The natural association for this autobiographical story, especially by 1982 when Durrell included it in his essay, is George Orwell’s famous essay “Shooting an Elephant.”[9] For Orwell, the servant of empire who shoots the elephant is constrained just as much by the expectations of the indigenous population as he is by his duties to empire, even if as an individual he rejects the social conditions into which he is placed. Yet Orwell’s essay casts the elephant as the British Empire itself, brought low by its own servant fulfilling the unwished duties of an imperial subject, ultimately leading to a Titanic-like rise and fall in the close to the work:
An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright…I fired a third time…But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upwards like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skywards like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay. (154–55)
For Orwell, the relations among the colonials, the Indians, and the elephant are antagonistic and inextricably caught in dynamics of power, control, and social position. The collapse of the elephant, rising for a final trumpet, is the recognition Orwell had previously lacked: “I did not even know that the British Empire is dying” (149). Durrell’s contrast, which avoids empire and focuses on individual relations, could not differ more:
One of the shot elephants had left a small child behind, and this was to become my playmate during my stay. It was called Sadu. It was an apprentice elephant learning its duties with a couple of trained grown-up females. But as yet it was not very big or strong; so it took me to practise upon. It had learned to say salaam, to pick up money from the ground, and was now learning how to hoist a man on to its back. A grown man would have been too heavy, so Sadu was told to practise with me. This he did with pleasure. They hold out their trunk curled up at the end like a human hand; you put your foot into it and presto you are raised in the air, and placed securely on the animal’s back, between those two fantastic ears, the signs of supernormal spirituality, they say. They have a singular floating walk, a little humorous, like a drunken Irishman.…But the proverb says that whoever sees the world from the back of an elephant learns the secrets of the jungle and becomes a seer. I had to be content to become a poet. (this volume 3–4)
For Durrell’s vision, the elephant becomes a partner while both are children and playmates unaware of the training to which they are being subjected. Moreover, while the elephant grants the gifts that allow Durrell to become a poet, its walk “like a drunken Irishman” signals Durrell’s most frequently used escape from being identified as British and a royal subject—his dubious claim to Irish ancestry. The elephant and the child are a part of each other, and hence both are reflections of Durrell himself. Perhaps more importantly, both resist the politics of the conflicting governmental bodies and material conditions in which they find themselves constituted as subjects.
This childhood experience of India, which fostered his first literary work and shaped the rest of his career of alienation from Britain, is reflected in Durrell’s approach to other homes, most notably the Mediterranean and Greece. “Helene and Philhellene” anticipates the critical vision articulated by Edmund Keeley in Inventing Paradise and by David Roessel in In Byron’s Shadow. It shows Durrell again revising the literary influences that shaped his interactions with others such that the historical desire for ancient Greece, which so blinded the vision of the Romantics and Victorians (and arguably a great many of the High Modernists), is displaced by a recognition of the Modern Greece that cannot be ignored, and also the historical desire is also displaced by the recognition of the rich culture that Classicism can inspire one to overlook. Durrell’s argument for the virtues of a contemporary vision is strikingly prescient and sets us to reconsider his frequently presented colonial attitudes toward Greece:
“Hellas” is written rather than “Greece” in order first of all to point the difference between the Philhellene of yesterday and the Philhellene of today—for up to almost the present generation the passionate bias of the English writer and scholar has been towards the classical world. In a sense Greece has represented to him, in terms of landscape and climate, the flowering of an education.…But the classical bias has had its defects no less than its virtues. It has tended to blindfold the traveller to the reality of contemporary Greece. (this volume 107)
For Durrell, thinking back to his young adulthood and happy years on Corfu, this contemporary vision demonstrates the transformation of the Romantic vision of a Classical Hellas into a modern vision of Greece, which has been documented by Roessel. For Roessel, “With contemporary notions of dancing Zorbas and Shirley Valentines with or without bikini tops, we might forget that before the late 1930s almost no one went to Greece to find their inner selves. This is the Greece that Miller and Durrell began to construct” (In Byron’s 6). Durrell’s frame is Modern Greek literature, and in his view the quasiparental relationship to Byron and imperial power remains, but with the significant recognition that Greek authors have transformed and surpassed this restriction: “not only has our Philhellenism undergone a radical change for the better but…the modern Greek has become more than worthy of the admiration that was too often in the past reserved for his ancestors” (this volume 117). The paternalism has not yet vanished, but the recognition of new vitality and the occluding restrictions of an imperialist vantage point are major shifts for this period. Such reconsiderations of Greece as home appear across Durrell’s other works in this volume, whether it is his desire to dote on Corfu or his hesitations over Cyprus, an island wounded deeply by imperialism, and which in turn wounded Durrell deeply. Again, the position as a subject of empire shapes the vision Durrell can conjure, but it is by this time most assuredly a vision of contemporary rather than ancient Greece, and that shift is still worth noting, even as we question the difficulties of Durrell’s conflicted politics.
