289- ] English Literature
Lawrence Durrell
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Lawrence George Durrell CBE (/ˈdʊrəl, ˈdʌr-/; 27 February 1912 –
7 November 1990) was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and
travel writer. He was the eldest brother of naturalist and writer Gerald
Durrell.
Born in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to
England at the age of 11 for his education. He did not like formal education,
and started writing poetry at the age of 15. His first book was published in
1935, when he was 23 years old. In March 1935 he and his mother and younger siblings
moved to the island of Corfu. Durrell spent many years thereafter living around
the world.
His most famous work is The Alexandria Quartet, published
between 1957 and 1960. The best-known novel in the series is the first,
Justine. Beginning in 1974, Durrell published The Avignon Quintet, using many
of the same techniques. The first of these novels, Monsieur, or the Prince of
Darkness, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1974. The middle novel,
Constance, or Solitary Practices, was nominated for the 1982 Booker Prize. In
the 20th century, Durrell was a bestselling author and one of the most
celebrated writers in England.
Durrell supported his writing by working for many years in the
Foreign Service of the British government. His sojourns in various places
during and after World War II (such as his time in Alexandria, Egypt) inspired
much of his work. He married four times, and had a daughter with each of his
first two wives.
Early years in India and schooling in England
Durrell was born in Jalandhar, British India, the eldest son of
Indian-born British colonials Louisa (who was Anglo-Irish) and Lawrence Samuel
Durrell, an engineer of English ancestry. His first school was St. Joseph's
School, North Point, Darjeeling. He had three younger siblings — two brothers
and a sister — naturalist Gerald Durrell, Leslie Durrell and author Margaret
Durrell.
Like many other children of the British Raj, at the age of 11,
Durrell was sent to England for schooling, where he briefly attended St Olave's
Grammar School before being sent to St Edmund's School Canterbury. His formal
education was unsuccessful, and he failed his university entrance examinations.
He began to write poetry seriously at the age of 15. His first collection,
Quaint Fragments, was published in 1931, when he was 19 years old.
Durrell's father died of a brain haemorrhage in 1928, at the age
of 43. His mother brought the family to England, and in 1932, she, Durrell, and
his younger siblings settled in Bournemouth. There, he and his younger brother
Gerald became friends with Alan G. Thomas, who had a bookstore and would become
an antiquarian. Durrell had a short spell working for an estate agent in
Leytonstone (East London).
Adult life and prose writings
First marriage and Durrell's move to Corfu
On 22 January 1935, Durrell married art student Nancy Isobel
Myers (1912–1983), with whom he briefly ran a photographic studio in London. It
was the first of his four marriages. Durrell was always unhappy in England, and
in March of that year he persuaded his new wife, and his mother and younger
siblings, to move to the Greek island of Corfu. There they could live more
economically and escape both the English weather, and what Durrell considered
the stultifying English culture, which he described as "the English
death".
That same year Durrell's first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, was
published by Cassell. Around this time he chanced upon a copy of Henry Miller's
1934 novel Tropic of Cancer. After reading it, he wrote to Miller, expressing
intense admiration for his novel. Durrell's letter sparked an enduring
friendship and mutually critical relationship that spanned 45 years. Durrell's
next novel, Panic Spring, was strongly influenced by Miller's work, while his
1938 novel The Black Book abounded with "four-letter words...
grotesques,... [and] its mood equally as apocalyptic" as Tropic.
In Corfu, Lawrence and Nancy lived together in bohemian style.
For the first few months, the couple lived with the rest of the Durrell family
in the Villa Anemoyanni at Kontokali. In early 1936, Durrell and Nancy moved to
the White House, a fisherman's cottage on the shore of Corfu's northeastern
coast at Kalami, then a tiny fishing village. The Durrell family's friend
Theodore Stephanides, a Greek doctor, scientist and poet, was a frequent guest,
and Miller stayed at the White House in 1939.
