1772120510 (N) by Lawrence Durrell

Author:Lawrence Durrell [Durrell, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781772120592
Publisher: The University of Alberta Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Bernard Spencer

1964

BERNARD SPENCER’S[1] SUDDEN DEATH recently snapped a link which was first forged in 1938 when he arrived in Greece to work for the British Council in Salonika. We met first in Athens; and later, when the Germans attacked Greece, we found ourselves fellow-refugees in Egypt together with Robin Fedden and George Seferis and many other poets and writers, some in uniform and others in civilian service like ourselves.[2] In Egypt we saw a great deal of each other, collaborated on a poetry magazine called Personal Landscape, and for some time shared a flat on the first floor opposite the Mohammed Ali Club. It was a strange period, full of a kind of tragic euphoria. Cairo at this time was buzzing with poets.

Our headquarters then was the Anglo-Egyptian Union, where in our time off we played billiards endlessly and drank beer, criticising each other’s work with merciless candour, and arguing hotly about the make-up of each number of our little paper. There was so much material to choose from, and so many people from whom to solicit verse; the trouble was that we were short of money and paper and were forced to limit ourselves strictly to what we thought was the very best work. As it was we found excellent material to hand in poetry by Terence Tiller, George Seferis, G.S. Fraser, Gwyn Williams, and many others; and translations of major European-work hitherto not available in English—Rilke by Ruth Speirs and Cavafy by Amy Nimr. Nor must I forget to include the satire and the essays of Robert Liddell and Diana Gould.[3]

In all this Bernard played an attentive if somewhat lackadaisical part; he was a man impossible to harry or fluster. Nor was this mere laziness; it was a kind of inherent belief that if you hurried things too much you couldn’t observe them with the necessary attention and extract from them their vital juices. He was always reproving me for my lack of what he called “a respect for the Object” and I accepted his mild reproofs with attention. I had discovered something in his poetry and his conversation which interested me and fired me—because it was a quality I felt I lacked. He had a sort of piercing yet undogmatic irony of approach to people and things; as if he had taken up some sort of quiet vantage-point inside himself from which with unerring fidelity he pronounced upon the world—not in the form of grandiose generalisations, aphorisms or epigrams, but in small strict pronouncements which hit home.[4] His best poetry is like that—a succession of plain, almost nude, statements which somehow give one the feeling of incontrovertibility. The feeling, the tenderness is all the purer for not being orchestrated too richly; in the fine grain of his poetry there is much that reminds me of Edward Thomas,[5] and his best poems will certainly live as long as the best of Thomas.

I told him this once; he neither agreed nor disagreed. He put on his most quizzical expression and said, “Have a beer.

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