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Alexandria: City of Memory, by Michael Haag
Download Ebook Alexandria: City of Memory, by Michael Haag
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This is a literary, social and political portrait of Alexandria during the first half of the twentieth century, a high-point in its history. Drawing on diaries, letters and interviews, Michael Haag recovers the lost life of the city, its cosmopolitan inhabitants and its literary characters. Located on the coast of Africa yet rich in historical associations with Western civilization, Alexandria was home to an exotic variety of people whose cosmopolitan families had long been rooted in the commerce and the culture of the entire Mediterranean world. Alexandria famously excited the imaginations of writers, and Haag folds intimate accounts of E. M. Forster, Greek poet Constantine Cavafy and Lawrence Durrell into the story of its inhabitants. He recounts the city's experience of the two world wars and explores the communities that gave Alexandria its unique flavour: the Greek, the Italian and the Jewish. The book deftly harnesses the sexual and emotional charge of cosmopolitan life in this extraordinary city, and highlights the social and political changes over the decades that finally led to Nasser's Egypt. 'Michael Haag's 'Alexandria' is a remarkable achievement. Not merely a composite biography of Forster, Cavafy and Durrell, or their relations with the city, it is also a history of Alexandria, full of fascinating detail.' Professor Sir Frank Kermode Michael Haag is a writer, photographer and publisher. He published and provided the afterword and notes to the first British edition of E. M. Forster's 'Alexandria: A History and a Guide', and he is the author/photographer of 'Alexandria Illustrated' (The American University in Cairo Press).
- Sales Rank: #1652387 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Yale University Press UK SR
- Published on: 2004-09-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x .79" w x 7.52" l, 1.45 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
“A fine and deft interweaving of the personal and the political.”—Michael Glover, The Financial Times
“This is full of intrigue and incident, and sparkles with countless delightful details.”—S.B Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
From the Inside Flap
"Michael Haag's Alexandria is a remarkable achievement. Not merely a composite biography of Forster, Cavafy and Durrell, or their relations with the city, it is also a history of Alexandria, full of fascinating detail." - Sir Frank Kermode
About the Author
Historian and writer Michael Haag has written widely on the Egyptian, Classical, and Medieval worlds. He is the author of The Templars: The History & the Mythand Alexandria: City of Memory, a definitive study of Cavafy, Forster, and LawrenceDurrell in the city, as well as travel guides to Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. He livesin London.
Most helpful customer reviews
18 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Alexandria at an Angle
By Christian Schlect
An interested reader will acquire sharp insights into the lives of three important authors (I confess--none of whose books I have read) connected to the city founded by Alexander the Great. Perhaps more importantly, one will be given glimpses of the social and political background to a fascinating three or four decades. Cotton, Zionism, Greece's role in the region, Rommel and his desert campaign, the British lion's reach, the rise of Egyptian nationalism, and the worldly inhabitants of a multicultural, usually tolerant, and historically special Mediterranean port city are all here. Michael Haag has written an extremely intelligent book on the end of a particular era.
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
City of Memory, creativity, poetry, talent, love
By Alekos
Alexandria. When I first got this book and leafed through it briefly I decided it was a lovely coffee table book and not much more. I could be forgiven this error of judgment because the photos are really attractive. When I opened it again some while later I realized that my first assessment had been a colossal mistake. The text is extremely well-written and Michael Haag's stunningly knowledgeable exploration of the city's social, cultural and political life between the world wars offers three major centers of gravity dealing with the lives and work of the literary figures Constantine Cavafy, E.M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell, each of whom had radical connections with Alexandria, and in the configuration of whose esthetic the city played a determining role. In addition there are countless points of secondary reference (people, places, historical figures) enriching the stories of these three giants of twentieth-century literature, especially in their individual and highly peculiar relation to the city and in what each believed the city had done for (and to) him. For Forster Alexandria meant emancipation from his domineering mother and from the corrosive mores of middle-class Britain. It also meant love - with a bus driver who had to be coaxed into bed but was never really good at it. Haag gives some profound insights on Forster's character and on what might be taken as a significant strain of unkindness, perhaps even hypocrisy, in the novelist (see p. 103). Caavafy, impoverished survivor of a once-wealthy family of cotton brokers, viewed his native city as a repository of myths and images and sexual encounters expressing the various realms of meaning he so successfully converted into world-class poetry. (Some of Edmund Keeley's books on Greek poetry go further into all that.) And finally, Lawrence Durrell endowed Alexandria with a quasi-mystical persona that figures prominently and profoundly in his still-important "Quartet."
