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291- ] English Literature - Lawrence Durrell

291- ] English Literature

Lawrence Durrell 

“Lawrence Durrell” by Anna Lillios, reproduced from Magill’s Survey of World Literature, volume 7, pages 2334-2342. Copyright © 1995, Salem Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the copyright holder. Revised 1997.

The Prince Returns: In Defense of Lawrence Durrell

By J. D. Mersault

“I must confess I have enjoyed nothing. I have been bored my entire life.”

—Lawrence Durrell

Early last year I found myself standing inside Strand bookstore, an entire city block of new, vintage and rare books, and one of the major points of light on New York City’s literary event circuit. Authors gather there for readings, signings, and book releases, and on any day of the week the many floors are overflowing with customers, readers, and tourists. I regularly stopped by, as I’m sure all recent clingers-on to the New York literary community do, to spend an hour or two after work thoroughly rifling through the well-kept sections dedicated to my favourite authors, and daydreaming over the rare first printings of my favourite novels. They have the first edition of East of Eden, The Sun Also Rises, and other cornerstones of American literature behind glass cases, available only to the true connoisseur. The Strand is every bibliophile’s dream. But, on this specific day I was not at the Strand to buy books; I was at the Strand to sell books.

Walking towards the book buyer’s room with two fifty-pound backpacks strapped across my shoulders, I was hopeful I could at least sell half of my lot. I had recently transported my home library from Canada to my apartment in Brooklyn, a task which took more time and money than I foolishly expected it would. And unfortunately, an average income apartment in Brooklyn is a lot smaller and more expensive than those in my hometown, and so I was left with the sad task of having to offload some of the chaff (chaff, in this case, being around twenty-five pristine literary classics) due to space considerations. That and one of the most expensive cities on the planet had certainly lived up to its reputation, and I was practically hemorrhaging money. So the books had to go, and after an afternoon of standing in tightly packed trains and trudging down Broadway, I was just about ready to never see any of them again. Panting in the wet July heat, I began to unpack the books from my bags and place them on the table for appraisal, one by one, all very heavy, all very thick. I am not a strong man.

I confess that I tie up a lot of my personal identity in the books that I own. It’s silly, yes, that so much of my psychic energy is wrapped up in paper, but I’m like a lot of young literary people: I like a nice bookshelf. So it was truly cringe-worthy that I was forced to sell these books, some with new designs and in fine new printing, but it had to be done. I definitely wasn’t carrying them back to Brooklyn. New, these books would be worth between twenty and thirty dollars, and I had hoped that I could get around half of that for each. After all, I knew that condition always played a part in these negotiations, and all were top-notch, with not a single folded page. I was wrong.

“We only pay one dollar for used paperback fiction,” the clerk said. “And this is used paperback fiction, even if it’s all in good condition. We only have so much room, you know.”

I balked. One dollar for Fathers and Sons? One dollar for The Waves?

“Sorry man, it’s store policy,” the clerk said. “I can only give you like fifty bucks. We already have a few copies of these, so some of them are going to have to go on the racks outside.”

The Strand keeps some of their used books in bins outside of the store along Broadway. If the books weren’t damaged now, they soon would be. I bristled with anger and frustration. I was surprised that my beloved novels were worthless. I think the clerk decided that I was likely hard up for train fare and desperate for cash. He began to count them up.

“So, we’ll take all of these. Except, uh…” he said as he slid the Quintet back across the table. “Not Durrell. We haven’t really sold anything of his in a long time.”

As he announced on television in 1986, four years before his death, and the year of my birth, Lawrence Durrell was bored. In ‘86 he was already seventy-six years old, and had written over a dozen major works, including novels, travel literature, poetry, and theatre. He was a towering figure in the austere post-war literary climate of Europe, a champion of experimental prose and poetics, a modern master. He had seen a lot in his life: he had married four times, but watched every one of his wives die, either slowly from mental illness or other diseases, or in one tragic case, a suicide. He had a daughter, but she committed suicide as well in her early thirties. He had lived in and around some of the most awe inspiring cultural centres of the ancient Mediterranean world— Athens, Alexandria, Rhodes, Corfu, Serbia, Cyprus, and perhaps foremost, Avignon, but then watched as the military and financial conflicts of the last great century saw them all destroyed or fade into obscurity. I imagine him, a very old man in the late 80s, still waiting for the other shoe to drop, for some kind of last laugh, for some kind of final, lasting literary acclaim.

