secrets of another human being’s life. Nor did this feeling diminish as I proceeded, rather it deepened into a sort of terror almost a horror of what might be coming next. The letters! Ferocious, sulky, brilliant, profuse — the torrent of words in that close hand flowed on and on endlessly, studded with diamond-hard images, a wild self-analytical frenzy of despair, remorse and passion. I began to tremble as one must in the presence of a great master, to tremble and mutter. With an interior shock I realized that there was nothing in the whole length and breadth of our literature with which to compare them! Whatever other masterpieces Pursewarden may have written these letters outshone them all in their furious, unpremeditated brilliance and prolixity. Literature, I say! But these were life itself, not a studied representation of it in a form — life itself, the flowing undivided stream of life with all its pitiable will-intoxicated memories, its pains, terrors and submissions. Here illusion and reality were fused in one single blinding vision of a perfect incorruptible passion which hung over the writer’s mind like a dark star — the star of death! The tremendous sorrow and beauty which this man expressed so easily — the terrifying abundance of his gifts — filled me with helpless despair and joy at once. The cruelty and the richness! It was as if the words poured from every pore in his body — execrations, groans, mixed tears of joy and despair — all welded to the fierce rapid musical notation of a language perfected by its purpose. Here at last the lovers confronted one another, stripped to the bone, stripped bare.

  In this strange and frightening experience I caught a glimpse, for a moment, of the true Pursewarden — the man who had always eluded me. I thought with shame of the shabby passages in the Justine manuscript which I had devoted to him — to my image of him! I had, out of envy or unconscious jealousy, invented a Pursewarden to criticize. In everything I had written there I had accused him only of my own weaknesses — even down to completely erroneous estimates of qualities like social inferiorities which were mine, had never been his. It was only now, tracing out the lines written by that rapid unfaltering pen, that I realized that poetic or transcendental knowledge somehow cancels out purely relative knowledge, and that his black humours were simply ironies due to his enigmatic knowledge whose field of operation was above, beyond that of the relative fact-finding sort. There was no answer to the questions I had raised in very truth. He had been quite right. Blind as a mole, I had been digging about in the graveyard of relative fact piling up data, more information, and completely missing the mythopoeic reference which underlies fact. I had called this searching for truth! Nor was there any way in which I might be instructed in the matter — save by the ironies I had found so wounding. For now I realized that his irony was really tenderness turned inside out like
a glove! And seeing Pursewarden thus, for the first time, I saw that through his work he had been seeking for the very tenderness of logic itself, of the Way Things Are; not the logic of syllogism or the tide-marks of emotions, but the real essence of fact-finding, the naked truth, the Inkling … the whole pointless Joke. Yes, Joke! I woke up with a start and swore.

  If two or more explanations of a single human action are as good as each other then what does action mean but an illusion — a gesture made against the misty backcloth of a reality made palpable by the delusive nature of human division merely? Had any novelist before Pursewarden considered this question? I think not.

  And in brooding over these terrible letters I also suddenly stumbled upon the true meaning of my own relationship to Pursewarden, and through him to all writers. I saw, in fact, that we artists form one of those pathetic human chains which human beings form to pass buckets of water up to a fire, or to bring in a lifeboat. An uninterrupted chain of humans born to explore the inward riches of the solitary life on behalf of the unheeding unforgiving community; manacled together by the same gift.

  I began to see too that the real ‘fiction’ lay neither in Arnauti’s pages nor Pursewarden’s — nor even my own. It was life itself that was a fiction — we were all saying it in our different ways, each understanding it according to his nature and gift.