Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (104 page)

Landscape-tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections. The lion-dust of desert: prophets’ tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake. Its huge sand-faults like watermarks from the air; green and citron giving to gunmetal, to a single plum-dark sail, moist, palpitant: sticky-winged nymph.

‘Do you know what they’re saying about me?’ Durrell indignantly asked one of his friends, ‘that my prose is as sticky as
nougat
.’ For those Britons (Durrell, working for the Foreign Office in Egypt at the time, was not one of them) who had endured a dozen years of sweet-rationing, prose-nougat was the next best thing. And for the bulk of the British population cooped up with the measly £10 travel allowance,
The Alexandria Quartet
was the only tourism on offer – and if it was sex tourism (before
Lady Chatterley
, Durrell was considered very adult) so much the better.

For a period in the early 1960s, Durrell’s star was ascendant.
Justine
(1957), the
New York Times
declared in 1960, ‘demands comparison with the very best books of the century’. Durrell was ranked with Proust, with Borges, with Svevo: the literate young adored him. Durrell’s opaque aphorisms (‘art, like life, is an open secret’) were pondered in every Gaggia-wheezing coffee bar, and the author’s postman in the South of France had a nervous collapse from having to carry so many sacks
of mail to Durrell’s door. Hindsight suggests that Durrell was overrated. He was, as T. S. Eliot put it with his usual precision, ‘extraordinarily good. But the scale is small.’ Nougat, nougat, nougat. Durrell appears to us now a significant writer, with a secure niche in the early 1960s, but not the giant that he was once taken for. His poetry, however, remains highly regarded.

Durrell was born Anglo-Indian in Jullundur in the Punjab. His father was a civil engineer, one of the practical men who kept India going. His son ‘Larry’, although he had the standard public school education, never felt he belonged in ‘Pudding Island’, as he called England. Nor did he willingly spend much of his life there. His was very much an away game. It is not clear that he was ever, properly, a British citizen. Durrell, intellectually brilliant though he clearly was, declined to pass his university exams. There were much more interesting things to do. And his mind was temperamentally undisciplined. It was his ‘sluttish Irish’ blood, on his mother’s side, coming out, he liked to claim. He could never be bothered to learn to spell, but mastered Einstein more thoroughly than any other novelist of the century (
The Alexandria Quartet
is, among much else, a conscious experiment in relativity). Oxbridge would probably have neutered him; although it would have needed a bigger than usual pair of gelding shears to do so.

Travel, especially travel to exotic places, was Durrell’s university. After his father’s death in 1928, he persuaded his mother (along with that ‘family and other animals’ about whom his brother Gerald wrote) to move from Bournemouth to Corfu. Bohemian adventures in pre-war Soho and Paris followed. Durrell ‘hymned and whored’ his way through young manhood, playing jazz in nightclubs, trying everything ‘short of selling my bottom to a clergyman’. And, of course, he wrote. Henry Miller and Anais Nin extinguished any lingering vestiges of his English upbringing. Like them, he wrote a novel,
The Black Book
(1938), publishable only in naughty Paris. In nothing was Durrell more bohemian, or athletic, than his sex life. He had four marriages, many affairs and innumerable sexual encounters. Women, particularly in his later years, he regarded as ‘poultices’ to be slapped on his never-ending sexual itch, for temporary relief. Durrell enjoyed his promiscuity without guilt or personal damage. His near and dear ones were not so lucky. Larry ‘destroyed’ wives, his brother Gerald observed. The effects on his younger daughter, Sappho-Jane, were particularly catastrophic. Shortly before hanging herself in 1985, she wrote in her journal: ‘I feel very threatened by the fact that my father is sleeping with women who are my age or younger. I feel he is committing a kind of mental incest.’ With the publication of Sappho’s journal in 1991, shortly after Durrell’s death, ugly accusations of actual incest surfaced. His biographer discredits them; but there is no doubt that Sappho-Jane was unlucky in her father.

