Chapter 3,  Ionian Profiles - "THE SEA’S CURIOUS workmanship: bottle-green glass sucked smooth and porous by the waves: vitreous shells: wood stripped and cleaned, and bark swollen with salt a bead: sea-charcoal, brittle and sticky: fronds of bladderwort with their greasy marine skin and reptilian feel: rocks, gnawed and rubbed: sponges, heavy with tears: amber: bone: the sea.

Our life on this promontory has become like some flawless Euclidean statement. Night and sleep resolve and complete the day with their quod erat demonstrandum; and if, uneasily stirring before dawn, one stands for a moment to watch the morning star, which hangs like a drop of yellow dew in the east, it is not that sleep (which is like death in stories, beautiful) has been disrupted: it is the greater for this noiseless star, for the deep scented treeline and the sea pensively washing and rewashing one dreams. So that, confused, you wonder at the overlapping of the edges of dream and reality, and turn to the breathing person in whose body, as in a sea-shell—echoes the systole and diastole of the waters.

Nights blue and geometric; endearing and seducing moon; the sky’s curvature like an impress of an embrace while she rises—as if in one’s own throat, so pure and glittering. When you have stared at her until she chills you, the human proportions of your world are reasserted suddenly.

Suddenly the man crosses the orchard to the seawall. Helen walks with a lighted candle across the grass to tend the goat. Abstract from the balcony Bach begins to play—absorbed in his science of unknown relations, and only hurting us all because he implies experience he cannot state. And because paint and words are useless to fill the gap you lean forward and blow out the lamp, and sit listening, smelling the dense pure odor of the wick, and watching the silver rings play on the ceiling. And so to bed, two enviable subjects of the Wheel."

Dès 1953, Lawrence Durrell avait fait part de son projet à Arthur Miller; il lui fallut trois ans pour concevoir "Justine", même s'il en avait déjà le plan en tête. C'est seulement le deuxième des quatre volumes. "Clea", écrit en huit semaines, sera achevé en 1959 ; un an plus tard "Balthazar", terminé en six, et "Mountolive" en douze. La tétralogie constitue une expérience ambitieuse, unique tant dans la forme que dans le fond, du fait des rapports respectifs des quatre volumes à un thème central ou commun. Seule "Justine" utilise le mode narratif classique, les trois autres romans, n`ayant aucune progression chronologique, représentent. selon l'auteur, les "trois dimensions de l'espace ". 

Durrell n'échappe guère à une forme de grandiloquence, d`hermétisme qui lui seront plus tard reprochés. ll a malgré tout maintes fois défini sa démarche. « Il nous faut cerner le vieux monde. C'est ce que j'ai voulu faire dans cette série... briser la personnalité et montrer ses diverses facettes. Une personnalité intégrée ça n'existe pas... Mes personnages ne sont pas réels... ils sont inventés... des marionnettes que l`on peut faire tourner sous des angles différents sur une toile de fond particulière." Solipsisme, narcissisme guettent cette option antiréaliste dans le jeu de miroirs qui multiplie la vision, l'intériorise mais la coupe aussi du monde extérieur. Ce parti pris préside à la composition de l'œuvre-kaléidoscope; il sous-tend le thème de l'inter-subjectivité, de l'interconnection, de la relativité tandis que l'artiste Darley, symboliquement isolé dans son île au moment où il écrit les trois romans, apporte un point de vue supplémentaire. 

L'intrigue du Quatuor d'Alexandrie rassemble des thèmes épars dans les écrits précédents pour créer une représentation d'unité dans la désintégration. Chacun des volumes forme un tout qui devient fragment dès lors qu'il est juxtaposé à un autre fragment. Ainsi s'impose la coexistence de vérités différentes, voire contradictoires. Il n`y a là rien de bien nouveau par rapport au "Carnet noir", sinon qu'au lieu de théoriser sa vision Durrell la concrétise....

"Of Justine who can pretend that she did not have her stupid side? The cult of pleasure, small vanities, concern for the good opinion ofher inferiors, arrogance. She could be tiresomely exigent when she chose. Yes. Yes. But all these weeds are watered by money. I will say only that in many things she thought as a man, while in her actions she enjoyed some of the free vertical independence of the masculine outlook. Our intimacy was of a strange mental order. Quite early on I discovered that she could mind-read in an unerring fashion. Ideas came to us simultaneously.

I remember once being made aware that she was sharing in her mind a thought which had just presented itself to mine, namely: ‘This intimacy should go no further for we have already exhausted all its possibilities in our respective imaginations: and what we shall end by discovering, behind the darkly woven colours of sensuality, will be a friendship so profound that we shall become bondsmen forever.’ It was, if you like, the flirtation of minds prematurely exhausted by experience which seemed so much more dangerous than a love founded in sexual attraction.

Knowing how much she loved Nessim and loving him so much myself, I could not contemplate this thought without terror. She lay beside me, breathing lightly, and staring at the cherub-haunted ceiling with her great eyes. I said: ‘It can come to nothing, this love-affair between a poor schoolteacher and an Alexandrian society woman.

