The Fugitive by Marcel Proust

 

Reaching the end of The Fugitive, volume six of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche de temps perdu, I begin to realise – not quite at last – how modern an experience he relates. Couched in the language and setting of a privilege we now associate with centuries past, the author eventually creates an utterly absurd world, in which nothing, not even the wealth of these wealthy people, is real. Assumptions of rightness or permanence, qualities of which their opinions positively reek, are thus laid bare as momentary invention, ephemeral, as trustworthy as a lie and as dependable as froth.

I am also reminded of William Shakespeare’s words spoken via the mouth of a fictional King Richard the Second:

Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am…

Is it possible for an individual simultaneously to feel like a king and a beggar? Can it be possible for someone to be revered, even considered a direct descendant of God one moment and then derided, drowned in wine the next, or even starved to death by those who once worshipped his very presence? Not even history can agree what constitutes the past, the only incontestable fact being death itself, the life that preceded it forever remaining negotiable. The rich and powerful, after all, have further to fall, so there can be interpretable bounces along the way.

A young man has chosen a liaison with a young woman. How original is that? One is the narrator and the other is called Albertine. This is, after all, fiction, though it claims to be a record of memory. They are not married. In the society they inhabit, this can be a problem. People, after all, may start to think… And then who is to say whether they will stay faithful to one another, true to themselves, or even agree which self, the public, the private or the invented will prevail? And what about the “preferences” of the young lady? Might they be questioned? Of course, they might.

Proust seems to have been keenly aware of this transmutability of the self. For if it was not in itself anything real, if it depended upon the successive form of the hours in which it had appeared to me, a form which remained that of my memory as the curve of the projections of my magic lantern depended upon the curve of the coloured slides, did it not represent in its own manner a truth, a thoroughly objective truth too, to wit that each one of us is not a single person, but contains many persons who have not all the same moral value and that if a vicious Albertine had existed, it did not mean that there had not been others, she who enjoyed talking to me about Saint-Simon in her room, she who on the night when I had told her that we must part had said so sadly: "That pianola, this room, to think that I shall never see any of these things again" and, when she saw the emotion which my lie had finally communicated to myself, had exclaimed with a sincere pity: "Oh, no, anything rather than make you unhappy, I promise that I will never try to see you again." Then I was no longer alone. I felt the wall that separated us vanish. And so, by recognising that she existed as several, contrasting but simultaneous people, the narrator sets his Albertine, the object of his desires, into a form that creates displeasure. This role displeases her, because it makes him unhappy and the solution is not to see him again, the state that precisely neither of them actually wants. Or so we are told…

But were they both lying? Or just one of them? And, when we are truly honest with ourselves, how many of us can actually be sure of who we are or, indeed, what we desire? Is that which we claim to desire just a momentary association of the self we want to project, a passing whim we can adopt to convince others we do, in fact, possess character? Is the goal of public persona to create fake news, a false narrative of identity, whose only test is whether we might market it so others might buy it? Albertine might indeed exist in my memory only in the state in which she had successively appeared to me in the course of her life, that is to say subdivided according to a series of fractions of time, my mind, re-establishing unity in her, made her a single person, and it was upon this person that I sought to bring a general judgment to bear, to know whether she had lied to me, whether she loved women, whether it was in order to be free to associate with them that she had left me. What the woman in the baths would have to say might perhaps put an end for ever to my doubts as to Albertine's morals. But was that woman in the baths telling a truth?

And then, when we have created that desired image and projected it, does it still represent the individual that created it? Time passes, and gradually everything that we have said in falsehood becomes true; I had learned this only too well with Gilberte; the indifference that I had feigned when I could never restrain my tears had ended by becoming real; gradually life, as I told Gilberte in a lying formula which retrospectively had become true, life had driven us apart. I recalled this, I said to myself: "If Albertine allows an interval to elapse, my lies will become the truth. And now that the worst moments are over, ought I not to hope that she will allow this month to pass without returning? If she returns, I shall have to renounce the true life which certainly I am not in a fit state to enjoy as yet, but which as time goes on may begin to offer me attractions while my memory of Albertine grows fainter."