Durrell fictionalised this period of his sojourn on Corfu in the
lyrical novel Prospero's Cell. His younger brother Gerald Durrell, who became a
naturalist, published his own version in his memoir My Family and Other Animals
(1954) and in the following two books of Gerald's so-called Corfu Trilogy,
published in 1969 and 1978. Gerald describes Lawrence as living permanently
with his mother and siblings — his wife Nancy is not mentioned at all. Lawrence,
in his turn, refers only briefly to his brother Leslie, and he does not mention
that his mother and two other siblings were also living on Corfu in those
years. The accounts cover a few of the same topics; for example, both Gerald
and Lawrence describe the roles played in their lives by the Corfiot taxi
driver Spyros Halikiopoulos and Theodore Stephanides. In Corfu, Lawrence became
friends with Marie Aspioti, with whom he cooperated in the publication of
Lear's Corfu.: 260
Pre WW2: In Paris with Miller and Nin
In August 1937, Lawrence and Nancy travelled to the Villa Seurat
in Paris, France, to meet Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. Together with Alfred
Perles, Nin, Miller, and Durrell "began a collaboration aimed at founding
their own literary movement. Their projects included The Shame of the Morning
and the Booster, a country club house organ that the Villa Seurat group appropriated
"for their own artistic ... ends." They also started the Villa Seurat
Series in order to publish Durrell's Black Book, Miller's Max and the White
Phagocytes, and Nin's Winter of Artifice. Jack Kahane of the Obelisk Press
served as publisher.
Durrell said that he had three literary uncles: T. S. Eliot, the
Greek poet George Seferis, and Miller. He first read Miller after finding a
copy of Tropic of Cancer that had been left behind in a public lavatory. He
said the book shook him "from stem to stern".
Durrell's first novel of note, The Black Book: An Agon, was
strongly influenced by Miller; it was published in Paris in 1938. The mildly
pornographic work was not published in Great Britain until 1973. In the story,
the main character Lawrence Lucifer struggles to escape the spiritual sterility
of dying England and finds Greece to be a warm and fertile environment.
World War Two
Breakdown of marriage
At the outbreak of World War Two in 1939, Durrell's mother and
siblings returned to England, while Nancy and he remained on Corfu. In 1940,
they had a daughter, Penelope Berengaria. After the fall of Greece, Lawrence
and Nancy escaped from Kalamata, where they had been teaching, via Crete to
Alexandria, Egypt. The marriage was already under strain and they separated in
1942. Nancy took the baby Penelope with her to Jerusalem.
During his years on Corfu, Durrell had made notes for a book
about the island. He did not write it fully until he was in Egypt towards the
end of the war. In the book Prospero's Cell, Durrell described Corfu as
"this brilliant little speck of an island in the Ionian". with waters
"like the heartbeat of the world itself".
Press attaché in Egypt and Rhodes; second marriage
During World War Two, Durrell served as a press attaché to the
British embassies, first in Cairo and then Alexandria. While in Alexandria he
met Eve (Yvette) Cohen (1918–2004), a Jewish Alexandrian. She inspired his
character Justine in The Alexandria Quartet. In 1947, after his divorce from
Nancy was completed, Durrell married Eve Cohen, with whom he had been living
since 1942. The couple's daughter, Sappho Jane, was born in Oxfordshire in
1951, and named after the ancient Greek poet Sappho.
In May 1945, Durrell obtained a posting to Rhodes, the largest
of the Dodecanese islands that Italy had taken over from the disintegrating
Ottoman Empire in 1912 during the Balkan Wars. With the Italian surrender to
the Allies in 1943, German forces took over most of the islands and held onto
them as besieged fortresses until the war's end. Mainland Greece was at that
time locked in civil war. A temporary British military government was
established in the Dodecanese at war's end, pending sovereignty being
transferred to Greece in 1947, as part of war reparations from Italy. Durrell
set up house with Eve in the little gatekeeper's lodge of an old Turkish
cemetery, just across the road from the building used by the British
Administration. (Today this is the Casino in Rhodes' new town.) His
co-habitation with Eve Cohen could be discreetly ignored by his employer, while
the couple gained from staying within the perimeter security zone of the main
building. His book Reflections on a Marine Venus was inspired by this period
and was a lyrical celebration of the island. It avoids more than a passing
mention of the troubled war times.
