The Durrells and Corfu

 

The Durrells are back on Sunday evening TV, bickering and creating mayhem against the heavenly backdrop of Corfu. Simon Nye’s adaptation is gorgeous escapism, much as the island was for the real Durrells in the years before the second world war. And the tales it spins are about as misleading.

Some years ago I became so fascinated by the family, and elder brother Larry in particular, that I wrote a novel inspired by his traveller’s life – and four wives along the way. I loved Gerard Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals from the moment I opened it aged about eleven. It was the funniest book I had ever read, and Gerald’s vicious yet loving lampoon of writer Larry sparkled in a glittering sea of hilarious set pieces, the 'diminutive blond firework' by turns pompously literary and infuriated by marauding beasts and insects.

But as ever with the Durrells, the truth was never allowed to get in the way of a good story. As sister Margo once said: “I never know what’s fact and what’s fiction in my family.”

To read more, please hop over to Katherine Sunderland's BiblioManiac blog. This is the opening of a guest post I've written for her.

 

 

I'm still fascinated by the Durrell family, their books, adventures and the truth behind the stories, and have recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Michael Haag's The Durrells of Corfu. It's a great overview of their real lives, with some poignant new photos that have never been released before, though it doesn't reveal much of the darker, and possibly most fascinating aspects of their stories. Still well worth reading if you're loving the TV series, and I bet you'll want to find out more...

 

 

 

Songs of Blue and Gold

 

The hard slog of writing goes on, made grim by persistent migraine. It’s an all too familiar scenario. The grey skies and rain so conducive to sitting at a desk lost in thought are also a disincentive to the tough walks through the countryside that help keep mind and body in sync.

Despite the frustrations, I remain convinced that this is the most creative time of the year. Before I had this blog I wrote a piece for my website about the writing of my novel Songs of Blue and Gold, in which I tried to capture the moment when words catch fire in quiet times, and the chance reading of one book leads to another. Here it is, lightly edited.

"Inspired by the writer, poet and traveller Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), this is a novel about love and memory, identity and biography.

It sparked into life one gloomy winter afternoon when I rediscovered Prospero's Cell on the bookshelves of a bedroom at the top of the house. Opening it and starting to read was like injecting the grey with vivid blues and emeralds. A richly evocative account of Durrell's life in Corfu in the 1930s, it was first published in 1945 and purports to be a diary in which he is a serious young writer living blissfully in the sun, deeply in love both with his new wife and with the idea of Greece.

Durrell states that Prospero's Cell is a "guide to the landscape and manners" of Corfu but it never quite becomes this. It is a lyrical personal notebook, and what he leaves out is as poignant as what he includes. Its content is almost unrecognisable as the same ground his younger brother, the zoologist Gerald, covers in his famous Corfu book My Family and Other Animals, in which "Larry" lives with the family (which he never did) and is the 'diminutive blond firework' by turns pompously literary and hilarious.

And by the time he wrote Prospero's Cell Lawrence and his first wife Nancy had separated. He was already sadder and wiser, and living in wartime Egypt with Eve Cohen who would become his second wife.

I was intrigued. Further researches and a reading of several biographies soon revealed a complex and contradictory character - and a further two wives. His work, over a period of nearly sixty years - most famously in The Alexandria Quartet - was concerned with duality: love and hate; truth and fiction; memory and misinterpretation. And running through it all, the transfiguring effect of time.

Lawrence Durrell wrote beguilingly, drawing constantly on his own experience and his many subsequent moves across the shores of the Mediterranean - to Rhodes (Reflections on a Marine Venus), Cyprus (Bitter Lemons), the former Yugoslavia, and finally to the South of France (Caesar's Vast Ghost) where he settled for thirty years.

What was especially rewarding as I dug deeper was that he featured in so many other biographies and memoirs - each giving further insights - thanks to his enduring friendships with writers such as Henry Miller, Anais Nin, T S Eliot (who was his editor and mentor at Faber and Faber), Patrick Leigh Fermor, Freya Stark, Rose Macauley, Richard Aldington and Elizabeth David.

