Lawrence Durrell | |
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.jpg) Durrell during his visit to Israel in 1962 | |
| Born | Lawrence George Durrell (1912-02-27)27 February 1912 |
| Died | 7 November 1990(1990-11-07) (aged 78) Sommières, France |
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| Nationality | British |
| Education | St Edmund's School, Canterbury |
| Period | 1931–1990 |
| Notable works | The Alexandria Quartet |
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| Website | |
| lawrencedurrell | |
Lawrence George DurrellCBE (/ˈdʊrəl,ˈdʌr-/;[1] 27 February 1912[2] – 7 November 1990) was anexpatriate British novelist, poet,dramatist, andtravel writer. He was the eldest brother of naturalist and writerGerald Durrell.
Born inIndia to British 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 ofCorfu. Durrell spent many years thereafter living around the world.
His most famous work isThe Alexandria Quartet, published between 1957 and 1960. The best-known novel in the series is the first,Justine. Beginning in 1974, Durrell publishedThe Avignon Quintet, using many of the same techniques. The first of these novels,Monsieur, or the Prince of Darkness, won theJames Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1974. The middle novel,Constance, or Solitary Practices, was nominated for the 1982Booker Prize. In the 20th century, Durrell was a bestselling author and one of the most celebrated writers in England.[3]
Durrell supported his writing by working for many years in theForeign Service of the British government. His sojourns in various places during and after World War II (such as his time inAlexandria, Egypt) inspired much of his work. He married four times, and had a daughter with each of his first two wives.
Durrell was born inJalandhar,British India, the eldest son of Indian-born British colonialsLouisa (who was Anglo-Irish) andLawrence Samuel Durrell, an engineer of English ancestry.[3] His first school wasSt. Joseph's School, North Point,Darjeeling. He had three younger siblings — two brothers and a sister — naturalistGerald Durrell, Leslie Durrell and authorMargaret Durrell.
Like many other children of theBritish Raj, at the age of 11, Durrell was sent to England for schooling, where he briefly attendedSt Olave's Grammar School before being sent toSt 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 abrain 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 inBournemouth. There, he and his younger brotherGerald became friends withAlan G. Thomas, who had a bookstore and would become anantiquarian.[4] Durrell had a short spell working for anestate agent inLeytonstone (East London).[5]
On 22 January 1935, Durrell married art student Nancy Isobel Myers (1912–1983), with whom he briefly ran a photographic studio in London.[6] It was the first of his four marriages.[7] 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".[8]
That same year Durrell's first novel,Pied Piper of Lovers, was published byCassell. Around this time he chanced upon a copy ofHenry Miller's 1934 novelTropic of Cancer.[9] After reading it, he wrote to Miller, expressing intense admiration for his novel. Durrell's letter sparked an enduring friendship[9] and mutually critical relationship that spanned 45 years. Durrell's next novel,Panic Spring, was strongly influenced by Miller's work,[10] while his 1938 novelThe Black Book abounded with "four-letter words... grotesques,... [and] its mood equally as apocalyptic" asTropic.[10]
In Corfu, Lawrence and Nancy lived together inbohemian style. For the first few months, the couple lived with the rest of the Durrell family in the Villa Anemoyanni atKontokali. In early 1936, Durrell and Nancy moved to the White House, a fisherman's cottage on the shore of Corfu's northeastern coast atKalami, then a tiny fishing village. The Durrell family's friendTheodore 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 novelProspero's Cell. His younger brotherGerald Durrell, who became a naturalist, published his own version in his memoirMy Family and Other Animals (1954) and in the following two books of Gerald's so-calledCorfu 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 withMarie Aspioti, with whom he cooperated in the publication ofLear's Corfu.[11]: 260
In August 1937, Lawrence and Nancy travelled to the Villa Seurat inParis, France, to meetHenry Miller andAnaïs Nin. Together withAlfred Perles, Nin, Miller, and Durrell "began a collaboration aimed at founding their own literary movement. Their projects includedThe Shame of the Morning and theBooster, a country club house organ that the Villa Seurat group appropriated "for their own artistic ... ends."[12] They also started the Villa Seurat Series in order to publish Durrell'sBlack Book, Miller'sMax and the White Phagocytes, and Nin'sWinter of Artifice. Jack Kahane of theObelisk Press served as publisher.
Durrell said that he had three literary uncles:T. S. Eliot, the Greek poetGeorge Seferis, and Miller. He first read Miller after finding a copy ofTropic of Cancer that had been left behind in a public lavatory. He said the book shook him "from stem to stern".[9]
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.
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 thefall of Greece, Lawrence and Nancy escaped fromKalamata, where they had been teaching,[13] viaCrete toAlexandria,Egypt. The marriage was already under strain and they separated in 1942. Nancy took the baby Penelope with her toJerusalem.
