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    Balthazar
    Balthazar
    Balthazar
    Ebook376 pages6 hours

    Balthazar

    By Lawrence Durrell and Jan Morris

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    About this ebook

    The deeply affecting second novel of theAlexandria Quartet, which boldly questions perception and the nature of contemporary love
    In Alexandria, Egypt, in the years before World War II, Durrell’s narrator, Darley, seeks to fully understand his sexual obsession with two women: the infamous Justine, and Melissa, a dancer. In Darley’s conversations with Balthazar, a doctor and mystic, it soon becomes clear that Darley’s fixation is more complex and ominous than either man could have imagined. Layered and unflinching, Balthazar is a poignant examination of the modern psyche, and a study of a world where love can become consumed by deceit.   This ebook contains a new introduction by Jan Morris.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJun 12, 2012
    ISBN9781453261422
    Author

    Lawrence Durrell

    Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Lawrence Durrell was a critically hailed and beloved novelist, poet, humorist, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet novels, which were ranked by the Modern Library as among the greatest works of English literature in the twentieth century. A passionate and dedicated writer from an early age, Durrell’s prolific career also included the groundbreaking Avignon Quintet, whose first novel, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and whose third novel, Constance (1982), was nominated for the Booker Prize. He also penned the celebrated travel memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. Durrell corresponded with author Henry Miller for forty-five years, and Miller influenced much of his early work, including a provocative and controversial novel, The Black Book (1938). Durrell died in France in 1990.  

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    Reviews for Balthazar

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    • 5/5
      I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!

      A fattened, more comprehensive and weezing approach will occur when I finish the Quartet.
    • 5/5
      again the poetry remains. what amazes me about this work is that durrell was able to continue those same themes over from justine yet still keep them vibrant and fresh. i was wondering what else could be added to justine, what other piece (let alone 250 pages of pieces) could add another dimension to such a perfect novel. all apprehensions were quickly undone as i read the first few chapters. i felt just as blown away by the revelations as the "i" was. i felt his pain in a very real way. some of the quotes in this work have been bouncing around in my brain and have worked their way out into conversation. specifically "we live by selected fictions" and "we live in the shallows of one another's personalities." these and several others like them are shaping the way i see the world. bravo!!!
    • 3/5
      The second novel of Durrell's Alexadria Quartet. Like the first book there wasn't much of a plot. What makes this readable are the superb writing and the unique time and place. Pre-WWII French/British run Alexandria Egypt. Durrell's insight's and languid writing make the book readable. Certainly not the best I've ever read but I will read the third book, Clea, one of these days.
    • 5/5
      Balthazar is the second volume of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. In the first book, Justine, the narrator Darley, an Irish expatriate living and teahing in Alexandria, described his fascination with the ancient Egyptian city and his immersion into the complex social life of the Alexandrians. As a writer, he wants to capture the essence of the city. The second volume is the Darley's review of an interlinear sent to him by Balthazar a psychiatrist acquaintence who presents another more informed view of the situation described in Justine. Key information not earlier available is supplied and the historical accuracy of events are supplemented by another layer of experience and interpretation. The personalities of the characters are shown to be less fixed and more determined by planned and chance events and locations than the narrator presented in volume one of the quartet. When there is limited information and insight, a point of view relies on Darley's projections of his own personality and life history necessarily limiting the understanding of a city, its citizens, and the artistic conception of the characters. Balthazar is a psychiatrist who focuses on realistic interpretations of emotions related to character interactions rather than presenting psychoanalytic jargon to obfuscate psychological history. Darley gains startling insight from the writing of Balthazar, his perspective broadens and deepens, and he adds the relativity of time as a factor in his understanding of emotions, especially love and betrayal. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and look forward to the next layer of the story, Mountolive, the third dimension of this evolving work of art. The analysis will continue in the third volume from the point of view of Mountolive, a British Ambassador.
    • 3/5
      Second book of the Alexandria quartet.Experimental fiction that was reportedly a commercial and critical success when first published, it has not aged well. Some of the stylistic quirks, such as heavily quoting the words of a fictional author in the story, just seem odd, while others are just self indulgent, such as the repeated returns to quote Scobie the gay former seaman and now police officer. Still the series is impressive in the capacity to represent the same events from the perspective of different story tellers at different times, and the while thing, in my view, is not great, but a good near miss. Read June - July 2010.
    • 3/5
      Balthazar is the second member of the Alexandria Quartet, "not a sequel, but a sibling" to Justine, as Durrell insists. The frame story is essentially that the narrator of Justine, still sitting on his Greek island with the child, has sent his manuscript to Dr Balthazar, and Balthazar has now brought it back covered in notes and comments supplying additional information about the events described that the narrator was not aware of. We are taken through the story of Justine once again, as the narrator takes on board the additional information, which throws an entirely new light on the motivations and actions of the other characters. The technique is thus reminiscent of the "unreliable narrator" technique famously associated with The good soldier, but with the additional twist that Justine was a complete, self-contained novel in its own right: a reader who wasn't aware of the existence of the second book would have no reason to doubt the narrative authority of the first. Of course, now that we have been told that the narrator could be wrong once, we may reasonably enough wonder if we are getting the full story in Balthazar - especially since Durrell's introductory note makes it clear that we are going to get this story at least once more...Balthazar is similar in style and structure to Justine - a relatively disjointed series of scenes shifting us backwards and forwards in time; descriptions that range from delightful pin-point economy to full-scale, all-guns-blazing, thick, creamy purple soup. At its worst, it is as though Durrell had decided to write a dictionary of quotations, supplying all the material himself; at best it is wonderful.
    • 5/5
      See the review for Justine.
    • 5/5
      The abridged version of events will be difficult to understand without a summary knowledge of what happened in “Justine,” so please read my review of that novel, the “sibling companion” of “Balthazar,” for a fuller appreciation of both. This review also gives away plot spoilers for both.“Balthazar” continues the narrative started in the first volume of the Alexandria Quartet, “Justine.” This time, we read of many of the events recounted in “Justine” from another perspective, that of the psychiatrist Balthazar, who unceremoniously disrupts and complicates our understanding of the events in “Justine.” A few years after the events, the narrator, whose name we finally learn is Darley, has moved to an island with the child that Melissa has had with Nessim. Here, Balthazar drops off what he refers to as his “interlinear,” (a literary recounting of previous events from his point of view) that Darley spends much of the novel reading and meditating upon. His account completely undermines Darley’s understanding, telling him that Justine was really in love with the novelist Pursewarden, and just used him as a decoy to cheat on her husband. And we read about Scobie, a mutual friend of almost everyone in the book, including Clea, Justine, Melissa, and Darley, who is killed while in drag, possibly trying to pick up sailor for a trick.In “Balthazar,” Durrell draws the reader to the meta-fictional aspects of the story in at least two ways. His account completely reconfigures Darley’s understanding of events in the previous volume, telling him that Justine was really in love with the novelist Pursewarden, and just used him as a decoy to cheat on her husband. In this sense, Balthazar’s “interlinear” almost serves to turn the entire narrative into a series of suspect, but all equally likely, Rashomon-like perspectival takes, without any single one being allowed to be account for the entire truth. Durrell also uses Pursewarden as a kind of a novelist-cipher to shed light on the plight of the novelist – or, more broadly, the artist’s – task. This ambiguity, which can at times seem heavy-handed, seems to mirror much of what Durrell is really saying about love, and especially erotic relationships in general: that they are a series of shadows, lies, deceptions, and figments of our own fragile imaginations. As with the first volume, the language is stunning, so just as in the first review, I’d like to end with a bit of what I’m talking about – those wonderful ambiguities and mysteries which so wholly constitute Alexandria and its residents for Durrell:“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 embrace, 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 by the inquiring mind and conscience in the French sense which of course has its own rights and its own field of deployment. I’d like to think of my work simply as a cradle in which philosophy could rock itself to sleep, thumb in mouth. What do you say to this? After all, this is not simply what we most need in the world, but really what describes the state of pure process in it. Keep silent awhile you feel a comprehension of this act of tenderness – not power or glory: and certainly not Mercy, that vulgarity of the Jewish mind which can only imagine man as crouching under the whip. No, for the sort of tenderness I mean is utterly merciless!” (p. 238).
    • 3/5
      This is the second book in the Alexandria Quartet. The four books tell the same story from different perspectives. It is about love, relationships, and jealousy. In the first book, we focused on the unnamed narrator’s overwhelming love for Justine. In this book we find out what he believed is not true.

      We spend a lot of time with the reminiscences of the narrator, and we learn his name. We find out more about Justine and her various relationships. The major set piece of this book is an intriguing description of Carnaval. There is a murder, and a mystery, all wrapped up in a wide variety of philosophical musings.

