The Colossus of Maroussi
How Lawrence appears in its pages: The British poet and novelist who was living on Corfu and kept inviting Henry Miller to come. Miller went, and Durrell is his companion for much of the trip.
Read the character guide- Author
- Poet
Lawrence Durrell
The Alexandria Quartet's author — converted to writing by Tropic of Cancer at twenty-three, and Miller's correspondent and ally for forty-five years.
In images
Details
- 1912–1990
- 27 February 1912
- Jalandhar, British India
- Lawrence George Durrell
- 7 November 1990
- Sommières, France
- British
- Novelist, poet and travel writer
- The Black Book, Prospero's Cell, Bitter Lemons, The Alexandria Quartet, The Avignon Quintet
- Nancy MyersEve CohenClaude-Marie VincendonGhislaine de Boysson
- Penelope Berengaria Durrell, Sappho Jane Durrell
- AuthorPoet
About Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence Durrell read Tropic of Cancer on Corfu at twenty-three, wrote its author a fan letter declaring it the book of the century for his generation, and got back a friendship that lasted forty-five years. He joined the Villa Seurat circle in 1937 — co-editing The Booster with Miller and Perlès — and went on to the fame the older man had predicted: the Alexandria Quartet, poetry, and the island books. The Durrell–Miller letters, published across the decades, are one of the great sustained literary correspondences of the century.
Born in British India in 1912 and shipped to England at eleven, Durrell hated the country he called the English death. He spent almost his whole life abroad: on Corfu, Rhodes and Cyprus, in Alexandria, and finally in the south of France. He supported his writing for years on British diplomatic and cultural postings, and turned each place into a book. His masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), tells one story four times over, from shifting points of view, in prose of famous richness.[1]
He married four times, was nominated for the Nobel Prize, and settled at Sommières in Languedoc, where he wrote The Avignon Quintet. A lifelong smoker, he died of a stroke there on 7 November 1990, aged 78. His brother was the naturalist Gerald Durrell, whose memoir My Family and Other Animals made the Corfu years famous from the other side.[1]
India, England, and the escape to Corfu, 1912–1937
Lawrence George Durrell was born in Jalandhar, in British India, on 27 February 1912, the eldest child of British colonial parents; his father was an engineer. At eleven he was sent to England for schooling, which he detested and failed, leaving without a university place. He began writing poetry at fifteen and published a first collection at nineteen. His father died in 1928, and his mother brought the family back to England, settling in Bournemouth.[1]
In 1935 Durrell married the art student Nancy Myers and, unhappy in England, persuaded her, his mother and his younger siblings, among them the future naturalist Gerald Durrell, to move to the Greek island of Corfu. There they could live cheaply and escape what he called the English death. On Corfu he found a copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and wrote its author an admiring letter, beginning a friendship and a running critical argument that lasted forty-five years.[2][1]
The Villa Seurat circle and The Black Book, 1937–1939
In August 1937 Durrell and Nancy went to Paris to meet Miller and Anaïs Nin at the Villa Seurat. With Miller, Nin and Alfred Perlès he threw himself into founding a small literary movement. They took over the magazine The Booster, and started the Villa Seurat Series. It published Durrell's The Black Book, Miller's Max and the White Phagocytes, and Nin's Winter of Artifice.[3]
The Black Book (1938), the story of a man escaping the spiritual sterility of England for the warmth of Greece, was the book in which Durrell said he first heard his own voice. Heavily influenced by Miller and full of the language that kept it out of British print until 1973, it won T. S. Eliot's admiration at Faber. Durrell named his three literary uncles as Eliot, the Greek poet George Seferis, and Miller.[1]
War, Alexandria, and the islands, 1939–1956
When war came, Durrell and Nancy stayed in Greece, had a daughter, Penelope, and fled the German advance through Crete to Alexandria, Egypt. The marriage broke there, and in Alexandria he met Eve Cohen, an Alexandrian Jewish woman who became the model for Justine and, in 1947, his second wife. He spent the war as a British press attaché in Cairo and Alexandria, and afterwards took a string of diplomatic and British Council posts, on Rhodes, in Córdoba and Belgrade, and finally teaching in Cyprus.[1]
Each posting produced a book. Corfu became Prospero's Cell, Rhodes Reflections on a Marine Venus, and Cyprus, where he lived through the violent EOKA years of the mid-1950s, the acclaimed Bitter Lemons (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1954 and left Cyprus in 1956.[1]
The Alexandria Quartet, 1957–1960
Durrell's masterpiece appeared in four volumes: Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958) and Clea (1960). The first three tell the same story of love and intrigue in pre-war Alexandria from different points of view, a method Durrell called relativistic; only Clea moves the story forward in time. Critics praised its rich style and its treatment of the ancient city as the true main character. The Times Literary Supplement said the work bore an instantly recognisable signature on every sentence.[1]
The Quartet made Durrell a best-seller and a celebrated name. Nobel records opened in 2012 showed he was nominated in 1961 and seriously considered in 1962, alongside Robert Graves and Karen Blixen, before losing to John Steinbeck; the academy wanted to keep him under observation, but never returned to him. His third wife, Claude-Marie Vincendon, whom he married in 1961, died of cancer in 1967, a loss that devastated him.
Sommières, the Avignon Quintet, and death, 1957–1990
From the late 1950s Durrell settled at Sommières, a village in Languedoc in the south of France, in a large walled house that was his home for the rest of his life. There he wrote The Revolt of Aphrodite and, from 1974 to 1985, The Avignon Quintet, using the same layered technique as the Quartet. Its first volume won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and a later one was shortlisted for the Booker. He married a fourth time, to Ghislaine de Boysson, from 1973 to 1979.[1]
A lifelong smoker, Durrell had emphysema for years and died of a stroke at Sommières on 7 November 1990, aged 78. He was buried in the churchyard of the Chapelle Saint-Julien de Montredon nearby. His younger daughter, Sappho Jane Durrell, had died by suicide in 1985, at 33. After his death her diaries were published, and their allusions to an alleged incestuous relationship with her father became part of the controversy that surrounds his memory. Durrell denied nothing and lived to answer nothing, having died before the diaries appeared.[1]
How Durrell wrote
Durrell's signature is dense, sensuous, image-laden prose and a structural interest in point of view. The Alexandria Quartet and the Avignon Quintet both build their meaning from the same events seen through different eyes, so that truth becomes a matter of perspective rather than fact, a method he compared, half seriously, to relativity in physics. Place is never mere backdrop: Alexandria, Corfu, Rhodes and Provence are treated as living presences, and the travel books are as carefully made as the novels.
The other constant is exile. Almost everything he wrote comes out of a life spent deliberately away from England, in the Mediterranean light he preferred to what he called the English death. Miller freed his voice, Eliot and Seferis refined his sense of poetry, and the diplomatic postings that paid the bills also supplied the settings, so that his career reads as one long conversion of displacement into books.
Reception
In his lifetime Durrell was a best-seller and one of the most celebrated English writers, and the Alexandria Quartet is his lasting monument, still in print and still argued over for its lushness. The International Lawrence Durrell Society, founded in 1980 while he was alive, runs conferences and a scholarly journal, and the correspondence with Henry Miller is prized as one of the century's great literary friendships in letters.[2]
His standing has been complicated since his death by the posthumous revelations from Sappho Jane Durrell's diaries and by changing views of his richly ornate style. The Corfu years reach a wide modern audience through his brother Gerald's memoir My Family and Other Animals and its television adaptations, in which Lawrence appears as the irritable elder brother trying to write.
Life events
Born Lawrence George Durrell in Jalandhar, British India, on 27 February.
Sent to England at eleven for schooling, which he detests and fails.
Marries Nancy Myers and moves the family to Corfu; reads Tropic of Cancer and writes to Henry Miller.
Joins Miller, Nin and Perlès at the Villa Seurat in Paris.
Publishes The Black Book in Paris, the novel in which he found his voice.
Reaches Alexandria after the fall of Greece; meets Eve Cohen, the model for Justine.
Publishes Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet, and wins the Duff Cooper Prize for Bitter Lemons.
Completes The Alexandria Quartet with Clea.
Wins the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Monsieur, opening The Avignon Quintet.
Dies of a stroke at his home in Sommières, Languedoc, on 7 November, aged 78.
Lawrence Durrell Featured in These Books
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934–1939
How Lawrence appears in its pages: A young British writer who came to Paris out of admiration for Henry Miller, made friends with Nin in an afternoon, and published her first book of fiction.
Read the character guide
The Durrell–Miller Letters, 1935–1980
How Lawrence appears in its pages: The young admirer who becomes Miller’s ideal reader, closest literary ally, critic, and correspondent for forty-five years.
Read the character guidePeople Lawrence Durrell Knew
Henry Miller
- Author
Met · 1937
It began with a 1935 fan letter about Tropic of Cancer and became a lifelong alliance — Durrell joined the Villa Seurat circle in person in 1937, and the correspondence ran forty-five years to Miller's death.
Alfred Perlès
- Author
- Journalist
Met · 1937
Co-editors of The Booster, the Villa Seurat circle's gleefully unserious magazine — the alliance of Miller's two lieutenants, Paris 1937.
George Katsimbalis
- Editor
- Critic
- Translator
Met
Durrell was living in Greece before Miller arrived and was in the party for much of the 1939 trip. It is his letter, printed whole, that Miller uses to close the book.
