extent of the Keynesian defences.

Much would then depend oh how fast and how far the Keynesian levers are pulled. They have plenty of play, since the Republicans have kept credit extremely tight, and the Democrats and the unions have argued throughout the Eisenhower period that the levers should have been pulled earlier and harder as each recession emerged. The admitted cost of this more aggressive policy would, of course, be inflation. Dr. Leon Keyserling, a leader of this school, maintains that modest inflation, within the limit of about 2 per cent per year, is a necessary cost for a satisfactory increase in growth rate, and well worth it. There is thus some significance in who is president as the economy begins its next decline. Beyond Keynes, there is the presence of Galbraith, and his policy of direct government intervention to shift private spending to the public sector, to meet Americas long list of needs for improved education, housing, roads, urban amenities, and health care. If the underlying trend in the economy is as menacing as some factors indicate, pressure may become strong enough to persuade a faltering Democratic or a baulky Republican administration that Galbraith must be accepted as well as Keynes. Starting from a different premisethe necessity of doing the same thing to compete internationally with RussiaR. H. S. Crossman predicts that within the next decade America (as well as Britain) will undertake a large-scale extension of planned economy. Whether the impetus is external or internal, or a combination, this could profoundly affect Americas economy and her politics if it happens. But, unless the administration of the day stonewalls all the way against the challenge, the American Left will still be waiting for the bust after the next recession.

Colin Falck

City Of The Disinherited

Lawrence Durrells Alexandria Quartet consists of four novels Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea published by Faber (16s. each).
WHEN THE Alexandria Quartet struck into our critical dovecote, the cry that went up was very confused indeed. Mr. Hilary Corke (May Encounter) has said that this tells us more about the contemporary state of the dovecote than about the Alexandria Quartet, but the hawklike mercilessness of his own attack is little help towards a sympathetic or critical understanding of either. Nevertheless the first sea-wall of criticism has been badly and in most places deservedly shaken, and this may be no bad occasion for another first appraisal. The central topic of the book, Durrell writes, is an investigation of modern love. This seems to me the best account that anyone has yet given of what the Alexandria

Quartet is about, and yet many people have written it off along with Durrells other prefatory remarksthe soup-mix recipe of a continuum, a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity propositionas pretentious nonsense. They may be right, in fact, that the space-time talk adds very little, but this is because the essential idea is better suggested at the beginning of Balthazar, where Pursewarden (principal novelistwithin-the-novel and general repository for some of Durrells most striking intuitions) writes that We live lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and timenot by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed. And the relevance of this to the whole subject and technical structure of the Quartet becomes clearer when Darley, the novelist-narrator, goes on to comment that, Personality as something with fixed attributes is an illusionbut a necessary illusion if we are to love (his italics). Sartre once wrote that Character has no distinct existence except as an object of knowledge to other people. Durrells quartet, like Sartres own (Les Chemins de la Libert), is a fictional exploration of just this proposition. It is this that justifies the sliding panel technique. Justine introduces most of the later characters and tells centrally of Darleys love for Justine, the wife of his friend Nessim Hosnani, a rich Coptic businessman (though if she were simply thisor simply anything the book would not be what it is: it is essential to it that almost none of the people are characters in the familiar sense). When, in the second novel, the doctor Balthazar makes his interlinear comments on this story, Darley, still narrating, sees that he has been deceived and is forced to reinterpret everything from the beginning. The third novel centres on the British diplomat, Mountolive who has hitherto appeared only at the margin, and again confronts the earlier accounts with new knowledge that completely alters the picture, this time in an objective, third-person narrative. Only with Clea do we move forward in time. To see why the novel demands to be cast in this form it is worth noticing another of Durrells prefatory remarks: it would be worth trying an experiment to see if we cannot discover a morphological form one might appropriately call classicalfor our time. The question, of course, is why for our time? What is essential to Durrells form, I think, is not the literalistic idea of three dimensions of space and one of timeas he himself suggests, the characters could go on being deployed and redeployed ad virtually infinitum, and the cryptic workpoints at the end of Clea suggest some alarming new worldsbut rather the whole shifting chiaroscuro of viewpoints, the seeming elusiveness of the real truth, the sense of the wild and ceaseless interflowing of appearances which finds its only possible expression in a brilliantly overloaded poetic language. Durrell seems hardly to believe in facts at all. And it is

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interesting that, for all the critical discord as to whether the Alexandria Quartet is a masterpiece or an appalling wreck (Mr. John Coleman: Spectator), two reactions have been almost universal: to credit Durrell with an unparalleled sense of place, with a magnificent poetic evocation of Alexandria, the shining city of the disinherited, but to insist that none of the characters is real, that there is no sense of interaction between them. (Is it an accident that just these points were commonly made of Nabokovs Lolita?) Mountolive has been generally agreed to be the most satisfying of the four novels, because only hereit might be called a political novelis there any continuous action, any crisis and resolution of the traditional kind. This agreement in analysis but divergence of verdicts suggests that Durrells attempt to produce something classical for our time has at least produced a challenge to our critical standards. Durrells characters have been described as sometimes almost unbearably complex, sometimes flat, like a masked chorus, fables, and in various other ways as having, in fact, no distinct existence. These are standard enough critical comments, and it could be that in this case they are quite simply true. But one comparison seems to me to be strikingly relevant: they recall the almost identical remarks that greeted the novels of D. H. Lawrence at the time of their publication. F. R. Leavis quotes Middleton Murrys review of Women in Love: we can discern no individuality whatever in the denizens of Mr. Lawrences world. We should have thought that we should be able to distinguish between male and female, at least. But no! Remove the names, remove the sedulous catalogue of unnecessary clothing . . . and man and woman are as indistinguishable as octopods in an aquarium tank. If we consider the other affinities between Durrell and Lawrence it may be that this comparison will not seem too fanciful, and if we ask what it was in Lawrence that laid him open to such incomprehension we may get a clearer perspective on Durrell: there is a sense, perhaps, in which Durrell takes over where Lawrence left off. Except that Lawrence did not leave off: it is Women in Love of which this may be true, not the later obsessive solution of The Plumed Serpent. Central to Women in Love is, in Leavis words, the question of the kind of success possible in marriage, and in life, for a pair that have cut themselves finally adrift. The society in which, if they had a place, their place would be, represents the civilisation that has been diagnosed in Gerald. And it is for this reason that the deeper significances of the novel cannot be understood in the conventional terms of role-playing characters. Lawrence represents the crucial transition, from a society and hence a novelwhere purposes and values permeate the practical activities of life, to a situation where this identification has broken down, where emotions, no longer channelled into meaningful social interaction, develop an autonomous existence and significance which can provide the main currentand

the key to the understandingof the novel. It is in this way that character, loosened away from any decisive social determinants, begins to lose its objectivity. The difference with Durrells total cosmopolitanism is that with the exception of Mountolive (and perhaps Nessim)all his characters have, like Ursula and Birkin, cut themselves finally adrift, they are all disinherited. And it is because of this that they can seem to drift endlessly in and out of a poetic mirage of philosophy, theology and the theory of art with an openness and complexity that surpasses that of Women in Love, but without that recurrent return to the rejected realities of an actual society that may appear to us necessary to the strength and structure of a novel. (The difference is mirrored in their language: Durrells need to transfix each moment and make it altogether self-sufficient places a heavy weight on his prose which Lawrences rarely feels.) Only in Mountolive do the roots seem to regain their grip; only for Mountolive himself does the mauvaise foi of an integrated social existence have any direct meaning. The writers and artists of Durrells Quartet, like the intellectual world of The Mandarins, or the religious community of Iris Murdochs The Bell, are all at one remove from social reality. In this, if not in the literal form itself, the Alexandria Quartet may indeedfor better or for worsebe classical for our time. It is concerned, I thinkas is perhaps all the great art, literature and philosophy of the twentieth centurywith a world which has lost its meaning and where, in the anxiety of this meaninglessness, emotion and personal relationship have become consuming problems in their own right. V. S. Pritchett seems to me to indicate just this when he comments that the characters are not talking about love, but only about Narcissism and desire, and that after the sexual act there is still unsatisfied desire. Exhausted romantics, they are looking over the sleeping lovers shoulder. Their love, he says, rarely grows beyond this first stage. But to recall Lawrence again: it isnt selfish at all, says Birkin to Ursula, Because I dont know what I want of you. I deliver myself over to the unknown in coming to you . . ., and later What I want is a strange conjunction with younot meeting and minglingyou are quite rightbut an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beingsas the stars balance each other. Could it not be the point of Clea that on the other side of Narcissism and desire just such a relationship is finally achieved? I wait, quite serene and happy says Clea, a real human being, an artist at last. Why is it that the accident with the harpoon (which the critics have found so ludicrous) is the one pure stroke of utter fate in the whole book? I have crossed the border and entered into the possession of my kingdom, thanks to the Hand. The idea that it is the delicate and beautiful steel contrivance which has made Clea an artist is surely absurd. The preparedness to live from other centres than the will and intellect, perhaps what Paul Tillich has called

