Books: The Carnal Jigsaw

(2 of 3)

Each book of the quartet has been weaker than the one before. But this is as much a tribute to the first volume, Justine, as a criticism of the others, for it is hard to see how the febrile excitement and verbal surprise of Justine could have been maintained. In all four volumes, Durrell has created a world peopled by extraordinary grotesques; each book is suffused with love of the ancient city and each is rich in pungent, aphoristic comment on man's fate. Novelist Durrell has very nearly brought off a major project, which—for poetic evocation and determined grappling with big themes—has not been duplicated by any postwar writer.

"I'm a dervish," says Lawrence Durrell.

"I dance, or try to." It is an apt description of his prose and his life, though scarcely of the man. At 48, Durrell is a short (5 ft. 3½ in.), chunky (145 Ibs.) man with clear blue eyes, thick blond-grey hair and a blunt face. Though his forebears were Irish Protestants, Durrell began his whirling-dervish life in India, where his engineer father helped build the Darjeeling Railway and died when Larry was 17. Recalls Durrell: "We lived the life which Kipling romanticized in Kim. All day long, processions of lamas passed my school whirling prayer wheels."

Larry spoke Hindi as a child and early felt the split-level identity of "a mixed-up colonial kid."

Back in England, the colonial kid whirled in and out of schools, failed to get into Cambridge, distinguished himself by playing jazz piano in a nightclub called the "Blue Peter." At 18, he wrote his first novel, Pied Pipers of Lovers, a dismal flop. To rip off his "cultural swaddling clothes," Durrell fled to Europe, and in the early '305 settled on the Greek island of Corfu. There, Larry learned Greek and discovered a literary foster father, Henry Miller.

Obviously affected by Miller's "Tropics," Durrell erupted with a steamy item called The Black Book, still regarded as too obscene" to be published in Britain jr America. When his disciple's novel cached Miller, that dithyrambic daddy f all unshy pornographers effused: 'Down with Shakespeare! Down with Jhaucer! I greet Lawrence Durrell as the first Englishman." Even that cool sage, T. S. Eliot, bobbed approval. For Durrell he effect was tonic, "like suddenly hear-ng your own tone of voice."

Big-City Tone Poem. World War II soon drowned out Durrell's voice while ic served as a British press attache in Athens, Cairo and Alexandria. In 1952, ic was ready to begin the "Big-City Tone Poem" that had been bubbling in his mind for more than a decade, only to lave the Cyprus crisis force him back to press-officer duty amid the tragic rup-;ure of Anglo-Hellenic relationships, which Durrell later movingly described in Bitter Lemons (TIME, March 24, 1958). Finally, in the years 1956-59, beginning in Cyprus and ending in Southern France, Durrell wrote The Alexandria Quartet.