GORDON BOWKER, author of an acclaimed biography of Malcolm Lowry, has been faced with the same problem as Peter Ackroyd in his life of T.S. Eliot (whom Durrell used to call "Tse-li-ot"): refused permission by the Durrell estate to quote from Durrell's works, he has been obliged to paraphrase almost every direct statement by Durrell about his life (especially the letters to Henry Miller) and every quotation from his books. Where Ackroyd nevertheless succeeded in creating a scintillating portrait which made the Eliot estate look very foolish, Bowker has unfortunately failed to rise to the occasion. His use of his subject's prose is wooden; here's an example which will have to stand for many: where Durrell opens that most provocative travel book, Prospern's Cell, "Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins", Bowker's version is "the point, he wrote, at which the sea and sky turn blue". Not quite the same magic.
Whereas Eliot did not want a biography, Durrell did, and before he died in 1990 had appointed an official biographer, Ian MacNiven, whose work will appear later this year - hence the reluctance of his executors to give much leeway to Bowker. And on balance I think they were right to stand in his way.
This is not a portrait of a writer at work, nor is it a perceptive account of his life. It is repetitive, and continually drags before us the same scenario of a magical childhood in India (beginning with the trauma of birth in 1912), a distressing exile to England, which he hated, and the consequent vagabondage of this most elusive of writers; this, for Bowker, is enough to account for Durrell's insecure womanising and gratuitous acts of violence. "I'm not real," Durrell once declared, and Bowker would have done well to take greater care in accepting Durrell's own word for events and inclinations without checking them against hard fact: thus he falls for Durrell's claim that he could see Everest from his college dormitory when MacNiven has already established that Durrell slept on the south side of the building - a small point but, again, a damning one.
In fact, Bowker tells us little that we did not already know about the author of The Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quintet, the creator of the "Antrobus" sketches of diplomatic misdemeanours and the portraitist of "islomania", in Corfu, Rhodes or Cyprus. Anyone is entitled to attempt a biography of such a fascinating character, especially if he wants to explain the bouts of violence and the stress that he put on his younger daughter, Sappho, who eventually committed suicide.
Bowker has simply not gone far enough in pursuing Durrell's inner thoughts he refers several times to the concept of a "Heraldic Universe" which Durrell hoped to popularise from the 12305 onwards, but only fitfully tries to explain what it means. He states that another of Durrell's schemata, a "Cosmography of the Womb", "never got beyond a few tentative notes", whereas it permeated his work all his life. He suggests that he has thoroughly explored the Durrell archives in Illinois and elsewhere but there are several places where it becomes clear that his researches were less than complete. There are points, for example, where he resorts to paraphrasing my own account of Durrell's mind and reading where his own judgments would have been more welcome.
The author may not be responsible for the lamentable proof reading which gives us "Epidorus" for Epidaurus, or Time and the [sic] Western Man, but he is surely to be criticised for the sloppiness of some of his language (a tree to "eat out under, a whole string of poets"). "Vernissage" is an unfortunate choice of word for a private view of a water colour show, but it epitomises Bowker's lack of sympathy with his subject, his consequent failure to understand him, and his inability to bring him to life.
