LAWRENCE DURRELL

Reading Lawrence Durrell is to take a dip in the deep-end of literary genius, of bourgeois writing at its best, which is to say, most poetic. Undoubtedly, The Alexandria Quartet is his classic masterpiece, written at a pace and with an intellectual vigour scarcely matched in the whole of Western literature. It is difficult to be critical of Durrell; for he gives so much so well, both technically and imaginatively, that most other contemporary authors, with the notable exceptions of Anthony Burgess and Norman Mailer, seem mean and mediocre by comparison.

And yet if criticism is due ... from my own anti-bourgeois standpoint, then it must be on account of his complacent acceptance of and willingness to deeply immerse himself in bourgeois criteria, in a world teeming with middle-class references ... from country houses to wealthy merchants, from passionate lovers to dispassionate priests, from expensive clothes to precious jewels - a whole world of open-society phenomena which Durrell objectively portrays with an acumen and stylistic brilliance worthy of the very greatest literary talent, albeit it remains strictly bourgeois, the impartial artist open to a vast panorama of the Given, the antithesis to the revolutionary.

One is almost won over, almost converted by Durrell, but not quite! Despite the manifest genius of his writings, a lacuna opens-up in the soul and remains there on account of the disparity between the contents of the page, natural as well as bourgeois, and one's inability or unwillingness to relate to them. All these lovers long-suffering in exotic spaces - what can they mean to a man who regards love as a bourgeois ideal and marriage as an outmoded tradition?

One reads, as with so many novels, from a higher moral-ground, call it supertheocratic or superproletarian, and no matter how impressive the style or poetic the metaphors, one is still unable to really admire something to which one cannot relate, because it reflects a lower stage of evolution. This is the old world, Western civilization, and it is destined for extinction. Poetic novels are no less obsolescent from a revolutionary point-of-view than philosophical novels and literary novels, the Conservative-Labour-Liberal triangle of idealism, materialism, and realism clinging to life with desperate intent but doomed, sooner or later, to severance from it. Only bourgeois diehards and moral hypocrites would pretend otherwise!