Books: The Carnal Jigsaw

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Stony-broke and close to hunger, he trusted his dervish genius to see him through. Sometimes typing "a slab of 10,000 words every two days," Durrell reeled off his tetralogy at an astonishing clip: Justine (about four months), Balthazar (six weeks), Mount olive (two months), Clea (seven weeks). His major defect, he feels, is overwriting, a prose style that is "too juicy."

At times, Durrell is plagued by the fear that all his creative juices will dry up, or that he will "do a Dylan Thomas and blow up with beer." His next literary project is far from juiceless. He hopes "to do something big, rambling, and perhaps rather bawdy. My theory is if you get too priggish and rule out the bawdy, you also lose the tenderness. The two things march together, as they did for the Elizabethans."

Ready Epitaph. Neo-Elizabethan Durrell leads a ruminative life these days in his four-room, stone peasant house in the south of France, near Nimes. After a full morning at the typewriter, he putters about building a stone wall, or shoots an occasional game bird, or strums a guitar to his own bawdy lyrics. A veteran of two stormy marriages, he looks forward to the summer visits of his ten-and 20-year-old daughters, who live in England. He is still content with the epitaph he once proposed for himself: "I intend to die young and have the following words on my tomb: 'Lawrence Durrell wishes you great passions and short lives.' If I die old, it will only need altering by one word."