There is no denying Durrell’s extraordinarily retentive powers of observation, but he was the first to say that his city was woven from many cities in his mind. Durrell was able to give up nearly 20 years on the British Foreign Office payroll and buy a house in southern France, where he lived ever after, receiving royalty checks, accolades, and pilgrims in inexorably dwindling numbers.ĭurrell had found his voice and located his literary identity in a particular place, Alexandria, Egypt’s second largest city, a seedy polyglot seaport of bygone luster.

Within months of Justine, rights to the whole opus, to his poetry, to Bitter Lemons, a book on Cyprus, were snapped up around the world. Durrell and others are leading us in a renaissance of romance.”Īt 45, the preternaturally energetic Durrell leapt into the awaited moment of his fame, churning out the rest of the volumes-siblings, he called them, not sequels- one after the other, faster than a publisher could keep up with them: six weeks to write Balthazar, he said, 12 weeks for Mountolive, and eight weeks for Clea, the last to appear, in early 1960. “The novel may indeed be dying,” declared the critic Robert Scholes, “but we need not fear for the future.

Lawrence, among other modernist forebears. He was confidently placed in the big shoes of Joyce, Proust, Henry Miller, and D. Almost at once the novel established an outlandish reputation for Durrell, previously known for a precocious first novel and some sublime travel writing. Yet half a century ago, when Justine appeared, it elicited a rush of critical superlatives that announced the birth of a literary classic. The well of memory tends to run dry about there, leaving only the wistful fragrance of the little remembered but not quite forgotten. Speak the name Lawrence Durrell, as I have been doing recently, and you will have little trouble prompting the title of his masterwork, the four-novel cycle he called “The Alexandria Quartet.” Yes, everyone read it back when.

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