The expanded program for Durrell 2012: The Lawrence Durrell Centenary has now been published.
Such was the sagacious Suchness of the Sage
That all of a sudden in his old age
He was uplifted bodily by
A wonderful Umptiousness.
He became Umptious in the highest degree.
— “On The Suchness of the Old Boy” (1973 / 1972).
Durrell 2012: The Lawrence Durrell Centenary will present attendees with an Umptious bounty of offerings, including:
13 panel sessions — featuring 40 presenters from 19 different countries.
4 plenary sessions and 8 keynote speakers — including talks by Ian S. MacNiven, Michael Haag, Christopher Butler, Leo Mellor, Joanna Hodgkin, Mark Morris, Corinne Alexandre-Garner, Anthony Hirst, Eleni Verhagen, and Simon Ings.
An afternoon and evening at the British Library — featuring special archival exhibits, panel discussions, and keynote talks.
More announcements will be forthcoming when new items are added to the program — stay connected, and stay tuned.
Follow the news as it breaks on the Durrell 2012 Facebook page.
Register for Durrell 2012: The Lawrence Durrell Centenary.
On 19 March, Guardian Books featured a live webchat with Joanna Hodgkin, author of Amateurs in Eden.
Faber and Faber recognized the online Reading Group by donating 20 gift copies of the 2012 reissue of The Alexandria Quartet. All 20 copies were snapped up immediately after the announcement — a promising sign of great things to come!
Happy Birthday, Lawrence Durrell: 27 February 1912 — 27 February 2012.
Time for celebrations, a good bit of wine, and public waltzing in the square!
It was late when we walked back together towards Trafalgar Square in the falling snow. There were few people about and the snowflakes deadened our footsteps. In the Square itself your poet stopped to apostrophize Nelson Stylites in true calf-killing fashion. I have forgotten exactly what he said, but it was sufficiently funny to make me laugh very heartily. And then he suddenly changed his mood and turning to his sister said: “Do you know what has been upsetting me all day, Liza? Today is Blake’s birthday. Think of it, the birthday of codger Blake. I felt I ought to see some signs of it on the national countenance, I looked about me eagerly all day. But there was nothing. Darling Liza, let us celebrate the old b. . .’s birthday, shall we? You and I and David Mountolive here — as if we were French or Italian, as if it meant something.” The snow was falling fast, the last sodden leaves lying in mounds, the pigeons uttering their guttural clotted noises. “Shall we, Liza?” A spot of bright pink had appeared in each of her cheeks. Her lips were parted. Snowflakes like dissolving jewels in her dark hair. “How?” she said. “Just how?”
“We will dance for Blake” said Pursewarden, with a comical look of seriousness on his face, and taking her in his arms he started to waltz, humming the Blue Danube. Over his shoulder, through the falling snowflakes, he said: “This is for Will and Kate Blake.” I don’t know why I felt astonished and rather touched. They moved in perfect measure gradually increasing in speed until they were skimming across the square under the bronze lions, hardly heavier than the whiffs of spray from the fountains. Like pebbles skimming across a smooth lake or stones across an icebound pond. . . . It was a strange spectacle. I forgot my cold hands and the snow melting on my collar as I watched them. So they went, completing a long gradual ellipse across the open space, scattering the leaves and the pigeons, their breath steaming on the night-air. And then, gently, effortlessly spinning out the arc to bring them back to me — to where I stood now with a highly doubtful-looking policeman at my side. It was rather amusing. “What’s goin’ on ’ere?” said the bobby, staring at them with a distrustful admiration. Their waltzing was so perfect that I think even he was stirred by it. On they went and on, magnificently in accord, the dark girl’s hair flying behind her, her sightless face turned up towards the old admiral on his sooty perch. “They are celebrating Blake’s birthday” I explained in rather a shamefaced fashion, and the officer looked a shade more relieved as he followed them with an admiring eye. He coughed and said “Well, he can’t be drunk to dance like that, can he? The things people get up to on their birthdays!”
“Guardian Books Podcast: Lawrence Durrell at 100″ features presenter Claire Armitstead in conversation with travel writer Jan Morris, Amateurs in Eden author Joanna Hodgkin, and Guardian Books blogger Sam Jordison. The podcast was produced by Tim Maby.
The podcast includes a sampling of audio clips – interviews with Lawrence Durrell from different moments in his career; recordings of Durrell’s early jazz lyrics; and readings by Durrell and others from his works – all backed by a lush, percussive soundtrack which attempts to convey the atmosphere of the writer’s life and works.