British Council work in Córdoba and Belgrade; teaching in Cyprus
In 1947, Durrell was appointed director of the British Council
Institute in Córdoba, Argentina. He served there for eighteen months, giving
lectures on cultural topics. He returned to London with Eve in the summer of
1948, around the time that Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia broke ties with Stalin's
Cominform. Durrell was posted by the British Council to Belgrade, Yugoslavia,
and served there until 1952. This sojourn gave him material for his novel White
Eagles over Serbia (1957).
In 1952, Eve had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalised in
England. Durrell moved to Cyprus with their daughter Sappho Jane, buying a
house and taking a position teaching English literature at the Pancyprian
Gymnasium to support his writing. He next worked in public relations for the
British government during the local agitation for union with Greece. He wrote
about his time in Cyprus in Bitter Lemons, which won the Duff Cooper Prize in
1957. In 1954, he was selected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Durrell left Cyprus in August 1956. Political agitation on the island and his
British government position resulted in his becoming a target for assassination
attempts.: 27
Justine and The Alexandria Quartet
In 1957, Durrell published Justine, the first novel of what was
to become his most famous work, The Alexandria Quartet. Justine, Balthazar
(1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960), deal with events before and during
the Second World War in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. The first three books
tell essentially the same story and series of events, but from the varying
perspectives of different characters. Durrell described this technique in his
introductory note in Balthazar as "relativistic". Only in the final
novel, Clea, does the story advance in time and reach a conclusion. Critics
praised the Quartet for its richness of style, the variety and vividness of its
characters, its movement between the personal and the political, and its
locations in and around the ancient Egyptian city which Durrell portrays as the
chief protagonist: "The city which used us as its flora—precipitated in us
conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!"
The Times Literary Supplement review of the Quartet stated: "If ever a
work bore an instantly recognizable signature on every sentence, this is
it."
In 2012, when the Nobel Records were opened after 50 years, it
was revealed that Durrell had been nominated for the 1961 Nobel Prize in
Literature, but did not make the final list. In 1962, however, he did receive
serious consideration, along with Robert Graves, Jean Anouilh, and Karen
Blixen, but ultimately lost to John Steinbeck. The academy decided that
"Durrell was not to be given preference this year"—probably because
"they did not think that The Alexandria Quartet was enough, so they
decided to keep him under observation for the future." However, he was
never nominated again. They also noted that he "gives a dubious aftertaste
… because of [his] monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications."
Two further marriages and settling in Languedoc
In 1955 Durrell separated from Eve Cohen. He married again in
1961, to Claude-Marie Vincendon, whom he met on Cyprus. She was a Jewish woman
born in Alexandria. Durrell was devastated when Claude-Marie died of cancer in
1967. He married for the fourth and last time in 1973, to Ghislaine de Boysson,
a French woman. They divorced in 1979.
In the spring of 1960, Durrell was hired to rewrite the script
for the 1963 film Cleopatra. The production company had also proposed a film of
Justine which would eventually appear in 1969.
Durrell settled in Sommières, a small village in Languedoc,
France, where he purchased a large house on the edge of the village. The house
was situated in extensive grounds surrounded by a wall. Here he wrote The
Revolt of Aphrodite, comprising Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970). He also
completed The Avignon Quintet, published from 1974 to 1985, which used many of
the same motifs and styles found in his metafictional Alexandria Quartet.
Although the related works are frequently described as a quintet, Durrell
referred to it as a "quincunx".
