Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  Much love from us all

  Larry Durrell

  [December 1954]

  PIO. [Cyprus]

  To Freya Stark

  Dear Freya,

  Thank you very much for your letter. I am glad you liked the book—glad indeed that it arrived safely. Your offer of a little excerpt from your new book is simply thrilling and will be so useful from every point of view. I am planning to give the government a really good Middle Eastern review. It really does need something to project Cyprus and to give some standing to British culture generally. Quite a lot of people have now been roped in, Paddy [Leigh Fermor] and Patrick [Lord Kinross], Sir Harry [Luke], Lehmann and so on that you need not fear to appear in bad company, or tower high above a series of nonsense-reportages. By all means send us photos too if you have them. We primarily aim to be a picture magazine.…

  Sincerely

  Lawrence Durrell

  31 March 1955

  PIO. Nicosia, Cyprus

  To Freya Stark

  Dear Freya,

  KYRENIA, CYPRUS

  (water colour)

  Delightful to hear from you and to learn that a contribution is on the way. You have all been a tremendous help and the little Review is struggling towards a satisfying final form. It will be something to stand the government in good stead—something worth owning. The Governor is very pleased with it but the Administration tends to grumble and regard it as frivolous. But the troops are buying it out and incoming tourists like it. Austen is I believe in London designing clock-towers for Nuffield College and Marie is in India consorting with rajahs and elephants. Her father flew in for a week and gave some lectures. My young and very successful brother Gerald arrived this morning for a two month stay to finish a book and make a couple of television films in colour. He is bursting with energy and enthusiasm. Sapphy is as charming as ever and has grown up into a most graceful little creature with lots of allure and intelligence. I am still working terribly hard and hope by midsummer to have completely made over the Information Services including a new radio station better by far than Athens. Then a little rest of some sort I hope. The Bellapaix house is spring-cleaned and [we] are all spending our first week-end out there this week. Sir Harry L. is here, in fine heart and sends his love, as do we all. I shall worry Xiutas.

  Sincerely

  Larry

  [1955]

  PIO. Nicosia, Cyprus

  To Freya Stark

  My dear Freya,

  I have been working and flitting about so fast that there has not been a moment to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed the selection of the new book,4 parts of which we are so gratefully carrying in the Cyprus Review. At every turn one confronts the self-questionings of a mature spirit which has quarried its own experience in solitude and patience and charity. Nowadays writers’ reflections only reflect bright surfaces of the mind; your prose has the overtones you sometimes see in the sea at noon when the sun is at zenith—a second floor below the surface. There is little news I can give you from here. We lurch from one crisis to the next. What a hedgehog of a problem Cyprus is! Eve has taken Sapphy to England and I must say it is a bit desolate. My humble official residence feels as if there had been a recent death in it! I’m awfully tired too and feel a very dilapidated old dung-beetle poet treading away at the meagre resources of time at my disposal. Perhaps something magical will happen to me next year. The Bellapaix house is shut up, empty and dusty, and all the toys in the cellar including Lucia with the spastic knee. However one learns about the deeps and shallows of one’s own feelings this way so I feel that at the worst I’m gathering useful information.

  My best love to you

  Larry Durrell

  [1956]

  PIO. Nicosia, Cyprus

  To Alan G. Thomas

  Dear Alan,

  I’m tidying up here against my departure in August and I thought I’d send you a clutch of letters from writers and others worth keeping. Also the Mss. of Justine—the new novel that Faber’s seem quite excited about. It may amuse you to read the first draft. My plan is to get to France for a couple of years—don’t ask me how it’s to be done. But after this long spell of Balkan service—nearly seven years flat I feel I need Debarbarizing and re-gilding. Could you, if I come down, put me up for a few days in September. It would be fun to see you again. Did you get the disc?

  Love

  Larry

  1 For more than thirty years Durrell has contemplated writing a book on the Elizabethan writer. To this end he has collected reprints of scarce works by minor authors of the period—reprints which are now very hard to find, hence, “my beloved Eliza’s.”

  2 Charminster Road, suburb of Bournemouth.

  3 The Coast of Incense.

  4 A Book in the Making by Freya Stark appeared in the Cyprus Review June-July-August 1955.

  The Midi

  DURING THE LATTER part of his stay in Cyprus Durrell had met and fallen in love with Claude, a Frenchwoman from Alexandria, who was destined to become his third wife. Soon after his return to England in 1956 they set up house together, for some months, in a Dorset village a few miles from Shaftesbury. Here, living in a tiny cottage, Durrell wrote an account of his experiences in Cyprus: Bitter Lemons. This was written, of course, with the remarkable capacity for rendering Greek life and landscape which had characterized his two earlier island books, but the drama and topicality of the ENOSIS struggle brought it to the attention of a far wider public, while the tension between his own dual loyalties, and his capacity to see the struggle from both sides, gave an additional vitality to its structure.

  Durrell very rarely discusses his work while it is being written; when a book comes to fruition in his mind, he writes with exceptional speed, often for long hours at a stretch, and while this happens he is virtually incommunicado. I well remember the week-end after Bitter Lemons was finished. He came down to stay with us, and we forgathered with his mother and sister Margaret who were also living in Bournemouth at the time. He was relaxed and exhilarated by the relief of having finished the book, while at the same time he was full of both the tragedy and humour of life in Cyprus; after a few bottles of wine had been consumed, his conversation leapt and sparkled like the fountains of Versailles.

  Never really content when living away from “the wine-drinking countries which surround the Mediterranean basin,” Durrell and Claude set out to look for a home in the Midi. Financially he was at a low ebb, his savings all but exhausted, and with no immediate prospect of a job; but, although he did not know this at the time, the great turning-point of success in his life as a writer was at hand. Justine and Bitter Lemons (and the first volume of Antrobus stories, Esprit de Corps, and the adventure story for the young, White Eagles Over Serbia) were all published within the same year; Bitter Lemons was chosen by the Book Society and won the Duff Cooper Memorial Award, and, in the words of Faber’s advertisement, this was “Durrell’s annus mirabilis” By the end of 1957 he was world famous; within the next few years his books were translated into Arabic, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. He would never need to look for uncongenial employment again.

  The ambience of southern France provides a very sympathetic setting in which Durrell has made his home and put down what may well be lasting roots. Its shores are washed by the Mediterranean, it is a wine-growing country, and the local people have many of the qualities Durrell found so congenial in the Greeks; while, on the other hand, Paris can be reached by overnight train. And although, to a large extent, the coastal regions have been exploited, vulgarized, and in many ways made intolerable to the sensitive eye, only a few miles inland French provincial life continues undisturbed as it has for centuries.

  Durrell and Claude settled at Sommières, a small town some miles west of Nîmes. Here they rented a modest house; it was somewhat primitive, there was no lavatory, cooking and heating facilities were rudimentary; but these details did not disturb their happiness, and
they soon made many friends among the Sommièrois. The butcher’s wife, waiting until their backs were turned, would add pieces of meat to that which had been already weighed, and, as one would expect, there were soon a number of cronies among the regulars who frequented the riverside café; among them Louis Legrand and Marcel Ranage. During the Occupation Louis and Marcel had been members of the Resistance. In the last weeks of the war they had been captured, red-handed, by the Germans; and had expected to be put up against the nearest wall and shot. But the German officer contented himself with taking away their automatic weapons and telling them to beat it, remarking: “The war is virtually over now, and we can’t win. I don’t want any unnecessary blood on my hands.”

  In due course the annual reunion of ex-service men, class of 1936, was approaching. The organizers discovered that if they could swell their numbers by only a few more they would be entitled to a better dinner at the same price. They were of the same age as Durrell; indeed, had he been a Frenchman, he, too, would have been of “the class of 1936”; so they enrolled him as an honorary member. The dinner was a great success; in the ensuing conviviality Durrell put on a straw hat and sang Maurice Chevalieresque songs. By the end of the evening Louis was considerably the worse for wear and Durrell volunteered to see him home. This was made the more difficult because Louis had reached the stage at which he was unable to recognize his own house. He kept peering at one house after another. “That looks like it … no it isn’t.”

  The dinner had taken place during Durrell’s early days in Sommières, before the spread of his reputation as a writer. In later years when he appeared, from time to time, on television, facing some top interviewer, his confrères would turn to one another and say: “And to think, he’s an honorary member of the Sommières class of’36!”

  The landlord, wanting the house in Sommières for his own family, refused to renew the lease, so Durrell and Claude moved to another home, a mazet just outside Nîmes, which they rented with an option to buy. A mazet is a peasant cottage on a small piece of ground akin to a smallholding, generally owned by someone who has another home elsewhere, as a week-end cottage or summer house. The Mazet Michel is situated in an area which was rich in olive trees until, some years ago, they were all killed by a ferocious frost. The district immediately around looks rather stark, littered with millions of slabs of stone, gleaming in the sun, and dotted with thousands of apparently dead tree trunks. The house itself, a cottage of four or five rooms, stands on a little eminence. Durrell developed, as an afternoon occupation, the habit of building dry stone walls from the ample materials which lay around on all sides, until it almost seemed that the mazet lay within a fortified enceinte. Tiny green shoots began to sprout from the blackened and twisted carcases of the olive trees, whose will to live is, it seems, invincible. With increasing affluence the house was made more comfortable and attractive, a lavatory and a bathroom were installed indoors, while a deep cistern on the edge of the courtyard provided a pleasant plunge in hot weather.

  In the Midi Durrell wrote the three other parts of The Alexandria Quartet—Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea—the Antrobus stories and two more verse plays, An Irish Faustus and Acte. In 1961 Sappho was produced at the Edinburgh Festival with Margaret Rawlings in the title-role; she had long admired the play and took the leading part in a rehearsed reading as early as 1952. Meanwhile, Gustaf Gründgens produced all three verse plays at Hamburg, to much greater acclaim; Elizabeth Flickenschildt taking the title-role in Sappho, 1959, and Anna Maria Gorvin appearing in Acte, 1961.

  Nothing, it seems, succeeds like success, and while the unrecognized author is left to starve, offers of highly-paid commissions are thrust from all sides upon the author who has already achieved fame and fortune. Among other articles, broadcasts, television appearances, and so forth, Durrell wrote the travel pieces for Holiday Magazine which are reprinted in this book.

  Old friends called as they passed that way, among them Sir Walter Smart, who, forced to leave Egypt, to which he had retired at the end of his distinguished career in the Foreign Service, now considered settling nearby, and wrote enquiring about possibilities. Henry Miller spent a summer, together with his wife and family, at Sommieres. And there was a new friend, Richard Aldington.

  Durrell had admired Aldington’s writings from early days, and I well remember the enthusiasm with which we both read All Men Are Enemies, The Colonel’s Daughter, and A Dream in the Luxembourg. Once, as a young man, before the war, Durrell had written to the maître about some point which I have now forgotten and received a courteous reply. Now neglected, Aldington was living at Montpellier, while his daughter Catha was studying at the University of Aix. Aldingtons power as a creative writer had deserted him in later life and he was writing no more books which could rank with The Colonel’s Daughter; but he remained an able man of letters capable of turning out well-written pieces of craftsmanship, a Life of Wellington, translations, anthologies, and so forth. However, he had become very embittered and this estranged many readers who should have been his natural sympathizers. The climax came with two savage books attacking Norman Douglas and T. E. Lawrence, both of whom have a considerable body of admirers. I was in the new book trade at the time, and remember subscribing these books among the enthusiasts before publication, only to have them hurled back at me by enraged devotees. There was T. E. Lawrence, the intellectual and archaeologist, who had shown up the 1914 professional soldiers as the pack of bungling amateurs, which, by and large, they were. Aldington himself had written one of the best accounts of the disillusion which came upon the young men who had volunteered in 1914; and here he was, blasting away as if he were a senior member of the Cavalry Club. After that no publisher risked giving him a commission, and the backwash affected the sale of his earlier books, however good.

  Durrell gave to Aldington a warmth of friendship which only those who know him well can appreciate. His admiration for Aldington’s creative work remained undimmed. Now that publishers on all sides were badgering him, almost daily, to write for them, he spent endless time and energy in the effort to place Aldington’s work instead. It is only just to add that Aldington’s bitterness was, to a large extent, an outward shell. The warm, deeply cultured man remained at the core. One of the happiest experiences of his last years was the Christmas that he spent with Durrell and Claude at the mazet. He wrote his last letter to Durrell in 1962 and walked out to post it. By a coincidence Durrell was reading this letter when the news came over the telephone that Aldington had died.

  Another good friend that Durrell made at this time is F.-J. Temple, Director of the RDF radio and television station at Montpellier. He supervised the production of two of Durrell’s privately printed pieces: Beccafico, a vignette of life in Cyprus, and the surrealist Down the Styx, adding translations into French by himself. These were printed in limited editions at Montpellier and are both reprinted here.

  During the summer holidays there were gatherings of children; Sappho, and sometimes Pinkie, joining Claude’s children by her first husband, Diana and Barry. And the party was even larger the year that Henry Miller’s children, Tony and Valentin, were there as well. They bathed in the river at Sommières, or all drove in convoy to the sea at Stes. Maries. On some days they explored the Camargue and on others they watched bullfights in the Roman arena at Nîmes. In 1964 the annual reunion took place in Corfu, Durrell and Claude going out first to establish headquarters in a villa at Paleocastrizza. This was the first time that Durrell had been in the island since 1939 and there were many reunions with old friends, as described in his essay Oil for the Saint.

  The little mazet was becoming overcrowded as the children grew well into their teens and possessions accumulated; so in 1966 Durrell and Claude moved into a new home in Sommières. This is a quite large nineteenth-century house, somewhat mysterious and romantic, hidden behind high walls, with a conservatory and an overgrown garden. Diana Menuhin described it as exactly the kind of house one would imagine as belonging to Madame Bov
ary. After considerable re-decoration and the installation of central heating they moved in.

  Ella and I were invited for the first Christmas in the new home. Claude wrote a lively and enthusiastic letter, urging us, as we were coming so far, to stay longer; there was the excitement of the new house, many places which we had not seen to explore, and so forth. Then on December 9 came an express letter from Durrell. Arrangements would have to be cancelled; Claude had not been too well for some time, nothing very serious, but the local doctors could not pin it down and they were going to consult a specialist in Geneva. A little later Durrell wrote again from Geneva: the trouble had been identified, the treatment would be a bit tedious and last for three weeks, however there was no need to worry. He returned to Sommières in order to collect various things which Claude needed for the longer stay. When he got back to Geneva there were long faces; Claude was not reacting to the antibiotics. On New Year’s Day, 1967, she died.