Lawrence Durrell and Corfu: a Centenary Assessment

lecture by Richard PineDurrell School of Corfu, 21 June 2012

Lawrence Durrell would have become one hundred years old this year, if he had lived.

But it is now over twenty years since his death, and over seventy-five years since he

came to live here in Corfu, which suggests that an appraisal of his relationship with

this island, and with Greece in general, together with an assessment of his life’s work,

comes at an appropriate time.

As someone who has been engaged with his work – and, indeed, struggling with it –

for nearly fifty years, and who founded this School ten years ago in the name of both

Lawrence and Gerald Durrell, and is still occupied and preoccupied by what he wrote,

what his life consisted of, and what he means, I would like to share with you today

my views, firstly, on the significance of Corfu for the Durrell siblings, especially

Lawrence and Gerald; secondly on the corpus of Lawrence’s literary output; thirdly,

to try to indicate areas where scholarship of that work has been valuable, and where it

still needs to be directed. Fourthly, I’ll end with a brief discussion of ‘Durrell’s

doubles’.

My lecture will therefore consist of these four strands, but due to time constraints the

third part will be presented in the form of listed points which I will distribute, and

which we can perhaps examine during discussion time.

1

Corfu

One of the most fundamental statements by Lawrence Durrell appears on the first

page of Prospero’s Cell, his memoir of Corfu: ‘Greece offers you… the discovery of

yourself’.1 In this statement we can discern the beginning both of his sense of himself

as an artist, and of his philhellenism, which would see him associated in different

connections with the Dodecanese islands and Cyprus, and culminating in his

impressionistic book The Greek Islands.

Durrell believed that he had been deprived of his childhood by being sent from his

birthplace, India, to England. India had been ‘paradise’: Corfu was his second chance

at ‘paradise’, as both he and Gerald called it. One can readily appreciate that, after the

greyness of England, the exotic nature of Corfu in every sense – its foreignness, its

timbres, its sensations – would become not merely fascinating but so attractive as to

become, as Lawrence said of Kalami, ‘our unregretted home’.2,3

In such circumstances, it is not surprising that all three Durrell brothers, and their

sister Margot, clutched at the latitude of freedom offered by Corfu. Nor is it surprising

that in retrospect Lawrence reconstructed aspects of that paradise – partly to heal the

wound of his separation from his wife and daughter while they were in Egypt, and

partly to protect his vision of that home. To use the title of Edmund Keeley’s account

of Durrell and others in Greece, he was ‘Inventing Paradise’4, in both senses of the

word discovering it and recreating it.

Lawrence asserted that in Corfu ‘we reconstituted the Indian period which we all

missed’. Gerald said ‘it was rather like being born for the first time’, to which

Lawrence echoed ‘I realise I too got born in Corfu’.

I will offer a biographical analogy, which may or may not be valid, but which can be

discussed: in Tunc, the central character, Felix, says:

1 Prospero’s Cell p.11.2 Ibid. p.12.3 A word which he used, as far as I am aware, only once elsewhere: ‘They were past speech and reflection – the diminished figures of an unforgotten, unregretted past, infinitely dear now because irrecoverable’; Alexandria Quartet p. 594 [Mountolive, ch. XIII].4 E. Keeley, Inventing Paradise

2

People deprived of a properly constituted childhood will always find something hollow in their responses to the world, something unfruitful […] The central determinant of situations like this is that buried hunger which is only aggravated by the sense of emotional impotence.5

In the same passage he refers to ‘a central lack’, and in the way Durrell spoke of

India, and of his unwilling transfer from India to England, I suggest that there was, in

his case, a ‘central lack’, a need to search for the elements of childhood, to satisfy that

‘buried hunger’, all of which was frustrated by ‘a sense of emotional impotence’. So,

conscious always of the dangers of reading from the work to the man, I also suggest

that we can read his literary output either separately, or in conjunction with the

biography.

It was not only ‘paradise’ for Lawrence and Gerald, but, according to her daughter, it

was also, for his wife Nancy, ‘the place that was to mean more to her than anywhere

else’.6 Corfu was the place where they discovered themselves, and also discovered

each other.

Having written his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, in England, Lawrence wrote his

second, Panic Spring (published under the pseudonym of ‘Charles Norden’), and his

third, The Black Book, in Corfu, and in respect of The Black Book he later said that ‘I

first heard the sound of my own voice’.7 I think it is reasonable to say that,

considering his slim output of prose and poetry up to that point, Corfu represented his

awakening as an artist.

It was also in Corfu that he invented, and discarded, what he called (in a letter to

Henry Miller)

My double Amicus Nordensis. He is a double I need… You see, I can’t

write real books all the time… Once every three years or more I shall try

to compose for full orchestra. The rest of the time I shall do essays,

travel-books, perhaps one more novel under Charles Norden. I shall

naturally not try to write badly or things I don’t want to: but there are a

5 Tunc p. 26.6 J. Hodgkin, Amateurs in Eden p. 152.7 Black Book p. 9.

3

lot of things I want to write which don’t come into the same class as The

Black Book at all.8

To which Miller forcibly replied:

Don’t… take the schizophrenic route!... You must stand or fall either as

Charles Norden or as Lawrence Durrell. I would choose Lawrence

Durrell if I were you… If, as you say, you can’t write REAL books all the

time, then don’t write. Don’t write anything, I mean. Lie fallow… Why

couldn’t you write all the other books you wish as L.D.? Why can’t L.D.

be the author of travel books, etc.?9

Although Durrell did kill off Charles Norden, he was conscious all his life of the

significance of the double. In his poem ‘Je est un autre’, the title of which he adopted

from Rimbaud, he wrote:

He is the man who makes notes, The observer in the tall black hat, Face hidden in the brim: In three European cities He has watched me watching him. .........................................................

often I hear him laughing in the other room. He watches me now, working late, Bringing a poem to life, his eyes Reflect the malady of De Nerval: O useless in this old house to question The mirrors, his impenetrable disguise.10

In declaring ‘I hear him laughing in the other room’ he was establishing a system of

self-mockery which was entirely typical of modernism in its self-awareness, and

entirely atypical of modernism in its willingness to encounter the laughing other. The

act of creation being observed in the course of another act of creation led Durrell to

the composition of the book-within-a-book in which the artist is haunted by an alter

ego, a twin or double who is a permanent presence in his life and his imagination,

8 I. MacNiven (ed.), The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-1980, p. 81.9 Durrell-Miller Letters, pp. 84, 86.10 Collected Poems pp.106-7.

