Aside from a modest article in a school newspaper, Lawrence Durrell’s earliest published works were poems. Thanks to a friend who had bought a printing press, several appeared as Quaint Fragment: Poems Written between the Ages of Sixteen and Nineteen (1931). Four other slim, privately-printed, volumes followed before the landmark publication in 1943 of A Private Country by Faber & Faber, destined to remain Durrell’s English publisher for the rest of his life. The work’s title aptly announced two of Durrell’s enduring themes: his interest in place, and his insistence upon the primacy of individual experience. Indirectly the title also reflected his concern with what he called the “Heraldic …
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