5

‘Pessaries of Grace’

‘Poems’, Durrell jotted in a notebook in the 1970s, ‘are pessaries of grace’.1 The statement, cryptic though it may appear, is more than a Durrellian squib. The gynaecological significance of the pessary, and its derivation from the Greek pessos, meaning a pebble, suggests that he may have had in mind a view of poetry as creation in the cosmological sense – as a method of defining the ‘field’ or ‘womb’ within which the game of poetry, of fertilisation, is played. (‘Love is the beginning of all geometry’ he also noted.)2 He may have simply set down the notion – it occurs amid a series of somewhat drunken scrawlings of verse and worse – to indicate the healing, cathartic effect of poetry. But I incline to the broader theory not simply because Durrell was thoroughly familiar with the etymology of the words he used but also because he followed it shortly with the note: ‘the resonances of language are not fine enough to capture the quiddity of the aesthetic experience. Hints must do.’3 At the time he was struggling to complete the Quintet and contemplating his further work on Provence. He was unhappy, ill at ease, and probably harking in his memory to the poetic life which had come to a halt at some point in Alexandria and had been only briefly revived thereafter. The kind of notes which he made in later life bore a strong resemblance, in its pursuit of the miraculous, to those we have just examined in his mapping of the Heraldic Universe: after repeatedly referring to the Delphic oracle in the 1970s he observed at one point ‘from moment to moment, then, nothing is determined: anything could happen. What does happen is then miraculous pristine unpremeditated!’4 Following what we have just seen of Durrell’s early intention with regard to coercion (or its absence) in relation to the infinite, it is instructive to read in his last notebook that ‘meaning in poetry is inherent and not explicit - is divulged by word-stress through association’ and that ‘the poetic flashpoint comes where the meaningless meets the sublime’.5

Within the canon of Durrell’s poetry we should include not only all his verse from the major to the minor mythologies (thus 1 SIUC/LD/Accession II: box 1. 2 CERLD inv. 1349, p. 18.3 SIUC/LD/Accession II: box 1.4 CERLD inv. 1349, p. 40.5 CERLD, ‘The Asides of Demonax’, pp. 36, 52.

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incorporating the largely, and properly, unpublished doggerel), but also the three verse dramas Sappho, Acte and An Irish Faustus (the latter is considered separately in Part 4) and – perhaps most important of all – the prose-poems ‘Zero’ and ‘Asylum in the Snow’. We might also regard certain sustained passages of prose, such as the ‘Minisatyrikon’ which closes Quinx. and the ‘Conclusion’ or ‘Cunégonde’ passage with which the largely poetic Caesar’s Vast Ghost comes to an end, as ‘prose-poetry’.

The poem is (in literal terms) an act of creation (poiesis), a self-contained and self-sustaining metaphor: poetry is the language of the Heraldic Universe. Like a seamless garment, the shortest poem has no verb, no movement, is merely an equation of love. Even Narcissus falling in love with himself in the light of the fountain runs the risk of refraction, of an infinitesimal movement in time between the faces of lover and beloved, which will destabilise the flashpoint. Durrell’s poetry aimed for the greatest quiet, the stillness which, as we shall see, he achieved in poems like ‘Nemea’ – words which lead nowhere and ask nothing except that we accept their hæcceitas. The first private metaphor was wordless; the first public metaphor, a unique occasion was, as Steiner has said, when Homer stated the quality of ‘the wine-dark sea’.6 Thenceforth, life became progressively more complicated by the piling of history onto emotion since, as Durrell stated for himself in the 1940s,

the basic question which lies at the root of humanity’s enquiry has been always: what is reality[?]. It is the one question that the poet is alone qualified to answer.7

The irony consists in the fact that Greece, where Durrell first made himself as a poet, was the home of such enquiry,8 and that in order to pursue it Durrell found it necessary to forsake poetry for prose. One of the simplest poems, from which Durrell derived one of the motifs of the Quartet, is Blake’s verse from ‘The Question Answer’d’.

What is it men in women do require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire. What is it women do in men require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire.9

6 Cf. G. Steiner, Antigones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) p. 133.7 CERLD Corfu/Egypt notes.8 Cf. W.B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: a study in the adaptability of a traditional hero (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968). Durrell’s copy (SIUC/LD/Accession II) is extensively annotated.9 W. Blake, ‘The Question Answer’d’ in ‘Poems from Blake’s Ms. Book’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies ed. M. Plowman (London: Dent, 1927) p. 383.

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Nothing could be simpler. It can be achieved, as Durrell wrote in ‘The Anecdotes: VII: At Alexandria’ by ‘this little rubbing together of minimal words’ but, once uttered, these tools betray the poet, occupied thereafter ‘By conscience in the very act of writing’ (CP 206-7).

Like a geodesic dome, the poem is its own argument. As in the creation of the Heraldic Universe, in the act of poetry the artist is not obliged to give his reasons, whereas the act of prose is itself a rhetorical function. Unmediated, the poem speaks to both subject and object, a perfect equation (like that which prefaces ‘Zero’ - SP 245) in that the poet addresses himself and, at the same time, the beloved: in so doing he finds himself in the beloved and finds the beloved in himself. In this sense, within the briefest of metaphors, there is an exact mapping of language onto meaning, a congruence of fact and perception.10

Early examples in Durrell’s work might be these lines from ‘Love Poems’ (1934):

‘Remember’ s a lost cry on a wind: A hollow nothing-heard, Most memorable, in a deaf night That does not heed (CP 38).

or these from ‘Themes Heraldic’ (1938):

It is no victory to write you, But to become you. Gnosis By osmosis. Knowing in becoming (CP 58).

It is here that the course of history can be altered by the success or failure of the mapping exercise. The signal fact about poetry is that its only chance of existence depends on achieving the ‘gnomic aorist’: there is no re-presentation, but an occurrence wherein the signifier and the signified are one and the same. This phenomenon cannot extend itself in speech, in place or in time without faltering into rhetoric and the agora.

Durrell’s poetry is a telling example of the distinction posited by Yeats: ‘we make of the quarrel with others, rhetoric; but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’.11 Durrell, on the evidence of his early prose, 10 Cf. G. Steiner, After Babel pp. 58-9: ‘as the modern epistemologist might put it, there was a complete, point-to-point mapping of language onto the true substance and shape of things. Each name, each proposition, was an equation, with uniquely and perfectly defined roots, between human perception and the facts of the case. Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror… Thus Babel was a second Fall’.11 W.B. Yeats, ‘Anima Hominis’, Mythologies op. cit., p. 331.

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had turned his back on the public world. In a retrospective note dating from the 1970s he remarked ‘Shocked by human behaviour, I took refuge in poetry’.12 It is unclear whether this was intended to be spoken by a character in the Quintet (it seems unlikely) or was simply an autobiographical aside, but it confirms that initially he took the route into poetry (as he did into Greece) to find himself. Poetry was his first agon, the private knowledge and possession of the island, a hermetic, discrete literature, a mapping and husbanding of landscapes and emotions which he would later bring into use in the public, rhetorical world of the city.

In ‘Adam’ (1939) he expressed this double-bind of freedom and birth-trauma:

I am Adam, of singular manufacture, A little clay, water, and prophetic breath; On the waters of chaos a lamp of red clay. The Word owns me. I have no armament Only my fear of the walking Thing. The rib follows me everywhere: and everywhere A shadow follows the rib. Eve, I am afraid. The Host walks and talks In the baobab shade: the unknowable Thing Is crossing the paths: the breath, woman, Is on us: a white light: O cover me From the unthinkable razor of thought Whose whisper hangs over me (CP 67).

Whose garden is this? Who made me? Why am I afraid of thought? Who are you? To negotiate the paths, discovering the fact of life (if that is what it is) becomes the poet’s function. Life becomes a book: at the time of completing the Quartet Durrell said ‘what I call life I see as an act of the imagination, a poem’,13 which neatly identifies the inner focus as the spring from which the poet’s eye could winnow a text that would pass muster in the city.

Meanwhile, in his homage to Wordsworth he said simply ‘A poem is an affirmation’:14 one wishes it could always be that simple. Nowhere did Durrell more accurately and appositely underpin the process by which he acquired the unique knowledge of the world, which he then addressed to the aesthetic and political forum in his novels and plays: documents which depend, for their inner strength, on the poet’s eye and his acknowledgement of a subtext, a harvesting of the massive corpus of ideas from which the Heraldic Universe had been constructed. 12 SIUC/LD/Accession II: box 1, file labelled ‘Provence ? Notebook’, p. 17.13 ‘Kneller tape’ p. 163.14 Introduction to Wordsworth p. 21.

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The period of Durrell’s finest poetry, then, coincides with his first island residence and his introduction to the Mediterranean shore which eventually brought him to wartime Alexandria. Socially and aesthetically he moved from self-chosen isolation to the imposed conditions of the city where, in addition to living the experiences of the Quartet, he would also reside, cheek by jowl, with an ‘oasis’ of expatriate poets in both civilian and military life. The period in question did not end, however, until the close of the 1940s, with the publication of two pivotal texts, each of which summed up his work to date and predicted his future development: the novel The Dark Labyrinth (1947) and the lectures published as A Key to Modern British Poetry (1952). With these, Durrell made the Heraldic Universe complete, moving, as he had intimated to Miller, from the minus side to the plus side of the equation, establishing himself in the public realm while at the same time copperfastening his privacies.

We must therefore distinguish first between the ‘pure’ poetry of the Corfiot years and the quasi-public poetry of his Egyptian period. Then we must take account of his later progression into verse drama and into a more combative, outward-looking poetry of greater vigour but less lyrical substance, which persisted throughout the 1960s and 1970s, until a more tranquil self-contained plateau was reached in the poetry of Caesar’s Vast Ghost.

Effectively, for reasons I shall explain shortly, with the exception of these last works and the plays, Durrell as a poet hardly concerns us after 1948. But his early writing is extremely important because, although he said that it was in The Black Book that he discovered his real voice, it was in A Private Country (1943) and Cities, Plains and People (1946), that he created that voice – ‘my private voice and vision’ (BB 9). Its tenor and syntax have the valedictory sense of a deep dive into the gnomic aorist (a condition equivalent to achieving ‘reality prime’ in its indefinite timelessness), an autonomous act of disappearance. Its argument is that since, in the ‘quarrel with others’, rhetoric had failed, then poetry should once more assume a public importance. It tells us that politics is a strategy for dealing with the conditions of life, and that poetry is another strategy. Echoing Eliot and Yeats, he wrote in 1942

All alone in an empty land, alone. This is what breaks the heart (CP 105).

The heartbreak which consisted in collecting himself as a writer saw him moving from a boyish frolic, trying out the associations between images and sensibilities, into a state of mind where he learned the strength of his own imaginative powers and discovered how to apply them to the events of the wide world. He was by no means inhibited or narrowed by the inner journey. Imaginatively fired

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by the Greek landscape and everything within it – the ‘spirit of place’ or genius loci – he brought to it the immensity of mindscape which he found in the metaphysical and romantic poets, and the richness of their vision (Vaughan’s ‘deep, but dazzling darkness’ suggests itself again)15 gave him a capacity for coping with that heartbreak.

There is some embarrassment in the naïveté of early lines such as these from ‘The Beginning’, written in 1931 at the age of nineteen:

Oh! to blunder onto the glory of some white majestic headland, And to feel the clean wisdom of the curving sea, And the dear mute calling of the windOn the masked heels of the twilight (CP 19)

or these from ‘Echoes’ (also dating from 1931):

Can you remember, oh so long ago, How we wandered one twilight over the edge of the clouds[?]

