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Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Lawrence Durrell’s Tragedies

From the old fortress in Girne (in Turkish Cyprus) looking up at the Kyrenia Mountains, in which the author Lawrence Durrell lived in the 1950s, as he describes in his memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.

During one of my days in Nicosia, I decided to travel north to the coastal town of Girne, which before the division was known as Kyrenia. On my map it was labelled as Keryneia, and some of the guide books raved about its Venetian fortress in the old port.

I associated the town with Lawrence Durrell’s celebrated memoir, Bitter Lemons in Cyprus, which was published in 1957 and in which he writes: “Venice will never be far from me in Cyprus – for the lion of Saint Mark still rides the humid airs of Famagusta, of Kyrenia.”

I first read Bitter Lemons in the late 1970s, around the time I read his Alexandria Quartet and some of his other books set in the Greek islands (he lived for many years on Corfu, north of the main town). I read Durrell while commuting to work in Manhattan, perhaps to remind myself that one reward of a day job might be the occasional trip to the Mediterranean.

In Nicosia I still had my rented bicycle, and for a while I thought that to get to the north coast (it’s not along the Green Line) I would ride over the Kyrenia Mountains. But the more I studied the maps (admittedly some pre-dated partition), the more it became clear that I would once again be riding on the shoulder of an autoroute, and by that point I had had my fill of truck exhaust.

In the end I locked my bicycle near the mini-van station in north Nicosia, and there paid a driver a few euros, even though the official currency for the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is the Turkish lira. (I never did get to an automated teller machine to have some lira in my pocket, but no one minded.)

In the careening mini-van, I was glad that I had left my bicycle behind, as the driver drove at chicken-scattering speeds and used the shoulder/bike lane to cut around slow-moving farm equipment.

As I didn’t exactly know where I was going, I stayed on the bus until the last stop, which was just above the historic harbor. From the bus stop, it was easy to explore the Venetian ramparts overlooking the sea, which was angry with February whitecaps.

I even found near the port the old Anglican Church of St. Andrew, which had a sign out front that read: “ALL WELCOME… Baptisms By Appointment…. Funerals By Arrangement.”

Sitting in old Kyrenia made me want to reread Bitter Lemons, but I didn’t find a copy either in Girne or later back in Nicosia. Only when I got home was I able to order one in the mail.

Durrell was in his forties when he moved to Cyprus, no doubt looking for a cheap place in the sun to write his books and drink the local wines. He had lived in Alexandria, Egypt, during World War II, when he was a press officer attached to the British legation, but it was only after he left Cyprus in 1956 that the four novels of the Quartet—Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea—were published.

In effect, the four novels are one: each tells the story of various failed love affairs from another perspective. The novels capture dissolute expatriate lives on the edge of World War II in Egypt (Rommel’s tanks were only stopped at el-Alamein, which is about sixty miles west of Alexandria).

I only struggled with the novels when Durrell’s language became rococo, as when he writes about Justine:

There are some characters in this world who are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal. For my part Justine always........

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