The formative period of Durrell’s career, his ‘good war’, was the four years he spent as a press officer in wartime Egypt, from 1941 to 1945. Out of it (and his second marriage to the original of Justine) came
The Alexandria Quartet
. Contemporary readers now will probably be struck, as his contemporaries were not, by Durrell’s pervasive racism. For him, Arabs were ‘apes in nightshirts’. Rootless cosmopolitan that he was, he hated Islam and hated all orthodoxy – and, most of all, Pudding Island.

Some critics complain that my characters are always farting. Well, we do, don’t we?

Patrick White can claim to be Australia’s greatest novelist – he was, after all, the first of his countrymen to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Australians have tended to see him differently – as ‘Australia’s most Unreadable Novelist’. As the more readable Thomas Keneally notes, White always positioned himself as offensively alien to his country, who return the compliment with only grudging respect – in Australia, but not of it. When he won his Nobel in 1973 White declined to accept it personally. ‘I don’t want to pretend to be me,’ was his reason. Nor did he want to be the literary equivalent of Qantas Airways. He dispatched, in his place, Sidney Nolan, the painter who figures, under thin disguise, as Hurtle Duffield in White’s recently published
The Vivisector
(1970). It was a bit like Dickens sending Mr Pickwick. Except that White was making a serious point – if you reward me, know the nature of my art.

The Vivisector
is a manifesto novel. White was a passionate lover of animals: he preferred Schnauzers to human beings. For people like him, vivisectors are the devil incarnate. But, White believes, the artist must do just that: cut up the living tissue of the innocent. It is the artist’s ‘doom’. When Duffield is old enough to work things out, he tells the woman he loves: ‘I don’t want to be like other people.’ He is stirring a vat of animal excrement as he says it. White elsewhere pictures novels as ‘resistant growths’ within himself which must be ‘cut out’ of the writer. Stirring shit, excising cancers – these are not the joyous images of creation. Forget nightingales.

White was born in Knightsbridge, London, where his parents, enriched on generations of sheep-farming, were enjoying a luxurious vacation. Victor White
was in his forties and emotionally remote; Ruth White, his wife and second cousin, was ten years younger and neurotic. On their return, the family moved to Sydney, principally because Ruth had taken against her rural in-laws. White’s vignettes of his parents are unforgiving. There were, however, things he might, were he not so cross-grained, have been proud of. The Whites had made it against formidable odds. Patrick’s great-grandfather had emigrated, penniless, to New South Wales in 1826 as a flockmaster, with nothing but his pastoral. Thereafter ‘Almost all the Whites remained wedded to the land, and there was something peculiar, even shocking, about any member of the family who left it. To become any kind of artist would have been unthinkable.’ Until, that is, 1912.

To break so drastically with ‘wool and leather’ meant rebellion. It helped that Patrick was chronically asthmatic (most of
Voss
was written flat on his back in bed). Poor health meant long periods by himself while others of his age were at play. Books, ‘locked words’, were his world. He had his first erection, he recalls, aged seven. It perplexed him, but then most things did. He was writing ambitiously before he was ten. His parents were wholly nonplussed. For his part, he resented ‘their capacity for boring me’.

To make a (English) man of him, he was sent, aged thirteen, to public school in England. He loathed his four years at Cheltenham College: he was a ‘foreigner’, scarcely ‘daring to open my mouth for fear of the toads which might tumble out and the curled lips, cold eyes, waiting to receive renewed evidence of what made me unacceptable to the British ruling class.’ At Cheltenham he flaunted an Anglophobic interest in Ibsen and Strindberg, ‘a taste my English housemaster deplored: “You have a morbid kink I mean to stamp out”, he said, and he then proceeded to stamp it deeper in.’ Like Ibsen’s Brand, White’s lifelong motto would be: ‘No compromise!’ He carried away from Cheltenham nothing that he much valued other than recollections of its smells: ‘especially those of crushed ants, smoke rising from twigs and bark kindled in the open, bread and mushrooms frying in biscuit tins on a schoolroom stove, hot darkness and spilled semen.’ There are worse educational legacies.

‘Till well into my life’, White recalls, ‘houses, places, landscape meant more to me than people.’ After liberation from his ‘English prison’, he persuaded his parents to let him spend two years as a ‘jackaroo’ (cowboy) on family sheep and cattle stations in the northern outback. They were ‘the bleakest places on earth … plagued alternately by drought and flood’. It was cosmically lonely. His fellow jackaroos regarded him as a Pom. He would become more pommish when he returned in his early twenties to Kings College, Cambridge, from where, in 1935, he graduated with a degree in Modern Languages. Like the novelist resident at the college, E. M. Forster, he now knew himself to be homosexual. He did not choose it, he said, it chose him.
Most gays, he said, were ‘colossal bores’. Whether Forster came into that category is not recorded.

He had steeped himself in European literature, in which his tastes were stark: ‘for me’, he said, ‘Tolstoy is the only literary genius who survives his own hypocrisy.’ He continued to detest England outside London, the city which offered discreet freedoms to a young man whose sexual preferences were, until 1967, criminal and nowhere less understood than in Australia. The other attractions of London were its bohemian underworld and its theatre. When in town, he went up to five times a week. He chose to stay on in London after leaving Cambridge. ‘At last’, he sardonically recalled, fifty years later, ‘I felt, I was
into
life, in a green pork-pie hat and a black polo sweater.’ By now his parents regarded him as a ‘freak’. The hat cannot have helped. The clinching break was his refusal to attend a cricket match at Lords with his father, over on a visit. None the less they afforded him an allowance.

White’s first novel,
Happy Valley
, was published in 1939. It was well received and reassured him that ‘I had become a writer’. The world remained to be convinced that he was a writer worth buying: ‘I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city.’ His mother, whose favourite author was Ruby M. Ayres, disapproved of
Happy Valley
– as did all the family and the relatively few Australians who read it. His father, White believed, had never read anything between hard covers other than a studbook and was damned if he was going to change now. Eventually White placed a second novel in New York,
The Living and the Dead
(1941), set in pre-war London. It led to ‘pseudo success’. These ‘wretched books’, he later believed, are ‘best forgotten.’

White returned to England to fight for a country he did not belong to. He was over-age, in poor health, gay, and legally resident in a country not at war. None the less in 1940 he was commissioned as an RAF intelligence officer. He spent a long and formative stint in North Africa. ‘My chest got me out of active service and into guilt,’ he writes, while conceding that he did at times come under fire. He despised ‘frivolous and corrupt Alexandria’ (Forster’s beloved city) but was fascinated by the desert. He was reading Dostoevsky and ‘wrote three of the novels for which I am now [in 1981] acclaimed’. Johann Ulrich Voss was conceived in the Western Desert of Egypt, as Erwin Johannes Rommel did his damnedest to kill Voss’s creator. Why, one may wonder, is White’s most famous character German? Because he isn’t English or Australian.

In Egypt, White fell in love and formed what would be a lifelong union with a young Greek liaison officer, Manoly Lascaris. After demobilisation, White and Lascaris decided to go to Australia where they bought a farm at Castle Hill outside Sydney. Locals thought them ‘rich Jews’. Over the next eighteen years they planted
trees and raised animals. ‘Painfully’, White was now writing the novel which ushers in his mature phase,
The Tree of Man
(1955), set in the farming world of Australia at the turn of the century. The novel was well received in England and the United States but ‘greeted with cries of scorn and incredulity in Australia: that somebody, at best a dubious Australian, should flout the naturalistic tradition, or worse, that a member of the grazier class should aspire to a calling which was the prerogative of school-teachers!’
Voss
(1957), which followed, ‘fared no better’. It was at this point that White was branded ‘Australia’s most Unreadable Novelist’. In
Riders in the Chariot
(1961) a scene in which the Jewish refugee Himmelfarb ‘was subjected to a mock crucifixion by drunken [Australian] workmates … outraged the blokes and the bluestockings alike’. He was now Australia’s most unpatriotic novelist as well. Everything combined to make him ‘a foreigner in my own country’. But, as his fiction relentlessly enquired, what was that country? Was it the Sydney depicted as ‘Sarsparilla’ in
Riders
, or was it the vast, empty central desert in which Voss perishes? The couple moved back to Sydney in 1964 where they ‘withdrew from circulation’. Over the next quarter century White would, from time to time, make known his liberal sentiments on Aboriginal rights, gay liberation and the environment. He was staunchly anti-royalist.