Modern Library Revue: #22 Appointment in Samarra

The four novels (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea) which make up Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet share the #70 spot on the Modern Library list. For various reasons I lay down on the job and only read one of them, Justine, so I am not at all qualified to talk about the series. But I do have an opinion about the first installment, and on Durrell generally, so I’ll talk about them and, god willing, get through the rest of the quartet in the future.

This first book of the four, Justine, is narrated by an Anglo-Irish fellow who lives on a Greek island and who is writing about the time when he lived in Alexandria and taught English. He seems like he has posh manners and he knows languages so one imagines that although he had no money he had a certain social cachet wherever he went. In Alexandria he had affairs and smoked and pondered heady subjects all the time (think a straight Isherwood with absolutely no sense of humor), and in odd moments managed to scrape together a pittance. Justine is one of the people he has sex with, and she is a (rather too good to be true) femme fatale, who eventually gives up her husband and lover and runs off to a kibbutz. Meanwhile, his other lover Melissa dies of TB and being two-dimensional.

I was wary of this novel. First, for a shortish book, it is long on boring paragraphs about astonishing feelings which the narrator seems to assume are universal. I have seen some other fiction of this period when everyone wanted to talk about sex and psychology and call gay people “inverts” and frankly it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between the first-rate (which Justine evidently is) and the awful. Second, the parts I like I suspect I only like because they appeal to the less edifying aspects of my own nature – basically, the orientalist and dirty-minded ones. (Although, in the case of this novel, “dirty” is in fact the operative word. The sexy bits convey nothing so much as a VD free-for-all taking place in an enormous ash-tray.) Third, for some obscure reason I just dislike Durrell and wanted him to apologize for things, even at moments when I was enjoying the book.

I think part of this dislike is founded in a pointless jealousy. I was a foreign service brat and I have been a lot of places and I used to marginally identify with the annoying Citizen-of-the-World thing Durrell has going on, but there is a duality to the identification. On the one hand, people like him (through no fault of their own) make me feel like a poseur and that I should have lived fifty years earlier in a really disgusting flat and fraternized with people who owned limousines, and I should have known about child prostitution and smoked more cigarettes, and been a man. Instead of being seven and going to school and putting all of my stuffed animals into a wagon. On the other hand, I resent his pretentiousness and his orientalism and his claims on the city of Alexandria and I think, ugh, horrible expat, and roll my eyes. Hypocrite lecteur and all that.

Ultimately, I like for reading to be a pleasurable activity, and reading Justine made me feel too much like I had to put on my Serious caftan. I chose to talk about it here so that I could mention two of the loveliest books I’ve ever read, which were written by Lawrence’s brother Gerald and which are the antidote to all things icky.

They are Gerald’s memoirs of the Durrell family’s sojourn on the Greek island of Corfu from 1935-1939, beginning when Gerald (Gerry) was 10, Lawrence (Larry) 23, brother Leslie 19, sister Margo 18, and their widowed mother “old enough to have four children.” The first book is called My Family and Other Animals, and the second is Birds, Beasts, and Relatives. (I have only just learned that there was a third Corfu book called Garden of the Gods, which is out of print but which I am acquiring second-hand with all possible haste.) The Durrells went to Greece to escape England’s appalling climate, and Gerry, who later became a very well-known and beloved naturalist, writer, and advocate for endangered species, spent his formative years running about in the island looking at bugs, collecting animals, making friends, and being educated after a fashion by friends of his doting family.