(CP 21)

but, despite their puppyish exuberance, sentimentality and lingering sense of Englishness which he had not yet shrugged off or entirely converted to his own uses, they were necessary lines, placing him in a better position to discuss the ideas of a contemporaneous poem, ‘Crisis’, which asks

How can we find the substance of the lie [?] (CP 20).

In titles like ‘Futility’, ‘Love’s Inability’ or ‘Inconstancy’ the prevailing atmosphere of the poems which brought him from London to Corfu was decadent, replete with ‘desolation’, the emotions ‘bitter’, ‘faded’, ‘empty’. The poet was self-consciously and unashamedly shedding the trappings which did not suit, recording a sense of loss, of betrayal, of disgust, and embracing a new life, a tabula rasa on which ‘the NEW BIBLE’ was to be inscribed (DML 29). His starting point was, however, by no means certain. His sense of being lost persisted, he was intensely conscious of loneliness, and he was critically apprehensive of the dangers of landfall. He already knew that pleasures and successes could turn sour, that love could suddenly become hate, that he was attended by a shadow, and that ‘He She and It are genders’ (CP 83).16 15 Cf. Henry Vaughan, ‘The Night’ in Henry Vaughan: poetry and selected prose ed. L.C. Martin (London: Oxford University Press, 1963) p. 358.16 Ben Jonson in his English Grammar (1640) categorised English nouns into six declensions: masculine (including men, angels, stars); feminine (women, islands, countries, cities); neuter (all inanimate things except ships); promiscuous or epicene; common or doubtful (cousin, gossip, friend, neighbour, enemy, servant, thief); and ‘common of three genders’: cf. Robert Burchfield, Unlocking the English

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On a personal level, poetry enabled Durrell to address the issue of birth-trauma and the resultant problem of sexuality which, as we have seen, expressed itself in the relation of curve to straight line. If, as Rank had asserted in Art and Artist, genius was the attribute of the male reproductive power, and gave rise to self-assertion,17 then the difficulty for the poet lay in determining how also to encompass ‘She’ and ‘It’ within the one poetic framework, how to reconcile the opposite and the shadow which potentially harboured the act of self-negation. Durrell devoted considerable attention to the idea of the sea as womb and amniotic fluid:

enter the recuperative night of the womb - the sea’s blue menstruum: for even sleep, the convalescent rhythm[,] demands the foetal position: the house: the room: the sky like a darkened negative of my despair which forbids me to suffer.18

In his copy of Art and Artist Durrell inscribed ‘man himself as an amphibian’,19 and his notebook from the 1940s, in which he continued to explore the ‘Tempest’ theme vis-à-vis Corfu, also contains several references to Ulysses, the sea-bound hero: ‘A man was wedded to an island / Go down go down by Ithaca. / His was a marriage to silence / Kneel down where the queen sea spins’ ... ‘Ithaca was chosen as the home of the Hero because the harbour is the exact reproduction of a womb’.20 (These in turn belong to a series of notes headed ‘The Aquarians’ which will be examined in the next chapter.)

Thus poetry meant a celebration of the island as a haven and a way of analysing what the haven contained. Durrell re-entered the womb in order to leave it once more. ‘After I awoke into poetry’ he later recalled, ‘I had the feeling that from thenceforward ... everything made sense’ (SME 29). But the awakening was less simple than this makes it seem: he also said ‘to write poetry - become a poet - is, in a sense, to take the whole province of human knowledge for one’s province. One gradually covers a field by continual abdication.’21 The movement through the negative field, in fact, was a stripping away of ecstasy until whatever was left was a site not of madness or of fear but of possession. No less than prose, poetry obliges the writer to ‘make sense’.

Poetry is the transitus of expression, Durrell’s first metaphor. In the years from the appearance of these adolescent verses (Quaint Fragment, 1931) and his first formal collections A Private Country and

Language (London: Faber and Faber, 1989) pp. 26-30.17 O. Rank, Art and Artist p. 18.18 CERLD Corfu/Egypt notes.19 Rank, Art and Artist p. 133.20 CERLD Corfu/Egypt notes.21 SIUC 42/19/10 ‘Nimes 1962’.

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Cities, Plains and People, to the publication of his own reflections on the nature and function of poetry in contemporary society in the Key, Durrell was exploring the proposition that poetry and the island are synonymous, with the prosaic city as their counterpart. It is therefore important for us to look for an understanding of this process in Durrell’s parallel development as poet and novelist. To do so, we can examine the body of his poetry from 1931, when he was still in his teens, up to the poems written at the end of his fortieth year (appearing as The Tree of Idleness, 1955) as a cohesive body of work, a self-contained metaphor in the long curve of his writing life, parallel to regarding his first four novels as a preliminary quartet. After that date, when Durrell left public service to press on with the long-contemplated Alexandrian writing, his published poetry became less frequent and less sustained in its sense of exploration. The poet seems to have become lost in the angry-middle-aged-man who went on to write about madness and Promethean daring in The Revolt; an ill-directed aggression and sense of helplessness took over from the lyrical, sensuous youthful sweep of his earlier mindscape. It is as if in his later work like The Red Limbo Lingo (1971), later subsumed into its successor Vega and Other Poems (1973) Durrell was stretching those early metaphors to see how much anger and frustration they could carry. He was in fact proving that as soon as he moves out of the circle of the gnomic aorist, the lover crumbles and becomes a mere historian.

