Lawrence Durrell on Love

I tell you love sister it’s just a kiss away. – Jagger & Richards

Nothing but the act of physical love tells us the truth about one another. – Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell, like Jagger and Richards, was a Britisher (or was he Irish?) who had something to say about love. Like Jagger and Richards, Durrell could press love and war into the same poem. In Balthazar, a character who we are told is a psychiatrist, Durrell observes that “Love is like trench warfare—you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and it is wiser to keep your head down” (p. 66). Balthazar is the second volume of Durrell’s famous Alexandria quartet. First published in 1958, this novel cemented Durrell’s fame. Even then, Balthazar must have seemed anachronistic, as it was set in pre-war Alexandria, pre-World War II, that is. At the time, the city was an aging if still alluring metropolis with a cosmopolitan flair, populated by Arabs, Jews, Armenians, Copts, and British officers of the colonial service as well as scattered literati, scattered in every sense of the word.

Durrell’s aim, besides invoking the charms of this lost world, is to ponder the impossibility of reciprocal love. Nessim loves Justine, who loves Balthazar (I think), and so on, reminding us of Chekhov. Durrell insists that love necessarily involves deception, not only of the other but also of the self. And yet, the need for it seems to be baked into human nature. No way out. A most mordant résumé of Durrell’s skepticism is found near the end, in a letter the narrator (whose identity remains obscure) receives from the beautiful Clea, who in the meanwhile has moved to Tashkent. “The whore,” Clea writes, “is a man’s true darling, as I once told you, and we are born to love those the most who most wound us.” The tragedy is identified in the second clause; the first clause is open to interpretation. From a contemporary psychological perspective, we may note that the tragic element of love has all but faded from view to the vanishing point (Berscheid, 2010).

Whence romantic love? “Balthazar claimed once that he could induce love as a control-experiment by a simple action: namely by telling each of the two people who had never met that the other was dying to meet them, had never seen anyone so attractive, and so on. This was, he claimed, infallible as a means of making them fall in love: they always did” (p. 240). This makes us chuckle and wonder whether our local IRB might allow this experiment. Perhaps not, as there would be a let-down at debriefing. Yet, Balthazar’s idea stands on solid reinforcement ground. People like those who like them, as this is a form of reinforcement (Kenrick & Cialdini, 1977). The ego is stroked and aroused. What’s not to like (love)?

Anticipating Schachter’s misattribution theory of emotion (Schachter & Wheeler, 1962), Durrell stresses illusion and the need for it. He has his British writer Pursewarden assert that “personality as something with fixed attributes is an illusion—but a necessary illusion if we are to love” (p. 15). Balthazar, the psychiatrist puts it thus: “'People' are as much of an illusion to the mystic as ‘matter’ to the physicist when he is regarding it as a form of energy” (p. 141; see Chu & Lowery, 2023, for the self-essence illusion and its effect on attraction).

Love, Durrell seems to realize, has a person’s essence as its object, an essence which, as best we know from the academic record, does not exist. Pursewarden elaborates that “at first [. . .] we seek to supplement the emptiness of our individuality through love, and for a brief moment enjoy the illusion of completeness. But it is only an illusion. For this strange creature, which we thought would join us to the body of the world, succeeds at last in separating us most thoroughly from it. Love joins and then divides. How else could we be growing?” (p. 234). This is pure existentialism: the individual’s essential isolation, which gives rise to the desire to join with another, the perception of achievement, which is necessarily illusory, and the eventual and sobering anticlimax and disillusion. Yet, Durrell finds a high note, the prospect of growth. What this growth consists of he does not say. Perhaps it is the seeing through love’s illusion and the willingness to love again in the knowledge of the anticlimax to come. “Gamblers and lovers really play to lose” (p. 246) is one of Durrell’s obiter dicta, a serviceable last word (see also Krueger & Grüning, 2024).

How can one live in the knowledge of illusion and tragedy? Durrell’s answer is humor. “There is hope for man,” his character writes in a letter to Clea (she who absconded to Tashkent), “perhaps the key lies in laughter, in the Humorous God? It is after all the serious who disturb the peace of the heart with their antics” (p. 239). In his view, the gods are of good humor as they are not laughing at our expense. It is the laughter among humans that makes the difference. One of Durrell’s lesser characters, Budgie, writes that “they live on, bright still with the colours that memory gives to those who enrich our lives by tears or by laughter—unaware themselves that they have given us anything” (p. 140).

So here, at last, is a lightness of perception (and being) that emerges from the tragic treatment of love. Durrell the dialectician, however, does not let us off the hook so easily. Throughout, he warns against the idea that language, even that of a great writer, can fully capture what needs to be said. “Of course,” he cautions, “one must always remember that truth itself is always halved in utterance” (p. 238). Perhaps a more adequate understanding of Durrell and his nuanced thinking requires a reading of the whole Alexandria quartet. I find that with Balthazar we are off to a good start.