"Vaumort"

“I knew that whenever
I want to be perfectly alone
With the memory of you, of that whole day,
It's to Vaumort that I'll be turning.”

Exceptional handwritten poem dated 1969, signed and illustrated with original drawings in graphite, markers and colour pencils by Lawrence Durrell.
The poem-art work is sent to Janine Brun, his French lover, and has the inscription “For Buttons,” the affectionate nickname given to her by the writer, on top of a heart pierced by an arrow.
Pin holes, marginal tears.

Published for the first time in Collected Poems: 1931-1974 (1980).
In this poem-drawing, the writer looks back on a day of love spent in the company of his lover Janine Brun in the cemetery of the small village of Yonne. At the same time, Durrell is painfully recovering from the premature death of this third wife two years earlier and publishes his series of dystopian novels Nunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970). He also takes refuge in poetry, the last exercise of literary and philosophical asceticism of a writer who, gradually, chooses to withdraw from the world.

It is during a journey from the capital towards the Midi in the south, that the lovers stopped for a day in Vaumort:

“Below us, far away, the road to Paris.
You pour some wine upon a tomb.
The bees drink with us, the dead [approve.”
Durrell's poetry has suffered from the resounding success of his novels, however, here it achieves great lyrical beauty, its free verse, nevertheless, very musical, picking up the cemetery's well-known motif:
“One careless cemetery buzzes on and on
As if her tombstones were all hives
Overturned by the impatient dead
We imagined they had stored up
he honey their of their immortality
In the soft commotion the black bees make.”

Here the writer attempts to capture in the poem a moment of happiness and carnal pleasure with his lover, and frames the verse he has written in long, graphite lines and many brightly coloured drawings. Here we have a rare example of a double work of art, both poetic and pictorial. Produced in marker and colour pencil, similar to the drawings of Joan Miró, it is a magnificent illustration marked with naivety, which beautifully complements the poem. Durrell continued this activity until the end of his life, which he spent in Sommières: Incidentally, we can also see a real pictorial reference to the “burnt and dusty Languedoc” (verse 12), where he spent the rest of his life.

Rare testimony of Durrell's Provençal adventure with the young French lady, who inspired him to write a delightful poem imbued with warmth and Mediterranean colours.