Ah, the Wonder of My Body; The Wandering of My Mind: Classicism and

Lawrence Durrell's Literary Tradition

James R. Nichols
Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 33, No. 4, Lawrence Durrell Issue, Part II. (Winter, 1987), pp.
449-464.
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Ah-the Wonder of My Body; the

Wandering of My Mind: Classicism and

Lawrence Durrell's Literary Tradition

In Act I, Scene 2 of Lawrence Durrell's much-ignored play Sappho,

Diomedes, a secondary character and seemingly indifferent poet (what
some of us might call, somewhat unsympathetically, a drunken bum)
wakes from his stupor of the previous night's party only to face three
silly young girls, Joy, Chloe, and Doris, maids who are trying
desperately to clean up the house. The girls try to hurry him on his way,
but fat old Diomedes will not be chastened. Bedecked with wreaths he
exclaims to the girls, "Twice this week I've won the laurel from
Sappho."'
Crowned with laurel, fat, vulgar, wine-beslobbered, old Diomedes
makes innocuous chit-chat with three silly young things, one of whom is
to marry his son, and tries to sleep once more, only finally to be forcibly
carried off stage by the girls while crying to the audience "A rape! A
rape! A palpable rape!" (Sappho, 17).
Ironically, as a secondary character Diomedes outlines the basis of
the play's value system-man as body and flesh, art and life as imitations
of one another. It is his later death that so irrevocably casts Sappho off
from what she might have so easily possessed, that for which all
Durrell's protagonists search, human love.
Diomedes is crucial to both the action and theme of Sappho. For
Durrell, he is the embodiment of the old male boast that one wishes to
live to a hundred and twenty and then be shot by a jealous lover. Thus,
it is poignant tragedy near the play's conclusion when Diomedes

Cover design by Lawrence Durrell, from a Quarry Notebook.

Lawrence Durl-ell in Manhattan.

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

chooses suicide because of his son's death, and Sappho can only blame
herself for both losses.
Diomedes had been life itself, living, breathing, sweating flesh,
gloriously untainted by the constant reflection and self-incrimination
which is Sappho's lot. As a representative of the healthy pagan world,
Diomedes is without peer in the Durrellian canon. He is true man,
asserting life, joy, optimism, communality, carnality, conviviality, a life
of human consequence as opposed to mechanism, energy and
accomplishment without guilt, and the embodiment of spirit and flesh
as one. He remains the quintessence of Durrell's paganism-man in
dialogue with himself to create, not discover, himself.
Earlier, he sings to Sappho and Phaon:
Though appetite is free, yet the belly is bounded.
Though desire is limitless, capacity is small.
Shall we define the free man mathematically
As the center of a circle with no circumference?
As almost a God, yet never quite a man. (Sappho, 68)
The stanza describes what Lawrence Durrell conceives pagan man to be.
Old Diomedes, with all his faults and flaws, represents no less than the
organizing principle and paradox of human society. He is pagan, fleshy
normality before original sin and, therefore, is in no need of Christ's
sacrifice upon the cross. At the core of Sappho's failure is her
abandonment of Diomedes until it is too late to help him. Both Sappho
and Pittakos strive toward their own understanding of personal virtue.
Only Diomedes avoids the seductions of that abstraction and places
himself squarely within the physical and material world. He is too
sensitive to deny the truths of human experience and too complex not
to revel in them.
As exemplum, much ignored and much forgotten Diomedes
illustrates a crucial characteristic of Lawrence Durrell's artistic tradition.
Perhaps surprisingly, Durrell is essentially a classicist, and the central
structure of his classicism is a denial of original sin and the heroic myth.
There are no epic heroes in Durrell, neither a Homeric Odysseus nor a
smoldering and dominant Lawrencian Mellors. There is not even a
darkly anti-heroic Richardsonian Lovelace, so carefully does Durrell
avoid romantic self-indulgence.
Diomedes, possibly more than any other Durrellian protagonist
(published in 1950, Sappho is far removed from the Quartet), suggests
the pathway along which Durrell's paganism has always led him.
Durrell's artistry has been informed by a view of man that trusts in the
communality and supportive nature of the heroic ideal.

AH-THE

WONDER OF MY BODY

As an answer to what he believes has become the sickness of a

modern Christian world, Durrell's paganism asserts three major
paradoxes about the human nature: that the tragedy of human
experience is neither good nor evil but merely inevitable, that the
separation of flesh and spirit is false and destructive of human
happiness, and finally that pure freedom, either physical or psychological, is an illusion which, once recognized, assures its own reality.
If we look closely at Sappho, a surprising possibility thus emerges.
The play can and should be read as classic and tragic morality,
non-Christian and non-allegorical no doubt, but clearly as a lesson
about the proper position of mankind within the cosmos. The play
becomes a lesson in the nature of human vanity, the danger of seeking
individual virtue, and the emptiness of worldly achievement that denies
intimate, human contact.
At the play's end, Sappho can only tell young Kleis to "Weep,
Weep, Weep" because, evidently, the "murderous armament of time is
without compassion or pity" (Sappho, 186).We may hope for no graces
to live by, muses Sappho self-pityingly. Yet Kleis has asked only for a
kiss. Grace itself! And a kiss is love, and compassion, and human
reassurance. The knife-like pain of Sappho's tragedy is that she wishes
to assert both of Durrell's great goals of life-Joy and Community-and
is unable to do so because she searches for the great pretenderswisdom and personal virtue.
Listen to Sappho's poem in response to Diomedes:
"0 Freedom which to every man entire

Presents imagined longings to his fire,

T o swans the water, bees the honey-cell,

T o bats the dark, to lovers loving well,

Only to the wise may you

Restricting and confining be,

All who half-delivered from themselves

Suffer your conspiracy,

Freedom, Freedom, prison of the free." (Sappho,69)

When Sappho finishes, Durrell's stage direction proclaims only

moderate applause, but Diomedes is asked by Phaon to surrender the
laurel. Under protest, he begins to but is interrupted by Minos and
never does. The paradox remains. Only to the wise is freedom
confining, and Sappho is without her laurel. We are left to wonder.
That Durrell is essentially a classicist is not an entirely new
suggestion. John Unterecker has noted, quite rightly so, that Durrell's
indeterminacy is a rejection of modernism, a re-evocation, implies

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

Unterecker, of the psychological novel of Richardson with a freed

humanistic morality."~ is not just idle to note, by the way, that the
comment applies equally well to Dorothy as to Samuel. Modernism has
never been very modern. But, most importantly, Unterecker places
Durrell with Joyce, Eliot, Gide, Woolf, and the others. Good company
for a pagan and classicist.
The same artistic classicism has been noted repeatedly by other
critics. G. S. Fraser insists that Durrell's Black Book characters are
'yonsonian humours."3 For Fraser, Durrell is very old-fashioned. His
readings are classical: Horace, Sade, La Rochefoucauld, Goethe,
Petronius. His style is often Pateresque and mannerist-too selfconscious at times. Like Iris Murdoch (and like Eliot as well?) he plays
games, and his belief in man's freedom is essentially Kierkegaardian
(Fraser, 13-15). T o the list we might also add that Durrell's comic
cynicism is quintessentially Auden, an artistry that makes Durrell a bit
of a "social moralist" (Fraser, 38) in spite of Fraser and because of
Groddeck. Certainly Tunc and Nunquam display a clear Audenesque
and Juvenalian social conscience.
Weigel, too, places the same influence within Durrell's intellectual
development, adding Wodehouse, Rimbaud's letters, and Zen Buddhism4 to the "soup-mix continuum." Harry T. Moore has also noted
the influence upon Durrell of Henry Miller and Anai's Nin.5 Later, Alan
Warren Friedman included Nietzsche and Yeats, among other^.^ The
list could go on and on. Durrell is widely read both in and by others.
But central to understanding Durrell's classicism is not the length of his
readings as much as its variety. His mind has ranged widely, carrying
with it a profound humanity and limitless vision.
Still, it would be a serious mistake to see Durrell's paganism as
merely a rejection of what he considers the unnecessarily guilt-ridden
Christian principles of western society. Durrell is a much more positive
thinker. There can be no doubt that he is at odds with the
establishment, and that "morality," whatever that might have meant to
Augustine or Calvin, is to Durrell a human concoction, not God's. Both
Sappho and Faust discover this.
Even Durrell's early concept of a "Heraldic Universe," that state in
which individual man lives so as to assert a human significance beyond
himself, is a re-evocation of the ethos of Petronius and Virgil. It is
essentially pagan in that it defies time and the assumption of human
guilt and is a positive approach to human experience. All knowledge is
a well from which individuals draw, and such knowledge is neither
inherently evil nor good but specific to the situation, the persons, and

A H - T H E WONDER O F MY BODY

their demands. The heraldic paradox, as Ray Morrison has so clearly

noted, is "Where life and death form a continuum . . . death interrupts
nothing . . ."; we exist in a "Heraldic Reality beyond the mirrored
surfaces of our life."' Thus life's greatness is beyond the individual, yet
it can only spring from him. Man is his own apotheosis, his own
justification.
Such a world need not be a godless one nor is such an assertion
necessarily sacrilegious. T o the contrary, it is the humanity of Durrell's
vision that should attract us. In the Quintet, God has become the Prince
of Darkness (Monsieur) and has failed to play fair with man, not vice
versa. Man has the right, indeed the necessary responsibility, to say
"No!" Life should be good, humane, and humanly fulfilling. By
definition no knowledge is inherently divorced from man's experience.
By definition God cannot limit, after the fact, his own created universe.
The tragedy of death is defeated by the joy of life, the flesh is
continually reborn, and the illusion of freedom is made spiritually
palpable in the heraldic life itself. Durrell's vision is essentially Greek
and stoic. Durrell as a stoic should not seem odd. The evidences are
clearly there-the boat trip down the Rhine in Monsieur, the entrance to
the cave in Quinx, the desert itself in the Quartet. Weigel has suggested
that when Durrell left the English Death of The Black Book he belatedly
rediscovered Panic Spring (Weigel, 42-43). In that book, a group of
people go to the Mediterranean to become well, and wellness (here, and
in the Quartet and Quintet) is a sensual discovery of life without guilt. It
is Pan, life at one with nature. In Panic Spring, therefore, Walsh does
not jump to his death at book's end; for there is no necessity to prove
either his own innocence or guilt. Man is free of false choices.
Thus all moralities are relative to Durrell, and Weigel admits this
(Weigel, 31), as have many others. Panic Spring was an early and flawed
work, but it presented what, for Durrell, became man's central choicewhether to allow ourselves to be judged by an arbitrary and
self-mocking standard. In Sappho, Pittakos carps at Phaon's Calvinistic
self-righteous belief that acts prove their causes:
Innocence! Innocence! Have you not ceased

Yet hunting for an innocence behind your acts?

There is no innocence under the sun.

We are all victims. I sup ose you suffered

At this imagined guilt o yours-

This innocent guilt? (Sappho, 177)

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

Pittakos, like all soldiers, considers it only the most outrageous bit of
bad luck that Sappho's son was killed in battle by an arrow through the
throat. Yet Phaon's belief that he can prove his own virtue through his
actions is equally suspect.
For Durrell the classicist, both Christian Innocence and Guilt fail
profoundly to describe the human condition. Phaon is guilty of running
away from life, of refusing to make necessary decisions, but Pittakos is
equally guilty of acting without thought. T o seek innocence is to deny
life. As Sappho discovers, we will soil ourselves. Abstractions such as
goodness and evil are great illusions, separating man from his own
divinity. All judgment implies stasis, and time, itself, proves the lie.
We must return, then, to Durrell's threefold paradox of good-evil,
flesh-spirit, and the illusion of freedom. Sappho's tragedy of judgment
is her subsequent denial of experience. The reality of flesh is the spirit's
exaltation with its own insufficiency. The orgasm denies man's freedom
from self as it affirms his victory over death. Monsieur is at once both
god and fakir, man his invention and sworn enemy.
Structurally, Durrell's paganism is a superbly rational approach to
the irrationalities of human experience. Durrell's Black Book implies the
desire for all experience in a single lifetime, the enduring fantasy of the
very young and very old artist. It is Fraser, remember, who refers to
Durrell as "Pateresque," thus belying Durrell's fin de siicle leanings.
Weigel notes that Gracie is a spiritual ancestor of Melissa, and we should
remember that Gracie, Melissa, Justine, and Livia are all faces of that
ancestor who, as Pater mused,
is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had
come to desire. . . . It is a beauty wrought out from within upon
the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and
fantastic reveries and exquisite passions . . . the animalism of
Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its
spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan
world, the sins of the B o r g i a ~ . ~
Pater's Mona Lisa, neither modern, nor Renaissance, nor Christian,
is the epitome of the Durrellian femme who, though not always fatal, is
forever an image of the great, mysterious fecundity of life. For Pater,
the Mona Lisa is Leda and St. Anne, "the embodiment of the old fancy,
the symbol of the modern idea" (Pater, 126).
And this is exactly why Durrell's sexuality is a classic vision of
woman, not truly Lawrencian, just as Lawrence's vision is not that of the
free woman to whom Durrell points in Tunc and Nunquam and the
Quintet. The sexuality of Lawrence's Constance has no cultural history