4

usually appearing as an alternative and real voice. One thinks perhaps of John

Banville’s Doctor Copernicus, where the scientist is haunted by the shadowy figure of

his menacing brother: ‘Throughout his days that other self crossed his path again and

again, always in sunlight, always smiling, taunting him with the beauty and grace of a

phantom existence’.11

I’ll return to the question of the double at the end of this lecture.

In terms of their lives in Corfu, and what they wrote about the island, one cannot

consider one Durrell without the other. Gerald recalled that, whereas previously he

had seen the world in black-and-white, when he arrived in Corfu he saw everything in

technicolour. Such was the way in which he ‘discovered himself’ in Greece, thanks

mainly to the mentoring of Theodore Stephanides, who exerted an enormous

influence on both Lawrence and Gerald, and is celebrated in both their books about

Corfu. And Stephanides was also saluted in the dedication of Gerald’s The Amateur

Naturalist: ‘This book is for Theo (Dr Theodore Stephanides) my mentor and friend,

without whose guidance I would have achieved nothing’. That Stephanides should be

acknowledged in this way by a man who had become one of the world’s foremost

zoologists and conservators, and also by his brother, one of the twentieth century’s

greatest novelists,12 suggests to me that Corfu was indeed the place of self-discovery

and also the site of awakening to both the physical and the intellectual wonders of the

Greek world.

Just as one cannot read Gerald’s My Family and Other Animals as a true account of

their lives in Corfu (for example, the sleight of hand which elides Nancy from the

story and implies that Lawrence lived full-time with the family), so one cannot accept

the narrative of Prospero’s Cell without severe reservations. The most glaring

fabrication consists in the dates which Durrell ascribed to the various episodes –

beginning on 10 April 1937 (by which time he and Nancy had in fact been in Corfu

for two years), and dating the entries in three of his chapters from August 1937 to

April 1938, when he and Nancy were actually in Paris and London. As Joanna

11 J. Banville, Doctor Copernicus p. 27.12 In the dedication to the (unpublished) ‘Magnetic Island’ (set in Corfu).

5

Hodgkin observes, this represents ‘the kind of manipulation of the past that Larry and

Gerry were both to elevate to a fine art’.13

We see the balance between the passion for facts and the poetic licence in Durrell’s

statement about his correspondence with Theodore Stephanides which he describes as

‘characterized on my part by flights of deliberately false scholarship, and on his by

the unsmiling and fastidious rectitude of a research worker.’14 As Joanna Hodgkin has

written of Nancy (her mother) ‘It is a cruel irony that she had joined forces with a

man for whom actual truth was less important than poetic truth’.15 As he himself said,

through the voice of Clea in the Quartet, ‘there are only three things to be done with a

woman ... You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature’.16 Perhaps, in the

case of Nancy, Lawrence Durrell achieved all three.

It was also the start of his mythologising his own life and making it a quarry for his

writing: for example, Nancy diving for cherries ‘like an otter’17 at the shrine of St.

Arsenius – a feature which she herself disputed - would re-emerge in The Alexandra

Quartet as the child of Nessim and Melissa whom Darley is mentoring on the Aegean

island.18 So too do the episodes with the fish-catch with carbide lamps.19 St Spiridon is

‘an amusing study in myth’20 and Fr Nicholas is ‘a great mythological character’.21

And he wanted to connect with the mythical world of Odysseus, maintaining all his

life that Corfu was central to Odysseus’s travels: in Prospero’s Cell he recorded that

at night he heard a shepherd piping, and insisted ‘It is the wheedling voice of the

sirens that Ulysses heard’.22 Not ‘it might have been’, but ‘it is’.23

13 J Hodgkin p. 289.14 Prospero’s Cell p. 17.15 J Hodgkin p. 186.16 Alexandria Quartet p. 25.17 Prospero’s Cell p. 16.18 Alexandria Quartet pp. 661-2.19 Prospero’s Cell pp. 25, 38-40; Alexandria Quartet pp. 397-400.20 Prospero’s Cell p. 28.21Ibid., p. 43.22 Ibid., p. 18.23 When he says (Elephant) ‘I have seen a cobra fight a mongoose’ he may simply be recalling that his cousin, Richard Blaker, in his novel Scabby Dichson, has a champion pet mongoose which can successfully fight to the death with snakes.

6

This, I believe, is the beginning of Durrell’s use of, and attitude to, character.

‘Compared to real life’, he noted, ‘my people are not “real”, they are “true”’,24 where

‘truth’, rather than ‘reality’, was conjured by their ability to create situations in which

their emotional life, rather than their incidental life, is believed, or at least taken

seriously. ‘How real is Heathcliffe or Valmont?’ he asked. ‘I hope the reader will feel

his characters in a different way: three clowns, three women, three writers, a man of

power, a starcrossed woman, etc. etc. Like a Tarot pack.’25

That was written after the creation of The Alexandria Quartet. But much earlier, in

Corfu, while plotting the trajectory of what he called ‘the English book of the dead’,

Durrell had noted:

It must be made clear that these are not ‘characters’: a character is an integer in a temporal series: whereas these are personalities embodied by reminiscence: the biological structure of a continuum. Space is my concern, not matter: so these men and women are not substance but the figment of substance seen in a mirror: I judge them not as man but as part of their scenery. This method of presentation is Chinese Tibetan in its disregard for the ego, an integer in flux: its intention is to stand on the threshold of the Aquarian Age as a messenger from ourselves. It will be deciphered only when it is useless (as all great works): that is to say when its emotional content has been realised.26

The reference to ‘Chinese Tibetan’ is an early indication of his ultimate intention, in

The Avignon Quintet, to write what he called ‘a Tibetan novel’.

