Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  Needless to say, he went on, their daughter was magnificent: ‘I would like you to know that in this vitally important world conference your daughter shone like a star. She will be, in the future, one of the most important people in world conservation. The fact that you managed to create her is a miracle, and the fact that she managed to join me is another miracle.’

  In June Gerald received the first instalment of a hefty £50,000 advance for an undemanding but remunerative new writing project – a series of four slim volumes called ‘The Puppy Books’, to be given away as part of a promotion for Andrex toilet tissue. He had already written a draft of the first book, Puppy’s Beach Adventure (which introduced children to seashore life), and the remaining three were soon to follow: Puppy’s Field Day (animals in the country), Puppy’s Pet Pals (domestic animals) and Puppy’s Wild Time (zoo animals). This was Gerald’s first experience of what might be called industrial literature, and the statistics impressed him. A £1 million television advertising budget was allocated to the promotion, and an astonishing ten million puppy books would be produced – one of the biggest print runs in publishing history.

  In July Gerald was down at the Mazet with Lee, putting his new-found surplus of funds to good use by embarking on an ambitious programme of outdoor improvements and landscaping. He wrote to the McGeorges: ‘My wife is convinced that if we spend another £50,000 on it we can turn it into something that Adam and Eve would envy. However, the sun is shining, the pool is soup temperature and, believe it or not, your daughter has become thoroughly unprincipled. She now bathes in the nude and has siestas in a huge hammock. How decadent can you get?’

  In the early autumn there was sad news at the zoo. On 16 September, Jambo, the patriarch of the Jersey gorillas, was found dead, only a few months after Nandi, his portly little thirty-four-year-old mate of some twenty years, and one of the founder members of the Jersey gorilla breeding group, had died, with him beside her to the end. A post-mortem at the Jersey General Hospital revealed that Jambo had died literally of a broken heart – his aorta had split, and he had died instantly and without pain. For Gerald, who had arranged to bring Jambo to Jersey back in 1972, it was like the loss of a friend. Jambo had fathered thirteen young gorillas born at the zoo, and was survived by fifteen grandchildren, making him a major contributor to the world’s captive gorilla population. He had long been one of the great characters of the zoo – powerful, dignified, gentle. In the summer of 1986 he had appeared on the world’s television screens when he gently stood guard over the unconscious figure of five-year-old Levan Merritt, who had tumbled into the gorilla enclosure – an extraordinary incident which changed people’s attitude to the gorilla species overnight and triggered a flood of fan mail and a stream of donations from around the world. Later Jambo’s keeper Richard Johnstone-Scott wrote the story of his life, Jambo: A Gorilla’s Story.

  In October 1992 Gerald’s thirty-seventh and last book (not counting the puppy books) was published. With The Aye-Aye and I, an account of his quest for one of the endangered lemurs of Madagascar, he was at last back in form both as a traveller and a writer. For a time his extraordinary literary career had seemed to falter, the mot juste becoming as elusive and endangered as the aye aye itself. But as Donald Dale Jackson was to write in his review in The Smithsonian: ‘It is a great comfort to open a book and discover in paragraph one of page one that you’re in the hands of a writer delighting in writing, and thus delighting you. The first and last fact about Durrell is that he’s a writer; he’s someone you want to listen to or wander with. Durrell’s eye and humor and skills are such that I suspect he could transform an account of two weeks in Oakland into a good read.’ The Sunday Telegraph’s critic enthused that the book was ‘a splendid, ebullient tale’.

  By the late autumn of 1992 Gerald had gravitated back to the medical world. While in London to publicise his puppy books he ‘collapsed gracefully again with this damn tummy bug’. Blood tests proved inconclusive, and eventually he was able to return to Jersey. By now, however, he had become aware of a new pain which he felt mostly in the abdomen, sometimes reaching round to the back. Though not continuous and never unendurable, it was more obtrusive and obdurate than most, and he was concerned that it would never quite go away. At Lee’s insistence he went to London for tests, but an endoscopy examination of the large bowel produced negative results.

