Maurice Cardiff. Friends Abroad: Memories
of Lawrence Durrell, Freya Stark, Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Peggy Guggenheim
and others. London and New York: The Radcliffe Press, 1997.
191 pages. $35.00
Ian S. MacNiven
This is a book that Lawrence Durrell would have
loved--except for the chapter devoted to him. No, Durrell might have
wanted the public acclaim that sold novels and brought him money to spend
on wine and girlfriends, but he hated to be caught by the candid camera
of reportage. "Surely whether or not I smoked Camels is irrelevant,"
he liked to say. Maurice Cardiff tells us that his friend visited
brothels in Nicosia--to gather stories "revealing of Cypriot character
and mores," of course. Durrell once discussed with a prostitute from
Athens "a practice then much favored by the mainland Greeks," and was told
that her clients on Cyprus never requested that particular maneuver.
"There's only one thing they think of doing here and they do it so often
that they soon wear themselves out," the girl told Durrell (27).
And Cardiff tells us. This is the charm of
his book: we become privileged eavesdroppers on the unguarded moments
of some highly original individuals. The fact that four of the nine
chapters deal directly with Durrell or members of his circle make this
otherwise very entertaining book of special interest to Durrellians.
Many episodes are set in the eastern Mediterranean, and the cast of characters
includes, besides the featured persons, various major or bit players in
Durrell's life, among them Rex Warner, Sir Steven Runciman, Niko Ghika,
George Katsimbalis, Sir Eugen Millington-Drake and his daughter Marie,
Austen Harrison, Richard Lumley (later Earl Scarborough), Wallace Southam,
and Eve, Sappho, and Claude Durrell, and even Larry's mother, Louisa.
Before meeting Durrell around 1946, Cardiff had
admired Prospero's Cell and had been told by King George of Greece,
"I hope you weren't a friend of that terrible fellow Durrell." Soon
after his audience with the king, Cardiff encountered Larry and Eve Durrell
in a Plaka taverna in the company of Katsimbalis, and Larry acted as cheerleader
to Katsimbalis's stories, only late in the evening opening up with his
own "crazy notions and outlandish paradoxes" (24). In 1952, when
Durrell was resigning from his Embassy post in Belgrade, he wrote to Cardiff,
then heading the British Council program in Cyprus, for advice about the
island. And it was through Cardiff that Durrell found his first regular
job on the island, teaching at the Pancyprian Gymnasium. Durrell
saw a good deal of the Cardiffs on Cyprus, when Sappho often was left at
their home to play with their youngest son. They remarked on the
extreme tenderness with which he cared for Sappho during the year that
Eve was in England recovering from a nervous breakdown. Cardiff witnessed
the break-up of Larry's marriage to Eve, and his subsequent campaign of
seduction that created "near panic" in the English community: "Wives
were packed off to England or bustled away by husbands who abruptly found
that they had no reason to stay" (30).
A different sort of panic gripped the expatriate
community with the outbreak of EOKA violence on 1 April 1955, and Cardiff
recalls knocking at Durrell's door and being confronted by the author stark
naked but pointing a twelve-gauge shotgun at his chest. Cardiff also
witnessed the early stage of Durrell's romance with Claude Vincedon, and
he was given the manuscript of Justine to read and critique before
it was sent to Faber. The meetings continued well into the Sommières
years, but the friendship dwindled: Durrell's heavy drinking and
a constant harping on English reviewers and his family's alleged rapacity
took the joy out of being with him. There is an unflinching frankness
and honesty about Cardiff that renders him especially credible in his analysis
of an admired friend's decline.
Patrick Leigh-Fermor, with his marvelous books on
the Mani and the Caribbean, and his famous wartime escapades, has long
since achieved almost mythic proportions, and the same is true of another
of Cardiff's subjects, Dame Freya Stark. Nonetheless, Cardiff delights
in taking them down a few pegs, recounting Leigh-Fermor's gaffe which got
him expelled from Somerset Maugham's home, and Stark's late-in-life marital
misadventure. Peggy Guggenheim is another of Cardiff's famous friends
whose recklessly irregular life invited gossip, but one quickly realizes
that it is not the fame but the quirks of behavior that attracted him in
the first place. Like Durrell, who wrote "In Praise of Fanatics,"
a potpourri of monomaniacs, for Holiday magazine, Cardiff cherished
his company of rare birds, and sometimes put up with considerable discomfort
in maintaining his relationship with them. In fact, Cardiff would
be worth reading on almost anyone, for the sheer joy of his prose and his
own enjoyment of his specimens, his feast of eccentrics. Pursuing
one of his subjects to Mexico, Cardiff presents the Day of the Dead in
terms reminiscent of that fellow Durrell:
But the days are usually clear, under
a tremendous azure--stalked by slowly moving giants of castellated cloud,
which blaze at sunset in
violent and cinnebar reds and golds,
against the enameled silence of an almost emerald sky. It is then
that the dead may seem to laugh; for
the skulls of pink or lilac tinted
sugar are sold in the lanes, with their names in white scrolls on their
foreheads: Carlos, Christomo, Hipolita
and Aurora. Yet the smell of
roasting chestnuts and the tolling of the convent bell combine to weave
an undertone of vast melancholy--full
of half stifled sighs. (139)
There is a Jamesian quality to some of Cardiff's
narratives, as they wend their way toward a subject by a series of seemingly
random but artful associations. His description of Osbert Moore,
mysterious solitary turned Pali scholar and translator of Buddhist texts
in his final decade, is among my favorites. Cardiff's account beings
with the serendipitous picking up in a Bangkok bookstall of a volume translated
by Nanmoli Thera. Cardiff is astonished to discover that Nanmoli
is his late friend Osbert Moore. Back Cardiff take us to 1934 and
a visit to Beckley House near Oxford, where after fifty miles in the rain,
riding in the open "dicky" of a bullnose Morris--a car that featured in
Durrell's early life--Cardiff heard Moore play the harpsichord. Moore
is the permanent guest of Mrs. Feilding and resident expert on everything
at Beckley, from the harpsichord to the clipping of topiary yews to embroidery.
He also never speaks unless addressed. With an unerring sense of
development, Cardiff sketches in a minimal cast: Mrs. Feilding, once
a renowned beauty, "had clearly let her looks go, particularly in regard
to her teeth of which one yellowing survivor was permanently and prominently
visible" (143). Since Cardiff is sneezing miserably, she bullies
him into employing her pet remedy, a clove of garlic jammed into his shoe.
Cardiff escapes to his London flat, still suffering, and throws the garlic
out of the window. Switch to 1982 in Sri Lanka, where "[t]he forest
began a short distance from the outskirts of Kandy," and Cardiff, having
changed continents as effortlessly as most men change shirts, is interviewing
the Venerable Nanyaponika about Nanmoli. He is admonished not to
attempt a biography of Moore/Nanmoli, but he decides that a "sketch" will
not violate this command. Thus, we are treated to another of Cardiff's
delightful and labyrinthine narratives.
Deus Loci 7 (1999-2000): 193-96.
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