Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  Life diplomatic

  Once was ecstatic,

  Sweet as a serenade,

  Although we keep drinking,

  Our spirits keep sinking,

  They’re sinking like New Belgrade.

  Moscow and Prague,

  Belgrade and Vienna,

  They sound so romantic

  But I’ll bet you a tenner,

  They’ve got those Iron Curtain blues.

  The Naval Attaché hung himself on the

  stairs,

  We brush past his body now—nobody cares,

  He’s got those Iron Curtain blues.

  And so on ad lib.

  His experiences in Yugoslavia gave Durrell the raw material for a number of books which he was to write in later years after he had left the country: White Eagles Over Serbia, an adventure book for boys in the John Buchan tradition, and the Antrobus stories, Esprit de Corps, Stiff Upper Lip, and Sauve Qui Peut, humorous books about life in the diplomatic service. Meanwhile, two books which he had already written were published in England: Sappho, a play in verse, which came from Faber’s in 1950, and Key to Modern Poetry, published by Peter Nevill in 1952.

  Durrell saw a good deal of Yugoslavia, for his duties as Press Attaché took him up and down the country, to Sarajevo, to Zagreb, to Bled, and so forth. He managed to acquire an immense German official-entry vehicle which had once belonged to Goering. Although quite impractical for private use, Durrell could not bear to part with this car because it made Tito jealous. The Press Attaché’s car was bullet-proof, the Dictator’s wasn’t.

  There were also three holidays abroad.

  In 1950 Durrell and Eve spent some weeks in Ischia, where a remarkable eccentric and friend from Corfiot days was living. This was Zarian, an Armenian writer and journalist, doughty upholder of all matters pertaining to his race, who is one of the major characters in Prospero’s Cell. While in this island Durrell produced another of his private editions, Deus Loci, printed in a limited edition by Mato Vito.

  Penelope Durrell, it will be remembered, had been born just as the Germans were invading Greece, and was carried into exile as a babe in arms under hazardous conditions. This was hardly an experience that any parent would care to repeat. The year 1951, when Eve was expecting a baby, was a time of apprehension in Belgrade; Stalin was hurling invective and threats at Yugoslavia, and his tanks were on the frontier. The invasion was expected from day to day. Not wishing her child to be born in the path of a blitzkrieg, Eve came to England and rented a furnished house on the outskirts of Oxford. When the baby was due, old Mrs. Durrell, Mother, planned to join Eve, and we drove her up from Bournemouth. The house was quite small, and, before entering the nursing home, Eve had engaged a room for us in a nearby hotel. When I went round to check this and deposit our luggage the proprietor denied all knowledge of the booking. Later it emerged that a friend of Durrell’s had stayed there the previous week-end. This man was a strong believer in nonviolence, a sentiment not shared by the hotel proprietor. The argument between them grew more and more heated until the pacifist knocked the landlord down. No friend of the Durrells was persona grata in his hotel after that.

  The third holiday from Belgrade allowed a brief return to Greece. In those days the wide new autoput that tunnels its way through the mountains and leaps across the valleys of Macedonia, along which thousands of tourists now speed every year, had not been built; but Durrell and Eve drove southwards over appalling Balkan roads, and set up camp in Chalcidice, the promontory which ends in Mount Athos. Not exactly a Boy Scout manner of camping, for they engaged a woman from a nearby village to cook and clean and to guard the camp while they were away during the day. It was on this occasion that Durrell wrote telling me about a Greek island which could be purchased for £60. I was fool enough to let the opportunity slip. What madness! This is among the most acute minor regrets of my life; even if I had never managed to get there, I would have had sixty pounds’ worth of throw-away conversation talking about my Greek island.

  Durrell’s term of service in Yugoslavia took place at the time when Tito, backed and encouraged by the West, succeeded in detaching his country from the bonds of Stalinist Russia. For those who worked at the British Embassy, who saw it all from inside, holding their breath, so to speak, while the broken bones of foreign policy, so tentatively re-set, were slowly knitting together, these were fascinating days.

  The success of this important detente was celebrated and sealed by the visit to Belgrade of Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary. His meetings with President Tito and the official junketings were given great publicity; a time of intense activity for the Press Attaché.

  Twelve long years separated Durrell’s departure from Egypt and the publication of Justine; during all that period the novel was germinating in his mind, and as the ideas grew nearer and nearer to their final form the frustration of having no time to write became almost unbearable. By 1952. he realized that his own crisis had come; if he was ever to make his break-through as a writer he must act now. Towards the end of that year Durrell wrote to Henry Miller: “By the way, I’m quitting the service in December and we are setting off to Cyprus, I think. No prospects. A tent. A small car. I feel twenty years younger. Heaven knows how we’ll keep alive, but I’m so excited I can hardly wait to begin starving.”

  [Autumn 1947]

  Blue Star Line, Montevideo

  To Anne Ridler

  Anne,

  Here we are in Montevideo, birthplace of poor Laforgue—a fly-blown Neapolitan town as flat as a pancake on a dirty estuary. Filthy dusty streets and no monument older than 20 years. “Well, you would go abroad.” I know. I know. And Buenos Ayres is reckoned worse than this. But the object of this brief note is to tell you to put Brazil on your visiting list as the most fantastic country in the world. In the first place it is the size of Europe—and only 1/10th explored—but Rio! My dear Anne I have seen nothing like Rio since I was 12 and stood on Eagle’s Crag in Kurseong, India. For miles you follow the dull alluvial water of a tropical coast, an occasional yellow-brown seagull with a long beak patrolling. Then you turn and enter a bay full of coral islands with thick tropical vegetation coming down to the water, bamboos, coconut-palms. Rio is dead white, rising like a dream, a mass of aerial Skyscrapers against a chain of stupendous mountains on whose very top stands a great barbaric stone cross with a stone Christ on it, half-hidden in cloud. The whole picture is as of a gigantic organ, the hills the fluted pipes, the town the white keyboard. It is completely Rider Haggard. Laid in a glittering crescent round a marvellous bay the skyscrapers are punctuated by cones of granite which rise clear out of the ground beside the buildings—from your 10th floor you lean out and kiss a precipice. A spider web of railway takes you up to the sugar-loaf mountain. But the streets are connected by huge tunnels lit by arc lamps and lined with marble, so that to go from one end of the town to the other is like going through a series of mad looking-glasses and finding more and more skyscrapers built round more and more dazzling bays. Rio is the dream of an ant bound hand and foot and delivered over to one of its own nightmares. The main street is as wide as—say the width from Marble Arch to Oxford Street. As wide! You walk between these huge buildings, looking down vistas of as much as four miles, feeling as if you were wandering about the ruled table-lands of a geometrical Chirico. It’s completely hallucinating. Pure blue oxygen air, and on an island in the bay a silver aeroplane per minute lands and takes off. For sheer magnitude and overpowering frenzied weight of scenery there is nothing like it. And for modernity! Meanwhile the jungle is lapping at the very edges of these marble palaces—you have the impression that every day they cut it back half a mile and every night it advances on them and mosses up the roads. Meanwhile the mountains keep appearing and disappearing in clouds so you can never count them, and the light changes all the time. The journey was worth it if only to see this hallucinating spectacle: Rio de Janeiro. Picture a country the size of Europe containing two towns more modern than New York�
�1/10th explored—containing also the Amazon, upper and lower, and all the theories of Darwin! After this B.A. will doubtless be very small beer.

  … I have written some poems—good I hope. If you see Theo give him my love and tell him I’ll try and materialize at his next séance with a green coconut in my hand. And Anne dear please ask Faber to register everything. I expect to go 800 miles inland to Cordoba for a month’s leave and understand that the postal services consist of state dromedaries driven by gauche gauchos. Hence register! Meanwhile onward from Trotsky, Blavatsky, and back to Potocki via Ouspensky. I have met a marvellous metaphysical Armenian who has 8 crates of hermetic writings on board and have been reading Laforgue’s Hamlet and Mallarmé’s Igitur, both perfectly seasoned for this voyage and my state of mind.

