From the Elephant's Back

by Lawrence Durrell

  The Poetic Obsession of Dublin

  [1]. As Richard Pine has pointed out, Duffy and the pub Duggans are fictional. This article is loosely based on Durrell’s visit to Dublin with Margaret McCall in 1972. Conversations with Pine have been particularly helpful for annotating this chapter.

  [2]. This paper was by Pine.

  [3]. The Liffey is the river running through Dublin.

  [4]. A luxury hotel in Dublin facing into St. Stephen’s Green.

  [5]. Pine is the author of several critical works on Lawrence Durrell, most notably Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape. He also founded and directed the Durrell School of Corfu. This incident is also described in MacNiven’s biography (590) and in Durrell’s letters to Henry Miller, The Durrell–Miller Letters, 1935–80 (453).

  [6]. Joyce and Yeats are frequent references for Durrell. Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) and J.M. Synge (1871–1909) are far less common, though Durrell first learned of Beckett in the 1930s from Henry Miller. All four are major Irish authors.

  [7]. The Brazen Head is Ireland’s oldest pub, dating to 1198, at 20 Lower Bridge Street.

  [8]. Forster 134. Durrell was particularly fond of quoting this passage.

  [9]. Trinity College Dublin.

  [10]. Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865), an Irish physicist, astronomer, and mathematician at Trinity College Dublin, and he was also a close friend to the poets William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).

  [11]. A Dog’s Nose is typically gin and stout (Guinness), but there are several variations. The description of the drink first appeared in Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers: “H. Walker, tailor, wife, and two children. When in better circumstances, owns to having been in the constant habit of drinking ale and beer; says he is not certain whether he did not twice a week, for twenty years, taste ‘dog’s nose,’ which your committee find upon inquiry, to be composed of warm porter, moist sugar, gin, and nutmeg” (412).

  [12]. Both pubs are on South Anne Street.

  [13]. Extreme accumulation of fat on the posterior.

  [14]. Durrell’s third wife, Claude, wrote a memoir about running a pub in Cork, Mrs. O’ (1957).

  [15]. On February 2, 1972, crowds destroyed the British embassy in retaliation to the Bloody Sunday Bogside Massacre in Derry (Northern Ireland) on January 30, in which twenty-six unarmed civil rights protestors were shot by the British Army, and thirteen were killed. Several were shot in the back.

  [16]. Durrell had a long-term attachment to Oscar Wilde’s (1854–1900) works. Le Fanu (1814–1873) was most famous for writing ghost stories, of which “Carmilla,” the story of a lesbian vampire in the collection In A Glass Darkly, is the most famous. Le Fanu is a likely influence on Durrell’s references in poetry and prose to vampires, such as in The Alexandria Quartet, The Avignon Quintet, and The Red Limbo Lingo. Charles Maturin (1782–1824) wrote Gothic plays and novels, most famously Melmoth the Wanderer—his sister-in-law was Oscar Wilde’s grandmother, and Wilde refers to Melmoth the Wanderer in The Picture of Dorian Gray. All three authors lived in Merrion Square, and a statue of Wilde sits there.

  [17]. From Jonathan Swift’s poem On The Death of Dr. Swift (1731).

  [18]. Anna Livia Plurabella is a famous embodiment of the River Liffey, and Durrell is surely thinking of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The keystones in the Customs House include the images of heads representing bodies of water.

  Borromean Isles

  [1]. Lear (1812–1888) was an English poet and artist. His nonsense verse remains popular today, and Durrell wrote an introduction to his letters and engravings from Corfu, Lear’s Corfu, published in 1965 (7–8).

  [2]. Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  [3]. A nonsense word (defined as a bird by Humpty Dumpty) in Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky,” which first appeared in Through the Looking Glass.

  [4]. William Blake (1757–1827), the English Romantic poet whom Durrell refers to frequently. Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) was a major French painter perhaps most famous for his Et in Arcadia ego, which is in the Louvre and is Durrell’s likely reference here, though Poussin is generally known for his pastoral scenes.

  [5]. This ancient family still owns some of the islands and was an important political force in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  [6]. Durrell took this trip in order to compile his book Sicilian Carousel (1976), his only travel book not based on a lengthy residence.

  [7]. The Castello Visconteo-Sforzesco in Navara is surrounded by the Allea public gardens.

  [8]. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) had a mental breakdown in the streets of Turin in 1889, followed by his “Madness Letters,” two of which were received by his friends Jacob Burkhardt and Franz Overbeck, who decided Overbeck would travel to Turin and return Nietzsche to Basel and then to Jena.

  [9]. Nietzsche had an indeterminate relationship with Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) via Paul Rée, which ended when she believed he had fallen in love with her.

  [10]. Nietzsche travelled to Orta with Andreas-Salomé, her mother, and Rée. Although the nature of their relationship is unclear, they were more intimate here than anywhere else. He had already begun drafting his most famous work, Thus Spake Zarathustra.

  [11]. The Sacro Monte di Orta is a Roman Catholic structure first built in 1583 and dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi.

  [12]. Napolean Bonaparte (1769–1821) was the emperor of France and married Joséphine de Beauharnais (1763–1814). Their mythic romance has been developed into many histories and fictions, and some of their love letters survive. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) is most famous for his novel Madame Bovary but also wrote historical fiction. Durrell is likely referring to either Salammbô or “The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier.” Stendhal is the pen name for Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), whom Durrell admired greatly.

  [13]. A seasoned, salted, and air-dried meat, mainly beef.

  [14]. Mark Twain (1835–1910) was the pseudonym for the American humorist Samuel Clemens. Durrell is referring to his travel narrative, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress (1869), which recounts his travel in Europe and with religious pilgrims in the Holy Land in 1867.

  [15]. The Brueghel family had several painters, the most famous of whom was Pieter Bruegel, the only one who spelled his name without the “h.” He is Durrell’s most likely reference here.

  Alexandria Revisited

  [1]. Peter Adam was responsible for the BBC documentary Durrell describes, and his own “Alexandria Revisited” is very close to this text (395–410). Also see Adam’s interviews with Durrell, “Everything Comes Right” (163–72) and “Creating a Delicious Amnesia” (173–81).

  [2]. Durrell used the Cecil Hotel as a setting in his novel Justine. He was also very familiar with the hotel itself.

  [3]. A humorous character in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet loosely based on Bimbashi McPherson among others. Durrell was fond of pretending that Scobie was a real person in interviews, though he was certainly fictional.

  [4]. Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970) was the president of Egypt and a major force for Pan-Arab nationalism as well as the international promotion of Egyptian culture.

  [5]. The Corptic Orthodox Monestary of St. Bishoy in Wadi El-Natroun, Egypt.

  [6]. Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) was a French military leader at this time and became prime minister of France in 1958 and then president in 1959.

  [7]. Stephanides reports that, in September 1941, he and Durrell were given a tour of the pyramids by the renowned Egyptologist George Andrew Reisner, including the tomb of Queen Hetepheres I, which Reisner had discovered (81–82).

  [8]. These novels were posthumously collected as The Avignon Quintet. At this time, he had completed the first, Monsieur, which contains several scenes set in Egypt, as well as the second, Livia, which he finalized after returning from this trip to Egypt.

  With Durrell in Egypt

&n
bsp; [1]. A major Egyptian newspaper.

  [2]. El-Din (1921–2013) eventually became the editor-in-chief of Egypt Today and was an important translator of modern Egyptian literature into English. He was an important spokesman and advisor to the Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat at this time and was particularly important to him during the secret negotiation of the Camp David Accords in September 1978. Durrell was in Egypt less than a month later in October. El-Din graduated from King Fuad I University’s English Department in 1943 where he took Bernard Spencer’s criticism tutorial. At this time, the department would have held many of Durrell’s good friends on staff, including Gwyn Williams, Herbert Howarth, and Robert Liddell. Durrell may, however, be confused about Mursi’s involvement in Personal Landscape, despite the very active participation of his professors at the time. The only Egyptian author included is Ibrahim Shukrallah with Howarth translating Shawqy’s “To a Late Composer” from Arabic (6–7). El-Din does refer to Durrell teaching and mentoring poetry in the 1940s in several of his articles.

  [3]. The Second Battle of Alamein was a major military victory by General Bernard Montgomery in World War II, November 1942. It ended the threat of Axis occupation of Egypt and the Suez Canal.

  [4]. Durrell also refers to “paws” and other animal images with regard to colonized subjects in other works (Gifford, “Editor’s Introduction” xii), though this is widespread enough in his works to avoid being related to racial categories.

  [5]. The USSR developed strong ties with Egypt, despite tensions with Nasser, but in 1972 Anwar Sadat expelled Soviet military forces.

  [6]. Durrell also thanks Moschonas for his advice in Prospero’s Cell (vii), which he wrote while living in Egypt during World War II.

  [7]. Although this evening did occur, Durrell had already encountered Cavafy’s works on Corfu shortly after meeting Stephanides there, likely in 1935 or 1936. He and Stephanides jointly translated “Waiting for the Barbarians” in The New English Weekly in 1939 as well (MacNiven, Lawrence 242).

  [8]. Robert Smythe Hichens (1864–1950) was an English novelist who wrote several works set in Egypt. He also anonymously wrote The Green Carnation, the satire of Oscar Wilde.

  [9]. Mursi was a personal advisor to Sadat, who had just completed the Camp David Accords less than a month earlier. Sadat had visited Israel a year earlier in November 1977.

  [10]. Muammar al-Gaddafi (1942–2011) was the leader of Libya from 1969 to 2011. He founded Islamic Socialism.

  [11]. Fathy (1900–1989) was a major force in Egyptian architecture and influenced architects around the world through his Institute for Appropriate Design and the 1973 translation of his book Architecture for the Poor, which emphasized natural resources and environmentally sound materials.

  [12]. A traditional Egyptian sailboat distinct from the Dhow.

  [13]. This entire archaeological site was relocated for the creation of the Aswan Dam.

  [14]. Farrow (1945–) had already been made famous by her roles in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Great Gatsby (1978). She was, at this time, filming an adaptation of Christie’s (1890–1976) mystery novel Murder on the Nile.

  [15]. Coward (1899–1973) was a famous British playwright and composer known for his wit.

  [16]. Davis (1908–1989), Ustinov (1921–2004), and Niven (1910–1983) all starred in Death on the Nile. Durrell’s mother died in 1964, and in the preceding decade Niven won the Academy Award for Best Actor and was at the height of his distinguished career.

  [17]. As a metaphor for Egypt and the intense struggles of the period over economic and social forms of organization, “the little brick” is notable for its working-class, anti-capitalist or anti-corporate, and social-levelling associations as well as its relation to indigenous history.

  About the Author and Editor

  Born in Jalandhar, British India, LAWRENCE DURRELL (1912–1990) was a critically hailed novelist, poet, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet novels, which were ranked by the Modern Library as among the greatest works of English literature in the twentieth century.

  JAMES GIFFORD is Associate Professor of English and the Director of the University Core Curriculum at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Vancouver. He has published several scholarly works on Lawrence Durrell.

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