The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [213]
and as a writer I wanted you to myself and did so keep you. Do you see?
‘There is nothing I can do to help you now — I mean help your book. You will either have to ignore the data which Balthazar has so wickedly supplied, or to “rework reality” as you put it.
‘And you say you were unjust to Pursewarden; yes, but it is not important. He was equally unjust to you. Unknown to either of you, you joined hands in me! As writers. My only regret is that he did not manage to finish the last volume of God is a Humorist according to plan. It is a loss — though it cannot detract from his achievement. You, I surmise, will soon be coming into the same degree of self-possession — perhaps through this cursed city of ours, Alexandria, to which we most belong when we most hate it. By the way, I have a letter from Pursewarden about the missing volume which I have carried around with me among my papers for ages, like a talisman. It helps not only to revive the man him-self a bit, but to revive me also when I fall into a depression about my work. (I must go to the village to buy eggs. I shall copy it out tonight for you.)
‘Later. Here is the letter I spoke about, harsh and crabbed if you like, but none the less typical of our friend. Don’t take his remarks about you too seriously. He admired you and believed in you — so he once told me. Perhaps he was lying. Anyway.
‘ Mount Vulture Hotel
‘ Alexandria
‘My dear Clea:
‘A surprise and delight to find your letter waiting for me. Clement reader thank you — not for the blame or praise (one shrinks from both equally) but for being there, devoted and watchful, a true reader between the lines — where all real writing is done! I have just come hotfoot from the Café Al Aktar after listen-ing to a long discursion on “the novel” by old Lineaments and Keats and Pombal. They talk as if every novel wasn’t sui generis — it is as meaningless to me as Pombal generalizing about “les femmes”
as a race; for after all it isn’t the family relationship which really matters. Well, Lineaments was saying that Redemption and Original Sin were the new topics and that the writer of today…. Ouf! I fled, feeling like the writer of the day before yesterday, and unwilling to help them build this sort of mud-pie.
‘I’m sure old Lineaments will do a lovely novel about Original Sin and score what I always privately call a suck-eggs d’ estime (it means not covering one’s advance). In fact, I was in such des-pair at the thought of his coming fame that I thought I would go
straight off to a brothel and expiate my unoriginal sense of sin right away. But the hour was early, and besides, I felt that I smelt of sweat for it has been a hot day. I therefore returned to the hotel for a shower and a change of shirt and so found your letter. There is a little gin in the bottle and as I don’t know where I shall be later on I think I’ll just sit down and answer you now as best I can until six when the brothels start to open.
‘The questions you ask me, my dear Clea, are the very questions I am putting myself. I must get them a little clearer before I tidy up the last volume in which I want above all to combine, resolve and harmonize the tensions so far created. I feel I want to sound a note of … affirmation — though not in the specific terms of a philosophy or religion. It should have the curvature of an em-brace, the wordlessness of a lover’s code. It should convey some feeling that the world we live in is founded in something too simple to be over-described as cosmic law — but as easy to grasp as, say, an act of tenderness, simple tenderness in the primal relation between animal and plant, rain and soil, seed and trees, man and God. A relationship so delicate that it is all too easily broken