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

by Lawrence Durrell

[27]. From the mid-1930s onward, D.H. Lawrence’s June 15, 1914 letter to Edward Garnett held special significance to Durrell:

  You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically-unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond—but I say “diamond, what! This is carbon.” And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.) (Lawrence, Letters 183)

  Lawrence’s use of the term “allotropic” derives from two footnotes in F.W.H. Myers’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (Gibbons 338–41), and it is this “‘subliminal self’ which represents ‘our central and abiding being’” (Gibbons 339). Also see Durrell’s 1936 letter to Alan Thomas, in which he claims, “it is a qualitative difference in which I blow the Lawrentian trumpet. I [know?] my own kind, I haven’t begun. Beside Lawrence, beside Miller, beside Blake. Yes, I am humble, I have hardly started. BUT I AM ON THE SAME TRAM” (Spirit 50).

  [28]. This mention of Hamlet is likely in reference to Ernest Jones’s (1879–1958) article “The Oedipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery,” which was expanded and later published as a book, Hamlet and Oedipus. Both versions developed in response to Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) comments on wish fulfilment and what would become the Oedipal drama in relation to Freud’s comments on Hamlet in his The Interpretation of Dreams.

  [29]. See C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, which is based on his 1959 Cambridge lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” In this famous work, he articulates the disjunctions between scholarship in the humanities and the sciences arguing for a synthesis of the two.

  [30]. To some degree, this is an exaggeration, but Paul Valéry was indeed strongly interested in the sciences and mathematics, both of which receive significantly more attention in his Cahiers than poetry. T.S. Eliot learned of Patanjali from James Haughton Woods and his Yoga System of Patanjali while a graduate student at Harvard and insisted this was a valuable part of his studies (Eliot, Letters 109); W.B. Yeats wrote the introduction to Patanjali and Purohit Swami’s Aphorisms of Yoga for Faber & Faber’s 1938 edition, and Patanjali influenced his poetic works (Marsh 15–18); Rainer Maria Rilke is less clear but is frequently quoted in literature relating to Patanjali; and Pessoa’s “lucid exposition” could be any number of his essays from 1917 through the 1920s, though possibly his intended introduction to a translation of Alvaro de Campos’s Ultimatum.

  [31]. This was Durrell’s inheritance (aged sixteen) after his father’s death in 1928. His first trips to France date from the same period.

  [32]. Durrell first moved to Greece to reside on Corfu in 1935, when he was twenty-three, though his good friend George Wilkinson was writing to him from Greece a year earlier.

  [33]. Heraclitus (c. 535–475) was an obscure Greek philosopher from Asia Minor who is famous for harmonizing opposites and emphasizing mutability and continual change.

  [34]. All of Durrell’s first three novels refer to India, though Pied Piper of Lovers (written in England in 1934–1935 but edited and proofed on Corfu) does so most overtly. The Black Book was Durrell’s first major literary work, published in 1938 but first drafted in 1935 concomitant with editing Pied Piper of Lovers.

  [35]. Although Durrell was devoted to the psychoanalytic component of automatism in Surrealism, he was opposed to its communist components and social theorizing. His role in distinguishing between surrealist methods against Surrealism’s politics was important to English Surrealism in the later 1930s and 1940s as well as to the New Apocalypse movement. Durrell’s comment in the proceeding sentence that Surrealism “did not really touch my deeper preoccupation with form” is a quintessentially New Apocalyptic sense of the movement as “a post-surrealist Romantic Movement…[that] believes in the functions of form” (Schimanski and Treece 14). This component is intimately tied to their anarchist notion of Personalism, which developed from their ties to Herbert Read, and it in turn reflects Read’s correspondence with Miller on the subject at the time. James Keery notes that Durrell’s “involvement in the Apocalypse movement is documented in [John] Goodland’s papers” and Durrell was included in the drafting of the New Apocalypse’s manifesto in Leeds in December 1938 (884, 882). The December 1938 drafting would coincide with his visit to London in the same year and the final issue of Delta, which he co-edited with David Gascoyne, who was also heavily tied to the New Apocalypse and wrote the first guide to Surrealism in English in 1935.

