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Tales of Incest: The Agony of Saph and Pa Durrell
by
Bruce Redwine
©2014
Agon
In Autumn
of 1991, Granta, a literary journal edited
by Bill Buford, published a selection of Sappho Jane Durrell’s diaries, poetry,
and correspondence.[1]
That issue of Granta was devoted to “The Family.”
Buford likes to shock; on the cover of the periodical, he announces his
theme: “They fuck you up,” a half line
taken from the beginning of Philip Larkin’s short poem, “This Be The Verse”
(1971). The full line reads, “They fuck
you up, your mum and dad.” The final
stanza (unquoted) ends with the message:
Man hands
on misery to man.
It deepens
like a coastal shelf.
Get out
as early as you can,
And don’t
have any kids yourself.[2]
Larkin’s poem was
especially relevant to Sappho, although this is unclear from Buford’s subsequent
remarks.
Sappho’s
father was the famous writer Lawrence Durrell; her mother was his second wife,
Yvette (Eve) Cohen, a native of Alexandria, Egypt. They married in 1947; Sappho was born in 1951. Yvette had a history of mental illness and an
episode of schizophrenia diagnosed in 1953.
The parents separated in 1955 and divorced in 1957. Sappho was raised by her mother in London.[3] She affectionately signed her letters to her
father as “Saph” (Gr., 74), often
sent him “lots of love” (Gr., 88‑89),
frequently lived with him during holidays, and apparently had a “close
relationship” with his third wife, Claude‑Marie Vincendon (Gr., 57).
The
published materials date from about 22 March 1979 to 10 July 1982. Buford takes most of the excerpts from 1979. In these selections, Sappho relates a troubled
relationship with her “Pa” or “pap” (Gr.,
73) — whom she describes as “an aggressive and demonic drunkard [who] has
always lived on the edge of madness” (Gr.,
62) — and details her extensive therapy with Patrick Casement, a London
psychoanalyst. Sappho’s characterization
of her father is entirely plausible. Biographers
provide ample evidence that Durrell was in fact prone to violence and suffered
from alcoholism in his latter years.[4] She also refers to Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), a novel about incest and
“nymphets,” as though it has personal relevance, and she insinuates incestuous relations
with her father, culminating perhaps “around the age of fifteen” (Gr., 68), which would have been in 1967. During that year, she spent the Christmas holidays
with her father at his home in Sommières, France. Durrell was then fifty‑five and a recent
widower. Claude‑Marie had died of cancer
on 1 January 1967.
The extracts
of Sappho’s diaries are often discursive, confused, and opaque. They do, however, tell a story of a
distraught and lonely person on the way to self‑destruction. In 1983, she attempts suicide with an
overdose of sleeping pills; her mother Yvette intervenes, and doctors save her
life. Then, on 1 February 1985, Sappho
commits suicide by hanging herself. She
was thirty‑three.
Sappho’s
insinuations are serious and damaging.
But how seriously should they be taken?
Should they be ignored, as Candace Fertile does in her article on incest
in Durrell’s oeuvre?[5] Should they be dismissed as the ramblings of
a neurotic or schizophrenic personality?
This is the usual view of such cases.
Disbelief has long been the reaction of legal and psychiatric
authorities from John Henry Wigmore to Sigmund Freud, who referred to accounts
of familial incest as largely “sexual fantasy.”[6] And incredulity is the reaction of Bill
Buford, Ian S. MacNiven, Durrell’s authorized biographer, and other literary
critics. They pay little attention to the
complex relationship between Durrell and his daughter. Her side of the story, however approximate,
deserves better treatment than being ignored, dismissed, or buried alive in a
long footnote, as MacNiven does.[7]
Feminist
scholars question the usual approach to incest.
Judith Lewis Herman, M.D., is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at
Harvard Medical School. She conducted
part of her research in a “clinical study” and forcefully argues that father‑daughter
incest is not a fantasy, rather a “common occurrence.” She further argues that “the greater the
domination of the father, and the more the caretaking is relegated to the
mother, the greater the likelihood of father‑daughter incest.” Durrell’s household fits this profile in its
broad outline. Herman submits these
definitions:
Incest
was defined to mean any sexual relationship between a child and an adult in a
position of paternal authority . . . We
further defined a sexual relationship to mean any physical contact that had to
be kept a secret.
