Alexandria in Cavafy, Durrell, and Tsirkas.

Among the several ways of looking at Alexandria, one is represented by Edmund Keeley's critical book, Cavafy's Alexandria, which condemns the city as "squalid." Another approach, even less generous and far less literal, is that of Lawrence Durrell, whose notions of the city's history, politics, linguistics, ethnography and topography are permeated with unconcealed ethnic and religious hostilities. These attitudes were certainly not shared by Constantine Cavafy, who is repeatedly appealed to by Durrell in the text as a kind of authority. Crucial in Cavafy's work is acceptance of the ordinary mundane physical reality of the city, without which precisely those emotions would be absent that provide significance or meaning. The same fidelity to the world is at the center of Tsirkas' Drifting Cities. Both were writing for the kind of reader who prefers to be told something based upon sensitive observation, rather than something merely imagined.

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There are several ways of looking at cities like Alexandria. One is represented by an opening passage in Edmund Keeley's critical book, Cavafy's Alexandria, a passage that unfortunately seems to have escaped the notice of Alexandria's city planners. "Aware of the poet's point of view," says Keeley, "I find it difficult to move through the streets of today's Alexandria without feeling the presence of Cavafy's ghost, especially the threat of its mockery. During my last visit there," he writes in 1976,

   arriving from Greece, I tried to make myself believe that
   the ugly reality I was seeing masked the presence of
   another city, more real in its way, a city open to those
   who could bring to it an imaginative vision, a mythical
   sensibility, if you will, akin to Cavafy's and exemplified
   in English letters by E. M. Eorster and Lawrence Durrell.
   But the mask, the surface reality, was so unlike literary
   images I brought with me, so immediate and harsh in its
   effect, that it frustrated any imaginative projection.

Shutting his eyes to the glamour that its own dazzling literature has always been able to cast over Alexandria, Keeley attempts to look at one small seaside fragment of the city near the Cecil Hotel with a detachment akin to that of a documentary camera. "Today's Alexandria," he says,

   strikes one first of all as squalid, if you walk along the
   esplanade leading to where the wondrous ancient Pharos
   used to stand (now Fort Kayet Bay [sic] grotesquely
   restored as a museum celebrating the Egyptian navy),
   you will encounter odors and sights that will amaze
   you--if none of the palaces and monuments that amazed
   Cavafy's exiles. The wall at your side rises just high
   enough to block all but the most cunning attempts to find
   the sea beyond, but not enough to conceal the spread of
   laundry-bannered tenements along the harbor's curve
   ahead. And the smells you breathe, cut only sporadically
   by a pinch of sea-salt, are of refuse not quite ripe enough
   to pass for garbage and of urine too spotty for official
   concern. The principal monuments in that part of
   town--the statues of Saad Zaghlul and Mohammed
   Ali--are surrounded by open space that is quartered,
   apparently deliberately, into dirt plots blooming with
   weeds, trash, and broken glass. The broad concrete steps
   leading the visitor to a close-up view of these
   nineteenth-century heroes become precarious in the dusty
   patchwork of discarded cabbage leaves and fruit peelings.
   The city that spreads out from the esplanade has a surface
   perhaps less surprising, because all conflict between
   illusion and reality vanishes in the stench of narrow
   unwashed streets overflowing with the murky drift of the
   poor, pushed on by pyjama-clad hawkers and ambitious
   urchins. (1)

For those of us who can remember Alexandria as it was when Keeley saw it a quarter of a century ago, five years before the assassination of President Sadat, Keeley's description is not much removed from the miserable way things really were. Why he should have presumed--as he must have--that the city should have been preserved in amber since Cavafy's death 43 years earlier is probably due to putting credence in some tourist-industry myth of "eternal Egypt."

All cameras lie, however, including documentary ones. And they are more apt to lie when the photographer's background information is insufficient or defective or when he himself is prejudiced or mean-spirited. To describe Muhammad 'Ali as a "hero" suggests a defective grasp of modern Egyptian history, for example, as does the consignment of Sa'd Zaghlul to the nineteenth century. Complete innocence of Arabic and perhaps of much else is meanwhile indicated in Keeley's text by references to something called the Quartier Attarine--notable, it would seem, only for bisexual brothels. (2)

Keeley's ungovernable disdain for everything he sees, we feel, has not only deprived him of the privilege of learning anything about what it is, but has also had an immeasurably negative effect on the very act of seeing it. "Aware of the poet's point of view" though he claims to be, moreover, he can hardly be said to share that point of view, as reverberantly exemplified in one of Cavafy's late poems:

On the Actual Site

   of a house, above all, of landmarks, a block of flats,
   which I see when I go for a walk, year alter year,

   I have brought you into being, both in joy and in sadness:
   with so many circumstances, so many mundane things.

