Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  Love and Love,

  Larry

  CARD-PLAYERS: STILL-LIFE

  Observe then with my eyes what I have

  seen.

  Remark the small inn asleep among

  olive-boughs:

  The curtain of scavenging flies,

  Like hanging bead, in the doorway: and

  men

  Snoozing against an olive-bole or playing

  Slow, greasy cards.

  Thumbed colours of conquest.

  At their backs, stacked up under the wall,

  Long rows of formal melons in sunlight,

  Melodious pippins, bright as lighted butter,

  Crushed full of juice in crazy sizes

  Between black shadow and shadow.

  If you could see my scene, would you

  believe

  That men can slough the creeping pale

  skinned north

  And become one with the afternoon

  silences,

  With the loungers,

  The gnomic card-players in a dead tavern

  Out of all time and circumstance?

  There’s no regret here, nor circumspection.

  The sun devours these morsels strip by strip

  Until we are one among the brown men,

  The respectful snoozers in hats of straw.

  Nothing, nothing is vocal now, nothing’s

  to say—

  Unless the melons burst their heavy cheeks

  And dither in the dust, in uproar,

  Haunting the incandescence of the sun!

  Perama. Corfu

  Now when are you coming out to see us?

  [1936]

  Corfu, Greece

  To Alan G. Thomas

  Dear Alan,

  Sorry I haven’t written for some time but I’ve been busy getting this novel off my chest. Soon you’ll have the last batch of paper. What horrid fruity stuff. The discussion on Walsh, however, is a good bit of work—different to the rest. I think someone might want to print it—the ghost story too is good literary journalism. I sent it off last night. Did you get the first batch? I think Music in Limbo is a better title. Short and quite as expressive. The book means nothing. I’ve tried—just for an exercise in writing to create characters on two continuous planes of life—the present—meaning the island and their various pasts. It does not progress as an ordinary novel progresses. The tentacles push out sideways while the main body is almost static. Whether I’ve managed to create the two planes successfully, or whether the total result is interesting I can’t tell. But I do know that there’s some interesting writing in it. I am beginning to feel that my pencil is almost sharpened. Soon I’ll be ready to begin on a BOOK.

  As soon as this goes off to you I begin preparing myself for writing. I’m starting at Vol. I of the Encyclopaedia Brit. and reading through all the big subjects. History. Biology. Surgery. Philosophy. And anything else that interests me. It will take me an age.…

  There was a young girl of Balboa

  Who had lots of fun with a boa,

  She found she could get it

  All in if she wet it

  In oceans of spermatozoa.

  Old Noah had a wife on the ark

  Who sleep-walked a bit after dark.

  But the rhino, the camel,

  The mandrills en famille,

  Soon gave way to the nose of the shark.

  Not very good: except for the felicitous middle rhyme.

  Old Noah developed a grouch,

  He was sick of this floating whore—houch,

  He was fed up of leavin’

  His Biblical semen

  To rot in the kangaroos’ pouch.

  Love

  Larry

  Rain again: hot damp sirocco and the sea piling up under the window in great tufts: an absolute doomed feeling, trapped here with the olives going it and purple buds falling off. It seems to affect even the peasants. During dinner in our huge stone-floored dungeon of a dining-room we heard our landlord go pleasantly mad with his mandolin. Playing a haunting tune in slow skips and quartertones: I asked him what it was: The Fishermen: I ask you? It would take a Greek to write a tune which would do royally as incidental music to Hamlet, and then christen it “The Fishermen.” Ask him if there’s any love-song he knows, but no, he’s too shy. Says he doesn’t know any Erotica. Meanwhile our gigantic Olga sniggers and opens her legs wide wide wide and sniggers. She’s deputizing for Helene who is slender and silk-skinned as an angel or an Indian. Poor H is pupping in town.

  I hope to god you got the other bits of the novel. I sent off two bits already. I’ve no copy. Two more bits go tomorrow. It’ll be about 100,000 all told. Get it prettily typed, will you, dear Alan, and edit it. It’s full of mistakes which I can’t notice I know it so well. It’s good in a poor way. Particularly Walsh. That, my man, is more than just fiction: it’s literature. Reuben and Francis show fire but a paucity of conception. What I didn’t make clear was the fact that it’s silly of her to mind him going off to fuck one of his madonnas and get money for them: it’s the wretched possession of love that I should have stamped on hard. Not used their pain as a cheap emotional pivot for a scene. I’d like to rewrite the whole book and create the people, but it’s no good. I’ve no patience with myself. I can’t go back any more. What’s past is past. Vale. My next will be better, and the next better until people recognize me. Aut Caesar aut nihil. A pretty thought. But one has to be so many nihils before the Caesar if any emerges. And now I no longer care: really care I mean down inside whether tomorrow all my poems are scrapped, or whether I’m scrapped myself. A new phase I spoze. Literature as such is slipping away like turds. Tell me what you get from Miller, I’m keen to know. Sometime I’ll send you a few rough notes I made on Tropic. Sorry the copies came here. I’ve told Curtis Brown to send you another. When you’ve typed Music in Limbo will you send it on to him? I never want to see it again. Tell me what you think of the writing. God I’m so despondent to write a BOOK. Something with contours and blood and stuff in it: not just romantic viscera that quiver at the sight of any rainbow, and a precious turduous STYLE à la Strachey. The Walsh bit is a good omen, do you think? What do you think? You see I’ve changed my tripe swinger’s ribbon? That signifies a change of heart. Adio. Adio. Adio. But I’m despondent until I see what new abortion I’m going to bring forth.

  Kali nikta sas,

  Larry

  [1936]

  c/o The Ionian Bank,

  Corfu, Greece

  To Alan G. Thomas

  Dear Alan,

  Yes, we got them all, after a considerable delay, and all in the wrong order. However, thanks lots for the typist etc. Is she an Oxford Grouper because my manuscript is dotted here and yon with occasional fucks. Really I’ve got so that I can hardly tell what is pretty or not as far as literary morals go. We’ve got so lax, what with Leslie farting at meals, and us naked nearly all day on the point, bathing.

  Les came for the week-end with his 16 bore and yesterday we shoved some food in the boat plus the gun and rowed north, past St. Stephano to the huge sweep in the channel where the big tides from the open sea come crashing up along the coast all britted and pitted with heat and the sun. Sun-blind, with the scurfy Albanian coast only a few miles away, knolls dotted with white Turkish-Byzantine towns and fortresses. The wind! With the gravel-boats scooting by us with their coloured sails wagging and groaning. On a hard stone beach, facing into the sheer tide and wind we dragged up the boat and unloaded. If you want to get the feeling, look at some of the buccaneer prints of boats on the Cuban beaches. And the sun! Shades of Esquemeling. The country is patched and blank with sun: rising in great hard breasts, with flinty rocks jutting from the hot dry covering of bushes. You can see a man miles away from the top of a hill. Dour, dour, with the flint hot as hell under your feet. Not much Celtic numen, here: only a sort of grasping hate for the land, dry and bone-hot. A hell. Occasional patches of ripe cypress: and the interminable little olive
s, powdery with heat and dust. But I love it, really, because it’s so savage and unapproachable. You can never feel inside like you can a northern landscape. You’re always a stranger, in rather a frightening position, among a savage people. You know? At any moment the undergrowth might push a viper out on you. However, we were cursing this bare north coast—rather Les was, because there was nothing to shoot, when I suggested a promenade. Patrol to you. He’d only brought 4 rounds with him, and was in a bad humour about the lack of game. We walked ten or twenty metres and nearly fell into a natural lake, complete with reeds, and SOMETHING. What? 7 or 8 specks on the further water, lolling quietly, at ease, I clapped the glasses to my rolling optics and saw a whole flight of wild duck, sitting there as if from the minute of creation, completely calm. They’d never been shot at; nor seen any men except an occasional fisherman. Les began to foam quietly at the mouth and curse himself. Only 4 rounds. Then things happened. Wild pigeon whoomed over. Two big water birds. Les nearly went off his head. He winged the pigeon, which fell, but in the deep undergrowth at the hill-top. We beat for hours but couldn’t find it. He killed a duck on the lake, but it took a long dive, and tho’ he crawled about in the chest-high mud for ages he couldn’t pick it up. Sod’s luck this.

  One of the duck got up along the surface and I missed a jammy shot. Sum total: two kills and nothing to show.

  Of course Les is transfigured. He loves the north now. On the way home in the boat we discovered two other lakes, as perfect as unshot, and with game on them. Only four miles or so from Albania, the richest shoot in the world. The big tasty duck come over to these nooks and hide out. No one seems to know except my landlord who fishes the lake once a year for eel. So next week Leslie is coming with two guns and a whole stack of cartridges to shoot the piss out of the lakes. Dear me, does Henry Miller jar?

  Larry

  [1936]

  c/o The Ionian Bank,

  Corfu

  To John Gawsworth

  … Yes this war is worrying. Of course we’re scared shitless because if there’s any place Benito wants more than Ethiopia it’s Corfu. He smashed up the town with bombs in 1925, and had to be chased out by the British: and everyone here is afraid he’ll do it again. Great excitement in the town yesterday coz an Italian bomber came over, reconnoitring, I thought our number was up when I saw this aluminium giant fart overhead. Grace à Dieu we’re living in the extreme north of the island, and if there’s trouble we’ll have to get a fisherman to row us over to Epirus, and escape thence to Athens. What with brigands on the main-land and Italians here I should probably lose my honour all the way to Athens. However, what can one do?

  When things quieten up a bit why not come out for a holiday with Barbara and stay with us? It’s cheap living. The drachma has crashed and we get good money for the pound. Rent 2 quid a month, for a big house over the water. Sea dashed up under our drawing room windows, and the dolphins slink by all day as I sit and write this. I’m so glad you’re full of work and plenty, and have got over your rutty bit. Hope the Shiel novel goes well. I must go and bathe now. Naked, by God, with nothing in sight except Leflkas on the horizon.

  Our regards to you both,

  Larry.

  [Spring 1936]

  c/o The Ionian Bank,

  Corfu

  To Alan G. Thomas

  Dear Alan,

  I’ve been very down in the jaw lately over this fucking book [The Black Book] which won’t go as it should. It’s difficult. If I ever finish it to my satisfaction I shall feel that virtue has gone out of me. Real virtue. It’s like fine crochet, done at one dead level of emotion. Very queer and difficult for an up and down chap like me. I feel a bit cross-eyed even after thirty thousand or so. Also a lot of new theories and principles which will be the death of me. I find that half our trouble is bad emotion. By that I mean romantic indulgence: vide Limbo. This comes from shallow sexual experience I feel sure. What I am after is the real feeling for things uncomplicated any more by our pal J.C. or ethic or code or whatnot. You will see what I mean in Villon. In Lawrence. In Miller. The Ballad of the Dead Ladies for instance is purer, more sharply pure and concentrated like a blow-flame, than, for instance Aldington’s Dream. One is the result of experience: the other a romantic indulgence. I don’t say I rend it and reject it: but I accept it henceforth as an indulgence, as man might eat another iced cake although he knew his diabetes would suffer. What I am for from now on is the essential male and female relationship uncomplicated by mirages and falsities and wish fulfilments. By which you will see that I am getting a very old man. I was twenty-four a month or so ago. But believe me Alan, this is a point worth looking at. I see now what Lawrence means, what Miller is at, and I corroborate it, not just intellectually, but with my own feeling and experiences and bowels. And it’s a very depressing thought. It means that 99 people out of a hundred never grow up emotionally. Never. Which is dismal. But pah! all this may come to nothing. I simply have no belief in my ability to follow a plotted path. I was inconsistent even in the womb my mother tells me, so there’s no hope of a change. Meanwhile the book, whose title changes daily, has got its head in its mouth and won’t budge. It started as Lover Anubis, then Anubis, then Anabasis, then The Black Book. Tomorrow it might be anything or nothing. Just Opus One. Quick, quick, a tabernacle to precocity and preciousness. But I am grateful having you in the van with a bloody standard. Also for the practical side of really quizzing books. I can’t bring myself hardly to look at a thing when it’s done, or not properly done even. It’s so much inert meat.…

