Durrell and the 'English Death'

...Twice he uses images of money, and both times they turn out to be not real money but just images, mere progress in his costly education...

...He could, however, write...

...For that matter, they do not equal the polished indecency, indicated in easily deciphered asterisks, that now and then enlivens the Quartet, At 26 Durrell was still too young to be naughty with style...

...In Alexandria he has to cope with a man-sized portion of the modern world, dazzlingly international...

...Is this amusia, aphasia, agraphia, alexia, aboulia...

...It is a kind of trap from which I cannot escape...

...Soon he switches more feelingly to a domestic scene with his wife in Corfu: "What am I doing with this noisy machine and these sheets of linen paper...

...Let us, on the contrary, hold on to our poetic virility at all costs, even if it means we must get the hell out of England and live by our wits in the Levant...

...In Clea we find the significant line: "Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself...

...His beautifully tender book about Corfu, Prospero's Cell, composed of a journal he kept at the time, makes that clear...

...They do not communicate the zest we get from Rabelais or Joyce or Henry Miller, whose bawdily hilarious Tropic of Cancer had a welcome liberating effect on Durrell...

...His palette was bright, but he obliged his colors to justify themselves...

...Readers of Clea will recall that the Quartet ends with a fortissimo huzza for the poet Darley, who has survived his whiff of grapeshot and ovaries, and is now ready to become a writer...

...The dead bullion of dying cashed in clean coin day by day, and every morsel of broken tissue redeemed for us...

...He is listening to an African girl read English verse in a London school.] . . . Dazzling, in the flash of this last moment's reason, I question myself eagerly...

...The four-letter words that have made it a scandal-collector's item are nothing but a tribute to the magnitude and subtlety of the forces of respectability that encircled him...

...Some readers may at this point be inclined to identify Durrell with Britain's Angry Young Men—though he came along sooner—and it is true that there are some superficial cross-generation similarities...

...By comparison with these slick contrivances he is as innocent as Rimbaud...

...It is then that I get up in panic and go to where you are sitting, working, and knitting, and put my hands on your hands...

...His book is about the private consolations he will always find in his precarious craft...

...he does not know how to squeeze the most applause out of each of his temper tantrums because he has shrewdly realized that an economy of postwar GERALD SYKES is the author of Children of Light and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review...

...abundance has produced a great many other spoiled children who will pay well for any chance to score off the Bastards Who Run the Show...

...Now they are a weakness, because they have been handled somewhat woodenly, as opposed to the joy that creeps spontaneously into gentler passages...

...I am sitting here with my eyes shut, watching the language cross my imagination, each syllable a colour...

...The Black Book tells essentially the same story as the Quartet tells two decades later...

...Durrell and the 'English Death' By Gerald Sykes MOST READERS will turn to The Black Book only after acquaintance with Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, the four novels called Justine, Balthazar, Mount-olive and Clea which made him famous...

...in London (the principal setting of The Black Book, though it is written on the Greek island of Corfu) he has to extricate himself first from what he calls the "English death...

...In this early volume he is still trying to escape from peacetime hazards that he feared more intensely than he ever feared the Germans...

...What is more...

...The protagonist of this distinctly un-evil Black Book, who quaintly calls himself Lawrence Lucifer, has none of the new tricks that enable Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger to get under the theatrical skin with what is a clinically demonstrable case of self-indulgent paranoia...

...If British proprieties had not been omnipresent, he would not have had to use so many obscenities...

...When I think this I am too afraid to continue writing...

...Then war came and ripped him away from his Greek paradise...

...It is life...

...We are nothing if we cannot convert the dross of temporal death: if we cannot present our cheque at the bank, and receive for our daily death, a fee in good clean sovereigns —images, hat, water, the statues in the park, snow on the hills...

...It did not take him long to give up the pursuit of Huxley...

...by this love, perhaps, this winter comet, a poem...

...It is the story of the education of a poet—in an earlier phase of his career...

...This man was born to put words on paper...

...Durrell avoided a university education, in his flight from the "English death...

...He also lacks Lucky Jim's pathological gift for collecting injustices where none exist and for triumphing perfectly over every enemy in sight...

...The terrific action of the senses...

...Then in a moment or two my courage is restored and I return to the pages, turning them over, reading them slowly...

...There he was caught up in the bewildering life that finally took form in the Quartet...

...He turned away from verbalization for its own sake and moved instead toward feeling...

...To escape the Cermans, he steered himself and his wife and baby by sailboat to Alexandria...

...This event is treated as one of more than personal interest, as symbolic of a victory that we all desire in our deepest being for ourselves...

...It is like examining a master's palette after seeing an exhibition of his best paintings in a museum...

...But Durrell is notably inferior to John Osborne and Kingsley Amis in one important respect: He is not an outsider who is also a spoiled child...

...The Black Book was published in 1938, when Durrell was 26 years old, and was the first book he signed with his own name...

...His attitude is different: "I know now, for the first time, where I stand...

...In other words, as The Black Book also choruses, let us not take the usual "English" view of ourselves, that we are mere members of the most disciplined nation in the world (with the mildest policemen and the purest hotels) and therefore must submit to poetic castration for the good of the race...

...His book is a poet's prose, in the sense that it makes the reader come to it, rather than the other way round, but it immediately sets going so many sparklers, pinwheels, Roman candles, skyrockets and Chinese dragons, and from so many different directions, that there is a willing "suspension of disbelief" in a fascinated desire to know what is going on...

...It is also an autodidact's attempt to match the Oxford coruscations of Aldous Huxley, which were in vogue in those days...

...And since those hazards are still prevalent today, in America as well as in England, and perhaps more insidious than ever, The Black Book can be recommended both as indispensable to an understanding of Durrell and as a heartening specific against alienation from oneself...

...he doesn't even seem to know that the mass media exist and can be worked even by outlaws, if they are cute enough, for large amounts of money and mass approval...

...All of his favorite colors are already spread out on the palette, merely waiting to be put to a mature use...