331 Bce 1851 1863 1869 1874 1876 1879 1881
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331 BCE April: Alexander, son of Philip of Macedonia, founds the city of Alexandria on the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea 1851 Samuel Durrell (LD’s paternal grandfather) is born in Suffolk, England. 1863 April 29: Contsantine P. Cavafy is born in Alexandria, Egypt. 1869 At the age of 18, Samuel Durrell enlists in the British Army. 1874 Having transferred to the Royal Artillery two years previously, Samuel Durrell marries Emma Cooper in Portsea, an event shortly followed by the birth of two daughters. 1876 Sergeant Samuel Durrell is posted to India and travels with his family by ship via the Suez Canal, a three week voyage in the equivalent of steerage aboard the troopship Malabar. By the end of the year both daughters die. 1879 January 1: Edward Morgan Forster is born in London. 1881 3 Having given birth to two more children, only one of which, a daughter, survives infancy, Emma Cooper Durrell dies in Allahabad. 1882 January 25: Virginia Woolf (née Stephens) is born in London. February 2: James Joyce is born in Rathgar, Dublin. 1883 His first wife Emma having died two years previously, Samuel Durrell marries Dora Maria Johnstone at Lucknow. 1884 Lawrence Samuel Durrell is born in Calcutta to Samuel and Dora. 1885 September 11: David Herbert Lawrence is born at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. 1887 Jack Kahane is born in Manchester, England. 1888 September 26: Thomas Stearns Eliot is born in St. Louis, Missouri. 1891 3 4 December 26: Henry Valentine Miller is born in Brooklyn, New York. 1892 July 8: Richard Aldington is born in Portsea, Hampshire. 1896 Alfred Perlès is born in Vienna to a Jewish businessman father and a French Roman Catholic mother. January 21: Theodore Stephanides is born in Bombay, India, of a Greek father from Thessaly and an English mother. 1897 September 25: William Faulkner is born in New Albany, Mississippi. 1898 Theodore Stephanides and his family move to Corfu, upon his father’s retirement, where the young man learns Greek. 1899 George Katsimbalis is born in Athens, Greece. July 21: Ernest Hemingway is born in Oak Park, Illinois. 1900 March 13: Giorgios Seferiadis (George Seferis) is born in Vourla, now Urla, near present-day Izmir in Asia Minor, Ottoman Empire, today Turkey. 4 5 1903 February 21: Anaïs Nin is born in the Paris suburb of Neuilly. June 23: Eric Arthur Blair (eventually known as George Orwell) is born in Motihari, Bihar, British India. 1910 Lawrence Samuel Durrell marries Louisa Dixie. 1912 Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig is published in Berlin and Paul Claudel’s L’Annonce fait à Marie is published in Paris. February 27: Lawrence George Durrell born in Jullundur, India, to Lawrence Samuel and Louisa Durrell (née Dixie). May 8: Nancy Isobel Myers born in Eastbourne, England. Early October: The Swedish Academy awards Gerhard Hauptmann (Germany) the Nobel Prize for Literature. 1913 D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers is published in London and Marcel Proust publishes the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu in Paris. February 27: LD is one year old. Early October: The Swedish Academy awards Rabindranath Tagore (India) the Nobel Prize for Literature. 1914 Now retired Major Samuel Durrell, LD’s grandfather, dies in Portsmouth having spent his entire adult life serving in India and China. February 27: LD is two years old. 5 6 June 28: The Serbian terrorist (or martyred patriot, depending on one’s Weltanschauung), Gavarilo Princip, assassinates the Austrian Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo. July 23: Austria presents an ultimatum to Serbia, noting that if its demands were not met in two days, it would declare war. July 29: The Russian Tzar mobilizes troops on the Austrian border. July 31: The Russians extend the mobilization to their border with Germany. August 1: Germany mobilizes for war against Russia. August 2: France mobilizes its armed forces against Germany. August 3: Germany declares war on France. August 4: Great Britain declares war on Germany, which had refused to respect Belgian neutrality guaranteed by Great Britain, and the slaughter begins. Early October: The Swedish Academy does not award a Nobel Prize for Literature. 1915 Poetry magazine in Chicago edited by Harriet Munroe publishes T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and changes the way 20th century poetry is conceptualized and written. February 27: LD is three years old. September: D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow is published in London and subsequently banned by the censors. Early October: The Swedish Academy awards Romaine Rolland (France) the Nobel Prize for Literature. – English authorities suppress The Rainbow. November 12: Margery Durrell is born in India to Lawrence Samuel and Louise Durrell. 