[ilds] Of course Tolkien was not being truthful_Durrell a "religious writer"?

Mon May 18 09:09:38 PDT 2015

Sumantra,

I’d say that Durrell is highly religious.  In an early letter to Miller, he says (via negativa) they’re both religious writers.  In A Smile in the Mind’s Eye, he calls himself a Taoist.  His Heraldic Universe attempts to locate meaning in some other earthly dimension.  His tropes are religious:  Holy Tibet, Plotinus and the Cabal, Gnosticism, the Knights Templar, allegory, and literature as some kind of pilgrimage.  Think about Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales:  the journey from the world of the flesh to the world of the spirit.  Many of his works follow that pattern.  The “kingdom of the imagination,” as I’ve said before, reminds me of the New Testament’s “Kingdom of Heaven.”  Durrell’s religion is not conventional, of course.  It’s religion without godhead, some divine being, and without dogma.  It’s closer to Buddhism and Taoism.

Bruce

> On May 17, 2015, at 7:27 PM, Sumantra Nag <sumantranag at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Bruce,
> 
> I'm not sure I understand in what sense Durrell can be described as a religious writer.
> 
> From the evidence emerging about Durrell as a person - much of which has been frankly presented by you in your exchanges - it would be difficult to see Durrell anchored to religion influences which guided his personal life. His relationship with women seemed to involve a high level of aggression on his part. His treatment of his daughter Sappho appears to have been questioned. In this aspect of Durrell I'm drawing from what I have read in ILDS exchanges.
> 
> Sumantra
> 
> Sent from my Samsung Tab
> 
> On 17 May 2015 01:46, "Bruce Redwine" <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net <mailto:bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>> wrote:
> James,
> 
> Stimulating response.  Okay.  We differ.  I tend to treat Durrell’s literary output as evidence for his personal philosophy.  He’s a religious writer, in my opinion.  He has a view to propagate.  His Quartet, as he states in the note to Balthazar, is an “investigation.”  I take him at his word (which presents problems, of course).  He doesn’t say he writing fiction with a moral, a story to instruct and amuse, Chaucer’s “sentence” and “solaas.”  He’s out to prove and demonstrate something.  You might say Durrell is in the great tradition of “spiritual autobiography,” another Bunyan and his Pilgrim’s Progress.
> 
> So I don’t separate the man from his work.  If all we had to go on about Lawrence Durrell was his oeuvre, then your approach to “truth” in his writings makes sense.  But we know a great deal about his life and behavior, often from his many statements in various media.  The dominant impression I get from those “communications” is a propensity to dissemble, to prevaricate, and to lie.  All of which resemble the Quartet’s unstable world without certainties.  You can say he’s creating a “public persona,” reprising his diplomatic role as Director of Public Relations or just confounding “the bastards,” but I think it’s much deeper than all that.  I think he’s revealing something about himself, an inability to distinguish fact from fiction.  Not all the time, of course, but when it comes to personal matters.  Bill Godshalk said he was a “fabulator.”  Yes, but that’s a nice way to say he lied a lot.
> 
> I recall the opening to the 1977 documentary about Durrell’s return to Alexandria.  The camera floats in from the sea and approaches the city with its magnificent skyline.  A voice intones those memorable words from Balthazar:  “We saw, inverted in the sky, a full-scale mirage of the city.”  We see Durrell and assume the words are his, if not the voice.  Well, neither.  The words are from the novel, but Durrell had stolen them, without accreditation, from R. Talbot Kelly’s Egypt:  Painted and Described (1903).  The author, however, appears to believe the description was actually his.
> 
> Bruce
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On May 15, 2015, at 12:43 PM, James Gifford <james.d.gifford at gmail.com <mailto:james.d.gifford at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Bruce,
>> 
>> I do think this is where we disagree -- I don't have any particular grudge against Tolkien for his misdirections, and I do think Durrell's contradictory truths are a genuine perspective.  For instance, the passage you point to in the Quartet, and others like it, gesture to the unresolvable nature of truth when we live in a world made up of subjects observing 'reality' from a multitude of perspectives.
>> 
>> As an example, did Justine ever love Darley, or was she merely using him as a blind for her political interests, or for Pursewarden?  It's probably not a question to be answered, since the perspective changes it, including Justine's retrospective self-observations.
>> 
>> I suspect this is also the appeal of the popularized notions of relativity or quantum strangeness for Durrell -- there are many contradictory perspectives from which to view the world, but there's not "godly" position at the centre from which to sort out absolute truth, and likewise there's no fixed point at which the Enlightenment subject is eternally fixed, instead leaving instead a protean process of subjectivity in its place.
>> 
>> There are other lies as well, such as Durrell's BBC years, which I see as an occasional part of his correspondences but a pervasive part of his interviews.  I suspect the interviews are almost all performance, and it would be speculation to ask how much of the bafflegab around the truth Durrell believed versus how much was a public persona for a private person.
>> 
>> However, I personally don't pick up fiction to look for truth, or at least not in any conventional sense.  I trust the telling more than the tale, if that's a fair way to put it, and the teller's involvement with the telling & tale is suspect.
>> 
>> All best,
>> James
>> 
>> On 2015-05-15 12:19 PM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
>>> James,
>>> 
>>> Yes, authors lie, and so do many people.  They do it for various
>>> reasons, some excusable, some not.  Durrell’s motives, however, I find
>>> suspect.  In fact, I think they’re pathological — the man couldn’t
>>> distinguish between truth and fiction, or chose not to, and then turned
>>> that disposition into a philosophic principle:  “Truth is what most
>>> contradicts itself in time.”  In Haag’s /City of Memory,/ Eve Cohen says
>>> this about him — he’s not to be trusted; he’s a storyteller.  Bill
>>> Godshalk lying in order to describe lying, if I understand correctly, is
>>> an example of the “liars paradox.”  Statements about lying — “I am
>>> lying” — are insolvable in terms of truth value, just as
>>> Durrell’s/Balthazar’s statement about truth is contradictory.  Now, we
>>> can say this is a profound observation about the way things are, or we
>>> can say there’s something wrong with the person who says and believes
>>> it.  I prefer the latter.
>>> 
>>> Bruce
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