Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  This is perhaps why we chose Corfu to live in: the island is a sort of ante-room to Aegean Greece with its smoke-grey bare volcanic islands like turtlebacks on the water. Corfu is all Venetian green and spoiled by the sun. Its richness enervates. Its valleys are painted out boldly in heavy brush-strokes of yellow and red, the Judas trees line the dusty-roads in terrific purple explosions. Everywhere you go you can lie down on grass. Even the rocky northern end is rich in mineral springs: even the bare rock here is fruitful of water.

  About the town one should use the past tense. Angular Venetian architecture, arcades, colonnades, shutters—peeling shutters holding back the sunlight, which bounds off the bay and strikes upwards in a terrific dazzle. You lie in bed and see the sea spangling the cracked Venetian ceilings with their scrolls and cherubs. There are other curiosities. The remains of a Venetian aristocracy living in overgrown baronial mansions deep in the country, surrounded by cypresses; a patron saint who lay (a cured mummy) in a silver casket in the church of his name, and who performed terrific miracles; festivals, dances, olive-pickings, holidays, storms, births, deaths, and magnificent murders. And outside everything beyond the charm of accidents and persons, the hallow-blue rim of the world pressing in on the outside edge of the crystal.

  We took a fisherman’s house built on the bare craggy northern point of the island, almost in Albania. The people were sailors and the village small. The whole landscape was metamorphic rock—great layers of laminated stone on which clung precarious symbols like the olive and cypress, myrtle and arbutus, persisting like anachronisms in this world of bareness. We built a top-storey to the house costing £43 10s, a balcony overlooking the deep curve of the bay, where we could gaze, like Jesus, on the cities, over the sloping verdant lowlands in their haze. To sit by the bare rocky border of the sea and gaze into the land of milk and honey was ideal. I had work to do; and my wife had a lot to think about.

  Here we lived—though “live” as a word takes an unfair advantage of the steady dropping away of time. Days dropped away from us like pebbles from the walls of a deep well. I wrote a good deal, burned a good deal, corrected a good deal, and went on writing.

  Our skin became slowly black, and our hair coarse with salt and very bleached. We began to learn Greek—to discover the rotation of the fruits—white and red hill-cherries, prickly pears, grapes, tangerines. We marked off a section of the bare white rock, walled it in, had some soil transported, and declared it a garden. The peace of those evenings on the balcony before the lighting of the lamps was something we shall never discover again—the stillness of objects reflected in the mirror of the bay; a mirror ever so slightly swinging, its surface un-grazed by the fishes moving about its lower floors. It was the kind of hush you get in a Chinese water-colour. The darkness leaked in over it all without disturbing anything; the proportions all remaining the same but the light changing. At last the sea would rise up to meet the sky and they would merge into a single warm veil. Everywhere you smelt the sage bruised by the feet of the sheep on the mountainside.

  The invisible shepherd would lie under an arbutus and start playing his pipe. Across the bay would slide the smooth, icy notes of the flute; little liquid flourishes, and sleepy quibbles. Sitting on the balcony wrapped by the airs, we would listen without speaking. Presently the moon appeared—not the white, pulpy spectre of a moon that you see in Egypt—but a Greek moon friendly, not incalculable or chilling; like the flash of swimmer’s arms out in the sea. Immediately the water was transformed into a tract of silver coins; a grampus puffed and was still; the flute stopped its meditations. We walked in our bare feet through the dark rooms, feeling the cool tiles under us, and down on to the rock. In that enormous silence we walked into the water, so as not to splash, and swam out into the silver bar. The black cutter lay motionless on the glaze. We touched the deck and found the wood still warm from the sun—like a human body almost. We didn’t speak, because a voice on that water sounded unearthly. We swam till we were tired and then came back to the white rock and wrapped ourselves in towels and ate grapes. Perhaps we walked for a while on the hillside in the moonlight under the cypresses.

