Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  I had a long and fruitful meditation in New Place, the little trim garden where the house stood from which he was carried down by water (I would hope) to Trinity when he popped off. I thought of the will he left; reading it, you intrude, because this is not Shakespeare as we think we know him, but a small cloth-weaver, or bailiff’s butt, or a parish choir-master. The simplicity of purpose dazzles one; it is so self-possessed and enclosed in its private items that you see at once that there was no writer left by this time; only man. Then, knowing his writing, and reading his will, you begin to understand how self-possessed this great artist must have been in order to outgrow his art and enter his manhood. The subtilty and purity of this conclusion moves me almost more than this most tragic tragedy. Indeed, I like the five-year silence the best in his life; because across this silence I seem to hear the quiet lucid notes of musical LIVING fall at last. From the fluent and profuse Folio subtract the formal will, the epitaph, the little memoranda of his lawsuits, quarrels, barterings and swappings. You get a kind of precipitate—a tiny residue of meaning which is harder than a diamond and so obvious, so beautifully obvious, like a mathematical conclusion. This is the kind of thing that tells you all you need to know; the other falsifies. Have you ever read the list of books in Greco’s library? Or the list of works in Newton’s library? Half a page of them and you nod and begin to see the style of the soul shining through. All the factual details, the problems of the man in the cloak, or the duke who wore a feather, or the dark nobody—these are simply the husk of things, contaminated by passing through the wringer of time. There is a message, of course; not an absolute commandment, but a hint, a riding-post on a hill. It is Prospero’s last epilogue over the Venetian water; the secret is embedded there for all who want it. It is the gesture of a chap who stuck close to the mystery, mastered it, and learned a kind of inner service to events. Otherwise he would have left us a suitcase of notes about his love-life like poor Johnny Gawsworth; or would have thrown his biographers off the track like dear artless and great simple Henry Miller. Or he would have hopped like a flea and piped my kind of indecency from every tuffet.

  I wonder if I can express what haunts me about the Silence, more than anything the Silence? I think immediately of Lao Tzu going over the hills to the land of Dragons on his patient water-buffalo. Don’t laugh; the analogy is close. I think quickly of the Pythagorean silence in Barbary. A peasant in the Ionian. A shop-girl who lives in Gloucester Terrace. Four kinds of the very same mystery; a kind of buoyancy in the event, non-attachment, the inward patience, the inner substance taut and yet resilient. In these people, all of them, I get the same silence—and from them a kind of parable of the good life spent in the service of infinitesimal seconds. I can’t make it any clearer; the mere metaphysics of the thing doesn’t stand up formally. But I mean realizing how PATIENT every second is as it passes through the heart and causes its tick; and the trick of dwelling on that patience, resting on it until the mirage clears, and the world becomes, FOR THE FIRST TIME, REALITY. I mean becoming the living signature of the paradox; not merely making one and passing on. It is really so simple, and yet these quiet smiling gentlemen in their graves leave us limping at it, and gnawing the edges of fear and restraint.

  Really, I haven’t strayed from Avon; I am closer to Shakespeare than ever. Because this is the X you will find written all over his town and grave and monuments; and this is the lack which you see in his worshippers—the empty place inside which they cannot fill, and so come to Stratford drawn by a dim tribal necessity for ritual and learning.

  It’s getting late and my hammering disturbs Nancy; but I could write more and shall about this X which I need to anchor-pin my own self. I looked back from the last Warwick hill and gloated. I suppose it is too ridiculous. Love to Vivian.

  Lawrence

  1 Beethoven Piano Concerto.

  2 The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

  3 My employer, Ernest Cooper, was retiring and had offered me the opportunity of buying his bookshop.

  4 So called because this lagoon was once very malarious and people who contracted the disease in youth looked older than their years.

  5 I had accepted his invitation to come and stay in Corfu.

  6 A joke. The actual spelling of Corfu, KERKYRA, in Greek letters.

  7 Greek God of ridicule.

  Greece

  WHEN THE CLOUDS of war loomed up Mrs. Durrell brought the younger members of her family back to England. In 1939 Durrell, accompanied by Nancy, moved to Athens working first for the Embassy as an unestablished press officer, and then for the British Council who subsequently posted him to Kalamata in the Peloponnese where he taught at the Institute of English Studies. While in Athens he met two Greeks, strikingly different in character, who were to remain close friends for life. The gentle and sensitive George Seferiades is the leading Greek poet of our time, an able diplomat who, in 1957, was to be accredited as Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. He writes under the name of Seferis and some of his poems have been translated into English by Durrell. In direct contrast, George Katsimbalis is a larger-than-life Rabelaisian figure with huge gusto, whose character suggested to Henry Miller the title of his book of Greek experiences, The Colossus of Maroussi. During the First World War Katsimbalis and Theodore Stephanides served together in the same battery in the Greek artillery.

  From time to time Theodore reminisces about his days as a gunner. No man, it seems, could be commissioned as an artillery officer unless he had directed the fire of a gun at least once. At that time the allied armies were cooped up within a narrow territory, each unit almost on top of another. Theodore was given the relative data the night before the test, and, determined to succeed, worked out the bearings over and over again with his habitual scientific accuracy. The great moment came, the gun fired, and the projectile landed upon a tent, belonging to the medical corps, in which a surgical operation was in progress. Absolutely certain that his calculations were correct, Theodore insisted that they be investigated; he was proved right, the data being based on true north, while the gun had been “laid” by magnetic north. “I am probably the only doctor,” Theodore is accustomed to recall with a smile, “who has dropped a shell into an operating theatre.” Considering that his book Climax in Crete is one of the best individual accounts of a campaign written from the human point of view, it is to be hoped that one day he will publish his experiences in the first war.

  For several years Durrell had been trying, in vain, to persuade Henry Miller to come on a visit to Corfu. But now at last he came to Athens, and then, together with Durrell and Nancy, made the journey through the Peloponnese in a small borrowed car, which he describes in his book.

  In 1941 the Nazis invaded Greece, and the ensuing blitzkrieg swept through the country in a few weeks. At this time Durrell and Nancy were living in Kalamata, and they managed to escape from Navarino, carrying their three-month-old daughter Penelope (Pinkie) in a pannier basket, “like a loaf of bread.” Refugees of all kinds crowded onto an old caique; fortunately the seas were calm, for the ship had a heavy list and was dangerously overloaded. By day, in order to avoid being dive-bombed by the German planes which seemed to fill the skies, they anchored close up against cliffs. When darkness fell the caique chugged out to sea, the engine emitting a constant trail of sparks, an almost perfect target. However, after a number of incidents, some of them rather picaresque in retrospect, they reached Crete.

  The Embassy in Cairo sent a ship to rescue the King of Greece, the British diplomats accredited to him, and various Greek worthies who, having fled from Athens, were gathered in Crete. There was a slightly Wodehousian touch, for when the ship was about to sail the King could not be found. By now it seemed that half the Middle East was in flight, as hundreds of people crowded onto a freighter which sailed about the same time, but at last the whole motley company, the Durrells among them, reached Alexandria in safety.

  [Late 1939]

  40 Anagnostopoulou,

  Athens
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  To Anne and Vivian Ridler

  Dear Anne & Vivian,

  Just a note to bless you for Xmas and the new year which becomes more problematical as the days pass. We have just arrived back dog-tired from a trip to Sparta. A friend of mine lent us his little Morris and Nancy, Miller and I went on an atmospheric adventure to Mistra, via Corinth, Argos, Tripoli, Sparta. The country is so still and wild; valleys unbelievably remote and pure. A serpentine hogsback to Sparta like the nether end of Tibet: huge sailing white clouds, and snow like lies on Taegetus. I’m trying to write a little thing about it now. Miller is in a permanent delirium about Greece: left for U.S.A. yesterday in a whirl of emotions. If ever there were valleys and enchanted places where the charm still holds good, it is here. Until you have seen the lion gate at Mycenae or the huge gumps of rock where Tiryns lies in the Argive valleys, you can’t get the impact of those weird Homeric phrases which always disturbed me. “The halls of Atreus.” Nemea too: a still pure meadowland surrounded by snow-bound hills, and great soft cloudscapes. The modern villages lie in dirty straggles over these wonderful sites, with their inhabitants yawning and scratching themselves. In Corinth on Xmas eve was strange; we felt so unreal we began sending fantastic postcards everywhere—even sent Eliot one of the more crazy. Talk about The Poet’s Tongue which I have just been reading: these people spoke of bricks and ramps of solid rock. It was funny to scratch up a finger-bone in Mycenae: quite preserved and white from the earth, but of no weight, like wood washed up by the sea. Funnier still to read the crazy folk-songs of Auden in the book. The taste of mock-naiveté is like the taste for negro sculpture: runs off the rails every now and then.

  OLD GREEK FOLK-SONG

  Old Aegisthus warmed his balls

  In Agamemnon’s marble halls,

  Marble halls, marble halls.

  Clytemnestra on the spot,

  She said nowt but thought a lot,

  On the spot, on the spot.

  Put a watchman on the shore,

  Just to please her paramour,

  On the shore, on the shore,

  One day came a puff of smoke,

  From their lustful couch they woke.

  Puff of smoke, puff of smoke.

  “Agamemnon comes” said he,

  A-counting of his rosary,

  “Comes” said he, “Comes” said she.

  “Lay the table. Make it snappy!”

  Thus Aegisthus, far from happy.

  “Make it snappy, make it snappy!”

  Clytemnestra hatched a plot.

  She said nowt but thought a lot,

  Thought a lot, thought a lot.

  “Agamemnon! what a cough!

  Take that soaking armour off!”

  What a cough, what a cough.

  In the barf-room this prosaic

  Wife nailed him to the mosaic,

  The mosaic, the mosaic.

  Then with minds for words too full,

  They sacrificed a cordial bull,

  Words too full, words too full.

