Lawrence Durrell Issue, Part I || Personal Reminiscences of Lawrence Durrell

Personal Reminiscences of Lawrence DurrellAuthor(s): Buffie JohnsonSource: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 33, No. 3, Lawrence Durrell Issue, Part I (Autumn,1987), pp. 287-292Published by: Hofstra UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441481 .

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Personal Reminiscences of Lawrence Durrell

BY BUFFIE JOHNSON

My principal feeling about Lawrence Durrell, and I am going to speak from the feeling side, is of a personality with an enormous sense of fun, terrific energy and a kind of wildness very evident when he was young. We were the same age, and came to Paris at the same time, Larry from Greece and I from the States. He came especially to see Henry Miller. The little circle that I met him in consisted of Fred Perles, David Edgar, Henry and Larry. I detested Henry, both the man and his writing. I didn't like his egomaniacal stance or his attitude toward women. I might say he disliked me quite as cordially. I rather liked the side of his personality that developed later after he came to America. I think he lived a more attractive bohemian style in California. He also had a kind of wildness like Larry's. Perhaps that wildness came from Larry. I don't know. But I have never understood Larry's devotion to what I considered such an inferior personality. Devoted he was, however. Apparently Henry had something Larry needed.

In thinking about Larry Durrell, I first realized that the characters in the Quartet are very bizarre, very far out, very baroque. Actually it's striking because of the similarities to people I've met through Larry. He seems to attract and reach out for some of the strangest people I have ever met. They're very much like characters in the Quartet.

These remarks were delivered at On Miracle Ground I: The First National Lawrence Durrell Conference, held at the State University of New York Maritime College, and were published in the Proceedings of the Conference as Vol. 5, Special Issue No. 1 (Fall 1981), of Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Newsletter. They are reprinted here with the kind permission of Buffie Johnson.

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I went to dinner in his studio in Paris one evening. I was a little late and the conversation was well under way. The other guest was introduced to me as Count Potocki.* I noted his appearance first. It was most unusual. He wore a long red velvet robe with a heavy silver chain around his neck from which a cross was suspended. This was long before the sixties. No one wore waist-length hair then. His was long and chestnut colored, very beautiful hair. He was a handsome man, clean shaven and noble looking. The whole effect was very medieval. They were talking about Gregorian music when I came in, so I just listened, knowing nothing about Gregorian music except that I liked it. This being the nineteen-thirties, I was very young and naive, and as I sat there listening, I tried to figure out how this titled man could at the same time be part of the Church. His appearance stunned me. What passed through my mind was that the Catholic Church was closely knit with the aristocracy in many countries and that this man, who was Polish, must be a cross between a Monseigneur and a Prince by birth. I didn't know about these things at all. But my illusion was dissipated quite soon. They began talking about the abdication of Edward VIII, the hottest topic of the day, when Potocki said, "Well of course I was picketing Buckingham Palace when I was arrested. I was uneasy because I was afraid they would find the pornographic pictures in the bottoms of my sleeves." He indicated the excellent hiding place in the cathedral sleeves of his robe. The next conversational gambit gave me a real jolt. Potocki, it seemed, enjoyed intercourse a trois, the third party being a servant whose sole purpose was to assist in the various postures. I began to concentrate carefully on how I might avoid being escorted home by this gentleman. I think I did avoid it. I don't remember. Shortly after this-a month or so I guess-I went to London with Larry and another friend. The purpose of the journey for Larry was to ask T. S. Eliot if he would write an introduction to The Black Book which Larry had just completed. Eliot did not do so, but instead wrote a letter of appreciation for the book which appeared in the first edition. It was the first time I had been in London. I had been living in Paris and London seemed very strange to me. My introduction was through Larry to whom the whole English way of life was an anathema. The Black Book mirrors this attitude. Everything in town was pointed out disparagingly, yet it all seemed very jolly to me. To me it was great fun. The first thing we did upon arrival was to call on Count Potocki who lived in a very

* Count Potocki de Montalk was the founder of the Right Review and, in 1958, of the Melissa Press.

