Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  These ideas, which may seem a bit far-fetched to the modern reader, would not have troubled the men and women of the ancient world, for their notion of culture was one of psychic education, the education of the sensibility; ours is built upon a notion of mentation, the cramming of the skull with facts and pragmatic data which positively stifle the growth of the soul. Travel wouldn’t have been necessary in the time (I am sure such a time really existed some time after the Stone Age) when there really was a world religion which made full allowance for the different dialects of the different races practising it: and which realized that the factor of variation is always inevitably the landscape and not the people. Nowadays such a psychic uniformity sounds like a dream; but already comparative anthropology and archaeology are establishing the truth of it. When we think about such formulations as “World-Government” we always think of the matter politically, as groups of different people working upon an agreed agenda of sorts; a ten-point programme, or some such set of working propositions. The landscape always fools us, and I imagine always will. Simply because the same propositions don’t mean the same in Greek, Chinese, and French.

  Another pointer worth thinking about is institutions; have you ever wondered why Catholicism, for example, can be such a different religion in different places? Ireland, Italy, Spain, Argentina—it is theologically the same, working on the same premises, but in each case it is subtly modified to suit the spirit of place. People have little to do with the matter except inasmuch as they themselves are reflections of their landscape. Of course, there are places where you feel that the inhabitants are not really attending to and interpreting their landscape; whole peoples or nations sometimes get mixed up and start living at right angles to the land, so to speak, which gives the traveller a weird sense of alienation. I think some of the troubles which American artists talk about are not due to “industrialization” or “technocracy” but something rather simpler—people not attending to what the land is saying, not conforming to the hidden magnetic fields which the landscape is trying to communicate to the personality. It was not all nonsense what D. H. Lawrence had to say in his communion with the “ghosts” in the New World. He was within an ace, I think, of making real contact with the old Indian cultures. Genius that he was, he carried too much intellectual baggage about him on his travels, too many preconceptions; and while the mirror he holds up to Mexico, Italy, England is a marvellous triumph of art, the image is often a bit out of focus. He couldn’t hold or perhaps wouldn’t hold the camera steady enough—he refused to use the tripod (first invented by the oracles in Greece!).

  The traveller, too, has his own limitations, and it is doubtful if he is to be blamed. The flesh is frail. I have known sensitive and inquisitive men so disheartened by the sight of a Greek lavatory as to lose all sense of orientation and fly right back to High Street Clapham without waiting for the subtler intimations of the place to dawn on them. I have known people educated up to Ph.D. standard who were so completely unhinged by French plumbing that they could speak of nothing else. We are all of us unfair in this way. I know myself to be a rash, hasty, and inconsiderate man, and while I am sitting here laying down the law about travel I feel I must confess that I also have some blind spots. I have never been fair to the Scots. In fact I have always been extremely unfair to them—and all because I arrived on my first visit to Scotland late on a Saturday evening. I do not know whether it is generally known that you can simply die of exposure and starvation in relatively civilized places like Inverness simply because the inhabitants are too religious to cut a sandwich or pour coffee? It sounds fantastic I know. Nevertheless, it is true. The form of Sabbatarianism, which the Scots have developed, passes all understanding. Nay, it cries out for the strait-jacket. And sitting on a bench at Inverness Station in a borrowed deerstalker and plaid you rack your brains to remember the least pronouncement in the Old or New Testaments which might account for it. There is none—or else I have never spotted the reference. They appear to have made a sort of Moloch of Our Lord, and are too scared even to brush their teeth on the Sabbath. How can I be anything but unfair to them? And yet Scotland herself—the poetry, and the poverty and naked joyous insouciance of mountain life, you will find on every page of Burns’s autobiographical papers. Clearly, she is a queenly country and a wild mountainous mate for poets. Why have the Scots not caught on? What ails them in their craggy fastnesses? (But I expect I shall receive a hundred indignant letters from Americans who have adopted Scotland, have pierced her hard heart and discovered the landscape-mystery of her true soul. Nevertheless, I stand by what I say; and one day when I am rich I shall have a memorial plaque placed over that bench on Inverness Station platform—a plaque reading “Kilroy was here—but oh so briefly”!) But I must not fail to add that I have always admired the magnificent evocations of Scots landscape in the books of Stevenson; they are only adventure tales, but the landscape comes shining through.

  So that I imagine the traveller in each of us has a few blind spots due to some traumatic experience with an empty tea-urn or the room-on-the-landing. This cannot be helped. The great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly—but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling, that mysterious sense of rapport, of identity with the ground. You can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle you’ll be there.

  I remember seeing a photo-reportage in Life magazine once which dealt with the extraordinary changes in physique which emigrants to the U.S.A. underwent over such relatively short periods as two or three generations. Some of the smaller races like Chinese and Filipinos appeared to have gained almost eight inches in height, over the statutory period investigated, while their physical weight had also increased in the most extraordinary way. The report was based on the idea that diet and environment were the real answers, and while obviously such factors are worth considering I found myself wondering if the reporters were right; surely the control experiment would fail if one fed a group of Chinese in China exclusively on an American diet? I don’t see them growing a speck larger myself. They might get fat and rosy on the diet, but I believe the landscape, in pursuit of its own mysterious purposes, would simply cut them down to the required size suitable to homegrown Chinamen.

  One last word about the sense of place; I think that not enough attention is paid to it as a purely literary criterion. What makes “big” books is surely as much to do with their site as their characters and incidents. I don’t mean the books which are devoted entirely to an elucidation of a given landscape like Thoreau’s Walden is. I mean ordinary novels. When they are well and truly anchored in nature they usually become classics. One can detect this quality of “bigness” in most books, which are so sited from Huckleberry Finn to The Grapes of Wrath. They are tuned in to the sense of place. You could not transplant them without totally damaging their ambience and mood; any more than you could transplant Typee. This has nothing I think to do with the manners and habits of the human beings who populate them; for they exist in nature, as a function of place.

  Pied Piper of Lovers

  Published by Cassell & Co. 1935

  AS SO OFTEN happens, much of Lawrence Durrell’s early life is reflected in his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers; a somewhat “prentice” effort with no great intimation of what was to come. The hero, Walsh Clifton, is also the son of an engineer working in India, and in the first extract, printed here, father and son are travelling to Kurseong where the father is to build a railway. After an Indian childhood, Walsh is sent “home” to school and there are descriptions of the impact of England, suburban London, and life at a minor public school. Walsh is bored rather than embittered by his schooling. A chapter in our imperial history might well be written, now that it is virtually over, analysing and recording the emotional price paid by the children of empire builders torn from their real home and sent “home” to the care of unwillin
g relatives, generally, it would seem, spinster aunts. Durrell’s fictional account of this experience is far less bitter than the appalling picture, etched in acid, which Kipling drew of the evangelical household in Southsea where he spent a miserable and tortured childhood; or the grim description given, in the memoir of her brother, by Saki’s sister.

  During a holiday in Devon Walsh makes friends with Gordon and Ruth, young people of somewhat uncertain private means who are staying nearby; he falls in love with Ruth, but at the end of the holiday they part. Clifton senior dies from the effects of a snake-bite, whereupon Walsh leaves school and goes to live in Bloomsbury on the small income which he has inherited. Disgusted, after a time, by the squalid and purposeless life of his fellow bohemians, and especially by a sordid party which he attends, Walsh, unable to subsist on his inheritance, looks around for further means of support, and discovers that he can turn his talent as a songwriter to effective purpose. He meets Ruth again, by chance, in the Library of the British Museum, and they join forces. But he soon learns that she is afflicted with a valvular disease of the heart and that her hold on life is precarious. In an epilogue Walsh and Ruth are seen living together in a cottage in Devon.

  Prologue

  set in India

  He remembered, for instance, standing on the deck of the Endeavour, craning over the side to watch the paddle-wheels. A ship was a more frightening thing, he reflected, than a motor-boat. It was nicer to sit nearer to the water, and feel it spin away under you unevenly, and trail your hand in it. When no one was looking you could lick your fingers. Salt water had a lovely taste: but the paddle-wheels of the seaship were very alarming things. The bleached white wood made its laboured rotations in the water, each paddle emerging with an increasing speed, as if released by a spring, and hurling itself up at you, threatening you with a crack over the head: deceptively it turned aside and rolled over into the water again, uttering a sinful chuckle at having made you timid enough to duck back. It flung a small, playful spray over you. A great hiss it made, flinging pert wavelets across the acres of still sea, with enormous disdainful gestures.

  The Endeavour was very old. Her timbers creaked like the stays of a very old lady forced into some unwonted activity. The captain had called him “Sonny,” and had said that she (the ship) would soon have to be broken up; there were lots of new white clean steamers now, stealing all the passengers. Walsh had nodded very sagely, and had asked if the new steamers had wheels. It appeared that they had not. Then how, in the name of heaven, did people go on them? Did they have interesting things on board? Apparently, the only things the Endeavour had in common with her newer competitors were engines, and even these, explained the bewildering old man, were different. Walsh wondered, rather bitterly, if grown-ups had any real sense.

  Later on in the voyage, he had been sick. That too was an experience, which he would not have missed for anything. It was so easy: and the fuss the women made before embarking!

  It had happened like this:

  He had stood for hours looking down at the paddles: bracing his feet under the tilt and heave of the deck: cling ing to the rail like a limpet. His head hung down over the water. Greens and blues and browns mixed, blended and dissolved in the confusion under him; a magic so swift and facile that it deceived the eye. He wondered if he would see a whale. How queerly the water frothed away from the paddles, showing its teeth in a white snarl! He spat not once, but several times, with gratifying precision right into the heart of the white turbulence. From time to time, when the blending of colour burst upon his sight and vanished in the green sameness of the major water, he smiled, a smile of pure happiness. It was then, in his memories, that the great moment came. How swiftly the water rushed! He spat again with more abandon. If you stared at it you became giddy, as if you were falling … falling … falling.… He shut his eyes against the first insidious nausea, but that only seemed to make it worse. He was whirled round in a chaotic darkness, punctured by sharp lights. Then the feeling left him. He opened his eyes and was frighteningly, but rather happily sick over the side, lolling his tongue out like a puppy to feel the wind cool upon it. The water seemed very near to his face…

  It was a magnificent feat, his being sick with such ease and pleasure. It placed him far, far above all those blowsy women who lurked in cabins with basins, retching and groaning, and hiding their shame from the menfolk: but then, of course, he was a man, not a girl, and that altered things considerably.

