No stars to guide. Death is that quiet cartouche,
A nun-besought preserve of praying time,
That like a great lion silence hunts,
At noon, at ease, and all because he must.
His scenery is so old, His sacred pawtouch cold.
A lupercal of girls remember him
In nights defunct from lack of sleep
Tossing on iron beds awaiting dawn …
He wound up his death each evening like a clock,
Walked to obscure cafes to criticize
The fires that blush upon the crown of Etna.
Leopardi in the ticking mind,
Lay unknown like an exiled king,
Printing his dreams among the olive glades
In orchards of discontent the fruitful word.
Acknowledgements
Though all the characters in this book are imaginary I would like to thank some real people who made it possible as well as pleasurable. M. Pages and Madame Robert of Nimes-Voyages for their itinerary and Simone Lestoquard for hunting up the illustrations in Paris.
LAWRENCE DURRELL
Index
A
Aedoni 146
Aeschylus 38, 94–95, 109, 148
Agrigento 69, 78, 131–193, 196–198, 201, 235, 254, 284
Akragas 93, 150
Alcibiades 37, 120
Alexandria 2, 12, 59, 86, 180, 211
Apollinaire, Guillaume 184
Arabs 73, 138
Aristotle 76, 176, 180
Athens 4, 66–68, 70, 73, 76, 78, 109, 116, 118, 120, 133, 135, 156, 160, 167, 174, 180, 265, 285
Augusta 58–59, 137
B
Baedeker 122
Baudelaire, Charles 184
Bellini, Vincenzo 28, 37
Besaquino 284, 290
Buddha 180, 217
Butler, Samuel 218
Byzantine empire 133, 138, 224, 256, 264
c
Caesar, Julius 278
Calabria 133
Calatafimi 236–237
Caltanissetta 148, 164
Cameirus 43
Capri 51, 273, 275–276
Caravaggio 115, 121–122
Carlentini 43
Carthaginians 93, 138
Castello Maniace 101
Catania 3, 6–7, 10–21, 23, 41, 59
Catanian Plain 42
Cavafy 184
Cefalu 257, 260–264
Centuripe 284
Chaos 158
Charles V, Emperor 216
Cicero 76, 173
Colonna, Vittoria della 148
Corfu 18, 65, 85–86, 100, 149, 262
Corinth 17, 73
Cos 236
Crete 3–4, 15, 17, 77, 81, 183
Cyprus 2–5, 9, 13, 17, 29, 47, 52, 63, 65, 131, 133, 136, 148, 152–153, 171, 206, 208, 258, 275
Dali, Salvador 178
Damarete 93
Delphi 181, 183, 215
Diocletian 142, 146
Diodorus Siculus 190
Dodecanese Islands 145
Douglas, Norman 275
E
Egadi Isles 216
Egypt 68, 73, 78, 192, 208, 210
Empedocles 60 175–176, 178, 180, 183, 286
Empedocles (port) 195
Enna 275
Epicurus 75, 176, 179
Epidaurus 236
Erice 212, 214 279
Eryx 215, 217, 219, 226
Etna 15–16, 34, 38, 41, 52, 76, 180, 183, 272, 274–275, 284, 286–287, 290
Euphemius 138
F
Famagusta 13
Favignana 216
G
Garibaldi, Giuseppe 37
Gela 69, 92, 94–95, 141, 148–150
Gelon 89, 92–95
Goethe 33, 44, 46, 103, 238
Guido, Margaret 190
H
Hadrian, Emperor 78–79, 146
Harrison, Jane 78, 107
Heraclius, Emperor 142
Hieron I 94
Himera 88, 93–94, 254, 264
Homer 74, 134
Hymettus 78, 160
I
Ionian Sea 16
Ithaca 218
K
Kazantzakis 180–181
Kephissos 75
Kesserling, Field Marshal 278
Kininmonth, Christopher 144
Kyrenia 30, 47
L
Lampedusa 103
Latomie 102, 114, 121, 279
Lawrence, D. H. 62, 103, 274–275
Lentini 43
Leopardi 184, 290
Leptis Magna 199
Levanzo 216
Lindos 85–86
Lucretius 176
Lycabettos 108
M
Mackenzie, Compton 275
Marettimo 218
Marsala 150, 204–205
Mentobello Beach 245
Messina 241, 255, 259, 261, 264–268, 284, 286
Midi 7, 111–112, 123, 136, 138, 187
Miller, Henry 63
Minoa 81
Mistral, Frédéric 184
Monreale 255
Monte Giuliano 216
Monte Pellegrino 251
Morgantina 146
Mycenae 192, 234
N
Naxos 2, 46, 269 280, 282, 289
O
Olympia 80, 234
Ortygia 85–86, 101
P
Paleocastrizza 86, 262, 273
Palermo 201, 208, 226, 233, 241–242, 244
Pantalica 284
Paphos 17, 133
Parparella 218
Paul, Saint 121, 180
Pausanias 69, 78–81, 258, 285
Persia 17, 208, 270
Piazza Armerina 141
Pindar 78, 94, 279
Pirandello, Luigi 103, 158–159
Plato 75, 176
Pliny 273, 280
Plymerion 120
Pompey 278
Porto Rafti 157
Psychico 157
Pythagoras 171
R
Rhodes 6, 15, 43, 63, 65, 73, 78, 86, 136, 145
Rimbaud, Arthur 184
Roger II, Count of Sicily 264
Rome 2, 6, 8–10, 51, 74, 103, 209, 222, 273, 279
Rosalie, Saint 249–254
Russell, Bertrand 176
S
Samos 85, 227
Seferis 181–182
Segesta 226, 233–242, 283
Selinunte 192, 195–212, 254
Sikelianos 180–184
Simeto river 43
Simonides 94
Smyrna 133
Socrates 76, 180
Spain 136–137
Sparta 120
Split 146
Suetonius 92
Swinburne, Algernon Charles 184
Syracuse 41, 57–59, 60 135, 138, 150, 216, 279, 283
T
Taormina 6, 153, 241, 259, 261, 264, 268–269, 270
Theocritus 241
Theron 93
Thucydides 116, 241
Timoleon 278
Tinos 80, 187, 227
Tivoli 146
Trapani 212, 215–220, 223, 225
Troy 191, 199, 236
Turkey 86, 137, 209
Tyndarus 275, 283
Tyrrhenian Sea 216
V
Verlaine, Paul 184
Villa Imperiale 141
W
William the Good 251, 255–256
X
Xante 16
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 o
f 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.
Durrell died in 1990 at his home in Sommières.
This photograph of Lawrence Durrell aboard his boat, the Van Norden, is taken from a negative discovered among his papers. The vessel is named after a character in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. (Photograph held in the British Library’s modern manuscripts collection.)
One of Nancy Durrell’s photographs from the 1930s. Pictured here is the Caique, which they used to travel around the waters of Corfu. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin, property of the Gerald Durrell Estate.)
This photograph of Nancy and Lawrence Durrell was likely taken in Delphi, Greece, in late 1939. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin and the Gerald Durrell Estate.)
A 1942 photograph of Lawrence Durrell with his wife, Nancy, and their daughter, Penelope, taken in Cairo. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin.)
This manuscript notebook contains one of two drafts of Justine acquired by the British Library as part of Lawrence Durrell’s large archive in 1995. (Notebook held in the British Library’s modern manuscripts collection.)
A page from Durrell’s notebooks, or, as he called them, the “quarry.” This page introduced his notes on the “colour and narrative” of scenes in Justine. (Photo courtesy of the Lawrence Durrell Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.)
“As well as serving delicious food in an idyllic setting, the Taverna Nikolas at Agni has strong links with the Durrell story in Corfu,” says Joanna Hodgkin of this 2012 photo. Durrell lived in the neighboring town of Kalami, where his famous White House sits right above the shoreline. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin.)
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
copyright © 1977 by Lawrence Durrell
cover design by Jason Gabbert
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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