The novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) was born In India, died in France, and lived in places as various as Cyprus, Greece, Provence, Egypt, Belgrade and Corfu. His greatest work, `The Alexandria Quartet’ (1957-1960) is set far away from England in the eponymous city where he tracks the lives, and loves of, among others, the diplomat David Mountolive, about whom he used the memorable line that diplomacy is a Jesuitical training in loss of feeling. There are many reasons to admire these novels, but as an unvarnished description of the over-romanticised life of being a diplomat, they could not be better. This drew on Durrell’s own experience of working for the Foreign Office as a Press Attaché in Egypt and Rhodes during the Second World War, and then for the British Council in Belgrade and Argentina after it.
As a adolescent Durrell was sent from the Jesuit College at Darjeeling, first to St Olave’s School in London, and then, from 1926 to St Edmund’s School in Canterbury. As his biographer, Ian S MacNiven, points out, St Edmunds enjoyed a respectable reputation at the time, rather than belonging to the top rank of public schools. `Larry’s education had been too spotty, his mathematical and science preparations too weak, and there were no influential Old Boys in the family to put in a word for him’ to get to places like Eton or Harrow (MacNiven, `Lawrence Durrell: A Biography’, Faber and Faber, 1998). Durrell himself remembers the place as `a most beautiful public school… whose architecture and atmosphere resembled very closely the school I had quitted in Darjeeling’ (Ibid).
St Edmund’s sits on the hill to the north of the city, overlooking the cathedral in the distance, beside the road to Whitstable. Today, it is joined by the University of Kent whose extensive campus now surrounds one side of it. The university was founded in the 1960s. In Durrell’s day, the school was more isolated, with boys rarely venturing down in the city centre. His recollection of the place was mostly about the coldness, and the almost persistent colds he suffered there. `The tyranny of prefects and housemasters, the seemingly pointless classes, the victimizing of the studious “swots” by the `”hairy ones” – the playing-field bullies – weighed upon Larry’ (MacNiven, Ibid). This gives his experiences of education there an almost Dickensian harshness.
Durrell was not a particularly successful student, describing his alter-ego in `The Pied Piper of Lovers’ (1935 – his first published novel) as something of a loner, who did not maintain contact with any friends he had made at the school after leaving it. In real life, Durrell had issues with the headmaster of the school at the time, a Canon Burnside, and his heavy religiosity and reactionary views. Between his grandmother, and `St Edmunds, Larry was cured of formal Christianity for good’ (Ibid), despite having to be confirmed in the cathedral on the 3rd December 1926 as a member of the Church of England. `He was fascinated by the place, the medieval darkness, the ancient martyrdom of Thomas Becket’ (Ibid). At the end of 1927, after a little over 18 months in the city, Durrell left. While his ambitious father had wanted him to get into Oxbridge, Durrell had other ideas, and indeed emulated his father in never acquiring a single professional or academic qualification. With his father’s death in 1928, he started to concentrate on writing. He was to marry four times, earn the admiration of critics as exacting as T S Eliot, and become one of the most enduring letter writers with Henry Miller.
The beginning of the first novel of `The Alexandria Quartet,’ `Justine’ is a remarkable piece of work:
`The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of spring. A sky of hot nude pearl under midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes…
`I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child, Melissa’s child. I do not know why I use the word “escape.”. The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well, then, I have come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way…’ (Durrell, `The Alexandria Quarter’, Faber Edition, London, 2012, 17).
The notion of a place of retreat after the challenges of life, from which to reflect and recover, and the way in which a slight scepticism is conveyed by the writer about all of this, along with its conspiratorial and intimate tone addressed to the reader (`if you like..’), and the telling unfinished nature of the opening two paragraphs along with the story the start to tell – all these set in track the tone for the next 900 pages with an almost seductive smoothness and skill.
Durrell’s time at the school in Canterbury is commemorated by a study bedroom wing, formerly a dormitory, being named after him. Interviewed by the `Paris Review’ in 1959, he was described memorably thus:
`Lawrence Durrell is a short man, but in no sense a small one. Dressed in jeans, a tartan shirt, a navy-blue pea jacket, he looks like a minor trade-union official who has successfully absconded with the funds. He is a voluble, volatile personality, who talks fast and with enormous energy’ (Julian Mitchell and Gene Andrewski, `Lawrence Durrell: The Art of Fiction 23’, Paris Review Issue 22, Autumn/Winter 1959/1960, https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4720/the-art-of-fiction-no-23-lawrence-durrell)
With a personality like this, no wonder Canterbury did not, and does not, forget him!