Lawrence Durrell. Caesar's Vast Ghost:
Aspects of Provence. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.
210 pages. £17.50
Caesar's Vast Ghost: The View from Dublin
Richard Pine
Denis de Rougemont, Lawrence Durrell's friend and
mentor, agreed with him that "the heart of any book about Provence would
be the history of modern love." This is Durrell's last book, but
it is much more than that. Ostensibly a series of essays on "Aspects
of Provence," it is a combination of autobiography, meditation, and testament,
with (as we might expect from the writer whose Alexandria Quartet
was an "explosion of modern love" set in the "city of the dead") love and
death as its chief characteristics. Provence, where Durrell lived
for almost the last thirty years, provides the background and much of the
inspiration, but the ideas excited by the "spirit of place" are those which
he had firmly developed from his adolescence: this book is a "retour
secret sur soimême."
Central to his philosophical approach to life (characterised
as "sexual curiosity and metaphysical speculation") is the question of
refusal: Durrell's main attraction to Provence, "this extraordinary
cradle of romantic dissent," was the fact that it embodies the spirit of
heresy, the rejection of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in favour of an
oriental gnosticism which refused to allow the qualities of transcendence
to be submerged and extinguished by scientific materialism.
One of Durrell's bugbears was the growth of "city
culture," the age of the machine and of the Philistines, who he beautifully
defines as "men without backs to their heads or sides to their ideas."
This is what he partly means in the tell-tale poetic line "world as threat"
and it worried him greatly. He was a subversive who delighted in
the discomfiture of the bourgeois and espoused the company of tramps--"vagabonds,"
"really at heart peripatetic philosophers who had opted out of ordinary
society in order to make an almost religious retreat, perhaps to 'redefine
their deaths' while there was yet time." Death had always obsessed
him. He would have enjoyed the comment recently overheard in a Connemara
pub: "Life and death? Sure, aren't they the same thing?"
Death for Durrell was "disappearance," as much a matter of degree as the
transition from reality to unreality.
Provence offered him the opportunity to regain some
of the earliest magical moments from his childhood on the edge of the Terai
jungle--indeed his own house in Sommières, near Nîmes, was
like a remake of his early home in Kurseong. It gave him the chance
to recast himself in the role of a mage and a poet, because it was as unreal
as language: "Provence is less a geographical entity than an idea...a
beautiful metaphor." His attention to his own identity amidst Provence's
"shifting contours" is also an attempt to capture the "quiddity" (a favourite
word) of the region's endurance, the "spirit of place" that connects it
with a prehistory and makes its inhabitants simply expressions of that
place: "it is what has remained obstinately constant and apparently
ineradicable that strikes you as time goes by...a cultural epic form, a
masterpiece of realized memory."
He evokes this memory by concentrating on the themes
of bull breeding and fighting; on the association between the mistral
and the modern poet of the region, Mistral; and on the mediaeval
courts of love celebrated by the troubadour tradition--all the time stressing
the way that it was a Roman Caesar who created the region for political
ends by naming it "Provincia." Here again, Durrell is close to one
of his basic preoccupations, as he traces modern love to "the role of woman...in
forging the European sensibility," a moral and aesthetic code "within which
love, that rarest of sentiments, could find its own values."
There are many indications that Durrell was quite
unwilling to give up or correct the lightness of tone and the self-indulgence
which some critics complain of in his later work as a form of puerile,
even lavatorial, wit, and the book ends with a fantasia in his early style
which is the sole evidence of the "Satyrikon" in the style of the "Ship
of Fools" that he was contemplating in the event of life continuing.
His characteristic irreverence is summarised in the quip: "Never
forget the last words of Aristotle: 'Si vous ne branchez pas votre
rasoir électrique dans le cul d'un sage, vous ne serez jamais bien
rasé."' But he is quite capable of putting it cheek by
jowl with the observation that Petrarch had discovered "that death is not
negotiable except through poetry and that language was really inadequate
to subsume truth. Yet the existential human sorrow which reigned
when one realized this enabled one to circumvent despair."
This is not simply a beautiful book (with brilliantly
evocative photographs by Henry Peccinotti) which will entrance and engage
the general reader: for avid Durrellians it is a powerful restatement
of many of his recurring themes, many of them refracted in some painfully
honest new poetry, his first for many years. It touches all his previous
work, often with deliberate echoes of The Alexandria Quartet, The
Revolt of Aphrodite, and his most recent series, The Avignon Quintet.
The poems, salutations it the region, are the last testimony of a man who
knew that time was running out, but who had always been "tortured beyond
endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world"; they renew his
reputation in a genre in which he had been eclipsed by his success in prose,
and, in his own words, they "close the circle" in a psychologically revealing
tone that has never been so evident or so truly stated.
Provence is a "separate place," simultaneously a
desired house of exile and a fervent quest for homecoming. It is
a place of relativity: Durrell parodies his own anti-hero Pursewarden
in The Alexandria Quartet when he says "one pace to the right or
left and you get a change of epicentre which changes the whole field of
observation." Durrell's own observation was acute and quintessentially
poetic. But where the epicentre lay was always his private mythological
secret.
Deus Loci 1 (1992): 127-129.
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LCW