Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  After the war, and after Suez, the axis shifted though not the central preoccupation; for the lovely Norman house belonging to the Smarts took over the role of the now sequestrated Cairo one. Poets, writers, painters converged on Gadencourt to gladden Smartie’s heart with their banter and their theories, while for his part he delighted in building log fires and stoking the Aga against the mammoth meals which were put before them.

  Physically he was very tall and thin; he had a sort of head which made sculptors feel hungry. A long wide slanting nose which gave his face sometimes (in repose) a slight resemblance to Wellington, but more often to some Norman knight of the past. There was always the suggestion of a smile—and indeed one cannot think of Smartie’s smile without instantly hearing the small and wicked chuckle with which he always greeted a jest. The general impression he created was one of gentle singularity, while the lively eager flow of his questions held always a hint of ingenuousness. Something in him remained fresh and unspoiled, like a child bubbling over with youthfulness; and I cannot recall ever meeting a happier man. And, of course, happiness is infectious. With Smartie everything became a treat, even a bus ride across Paris, even walking to the corner to post a letter. The whole world held a sort of pristine freshness for him—it was always newly born, curious, variegated, and utterly absorbing. And, of course, after a few moments with him one began to see it through his eyes rather than through one’s own. There was inspiration to be gained this way and encouragement—as necessary to artists as oxygen.

  TURKISH WOMEN: EGYPT

  (gouache)

  I dare not mourn his passing—the memory of his chuckle inhibits me. Besides, he himself once told me wistfully that he would have given almost anything to have a chance of discussing poetic theory with the Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi—“if only one could reach the brute.” Perhaps he has. At any rate I seem to hear the quiet laughter and conversation of their shades as I write.

  L.

  [Spring 1944]

  British Information Office,

  Alexandria

  To Theodore Stephanides

  Dear Theodore,

  Thank you for your letter which was entertaining but rather too Pun-gent for my taste. But then, as Paul says, your bite was always worse than your Barce;1 yes, I think the material you mention is excellent. One thing is important—I think you should keep the locality the same all through—Greece, or Corfu, but always the same place; because as well as the facts you must also put in some colour. Paragraphs? Yes—like this—

  XX-III-40

  Today Spring has moved a step nearer: the anemones in the great field below Glysoura are bright and pristine once more after a night’s rain, and Marco sings in the fields at his work. He is singing a song called “Is Death a Kind of Sleep?” and as I listen to it sitting in this white sterile laboratory, I am reminded once more how deeply the limitations of science weigh on us: how impenetrable the veil is. “Is Death a kind of sleep?” Biological death, according to Purdy, is …

  Flower-hunting with young David I find that he does not know that butterflies are blind:—The gorgeous stupid waste of so much colour in flowers plays no part in the biological scheme of things …

  Quite freely and easily bringing in your information in a given context. Invent some people, peasants and so on—and treat them quite boldly. Put them in and forget them just as you feel inclined; short sentences—no purple patches—no Leacock—and I think you should have a good book on your hands.

  As for X words—I get too many of those from my womenfolk to know how to place them for you. When do you get some leave? Billie and Paul [Gotch, in British Council] would like to know. Come and Stay. And see the Embassy people, you silly.

  [Signed with caricature self-portrait.]

  [1942?]

  [Cairo, Egypt]

  To Anne Ridler

  Well my dear Anne,

  Once more the communique with its familiar disasters making one feel quite loquacious and talkative; I haven’t felt like writing a line to anyone, being so dead to the world in this copper-pan of a blazing town with its pullulating stinking inhabitants—Middle East is Far enough east for me. But it is so nice to get your lovely letter AND marvellously well-recollected and unstrained poem for Vivian. I must dash off at eight and show it to Bernard [Spencer]—poem and letter and to Dorian Cooke.

  No sooner did I get permission to use the bag than I loaded up four envelopes with poems and sent them direct to TSE. I also sent some translations of Rilke by Ruth Speirs, and have persuaded Bernard S to collect for a book which God willing will also wing its way Faber-wards. There is nothing else doing—Personal Landscape should be in London by now—One Special copy on light paper we printed specially for TSE as an inducement to send us a poem about IT.

  The photo is awfully nice and how frightfully healthy she looks—O I wish we are all in the Orkneys instead of in this terrible blinding sand-pan with its mocking hideous tombs and minarets. Such a country—cripples, deformities, opthalmia, goitre, amputations, lice, flies. In the street you see horses cut in half by careless drivers or obscene dead black men with flies hanging like a curtain over their wounds and a crowd hemming them in with ghoulish curiosity. Dust in the air carrying everything miasmic, fevers, virus, toxins,—One writes nothing but short and febrile like jets by this corrupt and slow Nile; and one feels slowly walked upon by the feet of elephants.…

  March 1944

  British Information Office,

  Alexandria

  To Diana Gould [Menuhin]

  Dearest Diana,

  I can’t think why you haven’t heard. I’ve written twice and sent you two little poems—the best I can do at the moment—which I am putting in the anthology for you.… Rainy streets; a decaying poster on a hoarding lit by a splash of light from a tobacconists shop said DIANA GOUL THE MER IDOW. PEELING. And back at the office I open a copy of Vanguard and find you dancing from left to right with deep captions in French and your strained rather pale face looking out at the world with that curious mixture of self-possession and self-deprecation.… Meanwhile we sing your duck song in tragic voices Gwyn and I by Mareotis and wonder how soon we can get out of this country. Now that the press pictures of the Italian front come in I feel a little nearer to you—pictures of Vesuvius carrying away towns and trees and churches. I suppose you must have received Gwyn’ s charming epigram by now?

  The proof that you’re in Naples, not with us,

  Is the misbehaviour of Vesuvius.

  Meanwhile the ubiquitous dust and blackness; the faces of the Arabs with their weakness and cupidity.

  The thin exhausted lusts of the Alexandrians running out like sawdust out of dummies; the shrill ululations of the black women, the rending of hair and clothes in mourning—a skilled occupation—outside the whitewashed hospital. The tarbush, the dark suit, the rings, the French accent; the scrofula, the pox, the riches, the food. Even in your Italian brothel I cannot think how to write or speak to you from this flesh-pot, sink-pot, melting-pot of dullness.

  I have typed out your clerihews for the anthology … which looks very good to me—god knows how it will read in the muddy light of an English summer; to the woollen and gaitered literary gents who are fast turning literary practice into a ministry of dehydration. A lot of variation in the material; a sense of humour; AND NO PERSONAL PUBLICITY. NO NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS. “Miriam Featherwight writes ‘at the age of twelve I was apprenticed to a glass-blower from whom I learned all about life. He urged me to write in the intervals of blowing retorts for the grammar school laboratories. This is my first published story. I can box, throw stones, and am fond of chess.’”

  Dearest Diana, your Bexhill Menu is a beauty. We have also collected a number of shop signs and wall-notices. For example “THE OXFORD IRONY” (Cairo Laundry Sign).

  I am meditating a section on puns too—perhaps to include Barron’s revolting story of the two bugs in the mortuary. One saying to the other “Come on, let’s make love in dead earnest.…”
My love to you.

  [Signed with caricature self-portrait.]

  1 Barce, near Benghazi, where Dr. Stephanides was serving at the time.

  Rhodes

  DURRELL DID NOT return to Greece until 1945. The Dodecanese Islands, captured from the Italians during the war, were destined, a few years later, to he handed over to the Greeks, but in the interregnum they were governed by the British. Durrell was appointed Public Information Officer with his headquarters in Rhodes, responsible for running newspapers in three languages and other forms of publicity. He was accompanied by Eve, and they established themselves in the Villa Cleobulus, a charming little house set in a Turkish cemetery; where, for the greater part of their free time, they lived out of doors under an immense plane tree which shaded the courtyard.

