Books: The Fon’s Fauna

A ZOO IN MY LUGGAGE (198 pp)—Gerald Durrell—Viking ($3.95).

Gerald Durrell once awakened in pain to find a squirrel assiduously stuffing a peanut in his ear. He has crawled into a cave to lasso a python. At various times, chimpanzees have commandeered his bed and bath, mongooses have suckled maternally under his shirt, and baby rodents have waited impatiently for him to tuck the 3 a.m. hot-water bottle under their tiny feet. Animals come close to being Durrell’s best friends, and as the zoologist brother of Novelist Lawrence (The Alexandria Quartet) Durrell, he writes about them with style, verve and humor.

Over the years, parting with animals became such a wrenching affair for Gerald that he finally decided to collect a zoo of his own. This book is his blithe-spirited account of a six-month collector’s safari in Bafut, a mountain grasslands kingdom in the Cameroons in British West Africa.

Gin & Mimbo. Durrell seems to lend his animals the qualities of far-out British eccentrics. There was the egg-eating snake which absorbed the yolk and white, regurgitated the crushed shell. There was Bug-Eyes, the needle-clawed female lemur, who daintily dabbed at her petal-thin ears with a drop of her own water as if applying perfume. But the most colorful character in the book is not an animal but the Fon of Bafut, a royal hedonist with a joyous appetite for women, dance, song and drink, in the form of tumblers of Scotch, gin and mimbo, the native palm potion. More than 6 ft. tall and past 80 in age, the gorgeously robed Fon moves through Author Durrell’s pages like the mythic club member of some eternally tipsy Olympus. The Fon also regaled Durrell with a pidgin-English account of Queen Elizabeth’s tour of the neighboring realm. “Dis Queen woman she get plenty power. She walker walker she never shweat. Na foine woman dis.”

Durrell and the Fon became foiner and foiner friends. When the time came for the zoologist to leave with his animals, the Fon gave him a set of his own magnificently embroidered black-and-yellow robes and proclaimed him the Deputy Fon.

Zoo, Anyone? Back home, the Deputy Fon of Bafut got a Blimpish reception from the city fathers when he offered his adoptive town of Bournemouth a ready-made menagerie: “There had never been a zoo in the town ever since it had become a town, and so they did not see why there should be one now.” For a year, Durrell almost literally had a zoo in his luggage. Then a 17th century mansion on the Channel island of Jersey was ceded to the animal kingdom.

While keeping his private zoo, Durrell, 35, has not neglected his writing. In fact, he shows his brother’s gift for impaling the vivid butterfly of reality on the point of a pen. Only a very special zoologist could look at a white-bodied, black-footed mongoose and observe: “She was sleek, sinuous, and svelte, and reminded me of a creamy-skinned Parisienne belle-amie clad in nothing more than two pairs of black silk stockings.”