British Novelist Durrell Dies in South of France

Lawrence Durrell, the British novelist whose works evoked the exotic imagery of the Mediterranean, has died at his home in southern France, his family said today. He was 78.

The cause of his death on Wednesday was not disclosed. Durrell had been fatigued for about two weeks, a family member said. Durrell told the Washington Post in 1986 that he was suffering from emphysema.

Durrell, who was a close friend of American novelist Henry Miller, died in Sommieres, a small town in the Provence region near the Mediterranean coast where he had lived for 24 years.

His best-known work was the Alexandria Quartet series, the elements of which came from the time he spent in Alexandria, Egypt, during World War II. The novels, written from 1957 to 1960, were “Justine,” “Balthazar,” “Mountolive” and “Clea.”

Durrell’s verse--romantic, taut and often humorous--began appearing in 1938. It includes “Red Limbo Lingo” and “Vega and Other Poems.”

Durrell was born in 1912 in India and spent his boyhood in the northern city of Darjeeling near the Tibetan border. His father, an Irish-Protestant engineeer, had gone to India to help build the country’s first railroads.

Durrell said in a 1982 interview:

“When I was looking back the other day to what the hell my career had been, I found I was really trying to find my way back to India. I think I really must have been marked by that enormous silence up in the mountains.”

At the age of 18, he left India for London, where he dabbled in jazz and poetry without much success. In 1935, he first encountered Greece, the inspiration for some of his works.

Durrell moved to Corfu, an Ionian island off the west coast of Greece. It was from there he began a lengthy correspondence with Miller. Letters between the two were published in two volumes in 1963 and 1988.

Cyprus was the inspiration for his work “Bitter Lemons,” written in 1957, while living in southeastern France. The book is a vivid, many-faceted account of Cyprus during the British-Turkish-Greek struggles there.

It was also while living in France that Durrell wrote the Alexandria Quartet. The series--written in a lush, baroque prose style--took as its theme love as a means of self-discovery.

Durrell once said: “I regard writing as a fascinating bore and wish it were better paid. I intended to die young and have the following words on my tomb: ‘Lawrence Durrell wishes you great passions and short lives.’ If I die old it will only need altering one word.”