Lawrence Durrell
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.
Lawrence Durrell in the atlas — books, places, and lifeThe book
At a glance
- “Durrell,” and later “Larry” — a young British writer who had come to Paris for Miller
- Nancy, who is in almost every scene he is in
- Publishes Winter of Artifice and pushes her to print extracts from the diary
- The last third of the volume, from the meeting at Miller's studio to the war
- Lawrence Durrell · 1912–1990 · Jalandhar, India
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeLawrence Durrell was a British writer in his twenties, living in Greece and corresponding with Henry Miller before he ever came to Paris. He arrives in the second half of the volume with his wife, Nancy, and Nin meets them both at Miller's studio. She likes him immediately, and says so in the plainest terms she uses about anybody in the book: she felt friendship at one bound, with no need of talk.
For the two years that follow they are a foursome — Miller, Durrell, Nancy and Nin — arguing about writing over dinners in a city that is running out of time. Durrell is the one who pushes Nin to publish extracts from the diary. He also brings out her novel Winter of Artifice, and it is to his house in Greece that Miller escapes when the war starts.
How the book draws them
- First sightShe walks to Miller's studio to meet him and is struck first by Mediterranean-blue eyes that look like a child's and an old man's at once. He is short and stocky, soft-contoured, healthy and funny — a swimmer and a sailing enthusiast. Nancy, beside him, she describes as a long-waisted gamin with long slanting eyes.
- Friendship without the preliminariesNin writes that they skipped the ordinary stages of friendship entirely. Later she puts it more strangely: she feels she has known him for a thousand years, a boy of ten and an old man in the same body, cautious rather than impulsive, a spectator who laughs easily.
- The English diseaseHer one persistent complaint about him is what she calls the English obsession with impersonality — it makes him a watcher, warm and withdrawn at the same time, and it means the personal terrifies him. She thinks he has a better sense of values than Miller and is more fluid than either of them.
- The heraldic universeDurrell keeps using a phrase of his own, the heraldic universe, and Nin admits in the diary that she is not sure what he means by it. She guesses at a poetic island, a place of nobility, a wholeness, a sign, a fraternity — and leaves the question open.
- He writes in her diaryAt one point he adds a note to the manuscript himself: “Anais is unanswerable. Completely unanswerable. I fold up and give in. What she says is biologically true from the very navel strings.”
- The one who tells her to publishIt is Durrell who urges her to bring out extracts from the diary, and Durrell who publishes her novel Winter of Artifice. He also tells her, in the same conversation, “I am altogether an actor, I am all mimetism.” They discover they were born within days of each other in February.