      This is not a standalone. Justine must be read first for it to make any sense. I appreciate the creativity but it’s not going to be for everyone. The reader will need a great deal of patience with flowery language and a nonlinear storyline. As in Justine, toward the end of the book we find a thin thread of a plot, but there is nothing that feels like a conclusion. It just … ends. I liked this one more than Justine and will continue to read the quartet. I am planning to take my time, since I can only digest these books in small portions. Next up is Mountolive.
    • 4/5
      It would be unrewarding to read this book without first reading 'Justine', the preceding novel of the quartet. This second book introduces the same narrator, revisiting the ground he's already covered thanks to new information that Balthazar provides him. This time he is less caught up in his own perspective, instead exploring what these new facts suggest about what moved through others' minds. Secondary characters come to occupy the foreground, especially Pursewarden and Clea. We meet Nessim's brother and mother, and are introduced to Mountolive whom I'm trusting will figure large in the third volume. Some of the first book's events acquire a new significance, such as Justine's missing child and Pursewarden's suicide, and additional events not mentioned before are now worth Darley's relating. While Balthazar's revelations lend new shading to Darley's understanding of all that he related in the first book, they do not add a new perspective to them for the reader so much as overlay them with additional scenes, content and themes. Durrell drives deeper in the subject of love, far less focused on Justine specifically. It is almost a malevolent force in this work, so easily manipulated yet so easily manipulating, creating victims of both those who love and those who are loved. Or that might just be Darley's unacknowledged bitterness talking.
    • 4/5
      The Alexandria quartet is a wonderful short course in the ways in which a writer can play with all the conventions of the narrative art. "Balthazar" was my second encounter with the set, and really showed me that I was going to see a lot of different angles on the same set of incidents and that Durrell was a master of the tale, in the same way that Picasso was a master of the pictorial. Even on rereads, I can happily let myself be swept away by that year in Alexandria. "Balthazar' is the voice of reason applied to the devouring dream of "Justine". Yet it is not a put-down, but a revelation of the context in which Darnley and Justine played out their affair. It is essential to the whole structure of the quartet, and, the first of the three steps back one is obliged to give any pictorial masterpiece, and essential to the three steps of return to it.
    • 4/5
      The second novel in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, "Balthazar" is very much in the same vein as its predecessor, "Justine": rollicking eloquence, elusive plot, and characters viewed dimly through layers of mystery. The writing is excellent and rich with emotion. Sometimes, however, the deliberately enigmatic nature of the story results in confusion; I simply didn't always know what was going on or which characters were being discussed. For such a short novel it can be a bit of a slog, especially if impatience is even an occasional vice of the reader. Almost a year passed between my reading of these first two novels, and I suspect that my comprehension level would have been markedly better if I had picked up the second novel sooner.

    Book preview

    Balthazar - Lawrence Durrell

    Balthazar

    Lawrence Durrell

    CONTENTS

    Title Page

    Dedication

    Introduction

    PART I

    I

    II

    III

    IV

    V

    PART II

    VI

    VII

    VIII

    IX

    PART III

    X

    XI

    PART IV

    XII

    XIII

    XIV

    CONSEQUENTIAL DATA

    SCOBIE’S COMMON USAGE

    WORKPOINTS

    NOTE IN THE TEXT

    Preview: Mountolive

    A Biography of Lawrence Durrell

    To

    MY MOTHER

    these memorials of an unforgotten city

    The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions.

    D. A. F. DE SADE: Justine

    Yes, we insist upon those details, you veil them with a decency which removes all their edge of horror; there remains only what is useful to whoever wishes to become familiar with man; you have no conception how helpful these tableaux are to the development of the human spirit; perhaps we are still so benighted with respect to this branch of learning only because of the stupid restraint of those who wish to write upon such matters. Inhabited by absurd fears, they only discuss the puerilities with which every fool is familiar and dare not, by turning a bold hand to the human heart, offer its gigantic idiosyncrasies to our view.

    D. A. F. DE SADE: Justine

    AN INTRODUCTION TO LAWRENCE DURRELL’S ALEXANDRIA QUARTET

    by Jan Morris

    This celebrated tetralogy from the 1950s was defined by its author as an investigation of modern love, but has often been regarded by its readers more as an evocation of a city – the Greco-Arab, multi-ethnic Alexandria of its title. Almost infinite variations of love are certainly explored in its 1000-odd pages, and the presence of Alexandria certainly permeates the work, but for myself I think the legendary fascination of the quartet is essentially existential. The work itself is greater than its themes, and casts a spell that is neither precisely emotional nor specifically topographic.

