you might try a four-card trick in the form of a novel, passing a common axis through four stories, say, and dedicating each to one of the four winds of heaven. A continuum, forsooth, embodying not a temps retrouvé but a temps délivré. He added: “In the Space and Time marriage we have the greatest Boy meets Girl story of the age.” (B, 142) Once it was grasped they were understood, too. He defended himself by saying that the Relativity proposition was directly responsible for abstract painting, atonal music, and formless (or at any rate cyclic forms in) literature. This for some reason annoyed Justine who took him to task for wasting his time in these studies. And I hope this essay sends our readers to the Quartet as well, an experience you should not miss, the brilliant, elaborate structure, the explosive lava flow of language, the stark view of modern love, the redemption of art.Īt the time when we knew he was reading hardly anything but science. But his essay sent me back, and when I went to my bookshelves to get the book, I realized my copy was gone, a gift to one of my sons in whom I hope it ignites the same conflagration it did in my heart. He began the project half afraid that what he had remembered so passionately might not hold up in the years of wisdom. He offers here an all too brief glance backward at the novel of his youth. Curtis during my East Coast reading tour last November and we discovered a bond over beer at the Tide & Boar in Moncton, a bond that included dogs and Durrell. There are so many things I tried to copy here as a beginning writer (the faux Einsteinian structure and the Pursewarden endnotes, for example), so many ideals inhaled and transformed to my own uses. I loved the mysterious and ineffably sad hand prints on the brothel walls, Justine’s mad search for her stolen child, and Pursewarden’s epigrams (I began to learn to write epigrams reading The Alexandria Quartet). Yes, I love the transformations at the end of the quartet, when time suddenly moves forward. I can’t count the vivid snippets of scene and dialogue that still float up in my mind: especially the end of Clea when the painter’s wounded hand can suddenly “paint” as here healthy hand had never been able to do or the moment when the feckless journalist (a minor character throughout) returns from war in the desert, a tan, golden warrior who has suddenly found his place in existence. Like Paul Curtis, as a young writer I was enthralled by Lawrence Durrell’s four astounding novels - Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive & Clea - together known as The Alexandria Quartet.
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