A Smile in His Mind's Eye: A Study of the Early Works of Lawrence Durrell 9781442670488

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations for Durrell's Works
1. The Taste of Elsewhere
2. Quaint Fragments and Literary Horizons
3. Pied Piper of Lovers: The Boy from India and the Faun
4. Panic Spring: The Romance of the Will and Its Music
5. The Black Book: The Journey to the Land 'Where God Is a Yellow Man'
6. Heraldic Side-Effects
7. The Suchness of the Early Durrell
Notes
Works Cited
Index

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A SMILE IN HIS MIND'S EYE A STUDY OF THE EARLY WORKS OF LAWRENCE DURRELL

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A Smile in His Mind's Eye A Study of the Early Works of Lawrence Durrell

Ray Morrison

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2005 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-8939-9

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Morrison, Ray A smile in his mind's eye : a study of the early works of Lawrence Durrell / Ray Morrison. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-8939-9 1. Durrell, Lawrence — Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR6007.U76Z77 2005

828'.91209

C2004-905145-8

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

In Memoriam

My mother, Delia Morrison, and my maternal uncles, Frank, Charles, and William Stevenson

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations for Durrell's Works xi 1 The Taste of Elsewhere 3 2 Quaint Fragments and Literary Horizons

11

3 Pied Piper of Lovers: The Boy from India and the Faun

68

4 Panic Spring: The Romance of the Will and Its Music 148 5 The Black Book: The Journey to the Land 'Where God Is a Yellow Man' 253 6 Heraldic Side-Effects

359

7 The Suchness of the Early Durrell 437 Notes

469

Works Cited Index

487

509

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for a generous sabbatical research grant some years ago for a study of Durrell's fiction written after the Second World War. That study has turned into this book, A Smile in His Mind's Eye, since Durrell's early texts give rise to the vision underscoring his later works. Of the many individuals who helped to make this book possible, I would like to thank the librarians in charge of Special Collections at Southern Illinois University (Carbondale), the University of Texas (Austin), the British Library (London), and the BBC Archives (Reading). The Interlibrary Loan Staff at Carleton University and at the Vancouver Public Library were invaluable in tracking down rare materials. Deus Loci: The Journal of the Lawrence Durrell Society and the International Conferences held on Durrell biennially kept me abreast of criticism. Students of Durrell at Carleton University have contributed to aspects of A Smile through their questions and lively discussion. Stephanie Hewitt has my gratitude for her patience and good humour in getting this manuscript through its computer phases. For the place Durrell's works and friendship hold in my life, I am most thankful.

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Abbreviations for DurrelPs Works

A AQ AVQ BB BS CP DL DM ER KP LL LDM MV N PC PP PS SM T VG

Acte (Faber, 1965) The Alexandria Quartet (Faber, 1968) The Avignon Quintet (Faber, 1992) The Black Book (Faber, 1973) The Big Supposer (Abelard-Schuman, 1972) Collected Poems 1931-1974 (Viking, 1980) The Dark Labyrinth (Penguin, 1978) The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-1980 (New Directions, 1988) 'Zero' and 'Asylum in the Snow': 'Two Excursions into Reality' (Privately printed, 1947) A Key to Modem British Poetry (University of Oklahoma Press, 1952) Literary Lifelines: Aldington-Durrell Correspondence (Faber, 1981) Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller: A Private Correspondence (Faber, 1963) Reflections on a Marine Venus (Faber, 1953) Nunquam (Faber, 1970) Prospero 's Cell (Faber, 1962) Pied Piper of Lovers (Cassell, 1935) Panic Spring (Faber, 1937) A Smile in the Mind's Eye (Granada, 1982) Tune (Faber, 1968) Caesar's Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence (Arcade, 1990)

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A SMILE IN HIS MIND'S EYE A STUDY OF THE EARLY WORKS OF LAWRENCE DURRELL

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Chapter 1 The Taste of Elsewhere

I started to write like everyone else, without having anything special to say. I never thought of my work as particularly original - it was a tesselation of other men's ideas filtered through my vision. But when I began to learn my job I knew that I was part of a splendid tradition ... What a gap stretched between Robinson Crusoe - the last novel of human isolation without loss of identity, without alienation, and Kafka's Castle in which the new sensibility had been mercilessly exposed to view. The new departures in scientific thought had unsettled and indeed had even ruptured both syntax and serial order; the signal of course had long been given, as when Rimbaud wrote Je est un Autre and when Laforgue echoed him with/e m'ennui Natale. (Durrell, 'From the Elephant's Back,' 4) [The Heraldic Universe] is not a 'state of mind' but a continuous self-subsisting plane of reality towards which the spiritual self of man is trying to reach out through various media: artists like antennae boring into the unknown through music or print or words, suddenly strike this Universe where for every object in the known world there exists an ideogram. (Durrell, 'The Heraldic Universe,' 72)

Durrell's novels and poetry written before the Second World War have received little critical attention. To a large extent it is as if his literary career in fiction began with The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60) and his poetry with A Private Country (1943) and Cities, Plains and People (1946). Some critics in the 1960s and even as late as the 1970s went so far as to claim The Black Book was his first novel, primarily because they were unaware of the two early, out-of-print novels, Pied Piper of Lovers, pub-

4 A Smile in His Mind's Eye

lished in 1935, and Panic Spring, issued in 1937 under the pseudonym Charles Norden. The confusion about the placement of The Black Book in Durrell's early oeuvre arose from two sources. Lawrence Lucifer, the protagonist of this agon, claims he is writing his first book. Unwisely, certain critics identified Lawrence Lucifer and Lawrence Durrell as one and the same. Further confusion arose because of the unusual publishing history of this work. Issued by the Obelisk Press in Paris in 1938, the novel, along with its two early 'siblings,' disappeared below the waves sweeping Europe during the Second World War. More than two decades later, The Black Book was reprinted in the United States by Button in 1960 and finally in England in 1973 by Faber. Like those early novels, the first three books of poetry, Quaint Fragment (1931), Ten Poems (1932), and Transition (1934), also vanished until 1980 when The Col lected Poems 1931-1974 of Durrell appeared. What little attention his poetry has received since then rarely even acknowledges these early lyrics. Instead, commentary generally begins with poems like 'The Death of General Uncebunke: A Biography in Little' and 'Five Soliloquies Upon the Tomb of Uncebunke' from A Private Country, published in 1943. To neglect the early poetry and fiction creates problems in the criticism of his later work, for these first experiments lay the foundations on which Durrell built his literary career. Durrell was asked in an interview about the importance to him of French and Greek as languages. He replies, 'It's a good question in a sense, because French is much more important to what I might call pompously my formation, my intellectual formation. But Greek occupies a special position philosophically, so to speak' (Green, 'Spirit of Winged Words,' 10). He continues: I was always reading French, you see. I mean I never stopped reading French from about the age of sixteen onwards. And of course I discovered French poetry, so to speak, from that period - the Parnassians - and from there I never looked back as a European. I felt how necessary French was. (11)

In the lecture Durrell gave at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1981 on 'the theory and practice of [his] fiction,' he relates that his French master at his school in Canterbury assisted him: on hearing that his student wanted 'to learn French and become a writer immediately' ('From the Elephant's Back,' 3), this teacher provided him with the weekly literary pages of French 'papers.' On a reading trip to Switzerland to prepare

The Taste of Elsewhere

5

for the entrance examinations to Cambridge University, he reveals that he discovered Paris and the door was opened on figures like the symbolists and Breton (Brelet, 'Interview,' 373). What Durrell actually read of French literature and what he understood during those years he gives few hints, but he does confirm that at seventeen he 'lived on philosophers and poets' ('Lawrence of Arabesques,' Ingersoll, 204). Even years later all he says is that he 'missed university but read Rimbaud' ('With That, I've Said It All,' Ingersoll, 187) after beginning with Lamartine's poems ('Lawrence of Arabesques,' Ingersoll, 205). Quaint Fragment, Durrell's first book of poetry, published in 1931, reveals a major focus of his reading centred around symbolism and its progenitors, Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. Chapter 2 ('Quaint Fragments and Literary Horizons') examines these first poems within symbolist contexts and considers their importance to Durrell's development. Characterized by suspended anacolutha, ellipses, a knowingly organized disorder, and so on, these lyrics read like a series of exercises that illustrate the elements of what was known as the symbolist movement as set out in 1886 by Jean Moreas. Landscape, in these atemporal, ahistorical poems, becomes a projection of the spirit's painful longing for a metaphysical solace and wholeness presented through a quickly shifting, osmotic relationship between the self and 'nature' in her many guises. In his attempts to suggest the nature of the mysterious reality underlying phenomena, just out of the reach of language, Durrell addresses for the first time in his fiction what he calls 'Heraldic Reality.' Viewed within the context of symbolism, there seems to be little that is original in his concept, despite claims he made to Henry Miller. Yet Durrell resembles his symbolist 'fathers' here, since they also desired 'newly meaningful equivalents with which to replace worn-out images lead [ing] ... to hidden metaphors' (Goldwater, Symbolism, 43). Soon Heraldic Reality becomes Durrell's 'signature,' symbolizing a hidden order of coherence and wisdom. Over the next few years, this personal symbol begins to evolve into a unified vision, a Heraldic Universe, whose origins at first seem to arise out of Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy of the will and its music. In a 1957 letter to Richard Aldington, Durrell writes that he owes him 'a great debt of gratitude' for introducing him at eighteen to 'French writers like De Gourmont whom [he] would otherwise not have encountered' (LL 3). In the writing of his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, Durrell continues with his symbolist investigations. This time the focus falls on Remy de Gourmont and his works, many of which had been

6 A Smile in His Mind's Eye translated into English in the early years of the last century. Chapter 3 ('Pied Piper of'Lovers: The Boy from India and the Faun') considers Durrell's heavy reliance on Gourmont's ideas such as his attacks on bourgeois values and his celebration of freedom and the role of individuality in artistic creation. An influence on Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Gourmont is too sophisticated for Durrell at this time to do much with many of his ideas. Through a murky handling of Gourmont's process of 'dissociation,' Durrell has Walsh Clifton, his eighteen-year-old protagonist, at the end of the novel reach a degree of maturity and happily accept that he has become 'De Gourmont's faun' (PP371). Its failings aside, this novel tests the limitations of symbolism in fiction for Durrell. Still more important, this text reflects Durrell's contact with Gourmont's sophisticated literary ethos, which speeded up and shaped his development, especially in areas like the relationship between sexuality and creativity. Durrell may have written his second novel under a pseudonym but he pushes on with his symbolist preoccupations. Chapter 4 ('Panic Spring: The Romance of the Will and Its Music') deals with what has been flickering intermittently in the background of the early poems and Pied Piper of Lovers, the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, considered by many as significant to much of symbolism. In this romance, Durrell sets up Mavrodaphne, the first Greek island in his fiction, so that its spirit of place becomes 'the copy, the shadow of... [the] will' (World as Will, 2: 605), through which certain of his dramatis personae begin to understand 'nature's half-spoken words' (I: 222). To convey higher gradations of the will than those manifesting themselves through nature as the ground bass of music, the novel draws on Beethoven's Piano Concerto no. 4 to symbolize the unity and omnipresence of the inscrutable will-in-itself as 'sympathy or compassion ... the basis of justice and philanthropy' (2: 601-2). Durrell not only reflects the German sage's reverence for music and the healing power of nature ('vis naturae medicatrix') (2: 241) but he even draws on metaphors from The World as Will and Representation to serve his romance. In one of the few helpful remarks he ever made about Panic Spring, Durrell dismissed the novel, calling it 'a brain-construct' (Young, 'Dialogue with Durrell,' 66). This revealing observation suggests that he attempted to execute in fiction what he could of Schopenhauer's views like those on the self, creativity, and literature. Central to an understanding of Durrell's experiments in this novel are Schopenhauer's attack on egoism, 'the starting point of all conflict' (World as Will I : 331), and his relegating of reason to a secondary posi-

The Taste of Elsewhere

7

tion in matters of art; when rationality gains the upper hand, he stresses, it hinders 'the intuitive, immediate discovery' (1: 57) of the will-in-itself. Panic Spring holds a special place in Durrell's development for at least two reasons. The first reveals his earliest attempts to handle Eastern ideas drawn from sources like kundalini and Tantrism on which he draws at the end of the novel. He explains: 'My notion of the affective flow is upwards, a notion I have borrowed from the Hindus' (Young, 'Dialogue with Durrell,' 62). The second concerns the significance of Schopenhauer in the grounding and definition of his theory of the artist, his deus loci and his Heraldic Universe. Much of the material with which Durrell wrestles has to undergo considerable development by way of Taoism before it appears in The Alexandria Quartet, some of whose concerns stem directly from this early novel. Durrell confesses that The Black Book built itself out of 'a long period of despair and frustration1 (BB 9) during which he accepted that his 'work, though well contrived, was really derivative' (BB 9). The quality of this despair, he explains, drove him to break free of his ' cultural swaddling clothes' (BB 9). In this battle he hears for the first time the true sound of his own voice. Speaking of his poems from this period, he writes that they turned out to be 'an invaluable mistress.' Poetry, he reveals, is 'form, and the wooing and seduction of form is the whole game' (Mitchell and Andrewski, Paris Review, 46) for him. Clearly he seems to have learned much from these early efforts, since The Black Book is probably his most ingeniously organized novel. Writing about the novel in 1938, T.S. Eliot praised its sense of pattern, organization of moods, and the unusual structure Durrell brought to the novel ('Statement,' Durrell Coll UCLA). What Eliot seems to have noticed is how intricately Durrell has worked on the relationship between form and meaning through musical structure, problems with which he had struggled in sections of Pied Piper of Lovers with the guitar-accompanied 'Quia Amore Langueo' and Beethoven's music in Panic Spring. Through his advance in musical structure, Durrell controls the anger and phantasmagoria of his attack on English Death through shifting surfaces: a 'visible notation of images thrown up, theme and counter theme, all mixed in a crazy fugue' (BB 126) runs throughout the novel. The ternary structure of this composition provides Durrell with a form supple enough to limn two of his major concerns: the first, the problem of action, the theme of this Taoist text, in which the protagonist Lawrence Lucifer sees himself as 'Hamlet's little godchild' (BB 136); the second, a progression from a crippling patriarchal consciousness to a feminine-

