Durrell's writing career began
early and continued until shortly before his death. He didn't expect The Black Book,
written when he was just twenty-four, to be accepted by Faber & Faber, but
it was, and there began not his writing career as such ... but his slow rise to
fame. Of all the writers discussed in
these necessarily partial sketches,
Temperamentally, Durrell is a poet,
which means that his literature as a whole will be more lyrical than academic. Temperamentally he is also a hedonist, though
of a rather different texture from, say, John Cowper Powys. His resemblance to Camus
comes readily to mind here, for the Mediterranean climate is congenial to both
- as are several of the cultures associated with it.
The
Black Book strongly bears the imprint of Henry Miller's
literary influence, and it was as a devotee of the American expatriate that Durrell began his writing career in earnest. It was Miller who backed the novel, and the
two men continued, despite their age-differences, to be friends thereafter,
regularly writing to and occasionally visiting each other, many of the letters
now published and a part of the literary canon.
Their occasional visits were more a consequence of geographical distance
- Miller returning to the United States following the outbreak of World War II,
Durrell living in Greece - than a reflection of
lukewarm relations; though one may, I think, surmise that their friendship was
always, at bottom, literary, and therefore something that thrived on
egotistical literary exchanges rather than temperamental affinity. Despite his allegiance to Miller, Lawrence Durrell remained a very different man and writer, a fact
which leads one to assume that their friendship was rooted in the attraction of
opposites, and that both men admired in the other what they were not in
themselves, but nevertheless had a subconscious desire to be.
After The
Black Book, Durrell began to forge his own
literary identity independently of Miller and became less of an
autobiographical writer than an imaginative fictional one, producing in such
multi-volume works as The Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quintet some of the finest fictional
compositions of our time, which, despite their slightly anachronistic
structures, appeal to the best instincts of the literary tradition. Only in novels like Tunq
and Nunquam did Durrell
retain anything like a Milleresque first-person
approach to the genre. But even then one
is on distinctly Durrellian territory, and the work
that emerges is literary rather than autobiographical, developing characters
and plot to their logical or, at any rate, fictional conclusions.
The paradox of Durrell's literary work
is that it is both traditional and avant-garde at the same time, and nowhere is
this more conspicuous than in Monsieur, the first novel of The Avignon Quintet, which reads like a conventional
narrative most of the time until, with the dénouement, one is left
dangling in the literary air, so to speak, as the character described converses
in a restaurant with someone absent whom he was nevertheless supposed to be
meeting. Beginning with the account of a
madness afflicting the protagonist's wife, the novel ends with another character
on the verge of madness, a development which typifies the paradoxical nature of
Durrell's ordinarily conventional literature,
granting it an almost surreal overtone and making one wonder whether one hadn't
missed a strand in the plot somewhere.
It's almost as though Durrell were a kind of literary
Paul Delvaux, whose fastidious technique is used to
mask or grant credibility to a bizarre subject-matter. For stylistically there can
be few authors who are more fastidious, methodical, and poetically conscious
than this enigmatic Englishman of partly Irish descent.
But the contrived side of Durrell's
writing isn't the only one, since the four novels which make up The Alexandria Quartet
demonstrate a more spontaneous, romantic, expansive style of writing
reminiscent of Gide and even of Camus. If the quasi-surreal writing seems to owe
something to Locus Solus, that masterpiece of
French literary surrealism by Raymond Roussel, then
the romantic writing of novels, for example, like Justine and Balthazar
is much closer to Roussel's contemporary, though the
treatment of characters is on the whole freer and the prose more elastic and
expansive than in Gide. It was this mode of writing, in particular,
which elicited most praise from Henry Miller, who began to regard Durrell as the greatest literary genius of his time.
Whether or not Durrell was as great as
Miller thought, there can be no doubt that his place in contemporary literature
was assured by The
Alexandria Quartet, and that he must rank as one of the finest British
writers of the twentieth century, if only from the imaginative and technical
points-of-view. For when it comes to
philosophy, to autobiography, religion, and indeed art, Durrell's
writing leaves something to be desired, and his neo-pagan bias for
Mediterranean hedonism must militate against his elevation to the front-rank of
decadent bourgeois or bourgeois/proletarian authors. Intellectually, he isn't on the level of
Huxley, Sartre, or Koestler, but is more closely
aligned with writers like Camus, Lawrence, and
Powys. He is, above all, an entertaining
rather than enlightening writer, and for this reason one cannot place him on
the highest pedestal of contemporary letters.
He is brilliantly accomplished in his own field, but it is one that pertains
more, on the whole, to traditional fictional literature than to revolutionary
philosophical literature. Returning to Barthe's distinction between 'authors' and 'writers', Durrell is much more an 'author' than a 'writer', and
therefore a literary lightweight in any evolutionary scale-of-values.
As for politics, he isn't as 'Bolshie'
as has been euphemistically claimed by some people, but is decidedly bourgeois
in his opposition to communism, decidedly British in his allegiance to liberal
civilization, with its capitalist traditions, even though he lived most of his
life in the Mediterranean area in relatively rural surroundings. He isn't a man to set himself up as a
champion of post-dualistic politics or religion, but prefers to immerse himself
in the pagan past and retain at least a minimal allegiance to the humanistic
status quo. His writings are therefore
respectable from a bourgeois standpoint, but inconsequential and even impotent
from a revolutionary one. And this isn't
simply because he is afraid of the consequences of speaking out in radical
terms, but because he is fundamentally a complacent bourgeois who sees no
reason why he should pose as a discontented proletarian. Also because he is
fundamentally an artist, and not interested in revolutionary politics. This is, at times, an enviable position, but
it can also be somewhat contemptible.
