Formerly a provincial from a remote island who did not value talk and companionship enough, I find I miss the wonderful life that Cairo built up for itself, with its exiled poets and ruffians, and its visiting secret agents with poetic talent.… It is your fault for making a pasha of me and letting me learn about the good things of life.
All good wishes
Sincerely,
Larry Durrell
15 December 1945
MOI. Rhodes
To Diana Gould
… Dear Diana, I have been wanting to write to you but simply didn’t dare because I was afraid I would sound so heartlessly healthy and the country so Shangri la that you would write me a stinker calling me a peach fed sod. But honestly the whole thing is a dream—I am so ashamed of the life we are leading here; and occasionally I let it out in a letter and get a wince back, a cry of anguish. Like Miss Grenside of Faber to whom I described the wonderful trees swollen with ice-cold and brilliant yellow tangerines, scented and gravid. She replied telling me how UNKIND I was—they hadn’t seen fruit for years. So finally one gets cautious—like dealing with invalids. And I took down a pomegranate as big as a piano and tried to send it to her with a friend on python;1 but he sat on it in a transit camp in Egypt and had to eat it at last so he says. And you, my poor dear, what can I do for you but make you writhe and your mouth and soul water? I wish you could get out of England. Of course the food is dull, mostly macaroni, but the island is swollen with fruit and vegetables. There is no deprivation anywhere, except in friends. The military are beyond words awful. Cohen and I are quite alone. For an all too brief time we had Romilly Summers here, but he was posted again. However we have lovely rooms in this great hotel Shepherds on Sea, with private bath-rooms, running water … Oh shut up … This week we got a tin of butter from Egypt. How we enjoyed it! We sit and play chess on the little pocket board that Roland Pym gave us and read; by God’s good grace, and my experience of islands, I managed to spend some money on books; lots of Proust, Dostoievski, and poetry. So we are going to withstand the siege of the winter I feel—ah but Diana you should see the landscape of Greece—it would break your heart. It has such pure nude chastity; it doesn’t ask for applause; the light seems to come off the heart of some Buddhistic blue stone or flower, always changing, but serene and pure and lotion-soft on the iris. And the islands … Simi built up from the water in a series of eagle’s nests; Calymnos like some grey scarab, grey sandstone mixed with I milky specks and dots and dashes of blue; and the spacious olive-glades below the marble town of Camiros in Rhodes: and louring Leros.…
Lots of love and a bit of blue broken from the sky
by special messenger
Larry
April 1946
MOI. Rhodes
To T. S. Eliot
Dear TSE,
Many thanks for your letter. Yes, any contract you say. I’ve just received copies of CITIES PLAINS AND PEOPLE and am delighted with the production. I don’t know how Faber does it, but I feel most grateful.
Latterly I ran off a poem which I felt I would like to dedicate to you as a mark of thanks for all your kind forbearance and generousness. I intended to make it one of my very best and worked for about three months hard on it. I then printed about thirty copies on the linotype and it seemed good—but I must leave it to dry for another six months; I am not sure but what it won’t seem too cloying and overcharged. I send you another copy in case you didn’t get the first.
There is no news of vast importance. I have been twice to Athens to hunt a job but found it full of mondaine people also hunting jobs; I fear we have done Greece harm by all the propaganda we’ve done for it these years. Everyone wants to go there now, and our market value as poor teachers and beggars has sunk. Heavily endowed literary figures are now on the scene like wasps round a jam-pot. I managed however to recover most of my Book of the Dead, which has set me thinking; and recasting to the tune of about five thousand words. But I can’t be alone with myself these days. This job is beastly. And the verse play Adam and Evil has gone. But no matter; I have found a tiny house in a Turkish graveyard with a very low rent, and simply do not intend to go anywhere near Egypt if I can help it. Also I MUST do this big book sooner or later if I have to starve for the bloody thing.…
One thing that is driving me almost cuckoo about English writing today is this terrible cult for the urbane; anything that’s too hot, that disturbs at all, is not permissible. It comes out of this fervent desire on the part of Englishmen to be gents. A terrible inheritance for a writer to start with. This just after reading Charles Morgan reviewing Henry Miller, and the Manchester Guardian cursing him for using “gutter-words”! Such a farce it is.
Now the only big subject left in English is sex really! I want to do a book involving the attitude of the near-Levant to sex—it’s so passionate and natural and really wonderful. How am I going to do it in English? In French or Greek it would be possible to do it without overtoppling. But in England you bring the ceiling down if you talk above a whisper. And then again, I don’t want to accentuate anything. I am not proselytizing with dark abdomens or anything. But the central dramas of life here come out of sex; and sex informs and warms everything. One is saturated and exhausted and bored to death with sex; consequently it is only here that one is ever free of it, as it were, and able to devote oneself to art or God or whatnot, and make the whole world an Eros—but an eros of contemplation and real biblical love. In the north—ach but why go on? I am not coming anywhere near England for years yet; and I’m seriously thinking of starting to write in Greek or some tongue where one is at ease, comfy, unbuttoned, etc.
Just been to Patmos to see the heavenly cave of the Apocalypse. How the devil do you manage to stay on in the fogs and cramps of that damned island?
So many thanks for the book. I think it’s awfully good. My book I mean. Which means it will get a bad press. No matter. All this Christian-introverted-self-congratulation-God-poetry the young write in England these days. Why don’t you stop it and make them write like human beings for a change.
Enough. Is there anything that I can send you from this part of the world? If so please tell me what.
Sincerely
Lawrence Durrell
15 June [1946]
MOI. Rhodes
To Anne Ridler
Dear Anne,
Just got your letter—It was awfully nice to hear after all this time. I kept track of your growing fame and fortunes. It seemed to me that the play had an awfully good press. Congratulations. On the whole CITIES PLAINS AND PEOPLE had rather a rough maiden voyage. Yes; I thought it good—as usual too good. I was surprised to find that while one group of papers thought it dry and scholarly, another thought it full of “audenesque gags” and the atmosphere of the 20’s (sic.) Queer I thought. Perhaps I am rather a dated writer from being so long out of touch and so little interested in the preoccupations of the home poets. There’s so much word spinning going on—I turn the pages of these terrible anthologies and journals in the hope of finding something clear and strong—nothing but apocalyptic nonsense. I’m afraid that we’ve had a bad influence Henry and I’s books about Greece. It is becoming a cult. In the last few weeks the number of poets who are compiling anthologies called SALUTE TO GREECE has risen; I have letters from them beginning “Sir: I would be glad if you would contribute to a strong powerful anthology dedicated to Greece. Excellent contributions have been sent in by Sheila Sniggs, Roly Besom, and John Bailer. We are expecting work from T. S. Eliot, Henry Miller, and Max Beerbohm shortly. While we cannot pay.…”
Well, dear Anne, here I am in Rhodes, and happy again—or as near to that precarious state as one can get in this beautiful world of ours. I have earned my money, just sent off the proofs of a novel called CEFALU, and hope to be divorced this summer. Three years is a long time to wait for people to pull their finger out. My immediate preoccupation is to find time and place to attack a really good book for a change. I don’t know how I’ll manage it
but I must sometime soon. I’m bursting with material—like an old suitcase; it trickles out in my conversation, and I make Cohen’s life a misery acting scenes from the book I can’t find time to write. Meanwhile it is quite clear that when this job stops (how sweet the NO of Molotov sounds to this jaded ear) I shall be on the parish—so to this end I have constructed and am racing through a farcical piece of theatre called BLACK HONEY’2 (the private life of Baudelaire’s octoroon mistress), I think it might be actable. Can I send it to Browne—as you suggest? Later I want to do a verse play about SAPPHO on Lesbos—not what you think, though! A book about Rhodes, an autobiography, and a lot more poems. As you see I am spinning like a weathercock. MEANWHILE I AM EDITING A DAILY GREEK, DAILY ITALIAN AND WEEKLY TURKISH NEWSPAPER which is killing me!!! And I can’t find time to do more than lunch with Brigadiers in all their boredom.
The people here! My God the people! The administration has certainly finished me as far as the British are concerned. No greater collection of defrocked priests, ex-jockeys, haberdashers, and ruined boxers was ever gathered together to lord it over an innocent and peaceful people; your hair would turn white to see the condescension and rudeness with which these slum C3’S treat the Greeks—whose fishermen and farmers are as fine as Cornishfolk, only poorer. The police, recruited from people who have spent years arranging sprigs of parsely over the testicles of Canterbury Lambs in our shops at home, have swollen like bullfrogs in their uniforms, and would have you think that they are having a dangerous and difficult job holding down a turbulent people. My shanty-Irish blood boils in me at their manners. And their wives! It is unbelievable—unthinkable that such people should ever be allowed to leave Luton or Swindon to represent England abroad. I’m told that Cyrpus is even worse. It’s depressing. So far wherever I’ve seen the Union Jack flying there is the same story. Obtuse, dense bureaucrats with cockney accents refusing to mix with the natives and ordering whiskies in the British Club. I won’t have it. I simply will not stand it. And then they ask me—why don’t I get a permanent civil service job in a colony. YOU SHOULD SEE EGYPT!
Meanwhile the weather smiles—I can’t think why. It hardly gets an answering smile from the lugubrious neurasthenic who rules the roost here or his simpering comic opera staff. Still, we do our best to smile back. Specimen of conversation in a mess. Newly arrived wife: “Of course the people are backward and dirty and life is hard, but one might do worse.” When you hear that we are living in the biggest hotel in central Europe with private bathrooms, hot water, a superb beach and all the drink we want and almost all the food, in surroundings so idyllic that NOWHERE in the world could you match them just now—the remark will have its full value. Sailing, motoring and swimming. Simply lovely. But spoiled by these horrible Marx and Spencer throwouts. There! That’s off my chest. As I can’t print it in my newspapers I make you a present of it. My dear Anne, England sounds so dreadful from my brother’s letters that I can’t face it for a year or two. I’m awfully tired, as you must be, helping everyone to prepare the next war; how about an anthology dedicated to the atom bomb, with strong powerful contributions from Tony Sniggs, Gerald Verve, Peter Piston, and Romney Botth-Gaunt? Pictures by Beaton? Let me know before next spring.… And while we cannot pay.…
Love larry
20 October 1946
MOI. Rhodes
To T. S. Eliot
Dear TSE,
I have just made up a new book of poems called ON SEEMING TO PRESUME and sent it off to Faber. I hope that you accept it. I think some of them are OK some so-so and some wonderful. Of course unless one is toothless in England one can expect little beyond the reviewer’s lip-service; and as reviewers are this breed of prim hermaphrodite—rather like Foreign Office nominees—one can’t expect much. However we live and burn? I am just off to Athens for a week; have some more poems in the workshop still but will send. My future still uncertain—I mean about a job here. Shall probably stick on for another year if I can get someone to pay me enough to do so.
By all accounts London sounds hell; I remember you telling me once how you liked best the wet weather and a blazing fire for working! Well you’re right; but here we have those AND in between we get whole fortnights of ringing blue sea-days where the mind can expand. I walk about in my Turkish graveyard, or sit for hours on the tomb of poor Hascid the satiric poet and brood upon mortality—or morality whichever way you look at it. The tall eucalyptus trees shed their spines and form a dense thick nap to walk on—the tombs are plodding marble with turbans on—like a forest of huge mushrooms. An air of ineffable decay and gloom—winding gloomy paths: like a Christina Rossetti peytol trance.
In Athens I am going to see Seferis and Katsimbalis and give modern lit a bashing with them; also Rex Warner is there they say.
[1946?]
MOI. Rhodes
To Hugh Gordon Porteous
Dear Hugh,
… In January I hope to marry my latest and greatest nymph—Gipsy Cohen: picture attached: if she looks pensive it’s because she is wondering what is in store for her: address me Public Nymphomation Officer: in other picture I am brooding on ways and means after Huxley!
