2016 Summer Grant Report Mary Sanders Pollock, Professor of English [email protected] September 15, 2016 a. Project title: Gerald Durrell: A New Biography b. Stated Goals: “During the summer grant period of 2016, I will write the first two chapters (outlined below) of a biography of Gerald Durrell (1925-95), an internationally respected conservationist and the author of more than thirty books--travel writing, memoir, environmental writing, and fiction.” [First chapter devoted to Gerald Durrell’s childhood on the Greek island of Corfu, second chapter to his teenage years in London during World War II.] c. Progress toward stated goals [results attached in Appendix]: I completed the second chapter and part of the third chapter. I produced the amount of work projected, but in a different form. Because my research travel to Corfu had to be delayed until 2017, I felt ill equipped to write about it. Instead of writing the first chapter, I began with the second chapter, a more thorough and detailed examination of Durrell’s London years than I anticipated because there were more primary materials and relevant theoretical work that I had not discovered when I wrote the grant application. As a result, this chapter is longer than originally planned. In addition, I wrote a section of the third chapter. The most significant work (and least visible) on the project absorbed my attention in May and June. After submitting the grant application, as I was writing a conference paper on a related topic (“Islomania, Island Biogeography, and the Durrell Literary Imagination”), it became clear to me that more grounding in cosmopolitan theory, as well as studies in immigration, exile, and refugee status would deepen and refine my initial assumptions about Gerald Durrell. Whereas I had been reading his works as the expression of an individual coming to terms with his own privilege and “green imperialist” impulses, in this conference presentation, I became more aware of Durrell’s position within post-colonial social and political structures. This new dimension of my thinking about this project is crucial, and I intend to pursue this line of inquiry next summer without grant funding from Stetson. 1 Below is a list of refinements I have made or expect to make: --Book title change from Gerald Durrell: A New Biography to Gerald Durrell and the Little Ones of God --New chapter titles: Island [Corfu] Metropolis [teenage years in London during WW II] Voyages Out [voyages to Africa and Latin America] The Ark [the zoo on the Isle of Jersey] A Wider World [projects in Madagascar and the Mascarenes] The Raven and the Dove [travels in Russia, and Durrell’s conservation projects since his death in 1995] --Rearranging chapter content (especially in the first three chapters) Other Accomplishments during the grant period: (1) Review of “Kingdoms of Elfin” by Sylvia Townsend Warner by James Overholtzer for a reference work on Supernatural Literature forthcoming from Gale Cengage Publishing. [fyi--My 2015 article on this author is cited in Overholtzer’s work.] (2) Abstract accepted for presentation at SLSA 2016, November 3-5 Atlanta: “Why Does the Dog Do the Adho Mukha Svanasana?” 2 Appendix Chapter 2 The Wide World Although I have never been a lover of big cities, I found London, at that time, fascinating. After all, the biggest town I was used to was the town of Corfu, which was about the size of a small English market town, and so the great sprawling mass of London had hundreds of exciting secrets for me to discover. (Fillets of Plaice 52) “This has become our unregretted home. A world,” Lawrence writes in the memoirs which became Prospero’s Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu. No one in the family wanted to leave Corfu in 1939, despite Britain’s declaration of war against Nazi Germany and the certainty that war would come to them soon, in some way. Mussolini’s plans for resurrecting the Roman Empire throughout the Mediterranean and beyond were generally understood, and Albania and Greece were in the direct line of fire. Clearly, it wasn’t all talk. In 1935 Italy attacked Ethiopia, one of the few independent African states left after the European scramble for Africa around the turn of the previous century. The following year, Mussolini poured enough treasure into Franco’s faction in the Spanish Civil War to help the future dictator seize complete control of the country by the end of the decade. After signing agreements with Germany in 1938, Italy confronted France with demands for control of Corsica and the territory east of Nice and the River Var, in addition to shared control of the Suez Canal and French Tunisia. In 1939, 3 Mussolini announced to his Grand Council an expansionist blueprint which included Cyprus, Gibralter, and Malta. In April of that