Elsewhere, Durrell listed his stock characters as: ‘two women blonde and dartk, two

clowns, lovers, poets, warriors, monks, villains and seers. The old stuff of fiction and

Christmas pantomime, under different names.’27

Durrell wrote: ‘If I wrote a book about [Corfu] it would not be a history but a poem’.28

The remarkable fact about this statement is that it occurs on page 20 of Prospero’s 24 CERLD inv. 1346, p. 12.25 CERLD uncatalogued typescript referring to the interview known as ‘The Kneller Tape’ which appears in H. Moore (ed.), The World of Lawrence Durrell. In this typescript, Durrell says: ‘a series of answers to a brilliant questionnaire by a young Austrian Jewish (I think) journalist which sought to uncover the background behind the Alexandria Quartet and its author’s intellectual intentions. On the whole, though executed off the cuff in somewhat haphazard fashion it holds up tolerably well’. There are, in fact, many variations between the typescript and the printed version. The note is dated ‘84’.26 CERLD Corfu/Egypt notebook.27 “From the Elephant’s Back”.28 Prospero’s Cell p. 20.

7

Cell itself – that is, within the book to which it refers. Prospero’s Cell is, in fact, a

prose-poem, with all the departures from veracity that that necessitates. You do not

write poetry by reciting facts. In the preface to one edition of the book, Durrell calls it

‘a poetic evocation’, the result, during his years in Egypt, of ‘trying to memorize its

beauties’.29

The passage on p. 34 could work just as well (with minor amendments) as a poem:

The sea’s curious workmanship:Bottle-green glass sucked smooth and porous by the waves:Vitreous shells: wood stripped and cleaned,and bark swollen with salt:a bead: sea-charcoal, brittle and sticky:fronds of bladderwort:rocks, gnawed and rubbed: sponges, heavy with tears:amber: bone: the sea.

Given that the world war had expelled Lawrence and Nancy from this new-found

paradise, as surely as Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, and given also that at

the time he was writing Prospero’s Cell Nancy had taken Penelope and had

irrevocably left him, we can, I think, understand why he retrospectively endowed

Corfu with an extra layer of beauty and also mystery.

When he writes of their life in Corfu as ‘like some flawless Euclidean statement’30 he

is claiming an equation between himself and Nancy, and also between himself and the

island. Their life, he says, is ‘a small private universe’.31

But there is a flaw in this argument, as there was in the marriage itself: Durrell was

remembering Corfu as what he was privately calling a ‘Heraldic Universe’ – that is, a

world in which one was the only occupant, and, consequently, god or at least king.

Durrell also proclaimed himself, the ‘Selfist’, ‘a Durrealist’32 or ‘autist’.33 This may

explain why Nancy is reduced to ‘N.’ and is not accorded the merit she deserves as an

29 Preface to [1945] edition of Prospero’s Cell, p. xi.30 Ibid., p. 34.31 Ibid., p.132.32 Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller: a Private Correspondence p. 24; cf. also ibid., p. 53.33 Windmill 2/6 (1947) ‘From a Writer’s Journal’.

8

artist in her own right – he refers to her ‘lazy pleasant paintings’,34 which is hardly the

way to describe the work of the artist with whom one is married and in love.

For Durrell, artist was autist and as a result excluded all ideas and actions other than

those emanating from, and reabsorbed by, the self.

Durrell’s friend Gostan Zarian referred to Corfu as ‘a landscape which precipitates the

inward crisis of lives as yet not fully worked out’35 and Durrell may have remembered

the expression in relation to his marriage: he and Nancy were, in a sense, fumbling

their way through their relationship and towards their lives and identities as artists. As

he said in a poem of 1946, ‘Alexandria’,

As for me I now move

Through many negatives to what I am.36

The search was for what he later called ‘a fulcrum of repose at the heart of reality’.37

So, to sum up the first part of this lecture:

The essence of Corfu was threefold: first, it represented a return to paradise; second,

in his private life, however turbulent it may have been, he was probably, for the first

time in his life, and until he met his third wife, Claude-Marie Vincendon, happy. He

was with an artist, which for him was extremely important, and this is why his time

later with Claude-Marie was so valuable.

Third, in his life as a writer, it was not only the place where he wrote Panic Spring

and The Black Book, but the place where he conceived all of his subsequent work, and

we are fortunate to have documentary proof of this from the notebook he kept in

Corfu. This was truly where he ‘discovered himself’, and his voice in The Black Book.

It was also the beginning of his love affair with islands, and the condition which he

later called islomania.38

34 Ibid., p. 1635 Ibid., p. 74.36 Collected Poems p. 154.37 “From the Elephant’s Back”38 Reflections on a Marine Venus p. 15.

9

And here we reach the crucial point in relation to Corfu: that it was here that he

mapped out the ‘groundplan’ for his life’s work. Originally conceived, in 1938, as a

dialogue entitled ‘The Aquarians’ – ‘letters between two selves: mon cher ego – mon

cher id’ – it provided the basis for almost all his subsequent writing, with the divided

self at its core, and with the idea of a secret, or cabalistic, society providing the notion

of hidden meanings. And if Nancy’s recollection is correct, contrary to what is

commonly believed, he even at that stage thought of Justine and its successors as a

multi-volume work, rather than as a single novel.

Assessment

I will begin my assessment of Durrell’s life and work by discussing poetry. I’ll follow

this with remarks about his interest in ‘sexual curiosity and metaphysical speculation’,

and the ‘minor mythologies’. Then I shall try to refer to details of his biography which

relate to his work – namely, his time in Cyprus during the enosis crisis, and his

relations with women.