   And you have become--perfectly--changed into feeling
   for me. (3)

(1929)

What the poet knows and tells us here and what the linguist/ critic refuses to grasp, for all his skill at translating the poet's words, is that "the mask, the surface reality" is not a "mask" at all, but the city's true being, its mundane reality. It is precisely Alexandria's ordinary physical commonplaces--its peristatika and pragmatai--that constitute the raw material, the beginning point, of the emotions that lead to Cavafy's poetry. So likewise is it the trivial gossip recorded in petites histoires, not the solemn narratives of great historians, that can bring us to an understanding of the pathos of all historical event, no matter how grandiose. And likewise again it is the overt physical appearance of young men, their "beauty," that provides the material for the poet's treatment of his most complex, most characteristic, and most noble subject--sexual passion.

Poem after poem reiterates versions of this classic and profoundly anti-Platonic truth--e.g., "The Souls of Old Men," "Longings," "King Dimitrios," "Alexandrian Kings," "Come Back," "In Church," "Very Seldom," "Tomb of Evrion," "Long Ago," "At the Cafe Door," "One Night," "Pictured," "Orophernes," "In the Street," "Passing Through," "In the Evening," "Gray," "I've Looked So Much," "Body, Remember," "Outside the House," "The Afternoon Sun," "Craftsman of Wine Bowls," "Of Colored Glass," "The Mirror in the Front Hall" and "The Photograph" (4)--all of them making ironic turns on the philosophy of ideal love that Plato assigns to Socrates in the Symposium, all of them insistent upon the value of mere appearances and the truth of emotions amid the reality of real things.

Cavafy's poetry echoes no School of Athens, indeed, but recalls instead the glories of the ancient school of Alexandria, reiterating the doctrines and practice of Callimachus and the Neoterics certainly, but even more the exquisite work of the epigrammatists of the city and of its literary satellites--Cos, Samos, Rhodes, Cyrene, Gadara, Berytus, Sicily, and Magna Graecia--throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Cavafy would not have been Cavafy, however, if his glance had not fallen simultaneously both upon the Mediterranean world as it had been two thousand years earlier and upon the world as it was in his own time, when the new aesthetic vision best defined by Pater had led to fresh ontologies and epistemologies, allowing equal validity both to reality and to the sensitivity with which it is perceived. Like Proust or the cinema, Cavafy offers us an art made up entirely of mere appearance, of "beauty," of surfaces that are triumphantly alive not only at the moment they are first perceived, but in the retrospect of written pages, exposed film, or human memory.

Another approach to the city, even less generous and far less literal or documentary than Keeley's, is represented by Lawrence Durrell in the Alexandria Quartet. Durrell arrived in Egypt as a refugee from Greece in April of 1941, with his first wife, Nancy, and their infant daughter, Penelope. Though only 29, he was already known as a writer and as a member of literary circles that included T. S. Eliot and Henry Miller. For more than a year Durrell lived in Cairo, where he worked as Foreign Press Officer at the British Embassy. In July 1942, during the famous "Flap," when Rommel was expected any minute, he was transferred to Alexandria as Press Attache, where he was expected to influence the local Greek newspapers in the British interest.

Durrell spent less than three years in Alexandria, living ultimately at 19 Shari' Ma'mun in a house that belonged to the Ambron family. In the little tower at one corner of the house he wrote incessantly, but he wrote about Greece, not Egypt, and the published evidence is that he detested Alexandria. The letters he wrote to Henry Miller during the period, for example, complain incessantly about the ugliness of the city and the venality of its denizens. (5) In a poem called "Conon in Alexandria" he assumes the persona of Ptolemy III's astronomer and describes Alexandria as an "ash-heap of four cultures," complaining of Egypt in general that he has "been four years bound here."

Nor does he seem to have been so very curious about the city, which he is supposed to have explored using a copy of the 1938 second edition of E. M. Forster's wonderful History and Guide. "I arrived in 1941, twenty-three years after the book was written," he says in his Introduction to Michael Haag's 1982 edition of Forster's book, which uses the text of the rare 1922 first edition. "Magically, nothing had changed that I could discern." (6) But in fact the 1938 text that he must be supposed to have used was a brand new revision completed and published only three years before his arrival in Egypt. And it had been called into being precisely because, during the fifteen years since the book's first edition, enormous transformations had taken place.

