Lawrence Durrell: Blue Thirst: Tales of Life Abroad

My first impulse when I received these two transcripts of impromptu lectures I gave in California, was the normal one, namely to sit down and rewrite them, to give the prose some shape. But then, on reflecting, it seemed to me that it would be better to leave them just the way they were, with all the hesitations and fumblings and false starts. They seemed more actual that way; I thought that if I tidied them up I might take all the life out of them. The result is that whatever small changes I have made have been only in the interests of intelligibility; there were defective patches in the transcript, and sometimes in the typing. These I touched up lightly, but careful to keep the colloquial tone, and the hesitations which are inevitable in impromptu lecturing.

The first lecture was given in the marvelous Beckmann Auditorium at Caltech in Pasadena under the general title “A Poet In The Mediterranean.” The second was perpetrated at Claremont College, Pomona. My grateful acknowledgements go to both institutions for permission to reprint.

Lawrence Durrell

Paris, 1975

An invitation to reminisce is always rather terrifying. One inevitably thinks of those old after-dinner speakers, rosy with fatuity, who somehow can’t break off. So when I received an invitation to reminisce I was a little bit tormented by doubts because I remembered also another cautionary tale — the curate, the shy curate in Leacock, a wonderful short story, where he found that every time he said, “Well, I think I ought to …,” they said “Won’t you have another cup of tea?” And he was too weak to leave. He sank back into his chair finally lingered until dinner time and they said “Do you really have to go home? We could easily give you dinner.” And he was too weak, he stayed for dinner. Finally, they had to make — they were naturally furious — they had to make up a bed in the spare room. And he stayed there for weeks in a strange delirium, sometimes rising up from his pillow he would cry, “I really think I must …” and then sink back hopelessly with a cracked laugh. Finally as you may remember, the angels came for him. I didn’t want them to come for me.

Nevertheless I did feel that perhaps there might be some point in trying to recollect and perhaps recreate a little bit of a Greece which is not finished now and gone for good, but which has changed very much and doesn’t resemble the Greece that I knew at the age of 21 when I was a young aggressive poet. It was in Greece that I first hit the Mediterranean proper. And thinking it over I thought I might perhaps accept and have a try at repainting this not forgotten but not so terribly distant Greece in time.

The land I went to then was not the popular one it is today — Italy was the in thing. Everybody great had given a cachet to Italy, from the Romantic poet onwards. Byron was the only person who went to Greece, but he did it for a special reason. But the Greece I met presented enormous practical day-to-day problems. It was the era before DDT. I have to remind you how recently the medicaments which make Mediterranean travel easy and pleasant are — DDT was discovered only during the last war. Greece was one large flea before then. One enormous hairy gnashing flea. And several kinds of bedbug as well, mostly elephant-size. And walking across it in the heat, the primitiveness of the country was really intimidating. It was in some ways almost as primitive as Africa. If it hadn’t been so beautiful and washed always by this marvelous blue sea, it would have really daunted even me, and I was tough and in very good health. But our Greece we learnt the hard way and we learnt it without penicillin and any of the amenities which are available now. The big miracle drugs, for example, that breakthrough was also at the end of the war: The sulphanilamides — a whole range of science that wasn’t available to us in 1934. One was deep in the Middle Ages in a remote Greek village. The actual medical arrangements were in the hands of a few kind pharmacists and women called “good women” who were kind of medieval bone-setters and also masseurs with a marvelous sense of anatomy. They really did perform wonders. I have seen miracles performed with them — and also nobody quite knows how they got their special knowledge because they have enough sense to leave a tubercular bone alone. But they were great manipulators of limbs and even today they are still there and perform astonishing cures. They are also specialists in herbal cures. In those days I elected to live in a Greek village the life of a fisherman. The house that I took is on the north end of the island of Corfu which is extremely beautiful and which I found by accident. Later on it was literally a question of putting a pin in a map and saying to my mother “You’ve got to stop spending money and start economizing.” In those days Greece was unbelievably cheap and she managed to live very satisfactorily with her family in a large house. My brother has described all this inimitably and powerfully in a wonderful book. And I think here I should say that I feel extremely pleased that I am responsible in part for two of the best books about modern Greece. One is Henry Miller’s book which is partly due to the fact that I took him there and he fell in love with it and wrote probably his best book there. And then my brother’s own book is marvelous because he literally wasn’t aware that there was an ancient Greece. It was extraordinary how he felt his way back into his 12-year-old skin to write it. Naturally in it his older brother figures as a sort of horrible Faustian figure. I was 22 and writing the Black Book at that time. And he paid off all his youthful grudges in the book, quite rightly. The book is really a masterpiece as a picture of Corfu simply because there is not a single classical reference in it. The seduction — you smile, but in fact it is perfectly true — the seduction about Greece is such that one tends towards purple prose all the time and it’s very difficult to see a Greek landscape or a Greek village without thinking of Aphrodite or a modern Greek situation which doesn’t immediately echo something Homeric. So naturally, if you have an Aphrodite in your pocket you tend to plaster it into your prose and consequently it’s just not as good as somebody treating Greece as if it was entirely new, pristine, fresh and born yesterday — a new-laid egg. And Miller deliberately ignored the classical stuff he knew and my brother didn’t know any. So between them they produced wonderful books of which I am rather proud because I took both of them there.

It’s funny, I’ve often thought, and philosophers have frequently said, that one remembers the hard beds better than the soft ones. And those winters in Greece were extraordinarily hard, particularly living in unheated houses with no chimneys and no wood in the north of this island. The rainfall in Corfu is almost tropical in density — that is why it is so green. But sometimes one heard it for weeks on end — that and the sea pounding on the rocks below the house we lived in.

My brother very skillfully gave the impression that I lived with the family, but that wouldn’t have been possible. You don’t know how awful they are. I always lived apart from them but I used to visit them at Christmas just to observe them. And make a few notes. But I always lived with my wife alone on the north point of the island in a very lonely and rather beautiful house. And as I say, our life was one of the utmost primitiveness — in terms of food I don’t remember what it was possible to find — apart from the few fish we caught — to eat, because the roads were washed out in the winter and apart from a few tins of macaroni I think we literally had nothing. Occasionally they killed a lamb, Greek lamb isn’t bad, it’s — well, I suppose it was horrible, our diet, but when you’re young and in good health it didn’t seem to matter very much.