The Durrells by Richard Bradford: My family and other lies

Everybody loves tales of Gerald Durrell’s family in Corfu, as recounted in My Family And Other Animals, ‘a pantomime of nostalgic innocence,’ published in 1956.

An instant bestseller, it outsold Churchill’s A History Of The English-Speaking Peoples. Hannah Gordon, Imelda Staunton and Keeley Hawes, have played Louisa, Durrell’s mother, on television.

The azure sea and ‘a sky that flickered with gold at sunset’ is of course a matchlessly photogenic setting.

But, as Richard Bradford demonstrates, behind the scenes the Durrells were far from being charmingly eccentric – and Corfu in actuality was nothing but relentlessly hungry mosquitoes and insanitary accommodation notable for lice infestations.

Louisa, sad to say, was not attractively daffy but a mentally-ill alcoholic, on the gin at breakfast time. She was often in a nursing home, being treated for depression.

Margo, the youngest sister, cried all the time, married an airline engineer and spent the war years in an Italian POW camp in Ethiopia.

Leslie, a brother, was frankly unhinged. He shot at gulls and pigeons, impregnated and abandoned the maid and emigrated to Kenya – where he ran fraudulent investment schemes to steal savings from widows.

In his famous memoir, Gerald never mentions that Larry, his literary brother, was in fact married and lived ‘as far from his mother as it is possible to be,’ visiting the rest of the family only on brief occasions. He was frequently unfaithful to his wife, having sex with other women ‘behind a rock.’

Regarding the other classic characters, Spiro, the comical cab driver (memorably portrayed by Brian Blessed), had in reality lived in America for six years and was perfectly fluent in English. His hysterical manglings – ‘Thems being worrying yous?’ – now seem a tad racist.

Nor was Theodore Stephanides a farcically inept doctor, having qualified in medicine at the Sorbonne.

The idea behind My Family And Other Animals is that the Durrells were unconventional and impoverished, and could only make ends meet by moving to some backwater abroad.

In truth they were well-off colonialists – Louisa’s husband left her almost a million in today’s terms when he died in 1928. The family had been in India for generations, building bridges, railways and canals, and chose Corfu in 1930 for ‘the carefree island lifestyle’, which was reminiscent of the Raj.

Everyone, save Margo, who was with her husband on a flying boat in North Africa, had to scurry back to Britain in 1939, when war was declared. Gerald, by some unexplained means, brought his collection of owls, toads and tortoises.

The Durrells lived in a Bournemouth mansion, with a parquet-floored ballroom. The house soon filled up with chimps, gorillas, poisonous snakes and rabbits, the wildlife ‘crawling over the furniture’.

Eventually, Gerald, who incidentally was never more than an amateur, and who never studied zoology professionally, was prevailed upon to get a job at Whipsnade Zoo, where he expressed a hope to ‘protect species in danger of extinction’.

Yet surely the people endangering extinction were the avid European collectors? In receipt of £105,000 from his late father’s trust fund, Gerald paid for trips to West Africa and South America, where he trapped baboons and bats.

A total of 139 crates of mammals and birds were shipped back to England and sold to zoos. The way to capture a hippo was to shoot the mother and take the calf.

In 1959, he began ploughing all his advances, royalties and fees into his own zoo in Jersey, which required a down-payment of £390,000.

David Niven visited and witnessed gorillas having sex. ‘Wherever I go, this sort of thing happens,’ he commented. A mandrill showed Princess Anne its fiery red bottom. ‘Wouldn’t you love to have a behind like that,’ asked Gerald. ‘No, I don’t think I would,’ replied Princess Anne, whom I can imagine bursting out laughing later.

Gerald’s various books outsold Larry’s by a factor of 40 to one. When Gerald called himself with justice ‘a hack journalist who has had the good fortune to be able to sell what he writes,’ his modesty and commercial success infuriated Larry, who wanted to be thought of as an experimental prose genius, the heir to James Joyce and T.S. Eliot.

Like F.R. Leavis, Bradford is a champion debunker of myth-makers, pricking the pomposity of literary legends to expose egomania and bogus reputations. Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer and Martin Amis have fallen at his sword – but nothing compares with the massacre here of Lawrence Durrell, who unaccountably was nominated for the Nobel in 1962.

Bradford, quite rightly in my view, describes the novels as ‘intellectually lazy drivel,’ ‘gnomic gibberish,’ written by ‘a humourless pornographer’. It doesn’t help that Larry was a horrible person, ‘calculatedly deceitful’, full of ‘cruel self-regard’ and puffed up with ‘greedy narcissism’.

Five-foot-two in his cotton socks, an angry and rotund little man, Larry, nevertheless, made dozens of sexual conquests. His most common remark to a woman was, ‘Why don’t you shut up!’ followed by a slap. His four wives always sported black eyes and bruised cheekbones. He beat them ‘once a week on average’. He had a daughter, Sappho, who alleged incestuous abuse, and hanged herself in 1985, aged 33.

During the war, despite zero academic qualifications, Larry had been an English instructor for the British Council in Athens and press officer at the British Embassy in Cairo, Belgrade and Cyprus.

Bradford says Larry was a part-time agent for MI6, passing on rumours and drunken disclosures, picked up in consulates and military gatherings. There’s much drunkenness in this story. Louisa, consuming a bottle of champagne a day, died in 1964. Larry drank himself to death in 1990.

Gerald’s ‘increasingly erratic behavioural habits’, drinking and taking tranquillisers, culminated in liver cancer and cirrhosis. He died in 1995, heartbroken at the way Corfu was now covered with concrete mixers and cranes, as modern hotels went up.

Leslie, working as a porter in a block of flats and estranged from his family, died in a pub in 1982. ‘Most of his wages went on drink.’ Margo ran a seedy Bournemouth boarding-house, where she was notable for serving watery stews and fried eggs sprinkled with cigarette ash. She died in 2007.

The Durrells may well receive ‘massive global audiences,’ when their lives are dramatised, but as this book amply shows, the ‘amiable chaos’ was more ‘dysfunctional and deranged’ than anyone had imagined. As a family saga, it is filled with pain and conflict, the very reverse of Gerald’s memoirs.