From the Elephant's Back

by Lawrence Durrell

  But meanwhile I had said goodbye to my elephant Sadu and my father had obtained a new job in the hills. It was to maintain a small mountain railway, the one that runs in the most precipitous fashion, sometimes upon gradients of one in three, up the rampart of Himalayan foothills until it arrives at Darjeeling, the terminus; after which, mules and horses carry the traveller onwards into Tibet.[17] My father was a true Victorian and his attitude to science was, in the anthropological sense, religious. Moreover he had inherited some ten new little elephants made of steel which he adored. They were sturdy and very beautiful as you will see, and marvellous workers. They were in fact the logical positivist’s version of Sadu. They really merited our adoration, and the first time we wound up the cliff-faces of the mountains we realised that they were not toys but as massively powerful as tug-boats. They had no names, but I called them all Sadu. This little locomotive was so simple! It was a cocotte-minute, a pressure cooker on wheels. How had nobody thought of it before? The track ran through landscapes of dreams—just as the abandoned railway lines of the Gard, near where I live in the south of France, along which I walk and reflect also.[18] Except that you had the snows and the mists always opening and closing upon sheer precipices. It was an uncanny world of strangely conflicting emanations in feeling, thought, atmosphere. You smelt Tibet!

  It was of course a dramatic wrench to leave India, but I was optimistic and eager to see this marvellous distant paradise upon which we had all depended morally for so long. It was known as “Home” which was very touching. I knew that it was better than heaven, because I had been told that everything British was better than everything foreign. I felt as pleased as a Jew, belonging to the chosen race,[19] and I was eager to affront the problems with good grace. Luckily too my school, after a year in London, was a most beautiful public school in Canterbury, whose architecture and atmosphere resembled very closely the school I had quitted in Darjeeling.[20]

  I gave no great trouble though I was rather neurotic and so a bad student; but I played games well and boxed so that my life was not rendered miserable like that of weaker boys.[21] I made good friends, and the masters, like the Jesuits, were honest and lively and most competent. My French master for example on learning that I wanted to learn French and become a writer immediately took a subscription to Le Monde for me—the weekly literary pages. So every week I had this foreign paper. This kindly and delightful man was mad about France and French literature and encouraged my interest. His name was Mr. Hollingsworth—I found it the other day among my papers. I believe he is still alive. It’s a pleasure to thank him publicly in French for he taught me my first words of the language.[22]

  But yes, it was a grave wrench leaving Sadu.

  There were compensations, the most important being the language and literature, which now became my passport and in which I performed my apprentice duties. My father hoped I would become a senior functionary and return to India, no longer a petit bourgeois but a great man with an expensive dinner jacket![23] I was not against the idea, but I said I wished to be a writer. He said it was okay but that I must go to Oxford first. His view was that all writers should go to Oxford where they made very influential friends who helped them to become successful afterwards. Perhaps this was not so silly as it then seemed. But he had read in the paper that Bernard Shaw had three Rolls-Royces and Kipling two[24]—he wanted me to enjoy this sort of success; but I wanted a typewriter and, if such a thing had been possible, an elephant.

  I got the typewriter for Christmas, and a complete Shakespeare. My father was a real gentleman in the basic sense and I regret he has not lived to read the fan-mail my books have brought me over the years.

  I started to write like everyone else, without having anything special to say. I never thought of my work as particularly original—it was a tessellation of other men’s ideas filtered through my vision. But when I began to learn my job I knew that I was part of a splendid tradition and I hoped to do as well as my forerunners. But as I came to read them I realised just how stable their Victorian world had been and how unstable mine had become, how precarious and unsettling the new metaphysics was. What a gap stretched between Robinson Crusoe—the last novel of human isolation without loss of identity, without alienation—and Kafka’s Castle in which the new sensibility had been mercilessly exposed to view.[25] The new departures in scientific thought had unsettled and indeed had even ruptured both syntax and serial order; the signal of course had long been given, as when Rimbaud wrote Je est un Autre and when Laforgue echoed him with Je m’ennui Natale.[26]

