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

by Lawrence Durrell

  [12]. This description is quite close to Seferis’s argument comparing T.S. Eliot and C.P. Cavafy (121–61), though this was not translated into English and published by Rex Warner until several years after this article. For a discussion of how Durrell appropriated Seferis’s comparison to develop a new approach to allusion, see Gifford, “Hellenism/Modernism” (82–97).

  [13]. Olivia Manning translated Papadimitriou at this time, and she also housed Durrell’s first wife Nancy when she fled Egypt to Palestine, mainly for safety but also in part to end her marriage. Durrell attempted flights to Palestine to reconcile, but these were not endorsed, and the tensions of the situation seem to expand beyond the Durrells’ marital discord. Nonetheless, Durrell continued to promote both Papadimitriou and Manning.

  No Clue to Living

  [1]. Durrell republished this piece several times in minor variants, which indicates its importance. The numerous political references suggest the work is akin to Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” as it relates to Durrell’s oeuvre. Charles Dickens (1812–1870), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) are widely known for the social critiques undertaken in their works. Given Durrell’s anti-authoritarian postures in this essay, it is worth noting that Tolstoy was a major anarcho-pacifist thinker, and Dostoyevsky is frequently tied to anarchist concepts.

  [2]. As peculiar as this combination sounds, Durrell collected precisely these letters in his unpublished typescript, “Price of Glory: Gleanings From a Writer’s In-Tray.” This is held in the Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

  [3]. Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) was president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. The pope at the time was Pope John XIII.

  [4]. Durrell wrote “Two Poems in Basic English” (141–144) in 1946, which predates the UNESCO conference.

  [5]. A direct reference to George Orwell. Durrell read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which double-think is a method for social control, in 1949 and wrote to Orwell to express his admiration for the novel in the same year. The two authors had previously disputed their differing positions openly (Gifford, “Editor’s Preface” viii-ix), so Durrell’s admiration and echoing of Orwell again in The Revolt of Aphrodite would appear genuine. Durrell, like most readers, regarded Nineteen Eighty-Four as an anti-Stalinist work, despite the use of dollars and atomic weapons by Big Brother’s regime; the Soviets did not acquire atomic weapons until after the novel’s publication. However, Durrell’s own Revolt of Aphrodite contains a similar critique of corporatism and cultural hegemony.

  [6]. Chessman (1921–1960) was a famous California convict who was executed after publishing four books he wrote while on death row. Calls for clemency were highly publicized. During his ten years on death row, Chessman received stays of execution, including one during his actual execution in a gas chamber, which would have stalled his execution had the caller not initially dialled a wrong number.

  [7]. Like Chessman’s uncertain stays of execution, this was a time of great uncertainty based on the possibility of nuclear war. It would, however, be anachronistic to read this in light of the subsequent Bay of Pigs Invasion or the Cuban Missile Crisis, although later publications of this article in the 1960s would have aroused that association.

  [8]. The use of the term “magic” here is akin to Raymond Williams’s in “Advertising: The Magic System,” which was published two months later in The New Statesman. They may share a common source.

  [9]. A tradition in French criticism to avoid “the hated I” of the first person singular. Durrell’s shift from “a better artist” to “I” is marked here as a refusal of the “society that is swallowing the individual” two paragraphs above. This same pattern from “one” to “I” repeats numerous times in the remainder of the essay, the subsequent paragraph in particular, as a way to emphasize the individual rather than obfuscate him or her.

  [10]. This emphasis on the tension between the individual and the group is also continued in Durrell’s next major novel series, The Revolt of Aphrodite.

  [11]. Durrell’s close friend, Henry Miller, articulates a similar position in his anarchist essay “An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere,” a text that Durrell admired. In contradiction of Paul Éluard’s notion of the Socialist Brotherhood of Man, Miller argues, “The brotherhood of man is a permanent delusion common to the idealists everywhere in all epochs: it is the reduction of the principle of individuation to the least common denominator of intelligibility. It is what leads the masses to identify themselves with movie stars and megalomaniacs like Hitler and Mussolini. It is what prevents them from reading and appreciating and being influenced by and creating in turn such poetry as Paul Eluard gives us” (152). To this, he adds, “I am fatuous enough to believe that in living my own life in my own way I am more apt to give life to others” (157).