  By early 1993 Gerald felt well enough to embark on a lecture cruise of the west coast of South America – a voyage he was afterwards to describe as ‘the trip to hell’. He and Lee had high expectations that a couple of months at sea would be both recuperative and interesting, but they were to be disappointed, as Gerald reported after they got back to Jersey at the end of April. ‘Nobody explained to me the ship was a close approximation to a Roman slave galley,’ he wrote to friends. The cabin was tiny, the service non-existent, the food indigestible, the noise of the engine indescribable, and the passengers ‘very sweet, very frail and approximately 2,000 years old … when we got to the Galapagos, they had to hitch a chair between two poles and carry me around as in the days of Empire. Then, when we got back to Jersey, my legs had completely given out on me and so I spent five weeks being pummelled and pushed in a nursing home by a physiotherapist who, I think, got her training under the Spanish Inquisition.’ It was not only his legs that had given out. He had been quite ill on his return from South America, and while in the nursing home in Jersey he underwent further drying-out treatment, which included administration of the tranquillising drug Valium. In the early summer he set off for the Mazet to recuperate.

  His beloved Mazet had for long been the place where he could take time out, rest up, dress as he wanted, do as he pleased. It was also the retreat where he went to write, which he found almost impossible to do in the flat at the zoo. This time his writing programme was much more ambitious than usual. Though he was now approaching his seventieth year, he vowed he would never retire. ‘Who wants to retire?’ he asked. ‘I’m interested in many things – art, poetry, cookery, philosophy. What you need is a wide-spectrum mind. I still have many things I want to try.’ All the same, he reckoned he had reached an age where it was appropriate to consider writing the story of his life. Many episodes, of course, had already been told in his numerous autobiographical books, but a complete, coherent autobiography was another matter, and he did not approach the task without a few misgivings. He aired them in his draft preface, entitled ‘How to Give Birth to an Autobiography’.

  When you set out to write your autobiography it has, as I have discovered, a very salutary effect on diminishing one’s self-esteem. You have, full of enthusiasm, sharpened up your goose quill, the inkwell is brimming, the capacious sandbox is ready to dry each precious sheet of parchment, but then you are suddenly overcome with terrible doubts, the chief one being that, though you know you are the most interesting person in the world, does everyone else SHARE YOUR VIEW?

  The author is a lonely soul, like the albatross. He has the black looming shadow always over his shoulder, the knowledge that he can write 50,000 words and not be certain that anyone will read them or, if they do, understand what he is trying to say. It was George III who, when presented with a complimentary copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, said: ‘Another damn, great, thick book! Scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr Gibbon, heh?’ I hope that these scribbles will amuse.

  Gerald was going to call his new book ‘Myself and Other Animals: A Sort of Autobiography’. As the title suggested, he did not have in mind a conventional chronological narrative, but something more impressionistic and idiosyncratic. So it is not surprising that among all his working notes not a single date is to be found, nor that in a memo early on he reminds himself to ‘dodge about in time – but don’t dodge too much’. Very soon he abandoned the idea of squeezing his life into a single volume, and considered spreading it over three: volume one to be called ‘Gilt on the Gingerbread’, volume two ‘Leaning Against the Sun’, volume three ‘Last Minute Exp
lorations’.

  Gerald reported in July that he was collecting a massive file of notes for this magnum opus. His health was better, he said, adding that ‘the only infliction I find hard to combat is old age, an ailment which cannot be averted, alas’. By August he was able to tell his agent Anthea Morton-Saner that the autobiography was progressing satisfactorily. But now the pain in his abdomen and back returned, with a new tenacity and intensity. At this point his progress with the book ceased to be either structured or coherent. His mind blunted and distressed by his deteriorating condition, he ceased writing sequential narrative, and took to fitfully jotting down a miscellany of maxims and pensées, snapshots and reveries. ‘Writing your autobiography,’ he noted, ‘is as terrifying as sleeping alone in a haunted house and dreaming … My mind is stuffed like the Chelsea Flower Show or Kew – with sights, scents, sounds and the patter of mammalian feet, the whisper of wings. I am never me, I am a thousand bits of a jigsaw.’

  Running through these jottings and doodles like a golden thread is the theme which was his life-blood – the wonder, beauty and magic of the world he had known. He wrote of the crystal-clear little waterfalls of the rainforest, the flowers with petals so thick they were like flakes of candle wax, the jungle creeks where the water shone like the finest sherry, the mistral hooting down his chimney and making the fire leap up like tapestry, the shapes of trees, clouds, fires … He wrote of ‘the magic that lies all about us – a fly’s wing as intricate as anything that let the sunlight into Chartres Cathedral, a teacup of water teeming with a myriad of life forms as extraordinary as anything you could find by exploring one of the man-made cities of the world – that is magic’. Trees obsessed him: ‘Trees are loving, immobile friends unto death, giving you a pageant throughout their lives. Trees are like women, we cannot live without them. Trees are the skivvies of the universe. Nobody appreciates them when they are alive but everybody feasts upon their warmth when they are dead.’ But over all of this golden theme lay the black shadow of man: ‘It was a dark day for the planet when man crawled out of his cave and picked up a rock. Of course we should be interested in our own beginnings, the ladder from sperm to sperm, ova to ova, bone to bone, until the skull was filled with tumultuous ideas that went beyond the necessity of pursuing other animals to survive. As soon as other animals became food they became inferior.’ None of this told the story of his life, of course, but it did convey a vision.

  Increasing pain made it difficult for Gerald to concentrate, as did the huffing and puffing of the bulldozers that were levelling and landscaping a new terrace garden outside the Mazet. It was at this moment – a point of no return, had anyone realised it – that Lee had to leave for a long-scheduled assignment in Madagascar, where as director of the Madagascar Tortoise Project she was involved in a captive breeding programme to save the endangered ploughshare tortoise, one of the rarest tortoises in the world.

  Lee was worried about leaving Gerald on his own, though he insisted he would be perfectly all right provided the wine cellar was full and the deep freeze well stocked. But Lee was persistent, so Gerald suggested that Alexandra Mayhew, the beautiful young woman with whom he had once travelled in Assam, come to stay. ‘Lee looked upon this suggestion with all the deep suspicion of a wife whose husband has told her he has to work late at the office with a new, blonde secretary,’ Gerald reported to the McGeorges. ‘I pointed out that Alexandra was married, now divorced, and had a two year old child who would act as chaperone. Anyway, after some argument, it was decided and Alexandra was telephoned and said she would love to come to a home in the South of France with a swimming pool and a good cook thrown in.’

  So Alexandra arrived, bringing her little daughter Siena. ‘The child was frail as a whisp (it was four months premature),’ Gerald was to record, ‘but hyperactive as a squirrel on amphetamines. She rose before dawn, refused to siesta and only went to bed at eight o’clock at night.’ Gerry was very good with the little girl, Alexandra recalled:

  He was very patient, very considerate, he related to her almost intuitively. I think he’d have made a good father – on the one hand strict, on the other totally unstructured. He was in appalling shape physically. He looked a lot older than he was and his legs had swelled up so much with oedema and were so tight inside their skin that they looked as if they could burst at any time. And he was drinking with a vengeance. He’d been to a drying out clinic in Jersey before he came down to the Mazet, but his idea of being on the wagon was beer for breakfast and as much wine as he could drink during the rest of the day, and that seemed to be acceptable – as long as he wasn’t on spirits. But the moment Lee left he started hitting the whisky. I spoke to him endlessly about it but he said he needed it for the pain. It had a pain-killing effect on his hips, he said. I felt very guilty about it, because it was me that had to drive him to the market in Nîmes to buy two bottles of whisky every time, and he would drink one a day while Lee was away, on top of all the other stuff. He changed quite considerably during the three weeks I was there. He became maudlin and morose and verbally aggressive. Though he was supposed to be writing a book he spent many days just staring blankly in front of him, sitting at a little desk by the door from the sitting room to the kitchen, not writing a word. It was very sad. It was as though he had pressed a self-destruct button. I quizzed him about it. I said, ‘Look, your brother’s already died of it, do you want to go the same way?’ But he was a bit fatalistic about it. It was karma, he said.