The opening novel, Monsieur, or the Prince of Darkness, received
the 1974 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. That year, Durrell was living in the
United States and serving as the Andrew Mellon Visiting professor of humanities
at the California Institute of Technology. The middle novel of the quincunx,
Constance, or Solitary Practices (1981), which portrays France in the 1940s
under the German occupation, was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1982.
Other works from this period are Sicilian Carousel, a
non-fiction celebration of that island, The Greek Islands, and Caesar's Vast
Ghost, which is set in and chiefly about the region of Provence, France.
Later years, literary influences, attitudes and reputation
A longtime smoker, Durrell suffered from emphysema for many
years. He died of a stroke at his house in Sommières in November 1990, and was
buried in the churchyard of the Chapelle St-Julien de Montredon in Sommières.
He was predeceased by his younger daughter, Sappho Jane, who
took her own life in 1985 at the age of 33. After Durrell's death, it emerged
that Sappho's diaries included allusions to alleged sexual abuse by her father.
Durrell's government service and his attitudes
Durrell worked for several years in the service of the Foreign
Office. He was senior press officer to the British embassies in Athens and
Cairo, press attaché in Alexandria and Belgrade, and director of the British
Institutes in Kalamata, Greece, and Córdoba, Argentina. He was also director of
Public Relations in the Dodecanese Islands and on Cyprus. He later refused an
honour as a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George,
because he felt his "conservative, reactionary and right-wing"
political views might be a cause for embarrassment.: 185 Durrell's works of
humour, Esprit de Corps and Stiff Upper Lip, are about life in the diplomatic
corps, particularly in Serbia. He claimed to have disliked both Egypt and
Argentina, although not nearly so much as he disliked Yugoslavia.
Durrell's poetry
Durrell's poetry has been overshadowed by his novels, but Peter
Porter, in his introduction to a Selected Poems, calls Durrell "One of the
best [poets] of the past hundred years. And one of the most enjoyable."
Porter describes Durrell's poetry: "Always beautiful as sound and syntax.
Its innovation lies in its refusal to be more high-minded than the things it
records, together with its handling of the whole lexicon of language."
British citizenship
For much of his life, Durrell resisted being identified solely
as British, or as only affiliated with Britain. He preferred to be considered
cosmopolitan. Since his death, there have been claims that Durrell never had
British citizenship, but he was originally classified as a British citizen as
he was born to British colonial parents living in India under the British Raj.
In 1966 Durrell and many other former and present British
residents became classified as non-patrial, as a result of an amendment to the
Commonwealth Immigrants Act. The law was covertly intended to reduce migration
from India, Pakistan, and the West Indies, but Durrell was also penalized by it
and refused citizenship. He had not been told that he needed to "register
as a British citizen in 1962 under the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962".
As The Guardian reported in 2002, Durrell in 1966 was "one
of the best selling, most celebrated English novelists of the late 20th
century" and "at the height of his fame". Denied the normal
citizenship right to enter or settle in Britain, Durrell had to apply for a
visa for each entry. Diplomats were outraged and embarrassed at these events. "Sir
Patrick Reilly, the ambassador in Paris, was so incensed that he wrote to his
Foreign Office superiors: 'I venture to suggest it might be wise to ensure that
ministers, both in the Foreign Office and the Home Office, are aware that one
of our greatest living writers in the English language is being debarred from
the citizenship of the United Kingdom to which he is entitled.'"
Legacy
After Durrell's death, his lifelong friend Alan G. Thomas
donated a collection of books and periodicals associated with Durrell to the
British Library. This is maintained as the distinct Lawrence Durrell
Collection. Thomas had earlier edited an anthology of writings, letters and
poetry by Durrell, published as Spirit of Place (1969). It contained material
related to Durrell's own published works. An important documentary resource is
kept by the Bibliothèque Lawrence Durrell at Paris Nanterre University.
