Read From the Elephant's Back Online
Authors: Lawrence Durrell
Pine, Richard.
Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape
. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994. Print.
âââ. “Theodore Stephanides: A Brief Biography.” Theodore Stephanides.
Autumn Gleanings: Corfu Memoirs and Poems
. Eds. Richard Pine, Lindsay Parker, James Gifford, and Anthony Hirst. Corfu, GR: Durrell School of Corfu, 2011. 12â18. Print.
Porteus, Hugh Gordon. “Phoenician Images.”
Personal Landscape
2.4 (1945): 13â14. Print.
Prem, Shri Krishna.
The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita
. Sandpoint, ID: Morning Light Press, 2008. Print.
Rainey, Lawrence S. “Eliot among the Typists: Writing
The Waste Land
.”
Modernism/modernity
12.1 (2005): 27â84. Print.
Ranasinha, Ruvani.
South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain
. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.
Read, Herbert. “Speech by Herbert Read at the Conway Hall.”
The Surrealist Bulletin
4 (1936): 7â13. Print.
Rodd, James Rennell.
The Customs and Lore of Modern Greece
. London: David Stott, 1892. Print.
Roessel, David. “âCut in Half as It Was': Editorial Excisions and the Original Shape of Reflections on a Marine Venus.”
Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal
NS 6 (1998): 64â77. Print.
âââ.
In Byron's Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination
. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.
Sanderson, John.
Travels of John Sanderson in the Levant, 1584â1602
. Vol. 67. London: Hakluyt Society, 1931. Print.
Schimanski, Stefan, and Henry Treece. “Towards A Personalist Attitude: Introduction.”
Transformation
. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1943. 13â17. Print.
Schorer, Mark. “
On Lady Chatterley's Lover
.”
Evergreen Review
1 (1957): 149â78. Print.
Secombe, Thomas.
The Age of Shakespeare (1579â1631)
. 1902. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1927. Print.
Seferis, George. “Cavafy and EliotâA Comparison.”
On The Greek Style: Selected Essays on Poetry and Hellenism
. Trans. Rex Warner. London: The Bodley Head, 1967. 121â61. Print.
âââ. “The King of Asine.”
Personal Landscape
2.3 (1944): 9â10. Print.
âââ.
The King of Asine and Other Poems
. Trans. Bernard Spencer, Lawrence Durrell, and Nano Valaoritis. London: John Lehmann Ltd., 1948. Print.
âââ. “Letter from a Greek Poet.”
Personal Landscape
1.1 (1942): 10. Print.
Shakespeare, William.
Hamlet (Folio 1, 1623)
. Ed. David Bevington.
Internet Shakespeare Editions
. University of Victoria, 1 June 2014. Web.
âââ.
Hamlet (Quarto 1, 1603)
. Ed. David Bevington.
Internet Shakespeare Editions
. University of Victoria, 1 June 2014. Web.
âââ.
Love's Labour's Lost (Folio 1, 1623)
. Ed. Timothy Billings.
Internet Shakespeare Editions
. University of Victoria, 1 June 2014. Web.
âââ.
Othello (Folio 1, 1623)
. Eds. Donald L. Bailey and Jessica Slights.
Internet Shakespeare Editions
. University of Victoria, 1 June 2014. Web.
âââ.
Rape of Lucrece (Modern)
. Ed. Hardy M. Cook.
Internet Shakespeare Editions
. University of Victoria, 1 June 2014. Web.
âââ.
The Sonnets (Modern)
. Eds. Michael Best, Ian Lancashire, and Hardy M. Cook.
Internet Shakespeare Editions
. University of Victoria, 1 June 2014. Web.
âââ.
The Tempest (Folio 1, 1623)
. Eds. Brent Whitted and Paul Yachnin.
Internet Shakespeare Editions
. University of Victoria, 1 June 2014. Web.
âââ.
Titus Andronicus (Folio 1, 1623). Internet Shakespeare Editions
. University of Victoria, 1 June 2014. Web.
âââ.
Venus and Adonis
. Ed. Hardy M. Cook.
Internet Shakespeare Editions
. University of Victoria, 1 June 2014. Web.
Shawqy. “To a Late Composer.” Trans. Herbert Howarth and Ibrahim Shukrallah.
Personal Landscape
2.1 (1943): 6â7. Print.
Snow, C.P.
The Two Cultures
. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1959. Print.
Sobhy, Soad Hussein. “Alexandria As Groddeck's It.”
Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal
NS 6 (1998): 26â39. Print.
Spencer, Bernard. “Ideas About Poetry.”
Personal Landscape
1.4 (1942): 2. Print.
âââ. “In an Auction Room.”
Personal Landscape
2.4 (1945): 12. Print.
Stanford, Derek. “Lawrence Durrell.”
The Freedom of Poetry: Studies in Contemporary Verse
. London: Falcon Press, 1947. 123â35. Print.
âââ. “Lawrence Durrell: An Early View of His Poetry.” Ed. Harry T. Moore.
The World of Lawrence Durrell
. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1962. 38â48. Print.
Stephanides, Theodore.
Autumn Gleanings: Corfu Memoirs and Poems
. Eds. Richard Pine, Lindsay Parker, and James Gifford. Corfu, GR: Durrell School of Corfu and the International Lawrence Durrell Society, 2010. Print.
Tambimuttu, James Meary. “Ceylonese Lovesong.”
Delta
3 (1939): 14. Print.
Thomas, Dylan. “Letters to Lawrence Durrell.”
Two Cities
4 (1960): 1â5. Print.
Tiller, Terence. “Roman Portraits.”
Personal Landscape
2.4 (1945): 4. Print.
Tomkinson, Fiona. “Durrell's âPoem in Space and Time' at the Crossroads of the Arts and Sciences.”
Lawrence Durrell at the Crossroads of Arts and Sciences
. Eds. Corinne Alexandre-Garner, Isabelle Keller-Privat, and Murielle Philippe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2010. 117â32. Print.
Treece, Henry. “Towards a Personalist Literature.”
Transformation Four
. London: Lindsay Drummond Ltd., 1945. 217â19. Print.
Trelawny, Edward John.
The Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron
. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc., 2000. Print.
Valaoritis, Nanos. “Remembering the Poets: Translating Seferis with Durrell and Bernard Spencer.”
Lawrence Durrell and the Greek World
. Ed. Anna Lillios. London: Associated University Presses, 2004. 46â56. Print.
Von Richthofen, Patrick. “The Booster/Delta Nexus: Henry Miller and His Friends in the Literary World of Paris and London on the Eve of the Second World War.” Diss. University of Durham, 1987. Print.
Waller, John. “Lawrence Durrell: A Clever Magician.”
The Poetry Review
38.3 (1947): 177â82. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. “Mr. W.H.”
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime: The Portrait of Mr. W.H. and Other Stories
. London: Methuen, 1900. Web.
Williams, Raymond. “Advertising: The Magic System.”
Culture and Materialism
. London: Verso, 2005. 170â95. Print.
Willinsky, John. “Lessons from the Wordsworths and the Domestic Scene of Writing.”
The Educational Legacy of Romanticism
. Ed. John Willinsky. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1990. 33â54. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. “On Not Knowing Greek.”
The Common Reader
. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1984. 23â38. Print.
Yates, F. “The Importance of John Eliot's
Ortho-Epia Gallica
.”
The Review of English Studies
7.28 (1931): 419â30. Print.
Zarian, Kostan.
Girk
â
diwts
â
aznergut
â
eants
â. ErusaghÄm: Tparan Srbotsâ Hakobeantsâ, 1978. Print.
