Lawrence Durrell
Dimitri Botsis
(apo thn shmerinh Athens News)
Gia ta kalokairiatika diabasmata, meta to meshmeriano faghto kai to karpouzi,
kapou sthn skia ths berantas me 8ea thn 8alassa, kai m'ena "upobruxio" sto
pothri,na liwnei arga....
Dimitris
YG Prosexte thn teleutaia paragrafo.
Lawrence Durrell and
Greece's spirit of place
By John F.L. Ross
ALONG with summer comes the search for a good beach and a good after-swim read.
Might I recommend something from Lawrence Durrell, one of modern Greece's
greatest literary publicists and door-opener to Greek life for myself and many
others in the Anglo-Saxon world?
Apart from his works themselves, Gordon Bowker's recent biography Through the
Dark Labyrinth has provided a life-history to complement the poetic prose.
Durrell (1912-1990) was a one-of-a-kind character and an evocative purveyor of
what he called "spirit of place," the idea that culture closely reflects
geography and location. Born in imperial India of British-Irish parentage, he
was immediately cast into the unsettled role of foreign resident which he was to
repeat in numerous locales throughout his life.
He seems to us almost stateless, footloose even if not fancy-free, more closely
associated with Greece and France than with the England he often despised and
sporadically visited. A master of the written word (novel-cycles down to
prolific letter-writing), he was truly an all-round artist: an accomplished
abstract painter (under a pseudonym), jazz pianist, and not least, raconteur.
Bowker's nonstop recounting indeed suggests more like nine lives lived
rather than merely one - appropriately for a subject who, in his youth, bore a
faint feline resemblance.
To call Durrell a philhellene would do scant justice to his near-lifelong
association with this country. He did as much as any single foreigner to promote
Greece abroad through his writings and actions (eg promoting the return of the
Elgin Marbles before it became fashionable). His appreciation of the people -
both everyday and the literary elite - the landscape, and the mythologies shine
through his triumvirate of single-island Greek travel books. Prospero's
Cell, set in 1930s Corfu, was his most untroubled and lyrical rendition of an
island idyll.
Reflections on a Marine Venus was a paean to beautiful Rhodes in its difficult
post-war recovery (a book with its own history; see Athens News, 27 June). And
the celebrated Bitter Lemons documented the political strife in 1950s Cyprus
that eventually drove him from his own home, just as he was forced by war from
his Corfu house in 1939. Indeed for Durrell, Greece's
tragic modern history and its beauty were closely interwoven, and lent his
island studies increasing depth and pathos. Yet he kept returning, as late as
the 1980s, as the perambulatory eccentric around Corfu in his camper-van.
His travel writings alone - which included the delightful Spirit of Place and
The Greek Islands - merit a fair literary reputation; but Durrell's voluminous
oeuvre attests to a Vesuvian mind's lava flow of ideas and imagery. He regarded
himself primarily as a poet (13 collections published), though his main impact
was via the novel, starting the The Black Book in the 1930s, endorsed by
T.S. Eliot but long banned in Britain. His reputation was sealed with the
Alexandria Quartet, set in the murky wartime atmosphere of Cavafy's city, and
later, the five-volume Avignon Quintet. To be sure, he is not universally hailed
as a classic fiction writer. His circuitous plot-lines, dreamy
characterisations and linguistic somersaults have been called deceptive or
worse; and they can make for difficult and abstract reading.
With Durrell, there is a tight connection between art and artist. By all
accounts, his outsized personality (accentuated further by his diminutive
stature), his magisterial command of English, and an effervescent physical
presence captivated those around him, including literary comrades-in-arms like
Henry Miller and Patrick Leigh Fermor. The downside of living the
artist's life, however, was the need to "get inside" his novels, sometimes to
the brink of madness, often provoking his multiple wives, countless lovers and,
not least, his daughter Sappho, who eventually committed suicide.
Durrell's exuberant exterior apparently masked a gloomy melancholy, and a
never-ceasing internal struggle with his own demons; indeed he
purposefully harnessed this struggle to drive himself to greater creative
heights. The description "troubled genius" obviously lends itself to such an
overflowing talent; and his later dabblings into yoga and Buddhism indicate
continuing efforts to achieve some measure of peace.
Though opinion is divided about his ultimate literary merits, Durrell's travel
works are always engaging, while his fiction challenges the reader's thoughts,
values, and moral certitudes. And his vivid sense of living what he saw as the
liberating Greek spirit makes this a particularly apt place in which to explore
the fruits of this uniquely fertile literary mind.
Last summer, on a personal pilgrimage to his cherished Rhodian home, the Villa
Cleobolus, I was saddened to find a shuttered and neglected little house and
environs. For such a homo universalis as Durrell, it is a rich irony that
matters of nationalism (the house is set in a
picturesque old Turkish graveyard) stand in the way of providing a more fitting
shrine to such a vivid exponent of Greek life, and such an effective channel
between Greece and the wider world. Let us hope that someone soon wakes up to
the need.