In my earlier post entitled
First encounter with Lawrence Durrell [display], I think I made it perfectly clear that this British novelist was truly a hero, for me, when I ran into him in the summer of 1963, in Nîmes, by an amazing stroke of luck. Once upon a time (not so long ago), before my enlightenment by great 21st-century scientists such as
David Deutsch and
Richard Dawkins, I even used to designate my chance encounter with
Lawrence Durrell as an obvious manifestation of the mysterious phenomenon referred to as
synchronicity. That's to say, I was convinced that some kind of yet-unexplained convergence of our respective destinies had caused our paths to cross, for an instant, on a sunny morning in Nîmes. With a small additional dose of imagination, I might have even concluded that the magnificent blocks of stone in the ancient Roman arena had surely contributed—in ways yet unknown to science—to the focalization of our itineraries upon that particular point in Alexandria-Quartet space-time: Nîmes, 18 July 1963. It all sounds so nice, in a fuzzy way (of which Durrell himself might well have approved), that I'm a little sad to admit that I no longer believe an iota about so-called synchronicity. Be that as it may, I'm relieved to realize today that there are infinitely many mysteries in the Cosmos that are infinitely more astounding than the silly synchronicity idea... and I take pleasure in deliberately spicing up my sentiments with the "infinitely" adverb.
Immediately after that encounter with Durrell, three major events took place in my life.
(1) I worked for a while as a seaman on a Greek cargo ship
[display].
(2) I returned to Paris and started work as an English teacher at the Lycée Henri IV
[display].
(3) I met up with my future wife.
Curiously, an indirect but undeniable outcome of these three events was that I totally abandoned my fascination for Durrell and his formerly-exhilarating
Alexandria Quartet. Instead of dreaming romantically about the inhabitants of a make-believe city in Egypt, or trying to imagine Durrell's life in places such as Corfu, Rhodes or Cyprus, I became more interested in the realities of modern Greece. In particular, I fell in love with the island of Tinos
[display]. But I was rapidly convinced that there was one outstanding nation on the shores of the Mediterranean, and it was neither Greece, Egypt, Spain nor Italy. That nation was France. Its capital was Paris, where I would be spending the next three decades. And its Mediterranean port was the ancient Greek settlement of
Massalia (designated by my friend
Natacha as
Marseille)... the official European capital of culture in 2013.
At this point, if my story is to be meaningful, readers need to know that, in 1965, I married a French girl,
Christine, whose maternal ancestors were essentially Provençal. In the summer of 1968, with our 18-month-old daughter
Emmanuelle, we drove down to meet up with Christine's grandparents at their home in the village of Saint Sériès, in the Mediterranean
département of the Hérault, not far from Nîmes.
This was an excursion of immense joy: my discovery of Christine's marvelous maternal grandparents, and of their Languedoc province.
One day, Christine's grandparents happened to speak to me of a certain British writer who lived nearby, in Sommières. They told me that he had a reputation of spending most of his time as a boisterous drunkard in local taverns. I soon gathered that they were speaking of my former literary hero, Lawrence Durell, whom I had encountered 5 years earlier in Nîmes, when he was living in a stone cabin up in the vicinity, north of Nîmes, indicated by a green bubble in the above map. Needless to say, I set off immediately, to see if I could meet up once again with Durrell in Sommières. I located the property, but Durrell himself was not there. So, I missed him.
Meanwhile, for years, I had started to realize to what extent the mythical novelist of my late teenage years in Sydney had ceased to concern me directly, if at all. Today, retrospectively, I can understand perfectly why this was the case. Durrell had fascinated me at a time, back in Australia, when I still believed in romantic Mediterranean legends. But I had grown up since then, and I realized that Durrell was merely an adept story-teller: no more, no less. But certainly not an authority on authentic present-day Mediterranean society… which was better described to me—devoid of the romantic trappings of literature—by Christine's splendid grandparents. Her grandfather had worked for the French military as a specialist in explosives.
Christine's ancestors were real Provençal individuals, with authentic Mediterranean genealogies, not mere figments of the fuzzy imagination of a British novelist. Consequently, by "
the force of things" (a splendid existentialist expression that I've always admired), I ceased to be a dyed-in-the-wool Durrellian (if ever I were). I became, modestly, the Australian-born husband of a lovely Breton girl (born, in fact, in Cognac) whose mother was Arlesian. Besides, incidentally, Christine told me she loved the French translations of Durrell's novels.
