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particularly true for works that appeared in the press. In these instances where variants exist, I have selected those paragraph breaks that seemed most congenial to reading in a book, as opposed to a news column. With regard to other variants, I have generally preferred the first publication, especially when the latter was prepared without significant, documented editorial oversight from Durrell. For Durrell’s UNESCO lectures on Shakespeare, which have appeared in print only in a French translation, I have attempted to remain faithful to the original English typescripts, even though they are not as editorially polished as the subsequent French publication. The problems of translating Durrell’s prose back into English created too many variants that were surely editorial in nature. To compensate, I have silently corrected the missing punctuation and frequent spelling errors of the draft manuscripts. In these works, I have added or altered punctuation to add clarity where a spoken reading would certainly have avoided misinterpretations through emphasis and pauses.
    For the final selection of materials, I have limited myself to works not otherwise accessible and particularly those that appeared in exceedingly rare publications or that exist only in typescript. This has meant excluding materials that would make natural pairings with those included here, such as Durrell’s successful surrealist prose pair “Asylum in the Snow” and “Zero,” as well as his useful comments on Henry Miller in the Introduction to The Best of Henry Miller .

Personal Positions

A Letter from the Land of the Gods
    1939
    Dear Potocki: [1]
    IT WON’T MISREPRESENT the reality of my enthusiasm for your work if I tell you that though I don’t always like what you think, yet I do always admire and subscribe to what you are . There is such brightness and warmth in your prose, and so much leisurely and wicked humour that I defy anyone not to be interested and delighted by it; there are good royal colours here, and I love the self-possession which makes each thrust—like a good fencer’s lunge—seem absolutely effortless. Power to your long right arm!
    To be a poet is to be religious: and to be religious is to be, in some way, a royalist. Is it not so? And if for me your admiration for the Fascists seems a little excessive it is only because I feel that if the Left are wrong today the Right are not right enough for me. I don’t want to barter the religion of the royal part of men for an inferior sort of totemism. And every man who feels the same will be more interested in your writing than in the prodigious squeaking and chirping that goes up from the leftist barnyards.
    Damn reservations ultimately: they are the critic’s drink—literary Wincarnis [2] with every issue of a paper instead of wine. I like men—not aggregates and contentions; and I admire the way you stand firm and speak because what you say is worth listening to. I respect the King in you and I respect the king in all men [3] —that is what I mean, I think; and this undercuts all dogma, which is after all only a man-made roughage.
    A King for all of us then: and the king in each of us. Would you accept that as a toast?
    Sincerely,
    Lawrence Durrell

Airgraph on Refugee Poets in Africa
    1944
    Dear Tambi, [1]
    EGYPT WOULD BE INTERESTING if it were really the beginning of Africa; but it is an ante-room, a limbo. In this soft corrupting plenty, nothing very much is possible. The Nile flows like dirty coffee under the solid English bridges. The country steams humidly—a sort of tropical Holland, with no hills anywhere to lift one’s eyes to. The people have given up long ago—have lapsed back into hopelessness, venality, frustration. Outside the towns forever the sterile desert preserves its ancient cultures with clinical care. Dust-storms herald the spring; and summer comes in on such a wave of damp that the blood