Notes
Introduction
[1]
.  This is a thorny publication history, and the scarcity of copies has led to a general oversight from scholars. The Freedom Press is the most important anarchist press in the United Kingdom, founded by Peter Kropotkin and Charlotte Wilson in 1886. To give a sense of its position, in 1945, four of its editors were arrested for their pacifism and subversion of military service following the 1944 government raid of the press. This led to the famous formation of the Freedom Defence Committee by Herbert Read, George Orwell, George Woodcock, Alex Comfort, and Osbert Sitwell, among others. Two years later, in 1947, Durrell published his “Elegy on the Closing of the French Brothels” in Woodcock's
NOW
, printed by Freedom Press (“Elegy” 30â32). Durrell first began to publish with Robert Duncan in 1940 when Duncan lived in an anarchist commune in Woodstock, New York, but he had already written in 1938 to support the journal
Phoenix
, published by James Cooney on the same commune, saying, “
Phoenix
is surely the most fertile effortâ¦in literature for some time now” (Orend,
Henry
49). Duncan published the largest collection of Durrell's poetry (in a periodical) in 1940 and repeatedly attempted to republish “Asylum in the Snow” while also beginning to typeset an edition of
The Black Book
. The latter two were advertised but fell through due to financial limitations; they were revived when Duncan relocated to Berkeley, CA, where he entered another anarchist group with Kenneth Rexroth and George Leite. This group then published more of Durrell's works in their anarchist journal
Circle
in 1946, published a book edition of
Zero
and
Asylum in the Snow: Two Excursions into Reality
in 1947, and advertised a completed edition of
The Black Book
for sale, though this appears to have vanished, very likely due to potential obscenity charges. Henry Miller claimed to have read the proofs for the book (
Letters of Henry
122), and Durrell's contract for it has survived. Alex Comfort, best known for writing
The Joy of Sex
, was another prominent anarchist figure who corresponded with Durrell while he was in Egypt and included his work in his anarchist journal
New Road
in 1944. Durrell and Miller also corresponded about him as an anarchist writer. Grey Walls published
New Road
and had previously printed
Seven
, which included (and was edited and printed by) many of the poets who subsequently led the New Apocalypse movement, which was also expressly anarchist. Previous scholars have not noticed this publishing history, and it casts Durrell's 1930s and 1940s works in a radically different context than has been traditionally accepted. Nonetheless, Durrell only briefly endorsed Cooney, rejecting him after Cooney turned down Durrell's poetry (Orend,
Henry
50), and John Waller recalls him attacking the Apocalypse Movement late in the war (177). Durrell's positions are far from straightforward.
[2]
.  In 1960, Durrell described his 1938 novel
The Black Book
as the work of “an angry young man of the 30s” (Durrell, “Preface” 9), which casts him in distinction from the Angry Young Men of the 1950s who were known for their working-class origins and social realism.
[3]
.  Read's anarchism and anarchist writings are widely recognized. Miller's are not, but anarchism is nonetheless explicit and a major component of his works, ranging from his admiration of and correspondence with Emma Goldman to his speaking for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and numerous written endorsements of anarchism. For more information on Miller's Anarchism, see Orend, “Fucking” (44â77) and Gifford, “Surrealism's” (36â64).
[4]
.  In this, I am drawing on Durrell's ties to the “Personalism” movement in British literature. For a detailed account, see Gifford,
Personal Modernisms
.
[5]
.  For instance, Durrell helped to send Albert Cossery's novel
Men God Forgot
from Egypt for publication in California by Circle Editions, which derived from an anarchist reading circle in Berkeley. Durrell's
Zero
and
Asylum in the Snow
appeared through the same press, and he signed a contract for it to produce
The Black Book
, though this failed to reach distribution and may not have been printed. Both works had gone through previous attempts at publication by anarchist groups in New York.
[6]
.  CMG is the abbreviation for Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.
[7]
.  For instance, see Pine's
Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape
(393) or Herbrechter's discussions of reactionary politics throughout
Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity
.
[8]
.  As Fiona Tomkinson has noted, Durrell's poetry still shows significant influence from Auden (117â32), and his 1939 “Poem in Space and Time” (later “The Prayer Wheel”) is a direct answer to Auden's famous 1937 poem “Lullaby.”
[9]
.  Durrell and Orwell also traded letters in
The New English Weekly
over the periodical
The Booster
, which Orwell saw as a return to the kind of magazine of the 1920s (such as
BLAST, The Egoist
, or
The Little Review
). Orwell's objection was to the inefficacy of such avant-garde work in the face of the looming Second World War, and Durrell's rebuttal was fierce. Nonetheless, both authors appear to have borrowed from each other's novels at the same time as wellâOrwell lifting a situation from
Pied Piper of Lovers
for his
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(to which Durrell refers in his rebuttal in
The New English Weekly
), and Durrell repaying in kind by subverting Orwell's novel in
Panic Spring
(Gifford, “Editor's Preface” viiâix). Nevertheless, Durrell wrote to Orwell from Yugoslavia expressing his admiration for
Nineteen Eighty-Four
.