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Irish Times
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Michael Haag's biography of Lawrence Durrell is important and often revelatory, but it is not neutral
Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell 1912-1945 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). READ MORE 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. [ From the archive: Cypriot Saints and Sinners – An Irishman's Diary about St Hilarion and Lawrence Durrell Opens in new window ] 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.
The Guardian
03-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell by Michael Haag review
Spirit of Place is a collection of minor travel pieces published by Lawrence Durrell in 1969. 'Spirit of Place', though, could easily serve as a descriptor for the entire arc of Durrell's literary output: Prospero's Cell (1945), an account of three years spent on Corfu before the second world war, the Cypriot memoir Bitter Lemons (1957), and the career-making Alexandria Quartet (1957-60). The islands and littorals of the Mediterranean gave Durrell his subject, remade by him into a theatre in which men and women, displaced by the political and social violence of the mid-20th century, stumbled towards each other amid the ruins of ancient civilisations. It feels right, then, that this biography of Lawrence Durrell, only the second major one since his death in 1990, is by Michael Haag, who spent his career writing about the eastern Mediterranean. Haag's best book was Alexandria: City of Memory (2004), which drew on the writings of Cavafy, EM Forster and Durrell to reconstruct the polyglot culture of the Greek, Italian, Jewish and Arabic population that flourished for centuries on the shores of north Africa. By the time of his own death in 2020, Haag had completed this biography of Durrell up to the year 1945, and the decision was made to publish posthumously. The result reads like an abbreviated account of Durrell's life rather than an amputation: despite not becoming a significant literary figure until 1957, most of Durrell's formative experiences had taken place by the time he left the city at the end of the war. Haag's insistence on treating place not just as a matter of landscape but also as social nexus provides new insights into Durrell's earliest years. The standard version has always been that his family was Anglo-Indian, with parents who were ethnic Britons living and working during the Raj while longing continually for 'home'. Lawrence Durrell Sr was even that quintessential figure, a civil engineer, at work on the railways that were joining up the subcontinent. Yet Haag's forensic analysis reveals that the Durrell family was located very far down colonial India's pecking order. Both Lawrence Sr and his wife, Louisa Dixie, were 'country born' in the Punjab, with only tenuous connections to Britain. On Louisa's side there may have been Indian blood. The decision not to automatically send the four surviving Durrell children back to 'Blighty' (a corrupted Urdu word) for their education likewise marked the family out as being perilously close to the Eurasians who made up colonial India's subaltern class. Haag is also able to put to rest some of Durrell's more outrageous fibs. It is not true that his family was Irish – he probably just liked the way it made him seem not-English. Nor, in his boarding school in Darjeeling, could young Larry see Everest from the foot of his bed: the windows of his dormitory looked out on to dreary playing fields. Such misdirections were perhaps an attempt to disguise a childhood that was distinctly troubled. Louisa – 'Mother' in My Family and Other Animals (1956), by younger brother Gerry – had already started her descent into full-blown alcoholism, an addiction she passed on to all three of her sons. Haag has dealt before with the Corfu idyll in The Durrells of Corfu (2017), but in this retelling he reminds us that even in Eden things were not always as they seemed. On the island, the Durrells were socially suspect: the gentry class found them rough and boorish, while the priests and peasants were deeply offended by their insistence on swimming in the nude without worrying who saw them. This biography inevitably comes into its own once Larry touches down in Alexandria in 1942 as the newly appointed press attache to the British embassy. Haag's descriptions of the city's melting-pot culture and its steamy eroticism are wonderfully done. It was here that Larry met Eve Cohen, the model for Justine in the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet, who became his second wife. Durrell's previous biographer Ian MacNiven was in the tricky position of having been invited by his subject to write the book, for which he would be given access to private papers. The result was both overlong and overawed. Haag doesn't set out to do a hatchet job, but he is clearer on Durrell's dark side. The puckish author, no more than 5ft 4in tall, was free with his fists, snobbish and racist (Eve's Jewishness seemed both to intrigue and repel him). The book's cut-off point of 1945 means that later accusations by Durrell's daughter Sappho that he compelled her into an incestuous relationship are not explored. She killed herself at the age of 33. Missing, too, is any assessment of where Lawrence Durrell's literary reputation currently stands. In truth, he is not much read or liked now, his books coming over as bloated and cod-metaphysical in a way no amount of gorgeous phrase-making can quite redeem. Durrell's time may come again, but at this point we will have to be satisfied with Haag's account of him as a supreme writer of place, rather than as an astute investigator of the human condition or, even less persuasively, an overlooked modernist master. Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell 1912-1945 by Michael Haag is published by Profile Books (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
