The Pillars of Hercules

Like the greatest cities in the world, Alexandria belonged to everyone who lived in it; shared by “five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbor bar. But there are more than five sexes.” That is Durrell writing in Justine, the first novel in The Alexandria Quartet, a sequence about love, sensuality, intrigue, deception. And so purple, with Nubian slaves, child brothels, and cabals and nearly always someone in the Casbah wailing with meningitis. But this cosmopolitan aspect of the city is persistent. Everyone belongs. In the second novel, Balthazar, the narrator amplifies this theme, speaking of how “the communities still live and communicate—Turks with Jews, Arabs and Copts and Syrians with Armenians and Italians and Greeks … ceremonies, marriages and pacts join and divide them.” And more: “its contemporary faiths and races; the hundred little spheres which religion or lore creates and which cohere softly together like cells to form the great sprawling jellyfish which is Alexandria today.”

Or rather, yesterday; for today, Alexandria is a monoglot city of one race, Arabic-speaking Arabs; and one creed, Islam; and no sex. The foreigners had gone—the last had been expelled by General Nasser in 1960—and the money was gone, too; there was certainly a connection. And another sign of the times was the large number of Egyptians who had migrated to New Jersey. This militant tribalism seemed to be the way of the world, and certainly the story in much of the Mediterranean. It was perhaps a depressing discovery, but it was news to me, and the desire for enlightenment seems one of the nobler justifications for travel. That was good. I was seldom prepared for anything I found on these shores.

The great multiracial stewpot of the Mediterranean had been replaced by cities that were physically larger but smaller-minded. The ethnic differences had never been overwhelming—after all, these were simply people working out their destinies, often in the same place. But in this century they had begun to behave like scorpions—big scorpions, small scorpions, greenish, russet, black; and now the scorpions had sorted themselves out, and retreated to live among their own kind. I had yet to find a Mediterranean city that was polyglot and cosmopolitan.

Even under the Ottomans, Smyrna had been full of Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Circassians, Kurds, Arabs, Gypsies, whatever, and now it was just Turks; Istanbul was the same, and so were the once-important cities of the Adriatic—Trieste was just gloomy Italians who advocated secession from the south; Dubrovnik was Croatians on their knees, praying for the death of the Serbs and the Bosnians. Greece seemed a stronghold of ethnic monomania, without immigrants. Durrës in Albania was a hellhole of pathetic Shqiperians, and if the Corsican clans had their way there would not be a French person from Bastia to Bonifacio. It was hard to imagine a black general named Othello living in Venice now, though there were any number of Senegalese peddlers hawking trinkets there.

Given his overripe imagery and his feverish imagination, it is wrong to expect to find Durrell’s Alexandria. He says himself that his Alexandria, “half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory.” That is true. And events have changed the cityscape. The Rue Nebi Daniel, where Darley, the narrator, lives and so much of the action takes place, is easy enough to find on the 1911 Baedeker map (running north-south, from the Jewish synagogue to the station) but nowadays is Horreya (Freedom) Street. In Durrell’s novels it is a dream-city, full of fantasies of food and sex, and even the descriptions are dreamlike, as an evocation of the body of water that lies just behind Alexandria, “the moonstone mirror of Mareotis, the salt-lake, and its further forevers of ragged desert, now dusted softly by the spring winds into satin dunes, patternless and beautiful as cloudscapes.” But that fictional city was gone, if indeed it had ever existed; and so was Flaubert’s Alexandria and E. M. Forster’s.

The great Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, who lived most of his life in Alexandria (and worked for the Ministry of Irrigation), told a different story. In his poems he had celebrated the richness, the history, the squalor, the eroticism of the place as something human. His sense of reality caused him to be labeled decadent. In “The City” and “The God Abandons Antony” he had emphasized that the city was something within us, sometimes as “black ruins” and sometimes representing human hope or failure. “The city is a cage … and no ship exists / To take you from yourself.” The English poet D. J. Enright wisely wrote, “It is not that Cavafy reminds us that we are merely human. He reminds us that we are human.”