Historically, foreign people, especially British ones, have liked to come to Greece and perpetrate arty things in or about it. I think it is because the Greek climate is wonderful, and because Greece has temples and Homeric associations, and because it used to be cheap, and because everyone there was supposed to be virile and mustachioed. Gerald Durrell’s books are delightful because they convey the island’s beauty so well that one feels it viscerally, while remaining free of self-conscious artiness and condescension for their subject. Above all they are full of fun, written by someone who sounds as if he were a kind-hearted person who loved all animals and most people. Gerry calls out the various family members for being absurd, but in a nice way; I believe that they remained close in Gerry’s adulthood, and that it was Larry who eventually encouraged Gerry to write. On page one, Gerry describes his older, literary brother:
It was Larry of course, who started it. The rest of us felt too apathetic to think of anything except our own ills, but Larry was designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blond, firework, exploding ideas in other people’s minds, and then curling up with cat-like unctuousness and refusing to take any blame for the consequences.
The books are full of similar fond tributes. I’m trying to find more rousing ways to say how much I love them, but it’s difficult. They are just happy and heartwarming, is all. I’ll leave you with a characteristic passage (from My Family and Other Animals), which doesn’t include any of Gerry’s numerous wonderful descriptions of the island’s flora and fauna, but which is a good window into the various qualities of the Durrell family. (I know it smacks of the Patriarchy, but it was the thirties, and Margo ends up fine.)
As the summer drew to a close I found myself, to my delight, once more without a tutor. Mother had discovered that, as she so delicately put it, Margo and Peter were becoming ‘too fond of one another.’ As the family was unanimous in its disapproval of Peter as a prospective relation by marriage, something obviously had to be done. Leslie’s only contribution to the problem was to suggest shooting Peter, a plan that was, for some reason, greeted derisively. I thought it was a splendid idea, but I was in the minority. Larry’s suggestion that the happy couple should be sent to live in Athens for a month, in order, as he explained, to get it out of their systems, was quashed by Mother on the grounds of immorality. Eventually Mother dispensed with Peter’s services, he left hurriedly and furtively and we had to cope with a tragic, tearful, and wildly indignant Margo, who, dressed in her most flowing and gloomy clothing for the event, played her part magnificently. Mother soothed and uttered gentle platitudes, Larry gave Margo lectures on free love, and Leslie, for reasons best known to himself, decided to play the part of the outraged brother and kept appearing at intervals, brandishing a revolver and threatening to shoot Peter down like a dog if he set foot in the house again. In the midst of all this Margo, tears trickling effectively down her face, made tragic gestures and told us her life was blighted. Spiro, who loved a good dramatic situation as well as anyone, spent his time weeping in sympathy with Margo, and posting various friends of his along the docks to make sure that Peter did not attempt to get back on the island. We all enjoyed ourselves very much.
So did I.

The much-quoted, perhaps less-read British novelist L.P. Hartley began one of his novels with a line so killer it reliably appears in at least one news lede per week, whether, like one’s bath, it is needed or not: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Add me to the ranks of those powerless to resist the pithiness of this line, which, conveyed to me by a history professor who spoke highly of its utility, indeed proved instrumental in guiding me through Theodore Dreiser’s great American novel.

The past is a foreign country, and Sister Carrie is our travelogue, with all that document’s power to illuminate and obfuscate. We get a map of the country’s major cities — Chicago and New York — a glimpse at its public transit systems, a review of its restaurants with a sampling of their menus, a glimpse inside its bars and lodgings from the swanky to the squalid. We see the sights and customs: the Elks theatrical, the Broadway promenade, the line of homeless men waiting for twelve-cent beds. The natives eat steak fried in butter obtained on credit from the Gansevoort Market (where the prices are better). We even accustom ourselves to the currency, so that when young Carrie — a small-town girl who makes it big in New York City — signs a theater contract for 150 dollars a week, we remember her four-fifty per week at the Chicago shoe factory, her 28-dollar-a month apartment on Thirteenth Street, and know her velocity.

For one Chicago-residing female reading of another a hundred years prior, there is much to beguile. There is also much to bewilder. In a state of temporal foreignness, it is not always easy to read the signs of the previous century.

I am not so inured to the libertinism of the day that I can’t see it wasn’t quite the thing for young Carrie to wantonly do it with a feller she met on the train — the first of two fellers with whom she so cavalierly trades her feminine goods for a square meal, a place to stay, and some new clothes. It’s not really the thing now, actually. And I can see how Hurstwood, the second of her squires — the one who steals the money from his employers’ cashbox and carries her off to New York under false pretenses — is a Bad Sort. Between this light woman and foolish man, between the shirt-waists and the occasional lumpy old-fashioned quality of Dreiser’s prose, between all this and my misapprehension that to be old is to be God-fearing, I was prepared for the inevitable smiting.

But rather than this profane couple being crushed by the clock tower falling off a church or some such, it is only Hurstwood who comes to a bad end after an excruciating slide to perdition: a self-administered smiting. With an obvious symmetry that is nonetheless quite elegantly carried off, Carrie winds up a successful actress at a fabulous address.

Being a youngish lady myself, and feeling both the lure of nice things and the anxieties of achieving financial security in an uncertain world (the headline of Hurstwood’s newspaper reported 80,000 unemployed New Yorkers), it doesn’t seem so very dire to me when famous Carrie sits in a rocking-chair in her sumptuous apartment and dreams “of such happiness as [she] may never feel.” Maybe I should think of her as an early Marilyn Monroe, destined for despair, but as the novel closes I feel like Carrie did pretty well. Even Dreiser paints her finally as a seeker of the Good and the Beautiful: “Not evil, but longing for that which is better, more often directs the steps of the erring.” It’s not much of a smiting, at any rate.