And if we create the projection of our intentions, passing though they may be, does it deliver what we conceived? Or are we perceived as the incompetently delivered amalgam of our intentions? "Oh, no. Monsieur, it doesn't do to cry like that, it isn't good for you." And in her attempt to stem my tears she shewed as much uneasiness as though they had been torrents of blood. Unfortunately I adopted a chilly air that cut short the effusions in which she was hoping to indulge and which might quite well, for that matter, have been sincere. Her attitude towards Albertine had been, perhaps, akin to her attitude towards Eulalie, and, now that my mistress could no longer derive any profit from me, Francoise had ceased to hate her. She felt bound, however, to let me see that she was perfectly well aware that I was crying, and that, following the deplorable example set by my family, I did not wish to 'let it be seen.' "You mustn't cry, Monsieur," she adjured me, in a calmer tone, this time, and intending to prove her own perspicacity rather than to shew me any compassion. And she went on: "It was bound to happen; she was too happy, poor creature, she never knew how happy she was."

And is fact not just another variety of fiction? …such is the cruelty of memory. At times the reading of a novel that was at all sad carried me sharply back, for certain novels are like great but temporary bereavements, they abolish our habits, bring us in contact once more with the reality of life, but for a few hours only, like a nightmare, since the force of habit, the oblivion that it creates, the gaiety that it restores to us because our brain is powerless to fight against it and to recreate the truth, prevails to an infinite extent over the almost hypnotic suggestion of a good book which, like all suggestions, has but a transient effect. You see, nothing, not even fiction, lasts.

And how much are we influenced by whim? Are our beliefs true merely because we want to believe them? Are we really capable ever of being objective? Moreover, with the minute observation of people whose lives have no purpose, they would discern, one after another, in the people with whom they associated, the most obvious merits, exclaiming their wonder at them with the artless astonishment of a townsman who on going into the country discovers a blade of grass, or on the contrary magnifying them as with a microscope, making endless comments, taking offence at the slightest faults, and often  applying both processes alternately to the same person. In Gilberte's case it was first of all upon these minor attractions that the idle perspicacity of M. and Mme. de Guermantes was brought to bear: "Did you notice the way in which she pronounced some of her words?" the Duchess said to her husband after the girl had left them; "it was just like Swann, I seemed to hear him speaking." "I was just about to say the very same, Oriane." "She is witty, she is just like her father." "I consider that she is even far superior to him. Think how well she told that story about the sea-bathing, she has a vivacity that Swann never had." "Oh! but he was, after all, quite witty." "I am not saying that he was not witty, I say that he lacked vivacity," said M. de Guermantes in a complaining tone, for his gout made him irritable, and when he had no one else upon whom to vent his irritation, it was to the Duchess that he displayed it. But being incapable of any clear understanding of its causes, he preferred to adopt an air of being misunderstood.

And in the final analysis, which, if we retain any faith in Christian salvation never happens, and, if we do not, happens all the time, we may just realise that the whole basis of what we did, the entire moral compass we imposed, the emotional standpoint we adopted, was born of misunderstanding, deception and misinterpretation. So, where are we? Certainly not in any dependable heaven, ever, but forever in life, simultaneously the ruler, the king of what we project and the beggar of how we are received.