Bibliography
Novels
Pied Piper of Lovers (1935) Panic Spring, under the pseudonym
Charles Norden (1937)The Black Book (1938; republished in Great Britain in 1973
by Faber and Faber)Cefalu (1947; republished as The Dark Labyrinth in 1958)
White Eagles Over Serbia (1957) The Alexandria Quartet
(1962)Justine (1957) Balthazar (1958)Mountolive (1958)Clea (1960) The Revolt of
Aphrodite (1974) Tunc (1968) Nunquam (1970) The Avignon Quintet (1992) Monsieur:
or, The Prince of Darkness (1974) Livia: or, Buried Alive (1978) Constance: or,
Solitary Practices (1982) Sebastian: or, Ruling Passions (1983) Quinx: or, The
Ripper's Tale (1985) Judith (2012, written 1962-c. 1966)
Travel
Prospero's Cell: A guide to the landscape and manners of the
island of Corcyra [Corfu] (1945; republished 2000) (ISBN 0-571-20165-2) Reflections
on a Marine Venus (1953) Bitter Lemons (1957; republished as Bitter Lemons of
Cyprus 2001) Blue Thirst (1975) Sicilian Carousel (1977) The Greek Islands
(1978) Caesar's Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence (1990)
Poetry
Quaint Fragments: Poems Written between the Ages of Sixteen and
Nineteen (1931) Ten Poems (1932) Transition: Poems (1934) A Private Country
(1943)
Cities, Plains and People (1946) On Seeming to Presume (1948) The
Tree of Idleness and Other Poems (1955) Collected Poems (1960) The Poetry of
Lawrence Durrell (1962) Selected Poems: 1935–1963. Edited by Alan Ross (1964) The
Ikons (1966) The Suchness of the Old Boy (1972) Collected Poems: 1931–1974.
Edited by James A. Brigham (1980) Selected Poems of Lawrence Durrell. Edited by
Peter Porter (2006)
Drama
Bromo Bombastes, under the pseudonym Gaffer Peeslake (1933) Sappho:
A Play in Verse (1950) An Irish Faustus: A Morality in Nine Scenes (1963) Acte
(1964)
Humour
Esprit de Corps, Sketches from Diplomatic Life (1957) Stiff
Upper Lip, Life Among the Diplomats (1958) Sauve Qui Peut (1966) Antrobus
Complete (1985), brings together the three preceding volumes plus the
previously uncollected sketch "Smoke, the embassy cat" (1978); omits
"A smircher besmirched", which appeared in the U.S. but not the
British edition of Stiff Upper Lip
Letters and essays
A Key to Modern British Poetry (1952) Art & Outrage: A Correspondence About
Henry Miller Between Alfred Perles and Lawrence Durrell (1959)
Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller: A Private Correspondence
(1963), edited by George Wickes
Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel (1969), edited by
Alan G. Thomas
Literary Lifelines: The Richard Aldington—Lawrence Durrell
Correspondence (1981), edited by Ian S. MacNiven and Harry T. Moore
A Smile in the Mind's Eye (1980)
"Letters to T. S. Eliot" (1987), Twentieth Century
Literature Vol. 33, No. 3 pp. 348–358.
The Durrell-Miller Letters: 1935–80 (1988), edited by Ian S.
MacNiven
Letters to Jean Fanchette (1988), edited by Jean Fanchette
From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings
(2015), edited by James Gifford
Editing and translating
Six Poems From the Greek of Sikelianós and Seféris (1946),
translated by Durrell
The King of Asine and Other Poems (1948), by George Seferis and
translated by Durrell, Bernard Spencer, and Nanos Valaoritis
The Curious History of Pope Joan (1954; revised 1960), originally
"The Papess Joanne" by Emmanuel Roídes and translated by Durrell
The Best of Henry Miller (1960), edited by Durrell
New Poems 1963: A P.E.N. Anthology of Contemporary Poetry
(1963), edited by Durrell
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