Bus Stops

By LANCE MORROW

SICILIAN CAROUSEL

by Lawrence Durrell

Viking; 223 pages; $10.95

"Travel," Lawrence Durrell once wrote, "can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection." It is an elegant thought. Aside from fiction, travel is also Durrell's chief literary racket, and he is wonderful at it. His travel books arrive like long letters from a civilized and very funny friend-- the prose as luminous as the Mediterranean air he loves. One evening in Sicily, he could look from his hotel balcony and "see the distant moth-soft dazzle of the temples'" at Agrigento. In a little Sicilian town called Chaos, the birthplace of Pirandello, Durrell watched sunlight "worthy of a nervous breakdown by Turner." When a local doctor was summoned to treat a tourist in Durrell's party, "he had a singular sort of expression, a sort of holy expression which one suddenly realised came from the fact that he was scared stiff in case someone asked him a question in a foreign language...He looked in fact as if he had just emerged after partaking of the Eucharist with Frank Sinatra."

Durrell's sense of place turned Alexandria into a popular municipality of literature, although his hothouse prose left the effect of unwholesome orchids raised in a mulch of shredded Oxford English Dictionaries. As a travel writer it would be difficult for Durrell to equal Bitter Lemons, his 1957 portrait of Cyprus. But then, Durrell lived for three years on Cyprus--owned a small old house, taught school, eventually worked for the British government as the island drifted into insurrection. Durrell went to Sicily as a tourist aboard the "Sicilian Carousel," a bus tour clockwise around the island.

Although he is a connoisseur of Mediterranean islands, Durrell sometimes seems to be laboring as hard as his red tour bus grinding up the mountain switchbacks. The reader must listen to Roberto, a wise and tactful Sicilian guide, discoursing on the first-aid kit aboard the bus; there is a pause while the French ladies buy postcards.

But Durrell is an endlessly inventive entertainer to bring along on a trip. Among his companions: Deeds, a former Indian army officer and Desert Rat, who speaks a jargon of 1940 Cairo; and the Anglican bishop, who has developed Doubts--"an evident Pauline-type neurosis which is almost endemic in the Church of England, and usually comes from reading Lady Chatterley's Lover in paperback." There is also the insufferable Bed-does, a cashiered prep school teacher obscurely on the lam, who mutters cracks about Alcibiades being a queer. A French couple reminds Durrell of "very cheap microscopes."

With apologies (not completely convincing) for taking in so much so fast, Durrell inspects Sicily--its history, people, temples, flowers. He pauses for a charming lecture on Empedocles (Durrell is an intellectual name-dropper). He loves sudden transportations over centuries. One afternoon the bus comes upon a serenely classical car crash: "The occupant of the sports car was a handsome blond youth, and he was lying back in his seat as if replete with content, with sunlight, with wine. The expression on his face was one of benign calm, of beatitude...But the little man whose stethoscope was planted inside his blue shirt over the heart was...making the traditional grimace of doctors the world over."

Durrell loves the poetic effusion, what he calls "romancing"--but in an amiable way, like a man on his third drink who suddenly falls in love with a phrase. Some times he treats the past with a lovely disrespect. At the catacombs in Syracuse, 'there was an unhealthy-looking monk on duty at the picture-postcard stall. He looked as if he had just been disinterred himself." As for the catacombs, "a coal mine would have offered the same spectacle, really."

For all his art, Durrell cheats a bit in Sicilian Carousel. He asks at one point: "What was Sicily? What was a Sicilian?" He never comes close to an answer, except for certain gestures, shades of light, knowledgeable asides. Never mind. The questions will keep, and they were probably too solemn anyway.

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