Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  The adjustment to married life was greater for Lee than for Gerald. Gerald had been married before, and knew what to expect and what not. But Lee had exchanged the Mississippi for the Channel Islands, a zoology department for a zoo, a career for a cause, obscurity for celebrity and a settled lifestyle for a nomadic one, with a third of the year spent globetrotting to raise money, lecture and collect animals, a third at the Mazet in the South of France, and a third in Jersey at the zoo. Gerald had worked out a way of life that suited him, and he was used to having his own way. He began the day with beer and ended it with brandy, and brooked no protest. ‘My doctor says I don’t deserve to have such a magnificent heart, liver and constitution,’ he would say. You fitted in with this or perished. Lee fitted in. That she did so readily and successfully was a tribute to them both.

  Gerald was enormously proud of his young wife and amazed at his luck in having married her. ‘He was inseparable from her,’ a close friend was to recall, ‘and she from him. In spite of the age gap and the culture divide they were a marriage made in heaven.’ Though Gerald had always had misgivings about people with letters after their names, Lee was an exception. He valued her Ph.D as highly as if it were his own, and was always anxious to promote her and encourage her in all her undertakings. His sister Margaret sometimes felt he clucked and fussed over his new wife too much. ‘Don’t put her on a pedestal,’ she recalled telling him. ‘Don’t try and make her something it’s impossible to be. She’s not a rare and tender plant. Just treat like a really nice, normal, beautiful wife. Just leave it at that.’ At first friends like Fleur Cowles wondered how this young and attractive girl and this portly middle-aged man had ever got together. ‘In fact Lee was a serious girl with a serious mission,’ Fleur recalled, ‘and she probably met the right man at the right time – and vice versa.’

  In one respect special credit must go to Lee. In marrying a much younger woman, Gerald was often tortured with feelings of insecurity about how long he could hold on to her, especially as they were often in the company of younger men. On a few rare occasions this insecurity erupted in Vesuvian explosions of unfounded and short-lived jealousy. Usually Gerald contented himself with assurances of his own devotion and love, as in the poem he wrote to her for her thirtieth birthday on 7 September 1979:

  Now you’re half sixty

  And I’m half a hundred

  In our liaison

  My dear, we’ve not blundered …

  But O! I assure you (it’s one thing 1 can)

  Whatever your age

  I’m your faithful old man.

  Lee’s new home, the flat in Les Augrès Manor, had changed a lot since Jacquie’s time. In order to achieve a greater sense of space, Gerald had knocked down a dividing wall between two smaller rooms to create a very large and spacious main reception room, then had it painted white, with a white carpet and yellow and orange Casa Pupo rugs. Gerald’s personal contribution to the furnishings consisted mostly of his books, which lined two walls in the sitting-room (general reading there – his wide-ranging zoological library was in his office on the ground floor), his remarkable collection of animal sculptures (some realistic, most fantastical, culled from many countries around the world and fashioned out of almost every material known to man, from clay and wood to glass and old iron), and a multitude of naughty Victorian picture postcards of discreetly naked and heavily rotund ladies which had been mounted in a big gilt frame. The overall effect was light, airy and rather disorientating to the uninitiated. ‘I remember walking into that room the first time,’ Simon Hicks, the Trust Secretary, was to recall, ‘and I’d never been in a room like it – you didn’t know where the hell you were, people didn’t know how to perform in there, Gerry had them entirely at his mercy.’

  It was here he held court, entertaining, haranguing and beguiling a stream of visitors that included zoo directors, biologists, conservationists, architects, publishers and a steady flow of reporters from around the world. He never let an opportunity slip to spread the word about the zoo and the Trust’s mission. It was at the kitchen table that he wrote when he was in Jersey (though his books were mostly written down at the Mazet) and met up with his staff over a drink at the end of the working day.