  Some of the women had continued to be sick long after they had landed; they had been compelled to stick their heads out of the rattling carriage windows. That, of course, made it dangerous for him to look out: but he had stuck his nose hard against the glass and stared out across the leagues of flat dry land across which they clattered. Miles and miles of forests, paddy-fields, swamps, through which the unfaltering engine lugged them: bridges and signal-boxes and towns, all silent under the aching noonday heat, with the sun flaring on the tin roofs. Once they disturbed a flock of wild duck from where they had settled, in a paddy-field by the track. What a wild trumpeting, squealing, flurrying, as they sprang into the air, wagging their heavy wings! There were cranes, too, standing pensively in the shallows of the river, mincing delicately around on their slim legs in search of food.

  It was at this point that his memories became jumbled and confused. He remembered the great houses in Calcutta; very tall and made of stone, and the dusty streets with the cavalcades of carriages, rickshaws, trolleys; Europeans dressed in white clothes; a cool hotel with a lift and a newspaper-stall; white napery spread upon a table and beautiful foods served by a host of impassive servants; a zoo with a baby elephant that shook hands with its trunk; a place where sickly ice-cream was given him in great quantities; a rickshaw in which he had been (naturally enough) sick; a leper whose skin had peeled off in little white flakes and to whom he gave a rupee, and a host of other things, fugitive and unreal, probably founded as much on imagination as fact.

  But when he came to the second part of the journey, it grew more distinct, more exciting still. His father had told him one night that he had got a job. That, of course, meant less than nothing to him, but it had transfigured his father. They ate an enormous dinner together, tipping all the waiters with a reckless prodigality that mystified him even when he remembered it. His father had given him round shiny coins and told him to give them to everyone he met. It was curious, but inexplicable. Grown-ups behaved in an extraordinary way when the mood took them. He had been rather afraid that they would both starve if they gave away all their money, but his father had assured him solemnly that he was going to get a lot more, so that it did not matter very much. His father was a “decenchap” whatever that meant. A travelling companion had told him so, and he had always remembered it.

  Two days later they left by train for the northern frontier, and it was during this time that they were forced to ride in a crowded carriage. Among their fellow-travellers was an old man with a happy face and a monkey which he carried perched on his shoulder, secured on a strip of rusty chain. The monkey was called Amos, and it looked very like the governess they had left behind. It indulged in an eternal search among the pockets of its master’s coat for food to eat—monkey-nuts—and chattered and showed its tiny white teeth in a grin of rage when it was stroked. Walsh joined it in a meal of nuts, to which he too was very partial, and made friends with this fascinating if treacherous companion.

  Once during the journey a man entered with a terrier which he placed upon the floor, not observing the monkey which had wrinkled up his ferocious little nose and begun to bounce up and down on the floor. There was bound to be trouble, but when it came, it was so unexpected that it took the boy’s breath away. That admirable monkey! When the dog lunged across the carriage at it, it bounced up to the lap of its master, and from there sprang upon the luggage rack. Then, from its secure perch, it uttered creaks of malignant triumph, and began to urinate, directing the flow with deadly accuracy upon the dog. Of course, th
ey were all splashed a bit, but Walsh didn’t mind. He was so astounded at the trick. He wished for a minute that he had as sure a way of dealing with his enemies: but his father was silly enough to be annoyed and grumble. The master of Amos dragged him down and punished him, making him apologize to everyone in the carriage, which he did with an air of humiliation and sorrowfulness which softened the hearts of even the most moist among them. He took a finger from their hands, very much as one takes a banana from a cluster, and very gently put it to his teeth. Then he removed the small green woollen cap, which was perched on the back of his brown head, and swept them a bow. Amos was enchanting. He had been really sorry when the happy little man left with the animal clinging to his shoulder. What would he not give now for a pet like that? He had asked his father, but he was told that monkeys were wild things, which grew sullen and spiteful in captivity. There were plenty of them in the woods above the cart-road, and he made up his mind to trap one. He wondered whether his father was really a “decenchap” and if so, was the title important?

  At any rate, he was Master Walsh Clifton, and that was marvellous enough.

  That was, I suppose, as far as he ever got with these tantalizing and beautiful memories. Certainly when there was so much to do in the garden of the old house, so many new moths and butterflies to discover, that he found little time for day-dreaming; the mood took possession of him without any conscious effort of will, and left him before he had either need or desire to drive it out. One minute he would be teasing a nest of red ants with a twig and the next he would see the whole panorama of his adventures roll out before him on the brown earth, like a picture-show; he would stop and sit dead still on his haunches, staring at the rows of angry defending soldier ants crowding to the shattered ramparts of the nest. His dark eyes would widen as he impressed upon himself the astonishing importance of these visions, and correspondingly, the huge importance of himself.