Status Updates From The Avignon Quintet: Monsie...

‘[…] As for the gipsies, they have made no effort to capitalise on the tragedy of their extermination in the camps as the Jews have done. A total silence is all that has emerged – not a poem, not a song, not a scrap of protest folklore! It's uncanny.’

‘For us gipsies both Hitler and Stalin were children of the Old Testament executing a blood programme inspired by Moloch. There is nothing to be done to hasten its inevitable disappearance and its transformation into something new, thank goodness! People fall into these thought moulds from copying each other. But we can with justice accuse Christianity of masterminding our intellectual disarray. […]

‘As for the book it was a hopeless task, for what is to be done with characters who are all the time trying to exchange selves, turn into each other? And then, ascribing a meaning to point-events? There is no meaning and we falsify the truth about reality in adding one. The universe is playing, the universe is only improvising!

‘I did not want to fuck her at first, I did not dare to want to because there was so much as yet unrehearsed between us. […] “From the first look we exchanged in the slip at Lyons as we set off down the Rhône. But alas!” […] Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?’

‘And like lovers at any time and everywhere they suddenly found the need for privacy overwhelming; so much so that for several weeks after this critical re-evaluation of their loving they almost went out of circulation as far as their friends were concerned—preferring to dine early and lock up at an early bedtime rather than dawdling over dinner […]’

Constance analysed every man she has been with. She analysed Sam, frustrated at his lack of communication during the war (he wrote about trifling affairs). Affad she could never analyse, for he didn't fall nearly into a category of thought. Sylvie was mad, and her position as her doctor allowed her to analyse her while being intimate. Finally she and Blanford discuss being together; the analysis is over.

Hilary raped Livia.

And here it's as if Durrell is exposing his writing method: Toby and Sutcliffe might be considered halves of one another—as they were Gog and Magog in the first book. But, Blanford says of his ‘figment of my fancy’, ‘[s]omehow you have managed to hold your separateness, your own identity… do I mean that?’

The blending of characters is conscious, deliberate: ‘The old stable outlines of the dear old linear novel have been sidestepped in favour of soft focus palimpsest which enables the actors to turn into each other, to melt into each other's inner lifespace if they wish.’

Here Blanford conflates Affad with Akkad: ‘[…] part of the notes which I scattered out of the train window were notes I had borrowed with permission from Affad – the little sermons he pronounced at Macabru in the desert.’

‘Reality has several dialects, and the most powerful are sexual ones.’

I like Blanford’s meditations here.

‘Yes, the observer fouls up everything by trying to impose a plan, an intention, upon nature which can only reproduce the limitations of his understanding, the boundaries of his personal vision. He disturbs the rest of the universe which has no fixed plan, but simply lolls about and goes whichever way things tilt, just as water does.’

Sutcliffe is the icon of a prolific writer which Blanford aspires to be. That is why Blanford is tired of him talking nonsense. On the previous page, he calls himself a ‘mortally shy man suffering from delusions of grandeur’, insinuating of himself that he can only attempt to write.

Aubrey has had enough of Sutcliffe's blathering.

The soothsayer does for Sylvie what psychiatrists couldn't.

Here again Sutcliffe and Sabine are called imaginary as they toss about in a love-scene: ‘They lay together later in tears of happiness, playing with each other and caressing each other with their minds. […] And they thought with compassion of their poor creator [Aubrey] who sat stiffly over his wine now, watching the crowd flowing down to the sea […]’

‘She [Sabine] seemed so real it was hard to think of her as purely imaginary.’ Are Sutcliffe etc. real or not? I can't tell. The real characters and the creations have conversations.

‘His uncle remained speechless and out of breath from the sexual orgasm he had experienced after witnessing the hounds at kill.’

A story of European racial hatred of gypsies.

A story of European racial hatred of gypsies.

Sabine in these few snatches of dialogue, in her explications, exceeds the other characters in fortitude and personality.

Lord Galen recognises Blanford and Sutcliffe’s musings as anti-Jewish.

‘But was there any happiness which was the equal of this? To be blissed-out by the kisses of the correct partner? […] Yet there were so many people, perhaps the most, who arrived at the end of a life of limited usefulness to find the doors of this kind of happiness booked and barred against them through no fault of their own—just scurvy luck.’

Another love triangle in Blanford, Constance and Affad.

Sutcliffe here makes an almost naked mention of the ‘double concerto’ of his and Blanford’s novels: ‘“[…] In this way enanteiodromion, everything would be seen to be turning into its opposite, even our book which would take on a might shifty strangeness, become an enticement for sterile linguists to parse in their sleep.”’