The Captive – aka The Prisoner by Marcel Proust

The musings of an adolescent male, perhaps not a completely formed adult human being, if such a state is ever achieved by anyone privileged to participate in the experience of this process we call life, the very process of feeling and responding to sensory existence, events that then might be recorded as recollections of that remembered experience in sufficient detail so that, at an indeterminate future time – are not all futures indeterminate? - except for the inevitable eventual failure of non-existence - that experience can be recalled, redrafted, relived, perhaps even to the extent that it might bear even a passing resemblance to the reality it recalls, or perhaps these memories might be rendered, via mis-recollection or mis-representation or merely by reinterpretation founded in doubt, self-analysis or mere deception, to become less than accurate, a mere doffing-of-the-hat acknowledgment in greeting to a now remote truth largely ignored, or merely taken for granted, then, these musings, themselves not really of an adolescent by age, but certainly one by character, and frequenting an upper-class, privileged society, perhaps as its captive or indeed prisoner, a society whose claims to represent wide experience is itself utterly bogus, since it comprises only those with pretensions to power and status, though often these people attain neither, despite their airs and graces, their titles, their honors, their unmentioned assets or over-valued, under-used property, their taste in fashion, arts or decor notwithstanding, especially in music, which often forms the background to their heart-felt but usually vapid conversation, words which habitually talk of sex, sexuality, marriage, concubinage, loves, lovers, loved, not loved or hated, cohabitants, commercially contracted or even voluntary relationships, especially when a young woman, girl perhaps, like Albertine chooses – chooses, I say! - to inhabit to the unmarried Paris abode of he who muses in adolescent fashion, about whether she really cares for him, loves him, thinks of him, or merely uses him to further her own interest in her own sex, in Andrée for instance, causing the adolescent to wander again and anew through his own musings, to reassess his own priorities, recalling Gilberte, for instance, a focus of his attention from some time before, a past that may even be continuing, or a boy’s obsession with Odette, officially Madame Swann, who before marriage made her a living largely on her back, a posture that facilitated the advantage of a particularly propertied client who admitted her to the permanence of his own impermanent life, and who thus never really found admittance to that titled society she regularly was forced - willingly it has to be said - to frequent, then these musings of the young, adolescence-passed man might just, in an imagined world, relate to the reality all these people lived, but by its variance from that reality might appear to be more about the writer carrying out the act of recollecting than any detail attributed to those he describes, so this reality becomes a record of things past, the remembrance of things past, thus rendered almost permanent by the pen’s commitment to paper, re-drawing and re-writing that reality, at least until it might encounter a full stop.

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

 

In a turn of uncharacteristic succinctness, Gioachino Rossini, himself the composer of long-winded and often empty vocal gymnastics undertaken because they were possible - or not! - rather than apposite or even aesthetic, uttered a remark, probably between courses, probably apocryphally, somewhere sandwiched between the tournedos Rossini and the baked Alaska, which wasn’t called by that name at the time because the Americans, who put the dish and the state on the map, had not yet purchased the real estate, a remark that became an oft-quoted opinion on Richard Wagner, a fellow composer, who was actually writing music at the time, rather than being a professional whipped cream spreader on the back of cigarette packets. “Wagner‘s music,” said the composer, “has its moments. It’s the hours in between that are the problem.” No doubt the other guests, also choking by now on the strozzapreti, probably guffawed their recognition of the maestro’s wit. And that was two sentences.

It is a sentiment that is often associated with the so-called task of reading A la recherche de temps perdu of Marcel Proust. He does go on, doesn’t he? Well, yes, a bit like life really, until the end. It’s where we go along the way that forms the point, a point of departure, a point of destination, a point of return and eventually no point at all. And that is the point, at least for one reader of this work.

Marcel Proust lives amongst an elite. He describes them in detail. He brushes shoulders, bellies and other parts on a regular, even daily basis, with members of “society”. It was Margaret Thatcher who claimed there was no such thing as society, only the individuals who constitute it. It is wonderful how something can be defined not to exist in terms of an agglomeration of things that unquestionably do. I digress, and so does Marcel Proust, regularly, but not because digression is an end in itself, rather because digression is all we have. Of course, when one is bored with such society one can always retire to other parts and brush bellies with one of those working women - never ladies! - who have a little time for digression. For them, it's the matter in hand that takes precedence, but usually not in the hand, itself. Times, it seems, have changed. Perhaps…

“Oh, my dear Charles," she went on, "what a bore it can be, dining out. There are evenings when one would sooner die! It is true that dying may be perhaps just as great a bore, because we don't know what it's like." A servant appeared. It was the young lover who used to have trouble with the porter, until the Duchess, in her kindness of heart, brought about an apparent peace between them. "Am I to go up this evening to inquire for M. le Marquis d'Osmond?" he asked. "Most certainly not, nothing before to-morrow morning. In fact I don't want you to remain in the house to-night. The only thing that will happen will be that his footman, who knows you, will come to you with the latest report and send you out after us. Get off, go anywhere you like, have a woman, sleep out, but I don't want to see you here before to-morrow morning." An immense joy overflowed from the footman's face. He would at last be able to spend long hours with his ladylove, whom he had practically ceased to see ever since, after a final scene with the porter, the Duchess had considerately explained to him that it would be better, to avoid further conflicts, if he did not go out at all. He floated, at the thought of having an evening free at last, in a happiness which the Duchess saw and guessed its reason

In The Guermantes Way, Marcel Proust describes these creatures of society, upper crust, titled, even royal, certainly rich if we ignore the debts, propertied, (no doubt proprietarian in Piketty’s terms), conceited, racist, learned yet ignorant, self-obsessed, selfish. They even have the odd good point. I could go on. They do. But at the root, they are pretty ordinary rather than pretty.