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the courage to accept acceptance, contrasts with Justines continuing attempts to find meaning in action. Durrell makes it impossible for us to believe that she will ever succeed, and it may be that this, implicit in the whole setting and nature of the novel, will lead us to accuse him of a certain kind of abdication. Ultimately this may be just. But Mr. Durrell chose to attempt an investigation of modern love: his truth is truth, be it of never so transient a social order. And whereof he cannot speak, thereof the critic should perhaps not always be ashamed to be silent.

left clubs
Peter Gillman
Recreative Arts
WHEN IT was realised by Croydon NLR Club that the London New Left Clubs challenge to a game of soccer was to be taken seriously, there was much unexpected enthusiasm from a hitherto ostentatiously sport-despising faction of political dissenters. Consequently the match was arranged to be played in Croydon on Sunday, April 10; and in their first game the Croydon YCND and New Left confounded all expectations by beating the London New Left by five goals to four. The Croydon team was composed of players of apparently antithetical styles. Basic football skillssuch as trapping and dribblingwere displayed by those players educated at grammar schools, whereas the public school clique scorned such proletarian refinements and employed for greater directness in their offensive and defensive methods. The London team appeared to display far greater cohesion and unitypossibly because they all wore shirts of the same colour. Playing with the hurricane at their backs in the first half, Croydon quickly turned the natural elements to their advantage. After a few London attacks had been rendered abortive, the large Croydon left-half ran through most of the London defence and served with a shot that went nowhere near the goalkeepet. What a pity he doesnt belong to N.D. or New Left was someones irrelevant remark. The Croydon left-winger, in spite of being the unfittest man on the field, quickly scored two opportunist goals, at least one of which left the London goal-keeper feeling a wronged man. After the desperately-awaited half-time, Croydon set about consolidating their lead to five goals to nil. But after the Croydon goal-keeper had watched interestedly as the ball rolled past him into the goal and jumped desperately at a shot that was well over his head but which dipped under the bar, Croydon realised the advantage the wind had brought them in the first half. However, fighting hard uphill into the wind, they made several strong attacks, in one of which their left-winger finished a brilliant move by smashing the ball narrowly past the goal, and in another the centre-forward drove the ball confidently against the post. London quickly retaliated by scoring two more goals with gentle shots which the Croydon goal-keeper contemptuously ignored. In the last quarter of an hour London attacked strongly. The Croydon goalkeeper momentarily made himself the local hero by brilliantly diving for the ball at the feet of the London left-winger, who was then adjudged offside by the referee. After many alarms and diversions, the referee blew his

whistle for full-time, and the players were halfway off the pitch when the Croydon left-back was prompted by an over-developed social conscience to announce that the referee was five minutes early. However, the combined presence of 21 players in the Croydon penalty area failed to produce another goal, and Croydon trooped off the pitch the winners by five goals to four. Between bouts of coughing and wheezing in the changing rooms, it was generally agreed that the match had been enjoyable and worthwhile. It is refreshing that members of the New Left and Nuclear Disarmament Campaign should meet on such an unexpected plane; and it is hoped that such contacts will be renewed in similar sporting activities in the future.

Bruce Reid
THE CROYDON

The Croydon Club

New Left Club has now been in existence for about four months. It evolved from the spontaneous demands of those people within the Croydon YCND and the Croydon Young Socialists, who wished for some independent socialist body, in which topics of a wider scope could be discussed and acted upon. The Club both suffers and benefits from the youth of its membership (the average age is about 19). This makes it difficult to achieve much continuity of development, since many of the keenest members, both students and apprentices, are continually disappearing to study for examinations, and this autumn the exodus to the universities will leave a big gap in the ranks. Yet these difficulties are more than compensated by the general enthusiasm, and readiness to take part in activities such as public demonstration and canvassing. The Club runs by co-operation rather than administration, and although this has meant some lack of efficiency, it seems to bring more people into the circle of active membership. The whole Club, i.e. an active membership of about 50, meets twice monthly for speakers (recently: Local Co-op official, Gordon Redfern, Clancy Sigal), and discussion, and individual members at the moment run three study groups, each group consisting of about 12. The most successful of these has been the Housing Group, which is examining the Problems of the Homeless in Croydon. It has visited the Council Receiving Homes, and is trying to expose some of the very real suffering that still exists in the town. The second group, the Teenager in Croydon, is studying the Albemarle

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