The Durrells of Corfu

by Michael Haag

  This page from one of Larry’s journals shows the White House in 1939. Kalami and Kouloura were used interchangeably. The Greek text above begins with the familiar entreaty of sailors at sea in a storm: ‘Alexander, who lives and rules…’

  The White House at Kalami during Larry and Nancy’s residence in 1937–38.

  Pied Piper of Lovers had sold poorly and Larry was furious with the editors at Cassell, who had cut or altered passages they deemed offensive. So he was fortunate that Faber and Faber, where the poet T.S. Eliot was editor and director, saw merit in Panic Spring, which they published in 1936. To give it a fresh start they suggested that Larry use a pseudonym. He chose Charles Norden, after the character Van Norden in Tropic of Cancer.

  ‘I am living at the Villa Borghese,’ Tropic of Cancer begins. ‘There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.’ Larry would do the same in The Black Book, where the epicentre of death is the Queens Hotel in Upper Norwood, or rather the Regina Hotel as he calls it in his novel, and like Miller finding this social and cultural death everywhere, throughout England, ‘the English death’, but also ‘a European death as yet incomprehensible to most Europeans’. England and Europe were in their death throes, but the Mediterranean was still alive. ‘The Mediterranean is the capital, the heart, the sex organ of Europe,’ Larry said.

  Larry finished The Black Book on 27 February 1937, his twenty-fifth birthday, added a dedication to Nancy, and sent his only copy of the typescript to Miller in Paris saying if he did not like it he could throw it into the Seine. Miller immediately replied in three long letters, the first dated 8 March beginning, ‘The Black Book came and I have opened it and I read goggle-eyed, with terror, admiration and amazement … You are the master of the English language … You have written things in this book which nobody has dared to write. It’s brutal, obsessive, cruel, devastating, appalling. I’m bewildered still … The whole thing is a poem, a colossal poem.’

  But Miller added, ‘Of course I don’t expect to see Faber & Faber publishing it.’ Larry had a three-book contract with Faber and Faber and so was obliged to offer them The Black Book. Miller was terrified that he possessed the only copy and before sending it on to London, he set to work with Anaïs Nin, his lover and patron, at making several copies more. When finally it went to Faber and Faber, T.S. Eliot replied to Larry on 28 June that he was ‘very much impressed’ but that it did contain certain words that presented difficulties. ‘I shall be glad if anything can be done to make this book publishable in England; if not, I shall be glad to see it published abroad.’

  Larry was tempted to expurgate his book so that it could be published by Faber, but Miller, who was a rock of artistic integrity, warned him against going down that route, and so it was published the following year in Paris by the Obelisk Press, which had done Tropic of Cancer, and carried Eliot’s recommendation: ‘The Black Book is the first piece of work by a new English writer to give me any hope for the future of prose fiction.’

  * * *

  Living conditions at Kalami were primitive. Because the roads were washed out in winter and storms might interrupt the daily caique, Larry and Nancy subsisted on a diet of fish and often macaroni from a tin, though occasionally a lamb was killed. A sea cave or a well were relied upon to keep foods cool, while to boil water for a cup of tea could take twenty minutes of puffing on a charcoal stove. In winter the weather was often blowy and sometimes cold, and on an especially hot summer’s day they would carry the whole table down to the water and dine with the Ionian up to their waists. And they had only a bedroom and a sitting room in addition to sharing the kitchen with the Athenaios family, who lived at the other end of the house.

  So when Alan Thomas came from Bournemouth he was taken not to Kalami but to Sotiriotissa, what Gerry would call the Daffodil-Yellow Villa near Kontokali, and then to Paleocastritsa on the far side of the island, where Larry and Nancy along with Theodore and his family all decided to rent rooms, turning Alan’s arrival into a holiday of their own.

  Alan disembarked at the quay in Corfu Town on 27 May 1937 and was met by Larry, Nancy and Pat Evans, a mutual friend of his and Larry’s who had been taken on by the family as a tutor for Gerry. Alan was also introduced to Spiro, describing him in his diary as ‘a great Rabelaisian character, nominally a car driver, but also one of the outstanding characters and general rogues on the island’. Arriving at Sotiriotissa, Alan wrote in his diary that ‘Mrs Durrell is away and Leslie is in charge, another reunion. Leslie, whom I remember as a shy adolescent boy, has developed wonderfully under the sun. Both physically and in character.’