But in the other boxes, everywhere almost, the white deities who inhabited those sombre abodes had flown for shelter against their shadowy walls and remained invisible. Gradually, however, as the performance went on, their vaguely human forms detached themselves, one by one, from the shades of night which they patterned, and, raising themselves towards the light, allowed their semi-nude bodies to emerge, and rose, and stopped at the limit of their course, at the luminous, shaded surface on which their brilliant faces appeared behind the gaily breaking foam of the feather fans they unfurled and lightly waved, beneath their hyacinthine locks begemmed with pearls, which the flow of the tide seemed to have caught and drawn with it…

They dress to the nines, but for many of the species adornment makes little difference.

The Marquis de Palancy, his face bent downwards at the end of his long neck, his round bulging eye glued to the glass of his monocle, was moving with a leisurely displacement through the transparent shade and appeared no more to see the public in the stalls than a fish that drifts past, unconscious of the press of curious gazers, behind the glass wall of an aquarium. Now and again he paused, a venerable, wheezing monument, and the audience could not have told whether he was in pain, asleep, swimming, about to spawn, or merely taking breath

This society is certainly snobbish, but it is also deeply racist. But then that was the norm of the time, wasn’t it? They were, after all, professedly Christian in an era where, in order to claim this allegiance, it may have been almost expected to be anti-Semitic. But a theme that underpins this society’s ever-competitive camaraderie deals with opposing and divisive views on the Dreyfus affair, the details of which may now be referenced with ease across a democratic internet, noted for its thorough fair-mindedness, disinterest and impartiality.

"In the first place because at heart all these people are anti-Semites," replied Swann, who, all the same, knew very well from experience that certain of them were not, but, like everyone who supports any cause with ardour, preferred, to explain the fact that other people did not share his opinion, to suppose in them a preconceived reason, a prejudice against which there was nothing to be done, rather than reasons which might permit of discussion. Besides, having come to the premature term of his life, like a weary animal that is goaded on, he cried out against these persecutions and was returning to the spiritual fold of his fathers. "Yes, the Prince de Guermantes," I said, "it is true, I've heard that he was anti-semitic." "Oh, that fellow! I wasn't even thinking about him. He carries it to such a point that when he was in the army and had a frightful toothache he preferred to grin and bear it rather than go to the only dentist in the district, who happened to be a Jew, and later on he allowed a wing of his castle which had caught fire to be burned to the ground, because he would have had to send for extinguishers to the place next door, which belongs to the Rothschilds."

Like the contemporary and newly enacted Brexit in the United Kingdom, the Dreyfus affair began in untruths married to conceit and racism, peddled by those with ideological interest in pursuing it, perpetrated by others who found their own identity in an insane bigotry that appealed to inane prejudice, and, unlike Brexit at least thus far, was eventually revealed as utter untruth. What it did do was bring to the fore the ideological cleavages born of racism that cut through this otherwise apparently monolithic society, revealing its inhabitants’ penchant for competition rather than the cooperation their decorum tried to advertise. For all their apparent politeness, for all their overt adherence to manners, these people are vicious cynics capable of waging war to achieve their interests. And that is precisely what they would do.

And the concerns of difference are so small minded that, like Remainers and Brexiteers, these Dreyfusards and their opponents cannot conceive that anything of interest might live outside their own myopic ambit. The universe, it seems, consists of my parlour and the rest.

…at this point in the social year, when people invited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dinner, making every effort to see that she was not already engaged, she declined, for the one reason of which nobody in society would ever have thought; she was just starting on a cruise among the Norwegian fjords, which were so interesting. People in society were stupefied, and, without any thought of following the Duchess's example, derived nevertheless from her action that sense of relief which one has in reading Kant when after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism one finds that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom. Every invention of which no one has ever thought before excites the interest even of people who can derive no benefit from it. That of steam navigation was a small thing compared with the employment of steam navigation at that sedentary time of year called 'the season.' The idea that anyone could voluntarily renounce a hundred dinners or luncheons, twice as many afternoon teas, three times as many evening parties, the most brilliant Mondays at the Opera and Tuesdays at the Français to visit the Norwegian fjords seemed to the Courvoisiers no more explicable than the idea of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea…

But just how self-obsessed and selfish these people are is indicated by the Guermantes’ reaction to Swann’s revelation that he has just three months to live.

