Lawrence Durrell

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Lawrence George Durrell

(born Feb. 27, 1912, Jullundur, India — died Nov. 7, 1990, Sommières, France) British writer. He spent most of his life in Mediterranean countries, often in diplomatic posts. He is best known for the tetralogy The Alexandria Quartet, composed of the novels Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960), which explore the erotic lives of a group of exotic characters in Alexandria, Egypt. His poetry — including Cities, Plains and People (1946) — and nonfiction books about locales — including Prospero's Cell (1945), Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953), and Bitter Lemons (1957), describing three Greek islands — are often considered his best works.

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A prolific British author, Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) wrote several large-scale, multi-volume series of novels as well as poetry, plays, short stories, and travel books. People and places of the Mediterranean were a central theme of his work.

Lawrence Durrell was born on February 27, 1912, in Darjeeling, India, at the foothills of the Himalayas. His parents were Irish Protestants engaged in colonial service. After attending the College of St. Joseph in Darjeeling, the 11-year-old Durrell, like many Anglo-Indian children, was sent to England to complete his education. He went to St. Edmund's School, Canterbury, and, failing to gain entrance to Cambridge, took up a bohemian existence and supported himself by working as a jazz pianist in London night clubs and taking on a variety of odd jobs. He also began to work seriously on his poetry and fiction.

Oppressed by the hardship of life in a grimy quarter of London, Durrell was also stung by the stifling pressure of British society on his artistic ambitions. He wrote in a letter: "England wrung my guts out of me and tried to destroy everything singular and unique in me." In 1935, to escape "that mean, shabby little island," Durrell went with his family to the island of Corfu, off the Adriatic coast of Greece. He wanted to live the life of an expatriate writer and to recreate the life of London in his novels, much as the expatriate James Joyce had done for Dublin. At this time, Durrell read Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, a book whose plain style and sexual candor would greatly influence his own fiction. He went to Paris to meet Miller, and so began their life-long friendship.

Durrell's stay on Corfu was interrupted by the onset of World War II. His life for the next 17 years was shaped by a series of postings in government service. Durrell was in Athens and Crete from 1939 to 1941 teaching English, in Cairo and Alexandria until 1945 as an officer in the Foreign Press Service, in Rhodes until 1947 as director of public relations for the Dodecanese Islands, in Argentina in 1948 as director of the British Council Institute in Cordoba, in Belgrade through 1952 as press attaché, and in Cyprus from 1953 to 1956 as director of public relations for the island's government. The literary result was that the world of the Mediterranean became Durrell's chief subject matter, in both his fiction and his many travel books. In 1957 he left government service to dedicate himself to this writing and settled in a village in the south of France, where he lived until his death in 1990.

Durrell's first important novel was The Black Book (1938), which, though similar in theme, represented a major stylistic break from his earlier fiction. The novel shows the influence of Miller's Tropic of Cancer, but The Black Book was no mere imitation. The novel recounts the lives and loves of struggling writers and artists in a grubby London hotel. Because of the novel's sexual frankness, Faber & Faber refused to bring out an unexpurgated edition; the book was finally published in its complete form through the efforts of Henry Miller. (The Black Book did not find a publisher in the United States until 1960.) With its appearance, Durrell was recognized as a major literary voice.

Durrell's subsequent fiction explores the people and places of the Mediterranean that he came to know so well. Cefalu (1947; later retitled The Dark Labyrinth) is a satirical portrait of a group of English tourists who are for a time trapped in the Cretan labyrinth, home to the legendary Minotaur.

The centerpiece of Durrell's career as novelist is The Alexandria Quartet, comprised of Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960). In this ambitious and intricate series of novels, Durrell attempted to create a fictional parallel of 20th-century physics, based on theories he had expounded in his one book of literary criticism, A Key to Modern British Poetry (1952). In a prefatory note to Balthazar, Durrell wrote: "Modern literature offers us no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition. Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup mix recipe of a continuum." The books of The Alexandria Quartet, which Durrell called "an investigation of modern love," are not sequential; rather, the first three books tell of the same events and characters in pre-World War II Alexandria, but from different viewpoints. The "facts" of the story of sexual liaisons and political intrigue are glimpsed only obliquely from the accounts of different narrators. There is, in a sense, no objective truth to be discovered. The fourth novel, Clea, is a more traditional chronological narrative which takes the characters through the war years.

In The Alexandria Quartet, Durrell adopted a highly ornate and sensuous narrative voice which drew much critical attention. George Steiner described the Quartet's style as "complex aural music" in which "light seems to play across the surface of the words in a brilliant tracery." The "baroque" style was not to everyone's taste though; Martin Green complained that "a steady diet of [Durrell's] sentences … makes one feel one is sickening for a bad cold."

