What different worlds we hailed from! Try to connect Brooklyn—the 14th Ward—and Darjeeling! Or the Ionian Sea and the East River! As well try to yoke Homer and Dostoevsky. Or Hannibal and Arthur. How well I remember his amazement when he learned that I had never read the Odyssey or the Iliad. Yes, there were roadblocks now and then. Stendhal was one; Laurence Sterne another. (I’ve never been able to read either to this day!) But we could share enthusiasm for Blavatsky, for Petronius, and for dear Knut Hamsun, among others. Not Shakespeare.
He was an exceedingly well read man even then. I could sit back and listen to him by the hour. The great link between us was Lao-tse and that disciple of his, the gay old dog, who followed some centuries later. (The man John Cowper Powys delights in referring to.) By comparison I was just a Brooklyn boy, an inculte who reached for his revolver whenever he heard the word Culture. Which is why, most likely, we got on so well together and could spend days on end getting drunk on Spengler.
(It’s strange, but I don’t recall any lengthy discussions about Rimbaud then. I’m sure he had read him, of course.)
How I enjoyed it when he laced it into me! No man who ridiculed me ever gave me more pleasure in the doing of it than Larry Durrell. It was like having your nine-year-old make a monkey of you. (“Put up your dukes! Not that way! Lead with your left!”) Yes, he could polish the floor with me—culture-wise. Besides, I was congenitally slow-witted, if not half-witted.
The one thing I never did learn from him, though I’ve never regretted it, was to improve my style. It’s amazing, too, because no one ever put his finger on my weaknesses more unerringly than Durrell. But I’m stubborn and recalcitrant. (I still lead with my right; I still stick my jaw out.) But it gives me infinite pleasure to add that the chap who talked improvements has worked them on himself, has demonstrated in his own work that it pays off. I know of no greater stylist today among contemporary writers of English, than the author of those unknown books which he had the good sense to sign with another name. The Black Book was not his first book. But it was the first book he wrote with his right hand. He had been at it, I would hazard, since grammar school days. (How lucky he was to have been “wasting his time” traveling about the world instead of going up to Cambridge or Oxford!)
In a few weeks I shall be seeing him again. It was just about twenty years ago that we parted, somewhere in Arcadia (Greece). What prodigious things he has accomplished in the interim! It will be like meeting Victor Hugo now. What I keep wondering is—will he have that same belly laugh? I don’t care what mistakes he may have made, what sins he may have committed, if only he has retained that infectious laugh! Books are forgotten, fame passes, but laughter is something you take with you to the grave. I don’t want him to die, but when he does—for he must one day!—please God, let him die laughing!
Big Sur, California
Feb. 9th, 1959
A Biography of Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence Durrell (1912—1990) was a novelist, poet, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet, his acclaimed series of four novels set before and during World War II in Alexandria, Egypt. Durrell’s work was widely praised, with his Quartet winning the greatest accolades for its rich style and bold use of multiple perspectives. Upon the Quartet’s completion, Life called it “the most discussed and widely admired serious fiction of our time.”
Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Durrell was an avid and dedicated writer from an early age. He studied in Darjeeling before his parents sent him to England at the age of eleven for his formal education. When he failed to pass his entrance examinations at Cambridge University, Durrell committed himself to becoming an established writer. He published his first book of poetry in 1931 when he was just nineteen years old, and later worked as a jazz pianist to help fund his passion for writing.
Determined to escape England, which he found dreary, Durrell convinced his widowed mother, siblings, and first wife, Nancy Isobel Myers, to move to the Greek island of Corfu in 1935. The island lifestyle reminded him of the India of his childhood. That same year, Durrell published his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers. He also read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and, impressed by the notorious novel, he wrote an admiring letter to Miller. Miller responded in kind, and their correspondence and friendship would continue for forty-five years. Miller’s advice and work heavily influenced Durrell’s provocative third novel, The Black Book (1938), which was published in Paris. Though it was Durrell’s first book of note, The Black Book was considered mildly pornographic and thus didn’t appear in print in Britain until 1973.
In 1940, Durrell and his wife had a daughter, Penelope Berengaria. The following year, as World War II escalated and Greece fell to the Nazis, Durrell and his family left Corfu for work in Athens, Kalamata (also in Greece), then Alexandria, Egypt. His relationship with Nancy was strained by the time they reached Egypt, and they separated in 1942. During the war, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British Embassy. He also wrote Prospero’s Cell, a guide to Corfu, while living in Egypt in 1945.
Durrell met Yvette Cohen in Alexandria, and the couple married in 1947. They had a daughter, Sappho Jane, in 1951, and separated in 1955. Durrell published White Eagles Over Serbia in 1957, alongside the celebrated memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and Justine (1957), the first novel of the Alexandria Quartet Capitalizing on the overwhelming success of Justine, Durrell went on to publish the next three novels in the series—Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960)—in quick succession. Upon the series’ completion, poet Kenneth Rexroth hailed it as “a tour de force of multiple-aspect narrative.”
Durrell married again in 1961 to Claude-Marie Vincendon, who died of cancer in 1967. His fourth and final marriage was in 1973 to Ghislaine de Boysson, which ended in divorce in 1979.
After a life spent in varied locales, Durrell settled in Sommières, France, where he wrote the Revolt of Aphrodite series as well as the Avignon Quintet. The first book in the Quintet, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize while Constance (1982), the third novel, was nominated for the Booker Prize.
Durrell died in 1990 at his home in Sommières.
This photograph of Lawrence Durrell aboard his boat, the Van Norden, is taken from a negative discovered among his papers. The vessel is named after a character in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. (Photograph held in the British Library’s modern manuscripts collection.)
One of Nancy Durrell’s photographs from the 1930s. Pictured here is the Caique, which they used to travel around the waters of Corfu. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin, property of the Gerald Durrell Estate.)
This photograph of Nancy and Lawrence Durrell was likely taken in Delphi, Greece, in late 1939. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin and the Gerald Durrell Estate.)
A 1942 photograph of Lawrence Durrell with his wife, Nancy, and their daughter, Penelope, taken in Cairo. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin.)
This manuscript notebook contains one of two drafts of Justine acquired by the British Library as part of Lawrence Durrell’s large archive in 1995. (Notebook held in the British Library’s modern manuscripts collection.)
A page from Durrell’s notebooks, or, as he called them, the “quarry.” This page introduced his notes on the “colour and narrative” of scenes in Justine. (Photo courtesy of the Lawrence Durrell Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.)
“As well as serving delicious food in an idyllic setting, the Taverna Nikolas at Agni has strong links with the Durrell story in Corfu,” says Joanna Hodgkin of this 2012 photo. Durrell lived in the neighboring town of Kalami, where his famous White House sits right above the shoreline. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin.)
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright©1959 by Lawrence Durrell
cover design by Jason Gabbert
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Lawrence Durrell, The Black Book
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