Balthazar (novel)

Durrell initially titled the book Justine II in his drafts. The novel includes several last minute changes to the publisher's proofs, perhaps most significantly the replacement and expansion of the novel's introductory Note. The Note begins: "The characters and situations in this novel, the second of a group – a sibling, not a sequel to Justine. ..." And later: "Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern. The three first parts, however, are to be deployed spatially...and are not linked in a serial form. They interlap, interweave, in a purely spatial relation. Time is stayed. The fourth part alone will represent time and be a true sequel. ..." The corrected proofs are held in the McPherson Library at the University of Victoria.

Both the epigraphs are from de Sade's Justine; the second, longer one begins: "Yes, we insist upon these details, you veil them with a decency which removes all their edge of horror; there remains only what is useful to whoever wishes to become familiar with man;....Inhabited by absurd fears, they only discuss the puerilities with which every fool is familiar and dare not, by turning a bold hand to the human heart, offer its gigantic idiosyncrasies to our view."

The book is dedicated to Durrell's mother: "these memorials of an unforgotten city".

The book begins with the Narrator living on a remote Greek island with Nessim's illegitimate daughter from Melissa (now either four or six years old – marking the time that has elapsed since the events of Justine); however the tone is very dark and opposed to the light and airy reminiscence of Prospero's Cell – Durrell's travelogue-memoir of his life on Corfu. The prolonged nature-pieces, which are a highlight of Durrell's prose, still intervene between straight linear narrative – but are uniformly of askesis and alone-ness – and have a more pronounced "prose-painting" feel to them pre-figuring Clea.

Durrell writes in the Author's Note : "The central topic of the book is an investigation of modern love. ..." What he means by the term, he leaves undefined but the subject-matter: prolonged affairs between the protagonists, mutual synchronous polygamy, homoeroticism and transvestitism, psychological and actual sado-masochism – with nary a hint of a socially-conventional romantic or sexual relationship – gives the reader a pretty good clue as to what he is about.

The book abounds in aphorisms – probably an exemplary use of the fecund observations a poet-littérateur writer's journals – such as: "When you pluck a flower, the branch springs back into place. this is not true of the heart's affections" is what Clea once said to Balthazar."

Or as when Justine proposes making love to Nessim on their first meeting: "No, she did not mean the words, for vulgar as the idea sounded, she knew that she was right by the terms of her intuition since the thing she proposed is really, for women, the vital touchstone to a man's being; the knowledge not of his qualities which can be analysed or inferred, but the very flavour of his personality. Nothing except the act of physical love tells us this truth about one another ..."

Or Pursewarden, to Pombal: "On fait l'amour pour mieux refouler et pour decourager les autres."

To Balthazar: "As for Justine, I regard her as a tiresome old sexual turnstile through which presumably we must all pass – a somewhat vulpine Alexandrian Venus. By God, what a woman she would be if she were really natural and felt no guilt!"

• The International Lawrence Durrell Society Official website of ILDS