From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings

  [16]. Robert Southey (1774–1843) and Samuel Rogers (1763–1855) were both English Romantic poets with early ties to supporting the radicalism of the French Revolution but who quickly became conservative Tories with little rebellion to incite their works. Southey was poet laureate for thirty years, and Rogers was vital for supporting other writers, including securing William Wordsworth’s sinecure as distributor of stamps and recommending Alfred Lord Tennyson for the position of poet laureate, succeeding Wordsworth in the position, who had succeeded Southey.

  Enigma Variations

  [1]. Pound (1885–1972) was a major American Modernist poet most famous for his epic poem The Cantos. By 1957, his reputation had been seriously damaged by his promotion of fascism, anti-Semitism, and charges of treason against him, which led to his incarceration in St. Elizabeths Hospital after an insanity plea. He remained there until 1958. Durrell’s wife in 1957 was Claude Vincedon, a Zionist Jew of the Menasce family who wrote a Zionist novel, A Chair for the Prophet, which bears many similarities to Durrell’s works. That Durrell reviewed Pound at this time, prior to Pound’s recanting of his anti-Semitism and while still incarcerated, is striking.

  [2]. Ezra Pound, Section: Rock-Drill. Cantos lxxxv–xcv, Faber, 12s.

  [3]. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) was a French Symbolist poet, though Igitur: ou, la Folie d’Elbehnon is an unfinished collection of experimental short prose pieces that he began in 1869. Christopher Smart (1722–1771) wrote his poem “Song of David,” which attempts to meld human poetry with divinely inspired scriptures, while incarcerated in an asylum. Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell” influenced the Surrealists through its experimentation. Solomos’s prose work “The Woman of Zante” is also experimental. For all these authors, influence on the Surrealists is the common thread as well as their blending of stylistic experimentation with idiosyncratic quasi-mysticism.

  [4]. Notably, in 1938 Durrell began his third novel, The Black Book, with the phrase “The agon then, it begins” (1).

  [5]. Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was most famous for The Decline of the West.

  [6]. Ernest Fenellosa (1853–1908) was an American professor in Japan whose work on Chinese language and literature was most famously promoted by Pound, who inherited his papers. The book is certainly The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry first published in 1919. See Haun Saussy’s 2009 critical edition through Fordham University Press.

  [7]. E.A. Wallace Budge (1857–1934) was a prolific British Egyptologist. Durrell titled several drafts of novels Book of the Dead and had read Budge closely.

  [8]. James Joyce’s (1882–1941) final novel, which is characterized by complex and lengthy multilingual puns and wordplays.

  [9]. Durrell may be suggesting a parallel to the closing scene of Eliot’s The Waste Land, which is also a “quotation-mad” text.

  [10]. Durrell’s debt is clear at this time as well. In the closing words of his 1962 revised version of his 1957 novel, Justine, for the omnibus edition of The Alexandria Quartet, he ends the book with the final words of Pound’s first Canto “So that…” (195).

  The Shades of Dylan Thomas

  [1]. Two versions of this commentary were published. The first, much shorter, version was published a year earlier in Tambimuttu’s Poetry London–New York as “Correspondence” (34–35), the manuscript for which is held in the McPherson Library, University of Victoria. Thomas died in 1953.

  [2]. Thomas’s first collection of poetry, 18 Poems, was published on December 18, 1934 and was highly acclaimed by critics, including Edith Sitwell.

  [3]. The pseudonym for Edith Alice Mary Harper (1884–1947). Her autobiographical essay “Prelude to a Spring Clean” dates from this time and is likely Durrell’s reference here, though it is more likely he was sent to Wickham by John Gawsworth than Miller. Wickham financially supported Thomas and his new wife in 1935.

  [4]. The group of authors associated with the Villa Seurat.

  [5]. Durrell edited the three issues of Delta, the last of which was dedicated to poetry and was co-edited with David Gascoyne. Several of Thomas’s works appear across both The Booster and Delta. For the most thorough survey of this network, see Von Richthofen’s exhaustive unpublished dissertation, “The Booster/Delta Nexus.”