8 A Smile in His Mind's Eye

centred one based on Taoism, the source of Durrell's 'private voice and vision' (BB9). Chapter 5 ('The Black Book: The Journey to the Land Where God Is a Yellow Man') considers the importance to Durrell of the shift in the mind's axis of his protagonist and his arrival in a new spiritual territory, the domain of the 'yellow man, an old philosopher brooding over his swanpan' (BB 234), a symbol of Tao. Through the flexibility of the fugue, Durrell is able to change his symbolist settings as the music progresses with its many correspondences occurring between Lawrence Lucifer on his 'tough black button' (BB 20) of Taoist rock on his Ionian promontory and the London world of the Hotel Regina, a microcosm of English Death, where most of his mimes reside. Gourmont is helpful in explaining another aspect of Durrell's structure: he writes that 'literature is nothing but the artistic development of ideas, the symbolizing of ideas by means of heroes' (Gourmont: All His Works, 2: 344). This Durrell achieves with impressive economy, since the novel becomes 'a theatre of the idea' (BB 163) in which Lawrence Lucifer is splintered into various selves like Lobo, Chamberlain, Tarquin, and Herbert Gregory, who illustrate how English Death warps such aspects of life as sexuality, politics, and creativity. As a result, Lawrence Lucifer becomes 'the hero, the clown, the chorus' in a novel in which there are 'no extras [and] no doubles to accept the dangers' (BB 218) for him in his struggle to enter 'the heraldic baronies' (BB 210) of art and life. Fluid in movement, the fugue becomes for Durrell comprehensive enough to allow him to shape tellingly Lawrence Lucifer's painful psychological rebirth through processes like Gourmont's 'experiments in dissociation' (BB 130) and a paradigm like the one from Hamlet. At the end of the novel, Durrell reveals that Herbert Gregory, so crippled by English Death, decides 'not to be' and goes to his 'quaint suicide' (BB 239), while Lawrence Lucifer, born anew as a child 'in an ark on a black rock' (BB 244) of Tao, chooses 'to be' an artist celebrating a new vision. The 'decomposition' of character occurring throughout this fiction owes much to Freud's methods of psychoanalysis and Ernest Jones's 'The Oedipus-Complex as an Exploration of Hamlet's Mystery: A Study in Motive,' published in 1910. Early in his career Durrell produced several short pieces, most of them humorous. Chapter 6 ('Heraldic Side-Effects') examines these works since they appear as adjuncts to the major works of the 1930s. Privately printed in 1933, Durrell wrote Bromo Bombastes under the name Gaffer Peeslake. This 'fragment from a laconic drama' serves as an out-

The Taste of Elsewhere

9

rageous parody of Shaw's tale 'The Black Girl in Search of God.' Early in his career, Durrell published 'The Cherries' in Masterpiece of Thrills. Presenting this short story in symbolist dress, he seems to relish creating the bleakest rendering of Schopenhauer's version of the will as male sexual hysteria that he can. Two pieces appeared in September 1937 under the pseudonym Charles Norden. 'Obituary Notice,' a short story with a satiric edge and two delightful illustrations by Nancy Norden (Durrell's wife Nancy Myers Durrell), leaves the reader to puzzle over its symbolist enigma, an otherworldly zebra. Again, Charles Norden, this time the sports editor of The Booster, writes humorous articles, much like early versions of what one finds in the Antrobus stories. These have as their concerns topics like boxing in the light of Lao-tzu and the invention of golf as therapy for constipation among Scots as the result of the Battle of Bannockburn. The second piece, 'Down the Styx in an Airconditioned Canoe,' takes the form of a tongue-in-cheek epistle to Auntie Prudence by her nephew 'Lawrence' on what this formidable English matron, clutching in white-gloved hands her crucifix and umbrella, is to expect on her journey through the body to be born anew. Subtitled 'Two Excursions into Reality,' 'Zero' and 'Asylum in the Snow' are the most important of these early works, for they depict the world Durrell escaped in his acceptance of Taoism as a 'ground-plan of the universe' (SM 17). Totalling fewer than forty pages, this diptych stands as Durrell's farewell to a mode of life dominated by an ego rigidly controlled by rational intelligence. Echoing The Black Book at many points, these prose poems become 'the fantastic barracks of [this] idea' (ER 37), which symbolizes what is taking place in a madhouse amidst the snow and ice of an approaching Christmas. Framed by a long epigraph taken from one of Friedrich Nietzsche's letters after he went mad, these works present a variety of inmates like Vasec, Fifi, Hamlet, Judas, a writer named Lawrence Durrell, and a dancer, probably modelled on Vaslav Nijinsky, in whom Durrell had an interest. Figures of tears and suffering, these individuals illustrate the madness that arises when the ego loses contact with the id, 'the caryatid' (ER8) of the self, symbolized as 'the green girl' (ER8). In this scenario, she is allowed to visit the asylum for a brief time only on Tuesdays. With vacuous eyes, an old man, suggestive of the superego, mouths platitudes and offers confusing advice in his guise as warden of this prison. Written with icicles, these 'eclogues' become a nightmarish depiction of selves '"hallucinated by the absolute"' (ER 11), indicative of the destructive ideals of a wrongheaded society. As a result, individuals become caught up in 'a flight of

10 A Smile in His Mind's Eye

Mind in a hollow alphabet of symbols' (ER 11). As if in homage to Schopenhauer and Taoism, the protagonist in these prose poems runs to ground zero 'the annihilating ego' (ER 17). After the recognition of these dangers, Durrell ends this 'carol,' as if in celebration, with talk of wine and charity as Christmas approaches, even if there is still much to do in restoring balance to the self. Durrell's study of symbolism, Gourmont, and Schopenhauer seems to ready him for his embrace of Taoism, which exerted a profound influence on his life and work after the Second World War. Chapter 7 ('The Suchness of the Early Durrell') considers how Tao becomes a homeland, providing a centre for the self. Through Taoism Durrell claims he is able 'to englobe' the problems of his world. Within the simplicity and roominess of Tao, he is able to accommodate in his works mutually enriching materials like his love of 'the Greek mind-pattern' with its subconscious full of distant voices from early worlds like that of Persia, India, and Egypt he sensed in early Greek philosophers (Green, 'Spirit of Winged Words,' 17-18). Welcoming figures like Lao-tzu and Chuangtzu1 provide Durrell with a cosmogony and an ontology appealing enough to help him control loneliness and alienation. Through the tuning of his body to Tao, he writes, later in his life: It is not possible to thank life. The universe seems like a huge hug without arms. (CP319)

The symbol for Durrell's vision becomes a smile of ironic compassion in his mind's eye playing over his world after the Second World War.

