Yes, the price of that medicine is certainly prohibitive. Unfortunately I couldn’t read the prescription or judge the contents. I send you another tenner to keep the account square. I’ve started a new play—but there’s nothing enlivening in the atmosphere to set it floating so I imagine it will just bog down like the Rhodes book.
Best love
Larry
15 February [1951]
British Legation,
Belgrade
To Anne Ridler
Dear Anne,
A brief line to let you know that Eve is coming to London for a fortnight in order to scout around and see what she thinks about having the baby there; I’ve told her to drop you a line and perhaps when she comes to Oxford you’d be good enough to give her tea and tell her roughly what the form is. She is still a bit undecided about everything, so I thought the best thing was for her to have a looksee for herself—.
There is no news to give you much that you don’t see in the papers; ah yes! I have struck a great blow for poetry. While in Trieste I found, hiding in a garage, too big to be used, a perfectly gigantic car—a Horch: the German Rolls Royce. Eight cylinder, forty horse power. It used to belong to Goering and then to the general commanding the area. I bought it for a song and brought it back. It is lovely, silver-grey, sleek and with a funny old-fashioned look. It makes you feel like a film-star of the twenties. We call it Herman and are planning one mad summer of plutocracy in it—before the war breaks out. As a matter of fact you have often seen Herman in the newsreels—do you remember the entry into Prague etc. with one of the big shots standing up in the front and giving the boys the salute. That’s how I go to the office now. Everyone is speechless with rage, and few will speak to me these days. But the Belgrade police force is deeply respectful. There are two horns on the car, bass and tenor. I say that I’ve struck a blow for poetry because it is an ideal poet’s car: too large for any purpose except triumphal entries, and so expensive to run that only a lunatic would buy such a thing. I shall sell it to Tito when I leave. He already has one but not as nice as mine. Wish you could come out and admire it.
Eve will give you the rest of the news such as it is!
Love
Larry
[1952]
Belgrade
To Alan G. Thomas
Dear Alan,
… Meanwhile as usual I’m offon a tangent. Can you lay hands on Sappho and Nero by Arthur Weigall (Hutchinson): I owned both once and sold them back to you. Now Margaret Rawlings has made such a success of her public reading of Sappho (did you see The Times notice on the 22nd?) that she is raving mad for me to tailor the text to her character: she wants to try and get it produced properly. I want to work myself back into the proper frame of mind and these books, though trivial, give a very good account of everyday life. God! this place feels so far from the Mediterranean. Flat, land locked, inhabited by pigs undistinguishable from Serbs and Serbs vice versa: no olives: blank stupid geese: dust in summer and fog in winter. This week terrific snow. Leave your car outside the office for an hour and it disappears into a giant snow-drift. Icy wind from Tartary. And I’ve missed Greece thanks to a number of unlucky things—chiefly not being successful enough as a bum-sucker. It always came hard. But by dint of sweat I’ve somehow finished the Rhodes book and now I want to fix Sappho for M.R. and give her a chance to act the great lady on the stage.
I am also interested in a translation of Aeschylus (but not verse on any account: prose. Bohn if possible: Blackwell is full of Bohns.) Also, if you still have it, that copy of The Sexual Life of the Ancient Greeks (which I always see lying glumly in a corner when I visit the shop, price rising steadily). Have you any cheap histories of early Greece—between Hesiod and Sappho? And in my book-box isn’t there a Daily Life in Ancient Greece?
Best love to you both
Larry
[May 1952]
Belgrade
To Anne Ridler
Dear Anne,
… This country has withered me with its Utopian present (40% of the children have t.b.) and the even more Utopian future it promises for all of us. I don’t see how we are going to get through the next few years without a war. The only hope is that Russia fears the USA enough. Anyway, next week we are taking the car, tents etc. and hobbling down across infernal roads through Macedonia to Greece! Six weeks of blue. We are going to amble down past Olympus in search of a fishing village with a good cold spring, rent a peasant house and hire a village girl. Our tent we’ll pitch on a shady headland and olive glade near the sea. To spend the days sleeping and swimming—I hope I’ll get enough energy to do a spot of writing—I’m bursting with ideas for a new play, a new novel, a new book of poetry. Ah well: we shall see! We have done several camping trips along the Danube—fine landscape, noble, copious—but not my style of thing—too much of it for one thing. And the sky is thick as an eggshell. Sleepy, flat lush land stocked with geese, pigs and sleepy peasants. Hans Andersen goose-girl landscape. How suddenly it all changes when you come to the Vardar Valley and quicken into Greece. Base rock. Olives, wild flowers, sweet limestone with hidden rivers rolling underground. Me for Greece! But I don’t seem to be able to get a job there. You see, I know the language! “A serious defect in a diplomat!” Pfui
Sappho-Jane is great fun and awfully pretty now in her first puppy-dom. She adores camping and has her own little tent of light-blue campeen—vivid as a sky. She loves every moment and is tremendously well-behaved. Last week-end we camped at a ruined and deserted monastery in the Fruskazena called Ohopovo—sunk in a secret dell full of bees and cherry trees and a terrific thunderstorm came up over the Danube at dusk. Spurts of rain and livid sparks of lightning. I thought Sapphy would be scared but she slept through it all quite soundly. Is learning to walk now and can say three words.
17 August [1952]
Bled
To Anne Ridler
Dear Anne,
I was able to fly to Belgrade yesterday in the Embassy courier plane and collect my mail, with your letter amongst it. Many thanks for the Herculean labour, I hope the wretched book reads the better for it.1 I went completely stale on it—too many changes of scene and five years of unlucky postings. Not sure you’re right about cutting the second siege: there were some six or eight and I chose the two greatest as historical milestones, one for ancient, one for modern Rhodes: it was pretty perfunctory as it was. The trouble is that there is too much history, and I selected only what a visitor would like to know as rapidly as possible. The 2nd siege is really a great turning point, apart from being the greatest ever in modern times. Must it go? If you say so okay. I would rather have out other parts: the ghost stories which were bad though true. You see, modern Rhodes town is a living replica of what it was at the last siege, and the visitor simply will feel a frightful letdown: what about thinning it out into its barest essentials? Somehow I can’t help feeling that when you spend a week in Rhodes, using the book as a companion you’ll say “Hell! Not a word about the medieval town: and here it all is before my eyes!” And the map I want to reproduce, so carefully showing every site—such a lovely map! Think it over, will you? Imagine a book on Oxford which ignored the present-day buildings and only touched Anglo-Saxon remains, mostly not visible to the naked eye?
… We are meditating a small house in Cyprus with 50 olive trees as a corner for S-Jane, who is turning out very prettily—like a small dark partridge. I must say Bled is the only place in Yugoslavia I would think seriously of revisiting—a wooded lake set in thickly-thatched Alpine meadow-scenery, and girdled by Alps; every ten days of sunshine is punctuated by one day’s soft polishing rain which brings up the whole landscape like a chamois leather does a car. Cool and peaceful. Little villages in orchards, their balconies built deep against snow like house-martin’s nests: narrow openings with deep wooden balconies behind. From inside you look at the landscape framed as if it was a mirror. The mountains thickly studded with stars and pierced everywhere by hoarse icy torrents—Lovely—and th
e Slovenes are blond as buttercups and bloom warmly in the sunshine to gold and cinnamon. Lovely girls! And such flowers.
All the best to Vivian and thanks.
Larry
[1952]
Belgrade
To Alan G. Thomas
Dear Alan,
Just got back after a very tiring but wonderful visit to Greece; the wilder part; Chalcidice, the promontory which ends in Mount Athos. In a grove of giant plane-trees next the sea. A wonderful month really. Found an old woman to cook for us. Just swam and sat about eating fruit, thinking about nothing. Consequence is masses of work waiting for me here. We were offered an island for sixty pounds, called Olympiada. (Alexander’s mum was exiled there after poisoning someone—her husband?) It is 8 sea miles from Stavros: water, harbour, several hundred olive trees. If interested apply care of the Harbourmaster, Stavros. Nearest village I sea mile from the island is Olympia; rugged country.
Love to you both
Larry
[Enclosed in letter:]
LETTER TO ANAÏS NIN
Anaïs, on this smashed and rocking skyline,
Through vermin, cinders, teeth of houses,
We wake and walk like nerves unseparated,
Within the body of our parent, man.
Now unprotected by the skill of lies
Watch in the turbid glass of these canals
Reflected like conceits each others’ faces,
By the foul waters of an Egypt’s hope.
People who have reached the end of
themselves
In new beginnings verify their ends.
We move upon the measure of this hope
Where women and mattresses from
windows—
The discoloured tongues of pleasure, hang.
And the romance of open sores—the noble
savage
Squats by his waterwheel to worship
And only wakes to piss his barbs and fishhooks
Against the politicians’ promises.
Here all who find their sweet distraction in each other
By these canals go down in hope
On the green diagrams of land,
Choked with dead leaves and setting sails,
find only
Passion that by its own excess divides,
And foreign on the ash-heaps of a city,
Garments for children roaming like the
germs,
Fragments of umbrellas, cooking-pots,
The weather did not give them time to try.
A few of us here, a very few,
Are critics of these causes,
Besides the dead, within their snoods of
stone;
We move in the refreshment of an exile,
A temperature of plenty served by want
Subtracting nothing in the formal science
Of verse: the art of pain by words in
measure.
We ask only
A statement of the nature of misfortune,
That by the act of seeing and recording,
We may infect the root and touch the sin
That the new corn of Egypt springing
From the lean year in a time of triumph
Deliver the usurper from his coffin
And let all that might be begin.
4 November [1952]
Belgrade
To Theodore Stephanides
Dear Theo,
Excuse my total neglect for some time past but I have been working awfully hard as well as travelling up and down this bloody country with various nobs. The last was my boss Eden whose much advertised tour was publicity-managed by little me, which resulted in my getting nearly as much publicity as he did; and included an invitation to the White Palace to meet Mr. and Mrs. Tito, and also two dinner parties at Bled where I was able to examine the leaders of this country at close quarters. Seeing is believing they say.
… I’ve turned in my resignation and we are clearing off in December to Cyprus. I’ve asked George to look around for a plot or a tiny villa for us to buy. We prospected in Greece but really the economy is so chaotic and prices so fluctuating. What do you think of Cyprus yourself? Is it as pretty as other islands? Water? Grass? Where would you live if you had to live there.
I have no idea what I am going to do but I suppose I can write a book a month for two years as a start—you’d better send me your plot-book.
Meanwhile of course we are in awfully good heart, and feel about twenty years younger at the thought of quitting this place which we have now examined from north to south and found full of savage beauty but quite impossible to live in. There are two special places which no one has been to which I think are worth while but apart from that—travel is too hard on the tyres and the mind.
Love
Larry
[1952]
Belgrade
To Alan G. Thomas
Dear Alan,
Amusing myself doing a scenario of Cefalû for a U.S. Film company which appears to be interested in buying it! We leave for Cyprus on Xmas Day all being well. Two things I would like you to do for me I) Could you assemble the fragments of my Alexandria novel for me and post it to G. Wilkinson, (care of) Villa Christina Kyrenia, Cyprus. Mark it “To Await arrival.” It consists of I) little loose leaf notebook with a black buckram cover—some bright doodles in it 2) E.M. Forster’ s book on Alexandria, yellow cover, limited ed—signed by EMF 3) I think one or two white lined notebooks, official Foreign Office Stationery labelled OHMS. S.O. Book and marked Supplied for the public service. Written up a bit in pencil I think.
Then I would like you to cast a mental eye over my hoard of books, mentally box or bale them compute the weight, and ask your clerk the cost of shipping them to Limasol in Cyprus—Would you be an Angel? Apparently I can take anything into the place if I am settling, provided that it comes in within six months of my own arrival.
Write you from Trieste when I’m shot of this job-Ouf! Relief!
Love to you both
Larry
1 Reflections on a Marine Venus.
Cyprus
AT THE LAST moment, just as they were about to leave Belgrade, Eve, the strain having been too great for her, suffered a breakdown and was sent to hospital in England. Durrell, accompanied by his infant daughter, Sappho, travelled on to Cyprus alone. Here the release from official duties and the escape from the claustrophobic pressures of a communist country to the knock-about freedom of a largely Greek community caused his spirits to rise. He bought, rehabilitated, and furnished a charming old Turkish house near the abbey of Bellapaix, and his mother came out from England to keep house.
Many friends came to visit Bellapaix. Cyprus had become a cross-roads where philhellenes and travellers in the Middle East paused before or after their journeys or while writing their books. Many of these were old friends, either from pre-war days in Athens or Egypt in war-time: George Seferis, Lord Kinross, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Sir Harry Luke, Freya Stark, Rose Macaulay, and many others. And there were new friends both among the English colony and the Greek and Turkish inhabitants of the island.
But the dual expenses of supporting Eve in England and making a home in Cyprus ate into the savings on which Durrell had planned to live for “a golden year of freedom for writing,” and he was forced to take up teaching in a Greek school. “How did you manage to do your writing in the days when you worked in a bank?” he once asked T. S. Eliot. “In that precious hour, when you first get up in the morning, before the day comes crowding in.” Every morning Durrell rose at 4.30, and, fortified by black coffee, sat down to write by candle-light, then, as dawn broke, he drove to the school in Nicosia. “I’m pushing my book about Alexandria along literally sentence by sentence,” he wrote to Henry Miller. “Every waking moment is possessed by it so that by the weekend when I type out my scribbles I usually have about 1500 words.” Normally Durrell works on the typewriter from the very first, but in order not to disturb the sleeping child he
wrote much of Justine by hand, pausing from time to time to make cryptic drawings in coloured inks on the opposite page or on the covers of his notebooks.
For almost thirty years, while Durrell moved around the world, his papers and considerable collection of books have been stored in the loft of my house. From time to time, during his infrequent visits to England, he climbs up through the trap-door and spends a morning sorting his effects into order; and while he is abroad I send out the books which he needs for work in hand. On three occasions, when he has bought a house and put down roots, the whole collection has been posted out to him. This has always been the signal for violence, war, and revolution on an international scale. In 1941, soon after the parcels had arrived, Greece was invaded by the Germans, and a considerable collection of unpublished typescripts was used by the occupying forces to kindle fires. Charles Eldecott, my packer, had hardly despatched the last parcel to Cyprus when the crisis of ENOSIS flared up, and within a year or two the books were all back in Bournemouth once again. Naturally I felt some trepidation when, in 1957, we sent these, by now well-travelled, books out to Provence; sure enough trouble flared up in Algeria, and there were riots in France itself; fortunately the Algerians did not have sufficient power to invade the South of France, and Durrell has now remained in possession of his books for the longest consecutive period since the nineteen-thirties.
But to return to the situation in Cyprus; when the ENOSIS crisis had developed in violence and intensity Durrell was pressed, once again, into the service of the Crown. His fluent Greek, previous experience as a press officer and sympathetic understanding of the Greek character ensured his fitness for this difficult and often dangerous post. Among other activities he devoted a good deal of energy to reviving the Cyprus Review, pressing his friends Freya Stark, Sir Harry Luke, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Lord Kinross, and other writers on the Middle East, to contribute. As the bomb explosions and assassinations were stepped up, only to be matched by the execution of captured terrorists, Durrell’s position, torn between conflicting loyalties, became more and more excruciating. On the one hand he was an Englishman working in Government House, yet his sympathies as a philhellene and his devotion to the Greeks extended back for almost twenty years. Friendships were strained to breaking-point and beyond, fellow villagers were afraid to speak to him and it became dangerous to live in his house at Bellapaix. But amid all these difficulties and hazards he snatched time to work, generally at night, on his writing, and by 1956, when he left the island for good, Justine had been completed.
Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel Page 12