10. Subversions

10

Subversions

‘What do I want for Christmas? A marinated seaman’s prick in a knitted french letter’, Durrell had written drunkenly in a notebook for Sebastian;[1] the passage did not appear in the final text. At other times, the coincidence of the vulgar and the wistful did survive editing: thus, when he was writing Tunc and Nunquam, the angriest and most caustic of his mature novels, he jotted down:

My ideal novel began: Jo Smith was a big man who enjoyed good health. But because when he was a child he had been told that if he laughed too heartily his balls would fall off his face had a singular twisted expression; he lived in expectation.[2]

This appears in a revised form in The Revolt (Nunquam 52). The entry shares with many others Durrell’s playfulness and irreverence which he juxtaposed with expressions of disillusion and retreat with apparent facility: other extracts, such as ‘old school toe’, ‘the arseless society, animated by blubberly love’, ‘laughter, a good strong disinfectant for our woes’,[3] suggest that the ingredients for the book which began as ‘The Placebo: An Attic Comedy’ (also subtitled ‘A Book of Asides’)[4] were dredged from a deep-seated struggle with the idea of England in particular and modern culture in general, which Durrell had largely succeeded in suppressing as he wrote the Quartet.

In this chapter I shall examine Durrell’s relation to England and his wider relation to the problem of history, by describing his ‘subversions’ in four ways: firstly, by briefly examining the ‘Antrobus’ stories and cognate pieces in which he cast an affectionate but critical eye on the foibles, strengths and weaknesses of the diplomatic habit and character; secondly, by suggesting how, in other more serious writing such as Bitter Lemons or Pope Joan (and in his doggerel), he could reach a level of criticism which could be regarded as openly subversive of the establishment and its culture; thirdly, by discussing surviving fragments of other play-projects which are indicative of his long-standing preoccupation with morality and probity; and fourthly, by exploring his methods in creating the two novels Tunc and Nunquam by reference to his notebooks and to the unpublished drafts of Tunc (‘The Placebo’ and ‘Village of Turtle Doves’) and other transitional or derivative novels such as Judith: these may be regarded as ‘sub-versions’ out of which the published ‘versions’ emerge.

These pieces may appear slight and peripheral in relation to Durrell’s main corpus, but they perhaps make clear something not always immediately evident in the major novels and the three published plays: that the craft of writing, and the pursuit of philosophical, aesthetic and political intention, do not necessarily march ‘with the cosmology of the age’ (Quartet 385). There is a menacing, destabilising air about many of these works, perhaps because they are largely fragmentary and provisional, transitory, apparently unconnected to the mainstream: but they contain the clearest indication of the danger to which I adverted in my Introduction – the notion of Durrell as a writer Iiving ‘on the edge of madness’, a condition of which he was always conscious.

This formed an explicit part of Durrell’s thinking – with Alfred Perlès he explored the notion ‘Is art always an outrage - must it by its very nature be an outrage?’,[5] noting of Henry Miller that he was ‘an inverted moralist’[6] and ‘has effected an imaginative junction between the obscene and the holy’,[7] that he ‘beats with great wings against the blank walls of our moeurs, the very quality of his despair giving his work that mad vital quality’.[8] It was this quality that he had shared in the Paris days and which persisted in his own work thereafter.[9]

The junction was one he himself would express, for example, by insisting that the Greeks ‘in their wisdom compounded temple and brothel’ (Tunc 43), thus keeping together ‘the obscene and the holy’, the notion of the prostitute as priestess. It is present also in the figure of Mnemidis, the madman in the Quintet who combines insanity with a strong sense of the priesthood – I am thinking particularly of Mnemidis’s thoughts as, after his escape, he browses outside cinemas offering ‘Queue de Beton or The Concrete Prick ... Plein le Cul or A Cuntfull and further on Les Enculées or The Buggered’.[10] The spectacle of ‘the profound succulence of abused flesh’ draws Mnemidis into a profound state of mysticism, a meeting of black and white: ‘He was the joker in the pack, he was equally ripe for black mischief or the felicity of pure godhead’ (Quintet 1129-30); Durrell no doubt recalled Eliot’s point that ‘blasphemy might ... be a way of affirming belief’.[11]

The years after the publication of The Alexandria Ouartet mark a caesura in Durrell’s career, one which indicates that it would be mistaken of us to regard the Quartet as the centrepiece of the ‘long strip’. As its author, Durrell was isolated by his success and by his continuing parallel ambition to establish a presence in the playhouse. He was exercised by the fact that his achievement in creating a ‘relativity poem’ had not in fact permitted him the further satisfaction of interrogating human values as far as he had hoped, and thus the ‘investigation of modern love’, which he regarded as intimately connected with that of culture, was incomplete.

A draft poem in the style of Pope, attributable to the early 1970s, gives an indication of Durrell’s sustained difficulty in addressing the issue of duality:

O wearisome condition of humanity

Born unto one law, to another bound

Created sane and yet forbidden sanity

Created sick, commanded to be sound -

What meaneth heaven by such divers/devious laws,

Passion and Reason, self-division’s cause.[12]

Another, contemporaneous note observed:

We have reached a degree of intelligence which nature never contemplated in framing her laws and for which she has consequently provided no adequate satisfaction. The human race is too developed for its corporeal conditions, the nerves being evolved to an activity abnormal. It may be questioned if Nature or what we call nature so far back as when she crossed the line from the invertebrates to the vertebrates did not exceed her mission. The planet does not supply the materials for happiness to higher existences.[13]

The disillusion with the idea of progress, and the innate assumption that man is born into something ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’,[14] is coupled with the fact that man possesses, but is controlled by, an inherent Faustian ambition to rise higher than his powers permit, and that nothing in his inevitable failure will curb that hubristic ambition. Durrell was concerned not merely with rescuing the English novel, but with finding a path that could negotiate the failure of modern history and return to a more civilised age.

The ‘Antrobus’ stories are a commentary on a part of Durrell’s life which gave him great anguish and frustration but also much opportunity to relish the haphazardness of diplomatic discipline, its inherent capacity for foolishness and, as one of his titles suggests, the esprit with which British diplomats maintained a sense of Englishness abroad. It was also, of course, a way of life from which Durrell, as a public figure of consequence, drew sustenance at a crucial time in his development as a writer: again, the parallel with the situation of Kim, an Indo-Celt in the pay of the British secret service, is striking.

Running through the affectionate humour in these diplomatic situations is a darker side, one which, as in the adventure novel White Eagles Over Serbia, highlighted the often tragic and explosive nature of many confrontations where the personal and the public became one, and which also saw the ridiculous aspect of being sent ‘to lie abroad’. There is never a wry chuckle without an accompanying intake of breath, especially in such observations as: ‘A press officer is like a man pegged out on an African ant-hill for the termites of the daily press to eat into at will’ (AC 38); Antrobian ‘dips’ tend to lose control and come out with unspeakable statements such as ‘“British policy IS A BLOODY CONUNDRUM’” (AC 55). Antrobus, like the commoner parties in Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, is liable to capitalise the important points. ‘His downfall was Quite Unforeseen’ ... ‘He was voicing the Unspoken Thoughts of many of us’ ... ‘He was subject to Sudden Urges’ (AC 55, 14, 74).

While he was in Belgrade Durrell began to make notes of these circumstances – including his own epitaph:

Hated Cant

Revered Cunt.[15]

He composed the ‘mottoe [sic] for F. O. No promotion without etiolation’[16] and was sharply observant of the strengths and pitfalls of the born diplomat, a condition which he went on to acknowledge in the meeting of Nessim and Mountolive: ‘[he] instantly recognized a person of his own kind, a person whose life was a code’ (Quartet 409).

Esprit de Corps is set in Yugoslavia, thus reflecting Durrell’s own experience which, as we have seen, was intensely unpleasant on both personal and public levels; Durrell permitted himself direct hits on the regime, with its ‘Order of Mercy and Plenty with crossed Haystacks, and the Titotalitarian Medal of Honour with froggings’ (AC 95). The later collections, perhaps because his humour was a little too near the bone – or perhaps because he wished to make his point about the dreadfulness of communism more forcefully – were transferred to a state called ‘Vulgaria’: ‘Bitter days ... perhaps one shouldn’t talk about them’ (AC 63).

Elements of Pursewarden recur: ‘have you ever noticed (said Antrobus) that people called Percy are almost invariably imbeciles?’ (AC 115), and in one story, ‘Cry Wolf’, he reappears as ‘Wormwood’, ‘a lean, leathery, saturnine sort of chap ... and he’s written a couple of novels of an obscurity so overwhelming as to give an awful inferiority complex to the Chancery’ (AC 86).

Certain true incidents emerge, such as the train episode related in a letter to Miller, which appears as ‘The Ghost Train’ (AC 13-21), or the visit of the Foreign Secretary (AC 40); one particularly bizarre occurrence, in which a diplomat is eaten by wolves when his car gets stuck in a snow-drift (AC 87) appears to have been based on Durrell’s personal knowledge.[17] Other elements among Durrell’s interests, such as the psychology of sex, are given an airing in ‘La Valise’, where the French Ambassadress to ‘Vulgaria’ turns into a man (AC 105). And Durrell was not above a little self-deprecation:

Americans are notoriously Romance Prone. He went off to Egypt on leave with the ALEXANDRIA QUARTET under his arm. Next thing we knew, he had become a Moslem - bang! just like that. Gone over to them bodily. He came back from leave looking pale but jaunty in a ghastly sort of way and towing a string of little black new wives. Real ones. ‘Durrell’s right’ he is alleged to have announced to his Chief with an airy wave. ‘Down there almost everything goes.’ (AC 172)

But the undercurrent was undeniable: ‘the diplomatic world - a world of kindly lampreys. Here the demon of accidie has one by the throat.’[18] We will see Livia, and others ‘buried alive’, submitting to the medieval torpor of accidie in the Quintet. Meanwhile we note Durrell railing against ‘Parochialism, Philistinism and Prudishness - the 3 ugly sisters which try to rule the English novel’,[19] trying to make a new idea of ‘England’ where he could be ‘the first Englishman’. One of the most endearing features of the ‘Antrobus’ stories is the use of mis-prints, which Durrell had already employed to effect in the ‘Yorick’ column which he had written for the Egyptian Gazette in 1941 (‘Boobs falling on London’; ‘An unforgettable picture of Prince Paul… waiting to be picked up by one of our giant Sunderland flying-goats’).[20] His interest in word-play is evident in some of his definitions: ‘Demonology: the study of demons… Apology: the study of apes…Hagiology: the study of hags… Geography: the study of horses’.[21] Most tellingly, perhaps, was the following, of 22 June 1941:

A Bremen broadcast on Friday night stated that a woman was seen in a stationary balloon eating a meal of cold chicken and claret with obvious zest; a German fighter pilot who approached the balloon was greeted by the woman, who leaned over the side and said ‘Pregnancy?’ ‘Pregnancy what?’ the pilot shouted back. ‘Pregnancy Deutsch?’ asked the woman with an Australian accent.[22]

It is, perhaps, coincidental that in White Eagles Over Serbia the text used as a coding manual is Walden, by the author of Civil Disobedience, and that fifteen years later Durrell should have written so passionately about the condition of Walden Pond; nevertheless, there is in this private note a strong flavour of his indignation at the way that ‘ancient springs’ can become devalued:

The day I landed in America I received a post-card of Walden Pond as it is today, a little concrete sparrow-basin of utter hideousness mediocrity situated in a clump of withered greenery - all that remains of a lake and a forest. The eloquence of this ikon was devastating in its heartlessness - it told us a bitter truth - that the game is up for us. It is simply a matter of time now. There is no room for delusions. I could not forbear to cry out with shame - my sort of poetic response. It was my way of accepting responsibility for all that had gone towards making this situation.[23]

This was written at the time when he was lecturing at CalTech where, he quipped, ‘my back is against the wall now... defending culture, whatever that is’.[24]

It is not, however, fortuitous that the idea of ‘accepting responsibility’, for which Durrell’s contribution had already been the composition of The Revolt of Aphrodite, finds expression in works which, however disparate, combine moral rigour with compassion. Humorous the ‘Antrobus’ stories may be; loaded with juvenile adventure interest White Eagles may be; but the portraits of a hell, where men had been condemned to inhumanity and to failure, ring true of the mind ‘tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world’.

With Durrell’s posting in Cyprus, the opportunity for humour, and even for the natural empathy which he expressed in his islomania, was greatly diminished by the pathos of the political situation and its impact on his personal friendship. As a teacher, however, he had occasion for a resounding insight into the semantic problems of English. Durrell had attempted to explain to his class that, as in Greek, there was more than one word for ‘love’, including ‘dote’. His pupils adopted the word wholeheartedly: the King and Queen of Greece were ‘doting at each other’, when they married ‘they were in a great dote. He was so excitement and she was so excitement’. One pupil,

invited to write an essay on her favourite historical character ... never failed to delight me with something like this: ‘I have no historical character but in the real life there is one I love. He is writer. I dote him and he dotes me. How pleasure is the moment when I see him came at the door. My glad is very big. How pleasure is that moment. As all people are dreamed so am I.' (BL 131)

Durrell claimed that Bitter Lemons was ‘not a political book’ (BL 11) but its political content, especially when backed up by the documentary evidence of his work in political intelligence, is highly significant. He did not go to Cyprus seeking work in the public service, but events overtook him. This simple fact underwrote the tragedy in the book, which describes not merely the impressions garnered by an English resident in Cyprus during the enosis crisis,[25] but the inherent problems of mutual understanding, of attempting to belong. This is encapsulated in the poem ‘Bitter Lemons’ which, as the book’s envoi, gives the lie to its opening assertion:

the dry grass underfoot

Tortures memory and revises

Habits half a lifetime dead (BL 52).

The next line continues ‘better leave the rest unsaid’ but it is what Durrell says, even in his silences, which creates the unease that goes deeper than history or mere politics: to ‘evaluate’ the island ‘in terms of individuals rather than policies’ did not absolve Durrell from political comment because politics is our way of expressing our failure at other forms of exchange, and it was this failure of communication which precipitated the violence and the diplomatic stalemate of the situation.

The ambiguity between Durrell’s feelings as a private person, trying to make a home in Cyprus, and as a public servant attempting to maintain a favourable attitude on the part of Greek Cypriots towards Britain, was acute, and was perceived by Greeks who commented publicly on it. The most penetrating criticism was contained in The Age of Bronze (1960) by Rodis Roufos, in pages excised from the original text at the insistence of the publishers, Heinemann.[26] Roufos, who, like many other Cypriot writers, had been friendly with Durrell before the latter joined the government service, referred to Bitter Lemons as ‘Sour Grapes’ and to Durrell as ‘Maurice Ferrell’, who appears to be friendly to the Greeks (as Durrell depicts himself in Bitter Lemons) but who ‘betrayed us’ and went over ‘to the other side’.[27]

His Greek friends spoke well of him because he was reputed to be a philhellene and told them he personally favoured ‘Enosis’ …it seems he was equally amiable to his Turkish friends, to whom he said widely different things, while I am told that with British interlocutors he adopted the proper jocular tone about both varieties of ‘Cyps’.[28]