[ilds] Diana Menuhin

Sun May 15 09:45:23 PDT 2016

Thanks, Richard.  Diana Menuhin (née Gould) was Durrell’s friend.  He met the ballerina in Egypt, fell in love with her, proposed, was rejected, and got his face scratched for the flirtation (by Eve), if I recall Haag’s City of Memory correctly.  She later married the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin.  Durrell dedicated Sicilian Carousel (1976) to the couple, those “fixed stars.”  Diana’s assessment of Tunc is pretty much the common reception.  I think it largely wrong, however.  It’s very interesting in terms of Durrell’s own development, although the novel is dense, difficult, and, yes, discursive.  But then, so is Ulysses.

Bruce

> On May 15, 2016, at 8:55 AM, Richard Pine <pinedurrellcorfu at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Here is the answer to Bruce's query no.4 - This info is from the revised Chronology by B Chamberlin which will very soon be available on the DLC website.
> RP
> The letter is in the Durrell Collection at Southern Illinois University, in which she told him he was essentially running in neutral and that the characters in no way matched the depths and breadths of the Alexandrians. He needed to refresh his well of creativity and reinvigorate his soul.
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, May 14, 2016 at 6:52 PM, Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net <mailto:bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>> wrote:
> James,
> 
> A couple of comments and add-ons to your very helpful analysis.
> 
> 1.  More should be done with Durrell and the influence of musical composition.  Re the fermata, a musical notation, I think you’re right—this is the “correct” interpretation of the symbol over Claude’s name in the dedication.  But it also seems to me that “multiple” interpretations is a fundamental rule of Durrell’s art, one which he actively promotes, as in “There seems to be a hundred reasons to account for every act,” cited below.  So, from the very beginning, we have Tunc, the title, turned into an obscene anagram.  So, early on, we have Athenian “honey cakes in the shape of female pudenda” (p. 35; 2.1).  The flip side to the sacred is the profane, especially for Durrell.
> 
> 2.  Re Charlock as “thinking weed,” your analysis seems right.  Nevertheless, I don’t know how attuned Durrell was to American English.  At the end of the 1960s and its hallucinogenic culture, weed was the ubiquitous term for marijuana.  (Dunno if this common usage crossed the Atlantic.)  So, with a stretch, we might have the act of thinking in the novel as a hallucinogenic exercise, which it certainly becomes.
> 
> 3.  Re ruins and architecture: the importance of the Parthenon (p. 35; 2.1) and Stonehenge (p. 250; 5.2).  Caradoc writes a history of architecture (p. 240; 5.1).  Maybe this is just part of Durrell’s Romantic Classicism (cf. Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins [1953]—the two were friends), but he spends a lot of time on ruins, reminiscent of Cavafy’s “black ruins of my life” in the translation of “The City” at the end of Justine.
> 
> 4.  According to Brewster Chamberlin, on 7 July 1968, “Diana Menuhin writes a highly critical letter to LD about Tunc.”  What did she say?  Where is this letter?
> 
> Bruce
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On May 13, 2016, at 9:57 PM, James Gifford <james.d.gifford at gmail.com <mailto:james.d.gifford at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Bruce,
>> 
>>> I assume we’re going to bounce around in the text and not stick to the
>>> usual fixed sequence, from beginning to end.
>> 
>> I think we can read any way we like...  There wasn't an instruction manual with my copy, so with Bill Godshalk very much in my mind, I intend to treat the book as passive and the reader as active.
>> 
>>> Re front matter, on 4/16/16, Peter Baldwin has already pointed out the
>>> symbol above Claude-Marie Vincendon’s name in the dedication.  I’ll
>>> refer to it as a lunette with a dot.  I think it’s Durrell’s symbol for
>>> Claude.  I also think it’s obscene, so use your imagination.  Durrell
>>> was fond on doodling in his books; he was also fond of obscene jokes.
>> 
>> I could be wrong too, but I've always read it as a fermata (the musical notation to sustain or hold), which seems entirely appropriate over Claude's name.  In effect, this book is for her and also as a way of holding onto or sustaining her.
>> 
>>> I believe
>>> Durrell has truncated FD’s prose to suit his
>>> purposes (he also alters Wordsworth’s letter in
>>> the epigraph to /Quinx/).
>> 
>> I think the Wordsworth was a genuine mistake -- he misquotes the same letter elsewhere, as do literally hundreds of other people, perhaps because it sounds better than the original...
>> 
>>> In the English
>>> translation of /Notes/, it’s clear that the
>>> “the wall” refers to the logic of mathematics
>>> as being irrefutable (so a character argues).
>> 
>> I think of Orwell's freedom to believe 2 + 2 = 4, or in other words, the freedom to be rational.  In this, we're stuck for freedom and intentionality with the Enlightenment subject (insofar as I am rational and have the capacity through reason to make self-determining choices, I can be free -- when I'm irrational or, perhaps like the drunken Charlock unable to exercise reason, I can't be said to make free choices).  This is, of course, very different from the subject described by Freud, riddled with irrationality or unconscious motivations.
>> 
>> Rather than transcending the wall as a way of breaking with determinism, there's also the fear that such a transcendence would be a way for external powers to rewrite reality.  Dostoevsky looks to freedom, but it's qualified and hesitant as well.
>> 
>>> In Durrell, the meaning is ambiguous, i.e., it
>>> either refers to logical irrefutability or it
>>> refers to a barrier to be transcended.  If the
>>> latter, then we follow up with all those many
>>> references in text to multiple interpretations
>>> of an event (e.g., “There seem to be a hundred
>>> reasons to account for every act” [p. 264; 5.3]).
>> 
>> I'd go a long way with that.
>> 
>>> “Charlock” = Sherlock Holmes (p. 13; 1.1) ...
>>> Charlock functions as a narrator/detective
>>> trying to figure out a puzzle; the plot is a
>>> mystery.  You and others might find this too
>>> simplistic.  Maybe.
>> 
>> I don't think that's simplistic at all, although I don't know if having a mystery leads us to a solution, which might be where Durrell parts ways with Doyle.  He writes about Doyle in his essay on Eliot, noting that they'd both read him closely and keenly.  Charlock is certainly expressing the turn to rationalism, but like the "flora" of the characters in the Quartet (the opening of /Justine/ casts them as flora rather than fauna and as lived *by* the city rather than controlling their own lives and decisions themselves), Charlock is the "thinking weed."  I'd take this as suggesting his rationalism is suspect, just as we know our first person narrator is unreliable when he lies to his colleagues in the opening of the book while drunk (if we weren't already suspicious based on Dostoevsky's deeply unreliable narrator in /Notes/).
>> 
>> But should we emphasize "Charlock" over "Felix"?  He is, of course, anything but...
>> 
>> All best,
>> James
> 
> 
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