From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings Read online

  However, this anti-authoritarian component of Durrell’s early works came to a head in 1948, shortly after a rapid flurry of publications and attempted publications by anarchist presses and periodicals as well as projects by other authors that he supported through the same literary circle.[5] In 1949, Durrell relocated to Yugoslavia, and in this new place, his anti-Marxist position was reshaped and intensified. The humanist and anti-Marxist elements of the anarchism envisioned by Miller in works like “An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere” took on, for Durrell, a conservative tenor after his sequential postings to Belgrade and then Cyprus, the former of which he regarded as proof of the impoverished outcomes of authoritarian communism. As Durrell wrote to his dear friend Theodore Stephanides while serving in Belgrade in 1949, in a letter taken up by Andrew Hammond as a demonstration of Durrell’s confirmed conservatism,

  There is little news except that what I have seen here has turned me firmly reactionary and Tory: the blank dead end which labour leads towards seems to be this machine state, with its censored press, its long marching columns of political prisoners guarded by tommy guns. Philistinism, puritanism and cruelty. Luckily the whole edifice has begun to crumble, and one has the pleasurable job of aiding and abetting. (Durrell, Spirit 101; Hammond 49)

  However, like most of Durrell’s comments on his reactionary nature, hyperbole and irony play a significant role. Durrell’s immediately previous letter to Stephanides shows a much different context and a far more qualified position:

  Conditions are rather gloomy here—almost mid-war conditions, overcrowding, poverty: As for Communism—my dear Theodore a short visit here is enough to make one decide that Capitalism is worth fighting for. Black as it might be, with all its bloodstains, it is less gloomy and arid and hopeless than this inert and ghastly police state. (Durrell, Spirit 100)

  This is hardly unqualified conservatism. Moreover, while he did not consider it as bad as Yugoslavia under Tito, Durrell’s capitalism remains black and bloodstained, and by 1974 he intimately bound money to merde (Monsieur 141) through “Marx’s great analysis of our culture or the Freudian analysis of absolute value as based on infantile attitudes to excrement. Gold and excrement” (141). A kindred irony appears in another of Durrell’s often quoted comments in a late-in-life interview: “I’m conservative, I’m reactionary and right wing” (Green 23; Pine, Lawrence 393–94; Calotychos 185). Richard Pine quotes from a portion of Peter Green’s interview, Vangelis Calotychos quotes Pine to demonstrate Durrell’s right-wing position, and from this context, Marilyn Adler Papayanis contends, “Durrell’s…reactionary politics [are] an important component of his ethics of expatriation” (41). However, this overlooks the irony and contextual poignancy of Durrell’s original statement in its original context. When Green asked, “Were you, or are you, romantic about Greece?” (23), Durrell offered a pointed response:

  Yes. I think super-starry-eyed in a sense.…Remember that neither my father nor mother had ever seen England.…I was already under the shadow of the myth of the British raj.…But I’ve been progressively disgusted with our double-facedness in politics over situations like the Greek situation. Remember I’ve worked as an official in Cyprus on that disgusting situation which was entirely engineered by us, do you see….And, as I say, I’ve never got over the fact of feeling ashamed that bits of the Parthenon are lying about. I refused a CMG[6] on those grounds, though I didn’t make an issue of it, and I don’t want to—I’m conservative, I’m reactionary and right wing—so I don’t want to embarrass anybody. But the reason I make a polite bow-out of the whole thing was that I didn’t want to be decorated by people who had bits of the Parthenon lying about in their backyard; and are too shabby not to send the biggest battleship…immediately back to the Greeks with it…to thank them for our existence. (Green 23)

  Like his qualified siding with capitalism over communism, for Durrell to reject the legitimacy of British Hellenic holdings in the British Museum and the Elgin Marbles is hardly reactionary and points to the irony in his political positions as well as his express disputation with British colonialism. It is equally difficult to read Durrell’s full comments as pro-imperial. Moreover, this comment was made at the height of the administration of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1987, and it discusses Durrell’s experiences during Sir Anthony Eden’s and Harold Macmillan’s Conservative governments in 1957 (which explains the fluctuations between present and past tenses in Durrell’s language above). The interpretive simplicity that Papayanis finds would now seem deeply blurred. The trouble for the reader here is how to hold in creative tension, perhaps even a defining tension, Durrell’s lengthy anti-authoritarian ties and anti-Marxist beliefs, both of which seem to have a significant role in the aesthetic structure of his works, in conjunction with his service to the British government. Durrell’s comments remained measured even after he was redefined as a British non-patrial without the right to enter or settle in Britain without a visa, a fact that “thickens” this tension. Moreover, we must ask whether or not the existing political interpretations of Durrell’s works are sufficient for the breadth of this creative tension.