How bitter it would be to have it all end in a conventional scandal which would leave us alone together and give you the task of deciding how to dispose of me.’ Justine hated to hear the truth spoken. She turned upon one elbow and lowering those agnificent troubled eyes to mine she stared at me for a long moment. 

‘There is no choice in this matter’ she said in that hoarse voice I had come to love so much. ‘You talk as if there was a choice. We are not strong or evil enough to exercise choice. All this is part of an experiment arranged by something else, the city perhaps, or another part of ourselves. How do I know?

I remember her sitting before the multiple mirrors at the dressmaker’s, beingfitted for a shark-skin costume, and saying: ‘Look! five different pictures of the same subject. Now if I wrote I would try for a multi-dimensional effect in character, a sort of prism sightedness. Why should not people show more than one profile at a time?’

Now she yawned and lit a cigarette; and sitting up in bed clasped her slim ankles with her hands; reciting slowly, wryly, those marvellous lines of the old Greek poet about a love-affair long since past — they are lost in English. And hearing her speak his lines, touching every syllable of the thoughtful ironic Greek with tenderness, I felt once more the strange equivocal power of the city — its flat alluvial landscape and exhausted airs — and knew her for a true child of Alexandria; which is neither Greek, Syrian nor Egyptian, but a hybrid: a joint.

And with what feeling she reached the passage where the old man throws aside the ancient love-letter which had so moved him and exclaims: ‘I go sadly out on to the balcony; anything to change this train of thought, even if only to see some little movement in the city I love, in its streets and shops!’ Herself pushing open the shutters to stand on the dark balcony above a city of coloured lights: feeling the evening wind stir from the confines of Asia: her body for an instant forgotten..."

 

Comme Mélissa, Justine est omniprésente dans le Quatuor. Alexandrine authentique, belle. complexe, pianiste de talent, elle possède, elle aussi, plusieurs visages qui ne coïncident jamais : lesbienne, nymphomane, somnambule, etc. Les détails de sa vie sont enfermés dans les arabesques de la technique romanesque, enfouis dans l'épaisse obscurité de la ville. Son premier mari, Arnauti, est l`auteur d'un roman, "Mœurs", utilisé par Darley pour compléter le portrait de Justine et la peinture d'Alexandrie qui, peu à peu, s'affirme comme véritable "dramatis persona". Darley étudie la ville dans tous ses détails avec ses habitants, Pombal le Français, Capodistria le cabaliste, Scobie le politicien homosexuel, et surtout Balthazar, heros éponyme du second volume, "l'une des clés de la cité", à en croire Darley. Celui-ci aime Justine d'une passion "romantique" qui la mythifie. Ainsi supprime-t-il la Justine-femme-de-Nessim, incompatible avec son sens de la possession dans une relation fondée sur la personnalité et non sur la sexualité. Ici les relations humaines remplacent "l'amour", l'esprit prédomine et interdit l'anarchie des sens. 

En fait l'importance des conversations de Darley avec Justine, cœur de leur liaison, tient moins à leur contenu qu'à leur forme. Alexandrie s`exprime dans les relations de ses habitants (quatre personnages - Darley, Justine, Nessim, Mélissa - liés par l'amour) et simultanément l'esprit d'Alexandrie, de cet espace qui affecte et informe les personnages. Ainsi s'ébauche l`idée du "lt" (Cela), celui d'Alexandrie, celui de la personne qui s`y identifie (Nessim) ou qui crée la vérité (Cléa), celui de la Nature aussi. Reste que toute tentative pour résumer Justine est une gageure.

Justine n'est que l'ouverture du roman où sont esquisses les réseaux qui lient personnages et cité dans l'univers multidimensionnel créé par Durrell. À la fin de ce premier volume subsistent nombre d`énigmes. Darley connaît à peine Alexandrie qui lui sera dévoilée par Balthazar dont les révélations conféreront à l'œuvre son épaisseur mystérieuse. La première mouture de ce conte trois fois raconté se termine paisiblement, toute passion éteinte pour le moment. 

À la fin du roman, Darley se rapproche de Clea, une belle artiste qui se remet d’une liaison lesbienne avec Justine. Ensemble, Clea et Darley analysent les événements qui se sont déroulés, rappelant la sagesse de leur ami littéraire énigmatique, Percy Pursewarden, qui s’est récemment suicidé....

Balthazar va reprendre l`histoire de Justine d'un point de vue différent. Darley conserve sa place de commentateur, sa liaison avec Justine restant centrale, les mêmes personnages satellites s`y retrouvant. Mais si personnages et événements de Justine forment le fondement de Balthazar, ils suscitent de nouvelles interprétations : la mort de Mélissa, la folie de Nessim, la fuite de Justine perdent de leur importance tandis que passent au premier plan l`amitié de Justine et de Cléa, l'enchaînement aboutissant au mariage de Nessim et de Justine, et que sont réaffirmés le rôle d'Alexandrie et l'importance de la création artistique (Cléa, Pursewarden, Darley, Balthazar sont des artistes). Ainsi Balthazar suggère-t-il l'instabilité des faits, la nécessité pour qui souhaite les interpréter de rajuster constamment son propre point de vue. Il suggère aussi que le premier roman nous avait égarés sur des pistes secondaires (Mélissa, naguère pièce essentielle, n`est plus ici qu`un objet pitoyable); Arnauti et Pursewarden voient leurs rôles renversés dans le miroir respectif des deux romans. Balthazar semble opérer un rétablissement salutaire de la vérité; chaque personnage devenant source d'événements qui affectent d'autres personnages. il n`y a plus de personnage secondaire. L'éducation de Darley n”est pas encore terminée, mais il commence à parler le langage nouveau de l'artiste moderne défini par Pursewarden comme "l`être humain totalement vivant". Pas plus que Justíne, Balthazar, qui se termine sur la vision de Darley passif et solitaire. ne permet d`imaginer l'avenir...

 

Part III - X - "I suppose (writes Balthazar) that if you wished somehow to incorporate all I am telling you into your own Justine manuscript now, you would find yourself with a curious sort of book — the story would be told, so to speak, in layers. Unwittingly I may have

supplied you with a form, something out of the way! Not unlike Pursewarden’s idea of a series of novels with “sliding panels” as he called them. Or else, perhaps, like some medieval palimpsest where different sorts of truth are thrown down one upon the other, the one

obliterating or perhaps supplementing another. Industrious monks scraping away an elegy to make room for a verse of Holy Writ!

‘I don’t suppose such an analogy would be a bad one to apply to the reality of Alexandria, a city at once sacred and profane;between Theocritus, Plotinus, and the Septuagint one moves on intermediate levels which are those of race as much as anything —like saying Copt,

Greek and Jew or Moslem, Turk and Armenian.… Am I wrong? These are the slow accretions of time itself on place. Just as life on the individual face lays down, wash by suc-cessive wash, the wrinkles of experiences in which laughter and tears are utterly indistinguishable.

Wormcasts of experience on the sands of life….’

 

« Je suppose (écrit Balthazar) que si vous vouliez maintenant incorporer d'une manière ou d`une autre tout ce que je vous apprends là dans votre manuscrit de Justine, vous vous trouveriez en présence d'un livre assez curieux; ce serait une histoire racontée par couches successives en quelque sorte. Sans le vouloir, je vous ai fourni une forme assez peu conventionnelle! Assez proche de l'idée qu'avait Pursewarden d'une suite de romans comportant des "panneaux coulissants" comme il les appelait. Ou, peut-être, comme un

palimpseste médiéval sur lequel des vérités de divers ordres ont été déposées les unes par-dessus les autres, les unes oblitérant ou peut-être complétant les autres. Moines industrieux effaçant une élégie pour faire place à un verset des saintes Ecritures!

"Je crois qu'il ne serait pas si mauvais d'appliquer une telle méthode à la réalité  d'Alexandrie, ville sacrée et profane tout à la fois; entre Théocrite, Plotin, et les Septante on se meut sur des plans intermédiaires qui sont aussi bien ceux de la race que de toute autre chose - quand nous disons : les Coptes, les Grecs et les Juifs ou les musulmans, les Turcs et les Arméniens... Ai-je tort? C'est là le lent accroissement alluvionnaire sur place du temps lui-même. De même la vie dépose sur le visage des individus couche après couche, les rides successives de l'expérience où il est absolument impossible de discriminer la part du rire et celle des larmes. Déjections de l'expérience sur les sables de la vie... "

 

 "So writes my friend, and he is right; for the Interlinear now raises for me much more than the problem of objective ‘truth to life’, or if you like ‘to fiction’. It raises, as life itself does — whether one makes or takes it — the harder-grained question of form. How then am I to

manipulate this mass of crystallized data in order to work out the meaning of it and so give a coherent picture of this impossible city of love and obscenity? I wish I knew. I wish I knew. So much has been revealed to me by all this that I feel myself to be, as it were, standing

upon the threshold of a new book — a new Alexandria. The old evocative outlines which I drew, intertwining them with the names of the city’s exemplars - Cavafy, Alexander, Cleopatra and the rest - were subjective ones. I had made the image my own jealous personal property, and it was true yet only within the limitations of a truth only partially perceived. Now, in the light of all these new treasures — for truth, though merciless as love, must always be a treasure — what should I do? Extend the frontiers of original truth, filling in with the rubble of this new knowledge the foundations upon which to build a new Alexandria? Or should the dispositions remain the same, the characters remain the same — and is it only truth itself which has changed in contradiction?

 

Voilà ce que m'écrit mon ami, et il a raison; le Commentaire me pose maintenant bien plus que le problème de "la vérité objective en face de la vie", ou si vous préférez, "en face de la fiction". Il me pose - comme le fait la vie - le problème au grain beaucoup plus dur de la forme. Comment manipuler cette masse d'éléments cristallisés pour en dégager la signification et donner un tableau cohérent de cette impossible cité d`amour et d'obscénité?