Of these changes Durrell appears to have been utterly unaware. If he had really used a copy of the first edition, for example, he could hardly have failed to notice the total absence along the entire seafront of what Forster in 1922 describes as the charming "coast walk from Alexandria to Ramleh." (7) In the 1922 text Forster goes on to declare that "there is no road east of the Silsileh. The scheme for a grandiose 'Corniche' drive has fortunately failed, and the scenery has escaped the standardised dullness that environs most big towns." (8) By 1938, however, as Forster records in the second edition, the "coast walk" had been replaced by "cafes, restaurants, 'boites de nuit,' etc., fringing the great Corniche Road that follows the winding coast for 12 miles, from the Yacht Club (Section II) to Montazah (Section VIII)." (9)

Durrell thus ignores--or perhaps never read--Forster's own preface to the 1938 edition of k History and Guide, the first sentence of which states that "since this book was first published, Alexandria has changed a good deal.... The Guide needed drastic revision." (10) Forster then goes on to underline many of the more obvious metamorphoses, remarking that "the Alexandria I knew and loved belongs to the war years" and that during a return visit in 1929 he himself had got lost outside the new railway station.

If the verisimilitude of Durrell's version of Alexandria in the Quartet has never had defenders, it has nevertheless had many well-meaning champions, who have challenged the sort of objection that I am mounting here. "When talking of it to a foreigner," says Artemis Cooper, for example. "almost every Egyptian begins by

saying rather defensively that Durrell got Alexandria all wrong in the Quartet. This is merely a way of saying that it is not full of sexual perverts and child brothels." (11) Such a glib reduction of all critical argument to a single simple-minded equation represents a total misunderstanding--an inversion, in fact--of what it is that Egyptian readers--and many non-Egyptian readers, like myself--find disturbing.

In his celebrated Antonius Lecture at St. Antony's College, Oxford, in 1984, for example, Professor Mahmoud Manzalaoui includes succinct objections to the physical and cultural topography of Durrell's Quartet, but makes no mention whatever of sexual perverts or child brothels: (12)

   Of course, a writer may choose to use his experience as a
   point of departure for a work of art which may be
   impressionistic or expressionistic, or in some other way
   subjective.... If a subjective work is not clearly
   perceived as such, the knowledgeable reader expects
   veracity. Even if the experience behind the narrative is
   declaredly subjective, the author, unless he makes up his
   own country of the mind from scratch, and invents his
   own terminology, must use external data in objectifying
   his experience into a written work. If he falsifies and
   fudges he will be considered a deformer of his subject. (13)

Such a mendacious or fraudulent writer may also be deemed simply unworthy of trust, Professor Manzalaoui might have added, and perhaps even suspect, as any artist must be whose intentions are to be charming and impressive rather than satirical, but who nevertheless treats his subject with contempt. Throughout the Quartet one constantly receives odd little whiffs of the bogus, like the smell of old drains that used to linger forty years ago in the backstreets of any French or Italian provincial town.

Durrell claims to be referring to a city that has a thoroughly concrete historical reality. "The characters in this story," he declares in the headnote to Justine, the first novel of the series, "bear no resemblance to living persons"--a statement with which most readers will concur--"Only the city is real." (14) Implicitly parallel to this claim is a claim to informational authority. As Professor Manzalaoui amply demonstrates, however, when it comes to plain physical truths about poor old Alexandria, this city he is alleged to have loved and known so well, Durrell plays very fast and loose:

   Some extremely simple, even trivial examples from
   Lawrence Durrell's Quartet can illustrate this. At one
   point, some characters from his presumably subjective
   city drive east to get to the desert. But the city bears the
   name of the actual city of Alexandria, and the English
   words east and west have fixed meanings, and common
   topographical knowledge tells you that you cannot get to
   the desert by going east from Alexandria. (15)

Defective or dubious topography runs right through the Quartet, as do anachronisms, typos, and bad syntax in English, uncorrected blunders in other languages, (16) and almost universally ludicrous renditions of Arabic. (17)

Creating differences among his characters in their speech, manners, and appearances was by no means Durrell's strong point: they are not always distinguishable from one another even by their gender and within the sexes often seem virtually interchangeable. Certainly, with one or two deliberately caricature-like exceptions--Scobie, for example--they all speak alike. Perhaps this lack of differentiation was programmatic, a result of his post-war surrender to alchemy and its monist basis, expressed in the axiom that all matter is one. They owe far more, in any case, to literature and logorrhea than to observation or experience of external reality.

The same indifference to verisimilitude that homogenizes characters also infects their motives and thus even the plot:

   Again, let us accept the highly unlikely political plot, in
   which some Copts are in secret alliance with the Zionists:
   within the framework of the novel this is the outcome of
   the hostility between Muslim and Coptic communities--and
   yet, still within the framework of the novel
   the distinction between Muslim and Copt is blurred by
   having the Koran recited at Narouz's Coptic funeral-rite. (18)

Religious distinctions are further blurred by the absurd introduction of Coptic characters who recite the shatladah, an act equivalent to introducing a Muslim or Jewish character who recites the Nicene Creed. Such confections are so anomalous, so impossible, and so pointless that they can only have been put together out of sheer ignorance. "These are small examples of artistic carelessness," says Professor Manzalaoui,

   but there are more damaging ones; and contend as one
   may that an artefact has an autonomous existence, one
   can hardly fail to agree that there is something faintly
   silly when a reader's knowledge of the actuality is a
   positive hindrance to his appreciation of the artefact. (19)

The Quartet's instances of radical misinformation are the more ludicrous in a work that pretends to such authority.

