Sterling Morrison of the Velvet Underground ... and the Books I Read

Having just finished writing a book at some speed I am now relaxing by reading a few books at leisure.  One of these is Paul Preston's A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War.  Another is E L James' Fifty Shades of Grey, which so far strikes me as a very sweet boy-and-girl love story, its adolescent appeal made acceptable to married women over thirty (which I gather is the main readership) by its scenes of flogging or whatever (I will know when I get further).  Ever since reading in Cicero about the scandalous adventure of Publius Clodius when he dressed as a woman and gate-crashed a girls-only booze-up given by the Vestal Virgins I have been interested in arcane rituals.  And then there is The Art of Memory which has set off a series of loosely associated thoughts.

Dante's Inferno has led me to begin reading The Art of Memory by Frances A Yates, first published in 1966. Her thesis is that before the invention of printing a trained memory was of vital importance and this was achieved by creating an elaborate memory system based on impressing images and places on the mind. The medieval love of the grotesque, she suggests, does not necessarily mean a tortured psychology, rather it serves as a mnemonic device.

So Dante's Inferno can be seen as the prudent man's handbook for memorising a theological landscape of sin and punishment, a landscape in which abstract concepts are converted to vivid and grotesque images the better to navigate one's way to salvation. 

Cerberus by William Blake

Not that Yates' says so, but her argument makes sense of Dante's use of contrapasso, by which a sin is met by a punishment that is similar or opposite but in any case serves as an apposite reminder of the transgression. Gluttons, for example, who in their lifetimes wallowed in food and drink, and who made nothing of their lives and offered nothing to God, now lie in their own excreta where they are forever ripped apart by the three-headed dog Cerberus.  Having produced nothing of value in their lives they are now reduced to so much rubbish and filth. Thus is the Third Circle of Hell memorably described and distinguished from the vivid horrors of the Second and the Fourth and the other circles of Hell.  By means of intense visualisation Dante's entire scheme of vices and virtues, punishments and rewards, is committed to memory.

Which may seem obvious and elementary, except when you think that such memory devices were essential, not only in literature but in architecture and many other fields, until just over five hundred years ago when a new memory device, the printed book, began to make itself felt. 

During the Renaissance one powerful idea that took hold was of the hermetic universe, which saw a link between that which is above and that which is below, that is between man and the cosmos. If the cosmos could determine the affairs of man, so man could determine the cosmos, and if a man possessed great powers - for example a highly developed memory system stocked with an understanding of the laws and forces of nature - he could use his powers to control the universe.  To the Renaissance mind the universe could be understood through memory devices like the book and operated by magic. 

Only in the seventeenth century did this magico-mechanical view of the universe begin to be replaced with a mathematical conception.  But meanwhile the underlying principle remained the same.  As Yates writes, 'The translation of this magical conception into mathematical terms has only been achieved in our own day. [The] assumption that the astral forces which govern the outer world also operate within, and can be reproduced or captured there to operate a magical-mechanical memory, seems to bring one curiously close to the mind machine which is able to do so much of the work of the human brain by mechanical means'.

And now by some process of magical or poetic association I have taken a book down from my shelves, and its old familiar cover reminds me of Sterling Morrison, a founding member of the Velvet Underground.

John Cale, Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison c1965.

The book is by Robert Graves, the English poet, novelist and eccentric, who died about thirty years ago.  He is probably best known for his historical novel I, Claudius, which has also been dramatised for television.  But the book lying on my desk is The White Goddess, whose thesis, as Graves himself said, ‘is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry'.  

It is a language of trees and leaves, which are an inspiration and a mnemonic as you realise if you spend a length of time in a forest where every shape and colour and form becomes part of a familiar pattern, immediately recognised and understood - like a fisherman reads the sea or magi read the stars.  

I bought my copy of The White Goddess in 1961 in the local drugstore, a general store really, which sold everything from lightbulbs and shoelaces to stationery and cigars, had a soda fountain for milk shakes and banana splits, a pharmacy at the back, and displayed magazines, newspapers and paperback books at the front.  All during high school I would go up to that drugstore and twirl its paperback racks, coming away with books by Thoreau, Whitman, Plato, Sartre and Freud, novels by Balzac, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Lawrence, Hardy, Huxley and Orwell, histories by Herodotus and Thucydides, plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Seneca, and some good ancient pornography like Petronius' Satyricon – Fellini later made a raunchy film of it.  (They would not sell books like that there today, but it was the beginning of the paperback revolution in America and publishers were fighting for market share, so they published any damn thing.) I still have some of these old paperbacks on my shelves, just as I have The White Goddess by me as I write.

