Books: Family + Fauna X 2

BIRDS, BEASTS AND RELATIVES by Gerald Durrell. 248 pages. Viking. $5.95.

Naturalist Gerald Durrell’s boyhood memoir, My Family and Other Animals, delighted nearly everyone except his family. The book started as a report on the beginning of young Gerald’s lifelong fascination with the animal world. The family, however, kept getting in the way. “It was only with the greatest difficulty,” Durrell confessed, “and by exercising considerable cunning, that I managed to retain a few pages here and there which I could devote exclusively to animals.” Then, when it was finished, his relatives ragged him for leaving out all the really funny family stories. Obligingly, Durrell set to work to make amends.

Birds, Beasts and Relatives, the just published result, is neither sequel nor second volume. It is the very same book, except that all the anecdotes and incidents are different. Durrell’s five boyhood years on the Greek island of Corfu are recalled with the same sense of a sun-drenched idylotry as before. The Durrell mythology is broadened to include the story of how a foul-mouthed old sea captain proposed to Durrell’s mother. One learns of “Gerry’s” visit to Corfu’s countess, a dotty and rotund old party who forced him to share a six-course lunch climaxed by a whole wild boar. There are inevitable references to the boat-scuttling yachtsmanship of Eldest Brother Larry (now better known as the author of The Alexandria Quartet).

Durrell dutifully and deftly relates such episodes, customarily avoiding the smug coziness that tends to afflict family anecdotage as a genre. But the boy who grew into a topflight zoologist was always slightly more interested in the doings of four-legged animals than two. At picnics, he was absorbed, not annoyed, by flies and ants. His endless hours of watching in the fields and at the edge of the sea were rewarded by such wonders as the sight of two snails mating. Sidling up side-to-side, each fired out a small white dart on a slender rope that thunked into the side of the other; then some internal winch slowly pulled the ropes in until the snails were lashed tightly together for 15 minutes of lovemaking.

The young Durrell saw death too. The crisp horror of a tarantula killing a newly hatched bird is as vivid in his prose as it must have been to the watching boy. “The spider drew the quivering baby to him and sank his long, curved mandibles into its back. The baby gave two minute, almost inaudible squeaks as it writhed briefly in the hairy embrace of the spider. The poison took effect, and then the spider turned and marched off, the baby hanging limply from his jaws.” Happily, Durrell refrains from following this description with a bloodless dissertation on the importance of nature’s balance. He is far too humane not to have been on the side of the bird. Indeed one of his most endearing traits is his capacity to react to animals as he would to people. Animals seem to find it endearing too. Like the bear who cheerfully followed Durrell home one afternoon. Gerry’s long-suffering mother was sure that he could explain the attachment. “Explain?” his brother Larry exploded. “Explain? How do you explain a bloody great bear in the drawing-room?” If you happen to be Durrell, you can explain—enchantingly.