But the philhellenes also put their own, distinctively northern European, imprint on the British understanding of Greece. Since their time, Greece has connoted qualities quite other than those which Englightenment neoclassicism had associated with ancient Greece. The Romantics, in short, made Greece Romantic — and such it has remained. Thus it took its place alongside Italy as one of those places in southern Europe which liberated pale northerners into the experience of suntan, sex, and Life itself.
Gerald Durrell’s 1956, ’69 and ’78 memoirs of Corfu in the 1930s are clearly the recollections of a pre-pubescent, and sexual matters are downplayed even to the dramatic extent of excising all mention of Lawrence’s wife Nancy, Theodore’s wife Mary, and Theodore’s daughter Alexia, whom Theodore hoped that Gerald would marry. Nonetheless, they describe the ascent of an English person into a heightened sensuous existence, deeply attuned to the glorious sun, fauna, flora and food. The British lack of such things is summed up in the famous opening of My Family and Other Animals, in which Larry suddenly expostulates to his family — variously indisposed as the result of foul August weather — that life in England is impossible, and they must all move to Corfu forthwith. “Why do we stand this bloody climate? What we all need is sunshine — a country where we can grow . . . So we sold the house and fled from the gloom of the English summer, like a flock of migrating swallows.”
As Michael Haag’s illuminating new biography of the Durrells makes clear, this was not at all how the decision was made. But his book also stresses how unhappy the Durrell boys were in their various stints at English boarding schools, and what a liberation back into the unregimented days of their Indian childhood the move to Corfu was. The very beauty of Gerald’s prose recreates the paradise in the reader’s mind:
Gerald Durrell’s 1956, ’69 and ’78 memoirs of Corfu in the 1930s are clearly the recollections of a pre-pubescent, and sexual matters are downplayed even to the dramatic extent of excising all mention of Lawrence’s wife Nancy, Theodore’s wife Mary, and Theodore’s daughter Alexia, whom Theodore hoped that Gerald would marry. Nonetheless, they describe the ascent of an English person into a heightened sensuous existence, deeply attuned to the glorious sun, fauna, flora and food. The British lack of such things is summed up in the famous opening of My Family and Other Animals, in which Larry suddenly expostulates to his family — variously indisposed as the result of foul August weather — that life in England is impossible, and they must all move to Corfu forthwith. “Why do we stand this bloody climate? What we all need is sunshine — a country where we can grow . . . So we sold the house and fled from the gloom of the English summer, like a flock of migrating swallows.”
As Michael Haag’s illuminating new biography of the Durrells makes clear, this was not at all how the decision was made. But his book also stresses how unhappy the Durrell boys were in their various stints at English boarding schools, and what a liberation back into the unregimented days of their Indian childhood the move to Corfu was. The very beauty of Gerald’s prose recreates the paradise in the reader’s mind:
In the low growth the pansies pushed their velvety, innocent faces through the leaves, and the violets drooped sorrowfully under their heart-shaped leaves. The bougainvillaea that sprawled luxuriously over the tiny front balcony was hung, as though for a carnival, with its lantern-shaped magenta flowers. In the darkness of the fuchsia-hedge a thousand ballerina-like blooms quivered expectantly.
Meanwhile Lawrence’s 1945 Corfu memoir, Prospero’s Cell, reveals a world of naked bathing which is the response of a mature sexual being — and one who had passed through London’s Bohemia at that — to Corfu’s nature.
But they were not the only contributors to a post-war intensificiation of the British association of Greece with hedonism, liberation, and general (to use D.H. Lawrence’s word) unEnglishing. Willy Russell’s 1986 monologue play, and 1989 film, Shirley Valentine, liberated a middle-aged English housewife into renewed sexuality and self-confidence (somewhat as the 2016 and 2017 ITV television series The Durrells have unhistorically liberated the widow Louisa Durrell). When Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1946 novel Zorba the Greek, translated into English in 1953, became a smash-hit film in 1964, the mainland Greek protagonist was significantly turned into an Anglo-Greek. Basil’s intellectual detachment is broken down by his connection to the vital Zorba, who teaches him how to love santuri, sirtaki, and taking days as they come. Four years earlier, Never on Sunday, starring Melina Mercouri, used a similar plot — except that the pale northerner was an American called Homer, who gave up on trying to restore the Piraeus prostitute Ilya to ancient Greek glory after recognising the lack of vitality in himself. He ends the film by drowning his notebooks, shedding his Classicist scholarship and scholarly attitudes together.
But they were not the only contributors to a post-war intensificiation of the British association of Greece with hedonism, liberation, and general (to use D.H. Lawrence’s word) unEnglishing. Willy Russell’s 1986 monologue play, and 1989 film, Shirley Valentine, liberated a middle-aged English housewife into renewed sexuality and self-confidence (somewhat as the 2016 and 2017 ITV television series The Durrells have unhistorically liberated the widow Louisa Durrell). When Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1946 novel Zorba the Greek, translated into English in 1953, became a smash-hit film in 1964, the mainland Greek protagonist was significantly turned into an Anglo-Greek. Basil’s intellectual detachment is broken down by his connection to the vital Zorba, who teaches him how to love santuri, sirtaki, and taking days as they come. Four years earlier, Never on Sunday, starring Melina Mercouri, used a similar plot — except that the pale northerner was an American called Homer, who gave up on trying to restore the Piraeus prostitute Ilya to ancient Greek glory after recognising the lack of vitality in himself. He ends the film by drowning his notebooks, shedding his Classicist scholarship and scholarly attitudes together.
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