Jay Rayner on Sappho Durrell’s death

I am catching up on posting various snippets I have collected over the years.

This is a piece from 1991 that was published in the Guardian by Jay Rayner–now better known as a food and restaurant critic!–on the tragic death of Sappho Durrell. It is quite raw and unforgiving in places–Rayner is a talented writer, actually–but it is extremely moving. I don’t think it is disrespectful at all. Why should we forget Sappho? I found some of the language to be rather dated, but bear in mind when the piece was written. I have posted it in full below with a link to the Google group where I came across it.

Here is a link to the Granta site where Sappho’s letters and journals were published.

Trigger warning: suicide, self harm, abuse.

Read more: Jay Rayner on Sappho Durrell’s death

September 14, 1991

HEADLINE: Inside Story: Daddy Dearest – The writer Lawrence
Durrell cast a long, dark shadow over the short and troubled
life of his daughter, Sappho. Jay Rayner on the tragedy of a
young woman shackled by her birthright

BYLINE: By JAY RAYNER

THE GREAT irony of Sappho Durrell’s shortened life has come
only now, more than six years after her death. There is
nothing extraordinary about such delay, no contradiction in
terms. It comes with the territory. For the land she
inhabited was one ruled by celebrity, where people and their
personas are forever separated. In her world the written
word was the thing, a delicate tool her family used to forge
its reputation, and one always bound to endure beyond
death’s call.

This is the story of the power of words, of how they can set
in stone that which was once only suggested, and then raise
it high for all to see. It is the story of a fight by one
troubled woman to save her own memory, to save her from
being steam-rol lered by the monstrous weight of family
success. And it is also a story of failure.

On the morning of February 1, 1985 the body of Sappho Jane
Durrell, daughter of the novelist Lawrence and his second
wife Eve, was found hanging by the neck in the attic bedroom
of her house in Loraine Road, Holloway, North London. She
was 33. Primarily, it was said, she was depressed over the
break-up of her marriage to Simon Tompsett, with whom she
owned the house.

Behind her she left four carrier bags full of papers, the
accumulated writings of her truncated years, and a set of
instructions. She wanted them published, but not until the
old man was dead too. When her body was found a message,
written on an envelope, was also there. It read: ‘In the
event that my father should request to be buried with me –
my wish is that the request be refused.’

‘She was forever frightened of being just a footnote in her
father’s biography,’ says Barbara Robson today, Sappho’s
neighbour, friend and literary executrix, who took posession
of those carrier bags and the demands that went with them,
at Sappho’s request, a few months before she committed
suicide. ‘She saw herself as a writer,’ says Robson. ‘She
wanted to have a name in her own right.’

Mrs Robson has kept her promise. Lawrence Durrell died, aged
78, on November 7, 1990. At the end of this month, after not
inconsiderable legal strife, 4,000 words from Sappho
Durrell’s diaries are to be published in Granta, the
literary magazine.

They agreed to buy the material in May of this year, after
an article by Barbara Robson in the Sunday Telegraph gave a
preview of what might be included. The revelations set
London’s literary world alight: Sappho, Robson says, once
confided to her that she had had a short incestuous
relationship with her father. If you know where to look, she
claims, it’s there in Sappho’s diaries. The feted author of
The Alexandria Quartet and the Avignon Quintet, who loved
nothing more than to romp through the hinterland of human
sexuality and spirituality, through the attractions or
otherwise of everything from child abuse, violence and the
occult to, yes, incest, may well not have fictionalised it
all. Durrell made no secret of the fact that his life, lived
mostly on the shores of the Mediterranean, was ploughed
rather less than obliquely into his novels. Sappho was bound
to be there too.

Her writings are now the stuff of literary note though not,
perhaps, in the way she intended. The revelations have made
the news pages of the broadsheet papers and a few tabloids
to boot, as great minds turn over these nuggets of
information to learn more of the psyche of one of Britain’s
great men of letters.

