Abstract
Lawrence George Durrell was born in Jullundur, near Lahore, in the Punjab province of north-west India, on 27 February 1912. He died in Sommières, near Nîmes, in Provençal France, on 7 November 1990. Apart from several years spent in England in childhood and adolescence he lived primarily in the Mediterranean region, visiting England rarely, and seldom for longer than a few weeks on each occasion. His unusual odyssey became a quest for a lost home, an imagined place inherently related to the circumstances of his childhood. Life became a book of which the writing was more real than the living, its storyline engaging at all the compass points with the events of his life and their chronology.
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Notes and References
L. Durrell, ‘From the Elephant’s Back’, op. cit.
B. Disraeli, Tancred, as paraphrased by E. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 1985) p. 5; cf. Disraeli, Tancred or, The New Crusade (London: Bodley Head, 1927) p. 360.
G. Durrell, The Garden of the Gods (London: William Collins, 1978) p. 113.
Cf. Said, Orientalism, pp. 1, 2,11, 20–1, 41,157.
‘From the Elephant’s Back’, op. cit., pp. 59, 60; cf. also Ian MacNiven, ‘The Durrells of India’, conference paper delivered at the VIIth International Lawrence Durrell Society Conference, Avignon, 1992. The fact that in The Alexandria Quartet the deceased Brigadier Maskelyne is reported to have been the grandson of ‘this now forgotten Suffolk farm-boy’ who had enlisted in the army, and that ‘of Maskelyne’s own father there was no record among his effects’ (Quartet 835) has a strongly autobiographical flavour. ‘Darjiling’ was Durrell’s preferred spelling.
‘From the Elephant’s Back’, op. cit., p. 60.
Ian MacNiven informs the author (from personal information from Lawrence Durrell) that Lawrence Samuel Durrell visited his son while he was at school at Canterbury, but that this may have been his only visit to England.
SIUC: 42/15/6; ‘notebook for Clea … France 1958’.
H. Miller, ‘Introduction’ to Selected Prose of Henry Miller (London: McGibbon and Kee, 1965) vol. 1.
K. Brown, British Writers: Supplement 1, Graham Greene to Tom Stoppard, ed I. Scott-Kilvert (New York: Scribner’s, 1987) pp. 95, 97.
L. Durrell, original interview with J. Fanchette, Two Cities, repr. in Labrys no. 5 (1979) p. 41.
The phrase was invented by Sir Henry Wotton and is repeated in AC 13; L. Durrell, ‘Writers at Work’, 2nd series, ed. G. Plimpton (London: Penguin Books, 1977) p. 268
L. Durrell, ‘Propaganda and Impropaganda’ in Blue Thirst (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1975) p. 38.
SIUC: 42719/10; notebook dated ‘1962 Nimes’.
SIUC: 42/19/8; ‘quarry for Tunc-Nunquam’.
SIUC: 42/19/10.
SIUC: 42/11/1; ‘Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1952 … Kyrenia, Cyprus’.
SIUC: 42/15/6; notebook for Clea.
Magazine Littéraire, op. cit.
In conversation with the author.
Les nouvelles littéraires, no. 2629, 30 March-6 April 1978, ‘Les Vies Singulières de Lawrence Durrell’.
Steiner, Extraterritorial, p. 10.
Richard Aldington, quoted in A. Thomas (ed.), SP 11.
J. Unterecker, Lawrence Durrell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964) p. 15.
Steiner, Extraterritorial, p. 37.
Magazine Littéraire, op. cit.
Les nouvelles littéraires, op. cit.
Conversation with the author.
CERLD, uncatalogued typescript of address to the Cercle Pompidou [1 April 1981?], eventually published as ‘From the Elephant’s Back’ [hereafter cited as Cercle/ts] and also published in French in Revue Parlée, edition dated March 1981.
Cf. Brown, op. cit., p. 93; cf. SME 19: One day while passing the Jesuit school chapel [in Darjiling] I found the door ajar and tiptoed inside, curious as children are. In the deep gloom I came upon a life-size figure of Christ crucified hanging over the altar, liberally blotched with blood and perfectly pig-sticked and thorn-hatted. An indescribable feeling of horror and fear welled up in me. So this was what those austerely garbed and bearded priests worshipped in this dense gloom among the flowers and candles! It was hardly a logical sequence of feelings and sentiments — it was quite spontaneous and unformulated. But the horror remained with me always; and later on, when my father decreed that I must go to England for my education. I felt that he was delivering me into the hands of these sadists and cannibals.
‘Placebo’ ts, p. 103
Magazine Littéraire, op. cit.