Chapter 2

Quaint Fragments and

Literary Horizons

A lion, I was thrown to the Christians! (5M35) A good poem is a congeries of symbols which transfers an enigmatic knowledge to the reader. At its lowest power you can find the faculty in the nickname or the nursery rhyme: at its highest it reflects a metaphysical reality about ourselves and the world. (KP9Q) To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which derives from the pleasure of step-by-step discovery; to suggest, that is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the symbol: to evoke an object little by little, so as to bring to light a state of the soul or, inversely, to choose an object and bring out of it a state of the soul through a series of unravelings. ('Interview with Mallarme,' in Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories, 141)

According to Ezra Pound the most interesting Englishmen were the ones born in India (Reck, Ezra Pound, 163). What he seemed to prize was the kind of personality laid down in certain writers as the result of the melding of two such different cultures. How much of his fascination with this type of character arose out of his study of Philostratus's Life of Apollonius ofTyana is hard to say. Through Apollonius's journey to India in the first century CE, Pound saw what he claimed was the first marriage of East and West (164), a concern important to him and other twentieth-century writers like Lawrence Durrell. In the latter's case his uprooting from India and the shock of his arrival in England on 27 April 1923 at the age of eleven became a traumatic event. His schooling

12 A Smile in His Mind's Eye added to the pain and left him feeling like an exile. From the poetry of Quaint Fragment, his first book, issued in 1931, and his earliest novels through to his last major endeavour, The Avignon Quintet, completed in 1983, Durrell's works are often haunted by a sense of separation and loss. So powerful are these tugs at the heart that he seems concerned, at the deepest levels of his writings, in reforging the broken links of a life. In his unhappiness and rebellion in England, Durrell clung to his memories of life 'under the Himalayas' (DM51). Because of his alienation he recognized early in his loneliness that he was one of the world's expatriates. Of his dislocation in childhood and his sense of loss, he gives this heightened account in a letter to Henry Miller: My life is like a chopped worm. Until eleven marvellous memories - white, white the Himalayas from the dormitory windows. The gentle black Jesuits praying to our lady and outside on the frontier roads the Chinese walking stiffly and Tibetans playing cards on the ground: the blue fissures in the hills. God what a dream, the passes into Lhasa - blue with ice and thawing softly towards the holy forbidden city ... I lived on the edge of it with a kind of nursery-rhyme happiness. I wanted to go one summer into the passes. They promised to take me. But I left without going - alamort - it is a kind of unreasoning disease when I think of it. I am illogical again like a child. I whimper. I pant. And so on. (DM52) Durrell never returned to India but he did draw on his Indian background in works like Pied Piper of Lovers, The Black Book, and The Avignon Quintet. Even in texts in which there are no references to the landscape of childhood, its effects seem to go on percolating below surfaces. About The Avignon Quintet, Durrell had this to say about his quincunx, 'Well, I'm back in India now, in Buddhism with the 5 Skandas, with the mysterious fifth proposition of Aristotle, not to mention the five wives of Gampopa ... I am trying to write an Indian book.'1 So much of Durrell's work has at its heart a liberation of the self from the ego, even if he could not always sustain this in his own private life. It seems fitting, as a result, that he comes full circle in his last work, for once again he appears to be back in the realm of childhood, where 'the air [is] saturated with the Dharma (Durrell, 'Letter,' 1 January 1980). About this landscape of the spirit, he confesses: Some part of India has always been at the core of my being, and now, at the age of seventy-one, I seem to have spent my life trying to get back to my

Quaint Fragments and Literary Horizons

13

roots ... India has always been in my heart, and I want to go back there some day, back where I started. In some ways India has always been looking for me. (Sansavio, 'Durrell's Himalayas,' 59)

At the age of sixteen, Durrell read the works of Milarepa, 'the national poet of Tibet' (SM54), and this kept alive his Indian memories of family excursions into the Teetsa Valley and visits to Buddhist monasteries when they were en fete. His lifelong interests in matters Tibetan received a fresh start when he discovered that some Buddhists, fleeing the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, had bought an old chateau in 1974 at Plaige near Dijon in France and set it up as a centre for study (Durrell, 'Lamas,' 33). This group, the Kagyu Ling clan, according to Durrell, had descended 'directly - by word of mouth, by breath to breath, by bouche a la bouche, of initiation' (SM54) from the hermit-poet Milarepa. Called on to assist, Durrell headed a committee to raise money for the completion of their temple, reported to be an exact copy of the eighth-century one at Samye in Tibet (34). This first-hand interest in Tibetan affairs probably accounts, in part, for stirring up once again Durrell's childhood memories of the Indian landscape like the one he drew on in his first novel. Much of Durrell's anger about religion, which surfaces in England, seems to have come with him from India because of the fear and dislike of Christianity he experienced there. Durrell explains this by way of 'the mental jolt' (SM 34) he received in Darjeeling as a seven- or eight-year old when he went to school at the Jesuit College of St Joseph from whose dormitory windows he remembered gazing out at the Himalayas: It was a very good school and the good fathers were fine men - there was no propaganda. They preached by example only, and the example they gave was a high one. No, it was not they who gave me the shock. We Protestants numbered about forty children, and we were supposed to worship in town at the Church of England chapel. But one day while passing the Jesuit school chapel I found the door ajar and tiptoed inside, curious as children are. In the deep gloom I came upon a life-size figure of Christ crucified hanging over the altar, liberally blotched with blood and perfectly pig-sticked and thorn-hatted. An indescribable feeling of horror and fear welled up in me. So this was what those austerely garbed and bearded priests worshipped in this dense gloom among the flowers and candles! It was hardly a logical sequence of feelings and sentiments - it was quite spontaneous and unformulated. But the horror remained with me always. (SM34)2

14 A Smile in His Mind's Eye

Durrell, as he continues describing this traumatic event, reveals, in guarded terms, what appears to be another source of his early dissatisfaction. Years later, writing of his father, an engineer, conspicuous by his absence in letters, interviews, and other writing, he had this to say: [W]hen my father decreed that I must go to England for my education, I felt that he was delivering me into the hands of these sadists and cannibals, men who could worship this brutal and savage effigy on the Christian cross. Naturally I could not put all this into words for many a year, but at that precise moment I knew that henceforward I would never bring myself to trust anyone who called himself a Christian and so invoke this doom-laden symbol of unhappiness! How right I was! So far nothing has ever come my way which might persuade me to modify this somewhat decisive though perhaps absurd view. The main road which passed the school in Darjiling ran along the side of the playing-fields; the sight of Tibetan lamas setting off on their long pilgrimages to the distant plains of India was a familiar one. Smiling, as if sauntering through the pages of Kim, they whirled their small prayer-wheels. I have had them on my mind ever since and can still hear the noise of the little brass wheels as they whirred out their prayers. But I had to make a wide detour to rediscover them, the lamas! A lion, I was thrown to the Christians! (SM34-5) By the time Durrell was in his early twenties and writing The Black Book, he was able to turn much of this material into fiction in which he routs English Death, a dragon, symbolic of all that was repressive for him in a Christian England.

Durrell never saw his father again, for he died of a brain hemorrhage in India five years later on 16 April 1928. Ian MacNiven, in his authorized study, Lawrence Durrell: A Biography, traces the history and achievements of the Durrells in India from the arrival of Samuel, a soldier in the British Royal Artillery, posted in 1876 to 'Fort William in the middle of the great Calcutta Maidan on the Hooghly River.'3 His son Lawrence Samuel, educated in India as a civil engineer, is reported as always feeling inferior because he did not have the hallmark of what he called a proper English education. As a result, he was determined his sons would be educated at 'home' in England in a proper public school. How angry and resentful the young Lawrence Durrell felt about being sent off at so tender an age and being offered up to the savage effigy he saw on the Christian cross, MacNiven delineates with sensitivity and considerable restraint. Feeling deserted and betrayed, Durrell ended up attacking

