BOO K S
607
(which does not exclude
wit)
and the beautiful intelligence with which
it
explores the realm of passion, a word which
is
here to be understood
in its original sense as
suffering.
Alone among these seven novelists, no
less alone, perhaps,
in
all of contemporary fiction, Durrell gives a sense
of the mystery of personality; perhaps precisely because he, or his nar–
rator, does not have that professional concern for 'real characters' which
is so often considered to be the mark of a talent for novel-writing. On
the contrary, "For the writer people as psychologies are finished. The
contemporary psyche has exploded like a soap-bubble under the investi–
gations of the mystagogues. What now remains to the writer?" Possibly,
as in this novel, what remains to the writer is the discovery again of a
certain austerity belonging in former times to allegory; a spiritual
heightening and exaggeration of the forms of things, away from the
purely novelistic convention of 'individuality' (which, exhausted as it
is, begins to produce either mere collections of details or, quite simply,
monstrosities) and toward the perception once more of the wholeness
of things, of "the city which we inhabited so briefly together: the city
which used us as its flora-precipitated in us conflicts which were hers
and which we mistook for our own."
Considering the sneering sense, currently, of the word 'Alexandrian'
with reference to the arts, it would be odd and ironic, and historically
most appropriate,
if
some renewal of the art of the novel should come
precisely thence; and it may be happening. Surely Mr. Durrell, whose
great talents are being realized more here than in his poetry, is reach–
ing something deeper than all those real characters in all those real
novels. I mean not only the brilliance of his delineations, but the sense
you get beyond that of his power as "a poet of the historic conscious–
ness" to reveal his people's necessities as rooted in the nature of things
more than in the nature of novels. An illusion, perhaps, but the illusion
on which the finest things solidly rest.
JOHN BUnON Oct. 1-19
ALFRED LESLIE
Oct. 22 - Nov. 9
ELAINE DE KOONING
Nov. 12-30
LARRY RIVERS
Dec.
3 - Jan. 4
Tl BOR DE NAGY GALLERY
24 E. 67
St.
(corner Madison)
N.Y.C.
Howard Nemerov
Coming Exhibit ions:
Calvert Coggeshall
Alfonso Ossorio
Forrest Bess
Ethel Schwabacher
Betty
Parsons Gallery
_15 East 57 Street, N. Y.
