The Durrells of Corfu
Page 15
Night after night they sat working on their books, their typewriters at opposite ends of the table, on which they spread a map of Alexandria, ‘tracing and re-tracing the streets with our fingers, recapturing much that I had lost, the brothels and the parks, the dawns over Lake Mareotis’. Against the noise of pistol shots and bombs going off at the rate of three or four a night, and of reports coming in from the operations room of another ambush in the mountains, it was a ‘very queer and thrilling period, sad, weighed down with futility and disgust, but marvellous to be able to live in one’s book’.
Claude, whom Larry met in Cyprus after his marriage to Eve collapsed.
Justine was finished, but so was Cyprus for Larry, and that summer he returned to England. Then, in early 1957, having lost all hope of making Cyprus his new Greek island home, he and Claude went to live in Sommieres, in Provence, where Larry remained for the rest of his life. Justine would be the making of his reputation as a novelist – the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet, which would be acclaimed around the world.
* * *
At the same time as Larry was writing Justine, Gerry was writing his own masterpiece in his small attic room at Margo’s house in Bournemouth, recovering the Corfu he thought he had lost with childhood. As with his other books, Gerry set out to write a straightforward money-earning animal book, first calling it Childhood with Scorpions, then World in a Nautilus, and running through several more titles as the writing progressed. But increasingly the family imposed itself on the book until finally he arrived at the title, My Family and Other Animals.
‘The book was written sitting in bed in my sister’s house, with an endless procession of family and friends coming into the room to gossip, drink tea or wine, fight or just simply tell me how the book should be written,’ Gerry recalled. He claimed to be astonished that he had managed to write anything at all, yet he found this book – unlike its predecessors – a joy to write, even suggesting that it was effortlessly written by some secret spirit within him.
When he had completed it, the first thing Gerry did was send a copy of the typescript to Theodore to check it for the biology and history of Corfu and the correct spelling of Greek names. Meanwhile the family was reading the book with differing reactions. Mother hardly recognised herself and complained, ‘The awful thing about Gerald’s book is that I’m beginning to believe it is all true.’ Larry, for his part, praised Gerry’s essential truthfulness: ‘He has successfully recreated his family with the devastatingly faithful eye of a thirteen year old. This is a very wicked, very funny, and I’m afraid rather truthful book.’
For Margo, who felt Gerry portrayed her as a walking non sequitur and something of an airhead, forever worried about pimple cream: ‘There were things I objected to strongly’; what she called exaggerations. ‘Gerry took it for absolute granted that I would sanction everything he wrote, but I didn’t. Gerry became very successful by libelling me a lot.’
By the time My Family and Other Animals was published, Leslie had long gone to Kenya and left no recorded reaction to the book. But Gerry, talking some years later to his friend David Hughes, said it was Leslie who had taught him what storytelling was all about. It had started when Leslie would return home from school on holidays ‘and tell me Billy Bunter stories. He used to embellish them with his own bits and pieces, add a dash of his own school adventures, imitate a master or two in a very clever and vivid fashion. He had the same gift as Larry, only untutored, not so well developed.’
The Family – Leslie aside – reunited: Gerry, Margo, Mother and Larry, at Gerry’s zoo on Jersey, Christmas 1960.
And more than that. Gerry paid Leslie the compliment of stealing at least one of his stories for inclusion in My Family and Other Animals. It was not, in fact, Gerry who encountered and was befriended by Kosti the convict and murderer. That story was Leslie’s; Gerry simply appropriated Leslie’s story to himself. Which was something of a family habit. Larry liked to tell the story of being treated for tropical sprue in India and having to drink the warm blood from a freshly killed chicken, but again the event belonged to Leslie; he had been the sickly child who was made to drink the chicken’s blood.
* * *
Defeated by violence from founding his zoo in Cyprus, Gerry hoped to start a zoo in Bournemouth or Poole, but in 1958 after months of negotiations he was thwarted again, this time by what he called the ‘constipated mentality of local government’. Gerry was about to abandon the idea of a zoo altogether when his publisher told him that he had a contact in Jersey who might be able to help him find someplace there. Gerry flew to the island and was met at the airport by Major Hugh Fraser, who took him back for lunch at his ancestral home, Les Augrès Manor, in Trinity. There, Gerry almost idly said this would make a fine place for a zoo, to which the Major replied, ‘Are you serious?’ and suddenly the deal was done. ‘So after a frustrating year of struggling with councils and other local authorities, I had gone to Jersey and within an hour of landing at the airport I had found my zoo.’
The Jersey Zoo would be Mother’s home for the last years of her life. At times Louisa’s children had seemed like animals, so, as she said, this was nothing new. On one occasion Chumley the chimpanzee escaped from his cage and with his girlfriend Lulu loped across the grounds to the manor house and up the stairs. Mother heard a loud bang on her door and found them cheerfully standing there, looking for a cuddle and treats. She sat them down on the sofa and opened a tin of biscuits and a box of chocolates. When Gerry found out he remonstrated with her for letting them in. ‘But dear, they came to tea – and they had jolly sight better manners than some of the people you’ve had up here.’
Gerry with Trumpy, the Greywinged Trumpeter, opening the Jersey Zoo.
On a visit to Bournemouth in 1964, Mother suddenly died.
* * *
The creation of the Jersey Zoo was miraculous but its survival required hard work. Gerry was obliged to write two books a year to keep it afloat. But he was not the man to manage the finances and administration of such a large and complex project. ‘Uncle Gerry had a heart of gold,’ said Margo’s son Gerry Breeze, who worked at the zoo in its early days, ‘but his wife Jacquie was the captain. Handing out orders was not his way of doing things. He was only concerned with the animals, not with administering anything.’ Jacquie, however, felt herself on the margins and claimed that Gerry was entirely absorbed in the animals and hardly took account of her. In 1976, she left Gerry and the zoo.
A year later, while visiting Duke University in North Carolina, Gerry met Lee McGeorge, a Zoology graduate who had recently returned from Madagascar, where she had been studying the social behaviour of lemurs and the vocal communication of birds and mammals. Gerry explained how this first encounter went: ‘Animal communication in all its forms happened to be a subject in which I was deeply interested. I gazed at her. That she was undeniably attractive was one thing, but to be attractive and studying animal communication lifted her almost into the realm of being a goddess.’ In 1979 they married, and for the next sixteen years, until his death in 1995, Lee joined Gerry on expeditions, in writing books and in running the zoo. Today, Lee continues to play an active role as honorary director of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and in its work at the Jersey Zoo.
Gerry with Lee McGeorge, 1977.
The earliest home to Gerry’s zoo in England was at 51 St Alban’s Avenue in Bournemouth, the place where he wrote My Family and Other Animals. Margo died there in 2004 and the house was sold. No monkeys have been seen in the neighbourhood for years. There ought at least to be a plaque outside.
Following the publication of The Alexandria Quartet, Larry was shortlisted for the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature. He revisited the Greece of his youth in the 1976 BBC film Spirit of Place – Lawrence Durrell’s Greece, in which he journeys to Corfu, Rhodes, Crete and Hydra. Meanwhile he had written two dystopian novels, Tunc and Nunquam, before turning his attention to Provence, where he lived. Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian
and Quinx comprise his last major work, The Avignon Quintet, filled with lyrical and mystical evocations of Provence, with Constance in particular being one of the best novels about France during the Second World War. In 1990 Larry, who had been living for some years with his last partner, Francoise Kestsman, died in Sommieres.
The acclaimed novelist: Lawrence Durrell in Paris, 1984.
* * *
The Jersey Zoo and Gerry’s My Family and Other Animals are the legacy of a magical childhood in Corfu. And Larry’s Prospero’s Cell, which lyrically captures the atmosphere of Corfu before the war, ranks with The Alexandria Quartet and Bitter Lemons, his account of his years in Cyprus, as one of the best books he ever wrote.
Corfu, meantime, has changed. It had already been ruined by tourism, in Gerry’s view, by the time he returned in 1967 to make Corfu, Garden of the Gods, a BBC television documentary. He felt guilty that perhaps the tourists were following in the footsteps of My Family and Other Animals. ‘Total lack of control, total rapacity, total insensitivity’ was his condemnation of the Greeks who sacrificed beauty to money – the money not even going into local pockets but to tour operators and hotel consortiums. Not only animals can be endangered and wiped out, he lamented, but landscapes too.
The three villas are, in fact, still there – the Strawberry-Pink, the Daffodil-Yellow, the Snow-White – but they are privately owned, cannot be visited (though the first can be rented) and can be hard to find. The airport runway extends to the tip of Canoni, where Spiro Americanos used to live, and planes approach low over Perama and the Chessboard Fields.
But at Kalami there is the White House where Larry and Nancy made their home. As Larry described it:
That house with its remoteness and the islands going down like soft gongs all the time into the amazing blue, and I shall really never, never ever forget a youth spent there discovered by accident. It was pure gold. But then of course there may be an element of self-deception in it because youth does mean happiness, it does mean love, and that’s something you can’t get over.
To the side of the White House is a taverna with beautiful views across the bay and towards Albania. The taverna is built upon that black ledge of rock where Nancy and Larry would breakfast early in the morning; where Henry Miller stripped himself naked and swam in the sea for the first time in twenty years; where Theodore observed stars and comets in the night sky; where Veronica and Dorothy danced; where Spiro would descend the goat path from his Dodge on the road above; where Margo sunned and Gerry searched the shallow waters for strange creatures when they came to visit; where Leslie put in with his boat when he took the whole family for a day of hunting, fishing, collecting and picnicking, at Lake Antiniotissa in the far north of the island, so beautiful that Mother gave it her highest accolade: ‘I’d like to be buried there.’
The house is owned now by Tassos Athenaios, grandson of Totsa, and his wife Daria – still in family hands. Here you can have a drink and know that everybody has passed by once upon a time.
* * *
Larry sent this photo to Henry Miller in 1947, writing: “Do you remember Spiro? Here is a picture of him cooking an eel in red sauce for Gerald, then aged about 12. The old car in the background. Just after this was taken the car was nearly carried away by the sea and we had to stand up to our waists in water and dig it out.”
Further Reading
Works by the Durrells and Friends
GERALD DURRELL:
Titles with an immediate relevance to Corfu.
My Family and Other Animals, 1956; Birds, Beasts and Relatives, 1969; The Garden of the Gods, 1978. (Published in one volume as The Corfu Trilogy, 2006).
Fillets of Plaice, 1971.
Marrying Off Mother and Other Stories, 1991.
LAWRENCE DURRELL:
Major works or otherwise relevant to Greece.
The Black Book, 1938 – written on Corfu.
Prospero’s Cell, 1945 – about Corfu.
Reflections on a Marine Venus, 1953 – about Rhodes.
Bitter Lemons, 1957 – about Cyprus.
The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, 1957; Balthazar, 1958; Mountolive, 1958; Clea, 1960).
Spirit of Place, 1969 – Mediterranean travel writing.
Blue Thirst, 1975 – about Corfu and Egypt.
The Greek Islands, 1978.
The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-80, 1988.
Lawrence Durrell Selected Poems edited by Peter Porter, 2006.
MARGARET DURRELL
Whatever Happened to Margo?, 1995.
HENRY MILLER
The Colossus of Maroussi, 1941.
THEODORE STEPHANIDES
Autumn Gleanings: Corfu Memoirs and Poems, 2011.
Works about the Durrells
Douglas Botting Gerald Durrell: The Authorised Biography, 1999.
David Hughes Himself and Other Animals: A Portrait of Gerald Durrell, 1997.
Ian MacNiven Lawrence Durrell: A Biography, 1998.
Joanna Hodgkin Amateurs in Eden: The Story of a Bohemian Marriage: Nancy and Lawrence Durrell, 2012.
Michael Haag Alexandria: City of Memory, 2004.
