No single imagination can truly own a city, so when we speak of Proust’s Paris, Joyce’s Dublin, Musil’s Vienna and Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria, we are really clearing a space in our minds where specific happenings and feelings may be identified and reconvened. It is these novelists’ pressing need to set their narratives down in some palpable place, almost as aliens colonizing a territory, rather than a compulsion to celebrate their country or fictionalize an already famous vicinity that leads to their iconic inventions.

This is especially the case with the four novels that make up The Alexandria Quartet – Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea – published in quick succession from 1957 to 1960. It had not been Durrell’s original intention to carry the story over so long a span, but once begun, he found he had an irresistible impulse to complete the full trajectory of a long-fostered obsession. Alexandria became the mise en scène of his masterpiece, if not by accident, at least fortuitously. To state this is not to question the powerful presence of the city throughout the novels. But Durrell’s creative instinct appears to have hit on Alexandria as the right domain for his long-anticipated magnum opus because it had become highly familiar to him during his wartime exile and, more importantly, because an Alexandrian woman had entered his life at a critical point.

London had been the metropolis he had first hoped to anatomize through the lives of a chosen group of people. Ever since settling in London in the early 1930s, Durrell had envisioned a major work of fiction to embody his critique of urban existence in the modern world. He filed this notion under the heading “A Book of the Dead”: England seemed to him a moribund society. Durrell was the son of an Empire family, a child of colonial officials in India. While a true inheritor of the English literary tradition, he was never at ease in his English homeland. He was sent home to receive an English public school education, but he and his brother Gerald called England “Pudding Island”, a stodgy place unattractive to anybody used to the freedoms enjoyed by children of the Raj.

Durrell’s years after school were spent in bohemian circles in London, but seemed to get him nowhere. In frustration he left London in the mid-1930s with an art student, Nancy Myers, to live on Corfu, beginning a lifetime’s devotion to all things Hellenistic and to the islands of the Eastern Mediterranean. He was joined on Corfu by his mother and the rest of his family, including Gerald. Their life there is recorded by Lawrence in Prospero’s Cell and by Gerald in several books. This celebration of their Corfu existence was written in the tower of a villa in Alexandria at the time of Lawrence’s most acute involvement with Egypt – though nothing can be imagined that is more unlike the pleasures of a Greek island than the dusty, noisy, claustrophobic Alexandrian suburb of Moharrem Bey.

In Alexandria Durrell would sometimes speak harshly of Egypt and the British and be scornful of most other nations, but never of Greece and its civilization. Though only ostensibly a Greek city, Alexandria harboured many Greek-speakers among its diverse inhabitants. There were also Italians, French and Jews, some endangered by their nationality in wartime, but Egyptian sovereignty and British suzerainty did not compromise the cosmopolitanism of the city.

Founded by Alexander the Great, and the second most important city of the Roman Empire, it later became the controversial centre of Christian theological disputation (Origen and Athanasius, among the Church Fathers, were Alexandrians). To this day the Coptic Church is a pervasive influence. After the Arab conquest, its Hellenism faded, as did its importance as a place of trade and culture. The fort on the mole separating the western and eastern harbours, Quitbey, approached by Tatwig Street, a slum area where Durrell lived when he first arrived, was built by a Mameluke sultan in the fifteenth century, and testifies to the city’s continued power in medieval times. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, when Egypt was opened up to European influence by Napoleon’s invasion, “Alex” had shrunk to a small port clutching only memories of its ancient fame.

In the 1830s the creator of modern Egypt, Muhammad Ali, invited Europeans to live in Alexandria and accelerate its prosperity. Ali’s equestrian statue still lopes in a friendly fashion in the square named after him in the heart of the commercial district, seeming to preside over the stately Corniche and the restored opulence of the Cecil Hotel, through whose doors Darley, Durrell’s alter ego and the narrator of the novels, and his lover, the mysterious Justine, pass on some of their clandestine appointments. By the first decades of the twentieth century Alexandria had regained its reputation as a fabulous site, though one notorious for the separation of rich and poor. Muslim Egyptians outnumbered foreigners but did not control public life. Today Alexandria has again fallen into dilapidation, and the visitor must search to find relics of its Victorian prime.

It is the revitalized nineteenth-century Alexandria in which Durrell’s characters live out their complex lives and extravagant fantasies. The Quartet is not truly decipherable as a roman-à-clef. Eve Cohen, the Alexandrian beauty who was the model for Justine, told Michael Haag, the city’s latest chronicler (Alexandria, City of Memory: TLS, January 7, 2005), that Durrell never took her to the Cecil – as a Jewish girl of modest background she felt the hotel was not for her. Justine, on the other hand, would never have entertained so limiting a sense of her own worth. Durrell was writing fiction and all his characters suffered a distinctive sea change from the persons they were based on. To some extent Alexandria has suffered a similar transformation. The protagonists, including Durrell himself, are magicked into creatures larger than life, and sometimes more formidable. As often in dreams, there is a fierce ambience of power and danger, a state of mind which this city, famous for its many metamorphoses, helps make natural. This is most apparent in Justine, where everybody seems to carry an halation round them. There is no agreed story about anyone: report and whispers rule. Even the locations conspire – the rue Lepsius is still haunted by Alexandria’s great modern poet, Constantine Cavafy, who died in 1933; Pompey’s Pillar belongs to a later emperor, Diocletian; Baudrot and Pastroudis, the two most fashionable cafés worthy of a Caesarean conspiracy, are unassuming establishments; Lake Mareotis is a chiaroscuro of mud and weeds; the tram out to Glymenopoulo is not a romantic trip; only Stanley Bay proves to be a refuge for secret lovers, but also a perfect hide for someone spying.

Durrell’s first piece of fiction was The Black Book (1937–8), a product of his friendship with the American Henry Miller and indebted to Miller’s libertarian philosophy. He had visited Miller in Paris and invited him in turn to Greece, where Miller met Durrell’s Greek friends and recorded them in The Colossus of Maroussi. When war broke out in 1939 the Durrell family was forced to leave Corfu. His mother and siblings returned to England, but Lawrence and Nancy went to Athens (where their daughter Penelope was born) and, as the fortunes of war grew harsher, to the Peloponnese. All three were lucky to escape the German invasion, first to Crete and then to Egypt. Trapped in a war zone, Durrell worked for the British authorities in Cairo. When he and Nancy split up in 1942, she took their daughter to Palestine, and, at the beginning of 1943, he was acting as an information officer in Alexandria. He had a staff and an office in the rue Chérif Pasha and quickly entered into the fretful social life of the city.

Many British writers were in Alexandria in the war years; like them, Durrell contributed poems and articles to such publications as Personal Landscape. Some of his most admired poems were composed in these years, and he was also able to publish his first collection, A Private Country, in 1943. In the eyes of the public, Durrell had a reputation wholly as a poet. He parodied the England of his ancestors in a series of brilliant Surrealist poems, “The Death of General Uncebunke”, and while on Corfu wrote many lyrics about the ancient Hellenistic world and its glittering remains, still visible in the scattered islands of the Aegean Sea. Two poems from his Alexandrian period are keys to the Alexandrian tetralogy: “On First Looking into Loeb’s Horace” and “Alexandria”. The second of these is really a poem against the city, or more correctly a lament by an exile from Europe reacting to the place of his confinement; it ends sadly and lyrically.

So we, learning to suffer and not condemn
Can only wish you this great pure wind
Condemned by Greece, and turning like a helm
Inland where it smokes the fires of men,
Spins weathercocks on farms or catches
The lovers at their quarrels in the sheets;
Or as a walker in the darkness might,
Knocks and disturbs the artist at his papers
Up there alone, upon the alps of night.

It was on these very “alps of night” that Durrell was to analyse the lives and actions of his people, often encountered as walkers in the darkness, and fit them into an uncertain world, like insects caught in amber.

“On First Looking into Loeb’s Horace” is a pointer to the novels in another way. Poems and novels make uncertain allies if only because both like to tell stories. But the poet in Durrell is never far away in his fiction. The Loeb poem is a masked short story: the Latin Golden Age poet Horace epitomizes the Mediterranean virtues and vices – a selfish fat man, vain, but also a writer of genius. Durrell composes a mini-novel by remembering a lover who had made notes in the margin of a Loeb student edition of Horace’s poems. As he traces their affair, he senses in her marginalia’s summary of the Roman’s personality, a shrewd discerning of his own. The creative writer’s need to distance himself from involvement, however romantic his attachment, is a match for the long-dead poet’s chilly self-regard.

