In a 1938 notebook, author Lawrence Durrell declared that a part of consciousness is lost at birth, and that “the whole course of one’s life is simply a searching for this lost fragment”.
When he died in 2020, Michael Haag left behind 12 complete chapters of a biography of Durrell. A writer, historian and long-time admirer of the Durrell family and their environs, Haag seems to take the above claim as his biography’s central thread.
Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell – which spans the period 1912-1945, the years Haag considered to be Durrell’s most important – is punctuated by loss and yearning, twin poles, Durrell believed, for “all those who start descending the long sad river of growth”.
Schooled in Kurseong, India – Durrell’s father was an engineer for the North-West Railway – the “nursery-rhyme happiness” of his childhood was interrupted by the loss of his younger sister Margery to diphtheria and the subsequent loss of his mother to alcoholism and depression (returning to the womb would become a motif across Durrell’s oeuvre).
Such traumas indelibly marked Durrell; other alleged losses in this biography are spurious, fitting less with Durrell’s fatalistic river of growth. Durrell had a penchant for melodrama – “I wasn’t unhappy. I made my unhappiness” – and was often the catalyst of his deprivations; his years in Alexandria lamenting the loss of first wife Nancy Myers and daughter Penelope, for example, are illuminated thanks to reference to Durrell’s domestic abuse of Nancy, and his ambivalence toward Penelope: “no news of the child either to which I was perhaps too much attached”.
Durrell, whose Alexandria Quartet was structured around the same story being told from numerous perspectives, is here chronicled in a similar multitudinous manner.
Larry: A New Biography homes in on Durrell’s various “uncles”, the great inspirations on his life and craft, functioning as antidotes to his qualms about modernity. His intellectual development is tracked fluidly. Henry Miller’s influence cannot be understated. Having read Tropic of Cancer at 23, Durrell declared it “the greatest thing written in our lifetimes”. While Joyce and DH Lawrence are bogged down in “the morass of modern life, Miller comes out on the other side grinning”.
Miller’s two-finger salute to the world struck a chord with the young Durrell, who wrote The Black Book with the American in mind, a diatribe against what Durrell called the English death; the novel described a spiritual paralysis manifesting in puritanical, repressive and self-conscious behaviours Durrell believed to be particularly English, and stifling to the creative process. Haag postulates that Durrell’s claim to Irishness was a means to circumvent Miller’s disdain for the English.
Durrell was named by George Orwell among other contributors to Miller’s short-lived Booster magazine as writers who embraced the following mantra: “The only thing to do about the world is to accept it, endure it and record it.”
Durrell found another kindred spirit in Plotinus, insisting that an overarching singularity has been obscured by the West’s insistence on pure rationalism, whose binaries rule out wholeness; without this, there can be “no inclusiveness or acceptance, no true experience of love”. This is what perennially blights Durrell’s characters, and Larry does well to root and demystify their sufferings.
Durrell’s writing is infused with deus loci – spirit of place – and thus it is only right to count Alexandria among the other uncles. Posted there during the second world War as a press attache for the British embassy, Durrell took CF Cavafy and EM Forster as spiritual guides to the city in which the past and present rub shoulders.
“[It] had floated away from the war,” giving it an atemporal quality. Durrell felt himself to be reliving the city as it was known by his guides, “nothing had changed that I could discern ... the phantom city which underlay the quotidian one”. For the itinerant unable to stomach the weight of change, Alexandria was a lost fragment regained.
A cursory glance at the book’s title reveals, in microcosm, some of its big shortcomings. While this isn’t a one-dimensional portrait of the author, Haag certainly has a preferred angle; Larry evokes a lovable cad, whose problematic behaviours Haag either skims over or defends vehemently. Accusations of abuse from wives Myers and Eve Cohen arise, though only by direct comment, and without further probing.
Given the author’s strident defence of Durrell elsewhere – Haag’s excuses for Durrell’s lies are often fanciful – it seems that neutrality was not the intention. Larry: A New Biography bends the truth slightly. Great parts of this book are reworked from Haag’s Alexandria: City of Memory, and often the transitions from biography to history are far from seamless; Larry veers off on tangents, often forgetting its subject. This is an important, often revelatory text, though limited on account of the author’s preferences.
