Durrell Against His Grain

...JL.is new book is a sequel to Tunc, published in 1968, and the duet is a dreary and muddled failure What the titles are meant to convey remains a cipher, though we are given the source, in Petromus A ut tunc, aut nunquam, "It was then or never " (In a sly moment, Durrell makes a naughty anagram of the first title, rather on the level of two small boys telling each other all the dirty words they know ) In Tunc-Nunquam the novelist Darley of Alexandria is replaced by Felix Charlock, a clever inventor For ancient Alexandria we now have "Merlin's, a monolithic corporation of the future, whose money-making tentacles reach mto every lucrative corner of the earth Felix first comes to the attention of Julian, the sinister and—well, mysterious head of Merlm's, when he builds a computer named Abel whose genius for storage memory and prediction go beyond any computer yet conceived Reluctantly, Felix allows himself and his machine to be sucked into the vast hierarchy of Merlin's, but he also strams to be free, remembering his carefree days in Athens when he lived with Iolanthe, a whore with a face of gold who becomes a famous movie star By the end of Tunc, the dream of freedom has vanished Felix has married the boss' sister, the enigmatic beauty Benedicta (Durrell's names are fruitier than ever), and his Iolanthe has died Science enters this fiction more directly m Nunquam, which completes what Durrell calls "a sort of novel-libretto based on the preface to The Decline of the West" But this note need no more send his readers scurrying back to Spengler than his Alexandria notes made them reach for an elementary Einstein Felix is plucked out of a mental hospital in Switzerland to work on Julian's current project, a man-made animated Iolanthe who will not only look like but actually be the dead girl come to life Provided with the best electronic gadgetry, technological expertise, plastic, and nylon that Merkn's money can buy, Felix does create a living doll that stunningly duplicates his ex-mistress But by endowing the creature with life, Felix also endows her with free will, which soon leads to disaster In place of the lively rounds of murder, seduction, rape, and sodomy that crowded the pages of Alex-andna we now have suffocatingly mannered and soph-omonc bull sessions that are supposed to be sophisticated philosophical dialogues about freedom and evil, Faust and alchemy, sex and the single robot—but the writing and thinking are embarrassingly inadequate to their pretensions After listening to pages of Julian's soul-searching about his obsession for Iolanthe, Felix remarks "Who would have thought it, Julian7 Iolanthe as the witch fulfillment, the which fulfillment?how do you prefer it9" One keeps stumbling over bad images?eyes like comugal raisins,' "a few light pantomime clouds puffed around us in glorious Cinerama " Now, much of the writing and conversation in the Alexandria books was also glib and sententious, swollen with quasi-profundity about love and power and money and passion, but it all seemed somehow perfectly m key with the air of genial charlatanism that pervaded its melodrama, all those rich men, chic women, and elegant deviants had their own plausibly theatrical vocabulary Tunc-Nunquam, though heady with talk about money and power, provides no dramatic framework for these abstractions, no characters with enough reality to bring them alive, nothing like the richly textured tapestry of Egyptian high-life that sustained the books about Justine What is intended to be an up-to-the-minute science-fiction parable about the nature of creation—perhaps even an allegory of the artist trying to breathe life into beings built of mky symbols on a page—and individual freedom and corporate menace is clearly beyond Durrell's novehstic reach because it is so wholly alien to his most deeply committed temper and taste A great deal of the charm in The Alexandria Quartet derived from precisely this old-fashioned romantic pull of the prewar Mediterranean lotus land And though Durrell returns to this epicene arcadia in some scenes of his new saga, the scheme of the two books?whether science fiction or Spengler—robs these formerly magic places of the descriptive vigor Durrell has brought to them in the past The alchemy of art has its own inexorable logic, and the wnter who goes as willfully against his gram as Lawrence Durrell does in his new book is courting failure on a grand but empty scale...

...Writers &Writing DURRELL AGAINST HIS GRAIN BY PEARL K BELL T m. en years ago when Clea, the final volume of Lawrence Durrell's ambitious Alexandua Quartet, was published, the literary air around his name was already thick with the incense of praise and getting thicker by the minute Some very respectable critics loudly sighed their thanks that, at last, one modern writer had courageously and brilliantly turned his back on the castrating shibboleths of the age, the dry prunes of laconic restraint that modern prose, nurtured on Hemmgway and his imitators, was heir to Here was a writer unafraid to plunder the rich country of the baroque, unabashedly romantic and ornate, a stylish devotee of the exotic and the erotic, his books as full-blown and gaudy with brocaded life and love as the North African city that was both his scene and mam character In fact, it had been a long time since the literati could sink their teeth into a prose so succulent and a world as lush as that of the mysterious, chic, and seductive Justine, her mysterious and very rich Coptic husband Nessim, the mysterious and tortured English writer Pursewarden, the mysterious French diplomat-satyr Pombal—not to mention the inscrutable atmosphere of northern Egypt before the Second World War It hardly mattered that one began casting Justine halfway through, that the choices became less taxing as Durrell's energy started to run down in the third volume, Mountohve, and sputtered out in the tedious repetitions of Clea Nor did it matter that Durrell, an eager it perhaps not altogether trustworthy exegete of his own work, said that his story should be taken, with very high seriousness, as a novelistic version of the theory of relativity and its propositions about space and time It was hard to keep a straight face when Durrell wrote, in the preface to Balthazar "Modern literature offers us 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 But it would be worth trying an experiment to see if we cannot discover a morphological form one might appropriately call 'classical'—for our time Even if the result proved to be a 'Science-fiction' in the true sense " I had always felt that this philosophical-scientific scaffolding was the author's self-fancying little joke on his enthusiasts, none of whom could easily embrace the fact that into every reader's life a little kitsch should fall But now, with the second volume of Durrell's new saga, Nunquam (Dutton, 318 pp $7 95), it seems that he was m earnest about science fiction, whatever its "true sense" may really be And surely no fashion of our time is more monumentally ill-suited to his peculiar talents and tastes Admittedly, m the decade since The Alexandria Quartet came to an end, some interestmg things have happened to science fiction, or at any rate to the once impenetrably snobbish barrier that separated the genre from serious literature (The only breakthrough was Brave New Woi Id ) By the late '60s, Robert Heinlein and Partisan Review were no longer strangers The twain had not only met, but embraced like long-lost brothers As science has seemed to become more obtrusive in the patterns of ordinary life, and its authority more a threat than a promise, writers have begun to look into the computerized universe of technology for their metaphors and even their method, finding in the enemy ever more exact adumbrations of the untold possibilities of human and mechanical madness For some writers, like Kurt Vonnegut Jr and William Burroughs, the lineaments of the not-so-imaginary future may be either comic or terrifying, and sometimes both at once, but the leap into the surreal scientific distance is as natural as blinking an eye For a wnter like Lawrence Durrell, science fiction, except as the kind of half-facetious smokescreen he made of relativity, is a catastrophic snare His romantic temperament, passion, and experience all point exactly in the opposite direction—not to the future, but to the world of the past, the multilayered record and ambiance of thousands of years of old civilization, old paganisms, that have made the Mediterranean and Aegean regions so much his rightful home What is more, for all his unregenerate bohemianism and literary modernism, Durrell is an intensely naturalistic writer whose forays into the language and complexity of technology read like a schoolboy reciting Latin declensions through clenched teeth XT JL...