"I don't know why I am telling you this; I have never said a word to you before about my illness. But as you asked me, and as now I may die at any moment. But whatever I do I mustn't make you late; you're dining out, remember," he added, because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took precedence of the death of a friend, and could put himself in her place by dint of his instinctive politeness. But that of the Duchess enabled her also to perceive in a vague way that the dinner to which she was going must count for less to Swann than his own death. And so, while continuing on her way towards the carriage, she let her shoulders droop, saying: "Don't worry about our dinner. It's not of any importance!" But this put the Duke in a bad humour, who exclaimed: "Come, Oriane, don't stop there chattering like that and exchanging your jeremiads with Swann; you know very well that Mme. de Saint-Euverte insists on sitting down to table at eight o'clock sharp. We must know what you propose to do; the horses have been waiting for a good five minutes. I beg your pardon, Charles," he went on, turning to Swann, "but it's ten minutes to eight already. Oriane is always late, and it will take us more than five minutes to get to old Saint-Euverte's."

I mean, Darling, doesn’t the man realise that in society there is a time and place for everything? And this, surely, is neither the time nor the place to talk of dea… of such things! Get a move on! We’ll be late! Our friend’s demise will have to wait until after liqueurs, dessert at least. Bid him goodbye and come along! But then there are things that are just not done, Darling. Such as…

"You know, we can talk about that another time; I don't believe a word you've been saying, but we must discuss it quietly. I expect they gave you a dreadful fright, come to luncheon, whatever day you like" (with Mme. de Guermantes things always resolved themselves into luncheons), "you will let me know your day and time," and, lifting her red skirt, she set her foot on the step. She was just getting into the carriage when, seeing this foot exposed, the Duke cried in a terrifying voice: "Oriane, what have you been thinking of, you wretch? You've kept on your black shoes! With a red dress! Go upstairs quick and put on red shoes, or rather," he said to the footman, "tell the lady's maid at once to bring down a pair of red shoes."

I mean, black shoes with a red dress… What could she be thinking of? Well he was Jewish, after all… Perhaps she should just have kept talking… The need to speak prevents one not merely from listening but from seeing things, and in this case the absence of any description of my external surroundings is tantamount to a description of my internal state… I bet she talked quickly and, at the same time, said very little. Just how little Marcel Proust says in the five hundred pages that constitute The Guermantes Way might just be its point. And, in the grand run of time, we have yet to reach perhaps the crowning absurdity of the century, The Great War, the apparently heroic event of unquestioned and racist imperialism we have all recently been honouring after its centenary. Times change, perhaps also assumptions.

Swann’s Way – In Search of Lost Time Volume 1 Marcel Proust

Imagine a collage, an assemblage of the entire output of august artists, especially those of fin-de-siecle France, those one-time upstarts and latter-day establishment pillars we have since learned to label “Impressionist”. Imagine too this vast canvas repeated in multiple shades, so that not only does it present to the eye a vast, near limitless, expanse of colour, of detail, of form, of fine ladies in finer drapery, of gardens replete with blooms of every season, of carriage-jammed Paris streets shining through murky wet evenings, of multi-coloured lilies afloat on a surface of quiet lakes or stilled streams of rural France, of dancing girls performing their ballet or rehearsing their slender limbs in outline at the bar, but also it revisits every view from multiple angles in different colours, at different times, from different perspectives with different impressions. We seem to see the same things repeat, repeatedly, but always different, always changed, always vivid. And imagine this presented not only in the bright colours of the original, but also the imposed hues of vividly recalled memory that knows every scene, but cannot fix exact date, time or form, so that they re-form truly solid, living structures reconstructed from what the original eyes only partially recorded. And then close those eyes, so that the images can be drawn from their memories, those indelibly, but perhaps inaccurately filed images that we have collected inadvertently by virtue of the unfinished act of living. And then we share that experience.

