'Another island: another small eternity,
Many tonight must smell the thunder
Look up uneasily from yellowing books'
- Salamis by Lawrence Durrell
With the humid weather recently it has often smelt like thunder. Particularly today I have noticed myself often looking up from my ‘yellowing books’ to check the sky out the window. However, Lawrence Durrell’s poem concerns a very different island from the Isle of Wight, and that is the Grecian island of Corfu.
The home to many famous writers, including a frequent visitor to the Isle of Wight, Edward Lear (the painter of the cover image for this blog, which is a picture of Greece taken from our folio set of his journals), Corfu was where Lawrence Durrell began his writing career and where he penned much of his poetry. It’s mediteranean charm is also evoked by the island on which the narrator of Durrell’s famous set of four novels, known as the Alexandria Quartet, finds himself abandoned at the story’s end.
(The cover of an early impression of 'Mountolive', the last novel in the series)
Based on Durrell’s experiences living in Alexandria as a diplomat during the Second World War, the Alexandria Quartet focuses on a sequence of intertwined romances that end up looking more like a ‘strange lozenge-shaped affair’ (to borrow Durrell’s phrasing from ‘Sauve Qui Peut’) than a love triangle (YA authors should take notes).
There is also something distinctly ‘foreign’ about the way that Durrell writes and which has led to his distinct fall out of fashion. The London Review of Books, for example, has criticised Durrell’s writing style as ‘caught between a desperate hope that one more word will do the trick, catch the reality or name the mystery, and the reluctant belief that nothing at all is going to work.’
Nevertheless, at the time of writing, Lawrence’s fiction was considered to be amongst the best being produced, with T.S. Eliot himself suggesting that Durrell’s work gave him ‘hope for the future of prose fiction.’
Having recently read ‘Justine’, the first novel of the four, it doesn’t seem to me that these two points of view have to be mutually exclusive. Alternately ridiculous and evocative, the novel could really be described in the same manner that Durrell describes his lead character. ‘After all Justine cannot be justified or excused. She simply and magnificently is; we have to put up with her, like original sin.’ The overblown prose is part of the character of the novel and does not overshadow the galloping plot (think adultery, murder and espionage).
(Four different lovers adorn the faces of the folio editions of the 'Alexandria Quartet')
On the other hand, Durrell’s non-fiction writing is witty and sharp, focusing on a satirical depiction of life as a diplomat during the twentieth century. It noticeably lacks adjectives (although the illustrations more than make up for this).
(An example of Nicolas Bentley's humorous illustrations from an early edition of 'Sauve Qui Peut')
Reading Durrell’s non-fiction alongside the Alexandria Quartet seems to make his decision to write something so elaborate all the more extreme, but then extreme writing is perhaps what we would expect of someone who (in the words of their famous brother) ‘was designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blonde firework, exploding ideas in other people's minds’.
(The cover of an early impression of 'Justine', the first novel in the series)
Reading ‘Justine’ certainly felt like exploding fireworks in my mind and I would recommend it to anyone as the perfect summer novel. Or perhaps I am simply trying to justify my purchase of a fan-girl style Lawrence Durrell t-shirt (see below).