  [36]. Heinrich Schliemann, an archaeologist, first identified the location of Troy in his attempt to demonstrate that Homer’s Iliad referred to historical events. While this is still a topic of much dispute, Schliemann’s views were influential.

  [37]. Durrell was particularly fond of this simile as a dismissal of “the discrete human personality” (Justine 196), and Pursewarden asks, “Are people…continuously themselves, or simply over and over again so fast that they give the illusion of continuous features?” (196).

  [38]. Lewis’s 1927 book, in which he critiques the main exponents of Modernism while also attacking several of their philosophical origins or counterparts, such as Henri Bergson’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s notions of time or duration.

  [39]. Durrell later wrote an introduction, in French only, for the French edition of Lewis’s novel Tarr (567–68).

  [40]. While Durrell did move from London to Corfu in 1935, this break is not entirely true. From 1935 until his flight to Egypt as a refugee following the German invasion of Greece, he remained in regular contact with T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne, and a number of other London- and Paris-based writers, and he visited London twice and met with many of them. While in Greece, he also had significant contact with other writers, including Theodore Stephanides (a significant translator of Modern Greek poetry) and the Nobel Laureate George Seferis.

  [41]. See Stanford’s “Lawrence Durrell” (123–35), first published in his The Freedom of Poetry in 1945, and reprinted in The World of Lawrence Durrell in 1962.

  [42]. Eliot (1888–1965) was Durrell’s editor at Faber & Faber as well as his friend; he is one of the defining poetic voices of Modernism. Henry Miller (1891–1980) was a major American novelist and Durrell’s closest literary friend, which led to their correspondence from 1935 until Miller’s death. Seferis (1900–1971) was the Nobel Prize winning Greek poet who influenced Durrell’s sense of Greek Modernism, as well as his professional interaction with Durrell as a diplomat. They continued to have a friendly correspondence even after Durrell’s service to the British on Cyprus. Katsimbalis (1899–1978) was a major translator and bibliographer for Greek literature and was the titular colossus in Henry Miller’s travel narrative of Greece prior to World War I, The Colossus of Maroussi. Stephanides was a dear friend to the Durrell family after their meeting on Corfu in 1935. He appears as a character in books by both Lawrence and Gerald Durrell but was also a significant translator of Greek poetry, a writer in his own right, and a significant scientist who published major works in botany and on the microscope, and had studied directly under Marie Curie.

  [43]. Nin (1903–1977) was a French novelist who wrote in English but was known mainly for her famous diaries and erotica. She was a dear friend and companion to Henry Miller, through whom she knew Durrell.

  [44]. This would have been August 1937 when Durrell travelled from Corfu to Paris with his first wife, Nancy. As MacNiven notes, Nin’s recollection differs, and she records meeting the Durrells a day or two later (166). Durrell’s notebooks of this month, including his drafts for “The Death of General Uncebunke,” contain several passages drawn from Rank’s (1884–1939) book on psychoanalysis and artistic creation, Art and Artist (1932). Rank edited the successive revisions to Freud�
��s The Interpretations of Dream, was Freud’s protégé until a public disagreement between the two in 1926, and he was close to both Miller and Nin in Paris and New York.

  [45]. Hugo Ball recited the first manifesto in 1916, but Tristan Tzara wrote what is regarded as the first DADA manifesto in 1918. DADA was a movement that influenced much creative activity and Surrealism in particular.

  [46]. James Joyce’s (1882–1941) major Modernist novel and last work was Finnegans Wake (1939), which is densely allusive and linguistically complex to the point of being nearly unreadable to some.

  [47]. Baron Ernst von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) developed the terminology of “psychosis” later used by Freud, and the text is likely The Principles of Medical Psychology, published in 1845 and translated into English in 1847.

  [48]. Durrell’s differences from Joyce here are notable, in particular given his anti-authoritarian tendencies and sympathy for anarchists such as Henry Miller (Gifford, “Anarchist” 57–71). Durrell’s flippancy may be misleading for an otherwise serious distinction.

  [49]. W.B. Yeats and Shri Purohit Swami’s The Ten Principal Upanishads, first published in 1937, the same time Durrell was writing The Black Book.