R. kipling, The Jungle Book (London: Macmillan, 1894); The Second Jungle Book (London: Macmillan, 1895).
Conversation with the author.
Les nouvelles littéraires op. cit.
Apart from one early title (published in 1905) Alexandra David-Neel’s first widely circulated title appears to have been My Journey to Lhasa (London: Heinemann, 1927), when Durrell would had been fifteen years old.
Conversation with the author.
‘From the Elephant’s Back’, op. cit., p. 59 and Cercle/ts: ‘I have a special relation to elephants — an animal suspended by enormous ears between two pendulums. It is a happy animal, a philosopher-king of the forest, which can smile as well as tip-toe.’
R. Williams, Border Country (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960).
Steiner, Extraterritorial, p. 31.
Conversation with the author.
But see L. Durrell, ‘Propaganda and Impropaganda’ in Blue Thirst, op. cit., for Durrell’s mixed feelings about the profession of diplomat. In R. Green, ‘Lawrence Durrell: The Spirit of Winged Words’, Aegean Review [n.d.] Durrell said: ‘I’ve been progressively disgusted with our double-facedness in politics. … I refused a CMG [Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George] on those grounds, though I didn’t want to make an issue out of it, and I don’t want to — I’m conservative, I’m reactionary and right wing — so I don’t want to embarrass anybody. But the reason I made a polite bow-out of the whole thing [the offer of an official decoration after his posting in Cyprus] was that I didn’t want to be decorated by people who had bits of the Parthenon lying about in their backyard.’
Information from Ian MacNiven.
Les nouvelles littéraires, op. cit.
SIUC: 42/21/3.
‘Writers at Work’, op. cit., p. 261.
Les nouvelles littéraires, op. cit.
An expression Durrell used in an address on Shakespeare which he appears to have given to a meeting of UNESCO in 1970 [letter to Durrell from Alexandre Blokh, 24 Novembre 1970], CERLD uncatalogued typescript, 5 pp.
‘Two Dance Tunes for the Blue Peter Night Club Band … Sung by little Dixie Lee … 1935’ [clearly Durrell was employing his mother’s maiden name] — SIUC: 42/9/3 — dated ‘Argentina 1948’; see also PPL 370–71, where Walsh writes songs with such titles as ‘To Be or Not to Be’, ‘Hold Your Woman’ and ‘Never Come Back’: ‘“Never Come Back” is our epitaph, our requiem, our good-bye’.
Cf. DML 121, 125.
Redonda is an island in the Caribbean, 25 miles south-west of Antigua, which was annexed on behalf of Britain by the father of the Irish novelist M. P. Shiel, who in turn bequeathed his claim to the property (unpopulated but rich in phosphate) to Terence Fitton Armstrong, better known by his pen-name John Gawsworth. Gawsworth created several ‘dukedoms’, thus honouring friends such as Lawrence and Gerald Durrell, Richard Aldington, Victor Gollancz, Arthur Machen, Frank Swinnerton, Arthur Ransome, A. E. W. Mason, Henry Miller, Bertram Rota, John Heath-Stubbs, Dorothy Sayers, Martin Secker, Derek Patmore, Jon Wynne-Tyson (the present ‘King’), Rupert Croft-Cooke, J. B. Priestley, Rebecca West, Stephen Potter and L. G. Pine (the father of the present author).
SIUC/LD/Accession II/: box 6.
Ten Poems (London: Caduceus Press, 1932); Bromo Bombastes: a Fragment from a Laconic Drama by Gaffer Peeslake (London: Caduceus Press, 1933); Transition (London: Caduceus Press, 1934). In a copy of Transition inscribed to the Wilkinsons, Durrell wrote: ‘Its [sic] a sign, my sweets, that the delightful genius which I derive from an holy age of colonial warblers, still spates in an unbroken torrent of capricious continuity’ (CERLD reserve no.1705). The caduceus, a rod entwined by two serpents, was a symbol of power and one of the attributes of Mercury, the messenger of the gods: as a device for Durrell’s early poems it is an interesting herald of his later interest in the phenomenon of ophitism as manifested particularly in The Avignon Quintet. In his copy of The Worship of the Dead or The Origin and Nature of Pagan Idolatry and its Bearing Upon the Early History of Egypt and Babylonia by Colonel J. Gamier (London: Chapman and Hall, 1909), Durrell marked the following passage: All the Pagan gods were eventually identified with the Serpent, which was also regarded, like the Sun, as the Great Father, and was a symbol of the Sun. The Serpent, in short, was regarded both as the source of life, and also of wisdom and knowledge, and as the instructor of men [p. 108]. … Worship of the Sun and Serpent … by means of which the idolaters were eventually led, by a gradual process of development, to worship the Prince of the demons himself [p. 213]. … The [Serpent was] the form which the Prince of the Demons took when he persuaded Eve to eat. … and the Serpent was thus represented in paganism to be the bestower of knowledge and wisdom on man [p. 216]. Durrell’s copy is held in SIUC/LD/Accession II; cf. also SME 13.
