The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [426]
Hail! Albion drear, fond home of cant!
Pursewarden sends thee greetings scant.
Thy notions he’s turned back to front
Abhorring cant, adoring ****
But if you wish to enlarge the image turn to Europe, the Europe which spans, say, Rabelais to de Sade. A progress from the belly-consciousness to the head-consciousness, from flesh and food to sweet (sweet!) reason. Accompanied by all the inter-changing ills which mock us. A progress from religious ecstasy
to duodenal ulcer! (It is probably healthier to be entirely brain-less.) But, Brother Ass, this is something which you did not take into account when you chose to compete for the Heavyweight Belt for Artists of the Millennium. It is too late to complain. You thought you would somehow sneak by the penalties without being called upon to do more than demonstrate your skill with words. But words … they are only an Aeolian harp, or a cheap xylophone. Even a sea-lion can learn to balance a football on its nose or to play the slide trombone in a circus. What lies beyond…?
No, but seriously, if you wished to be — I do not say original but merely contemporary — you might try a four-card trick in the form of a novel; passing a common axis through four stories, say, and dedicating each to one of the four winds of heaven. A continuum, forsooth, embodying not a temps retrouvé but a temps delivré. The curvature of space itself would give you stereo-scopic narrative, while human personality seen across a continuum would perhaps become prismatic? Who can say? I throw the idea out. I can imagine a form which, if satisfied, might raise in human terms the problems of causality or indeterminacy…. And nothing very recherché either. Just an ordinary Girl Meets Boy story. But tackled in this way you would not, like most of your contem-poraries, be drowsily cutting alon g a dotted line!
That is the sort of question which you will one day be forced to ask yourself (‘We will never get to Mecca!’ as the Tchekhov sisters remarked in a play, the title of which I have forgotten.) Nature he loved, and next to nature nudes,
He strove with every woman worth the strife,
Warming both cheeks before the fire of life,
And fell, doing battle with a million prudes.
Who dares to dream of capturing the fleeting image of truth in all its gruesome multiplicity? (No, no, let us dine cheerfully off scraps of ancient discarded poultice and allow ourselves to be classified by science as wet and dry bobs.)
Whose are the figures I see before me, fishing the brackish reaches of the C. of E.?
One writes, Brother Ass, for the spiritually starving, the castaways of the soul! They will always be a majority even when everyone is a state-owned millionaire. Have courage, for here
you will always be master of your audience! Genius which cannot be helped should be politely ignored.
Nor do I mean that it is useless to master and continuously practise your craft. No. A good writer should be able to write anything. But a great writer is the servant of compulsions which are ordained by the very structure of the psyche and cannot be disregarded. Where is he? Where is he?
Come, let us collaborate on a four-or five-decker job, shall we? ‘Why the Curate Slipped’ would be a good title. Quick, they are waiting, those hypnagogic figures among the London minarets, the muezzin of the trade. ‘Does Curate get girl as well as stipend, or only stipend? Read the next thousand pages and find out!’
English life in the raw — like some pious melodrama acted by crimina l churchwardens sentenced to a lifetime of sexual mis-givings! In this way we can put a tea-cosy over reality to our mutual advantage, writing it all in the plain prose which is on ly just distinguishable from galvanized iron. In this way we will put a lid on a box with no sides! Brother Ass,