These islands are really heavenly when the weather allows one to get round them. Please reserve the following islands for a visit in the future—Patmos! Straight middle ages stuff with the strangest atmosphere of any place I’ve visited—Carpathos—pale chalky, beautiful as an anemone, clean pre-historic picked bone—one wants to undress and climb trees—Cos very Hipp! Hipp! Hippocrates! Green verdant and mildly lenitive—Coan wine a washout nowadays—Rhodes the great dark abdominal FEMALE PRINCIPLE!! The Italians have emasculated it and sugared it all over—and weakened its lovely undulous femininity. All these places must be seen my dear Hugh—far more important than Arundel or Corfe or Epsom—Myself I have become a complete Levantine and cannot face another English winter. Hoping very much to make Paris for a year next year and then afterwards India, China or South America, for a 5 year spell.
Write a line when you feel like it.
L.
Larry.
[1946?]
MOI. Rhodes
To Gwyn Williams
Dear Gwyn,
… I have all but recovered from my wonderful visit to Athens, moving and melancholy as it was. What it means to be a Christian in a Christian country—however bloodthirsty! There is little enough news in the newsy sense—even the weather which has been spouting rain and even snow has suddenly balmed itself into a spring cocoon. On Sundays we take a pack, some white wine, biscuits, sandwiches, and walk over the hill, past the old stadium with its bogus pillars, out into the country, lovely and green and gashed everywhere by emplacements, trenches, OP’s etc. It’s an archeologist’s paradise for the German sappers have made holes everywhere and pottery is hanging out of the walls.… I am turning about in my mind to do something about Patmos—an enchanted island by the way—and the apocalypse.… But another trip to Athens this Monday just to pick up my trunks and be picked up by my drunks. The passes were deep in snow and I got stuck. Athens looked so strange under snow—the Parthenon like some diseased Christmas Card by Raphael Tuck and Son! But the roaring voice of Katsimbalis filled in the four horizons …
Larry
1 Under Python leave any soldier who had been in the Middle East for more than four years was granted one month at home with his family and then three months in some unit in Britain.
2 Never printed or produced. There is a typescript in the library of Iowa State University.
South America—Yugoslavia
WHEN THE ENGLISH administration of the Dodecanese came to an end in 1947 Durrell returned to England, where he had not been for ten years, and rejoined his family in Bournemouth. This was not an easy time for him. The remuneration accruing from his writing could in no way be described as an income; he had no immediate prospects, and found himself unable to settle down to writing during the frequent periods of restlessness which ensued. Indeed he spent much of his time paintin
g vivid and colourful pictures with poster paints.
Towards the end of the year, having been engaged by the British Council, Durrell, accompanied by Eve, set out for the Argentine. This was the farthest he was ever to travel from the Mediterranean, and of all the countries in which he was ever to live, he disliked it the most. The interaction between climate and character is very much a matter of personal temperament; Gerald Durrell, in contrast to his brother, took to the Argentine with enthusiasm, enjoyed life there, and is always happy to return.
Durrell spent much of his time in the Argentine at Cordoba, a university town, dominated by the Jesuits. Here he gave a series of lectures for the British Council that were later published as Key to Modern Poetry; but otherwise this was a sterile year in which he did no creative writing. By the end of 1948, having broken his contract with the British Council, Durrell was back in Bournemouth, where he spent the next few frustrating months with his family, pacing up and down, seldom able to relax; and it came as a relief when the Foreign Office sent him to Yugoslavia, as Press Attaché, in July 1949.
Conditions in Belgrade were grim; Yugoslavia had been subjected to desperate suffering under German occupation, and there was a shortage, indeed an absence, of all but the barest necessities of life; while, in any case, the birth struggles of a communist state are hardly the happiest times through which to live. In 1940, when Durrell had settled in Athens, he soon made friends with “the two Georges,” Seferiades and Katsimbalis, and other kindred spirits. In Belgrade, an incipient friendship with a young Yugoslav writer was swiftly nipped in the bud when the young man was flung into prison for associating with a western imperialist. The corps diplomatique, forbidden to mix with the rest of the population, was confined within a claustrophobic social circle in which they constantly met each other in an endless round of parties where the guests never varied. At some of the more informal parties Durrell would play and sing a blues of his own composition.
Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel Page 9