Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  Spirit of Place

  Letters and Essays on Travel

  Lawrence Durrell

  Edited by Alan G. Thomas

  Contents

  Preface

  LETTERS BY LAWRENCE DURRELL

  Corfu and England

  Greece

  Egypt

  Rhodes

  South America—Yugoslavia

  Yugoslavia

  Cyprus

  The Midi

  ESSAYS, TRAVEL PIECES, SELECTIONS FROM EARLY NOVELS

  Landscape and Character

  Pied Piper of Lovers

  Corfu, Greece, Cyprus

  A Landmark Gone

  Panic Spring

  Zero

  Delphi

  Troubadour

  Beccafico: A Tragic History

  Oil for the Saint; Return to Corfu

  France

  “In Praise of Fanatics”

  The River Rhône

  Laura, A Portrait of Avignon

  Across Secret Provence

  Old Mathieu

  Women of the Mediterranean

  Three Roses of Grenoble

  The Gascon Touch

  Solange

  Down the Styx

  Reflections on Travel

  Index

  Preface

  LAWRENCE DURRELL HAS achieved success in many forms of literature—nullum tetigit quod non ornavit—and one of his most striking qualities as a writer lies in his ability to render scenery and the feel of places. His early years were spent in India, and since 1935 his total residence in England can hardly add up to more than a year or so. In the meantime he has lived in Corfu, Greece, Paris, Egypt, Rhodes, the Argentine, Yugoslavia, Cyprus, and the Midi. Before the publication of The Alexandria Quartet, in which the city itself looms almost larger than the human characters, Durrell was most widely known for his books about Greek islands. These are not so much travel books. “It would be far more accurate,” as Richard Aldington remarked, “to describe them as ‘foreign-residence’ books.”

  In addition to Durrell’s books, a number of articles describing scenery, generally Aegean or Mediterranean, have appeared in magazines, small privately printed pamphlets, and so forth. These essays and sketches are now gathered for the first time in book form. To provide something of the setting in which they were written I have collected passages from letters which Durrell has written to his friends over the last thirty years and linked them together with some brief biographical notes and a few memories of my own.

  One of the difficulties which confronts any editor of Durrell’s letters is the fact that he almost never dates them. T. S. Eliot, with a kindly eye on future scholars, had the admirable habit of noting the date of receipt; in some cases postmarked envelopes have survived, in others there are internal clues, while Durrell’s frequent movements from one country to another provide a general framework into which most letters can be fitted. I know that some of my conjectures may well prove inaccurate, but hope that almost all the letters have been dated within a year of their having been written.

  I have had one advantage not generally available to literary editors. When work on this book was well advanced Durrell came to stay with me, here in Chelsea, for a month, and I was able to consult him regarding the queries which had accumulated; indecipherable words, mistakes in typing, obscure references, etc. For example, a hand-written letter from Cyprus contains the sentence: “… Rose Macaulay? She adopted us and whizzed us off to bxxxe in her old car.” I scanned the map of Cyprus and read through a guide trying to find a place-name beginning with b (Durrell often fails to capitalize) and ending with e, but in vain. I asked Durrell to read the passage: “… whizzed us off to bathe.” In an account of shooting in Corfu, in 1936, one typewriter key had failed to strike home: “So far I’ve prohibited herons. They’re such heraldic creatures, and when they’re wounded they use their great razor bill like a tailor. I shot a couple and one chased Leslie and nealy, nipped him in the arse.” Was this word nearly or nealy I asked. “How can I remember what I meant to say more than thirty years ago? Put ‘neatly nipped him in the arse,’ that will annoy Les if he ever reads it.” My friend John Bradley, the editor of Ruskin’s letters, was also staying in the house at the time, and this unfair advantage almost drove him round the bend. When he gets stuck he can’t run downstairs and ask Ruskin. Just as well perhaps as he has a very attractive young daughter.

  No attempt has been made to identify all persons and places mentioned, thus loading down every page with notes, or, worse still, putting them at the end. This is intended to be a readable book; not a definitive edition. Besides, time is too pressing; I am not in the position of one scholar I know who gained a Guggenheim which enabled him to spend two years in Rome working on one Milton letter.

  Several of Durrell’s friends have helped with suggestions and elucidations, and in particular Dr. Theodore Stephanides has placed his knowledge of Greece, the Middle East, and the Greek language at my disposal. But consulting Theodore is a rich pleasure in itself, for some small question about dating or a reference to mythology unlocks a flood of erudite or amusing memories, and it seems as if he carries the whole of Greece in his mind. I would also like to thank my secretary, Shirley Ossipoff, for her stalwart help in copying the letters and for her enthusiastic devotion to the book in general; Mrs. Rose Briggs, who read both typescript and proofs, has made a valiant attempt at coping with my inability to spell.

  But especially I am indebted to those of Durrell’s friends who, having kept his letters over the years, have now placed them at my disposal: Catha Aldington and Alister Kershaw for letters to Richard Aldington; Mrs. T. S. Eliot for letters to her husband; John Gawsworth; Diana Gould (Mrs. Menuhin); Mary Hadkinson; Alfred Perlès; Hugh Gordon Porteus; Lawrence Clark Powell; Anne Ridler; Patricia Rodda; Lady Smart for letters to Sir Walter Smart; Freya Stark; Theodore Stephanides; Buffie and Gerald Sykes; Mrs. George Wilkinson for letters to her husband; and Gwyn Williams.

  The debt of future literary scholars to Hugh Gordon Porteus might well have been greater, for he received many letters from fellow poets and accumulated a good deal of material when writing his excellent life of Wyndham Lewis. He sorted all this original material into two groups, important and less important. Unfortunately, he placed the former in a paper bag similar to the kind he used for the disposal of garbage. He returned home one evening to find that his charlady had given this to the dustmen.

  Many of Durrell’s letters already repose in the rare book rooms of American University Libraries; and it is a pleasure to thank the librarians concerned for their courtesy and kindness in allowing me to print the letters, which they have preserved. Especially those of The University of California at Los Angeles, for letters written to John Gawsworth, Lawrence Clark Powell, and Theodore Stephanides, of The Academic Center Library of The University of Texas, at Austin, for letters to Patricia Rodda and Alfred Perlès, and to Mr. Frank Paluka, of The University of Iowa, for letters to George Wilkinson. Some of the pieces now printed for the first time in book form were originally published in journals, and I am grateful to their editors, especially to the editor of Holiday Magazine, who have kindly allowed them to appear here; more detailed acknowledgements appear at the head of each essay. In a few places the texts have been revised slightly. I would also like to thank Lawrence Clark Powell and F. J. Temple, who produced the original, privately printed, editions of A Landmark Gone, Beccafico, and Down the Styx.

  Early Days

  Lawrence Durrell was born in India, at Jalunda, in the United Provinces, on the 27th of February, 1912: the families of both his parents having been long establishe
d in that country. He is sometimes described as an “Irish Poet,” but, although his mother’s family is of Irish extraction, he has never set foot in Ireland itself. His father was an engineer of uncommon ability whose magnum opus was the building of the Tata Iron and Steel Works. When his eldest son was still quite a small boy, Mr. Durrell, senior, moved his family to Kurseong where he had a three-year contract for engineering work on the mountain railway that snakes its way up to Darjeeling through the lower slopes over the Himalayas. The immense snow-covered peaks, which filled the northern horizon during his childhood made a deep impression that has lasted with Durrell all his life.

  In early boyhood, he attended the Jesuit College at Darjeeling, and it was here that he received his first encouragement in literature from Father Joseph De Guylder, a Belgian schoolmaster of unusual perception and sympathy.

  At the age of twelve Durrell was sent “home,” together with his younger brother Leslie, “to get the hall-mark” as his father used to say, by going to a public school. The two boys were lodged, in somewhat Spartan conditions, at Dulwich, and during his first year in England Durrell attended St. Olave’s and St. Saviour’s Grammar School. This is situated in Southwark, more or less on the site of the early theatres; in the lunch hour, the young boy used to spend much of his time in Southwark Cathedral, which contains the tomb of Gower; and it was here that he first fell in love with the Elizabethans. He next proceeded to his public school, St. Edmund’s, Canterbury. Here he was bored and fairly unhappy at school; but his ability as a boxer, promoted during the holidays by the training and expertise of Stone, the family manservant, preserved him from the bullying that all too often constitutes the lot of sensitive boys who do not conform to tribal conventions.

  After the early death of his father, Durrell inherited a small income, left school, and went to live in Bloomsbury with the ambition of becoming a writer. It was the Bloomsbury of John Gawsworth, King of Redonda, Count Cedric Potocki of Montalk,1 the Polish Royalist, Mulk Raj Anand, and other characters.

  Having an ability to do many things with dash and brio Durrell augmented his income by a number of jobs; as a self-taught pianist, he worked for some time in the Blue Peter Night Club, and many of the jazz songs which he played were of his own composition. He met Nancy Myers, then a student at the Slade, who was to become his first wife, and for some time they ran a photographic studio together.

  Durrell, himself, gives a lively picture of his Bloomsbury days in the following essay contributed to an, as yet unpublished, volume celebrating the fiftieth birthday of John Gawsworth.

  Some Notes on My Friend John Gawsworth, 1962

  Some notes on my friend John Gawsworth may not be out of place in this compilation as I have been a friend of his for nearly thirty years, during which we both have been through a number of ups and downs. I first met him when I was about nineteen I suppose; he was my first Real Writer—a professional, living by his books. I say “living,” but the word should have some qualification, for he barely existed on his work, inhabiting an old attic in Denmark Street, with a huge dormer window and a rotting wooden floor through which seeped the noise of jazz being played by Percival Mackay’s band rehearsing downstairs. I was a complete literary novice and a provincial, and the meeting was an important one for me, for in John I found someone who burned with a hard gem-like flame—the very thing I wished to do myself; moreover his gem-like burnings then were sufficiently good to merit the attention of real publishers, while my post-Imagist maunderings and occasional derivative sonnets did not.

  I had moved to London at the behest of my mother who, tired of my antics, said one day: “You can be as Bohemian as you like but not in the house. I think you had better go somewhere where it doesn’t show so much.” So I left Bournemouth to study Bohemianism at first hand. I had some help in my researches from a young and beautiful student of the Slade School whom I married; but while we weren’t actually starving money was short, so she went on the stage as a temporary measure and I played the piano very inexpertly in the Blue Peter Night Club in St. Martin’s Lane. My engagement was a brief one as the police closed the club down, though fortunately the raid took place while I was near an upstairs window, or I might have started my professional studies with a prison sentence. This explains why John and I met at about three in the morning in the Windmill Café, drinking coffee, for it was here that I first ran into John. He was correcting the galley-proofs of a book with a heavy self-commiserating air and drinking black coffee. I watched him fascinated; I had never seen galleys. Soon he borrowed a match and we got into conversation. I soon began to congratulate myself as I heard him talk, for it seemed that he knew everybody of importance. He had actually met Yeats and Hardy; he had corresponded with poets like de la Mare and Drinkwater; he knew Wyndham Lewis on whom he was doing an essay. He had seen Eliot! I was agog. I was in the presence of a Real Writer, someone who could tell me something about literary life in the capital. We got very friendly right off, though I remember wondering what a Real Writer could see in a callow youth of nineteen—though a pretty wife is quite a help in moments like these. We walked back, the three of us, to his little attic, and there by the light of a flickering gas-jet he showed me an enviable collection of treasures in the way of first editions, manuscripts, and letters of famous poets, and also a number of literary curiosities, which he had picked up in the sale rooms which he regularly frequented; he had a skull-cap of Dickens’, a pen of Thackeray’s, and so on.… He even had a ring belonging to Emma Hamilton, which afterwards I unfortunately lost for him, but he was a very good-natured person and didn’t blame me. Nor did he ask me to pay for it.