During her life, Sappho was only ever published in City
Limits, the London listings magazine, and then under a
pseudonym, Vivien Gantry, that she used to hide her father’s
identity. Now in death, the exotic smell of controversy
hanging around her exotic name, Sappho’s currency has
increased in value: she is being published in Granta.

What she feared most, being a handmaiden at the celebrity of
her father, may have come to pass. Sappho Jane Durrell will
now, it seems, forever be a footnote in her father’s
biography.

THE GREATEST tragedy that can befall any celebrity’s child
is that they should develop a desire to follow their parent
into the same field. It is a sure recipe for pain and
conflict. Unfortunately it happens all too often. But the
reason writers beget writers, actors beget actors, is not
that they will have great contacts on tap, a clear path into
the business, even if it may be true.

It is more personal than that. For many people who might
wish to break into those careers where success inevitably
means fame, the first battle is to conquer intimidation, to
realise that it is possible to do it. The child of the
famous writer doesn’t have that problem. They grow up
assuming it is ordinary to do this extraordinary job. The
child of the celebrity who develops a desire not only to
follow them into the same field but also to be the best, to
be, in fact, their parent, is on a terrible journey to
profound disappointment.

Lawrence Durrell’s second daughter, born on May 30, 1951,
never really had a chance. Parted from his elder daughter
Penny when his first wife, Nancy Myers, left him in 1942,
Durrell was determined to keep a grip on this new arrival.
He called her Sappho after the ancient Greek lesbian
poetess, and told her that she too would be a great poet;
she would, he said, be the new Sappho. Apart from the
practical problems with the name – she always feared people
would think she was a lesbian – the pressure it placed on
her was enormous. She was creative as of birthright; it was
there in her name.

Her childhood was a difficult one. Born into a home that was
practically broken before she got there, she became a pawn
in the battles between her parents as their marriage broke
up. While her mother, Eve, an Egyptian Jewess, was
hospitalised suffering from profound post-natal depression,
Sappho was looked after on Cyprus by her father and
grandmother who allowed her to run wild. Eventually, when
Eve returned, she left for England with her.

Calm only came to her world when her father, his coffers
swelled by the success of The Alexandria Quartet, the last
volumn of which was published in 1960, was able to afford to
send her to Bedales, the public school. She stayed there
until she was 18 and it was here that she first began to
write.

The events that have led people to believe she had an
incestuous affair with her father are said to have taken
place one summer when she was 14 in Sommiers in the South of
France where the novelist lived. Durrell’s third wife,
Claude, also a novelist, had just died of cancer. In her
diaries Sappho describes how she fell from grace. Before she
had been the daughter: ‘virgin/wise’. Now Durrell got her to
play the role of the ‘the whore/stupid/bitch’ that he had
previously forced upon his wives. Sappho had become a
surrogate. It is impossible to be sure exactly of the date.
The diaries in which she is said to have made allusions to
the incidents were written approximately 15 years later,
though some passages were undated. Death has a way of
churning up chronology.

In the mid-Seventies, having gained a degree in English from
York University where she met her future husband, Simon
Tompsett, Sappho moved to London. After a period living in a
squat, almost a rite of passage then, the couple bought the
house in Loraine Road with help from both sets of parents.

Barbara Robson met her in 1978 when they moved into the
street, a classic North London jumble of high, flat fronted
town houses, just off the busy Holloway Road. ‘Simon was
sitting in a car waiting for someone with a key and I
invited him in for a cup of tea. I asked who else was moving
in and he said Sappho Durrell. I said it had to be Lawrence
Durrell’s daughter. Immediately he told me there were two
things she was sensitive about: her father and
anti-semitism, because her mother was Jewish.’

A close friendship developed between the two women, despite
their great differences. Robson was ten years Sappho’s
senior. She had also, after a long period on the far Left,
embarked on a journey to the far Right and was writing
articles for Conservative think tanks like the Centre for
Policy Studies and the Institute of Economic Affairs.
Sappho, meanwhile, had stayed firmly on the far Left,
aligning herself for a period with the International Marxist
Group.

