I have not run into them so often lately, but Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and its constituent novels (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea) were once among the paperbacks often to be found on the shelves of used bookstores and some of your better upstairs bedrooms. Products of an ambitious late Modernist moment, they joined projects of similar scope—Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, Anthony Powell’s Proustian Dance to the Music of Time—and often shared the company of other works of postwar fiction understood as serious: the early novels of Iris Murdoch and William Golding. They were also rumored to be racy, in the manner of, but somehow less scandalous than, the Henry Miller novels that also gathered in used bookshops. My own copy of Justine was part of a handful I bought on the cheap during the summer after my freshman year in college, along with a pocket-size copy of Golding’s The Spire. (No Miller books in that haul.) After many moves, these are both still on a shelf in my office.
Durrell’s quartet differed from some of the books with which I associate it, not because it was any more or less experimental (or sexy) than they but, instead, because it quickly became apparent that for all the interaction and intrigue among the characters (Justine and her lover, Darley, her husband, Nessim, and a cast of others, all compellingly drawn), the most important presence and something of a protagonist was the city of Alexandria itself. The Egyptian city is not simply a backdrop for erotic conspiracy or, in the later volumes, the machinations of the British security services. With its complex geography and layers of history, it emerges as a character in its own right, “the unconsciously poetical mother-city exemplified in the names and faces which made up her history.”[1] Like the Dublin of Joyce or the London of Woolf, this was a city that, it seemed, the author had come to know so well that he could narratively become it, think as it thought and feel as it felt.
There were good reasons for that impression. Though he lived there for only a fairly short time during the Second World War, Alexandria was the site of intense emotional experience for Durrell. He came to the city after a strenuous and dangerous evacuation from Kalamata when Greece fell to the Nazi invasion in 1941. Durrell, his wife, Nancy, and their infant daughter, Penelope, were evacuated to Egypt. The marriage, already strained, broke apart, and Nancy took Penelope to live with her in Jerusalem. Durrell accepted a posting in Alexandria as British Information Officer, finding satisfaction in the work and in the expatriate British community with whom he mingled. He also found two new loves in Alexandria: the poetry of Constantine Cavafy, itself inextricable from the city and its history, and Yvette (Eve) Cohen, who would become his second wife. New work, new friends, and new love in a new place all conspired (I choose the word deliberately) to produce new work in the form first of Justine and then in the novels that complete the tetralogy.
Though the novels grow out of Durrell’s intense experience of Alexandria during the war, the first was not published until 1957, and the quartet was not complete until 1960. This fact presents a problem for Michael Haag’s posthumously published new biography, Larry: A Biography of Lawrence Durrell, 1912–45.[2] The subtitle is a bit misleading; an epilogue jumps forward to 1953 and covers four years in the mid-fifties when Durrell lived in Cyprus. Still, the book hews mostly to what its cover promises, which means that this is a biography of the author that does not include the years of his greatest renown, the years during which he wrote and published the novels for which he is now remembered. And though the book is a biography, focused more on the life than the work, its cutoff date deprives it of any substantial treatment of the novels themselves, which is a shame both because they are the reason for a biography of Durrell in the first place and because there are interesting things to say about their weaving of the intimate and the institutional, the erotic and the historic, and about their experiments with narrative structure.
All of these things go largely unsaid in the book partly because its author, Haag, died in 2020, before he could complete his projected new biography. Haag was the author of a previous book about Durrell and his family, The Durrells of Corfu (2017), as well as earlier histories of the Knights Templar and the city of Alexandria. Whether by design or accident, Larry reads as the first half of a projected multi-part biography. Mark Ellingham’s Editor’s Note reports that at the time of Haag’s death, “a good part of the biography—covering the most compelling years, in Michael’s opinion—was, more or less, complete.”[3] It was this material, closest to readiness for publication, that he decided to publish as Larry. As a result, not only do we not get to the writing, publication, and reception of Durrell’s best-known work (to say nothing of the three decades the author lived after he wrote The Alexandria Quartet), we also don’t quite reach his second marriage (to Eve Cohen), though we have hints of its eventual dissolution in the Cyprus epilogue. Even if the original design had been for a treatment, as the jacket copy has it, of the “author as a young man,” the final chapter and the epilogue lack any of the closure signals we associate with the consummation of a finished project. What we have is a book that feels (appropriately, in light of the circumstances) incomplete and unfinished. More than this, it must be said that we also have a book that adds little of substance to the authoritative account of Durrell’s life (all of it) offered by Ian S. MacNiven in his Lawrence Durrell: A Biography (1998). (This is unfortunate, because though MacNiven’s book covers all of Durrell’s life, it does so with more discretion than full disclosure would require. MacNiven does not explore the allegations of sexual abuse made by Durrell’s daughter, Sappho, nor Sappho’s suicide in 1985. Ending where it does, Haag’s book does nothing to fill such gaps.)
The unfinished character of Larry arises not only from its structure, focusing only on half of the subject’s life, but also from its level of finish (or lack thereof). Some editorial errors are inconsequential: a photo caption identifies “Bernard Spencer, with an unkown [sic] singer,” a comparison of Mountolive “mauled by frenzied child prostitutes” mistakenly cites “Dionysus being torn apart by the Maenads” rather than Pentheus.[4] Others, however, are more substantial. In lieu of a typical introduction, the book opens with an obituary of Durrell that Haag wrote for Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal in 1992. This brief sketch of the life does none of the work expected of an introduction. No overarching themes of the biography are announced, and no mention is made of the book’s limited focus on the first half of Durrell’s life (the obituary, of course, covers the writer’s entire life). Some passages suffer from snarled chronology, Haag doubling back awkwardly having jumped ahead in time. Pages after a section on Durrell’s time in Paris, for example, we belatedly read that “Larry was marked by Tessa, a dark-haired Jewish beauty, with whom he had had a brief but intense affair.”[5] While it may be the case that “nobody seems to have noticed” the affair at the time, it is something that the biographer would be expected to notice, and to call readers to notice, not least because Haag goes on to write that “Tessa’s image would long stay with” Durrell and that “she would be the original model for Justine.”[6] This is the kind of thing the writer would probably have smoothed out in revision. Some chapters’ narratives stall in long contextual digressions—on the history of British-style schools in India, on the Amritsar massacre, etc.—so that the thread of Durrell’s story disappears for pages at a time. Here, too, one imagines that Haag would have tightened and clarified so that his protagonist remains in view. The two problems combine to produce some buried ledes. Twenty pages after introducing the family’s conundrum about where to send young Larry to school, we find, at the end of a paragraph about home life in Jamshedpur, that “Larry had, in fact, been away from the family for much of the previous three years, at St. Joseph’s College in Darjeeling.”[7]
Unsurprisingly, given Haag’s earlier book, the account is more straightforward once Durrell (along with his mother and siblings, and his first wife, Nancy) are living on Corfu. This move comes after his early years in India, his unhappy school days in London and Canterbury, the penurious Bohemian life that followed his failure to pass the Cambridge entrance exams, and his moves between London and Bournemouth, where his mother and siblings had settled after their own emigration from India in the wake of Durrell’s father’s death. Durrell was inspired by stories of Corfu that he heard from his friends, George and Pam Wilkinson, who had ended up on the island after a cycling trip through Europe. Life on the island was inexpensive and offered a respite from the dull climate (both literal and cultural) against which Durrell chafed in England. It also offered a site in which he could settle his mother, who suffered from alcoholism and had experienced a breakdown in 1932, as well as his younger sister and brothers. One of those brothers, Gerald, who would go on to become a well-known naturalist, later published a comical account of the move in My Family and Other Animals. Haag cites the book frequently, but also corrects and balances its version of the story with passages from Lawrence Durrell’s letters and Nancy Myers’s recollections. He is scrupulous and clear about Durrell’s movements in and around Corfu. He guides the reader smoothly through the family’s moves from one villa to another, introduces a growing cast of Corfu eccentrics, and provides compelling descriptions of Larry and Nancy’s life in the remote village of Kalami, where they settled. It was in Corfu that Durrell learned that his first novel, The Pied Piper of Lovers, had been accepted for publication by Cassell, and it was in Kalami that he compiled the experiences out of which he would later compose Prospero’s Cell, his compelling portrait of the island. Durrell thrived on Corfu, though his happiness there did not prevent him from traveling with Nancy to Paris and London in 1937 and 1938, largely at the invitation of, and to spend time with, Henry Miller, who had become one of Durrell’s most frequent and supportive correspondents.
Also as expected, in light of another of his earlier books, Haag’s discussion of Alexandria and of Durrell’s time in the city is strong. Ellingham is apologetic about Haag’s repurposing research for City of Memory, his book on Alexandria, for this part of the biography, writing that readers of the earlier book “may be disappointed to find much here that is familiar.”[8] But Haag is an expert guide to the city and its history. He neatly sketches the geography, following Durrell on his daily commute via tram, from Stanley Bay and the Sporting Club to the Mustafa Pasha station, the Ramleh terminus, and the walk to his office on Rue Toussoun Pasha and watching him socialize in the nearby bars and cafes. As in the section on Corfu, Haag brings a cast of supporting characters to vivid life in Alexandria, from Gwyn Williams, the head of the English department at Farouk University (now Alexandria University) to Joseph McPherson, known as Bimbashi, the eccentric retired British diplomat and civil servant and expert on the moulid, a folk religious festival commemorating the birthday of a Coptic or Muslim holy man. Haag explores not only the way the narrow streets of the Arab quarter influenced Durrell, but also the way he was led to the spirit of the city by the poetry of Cavafy, with whom Durrell became acquainted through friends in Alexandria.
