[ilds] Cambridge?

[Bruce Redwine]

Sumantra,

Yes, we're both in the dark regarding Lawrence Durrell's early years,  
before his great escape to the Greek isles -- but then, who isn't?   
So, if I may expand on your informative analysis, as follows.

Bowker in Through the Dark Labyrinth (1997) says Durrell failed his  
entrance exams (p. 33), and MacNiven in Lawrence Durrell (1998)  
repeats the story (p. 67), but in a discreet footnote he suggests,  
after examining the lack of hard evidence, Durrell may not have taken  
the exams:  "Quite possibly Durrell never attempted entrance  
examinations for Oxford or Cambridge" (p. 697, n. 71).  And what is  
the basis for supposing he failed?  His own words, as he relates in  
The Paris Review (n. 22, 1960, p. 34) and The Big Supposer (1974, pp.  
29-30).  Of course, if Durrell is fabricating, the question is, why  
invent failure?  MacNiven accounts for it by calling the story a  
"smokescreen behind which he fled formal education."  Perhaps.  But  
why boast about it in at least two interviews?  Recounting such a  
failure is the exact opposite of padding one's CV (not an uncommon  
practice, it would seem, as newspapers occasionally report) -- unless  
someone who's successful wants to create a good story about how he  
overcame an obstacle on the way to triumph.

Here's one scenario.  Durrell says that during his early years,  
seventeen to eighteen, he was "anti-everything" (Big Supposer, p.  
29).  That negativity becomes fictionalized into a social disease  
known as "the English death" in The Black Book (1938, 1977):  "I  
[narrator?] am marking down these items in the log of that universal  
death, the English death, which I have escaped" (p. 102).  What is  
"the English death?"  Some kind of psychic paralysis caused by the  
restrictions of English society?  Something emotionally analogous to  
England's frozen landscape.  Probably, but the diagnosis is not  
explained, only suggested.  (Note, Durrell/narrator calls the  
condition the English death, not the British death.  What's the  
difference?  I should think that if you're Welsh, Scots, or Irish,  
members of the so-called "Celtic fringe," you would know what that  
difference is.  As I was once told by an angry Welshman, who accepted  
the appellation British but who vehemently rejected being called  
English, that the difference is one of class and ethnicity, the Celts  
being the subjugated minority, historically and socially.  My  
irascible Welshman called himself the "nigger" of English society.   
Note also that Durrell sometimes refers to himself as Irish  
["Intellectually I was brilliant, but like all Irishmen I was  
dreadfully lazy," Big Supposer, p. 29], a disputed claim, however.  I  
seem to recall him referring to himself, somewhere, as a "two-fisted  
Irishman," that pugnacity, I find appropriate.)

So, Durrell goes to England as an adolescent and a colonial boy from  
India.  He's sent there by his father to get an Oxbridge education, a  
passport into higher English society.  But young Durrell feels he's an  
outsider.  He rejects both England and his father's ambitions and  
eventually leaves for Corfu.  This is not an unusual story.  Few  
expatriates find it easy to adjust to the mother country, and few  
males have easy relationships with their fathers, as Durrell himself  
admits when giving a Freudian twist to their relationship (Big  
Supposer, p. 29).  The story, however, becomes far more colorful when  
the protagonist is portrayed as an Irishman struggling against Anglo- 
Saxon society, which threatens to infect him with "the English death,"  
who fails to gain access to the gateway of success, who then takes a  
Byronic flight to points south, and who eventually succeeds by dint of  
that intellectual brilliance previously acknowledged.  It's a good  
story, both published and personally narrated, part truth and part  
fiction.  Aside from the outline of events, the big truth is Durrell's  
youthful genius, of which he was not particularly modest; the  
fabrication is the telling of the conflict, its great panache, in  
which he seems to believe.


Bruce



On Sep 29, 2009, at 11:45 AM, Sumantra Nag wrote:

> Bruce: "A question which has always puzzled me? was L. G. Durrell's  
> hostility to mother England, assuming it was more or less genuine  
> (but not genuine enough for him to shun service in His/Her Majesty's  
> Government), in part caused by the fact he didn't make it into  
> Cambridge?"
>
> Bruce, I'm in no position to comment on this because one would need  
> to understand Lawrence Durrell's life in some detail, something  
> which you and other scholars working on LG may be doing. But from  
> what I have read from disparate sources it seems that Durrell (I'm  
> speaking only of Lawrence) resented going to England from India and  
> no ambition seems to have thereafter arisen for him to really try to  
> make the most of the opportunities he received. If I'm not wrong, he  
> made more than one attempt at gaining entrance to Cambridge.  
> (Incidentally why not Oxford as well? It may have been equally  
> difficult.) But could he not have succeeded in his entrance exams  
> for Cambridge if he had really wanted to? It was his father who  
> wanted him to become a civil servant (in India?) and Cambridge seems  
> to have been the projected foundation for this objective. Was  
> Lawrence Durrell himself excited by the intellectual attractions of  
> Cambridge? I remember reading about an interview with LD very long  
> ago in a British paper, where he describes himself as a "literary  
> blimp", from which I understand that he saw himself as an English  
> colonial. I don't get the impression that Durrell was deeply  
> affected by his failure to get into Cambridge. But I don't know  
> enough to say so with any authority.
>
> I remember reading somewhere that Henry Miller regarded Lawrence  
> Durrell's failure at entering Cambridge as a boon, because he  
> wondered what the effect of Leavisite teaching of English at  
> Cambridge would have had on Durrell's writing!
>
> Writers of the pre-WWII generation were often academically  
> unsuccessful at Oxford or Cambridge even when they went there.  
> Christopher Isherwood, for instance who was at Cambridge but only  
> for two years. He seems to have won a history scholarship to  
> Cambridge, and then failed his exams by answering the questions in  
> limericks. His bohemian existence in Berlin and "Goodbye to Berlin"  
> seem to be in a vein which echoes Durrell's writing  in The Black  
> Book and the novels of the AQ. Perhaps a common quality of  
> impressionism, although Durrell's work is much larger, complex and  
> uniquely lyrical.
>
> Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell both got Third Class degrees at  
> Oxford, from what I can recall having read. I know that Dom Moraes,  
> the Indian poet writing in English in the late 1950s and the 1960s,  
> who got the Hawthornden Prize for literature in Britain at the age  
> of about 19 for his poetry, barely managed to get a degree at  
> Oxford. He wrote somewhere about the lightness with which he may  
> have treated his tutorials. (But he did pass his entrance exam for  
> Oxford and got into the university.) The link between literary  
> success and academic success at Oxbridge was quite tenuous at one  
> time, but was probably not the case in later years.
>
> Going back further, the historian Gibbon regarded the two years of  
> his truncated stay at Oxford as a waste of time!
>
> Sumantra
>

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