Durrell's career as novelist continued with two other large-scale, multi-volume works. Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970) comprise The Revolt of Aphrodite, which tells a gothic story of corporate intrigue. The five-part Avignon Quintet is made up 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). These later works, which are heavily weighted with allusions to gnostic mysticism and the medieval legends of the Knights Templar, are direct descendents of Durrell's Alexandria series. As the critic Alan Friedman points out:

They too offer exotic settings peopled by improbable characters; multiple fictional and narrative layerings; … extensive mythical and metaphysical speculation on the nature of the universe and its creator, on the ego and personality, on the enterprises of being, becoming and creating; a harsh critique of western civilization and values; and an erotically charged prose style whose evocations and allusions overtly echo and invoke the Quartet.

In addition to his novels, Durrell is noted for a series of works generally referred to as the "island books," a hybrid genre incorporating autobiography and satiric social commentary. Prospero's Cell (1945) is an "island portrait" of Corfu, its geography, lore, customs, and eccentric inhabitants. Later, Durrell published Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes (1953); Bitter Lemons (1957), which deals with the Greek-Turkish conflict on Cyprus; Sicilian Carousel (1977); and The Greek Islands (1978).

Durrell's literary output also includes twelve volumes of poetry, three plays, several books of satiric sketches of diplomatic life, short stories, and collections of his correspondence with Henry Miller, Alfred Perles, and Richard Aldington. Durrell died of emphysema at his home in the village of Sommieres, November 7, 1990.

Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence Durrell
Born	27 February 1912(1912-02-27) Jalandhar, British India
Died	7 November 1990 (aged 78) Sommières, France
Occupation	Biographist; poet; playwright; novelist
Nationality	British
Writing period	1931 - 1990
Notable work(s)	The Alexandria Quartet

Influences Henry Miller, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Friedrich Nietzsche, Constantine P. Cavafy, T. S. Eliot, George Seferis

Influenced Julio Cortázar, Thomas Pynchon, Susan Swan, David Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, M. G. Vassanji

Official website

Life and work

Durrell was born in Jullundur, British India, the son of Indian-born British colonials Louisa and Lawrence Samuel Durrell. His first school was St Joseph's College, North Point, Darjeeling. At the age of eleven, he was sent to England 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, but he began seriously writing poetry at the age of 15 and his first collection of poetry, Quaint Fragment, was published in 1931.

On 22 January 1935, he married Nancy Isobel Myers, the first of his four marriages.^[2] Durrell was always unhappy in England and in March of that year he persuaded his new wife, his mother, and his siblings (including brother Gerald Durrell, later to be a major British wildlife conservationist and popular writer), to move to the Greek island of Corfu, where they might live more economically and escape both the English weather and stultifying English culture - what Durrell called "the English death" ^[3]

In the 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, and wrote to Miller, expressing intense admiration for his novel. Durrell's letter sparked an enduring friendship and mutually-critical relationship that spanned 45 years. The two got on well, as they were exploring similar subjects, and Durrell's next novel, Panic Spring was heavily influenced by Miller's work^[4], and after that 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 in a number of large houses, notably the 'White House' on the coast at Kalami. Henry Miller was a guest in 1939. The period is somewhat fictionalised in Durrell's lyrical account in Prospero's Cell, which may be instructively compared with the accounts of the Corfu experience published by Gerald Durrell, notably in My Family and Other Animals. Gerald describes Lawrence as living with his mother and siblings—Nancy is not mentioned at all—whereas Lawrence's account makes few references to the fact that his mother and three siblings were also resident on Corfu. The accounts do cover a few of the same topics; for example, both Gerald and Lawrence describe the role played by the Greek doctor, scientist and poet Theodore Stephanides in their lives on Corfu.

In August 1937, Lawrence and Nancy travelled to the Villa Seurat in Paris, 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."^[5] 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, with Jack Kahane of the Obelisk Press as publisher.

Durrell's first novel of note, The Black Book: An Agon, was heavily influenced by Miller and was published in Paris in 1938. The mildly pornographic work only appeared in Britain in 1973. In the story, Lawrence Lucifer struggles to escape the spiritual sterility of dying England, and finds Greece's warmth and fertility.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Durrell's mother and siblings returned to England, while he and Nancy remained on Corfu. In 1940 he and his wife Nancy had a daughter, Penelope Berengaria. After the fall of Greece, Lawrence and Nancy escaped via Crete to Alexandria in Egypt, where he described Corfu and their life on "this brilliant little speck of an island in the Ionian" in the poetic book Prospero's Cell.

During the war, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British Embassies, first in Cairo and then Alexandria. It was in Alexandria that he met Eve (Yvette) Cohen, a Jewish woman and native Alexandrian who was to become his model for the character Justine in the Alexandria Quartet.

