LAWRENCE DURRELL

Constance

1982

ANOVELIST IS SUPPOSED to create his or her own world, fictional but believable, and word of mouth in the Oxford of my day kept on promising that this was what Lawrence Durrell had done. And so he had. The Alexandria Quartet fixed in my head a whole carnival of characters suave yet exotic, with names like Mountolive and Pursewarden, who expressed themselves in aphorisms, quotations and generally playful literary language. Latter-day Cleopatras, the womenfolk – Clea, Justine, Melissa – were working their passages through the cultural mix-up of the Middle East complete with Copts and Muslims. At home, the British were living in the darkness of Look Back in Anger, the void of The Birthday Party, the morbid paintings of John Bratby, and Durrell was a light to lighten them. Nobody else was writing like that.

The Suez campaign of 1956 for a few days looked likely to provide my introduction to Egypt. My national service had not much longer to run, but my regiment was on stand-by, busily camouflaging whatever they could with paint supposedly as yellow as the desert. Many of the men had previously been stationed along the Canal. Shufti and bint and baksheesh were familiar terms in their vocabulary. A ditty that went, “King Farook, hang his bollocks on a ’ook” told you what the guardsmen were thinking. At the last minute, we were stood down and I went up to Oxford as planned. More than ten years were to pass before I was in a position to match the extravagant world of The Alexandria Quartet against the grime of Egypt.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian strongman, had used his 1956 victory to militarize the country. The kind of Levantine characters who had caught Durrell’s imagination had no means to defend themselves. Dispossessed, their businesses and fortunes sequestrated, Alexandrian Greeks, Italians, Jews, Armenians, fled to the United States and Canada, lucky to escape with their lives. Victor Simaica Bey was one particular family friend whose estate was confiscated. Waguih Ghali’s novel Beer in the Snooker Club has a scene in which a rich lady is obliged to hand out to expectant but shame-faced fellahin the legal right of each to a miniscule strip of her land. Worse was to come as Nasser lent himself to the Soviet Union, opened concentration camps for those who might disagree with him, and squandered the country’s future in wars that led nowhere.

By the time the Daily Telegraph Colour Magazine sent me to interview Durrell in 1982 to coincide with the publication of Constance, he had settled down in Sommières, a historic fortified village in Provence. The foundations of the bridge across the river Vidourle had been laid in the reign of the emperor Tiberius. “Monsieur du Rèle,” the locals called him. The house he lived in had been built around 1900, a provincial villa with the only slate roof in this region of semi-circular terracotta tiles. The rooms were sparse, impersonal except for some Chinese lacquered boards and a framed sheet of manuscript that Stendhal had written. The verandah room in which he lived and did his writing had pastel-shaded stained glass and a table with a green plastic cloth. Impervious to his surroundings, he evidently had no interest in what money can buy. “I’m terribly flush” was one of the first things he said, as though that was that.

Durrell was a homunculus, a sprite, one of the company of Pan, stocky, his shoulders broad and his legs bandy. A bulbous nose made his head seem disproportionately large and strong. He was wearing a blue shirt and white shorts so ill-fitting that his private parts were exposed. He lived with a much-younger woman and presumably she might have told him to arrange himself but he had sent her out of the house and we never met. Accompanying me, Clarissa and our son Adam, then nine, said nothing at the time, but down the years couldn’t help remembering this give-away sight.

Bored to be questioned, bored to be famous yet proud of it too, Durrell laughed at the literary hoo-ha of publishers and agents. His papers have long been in the University of Southern Illinois, and he joked about a couple of American academics “who know more about me than I know about myself.” In the same tone of delighted disdain he said, “I’m in the Michelin Guide as one of the tourist attractions here. Couples ring the bell to shake my hand when I’m probably naked in the swimming pool. Partly it’s my fault because I made the mistake of appearing on French television.”

At about ten o’clock in the morning he started in on the red wine. The old soak, the smoker, the bar-room story-teller, the fabulator, the poet, the colonial, the stag, he could even play the part of the colonel frowning at the young of today who go in for what he called “squirty couplings” and think that’s all there is to life. Which reminded him that he’d been employed to rescue a film script set in ancient Egypt, so he had eunuchs parading with papier-mâché phalluses sixty foot high: “That’s not box-office,” the producer had said.

The moment I was back home, I received a letter hotfoot from Durrell with a request not to mention one or two things from our conversation. I wasn’t aware that he’d been filling me in with what he described as his “yogic theories about fucking.” Whatever these theories might be, he was afraid that they would “hamper the free-selling run of the book and raise blushes and irritation” on the part of Telegraph readers. Within a few volatile years, a change of taste had turned his fiction first into a requiem, and then without warning it vanished out of sight down one of the twentieth century’s literary rabbit-holes.