LAWRENCE DURRELL
(1914-1990)
Durrell was born in India and educated at Darjeeling and St Edmund's School, Canterbury. For many years, after leaving school he led a bohemian life in London, at one time playing the piano in a nightclub for a living, at another working in a photographer's studio, but for the last thirty years or so he lived abroad, chiefly around the Mediterranean, and he wrote some of his books at his home in Provence (France). His publisher was T. S. Eliot, and he became a lifelong friend with Henry Miller.
Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea, Durrell is probably better known as a novelist than as a poet, but it was as a poet that he began writing, and it is his poetry that still seems to be his central achievement. His first poetic collection �if we disregard a preliminary Poems (1938), edited by O. Blakeston� was A Private Country (1943). Later volumes are: Cities, Plains and People (1956), On Seeming to Presume (1948), and The Tree of Idleness (1955). Collected Poems appeared in 1960. Other publications than those already mentioned include Prospero's Cell (1957) and Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953), which he described as "companions to the landscapes of Corfu and Rhodes", a verse play Sappho (1950), and a single work of literary criticism, A Key to Modern British Poetry (1952).
Durrell's work, in which the evocation of the landscapes of the Aegean Islands and of the Near East plays an important part as a background to feeling, has a sensuousness nicely kept in control by wit and a satirical temperament. This combination is exhilarating and satisfying. His weaknesses are occasional carelessness about making his meaning clear and, in some of the earlier poems, a kind of undergraduate brashness. He died in his house at Sommi�res (French Provence) in 1990.Since the completion of The Alexandria Quartet (1960), a 'word continuum' consisting of the four novels.
Fragments from "THE DEATH OF GENERAL UNCEBUNKE"
I
My uncle sleeps in the image of death.
In the greenhouse and in the potting-shed
The wrens junket: the old girl with the trowel
Is a pillar of salt, insufferably brittle.
His not to reason why, though a thinking man.
Beside his mesmeric incomprehension
The little mouse mopping and mowing,
The giraffe and the spin-turtle, these can
On my picture-book look insufferably little
But knowing, incredibly Knowing.
III
Well, God sends weather, the English apple,
The weeping willow.
Grum lies the consort of Prudence quite:
Mum as a long fiddle in regimentals:
This sudden IT between two tropical thumbs.
Unwrinkled him, Lord, unriddle this strange gorgon,
For tall Prudence who softens the small lamps,
Gives humble air to the organ that it hums.
Fragments from "DEUS LOCI"
I
All our religions founder, you
remain, small sunburnt deus loci
safe in your natal shrine,
landscape of the precocious southern heart,
continuously revived in passion's common
tragic and yet incorrigible spring:
in every special laughter overheard,
your specimen is everything-
accents of the little cackling god,
part animal, part insect, and part bird.
II
This dust, this royal dust, our mother
modeled by spring-belonging rain
whose soft blank drops console
a single vineyard's fever or a region
falls now in soft percussion on the earth's
old stretched and wrinkled vellum skin:
each drop could make one think
a footprint of the god, but out of season,
yet in your sudden coming know
life lives itself without recourse to reason.
III
On how many of your clement springs
the fishermen set forth, the foresters
resign their empty glasses, rise,
confront the morning star, accept
the motiveless patronage of all you are�
desire recaptured on the sea or land
in the fables of fish, or grapes help up,
a fistful of some champion wine
glowing like a stained-glass window
in a drunkard's trembling hand.
VI
The saddle-nose, the hairy thighs
composed these vines, these humble vines,
so dedicated to themselves yet offering
in the black froth of grapes their increment
to pleasure or to sadness where a poor
peasant at a husky church-bell's chime
crosses himself: on some cracked pedestal
by the sighing sea sets eternally up,
item by item, his small mid-day meal,
garlic and bread, the wine-can and the cup.
Bibliography:
Brigham, James, ed. (1985): Lawrence Durrell, Collected Poems 1931-74. Diane Pub Co: London.
Bowker, Gordon (1997): Through the Dark Labyrinth: A Biography of Lawrence Durrell. St Martin's Press: New York.
Durrell, Lawrence (1970): Key to Modern British Poetry. Oklahoma University Press: Oklahoma.
Herbrechter, Stefan (1999): Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity. Rodopi: Amsterdam.
Lillios, Anna (2004): Lawrence Durrell and the Greek World. Associated University Presses: London.
En espa�ol:
Durrell, Lawrence (1982): Lawrence Durrell, poemas escogidos (1935-1963). Madrid: Visor.
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