Michael Haag's biography of Lawrence Durrell is important and often revelatory, but it is not neutral
Author
:
Michael Haag
ISBN-13
:
978-1788169790
Publisher
:
Profile Books
Guideline Price
:
£25
In a 1938 notebook, author
Lawrence Durrell
declared that a part of consciousness is lost at birth, and that 'the whole course of one's life is simply a searching for this lost fragment'.
When he died in 2020, Michael Haag left behind 12 complete chapters of a biography of Durrell. A writer, historian and long-time admirer of the Durrell family and their environs, Haag seems to take the above claim as his biography's central thread.
Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell
– which spans the period 1912-1945, the years Haag considered to be Durrell's most important – is punctuated by loss and yearning, twin poles, Durrell believed, for 'all those who start descending the long sad river of growth'.
Schooled in Kurseong,
India
– Durrell's father was an engineer for the North-West Railway – the 'nursery-rhyme happiness' of his childhood was interrupted by the loss of his younger sister Margery to diphtheria and the subsequent loss of his mother to alcoholism and depression (returning to the womb would become a motif across Durrell's oeuvre).
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Such traumas indelibly marked Durrell; other alleged losses in this biography are spurious, fitting less with Durrell's fatalistic river of growth. Durrell had a penchant for melodrama – 'I wasn't unhappy. I made my unhappiness' – and was often the catalyst of his deprivations; his years in Alexandria lamenting the loss of first wife Nancy Myers and daughter Penelope, for example, are illuminated thanks to reference to Durrell's domestic abuse of Nancy, and his ambivalence toward Penelope: 'no news of the child either to which I was perhaps too much attached'.
Durrell, whose Alexandria Quartet was structured around the same story being told from numerous perspectives, is here chronicled in a similar multitudinous manner.
Larry: A New Biography homes in on Durrell's various 'uncles', the great inspirations on his life and craft, functioning as antidotes to his qualms about modernity. His intellectual development is tracked fluidly. Henry Miller's influence cannot be understated. Having read Tropic of Cancer at 23, Durrell declared it 'the greatest thing written in our lifetimes'. While Joyce and DH Lawrence are bogged down in 'the morass of modern life, Miller comes out on the other side grinning'.
Miller's two-finger salute to the world struck a chord with the young Durrell, who wrote The Black Book with the American in mind, a diatribe against what Durrell called the English death; the novel described a spiritual paralysis manifesting in puritanical, repressive and self-conscious behaviours Durrell believed to be particularly English, and stifling to the creative process. Haag postulates that Durrell's claim to Irishness was a means to circumvent Miller's disdain for the English.
Durrell was named by George Orwell among other contributors to Miller's short-lived Booster magazine as writers who embraced the following mantra: 'The only thing to do about the world is to accept it, endure it and record it.'
Durrell found another kindred spirit in Plotinus, insisting that an overarching singularity has been obscured by the West's insistence on pure rationalism, whose binaries rule out wholeness; without this, there can be 'no inclusiveness or acceptance, no true experience of love'. This is what perennially blights Durrell's characters, and Larry does well to root and demystify their sufferings.
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From the archive: Cypriot Saints and Sinners – An Irishman's Diary about St Hilarion and Lawrence Durrell
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]
Durrell's writing is infused with deus loci – spirit of place – and thus it is only right to count Alexandria among the other uncles. Posted there during the second world War as a press attache for the British embassy, Durrell took CF Cavafy and EM Forster as spiritual guides to the city in which the past and present rub shoulders.
'[It] had floated away from the war,' giving it an atemporal quality. Durrell felt himself to be reliving the city as it was known by his guides, 'nothing had changed that I could discern ... the phantom city which underlay the quotidian one'. For the itinerant unable to stomach the weight of change, Alexandria was a lost fragment regained.
A cursory glance at the book's title reveals, in microcosm, some of its big shortcomings. While this isn't a one-dimensional portrait of the author, Haag certainly has a preferred angle; Larry evokes a lovable cad, whose problematic behaviours Haag either skims over or defends vehemently. Accusations of abuse from wives Myers and Eve Cohen arise, though only by direct comment, and without further probing.
Given the author's strident defence of Durrell elsewhere – Haag's excuses for Durrell's lies are often fanciful – it seems that neutrality was not the intention. Larry: A New Biography bends the truth slightly. Great parts of this book are reworked from Haag's Alexandria: City of Memory, and often the transitions from biography to history are far from seamless; Larry veers off on tangents, often forgetting its subject. This is an important, often revelatory text, though limited on account of the author's preferences.