In my opinion, one of the most serious questions to be discussed – and I’m sorry that

there is no-one here this week to speak specifically about Durrell’s poetry – is: is he a

poet who also wrote prose, or a novelist who also wrote poetry? He was noted as a

poet long before anyone knew about The Black Book or before the Quartet was

written, and was the principal poet included in the inaugural volume of Penguin

Modern Poets in 1962. Joanna Hodgkin believes that ‘it is in his poetry that he is at

his triumphant best’.39 This echoes her mother’s view, that ‘poetry was the core of

Larry’s creation’.40

As Walter Pater said to the young Oscar Wilde: ‘Why do you always write poetry?

Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult’.41 Durrell’s own

transition from poet to novelist is perhaps exemplified by his remark to T.S. Eliot in

1945, after he had proposed his schema for his life-work: ‘I think you know that I AM

39 J Hodgkin p. 335.40 J Hodgkin p. 239.41 O Wilde, ‘Mr Pater’s Last Volume’ – Speaker, 1/12, 1890.

10

a poet really; certainly I have too poor a grasp of character to be a novelist, and my

construction is always faulty and lazy’.42

In the Quartet one character exclaims:

Language! What is the writer’s struggle except a struggle to use the medium

as precisely as possible, but knowing fully its basic imprecision? A hopeless

task, but none the less rewarding for being hopeless. Because the task itself,

the act of wrestling with an insoluble problem, grows the writer up!43

Ironically, Durrell gives this statement to a character called John Keats. It suggests

that poetry is the medium in and through which the writer can approximate to truths

which he can never ultimately establish with any accuracy, manipulating words into

puzzles and images. A poet can divine, but he can never define.

Elsewhere in the Quartet, Durrell says that ‘The … impulse to confide in the world’ is

another symptom of the writer’s agon44 and refers to ‘The bondage of these forms

which seemed so inadequate an instrument to convey the truth of feelings’.45 (One

thinks also of Eliot’s ‘words strain,/Crack and sometimes break, under the

burden,/Under the tension slip, slide, perish, /Decay with imprecision, will not stay in

place,/Will not stay still.’)46

Perhaps this explains the passage in Clea when Darley ponders Pursewarden’s notes

headed ‘My Conversations with Brother Ass’ – of which we should recall that

‘Brother Ass’ was the term used by St Francis of Assisi to refer to his physical body.

Darley, or is it Durrell? realises that we are condemned to writing:

we artists form one of those pathetic human chains which human beings form

to pass buckets of water up to a fire, or to bring in a lifeboat. An uninterrupted

chain of humans born to explore the inward riches of the solitary life on behalf

42 Quoted in Rachel Foss, Lawrence Durrell – the Spoken Word, British Library/BBC audio CD, accompanying booklet, p.6.43 Alexandria Quartet p.798.44 Ibid., p. 839.45 Ibid. p. 839.46 TSEliot, Four Quartets ‘Burnt Norton’.

11

of the unheeding unforgiving community; manacled together by the same

gift.47

And he was

suddenly afflicted by a great melancholy and despair at recognizing the

completely limited nature of my own powers […] lacking in sheer word-

magic, in propulsion, in passion, to achieve this other world of artistic

fulfilment.48

And yet, as Darley also says in the Quartet, ‘We are never free, we writers’.49 Having

seen his final notebook, the last entry being an expression of his fear that he had not

sufficiently succeeded, I can well understand the fear of the artist, however

distinguished and successful he or she may be, of the compulsion to write and the

possibility, with every word, of failure.

The struggle with language took place not only on paper, but in verbal exchanges. As

Nancy wrote to her first daughter Penelope (the child of Larry) about their quarrels:

‘Scorched with words, muddled with words, bewildered with words’.50

Three headlines help us to understand Durrell’s preoccupation with the twentieth

century.

In the lectures which became A Key to Modern British Poetry he told an Argentinian

audience:

the trouble with the common reader is that he knows that the twentieth century

is a battlefield, but he does not know what the battle is about.51

47 Alexandria Quartet p. 792.48 Ibid., p. 792.49 Ibid., p. 116.50 J Hodgkin p. 277.51 Key to Modern Poetry p. 144.

12

The reader with an established affection for some of Durrell’s major characters –

Pursewarden in The Alexandria Quartet for example – will already have given

thought to the following proposition:

Underneath all his preoccupations with sex, society religion ... there is, quite

simply a man tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the

world.52

Such a reader will respond with automatic sympathy to one of Durrell’s earliest

statements (from The Black Book of 1937) that

I am weeping for my generation. I am devising in my mind a legend to convey

the madness which created us in crookedness, in dislocation, in tort.53

Here, I think, we find a premonition of the Gnosticism which permeates the Quintet –

the refusal to accept an imperfect world created by a demiurge pretending to be god.

It is within this mindscape that Durrell gives to Pursewarden the expression: ‘one

writes to recover a lost innocence’.54 As I have already suggested, this becomes, in

Tunc/Nunquam, a lost childhood.

Durrell’s sense of being unable to escape a destiny that ineluctably existed within

himself is exemplified by the statement in Georg Groddeck’s The Book of the It,

which influenced him profoundly:

The assertion ‘I live’ only expresses a small and superficial part of the total

experience ‘I am lived by the It’.55

As a writer, Durrell wholeheartedly accepted this by saying ‘the writing itself grows

you up’.56 This, I suggest, brings together the man and his work, acknowledging that

52 Alexandria Quartet p. 194; Durrell’s emphasis.53 Black Book p. 138.54 Alexandria Quartet p. 475.55 p. vi.56 “Writers at Work” p. 275.

