From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings

by Lawrence Durrell

  The earliest impression one gets on the way into the city is one of amazement at the number and height of the television aerials. It’s as if the people were dying of news-hunger, as if the houses were reaching up to drink the sky empty of information. Reception was bad, said the chauffeur, and now with the troubles on the northern border people wanted to get the English channels. He was a mine of essential information but I have forgotten most of the things he told me—all except one. He said that Guinness was not fattening if you drank enough of it. I made a mental note of the fact.

  I was deposited at the old Shelbourne hotel,[4] which appeared to have as many bars as bedrooms—comfortable old-fashioned bars with good service, where hunting men could gather round a tall glass in the intervals of riding to hounds. Here there was a good deal of damning of England’s eyes—always a pleasant occupation—but not so much serious politics was talked. I had agreed to meet Duffy later in the day, and to deliver myself to the student representative who would meet me in the bar. This pleasant and serious young man, by name Richard Pine,[5] was waiting for me already, and Duffy, who had a terror of intellectuals, fled with a murmured goodbye.

  Pine and I shared a precious glass of smoky whiskey while we talked about the paper he was to read to the society that evening, and then when I had washed and brushed up, he took me for my first leisurely stroll about the city, up and down the little streets made world famous by the writers who have lavished their poetry on them. Was ever a city—apart perhaps from Paris—so beloved of its artists? The net result, of course, is that when one gets there one is continually shocked into surprised recognition of its features. One knows the place already. The streets wiggle and wander in real life as they do in Irish fiction. The worlds of Joyce, Beckett, Yeats, and Synge[6] leap out at one in isolated vignettes, or merge into a spectrum of colours illustrated everywhere by that soft, bitter-sweet accent with its sensual lilt. One realises the charm and strength of intimacy. Why, running like a leitmotiv under the soft buzz of traffic, one hears the crying of seagulls as they hover over the main street. One is aware of the sea always and of the Liffey, which puffs and stumbles and bumps its way through the streets like some tiny locomotive. Grafton Street down to O’Connell was not a long way in miles, but it spanned centuries of Ireland’s confused but magical history, and once one hit the river one was seduced along its quays towards venerable pubs like the Brazen Head[7] where ragged gentlemen of the most absurd respectability wagered mind over porter in huge glasses full of the foaming ruby brew. One recalls E.M. Forster’s advice to the visitor to Alexandria. “The best way to see the city is to walk about aimlessly,”[8] he says. Same goes for Dublin. But your journey will be punctuated at every turn by a pub of charm. My hosts informed me that there were over a thousand places where one could drink—a large number for a population of six hundred thousand souls. Consequently, it is safe to say that that little puddle of soapsuds at the bottom of the Irish soul is composed of the “heads” of thousands of demolished Guinnesses.

  But that night it was Trinity,[9] and here I was received for dinner in Hall with the philosophic society whose members were all very young but conscious of forming part of a venerable tradition. The surroundings too—the Elizabethan college with its world famous library and its clattery courts of cobbles linking the lecture rooms and residences softly lit in the evening mist (a feeling of gaslight): the imposing backcloth of the place was a fitting match for the dignity and sobriety of my hosts. The great Hall with its portraits has been so often described and I will not attempt yet another picture. Two pretty blonde girls—scholars of the college—opened and closed the proceedings with a Latin grace. I felt relaxed and happy, surrounded by these young philosophers of Ireland. I recalled Hamilton of Trinity[10]—practically the Einstein of his day—who so entranced Wordsworth by his conversation that the old poet became a firm friend of his. These younglings were fitting successors to that great man, who was still practically a babe in arms when he became Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom. After dinner we retired for coffee before the lecture, and here my host disappeared for a moment to consult his notes.