  ‘Gerald Durrell is a passionate man,’ noted a reporter from the Canadian magazine Maclean’s. ‘The enormous living room of his home in Jersey is packed with assorted bric-à-brac, yet Durrell, casually dressed and sunk in a red plush chair, overflows the room with a larger-than-life presence. He can talk with fluency and vehemence about anything from poetry to cooking, politics to music. But underneath the fluency lies the bitterness of a man who has devoted his working life to the ever-more-precarious survival of animals; the anger of a portly Cassandra.’ Jocular, outrageous, totally without reticence, Gerald was a journalist’s dream, the reporter reckoned. But it was a mistake to suppose his ebullient wit and trencherman’s paunch summed up the whole man. He was a sensitive, unpredictable soul whose love of the world went far beyond biological curiosity.

  Gerald laughed easily, but his mood could change mercurially. He was weary of people questioning his concern about endangered animals by asking ‘But what use are they to us?’ ‘What an arrogant attitude,’ he exploded. ‘Is it not possible for animals to have a right to exist in the world without being of use to us? Ever since the Bible was published we have got it into our heads that everything exists for us. God tells Adam and Eve to subdue the earth and have dominion over all living things – it is one of His few instructions that human beings have obeyed with enthusiasm.’

  It was not only the views in the flat, but also the views from the flat that riveted the visitor. For Gerald and Lee lived over the shop, so to speak, in the middle of a working zoo. In the living-room, for example, Gerald might be suddenly transfixed in the middle of pouring a gin for a guest by the sight of the Przewalski horses in full gallop, while in the dining-room his carving might come to a halt in mid-joint at a glimpse of the crowned cranes doing their courtship dance. ‘Modesty prevents me from relating what can be seen from the bathroom window,’ he wrote, ‘when the serval cats are loudly and apparently agonisingly in season, moaning their hearts out, screaming with love and lust. However, worse – far worse – befalls you in the kitchen should you lift your eyes from the stove and let them wander. You are confronted by a cage full of Celebes apes, black and shiny as jet, with rubicund pink behinds shaped exactly like hearts on valentine cards, and all of them indulging in an orgy which even the most avant-garde Roman would have considered both flamboyant and too near the knuckle. Close contemplation of such a spectacle can lead to disaster, such as irretrievably burning lunch for eight people.’

  Quite apart from adapting to daily life in such an unusual domestic environment, a major task for Lee was to undertake a systematic exploration of the mind and nature of her husband. A flamboyant, robust but occasionally temperamental genius, he did not so much defy analysis as stimulate it. He was sometimes prone to confessionals over a bottle round a table late at night with close friends, though in general he was infinitely more interested in other people than in himself – an essential humility characteristic of human beings bent on great and selfless missions of salvation.

  A list of his favourite things he was asked to provide for a magazine gave a clue not only to his preferences but to the subterranean pressures that caused them to break through to the surface. His favourite sexy animal, for example, was the female giraffe: ‘For gracefulness of movement, size and lustre of eyes, length and thickness of eyelashes, the female giraffe is incomparable. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, no one should have any complaint if they came back as a male giraffe.’ His favourite reptile was the flying snake of the Far East, his favourite poisonous animal the poison arrow frog of the Amazon. No animal was more curious than the narwhal, he reckoned, none more surprising than the mudskipper, none better to eat than reindeer, preferably smoked – ‘but it is best not to serve it at Christmas time to children of a se
nsitive nature’.

  One of the odder ways of divining the real Gerald Durrell was carried out on a Channel TV series called Zodiac and Co. The idea was for a panel consisting of an astrologer, a graphologist and a palmist to produce a profile of a star guest (whose identity was not revealed till the end of the programme) based simply on his or her gender, date of birth, handwriting and palm prints. Given his interest in unorthodox methodology and the paranormal, Gerald did not require much persuasion to take part in the show, but the uncanny accuracy of the panel’s profiles astonished even him.

  Observing that the subject had been born with the sun in Capricorn and the moon in Gemini, the astrologer concluded that he was highly ambitious, prepared to take risks, prone to strain and tension, and liable to breakdown. He was very funny man, and also versatile, astute, cunning and stubborn. There was a hint of the poetic and romantic about him, and he was a good talker with high intellectual ability. If he was born in the early evening he could be a painter, poet or architect. If he was born later at night he might be a journalist or broadcaster. He might very well enjoy danger in his profession, and he could probably sell deep-freezes to Eskimos – ‘if necessary standing on his head’.

