My Family and Other Gnostics

A funny story is almost never improved by an assiduous concern for facts. Case in point: Gerald Durrell’s marvelous My Family and Other Animals, one of the glories of British memoir. It turns seventy next year, and it is still laugh-out-loud funny, one of those rare books whose pages can please both a literary connoisseur and a pre-teen who hasn’t gotten much beyond Roald Dahl. Its setting is the mid 1930s: A family escapes from the England of the Great Depression to Greece. There the British live in large villas, get all the sunshine and sea-swimming they could want, and are tended by multiple servants while never having to work a day or go to a real school. 

When writing the book, Durrell was a zoologist with a dream to open his own breeding zoo for endangered species. His close observations of animal behavior adorn what might otherwise be a humorous tale of family eccentricity. (Success inspired him to write innumerable sequels to fund his ambition. He got his zoo in the end.) The charming title has been spoofed over and over again, such as Monty Don’s My Family and Other Dogs. Multiple film adaptations have appeared, most recently the BBC series The Durrells in Corfu, with its tourist-bureau evocations of Mediterranean travel. Its promises of eccentric family “joy and togetherness” (the screenwriters’ words) seem likely to keep the Durrells current and increase their popularity outside the United Kingdom. 

Gerald Durrell writes just as well, though in a more restrained style, as his older brother Lawrence Durrell, known for the Alexandria Quartet. (He figures prominently in the memoir as “Larry.”) “In the water-filled ditches,” Gerald writes of spring, “frogs snored a rapturous chorus in the lush weeds.” Swimming in a phosphorescent bay at night, you “plunged in a frosty furnace of glinting light.” He has a special gift for simile: Two giant toads were “like two obese, leprous buddhas.” In his hands, they were “like two flaccid, leathery balloons.” 

Durrell’s humor is harder to demonstrate in brief, for it is largely based on character. Each member of the family is a variation on a theme of self-absorption: Larry longs for bohemian guests and quiet time to write; he gets “interminable letters from authors, artists, and musicians, about authors, artists, and musicians.” Margo, the sister, obsesses over her own appearance and her various boyfriends; Leslie, a brother, loves guns and hunting; the mother Louisa just wishes everyone to be a bit more normal. When you add a zoologically-talented, unschooled ten-year-old—young Gerald himself—the result is uproarious: scorpions skittering over the dinner table, magpies demolishing Larry’s study, snakes cooling off in the bathtub.

As I have gotten older, I treat humor less as a reflection of a divine quality and more as a human performance. Being funny seems like a good quality that keeps sorrows in due proportion; in actual fact, it tends to be a manic compensation for unhouseled inner despair. Durrell never mentions that the family went to Corfu because his mother was on the verge of suicide after losing her husband; he mentions that they brought a lot of wine to their picnics, but not that his mother and brother were alcoholics. (He was to follow in their footsteps.) He never mentions that his brother Larry was twenty-six at the time, married, and did not live with the family in the villa; nor does he mention Larry’s atrocious treatment of his wife Nancy, and that he forced a doctor to perform an illegal abortion when she got pregnant. “Nancy wants to have a child,” he wrote to a friend, “the slut.” Larry would go through four wives. By the end, his daughter by Nancy refused to speak with him, and his daughter by his second wife, Eve, committed suicide after claiming in her diary that he had sexually abused her. The brother Leslie did little better: He impregnated their former maid after the family moved away, and refused to help her and his child. None of this makes any appearance in Gerald’s sunny Corfu, where “the magic of the island settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen.”

Writers of integrity write nothing of importance about the people they know best—no one wants a family writer to publicize their sins. Yet it is particularly peculiar to have a zoologist in the Durrell family saying nothing at all about the curious evolutionary twist known as the British upper classes in the 1930s. Homo britannicus, subspecies modernus, lost in one generation its natural love for its own children. Gerald himself had two wives but no children; given the opportunity, his two older brothers refused fatherhood with open disgust.

It is also peculiar to find these shadows so near to glorious sunshine and great blue seas, lurking just offstage of what must be the greatest evocation of a British holiday ever put to paper. It is as if the decline and fall of the old world demanded sacrifice from its members, of their own children and their own future. For the British the disease may start simply with a desire to escape England: “I am just a refugee,” Lawrence makes a character say in his novel Balthazar, “from the long slow toothache of English life.” But restless spirits cannot resolve their problems with a steamer ticket. Later in his career, Lawrence put no faith in running away: “Human life is a damnable labyrinth out of which one never escapes,” he penned in 1974 on a fan’s copy of his novel The Dark Labyrinth.

Around the same time, Lawrence wrote a preface to an English translation of Jacques Lacarrière’s The Gnostics. He suggests that the fortress of Montségur at the foot of the Pyrenees, where the Roman Catholic Church extinguished the Cathar heresy in a crusade of blood, is a kind of Thermopylae of noble idealism. He contrasts the Cathars and their belief that the material world was evil with the weakness of the hippie movement, which wished that everything would just be loving and groovy but refused to see the rot inside all fleshly things: “How noble in comparison with this shallow hippie defeatism is the grand poetic challenge of the Gnostics. They refused to countenance a world which was less than perfect, and they affronted the great lie of Lucifer-Mammon with the hopeless magnificence of the Spartan three hundred.”

It is a revealing admiration. Gerald and Lawrence Durrell wanted to appreciate the flesh, to marvel at the mating animals and the diversity of creatures and the glories of the created world; but they never achieved any comfort living in their own skin. The wine and the sex and the Mediterranean swims and the fireflies in the olive groves never amounted to incarnation, a point of light and heat where spirit and dust meet. Lawrence thought that embracing Gnosticism and hatred of the flesh—“to behave,” in Lacarrière’s words, “always and everywhere as unsubjugated outsiders”—might be better than this half-lived Mammon of tourist consumerism. The irony is that it is precisely this half-lived Mammon that people will associate with him.