Durrell's sense of the city's history is as haphazard as his politics, linguistics, ethnography or topography, but is additionally colored by overt ethnic and religious hostilities. His version of Alexandria thus contains only a handful of Muslim indigenes, marginal, degraded, and despised, living on sufferance in a setting otherwise wholly owned and operated, it seems, by the British. Throughout the Alexandria Quartet, he writes only with abhorrence of "Arabs"--i.e., the people who make up the vast majority of the city's population--and refers suggestively to something called "the native quarter," apparently identifiable with Keeley's curious Quarrier Attarine, where things take place that are both picturesque and terrible.

"With the arrival of Amr and his Arab cavalry," he glibly remarks in his introduction to Michael Haag's annotated edition of Forster's guide, "the famous resplendent city nose dived into oblivion, the sand dunes encroached and covered it." (20) So much for Islam and thirteen vivid centuries of human history. But Durrell's dismissive and contemptuous disregard is by no means reserved for Egyptian Muslims: a very well-known poem of his about the Coptic Church suggests that he also found the Christians of Egypt equally despicable. (21) It is hardly surprising that in 1945, as soon as it was possible to do so, Durrell returned to Greece, accompanied by Eve Cohen, an Alexandrian who officially became his second wife two years later and eventually the mother of his second daughter, Sappho-Jane.

Durrell's vision of Alexandria is not only racist, but preposterous; and was certainly not shared by Constantine Cavafy, repeatedly appealed to by Durrell in the text as a kind of ghostly authority. Durrell includes his own complete translations of six poems in the Quartet and quotes portions of no fewer than ten more. Tactically, it is the spirit, idea, or figure of Cavafy and the substance of his work that supply Durrell's catch-phrases, themes, and atmospheres, as well as such minor motifs as the recurrent address in Rue Lepsius, where one of his characters is alleged to live in Cavafy's old flat. Strategically, Cavafy himself is used as a touchstone throughout the Quartet and is constantly referred to either by name, as "the poet of the city" or simply as "the old man." Without Cavafy's poetry the Quartet would be in fact inconceivable.

We have already seen something of how Cavafy himself ultimately treated the city. Edmund Keeley claims that there is an evolution of the poet's attitudes toward Alexandria through three stages. The poet transformed "a personal obsession with the confining and constricting aspects of his city," Keeley says, "first into a useful metaphor, then into a unique erotic landscape, and finally into liberating myth." In terms of this reading, what seems to have happened with Durrell is that he was so captivated by the erotic poetry of Cavafy that he never moved out of Keeley's "second phase," which involves the erection of "a unique erotic landscape."

In the Quartet Durrell clearly set out to create a fiesta of utopian sex--his stated aim was to conduct "an investigation of modern love"--in which characters couple and recouple, cluster and disperse, like clouds of microbes seen between glass plates in a microscope--an endless Carnaval ball. The chief function of the physical and historical city itself in the Quartet is little more than to serve as an appropriately decadent venue for erotic pursuits. His Alexandria is a Levantine theme park casually hung with miscellaneous gobbets of dubious local color snatched almost entirely from various literary sources.

In the poetry of Cavafy, on the other hand, the absolutely ordinary mundane physical reality of the city itself is a central and crucial element. Without it precisely those emotions would be lacking that give in each case a peculiarly Cavafyian configuration to meaning. It is this physical reality--of ordinary furniture, broken-down beds and shabby sofas, windows and doors opened or closed, houses, streets, crowds, ordinary times of night or day--that inhabits and informs not only Cavafy's erotic poetry, but also his historical and philosophical poetry. It is always seen obliquely, never pointed out or described, because explicitness is never required. It is the entire background, however, against which his speakers may remember a brief moment of beauty or passion, within which they act out their inertia, their failed ambitions, their pathetic disappointments, or their grandiose delusions.

There are thus no utopias, erotic or otherwise, in Cavafy. Cities and their physical reality seem to represent, in fact, two things: the cultural and biological dynamics that have always limited and determined the shapes of human lives; and the necessary ephemerality of all merely physical things. Typical of this vision is "The Afternoon Sun": (22)

   This room, how well I know it.
   Now they're renting it, and the one next to it,
   as offices. The whole house has become
   an office building for agents, merchants, companies.

   This room, how familiar it is.

   Here, near the door, was the couch,
   a Turkish carpet in front of it.
   Close by, the shelf with two yellow vases.
   On the right--no, opposite--a wardrobe with a mirror.
   In the middle the table where he wrote
   and the three big wicker chairs.
   Beside the window was the bed
   where we made love so many times.

