4

‘Islomania’

In order to ‘recompose the ego, to give it value and shape’, Durrell needed to escape from a world whose history and morals repelled him and whose literature he found boring and stagnant. In his physical life he made this departure by means of voluntary exile, the relocation in Corfu where, as he put it in Prospero’s Cell, ‘Greece offers you ... the discovery of yourself’ (PC 11). On the intellectual plane he withdrew into himself in order to evaluate his strengths and weaknesses and to construct ‘the Heraldic Universe’. Twenty years later, writing about Rhodes, he coined the term islomania, defining the islomane as someone ‘who find[s] islands somehow irresistible’, a direct descendant of the people of Atlantis: ‘it is towards the lost Atlantis that [his] subconscious yearns throughout [his] island life’ (RMV 15). Reflections on a Marine Venus appeared in 1953; the earliest recorded usage of the word in the OED dates from 1962. Islands, Durrell wrote elsewhere, represent ‘visionary intimations of solitude, of loneliness, of introspection ... because at heart everyone vaguely feels that the solitude they offer corresponds to his or her inner sense of aloneness’.1 Publicly, they magnify this condition: ‘they are places where different destinies can meet and intersect in the full isolation of time’ (BL 20).

This chapter will describe how Durrell set about his rediscovery of the lost part of his childhood by means of constructing the ‘Heraldic Universe’ – a physical and metaphysical location which was accompanied and exemplified by the development of his early writing in both poetry and fiction, and the additional, equally important, prose of his philosophical notebooks. The Heraldic Universe both emphasised, and was intended to defeat, the sense of absence and otherness which eluded and impugned the artist. To inhabit it was equivalent to achieving ‘reality prime’ or the ‘gnomic aorist’, and was where poetry transcended logic, creating ‘a realm where unreason reigns, and where the relations between ideas are sympathetic and mysterious - affective - rather than causal’.2

1 ‘The Magic of Islands’ (CERLD), intended as a preface for a Readers’ Digest ‘Sélection’, Iles de brume et de lumière (Paris, 1978/82). 2 L. Durrell, ‘Ideas about Poems’, in Personal Landscape: an anthology of exile (London: Editions Poetry, 1945), originally in the first issue of Personal Landscape (1942).

The Island

Durrell’s own fascination with the concept of ‘the island’, and his obvious relish for island life, is reflected in much of his poetry. The idea that by diving within one’s subconscious one can discover a submerged part of oneself was a frequent motif in his work: it became the central ploy of Sappho. The islomane has a counterpart in ‘city man’ and Durrell’s own career, alternating between ‘the island’ and ‘the city’, in pursuing the ultimate quest for stillness and silence through the world’s marketplace, found expression in the tensions between poetry and prose, and the dichotomies of action and repose.

Corfu had been his first landfall, a haven from England: both physically and imaginatively the island presented the opportunity to grasp the notion of the Heraldic Universe, a subject which occupied his letters to Miller at this time. On the physical plane, the knowledge of being in ‘a little world surrounded by the sea, fills [the islomane] with an indescribable intoxication’ (RMV 15); on the practical level, there was the chance to collect his thoughts in tranquillity;3 on the imaginative, to realise that much vaunted artistic personality, to find his own voice. If, like Miller and Socrates, Durrell was ‘born many’ it was in the Heraldic Universe that his multiple personae would become one, and all antinomies would be resolved.4

The Heraldic Universe is not difficult to understand, provided that it is apprehended as simple rather than complex and as an idea rather than a structure. The home of the ‘perennial culture’ – a much more comprehensive term than ‘philosophy’ – it encompasses whatever the poet chooses. A self-contained intellectual and emotional space, it is a place of isolation, a haven from the noise and confusion of the ‘unmannerly town’,5 a laboratory where the imagination can assemble the elements of an alchemical sortie back into that world. In psychological terms it represents a retreat into the amniotic fluid of the womb;6 in aesthetic terms it is the poet’s first benchmark whereby to engage in writing the book of his life. The Heraldic Universe cannot exist except in relation to the city in which that book is to be validated. All the symbols of abstraction – the garden, the island, the cloud – operate as apostrophes to that city, proclaiming the 3 In his copy of Three Parnassus Plays Durrell had noted the passage ‘letts… hast unto those sleepe adorned hills, / Where if not blesse our fortunes one may blesse our wills’ ([p. 357); while in The Complete Works of John Webster ed. F.L. Lucas (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927) he had noted (vol. 4, p. 80) ‘anything for a quiet life’ in the play of that title; cf. Wordsworth, ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’, Letters [24 May 1807].4 In his copy of Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927) Durrell had noted (p. 175) ‘you become no longer one, but many. What you pay for the pantheistic, immanent oneness of “creative”, “evolutionary” substance, into which you are invited to merge, is that you have become a phalanstery of selves’ (SIUC/LD/Accession II).5 Cf. W.B. Yeats, The Poems p. 150.6 ‘The Magic of Islands’; cf. Mott’s works (cited above) passim.

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individuation of the artist as the necessary preliminary to the confrontation with the crowd. (Indeed, Durrell went so far as to stress the notion that, at their Indo-Greek root, the words for woman [], knowledge [] and garden were etymologically linked, and that ‘Eden’ was associated with the Greek word for water [].7

In Rank’s Art and Artist Durrell noted that the artist ‘appears first as sculptor of the world, making the universe macrocosmically from himself’ and that ‘this leads finally to the pure poetic form in which a world is born from nothingness by the Word’.8 In this space, ‘liberated from God, [he] himself become[s] god’.9 In the Quartet Clea refers to this process as the artist taking possession of his kingdom (Quartet 874, 877): king or god, the artist or, as Durrell also proclaimed himself, the ‘Selfist’, ‘a Durrealist’10 or ‘autist’11 achieves a condition analogous to the religious state of ‘election’. Writing to Miller in 1945, Durrell referred to the process of passing from the minus to the plus side of ‘pure forms’ as making ‘raids on the inarticulate’. On the ‘plus side’

you enter a field or laboratory of the consciousness which is not dangerous because it is based in repose. It does not strain you because having passed through the impurities of the ONENESS OF EVERYTHING, you are included in Time. NOW FORMS EMERGE… You cannot define these forms except by ideogram: this is ‘non-assertive’ form. THE HERALDIC UNIVERSE.12

Almost simultaneously, Durrell wrote more publicly that

the Heraldic Universe is that territory of experience in which the symbol exists... It is not a ‘state of mind’ but a continuous self-subsisting plane of reality towards which the spiritual self is trying to reach out through various media ... since words are inadequate they can only render all this negatively - by an oblique method.13

Commenting on this, Keith Brown calls the Heraldic Universe ‘a total and immediate, non-discursive, non-analytic, apprehension of the world about one’ which for Durrell was ‘the sine qua non of art’.14

While Durrell had promulgated the Heraldic Universe in correspondence with Miller as early as 1936, the fact that in 1945 he 7 SIUC 42/8/1.8 Rank, Art and Artist p. 217.9 Ibid., p. 24.10 Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller: a Private Correspondence p. 24.11 Windmill 2/6 (1947) ‘From a Writer’s Journal’.12 Private Correspondence pp. 202-3.13 Personal Landscape 1/4 (1942).14 K. Brown, op. cit., p. 106.

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was still experiencing the novelty of the phenomenon, as a result of meeting a cabalistic group in Alexandria, indicates that the major work which he knew to be within him, the ‘Book of the Dead’, would not become amenable to his pen until he had properly met the world.

In theory it was like Pessoa’s ‘heaven where I secretly constellate myself and where I possess my infinity’,15 but in practice Durrell discovered that, as Kierkegaard put it, ‘the ethical life has this twofold notion, that the individual has himself outside himself within himself’.16 If there is a complexity in this conception of the Heraldic Universe, it is here, since it consists in understanding how space and time are to be set aside as factors in our consciousness yet continue to be ‘real’ in so far as they materially affect the way our consciousness is applied to the business of living.17 This onus is made clear in a study from which we have already seen Durrell taking stock: in Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (1959) Krishnamurti is quoted to the effect that ‘to understand timeless reality, timeless life, action must be complete. But you cannot be aware of this timeless reality by searching for it’.18

(Elsewhere Durrell had applauded the statement - by Paracelsus - that ‘the word eternal does not signify a time without end, but a state in which time is not measured, and in which it therefore does not exist’.)19

Ultimately, it is the place in which to recognise the ‘other’ who, as we noted in discussing Durrell’s psychology, has been present since the moment of birth and is part of the acute sense of loss occasioned by that birth. Only by passing through the other and discovering him to be oneself, can the loss be redeemed. This is a lonely path, since, despite the ubiquity of the trauma in the human condition, each of us pursues a different vision and a different set of values. Durrell quotes Heraclitus: ‘the waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into [a] world of his own’.20

Ideally, the Heraldic Universe would facilitate a palingenesis, a way back, rather than forwards, to ‘primordial reality’, to the reinvention of oneself, and thereby of one’s ‘nation’, ‘culture’ or ‘faith’ but (and here Durrell went beyond both Yeats and Joyce in his method of achieving unity) it would depend not on coercion but on waiting for the affect, abandoning belief in favour of the provisional, ‘the great metaphor of the world as TAO’ at ‘the flashpoint where the mind joins itself to the nature of all created things’ (SME 1).15 F. Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, p. 18.16 S. Kierkegaard, Either/Or p. 550.17 Cf. S. Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam, 1988) pp. 171-3.18 Quoted in Lama Anagarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism According to the Esoteric Teachings of the Great Mantric OM MANI PADME HUM (London: Rider, 1959) p. 270 (SIUC/LD/Accession II).19 Quoted in F. Hartmann, The Life of Paracelsus (London: Kegan Trubner Trench n.d.) p. 229 (SIUC/LD/Accession II).20 SIUC 42/9/3.

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The directions of Durrell’s island experiment were various: firstly, he began Prospero’s Cell, as far as the printed page informs us, as a diary on 10 April 1937; but not too far towards the back of his mind was the idea that it might also be a book about Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest:21 the notion that Corfu might indeed have been the landfall of the exiled, shipwrecked Prospero, and that here, amid his books, he might have played out the dialogue with Caliban, would have been a deliciously autobiographical temptation for Durrell. Secondly, he began the experiments with poetry, prose and prosepoetry, out of which would come three novels and at least one major collection of poems, A Private Country. Thirdly, he began an intimate acquaintance with the land, language and character of Greece which was to create an abiding hinterland of cultural and spiritual values.

These three areas of activity were intricately and organically related. The unity of the Heraldic Universe depended not only on a ‘factitious repose’ but, equally importantly, on making an acceptable intellectual grid. This he attempted in a series of notebooks where we can see the conscious creation of a modus operandi. It would be impractical here to give more than a general indication of the depth and range of his research, but in the following pages we shall see how Durrell searched for ‘the quiddity, the nub’ (Nunquam 87) of human thought and related it to the natural world. Like any young man who thinks he is exploring uncharted territory, his notes have a freshness, a vigour and an excitement as if he were rediscovering a lost civilisation.

The most significant of his early notes is one of his simplest, and its Hegelian simplicity is the hallmark of the way he conceived the Heraldic Universe:

It is the nature of thought to strike a locus around itself ... Pure thought, in thinking of itself, can remain thought.22

Coupled with Durrell’s acceptance of the notion that ‘our consciousness determines the space in which we live’,23 this becomes the site and strategy of the Heraldic Universe: a membrane between 21 CERLD Corfu/Egypt notes: ‘Prospero’s Cell: a speculative essay from the marked IVth Folio, suggesting Corfu as the possible imaginative site of the tempest’. Another note, in SIUC 42/9/1, among notes referring to Rank’s Trauma of Birth, puts the viewpoint (often, as we have already seen, promoted by Durrell) that men are attracted to harbour as a return to the womb: ‘this acceptance is the Tempest World: womb again, as the Shakespearean finale: AN ISLAND – beautiful foetal growth, surrounded by amniotic ocean’.22 SIUC 42/8/1: this entry is accompanied by the marginal notation ‘Macon’ (see above, ch. 2, note 35).23 Ibid.

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the thinking mind and the external world, and, within that locus, the development of what Plato called the ‘pure forms’, which in Durrell’s mindscape became ‘the statues on the snow’ (BB 59). Gradually he would establish a relationship with ‘the statues’, finding his way into their world, searching – again it was a favourite expression – for the ‘gnomic aorist’ (the proverbial definition of simple time past - cf. DML 55) in which the original ‘primal’ Lawrence Durrell could be found. Within this simplex notion can be found many facets of Durrell’s eclectic interests, perhaps ironically reflected in his observation, in Mead’s exegesis of Hermes Trismegistus: ‘Jesus the Christ, and Gautama the Buddha, and Zoroaster the Mage, and Lao-Tze the Sage, and Orpheus the Bard, and Pythagoras the Philosopher, and Hermes the Gnostic, and all and every Master and Master of masters’24 – almost without exception cardinal figures in his reading in the 1930s. But at root is the Zen thought that ‘mind is an arbitrary term for something that cannot properly be expressed in words’; implicit in Durrell’s own ‘hints must do’ is the love of the tacit: ‘refrain from conceptual thought’ says Huang Po – ‘let a tacit understanding be all! Any mental process must lead to error’.25

The fragility of this Universe, and its tendency to imbalance, was never denied. At the core of all Durrell’s work was the simple acceptance of the fact that the real can never be realised, that it is the matter of poetry, that the imaginary must always be imagined, and that the resulting tension is the matter of prose. This underlines the swimmer’s relationship with the shore; sometimes he is hurled against its rocks, at others he sweeps gently onto its beaches until the tide reclaims him: Proteus (the polymorphous, sinuous sea-god) beguiles, and is baffled by, Antæus (the earth-rooted, monolithic giant). Curve and straight line are sometimes one and requited, at others frustrated and opposed.

The Heraldic Universe is the all-embracing cosmos which contains all matter, all humanity and all thought – the place of correspondance. In its brevity it is the ultimate metaphor. Durrell gave considerable thought to the question of how to deploy his reading matter satisfactorily in building in his mind – at least for an imagistic, poetic instant – a proposition that would bring alive the mandala at the tantric heart of the universe. As he wrote in A Smile in the Mind’s Eye (SME 53): ‘heraldic… means simply the “mandala” of the poet or of the poem. It is the alchemical sigil or signature of the individual; what’s left when the ego is extracted. It is the pure nonentity of the entity for which the poem stands like an ideogram!’

24 Marked by Durrell in G.R.S. Mead, Thrice Greatest Hermes: studies in Hellenic Theosophy and Gnosis (London: Watkins, 1906; 1949 reprint) vol. 3, p. 32 (SIUC/LD/Accession II).25 Marked by Durrell in The Zen Teaching of Huang Po on the Transmission of Mind trans. J. Blofeld (London: Rider, 1958) p. 42 (SIUC/LD/Accession II).

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Diagrammatically, Durrell illustrated this in his notes for the ‘Book of the Dead’ by drawing a (yet-to-be-discovered) double helix (representing not only the structure of our genetic imprint but also a double caduceus) on either side of which he placed a ‘self’ – one the ‘id’ and the other the ‘ego’. In other contemporaneous scribbles he indicated the motion of the ego across the partition of the helix to reach the pure otherness or nothingness of the side on which the id was to be found, thus eliminating the intrusive and faulty ego to allow motion to the life-force by which the ego is lived.