13

within the man there is a writer who affects the direction taken by the man. And I

would also suggest that this is more powerful and more significant than the somewhat

anodyne alternative, that it is the man who controls the writing. It chimes with

Simenon’s statement that ‘writing is not a profession, it is a vocation of

unhappiness’.57 As Joanna Hodgkin records, Durrell ‘said that he began each novel as

an alternative to committing suicide’.58

Sexual curiosity and metaphysical speculation

As Durrell tells us in The Dark Labyrinth, our principal concerns are ‘sexual curiosity

and metaphysical speculation’59 – that is, exploration of our body and our mind, in

relation to self and in relation to the rest of the world – the basic quest of finding

one’s place in the world, knowing one’s mind and, in the case of the writer, being able

to relate the adventure.60

Significantly, the two parts of the phrase originate, respectively, with Freud and

Aldous Huxley: ‘sexual curiosity’, which, says Freud, is inseparable from the thirst

for knowledge, was the key to a case study much admired by Durrell, that of ‘Little

Hans’;61 while ‘metaphysical speculation’ was a central issue in Huxley’s influential

Point Counter Point published in 1928.62

I believe that this explains why Durrell was such a magnet to readers such as myself

during their adolescent years, and it may be that that appeal to adolescent readers

continues today. It is not only in the Quartet, with its twin themes – as he called them

– of ‘sex and the secret service’,63 but also in the relationship of Felix and Benedicta

in Tunc/Nunquam which develops into a narrative of duo contra mundum, and in the

exploration which takes place between Constance and Sebastian Affad in the Quintet.

57 “Writers at Work” p. 132.58 J Hodgkin p. 192.59 Dark Labyrinth p. 59.60Cf. B. Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment p. 53: ‘at the age when these stories are the most meaningful to the child, his major problem is to bring some kind of order into the inner chaos of his mind so that he can understand himself better – a necessary preliminary for achieving some congruence between his perceptions and the external world’. 61 S. Freud, Case Histories I: ‘Dora’ and ‘Little Hans’ Penguin Freud Library vol. 8 (London: Penguin, 1977) pp. 173, 265.62 A. Huxley, Point Counter Point (London: Chatto and Windus, 1928) p. 268.63 Spirit of Place p. 120.

14

Minor mythologies

Another aspect of Durrell’s writing which has seldom been given adequate attention is

the question of ‘Amicus Nordensis’ – the writer who will fill in with essays and travel

books and lightweight novels while ‘Durrell’ gets on with what he called ‘REAL’

books. He himself, however, eventually came to accept that he could do both. When

he was writing the ‘Antrobus’ stories he told Miller ‘The Times is mad about

Antrobus and offers to run one a month at forty guineas! They take me twenty

minutes to write. Only 1000 words. All this is very perplexing to my fans who don’t

know whether I am P.G. Wodehouse or James Joyce or what the hell’.64

The point is a telling one: in his essay ‘Minor Mythologies’ Durrell had complained

that ‘the reader who enjoys Proust and Kafka will seldom confess that he enjoys P.G.

Wodehouse and vice versa’. It was a matter of concern to Durrell that ‘a critic

interested in the creative process may find more food for thought in a Stephen

Dedalus than in a Jeeves. Yet he should be prepared to acknowledge them both.’

Both are, in essence, folk tales, locating the core of popular imagination in whatever

genre seems appropriate for the audience. But at the same time, Durrell was also, as

Frank Kermode said of William Golding, ‘a philosophical novelist’.65

Perhaps we should regard a writer’s ‘minor mythologies’ as coming from the dexter

side, while the major works emanate from the sinister, the question being whether the

writer in the middle knows what these two hands are doing. In Durrell’s case, he

certainly did. After he wrote Sicilian Carousel – in my opinion a very poor work – he

wrote to me that it was ‘a makeweight while I am waiting for the cistern to fill up with

the successor to Monsieur’.66

What, then, should we say about the hierarchy of Durrell’s work, from ‘Antrobus’ to

The Avignon Quintet? A critic as persuasive as Harold Bloom has said that the

Quartet is the only book by which he is to be judged.67 It must be borne in mind – at

least by literary historians – that, when the Quartet appeared in the period 1957-60,

64 Durrell-Miller Letters p. 306.65 Quoted in Peter Carey, William Golding p. 201.66 Letter to the author.67 E-mail to the author

15

this type of novel was almost unknown in the English-speaking world. Not only the

setting, but the behaviour of the characters and, indeed, the behaviour of the narrative

itself, is entirely exotic. As Anthony Burgess remarked, ‘because he preferred warm

expatriation to the tepid recording of adultery in Hampstead, he was regarded as a

kind of baroque traitor to our insular literary tradition’. Or, as the London Times said

of William Golding, he was a rare spectacle of ‘an English writer indulging in over-

statement’.68 Not only its exoticism, but also the use of epigraphs from the Marquis de

Sade and the entire question of relativity, identified the Quartet as sui generis – the

product of over twenty years of development in Durrell’s mind, as demonstrated in

the ‘Corfu’ groundplan. The idea that, with relativity, one could interrogate the

interstices where we harbour the unknown, the unheimlich, became crucial to

Durrell’s writing method.

In terms of the ‘Great Tradition’, Durrell was described by F.R. Leavis as ‘not one of

us’, and ‘do[ing] dirt on life’.69 Durrell himself said ‘I knew that I was part of a

splendid tradition [but] the stable ego of fiction had disintegrated’.70 Thus the way

seemed clear to deal with characters who were ‘part of one another’, constituting an

integer only in terms of the overall conception of the work – something which became

more and more complex as his work continued, and culminating in the inter-

relationships of The Avignon Quintet.

Flann O’Brien had gone some of the way with At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and Miguel

de Unamuno had put down markers with the ‘nivola’ such as Mist (1914) but Durrell

(who did not know Flann O’Brien’s work, but was aware of Unamuno) was the first

68 Quoted in Peter Carey: Willam Golding: the man who wrote Lord of the Flies: A life’, p. 205.69 F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962) p. 26: ‘It is true that we can point to the influence of Joyce in a line of writers to which there is no parallel issuing from Lawrence. ... In these writers, in whom a regrettable (if minor) strain of Mr Eliot’s influence seems to me to join with that of Joyce we have, in so far as we have anything significant, the wrong kind of reaction to liberal idealism. I have in mind writers in whom Mr Eliot has expressed an interest in strongly favourable terms: Djuna Barnes of Nightwood, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell of The Black Book. In these writers – at any rate in the last two (and the first seems to me insignificant) – the point of what we are offered affects me as being entirely a desire in Lawrentian phrase, to “do dirt” on life.’ The remark about Durrell being ‘not one of us’ is attributed by R. W. Dasenbrock to Ray Morrison in ‘Centrifugality: An Approach to Lawrence Durrell’, in L. W. Markert and C. Peirce (eds.), p. 210.70 “From the Elephant’s Back”.