   They must still be around somewhere, those old things.

   Beside the window was the bed;
   the afternoon sun fell across half of it.

   ... One afternoon at four o'clock we separated
   for a week only.... And then--
   that week became forever.

1919)

Cavafy's sense of human vanity and the voracity and inexorability of time would by no means have been incompatible with Tsirkas' Marxist view of history. And in the older poet's sense of what cities mean he must certainly have found something deeply sympathetic, appealing even from the technical point of view. In my understanding, indeed, this Cavafyian conception of the city is at the very center of Tsirkas' trilogy Drifting Cities, where I also suspect we could somehow place Cavafy himself.

The poem of Cavafy's that Tsirkas indicated as having inspired the beginning of his study Cavafy and His Era, for example, is "Thermopylae." And "Thermopylae" could also stand as a perfect summary of the main theme of Drifting Cities, which Tsirkas began writing just over five years later:

   Honor to those who in the life they lead
   define and guard a Thermopylae.
   Never betraying what is right,
   consistent and just in all they do
   but showing pity also, and compassion;
   generous when they are rich, and when they are poor,
   still generous in small ways,
   still helping as much as they can;
   always speaking the truth,
   yet without hating those who lie.

   And even more honor is due to them
   when they foresee (as many do foresee)
   that in the end Ephialtis will make his appearance,
   that the Medes will break through after all. (23)

The reverberancy of Tsirkas' Greek title--[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]--presents a major problem for the translator: how can one hope to re-echo in English the notes first sounded for Hellenes by the likes of Alcaeus and Plato, marvelously resounded by Tsirkas' great contemporaries Kazantzakis and Seferis? (24) Kay Cicellis' English title--Drifting Cities--is at least a partial solution, recalling for English-speaking readers the lines from The Waste Land that are quoted by Nancy and completed by Manos in the first books of the trilogy:

   Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
   Vienna London
   Unreal

Stratis Tsirkas--the pen-name of Yannis Hadziandreas--was born in Cairo in 1911 and spent his early childhood in Shari' 'Abd al-Dayyim in 'Abdin. (25) His father, who owned a barber shop in Shari' Sulayman Pasha, had come from Imbros, his mother from Chios via Palestine. They had met in Cairo and married only a year earlier. Tsirkas published translations (Heine, de Musset, Schiller) at fifteen, his first prose piece before he was sixteen. In 1929, when he was just 18, he began earning his own living, first as an accountant, then as manager of a cotton gin, in Upper Egypt. During the next year, 1930, when his first poem was published, he met Cavafy; and in the three years remaining before the great poet's death (1933) they managed to meet again, usually tete-a-tete, a dozen times. Simultaneously, however, Tsirkas had also become a Communist. Left-wing political interests were to dominate his life thereafter; and despite his early and vehement opposition to Stalinism, which led to party-sanctioned attacks on him from 1961 onward, he was to remain communist in his sympathies all his life.

With his first book of poems in 1937, he adopted the pen-name "Stratis Tsirkas" definitively. A second collection appeared in 1938. In 1939, after ten years of managing cotton gins, he moved from Dayrut in Upper Egypt to Alexandria, where he became manager of the Greek-owned Halkousis tannery. During the war he was active as a propagandist among the increasing multitude of Greeks in Egypt and fervently supported the left-wing mutinies in the Greek Army and Navy that broke out during April 1944 and were calculated to strengthen the hand of the Greek Communist Party on the mainland.

In the first fifteen years after the war he published a third collection of poems (1946), three collections of short stories (1947, 1954, 1957), and his first important full-length study of Cavafy, Cavafy., and His Era (1958), which took three years of study. In 1959 he began writing The Club, the first volume of the Drifting Cities trilogy, which was published in 1960 and earned his expulsion from the Alexandria branch of the Greek Communist Party a year later. The second volume, Ariagni, appeared in 1962, the third, The Bat, in 1965. In 1963, meanwhile, after the Halkousis tannery had been nationalized by the Nasser regime, Tsirkas was forced to emigrate with his young family to Athens, where he spent the last sixteen years of his life, active to the end both in political causes and as a writer and translator.

Of the three cities that provide settings in the Drifting Cities trilogy, it is Alexandria, the setting for The Bat, that Tsirkas ultimately must have known best, thanks to his childhood summers regularly spent there with his grandfather, his intermittent visits for political or business purposes, and finally his 24 unbroken years of residence from 1939 to 1963. Manos, his protagonist, introduces us to a version of Alexandria based very closely on Tsirkas' own experience, a powerfully effective antidote to Durrell's decadent and bookish "city of memory" and far more true to life, as can easily be demonstrated by an examination of details. (26) The Egyptians and Europeans of Tsirkas' Alexandria, for example, are mainly working-class, like most of the modern city's real population; and it is cosmopolitan only in the truly Alexandrian sense, that of being a place where many different ethnic communities have incidentally made their homes at the same time, living otherwise more or less separately from one another, none feeling permanently installed.

