Lawrence Durrell

British · 1912 to 1990

Born Lawrence George Durrell on February 27, 1912, in Jalandhar, British India, the eldest son of an engineer of the Raj and his Anglo-Irish wife, he was raised in the foothills of Darjeeling and shipped at eleven to England for schooling. He hated it. He failed his university entrance examinations, began writing poetry at fifteen, and watched his father die of a brain haemorrhage at forty-three. In 1935 he married the art student Nancy Myers, persuaded his widowed mother and three younger siblings to leave grey England for the Greek island of Corfu, and there began a lifetime as an expatriate; he called what he had left behind the English death. On Corfu he read Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in a single sitting and wrote Miller a fan letter that opened a forty-five-year correspondence. The war drove him to Athens, Cairo, and finally Alexandria, where he worked as a British press attaché and lived the love-affairs and intrigues that would become The Alexandria Quartet: Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960), four overlapping novels each retelling the same Alexandrian story from a different angle and according to Durrell's reading of Einstein, three sides of space and one of time. He worked in the Foreign Service in Belgrade, Cyprus, and Córdoba, then settled at Sommières in the Languedoc and began The Avignon Quintet. His younger brother Gerald immortalised the Corfu years in My Family and Other Animals, in which Lawrence is the touchy literary elder son. Lawrence died on November 7, 1990, at the age of seventy-eight, of a stroke at his house in Sommières, and was buried in the churchyard of Saint-Julien de Montredon.