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Overview: Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) was a novelist, poet, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet, his acclaimed series of four novels set before and during World War II in Alexandria, Egypt. Durrell’s work was widely praised, with his Quartet winning the greatest accolades for its rich style and bold use of multiple perspectives. Upon the Quartet’s completion, Life called it “the most discussed and widely admired serious fiction of our time.”
Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Durrell was an avid and dedicated writer from an early age. He studied in Darjeeling before his parents sent him to England at the age of eleven for his formal education. When he failed to pass his entrance examinations at Cambridge University, Durrell committed himself to becoming an established writer. He published his first book of poetry in 1931 when he was just nineteen years old, and later worked as a jazz pianist to help fund his passion for writing.
Determined to escape England, which he found dreary, Durrell convinced his widowed mother, siblings, and first wife, Nancy Isobel Myers, to move to the Greek island of Corfu in 1935. The island lifestyle reminded him of the India of his childhood. That same year, Durrell published his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers. He also read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and, impressed by the notorious novel, he wrote an admiring letter to Miller. Miller responded in kind, and their correspondence and friendship would continue for forty-five years. Miller’s advice and work heavily influenced Durrell’s provocative third novel, The Black Book (1938), which was published in Paris. Though it was Durrell’s first book of note, The Black Book was considered mildly pornographic and thus didn’t appear in print in Britain until 1973.
In 1940, Durrell and his wife had a daughter, Penelope Berengaria. The following year, as World War II escalated and Greece fell to the Nazis, Durrell and his family left Corfu for work in Athens, Kalamata (also in Greece), then Alexandria, Egypt. His relationship with Nancy was strained by the time they reached Egypt, and they separated in 1942. During the war, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British Embassy. He also wrote Prospero’s Cell, a guide to Corfu, while living in Egypt in 1945.
Durrell met Yvette Cohen in Alexandria, and the couple married in 1947. They had a daughter, Sappho Jane, in 1951, and separated in 1955. Durrell published White Eagles Over Serbia in 1957, alongside the celebrated memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and Justine (1957), the first novel of the Alexandria Quartet Capitalizing on the overwhelming success of Justine, Durrell went on to publish the next three novels in the series—Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960)—in quick succession. Upon the series’ completion, poet Kenneth Rexroth hailed it as “a tour de force of multiple-aspect narrative.”
Durrell married again in 1961 to Claude-Marie Vincendon, who died of cancer in 1967. His fourth and final marriage was in 1973 to Ghislaine de Boysson, which ended in divorce in 1979.
After a life spent in varied locales, Durrell settled in Sommières, France, where he wrote the Revolt of Aphrodite series as well as the Avignon Quintet. The first book in the Quintet, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize while Constance (1982), the third novel, was nominated for the Booker Prize.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
The Black Book:
Death Gregory has disappeared, abandoning his diaries in a seedy London hotel. Discovered by Lawrence Lucifer, they depict a clique of intellectuals living a life of squalid debauchery: struggling writers and artists consumed by loves, lusts, and a quest for innovation. But as they satisfy violent appetites of the flesh – and mind – their descent into darkness accelerates…
Written when he was only 24, Lawrence Durrell described his controversial third novel as ‘a two-fisted attack on literature by an angry young man of the thirties’ in which he ‘first heard the sound of my own voice.’ First published in Paris in 1938, it was banned in Britain for nearly four decades due to its ‘obscenity’ (influenced by Durrell’s friend Henry Miller). Vivid, surrealist, and haunting, The Black Book peers into the recesses of our souls: and establishes Durrell as a trailblazing stylist.
The Dark Labyrinth (Cefalu):
Who will survive the Labyrinth of Crete?
A group of English cruise-ship tourists debark to visit the isle of Crete’s famed labyrinth, the City in the Rock. The motley gathering includes a painter, a poet, a soldier, an elderly married couple, a medium, a convalescent girl, and the mysterious Lord Gracean. The group is prepared for a trifling day of sightseeing and maybe even a glimpse of the legendary Minotaur, but instead is suddenly stuck in a nightmare when a rockslide traps them deep within the labyrinth. Who among the passengers will make it out alive? And for those who emerge, will anything ever be the same?
To some extent the book is a roman à clef and Durrell’s characters talk with great reality about their experiences, themselves and a certain psychological unease that has led most of them to embark on their journey. The climax is a disastrous visit to the labyrinth, with its reported minotaur. The novel is a gripping piece of story-telling, full of atmosphere and the vivid first-hand writing about Mediterranean landscape and people of which Durrell was a master.
White Eagles Over Serbia: (2021 edition)
Lose yourself in this classic 1950s Cold War spy thriller tracking a British secret agent in Communist Serbia by the celebrated of The Alexandria Quartet, perfect for fans of John le Carre.
—’A spellbinder … Desperately exciting.’ (Daily Telegraph)
Methuen is a seasoned British secret agent, weary of espionage missions and desperately in need of a break – but he can’t resist an assignment to investigate dirty dealings in the Balkans. A fellow British spy has been murdered in Serbia by a guerrilla gang of underground royalists, the White Eagles – but when Methuen arrives, he soon finds himself in a life-and-death struggle, pursued by both the royalists and Communists alike …
Inspired by Lawrence Durrell’s own experiences in the British Foreign Office, White Eagles Over Serbia is a classic Cold War espionage thriller: a white-knuckle adventure perfect for fans of John le Carre and Graham Greene.
Collected Poems: 1931-74
This third collection of Lawrence Durrell’s poems makes generally available for the first time all of the poems published between 1931 and 1974. The earliest items are now all quite scarce: Quaint Fragment: Poems Written between the Ages of Sixteen and Nineteen (1931); Ten Poems (1932); Ballade of Slow Decay (Christmas, 1932); Transition: Poems (1934); Mass for the Old Year (1935). Durrell’s first real volume of verse, in terms of availability to the public, was A Private Country (1943), and it was followed by Cities, Plains and People (1946) and On Seeming to Presume (1948). Deus Loci (1950) and Private Drafts (1955) marked a brief return to private, limited editions, but Durrell has remained a truly public poet since The Tree of Idleness (also 1955). That volume was followed by Selected Poems (1956); the first Collected Poems (1960); Selected Poems, 1935–1963 (1964); The Ikons and Other Poems (1966); the second Collected Poems (1968); Vega and Other Poems (1973), which included the poems published in The Red Limbo Lingo (1971); and Selected Poems (1977). All the poems published in these volumes are collected here, as are those poems which were published in little magazines but which were never collected. However, poems published as integral parts of plays or novels are not included, nor are poems which exist only in manuscript form.
The poems have been arranged chronologically by year of first publication. Two dates are given beneath each poem: the date on the left is the year in which the poem was first gathered by its author as part of a volume of verse; the italicized date on the right is the year of first publication. Poems which were originally dated by the poet retain those dates, in parentheses, beneath their titles.
Over the years, and for various reasons, many of the original dedications to the poems had been removed; they have been restored in this edition. Similarly, original author’s or prefatory notes which had been either pared down or completely excised have here been reinstated. Finally, epigrams from Georges Blin and Mila Repa which appeared in first editions as ‘keys to a mood’ but have not appeared in collected editions have been slipped into this edition in their original chronological settings.
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