"A city becomes a world when one loves one of it's inhabitants.""A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.""Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.""Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.""History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.""I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.""I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.""I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.""It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.""It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.""Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.""Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.""Music is only love looking for words.""Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.""No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.""Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.""Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.""Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.""The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.""The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.""There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.""Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.""Truth disappears with the telling of it.""We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it."
Durrell was born in Jallandhar, British India, the son of Indian-born British colonials Louisa and Lawrence Samuel Durrell. His first school was St Joseph's College, North Point, Darjeeling. At the age of eleven, he was sent to England where he briefly attended St Olave's Grammar School before being sent to St Edmund's School, Canterbury. His formal education was unsuccessful and he failed his university entrance examinations, but he began seriously writing poetry at the age of 15 and his first collection of poetry, Quaint Fragment, was published in 1931.
On 22 January 1935, he married Nancy Isobel Myers, the first of his four marriages. Durrell was always unhappy in England and in March of that year he persuaded his new wife, his mother, and his siblings (including brother Gerald Durrell, later to be a major British wildlife conservationist and popular writer), to move to the Greek island of Corfu, where they might live more economically and escape both the English weather and stultifying English culture - what Durrell called "the English death"
In the same year, Durrell's first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, was published by Cassell. Around this time, he chanced upon a copy of Henry Miller's 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer, and wrote to Miller, expressing intense admiration for his novel. Durrell's letter sparked an enduring friendship and mutually-critical relationship that spanned 45 years. The two got on well, as they were exploring similar subjects, andDurrell's next novel, Panic Spring was heavily influenced by Miller's work, and after that The Black Book abounded with "four-letter words... grotesques,... [and] its mood equally as apocalyptic" as Tropic.
In Corfu, Lawrence and Nancy lived together in bohemian style in a number of large houses, notably the 'White House' on the coast at Kalami. Henry Miller was a guest in 1939. The period is somewhat fictionalised in Durrell's lyrical account in Prospero's Cell, which may be instructively compared with the accounts of the Corfu experience published by Gerald Durrell, notably in My Family and Other Animals. Gerald describes Lawrence as living with his mother and siblings...Nancy is not mentioned at all...whereas Lawrence's account makes few references to the fact that his mother and three siblings were also resident on Corfu. The accounts do cover a few of the same topics; for example, both Gerald and Lawrence describe the role played by the Greek doctor, scientist and poet Theodore Stephanides in their lives on Corfu.
In August 1937, Lawrence and Nancy travelled to the Villa Seurat in Paris, to meet Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. Together with Alfred Perles, Nin, Miller, and Durrell "began a collaboration aimed at founding their own literary movement. Their projects included 'The Shame of the Morning' and the 'Booster', a country club house organ that the Villa Seurat group appropriated for their own artistic...ends." They also started the Villa Seurat Series in order to publish Durrell's Black Book, Miller's Max and the White Phagocytes, and Nin's Winter of Artifice, with Jack Kahane of the Obelisk Press as publisher.
Durrell's first novel of note, An Agon, was heavily influenced by Miller and was published in Paris in 1938. The mildly pornographic work only appeared in Britain in 1973. In the story, Lawrence Lucifer struggles to escape the spiritual sterility of dying England, and finds Greece's warmth and fertility.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Durrell's mother and siblings returned to England, while he and Nancy remained on Corfu. In 1940 he and his wife Nancy had a daughter, Penelope Berengaria. After the fall of Greece, Lawrence and Nancy escaped via Crete to Alexandria in Egypt, where he described Corfu and their life on "this brilliant little speck of an island in the Ionian" in the poetic book Prospero's Cell.
During the war, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British Embassies, first in Cairo and then Alexandria. It was in Alexandria that he met Eve (Yvette) Cohen, a Jewish woman and native Alexandrian who was to become his model for the character Justine in the Alexandria Quartet. He also worked for the British government in Yugoslavia and Argentina. He later claimed to have disliked both Egypt and Argentina, although nowhere near as much as he disliked Yugoslavia. Reacting to his experience of life under Communism, he would sometimes claim to be a Fascist, although this was most likely said to shock people, something he always enjoyed. He claimed as well that he was an anti-Semite - although he married two Jewish women and his fiction included many sympathetic Jewish characters."
