THE DURRELLS

                                       

 

 

According to the book “The Durrells in Corfu”, by Michael Haag,  the Durrells spent five years on the idyllic Greek island.

The family’s circumstances leading them to live on the island are quite dreadful.  After her husband died, Luisa Durrell was left with four children to look after and she was deprived and could not bring them up the way she ought to. 

 

Unfortunately, depression led Louisa to alcoholism, so she became unable to attend to her children.

 

In January 1953, her budding novelist son Lawrence married and as he was always unhappy in England, he persuaded his wife, mother and younger siblings to move to Corfu.

 

There they could live more economically and escape the English weather and Durrell considered the stultifying English culture terrible which he described as “English Death”.  

During that summer Durrell’s first novel “Pied-Piper Lovers” was published, enabling him to look after the family, economically.

His most famous work is the “The Alexandrian Quartet” published between 1957 to 1960.  The most famous of this series was “Justine.  At the beginning of 1974, Durrell published "The Avignon Quintet”.

 

One of his novels “Monsieur or the Prince of Darkness” won the James Tart Black Memorial Prize in 1974.  Another novel “Constance are Solitary Practices” was nominated for the 1982 Broker Prize.   By the end of the century, he was a best-selling author and one of the most celebrated writers in the UK.

 

It is known that the adventures of the family began in 1935 and it was the one that would shape their lives forever, despite of them having to flea because of World War II, just four years after they had arrived there.

                                                            Gerald Durrell

Two writers in the family both Lawrence and his animal-loving brother Gerald recounted various tales of their life in Corfu, in their literary works.  Gerald Durrell later became a world-renowned naturalist in Great Britain for his work with animals. He also wrote the novel “My Family and Other Animals”.  Both brothers loved Greece, especially Corfu.

 

Lawrence was becoming very knowledgeable about the political realities in Greece, after the outbreak of World War II, and he went to work for the British Foreign Service, and later he worked as an official in the  Cyprus Government.

“Prosperous Cell” is Lawrence Durrell’s love letter to Corfu, finishing in 1942.  He wrote the book to pay honor to his friends and villagers who had been killed during the invasion and for the house in Corfu in which Nancy and he had lived in which had been bombed and destroyed.  He knew that pleasant, simpler times had ended for good not only in Corfu but Greece itself.

 

His work “Prosperos’ Cell” is the first of his travel writing is Durrell’s paen to the beautiful Ionian Island.  Prospero the protagonist in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” also like Durrell escapes to a desert island.

 

A Count who Durrell met in Corfu, says that he believes that the desert island was indeed Corfu.  In the book that includes the history of the island, Durrell quotes the Count who tells hem bluntly just what he thinks the book will look like and what Durrell will accomplish this by writing it.

 

The Count answered him “It is difficult to say …a portrait in exact detail contains splinters of landscape, written out roughly, as if to get rid of something which obstructs the optic nerves.”

 

That in a nutshell is how many travelers who go to Greece experience the country’s staggering beauty that is so strange, that it is almost no way categorize it in the mind’s eye.

After he was married Lawrence and his wife Nancy Meyers (he refers to her as “N” in the book) went to live in a white house at the northernmost tip of the island.  His work grew out of their time together from poetic images he had gathered during the years.

It is similar to his later work “Reflection on the Marine Venus”, an account of his post-war life on the island of Rhodes.

 

“It is April and we have taken an old fisherman’s house in the extreme north of the island,” Durrell relates in his book.  “Ten sea-miles from the town, and some thirty kilometers by road it offers all the charms of seclusion. A white house set like a dice on a rock already vulnerable with the scars of time and water. The hill runs up to the sky behind it so that the cypresses and olive trees overhang the room in which I sit and write,”                            

 

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