My 1961 copy of The White Goddess.

The reason I bought The White Goddess was because Sterling Morrison raved so much about it.  Sterling was in the year above me, so I did not have him as a classmate, but I knew him through Tom Dargan, a good friend of mine at the time, who had two lively and appealing sisters, Dorothy, or Dot as everyone called her, and Martha, who became Sterling’s girlfriend and later his wife.

It was the summer of 1961 and as usual I was staying up late.  Sterling must have seen the lights; anyway he roared up on his motorcycle, rang the bell, and bounded through the door.  I should mention that he was fully clothed, but he told me that he sometimes rode his motorbike stark naked wearing only a Roman helmet.  We had some wine, and then he started talking about books.  He talked till close to dawn, and I sat there spellbound.  Most of all he spoke about Robert Graves and The White Goddess, and how the worship of the goddess and the knowledge of true woman who in her five-fold person encompasses Birth, Initiation, Consummation, Repose and Death, was not only the key to poetry but the remedy for the chaos of our times. 

I saw Sterling in Manhattan a few years later.  By then I was living in London but I had flown over to New York and met up with Tom and Dot and Martha, and we went to the club where Sterling was playing with the Velvet Underground. They were stroking and beating and scratching their instruments - John Cale on the electric viola, sometimes on the organ, Sterling on electric guitar and bass, alternating lead guitar with Lou Reed - and producing amazing droning, rasping, dissonant sounds; that was the fun of it, Sterling said, the energy, the inventiveness, not how well they played. The Velvet Underground were not well known at that time, hardly known at all I think, which I am not sure that Sterling entirely minded. I remember him complaining that Andy Warhol had just taken over as their manager and was imposing on them a German blonde vocalist called Nico to make them more commercial, an idea that filled Sterling with dismay, though he did co-write Femme Fatale for her.

Sterling in 1966.

That was the last time I saw Sterling (and Tom and Dot and Martha for that matter, though I have been in touch with them since), but from time to time I would catch news of him. In London I bought and would listen to the Velvet Underground's banana album.  Sterling broke with the band, I gathered, and did a PhD on the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf at the University of Texas and then taught for a while at Austin, and also became a licenced master mariner and a tugboat captain. The Underground briefly reformed in 1993 for a tour of Europe where it played to packed houses; Sterling was interviewed in The Times and talked about his interest in poetry and also the novels of Lawrence Durrell.

Which takes me back to that copy of The White Goddess which has travelled with me from that drugstore.  In researching the biography I am writing of Lawrence Durrell I have been to Greece where I have interviewed a poet called Nanos Valaoritis who knew Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller when they came to Athens back in 1939.  Nanos talked about the sacred feminine, and he gave me the manuscript of a book he has written, inspired by The White Goddess, which finds the Moon goddess at work in the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer.  Nanos has also given me a copy of a CD on which, accompanied by strange music, he has recorded some of his own poetry dedicated to the goddess.

I filled you once and the sea was born
Then I emptied you and the sky was born
The starry sky the blue-black sky
The sky of dreams instead of birds of cloud

I feel that I am connecting dots, but that really Sterling should be here playing his electric guitar and singing Femme Fatale.

John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Lou Reed and Maureen Tucker.

The Tragedy of the Templars: American Edition

Harper Collins publishes the American edition of The Tragedy of the Templars on 13 August 2013. The two thirteens are appropriate given that the Templars were arrested on the thirteenth of October 1307.

Click to enlarge.

The Mysteries Behind Dan Brown's Inferno

Cover for the Simon and Schuster US edition of Michael Haag's Inferno Decoded. Click on the image to enlarge.

Inferno Decoded, set for publication in Britain on 18 June, is an exploration of the infernal world of Dante and Dan Brown.  Following in the footsteps of Robert Langdon, Harvard professor of symbology, as he tries to decrypt clues from Dante's Divine Comedy, the book joins the chase from Florence to Venice and to Istanbul, and covers everything along the way, from the Black Death to transhumanism, from the Renaissance to esoteric knowledge.