    Actually it is neither specific nor precise about almost anything. It was an experimental novel of its day, perhaps related to the work of Durrell’s friend Henry Miller, perhaps to Ulysses. It was based upon the premise that people and events seem different when considered from different angles and periods, and that they can best be recorded, as Durrell himself put it, stereoscopically. The four volumes concern the same characters, but several narrators tell its complex tales from their several viewpoints, and they write at different times. It is a device, Durrell claimed, amounting to a new concept of reality, reflecting the ideas of Freud and Einstein and a convergence of Western and Eastern Metaphysics.

    If that sounds over-blown, well, the Quartet itself is not without pretension, in concept as in performance. As has generally been admitted, it is often ornately over-written, sometimes to an almost comical degree. The high ambition of its schema sometimes makes its narratives and characters inexplicably confusing, and its virtuoso use of vocabulary can be trying (pudicity? noetic? fatidic? scry?) But if there are parts of the work that few readers, I suspect, will navigate without skipping, there are many passages of such grand inspiration that reaching them feels like emerging from choppy seas into marvellously clear blue Mediterranean waters.

    *                  *                  *

    For it is true that the city of Alexandria does colour the entire work. Durrell lived and worked in the city from 1942 to 1945, and he believed strongly in the effect of place upon human temperaments. Alexandria’s peculiar Levantine character, as it existed during Durrell’s time there, is insistently summoned into these pages. His responses to the place were moulded partly by E.M. Forster’s elegant Alexandria, A History and Guide, first published in 1922, and more especially by the greatest of Alexandrine poets, Constantin Cavafy – who had died in 1933, but whose drifting presence in the books is almost as haunting as the presence of the city itself.

    It was Cavafy who wrote of Alexandria "There’s no new land, my friend, no/ New sea; for the city will follow you, /In the same streets you’ll wander endlessly.… One of this work’s narrators goes further still: man is only an extension of the spirit of place, says Nessim (I think it is) in Justine. The several narrators of the Quartet are certainly enslaved by Alexandria’s genii loci, and readers are likely to be entrapped too, because the work, so opaque in other contexts, is clear enough when it deals with the city. We soon learn the geography of the place, from the handsome Rue Fuad to the meshed Arab backstreets, from the elegance of L’Etoile or the Cecil Hotel to the hashish-cafés of the slums or the sandy approaches to the Western Desert. We see inside the mansions of rich cosmopolitans and diplomats, we visit stifling attic bedrooms, brothels and pleasure pavilions by the sea.

    Much of all this is factual. Durrell based much of his fiction upon personal experience, reminiscence and tittle-tattle, which gave the Quartet, for his contemporaries, something of the allure of a roman-à-clef, not least in its sexual allusions. In fact a general sensuality is the most Alexandrine aspect of the Quartet, but it does shows itself, too, in somewhat hazy illustrations of individual sex – modern love, as Durrell put it. These dark blue tides of Eros are far from pornographic. Sometimes, it is true, we are unsure who is loving whom, and now and then there are homosexual and cross-dressing deviations, but mostly the love elements are straightforward and moving, and really do dominate, as Durrell implied, the devious goings-on of the plot.

    Which are full of surprises. Some, I dare say, really are Freudian or Einsteinian in origin, or metaphysically intercultural, but they often seem to me like twists in a skilful thriller, closer to Le Carré than to James Joyce, and sometimes embroiled in melodrama – the slime of plot and counterplot, as another of Durrell’s characters defines it. He was particularly admired for his descriptive writing, and these books are rich in masterly set-pieces, but he was also a fine story-teller, adept in techniques of suspense and deception. Reader, watch out! Shocks are always around the dusty corner, in the Alexandria Quartet.

    *                  *                  *

    The four books of the tetralogy originally appeared separately – Justine in 1957, Balthazar and Mountolive in 1958, Clea in 1960. They were immediately recognized as remarkable works of art, but the verdict on the whole work, while always respectful, was mixed. French critics adored it. Americans lapped it up. English reviewers were not so sure. Lawrence Durrell, a lifelong expatriate, never was an admirer of English culture, and his elaborate prose did not greatly appeal to more austere littérateurs like Angus Wilson, who called it floridly vulgar. Its pretensions were mocked, its avant garde excesses parodied, and although the books were commercial triumphs, he wrote nothing so publicly successful again.

    But the whole thing itself, this immense imaginary construction, has stood the tests of time and taste, and has never been out of print – probably never will be. Half a century after its completion those florid vulgarities, those modernist pretensions, seem no more than incidental to its unique flavour, which lingers in the mind long after its labyrinthine plots (for they are myriad, and muddling) have been forgotten.

    The Alexandria Quartet is one of a kind, and as I see it, on the whole a masterpiece.