  The Durrells on Corfu in 1938: Leslie, Spiro, Larry (with the gun), Gerry’s tutor (and Margo’s ‘Homeric lover’) Pat Evans, Mother and Nancy.

  After lunch at Louisa’s villa, which Alan noted was ‘pale pink’ (Daffodil-Yellow was Gerry’s invention), Leslie joined them for the drive to Paleocastritsa, where after a swim and tea Leslie returned to the villa, while Pat, who had waited in Corfu long enough to see Alan, set off on a month-long walking tour through Epirus to Macedonia. It was a diversion from what Larry called his ‘Homeric love’ for Margo.

  In My Family and Other Animals Gerry has Pat appear as Peter, ‘a tall, handsome young man, fresh from Oxford, with decided ideas on education which I found rather trying to begin with. But gradually the atmosphere of the island worked its way insidiously under his skin, and he relaxed and became quite human.’ Gerry persuaded Pat that instead of receiving English lessons he should write his great novel of the flora and fauna of the world, ‘four fat notebooks in which was written my great Epic of going round the world collecting animals, taking my entire family with me’, a page-turner with each chapter ending on a thrilling cliffhanger, making the reader eager to know more, ‘Mother being attacked by a jaguar, or Larry struggling in the coils of an enormous python.’ The epic was packed in a trunk to be forwarded when the family left Corfu, but in the rush and confusion it was lost. ‘It would, I feel,’ wrote Gerry in his memoirs written near the end of his life, ‘have made interesting reading now’.

  But things did not go well with Pat, Gerry continues in My Family and Other Animals. ‘Mother had discovered, as she so delicately put it, Margo and Peter were becoming “too fond of one another”’. Pat’s services were dispensed with and Margo took it badly, locking herself in her room and howling. ‘Yes, I did have a crush on Pat Evans’, Margo said years later. ‘It was inevitable that we would get together, we did things together, you know. We rode horses and we went through the olive groves. And he introduced me to opera, La Traviata. He used to come to us in Bournemouth. And I liked him then; well, who wouldn’t? He was great.’

  Amid the upset of having her relationship with Pat broken off, Margo began grossly over-eating and was putting on a pound a day. ‘Margaret was in a very bad way,’ recalled Nancy. ‘She began to get very fat, I mean she really did get awfully fat.’ But the cause turned out not to be a broken heart, rather a glandular condition for which Louisa took Margo to London, and took Gerry too, leaving the Daffodil-Yellow Villa in Leslie’s hands. ‘Coming from the calm, slow, sunlit days of Corfu, our arrival in London late in the evening was a shattering experience,’ Gerry writes in The Corfu Trilogy. ‘So many people were at the station that we did not know, all hurrying to and fro, grey faced and worried.’

  Back in Corfu, at Paleocastritsa, Alan Thomas spent his first day swimming in the warm Ionian and walking with Larry and Nancy up to the Byzantine monastery built on a crag overlooking the sea, ‘an amazing situation, like living in the sky’. At nightfall they dined outdoors under thatching at their rented cottage and talked themselves to sleep. ‘This is a glorious place,’ wrote Alan in his diary. ‘I despair of giving any idea of it.’

  On another day they sailed south in the Van Norden, Larry’s sailing boat, which ‘rode the sea like a bird’, and landed at Mirtiotissa, a sand beach under a great cliff where they stripped and dashed into the sea
– ‘the water was like warm milk’. Alan had not bathed naked since schooldays: ‘It is an exhilarating feeling to have the water caress the whole of your body as you slide through it.’

  Larry at Paleocastritsa.

  They were all living in the same stone cottage at Paleocastritsa. An American painter called Maurice Koster was living in one half but offered two of his four rooms to Larry and Nancy. Theodore, with his wife Mary and his daughter Alexia, lived in the other half of the cottage. Alan talked a good deal with Theodore, his deliberate and accurate way with English coupled with his wide knowledge and a dry sense of humour making him a delightful conversationalist and the possessor of bizarre stories.