Intercalated with the stories of these important literati, there are excursuses to history ancient and modern, architecture, politics and diplomacy. There is also a fascinating cast of secondary, mostly bon vivant characters, Alexandrians and expatriates, who give elegant dinner parties and balls (the ones that inspired some of the more riveting moments in Durrell's great opus), engage in shimmering conversations over long boozy lunches, and hop, most of them, into bed with whomever strikes their fancy or whose fancy they strike. Many of these people are also quite talented and creative. Alexandria's foreign communities, later destroyed by what the author correctly calls Nasser's puritanical socialism, were the real heart and soul of the city in the period covered here. There were Greeks, lots of them, and they were very prosperous, reasonably well educated and very socially conscious. The Italians were victims of occupational polarity: they were either high-class architects or lowly construction workers. They were responsible for most of the buildings, some beautiful,some ugly, in the city. There were also assorted Frenchmen, Britons, Jews (who got involved in everything and did everything well), and even (Jasper Brinton most notable among them) some few Americans.
Michael Haag's writing style is strong, vigorous and unmistakably masculine. Yet he manages to convey many scenes and situations of Alexandrian life with striking esthetic refinement and great evocative power, especially as he explores his three major figures' central artistic ideas and literary dispositions and show how they relate to history, political power - and love.
Alexandria was not, of course, the center of the world between the world wars. Nor was it where "big" history was being made during that period. But isn't it marvelous to have a book like this one that tells us so much about the world contained within the city and about the people who contributed to its history?
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
An Excursion into Nostalgia
By Silverfish
Of the triumvirate of Alexandrian literary giants of the early twentieth century - Constantine Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell - Cavafy is perhaps the guardian spirit. His poetry provides the capstone to Forster's Alexandria: A History and a Guide, and is present both as invoked persona ("the old poet of the city") and fictionalized character (Balthazar) in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Cavafy's presence also haunts Michael Haag's evocative Alexandria: City of Memory. Though the book focuses on the Alexandria of Forster and Durrell, the photograph of Cavafy's melancholy face seems to stare through every page, and his poem "The City," used as epigraph, imbues the text with nostalgia. The image Haag describes of Cavafy at twilight opening or closing shutters, "adjusting the fall of light on his guests," aptly describes Haag's approach to his material, illuminating the sojourns of Forster and Durrell in this city.
Both Forster and Durrell were cast into Alexandria by wars: Forster came as a Red Cross "searcher" in World War I, interviewing wounded soldiers to ascertain the whereabouts of the missing; Durrell fled the Nazi invasion of Greece. In Alexandria both found the loves that, if not the most inspiring of happiness, nevertheless provided the foundation for some of their greatest writing.
Forster fell in love with a tram conductor, Mohammed al Adl, and their tenuous, fraught relationship is movingly recounted in Forster's long "letter," never sent, and continued after Mohammed's death at twenty-three from consumption. Their relationship, transformed, underlies Forster's acclaimed A Passage to India, informing both Dr. Aziz's friendship with Fielding, and the misunderstandings between Aziz and Adela Quested. Perhaps the most strangely stirring image in Haag's book is the tattered photograph of Mohammed that Forster kept with him to the end of his life, preserved only because he had taped a tram ticket to the reverse side.
The eponymous central character of Durrell's Justine is based on his second wife, the Alexandrian Jew Eve Cohen. They met at a party, where she terrified and entranced Durrell with her voluble eagerness and puckish beauty. Eve was involved with an Austrian Jew who didn't feel he could trust her, and Durrell had recently ended his first marriage, so they initially discussed their difficult love lives. But when Eve left her family, it was to Durrell that she turned; they were soon lovers, and then married. Their relationship, lopsided, passionate, scarred by violence, is evoked in Haag's book through Durrell's letters, the memories of friends, and interviews with Eve Durrell.
A host of minor characters fills out the book, which is assiduously researched, lucidly written, and accompanied by a trove of photographs that bring to life this fleeting, fascinating epoch of Alexandria's history.
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