Inferno Decoded examines codes, symbols, numerology, the Templars, paganism and the heretical and erotic undercurrents of the times, and it tells the strange stories of Beatrice, the love of Dante's life, of Botticelli's Map of Hell, and of the Bonfire of the Vanities and other burnings, including very nearly the burning of Dante himself.

And it weighs the argument advanced in Dan Brown's Inferno, that it would be no bad thing if the human race were culled.

Inferno Decoded will also be published in the United States, and the Italian, French, Brazilian-Portuguese, Estonian, Chinese and Japanese language rights have been sold.

Profile Books British edition cover. Click on the image to enlarge.

Night

'First of all, I never get down to writing except at dead of night when it is absolutely quiet and deep silence reigns over all ... in short, when there is such complete peace that if Pythagoras were alive he would be able to hear the music of the spheres quite clearly. At such a time gods and goddesses delight to hold converse with pure minds.'
                                - Erasmus, Dialogus Ciceronianus

Les Templiers: de la légende à l'histoire

Michael Haag's The Templars: History and Myth has been published in France and Belgium by Ixelles éditions with the cooperation of the Association Historique du Temple de Paris.


Ixelles éditions' catalogue entry for Les Templiers can be seen by clicking here. 

L'Association Historique du Temple de Paris has also announced the publication of Les Templiers by Michael Haag.  Click here for their website.

The announcement by the Temple de Paris.  Click on the image to enlarge.

Mary Magdalene at Easter

Noli Me Tangere by Fra Angelico

Today is Easter Sunday in the calendar of the Western Churches (in the Orthodox Churches Easter Sunday will fall on 5 May).  The story of Easter, of the events that happened on this day nearly two thousand years ago, belongs to two people above all others, Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene.

This year Easter has been marked by special attention to Mary Magdalene.  A relic of Mary Magdalene from Sainte-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in Provence has been touring the American Midwest.  And to some stir in Britain, even outrage from the Church of England and the Catholic Church, Melvyn Bragg, who wrote the filmscript of Jesus Christ Superstar, has written and presented a BBC television programme called The Mystery of Mary Magdalene, its purpose 'to unravel the many questions surrounding one of the Bible's most enigmatic and controversial figures'.

Melvyn Bragg's article in The Telegraph about his BBC 1 television programme can be read by clicking here.  Lord Bragg does touch on many of the 'questions' about Mary Magdalene but he does so from an almost exclusively feminist point of view.  Feminists - or perhaps one should just say women - in academic positions in British and American universities have for some time now been pushing Mary Magdalene as an overlooked, disregarded, suppressed, denied and slandered figure in Christianity.  Their efforts should be welcomed, but it is simplistic and essentially wrong to say the depreciation of Mary Magdalene has been caused by a conspiracy of men against women.  Rather Mary Magdalene has fallen foul of a profound argument over the apprehension of the divine, in which the established, ritualised and hierarchical Church requires that God be mediated through itself, whereas everything about Mary Magdalene suggests a more immediate and personal experience of the divine. 

Michael Haag's book The Quest for Mary Magdalene, which will be published in 2016, examines in breadth and depth the questions about this remarkable figure in Christian culture and belief.  For more information click here.

Defaming Lawrence Durrell

Under the headline 'Book of a Lifetime' the novelist Jim Crace has written an article in The Independent saying how much he enjoyed reading The Alexandria Quartet when he was a young man, how much he enjoyed reading it again later, and how much he looks forward to reading it yet again.  

But also Jim Crace confesses that he is 'embarrassed to enjoy Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet so much', for he associates the pleasure with a more 'callow' and 'less judgmental' version of himself.  The Quartet 'is still for me a brave and brazen work, more ready to take risks than take excessive care', says Jim Crace.  But that is not good enough, and the rest of Jim Crace's article is an exercise in how a grown up man in England these days learns to keep his tail between his legs.  The Quartet, he says, is 'an early passion of mine and one I revisit for the blowsy comfort it provides'.  Well, that is all right then, Jim.  The cultural police will let you off this time. 

For anyone curious to read Jim Crace's own account in The Independent of his struggle against exciting writing, click here.

