[ilds] "this is not a war book"

[Denise Tart & David Green]

No one who lived through the the 1930s and 40s in close proximity to the great conflict of World War Two; the largest most destructive war in world history, can have failed to be affected by this catasthrophe. The war drove Durrell out of Corfu. He was sent to war shattered Rhodes, well depicted in Reflections on a Marine Venus. He experienced it in Cyprus. He was haunted by the prospect of atomic war - as many of my generation were (I was born in 1959). While Durrell was probably not all that keen to be  soldier, he certainly enjoyed the looseness of wartime Cairo/Alexandria 1939 - 45; the relaxed morals, the drink, the characters bold, beautiful and horrible that are thrown up by war.

When first sent to Rhodes Durrell "missed the companionship of poets, desperadoes and under cover agents passing through wartime Egypt."

Post war Rhodes seems like a good topic to me.

DG

Denise Tart & David Green
16 William Street, Marrickville NSW 2204

+61 2 9564 6165
0412 707 625
dtart at bigpond.net.au
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: slighcl 
  To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca 
  Sent: Saturday, May 24, 2008 11:05 PM
  Subject: [ilds] "this is not a war book"


  On 5/23/2008 11:41 PM, James Gifford wrote:


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.  I mentioned that for me the "Epilogue in Alexandria" in Prospero's Cell seems to be the strongest "presage" or premonition of the prose-poem style and narrative attitude I find in those opening episodes of Justine.  A ruined house.  A smashed cutter.  I sit here like Odysseus on the sand, looking back there, where I am not.  Many things and many people lost, buried, amputated.  A loss that smarts like a phantom limb.  Melissa!

  *****

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.So at the question "where is the war in the books?" I recall now the opening lines of one of the Ur-Justines at the BL, one of those aborted notebooks that Durrell put into a drawer, setting it aside for discovery later:


    The concussions of a recent bombardment (this is not

    a war book) which had blackened the muzzles of

    the 15-inch guns, shattered crockery in its racks,

    and shaken down cockroaches from their hiding-

    places behind pipes and bulkheads, still hung about

    the airless ships' quarters in which Faber found

    himself.  The air was still full of dust.  Fragments of

    paper trembled in the corners of the room as the

    tepid gusts of the fan touched them.  It was

    remarkable to be feeling so ill.  The doctor, whose

    height gave him a stoop, looked not unlike

    an angle-shot from a German film, as he stood

    in the doorway of the cabin.  Like all naval men he

    gave the impression of having been sold into slavery

    as a boy.  Only the excessive probity of his professional

    status held his curiosity in check:  for a sick civilian

    aboard a warship in wartime is not a usual sight.  







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

------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  ILDS mailing list
  ILDS at lists.uvic.ca
  https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080525/3ad3e0ac/attachment.html