LAWRENCE DURRELL - A NEGLECTED IRISH WRITER

We Irish tend to admire our writers. After all, it’s a lonely old job - long hours spent mooning into monitors, broken only by visits to the pub, occasionally enlivened by feats of slagging or bouts of fisticuffs.

Behan, Kavanagh, and Donleavy spring to mind, but wait a minute, should Donleavy even be classed as Irish. Well, yes, if we go by blood rather than place of birth.

Which brings me to a writer who vehemently claimed he was Irish, though usually pigeonholed as British, or at best a hapless colonial.

I speak of Lawrence Durrell. Born in India in 1912 to Anglo-Irish stock; upon the death of his father in 1932, the family moved lock, stock and barrel to England, a country that young Larry despised; in fact, he was known to call the imperial way of life “the English death.”

The Durrells were barely settled in Bournemouth when Larry prevailed upon his mother, family, and recently acquired wife Nancy, to move house once again to the Greek island of Corfu.

From then until his death in 1990, through four marriages, he spent most of his life in close proximity to the Mediterranean.

A man of great learning, Lawrence Durrell never took well to formal education and failed his university entrance exam; still, he was a prodigious writer, turning his hand to fiction, poetry, travel and history. One wonders when he had the time, given the four wives, love of conversation, tipple, friendship, mythology and travel.

I first noted him on account of his long friendship with Henry Miller. Durrell himself discovered the then unknown Bard of Brooklyn on finding a copy of Miller’s epic, Tropic of Cancer, in a public lavatory.

Durrell’s own masterpiece is a series of books called The Alexandria Quartet. Justine, the first book, is in his own words a “modern love story,” though whether it’s about the mysterious Jewish woman in question or the Egyptian city is often hard to decipher.

If Joyce had his Molly and Dublin, then Durrell had his Justine and the even more turbulent Alexandria. 

Dare I mention the two writers in the same breath? Both books are dense, though throbbing with life, love in its many forms, intrigue and general skullduggery.

Occasionally the Quartet even surpasses Ulysses, for when you begin Balthazar, the second book, you’re forced to call into question the “facts” you took for granted in Justine. 

By the end of the fourth book, Clea, you begin to wonder if indeed all life is a pilgrimage through a universe of mirrors.

The Quartet provides an added bonus: through quotes and his role in city lore you’ll become familiar with the lonely, probing verses of Constantine Cavafy, “the Poet of Alexandria.”

“Two for the price of one,” Pete Hamill, another Durrell admirer, once suggested. Jacqueline Kennedy too was a well-known devotee of the Durrell/Cavafy association.

Durrell’s stock has fallen somewhat of late, then again, his prose, byzantine plot twists, and overweening love of language is hardly suited to our texting times.

Perhaps it was the nature of his most creative era: the autocratic 30’s, war-scarred 40’s, empire- shattering 50’s, that led him to tunnel so deeply into Alexandria’s world of decaying beauty?

Durrell spent his later years in France where he turned his hand to the Avignon Quintet, no less, delving into the history of that medieval city and its relationship to the esoteric Knights Templar organization.

And what of his poetry? Under the undoubted influence of Cavafy, it gleams with clarity and is often touching.

His travel books are unforgettable and leave their mark. I first read Sicilian Carousel in the late 70’s and only fulfilled a vow to visit the island recently. Durrell’s knowledge of this oft-conquered, exotic island can add so much to the enjoyment of The White Lotus in its Sicilian season. 

Whatever you do, read The Greek Islands, Durrell’s 1978 coffee-table tome. He brings the many islands he has visited, or dwelt in, to life. An avid swimmer, he is no literary snob who frowns on packed beaches, for he generously excavates gods, poets and distinctive humans who once frolicked where tourists now braise themselves in the sun.

So welcome, Lawrence Durrell. We can use an Irish writer capable of transporting us into the heart of love, loss, life and antiquity in these unfocused days of stress and hysterical social mediating.