  We know simply nothing about them; at once on our coming back we began to hunt up the history and archaeology of the Argos plain; sad what a muddle it is in; a tissue of conjectures and hypotheses built upon grains of rice and traces of horse-manure. No. But the places await their real interpreters; even bloody mud-lashed Eleusis with its grimy petrol-stations. Somewhere we have missed the whole point, of that I am sure. All we can do is this sort of thing, which I am sending to the N.E.W.

  Song in the valley of Nemea:

  Quite quiet, quiet, quite quiet here.

  Song of the cock pheasant in Argos,

  The purr of the doves in Corinth,

  Quite quiet, quite quiet.

  Under the sward the sword,

  Under the dolmen the man’s helm:

  Over Agamemnon tumulus, tumulus,

  Under the stone queen cumulus.

  Song in the valley of Nemea:

  Quite quiet, quiet, quite quiet here.

  Song of the wild bone in the ruined hall,

  Song of the fox’s paw on the yellow skull,

  Quite quiet, quite quiet.

  Which shows our limitations at a blow; but what can one do? Our spiritual expense begins and ends with good wishes. Plenty of every kind for you two in the new year. YOU MUST See Greece one day.

  love. l.

  October late [1939?]

  40 Anagnostopolou,

  Athens

  To Anne Ridler

  Dear Anne,

  I have been more or less tonguetied: the war is like a great severance, and your voices sound muffled across the gulf. I have written to no one, because there is not an atom of comfort to be given. It is a huge symbolic contortion in which individual lives seem to lose their significance and shape. I am cut to the heart and dumb.

  We performed a masterpiece of unnecessary escape from Corfu when it came in a weather weird and autumnal; vast Japanese craters of pearl grey cloud over Albania, a dazzling thin rain like star-dust, and a black sheet of viscid water between us and Albania. Standing on our balcony over the sea it seemed like the end of the world. The whole hillside lay with its cheek in a cloud, the cypresses all stiff and priapic with dew. The children weeping in the garden. Every able-bodied man was mobilized and every horse; the town was swarming with escapists. Only one boat came so far north to disgorge Cretan infantry. It was the most mournful period of my life those dark masses of humanity murmuring by the lapping water like the Jews in Babylon; such passionate farewells, so many tears, so much language, it made one deaf. I had nothing to say goodbye to except the island, and it seemed already lost. Huge naphtha flares on the boats unloading flour and bullets. Four regiments deployed in idiotic positions over the north east of the island, sitting in the dark. I managed to go round the defences before coming away; Leslie and I always swore to defend Corfu against the Italians, and we fought the whole thing out during the winter shoots, taking into account everything, including fleet movements. Ill luck found him in England; and I could get no ratification of my naval intelligence job, so the one thing to do was to get to Athens. It was horrible leaving them to fight the wrong battles in the wrong places; the commander of the fort was in hysterics, planning to place submarine tubes outside our house and mine the straits and God knows what else. The infantry marched about with stony faces, smelling like hell, but with great morale; how the Italians are loathed! All the village was sent inland to a secret dump of arms, Nicholas the schoolmaster, horny-handed Jani with the limp, who can lift the cutter by the bowsprit, and Anastassiou our suave, cool, beautiful landlord, too feminine and hysterical to handle a cold rifle I always thought. There were only the women left to weep round the wells, and the uncomprehending black children with eyes like mulberries. I ached for them all. The voyage was terrific; all the weathers blew at once, mountainous seas off Ithaca and Santa Maura, and got us pitching and swinging in this damned smoky little steamer. From Patras we caught the automotrice and arrived in Athens at dead of night.

  For the last month I have been working for the Legation here as a sort of private Godfrey Winn, checking on opinion. Now a new man has arrived from England and sacked the whole of a very efficient and necessary department. It was all very Compton Mackenzie, racing round Athens in taxis, being followed and escaping. Now good English departmentalism has triumphed over those of us who knew Greece and Greek, and liked both. His Majesty’s Press Attaché rules the roost. The same inert supine attitude as the last war; the same idiotic complacence and over-confidence. Our money will save us, however, whatever the dolts do.

  I am moving in Nov. to the British Council, where I am to teach Greeks so help me; will be back in Corfu by the Spring I hope, unless Italy comes in, in which case I will get back sooner in some naval unit I hope. I do not want to fight in the north; I have absolutely no confidence in the cause or the fight promoters. The whole business stinks to heaven as a bankers’ war, and I hope the bankers are the first to be bombed. If England was reall
y as great in heart as geographically great her honour would be quicker over the Czechoslovakias of the world. For me I feel our international dignity is irreparably damaged; I put my name down to fight over the Czechs. But not after this shabby let-down of Poland, and the flabby bowelless attitude of the political casuists. Only look at the faces of cabinet without reading their hog-wash and you see that they are a pack of degenerates. As for the French, they are beneath contempt both as neighbours and allies; mean, grasping, cringing. If nations can’t have a sense of responsibility corresponding to their size (not their “interests”) then I don’t feel that any of us who are honourable or passionate should lift a finger to help them. Bang! These are the uncharitable sentiments which I have been hugging under my player’s hide while I was a faithful servant of his majesty, writing wonderful articles in the Greek press, and conceiving wily schemes for the furtherance of our arms. Now as a teacher I breathe more freely.