This partly explains why his reputation as a poet was eclipsed by his growing fame as a novelist, but it does not absolve us from explaining (as I shall in Part 5) the later work, where the sublimity of Tao is once again briefly recaptured: there are some poems in Caesar’s Vast Ghost which display a master-stroke. But the gearchange in the early 1950s was decisive, and this constitutes the remaining grounds for the comparative neglect of Durrell’s poetry: despite its multifaceted appearance, his prose was more monolithic as a body of writing than his poetry. This difficulty can be overcome by refusing (initially at least) to separate Durrell the poet from Durrell the novelist, and seeing them crystallised in one particular work, ‘Asylum in the Snow’ : his different poetic moods – lyrical, sensuous, strident, satirical, political – provide a single, rather than a diverse, index to his feelings during this long period of adolescence, especially in its swings from public to private expression and illustrates, more clearly than his subsequent prose, the problem of vacillation which bedevils the growth of a modern personality in its search for meaning and relevance.

Moreover, when Durrell’s writing began to acquire a more public flavour, his prose ironically grew more reflective of the diversity that had previously been found in his poems: parallel to the pursuit of modern love in the Quartet, we find the scurrilous

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translation of Pope Joan, the subversive sketches of diplomatic life by ‘Antrobus’ and a welter of books and articles on travel and island residence. It is as if Durrell were silently acknowledging Adorno’s dictum that after Auschwitz there could no longer be an excuse for poetry. ‘One lived by prose and one lived in poetry.’22

The specific work in which Durrell’s integrity as a writer is exemplified is the prose-poem ‘Asylum in the Snow’, published in 1938, in which he stated: ‘I have a confession to make, I am Lawrence Durrell the writer, who wrote until one day the world came into terrible focus’ (SP 263). This seminal work, from which, together with its sister-piece ‘Zero’, so much of his work descends, has already been examined in detail in The Dandy and the Herald (in relation to Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Nin’s Winter of Artifice).23 It repays intense analysis of the way in which he addressed the themes of modern writing in terms of the difficulties of language itself. It is of immense significance that the prose-poem is the location of his intimate thought about the capacity of both vocabulary and syntax for a writer’s deliberations on madness and death: in particular, it introduces us to Durrell’s paraphrase for Plato’s ‘pure forms’ as ‘the statues’ – figures which recur throughout the poetry and the novels. It is a bizarre world of snow – ‘sane white’ (SP 271) – populated by deformed, deranged creatures ‘maddened by sanity’, railing against the progress of time, in which the writer admits that he is inhabited by ‘the great beings’ against which words are powerless (SP 278).

Once again the poet attempts to consume the world – ‘I am trying to eat the whole pantheon of spirits, with a dictionary’ – and in doing so displays a religious fervour for a cause as yet unspecified. ‘I used to go quicker, quicker, until it was no more pen and paper, but a sort of cinema inside my breast, a sort of mass ... it is quite fatal to approach me unless you have the faith’ (SP 259, 272). Words give way to the imago: ‘this again I cannot write. I could show it to you in my face, but I cannot write it’ (SP 261). The main cards in his Tarot are already in place – the dancer, the magic man, the hunchback, the impotent castrate (‘Vasec’), the hanged girl (‘Fifi was hanging from a rusty nail’ - SP 272) – and the ‘hero’ is downstage, delivering his apologia against their baroque backcloth: ‘in the fantastic barracks of the idea I made many coloured regiments, but they have all failed ... I see the terrific protagonist: the last one left on the stage: and it is I’ (SP 272).

Not only is Durrell’s poetry poised between the private and the public spheres: it also swings between his twin themes of ‘sexual curiosity and metaphysical speculation’. The poetry from the island is a celebration and exploration of all nature – sea and land, woman and 22 Interview with R. Green, op. cit., p. 14.23 Cf. Pine, The Dandy and the Herald pp. 196-217.

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man, protean and antæan – in which sexual and intellectual functions often merge indiscriminately. Parallel with his construction of a choice philosophy by means of which to inhabit the Heraldic Universe, Durrell sought the original, primordial flavours of flora and fauna and united them with some of the preoccupations about ‘loss’ which he had carried with him to the island from the dead kingdom of his previous imagination. Displacement nourished his sense of destiny and heightened his quest for an identity.

Many of his early poems could illustrate Richard Ellmann’s exceptionally important observation of Yeats’s poems, that they begin in decadence and end in renaissance:24 indeed, a poem like ‘Sonnet Astray’ (from his first collection, Quaint Fragment) is that kind of transitional work, coming from a period in which, as Durrell put it, younger writers were, after Yeats’s The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933), regaining Yeats as a source of poetic energy and faith.25

‘Sonnet Astray’ (‘We had a heritage that we have lost’ - CP 19) moves us from Yeats to Beckett: here we find many of Durrell’s master-images, an ur-lexicon for the journey, inward to peace of mind and self-knowledge and outward to the ‘aesthetics of the new Age’: ‘twilight’, ‘fragments’, ‘lost’, the Pre-Raphaelite youth ‘dead a painted age ago’, are descriptions of the world for which he provided the threnody in Pied Piper of Lovers and The Black Book; the ‘star swept sea’ and ‘laughter’ are conditions of the new home he begins to build in Panic Spring. The death of youth and of reason, the swing of time, the nature of godliness, are elements in his dream of retaining the pristine condition by palingenesis, creating, predicating, another heritage. ‘Before perfection!’ might be written over the gate of the Heraldic Universe: in juxtaposing ‘the wisdom of a fool’ with ‘life [as] loneliness and heritage / A whispered mockery’ Durrell was paying eloquent tribute to Yeats, whose own transitional poem, ‘The Symbols’, was to appear two years later. It is perhaps no accident that in his Collected Poems ‘Sonnet Astray’, with its ‘wandering minds’, appears between ‘Happy Vagabond’, which celebrates ‘the vagrant heart’, and ‘The Beginning’ which, as we have seen, opens up new vistas for the dreamer.