At the same time that he was reading Groddeck’s The Book of the It Durrell was also annotating Groddeck’s The Unknown Self which confirmed his readings in the former: he underlined the passages: ‘not one single process of any kind is directed by the “Ego”… everything is conditioned by the coherence of the universe… If one wished to utter one unquestionable truth about humanity, one would need to know the whole cosmos’ and ‘For me it is clear, the poet is the It. But however far one goes, what is most important always must remain a mystery’.26

We must also note the congruence of this schema with that of the left and right sides of Valentinian gnosticism to which Durrell refers in the Quartet: as Mike Diboll points out, the soul progresses on a spiritual journey from left to right, and the ‘city’, as a material entity, ‘threatens spiritual and existential autonomy’.27

It was not, despite all his book-learning, a question of comprehending the proposition but of apprehending it. ‘Beauty’, he noted late in life, ‘resides in congruence, the appropriateness of parts to wholes. The wholes not only summing up the parts but inspiring a feeling of perfect significant order in the observer’.28 From Paracelsus came the view that ‘the microcosm of man is the counterpart of the macrocosm of Nature’, the ‘congeries’ of man and the Universe being related;29 from Taoism, the ‘principle of right apprehension’, that ‘one could breathe in the whole universe with every breath’ (SME 10): the sixteenth century and the timeless met effortlessly in Durrell’s imagination, expressing ‘an eternal simultaneity... present in every thought ... an incandescent Now’ (SME 48).

It is fascinating to find him paying equal attention to the philosophic content, the landscape and the architectonic structure – a feature of his later writing, in The Revolt and the Quintet in 26 G. Groddeck, The Unknown Self pp. 37, 160; Durrell’s copy is in the library of the University of Victoria BC: I am indebted to James Gifford for drawing this to my attention.27 M. Diboll. op. cit.28 Cf. SME p. 53: ‘heraldic… means simply the “mandala” of the poet or of the poem. It is the alchemical sigil or signature of the individual; what’s left when the ego is extracted. It is the pure nonentity of the entity for which the poem stands like an ideogram!’29 Hartmann, op. cit., p. 172.

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particular. In this sense his imagination succeeded in merging three concepts, which he seems to have used indiscriminately: cosmology (the science of the universe as a whole), cosmography (a way of describing the universe, re-presenting it) and cosmogony (theories about the origins of the universe): a poem could simultaneously encapsulate all three mental exercises. He was thus equally at ease with the universe as a concept, as a set of principles and as a single poetic ideogram. The purpose of such eclecticism was therefore equally threefold: for Durrell the lost child, to achieve ‘a fulcrum of repose at the heart of reality’, as he called the Indian way of life; for Durrell the artist to find ‘an inner coherence which relates all these separate parts into a system of ideas or philosophy of life’; and for Durrell the citizen, to ‘learn the secrets of the jungle and become a seer’.

In Greece, he wrote, ‘I discovered the Ancient Greek philosophers like Heraclitus and discovered their Indian parentage’.30

This is one clue to his imaginative method in proclaiming the Heraldic Universe. The ‘trick’, as he would call it, consisted in being able to seize the grain of heraldry in a proposition and to abandon the chaff. The choice of propositions, from Heraclitus to Bergson, from Mayan culture to Buddhism, from Wordsworth to Whitehead, led him to what we shall see was a Yeatsian idea, that ‘there is a faint hope of a great synthesis which will conjoin all fields of thought, however apparently dissimilar, to make them interpenetrate, interfertilise. This is the sense in which it is worth being a poet’.31

A notebook, dated ‘London June 1939’, contains the following paragraphs, which have the appearance of being a fair copy, and bear a strong resemblance to other attempts to address the subject which, at the beginning and the end of his ‘long strip’ he described as ‘Tao and its Glozes’:

Life is a science whose object is to enquire: enquiry, in the pure sense is to live. By the act of breathing, walking, seeing, we enquire, our lungs and bodies enquire, into the nature of the world around us. Thus human activity may be known as pure enquiry. Any other subdivisions would come under the heading of technique; all philosophy is concerned with the classification of human techniques in enquiry. For the purposes of this book it would be better to regard the universe as a huge intestinal tract at work upon whatever substance is fed to it.

But time and experience has [sic] made us aware of an underlying principle in our selves which we have tried to express in every department of our thought. This is a schism, a rupture between two portions of our spirit, which has resulted

30 ‘From the Elephant’s Back’.31 Ibid.

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in two separate techniques of being. For the purposes of pure convenience Feeling and Thinking: cognition and perception. A duality of being which is alone responsible for a trinity.of purpose… In science the straight line and the curve represent symbolically this duality; the line, thought, the curve, sensibility.

The logical end of the straight line is infinity ∞The logical end of the curve is the ‘o’ circle a symbol of deep mystical and religious importance in the history of the world’s thought.32

The ideas of duality and trinity are central to Durrell’s thought about human nature; the relation of the straight line and the curve, of perception and cognition, was the cause of fruitful tension in his mind and art. His notebooks provide further evidence that he was simultaneously contemplating the structure of the human mind and the structure of the universe, an exercise which he eventually teased out in the most explicit statement of the ‘Cosmography [or ‘Cosmology’] of the Womb’ in Caradoc’s ‘sermon’ on the Acropolis (Tunc 67-78). At one point he referred to ‘the attempt of the philosopher to break free from the claim of causality. All philosophy is concerned only with this idea.’ A few pages later he underlined this resolution with the reminder ‘the cardinal necessity for commencing to philosophize is to sidetrack causality!’33 The claim – a poetic one – that philosophy’s sole concern is to be free of causality was central to Durrell’s project of eliminating from thought the occidental elements which had subjected the concept of ‘will’ to that of ‘logic’, and had thus inhibited the freedom of the mind (ultimate ‘will’) in its poetic quest for the resolution of opposites.