  This problem surfaces again in Durrell’s travel narrative of Yugoslavia, “Family Portrait,” as well as in his discussions of Sadat-era Egypt and the communist experiences of his friend Gostan Zarian. All three pieces adamantly reject Marxist forms of government that arose from Soviet Russia as well as Soviet influences abroad. They also postdate Durrell’s last publications among the anarchist presses and periodicals. However, in all three, Durrell’s vision returns to the village, everyday life, the materials of rural living, and resistance to exploitative labour and class. It is surprising to find an anti-Marxist position adopted that nonetheless questions rural–urban tensions and the transformation of traditional ways of life by the introduction of technology and new forms of organization—both quintessential Marxists areas of attention. To be more exact, it is only if we fail to account for Durrell’s previous anti-authoritarian affiliations and quietist interests that his rustic, utopian anti-Marxism is surprising. This combination has confused much previous scholarship, which either casts Durrell as a reactionary Tory or as an elitist artist without regard for the conditions of labour and life. Both are oversimplifications that this collection aims to trouble.

  Durrell’s only expressly political musings in this collection appear in “No Clue to Living,” in which he was invited to consider the role of the artist in contemporary society. Juxtaposed against the activist and formerly communist authors in the series of articles organized by Stephen Spender, Durrell’s stance that the public ought to form its own individual opinions without relying on the authority of artists, politicians, or other figureheads is shockingly anti-authoritarian in the comparison. In contrast to the earnest protestations of the other authors involved in the project, Durrell contends, “it is very doubtful whether [the artist] has anything to say which could be more original than the other pronouncements by public figures, for apart from his art he is just an ordinary fellow like everyone else, subject to the same bloody flux of rash opinion” (this volume 37–38). The phrase, “he is just an ordinary fellow like everyone else” is the leveling force that puts the reading public on par with presidents and popes (37), and to which a poet dare not lecture or opinionate. The poet clearly retains opinions but his public is taught self-reliance without relying on opinionated poets for leadership. The result is much akin to Miller’s anarchist revision to the authoritarian communism of the Surrealists. Rather than the notion of an artist’s authority as a “public opinionator” (37), which “leads the masses to identify themselves with movie stars and megalomaniacs like Hitler and Mussolini,” Miller proposed to abandon leadership because “I am fatuous enough to believe that in living my own life in my own way I am more apt to give life to others” (“Open” 157). Despite the appearance of “No Clue to Living” after Durrell’s years in Yugoslavia and the cementing of his anti-Marxist beliefs, Durrell’s rej
ection of “that ineradicable predisposition to legislate for the man next door” demonstrates his desire to emphasize the “limitations of Time, on whose slippery surface neither kings nor empires nor dictators could find more than a precarious and temporary purchase” (“No Clue,” this volume 41, 42–43). Doomed kings, empires, and dictators make a striking combination for an author who was a royal subject, servant of empire, and recent resident in Péron’s Argentina and Tito’s Yugoslavia. It is difficult to recognize in this Durrell the same man described by biographers and critics as a reactionary,[7] although the complex relations among these differing positions certainly enrich our approach to his major novels and the troubled politics of his travel writings. One immediately thinks of Durrell’s comments on T.S. Eliot, who when accused by Durrell of being too interested in esoteric material to be Anglican, responded by saying, “Perhaps they haven’t found out about me yet?” (this volume 265).

  As a Late Modernist, Durrell is also difficult to pin down to a single category. His generation came into its artistic strength after the blossoming of the Auden generation and the outbreak of the Second World War. Although Durrell had already begun to publish innovative works that significantly influenced the network of writers around him, accession to editorial authority and cultural acceptance as the avant-garde did not follow—the High Modernists had attained the former while the Auden poets had become synonymous with the avant-garde until the 1950s. The generation immediately following was largely dispersed by the war or fragmented by distance from the major artistic and publishing centres. This left a gap in the received literary histories until the Movement poets, the Angry Young Men, and the Beats. Yet a significant difference from Auden’s sphere of influence appears in Durrell’s literary criticism included in this volume.[8] Readers will note the extent of the allusions by Durrell to the works of the High Modernists as well as his desire to recontextualize these works and to resist their influence—Harold Bloom’s strong poet struggling through a misprision of his progenitors seems overtly the case here. Durrell’s vision of C.P. Cavafy is tied to his resistance to T.S. Eliot, and the two counterpoise each other in several ways. Durrell’s attachment to Henry Miller betrays a similar function when he reinterprets Miller’s Hamlet correspondence with Michael Fraenkel in order to dispute Eliot’s influential “Hamlet and His Problems.”

