Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  I’m not giving you this dope to bore you, but for bibliographical curiosity. My Family and Other Animals has had a good press in France chez Stock; but the man who published it nearly lost his job because he turned down Justine in the same batch on the grounds that they didn’t want two brothers on the same list! HE is much abashed; and Stock apparently have put (frére de Lawrence Durrell) on some of their advertising (I’m quoting Jean) which is an amusing topsy turveydom. But then—The new CORREA list had a front cover with four pictures, Pasternak, Jung, Miller and yours truly with a banner THE GREATEST EUROPEAN WRITERS ON OUR LIST, Tiens, I thought, swelling like a frog with pride, I’ll pinch one to send the family; but then I realized that probably the only familiar name would be that of the wicked Durrell himself!

  All this goes to show that fortune is a fickle jade and not to be trusted; every penny I make will go into bricks and mortar and ground, and not in nightclubs.

  Dear Alan and Ella, it is hard to thank you adequately for such royal hospitality; to leave you with such a savagely punished cellar—I don’t know what to say except to thank you a thousandfold for it; it held the ring and gave Claude the necessary time to réagir and climb to her feet. I’ll be sending along a lot of bumph soon.…

  More soon

  Love

  Larry.

  [Early Summer 1960]

  Masmichel Engances

  Nîmes Gard France

  To Alan G. Thomas

  Alan dear,

  Did I ever write and thank you for the bibliographical data? I hope so. If not herewith warm thanks to you. Incidentally in Paris yesterday I ran into Larry Powell quite by chance and was able to thank him. Clea has gone with quite a big bang in Paris—scads of publicity, television and all sort of papers thrown open to me—and fan mail! Such a lot from all over—lots from U.K. Two mathematicians have written to vindicate my notion of the form; altogether the old quartet has really I think got by. By the way the boys of King’s School1 were so angry about the Observer sending me to school there that they asked for an article for the school mag. It is completely unpublished—May interest you? It is quite funny. Miller and Katsimbalis are both weaving about down here and we are expecting a visitation any day. I’m writing a scenario for Elizabeth Taylor on Cleopatra!! It means money for my Piero della Francesca book next year.

  Just got back after 10 hectic Paris days—I am becoming quite a celebrity in Paris. It is surprising and pleasing to have young kids mobbing me at cafés in St. Germain.

  Love from us both

  Larry

  [Written on menu:

  “Dîner D’Adieu du Commandant.”

  Menu dated 24 September 1962.]

  To Diana Menuhin

  Dear Diana,

  I believe our paths crossed by a few hours recently—a near graze! What bad luck. I have been sent on a journalistic assignment for a brief tour of Israel and Greece. As you can imagine the Greek visit was most exciting though Israel was interesting and rather moving and I hope to write something about it. But Athens gave me back at a blow all my old friends whose touching warmth was really like a home-coming; made it like one I mean. We did a swift autumn tour of the Peloponnesus—deserted bare and blue! Dug out old taverns, discovered new. Above all had Katsimbalis and Seferis to ourselves for days on end. Such stunts, such gales of laughter, such memories exchanged! It was like a gasp of rare air and I felt twenty years younger. “Fifty years seemed but a day”! And now we are back to the problems of country-folk, leaking roofs and cisterns, damp wood etc., etc. I won’t bore you with them. I’m glad you’ve found Mykonos. I first went there in 1936 and stayed with an old lady called Poppeia—there were no hotels and no tourists. I shared a lavatory seat with a hen and a bed with 1000 fleas.…

  Larry D

  14 November 1962

  Masmichel

  Engances par Nîmes

  Gard France

  To Freya Stark

  My dear Freya,

  The pleasure of getting your delightful Trojan letter was mixed with a sense of chagrin at having missed you in Athens by a few—a very few days. If you managed to see Austen he will have told you of our brief visit: we made a “crochet” to spend a few days with old friends. It arose quite by hazard out of an invitation I received from a film man to spend 3 weeks in Israel and write him a short story about kibbutz life there. It was a handsome offer and it gave us the first travelling holiday (congé payé) that we [have] had for ages without the question of the children. It turned out to be more tiring than I’d guessed but much more interesting than I’d dared to hope. We saw a great deal in a short time and went round all the crazy deckle-edged frontiers. Disconcerting often to be looking down the barrel of an Arab Sten gun: in Jerusalem for example. What a sad mess—a neither-nor of a place—typical fruit of British intellectual cowardice! But all in all I was glad that we were now out of the Muddle East and living in France. Greece was an unmixed delight—my fears of being disappointed faded like snowflakes. Nothing of value has changed and much that I remember as shabby and nasty had been ameliorated. The restoration of monuments and the accommodation of an expanding tourist trade have been admirably and tactfully handled. And the Greeks themselves have lost none of their gay kindness—even though they have now learned to respect traffic lights!