year, Italy invaded Albania, just across the strait from the northern end of Corfu, within sight of Kalami, where Lawrence and Nancy lived for much of their Corfu sojourn. Everyone assumed Greece would be invaded soon, but isolated as the Durrells were in their rural domiciles, surrounded by friends and friendly neighbors, they were inclined to hang on. They had progressed from feeling exiled to feeling at home, and had no desire to change their state into that of refugees. But the circle was broken and scattered by the end of the year. In June, Louisa’s bankers warned her that when war did break out, access to her funds would be cut off. Margo had already left to stay with relatives in England, but Larry and Nancy wanted to stick it out on Corfu as long as possible. In September, Gerald, Leslie, and their mother packed up the family’s belongings, caged what residents of Gerald’s zoo they could manage, put new collars on the dogs, took their “last tearful goodbyes,” labored nervously through customs, with Louisa “looking as guilty as a diamond smuggler,” and boarded the tender (My Family 298-99). “As the ship drew across the sea,” Gerald recalled fifteen years later, and Corfu sank shimmering into the pearly heat haze on the horizon a black depression settled on us, which lasted all the way back to England. The grimy train scuttled its way up from Brindisi towards Switzerland, and we sat in silence, not wishing to talk. Above our heads, on the rack, the finches sang in their cages, the Magenpies chucked and hammered with their beaks, 4 And Alecko gave a mournful yarp at intervals. Around our feet the dogs lay snoring. (300) At the Swiss border, Louisa “stiffened” at the description an unsmiling official had written on the entry card: “One traveling circus and staff” (302). They left none too soon. In December, England imposed a blockade on Italy to impede the shipment of strategic materials. By that time, Margo had returned to Corfu to live briefly with the Condos family, until a British pilot, her future husband Jack Breeze, persuaded her to rejoin the family in England. In October, Lawrence and Nancy reluctantly removed to the Greek mainland, taking with them Henry Miller, who had arrived in Corfu at summer’s end for an extended visit. By Christmas, military conditions had worsened, and, after a helter-skelter road trip around Greece in an automobile constantly on the verge of collapse, the couple fought bitterly and delivered Miller to his ship within minutes of its departure schedule and the expiration of his visa (Colossus). In less than a year, Italy would, indeed, invade Greece. Gerald and Nancy sailed for Crete in 1941. In 1943, the Germans, now hostile to their former Italian ally, drove the Italian invaders out and developed the island into a staging ground for land and sea campaigns. By this time, Lawrence was deployed as a press attaché with the British Embassy, stationed mostly in Cairo; Margo had married Jack and accompanied him to Egypt; Louisa, Leslie, and Gerald, after some months in London, settled more or less permanently in Bournemouth, where they had some ties to the extended family. 5 The lives of the Durrells had changed drastically, several times, they were exiles and settlers, provincial and metropolitan, expatriates and refugees. For this continually uprooting, all three brothers would pay a great price for the rest of their lives. But the cosmopolite experience also permitted distinct freedoms abroad: not belonging within a culture, sometimes not even knowing the customs by which its members must abide, and certainly not feeling bound by those customs, grants cosmopolites both de facto social choices and expanded perspectives, no matter their economic condition. Gerald brought that freedom back to England. His unconventional mindset and perspective on the natural world were formed during his childhood years in Corfu and imported to England with considerably less struggle than those confronted by his older brothers. At the age of fifteen, he was freed by his mother’s relaxed parenting, and perhaps a certain degree of naïvete, to violate class boundaries by working at a pet shop instead of attending a public school. Reluctant though he was to leave Paradise, London’s novelty and cultural riches contributed significantly to his education as a future zookeeper, environmentalist, and writer of books and television scripts. Since his mother was preoccupied with housing, Gerald was left to his own devices, just as he had been free to range over field, grove, and seashore in Corfu. His memoirs of this time reveal a continuity between the untrammeled freedom of his childhood rambles in Corfu and delightfully unsupervised teenager forays into the cityscape. With access to bookstores, he continued to read voraciously.