From the Elephant's Back (46 page)

[40]
. While Durrell did move from London to Corfu in 1935, this break is not entirely true. From 1935 until his flight to Egypt as a refugee following the German invasion of Greece, he remained in regular contact with T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne, and a number of other London- and Paris-based writers, and he visited London twice and met with many of them. While in Greece, he also had significant contact with other writers, including Theodore Stephanides (a significant translator of Modern Greek poetry) and the Nobel Laureate George Seferis.

[41]
. See Stanford's “Lawrence Durrell” (123–35), first published in his
The Freedom of Poetry
in 1945, and reprinted in
The World of Lawrence Durrell
in 1962.

[42]
. Eliot (1888–1965) was Durrell's editor at Faber & Faber as well as his friend; he is one of the defining poetic voices of Modernism. Henry Miller (1891–1980) was a major American novelist and Durrell's closest literary friend, which led to their correspondence from 1935 until Miller's death. Seferis (1900–1971) was the Nobel Prize winning Greek poet who influenced Durrell's sense of Greek Modernism, as well as his professional interaction with Durrell as a diplomat. They continued to have a friendly correspondence even after Durrell's service to the British on Cyprus. Katsimbalis (1899–1978) was a major translator and bibliographer for Greek literature and was the titular colossus in Henry Miller's travel narrative of Greece prior to World War I,
The Colossus of Maroussi
. Stephanides was a dear friend to the Durrell family after their meeting on Corfu in 1935. He appears as a character in books by both Lawrence and Gerald Durrell but was also a significant translator of Greek poetry, a writer in his own right, and a significant scientist who published major works in botany and on the microscope, and had studied directly under Marie Curie.

[43]
. Nin (1903–1977) was a French novelist who wrote in English but was known mainly for her famous diaries and erotica. She was a dear friend and companion to Henry Miller, through whom she knew Durrell.

[44]
. This would have been August 1937 when Durrell travelled from Corfu to Paris with his first wife, Nancy. As MacNiven notes, Nin's recollection differs, and she records meeting the Durrells a day or two later (166). Durrell's notebooks of this month, including his drafts for “The Death of General Uncebunke,” contain several passages drawn from Rank's (1884–1939) book on psychoanalysis and artistic creation,
Art and Artist
(1932). Rank edited the successive revisions to Freud's
The Interpretations of Dream
, was Freud's protégé until a public disagreement between the two in 1926, and he was close to both Miller and Nin in Paris and New York.

[45]
. Hugo Ball recited the first manifesto in 1916, but Tristan Tzara wrote what is regarded as the first DADA manifesto in 1918. DADA was a movement that influenced much creative activity and Surrealism in particular.

[46]
. James Joyce's (1882–1941) major Modernist novel and last work was
Finnegans Wake
(1939), which is densely allusive and linguistically complex to the point of being nearly unreadable to some.

[47]
. Baron Ernst von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) developed the terminology of “psychosis” later used by Freud, and the text is likely
The Principles of Medical Psychology
, published in 1845 and translated into English in 1847.

[48]
. Durrell's differences from Joyce here are notable, in particular given his anti-authoritarian tendencies and sympathy for anarchists such as Henry Miller (Gifford, “Anarchist” 57–71). Durrell's flippancy may be misleading for an otherwise serious distinction.

[49]
. W.B. Yeats and Shri Purohit Swami's
The Ten Principal Upanishads
, first published in 1937, the same time Durrell was writing
The Black Book
.

[50]
. This same terminology appears in Durrell's
Avignon Quintet
(693) from the same period as this lecture.

[51]
. Georg Groddeck (1866–1934) was a German analyst and doctor who wrote extensively on psychosomatic illness and gave Freud the terminology for the Id, the unconscious, in his typology of the mind. Durrell was significantly influenced by Groddeck's works and used his cases as fodder for plots. See Durrell's essay on Groddeck in this volume.

[52]
. Miller's recollections of this trip are published in
The Colossus of Maroussi
and
Reflections on Greece
. A letter from Durrell concludes the former book.

[53]
. Durrell had a short correspondence with Carl Jung (1875–1961) in which he discussed Groddeck's work; this correspondence is held in the Durrell Collection of Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

[54]
. Durrell often played down the desperation of this situation. After being evacuated to Athens from Corfu, where he was involved in producing anti-fascist propaganda, he was moved by the British Council to Kalamata, from whence he fled by a small caïque overnight on April 22, 1941 to Crete when the Germans invaded, and from Crete to Egypt on April 30 as a refugee. MacNiven discusses this period (226–31), as does Stephanides (75–85).

[55]
. Plotinus (204–270) and Philo (20 BCE–50 CE) were important metaphysical philosophers. Euclid (3rd century BCE) is the creator of modern Euclidean Geometry. All three were active in Alexandria. Alexandria housed the greatest library of the time and was renowned as a centre for learning and the arts.

[56]
. Albert Einstein (1879–1959) was the most influential physicist of the twentieth century. He and Sigmund Freud co-authored
Why War?
in 1939, and Durrell used his theory of relativity metaphorically in
The Alexandria Quartet
.

[57]
. This “book” is
Justine
, the first of
The Alexandria Quartet
.
Justine
begins with two quotations from Freud and the Marquis de Sade. The second volume,
Balthazar
, integrates an opening note that mentions Einstein, and this is developed into an introductory note for the revised omnibus edition of all four volumes. Durrell refers to Einstein several times in interviews about
The Alexandria Quartet
but generally described this as a purely metaphorical approach.

[58]
. The book series described here was completed three years later and collected posthumously in 1992 as
The Avignon Quintet
, though Durrell generally described it as his
Avignon Quincunx
.

[59]
. In Buddhist philosophy, the skandhas are five aggregates that give rise to the false notion of the ego or self. Suffering is alleviated by practising detachment from the skandhas.

[60]
. Though now associated only with nurseries, mobiles were invented by Alexander Calder, an American sculptor, in 1931 as kinetic art and are associated with the works of Marcel Duchamp, Morton Feldman, and Frank Zappa.

[61]
. Eternity in the present tense, a notion of eternity in which past and future are caught only in the Now. St. Augustine emphasized the
nunc stans
, though Durrell likely came to the concept via Schopenhauer.

[62]
. As Durrell repeats, this is literally, “Nature does not do anything in jumps.” Though attributed to Aristotle, the phrase first appears in this context in Carl Linnaeus's 1751
Philosophia Botanica
and was subsequently taken up by Charles Darwin.

[63]
. This is slightly misquoted, perhaps from memory. Darwin wrote in his
Beagle
notebook in 1837, after returning to London, “so must we believe ancient ones: not
gradual
change or degeneration. from circumstances, if one species does change into another it must be per saltum [sic]” (50).

[64]
. Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) was a major mathematician and scientist as well as an alchemist and occult theorist. Newton was deeply religious, but Einstein made his rejection of any personal god or religiosity clear, though he held a quasi-religious awe for the structure of the world.

[65]
. Durrell does employ such pairs, as in Melissa and Justine or Justine and Clea, Scobie and Pombal, Darley and Arnauti, Darley and Pursewarden, and so forth in
The Alexandria Quartet
. Similar pairs or doubles appear in virtually all of his fictional works.

[66]
. The same language subsequently appears in
The Avignon Quintet
when Durrell's protagonist intends to write “a book full of spare parts of other books, of characters left over from other lives, all circulating in each other's bloodstreams.…Be ye members of one another” (693).

A Letter from the Land of the Gods

[1]
.   Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk (1903–1997) was a poet and pamphleteer who claimed the Polish throne. He was born in New Zealand but relocated to London in 1926. He was imprisoned for obscenity for six months in Wormwood Scrubs Prison. He produced the right-wing periodical
The Right Review
from 1936 to 1973 and supported the fascists and royalists, regarding them as better than the Bolsheviks. See Stephanie de Montalk's
Unquiet World: The Life of Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk
. Durrell knew Potocki and his brother well during his life in London around the Fitzroy Tavern. They first met in 1933 just after Potocki had been imprisoned for libel (MacNiven 83–84).

[2]
.   Literally, “Meat Wine.” By this time, Wincarnis was a brand name for a tonic wine popular in the British colonies.

[3]
.   In the context of Durrell's publications in the anarchist press and interactions with several anarchist authors, the politics of this statement are not casual.

Airgraph on Refugee Poets in Africa

[1]
.   James Meary Tambimuttu (1915–1983) was the editor of
Poetry London
. Durrell had already published Tambi's works (as he was known to most friends) in
Delta
. Tambimuttu's Poetry London imprint published Durrell's novel
Cefalû
(also published as
The Dark Labyrinth
), and through Durrell's influence Henry Miller's
The Cosmological Eye
and Elizabeth Smart's
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
. Also see “Poets under the Bed” in this volume.

[2]
.   As is evidenced in Stephanides's
Autumn Gleanings
, this is no exaggeration: “I learnt of Lawrence and Nancy's whereabouts—they were staying temporarily at the Luna Park Hotel, a rather ramshackle place that the authorities had requisitioned to house British refugees from German-invaded Europe.…He had managed to get away in a small
caïque
crowded with other refugees, just one day before the entry of the Germans.…In its overcrowded state, the
caïque
would founder if even a moderate storm arose.…The Durrells, were pounced on by the military authorities and interned in a concentration camp where they were even more overcrowded than in the Luna Park Hotel. This was done routinely as a precaution to prevent German agents from being smuggled into Egypt together with the genuine refugees” (78–79).

[3]
.   George Katsimbalis was the titular colossus to Henry Miller's travel narrative of his time in Greece immediately prior to World War II,
The Colossus of Maroussi
.

[4]
.   Edward Lear (1812–1888), in whom Durrell had an ongoing interest, in part based on their common residence on Corfu, though Lear predates Durrell significantly. Lear was accomplished as both a writer and visual artist.

[5]
.   Durrell's letters to Seferis, now held in the Gennadius Library in Athens, also contain dozens of Learish sketches and frequently quasi-pornographic limericks. Durrell published Seferis's comments on limericks and such in
Personal Landscape
while in Egypt and while Seferis was in the Greek government in exile in Pretoria, South Africa (“Letter” 10).

[6]
.   Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863–1938) was an Italian poet who is also seen as the forerunner to fascism under Mussolini. The contrast is between a poetry concerned with aesthetics or a primarily propagandist poetry.

[7]
.   This translation is Durrell's own and differs substantially from that published in
Personal Landscape
in 1944 (Seferis, “King” 9–10), which was possibly by Seferis himself or most likely Bernard Spencer.

[8]
.   Papadimitriou was an active and outspoken Marxist as well as an agitator against Turkey's actions in 1922 against the Greek population of Smyrna. Durrell's poem “In Europe” is dedicated, as Bowen notes, somewhat dangerously to her (Bowen 49), and Durrell continued to promote her in his letters to T.S. Eliot (354).

[9]
.   This is corroborated as “Luna Park” by Stephanides's account in
Autumn Gleanings
(79). Luna Park was largely a location for refugees arriving from Greece following the 1941 German invasion.

[10]
. In 1922, following on the defeat of the Greek army, Turkish forces removed the Greek population from Smyrna extremely rapidly in an act has been varyingly described as ethnic cleansing and as defensive. In either case, Durrell's sympathies here fall to the Greeks who feel the loss of the home of Homer to a non-Greek population and language. Population exchanges between the two countries followed shortly after 1922. Even Ernest Hemingway's
In Our Times
emphasizes this event in the opening and closing to his volume of primarily American-based short stories.

[11]
. A variant translation of the fragment of Papadimitriou's “Anatolia: Second Recitative” published in
Personal Landscape
(3–4).