An embarrassed Jim Crace

Not that I have written this post to draw your attention to the solitary practices of Jim Crace.  Instead my eye was caught by his remark that Lawrence Durrell's private life has been 'peeled off to reveal a predatory and sleazy man'.  If I were Jim Crace I would be embarrassed to have made that remark. 

I have answered it by adding a comment at the end of his article in The Independent, which you can see online and I repeat below.

'It is remarkable that Jim Crace can write that Lawrence Durrell's life has been 'peeled off to reveal a predatory and sleazy man'. Having written about Durrell myself, and being engaged in writing his biography, I can say that Durrell has been the victim of certain predatory and sleazy people out to make a buck. In due course their deceits will be exposed and they will be publicly shamed in my book. Meanwhile it would be good if Jim Crace exercised his critical faculties before re-blabbing whatever blab he has picked up from the literary sewer.'

Michael Haag's Book about the Templars and the Crusades Reviewed in the BBC History Magazine

'Helen Nicholson explores an unusual, but contentious, account of the effect that the crusades had on the Middle East.'  So runs the headline to Helen Nicholson's review of Michael Haag's The Tragedy of the Templars in the February 2013 issue of the BBC History Magazine. Dr Nicholson is reader in history at Cardiff University and author of A Brief History of the Knights Templar.

The narrative of the crusades as told here differs from the norm. Most books on the crusades concentrate on the western European Christians (the ‘Franks’) and say very little about the Muslims. Haag’s work describes in detail the divisions between Arabs and Turks, and Sunnis and Shi’ites, explaining the history of their conflicts. The fractures between the peoples of the Middle East are made clear, and readers can understand how the crusaders and other European settlers fitted into the politics and culture of the Middle East.

Haag traces the history of Islamic-Christian relations in the east before the crusades and explains the basis for the western Europeans’ expedition to Jerusalem at the end of the 11^th century. He argues that, contrary to popular belief, most of the people of the lands the crusaders conquered were Christian, not Muslim. He describes how the western Europeans and local Christians lived alongside each other in the Middle East and argues that the Europeans were much more tolerant than the Muslims in their dealings with the local peoples. 

Muslim pilgrims queuing to enter the tomb of Jesus at Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Islam regards Jesus as a mortal prophet and a precursor of Mohammed.

BBC Podcast: Michael Haag Talks about the Templars and the Crusades

BBC History Magazine has done a podcast of Michael Haag talking about his new book, The Tragedy of the Templars.

The podcast can be listened to by clicking here.

The talk with Michael Haag begins at 16 minutes and 24 seconds into the podcast and lasts for half an hour.

Or go to the list of podcasts on the BBC History website by clicking here, and then scroll down to 17 January 2013.

The podcast seems to work best with the Chrome browser.

A New Look at the Crusades

The Crusades have always excited political controversy, both at the time and since. They have sometimes been used as a stick to beat the Catholic Church, or to condemn modern western powers.

Instead, I have looked at the conditions in the East as they were before the Crusades, at the circumstances of the beleaguered population – a population that remained overwhelmingly Christian 400 years after the Arab conquest. This Christian East had recently suffered a new invasion, this time by the Turks who in 1071 overran not only Palestine and Syria, but also Asia Minor, a vast and prosperous part of the Byzantine Empire, and soon stood on the Bosphorus opposite Constantinople, whose emperor called to his fellow Christians in the West for help.

These dangers and oppressions in the East understandably aroused a reaction in the West. In 1095, Pope Urban II called for a Crusade, but neither Christianity nor the West was the cause of the Crusades. Rather, for centuries Islam had been on the attack. Already in the eighth century Muslim forces had occupied Spain; soon they invaded southern France, Sicily, and the toe and heel of Italy. In 846, a Muslim fleet even sailed up the River Tiber and sacked Rome. The Crusades were part of a centuries-long struggle between Islam and Christianity throughout the Mediterranean world.

So begins my recent newspaper article about my new book, The Tragedy of the Templars.  To read the complete feature, click here.

Inferno Decoded

Report in today's Bookseller: 

Profile has announced a new book from Michael Haag exploring the background of Dan Brown’s latest novel, Inferno (Transworld). Haag’s book, Inferno Decoded, is set for publication in June 2013, just four weeks after Inferno’s release.
 