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to construct an entire mythology which seemed to speak for a post-war generation

humbled and disoriented by the collapse of civilisation.

I believe that this accounts for the predominance in academe of theses on the Quartet,

with many PhD-hunters unwilling to face the challenges of either Tunc/Nunquam or

the Quintet.

Durrell’s younger daughter, Sappho, recorded that ‘my father lives always on the edge

of madness’, to which we might add his own admission, ‘my job is to throw myself

over precipices’.71 Since he lived permanently in uncertainty and insecurity, I think

this indicates that he believed the writer’s inescapable destiny was to live at risk, to

attempt always to push his work into the unknown, and it may be said that in the

Quintet he threw himself over a precipice too far, from which the envisaged ‘Tibetan

novel’ could not recover.

Assessment – biography

Is it possible to assess the elusiveness and ambiguities in Durrell’s life, in the same

frame of reference as the elusiveness and ambiguities of his work? There remain

question-marks over his Indian background, and the extent to which India, and Tibet,

represented a paradise from which he had been expelled, both physically and

metaphysically. And there remains a different kind of question-mark over his

deployment of his supposed Irishness. After the search for security, for that

‘unregretted home’, in the Corfu years, it is an obvious but seldom contemplated fact

that Durrell was once more déraciné, deprived of any sense of settlement: Athens,

Kalamata, Egypt, the Dodecanese, Argentina, Belgrade, Cyprus, saw to that. Even

after twenty years of settled residence in his final home in Sommières, he was still

able to say to me:

My life has been tremendously lonely. I’ve always been catapulted into jobs… where it took you three or four years to make friends, and always with people I didn’t want to make friends with… In the jobs I had I couldn’t have adopted a bistro ... that would have been bad for the job… It’s been superficially very mouvementé [animated, thrilling, full of incident], but I’ve never had a foyer, a

71 Qtd in MacNiven.

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hearth, a home. Every time I’ve tried to build one the British came along and put a bomb up my arse72

- even though he could hardly have blamed the British for all his peregrinations,

especially the expulsion from Corfu and mainland Greece.

All his life, Durrell lived on the cusp, between realities, between worlds. And the fact

that the scorch-mark of the second world war became the background, and sometimes

the foreground, to so much of his work, shows us how deeply he recognised that the

years of displacement were years of separation from the paradise which he had

glimpsed twice in his earlier life. There is a strong similarity with the physical and

metaphysical experiences of Olivia Manning in the Middle East during the same

period.73 In Clea he refers specifically to the fall of France to the Germans as

symbolising ‘the psychic collapse of Europe… an irremediable failure of the human

will’74 which led to the composition of Tunc/Nunquam.

Cyprus

Another aspect of Durrell’s career, which involves both his ‘island’ books and his

engagement as a British official, is the question of Cyprus, which gave rise to his

book Bitter Lemons and which has been explored by David Roessel. It is the crucial

point at which his head and his heart were in conflict, a deeply wounding experience

in which the necessity for earning a living, and his innate philhellenism could not be

reconciled. As Roderick Beaton will no doubt relate to us, Durrell’s friend George

Seferis – himself both a poet and a diplomat – called Durrell a gauleiter when his

appointment in the British administration was announced, predicting that he would

lose all his Greek friends. The episode brings to the fore the question of how much of

Durrell’s residual Englishness influenced his work. While publicly he ‘worked to

rule’, so to speak, in presenting the British case against enosis, in his private

notebooks he recorded his disillusion at the manner in which British interests were

being pursued.

72 Conversation with the author; cf. also Nunquam 138: ‘I really have no foyer, no hearth of my own’ and the passages in the Quintet, particularly pp. 1091-2, where the need for an informal, congenial locale for those without a home is reiterated; cf. also L. Durrell, letter to A. Perlès, in Art and Outrage p. 7: ‘to walk in this milky dusk with the smoke rising from the bistro. Click of billiard balls, click on the zinc of white wine glasses…’73 Cf. Eve Patten: Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning’s Fictions of War (2011) passim.74 Alexandria Quartet p. 677.

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On 2 June 1956 he recorded this disillusion with the year’s work: ‘Achievements of

H[er] M[ajesty’s] G[overnment] this year […] Turko-Greek discord, Community

strife in Cyprus, 22,000 troops disguised as police […] Suspension of Habeous [sic]

Corpus, Concentration Camps, Completely muzzled press, Right & left wing in

prison, No hope of constitutional issue’.75

Again, his experience was projected onto a fictional character, Pursewarden, who

comments on his dual existence in relation to the Middle East situation: ‘Can England

be as short-sighted as this? Perhaps. I don’t know. It is not my job to know these

things, as an artist; as a political I am filled with misgiving’.76 This dichotomy

haunted Durrell throughout his career in the Middle East.

Women

Durrell’s relations with women – mother, wives, daughters, lovers – were a minefield,

in which, in my opinion, the ‘emotional impotence’ to which I have referred was

crucial. Ian MacNiven quotes both Gerald and his sister Margot to the effect ‘Larry

destroyed women’ – to which we should add Joanna Hodgkin’s observation that there

was ‘a terrible destructive ambivalence to anyone who got close to him’.77 I think it is

reasonable to suggest that he was a misogynist, and that his misogyny stemmed from

a fear of women.

Deborah Lawrenson, author of a highly fictionalised account of Durrell’s life at

Kalami in the 1930s, says that her interest in Durrell as a subject began with what she

calls ‘his persistent charm on paper’.78 This raises several questions which it is

worthwhile to pursue. Firstly, if one accents the words ‘on paper’, it suggests that he

did not display ‘persistent charm’ in other aspects of his life. For example, we have

several documented cases of his violence – both verbal and physical – towards at least

one of his wives, which could hardly be described as ‘charming’, but at the same time

we have plentiful evidence that, when showing a public face, he could exhibit charm

to excess.

75 SIUC/LD/Accession II.76 Alexandria Quartet p. 473.77 J Hodgkin p. 326.78 Interview in The Corfiot, October 2008.

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But there is also a nagging question: was Durrell always ‘charming’ on paper? While

it is probably arguable that the overall intention of his writing was to seduce the

reader, with charm as his chief device, there are also many instances where charm is

completely absent.

But I think that Lawrenson was right to acknowledge the charm which suffuses most

of Durrell’s writing [if you allow ‘charm’ to include the merveilleux….] [miracle].

Due, I think, to two factors: to keep faith with his readers, to maintain their interest by

means of seduction, but, perhaps more importantly, in view of what I have been

discussing today, to keep faith with himself. There is little of the literary violence

which we find in Henry Miller (except for The Black Book which was written in

Miller’s shadow), but when it does surface in Durrell it is very unpleasant – for him

more than for us, I suspect, but nonetheless necessary. As a writer, I personally see

the act of writing as an act of confession, and Durrell’s life work as a whole is that: an

apologia pro vita sua, as it was also for Miller. An account of his place in the world,

and of the world’s place in him – again, as it was also for Miller.

If we return to the three statements which I presented to you as headlines in Durrell’s

work (the battlefield, the lack of tenderness and the tort) they were woven in his work

into a song, a poem which is both a plea and a celebration, a song of hope and

uncertainty.

‘WORKPOINTS’ and ‘CONSEQUENTIAL DATA’I call this list of suggested research topics ‘workpoints’ and ‘consequential data’ in deference to

Durrell’s own use of the terms in the Quartet.79

- Fragmentation of what was once a monolithic study: how far are we capable of applying

theory to Durrell’s work? (He himself was largely sceptical of its relevance.)

- Durrell and Science: he himself acknowledged the relevance of Freud, and frequently includes

references to scientific development in his work (in Tunc/Nunquam, and the Quintet in

particular). Of particular importance is his interest in, and use of, relativity: when he writes

that ‘to intercalate realities […] is the only way to be faithful to Time’.80 In his essay ‘From

the Elephant’s Back’ he says: ‘I think there is a faint hope of a great synthesis which will

79 Alexandria Quartet pp. 197-202, 385-7, 389, 878.80 Ibid/ p. 370

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conjoin all fields of thought, however apparently dissimilar, making them interpenetrate,

interfertilise. This is the sense in which it is worth being a poet’.

- Durrell’s ‘Englishness’: although he scorned much of British behaviour and mores, we should

take note of the fact that, in The Black Book, he speaks of becoming ‘the first Englishman’81

and of Miller’s view that he was ‘English despite himself’.82 - Durrell’s ‘Irishness’: at many points in his life Durrell referred to his Irish ancestry on his

mother’s side; the veracity of this has been disputed by, among others, Michael Haag, but

there can be little doubt that Durrell himself believed it, and attributed the poetic, wayward

side of his character to his Irishness.

- Cyprus: David Roessel has researched Durrell’s work in, and attitude to, the enosis crisis:

should there be further examination of two responses to Bitter Lemons: Rodis Roufos’ The

Age of Bronze (1960)83 and Costas Montis’ Closed Doors: an Answer to Bitter Lemons by

Lawrence Durrell (trans D Roessel and S Stavrou, 2004)?

- Durrell’s library: the collections at SIUC and Paris-X list holdings of sections of Durrell’s

working library; other evidence of his reading can be gleaned from auction and sales

catalogues: a listing of Durrell’s readings, from the Elizabethan dramatists, Egyptology,

Buddhism, and ‘minor mythologies’ would enable scholars to establish with more accuracy

both his sources and his use of them.

- In the light of new evidence in recent publications, it is important, firstly, to establish a more

accurate biography of Durrell [in the sleevenote for the British Library/BBC audio CD

‘Lawrence Durrell: the Spoken Word’ there are several serious factual errors] and, secondly,

to discuss how far we can read biography in the light of fiction (and vice versa): cf. Eve

Patten, Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning’s Fictions of War (2011).

81 Black Book p. 136.82 H. Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi p. 28; cf. also ibid. p. 225: ‘The Englishman in Durrell [is] the least interesting thing about him, to be sure, but an element not to be overlooked’.83 Cf. D Roessel, ‘Rodis Roufos on Bitter Lemons: a suppressed section of The Age of Bronze’, Deus Loci ns 3, 1997.

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Conclusion: Durrell’s doubles

As an epigraph to Justine, the first volume of the Quartet, Durrell quotes from a letter

of Sigmund Freud: ‘I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act

as a process in which four persons are involved’.84 If by this Freud intended to suggest

that every person has a second self, and that therefore in the act of copulation two

people are in fact four, then I think this gives us a profound insight into Durrell’s own

understanding of psychology. Throughout his work, Durrell presented a central

character with a double, or shadow: Darley and Pursewarden in the Quartet, Blanford

and Sutcliffe in the Quintet.

As we have seen, Durrell had told Miller of ‘my double Amicus Nordensis’, which

Miller criticised as ‘the schizophrenic route’. But it seems, from our certain

knowledge of Durrell (rather than surmise), both as a writer and as a person, that there

was considerable latitude for schizophrenia in both public and private.

I would go so far as to say that in Lawrence Durrell we encounter not two, but four

personae: the man whose biography is well established, and which indicates that his

behaviour in private and in public was capable of bifurcation, and the writer who

produced not only the major works with which his name is so closely connected – The

Black Book, the Quartet, Tunc/Nunquam and the Quintet – but also a stream of lesser

works such as he had intended to ascribe to Amicus Nordensis.

This is not unusual. As Joanna Hodgkin remarks, the ‘inner, more complex reality’ is

‘that shadow so beloved of Jungians’.85 Perhaps Nancy knew this and reflected it in

the cover she designed for Pied Piper of Lovers, ‘a harlequin figure split down the

centre, dark and light, the ambivalence at the heart of so much of Larry’s writing –

and their relationship’.86

It is possible that Durrell himself was at times unaware of his dual personality.

