From the Elephant's Back (2 page)

For the opportunity to teach several of these shorter works, and thereby develop a sense of what annotations would be most congenial to a typical undergraduate reader, I am indebted to my students from 2005 to 2011 at the University of Lethbridge, the University of Victoria, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and Simon Fraser University. Graduate students at the University of Iowa and Simon Fraser University have also helped with feedback on lectures that discussed several of the critical interventions I have attempted here. I am also indebted to Joanne Muzak for her astonishingly keen eye as an editor and generous critical acumen.

James Gifford

Vancouver

November 2014

Introduction

THIS COLLECTION HAS A STRAIGHTFORWARD AMBITION:
to redirect the interpretive perspective that readers bring to Lawrence Durrell's literary works by returning their attention to his short prose. This includes three main areas for critical intervention: reconsidering Durrell's political postures over time, reassessing his position in English literature as a Late Modernist, and addressing the role of the poignant suffering surrounding the Second World War in his travel writing. For both “scholarly” and “pleasure” readers, these new perspectives on his texts alter our approach to Durrell's more famous works, mainly his novels and travel books, which continue to attract a wide audience. A century after his birth, such reconsideration is increasingly necessary. And Durrell's works are increasingly necessary to that century's understanding of itself.

In each of the three areas I have outlined, much literary baggage has accumulated over time, and, as a consequence, most readers find it difficult to approach Durrell without preconceived interpretive notions. He is most often presented as an imperialist author belonging to no definite generation or movement, whose works evoke a tourist's dream of the orientalist and philhellenic luxuriance of the Eastern Mediterranean. We need little prompting to regard Durrell's works through such a tinted glass. In a more general sense relating to that first paradigmatic approach—his political positions over time—Durrell is known for his literary activity at the end of empire, writing such works as
Bitter Lemons
and
The Alexandria Quartet
in the immediate aftermath of the Enosis struggle on Cyprus and the Suez Crisis in Egypt. This has led to his works being associated with other late imperial prose writers and works, such as Paul Scott's
Raj Quartet
and Doris Lessing's
The Golden Notebook
. What this perspective masks is Durrell's Indian childhood, his troubled position as an imperial subject, and his close ties to several anti-authoritarian-cum-anarchist figures in tandem with his lifelong anti-Marxism. Durrell's short prose presents a politicized author very much unlike the popular image constructed from the accumulated veneers of many years of critical thought, much of which grew out of the decolonization process that erupted in 1956, the same year as Durrell wrote
Justine
. At a minimum, we uncover a far more politically complex author than we are typically compelled to find when first reading
The Alexandria Quartet
. This other Lawrence Durrell more clearly relates to the major literary achievements of other writers from the same time period.

In the works gathered here, we find the character-defining aesthetic ponderings of the young Lawrence Durrell who was about to begin a series of publications in such venues as George Woodcock's wartime magazine
NOW
, Robert Duncan's
Experimental Review
, George Leite's
Circle
(also with Kenneth Rexroth and Duncan), and Alex Comfort's
New Road
; all four were expressly anarchist periodicals edited by self-identifying anarchist poets. The first was published by Freedom Press and the last by Grey Walls Press, which bound itself closely to the anarchist New Apocalypse movement and produced
Seven
, which Durrell also repeatedly published in and promoted.
[1]
Immediately prior, he appeared in the Oxford student poetry journal
Kingdom Come
, which was the rebirth of the short-lived
Bolero
—both were edited by John Waller (succeeded by New Apocalypse poets) who had dabbled significantly with anti-authoritarian politics and fostered the network of poets that would reassemble with Durrell in North Africa during the Second World War. Duncan twice published Durrell in
Experimental Review
and reviewed Henry Miller in it, noting, “Politically he has no politics. Having come at last into the real world he is an anarchist. Anyone reading over the foregoing passage will see clearly why the Marxist surrealists are afraid of Miller” (79). At the same time, Duncan was repeatedly attempting to publish Durrell's surrealist
Asylum in the Snow
under the same conceptual revision to Surrealism, though it took him seven years to accomplish it—and the book was finally published by Circle in 1947.

This
Lawrence Durrell comes as a surprise to early twenty-first-century readers. This angry young man of the 1940s gives an unanticipated voice to anti-authoritarian visions of poetic inspiration in “Ideas About Poems” and “The Heraldic Universe,”
[2]
both of which are in this collection and originate in his correspondence with Henry Miller about Herbert Read and Surrealism. Both Read and Miller, again, self-identified as anarchist writers,
[3]
and the vision Miller fostered shaped Durrell's developing sense of his poetics in the 1930s and 1940s. Recontextualized, Durrell's production of an open text that is dependent on the reader's independent interpretive ventures and individual creativity forces a contemporary reader to examine the potential politics of such an aesthetic vision. If the text thrusts interpretive independence on the reader for a highly personal vision, does this “Personalist” concept imply a politics?
[4]
More to the point, how is Durrell's “personal” stance akin to or different from the Personalist movement that grew among his colleagues at the same moment in Britain, and which also rebutted T.S. Eliot's impersonal theory of poetry? It is also tempting to ask if Durrell's early “heraldic” notions of creativity influenced the ambiguity and reader-imminent interpretations we are given in
The Alexandria Quartet
, whether they appear as “Workpoints” in
The Alexandria Quartet
that allow the reader to continue the narrative or as an unreliable narrator whom the reader cannot trust to provide meaning. In any case, the traditionally understood notion of Durrell's Heraldic Universe as a mental state of being is insufficient for the context revealed by its publishing history and associations.

As I have shown elsewhere, the descriptions of the Heraldic Universe that Durrell articulates in the works gathered in this collection derive directly from his partnership with Miller in a correspondence with Read that concerned communism and anarchism (“Anarchist” 61–63). This relationship between aesthetics and politics has been overlooked entirely in previous scholarship. In reaction to the copy of Read's speech from the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition, a speech that Miller sent to Durrell with Read's letter, Durrell responded, “This manifesto would be a lot clearer if these brave young revolutionaries started by defining what they mean by art. To begin with, they seem to mean Marx” (Durrell and Miller 18). Read concludes his uncharacteristically pro-communist speech with the statement that Surrealism only succeeds “in the degree to which it leads to revolutionary actions” (8) and “work[s] for the transformation of this imperfect world” (13). To this, Durrell responded directly: “A definition of the word surrealism, please” and “I firmly believe in the ideals of cementing reality with the dream, but I do not believe the rest of this stuff. That the artist must be a socialist, for example. That he wants to transform the world. (He wants to transform men.)” (Durrell and Miller 18). It was only in this immediate context, for which Miller had established his anarchist vision in contrast to the communist perspective endorsed by Surrealism, that Durrell offered his first articulation of the Heraldic Universe just a few lines later in the same letter: “Listen, Miller, what I feel about it, is this…What I propose to do, with all deadly solemnity, is to create my HERALDIC UNIVERSE quite alone. The foundation is being quietly laid” (18). In this context, Durrell's subsequent anti-rationalist and autonomous articulation of the Heraldic Universe in
Personal Landscape
, collected in this volume, takes on a new tone: “Describing, logic limits. Its law is causality.…Poetry by an associative approach transcends its own syntax in order not to describe but to be the cause of apprehension in others: Transcending logic it invades a realm where unreason reigns” (“Heraldic,” this volume 103). Durrell's other aesthetic comments for the journal, “Ideas About Poems,” draw on further loaded terms gesturing to the anarchist New Apocalypse's Personalist movement, “The poet is interested in the Personal aspect….That is the only explanation for
Personal Landscape
now” (this volume 99). John Waller, who edited
Bolero
and
Kingdom Come
in Oxford and was published by Durrell in
Personal Landscape
, stated the relation succinctly: “Durrell is likely to found no school. (Indeed the best poetry of 1940 onwards may come to be known as that of brilliant individuals rather than of groups and tendencies.)” (179).

However, this anti-authoritarian component of Durrell's early works came to a head in 1948, shortly after a rapid flurry of publications and attempted publications by anarchist presses and periodicals as well as projects by other authors that he supported through the same literary circle.
[5]
In 1949, Durrell relocated to Yugoslavia, and in this new place, his anti-Marxist position was reshaped and intensified. The humanist and anti-Marxist elements of the anarchism envisioned by Miller in works like “An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere” took on, for Durrell, a conservative tenor after his sequential postings to Belgrade and then Cyprus, the former of which he regarded as proof of the impoverished outcomes of authoritarian communism. As Durrell wrote to his dear friend Theodore Stephanides while serving in Belgrade in 1949, in a letter taken up by Andrew Hammond as a demonstration of Durrell's confirmed conservatism,

There is little news except that what I have seen here has turned me firmly reactionary and Tory: the blank dead end which labour leads towards seems to be this machine state, with its censored press, its long marching columns of political prisoners guarded by tommy guns. Philistinism, puritanism and cruelty. Luckily the whole edifice has begun to crumble, and one has the pleasurable job of aiding and abetting.
(Durrell,
Spirit
101; Hammond 49)

However, like most of Durrell's comments on his reactionary nature, hyperbole and irony play a significant role. Durrell's immediately previous letter to Stephanides shows a much different context and a far more qualified position:

Conditions are rather gloomy here—almost mid-war conditions, overcrowding, poverty: As for Communism—my dear Theodore a short visit here is enough to make one decide that Capitalism is worth fighting for. Black as it might be, with all its bloodstains, it is less gloomy and arid and hopeless than this inert and ghastly police state.
(Durrell,
Spirit 100
)

This is hardly unqualified conservatism. Moreover, while he did not consider it as bad as Yugoslavia under Tito, Durrell's capitalism remains black and bloodstained, and by 1974 he intimately bound money to
merde
(
Monsieur
141) through “Marx's great analysis of our culture or the Freudian analysis of absolute value as based on infantile attitudes to excrement. Gold and excrement” (141). A kindred irony appears in another of Durrell's often quoted comments in a late-in-life interview: “I'm conservative, I'm reactionary and right wing” (Green 23; Pine,
Lawrence
393–94; Calotychos 185). Richard Pine quotes from a portion of Peter Green's interview, Vangelis Calotychos quotes Pine to demonstrate Durrell's right-wing position, and from this context, Marilyn Adler Papayanis contends, “Durrell's…reactionary politics [are] an important component of his ethics of expatriation” (41). However, this overlooks the irony and contextual poignancy of Durrell's original statement in its original context. When Green asked, “Were you, or are you, romantic about Greece?” (23), Durrell offered a pointed response:

Yes. I think super-starry-eyed in a sense.…Remember that neither my father nor mother had ever seen England.…I was already under the shadow of the myth of the British raj.…But I've been progressively disgusted with our double-facedness in politics over situations like the Greek situation. Remember I've worked as an official in Cyprus on that disgusting situation which was entirely engineered by us, do you see….And, as I say, I've never got over the fact of feeling ashamed that bits of the Parthenon are lying about. I refused a CMG
[6]
on those grounds, though I didn't make an issue of it, and I don't want to—I'm conservative, I'm reactionary and right wing—so I don't want to embarrass anybody. But the reason I make a polite bow-out of the whole thing was that I didn't want to be decorated by people who had bits of the Parthenon lying about in their backyard; and are too shabby not to send the biggest battleship…immediately back to the Greeks with it…to thank them for our existence.
(Green 23)

Like his qualified siding with capitalism over communism, for Durrell to reject the legitimacy of British Hellenic holdings in the British Museum and the Elgin Marbles is hardly reactionary and points to the irony in his political positions as well as his express disputation with British colonialism. It is equally difficult to read Durrell's full comments as pro-imperial. Moreover, this comment was made at the height of the administration of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government in 1987, and it discusses Durrell's experiences during Sir Anthony Eden's and Harold Macmillan's Conservative governments in 1957 (which explains the fluctuations between present and past tenses in Durrell's language above). The interpretive simplicity that Papayanis finds would now seem deeply blurred. The trouble for the reader here is how to hold in creative tension, perhaps even a defining tension, Durrell's lengthy anti-authoritarian ties and anti-Marxist beliefs, both of which seem to have a significant role in the aesthetic structure of his works, in conjunction with his service to the British government. Durrell's comments remained measured even after he was redefined as a British non-patrial without the right to enter or settle in Britain without a visa, a fact that “thickens” this tension. Moreover, we must ask whether or not the existing political interpretations of Durrell's works are sufficient for the breadth of this creative tension.