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attractive 18th century attic. As we came in, we saw a huge map of Poland spread over the floor with map pins marking boundaries. Potocki greeted us with, "Oh, this is a terrible day for me, a terrible day for me. My horoscope is impossible! I don't know what to do. I'd kill myself if it weren't for the fact that my brother and I are very occupied with the dividing of Poland between us. I should commit suicide. I should according to the stars." And so he went on about it for some time. I understood then that, being the eldest son, he was the pretender to the throne of Poland. What I didn't know was that he was, in truth, an Australian.

At that time, Larry was filled with the idea of writing a book on pretenders. He knew so many that he felt it would make a good book. That started another saga. We went to see the poet John Gawsworth, the crown prince of Redonda, a tiny island in the West Indies. As pretender to the throne, he would inherit the title of Juan I of Redonda from a writer, M. P. Shiel, whose father had bought the island, made himself king and collected taxes from the natives. The realm was very rich from its great piles of booby bird droppings that had accumulated on the island for hundreds of years. The droppings were actually mined and sold for fertilizer. What delighted Larry the most was that one could make money out of booby shit. Some time later, the British came along with a gunboat and claimed Redonda as their own, leaving Juan I without a throne. All of this was told by Gawsworth who said that as crown prince it was within his power to make us aristocrats of his lost kingdom. He was collecting a group of people whom he found entertaining to take back to Redonda when he reclaimed it. What he really enjoyed was making these friends a part of his court. I was given the wonderful title of Duchess de la Nera Castilla de Redonda, and have a parchment scroll to this effect. It seems there was some rivalry between Larry and Gawsworth for the favors of Larry's first wife, Nancy. So the tall John Gawsworth named Larry, who is not a very tall man, Don Cervantes Pequefia (the Little Duke).

Everyone I met through Larry had an aura of the fabulous about them. He collected the wild and fanciful. I have seen Larry off and on through the years, and he has always had the same preoccupation with strange and colorful people. The English love eccentrics and the reality which they construct for themselves. Americans are conformists and frown on anyone unusual. Larry had a wild sense of fun, though underneath one feels the solidity of his character. One of his friends from London whom I met after the war was Tambimuttu, the publisher of Poetry London. A good poet himself, Tambi was one of the most

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consistently outrageous people I've ever known, a real eccentric. Another was Alexander Calder at whose large country house outside of London we gathered one evening with artists and writers to view his Circus, now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Sandy had constructed little manikins who performed circus acts with his aid. That a serious artist would be so playful as to perform a whole circus with little mechanical toys was considered very avant garde at that time. Curiously enough, Sandy was one of the few eccentrics ever to have achieved success in America.

Larry was somewhat of a visual artist himself, continually making sketches as he sat in cafes. I just came across a watercolor he had given me that I'd tucked away in a book. The sketches of little towns he jotted down from memory of Greece and especially Corfu are really good. But I think his drawings (of which I have a number) are the best of all. The descriptions in Larry's work, the coloring of landscapes especially, seem to me extraordinarily sensitive. I think he is very, very "eyeminded." That is to say, we are all divided into eye or ear people, most of us leaning in one direction exclusively. I think that Larry's visual sense is certainly more vivid than that of almost any modern writer I can think of, and this is apparent also in his conversation. This visual sense extends into a sense of place. Larry had intended to lay the Quartet in Athens, not in Alexandria. He had lived in Athens a long time and his friends, such as Katsimbalis (Henry's model for The Colossus of Maroussi), whom I subsequently met through Larry, told him that he would never be able to live in Athens again if he laid his book there. Athens is so ingrown, so vitriolic if it chooses to be. He just didn't dare place it in Athens. I think Alexandria was the better choice, combining as it does the East and West to a greater extent than Athens.

