DURRELL, Lawrence. [The Alexandria Quartet:] Justine; Balthazar; Mountolive; Clea.

The Alexandria Quartet in Proofs

DURRELL, Lawrence. [The Alexandria Quartet:] Justine; Balthazar; Mountolive; Clea. London: Faber and Faber. 1957–1960.

Four volumes, 8vo. Original marbled green card wrappers lettered in black to spine and front panel; Justine: pp. 253, [3 (blank)]; Balthazar: pp. 250, [2 (blank)]; Mountolive: pp. 320; Clea: pp. 287, [1 (blank)]; spine of Clea rolled and creased (binding holding firm), light spotting to textblock of Balthazar, minor rubbing to lower spine tips of Clea and Justine, manuscript publication date and price in blue ink to front panel of Mountolive, which also includes a loosely laid in Faber and Faber compliments slip from the Sales Manager with the same date and price typed in blue; a very good to near fine set.

A scarce complete and uniform set of bound first edition proofs for Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, with a number of pre-publication variants to preliminary pages and endnotes.

Although Durrell’s monumental tetralogy has not (yet) been accorded the exalted status of comparably ambitious works of twentieth-century modernism, it deservedly stands with them and, like them, has been discussed more often than read. If there are ‘parts of the work that few readers, I suspect, will navigate without skipping, there are many passages of such grand inspiration that reaching them feels like emerging from choppy seas into mar-vellously clear blue Mediterranean waters’ (Morris).

The individual novels, published between 1957 and 1960, were critically and commercially successful and, in 1962, bound together in a single volume with the author’s final revisions included. Durrell described the Quartet as ‘an exploration of relativity and the notions of continuum and subject–object relation, with modern love as the theme’ and, in this spirit, the first three volumes – set in the years leading up to the Second World War – present the same sequence of events from three different perspectives (which we might describe as a species of literary cubism); the fourth volume, set six years later, moves the story into the period during and after the war.

The sequence is also, of course, an evocation of the vibrant multi-ethnic city of the title, moulded by the time Durrell spent there working for the Foreign Service, as well as E. M. Forster’s Alexandria, A History and Guide (1922), and the works of the great Alexandrine poet Constantin Cavafy (1866–1933) ‘whose drifting presence in the books is almost as haunting as the presence of the city itself’ (ibid.).

According to the author, the first edition of Justine contained ‘about 250 errors which were put right in the 2nd, though some caused beautiful muck-ups in the French translation, notably “her tree” for “her knee”’ (quoted by Alan Thomas). The proof copy offered here includes a number of minor details that were changed for the published edition. The proof dedication to Durrell’s second wife, Eve, who inspired the title character – reads ‘TO THE FIRST EVE | these memorials of her beloved city’, which became ‘To Eve | these memorials of her native city’. The appended ‘CONSEQUENTIAL DATA’ is, in proof stage, referred to as ‘SOME CONSEQUENTIAL NOTES’; while the final ‘NOTES IN THE TEXT’ [paginated endnotes] include, in proof, fifteen entries for the published edition’s thirteen. Four of the fifteen notes, however, are exclusive to the proof, and were deleted and replaced with two which do not appear in the proof.

Thomas 27, 29, 30, and 33. See Morris, Rereading: The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, The Guardian (24 February 2012).

SKU: 2125256