  At this time, John was just staking his claim as a poet, bibliographer, and essayist and had big plans for the future, but he did not seem to have many friends of his own age. His literary admirers and acquaintances were for the most part elderly, and while they were always glad to see him they were not the sort of people to enjoy squatting on the floor and drinking beer: few of them existed, as we mostly did, on Smith’s Potato Crisps. This is probably why he allowed me to hang about, drinking in through every pore the thrilling literary information, which he disbursed so liberally.

  In physique he was of medium height and somewhat pale and lean; he had a broken nose, which gave his face a touch of Villonesque foxiness. His eyes were brown and bright, and his sense of humour unimpaired by his literary privations. At that time, he was an ardent student of the nineties, and looked forward rather hopefully to a Dowsonesque death by alcohol or the dagger. In fact as a poet he was proud to proclaim himself a post-nineties man rather than a modern poet; but the death by alcohol evaded him. He was relatively abstemious as poets go, and enjoyed good health too much to take absinthe. He had just published a sequence of love-lyrics called Kingcup, which I admired extravagantly, and which had won him both a prize and election to the Royal Society of Literature. He must have been by far the youngest Fellow for in those days one had to be a hundred before achieving such an apotheosis. But this honour was more valuable to others than to himself for it gave him a leverage on his elders which few young writers then possessed; and apart from the hard gem-like flame John burned with a passionate ardour for literature itself. The faintest whisper that told of a writer in straits alerted him like a foxhound; he had a very special look at such times. A mixture of ferocity and brute determination irradiated his features. He would drop everything and work night and day until he found some help for the writer in question. “I think,” he would mutter, “I’ll just pop round and see Abercrombie or Masefield.” (I am inventing the names at random.) At any rate he was always “popping” somewhere to “fix” something. He was one of nature’s lobbyers—a tireless and relentless fellow. I am sure that on many occasions the Royal Society groaned as they saw him coming down the street; they probably locked the front door and got under sofas. Lobby, lobby, lobby. He would not rest until petitions had been devised, signed, and distributed; moreover, he was cunning and knew how to use the press.
I can think of several writers who owe him thanks for a pension in their old age. He literally wore out his elders with his assiduities, and bent them into reasonable attitudes by force of will.

  His royalism also chimed with his literary attitude; even when he was very poor he would rise at dawn and pad down to Covent Garden to buy a large white rose to place upon the statue of Charles I; this, of course, on the anniversary of the King’s execution. He was full of little gestures like these, though he seldom spoke of them to others. A real Romantic. I thought this was splendid, and still do. But the romantic side was offset by a brain as sharp as an awl when it came to any matter which touched on publishers or publishing. He knew the whole business backwards. I do not think he would have been able to avoid having to take a job otherwise. But while he never spoke of poverty, and was always neatly dressed and properly shined of shoe, he was often in great straits. At such times he would depend on his gift for bibliography to provide his breakfast. This was a truly remarkable side to his character. He literally picked up a few pounds in a matter of moments from the threepenny boxes outside the bookshops in the Charing Cross Road. This was a feat I never tired of watching, and I suppose I must have watched him at it about a dozen times; more than once when I was broke I shared his bibliographic breakfast. This was what he did. He would stand for a moment over a threepenny box of throw-outs, barely touching them with his fingers. His hands became all sensitive like a pianist’s. Then he would give an expert riffle here and there like a cardsharper. Finally, he would pick out a book and mutter, “Edward Carpenter. Hum … Carpenter.… That must be the 1915. Christ! That is the mispaginated edition surely.” If it was he would add quietly: “About thirty bob I should say.” He would take a twenty-minute patrol down Charing Cross Road and on his return sell the books to Foyle’s Rare Book Department. His memory for bibliography was simply amazing, and had he cared to be a bookseller he would now be the greatest one in England. Of course, his haul varied each day, but I should say on an average this breakfast patrol never brought him in less than a pound; yet I myself was with him on two occasions when he made finds, which earned him very much larger sums. One was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in three volumes (a first), and the other a rare edition of Dracula. This was a fine and flexible way to start off the day, and the proceeds would provide bacon and eggs and coffee at the Windmill Café.