[ilds] Durrell and Cortázar

[slighcl]

An open note to anyone working the archives or actively collecting Cortázar:

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you discover any evidence of 
additional mentions or even direct exchanges between Durrell and 
Cortázar.  Some time ago I took the literary connections (points of 
influence and confluence) about as far as possible.  But it always 
struck me as odd these two literary celebrities from the early 1960s 
never made even a chance encounter while they lived in France.  The 
French have always been good about setting up literary and artistic 
panels on radio and television programming.  Taken alone, the fact that 
two major expatriate authors lived in France would make you wonder.  
Then comes the fact that JC's wife Aurora Bernardez translated part of 
the /Quartet /into Spanish, along with the obvious direct and indirect 
presence of LD's work in JC's /Rayuela // /Hopscotch/. 

I cannot think that LD would have appreciated JC for a number of 
political and ideological reasons.  Instead, my imaginary occasion of 
their meeting would be something quite awkward, LD perhaps tipsy, 
remarks made about socialism, and then that was that.  But I would still 
like to know. 

And I wonder if JC's reading copy of the /Quartet /survives?  JC was a 
close and thorough student of English literature (and jazz, as Steve has 
reminded us).  JC's thesis was on Keats, I recall.  His earlier works 
all come back to the individual artist's relationship to Tradition.  (A 
jazz ethic of riffing off of originals and standards would add something 
to the Romantic inheritance, no doubt.)  I did not find anything in the 
UT Austin materials when I looked way back when.  But I will be 
delighted to learn that a missing JC notebook or reading copy or a cache 
of letters has come to light. . . .

As with the strange mention found in /The Jaguar Smile/, all of this 
reminds us that an Anglo-American or French or Greek or Egyptian 
definition of Durrell's influence is not enough.  Like Coleridge's river 
Alph, Old D's influence plunged underground many measures deep and 
continues to spring up here and there in the most surprising ways.  
Latin America was one of the places the font sprang up.  And that is 
especially strange since he had spent that period down in Argentina.  
Durrell, of course, met Borges there at an ill-starred cocktail party.  
(See MacNiven.)  Was JC paying attention to the poet-lecturer LD even 
then, as LD passed back and forth between the metropolis and the 
pampas?  LD made enough friends and caused enough gossip while in 
Argentina to merit looking into it.

Many thanks!

Charles

-- 
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Charles L. Sligh
Department of English
Wake Forest University
slighcl at wfu.edu
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