  It is astonishing how little of the past can be recaptured in words. I have been trying for a year to rebuild that white house by the water’s edge in a book; the taste of the little yellow grapes—a particularity of the island—the private and forgotten cove under the red shrine of St. Arsenius where Dorothy and Veronica, two ballet-dancers, invented a water ballet by moonlight; the cool white rooms with my wife’s lazy pleasant paintings of our peasant friends looking at us from every wall; the little black boat riding at anchor outside the window, its masts grazing the balcony.

  The day war was declared we stood on that balcony in a green rain falling straight down out of heaven on to the glassy floor of the lagoon; we were destroying papers, drawings, packing books. We were still inside the dark crystal, as yet unconscious of our separation. We refused to read the omens.

  Last April as I lay in pitch darkness on the packed deck of a caique as we nosed past Matapan towards Crete, I thought back to that balcony in Corcyra, that green rain in the shadow of the Albanian hills. I remembered it all with a regret so deep that it did not stir the emotions; seen through the transforming lens of memory the past seemed so enchanted that any regret would have been unworthy of it. We never ever speak of it any more, having escaped. Time has done its stuff, the house is in ruins, the little black cutter smashed. I think only the shrine with the three cypresses and the tiny rock pool where we bathed is still left. How can these few hastily written words ever recreate more than a fraction of it?

  Panic Spring

  Published by Faber and Faber, 1937.

  THE SETTING FOR Durrell’s second novel is an imaginary Ionian island, Mavrodaphne, owned by Kostas Rumanades, an immensely wealthy Greek who, from the modest beginnings of his father’s currant business, has built himself up into a merchant and financier of international power and importance. Deprived of friendship by the ruthless nature of his career, for even his wife has deserted him, he finds it lonely at the top. So, in order to secure company and conversation, he has fitted up a number of villas, scattered about the island, which he places at the disposal of any guests who show some sign of originality and character.

  A modest boat brings supplies of all kinds from the mainland, and its captain, Christ by name, is commissioned to watch out for congenial travellers likely to provide Rumanades with good company and bring them to Mavrodaphne. As the novel opens, Marlowe, an English schoolmaster, is stranded at Brindisi by the Greek revolution; bored, after a few days of close contact with his compatriots in the hotel, he seeks refuge in a dockside wine shop. Here he is found by Christ who offers to take him to Greece.

  On arrival at Mavrodaphne Marlowe meets members of the colony, guests of Rumanades; Fonvisin, a Russian doctor, refugee from Bolshevism, Francis, an English girl, a painter, who is supposed by her employers to be combing the Middle East for textile designs, and two young Englishmen, Walsh, who supports himself by writing jazz songs, and Gordon who has independent means. In due course Marlowe meets the great man himself, and is offered a villa.

  Nothing of great moment occurs; Rumanades entertains them all at his luxurious villa, gives concerts by means of his E.M.G. gramophone and a firework display in honour of the local saint. He starts to repair the church and commissions Francis to decorate it with frescoes. There is a great deal of conversation and longish flashbacks depict the earlier history of Marlowe, Francis, and Walsh. Towards the end of the book a great storm rages, during which Rumanades dies, and as it closes the characters are about to leave the island and go their several ways.

  Walsh, the reader will remember, was the leading character in Pied Piper of Lovers, and both Gordon and Ruth also appear therein; indeed, the chapter entitled “Walsh” might well have served as a coda or small sequel to that novel. It is interesting to observe that, as a young man, twenty years before the publication of Justine, Durrell
was already experimenting with the exercise of writing at two levels of time.

  Chapter Three: Rumanades

  The Ritual of the Fireworks, as it was called, had been Rumanades’ own idea.

  In the old days, the annual church procession in honour of the patron saint, led by the village priest and two senile deputy-acolytes recruited from the monastery on the top of Leucothea (of which they were the sole inhabitants), had been enough to satisfy his national and personal sense of honour. But with the arrival of foreigners he had begun to feel that something more was demanded of him; something more in the way of entertainment which would reflect favourably not only upon himself as the owner of the island, but also upon the patron saint. Hence the fireworks.

  More than this (since any fool could buy a box of fireworks and let them off on the beach for the entertainment of foreigners), it was necessary and fitting that the whole business should receive, as it were, ecclesiastical sanction. It was the Punctilio, the Large Gesture, that the old man was after.

  The village priest was asked if, before the ceremony, he would be good enough to give a short address, offer up a brief prayer—in short, indicate in some way that a definite connection existed between the bona-fide ecclesiastical ceremonies and this informal one. And here was the rub.

  The priest, who was conscientious, crawled up the precipices leading to Leucothea on his hands and knees, and was hauled up the sixty-foot cliff-face fronting the monastery, in a basket to which a rope was attached; which itself was attached to an antiquated windlass propelled by the two senile, perspiring, verminous old gentlemen who were his acolytes in times of ceremony. A grave conference was held; the priest wondering all the time whether he would live to announce its results to Rumanades.

  The two monks, who were jealous at being excluded from the invitation (this was a grave tactical blunder on the part of the old man), spent the whole day arguing the matter backwards and forwards, stopping for a glass of wine and a rest at five-minute intervals, during which the question was pondered with a grave silence.

  “Let us not be in a hurry,” one of the old men kept repeating. “We must consider the question from every angle.” With the air of hardened medieval Sorbonnières they settled down to resolve the tangle of opinion with a wealth of dialectic that did them considerable credit, when it is remembered that neither could read nor write. At sunset, when the priest was finally deposited with a crash at the foot of the cliff, they were still at it, primed with wine, and really grateful to have something which they could discuss for an indefinite period of time. Looking up indignantly, he caught sight of one of them leaning over the terrifying drop, waving genially at him with one hand and unsteadily clawing his vast beard with the other. As he stumbled down through the dusty woods he caught the sound of an aged voice blithering: “We must not be in a hurry. We must consider it from every angle.”

  That night he presented himself at the Villa Pothetos, and informed Rumanades that the procedure demanded of him would not be seemly in the eyes of either God or man. By “man” he implied the two garrulous anatomies he had left behind on the cliff-top; God, even after twenty years of diligent search, still withheld a single clue to His identity.

  Rumanades sighed, raised his eyes, and drummed his long fingers on the glossy wood of his desk. He would have liked to accomplish the business with tact and diplomacy, but in the face of refusal so blank he felt called upon to exert what pressure he could still apply.

  The church, he said, after a long and stealthy silence, was in a very bad state of repair. The priest agreed. There were holes in the walls, the damp had rotted the painting off the walls, and the woodwork of the altar was rotten. The priest agreed. Did he (the priest) think it was fitting for services to be held for the glorification of God in a temple which was only distinguishable from a stable by the bleached cross on its door? At this point the priest opened his mouth to speak, but the old man with a gesture silenced him and continued quietly. Did he (the priest) not realize that they could be of great use to each other, and between them assist in the general advancement of worship, to the glory of the patron saint and all concerned? The priest knew he was beaten.

  In the silence that followed, Rumanades scrutinized him closely, from the top of his grubby stove-pipe hat, to the uneasy black shoes that peeped nervously out from time to time under the soutane. Then meaningly he said: “Would it not be to the glory of us all if I were to restore the church?”

  He knew only too well that the priest slept on a straw mattress behind the damp altar: and that he suffered from rheumatism; that another winter in the dank, unprotected barn was more than even the most practised ascetic would stand. Accordingly, he drummed away at the table-top and smiled: and called for a bottle of wine to seal the pact.

  And it was so.

  Chapter Four: Phaon

  There are moments in the intercourse between men, when qualities of ease, silence, content become, not the jealous property of one person, but the common pool of all; and it was in such a silence that the three of them, Marlowe, Gordon, and Walsh, set out to walk down the road to the bay. Food (and Gordon’s cooking was really excellent) had put new life into them. They lounged down towards the beach, lazy and comfortable in knowledge of their companionship, talking triviality with the zest of veterans in friendship.

  In the electric hush of twilight, which preceded positive darkness and followed the quenching of the sun, the highroad had become peopled with peasants from the mountain villages who had come down to watch the fireworks. The throb of donkeys’ hooves in the thick dust, the voices, the bright passing of coloured clothes, the curtain of drifting dust—all contrived a soft, orderly pageant of colour and sound, through which the hush of twilight contrived to break. Then, lingering, trembling, like a new lover for the world, the night slipped down upon them, and the pageant was swallowed up, annihilated. In a moment they were marooned on the stony cliff-path, groping for sure footholds where a minute before they could walk upright and at ease. Gordon stumbled and swore with fervour. Somewhere to the left on the darkened beach a maroon stormed up to the sky and, after the preliminary crash, loosed its five or six pattering yellow flares.

  “Good God,” said Marlowe.

  “I know,” panted Gordon between blasphemies. “Seems to go off between one’s teeth up here.”

  “We’re late,” said Walsh. “The priest’s beginning.”

  A beautiful bass voice like a gong now took up the tale. Slowly and with infinite relish it began what seemed to be some sort of liturgical incantation, dwelling on and tasting the lovely syllables of language, rising and falling in the perfect expression of the sense. From the terraces of olive-trees came an occasional muttered response. Soft shapes moved like pieces broken from the darkness, and the humid silence was penetrated by whispers, and girls’ quiet laughter.

  “Look,” said Walsh suddenly, “do look.”

  To the left and above them, in broad silhouette against the sky, a ledge of rock curved out sheer from the level of the cliff-face, and on it, sculptured in black, fixed in a rigid sitting pose, the figures of the two old monks were visible. Leaning forward in a vain attempt to see the palpably invisible, their bodies were clenched in scornful anger. They seemed the very substance of rock carved into a caricature of scorn. Gordon chuckled.

  “The poor old dears,” he said. “They’re as jealous as hell.”

  Walsh, giggling as he stumbled down in the chasmic glooms ahead, turned up his face to Marlowe and explained that they lived on the top of Leucothea, in the ruined monastery. “How they both manage to get back into the nest is a mystery to me,” said Gordon. “Its bad enough when one stays behind to work the windlass.”

  “Oh, I saw them doing it once,” said Walsh, “through the old man’s telescope. Quite by mistake. They both got into the basket and started to pull the rope. Like a couple of demented prophets, with their old beards flapping over the side. Crashing against the cliff at every pull. And ducking down, too, as if
they were afraid of bashing their craniums on the sky.”

  “Do they do anything?” asked Marlowe. “I mean, besides just winding themselves up and down the cliff?”

  “Hold hard, the path turns here,” said Gordon. “No. I don’t think they do much. Pray a good deal, I suppose. And they love considering things. Simple things for preference. It’s their own brand of work; that and drinking white wine. They’re perfect medieval relics. If only they could write I’m sure they’d spend their time composing long tracts determining the exact number of camels that could pass through a needle’s eye, or ditto angels stand on the point of a pin.”

  “Rubbish,” said Walsh. “They’re too simple-souled to be casuists. Christ! The old man’s started blasting.”

  For a second the darkness was broken by one tiny flare: a match: and in its flapping light the domed face of Fonvisin was visible, puckered about a cigarette. Then a flight of saffron rockets fizzed wildly up into the night, and the bay of Nanos rocked in a wild sheet of colour; a pungent cloud of smoke fell to the level of the water, and lolled drunkenly inshore. A rapturous murmur of applause greeted this effort, and from the higher terraces a sharp burst of clapping. In the few seconds of light Marlowe caught sight of the little band of privileged sightseers grouped round Rumanades: Vassili hopping with uncontrollable delight on one gaitered leg; the priest, lounging in an attitude of resigned boredom, chin on breast, Fonvisin supine on a rock, motionless and somehow contemptuous; and Rumanades himself, with Francis and Christ at his heels, fussing about among the mounds of seaweed.

  Any introductions at that time and place were bound to be cursory. Rumanades was for a moment nothing but a handshake with darkness, until a shower of gold rockets gave him a lean, bearded face, shyly arrogant in expression, and a lank body clad in fusty black; a shower of white light for the grave face of Francis, with its deep eyes, and sleek, unplucked black eyebrows; red for the bony dome of Fonvisin’s head.