Theodore Stephanides, ‘First Meeting with Lawrence Durrell’, Deus Loci, vol. 1 no. 1 (September 1977).
Durrell’s ticket for the reading room of the British Museum, contained in a notebook of 1938 inscribed ‘Lawrence Durrell, human being’, is numbered B52750 (SIUC: 42/9/2).
Cf. M. Haag, obituary notice of Lawrence Durrell, Independent, 9 November 1990.
Information from Ian MacNiven; Sappho Durrell thought that her grandfather had died of a heart attack (S. Durrell, op. cit., p. 61).
G. Durrell, My Family and Other Animals (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1956) pp. 15–16.
Stephanides, ‘First Meeting’, op. cit.
G. Durrell, The Garden of the Gods, p. 27.
Ibid., p. 29.
Cf. SP 104–5; DML 29, 36; the reference in The Black Book (p. 47) to Lobo who’ said good day with the frigidity of a Castilian gentleman dismissing a boring chambermaid’ perhaps owes something to Unamuno’s Mist, a work with which, as we shall see, Durrell had been familiar since the 1930s.
Cf. G. Durrell, Garden of the Gods, p. 66.
Cf. T. Stephanides, Island Trails (London: Macdonald, 1973) pp. 54–8. Another source for The Dark Labyrinth is a play sketch (SIUC 42/7/35 — possibly written in Paris in 1937), ‘The Maze: the guide dies while conducting a tour of the maze: leaving the dramatis personae lost in it a boy, a girl, a parson, a policeman, a thief, an undertaker, a whore, an old lady: the stranger’ — in fact, the stock characters who constitute, and enact, life itself in his novels.
SIUC/LD/Accession II: box 4: miscellaneous items.
SIUC/LD/Accession II: typescript ‘answers to questionnaire by a Paris journal’ [1973?] 6 pp.
For example an apparently unpublished typescript ‘Maiden Over’ (4 pp.) which begins: ‘What is so peculiarly magical about cricket if it isn’t its strange appropriateness to the landscape in which, and probably from which, it has sprung?’, CERLD uncatalogued ts.
Cf. Steiner, Real Presences, pp. 30, 60–1.
SIUC: 42/21/4 contains an appreciation of Hans Reichel in which Durrell recalled the painter saying: ‘“You must work the paint into the pores of the paper as if it were kisses penetrating human skin with the idea of love.” Then he added a little sadly “But the idea always falls short of reality”’; published as a preface to H. Miller, Order and Chaos chez Hans Reichel (Tucson, Ariz., 1966).
Durrell’s poetry notebook for 1938 (SIUC: 42/7/2) is inscribed ‘Jan. 1st 1938 Innsbruck/Austria’ and is followed by the quotation [sic]: εις τηv ɑρχηv ετɑv Ω λoγoς [in the beginning was the word]. It also includes his Paris address at this time: xxi rue Gazan Paris xiv.
Conversation with the author.
L. Durrell, preface to David Gascoyne, Paris Journal 1937–1939 (London: Enitharmon Press, 1978) p. 5.
Conversation with the author; cf. also D. Gascoyne, op. cit., p. 124: ‘April 16th. [1939] … aware of being perhaps the only human being there, in the middle of London, with any idea of what is really happening at this time upon this planet’.
Nicholas Moore, ‘At the Start of the Forties’, Aquarius, nos. 17/18 (1986/87) p. 104.
Delta, 2e année, issue no. 3 (Christmas 1938); cf. M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane, ‘Movements, Magazines and Manifestos: The Succession from Naturalism’, in Bradbury and McFarlane (eds), Modernism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) pp. 192–205, for a review of cognate publications such as Blast and the Dadaist manifestos.
Cf. Pine, The Dandy and the Herald, ch. 5, for a discussion of the Hamlet theme.
L. Durrell, ‘The Cherries’, typescript in UCLA Special Collection 637, box 2, f. 2. was published in the Daily Express series ‘Masterpiece of Thrills’, 1936 — a genre to which he returned in 1957 with ‘Letter in the Sofa’ published in the ‘Did it Happen Series’ in the Evening Standard.