Quaint Fragments and Literary Horizons 15 England. Years later, he came up with this explanation: 'I attack England because I identify it with my father. I immediately sensed the hypocrisy there and the puritanism ... I reacted with everything I had against England, primarily in order to break my father's will' (BS 26). In reaction, Durrell identified himself with the Irish through a connection by way of his mother Louisa (nee Dixie). This suited the young man's 'rebel guise,' we are told, for 'Ireland had never had a chance to hurt him' (MacNiven, A Biography, 8). Gordon Bowker, in Through the Dark Labyrinth: A Biography of Lawrence Durrell, is much more melodramatic in his assessment of these influences on the boy's life: he claims that Durrell's being shipped off to England was like being given 'a prison sentence' and served only to heighten the child's Oedipal feelings about his parents (17-18). Below the smiling exterior Bowker sees 'a deeply unhappy child who felt deserted and betrayed' (22). The results of this 'abandonment' account for what he labels the 'dark and violent' both in Durrell's fiction and his life (2). MacNiven's and Bowker's observations go far to account for what happens in Durrell's life and in his early works: his repeated failures to pass the entrance examinations to Cambridge University, his soidisant Irishness,4 and his bohemian 'jokster' persona with its fanciful embellishments of certain events in his life. In short order, Durrell's pain and resentment find expression through his iconoclastic first attempts at poetry and fiction. For most of his life Durrell maintained in his letters and interviews a cautious silence about his deepest feelings for his father. In his early and middle fiction protagonists like Lawrence Lucifer in The Black Book and Darley in The Alexandria Quartet appear as orphans, making no mention of their parents. Even Walsh Clifton's father in Pied Piper of Lovers, an engineer like Durrell's own father, is rather summarily dispatched by the bite of a hamadryad. Clergymen like the Jesuit Father Calhoun in the first novel become fearful figures for the boy Walsh Clifton, while others like the Rev. Pixie in Panic Spring and Father Paul in The Alexandria Quartet are little more than the butt of jokes in their narrowness and wrongheadedness. Turning his back on these 'figures,' which probably also reflects the idea that the artist creates his own 'parents,' Durrell, like many of his protagonists, looks to the world of art and philosophy for his spiritual 'fathers.' These 'fathers' function somewhat differently and often stand apart from what Durrell calls his 'uncles or godfathers,' figures like Henry Miller, T.S. Eliot, George Seferis, George Katsimbalis, and Dr Theodore Stephanides, whom he saw as 'benevolent spirits to

16 A Smile in His Mind's Eye

guide [his] path, to judge [his] work' ('From the Elephant's Back,' 5). Durrell's restless search for 'fathers' continues throughout much of his life and, to a large extent, limns his literary progression and development in ways quite different from his 'uncles' and his 'aunt' Anai's Nin. Durrell's earliest filiation reveals itself in Quaint Fragment and Pied Piper of Lovers, when he turns to Remy de Gourmont (1858-1915) and the symbolists whom this important French critic championed so strongly at one point in his career. In his numerous interviews up to the 1970s and his voluminous correspondence with Henry Miller, in which the two seem to discuss everything of any importance to themselves as writers, Durrell never seems to get around to discussing Gourmont and symbolism. However, Durrell, in a lecture he gave at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on 1 April 1981, entitled 'From the Elephant's Back,' discusses his past and what he thinks is central to his 'theory and practice of fiction' (1). At the age of fifteen when he was attending St Edmund's in Canterbury in 1927, he informed the French master, Mr Hollingworth, that he wanted to learn French and become 'a writer immediately' (3). This kind man, who was 'mad about France and French literature' (3), took out a subscription to Le Monde5 so that his student could read 'the weekly literary pages' ('From the Elephant's Back,' 3). According to Bowker, Durrell was hooked on French literature and the French way of life, since there was something about the smell of a French newspaper that spoke of 'an exotic culture' (Through the Dark Labyrinth, 31). In an interview in French with Claudine Brelet in 1971 but not published in English until seventeen years later, Durrell elaborates further on his early fascination with French literature: on a reading party to Switzerland to prepare him for the entrance examinations to Cambridge University he relates that he discovered Paris and bought his first book in French, Isadore Ducasse's Les Chants de Maldoror, published by Philippe Soupault (Brelet, 'Interview,' 373). He continues, 'The door was opened to Rimbaud, the Symbolists, etc. (a world totally unknown to me), with, eventually, Dada, Andre Breton, Tristan Tzara and many others' (373). Durrell's admiration for matters French went so far, according to Bowker, that the young francophile wore a black bow tie in honour of Ducasse, the self-styled Comte de Lautreamont (1846-70), and 'took absinthe a la Baudelaire,' when he worked as a railway porter at the Bournemouth station in 1931 (Through the Dark Labyrinth, 44), much to the distress of his mother Louisa Durrell. MacNiven tells us Durrell's interest in the Comte de Lautreamont went considerably beyond affectation, for he and some of his friends completed a transla-

Quaint Fragments and Literary Horizons 17

tion of Les Chants de Maldoror with Durrell supplying the 'poetry' to the text (A Biography, 88). No publisher would handle the final product. MacNiven goes on to claim that this translation threw Durrell 'deeper than ever before into French literature ... and point[s] towards the prose fantasies' (88), 'Zero' and 'Asylum in the Snow,' but he does not elaborate. Shortly after this, Durrell writes to Richard Aldington, the translator of a two-volume edition of selections from Gourmont's works published in the United States in 1929 and a single volume in England in 1932. Unfortunately this letter is lost, but in a 1957 letter to Aldington Durrell states the following: I HAVE BEEN A STUBBORN ALDINGTON FAN FOR MANY YEARS AND OWE YOU MANY A DEBT OF GRATITUDE FOR INTRODUCTIONS TO FRENCH WRITERS LIKE DE GOURMONT WHOM I WOULD OTHERWISE NOT HAVE ENCOUNTERED ... YOU WERE ONCE KIND ENOUGH TO ANSWER AN ENTHUSIASTIC EFFUSION OF MINE WHEN I WAS EIGHTEEN. (LL 3).

Durrell expands on his interests in A Key to Modern British Poetry, based on a series of lectures on modern poetry he gave to graduate teachers of English in Argentina when he was there with the British Council in 1948. In his 'Preface' to this book he tells us: Of the books which have helped me to formulate some of my own vague ideas about literature two should be of interest to all students of the contemporary scene: Wyndham Lewis' Time and Western Man and Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle. It will not be difficult to pick out the ideas I have derived from these two admirable surveys. As for the main bias of my own thinking (if I may, for want of a better word, call it that), it has developed out of a study of anthropologists like Tylor, Frazer, Rivers, etc.: of psychologists like Jung, Rank, Groddeck and their great master, Freud: of scientists like Eddington, Whitehead and Einstein. I have always regarded these various fields of thought as interlocking and mutually fertilizing, and have never hesitated to borrow an idea from one to apply in another. (jKPxi-xii)

Durrell expatiates further in these lectures on how Baudelaire and other French writers like Rimbaud, Laforgue, and Mallarme are important to a study of modern poetry. In the process, he reveals much that has shaped his own work, especially by way of symbolism.

