Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990)
Anglo-Irish novelist, playwright, best known for THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET (1957-60). Many once believed it would secure Durrell the Nobel Prize for Literature. The experimental novel of mystery, love, and espionage explored memory, contradicting a love affair of a young writer with the recollections of the other people. Durrell spent most of his life outside England - in India, Corfu, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Rhodes, Cyprus, and the south of France. Durrell was born in Darjeeling, India, as the son of Lawrence Samuel Durrell, a British engineer, and Louisa (Dixie) Durrell, who was an Irish. At the age of twelve he was taken to England. Durrell had little feeling for England and the English. He attended numerous schools from 1923 to 1928 without much success, and worked for some time as a jazz pianist in a London nightclub. In the 1930s he went to Paris, where he started his career as a writer and associated with such author as Henry Miller, who became his mentor. The two kept up an exchange of letters over 45 years. In 1935 Durrell moved with his mother to the island of Corfu - several of his works were later connected to Mediterranean countries. His brother Gerald Durrell described life there in his book My Family and Other Animals (1956). Between the years 1934 and 1940 he edited a little magazine called Booster (later Delta). Durrell's first novel of interest, THE BLACK BOOK: AN AGON, heavily influenced by Miller, was published in Paris in 1938. The mildly pornographic fantasia did not appear in Britain until 1973. In the story Lawrence Lucifer struggles to escape the spiritual sterility of dying England, and finds Greece's warmth and fertility. During WW II Durrell served as a press attaché to the British embassies in Cairo and Alexandria from 1941 to 1944. After the war he held various diplomatic and teaching jobs. He worked in Rhodos, Belgrad, finally settling in Cyprus in 1953. From 1947 to 1948 he was a director of the British Council Institute in Argentina. Durrell's observation of the diplomatic life at the British legation in Belgrade, where he was from 1949 to 1952, gave him material for WHITE EAGLES OVER SERBIA (1957), which gained considerable success.