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A Tree in Cypress
In an author’s note Mr Durrell tells us that the Tree of Idleness stands outside Bellapaix Abbey in Cyprus, and confers the gift of pure idleness on all who sit under it. That gift has yet to be conferred on today’s Cypriot nationalists and on the British troops now on the island; but Mr Durrell has undoubtedly accepted it and benefited. We remember that vigorous, obscure poet celebrating the power of sexual love, the immediacy of rock, air and sea, and the beauty of Greek nouns. His gift seemed partly a flair for eccentric verbal architecture. We thought he would end exhibiting other people’s wares, editor of an anthology of scholarly translations from the modern Greek. But instead Greece took him to her flinty Byzantine heart, breaking his own, and conferring the gift of idleness, freedom to know oneself without hope or self- pity. Hence Mr Durrell, alone among veteran poets of his generation, is able to produce a book of poems in which every phrase rings true. And hence one wishes absurdly to quote every poem:
I shall die one day I suppose
In this old Turkish house I inhabit:
A ragged banana-leaf outside and here
On the sill in a jam-jar a rock-rose . . .
He discusses degrees of survival, then gently rejects them in favour of a personal negative credo:
No: the card-players in tabs of shade
Will play on: the aerial springs
Hiss: in bed lying quiet under kisses
Without signature, with all my debts unpaid
I shall recall nights of squinting rain,
Like pig-iron on the hills: bruised
Landscapes of drumming cloud and everywhere
The lack of someone spreading like a stain.
There are other pieces also in Mr Durrell’s book which his irony, courage and controlled negative passion brings to the verge of greatness. Many are quietly terrible poems. His theme is the decay of sexual love and the vast unusable freedom it leaves in its wake. One might desire another kind of poetry; but of its kind, his poetry stands without competition and without parallel in modern English literature.
1956 (138)