  ‘Mainly we discussed death, how to avoid and come by it’, Alan noted one afternoon. The most effective way to commit suicide, said Theodore, was holding a revolver in the mouth at a forty-five degree angle, but not a .22 calibre.

  ‘I would advise either of you, should you contemplate suicide,’ Theodore said to Alan and Larry, ‘to use a .38 or preferably a .48.’

  ‘Surely’, said Larry, ‘if you used a .48 you would blow your head off.’

  ‘But that would be your object, wouldn’t it?’ Theodore replied, and then went on to discuss the various symptoms of syphilis until ‘between us’, thought Alan, ‘we seemed to have them all’. And ‘he also told us how to get out of a whirlpool’.

  In between times they listened to Theodore’s collection of Greek folk songs, talked about peasant dances, turned over the latest news from the civil war in Spain, and discussed the effect of a major conflagration on the price of vegetables. ‘I have become a worshipper of the sun, and beneath it nothing matters. I live in a vortex of light’, Alan wrote in his diary. ‘Time is of no account here. I haven’t wound my watch for a week. Larry frequently writes dates 1938.’

  After ten days they returned to Corfu Town, Nancy, Larry, Theodore, Alan, Spiro, and also Leslie, who had fetched up at Paleocastritsa after spending the night on a fishing expedition with his Greek friends. The road rose steeply and twisted back and forth upon itself, some of the hair-pin bends so sharp that Spiro had to reverse the car once or twice to get round, while all along the way he blasted his horn and shouted to everyone he passed.

  Nancy and Theo on the caique to town.

  ‘He is a character, that man,’ Alan wrote in his diary.

  Sitting at the wheel in his shirt sleeves, white chauffeur’s cap on one side of his head, brown eyes almost hidden in little bags of wrinkled flesh, cigarette in mouth, upper lip scarred. With everyone he is on familiar terms, to him they are Nancy or Alan. Or else ‘dear’. Always excepting Larry whom he addresses as Lord Byron.

  Twisting down the narrow cork-screw road with its loose surface and undefended drops, swinging round hair-pin bends with inches to spare.

  Leslie: It’s a dangerous drive this, Spiro.

  Spiro: Not with me, dear.

  The idyll of those days, the idyll that Alan experienced, was not shared by Nancy, who later said, ‘I never liked Alan Thomas. In fact I disliked him.’ She did not remember a great deal about his visit to Corfu, ‘except that he annoyed me as usual, and particularly in that I thought he was living in a dream-land and not in reality at all. He wanted the whole Corfu thing to be a sort of Dream in the Luxembourg – romantic and wonderful. And it was a time when I remember Larry and I were quarrelling very violently.’ On one occasion they were quarrelling at breakfast while Alan was there. Later in the day she saw his diary open and he had written something like ‘“sitting having breakfast in this magical place with the wonderful sunshine streaming in and the delightful conversation with the Durrells”, etc, etc. And I remember my feeling of intense irritation. He was completely ignoring reality so far as I was concerned.’

  Alexia, who was in Paleocastritsa with her mother throughout the summer while Theodore would go back and forth to his radiology work in town, remembers Larry and Nancy, who also spent much time in Paleocastritsa after Alan left. Alexia recalled them living in complete harmony. Larry had taken up painting and they worked busily throughout the day with never a cross word between them. But Alexia remembered that, while Larry never minded the little girl watching him, Nancy, who would set up her easel in some quiet spot, would shoo her away.

  Larry and Nancy had come to Corfu to each freely enjoy their artistic pursuits. Each was fiercely independent and demanding of their art. But the attention attracted by Larry’s writing was beginning to open up their hermetic world and to alter the balance between them. In Nancy’s response to Alan’s diary remarks, one has the sense that she felt she was being intruded upon and put to one side.

  Larry and Nancy at Kalami on the Van Norden.

  In mid-July, Louisa, Margo and Gerry returned from London. Then on 10 August, five and a half months after completing The Black Book, Larry and Nancy took the ferry to Brindisi and from there the train to Paris to meet Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. They would stay in Paris and in London for eight months altogether before returning to Corfu in April 1938. And in November that year they would go to Paris and London again, not coming back to Corfu until May 1939, seven months later. While Gerry in My Family and Other Animals teasingly depicts Larry as a would-be writer living at home with the rest of the brood, struggling against scorpions to write deathless prose, the reality was that Larry had entered the innermost literary circles in England, where he became such a familiar sight that Dylan Thomas, after bumping into Larry yet again in a London pub, asked him, ‘Has somebody moved Corfu?’ In truth, from August 1937 to the outbreak of war in September 1939, Larry and Nancy spent more time in France and England than they did in Corfu.