Since we cannot be dual citizens of the past and present, I have no idea if my relatively sanguine view of Carrie’s circumstances at the end of the novel is the result of my morally bankrupt 21st-century status, or because Dreiser was a master of writing the perfect ordinariness of sinful behavior. I think both; Dreiser tells the story in such a way that you can’t hear a mattress creak or smell a hint of brimstone, and I’m a modern miss who finds it normal and unprovoking that things should be so.

Evidently the critics of the early twentieth century, disciples all of what Dreiser called the “genteel tradition,” were provoked. It is instructive to read Dreiser’s foreword to the 1927 Modern Library edition, which describes how the novel was published only at the urging of Frank Norris, another great American writer and shit-disturber, who worked as a reader at Doubleday. According to Dreiser’s foreword, the ink was barely dry on the contract before Mrs. Doubleday herself, a “a social worker and active in moral reform,” insisted that the book be withdrawn. However, Dreiser may have been doing his own myth-making with an apocryphal do-gooding harpy; an article by Jack Salzman for the Journal of American Studies somewhat vindicates Mrs. Doubleday. We know at least that Doubleday in fact sold several hundred copies of the book and that Dreiser was paid accordingly.

Regardless of the veracity of the avenging missus, it’s easily ascertained that American critics found the novel distinctly unedifying. One New York Times reviewer tutted that it was “a frankly realistic story…a photograph of conditions in the crude larger cities of America and of the people who make these conditions and are made by them. There is no attempt to complicate the facts as they are with notions of things as they should be morally…It is a book one can very well get along without reading.”

(The past is a foreign country. Last month I read Dennis Cooper’s The Marbled Swarm, a novel in which myriad youngsters are graphically raped to death in baroque prose, and of which it is said in The New Yorker in a truly masterful bit of economy and understatement: “Cooper’s interest in exploring the darkest corners of the human experience — here including incest, rape, and cannibalism — has not dimmed with age.”)

Sinclair Lewis said of his friend Dreiser in his own Nobel lecture, “in [his] world, men and women are often sinful and tragic and despairing, instead of being forever sunny and full of song and virtue, as befits authentic Americans.” This was a problem. From what I gather, a novel of Dreiser’s day should either be moral (presumably with smitings), or it should be peppy, and Sister Carrie is neither of these things. Even so, the critical position was not without pushback — there are two letters subsequent to the Times review of June 1907, from readers who scolded the reviewer for missing the point. There are probably many points that I likewise miss about this novel, and it was comforting to read Donald Pizer’s essay on the long, twisted road of Sister Carrie’s critical reception, wherein we learn that the scholars took decades to agree about what this novel even is.

I wonder what it would feel like to read Sister Carrie as a citizen of the country it describes. We foreigners are lucky to have this novel as window onto the exotic past. I really like Sister Carrie, for its well-drawn sets, its vibrant cities, its views of the territory. I like the charming accent of its old-fashioned prose.

If anything shocks me about this novel now, it is not that Dreiser put two men inside of Carrie’s pants, but that he put himself inside her slow-moving brain. The idea that a novelist cheerfully set out to map the interior of the lower classes and perceived lesser intellects — that is what is shocking today, when social realism is largely restricted to the the author’s own immediate territory, and many novels seem like an elaboration of what authors might share with their therapists.

Today, I contemplate the sheer balls of writing:
Sister Carrie…was possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power of observation and analysis. Self-interest with her was high, but not strong. It was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic. Warm with the fancies of youth, pretty with the insipid prettiness of the formative period, possessed of a figure promising eventual shapeliness and an eye alight with certain native intelligence, she was a fair example of the middle American class…A half-equipped little knight she was, venturing to reconnoitre the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some vague, far-off supremacy…
With these same balls, Dreiser clearly writes himself into the story as the young, superior Ames:
She felt as if she would like to be agreeable to this young man, and also there came with it, or perhaps preceded it, the slightest shade of a feeling that he was better educated than she was — that his mind was better. He seemed to look it, and the saving grace in Carrie was that she could understand that people could be wiser.
I don’t think we write books like this anymore. There is something frank, transgressive, awful, and attractive about this liberated language. For what it’s worth, that’s the really scandalous thing about this book, the custom that simply doesn’t do in our own country.