I tell everyone Margaret’s the puritan, I’m the pagan. Some pagan! Such wild returns I make to the womb of civilisation. Three weeks a year in the Peloponnese, every bed booked in advance, every meal paid for by vouchers, cautious jaunts in hired Fiats . . . Such a fantastic surrender to the primitive . . . I sit looking at pages of centaurs trampling the soil of Argos — and outside my window he [his patient Strang] is trying to become one, in a Hampshire field! . . . Then in the morning, I put away my books on the culture shelf, close up the kodachrome snaps of Mount Olympus, touch my reproduction statue of Dionysus for luck — and go off to hospital to treat him for insanity. Do you see?
Such attitudes as those embodied in these works may well have been therapeutic for north Europeans deficient in vitamin D and spontaneity. And they recovered a real aspect of ancient Greece — the Dionysian — which neoclassicism, Arnold’s Hellenism, and the bleached architecture and sculpture that we have inherited and find hard to unimagine — have all denied.
But this attitude significantly mistakes modern Greek culture, shaped as it has been by centuries of Orthodox and orthodox Christianity. The Durrells’ memoirs and their recent adaptations downplay the disapproval aroused by their Bohemianism among not only the Anglo-Corfiot high society to which Theodore Stephanides belonged, but the Corfiot peasantry, who deeply objected to Lawrence, Nancy and friends bathing naked; according to Haag, “They were known to have been stoned by the village priest and boys.” Neither Lawrence nor Gerald mention the fact that their brother Leslie made one of their maids, Maria Condos, pregnant (as my mother-in-law recently told me). When the maid’s brothers threatened to kill her for disgracing them, she fled to England to work for the Durrells there. Around the same time, according to Kazantzakis’s imagination, a Cretan widow was stoned and beheaded alive for a one-night stand with an Englishman. Theodore’s writings such as Island Trails (1973) and the posthumous Autumn Gleanings (2011), contain several anecdotes of this kind of patriarchy.
The clash between the British vision of Greece and the reality came to a head during the dictatorship, when British tourists continued to flood in, only to find mini-skirts, beards and holding hands illegal in the “Greece of the Christian Greeks”. On finding tourist income to have collapsed, the Colonels quickly unbanned these things for foreigners. Nonetheless, my husband’s recollection of arriving as a small boy in the London of 1968 was that it was like moving from a black and white film into technicolour — the reverse of the trope of grey England and colourful Greece. History since then has produced further instances of this clash — as on Mykonos, where the film of Shirley Valentine was shot, which later became the Cycladic capital of British hedonism. Lawrence, Gerald and Theodore were all appalled by the Anglicised Corfu of their several post-war visits, which they had themselves helped to create.