‘I think,’ says Robson. ‘She needed a belief system. She
would move around from group to group and would despair that
she wasn’t being accepted. She didn’t understand why.’

In 1978, Sappho gave up her publishing job as an editorial
assistant at Weidenfeld and Nicholson because she believed
she could become a freelance editor while writing novels on
the side. She saw it as the chance she needed to fulfil her
birthright.

Together Sappho and Robson would work in the living room of
Sappho’s house, a colourful affair decorated in shades of
violent orange and scarlet, a hangover from her period as a
disciple of the eventually discredited cult leader Bhagwan
Shree Rajneesh.

‘If it was for publication Saph – we all called her Saph –
would have enormous writer’s block,’ says Robson. She would
be coughing and fidgeting the whole time. There would be
endless research, anything to put off actually putting down
words.’ A friend, who lived with Sappho for a while,
confirmed this. ‘She was incredibly slow,’ he said.

By contrast, both Lawrence Durrell and Claude, whom Sappho
adored, would work very fast. Durrell could produce up to
3,000 words a day. ‘Saph knew,’ says Robson, ‘That the
parameters of whatever she wrote would be judged by others
on the grounds that she was Durrell’s daughter.’

AS WELL as the theatre reviews for City Limits, she sweated
out a play about the Bronte sisters and, Robson believes,
either an autobiography of herself or a biography of her
father. The only thing she wrote with any fluency were those
diaries. ‘They would flow. There was no hesitancy.’
Eventually, in 1979, she would give up her unsuccesful
freelance life to work with children in care and people with
psychiatric problems.

However, she continued trying to write. None of it was ever
shown to her father. Whenever she had to write to him, it
was a great effort. ‘She knew that everything she put down
would eventually appear in the books so she would buy five
or six postcards and slave over them to get the right tone
of banality. There had to be nothing there he could use.’

Her father, she felt, was being manipulative. He would
complain of being starved of affection, of love. In her
diaries she would complain of his dark side: ‘I feel that
when I’m with him – or writing to him – that I am on his
black side. I’m frightened of him physically and mentally.’

She also gained little pleasure from the cult of personality
that had developed around her father by the Seventies. A
trip to America, financed by Durrell, depressed her. She was
put on the Durrell circuit and presented before the
acolytes, paraded like some specimen. Later she wrote of
being ‘imprisoned by the Durrell name, unable to escape. If
to be a Durrell means I make enemies and false friends, then
I renounce it.’

Her death, in 1985, seems, with hindsight, to be the only
likely conclusion to a tragic life. ‘When you look back
you’re tempted to say it was inevitable, like the acting out
of some ghastly classical tragedy,’ says Robson. ‘But when
you were living through it there were moments of hope.’

It is possible that she had inherited a tendency towards
depression. Certainly she was very prone to mood swings.
‘Saph was not a girl who could shrug her problems off,’ says
Robson. ‘If she was hurt you would know.’

In 1979, after a series of abortions – four in all – she had
a breakdown. The year after, she and Tompsett married though
it may well have been an attempt to save the relationship.
Slowly, however, they drifted apart. In the early Eighties,
no longer willing to take the pressure that came with his
job at a London theatre, Tompsett moved to York.

In 1983, Sappho made her first attempt at suicide by taking
an overdose of sleeping pills. However, when she recovered
she vowed she would never do it again. ‘When I came round
the next day I thought I might have brain damage,’ she
wrote. ‘That was when I phoned for help. I thought I had a
perfect plan but I failed. I realise now that I will have to
go on living.’

The following year she went on a trip to Australia as part
of a process of rehabilitation. It was for that trip that
she made her will. ‘One of Saph’s heroines was Sylvia
Plath,’ says Robson. ‘She was aware that Plath had died
intestate and that it had all gone to Ted Hughes. She wanted
to make sure it all went to Eve and she also wanted to
protect her writing. I wanted a will I could prove.’

