Olivia Laing 

Amateurs in Eden: the Story of a Bohemian Marriage by Joanna Hodgkin – review

Lawrence Durrell's wife Nancy, an artist, was silenced by his bullying. Olivia Laing enjoys finally reading her story
  
  

nancy durrell
Lawrence and Nancy Durrell in the early days of their marriage, 1930s. Photograph: Estate of Gerald Durrell Photograph: Estate of Gerald Durrell Estate of Gerald Durrell

Anyone who spent their formative years reading My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell's magnificently funny account of his childhood in 1930s Corfu, is disadvantaged when it comes to the adult contemplation of Lawrence Durrell. It's hard to take The Alexandria Quartet, Prospero's Cell and The Black Book: An Agon with the requisite seriousness when one's strongest impression of the man is as a bossy, opinionated know-it-all who once ended up almost drowning in a quagmire while shooting snipe, an activity for which he possessed no aptitude whatsoever, despite a good deal of boasting to the contrary. In a work overendowed with comic creations, Larry is the most gleefully memorable of the lot.

As it turns out, Gerald Durrell wasn't a very reliable witness. Though he presents Larry as living en famille, producing his deathless prose while masterminding the activities of his scatty siblings, in fact he lived nearby with his wife, Nancy Myers. History has not been entirely kind to Nancy. In addition to being erased from the Corfu cast, she appears in memoirs and novels of the interwar period as a silent beauty, a kind of Greta Garbo-cum-wild animal. Her friend Anaïs Nin described her as a puma and wrote: "I think often of Nancy talking with her eyes, her fingers, her hair, her cheeks, a wonderful gift." It's understandable that Joanna Hodgkin, her daughter by her second marriage, might want to restore to her the function of speech, redrawing these bohemian configurations from the perspective of the puma herself.

Nancy was born in Eastbourne in 1912, and though the first five years of her life were comfortably genteel, her family suffered a mysterious downturn in fortune, necessitating a move to a factory town in Lincolnshire, where they entered that malignantly English drama of keeping up appearances. This experience, combined with a miserable spell at boarding school, left her with a lasting disdain for bourgeois convention. She escaped to art school in London, made friends with a rackety array of male students and reinvented herself as a beauty, with the help of a blunt-cut bob and borrowed lipstick.

It's almost 100 pages before Larry toddles on to the scene, a small blond man who disguises what would later prove a ferocious tongue under an endearing – to Nancy, at least – fondness for baby talk. After a spell in one of those underfurnished Sussex cottages so irresistible to 1930s bohemians, they lit out for Corfu for an Edenic period of swimming, sailing and creative work. The fall came in 1937, when they joined Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin in Paris. The couple had always rowed, but now Larry's bullying slid into cruelty ("Nothing but a dirty Jew" was a favourite insult). Nancy's apparently charming silence is revealed to be the product of a sustained campaign on the part of her husband to keep her isolated behind what Miller later described as a "wall of ice". By the time war began, the marriage was over, although the couple had by then produced a child. After an impossibly dramatic escape from Greece to Cairo aboard various boats and lorries, she left him for good, spending the rest of the war in Palestine.

It's a cracking story, and Hodgkin, who writes historical and detective fiction as Joanna Hines, is a meticulous researcher. But while the externals of Nancy's life are evidently more than deserving of such scrutiny, the woman herself often seems to vanish beneath the drama of what's going on around her. There's no doubt that it takes rare courage to leave a husband in wartime, particularly when one is a refugee with a small child. The problem is that Hodgkin also very much wants to make a case for Nancy as an artist in her own right, but this only emphasises her strange knack for self-erasure.

Little of her work survived the war and what's reproduced here is slight – a few woodcuts and stylish book covers, as well as one of the sculptures she produced during her second marriage in England. Henry Miller apparently thought a lot of one oil painting, but there were also long periods in which she produced no work at all – due, Hodgkin claims, to a crippling case of perfectionism. The argument about how hard it was for women then to make art or build independent friendships is frequently and loyally advanced. It's not untrue, the likes of Vanessa Bell and Gwen John excepted, but all the same it leaves a slightly melancholy cast to the story, since "not quite successful artist" is surely almost as unsatisfactory an epitaph as "puma" or "handmaiden to genius".

Olivia Laing's To the River is published by Canongate

 

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