From the Elephant's Back

by Lawrence Durrell

  Yours,

  Larry Durrell

  No Clue to Living

  1960

  ONE SUPPOSES THAT THE ARTIST as a public Opinionator only grew up with the social conscience—with Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.[1] He became an accusing finger pointed at the wrongs of society as well as something of a soul-consultant for his correspondents. Out of this change of preoccupation grew the truly extraordinary phenomenon of his daily postbag today; apart from the begging letters, which doubtless formed a part of Shakespeare’s fan-mail as well, there come hundreds of letters asking him to take up public positions on every conceivable matter from the fate of Irish horses or homosexuals to the rights and wrongs of nuclear warfare and theosophy.[2] It is clear that what is expected of him is to operate as a hardened committee man, appear on boards, advise and comment on public affairs—in short to add his mite to the flood of opinionation which is slopping over the world, obscuring the inner world of values which once he was supposed to sift within himself before expressing his findings in a work of art—poems, paintings, plays. Today they want his message in capsule form. It is, of course, very flattering to see his epigram printed in Sayings of Today beside a message from the Pope and one from Mr. Eisenhower.[3] But it is very doubtful whether he has anything to say which could be more original than the other pronouncements by public figures, for apart from his art he is just an ordinary fellow like everyone else, subject to the same bloody flux of rash opinion, just as eager to lose a friend rather than forgo a jest.

  Yet in some obscure way readers and editors believe that he may have something up his sleeve which will help them to formulate a new way of arranging the world or society; at the worst some sort of tranquilliser which will help alleviate the sleepless pangs of the world conscience. Has he? It is very much to be doubted that he has, outside the world of his artistic formulations where the one constant message (of all artists at all times) remains exactly the same as it always was: and will do until the nature of the work of art is understood and embodied in a way of life, when it will cease to become necessary. This, of course, presupposes that society will enter the poet’s kingdom and realise its life fully. But, goodness me, it does not look likely to the artist wrestling with a ten-page questionnaire about the UNESCO Conference on Basic English.[4] How Basic can one really get? We accuse our enemies of double-thinking;[5] but what nature of self-deception would be necessary to invent a word like humane-killer?

  No, the artist is not really to be blamed if his laughter is slightly cracked, slightly off-key. Nor does his laugh indicate a flippant attitude to the world of today. He admits that we are in an age of profound crisis. The position of humanity today resembled until recently that of Caryl Chessman,[6] under sentence of death and simply living from reprieve to reprieve, albeit in comfortable prison quarters and denied neither food nor books nor ink and paper. Nobody knows for how long.[7] The opinionators, too, are quite ready to sign petitions and organize meetings, and to these the artist is supposed to contribute his ration of right-feeling and right-thinking. The times are out of joint. A technocratic society is swallowing the individual.

  Somehow the artist is expected to find an answer to this situation and to express it in such a way as to make it agreeable to print and palatable to read for the man in the street (the sleeping artist among us). I would like to question whether this is really a proper function for him or not; nor do I mean the word “proper” to be taken in the moral sense—but is this the field in which he can make the greatest contribution? A gaggle of artists round a table busily discussing the human crisis in our culture does not look very different from a Politburo of uncultivated and unshaven peasants discussing how to ameliorate the living standard of a backward province.

  The trouble seems to me to be in the act of opinionation itself—because fundamentally when we address ourselves to the enjoyable task of rearranging the world into a juster and more equitable pattern we never consider ourselves as taking part in the plan. We are outside it somehow, directing the operation: the other fellow must change his ways. Thinking so directed cannot help but end in a magic formula which argues ill for somebody else’s freedom.[8] I deduce this from making a brief survey of my own sinking-fund of opinionations which I trot out in conversation for the sheer fun of the thing. Perhaps a better artist would have learnt to shut up more. I still have not—excuse the moi haïssable:[9] there is no other way to tackle these things except from a personal point of view. I must honestly confess to discovering exactly the same quantity of idiocy, bigotry, confusion, and rashness that I am so disgusted to find in the opinions expressed by my own friends. In myself I find this rather a delightful trait, in others I find it most unsound. This is possibly common to all of us?

  In this field of idle ratiocination one does, of course, come across bright solutions to the world problem. I can think of several—to abolish all news media, journals, films, books, for a period of ten years. Let no one have anything but word-of-mouth news from the village for a long time. I have tried this on myself and can testify to the extremely beneficial effect it has on one. To live in a Greek island with no radio, no newspaper, for a year at a time is a marvellous experience. Energy was saved which could be devoted to private inquiry and the practice of becoming more oneself;[10] I even try the same thing today, for where I live there is no radio, no television, and the papers arrive ten days late. This is a great blessing. It makes it impossible to get worked up about the crises they record—for by the time I read about them they will already have been replaced by others. They come to me, these crises, with the time-lag of distant stars. In this way I strive to keep the milk of opinionation from boiling over. But I have noticed one thing about crises; they perpetually reproduce themselves, there is never any lack of them. Is it possible that man himself is the secret source of manufacture, that the psychosomatic elders of the future will place crises of opinionation in the scale of self-manufactured illnesses—acne of the world soul? It seems likely. Nevertheless, selfish as it may seem, I am spared all the anguish of the opinionator by arriving too late at the denunciation-point. I would always be denouncing the wrong crisis otherwise.