18 A Smile in His Mind's Eye Surprisingly, interviewers and most critics writing in English have largely avoided these French influences. Durrell himself has not always been helpful when placed in front of a tape recorder and could appear secretive and even wily, despite the information readily available in A Key to Modern British Poetry. When asked by Mitchell and Andrewski in The Paris Review (Autumn-Winter 1959-60) whether he was 'conscious of any specific influences' in his writing, he replies in this fashion: You know I'm not quite sure about the word, because I copy what I admire. I pinch. When you say 'influences' it suggests an infiltration of someone else's materials into yours, semi-consciously. But I read not only for pleasure, but as a journeyman, and where I see a good effect I study it, and try to reproduce it. So that I am probably the biggest thief imaginable. I steal from people - my seniors I mean. And in fact, Panic Spring, which you said was a respectable book, seemed to me dreadful, because it was an anthology, you see, with five pages of Huxley, three pages of Aldington, two pages of Robert Graves, and so on - in fact all the writers I admire. But they didn't influence me. I pinched effects, I was learning the game. Like an actor will study a senior character and learn an effect of make-up or a particularly slouchy walk for a role he's not thought of himself. He doesn't regard that as being particularly influenced by the actor, but as a trick of the trade which he owes it to himself to pick up. (52) Of course, Durrell seems correct to dismiss 'influences' like Huxley, Aldington, and Graves and even other writers like Eliot and Pound whom he does not mention. Their works do not appear 'to infiltrate' his at the deepest levels at this point but turn up more as images and echoes at a surface level. For whatever reasons, Durrell neatly begs the question and ends up speaking not about influences but of 'pinching effects.' With the influences of Gourmont and the symbolists so pronounced in Quaint Fragment, Pied Piper of Lovers, and later works, their omission seems glaring. As if he wished to throw up a smoke screen or as if these early works would detract from his later achievements, Durrell always dismissed his first two novels scornfully, refusing to have them reissued. Even in this, he seems to have been influenced by Gourmont, who also wanted his first attempts at writing forgotten (Aldington, 'Remy de Gourmont,' 32). In 1931, Quaint Fragment: Poems Written between the Age of Sixteen and Nineteen was privately printed by the Cecil Press in London. For An Illustrated Checklist, published in 1983, Durrell provided the following state-

Quaint Fragments and Literary Horizons 19 ment: 'Never published. Cecil Jeffries bought a hand press and asked me to give him something to practise with; poems were easier than prose so I gave him an old notebook with roughs. Title was his. We took two putts I think before the type was dispersed. One copy bound (Thomas and Brigham, Illustrated Checklist, 1).

Alan Thomas and James Brigham, the editors of this checklist, append this note: 'The book is extremely rare, but Durrell's statement that only one copy was bound is an exaggeration. Three or four have passed through the antiquarian book market in the last few years, and one copy, left behind in Corfu, was destroyed' (1). Durrell may have forgotten the number of copies of the Quaint Fragment run but he becomes much more problematic when he speaks about the contents of the book and the selection of its title. In their attempted unity of mood and design, these early poems, regardless of their youthfulness, are artful in ways which belie Durrell's statement about a notebook with 'roughs.' If Jeffries came up with the title, based on the author's phrase, 'tawdry fragment,' from 'Sonnet Astray' and the word 'quaint' in 'Echoes: IF and again in 'A Dedication,' the penultimate poem in the collection, it turns out to be a felicitous choice, since it ends up focusing on and helps to illustrate Durrell's earliest influences. Durrell seems to have been fascinated by the work 'quaint' at the beginning of his career, since it appears in each of his major works before the Second World War. In his symbolist prologue to Pied Piper of Lovers, he uses the adverbial form of this word in such a bizarre way that it jumps off the page, drawing attention to itself. To the woman doctor's jagged question, 'Everything be all right?' the impersonal narrative flow provides this kind of response on behalf of the exhausted, worried John Clifton: 'The question rang oddly on the silence. He was afraid, quaintly, that she doubted the realness of his anxiety; afraid, too, to lose his grasp on events that concerned him so nearly' (PP 14; emphasis added). The words 'afraid quaintly,' by way of their strangeness, end up functioning well enough in a symbolist context; they suggest that even a simple act becomes a twisted reflex hiding so much that is deceptive in these characters' lives in this first novel. The word 'quaint' appears next in the novel Panic Spring, where it is placed at the end of the section about Francis's desperate attempt to raise money through the commercial illustrations she does after Reuben's departure. Durrell rounds off this passage on these advertisements for shoes where each of the subjects is adorned in 'garish imbecility' with a pair of luminous shoes with the observation, 'They were extraordinarily quaint' (PS 212; emphasis added). Strategically placed, the word 'quaint' appears next in The Black Book

20 A Smile in His Mind's Eye

and then in the companion text, 'Asylum in the Snow.' In this prose poem, Durrell seems to use the expression 'It was quaint' to point up his odd 'construction' of Hamlet and Ophelia in his exploration of the madness at the heart of Western rationality. In The Black Book, Durrell appears to have fully assimilated much of the symbolist ethos of creativity he centres around the word 'quaint.' More tellingly this time, he bursts into his own text by way of Lawrence Lucifer, who stresses the importance to the novel of the following passage and how the reader should 'read' it: There is only trial and error on a journey like this, and no signposts. The end is somewhere beyond even Ethiopia or Tibet: the land where God is a yellow man, an old philosopher brooding over his swanpan. In the light of a Sunday afternoon this must be read quaintly. (BB 233-4; emphasis added)

To read as 'quaintly' as Durrell wishes, the reader, in symbolist fashion, must help to create the text at hand. This becomes difficult since the word 'quaint' has shifted its stance over the years, for it has separated itself from its rich levels of lexical meaning such as 'ingeniously designed,' 'cunningly constructed,' 'uncommon in character,' and so on. Durrell seems to have been so cerebral here that he ends up being enigmatic and hermetic, for most critics appear baffled by this passage so central to the remaining few pages and the final vision at the very end of The Black Book. Told we must read quaintly in 'the light of a Sunday afternoon,' the fading light of the Judeo-Christian 'day,' most readers seem to find all this puzzling and even frustrating, especially if they know little about Taoism. Through his symbolist attacks on English Death, the product of Judeo-Christian patriarchy, Durrell draws attention to this crucial passage, which designates a shift in his protagonist's consciousness from that of the West to one modelled on the East, on Tao, the Mother of All Things. The old 'yellow' philosopher, pondering his abacus, suggests Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism. This 'father' figure, central to Durrell's spiritual development, is foregrounded briefly in the long autobiographical poem, 'Cities, Plains and People,' published in 1946, and is discussed at length in a later chapter on The Black Book, entided 'The Journey to the Land "Where God Is a Yellow Man."' Durrell appears to have been influenced by Stephane Mallarme (1854—98), whom he may not have understood very well at eighteen in his choice of Quaint Fragment as a tide for his first book of poetry. As

Quaint Fragments and Literary Horizons 21

well, the ambitious student, who wanted to master French as quickly as possible and become 'a writer immediately,' seems to emulate Mallarme when he too lays out what suggests a unified design for his proposed works. Responding to Paul Verlaine's request for personal materials for his Hommes d'aujourd'hui, Mallarme speaks of his own writing as a fragment of a greater work. He explains in this fashion: I have always dreamed of and tried for something else ... What? ... the Book, convinced that basically there is only one, attempted unknowingly by whoever has written, even Geniuses. The orphic explanation of the earth, which is the poet's sole duty and the literary game par excellence: for the very rhythm of the book, in that case impersonal and alive, even in its pagination, is juxtaposed against the equations of this dream, or Ode ... perhaps I shall succeed: not in creating this work in totality ... but in showing one executed fragment, in making its glorious authenticity scintillate in one spot, giving an indication of all the rest, for which one lifetime is not enough. To prove by finished portions that this book exists, and that I have recognized what I shall not have been able to accomplish.6