So perfect a disguise for one who had
Exhausted death in art – yet who could guess
You would discern the liar by a line,
The suffering hidden under gentleness
And add upon the fly-leaf in your tall
Clear hand: “Fat, human and unloved,
And held from loving by a sort of wall,
Laid down his books and lovers one by one,
Indifference and success had crowned them
all.”

In the novels Durrell marshals his characters with the same ruthless determination as the female lover in the poem. Yet his method is an open one – the reader perceives that the way these people are dissected reflects on the figure of Darley quite as much as on them. Alexandria becomes for them a guide to personal revelation. Darley would see himself either as an unmoved mover, an Isherwoodian observer, the camera who simply records; or he might prefer to be the suffering catalyst of the actions that bedevil them. But the reader begins to appreciate the strategy; the Durrell personality can be filleted out of the action, leaving a huge ground plan of contradictory and bewildered people trapped by history on a darkling plain.

Whether Durrell would have accepted that the liar in Horace was a pre-echo of himself is unknowable. He was writing fiction, and very complicated fiction at that. No brief essay can unravel the complexities of what happens in the four novels, principally because so much is revealed in letters and later confessions. Reading the stories, often the same story presented from another angle, should be done headlong – the fast-flowing narrative should carry you along. Then you must pause to enjoy the mini-disquisitions on national character, geography, history and psychology. A good example of the author’s clearing a space for a lecture comes in a quiet moment in Mountolive, the third of the sequence. In England, preparing to leave for Alexandria as a senior diplomat, Mountolive has a sudden vision of the land he is returning to after a long absence. He was

“mentally unrolling a map of Egypt with its central green spine bounded by deserts, the dusty anomalies of its peoples and creeds; and watching it fade in three directions into incoherent desert and grassland; to the north, Suez like a Caesarean section through which the East was untimely ripped; then again the sinuous complex of mountains and dead granite, orchards and plains which were geographically distributed about the map at hazard, boundaries marked by dots.”

At the end of the war in 1945, Durrell and Eve Cohen sailed away from Alexandria. (Durrell was not to see it again until after Justine was published.) He helped restore the Dodecanese to Greek rule, moving on then to Cyprus. This was the era of Enosis, the movement for union with Greece, and the British authorities faced a local insurrection. Worse for this Greece-loving but residually loyal Englishman was his alienation from old friends such as the poet George Seferis. Here and in Rhodes, Durrell was rejoined by his mother. His separation from Nancy and his daughter Penelope had been painful, and was now to be followed by his break-up with Eve. He continued to work at his notes for a great fictional masterpiece and relaxed by writing two more studies of important Greek islands, Reflections on a Marine Venus (Rhodes) and Bitter Lemons (Cyprus).

But one experience changed both his life and the direction of his writing: he met an Alexandrian woman whom he had first encountered there during his wartime residence. She was Claude Vincendon, a well-born Alexandrian from the Menasche family, one of the most influential in the city. Best for him, this new love was an encyclopedic source of information about all things Alexandrian. With Claude beside him he could now begin to impose order on the copious notes he had kept for over twenty years, the greater part of which dealt with life in Alexandria. Justine was begun at the beginning of the new decade and was to occupy him throughout the remainder of his stay on Cyprus.

The shape of the Quartet suggests a musical analogy – that of the Theme and Variations. Justine introduces not one theme but a plethora of them as the lovelorn but unconfident Darley, seemingly a displaced person in the turbulent city, meets one after another of the people who are to be the actors in his story. Justine herself binds them all together: Durrell is successful in convincing our sceptical natures that this woman, who seems to have no discernible past, no real station other than mistress of a number of remarkable men, is more than a femme fatale but represents the goddess Aphrodite in a world of mystical emblems. Perhaps she is Durrell’s version of Virgil, seconded to guide Dante through the Inferno, a place of individual cruelty and exaggerated emotions.

Alexandria itself is treated as if it were a player in the action. Time feels evasive, and responsibility equivocal. What concerns the dramatis personae is how interesting their emotions are. Durrell maintains a dream-like narrative fluidity, yet most of the events described follow accurately the layout of the city and its environs. Apart from Nessim Hosnani, Justine’s protector, no central personality is an Egyptian, something that has not gone unremarked in modern Alexandria, where pride in the city’s having fostered a literary masterpiece is modified by a sense of condescension in the author’s attitude.

