[ilds] ILDS Digest, Vol 31, Issue 1_Durrell and Cambridge

[Sumantra Nag]

Durrell and Cambridge: Bruce and David have provided informed conjectures.

Bruce has quoted MacNiven: "it is probably that he [Durrell] would have been 
accepted somewhere, given a modicum of perseverance."

Here are some accounts from a Website, which could be further explored:

1. http://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Durrell,_Lawrence

'...His Indian-educated father was an engineer employed by the railway and 
later, a partner in a construction firm. Wanting his son to have the 
education of an English gentleman he packed the boy off [to] England, where 
Durrell failed to pass entry exams. Later he wrote that, "Intellectually, I 
was brilliant, but failed the exams because of subconscious resentment."...'

2. Lawrence Durrell, Conversations, Edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, Associated 
University Presses Inc. 1998 - Google Books (Pages 22, 39)
http://books.google.co.in/books?id=8lbL0NYdKP4C&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=lawrence+durrell+cambridge&source=bl&ots=PjV5OyXX8O&sig=aNpjy81OIO6-Ebe2xiUrGYNzbME&hl=en&ei=wxnHSvPTKMydkAXgz-w8&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10#v=onepage&q=lawrence%20durrell%20cambridge&f=true

In some of these conversations Lawrence Durrell claims that Mathematics was 
the main cause of his repeated failure in the Cambridge entrance exams, 
which he admits to having taken about eight times.

Sumantra

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Subject: ILDS Digest, Vol 31, Issue 1


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> Today's Topics:
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>   1. Cambridge? (Bruce Redwine)
>   2. Re: Cambridge? (Marc Piel)
>   3. Cambridge or not (Denise Tart & David Green)
>   4. Re: Cambridge or not (Bruce Redwine)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 14:31:13 -0700
> From: Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>
> Subject: [ilds] Cambridge?
> To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca
> Cc: Sumantra Nag <sumantranag at gmail.com>, Bruce Redwine
> <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>
> Message-ID: <4006F90C-0E54-4249-A31D-47DE87AF1692 at earthlink.net>
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>
> 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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> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:03:47 +0200
> From: Marc Piel <marcpiel at interdesign.fr>
> Subject: Re: [ilds] Cambridge?
> To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca
> Message-ID: <4AC52743.5060908 at interdesign.fr>
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>
> 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 ?crit :
>> Sumantra,
>>
>>
>>
>>>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 13:08:04 +1000
> From: "Denise Tart & David Green" <dtart at bigpond.net.au>
> Subject: [ilds] Cambridge or not
> To: "Durrel" <ilds at lists.uvic.ca>
> Message-ID: <3642219B63004F60A26F11597C8AAB36 at MumandDad>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> I wonder if the question of Larry's efforts to attend Cambridge and or 
> Oxford could be settled by inquiring after the fact to those 
> institutions??
>
> Surely they would have records??
>
> Be that as it may, I sense in Larry a deliberate anti intellectualism. 
> Perhaps as an overprivileged raj colonial he felt no real need for the 
> university. Perhaps as an aspiring bohemian writer he saw it as a waste of 
> time and full of cant and monastic scholarship.
>
> I note many of Larry's friends appear to be drifters like himself: wayward 
> aristocrats, fellow bohemians, local school teachers and peasants.
>
> I've got this thing about Larry and peasants. I think, especially after 
> his post adolescent days as described by brother Gerald in My Family and 
> other Animals, and after the diplomatic years, he liked to see himself as 
> one: the woodcutter, the stone wall builder, the 2 litre of wine a day man 
> (not uncommon in the part of France here he lived), the man who hewed 
> novels and poems out of the landscape and the experience of life, the man 
> who wore checked flanelet shirts and heavy corduroys. I think he hated all 
> that academic stuff. He liked clever talk and was very well read, but well 
> read in an untutored way. He devoured libraries of books like litres of 
> wine but he did not apply the acamemic method because he did not know it 
> for one thing and probably did not want it anyway.
>
> Not convinced at all by the fake Irish thing. "Land of my fathers, my 
> fathers can have have it!" as Dylan Thomas said of Wales
>
> Larry was trying to emulate Oscar Wilde, the Irish Gentleman who stood up 
> to the English establishment. Well, old Oscar went to prison and Larry 
> went to the Mediterranean and my ancestors came to the Australia for much 
> the same reason.
>
> David
>
>
> 16 William Street
> Marrickville NSW  2204
> +61 2 9564 6165
> 0412 707 625
> dtart at bigpond.net.au
> www.denisetart.com.au
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> Message: 4
> Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 11:09:37 -0700
> From: Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>
> Subject: Re: [ilds] Cambridge or not
> To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca
> Cc: Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>, Denise Tart & David
> Green <dtart at bigpond.net.au>
> Message-ID: <3DBA7601-717A-4096-8631-E05B4C95362B at earthlink.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> David,
>
> Get a hold of MacNiven's book, Lawrence Durrell:  A Biography (London
> 1998), and read footnote 71, p. 697, which says, in part, "Neither
> university [Oxford or Cambridge] kept systematic records of failed
> candidates for admission during the years Larry might have applied."
> MacNiven also says, "it is probably that he [Durrell] would have been
> accepted somewhere, given a modicum of perseverance."  In short,
> failing the Oxbridge entrance exams is probably one of Durrell's tall
> stories, told repeatedly, with subsequent embellishment, for whatever
> reason.  I suspect Durrell came to believe his own stories, in which
> he portrayed himself with glamorous, Byronic flourishes.
>
> Durrell could have thought of himself as a rustic version of Oscar
> Wilde, but Wilde had superb academic credentials (Magdalen College,
> Oxford:  first in Mods, double first in Finals) to stand up to the
> English Establishment.  I would offer that Durrell felt compelled to
> invent the story of how he acquired his own bona fides, and that story
> follows the plot line of outsider (Irishman), thrust into cultural
> conflict (Black Book and English death), rejected by Establishment
> (failing Oxbridge exams), and exiled and redeemed (flight to Corfu and
> self-discovery).
>
> Durrell undoubtedly felt at home among the country folk of Languedoc.
> You describe well some of his most appealing traits, but I don't think
> "he hated all that academic stuff."  After all, he attended one OMG
> conference and accepted an invitation to teach at Caltech for three
> months.  By the accounts I've read and heard, he had a great time at
> both places, especially when given the chance to flirt with the ladies.
>
>
> Bruce
>