  7 February 1948

  The British Council

  190 Lavalle,

  Buenos Ayres

  To Mary Hadkinson

  Dear Mary,

  … You envy us? Argentina is a large flat melancholy and rather superb-looking country full of stale air, blue featureless sierras, and businessmen drinking Coca-Cola. One eats endless beef and is so bored one could scream. It is the most lazy-making climate I have struck: not as bad as Egypt, of course: but I’d give a lifetime of Argentina for three weeks of Greece, fascist or no fascist. Here one is submerged in dull laisser faire and furious boredom. People quite nice in a very superficial and childish way. I think the States would be better. However I’m contracted for a year so I can’t think of escape until next March. The only fun is horseback riding which we do plenty of—across the blue sierras, a la Zane Grey. But it’s all very dreary really. As for the meat it’s rapidly driving me vegetarian—next week I move into Cordoba, my new post, and take over amid polite bowings—I did as a matter of fact write to Katsimbalis, but one-way correspondence is inevitable with him: one is always left holding the leading strings—But we THINK on him a great deal—Tell him that Papissa Joanna is now in proof in a very GOOD Translation (so says Theodore who is vetting my text with the original in London). CEFALU should be out by the time you get this: new book of poems going into print ON SEEMING TO PRESUME. My verse play being considered for possible production. Next on the list a Rhodes book and another verse-play I hope—O but this country makes you feel as lame as a Peruvian bishop—Tell K. that Henry has added 1000 unprintable pages to Capricorn in USA and I hope perhaps to fly up and see him if I have the money during my next leave. There is no other news—I leave space for a beautiful description of landscape—it is quite pretty in a cow-like way, and smells of the stock-whip. I really think I would prefer England to staying here. But this may pass with the weather. Endless thunderstorms and drops of temperature—Brazil is the place to go to if you must—not here. Ach it makes me so homesick to think of you trotting about in Athens that I must stop. Love to Henry, and you—Eve is writing separately, probably with more intelligible news.

  Larry

  [March 1948]

  The British Council

  190 Lavalle,

  Buenos Ayres

  To Lawrence Clark Powell

  Dear Larry Powell,

  If I may trade a Larry against a Larry. I’m sorry I faded out on you so abruptly but I’ve been travelling like a maniac across this blasted pampas, lecturing in one place and another, until finally I have come to rest in Cordoba, “the Oxford of Argentina” as they call it, rather misguidedly I think. It’s a variation on a small Henry Miller town in the dust belt. The people are charming but zombies. The town is pleasant compared to anywhere else in Argentina—but give me Naples any day, even any hot day when the smell from the rotting fish is enough to put a philosopher out of countenance. On the whole I dislike Argentina heartily. It is empty, noisy, progressive, money-ridden—all the sins including those by Coca-Cola Inc. and Buick. But I could stand all of that if only the climate were not like a piece of wet meat laid across the nervous system. Life goes on in a muted sort of way—as when you press your hand on the piano strings and play. No concentration, no power of holding on to things: and yet they eat meat here as the staple instead of bread. You see a picnic party all eating loaf-sized pieces of beef washed down with red wine. Never bread. There should be enough raw power you’d think to think a single great thought—but it never comes. It ends in Coca-Cola, in Studebaker, in movie. The irony of lecturing about Shakespear in this ambience is something that perhaps only Shakespear would enjoy. I don’t. Meanwhile however I have a new volume of verse coming out from Fabers, and am halfway through a book about Rhodes—slow going I’m afraid. Also the Greek novel I translated. POPE JOAN is coming out soon in England, while CEFALÛ, another novel, has just been put out. In the U.S. it is called The Dark Labyrinth.

  Meanwhile several poet friends find themselves in America and tell me to see it before I go home. They say that some of the smaller universities might employ me for a two year spell to lecture. Do you know if this is so? I have no academic background beyond my books. I ran away to Europe when I shd have gone up to Cambridge. But sooner or later I must get near a library and finish my account of authorship in Elizabethan times: I’ve been some ten years taking notes on every aspect of writing then, and had planned at the end of this part of my contract to get sent home for a six month rest to finish it off: which I’ll do. But I suddenly thought when I got a letter that if I could go home via USA I might get a chance to visit Henry en route. Do you ever see him? I think he’s more or less settled at Big Sur now, and the state of Europe would be enough to keep anyone at home these days. I suppose the next war will break long before you have time to answer these jottings. Can you tell me anything about Giordano Bruno’s influence on the Elizabethans?

  I wonder if you have read Evelyn Waugh’s THE LOVED ONE, a devastating satire on the burial customs of Hollywood. It would amuse you I think. It’s the most macabre thing I’ve ever read—I can’t believe it is a true picture of what actually goes on, and yet it seems to be: life of the mortician in Hollywood—It’s certainly the best thing of its kind since Brave New World, and unlike most of his work it doesn’t play down to anyone, the English gentry or the Catholics or anyone. In its curious way I think it’s a masterpiece—the first since Vile Bodies. I’m afraid I must bring this letter to an abrupt end. Work.

  Yours

  Lawrence Durrell

  [June? 1948]

  The British Council

  190 Lavalle,

  Buenos Ayres

  To Mary Hadkinson

  Well, we have found a flat in Cordoba and a mutton-headed slavey and now await furniture from the British Council. But really Mary, Kenya! What an extraordinary thing to happen to you. Ah! but in a week you’ll feel you could scream with boredom as I do here and want to get back to the banditry—What a terrible picture you paint of it all—Incidentally you harangue me as if I were a communist which you know I’m not. I was a republican-Sophouliot, and I believed in REAL INTERVENTION, not this mealy mouthed disgraceful shambles we’ve created. O of course I know that Russia is to blame and that now we MUST fight to keep her out of Greece: but my Greek politics date from when we first went into the country. Now I’m out of date, I expect, the situation has been allowed to deteriorate. Ifs and Buts won’t cure it: nor will kings—though if it has got as bad as you say I now believe in keeping the King there, and sending 10,000 BRITISH AND AMERICAN Troops to clear up, build roads, etc. Incidentally 200,000 Greeks did quite well against the Italians and Germans. If you want to know why the Gk Army won’t fight ask the British Military Mission—But now it has all gone far beyond the situation I was fulminating over when we were last there. You choose the cures for it: but I still believe either policy RIGHT OR LEFT if wholeheartedly applied would have quieted Greece down’: it’s the neither norness that has done it: and this pathetic belief that Greeks are not natural bandits at heart—which I never believed. Read Napier’s despatches from Cephalonia. There was a man who knew what he was at. “If I went to Greece I would take a gallows, plenty of tarred
rope and a sufficiency of foreign troops.” Otherwise it’s a WASTE OF TIME, GET OUT, LEAVE THE BLOODY PLACE. It is not strategically important enough anyway for all this nerve-strain. Which is of course the last thing you or I really want—I mean personally. I still think I shall live there some time—perhaps after the next war—looks pretty imminent doesn’t it? I wonder why we don’t get it over now? Russia can’t be allowed to take over where Hitler left off—that’s obvious. Meanwhile—the Argentine—O dear, this boring tedious town. Food very good. Easy life, but the climate is desperately exacerbating—electrical storms four times a week—temperatures going up and down—One new delicacy as fine as anything the Chinese thought of—called Palmita. It’s the white heart of a small Brazilian palm tree, tastes like a mixture of oyster and asparagus—a lovely taste—yes, horses and cows, there is nothing else—We ride one and eat the other interminably. Sorry about Patmos—Yes, I will consider it as soon as I finish my 1/2 done Rhodes book—Mary, it’s so hard to write about Greece from here: one’s feelings don’t rise in this climate, the death-dew settles on one, one don’t nostalge enough. Even England is far better—But if I can raise a spark of marble-dust and blue nostalgia I will do Patmos. Another thing—reference-books! I need the British Museum. Meanwhile do you send all your pictures to VIVIAN RIDLER CARE OF CONTACT 24 MANCHESTER SQUARE LONDON, and offer him reportage will you? Don’t be shy now, nothing was ever done by shyness, forward into the breach. I’ve suggested to Tambi that RUNCIMAN might do a small Patmos book to go with your pics? POPE JOAN is due in October; that’s a marvellous book—What else? Cefalû is being done here in Spanish. Nothing else. Heat. Vapour-trails of cows on the pampas, desolation, Cunninghame Graham, green tea, big belly, much sleep, no exercise, force majeur, British Institute. Me one time lecture-man. Me givvy lecture Shakespear. Shakespear him velly fine big-speak sing song man, velly wise, velly pure, velly clean.