Durrell 2012 readers will perhaps be most interested to hear Jan Morris speaking about her encounters with Lawrence Durrell – in life, and on the page.
Morris candidly shares the story of her evolving appreciation of Durrell’s achievement in The Alexandria Quartet. After recalling her meeting with the writer on 1950s Cyprus, Morris admits that nothing about her first impressions of Durrell the Man prepared her for her appreciation of his achievement today. She confesses: “I didn’t think of him then as being a sort of visionary – which, I do see now, he must have been.”
Morris then goes on to make some further elaborations upon her introductory remarks for the 2012 Faber reissue of The Alexandria Quartet.
While pondering how The Alexandria Quartet achieves its uniquely “fascinating” effect by means of its experimental form, atmospheric sketches of the Alexandrian cityscape, heady metaphysical speculation, and shifting plots of romantic betrayal and espionage, Morris emphasizes the importance of taking in all of the tetralogy — Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea — as unfolding parts of Durrell’s “most extraordinary achievement“:
Clearly it is a masterpiece, of some sort or another – and a very unusual one – but the whole of it is a most extraordinary achievement. It’s full of the most beautiful things, and full – to my mind – of rather silly things. But the whole of it is what counts, really. You can read a bit of it – even one of these books, I suppose – and come away thinking the whole thing was nonsense, and pretentious nonsense at that. But if you read the whole work, you can hardly leave it without thinking that you’ve come across something rather great in the history of literature.
Morris extends these insights by insisting that it is Durrell’s evocation of “Spirit of Place”– his ability to use words to communicate the abiding sensuality of Alexandria between the wars – that makes his work stand out from the work of other novelists of the 1950s and 1960s:
That is what I think Durrell does so brilliantly in these books. It is the intangible, indefinable spell of this particular city, on the cusp between Europe and Asia and Africa – and on the cusp between a historical Past and a very remarkable Present – that makes the City – that made the City – unique among cities. It was one of a kind. And The Alexandria Quartet is one of a kind.
In closing, Morris makes clear her sense that The Alexandria Quartet has secured a permanent place within world literature:
At the basic level, I think that it has lasted very well, and it will always be read, I feel sure[. . . .] The work itself is really such a great idea, and is executed, really, with such remarkable technical skill and imagination, that I feel sure that people will still be reading them one hundred years from now.
Following up on Jan Morris’s insights into Durrell the Novelist, Joanna Hodgkin – daughter of Nancy Durrell Hodgkin, by a second marriage – turns the conversation to Durrell the Man.
Podcast listeners following the recent reviews of Amateurs in Eden will take special note when Hodgkin offers an explanation of the different goals she had in writing the biography of Nancy Durrell:
My mother, when she realized she was going to be written about [. . .] wanted her side of the story to be told. So that is what I have tried to do. I have tried to do it as honestly as I could[. . . .]
In a way, it gives a portrait of [Lawrence Durrell] as a young husband not doing very well, and not being a terribly good young husband. But I hope that it also gives an idea of him as a passionate writer, and someone who put his writing first.
Finally, Sam Jordison makes a passionate case for why the “strange magic” of The Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quintet are ripe for rediscovery by a new generation of readers in the twenty-first century.
Durrell 2012: The Lawrence Durrell Centenary looks forward to March 2012, when the Guardian Books Online Reading Group of The Alexandria Quartet will take place.
Read Sam Jordison’s 2009 appraisal of Lawrence Durrell’s The Avignon Quintet – “A Different Kind of Durrell.”
On Thursday, 14 June 2012, Joanna Hodgkin will give a keynote address at Durrell 2012: The Lawrence Durrell Centenary.
For this and other events and exhibitions related to the Durrell Centenary, please see the draft schedule.
On 7 February 2012, Virago Books hosted a book launch for Amateurs in Eden, Joanna Hodgkin’s new biography of her mother, Nancy Durrell Hodgkin.
Joanna tells us that the party was held at one of Fiztrovia’s longstanding literary landmarks – the Wheatsheaf – ”a small pub with a proper 1930s atmosphere”:
Despite Siberian temperatures outside, it was a really great party – a lovely mix of people from all different bits of my life. My fear had been that everyone would stay with who they knew, but in fact there were all sorts of unexpected meetings and links.
The event included readings from Lawrence Durrell’s poetry, and Joanna reports that all copies of Amateurs in Eden sold out before the end of the party – a very promising sign!