The arrangement they eventually came to was that Sappho
would make a gift of her writings to Robson, but that there
would be conditions tied to it. Robson would have to seek a
publisher, after the death of her father, an attempt to have
her say without the influence of Durrell, to free herself of
him.

Six months later, after a number of further attempts, Sappho
was dead. She left a note advising Eve that everything was
to go to her, told her to trust Barbara Robson and signed
off with ‘. . . forgive me for the suffering I keep
inflicting on you in one way or another. I love you and give
my love to Daddy and Pinks (her sister Penny, also known as
Pinky) and John.’

EVENTS since then have been messy, a tight knot of claims
and counter-claims, allegations and denials. Eve Durrell did
not take the suggestion that her daughter had had an
incestuous affair with her ex-husband well. She also
initiated court action to try and stop the publication of
her late daughter’s diaries. When the case came to court at
the end of July this year she argued that, as sole
beneficiary of the will, only she had the right to publish
her daughter’s work as she owned the copyright.

In the course of the case it was revealed that Mrs Durrell
had tampered with Sappho’s suicide note. Where the original
letter had said, ‘Keep Pinky and her advice at a distance’,
the version handed into the court had the name Barbara
substituted for that of Sappho’s half-sister.

Eve Durrell admitted she had altered the note but only to
protect Penny from any further pain. She also said that she
was not objecting to the publication of the work outright
but to the timing. She wanted it to coincide with the
publication of a biography of Lawrence Durrell next year.
But it is unlikely that such timing would serve her
daughter’s memory any better. The book is being written by
an American, Ian MacNiven, who was chosen by Durrell. It is
expected to be somewhat less than critical. Sappho’s words
would still be used as a means to analyse her father’s life.

The court ruled that Granta could publish, subject to
certain injunctions. The magazine had not been able to
circulate any of the text until this week. A further court
hearing is planned, at which point ownership of copyright
will be decided. Eve Durrell, meanwhile, has declined to
talk about the affair.

During the court case, affidavits from such luminaries as
Salman Rushdie attesting to the literary worth of Sappho’s
writing were presented. She was, according to Rushdie, a
writer of ‘considerable talents, great honesty and no little
courage.’

The contents of the 30 pages of Granta are mixed. Where the
prose flows, it is a rich confection indeed, bursting with
literary allusion. The problem is those passages are few and
far between.

The majority of it is notes of her invoices from her
psychotherapist, those banal letters to the South of France,
and jotted lines, showering her father with shards of abuse.
Indeed, without the material about Lawrence Durrell there
would be very little there at all. The excerpt appears in an
issue called The Family and subtitled ‘They fuck you up’,
the first line of a famous Philip Larkin poem.

In this context it works perfectly as a portrait of a family
ripped apart by the arrogance and manipulative tendencies of
one sexually obsessed novelist. It also bangs home the
dreadful effect all this had on the author. On more than one
occasion she talks of wanting to kill Durrell to escape.

‘He would like me to stand up and create,’ she also writes.
‘There is something in him which would ‘kill’ me if I did. I
will always have his ego between me and the world, and my
surroundings will be as dry as dust.’

As to incest: one could believe it had taken place if one
had the code. There are references to books on incest she is
interested in, passing comments and the odd poem with
allusions. Only those who knew her well will now be able to
attest to whether it happened or not.

For her part Barbara Robson is content that publication will
be the making of Sappho, the final if somewhat late
realisation of the dream that was forced upon her by her
father. ‘When her stuff is published in Granta they will
value her for herself. Sappho will be established as a
writer.’ And then she adds: ‘If her father had died first
you would have seen Sappho flourish.’

It is certain Robson has dispensed her duties well. It was
she who first brought the allegations of incest out into the
open and without those it is unlikely that Sappho Durrell
would ever have received anything like the attention she has
been getting. It has got to the point where it is no longer
relevant whether incest took place or not. Just the
intimation, the gossip, is enough. It adds a frisson to
Lawrence Durrell’s sometimes risque, sometimes controversial
prose. And that is the point. We come away knowing more
about the father than the daughter.