  To what point should I try to keep abreast of our crises so that I am always ready with a piece of packaged self-aggrandisement in the form of an opinion? I do not honestly know. But I cannot help feeling that if our crises are conditioned by lack of understanding and good feeling among human beings, no amount of hortatory lecturing will ever add up to a contribution. You get closer to your fellow man, paradoxically enough, by trying to get closer to yourself.[11] We talk with terror of brain-washing—but what of this vast flood of brain-bashing which sweeps the world? And even brain-washing presupposes brains to wash. There seem to me to be very few about. And whether our daily journalism is any better or worse than the methods used to extract confessions in police states is questionable. Can anyone calculate the effect upon human souls of being subjected to an exclusive diet of Pravda or the Daily Mirror?[12] Perhaps we should talk of a soul-washing rather than a brain-washing; but in this field, too, there are bigots ready with exclusive world-views and questionable techniques for use on children. But perhaps this is simply indicative of my own weakness in opinionizing. I have closely studied several types of government, from democratic, fascist to marxist; in each it seemed to me that the limiting factor could be traced to the region of blank opinionation. Any of them could have become the ideal State if…But I will not dare to finish the sentence, for the answer is known to everyone from the greatest artist to the smallest retail grocer. Here we come up against that ineradicable predisposition to legislate for the man next door.[13] Is the fault perhaps rather in our stars than in ourselves? I would hesitate to answer this dogmatically, living as I do in the country of Nostradamus![14]

  But the problem of commitment remains—or at least this is what the world, and very often the artist, maintains. But here again, speaking purely for the artist, I would say that one cannot create and rem
ain uncommitted. To opinion, yes. But the act of laying pen to paper, brush to canvas, is an act of mystical participation in the common world to which we all belong. An unfamiliar corner of it, perhaps, to most men; sometimes (to opinionators-in-ordinary) even a distasteful one; but nevertheless what emerges from the resolution of selves, if it can be called art, of whatever scale of magnitude, is a direct contribution to the health of the human psyche and as such a restorative, a cordial which makes it better able to recuperate its forces against those of destruction. This is not, of course, to be numbered among the artist’s conscious intentions. It is a by-product of the work. The artist is only concerned with the pure act of self-penetration, of self-disentanglement when he addresses his paper or canvas. But his audiences (those who get his wavelength, so to speak) get his message not in a formulated manner but as a vicarious intuition of a hitherto concealed part of their own natures. Those who want the message packaged are those whose self-intuitions are in need of practice. This is where our education should be helpful—but is it?

  In my view (here we go!) it does little or nothing because it is not oriented around a cosmology or a religion. Music, Divination, Prayer, Sacrifice, Mathematics—how one envies the comprehensiveness of the Greek pattern, with each branch closely linked to the next, each complementing and silhouetting the next. One only has to meet a physicist in the street to notice the pale shrunken soul of the man sprouting behind his eyeglasses. Everything, including the ataxic walk and the twitching, gives away the secret of his imbalance; he is fundamentally doing something meaningless because it is unrelated. Then turn to his spastic brother the artist, clothed in his homespun uniform and decorated by a fern-like spread of beard. He is no less revelatory in his weird habits. (Since television came in beards are going out, but corduroys do not show.) And what is he doing? Painting abstracts which are not half as fascinating as the purely utilitarian shapes of crystals under a microscope. He feels that his function is somehow unrelated, so he takes refuge from the world in this extraordinary activity, the explanations of which appear punctually every week in the press or on television, confided to professional appreciators who can really sling a pot of culture in the public’s face.

  Is it possible that the answer…I am indulging myself again. But is it possible that given time (as indeed space, for another crisis is the cancerous multiplication of races in this present decade: I must remember to give orders to have this process arrested at once): given time enough, it seems clear to me that science could lead us back to the central cosmological preoccupations of religion, and actually reinvigorate what one might call (I don’t like the words) “a religious view” of things based on the masses of new information we have acquired in the past fifty years and which is lying idle, stored in the great lumber rooms of the learned journals? This could also be a possibility, for I believe that science and religion are now within hailing distance, though churches and governments are trying to row in the opposite direction.

  But all these long term speculations, you will murmur restlessly…they are all very well, but they add nothing helpful to the current crisis. Instead of these vague formulations about a future which we may never see, can you not say something concrete about the present? What, in sum, can the artist do?

