LAWRENCE DURRELL

I've owned a single book by Durrell for nearly 30 years, which I bought at the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop in Paris from Mr. George Whitman himself. It was Durrell's first novel, The Black Book, in its original Olympia Press edition.

With the recent PBS television drama, "The Durrells in Corfu" I have come back to a reinvigorated engagement with his writing, and have been buying and reading most of the volumes of his Alexandria Quartet, and anything else I can get my hands on. Below is a quote from the last book in that series: 

Yes, I believe in this miracle! Our very existence as artists affirms it! It is the act of yea-saying about which the old poet of the city speaks in a poem You once showed me in translation. The fact of an artist being born affirms and reaffirms this in every generation. The miracle is there, on ice so to speak. One fine day it will blossom; then the artist suddenly grows up, and accepts the full responsibility for his origins in the people, and when simultaneously the people recognize his particular significance and value, and greet him as the unborn child in themselves, the infant Joy! —CLEA, p. 140