Lawrence Durrell: Spirit of Place
Cyprus and Bitter Lemons
Lawrence Durrell was a modernist writer of elegance, wit, with Proustian depth of thought that is so excruciatingly good that you need to savour every word and sentence, and then go back and read it again just to make sure you’ve understood it, and then a third time. Then you’ll hit a long paragraph that can only be read at speed, with no going back because you might spoil a reading experience of a lifetime. Durrell, who died in 1990, is still one of the most important English writers of the 20th century, even though he was born in India and lived most of life in France, and was greatly influenced by the American novelist Henry Miller, which is no bad thing.
He was also, like many writers of his generation, a British intelligence officer who served in the Middle East during World War Two, an experience that was the source material for the novels that make up The Alexandria Quartet.
I’m not sure if Lawrence Durrell’s popularity as a writer will decrease or increase as a result of the recent TV series The Durrells, where actor Josh O’Connor (who was born the year Durrell died) plays him as a rather naive and slightly pompous character hugely attracted by women yet, at the same time, petrified by them. Maybe there’s an element of a truth there?
