Lawrence George Durrell was born in India at Jullundur in the United Provinces, of an Irish mother, Louisa Florence Dixie Durrell, and a British civil-engineer father, Lawrence Samuel Durrell. The autobiographical title poem, dated 1943, of Cities, Plains and People (1946) looks back on that early landscape, its horizon bounded by the Himalayas and the distant snows of Tibet; here was a sense of living in timeless harmony, which all his poetry and prose fiction would seek to evoke. "Once in idleness was my beginning," he remembers; it was a "honeycomb of silence," where time and history took on fresh dimensions and "Death marched beside the living as a friend/With no sad punctuation by the clock." The poem traces his passing from that paradise to "Pudding Island o'er the Victorian foam"--that is, St. Edmund's School in Canterbury, Kent, then bohemian London, where, in his early twenties, he made...