Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  But one review in particular rankled. It was in the Daily Telegraph, and was by George Cansdale, the London Zoo Superintendent who had shot Chumley two Christmases ago. Cansdale had little time for Gerald, and had been riled by the bitter account of Chumley’s death in The Overloaded Ark. Now he took the opportunity to get his own back, and he pulled no punches in a peevish attempt to put Gerald down as a feckless amateur. He conceded that Gerald wrote ‘infectiously’, but he and his party seemed very much like ‘innocents abroad’. ‘If they did live as he describes it,’ wrote Cansdale, ‘it is surprising that they brought themselves back alive.’ The book was prepared in haste, he declared, and more work would have improved it. The grammar was flawed, the treatment superficial, it contained too little information and too much ‘backchat’, and not enough about ‘trapping and collecting and natural history’.

  This was bad enough to come home to, but worse was to follow. In Gerald’s absence his publishers, Hart-Davis, had decided to publish The Bafut Beagles in the coming autumn, rather than waiting till the following spring. This meant that instead of having a book in hand, Gerald would now have two books coming out in 1954, and nothing on the stocks for 1955. With extreme reluctance he began to face up to writing a fourth book, The Drunken Forest, an account of the Argentina-Paraguay foray. Sometimes Gerald found it difficult even to sit at his desk unless he was cajoled and bullied by Jacquie and Sophie Cook.

  The situation grew even more intolerable when, to offset the financial losses of the Argentina expedition, Gerald undertook to begin a fifth book hard on the heels of the fourth – a collection of true stories for children based on his collecting trips to the Cameroons, Guiana and Paraguay which he called The New Noah – a not insignificant title. ‘For some unknown reason Durrell just did not want to finish this book,’ Jacquie was to write, ‘and in sheer desperation Sophie and I set about writing the final chapter. This was naturally tossed aside with scorn by the genius when we had completed it, but it did inspire him to rewrite it and get the thing out of the way.’ ‘Why can’t you two hags realise I am not a machine?’ Gerald complained. ‘I can’t just turn on a tap when I want to. I have to wait for inspiration.’

  When Jacquie suggested that he adopt a system like brother Larry, who got up at half past four in the morning to write for a set number of hours, then used the rest of a day to earn a living and get on with anything else he felt like doing, Gerald retorted: ‘The subtle difference between us is that he loves writing and I don’t. To me it’s simply a way to make money which enables me to do my animal work, nothing more. I’m not a serious writer in that sense, merely a hack journalist who has the good fortune to be able to sell what he writes.’

  He was buoyed up, though, by the sales figures for Three Singles to Adventure and by the way the launch for The Bafut Beagles, due out on 15 October, was shaping up. A Scottish newspaper had bought the rights to a twelve-part serialisation, and later the BBC ran a fourteen-part radio adaptation of the book on Book at Bedtime and a dramatised version called The King and the Conga on New Year’s Eve. The mass-circulation book club World Books made it their Book of the Month, and on the strength of the sales guaranteed from this alone Hart-Davis held a lavish dinner in Gerald’s honour at the Savoy.

  Gerald was outwardly pleased but secretly embarrassed by his success as an author. He had little esteem for himself as a literary figure compared to the likes of his elder brother, whom he deemed a ‘true’ writer, even though he couldn’t (as yet) make a living out of it, and felt the only good thing that could be said about his own literary career was that it funded his zoological one. In this he seriously demeaned himself. It was patently clear from his first three, relatively youthful, books that Gerald had a highly original talent and an innate grasp of the essentials of narrative: a facility with language that was fluent, lucid and sensitive; a naturalist’s precise powers of observation combined with the aesthetic sensibility of a poet; the story-telling gift of a born raconteur, with an ear for dialogue and an eye for the eccentric and the absurd; and a highly individual comic sense, based au fond on an intense reverence and affection for life of all kinds, human and otherwise. His talent put him in the forefront of the nature writers of his age and among the best comic authors in the language, and at its very best his writing could sing with the true voice of poetry. Even the Poetry Review was to commend his works for ‘their innate poetry shown in the masterly use of imagery which brings the creatures and landscapes most vividly to life and can compare successfully with the diction of Gerald’s poet brother, Lawrence’.

  Gerald himself remained unconvinced about the merits of what he wrote. ‘The only thing that worries me,’ he was to write to Larry, ‘is how long is the great British public going to continue to read this sort of slush without getting bored by it. Hart-Davis seemed to think it might be a good idea if I interspersed it with something of a different type.’ To this end he wrote a book of short fiction stories for children, only to have Hart-Davis turn it down on the grounds that it was too ‘precious’.

  On 13 November 1954 Gerald gave an illustrated lecture at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The idea appalled him, as he loathed any form of public speaking. Often he was literally sick with worry at the prospect of such an occasion, and it was only when Rupert Hart-Davis persuaded him of the enormous publicity value of a lecture in the Festival Hall that he agreed to go ahead.

  The lecture was widely advertised. ‘A Feast of Flying Mice’, chattered the posters. ‘Dancing Monkeys … Hairy Frogs … GERALD DURRELL!’ The seats were soon sold out. ‘The whole family bore the strain and worry of the venture,’ recalled Jacquie. Gerald was cajoled into donning a freshly pressed dark suit, crisp white shirt and respectable tie, and was driven to the Festival Hall feeling as if he was being taken to his execution. But the moment he stepped on to the stage in the huge auditorium, he metamorphosed from a neurotic almost incapacitated by terror into a brilliant natural speaker, funny and captivating, commanding rapt attention by the warm, compelling timbre of his voice and the charisma of his stage presence.

  ‘Most people,’ he began, ‘think that collecting animals consists of six months of tropical paradise, sitting in a deck chair with a glass of whisky while the natives do all the work. To try to correct this sort of idea, I would like to give you some sort of picture of an average collecting trip.’ He talked about his unusual experiences as an animal collector, the travails, the surprises, the comedies (though not the tragedies). He was a gifted cartoonist, and introduced every animal with a lightning crayon sketch on a large sheet of paper mounted on an easel beside him. By way of variation he showed a sequence (the capture of a giant anaconda) from his abortive South American film – its first and virtually only screening. Because of the Paraguayan revolution, he explained, he was forced to do two months’ filming in four days, but he hoped the audience would overlook its deficiencies – ‘especially as the National Film Theatre is so close’.

  Then he came to the coup de théâtre. ‘Now I would like to introduce you to two members of the opposite sex,’ he announced. ‘I collected them in various ways. One I caught in the Chaco and the other I married. Ladies and gentlemen – my WIFE … and … SARAH HUGGERSACK!’ Jacquie came on to great applause, but when it was Sarah’s turn it was no artist’s impression the audience were introduced to, but the real thing – furry, sinewy, eager and honking wildly as she lolloped across the stage. ‘The lecture was a tremendous success,’ Jacquie recalled of that memorable occasion. ‘But it was Sarah Huggersack who stole the show. She accepted completely the adulation that was showered upon her from all sides and became so excited that she did not want to get into her box.’

  The Bafut Beagles was published in Britain and America in the autumn of 1954, and later in most European languages and in South America. The reviews were terrific, and so were the sales. In Britain it was one of the top twenty Christmas books, with Gerald rubbing shoulders with long-established best-selling authors like Agatha Christi
e, Paul Gallico and Colette. The first impression of ten thousand copies sold out almost overnight, and a second was rushed through to meet the demand, with a third soon afterwards. The book never stopped selling, and has remained in print ever since, being translated into more than twenty-five languages. Even the eminent Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was a fan, it seemed, and kept a copy of The Bafut Beagles with him wherever he went. Gerald’s fan mail became truly global, many of the letters coming from the younger end of his vast readership, and particularly from those who lived within the Communist Bloc. They ranged from the moving to the incomprehensible, but all were impassioned by a love for the natural world, and often by a poignant sense of deprivation and longing.

