With celebrations underway to commemorate the publication of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet half a century ago, Mona Anis asks: is not the present high regard for the work in Egypt the very epitome of alienation? As the Library of Alexandria and the British Council in Egypt commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet ( Justine, 1957; Balthazar, 1958; Mountolive, 1958; and Clea, 1960), it might be fitting to remember a long-forgotten fact: Durrell's Alexandria is not in any way a direct expression of the real Alexandria, past or present. And before any reader begins to take aim at the present writer for not knowing the difference between art and reality, I would like to state at the outset that this piece is not concerned with the discrepancy between the real Alexandria and the fictional one of the Quartet. Rather, it attempts to explain why the real city where the author of the Quartet lived between 1944 and 1945 mutated in his hand into this "whore among cities." Statements such as Durrell was a foreigner who frequented a narrow clique of foreigners and transient visitors, or that he didn't know the topography of the city or its native tongue, valid as they might be, are not the main concern of this article. Such arguments would have been relevant had Durrell set himself the task of writing a guide to Alexandria, a task achieved by E. M. Forster in the early 1920s, although Forster was also a foreigner frequenting the same narrow clique Durrell socialised with some 20 years later. BACK TO BASICS: Of course Durrell was a foreigner, and one who didn't know or care to know the history of the city or its language, but this fact need not detract from the value of his work, a work of art governed by laws different to those adopted when writing tourist guides, or history books for that matter. The depiction of a place in a work of art, as the French critic Pierre Macherey once wrote about Balzac's Paris, "is the product of a certain labour, dictated not by reality but by the work. It is not the reflection of a reality or an experience, but of an artifice, which consists wholly in the establishment of a complex system of relations." Consequently, rather than attributing Durrell's hostility and contempt for most things Egyptian in the Quartet to his insufficient knowledge, we should seek an explanation for that phenomenon in the system of complex relations constituting the work of art we call the Alexandria Quartet, littered as it is with disturbing statements such as "the timorous soul of the Egyptians cries always for the whip." One obvious way of accounting for such ideological statements would be to attribute them to the white supremacist mentality prevalent during the high noon of imperialism -- one that is unfortunately rearing its ugly head again today with the current "war on terror". This would not be totally wrong, yet if we want to deal with the Quartet as a work of art--as a great part of it, especially Justine, genuinely is-- then we have to assume that this imperialist ideology influenced the work in a more complex manner than is apparent in the offensive ideological statements scattered here and there in it, especially in Mountolive, by far the most ideological and least artistically satisfying of the four volumes. However, to write a literary critique of Durrell's Quartet is something that is beyond the scope of this article, and neither do the reasons behind writing it merit such an endeavour. My reasons stem solely from a desire to commemorate the anniversary of Justine, celebrated today in Alexandria, by sharing a few forgotten facts about the conditions surrounding the production of the work, and not discussing its literary merits. CONDITIONS OF PRODUCTION: Before getting to the ideological project behind the Quartet, as elucidated by Durrell, we might begin by providing a short biographical note on him. Born in India in 1912, Durrell was sent at the age of 12 to a public school in England, where he stayed until the age of 18. Following his father's death in 1930, he left school and used the money he had inherited to pursue his literary ambitions. He moved to Bloomsbury and wrote poetry, of which he published two slim volumes that received little notice. In 1935, now married, Durrell decided to set out with his wife to Greece. They lived in Corfu until the end of 1938. As the clouds of WWII were gathering, he and his wife moved to Athens where he worked first at the British Embassy and then at the British Council. In April 1941 the Nazis invaded Greece, and a British rescue ship was dispatched from Egypt to Crete, returning to Alexandria with the king of Greece, his courtiers, and many British subjects including Durrell and his wife. Spending his first couple of months in Egypt writing a weekly column for the Egyptian Gazette, in August 1941 Durrell was offered the job of foreign press officer at the British Embassy in Cairo. It was not until 1944 that he got posted to Alexandria as a press attaché. While in Egypt, Durrell's first marriage broke up, and he met an Alexandrine Jewess, Eve Cohen, who was to become his second wife. In 1945, accompanied by Eve, Durrell returned to Greece. He was never to return to Egypt or Alexandria until the mid-1970s, when a BBC programme retracing his steps in Egypt brought him back for a few days. He then wrote a rather negative article about this experience. From the above, we can see that Durrell's residence in Alexandria was not by any stretch of the imagination a long sojourn, nor was it one that merits considering him to be an authority even on the cosmopolitan city. Indeed, long before he set foot in the city the ideas which came to fruition in the Alexandria Quartet -- completed between 1956 and 1959--had germinated in his mind 20 years earlier while he was still living in Corfu. There were a number of provisional titles for this work, among which two are most frequently mentioned: "The Book of the Dead" and "The Heraldic Book". In December 1936, Durrell wrote to the American writer Henry Miller about this book: "Have planned the heraldic book, but lack reference books on psychology, the pathology of childhood, cretinism, genius, etc. LET US KILL THE LITERARY MEN ONCE AND FOR ALL AND force THEM TO A PHILOSOPHIC ADMISSION OF THE mystery. ONWARD. ONWARD." We can fully appreciate the significance of the needed reference material when we understand that at this early stage of his life Durrell was much influenced by pseudo- scientific theories purporting to establish a connection between the social position of individuals and their anatomical and physiological characteristics (the size and shape of their skulls, height, skin colour, etc).This penchant for biological determinism, woven with, and perhaps also exacerbated by, his hatred for most things Egyptian, colours much of his perception of Alexandria and its native population. In 1944, he described the city to Miller: "I don't think you would like it. First this steaming humid flatness--not a hill or a mound anywhere--chocked to bursting point with bones and the crummy deposits of wiped out cultures. Then this smashed