From the Elephant's Back (55 page)

[14]
. Hippodamus of Miletus (498–408 BCE) is described by Aristotle as the first man to plan a city in order to shape society. Durrell's interest in city structures here foreshadows his later work in
The Alexandria Quartet
and
The Revolt of Aphrodite
, both of which are concerned with how urban space influences its residents.

[15]
. Strabo (63 BCE–24 CE) is known primarily for his seventeen-volume work,
Geographica
.

[16]
. Stadia are an ancient measurement of length. Approximately 14,800 metres or nine miles.

[17]
. Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) wrote of Rhodes in his
Natural History
.

[18]
. King Richard I (1157–1199) resided briefly in Byzantine Rhodes during the Third Crusade before continuing to Cyprus.

[19]
. The accretion of the Dodecanese Islands to Greece was completed in 1947 with the Peace Treaty with Italy, and union was formalized in 1948.

[20]
. Mussolini imposed a formal program of Italianization on the island, but it did not succeed.

[21]
. Although the Dodecanese are literally “twelve islands,” they include 150 smaller islands.

[22]
. Lago was governor from 1923 to 1936. In contrast to his successor, his term is seen as harmonious and peaceful.

[23]
. Cesare Maria De Vecchi (1884–1959) was a lifelong fascist. He is also responsible for much of the oppression of Rhodes' Jewish population prior to their removal to concentration camps by the Nazis.

[24]
. Charles Thomas Newton (1816–1894) published this work in 1865 while professor of archaeology at University College, London.

[25]
. Newton 207.

[26]
. The Homeric epithet in
The Iliad
is actually “white-gleaming” αργινοεις (2.656), often translated as “chalky.”

[27]
. Demetrius I (337–283 BCE) unsuccessfully besieged Rhodes and invented several new siege engines to do so. Durrell's source is Plutarch's
Life of Demetrius
.

[28]
. The Knights Hospitaller built the Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes in the fourteenth century, after 1309.

[29]
. This garden is where Durrell lived in the Villa Cleobolus during his time on Rhodes.

[30]
. Durrell is drawing from the
Chronicle
of Theophanes the Confessor (758–818) in which the remains of the Colossus are reported as sold by Turkish conquerors to a Jew from Edessa.

[31]
. Cecil Torr (1857–1928) wrote both
Rhodes in Ancient Times
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1885) and
Rhodes in Modern Times
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1887). Durrell also refers to Torr several times in
Reflections on a Marine Venus
.

[32]
. In Ancient Greek materials, nereids are water nymphs who are typically helpful to sailors. In Modern Greek myths, they are any form of nymph or fairy, typically quasi-demonic.

[33]
. Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, 6th Baronet CH (November 15, 1897–October 1, 1988) was an English writer, best known as an art critic and writer on architecture, particularly the baroque. He was the younger brother of Dame Edith Sitwell and Sir Osbert Sitwell.

[34]
. Sitwell's collection,
Canons of Giant Art: Twenty Torsos in Heroic Landscapes
(1933).

Can Dreams Live on When Dreamers Die?

[1]
.   Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius (395–423), a Roman philosopher, wrote two books on
The Dream of Scipio
that make this stratification of dreams, as did Calcidius, a fourth-century translator of Plato from whom Chaucer drew materials. Durrell may also be referring to Artemidorus, a Greek geographer of the second and first centuries BCE who wrote the five-volume
Oneirocritica
, or
The Interpretation of Dreams
, though he does not expressly make this same classification.

[2]
.   Asclepius is the Greek god of medicine and healing. In the Cult of Asclepius, the injured or sick would make a pilgrimage to the temple where they would undergo a variety of cleansing rituals followed by spending the night in the sanctuary, after which they would report their dreams to the priest for interpretation and prescription. The god would visit the pilgrims during sleep to prescribe or carry out healing. Epidaurus was the most famous asclepieion, but there were many others, including Butrint in Albania, a short journey by boat from where Durrell had lived in Kalami.

[3]
.   Both sites are well preserved, and Epidaurus is famous for the astonishing acoustics of its theatre. Kos is near to the Dodecanese, where Durrell served at this time, and was home to Hippocrates (460–370 BCE), from whom we derive the Hippocratic Oath.

[4]
.   Durrell later returned to Epidaurus with his wife Nancy after parting ways with Henry Miller en route, who was planning to return to America for fear of the impending invasion of Greece. This previous 1939 visit is not otherwise recorded.

[5]
.   Henry Miller describes a visit to Mycenae with George Katsimbalis in his 1941 book
The Colossus of Maroussi
, which Durrell had read by this time.

[6]
.   In the Cult of Asclepius, the god might appear to the pilgrims during their night in the temple.

[7]
.   The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which organized relief for the victims of World War II.

[8]
.   Like penny dreadfuls, yellowbacks were inexpensive sensational or adventure novels.

[9]
.   Carl Jung (1875–1961), the famous Swiss psychiatrist, wrote to Durrell on December 15, 1947 via the BBC after reading this piece. Jung notes, “Having had some experience of a similar kind I should very much like to know in what your further observations consist” as he was keen “to learn about your hellenic dreams” (Jung n. pag.). Only two letters are extant from Jung, the second sent directly to Durrell in Argentina, in which he responds to Durrell's comments on Georg Groddeck. Jung's interest focuses on Durrell's dream experiences during travel with the implication that these express the “extraordinary relations between our unconscious mind and what one calls time and space” (n. pag.).

Family Portrait

[1]
.   Modern day Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo, Slovenia, and Croatia in the Balkans. Durrell served in communist Yugoslavia from 1948 to 1952 while Josip Broz Tito was in power. He was first posted there when Tito broke ties with Stalin's Cominform.

[2]
.   This plurality of cultures, ethnicities, and politics was always “the problem” and has ultimately led to the dissolution of the state. Ljubljana is now the capital of Slovenia; Zagreb is the capital of Croatia; Belgrade is the capital of Serbia; and Skoplje is the capital of Macedonia.

[3]
.   Sir John Falstaff is a comic yet complex character in Shakespeare's
Henry IV, Part I, Henry IV, Part II
, and
The Merry Wives of Windsor
.

[4]
.   Dubrovnik is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and idyllic city on the coast of Croatia.

[5]
.   A major city in Serbia known for construction and industry.

[6]
.   The nerve centre.

[7]
.   Durrell voiced his dislike of Marxism beginning in the 1930s, despite its fashionable nature among poetry circles of the time. Despite his anti-establishment pose and critique of social norms, as well as his critique of consumerism and capitalism, Durrell never voiced support or serious interest in Marxism. This is most likely due to his alignment with a variety of anti-authoritarian views (Gifford, “Anarchist” 57–71; Gifford, “Surrealism's” 36–64) until his posting to Yugoslavia, after which a tone of conservatism entered his public comments, though his fiercest critiques of consumerism and cultural hegemony were in the novels of
The Revolt of Aphrodite
(
Tunc
and
Nunquam
), published in 1968 and 1970.

[8]
.   
Grimm's Fairy Tales
, which are German but richly illustrated in many editions.

Letter in the Sofa

[1]
.   Rhodes had been hard pressed under a fascist and anti-Semitic Italian governor and then the Nazi occupation. In 1944, 1,673 Jews were taken from Rhodes and transported to Auschwitz where approximately 150 survived. A Rebecca Capelouto was among the survivors, and she may be Durrell's inspiration in this text.

The Moonlight of Your Smile

[1]
.   Durrell initially moved to Cyprus as an English teacher at the Pancyprean Gymnasium in order to spend his time writing, but he was drawn into public relations work for the British government and editorship of the
Cyprus Review
during Greek agitation for union with Greece and independence from British rule.

[2]
.   Ultimately, these crises included the planting of an incendiary bomb in Durrell's garage and his flight from the island after having been informed he had become a target (MacNiven 439). This was during the struggle for Enosis, union with Greece.

[3]
.   Durrell edited the
Cyprus Review
from 1954 to 1956. It had been run as a vehicle for British propaganda since 1942 but was meant to become a vehicle for Cypriot pride as well as literary and artistic materials (MacNiven 418). It is unrelated to the modern journal
Cyprus Review
.

[4]
.   The National Organization of Cypriot Fighters who fought for union of Cyprus with Greece.

[5]
.   Durrell left Cyrpus under much different circumstances, and his comments here minimize the desperation of the situation and his personal fears of assassination after an incendiary bomb was left in his garage and Greek friends told him he was a potential target. Durrell fled Cyprus quickly on August 26, 1956.

[6]
.   After fleeing Cyprus and leaving his house in Bellapaix, Durrell returned to London in August 1956 with little money and lived with Claude, who would become his third wife, in friends' homes and with his mother for a time. It was a poor homecoming after so many years in service abroad, and they moved to France little more than four months later, very early in 1957.

[7]
.   At this point in 1960, after four years out of British government work, it was unlikely Durrell would accept another posting for any reason, but the text may date to the period prior to his publication of
Bitter Lemons
and
Justine
in 1957 when the financial necessity would likely have been stronger, and it is possible this was initially meant to form a scene in
Bitter Lemons
.

The Poetic Obsession of Dublin

[1]
.   As Richard Pine has pointed out, Duffy and the pub Duggans are fictional. This article is loosely based on Durrell's visit to Dublin with Margaret McCall in 1972. Conversations with Pine have been particularly helpful for annotating this chapter.

[2]
.   This paper was by Pine.

[3]
.   The Liffey is the river running through Dublin.

[4]
.   A luxury hotel in Dublin facing into St. Stephen's Green.

[5]
.   Pine is the author of several critical works on Lawrence Durrell, most notably
Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape
. He also founded and directed the Durrell School of Corfu. This incident is also described in MacNiven's biography (590) and in Durrell's letters to Henry Miller,
The Durrell–Miller Letters, 1935–80
(453).

[6]
.   Joyce and Yeats are frequent references for Durrell. Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) and J.M. Synge (1871–1909) are far less common, though Durrell first learned of Beckett in the 1930s from Henry Miller. All four are major Irish authors.

[7]
.   The Brazen Head is Ireland's oldest pub, dating to 1198, at 20 Lower Bridge Street.

[8]
.   Forster 134. Durrell was particularly fond of quoting this passage.

[9]
.   Trinity College Dublin.

[10]
. Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865), an Irish physicist, astronomer, and mathematician at Trinity College Dublin, and he was also a close friend to the poets William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).

[11]
. A Dog's Nose is typically gin and stout (Guinness), but there are several variations. The description of the drink first appeared in Charles Dickens's
Pickwick Papers
: “H. Walker, tailor, wife, and two children. When in better circumstances, owns to having been in the constant habit of drinking ale and beer; says he is not certain whether he did not twice a week, for twenty years, taste ‘dog's nose,' which your committee find upon inquiry, to be composed of warm porter, moist sugar, gin, and nutmeg” (412).

[12]
. Both pubs are on South Anne Street.

[13]
. Extreme accumulation of fat on the posterior.

[14]
. Durrell's third wife, Claude, wrote a memoir about running a pub in Cork,
Mrs. O'
(1957).

[15]
. On February 2, 1972, crowds destroyed the British embassy in retaliation to the Bloody Sunday Bogside Massacre in Derry (Northern Ireland) on January 30, in which twenty-six unarmed civil rights protestors were shot by the British Army, and thirteen were killed. Several were shot in the back.

[16]
. Durrell had a long-term attachment to Oscar Wilde's (1854–1900) works. Le Fanu (1814–1873) was most famous for writing ghost stories, of which “Carmilla,” the story of a lesbian vampire in the collection
In A Glass Darkly
, is the most famous. Le Fanu is a likely influence on Durrell's references in poetry and prose to vampires, such as in
The Alexandria Quartet, The Avignon Quintet
, and
The Red Limbo Lingo
. Charles Maturin (1782–1824) wrote Gothic plays and novels, most famously
Melmoth the Wanderer
—his sister-in-law was Oscar Wilde's grandmother, and Wilde refers to
Melmoth the Wanderer
in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. All three authors lived in Merrion Square, and a statue of Wilde sits there.