And then technology also has its problems. In fact it creates more than it solves. One of the great things that bugged me as a press attaché always when I had to try to control newspapers was misprints. The Arabs just loved them. The English-speaking paper in Cairo, the Egyptian Mail, was manned by an Arab staff. The three proofreaders were absolutely grey, they were little grey old men. They’d got grey trying to correct misprints. And the Arabs were an anarchic lot who didn’t understand what they were setting up. The linotypist seemed to be playing the organ the whole time. And as fast as you sent down one proof with some misprints on it, they sent you back a whole new set of misprints and this could go on indefinitely. Of course, it led to awful political situations. For example, there was a particularly good and devout general who was described in the Egyptian Mail as a “bottle-scarred” veteran instead of a “battle-scarred” veteran. His press attaché rang me up at the embassy and said, “Look, it’s absolute scandal that General B. should be treated like this. You must get a correction.” So I rang up Mr. Goldstein who was the head of the paper and I said, “Do you realise what you’ve done to General B.? Will you please correct this tomorrow morning?” He said yes, he would and the next morning they come out with “We are so sorry about the reference to a “bottle-scarred veteran”, what we mean was a “battle-scared veteran.” There seemed to be no way forward from this. I was on the point of resigning.
Then there were all kinds of engaging things. When Lord Mountbatten came to visit us he was described as having a lovely “louse-lipped smile.” And the British Air Force was going to get even with Germany with their giant Sunderland Flying-Goats. You know their flying boats were quite celebrated, but their flying goats? Perhaps a secret weapon? A new British device to defeat the enemy, you see. And an item in the want-ad section of the paper, placed by a gentleman who needed someone to cook for him, read: “British officer urgently needs one good plain cock.” We had a very great deal of trouble like this, which kept everyone swearing and telephoning.
And I’ve also had trouble with statistics. I tried first of all to computerise this job a little bit because we were wasting so much money and it was costing lives to bring newsprint across. One had to take it seriously. The newsprint shortage was such that shipping space was allocated out for various demands and it seemed to me scandalous that one should waste it on propaganda pamphlets describing the situation in Nubia. So I started doing some spot propaganda as market research, of the kind that I suppose the big industries here must do; in fact it’s a kind of advertising, really. But so much was wasted that I tried to establish a kind of percentage of waste. I got one factory which had 2,000 workers and I inundated it with 2,000 pamphlets on one subject or another and I went on inundating it, and as we knew the dustmen in the area we collected what they threw away so that I finally established that most of the stuff I was feeding into the factory was being thrown automatically into the dustbin. By continuing the process I suddenly discovered that what creates a demand is shortage. I’m not a good Marxist, but I suddenly realised that if I gave 3% of the total, the fact that it wasn’t enough to go around made the 3% read it and pass it around, whereas if I gave 100% of my product to them it appeared in the wastebins the next morning automatically. So this was a valuable discovery for the record. But I couldn’t interest London in this. They thought I was being too clever. Of course suborning the press and buying its influence is also very gay but what can one do against honest people with honest convictions? Nothing. The Germans were much better at it because they were not so respectable and they were not worrying about their image the whole time because they were desperate. We were still fuddy-duddy and worrying a great deal about our image, so it was they who suborned all the mullahs in the minarets who give out the evening prayers and make a little sermon, to tell the Egyptians that once Rommel came they’d all have ice cream. And the Egyptians liked ice cream so much that this was our most dangerous moment, our most heroic moment. I was tempted to do a cut-rate ice cream act and hand out ice cream on our side, but this would have been considered rather inferior behaviour. But our servants at our houses came to us and said, “We’re sorry you’re leaving. You’ve been quite square with us and on the level, but this ice cream, you know, you can’t pass that out.” And it’s very difficult in those sort of countries to find some way of countering that kind of idiocy. We came across it all the time, all over the place. And it was no good buying an indignant priest to say,”not ice cream but bully beef.” We couldn’t do that either. So I had a great deal of trouble with that.
