Lawrence Durell

Where I go, The Green Room goes. Last week, I was on the Greek island of Corfu. With a heavy heart, I had accepted an invitation to deliver a short talk about the novelist Lawrence Durrell, of whose work I’m wholly ignorant, to an audience of experts in Lawrence Durrell. I’ll spare you the details of how the talk went. It rapidly emerged that most of what I know about the Durrell family comes from the television series The Durrells of Corfu, which was adapted for television by Simon Nye from the memoir-novels of Gerald Durrell. Being serious-minded literary and academic types, we passed many long and arduous hours conferring hard in the Dionysios Solomos Museum, the home of the poet who wrote ‘Hymn to Liberty’, the lyrics of modern Greece’s national anthem.

There’s a wonderful moment in the third television series of The Durrells in Corfu when Louisa, the mother of Gerald and Lawrence Durrell, has been reading a badly-spelled essay by Gerald, her youngest son. She turns to him with proud love in her eyes and says ‘Larry writes to dazzle. You write to entertain.’Screenwriter Simon Nye could not have better expressed the different literary skills of the two brothers. Lawrence, in his mid-twenties in the 1930s, was destined to become a leading poet of his generation and then, as he put it, to ‘stumble into prose’ with the ground-breaking Alexandria Quartet (1957-60).