J'aimerais le savoir. J'aimerais le savoir. Tant de choses m'ont été révélées par tout cela, que j'ai en quelque sorte l'impression d'être au seuil d'un nouveau livre - une nouvelle Alexandrie. Les antiques contours évocateurs que j'ai tracés, en y imbriquant les noms des modèles de la ville - Cavafy, Alexandre, Cléopâtre et les autres - n'étaient que des traits subjectifs. C'est mon petit univers jaloux que j'ai représenté, et c'était une image véridique, mais seulement dans les limites d'une vérité qui n`était perçue que partiellement. Maintenant, à la lumière de tous ces nouveaux trésors - car la vérité, encore qu'impitoyable comme l'amour, doit toujours être un trésor - que dois-je faire ? Elargir les frontières de la vérité originelle, ajouter les moellons de cette nouvelle connaissance et rebâtir sur elles une nouvelle Alexandrie ? Ou bien l'agencement doit-il rester le même, ainsi que les personnages - seule la vérité elle-même s'étant changée en contradiction ?

 

 All this spring on my lonely island I have been weighed down by this grotesque information, which has so altered my feelings about things — oddly enough even about things past. Can emotions be retrospective, retroactive?

So much I wrote was based upon Justine’s fears of Nessim — genuine fears, genuinely expressed. I have seen with my own eyes that cold speechless jealousy upon his face — and seen the fear written on hers. Yet now Balthazar says that Nessim would never have done her harm. What am I to believe?

We dined so often together, the four of us; and there I sat speechless and drunk upon the memory of her actual kisses, be-lieving (only because she told me so) that the presence of the fourth — Pursewarden — would lull Nessim’s jealous brain and offer us the safety of

chaperonage! Yet if now I am to believe Balthazar, it was I who was the decoy. (Do I remember, or only imagine, a special small smile which from time to time would appear at the corner of Pursewarden’s lips, perhaps cynical or per-haps comminatory?) I thought then that I was sheltering behind the presence of the writer while he was in fact sheltering behind mine! I am prevented from fully believing this by … what? The quality of a kiss from the lips of one who could murmur, like a being submitting its body to the rack, the words ‘I love you.’ Of course, of course. I am an expert in love — every man believes himself to be one: but particularly the Englishman. So I am to believe in the kiss rather than in the statements of my friend? Im-possible, for Balthazar does not lie….

 

Durant tout ce printemps sur mon île solitaire j'ai été accablé par la révélation de ces grotesques éléments, qui ont tant altéré mon sentiment des choses - même des choses passées, ce qui est étrange. Les émotions seraient-elles aussi rétrospectives, rétroactives ?

Presque tout ce que j'ai dit était fondé sur les craintes que Justine éprouvait å l'égard de Nessim - craintes sincères; sincèrement exprimées. J'ai vu de mes propres yeux cette froide et muette jalousie sur le visage du mari, j'ai vu la peur écrite sur celui de l'épouse. Mais voilà que Balthazar dit que Nessim ne lui aurait jamais fait le moindre mal. Que dois-je croire ? 

Nous dînions si souvent ensemble, tous les quatre; je me revois, assis en silence, buvant le souvenir de ses baisers réels, croyant (uniquement parce qu'elle me l'avait dit) que la présence du quatrième - Pursewarden - endormait la cervelle jalouse de Nessim et nous offrait la sécurité d'un chaperon! S'il me faut en croire aujourd'hui Balthazar, c`était moi qui jouait le rôle d'appât. (Est-ce que je me rappelle, ou ne fais-je que l'imaginer, ce petit sourire très spécial qui apparaissait de temps en temps au coin des lèvres de Pursewarden, peut-être cynique, peut-être comminatoire?) Je croyais m'abriter derrière la présence de l'écrivain alors qu'il s'abritait en réalité derrière la mienne! Quelque chose m'empêche de croire tout à fait cela... Quoi `? La réalité d'un baiser des lèvres de celle qui pouvait murmurer, comme un être soumettant son corps à la torture, les mots "je t'aime". Certes. Certes. Je suis expert en matière d'amour - tout homme croit l'être, mais surtout les Anglais. Je croirai donc au baiser plutôt qu'aux affirmations de mon ami ? Impossible, car Balthazar ne ment pas... .

 

Is love by its very nature a blindness? Of course, I know I averted my face from the thought that Justine might be unfaithful to me while I  possessed her—who does not? It would have been too painful a truth to accept, although in my heart of hearts I knew full well, that she could never be faithful to me for ever. If I ever dared to whisper the thought to myself I hastily added, like every husband, every lover, ‘But of course, whatever she does, I am the one she truly loves!’ The sophistries which console — the lies which keep love going!

Not that she herself ever gave me direct reason to doubt. I do however remember an occasion on which the faintest breath of suspicion roused itself against Pursewarden, only to be immediately stilled. He walked out of the studio one day towards us with some

lipstick on his mouth. But almost immediately I caught sight of the cigarette in his hand — he had obviously picked up a cigarette which Justine had left burning in an ashtray (a common habit with her) for the end of it was red. In matters of love everything is easy to explain.

 

L'amour est-il aveugle par nature? Certes, je fermais les yeux à cette idée que Justine aurait pu m'être infidèle quand je la possédais - qui n'en fait pas autant ? Cette vérité  aurait été trop douloureuse à accepter, bien qu'au tréfonds de mon coeur j'eusse su parfaitement qu'elle ne pourrait jamais m'être fidèle. S'il m'arrivait d`oser me murmurer cette idée, j'ajoutais précipitamment, comme n'importe quel mari, n'importe quel amant, "Mais naturellement, quoi qu'elle fasse, c'est moi qu'elle aime vraiment!" Voilà les sophismes qui consolent, les mensonges qui gardent l'amour en vie!

Non qu'elle m'ait jamais donné des raisons précises de douter. Je me rappelle toutefois une occasion où l'ombre `d'un doute se leva en moi à l'égard de Pursewarden, pour être aussitôt étouffé. Un Jour, comme il sortait de l'atelier et se dirigeait vers nous, je vis une trace de rouge à lèvres sur sa bouche. Mais aussitôt j'aperçus la cigarette qu'il tenait à la main - il venait manifestement de prendre une cigarette toute allumée que Justine avait laissé brûler dans le cendrier (une habitude courante chez elle) car le bout était maculé de rouge. En matière d'amour tout s'explique facilement. 

 

 The wicked Interlinear, freighted with these doubts, presses like a blunt thumb, here and here, always in bruised places. I have begun to copy it whole — the whole of it — slowly and painfully;not only to understand more clearly wherein it differs from my own version of

reality, but also to catch a glimpse of it as a separate entity — as a manuscript existing in its own right, as the deter-mined view of another eye upon events which I interpreted in my own way, because that was the way in which I lived them — or they lived me. Did I really miss so much that was going on around me — the connotation of smiles, of chance words and gestures,messages scribbled with a finger in wine spilt upon a table-top,addresses written in the corner of newspapers and folded over? Must I now rework my own experiences in order to come to the heart of the truth? ‘Truth has no heart’ writes Pursewarden. ‘Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic. Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.’

According to Balthazar, I have misread the order of Justine’s fears in so far as they concerned Nessim. The incident of the car I have recorded elsewhere; how she was racing towards Cairo one night to meet Pursewarden when the lights of the great moth-coloured Rolls

went out. Blinded by darkness she lost control of it and it swarmed off the road, bouncing from dune to dune and throwing up spouts of sand like the spray thrown up by the death-agonies of a whale. Then ‘whistling like an arrow’ it buried itself to the windscreens in a dune and lay trembling and murmuring. For-tunately, she was not hurt and had the presence of mind to switch off the engine. But how had the accident come about? In telling me of it she said that when the car was examined the wiring was found to have been filed down — by whom?

 

Le diabolique Commentaire, tout empoisonné de ces doutes, appuie comme un gros pouce carré, ici et là, toujours aux endroits douloureux. J'ai commencé à copier le tout -- le tout - lentement, avec amertume; non seulement pour mieux comprendre les points où il diffère de ma propre version de la réalité, mais également pour le plaisir en tant qu'entité distincte - comme un manuscrit ayant une existence propre, comme la vision particulière qu'un autre œil a eue de certains événements que j'ai interprétés à ma façon, parce que c'est ainsi que je les ai vécus - ou qu'ils m'ont vécu. Comment tant de choses autour de moi ont-elles pu m'échapper - sourires pleins de sous-entendus, mots et gestes fortuits, messages griffonnés dans une tache de vin sur la table, adresses écrites dans un coin de journal qu'une main chiffonne ensuite ? Dois-je réviser toutes mes expériences pour atteindre au cœur de la vérité ? `"La vérité n'a pas de cœur, écrit Pursewarden. La vérité est femme. C'est pour cela qu'elle est énigmatique. Des femmes, le plus que l'on puisse dire, à moins d'être français, c'est que ce sont des animaux fouisseurs."

Selon Balthazar, j'ai mal interprété l'enchaînement des craintes de Justine concernant Nessim. L'incident de la voiture que j'ai relaté ailleurs par exemple : comment elle filait à grande allure vers Le Caire pour aller rejoindre Pursewarden quand tout à coup les phares cle la grande Rolls couleur de papillon de nuit s'éteignirent. Aveuglée par l'obscurité, elle perdit le contrôle de sa direction et la voiture quitta la route, bondit de dune en dune en soulevant une tempête de sable comme les gerbes d'eau soulevées par les spasmes d'une baleine à l'agonie, puis, "en sifflant comme une flèche", alla s'enterrer jusqu'au pare-brise dans une dune et s'immobilisa en tremblant et toussotant. Heureusement elle ne fut pas blessée et elle eut la présence d'esprit de couper le contact. Mais comment l'accident s'était-il produit ? Quand elle me le raconta elle me dit que lorsqu'on examina la voiture on s'aperçut que les fils avaient été limés... par qui ?"

(...)