Durrell wrote a preface for the English edition of Nin’s Children of the Albatross, to which Nin took exception (see A. Nin, The Diary of Anaï’s Nin, Vol. 6: 1955–1966 [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976] pp. 172–3); however, relations were sufficiently restored for Nin to participate in the seminars which Durrell gave at CalTech in 1974.
Under the pseudonym ‘Charles Norden’ Durrell issued ‘Obituary Notice: a tragedy by Charles Norden’ (illustrated by Nancy Norden [Nancy Durrell]) published in Night and Day, 9 September 1937; his travel piece ‘A Landmark Gone’ (containing material which also appears at the opening of PC) was first published under ‘Charles Norden’ in Orientations, vol. 1, no. 1 (n.d. [1940/41?]) and subsequently in SP 187–90.
O. Rank, Art and Artist, trans. C. F. Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1932). The inscription in Durrell’s copy, held at CERLD is: ‘To Lawrence Durrell — protegée of Jupiter and Neptune, born at the foot of the Himalayas in mounds of snow out of which emerged the Ionian edelweiss which carries him safely through one panic after another, and finally into the empyrean where with the great Buddha and other mystics he is at last enshrined in annihilation.’
5 May, 1945; published in TCL 33/3, p. 354.
Conversation with the author.
Letter to the author.
SIUC/LD/Accession II: notebook dating from c. 1938. The third jotting (‘Ci-gît …’) also appears in a variant form in a letter to Anne Ridler: TCL 33/3, p. 293.
Cf. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets: ‘East Coker’ V, 1.2, The Complete Poems and Plays, p. 182.
C. Connolly, ‘England Not My England’, The Condemned Playground: Essays 1927–1944 (London: Hogarth Press, 1945) pp. 196–210.
Husserl’s view of ‘the crisis of European humanity’ is discussed in Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (London: Faber and Faber, 1988) pp. 3ff.
H. Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950) 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’.
SIUC/LD/Accession II: box 1, ‘Book of Travels’.
Cf. J. L. Pinchin, Alexandria Still: Forster, Durrell and Cavafy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977) p. 159.
SIUC/LD/Accession II: box 1, ‘Book of Travels’.
‘Alexandria Revisited: Lawrence Durrell’s Egypf, Listener, 20 April 1978.
Cf. L. Durrell, ‘The Viennese Temper’, Fiction Magazine, vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer 1982) 00.
Cf L. Esther, ‘The Plot to Save the Artists’, The Times Literary Supplement, 2 January 1987 00.
Fraser, op. cit., pp. 41–2.
Fitzrovia: Cf. H. David, The Fitzrovians (Sevenoaks: Sceptre, 1989); cf. also Tambimuttu in Labrys, 5 (July 1979) p. 167.
Cf. A. Tolley, The Poetry of the Thirties (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1975)
A. Tolley, The Poetry of the Forties (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987)
W. Pritchard, Seeing Through Everything: English Writers 1918–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977)
V. Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Rank, Art and Artist, p. 17
The Curious History of Pope Joan, trans. out of the modern Greek of Emmanuel Royidis by Lawrence Durrell (London: Verschoyle, 1954).
Esprit de Corps: Sketches from Diplomatic Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1957); Stiff Upper Lip: Life among the Diplomats (London: Faber and Faber, 1958); Sauve Qui Peut (London: Faber and Faber, 1966): these were collected in Antrobus Complete, but not every Antrobus story appears in every edition.
SIUC: 42/8/4.
SIUC: 42/11/1.
Kundera, op. cit., p. 14.
Sketches are contained in SIUC: 42/9/5.
Ethnikē Organōsis Kypriōn Agōniston: National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters.
Durrell noted the date in SIUC 42/12/5: ‘I took over’. A cutting (undated) from The [Cyprus] News records Durrell’s appointment: ‘His understanding of Greek and the Greeks is formidable, and there can be few men with a more sensitive appreciation of all that Greece stands for. The most ardent philhellene could find no fault with this appointment.’ It is not unlikely that Durrell himself was the author of this piece: contained in ‘Diary and Rough Notes 1955’ kept in a publisher’s dummy labelled ‘The Cantos of Ezra Pound’: CERLD uncatalogued item. Durrell was in the habit of ordering dummy volumes for use as notebooks.
‘The Rosy Crucifixion’ was the collective title given to Miller’s trilogy: Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953) and Nexus (1960).
SIUC/LD/Accession II: box 1: ‘Book of Travels’. Psalm 75 begins: ‘Unto thee, O God, do we give thanks … for that thy name is near thy wondrous works declare.’