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 bookProspero's Cell, Durrell described Corfu as "this brilliant little speck of an island in theIonian"[page needed] with waters "like the heartbeat of the world itself".[14]
During World War Two, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British embassies, first inCairo and then Alexandria. While in Alexandria he met Eve (Yvette) Cohen (1918–2004), a Jewish Alexandrian. She inspired his characterJustine inThe Alexandria Quartet. In 1947, after his divorce from Nancy was completed, Durrell married Eve Cohen, with whom he had been living since 1942.[15] The couple's daughter, Sappho Jane, was born inOxfordshire in 1951,[16] and named after the ancient Greek poetSappho.[17]
In May 1945, Durrell obtained a posting toRhodes, the largest of theDodecanese islands that Italy had taken over from the disintegratingOttoman Empire in 1912 during theBalkan 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 ofwar 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 bookReflections 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.
In 1947, Durrell was appointed director of theBritish Council Institute in Córdoba,Argentina. He served there for eighteen months, giving lectures on cultural topics.[18] He returned to London with Eve in the summer of 1948, around the time that MarshalTito of Yugoslavia broke ties withStalin'sCominform. Durrell was posted by the British Council toBelgrade,Yugoslavia,[19] and served there until 1952. This sojourn gave him material for his novelWhite Eagles over Serbia (1957).
In 1952, Eve had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalised in England. Durrell moved toCyprus with their daughter Sappho Jane, buying a house and taking a position teaching English literature at thePancyprian Gymnasium to support his writing. He next worked inpublic relations for the British government during the local agitation forunion with Greece. He wrote about his time in Cyprus inBitter Lemons, which won the Duff Cooper Prize in 1957. In 1954, he was selected as a Fellow of theRoyal 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.[11]: 27
In 1957, Durrell publishedJustine, the first novel of what was to become his most famous work,The Alexandria Quartet.Justine,Balthazar (1958),Mountolive (1958), andClea (1960), deal with events before and during the Second World War in the Egyptian city ofAlexandria. 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 inBalthazar as "relativistic". Only in the final novel,Clea, does the story advance in time and reach a conclusion. Critics praised theQuartet 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 theQuartet stated: "If ever a work bore an instantly recognizable signature on every sentence, this is it."
In 2012, when theNobel Records were opened after 50 years, it was revealed that Durrell had been nominated for the 1961Nobel Prize in Literature, but did not make the final list.[20] In 1962, however, he did receive serious consideration, along withRobert Graves,Jean Anouilh, andKaren Blixen, but ultimately lost toJohn Steinbeck.[21] The academy decided that "Durrell was not to be given preference this year"—probably because "they did not think thatThe Alexandria Quartet was enough, so they decided to keep him under observation for the future." However, he was never nominated again.[21] They also noted that he "gives a dubious aftertaste … because of [his] monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications."[21]
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 filmCleopatra.[22] The production company had also proposed afilm ofJustine which would eventually appear in 1969.
Durrell settled inSommières, a small village inLanguedoc, 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 wroteThe Revolt of Aphrodite, comprisingTunc (1968) andNunquam (1970). He also completedThe Avignon Quintet, published from 1974 to 1985, which used many of the same motifs and styles found in his metafictionalAlexandria 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 1974James Tait Black Memorial Prize. That year, Durrell was living in the United States and serving as the Andrew Mellon Visiting professor of humanities at theCalifornia Institute of Technology.[23]The middle novel of the quincunx,Constance, or Solitary Practices (1981), which portrays France in the 1940s under theGerman occupation, was nominated for theBooker Prize in 1982.
Other works from this period areSicilian Carousel, a non-fiction celebration of that island,The Greek Islands, andCaesar's Vast Ghost, which is set in and chiefly about the region ofProvence, France.
A longtime smoker, Durrell suffered fromemphysema for many years. He died of astroke 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.[17][24][25][26]
Durrell worked for several years in the service of theForeign 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 inKalamata, Greece, andCórdoba, Argentina. He was also director of Public Relations in theDodecanese Islands and on Cyprus. He later refused an honour as aKnight 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.[11]: 185 Durrell's works of humour,Esprit de Corps andStiff Upper Lip, are about life in thediplomatic corps, particularly inSerbia. He claimed to have disliked both Egypt and Argentina,[27] although not nearly so much as he disliked Yugoslavia.
Durrell's poetry has been overshadowed by his novels, butPeter Porter, in his introduction to aSelected Poems, calls Durrell "One of the best [poets] of the past hundred years. And one of the most enjoyable."[28] 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."[29]
For much of his life, Durrell resisted being identified solely asBritish, or as only affiliated with Britain. He preferred to be consideredcosmopolitan. Since his death, there have been claims that Durrell never hadBritish 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.[citation needed]
In 1966 Durrell and many other former and present British residents became classified as non-patrial, as a result of an amendment to theCommonwealth Immigrants Act.[3] 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 theCommonwealth Immigrants Act 1962".[3]
AsThe 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".[3] 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. "SirPatrick 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.'"[3]
After Durrell's death, his lifelong friendAlan G. Thomas donated a collection of books and periodicals associated with Durrell to theBritish Library. This is maintained as the distinctLawrence Durrell Collection. Thomas had earlier edited an anthology of writings, letters and poetry by Durrell, published asSpirit of Place (1969). It contained material related to Durrell's own published works. An important documentary resource is kept by the Bibliothèque Lawrence Durrell atParis Nanterre University.[citation needed]
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