The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [216]
‘But by now you will think that I have simply become an opinionated old shrew. Perhaps I have. What does it matter, pro-vided one can get a single idea across to oneself?
‘There is so little time; with the news from Europe becoming worse every day I feel an autumnal quality in the days — as if they were settling towards an unpredictable future. And side by side with this feeling, I also feel the threads tightening in our sleeves, so to speak, drawing us slowly back towards the centre of the stage once more. Where could this be but to Alexandria? But perhaps it will prove to be a new city, different to the one which has for so long imposed itself on our dreams. I would like to think that, for the old one and all it symbolized is, if not dead, at least mean-ingless to the person I now feel myself to be. Perhaps you too have changed by the same token. Perhaps your book too has changed. Or perhaps you, more than any of us, need to see the city again, need to see us again. We, for our part, very much need to see you again and refresh the friendship which we hope exists the other side of the writing — if indeed an author can ever be just a friend to his “characters”. I say “we”, writing in the Imperial Style as if I were a Queen, but you will guess that I mean, simply, both the old Clea and the new — for both have need of you in a future which….’
There are a few more lines and then the affectionate super-scription.
CONSEQUENTIAL DATA
* * *
Some shorthand notes of Keats’s, recording the Obiter Dicta of Pursewarden in fragmentary fashion:
( a)
‘I know my prose is touched with plum pudding, but then all the prose belonging to the poetic continuum is; it is intended to give a stereoscopic effect to character. And events aren’t in serial form but collect here and there like quanta, like real life.’
( b)
‘Nessim hasn’t got the resources we Anglo-Saxons have; all our women are nurses at heart. In order to secure the lifelong devotion of an Anglo-Saxon woman one has only to get one’s legs cut off above the waist. I’ve always thought Lady Chatterley weak in symbolism from this point of view. Nothing should have earned the devotion of his wife more surely than Clifford’s illness. Anglo-Saxons may not be interested in love like other Europeans but they can get just as ill. Characteristically, it is to his English Kate that Laforgue cries out: “Une Garde-malade pour l’ amour de l’ art! ” He detected the nurse.’
( c)
‘The classical in art is what marches by intention with the cos-mology of the age.’
( d)
‘A state-imposed metaphysic or religion should be opposed, if necessary at pistol-point. We must fight for variety if we fight at all. The uniform is as dull as a sculptured egg.’
( e)
Of Da Capo: ‘Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.’
( f)
‘Art like life is an open secret.’
( g)
‘Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart’s affections.’
( h)
‘Truth is independent of fact. It does not mind being dis-proved. It is already dispossessed in utterance.’
( i)
‘I love the French edition with its uncut pages. I would not want a reader too lazy to use a knife on me.’
( j)
In a book of poems: ‘One to be taken from time to time as needed and allowed to dissolve in the mind.’
( k)
‘We must always defend Plato to Aristotle and vice versa because if they should lose touch with each other we should be lost. The dimorphism of the psyche produced them both.’
( l)
‘To the medieval world-picture of the World, the Flesh and the Devil (each worth a book) we moderns have added Time: a fourth dimension.’
( m)
‘New critical apparatus: le roman bifteck, guignol or cafard.’
( n)
‘The real ruins of Europe are its great men.’
( o)
‘I have always believed in letting my reader sink or skim.’
( p)
On reading a long review of God is a Humorist: ‘Good God! At last they are beginning to take me seriously. This imposes a terrible burden on me. I must redouble my laughter.’
( q)
‘Why do I always choose an epigraph from Sade?