But that never happened. The last train never came in—Lawrence Durrell died, largely unnoticed by the literary world, in 1990.

And now, in 2014, Durrell has failed to be appreciated in any substantial way by modern audiences. In fact, the opposite is true: he is positively derided in most serious literary circles, and his books are rarely studied in universities. His novels are said to be antiquated and selfish, indulgent and over-written. His prose, once thought to be incisive and muscular, is now judged as florid and confusing. His cipher-like complexities have been have been set aside with a shrug. During my stint working in the literary industry in New York, few of my peers, people within five years of my age, had even heard of Durrell, or if they had, remembered his books as overly verbose bricks they had assigned themselves out of guilt. And yet, sixty years ago, few people doubted that the books of The Alexandria Quartet, Durrell’s first serious set of novels, were the literary achievements of their age, and would undoubtedly win him the Nobel Prize. But they didn’t. And nowadays, they are little more than a strange literary oddity.

In the 1961 Nobel deliberations, Durrell didn’t even make the final lightning round. In ’62 however, he was given some consideration. Along with Robert Graves and French dramatic Jean Anouilh, he made the shortlist for the prize, but ultimately lost out to that great, although sometimes shrill voice of America, John Steinbeck.

When one examines the reasoning behind the committee’s decision, it appears that Steinbeck’s citation arose largely from extra-literary considerations and lethargy. From the recently declassified archives in Sweden (Nobel nominations are considered top secret for an incubation period of fifty years), we learn that ’62 was a standstill year for the Swedish academy. As a member reported, “There aren’t any obvious candidates for the Nobel Prize, and the committee is in an unenviable position.” Steinbeck was apparently the lowest of all the hanging fruit. One wonders why the committee had nominated him a previous eight times if he was indeed a mollifying choice.

Jean Anouilh suffered from simply being French. The poet-diplomat Saint-John Perse had won in 1960 and it was decided that awarding the prize to another French citizen would be bad form. And Sartre was on the rise, sure to take it home soon.

Ezra Pound damned Graves. Graves was ultimately decided to be poet rather than a novelist—a line which, nowadays, is often crossed without reproach. And because he shared the poetic limelight with the still-clinging-to-life Pound, an undeniable master, he was overshadowed. Pound’s skill as a poet was considered unparalleled by the committee, and it was decided that as long as he remained alive, no other poet could claim the prize. Pound was never chosen due to his politics, likely a decision by the committee to attempt to erode his future impact in the canon, and sideline him for more socially acceptable, less insane artists. If Graves were awarded the prize that year, I imagine an asterisk next to his name on the plaque with the subtext “Best Poet in the World Who Isn’t a Fascist.” The Nobel and other prestigious awards often contribute considerably to lasting acclaim. But award committees are subject to trending literary climates, nationalities, and politics—this was certainly the case in ’62, and is surely the case still.

In a deadlocked year, it’s easy to imagine the committee would opt for a safe bet, and not want to err on the side of an experimental newcomer in Durrell. For a body so focused on posterity, the Swedish academy would be sensitive to what might one day be seen as a misstep. Officially, Durrell wasn’t given the nod because the committee wanted more time to see his catalogue develop. The committee, however, also noted that his work “gives a dubious aftertaste… because of [his] monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications.” The problem for Durrell was that he never got another look. After ’62, no more nominations came in. His next series of novels, The Avignon Quintet, passed without much critical notice. But if for no other reason than Nobel or Pulitzer Prize winners get a special designation in their section at used book stores, and their books are generally reprinted multiple times, I regret that Durrell missed his chance.

