From the Elephant's Back Read Free

also tempting to ask if Durrell’s early “heraldic” notions of creativity influenced the ambiguity and reader-imminent interpretations we are given in The Alexandria Quartet , whether they appear as “Workpoints” in The Alexandria Quartet that allow the reader to continue the narrative or as an unreliable narrator whom the reader cannot trust to provide meaning. In any case, the traditionally understood notion of Durrell’s Heraldic Universe as a mental state of being is insufficient for the context revealed by its publishing history and associations.
    As I have shown elsewhere, the descriptions of the Heraldic Universe that Durrell articulates in the works gathered in this collection derive directly from his partnership with Miller in a correspondence with Read that concerned communism and anarchism (“Anarchist” 61–63). This relationship between aesthetics and politics has been overlooked entirely in previous scholarship. In reaction to the copy of Read’s speech from the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition, a speech that Miller sent to Durrell with Read’s letter, Durrell responded, “This manifesto would be a lot clearer if these brave young revolutionaries started by defining what they mean by art. To begin with, they seem to mean Marx” (Durrell and Miller 18). Read concludes his uncharacteristically pro-communist speech with the statement that Surrealism only succeeds “in the degree to which it leads to revolutionary actions” (8) and “work[s] for the transformation of this imperfect world” (13). To this, Durrell responded directly: “A definition of the word surrealism, please” and “I firmly believe in the ideals of cementing reality with the dream, but I do not believe the rest of this stuff. That the artist must be a socialist, for example. That he wants to transform the world. (He wants to transform men.)” (Durrell and Miller 18). It was only in this immediate context, for which Miller had established his anarchist vision in contrast to the communist perspective endorsed by Surrealism, that Durrell offered his first articulation of the Heraldic Universe just a few lines later in the same letter: “Listen, Miller, what I feel about it, is this…What I propose to do, with all deadly solemnity, is to create my HERALDIC UNIVERSE quite alone. The foundation is being quietly laid” (18). In this context, Durrell’s subsequent anti-rationalist and autonomous articulation of the Heraldic Universe in Personal Landscape , collected in this volume, takes on a new tone: “Describing, logic limits. Its law is causality.…Poetry by an associative approach transcends its own syntax in order not to describe but to be the cause of apprehension in others: Transcending logic it invades a realm where unreason reigns” (“Heraldic,” this volume 103). Durrell’s other aesthetic comments for the journal, “Ideas About Poems,” draw on further loaded terms gesturing to the anarchist New Apocalypse’s Personalist movement, “The poet is interested in the Personal aspect….That is the only explanation for Personal Landscape now” (this volume 99). John Waller, who edited Bolero and Kingdom Come in Oxford and was published by Durrell in Personal Landscape , stated the relation succinctly: “Durrell is likely to found no school. (Indeed the best poetry of 1940 onwards may come to be known as that of brilliant individuals rather than of groups and tendencies.)” (179).
    However, this anti-authoritarian component of Durrell’s early works came to a head in 1948, shortly after a rapid flurry of publications and attempted publications by anarchist presses and periodicals as well as projects by other authors that he supported through the same literary circle. [5] In 1949, Durrell relocated to Yugoslavia, and in this new place, his anti-Marxist position was reshaped