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Lawrence Durrell

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Lawrence George Durrell (February 27, 1912 – November 7,1990) was a British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer, though he resisted affiliation with Britain and preferred to be considered cosmopolitan. His most famous work is The Alexandria Quartet which is a tetralogy.

Contents

Life and work

Durrell was born in Jullundur, India, the son of Indian-born British colonials. At the age of eleven, he was sent to attend school in England — a country in which he was never happy and which he left as soon as possible. Although his formal education was unsuccessful and he failed his university entrance examinations, Durrell had started writing poetry at the age of fifteen: his first collection, Quaint Fragment, was published in 1931.

In 1935, Durrell married Nancy Meyers, the first of his four marriages. Later that year Durrell, Nancy, his mother, and his siblings (including brother Gerald Durrell, later to be a major British wildlife conservationist and popular writer) moved to the Greek island of Corfu. In the same year his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, was published by Cassell; he also wrote to Henry Miller expressing intense admiration for his novel Tropic of Cancer, which sparked an enduring friendship and mutually critical relationship. The two got on well as they had similar subjects at the time: Durrell's The Black Book abounded with "four letter words... grotesques,... [and] its mood [as] equally as apocalyptic" as Tropic.

In August 1937 he and Nancy travelled to the Villa Seurat in Paris, to meet Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. Together with Alfred Perles, Nin, Miller and Durrell "began a collaboration aimed at founding their own literary movement. Their projects included 'The Booster', a country club house organ the Villa Seurat group appropriated for their own artistic...ends."Dearborn, op. cit. page 192 and picture insert captions They also started the Villa Seurat Series in order to publish Durrell's Black Book, Miller's Max and the White Phagocytes, and Nin's Winter of Artifice, with Jack Kahane of the Obelisk Press as publisher.

At the outbreak of the Second World War his mother and other siblings returned to England, while Durrell remained on Corfu. After the fall of Greece, Lawrence escaped via Crete to Alexandria in Egypt, where he wrote about Corfu and their life on "this brilliant little speck of an island in the Ionian" in the poetic Prospero's Cell.

During the Second World War Durrell served as a press attaché to the British Embassies, first in Cairo and then Alexandria. After the war he held various diplomatic and teaching jobs. It was in Alexandria that he met Eve (Yvette) Cohen, who was to become the model for Justine.

Durrell separated from Nancy in 1942. In 1947 he married Yvette Cohen and in 1951 they had a daughter, Sappho Jane.

In 1947 he was appointed Director of the British Council Institute in Córdoba, Argentina, where for the next eighteen months he gave lectures on cultural topics.Alyn, op. cit. Ingersoll, page 138 He returned to London in the summer of 1948, around the time that Marshal Tito broke ties with Stalin's Cominform, and Durrell was posted to Belgrade.Alyn, op. cit. Ingersoll, page 139 where he was to remain until 1952. This sojourn gave him material for his book White Eagles over Serbia (1957). In 1952 he moved to Cyprus, buying a house and taking a position teaching English literature to support his writing, followed by public relations work for the British government there during agitation for union with Greece. He wrote about his time in Cyprus in Bitter Lemons.

It was in 1957 that he published "Justine", the first part of what was to become his most famous work, The Alexandria Quartet. "Justine", "Balthazar" (1958), "Mountolive" (1959) and "Clea" (1960) deal with events in pre-Second World War Alexandria. The first three books tell essentially the same story, but from different perspectives. Only in the final part, "Clea", does the story advance and finish. George Cukor's 1969 attempt to film the Quartet (Justine) was poorly received. Durrell was married again in 1961 to Claude-Marie Vincendon; however she died of cancer in 1967.

Durrell finally settled in Sommières, a small village in Provence, France, from where he wrote The Revolt of Aphrodite, comprising "Tunc" (1968) and "Nunquam" (1970), and The Avignon Quintet, which attempted to replicate the success of The Alexandria Quartet and revisited many of the same motifs and styles to be found in the earlier work. Although it is frequently described as a quintet, Durrell himself referred to it as a "quincunx". The middle part of the quincunx, "Constance, or Solitary Practices" was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1982. Despite this, The Avignon Quintet was on the whole considered less successful than The Alexandria Quartet.

Durrell's poetry has been overshadowed by his novels. Peter Porter, in his introduction to a Selected PoemsPorter, P. (editor): Lawrence Durrell: Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, 2006, writes of Durrell as a poet: "one of the best of the past hundred years. And one of the most enjoyable." He goes on to describe Durrell's poetry as "always beautiful as sound and syntax. Its innovation lies in its refusal to be more high-minded than the things it records, together with its handling of the whole lexicon of language."Porter, op. cit., page xxi

Durrell had suffered from emphysema for many years: he died of a stroke at his house in Sommières in November 1990.

Major works

Novels

Travel

Poetry

Drama

Humor

Letters and essays

Further reading

References

Notes

External links

 

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