Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell, 1912–1947, Michael Haag, Profile Books, £25

Lawrence Durrell was nominated for the Nobel Prize 11 times, but never won. He came closest in 1962, the year it was awarded to John Steinbeck. ‘There aren’t any obvious candidates,’ committee member Henry Olsson wrote about the shortlist, which also featured Robert Graves and Karen Blixen. But Blixen died before the decision was made, and neither Graves’ poems nor novels were considered quite strong enough. The previous year Durrell had been rejected ‘because of [his] monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications’. This year he was passed over again, the judges deciding that Steinbeck was the least unpopular choice. However, when asked whether he deserved the award, the American author replied, ‘Frankly, no.’

Seen from a distance of six decades, the Nobel committee made the right call. Steinbeck is now a permanent presence on school curricula in Britain and America, while Lawrence is not even the most popular Durrell. These days his brother Gerald is better known, thanks to his much-loved memoir, My Family and Other Animals, which has inspired several Sunday evening TV adaptations. Occasionally a precocious teenager will chance upon Lawrence’s Alexandria Quartet and imagine that the pages of passionate tangles in exotic settings offer a glimpse of the adulthood awaiting them. ‘Alexandria was the great wine press of love,’ the first novel Justine claims in its opening paragraphs, ‘those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets – I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex.’ However, revisiting the books in adulthood, most readers conclude that the poetic impressions and philosophical fragments are at best indulgent and at worse superficial, like a highbrow equivalent of a holiday romance.

Nowadays, it’s hard to believe that Durrell was once ranked among the best prose stylists of the postwar period. Such is the fickle nature of literary legacies that the main charge made against his writing – its luscious language and bewildering structure – was originally considered its unique achievement. As the Times Literary Supplement argued in a review of the Quartet: ‘If ever a work bore a recognisable signature on every sentence, this is it.’ Admittedly, the tweedier English critics treated Durrell with suspicion – he had the dubious honour of being popular on the continent – yet his work sold well and was shortlisted for several prizes. And he was the favourite author of every literary young man hoping to display his sensitive but sophisticated taste. For instance, in Julian Barnes’s first novel, Metroland, when the pretentious narrator is spending a year in Paris, he strikes up a conversation with a beautiful French woman over their shared love of – what else? – the Alexandria Quartet.

But there’s more to Durrell than the sensuous, sweaty prose of the novels. As a new biography of the author makes clear, he witnessed first-hand a fascinating period of Eastern Mediterranean history, spanning the collapse of the colonial powers and the arrival of the modern tourist industry. Michael Haag, his biographer, spent his career writing about the cultural flourishing that took place in the region’s most cosmopolitan cities, which blended Arabic, Jewish, Italian, Greek and Turkish influences. As Haag makes clear, these were the settings of Durrell’s formative experiences as a writer: bohemian life in 1930s Corfu, working for the British embassy in Cairo and Alexandria during the Second World War, and then postwar positions in Rhodes and Cyprus.

The biography was published posthumously and it breaks off once the fighting ends. Nonetheless, Durrell’s latter years were described in a series of travel books, and whereas his fiction often lacks discipline, his non-fiction is tempered by the demands of conventional narrative and historical research. The poetic language is used sparingly, which gives it greater force, such as this memorable passage from Prospero’s Cell evoking sun-drenched days in Corfu before the German occupation: ‘The whole Mediterranean, the sculpture, the palm, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers – all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.’

The same giddy evocations of place can be found in Reflections of a Marine Venus and The Greek Islands. But Durrell’s best travel book is Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, his superb account of living on Cyprus during the ‘Enosis’ campaign, where local guerrilla forces claimed independence from Britain to unite with Greece. Here, Durrell captures exactly the mood in the dying decades of empire: the exhaustion, the regret, the relief – and the grim comedy of the whole situation. ‘Life in an island, however rich, is circumscribed, and one does well to portion out one’s experiences, for sooner or later one arrives at a point where all is known and staled by repetition. Taken leisurely, with all one’s time at one’s disposal Cyprus could, I calculate, afford one a minimum of two years reckoned in terms of novelty; hoarded as I intended to hoard it, it might last anything up to a decade […] Alas! I was not to have time.’

Durrell was not a travel writer in the orthodox sense. Rather than setting out from the comforts of Britain – a place he christened ‘Pudding Island’, convinced its food and weather smothered any creative work – he was a perpetual exile, seeking to belong in each place that he settled. Greece was not yet filled with the second homes of affluent Europeans and, despite its wealth of classical sites, the country was little visited. Between the wars it was ‘pretty backwards and pretty wild,’ Durrell claimed. ‘I think there were only about 20 tourists a year.’ Until the country entered the EU, British travellers were put off by the political instability, and it was writers like Durrell and his friend Patrick Leigh Fermor who taught readers to appreciate the beauty of its landscapes and the richness of its more recent history. In fact, Durrell helped to foster a fascination that eventually made his prose seem so dated.

In an age without colour television, let alone the kind of glossy material that fills social-media feeds, expat authors like Durrell and Leigh Fermor captured vivid foreign settings for people trapped in drab, postwar Britain. However, the ease of modern travel means extravagant accounts of Levantine life can now be measured against the real thing. At the same time, budget flights and mass tourism have hollowed out much of the enchantment to be found in traditional Greek communities, and Durrell’s lavish prose now preserves an Eastern Mediterranean that has long disappeared – if it ever existed.

In 1977 the author returned to Alexandria with the BBC, seeking some trace of the cosmopolitan city he knew before Nassar’s Egyptian revolution. A young Michael Haag witnessed the scene, writing in another book, Alexandria, City of Memory: ‘The city seemed to him listless and spiritless, its dreary harbour a mere cemetery, its famous cafés no longer twinkling with music and lights.’ Of course, even when Durrell lived in Alexandria, the city was a cemetery for many millennia of history, but it was his genius to breathe life into those buried bodies and make them dance upon the page.