  [6]. This includes Thomas’s final version of “Prologue to an Adventure,” which has never been reprinted in this corrected form. The timelines for Thomas’s works and the dating of the Durrell–Thomas correspondence are conflicting in much of the critical work on Thomas, often dating their friendship later and overlooking the importance of the versions of Thomas’s works published in Delta (Gifford, “Durrell’s Delta” 19–23). Thomas also comments on the important influence Durrell’s The Black Book (1938) had on him.

  [7]. Durrell reviewed Ezra Pound’s “rock-drill” Cantos in the same year as publishing this piece, so this is more than a casual description. See his “Enigma Variations” in this volume (235–38).

  [8]. Miller includes an extended account of being turned back in his collection The Cosmological Eye (Miller, “Via Dieppe-Newhaven” 197–228).

  [9]. This fact was generally kept private and not printed until after Guiler’s death in 1985, after which unexpurgated version of Nin’s famous diary appeared that corrected previous omissions of references to Guiler. Durrell originally spelled Guiler as “Guyler” in this piece.

  [10]. Brandt (1904–1983) was also familiar to Durrell, and he wrote an introduction to Brandt’s 1983 book Nudes.

  [11]. Thomas’s account of some of this period appear in his letters to Durrell, published in Two Cities three years after this article (“Letters to Lawrence” 1–5).

  [12]. The British Museum. Durrell describes his semi-autobiographical alter ego, Walsh, in Pied Piper of Lovers as also reading extensively in the British Library.

  [13]. George Gordon Byron’s (1788–1824) epic poem “Don Juan.” Durrell refers to John Keats (1795–1821) extensively across both his poetry and prose.

  [14]. Cary (1888–1957) was an Irish novelist who died in March of the same year as Durrell published this work on Thomas. This was likely Durrell’s reason for the comparison.

  Bernard Spencer

  [1]. Spencer (1909–1963) was a British poet arising from the same network of authors that later became known as the Auden generation. He was, like Durrell, born in India, though he went on to an Oxford education where he knew W.H. Auden (1907–1973), Louis MacNeice (1907–1963), and Stephen Spender (1909–1995). He also co-edited Oxford Poetry for two years, first with Spender and then with Spender’s cousin Richard Goodman, the former just one year after the journal had been edited by Auden and Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972).

  [2]. Durrell was active in anti-fascism activities prior to the Nazi invasion of Greece, and his characterization of their group as refugees is accurate with other contemporary descriptions. Durrell had begun working for the British Council on an interim basis during the Italian invasion of Greece, but this would have followed after Spencer’s arrival.

  [3]. This is an illustrious list. Amy Nimr became Lady Amy Smart; Diana Gould married the violin virtuoso, perhaps the greatest of the twentieth century, Yehudi Menuhin. They all remained close for the rest of their lives. Tiller, Seferis, Fraser, and Williams were closely linked with Durrell during this period. All contributed to Personal Landscape in the terms described here.

  [4]. Spencer’s “Ideas About Poetry” in Personal Landscape is a good instance of such specific pronouncements that would have impacted Durrell’s work (2).

  [5]. Thomas (1878–1917) was a World War I poet commemorated in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner.

  [6]. Douglas (1920–1944) was a major poet of World War II and was well known by most of the North African poets in Personal Landscape.

  [7]. Fedden selected from the journal Personal Landscape for an anthology of the same title published under Tambimuttu’s Poetry London imprint in 1945. Durrell is listed as the editor in a portion of the advert
ising materials.

  [8]. None of these four authors appear in Personal Landscape. Durrell later wrote the introduction to Stark’s The Journey’s Echo (xi–xii) and the two wrote mutually supportive pieces for a variety of venues. Newby went on to anthologize Durrell’s works as well. Cossery was first published in English in part through Durrell’s connections to the anarchist Circle Editions series of publications in California, which was produced by George Leite, Kenneth Rexroth, and Robert Duncan (all of whom also published Durrell’s works). Henein was published by the same group.

  [9]. “Introduction: An Anatomy of Exile” (7–15). Also see Fedden’s “Personal Landscape” (63–65).

  [10]. Many of these poets also became government officials. All were published in Personal Landscape.

  [11]. This extra-national and anti-propaganda perspective is not simply apolitical. In many respects, it reflects the anti-authoritarian emphases of the networks from which Personal Landscape was built, which had developed via the Villa Seurat and was reflected in the journal’s ties to the expressly anarchist Circle and Transformation publications.

  [12]. See Spencer’s “In an Auction Room” (12). The issue also includes Terence Tiller’s “Roman Portraits” (4), Porteus’s “Phoenician Images” (13), and Nimr’s “The Poetry of Cavafy” (14–20), which translates Cavafy’s “In the Same Space,” “The God Abandons Anthony,” “The Ides of March,” “Without Heed,” “Those Who Risk,” “Return,” “To Ammonis Who Died at 29 Years Old in 610 A.D.,” “The Afternoon Sun,” and “So That it May Survive.” Nimr also refers to Valassopoulo’s translations included in Forster’s Pharos and Pharillon. The obituary on Douglas closed the issue and was written by Bernard Spencer himself.

  [13]. Spencer relocated several times, like Durrell, due to his work in the British Council.

  [14]. Edwards was a faculty member at Farouk I University in Alexandria with Gwyn Williams during World War II, and was hence close to Durrell. Edwards translated Cossery’s Les hommes oubliés de Dieu as Men God Forgot, which was published in 1946 by George Leite’s Circle Editions in Berkeley, through Henry Miller’s influence and Durrell’s involvement. Leite also published Durrell’s Zero and Asylum in the Snow the next year and had advanced plans and a contract to publish Durrell’s The Black Book, likely up to the production of page proofs, perhaps abandoned over financial difficulties or fears of censorship. A portion of Edwards’s translation of Cossery was also published in 1943 in the Cairo-based journal Orientations, which was edited by G.S. Fraser. In addition to his ongoing ties to Durrell, Cossery was also close friends with Albert Camus and Jean Genet.

  [15]. All of their relocations were as a result of government service.

  [16]. Abercrombie (1909–1992) was a professor of phonetics at the University of Edinburgh where he established the Department of Phonetics.

  [17]. Bernard Spencer, Lady Ines Burrows (née Walter), Robin Fedden, Gwyn Williams, Dorian Cooke, Keith Bullen, and Harold Edwards were all close friends in Alexandria during the war. Cooke, Williams, and Edwards were all at Farouk I University, Bullen was headmaster of the Gezira Preparatory School (which hosted the Salamander Club, later the Salamander Trust that published much war poetry), and Burrows married the British diplomat Bernard Burrows, with whom Durrell remained close long after his work with the British Council ended.

  [18]. See Sanderson’s Travels of John Sanderson in the Levant, 1584–1602. Durrell was also a long-time reader of Elizabethan literary materials of all forms.

  The Other Eliot

  [1]. “T.S. Eliot,” Durrell’s poetry editor at Faber & Faber. The French translation of this piece was published as “Tse-lio-t” (3–8) in the same year.

  [2]. Faber & Faber is now a famous British publishing house, but it originated in the Scientific Press, run by Sir Maurice Gwyer. Gwyer and Geoffrey Faber founded Gwyer and Faber in 1925, and when they dissolved the enterprise in 1929, Faber created Faber & Faber, though he had no partner. The publishing house became known for its extensive poetry offerings, and its publications include the most eminent authors of the twentieth century.

  [3]. John Murray was an English publisher founded in 1768, and it has perhaps the most illustrious “stable” of authors for any press, ranging from Jane Austen and Queen Victoria to Charles Darwin and Lord Byron.

  [4]. A portion of Durrell’s letters to Eliot are published as “Letters to T.S. Eliot” (348–58). Eliot’s letters to Durrell remain in the Durrell Collection of the Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

  [5]. Durrell was often keen to avoid showing Eliot’s influence, and his positioning of Cavafy in The Alexandria Quartet is likely a way of displacing attention from the book’s extensive allusions to Eliot’s poetry.

  [6]. This relationship was not normally acknowledged in print until after Guiler’s death in 1985, though Durrell also refers to it in his “Shades of Dylan Thomas.”

  [7]. Eliot’s comments were used for the flyleaf of the Obelisk Press edition of Durrell’s The Black Book. Since both books were banned, this was a significant risk for Eliot.

  [8]. Eliot’s own bawdy and semi-pornographic writings were only published in 1996, long after his death, in Inventions of the March Hare.

  [9]. Morgan (1894–1958) was a highly successful though now overlooked British novelist and critic.

  [10]. Durrell’s first published and performed play, which Eliot published through Faber & Faber.

  [11]. First published by Faber & Faber in 1948. Apart from edited collections, Durrell did not publish another book of poetry with Faber & Faber until The Ikons in 1966, after Eliot’s death.

  [12]. 10/6 is a pre-decimalization price of a half guinea or ten shillings and six pence. Counting in guineas traditionally indicates a higher class affiliation; hence, pricing to 10/6 would be posh and reflects the target audience of “wealthy poetry lovers.”

  [13]. Ernst Kretschmer was a German psychiatrist who established a typology of human bodies and personalities. The leptosomic is small and weak and prone to fastidiousness.

  [14]. Likely Colletts or Central Books, which would then have been the Worker’s Bookshop.

  [15]. For a detailed survey of the composition of The Waste Land, see Lawrence Rainey (27–84).

  [16]. This remark by Thomas is included in his letters to Durrell (2–5).

  [17]. The French poet, Paul Valéry (1871–1945), was employed by the Havas news agency for twenty years and only began his writing career after having taken up this flexible position.

  [18]. Durrell resided on Rhodes from 1945 to 1947 while he was director of public relations. He describes this period in Reflections on a Marine Venus and this particular winter in “From a Winter Journal” (252–60).

  [19]. Eliot’s Four Quartets is a set of four poems first published from 1935 to 1942. They were only published as a set in 1943 and 1944 in Britain.

  [20]. Eliot only mentions a grimpen (a term etymologically uncertain but generally seen as invented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) in the second section of “East Coker,” the second poem of the Four Quartets. The Oxford English Dictionary lists both Eliot and Doyle as its only examples of the word in use.

  [21]. D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) was a British novelist and poet who is often regarded as given to peculiar or unusual views on sexuality, psychology, and instinct.

  Richard Aldington

  [1]. Aldington’s two books from 1954, Pinorman: Personal Recollections of Norman Douglas, Pino Orioli and Charles Prentice and his more contentious Lawrence L’Imposteur: T.E. Lawrence, The Legend and the Man (1954), which was retitled the next year for its British publication with the more neutral Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry. Douglas (1868–1952) is largely remembered for his novel South Wind, to which Durrell alludes in several of his own novels.

  [2]. Claude Vincedon.

  On George Seferis

  [1]. Seferis was granted the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963.

  [2]. Prufrock appears in Eliot
’s famous “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) and Mauberley in Pound’s long poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920), which is in many ways akin to Eliot’s poem, though more overtly autobiographical. Seferis’s poem “Stratis Thalassinos among the Agapanthi” is focused largely on exile, but the characters appears across several of his works from 1940 to 1965. Durrell’s juxtaposition of Seferis and Eliot shows how he regarded the two poets.

  [3]. See Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 13–22.

  [4]. Eliot had a significant impact on Seferis’s works, and he was familiar with at least a little of Eliot’s work as early as 1931 (Beaton 107–09).

  [5]. Jules Laforgue (1860–1887) was an important French Symbolist poet who influenced English literary Modernism, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in particular. Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) was also a profoundly influential French poet, though he gave up writing by the time he was twenty-one. Durrell mentions Rimbaud and his lover Paul Verlaine in his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers (190).

  [6]. Durrell spoke out against the communist politics of Surrealism during and after the 1936 London International Surrealist exhibition and was closely tied to its anarchist revisions in English Surrealism.

  [7]. All three did significant work as translators. La Carrière (1925–2005) was a writer and translator as well as a personal friend of Durrell’s, Bonnefoy (1923–) is a French poet and essayist, and Warner (1905–1986) was a major translator of Greek materials whom Durrell knew well and who introduced Durrell’s co-translated edition of Seferis’s poetry.