From the Elephant's Back

by Lawrence Durrell

  Published by

  The University of Alberta Press

  Ring House 2

  Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E1

  www.uap.ualberta.ca

  Copyright © 2015 The Beneficiaries of the Literary Estate of Lawrence Durrell

  Introduction and annotations copyright © 2015 James Gifford

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Durrell, Lawrence [Essays. Selections]

  From the elephant’s back: collected essays & travel writings / Lawrence Durrell; edited and with an introduction by James Gifford; foreword by Peter Baldwin.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978–1–77212–051–6 (pbk.).—

  ISBN 978–1–77212–059–2 (epub).—

  ISBN 978–1–77212–060–8 (kindle).—

  ISBN 978–1–77212–061–5 (PDF)

  I. Gifford, James, 1974–, editor, writer of introduction II. Title.

  PR6007.U76A6 2015 824’.912 C2014–908313–0

  C2014–908314–9

  Index available in print and PDF editions.

  First edition, first printing, 2015.

  First electronic edition, 2015.

  Digital conversion by Transforma Pvt. Ltd.

  Copyediting and proofreading by Joanne Muzak.

  Indexing by Lindsay Parker.

  Cover design by Alan Brownoff.

  Cover image: Chris Bennett, Hannibal (detail). Used by permission. www.chrisbenn.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written consent. Contact the University of Alberta Press for further details.

  The University of Alberta Press gratefully acknowledges the support received for its publishing program from The Canada Council for the Arts. The University of Alberta Press also gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund (AMF) for its publishing activities.

  This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

  Contents

  Foreword

  PETER BALDWIN

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  JAMES GIFFORD

  From the Elephant’s Back

  PERSONAL POSITIONS

  A Letter from the Land of the Gods

  Airgraph on Refugee Poets in Africa

  No Clue to Living

  This Magnetic, Bedevilled Island That Tugs at My Heart

  Lamas in a French Forest

  IDEAS ABOUT LITERATURE

  The Prince and Hamlet: A Diagnosis

  Hamlet, Prince of China

  Prospero’s Isle: To Caliban

  Ideas About Poems

  Ideas About Poems II

  The Heraldic Universe

  Hellene and Philhellene

  A Cavafy Find

  A Real Heart Transplant into English

  Introduction to Wordsworth

  L’amour, Clef du Mystère?

  ETERNAL CONTEMPORARIES

  Theatre: Sense and Sensibility

  The Happy Rock

  Studies in Genius VI: Groddeck

  Constant Zarian: Triple Exile

  Enigma Variations

  The Shades of Dylan Thomas

  Bernard Spencer

  The Other Eliot

  Richard Aldington

  On George Seferis

  Poets Under the Bed

  SPIRIT OF PLACE: TRAVEL WRITING

  Corfu: Isle of Legend

  The Island of the Rose

  Can Dreams Live on When Dreamers Die?

  Family Portrait

  Letter in the Sofa

  The Moonlight of Your Smile

  The Poetic Obsession of Dublin

  Borromean Isles

  Alexandria Revisited

  With Durrell in Egypt

  Works Cited

  Foreword

  A taste or more correctly a passion which once contracted can never be cured.

  —JAMES POPE-HENNESSY, Aspects of Provence

  As for human characters, whether real or invented, there are no such animals. Each psyche is really an ant-hill of opposing predispositions. Personality as something with fixed attributes is an illusion—but a necessary illusion if we are to love!

  —LAWRENCE DURRELL, Balthazar

  THE GENESIS OF THIS COLLECTION took place one weekend over ten years ago when I met with my fellow Durrell enthusiast and collector, Peter Dixon, to talk Durrell and to inspect my extensive but disordered collection of work by and about Lawrence Durrell.

  I had been a serious collector (someone who will order a book first then look at the price!) since the late 1970s. I had wandered in and out of second-hand bookshops, raided the catalogues of dealers of “Modern Firsts,” plagued Bernard Stone (himself a long time collector, seller, and publisher of Durrell’s work from various London bookshop premises), and placed daredevil bids at auctions until I had what might be termed a respectable collection.

