Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  Larry.

  [1948]

  Argentina

  To Mary Hadkinson

  Mary,

  This brief scrawl may reach you before you leave—it’s just to acknowledge your last note with the cracker mottos from St. Winifred’s. I don’t know if Kenya’s like this place—if it is, I give you six months! By the way, look out for an astonishing woman writer living there in great secrecy. Her real name is The Baroness Blixen and she writes extraordinary short stories under the name Isak Dinesen. Several of her books have been done in U.S.A.—the latest Winter Tales—no, Seven Gothic Tales are excellent in their genre. Nobody knows anything about her. She must be queer to live in Kenya—and she a Dane!

  … We have just travelled 300 miles thru a wall of yellow dust to TUCUMAN to lecture, past a dead salt lake which is worse than Sodom and Gomorrah to look at, thru a landscape so flat and barren and dusty that it was really a nightmare. Tomorrow I fly to Mendoza—at the foot of the fucking Andes to perform the same office—gabble, gabble, gabble. Next to Rosario—in the heart of the dust-bowl ugh! We pant for air. Here it is cold bitterly cold, but dusty and windy. Imagine an Egyptian Khamseen for 4 winter months, not a drop of rain, and freezing point! The air is so dry that you wake with a sore throat and a skin like a rhino—England will be all golden balm after this. Let it rain! Let it snow! Let it freeze! I have half a book about Rhodes written—very bad. Must be redone. No other plans or projects except a book, a play, a film, a poem, climate permitting.

  All the best to you. Learn to ride in Kenya. It’s wonderful for the Oedipus Complex—and shoot big game. Have just seen Gregory Peck doing it with great charm.

  Love—Larry D.

  Yugoslavia

  [1949]

  British Legation,

  Belgrade

  To Theodore Stephanides

  Theo,

  Just a brief line to tell you we’ve arrived safely. Conditions are rather gloomy here—almost mid-war conditions, overcrowding, poverty: As for Communism—my dear Theodore a short visit here is enough to make one decide that Capitalism is worth fighting for. Black as it may be, with all its bloodstains, it is less gloomy and arid and hopeless than this inert and ghastly police state. Our own situation however will not, thank goodness, be as gloomy as that of the Yugoslavs—as soon as we find a house to live in, and as soon as our little car arrives from England. Diplomats live well everywhere as a rule—and here they suffer only from claustrophobia. There will be a chance of some shooting this winter and perhaps a trip to Salonika by car. But for the rest we are marooned in a large hotel—together with the rest of the press and fragments of diplomatic missions. I wonder if you could send us a heap of Vitamin tablets (ABCD) to keep our flagging spirits up. The Summer is hot—hot as Cairo; and Belgrade lies at the confluence of two damnably dirty and moist rivers. I hope to crack down on the Rhodes book some time this year. Any news of your book?

  Love

  Larry

  [1949]

  British Embassy,

  Belgrade

  To Theodore Stephanides

  Dear Theodore,

  Just a brief line to thank you for the Vitamin tablets which arrived yesterday and which I am dishing out to our avitaminosed staff. I’ve also started to take them myself experimentally as I was beginning to suffer from insomnia and I think they are doing me a certain amount of good.

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  There is little news except that what I have seen here has turned me firmly reactionary and Tory: the blank dead end which labour leads towards seems to be this machine state, with its censored press, its long marching columns of political prisoners guarded by tommy guns. Philistinism, puritanism and cruelty. Luckily the whole edifice has begun to crumble, and one has the pleasurable job of aiding and abetting this blockheaded people to demolish their own ideological Palace of Pleasures.

  Tomorrow we move into a house and perhaps there’ll be a chance to do a little work later on this year. But the climate is foul.

  Love

  Larry

  21 September [1949]

  British Legation,

  Belgrade

  To Anne Ridler

  Dear Anne,

  We have just come jolting back from the Zagreb fair and found your letter. Letters are very welcome behind the curtain. One almost forgets in the Sabbatarian gloom of a Communist country what life in the west is like. Never mind. Our car is supposed to be on the way and we shall soon start travelling madly. We have a trip laid on to Salonika in October though I don’t know really whether to take Eve down with me coz we have to traverse Yugoslav Macedonia to get there and things down there are obscure and full of portent. However we’ll see. Zagreb was a bit of a rest—a lovely little Austrian university town with good walking hills round it, and forty miles to the north some really lovely lush landscape with wide-eyed brightly-dressed peasants; gay jolly and sensual after the central European pattern. The whole of the corpse diplomatic was taken up to Zagreb in a special train. It was a scene from a Waugh novel. The Nederlands chargé d’affaires slightly tipsy on the platform; the ministers shaking hands and cooing like doves; the Argentine Ambassador in a frock-coat got locked out of his pull-man and ran shrieking beside the train for a hundred yards, paced by a couple of taciturn guards with skeleton keys, each leaping up in turn and trying to open the door. The wife of the Brazilian Ambassador got locked in the lavatory and had to be set free with axes and dosed with peppermint. The coaches which conveyed the corpse diplomatic had been specially made for the occasion by the Yugoslav Light Industry. It was a compliment to us that we should be the first to try them: or was it something else? At all events the lavatory didn’t work and the whole superstructure rocked so much that the Egyptian Minister’ s wife was thrown out of her bunk and spent the night on her knees invoking Allah. I must say there were several occasions on which I was sure we were going over. As the lights fused almost from the beginning we passed the night hours in anxious darkness roaring across the Croatian plain in a trail of sparks from an Emett-like engine. At Zagreb a red carpet had been laid down and we dawdled out to our cars under the clickety click of news cameras. Luggage was lost. Porters and flunkeys fought and cursed. We shot our cuffs and drove off to our hotels. The fair was most interesting and very well done; there was a prototype of almost everything from refrigerators to motor-bikes on show—none have so far been seen outside the fair: certainly none are for sale anywhere. But the impression created was that Yugoslav light industry was running America a close second. Enormous crocodile like speeches were made; we overate and overdrank; and then escaped to spend two days making friends and touring the surrounding landscape with my number two in Zagreb. Little Dorian Cooke was with us, on his first visit for years and we had some pleasant boozing in various taverns and met a number of his friends. All prices had been halved for the duration of the fair so that one had the very faintest illusion of being back somewhere—in the Tyrol say before the war. There is no other news of any weight that you won’t get in your morning press; the country is comparatively calm—the journalists think ominously. We don’t think. Not paid to. We answer telephones and wait for leave. Glad to appear in your appendix. I think some of the short poems in the last book were as good as anything I could ever do—Christ in Brazil and Pomona de Maillol etc. but you are the chooser. No news of Sappho or the apologie for poetry yet. Love to V and the children.

  Larry

  [1949]

  British Legation,

  Belgrade

  To Anne Ridler

  Dear Anne,

  A brief note from a troubled spot to wonder how you are and what you are writing—despite the patient motherhood 5 year plan. We have been travelling rather hard all this past week. The hardest trip was to Sarajevo—crossing the dusty plain and bumbling over the Zvornik bridge to climb the stone ladder into Bosnia. You would love the upland country—lovely smooth grassy slopes and pine-trembling mountain peaks all round. Cold air. And the Bosnian peasan
ts in their dramatic costume—can you imagine the quaintness of Tyrolean costume stabbed here and there with an oriental touch, giving a rude masculinity to it. A whole day you crash across this great alpine plateau and towards evening the road begins to fall, to hesitate, to follow water like a hound through two beetling ravines. Torrents rushing, eagles flying. You come around a shoulder of rock and—guess what? A Turkish town—pure 1795. Soft pearl bulbs of minarets and trellised houses built up the steep sides of the mountains above a tinkling river that jingles through the town to chime with the clink of stirrup-irons and the soft blackish chatter of the veiled Turkish women. All the houses in the Turkish quarter have musharabaya trellis windows for purdah-ed girls. The cafés are fenced in with coloured wooden trellis. The older houses look like charming birdcages hung about the hills. The whole town gives the air of being some late 19th century drawing by Lear, say. Mosques, minarets, fezes—holding the gorgeous East in fee while the river cools the air, splashing through the town and the bridge on which whatsis-name was assassinated (now called the People’s Bridge) stands gracefully but ominously where it has stood for some 80 years. After this filthy dank capital with its cloddish inhabitants Sarajevo was a treat. One was back in Jannina or some town in Epirus again. At least I was. It is by far the best trip we’ve done to date (in a borrowed jeep) and I was sorry to return here. Northward the great flat Hungarian plain stretches away interminably through its ugly villages—to some final oblivion. But the hills are west and south—and how one longs for them in Belgrade.

