...how does a man die?
                                      Yet each of us earns his death, his own death, which belongs
                                            to no one else
                                      and this game is life.

My reading of Durrell's last work, Caesar's Vast Ghost:  Aspects of Provence, became a gloss on these lines by his friend Seferis, so that I now feel I have not only a better grasp of Seferis' meaning but, by way of that apprehension, a clearer sense of Durrell's aim and accomplishment in the book that was his final gift to the world of letters.  I take that book to be, at its heart, a revelation of the death he earned, a death that was entirely his own because of the way he played the game that was his life.  Almost every page of the book is colored by Durrell's way of playing the game during his lifetime, and especially during his later years in Provence.
    The frontispiece, just the first of many stunning photographs by Harry Peccinotti, sets the tone for my reading:  the author's house in Sommières, isolated, all the shutters closed, no living thing in sight, two small palm trees for a Mediterranean gesture, and then the tall trees in front of the house lush with green and yellow, dappling a spread of bright sunlight with their shadows and seemingly straining to reach high above the picture's frame against a light blue sky.  The theme of closure is there, and the absence of those whom Durrell speaks of in his introduction as having "vanished from the scene" so that he is "left to complete his book before joining them," one of these his friend Marie M-D from Naxos, who had a "style in loving" but who, along with the author at their last meeting in Avignon, "did not recognize death walking towards us--one never does!"  There is also the theme of aspiring towards some mystery that lies outside conventional religion, something pagan enough to be called magic but not quite, something beyond anyone's reach who is not a poet with feet firmly rooted in this world but a head that can be tilted to receive otherworldly visions.
    These are strong themes with their analogies in Durrell's earlier work, yet death and otherworldly mystery are not what dominate the book.  It is the author's journey through time towards the lush country that he has celebrated so often over the years while he was playing the particular game that was his.  One finds, of course, much insight into the special beauty and hedonism of the literal country where he spent his last thirty-odd years, as his subtitle, "Aspects of Provence," promises.  And if it proves to be a more complex country in his image of it than one might have suspected, there are enough obvious pagan Mediterranean remnants in it to explain why he went there in the first place and managed to stay until the end.  The wine and food and heady talk, the gathering of characters with shady pasts and quirky preoccupations and ribald wit, the open eroticism of the landscape and many of the figures in it are all aspects that one would expect to find in Durrell's view of the place he chose to end up.
    What comes as more of a surprise is the telling conjunction of the country's present landscape with the author's travels into the history of the place, a conjunction that shows all his learning, humor, and sometimes outrageous imagination.  He ranges into the past wherever his fancy chooses to take him, and that includes the Greeks and their way of thinking, the Roman women and their way with perfume, the Roman generals and their way with monuments of war, the courtly poets and their way with women, and on into our own time.  If there is need along the road from past to present for a diversionary analysis of what really happened at the battle of Actium on the west coast of Greece, this in order to give us a more tolerable rationale for the behavior of Antony and Cleopatra, we get that too, or an account of the culinary talents of a pleasure-loving Parisian girl who taught the young author as much about the delicacies of food as she did about the subtleties of love, or any excuse for an anecdote to break the travelogue pattern with a priceless joke, such as this one from the Provençal peddlers' chapbooks recounting the adventures of Marius and Olive, who one day find themselves on a raft in the Indian Ocean, almost dead from starvation:

            Marius after deep reflection said to Olive:  "Olive, I have been thinking things over and have reluctantly come to a
            decision.  I cannot stand any more malnutrition.  Of what use is little Jules (his member) in a situation like this?  None!
            I am going to cut it off and have it for lunch."  Olive showed great concern.  "Not so fast, Marius," she said.  "Why
            don't you flatter it a little--there may be enough for two!"

    If there is a single metaphor that best evokes my reading of Durrell's last book, it is a journey in the manner of La Cloche, what Durrell describes as a "great brotherhood of scamps and contemplatives and dissenters" which once could be seen everywhere in Provence "marching and counter-marching across the land," with a liter of wine in one pocket and sometimes a commonplace book in the other pocket for preserving stray thoughts--and, in this case, a casual assortment of poems to punctuate with rhyme and wit a prose that has its own generous portion of a different kind of poetry.  It is clear that Durrell envied "these whiskered gentlemen" who were "really at heart peripatetic philosophers who had opted out of ordinary society in order to make an almost religious retreat, perhaps to 'redefine their deaths.'"  Durrell travels that same road through much of this book, challenging the puritan view, celebrating the open spaces of the mind whether manifest in past or present, honoring pleasure in all its possibilities however restricted by the changes that have entered the landscape he loved.  What emerges from this journey is a redefinition of death that in fact confirms Durrell's long devotion to the bright and green things of the world.  One puts the book down with an abiding sense of a man who has lived a fully privileged life and who has now earned a death that is very much his own exactly because he had the courage to play the game of life as his heart and mind knew best.

Deus Loci 1 (1992):  123-126.

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