  The graphologist described the subject in no less percipient terms: ‘The writer has a strong sense of self, but an uncertain sense of identity, resulting in alternation of inferiority and superiority feelings. He is sensitive and becomes uptight through the hustle and bustle of occupational living. He has a need to withdraw from people to recuperate and to experience being himself. He has both vision and practicality. With his vision there goes culture; with his practicality there goes the will to dominate, in order to escape being dominated by others. He is endowed with inspiration and intuition, good observational powers and constructional ability.’

  As for the palmist, her report was as unerringly on target as the others had been. The subject was an outdoor type, with a love of nature, love of life, qualities of leadership and a deep sense of justice. He was ambitious, well-adjusted and self-sufficient, inspirational and emotional rather than logical and pragmatic, with a sense of fatalism. He had a touch of humour, sometimes lapsing into facetiousness, and he was gifted with an understanding of animals and a devotion to nature in general. ‘At the moment this gentleman is beginning to feel restless in his career,’ she concluded, ‘and a break in the fate line implies that he may be changing his job in the next few years.’

  Gerald’s resurrection as a human being following his marriage to Lee was mirrored by his resurrection as a writer and media man. Felicity Bryan had taken over from Peter Grose as his literary agent at Curtis Brown shortly after his marriage. In the publishing world she was advised that he was a ‘has-been’ as an author and a bit of a wreck as a man. His first more serious book about animals, The Stationary Ark, a spin-off from the television series of the same name which dealt with the practice of modern zoo husbandry at Jersey Zoo, had been a commercial disaster by Gerald Durrell standards, although the reviews were favourable. ‘Durrell’s army of readers,’ wrote the Yorkshire Post, ‘will be relieved to know that despite a new depth in his approach, Mr Durrell has not allowed the flow of rib-tickling anecdotes to run dry; some of them, indeed, seem funnier than ever.’ The Daily Telegraph was no less enthusiastic: ‘He is simultaneously funny, enthusiastic, unsentimental and compassionate. His latest book further enhances his reputation.’

  The trouble was that Gerald had had to write The Stationary Ark as his first marriage collapsed around him, and by the time it was published in 1976 Jacquie had left. Perhaps because the book reflected that unhappy period in his life, perhaps because it did not deal with the animal world in a totally light-hearted way, it never found favour with the public, and its sales were poor. 1976 represented Gerald’s nadir as an author – so much so that Peter Grose described it as ‘the disaster year’– though he retrieved some lost ground with his next two titles, Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons (an engaging account of his animal rescue mission to Mauritius) and Garden of the Gods (the final volume of his Corfu trilogy).

  Possibly because Gerald had decided that his fund-raising trips to America on behalf of the Trust should be undertaken in parallel with publicity tours to promote his books, Garden of the Gods was particularly well received in the United States, though he himself had little regard for it (‘a third work of fiction about our lives,’ he told his brother Larry, ‘and definitely the last, as I have run out of your similes.’) The Miami Herald, for example, found the book ‘an absolute delight – witty, wonderfully evocative, sharply observant, a joy all the way’, while the Boston Globe went overboard: ‘The best of the trilogy, maybe the best written of all, the stories unerringly shaped and paced, the sentences full of the sound and scent and touch and being of everything they describe. There are so many good stories here, so much hilarity, so much acute observation of nature and human nature that one marvels … and one marvels at the prodigal bounty of Creation itself.’ But some reviewers had reservations. How could the author remember so much detail, forty years after the events he described? How could he write three books about five years on Corfu without exhausting the subject? ‘For what this statistic is worth,’ observed the Washington Post, ‘this is the first of the Corfu books over which I did not laugh aloud, though I could see I was expected to.’

  Gerald’s status as a best-selling author remained in jeopardy. When his latest manuscript – a collection of short stories entitled The Picnic – was submitted to Collins early in 1979, his editor, Philip Ziegler, was not wildly enthusiastic, reporting to Peter Grose:

  It is by Gerry and therefore is funny and lively, but I have far too high an opinion of him and his writing to pretend that I think it is anywhere near his top standards. Of course we want to publish it – but I must admit that it is not going to be very easy to promote. It is very distressing to see a downhill trend in Gerry’s sales. I do tremendously hope that in his next book Gerry will be able to give us something on which we can base a major campaign – an expedition book which features some really exceptional prey would certainly provide the goods, though I confess the only animal that springs to mind is the panda.