  I’m afraid nothing—but I utter the word with cheerfulness. From the very beginning of recorded history our world has been apparently in the same disturbed and racked condition. Every attempt at a humane or rational order is subject to limitations of Time, on whose slippery surface neither kings nor empires nor dictators could find more than a precarious and temporary purchase.[15]

  Is the artist, then, only a messenger of despair, can he say nothing? He can only say what his predecessors have said in their various dialects and voices. It is a magnificent prospect that he can offer. There remains, until the very last moment, the great Choice, the great act of affirmation. Raising his cracked and somewhat sardonic voice in every generation he utters the same, and by now somewhat shop soiled, truth: Choose![16]

  This is not very helpful, I know. But we must take into account the limited field of operation of even the greatest artist. He is only a conveyer of the good news, the herald who plays his part among the other actors on the stage. Feeble in everything but these intuitions of possible miracles which lie buried and unrealised in every human psyche, and out of which one could pattern the real cloth-of-gold fabric of a possible Way.[17] What is lacking then? Nothing but the simplest ingredients, but apparently rarer than uranium or cobalt. It is too tiresome to list them—besides it is unnecessary, for any retail grocer could tick them off on his fingers for you.

  And can the artist offer no clue to living? Alas, no; his public does that for him.[18]

  This Magnetic, Bedevilled Island That Tugs at My Heart

  1974

  THE CYPRUS SITUATION has been likened to a hedgehog wearing a coat full of prickles—too many for his own good.[1]

  It is certainly the most obstinate of Mediterranean problems, and, moreover, the issue that divides Greek and Turk has not changed since the very beginning. Once more we have a manifestation of the Greek desire for Enosis,[2] union with Greece, this time in the unfortunate form of a military intrigue which misfired—as anybody could have foreseen it would.

  But, of course, Cyprus means something more personal to me, for I was not just a Briton, I was a Cypriote by residence and choice, living in the island with my small daughter.[3] Its peace and happiness was as vital to me as it was to any Greek or Turk, and I still feel the island tugging at my heart.

  Behind the politics and the bloodshed I always seem to hear the rumble of surf on Aphrodite’s beach, Paphos, always see the sunset, exploding over the Abbey of Bellapais, where the old Tree of Idleness[4] hid nightingales in its leaves all summer long. In the real sense it is what is at stake—the peace of this magnetic island and the happiness of its inhabitants, of whom I was one. Is it too much to hope for? Must the lemons remain always bitter?

  That time around, when it was the British who were alleged to be obstructing union with Greece, some compromise was sought to meet the case and the result was the Cyprus Republic under Archbishop Makarios.

  Truth to tell, this hybrid political animal managed to work quite well for a decade before the EOKA[5] intriguers, aided by Athens, managed to plunge the island into chaos once more. This was largely due to the astute and deft governorship of the Archbishop who for this long period of time had been riding the tiger of Enosis as nobody else could. The minority of fanatics has always wanted to take the law into its own hands and President Makarios[6] had been running considerable personal danger in trying to hold them down.

  He is no less patriotic than the next Greek but he hates bloodshed and faction and he sees that the Cyprus situation can only be settled by a decent compromise. If he had been forced to store arms in the kitchen cupboard it was not the Turks that bothered him so much as his own compatriots. The result of years of intrigue and agitation is now before our eyes to see.

  It seems really extraordinary that two small communities, 454,000 Greeks and 106,000 Turks, cannot manage to live in peace in this island paradise. The conflicting claims have often been discussed in a search for a compromise but the real stumbling block is the Greeks’ refusal to give up the dream of Enosis, and one of course can quite understand them.

  Ethnologically the island is Greek. Aphrodite was washed up in Paphos, and the Cyprus variety of ancient Greek is the oldest known. The majority of inhabitants are Greek and the product of a Greek culture and education. The religion is Orthodox and for the Greeks today it seems unthinkable that union with Greece should not be envisaged even if they have to wait fifty years for it. The Republic of Cyprus temporized on this issue but we have a right to respect the Greek case.

  But what of the Turkish? Well, there are no poetical, ethnological, or historic reasons to be invoked by the Turkish position. It is purely strategic and quite straightforward.

  The island is too clo
se to Turkey and the Turks would prefer to see it neutralized. Also, the Turks in the island have always claimed that they were being discriminated against. And they have shown a desire to be ruled by something a little more liberal than the Greek-oriented administration. One can respect their point of view, also, remembering that they are Moslems, and that counts for something.

  But that this tragic situation should have blown up just at the present moment is terribly unlucky not only for Cyprus but for Greece as a whole, which has just welcomed back the new-old Premier, Constantine Caramanlis,[7] whose Government could be easily overturned on an issue as burning as this one. Surely everything must be done to see that he stays in.

  He has hardly begun to liberalize the country and restore a true democracy. He is a careful, thoughtful, and forceful man and certainly the wisest Greek politician since Premier Sophocles Venizelos.[8] Ironically, too, he is the architect of the Cyprus Republic and the man who created a warm rapprochement with Turkey. Yet here he is also riding the tiger of Enosis.

  The talks in Geneva appear to be in deadlock and one senses why, for if the Turks are granted the sort of autonomy in the island which they seek, bang might go to the old dream of Enosis and the man in the street in Athens would take that very hard indeed.

  The real problem is to try to do justice to Moslem feelings without wounding or stifling Orthodox ones. If an answer cannot be found, we will have to go back to first base.

  Curiously enough the Soviet solution—a return to a republic under Makarios—may be the only one still acceptable to the two factions.

  After all, the Turks of Cyprus have had ten years of Makarios’s rule and they know he is, when all is said and done, a man of peace, and, of course, he has the enormous prestige of being a religious leader.