Tag: Lawrence Durrell

Echo by Lawrence Durrell

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Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) was a very versatile writer. He is probably most famous today for his Alexandria Quartet novels. He was also a renowned travel writer, specialising in the Mediterranean area that he knew and loved so well.

I particularly like Bitter Lemons, his memoir of his time in Cyprus during the political upheavals of the 1950s. Another of my favourites of his is White Eagles Over Serbia, an excellent Cold War era spy story in the outdoor adventure style of John Buchan. 

His striking, painterly prose style tells you immediately that whatever genre he was working in he was primarily a poet. It’s quite odd, then, that when I have read his poetry, I have tended to find it somewhat lacking in comparison to his prose works.

The short poem below is a welcome exception. I came across it by chance the other day and I really like it. It has to be heard to be fully appreciated, as the beautiful internal rhymes act out the theme of the poem.        

Echo by Lawrence Durrell

Nothing is lost, sweet self,
Nothing is ever lost.
The unspoken word
Is not exhausted but can be heard.
Music that stains
The silence remains
O echo is everywhere, the unbeckonable bird!

White Eagles Over Serbia by Lawrence Durrell

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White Eagles Over Serbia is an unusual book among Lawrence Durrell’s many works. It is a cold war spy story that was published in 1957. Intriguingly, that was also the year that he published Justine, the first volume of his most celebrated work, The Alexandria Quartet.

The opening in London’s clubland recalls Ian Fleming and this intelligence unit is called Special Operations, Q Branch. The shabby office where the lifts don’t work, known as “The Awkward Shop”, and Boris, the specialist in disguise, anticipate John Le Carré or Len Deighton.

I don’t know if this was intended as the first of a series, because the hero, Methuen, is on the point of retirement from the service and is tempted back for one last mission. Realism is given by the mention of a recent mission in Malaya. There are no first names here; his boss is known simply as Dombey.

Methuen is despatched to Yugoslavia to investigate the death of a British agent and to try to find out about mysterious goings-on in the mountains of Serbia. A royalist, anti-communist organisation known as the White Eagles is up to something. They distrust the British because of British wartime support for the Partisans, the group led by Tito who now rules communist Yugoslavia.

There are patriotic poems broadcast on the radio that may be coded messages of some sort. Methuen is of course expert in the language, an old hand in the area.

Durrell makes his political opinions quite clear with the descriptions of the degraded state of ordinary people under the communist regime. Methuen is struck by the change in the people since he was last in the country, before the communist takeover. “These ragged creatures seemed to have lost all self-respect in the struggle to make ends meet.” The officials on the other hand look secure and well-fed. The secret police or “leather men” as they are known, are everywhere.

Methuen is based at the Belgrade embassy under a false identity. His cover for his journey to the mountains is that he is on a fishing trip, and he gains the support of the ambassador through their shared love of fly fishing. Once his real mission begins, he lives rough in a cave in the mountains.

Here, the book takes on the flavour of John Buchan or Geoffrey Household as an outdoor adventure, allowing Durrell free reign with his landscape descriptions. The bulk of the story concerns Methuen’s solitary investigations among the forests and rivers. He realises the danger he is in when he sees a fisherman sitting still on the riverbank for some time. When he goes to check, he finds that the man is dead and a placard with the word “traitor” is round his neck.

The code by which Methuen keeps in touch with Dombey in London is based on Thoreau’s Walden. He selected this book simply as a code book long ago, but has come to love it after “many re-readings in solitary places”.

The story bursts into action when Methuen infiltrates the White Eagles and discovers just what they have been involved with.

I don’t know the extent of Durrell’s involvement, if any, with the espionage world. Certainly, he worked on and off for the Foreign Office, his duties described as press officer. This novel draws on his time in the Belgrade embassy, as do his comic stories of diplomatic life.

I’m also not sure if this was intended as a children’s book. The paperback I had in the 1980s was published by Peacock, a “young adult” offshoot of Puffin books. The novel was re-issued by Faber in 1993, perhaps because of the war in the Balkans. It is packaged as an adult book and described as “an early novel that continues to appeal to readers of all ages”.

If this is not quite up to the level of Ian Fleming or Eric Ambler, this realistic and enjoyable spy thriller is not far off it. It shows just how talented and versatile a writer Lawrence Durrell was.

Prospero’s Cell by Lawrence Durrell

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This book by Lawrence Durrell was published in 1945. It is an account of his life on Corfu in the years 1937-38. It forms part of a loose “island trilogy” with the later Reflections on a Marine Venus (Rhodes) and Bitter Lemons (Cyprus).

The great strength here is Durrell’s eye for the unusual and his extraordinary descriptive prose. This is a book full of local colour in every sense. It opens with the sentence: “Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins”. He was primarily a poet, after all. He is particularly effective at evoking the maritime world and the sea is a constant presence. There are vivid descriptions of night fishing for squid and octopus by carbide lamp.

The part of the island where Durrell lives is tranquil in 1937: “The silence here is like a discernible pulse – the heart-beat of time itself”.

There is not much narrative to speak of, and it has to be said that some of the philosophical conversations with his Greek friends are a bit tedious. It is one of these friends who claims to have proved that Corfu was Prospero’s island in The Tempest.

There is an extraordinary visionary passage where Durrell, bathing in a rock pool, seems to have become one with the landscape: “One is entangled and suffocated by this sense of physical merging into the elements around one”.

The book is perhaps most effective as an attempt to convey the history, myths and customs of Corfu as revealed in the everyday lives of its inhabitants. He gives us the details about olive gathering and oil manufacture, a village dance in old-fashioned clothing, and a strange pageant dedicated to a mythical figure who embodies the Greek character. Even the brief period of British rule has left its trace in an enthusiasm for cricket. I think of it as a sort of literary cubism, where it does not really seem to be going anywhere, but by the end the reader has gained a complete picture.

Like Kipling, Durrell was born in India and spent his early years there. I have wondered whether his painterly talent for rendering colours and landscape in words derived from this in some way.

This book is connected to the story of the Durrells’ family life on Corfu as told by Gerald elsewhere, although you wouldn’t really know it. There is a fleeting reference to “my brother” and “his guns”, so that must be Leslie. Lawrence was living with his wife Nancy in the White House to the north of the island, while his mother and siblings lived elsewhere, but he doesn’t really mention them much. Nancy is referred to only as “N” here.

Towards the end, the coming war starts to make its ominous presence felt and the final section is an epilogue looking back from Alexandria in 1943. This is pointing towards Durrell’s  later career and the collapse of his marriage to Nancy. She was something of a shadowy figure, but her story has now been told by her daughter Joanna Hodgkin, in Amateurs in Eden. Prospero’s Cell portrays pre-war Corfu as a paradise lost.

This book can be seen as an early example of a sub-genre of writing that became popular in the 1950s, which sought to bring the colour, sunshine and abundance of foreign locations to a Britain still feeling the effects of wartime austerity. Other examples of this are the Mediterranean cookery books of Elizabeth David, with their cover illustrations by the painter John Minton, and the James Bond books.

Fleming kept Bond in England in Moonraker but readers complained so he did not repeat the experiment. Jamaica was Bond’s real home and perhaps the Caribbean was to Fleming what the Mediterranean was to Durrell.