288- ] English Literature
Lawrence Durrell
Biography
Lawrence
George Durrell was born on February 27, 1912, in Jullundur in northern India,
near Tibet. His English father, Lawrence Samuel Durrell, and his Irish-English
mother, Louisa Florence Dixie, had also been born in India. This mix of
nationalities marked Durrell’s creative imagination. He would claim in later
years that he had “a Tibetan mentality.”
Durrell’s
“nursery-rhyme happiness” came to an end when he was shipped to England at age
eleven to be formally educated. The immediate discomfort he felt in England he
attributed to its lifestyle, which he termed “the English death.” He explains:
“English life is really like an autopsy. It is so, so dreary.” Deeply
alienated, he refused to adjust himself to England and resisted the
regimentation of school life, failing to pass university exams.
Instead,
he resolved to be a writer. At first he had difficulty finding his voice in
words, both in verse and in fiction. After publishing his first novel, Pied
Piper of Lovers (1935), he invented a pseudonym, Charles Norden, and wrote his
second novel, Panic Spring (1937), for the mass market.
Two
fortunate events occurred in 1935 that changed the course of his career. First,
he persuaded his mother, siblings, and wife, Nancy Myers, to move to Corfu,
Greece, to live more economically and to escape the English winter. Life in
Greece was a revelation; Durrell felt it reconnected him to India. While in
Greece, he wrote a plan for The Book of the Dead, which was an ancestor–though
it bore little resemblance–to what may be his greatest literary accomplishment,
The Alexandria Quartet. Second, Durrell chanced upon Henry Miller’s Tropic of
Cancer (1934) and wrote Miller a fan letter. Thus began a forty-five-year
friendship and correspondence based on their love of literature, their
fascination with the Far East, and their comradeship in the face of personal
and artistic setbacks. In their early letters, Miller praised Durrell and urged
him not to accede to Faber’s suggestion that he expurgate portions of The Black
Book (1938), the work on which Durrell was then focused. Durrell followed
Miller’s advice and stood firm.
After
six years in Corfu and Athens, Durrell and his wife were forced to flee Greece
in 1941, just ahead of the advancing Nazi army. They settled together in Cairo,
along with their baby daughter Penelope Berengaria, who had been born in 1940.
In 1942, separated from his wife, Durrell moved to Alexandria, Egypt, and
became press attaché in the British Information Office. Ostensibly working,
Durrell was in reality closely observing the assortment of sights, sensations,
and people that wartime Alexandria, a crossroads of the East and West, had to
offer. He also met Eve Cohen, a Jewish woman from Alexandria, who was to become
his model for Justine. Durrell married her (his second wife) in 1947, after his
divorce from Nancy Myers. In 1951, their daughter Sappho Jane was born.
In
1945, “liberated from [his] Egyptian prison,” Durrell was “free at last to
return to Greece.” He spent two years in Rhodes as director of public relations
for the Dodocanese Islands. He left Rhodes to become the director of the
British Council Institute in Cordoba, Argentina, from 1947-48. He then moved to
Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he was press attaché from 1949-52.
Durrell
returned to the Mediterranean in 1952, hoping to find the serenity in which to write.
He bought a stone house in Cyprus and earned a living teaching English
literature. During that time period, peace proved elusive. War broke out among
the Cypriot Greeks who desired union with Greece, the British (who were still
attempting to control Cyprus as a crown colony), and the Turkish Cypriots (who
favored partition). Durrell, by this time, had left teaching and was working as
the British public relations officer in Nicosia. He found himself caught
between the warring factions and even became a target for terrorists. Bitter
Lemons (1957) is Durrell’s account of these troubled years.
While
in Cyprus, Durrell began writing Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria
Quartet. He would eventually complete the four books in France. The Quartet was
published between 1957 and 1960 and was a critical and commercial success.
Durrell received recognition as an author of international stature.
After
being forced out of Cyprus, Durrell finally settled in Sommières, in the south
of France. In the next thirty-five years, he produced two more cycles of
novels: The Revolt of Aphrodite, comprising Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970), and
The Avignon Quintet (1974-1985). Neither of these cycles achieved the critical
and popular success of The Alexandria Quartet. Durrell continued writing
poetry, and his Collected Poetry appeared in 1980.
Durrell
married two more times. He wed his third wife, Claude-Marie Vincendon, in 1961.
He was devastated when she died of cancer in 1967. His fourth marriage, to
Ghislaine de Boysson, began in 1973 and ended in 1979. His later years were
darkened by the suicide of his daughter, Sappho-Jane, in 1985. His final work,
Caesar’s Vast Ghost, was published in 1990. Lawrence Durrell died on November
7, 1990.
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