Lawrence Durrell
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| Lawrence Durrell | |
 Lawrence Durrell |
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| Born: | February 27, 1912 Jalandhar, India |
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| Died: | November 7, 1990 Sommières, France |
| Occupation: | Biographist; poet; playwright; novelist |
| Nationality: | British |
| Writing period: | 1931 - 1990 |
| Website: | Lawrence Durrell |
Lawrence George Durrell (February 27, 1912 – November 7, 1990) was a British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer, though he resisted affiliation with Britain and preferred to be considered cosmopolitan. It was also discovered posthumously that Durrell never had British citizenship[1]. His most famous work is the tetralogy The Alexandria Quartet.
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[edit] Life and work
Durrell was born in Jalandhar, India, the son of Indian-born British colonials. At the age of eleven, he was sent to attend school in England — a country in which he was never happy, and which he left as soon as possible. Although his formal education was unsuccessful and he failed his university entrance examinations, Durrell had started writing poetry at the age of fifteen: his first collection, Quaint Fragment, was published in 1931.
On January 22, 1935, Durrell married Nancy Isobel Myers, the first of his four marriages[2]. In March that year Durrell, Nancy, his mother, and his siblings (including brother Gerald Durrell, later to be a major British wildlife conservationist and popular writer) moved to the Greek island of Corfu. In the same year his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, was published by Cassell; he also wrote to Henry Miller expressing intense admiration for his novel Tropic of Cancer, which sparked an enduring friendship and mutually critical relationship. The two got on well as they had similar subjects at the time: Durrell's The Black Book abounded with "four-letter words... grotesques,... [and] its mood equally as apocalyptic" as Tropic.
In August 1937 he 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 the Villa Seurat group appropriated for their own artistic...ends."[3] 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.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, his mother and other siblings returned to England, while Durrell remained on Corfu. After the fall of Greece, Lawrence escaped via Crete to Alexandria in Egypt, where he wrote about Corfu and their life on "this brilliant little speck of an island in the Ionian" in the poetic Prospero's Cell.
During the war, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British Embassies, first in Cairo and then Alexandria. After the war he held various diplomatic and teaching jobs. It was in Alexandria that he met Eve (Yvette) Cohen, who was to become the model for Justine.
Durrell separated from Nancy in 1942. In 1947 he married Yvette Cohen and in 1951 they had a daughter, Sappho Jane, named after the legendary Ancient Greek poetess Sappho.
In 1947 he was appointed director of the British Council Institute in Córdoba, Argentina, where for the next eighteen months he gave lectures on cultural topics[4]. 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[5], 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.
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 for 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.
Following his separation from Eve in 1955, Durrell was married again in 1961 to Claude-Marie Vincendon; she died of cancer in 1967.
Durrell settled in Sommières, a small village in Provence, France, from where 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 Avignon Quintet is on the whole less successful than The Alexandria Quartet, although 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.
Durrell's poetry has been overshadowed by his novels. Peter Porter, in his introduction to a Selected Poems[6], 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."[7]
Durrell suffered from emphysema for many years. He died of a stroke at his house in Sommières in November 1990.
[edit] Major works
[edit] 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)
- The Dark Labyrinth (1958; published as "Cefalu" in 1947)
- White Eagles Over Serbia (1957)
- The Alexandria Quartet—Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), Clea (1960)
- The Revolt of Aphrodite—Tunc (1968), Nunquam (1970)
- The Avignon Quintet—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)
[edit] Travel
- Prospero's Cell: A guide to the landscape and manners of the island of Corcyra (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)
[edit] Poetry
- Selected Poems: 1953–1963 Edited by Alan Ross (1964)
- Collected Poems: 1931–1974 Edited by James A. Brigham (1980)
[edit] Drama
- Sappho: A Play in Verse (1950)
- An Irish Faustus: A Morality in Nine Scenes (1963)
- Acte (1964)
[edit] Humor
- Esprit de Corps (1957)
- Stiff Upper Lip (1958)
- Sauve Qui Peut (1966)
[edit] Letters and essays
- A Key to Modern British Poetry (1952)
- 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)
- The Durrell-Miller Letters: 1935–80 (1988) edited by Ian S. MacNiven
[edit] Notes
- ^ Ezard, John. "Durrell Fell Foul of Migrant Law", The Guardian, 2002-04-29. Retrieved on 2007-01-30.. }}
- ^ MacNiven, Ian S. (1998). Lawrence Durrell: A Biography. Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-17248-2. p. xiii.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ (2006) in Porter, P. (ed).: Lawrence Durrell: Selected Poems. Faber and Faber.
- ^ Porter, op. cit., p. xxi.
[edit] Further reading
- Bowker, Gordon. Through the Dark Labyrinth: A Biography of Lawrence Durrell. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.
- Durrell, Lawrence. The Big Supposer: An Interview with Marc Alyn. New York: Grove, 1974.
- Fraser, G. S. Lawrence Durrell: A Study. London: Faber and Faber, 1968.
- Friedman, Alan Warren, ed. Critical Essays on Lawrence Durrell. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
- Kaczvinsky, Donald P. Lawrence Durrell’s Major Novels, or The Kingdom of the Imagination. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1997.
- Haag, Michael. Alexandria: City of Memory. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
- MacNiven, Ian. Lawrence Durrell - A Biography. London: Faber and Faber, 1998.
- Pine, Richard. Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape. New York: St. Martin's, 1994.
- Raper, Julius Rowan, et al., eds. Lawrence Durrell: Comprehending the Whole. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1995.
- Rashidi, Linda Stump. (Re)constructing Reality: Complexity in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.
- 'Lawrence Durrell' - song by Mick Thomas
[edit] External links
- The International Lawrence Durrell Society
- Lawrence Durrell Library (Nanterre - France)
- Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990)
- Biography: Lawrence Durrell Archive
- [1]
- Photos
- Andrewski, Gene; Mitchell, Julian (1959-04-23). Lawrence Durrell: The Art of Fiction No. 23 (interview). The Paris Review. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