Meanwhile, my second face-to-face encounter with Lawrence Durrell took place in the Latin Quarter of Paris, in the early 1970s, when the novelist was exhibiting his talents as a painter, identified as
Oscar Epf.
On that evening, I was thrilled to meet up with the 20-something daughter of the writer/painter,
Sappho Durrell. Back at the time of my initial encounter with Lawrence Durrell, in Nîmes in 1963, Sappho was a child.
That evening, in Paris, she was an elegant young woman, sporting a magic name:
Sappho Durrell. While her father chatted diplomatically with visitors, I preferred to enter in contact with Sappho. I told her, of course, that I had met up with her father for the first at Nîmes in 1963. Then I explained how I had come upon their family mansion in Sommières, in 1968. I half-expected that I would hear the profound reflections of the writer's daughter concerning life in a small Provençal town such as Sommières. Instead, at that instant, I was utterly stupefied by the spontaneous reaction of Sappho Durrell, who replied casually in the style of a mindless suburban brat:
SAPPHO DURRELL:
"We refer to my father's place in Sommières as the House of the Addams Family."I had no idea who might be designated by Sappho's "we", but I was immediately shocked (the term is true) by the fact that this young woman, daughter of a great British novelist, with the privilege of living with her illustrious father in the heart of Provence, might dare to allude to such cheap foreign shit as an American TV series. I concluded immediately (maybe wrongly, but first impressions count) that, intellectually, there was little to be acquired from Sappho… who may or may not have inherited significant genes from her Alexandrian mother
Eve Cohen, a victim of depressive schizophrenia.
Years later, Christine's brother
Lan Mafart, aware of my interest in Durrell, happened to be traveling around in the south of France, and he sent me a lovely photo of the entrance to Durrell's house in Sommières:
Lan also sent me a postcard from Sommières, with an image of the ancient rectangular keep on a hill above the capricious Vidourle:
Here, on the other side, is the text (in French) of Lan's postcard, written from the
Café du Commerce:
Lan wrote:
"A pale lightbulb shines upon the entrance to the house of Lawrence Durrell. The flakes of paint are like dead leaves forgotten by the gardener." In a cynical vein, Lan notes the absence of
"camping-cars in the driveway", meaning that Durrell's home is no longer, apparently, a place of pilgrimage (if ever it were).
The most striking aspect of Lan's postcard is the date: 17 February 1990. On that day, if I understand correctly, Lawrence Durrell was in fact working inside his great bourgeois home on the manuscript of his final masterpiece:
Caesar's Vast Ghost — Aspects of Provence. And the writer himself would be dead before the end of that year.
Today, when I learn that Sappho Durrell hung herself in London in 1985, and that she left papers suggesting (in terribly indirect terms) that her father might have straddled her incestuously, my immediate reaction is:
crazy Addams-family talk!
I simply cannot, for a moment, imagine why Larry—surrounded constantly by hordes of seductive females—might have suddenly decided to fornicate with his 15-year-old daughter. Inversely, I can well imagine why Sappho might have decided, later on, that it would be nice if she were to make herself interesting (Durrell's daughter was a budding writer) by injecting make-believe sex into the alleged relationship with her father. After all, wasn't that a bit like what her old man had been doing, for ages, to add spice to his stories?
Normally, among rational human beings, this necessity should itself be evident. Sadly, though, we know it isn't. Mindless believers, Taliban-like fundamentalists, quacks and snake-oil salesmen abound. Their common characteristic, which they often share unwittingly, is a total disrespect for evidence.
There was no evidence proving that this man had ever committed the murder for which he was condemned.
In French literature, the upside-down theme of anthropomorphic animals reached a summit in the celebrated Fables of the poet Jean de la Fontaine. In fact, they were an evolution of the oral fables attributed to the legendary Greek author Aesop. Every French schoolchild has heard these fables, and know some of them off by heart. So, the notion that moral tales involving animals can teach us virtue is deeply integrated into the French mindset. It's not surprising that authorities concerned about the decline of civility in the Paris métro have resorted to animals to obtain illustrations of bad manners.
In a crowded compartment, this lazy sloth wants to sit down and spread his legs out:
This chicken is screeching out on her mobile phone:
Instead of paying for a ticket, this frog prefers to jump over the turnstile:
And, in a corridor of the métro, this llama is spitting out chewing-gum:
It's a pity, I feel, that the creators behind this campaign didn't think of looking around, on the contrary, for exemplary illustrations of nice animals behaving in a perfectly correct manner in the Paris métro.
