The Revolt of Aphrodite (78 page)

I have been working all day and am enormously weary. Benedicta has had fires lit in the big ballroom where once she shattered all the mirrors. It has been transformed now into rather an elegant room. It is full of flowers. There is some fine black jazz playing and we have been dancing, dancing in complete happiness and accord. And we will keep on this way, dancing and dancing, even though Rome burn.

THE END

Dear C.-M. V.,

Well, here it is, the second volume I promised you. As always I have tried to move from the preposterous to the sublime! It was you who said once that all my novels were inquests with open verdicts. This was true. But in this one I have tried to play about with the notion of culture—what is it? The provenance of the ideas will be familiar to you. It’s a sort of novel-libretto based on the
preface
to
The
Decline
of
the
West.
Freud is there too, very much there. I remember too that you remarked once about Spengler “He’s not pessimistic at all. He is a realist, that is all.” Well in its way this novel in two parts tries to take a culture-reading merely. Of course the poetic game is to try and put a lid on a box with no sides. But when you go on deck, for example, to find that the ship is out of sight of land you are pleased to see a map in the chart-room with a flag in it, stuck there by an invisible hand. It marks your position. By intention this is such a flag.

For the rest, the form presents no singularities. A two-part novel of an oldfashioned sort; perhaps you might say an Ur-novel. Nor do the epigraphs present any mystery. It’s always now or never—since we are human and enjoy the fatality of choice. Indeed the moment of choice is always now. For the rest, the fabled two is the human couple, but it is also the basic brick out of which our culture is constructed—mathematics, measure, motion, poetry. And so cheers,

ever thine

                                                      LD

P.S. To Ur is human to forgive divine.

Lawrence Durrell was born in 1912 in India. He attended the Jesuit College at Darjeeling and St Edmund’s School, Canterbury. His first literary work,
The Black Book
, appeared in Paris in 1938. His first collection of poems, A Private Country, was published in 1943, followed by the three Island books:
Prospero
’s Cell, Reflections on a Marine Venus,
about Rhodes, and
Bitter
Lemons
, his account of life in Cyprus. Durrell’s wartime sojourn in Egypt led to his masterpiece,
The Alexandria Quartet
, which he completed in southern France where he settled permanently in 1957. Between the Quartet and
The Avignon Quintet
he wrote the two-decker
Tunc
and
Nunquam
. His oeuvre includes plays, a book of criticism, translations, travel writing, and humorous stories about the diplomatic corps.
Caesar
’
s Vast Ghost
, his reflections on the history and culture of Provence, including a late flowering of poems, appeared a few days before his death in Sommières in 1990.