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| PBS portrayal of Durrell family on Corfu (2016) |
--New York Times
I read this morning of techno parties and bars and clubs in Sofia, Bulgaria. The wild and woolly Balkans. So much for exoticism. So much for travel to get away from it all.
'Twas not always thus. I've just finished reading Lawrence Durrell's Prospero's Cell, a poetic description of places and people, based on Durrell's journal that he kept in 1937 while he lived on Corfu. Prospero's Cell was the first of Durrell's travel writings. It was written in 1941-42, after the fall of Greece, while Durrell was stationed in Alexandria.
Corfu (Corcyra, or a number of related Latin spellings, in Greek) is a crescent shaped island in the Ionian Sea, offshore from the point where Greece borders Albania. Lawrence and his wife Nancy (N. in the book) lived for a time in a "white house" at the northern-most tip of the island, facing Albania across the strait. Their house was 20 miles from the nearest town, a distance much easier to cover by small boat (caique) than by vehicle.
Lawrence was a poet before he was a travel writer or a novelist, and Propero's Cell is a compilation of poetic descriptions. As with Reflections on a Marine Venus (an account of his post-war experiences on Rhodes), only more so, his language is lush, repetitive, impressionistic. Perhaps too much so, but for Durrell, Corfu was an isle of magic, and magic can be expressed only through poetry.
At any rate, for a young poet, one still not much more than a teenager, untroubled by a need or desire for money, an isolated house on beautiful Corfu with a loving wife was heaven. His bliss was only compounded by the company and friendship of a number of amateur philosophers and other intellectuals, Greek and foreign, who hung about the nearest town. Long evenings were spent in conversation while the moon rose over the Albanian shoreline and the stars wheeled overhead. The food was local and simple, and the wine -- although hardly French in quality -- was good.
Durrell's book tells us far more than we need to know about Corfu's history and geology and crops and festivals and demographics. Most of what he tells us -- unless we are perhaps already well familiar with Corfu -- will go over our heads and be forgotten. But these subjects are but a pretext for the poet to exercise his facility with prose, to demonstrate his love of words.
And the poetry, the prose, reveals to us the delight to be found in an almost total isolation from the "real world," in the immersion in a local culture that had not yet felt the effects of modern culture and technology. A culture where the people, including the local clergy, still believed in vampires -- the "Vrikolas" -- as the fate of those who had led exceptionally evil lives. A culture untouched, as he remarked darkly in a speech* he gave much later, by the leveling effects of television. A world that could be understood not so much by rational thought as by the senses and the emotions.
If I wrote a book about Corcyra it would not be a history but a poem.
World of black cherries, sails, dust, arbutus, fishes and letters from home.
And a world yet untouched by tourism.
In Alexandria, after fleeing the German invasion, he wrote his eulogy for Corfu -- for the villagers who were killed in the invasion, for the "white house" that was bombed to rubble, for his tiny boat that was sunk. And for Greece itself, and especially for the ageless traditional peasant life that he and his friends had so enjoyed observing and joining.
Before the German disaster, one of his friends described Durrell to his face:
You are the kind of person who would go away and be frightened to return in case you were disappointed, but you would send others and question them eagerly about it.
I sympathize. I'd be the same sort of fellow.
Lawrence at least had a chance to experience an unspoiled world, a world not yet overwhelmed by mass tourism, by mobs descending from giant cruise ships, a world that required no 16-hour techno parties to avoid boredom. For the most part, we today have lost that opportunity; it was lost before we even arrived on the scene.
Lost not just on Corfu, but everywhere on earth.
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