  And so back to this windy cottage on the moors with the mistral howling and the trees bending double. It has turned cold. Time to cut wood and keep the fires going all day. We are expecting to spend Christmas with my family and other animals in Jersey.

  Every good wish for the birthday and for many more of them; keep up the good books which nourish the age!

  Much love from us both.

  Larry Durrcll

  [Received 2.2 June 1967]

  Zefiros Beach Hotel

  Paleokastritsa: Corfu

  To Alan G. Thomas

  Dear Alan,

  I hope you got my card and forgave the delay. I was doing a very tiring drive across Europe. Well, here I am for a day or two. I leave for Athens Sunday. There’s hardly a soul about except for Durrells and there are rather too many of those about—Margaret is also here spreading sweetness and light. Theo as well. I’ve been round about a good deal looking up old friends—it’s been melancholy in a way. Claude was so very much loved here that it’s been watering-cans all the way. This last three years so many friends, etc., have died that I feel ringed about with graves. Another sad epilogue—that peaceful house at Kouloura with its gay and industrious family—I noticed that it was all shuttered and barred, through my heavy glasses. Today I learnt that Athenaios, that sweet man, in despair at the paralysis gaining on him committed suicide. He drank the olive spray insecticide—terribly painful death. Little Kerkyra has abandoned the house and gone to Jannina to live with her daughter. Spiro, the boy, my godson, has gone to sea again on the China run. I went up yesterday and sat about on the rock below the house. Niko, the sailor, was away. Pas un chat. How strangely things turn out. I expect you feel rather as I do, vague and scattered—as if one were convalescing from a major operation. Damn everything.

  Love

  Larry D.

  1 King’s School, Canterbury, confused with Durrell’s own school, St. Edmund’s.

  ESSAYS, TRAVEL PIECES,

  SELECTIONS FROM

  EARLY NOVELS

  Landscape and Character

  Published in the New York Times Magazine section.

  June 12, 1960.

  “YOU WRITE,” SAYS a friendly critic in Ohio, “as if the landscape were more important than the characters.” If not exactly true, this is near enough the mark, for I have evolved a private notion about the importance of landscape, and I willingly admit to seeing “characters” almost as functions of a landscape. This has only come about in recent years after a good deal of travel—though here again I doubt if this is quite the word, for I am not really a “travel-writer” so much as a “residence-writer.” My books are always about living in places, not just rushing th
rough them. But as you get to know Europe slowly, tasting the wines, cheeses and characters of the different countries you begin to realize that the important determinant of any culture is after all—the spirit of place. Just as one particular vineyard will always give you a special wine with discernible characteristics so a Spain, an Italy, a Greece will always give you the same type of culture—will express itself through the human being just as it does through its wild flowers. We tend to see “culture” as a sort of historic pattern dictated by the human will, but for me this is no longer absolutely true. I don’t believe the British character, for example, or the German has changed a jot since Tacitus first described it; and so long as people keep getting born Greek or French or Italian their culture-productions will bear the unmistakable signature of the place.

  And this, of course, is the target of the travel-writer; his task is to isolate the germ in the people which is expressed by their landscape. Strangely enough one does not necessarily need special knowledge for the job, though of course a knowledge of language is a help. But how few they are those writers! How many can write a Sea and Sardinia or a Twilight in Italy to match these two gems of D. H. Lawrence? When he wrote them his Italian was rudimentary. The same applies to Norman Douglas’ Fountains in the Sand—one of the best portraits of North Africa.

  We travel really to try and get to grips with this mysterious quality of “Greekness” or “Spanishness”; and it is extraordinary how unvaryingly it remains true to the recorded picture of it in the native literature: true to the point of platitude. Greece, for example, cannot have a single real Greek left (in the racial sense) after so many hundreds of years of war and resettlement; the present racial stocks are the fruit of countless invasions. Yet if you want a bit of real live Aristophanes you only have to listen to the chaffering of the barrow-men and peddlers in the Athens Plaka. It takes less than two years for even a reserved British resident to begin using his fingers in conversation without being aware of the fact. But if there are no original Greeks left: what is the curious constant factor that we discern behind the word “Greekness”? It is surely the enduring faculty of self-expression inhering in landscape. At least I would think so as I recall two books by very different writers which provide an incomparable nature-study of the place. One is Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor, and the other Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi.

  I believe you could exterminate the French at a blow and resettle the country with Tartars, and within two generations discover, to your astonishment, that the national characteristics were back at norm—the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness for good living, and the passionate individualism: even though their noses were now flat. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistrot. He may not be able to formulate it very clearly to himself in literary terms, but he will taste the unmistakable keen knife-edge of happiness in the air of Paris: the pristine brilliance of a national psyche which knows that art is as important as love or food. He will not be blind either to the hard metallic rational sense, the irritating coeur raisonnable of the men and women. When the French want to be malins, as they call it, they can be just as we can be when we stick our toes in over some national absurdity.

