[1912–90]
Lawrence George Durrell was born in Julundur, India. His parents were colonials of Irish and English descent. Accounts of his somewhat eccentric childhood (as well as his bohemian early adulthood) can be found in affectionate detail in his zoologist brother Gerald’s autobiographical books. Educated in England at St Edmund’s College, Canterbury, Durrell’s subsequent working life was characteristically eclectic. In his own words, he ‘hymned and whored’ in London, with jobs ranging from jazz pianist and composer to automobile racer and real-estate agent. In the 1930s he began what was to be a long and close correspondence with Henry Miller. Miller’s own erotic novels greatly influenced Durrell’s work, and when a manuscript of Durrell’s failed to pass the British obscenity regulations Miller suggested that Durrell publish his now-infamous Black Book (1938) in Paris. Ironically, this work examines what Durrell calls ‘the English Death’, or the sterility of British society.
Durrell supplemented his writing with schoolteaching and employment in various diplomatic posts, both during and after the Second World War. He spent much of his life on islands in the eastern Mediterranean; by the time The Black Book was published, he had moved to the Greek island of Corfu. He served as a Foreign Service press officer during the 1940s and early 1950s in Athens, Cairo, Rhodes and Belgrade, and was a lecturer and the director of the Institute for the British Council in Cordoba, Argentina, from 1947 to 1948. In the 1950s he acted as the director of public relations for the British government in Cyprus. In 1957 he moved to Provence, France, and became a full-time writer.
Durrell was a novelist, dramatist, short-story and travel writer, translator, editor and critic; yet he considered himself to be principally a poet. His first book to be accepted by a major publisher was the collection of verse A Private Country (1943). His early poetic work blends traditional Western lyric forms with Mediterranean sensuality. These poems are included in the compilation Collected Poems, 1931–1974 (1980). Durrell the poet is often overlooked, and the work commonly regarded as his chef-d’œuvre is the fictional opus The Alexandria Quartet.
Comprising the volumes Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958) and Clea (1960), the Quartet is an experiment with structure. It uses Einstein’s space-time continuum to question our perception of reality, examining the same events from a multitude of different perspectives. Durrell frequently employed his Baroque sensibilities and a Joycean absence of plot to explore the theories of Einstein and Freud. But his flamboyant language was seen by some critics as excessive, and Durrell was often cited for his overblown metaphors and lack of subtlety.
Sappho (1959) is one of Durrell’s several verse plays. It uses classical myth, dramatic principles and blank verse to explore the contemporary notion that traditional beliefs can hinder the pursuit of knowledge. Such irony seemed to be central in Durrell’s life, for while he lived for the most part in the eastern Mediterranean, enjoying a tangential relationship with Britain, he was perfectly aware that British people made up a large part of his readership. His expatriate status greatly influenced his work and he himself openly acknowledged a ‘love-hate’ relationship with Britain.
Durrell married his first wife, Nancy Myers, in 193 5; the two divorced in 1947 and Durrell was remarried in the same year to Tyvette Cohen, whom he later divorced. He had a daughter from each union, Penelope Berengaria and Sappho-Jane respectively. In 1961 he married Claude Marie Vineenden, a writer, who died in 1967. He married his fourth wife, Ghislaine de Boysson, in 1973. Durrell lived with her in Provence – wearied by his travels and perhaps by his turbulent personal life as well – in reclusive fashion. He died in 1990.
Durrell found it difficult to take Britain’s grand conception of herself seriously. For him Britain would always be a stuffy, comically self-important country. His contempt is evident in ‘London at Night’ (1969), in which he bemoans this grubby, unsensual city that clearly holds no attraction for him: it is neither an exciting place of multicultural possibilities, as it was for Conrad, nor a crucible for investigation, as it proved to be for Orwell.
London at Night
(Walsh in Bloomsbury)
Some nights, when sleep was impossible, and he had lain awake for hours watching the yellow pools of light on the ceiling as they flickered, and listening to the growing quiet of the streets, he would get up out of his bed and stand at the window. The café opposite stayed open until three o’clock and through the steamy glass of the swing-doors he could see the groups of men and women sitting round the marble-topped tables drinking coffee; mostly tall, sallow Jews, he noticed, with long dark overcoats and rakish hats; their clothes were padded out about the shoulders to give them the appearance of physique which they did not possess. And the women, mostly Euston Road bawds, with their loud market-place voices and disease fast hollowing out their eyes and melting down their features. Across the clear sound of voices in the silent street he caught clear scraps of words, unfinished sentences which hung for a moment in the air of the darkened room, and disappeared, leaving only the ghost of meaning in his watching mind. And from this polyglot crew of ruffians and bawds, lustrous Jews who waited in the shadows of every street-corner, and loud-mouthed taxi-drivers who drank tasteless coffee as they awaited late fares, some few he selected as worthy of remembrance. He knew from habit the times of their appearance, and waited to see them come down the street and shoulder their ways into the steamy den. At eleven, for instance, a tall negress walked through the street, limping with fatigue but with a face cocked up to the sky. She hummed a song as she passed in a low, nasal voice, very melancholy but not displeasing, and, surprisingly, held a beautiful silvery-coated whippet on a lead, which followed her softly, its arched body taut and docile. Every night, as she passed, she stopped at the entrance of the café and pushed the swing-doors aside, peering around at the seated people as though seeking someone; but she never went inside, only turned back each night with a little shrug of annoyance and continued her walk. Later, shortly after two, there appeared the figures of two men, one tall and powerful, the other smaller, but sturdily made. The larger was always without a hat, and his face was small and twisted with knobs of curly hair trained back across his poll. His shoulders were large enough for him to do without a padded overcoat. His companion was dark but in a more pallid, Israelite way and carried a huge, ebony-handled stick which seemed thick enough to house the blade of a sword. They walked slowly, with a kind of nervous nonchalance, and always stayed in the café until a quarter-past-three when they both swaggered out and called a taxi to them from the cab-rank at the corner of the road. They seemed never to speak to each other.
Some nights when he found it impossible to sleep he would dress and go out for a walk in the streets, slowly treading out the deliberate sound of his feet upon the pavements, smelling the stale night smells and hearing the noises, and imagining himself in a new world – a world of which half-silence and fear were the keynotes. The stale earth in the window-boxes, sterile and exhausted, unwilling to put forth more small flowers for the dust to choke, had a sharp, rancid smell that mingled with the stale odours of basement kitchens. When he walked thus, in a land where noise was so sharp and disturbing, he found himself able to notice things and comment on them, compare and associate groups of ideas. Even if the nearer silence was unbroken there was the great purring sound of distance, the mighty pouring of blood through the arteries of the city that was never silent. He wondered how many diverse sounds, how many different causes, went to make up this giant uniform growl of silence; the gurgle of water in the underground sewers, the wailing of sirens on the river, the swishing of the late trains as they moved out on their journeys, the groan of an early cart as it crawled down through the city, the chatter of the prostitutes at the street corners, the drone of taxis, the scratching of paper as it drifted upon the pavements – all these were absorbed and became components of that blare of silence; even the small flat sound of his feet upon the pavement was absorbed into it, and made a millionth part of the activity. Sometimes he would stand quite still and strain to distinguish the separate sounds of the vast orchestra – strain until his head ached for those indistinct sirencalls, the roar of trains, but he could never distinguish anything; always a nearer sound would break down his effort, laughter from the next street, or a cry from some shuttered window.
Yet from out of all the bewildering diversities of the night-life some sounds and smells remained constant and unchanging, and for these he treasured recognition as he did for those two or three inhabitants of the café opposite his house. The wheels of a taxi on the smooth black road never made anything but the sound of a choir of gnats, even in wet or frosty weather; and those gaunt men who wheeled their barrows of fruit through the dark squares never looked anything but furtive and hunted; their filthy cloth caps were pulled down low over their faces, and they lowered their voices when they spoke as though there were something shameful in the act of peddling their rich merchandise through the midnight city.
In a little street off Fitzroy Square there was always a light in the basement, and if you stood on the gleaming glass slab fretted with metal, your body was shaken by the pulsing of the machines that baked bread all night; and at each fresh throb of sound the wholesome smell of bread came out upon you from the grating in great heartening whiffs. He would stand upon the pitted glass and let the hot draught pour out around him, permeating his clothes, while he sniffed the sweet odours of the bakery. Once, as he stood there, taking great breaths of the pure warm air, a man, clad in a white smock, came to the grating and handed him two huge hunks of newly baked bread on a long fork, inviting him to eat it, smiling very kindly upon him:
‘I get lots of you poor artists round ’ere. Always ’ungry, aren’t yer?’
And as Walsh let his teeth sink into the warm crumbly richness of the bread he said, after thanking the man:
‘That’s settled it. I’m going to be a baker.’
But there were other things that he hated. Down by Leicester Square, in the little burrows behind the theatres, he found many a bundle of rags that had once been a human being curled up asleep in the doorway where tomorrow it would be turned away to make room for a pit queue; and once, a ragged little old man with a tabby beard who was burrowing in a dustbin. Beside him on the pavement lay a very old and very worn violin with only three sound strings, and a minute parcel of his belongings, girded up in a stained handkerchief. Walsh gave him a florin, but the poor creature seemed hardly to comprehend the meaning of the act, and he stared at the coin as it lay in his creased brown palm. Then, with a sudden quick gesture, he nodded his head and turned back to the dustbin, rummaging among the scattered paper and filth. His little frog-head was ducked flat as he tried to reach some object deep in the bin, while unconsciously with his boots he trampled the little round parcel which held his belongings, trampled and tore the red handkerchief.
On these late walks Walsh would often be filled with the feeling that he alone among the living trod the gloomy streets; his moving body and the feel of his clothes hanging on him, they were the only knowledge of substance in an illusory world. Even the sleek and silent men who stood night-long at the street-corners, and the women with their chalk-pale vermilion-rouged masks hiding what little self was left them, were but puzzling symbols of actualities that existed only in the squalid turbulence of the daytime. With the knowledge that so many activities, so many interests, so many personalities lay submerged in the second-sleep of dawn, his own perceptions quickened and briskly demanded food, as if given a freedom which the day denied them.