up broken down shabby Neapolitan town, with its Levantine mounds of houses peeling in the sun. A sea flat, dirty brown and waveless rubbing the port." In his last letter before leaving Alexandria, Durrell wrote to Miller: "I have drafted about twenty pages of the new version of the Book of the Dead -- it's about incest and Alexandria, inseparable ideas here, but will take me a year or so to do." NASSER AND DURRELL: In fact it took him another ten years before he made substantial progress in writing Justine. In 1955, while Durrell was working in Cyprus setting up a pro-British radio station, the EOKA guerrilla movement that was struggling to end British rule of the island was gaining strength. In autumn 1955, Durrell wrote to Miller: "We are in the middle of a very nasty little revolution here with bombs and murders on the Palestine pattern.... In the midst of all this noise and slaughter I am half way through a book called Justine which is about Eve's Alexandria before the war". In summer 1956, Durrell told Miller that "I have just finished a book about Alexandria called Justine... Outside the dull, desultory noise of occasional bombs going off, or a few pistol shots, or a call from the operations people to say there was another ambush in the mountains. A very queer and thrilling period, sad, weighed down with futility and disgust, but marvellous to be able to live in one's book while everything is going up inchmeal around one and the curfews settle on the dead towns." By August he has had to flee Cyprus for England, and in October 1956 he writes: "I don't know what is happening in Cyprus--maybe they have burnt my house down by now... Clearly, we can't go on being a great power if our political grasp of things is so elementary. Russia can do it because she shoots to kill. But we can neither shoot nor think it seems." It does not take great insight to link the dates of these letters to fateful events in the history of British imperialism, then on the decline, that were taking place at the same time. And it should be remembered that the Egyptian revolution of 1952, under the leadership of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, was then the focus of the uprooting of British imperialism in the Arab countries and beyond. October 1956 is the date of the Suez war, for example, and August is the month following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, announced from Alexandria on 26 July. The EOKA guerrilla movement was an anti-imperialist movement with strong links to the Nasser regime. Neither is it far fetched to claim that the illusory world of the Quartet is both Durrell's response to and refuge from the nightmare of the end of the empire, a therapeutic venture enabling its author "to live in one's book... while everything is going up inchmeal around one." Justine, in fact, is a book that converts real history into myth, constructing instead a supposedly independent country and a people unworthy of independence. It is a book that had to start in 1936--"Eve's Alexandria before the war"--in order to convert the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 from a treaty dictated by the approaching war, into a full independence granted by the British. As Mountolive puts it: "How had he risen swiftly stage by stage in the Commission which had taught him contempt for his masters. When Egypt became free, he surprised even his sponsors by gaining the ministry of the interior at a single bound. He knew well how to strike echoes around his name with the whip--for he was now wielding it. The timorous soul of the Egyptians cries always for the whip." Indeed, there is a link between the manner in which the Alexandria Quartet converted the real Alexandria into a dream-like myth offered as a substitute for the real city, and the way Nasser's image was converted in British prime minister Anthony Eden's speeches following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal into being that of the devil incarnate and of a fascist threatening world peace. And it is certainly more than a coincidence that the city which Durrell had popularized as "a whore among cities" bears the same name as the city in which Nasser had announced the nationalisation of the Canal. Indeed, it was the very same city in which Nasser was born in 1918. And while we're at it, one hopes the city of his birth will commemorate next January his 90th birth anniversary with the same enthusiasm witnessed in this week's celebrations of Justine 's 50th anniversary. REINVENTING THE WHEEL: A final personal note: the present writer's first encounter with the Alexandria Quartet dates back to 1968, when, upon enrolling for a BA in English Language and Literature at an Egyptian national university, students were taught Justine on the first-year novel course. Back then, along with this novel, we also studied material produced by our professors detailing the glaring errors in the Quartet, warning us not to take the novel as a true reflection of Alexandria. Indeed, one such paper, Professor Mahmoud Manzalaoui's "Curate's Egg: An Alexandrian Opinion of Durrell's Quartet", sent me ten years later, while reading for a post-graduate degree in the Sociology of Literature, to search for the reasons behind Durrell's presentation of the city. Today, almost 40 years after my initiation into the world of Durrell's Alexandria, I cannot help feeling dismayed at the way in which many Egyptian intellectuals cannot seem to separate the wheat from the chaff where Durrell is concerned, and--as much of the current debate in Arab literary publications reveals--are now lamenting the "disappearance" of Durrell's cosmopolitan Alexandria, which never existed in the first place. While being aware that throughout history some great writers and artists have been--and probably some still are--guilty of racist or even fascist ideas without this on its own detracting from the value of their works, I have always thought that appreciating the artistic merits of such works is one thing and welcoming their producers in countries at the receiving end of such prejudices is a totally different matter. Not so, apparently, in my country. For years now, the present writer has been watching with bewilderment the way in which the Alexandria Quartet and its author--invited by Egyptians 25 years ago to teach a course in an Alexandria-based university, though he declined the invitation--have been gaining in stature, and for some time now the novel has been considered a masterpiece and a definitive statement on a bygone era of Egyptian history. Suffice it to mention here that the Alexandria Library in the heart of modern Alexandria boasts a permanent exhibition depicting Durrell's Alexandria. For me, this exhibition is the epitome of alienation. Trying to think of a parallel to drive the absurdity of the notion home, I invite the reader to imagine what an extraordinary idea it would be if the British Museum, or any other national museum in London, were to dedicate a permanent exhibition to the London of Tayeb Saleh, for example--a great Anglophile by the way--as depicted in his famous novel Season of Migration to the North.