One - "WHEN I saw Finn waiting for me at the comer of the street I knew at once that something had gone wrong. Finn usually waits for me in bed, or leaning up against the side of the door with his eyes closed. Moreover, I had been delayed by the strike. I hate the journey back to England anyway; and until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable. So you may imagine how unhappy it makes me to have to cool my heels at Newhaven, waiting for the trains to run again, and with the smell of France still fresh in my nostrils. On this occasion too the bottles of cognac which I always smuggle had been taken from me by the Customs, so that when closing time came I was utterly abandoned to the torments of a morbid self-scrutiny. The invigorating objectivity of true contemplation is something which a man of my temperament cannot achieve in unfamiliar towns in England, even when he has not also to be worrying about trains. Trains are bad for the nerves at the best of times. What did people have nightmares about before there were trains? So all this being considered, it was an odd thing that Finn should be waiting for me in the road.

As soon as I saw Finn I stopped and put the cases down. They were full of French books and very heavy. I shouted ‘Hey!’ and Finn came slowly on. He never makes haste. I find it hard to explain to people about Finn. He isn’t exactly my servant. He seems often more like my manager. Sometimes I support him, and sometimes he supports me; it depends. It’s somehow clear that we aren’t equals. His name is Peter O‘Finney, but you needn’t mind about that, as he is always called Finn, and he is a sort of remote cousin of mine, or so he used to claim, and I never troubled to verify this.

But people do get the impression that he is my servant, and I often have this impression too, though it would be hard to say exactly what features of the situation suggest it. Sometimes I think it is just that Finn is a humble and self-effacing person and so automatically takes second place. When we are short of beds it is always Finn who sleeps on the floor, and this seems thoroughly natural. It is true that I am always giving Finn orders, but this is  because Finn seems not to have many ideas of his own about how to employ his time. Some of my friends think that Finn is cracked, but this is not so; he knows very well indeed what he is about.

When Finn came up to me at last I indicated one of the cases for him to carry, but he did not pick it up. Instead he sat down on it and looked at me in a melancholy way. I sat down on the other case, and for a little while we were silent. I was tired, and reluctant to ask Finn any questions; he would tell all soon enough. He loves trouble, his own or other people’s without discrimination, and what he particularly likes is to break bad news. Finn is rather handsome in a sad lanky fashion, with straight drooping brownish hair and a bony Irish face. He is a head taller than me (I am a short man), but he stoops a little. As he looked at me so sadly my heart sank.

‘What is it?’ I said at last.

‘She’s thrown us out,’ said Finn.

I could not take this seriously; it was impossible.

‘Come now,’ I said kindly to Finn. ‘What does this really mean?’

‘She’s throwing us out,’ said Finn. ‘Both of us, now, today.’

Finn is a carrion crow, but he never tells lies, he never even exaggerates. Yet this was fantastic.

‘But why?’ I asked. ‘What have we done?’

‘It’s not what we’ve done, it’s what she’s after doing,’ said Finn. ‘She’s going to get married to a fellow.’

This was a blow. Yet even as I flinched I told myself, well, why not? I am a tolerant and fair-minded man. And next moment I was wondering, where can we go?

‘But she never told me anything,’ I said.

‘You never asked anything,’ said Finn.

This was true. During the last year I had become uninterested in Magdalen’s private life. If she goes out and gets herself engaged to some other man whom had I to thank but myself?

‘Who is this person?’ I asked.

‘Some bookie fellow,’ said Finn.

‘Is he rich?’

‘Yes, he has a car,’ said Finn. This was Finn’s criterion, and I think at that time it was mine too."

 

CHAPTER 1

DORA GREENFIELD LEFT HER HUSBAND because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason. The absent Paul, haunting her with letters and telephone bells and imagined footsteps on the stairs had begun to be the greater torment. Dora suffered from guilt, and with guilt came fear. She decided at last that the persecution of his presence was to be preferred to the persecution of his absence.

Dora was still very young, though she vaguely thought of herself as past her prime. She came of a lower middle-class London family. Her father had died when she was nine years old, and her mother, with whom she had never got on very well, had married again. When Dora was eighteen she entered the Slade school of art with a scholarship, and had been there two

years when she encountered Paul. The role of an art student suited Dora. It was indeed the only role she had ever been able whole-heartedly to play.

She had been an ugly and wretched schoolgirl. As a student she grew plump and peach-like and had a little pocket money of her own, which she spent on big multi-coloured skirts and jazz records and sandals. At that time, which although it was only three years ago now seemed unimaginably remote, she had been happy. Dora, who had so lately discovered in herself a talent for happiness, was the more dismayed to find that she could be happy neither with her husband nor without him.

Paul Greenfield, who was thirteen years older than his wife, was an art historian connected with the Courtauld Institute. He came of an old family of German bankers and had money of his own. He had been born in England and attended an English public school, and preferred not to remember the distinction of his ancestors. Although his assets were never idle, he did not speak of stocks and shares. He first met Dora when he came to lecture on medieval wood-carving at the Slade.

Dora had accepted his proposal of marriage without hesitation and for a great many reasons. She married him for his good taste and his flat in Knightsbridge. She married him for a certain integrity and nobility of character which she saw in him. She married him because he was so  wonderfully more grown-up than her thin neurotic art-student friends. She married him a little for his money. She admired him and was extremely flattered by his attentions. She hoped, by making what her mother (who was bursting with envy) called a ‘good marriage’, to be able to get inside society and learn how to behave; although this was something she did not put clearly to herself at the time. She married, finally, because of the demonic intensity of Paul’s desire for her. He was a passionate and poetic suitor, and

something exotic in him touched Dora’s imagination, starved throughout her meagre education, and unsatisfied still amid the rather childish and provincial gaieties of her student life. Dora, though insufficiently reflective to suffer from strong inferiority feelings, had never valued herself highly. She was amazed that Paul should notice her at all, and she passed quickly from this amazement to the luxurious pleasure of being able so easily to delight this subtle and sophisticated person. She never doubted that she was in love.

Once married and installed in the Knightsbridge flat, in the midst of Paul’s unique collection of medieval ivories, Dora set about the business of being happy, at first with success. But as time went on, she discovered that it was not so easy as she had imagined to grow into being Paul’s wife. She had been beckoned on by a vision of Dora the cultivated woman; but after a year of being Mrs Greenfield she was already finding her ideal too difficult and was even beginning to dislike it. Paul had assumed that she would wish to give up her art studies, and she had given them up with some regret. But since she was lazy, and had in any case shown few signs of talent, she was also relieved. Paul, whose courting had upset the régime of his work, now safely wed resumed his studies with the single-mindedness which Dora so much admired. During long hours when Paul was at the Courtauld or the British Museum Dora found time on her hands. She endeavoured to keep the flat, where she did not dare to disturb any object, meticulously clean.

She made long preparations for dinner parties for Paul’s friends; on such occasions Paul usually did the cooking. She enjoyed these things, but without feeling that they were really what she wanted to do. The elated confidence which Paul’s love had given her at first began to ebb. It seemed to her that Paul was urging her to grow up, and yet had left her no space to grow up into. He wanted to teach her everything himself, but lacked the time and the patience to do so. Though a natural devourer of the women’s  magazines and an indefatigable tester of ‘accessories’, she did not even know how to dress herself any more. She abandoned the big skirts and the sandals. But after annoying Paul with a number of mistakes, she purchased one or two safe expensive outfits, which she thought extremely dull, and then stopped buying clothes altogether. Nor was she easily able to spend her money on anything else because of a haunting uncertainty about her taste. She began to suspect that Paul thought her the tiniest bit vulgar..."

 

(PREFACE,  A. S. BYATT, 1999)

To say that The Bell is a novel of ideas is to misdescribe it. One of Murdoch’s abiding preoccupations was with the complicated, not wholly describable “thinginess” of the physical and moral world, which could be represented in art in a more complex way than it could be analysed in discourse. It is better to say that The Bell is a novel about people who have ideas, people who think, people whose thoughts change their lives just as much as their impulses or their feelings do. (This includes Dora, who often does not stop to think until too late.) It is a novel about goodness, the good life, power, cruelty, and religion. It is also funny, sad and moving. Murdoch wrote in her wise book on Sartre1 that he had “an impatience, which is fatal to a novelist proper, with the stuff of human life”. Her own desire to make a world in which consciousnesses were incarnate, embedded in the stuff of things, might seem to derive from George Eliot, who wrote movingly of her wish to make pictures, not diagrams, to “make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate”. Eliot, like Murdoch, was a European intellectual who had also a very immediate sense of human bodies, encounters and absurdities. They shared a preoccupation with the tensions between the formal complexity and design of the work of art and the need to give the characters space, freedom, to be people, not only to represent ideas or classes.

 

Dire que "The Bell" est un roman d'idées, c'est mal le décrire. L'une des préoccupations constantes de Murdoch était la complexité et l'impossibilité de décrire le monde physique et moral, qui pouvait être représenté dans l'art de manière plus complexe qu'il ne pouvait être analysé dans le discours. Il est préférable de dire que "La Cloche" est un roman sur des gens qui ont des idées, des gens qui pensent, des gens dont les pensées changent leur vie tout autant que leurs impulsions ou leurs sentiments. C'est un roman sur la bonté, la belle vie, le pouvoir, la cruauté et la religion. Il est également drôle, triste et émouvant. Murdoch a écrit dans son livre judicieux sur Sartre qu'il avait "une impatience, qui est fatale à un romancier proprement dit, avec les choses de la vie humaine". Son propre désir de créer un monde dans lequel les consciences sont incarnées, ancrées dans la matière des choses, pourrait sembler dériver de George Eliot, qui a écrit de manière émouvante qu'elle souhaitait faire des images, et non des diagrammes, afin de "rendre certaines idées complètement incarnées". Eliot, comme Murdoch, était une intellectuelle européenne qui avait aussi un sens très immédiat des corps humains, des rencontres et des absurdités. Ils partageaient la même préoccupation pour les tensions entre la complexité formelle et la conception de l'œuvre d'art et la nécessité de donner aux personnages l'espace, la liberté, d'être des personnes, et pas seulement de représenter des idées ou des classes. 

 

It may be that Murdoch thought that Eliot had failed. She asked me once what I thought was the greatest English novel. Middlemarch, I said. She demurred, looking disapproving, and finally said that she supposed it was hard to find which one of Dickens’s novels was the greatest, but that surely he was the greatest novelist ... Eliot began, in English, the elegant patterning with metaphor and leitmotiv that Murdoch, who believed that novelists were first and essentially storytellers, sometimes saw as a trap.