  If space, the arrival of babies, and indolence stopped me cataloguing the collection, it is still great fun to pull down a banker’s box marked simply “Durrell” and see what lies beneath the anonymous cardboard lid. Thus it was that, one winter’s day, Peter and I dug into this trove. We pulled out all the copies we could find where Durrell had contributed an occasional piece of writing. I knew there would be a lot, and soon Peter and I were in hot debate as to what should be left out of the collection that I then had in mind and of which this book is the result.

  Under cover of darkness, we slipped into the law office where I worked, coaxed the photocopier into life, and spent the next two hours copying all that we had found. Having established a bundle of copies which I felt would provide a fair selection of Durrell’s writing in this form, I used my charm and the promise of some pocket money to persuade Janet, one of the secretaries at my office, to prepare a typescript for me.

  My plan had been to publish the collection under the imprint of my own Delos Press. In the meantime, Richard Pine, director of the Durrell School of Corfu and author of the most impressive Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape, had provided much encouragement by adding some editorial notes to the copy I had prepared. Richard’s support and contribution may have come at a time when my interest would otherwise have flagged, given that the project then seemed beyond the scope of both my finances and competence as an editor.

  I also had the benefit of advice and editorial encouragement from Dr. James Gifford of Fairleigh Dickinson University. As well as being aware of his scholarly work, I knew that he was instrumental in the republishing of Durrell’s first two novels, Pied Piper of Lovers and Panic Spring. I am immensely grateful for his efforts.

  That this selection of essays has progressed from being “good” to exceptional is entirely down to his work and diligence in finalising and editing the selection now available.

  Much of what Durrell wrote as occasional pieces about Provence is readily available elsewhere, such as in the Spirit of Place collection. For the most part, the essays reproduced here are reprinted for the first time.

  My epigraph from Pope-Hennessy’s excellent and evocative book opens with the words, Provence is “a taste.” So fiery has my passion been for the work of Lawrence Durrell that I benefited from Larry’s munificent encouragemen
t to publish two of his books under my own Delos Press imprint: with Penelope Durrell-Hope, a revised edition of An Irish Faustus (1987) and a short text he wrote specially for Delos, Henri Michaux: The Poet of Supreme Solipsism. I am ever grateful for the opportunity to have published these books and this collection therefore seems to be the best possible tribute to a writer of such style, inspiration, and imagination.

  Salut, Larry.

  I am gratified that the following shared my commitment to seeing this collection of writing published: Peter Dixon; Janet King for doing the first typescript; Anthony Astbury for the first proof reading; John Glass for adding his editorial skills; Anthea Morton Saner and her successor Camilla Goslett at Curtis Brown for agreeing to the contractual side; Richard Pine of the Durrell School of Corfu for editorial guidance; Penelope and John Hope for offering their wisdom and inspiration; Brewster Chamberlin for checking the chronology I prepared to assist my work on the project; and Tony Rudolf for perfecting my weak translations from the French when only versions in that language are available.

  Finally, and most importantly, to Françoise Kestsman Durrell who, as Durrell’s literary executor, so promptly agreed to this publication when first mooted as a Delos Press book.

  Peter Baldwin

  Moseley, Birmingham, England

  November 2014

  Acknowledgements

  I COULD NOT HAVE COMPLETED THIS COLLECTION without a good deal of help from many people. Peter Baldwin first envisioned this collection for Delos Press, which has produced many fine editions. I have benefited from much correspondence with Peter as well as a detailed conversation in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 2009 with regard to the changes to the project. In the same year, Fairleigh Dickinson University supported two weeks of research in Oxford where I completed the majority of the revisions to the manuscript. The staff of the Bodleian Library were extremely helpful with locating several otherwise overlooked works by Durrell, including many of his minor works from the 1930s and 1940s, some of which were added to the collection initially envisioned. I am thankful for their efficient assistance as well as for providing a working environment that was highly productive. Although the drafted comments Richard Pine and I created for the Delos Press edition were abandoned, my discussions with Richard were of great use and undoubtedly influenced my approach here. I was also fortunate to enjoy two weeks in residence at the Durrell School of Corfu in 2010 at the invitation of University of Iowa’s Overseas Writer’s Workshop, during which I completed a good deal of the annotations to the new additions made in Oxford.

  With regard to this volume’s revisions to the accepted critical interpretations of Durrell’s notion of the Heraldic Universe, I am in the debt of the Special Collections librarians at the University of Victoria. They first introduced me to the Henry Miller–Herbert Read correspondence, which significantly reoriented my understanding of Durrell’s critical context. This was compounded by the Read–Henry Treece correspondence, and the Read–George Woodcock letters, a published copy of which was very generously given to me. The manuscripts for all three items are held in the McPherson Library at the University of Victoria. Members of the International Lawrence Durrell Society have also given me great support through their listserv and as colleagues and friends. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the fine feedback I have received from Charles Sligh, Michael Haag, William Leigh Godshalk, Anne Zahlan, James Clawson, and Pamela Francis.

  For the opportunity to teach several of these shorter works, and thereby develop a sense of what annotations would be most congenial to a typical undergraduate reader, I am indebted to my students from 2005 to 2011 at the University of Lethbridge, the University of Victoria, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and Simon Fraser University. Graduate students at the University of Iowa and Simon Fraser University have also helped with feedback on lectures that discussed several of the critical interventions I have attempted here. I am also indebted to Joanne Muzak for her astonishingly keen eye as an editor and generous critical acumen.

  James Gifford

  Vancouver

  November 2014

  Introduction

  THIS COLLECTION HAS A STRAIGHTFORWARD AMBITION: to redirect the interpretive perspective that readers bring to Lawrence Durrell’s literary works by returning their attention to his short prose. This includes three main areas for critical intervention: reconsidering Durrell’s political postures over time, reassessing his position in English literature as a Late Modernist, and addressing the role of the poignant suffering surrounding the Second World War in his travel writing. For both “scholarly” and “pleasure” readers, these new perspectives on his texts alter our approach to Durrell’s more famous works, mainly his novels and travel books, which continue to attract a wide audience. A century after his birth, such reconsideration is increasingly necessary. And Durrell’s works are increasingly necessary to that century’s understanding of itself.

  In each of the three areas I have outlined, much literary baggage has accumulated over time, and, as a consequence, most readers find it difficult to approach Durrell without preconceived interpretive notions. He is most often presented as an imperialist author belonging to no definite generation or movement, whose works evoke a tourist’s dream of the orientalist and philhellenic luxuriance of the Eastern Mediterranean. We need little prompting to regard Durrell’s works through such a tinted glass. In a more general sense relating to that first paradigmatic approach—his political positions over time—Durrell is known for his literary activity at the end of empire, writing such works as Bitter Lemons and The Alexandria Quartet in the immediate aftermath of the Enosis struggle on Cyprus and the Suez Crisis in Egypt. This has led to his works being associated with other late imperial prose writers and works, such as Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. What this perspective masks is Durrell’s Indian childhood, his troubled position as an imperial subject, and his close ties to several anti-authoritarian-cum-anarchist figures in tandem with his lifelong anti-Marxism. Durrell’s short prose presents a politicized author very much unlike the popular image constructed from the accumulated veneers of many years of critical thought, much of which grew out of the decolonization process that erupted in 1956, the same year as Durrell wrote Justine. At a minimum, we uncover a far more politically complex author than we are typically compelled to find when first reading The Alexandria Quartet. This other Lawrence Durrell more clearly relates to the major literary achievements of other writers from the same time period.

  In the works gathered here, we find the character-defining aesthetic ponderings of the young Lawrence Durrell who was about to begin a series of publications in such venues as George Woodcock’s wartime magazine NOW, Robert Duncan’s Experimental Review, George Leite’s Circle (also with Kenneth Rexroth and Duncan), and Alex Comfort’s New Road; all four were expressly anarchist periodicals edited by self-identifying anarchist poets. The first was published by Freedom Press and the last by Grey Walls Press, which bound itself closely to the anarchist New Apocalypse movement and produced Seven, which Durrell also repeatedly published in and promoted.[1] Immediately prior, he appeared in the Oxford student poetry journal Kingdom Come, which was the rebirth of the short-lived Bolero—both were edited by John Waller (succeeded by New Apocalypse poets) who had dabbled significantly with anti-authoritarian politics and fostered the network of poets that would reassemble with Durrell in North Africa during the Second World War. Duncan twice published Durrell in Experimental Review and reviewed Henry Miller in it, noting, “Politically he has no politics. Having come at last into the real world he is an anarchist. Anyone reading over the foregoing passage will see clearly why the Marxist surrealists are afraid of Miller” (79). At the same time, Duncan was repeatedly attempting to publish Durrell’s surrealist Asylum in the Snow under the same conceptual revision to Surrealism, though it took him seven years to accomplish it—and the book was finally published by Circle in 1947.