  This letter not only underscored Gerald’s crisis as an author, but defined a low point in his relations with his publishers. Stung to a vigorous riposte, he described Ziegler’s comments as ‘condescending’, and reckoned that Ziegler had reached a ‘low point in my opinion poll of publishers I have known and loved’. Gerald had been trying to get into China for the last ten years, he complained, and if Collins cared to cough up a huge advance he would be very happy to go off and bring back what Ziegler ‘so sweepingly calls “the goods”’. He asked Peter Grose: ‘Is it time I started looking for another publisher?’

  Given this recent history, it is not surprising that at her first meeting with her new author at the manor house in Jersey, Felicity Bryan was greatly taken aback to find herself confronted with a spry, highly energetic and charming figure, brimming with ideas and the joys of life, back in control of his destiny. On a subsequent visit she took her four-year-old son with her, and was enchanted at how well he and Gerry got on together. ‘Desmond Morris’s summation of David Attenborough – that he personified the intellectual curiosity of a bright fourteen-year-old,’ she was to say, ‘equally applied to Gerry. At his best he was wonderfully entertaining, and his writing beautifully descriptive.’ More to the point, she brought news of a big idea for a book that might revive Gerald’s literary fortunes. It was to be called The Amateur Naturalist, and its international market was potentially huge. Moreover, the chances that a TV series could be tied in with it were high. Gerald was on his way again. In the course of time The Amateur Naturalist was to outsell everything he had ever written, My Family and Other Animals included.

  Meanwhile the Trust was going from strength to strength, in spite of opposition to everything it stood for from the zoo establishment. As long ago as 1965 captive breeding as a tool to save endangered species had recei
ved endorsement in important quarters. At a conference held that year at the Zoological Society of London – the Zoos and Conservation Symposium – Dr Ernst Lang of Basle Zoo had told the delegates: ‘In order to save threatened species from extinction it is not enough to keep and breed them over generations in zoos; there must exist, in addition, the possibility of readapting them to wild life in reserves and national parks. We believe we have enough evidence to show that the scheme can be carried out successfully. The zoos are ready to help the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in their momentous task, provided they are heard and invited to co-operate.’

  But more than ten years later there was still entrenched opposition to the whole idea at the highest level. At the second World Conference on Breeding Endangered Species in Captivity, held at London Zoo in July 1976 and attended by Gerald, the conference’s Chairman, Professor Lord Zuckerman, revealed his own reservations about the subject of the conference in no uncertain terms. It was the last stand of the old guard against the new believers.

  Lord Zuckerman’s closing address was precise, thoughtful and specious. Nothing that had happened in the world of zoos and animal conservation had caused him to change his spots. Nothing that had been said at the conference had led him to budge an inch. He remained at heart an unreconstructed pre-war zoo apparatchik. The purpose of zoology, in his view, was the promotion of the interests of the zoological scientist, not the zoological animal. ‘Species have always been disappearing,’ he said. ‘There will always be rare species.’ If you wanted to leave the remaining species of the world as they were, you would have to get rid of the human species. As that was not an option, ergo saving endangered species from extinction was not an option either.

  What was more, Lord Zuckerman went on, some animals in the wild didn’t deserve to be saved. Some are pests. Especially monkeys. And what about mosquitoes? ‘Man can affect the process of biological selection,’ he agreed, ‘but regardless of human influence there will always be selection and evolution.’ This was true, as any biologist would acknowledge, but was it really a justification for not raising a voice or lifting a finger in the midst of an animal holocaust? The preservation of endangered animals was theoretically desirable as a social good, Zuckerman went on – meaning good for man – but practically impossible. There was no stopping the growth of human populations and the march of progress. And the cost was formidable. Where was the money going to come from? People might queue up to hear circus seals play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on car horns, but governments are not going to allocate large sums of money to help endangered species whose owners are making money out of them.