Lawrence Durrell: A Biography, by Ian McNiven, Faber & Faber, 801pp, £25 in UK
In 1957, with the appearance of Justine, the first volume of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, English literature shifted seismically. By 1960, when the final volume was published, a new genre of writing, the novel of relativity, where author, reader and characters change places and interpenetrate, was firmly in situ.
Flann O'Brien had gone some of the way with At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), and Miguel de Unamuno had put down markers in Spanish with the "nivola" such as Mist (1914), but Durrell was the first to construct an entire mythology which seemed to speak for a postwar generation humbled and disoriented by the collapse of civilisation, and reduced to mindless boredom by decades of twee English writing which took as its subject only what was "naice". Durrell himself had a love-hate relationship with England and the English (he spent almost all his life outremer), saying to Ian Mac Niven that life was "solitary, poor, nasty, British and short".
Durrell's work, which continued with the novels Tunc and Nunquam (which he regarded as his best work) and the Avignon Quintet, made it possible for writers such as John Fowles and, in America, John Hawkes, to set about the celebration of modern love and sexuality in terms which would otherwise have been unavailable and taboo. His twin themes were "sexual curiosity and metaphysical speculation", which he employed to create, ultimately, a "Tibetan novel" in the Quintet, re-uniting eastern and western modes of thinking and loving.
Durrell had been incubating the Quartet for twenty years, and Ian MacNiven's excellent biography has been twenty years in the making - the same length of time that occupied me in coming to terms with Durrell's "mindscape", and for the same reasons: the elusiveness and the ambiguities of Durrell's life and work. No one else could have written this book. MacNiven has assiduously cultivated his subject and tirelessly researched every available detail with a passion that in lesser biographers would have seemed prurient, but here convinces by its sincerity and the sureness of its application.
It's a long book, covering the arching span of Durrell's career from his birth in India in 1912 to his death in Provence in 1990, describing the stars by which his life would be directed - insecurity, uncertainty, the need to keep faith yet always to challenge and to explore, the search for a father-figure and for the reality of womanhood - all based on his sense of lacking an identity, and causing him to present himself by means of two contrasting voices - Darley and Pursewarden in the Quartet, for example.
Although much of Durrell's writing stems from his reading in eastern philosophy and the Elizabethan playwrights, it also follows the reality of European events in the 1935-50 period and was greatly influenced by his lifelong friendship with Henry Miller and, to a much lesser extent, Anais Nin. MacNiven introduces us to all the players, subtly indicating those who were to be major rather than minor figures, and painstakingly documents every nuance of Durrell's career. Novelist, poet, playwright, spirit-of-place writer, painter, British diplomat, university lecturer, drunken Irishman, husband (4 1/2 times) and father (two daughters), lover of many, many women - every turn of his life is exhibited and refracted through MacNiven's expert lens.
Durrell's weaknesses are exposed and, although MacNiven clearly loved his subject, he does not allow him to escape censure for his sometimes abominable conduct, usually occasioned by his heavy drinking and his innate fear of woman. He calls his womanising by turns "tender, cruel, entertaining, boorish, courtly and possessive" and quotes Durrell's sister and brother as saying "Larry destroyed women".
Durrell's charm and wit sit side by side with these characteristic fault lines which dealt him a fatal blow in the suicide of his younger daughter Sappho, which Mac Niven describes dispassionately and yet with complete sympathy. "My father lives always on the edge of madness," Sappho had written. That was one way of seeing it. Durrell's own explanation was that "my job is to throw myself over precipices" - "job" being a curiously revealing word for the life-sentence of a born writer. "Wrong" and "twisted" were also used as an apologia for the writer with whom women were condemned to live.
Already crippled by emphysema, with Sappho's suicide he decided to complete the job by drinking himself to death, describing himself in his last years as "feeling a trifle posthumous". Always worried by whether or not he had finally pulled off the big trick, assuring him of his place in the literary pantheon, Durrell would have welcomed this admirably honest presentation of the case both for and against one of the great writers of our time.
Richard Pine, critic and lecturer, is the author of Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape