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Wednesday, January 29, 2014
India
Kennedy Gammage has a couple of questions: "Durrell lived in India until he was eleven, but he never wrote about it. Why? — if it made such a big impression on him. Did he ever go back there?"
Durrell wrote about India in his first novel, "Pied Piper of Lovers" (1935). "Mountolive" (1958) has the Dewford Mallows episode in which a father abandons his family and lives in a monastery near Madras. Then in 1981, Durrell delivered a lecture in Paris entitled, "From the Elephant's Back." The address supposedly describes his Kiplingesque childhood in India. As Ian MacNiven notes in the preface to his biography of LD (1998), "To understand Lawrence Durrell one must go to India, physically if possible, but otherwise at least in the imagination" (p. xvii). MacNiven is right, if he vastly understates the importance of "imagination," particularly Durrell's own. Durrell mythologized India, and "From the Elephant's Back" is full of misrepresentations, to put it kindly. I think Durrell knew, as we all do to some extent, that you "can't go back home," as Thomas Wolfe says. But he also preferred to live in "the kingdom of [his] imagination." Clea makes that statement at the end of the "Quartet" (1960) and it's clear that the city of Alexandria is wholly Durrell's because of his creative powers. If one's fantasy life is so pleasant, why let reality intrude?
Durrell wrote about India in his first novel, "Pied Piper of Lovers" (1935). "Mountolive" (1958) has the Dewford Mallows episode in which a father abandons his family and lives in a monastery near Madras. Then in 1981, Durrell delivered a lecture in Paris entitled, "From the Elephant's Back." The address supposedly describes his Kiplingesque childhood in India. As Ian MacNiven notes in the preface to his biography of LD (1998), "To understand Lawrence Durrell one must go to India, physically if possible, but otherwise at least in the imagination" (p. xvii). MacNiven is right, if he vastly understates the importance of "imagination," particularly Durrell's own. Durrell mythologized India, and "From the Elephant's Back" is full of misrepresentations, to put it kindly. I think Durrell knew, as we all do to some extent, that you "can't go back home," as Thomas Wolfe says. But he also preferred to live in "the kingdom of [his] imagination." Clea makes that statement at the end of the "Quartet" (1960) and it's clear that the city of Alexandria is wholly Durrell's because of his creative powers. If one's fantasy life is so pleasant, why let reality intrude?
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