Truth or Dare

Yesterday I was reminded how difficult it can be to get to the truth in biography. Larry Durrell is known for editing his own life history so much that the authorised biography by Ian MacNiven admits: “I do not pretend to have written the definitive word. How could I?”

We all edit and re-edit our lives, so it might not be surprising that a famously creative and imaginative force like Larry might make a few deliberate mistakes over a career of half a century. But sometimes these things really matter.

I refer to the manner of the death of Lawrence Samuel, Larry’s father. I now believe that it was a brain haemorrhage, as even Wikipedia will tell you. But it threw me into half an hour of confusion because the MacNiven book suggests a brain tumour at one point. Why is this so important? Apart from anything else, there are many critics of the Bowker biography, and I was determined to find out how accurate it was. Perhaps to most people brain haemorrhages are equivalent to tumours. Both are usually fatal, both occur in the brain, and both are terrible events even when not fatal.

But the claim made in both books is that the death of Larry’s father was a formative event, given his father was barely over forty when he died in 1928. Which made Larry only 16, a younger age today than it was then, but still young. It seems clear to me that a sudden death can cause more upset and confusion than an expected one.

If Lawrence Samuel had a tumour, and was therefore ill for a time before the fatal haemorrhage, it means the family had time to prepare, as they would for the death of an elderly relative. Relationships and life were very different then, but it looks to the modern eye as though nobody much liked Lawrence Samuel. He was the breadwinner, though, and financial matters cloud the emotions when a family of three children is in the balance.

I am convinced now, by the various secondary sources, that the brain tumour caused the haemorrhage. Lawrence Samuel’s death, while young and tragic for the family, was not a shock. He had been behaving oddly for months and was in hospital when he died. I can understand that Larry would continue to seek his father’s approval, even after the mortal departure of Lawrence Samuel. But do not be fooled by the haemorrhage. There was no shock involved, and money aside, the lingering feeling is that Louisa and the children did not miss him all that much.