The news comes only four days after Transworld announced that a new title from the bestselling author of The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol would be published in May. Haag has written guides to Brown’s books before, authoring the Rough Guide to the Da Vinci Code (Rough Guides) and two books for Profile on the Knights Templar, who feature in Brown’s work.

Click here for the full report in The Bookseller.

Writing about Lawrence Durrell

Peter Baldwin of the Delos Press, who was sitting in the audience at the Lawrence Durrell centenary conference in London in June 2012, has given me some photographs he took during the biographers' session.  Rather late in the day to be showing them now, but I show them anyway.

Joanna Hodgkin, Michael Haag and Ian MacNiven

The biographers' session heard talks from three people who have written about Durrell's life.  Ian MacNiven is the author of Lawrence Durrell: A Biography.  Joanna Hodgkin, who is the daughter of Nancy Durrell by her second marriage, has written Amateurs in Eden, an account of Nancy and Lawrence Durrell's time in Corfu.  Michael Haag has written Alexandria: City of Memory, which is a social and cultural history of the cosmopolitan city during the early twentieth century.  It also tells the story of three writers who lived there, Constantine Cavafy, E M Forster and Lawrence Durrell; Michael Haag is now working on a new biography of Durrell to be published by Yale University Press.

Michael Haag and Ian MacNiven

Lawrence Durrell in Russia

These beautifully designed Russian-language volumes of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, translated by Vadim Mikhailin, were published as a set by Symposium in Saint Petersburg in 2007.

Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea first made their appearance in Russia only a few years earlier, after Mikhailin did the translations - of Justine and Balthazar in 2001, and of Mountolive and Clea in 2003.

  

Remarkably, these were the first translations of the Alexandria Quartet into Russian.  Justine had been published in Britain in 1957, both Balthazar and Mountolive in 1958, and Clea in 1960. English-language editions and foreign translations quickly followed throughout the world.  But over forty years passed before they were published in Russia.

The explanation is that Lawrence Durrell was banned in the Soviet Union.  Diplomats and tourists sometimes possessed copies of his books which they left behind; these found their way into a particular bookshop in Moscow where with luck they could occasionally be obtained by discreet enquiry.

 

Vadim Mikhailin first came upon Durrell in this way, when the bookshop offered him a copy of Balthazar.  For Mikhailin, Durrell was a revolutionary writer, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union he began translating Durrell's work, first for private academic purposes, then for commercial publication.

Why was Durrell banned in the Soviet Union?  Because of his well-known dislike for communism, says Mikhailin, in particular his experience of Yugoslavia where Durrell was press officer at the British Embassy in Belgrade from 1949 to 1952.

'Communism is something so much more horrible than you can imagine', Durrell wrote to Henry Miller soon after arriving in Belgrade: 'systematic moral and spiritual corruption by every means at hand. ... And the smug cooperation of the intellectuals is also terrifying! They are paid to shut up - and they have.  The terrible deadness of everything is fantastic!  It really is a menace, an intellectual disease.'

The Alexandria Quartet would certainly prove an antidote to intellectual deadness and conformity, and not only of the communist kind.

Curse of the Templars

'The arrest of the Knights Templar on Friday October 13, 1307 is said to have called down a terrible curse on the kings of France.  This seems to affect authors as well as monarchs; the good books on the Templars are outnumbered by the bad.  Michael Haag has now twice defied the curse.'

So begins a review of The Tragedy of the Templars by Minoo Dinshaw in The Times Literary Supplement, 14 December 2012, which in passing also pays tribute to my earlier book, The Templars: History and Myth. 

Dinshaw, who is writing a biography of Sir Steven Runciman, author of the monumental three-volume History of the Crusades, goes on to describe The Tragedy of the Templars as 'enjoyable and informative ... a pleasure to read', and describes me as 'a romantic pluralist, with an instinctive taste for the esoteric, the independent and the defeated; and a corresponding distrust of victors and orthodoxies'.  Which I guess is no bad thing.

Lawrence Durrell: In an Irish Fairy's Armpit

'I am Irish on my mother’s side, and half on my father’s side’, Lawrence Durrell said in a 1970 television interview.  It was a story he repeated with various permutations and contradictions throughout his life. 

