[ilds] Cambridge?

[Bruce Redwine]

Marc,

Good point.  "'We live' writes Pursewarden somewhere, 'lives based  
upon selected fictions'" (Balthazar, New York 1986, p. 14).  And  
Durrell and his alter ego weren't lying.

Bruce


On Oct 1, 2009, at 3:03 PM, Marc Piel wrote:

> 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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