  In September, a month after Larry and Nancy’s departure, Louisa and the family moved out of the Daffodil-Yellow Villa to what Gerry would call the Snow-White Villa, not far from the Strawberry-Pink Villa at Perama. According to Gerry the idea was Larry’s, of course.

  ‘Well, if we’re going to be invaded by relations, there’s only one thing to do’, said Larry resignedly.

  ‘What’s that?’ inquired Mother, looking over he spectacles expectantly.

  ‘We must move, of course.’

  That is what Gerry says in My Family and Other Animals. Yet no relations were expected. And Larry was not there. But as Margo, speaking of her brothers, once said, ‘I do not trust writers.’

  Chapter 7: The Snow-White Villa

  BEFORE LARRY AND NANCY SET OUT for Paris, in August 1937, they arranged with Anastasius Athenaios, the owner of the house in Kalami, to add another storey; the Durrells would pay for it and live on the upper floor, while Anastasius would have his house enlarged at no cost to himself. Work was already underway by the time they left; Anastasius, or Totsa as he was known, was a man of many abilities, a fisherman, a carpenter, and he had built the original stone house himself. Now with the help of a few local men, and working by rule of thumb, he set to work.

  Larry set one condition. As Theodore recounted the story, Larry repeatedly told Totsa, ‘I want two big windows that will take up almost the whole of the wall facing the sea. I insist on two big windows. I must have two big windows so that I can look out on the sea and feel as if I were actually riding the waves.’ Totsa gently and patiently explained that delightful as two big windows would be in summer, they would offer no protection against the icy winds blowing in from the snow-clad mountains of Albania in winter. The occupants would freeze and storms could whip the sea as high as the upper storey and smash through such big windows, drenching everything within. But Larry brushed these excuses aside. ‘From here to here. See, I’m marking it so that there should be no mistake. Two big wide windows.’ And away went Larry and Nancy to France and England for eight months.

  The White House and Kalami photographed in 1955. Larry and Nancy paid for the addition of the upper storey which was built during the winter of 1937/38.

  The White House, as it became known, was being transformed into the handsome dwelling overlooking the bay at Kalami that we see
today. And for Larry and Nancy the spacious upper storey of several rooms was to be their year-round home. Whatever the disturbances in the outside world, they meant to be in Corfu to stay. This is probably one reason why Louisa decided to move; Larry and Nancy would no longer be under her roof even occasionally and the Daffodil-Yellow Villa was now too large.

  The family’s new house was smaller but grand, and also closer to town, at Cressida, very near the Strawberry-Pink Villa at Perama where the Durrells had made good friends with the Condos family who had a fish taverna down the hill. In My Family and Other Animals Gerry called it the Snow-White Villa.

  Perched on a hill-top among olive-trees, the new villa, white as snow, had a broad verandah running along one side, which was hung with a thick pelmet of grapevine. In front of the house was a pocket-handkerchief sized garden, neatly walled, which was a solid tangle of wild flowers. The whole garden was overshadowed by a large magnolia tree, the glossy dark leaves of which cast a deep shadow. The rutted driveway wound away from the house, down the hillside through olive-groves, vineyards and orchards, before reaching the road. We had liked the villa the moment Spiro had shown it to us. It stood, decrepit, but immensely elegant, among drunken olives.

  Built in 1824 in the Georgian style and owned then and still now by the Palatiano family, the villa was once a weekend retreat for the British High Commisioners, until 1864, when Britain transferred Corfu and the other Ionian islands to Greek rule. The villa stands on a prominent rise overlooking the shallow Halikiopoulou Lagoon, with a far view towards Canoni, while on the flat lands on the near shore were what Gerry called the Chessboard Fields, an intricate pattern of saltpans created by the Venetians to collect brine but now flooded by fresh water from the hills so that each small patch of earth, framed with canals, was richly cultivated and green with vegetables, figs and grapes.