1916 6 7 Margery Durrell dies in India, probably of diphtheria, exact date uncertain. February 27: LD is four years old. February 28: Having lived in England for decades and after becoming a British citizen to show his solidarity with England at war, the old American prose master Henry James dies in London at the age of 73. Early October: The Swedish Academy awards Carl Gustaf von Heidenstam (Sweden) the Nobel Prize for Literature. November 22: The American writer Jack London dies at the age of 40 of uremic poisoning and a deliberate overdose of morphine at his ranch in Glen Ellen, California. 1917 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot is published in London by The Egoist Press. Carl Jung’s The Unconscious is published. Leonard and Virginia Woolf establish the Hogarth Press in London. February 27: LD is five years old. March 10: Leslie Durrell is born India. Early October: The Swedish Academy jointly awards Karl Adolph Gjellerup (Denmark) and Henrik Pontoppidan (Denmark) the Nobel Prize for Literature. October: The Bolsheviks take power in St. Petersburg in a violent coup d’état. 1918 The first volume of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) is published. February 27: LD is six years old. August 8: Yvette Cohen is born in Cairo, Egypt. Early October: The Swedish Academy awards Erik Karfelt (Sweden) the Nobel Prize for Literature, which, as a true gentleman and a scholar, he refuses because his work is unknown outside Sweden. November 9: The republic is proclaimed in Berlin, the Kaiser abdicates and goes into exile in the Netherlands. 7 8 November 11: An armistice is signed by the Allies and Germany, temporarily ending the slaughter. 1919 A peace treaty is “negotiated” in Versailles between the Allies and Germany. February 27: LD is seven years old. April 12: Maurice Kahane, son of the English publisher Jack Kahane, is born in Paris; during the German occupation of France 1940-44 he takes his mother’s maiden name, Girodias, to conceal his Jewish heritage. July 30: Margaret “Margo” Durrell is born in India. Early October: The Swedish Academy awards Carl Friedrich Spitteler (Switzerland) the Nobel Prize for Literature. October 13: Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Nobel 1917, dies at 60. 1920 Yvette Cohen and her family move from Cairo to Alexandria. February 27: On his eighth birthday LD receives the complete works of Charles Dickens as a present from his parents. Early October: The Swedish Academy awards Knut Hamsun (Norway) the Nobel Prize for Literature. 1921 February 27: LD is nine years old. February 28: LD begins at St. Joseph’s College at North Point, Darjeeling. Early October: The Swedish Academy awards Anatole France (France) the Nobel Prize for Literature. 1922 Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Duineser Elegien (The Duino Elegies), e.e. cummings’ The Enormous Room, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room are published. The first issue of The 8 9 Criterion appears. Eliot’s The Waste Land and E.M. Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide are published in London. February 2: James Joyce’s Ulysses is published in Paris by Sylvia Beach at her Shakespeare and Company bookshop on the rue de l’Odéon in the VIth arrondissement. February 27: LD is ten years old. Early October: The Swedish Academy awards Jacinto Benavente (Spain) the Nobel Prize for Literature. November 18: Marcel Proust dies in Paris at the age of 51. December: LD finishes at St. Joseph’s College. 1923 Sigmund Freud publishes Das Ich und das Es (The Ego and the Id) and Georg Grodeck pubishes Das Buch vom Es (mistitled in English as The Book of the It), the latter of which eventually exerts a strong influence on LD. February 27: LD is 11 years old. March 18: LD unwillingly departs India for school in England accompanied by Lawrence Samuel, Louisa, Leslie and Margo, sailing from Calcutta on the City of London. April 27: The family disembarks at Tilbury, finds lodgings first briefly in a London hotel, then in a rented house in Dulwich, a south London suburb. September: After enrolling LD in a school in Tunbridge Wells and Leslie at another school, the family returns to India, leaving the two boys with “very unsympathetic aunts.”1 Early October: The Swedish Academy awards W. B. Yeats (Ireland) the Nobel Prize for Literature. 1924 1 There is some confusion about the comings and goings of Durrell family members during the years 1923-1924. GB, 20-21, has Lawrence Samuel remaining in India in 1923, his mother leaving India for England to join Louisa and the children, and Louisa and Margo departing for India “early in 1924” leaving Leslie and LD in charge of their grandmother being schooled partly at home (they were living with the widow of a former colleague of Lawrence Samuel) and “possibly a local day school.” This Chronology follows IMN and information from Penelope Durrell Hope in this instance.