And then there was my statistical plan—I’m warned forever against the reliability of statistics … When I was in Rhodes I had to run 3 newspapers, an English daily for the army, and an Italian daily for the Italian community and a little Turkish one. And I started a Greek one called “Kronos” which I believe is still going on, which was quite pleasant and had a little literary corner which the English thought was highly untrustworthy. Then I received my annual reports. My agent said the sales on a small island called Micronesium (one of the Dodecanse group), it’s so tiny that it really hasn’t got a name, was buying 400 copies of this newspaper. This was a bit of a puzzle. We were printing 5,000-10,000 copies, but 400! The total inhabitants of that island struck me as around 25. I couldn’t understand why each man was reading my paper so often. I knew it was a good paper, I was putting my back into it, it was excellent stuff, but I didn’t see why they would keep buying extra copies just to reread the same things? So I thought this merited a trip, and I got the navy to ship me out in a corvette and I went ashore. I was met as though I was a sort of Henderson the Rain King. And only two people on the island read, the schoolmaster and the priest, and the others were all peasants. I said, “Of course, you read the news to them.” They said yes. I said, “Where in the hell do these other 385 copies go then?” He said, “What a godsend, we use them to wrap fish. You know I can’t tell you how much they mean to us.” The whole of this little fishing industry was based on my journalism. It’s a very salutory thought when you think statistically to remember that sort of thing because its puts you in your place. Don’t ever trust statistics—even your own sales. They are really wrapping fish in your work.
Well, the great curse of diplomacy is, I think, national days. A great horror, particularly in peace time, because everyone has to have a national day birthday party and everybody has to go for fear of offending the Israelis, offending the Arabs, offending somebody, so you don’t dare to offend somebody and so spend the entire time drinking yourself insensible at parties out of sheer depression. And that I think is a great curse. But from the point of view of an English diplomat the real curse is paper games because, as you know, the English have nothing whatsoever to say to each other but they’re forced to entertain each other because it’s supposed to promote morale. Actually, it used to drive my morale right down to rock bottom. You simply had to go; you couldn’t refuse anybody senior to you—my head of chancery, my oriental counselor, my ambassador. As they didn’t have much to say we used to sit and play “consequences” all evening with paper and pencil—these long long intellectual evenings became absolutely burnt into my memory. And even now I often awake screaming in the night playing a paper game with a British Dip.
The bad faith and secrecy have been very well done by Compton McKenzie in his five books which analyse the situation in Athens during the first world war because in every country you have a divided optic on any given topic and it’s amusing, exciting, and sometimes a tiny bit dangerous to try to find out exactly what’s eating them and then convey that back. But our methods of spying nowadays are so ludicrous. Everything is really known technologically so that I should suppose that it won’t be long now before, if you want to know what’s going on in the Kremlin you could throw a switch somewhere in Pomona and listen to it. Which would be a great relief. A few jobs would be lost but in fact it would be a great relief because nothing very much is going on in the Kremlin that isn’t going on j
ust in this room. It’s an attempt to bolster an idiocy, to blow it up as something important when it really isn’t important at all. Nevertheless, one does have some exciting times. We had once an illustration which struck me as useful. There is one absolutely cardinal thing that the British are supreme masters of, and that is to say nothing and look idiotic. I’m not joking. Several times, just by not saying anything and not doing anything, people don’t believe it’s true. They come to you panicky with some bit of information such as the German’s are 10 kilometers away, and you say, “Are they?” And it’s clear that you wouldn’t be in that complacent state if they were. So by not doing anything sometimes you can get away with murder. There is one particular example: in one of the most brilliant Italian feats during the war, three men in a baby submarine—commandos—came in and stuck plastic on the bottom of the biggest battleship we had at the moment in Alexandria harbour, the flagship of the Mediterranean fleet. In the middle of the night there was a dull explosion and the thing went down about 2 or 3 feet, but it stayed at anchor. As press attaché, they rang me up and said, “Do you know what’s happened? We’ve caught these men but they’ve blown the whole bottom out of this ship.” And of course these ships were surveyed all the time by the Germans by air making their calculations about the strength of the Mediterranean fleet in case of a fight at Oran or whatever. So it was really rather critical. They suggested that, “The best thing was to pretend that nothing has happened, old boy.” It seemed to me quite a big pretend, but I said, “Okay, yes. We don’t do anything.” He said, “Absolutely nothing. Don’t mention it.” But though the explosion was very badly muffled the whole town felt it. It was like an earthquake. But it was muffled by the water and it was so deep down below, that, though the ship had subsided slightly and was absolutely out of action, it hadn’t moved. So we just went around with what, in technical terms in my profession, is known as an operation poe-face—a chamberpot expression—for about five days. Strangely enough the event wasn’t picked up by the press, nor by anybody, and that ship lay there for nearly five months before the enemy realised that it had the bottom blown completely out of if. A very useful thing, silence.
