From the Elephant's Back by Lawrence Durrell Page B

overlooked works by Durrell, including many of his minor works from the 1930s and 1940s, some of which were added to the collection initially envisioned. I am thankful for their efficient assistance as well as for providing a working environment that was highly productive. Although the drafted comments Richard Pine and I created for the Delos Press edition were abandoned, my discussions with Richard were of great use and undoubtedly influenced my approach here. I was also fortunate to enjoy two weeks in residence at the Durrell School of Corfu in 2010 at the invitation of University of Iowa’s Overseas Writer’s Workshop, during which I completed a good deal of the annotations to the new additions made in Oxford.
    With regard to this volume’s revisions to the accepted critical interpretations of Durrell’s notion of the Heraldic Universe, I am in the debt of the Special Collections librarians at the University of Victoria. They first introduced me to the Henry Miller–Herbert Read correspondence, which significantly reoriented my understanding of Durrell’s critical context. This was compounded by the Read–Henry Treece correspondence, and the Read–George Woodcock letters, a published copy of which was very generously given to me. The manuscripts for all three items are held in the McPherson Library at the University of Victoria. Members of the International Lawrence Durrell Society have also given me great support through their listserv and as colleagues and friends. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the fine feedback I have received from Charles Sligh, Michael Haag, William Leigh Godshalk, Anne Zahlan, James Clawson, and Pamela Francis.
    For the opportunity to teach several of these shorter works, and thereby develop a sense of what annotations would be most congenial to a typical undergraduate reader, I am indebted to my students from 2005 to 2011 at the University of Lethbridge, the University of Victoria, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and Simon Fraser University. Graduate students at the University of Iowa and Simon Fraser University have also helped with feedback on lectures that discussed several of the critical interventions I have attempted here. I am also indebted to Joanne Muzak for her astonishingly keen eye as an editor and generous critical acumen.
    James Gifford
    Vancouver
    November 2014

Introduction
    THIS COLLECTION HAS A STRAIGHTFORWARD AMBITION: to redirect the interpretive perspective that readers bring to Lawrence Durrell’s literary works by returning their attention to his short prose. This includes three main areas for critical intervention: reconsidering Durrell’s political postures over time, reassessing his position in English literature as a Late Modernist, and addressing the role of the poignant suffering surrounding the Second World War in his travel writing. For both “scholarly” and “pleasure” readers, these new perspectives on his texts alter our approach to Durrell’s more famous works, mainly his novels and travel books, which continue to attract a wide audience. A century after his birth, such reconsideration is increasingly necessary. And Durrell’s works are increasingly necessary to that century’s understanding of itself.
    In each of the three areas I have outlined, much literary baggage has accumulated over time, and, as a consequence, most readers find it difficult to approach Durrell without preconceived interpretive notions. He is most often presented as an imperialist author belonging to no definite generation or movement, whose works evoke a tourist’s dream of the orientalist and philhellenic luxuriance of the Eastern Mediterranean. We need little prompting to regard Durrell’s works through such a tinted glass. In a more general sense relating to that first paradigmatic approach—his political positions over time—Durrell is known for his literary activity at the end of empire,