  The stable ego of fiction had disintegrated—Lawrence says so in his letters;[27] in every sector the basic propositions of theoretical physics had come under fire and some of these factors were of concern to poets—such as that one could not observe a field without disturbing it, so that all objective judgement was qualified. We had been taught to believe in the existence of absolute objective Truth—which would be revealed when analysis had gone far enough. But the new ideas made truth seem highly provisional and subject to scale and context. The Indians had always said that the notion of matter was an illusion, and voilà we had begun to find that this was becoming scientific fact. Not only physics—philosophy and psychology were also in an impasse, thanks to Freud. He had deciphered Hamlet at last,[28] and we now knew his madness to be our own. Both the outside world and the inner one had been quite transformed by these ideas. Of course long ago the Indians had told us that the notion of the discrete and separate ego was also an illusion—perhaps a dangerous one. Under the probings of Freud and Co. it had all but disintegrated already! Here again the Asiatics seemed to be right. Hamlet’s father’s ghost had emerged once more upon the stage.

  I am simplifying this matter now, and of course when I was twenty I had not fully grasped it in detail. Now I see that the fashionable critical notion of “two cultures” is a misconceived one.[29] All the great poets who took the European spirit as a responsibility were fully abreast of this crisis. Valéry studied mathematics, Eliot was familiar with the precepts of Patanjali, Rilke, and Yeats also; while in the greatest of them, Fernando Pessoa, we find a lucid exposition of the crisis which led to so many hysterical symptoms like DADA and Surrealism, to mention only two.[30]

  This for me was a great problem as I felt that I needed some sort of classical frame upon which to expose the tapestry which I wanted to weave. I did not know whether I could use some of the by-products of this crisis and use them as if they were classical unities. The disintegration of the stable ego, the subject-object relationship, the poetic sickness of syntax which made modern poetry so like the effusions of talented schizophrenics…Could I make myself a classical backcloth out of the by-products of relativity?

  The worst was that there was nobody with whom I could discuss such matters; they did not interest people, and I knew no poets. Had I been less of a fool, had I passed my exams and gone to Oxford, things would have been different. But I didn’t. I was like a cat taken and left miles from home—I was really trying to find my way back to India. It was not clear of course, but now I see it was really that. It led me to become a European to begin with—at eighteen I was footloose in Europe. My father gave me some money to spend on books and travel.[31] It was not much: I travelled like a poor student, with a rucksack. How marvellous it was! I discovered Greece at twenty-one.[32]

  In this country I discovered the Ancient Greek philosophers like Heraclitus[33] and discovered their Indian parentage, for there was hardly one who had not studied his philosophy in India. I was half way home, and to celebrate this I wrote the Black Book.[34] I was influenced by surrealism but not convinced theoretically.[35] It did not really touch my deeper preoccupation with form, and the rupture of form by science. Forms in the novel since Proust had become circular, as if they were trying to darn the hole. Time or memory now extended into infinity. We had believed that the history of man began with Adam and Eve, but the new geology extended time immeasurably. We thought that the Iliad was a fol
klore poem; Schliemann uncovered the remains of Troy and proved it a reality.[36] After Freud it was not possible again to write Hamlet. The universe had become a huge incomprehensible machine from which the only philosophy to be drawn was one of cosmic pointlessness.