  [50]. This same terminology appears in Durrell’s Avignon Quintet (693) from the same period as this lecture.

  [51]. Georg Groddeck (1866–1934) was a German analyst and doctor who wrote extensively on psychosomatic illness and gave Freud the terminology for the Id, the unconscious, in his typology of the mind. Durrell was significantly influenced by Groddeck’s works and used his cases as fodder for plots. See Durrell’s essay on Groddeck in this volume.

  [52]. Miller’s recollections of this trip are published in The Colossus of Maroussi and Reflections on Greece. A letter from Durrell concludes the former book.

  [53]. Durrell had a short correspondence with Carl Jung (1875–1961) in which he discussed Groddeck’s work; this correspondence is held in the Durrell Collection of Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

  [54]. Durrell often played down the desperation of this situation. After being evacuated to Athens from Corfu, where he was involved in producing anti-fascist propaganda, he was moved by the British Council to Kalamata, from whence he fled by a small caïque overnight on April 22, 1941 to Crete when the Germans invaded, and from Crete to Egypt on April 30 as a refugee. MacNiven discusses this period (226–31), as does Stephanides (75–85).

  [55]. Plotinus (204–270) and Philo (20 BCE–50 CE) were important metaphysical philosophers. Euclid (3rd century BCE) is the creator of modern Euclidean Geometry. All three were active in Alexandria. Alexandria housed the greatest library of the time and was renowned as a centre for learning and the arts.

  [56]. Albert Einstein (1879–1959) was the most influential physicist of the twentieth century. He and Sigmund Freud co-authored Why War? in 1939, and Durrell used his theory of relativity metaphorically in The Alexandria Quartet.

  [57]. This “book” is Justine, the first of The Alexandria Quartet. Justine begins with two quotations from Freud and the Marquis de Sade. The second volume, Balthazar, integrates an opening note that mentions Einstein, and this is developed into an introductory note for the revised omnibus edition of all four volumes. Durrell refers to Einstein several times in interviews about The Alexandria Quartet but generally described this as a purely metaphorical approach.

  [58]. The book series described here was completed three years later and collected posthumously in 1992 as The Avignon Quintet, though Durrell generally described it as his Avignon Quincunx.

  [59]. In Buddhist philosophy, the skandhas are five aggregates that give rise to the false notion of the ego or self. Suffering is alleviated by practising detachment from the skandhas.

  [60]. Though now associated only with nurseries, mobiles were invented by Alexander Calder, an American sculptor, in 1931 as kinetic art and are associated with the works of Marcel Duchamp, Morton Feldman, and Frank Zappa.

  [61]. Eternity in the present tense, a notion of eternity in which past and future are caught only in the Now. St. Augustine emphasized the nunc stans, though Durrell likely came to the concept via Schopenhauer.

  [62]. As Durrell repeats, this is literally, “Nature does not do anything in jumps.” Though attributed to Aristotle, the phrase first appears in this context in Carl Linnaeus’s 1751 Philosophia Botanica and was subsequently taken up by Charles Darwin.

  [63]. This is slightly misquoted, perhaps from memory. Darwin wrote in his Beagle notebook in 1837, after returning to London, “so must we believe ancient ones: not gradual change or degeneration. from circumstances, if one species does change into another it must be per saltum [sic]” (50).

  [64]. Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) was a major mathematician and scientist as well as an alchemist and occult theorist. Newton was deeply religious, but Einstein made his rejection of any personal god or religiosity clear, though he held a quasi-religious awe for the structure of the world.

  [65]. Durrell does employ such pairs, as in Melissa and Justine or Justine and Clea, Scobie and Pombal, Darley and Arnauti, Darley and Pursewarden, and so forth in The Alexandria Quartet. Similar pairs or doubles appear in virtually all of his fictional works.

  [66]. The same language subsequently appears in The Avignon Quintet when Durrell’s protagonist intends to write “a book full of spare parts of other books, of characters left over from other lives, all circulating in each other’s bloodstreams.…Be ye members of one another” (693).

