Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island (37 page)

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A Biography of Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) was a novelist, poet, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet, his acclaimed series of four novels set before and during World War II in Alexandria, Egypt. Durrell’s work was widely praised, with his Quartet winning the greatest accolades for its rich style and bold use of multiple perspectives. Upon the Quartet’s completion,
Life
called it “the most discussed and widely admired serious fiction of our time.”

Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Durrell was an avid and dedicated writer from an early age. He studied in Darjeeling before his parents sent him to England at the age of eleven for his formal education. When he failed to pass his entrance examinations at Cambridge University, Durrell committed himself to becoming an established writer. He published his first book of poetry in 1931 when he was just nineteen years old, and later worked as a jazz pianist to help fund his passion for writing.

Determined to escape England, which he found dreary, Durrell convinced his widowed mother, siblings, and first wife, Nancy Isobel Myers, to move to the Greek island of Corfu in 1935. The island lifestyle reminded him of the India of his childhood. That same year, Durrell published his first novel,
Pied Piper of Lovers.
He also read Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
and, impressed by the notorious novel, he wrote an admiring letter to Miller. Miller responded in kind, and their correspondence and friendship would continue for forty-five years. Miller’s advice and work heavily influenced Durrell’s provocative third novel,
The Black Book
(1938), which was published in Paris. Though it was Durrell’s first book of note,
The Black Book
was considered mildly pornographic and thus didn’t appear in print in Britain until 1973.

In 1940, Durrell and his wife had a daughter, Penelope Berengaria. The following year, as World War II escalated and Greece fell to the Nazis, Durrell and his family left Corfu for work in Athens, Kalamata (also in Greece), then Alexandria, Egypt. His relationship with Nancy was strained by the time they reached Egypt, and they separated in 1942. During the war, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British Embassy. He also wrote
Prospero’s Cell,
a guide to Corfu, while living in Egypt in 1945.

Durrell met Yvette Cohen in Alexandria, and the couple married in 1947. They had a daughter, Sappho Jane, in 1951, and separated in 1955. Durrell published
White Eagles Over Serbia
in 1957, alongside the celebrated memoir
Bitter Lemons of Cyprus
(1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize,
and Justine
(1957), the first novel of the Alexandria Quartet Capitalizing on the overwhelming success
of Justine,
Durrell went on to publish the next three novels in the series—
Balthazar
(1958),
Mountolive
(1958), and
Clea
(1960)—in quick succession. Upon the series’ completion, poet Kenneth Rexroth hailed it as “a tour de force of multiple-aspect narrative.”

Durrell married again in 1961 to Claude-Marie Vincendon, who died of cancer in 1967. His fourth and final marriage was in 1973 to Ghislaine de Boysson, which ended in divorce in 1979.

After a life spent in varied locales, Durrell settled in Sommières, France, where he wrote the Revolt of Aphrodite series as well as the Avignon Quintet. The first book in the Quintet,
Monsieur
(1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize while
Constance
(1982), the third novel, was nominated for the Booker Prize.

Durrell died in 1990 at his home in Sommières.

This photograph of Lawrence Durrell aboard his boat, the
Van Norden,
is taken from a negative discovered among his papers. The vessel is named after a character in Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer.
(Photograph held in the British Library’s modern manuscripts collection.)

One of Nancy Durrell’s photographs from the 1930s. Pictured here is the
Caique,
which they used to travel around the waters of Corfu. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin, property of the Gerald Durrell Estate.)

This photograph of Nancy and Lawrence Durrell was likely taken in Delphi, Greece, in late 1939. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin and the Gerald Durrell Estate.)

A 1942 photograph of Lawrence Durrell with his wife, Nancy, and their daughter, Penelope, taken in Cairo. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin.)

This manuscript notebook contains one of two drafts of
Justine
acquired by the British Library as part of Lawrence Durrell’s large archive in 1995. (Notebook held in the British Library’s modern manuscripts collection.)

A page from Durrell’s notebooks, or, as he called them, the “quarry.” This page introduced his notes on the “colour and narrative” of scenes in
Justine.
(Photo courtesy of the Lawrence Durrell Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.)

“As well as serving delicious food in an idyllic setting, the Taverna Nikolas at Agni has strong links with the Durrell story in Corfu,” says Joanna Hodgkin of this 2012 photo. Durrell lived in the neighboring town of Kalami, where his famous White House sits right above the shoreline. (Photo courtesy of Joanna Hodgkin.)

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copyright © 1957 by Lawrence Durrell

cover design by Jason Gabbert

This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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