Durrell separated from Nancy in 1942. In 1947 he married Eve Cohen and in 1951 they had a daughter, Sappho Jane, named after the legendary Ancient Greek poet Sappho. Sappho Durrell committed suicide by hanging in 1985.
In 1947 Durrell was appointed director of the British Council Institute in Córdoba, Argentina, where for the next eighteen months he gave lectures on cultural topics. He returned to London in the summer of 1948, around the time that Marshal Tito broke ties with Stalin's Cominform, and Durrell was posted to Belgrade, Yugoslavia where he was to remain until 1952. This sojourn gave him material for his book White Eagles over Serbia (1957). In 1952 he moved to Cyprus, buying a house and taking a position teaching English literature at the Pancyprian Gymnasium to support his writing, followed by public relations work for the British government there during agitation for union with Greece. He wrote about his time in Cyprus in Bitter Lemons, which won the Duff Cooper Prize in 1957. In 1954, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Durrell left Cyprus in July 1955 after problems on the island and his British government position led to him being made a target of assassination attempts
In 1957, he published Justine, the first part of what was to become his most famous work, The Alexandria Quartet. Justine, Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1959) and Clea (1960) deal with events before and during the Second World War in Alexandria. The first three books tell essentially the same story but from different perspectives, a technique Durrell described in his introductory note to Balthazar as "relativistic". Only in the final part, Clea, does the story advance in time and reach a conclusion.
The Quartet impressed critics by the richness of its style, the variety and vividness of its characters, its movement between the personal and the political, and its exotic locations in and around the city which Durrell portrays as the chief protagonist: "... the city which used us as its flora - precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!" The Times Literary Supplement review of the Quartet stated: "If ever a work bore an instantly recognizable signature on every sentence, this is it." There was some suggestion that Durrell might be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but this did not materialize.
Given the complexity of the work, it was probably inevitable that George Cukor's 1969 attempt to film the Quartet (Justine) simplified the story to the point of melodrama, and was poorly received.
Durrell separated from Eve Cohen in 1955, and was married again in 1961 to Claude-Marie Vincendon; she died of cancer in 1967. His fourth and final marriage was in 1973 to Ghislaine de Boysson, whom he divorced in 1979.
Durrell settled in Sommières, a small village in Languedoc, France, where he purchased a large house standing secluded in its own extensive walled grounds on the edge of the village. Here he wrote The Revolt of Aphrodite, comprising Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970), and The Avignon Quintet, which attempted to replicate the success of The Alexandria Quartet and revisited many of the same motifs and styles to be found in the earlier work. Although it is frequently described as a quintet, Durrell himself referred to it as a "quincunx". The middle book of the quincunx, Constance, or Solitary Practices, which portrays France under the German occupation, was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1982 and the opening novel, Monsieur, or the Prince of Darkness, received the 1974 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 1974, Durrell was the Andrew Mellon Visiting Professor of Humanities at the California Institute of Technology.
Durrell suffered from emphysema for many years. He died of a stroke at his house in Sommières in November 1990. Alan G. Thomas donated a collection of books and periodicals associated with Durrell to the British Library, which is maintained as a distinct Lawrence Durrell Collection.
Poetry
Durrell's poetry has been overshadowed by his novels. Peter Porter, in his introduction to a Selected Poems, writes of Durrell as a poet: "one of the best of the past hundred years. And one of the most enjoyable." He goes on to describe Durrell's poetry as "always beautiful as sound and syntax. Its innovation lies in its refusal to be more high-minded than the things it records, together with its handling of the whole lexicon of language."
Work with the British government
Durrell also spent several years in the service of the Foreign Office. He was senior Press Officer to the British Embassies in Athens and Cairo, Press Attache in Alexandria and Belgrade, Director of the British Institutes in Kalamata, Greece, and Córdoba, Argentina. He was also Director of Public Relations in the Dodecanese Islands and on Cyprus. Durrell later refused a CMG (Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George) because he felt his "conservative, reactionary, and right-wing" political views might be a cause for embarrassment.