Immediately after the notebook entry relating to philosophy and causality we find the following series of notes and queries:

Eusebius writes that Pythagoras spoke of Unity as like unto God, of Duality as like to the devil; Plutarch says that Pythagoras called II the number of strife.

Query: perhaps the frequently opposed symbols of the staff and the snake in primitive mythology may symbolise the yang yin also.

Snake= curve= sensibility= yang Rod= str. line= intelligence= yin Note= Cadeuceus [sic]

32 CERLD inv. 1344, p. 45.33 Ibid.

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Note a diagrammatic relation between Howe’s diagram 13 in Time and the child; and the chapter called The Sphere in Saurat’s The End of Fear.34

This indicates very clearly Durrell’s own compositional method in combining the capacity for abstract thought with a delight in the practical: his use of symbols in his writing to support his philosophical projects began privately with the correspondence with Miller about the Heraldic Universe, moved into the prose-poem with ‘Zero’ and ‘Asylum in the Snow’, became explicitly diagrammatic in the framework of The Dark Labyrinth and provided the sense of the ‘field’ of Alexandria, the underlying architectonic ground of The Revolt and the quincunxial goal to which the Quintet is directed.

Durrell’s continuing concern, therefore, was to reinforce the symbiotic relationship of humans and natural rhythms as a way of explaining the universe. Although Durrell almost never used the terms ‘yin’ and ‘yang’ in his published writing, the sense in which he used them in this notebook, that Ch’ű Yuan [sic] ‘owned a superior immaterial principle in addition to Yin and Yang’,35 was the bedrock of what he subsequently wrote: that the tension along the sliding scale between the yin and yang of human consciousness is subject to the inexpressible ‘immaterial principle’ which constitutes the Heraldic Universe: the curve of sensibility and the straight line of intelligence, the mythopoeic and the logocentric. He added, from the entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica on Indian philosophy that:

the most advanced theory of creation ... starts with the assertion that in the beginning there was neither being nor non-being, neither sea nor sky… This is the poet’s way of describing the primal unconditional ground of all being which is beyond categories.36

34 Ibid.; the reference to ‘Cadeuceus’ [sic] reminds us of the name under which the Wilkinsons published Durrell’s early poetry. The reference to Graham Howe’s Time and the Child concerns a diagram (p. 220) intended to demonstrate a form of ‘incarnation’ by movement from one side of a line (representing an ‘ideal’ state – ‘unseen, spiritual, eternal’) to the other, ‘real, Me, Now, seen, material, space-temporal’); in some senses this contradicts Durrell’s movement to possess the Heraldic Universe (from ‘minus’ side to ‘plus’ side) and in others it confirms it (Durrell made his own version of this diagram in CERLD Corfu/Egypt notes); the reference to Saurat’s The End of Fear (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), a prose-poem, focuses on Durrell’s interest in a sphere ‘moving by its own force in a straight course through a space apparently unlimited’ which enters a funnel-like canal before reaching ‘an eternal moment: the sphere and [its] limits are one… the sphere is clothed with the canal’ (pp. 45-6).35 Ibid.36 Encyclopaedia Britannica vol. 12, p. 248.

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To be ‘beyond categories’ is to enter the pure realm of the geodesic world. But in order for the Heraldic Universe to come into existence it is not enough for it to be imagined; it must also be possessed, inhabited and lived. Durrell found in Hermes Trismegistus the inspiration which allowed him to proclaim to Miller: ‘I AM SLOWLY BUT VERY CAREFULLY AND WITHOUT ANY CONSCIOUS THOUGHT DESTROYING TIME ... I AM A MAN ... I AM AN ARTIST...I AM GOD!!!’ (DML 18):

For the thing to be known does not itself begin to be when we get knowledge of it; it is only for us that our knowledge makes it begin… If then you do not make yourself equal to God you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like.37

The motivation for such identity is the search for the ‘integrating principle’, since this alone can allow the artist to ‘sidetrack’ causality. Another note tells us: ‘under the foul causal claim of speculative philosophy lies one eternal and destructive worry: the nature of the self.’38

The main achievement in this particular notebook – as significant in its simplicity and its ramifications as that which defined thought as a locus around itself – is the statement: ‘Man’s place is that of a conjunction between sentences’39 (my emphasis): if this notebook was indeed compiled in 1939, subsequent to the writing of ‘Zero’ and ‘Asylum in the Snow’, the statement is a nexus between the view of language and of human personalities as ideas written on the snow (the way Durrell conceived ‘the statues’ as pure forms) and the more politically developed idea that they are units of currency in a field dominated semiotically by the culture of amour courtois. Durrell ultimately expressed this in an heraldic statement which indicated that he had assimilated the distinction between the symbol and the thing symbolised. He began with a classic reformulation of the Hermetic world-view.

The basic duality could perhaps be symbolised better by enunciating two different views of the world - organic and mechanic. The cosmos as mechanism or organism. The rationalistations [sic] of these views have produced respectively the mathematical calculus and the Tarot.40

Then follows a message to himself which constitutes the ground-rules for all his subsequent fiction, the point at which, as we shall see, he connected with both Freud and Sade:

37 SIUC 42/8/1.38 Ibid.39 Ibid.40 Ibid.

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Enunciate most carefully the basic paradox: the rule of four:

that in each statement the fulcrum of the counter statement finds itself ... Until the artist has reached the paradoxical or hermetic stage of his growth his art cannot cross the gulf which lies between the emblem and the symbol.41

The ‘rule of four’, the acceptance of opposites which carry their opposite within them, became the blueprint for the Quartet, something which Durrell admired immensely in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: ‘Qualities are inherent in their negatives’, Durrell added, in an expression reminiscent of the mindset we have already examined in discussing his psychology (‘I move through many negatives to what I am’). Again and again he saw the world not only in duplets and triads but as ‘the rule of four’, the couple mirrored within its shadow, its negative – a factor that would weigh heavily on, and be amply demonstrated in, the work of John Hawkes.

Durrell was constantly at pains throughout this notebook and elsewhere to come to terms with the duality that polarised good and bad, god and devil, being and not-being, life and death, arguing instead for the ‘rule of four’ which made it possible to live in an otherwise unlivable world and drove the artist into his selfish autism. One must accept duality but must be discontent with it: this became the poet’s constant project because it led him towards the essential quality of the Heraldic Universe, the new relation of space and time:

Space and time are really (as with all opposites) identical: they come into the word [sic], as it were from different angles. Imagine a woman knitting. Time is the ball of wool entering the fabric in periodic motions: Space is the same wool but in extension. The conception of God is the whole jumper. The duality is the two needles - the horn between which apprehension must pass to register. Motion is the one law: time gives us our language, our nature etc: paradoxically to enter the Void we must knit time.42

Entering the void is part of the refusal, and is closely associated with the gnostic embrace of death, which is a recurring motif in Durrell’s writing, from early poems such as ‘The Three Sons’ and the concept of the ‘dark labyrinth’ to the exploration of the twin heresies of gnostics and Templars in the Quintet.

41 Ibid.42 Ibid.

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A further strand of Durrell’s mindscape was gnosticism, since implicit in his embrace of Jung and the search through Buddhism for ‘home’ was the rejection of Freud and Judaeo-Christianity. He found it in what, in a piece of writing only equalled for anger by the tone of Bitter Lemons, he called ‘the great Gnostic refusal of a lie’. Writing, in 1973, an introduction to Jacques Lacarrière’s essay on the gnostics, Durrell, carried by the same sense of outrage that fuelled The Revolt, referred to the essay as

of burning topicality in a world which is also playing at Gnosticism – the pathetic cockroach world of the anti-hero with his anti-memoirs, not to mention his anti- poetry. How noble in comparison with this shallow hippie defeatism is the grand poetic challenge of the Gnostics. They refused to countenance a world which was less than perfect.43

Durrell himself provided the connection between gnosticism, with its clearly eastern roots, and Buddhism. In a notebook begun in Paris in 1937 – during his first meeting with Miller and Nin – he wrote of Lao Tzu:

He refuses the dogma with its sharp black and white tones. Within the experience there is room for infinite adjustment, infinite movement. The iron scheme is a violence which he dissociates himself from utterly; his method is a wingless flying - an act which operates on a line where the mere mechanics of the act is lost; is irrelevant ... a direct challenge to the world of dogmatic relations, where good is balanced against evil; the world of opposites, from which alone flowers the canon, the principle ... He refuses to place himself at the mercy of the dogmatic assumption; which he recognises can carry embedded in it the poisons of the personality, against which the volatile principle of being is at war. Consequently the ratiocinative principle itself must go: and the tabu with it. Here we reach the very heart of Tao.44

Lao Tzu, whom Durrell characterised as ‘the Chinese Heraclitus’ (SME 2), was in Durrell’s view susceptible to one major criticism: ‘that an attempt was ever made to reduce the Way to words: since the use of words themselves implies a formal coercion - unless all writing be regarded as tuistic - the writing itself is open to accusation’.45 The inadequacy of words in expressing ‘the Way’ was the continuing burden of occidental thought which Durrell was obliged to negotiate 43 L. Durrell, foreword to J. Lacarrière, The Gnostics p. 7.44 SIUC 42/8/1; this is a variant on the text which appears in SME pp. 56-7.45 SIUC 42/7/2.

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in his own path towards ‘the Tibetan novel’. (‘For the poet less and less can be spoken about - for the novelist more and more must’, he recorded in 1962.)46

Durrell’s early notebooks are crammed not only with jottings and scraps from a wide range of authorities and sources, but also with several embryonic essays of extraordinary significance for his intellectual biography. This continued throughout his life: the mental image of Taoism in the persona of Lao Tzu was forged in a series of returns to passages such as this, in which we can detect the continual remaking of the idea of ‘home’ and permeate several others such as that on ‘Shakespeare and Love’.47 Ultimately, they found expression in Pied Piper of Lovers, where we find (the passage is entirely italicised by Durrell):

All philosophy seems to lead me towards a perfect spiritual detachment – a divorce from the world, and therefore towards sterility and deadness. Let me be content to say: I am, and content to be as fully as possible (PPL 33-4).

