Keith Goldsmith is a former editor and marketing executive with the Knopf Publishing Group.
By Keith Goldsmith
But then came retirement, earlier than I had anticipated, but not unwelcome. Approaching 70, I found my thinking and perspective of time subtly — and not so subtly — altered as I was freed of the repetitive cycle of work routines, deadlines and planning. My temporal horizons expanded. Surveying my bookshelves, I spotted “The Alexandria Quartet,” British novelist Lawrence Durrell’s intoxicating, kaleidoscopic fever dream of expatriate intrigue and romance set mostly in pre-World War II Egypt. Durrell called it “an investigation of modern love.”
I had read these four linked novels, published between 1957 and 1960, nearly 50 years ago while in college. The first of them, “Justine,” was fixed in my memory as the first book that had floored me. It had moved me unlike any book had ever done before (or since?). Its lingering effect was akin to the cosmic microwave background radiation — that faint hum in my universe, speaking to my early origins.
Would revisiting “The Alexandria Quartet” tell me something about that young enthusiast, or about who he had become? Maybe I would rediscover a lost self — more innocent and less jaded perhaps, but more dynamic, more alive to the world — and experience only regret. Or maybe I would experience a rekindled joy that would set my world alight once more.
The most likely result, I feared, was disappointment: The tetralogy — or rather the experience and emotions elicited by the books — not living up to my memory and stirring only embarrassment at a literary misjudgment by an overconfident, callow adolescent. Maybe the anticipated disillusionment was the real reason I had resisted rereading books I had once treasured. There was only one way to find out.
I read with eagerness. The plot revolves around Darley, a British teacher swept up in the demi-world of Alexandria and his impossible, quixotic affair with the married Justine. His immediate understanding of the romance and its fallout, which are described in the first volume, turns out to be undermined and revised in the subsequent novels as other perspectives and new information come to light. It is ultimately the story of Darley’s initiation and apprenticeship as a writer.
I had forgotten enough of the storyline to be continually surprised by events in the novels. My surprise, though, quickly resolved itself into an acknowledgment of the inevitability and rightness of Durrell’s choices. “Of course,” I kept saying to myself as I moved from “Justine” to “Balthazar,” then “Mountolive.” My original dismay with the final volume, “Clea,” where the multiple points of view seemed to collapse into a final, singular and conclusive version of events, registered again. The earlier volumes, which had so delighted by their shimmering instability whose irresolution left open endless possibilities, now were fossilized in amber. The memory of that letdown felt like a reprise recalling a melody in a minor key.
My rereading was inevitably informed by the intervening half-century of study, knowledge and life that I had lived. The British imperial world of the 1930s and ’40s now strikes me as distinctly colonialist and Orientalist — ideas that meant little to me on first reading. Whereas fiction using multiple points of view would become fairly commonplace, I could still sense how invigorating and exciting the approach had been in that first encounter.
The book’s florid prose was a bit trying on second reading, something I savored originally and uncritically accepted, but that in itself was revealing. I had been a more unguarded, tolerant reader, allowing myself to be totally immersed in Durrell’s (over)indulgences. He could take flight with a passage such as: “And then: the first pure draughts of desert air, and the nakedness of space, pure as theorem, stretching away into the sky drenched in all its silence and majesty, untenanted except by such figures as the imagination of man has invented to people landscapes which are inimical to his passions and whose purity flays the mind.”
Still, there were moments of pure beauty that could also land with epigrammatic force: “Reality, he believed, was always trying to copy the imagination of man, from which it derived.”
Reading always has afforded the opportunity to step out of both space and time, but this exercise was different. An eerie, unworldly feeling, clarifying more than disorienting, crept up on me. Like two quantum entangled particles separated by light-years, I was still connected in a fundamental way with my earlier self — but now I could no longer uncritically read a book. Some part of me is always standing outside, judging. I understood better what I had gained, but also what I had lost.
The rereading experience was both a reawakening and a recognition. That long-dormant younger version of myself awoke — beyond simply recalling a memory as I read, I hummed with same excitement and nervous expectation that I had originally felt as I connected with the story and characters. I marveled as the books again stirred thoughts about the passions and betrayals I knew when young. I recognized that younger self and relished the reminder of who I had been and who I had become.
