A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: In full Lawrence George Durrell. English novelist, writer of topographical books, verse plays, short stories and poet whose sensuous and exotic fiction made him a sort of prophet of the sexual revolution of the 1960's. Lawrence Durrell wrote both poetry and prose, with a notable sense of place and a concentration on the complexity of human relationships. Durrell is best known as the author of The Alexandria Quartet, a series of four interconnected novels. Many once believed it would secure Durrell the Nobel Prize for Literature. Lawrence George Durrell was born on February 27, 1912, in Jullundur in northern India, near Tibet. His English father, Lawrence Samuel Durrell, an engineer, had gone to the subcontinent to work on the construction of the country's first railway. His Irish-English mother, Louisa Florence Dixie, had also been born in India. This mix of nationalities marked Durrell's creative imagination. Durrell spent most of his life outside England and had little sympathy with the English character. He was educated in India until he reached age 11 and then at St. Edmund's School, Canterbury, in England. The immediate discomfort he felt in England he attributed to its lifestyle, which he termed "the English death." He explains: "English life is really like an autopsy. It is so, so dreary." Deeply alienated, he refused to adjust himself to England and resisted the regimentation of school life. He attended numerous schools from 1923 to 1928 without much success. Durrell failed to gain admission to Cambridge University, and held a number of brief jobs, including that of jazz pianist in a London nightclub. His younger brother, Gerald Durrell, is a naturalist and author whose book My Family and Other Animals chronicled the eccentricities of the Durrells. In the 1930s he went to Paris, where he started his career as a writer. Between the years 1934 and 1940 he edited a little magazine called Booster (later Delta). After the failure of his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers (1935), he invented a pseudonym, Charles Norden, and wrote his second novel, Panic Spring (1937), for the mass market. Two fortunate events occurred in 1935 that changed the course of his career. First, he persuaded his mother, siblings, and wife, Nancy Myers, to move to Corfu, Greece, to live more economically and to escape the English winter. Life in Greece was a revelation; Durrell felt it reconnected him to India. While in Greece, he wrote a plan for The Book of the Dead, which was an ancestor--though it bore little resemblance--to what may be his greatest literary accomplishment, The Alexandria Quartet. Second, Durrell chanced upon Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934) and wrote Henry Miller a fan letter. Thus began a forty-five-year friendship and correspondence based on their love of literature, their fascination with the Far East, and their comradeship in the face of personal and artistic setbacks. Durrell's first novel of interest, The Black Book: An Agon, heavily influenced by Miller, was published in Paris in 1938. The mildly pornographic fantasia did not appear in Britain until 1973. In the story Lawrence Lucifer struggles to escape the spiritual sterility of dying England, and finds Greece's warmth and fertility. After six years in Corfu and Athens, Durrell and his wife were forced to flee Greece in 1941, just ahead of the advancing Nazi army. They settled together in Cairo, along with their baby daughter Penelope Berengaria, who had been born in 1940. In 1942, separated from his wife, Durrell moved to Alexandria, Egypt, and became press attaché in the British Information Office. Ostensibly working, Durrell was in reality closely observing the assortment of sights, sensations, and people that wartime Alexandria, a crossroads of the East and West, had to offer. He also met Eve Cohen, a Jewish woman from Alexandria, who was to become his model for Justine. Durrell married her (his second wife) in 1947, after his divorce from Nancy Myers. In 1951, their daughter Sappho Jane was born. In 1945 Durrell returned to Greece and spent two years in Rhodes as director of public relations for the Dodocanese Islands. He left Rhodes to become the director of the British Council Institute in Cordoba, Argentina, from 1947-48. He then moved to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he was press attaché from 1949-52. Durrell's observation of the diplomatic life at the British legation in Belgrade, where he was from 1949 to 1952, gave him material for White Eagles Over Serbia (1957), which gained considerable success. In 1953 Durrell left diplomatic service and moved to Cyprus, but from 1954 to 1956 he returned to it, on account of the Cypriot revolution, as director of Public Relations for the British Government. He found himself caught between the warring factions and even became a target for terrorists. Bitter Lemons (1957) is Durrell's account of these troubled years. While in Cyprus, Durrell began writing Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet, composed of Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960). He would eventually complete the four books in France. The Quartet was published between 1957 and 1960 and was a critical and commercial success. Durrell received recognition as an author of international stature. The lush and sensuous tetralogy became a best-seller and won high critical esteem. The first three volumes described, from different viewpoints, a series of events in Alexandria before World War II; the fourth carried the story forward into the war years. By its subjective narrative structure The Alexandria Quartet demonstrates one of its main themes: the relativity of truth. More important is the implied theme: that sexual experience, the practice of art, and love are all ways of learning to understand and finally to pass beyond successive phases of development toward ultimate truth and reality. The relationship of the novels to one another was described by Mr. Durrell as that of siblings. He also said that the quartet was an attempt to apply the space-time continuum to the novel. The books were intended, he said, to be an investigation of modern love. After being forced out of Cyprus, Durrell finally settled in Sommières, Provence, in the south of France, where he lived for the rest of his life. In the next thirty-five years, he produced two more cycles of novels: The Revolt of Aphrodite, comprising Tunc (1968) and and its sequel, Nunquam (1970), and The Avignon Quintet (1974-1985) --consisting of Monsieur; or, The Prince of Darkness (1974), Livia; or, Buried Alive (1978), Constance; or, Solitary Practices (1982), Sebastian; or, Ruling Passions (1983), and Quinx; or, The Ripper's Tale (1985)--. Neither of these cycles achieved the critical and popular success of The Alexandria Quartet. Mr. Durrell's prose fiction, in the general opinion of critics, became overwhelmingly intricate -- intricate, some said, to the point of obfuscation. He first gained recognition as a poet with A Private Country (1943), and his reputation was established by Cities, Plains and People (1946), The Tree of Idleness (1953), and The Ikons (1966). Durrell continued writing poetry, and his Collected Poetry appeared in 1980. Durrell married two more times. He wed his third wife, Claude-Marie Vincendon, in 1961. He was devastated when she died of cancer in 1967. His fourth marriage, to Ghislaine de Boysson, began in 1973 and ended in 1979. He had two daughter by each of his first two marriages. His second daughter, Sappho, committed suicide in 1985, leaving behind writings that pointed accusingly to his father - probably without basis. His final work, Caesar's Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence, was published in 1990. Durrell also carried on a 45-year-long correspondence with American writer Henry Miller. In the nonfiction works Prospero's Cell (1945), Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953), and Bitter Lemons (1957), Durrell describes the Greek islands of Corfu, where he lived with his first wife in 1937-38; Rhodes, where in 1945-46 he acted as press officer to the Allied government; and Cyprus, his home from 1952 to 1956. Many critics regarded his poetry and nonfiction books as his most enduring achievements. Lawrence Durrell died of a stroke at his home in Sommeèrs, on November 7, 1990, following a lenghty struggle with emphysema. |
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