    PART I

    I

    Landscape-tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections. The lion-dust of desert: prophets’ tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake. Its huge sand-faults like watermarks from the air; green and citron giving to gunmetal, to a single plum-dark sail, moist, palpitant: sticky-winged nymph. Taposiris is dead among its tumbling columns and seamarks, vanished the Harpoon Men … Mareotis under a sky of hot lilac.

    And spring? Ah! there is no spring in the Delta, no sense of refreshment and renewal in things. One is plunged out of winter into: wax effigy of a summer too hot to breathe. But here, at least, in Alexandria, the sea-breaths save us from the tideless weight of summer nothingness, creeping over the bar among the warships, to flutter the striped awnings of the cafés upon the Grande Corniche. I would never have …

    The city, half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory. Why must I return to it night after night, writing here by the fire of carob-wood while the Aegean wind clutches at this island house, clutching and releasing it, bending back the cypresses like bows? Have I not said enough about Alexandria? Am I to be reinfected once more by the dream of it and the memory of its inhabitants? Dreams I had thought safely locked up on paper, confided to the strong-rooms of memory! You will think I am indulging myself. It is not so. A single chance factor has altered everything, has turned me back upon my tracks. A memory which catches sight of itself in a mirror.

    Justine, Melissa, Clea.… There were so few of us really — you would have thought them easily disposed of in a single book, would you not? So would I, so did I. Dispersed now by time and circumstance, the circuit broken forever.…

    I had set myself the task of trying to recover them in words, reinstate them in memory, allot to each his and her position in my time. Selfishly. And with that writing complete, I felt that I had turned a key upon the doll’s house of our actions. Indeed, I saw my lovers and friends no longer as living people but as coloured transfers of the mind; inhabiting my papers now, no longer the city, like tapestry figures. It was difficult to concede to them any more common reality than to the words I had used about them. What has recalled me to myself?

    But in order to go on, it is necessary to go back: not that anything I wrote about them is untrue, far from it. Yet when I wrote, the full facts were not at my disposal. The picture I drew was a provisional one — like the picture of a lost civilization deduced from a few fragmented vases, an inscribed tablet, an amulet, some human bones, a gold smiling death-mask.

    ‘We live’ writes Pursewarden somewhere ‘lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time — not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.’ Something of this order.…

    And as for human characters, whether real or invented, there are no such animals. Each psyche is really an ant-hill of opposing pre-dispositions. Personality as something with fixed attributes is an illusion — but a necessary illusion if we are to love!

    As for the something that remains constant … the shy kiss of Melissa is predictable, for example (amateurish as an early form of printing), or the frowns of Justine, which cast a shadow over those blazing dark eyes — orbits of the Sphinx at noon. ‘In the end’ says Pursewarden ‘everything will be found to be true of everybody. Saint and Villain are co-sharers.’ He is right.

    I am making every attempt to be matter-of-fact.…

    In the last letter which reached me from Balthazar he wrote: ‘I think of you often and not without a certain grim humour. You have retired to your island, with, as you think, all the data about us and our lives. No doubt you are bringing us to judgement on paper in the manner of writers. I wish I could see the result. It must fall very far short of truth: I mean such truths as I could tell you about us all — even perhaps about yourself. Or the truths Clea could tell you (she is in Paris on a visit and has stopped writing to me recently). I picture you, wise one, poring over Moeurs, the diaries of Justine, Nessim, etc., imagining that the truth is to be found in them. Wrong! Wrong! A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love. Do you know whom Justine really loved? You believed it was yourself, did you not? Confess!’

    My only answer was to send him the huge bundle of paper which had grown up so stiffly under my slow pen and to which I had loosely given her name as a title — though Cahiers would have done just as well. Months passed after this — a blessed silence indeed, for it suggested that my critic had been satisfied, silenced.

    I cannot say that I forgot the city, but I let the memory of it sleep. Yet of course, it was always there, as it always will be, hanging in the mind like the mirage which travellers so often see. Pursewarden has described the phenomenon in the following words:

    ‘We were still almost a couple of hours’ steaming distance before land could possibly come into sight when suddenly my companion shouted and pointed at the horizon. We saw, inverted in the sky, a full-scale mirage of the city, luminous and trembling, as if painted on dusty silk: yet in the nicest detail. From memory I could clearly make out its features, Ras El Tin Palace, the Nebi Daniel Mosque and so forth. The whole representation was as breath-taking as a masterpiece painted in fresh dew. It hung there in the sky for a considerable time, perhaps twenty-five minutes, before melting slowly into the horizon mist. An hour later, the real city appeared, swelling from a smudge to the size of its mirage.’