Full of this stuff, the French fellows won't let the Blacks mess around with them. They won't necessarily win the match… but they wouldn't feel too bad about losing.
And, once again, I'm trying to analyze the contents of this remarkable book—probably Durrell's most profound work, to my way of thinking—in order to set the various themes in their right perspective, and to determine why he decided to blend together several quite different styles of writing, ranging from travel and tourism through to history and philosophy, with twenty original poems and two or three hefty blobs of pure fantasy.
Back at the time that Durrell brought out The Alexandria Quartet, readers were warned amply that the novelist had in fact invented the people and the places that he wrote about. In other words, a visitor to the Mediterranean city of Alexandria would not encounter anything, today, that might be associated with the exotic context of Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea. Even in the case of Durrell's so-called travel books inspired by such places as Corfu, Rhodes and Cyprus, readers should not imagine that they are being offered tourist guidebooks. Durrell's tales are hinged around the author's special relationships, not only with exceptional places, but with various colorful individuals. And a typical site, deprived of the author and his contacts, can become rather sterile. I'm reminded of the idea of considering the Bible as a guidebook to the modern land of Israel. Unfortunately, all the biblical personages disappeared long ago. And today, the places and people you encounter as a tourist in the Holy Land are not necessarily particularly "biblical" (whatever that might mean).
Durrell's book has little in common—at the level of both its form and its content—with a conventional guidebook such as, say, the excellent Michelin guide to Provence. They're not at all in the same writing category. But, although Caesar's Vast Ghost does not appear to be a tourist guidebook, I look upon it as a wonderful guiding book for visitors who would like to acquire a set of basic notions concerning the historical and cultural foundations of Provence, and the essence of this fascinating region. Without these notions, a newcomer to Provence runs the risk of being waylaid, sadly and superficially, by caricatural images of Provence. I see this happening constantly in the case of visitors who imagine naively, for example, that Provence is primarily a romantically pretty land for photographers. (See, for example, the olive tree and field of lavender on the cover of the Green Guide.) While it's a fact that sunny Provence can indeed be an ideal subject for photographers, it would be silly to imagine this fascinating region as little more than a giant set of colorful postcard images, whose inhabitants are generally beautiful, glamorous, quaint, rich, famous…
From the very first paragraph of Durrell's book, I was struck by the familiar tone of his description of his arrival in Provence, which evokes my personal memories of the '60s. Here are Durrell's opening words:
Generally, it led us through rural settings, and countless villages. But often, it forced us to drive through the main streets of busy towns.
Durrell arrived in Provence around 1957 with his future wife Claude, and they lived for a while in a house in Sommières, the Villa Louis.
A year later, they moved to the stone house north of Nîmes called the Mazet Michel, mentioned in my recent blog post entitled First encounter with Durrell [display]. And it wasn't until 1966 that Durrell and Claude moved into the big house in Sommières… where Claude died in 1967, and where Lawrence Durrell finished Caesar's Vast Ghost in 1990. This is the place at 15 Route Saussine mentioned in an earlier blog post entitled Old house in Sommières [display].
Early in his book, Durrell introduces us to two of his mates, Aldo and Jérôme, who are talking about the idea of writing a book on Provence. Aldo is said to be the owner of a dilapidated castle and vineyard near Beaucaire, and Jérôme is a beatnik of the kind that moved away from cities and roamed around in the south of France in the '60s. Frankly, though, I have the impression that these two personages are largely make-believe, made necessary by the author's desire to present the back woods of Provence as a decadent and decrepit place, on a par with Durrell's mythical Alexandria. Durrell attempts to make his readers believe, for example, that Aldo had once studied medicine, and that his passion for embalming led him to gold-plate dead human foetuses, which he would sell to a gypsy whom he had met at the famous fête at Saintes Maries de la Mer. One of Aldo's friends was "an old and somewhat impoverished Roman Papal Count", Reynaldo de Saturnin, who had asked Aldo to embalm the body of his daughter, so that he could keep her in a glass case.
Since then, bull-worship has evolved into bull-fighting of one kind or another. In the arenas of Provence, there are both Spanish-style combats in which the bull is actually killed by a matador, and French-style events in which young fellows taunt the bulls while trying to flee without getting hurt.
In the midst of splendid places such as Marseille, Aix, Nîmes, Avignon, Orange, Vaison la Romaine, Saint-Rémy, Carpentras and Cavaillon, Durrell seems to consider that the heart of Provence is "dusty, sunburnt Arles at the end of its cobweb of motorways". And I agree with him totally. He draws attention to "the beauty of the Arles girls: each looks as if she had been freshly wished and love-minted to order".
Towards the end of Caesar's Vast Ghost, Durrell devotes an entire chapter to an amazing historical subject that is little-known in the English-speaking world: the evolution of the medieval art of courtship, as practiced by troubadours in the so-called "courts of love" in places such as Baux de Provence. This phenomenon was described in a celebrated book by the Swiss intellectual Denis de Rougemont, who was one of Durrell's close friends.
Durrell writes about so many fascinating themes in his book that I cannot hope to mention them all here in this short blog post. The most profound theme of all is the fact that most of the man-made marvels of Provence, creations of Caesar and Augustus, have lost their pristine splendor. Today, we witness no more than the remnants: a pale ghost of the Roman paradise.
As for the concluding chapter of Caesar's Vast Ghost—with a French title, Le cercle refermé—I've worked through Durrell's surrealist pages several times, trying to grasp what he was trying to say. I remain dumbly confused, however, by the author's weird descriptions of his romantic idyll in the company of the doll Cunégonde. It's worse than attempting to grasp the kind of relationship that might have existed fleetingly between a celebrated international economist and a humble hotel maid. The jumble of crazy words brings to mind a fuzzy derogatory expression that I remember hearing long ago, when I was a student: literary masturbation. The writer rambles on in an orgy of images, trying vainly to arouse his senses by the mounting fever of his choice of words. In the middle of this curious chapter, there are even smatterings of colloquial French, suggesting that Durrell has forgotten momentarily that he was writing an English-language book about Provence. There is much stoical despair in these 19 pages, as if the author were conscious of the fact that he was penning a testimony. But I can't help wondering whether Durrell would have retained this effusion of sad sexuality if he had been offered the luxury of calmly reworking his typescript in the company of competent editors and critics.
You can click to make the movie fill up your entire screen, so that you won't miss out on any of the fine graphic details. And you can also click to highlight one side of the dual screen rather than the other. Besides, if you click the ABOUT button, you reach a page that invites you to download, for free, the original music of the movie.
Let me refer to it as an iHat (even though I would imagine that this term is already being used out in the wide world). The top hat style—which is just one suggestion among others—has the advantage of offering a rigid lightweight structure to house both the electronic components and the wearer's skull. The size of the hat and the position of the flat screen would have to be adjusted so that it could be worn by people who don't necessarily have receding Neanderthal foreheads.
Interesting and beautiful variants of the iHat could be designed for special occasions, such as weddings or horse races of the Ascot kind.
I'm amazed and happily impressed by the apparent absence of critical fuckwit comments of the following kind:
With the French presidential elections looming, liberated Libya will be a fine feather in Sarko's campaign hat. Besides, images of the visit will no doubt dominate this evening's TV news in France, at exactly the same moment that viewers are getting ready to watch the very first debate between the six candidates for the Socialist primary.
Here are the results of the latest opinion poll, published this morning in the French press:
Incidentally, on the subject of Sarko, it's interesting to discover that the poor man's hair is rapidly turning gray.
That, too, will be a significant asset in the forthcoming presidential campaign. The Socialist favorite François Hollande is some six months older than Sarko, and he has a receding hairline. But I can already visualize the wise old gray-haired Sarko treating Hollande condescendingly as a politically-inexperienced youngster.
At this point, if my story is to be meaningful, readers need to know that, in 1965, I married a French girl, Christine, whose maternal ancestors were essentially Provençal. In the summer of 1968, with our 18-month-old daughter Emmanuelle, we drove down to meet up with Christine's grandparents at their home in the village of Saint Sériès, in the Mediterranean département of the Hérault, not far from Nîmes.
This was an excursion of immense joy: my discovery of Christine's marvelous maternal grandparents, and of their Languedoc province.
One day, Christine's grandparents happened to speak to me of a certain British writer who lived nearby, in Sommières. They told me that he had a reputation of spending most of his time as a boisterous drunkard in local taverns. I soon gathered that they were speaking of my former literary hero, Lawrence Durell, whom I had encountered 5 years earlier in Nîmes, when he was living in a stone cabin up in the vicinity, north of Nîmes, indicated by a green bubble in the above map. Needless to say, I set off immediately, to see if I could meet up once again with Durrell in Sommières. I located the property, but Durrell himself was not there. So, I missed him.