  [12]. Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The Daily Mirror was the largest selling newspaper in the United Kingdom at the time and generally promoted a Labour and working-class perspective. Much like his later The Revolt of Aphrodite, Durrell’s indictment is of the nature of mass media in general as a degradation of the individual, regardless of the media’s left or right political affiliation.

  [13]. Apart from left or right affiliation, Durrell’s discomfort is with the unavoidably authoritarian nature of government in general or the state itself. This is akin to the anarchist position of many of Durrell’s poetic colleagues, as well Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, which was first translated into English by the Scottish poet Hamish Henderson, whom Durrell had known in Egypt during the Second World War.

  [14]. Durrell lived in Sommières at this time, less than one hundred kilometres from Nostradamus’s birthplace and the universities where he studied. Henry Miller also refers to Nostradamus twice in his letters to Durrell in 1959 while in France (Durrell, Durrell–Miller 343, 363).

  [15]. Notably, these descriptions apply to governments but not to artists or individuals.

  [16]. This is the quandary in which Durrell leaves his readers at the end of each of his major novel sequences. The Alexandria Quartet ends with uncertainty just as Justine ends with an ambivalent resolution according to the reader’s own wants and needs; The Revolt of Aphrodite ends with an abolition of contractual obligation in a corporate world; and The Avignon Quintet ends with a total reversion to meta-fiction. In all three cases, the reader (and not the author nor critic) is left in an unresolved moment of personal engagement and choice.

  [17]. Durrell refers to “cloth-of-gold” in The Alexandria Quartet as well, and he would still have been completing the novel series at this time. Cloth of gold is typically silk wrapped with gold and used as the weft in woven fabric. The “Way” is the Tao, and this sentence combines it with the Western ecclesiastic sense of the cloth as used in church services and for royalty (Psalms 45:13–14). Ray Morrison details Durrell’s Taoist interests (446–50).

  [18]. An allusion to the French Symbolist author Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1838–1889) and his play Axël: “Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous” (“as for living, our servants will do that for us”). Both W.B. Yeats and Friedrich Nietzsche frequently quoted this specific passage, and the work also supplied the title for Edmund Wilson’s major study of Modernist literature Axel’s Castle.

  This Magnetic, Bedevilled Island That Tugs at My Heart

  [1]. This article was first published in the Daily Mail on August 22, 1974. It was retitled the next day in the New York Times, “Must the Lemons Remain Bitter?” This alternate title demonstrates the kinships between this piece and Durrell’s travel book, Bitter Lemons, which describes his years living on Cyprus during the struggle for Enosis (union). This title, from the Daily Mail publication, also connects with Durrell’s earlier draft of a novel, The Magnetic Island. See Shelley Cox (45–57). I have generally retained the paragraph formatting of the later prin
ting and have eliminated the paragraph headings of the first, which are most likely editorial additions by the Daily Mail.

  [2]. The Cypriot struggle for unification with Greece and independence from British rule, which was fought by EOKA (National Organization of Cypriot Fighters) using armed conflict from 1955 to 1959. In 1974, Makarios was overthrown in a coup, and Turkey invaded after failing to secure British support for an intervention. Turkey remains on the island.

  [3]. Sappho Durrell (1951–1985), born from his second marriage to Eve Cohen.

  [4]. This is both a chapter and location in Durrell’s book Bitter Lemons, which is set during his life on Cyprus, as well as the title of his poetry collection and poem The Tree of Idleness.

  [5]. EOKA is the acronym for Εθνική Οργάνωσις Κυπρίων Αγωνιστών (National Organization of Cypriot Fighters).

  [6]. Makarios III (1913–1977), Archbishop of Cyprus and its first president. He was archbishop and enormously influential during the Enosis struggle, and he negotiated the resolution in 1960, which lasted until the Athens-supported coup.

  [7]. Caramanlis was a former prime minister of Greece who went into self-imposed exile after losing the election in 1963. He won the first election after the end of the Junta in 1974. Originally, Kanellopolous was supported as the interim prime minister to lead the country to elections, and Durrell had tutored him in English during the Greek Government in Exile during World War II.

