Alexandria Hothouse

A selfish day. I sent out a couplethree emails, looking for old data points on: me. One came back not making me out to be the scoundrel I thought I was. I was almost disappointed, but ultimately relieved.

I wrote a little today, not much. I took out from the basement the old A Summer Away interlinear, looking through part two, the part I deleted from the book, for inspiration. I liked most of it. It's now upstairs. I don't think I have it as an electronic file anywhere though.

I remember when I first tried to edit it liking it up to page eight, then page fifteen, then page twenty, then page twenty-five...and in the process of editing it thinking it was hopeless, every five-page advance changes things everywhere, like a new drop in a loom. When I looked at part one, it worked just fine without it. I was reminded of a debt to Durrell. I also read more of Justine today.

Even my first novel had a debt to Durrell. Significantly, to me anyway, it's been lost for years; a woman named Millicent, who last I heard splits her year between Spain and Morocco, may have the only copy.

I have been looking through my papers tonight. Some have been converted to kitchen uses, some the child has destroyed. This form of censorship pleases me for it has the indifference of the natural world to the constructions of art---an indifference I am beginning to share. After all what is the good of a fine metaphor for Melissa when she lies buried deep as any mummy in the shallow tepid sand of the black estuary?

--L. Durrell, Justine, p. 15

"Kitchen uses" recalls something else: Haydn's wife used music to line pastry pans. Did you know that? In 1980, the guy who wrote that line (it's from a poem) also told me this much about the Alexandria Quartet: "The six months you're reading it, it's the best thing you've read. Then you finish and ask yourself what you liked." I didn't agree then; I don't agree now. Pritchett and Steiner have both written of it glowingly, too.

Every now and then, you run into a fellow traveller. I once brought an old paperback copy of Justine into the office with me (I still have it; it's nearly disintegrated, but I have preserved it in a plastic bag) and when my boss Barbara Goldstein saw it, she gasped; it had been so long since she had thought of it, and she reassembled her affection for it.

The book has unquestionably stamped my life. Yet I am never fan enough to join any kind of admiration or scholarship society. I'll just keep reading; it's great summer reading, and at this lifestage, it's more relevant than re-reading Proust.