02-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell by Michael Haag review
Spirit of Place is a collection of minor travel pieces published by Lawrence Durrell in 1969. 'Spirit of Place', though, could easily serve as a descriptor for the entire arc of Durrell's literary output: Prospero's Cell (1945), an account of three years spent on Corfu before the second world war, the Cypriot memoir Bitter Lemons (1957), and the career-making Alexandria Quartet (1957-60). The islands and littorals of the Mediterranean gave Durrell his subject, remade by him into a theatre in which men and women, displaced by the political and social violence of the mid-20th century, stumbled towards each other amid the ruins of ancient civilisations. It feels right, then, that this biography of Lawrence Durrell, only the second major one since his death in 1990, is by Michael Haag, who spent his career writing about the eastern Mediterranean. Haag's best book was Alexandria: City of Memory (2004), which drew on the writings of Cavafy, EM Forster and Durrell to reconstruct the polyglot culture of the Greek, Italian, Jewish and Arabic population that flourished for centuries on the shores of north Africa. By the time of his own death in 2020, Haag had completed this biography of Durrell up to the year 1945, and the decision was made to publish posthumously. The result reads like an abbreviated account of Durrell's life rather than an amputation: despite not becoming a significant literary figure until 1957, most of Durrell's formative experiences had taken place by the time he left the city at the end of the war. Haag's insistence on treating place not just as a matter of landscape but also as social nexus provides new insights into Durrell's earliest years. The standard version has always been that his family was Anglo-Indian, with parents who were ethnic Britons living and working during the Raj while longing continually for 'home'. Lawrence Durrell Sr was even that quintessential figure, a civil engineer, at work on the railways that were joining up the subcontinent. Yet Haag's forensic analysis reveals that the Durrell family was located very far down colonial India's pecking order. Both Lawrence Sr and his wife, Louisa Dixie, were 'country born' in the Punjab, with only tenuous connections to Britain. On Louisa's side there may have been Indian blood. The decision not to automatically send the four surviving Durrell children back to 'Blighty' (a corrupted Urdu word) for their education likewise marked the family out as being perilously close to the Eurasians who made up colonial India's subaltern class. Haag is also able to put to rest some of Durrell's more outrageous fibs. It is not true that his family was Irish – he probably just liked the way it made him seem not-English. Nor, in his boarding school in Darjeeling, could young Larry see Everest from the foot of his bed: the windows of his dormitory looked out on to dreary playing fields. Such misdirections were perhaps an attempt to disguise a childhood that was distinctly troubled. Louisa – 'Mother' in My Family and Other Animals (1956), by younger brother Gerry – had already started her descent into full-blown alcoholism, an addiction she passed on to all three of her sons. Haag has dealt before with the Corfu idyll in The Durrells of Corfu (2017), but in this retelling he reminds us that even in Eden things were not always as they seemed. On the island, the Durrells were socially suspect: the gentry class found them rough and boorish, while the priests and peasants were deeply offended by their insistence on swimming in the nude without worrying who saw them. This biography inevitably comes into its own once Larry touches down in Alexandria in 1942 as the newly appointed press attache to the British embassy. Haag's descriptions of the city's melting-pot culture and its steamy eroticism are wonderfully done. It was here that Larry met Eve Cohen, the model for Justine in the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet, who became his second wife. Durrell's previous biographer Ian MacNiven was in the tricky position of having been invited by his subject to write the book, for which he would be given access to private papers. The result was both overlong and overawed. Haag doesn't set out to do a hatchet job, but he is clearer on Durrell's dark side. The puckish author, no more than 5ft 4in tall, was free with his fists, snobbish and racist (Eve's Jewishness seemed both to intrigue and repel him). The book's cut-off point of 1945 means that later accusations by Durrell's daughter Sappho that he compelled her into an incestuous relationship are not explored. She killed herself at the age of 33. Missing, too, is any assessment of where Lawrence Durrell's literary reputation currently stands. In truth, he is not much read or liked now, his books coming over as bloated and cod-metaphysical in a way no amount of gorgeous phrase-making can quite redeem. Durrell's time may come again, but at this point we will have to be satisfied with Haag's account of him as a supreme writer of place, rather than as an astute investigator of the human condition or, even less persuasively, an overlooked modernist master. Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell 1912-1945 by Michael Haag is published by Profile Books (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