  [8]. Venizelos (1894–1964) was an extraordinarily important Greek politician. He was prime minister during the Greek Government in Exile during World War II and had led the Centre Union party. Durrell is tactfully balancing his praise between socialist and conservative forces.

  Lamas in a French Forest

  [1]. Jetsun Milarepa (1052–1135) is one of the most famous Tibetan yogis and poets.

  [2]. Huxley (1894–1963) was a British novelist best known for Brave New World, though he wrote many highly successful works. Maugham (1874–1965) wrote in many genres but is best known for his semi-autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage.

  [3]. Durrell’s comparison is bold and marks his pro-Tibet and pro-Greece position. China first invaded Tibet in 1950. The Fall of Constantinople refers to the 1453 conquest of the capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire by the Islamic Ottoman Empire, modern Turkey, which renamed it Istanbul. Referring to the city using the Greek name recalls the attempt in 1922 by Greece to reclaim the city, which failed and led to the Asia Minor Catastrophe.

  [4]. The quarterly journal began in 1943, replacing Buddhism in England, which began in 1926. The Middle Way is still published.

  [5]. Rinpotché (1904–1989) was the modern holder of Shangpa Kagyu lineage. He taught extensively in Europe and North America after being forced into exile from Tibet.

  [6]. Although Durrell is modest here, this was a fairly extensive campaign, and Durrell wrote giving his support to a variety of French government officials, including the president and minister of culture (MacNiven 660–61).

  The Prince and Hamlet

  [1]. This letter was sent early November 1936 (Durrell, Durrell–Miller 22). Durrell is playing against the lyrics of “Rule Britannia.”

  [2]. Although Durrell was not included in their published correspondence, this work relates closely to Henry Miller and Michael Fraenkel’s Hamlet letters, published in 1939.

  [3]. From Milton’s Areopagitica, “a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life” (7).

  [4]. The Modernist author D.H Lawrence (1885–1930) and Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903).

  [5]. J. Dover Wilson (1881–1969) was Regius Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He was known largely for his work on Shakespeare and his editorship of the New Shakespeare complete works through Cambridge University Press, for which Hamlet occupied his greatest attention. Durrell is likely referring to his 1935 book What Happens in Hamlet, which is still influential, as well as his 1934 The Manuscript of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. J.B. Harrison was a professor at Queen’s University and was the editor of the Penguin Shakespeare beginning in 1937. He produced a wide range of critical texts on Shakespeare and Elizabethan literature in general, including several critical editions Durrell was likely to have owned, such as Thomas Nashe’s An Elizabethan Journal (published in three volumes in 1928, 1931, and 1933). Durrell claimed to have read across the whole of Elizabethan literature before moving to Corfu in 1935.

  [6]. André Breton (1896–1966) was the founder of Surrealism, and Durrell’s ties to Surrealism and English Surrealism were significant both for his own works and for English Surrealism in general (Gifford, “Surrealism’s” 36–64).

  [7]. The Mousetrap is the play within the play in Hamlet through which Hamlet believes “the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” (II.ii.531–32).

  [8]. Durrell misquotes here, likely from memory: “The time is out of joint, Oh, cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right” (I.v.885–86). The same misquotation is ubiquitous in works on Shakespeare.

  [9]. Generally known as the “bad Quarto,” Quarto 1 (Q1) is likely a pirated version of the play published in 1603, followed by Quarto 2 (Q2) and Folio 1 (F1). Typically, modern editions of Hamlet are based on a compromise between Q2 and F1. At the time, Q1 was generally only available in facsimile and not a modernized text—in general, Durrell’s quotations are in the original spelling for Q1 and in modernized spellings for F1.

  [10]. Durrell’s argument here is the revision hypothesis, which views Q1 as an early version of the play later revised by Shakespeare (or an actor). This contradicts J. Dover Wilson’s 1934 argument in The Manuscript of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which is likely why he has already dismissed Wilson’s work. Also see Kathleen Irace’s Introduction to The First Quarto of Hamlet (1–27).

  [11]. Hamlet V.i.3471–81.

