[ilds] Durrell concordance

[slighcl]

Here follows directions for Deborah Lawrenson's UK website.  The photo 
treatment is very Larry/Nancy.

http://www.deborah-lawrenson.co.uk/

> In the horseshoe bay of Kalami in Corfu, a tumultuous love affair 
> begins between a renowned novelist and a woman escaping scandal. Years 
> later, her daughter Melissa, running from her own past, comes to the 
> island ...
>
> Melissa's life in England is in disarray. There are cracks in her 
> perfect marriage, and her elderly mother, Elizabeth, is losing her 
> memory and slowly drifting away. In the last glimmers of lucidity, 
> Elizabeth presents her daughter with a gift that suggests a very 
> secret history - one that leads Melissa to Kalami, where Julian Adie, 
> poet, traveller and novelist, once lived.
>
> Published August 2008 ISBN 0099481898

>
>   Extract - Melissa's account of her arrival for the first time in Corfu
>
>
>
> By the time I reached Corfu, the season was in its last gasp.
>
> The White HouseEvening hung early over the bay when I walked the stony 
> beach at Kalami and found the White House. It was just as he 
> described: defiant on a rock, the sea clawing at its feet. On the 
> headland behind, cypress trees pointed into a curdling sky. Pebbles 
> crunched under my feet as I went closer, and waves sighed on grey 
> stones. A brackish smell of nets and seaweed was sharp in the air.
>
> This was how my search began. Looking for someone I didn't know, many 
> years too late. And looking, at the same time, for someone I had 
> always known, but trying to place her in a strange setting, 
> reconfigured in some new history.
>
> It was late October. My summer had disappeared, hour by hour, into the 
> oppressive sun and rain of an English heat wave that drained suddenly 
> into autumn while it was still August. Here, though, warmth lingered. 
> I'd fallen asleep for an hour, late afternoon, to the weary hum of 
> ageing insects and woke with the drumming thought: time present is 
> only a breath, a heartbeat, and then it's gone. So I went out quickly, 
> clutching the book. My knuckles were white around it, I noticed, as if 
> my hands belonged to someone else.
>
> I don't mind admitting it: I was nervous, frightened of what I might 
> find and how much it might alter my old certainties when so many of 
> the recent ones had already gone. In retrospect, it was the perfect 
> frame of mind in which to begin what I was trying to do; alive to 
> changes and misinterpretations, I trusted nothing.
>
> This was a new way of thinking for me. It still felt odd, to have no 
> trust in the world. But thanks to Richard, there was deceit and 
> duplicity everywhere. It was like a cold knife in the flesh, this 
> newly minted cynicism, sharpened by my own small deceptions to cover 
> the wound.
>
> Albanian coast view The lies had started as soon as I arrived alone at 
> the boat hire office where I picked up the key to the Prospero 
> Apartments.
>
> 'Unfortunately my husband couldn't come with me,' I told Manolis 
> Kiotzas. He was frowning at the print-out of my booking, clearly made 
> for a married couple: Richard and Melissa Quiller.
>
> Manolis, a jovial, wide-faced man in his forties, was sympathetic and 
> eager to offer help. He was also waiting for more. The Greeks are 
> tactful as well as hospitable; for all that, they are unembarrassed in 
> their curiosity about other people's lives, especially on this island. 
> I had learned that much already from Julian Adie.
>
> 'Work...his business, he couldn't get away,' I said.
>
> Manolis pulled down the corners of his mouth, with a wry twist this 
> time. He nodded sagely, acknowledging a wise decision not to have 
> cancelled in the circumstances. 'Is good you have come. You will have 
> a nice time. Still sunny for a few days, nice rest, nice food...'
>
>
> 'I'm sure I will.'
>
> 'You come to the Prospero Taverna this evening, you have some wine...'
>
> I smiled, without committing myself.
>
> He handed over two large keys and gave me directions to the apartment, 
> about a hundred metres further up the road. It was on the first floor 
> of a modern house overlooking the sea, a few steps up a path on the 
> hill side of the road. I found the outside stairs at one side, and 
> carried my bags up feeling suddenly exhausted. There was no evidence 
