Amateurs in Eden - The story of a Bohemian Marriage: Nancy and Lawrence Durrell

This is a tender, sympathetic and revelatory biography of a marriage, described as ‘Bohemian’ by Nancy’s daughter from her second marriage to Edward Hodgkin.. Perhaps it was ‘Bohemian’ in the aspirations of the strangely naïve Nancy, but for Lawrence we are left with some doubt as to why he married as and when he did. Although I have long thought that women’s motives for marriage tend to be much clearer focused than those of men, this may be a case of two people who both thought that it seemed a good idea, at the time, who knows? Clearly, there is more to Lawrence’s apparently flippant verdict on the break-up than is suggested in a letter to Henry Miller around Christmas 1943: ‘Nancy is in Jerusalem with the child. We have split up; just the war I guess.’ This quotation provides a trigger for the author in her introduction and she returns to it in her final chapter where she speculates whether, had their circumstances been different, the marriage might have survived, and she may well be right for the very next sentence is: ‘After Greece, Crete and the Alamein evacuation we got to understand what the word ‘refugee’ means.’ For a woman with a toddler and a somewhat self-centred husband to look after, those war years cannot have been easy, and perhaps both had got fed up trying to keep up the pretence that they were in anything like a normal marriage. Hodgkin notes that her mother had been described as an ‘innocent’, and it seems likely that we have two innocents at large here.

There are short but touching portraits of Hodgkin’s half sister Penelope, of ‘Mother Durrell, and the scamp Gerald, and the fiction of Gerald’s supposed memoir ‘My family and other animals’, is firmly exposed. Henry Miller is warmly portrayed throughout but his mistress Anais Nin remains the enigma she always has been. Nancy’s failure to complete her studies at the Slade is a source of regret, as is the dearth of surviving painting by Nancy during her years with Lawrence, and it is with some gratification that we find that Nancy took up sculpture later in life.

A well-written, interesting and frequently touching memoir of a marriage and the apparently ‘silent’ woman in it and whose potential never seems to have been fully realised. As a bonus, Hodgkin has provided me with the impetus I needed to take Olivia Manning’s ‘Balkan Trilogy’ off my shelf and to get stuck in. After that I will simply have to have yet another attempt to get through ‘The Black Book’.