In the summer of 1965, I hitchhiked with two school friends to Greece. We had just done our A levels, with mixed results. In Corfu, we all met our first boyfriends: likewise. What cast the real spell, over all of us nice Surrey girls, were the Greek islands. And the two books we read in those enchanted weeks offered the most intense marriage of literature and experience that I can remember.
After our hot, arduous journey through France and Italy, by car and (mostly) lorry, we had made the night crossing from Brindisi, in south-east Italy, to a Corfu first seen in a silvery dawn. Almost thirty years earlier, in the spring of 1937, Lawrence Durrell had made a similar crossing with his wife, a painter. They were young, and freespirited; in Kalami, in the north of the island, they took an old fisherman’s whitewashed house overlooking the sea. She began to paint. He began a journal.
Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins . . . Once you strike out from the flat and desolate Calabrian mainland towards the sea, you are aware of a change in the heart of things . . . of islands coming out of the darkness to meet you . . . aware not so much of a landscape coming to meet you invisibly over those blue miles of water as of a climate . . . Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder – the discovery of yourself.
Prospero’s Cell (1945) is the first of three books charting Durrell’s long love affair with Greek islands. Begun in notebook entries, it was, he explains in the Preface, finally composed in Alexandria – the setting for The Alexandria Quartet, novels which in retrospect seem to have cast their own spell over my whole generation. There he had fled, as the war took hold of Greece. ‘In thos
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Subscribe now or Sign inIn the summer of 1965, I hitchhiked with two school friends to Greece. We had just done our A levels, with mixed results. In Corfu, we all met our first boyfriends: likewise. What cast the real spell, over all of us nice Surrey girls, were the Greek islands. And the two books we read in those enchanted weeks offered the most intense marriage of literature and experience that I can remember.
After our hot, arduous journey through France and Italy, by car and (mostly) lorry, we had made the night crossing from Brindisi, in south-east Italy, to a Corfu first seen in a silvery dawn. Almost thirty years earlier, in the spring of 1937, Lawrence Durrell had made a similar crossing with his wife, a painter. They were young, and freespirited; in Kalami, in the north of the island, they took an old fisherman’s whitewashed house overlooking the sea. She began to paint. He began a journal.Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins . . . Once you strike out from the flat and desolate Calabrian mainland towards the sea, you are aware of a change in the heart of things . . . of islands coming out of the darkness to meet you . . . aware not so much of a landscape coming to meet you invisibly over those blue miles of water as of a climate . . . Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder – the discovery of yourself.
Prospero’s Cell (1945) is the first of three books charting Durrell’s long love affair with Greek islands. Begun in notebook entries, it was, he explains in the Preface, finally composed in Alexandria – the setting for The Alexandria Quartet, novels which in retrospect seem to have cast their own spell over my whole generation. There he had fled, as the war took hold of Greece. ‘In those dark winters of 1941–2 Corcyra [as he always refers to it, anglicizing the Greek Kerkyra] seemed a place I would never see again in this life.’ The book was a huge success. ‘And its continuing success down the years has always touched me like a sort of confirmation that my dreams of being a writer when I was young were worth holding on to.’
In our floppy straw hats and wraparound cheesecloth skirts, the three of us sat on the steps of the youth hostel outside Corfu town, our sandalled feet in the dust, and drank in Durrell’s miraculous prose.
You wake one morning in late autumn and notice that everything has changed: the sky shines more deeply pearl, and the sun rises like a ball of blood – for the peaks of the Albanian hills are touched with snow. The sea has become leaden and sluggish, and the olives a deep platinum grey. Fires smoke in the villages, and the breath of Maria as she passes with her sheep to the headland, is faintly white upon the air . . . sheep bells clonk dully around her.
Like Durrell, we were in a timeless landscape of cypress, olive groves and sun-warmed stone, of donkeys laden with firewood and old men sitting outside cafés on wooden chairs. Like him, we walked through mountain villages and along the coast, and saw the shadowy outlines of the mountains of Albania across the sea. And, as he had done, we visited the church of St Spiridon where, in a much-kissed silver casket, lie the remains of the island’s patron saint, still performing miracles today. ‘St Spiridon’, wrote Durrell, ‘is still awake after nearly two thousand years.’
Other spirits preside over Corfu, as they preside over the whole of our understanding of Ancient Greece: Euclid, Socrates, Plato, evoked here mostly through imagery: ‘And now the stars are shining down frost-blown and taut upon this pure Euclidean surface.’ ‘The divine Plato’, a friend tells Durrell, ‘once said that in Greece you see god with his compasses and dividers.’
But Homer and the Odyssey are also layered into the landscape, and Durrell makes pilgrimages to the three towns which contend for the meeting place of Ulysses and Nausicaa. ‘Last and most likely is Paleocastrizza, drenched in the silver of olives on the north-western coast. The little bay lies in a trance, drugged with its own extraordinary perfection.’
Then there is Shakespeare, and The Tempest, about which Durrell’s new scholarly Greek friends have complicated theories. Was Shakespeare thinking of Corfu when he wrote his last great play? And, finally, there is Edward Lear, who stayed here in the 1850s and early 1860s, who played the piano, painted and exhibited gloomy watercolours, and wrote beguiling letters home. ‘My life here has gone on very sklombionbiously on the whole . . .’
All this, with Durrell’s rhapsodic response to place and people, isrichly interwoven with political history. Corfu was colonized many times: by France, Italy and Britain, before being ceded to Greece in 1864. Napoleon saw it as the keystone to an Empire in the East. Italy left the architecture of Corfu town, ‘all Venetian blue and gold’. Britain left the University of Corfu, good roads and a proper water supply – in the 1930s ‘an English house’ meant one with a lavatory, commanding twice the rent. Overall, remarks one of Durrell’s friends, ‘of the vanished Imperial culture of England little remains . . . but . . . cricket lives on independently as the patron saint’.
The legacies of colonial rule lie at the heart of Bitter Lemons (1957). I have a dim memory of the cover of Prospero’s Cell, perhaps a mysterious green. But to this day I can remember the impact of the bold black outlines and acid lemon-yellow of that Sixties Faber edition. Now published as Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, it is a book no less lyrical and exact in its descriptive writing but which offers more of a narrative.
By 1953, when it opens, with a magical voyage from Venice, it seems that Durrell and his wife have separated. With very little money, he settles into lodgings with a Greek schoolmaster, overlooking the harbour of Kyrenia, then buys a little house in a mountain village. Over the three years of his stay on the island he is visited by his small daughter, whom he teaches Greek; by his effervescent mother; and later by his brother Gerald, who arrives with a great deal of equipment. Knowing that ‘the minute he started collecting the whole place would be alive with lizards, rats, snakes and every foul creeping thing’, Durrell moves out for a while. There are letters from Henry Miller in Paris; there are other tremendous visitors – Paddy Leigh Fermor and Freya Stark in his first autumn – as well as the new friends Durrell makes wherever he goes: artists, journalists and teachers. And he penetrates the working life of the island, observing it not only as diarist and writer but as publicist for a wine company; English teacher in the Nicosia Gymnasium; and finally as Press Adviser to the Colonial Secretary, at a time when political discontent is rumbling towards violent revolution. ‘Journeys, like artists, are born, and not made,’ he writes as he sets sail for Cyprus. ‘They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures – and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space but inwards as well . . . These thoughts belong to Venice at dawn . . . [With the approach of night] we had become once more aware of loneliness and time – those two companions without whom no journey can yield anything.’ Durrell is scholar, philosopher, colourist. His writing is lush and intense. With the dramatic arrival of spring rain, ‘Thunder clamoured and rolled, and the grape-blue semi-darkness of the sea was bitten out in magnesium flashes as the lightning clawed at us from Turkey like a family of dragons.’ There are huge contrasts between the beauty of the place and its impoverished, crumbling infrastructure, and between the extremes of feeling about the English. His students at the Gymnasium are in love both with Byron’s legendary, heroic death and with Durrell himself – ‘I dote my English teacher’ – but they drape the blackboard with black crêpe on the anniversary of Greek Independence Day. Some of the young men in these classes will become recruits to EOKA, the resistance movement formed in 1955 to end British rule and annex the island to Greece. Some will die for it. By the end of the book, the slogans scrawled on whitewashed village walls – the BRITISH MUST GO . . . WE WILL SHED BLOOD – have given way to bombings. And Durrell himself has at least one attempt made on his life. It is time to go. ‘My footsteps echoed softly upon the sea-wall. I was, I realized, very tired after this two years’ spell as a servant of the Crown; and I had achieved nothing. It was good to be leaving.’ By the time we three girls arrived in Corfu, Cyprus had been an independent state for five years. Back in ordinary old Surrey, I spent long afternoons in the town bookshop, furtively reading Henry Miller’s extraordinary letters to Durrell, all drink and literature and astonishing sex. I had, finally, been abroad, and my mind had been lit: by Mediterranean sun, by my first romance, and by Durrell’s deep love-affair with Greece. Perhaps, like him, I had begun to discover myself.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 42 © Sue Gee 2014
About the contributor
Sue Gee makes a kind of peace with Surrey in her latest novel, Coming Home, now out in paperback.