John helped me to print my first wretched fascicules, which are now fetching ridiculous sums among collectors; I don’t believe either of us have any copies ourselves today, and the stock was mercifully blitzed during the war. He also got a few of my poems into youthful anthologies. Even though he knew my work was weak, he was always kind and considerate to me at a time when he need not really have bothered. Certainly, I did not merit any sort of attention then. But he was also valuable to me in another way for he was a walking literary calendar of London, and seemed to have a gigantic mental file of anniversaries tucked away in his brain. Thus we would drink to Dr. Johnson on appropriate days in Lambs Conduit Street, or eat a chop in the memory of Sheridan or Goldsmith whenever the requisite moment dawned. I can hardly think of London even today without remembering these walks, those visits to remote chop houses or pubs; he always knew where to knock up a glass of Burgundy (“Machen came here every day”) in Fleet Street, or a glass of Canary (“Try this: Ouida’s favourite tipple”) in Cheapside. He was as much of a Londoner as Lamb or Leigh Hunt or Hazlitt—and indeed he never tired of talking about them and their London, and comparing it to the rushing and grubby city in whose rainswept streets he walked, determined to carry on the great tradition they had left us.
His activities at that time were multiform and the pace at which he lived was astonishing; part of his day was spent on research of the nineties, and the rest in literary pursuits. He was responsible for the reissue of work by a number of good poets of his chosen period—like Canon Gray and Richard Middleton, as well as a number of discoveries of little-known texts and stories which, but for him, would have perished completely. But he was also keeping a hawk-like eye on a number of his elders, just to make sure that they were not starving. I remember him disappearing for a week-end to visit Arthur Machen in Buckinghamshire whom he suspected of being too proud to ask for help at a time when he (John) knew full well that the old writer was in grave financial difficulties. He just wanted to make quite sure before going down to terrorize those people at the Royal Society of Literature.
In matters of literary theory we had our differences though these made no difference to our friendship and generated no heat whatsoever; it was impossible to quarrel with someone so good-natured. John’s passion for the nineties had made him something like an anachronism poetically; I mean it was odd for a youth of twenty to be copying Dowson at that time as he was and ignoring Eliot, Yeats, Lawrence. But the only time when I saw him really incensed was when New Signatures was published containing the work of university poets unknown, like Auden, Spender, etc. He felt then that the very headsprings of poesy were being polluted by this sort of stuff and that some sort of answering broadside should come from those stern traditionalists who stood for English unmashed, unsquashed, pure! His own favourite poets then were not bad poets as poets go, but when he assembled them, the result was rather weak and wishy-washy. It was, to say the least of it, a queer idea to hit Mr. Auden with John Freeman and Mr. Spender with Harold Monro. But despite these sometimes wrong-headed ploys his essential good nature and his passion for literature remained undamaged. One day when he was being rather tedious about the university poets I told him that I had recently heard that both Mr. Auden and Mr. Spender were in great straits, in fact virtually starving in adjoining garrets in Wapping. At once his expression changed. “Are you sure?” he asked hoarsely. “Positive,” I replied solemnly. His face took on the look I knew so well. Matters of literary principle were one thing, but starvation among writers quite another. “I think,” he said sotto voce, “that I’ll just pop round and see Masefield and Abercrombie.…” Of course, I confessed that I was lying before he did so.