Durrell never comes right out and states his work forms one single 'book.' In his correspondence with Henry Miller, he seems to imply much more than just thematic projection when he claims that The Black Book will be followed by '"The Book of the Dead," "The Book of Miracles," etc.' (DM81). In Quaint Fragment, there is the obvious implication that these poems are 'fragments' - much in the sense of which Mallarme writes - of some larger work or vision which language attempts to convey. There is little evidence that Durrell at this time knew enough about Schopenhauer to suggest these early lyrics are 'fragments' of the unity and omnipresence of the will-in-itself. In all likelihood, what he sensed underlying Mallarme's work was little more than an appealing concept to which he was drawn much as a plant is to light. Alienated, lonely, and with a mystic bent to his personality, Durrell gives expression to his will to believe, through which he hints at a transcendent realm in keeping with his artistic temperament at this time. Through what appears to be an attempt to avoid being merely derivative, he begins to explore what he calls Heraldic Reality by way of 'heraldic shields' with their mottoes in his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers; he soon ends up labelling what is basically a symbolist domain his Heraldic Universe as he goes about trying to colonize it with suitable ideas. As if each of his works is an executed

22 A Smile in His Mind's Eye fragment of something greater, Durrell's writing over the decades remains highly consistent: woven nearly always from similar kinds of ideas with their heraldic underpinnings by way of Schopenhauer, Taoism, and figures like Georg Groddeck and Samuel Alexander, Durrell attempts to present his own 'orphic explanation' of his relationship to earth by way of his spirit of place, his deus loci. Looking back years later, Durrell said of his total work, 'After my death the whole collection of my books will have an air of a family, the characters wandering from one novel to another' (Bowker, Through the Dark Labyrinth, 392). Durrell, so early in his career, may have bitten off too much in his grandiose design but he did confer on these early 'executed fragments' through symbolism and his relationship with nature a vision for what he hoped would be his own 'merciful self-repair' (CP338). It is difficult to ascertain what texts Durrell actually read in his assault on French literature. In all likelihood one book which probably helped to direct some of his study was Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Published in 1899 and again in revised editions in 1908 and 1919, this work treats a variety of writers like Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarme, Huysmans, and Maeterlinck: in their 'revolt ... against a materialistic tradition' in an endeavour 'to disengage the ultimate essence, the soul, of whatever exists and can be realized by ... consciousness' (5), these authors record what Richard Ellmann in his 'Introduction' calls the search for a psychic reality (vii). Walsh Clifton in Pied Piper of Lovers, published in 1935, in all likelihood reveals something of Durrell himself when he has his eighteen-year-old protagonist remark that he searches books for ideas with which he can agree. Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870 to 1930 probably did not appear in time to influence Quaint Fragment, since both were published in 1931, but it did become one such text. Durrell acknowledges in his 1952 preface to A Key to Modern British Poetry that this book helped him to formulate some of his own ideas about literature and why it 'should be of interest to all students of the contemporary scene' (KP xi-xii). Tracing 'the origins of certain tendencies in contemporary literature' (Wilson, Axel's Castle, 1), the book sets out to chart the major changes which occur in writers such as W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, and Paul Valery, whose works have been 'largely a continuance or extension of Symbolism' (24). Wilson concludes his introductory chapter by stating, 'The literary history of our time is to a great extent that of the development of Symbolism and of its fusion or conflict with Naturalism' (25). Com-

Quaint Fragments and Literary Horizons 23

ing under the influence of Remy de Gourmont, 'the most distinguished critical champion' (22) of symbolism, Durrell begins his career with some of the most imaginative exemplars from French literature. This he follows up with some of the most prominent innovators in the first decades of the twentieth century who had assimilated certain of these continental influences in their attempts to revitalize literature in English. For so ambitious an acolyte as Durrell, these forces both liberated and hobbled. For any student coming to symbolism for the first time, Symons's and Wilson's books probably still stand as basic starting points. In Durrell's case, these texts help to give some idea of how he probably saw the word 'symbol' and what he considered the basic characteristic of symbolism. Symons is helpful here since he provides a definition by way of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, first published in Boston in 1836. This definition reads: In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: hence therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance ... In the Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. (Symons, Symbolist Movement, 2)

Andrew Wilton, in his 'Symbolism in Britain,' points out that Sartor Resartus became 'a cult book for the Symbolist' (30), especially after it had been translated into French and appeared in installments in 1896 in the Mercure de France, the most influential and enduring symbolist periodical (Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories, 127). Carlyle's definition of the symbol probably indicates how Durrell wanted language to function in his earliest poems in its attempt to convey what lies at the heart of symbolism. Four years after Durrell began his study of French, he published Quaint Fragment in 1931, a work best characterized as symbolist. One again ends up speculating as to what French texts he read between the ages of fifteen and nineteen and just what he was able to take from them. Probably written under the aegis of figures like Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine, these seventeen poems function within symbolist contexts. What, then, can one say about symbolism that would be in keeping with Durrell's rudimentary grasp of this movement which ran from 1885

24 A Smile in His Mind's Eye

to 1910 in various countries?7 One can say that Durrell appears to have accepted that this movement had at its core the awakening of the spirit to a higher state of being by way of the 'Idea,' the mystery at the heart of reality, as he attempted to personalize it at this time. For him, the symbol appears to be grasped as Carlyle described, but Durrell adapts it according to his own poetic needs; that is, it serves as a way of moving from the visible through suggestion, language, dream, and silence to the invisible world, limited at this stage of Durrell's development to the enigmatic relationship linking the poet and nature. Many of the lyrics in Quaint Fragment become a stage on which the I-persona projects the dream of the self most affected by the mystery of this kind of symbolist experience with nature. To suggest this inner vision, Durrell negates or suppresses nearly all naturalistic details of person, geography, history, and narration: what he is left with are an atemporality and an I-persona whose generalized self can be extended to embrace and explore a variety of symbolist types and situations. The essence of many of these poems often consists of what is not or cannot be expressed. One can also say some of Durrell's ideas at the outset of his career appear to stem directly from Jean Moreas (1859-1901). Born loannes Papadiamantopoulos in Greece, he ended up in Paris, where he met writers like Verlaine in 1882 and Mallarme in 1883 and published poetry through which he 'established his reputation among the avantgarde literary clubs' (Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories, 150). In a response to an 'article mocking new poetic trends,' Moreas was asked by the editor of the literary supplement of Le Figaro to respond. The result, published on 18 September 1886, established for better or worse the critical term 'symbolism'8 and outlined much that is still considered basic to the movement. Some of Durrell's ideas on symbolism central to these early poems appear to stem directly from the Moreas article, translated by Henri Dorra as 'A Literary Manifesto - Symbolism (1886)' (Symbolist Art Theories, 151-2). This seminal essay stresses that symbolist 'poetry endeavours to clothe the Idea in a form perceptible to the senses ... [but] the essential character of symbolist art is never to reach the Idea itself (151). To achieve this effect, Moreas explains that symbolism requires a complex style: 'pure sounds, densely convoluted sentences alternating with gentler rhythms, significant redundancies, mysterious ellipses, suspended anacolutha, any bold and multiform trope, and finally good language, restored and modernized' (152). At this point, he gives examples of writers he approves of and then moves on to talk of rhythm: here he

