Reilly 110.

Durrell, Lawrence George (1912–1990), novelist and poet, was born on 27 February 1912 at Jullundur in the Punjab, India, the first of the five children of Lawrence Samuel Durrell (1884–1928), a civil engineer then with the railway system, and his wife, Louisa Florence Dixie (1884–1964), from a family associated with the Thomason College of Civil Engineering at Roorkee. Neither parent had seen England, and many of Durrell's forebears, over half from England, but some protestant Irish on his mother's side, had gone to India before the revolt of 1857–9 as privates or non-commissioned officers in the British army. Durrell emphasized how rooted in India his ancestors were, speaking the local languages and studying Buddhism. Durrell's father became quite successful: his construction firm, Durrell & Co., built much of the Tata iron and steel enterprise in Jamshedpur. This heritage was vital in forming Durrell's outlook: a cosmopolitan, he called himself ‘a pure Anglo-Irish-Indian ASH BLOND’ (Durrell–Miller Letters, 50), but could never identify fully with England, Ireland, or even India.

During Durrell's early life the family followed his father to various postings. The next child born after Lawrence died in infancy, but two brothers and a sister survived to adulthood. His youngest sibling was Gerald Malcolm Durrell (1925–1995), who became a noted zoologist and author. After some tutoring by his Irish governess in Kurseong, Durrell spent the years 1921–2 in the primary school at St Joseph's College in Darjeeling, within sight of the Himalayas, and the vast panorama of snowy peaks remained his lifelong metaphor for unattainable beauty. Although baptized at the chapel of St Luke in the Jullundur cantonment, late in his life Durrell considered himself a Buddhist.

In 1923 Durrell sailed with his family for England, where he was left by his parents to continue his schooling for two years at St Olave's and St Saviour's in Southwark and then for one year and a term at St Edmund's College in Canterbury. Durrell dropped out of St Edmund's in December 1927, having completed only the fourth form. He then studied with an army crammer at Cambridge, but did not join the army, and claimed—no corroborating evidence exists—to have repeatedly failed university entrance examinations. On the death of his father, aged forty-three, at Dalhousie in April 1928, his mother moved to England, living successively in south London and Bournemouth. Durrell demanded his patrimony, and on £150 a year he embarked at about the age of eighteen on a bohemian existence in London, convinced that he would become a poet and spending much of his time in the British Museum reading room, while attempting to supplement his income through various stratagems: as estate agent, jazz pianist, and, with the Slade art student Nancy Isobel Myers (1912–1983), studio photographer. Durrell's first book of poems, Quaint Fragment, was printed on a friend's hand press in 1931. A year spent in relative seclusion in a Sussex cottage produced Durrell's first work of fiction, Pied Piper of Lovers, written as an entry for a first novel prize offered by Cassell. Durrell did not win, but Cassell published his novel, paying an advance of £50. Early in March 1935, having married Nancy Myers on 22 January, the 5 foot 2 Durrell and his tall, slender bride set off for the island of Corfu, where they were soon joined by his mother and siblings. In 1956 Gerald Durrell published his hilarious version of their Corfu adventures, My Family and other Animals...

In 1941 Durrell, Nancy, and their infant daughter, Penelope, fled to Egypt ahead of the German invasion. While in Egypt during the war he composed Prospero's Cell, a lyrical account of the life he had lived on Corfu, as well as a teasing suggestion that the island might have been the setting for Shakespeare's Tempest. Durrell's book is not travel literature but a ‘foreign residence’ account, combining a first-person narration and vividly presented characters and events with a palimpsest of history, botany, and folkways. In 1947 he drafted another book in this genre about Rhodes: Reflections on a Marine Venus, eventually published in 1953...

Durrell still thought of himself as a poet forced to write novels to support himself, but in 1945 he sketched out for Eliot his master plan for fiction. He would treat, sequentially, the agon (struggle), pathos (suffering), and anagnorisis (recognition). These three main thrusts would present dislocation, uniting, and acceptance and death. In The Black Book Durrell had already described the necessary dislocation of the artist from suffocating England. ‘The Book of the Dead’—Durrell's working title for The Alexandria Quartet—would show the birth of the artist through suffering and love. The final segment he called provisionally ‘The Book of Time’, and, true to his plan, The Revolt of Aphrodite and The Avignon Quintet would purport to vanquish time and death. Durrell's sequence, loosely linked by his major themes, love, art, and death, by geography (the Mediterranean world), and by a few recurring characters, eventually comprised twelve volumes in all and took him almost fifty years to complete. Durrell considered his first two novels outside his master plan, and he placed in the potboiler category two later works of fiction, The Dark Labyrinth and White Eagles over Serbia.

In Egypt Durrell found employment as public information officer attached to the British embassy, first in Cairo and, from 1942, in Alexandria. His familiarity with a broad spectrum of the polyglot society of the Egyptian cities provided him with material for his Quartet. Divorce from Nancy, marriage on 17 February 1947 to the Alexandrian Yvette (Eve) Cohen (b. 1918), various press officer jobs in Rhodes, Yugoslavia, and Cyprus, interrupted by a year as director of the British council in Córdoba, Argentina—where he wrote the monograph A Key to Modern Poetry—postponed Durrell's start on the Quartet until 1955. He completed Justine, the first volume of the Quartet, on Cyprus in 1956, after his separation from Eve, and wrote the remaining three volumes in Languedoc, where he lived near Nîmes and in Sommières...

Durrell's later years were trouble-filled. His marriage to his fourth wife, Ghislaine de Boysson, a model and actress whom he married in 1973, ended in divorce in 1978; and his daughter Sappho committed suicide in 1985. Although he talked about a major novel to follow the Quintet, Durrell was barely able to complete Caesar's Vast Ghost, his non-fiction tribute to his beloved Languedoc and to Provence. His relationship with his final companion, Françoise Kestsman, a translator and restaurateur, was turbulent; his laboured breathing was diagnosed as due to emphysema; and he tried with varying degrees of success to stave off his heavy drinking with yoga and acupuncture. He died on 7 November 1990 of a cerebral haemorrhage at his home in Sommières, France, and was buried on 8 November at La Chapelle St Julien, Sommières. After Durrell's death, Sappho's literary executor accused the author of an incestuous relationship with his daughter, on the uncorroborated revelations of ‘recalled memory’ induced while Sappho was undergoing psychoanalysis. On the basis of present evidence, this accusation should be regarded as unfounded...

I. S. MacNiven, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography