[ilds] Cambridge?

[Marc Piel]

Surrely he summed it all up himself with the words 
"we each live our selected fictions".
Marc (or was it "we all live our selected fictions"

Bruce Redwine a écrit :
> 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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