  It will be enough to say that young Pine’s dismantling of my ideas and intentions was brilliantly done and was one of the best close-ups of the work—such as it is—I have heard. He was a skillful and persuasive lecturer, and not at all deaf to the ironies and comedies which form so large a part of my literary baggage. The hall filled up, and the philosophic proceedings which followed allowed everyone to fire an arrow into the target area which Pine had labelled “Sexual curiosity and metaphysical speculation in the work of.” It was a treat to see with what interest and vivacity these young men and women skirted the minefields of modern ideas, and with what idealism they tackled our contemporary problems from permissiveness to pollution. The young today are touching in their concern; they are young and fresh of course, and not worn down to the lining as we old buffers are—disgusted at the behaviour of man after having lived out a long lifetime of wars and catastrophes and big disappointments. They are more idealistic than I was at their age, and I give them a sincere chapeau in the French sense. I can well understand why my daughters think I am a damned old reactionary corpse-watcher. It’s just that I have run out of oxygen and adrenaline.

  It was a fine Irish gift to me this evening with the students of Trinity, and it formed so to speak one leg of my Irish see-saw. While I was in Dublin I spent half my time with Richard and his friends, being guided and coaxed and instructed by (what better?) undergraduates with their sharp and special knowledge of ways and means and their sang froid which reminded me of my own student days. The energy one had! I doubt if I slept more than a few hours between my seventeenth and twenty-third year. As I remember too, I lived on beer and Smith’s Potato Crisps with an occasional watered gin to make the mortar set.

  The other leg of my see-saw was, of course, Duffy, who awaited me at strategic points, strategic pubs where he crouched against the bar in the attitude of a mental defective, and in between, in gulps of ruby beer, addressed himself to a fearful drink called Dog’s Nose (invented by the Liverpool Irish). To watch this thing being made up before him was horrifying—all the customers including myself turned pale to the gums. Unless I am wrong, it is equal parts of gin, whiskey, rum, cognac, and Liffey water with a touch of lemon and an aspirin.[11] I didn’t dare to try it. I stayed with the ruby which was dense and powerful and kept me getting thinner and thinner or so I hoped devoutly. Thus gradually under the tutelage of these people I assembled my impressions of this charming and seductive capital. With the students I explored the river line with its fine landmarks—St. Paul’s, or Four Courts, or the ravishing Customs House. Softly puffing ran the Liffey, softly whewing wheeled the gulls in the high grey air where snatches of blue showed through. The spring was hesitant, still hovering on the edge of snow.

  Faithfully after every such outing my undergraduate hosts would deliver me to pubs like Mooney’s or Kehoe’s[12] in South Anne Street where Duffy would be waiting with his hat pulled down over his nose like the original Informer, drawing softly on his pipe. “Sure ’tis the drinking keeps me in a state of candour,” he admitted. Yet it was with Duffy I enjoyed the life of the open street; he had no eye or feel for literature or architecture but he had the innate taste to take me to the open markets in Moore and Thomas Streets where fruit and vegetables are sold to a background of scabrous back-chat worthy of Aristophanes. At every street corner practically he would introduce me to large fully-fashioned and loquacious bodies selling flowers from dilapidated prams. Whether they made any money is questionable as they seemed always ready to give away their stock to passers-by. Duffy never failed to earn a button-hole as he passed, exchanging growls of welcome and warm shoulder-thumps with these steatopygous[13] mamas. When he did not know their names he called them “Mrs. O,”[14] which is apparently the usual form of address when such a case arises. With Duffy I walked the slums as well as the docks. We went right down to the harbo
ur mouth one day to a pub he wished to revisit for sentimental reasons. The girl behind the bar used to be “kind as a Christian to him.” But, alas, she had gone and nobody knew where, and the bar was full of rowdy French fishermen whose trawler had just put into harbour for refitting. They were huge crumbling men with the strong accents of Brittany. Nor need I fear to add that it was with Duffy that we made a deeply reverent visit to the giant Guinness factory on the southern bank of the river—probably the greatest religious edifice in the country, speaking purely in the anthropological sense. Even Duffy, for whom nothing was sacred, lowered his voice when he spoke of it. He almost took off his hat and genuflected when we entered the gates for the grand tour of the place. For miles around spreads the rich thick smell of heated barley. Like grave scientists we enrolled ourselves for the guided tour which we knew would entail a great deal of free sipping, tasting, and perhaps at the end (if our control broke loose) actually paddling in the stuff. There were about a dozen other tourists full of scientific curiosity like ourselves. Inevitably after this protracted tour we hit the evening air again and felt everything bending backwards. There was nothing for it but to rush down to O’Connell Street and restore the equilibrium of the universe with a more pointed drink—like Jameson’s brown whiskey in small compact doses. But what happy memories of the factory I would take away with me! If ever I had to write about Ireland I would write a long mood-piece redolent of blarney, barley, and silky blackness: of Guinness, God, and whatever else begins with a G.

