Overview
Born in India, schooled under Mount Everest, Durrell spent his most productive years in Greece and around the Mediterranean. He was an accomplished poet, and his lyrical books about Mediterranean islands are among the best of their kind. In wartime Egypt he conceived The Alexandria Quartet, which brought fame with its "exploration of modern love" and experimental form. His last great novel cycle, The Avignon Quintet, has intrigued with its formal complexity and compelling mystery - the story of his generation through peace and war. Married four times, he lost two daughters (one through separation; the other through suicide) and his most blissful marriage ended in his wife's sudden death. Searching for wholeness after the shattering loneliness of his childhood, he rejected Christianity in favor of Western mysticism and Eastern religions. These things mark his work, showing a dark side to the effervescent wit evident in his writing.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Try to write a biography of a writer whose "power over language was daunting" without being able to quote from his works-published or unpublished- "except occasionally and briefly for purposes of literary explanation or critical comment." With an "official" biography sanctioned by the Durrell estate in the works, Bowker (Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry) must resort to paraphrase, summary and assertion. He was still able to interview many of Durrell's family and friends, but their voices are almost always filtered through Bowker's unremarkable prose. The most sparkling and "daunting" words are those of the critics who have attacked and lauded Durrell's fiction and poetry. Durrell was born in India, sent to school near the border of Tibet and raised from age 11 in England. After a career as a poet and foreign diplomatic press agent, the Alexandria Quartet, four novels written in short, mad bursts (and published between 1957 and 1960) brought him his long-sought fame and fortune. With that success, the squat, lusty, miserly Durrell liked to mock himself as a literary "fraud," yet basked in a stupor of fame through the 1980s. At the age of 72, he finished the Avignon Quintet and declared himself through with novel-writing. He occasionally relaxed his strenuous pace of womanizing, drinking and smoking before dying in 1990 without having won the coveted Nobel Prize. Bowker's thesis that "Lawrence Durrell's place in English literature is not as secure as it ought to be" will not convince anyone not already converted.Booknews
A biography of the poet and novelist whose "Alexandria Quartet" and "Avignon Quintet" continue to inspire and provoke contemporary readers. Bowker digs deeply into the subconscious artistic regions of Durrell's acquisitive intelligence and appetites, unearthing an unhappy life marked by an unhappy childhood, four marriages, the loss of two daughters (one through separation and another by suicide), accusations of incest, a brutal sexuality, and a conversion to Buddhism which did not seem to bring the novelist any peace much less Nirvana. Although well researched and written, the biography nevertheless confirms every imaginable stereotype of the mad artist. Includes photographs. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.Kirkus Reviews
As with his equally masterful biography of Malcolm Lowry (Pursued by Furies, 1995), Bowker here does signal service in reviving a once great literary reputation.Durrell (191290) may only occupy the second tier of 20th- century British writers, but he's at the very top of it. Like Lowry, he was personally unpleasant, abusive, misogynistic, blithely lecherous, cantankerous, an inveterate drunk. Writing tended to goad him into a state bordering on madness, drawing those around him into the fecund maelstrom, often with unpleasant results. He wrote quickly, anxiously; many of his greatest books were produced in a matter of months. Though a proponent of Freudian analysis, he stayed far away from the analyst's couch, afraid the talking cure would dissipate his creativity. While Durrell had an ostensibly large artistic range—poems, travelogues, thrillers, even paintings—most of his work returned to a few large themes, in Bowker's words: "the quest for wholeness through sex and art and, faced with the disintegrating ego and a world gone mad, the confrontation of death and the coming to terms with it." Until modern mores caught up with him, his focus on sex was considered quite scandalous, and he was often lumped together as a pornographer with his close friend Henry Miller. Yet behind all the bad behavior and outrageousness, Durrell worked a good deal of his life as a respected member of the British diplomatic corps, with postings to Cyprus and Yugoslavia. Bowker is a shrewd judge of character and has substantial storytelling flair. He effortlessly weaves biography and criticism together into a discerning whole. The only major flaw in this unauthorized biography is beyond his control: The "fair use" doctrine drastically limits his ability to quote from Durrell's work.
A noteworthy success that meets the highest standard of literary biography.