Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

---

The Alexandria Library and the British Council are organising a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of Justine, the first volume of the Alexandria Quartet.

When the name Lawrence Durrell is mentioned, one immediately thinks of the Quartet, the series of novels that made his name. But Durrell was also a poet. In fact his poetry writing started long before his novels, the first of which appeared in 1957.

I first got to know Durrell soon after his arrival in Egypt in 1941. He had been working with the British Council in Greece when the Nazi storm broke out, creating, as Durrell put it in his introduction to Return to Oasis, an anthology of poetry, "a sense of anti-climax; almost relief, for now at least we would know the worse that had to be faced."

Durrell arrived in Alexandria in a small boat from Greece, and he told me later about the shock he had on his arrival in Cairo on seeing the apparent normality of everyday life. The country basked "in its fictitious neutrality, the shops were crammed, the cinemas packed. Cairo was one blaze of light all night long."

This created in Durrell, and other writers who found themselves exiled, a sense of alienation and distance, which coloured their writings.

I used to meet Durrell and writers like Terence Tiller, Bernard Spencer and Robin Fedden at the Anglo-Egyptian Union, a rather exclusive club whose members were mostly British. I was one of the lucky locals who somehow got accepted. It was at this club that I witnessed the birth of a leading literary magazine, Personal Landscape, which was started by the three writers mentioned above. It had been on the beautiful lawns of the Union that the idea for the magazine was born, and I can still remember how the title, Personal Landscape, was proposed by Fedden. It was accepted since it "expressed our wish to emphasise personal life and values when the current of all thought and feeling around us was set strongly in the channels of war, and when it was growing ever more difficult to exist outside the 'war effort'. It was a current against which, as a pacifist, I felt bound to swim," wrote Fedden.

The magazine was published for three years, becoming a vehicle in English for serious poets and critics in the Middle East, and Durrell was one of its regular contributors.

The question which always comes up is what was Alexandria to Durrell? Some compare his Alexandria with that of DJ Enright whose novel, The Academic Year, is set in the city. Nothing could be more different than the two poets' treatment of the city. For Durrell, in love with Greece, Alexandria was an extension of his adopted land.

Durrell returned to Egypt in the late '70s. He came with a BBC film crew to make a film about his life in Egypt. I accompanied him on his Alexandrian trek and, I must say, he could find no trace of the city of his Quartet. But he became somehow more sympathetic towards the city. He later published a long article in the New York Times Literary Supplement about his visit -- a sympathetic and sometimes sentimental account of old haunts and surviving Egyptian friends, including myself.

The last time I saw Durrell was in May 1987 in London. He was autographing his latest book Constance at a reception given by the publisher. The novel had first been published in 1983 and yet a whole chapter, a rather long chapter, is titled "Into Egypt," proving a kind of link with the Quartet. It seems that Egypt, despite what Durrell at times expressed, still lingered in his memory, continuing as a rich mine to which he would constantly return in his search for inspiration. Durrell had not aged well, I thought, and indeed he looked older than his age. He was quite a different person, bitter and nonchalant. I later found out why; he had just lost his daughter.