[ilds] Note re: the name “Aubrey”

Mon Jun 1 11:56:12 PDT 2015

Ken, now Robin Sutcliffe as Buck Mulligan is indeed a fascinating idea.  Of course, that makes Aubrey Blanford a Stephen Dedalus, which, as you point out, doesn’t really work.  James notes the correspondences between Joyce’s Portrait and Durrell’s Quartet, so LD surely felt the pull of the Joycean hero.  I go back, however, to your idea of effeminacy, with a link to homosexuality, which has a way of creeping into Durrell’s work in unexpected places.  Aubrey Blanford and Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) have similar names, initials, artistic interests, and dubious sexuality.  Why do characters such as Melissa and Blanford have to be “wounded in their sex?”  Wilde and Beardsley collaborated on the play Salome, produced a book (1894), with Beardsley’s illustrations.  Those drawings are full of nude androgynous figures; the cover shows a stylized Salome admiring the Baptist’s (“Iokanaan’s”) severed head.  It recalls Freud’s castration complex and what happens to Piers and his missing head in the Quintet.  Beardsley would have made a fine illustrator for the Quintet.

Bruce

> On May 31, 2015, at 10:24 PM, Kennedy Gammage <gammage.kennedy at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thank you James and Bruce. I guess my take-away is, if Durrell was consciously saddling his character with a name known to be a byword for effeminacy, it serves to further weaken the Alpha Male primacy of Blanford the Novelist:  would-be alter ego/ delusional creator of other characters etc. It may help us make allowances for his egotism, for this is an at-times deeply insecure person who has truly been ‘wounded in his sex.’ Aubrey is no Stephen Dedalus - he will in no sense grow up to write the Avignon Quintet, though that would have saved Durrell quite a bit of work. Blanford’s friend and foil Sutcliffe has a bit of Buck Mulligan in him.
> 
> Cheers - Ken 
> 
> 
> On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 8:53 PM, James Gifford <james.d.gifford at gmail.com <mailto:james.d.gifford at gmail.com>> wrote:
> Hi Bruce & Ken,
> 
> Since I technically am a "Don Gifford," I feel like I need to respond to this one (I devilishly enjoy pointing out that my father is Don Gifford when I'm at the Modernist Studies Association conferences, just not /that/ Don).
> 
> Might I suggest the MVP Ulysses?
> 
> http://web.uvic.ca/~mvp1922/portfolio/ulysses-shakespeare-co-1922-1st-edn/ <http://web.uvic.ca/~mvp1922/portfolio/ulysses-shakespeare-co-1922-1st-edn/>
> 
> Apart from the text, we have a whole series of videos including ILDS members James Clawson, Alan Warren Friedman, and Michael Stevens.
> 
> Charles could indeed elaborate, but perhaps we'll get Clawson to chime in as well -- he was in the NEH Ulysses seminar in Dublin just after the centenary conference in London.
> 
> Durrell could very well be thinking of Joyce, and his CalTech lectures included a detailed consideration of Ulysses (a *very* Durrellian version of Joyce, albeit).  As for Joyce thinking of Wilde, he did have Dorian Gray in his library in Trieste and the Italian translation.
> 
> On 2015-05-31 3:47 PM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
> 1.  How is Aubrey Blanford effeminate in the Joycean sense of an Aubrey
> Beardsley and/or Oscar Wilde?
> 
> I don't suspect he is, and I doubt Durrell would have been reading Don Gifford, though who knows.  It wasn't in his library for Carbondale nor Paris X.
> 
> 2.  Why does Blanford refer to /Ulysses/ as “Joyce’s masterpiece”
> /(Sebastian/ 126) and later as “that odious book” (131)?  Simply irony?
> 
> "Odious" might be an allusion, but the word has been applied to Ulysses so many times, especially around the trials, we'd probably need to consult the Joyce scholars to sort out what voice came first and if it would be pertinent here.
> 
> 3.  Is Durrell rewriting or taking-on the Joycean novel (a worthy
> opponent in literary prizefighting), and, if so, is there a close
> connection between the author and his alter ego, Aubrey Blanford?  (“So
> D. begat Blanford.”)
> 
> To use a Joycean word, "Yes."  There is, of course, a close connection between Joyce and Stephen, and I think Durrell (like Miller) saw Joyce as one of the Bloomian strong poets to be redefined through a stronger misprision.  I don't usually go for Bloom, but in this situation I think he applies remarkably well.
> 
> I'm reminded that the Quartet ends with (or almost ends with) the same words that open /A Portrait of the Artist/, much as Justine (revised) ends with the same final words as Pound's Canto I.  Durrell was keenly aware of this modernist forebears and their influence, to be carried or corrupted.  More often than not, I think he was conducting that corrupting misprision.
> 
> All best,
> James
> 
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