Word: dervishes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...dervish," says Lawrence Durrell...
...description of his prose and his life, though scarcely of the man. At 48, Durrell is a short (5 ft. 3½ in.), chunky (145 Ibs.) man with clear blue eyes, thick blond-grey hair and a blunt face. Though his forebears were Irish Protestants, Durrell began his whirling-dervish life in India, where his engineer father helped build the Darjeeling Railway and died when Larry was 17. Recalls Durrell: "We lived the life which Kipling romanticized in Kim. All day long, processions of lamas passed my school whirling prayer wheels...
Stony-broke and close to hunger, he trusted his dervish genius to see him through. Sometimes typing "a slab of 10,000 words every two days," Durrell reeled off his tetralogy at an astonishing clip: Justine (about four months), Balthazar (six weeks), Mount olive (two months), Clea (seven weeks). His major defect, he feels, is overwriting, a prose style that is "too juicy...