  It was singular, too, how little time and thought people spent on the troubles in the black north; the situation went up and down like the temperature of a fevered patient. But in between its high points it could fall to sub-normal. One cheerful undergraduate spoke of an inevitable civil war. But there had been a long lull in the north and the mercuric Irish temperament could not sustain a high pitch of feeling unless it was perpetually being fed by bloody incidents. Thoughts turned elsewhere. Duffy admitted that everyone was behaving like cannibals. Nevertheless, he added, since the troubles began the suicide rate had dropped to zero. It was confusing, these sudden outbursts of blind hate followed by long sunny Guinness-golden periods when the troubles didn’t seem to exist. For the sake of the record I note that we were ten days off the Londonderry incident when Dublin retaliated by burning down the Embassy in Merrion Square.[15]

  I am glad to have got in a visit with Pine to this gracious and evocative square. It wasn’t only to visit Oscar Wilde but also to say hullo to Sheridan Le Fanu and Maturin.[16] By the time they fired the lovely building where the British Embassy was housed I was back in London. But I didn’t neglect to pay my respects to Swift also as he lay buried beside Stella in echoing St. Patrick’s. I dragged the reluctant Duffy with me this time and succeeded in mildly interesting him in the fact that Swift had endowed the first lunatic asylum in Dublin. According to the rhyme it was a very necessary act.

  He gave the little wealth he had

  To build a house for fools and mad

  And show by one satyric touch

  No nation needed it so much.[17]

  But now my visit was drawing to a close and Duffy said: “Sure, I guess you’ve just about inhaled the place.” Yes, that was it. Soft powder of snowfall on the Wicklow hills next day turned all the pleasant landscapes around Dublin into a Chinese watercolour. Then rain came, a soft grey rain falling across the long tender sweeps of Georgian building, ruffling the plumes of the river and making the seagulls plaintive as they wheeled over O’Connell Street and Halfpenny Bridge. Everything was sinking back into the mist and silence of winter again, after a few days of false spring. I went to kiss Anna Livia goodbye—her head is a keystone on the Customs House.[18] I wished her many more poets and drunkards to celebrate her charms. She is the symbol of the Liffey. Duffy was too sad to accompany me to the airport and I was glad. I hate goodbyes. It had been a good trip but too short. “Come again, sir,” said the girl with the cowslip complexion. “Come back for longer.” As the plane lifted and careened I saw that the grey mist had seized the island and blotted out its soft outlines. The sea looked black and cruel as we sped back to England.

  Borromean Isles

  1973

  SOMETHING IN THE NAME has always set up a sympathetic echo in my head—a hint of an Edward Lear[1] invention, a hint of Through The Looking Glass;[2] and while many years ago I caught a glimpse of them from the deck of a small boat wrapped in lake mist, it was only enough to whet my curiosity. Yet the idea of them stayed on tenaciously in my memory over the years. Borromean! Were the islands perhaps inhabited by Lewis Carroll’s “borogoves?”[3] The word echoed on in my head, and then, at long last, came the chance to revisit them, the invitation I waited for.