  ‘Expensive Gerald Durrell. How-do-you-do?’ wrote one. ‘My name Alosha. I live in the Rossia. I read many yours book. I very love your book “The Bafut Beagles”. I very, very want have toad dry-leaf. I very, very requests send me toad dry-leaf. And if shall send, then write what feed. And expensive Gerald write me letter. Plise. Good-buy. Alosha.’

  More coherent was a letter from Elena, a fifteen-year-old girl who lived in Sofia, Bulgaria. ‘You are popular in the midst of young people here,’ she wrote. ‘I like most “Three Tickets for Adventure” and “The Drink Wood”. I love animals very much and I am terribly sorry that in our house there is no room to turn, let alone for domestic animals. But I have sponge. His name is Klavdy. He live in one jar and eat only sea salt. He has four/five children. Sponge, pitiful sponge …’

  Critics in Britain and America responded with similar enthusiasm. The Bafut Beagles, most agreed, was Gerald’s best book yet. It was the best thing they had read about Africa for a long time, the best about animals, the best about travel, the best about anything. ‘I have seldom enjoyed a book so much,’ wrote novelist James Hanley. The zest, the fun, the humour, the acute observation were there as before, and so was the author – ‘a faunlike, almost furry personality of exceptional charm’. And there was the Fon.

  This bibulous African giant – a source of great embarrassment to politically correct African nationalists of future years – strides through the book like an empowered black Falstaff. ‘The gin-loving King of Bafut is a creation of pure joy,’ wrote Time and Tide, while another reviewer declared: ‘I am glad that he should have joined Agamemnon and Sir Tickeji Rao III and found a poet to make him immortal.’ The Saturday Review of Literature in New York enlarged on this theme: ‘Mr Durrell, who appears to have as formidable a head for liquor as any private eye in print, joined the Fon in guzzlings that earned the potentate’s profound respect. In the course of these alcoholic shindigs Mr Durrell conducted some of the most peculiar conversations on record, but achieved in seriousness an intimate understanding of the native chief. The depth and dignity under the 100-proof exterior came through to Durrell, and he catches this in a portrait that is tender, absurd and penetrating.’

  But the praise was not unstinted. In a world increasingly critical of the old relationships between animals and zoos and between natives and colonies – the one a metaphor for the other – some critics were surprised by the absence of any sign of a moral standpoint towards these matters. ‘He attempts no explanations;’ wrote the Spectator, ‘he passes no moral judgements; he is absorbed wholly in particulars.’ Moreover, he had ‘no recipes for the future of the dark continent’, and seemed convinced that ‘smaller animals are, and feel, better off in zoos.’ David Attenborough noted that there was next to nothing of ‘the anxieties and tragedies and horror of a collecting expedition’ in the book. From America came another cautionary word: this book was unsuitable for any ‘fond Aunt Emma’. For one thing, Gerald was not without a fancy for lavatorial references, and for another, he had a cheery, chortling way of discussing such matters as the sexual antics of monkeys. ‘And, of course, there is the drinking. It goes on by the case.’

  By now Gerald had realised that he was becoming public property. He therefore decided the time had come to straighten out the meandering course of his earlier life somewhat, and to re-present himself to the world at large in a more acceptable form. Abashed to find himself described in the papers as a ‘scientist’, he beefed up his credentials for the benefit of book jackets and press releases. He now emerged newly (though not truly) authenticated with an education in France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece and England before the war (two-fifths correct), and involvement in agricultural research and the study of animal ecology during it (some way wide of the mark).

  With three best-sellers to his name in the space of two years, and two more in the pipeline – The Drunken Forest and The New Noah – Gerald was beginning to be reasonably affluent and seriously well-known; so much so that his brother Lawrence was to write to Henry Miller that Gerald was ‘a more famous writer than all of us put together’, though he remained ‘completely unspoiled by his fame and just the same as ever’. For the first time Gerald’s lifelong dream of having a zoo of his own began to look like more than a fantastical dream – though a proper full-blown zoo was far beyond even his much-improved current means. The more determined he became, the more alarmed grew his family and friends. ‘But why take on a zoo?’ they asked, ‘and not a biscuit factory, or a market garden, or a farm, or something safe and respectable?’

  ‘The first answer,’ Gerald was to write later, ‘was that I never wanted to be safe and respectable. Second, I did not think that the ambition to own one’s own zoo was so outrageously eccentric. To me the thing was perfectly straightforward. I was deeply interested in all creatures that lived with me on the planet and wanted them at close quarters so that I could watch them and learn about and from them. What simpler way of accomplishing this than to found my own zoo?’

  Rationalise it how he might, Gerald’s dream went deeper than mere logic. It was more an obsession, seemingly almost as predetermined as genetic programming. Certainly he was driven by an unbroken sense of mission that ran from his childhood to his death, an instinctive perception of his own destiny. It mattered little whether his ambition was eccentric or not, and even less that it would involve Herculean labours. ‘In those palmy days,’ he recalled, ‘I had no conception of the amount of money and hard work that would have to be put into such a project before the dream could become a reality.’

  But where, and when, and how? By now his thinking about his projected zoo had made considerable advances, and he felt confident enough about both his ideas and his status to seek the advice of three of the most eminent naturalists and conservationists in the land – the biologist Julian Huxley, who as Director General of UNESCO had helped to found the first truly global nature protection body, the International Union for the Protection of Nature, in 1948; Peter Scott, who had founded the Wildfowl Trust at Slimbridge in 1946 and was later to become Chairman of the World Wildlife Fund; and James Fisher, one of Britain’s leading ornithologists and natural history broadcasters. He also visited Jean Delacour – ‘the most incredible aviculturist and ornithologist’ – who had a famous bird collection at Clères, in France. ‘Jean gave me a lot of advice about my scheme,’ Gerald was to write, ‘and coming from a man with his vast experience his advice was invaluable.’ At the end Gerald asked the great man if he thought there was any hope for the world. Delacour thought for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he declared. ‘There is hope – if we take up cannibalism.’

  On 24 October 1954, a few days after the publication of The Bafut Beagles, Gerald had written to Lawrence, outlining an ambitious scheme that had long been on his mind:

  I wish to propound an idea to you on which I should like your help and co-operation. I am now, I think, sufficiently well known to attempt something which I have had in mind for a number of years. To you, no doubt, it will sound completely mad and a lot of rubbish. I want to start a Trust or organisation, with land in somewhere like the West Indies, for the breeding of those forms of animal life which are on the borders of extinction, and which without help of this sort cannot survive. I had always privately thought that such a scheme would be too
hairbrained to have much chance of success, but when I met Julian Huxley (who wrote me a very nice crit on the Ark) I put my idea to him and he agreed that it was very necessary and an excellent idea all round, but, as he pointed out, while I could get nearly every known zoologist on my side in such a scheme, very few of them have sufficient funds to help financially. What I would like to know from you is, who do you know that is stinking rich? … I can get a glittering array of scientific names on the prospectus, and also probably one or two rather faded nobility. Unfortunately, nowadays, it is neither the nobility nor the scientific world that has the cash.

  If he could find three or four people who could put up £10,000 between them, Gerald reckoned he could get the whole thing started. He also wondered if Lawrence could help with big names as well as moneyed ones – the author and Arabian traveller Freya Stark, for example, and Osbert Lancaster, Igor Stravinsky and others known to Lawrence personally. Gerald’s accountants were already working out how the Trust could be organised. The next step would be the big money and the big names.

  In a later letter to Lawrence, dated 14 December, Gerald gave news of brother Leslie. Back in March 1952 he had finally married Doris Hall, his divorcee lady friend – ‘big-hearted, big-voiced, laughing Doris’, who at nearly forty-six was some eleven years older than he was – and now the couple had emigrated to Kenya, where Leslie was to manage a farm (on their marriage certificate he was described as an ‘agricultural implements mechanic’). Gerald had high hopes that he would at last settle down to doing something worthwhile with his life. The first signs looked promising. ‘An absolute cataract of letters tell us that he is thoroughly enjoying himself,’ Gerald told Lawrence, ‘and likes his work and the life, which I thought he would.’