On the physical plane, the Mediterranean in general, and Greece in particular, offered Durrell a spiritual accommodation as well as a comfortable place to settle. The remark quoted earlier about ‘discovering oneself’ in Greece was penned in 1937, and was part of a scheme in which he asked Greece to absorb him both physically and psychically, coming into contact with the depths of time, with the quiddity of ‘a landscape shorn of temporality’ – with the everyday habits which had already been antique thousands of years ago. This is the place of the merveilleux:

Tread softly, for here you stand On miracle ground, boy (‘On Ithaca Standing’, CP 111).

To be put in touch with a world in which the merveilleux was a quotidian reality became an unattainable quest of the child-become-man. In his synoptic volume The Greek Islands Durrell constantly affirmed ‘the almost unimaginable antiquity of the Greek land and the Greek tongue’ (GI 37) and there was something of his own evolution as an artist in his speculation that the word ‘anthropos’ [: man] came into use when ‘presumably one day it became necessary to define … the “man who looked upwards” ... “the man who walked upright” ... a new sky-piercing attitude for man…the birth of a new consciousness, no less’ (GI 34). He found himself on the same ground as ‘men like Heraclitus, who first posed questions we are still trying to 46 SIUC 42/19/10: ‘Nimes 1962’.47 ‘Shakespeare and Love’ SIUC 42/15/1, published as ‘Shakespeare et l’Amour’ in Shakespeare: Collection Génies et Realités (Paris: Hachette, 1965).

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answer satisfactorily. It is pleasant to think of them lazing about, eating olives ... as they wrestled with questions which weigh down the human reason and intuition alike’ (GI 159); while in the agora he encountered ‘the mercuric prototypes made familiar by the old Greek dramatists ... they have not stirred in their frames - merchant-bankers, adventurers, seamen, shipowners, négociants in wine and oil and fruit, peasants, priests, poets, paupers - the whole dramatis personae of the Aristophanic scene’ (GI 227). He also made strenuous claims for linking some aspects of Greek civilisation to those of India: ‘looking at the Corfu Medusa ... one is inclined to think that she would be better interpreted in terms of Indian yogic thought’ (GI 32) - a tendency that Miller had noticed in him forty years earlier in touring the Peloponnese: ‘Durrell, who was raised near the Tibetan frontier in India, was tremendously excited and confessed that at times he had the impression of being back in India, in the hill country’.48

To experience the silence of the place is to allow its quiddity to speak. Probably the most expressive of Durrell’s poems to achieve this is ‘Nemea’, which is examined in the following chapter. In Cyprus, Durrell once more found ‘the silence which grows up between sentences uttered among the ruins of time’ (BL 164). To make a connection with a past age, to go beyond that in denying time’s procedure and to sidetrack ‘the merely historic’ (GI 50) is to know the quiddity of habits which have been lived continuously since they first became ‘necessary’. ‘Each book, house, donkey, is prime - a Platonic prototype of a sudden invention ... the essence, the quiddity’ (GI 21). As we shall also see in looking through Durrell’s eyes at Provence, Greece ‘never had any fixed geographical borders. It was a state of mind’ (GI 273, my emphasis) – one which had set in motion a process of thinking about atomic physics just as it had given us everyday concepts like ‘economics’ or ‘democracy’ or – terms close to Durrell’s heart – fusis, pneuma, daimon, onoma, anthropos, ekklesia, and the precious greeting ‘!’ To achieve ‘reality prime’ was thus to move backwards, even beyond the point where one was ‘in illo tempore’, to an ab-original or pre-original state.

This, however, was seldom if ever to be attained. Durrell was well aware that human behaviour would usually prevent that. His conclusion was ‘that history itself, conditioned by place, repeats characteristics and familiar gestures’ (RMV 157). That landscape affects - indeed, shapes - character - was one of Durrell’s major tenets, and was not confined to Greece. Continuity – of national and gender characteristics, of behaviour, of culture – is assured by ‘spirit of place’ ‘the continuity of the world of the imagination ... the proofs ... that some spots on earth are the natural cradles of genius’ (SP 356). Thus ‘the Mediterranean woman has never subconsciously forgotten that, by origin, she is descended from her foam-born prototype Aphrodite’ 48 H. Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi p. 218.

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and ‘the Mediterranean is older than history and stronger than religion’ (SP 369, 371). Durrell’s insistence that a place or a region should be ‘older than history’ turned on his problem with the nature of time in relation to death: he was concerned to demonstrate that time does not interfere with experience. The statement that ‘all time is contained in each moment of time’ (Key 29, 36) is the keynote of the Heraldic Universe – since it subsumes the omnivorous nature of serial time within the omnipresent nature of cyclic time. A stream of consciousness will be of no use unless it can come back upon itself.

Nevertheless, Durrell still had to deal with the question of flux and indeterminacy – the notion that by being involved in time and the events that take place in time we ourselves become the part-authors of our own and others’ activities; we can no longer be immune from, or independent of, or indifferent to, that which we affect and which affects us.

