Jacquie began to have a sneaking feeling that the book might make them ‘quite a lot of money’. But it seemed to go on and on: ‘It began to look as if Gerry was trying to write Gone With the Wind.’
In fact, when she counted the words in the finished typescript it came to sixty-five thousand, which was on the short side of average for that kind of book. But it was enough, and soon it was stitched between two pieces of stiff cardboard, given a typed sticker on the front with the title, the author’s name and address, and the number of words. Then Jacquie wrapped it up into a neat parcel and posted if off to Faber, with a note saying that it came from Lawrence Durrell’s brother.
Gerald and Jacquie settled down to another long wait in penury, and to catch up on their sleep. There was a flurry when two overseas job opportunities cropped up, one in the Uganda Game Department and the other in the Khartoum Museum in the Sudan. Gerald went to interviews for both. He rejected the Sudan job straight off, because it would not allow him to bring Jacquie out for two years, but he was confident he stood a good chance for the one in Uganda. But a new cost-cutting Conservative government had recently been elected, and in a wave of economies the Uganda post disappeared overnight.
Six weeks after he had sent off the typescript, Gerald received a letter from Faber. They had now read The Overloaded Ark. They thought it was wonderful. Could he come up to London to talk about it? Gerald couldn’t. He didn’t have enough money for the train fare. If they wanted to haggle, it would have to be by post. Faber were used to indigent authors, and felt no pressing need to improve Gerald Durrell’s status in this regard. The best offer they could come up with for an exciting new book by an unproven writer was £25, followed by another £25 on publication. Gerald accepted, reluctantly. He was broke, and he needed the money. Above all, he wanted the book to be published.
Increasingly Gerald began to have doubts about Larry’s strictures regarding literary agents. In his dealings with Faber he realised it would have been helpful to have had someone in the business to argue his corner. So worried was he about the vulnerability of his position that eventually, in the autumn of 1952, he decided to write to Larry’s own agent, Spencer Curtis Brown, son of the founder of the firm that bore his name, the Fortnum & Mason of London literary agencies, whose clients included names like Noël Coward, Somerset Maugham and A.A. Milne. Curtis Brown replied immediately, asking for a copy of the manuscript, and Faber were asked to supply a galley proof. A few days later another letter arrived from Curtis Brown. Could Gerald come up to London to see him? Once again Gerald and Jacquie trooped down the road to borrow Leslie’s phone. The whole Durrell clan waited in the living-room in a state of hushed anxiety while Gerald explained that he couldn’t come up to town because he couldn’t afford the fare. They heard him put the phone down, and the next they knew he had burst through the door.
‘What do you think?’ he yelled with excitement. ‘He’s so anxious to see me that he’s sending me some money to travel with.’
The money came by return of post – and to the value of rather more than the fare, for inside the envelope Gerald found a cheque for £120. ‘This was fantastic,’ Jacquie was to write of that benchmark day. ‘It really was the first time that anyone had given us any concrete evidence of their faith in Gerry’s abilities.’
Gerald insisted that Jacquie come to London with him. After eighteen months cooped up in the flatlet it was like being let out on remand. They found Curtis Brown in his office in a quaint old building – ‘like something out of Dickens’ – near the Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market. Curtis Brown was in his forties then, and had gingery hair and a military moustache. He had a reputation for being impulsive – he had once thrown Dylan Thomas out for being sick all over his office – but Gerald and Jacquie found him affable and encouraging. He told them how much he liked the book, and that if it was handled properly it might prove a very valuable property.
‘If Fabers haven’t done anything about the American rights,’ he said before they left, ‘can I have your permission to show your manuscript to an American friend of mine I’m having dinner with this evening?’
Back in the little room in Bournemouth, Jacquie went down with a bad bout of flu. She was feeling wretched and unusually sorry for herself when she heard someone running up the stairs. The door was flung open. It was Gerald, looking very excited and pleased with himself.
‘Here’s some medicine that should make you feel better,’ he whooped, thrusting a telegram at his prostrate wife.
Jacquie read the words ‘HAVE SOLD AMERICAN RIGHTS FOR £500 CONGRATULATIONS SPENCER’ (£500 then would be worth about £7500 now).
‘We were on our way,’ she recalled.
One sad event unexpectedly blighted the general euphoria. Gerald had last seen his favourite chimp, Chumley, some six months after he had been delivered to London Zoo by Cecil Webb in 1948. Chumley, wildly delighted to see his old friend again, had rushed into Gerald’s arms, held his hand and contentedly smoked a cigarette. Gerald was unaware that anything was amiss until he saw an article in the Daily Express:
CHUMLEY THE CHIMP
– Boards a 53 bus
– Bites a woman
– Wrestles with man
– Acts as King Kong
Chumley had become a highly popular animal at London Zoo, and had been seen by millions on television drinking tea and smoking cigarettes. His problems started when he developed toothache early in 1952, and was taken to see the dentist in the zoo sanatorium. Chumley took a dislike to the dentist and made a break for it. Pushing aside his keeper, he swung open the door of his cage, got out through a skylight and legged it across Regent’s Park, stepping into the middle of the road and holding up a number 53A bus. He got on board, and put his arms round a woman passenger’s waist. When she screamed, Chumley bit her, got off the bus and made his way towards a queue of people at a bus stop, all but one of whom, a blind woman, fled. Chumley then felled a passing ex-sergeant-major-cum-nightclub bouncer before climbing on to the balcony of a house where, according to an eyewitness, ‘he beat his chest and cried out like King Kong’. Terrified in a frightening and alien world, Chumley climbed gratefully into his keeper’s arms when he at last caught up with him.
‘Chumley is a darling,’ a member of the zoo curator’s family told the press later that day. ‘He would wring any mother’s heart – the funny little soul. If he bit anyone it was out of sheer fright.’
That seemed to be the end of the matter. But on Christmas Eve Chumley escaped again, loping across Regent’s Park once more and banging on the doors of a few cars at Gloucester Gate in the hope of a lift. This time there was to be no second chance. ‘He was a moody animal,’ George Cansdale, the Superintendent of London Zoo, told the Daily Express, ‘gentle as possible at times, a positive terror at others. And on Christmas Eve he was in a mood to be a terror. Regretfully I decided the only thing to do was to shoot him.’
Gerald, jolted out of the jollity of a family Christmas in Bournemouth, was aghast at the news, and took the opportunity to insert into the proofs of The Overloaded Ark a valedictory epilogue to his chimpanzee friend.
Chumley decided that if he had a walk round London on Christmas Eve, he might run across someone who would offer him a beer. But the foolish humans misconstrued his actions. Before he had time to explain his mission, a panting posse of keepers arrived, and he was bundled back to the zoo. From being a fine, intelligent animal, he had suddenly become (by reason of his escapades) a fierce and untrustworthy monster, he might escape yet again and bite some worthy citizen, so rather than risk this Chumley was sentenced to death and shot.
‘The Chumley affair really soured Gerry,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘and he blamed London Zoo and George Cansdale in particular for incompetence and total lack of appreciation of what this particular primate needed to survive happily in that confined environment. Again Gerry was rather vocal and left no one in any doubt how he viewed London Zoo’s competence and capability.’ In years t
o come Gerald was to wage a ceaseless passage of arms with London Zoo, the top establishment organisation of the British zoological world. It is hard to believe that the fate of Chumley did not have something to do with the implacable contempt he felt for much of what London Zoo then stood for.
By now Gerald was well into his second book, Three Singles to Adventure, a light-hearted account of his third collecting expedition, to British Guiana. Even though The Overloaded Ark had not yet been published, Spencer Curtis Brown had suggested that Gerald keep writing while he still had a head of steam, so that he could fulfil the expected public demand for a sequel. Three Singles to Adventure took him only six weeks to write, and since Faber were not prepared to offer him any more for it than they had for the first book, Curtis Brown offered it to Rupert Hart-Davis, who ran an up-and-coming publishing house and was prepared to offer this up-and-coming author a substantially bigger advance. After a brief respite Gerald embarked on a third book, The Bafut Beagles, about his second Cameroons expedition. In the midst of this punishing literary endeavour The Overloaded Ark, beautifully illustrated with line drawings by Sabine Baur, was finally published in Britain on 31 July 1953.
By a remarkable coincidence, Gerald Durrell’s first book came out at exactly the same time as his brother Lawrence’s new one, a discursive literary essay on the Greek island of Rhodes entitled Reflections on a Marine Venus. Faber promoted the two books in tandem in an advertisement which read: ‘Quests animal … and human – a dual demonstration of the enviable art of Durrelling.’
Both books had appeared at exactly the right moment. A new golden age of British travel writing had dawned. Memories of the war years were receding, and post-war austerity was at an end. There was a feeling of standing at the beginning of a new era. Young men woke up to find that the world was once again their oyster, and not just a place you went to on a troopship. At almost exactly the time the Durrell brothers’ two books were published, a galaxy of talented travel writers, including Laurens van der Post, Gavin Maxwell, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Norman Lewis, were also bringing out new books, while one-off accounts of new worlds conquered or explored, such as Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World, Hein-rich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet and John Hunt’s The Conquest of Everest – all published in this same annus mirabilis of 1953 – were in huge demand.
The Durrells’ books basked in this sun. ‘Glorious Press for the Brothers Durrell!’ ran the publishers’ ads. While Larry’s book was received with almost reverent acclaim by the literati, Gerry’s was singled out as a Book Society Choice, Daily Mail Book of the Month for August, and BBC Book of the Week in December, and greeted with rave reviews in the press and hot-cake sales in the bookshops. ‘Congratulations,’ Lawrence told Gerald. ‘We are now a circus act. Clad in sequinned tights, three hundred feet above the ring, you will fling yourself into space, while I, hanging by my knees, will attempt to focus my bleary eyes sufficiently quickly to catch you by the ankles as you sweep past.’
All the quality national newspapers devoted space to The Overloaded Ark, and several of the most eminent reviewers of the day turned their critical attention to it. Most commended the book for its charm, its freshness, its humour, its totally new approach to wild animals and wild places, and the vivid quality of its writing. Most praised the author’s courage, sensitivity, humanity and devotion to the animals in his charge (‘what he did for them,’ wrote one, ‘would equal the services of the most devoted mother’). All adored the animals he wrote about – ‘like so many guests at a Mad Hatter’s cocktail party’. Some tried to compare the book to putative literary antecedents – Victorian adventure books for boys, for example, or (more persuasively) recent best-selling books which shared Gerald’s view of animals as creatures of interest and individuality, such as Colonel Bill Williams’ Elephant Bill and Konrad Lorenz’s popular study of animal behaviour, King Solomon’s Ring.
‘As a person Gerald Durrell has a warmth of sympathy and a good humour you would expect to find in an elderly keeper of a baboon house,’ wrote Nigel Nicolson in the Daily Dispatch. ‘As a zoologist he is a modestly disguised expert. As a writer he has almost everything – clarity, great humour, a vivid style and an exact knowledge of how not to be dull without being flippant … It is a splendid book.’
Laurens van der Post, writing in the Countryman, also found a host of reasons to be impressed by the book: ‘His chase after live fauna reveals something of the abiding Africa in its more tender, intimate, mysterious and darkly domestic moods. What a relief to read a book about Africa without drums and lion and elephant stories!’
Peter Quennell in the Daily Mail judged the book ‘fascinating … he shows an enviable gift of discovering the apt phrase’. Raymond Mortimer in the Sunday Times found it ‘exhilarating’ and had no doubt it would appeal to all ages and tastes. John Hillaby in the Spectator saw it as one of a new breed of books about wild animals ‘characterised by a new and refreshing level of realism’. Gavin Maxwell in the New Statesman wrote that Gerald ‘communicates every detail of his experience with just the right degree of zest’. Within a few months The Overloaded Ark had sold twenty-seven thousand copies, putting it near the top of the best-seller list. It has rarely been out of print since.
But the acclaim was not universal. One or two of the stuffier old hands in the British animal-catching business looked askance at Gerald as a novice and an upstart, and poured sour grapes on his book, calling it ‘lightweight’ and comparing it unfavourably to the recently published autobiography of his Cameroons rival Cecil Webb. And while most critics commended his affectionate treatment of his African helpers, some wondered whether the use of pidgin English for most of the dialogue – for all the accuracy of its transcription – might not be seen as colonial and demeaning. (Conversely, one critic regarded the book’s pidgin English conversations as ‘amongst the best and kindliest things I have ever read about Africa’.)
More seriously, a few reviewers queried the ethics of what Durrell was actually doing in Africa. The Irish Times, for example, questioned the morality both of zoos and of collecting wild animals to put in them. ‘We are tempted to ask: “What of the birds and the mammals and the reptiles, or do they not remember at all?”’ Remember, that is, the days of their freedom in their native land. But as another reviewer pointed out, ‘even those who disapprove of caging the wild will not be able to help following Mr Durrell on his journey with rapture and enchantment’.
Nobody could have predicted the potential impact of the book on public thinking, its value as propaganda for wildlife, especially among the young, in the dawning age of environmental consciousness to come. In fact there is not a glimmer to be found in the book – or, for that matter, in its immediate sequels, Three Singles to Adventure and The Bafut Beagles – of Gerald’s views on the proper role of zoos, on animal conservation in general and on the captive breeding of endangered species in particular.
His silence on these issues in his early books is puzzling. It is clear that Gerald was thinking about them as far back as the war years, when he was in his teens. In later books he records how his ideas in these matters were virtually fully fledged while he was still a student keeper at Whipsnade in 1945 and 1946. Yet before the mid-fifties there is no written evidence at all of any particular interest in animal conservation or in environmental matters as a whole. Why this lack of any reference in his early books to the concepts he claimed to have developed in his youth, and on account of which he was to become world famous in his maturer years?
Was it because his ideas about these matters were not yet evolved and solid enough to be expressed in public? Or because the relatively novice author judged those early books were not appropriate vehicles for advanced zoological dialectic? Or because he felt that the cultural climate was not yet ready for what he had to say? Or because he was not yet confident and secure enough to go out on a limb and risk the ridicule of the zoo establishment on which he believed he still depended for a livelihood?
One reviewer
above all came near to divining the man and the message – or lack of it – in The Overloaded Ark, Writing for Country Life, the influential critic Geoffrey Grigson saw Gerald Durrell as a latter-day literary equivalent of a primitive painter or naïf like Henri Rousseau, who also depicted jungles of a sort. The vision, Grigson perceived, was child-like, and so was the author – a child of nature. The book as a whole was like a dream of childhood in a childlike world of wonders. The big questions went unanswered, though not necessarily (buried deep in the subtext) unasked, wrote Grigson:
Mr Durrell does not consider too much the dangers, the difficulties, the drudgery. He does not consider his own destiny, he does not involve himself in the problems of life or its duties, he does not weight the pros and cons of collecting. Animals from under a stone, from inside a cave, from water, from the high branches of the forest – these are like birds’ eggs to the small boy in the April holidays. Some live, some die. Some things go well, some go badly, but the happy collector is unruffled. He likes the world. He likes his tall, thin hunter and his short, stocky hunter. He likes pidgin English. He likes the forest … This writer accepts, he enjoys, and he hands on his enjoyment.
In September 1953 The Overloaded Ark was published by Viking in the United States (and in due course in many countries in Europe), and met with the same rapturous reception it had received in Britain. All the major papers heaped praise upon it, and unlike their British counterparts the old Africa hands and collecting professionals of America generously commended the author – described as ‘Britain’s youngest wild animal collector’ – for his ‘absolute fidelity to the truth’ and his ‘mastery of the fundamental law of jungle conduct’.
Gerald Durrell Page 28
