Durrell's Clea

...If, he asks, the great ideals of political, social, economic, and religious systems have failed to work because man's basic nature always pollutes them, then why should we think we are capable of making the infinitely more delicate dialectic of love work for us...

...The question raised is disturbing...

...In short, when the ego has been put down enough to create, it has also been put down enough to begin to try to love...

...Shortly thereafter, the withdrawn Darley begins to write, his passivity shattered by the meaning of all that he has witnessed working through his memory...

...It is the handmaid of silent content, essential only to joy and to love...

...The two achieve, at first, a kind of idyl, but then it sputters out...

...But, with Clea, Durrell's meaning is manifest...

...it became an alternative to political, social, and economic action, an alternative to philosophy, religion, and, indeed, rationalism...

...They drift apart...

...He adds, speaking through the voice of a character: "This because it is impossible I call The Whole Joke...

...That is not odd, because in the first three volumes one could only sense what he was driving at...

...Then there is an accident—the result, significantly, of an intellectual's fooling around—and Clea's painting hand is torn...

...Love was raised to the level of ideology by Yeats and by a hundred others...

...Of course, the ideal is impossible of realization, but perhaps people can go far enough toward it to achieve some kind of meaningful happiness, perhaps they can shed enough of that egotism that foredooms most love to achieve at least a vision of good...

...And here is Durrell, beginning every volume with a quotation from De Sade, philosopher and poet of the perverse, ironically laying his scene in one of those crossroad Middle Eastern cities that so delighted the Nineteenth Century romancers, telling us that this is nonsense...

...He too offers us a hope, but a much more difficult one than that implied by the advice to go out and love somebody...

...That is unarguable, but is it not curious that only at its very end, two people can meet, love, and live as they do in most novels and as they are alleged to do in reality all the time...

...The safest thing was to applaud the obvious skills of the literary man at work...

...This is not an examination, this is a pathologist's dissection, turning love over and over like dead flesh on a scalpel—and what a diseased thing it is...

...Time, perversion, stupidity, neurosis, psychosis, intrigue, indifference, even politics and religion have done their work on it...

...The value, the beauty of love, the only surviving tree of the romantic and mist-shrouded ideological forest bequeathed us by the Nineteenth Century is, he says, dead...

...what scenes of splendor and squalor...

...That trunk, around which we dance so madly, singing our belief that it symbolizes the one true meaning of life, is no longer worshipful in the old ways...

...Love, they say, gives meaning...

...Still the silence persists...

...In a novel you are not juggling fruit and wood, but characters, motivations, ideas, plot gimmicks, and the like—which makes the whole effort even more difficult...

...You must get everything—apples, oranges, Indian clubs—effortlessly into the air, keep them going for a certain time in ever-shifting, ever-startling patterns, then catch them all again with the same graceful ease with which you started the trick and built in each new complication...

...But he is not simply another existentialist telling us that we are hollow men...

...The two break through as artists and human beings not merely because they want so much to do their chosen work, but because they are willing to undergo the necessary psychic preparation to do it well...

...find it and you will find meaning...

...It has no intention, that is to say no theology . . . Art is the purifying factor merely...

...An interesting question, is it not, when stated so baldly...

...How infinitely more interesting it is when examined with Durrell's subtlety...

...Just how difficult only those who have attempted the stunt know—that is probably why fellow artists are so taken with Lawrence Durrell's "Alexandria Quartet," the last movement of which, Clea (Dutton), has recently been published...

...The meaning of Durrell's work has received but scarce and superficial comment...

...But is it...

...All this seems to posit a special class which alone is eligible for salvation...

...It predicates nothing...

...He rings a hundred changes on it, shows it in the limelight of farce, in the purple of tragedy, worrying in every way at this idea which lies at the heart of his great work...

...For the grand meaning is that the ideology of love is a lie...

...What does "love as an ideology" mean...

...No wonder some critics say the book is "obscene," which in the common meaning of that word it is not...

...But fitted with an artificial hand, she suddenly breaks through as an artist...

...How the words flashed, dashed, and splashed...

...The great critical cliche about Durrell's quartet is that it is an examination of every facet of love in our time...

...So Durrell gives us, in his last volume, the love of the poet-becoming, Darley, and the painter-becoming, Clea...

...So the artists Darley and Clea are symbols not of a theory that only the artist may be saved, but of the relevancy of art and its unique insights for our situation...

...minds as generous as Camus, Tillich, and Fromm, not to mention lesser talents, have turned to love as an answer to our need for belief in something...

...To which Yeats replied: And maybe what they say is true Of war and war's alarms, But O that I was young again And held her in my arms...

...Try art, he suggests, for "to become an artist one must shed the whole complex of egotisms which led to the choice of self-expression as the only means of growth...

...what a collection of grotesques and cripples they illuminated in their lightning flashes...

...Successful novels, unlike circus performances, must have meaning...

...How we hoped it was viable, particularly in the last fifteen years, when we have witnessed the failure of so many "big" ideologies, so many "big" systems...

...But Pursewarden, the one mature artist among Durrell's characters, writes: "I see art more and more clearly as a sort of manuring of the psyche...

...The book closes with the promise that the two lovers will be reunited on a new plane...

...Just before World War II Thomas Mann wrote: "In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms...