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Notes
Introduction
[1]. This is a thorny publication history, and the scarcity of copies has led to a general oversight from scholars. The Freedom Press is the most important anarchist press in the United Kingdom, founded by Peter Kropotkin and Charlotte Wilson in 1886. To give a sense of its position, in 1945, four of its editors were arrested for their pacifism and subversion of military service following the 1944 government raid of the press. This led to the famous formation of the Freedom Defence Committee by Herbert Read, George Orwell, George Woodcock, Alex Comfort, and Osbert Sitwell, among others. Two years later, in 1947, Durrell published his “Elegy on the Closing of the French Brothels” in Woodcock’s NOW, printed by Freedom Press (“Elegy” 30–32). Durrell first began to publish with Robert Duncan in 1940 when Duncan lived in an anarchist commune in Woodstock, New York, but he had already written in 1938 to support the journal Phoenix, published by James Cooney on the same commune, saying, “Phoenix is surely the most fertile effort…in literature for some time now” (Orend, Henry 49). Duncan published the largest collection of Durrell’s poetry (in a periodical) in 1940 and repeatedly attempted to republish “Asylum in the Snow” while also beginning to typeset an edition of The Black Book. The latter two were advertised but fell through due to financial limitations; they were revived when Duncan relocated to Berkeley, CA, where he entered another anarchist group with Kenneth Rexroth and George Leite. This group then published more of Durrell’s works in their anarchist journal Circle in 1946, published a book edition of Zero and Asylum in the Snow: Two Excursions into Reality in 1947, and advertised a completed edition of The Black Book for sale, though this appears to have vanished, very likely due to potential obscenity charges. Henry Miller claimed to have read the proofs for the book (Letters of Henry 122), and Durrell’s contract for it has survived. Alex Comfort, best known for writing The Joy of Sex, was another prominent anarchist figure who corresponded with Durrell while he was in Egypt and included his work in his anarchist journal New Road in 1944. Durrell and Miller also corresponded about him as an anarchist writer. Grey W
alls published New Road and had previously printed Seven, which included (and was edited and printed by) many of the poets who subsequently led the New Apocalypse movement, which was also expressly anarchist. Previous scholars have not noticed this publishing history, and it casts Durrell’s 1930s and 1940s works in a radically different context than has been traditionally accepted. Nonetheless, Durrell only briefly endorsed Cooney, rejecting him after Cooney turned down Durrell’s poetry (Orend, Henry 50), and John Waller recalls him attacking the Apocalypse Movement late in the war (177). Durrell’s positions are far from straightforward.
[2]. In 1960, Durrell described his 1938 novel The Black Book as the work of “an angry young man of the 30s” (Durrell, “Preface” 9), which casts him in distinction from the Angry Young Men of the 1950s who were known for their working-class origins and social realism.
[3]. Read’s anarchism and anarchist writings are widely recognized. Miller’s are not, but anarchism is nonetheless explicit and a major component of his works, ranging from his admiration of and correspondence with Emma Goldman to his speaking for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and numerous written endorsements of anarchism. For more information on Miller’s Anarchism, see Orend, “Fucking” (44–77) and Gifford, “Surrealism’s” (36–64).
[4]. In this, I am drawing on Durrell’s ties to the “Personalism” movement in British literature. For a detailed account, see Gifford, Personal Modernisms.
[5]. For instance, Durrell helped to send Albert Cossery’s novel Men God Forgot from Egypt for publication in California by Circle Editions, which derived from an anarchist reading circle in Berkeley. Durrell’s Zero and Asylum in the Snow appeared through the same press, and he signed a contract for it to produce The Black Book, though this failed to reach distribution and may not have been printed. Both works had gone through previous attempts at publication by anarchist groups in New York.
[6]. CMG is the abbreviation for Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.
[7]. For instance, see Pine’s Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape (393) or Herbrechter’s discussions of reactionary politics throughout Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity.
[8]. As Fiona Tomkinson has noted, Durrell’s poetry still shows significant influence from Auden (117–32), and his 1939 “Poem in Space and Time” (later “The Prayer Wheel”) is a direct answer to Auden’s famous 1937 poem “Lullaby.”
[9]. Durrell and Orwell also traded letters in The New English Weekly over the periodical The Booster, which Orwell saw as a return to the kind of magazine of the 1920s (such as BLAST, The Egoist, or The Little Review). Orwell’s objection was to the inefficacy of such avant-garde work in the face of the looming Second World War, and Durrell’s rebuttal was fierce. Nonetheless, both authors appear to have borrowed from each other’s novels at the same time as well—Orwell lifting a situation from Pied Piper of Lovers for his Keep the Aspidistra Flying (to which Durrell refers in his rebuttal in The New English Weekly), and Durrell repaying in kind by subverting Orwell’s novel in Panic Spring (Gifford, “Editor’s Preface” vii–ix). Nevertheless, Durrell wrote to Orwell from Yugoslavia expressing his admiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four.
From the Elephant’s Back
[1]. Durrell first delivered this paper in French as a lecture on April 1, 1981 at Centre Georges Pompidou, a major library and exhibition gallery in the Beaubourg area of Paris. He only subsequently published the English version in James Meary Tambimuttu’s Poetry London–New York and Apple Magazine. A significant variant of the lecture is available in typescript in English at the Bibliothèque Lawrence Durrell at the Université Paris Ouest, Nanterre.
[2]. These first two volumes of The Avignon Quintet, which was so titled posthumously, are Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness and Livia or Buried Alive. Durrell considered the formal issues in these two books quite a bit, and he was particularly concerned with form while beginning Livia just after having finished Monsieur. He attempted to revise Monsieur to address his new ideas but could not, and the variant first chapter of Livia shows these formal ideas clearly (Gifford and Stevens 173–93).
[3]. This critique distinguishes Durrell’s lecture from the then popular seminars of Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) who was tied to the “linguistic turn” in modern literary critical theory, and whom Durrell derogates in his “Endpapers and Inklings” by writing, “As for Lacan—what a frenzy of ignoble parody, rhetoric of self-aggrandisement!” (90). It may also be a general turn away from the “linguistic turn” itself, though this is unlikely given Durrell’s other interests.
[4]. Since his youth, Durrell self-identified as Anglo-Indian, most famously so in his letters to Henry Miller, in which he clarified, “I enclose a photograph to prove that I am NOT a Greek, but a pure Anglo-Irish-Indian ASH BLOND” (Durrell and Miller 30). Durrell’s Irish background is disputed, but he was born in India, and in 1968 was redefined as a British non-patrial without the right to enter or settle in Britain without a visa. This was due to the amendment to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1962, which aimed to curb immigration from India, Pakistan, and the West Indies.
[5]. Durrell’s 1935 novel Pied Piper of Lovers resembles Rudyard Kipling’s (1865–1936) 1901 novel, Kim.
[6]. This is very likely a reference to Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” alluding to Durrell’s time in the 1930s playing jazz and failing to fit into English culture.
[7]. The Indian Rope Trick began as a hoax in 1890 but was developed as stage magic. Versions range from a rope standing up in the air, which a child or assistant would then climb and descend, through to a child climbing the rope, disappearing, his limbs falling to the ground, and then being reassembled. The hoax was revealed in 2004 in Peter Lamont’s The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick. If Durrell had seen the trick in the 1920s, it would have been stage magic deriving from the 1890 hoax.
[8]. While these are both exaggeration, Durrell does use Hindi and Urdu in his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers. Everest was not visible, but he could have seen Kanchenjunga from the dormitory (MacNiven 40).
[9]. This is a reference to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which is also called India’s First War of Independence.
[10]. Durrell’s paternal great-grandfather moved to India aged eighteen, and his maternal great-grandmother was born there. Both his parents and all his siblings were born in India, and neither parent had visited Britain before sending him there for his education, aged eleven.
[11]. Durrell’s father, Lawrence Samuel Durrell, was a significant railway engineer (MacNiven 1–26).
[12]. Similar claims are made about Durrell’s character Mountolive in The Alexandria Quartet.
[13]. This sets Durrell’s works in comparison to George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” and invites contrasting readings of their views on empire and government. This is especially so if the elephant is regarded in both texts as a symbol for the British Empire’s demise. Durrell and Orwell sparred in the English press and appeared to have borrowed from each other in their novels. Orwell discusses Durrell’s The Black Book in the second publication of “Inside the Whale,” and the two shared several friends, such as George Woodcock and Henry Miller, though Durrell’s sympathies for anti-authoritarian politics (as with Woodcock and Miller’s overt anarchism) could not easily relate to Orwell’s socialism.
[14]. Ranchi was a significant industrial and military town southeast of Delhi, near to West Bengal. MacNiven identifies this uncle as William Henry Durrell (46).
[15]. In contrast with Orwell’s imperial elephant in “Shooting an Elephant,” Durrell’s Sadu becomes a partner rather than a threat or “White Man’s Burden.”
[16]. Durrell’s comparison of the poet and the seer is akin to his good friend G.S. Fraser’s “Ideas About Poetry VI” in the journal Durrell co-edited in Egypt, Personal Landscape: “All poems written or unwritten exist. I don’t mean a platonic but a biological existence. Their relation to
their written form is the relation of the model to its portrait. The special ability of the poet is to see them: that’s why the poets are sometimes called seers” (2).
[17]. Lawrence Samuel Durrell tended to several rail lines, but this is likely the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, well-known as the “toy train” for it small, powerful engines.
[18]. These railways provide the opening scenes for both Monsieur and Quinx, the first and final novels of Durrell’s Avignon Quintet, which he was writing at the same time as this piece.
[19]. Durrell’s ties to Judaism are complex. His second and third wives were both Jewish and Zionist, and he wrote a series of pro-Israeli, Zionist works prior to 1967–1968, after which his attitudes appear to have changed.
[20]. St. Joseph’s College, North Point, Darjeeling.
[21]. Durrell’s alter ego, Walsh, in Pied Piper of Lovers has these traits and punches well (26, 82, 122).
[22]. Durrell includes a scene such as this in Pied Piper of Lovers involving Abel, the French master (126). As MacNiven points out, “Larry’s memory failed him—Le Monde did not commence publication until 1944—yet he did rise from 13th out of 16 in French to first place in his form” (63).
[23]. Durrell refers on several occasions to the importance of colonial and diplomatic dress. Donald Kaczvinsky has detailed this element of ornamentalism (“Memlik’s” 93–118).
[24]. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) and Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) were both significant influences on Durrell. His “Bromo Bombastes” is a rebuttal of Shaw, whom he engaged in a brief correspondence, and his Pied Piper of Lovers shows a significant influence from Kipling.
[25]. Robinson Crusoe is an important novel at the beginning of the novelistic tradition in English, published by Daniel Defoe (c. 1659–1731) in 1719. Franz Kafka’s (1883–1924) existential novel The Castle was published posthumously in 1926.
[26]. Durrell refers to both poets and works elsewhere as well, notably in his poem “Je est un autre.”