Durrell separated from Nancy in 1942. In 1947 he married Eve Cohen and in 1951 they had a daughter, Sappho Jane, named after the legendary Ancient Greek poetess Sappho. Sappho Durrell committed suicide by hanging in 1985, leaving behind writings that some interpret as implying an incestuous relationship.^[6]

Lawrence Durrell's home in Rhodes from 20 May 1945 until 10 April 1947

In 1947 Durrell was appointed director of the British Council Institute in Córdoba, Argentina, where for the next eighteen months he gave lectures on cultural topics.^[7] He returned to London in the summer of 1948, around the time that Marshal Tito broke ties with Stalin's Cominform, and Durrell was posted to Belgrade, Yugoslavia ^[8] where he was to remain until 1952. This sojourn gave him material for his book White Eagles over Serbia (1957). In 1952 he moved to Cyprus, buying a house and taking a position teaching English literature at the Pancyprian Gymnasium to support his writing, followed by public relations work for the British government there during 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 became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

In 1957, he published Justine, the first part of what was to become his most famous work, The Alexandria Quartet. Justine, Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1959) and Clea (1960) deal with events before and during the Second World War in Alexandria. The first three books tell essentially the same story but from different perspectives, a technique Durrell described in his introductory note to Balthazar as "relativistic". Only in the final part, Clea, does the story advance in time and reach a conclusion.

The Quartet impressed critics by the richness of its style, the variety and vividness of its characters, its movement between the personal and the political, and its exotic locations in and around the 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." There was some suggestion that Durrell might be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but this did not materialize.

Given the complexity of the work, it was probably inevitable that George Cukor's 1969 attempt to film the Quartet (Justine) simplified the story to the point of melodrama, and was poorly received.

Durrell separated from Eve Cohen in 1955, and was married again in 1961 to Claude-Marie Vincendon; she died of cancer in 1967. His fourth and final marriage was in 1973 to Ghislaine de Boysson, whom he divorced in 1979.

Durrell settled in Sommières, a small village in Languedoc, France, where he purchased a large house standing secluded in its own extensive walled grounds on the edge of the village. Here he wrote The Revolt of Aphrodite, comprising Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970), and The Avignon Quintet, which attempted to replicate the success of The Alexandria Quartet and revisited many of the same motifs and styles to be found in the earlier work. Although it is frequently described as a quintet, Durrell himself referred to it as a "quincunx". The middle book of the quincunx, Constance, or Solitary Practices, which portrays France under the German occupation, was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1982 and the opening novel, Monsieur, or the Prince of Darkness, received the 1974 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 1974, Durrell was the Andrew Mellon Visiting Professor of Humanities at the California Institute of Technology.^[9]

Durrell suffered from emphysema for many years. He died of a stroke at his house in Sommières in November 1990.

Poetry

Durrell's poetry has been overshadowed by his novels. Peter Porter, in his introduction to a Selected Poems,^[10] writes of Durrell as a poet: "one of the best of the past hundred years. And one of the most enjoyable." He goes on to describe Durrell's poetry as "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."^[11]

Work with the British government

Durrell also spent several years in the service of the Foreign Office. He was senior Press Officer to the British Embassies in Athens and Cairo, Press Attache in Alexandria and Belgrade, 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.

Major works

Novels

Pied Piper of Lovers (1935)
Panic Spring, under the pseudonym Charles Norden (1937)
The Black Book (1938; republished in the UK on January 1, 1977 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)

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 (1990)

Poetry

Quaint Fragments (1931)
Ten Poems (1932)
Transition: Poems (1934)
A Private Country (1943)
Cities, Plains and People (1946)
On Seeming to Presume (1948)
Selected Poems: 1953–1963 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 (1957)
Stiff Upper Lip (1958)
Sauve Qui Peut (1966)
Antrobus Complete (1985), a collection of short stories, previously published in various magazines, about life in the diplomatic corps.

Letters and essays

A Key to Modern British Poetry (1952)
Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller: A Private Correspondence (1962) 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 (1982)
"Letters to T. S. Eliot." (1987) Twentieth Century Literature vol. 33 no. 3 pp. 348–58.
The Durrell-Miller Letters: 1935–80 (1988) edited by Ian S. MacNiven
Letters to Jean Fanchette (1988) edited by Jean Fanchette

Editing and translating

Wordsworth; Selected by Lawrence Durrell (1973) edited by Durrell
New Poems 1963: A P.E.N. Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (1963) edited by Durrell
The Best of Henry Miller (1960) edited by Durrell
The Curious History of Pope Joan (1954) by Emmanuel Royidis, translated by Durrell
The King of Asine and Other Poems (1948) by George Seferis, translated by Durrell, Bernard Spencer, and Nanos Valaoritis
Six Poems From the Greek of Sekilianos and Seferis (1946) translated by Durrell