  This Lawrence Durrell comes as
a surprise to early twenty-first-century readers. This angry young man of the 1940s gives an unanticipated voice to anti-authoritarian visions of poetic inspiration in “Ideas About Poems” and “The Heraldic Universe,”[2] both of which are in this collection and originate in his correspondence with Henry Miller about Herbert Read and Surrealism. Both Read and Miller, again, self-identified as anarchist writers,[3] and the vision Miller fostered shaped Durrell’s developing sense of his poetics in the 1930s and 1940s. Recontextualized, Durrell’s production of an open text that is dependent on the reader’s independent interpretive ventures and individual creativity forces a contemporary reader to examine the potential politics of such an aesthetic vision. If the text thrusts interpretive independence on the reader for a highly personal vision, does this “Personalist” concept imply a politics?[4] More to the point, how is Durrell’s “personal” stance akin to or different from the Personalist movement that grew among his colleagues at the same moment in Britain, and which also rebutted T.S. Eliot’s impersonal theory of poetry? It is also tempting to ask if Durrell’s early “heraldic” notions of creativity influenced the ambiguity and reader-imminent interpretations we are given in The Alexandria Quartet, whether they appear as “Workpoints” in The Alexandria Quartet that allow the reader to continue the narrative or as an unreliable narrator whom the reader cannot trust to provide meaning. In any case, the traditionally understood notion of Durrell’s Heraldic Universe as a mental state of being is insufficient for the context revealed by its publishing history and associations.

  As I have shown elsewhere, the descriptions of the Heraldic Universe that Durrell articulates in the works gathered in this collection derive directly from his partnership with Miller in a correspondence with Read that concerned communism and anarchism (“Anarchist” 61–63). This relationship between aesthetics and politics has been overlooked entirely in previous scholarship. In reaction to the copy of Read’s speech from the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition, a speech that Miller sent to Durrell with Read’s letter, Durrell responded, “This manifesto would be a lot clearer if these brave young revolutionaries started by defining what they mean by art. To begin with, they seem to mean Marx” (Durrell and Miller 18). Read concludes his uncharacteristically pro-communist speech with the statement that Surrealism only succeeds “in the degree to which it leads to revolutionary actions” (8) and “work[s] for the transformation of this imperfect world” (13). To this, Durrell responded directly: “A definition of the word surrealism, please” and “I firmly believe in the ideals of cementing reality with the dream, but I do not believe the rest of this stuff. That the artist must be a socialist, for example. That he wants to transform the world. (He wants to transform men.)” (Durrell and Miller 18). It was only in this immediate context, for which Miller had established his anarchist vision in contrast to the communist perspective endorsed by Surrealism, that Durrell offered his first articulation of the Heraldic Universe just a few lines later in the same letter: “Listen, Miller, what I feel about it, is this…What I propose to do, with all deadly solemnity, is to create my HERALDIC UNIVERSE quite alone. The foundation is being quietly laid” (18). In this context, Durrell’s subsequent anti-rationalist and autonomous articulation of the Heraldic Universe in Personal Landscape, collected in this volume, takes on a new tone: “Describing, logic limits. Its law is causality.…Poetry by an associative approach transcends its own syntax in order not to describe but to be the cause of apprehension in others: Transcending logic it invades a realm where unreason reigns” (“Heraldic,” this volume 103). Durrell’s other aesthetic comments for the journal, “Ideas About Poems,” draw on further loaded terms gesturing to the anarchist New Apocalypse’s Personalist movement, “The poet is interested in the Personal aspect….That is the only explanation for Personal Landscape now” (this volume 99). John Waller, who edited Bolero and Kingdom Come in Oxford and was published by Durrell in Personal Landscape, stated the relation succinctly: “Durrell is likely to found no school. (Indeed the best poetry of 1940 onwards may come to be known as that of brilliant individuals rather than of groups and tendencies.)” (179).