In his review of The Novel Today (1936) by the Marxist theoretician Philip Henderson, George Orwell refers to the last occasion – six or seven years before, he estimates – when the magazine Punch ‘produced a genuinely funny joke’. This, according to Orwell, was a cartoon of an ‘intolerable youth’ telling his aunt that when he comes down from university he intends to ‘write’. And what is he going to write about, the aunt wonders. ‘My dear aunt,’ her nephew crushingly replies, ‘one doesn’t write about anything, one just writes.’

There are several points worth making about the ‘art for art’s sake’ attitude to writing. One is that it is a political attitude, if only because most of its exponents tend to be moneyed people from the rentier class. Another is that writerly detachment of the kind commended by the ‘intolerable youth’ was not quite extinguished by the highly divisive political conflicts of the 1930s. It simply evolved into different varieties of quietism. A hard-boiled version was pioneered by Henry Miller, whose Tropic of Cancer – much admired by Orwell – appeared in 1934. A much less abrasive variant was peddled by Miller’s acolyte Lawrence ‘Larry’ Durrell.

Thirty-five years after Larry’s death, it is no use pretending that the attitudes he espoused, the life he lived or the work he produced have worn at all well. In fact, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, scrupulously set down by I S MacNiven, reads like a satire of