  And man? His coherence and self-possession had become dispersed and tarnished by doubts about his identity. Was he simply a succession of states, like an old movie?[37] Once more one thought of the Indian notions about human identity…

  It seemed to me that if I could somehow touch all this in a novel it would need stereoscopic vision and stereophonic sound, not to mention jump-cutting like a modern film. The matter would be the ordinary old-fashioned matter of novels, people and situations and quotidian problems—but all seen through this new angle of vision. I was much helped in these ideas by Wyndham Lewis’s book Time and Western Man.[38] He was the only English intellectual who was actively interested in these ideas which were fermenting in Europe at the time. It is very hard to interest the English writer in ideas.[39]

  I went to live in Greece, a very dangerous course for a young writer, as it cut me off from literary life in London altogether;[40] I had met nobody, neither editors nor publishers nor other writers—which is the normal way to begin a career in letters. But I needed this country very badly in order to hatch the eggs I wanted to lay. In those days Greece was, from the European point of view, not only primitive and dangerous, but a long way away. So much so that when first my poems received any notice I was treated as an English “Gaugin” in an article by Derek Stanford![41] Now everyone has visited this beautiful, modern, prosperous little country.

  At first I was very much alone, but in a few years I acquired, by a series of pure flukes, a number of uncles or godfathers or whatever you may call them; benevolent spirits to guide my path, to judge my work. I was electrified when they told me that I had something more than juvenile promise. I am so vain that the more I am praised the better I work. These great men, some of whom were then unknown, gave me the necessary encouragement to persevere. What luck! I discovered that T.S. Eliot was my editor; among other uncles I had Henry Miller, George Seferis, George Katsimbalis the Colossus of Maroussi, and Theodore Stephanides the great savant, doctor, astronomer, biologist, cancerologist—everything![42] I could not have hoped for such a circle of acquaintance had I gone on living in suburban London. And at twenty-two years of age! I was not too stupid not to recognise the importance of these friendships. Among them was one aunt, the delectable Anaïs Nin.[43] I shall never forget that when I arrived in Paris a couple then completely unknown came to the station to meet me and praise me for the Black Book—Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller! They brought me as a gift, Otto Rank’s Art and Artist, right there to the station. We went to the Café Dôme for a drink.[44]

  Paris as usual was humming with ideas, like a beehive, and here at last I found people with whom I could discuss these ideas—albeit in the shadow of the swastika, for the war had almost arrived. Yet the portrait I had sketched of our intellectual predicament proved to be accurate—both the outside world, the world of matter, and the inside world, the world of the self, had been completely transformed by advances in science. As for atomic physics, the very language used today to try and describe the debris of the atom—for it has disintegrated into some two hundred sub-particles—is taken from Joyce and reminds one of Lewis Carroll. As the particles become increasingly diminutive in size and enigmatic in function a kind of literary hysteria set in; the smallest so far have been christened “quarks,” a word borrowed from Joyce. A quark has three forms: “up,” “down,” and “strange.” This is not all. They have another quality which the same looking-glass minds have christened “charm.” Finally, to complicate the picture further, they must be considered as either “top” or “bottom” and to have yet another quality called “spin.” The first DADA manifesto[45] is nothing to this extraordinary parade of scientific categories borrowed from literature! Poor Joyce! Even though his Finnegan,[46] a real curiosity of literature, is really a potentially protracted pun! The important thing for me was the dissolution of the fiction of the stable discrete ego. Despite the apparent originality of Freud’s discoveries, the majority of his ideas had been anticipated years before by another Viennese doctor whose work, while popular, did not cause the same sort of revolution. His name was Von Feuchtersleben.[47] We see I think from this that each great man is really a syndicate of several other great men. He matches and accords dissimilar views and finds a new synthesis from old ideas. He is a joiner and harmoniser more than an inventor. There is no need to go further with this sort of exposition; the question was this: could such material influence literary form, and provide a sort of frame? It was certainly more topical and more typically modern than so much which the modern novel was treating.