  Yes, human beings are expressions of their landscape, but in order to touch the secret springs of a national essence you need a few moments of quiet with yourself. Truly the intimate knowledge of landscape, if developed scientifically, could give us a political science—for half the political decisions taken in the world are based on what we call national character. We unconsciously acknowledge this fact when we exclaim, “How typically Irish” or “It would take a Welshman to think up something like that.” And indeed we all of us jealously guard the sense of minority individuality in our own nations—the family differences. The great big nations like say the Chinese or the Americans present a superficially homogeneous appearance; but I’ve noticed that while we Europeans can hardly tell one American from another, my own American friends will tease each other to death at the lunch-table about the intolerable misfortune of being born in Ohio or Tennessee—a recognition of the validity of place which we ourselves accord to the Welshman, Irishman, and Scotsman at home. It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. “I am watching you—are you watching yourself in me?” Most travellers hurry too much. But try just for a moment sitting on the great stone omphalos, the navel of the ancient Greek world, at Delphi. Don’t ask mental questions, but just relax and empty your mind. It lies, this strange amphora-shaped object, in an overgrown field above the temple. Everything is blue and smells of sage. The marbles dazzle down below you. There are two eagles moving softly softly on the sky, like distant boats rowing across an immense violet lake.

  Ten minutes of this sort of quiet inner identification will give you the notion of the Greek landscape, which you could not get in twenty years of studying ancient Greek texts. But having got it, you will at once get all the rest; the key is there, so to speak, for you to turn. After that you will not be able to go on a shopping expedition in Athens without running into Agamemnon or Clytemnestra—and often under the same names. And if you happen to go to Eleusis in springtime you will come upon more than one blind Homer walking the dusty roads. The secret is identification. If you sit on the top of the Mena House pyramid at sunset and try the same thing (forgetting the noise of the donkey-boys, and all the filthy litter of other travellers—old cartons and Coca-Cola bottles): if you sit quite still in the landscape-diviner’s pose—why, the whole rhythm of ancient Egypt rises up from the damp cold sand. You can hear its very pulse tick. Nothing is strange to you at such moments—the old temples with their death-cults, the hieroglyphs, the long slow whirl of the brown Nile among the palm-fringed islets, the crocodiles and snakes. It is palpably just as it was (its essence) when the High Priest of Ammon initiated Alexander into the Mysteries. Indeed the Mysteries themselves are still there for those who might seek initiation—the shreds and shards of the Trismegistic lore still being studied and handed on by small secret sects. Of course, you cannot arrange to be initiated through a travel agency! You would have to reside and work your way in through the ancient crust—a tough one—of daily life. And how different is the rhythm of Egypt to that of Greece! One isn’t surprised by the story that the High Priest at Thebes said contemptuously: “You Greeks are mere children.” He could not bear the tireless curiosity and sensuality of the Greek character—the passionate desire to conceptualize things metaphysically. They didn’t seem to be able to relax, the blasted Greeks! Incidentally, it is a remark which the French often repeat today about the Americans, and it is always uttered in the same commiserating tone of voice as once the High Priest used. Yet the culture of Greece (so different from that of Egypt) springs directly from the Nile Valley—I could name a dozen top Greek thinkers or philosophers who were trained by Egyptians, like Plato, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, Democritos. And the “tiresome children” certainly didn’t waste their time, for when they got back home to their own bare islands the pure flower of Greek culture spread its magnificent wings in flights of pure magic to astonish and impregnate the Mediterranean. But just to hand the eternal compliment along they invented the word “barbarians” for all those unfortunate savages who lived outside the magic circle of Greece, deprived of its culture. The barbarians of course were one day to produce Dante, Goethe, Bach, Shakespeare.

  As I say the clue, then, is identification; for underneath the purely superficial aspects of apparent change the old tide-lines remain. The dullest travel poster hints at it. The fascinating thing is that Dickens characters still walk the London streets; that any game of village cricket will provide us with clues to the strange ritualistic mystery of the
habits of the British. While if you really want to intuit the inner mystery of the island try watching the sun come up over Stonehenge. It may seem a dull and “touristic” thing to do, but if you do it in the right spirit you find yourself walking those woollen secretive hills arm in arm with the Druids.

  Taken in this way travel becomes a sort of science of intuitions which is of the greatest importance to everyone—but most of all to the artist who is always looking for nourishing soils in which to put down roots and create. Everyone finds his own “correspondences” in this way—landscapes where you suddenly feel bounding with ideas, and others where half your soul falls asleep and the thought of pen and paper brings on nausea. It is here that the travel-writer stakes his claim, for writers each seem to have a personal landscape of the heart which beckons them. The whole Arabian world, for example, has never been better painted and framed than in the works of Freya Stark, whose delicate eye and insinuating slow-moving orchestrations of place and evocations of history have placed her in the front rank of travellers. Could one do better than Valley of the Assassins?