Stephanides, Island Trails, pp. 104–10. An uncatalogued typescript in CERLD dated ‘Corfu 1940’ refers to ‘Abandoned Ms.’ of ‘Island Trails [by T. Stephanides and L. Durrell]’: an explanatory note in Durrell’s hand, dated 23/2/89, reads: ‘he [Stephanides] would provide the scholarship and I the written text’.
The error in the published version of Mountolive is presumably due to the failure of the copy-editor at Faber to spot Durrell’s characteristic mis-spelling of ‘δαιµονος’ (Durrell frequently transposed adjacent letters, suggesting that he was almost dyslexic in this regard). The error arose in Durrell’s having wrongly noted ‘αγαθou διαµovoς’ from p. 207 of his copy of E. Rhode, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks (London: Kegan Paul Trubner Trench, 1925), which discusses ‘the ‘αγαθoς δαιµωv’ in relation to its chthonic powers and says that ‘on a snake on a talisman the words are written τo ‘ονοµα τov αγαθ0v δαιµονος’: Durrell’s copy is now in SIUC/LD/Accession II.
Cf. Pine, The Dandy and the Herald, pp. 151–6.
SIUC: 42/13/3; the article was published in Holiday (October 1966) as ‘Oil for the Saint; Return to Corfu’, and reprinted in SP 286–303.
SIUC/LD/Accession II: box 1 (catalogue item no. 3), notebook inscribed on cover ‘Notebook on Avignon book 1971’ and, below this inscription, ‘Notebook. Geneva. New Year 1967’.
SIUC/LD/Accession II: box containing material relating to ‘Ulysses’ also contains a letter to Durrell from Juliet O’Hea, of Curtis Brown, dated 26 June 1972, referring to the 169-page version of Judith and the 38-page scenario and saying ‘Just let me know when you would like it published’, suggesting that, beyond the already serialised version which had appeared in Woman’s Own between February and April 1966 (and, in French, in Elle in the same year as ‘le nouveau roman de Lawrence Durrell’) a fuller publication in volume form was anticipated.
W. B. Yeats, Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962) p. 263.
SIUC: 42/13/5, letter to ‘Mr Wanger’ dated 28 March 1961.
Cf. letter from Durrell to Aldington, c. February 1960, in Literary Lifelines, p. 129.
Conversation with the author.
L. Durrell, ‘The Poetic Obsession of Dublin’, Travel and Leisure (Autumn 1972) pp. 33–70.
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. Perles, in Art and Outrage (London: Village Press, 1973) p. 7: ‘to walk in this milky dusk with the smoke rising from the bistro. Click of billiard balls, clink on the zinc of white wine glasses …’
The first essay, ‘Tao and Its Glozes’, was, according to a note in SIUC: 42/7/2, ‘conceived as a 12,000 [word] critical essay’ and was published in The Aryan Path, vol. X, no. 12 (December 1939).
Wildeis credited with having made this remark in connection with speedily produced biographies of Rossetti by Hall Caine and William Sharp.
Letter from Durrell to Perlès, undated: SIUC/LD/Accession II.
Conversation with the author.
Manuscript notes clearly made during or shortly after Mrs Durrell’s funeral (cremation?) and subsequent reception (at a ‘Basil St. hotel with its resemblance to the Planters’ Club in Darjiling’) are contained in notebook in CERLD inv. 1349, pp. 50–2. The details noted were introduced into Durrell’s writing in the passage in Livia describing the funeral of Blanford’s mother (Quintet 478–80).
Construire, no. 4 (23 Janvier 1985).
Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 18 November 1984 ‘Lamas in a French Forest’; Durrell wrote on behalf of the Tibetan community to the President of France, inviting him to attend the official opening of the lamasery on 22 August 1978 (letter, uncatalogued, in CERLD; text of printed appeal, written by Durrell and listing Durrell, Jacques Lacarrièsre and Gerald Durrell as the ‘comité’, in SIUC/LD/Accession II).
Several versions of another poem, addressed to ‘F. K.’ (‘I’m dying more slowly since we met … For me the last love was the very best/You set the boundaries of my art apart/And gifted me a wideawake old heart’) are contained in a notebook in CERLD inv 1359, pp. 67ff.
SIUC/LD/Accession II.
SIUC/LD/Accession II: box 1 (catalogue item no. 3)
A. Burgess, obituary notice of Durrell, Independent on Sunday, 11 November 1990.
Haag, op. cit.
Obituary notice [anonymous] in The Times, 9 November 1990.
P. Howard, The Times, 9 November 1990.
Haag, op. cit.
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© 1994 Richard Pine
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Pine, R. (1994). ‘Une vie artistique’. In: Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23412-7_2
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