She also examines
two types of incest: one in which the
father commits “overt” incest and another in which he exhibits seductive
behavior or “covert incest.” Herman
defines “seductiveness on the part of fathers to mean behavior that was clearly
sexually motivated, but which did not involve physical contact or a requirement
for secrecy.”[8]
Durrell seems closest to the latter
type.
In 1979, Sappho
read Herman’s early article on incest, published by the New York Academy of
Sciences, and wrote to the psychiatrist a perfectly sane and professional
letter requesting further information on the subject (Gr., 82).[9] In 1981, Herman published her full study on
incest. Sappho may have read this book,
and the extent of its influence is open to debate and awaits further research. Given Herman’s work on the subject, however, it
is hard not to conclude that outright dismissal is outright negligence. The matter deserves serious consideration. I therefore propose that Lawrence Durrell’s literary
treatment of incest, that is, his obsession with the issue, be examined closely
as an insight into his and his daughter’s motivations.
The
problem baffles and teases. On the one hand,
we have a talented but unstable daughter whose insinuations of paternal incest
are provocative but unverifiable; on the other, we have a mercurial and
authoritarian father whose writings wallow in incest and suicide. Sappho appears to play out her father’s
fantasies — with disastrous consequences.
In a perverted sense, what might be said of her is what Ben Jonson said
of his son Benjamin: “his best piece of
poetry.”[10] Daughter Sappho might be called Lawrence Durrell’s
best (or worst) creation. I shall argue
that Sappho Jane Durrell may have been a victim of her father’s weird
obsessions, sexual and thanatological, which include such curiosities as
quoting the Marquis de Sade in the epigraphs to each of his novels comprising The Alexandria Quartet (1957‑1960).[11]
[1] Sappho Durrell, “Sappho Durrell: Journals and Letters,” Granta 37 (Autumn 1991): 55‑92. Hereafter cited in text as Gr.
[2] Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems: Philip
Larkin, ed. Archie Burnett (New York, 2012), p. 88.
[3] Brewster Chamberlin, A Chronology of the Life and Times of
Lawrence Durrell: Homme de Lettres
(Corfu, 2007), pp. 41, 47, 49, 53, 58. I
take all dates associated with Durrell’s life from Chamberlin’s chronology.
[4] For a summary of Durrell’s personality,
see Gordon Bowker, Through the Dark
Labyrinth: A Biography of Lawrence
Durrell, rev. ed. (London, 1998), pp. 425-37. See also, Chamberlin, Chronology, pp. 53 n. 111,
79, 82, 83, 92, 93, 94.
[5] Candace Fertile, “The Meaning of Incest in the
Fiction of Lawrence Durrell,” Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal (NS4
1995-96): 105-23..
[6] For a discussion of the historical denial of
incest, see Judith Lewis Herman with Lisa Hirschman, Father‑Daughter Incest (1981; Cambridge, MA, 2000), p. 11. John Henry Wigmore, an American law
professor, wrote a major study on the law of evidence. Herman writes, “John Henry Wigmore’s Treatise on Evidence (1934), set forth a
doctrine impeaching the credibility of any female, especially a child, who
complained of a sex offense.” On Freud’s
rejection of various accounts of incest, see The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904,
trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA, 1985), p. 264. Freud’s letter is dated 21 September 1897.
[7] Ian S. MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell: A Biography
(London, 1998), pp. 759-60, n. 218.
[9] The article’s full citation: Judith Herman and Lisa Hirschman, “Incest
Between Fathers and Daughters,” The Sciences 17 (issue 7, Nov. 1977): 4-7.
[10] Ben
Jonson and the Cavalier Poets:
Authoritative Texts and Criticism, ed. Hugh Maclean (New York, 1974), p. 8. Epigrams,
XLV: “On My First Son.”
[11] Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet: Justine,
Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea, [rev. ed.] (London, 1962), pp. 15, 208, 396,
656. Hereafter cited in text as AlQ.
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