Durrell School of Corfu, Foteini Dimirouli

Another session I did manage to attend at the Lawrence Durrell Centenary Seminar (morning session on 26 June) featured the presentation of an impressive and well-argued paper by Foteini Dimirouli, of Keble College, Oxford.

Her paper was entitled "Paradise Lost? Lawrence Durrell's 'Romance' with the Hellenic World" and dealt with the change in Durrell's relationship (and the nature of his British sense of identity and his Philhellenism over time) with Greeks and three Mediterranean islands (Corfu, Rhodes and Cyprus), as reflected in his three island books.

It was particularly interesting to listen to a young Greek scholar's assessment of the writer of these much-admired works. I found myself in agreement with a great deal of what she said, although I wouldn't necessarily have read back from "Bitter Lemons" to "Prospero's Cell". For me, each book stands on its own within the time, space and political environment in which it was written.

In the questions afterwards, on the subject of colonial attitudes in "Bitter Lemons", I made the point that, much to his credit, Durrell had encouraged the Greek poet Dimitris Tsaloumas, when Durrell lived on Rhodes. See also my earlier posting on Tsaloumas.

David Roessel demonstrated on 21 June that the printed book we have is not always the book that the author intended us to read. A whole chapter, and important large chunks of "Reflections on a Marine Venus" were omitted after the typescript was submitted and edited down to a publishable size by Anne Ridler at Faber and Faber. In his acknowledgements, Durrell expresses his gratitude "for her help in editing an overgrown MS".

As a result, we have lost, amongst other things, a wonderful paragraph about the nature of the Greek way of happiness, which the talented Courtney Sherman performed at the seminar and again, at my request, over coffee with David and his wife at a meeting at Coffee and Books in Corfu's Upper Plateia.