A Forgotten Master?

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

i read The Alexandria Quartet with intensity as a teenager and can still recall its breath defying attraction fifty years on ...

here, at last, someone tries the virtually impossible ... resurrecting Laurence Durrell's reputation from its present obscurity as the brother of the animal writer .... oh what a hero he seemed then ...

Not Joyce, not Kafka, not Proust, not Pasternak, not Garcia Marquez, not Bellow. The most important 20th-century novelist for a 21st-century reader could well be Lawrence Durrell. This year celebrates the centenary of his birth. Next to nothing is taking place to celebrate it. But Durrell, whose best work came in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was the first to explore the poetry and puzzles of life in an era of globalization (a clunky term Durrell would have improved on), hyphenated identities, perpetual movement. “I think the world is coming together very rapidly,” he said in an interview in 1983, “so that within the next fifty years one world of some sort is going to be created. What sort of world will it be? It’s worth trying to see if I can’t find the first universal novel. I shall probably make a mess of it—but we shall see.”

and a Paris Review Interview 1959

[umslopogaas]

He's not forgotten by me, its ages since I read his books but they are still on the shelf. I can recall bits of the Quartet, but can remember nothing of The Revolt Of Aphrodite, or of The Dark Labyrinth. I do remember very well Sauve Qui Peut and Stiff Upper Lip, they are both very funny and quite unlike his serious stuff. Must try and find a copy of Esprit De Corps, somehow that one escaped me.

[vinteuil]

... I remember reading (and being impressed by) The Alexandria Quartet when I was a Serious Teenager.

Then I grew up.

At university those doing Modern Languages (I was not of their number) regularly encountered chunks of Lawrence Durrell in their examinations as test-pieces for translation into French/German/Spanish/Italian/whatever - clearly his luscious prose was deemed to be a good test of candidates' mastery of vocabulary if nothing else.

I much enjoyed his squibs on diplomatic life ('Esprit de Corps', Sauve qui Peut', 'Stiff Upper Lip').

I dipped into The Alexandria Quartet the other day; I can still understand the seduction and the allure - but I don't think I'll wade through it all again. The notion that he might be 'the most important twentieth century novelist' - well...

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

don't really believe such titles as most important 20th century anything ... but still good seeing an attempt to resurrect his profile ...

[Flosshilde]

I read the Quartet in my twenties, & was very taken by the exoticism. I think it was recommended by a (female) friend, who seemed nearly as exotic - & I envisioned the central female character - Clea? - as being physically very like my friend. I had thought of re-reading the books (I think I still have them) but it's rather like re-visiting a place you were once enthralled by - will it live up to your memories of it?

[Extended Play]

I can't remember which literary critic it was, but his/her point was that -- once you have rightly admired the verbal wizardry -- the trouble is that there is a gaping moral void at the core of Durrell's work. I do think that is a valid point. I first read the Quartet as a teenager (something of a pattern here, judging by posts above!) and returned to it in later years, and read several of the other novels -- but probably won't take them down from the shelves again. As it happens, at the moment I'm re-reading the last work of one of my favourite novelists of the 20th Century, R.C. Hutchinson, a writer whose reputation has probably faded even more than that of Durrell. Yet in Hutchinson I find a craftsmanship, a mastery of the language, and a moral compass, that make his neglect all the more regrettable.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

well one person's moral void is another's sense of alienation/displacement or disengagement quite a theme of the 20th century and an illuminating attribute of modern art ....

precisely whose moral compass being a major point at issue in the last seventy or so years at least ...

i have not read R C Hutchinson but will look him out ...

[verismissimo]

I keep thinking that I'll re-read the Quartet, get out the first part... and read something else. Ah well...