Books: Adrift on a Wine-Dark Sea

PROSPERO’S CELL (142 pp.) AND REFLECTIONS ON A MARINE VENUS (198 pp.) —Lawrence Durrell—Dutton ($5).

Lawrence Durrell is an islomane. A friend of his coined the word for those who find islands irresistible, especially Aegean islands. In this publishing duet, the author of The Alexandria Quartet writes of two isles in the wine-dark sea.

Corfu (Prospero’s Cell) and Rhodes (Reflections on a Marine Venus). First published in England in 1945 and 1952, the two short books confirm Durrell’s superlative gifts as a travel writer. As with Hemingway, part of his strength lies in using scenery to intensify personal states of feeling. His credo is on the first page: “Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder—the discovery of yourself.”

The Living Eye. For Durrell, this discovery is a kind of Dionysian revel of language, a sunburst of images. Red wine is “volcano’s blood.” The evening air is “cool as the breath from the heart of a melon.” A sunset in Rhodes becomes a conflagration. This is the kind of thing Durrell does so well that he tends to overdo it. But, periodically, he lifts imagery to insight. Many have written of the preternatural brilliance and clarity of the Greek light, but Durrell sensitively isolates its effect when he calls Greece not a country but a living eye: “The traveler in this land could not record. It was rather as if he himself were recorded … in the ringing blue sky, the temples, the supple brushes of cypress, the sun beating in a withering hypnotic dazzle on the statues with curly stone hair and blunt sagacious noses.”

Elsewhere, Durrell notes that the “Greeks adore partings.” So does Durrell. He writes in what might be called the present past tense. He seems to be savoring his island idyl as if the relativities of war, chance and change had already foreclosed it, as indeed they subsequently did. In Durrell’s case, the nostalgic mood is an authentic foretaste of his fictional calling, that subtle parting, or detachment, of a novelist from his experience, without which life would never become literature. But while he is still the close observer, Durrell sets down much of the immemorial daily life of the islanders, from grape-treading to olive-pressing, from the festivals of miracle-accredited saints to the circular communal ritual of the Greek dances, which by some law of emotional gravity galvanizes spectators into performers.

Feathers or Lead? Himself steeped in Greek myth and history, Durrell is quick to relish the durable, often superstitious, links with the pagan past. In Rhodes, the peasants believe that a child conceived on March 25 must be born on Christmas Eve and will inevitably turn out to be a Kaous. A Kaous is an impish little devil, complete with horns, hoofs and pointed ears, descended from Pan. He circulates after dark, croaking, “Feathers or lead?” Either answer may be wrong, after which the Kaous mounts his victim like a horse for a breakneck ride across country, lashing him all the while with a stick.

If the Greek temper is erratic, the Greek tempo seduces Durrell with its essential timelessness. Sky, sea and air are the only absolutes, and full absolution; Durrell is convinced that the Greeks live “beyond good and evil.” The only space that matters to them is the spot they occupy. Asked the distance to a neighboring town, a Corfiote villager would reply with the number of cigarettes smoked in transit. With the reminder that “Poverty is the Tenth Muse” of Greece, Durrell makes the inevitable attempt to define the national character: It “is based on the idea of the impoverished and downtrodden little man getting the better of the world around him by sheer cunning. Add to this the salt of a self-deprecating humour and you have the immortal Greek. A coward and a hero at the same time; a man torn between his natural and heroic genius and his hopeless power of ratiocination.”