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

by Lawrence Durrell

  [7]. This book is Kastimbalis and Stephanides’s 1930 collection Some Modern Greek Poets.

  [8]. Valaoritis (1921–) is an important Greek writer and was both a friend to and co-translator with Durrell, which he has described in detail (46–56).

  [9]. Rex Warner’s Seferis translations followed after Durrell’s joint translations in 1948 with Bernard Spencer and Nanos Valaoritis, The King of Asine and Other Poems, which itself came after Durrell’s own translations of Seferis and Sikelianos as Six Poems From the Greek of Sekilianos and Seferis, though it was not published until he was residing on Rhodes in 1946. Durrell corresponded with Liddell before the two were evacuated to Egypt, and he retained a strong friendship with him. Liddell wrote the influential first English biography of Cavafy and includes a Cavafy figure in his Alexandrian novel, Unreal City, which precedes Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Amy Smart’s “The Poetry of Cavafy,” was published as Amy Nimr and appeared in Durrell’s co-edited journal Personal Landscape in Cairo in 1945 (14–20). It contains several translations, as does the journal’s print run as a whole. Smart’s correspondence from Durrell is now held at the McMaster University Library, Hamilton, ON.

  [10]. Durrell’s translations of Cavafy appear several times in The Alexandria Quartet, most prominently at the end of Justine, which also contains a variant of one of these translations completed by a character. Durrell translated Cavafy a number of times. See Anthony Hirst’s “‘The Old Poet of the City’: Cavafy in Darley’s Alexandria” (69–94).

  [11]. Literally “good minded” but implying a conservative or orthodox viewpoint.

  [12]. This is something of a self-allusion here to Durrell’s first notebooks for The Alexandria Quartet, which he later integrated into the final form of the novel as the novel Moeurs written by the character Arnauti.

  [13]. George Savidis (1929–1995) was a professor of Greek literature at Harvard University and the Artistotle University of Thessaloniki as well as an important editor and critic.

  Introduction to Wordsworth

  [1]. Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) was the eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and was also a poet and biographer.

  [2]. Coleridge 93.

  [3]. This verse by J.K. Stephen (1859–1892) is itself a parody of Wordsworth’s own “Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland.” Durrell appears to be quoting from memory a compressed version of Stephen’s “A Sonnet”:

  Two voices are there: one is of the deep;

  It learns the storm-cloud’s thunderous melody,

  Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,

  Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:

  And one is of an old half-witted sheep

  Which bleats articulate monotony,

  And indicates that two and one are three,

  That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:

  And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times

  Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes,

  The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst:

  At other times—good Lord! I’d rather be

  Quite unacquainted with the A.B.C.

  Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.

  [4]. Durrell is likely referring to Mary Moorman’s two-volume William Wordsworth: A Biography.

  [5]. This comment, and a good deal of the Introduction, speaks as much to Durrell’s wishes for his own works as it does to Wordsworth.

  [6]. Wordsworth visited France during the Revolution and felt a strong attachment to the Republican movement; however, he was highly distressed during the Reign of Terror when he left France.

  [7]. Annette Vallon, who bore their child Caroline Vallon in 1792.

  [8]. A common paraphrase from Freud’s “Dostoevsky and Parricide” in The Future of an Illusion, in which he writes, “The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written; the episode of the Grand Inquisitor, one of the peaks in the literature of the world, can hardly be valued too highly. Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms” (177).

  [9]. Paul Valéry (1871–1945) was a French poet whose works Durrell was very familiar with. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was an Austrian poet whose works Durrell wrote on and helped to publish in the 1940s in English translations. Durrell refers to W.B. Yeats’s (1865–1939) poetic works frequently.

  [10]. Durrell used a paraphrase of the same quotation as the epigraph to the final novel of his career, Quinx. This often misquoted passage derives from Wordsworth’s May 21, 1807 letter to Lady Beaumont: “Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.”