    The two or three winters we have spent in this island have been lonely ones — dour and windswept winters and hot summers. Luckily, the child is too young to feel as I do the need for books, for conversation. She is happy and active.

    Now in the spring come the long calms, the tideless, scentless days of premonition. The sea tames itself and becomes attentive. Soon the cicadas will bring in their crackling music, background to the shepherd’s dry flute among the rocks. The scrambling tortoise and the lizard are our only companions.

    I should explain that our only regular visitant from the outside world is the Smyrna packet which once a week crosses the headland to the south, always at the same hour, at the same speed, just after dusk. In winter, the high seas and winds make it invisible, but now — I sit and wait for it. You hear at first only the faint drumming of engines. Then the creature slides round the cape, cutting its line of silk froth in the sea, brightly lit up in the moth-soft darkness of the Aegean night — condensed, but without outlines, like a cloud of fireflies moving. It travels fast, and disappears all too soon round the next headland, leaving behind it perhaps only the half-uttered fragment of a popular song, or the skin of a tangerine which I will find next day, washed up on the long pebbled beach where I bathe with the child.

    The little arbour of oleanders under the planes — this is my writing-room. After the child has gone to bed, I sit here at the old sea-stained table, waiting for the visitant, unwilling to light the paraffin lamp before it has passed. It is the only day of the week I know by name here— Thursday. It sounds silly, but in an island so empty of variety, I look forward to the weekly visit like a child to a school treat. I know the boat brings letters for which I shall have to wait perhaps twenty-four hours. But I never see the little ship vanish without regret. And when it has passed, I light the lamp with a sigh and return to my papers. I write so slowly, with such pain. Pursewarden once, speaking about writing, told me that the pain that accompanied composition was entirely due, in artists, to the fear of madness; ‘force it a bit and tell yourself that you don’t give a damn if you do go mad, and you’ll find it comes quicker, you’ll break the barrier.’ (I don’t know how true this all is. But the money he left me in his will has served me well, and I still have a few pounds between me and the devils of debt and work.)

    I describe this weekly diversion in some detail because it was into this picture that Balthazar intruded one June evening with a suddenness that surprised me — I was going to write ‘deafened’ — there is no one to talk to here — but ‘surprised me’. This evening something like a miracle happened. The little steamer, instead of disappearing as usual, turned abruptly through an arc of 150 degrees and entered the lagoon, there to lie in a furry cocoon of its own light: and to drop into the centre of the golden puddle it had created the long slow anchor-chain whose symbol itself is like a search for truth. It was a moving sight to one who, like myself, had been landlocked in spirit as all writers are — indeed, become like a ship in a bottle, sailing nowhere — and I watched as an Indian must perhaps have watched the first white man’s craft touch the shores of the New World.

    The darkness, the silence, were broken now by the uneven lap-lap of oars; and then, after an age, by the chink of city-shod feet upon shingle. A hoarse voice gave a direction. Then silence. As I lit the lamp to set the wick in trim and so deliver myself from the spell of this departure from the norm, the grave dark face of my friend, like some goat-like apparition from the Underworld, materialized among the thick branches of myrtle. We drew a breath and stood smiling at each other in the yellow light: the dark Assyrian ringlets, the beard of Pan. ‘No — I am real!’ said Balthazar with a laugh and we embraced furiously. Balthazar!

    The Mediterranean is an absurdly small sea; the length and greatness of its history makes us dream it larger than it is. Alexandria indeed — the true no less than the imagined — lay only some hundreds of sea-miles to the south.

    ‘I am on my way to Smyrna’ said Balthazar, ‘from where I was going to post you this.’ He laid upon the scarred old table the immense bundle of manuscript I had sent him — papers now seared and starred by a massive interlinear of sentences, paragraphs and question-marks. Seating himself opposite with his Mephistophelean air, he said in a lower, more hesitant tone:

    ‘I have debated in myself very long about telling you some of the things I have put down here. At times it seemed a folly and an impertinence. After all, your concern — was it with us as real people or as characters? I didn’t know. I still don’t. These pages may lose me your friendship without adding anything to the sum of your knowledge. You have been painting the city, touch by touch, upon a curved surface — was your object poetry or fact? If the latter, then there are things which you have a right to know.’

    He still had not explained his amazing appearance before me, so anxious was he about the central meaning of the visitation. He did so now, noticing my bewilderment at the cloud of fire-flies in the normally deserted bay. He smiled.

    ‘The ship is delayed for a few hours with engine trouble. It is one of Nessim’s. The captain is Hasim Kohly, an old friend: perhaps you remember him? No. Well, I guessed from your description roughly where you must be living; but to be landed on your doorstep like this, I confess!’ His laughter was wonderful to hear once more.