And then, in the words of the author, himself, so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

But the imperative is that we must try. We have but one chance shot at this moving target we call ‘life’ and our aim is, by its very nature, wayward. We remain forever unsure of the boundary between what we remember and what we imagine, especially when one merges into the other in that uncontrolled manner, that imposed confusion of blurred edge that inevitably results when we attempt to focus on a passing image and have only a memory of its momentary impression on the mind to recall whatever detail it shed.

And the result? The result is a passing stream, an ever-changing, forever variable vista that always comprises the same view, the same solid objects that once, or perhaps still, peopled its banks. And, from the distance of time, who can ever be sure what we felt? Who can be sure of motive, of consequence, of intention or stratagem? Who can testify that those remembered words were spoken in love, hate, respect, derision, criticism, praise or merely to pass the time we now realise we never had? It is irony that perhaps lasts longest, as in an invitation to dine with an acquaintance of the family, M. Legrandin?

Only the day before he had asked my parents to send me to dine with him on this same Sunday evening. "Come and bear your aged friend company," he had said to me. "Like the nosegay which a traveller sends us from some land to which we shall never go again, come and let me breathe from the far country of your adolescence the scent of those flowers of spring among which I also used to wander, many years ago. Come with the primrose, with the canon's beard, with the gold-cup; come with the stone-crop, whereof are posies made, pledges of love, in the Balzacian flora, come with that flower of the Resurrection morning, the Easter daisy, come with the snowballs of the guelder-rose, which begin to embalm with their fragrance the alleys of your great-aunt's garden ere the last snows of Lent are melted from its soil. Come with the glorious silken raiment of the lily, apparel fit for Solomon, and with the many-coloured enamel of the pansies, but come, above all, with the spring breeze, still cooled by the last frosts of wirier, wafting apart, for the two butterflies' sake, that have waited outside all morning, the closed portals of the first Jerusalem rose."

The question was raised at home whether, all things considered, I ought still to be sent to dine with M. Legrandin.

Irony, then, leaves its mark, but not as deep as the scars left by the cuts of young love, obsession or jealousy. In a vast, detailed and probably reconstructed memory of M. Swann’s relationship with Odette, a woman he initially likens to an image from a Botticelli painting in the Sistine chapel, we share the heart-racing exhilaration of a man becoming obsessed with the sensual beauty of a desirable and available woman, we euphemistically accompany him in adjusting the flowers that decorate her bodice and then we suffer the gnawing, destroying doubts about her motives that grow out of an all-embracing, near-destroying jealousy.

There is, of course, much socialising. It would not be far from the truth to observe that these people spend more time worrying about whom to include and whom to specifically and justifiably exclude from a guest list than they do at work, in their beds or on the road. And the decisions are usually based on class, that universal categorising and branding of quality that seems to suffuse and smother human society in whatever age and every place, the very quality that revolutions might occasionally but unsuccessfully seek to eradicate. And what happens at these gatherings remains primarily social, whatever the focus of the soiree.

If the pianist suggested playing the Ride of the Valkyries, or the Prelude to Tristan, Mme. Verdurin would protest, not that the music was displeasing to her, but, on the contrary, that it made too violent an impression. "Then you want me to have one of my headaches? You know quite well, it's the same every time he plays that. I know what I'm in for. Tomorrow, when I want to get up - nothing doing!" If he was not going to play they talked, and one of the friends - usually the painter who was in favour there that year - would "spin," as M. Verdurin put it, "a damned funny yarn that made 'em all split with laughter," and especially Mme. Verdurin, for whom so strong was her habit of taking literally the figurative accounts of her emotions - Dr. Cottard, who was then just starting in general practice, would "really have to come one day and set her jaw, which she had dislocated with laughing too much.

And this is a place and time where no-one lives life by halves, where no person is ever truly reticent in expressing emotion, even when that which is quite sincerely expressed may, at some later date, convey at least the partial sensation of over-statement. She had been taught in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long-necked, sinuous creatures, the phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by seeking their ultimate resting-place somewhere beyond and far wide of the direction in which they started, the point which one might have expected them to reach, phrases which divert themselves in those fantastic bypaths only to return more deliberately with a more premeditated reaction, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl which, if you strike it, will ring and throb until you cry aloud in anguish to clutch at one's heart.  