Although in the Quartet he makes much use of the mirror as a device, he may not in

fact have been able to reflect very deeply on his own double.

84 Justine p. 1585 J Hodgkin p. 5.86 J Hodgkin p. 162.

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Nevertheless, in the epigraph to Balthazar he quotes Sade:

The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror

sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who

produces the impression.87

In Clea, the final volume of the Quartet, he ascribes to the alter ego, Pursewarden, the

idea that ‘There is no Other; there is only oneself facing forever the problem of one’s

self-discovery’.88 (I might here make an oblique reference to Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself

as Another [1992].)

As I have mentioned, his younger daughter Sappho recorded that ‘my father… has

always lived on the edge of madness’.89 This observation may be directed towards

Durrell’s private life and conscience, and it may also apply to his written work – the

fact that anxiety (angst, angustia) is a keynote of much of his more serious output.

The two strands – the writer and the private persona – came together in the writing of

Tunc/Nunquam, during a period when he himself was conscious of incipient madness,

and exemplified in the madness of the two central characters, ironically named Felix

and Benedicta, happy and blessed.

I have previously, in this forum, spoken of Durrell’s madness and of his position as a

writer at the frontier. Madness of course is subjective and I have been challenged by

psychiatrists who do not perceive any of the clinical symptoms of madness in

Durrell’s life or work. But Durrell, as a writer at the frontier, is a commonplace, as

expressed by George Steiner in metaphysical terms, and I believe that Durrell’s

insecurity as both a man and a writer stems from this precarious liminal condition

which is experienced by so many of us.

In his play Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964) Brian Friel split his central character

into two: ‘Private Gar’ and ‘Public Gar’. His directions read:

87 Alexandria Quartet p. 208.88 Ibid., p. 729.89 R Pine, Lawrence Durrell: the Mindscape p. 18, n.6

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Public Gar is the Gar that people see, talk to, talk about. Private Gar

is the unseen man, the man within, the conscience, the alter ego, the

secret thoughts, the id. Private Gar, the spirit, is invisible to

everybody, always. Nobody except Public Gar hears him talk. But even

Private Gar, although he talks to Public Gar occasionally, never sees

him and never looks at him. One cannot look at one’s alter ego.90

There is a sense, in the Quartet, that Darley never in fact ‘sees’ his alter ego,

Pursewarden, until after the latter’s death and the realisation of his notebooks, ‘My

Conversations with Brother Ass’.

Of more importance than the influences on Durrell is his – admittedly restricted –

influence on other writers, especially John Hawkes, who specifically acknowledges

that The Blood Oranges (1971) would not have been written if it had not been

preceded by Justine and the Quartet in general,91 while William Golding, when

teaching at Hollins College, Virginia, just after the Quartet had appeared in a single

volume, insisted on including it on his course on British post-war novelists.92 I would

particularly draw attention to this short passage from Hawkes’s The Blood Oranges:

we were a quartet of tall and large-boned lovers aged in the wood ... It was another left-hand right-hand day, as I had come to call them, another of those days when the four of us ... fit together like the shapely pieces of a perfectly understandable puzzle ... Each one of us was witness to the other three.93

Despite the vast number of theses that have explored the Quartet, Durrell’s later work

has not inspired so much scholarship or critical study, and, despite the fact that the

Quartet has enjoyed remarkably wide readership, it must also be acknowledged that it

is very much less than that of his younger brother, whose My Family and Other

Animals has sold well in excess of five million copies, compared to 300,000 for

Prospero’s Cell.

90 B Friel, Philadelphia, Here I Come! pp. 11-12.91 Twentieth-Century Literature 33/3 p. 413.92 John Carey, William Golding: the Man who Wrote Lord of the Flies, pp. 253-4.93 J. Hawkes, The Blood Oranges (New York: New Directions, 1971) pp. 17, 88, 184.

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As Durrellian scholars and teachers, we need to recognise the importance of our

subject and at the same time to realise that he isn’t the beginning and the end of

literature. We need to acknowledge, as Keith Brown wrote some years ago,94 that

major attention will always be directed at the D.H Lawrences and the T.S. Eliots. But

within the smaller world of Durrell, if we can be passionate and yet tempered in our

passion, we have it within our grasp to place him as both a major writer and a voice

for the modern world.

Durrell describes the typical Greek as ‘a coward and a hero at the same time; a man

torn between his natural and heroic genius and his hopeless power of ratiocination’.95

Furthermore, he refers to the Greek’s ‘bitter dualism of heart – an interior anarchy,

which will not let him rest’.96 Perhaps this tells us as much about Durrell as it does

about the typical Greek. If Greece allowed Durrell to discover himself, maybe he was

able to identify both the coward and the hero within himself, the dualism and the

anarchy.

Referring to his Indian background, he identified ‘two types of consciousness’: the

Indian and the British, giving him ‘an ambivalence of vision. At times I felt more

Asiatic than European, at times the opposite; at times I felt like a white negro thinking

in pidgin!’97

The need to reconcile east and west, which he attempted in The Avignon Quintet, was

his last explicit intellectual and spiritual journey. But there was also the need to

conceal himself as both a person and an artist. In his final book, Caesar’s Vast Ghost,

a tribute to Provence, he left a warning for those of us who might like to think that we

‘understood’ him, that we had him complete:

Though you an eternity may take

You’ll not unravel the entire mosaic.98

94 In a message to the ILDS conference at San Diego, 1994, read on his behalf by Ian MacNiven.95 Prospero’s Cell pp. 47-8.96 Ibid. p. 72.97 “From the Elephant’s Back”.98 Caesar’s Vast Ghost p. xiv.

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I’m not sure how one unravels a mosaic – Durrell seems to have dug himself into a

mixed metaphor – but it’s apt. One is constantly tempted to think, when writing about

Durrell, that he has the last laugh – that whatever truths one may uncover, whatever

sources of information or inspiration, the ‘supreme trickster’, as he called himself, is

somewhere else – ‘in the other room’, perhaps.

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