Quaint Fragments and Literary Horizons 25

stresses the role of 'a knowingly organized disorder,' of attempting to achieve a 'mysterious fluidity' and verse with 'multiple and mobile caesuras' (152). Like illustrations of this manifesto, Durrell's first poems attempt to generate a sense of openness and spiritual search by way of the selection of personal symbols through which the manipulation of a mood becomes central to the poem. Reflecting life as a dream, Durrell often attempts to blur reality in order to present the ideal more clearly. Verse forms and line rhythms become fluid and strange, probably in an effort to imitate the indefiniteness of music, often more talked about than practised by many symbolists. At this time, Durrell's attempts in Quaint Fragment are but a juvenile stab at symbolist work, even as these lyrics seem to approximate a definition like this one summing up this kind of poetry: These poems are a living arabesque in which metaphor, before even being completed, diverges as the mood changes, bringing forth another that itself metamorphoses. The extreme motility of the idea is borne out by the grammatical context: garlands of genitives, impersonal and neutral verbs becoming active, every word getting full play. (126)

Durrell may not be able to give all his words full play nor end each poem with the sophistication he would like, but in a few years he is much more adept in carrying out his intentions. Durrell, in A Key to Modern British Poetry, published in 1952, reflects this assimilation in a summing up of these symbolist ideas by way of Moreas, especially in the concern for 'a knowingly organized disorder.' 'A good poem,' Durrell claims, is 'a congeries of symbols which transfers an enigmatic knowledge to the reader' (XP90). Through this congeries, this disorderly ordering, this seemingly disconnected piling up of symbols, the good poem, 'at its highest,' we are told, 'reflects a metaphysical reality about ourselves and the world' (XP90). In 1931 Durrell had not matured enough to suggest much beyond an orphic posturing about the poet's metaphysical relationship to earth arid her mysteries. A symbolist ethos of the kind delineated by Moreas no doubt encouraged a young writer like Durrell while providing a cloak to mask certain inadequacies. Durrell, with a fashionable touch of Baudelairean 'spleen,' probably best described here as a melancholic world-weariness, which arises out of the personal conditions of a life, likely took comfort in and began to construct a persona for himself from the elitist symbolist view of the poet as a renunciant (Symons, Symbolist Movement, xiii), one who

26 A Smile in His Mind's Eye gives up contentment and suffers in his loneliness and feeling of exile for the sake of his art and his soul. These seventeen poems in Quaint Fragment become a kind of theatre in which Durrell sets up a stage for the working out of certain symbolist ideas important to his development at this time. Dominating most of these lyrics are some of the basic concerns one finds in certain symbolist works: a shift from the visible to the invisible, from the material to the spiritual world by way of the unconscious and its prompting; moods of crisis, suffering, and nostalgia; a focus on the inadequacy of language and the problems of writing which leave the I-persona pinioned between painful doubts and a longing for release; and, in Durrell's case, a yearning for a healing symbiosis with nature. Anna Balakian, in The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal, writes that such an I-figure can become elevated to 'cult' status, transcending 'mere preoccupations with the personal ego' (131). She goes on to say that the symbolist T can be identified with 'a whole area of the human condition, particularly as it was prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century, and which re-echoes among so many artists in the mid-twentieth century' (49). In 'The Gift' (CP 17), the opening lyric in Quaint Fragment, its I-persona indicates little of this kind of extension; as a symbolist prologue, this poem suggests much that is to follow by way of symbol and semantic disturbance. In itself the poem seems simple enough with its I-figure ordering that the purse, this collection of poetry, with its lyrics like newly minted coins, be slit open and examined. Fearfully, the speaker imagines his offering to this muse being casually considered, then relegated to the springtime place where youthful enterprises of this type often end up. What becomes important here is the method of semantic disturbance byway of ellipses and the flow of ideas within certain lines. With its eliding syntax, the first three lines of 'The Gift' give way to a technique of wrenching lines apart, seemingly to achieve enigmatic effects. This is illustrated by the jump from 'spring' in line three to what follows after in line four, where materials are spread out in this kind of arbitrary arrangement: To the rich Autumn leaves: The crumbled dust Of ancient adorations, murmurings, And the dull story of some faded lust... [Ellipsis added]9 The fourth line of the poem about 'Autumn leaves' with its colon proba-

Quaint Fragments and Literary Horizons

27

bly does not act as a true anacoluthon, but it does disrupt the flow of ideas so that the reader is left staring away into space, into absence, confronting a disturbing strangeness. Faced with sprawling tropes of faded 'worship,' mutterings, and the account of some ghostly lust, the reader, moving within this strange flow, finds himself enmeshed in the I-persona's fearful doubts about what he later calls 'these lame and halting parodies / Of greater, better poems.' Used several times in other lyrics, this technique of pulling lines apart after colons often seems more successful in later poems in generating ambiguity, which Balakian sees 'as a part of the process of construction of the poem-riddle' (Balakian, Critical Appraisal, 49). Here this dismembering device seems to work well enough since the reader, in the ebbing of this lukewarm flow of emotion, ends caught up in the question whether this muse will remember the 'purse' of poems when the I-persona imagines himself emptyhanded in some frigid, barren future. The reader, in the presence of this 'mother-wise' figure, seems prompted to create an affirmative answer to the 'child's' symbolist question. The process of unsettling surface reality is also maintained through the insertion of three dots between certain word groupings to create an ellipsis. Used more than twenty times throughout these lyrics, these ellipses at first isolate sections of thought and allow some lines to trail off, as if something is omitted or there is more to be said which cannot be expressed. The I-persona does acknowledge later that this can be an aspect of language itself with its 'unintelligible throng / Of words inadequate.' Ellipses, along with devices like caesuras, play a major role in these poems in dissolving surface and suppressing rational explanation and realistic narrative flow, both of which were anathema to symbolists. Drawing attention to themselves, these ellipses begin to unsettle the reader, further forcing him to question their placements and values when he has to glide over these spaces and gaps. This sense of disordering and the opening out of these poems in an attempt to establish the 'mysterious fluidity,' which Moreas commends, suggests the invisible world of the psyche with its promptings; from the unconscious, these stirrings bubble up so that the definite blurs into the indefinite. Generating ambiguity, these ellipses become part of the construction of 'the poem-riddle.' According to Balakian, what often occurs in poems like these is what she labels 'the poetization of the reader' (159). This creation of an 'elite reader,' attuned to what the poem is attempting, results in a collaboration with the poet, through which the reader becomes a creator of the poem he is reading.

28 A Smile in His Mind's Eye

Durrell, with his I-persona set up in a fashion similar to that discussed by Balakian so that it can extend to other areas of 'the human condition,' appears to take his cues from Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) and Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91). A 'fountainhead for the symbolist movement' (31), Baudelaire asserts that the artist needs to be at once 'a detached observer of the drama of his life and an active participant in it' (Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories, 7). Durrell's observation of the self still awaits a stronger treatment but can be observed in important poems like 'Largesse' and 'Sonnet Astray.' At this point in his development, Durrell seems more at ease following Rimbaud's dictum, Je est un autre. This can be seen in the way the I-persona seems to flow into and become one with variants of self such as a modern Christ and a dark Grecian. At times, this extends as well to the I-persona's relationship to nature with her enigmatic 'you' voice. Like the segments of a musical composition, the subjective world of this I-figure also appears to merge, because of symbolist preoccupations and moods, with that of the more impersonal poems like 'Crisis,' 'Futility,' and 'Highwayman.' Speaking of Rimbaud in A Key to Modern British Poetry, Durrell sees the famous pronouncement Je est un autre as 'a magical phrase, for it not only expresses this feeling of dedoublement but in its very dislocation of the grammatical form it prefigures much that is to come. It is both mantic and semantic in its implications' (XP42). Durrell, in 1942, published a twenty-five-line lyric, '"/