French Connection

Retracing the footsteps of a beloved author, our writer separates fact from fiction in the sensual, sun-drenched back roads of southern France.

The sun cast a muted grey glow on the craggy Alpine peaks far below as I made my way from Sweden to Marseille. The deep folds of their valleys, the hidden shadows and barely glimpsed villages put me in a pensive frame of mind. As my eyes probed their dimmest corners, my mind leafed through reams of yellowed documents, the musty old books I’d scanned line by line, and the Internet sites I’d clicked through until my eyes ached. I sat back in my seat and plugged in my iPod, and I let my mind wander more freely over the
nature of my quest.

I was searching for the traces of a dead man—hoping to commune with his ghost. My goal for this trip through the back roads of southern France was to seek out locations from Lawrence Durrell’s fi ction and places associated with his life. At the airport, I was met by my friends Anita and Alja, who had driven all day from Slovenia to join me in my search. There was barely enough room in the back seat of their tiny red car for me and my notebook. It was crammed full of jumbo-sized chocolate bars, fruit, bottles of water and maps: a fully stocked larder for a major road trip. They’d come because Provence in autumn was difficult to resist. But they would soon be drawn into my quest, sifting through clues like detectives and chasing down the barest hint of a rumour.

We left Marseille in a rush-hour traffic jam, the sun hitting the Mediterranean Sea like shattered glass and bouncing off the grimy white stucco of the walls, while on the road motorcycles passed between cars like angry bees, and on the sidewalk everyone seemed to be walking dogs. I caught my first sight of the Rhône at Arles, standing at the top of a set of concrete steps by the riverbank with the mouldering copper of the Roman amphitheatre at our backs. The sound of cars had been replaced by the ebb and tide of murmuring conversation. The life of early evening was the life of the cafés: a pastis (the traditional drink of the south) among friends at a sleepy sidewalk table beneath the acacia trees, and then a glass of rosé with a meal of lamb.

“So who is Lawrence Durrell?” Anita asked, as the damp weedy smell of the river fi lled our nostrils, “And what’s your obsession with him?”

“He was a great writer with a poet’s eye for landscape,” I replied. “A literary romantic in a world where such sentiments were dying out.” I picked up a handful of water-smoothed stones and tossed them into the evening-dark Rhône as I thought about how to continue. “At first, as a writer, I was amazed by the richness of his prose. Then, as a traveller, I came to envy his amazing life.”

Born in colonial India in the foothills of the Himalayas but sent to boarding school in England, Durrell hated the buttoned-up lifestyle of the north. When his father died he saw an opportunity to escape. Somehow, by some incredible art of persuasion, he convinced his mother to pack up their entire family—four children, of which he was the eldest—and move them all to the Greek island of Corfu.

They lived a crazy island life with eccentric locals and writers dropping by—people like Freya Stark and Patrick Leigh Fermor—and during all those years Durrell plugged away in a little stone house on the side of a mountain and taught himself to write.

“I respected that about him. That he was self-taught and that he had an eccentric take on life. In the end, he never went back to Britain. He was an expatriate all his life. An outsider.” I paused. “I guess I’ve always felt that way, too.”

“But if Durrell hung out in Greece,” she asked, “then what are we doing in France?”

I tossed one last stone into the river and brushed the dust off my palms. “Durrell lived the last two decades of his life in a village called Sommières,” I replied, “in the Languedoc. During that time he also wrote a novel sequence—The Avignon Quintet—set in nearby Provence. Many of those locations still exist. I think we should be able to fi nd them.”

I wanted to walk some of those same streets and avenues just to be there, it was true. But I also wanted to see if any trace of Durrell remained. Because if it didn’t—if the work could fade away as easily as the person—what did that mean for my own literary aspirations?

Article courtsey of Outpost Magazine