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Durrell in Sommières, in pagan Provence, shortly before he died. I needed to talk to him about Henry Miller, needed to hear about the flavor of their friendship at firsthand. Durrell had written enough about Miller for me to have it from texts, but now that Larry is gone (he died November 1990, in Sommières, at the age of seventy-eight) I’m glad I went. Though Durrell had expressed himself thoroughly on the subject of our mutual friend Henry, it was still a revelation to talk to him if only to know the impish humor behind the mellifluent prose.
    The English publisher of The Durrell-Miller Letters had at first wanted to bowdlerize the photo on the jacket (a nude picture of Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell on a Greek beach, circa 1940) by “cutting off Henry’s cock,” as Larry said.
    “To think that at the end of my life I’d have to defend the zizi of a genius!”
    He flung the witticism with perfect good humor and went on to explain that for him Miller had always been the maître and himself merely the acolyte.
    “In order to find your own voice as a writer,” Durrell said matter-of-factly, “you have to have a nervous breakdown. Henry Miller and T.S. Eliot gave me myself…. And yet, I always considered myself a talented also-ran.” He knew, he told me, that a real book is “a tentative chance one takes on the infinite.” Miller wrote real books; he, Durrell, merely wrote literary ones. He had not, he felt, taken that chance on the infinite.
    It was Durrell’s modesty that was so beguiling. He was not going to make Miller’s mistake “of accepting the Nobel Prize before it was offered.” He was touched when I brought him some of his poetry books to autograph, but when I also turned up a first edition of his novel Tunc , he said: “Oh, forgive me.”
    Self-importance is endemic in literary circles. Larry had a lovely humility. We are all just stumbling human beings, his demeanor seemed to say, doing the best we can.
    Durrell thought of himself—and I daresay the “literary world” (whatever that is) thought of him—as “a minor poet,” who happened to write novels. The Alexandria Quartet (which my husband describes as “wading through halvah”) seems to me to deserve better than that. I have a rather higher opinion of Durrell’s poetry and of his wonderful last book about Provence ( Caesar’s Vast Ghost, 1990). But I liked him above all for understanding Henry’s courage, for understanding that the difference between a small writer and a great writer is that rare commodity, the courage to create.
    After he had shared his reminiscences about Henry on that gray January day in Provence, Durrell spoke of T.S. Eliot. What Larry said about Eliot seemed the absolute definition of the daring that makes a major writer: “He took full responsibility for being an artist in a maelstrom,” Larry said. “In a world of Masefields, Eliot seemed even more shocking then than now.” He was attacked for “The Wasteland,” but it rolled off his back like water off a duck’s. He knew, Durrell said, that one can only incarnate the unrealized pattern of the race by a “surgical operation on the self.”
    Who knows if Durrell was a maître or an “also-ran”? Only time knows. But he and his generation of writers had a kind of courage that seems lacking now. Whether it is the fault of conglomerate publishing controlled by accountants or a failure of inner-directedness on the part of writers, my generation seems focused upon crowd-pleasing and success to the detriment of being free to tell the truth. As much as their publishers and agents, my contemporaries seem to worry about grosses and sales figures. And often the deal is far more memorable than the book. A sort of literary Gresham’s law has set in with the mass-marketing of hardbacks. The bestselling books of our time are rehashes of Gone with the Wind , gossipmongerings about “first” ladies, princesses, and movie stars, and ghostwritten bubbe-mayses