  It was a great joy for Durrell to be freed from the atmosphere of war, to get away from Egypt and to be back in Greece once again. But there was a sharp distinction from the “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” atmosphere of pre-war Corfu. Many people in the Middle East were starving or living in conditions of the most fearful poverty and hardship; on the mainland civil war was being waged with the ferocious cruelty that forms a dark side to the character of this passionate people; while the ever-present menace of Stalinist communism pressed against the very frontiers of Greece itself. But despite the dark undertones this was one of the happiest periods of Durrell’s life; Greece and the Greeks meant as much to him as ever, his position as a government officer conferred considerable privileges and freedom of movement; and, even if some of his colleagues were banal, there were others such as Romilly Summers and, especially, the Quaker doctor, Ray Mills, who became good friends. But above all he was deeply in love.

  From time to time it has been Durrell’s custom when living in some out-of-the-way place such as Rhodes, Ischia or Nicosia, to produce privately printed editions of his own works in limited editions; small booklets which have become the delight and despair of book-collectors. In Rhodes, being in charge of a whole battery of printing presses, he issued two of these: Zero and Asylum in the Snow, two surrealist pieces which are reprinted in this book, and The Parthenon, a poem, for T. S. Eliot, printed in an edition of about thirty copies as a Christmas Card for friends.

  Life on Rhodes provided the material for Durrell’s second island book, Reflections on a Marine Venus, mainly written, in retrospect, after he had left the island. The original version was a great deal longer than the published text; too long, Faber’s felt, for publication. Loath to perform disagreeable surgery upon a book which embodied so much of his own life, Durrell entrusted the task of cutting to Anne Ridler, the poet and critic, and an old friend whom he had met when she was working as secretary to T. S. Eliot. She carried out the work with perceptive sympathy; and in this form the book was published in 1953.

  Durrell had been writing for over twenty-five years before his books reached the general reading public; whereas his younger brother Gerald became widely popular, almost overnight, with his first book on collecting wild animals, The Overloaded Ark. When Reflections on a Marine Venus received some good reviews, an old lady telephoned my bookshop: “I want to order a book by a Mr. Durrell, not THE Mr. Durrell, it’s not about animals at all.”

  Meanwhile, in 1945, Faber’s published Prospero’s Cell, followed in 1946 by Cities, Plains and People, the first volume of Durrells poetry to be issued by a regular publisher; and Tambimuttu, in charge of Editions Poetry London, brought out Cefalû, written, so Durrell was inclined to say, to pay for his divorce from Nancy; and Personal Landscape, An Anthology of Exile, a reprint in book form of the magazine published in Egypt during the war.

  [1945]

  Public Information Officer

  Rhodes, Dodecanese Islands

  MOI. BMA. ATB. MEF.

  To Gwyn Williams

  Dear Gwyn,

  How nice to get your letter together with one from Diana saying that she’d seen you and was happy.… We have panned out with the most extraordinary luck: of course with every wangle known to man also involved: the embassy, the army, the Quakers and the pashas. It finally, like some spool of greasy film, unwound and there was a laisser passer, and we found ourselves on a filthy little Norwegian tanker in Alex harbour, with the inevitable last minute policeman trying to stop us, as in a film. I can’t tell you how excited it was to see that misty eggshell blue go down as we tooled away from Alex.… We were locked up for two days with an assortment of Norwegian cut-throat sailors, very good fun, before being shot into the lovely island of Carpathos.… What followed was so like one of my Mykonos dreams that even describing it spoils it. We went ashore and were led by ten little children, very clean and polite, through the warm scented morning through the bright crazy Douanier Rousseau town: no Douanier is too harsh: Paul Klee. Rows of pastel pink blue yellow and sugar-white houses in the bowl of the harbour. The children led us deftly through a German minefield to bathe on a dazzling scorched beach where the sea was livid and nitric. Then we all went up the hill together hardly speaking, and lay under a big spreading olive in an almond-orchard and here the children sat in a circle round us like druids and sang. It was beyond words clean and pure and life-giving. Then they got us water from the mountain spring, and were indignant when we wanted to tip them. And at every door in the village wonderful old wrinkled people blessed us and asked us in for a drink. E was in tears. And so, after two days’ terrific north wind to the softer rounder fatter Rhodes.… Food is scarce and poor here but we are living in a Cecil B. de Mille hotel and masses of fruit to eat: I have a bunch of yellow grapes by me as I write.… Bathe in green sea at six. Run on grass. Sunshine like the wand of Apollo. Only there are too many military here with their NAAFI and coarse sports and false moustaches. Otherwise heaven.