Doris Lessing
[1919-]
The oldest of two children, Doris Lessing was born in Kermanshah, Persia. In 1925, her family moved to Southern Rhodesia and settled on the 1,000-acre farm where Lessing would spend most of her childhood. The joy of living in the adventurous African landscape contrasted sharply with her unhappy home life. Her relationship with her mother was characterized by emotional abuse and, as is evident in Lessing’s autobiography, left deep psychological scars.
Lessing attended a convent boarding school and was enrolled for a brief time at an all-girls high school. However, she dropped out of the formal educational system at age thirteen. Although she had already written two full-length manuscripts and had published several short stories by the time she was eighteen, she made her living working in various secretarial positions. In 1939 she married Frank Wisdom, a civil servant who was much older than she was, and they had two children, John and Jean. After the couple’s divorce in 1943, the children remained with their father.
Inspired by the charged political atmosphere that followed the battle of Stalingrad, Lessing embraced Communism. She met her second husband, a Jewish-German immigrant named Gottfried Lessing, through a Marxist organization in Salisbury. The two were married in 1945, but the union was a troubled one that existed more for convenience than any emotional involvement. It ended in divorce in 1949, after Gottfried’s application for British citizenship had been approved. That same year Lessing emigrated to London, taking the couple’s two-year-old son, Peter, with her. Thus began her relationship with England, a country she found to be full of ‘quiet, mad maniacs – behind closed doors’. In 1950 she published her first novel, The Grass is Singing, which was unanimously acknowledged to be a highly accomplished debut. The protagonist is a woman whose spiritual isolation, both a product and a reflection of the racist society in which she was raised, results in a mental breakdown.
In 1956 Lessing paid a visit to Rhodesia. It was not a pleasant homecoming, for the government labelled her a prohibited immigrant’ and restricted her travel. She subsequently returned to England and, later that year, officially left the Communist Party. Nonetheless, she remained politically active, participating in mass nuclear disarmament demonstrations in the late 1950s and serving, until 1961, on the editorial board of an independent Marxist publication, The New Reasoner (later the New Left Review). Her experiences with the Communist Party are recorded in the first three of the five Children of Violence novels (1952–69). In 1962 Lessing’s most celebrated work, The Golden Notebook, was published. In it she chronicles the life of novelist Anna Wulf from the Second World War to 1957, and explores the idea that modern women are bound by the ‘rules’ of the society in which they live.
In the late 1960s Lessing became involved in theatre work and wrote several plays that were produced. During this time she also began to take an avid interest in Sufism, and its influence has been evident in her work. Over the course of her career Lessing has received several awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award (1954) and the Prix Medici (1976). Most recently, Lessing published the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994), and a novel Love, Again (1996). She is acutely aware that while she is a member of the British literary establishment, she is also a white African whose sensibilities were formed in and by Africa. Her relationship with British culture and her constant struggle to reconcile her status as a woman writer and a white African figure largely in her work.
In her essay ‘In Defence of the Underground’ (1987), Lessing finds reason to celebrate multicultural, heterogeneous London. Given the nature of her upbringing as a white African, this is an author who fully understands the interrelationship between race, class and colonialism, and she remains optimistic about the manner in which these societal components come together in modern-day Britain.
In Defence of the Underground
In a small cigarette and sweet shop outside the Underground station, the Indian behind the counter is in energetic conversation with a young man. They are both so angry that customers thinking of coming in change their minds.
‘They did my car in, they drove past so near they scraped all the paint off that side. I saw them do it. I was at my window – just luck, that was. They were laughing like dogs. Then they turned around and drove back and scraped the paint off the other side. They went off like bats out of hell. They saw me at the window and laughed.’
‘You’re going to have to take it into your own hands,’ says the Indian. ‘They did up my brother’s shop last month. They put burning paper through the letter box. It was luck the whole shop didn’t burn. The police didn’t do anything. He rang them, and then he went round to the station. Nothing doing. So we found out where they lived and we went and smashed their car in.’
‘Yes,’ says the other, who is a white man, not an Indian. ‘The police don’t want to know. I told them. I saw them do it. They were drunk, I said. What do you expect us to do? the police said.’
‘I’ll tell you what you can do,’ says the Indian.
All this time I stand there, disregarded. They are too angry to care who hears them and, it follows, might report them. Then the young white man says – he could be something in building, or a driver, ‘You think I should do the same, then?’
‘You take a good-sized hammer or a crowbar to their car, if you know where they live.’
‘I’ve a fair old idea, yes.’
‘Then that’s it.’
‘Right, that’s it.’ And he goes out though he has to return for the cigarettes he came to buy, for in his rage he has forgotten them.
The Indian serves me. He is on automatic, his hands at work, his mind elsewhere.
As I go out, ‘Cheers,’ he says, and then, continuing the other conversation, ‘That’s it, then.’