  [11]. Famously chaste lovers. Héloïse d’Argenteuil (1101–1164) was a highly learned French nun and Pierre Abélard (1079–1142) was a French philosopher and theologian. They had a love affair, a child, and married, but when Héloïse’s uncle Fulbert discovered it, he became abusive to her and eventually had Abélard castrated. Their subsequent love letters ultimately lead to a resignation and acceptance of love as a brother and sister.

  [12]. Wordsworth’s The Prelude (10:908–21).

  [13]. John Willinsky makes a similar argument based on the same lines from The Prelude as a way of reading the scene of instruction in “Tintern Abbey” (Willinsky 47).

  [14]. It is difficult to not regard this as Durrell commenting on himself rather than Wordsworth, as often seems the case in this essay. Durrell’s early works from the 1930s to 1948 frequently aligned with the anarchist trends in his contemporaries and most notably through Henry Miller, but after his time in Yugoslavia from 1949 to 1952 followed by four years on Cyprus during the Enosis struggle, he began to adopt more conservative rhetoric, even though his 1968 Tunc and 1970 Nunquam are strongly anti-corporate and critique cultural hegemony. This relationship between revolution or rebellion and later conservatism is an unresolved conflict in Durrell’s career.

  [15]. Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867) was a diarist whose posthumous Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence (1869) is an important source of information on many Romantic English writers.

  [16]. From a letter by Robinson to Sir George Beaumont, May 29, 1812 (Batho 169).

  [17]. De Quincey 117. Since Thomas de Quincey’s (1785–1859) Recollections was republished by Penguin in 1970, and Durrell organized this collection of Wordsworth’s poetry for Penguin in 1973, it is likely he has drawn on the De Quincey collection in the 1970 printing. De Quincey is best known for his autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821).

  [18]. Wordsworth was granted a Doctor of Civil Law from Durham University in 1838 and from the University of Oxford in 1839.

  [19]. Robert Southey (1774–1843) was another English Romantic poet and a “Lake Poet” like Wordsworth.

  [20]. The name Dorothy (as with Theodora) is literally gift of the gods.

  [21]. The first several lines of Wordsworth’s “Surprised by Joy.”

  [22]. Wordsworth and Coleridge were estranged in 1810 due to Coleridge’s addiction to opium.

  [23]. Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865), the Irish mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. The two corresponded for many years. Durrell notes their meeting and friendship in his “The Poetic Obsession of Dublin” in 1972 as well, the year before this work.

  L’amour, Clef du Mystère?

  [1]. This title is taken from Durrell’s publication of an eclectic, partial version of this piece in French translation. The return of the essay to English here is reconstructed from his original English typescript of his UNESCO lectures, which are held at the Bibliothèque Lawrence Durrell, l’Université Paris Ouest, Nanterre. These contain more errors and the repetitions more typical of a spoken presentation than the partial publication in French. The second portion is much cleaner work than the first, but they are presented together here for the sake of completeness. The lecture was given on November 13, 1964 but is based on
his draft in 1962 (MacNiven 542). I have taken liberties with punctuation to clarify what would have read aloud well but would cause confusion to the eye. Spelling is also corrected throughout. Most repetitions have been retained from the manuscript of the speech, but those most obviously for spoken presentation are silently elided.

  [2]. George Chapman (1559–1634) was a playwright contemporary with Shakespeare who is best known for his translations of Homer, which inspired John Keats’s famous sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

  [3]. Thomas Kyd (1558–1594) was an Elizabethan playwright whose Spanish Tragedy is one of Shakespeare’s sources for Hamlet. There is also much speculation that Kyd wrote a play titled Hamlet prior to Shakespeare’s.

  [4]. Greene’s 1592 pamphlet Groats-worth of Witte.

  [5]. Famously, heads decorated the posts of London Bridge as well. It is worth comparing this political discussion with that adopted by Durrell two years earlier in his essay “No Clue to Living” included in this volume (37–46).

  [6]. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was a French writer and philosopher who represented Marxism and existentialism in France. Sartre later became explicitly anarchist but at this time was Marxist (though he never belonged to the Communist Party). He also had a long-running public dispute with the French critic Louis Althusser in the 1960s. Althusser held an anti-humanist Marxist position whereas Sartre was adamantly humanist.