  Similar tensions arise in Durrell’s greatly overlooked comments on Ezra Pound in “Enigma Variations,” a work that gives shape to the myriad allusions to Pound across Durrell’s works as well as to the specific moment in his career at which it appeared. In this collection, Eliot tell us that the young Durrell “dismiss[ed] Ezra Pound in a phrase” (“Other,” this volume 261), yet his influence clearly lingers, and Durrell admits, “I have always loved the early Pound and no writer of my generation can fail to acknowledge the debt he owes to so brilliant an innovator” (“Enigma,” this volume 237). At the same moment as Durrell was reviewing Pound’s Section: Rock-Drill de los Cantares LXXXV–XCV, he was also engaged in the major literary work of his own career. In 1957, he had completed Justine and was at work on the remainder of The Alexandria Quartet. This specific moment is crucial since it shows the conjoining of Durrell’s curious politics, his allegiances to his predecessors, and his desire to revise their strong influence. Pound was notoriously incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital after an insanity plea, which secured him from treason charges and potential execution following from his support for fascism and radio broadcasts for Mussolini during World War II. Yet Pound’s literary origins began with a great deal of contact with the anarchist press, albeit of a form heavily influenced by Max Stirner: The Egoist. Durrell, after finishing Justine, revised the conclusion of the novel to directly allude to the conclusion of Pound’s first Canto, and this allusive recontextualization is deeply anti-authoritarian in nature, which rebuilds a specific conceptualization of Ezra Pound.

  In a renunciation of the author’s authority, Durrell “refer[s] the reader to a blank page in order to throw him back upon his own resources—which is where every reader ultimately belongs” (Alexandria 307). This was a technique Durrell discussed in his novel Balthazar in 1958 but only realized in 1962 when he added it to his revised 1957 novel Justine while revising all the books in this series for omnibus publication as The Alexandria Quartet. The reader finds “everything*” given an endnote, which in turn directs the reader to the blank ending of the novel (Alexandria 195–96, 203). The reader is led into a collaborative development of meaning with the text rather than receiving meaning from the artist, priest, or political leadership—as the narrator states in the closing of the novel, “I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to [my reader] to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires” (195). His reader is made to actively grapple with the text and make something of it rather than passively receive it. Moreover, the anti-authoritarian component of this “wish” is difficult to overlook, especially since the conflagration of such coercion, promises, compacts, resolutions, covenants is also the conclusion of Durrell’s next novel series, The Revolt of Aphrodite.

  However, this rejection of authority in “everything*” integrates a new finale for the novel when “Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?” in the original is extended with the annotation and a repetition of the famous final words of Pound’s Canto as a subsequent sentence: “So that…” (195). In effect, Durrell recuperates the Pound of his youth after reviewing the Pound of his maturity, whom he finds lacking, and this recuperation through the misprision of the strong poet (in Bloom’s sense) reasserts a version of Pound more in line with Durrell’s vision from the 1930s and 1940s. This tension over the literary baggage of strong predecessors calls out for a critical reassessment of Durrell’s work as a Late Modernist carrying the agon of Modernism well beyond the mid-point of the century.

  For my third area of critical intervention, the reader will also find a different form of travel writing in this collection. While Durrell obviously used the short travel essay as a genre that could produce significant income, his works have been generally “tidied” by a variety of editors, in large part to avoid the discomforts of writing about beautiful locations in the aftermath of violent struggles. Durrell’s travel works here have been unavailable since their initial publication, some for more than seventy years. Scholars are already aware of how Durrell’s book Reflections on a Marine Venus was heavily edited by the poet and editor Anne Ridler in order to minimize its inclusion of war references and suffering for a post-war British readership (Roessel, “‘Cut’” 64–77). “The Island of the Rose” and “Letter in the Sofa” appear without such cuts, the latter of which is clearly meant to charm a specific audience yet still includes discomfiting references to the Holocaust and the extent of destruction endured by the communities of Rhodes even while emphasizing the poignant or melancholy happiness such locations dually afford.

  Moreover, Durrell’s relationship with many homes becomes evident in these materials. In an autobiographical turn, the titular essay “From the Elephant’s Back” sets his childhood as a subject of empire in relief against the homelessness he felt when he was returned to the centre of empire: his Indian childhood and his adolescent migration to London. This theme opens Durrell’s first major work of prose fiction, his 1935 novel Pied Piper of Lovers, and its importance to his thinking brought about its autobiographical return in this 1982 essay. The potential for a new vision is articulated in both works. The first casts Durrell’s semi-autobiographical protagonist as racially Anglo-Indian and hence as a reconciliation between Mother Indian and Father England; the second finds an avatar of Durrell’s childhood, very much like his fictional character Walsh in the novel, befriending a juvenile elephant. Although the relations of empire mark the elephant’s servant status in Durrell’s lecture, it is important that both Durrell and the elephant are “children,” and their interact
ions appear to be mutually beneficial. Durrell’s uncle, in this narrative, shot the elephant’s parent that went mad and attacked a village.