Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  Lawrence’s own life had been peripatetic and tumultuous in the last two years. At the beginning of 1953, faced with a new posting to either Russia or Turkey, he had resigned from his position as information officer at the British Embassy in Belgrade and retreated to Cyprus to rediscover his Greek and Mediterranean roots and rekindle his creative fire. He was working hard to finish his novel Justine, the first volume of what eventually became the Alexandria Quartet, which was to make his fame and fortune. In a little village called Bellapaix a few miles from Kyrenia, he bought a small house near a medieval abbey on a hill overlooking a landscape of orange and lemon trees. His dark-eyed baby daughter Sappho was with him, and so for a while was Mother, standing in as housekeeper and nanny for his wife Eve, who had suffered a serious nervous breakdown.

  Cyprus itself was also entering a period of breakdown, and before long, as Greek Cypriot complaints over British rule turned from protests and strikes to open resistance and the outright armed war of the struggle for enosis (union) with Greece, Lawrence’s peace was shattered. Before long, against his instincts, he once again found himself in government harness, this time (because of his knowledge of the Greek language and Greek mind) as director of information services for the British colonial authority in Nicosia, a post some Cypriots thought made him tantamount to being a British spy.

  In the midst of all this it was clear that Lawrence and Eve’s ailing marriage was beyond all repair, and was descending into a deeper circle of recrimination and pain. A stream of visitors alleviated the tedium and duplicity of Lawrence’s job and the nastiness of the private hell, and early in 1955 Gerald and Jacquie came to stay for two months. ‘Knowing Gerry’s fascination with films and film-making,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘Larry suggested that he might get to know the island by making a film about it. Gerry needed no excuse for leaving “Pudding Island” and soon we were once again surrounded by odd bits of equipment.’

  There may have been another reason for visiting Cyprus. Like his brother, Gerald was not a committedly English Englishman, and had no problem with the idea of pitching camp elsewhere. He was still haunted by the magic of his childhood on one Mediterranean Greek island, and entertained a faint hope – though Cyprus was no Corfu – of gaining a foothold on another in his maturity. More, he fancied that perhaps somewhere in Cyprus might be found an ideal location for an ideal zoo – a dream zoo on a dream island, warm, Greek and indulgent. At the end of 1954, at his brother’s request, he had written an article for the Cyprus Review, a quasi-governmental periodical which Lawrence was editing, on the subject of the potential for a zoo on the island: ‘It strikes me as surprising that no one has yet started a zoo in a place like Cyprus … The advantages are considerable, the main one being the climate. It is amazing how a good climate can cut down the costs of such a project, and most creatures, including some of the more rare or delicate beasts, could be bred there with success.’

  Gerald and Jacquie arrived in Cyprus on 31 March 1955. It was Gerald’s first glimpse of the Mediterranean since he left Corfu as a boy before the war. ‘My young and very successful brother arrived this morning,’ Lawrence wrote to Freya Stark, ‘for a two month stay to finish a book and make a couple of television films in colour. He is bursting with energy and enthusiasm.’ Among a stream of guests who passed through Lawrence’s house were the writer and philhellene Patrick Leigh Fermor and his wife, who overlapped with Gerald for a couple of days. ‘We were delighted and very amused to see how very alike the two brothers were,’ Leigh Fermor recalled, ‘in looks, voice, laughter, outlook, humour and zest for life.’

  But Gerald’s high expectations of Cyprus as a possible location for his zoo were almost instantly scuppered. Lawrence had arranged a small cocktail party to introduce his brother and sister-in-law to Cypriot society in Nicosia. Later that night, the two brothers were having a drink when a series of bomb blasts went off all over the city, followed by an enormous explosion from the direction of the radio station. It was the beginning of the Cypriot terrorist war of resistance against the British. Lawrence rushed out of the house, shouting: ‘My classical records!’ Gerald rushed after him. ‘Wait!’ he shouted. ‘If you’re going to be such a damn fool as to get yourself blown up, I can’t let you go alone. Wherever I go,’ he complained, remembering Paraguay, ‘there’s a bloody revolution.’

  The plan of travelling around in a government van to make a film of the island was hurriedly abandoned. Instead, Gerald and Jacquie stayed on at Bellapaix to make a film about the importance of a water supply to a Cypriot village – an oddly earnest subject for a man of Gerald’s disposition. He remembered enough Greek to get on good terms with the local Cypriots, and was treated with friendly hospitality even in hostile areas of the island, but an island at war was no place for a zoo, and a family at war no place for a brother. When a television project cropped up in London, Gerald and Jacquie were happy to leave Cyprus to its troubles and Larry and Eve to theirs.

  THIRTEEN

  The Book of the Idyll

  1955

  On 12 June 1955 Gerald and Jacquie returned to England and settled into another rented flat, this time at 70A Holden Road, Woodside Park, on the northern edge of London. Here Gerald went down with a bout of jaundice and was put on an austere diet of steamed fish, dry bread and no alcohol – ‘something no sane person will put up with’, he was to complain.

  Never had he been so fortuitously laid low. Agueish and ailing, confined to his room, removed from the obligations and routines of daily life, waited on hand and foot by Jacquie, Gerald had a rare opportunity to roam mentally at will, turn over stones, re-form the scattered fragments of the past into new patterns and meanings that had not been perceived before – indeed, there was nothing much else for his mind to do.

  As he entered the fourth decade of his life, Gerald began to rediscover the terrain of the early part of his second – the paradise years on Corfu before the war. The island had never been far below the threshold of his consciousness. He had never stopped talking about it. A childhood experience of such intense and transcendent joy, a happiness so powerful it was like an ache, is always with you. In many ways Corfu had made Gerald what he was now, had firmed and channelled his interests in natural history, taught him a way of life and fashioned a point of view, an insight into the nature of existence, human as well as animal, that hidebound, sclerotic old England could never have done. In his illness Gerald allowed himself the luxury of reliving those halcyon years in a wallowing of nostalgia that was both exquisite and sad, like the remembrance of a perfect love that is for ever past and gone. ‘Corfu,’ he told his friend David Hughes years later, ‘was like Christmas every day.’

  On Corfu, he realised, ‘what I really learned was pleasure … Sun and sea. Music. Colours. And textures: rocks, tree barks, the feel of things. Then bathes, swimming, water on the body … The island was perfect for it, like a film set, the cypresses stagily against the sky, the olive groves painted on the starry backcloth of the night, the big moon hanging over the water – a Hollywood of the senses.’

  Gerald had first exhumed his childhood memories in a systematic way some three years previously for a radio talk entitled My Island Tutors, broadcast on the BBC Home Service in December 1952. The talk confined itself to the four eccentric expatriate tutors – to whom he gave the names Thomas Johnson (i.e. George Wilkinson), Michel (Pat Evans), the Belgian Consul and the Polish humpback (Krajewsky) – who had been hired to instil some learning into the obdurate flint of his juvenile head. The characters of this bizarre foursome were brilliantly and hilariously drawn, and occasionally Gerald allowed a brief peep of the broader backcloth of the island and the boy’s true interests there – dusty goat tracks through olive groves down to beaches white as snow and seas as clear as crystal and warm as blood; the cobbled streets and bright stalls of the Jewish quarter of Corfu town, overrun by an army of cats; the intricate, intimate nether world of the trapdoor spider; a matchbox full of scorpions; an attic full of singing birds …


  Gerald had barely skimmed the surface of his memory for this broadcast, and notably missing was his true island tutor, Theo Stephanides, who counted as a friend and mentor rather than a hired hand, along with the rest of his family. But it was a beginning, and now, laid up in bed in the flat in the very different environment of an outer London suburb, he began to forage wider and delve deeper, till a whole vanished world lay bare before him. Here, he realised, set out like an array of riches in some exotic bazaar, was the raw material of the one book he really wanted and needed to write – the story of his enchanted childhood in the never-never land of Corfu. ‘It was,’ said Jacquie, ‘the one book he had been talking about for years.’

  Gerald was artist enough to know that here was the stuff of true literature, and hard-headed enough to know that if he did it right, he had a winner. Two opposing but complementary forces began to work on the idea. On the one hand, whole scenes, whole chapters even, began to gush out like a verbal oil-strike – crude oil, perhaps, but the genuine stuff nonetheless – complete and fully formed, apparently without the intervention of any human agency between memory and pen. On the other hand, the way Gerald set about fashioning the raw material of his story entailed a great deal of calculated, professional cunning.

  In conversation with David Hughes years later, Gerald intimated that he had ‘sat down consciously to manufacture a best-seller’. Hughes recorded: ‘To mix the magic, Durrell maintained he had started off like a good cook with three ingredients which, delicious alone, were even better in combination: namely, the spellbinding landscape of a Greek island; his discovery of its wild denizens, both animal and Greek; and the eccentric conduct of all the members of his family. The first offered escape, sunshine, paradise, peace; the second adventure in the natural world; the third, fun, light relief, situation comedy.’ The trick, Gerald reckoned, was to ring the changes on the three ingredients, so that the reader never had a chance to grow tired of one before being hit with another.

  ‘I made a grave mistake by introducing my family in the first few pages,’ Gerald was to write towards the end of this intensive exercise in total (but reconstituted) recall. Once they appeared, he complained, ‘the family took the book over, as characters often do, developing a life of their own on the printed page’. Only with difficulty, he said, did he manage to squeeze his animals in at all.

  There is no doubting the meticulous care with which he originally planned the book. ‘I plan my chapters with great care,’ he explained later, ‘and also the order in which they appear. It’s a bit like a layer cake.’ He would put a bit of descriptive writing here, and a bit of humour there, followed by some natural history just so, so that there was a constant variety in the flow.

  The first question to be settled was the title, for a book without the right title is like a battle without an objective; a good title not only evokes but defines, and without one there often lurks a text without a concept. Gerald listed the possibilities as they occurred to him. First ‘A Young Man’s Fancy’, ‘Childhood with Scorpions’, ‘World in a Nautilus’. Then, as the Family began to creep in, ‘Quinqueniad’. Later, as the true theme of the story became clearer, ‘The Map of Paradise’, ‘The Chart of Childhood’. Finally he decided to go with ‘The Rose Beetle Man’. Unlike the other titles, which were mostly trite or obscure, this one at least evoked a hard, visual image, though one too focused to serve as a metaphor for the whole book.

  Next came the structure. There were to be three parts, one for each of the family villas – the Strawberry-Pink Villa at Pérama, the Daffodil-Yellow Villa at Kondokali, the Snow-White Villa at Criseda. Each part would consist of four chapters (later increased to six), and would be twenty thousand words in length. Some complicated sums scribbled on a page of chapter titles produced the astonishingly precise figure of 105,076 words for the total length of the book. Possibly an addendum in the form of a preface, described as ‘small description of me’, accounted for the additional 45,076 words.

  Then came a list of the book’s characters – many of them provided with cartoon portraits drawn by Gerald in ink outline – and their principal characteristics. For example: ‘Larry – unctuous, posey, humorous’; ‘Mother – vague and harassed’; ‘Spiro – typically Greek, volatile, explosive, coarse, kind’.

  Next in Gerald’s meticulous plan came a schedule of the characters’ speech and mannerisms. The cast of human characters was followed by a cast of animal ones – Roger, Widdle, Puke, Aleca, Ulysses, Dodo, and a horde of extras that included magenpies, geckos, sea slugs, ant lions, spider crabs, mason wasps, giant toads and many more.

  There followed a cue-sheet with the order of appearance of every character, human and animal, in all their permutations and combinations, at the end of which, suddenly realising that some of the human ones might still be alive and potentially litigious, Gerald made exhaustive attempts to rename them. His Polish tutor, Krajewsky, for example, went through more than twenty variations, from Quarenski and Petrogubski to Vedzar-dopski and Mulumnivitski, before Gerald settled on an anglicised approximation of his real name, Kralefsky.

  Finally, Gerald composed a two-page overview, entitled ‘Explanation’, of what he thought constituted the premise of the new book (which he now retitled ‘Beasts in my Belfry’). It was, he wrote, ‘the tale of a rather curious apprenticeship’, of how, having become by the age of six ‘a confirmed zoophilist’, he went to live in a rambling villa on a remote Greek island in the Aegean (sic) Sea, which he proceeded to fill with the largest assortment of animals he could find.

  Woodside Park was not the place to write the book. Gerald’s landlord objected to the two monkeys he was keeping in the flat, and after a few weeks of ailing creativity, with Gerald’s yellow complexion now fading to a healthier pasty-white, Margaret drove up to London to convey him back to the bosom of the family in Bournemouth. Here he began to write: ‘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 to tell me how the book should be written. That I managed to write anything at all is a constant source of astonishment to me.’

  Gerald had found most of his books a chore to write. This one was different. Writing it became a joy, a passion, for he was now engaged in reliving, reshaping the paradise years of his life. Looking back, he came to the conclusion that he didn’t actually write it at all: ‘In some curious way, a gremlin seems to have done it for me.’ Jacquie remembered: ‘Never had I known Gerry work as he did then. It seemed to pour out of him and it was all that poor Sophie could do to keep up with the output. Six weeks and 120,000 words later, Durrell collapsed gracefully. It was finished – and so, nearly, was he.’

  What he had written was a wonderful Utopian tale of an island idyll, a classic of childhood seen through the eyes of a grown man who was still that same child at heart.

  Halfway through he had second thoughts about the title, and this time changed it (not very felicitously) to ‘Merrily we Lived’, a phrase adapted from a couplet in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

  But as soon as the book was finished, in a final, exhausted frisson of inspiration – ‘a fit of pique,’ he called it, ‘because the family had taken up so much space’ – he crossed out the latest title and in its place scribbled a new one, dreamed up by his literary agent’s son-in-law:

  MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS

  Gerald’s first thought was to send a copy of the typescript for checking by his old mentor Theo Stephanides. Theo put it under the microscope of his exhaustive scholarship, correcting the spelling of Greek names and recondite details of Corfiot history and biology. ‘Oranges do not start to turn red till about November,’ he pointed out, ‘they are a winter fruit … Are you quite sure that land tortoises eat tiny snails – they are supposed to be vegetarians … I have never seen luminous fire-flies in Corfu after the month of May, only on Mt Olympus did I see them in July … “Turkish” should be “Persian” – corre
ct this for goodness sake or you’ll have the critics trying to be clever about the Turks at the Battle of Thermopylae!’*

  With the typescript safely through this preliminary test, copies were packed off to Curtis Brown and Rupert Hart-Davis. They reacted swiftly. It was a brilliant book, they enthused, the best he had ever done, and would beyond doubt sell in enormous numbers. Hart-Davis would put their whole weight behind its launch, but since it was such an obvious Christmas book they proposed holding back publication until the autumn of 1956, even though that was a year away. They were sorry to hear the book had half-killed him, but the good news was that it was perfect as it stood, and would require absolutely no editorial changes.

  By now Gerald was suffering from total exhaustion. Alan Ogden recommended that he remove himself totally from the cares of the world and give his mind a complete break. The Scilly Isles was suggested as a good place for this sort of mental anaesthesia, and Gerald and Jacquie spent two weeks under the wind and sky, walking, birdwatching, drinking home-made parsnip wine and working hard at thinking of nothing at all. Corfu, for the moment, was out of his system.

  In the meantime, the Family was reading the book. Their reactions were more bemused than amused. Apart from Larry, none of them had been put in the public eye before, and they had some difficulty recognising themselves in the form that the boy Gerald had evidently once seen them. Mother, to whom the book was dedicated – ‘We can be proud of the way we brought her up,’ Larry remarked of her; ‘she is a credit to us’ – was heard to remark: ‘The awful thing about Gerald’s book is that I’m beginning to believe it is all true, when it isn’t.’