> that any of the other apartments in the property were occupied. The 
> door opened easily. Inside, it was clean and white: a bedroom, a 
> shower room and a sitting room with a basic kitchen along one wall.
>
> I sluiced off the grime of travel, the early morning start on the 
> motorway, the sweat of penned-in airport queues, then lay down wrapped 
> in a dry towel on the double bed.
>
> I could cry now if I wanted. It didn't matter. I knew no-one here in 
> Corfu. No need for any pretence. The stupid lie to Manolis apart, I 
> was feeling all right. Or as well as could be expected. There was 
> relief in simply being away, a guilty relief, that the worst had 
> happened and I could stop fearing it. I didn't intend to sleep, but my 
> eyes closed and oblivion took over.
>
> That first evening, thoughts of my mother came easily as I sat on the 
> rocks below the White House. It was certainly possible to imagine her 
> in this place.
>
> A lilac veil was poised to drop over the water between the island and 
> the mountainous Albanian coast so close by. Julian Adie's description 
> of its hulking nearness was more accurate than I had expected.
>
> Sunset over Albania, viewed from The White House
> /The Gates of Paradise/ was his account of an idyllic sojourn by the 
> Ionian Sea, first published at a time when Britain was /"a place of 
> thin greasy soup and shrivelled lips"/ and most people could only 
> dream of sensuous escape, of unbroken sunshine and the freedom to swim 
> each day in dark blue seas, to eat fresh figs and drink wine, make 
> love and write poetry under the sun. Sixty years ago, it was the book 
> that made Julian Adie famous.
>
> Near the end he writes of this very place, this fabled white house, 
> after he and his first wife Grace had reluctantly sailed away in the 
> teeth of imminent war: "It is never mentioned. The house is destroyed, 
> and the lovely boat lies holed and upturned, a ribcage rotting in the 
> sun. Only the shrine and the sacred pool are unchanged."
>
> The Shrine of St Arsenius - Durrell's place of 
> predilectionDisingenuous, of course. All the biographical sources 
> note, usually in a spirit of indulgence, that Adie was not to be 
> trusted with the truth when it came to spinning his literary web. 
> Better to mesmerise with prose studded with poetic jewels, to conjure 
> a yearning nostalgia by smashing up the beautiful landscape, setting 
> it out of reach like a myth, than to tell it how it was.
>
> Maybe the house was damaged, but it was never destroyed, for all that 
> the Germans cruelly bombed the island. It still stands, solid as it 
> ever was, at the southern end of the horseshoe bay. The boat had been 
> sold before they left, according to other accounts, and if Grace and 
> Julian never spoke of their idyll it was because by the time he came 
> to write the words, she had left him, taking their baby daughter with 
> her. By 1945 she was back in England, while he was rampaging through 
> parties in Cairo.
>
> Time and truth are elastic. I could feel that strongly here, sitting 
> on the rocks where they once sat and which he described so alluringly, 
> peeling away the layers of the present and the past. The slippage of 
> years is like a strong undertow of the sea over steeply shelving 
> beach. Could Julian Adie have been right all along, in his romantic 
> claims? Was it possible to escape from the English way of death, and 
> emerge in the blue light of a Greek island to collect and restructure 
> the past, current and recurrent?
>
> The rocks under The White House
>
>
> Between the bay's twin headlands where tall cypresses blackened into 
> dark fringes, the sea was glassy. The looming foreign coastline was a 
> bulge of rocky muscle, indigo-ridged on the horizon, as I strained the 
> sinews of my own memory for the clues I must have missed.
>
> There was no doubt in my mind that she had sent me here deliberately 
> when she gave me the book of poetry and with it all the unanswered 
> questions.
>
> Collected Poems by Julian Adie, published 1980. On the title page is 
> an inscription by the author. /"To Elizabeth, always remembering 
> Corfu, what could have been and what we must both forget."/
>
> To Elizabeth, my mother.
>
> Kouloura Bay


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

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