Lawrence Durrell is my favourite author. I own every book he’s ever written in every imaginable literary form, including a few first printings. If someone published his tax records, I would probably buy those too. So it struck me personally that the clerk at the Strand would not even offer me a dollar for my copy of The Avignon Quintet, a series of novels that are, in my mind, without equal. Durrell’s books are very difficult to understand, and to even read, and for this reason he is understudied and under-read. But as I stood in the back of the bookseller’s room at the Strand, I wondered about written word itself, or specifically the written word which is printed in a physical book, which in the millennial era of Kindles and iPads is becoming steadily less valued, or in Durrell’s case, apparently literally worthless. I wondered about posterity. How can a person spend a life in austere artistic toil, but be lucky to wind up in a rack on Broadway?

I believe that the main reason Durrell has fallen out of favour with contemporary audiences is that he doesn’t really have an oeuvre. Steinbeck’s novels, in contrast, are mainly concerned with rural American hardships in the dog days of the depression, and are populated by generally honest folks just trying to find their place in the great American dream: an enduring motif if there ever was one, fit to be studied ad nauseam in prep schools and universities. Durrell’s novels, of which there are more than a dozen, share no common figure, treatment, or theme (despite perhaps, their “erotic complications”), and often are occupied with topics outside the pertinence of the high school classroom. Of course, many authors have endured along with their risqué or erudite tropes, but none who have so readily shirked the confines of a national identity, linear narrative, or ability to be brief. Durrell’s books are also very long.

However, it is my opinion that Durrell’s works, although experimental and somewhat radical for his time, are long overdue for another reading, and are slightly less insane than often made out to be. Despite his complexity, Durrell manages to communicate with us clearly, although circuitously, and largely without the overwhelming literary affectation of various experimental authors writing today, authors who, now much beloved by the established literary community, stand on his shoulders. Metafiction is now generally an acceptable mode in modern literature, if the enduring success of Murakami, Coetzee, and even to some extent the poetry of Lydia Davis can be trusted.

 A closer reading of Durrell will show that experimental fiction is something he was doing very well sixty years ago, and because of this he deserves at least a nod of recognition from that section of the contemporary literary audience who appreciate a deep, layered novel. “Layered” is a term often bandied around by critics describing authors writing about authors, but in Durrell’s cause, the authorship of his books are actually disputed by characters within his books, adding another layer to the strata. For this reason, Durrell requires a lot of patience. I understand that patience is something which seems to be in short supply from a lot of people in my generation, especially when understanding is in doubt. But with enough patience, Durrell is an enjoyable puzzle. Below, I offer a detailed introduction to the Quintet as an effort to tempt the reader. It may seem like I’m spoiling the plot, but rather I’m providing a table of contents. The novels of the Quintet can be read in any order.

The first book of The Avignon Quintet, in my opinion Durrell’s most important work, is called Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness. The novel is written from five different perspectives and claims to be written by five different people, four of whom have not ever, to my knowledge, existed: the first person is Lawrence Durrell (who definitely existed) the author, also referred to as D in the novel, and who sometimes refers to himself as the Devil in the Details, or ‘a devil’, and is referred to as such by numerous others in the book, often equating him with the “Prince” of darkness himself. However, Durrell is physically writing the book in real life as the story unfolds and he never denies this. The book says his name on the front. His face is on the back. He has a mailing address, drives a car, and shaves every morning. He is as real as anything else is real.

Second, the novel claims to be wholly invented by a character within the novel who doesn’t make his appearance until the crucial last fifty pages once he finally wrestles the narrative from Durrell: the fictional author Aubrey Blanford. Earlier in the narrative, Blanford is mentioned to have recently finished writing a novel, and is now famous after its widespread appeal. Blanford contends that the very book Durrell claims to have written, and the one the reader is currently holding, Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness, Blanford actually wrote himself. And he has proof. He also has a mailing address and shaves his (fictional) face every morning. He is conscious of Durrell, and is constantly quarrelling with him over who invented who first.

Third is Robin Sutcliffe, a character in Blanford’s novel, solely created by Blanford and who admits to this, but who will regularly call Blanford up on the telephone from time to time to ask for writing advice. Blanford is known to be very old, and perhaps a bit addled, but a great writer. Sutcliffe is writing the same novel as Blanford and Durrell, and although it is the same book word for word, Sutcliffe calls it by another name, just The Prince of Darkness, to distinguish it from the two.