Not surprisingly, when Durrell died in 1990 his obituary in The New York Times described him as the son of an 'Irish-born father'.  The Daily Telegraph in London said the same.  The British Library, however, took a somewhat different view when it described Durrell’s ancestors as ‘English on his father’s side and Irish on his mother’s side’ on their recently released CD of Durrell's readings and interviews in their Spoken Word series. 

But the truth about Durrell is that he had good English roots on both sides of his family.  

Hacheston in Suffolk.  Its population in the mid-nineteenth century was barely four hundred.  The widowed Mahala Durrell lived on this street when she gave birth in 1851 to her illegitimate son Samuel Stearn Durrell, grandfather of Lawrence Durrell.

The paternal side of the family came from Suffolk, a deeply rural county northeast of London. Mahala Durrell, who lived in the village of Hacheston, was Lawrence Durrell's great grandmother. Her husband, a sailor called William Durrell, committed suicide some years before she gave birth to an illegitimate son.  Boldly fixing responsibility on the child’s father, a landowner called Samuel Stearn, she baptised her boy Samuel Stearn Durrell.

At the age of eighteen Samuel Durrell joined the army and was soon shipped to India, saw service in Afghanistan and China, and achieved the rank of major before retiring to England.  Major Durrell’s children were all born in India, among them Lawrence Samuel, who married the India-born Louisa Dixie; their oldest child, likewise born in India, was the future novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell.

Dixie is an English surname, primarily local to East Anglia, that is to the same part of England as the Durrells and Stearns in Suffolk. Lawrence Durrell’s own daughter Penelope spent years interviewing family members and searching official records seeking evidence that the Dixies had a connection with Ireland but she drew a blank.

There is one exception to Lawrence Durrell’s English ancestry: a young widow named Johanna Doherty, born O’Brien, who married Louisa’s grandfather John Dixie, a sergeant-major in the Sappers and Miners, at Delhi in 1845. Assuming that Johanna was herself wholly Irish, that would make Durrell at best one-eighth Irish. But Johanna’s ancestry is open to doubt.

The rounded gravestone of Lawrence Durrell's great grandmother Mahala Durrell in a Suffolk churchyard.

Lawrence Durrell is not known to have mentioned his slight Irish ancestry until he was twenty-four and living in Corfu where he began a correspondence with Henry Miller, an American who disliked the English.  Suddenly Durrell was 'pure Anglo-Irish-Indian ASH Blond', as he exotically described himself to the older and admired writer.

But Irishness also had another appeal to Durrell. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary Irishness can refer to ‘their reputation for illogicality’, and for Durrell, whose developing genius in part lay in his fantastical imagination, he felt the need to escape the bonds of logic, of cause and effect, and of space and time.  The whole of Durrell's work, from Prospero's Cell, his island book about Corfu, through The Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quintet, presents a universe of unconfined dimensions in which past and present are not distinct, in which human personalities merge, in which the writer, the artist, is the supreme and unbridled creator.  Or in the words of one of Durrell’s reproving English critics P N Furbank, ‘He just makes it up’.  To the orderly English mind, Durrell does not play by the rules.   

This substantial house several miles from Hacheston belonged to Mahala Durrell's lover, the father of her son.  The future poet and novelist was not a Durrell at all, instead he was the great grandson of the Suffolk landowner Samuel Stearn.

In later life Durrell rubbished his earlier claims to be literally Irish, laughing it off as a joke which people fell for easily.  And in Livia, the second volume of his Avignon Quintet, he has his character Sutcliffe, to whom he has given a biography very similar to his own youthful experience of England, and who is himself the literary creation of another character in the novel, explain how he invented his Irishness: ‘For my part I told everybody that I lived in Ireland in a fairy’s armpit’.

Michael Haag is writing a biography of Lawrence Durrell to be published by Yale University Press.  The colour photographs are his copyright.

Lawrence Durrell's Clea

Clea, the Alexandrian woman who inspired the character of the same name in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, was a painter called Clea Badaro.  

Clea spoke of the day that Durrell was first brought round to her studio, and though she hated it when people dropped in unexpectedly, she put aside her annoyance when he showed an interest in her work, her paintings of soldiers at the bars and cabarets around town, of harlequins, clowns and circus women on horseback, and she remembered also how he was fascinated by her name. 

'Clea, the gentle, loveable, unknowable Clea', is how Durrell introduces her in the Quartet, 'so disarmingly simple, graceful, self-contained ... poured, while still warm, into the body of a young grace: that is to say, into a body born without instincts or desires'. 

Since her childhood, when she first began to draw, Clea recorded her impressions on almost every piece of paper that came to hand, in school copybooks, on house accounts, in the margins of letters to her friends, stimulated not only by what she saw about her but also by her dreams.  

This is one of Clea's sketches, characters from a circus.  

Jesus said to them, 'My wife ...'

The following excerpt and photograph are from an article that appeared in The New York Times. This and much else will be covered in Michael Haag's forthcoming book, The Quest for Mary Magdalene.

'Jesus said to them, "My wife ..."'

September 18, 2012

A Faded Piece of Papyrus Refers to Jesus’ Wife

By Laurie Goodstein

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife ...’ ”

The faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black ink legible under a magnifying glass. Just below the line about Jesus having a wife, the papyrus includes a second provocative clause that purportedly says, “she will be able to be my disciple.”

The finding was made public in Rome on Tuesday at the International Congress of Coptic Studies by Karen L. King, a historian who has published several books about new Gospel discoveries and is the first woman to hold the nation’s oldest endowed chair, the Hollis professor of divinity.
 

The Tragedy of the Templars

The final cover for The Tragedy of the Templars

The Tragedy of the Templars

The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States

The Tragedy of the Templars is going to press next week and will be published on 1 November 2012.  The final cover artwork is shown above. 

The entire cover artwork, including front, back and flaps

Lawrence Durrell's Mother-in-Law

Lawrence Durrell's mother-in-law Claire Vincendon.

Lawrence Durrell's third wife was Claude Vincendon.  Claude was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1925; her mother Claire Vincendon is mentioned in the post of 7 June 2012, Nudism in Alexandria.  Claire enjoyed performing in theatrical entertainments and often designed the costumes and illustrated the programmes. These images are from Alex Cendrillon, a 1934 review which raised funds for Amélé Torah, a Jewish charity in the city.

Claire was involved in Alex Cendrillon, that is the story of Cinderella in Alexandria, presented in the city in April 1934.

Max Bally was the compère of Alex Cendrillon and Claire Vincendon was commère.  Here they are dressed for their roles in a Spanish number.

This backdrop shows the old Ottoman fort atop Kom el Dik, garrisoned by the British, and on the left Pastroudis, a café frequently mentioned in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.   

Women of Alexandria playing the roles of the city's goddesses.

The Quest for Mary Magdalene

The skull of Mary Magdalene in the crypt at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in Provence

The canonical gospels say little about Mary Magdalene; in fact until the crucifixion she is absent from all of them, except for a brief mention in Luke.  Yet Mary Magdalene is the only figure described in the Bible as a witness to all three defining events of the first Easter, the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus.  She suffers the death of Jesus at the foot of the cross, and when he rises from the tomb it is to Mary Magdalene that he first appears.  In one of the most moving moments in the New Testament he returns to her, but he is transfigured: 'Touch me not', he says, for he is no longer of this world; and it is Mary Magdalene who understands this, passionately and spiritually, and who carries this message to the disciples.  She is the mediator of the divine mystery, and she has remained a potent and mysterious figure ever since. 

Mary Magdalene is a larger figure than any text; she has taken on a life of her own.  In medieval times she was called 'the light-bearer', recalling her Gnostic epithet, 'inheritor of light' in her search for the truth.  In the manner of a quest, this book follows Mary Magdalene through the centuries, explores how she has been reinterpreted for every age, and examines what she herself reveals about man and the divine.

The Quest for Mary Magdalene by Michael Haag will be published by Profile Books in Britain and HarperCollins in the United States in 2016.

Lawrence Durrell's Panic Spring: to Alexandria from Corfu

Panic Spring published in the United States by Covici-Friede, first edition 1937

'Charles Norden', the author of Panic Spring, is really Lawrence Durrell.  His first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, published by Cassell in London, had not sold well; when his new publishers, Faber and Faber, suggested that his second novel, Panic Spring, appear under a pseudonym, Durrell based the name on Van Norden, a Jew in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.  The Faber edition appeared in 1937 and in the United States the novel was published by Covici-Friede in the same year.  Neither sold well and copies are rare; a Faber copy in good condition will set you back many thousands of pounds and a good Covici-Friede edition will cost in the hundreds to a thousand or so; luckily my beaten-up copy cost a few quid.