Interwoven throughout were his many loves and four marriages. He seemed to pack so many different lives into one! And while he was a comet blazing, what of the women he collided with along the way, I wondered? How did their stories end? And what of those he met, whose lives he changed but who did not rate even a footnote in the biographies? Soon, I was busy inventing a fictional version of Durrell - Julian Adie - and Elizabeth. 

 

Julian Adie is a fictional creation, yet I have been faithful to the settings of Lawrence Durrell's life abroad and his quest for "the spirit of place". The White House in Kalami, Corfu is, and was, as described. It is still owned by the Athinaios family, who were Durrell's landlords in the 1930s.

Durrell aficionados might be disconcerted by the way I've played fast and loose with his chronology, compressing and altering his travels and his wives' biographies to give an impression of the author's life without providing in any way an accurate portrayal. In this, the book has more in common with his fictional characters, his use of dualism and reinterpretation, than with real people. "All these writers [in my books] are variations of myself," he said a few years before he died.

 

For the last thirty years of his life Durrell made his home in the Languedoc, south-west France, where the herb-scented raggedness reminded him of Greece. There it was harder, initially, to find his traces. Time does seem to have reset the co-ordinates. The centre of the small market town of Sommieres remains much as he described it, but across the Roman bridge over the Vidourle, his old house is swamped by the present in the form of a Champion hypermarket and its parking spaces.

But in Corfu, the Shrine of St Arsenius - Durrell's "place of predilection" where he felt he was reborn as the writer he would become - is scarcely changed from the tiny waterside chapel on the cliff rocks where he and his wife Nancy dived and sunbathed naked, she 'like an otter…bringing up cherries in her teeth,' (Prospero's Cell).

As a reader of his biographies, I couldn’t help but wonder how is it that some people manage to live so many different lives in one, while others lack the courage to change. Does finding out that a parent or husband was not the person you thought they were change the way you feel about yourself, and colour your own memories?

The best biographies charm the reader into imagining they allow us an insight into what a famous person was really like. But how does this square with the difficulty we have in ever really knowing the people closest to us? Even the finest biographies are only one version of a life. What of the episodes that the biographer never discovers, or misinterprets according to his own prejudices and what of the people who are there only between the lines?"

For those who are still with me, here is the opening: of my novel:

By the time I reached Corfu, the season was in its last gasp.

Evening hung early over the bay when I walked the stony beach at Kalami and found the White House. It was just as he described: defiant on a rock, the sea clawing at its feet. On the headland behind, cypress trees pointed into a curdling sky. Pebbles crunched under my feet as I went closer, and waves sighed on grey stones. A brackish smell of nets and seaweed was sharp in the air.

This was how my search began. Looking for someone I didn't know, many years too late. And looking, at the same time, for someone I had always known, but trying to place her in a strange setting, reconfigured in some new history.

If you would like to read on a while longer, you can click this link.

Songs of Blue and Gold is still in print, published by Random House UK, and is available on Kindle.



Elizabeth David at Ménerbes

I do love a literary puzzle. If it involves a writer I admire and a geographical location, I’m in seventh heaven. Sometimes the mystery can take years to solve and requires a lucky break to provide the answer, and so it was with this conundrum: which was the house where Elizabeth David lived for a few months at Ménerbes?

Of all the British women writers of the 20^th century, perhaps it is cookery writer Elizabeth David who brought sensuousness to the widest reading public. When she wrote about aubergines, courgettes, garlic and aromatic herbs, they were not widely available and her descriptions evoked the tastes, aromas and brightness of the Mediterranean in the grey of Britain’s post-war rationing. She was far, far more than a collector of recipes: her writing captured a sense of time and place that was uplifting and inspirational. Many people claim that Elizabeth David began the transformation of the nation’s palate to the kind of food we eat today.

