First marriage and Durrell's move to Corfu On 22 January 1935, Durrell married art student Nancy Isobel Myers (1912–1983), with whom he briefly ran a photographic studio in London. It was the first of his four marriages. Durrell was always unhappy in England, and in March of that year he persuaded his new wife, and his mother and younger siblings, to move to the Greek island of Corfu. There they could live more economically and escape both the English weather, and what Durrell considered the stultifying English culture, which he described as "the English death". That same year Durrell's first novel,
Pied Piper of Lovers, was published by
Cassell. Around this time he chanced upon a copy of
Henry Miller's 1934 novel
Tropic of Cancer. while his 1938 novel
The Black Book abounded with "
four-letter words... grotesques,... [and] its mood equally as apocalyptic" as
Tropic.
Pre WW2: In Paris with Miller and Nin In August 1937, Lawrence and Nancy travelled to the Villa Seurat in
Paris, France, to meet
Henry Miller and
Anaïs Nin. Together with
Alfred Perles, Nin, Miller, and Durrell "began a collaboration aimed at founding their own literary movement. Their projects included
The Shame of the Morning and the
Booster, a country club house organ that the Villa Seurat group appropriated "for their own artistic ... ends." They also started the Villa Seurat Series in order to publish Durrell's
Black Book, Miller's
Max and the White Phagocytes, and Nin's
Winter of Artifice. Jack Kahane of the
Obelisk Press served as publisher. Durrell said that he had three literary uncles:
T. S. Eliot, the Greek poet
George Seferis, and Miller. He first read Miller after finding a copy of
Tropic of Cancer that had been left behind in a public lavatory. He said the book shook him "from stem to stern". Durrell's first novel of note,
The Black Book: An Agon, was strongly influenced by Miller; it was published in Paris in 1938. The mildly pornographic work was not published in Great Britain until 1973. In the story, the main character Lawrence Lucifer struggles to escape the spiritual sterility of dying England and finds Greece to be a warm and fertile environment.
World War Two Breakdown of marriage At the outbreak of World War Two in 1939, Durrell's mother and siblings returned to England, while Nancy and he remained on Corfu. In 1940, they had a daughter, Penelope Berengaria. After the
fall of Greece, Lawrence and Nancy escaped from
Kalamata, where they had been teaching, via
Crete to
Alexandria,
Egypt. The marriage was already under strain and they separated in 1942. Nancy took the baby Penelope with her to
Jerusalem. During his years on Corfu, Durrell had made notes for a book about the island. He did not write it fully until he was in Egypt towards the end of the war. In the book ''
Prospero's Cell'', Durrell described Corfu as "this brilliant little speck of an island in the
Ionian". with waters "like the heartbeat of the world itself".
Press attaché in Egypt and Rhodes; second marriage During World War Two, Durrell served as a press attaché to the British embassies, first in
Cairo and then Alexandria. While in Alexandria he met Eve (Yvette) Cohen (1918–2004), a Jewish Alexandrian. She inspired his character
Justine in
The Alexandria Quartet. In 1947, after his divorce from Nancy was completed, Durrell married Eve Cohen, with whom he had been living since 1942. The couple's daughter, Sappho Jane, was born in
Oxfordshire in 1951, and named after the ancient Greek poet
Sappho. He returned to London with Eve in the summer of 1948, around the time that Marshal
Tito of Yugoslavia broke ties with
Stalin's
Cominform. Durrell was posted by the British Council to
Belgrade,
Yugoslavia, and served there until 1952. This sojourn gave him material for his novel
White Eagles over Serbia (1957). In 1952, Eve had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalised in England. Durrell moved to
Cyprus with their daughter Sappho Jane, buying a house and taking a position teaching English literature at the
Pancyprian Gymnasium to support his writing. He next worked in
public relations for the British government during the local agitation for
union with Greece. He wrote about his time in Cyprus in
Bitter Lemons, which won the Duff Cooper Prize in 1957. In 1954, he was selected as a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature. Durrell left Cyprus in August 1956. Political agitation on the island and his British government position resulted in his becoming a target for assassination attempts. In 1962, however, he did receive serious consideration, along with
Robert Graves,
Jean Anouilh, and
Karen Blixen, but ultimately lost to
John Steinbeck. The academy decided that "Durrell was not to be given preference this year"—probably because "they did not think that
The Alexandria Quartet was enough, so they decided to keep him under observation for the future." However, he was never nominated again. The production company had also proposed a
film of Justine which would eventually appear in 1969. Durrell settled in
Sommières, a small village in
Languedoc, France, where he purchased a large house on the edge of the village. The house was situated in extensive grounds surrounded by a wall. Here he wrote
The Revolt of Aphrodite, comprising
Tunc (1968) and
Nunquam (1970). He also completed
The Avignon Quintet, published from 1974 to 1985, which used many of the same motifs and styles found in his metafictional
Alexandria Quartet. Although the related works are frequently described as a quintet, Durrell referred to it as a "
quincunx". The opening novel,
Monsieur, or the Prince of Darkness, received the 1974
James Tait Black Memorial Prize. That year, Durrell was living in the United States and serving as the Andrew Mellon Visiting professor of humanities at the
California Institute of Technology. The middle novel of the quincunx,
Constance, or Solitary Practices (1981), which portrays France in the 1940s under the
German occupation, was nominated for the
Booker Prize in 1982. Other works from this period are
Sicilian Carousel, a non-fiction celebration of that island,
The Greek Islands, and ''Caesar's Vast Ghost'', which is set in and chiefly about the region of
Provence, France. ==Later years, literary influences, attitudes and reputation==