  As you probably know we are enjoying a lovely little crisis whose end is as yet unforeseen. I have been trying to give London the impression that the whole thing is my doing. I somehow don’t think they believe me. Meanwhile however, not a line of poetry or prose—O Lord. I can’t work here.

  Love to Vivian

  Larry

  10 May 1950

  Belgrade

  To Theodore Stephanides

  Dear Theodore,

  A line by this bag to thank you most warmly for the medicaments which arrived safely and for which I enclose a cheque. Would you be an angel and send me the prescription mentioned on this form. It is for another sufferer—I think the TB rate must be round 80% here. A few gifts of this kind are such a godsend to the wretched people who are starved and terrorized almost to death.… And Yugoslav security is so tight, and friendship with foreigners so discouraged, that we cannot make friends normally without great difficulty. We are so looking forward to leaving for Ischia. It would double the pleasure to see you again with Zarian. Surely you can conquer your travel phobia? Xan Fielding is going to meet us in Naples. It should be enormous fun really and give me the rest I need. No chance of doing any work here—though I must say it is the most interesting assignment I’ve had so far from the purely political point of view—I shouldn’t be surprised if it all piles up in a new Spanish war this summer. However, better than peaceful Argentina much.

  Much love to you from us both.

  Larry

  [June 1950]

  Forio d’Ischia, Ischia

  To Anne Ridler

  Dear Anne, I have been owing you a letter

  From furrin parts—from Ischia,

  where better

  To spin the odd iambic in your name

  And tell you something of this island’s fame?

  We came originally here to see

  A character from Prospero called C.

  (It stands for Constant) Zarian,

  The wild and roguish literary man

  Who with his painter wife lives on this

  island,

  A life romantic as one could in … Thailand.

  Together we have tasted every wine,

  Most of the girls (I mean the Muses Nine)

  And some small favours accident affords

  To such poor chaps as we—as deal in words.

  Sure provender of every sort’s to hand

  For us old roués of the writing brand—

  The island is decidedly volcanic,

  Quite different to Greece though quite as

  “panic,”

  The soft blue vapour hanging over the bay

  Gives tones of blue you don’t see every day

  While the volcanic rock is all contorted

  As if an island goddess had aborted:

  But limestones soften into sparkling bays

  And geysers everywhere contribute haze,

  So soft and sweet and indolent it lies

  Under its Naples’ picture-postcard skies

  They’ve lodged us in a wine-press high

  On a lighthouse point—a window in the sky

  Hidden in vineyards where the sunburnt

  girls

  Shout blithe as parrots in their darkling

  curls,

  Sing bits of opera at me all day

  With mad Italian generosity.

  So far, however, no real offers of marriage.

  If Eve weren’t here I would have had a bar-

  rage (Sorry!)

  Despite advancing years and stoop and

  paunch—

  You get here by a super motor-launch

  Crowded with chattering girls from Naples O

  Such animation such colossal brio

  It makes one feel much younger just to see,

  At least so Zarian says. (He’s sixty-three)

  He scales a mountain like a wild chamois

  Despite a certain—bulk—avoirdupois

  And swears Per Baccho loud as any peasant:

  Together we’ve enjoyed a very pleasant

  Month of mad cookery and writing talk,

  Such food, such wine—a wonder we can

  walk.