When World War II broke out, Larry returned to the island of Corfu but he ended up spending the war in Egypt. I didn't hear anything from him until the war was over. We began to correspond again, and then I came back to Europe where we met in London for a few weeks. Looking back, I think all of us, when we first met, were suffering a great deal living in Paris just before the war. Hovering over us was the threat of war, the collapse of Europe, the terrors for so many people, especially our Jewish friends whom we tried to help. Paris was under the influence of the Third Column burrowing from within, and constantly sprinkling us with propaganda through secret agents. They convinced the French and the foreign populaces of the enormous strength of the Nazis, who would sweep into Paris and absolutely annihilate everyone and everything. The war would be over before we

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knew it, we thought. But it didn't happen that way. I was in Corsica for the summer when war was declared. Everyone I knew hurried away on the first boat they could catch to their regiments or to the nearest seaport. I went straight to Paris because three years' production of my paintings were there. I felt that if people could live in Madrid for years under bombardment, I could certainly survive a brief sojourn risking the bombs to save my canvases. It was a good thing I did.

By the time of the war, Larry and Nancy were divorced. His marriage to her was breaking up when we had first met in Paris. During the war he married Eve, a pretty young woman, an Alexandrian I believe, and the mother of his second daughter. His first wife, Nancy, was a talented English painter. His last wife-no, not his last wife-his third wife, Claude, with whom he was really deeply in love, was a writer and had published several novels of interest. A French woman, very beautiful, nice, helpful, understanding and supportive, Claude was also very French. They were really happy together. Unfortunately, she died suddenly of cancer. Larry was absolutely inconsolable. I don't think he's ever gotten over it. It's very hard for creative people to find the right mate. If Larry is very lonely and embittered by the loss of the only person really important to him, it's understandable. He finally remarried after some years. I haven't seen him since that marriage was dissolved.

I myself have never been able to quite make out his attitude toward women, a very important question for me. I am inclined to think that perhaps I am basing my impression entirely on my early feelings about Larry. His seemed to be the Pygmalion attitude which prevailed at that time. But, by the time he married Claude, I wasn't at all sure what it was. I wasn't close enough to him anymore to know. I visited them twice on the farm at Mazet Michel for extended visits, but it was no longer possible for me to gauge his attitudes. Larry was very respectful of her writing and of her education and her mind. They were well suited. After Claude died he seemed to be just annoyed with every woman because she was not Claude. The circumstances under which I first met Larry were very revealing of his attitudes; that is, the imminence of war and the dissolution of all that we knew and cared for. Under such conditions, it is easier to tell what people are like, to really see them. Sometimes people change and, at others, circumstances change them. Some will to change, others grow and become more conscious. It's particularly difficult for me to analyze Larry as our Piscean birthdays were one day apart, and for me he represented the twin that was lost at my birth.

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There was a certain amount of excess in evidence, the most striking example of which I recall had to do with a film, rather mediocre at best, about travelers in Tibet. Henry Miller and Larry were both absolutely mad about the film, absolutely frantic, like children. I think I went with them about three times to see Lost Horizon, and they must have gone ten. Henry thought of himself as a mystic, which was about as far from reality as one could get. He was always writing begging letters for money for himself, and always trying to extract money from me for a magazine they had all gotten together to edit called The Booster. This magazine represented Larry's sense of fun, but it was a lot like Henry too, in that the magazine was gotten by a trick. There wasn't any money for the magazine which was the house organ of the American Country Club of France. The printer didn't realize that they had decided not to publish anymore; neither did the Cunard Line or the French Line nor did the various perfume manufacturers who had advertised in The Booster. So that's how The Booster was launched. And anybody could get into the magazine if they made a financial contribution. William Saroyan was their favorite author at that time, and so he was published, whether or not he sent them money. The magazine's name delighted them. It amuses me still.

Larry's wild humor is not so discernible in his books. Larry had such a great sense of fun. He was like a trickster hero, very much like Loki or Raven. I suppose that is what he liked about Henry. Henry was a real trickster hero. Larry didn't have to be, but I think he had a trick or two up his sleeve.

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Lawrence Durrell Issue, Part I || Personal Reminiscences of Lawrence Durrell