  Instead of fighting my way to the sea, I was to turn inland at Genoa and ramble across the midriff of Italy until I came to that comer of Lake Maggiore, with its twisting mountain ranges and shifting lake mists, its mauve and yellow sunsets wrapped in huge skeins about the sky. Italy is so shamelessly beautiful that one is constantly forgetting the fact of its beauty. As for the Borromean Islands, their romantic celebrity has always put them on a par with Capri or Corfu. For my part I found them so wonderfully, outrageously soft on the eye as to invite other, more symbolic associations—an Eden dreamed up by Blake or Poussin.[4]

  Part of the dream music of the name was connected with the story of the three little deserted islands that got somehow woven into the life history of the Borromeo family.[5] Gradually, over very many generations, the family secured one part and then another, thinking first of summer houses or country residences. The mad dream of the palace of Isola Bella was slow in forming. But it came, and when it did its conception was breathtaking in its grandeur, for it was to be the real family seat of the illustrious house of Borromeo. This was a family that had given so many brilliant sons to the science and the arts, to the church and to the law. Under Charles Borromeo III the central idea found root, and the grand design of Isola Bella took shape. It was named after his wife Isabella D’Adda, though neither he nor she lived to see it completed. But the divided motif was there, for it was to be their family seat, yes, but it was also to be a palace of pleasure shaped into the design of a huge green ship, lying at anchor on the azure waters of the great lake. Ideas were taken from everywhere. There is even a hanging garden of Babylonian provenance. But, as the family was forever running out of money, the work proceeded by fits and starts and remains incomplete in some details to this very day. This is romantic sugar-icing architecture of an outrageous kind, offset by the luxuriance of lake greenery that is almost tropical in its profusion.

  But first I lay at Novara, the fine little town that gives its name to the whole province. Moreover I was travelling rather late in the season, which is always wise when one has to deal with a very popular tourist place. Italy cannot be all that different, I thought to myself.[6] To my delight I was not wrong; the last days of September were placid and autumnal-sweet, and everybody who didn’t live there was starting to pack up. Hotels were slacking off, and the lake campgrounds were already deserted. Winter and mist lay ahead. But meanwhile the cafés basked in sunshine, their coloured awnings spread out like sails. The graceful gardens of the little town were drifted up with the first fallen leaves.[7] Plump horse chestnuts crashed through the trees, falling from their spiky green purses and bumping on the roof of my little camping car. Old pensioners swept away at them so that children or old ladies would not turn an ankle walking on them. In the public garden there is a ghastly statue of nymphs in attitudes of supplication, invoking the sky for rain, perhaps, or the gods for husbands. I have forgotten the inscription.

  Novara, too, I had almost forgotten, but not quite. I remember the queer red tessellated streets with their strips of gray concrete stretching down the middle for rubber wheels to grip. And the lovely duomo rearing up in the same shredded red brickwork, so fragile.

  I am a literary tourist, which is the worst kind of globetrotter. For example, I sp
ent ten minutes in Novara station. Why? When Nietzsche went mad, his two closest friends went to his aid and took him back to the lunatic asylum at Jena from Turin.[8] There was a three-hour wait in bitter weather here, the silent madman standing between his two sad friends. Indeed the whole of Novara smells of Nietzsche, of that marvelous girl Lou Andreas-Salomé.[9]

  These literary memories were only strengthened when next morning very early I took the road to Orta, that little kidney-shaped lake of quite special beauty where they spent a summer, and where Nietzsche outlined to the eager and sympathetic Lou (he was thirty-eight and she twenty-four) the plot of Zarathustra.[10] In the dense warm mist I did a little pilgrimage to the Sacro Monte with its twenty little chapels, each with a group of statuary illustrating the vicissitudes of St. Francis’s life.[11]

  Then on I went to Stresa nearby at a single bound. By now the morning mists had cleared, and the whole clear-scooped foreshore of the great lake opened in front of me like a seashell. Stresa with its tiny railway station emphasizes the Victorian storybook atmosphere. A sign said TO THE ENGLISH CHURCH, which gave one an instant feeling of security. There would be sure to be a branch of Barclays Bank at Stresa.

  And then the islands—they came sailing unselfconsciously out of the mist and into the warm orbit of the sun, sure of the visitor’s approbation, like great film stars. Could one not echo Napoleon and Josephine’s admiration? And who would want to cross swords with Flaubert and Stendhal?[12] Not me.

  And these great rambling hotels left over from a forgotten age of opulence, inhabited now by the ghosts of long dead millionaires and frail English nannies. Each hotel had its vast library of tall glass-fronted bookcases full of yellowing Tauchnitz editions of Conrad and Dickens and Kipling. How beautiful it was.