The many viewpoints don’t become clear-cut – there is no Rashomon-style chance to choose the truth from its several advocates. Everybody is seen at an angle to the universe, as E. M. Forster declared Cavafy’s natural posture to be. Some of the detail still shocks, even in our own age of genocidal horrors – the child brothels; the terrible street deaths; the vendettas acted out against formal balls and hunts; the automatic cruelty to animals; the meeting of secret societies and clubs of ridiculous philosophers. An atmosphere of continuous emergency supports the general message of the impermanence of sexual love. We are reminded that this is not just the city of the tragic queen Cleopatra but also of Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians”.

My metaphor of Theme and Variations might be modified to this extent – Justine is a melange of variations in itself. Thereafter the three further novels choose to develop the material by opening up the action – as much simplification as elaboration. Each is named after one of the major characters involved most intensely with Justine. Though we are informed at the end of the book that she leaves Alexandria to become an Israeli pioneer, she stays at the heart of the action to the end of the sequence: time-shifts in the sequels keep her on stage, and someone is always trying to explain her fascination. Thus Balthazar writes to Darley after he has left Egypt to inform him of events and happenings he might not have known at the time or might simply have misconstrued. Balthazar is the explainer, the serpentine but humorous commentator, a man outside the passionate participators but a keeper of Alexandria’s deepest secrets.

Mountolive is a prequel, and a chance for Durrell to expand his portrait of Egypt. Nessim and his brother Narouz come into their own as the only native Egyptians among the cast of self-conscious Europeans and Levantines. They are keepers of Egypt’s oldest flame – the inheritance of the Pharaohs. Nessim is a businessman and a broker on the Cotton Exchange, but exhibits an almost sacerdotal responsibility to his nation. There is no escaping the sense that the novels have been composed backwards and the story of Mountolive’s love for Leila, Nessim’s mother, gives Durrell the chance to comment on Britain’s troubled presence in Egypt. Mountolive is the most straightforward, traditional even, of the four books, and the most consummately well written. Clea is at a further remove from the hypnotic frenzy of Justine. The real-life model for the character was Clea Badaro, one of Durrell’s closest friends when he lived in Alexandria. If Justine is a dark night of the soul, enveloped in a fog of betrayal and despair, then Clea, the last in the quartet, is a despairing but cleansing dawn, a clearing of pieces from the board.

In the end, perhaps, plot hardly matters, as the Quartet swirls with life, if not as we have known it in our more reasonable cities. Along with the erotic and dramatic, much is bizarre and comic. As well as his relationship with Justine, Darley has an extended affair with an otherworldly waif, Melissa, an unsuccessful nightclub dancer whose purpose is to flit moth-like round Justine and suffer the ignominy of Darley’s pity. Then some lesser lights cry out for their share of the fame – Pombal, the randy French diplomat who shares a flat with Darley; Scobie, the seedy English remittance man who is employed part-time by the Egyptian secret police and who is a comical transvestite; Pursewarden, a reincarnation of Ronald Firbank with a touch of Baron Corvo, who worked for a while with Mountolive, but who has many walk-on parts as aphorist, essayist and novelist; Capodistria, whose name brings to mind a famous eighteenth-century trickster, whose mysterious conspiracies lead to the murderous apotheosis of Justine; John Keats, the disreputable journalist who is always on hand when any public nastiness is in question, and whose name is another hint of Durrell’s scepticism about the greats of English Literature. The set pieces are remarkable, especially the hunting excursions on Lake Mareotis – one in Justine for duck, and one in Mountolive for fish. The expeditions to desert monasteries, the car trips up from the Delta to the city by night; the cemetery at Chatby, the ferocious fancy-dress balls. As you enter Durrell’s world, you forget, despite the presence of war, that Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Korps had so recently been defeated at El Alamein.

In the fifty years since Justine first appeared, the world and Durrell’s chosen city have changed and some things in his pages have dated, but the ambiguous white metropolis shines on, its denizens ready to welcome readers to a place they have not had the privilege of knowing.

This is the introduction to a new edition of The Alexandria Quartet to be published by the Folio Society next month.

Peter Porter’s most recent collection of poems is Afterburner, 2004. His Saving from the Wreck: Essays on poetry appeared in 2001.

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