George Seferis
- Poet
- Translator
- Author
Met · 1939
They were in the same Athens circle in 1939, and the acquaintance became a working one: Durrell was among the translators of The King of Asine and Other Poems, published in London in 1948 and one of the first substantial selections of Seferis in English.
Books by Lawrence Durrell
Forty-five years and nearly a million words — the expanded correspondence that restored lost letters and passages cut from the 1963 selection.
Questions about Lawrence Durrell
Who was Lawrence Durrell?
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) was a British expatriate novelist, poet and travel writer, best known for The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960). Born in British India, he spent almost his whole life abroad, on Corfu, Rhodes and Cyprus, in Egypt, and finally in the south of France, often supporting his writing through British diplomatic and cultural postings. He was a lifelong friend and correspondent of Henry Miller, and the elder brother of the naturalist Gerald Durrell.
What is The Alexandria Quartet?
Durrell's four-novel masterpiece, made up of Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958) and Clea (1960), set in the Egyptian city of Alexandria before and during the Second World War. The first three books tell essentially the same story of love and intrigue from different characters' points of view, a device Durrell called relativistic, and only the last moves the story forward in time. Famous for its lush prose and its portrait of the city itself as the main character, it made him an international best-seller.
What was Durrell's relationship with Henry Miller?
It began with a fan letter. Reading Tropic of Cancer on Corfu around 1935, the twenty-three-year-old Durrell wrote to Henry Miller in intense admiration, and the two struck up a friendship and frank critical exchange that lasted forty-five years, until Miller's death in 1980. Durrell joined Miller's Villa Seurat circle in Paris in 1937, and their published correspondence is regarded as one of the great sustained literary friendships of the twentieth century.
Was Lawrence Durrell related to Gerald Durrell?
Yes, they were brothers. Gerald Durrell, the naturalist and author of My Family and Other Animals, was Lawrence's much younger brother, and the two lived together with their mother and siblings on Corfu in the 1930s. Gerald's comic memoir tells the Corfu years from the family's side, portraying Lawrence as the exasperated elder brother trying to write, and its television adaptations have introduced Lawrence to a wide modern audience.
How did Lawrence Durrell die?
He died of a stroke at his home in Sommières, in the Languedoc region of southern France, on 7 November 1990, at the age of 78. A lifelong smoker, he had suffered from emphysema for many years. He was buried in the churchyard of the Chapelle Saint-Julien de Montredon nearby. He had been predeceased in 1985 by his younger daughter, Sappho Jane, who died by suicide at 33.
Did Durrell win the Nobel Prize?
No, though he came close. Nobel records opened in 2012 revealed that Durrell was nominated in 1961 and given serious consideration in 1962, alongside Robert Graves, Jean Anouilh and Karen Blixen, before the prize went to John Steinbeck. The Swedish Academy decided to keep him under observation for the future, citing doubts about whether the Alexandria Quartet was sufficient and objecting to what it called his preoccupation with erotic complications, but he was never nominated again.
Connections and Sources
Frequented · 1937–1939
18 Villa Seurat
Durrell arrived from Corfu in August 1937 to meet the man he'd been writing fan letters to — and stayed to co-found the circle's projects: The Booster, and the Villa Seurat Series that published his Black Book in 1938.
Met · 1937
Henry Miller
It began with a 1935 fan letter about Tropic of Cancer and became a lifelong alliance — Durrell joined the Villa Seurat circle in person in 1937, and the correspondence ran forty-five years to Miller's death.
Met · 1937
Alfred Perlès
Co-editors of The Booster, the Villa Seurat circle's gleefully unserious magazine — the alliance of Miller's two lieutenants, Paris 1937.
Met
George Katsimbalis
Durrell was living in Greece before Miller arrived and was in the party for much of the 1939 trip. It is his letter, printed whole, that Miller uses to close the book.
Met · 1939
George Seferis
They were in the same Athens circle in 1939, and the acquaintance became a working one: Durrell was among the translators of The King of Asine and Other Poems, published in London in 1948 and one of the first substantial selections of Seferis in English.
References
References
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Lawrence Durrell and their work.
3↑Henry Miller: The Paris Years
BiographyBrassaï, 1995Used forBiographical evidence used to verify chronology, relationships, and historical context connected to Lawrence Durrell.
4The Colossus of Maroussi
MemoirHenry Miller, 1941Used forFirst-person evidence and historical context used in preparing the Lawrence Durrell page.
5Seferis, George (13 March 1900 – 20 September 1971)
WebsiteDictionary of Literary Biography (Gale)Used forWeb source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Lawrence Durrell page.
6Lawrence Durrell
WebsiteWikipediaUsed forReference article cross-checked for the chronology, the postings, the Quartet, the Nobel nominations, and the death.
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Why these sources are here
These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Lawrence Durrell. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.
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