Beatles In Colour → John In BLACK For @sgt-revolver

The city of memories: Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria

If one of the novels in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet were submitted to a publisher today, it probably wouldn’t make it past the receptionist. A great, sprawling meditation on the tangled loves and confusing lives of a group of wealthy, privileged eccentrics living in 1930s Alexandria, the two I’ve read (Balthazar and Justine) break just about every rule in the creative writing book. The plot, as much as there is one, meanders aimlessly, all the characters speak in an identical voice that exactly mirrors that of the narrator, the prose is laden with archaic terms and classical allusions, and the mood of relentless intensity never lets up. Yet the novels are captivating in a way other, better-written books are not, because even though they present us with one writer’s idiosyncratic version of reality, that reality is presented with utter conviction and sincerity. Durrell himself was fully aware of what he was doing, as the note at the beginning of Balthazar reveals. In it, he explains that ‘modern literature offers no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition. Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. These four novels follow this pattern.’ In the postmodern age, such grandiose ambition might seem incredible, but Durrell was not being an egomaniac – he was simply following the themes of early 20th century modernism, in all its forms, when many still believed that art and literature could change the world. He acknowledges himself the outdatedness of his ambition, even as early as the 1950s (Balthazar was published in 1957): ‘These considerations sound perhaps somewhat immodest or even pompous. But it would be worth trying an experiment’ I have always found that the greatest artists are the ones who succeed in drawing you absolutely into their world, who weave such a compelling spell with words or music or images that even the flaws in the work become an essential part of it. Other great artists can present you with a perfectly achieved idea or object, to be consumed in the exact moment it is seen in and executed with the flawless precision that comes from years of work. Paul Klee, Philip Larkin and Stevie Wonder are examples of this kind of artist, and they and their kind are essential and great. But there is an especial wonder in being drawn into a fully realised artistic world, and it take a very different kind of artist to do that – the kind that writes a four-volume novel about one city and a few of its inhabitants. Evoking place is a key obsession for many novelists, and Durrell succeeds magnificently. Alexandria – a long-disappeared Alexandria – seems to breath from the page as he lovingly describes the moods of its harbour waters, the smell of the streets, the faces of diplomats, policemen, Bedouin and barbers, the wind swelling the curtains of the narrator’s tiny room, the sweep of coast and silent deserts outside the city walls. The characters live vividly, even though they all speak in the narrator’s voice – in fact that is part of the spell, as the quartet is telling the story of one man’s experience of a place and time. Wordy, humourless and intense, the characters should be insufferable, but Durrell’s longing eye lights on a hundred and one idiosyncracies and tiny mysteries that makes them all live and makes you care what will become of them. I say ‘longing’ because though the central theme of the quartet may seem to be the course of a love affair, in fact it is about memory and the almost painful longing that writers have to preserve long-distant times and feelings in prose that will bring it all back to life, rather than condemning it to a dry death on the page. Many times throughout the books the narrator makes reference to the continual struggle of the artist to catch a place and a time, and the act of love required to hold that form permanently. It’s love that inspires this kind of writing, not just romantic love, but love of existence. The unequal city with its countless tales of poverty, misfortune and unhappiness is presented with a loving eye that doesn’t want any part of it to be forgotten. It’s this loving capture of a personal version of reality which brings the work of Henry Miller to mind. Durrell greatly admired Miller, but though they shared the same all-encompassing eye Miller’s approach was much more rough-and-ready, not just in his sexual explicitness, but in his harsher assessments of the people around him. However, in Tropic of Capricorn, he evokes New York in the early 1920s with the same vividness that Durrell does Alexandria, taking the same joy in every beautiful and hideous aspect of the city. This is the great value of fiction – when written by a person consumed with longing for a place and time, it gives us a kind of completeness of vision that could never be provided by a straight-up factual account. We read non-fiction to find ways to change the wrongness of the world, we read fiction to balance that quest and find a fully realised version of reality. Much of this is a matter of taste – plenty would find Durrell’s intensity impossible to read, and there’s no denying that the novels have pretentious passages. The focus on the lives of the rich and idle, and their various hangers-on, is not exactly all-encompassing, even though just about every part of Alexandrian society features in some way. But if Durrell had ever adapted any of his content to suit a greater number of readers, or provide a more fully-rounded version of the story, the spell would immediately have been broken, because the sincerity would be gone. For any who do start the novels and find the first few pages heavy going, my advice would be to give it time to work its magic. As a postscript, I generally am not very interested in books about fading aristocracy – ‘Big House’ novels leave me cold – but between this quartet and the wonderful, little-known novel Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali I have developed a compulsive fascination with the former aristocracy of Egypt: the French-speaking Coptic community. Perhaps the heterogenuity of the world they lived in, as opposed to that of the aristocracy of England and Ireland, has something to do with it.

Hollering at this description of Magic Alex at some pre-Apple planning meeting. John's weird little boyfriend, plotting away.

(Source: Magical mystery tours : my life with the Beatles by Tony Bramwell)

251 Menlove Avenue in Liverpool, England | 21 April 1964

[➕] Mimi's framed photo of John:

Veep style tv shows about the Beatles that I want

Veep style tv show about Apple in 1968

Veep style tv show about the staff at the Dakota

Crates from every port.

On Instagram

Early Bloomsday.

On Instagram

The Beatles at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, England | 25 March 1963 (I)

Hi! You don't mind playing a game with me?

If you could ask each Beatle only one question however without any consequences what would you ask them~?

Hi!!! Sorry I took a while to get to this, what a fun ask!!!!

I am presuming they will tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (including things they maybe actually forgot in the meantime).

This is very hard, because of course I'm nosy about specific historical facts.

So, here are my thoughtful, more open-ended questions that I think would lead to something pretty insightful:

Ringo: How have your feelings on the Beatles breakup changed over the years and did Get Back have a specific impact?

George: What role has forgiveness played in your relationships and how do you feel about your willingness to forgive?

John: How do you reconcile your need to be authentic with the inherent performance of fame?

Paul: What are you most afraid could happen to your legacy once you're no longer with us?

And here are my kneejerk "EXPLAIN THIS!!!!"-type questions. Imagine me throwing a chair before yelling these. (also I avoided questions where the answer might depress me too much or that presume things I'm not actually sure about lol)

Ringo: What happened that one time on tour you went on some sort of bender and were maybe suicidal? :(

George: The Maureen affair. Please Elaborate.

John: What was going through your mind when you told Hunter Davies you slept with Brian in Barcelona?????

(still hoping Davies' archive might give me some clue regarding this one, once it becomes available....)

Paul: I Demand Your Actual Unfiltered Yoko Take, Sir.

If you could instantly be granted fluency in 5 languages—not taking away your existing language proficiency in any way, solely a gain—what 5 would you choose?