BOO KS
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It is a story about art, too, and I can see, through my objection,
that Mr. Morris may have chosen his detective-story idiom both de–
liberately and shrewdly as the tritest idiom available. For while the
superficial action tells how the cliche becomes real in love, the reflec–
tions of the narrator, a writer of "lyrics," constantly penetrate to the
situation of the artist, whose business it is to make cliches real in art:
"Every cliche in the world once had its moment of truth."
"If
you live
in a world of cliches, as I do, some of them of the type you coined
yourself, you may not realize how powerful they can be." So, renting
a cabin from a motel proprietor for what are called immoral purposes:
"'We are in love,' I said, 'and want something good.' The freshness
of the cliche disarmed him."
Taken this way the fable succeeds, I think, but at a disturbing ex–
pense; one might paradoxically say, at its own expense. How narrow
the way, and how fastidious, even precious, must the artist be in a
world so full of cheap plastic art works that every word, every feeling,
every tonality, seems used up and dead and available only as its own
parody.
The overt theme of Mr. Morris's book, however casual-appearing
its treatment, is deep and serious:
all for love
in the most literal and
sarcastic sense-love as destructive of wealth, pride, value, love as can–
nibalism, love as unalterably opposed to civilization, love as producing
an anguish only dubiously purifying, an
askesis
not even redemptive, or
redemptive only by negations. A religious book, really, where there is
no religion to give constancy to its attack.
Something like this is the theme also of Lawrence Durrell's
Justine,
which opens appropriately with quotations from two great transvaluers,
Freud and the Marquis de Sade (whose own
Justine
dealt with the
punishment of virtue and the rewards of vice). Mr. Durrell's book deals,
possibly, with the irrelevance of punishment and reward to either virtue
or vice, and is not so much a novel, perhaps, as a hymn to a city,
Alexandria, which is also a state of mind: "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." The book is announced as the first of a series, and re–
ferred to as "this brief introductory memorial"-so that Mr. Durrell,
along with C. P. Snow and Anthony Powell, seems, if only accidentally,
to be in contention for the title of
le Proust anglais.
The comparison
with Proust, however, does not come up except in certain details of
style, inevitable perhaps in so reflective a work. But this book is, in
every major respect, original and immensely impressive. I was reminded
