The Black Book was published by Obelisk Press in Paris in 1938 — the same house that published Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer — because its sexual frankness and experimental style made British publication impossible under the obscenity laws then in force. It was not published in England until 1973, by which time Durrell’s reputation had been established by the Alexandria Quartet.
The novel is set in a London residential hotel — the “Regina” — where the narrator, Lawrence Lucifer (a transparent alter ego), observes the spiritual death of the English middle class. The residents are trapped in routines of genteel poverty and emotional repression; England itself is presented as a dying culture — sexually frigid, intellectually exhausted, culturally moribund — from which the narrator must escape to survive.
The style owes much to Miller (who championed the book and helped arrange its publication) and to the French Surrealists: hallucinatory, sexually explicit, moving freely between internal monologue and external observation, between poetry and obscenity, between rage and tenderness. It is deliberately excessive — Durrell was twenty-six, furious at the culture that had formed him, and writing with the desperate energy of a man who feared he might not escape.
Henry Miller called it “the first piece of writing which in my opinion stands up alongside the work of our very best living English writers” — and whatever one thinks of that judgment, the book unmistakably announces a major talent.
Collecting The Black Book
First edition (Obelisk Press, Paris, 1938): Wrappers (paperback original).
Market values:
- First Obelisk Press edition (Paris, 1938): $200–$600
- First UK edition (Faber, 1973): $25–$60
- First US edition (Dutton, 1960): $30–$80
- Signed copies (any edition): $100–$300