AH-THE WONDER OF MY BODY

woven into her biological certainty. At best Connie is dominated by

Mellors and his masculinity, humbled before it and the very Calvinistic
prudery which Lawrence wanted so much to deny. Connie needs one
man with the power to allow and enable her self-realization. Kate Leslie
in The Plumed Serpent is, finally, wedded to the same fate.
Durrell's Constance, on the other hand, has a history. She is neither
alone nor desperate, and her path is not so much toward a new frontier
as toward a rediscovery of a lost world. Durrell's paganism does, indeed,
make him a very old-fashioned writer. Durrell's free woman lives
beyond Puritanical guilt toward a re-evocation of joy and human
completeness. She is not only taught by man, she teaches as well. She,
far more than Durrell's males, is the saving and abiding presence in
human relationships, most of the time far stronger and less fearful than
her lovers. She seeks not virtue but experience, not judgment but
understanding. "Older than the rocks among which she sits," insists
Pater, she is "all modes of thought and life" (Pater, 125).
The secret to Durrell's women, then, is not merely their sensuality,
or non-conformism, or courage, or ability to sacrifice; it is their history,
their interpenetration of all experience. They deny nothing and thus
encompass all. Justine changes so drastically because she is, in the end,
dependent upon men for her identity. But Clea and Constance, and
Iolanthe as well, discover themselves as independent beings, without the
necessity of male approval. Thus, paradoxically, they are transformed
and completed.
Durrell's pagan classicism insists upon this complexity of life, along
with the frustrating realization of maturity that there are no easy
answers to life's problems, no stable solutions. Both Justine and
Balthazar, suggests Lawrence Thornton, represent the "life-denying
nihilism"9 of Alexandria, the old, stable ego that is uselessly simplistic
when confronting the problems of a modern world. Just as there is
neither good nor evil, there is neither self nor other. "What's a poor
inventor to do?" wails Felix Charlock over the still mechanical body of
his creation.10 The obvious answer, "let go," is, however, only the
beginning. Mechanical Iolanthe's death is a tragicomedy of human
possessiveness and insecurity. By dying her non-death (mechanism
made flesh made mechanism), Iolanthe is perfectly heraldic. Petronius
in Acte and Diomedes in Sappho also die heraldically. All assert that
death is preferable to life without human significance.
Freedom, then, is the key to Durrell's world and to his paganism,
the very freedom that Sappho loses, first because of her search for
virtue and later because of her insistence upon revenge. Illusory, yes.

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

Demetrius will not live without it, and Phaon cannot run away to find it.
Sappho is never more alone than when she attempts to teach her
daughter of the world's pain and fails to give a kiss. And this freedom,
this illusion of modern man is found, I suggest, in the alpha and omega
of Durrell's heraldic imagery, the labyrinth, as he suggests in the poem
"Blood-Count," "in the long blue canals 1 Of the human heart. . . .""
In Cefalii (1946) Durrell first explained the concept fully, and in the
gnostic caves of the Quintet he has come full circle. The labyrinth,
Daedalus' labyrinth, built to hide the Queen of Crete's monstrous
progeny, is another quintessential pagan symbol, representative of
patterns and art so complex as to seem aimless, the loss of spiritual
creation and so of man's need to discover a "way out" of the material
world and back to the spirit. At its center, the labyrinth holds the
Minotaur, thus protecting man from the essence of his own masculinity
and barbarism while at the same time, paradoxically, ensuring the
Minotaur's safety from man. The journey is always, however, the
personal journey of man within himself to find and master his own
perversity and unimaginable powers, a journey to the center of human
experience. The labyrinth and journey are art and life as one creation.
Thus Durrell's labyrinth represents the omphalos, the vulnerable
center of creation and the necessary journey that all mankind must
make toward self-knowledge and self-realization. Durrell's characters
face the labyrinth as questing visitants, intent, sometimes reluctantly,
upon discovering their own souls. In Cefalii, the attitude of each
character (quiet Miss Dale, brassy Miss Dombey, raffish Campion,
Fearmax the medium, Captain Baird, Lord Graecen, and the elderly,
loving, bourgeois Trumans) toward the labyrinth determines his or her
destiny and not the maze itself. One by one the accidental visitants find
the Minotaur either to be or not be within themselves. Life and
experience become what each imagines it to be. Art becomes reality.
The labyrinth comes to represent the complexity and mystery, the
wholeness and classic unity of man's experience and not its possibility
for virtue. The Trumans, Fearmax, Campion, Miss Dale, and Miss
Dombey all come to live beyond judgment. At the novel's end, Elsie
Truman at last realizes "that the roof of the world did not really exist,
except in their own imaginations!"l2
Durrell's paganism, then, implies nothing less than a redirection of
the very organizing principle of western society. If man's imagination
created civilization, then it can recreate it. And if man has gone awry
then he can recapture what has been lost. T o enter Durrell's labyrinth
suggests neither a search for good or evil, nor a search for undiscovered

AH-THE WONDER O F MY BODY

truth. Durrell's questers wander back in time and history in search of

themselves and their own lost past. As in Keats's Hyperion, Apollo, when
faced with his own entrance into life, heroically declares "Knowledge
enormous makes a God of me." Keats's development of the mystery of
Godhead in the lines that follow accurately describe Durrell's artistry:
Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions,
Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,
Creations and destroyings, all at once
Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,
And deify me, as if some blithe wine
Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk,
And so become immortal.'"
Durrell's humans are "enkindled" to life by experience and action.
Thus Durrell's art is idiosyncratic in a modernist world precisely
because so much of his style and thought rise out of the aesthetic
movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. Durrell's
women, like Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel," find heaven a dreary place
and stand at the bar longingly gazing downward toward a land of flesh
and blood, movement, change, and imperfection. Durrell's classicism is
as bereft of spiritual otherworldliness as Greek and Latin mythology.
T o Durrell as to Sophocles or Aeschylus, the gods are merely more
intense and complete versions of the human beings they imitate so well.
Zeus/Jupiter forever longs for sweet young innocent girls. HeraIJuno
always protects her own hearth. AresIMars takes what he will in
primordial sacrifice and creation. Potentiality remains unreal until
discovered in form. AphroditeIVenus as whore is mankind's true savior.
And AthenaIMinerva is not so much forgotten as present in all else.
Wisdom, finally, is knowledge of the flesh, human experience become
human sympathy. And comedy is indistinguishable from tragedy as
man's final protection against the absurdity of experience.
In the Quartet, Scobie, the great invert, achieves sainthood
specifically because his sin, his homosexuality, allies him more closely
with the human condition than could any kind of virtue. Near the
book's end Darley and Clea, heterosexuals at the time by any stretch of
the imagination, worship at his tomb. Experience, change, action,
struggle, desire, even failure bind humanity more than the imagined
perfections of an "excessive puritan morality."l4 Like Morris's Guinevere, Durrell's characters justify sin on the basis of their own supernal

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

beauty. And, as Weigel has noted, in Durrell's world all knowledge is

equivocal and enigmatic (Weigel, 63).
As an essential organizing principle for society, then, Durrell's
paganism specifically rejects Calvinism far more directly than it does
Christianity in general. T h e flitting Cupids of the Renaissance Popes
are still at home in Durrell's Mediterranean ethos; and Jesus, himself, is
a proto-gnostic, as Akkad characterizes him, going to his own "foolish
personal fate."lj Akkad also notes that Jesus's end was "poetic and not
theological." Life became art. Durrell's four M's, Monotheism,
Messianism, Monogamy, and Materialism (and Merde as a fifth) fit
either a Marxist or Freudian interpretation of history; their rejection
finally affirms the living flesh and denies the dead spirit. Marx
understood human experience economically as money and gold. Freud
saw it as infantile sexuality and excrement. Both asserted possession as
the basis of all value (Monsieur, 142). Durrell opposes their false modern
calculi with a classic view of human sharing and corporate experience.
Durrell's classical mathematics denies the Calvinistic inversion of
virtue for experience. Gold-money is merde-shit. T h e Calvinistic work
ethic, a curious inversion of cause-effect logic, is foreign to the Quartet
and Quintet and laughed at in Tunc and Nunquam.
T o Durrell, Calvin's elect are those who, practically, deny their own
humanity for an imagined place in an inhumane heaven. T h e equation,
insists Akkad, is simply "matter-spoil-loot-capital value-usuryalienation . . . ." Akkad then explains, "It runs counter to nature"
(Monsieur, 170). Akkad's implications here cannot be more clear. Order
is man-made, created out of the primal stuff of the cosmos and human
experience. It is not to be discovered as the pattern of a super-human
creator. T h e labyrinth, too, as Bruce later casually acknowledges, is the
infinitely complex pattern and interrelationship of concealed motives,
and the recording of human action itself produces a kind of lie, an
"ordering which may be false" (Monsieur, 173).
In one sense, Durrell's classicism is exactly Akkad's gnosticism, one
"not of repression and original sin but of creation and relaxation, of
love and not doubt" (Monsieur, 142). The gnostic death, says Akkad a
few lines later, at once redeems all nature and reestablishes "that
self-perpetuating cycle of joy which was the bliss of yesterday-the
ancient mode of yesterday." Few statements in Durrell's work so
accurately describe their creator. Life and human self-realization are
possible not through denial but only through the affirmation of man's
potentialities. Love, the orgasm, spends and affirms life. Greed, merde,
hoards and denies life. Such a philosophy automatically denies