The collision of decadence and renewal is no accident, redolent of Eliot’s own emergence from the spiritual landscape of ‘Gerontion’ and The Waste Land towards the new light of Four Quartets.26 Yet although Durrell’s trajectory carried him into new realms of excitement and conjecture, he was never able to escape where he came from, nor to avert the war which was predicted before his birth 24 R. Ellmann, ‘The Uses of Decadence’ in A Long the Riverrun (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) p. 14.25 Conversation with the author.26 Cf. Pine, The Dandy and the Herald pp. 113-23.

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and continues to dictate the landscape in which his younger readers approach his work. In 1946 he wrote in the poem ‘Near El Alamein’ that with a ‘general death in the desire for living’ we now record ‘all the apparatus of man’s behaviour’ as if the specimen of an extinct species. ‘But’ Durrell continued,

ideas and language do not go. The rate of the simple things – Men walking here, thinking of houses, Gardens or green mountains or beliefs (CP 142).

The lines might be prose. The nub of culture to be protected, to be fought for, is ‘the rate of the simple things’. Durrell’s insistence that ‘simple things’ have a temporal as well as a spatial life of their own, that landscape and the man in the landscape approach infinity at different speeds, becomes explicit in The Revolt where, effectively, he breaks down human volition and ontology into ‘the smallest conceivable unit of meaning in speech’, the (pogon, ‘a word that does not exist’ - Tunc 11). As I suggested earlier, Durrell was consciously entering the territory where language, meaning and politics coalesce.

But as we have seen in examining Durrell’s psychology, the most significant element in his adolescent quest was the accompanying character of Rimbaud and his diverse manifestations. The poem ‘Je est un Autre’ (1942, CP 106-7) establishes the ‘other’ who dogs his progress through the Quartet and the Quintet, and also supplies the philosophical dialogue between Felix and Koepgen which underpins the science fiction of The Revolt. In this poem, directly addressed to Rimbaud, Durrell only began to lay siege to the idea of otherness and the double, to the notion that for our every action and emotion there is another equal and simultaneous experience, in which our own ‘otherness’ participates. Its concluding lines –

O useless in the old house to question The mirrors, his impenetrable disguise

- fall back on one of his standard early images, the house, but predict the intense play that he would make with the distorting and fragmentary power of the mirror. In earlier poems such as ‘Paris Journal’ he referred to ‘the absence of a definite self’ (CP 68), or, in ‘A Small Scripture’ to ‘Murder of self within murder to reach the self’ (CP 71). In ‘Fangbrand’, a long poem of 1941 described as ‘a biography’, he wrote in the Yeatsian mode

Truth’s metaphor is the needle, The magnetic north of purpose

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Striving against the true north Of self: Fangbrand found it out, The final dualism in very self, An old man holding an asphodel (CP 95).

Durrell is part self-analyst, part literary historian, pre-dating those critics who would pursue the theme of the double as the spirit of an age, through specific texts.27 In ‘Byron’ (1944) he projected onto his subject the notion that

Hobbled by this shadow, My own invention of myself, I go In wind, rain, stars, climbing This ladder of compromise into Greece Which like the Notself looms before My politics, my invention and my war[.] (CP 120)

The position of the shadow as something between ‘self’ and ‘Notself’ is crucial: as we shall see, it points to the idea of ‘included [rather than excluded] middle’ as the strategy for solving the dilemma of ‘either/or’; mathematics may be binary, poetry is multiplex. Durrell allowed us to see Byron in a triptych, as three different (discrete, individuated) psychic manifestations of the life force:

picture to yourself A lord who encircled his life With women’s arms; or another Who rode through the wide world howling And searching for his mother. Picture to yourself a third: a cynic[.] (CP 121-2)

27 Cf. O. Rank, Don Juan: une étude sur le double (Paris: Denoel and Sterle, 1932); Der Doppelgänger: eine Psychoanalytische Studie (Leipzig: Internationalischer Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1925); Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self: a perspective on the literature of the Victorians (New York: New York University Press, 1969); R. Tymms, Doubles in Literary Psychology (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1949); Praz, Romantic Agony op.cit.; K. Miller, Doubles: studies in literary history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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Even when Durrell is addressing the beloved in Corfu, he is conscious that his imagination is elsewhere, there,28 while the ‘other’ haunts him here.29

It is, once again, significant that in his Collected Poems Durrell’s ‘Je est un Autre’ is immediately followed by ‘Conon in Exile’, which bears this ‘Author’s Note’:

Conon is an imaginary Greek philosopher who visited me twice in my dreams, and with whom I occasionally identify myself; he is one of my masks, Melissa is another; I want my total poetic work to add up as a kind of tapestry of people, some real, some imaginary. Conon is real (CP 107-8).

Conon is ... imaginary ... Conon is real. As a preface to his later novels, this note, written in 1942, could not be more apposite. The interconnection between the ideas of reality and imagination, in the visitations of Conon, who in this poem is ‘in exile’, and, in later poems is ‘in Alexandria’; the provision of a number of masks for the transsexual imagination of the writer, who can be ‘Conon’ at one moment, ‘Melissa’ at another; and the equation in which the real and the imagined are simultaneously identical and opposite, are all theories which Durrell was trying out in poems before he came to write them in a novel. ‘Melissa’, after many visitations in his poetry, explodes from the poet’s mind to become the whore-with-the-heart-of-gold in the Quartet, a book which is predicted in ‘Conon’.

Like a spider in a bottle writing the immortal Of Love and Death, through the bodies of those Who slept with my words but did not know me (CP 108)

- moving, like the poet himself, ‘through many negatives to what I am’.30

There are, as we can detect from Enid Starkie’s study of Rimbaud, strong parallels between the adolescent minds of

28 Cf. K. Miller’s discussion of Edward Thomas’s poem ‘The Other’ (Doubles p. 29): ‘for all that he is cultivating a genre, addressing a topos, adapting and inflecting, while also reversing, a traditional utterance, we may think that Thomas means what he says. What he says could never happen, though it could well be dreamt, and it had in some sense been said before by others’.29 Cf. Unamumo, Abel Sanchez p. 319: ‘In solitude he never managed to be alone, the other one was always present’.30 Cf. Rank, Art and Artist p. 61: ‘To the muse for whom he creates (or thinks he creates), the artist seldom gives himself; he plays with his works, and this the truly womanly woman often refuses to accept. But if his relation takes a homosexual form, this giving is still more obviously a giving to himself; that is, the artistic form of giving through production instead of surrendering the personal ego’; n.b. Durrrell’s marginal comment ‘Wonderful. Conon’.

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Rimbaud and Durrell (although not in their personal circumstances): the passionate interest in the cabala; in the construction of a system of correspondance which both explains and unites the universe and creates a higher sense of being; the rewriting of the experiences of childhood; and a revulsion with the reality of the modern world. The chief difference between the two is reflected in the fact that whereas Rimbaud failed to accept life, and reacted by suspending his creative faculties, Durrell, despite his horror at the prospect of holocaust, always relished the fruits of experience and threw himself into a career of hectic literary output. The chief similarity between them is found in Durrell’s continued exploration of the rupture between eastern and western philosophies and political systems, of the relations between dream, imagination and reality, of the Faustian nature of man’s imagination, and of the renewed role of women in society as a consequence of men and women achieving a new understanding of each other.31

The techniques used by Rimbaud to obtain what he, and Durrell, called a ‘fix’ on reality are those of childhood: the sensitivity of the child’s perceptions and the confusions of vocabulary and syntax. The poet’s function is to act as a receiving plate, sensitised ‘to fix with words what it tells us has happened’.32 The poet himself remains in doubt as to the relationship of reality and dream, possible and impossible, as affected by the play of the imagination.

‘A Soliloquy of Hamlet’ concludes with the lines

The double fellow in the labyrinth,

Whose maps were stifled with him in the maze, Whose mother dropped him like the seedless pod (CP 80).

Hamlet is an ikon for madness: his birth, parentage, circumstances, all point to a man with no future, but with multiple meanings which cannot be resolved. Hamlet speaks no known language; he is his own father and therefore, in the role of ghost, is doomed to haunt himself; everything he thinks is inverted into its opposite, so that he can never effect his intentions. The poem is a threnody for England (‘Pudding Island’), for sanity, beauty, language, communication and nature; it is a poem to the chill winter of death and solitude. It chastises the mother, mourns the father, pities Ophelia (‘the marble woman’), and acknowledges the impossibility of singing poetry in a world drained of truth and compassion:

I hang my heart, being choked, upon a noun. 31 Cf. Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud pp. 104-12; see also pp. 13-15, 93.32 Ibid., p. 234, 346-50.

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I hang her name upon this frantic pothook (CP 76).

Emotion and syntax hang together. In terms suggestive of both Rimbaud and Eliot, Durrell tells us

I kneel at the keyhole of death’s private room.To meet His eye, enormous in the keyhole (CP 78).33

Death, however, is not only the ‘double fellow’ whom the poet confronts externally, since it is the author of death, the murderer, who lurks not only before him but within his own imagination:

Make in the dormitory of the self

For sleepless murders combing out the bloodA blessing and an armistice to fear (CP 74).

‘A Soliloquy of Hamlet’ is succeeded in the Collected Poems by ‘The Sermon’, allegedly the introduction ‘to a verse play’ which, dated 1940, has clear affinities with the prologue to Yeats’s The Death of Cuchulain published the previous year:

we speak to the child under the title Of players acting a play which is not the less life For being enacted: not the less a play for being lived On both sides of the lamp, under ordinary coats (CP 80).

Hamlet recurs, held in the medieval fix of Durrell’s Canterbury days – ‘for all time in the helmet of the prince’ – and the concept of play as the tragic element in life is expressed in Jungian forms:

So many shadows lit between all of us here: Between I, an actor, and the live men on the stage: Between I, an actor, and you who are playing at life (CP 80).

If, in Seamus Heaney’s words, poetry is ‘the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality ... affirming what is denied voice’, then it is able to celebrate while bearing witness. Its dissociations, its upheavals of vocabulary and syntax, constitute what Heaney calls ‘an extension and refinement of the mind’s extreme recognitions, and of language’s most unexpected apprehensions’.34

33 Cf. Pessoa, op. cit., p. 6: ‘unceasingly I felt that I was an other, that I felt other, that I thought other. I am a spectator of a play produced with different scenery. And I am a spectator of myself’.34 S. Heaney, The Redress of Poetry: an inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 24 October 1989 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) pp. 2, 4.

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Here is the answer to Adorno’s injunction: that poetry, in the words of Durrell’s friend the Greek poet Seferis, should be ‘strong enough to help’, and it is clear that the poet must be not only creator but also judge – that is, capable of the highest criticism. Writing in Cairo during the world war, George Fraser, holding up Durrell as a model, urged that the poets should ‘create rules for writing ... set up patterns of integrity’.35 Durrell himself was fond of urging would-be poets to gain direct experience of death and childbirth, ‘these two great basic experiences which are the workshop of poetry’.36

We have only to consider a poem like ‘Nemea’ to realise how completely Durrell the poet could encapsulate the relations of time and space, seeking the gnomic aorist in order to preserve emotion:

A song in the valley of Nemea: Sing quiet, quite quiet here.

Song for the brides of Argos Combing the swarms of golden hair: Quite quiet, quiet there.

Under the rolling comb of grass, The sword outrusts the golden helm.

Agamemnon under tumulus serene Outsmiles the jury of skeletons: Cool under the cumulus the lion queen:

Only the drum can celebrate, Only the adjective outlive them.

A song in the valley of Nemea: Sing quiet, quiet, quiet here.

Tone of the frog in the empty well, Drone of the bald bee in the cold skull,

Quiet, Quiet, Quiet (CP 87-8).

It is instructive to note that ‘Nemea’ is preceded and followed in the Collected Poems by verses equally evocative of location – ‘At Corinth’ and ‘In Arcadia’ – which are, however, far less successful in establishing a sense of stillness: their storyline has an acoustic too intrusive for Nemea’s ‘quiet’, the poet’s voice has a public, rhetorical tone which addresses the question of privacy and evanescence (‘to 35 Fraser, Aquarius pp. 79-80.36 CERLD, ‘Asides of Demonax’ p. 7.

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dissolve the statues and retire / Night after night with a dissolving moon’ - CP 86) but cannot solve it. The problem of time, which does not impinge in ‘Nemea’, remains: ‘At Corinth’ ends with the lines

Winter was never native here: nor is. Men, women, and the nightingales Are forms of Spring (CP 87)

while ‘In Arcadia’ ends:

Something died out by this river: but it seems Less than a nightingale ago (CP 89).

While life is to be measured out in nightingales, it cannot, for ontological reasons, achieve the stillness of ‘Nemea’: in terms of Durrell’s space-time continuum ‘a precise knowledge of the outer world becomes an impossibility ... We and the outer world (subject and object) constitute a whole’ (Key 30).

One might wish, after hearing a poem like ‘Nemea’,37 to say that the overriding characteristic of Durrell’s poetry was its beauty. But the central experience – which is intensified by hearing the poem in the author’s own voice – in this and throughout his work, is the sense of danger. Apprehension is the keynote; schizophrenia the suggestion. A haunting presence in the poems – usually evident in the idea that an unannounced, unidentifiable third party is causing a disruption of meaning between poet and reader – makes the act of reading an uncertainty. Very rarely does one feel grounded in the poem; although the poet creates epiphanies, makes the spirit of the place come alive, it is not with any intention of drawing the reader into the landscape, but of conveying the poet’s own emotional response to it. In place of the desolation and decay which he had left behind in England, he founds a new colony of despair; the decadence, so faded but so necessary, persists because it is part of his birthright. The spirit of Dorian Gray has followed him to the Ionian, with the idea of the shadow or double, the sense of futility or sadness and, ultimately, loneliness, running like a motif through the work. A perverse notion, that the hazards of life and its rewards are interchangeable, that the world could be turned upside down or inside out and remain much the same, makes the work insecure in its geometry. An early poem like ‘Dark Grecian’ (1931, CP 21), evoking a youth with ‘full, lustrous eyes / Dim with unbidden searching’, is echoed twenty years later by ‘The Sirens’ (1951, CP 220); and again, in the late 1960s, in the ‘Ulysses’ lyrics:

37 Durrell recorded ‘Nemea’ and other poems for Jupiter Recordings in the 1960s: jep 0C28.

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Every poet and hero has to face them, The glittering temptresses of his distraction,

The penalties which seek him for a hostage. Homer and Milton: both were punished in their gift.

The recurrence of the ‘mortuary’ mood (cf. CP 156), the intrusion of the philosophical into the poet’s consciousness, is a condition of adolescence which seems to have been Durrell’s continual experience: the child in him kept losing his bearings and consequently everything was reversed or inverted and his world was shattered by ‘the enemies of silence’ (‘The Pilot’ - CP 133).

This inversion is even more pronounced in Durrell’s verse drama, particularly Sappho and Acte in their classical settings, exploring the female side of psychology against a background of political unrest and in an atmosphere of suspicion and discontent. Sappho, stammering poetess who is also, secretly, the island’s oracle, queries her potential role as power-broker in a world which is outwardly seeking an empire by invading and conquering Athens, and inwardly asking itself questions about its origins, its history and its moral and political validity. With deliberate echoes of ‘Gerontion’, the play self-consciously puts forward the verse drama as having an anachronistic function which consists in the very fact that it is out of date. Durrell was proposing, as he said in the case of Acte, to use poetry to

set up sympathetic vibrations in the psyche, operating not by ideas (which have to be filtered through the forebrain) but by ideograms ... not to manufacture massive bravura pieces for declamation, but to find a way of writing poetry so that it lifts the effective charge of words by an octave or so, without imposing rhetoric upon the ear.38

Referring to Eliot’s achievement of ‘heightened speech’ in The Cocktail Party, Durrell said

I am conducting the same sort of hunt for myself, but starting at a slightly different angle. I would like to fuse poetry and dramatic action so thoroughly that the audience would not be conscious of poetry as a separate ingredient in my dish… But I suppose this is a hopeless ideal.39

38 Note on Acte for the German production, SIUC 42/18/8.39 Ibid.

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Many of Durrell’s poetic motifs are brought into play in Sappho: the search for a submerged city:

You are condemned to hunt your peace of mind Forever in the buried city where the truth lies hid (Sappho 160)

- the dialogic voices of self-communing;40 the value of language; the difference between reality and imagination as displayed in the differences between a pair of brothers -

Pittakos: You were always hard on the real world, That is why it was always hard on you. ....................................................................................

Phaon: I see, brother, I see it all. But my real life Will not release me from its own directions.

Pittakos: Do you call this your real life?.. What is your island called? How can one reach it?

Phaon: It has no name but lies twelve days from Lesbos, Nine from Rhodes. I have a cave there, not a house, Above the sealine on the western coast.

Pittakos: A cave? You live in a cave? Phaon: Yes, I live in a cave. Pittakos: You say it as one might say: a country house! Phaon: Or an empire - why not, Pittakos?

There I feel truly surrounded by the world, Not here, not here.

............................................. Pittakos: Our history is full of stories of the exiled brother.

The people of Lesbos are left waiting for a miracle, but find that in the meantime they are capable only of ‘fighting with shadows’ (Sappho 112).

Durrell determined, in writing Sappho, not to neglect situation and character in creating what would be more a masque or a morality play than a drama, which he thought was the main problem of Eliot and the New Signature poets.41 One is tempted to believe that he failed in this attempt, since with this first (publicly avowed) essay in the genre he was technically very limited. The experience returned him to what we might reasonably regard as the central problem of Sappho herself and, later, Acte: ‘the poetic problem’. The dramatist

40 Cf. Sappho scene 1, stage direction for Minos: ‘the bracketed parts of his soliloquy represent the intrusion of a dual voice which resembles his own’ (p. 9); in scene 2, the same strategy is adopted for Sappho: ‘the intruding dual voice which is not hers but resembles it’ (p. 81); a similar technique is employed in Beckett’s Rockaby and Krapp’s Last Tape.41 L. Durrell, ‘Sappho and after’, Labrys 5 (1979).

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must ‘help to establish the vital link which [poetry] ought to have with the public consciousness ... [The poet/dramatist] must find a way to penetrate the scum of inattention which floats over the surface of the common mind in order to establish his hold over the public psyche.’42

This somewhat grandiose and potentially totalitarian ambition is a little at odds with the introspective poet of the poems: it suggests that Durrell’s distinction between the effective power of poetry, and the crude role of prose which ‘demarcates, delimits, defines, circumscribes’,43 was a true one, and that his later movement towards addressing ‘the common mind’ (or ‘MobEgo’ as it became in The Revolt) would be best served by prose.

That he may have felt this himself (since he was always ill-at-ease with his plays) is suggested by the fact that, whatever he may have said about it in 1961, there is clear evidence that Sappho was begun as a novel, of which an incomplete version of twelve chapters survives. Originally entitled ‘The Dark Peninsula’, there are strong pre-echoes of the language of The Alexandria Quartet, especially in the brooding of Sappho herself which we encounter, spelled out extensively, throughout the Quartet in the exchanges between Justine and Darley: ‘hunting for the key to the pattern, the meaning of history which first engulfs us in promises and afterwards betrays. I can see no pattern’.44 Written as the memoirs of an elderly amanuensis, with Sappho as the central character or enigma, the novel describes

her interest in what was going on around her [which] might almost be described as a mania; she meant no harm by it, and certainly no harm ever came of it that I could see. She was the prey to an insatiable curiosity. That is perhaps how I came to know so much not only about my mistress but also about the world she inhabited. It is possible that those who have written about her, and about her times ... missed seeing her as she truly was. It is possible that they could judge her the better as a historical character, or as a poet. But perhaps the person was lost, I mean the fallible everyday person who had to mediate between these various official roles ... I see her against the confused colouring of daily life, a prey to the fluctuations of her own character and abilities.45

With Acte, originally subtitled ‘or The Prisoners of Time’,46 these preoccupations are deepened: the play is technically more mature and 42 Ibid. The account reprinted in Labrys includes material from the original production, including this passage.43 Ibid.44 SIUC 42/10/1.45 Ibid. While there is no hint in the play of any lesbian tendency in Sappho, there is evidence in the prose version that Durrell had contemplated its introduction.46 SIUC 42/18/8.

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secure, and the placing of the heroine, a Scythian princess, at the front and in the centre of the play’s real dramatic content, is a successful deceit. Durrell referred to this centre as

the heart of the Roman cobweb [where] the two spider-shapes are ... provoking destiny; Nero and Arbiter struggle like unsuccessful artists to discover the meaning of history. Behind their intellectual manouvres [sic] lies the question: can history ever be harnessed and moulded by the artist? Or is it always to be a succession of tragic errors which must engulf the individual and destroy him?47

Durrell pursued the fact that ‘the personal histories intersect with the political destinies of the countries involved; human values, personal values and historic values have become entangled in each other’.48 Again, the characters represent certain metaphysical principles rather than real people: ‘Nero’ stands for the decadent mind, the frightened child and the remorseless tyrant, as ‘Petronius Arbiter’ (author of one of Durrell’s favourite works, Satyricon), represents irony, wit, cynicism and despair. And once more the theme provides us with anticipations of the Quartet and of the ‘absurd’ drama of Beckett. Certainly he had brought poetry to the very edge of the as-yet-unaskable question, as he had in 1946 with the ‘recitative for a radio play’, ‘In Europe’, which bears the mark of Yeats’s Purgatory and anticipates Beckett’s tramps with its refrain ‘We are getting the refugee habit ... frontiers mean nothing any more’ (CP 136-40).

There may be a personal irony in the fact that Acte ends with a mad child who ‘can only repeat, over and over again, a single phrase: “Heroism is divine. My father is a God”’ – to which Petronius, who has just slit his wrists in an act of public suicide, retorts

My father is a God! How limited the human imagination is! The catalogue of human pain is fathomless. We try to Circumscribe it with our poems and stories ... ... How terrible beauty is! (Acte 74-5)

The poet who was to write in the late 1960s the MacNeician line ‘First of all/He did not ask to be born’, which continues

... simply to try and find a way Through the whole unscripted and quite Untabulated cryptic faun posed against Its tapestry of carnal violence.

47 SIUC/LD/Accession II.48 Ibid.

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Because he was free he was bound,49

was discovering that not only was poetry incapable of sustaining his journey through that jungle, but also that, on occasion, he had to abandon any hope of the Heraldic Universe while he negotiated the questions of madness and history which only rhetoric could pose.

49 Red Limbo Lingo p. 9. This prefatory poem, together with the prose sections of Red Limbo Lingo, was omitted from the 1980 revised edition of the CP: the editor, James A. Brigham, is not aware of Durrell’s reason for the exclusion.

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