Through Manos we thus see an Alexandria of ordinary daily life, in neighborhoods ranged along the familiar stops on the old B and V tram routes, always breathed upon or blasted by a salt wind from the sea. Nancy, Manos' lover and eventually the mother of his daughter, lives in a pension on the Corniche that is perfectly Cavafyesque:

   A searchlight went on at the end of the jetty. It went out,
   then on again. The sheath of light crawled across the
   cloud, paused as if it found the navel of the sky then
   swept low, covered the whole curve of the harbor in a
   single brush stroke and finally went out. Nan pulled at
   the shutters. She felt an unpleasant sensation on her
   palms, it was a mixture of flaking paint, the damp and
   dust on the shutters, and the resistance of the rusty
   hinges. She managed to draw the shutters in the end, and
   fumbled her way through the dark room in search of the
   switch. She let her dull gaze travel around the room. The
   anonymous furniture, the grayish bedsheets--a twinge in
   her heart as she remembered those other sheets, made of
   fine starched linen. There was the little lame table, with
   the telephone on it, silent, silent, silent. All these days,
   she had looked at it in vain, hoping it might ring, even by
   mistake, just so long as she could have the thrill of
   hearing it ring.... Then the dim greenish mirror, with a
   dark stain in the middle, like an eruption of mold, like a
   jellyfish, a lunar crater. The curtains smelled of
   insecticide, a moldy smell that also pervaded the worn
   carpet, the back of the armchair in the living room, gray
   and threadbare like the rest. (27)

Recalling Cavafy's wonderful "The Afternoon Sun," this passage tells us everything we need to know by telling us simply about Nancy's physical situation, without dramatizing, glamorizing or falsification. Less a description than an ironic tour d'horizon, it has philosophical depth and the pathos of a tango, (28) as well as the ring of truth. In its oblique economy, its austerity and tact in its treatment of what it touches upon, it exemplifies an artistic code requiring faithful adherence to physical reality.

To exemplify further this ethical code, let us quote one more passage from Drifting Cities. Manos and two other Communist conspirators are arriving at a hideout, an unused flat in a building behind the new (29) Jewish Hospital at Sporting (Sidi Gabir) on the Abu Qir road:

   We stopped talking because we had reached the place.
   The door to the apartment was at the back of the building.
   As the other two fumbled with the lock, which had gone
   rusty with disuse, I turned round for a moment and gazed
   at the night. There was a broken-down wall, mounds of
   earth, the railway, and beyond all that the empty fields.
   The breeze brought a smell of sugar cane and cinnamon
   from the damp earth--sweetish, strangely exciting.
   Lights flickered in the distance--they must have been
   paraffin lamps (30)--and there was the sound of voices and
   musical instruments. Some sort of celebration, a wedding
   or a circumcision ritual. We were standing on the edge of
   a different world. Beyond those railway lines stretched
   Egypt, vast and motionless, indifferent to our war. (31)

For many of us, a brilliant passage like this one captures something not merely truthful, as we can know only from our own experience, but essential, as we know from having given the subject thought. There is nothing remotely like this paragraph in Durrell, who never seems to have looked at the world around him. Technically, it is like those Byzantine icons described by the painter John Craxton that make a "fascinating and sophisticated use of reverse perspective where the viewer becomes the vanishing point." (32) It reveals to us, through Manos, in each detail, from the rusted lock and the scents arising from the darkling fields, the distant music and lights, an Egypt that we can recognize as one we know; and it also shows us in Manos himself a generosity of spirit that understands the irrelevance of self-sacrifice, foresees futility, betrayal and death, and nevertheless perseveres in what he believes to be a heroic course, without even the Achillean promise of future fame.

This passage is a prose version, in effect, of Cavafy's "Thermopylae." The political and philosophical attitudes it implies stand at an opposite remove from the crude racism so patent and pervasive in Durrell, who presumes--cynically, perhaps--that imperialist values will permanently prevail, not only in real peoples' sex-lives, but also in the world around them. Tsirkas, by contrast, quotes with approval as one of his Greek characters recalls what he was told by the great Egyptian nationalist Ahmad 'Urabi himself:

   "You're guests in this country. Our people have waked
   up, and they want to be masters in their own house. Don't
   be fool enough to trust the British. They try to pass as
   your protectors, but when they don't need you any more,
   they'll slip the noose around your necks and sell you
   cheap. If you know what's good for you, keep your eyes
   open. We like you, we don't mind you being here. But as
   guests, not as bosses." (33)

It is highly unlikely that the real 'Urabi ever said anything so concise to anyone, so prescient, or so proleptically wise: Tsirkas is in fact deliberately adducing here for comparative purposes the more liberal political consensus of a later age, as the serious historical novel from Scott to Gore Vidal has always done.