  [12]. Hamlet Q1 xiii.2495–96.

  [13]. A reference to Michael Fraenkel, with whom Henry Miller wrote Hamlet, a collection of their correspondence. See Fraenkel’s Bastard Death: The Autobiography of an Idea (1936).

  [14]. Hamlet, F1 III.v.2210.

  [15]. Hamlet, F1 IV.v.2945. This line is also in Q1 but lacks the same surrounding materials and removes the verb “His beard as white as snowe” (17.2945).

  [16]. This is Eliot’s “Hamlet and His Problems” in which he famously argues, “So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure” (98).

  [17]. This is a dry joke on the grave digger scene in Hamlet.

  [18]. “Doubt that in earth is fire, / Doubt that the starres doe moue, / Doubt trueth to be a liar, / But doe not doubt I loue” (Q1 vii.1144–47).

  [19]. The line breaks and modernized spelling are Durrell’s own (Q1 vii.1148–49).

  [20]. Capitalization and line breaks are Durrell’s own (II.ii.1148–52). Polonius is reading aloud Hamlet’s purloined letter, though the identity of the speaker changes between Q1 and Q2/F1. Durrell refers to the same passage again in 1974 in his novel Monsieur (205), but he blends the two variants in that instance. He discusses the nature of the word “machine” in this passage again in 1947 in “From a Writer’s Journal” (52).

  [21]. It literally both is and is not: the personal Hamlet and not the social figure of the State of Denmark.

  Hamlet, Prince of China

  [1]. “This letter was addressed by Mr. Durrell to Henry Miller regarding the book, Hamlet, by Michael Fraenkel and Henry Miller to be published next year.” (Durrell’s original note). Durrell’s letter was originally sent from Corfu in mid-January 1937 (Durrell and Miller 42).

  [2]. Michael Fraenkel (1897–1957) was an American poet and critic who corresponded extensively with Miller.

  [3]. Durrell developed the notion of the English Death in his novel of the same year, The Black Book, which Miller would have already read in typescript by this time.

  [4].
Durrell’s notion of the Heraldic Universe had already been articulated in his September or October 1936 letter to Miller (dated August in MacNiven’s edition), in which the notion is closely aligned with refuting Herbert Read’s temporary support for communism during the London International Surrealist Exhibition (Durrell, Durrell–Miller 17–19; Miller, “Henry Miller’s” 33).

  [5]. Corfu Town, Greece.

  [6]. The language here is very close to Durrell’s letter to Miller in which he rebuts Herbert Read’s communism in contrast to the anarchism Miller espouses. Only four months earlier Durrell wrote to Miller as an interlocutor in his correspondence with Read: “What I propose to do, with all deadly solemnity, is to create my HERALDIC UNIVERSE quite alone. The foundation of which is being quietly laid. I AM SLOWLY BUT VERY CAREFULLY AND WITHOUT ANY CONSCIOUS THOUGHT DESTROYING TIME” (Durrell, Durrell–Miller 18).

  [7]. Durrell later uses a similar phrase to finish his “The Heraldic Universe,” which appears in this volume (103–05).

  [8]. Durrell makes the same comment, alluding to Thomas Arne’s “Rule Britannia,” in “The Prince and Hamlet: A Diagnosis” (this volume 63–71).

  [9]. Miller published his novel Tropic of Cancer in 1934 and the follow-up collection of short prose Black Spring in 1936.

  [10]. Nancy Hodgkin, née Myers, Durrell’s first wife.

  [11]. D.H. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers, perhaps his best novel.

  [12]. A year earlier, Durrell alluded to Thomas Dekker’s Elizabethan play of 1599, The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Durrell, Panic 17).

  [13]. Thomas Lodge’s (1558–1625) satirical prose work of 1595.

  [14]. The structure of this phrase, and its repetition in the final paragraph, are akin to Durrell’s alter ego’s realization on the final page of Pied Piper of Lovers that “I know something, though, that’s very startling—absolute mental dynamite. That is: ‘I am, and quite soon I will not be.’ Isn’t that enough?” (253).

  [15]. The same phrase appears at the opening of Durrell’s short story “Zero” published a year after this essay (8).