Among the odder romantic histories of that epoch none was more beguiling than the story of the island of Redonda, of which John is now King—in exile of course. The father of M. P. Shiel the novelist had seized an island of this name in the Caribbean. He had declared himself a sovereign King. But when phosphates were discovered on the place the British Government took the island away from him. Shiel refused to relinquish his kingdom and a furious debate with the Colonial Office began which doubtless continues to this day; on the death of the old man, M. P. Shiel declared himself rightful King of Redonda, and created a number of dukes to help him carry on the battle. John came across Shiel in the course of his nineties researches and vastly admired his work, which later he edited for the press. When I first met John, he was in close touch with the exiled King who, as far as I understood the matter, was then living on fruit and nuts in a tree near Horsham. John frequently visited him to discuss literary matters—though whether he climbed the tree or whether Shiel came down to earth to talk to him I forgot to ask.… At any rate, Shiel must have seen the makings of a wise King in my friend for on his death he left the throne to John on condition that the battle over Redonda continued. To this end, John now began to create dukes whose duties consisted of bombarding the Colonial Office with memoranda about this wicked injustice. As the prevailing temper of his mind was largely literary, it was natural that for the most part he showered these honours upon writers he admired. We are a motley lot, we dukes of Redonda. Unfortunately, just after he had honoured me with the title of Duke of Cervantes Pequeña he ran into financial difficulties which prevented him from engrossing the titles on parchment, as was apparently customary; thus to this day I am still lacking armorial bearings, and do not know what the devices on my shield should be. A duke without benefit of heraldry feels rather naked. But perhaps this is just as well. I could see even then some rather acrimonious passage-at-arms with the College of Heralds over these dukedoms.
Our ways separated after this period and we met rarely, usually when I was back in England on leave from some foreign posting or other. John turned up in Cairo briefly during the war and we met once or twice; but these were glancing blows, so to speak, as he was in the R.A.F. and being moved about like a pawn. In the postwar period he hit a long patch of ill-health and wretched luck which is probably why he published so little work. My last glimpse of him was about six years ago. I saw my King walking down Shaftesbury Avenue wheeling a pram—a large Victorian pram. I thought to myself: “Ah, my dear John; life has caught up with you as well. Like the rest of us you have shackled yourself with children, three lots of twins I’ll be bound, and have been forced to walk them in the Park instead of writing the sonnet you had in mind.” But judge my relief when I caught up with him, for the pram contained nothing more sinister than a mountain of beer bottles—empties which he was on his way to sell. We were delighted to see each other, and of course repaired to a pub to celebrate. It happened to be someone’s anniversary, so we drank several glasses of wine to the shade of … was it Gibbon? I forget. Yet despite this long period of bad health and bad luck John was still very much his old self, still gay and amusing, and full of typical quirky ideas. There were a few dukedoms still going, and he solemnly created my brother a duke as we stood at the bar.
At closing time, much refreshed, we parted. John’s pram had been liberally re-stocked with a vital, life-giving stout; he wheeled it off into the dusk at a leisurely pace, stopping at the corner to wave a royal hand.
Floreat!
At length, having had their fill of English bohemian life, Durrell and Nancy cut loose and spent a year with their friends George and Pam Wilkinson in a cottage at Loxwood in Sussex. Here Durrell wrote the greater part of his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers; and, in collaboration with Wilkinson and the Bloomsbury bookseller J. A. Allen, founded The Caduceus Press, which issued two slim volumes of his early poems: Ten Poems, 1932, and Transition, 1934.
Shortly after the death of her husband Mrs. Durrell (Mother) had left India and brought her family home to England; settling, after one or two hesitations, in Bournemouth. Meanwhile, at the end of a year, the foursome at Loxwood broke up, George and Pam Wilkinson emigrating to Corfu, while Durrell and Nancy joined the family.
H. G. Commin, where I was then working, is an old-fashioned b
ookshop, with a nineteenth-century atmosphere; tens of thousands of books filling the whole of five floors. Customers were free to wander at will, so little molested by pressure to buy that we occasionally locked them in when we went home at night. Working hours were long in those days, but a good deal of our time was spent in congenial conversation with fellow spirits. Once he had discovered the shop Durrell, generally accompanied by Nancy, came in almost every day; and in a short time I was spending almost every evening and week-end with the family.