  A Letter from the Land of the Gods

  [1]. Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk (1903–1997) was a poet and pamphleteer who claimed the Polish throne. He was born in New Zealand but relocated to London in 1926. He was imprisoned for obscenity for six months in Wormwood Scrubs Prison. He produced the right-wing periodical The Right Review from 1936 to 1973 and supported the fascists and royalists, regarding them as better than the Bolsheviks. See Stephanie de Montalk’s Unquiet World: The Life of Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk. Durrell knew Potocki and his brother well during his life in London around the Fitzroy Tavern. They first met in 1933 just after Potocki had been imprisoned for libel (MacNiven 83–84).

  [2]. Literally, “Meat Wine.” By this time, Wincarnis was a brand name for a tonic wine popular in the British colonies.

  [3]. In the context of Durrell’s publications in the anarchist press and interactions with several anarchist authors, the politics of this statement are not casual.

  Airgraph on Refugee Poets in Africa

  [1]. James Meary Tambimuttu (1915–1983) was the editor of Poetry London. Durrell had already published Tambi’s works (as he was known to most friends) in Delta. Tambimuttu’s Poetry London imprint published Durrell’s novel Cefalû (also published as The Dark Labyrinth), and through Durrell’s influence Henry Miller’s The Cosmological Eye and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Also see “Poets under the Bed” in this volume.

  [2]. As is evidenced in Stephanides’s Autumn Gleanings, this is no exaggeration: “I learnt of Lawrence and Nancy’s whereabouts—they were staying temporarily at the Luna Park Hotel, a rather ramshackle place that the authorities had requisitioned to house British refugees from German-invaded Europe.…He had managed to get away in a small caïque crowded with other refugees, just one day before the entry of the Germans.…In its overcrowded state, the caïque would founder if even a moderate storm arose.…The Durrells, were pounced on by the military authorities and interned in a concentration camp where they were even more overcrowded than in the Luna Park Hotel. This was done routinely as a precaution to prevent German agents from being smuggled into Egypt together with the genuine refugees” (78–79).

  [3]. George Katsimbalis was the titular colossus to Henry Miller’s travel narrative of his time in Greece immediately prior to World War II, The Colossus of Maroussi.

  [4]. Edward Lear (1812–1888), in whom Durrell had an ongoing interest, in part based on their common residence on Corfu, though Lear pred
ates Durrell significantly. Lear was accomplished as both a writer and visual artist.

  [5]. Durrell’s letters to Seferis, now held in the Gennadius Library in Athens, also contain dozens of Learish sketches and frequently quasi-pornographic limericks. Durrell published Seferis’s comments on limericks and such in Personal Landscape while in Egypt and while Seferis was in the Greek government in exile in Pretoria, South Africa (“Letter” 10).

  [6]. Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863–1938) was an Italian poet who is also seen as the forerunner to fascism under Mussolini. The contrast is between a poetry concerned with aesthetics or a primarily propagandist poetry.

  [7]. This translation is Durrell’s own and differs substantially from that published in Personal Landscape in 1944 (Seferis, “King” 9–10), which was possibly by Seferis himself or most likely Bernard Spencer.

  [8]. Papadimitriou was an active and outspoken Marxist as well as an agitator against Turkey’s actions in 1922 against the Greek population of Smyrna. Durrell’s poem “In Europe” is dedicated, as Bowen notes, somewhat dangerously to her (Bowen 49), and Durrell continued to promote her in his letters to T.S. Eliot (354).

  [9]. This is corroborated as “Luna Park” by Stephanides’s account in Autumn Gleanings (79). Luna Park was largely a location for refugees arriving from Greece following the 1941 German invasion.

  [10]. In 1922, following on the defeat of the Greek army, Turkish forces removed the Greek population from Smyrna extremely rapidly in an act has been varyingly described as ethnic cleansing and as defensive. In either case, Durrell’s sympathies here fall to the Greeks who feel the loss of the home of Homer to a non-Greek population and language. Population exchanges between the two countries followed shortly after 1922. Even Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Times emphasizes this event in the opening and closing to his volume of primarily American-based short stories.

  [11]. A variant translation of the fragment of Papadimitriou’s “Anatolia: Second Recitative” published in Personal Landscape (3–4).