In only these three approaches—Durrell’s politics, his position as a Late Modernist, and the often-censored poignancy of his writings of place—we find that attention to Durrell’s short prose creates a greatly transformed understanding of Durrell as an author and, as a consequence, a radically new way of re-reading his major works. If, in reading Durrell’s charming works collected here, the reader develops a startlingly new or at the least refreshed way of engaging with the major novel sequences or with Durrell’s overlooked poetry, then the purpose of this collection will be amply served.
THIS EDITION
This collection was first envisioned by Peter Baldwin as a volume to be produced by Delos Press, which has specialized in fine editions. At his invitation, Richard Pine and I prepared a series of very brief comments on each piece to provide a précis for the unfamiliar reader or to point out one or two of the potentially confusing references to which Durrell is prone. The contents of this original volume, and the nature of its editorial comments, were significantly different from those brought together here. Yet this was the genesis of the project, and it remains a significant influence. This project was unfortunately abandoned due to the demands of the financial crisis of 2008, which has impacted small press endeavours in a number of ways worldwide. While a letterpress edition with marbled wrappers has advantages, and I greatly value the few beautiful Delos editions my shelves afford, the wider availability of this edition and its scholarly nature has led to extensive revisions.
This present volume developed, phoenix-like, from this earlier vision, albeit without any dramatic flames or burning of manuscripts. I have both expanded and contracted the contents, trimming some initially intended works while integrating others that had not been previously considered, and stitching still others together for a future volume on Durrell’s creative process.
This also led to a new sequence and series of divisions between the various works. Durrell’s fascinating discussions of the relations between the visual arts and writing must remain for another project, as does much of his literary criticism and short creative prose. However, the most significant transformation has been to the nature of the volume and its aims, specifically the audience and purpose it envisions. It has shifted from a fine press printing with only very brief and unobtrusive contextual materials to a full critical edition with a scholarly apparatus, detailed annotations, and bibliography. This new vision necessitated changes not only to the selected works, such that those of a more scholarly orientation were retained to a higher degree than others, but also to the order and structure of the work.
In general, I have left Durrell’s idiosyncratic grammar untouched, although spellings have been standardized. Where more than one edition of a work previously exists, changes to paragraph breaks are common. This is particularly true for works that appeared in the press. In these instances where variants exist, I have selected those paragraph breaks that seemed most congenial to reading in a book, as opposed to a news column. With regard to other variants, I have generally preferred the first publication, especially when the latter was prepared without significant, documented editorial oversight from Durrell. For Durrell’s UNESCO lectures on Shakespeare, which have appeared in print only in a French translation, I have attempted to remain faithful to the original English typescripts, even though they are not as editorially polished as the subsequent French publication. The problems of translating Durrell’s prose back into English created too many variants that were surely editorial in nature. To compensate, I have silently corrected the missing punctuation and frequent spelling errors of the draft manuscripts. In these works, I have added or altered punctuation to add clarity where a spoken reading would certainly have avoided misinterpretations through emphasis and pauses.
For the final selection of materials, I have limited myself to works not otherwise accessible and particularly those that appeared in exceedingly rare publications or that exist only in typescript. This has meant excluding materials that would make natural pairings with those included here, such as Durrell’s successful surrealist prose pair “Asylum in the Snow” and “Zero,” as well as his useful comments on Henry Miller in the Introduction to The Best of Henry Miller.
From the Elephant’s Back
1982
THIS IS THE FIRST TIME that I have ventured to accept an invitation to lecture in France, in French, and I am happy that it should be here in Paris, at the Centre Pompidou.[1] It is a suitable place to discuss the theory and the practice of fiction in relation to myself, and moreover in a language which prides itself on being able to make fine distinctions.
The invitation reached me at a suitable moment also, for I was between two instalments of a new constellation of novels, and pondering on its form;[2] I thought that the act of turning my notions into French might help me to realise them more clearly and thus help me to explain, if not to excuse, the direction taken by my writing. I have nothing very esoteric to propound, no views about the novel which would justify an excursion into such disciplines as are offered by the newest sciences, like linguistics, for example.[3] That would be too sophisticated. At the worst I might confess to using my Freud as a compass, for psychoanalysis has brought us real treasures of observation and insight which we should not neglect. Of course it does not go far enough, but then nothing does!
