Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence George Durrell (27 February 1912 – 7 November 1990) was a British novelist, poet, and travel writer whose Alexandria Quartet — Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960) — is one of the most ambitious and sensorily overwhelming works of English-language fiction of the mid-twentieth century. His lush, incantatory prose, his Mediterranean landscapes, and his preoccupation with the relationship between love, art, and truth made him a major figure in postwar literature, though his critical reputation has fluctuated sharply since his death.

Life

Durrell was born in Jalandhar, India, the eldest son of an Anglo-Indian family. He was sent to England for schooling and hated it — the grey climate, the rigid social structures, the philistinism. He would spend the rest of his life avoiding England, living on Corfu, in Egypt, in Rhodes, in Cyprus, in Yugoslavia, and finally in Sommières in Provence, where he died.

On Corfu in the 1930s, living with his family (including his brother Gerald, the future naturalist), he began writing seriously and established the lifelong friendship with Henry Miller that would shape his literary ambitions. Miller encouraged Durrell’s most experimental instincts, and the two maintained a correspondence — published as a book — that is one of the great literary friendships of the century.

During the war, Durrell worked for the British Foreign Office and lived in Egypt — in Alexandria, the city that would become his greatest subject. After the war he served as a press attaché in Rhodes and then in Cyprus during the EOKA crisis, experiences that produced his three great island books.

He was married four times and his personal life was troubled — allegations of abusive behaviour toward his daughter Sappho, who committed suicide in 1985, have darkened his legacy.

The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960)

The Quartet is Durrell’s masterwork and one of the most formally inventive novels of the twentieth century. The four books tell the same story — love, espionage, and artistic ambition in Alexandria in the years before and during the Second World War — from four different perspectives.

Justine (1957) — narrated by Darley, a young Irish schoolteacher and aspiring writer, who becomes entangled with the beautiful, mysterious Justine Hosnani and her wealthy Coptic husband Nessim. The novel is drenched in Alexandrian atmosphere — the city’s polyglot streets, its harbour, its perfumed gardens — and introduces the central characters and relationships.

Balthazar (1958) — the same events retold and reinterpreted through the corrections of Balthazar, a doctor and mystic, who reveals that Darley’s understanding of events in Justine was comprehensively wrong. What Darley took for love was manipulation; what he understood as passion was political conspiracy.

Mountolive (1958) — a shift to third-person narration and a conventional diplomatic novel, revealing the political dimensions of the Quartet: Nessim’s Coptic conspiracy to arm the Palestine Jews, and the British ambassador Mountolive’s compromised position.

Clea (1960) — returns to Darley’s first-person narration, now set during the war. The characters have changed, the city has changed, and the novel moves toward a qualified redemption through art and love.

Durrell described the Quartet’s structure as “relativistic” — the first three novels explore the same events in “space” (different perspectives), while the fourth moves forward in “time.” The influence is Einstein rather than Proust, though the Quartet is often compared to Proust for its sensuous evocation of a lost world.

The Island Books

Durrell wrote three luminous travel books about Mediterranean islands:

• Prospero’s Cell (1945) — Corfu in the late 1930s, a sun-saturated memoir of the Durrell family’s life on the island before the war destroyed everything
• Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953) — Rhodes immediately after the war, as Durrell arrives to work for the British administration
• Bitter Lemons (1957) — Cyprus during the EOKA insurgency. Durrell buys a house in a mountain village, learns Turkish and Greek, and watches the island descend into political violence. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize

These books are among the finest travel writing in English — lyrical, precise, and deeply engaged with landscape and community.

The Black Book (1938)

Durrell’s early experimental novel, published by the Obelisk Press in Paris (too sexually explicit for British publication). It is a modernist assault on English suburban life, heavily influenced by Miller and D. H. Lawrence. Durrell considered it his first “real” book, though most readers come to it after the Quartet.

Critical Standing

Durrell was widely regarded in the 1960s as one of the greatest living English-language writers — the Quartet was a bestseller, he was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize, and critics placed him alongside Proust and Joyce. The critical tide turned in the 1970s and 1980s, as postcolonial critics pointed out the Quartet’s Orientalist treatment of Alexandria and its Egyptian characters, feminist critics noted the consistently objectifying treatment of women, and literary fashion moved away from the kind of baroque, sensuous prose that was Durrell’s signature.

The biographical revelations about Sappho’s suicide and the allegations in her posthumously published writing further damaged his reputation. Yet the Quartet endures — its evocation of Alexandria remains unmatched, its formal ambition is genuine, and its prose at its best achieves a hallucinatory beauty that no other English-language novelist of the period could match.

Collecting Durrell

Justine (1957, Faber and Faber) in first edition with dust jacket brings $200–$500. The complete Quartet in first edition is a desirable set. The Black Book (1938, Obelisk Press, Paris) is scarce and valuable — $300–$800. The island books in first edition bring $50–$150 each. Durrell signed readily, and inscribed copies are relatively available.