A H - T H E WONDER O F MY BODY

Godhead and eternality in favor of mankind, mortality, and the

ineffability of what is transitory. At one point in "The Venetian
Documents," Sutcliffe no longer cares whether "God existed or not-so
fantastic was the sunset that it all but sponged away his consciousness"
(Monsieur, 197). Before the completeness of sensual experience, who
needs understanding, pattern, or order?
It is just this insistence upon the paradox of change-that no
beauty of the mind can be eternal unless experienced in the flesh-that
is at the heart of Durrell's paganism. Akkad had earlier noted that to
make "super-sense" one had either to become a poet or stop talking
(Monsieur, 144). Both instances are closely allied to Wallace Stevens'
assertion that "Beauty is momentary in the mind- /. . . / But in the flesh
it is immortal." Again, Durrell is revealed as an anti-heroic aesthete with
deeply classical and humanistic leanings. Sutcliffe, captured by the
moment, reminds us of Sterne's Uncle Toby weeping for Socrates' dead
children, after thousands of years, while Mr. Shandy the abstract
philosopher cannot understand the sympathy of flesh.
Actually, Durrell's classicism is far more deeply indebted to the
comic-humanism of Sterne and the romance of Richardson than to the
epic of Fielding or even the manners of Austen. If we may oversimplify
for the sake of clarity, then Durrell is very clearly a character novelist.
His paganism revolves around people, emotions, and feelings more
than plot and action. Life becomes an inner not outer reality, an art not
a science, and man his own master. The latter is exactly what Sappho
forgets. Man can atone for his own sins.
Sutcliffe insists upon such a truth in Quinx. "Men without awe," he
asserts, "will never be wise." And a few lines later, "Ours is perhaps the
first civilization which cannot decide if the answers lie in art or in
science" (Quinx, 174, 175). Notice that Durrell (a la Blanford, Sutcliffe,
et a1.-ego, alter ego, and id at once?) not only suggests that such a
choice can be made by modern man, he also implies that it is a conscious
human choice whether we like it or not and that it has been made in the
past.
Art is awful-awful in its actuality, its immediacy, and its fleshly
reality. It can and does control and determine men's actions. It is a meld
of the conscious and unconscious in man, a joining (not an imposition
or discovery) of structure and pattern to the chaos of existence. Art is
not different from reality here; instead, art is reality and vice versa. Art
is identical to the primal power of creation itself, part and parcel of it
(Wilde's greatest work of art, remember, was his life-so he insisted).
Imitation and Locke's tabula rasa are absurd within a Durrellian world.

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

The imagination creates, in life as well as art. Great living is as equally

structured and patterned by the imagination as is great art. So,
tragically and poignantly, we are forced to accuse Sappho of a lack of
imagination. The challenges of her life defeated her, and she imitated
the patterns of her enemy.
Thus the orgasm is important to Durrell's classicism not just
because he is a post-Lawrencian, which he is; overcome by the mystery
of sex, which he is; but because Durrell asserts the necessity of a rational
control over (and with) those mysteries in a complete and considered
statement to which Lawrence never attained. Clea must lose her hand to
become a great artist. Darley must become a hermit not just to write a
book but to learn how to live amid his fellows. Constance must not only
become her own woman (an attainment we can and must question in
Lady Chatterley), she must be a match for her man, whichever of the
many men that may be. Durrell's Constance is dominated, finally, by no
man, certainly not Blanford. In fact, she does most of the saving when
that is possible. Sebastian and Blanford are only two cases in point.
Durrell insists upon absolute classical balance and rationality.
Creation is the constant interpenetration of opposites to form wholly
new, actual experience. Mystery and reason, consciousness and
unconsciousness, spirituality and sexuality, intellectuality and physicality, self and other, man and woman, suffering and joy; all find
themselves reflected narcissistically in their opposites. The orgasm
remains the secret of all this seeming chaos. It is primal energy in the
creation of matter, compulsion which inevitably moves toward stasis, the
final and complete joining of opposites in human experience, the
culmination of knowing, mystery and fact at one.
Blanford and Constance make love, we are told, as if their
embraces are "extensions of their thoughts" (Quinx, 175). Later they
ride together in "sweet symbiosis," and alongside a "ravenous blue sea"
and under a "heartfelt blue . . . sky," Constance convinces Blanford of
the "existence of lovers as philosophers"-"the
need for a joint
approach to time through the atom of their love" (Quinx, 176).
Now, let me pause. If Durrell's paganism is nothing less than the
organizing principle of society, and the orgasm is the secret primal
center of that organization, and Constance is desperate for philosophic
love-the reader might lose track of what is "real" in Durrell. Let's not
forget that in Durrell's fictive world as in the actual one, a good fuck is
still a good fuck. Durrell insists upon this comic sanity and his note of
the need for a "joint" approach to love is a banality unless we also
recognize its undercutting humor. Durrell's world is neither heroic nor