ONLINE
Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust
www.durrell.org
The Ark Gallery
www.arkgallery.org
Durrelliana: a Scrapbook
www.whitemetropolis.wordpress.com
The International Lawrence Durrell Society
www.lawrencedurrell.org
Acknowledgments
My special thanks to Lee Durrell and the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust for generously allowing me access to Gerald Durrell’s family photographs and his papers, in particular his notes for his unpublished autobiography. Family and other interviews with Margaret Durrell and also memoirs written by her were kindly made available to me by her granddaughter Tracy Breeze and her niece Penelope Durrell Hope
Thanks also to the following people who in various ways have kindly contributed towards the writing of this book, in some cases before I knew I was going to write it:
Tassos and Daria Athenaios, Gerry Breeze, Tracy Breeze, Catherine Brown, Brewster Chamberlin, Veronica Tester Dane, Eve Cohen Durrell, Jacquie Durrell, Lawrence Durrell, Anthony Hirst, Joanna Hodgkin, Penelope Durrell Hope, Françoise Kestsman, Ian MacNiven, Alexia Mercouri, Alexander Mercouris, Anthea Morton-Saner, Simon Nye, Frank Pike, Richard Pine, Dorothy Stevenson Rumsey, Charles Sligh, Alan Thomas, Rev Alistair Tresider at St Luke’s Church, Hampstead, Nanos Valaoritis, and Rev Jules Wilson at Holy Trinity Church, Corfu.
I would like to thank for their assistance: the British Library, the Gennadius Library in Athens, the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, the University of Victoria Library in British Columbia, the University of California Los Angeles Library, and l’Université Paris X at Nanterre.
Sources and images
The following works have been quoted in this book
GERALD DURRELL
My Family and Other Animals, 1956; Birds, Beasts and Relatives, 1969; The Garden of the Gods, 1978. All copyright Gerald Durrell:
LAWRENCE DURRELL
Pied Piper of Lovers, 1935; The Black Book, 1938; Prospero’s Cell, 1945; Spirit of Place, 1969; Blue Thirst, 1975; The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-80, 1988. All copyright Lawrence Durrell excepting letters by Henry Miller.
OTHERS
Autumn Gleanings: Corfu Memoirs and Poems by Theodore Stephanides, 2011 (copyright Theodore Stephanides).
The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller, 1941 (copyright Henry Miller).
Golden Threads by Benjamin Rossen. Recollections of the Durrells by Vivian Iris Raymond (www.levantineheritage.com) (copyright Benjamin Rossen)
PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
All photographs and illustrations are the copyright of and used with permission of Lee Durrell and the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust unless noted below.
Gerry and Tracy Breeze: pp.164, 170, 178, 182.
Penelope Durrell: p
p.xii, 4, 10, 39, 40, 87, 114, 119, 120, 123, 127, 129, 147, 151, 162, 166, 187, 191.
Joanna Hodgkin: p.161.
Catherine Brown and Alexander Mercouris: pp.88, 99, 185.
Michael Haag: pp.2, 7, 8, 27, 33, 60, 109, 112, 125, 157, 181.
Getty Images: p.193 (Loomis Dean, The LIFE Picture Collection); p.198 (Ulf Andersen, Hulton Archive).
I have endeavoured to credit all sources and photographers; apologies to anyone who is not properly credited – omissions can be corrected in future editions. Please contact the publishers.
Index
A
Agathi 68, 70
Albania 91, 131, 138, 145, 155, 156
Alecko (bird) 137–8, 139, 140, 148
Alexander, Mary see Stephanides, Mary
Alexandria 171–2
Alexandria Quartet, The (Lawrence Durrell) 57, 172, 186, 190, 191, 197, 199
Allard, Miss 46
Androuchelli, Dr 96
Aphrodite 81
Argentina 185–6
Arsenius, St 116–17, 156
Athenaios, Anastasius (Totsa) 110, 122, 131, 143, 159, 200
Athenaios, Daria 200
Athenaios, Tassos 200
Avignon Quartet, The (Lawrence Durrell) 57, 198
B
Bafut Beagles, The (Gerald Durrell) 180, 188
bear cubs 13–14
Berridge House, Bournemouth 31–8
Bindle (dog) 14, 16–17
Birds, Beasts and Relatives (Gerald Durrell) xi, 59
Bitter Lemons (Lawrence Durrell) 199
Black Book, The (Lawrence Durrell) 28, 110, 115, 118, 120–2
Borovansky, Edouard 184–5
Bournemouth 31–8, 41–5, 46–51, 168, 177–9, 180, 181–2, 197
Breeze, Gerry 169, 196
Breeze, Jack 163–4, 168, 169–70, 177