 

Il se peut que Murdoch ait pensé qu'Eliot avait échoué. Elle m'a demandé un jour quel était, selon moi, le plus grand roman anglais. J'ai répondu Middlemarch. Elle a hésité, l'air désapprobateur, et a fini par dire qu'elle pensait qu'il était difficile de trouver lequel des romans de Dickens était le plus grand, mais qu'il était certainement le plus grand romancier... Eliot a commencé, en anglais, à utiliser des métaphores et des leitmotivs élégants que Murdoch, qui pensait que les romanciers étaient d'abord et essentiellement des conteurs d'histoires, considérait parfois comme un piège.

 

Martin Lynch Gibbon, qui se prélasse un après-midi dans l'appartement de sa maîtresse, réfléchit à sa vie. ll n'a aucune intention de quitter sa femme, Antonia, plus âgée que lui, mais se délecte de sa liaison avec Georgie.Vaguement conscient des besoins affectifs de sa maîtresse, malgré sa politesse et son comportement bienséant, Martin est un personnage obtus et suffisant, qui a grand besoin d'une éducation morale. Celle-cí se présente sous la forme de Honor Klein, anthropologue fascinante et démoniaque qui possède un certain aspect primitif mais défend la vérité. Martin est choqué d'apprendre que sa femme désire le quitter pour Palmer, le demi-frère de Honor, mais se fait une raison en acceptant que le couple devienne son substitut parental. Honor, elle, dénonce l'hypocrisie et la fausse civilité de cet arrangement. Lorsque Martin apprend qu'Antonia a aussi eu une aventure avec son frère, et que Honor révèle le lien qui l'unit à Georgie, son monde s'écroule...

 

"The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine. With the tide turning, it leans quietly against the land, almost unflecked by ripples or by foam. Near to the horizon it is a luxurious purple, spotted with regular lines of emerald green. At the horizon it is indigo. Near to the shore, where my view is framed by rising heaps of humpy yellow rock, there is a band of lighter green, icy and pure, less radiant, opaque however, not transparent. We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea. Where the gentle water taps the rocks there is still a surface skin of colour. The cloudless sky is very pale at the indigo horizon which it lightly pencils in with silver. Its blue gains towards the zenith and vibrates there. But the sky looks cold, even the sun looks cold.

I had written the above, destined to be the opening paragraph of my memoirs, when something happened which was so extraordinary and so horrible that I cannot bring myself to describe it even now after an interval of time and although a possible, though not totally reassuring, explanation has occurred to me. Perhaps I shall feel calmer and more clear-headed after yet another interval.

I spoke of a memoir. Is that what this chronicle will prove to be? Time will show. At this moment, a page old, it feels more like a diary than a memoir. Well, let it be a diary then. How I regret that I did not keep one earlier, what a record that would have been! But now the main events of my life are over and there is to be nothing but ‘recollection in tranquillity’. To repent of a life of egoism? Not exactly, yet something of the sort. Of course I never said this to the ladies and gentlemen of the theatre. They would never have stopped laughing.

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit: put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good. The end of life is rightly thought of as a period of meditation. Will I be sorry that I did not begin it sooner?

It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before. What I wrote before was written in water and deliberately so. This is for permanence, something which cannot help hoping to endure. Yes, already I personify the object, the little book, the libellus, this creature to which I am giving life and which seems at once to have a will of its own. It wants to live, it wants to survive...."

 

Charles Arrowby, vieil acteur fatigue, se retire dans une maison délabrée au bord de la mer pour y écrire ses mémoires. Bien qu’il ait toujours dit qu’il prendrait sa retraite une fois qu’il avait plus de soixante ans, ses amis, collègues et amoureux divers sont surpris quand il dit au revoir aux lumières de la rampe et s’installe dans une petite maison sur une partie laide de la côte (le mieux pour éloigner les touristes). D'anciens collègues et amantes envahissent son refuge et font resurgir des souvenirs malheureux, mais c'est lorsque entre en scène Mary Hartley, avec qui Charles a vécu une histoire d'amour non consommée de nombreuses années auparavant, - l’adolescente chérie perdue qui a mûri en une vieille femme robuste -, que les choses menacent de virer au tragique. Ses efforts pour échapper au passé sont voués à l'échec et, afin de se transformer en personnage digne de notre compassion, Arrowby doit passer par une découverte de soi douloureuse. La mer évoquée dans le titre est non seulement source principale des images du roman mais aussi un véritable "personnage" d'importance. Force naturelle d'indétermination et de fluctuatíon, elle sert de contrepoint aux efforts narcissiques et illusoires d'Arrowby pour figer le passé en une image de son invention. La façon dont Arrowby (qui rappelle Prospero dans "La Tempête" de Shakespeare) prétend orchestrer la vie de ceux qui envahissent son île provient d'une tyrannie égocentrique qu'il devra abandonner avant le dénouement de l'histoire.