[ilds] Durrell's Derring-do

[James Gifford]

Hi Charles,

All very interesting here.  In particular, I like this quotation:

> 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.

I think you're evaluation of it is correct:

> 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 conjunction with your note that the Epilogue finds Durrell "pondering 
different friends dispersed into different theatres of action," I can't 
help but notice the suggestive nature of the language.

I believe (someone please check since I might have my dates wrong), 
Durrell had already published a short piece in which he asserts the 
White House has been bombed and the Shrine of Saint Arsenius blasted by 
a mine.  That's not true, but it does show how we wished to portray the 
war.  Adding to that "islands lie buried in smoke" and "cypresses spring 
from the tombs," I don't think it's any interpretive intervention to 
suggest Durrell is portraying the desolation of war in the most poetical 
terms he can muster.  A poet can only write while the soldiers die and 
paradise burns, leaving the flora to feed off the remains while he 
friends fight in North Africa, etc...  He may be turning to the private 
world, but that is not an act devoid of its politics.  Its politics 
spring precisely from his statement "There is simply patience to be 
exercised.  Patience and endurance and love."

Is that sensible?  I think it goes some way to explaining why the New 
Apocalypse poets (highly political, semi-anarchist servicemen) would 
describe Durrell as being on the extreme far Left as "a brilliant 
visionary of defeatism."  The war is never far from his writings at this 
time, but it's never the point of the writings either -- the poetry 
reflect the personal rather than enacting an intervention into the 
social.  I think he tried the latter later in life (with some hesitation 
and some revisions), but certainly not in the early years.

Do those comments draw us to the text in any way?  I wonder how we would 
read the opening of /prospero's Cell/ with the ending in mind.  I'm also 
not sure how we would reconcile his earlier work on the book while on 
Kalamata (based on my past digging in the Gennadius Library) with his 
later completion of it in Egypt.

As Jay Brigham notes in a notebook held in Victoria, Durrell lost much 
of his notebook materials when fleeing Greece, such that he had to copy 
"In Arcadia" out of John Waller's /Kingdom Come/ when Waller visited 
Egypt.  I wonder how much of /Prospero's Cell/ vanished and was 
reconstituted.  I'd suspect he began it in Greece, at the latest on 
Kalamata, but only compiled and finished it in Egypt, perhaps rewriting 
the entire work.

Best,
Jamie