A Thoroughly Modern Freudian

...Although he believed writers should give politics a wide berth, his instincts were nominally conservative...

...It was in Alexandria that Durrell found the setting for his greatest achievement...

...His father, who wanted him to become an engineer, thought that even for an aspiring writer Oxford was the place to make contacts, to start working one's way up...

...Reviewed by Marc Carnegie Contributor, Washington "Post," "Financial Times" Lawrence Durrell began his career writing romantically about the dreamlike colonial India of his youth...

...His estranged daughter Sappho, who felt he had screwed her up, hanged herself...

...He recommended that Durrell maintain its integrity rather than make the cuts necessary for it to appear in chaste pre-World War II England...

...It's hard to teach an old god new tricks, and his incessant whoring and drinking did him no favors...

...As he liked to say, he was "born with a typewriter in my mouth...

...Events were repeated from book to book by different narrators, calling into question the time-honored concept of objective Truth...

...Miller, still largely neglected, was happy to have such an appreciative correspondent...

...His first novel was published in 1935 when he moved to Corfu, and his second appeared the next year...

...In between he married four times and nearly a fifth, earned an impressive if now somewhat tarnished reputation as a poet, travel writer and best-selling novelist, and became an apostle of sexual liberation in the mode of Henry Miller—with whom he forged one of the great literary friendships of the century...

...While it is overstuffed with sex, including incest, death is never far from the dreamscape narrative's surface...

...In considerably less space, Gordon Bowker's biography, published last year, managed to capture something of Durrell's irrepressible spirit, even though none of his books or letters were allowed to be quoted...

...He conceived the four volumes as constituting the three dimensions of space and one of time...

...He was later posted to Rhodes and Yugoslavia, and then served with the British Council in Argentina and the colonial government in Cyprus, where he ended his ironic career in 1957...

...Another part of his macabre sensuality was an intoxicating way of making color come alive in prose, perhaps inspired by his painting...

...Not a scream of protest, not a struggle...

...In patches of the Quartet, Durrell could not keep from lapsing into an overwritten froth, and his later novels suffer from a wretched excess of forced sexuality plus some rather ridiculous Olympian posturing...

...After struggling to establish the right tone of nearly hallucinogenic mystical sensuality in Justine (1957), the first volume of the Quartet, he wrote the remaining three books—Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958) and Clea (I960)—at blinding speed...

...Then Durrell discovered Tropic of Cancer...

...T. S. Eliot, who had irked Durrell by refusing to publish a volume of his poems until he had written something more substantial, thought highly of The Black Book...

...In one of its better-known passages, starving Alexandrians carve up a camel that has collapsed from exhaustion: "The animal looks ever more pained more aristocratic, more puzzled as its legs are hacked off...

...he boasted to a friend...

...The Black Book came out in 1938...

...Durrell was favorably compared to Proust...

...At least one series of Durrell's novels, The Alexandria Quartet, will be read as long as there is an audience interested in what English prose can do—or, for that matter, what it ought not do...

...the name and address of Durrell's curry house...

...The same can be said of the novelist late in life...

...Before long," he said, "I had joined the world of London bums...

...As an epitaph for himself, he once suggested "Hates Cant, Reveres Cunt...

...A voracious reader but an indifferent student, Durrell did not find the idea of attending the university at all appealing...

...Café society ate it up...

...Finally, there is the head still alive and eyes open, looking round...

...His early years were typical for a boy of the imperial middle class, and represented the only time in his life that he followed a predictable path...

...Either criterion, he noted, left him unsuitable for a career in the diplomatic corps...

...Having previously dismissed Eliot as "debility's greatest handmaid," Durrell thereafter lauded him as one of the two poets of consequence in the English language (the other was W. H. Auden...

...For Durrell, a thoroughly modern Freudian, death was an essential part of the senses...

...The English writers just behind him, though, were the laconic Angry Young Men, wary of his extreme eroticism and that of his pal Henry...

...This must have made Durrell shudder, for he intentionally failed his entrance exams...