The crucial difference between Sufcliffe and Blanford is that Sutcliffe knows that he is unfortunately a figment of Blanford’s imagination, whereas Blanford readily denies the fact that he is a figment of Durrell’s. Sutcliffe is a sympathetic character: it bothers him a great deal that he actually doesn’t exist, and he’s often rather depressed. But by writing the same book as Blanford, and simply changing the title, Sutcliffe is vying for, in spite of the overwhelming limitation of not technically existing, something to extricate himself. There is a particularly jarring scene where Sutcliffe calls Blanford up and berates him for being completely insane because he’s talking to Sutcliffe in the first place.

Fourth is Bruce Drexel, the protagonist, and the person who narrates most of the novel. Bruce actually writes most of the novel, or at least he dictates it to be written, because Bruce’s notes and diaries allegedly comprise the bulk of the text. Of all the characters, he does the most “writing.” Bruce is acquainted with Sutcliffe, whom he knows to be a great author, and he’s vaguely aware that Sutcliffe is trying to write a novel based on Bruce’s life. Bruce believes that he himself is as real as Durrell, although he knows a fictionalized version of himself is being interpreted in an upcoming novel by his friend Sutcliffe. But that doesn’t bother him. After all, Bruce is a man who goes about the world and does all kinds of interesting things. He’s a diplomat and press attaché for the government (Durrell’s old job: in many ways, Bruce is Durrell). It doesn’t strike Bruce as odd that Sutcliffe is writing a novel in which Bruce is the sole character, because Bruce believes that’s something Sutcliffe would do. Bruce does not know, however, that Sutcliffe is a fictional creation of Blanford. In fact, if that is true, Bruce would also be a fictional creation of Blanford because he lives in Sutcliffe’s world. But Bruce never meets Blanford, he only hears of him as a distant friend of Sutcliffe.

 

Fifth (and yes, there are five for a reason, this is a quintet after all) and final, is Piers de Nogaret, the only character in the book who actually might be “real” insofar as something happens to him outside of the loop of “fiction”: he dies on the first page. Later, when the body is removed, Bruce finds a secret manuscript hidden by Piers’ in the dead man’s hotel room. Bruce then begins to write a novel based on this manuscript. The manuscript is of course the incomplete novel, written by none other than Piers de Nogaret himself, and unfinished due to his apparent suicide: Monsieur, or the Prince of Darkness.

In addition, and this is somewhat difficult to believe, all of the alleged writers of the book were at one time members of a secretive and bizarre Gnostic cult. This cult believed that when Christ was resurrected he was in fact resurrected not by God, but by the Devil, and that this is the main source of all evil in the universe. Because of this belief, this wholly undermining aspect of the universe, the presumption of this cult is that humanity’s situation is now absolutely unsolvable, and, chillingly: the only sensible reaction to being alive is suicide. This explains why all the characters in the book die off one by one, in “apparent” suicides. They’re looking for a way out of the universe. This also glimpses into Durrell’s past, commenting on the suicides of his wife and daughter, and perhaps, sadly, of Durrell himself.

There are four more books in the series, each as complex and exciting as the first. In the final novel, Quinx, Durrell ties everything up in one brilliant masterstroke. One of last chapters of the last book in the Quintet, the last series that Durrell wrote before his death, is entitled, fittingly, The Prince Returns.

Durrell is complicated, and he does go on a little too long. Even if I’ve managed to do a decent job in summarizing the first book of the Quintet, it’s still very much a challenge to read. But in my opinion, a worth-while challenge, one that awards the reader with a novel that can be studied and re-read many times: a novel that deserves a place in the canon. It is a novel uniquely positioned in opposition to the current trend of bloated, post-modern novels about nothing, to deliver some much needed insight into the mirage-like layers of reality in our new century.

By naming himself as a character in his fiction, Durrell became, in a way, fictional himself. A character stuck in a time forgotten. But in the digital world of the self detached from its surroundings, the subject detached from the object, his study of the tension between the real and the unreal can help bring us back to reality. Durrell wasn’t insane, he was prescient.

