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Writer's pictureAlistair Appleton

From Justine / Lawrence Durrell

Again, like my selection from Gravity’s Rainbow this ‘poem’ is actually prose. A little chipping from the strange crystal that is the Alexandria Quartet. Streaked through with very out-dated attitudes towards women and other races; it is however a patchily brilliant display of writing. For example, this portrait of an ancient British colonialist, self-exiled In the Egyptian city. I also want to develop a “taste for quinqueremes”…


Frankly Scobie looks anybody’s age; older than the birth of tragedy, younger than the Athenian death. Spawned in the Ark by a chance meeting and mating of the bear and the ostrich; delivered before term by the sickening grunt of the keel on Ararat. Scobie came forth from the womb in a wheel chair with rubber tyres, dressed in a deer-stalker and a red flannel binder. On his prehensile toes the glossiest pair of elastic-sided boots. In his hand a ravaged family Bible whose fly-leat bore the words "Joshua Samuel Scobie 1870. Honour thy father and thy mother". To these possessions were added eyes like dead moons, a distinct curvature of the pirate's spinal column, and a taste for quinqueremes. It was not blood which flowed in Scobie's veins but green salt water, deep-sea stuff.


His walk is the slow rolling grinding trudge of a saint walking on Galilee. His talk is a green-water jargon swept up in five oceans - an antique shop of polite fable bristling with sextants, astrolabes, porpentines and isobars. When he sings, which he so often does, it is in the very accents of the Old Man of the Sea. Like a patron saint he has left little pieces of his flesh all over the world, in Zanzibar, Colombo, Togoland, Wu Fu: the little deciduous morsels which he has been shedding for so long now, old antlers, cuff-links, teeth, hair. ... Now the retreating tide has left him high and dry above the speeding currents of time, Joshua the insolvent weather-man, the islander, the anchorite.

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