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and intensified. The humanist and anti-Marxist elements of the anarchism envisioned by Miller in works like “An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere” took on, for Durrell, a conservative tenor after his sequential postings to Belgrade and then Cyprus, the former of which he regarded as proof of the impoverished outcomes of authoritarian communism. As Durrell wrote to his dear friend Theodore Stephanides while serving in Belgrade in 1949, in a letter taken up by Andrew Hammond as a demonstration of Durrell’s confirmed conservatism,
    There is little news except that what I have seen here has turned me firmly reactionary and Tory: the blank dead end which labour leads towards seems to be this machine state, with its censored press, its long marching columns of political prisoners guarded by tommy guns. Philistinism, puritanism and cruelty. Luckily the whole edifice has begun to crumble, and one has the pleasurable job of aiding and abetting. (Durrell, Spirit 101; Hammond 49)
    However, like most of Durrell’s comments on his reactionary nature, hyperbole and irony play a significant role. Durrell’s immediately previous letter to Stephanides shows a much different context and a far more qualified position:
    Conditions are rather gloomy here—almost mid-war conditions, overcrowding, poverty: As for Communism—my dear Theodore a short visit here is enough to make one decide that Capitalism is worth fighting for. Black as it might be, with all its bloodstains, it is less gloomy and arid and hopeless than this inert and ghastly police state. (Durrell, Spirit 100 )
    This is hardly unqualified conservatism. Moreover, while he did not consider it as bad as Yugoslavia under Tito, Durrell’s capitalism remains black and bloodstained, and by 1974 he intimately bound money to merde ( Monsieur 141) through “Marx’s great analysis of our culture or the Freudian analysis of absolute value as based on infantile attitudes to excrement. Gold and excrement” (141). A kindred irony appears in another of Durrell’s often quoted comments in a late-in-life interview: “I’m conservative, I’m reactionary and right wing” (Green 23; Pine, Lawrence 393–94; Calotychos 185). Richard Pine quotes from a portion of Peter Green’s interview, Vangelis Calotychos quotes Pine to demonstrate Durrell’s right-wing position, and from this context, Marilyn Adler Papayanis contends, “Durrell’s…reactionary politics [are] an important component of his ethics of expatriation” (41). However, this overlooks the irony and contextual poignancy of Durrell’s original statement in its original context. When Green asked, “Were you, or are you, romantic about Greece?” (23), Durrell offered a pointed response:
    Yes. I think super-starry-eyed in a sense.…Remember that neither my father nor mother had ever seen England.…I was already under the shadow of the myth of the British raj.…But I’ve been progressively disgusted with our double-facedness in politics over situations like the Greek situation. Remember I’ve worked as an official in Cyprus on that disgusting situation which was entirely engineered by us, do you see….And, as I say, I’ve never got over the fact of feeling ashamed that bits of the Parthenon are lying about. I refused a CMG [6] on those grounds, though I didn’t make an issue of it, and I don’t want to—I’m conservative, I’m reactionary and right wing—so I don’t want to embarrass anybody. But the reason I make a polite bow-out of the whole thing was that I didn’t want to be decorated by people who had bits of the Parthenon lying about in their backyard; and are too shabby not to send the biggest battleship…immediately back to the Greeks with it…to thank them for our existence. (Green 23)
    Like his qualified siding with capitalism over communism, for Durrell to reject the