I never did sell any of my books at the Strand. I hauled them all back to my small apartment in Brooklyn, stacked them up under my sink, and found a third job. Most of them are still there, waiting to be shipped home. But not Durrell. His books returned with me.

What will be his legacy?

“When I leave I usually go to the station on my way home and wait for the last train to come in from Paris. There is never anyone on it I know—how could there be? Often it is completely empty. But I walk about the town at night with a sort of numbness, looking keenly about me, as if for a friend.”

  

290- ] English Literature , Lawrence Durrell

290- ] English Literature

Lawrence Durrell 

Lawrence Durrell (born Feb. 27, 1912, Jullundur, India—died Nov. 7, 1990, Sommières, France) was an English novelist, poet, and writer of topographical books, verse plays, and farcical short stories who is best known as the author of The Alexandria Quartet, a series of four interconnected novels.

Durrell spent most of his life outside England and had little sympathy with the English character. He was educated in India until he reached age 11 and moved in 1935 to the island of Corfu. During World War II he served as press attaché to the British embassies in Cairo and Alexandria, and after the war he spent time in Yugoslavia, Rhodes, Cyprus, and the south of France.

Durrell wrote several books of poetry and prose before the publication of The Alexandria Quartet, composed of Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960). The lush and sensuous tetralogy became a best-seller and won high critical esteem. The first three volumes described, from different viewpoints, a series of events in Alexandria before World War II; the fourth carried the story forward into the war years. By its subjective narrative structure The Alexandria Quartet demonstrates one of its main themes: the relativity of truth. More important is the implied theme: that sexual experience, the practice of art, and love are all ways of learning to understand and finally to pass beyond successive phases of development toward ultimate truth and reality.

Durrell’s later novels, Tunc (1968) and its sequel, Nunquam (1970), were less well received than his earlier fiction. The Avignon Quintet—consisting of Monsieur; or, The Prince of Darkness (1974), Livia; or, Buried Alive (1978), Constance; or, Solitary Practices (1982), Sebastian; or, Ruling Passions (1983), and Quinx; or, The Ripper’s Tale (1985)—received mixed reviews. He first gained recognition as a poet with A Private Country (1943), and his reputation was established by Cities, Plains and People (1946), The Tree of Idleness (1953), and The Ikons (1966). His Collected Poems 1931–74 appeared in 1980. In the nonfiction works Prospero’s Cell (1945), Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953), and Bitter Lemons (1957), Durrell describes the Greek islands of Corfu, where he lived with his first wife in 1937–38; Rhodes, where in 1945–46 he acted as press officer to the Allied government; and Cyprus, his home from 1952 to 1956. Many critics regarded his poetry and nonfiction books as his most enduring achievements. His last book, Caesar’s Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence, was published in 1990. Durrell also carried on a 45-year-long correspondence with American writer Henry Miller.

The Alexandria Quartet

work by Durrell

The Alexandria Quartet, series of four novels by Lawrence Durrell. The lush and sensuous tetralogy, which consists of Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960), is set in Alexandria, Egypt, during the 1940s. Three of the books are written in the first person, Mountolive in the third. The first three volumes describe, from different viewpoints, a series of events in Alexandria before World War II; the fourth carries the story forward into the war years. The events of the narrative are mostly seen through the eyes of one L.G. Darley, who observes the interactions of his lovers, friends, and acquaintances in Alexandria.

In Justine, Darley attempts to recover from and understand his recently ended affair with Justine Hosnani. Reviewing various papers and examining his memories, he reads the events of his recent past in romantic terms. Balthazar, named for Darley’s friend, a doctor and mystic, reinterprets Darley’s views from a philosophical and intellectual point of view. The third novel is a straightforward narrative of events, and Clea, volume four, reveals Darley healing, maturing, and becoming capable of loving Clea Montis, a painter and the woman for whom he was destined.  

289-] English Literature , Lawrence Durrell

289- ] English Literature

Lawrence Durrell 

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

Wordsworth; Selected by Lawrence Durrell (1973), edited by Durrell  

288- ] English Literature , Lawrence Durrell

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.