Viewing this vast, sewn together patchwork of art, this mixture of people thrown together by time and the filter of memory, may at times feel like making an ocean journey by small boat, rigged with too scant a sail, a boat that, often becalmed, seems to drift. The real trick, undoubtedly, is to relax and go with the flow. That’s life, it seems.

Lawrence Durrell's Quincunx, The Avignon Quintet

In Egypt, in Alexandria to be precise, if precision be our goal, Lawrence Durrell once attempted to fuse fiction into a relativistic universe that, poorly interpreted, might blur perception to render all positions relevant. The aim was vast and its non-achievement eventually irrelevant, for the quartet that grew out of it proved to be an enduring masterpiece. Half a generation later, and self-referentially, Lawrence Durrell began a quest to go one better. Over the decade it took to construct, this magnum opus grew into a Quincunx, five books that formed a whole, five petals of a great flower of a novel, all attached, apparently, to a non-existent core. So now, thirty years on, what does a new visit to Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian and Quinx reveal?

Perhaps Blanford should be offered the opportunity to open the discussion. Who is Blanford? Now there’s a question. “My style may be described as one of jump-cutting as with cinema film. The basic illustration is of course the admission that reincarnation is a fact. The old stable outlines of the dear old linear novel have been side-stepped in favour of soft focus palimpsest which enables the actors to turn into each other, to melt into each other’s inner lifespace if they wish. Everything and everyone comes closer and closer together, moving towards the one. … But the book, my book, proved to be a guide to the human heart, whose basic method is to loiter with intent…” This is how Blanford himself describes his own work, for he, we are told, is the author.

A word of warning: Lawrence Durrell is as good as Blanford’s word. Lawrence Durrell is a wrier, a novelist, who invents Blanford, who is also a novelist. In his novel, Lawrence Durrell has his creation, Blanford, write a novel, in which he invents a character called Stucliffe, who is a novelist, and who writes a book. Characters that Durrell invents, or even perhaps knows, live alongside Blanford, himself a fiction, and are reinvented by Sutcliffe, under different titles but with the same character, in his own fiction, which really is written by Blanford, who is Durrell.

So we have a fiction within a fiction, featuring the same characters, but with different names. They sometimes meet one another and, ego to alter ego, discuss the others and sometimes themselves. Here and there, just to clarify things, the writer also includes thoughts and actions from characters in the Alexandria Quartet, who seem to relish being cameo-quoted in these new surroundings. Don’t worry, because they don’t exist either.

Blanford’s assertion that material will be inter-cut has to be taken seriously. There is barely a page in the five novels of the Quincunx that does not slip from a layer of apparent fact into fiction in order to render it fact and the source fiction. And, of course, the whole thing is nothing more than the musings of Durrell, who perhaps intends to loiter a little longer than he ought.

The five books of the Quincunx, Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian and Quinx, often approach an approximation of plot. There’s Tu Duc near Avignon in France, an old house near the city of Popes. It has its own memories, almost its own character. But is it real? Of course it isn’t! Just ask one of the characters to confirm its fiction. There’s a cult of Gnostics in the Egyptian desert who seem to convene like some diplomatic corps whose party has lost its bearings while on its way to an official gathering. There is drug abuse, and a lot of sex. They are human, after all, aren’t they?

There is also mental illness and breakdown. There is congenital deformity, illness and death. There is sexuality of every persuasion, visits to bordellos and yearnings for more, something more. There’s a Templar treasure to be discovered, a Nazi occupation to endure, labour camps and internment, novels to be written, relationships to perfect. Confused? Why should anyone be confused? What, after all, is there to be confused about? We wake up and, as long as we loiter around long enough, we go to bed and, if we are lucky again with the loitering, we sleep or, if we are a tad luckier, make love. So what?

Lawrence Durrell’s Quincunx, the Avignon Quintet, feels very much like an author’s commonplace. It’s a disjointed and sometimes deliberately obtuse, often intentionally banal set of musings. It’s five books that head in no particular direction and go nowhere on their extensive travels, but explore character along the way, without ever really getting near any of the humanity they encounter. They dip into history which is always present, and seek material consequences in ethereal ideas. And, sure enough, it loiters around in its unfocused way for what increasingly seems like a lifetime. And where does it go? Where does it finish? Now there’ a question… 

A Search For Donald Cottee by Philip Spires is a Quixote parody set in Benidorm and West Yorkshire