What this passage also points to, however, is yet another dimension of the real and historical Alexandria that is missing in Durrell and to which he seems to have been quite blind. Habitually muddling the synchronic with the diachronic, the Quartet offers us garbled history and fanciful politics far removed from the grittiness and pain of the real thing. By contrast with Tsirkas' passionate observation, which constitutes his most overt claim on our attention, Durrell parades what appears to be a cynical indifference--perhaps even hostility--to the physical and historical underpinnings of what purports to be his subject. His treatment of either his own fictional characters or the real people who incidentally live on this earth show equally a disturbing lack of capacity for either sympathy or imagination. (34)

Can the books that make up the Quartet even be called novels? It is fidelity to the world as it exists that provides the single quality that creates the decisive distinction between the literary sub-genre we call the novel from the larger and older prose genre to which it belongs, the genre we call the romance. It is what distinguishes the Satyricon, say, or the Golden Ass from Chaereas and Callirhoe, Daphnis and Chloe, or Theagenes and Chariclea, The Scarlet Letter from Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, its philosophical, technical, and aesthetic ramifications are obvious, as are their inter-linkages.

Philosophically, for example, it clearly precludes idealism, of either the Platonic or the Hegelian kind. Technically it predicates the general approach to writing that is ascribed by Swift in The Battle of the Books to the artists he designates figuratively as "bees," rather than "spiders." Aesthetically it can deliver meanings that are both rich and intelligible, that are not utterly unrelated to how people really live, and that thus call out to faculties other than mere fantasy. There are readers, after all, who find it much more satisfactory to be told something based upon observation that is challenging, honest, and true, rather than something spun out of the artist's entrails that is concocted, pretentious, and false.

But such fidelity to the world--surely in itself a good thing--is above all an ethical posture, I believe, not unconnected with what separates our greatest novelists--Cervantes, Dickens, or Tolstoy, for example--from the merely good or second-rate. Whether or not they are aware of it, they subscribe to a heroic code as exigent as the one that sustained Cavafy's Spartans at Thermopylae, which makes them

   generous ... always
   speaking the truth.

Notes

(1) Edmund Keeley, Cavafy's Alexandria (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976, 1996) 3-4.

(2) There is, incidentally, no reference of any kind at all to any such district in E. M. Forster's Alexandria: A History and Guide.

(3) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]." The translation is mine.

(4) I use the English titles given to the poems in C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, trans., George Savidis, ed. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975, 1992).

(5) See, for example, Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, A Private Correspondence, George Wickes, ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1963) 187.

(6) Alexandria: A History and Guide, First Edition Reprint (London: Michael Haag, 1982) xvi.

(7) The first edition is very rare. It was published in Alexandria by Whitehead and Morris in 1922 and dedicated to G. H. Ludolf, "to whose suggestion this book is due and without whose help it would never have been completed." In Alexandria all the stored copies were burnt in a warehouse fire and all remaining unsold copies were destroyed to comply with insurance regulations. Some copies shipped out before the fire were available in London, however, at the Whitehead Morris office in Fenchurch Street and at Francis Birrell and David Garnett's bookshop, 30 Gerrard Street, W. I.

(8) Alexandria: A History and Guide, First Edition Reprint, 182.

(9) Alexandria: A History and Guide, Second Edition (Alexandria: Whitehead Morris, 1938) 157.

(10) Alexandria: A History and Guide, Second Edition, iii.

(11) Artemis Cooper, Cairo in the War 1939-1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989) 253-54.

(12) Professor Manzalaoui was also the author of a well-known critical article, "Curate's Egg: An Alexandrian's Opinion of Durrell's Quartet," Etudes anglaises XV (1962): 248-60.

(13) Mahmoud Manzalaoui, "Mouths of the Sevenfold Nile: English Fiction and Modern Egypt," Studies in Arab History: The Antonius Lectures, 1978-87, Derek Hopwood, ed. (London: Macmillan in Association with St. Antony's College and World of Islam Festival Trust, 1990) 134.

(14) The Alexandria Quartet; Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea (London: Faber and Faber, 1968) [15]. Hereinafter Quartet.

(15) Manzalaoui, "Mouths of the Sevenfold Nile" 134.

(16) E.g., "I think of Melissa once more: hortus conclusus, soror mea sponsor [sic] ..." Quartet 38. "I was of course drunk by this time--drunk as much on Justine as on the thin-paper-bodied Pol Roget [sic]." Quartet 150.