I would prefer to present my case in terms of biography, for my thinking is coloured by the fact that I am a colonial, an Anglo-Indian,[4] born into that strange world of which the only great poem is the novel Kim by Kipling.[5] I was brought up in its shadow, and like its author I was sent to England to be educated. The juxtaposition of the two types of consciousness was extraordinary and created, I think, an ambivalence of vision which was to both help and hinder me as a writer. At times I felt more Asiatic than European, at times the opposite; at times I felt like a white negro thinking in pidgin![6]
At first one hatches books, stories, poems, as they arrive, with pleasure and surprise, and quite without guarantees, as one produces babies. It is only after five or ten years that one starts to recognise a family resemblance—the blue eye, the characteristic nose—which give a specific character to the whole. One begins to trace an inner coherence which relates all these separate parts into a system of ideas or a philosophy of life of a distinctive kind. In this way one’s author grows his unique personality and assumes himself, just as a child does. In my case, India was just as important to me as England was. I reacted creatively to both styles of vision, and I often criticised both tartly, perhaps unjustly even, for it was difficult to match such opposing attributes and to make something coherent of the lessons they taught me. One part of me has remained a child of the jungle, ever mindful of the various small initiations which an Indian childhood imposes. I have seen the Rope Trick when I was ten, and distinctly felt the hypnotic power of the conjuror over us as we sat round him in a circle.[7] I have been followed from tree-top to tree-top by sportive monkeys which pelted me with nuts and stones. Their anger made them very accurate and I was glad I wore the stout pith helmet of my father, made of cork about two inches thick—better than a modern crash-helmet! I have seen a cobra fight a mongoose, I have seen the peak of Everest from the foot of my bed in a gaunt dormitory in Darjeeling! My first language was Hindi. And so on![8]
My family came to India before the great Indian Mutiny,[9] so that neither my father nor my mother had seen England or experienced the English at home.[10] We were virgin. My father was an engineer at an epoch when we were building the great railway system which now secures the postal system and is a life-line which helps in cases of famine or flood.[11] The family ramified throughout India, in the police, the military, the functionaries, the technocrats. But we were real Anglo-Indians, we spoke the languages of the places, and one of my uncles and a cousin became known as translators of Buddhist texts.[12] But what of my elephant?
One of my uncles was a district Commissioner in Bihar, that is to say a sort of Prefect in charge of a land area as large as two or three French departments. He had many duties including that of shooting elephants when, as often happened then, they went mad and attacked villages.[13] Also tigers and rhinoceroses. But the elephants caused him the most regret. My father wished me to learn to shoot and sent me to visit him—he lived in a strange sinister rambling house in Ranchi,[14] with a large garden full of animals. I arrived at dusk to find it empty—everyone was away on a picnic. I walked round this empty house with interest for I had heard stories of this great hunter among my uncles. But I had not been prepared for the dozen or so skulls of fully grown elephants which lined the back verandah. They were huge and grave, like a Greek chorus. Why had he put them there?
During the week, when I went on my first shoot with him, I was able to interrogate him. He said that he thought that the mad elephants developed a sort of brain tumour, and that when he shot one he had the head cut off and examined. Then the sun bleached away the flesh and you were left with this big beautiful skull. I was struck by the word “beautiful.” He said it twice. But this was not all. One of the shot elephants had left a small child behind, and this was to become my playmate during my stay. It was called Sadu.[15] It was an apprentice elephant learning its duties with a couple of trained grown-up females. But as yet it was not very big or strong; so it took me to practise upon. It had learned to say salaam, to pick up money from the ground, and was now learning how to hoist a man on to its back. A grown man would have been too heavy, so Sadu was told to practise with me. This he did with pleasure. They hold out their trunk curled up at the end like a human hand; you put your foot into it and presto you are raised in the air, and placed securely on the animal’s back, between those two fantastic ears, the signs of supernormal spirituality, they say. They have a singular floating walk, a little humorous, like a drunken Irishman; elephants are great comics. But the prover
b says that whoever sees the world from the back of an elephant learns the secrets of the jungle and becomes a seer. I had to be content to become a poet, but it was enough for one life.[16]
I am often asked if I was not marked by India. Obviously, to live in a country where the whole population, both civil and ecclesiastical was trying implacably to seek a fulcrum of repose at the heart of reality, a country where people were living alongside nature and not in tangence to it, gives off a very powerful flavour, permeating the air. On the other hand, what I was learning at school taught me that one should not become too resigned to the behaviour of nature. Famines and floods and epidemics should and could be resisted by science. So our lives ran counter to the life of passivity which was the Indian way. Who is right? Even now the problem dogs India—can one expect to have pure drinking water and modern clinics without losing the Mantras? We were too cocksure about the matter, and gloried in the perfections of Victorian science. I remember a great savant announcing that all the secrets of the universe had been discovered and that only a few insignificant details remained to be worked out! By the time I was sixteen the whole of this scientific edifice had been undermined and was ready to crash down in ruins. Strange that there is no word for the Greek “hubris” in English or French.
From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings Page 3