  [7]. A film director.

  [8]. This repetition from the previous section likely reflects the structural division of the lecture given in two parts, hence this reminds the audience of what the previous section had covered.

  [9]. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) is a French Renaissance writer most famous for his essays.

  [10]. As above, these repetitions appear designed to remind the audience in this second part of the lecture of the concepts and content discussed in the first.

  [11]. Dee (1527–1608) was a mathematician and occultist who tutored Elizabeth I and acquired the largest library in England, perhaps all of Europe at the time.

  [12]. Henry Wriothesley (1573–1624). Shakespeare’s first poetic works were dedicated to Wriothesley, and hence speculation leads many to posit his role in the sonnets.

  [13]. Durrell’s typescript omits the ninth line.

  [14]. Shakespeare, Sonnet XX. Oscar Wilde famously uses the same sonnet for the same evidence in his novella “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.”

  [15]. Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) was a military leader in the English Civil War and was Lord Protector of the United Kingdom during the Interregnum.

  [16]. As reported by Richard Baines in “the Baines Note,” which contains many varied claims about Marlowe (Hopkins 15–17).

  [17]. Edmund Spenser’s (1552–1599) The Shepheardes Calender, first published in 1579. This refers to the January eclogue in which Hobbinol loves Colin Clout who loves Alexis; however, the anonymous commentary by “E.K.” in the poem denies a sexual component (Fone 158–61).

  [18]. An allusion to Vladimir Nabokov’s famous pedophiliac novel Lolita, in which his narrator, Humbert Humbert, falls in love with a “nymphet” approximately the same age as Dante’s Beatrice.

  [19]. Durrell also used the same phrase a few years earlier in the opening note to his novel Balthazar. He had wanted Justine described as “an investigation of bisexual love,” but this was not suitable for publication and reappears in his drafts for the prefatory “Note” to Balthazar only as “My topic is a[n] investigation of modern love; the bisexual psyche.” I am indebted to Charles Sligh of the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga for further archival evidence—these materials appear in the Durrell fonds in the Morris Library of Southern Illinois University, ICarbS 42/12/1 (enumerated by MacNiven as A.44—A.47). A.44 reads as I have quoted, A.45 is a typed duplicate, A.46 is a typed copy revised in pencil that adds “of Freud” to “the bisexual psyche,” and A.47 is then a typed copy identical to the final published Note, which reads, “The central topic of the book is an investigation of modern love” (Balthazar 9). The lateness of this revision is further demonstrated by the proof copy of the novel, which is held at the University of Victoria, in which the A.44–A.47 materials from Carbondale are finalized in typescript and then pasted into the proofs for the novel, placed directly over a previous and entirely different version of the same Note (see item 2.3 in the Durrell fonds).

  [20]. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a Danish philosopher often seen in the existentialist school. He questioned the importance of non-being and impotence to the notion of the self. Durrell referred to Kierkegaard’s works as early as the 1930s.

  [21]. John Leslie Hotson (1897–1992) advances this theory in Shakespeare’s Sonnets Dated and Other Essays (1949). Durrell’s earlier comments on Shakespeare being the son of a wool dealer also derive from Hotson. Hotson did not publish his famous Mr WH (1964) until two years after Durrell’s piece appeared in print. Durrell follows Wilde closely here.

  [22]. See Wilde’s novella “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” first published in 1889 but expanded for publication in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories in 1891.

  [23]. Lee (1859–1926) was a major Shakespeare scholar and biographer. He taught at Balliol College, Oxford, and edited Oxford University Press’s facsimile of the First Folio. Durrell is likely referring to his 1904 book Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century.

  [24]. This is speculative and relates to Durrell’s own working method with his notebooks.

  [25]. Durrell refers to this passage several times (Freud, Future 177).

  [26]. Wilder (1897–1975) was an American playwright and novelist most famous for his play Our Town. He met with Freud in 1935.