It must have been at least five years ago that I read Elizabeth David: A Mediterranean Passion, Lisa Chaney’s enjoyable biography of this woman whose adventurous life – born into privilege, she abandoned England for a yacht and a rackety lover – included escaping from the South of France in World War II via a Greek island and Egypt, where she worked at the Ministry of Information and socialised with an artistic and literary set that included Lawrence Durrell, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Olivia Manning.

In 1950, shortly after delivering the manuscript of French Country Cooking, Elizabeth and a couple of friends rented a huge draughty house in the Vaucluse at Ménerbes, in her own words, “a crumbling hill village opposite the Luberon mountain”. She was there for some months from late winter to early summer.

“How you would laugh your head off if you could see me in this tumbledown old Castle of Otranto,” she wrote to her sister, “with Romney (Summers) stacking logs on a great open fireplace as large as the town hall, and carrying his little khaki bag down to the village every day for the shopping. The weather has been a disgrace, the place as cold and wet as Charity. A fog comes up from the valley (or down from the hills) every night and in the morning you can’t see out of the windows.”

It wasn’t a particularly happy time. Even in May, the weather was terrible. Rain lashed at the old fortified manor, a constant stream of visitors arrived expecting to eat and stay over, and everyone drank far too much cheap wine, exacerbating bad tempers. On top of that, the “relentless screaming” of the Mistral drove her and her many guests “perilously close to losing our reason”.

Although there was one guest who remained popular. “Hamish doesn’t get up till lunchtime and most of his working hours are occupied fetching wood for the fire and doing the flowers.” For those who like literary asides as much as I do, Hamish was Hamish Erskine, bright young thing of the 1920s and son of the Earl of Rosslyn, known by everyone to be homosexual with no interest in marriage for form’s sake – everyone, it seems, except Nancy Mitford who, in their youth, stubbornly persisted for several years in her belief that they were engaged.

When the sun eventually reappeared in June, Elizabeth was exhausted, shattered by the sheer hard work (there had been some local help but not nearly enough) of having so many people around, catering for them and trying to work. In addition to research – including taking buses to Avignon’s markets - and writing, there had been the proofs of French Country Cooking to deal with.

I was hooked. I wanted to see the house where all this drama took place. There is a picture in Lisa Chaney’s book, captioned ‘The Provençal “Castle of Otranto” where Elizabeth stayed in 1950’. It does indeed look bleak, higher than the valley floor of fields. Obviously the first thing to do was to do an internet search, but google drew a blank with “Ménerbes + Otranto”.

Of course, I should have paid attention to the inverted commas. Otranto, it transpired, was Elizabeth David’s allusion to the title of a novel by Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story. Published in 1764, it is generally accepted to be the first gothic novel, and the opening salvo in a genre that would become wildly popular in the later 18^th and early 19^th centuries. Perhaps it was her way of saying it had been a house of horrors.

In the present, it seemed to me that it was the kind of place that might well be a chic boutique hotel now but more searches brought no match. From the photograph, I imagined the house was set on a small hill on the plain a little apart from the village. I scoured a large-scale map, wondering if I could find the pattern of roads and so pin down the precise location that way, but that didn’t work.

During various visits to Ménerbes and the surrounding countryside, I had the picture of “Otranto” in my mind but never saw a building like it. There wasn’t much point in asking anyone in the village about Elizabeth David – she had been there for such a short time and wasn’t well known in France. At one point I did think about taking the picture to a local estate agent and asking, but that seemed...well, a little obsessive. And so the mystery remained.

Until, quite by chance, I found it – or rather, I found a drawing in a book. I had bought Patrick Ollivier-Elliott’s Luberon Pays d’Apt: Carnet d’un voyager attentive (Trans: An observant traveller’s notebook) and there it was. In fact, I had to bring it back to England to check it against the picture in Lisa Chaney’s book before I could be sure, but it was the right house. And it had a name: Le Castellet.

From then on it was easy to discover that Le Castellet stands on the western spur of Ménerbes, a village that sits like a ship on a long rocky outcrop. The ‘little castle’ has a long history of its own, including a honourable part in the religious wars of the 16^th century when the villagers withstood a force of 12,000 Catholic troops for 14 months, much of the action focusing on Le Castellet.

It’s reached by walking up through the medieval part of the village on the narrow streets towards the church and the cemetery. There are lovely views all around, of the Luberon hills and the orchards and vineyards below, and finally there is a view down to Le Castellet from the walls surrounding the church: still completely recognisable from the picture in the biography.  

A few years after Elizabeth David’s stay, the property was sold to abstract artist Nicolas de Staël (1914-55), an associate of Braque and Picasso. In the early 1950s, Pablo Picasso too lived for a while in Ménerbes, as did his muse, the photographer Dora Maar. Le Castellet remains in the ownership of the de Staël family. It is not open to the public. The painting below is Ménerbes (1954) by Nicolas de Staël.

                                    

Stinging yellow

Even after weeks of rain in Kent, when the clouds clear the colours of an English May are eye-catching distractions everywhere you look. It will soon be as hard to write here as it is in Provence.

“I think England is the very place for a fluent and fiery writer. The highest hymns of the sun are written in the dark. I like the grey country. A bucket of Greek sun would drown in one colour the crowds of colours I like trying to mix for myself out a grey flat insular mud. If I went to the sun I’d just sit in the sun; that would be very pleasant but I’m not doing it, and the only necessary things I do are the things I am doing. Unless by accidents, and my life is planned by them, I shall be nearer Bournemouth than Corfu this summer.”

So wrote Dylan Thomas to his literary acquaintance Lawrence Durrell in December 1938. I’m a great admirer of both men’s work but have to confess that I take heart from the Welshman on this: I much prefer to write in the dark drear of British grey than the vibrant light of the south.

Thomas on his Carmarthenshire waterfront; Durrell in the searing blues and golds of the Greek island of Corfu: both connected through a mutual admiration of what the other achieved, one in the dark, one in sunlight. It’s fascinating to see, as the letter goes on, how well Thomas understands the effort and the personal turmoil of Durrell as he hammers out his words, striving so hard to be taken seriously, and how generous his encouragement:

"I liked your Stygian prose very very much, it’s the best I’ve read for years. Don’t let the Greek sun blur your pages as you said it did. You use words like stones, throwing, rockerying, mossing, churning, sharpening, bloodsucking, melting, and a hard firewater flows and rolls through them all the time…"

Sunlight on Lavender



Some scents sparkle and then quickly disappear, like the effervescence of citrus zest or a bright note of mint. Some are strange siren songs of rarer origin that call from violets hidden in woodland, or irises after spring rain. Some scents release a rush of half-forgotten memories.  And then there are the scents that seem to express truths about people and places that you have never forgotten: the scents that make time stand still.

                                                                                             From The Lantern

A real taste of Provence to wish you Happy New Year, as there’s nothing like the promise of southern light and warmth to raise the spirits when January days can be dank and dreary.

Actually, bad weather, on a working day at least, can be a positive for writers of a certain disposition. Dark clouds and rain stimulate the imagination. The colours seem brighter in the mind, somehow. I’m content sitting at my desk knowing I’m not missing out on much outside, as I try to paint pictures in words.

A few years ago when I was reading everything I could about Lawrence Durrell for my novel Songs of Blue and Gold, I came across a telling exchange between him and the poet Dylan Thomas. However did Thomas manage to write in the grey gloom of winter in Wales, Durrell wanted to know. Surely he needed vivid colours and vibrant life around him for inspiration? Thomas replied that if he lived on Greek island, like Durrell, he would never get any work done; the grey helped him to see brightness better. I’m definitely with Dylan Thomas on that one.

Researching a book is something different, though. That’s the time to get out and about in the sun with a notebook; the time when life can seem pretty much ideal. Then, in my case, it’s back to England in winter to form the fragments, the odd details and observations, into some kind of whole. I’m just at that stage now with a new novel. New Year’s Resolution Number One: start writing!