There never was more generous hospitality. Whatever Dr. F. R. Leavis may think about Durrell’s writing, nobody who has known the family at all well could deny that their company is “life-enhancing.” All six members of the family were remarkable in themselves, but in lively reaction to each other the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. Amid the gales of Rabelaisian laughter, the wit, Larry’s songs accompanied by piano or guitar, the furious arguments and animated conversations going on far into the night, I felt that life had taken on a new dimension. Larry was writing, Nancy painting, Leslie crooning, like a devoted mother, over his collection of unlicensed firearms. One day he borrowed, from the shop, a book called Tombstone, which described life in an American western town, and I remember his delight on discovering that the most infamous bad man in those parts was known as “two-gun Leslie.” Every basin in the house was unusable because Gerry, then only a little boy, but already an animal collector, had filled them with newts, tadpoles, and such-like; he roped me in to serve as a giant in the circus which he organised in the garage. Margaret, realizing that book-learning was no part of her world, was rebelling about returning to school, and soon succeeded, backed by the rest of the family, in staying put.
While one could hardly say that Mrs. Durrell was in control of her family, it was her warm-hearted character, her amused but loving tolerance that held them together; even during the occasional flare-ups of Irish temper. I remember Gerry, furious with Larry who, wanting to wash, had pulled the plug out of a basin full of marine life. Spluttering with ungovernable rage, almost incoherent, searching for the most damaging insult in his vocabulary: “You, you (pause), you AUTHOR, YOU.”
Nancy was a striking and beautiful girl, very tall and slim, with a clear white complexion and light blonde hair; more than once I have heard people in the street call out as we passed: “Look—Garbo.” While in Bournemouth, Durrell and Nancy were married. It seems rather absurd, now, looking back, that they insisted on a secret wedding. Children, then as now, were in revolt against their elders, but nobody could feel themselves in opposition to so humanely tolerant a woman as Mrs. Durrell—who would have rejoiced in the wedding anyway. I was sworn to secrecy and asked to act as a witness. Then there was some perturbation because Nancy and I were both a good deal taller than Durrell; none of us knew anything about the marriage ceremony; we might find, at the end of all the uncomprehended rigmarole, that the registrar had joined Nancy and me by mistake, without our realizing it. With a view to avoiding any such contingency we approached a couple of midgets, then appearing in a freak-show at the local fun-fair, and asked them to act as witnesses; but their employer refused to allow such valuable assets out of his sight.
Passionately interested in mediaeval architecture, I introduced Durrell to Christchurch Priory, the Norman parts of which were built by Ranulph Flambard as a trial run for Durham Cathedral. We used to get permission from the Vicar to go up through the cavernous space between the vaulting and the roof timbers and then out onto the leads, clambering over walls and buttresses. From this height a wide view extends over the little town, the water-meadows, the marshes, and Christchurch harbour. Often, on those autumnal Saturday afternoons, we stayed aloft until it was almost dark, descending by spiral staircases into the great church as a few scattered worshippers gathered for evensong. It is this picture of England that Durrell recalls in his letter to me in The Black Book. And it was from this point of departure that we each set out in different directions, he into the future, I back into the past.
1 Now of Draguignan and Lovelace’s Copse, Plush Bottom, Dorset. See: The Private Library, Spring 1967.
LETTERS BY
LAWRENCE DURRELL
Corfu and England
THERE WERE NO ties binding the Durrell family to England; none of them had been born here, and Larry, having put down no roots, was feeling restless. From time to time a letter would arrive from George Wilkinson describing their idyllic life in Corfu, and the island began to sound more and more evocative. Naturally, I was very loath to lose the most brilliant and exciting friends it had ever been my good fortune to make, and I attempted to counter their plans with a few feeble arguments. “Alan,” retorted Durrell, “think of the times in England when everybody that you know has got a cold.” Wilkinson’s latest letter had described the orange groves surrounding his villa. I was silenced.
