[ilds] durrell & kitsch

[Charles Sligh]

Bruce Redwine wrote:
> Said dismissed Durrell as a writer of "classy fiction" /(The World, 
> the Text, and the Critic/ [Cambridge 1983], 3).  He tells the anecdote 
> of going to the Pentagon and talking to a college friend working in 
> DOD (Said graduated from Princeton and Harvard).  This is during the 
> Vietnam War, and Said wants to understand the type of people bombing 
> the North.  The friend defends his boss and says McNamara, Secretary 
> of Defense, has the /Quartet/ on his desk, ergo the Secretary is an 
> intellectual and no monster.  Said scoffs at the equation.

I imagine that "we" noted this before on the list, but the plotline of 
Said's anecdote seems uncannily similar to Eagleton's anecdote about 
some middling Cambridge don having the /Quartet/ placed conspicuously on 
his desk to show his visitors this and that. . . .

Of course, the anecdotes may or may not be true.

And I must confess that I delight in setting out my Durrell collection 
in such a way that visitors again and again pause to look at those 
colored Faber bindings and remark, "Oh--Durrell--/Lawrence/ Durrell--I 
remember. . . ."

Such remarks--made by Eagleton, Said, &c.--tend to reveal more about the 
speaker than the books, I suspect. 

Cf. Wilde on Caliban seeing his face in the mirror. . . .

Durrell was definitely not "on board" with 1968 and all of that.   That 
has much to do with these little latter-day peltasts of the left.  Why 
Durrell should be their target is the real question.  It takes a 
careless reading of history to see him as establishment.

>
> Durrell's best solution for Pursewarden was to have him commit suicide 
> in /Balthazar,/ like Seymour's suicide in "A Perfect Day for 
> Bananafish." 

An interesting parallel--the decision to kill off characters is fascinating.
> True, Durrell and Miller had a program for reforming English 
> literature, but are we to take this seriously?  Highbrow (bad) vs. 
> lowbrow (good)?  English priggishness (bad) vs. French earthiness 
> (good)?  High Moderns (bad) vs. Jacobeans (good).  Joyce (bad) vs. 
> Rabelais (good)?  Are we to discount Joyce and Pound because they knew 
> their classics?  Durrell scoffs at Joyce because he went back to /The 
> Odyssey/ to seek a new form /(Paris Review/ 1960).  In that interview 
> in /PR,/ Durrell talks a lot about art and literature.  Does the 
> average Frenchman really appreciate, in a way an Englishman can't, a 
> good Camembert as much as he (or she) does a Picasso?  Have the French 
> really integrated art and everyday living?  I don't know, but I doubt 
> it.  All this talk sounds "classy" and "kitschy" to me, something 
> fundamentally false.  Which brings us back to our discussions about 
> Durrell the "wise" sage.
No, I suspect Durrell is a floating like a butterfly and stinging like a 
bee in those moments.  If we take him as some sort of literary 
historian, I think that we mistake him.

And Durrell has different attitudes on display in different places and 
times. 

Gerry Durrell and the family witnessed one moment of a young Larry 
Durrell's evolution of taste, and Gerry lampoons it nicely.

Durrell's book-length treatment of modern British poetry shows how much 
he learned from Eliot and Joyce.

Durrell's "Minor Mythologies" essay argues that contemporary writers 
must read both Beerbohm and Proust, both Conan Doyle and Joyce.

His remarks to Miller about Eliot are not in line with many of his 
remarks in his letters to Eliot.  I have no problem understanding that 
Durrell appreciated and relied upon Eliot's attentions as an editor 
while also speaking out in frustration against what he perceived as the 
High Modern constipation blocking new things for a new generation.

Is "authenticity" what we seem to be circling around in these posts and 
past posts?

"Authenticity" is something about which the modernist writers cared 
deeply.  It was the reason that the new writer must "make it new" &c.

But I wonder what "authenticity" meant for Durrell the writer of 
fiction?  Did he care for it all in the /Quartet/ and subsequent 
fiction?  Did he find that he "lacked a belief in the true authenticity 
of people in order to portray them"?

In life, away from writing and interviewers and biographers, I think 
Durrell was very interested and working hard at the authentic.  Thus his 
move to quietism, seclusion, peasant-culture in France and Greece, &c. 

I also find the travel writing more thirsty for the "authentic" than the 
fiction.

By the /Quintet/, I cannot find the authentic at all.

Charles

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Charles L. Sligh
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
charles-sligh at utc.edu
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