Also I had another ship experience that didn’t endear the navy to me at all. I had one of those old rolltop desks, you know that kind you get in cheap offices everywhere downtown, and my secretary had got Jane’s Fighting Ships and we got the entire Mediterranean fleet. We were trying to influence the French to give us a battleship and they wouldn’t. We locked up all the machinery on their warships so they actually couldn’t shoot at us, but they wouldn’t go ashore and they wouldn’t do anything. We didn’t want to offend the Free French, you know, and so we were trying to get the French Admiral to come out on our side—trying to coerce a little bit. Then they said to me, “Can’t you do some articles about the glories of the French fleet, and so on.” So I had some articles like that and I put them in the rolltop desk. The next morning when I opened the desk to launch these articles they had disappeared. I said, “Oh, God, I’ve been burgled.” They were all marked highly confidential. There was nothing that wasn’t out of Jane’s Fighting Ships, but still they were confidential. I had to report a confidential loss. Immediately the secret service visited me, the whole Scotland Yard came and took fingerprints and so on. I found other copies of the things and duly sent them out to the press, but this mystery was never cleared up until a month later when I opened the press and discovered that the roller had sucked the entire French fleet into the surround. But meanwhile everybody panicked. The French navy locked up their files and said that the Bulgarians were at it again. Moments of intense panic.
And in the middle of it another absurdity. I get a telegram from London saying, “George Bernard Shaw’s film is being made by Mr. Pascal in Alexandria”—Anthony and Cleopatra, actually, a very bad film—”will you please look after the unit.” It was the middle of the war, but I said yes, I would and got in touch with Mr. Pascal and arranged for barrels to put his film in to send it off. But he had perhaps 5,000 extras for battle scenes who were all Egyptians he picked up anywhere. He also had a false foam rubber Sphinx. Every day at the end of the shooting, they, the extras, didn’t quite understand what was going on. They drew their salary and walked off with their costumes. The company was losing costumes at a rate of about 1,000 a day. At that time we had a bit of a fifth column phobia about parachutists. We had had such a bad mauling in Crete with the 1st division of the German parachutists being dropped. It was the first really extensive drop. Later the Army turned the tables on them at Arnhem. It was quite clear to us with our communications layout in the middle east and the internal sensibility of the Egyptians that perhaps a frightfully determined parachute drop might cut us off from the canal. It would be much worse havoc strategically than having to face Rommel nose to nose. So we were a bit sensitive to this element. At that time, in my office, I had an enormously spy-conscious man with popping eyes called Mr. Axelos who had a deep hoarse voice and smoked cigars, and he used to go about on a bicycle dressed in shorts with his beady eyes, all through the Arab quarter, looking for strange anomalies like, say, Italian parachutists disguised as nuns. And when he’d arrive at the office I’d say, “Mr. Axelos, how are things down at the airport?” And he’d say, “C’est drole! C’est etrange! C’est trés etrange!” Well, no sooner had Pascal begun to shoot there than Axelos began to go down more and more to the airport and he came back looking really purple. He said, “There’s something really astonishing. I can’t believe my eyes. It must be the Italian Air Force!” I said, “What’s happened?” He said, “I’ve seen ancient Roman centurions walking about in the marketplace!” Of course it was these damned extras of Pascal’s. They got so excited with their plumage they carried it off and used to do their evening shopping down there, which for a propagandist, was confusing to say the least. And then that foam rubber Sphinx caused terrible trouble, because the R.A.F. used the real one at Gizeh as a marker, to navigate by and they thought the Germans had dropped a dummy Sphinx to fool them.
These are some of the silly as well as interesting sides of diplomacy as it was yesterday. Perhaps things have changed, but I doubt it very much. Basically, I should say, Tallyrand’s advice is really sound and can’t be bettered. But the British contribution hasn’t been negligible either. They have cultivated two secret weapons of great efficacy—the poe-face and the stiff upper lip. There’s nothing like them when you are in a spot. Long may they flourish!
A Biography of Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) was a novelist, poet, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet, his acclaimed series of four novels set before and during World War II in Alexandria, Egypt. Durrell’s work was widely praised, with his Quartet winning the greatest accolades for its rich style and bold use of multiple perspectives. Upon the Quartet’s completion, Life called it “the most discussed and widely admired serious fiction of our time.”
Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Durrell was an avid and dedicated writer from an early age. He studied in Darjeeling before his parents sent him to England at the age of eleven for his formal education. When he failed to pass his entrance examinations at Cambridge University, Durrell committed himself to becoming an established writer. He published his first book of poetry in 1931 when he was just nineteen years old, and later worked as a jazz pianist to help fund his passion for writing.
Determined to escape England, which he found dreary, Durrell convinced his widowed mother, siblings, and first wife, Nancy Isobel Myers, to move to the Greek island of Corfu in 1935. The island lifestyle reminded him of the India of his childhood. That same year, Durrell published his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers. He also read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and, impressed by the notorious novel, he wrote an admiring letter to Miller. Miller responded in kind, and their correspondence and friendship would continue for forty-five years. Miller’s advice and work heavily influenced Durrell’s
provocative third novel, The Black Book (1938), which was published in Paris. Though it was Durrell’s first book of note, The Black Book was considered mildly pornographic and thus didn’t appear in print in Britain until 1973.
In 1940, Durrell and his wife had a daughter, Penelope Berengaria. The following year, as World War II escalated and Greece fell to the Nazis, Durrell and his family left Corfu for work in Athens, Kalamata (also in Greece), then Alexandria, Egypt. His relationship with Nancy was strained by the time they reached Egypt, and they separated in 1942. During the war, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British Embassy. He also wrote Prospero’s Cell, a guide to Corfu, while living in Egypt in 1945.
Durrell met Yvette Cohen in Alexandria, and the couple married in 1947. They had a daughter, Sappho Jane, in 1951, and separated in 1955. Durrell published White Eagles Over Serbia in 1957, alongside the celebrated memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and Justine (1957), the first novel of the Alexandria Quartet Capitalizing on the overwhelming success of Justine, Durrell went on to publish the next three novels in the series—Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960)—in quick succession. Upon the series’ completion, poet Kenneth Rexroth hailed it as “a tour de force of multiple-aspect narrative.”
Durrell married again in 1961 to Claude-Marie Vincendon, who died of cancer in 1967. His fourth and final marriage was in 1973 to Ghislaine de Boysson, which ended in divorce in 1979.
After a life spent in varied locales, Durrell settled in Sommières, France, where he wrote the Revolt of Aphrodite series as well as the Avignon Quintet. The first book in the Quintet, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize while Constance (1982), the third novel, was nominated for the Booker Prize.