    But I hardly listened, for his words had plunged me into a ferment, a desire to study his interlinear, to revise — not my book (that has never been of the slightest importance to me for it will never even be published), but my view of the city and its inhabitants. For my own personal Alexandria had become, in all this loneliness, as dear as a philosophy of introspection, almost a monomania. I was so filled with emotion I did not know what to say to him. ‘Stay with us, Balthazar —’ I said, ‘stay awhile.…’

    ‘We leave in two hours’ he said, and patting the papers before him: ‘This may give you visions and fevers’ he added doubtfully.

    ‘Good’ I said — ‘I ask for nothing better.’

    ‘We are all still real people’ he said, ‘whatever you try and do to us — those of us who are still alive. Melissa, Pursewarden — they can’t answer back because they are dead. At least, so one thinks.’

    ‘So one thinks. The best retorts always come from beyond the grave.’

    We sat and began to talk about the past, rather stiffly to be sure. He had already dined on board and there was nothing I could offer him beyond a glass of the good island wine which he sipped slowly. Later he asked to see Melissa’s child, and I led him back through the clustering oleanders to a place from which we could both look into the great firelit room where she lay looking beautiful and grave, asleep there with her thumb in her mouth. Balthazar’s dark cruel eye softened as he watched her, lightly breathing. ‘One day’ he said in a low voice ‘Nessim will want to see her. Quite soon, mark. He has begun to talk about her, be curious. With old age coming on, he will feel he needs her support, mark my words.’ And he quoted in Greek: ‘First the young, like vines, climb up the dull supports of their elders who feel their fingers on them, soft and tender; then the old climb down the lovely supporting bodies of the young into their proper deaths.’ I said nothing. It was the room itself which was breathing now — not our bodies.

    ‘You have been lonely here’ said Balthazar.

    ‘But splendidly, desirably lonely.’

    ‘Yes, I envy you. But truthfully.’

    And then his eye caught the unfinished portrait of Justine which Clea in another life had given me.

    ‘That portrait’ he said ‘which was interrupted by a kiss. How good to see that again — how good!’ He smiled. ‘It is like hearing a loved and familiar statement in music which leads one towards an emotion always recapturable, never-failing.’ I did not say anything. I did not dare.

    He turned to me. ‘And Clea?’ he said at last, in the voice of someone interrogating an echo. I said: ‘I have heard nothing from her for ages. Time doesn’t count here. I expect she has married, has gone away to another country, has children, a reputation as a painter … everything one would wish her.’

    He looked at me curiously and shook his head. ‘No’ he said; but that was all.

    It was long after midnight when the seamen called him from the dark olive groves. I walked to the beach with him, sad to see him leave so soon. A rowboat waited at the water’s edge with a sailor standing to his oars in it. He said something in Arabic.

    The spring sea was enticingly warm after a day’s sunshine and as Balthazar entered the boat the whim seized me to swim out with him to the vessel which lay not two hundred yards away from the shore. This I did and hovered to watch him climb the rail, and to watch the boat drawn up. ‘Don’t get caught in the screw’ he called, and ‘Go back before the engines start’ — ‘I will’ — ‘But wait — before you go —’ He ducked back into a stateroom to reappear and drop something into the water beside me. It fell with a soft splash. ‘A rose from Alexandria’ he said, ‘from the city which has everything but happiness to offer its lovers.’ He chuckled. ‘Give it to the child.’

    ‘Balthazar, good-bye!’

    ‘Write to me — if you dare!’

    Caught like a spider between the cross mesh of lights, and turning towards those yellow pools which still lay between the dark shore and myself, I waved and he waved back.

    I put the precious rose between my teeth and dog-paddled back to my clothes on the pebble beach, talking to myself.

    And there, lying upon the table in the yellow lamplight, lay the great interlinear to Justine — as I had called it. It was cross-hatched, crabbed, starred with questions and answers in different-coloured inks, in typescript. It seemed to me then to be somehow symbolic of the very reality we had shared — a palimpsest upon which each of us had left his or her individual traces, layer by layer.

    Must I now learn to see it all with new eyes, to accustom myself to the truths which Balthazar has added? It is impossible to describe with what emotion I read his words — sometimes so detailed and sometimes so briefly curt — as for example in the list he had headed ‘Some Fallacies and Misapprehensions’ where he said coldly: ‘Number 4. That Justine loved you. She loved, if anyone, Pursewarden. What does that mean? She was forced to use you as a decoy in order to protect him from the jealousy of Nessim whom she had married. Pursewarden himself did not care for her at all — supreme logic of love!’

    In my mind’s eye the city rose once more against the flat mirror of the green lake and the broken loins of sandstone which marked the desert’s edge. The politics of love, the intrigues of desire, good and evil, virtue and caprice, love and murder, moved obscurely in the dark corners of Alexandria’s streets and squares, brothels and drawing-rooms — moved like a great congress of eels in the slime of plot and counter-plot.

    It was almost dawn before I surrendered the fascinating mound of paper with its comments upon my own real (inner) life and like a drunkard stumbled to my bed, my head aching, echoing with the city, the only city left where every extreme of race and habit can meet and marry, where inner destinies intersect. I could hear the dry voice of my friend repeating as I fell asleep: ‘How much do you care to know … how much more do you care to know?’ — ‘I must know everything in order to be at last delivered from the city’ I replied in my dream.

    ‘When you pluck a flower, the branch springs back into place. This is not true of the heart’s affections’ is what Clea once said to Balthazar.

    And so, slowly, reluctantly, I have been driven back to my starting-point, like a man who at the end of a tremendous journey is told that he has been sleepwalking. ‘Truth’ said Balthazar to me once, blowing his nose in an old tennis sock, ‘Truth is what most contradicts itself in time.’

    And Pursewarden on another occasion, but not less memorably: ‘If things were always what they seemed, how impoverished would be the imagination of man!’

    How will I ever deliver myself from this whore among cities — sea, desert, minaret, sand, sea?

    No. I must set it all down in cold black and white, until such time as the memory and impulse of it is spent. I know that the key I am trying to turn is in myself.

    II

    Le cénacle Capodistria used to call us in those days when we gathered for an early morning shave in the Ptolemaic parlour of Mnemjian, with its mirrors and palms, its bead curtains and the delicious mimicry of clear warm water and white linen: a laying out and anointing of corpses. The violet-eyed hunchback himself officiated, for we were valued customers all (dead Pharaohs at the natron baths, guts and brains to be removed, renovated and replaced). He himself, the barber, was often unshaven having just hurried down from the hospital after shaving a corpse. Briefly we met here in the padded chairs, in the mirrors, before separating to go about our various tasks — Da Capo to see his brokers, Pombal to totter to the French consulate (mouth full of charred moths, hangover, sensation of having walked about all night on his eyeballs), I to teach, Scobie to the Police Bureau, and so on.…

    I have somewhere a faded flashlight photograph of this morning ritual, taken by poor John Keats, the Global Agency correspondent. It is strange to look at it now. The smell of the gravecloth is on it. It is a speaking likeness of an Alexandrian spring morning: quiet rubbing of coffee pestles, curdling crying of fat pigeons. I recognize my friends by the very sounds they make: Capodistria’s characteristic ‘Quatsch’ and ‘Pouagh’ at some political remark, followed by that dry cachinnation — the retching of a metal stomach; Scobie’s tobacco cough ‘Teuch, Teuch’: Pombal’s soft ‘Tiens’, like someone striking a triangle.’ ‘Tiens’.

    And in one corner there I am, in my shabby raincoat — the perfected image of a schoolteacher. In the other corner sits poor little Toto de Brunel. Keats’s photograph traps him as he is raising a ringed finger to his temple — the fatal temple.

    Toto! He is an original, a numéro. His withered witch’s features and small boy’s brown eyes, widow’s peak, queer art nouveau smile. He was the darling of old society women too proud to pay for gigolos.‘Toto, mon chou, c’est toi!’ (Madame Umbada), ‘Comme il est charmant, ce Toto!’ (Athena Trasha). He lives on these dry crusts of approbation, an old woman’s man, with the dimples sinking daily deeper into the wrinkled skin of an ageless face, quite happy, I suppose. Yes.

    ‘Toto — comment vas-tu?’ — ‘Si heureux de vous voir, Madame Martinengo!’

    He was what Pombal scornfully called ‘a Gentleman of the Second Declension.’ His smile dug one’s grave, his kindness was anaesthetic. Though his fortune was small, his excesses trivial, yet he was right in the social swim. There was, I suppose, nothing to be done with him for he was a woman: yet had he been born one he would long since have cried himself into a decline. Lacking charm, his pederasty gave him a kind of illicit importance. ‘Homme serviable, homme gracieux’ (Count Banubula, General Cervoni — what more does one want?).

    Though without humour, he found one day that he could split sides. He spoke indifferent English and French, but whenever at loss for a word he would put in one whose meaning he did not know

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