[ilds] Rain, Scholars and Avignon

[Denise Tart & David Green]

Hey Roy,

good to see you getting into the list again. I hoped you would come out of your late night grotto.

I write on a windswept and swirling morning of rain and cool southerly winds; rather a good day to inside corresponding and or reading. It's school holidays now and I'm heading up to my family's weekender in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney for a few days of books and walking and talking into the night over wine and candles - very Durrellesque. On the menu are EH Carrs' what is History and a re read of Justine, which have not read for many years and feel I must if am to be considered a serious Durrellist.

To all the ILDS people, Yesterday I found this this www with a whole heap of mp3 recordings of lectures on Durrell and an interview with him by American academics, many of them ILDS people: James Gifford, Charles Sligh and some very critical chap called John Bandler who ripped 'Bitter Lemons' and 'Collossus of Morrosi' to pieces.  I wrote down a whole bunch of lines from these lectures and reckon they will make an poem on Durrell. It is interesting how LD receives such scholarship in the USA but not in his own country. As to my own land, he is barely known in Australia even amongst academic circles.

Yesterday I had the following thoughts on the Avignon thing - although I have only read Monsieur- it has an otherwordliness, a dreamlike quality. It really is the heraldic universe, carefully constructed, much more so than Alexandria where I think the characters are more drawn from real life. There is something etherial about the characters, they are almost ghosts and I wonder how deliberate that is. many of the lectures mentioned above and the interview with Larry were made just after the Avignon Quintent had been published. Durrell sound very tired and frail. I guess he had been cutting that log for a long time.

Anyway, impressive stuff those lectures etc. to hear all that scholarship poured into one 5 foot 4 inch tall man who never called England home.

David Green
16 William Street
Marrickville NSW  2204
AUSTRALIA
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