Durrell 2012: The Lawrence Durrell Centenary congratulates our friend Joanna Hodgkin on the the successful release of her new book, Amateurs in Eden. We look forward to joining Joanna and the other invited speakers during the Durrell Centenary events, 13 – 16 June 2012.
See the Durrell 2012 draft schedule to learn when Joanna Hodgkin and other invited speakers will be giving their talks.
Faber has announced the release of a new edition of Lawrence Durrell’s signature work – The Alexandria Quartet.
The newly-issued Alexandria Quartet features a distinctive cover-design. The calligraphic scripting and a crimson-barred spine calls to mind Berthold Wolpe‘s classic work for Faber in the 1950s and 1960s.
In her remarks, Jan Morris places particular emphasis upon what she calls “the devious goings-on of the plot,” thus highlighting Lawrence Durrell’s place alongside John Le Carré and other masters of the Spy Novel:
[Lawrence Durrell] was particularly admired for his descriptive writing, and these books are rich in masterly set-pieces, but he was also a fine story-teller, adept in techniques of suspense and deception. Reader, watch out! Shocks are always around the dusty corner in The Alexandria Quartet.
Morris concludes by declaring that “The Alexandria Quartet is one of a kind” – “on the whole a masterpiece.”
Listen to the Guardian Books Podcast where Jan Morris talks about The Alexandria Quartet – Lawrence Durrell’s “most extraordinary achievement.”
Marking Lawrence Durrell’s Centenary year, Les Éditions Louis Vuitton and La Quinzaine Littéraire have joined forces to publish a new literary biography that draws upon Durrell’s writings about the Greek world — Lawrence Durrell: Dans l’ombre du soleil grec (Lawrence Durrell: In the Shadow of the Greek Sun).
This striking new biographical study is penned by Durrell scholar Corinne Alexandre-Garner (Université Paris Ouest-Nanterre La Défense).
Alexandre-Garner guides readers through a generous sampling of Lawrence Durrell’s various encounters with the sun-spoilt Greek landscape, amply demonstrating just how thoroughly an early immersion in the Hellenic world transformed the writer’s artistic sensibility.
According to Alexandre-Garner, the book’s coverage spans from Durrell’s first novel – Pied Piper of Lovers (1935) — to the last work completed in his lifetime, Caesar’s Vast Ghost (1990). The book also introduces writings that will be new to most readers, “very many of them never published in French, some but few not published in English either.”
In addition to its selections from the travel writing, poetry, and letters, Lawrence Durrell: Dans l’ombre du soleil grec also reproduces for the first time a number of previously-unseen Lawrence Durrell drawings and paintings.
Durrell 2012: The Lawrence Durrell Centenary heartily congratulates Corinne Alexandre-Garner on the publication of her new collection, and we look forward to joining Corinne in London during the Durrell Centenary events, 13 – 16 June 2012.
Order Lawrence Durrell: Dans l’ombre du soleil grec at Amazon.fr.
Order Lawrence Durrell: Dans l’ombre du soleil grec at Amazon.co.uk.
The Folio Society has published an eye-catching four-volume set of Lawrence Durrell's keynote work, The Alexandria Quartet — Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea.
Lawrence Durrell: Dans L’Ombre du Soleil Grec.
Marking Lawrence Durrell’s Centenary year, Les Éditions Louis Vuitton and La Quinzaine Littéraire have joined forces to publish a new literary biography that draws upon Durrell’s writings about the Greek world — Lawrence Durrell: Dans l’ombre du soleil grec (Lawrence Durrell: In the Shadow of the Greek Sun).
Vintage Alexandria: Photographs of the City 1860 – 1960.
Using vintage photographs from the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, many from private family albums, Michael Haag brings to life the world of a vanished Alexandria.
The Durrell-Miller Letters, 1935 – 1980.
In 1935, Lawrence Durrell spotted a copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer left discarded among the litter in a public toilet on Corfu. The young Englishman was electrified by what he read, and he immediately penned a letter to Miller, an American expatriate then living at 18 Villa Seurat in Paris. Thus began The Durrell-Miller Letters, a correspondence that ended only with Miller's death in 1980 — nearly 1,000,000 words later.
Theodore Stephanides: Autumn Gleanings.
Complete for the first time in Autumn Gleanings are Stephanides’ memoirs of his meetings with Lawrence Durrell in Corfu, Athens, and Egypt, in the years 1935–44, together with his last (and hitherto unpublished) collection of poems.
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