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I was thrilled with Sam Cooke; that was an immersion in a world that was so extraordinary and wide-ranging. 'Sam Phillips was more of a self-invented world, but there were no limits to it. It was without boundaries. I was convinced I didn't want to do anything further, because it involves such total immersion. What are the specifics? What was the colour of the sky on that day?' This is not a question of blame, but Elvis began to stumble in public Phillips 'became a great friend, but I would ask him these questions which really were of no relevance to him, and he would touch his head and say, 'You're making my brain hurt.' But he would make the effort. People really want to tell their own stories.' Tom Parker had long threatened to write his autobiography. (How Much Does It Cost if It's Free? was one his pet titles.) He never got there, but he was a prolific – some would say compulsive – letter writer, and many of his dispatches are collected in the new book. In some ways Guralnick, who knew the Colonel as an old man, has charged himself with fulfilling that vow. The character he reveals is far more complex, and more sympathetic, than the Machiavellian plotter of matinee biopics. For one thing, the Colonel steadfastly refused to interfere with Presley's creative process, always confining himself to business negotiations. Why did he get such a bad reputation? 'People like to mythologise. Elvis was, in many circles, considered sort of an idiot savant. I started writing about him when he put out those singles in 1967 and then the [1968 comeback] special and then From Elvis in Memphis, but I wanted to take him seriously as a creative artist. That was something that was more difficult for people to get their head around, just like Jerry Lee Lewis . 'Jerry Lee Lewis was a f**king genius. He was perceptive; he was insightful ... He was also, as he would be the first to admit, an idiot when it came to money, when it came to women, when it came to taking care of himself. But he was not a cartoon figure. 'Why did the Colonel get this reputation? One [reason] was nobody had any idea what he did. He was totally uninvolved in Elvis's creative process, but he was totally committed to furthering Elvis's creative process, and he signed on to doing that almost from the moment they met. Elvis Presley and his manager Colonel Tom Parker in Hawaii, March 1961. Photograph: Michael'Except for Sam Phillips, who didn't have the money to promote him, nobody else saw what Colonel saw, which was not necessarily the music that Elvis was doing but the vision that Elvis had. He saw Elvis as being entirely apart, and was prepared to set aside all the conventional success that he had achieved – which was the greatest success that anyone could achieve at that time within the world, with Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow – and he was prepared to walk away from that in a minute for this untried, untested, unproven kid that he saw unlimited potential in not for money but for artistic self-expression. 'I would say, until the mid-1960s, maybe even until Las Vegas, he was seen as the smartest manager in the business, somebody whose imperious sense of humour set him apart and above. I mean, who did Brian Epstein seek out when he wanted advice? Nobody ever questioned his integrity.' So how did this trailblazing character end up adrift, lost, purposeless, prey to a gambling addiction? 'This is not a question of blame, but Elvis began to stumble in public. After the glorious Las Vegas debut, descriptions of him in the New Yorker and New York Times as a God come down from heaven, his performances began to suffer, his abuse of prescription drugs became more and more evident. And the sense that he was stuck,' Guralnick says. 'All of a sudden, who is there to blame? Well, Colonel: 'He didn't give him the artistic opportunities. Colonel is stealing his money,' all this kind of thing. It's understandable in a sense. Colonel's perspective was the artist wears the white hat, the manager wears the black hat; the manager takes all the blame. 'The thing that came as a shock to me was the extent of the tragedy of the ending, on both Elvis's side and on Colonel's side. If you look at the portrait that I drew in Looking to Get Lost' – a collection of Guralnick's profiles – 'or in Careless Love, Colonel is a Falstaffian figure. I thought of him as a character who was untouched by any of this. And it's absolutely crystal clear from what Loanne told me, which comes straight out of her diary, her journal, how devastated Colonel was by his own addiction.' [ Priscilla Presley on marriage to Elvis: 'I knew what I was in for. I saw it from a very young age' Opens in new window ] In fact, The Colonel and the King contains a desperately sad photograph of Presley and Parker taken in Las Vegas in 1972. The singer looks completely out of it, and for the first time his manager appears fragile and frail. 'Isn't that awful? At first I said, 'I can't put that in the book.' And then I thought, it has to be in the book, because whatever was happening at that moment, it expressed so much of what you just described. It was like I thought Colonel was a lovable rapscallion, and as foolish as what he was doing was, he never overextended himself. He lost a lot of money, but he left Loanne with $1 million in the bank. He always had $1 million in the bank to cover both his and Elvis's potential losses. 'But, jeez, I mean, to be up three days in the casino and then just to go to bed, to be so overwhelmed, the devastation of the [final] tours – and again, this is not putting the blame on Elvis, but I think I may have used the words in Careless Love: it was like a folie a deux. Everybody was living in a fool's paradise. Everybody seemed to believe that Elvis could rise to the challenge. That was the crippling illusion that Colonel was under.' The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership That Rocked the World is published by White Rabbit on Tuesday, August 5th
