From the Elephant's Back (45 page)

From the Elephant's Back

[1]
.   Durrell first delivered this paper in French as a lecture on April 1, 1981 at Centre Georges Pompidou, a major library and exhibition gallery in the Beaubourg area of Paris. He only subsequently published the English version in James Meary Tambimuttu's
Poetry London–New York
and
Apple Magazine
. A significant variant of the lecture is available in typescript in English at the Bibliothèque Lawrence Durrell at the Université Paris Ouest, Nanterre.

[2]
.   These first two volumes of
The Avignon Quintet
, which was so titled posthumously, are
Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness
and
Livia or Buried Alive
. Durrell considered the formal issues in these two books quite a bit, and he was particularly concerned with form while beginning
Livia
just after having finished
Monsieur
. He attempted to revise
Monsieur
to address his new ideas but could not, and the variant first chapter of
Livia
shows these formal ideas clearly (Gifford and Stevens 173–93).

[3]
.   This critique distinguishes Durrell's lecture from the then popular seminars of Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) who was tied to the “linguistic turn” in modern literary critical theory, and whom Durrell derogates in his “Endpapers and Inklings” by writing, “As for Lacan—what a frenzy of ignoble parody, rhetoric of self-aggrandisement!” (90). It may also be a general turn away from the “linguistic turn” itself, though this is unlikely given Durrell's other interests.

[4]
.   Since his youth, Durrell self-identified as Anglo-Indian, most famously so in his letters to Henry Miller, in which he clarified, “I enclose a photograph to prove that I am NOT a Greek, but a pure Anglo-Irish-Indian ASH BLOND” (Durrell and Miller 30). Durrell's Irish background is disputed, but he was born in India, and in 1968 was redefined as a British non-patrial without the right to enter or settle in Britain without a visa. This was due to the amendment to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1962, which aimed to curb immigration from India, Pakistan, and the West Indies.

[5]
.   Durrell's 1935 novel
Pied Piper of Lovers
resembles Rudyard Kipling's (1865–1936) 1901 novel,
Kim
.

[6]
.   This is very likely a reference to Norman Mailer's 1957 essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” alluding to Durrell's time in the 1930s playing jazz and failing to fit into English culture.

[7]
.   The Indian Rope Trick began as a hoax in 1890 but was developed as stage magic. Versions range from a rope standing up in the air, which a child or assistant would then climb and descend, through to a child climbing the rope, disappearing, his limbs falling to the ground, and then being reassembled. The hoax was revealed in 2004 in Peter Lamont's
The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick
. If Durrell had seen the trick in the 1920s, it would have been stage magic deriving from the 1890 hoax.

[8]
.   While these are both exaggeration, Durrell does use Hindi and Urdu in his first novel,
Pied Piper of Lovers
. Everest was not visible, but he could have seen Kanchenjunga from the dormitory (MacNiven 40).

[9]
.   This is a reference to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which is also called India's First War of Independence.

[10]
. Durrell's paternal great-grandfather moved to India aged eighteen, and his maternal great-grandmother was born there. Both his parents and all his siblings were born in India, and neither parent had visited Britain before sending him there for his education, aged eleven.

[11]
. Durrell's father, Lawrence Samuel Durrell, was a significant railway engineer (MacNiven 1–26).

[12]
. Similar claims are made about Durrell's character Mountolive in
The Alexandria Quartet
.

[13]
. This sets Durrell's works in comparison to George Orwell's “Shooting an Elephant” and invites contrasting readings of their views on empire and government. This is especially so if the elephant is regarded in both texts as a symbol for the British Empire's demise. Durrell and Orwell sparred in the English press and appeared to have borrowed from each other in their novels. Orwell discusses Durrell's
The Black Book
in the second publication of “Inside the Whale,” and the two shared several friends, such as George Woodcock and Henry Miller, though Durrell's sympathies for anti-authoritarian politics (as with Woodcock and Miller's overt anarchism) could not easily relate to Orwell's socialism.

[14]
. Ranchi was a significant industrial and military town southeast of Delhi, near to West Bengal. MacNiven identifies this uncle as William Henry Durrell (46).

[15]
. In contrast with Orwell's imperial elephant in “Shooting an Elephant,” Durrell's Sadu becomes a partner rather than a threat or “White Man's Burden.”

[16]
. Durrell's comparison of the poet and the seer is akin to his good friend G.S. Fraser's “Ideas About Poetry VI” in the journal Durrell co-edited in Egypt,
Personal Landscape
: “All poems written or unwritten exist. I don't mean a platonic but a biological existence. Their relation to their written form is the relation of the model to its portrait. The special ability of the poet is to see them: that's why the poets are sometimes called seers” (2).

[17]
. Lawrence Samuel Durrell tended to several rail lines, but this is likely the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, well-known as the “toy train” for it small, powerful engines.

[18]
. These railways provide the opening scenes for both
Monsieur
and
Quinx
, the first and final novels of Durrell's
Avignon Quintet
, which he was writing at the same time as this piece.

[19]
. Durrell's ties to Judaism are complex. His second and third wives were both Jewish and Zionist, and he wrote a series of pro-Israeli, Zionist works prior to 1967–1968, after which his attitudes appear to have changed.

[20]
. St. Joseph's College, North Point, Darjeeling.

[21]
. Durrell's alter ego, Walsh, in
Pied Piper of Lovers
has these traits and punches well (26, 82, 122).

[22]
. Durrell includes a scene such as this in
Pied Piper of Lovers
involving Abel, the French master (126). As MacNiven points out, “Larry's memory failed him—
Le Monde
did not commence publication until 1944—yet he did rise from 13th out of 16 in French to first place in his form” (63).

[23]
. Durrell refers on several occasions to the importance of colonial and diplomatic dress. Donald Kaczvinsky has detailed this element of ornamentalism (“Memlik's” 93–118).

[24]
. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) and Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) were both significant influences on Durrell. His “Bromo Bombastes” is a rebuttal of Shaw, whom he engaged in a brief correspondence, and his
Pied Piper of Lovers
shows a significant influence from Kipling.

[25]
.
Robinson Crusoe
is an important novel at the beginning of the novelistic tradition in English, published by Daniel Defoe (c. 1659–1731) in 1719. Franz Kafka's (1883–1924) existential novel
The Castle
was published posthumously in 1926.

[26]
. Durrell refers to both poets and works elsewhere as well, notably in his poem “Je est un autre.”

[27]
. From the mid-1930s onward, D.H. Lawrence's June 15, 1914 letter to Edward Garnett held special significance to Durrell:

You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically-unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond—but I say “diamond, what! This is carbon.” And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.) (Lawrence,
Letters
183)

Lawrence's use of the term “allotropic” derives from two footnotes in F.W.H. Myers's
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
(Gibbons 338–41), and it is this “‘subliminal self' which represents ‘our central and abiding being'” (Gibbons 339). Also see Durrell's 1936 letter to Alan Thomas, in which he claims, “it is a qualitative difference in which I blow the Lawrentian trumpet. I [know?] my own kind, I haven't begun. Beside Lawrence, beside Miller, beside Blake. Yes, I am humble, I have hardly started. BUT I AM ON THE SAME TRAM” (
Spirit
50).

[28]
. This mention of Hamlet is likely in reference to Ernest Jones's (1879–1958) article “The Oedipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery,” which was expanded and later published as a book,
Hamlet and Oedipus
. Both versions developed in response to Sigmund Freud's (1856–1939) comments on wish fulfilment and what would become the Oedipal drama in relation to Freud's comments on
Hamlet
in his
The Interpretation of Dreams
.

[29]
. See C.P. Snow's
The Two Cultures
, which is based on his 1959 Cambridge lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” In this famous work, he articulates the disjunctions between scholarship in the humanities and the sciences arguing for a synthesis of the two.

[30]
. To some degree, this is an exaggeration, but Paul Valéry was indeed strongly interested in the sciences and mathematics, both of which receive significantly more attention in his
Cahiers
than poetry. T.S. Eliot learned of Patanjali from James Haughton Woods and his
Yoga System of Patanjali
while a graduate student at Harvard and insisted this was a valuable part of his studies (Eliot,
Letters
109); W.B. Yeats wrote the introduction to Patanjali and Purohit Swami's
Aphorisms of Yoga
for Faber & Faber's 1938 edition, and Patanjali influenced his poetic works (Marsh 15–18); Rainer Maria Rilke is less clear but is frequently quoted in literature relating to Patanjali; and Pessoa's “lucid exposition” could be any number of his essays from 1917 through the 1920s, though possibly his intended introduction to a translation of Alvaro de Campos's
Ultimatum
.

[31]
. This was Durrell's inheritance (aged sixteen) after his father's death in 1928. His first trips to France date from the same period.

[32]
. Durrell first moved to Greece to reside on Corfu in 1935, when he was twenty-three, though his good friend George Wilkinson was writing to him from Greece a year earlier.

[33]
. Heraclitus (c. 535–475) was an obscure Greek philosopher from Asia Minor who is famous for harmonizing opposites and emphasizing mutability and continual change.

[34]
. All of Durrell's first three novels refer to India, though
Pied Piper of Lovers
(written in England in 1934–1935 but edited and proofed on Corfu) does so most overtly.
The Black Book
was Durrell's first major literary work, published in 1938 but first drafted in 1935 concomitant with editing
Pied Piper of Lovers
.

[35]
. Although Durrell was devoted to the psychoanalytic component of automatism in Surrealism, he was opposed to its communist components and social theorizing. His role in distinguishing between surrealist methods against Surrealism's politics was important to English Surrealism in the later 1930s and 1940s as well as to the New Apocalypse movement. Durrell's comment in the proceeding sentence that Surrealism “did not really touch my deeper preoccupation with form” is a quintessentially New Apocalyptic sense of the movement as “a post-surrealist Romantic Movement…[that] believes in the functions of form” (Schimanski and Treece 14). This component is intimately tied to their anarchist notion of Personalism, which developed from their ties to Herbert Read, and it in turn reflects Read's correspondence with Miller on the subject at the time. James Keery notes that Durrell's “involvement in the Apocalypse movement is documented in [John] Goodland's papers” and Durrell was included in the drafting of the New Apocalypse's manifesto in Leeds in December 1938 (884, 882). The December 1938 drafting would coincide with his visit to London in the same year and the final issue of
Delta
, which he co-edited with David Gascoyne, who was also heavily tied to the New Apocalypse and wrote the first guide to Surrealism in English in 1935.

[36]
. Heinrich Schliemann, an archaeologist, first identified the location of Troy in his attempt to demonstrate that Homer's
Iliad
referred to historical events. While this is still a topic of much dispute, Schliemann's views were influential.

[37]
. Durrell was particularly fond of this simile as a dismissal of “the discrete human personality” (
Justine
196), and Pursewarden asks, “Are people…continuously themselves, or simply over and over again so fast that they give the illusion of continuous features?” (196).

[38]
. Lewis's 1927 book, in which he critiques the main exponents of Modernism while also attacking several of their philosophical origins or counterparts, such as Henri Bergson's and Alfred North Whitehead's notions of time or duration.

[39]
. Durrell later wrote an introduction, in French only, for the French edition of Lewis's novel
Tarr
(567–68).