Abstract
In order to ‘recompose the ego, to give it value and shape’, Durrell needed to escape from the world whose history and morals repelled him and whose literature he found boring and stagnant. In his physical life he made this departure by means of voluntary exile, the relocation in Corfu where, as he put it in Prospero’s Cell, ‘Greece offers you … the discovery of yourself’ (PC 11). On the intellectual plane he withdrew into himself in order to evaluate his strengths and weaknesses and to construct ‘the Heraldic Universe’. Twenty years later, writing about Rhodes, he coined the term islomania, defining the islomane as someone ‘who find[s] islands somehow irresistible’, a direct descendant of the people of Atlantis: ‘it is towards the lost Atlantis that [his] subconscious yearns throughout [his] island life’ (RMV 15). Islands, he wrote elsewhere, represent ‘visionary intimations of solitude, of loneliness, of introspection … because at heart everyone vaguely feels that the solitude they offer corresponds to his or her inner sense of aloneness’.1 Publicly, they magnify this condition: ‘they are places where different destinies can meet and intersect in the full isolation of time’ (BL 20).
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Notes and References
‘The Magic of Islands’, ts in CERLD (uncatalogued item), intended as a preface for a Reader’s Digest’ selection’, Iles de brume et de lumière [1981].
In his copy of The Three Parnassus Plays Durrell had noted the passage ‘letts … hast unto those sleepe adorned hills,/Where if not blesse our fortunes one may blesse our wills’ (p. 357); while in The Complete Works of John Webster, ed. F. L. Lucas (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927) he had noted (vol. 4. p. 80) ‘anything for a quiet life’ in the play of that title; cf. Wordsworth, ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility’, Letters [24 May 1807].
In his copy of Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927) Durrell had noted (p. 175): ‘you become no longer one, but many. What you pay for the pantheistic, immanent oneness of ‘creative’, ‘evolutionary’ substance, into which you are invited to merge, is that you have become a phalanstery of selves’ (SIUC/LD/Accession II).
Cf. W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. R. Finneran (London: Macmillan) p. 150.
‘The Magic of Islands’ ts; cf. Mott’s works (cited above) passim.
SIUC 42/8/1.
Rank, Art and Artist, p. 217.
Ibid., p. 24.
Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller: A Private Correspondence, ed. G. Wickes (London: Faber and Faber, 1963) p. 24.
Windmill, vol. 2, no. 6 (1947) ‘From a Writer’s Journal’.
Private Correspondence, pp. 202–3.
Personal Landscape, vol. 1, no. 4 (1942).
Brown, op. cit., p. 106.
F. Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. I. Watson (London: Quartet, 1991) p. 18.
S. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, ed. V. Eremita (London: Penguin, 1992) abridged edn, p. 550.
Cf. S. Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam, 1988) pp. 171–3.
Quoted in Lama Anagarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism According to the Esoteric Teachings of the Great Mantric OM MANI PADME HUM (London: Rider, 1959) p. 270 (SIUC/LD/Accession II).
Quoted in F. Hartmann, The Life of Paracelsus (London: Kegan Trubner Trench, n. d.) p. 229 (SIUC/LD/Accession II).
SIUC 42/9/3.
CERLD Corfu/Egypt notes: ‘Prospero’s Cell: a speculative essay from the marked IVth Folio, suggesting Corfu as the possible imaginative site of the tempest.’ Another note, in SIUC 42/9/1, among notes referring to Rank’s Trauma of Birth, puts the viewpoint (often, as we have already seen, promoted by Durrell) that men are attracted to harbour as a return to the womb: ‘this acceptance is the Tempest World: womb again as the Shakespearean finale: AN ISLAND — beautiful foetal growth, surrounded by amniotic ocean.’
SIUC 42/8/1: this entry is accompanied by the marginal notation ‘Macon’ (see above, chapter 2, n. 35).
Ibid.
Marked by Durrell in G. R. S. Mead, Thrice Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenic Theosophy and Gnosis (London: Watkins, 1906; 1949 reprint) vol. 3, p. 32 (SIUC/LD/Accession II).
Marked by Durrell in The Zen Teaching of Huang Po on the Transmission of Mind, trans. J. Blofeld (London: Rider, 1958) p. 42 (SIUC/LD/Accession II).
Cf. SME, p. 53: ‘heraldic … means simply the “mandala” of the poet or of the poem. It is the alchemical sigil or signature of the individual; what’s left when the ego is extracted. It is the pure nonentity of the entity for which the poem stands like an ideogram!’
CERLD inv.1344, p. 45.
Hartmann, op. cit., p. 172.
‘From the Elephant’s Back’.
Ibid.
Ibid.
SIUC 42/8/1.
Ibid.
Ibid.; the reference to ‘Cadeuceus’ [sic] reminds us of the name under which the Wilkinsons published Durrell’s early poetry. The reference to Graham Howe’s Time and the Child (London: 1939) concerns a diagram (p. 220) intended to demonstrate a form of ‘incarnation’ by movement from one side of a line (representing an ‘ideal’ state — ‘unseen, spiritual, eternal’) to the other ‘real, Me Now, seen, material, space-temporal’); in some senses this contradicts Durrell’s movement to possess the Heraldic Universe (from ‘minus’ side to ‘plus’ side) and in others confirms it (Durrell made his own version of this diagram in CERLD Corfu/Egypt notes); the reference to Saurat’s The End of Fear (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), a prose-poem, focuses on Durrell’s interest in a sphere ‘moving by its own force in a straight course through a space apparently unlimited’ which enters a funnel-like canal before reaching ‘an eternal moment: the sphere and [its] limits are one … the sphere is clothed with the canal’ (pp. 45–6).
Ibid.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 12, p. 248.
SIUC 42/8/1.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
L. Durrell, foreword to J. Lacarrière, The Gnostics (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989 repr.) p. 7.
SIUC 42/8/1; this is a variant on the text which appears in SME, pp. 56–7.
SIUC 42/7/2.
SIUC 42/19/10: ‘Nimes 1962’.
’shakespeare and Love’, SIUC 42/15/1, published as’ shakespeare et l’Amour’, in Shakespeare: Collection Genies et Realités (Paris: Hachette, 1965).
H. Miller, Colossus of Maroussi, p. 218.
‘From a Writer’s Journal’, Windmill, II, 6 (1947).
Diaries of Anaïs Nin, vol. 2, p. 255.
Ibid.
Cf. Pine, The Dandy and the Herald, pp. 186–95.
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© 1994 Richard Pine
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Pine, R. (1994). ‘Islomania’. In: Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23412-7_5
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