...I was afraid they were going to go on like this forever...

...It consisted, at this stage, of drinking in the pubs of London's Fitzrovia district and cadging a few quid playing jazz piano...

...he ended it fat and boozed-out in France, where he read books about Zen archery and kept a photo of Andy Warhol protégé Ultra Violet in pride of place on his wall...

...Soon afterward Durrell joined him and Anaïs Nin in Paris, where he wrote his own scabrous novel, The Black Book...

...With Lady Chatterley's Lover still unavailable, Durrell's series established him as the guru of proseas-liberation...

...The lion-dust of desert: prophets' tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake...

...Despite his maintaining that he found the city a "melting-pot of dullness," the decadence and sun-baked eroticism he discovered there helped purge most of his remaining vestiges of English priggishness...

...The book is long, exhausting and needlessly crammed with the dead weight of minor acquaintances and niggling details: a cinder in the eye on a train...

...Durrell himself chose MacNiven (who edited The Durrell-Miller Letters 19351980, published in 1988) as his authorized biographer...

...His pronouncements as he chased down scores of odd intellectual byways were repeated by enthusiastic youths looking to emulate the master...

...The notion seems tired now, but Durrell also attempted to grapple with Einstein's theory of relativity in the Quartet...

...After the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki he wrote to Miller, "It's a great relief...

...Larry," as MacNiven somewhat gratingly insists on calling him, was enraptured by the exotic splendor and squalor of India, and not surprisingly found England—he always called it "Pudding Island"—a poor substitute after being shipped off in his teens to prepare for Oxford...

...It earned the young writer little, but now that he had produced a naughty work that could only be published in naughty Paris, his bohemian bonafides were squarely established...

...Nevertheless, Durrell spent World War II working for the British Foreign Service as a press attaché in Alexandria...

...Among other things, the Quartet was intended to be "an investigation of modern love...

...A biographer would have to work hard to make such a life dull...

...At age 78 he died, perhaps aptly, on the commode...

...The rebellion had begun...

...Following a tiff with the English writer Osbert Sitwell, he declared that life was "solitary, poor, nasty, British, and short...

...The doctors warned him about his prodigious thirst, but in vain...

...Lawrence Durrell takes roughly 450 dense pages to get to The Alexandria Quartet...

...Durrell (it almost rhymes with squirrel) was born in 1912 in Jullundur, the oldest son of a civil engineer in the Indian Railway Service...

...Here, for example, is the opening of Balthazar: "Landscape tones, brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections...

...Do you know what they're saying about me...

...Durrell's claim that they took six, 12 and eight weeks, respectively, was undoubtedly an exaggeration, but he probably wasn't far off...

...That was another of his late-life mistakes...

...Through all of his boozing and womanizing—he seems to have been unfaithful to all of his wives, and to have smacked them around on occasion—the novelist maintained his impish sense of humor...

...He wrote a gushing letter to Miller, saying the book "really gets down on paper the blood and bowels of our time...

...Both were not entirely successful attempts to find a prose voice that matched his libertine inclinations...

...MacNiven's exclusive access to his subject's papers has yielded much that is of interest, but this material remains as unshaped as Durrell's chaotic closing years...

...Unfortunately, Ian MacNiven has worked very hard indeed, compiling a thick brick of a book that runs (and runs) to just under 800 text pages of rather small type...

...In the late 1950s this was the ne plus ultra of the avant-garde...

...He began to routinely abuse his fourth wife...

...In between, as Durrell himself put it, he tried everything "short of selling my bottom to a clergyman...

...The Quartet was such a smashing success—three of the four volumes were on the New York Times Best Sellers list simultaneously—that Durrell's postman collapsed from bringing him so many satchels of fan mail...

...And he made a handsome sum of money...

...That my prose is sticky as nougat...

...green and citron giving way to gunmetal, to a single plumdark sail...

...Its huge sand-faults like watermarks from the air...

...The story of the novelist's life, and much of its meaning, is lost in the thicket...