Early in 1935 Durrell and Nancy set out as an advance guard, travelling by sea to Brindisi, where they were held up for some time by the revolution then taking place in Greece. The rest of the family followed a few weeks later. Durrell’s first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, was still under consideration by Cassell’s when he left, but their offer to publish came through shortly afterwards, in time for me to send a message which caught up with the family, en route, at Naples; this enabled them to announce the good news on their arrival in Corfu.
It is difficult to believe that any place in the world today can rival Corfu, as it was then, as an elysium for a young writer and a young painter. It was not only warmer and sunnier than Bournemouth, it was cheaper. Durrell had a private income of about £150 a year, Nancy an allowance of £50; on the combined sum of £4 a week they lived in comfort and at ease in their own villa, and their outgoings covered a maidservant and a sailing-boat—the Van Norden.
Corfu is greener and more fertile than the sunburned islands of the Aegean, and the higher economic level, together with certain residual advantages left over from the Venetian and British occupations, provided a greater degree of amenity than was then to be found in the starker islands farther south. Skilled medical attention, for example, was afforded by the presence of Doctor Theodore Stephanides. But, for the Durrells, Theodore became much more than a physician; for one would be hard pressed to find a more erudite, civilized, and charming man; a mine of every kind of knowledge relating to the island, he became the perfect friend and mentor of their new world.
But it was not only the lyrical beauty of Corfu and the prismatic clarity of Greek light that appealed to Durrell; nor even the eternal legends handed down from classical times but intimately wedded to the landscape of today; there were qualities in the character of the modern Greeks themselves which struck deep chords with his own nature; so that Greece and the Greeks have formed one of the major influences in Durrell’s life and writing. His own feeling for Corfu has been expressed in the most poetic and least troubled of his island books: Prospero’s Cell; but the day-to-day life of the family has been vividly described in Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, the continued success of which is partly due to the fact that it provides the perfect “escape book.” Most people set out with high hopes in their youth—they will not be caged in the rat race; but all too often disillusion sets in, they marry, produce a family, give hostages to fortune, and ultimately face the realization that they are going to live out their lives as strap-hanging commuters. And here is this fantastic family living an uproarious life in magical surroundings; so long as the book lasts the reader, too, can live in Arcadia. Again and again, people who came into my bookshop would ask me: “Is it true? Was it really like that?” From my own brief experience of life on the island I can certainly affirm that the book is true in essence; but Theodore Stephanides, who was in Corfu for the whole time, confirms that virtually every incident described really took place. Not necessarily in the same order, of course, not in one uninterrupted series, but it all actually happened.
Cassell’s published Pied Piper of Lovers in 1935 (the du
st-jacket bearing a design by Nancy); it received little notice and only a few copies were sold. As the greater part of the edition was destroyed when Cassell’s warehouse went up in the London blitz, it has become a rare book, sought after by libraries and collectors, and therefore valuable. In later years, in the hope of supplying one or two of the requests, which so frequently reached me as an antiquarian bookseller, I wrote round to those friends who had bought copies of the book when it came out. Their replies might well form the basis of a short essay on how books become rare: “… unfortunately I left it in a train”; “… when we were divorced my wife took the fiction and I kept the non-fiction”; “All my possessions were destroyed when a furniture repository in Jersey was burned to the ground.” (Lord Jersey’s great Rubens went in the same holocaust). Meanwhile Durrell was at work on a second novel, the landscape and general ambience of which were largely influenced by Corfu. The provisional title went through a variety of forms, Phoenix and the Nightingale, Music in Limbo; but it was finally published, by Faber’ s in 1937, as Panic Spring. Early books by young writers are generally derivative to a greater or lesser extent, and Durrell’s second novel owes a good deal to Aldous Huxley and Norman Douglas; but the original quality, which does begin to emerge, is a remarkable capacity for rendering scenery. As this is also a scarce book, and as Durrell does not intend to reprint either of his early novels, a number of selected passages, mainly those describing landscape, are reprinted here.
Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel Page 2