  I began to dream of a sort of novel-as-apparatus (un roman-appareil) which one could use as a historic or poetic “conscience,” as portable as a pocket-compass! I did not wish (even had I ever had the talent) to build a word-cathedral like Joyce; you must be a dispossessed Catholic for that. I wanted to build something like a cave-cooperative with perhaps Dionysus as manager![48]

  It was years before I dared to begin on such a book and, meanwhile, I went into training for the big fight by learning how to write. I wrote in many different styles and on many topics. I felt that not only the world was coming to an end but also language—for the new visual age had begun to arrive. I felt that one day we should communicate in grunts like black jazzmen! I was too pessimistic I now see, but nevertheless the trend is still apparent. But side by side with this merely scientific interest I was also reading the Upanishads translated by Yeats,[49] and discovering the Chinese philosophers who one day would teach me their magic, which is the art of manipulating the inevitable! What seemed evident to me was that all disciplines, all styles, were gradually moving closer to each other, whether East and West, or simply mysticism and logic. It has not gone as fast or as far as I expected but already in this contemporary world the trend has become a marked one.

  I am not sure, but I think there is a faint hope of a great synthesis which will conjoin all fields of thought, however apparently dissimilar, making them interpenetrate, inter-fertilise.[50] This is the sense in which it is worth being a poet. We must learn from such doctor-mystics as Groddeck[51] to treat the whole of reality as a symptom!

  I went back to Greece to wait for the coming of the expected war. I took Miller with me for a holiday.[52] In this Greek island one felt very strongly that ancient Greece had its roots in Egypt, whence India. For my part I also had one foot in Vienna, so to speak, with Freud and Jung and Groddeck.[53] I began to see what becoming a European meant!

  While I was wondering about this, the Germans made a useful contribution to my thinking by chasing me all the way down Greece, into Crete, and thence into Egypt.[54] I would have been too lazy to visit Alexandria myself—I was not interested in Egypt, I was happy in Greece. But in Alexandria I found myself at the cradle from which the whole of our civilisation had sprung. The roots of all our theologies as well as the roots of mathematics and physics had been hatched here. The first measurements of the earth—something as exciting as going to the moon—had been made here. Between Plotinus, Philo, and Euclid[55] all aspects of human thought had been enriched here. It was the ideal frame for a book which might try, in a modest way, to touch the contemporary reality. It was impertinent, I suppose, to invoke the Gods, like Einstein[56] and Freud, but that was the way I saw things, and I was quite pleased when in the book[57] I saw the stereo effects, and the slight bending of time and space—like Einsteinian space being curved!

  The success was astonishing and very pleasing; I was amply rewarded for the thought and reflection which had gone into the book.

  Nothing has changed today in the world picture, but what is apparent is that the two metaphysics, Eastern and Western, are moving steadily together and given time will meet in many essential fields. Numen and phenomenon were made to be complime
ntaries and not opposites. It is so obvious that this is happening that I decided two years ago to celebrate this marriage, which I foresaw, by making a small group of novels, interlaced and interdependent based on the five-power system of the Buddhist psychology—the five aggregates, so to speak.[58] A five-part book, independent but linked in a new way, a somewhat haphazard way, but occupied with much the same material as the last. One’s experience of life is very limited. In this book I proposed to return to India—to move from the four dimensions to the five skandas.[59] The old stable ego had already gone, reality has realised itself there, so to speak. In a sense all my new people are aspects of one great person, age, culture. I would like to make a metaphor for the human condition as we are living it now. I have dug sideways also to make a tunnel back into the Quartet, for part of the action of this new novel takes place in Egypt, and one meets characters and places from the old Quartet, but they are not named. But passionate fans—les fervents—will recognise them. I like to think that there is a family feeling about my books and here and there a character from an early book may stray into a later book without warning. I like this sort of continuity which hints at an inner progression from the Black Book onwards. I need two more years for the last three books. I am not of course sure that my idea will work, but if it does I will have two floating structures, poems of celebration drawn from the East and the West. Imagine two Calder-mobiles.[60] After that I shall be happy to retire. I have a few things more to say about the destiny of woman, the fate of the world, and the second law of thermodynamics—the law of divine entropy. I would like to say them as an Indian this time!