The interview took place at Durrell’s home in the Midi. It is a peasant cottage with four rooms to which he has added a bathroom and a lavatory. He writes in a room without windows, with notices of his work in foreign languages he cannot understand pinned to the bookcase. The sitting room, where the interview was held, has a large fireplace and a French window leading onto a terrace constructed by Durrell himself. From the terrace one has a view of the small valley at the end of which he lives. It is a bare rocky district, full of twisted olive trees destroyed in a blight a few years back.

Lawrence Durrell is a short man, but in no sense a small one. Dressed in jeans, a tartan shirt, a navy-blue pea jacket, he looks like a minor trade-union official who has successfully absconded with the funds. He is a voluble, volatile personality, who talks fast and with enormous energy. He is a gift for an interviewer, turning quite stupid questions into apparently intelligent ones by assuming that the interviewer meant something else. Though he was rather distrustful of the tape recorder, he acquiesced in its use. He smokes heavily, Gauloises bleues. When at rest he looks like Laurence Olivier; at other times his face has all the ferocity of a professional wrestler’s.

The interview was recorded on April 23, 1959, the birthday of William Shakespeare and Scobie of Durrell’s Quartet. Beginning after lunch and continuing that evening, it commenced with Durrell reviewing his early life, his schooling at Canterbury, and his failure to enter Cambridge.

INTERVIEWER

What did you do after Cambridge turned you down?

LAWRENCE DURRELL

Well, for a time I had a small allowance. I lived in London. I played the piano in a nightclub—the “Blue Peter” in St. Martin’s Lane, of all places —until we were raided by the police. I worked as an estate agent in Leytonstone and had to collect rents, and was badly bitten by dogs. I tried everything, including the Jamaica police. I have been driven to writing by sheer ineptitude. I wanted to write, of course, always. I did a certain amount of stuff but I couldn’t get anything published —it was too bad. I think writers today learn so much more quickly. I mean, I could no more write as well at their age than fly.

INTERVIEWER

Had you written anything before Pied Piper of Lovers?

DURRELL

Oh yes, since the age of eight I have been madly scribbling.

INTERVIEWER

How long did you stay in London before you decided to leave?

DURRELL

In my parents’ view, only Colonial Office jobs or the Army were then respectable; their dream was to see me as an Indian Civil Servant. Thank God I escaped it, but I manfully did my best to try all these things. I think I must have failed more examinations in about three years than probably anyone of my weight, height, size, and religion. But my parents, who were unwisely sending me quite large sums of money, didn’t realize that I was putting it all into night clubs and fast cars and living a perfectly stupid puppy-clubman sort of life, do you see? I think the first breath of Europe I got was when I went on a reading party for one final cram for something —I think it was for Cambridge again, which I must have tried about eight times, I suppose. Mathematics —three, two, one, nought —it was always this damn thing. I was taken to Switzerland, you see, which gave me a glimpse of Paris on the way, and I went to a reading party which was conducted by a very deaf old scholar, and instead of reading I suddenly had a look at Lausanne, Vevey, and the lakes there, and on the way back managed to get three days in Paris which converted me to Europe as such. And then after this whole question of being educated failed and faded out, I made my way immediately for Paris.

INTERVIEWER

Was it then that you met Henry Miller?

DURRELL

Oh, no, that was much later. I went to Paris for a brief period and then I came back and convinced my family, who were dying of catarrh, that it was necessary to get out of England for a breath of air and see some new landscapes and places. And it was then that I persuaded them that Greece was a good idea, which my brother has recounted in his book on Greece. So then I went ahead and they all followed about a year later, and then began this wonderful period in Corfu of—oh, what? I suppose five or six years?—really until the outbreak of the war. In the meantime I’d got married and, you know, I was trying everything.

INTERVIEWER

It seems that your writing very much improved when you got to Corfu. For instance, Panic Spring is very much better than Pied Piper of Lovers.

DURRELL

Yes, it’s still a damn bad book. There’s quite a gap in between there, you know. Panic Spring I think I wrote there, actually. I used all the color material I could get from Corfu, there’s no doubt.

INTERVIEWER

And since then you have never lived in England at all, have you?

DURRELL

Well, no, I haven’t, really. I have not been domiciled in England. I have had the odd six months at a time, I mean, which is just about the length of time I enjoy England for. It gives you time to see your friends, get all the free meals you can, and everyone is glad to see you, to begin with, and so on. But I must confess that I’ve been a European since I was eighteen, and I think it is a grave national defect that we aren’t Europeans any more. We were talking today at lunch about Kingsley Amis. I was thinking about the anti-living-abroad trend or something—which implies a sort of unpatriotic attitude on my part—but, you see, my heroes of my generation—the Lawrences, the Norman Douglases, the Aldingtons, the Eliots, the Graveses—their ambition was always to be a European. It didn’t qualify their Englishness in any way, but it was recognized that a touch of European fire was necessary, as it were, to ignite the sort of dull sodden mass that one became, living in an unrestricted suburban way. Things would have been vastly different if I had had a very large private income, been a member of the gentry, had a charming country house and a flat in town and the ability to live four months of the year in Europe: I should certainly have been domiciled in London. But when you’re poor and you have to face shabby boarding houses and all the dreariness of South Ken or Bayswater or Woburn Place, with only the chance of seeing Europe in snippets of a month at a time, you have to make the vital decision as to whether you live in Europe and visit England, or whether you live in England and visit Europe.

INTERVIEWER

There is still quite a lot of violent anti-bourgeois England in your early things.

DURRELL

I think part of it I may have got from my heroes of that time—Lawrence, as I said, and Aldington, and so on—but it’s more than just a fashionable thing. I think that, as I say, in England, living as if we are not part of Europe, we are living against the grain of what is nourishing to our artists, do you see? There seems to be an ingrown psychological thing about it, I don’t know why it is. You can see it reflected even in quite primitive ways like this market business now—the European Common Market. It’s purely psychological, the feeling that we are too damned superior to join this bunch of continentals in anything they do. And I think that’s why it is so vitally important for young artists to identify more and more with Europe. As for me, I have joined the Common Market, as it were. But, mind you, that doesn’t qualify one’s origins or one’s attitudes to things. I mean if I’m writing, I’m writing for England—and so long as I write English it will be for England that I have to write.