Category: Pocket Books

The second novel of Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet” (which otherwise in order comprised Justine, Mountolive, and Clea), Balthazar – as well as the latter two novels – was never adapted for film, unlike the first volume of the series. 

Though the cover artist of this 1961 edition of Balthazar is unknown, that anonymous person would s e e m to have been the same individual who created the cover of the other three 1961 Cardinal Edition Quartet novels:  For each of the four books, a woman’s face – sometimes veiled; sometimes not – occupies most of the cover, while at the lower left appears a mosque and minaret.  Each of the four novels also has its own distinguishing background color:  Justine in pale yellow, Balthazar in blue, Mountolive in violet, and Clea in Brown.  

He was at that time deeply immersed in the novel he was writing,
and as always he found that his ordinary life,
in a distorted sort of way,
was beginning to follow the curvature of his book. 

He explained this by saying that any concentration of the will displaces life
(Archimedes’ bath-water) and gives it bias in motion. 

Reality, be believed, was always trying to copy the imagination of man, from which it derived. 

You will see from this that he was a serious fellow underneath much of his clowning
and had quite comprehensive beliefs and ideas. 

But also, he had been drinking rather heavily that day as he always did when he was working. 

Between books he never touched a drop. 

Riding beside her in the great car, someone beautiful,
dark and painted with great eyes like the prow of some Aegean ship,
he had the sensation that his book was being rapidly passed underneath his life,
as if under a sheet of paper containing the iron filings of temporal events,
as a magnet is in that commonplace experiment one does at school:
and somehow setting up a copying magnetic field.  (pp. 106-107)

References

Alexandria Quartet, at Wikipedia

International Lawrence Durrell Society

P.S.!…  Here’s the cover – with a prominent and rather distracting bend in the lower right corner (ugh!) – that originally featured as the main image of this post.  As you can see above, the cover image is now from a different, undamaged copy of Durrell’s book. 

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The first novel in Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet” (which also comprised Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea), Justine was produced for the screen in 1969 as a film directed by George Cukor and Joseph Strick.  The movie’s cast included Anouk Aimée in the title role, Dirk Bogarde as “Pursewarden”, and Michael York as “Darley”.  According to Wikipedia, the film … uh, er, ah … didn’t go over too well, either critically or financially. 

(C’est la vie!)

Though the full film is apparently unavailable in digital format, you can view the trailer – rather a brief trailer at only a minute in length – (uploaded to YouTube in 2010) here. 

As for Clea herself:
is it only my imagination which makes it seem so difficult to sketch her portrait? 
I think of her so much –
and yet I see how in all this writing I have been shrinking from dealing directly with her. 
Perhaps the difficulty lies here:
that there does not seem to be an easy correspondence between her habits and her true disposition. 
If I should describe the outward structure of her life –
so disarmingly simple, graceful, self-contained –
there is a real danger that she might seem either a nun
for whom the whole range of human passions had given place
to an absorbing search for her subliminal self,
or a disappointed and ingrown virgin
who had deprived herself of the world because of some psychic instability,
or some insurmountable early wound.

Everything about her person is honey-gold and warm in tone;
the fair, crisply trimmed hair which she wears rather long at the back,
knotting it simply at the downy nape of her neck.
This focuses the candid face of a minor muse with its smiling grey-green eyes.
The calmly disposed have a deftness and shapeliness
which one only notices when one sees them at work,
holding a paint-brush perhaps
or setting the broken leg of a sparrow in splints made from match-ends.

I should say something like this:
that she had been poured,
while still warm,
into the body of a young grace:
that is to say, into a body born without instincts or desires.

To have great beauty;
to have enough money to construct an independent life;
to have a skill – those are the factors which persuade the envious,
the dispirited to regard her as undeservedly lucky.
But why, ask her critics and observers, has she denied herself marriage?

She lives in modest though not miserly style,
inhabiting a comfortable attic-studio
furnished with little beyond an iron bed and a few ragged beach chairs
which in the summer are transferred bodily to her little bathing cabin at Sidi Bishr. 
Her only luxury is a glittering tiled bathroom in the corner
of which she has installed a minute stove
to cope with whatever cooking she feels inclined to do for herself;
and a bookcase whose crowded shelves indicate that she denies it nothing.

She lives without lovers or family ties, without malices or pets,
concentrating with single-mindedness upon her painting which she takes seriously. 
In her work, too, she is lucky; for these bold yet elegant canvases radiate clemency and humor.
They are full of a sense of play – like children much-beloved.

From rear cover:

The wine press of love

Alexandria – a thousand dust-tormented streets.  Flies and beggars own it today, and those who enjoy an intermediate existence in between.

Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds – but there are more than five sexes.  The sexual provender which lies to hand is staggering in its variety and profusion.  The Orient cannot rejoice in the sweet anarchy of the body – for it has far outstripped the body.

Someone once said that Alexandria was the great wine press of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets – I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex.