Ireland as a State of Mind

Abstract

‘A child, a poet, a drunken Irishman’.¹ Durrell’s self-description was a useful sobriquet which suggested alternative worlds and defied definition. He had three reasons for wanting to be ‘Irish’: the Irish were traditionally anti-English; they offered an imaginative, irresponsible, compensatory way of life; and Ireland represented, in the gnomic aorist, the roots of his mother’s family — it was his ‘other’ birthplace. He called it ‘an inner space, more a state of mind than a country’,² which he also said of Greece and Provence. The idea of duality, of life being at once here and elsewhere, of there being a magic home as well as the real one, of the parish as a place of the imagination, has been the seedbed of much modern Irish writing, and is rooted in a way of thinking which can be historically identified as alternative to the mainstream of European logocentric thought. Durrell’s mindscape bears extraordinary affinity to this Irish mind, and it is the purpose of this chapter to explore that affinity, partly in order to explain why the anger and frustration he was capable of displaying in, for example, Bitter Lemons could turn into such a major act of refusal as The Revolt of Aphrodite.