Finally, though the book’s timeline does not extend to the years during which Durrell wrote and published The Alexandria Quartet, Haag effectively grounds some of Durrell’s characters and some events in those novels’ plots in the writer’s wartime experience of the city. He regularly concludes the description of a friend or acquaintance of Durrell’s with the fact that they became the model for a character in the novels. McPherson, he writes, is the obvious model for Scobie just as Walter Smart, the Oriental Counsellor at the British Embassy in Cairo, provided the basis for Mountolive, and Cavafy’s friend, Gaston Zananiri was the original of Balthazar. Incidents, often stories that Durrell heard rather than witnessed, became episodes, as when a couple of anecdotes involving the discovery of human heads—in a sack loaded onto a donkey, on the seat of a taxi on a city street—become a story told to Darley, the narrator of Justine, about the head of a Swedish diplomat’s wife being found in the possession of some Bedouin women who are trying to remove gold teeth from it. At a couple of moments, we get glimpses of what might have been had Haag lived to complete and revise this biography. Narrating Durrell’s visit to London in 1938, Haag describes the origins of the novel as a projected “Book of the Dead.” He reproduces a map that Durrell sketched in his notebook, the intersection of Oxford Street and the Tottenham Court Road dividing the page into quadrants in each of which Durrell located images, questions, or concepts out of which he would go on to generate the characters and convoluted plots of the Quartet. Though he has not yet arrived in Alexandria at this point, Durrell has begun to develop the distinctive narrative experiment that characterizes the novels. Haag quotes Durrell’s fragmentary notes: “These are not ‘characters’: a character is an integer in a temporal series: whereas these are personalities embodied by reminiscence.”[9] Here, Durrell is feeling his way toward the central role that memory plays both thematically and structurally in the novels he would write twenty years later, novels in which the streets and sites of Alexandria replace those of London. Haag draws the connection by directing readers to the conclusion of Justine: “The slow unreality of time begins to grip them [the characters], blurring the outlines—so that sometimes I wonder whether these pages record the actions of real human beings.” Two hundred pages later, in the Cyprus epilogue, Haag presents Durrell again mapping and conceptualizing what will become the quartet’s first novel: he writes that in a notebook labeled “Justine Rough Draft,” Durrell “drew a view of Alexandria from the sea—a mosque, a church, the Pharos surmounted with its statue of Poseidon—combining all three epochs of the city’s history. Then he filled a page of his notebook with another translation of [Cavafy’s poem] ‘The City.’”[10] We see how the novel brews in Durrell’s mind for years, how it moves with him from place to place, from time to time, deepening and darkening as it does so, and we wish for a more coherent and fully elaborated critical discussion that pulls together some of the strands that now feel something like loose ends.
Many books are luxuries, and it is probably unproductive to wonder whether any book is really necessary. Nevertheless, I finished this biography nagged by the question of why it had been published, especially when it is so obviously unfinished. On the one hand, the publication honors the labors of a writer described on the dust jacket as the world’s preeminent biographer of Lawrence Durrell, work that was unfortunately cut short by the author’s death. On the other hand, those used bookstore shelves stand before my mind’s eye, loaded with their immovable copies of Justine and Balthazar, of Mountolive and Clea. The particular late Modernism of Durrell (like that of his friend, Henry Miller) commands a dwindling share of the contemporary audience. Durrell and readers alike might have been better served by a book that understood the need to persuade an audience that they should be interested in both the life and work rather than assuming that interest. By way of contrast, consider the late John Carey’s biography of Durrell’s contemporary, William Golding.[11] Though his subject had won the Nobel Prize that Durrell never received (though he was on the shortlist for a couple of years in the 1960s), and though the Lord of the Flies remains on high-school curricula in both the U.S. and the U.K., Carey sees the need to bring readers in with both a clearly narrated story and explicit claims for the quality of Golding’s fiction (which he also describes and of which he offers brief but effective readings). Haag’s sometimes muddled and overly detailed narrative and his hasty gestures toward the novels fails to meet unknowing or unconvinced readers where they are. For all of its detail about Durrell’s first thirty-odd years, this biography does little for readers not already committed to the proposition of his importance.
[1] Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet (single-volume edition) (London, 1962), p. 194.
[2] LARRY: A Biography of Lawrence Durrell, 1912–45, by Michael Haag. Profile Books. £25.00.
[3] Haag, viii.
[4] Haag, p. 355, p. 288.
[5] Haag, p. 206.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Haag, p. 52.
[8] Haag, p. ix.
[9] Haag, p. 208.
[10] Haag, p. 418.
[11] John Carey, William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies (London, 2010).
