[ilds] Diana Menuhin

Sun May 15 10:19:16 PDT 2016

Yes, and Yehudi and LD got along famously at a later stage. RP

On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 7:45 PM, Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>
wrote:

> 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
> > 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>
>> 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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