  Well the north is flowering under the rain. This poor shot and dropping stone countryside has flowered in soft grass the height of ankle-boots. The iris and the flag stare at one like stone carved and coloured delicately everywhere. And the asphodel are going through their Victorian aspidistra stage. Moderate fishing. Ten miles south the family brawls and caterwauls and screams in the cavernous new Ypso villa. George and Pam are buying land and building a house. Why I don’t know. When the good weather comes we start our explorations of the virgin north end, with a donkey & a tent. I send you the voting slips from the recent elections. Le roi is the phoenix rising again. Poor devil he’ll burn right enough if he’s not careful. He’s a good man, but the people are hopeless. Politically hopeless as a nomadic tribe. I’ll type out a poem on the back I’ve just done. My landlord is sweetly learning English under my tuition, and I Greek incidentally. Here’s his first parrot memory feat.

  I have a little garden and every summer day

  I dig it and I rake it and I pull the weeds

  away …

  He declaims this to the people in the wine-shop thus:

  Ai hef an leetle gungdung end effery zummer

  die

  I deeg it end I rack it end I pule the veeds

  awaye.

  I happened to hear him impressing a chum who came to help him grind the olives up. You should just HEAR him end up, fortissimo with a gesture: and O the wed wed woses that bloom so sveetly there! Laugh? I fair shat meself.

  I liked your limerick much. You’re getting a real hand at these affairs. We’ll do an immense heroic satire one day entirely in limericks. As soon as I feel free of this book. It oppresses me, like a sort of malignant constipation. It will not get out. Ah well. Asta mañana and all that sort of crap.

  A hail and a Hail.

  Larry

  [1936]

  Kouloura [Corfu]

  To Alan G. Thomas

  Dear Alan,

  Thank you so much for your long letter. I’m so glad that the news Pat mentioned is really news: hurrah for your good luck, and the horse-sense of Cooper to keep you on.3 No, my dear man, none of the stigmata, watch-chain, season-ticket, etc., really apply. It’s a question of temperament, not status. The most cultured people I have met, the most gentlemanly, the most proper, in my sense of the word, have been tied by a willing leg here there and everywhere. But a bookshop of your own is wonderful. I’m almost tempted to come back and join y
ou. Only the English weather po po po as they say here, shaking their rueful heads. Too awful. Which reminds me that we’ve had some lovely weather. Ringing blue days, smelling of ice, but with bright bright sunshine. Today we climbed to the cliff-top and lay for hours in it, out of action. Irises studded everywhere, lemons ripe and oranges. Olives picked and crushed already. Summer is icumen in already. Soon we shall bathe. We are planning trips everywhere when we get our tent made. To Signès, the surprising crater under the very chin of old man Panto, where there flourishes a sudden torrent of holm-oak. So queer, like a green wound in the middle of the stone and rubble and shot and smashed metamorphic rock. There is a drunken papas who rides a mule, is dirty, lascivious and 84 who will make a good photo. Our landlord welcomes us with a kiss on the wrist when we arrive from our sojourn in the lowlands with my people. Altogether hurrah and that kind of thing.

  The day before we left Margaret picked up a couple of jongleurs in Kerkyra and brought them to the family villa in the car. They sat on the porch and played turgid Greek jazz with a guitar, a mandolin, and their strong voices in unison. Tha geiresis—I think it means I will come back.