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Lawrence DURRELL

Lettre autographe signée adressée à Jani Brun à propos du roman Tunc: "maintenant je n'ai plus d'excuses. Il faut vraiment reprendre ce sacré bouquin en main"

Sommières 18 juillet 1968, 21,2x13,4cm, 1 feuillet sous enveloppe.

Autograph letter signed by Lawrence Durrell addressed to Jani Brun, written in brown felt pen. Central fold inherent in the enveloping of the missive. Envelope attached.
The writer advises his French lover, who was then suffering, to have a second opinion at the American Hospital in Neuilly: "I do not have the slightest confidence [sic] in the therefore diagnoses [sic] of French doctors You really need to have the thing assessed before believing in them. Take your X-rays and visit The American Hospital in Paris [...] if it's serious, well it's serious. If, on the contrary, French mythomaniacs tell you fairy tales ...? "
After many years spent in Greece, Egypt and Rhodes, the travel writer Lawrence Durrell was forced to flee Cyprus following popular uprisings which led to the island's independence from the British crown. Rich only in a shirt and a typewriter but crowned with the success of his novel Bitter Lemons of Cyprus ( Acid lemons ), he arrived in 1956 in France and settled in the Languedoc village of Sommières. In the "Maison Tartès", his large house surrounded by trees, he wrote the second part of his work, his monumental Quintette d'Avignon, devoted himself to painting and received his illustrious friends, including the couple Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, the London editor Alan G. Thomas, and his two daughters Pénélope and Sappho.
Among the olive trees and under the Mediterranean sun, he met there in the mid-1960s the young and sparkling "Jany" (Janine Brun), Montpellier of thirty years with ravaging beauty, who worked in the Department of Antiquities of the Sorbonne in Paris. It was named “Buttons” in memory of their first meeting, where the girl wore a dress covered with buttons. Henry Miller also fell in love with "Buttons", praising his beauty and his eternal youth in exceptional letters that were never published. The three friends spent memorable Parisian evenings of which we keep precious autograph traces through their correspondence. Recommended by Durrell, she made numerous trips, notably to England, from where she received a large correspondence from the writer as well as original works of art signed by her artist pseudonym, Oscar Epfs.

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