(17) It seems obvious that Durrell never consulted his Alexandrian wives--Eve Cohen and Claire Vincendon Ford--in this respect. The textus receptus of the Quartet, the Faber and Faber editions, has clearly never received anything like adequate editing or proof-reading.

(18) Manzalaoui, "Mouths of the Sevenfold Nile" 134.

(19) Manzalaoui, "Mouths of the Sevenfold Nile" 134-35.

(20) Alexandria: A History and Guide, First Edition Reprint, xvi.

(21) "The sexualizing of all things in Durrell's Alexandria," Professor Manzalaoui goes on to say, comes partly from his over-charged self-engendered landscaping; behind it is also the tradition, which goes back to the Romans and the medievals, which portrays the luxury and sensuality of Cleopatra and "the Soldan of Babylon." Certainly, also, there is a distortion of veracity brought about by changing the proportion of components, suggesting for example a blown-up Levantine population, a sparse native one. Durrell's sensitive, witty, sensual and uprooted characters walk the pavements of a town remarkably depleted of average man. I am reminded of Arthurian knights errant who rove fields and forest with scarcely ever a cottager among them ...

The really depressing fact, however, is that legitimate works of imaginative literature should be seized upon by the educated western public and thought to have a documentary value to which they do not lay claim.... An unthinking notion of Double Truth seems to grip people who turn from an article on social change in Egypt in The Economist to a wholly contradictory picture of Egypt in a review of a novel in one of the desperately-named "quality Sundays." Do people who ask one how accurate Durrell's portrayal is genuinely think it likely that a middle-aged upper-class Coptic woman like Durrell's Celia would, in the middle years of this century, keep a pet cobra in her summer house and feed it on milk?" Manzalaoui, "Mouths of the Sevenfold Nile" 140.

(22) Cavafy, Collected Poems 96. Durrell quotes from this poem in Clea (1960), the last volume of the Quartet, and offers a "free translation" of it in an appendix called "Notes in the Text."

(23) Cavafy, Collected Poems 15.

(24) Tsirkas quotes Seferis' lines "Jerusalem, drifting city/Jerusalem, city of refugees" as an epigraph to the first volume of the trilogy. We are reminded that Alcaeus of Mytilene invented the metaphor of the ship of state and that the real name of Plato's' Republic" is Politeia. The real name of Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek is likewise [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (The Life and Politics of Alexis Zorba) and the book is not about being Greek, but about being a modern man.

(25) I am indebted for biographical information about Tsirkas to Chrysa Prokopaki, "On the Trail of Stratis Tsirkas," translated by Vivienne Nilan from [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Athens: Kedros, 1985).

(26) Many of them were kindly annotated for me in my copy of Drifting Cities just before his death by the late Count Bernard de Zogheb ([dagger] 1999).

(27) Stratis Tsirkas, Drafting Cities : A Trilogy, Kay Cicellis, trans. (Athens: Kedros, 1995) 446, hereinafter "Tsirkas."

(28) E.g. the lyrics of "A Media Luz" by Carlos Cesar Lenzi: "Corrientes tres--quatro--ocho/segundo piso, acensor/Adentro coctel y amor/Pisito que puso Maple/piano, estera y velador,/un telefon que contesta,/una vitrola que llora/viejos tangos de mi flor,/y un gato de porcellana/pa'que no maulle al amor."

(29) Built in 1930-1932 to replace the old one in Muharram Bey.

(30) Kay Cicellis says "acetylene lamps," which seems highly unlikely.

(31) Tsirkas 520.

(32) In "Music to the Soul," RA: The Royal Academy Magazine, no. 58 (Spring 1998): 40.

(33) Tsirkas 551.

(34) It is for this reason--not the deployment of "artistic license"--that the chronology of fictional and real events in the Alexandria Quartet is so confused and problematical. Only in the headnote to Mountolive, the third volume of the Quartet, does Durrell remark that "in this book" he has "exercised the novelist's right in taking a few necessary liberties with modern Middle Eastern history and the staff-structure of the Diplomatic Service," Quartet 395.

He is not attempting here to explain or excuse his generally haphazard treatment throughout the whole of the Quartet of the period ca. 1934-1945, which is supposed to be its vague temporal setting. What he is obviously referring to instead is the specific fact that the central character of this third novel, David Mountolive, occupies a position as British Ambassador that was notoriously and most emphatically held from before and throughout the war (1936-1946) by Miles Lampson, previously High Commissioner (1933-1936), ennobled as Lord Killearn in 1943. Huge, colorful, and domineering, Lampson was not only the first British Ambassador to Egypt, but also the only foreign diplomat in Egypt of full ambassadorial rank. It was Sir Miles who administered the re-occupation of Egypt from 1939 onward and who at pistol-point on 4 February 1942 forced the 22-year-old King Faruq to choose between the appointment of Nahas Pasha Prime Minister and unconditional abdication.