Alexandrian themes.

Nowadays nobody needs to hunt far and wide nor pay an arm and a leg for a reading copy; both Panic Spring and the earlier Pied Piper of Lovers have recently been published by ELS Editions in Canada.

They make interesting reading.  As the blurb I wrote for the cover of Pied Piper of Lovers says, the book 'introduces in nascent form themes, techniques and characters that Durrell will develop in his later novels. Not least intriguing are his protagonists Walsh and Ruth who will appear again in the streets of Alexandria, Athens and Avignon; their mysterious relationship, which lies at the heart of Durrell's creative urgency, is first explored here in Pied Piper of Lovers'.  And, I should say, it is further explored in Panic Spring, set on a Greek island and written while Durrell was living in Corfu.

Even reading the front flap blurb of the first US edition of Panic Spring is to sense the familiar, what will become fully developed in The Alexandria Quartet - for the island read the city, for Rumanades read Nessim, for his beautiful young mistress read Justine, etc.     

But apart from all that there is the inscription in my copy which has its own story to tell - just as the inscription in my first edition of A Passage to India that I mentioned in an earlier post also had its tale.

My copy of Panic Spring is signed by its owner Harriet Bienstock and dated 6 June 1938.  Later it is stamped with Harriet's ex libris device; she has married Eric Fried and among the pleasures of the loving young couple is to lie before a fire with nothing much on reading books such as Panic Spring. 

Ex Libris: Nothing much on.

I was curious to know who this Harriet was, and what a nice girl like Harriet was doing reading this book by the unknown Lawrence Durrell.  I discovered one other book recorded as having been owned and stamped by Harriet and Eric; it is in the library at Wake Forest University and is called Unholy Memories of the Holy Land by the English lawyer Horace Samuel and published in London in 1930 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf of the Hogarth Press.  The book is a condemnation of British attitudes and policy towards the Jews during the Palestine mandate. 

A little bit of research revealed that seven months before Harriet read Panic Spring her father Samuel Bienstock died.  Born in Russia, he came to America and founded a drug company and a chain of drug stores; he also served as treasurer of the Jewish Telegraph Agency in the 1920s.  Samuel had two sons and three daughters; one of his daughters, Ida, married Jacob Landau, founder of the Jewish Telegraph Agency for which Ida became a correspondent during the Second World War; while one of his sons was Victor Bienstock, a journalist who worked for the Herald Tribune and then, when Hitler came to power in 1933, joined the Jewish Telegraph Agency for which he too covered the war and later supervised such writers as Theodore H White and the Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel.  The Jewish Telegraph Agency became intimately linked with the Jewish Agency, which acted as a kind of autonomous Jewish government for Palestine during the Mandate period, and continues to this day as an international news agency serving Jewish community newspapers and media.

A curiosity - an association of no significance, if there is such a thing - is that the Landaus were close to Albert Einstein, author of the theory of relativity.  In 1933 Einstein became godfather to Ida and Jacob Landau's son, and in the late 1940s, as the Landaus were working for the creation of the State of Israel, they drew on the public support of their friend.

Correspondence between Albert Einstein and Jacob Laundau, Harriet Bienstock's brother in law.

So Durrell wrote Panic Spring while living in Corfu before the war.  Perhaps the exotic location in the Eastern Mediterranean attracted Harriet to his book, though her family also had an interest elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean; they were Zionists who were actively involved in promoting Palestine as a Jewish state.  The war drove Durrell from Corfu; fleeing from the advancing Germans as they invaded Greece he escaped to Egypt where he spent most of the rest of the war working for the British Information Office in Alexandria.  There he met Eve Cohen who became his second wife; he also met the Zionist family of the woman who would become his third wife, Claude Vincendon; and when it came to writing what he described as the Einsteinian four-dimensional Alexandria Quartet Durrell would place at its heart a Palestine conspiracy, an attempt to create the State of Israel in the teeth of British policy.  Harriet probably read the Quartet too; she and Durrell had arrived at the same story, but the name Lawrence Durrell would have thrown her off making any connection with Charles Norden, the author of Panic Spring.