A man pursued by furies

Sinclair-Stevenson, #25

SAPPHO, the daughter of Eve and Lawrence Durrell, hanged herself in 1985 at the age of 33. Asked to explain the tragedy, the reputedly omniscient novelist gave an agnostic answer: ``I don't know. I don't think anybody knows. It's another mystery.'' However, after Durrell's death at the age of 78 in 1990, there were allegations that he had incestuously abused Sappho. His fiction encouraged such rumours and his biographer, Gordon Bowker, comes to the conclusion that Durrell felt cheated and emotionally abused by women so felt he had a right to wrong them. He was not, according to this account, a nice man but a nasty character who was only loved for his contribution to literature. Like Malcolm Lowry, the subject of Bowker's last biography, Durrell was pursued by furies.

Who knows for sure? Gerald Durrell was baffled by his brother as he explained, in My Family and Other

Animals (1956), when talking of the time the family settled on Corfu in the 1930s. There, Larry Durrell dug into his books and resented anything that upset his literary ambitions. Durrell also fumed at his brother's portrait of him as a boring bookworm, as Gerald discussed in Birds, Beasts and Relatives (1969). And Durrell was not happy with Gerald's popular success as a writer.

Durrell published 18 much-admired novels but never won the Nobel Prize for his finest achievement, The Alexandria Quartet, which Bowker understandably considers a classic statement of modern fiction. Durrell married four times but never found much happiness. He assured an interviewer shortly before his death: ``I have enjoyed nothing in my life. I've been bored ever since I crawled out of my mother's womb and never found anything that really pleased me.'' Born in India and at home with Buddhism, fiction was his fantasy and he did manage to have a fantastic relationship with one literary fellow.

Look back to Ian MacNiven's edition of The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-80 (1988) and it all becomes clear. Henry Miller's prose, by turns orgasmic and opinionated, may often suffer from overstatement but never succumbs to compromise. ``The only thing that truly nourishes,'' he told Durrell, ``is the doing what one wants to do. I tell you, everything else is crap, and futility, and waste.'' At the beginning of his literary career Miller felt he was casting his pearls before swine; until, he was approached by Durrell.

The correspondence between the two novelists ranges over 45 years and runs to more than a million words from which 210,000 were selected for MacNiven's scholarly edition. Both novelists realised, at the outset of their exchanges, they were conducting a serious artistic dialogue so both carefully preserved the letters they received. A previous edition, Lawrence Durrell-Henry Miller: A Private Correspondence (1963), was restricted by length and the relative linguistic modesty of the period. MacNiven's edition printed, whenever possible, complete texts of all letters judged to be genuinely important by the editor.

Durrell defined the early tone of the relationship with his first fan letter to Miller. Having settled in Corfu, to explore his literary options, he was astonished by a new novel a friend showed him.

Miller's Tropic of Cancer, published in Paris in 1934, was exactly the book to liberate him from his privileged colonial background and cultural inhibitions. In August 1935, Durrell wrote an effusive letter which began: ``Dear Mr Miller, I have just read Tropic of Cancer again and feel I'd like to write you a line about it. It strikes me as being the only really man-size piece of work which this century can really boast of.''

Predictably Miller, then a struggling American exile in Paris, was flattered. ``Dear Mr Durrell,'' he replied, ``You're the first Britisher who's written me an intelligent letter about the book. For that matter, you're the first anybody who's hit the nail on the head.'' Miller guessed Durrell was an aspiring writer and looked forward to his first novel Pied Piper of Lovers (1935). In his own view, Durrell had not yet emancipated his prose from negative influences and was not willing to submit this apprentice work to his mentor. In 1935, after all, Durrell was 23, Miller 20 years older.

In 1937, however, Durrell sent the only typescript of The Black Book to his master. It was Miller's turn to be astonished. Writing from Paris, he exclaimed: ``The Black Book came and I have opened it and I read goggle-eyed, with terror, admiration and amazement. You are the master of the English language - stupendous reaches, too grand almost for any book.'' Durrell was glad to let Miller promote the novel which, like Tropic of Cancer, was published by Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press in Paris (in 1938, it was not published in Britain until 1973).

Accepted as a major talent by Miller, Durrell was able to address the older man as an equal when they first met, in Paris, in August 1937. In a literary sense, Miller and Durrell were made for each other. Durrell, who always wanted to be part of a movement, was carried away by Miller's energy. Miller, who had doubts about his cultural credentials, was impressed by Durrell's erudition.

Whereas Miller's most impressive prose is a celebration of sensuality, Durrell was always on an intellectual quest. He tested his ideas - on the heraldic universe, on timeless space, on the meaning of Hamlet, on the pathology of genius - on Miller and the American revelled in the Englishman's insights. To some extent the intense correspondence made Durrell more like Miller and vice-versa.

Ironically, Durrell did not care for Miller's pseudo-philosophising about sex. In 1949 he criticised Miller's Sexus, condemning the way his chum had trashed a traumatic experience. Miller was hurt and countered with a perceptive attack on Durrell's lifetime of enjoying a socially secure lifestyle: ``Sometimes I think that you, Larry, never really knew what it was to live in our modern age - of asphalt and chemicals.'' Each man had made a valid point and the friendship survived until Miller's death in 1980.

Years before, Durrell had told Miller ``I love you more than any man I have ever met'' and the sincerity of this shines through the letters which inform Bowker's illuminating biography of the dark and despairing side of one of the most troubled stylists of the century.