On that evening, I was thrilled to meet up with the 20-something daughter of the writer/painter, Sappho Durrell. Back at the time of my initial encounter with Lawrence Durrell, in Nîmes in 1963, Sappho was a child.
That evening, in Paris, she was an elegant young woman, sporting a magic name: Sappho Durrell. While her father chatted diplomatically with visitors, I preferred to enter in contact with Sappho. I told her, of course, that I had met up with her father for the first at Nîmes in 1963. Then I explained how I had come upon their family mansion in Sommières, in 1968. I half-expected that I would hear the profound reflections of the writer's daughter concerning life in a small Provençal town such as Sommières. Instead, at that instant, I was utterly stupefied by the spontaneous reaction of Sappho Durrell, who replied casually in the style of a mindless suburban brat:
Lan also sent me a postcard from Sommières, with an image of the ancient rectangular keep on a hill above the capricious Vidourle:
Here, on the other side, is the text (in French) of Lan's postcard, written from the Café du Commerce:
Lan wrote: "A pale lightbulb shines upon the entrance to the house of Lawrence Durrell. The flakes of paint are like dead leaves forgotten by the gardener." In a cynical vein, Lan notes the absence of "camping-cars in the driveway", meaning that Durrell's home is no longer, apparently, a place of pilgrimage (if ever it were).
I simply cannot, for a moment, imagine why Larry—surrounded constantly by hordes of seductive females—might have suddenly decided to fornicate with his 15-year-old daughter. Inversely, I can well imagine why Sappho might have decided, later on, that it would be nice if she were to make herself interesting (Durrell's daughter was a budding writer) by injecting make-believe sex into the alleged relationship with her father. After all, wasn't that a bit like what her old man had been doing, for ages, to add spice to his stories?
The ICC will now have to decide whether it has jurisdiction in this context. Even if the outcome of this preliminary investigation were negative, as is likely, the ICC will be obliged to respond explicitly to the two American advocacy groups that filed the complaint: the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. And the ICC's response will inevitably raise public awareness of these questions.
Besides, our ship would soon be sailing alongside Durrell's Mediterranean world of Egypt and Greece, and I had planned on rereading the Quartet during the voyage.
I was amused to think that 14-year-old Lawrence Durrell had once arrived here, in the heart of the superb county of Kent, to study at Saint Edmund's School.
After this rapid pilgrimage, I crossed the Channel by ferry from Dover and hitchhiked from Calais down to Nantes. I then spent a fortnight staying in hostels and moving slowly from Nantes across to Tours and down to Poitiers and Beaulieu-en-Dordogne. At Saint-Brévin-les-Pins, I was fascinated by a French girl who took me out on an excursion to the local market to buy fresh fish, which she then prepared expertly in the simple kitchen of the youth hostel. I've often thought, retrospectively, that it was then that I was charmed, for the first time, by the subtle blend of simple beauty and provincial pragmatism (quite the opposite of sophistication) that characterizes so many young French women.
The streets surrounding the arena were quite busy. Most of the pedestrians seemed to be local folk: employees rushing to their jobs in offices and shops, women engaged in early-morning shopping, and adolescents obliged to spend the school vacation in their hometown. There were many tourists, too. Like me, they were clearly overwhelmed by the massive proportions of the ancient Roman structure. The local people, on the other hand, walked past quickly without ever glancing at the stones; they were far more interested in the likelihood of running into friends. For me, this busy scene was far removed from my expected idyllic image of a village square with a tiny church, a stone fountain, and a couple of bistrots whose outdoor tables were shaded by plane trees. The scale alone overpowered me. Nîmes was no village. It was a big town, if not a provincial city. Clearly, this place had nothing to do with the austere Durrellian environment I had imagined on the basis of a few photos I had come across in books and literary magazines.
Feeling somewhat lost, and a little disappointed by the dimensions of the place, I decided to stroll around the stone walls of the Roman arena in Nîmes. On the far side of the vast square, there were several large cafés, where black-uniformed waiters were organizing the rows of tables and chairs out on the pavement.
At this early hour of the morning, there were not many clients, merely a handful of old men reading newspapers. I walked towards the largest café, which was almost empty. A single customer was seated in the sun at one of the tables in the front row. He was sipping a beer and gazing out at the Roman edifice. I recognized him instantly. I had found my novelist. Without hesitating, I walked towards him.