  write soon

  Larry

  [1945]

  MOI. Rhodes

  To Gwyn Williams

  Gwyn,

  The corner of Wales sounds absolutely lovely and we were full of envy to hop over—but the work and the weather does not permit. Instead we have been seeing this island—the three ancient cities Lindos, Camiros and Ialysos: have been to Eve’s first Panagyrie in a pine-forested hollow sacred to Saint Soula—whoever she is—dispenser of miracle water. We drive about all stately in a huge captured German car which must have belonged to at least an Oberkortschfunkler-Kommandant, all very official and respected servants of the crown: and we have already discovered two little houses which I would buy if I had any money. One lies on the lovely sinuous road to Calithea, on a small headland, bare and smooth, between two fig-trees. The other stands on the wutheringest height of Monte Smith (sacred to that British tree-nymph Sir Sidney Smif), tucked into the shoulder of hill and looking down twenty miles of valley.

  Ach the blueness. Lindos lies like a city built of dazzling mica around a circle of shock-blue sea. One boat, clear, a man in blue shorts, two solidified ripples; it moves with the languorous slowness of a beetle in a glass of water. Camiros Castello on a bluff over the sea. Dead silent. A huge palpitating emptiness under it, and then the sea striking like a gong. Kestrels swerve about and a sudden wind swishes in the parasol pines. A man whistles his dog in the underworld and it echoes. I am snoring among the ginger-beer bottles and the crumbs of our picnic. Greece—you can’t capture what the silence keeps erasing, a permanent fluidity at the edges of the world, washing away. And the warmth of the sun on old marbles or pebbles, or drying and warming the salt on the lobes of your ears so it crisps in your fingers. I am very happy.…

  larry

  5 December 1945

  MOI. Rhodes

  To Sir Walter Smart

  Dear Sir Walter,

  I am glad you liked Prospero. Which was read under what you might call test conditions! I’m afraid though that the life it tries to depict is impossible under a military dispensation however humane and liberal. The B.M.A. is doing a very good job here, but looking round them one wonders how the Somaliland Postal Service managed to spare so m
any of its most experienced men to administer this area. The people are ghastly, the island lovely, and the Greeks delightful and unspoiled—troublesome of course: argumentative, of course. But there are no party politics here. A complete calm. We live however very much alone; I have a case of books and Gipsy Cohen [Eve] is working in the office; every Sunday we take a pack and walk over the hills. There are places which still lie dreaming their pre-cyclopean dreams, untouched except where the German barbed wire traces its minefields round them. Camiros is far the loveliest of them; a blinding white town tucked in a knuckle between two limestone hills covered with deep green ilex and supple bright cypresses. You look down from the central plinth across a winding main street backed by the taut hard unpaintable blue of the sea, and the smoky chunks of the Turkish mainland.

  Latterly ONE person has been a perfect companion on these trips. Romilly Summers, round as the setting sun, ruddy with good humour, wine and food; a companion out of the old world, a great walker and chatterer.

  Every curve of the coast reminded him of somewhere in the Tyrol, somewhere in Hungary: a night in Buda: an incident on a train in Slovenia: a cheese in Gottingen, a wine in Tours—until one felt that he carried the whole of Europe synthesized and digested inside himself.

  MIMOSA, RHODES

  (gouache)

  Poor Romilly, he is being sent back to Egypt, a victim of a departmental intrigue! One still pays, it seems, for liking the Greeks and saying so! Everyone here hates them and loves the Italians. We are going to miss him terribly—a new sensation for me.