[ilds] London and Lawrence Durrell

[Bruce Redwine]

Corfu as the place of Durrell's self-discovery seems quite reasonable.  That, after all, is what he himself states at the beginning of Prospero's Cell.  What is hard to believe is that Durrell in the "Corfu/Egypt" notebook (ca. 1944?) could have mapped out his past and future literary career in the terms of Greek myth and tragedy.  But maybe he did.  Authors, however, are not always reliable in relating or predicting how they come up with their ideas.  Conrad claimed The Secret Agent sprung full-blown from his head much like Athena did from her father's.  Conrad's revisions prove that didn't happen.


Bruce



On Jun 21, 2011, at 6:32 AM, Richard Pine wrote:

> I regret to disagree with my friend Ian MacNiven, who says in the ILDS (website apropos London as the venue for OMG 2012), that London was the place where he first heard his own voice (as a writer). That expression comes from the preface to The Black Book, which was conceived and written in Corfu. Corfu was where LD 'first heard [his] own voice', and it was here that he conceived of his life-work - as he wrote to TSEliot - and which is graphically set out in his notebook labelled 'Corfu/Egypt', in which he explicitly foresaw his work in four stages: The Black Book, The Alexandria Quartet, Tunc/Nunquam  and The Avignon Quintet: agon, pathos, sparagmos and anagnorisis. Corfu was also the topos where he corrected the proofs for Pied Piper of Lovers and where he wrote Panic Spring and (most probably) The Magnetic Island . While LD undoubtedly began to blossom as a writer in Fitzrovia, Sussex, etc., he definitively 'heard [his] own voice' here in Corfu.
> RP 
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