  Margaret, too, had noticed a change in her brother in recent years. His liver was not in good working order, she guessed, but sometimes she wondered whether he was mentally affected as well. ‘There is an atmosphere of sullen gloom,’ she wrote to a friend from the Mazet on an earlier visit, ‘with bouts of vitriolic outbursts when he rumbles on like a Kodiak bear with ulcers.’ Gerald once told her he knew what would happen if he went on as he was – he had read it up in the medical books. ‘It wasn’t that he was exhausted with life’s struggle,’ Alexandra Mayhew noted. ‘He still had this tremendous verve and enthusiasm. He was still a zealot as far as his subject was concerned. I didn’t see a great diminution in that side of him at all. He just had a sickness called alcoholism.’

  A hospital doctor who knew and admired Gerald was to say: ‘It’s easy to see how he became hooked on alcohol. Even if he hadn’t been genetically prone to it, he was the kind of man who just had to escape, protect himself from the harshness of everyday reality, which he found too scary or terrible or depressing in the raw. In his case alcohol did not by and large have an adverse affect on his ability to do his work and function properly as a human being. Well-compensated alcoholics can do that. Going around with a drink inside them is their normal functioning level. Alcohol is a necessary part of their daily intake; it enables them to do the things they do, things they might otherwise not have the courage or verve or effrontery to do. So alcohol can be an enabler as well as a disabler.’

  It was Gerald’s friend Tony Daniells who picked Lee up from the airport on her return on 5 September and broke the news to her that Gerald was hitting the hard stuff. Lee found him in desperate pain from his stomach, and he said he had turned to spirits in a vain attempt to cope.

  Lee had arrived back two days before her birthday, and her sister Hat had flown over to help her celebrate. ‘We had invited twenty people to the party,’ Gerald wrote, ‘for which I had to cook. Trying to cook for twenty-odd people with a two year old child asking you to read, for the fifteenth time, Baby Bear Goes Shopping, is one of the experiences that is etched with acid into my brain.’ It did not help that Gerald suffered a massive nosebleed, or that the weather turned foul and it rained in torrents, but in the end the birthday party was a great success.

  Gerald managed to hang on, though in a steadily declining condition. With increasing difficulty he pegged away at his autobiography, though his thoughts were tending less towards the events of his life than its end:

  Death is a great inconvenience, simply because there
is so much more to do and see on this incredible planet. Of course, when it comes knocking at your door you hope it will be swift and painless. What happens after is an intriguing thing which I await with interest. Are you snuffed out like a Shakespearean candle? Do you find yourself suddenly surrounded by compliant and voluptuous houris? Do you awake in some Elysian pasture to be greeted by – horror of horror – all your relatives? Or do you suddenly find you are a tadpole-like creature again, about to metamorphose into a frog in an extremely vulnerable French pond? The ideal solution, of course, would be a sort of delicate omelette of all the more attractive after-life fantasies, a place where the women were beautiful beyond belief, a place where you could – for a short time – feel like a tree, chained to the soil by its roots, or feel the breathless delight of the dolphin as it leapt from one world to another, or feel the wind under your wings like an albatross or a condor, seeing the world from above, using the wind to pillow your scanning. Nothing except possibly love and death are of importance, and even the importance of death is somewhat ephemeral, as no one has yet faxed us back a reliable report.

  In November Gerald and Lee returned to London to take part in a pre-launch publicity campaign for the puppy books, and it was then that Lee realised there was something dreadfully wrong with her husband – an illness that was of an altogether different order to anything that had occurred before. ‘Gerry and I sort of knew the game was up,’ she recalled. ‘He was feeling just absolutely horrible, with intense stomach pains for part of the day, and though they would sometimes go away for a bit they would always come back So we stayed on in London so that he could have tests to find out what was wrong.’ Later Gerald wrote cheerily to Lee’s parents to tell them of his second endoscopy of the large bowel: