[ilds] Durrell's Derring-do

[slighcl]

On 5/23/2008 12:22 PM, slighcl wrote:

>
> You offer some important moments from the writing.  I am also thinking 
> of the end of /Prospero's Cell/.   The loss of Corfu is profoundly 
> felt because it is /personally /felt.  The epilogue in Alex seems to 
> capture Durrell's world view and politics in the 1940s and 1950s quite 
> nicely 
Specifically, see for example Durrell's elaboration of  the "small 
private universe: a Greek universe":

        Inside that world, where the islands lie buried in smoke, where
        the cypresses spring from the tombs, they know that there is
        nothing to be said.  There is simply patience to be exercised. 
        Patience and endurance and love.

That, tempered by an underlying Epicurean self-interest and 
self-cultivation, I take to be Durrell's core ethic, 1945-1957.  What 
happened after?

In support of Bruce's attention to Durrell's views on soldiers and 
spies, I will also note that the "Epilogue in Alexandria" does find 
Durrell pondering different friends dispersed into different theatres of 
action.

A finely wrought 2 1/2 pages, all in all.  The fullest presage of the 
/Quartet/, I think.  Elegiac. Autumnal   Memorious. Very belated.

Charles

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