Cultural references

Lawrence Durrell - song by Mick Thomas
Stranger Than Fiction - The Alexandria Quartet is briefly referred to in a scene between Dustin Hoffman and Will Ferrell in the movie Stranger Than Fiction (2006). The following is written on the chalkboard behind them: "Mountolive's ear aches, Liza's blindness, Clea's amputated hand, Leila's smallpox, Justine's stroke, Pombal's gout." This is juxtaposed against Harold Crick's (Farrell) impending, 'literary' doom.
Flirting - A paperback copy of Durrell's Justine sits on her vanity while Thandi Newton smokes at her mirror, echoing a scene in Justine.
Wonder Boys - In the novel by Michael Chabon, one of the characters is said to carry a photo of Lawrence Durrell in her wallet.

Notes

^ Ezard, John (2002-04-29). "Durrell Fell Foul of Migrant Law". The Guardian. http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,706830,00.html. Retrieved 2007-01-30. .
^ MacNiven, Ian S. (1998). Lawrence Durrell: A Biography. Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-17248-2. p. xiii.
^ Karl Orend, "New Bibles", Times Literary Supplement 22 August 2008 p 15
^ Dearborn, Mary V. (1992). The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller. Touchstone Books. ISBN 0-671-77982-6. p. 192 and picture insert captions.
^ Hamer, Mary (2002.). Incest: A New Perspective. Polity. The book, unfortunately, makes several biographical errors and fails to cite its sources.
^ Interview with Marc Alyn, published in Paris in 1972, translated by Francine Barker in 1974; reprinted in Earl G. Ingersoll, Lawrence Durrell: Conversations, Associated University Presses, 1998. ISBN 0-8386-3723-X. p. 138.
^ Alyn, op. cit. Ingersoll, page 139.
^ Andrews, Deborah. (ed)., ed (1991). The Annual Obituary 1990. Gale. p. 678.
^ Porter, P. (ed)., ed (2006). Lawrence Durrell: Selected Poems. Faber and Faber.
^ Porter, op. cit., p. xxi.

External links

Durrell Celebration in Alexandria
The International Lawrence Durrell Society
Lawrence Durrell Library (Nanterre - France)
The Durrell School of Corfu
Critical Materials on Lawrence Durrell: A Bibliographic Checklist
Lawrence Durrell Bibliography from Inventions of Spring
Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990)
Biography from the Lawrence Durrell Archive
Photos from Find a Grave
Songs of Blue and Gold by Deborah Lawrenson - a fictional work set in Corfu loosely based on Durrell's life

Andrewski, Gene; Mitchell, Julian (1959-04-23). "Lawrence Durrell: The Art of Fiction No. 23 (interview)". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4720. Retrieved 2006-07-01.
Gifford, James (2004-07-30). "Lawrence Durrell: Text, Hypertext, Intertext". Agora: An Online Graduate Journal. http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/202/300/agora/2004/v3n01/index.htm. Retrieved 2007-10-14.
Gifford, James (2001-11-30). "Forgetting A Homeless Colonial: Gender, Religion and Transnational Childhood in Lawrence Durrell's Pied Piper Of Lovers". Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies. http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v6i1-2/giffor.htm. Retrieved 2007-10-14.
"Lawrence Durrell in the ambiguous white metropolis": an essay on the "Alexandria Quartet" from TLS, August 27, 2008.
Lawrence Durrell collection at University of Victoria, Special Collections

Persondata
NAME	Durrell, Lawrence
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Durrell, Lawrence George
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Biographer; poet; playwright; novelist
DATE OF BIRTH	February 27, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH	Jalandhar, British India
DATE OF DEATH	November 7, 1990
PLACE OF DEATH	Sommières, France

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Lawrence Durrell

Contents

Life and work

Poetry

Work with the British government

Major works

Novels

Travel

Poetry

Drama

Humour

Letters and essays

Editing and translating

Cultural references

Notes

Further reading

External links

	Whatever happenened to margot durrell sister of gerald durrell and lawrence durrell? Read answer...
	What is the fate of Nancy Myers first wife of Lawrence Durrell and where did she live after they divorced? Read answer...
	Which country is the Gerald durrell zoo? Read answer...

	Where can you find the poem Alexandria by Lawrence Durrell?
	Why was Lawrence Durrell's wife Nancy never mentioned in the book 'My Family and Other Animals'?
	Where lives Jacqui Durrells first wife of Gerald Durrell-writer?

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	Justine (1969 Drama Film)