[ilds] Durrell's Derring-do

[Bruce Redwine]

James, I'm glad you agree.  Seriously, Durrell and soldiering would be a worthy topic of an essay.  I think, for Durrell, the turning point came during the war.  I seem to recall reading somewhere he tried to enlist while in Greece but was rejected.  Like John Keats, reporter, the war was a formative experience for him.  Deeds, Col. ret., DSO, is a font of wisdom and sanity in Sicilian Carousel, which takes place around 1974.  The fact he's working in the "Allied Graves Commission," i.e., finding and registering British war dead twenty years after the fact is also significant, and, I think, tied in with Durrell's "dark side."  How many times do graves appear in Durrell's fiction? -- characters hang around them like the Egyptian "ba," the alter-ego of the dead that hangs around tombs.


Bruce
  

-----Original Message-----
>From: James Gifford <odos.fanourios at gmail.com>
>Sent: May 23, 2008 4:26 AM
>To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca
>Subject: Re: [ilds] Durrell's Derring-do
>
>Nice eye, Bruce.  I don't think I've seen such an interpretation before, 
>and there's merit in it.  My only problem would be the archly unromantic 
>images of war from /Clea/ and the general turn away from the state or 
>it's impositions in such works as /Prospero's Cell/, /Revolt of 
>Aphrodite/, /Panic Spring/, and so forth.
>
>How does /The Avignon Quintet/ stack up on this?  I'd quickly suggest 
>that Sam doesn't follow in the footsteps of Keats, and militarism is 
>generally deplored, but that's a very different period in his life.
>
>I suppose that in general I've been increasingly looking to Durrell's 
>anarchic life of the village against the over-determined life in the 
>city, and I'd have to associate the soldiers with the city, though 
>"daring-do" and messages by moonlight might come in other forms!  They 
>also just make for good page turners when one is needed -- Scobie is 
>hardly the kind of James Bond we'd expect to find...
>
>Don Kaczvinsky gave a (possibly) related paper last year in Louisville 
>on Durrell and Ian Fleming.  Don?
>
>Best,
>James
>
>Bruce Redwine wrote:
>> Bill, I believe you're onto something important.  I think you're right -- old LD had secret ambitions to be a soldier and do "derring-do."  He was clearly frustrated in that regard.  Some of his most sympathetic figures are soldiers or former soldiers, and here I'm thinking of Deeds in Sicilian Carousel and how the desert campaign makes a man of sniveling John Keats, reporter.
>> 
>> 
>> Bruce
>>    
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: william godshalk <godshawl at email.uc.edu>
>>> Sent: May 22, 2008 1:03 PM
>>> To: Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>, ilds at lists.uvic.ca
>>> Subject: Re: [ilds] The Ariadne Objective
>>>
>>> Perhaps our boy has been up to no good on dark and foggy nights in 
>>> the Med. Blowing German cruisers. Darley's dive is a reminiscence of 
>>> his special work for MI during the Big One.
>>>
>>>
>>> At 03:41 PM 5/22/2008, you wrote:
>>>> Lawrence Durrell???  That would be news.  If I'm not mistaken, W. 
>>>> Stanley Moss in his Ill Met by Moonlight (1950), the first-hand 
>>>> account of that famous British commando raid, makes no mention of 
>>>> Lawrence Durrell, who, I believe, had nothing to do with British 
>>>> military operations in WWII.  Waugh, Dahl, and Fermor did serve in 
>>>> the British military.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Bruce