  [27]. Thomas Lodge (1558–1625) published this collection of poems in 1580, and it is generally believed that Shakespeare is indebted to him for Venus and Adonis.

  [28]. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis 9–10.

  [29]. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis 251–52.

  [30]. Hamlet III.i.161.

  [31]. Durrell is referring to Shakespeare’s poem “The Rape of Lucrece,” which is drawn from Ovid’s Fasti. Sextus Tarquinius, the son of King Tarquin of Rome, rapes Lucrece, who commits suicide, which ultimately leads to revolt against the Tarquins and the creation of the Roman Republic. Durrell uses the name Tarquin for a major character in his The Black Book as well as Panic Spring.

  [32]. Shakespeare, Rape of Lucrece 115–17.

  [33]. Shakespeare, Rape of Lucrece 1074.

  [34]. For instance, see Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, canto 8, stanza 7.

  [35]. William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) was a comic book writer who created the famous brunette Wonder Woman.

  [36]. Shakespeare, Othello I.ii.288–89.

  [37]. This section derives from Titus Andronicus IV.ii.1750–85.

  [38]. Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost IV.iii.1597–99.

  [39]. John Florio (1553–1625) was best known for translating Montaigne into English.

  [40]. Beyond this collection and his contribution to it, very little is known of Chester.

  [41]. Shakespeare, The Phoenix and the Turtle 25–40.

  [42]. Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece 1611–14.

  [43]. Shakespeare, The Phoenix and the Turtle 56–67.

  [44]. Originally from a note in the Aubrey manuscript (Chambers 252).

  [45]. Richard Burbage (1568–1619) was the star of Shakespeare’s company and a major actor of the period.

  [46]. Shakespeare, As You Like It III.ii.1589–93.

  [47]. Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona IV.iv.2007.

  [48]. Shakespeare, Sonnets I.1–2.

  [49]. Durrell also had only two daughters, neither of whom had children.

  [50]. Shakespeare, The Tempest III.iii.1541–46.

  Theatre

  [1]. This relatively obscure play was printed several times and was well-known at the time, but Danvers-Walker does not appear to have had other productions, apart from acting roles. It concerns
a working-class youth who strangles his sweet-heart, and several reviewers note the play’s maudlin nature and comic wit are mismatched with its class orientation (Agate 85–86).

  [2]. Durrell was reading John B. Watson’s behaviourist psychology at the time.

  [3]. The high performance standard is noted by other reviewers at the time as well.

  [4]. Norman and Wilson are the play’s protagonists.

  [5]. This play went through a large number of productions, during which the cast continued to change. This particular cast cannot be traced back to a specific production date.

  [6]. Eliot’s play The Family Reunion was not successful during this first production, which ran from March 21 to April 22, 1939. Durrell attended the opening with his wife Nancy and lunched with Eliot on March 25 before travelling to Stratford-upon-Avon to review productions of Shakespeare’s Othello and A Comedy of Errors (Chamberlin 24).

  [7]. Durrell may be pointing to Eliot’s essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” first published in 1920.

  [8]. Many critics argue the moral struggles in the play reflect Eliot’s difficulties in his first marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, from whom he separated in 1933. She was committed to the Northumberland House asylum in 1938 by her brother.

  [9]. This opening production featured Michael Redgrave as Harry, Helen Haye as Lady Monchensey, and Catherine Lacey as Agatha.

  The Happy Rock

  [1]. Miller’s works were frequently banned and went through a range of high-profile trials for obscenity around the world.

  [2]. Herman Melville (1819–1891) and Walt Whitman (1819–1892), both American writers, are frequent references for Miller.

  [3]. Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), John Dos Passos (1896–1970), and William Faulkner (1897–1962) were contemporary novelists who shaped American Modernism and avant-garde prose. Durrell had few comments and little praise for any of these three authors but does note reading them all in his correspondences.

  [4]. Durrell first read Tropic of Cancer in 1935, likely in August, after Barclay Hudson had given him the book on Corfu (Durrell, Durrell–Miller 3).