The Carnal Jigsaw

CLEA (287 pp.)--Laurence Durrell--Duffon ($3.95).

In this new novel, the fourth volume of a quartet, Author Durrell continues his absorbed investigation of contemporary Alexandria, the 2,000-year-old Egyptian seaport that he calls the "royal city and the anus mundi." Durrell delightedly wanders Alexandria's dust-tormented streets, blinks in its lemony sunlight, and pokes curiously through its stews, brothels, and hysteric festivals. Keeping him company is a clutch of God-haunted characters who live, love and die with tautly stretched minds.

Here again are Durrell's ravening women: handsome, black-browed Justine, a nymphomaniac with a neurotic need of intrigue; large-eyed, blonde Clea, who, when stripped, looks as "naked and slender as an Easter lily"; and blind Liza, still dotty with love for her suicide brother Pursewarden. Here, too, are his strangely ineffectual men: Nessim, the Coptic millionaire, in trouble both with his wife Justine and the British government; Dr. Balthazar, the homosexual cabalist; Mountolive, the stiff-necked British ambassador; and Darley, the Irish schoolteacher, who tries to put together the carnal jigsaw puzzle of his friends.

Contradictory Truth. In the three earlier books, time stood still as Novelist Durrell sought to prove how any single event can be variously interpreted by different participants. In Justine, Purse-warden's suicide is attributed to acedia, or boredom with life; Balthazar suggests that the suicide was caused by his failure as an artist; in Mountolive, the motive becomes purely political; and now in Clea, it seems established that Pursewarden took his life in an ironic expiation of his incestuous love for his blind sister. Durrell's point: "Truth is what most contradicts itself."

In Clea, which opens several years after the events of the first three books, time marches forward again. After selfexile on an Aegean island. Irishman Darley returns to Alexandria, still asking questions, still getting dusty answers. Justine, the great intriguer, has grown older and suffered a stroke: a drooping eyelid gives a leering expression to her rouged and overpowdered face. She climbs again into Darley's bed, and he flees her, shuddering. But Darley must love someone, and he turns to blonde Clea. Her words after they make love are the same ones spoken by Justine in the first volume of the quartet: "I am always so bad the first time, why is it?" And Darley makes his very same answer: "So am I."

Contrived Melodrama. Some echoes of the earlier books are intentional, but Clea has about it a curious air of repeated conversations, slapdash structure, and contrived melodrama. The cruel Memlik Pasha, who in Mountolive "never smiled," is brought onstage in Clea "smiling gently." A girl named Fosca is introduced only so that she may be strangely murdered, ,. and Clea herself is horribly and pointlessly maimed by a fishing spear.

Each book of the quartet has been weaker than the one before. But this is as much a tribute to the first volume, Justine, as a criticism of the others, for it is hard to see how the febrile excitement and verbal surprise of Justine could have been maintained. In all four volumes, Durrell has created a world peopled by extraordinary grotesques; each book is suffused with love of the ancient city and each is rich in pungent, aphoristic comment on man's fate. Novelist Durrell has very nearly brought off a major project, which--for poetic evocation and determined grappling with big themes--has not been duplicated by any postwar writer.

"I'm a dervish," says Lawrence Durrell.

"I dance, or try to." It is an apt description of his prose and his life, though scarcely of the man. At 48, Durrell is a short (5 ft. 3 1/2 in.), chunky (145 Ibs.) man with clear blue eyes, thick blond-grey hair and a blunt face. Though his forebears were Irish Protestants, Durrell began his whirling-dervish life in India, where his engineer father helped build the Darjeeling Railway and died when Larry was 17. Recalls Durrell: "We lived the life which Kipling romanticized in Kim. All day long, processions of lamas passed my school whirling prayer wheels."

Larry spoke Hindi as a child and early felt the split-level identity of "a mixed-up colonial kid."

Back in England, the colonial kid whirled in and out of schools, failed to get into Cambridge, distinguished himself by playing jazz piano in a nightclub called the "Blue Peter." At 18, he wrote his first novel, Pied Pipers of Lovers, a dismal flop. To rip off his "cultural swaddling clothes," Durrell fled to Europe, and in the early '305 settled on the Greek island of Corfu. There, Larry learned Greek and discovered a literary foster father, Henry Miller.

Obviously affected by Miller's "Tropics," Durrell erupted with a steamy item called The Black Book, still regarded as too obscene" to be published in Britain jr America. When his disciple's novel cached Miller, that dithyrambic daddy f all unshy pornographers effused: 'Down with Shakespeare! Down with Jhaucer! I greet Lawrence Durrell as the first Englishman." Even that cool sage, T. S. Eliot, bobbed approval. For Durrell he effect was tonic, "like suddenly hear-ng your own tone of voice."

Big-City Tone Poem. World War II soon drowned out Durrell's voice while ic served as a British press attache in Athens, Cairo and Alexandria. In 1952, ic was ready to begin the "Big-City Tone Poem" that had been bubbling in his mind for more than a decade, only to lave the Cyprus crisis force him back to press-officer duty amid the tragic rup-;ure of Anglo-Hellenic relationships, which Durrell later movingly described in Bitter Lemons (TIME, March 24, 1958). Finally, in the years 1956-59, beginning in Cyprus and ending in Southern France, Durrell wrote The Alexandria Quartet.

Stony-broke and close to hunger, he trusted his dervish genius to see him through. Sometimes typing "a slab of 10,000 words every two days," Durrell reeled off his tetralogy at an astonishing clip: Justine (about four months), Balthazar (six weeks), Mount olive (two months), Clea (seven weeks). His major defect, he feels, is overwriting, a prose style that is "too juicy."

At times, Durrell is plagued by the fear that all his creative juices will dry up, or that he will "do a Dylan Thomas and blow up with beer." His next literary project is far from juiceless. He hopes "to do something big, rambling, and perhaps rather bawdy. My theory is if you get too priggish and rule out the bawdy, you also lose the tenderness. The two things march together, as they did for the Elizabethans."

Ready Epitaph. Neo-Elizabethan Durrell leads a ruminative life these days in his four-room, stone peasant house in the south of France, near Nimes. After a full morning at the typewriter, he putters about building a stone wall, or shoots an occasional game bird, or strums a guitar to his own bawdy lyrics. A veteran of two stormy marriages, he looks forward to the summer visits of his ten-and 20-year-old daughters, who live in England. He is still content with the epitaph he once proposed for himself: "I intend to die young and have the following words on my tomb: 'Lawrence Durrell wishes you great passions and short lives.' If I die old, it will only need altering by one word."

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