A H - T H E WONDER OF MY BODY

Utopian, neither full of swords and clashing cymbals nor of passive

rural philosophers contentedly listening to lowing cows across the dales
and congratulating themselves on their final good fortune and wisdom.
The Livias of Durrell's world see to this. Remember, Durrell insists
upon "the taming of the screw" (Quinx, 179).
Nor does Durrell's fiction deny the importance of art as decoration
in life. T o the contrary, life is decoration upon the unplumbed and
unplanned nature of things. Normality exists only in our expectation of
it. What is knowable must be repeatable. T o the scientist such
knowledge is "replication." Life and art are one. In the final narcissism
of experience, they imitate and create each other.
At its center then, Durrell's classicism is a refusal to forget-to
forget our bodies, our minds, the possibility of freedom, the necessity of
community, the constancy of change. It is dogma without fact. It is the
coexistence of past and future in the present. Near the end of Quinx,
Blanford says:
Your consciousness bears witness to the historic now which you
are living while your memory recalls other nows, fading slowly
into indistinctness as they move into the prehistory you call the
past. . . . But . . . in the course of a few years, about seven I think,
every cell in the body of this '1', this individual, has been
modified and even replaced. . . . What then is the permanence
which you designate as an 'I'? (Quinx, 176)
Blanford, here, does not deny constancy or stasis. He merely presents
the scientific fact and its artistic analysis. We will not be tomorrow what
we are today and yet today is part of what was yesterday. Each cell of
our body will either die or change within seven years-a scientific fact.
And yet the person, the human animal, retains an identity.
Blanford's final question is rhetorical, and he knows it. Each
organism is individuated by its past, by the simple fact that each cell has
its own history, because life continues not in the spirit but in the body.
All experience, however, is never lost in the flesh because it has never
been but in the flesh. Permanence is the continuous act of change-life
creating life, man recreating himself out of loneliness and isolation
amid the bewildering complexity of a modern world. Like Terence or
Sterne, Durrell sees the human comedy in all its poignant fragility. All
experience is subjective and, therefore, all knowledge relative. Man's
sexuality is at the center of this rollicking chaos whether it be
Slawkenbergian noses (Durrell, remember, builds noses in the Quartet)
or Navarrean whiskers or Julian Merlin falling desperately in love with
his (and Felix Charlock's) own creation whichlwho has the effrontery to

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

refuse him. Remember, too, that Charlock's Abel is really a fantastic

memory machine, and Iolanthe's desire to be free is merely her
birth-right (or machine-right), in any case a product of man's lust to
create and recreate, narcissistically, himself.
Think for a moment of how many of Durrell's themes and image
patterns revolve around this classical dialogue which man ecstatically
conducts with his own image. Narcissism is only one. Aspects of man's
constant recreation of himself are found in his desire for freedom, the
gnostic refusal of virtue as a moral guide, the recognition of the
inevitability of suffering and its possible redemptive qualities, the
landscape as "Deus Loci" (both mapped and uncharted), sickness (the
English death is but one-physical, spiritual and psychological), the
repetition and wholeness of the circle, fiction and art as reality, islands,
caves, Buddhism, the heraldic life, the inevitability and need for pattern
in all experience. If not endless, the list is almost so. Unterecker even
includes peaks and mountains as a rediscovery of lost innocence
(Unterecker, 6-7).
T o understand and appreciate Lawrence Durrell's achievement,
then, requires that we be constantly aware of a paganism which he
increasingly presents as a legitimate and increasingly desirable
alternative to what Durrell sees as a moribund and virtue-ridden
western culture. In classical fashion, Durrell argues for man ascendent,
his own creator and master; for joy without guilt, the productive life;
and for man within society. The basis of all this is the couple, man and
woman in all their mystery and sexual comedy: Darley-Melissa,
Nessim-Justine, Clea-Darley, Felix-Benedicta, Merlin-Iolanthe, SutcliffePia, and Aubrey-Constance. Bruce-Silvie-Piers is in reality a triad of
failed couples in which the woman, unlike Constance, is unable to attain
her rightful place.
In the final paragraphs of Quinx, Sutcliffe and Blanford speak to
each other as they have throughout the Quintet. "Sex," remarks
Sutcliffe, "the human animal's larder." And his double replies, "Yes. O r
the fatal power-house. We could do so much with it if we learned the
code!" (Quinx, 200). And where do we learn the code but from within
the pattern itself? For the code is ourselves, our own bodies and
emotions and minds. As Quinx ends, Durrell, prophet of the flesh and
its delights, becomes almost medievally symbolic. The lovers Constance
and Aubrey follow in the procession led by the Prince in a Daimler and
the singing gypsy woman who is walking. The cave is marked "Danger,"
and its first room is vast, "like a cathedral" (of the mind?) Durrell notes.
From it radiates a labyrinth of "inner corridors" down which Smergil

AH-THE WONDER OF MY BODY

and Quatrefages lead the multitude. The lovers shiver with premonition and in rushes "totally unpredictable" reality.
Love is not Durrell's religion, as Weigel implies it is when he notes
that Justine's pagan mask becomes a station of the cross in the Quartet
(Weigel, 99), but it has been the major medium through which Durrell
has explored human experience.
The caves and the corridor of the inner self have always been
Durrell's most passionate love. They are the proper study of man as the
Greek tragedians well knew. T o return to our initial example, Sappho's
tragedy, as well, is always deep within her. "Egoist," she rages at Minos
near the play's beginning after Diomedes has been carried off by the
girls, "You are in love with yourself. Your romance is with your own
mind" (Sappho, 24). Such self-defeating narcissism is the heart of the
tragic protagonist's fatal flaw. Diomedes dies, he admits, of shame and
boredom (Sappho, 144-45) while Sappho, herself, tells Kleis, "Come
here and look upon the face; / The tortured wicked features of your
mother, /. . . washed up / On the bare island of her good intentions"
(Sappho, 185).
Unwittingly, Sappho has sought virtue rather than human lovethe very love from which Diomedes has died. It is "hubris" which
destroys Sappho's life, the classic pride of good intentions, the hubris of
Agamemnon, Oedipus, and Antigone which cuts them off so
completely from their fellow humans. Better to be dead.
Durrell's art has been unique in the twentieth century specifically
because it has not rebelled but sought its roots. Durrell's fiction, drama,
poetry, criticism, and even travel literature is a modulated blend of
classical tragedy and comedy, aesthetic delight, humanistic optimism,
and mystic wonder. What Durrell has definitely never been is a
self-pitying, romantic cynic, a luxury which poor, tragic Sappho
unwittingly allows herself-as wandering mind denies a kiss, the body's
wonder.

'

Lawrence Durrell, Sappho (London: Faber and Faber, 1950), p. 15. All
further references to this work appear parenthetically as Sappho.
John Unterecker, Lawrence Durrell (New York: Columbia Univ. Press,
1964), p. 19. All further references to this work appear parenthetically as
Unterecker.
G. S. Fraser, Lawrence Durrell: A Critical Study (New York: Dutton, 1968),
p. 28. All further references to this work appear parenthetically as Fraser.
John A. Weigel, Lawrence Durrell (New York, Dutton, 1966), pp. 18-27.
All further references to this work appear parenthetically as Weigel.

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

Harry T. Moore, The World of Lawrence Durrell (Carbondale: Southern

Illinois Univ. Press, 1962), p. x.
Alan Warren Friedman, Lawrence Durrell and The Alexandria Quartet
(Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1970), pp. 6, 8.
Ray Morrison, " 'With His Art Like a Vase': 'Fangbrand'-An Heraldic
Life as Poetry," Dew Loci, 5, No. 1 (Sept. 1981), p. 4.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London:
Macmillan, 1917), pp. 124-25. All further references to this work appear
parenthetically as Pater.
Lawrence Thornton, "Narcissism and Selflessness in The Alexandria
Quartet," Deus Loci, 1 , No. 4 (June 1978), p. 17.
l o Lawrence Durrell, Nunquum (New York: Dutton, 1970), p. 317.
Lawrence Durrell, The Ikons (New York: Dutton, 1967), p. 44.
12
Lawrence Durrell, The Dark Labyrinth (New York: Dutton, 1964), p. 256.
l 3 John Keats, The Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1958), p. 304.
l4 Lawrence Durrell, Quinx (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 13. All
further references to this work appear parenthetically as Quinx.
l5 Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 142. All
further references to this work appear parenthetically as Monsieur.

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