[ilds] Violence and Disintegration

[Bruce Redwine]

"What happened after?" Charles Sligh asks.  A lot.  Sorry that I tend to emphasize the negative, but a lot of troubling things did happened.  All is not sweetness and light.  It's useful to read Brewster Chamberlin's instructive summary of those years in the 70s (A Chronology of the Life and Times of Lawrence Durrell:  Homme de Lettres), particularly the year 1974, when Chamberlin records alcoholism, the beating of Ghislaine, and the near break-up of his friendship with Miller.  And then we have Monsieur published in that same year, first novel of the Avignon Quintet, which is very dark indeed.  As Charles has mentioned before, we are witnessing the disintegration of a man.

I am particularly troubled by the accounts of Durrell's physical violence towards women.  I emphasize strongly that I do not by any means know all the facts, but there is some suggestive evidence that Durrell was abusive towards women.  In a recent ILDS posting, Fraser Wilson has noted the following passage from Eric Gifford's East of Athens (1939):  "Larry was short, blond and excitable . . . His wife was tall and slender, with handsome cats' eyes.  Being an ex-Slade student, she wore her straight, fair hair cut a la Trilby.  As her husband once remarked to me:  'You've no idea what an arty-arty little bitch Nancy was until I knocked her into shape.'"  I have Gifford's book.  The quote is accurate, on p. 139.  "Little bitch . . . knocked her into shape" -- what does all this mean?  And I don't take it as a metaphor, in view of subsequent events.  Eric Gifford's account is of course hearsay, but it fits a pattern confirmed in Durrell's latter years.

In sum, I don't see Durrell as espousing pacifist's views, political or otherwise, in view of how some of his personal relationships developed.


Bruce


-----Original Message-----
>From: slighcl <slighcl at wfu.edu>
>Sent: May 23, 2008 7:01 PM
>To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca
>Subject: Re: [ilds] Durrell's Derring-do
>
>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