Thus, while the Heraldic Universe is the location and focus of our hopes and dreams, it can only be an occasional landfall. No artist, in whatever medium, can hope to establish such an equilibrium for more than a brief moment. Every mere word, colour or sound tone qualifies the absolute nature of the Heraldic Universe so that, in the very act of poetry, the desired state is created and destroyed. Conceived at the outset of his career as a nirvana, the Heraldic Universe, like the island itself, is a landfall Durrell rarely touched during the ‘long strip’, an imagined place that he could inhabit only when he could hold the balance between the keenly competing forces.

All these preoccupations are epitomised in an unpublished 100-page typescript entitled ‘The Magnetic Island’ which appears to have been written by Durrell towards the end of his period in Corfu and is dedicated to Theodore Stephanides ‘in memory of four years of charmed friendship’.49 Its sub-title is: ‘A parable of islands and blue water: of souls and ceremonies: of oracles and miracles’.50 Thus the physical fact of the island, and the ideas of magic and ritual, are hinted at. The story incorporates many of Durrell’s later trademarks: Tiryns (named after the megalithic city which Durrell would have seen in the Peloponnese), a semi-wild man, born on an unnamed island of unknown parents, keeps company with a prostitute called Persephone; he is demented, and an oracle tells him ‘This is the first fragmentation of the heart’;51 shipwrecked while sailing from island to island in the Ionian, he finds a landfall and is taken up by ‘Lady Daphne’ (suggestive of Hippolyta in Tunc); he is taken for a philosopher, but in his turn is tutored by ‘Conon’; he swims to a shrine accessible only by sea (a major feature of Durrell’s life on Corfu); he is brought into a 49 The journey of the shipwrecked ‘hero’ exactly matches that undertaken by Stephanides as recounted in his Island Trails.50 Quoted by Shelley Cox, ‘The Island Lover’, p. 45.51 Ibid. p. 46.

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labyrinth; and, if final proof were required that this is already ‘vintage’ Durrell, in the sense of his embrace of the dual elements of island and water, he swims away ‘to seek destiny as a swimmer, and kicked the island from under him as a suicide kicks a stool’.52

Shelley Cox’s comment, that ‘the language… seems somewhat flattened and simplified, with little of the Durrellian brilliance and wit that we have come to expect’,53 underlines Durrell’s writing technique, in which he set out ‘the argument’ in a pedestrian fashion, hesitating to raise the matter to the level of fine writing until the conception and the structure had been mastered (as he was to do also in the prose (novel) version of Sappho). Furthermore, Cox is correct in asserting that the text is ‘the prose side of the mood that Durrell successfully captures in his poetry of this period’.54 This was an epicurean feat: aided by Buddhist techniques such as yoga, for both intellectual and physical ease, Durrell could harness energies necessary for self-expression with a mental harmony that became the subject of discussion in A Smile in the Mind’s Eye and the symbolic object of the physical and metaphysical quests in the Quintet.

The ideal Heraldic Universe is the ‘Asylum in the Snow’, an anaesthetic dream in which statues, like barely visible glyphs, dance an ethereal pattern in ‘the enormous now’. Writing in his diary in December 1946 (a time when he was still unsure whether he had yet fully taken possession of his ‘Heraldic Universe’) Durrell commented on the fragility and elusiveness of the concept:

Underneath the whole question of poetry an unstateable proposition like the shadowed side of the moon. It is something like the proposition mentioned in Plato’s letters: the proposition he had never been able to put into words. This creative element I call, privately, ‘the Heraldic Element’. For it seems that if poetry is not exactly lying about the world it is talking about the things of the substance in a very special relation to time.55

The idea that a proposition can be so ‘unstateable’ that it cannot be put into words not only symbolises the provisional nature of poetry but also makes a statement about the unstateable, such as he had attempted in the early prose-poems which are at the same time exploratory and hieratic.

Parsing ‘Zero’ and ‘Asylum in the Snow’, the seminal works of Durrell’s adolescence and literary apprenticeship, is one of the most rewarding approaches to his subsequent work, especially if we regard 52 Ibid. pp. 46-9.53 Ibid. p. 49.54 Ibid., p. 52.55 ‘From a Writer’s Journal’.

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them primarily as poetry rather than as prose, cognate with the verse output of these years. In their imagery, vocabulary, syntax and momentum they provide the quietism against which the subsequent writing can be measured. It was the place where, as Anaïs Nin suggested to him, he might conceive ‘the version of Hamlet you want to write’.56

Anaïs Nin responded immediately to ‘Asylum in the Snow’, originally dedicated to her: ‘you have ... reached a world so subtle, almost evanescent, caught a climate so fugitive, the dream life directly through the senses, far beyond the laws of gravity.... You wrote from inside of the mystery, not from the outside’.57 The expression ‘the dream life’ is common to Miller, Nin and Durrell.58

Hence the point should be made that the ‘inside of the mystery’, a technique Durrell adopted on the levels of both the major and minor mythologies, in the detection of both love and espionage, became the framework and substance of all his writing, the quest of meaning and the treasure-game. But thought itself, embodied in language, shakes its fist at the figures on the snow. Durrell had no sectarian affiliations, followed no religion, but his inescapable obligation to interpret, by means of words, the labile concepts of anything less than the purely mythopoeic, whether it be the thoughts of Heraclitus, Spengler or Groddeck, turned poetry into a concrete exercise by ascribing value.

56 Anaïs Nin, Diaries vol. 2, p. 25.57 Ibid.58 Cf. Pine, The Dandy and the Herald pp. 186-95.

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