  The Master with his silver flying hair

  Cooks like a saint and eats like a Corsair,

  In octopus and scampi and red mullet,

  In hen and hare and cuttlefish and pullet

  We’ve eaten round through past and

  present tense

  Right through the heart of time’s

  circumference,

  And now, a week from leaving, in

  cross-section,

  I look like—what? Old Mercator’s

  Projection

  That used to hang upon the schoolroom wall

  And puzzle us when we were very small.

  Puzzle no more—as Groddeck says: “The

  wish”

  —But what imports his counsel when a dish

  Floating in some extraordinary dressing

  Comes to the table? None of us needs

  pressing.

  This then the sum of all our news is,

  Apart from gastronomic self-abuses,

  We’ve bathed and boated and collected

  pumice,

  Lain on the beach sunbandaged as black

  mummies,

  Tasted the salt good Mediterranean blue

  Which is as much as we had hoped to do.

  Good company, good eating and the sun—

  The indulgent patron of this island home

  Have all contributed to make the spell

  Unbreakable—so leaving will be hell.

  Of literary news there is a lot.

  Ischia it seems has fast become The Spot

  Capri is finished, everyone is here,

  Poets and painters too from all the nations,

  And some of curious sexual persuasions

  Among the giants Auden, the great peer

  Of all us little moderns, he’s acquired

  A villa for himself and lives retired;

  We’ve met the great man more than once or

  twice,

  Eve is indifferent; I thought him nice.

  A place for exiled writers hating fuss

  This seems; why in a little country bus

  Jogging to Panza yesterday who should I see

  A man I’m sure you reverence as much as

  me,

  Old Norman Douglas, worn as
if by sea

  Like some old whorled and rubbed-out

  ocean shell

  Still holding shape and life and living well;

  Eyes a Homeric blue and hands quite firm,

  An air of indefinable ancient charm

  Like some old Roman talisman’s patina

  His Italian pure and deft—I’ve heard none

  finer.

  But look—the bottom of my second page.

  To read this all will take you quite an age;

  Time to sign off and tell you we are well

  Beneath the ocean-swelling spell

  Of mare nostrum; how’s life treating you?

  How is the poetry, housework, knitting,

  stew?

  It is high time for me to take my leave,

  And wish you everything from Larry and

  Eve.

  Friday, [Winter 1950/51]

  Belgrade

  To Theodore Stephanides

  Dear Theo,

  Yes, it must seem churlish on my part to send you nothing but prescriptions—I’m sorry to be so Keatsian: but you must think of me as someone who is serving a 3 year sentence in Pentonville, from whom you get little news but many demands upon your attention. Nor would you blame me if you could see the amount of oakum I have to pick—journalists’ brains are lined with oakum—and I have to wine and dine them until my own brains are beginning to resemble theirs. Such news as there is Eve will already have given you. For the rest, we are sinking slowly into the frozen mush of a Central European winter—It is very gloomy I find. And the inhabitants of this benighted country are facing starvation—which sets our appetites on edge, living as we are in the lap of a positively pre-war luxury. Our own little domain (the internal politics of this place) competes in dreariness with the landscape, the dirty streets, the shaggy, forlorn crowds. To change into a dinnerjacket and motor to a reception where the combed and scented ladies of the Diplomatic corpse (sic) await, is to experience the pleasures of Babylon (the surfeit of which is hellish). Eve is struggling with the first signs of a child which she proposes to produce sometime in late spring. She is spending a few days in Zagreb where the air is better than it is here, and I ‘ve just done the long drive up and back to carry her there. No Russians in sight as yet on the autoput—and no flying saucers neither. Don’t know why it is that we dislike most of the countries we get sent to—never happy unless we are in Greece.