Guest post by Mary Sanders Pollock
When I saw My Family and Other Animals on a bookstore shelf thirty years ago, I had to have it. I grew up on a farm, in a large, vociferous family, and the resonance with my own life was obvious. It also turned out to be one of the funniest books I have ever read.
When I happened upon Gerald Durrell’s work, my teaching and research field was Victorian literature, but the interdisciplinary field of animal studies was developing. I was all in. The day I saw that title on the bookstore shelf, my research broadened, and I started to teach a stream of new classes.
Gerald was the younger brother of the novelist Lawrence Durrell, whose tetralogy The Alexandria Quartet was an instant modernist classic in the 1960s. Lawrence is a frequent target of Gerald’s jokes in what came to be known as The Corfu Trilogy: My Family and Other Animals; Birds, Beasts, and Relatives; and The Garden of the Gods. The resemblances between the literary voices of these two brothers are a hyperbolic, fluid, vivid style, and cosmopolitan subject matter. However, without knowing the family background, even a careful reader might not see the resemblance since their primary subject matter is so different. Gerald is funny. Lawrence is not. That makes the portrait of the novelist in The Corfu Trilogy even more entertaining.
During the second half of the twentieth century Gerald published about thirty books—memoirs, travel narratives, animal advocacy, and comic fiction. Many of these books were best sellers, and boxed sets were especially popular with children. Gerald’s work also included numerous wildlife films for the BBC. All of it reveals a passion for animals as individuals and for saving animal species at risk. And Gerald really did evolve, as my title—The Evolution of Gerald Durrell—suggests. He came to understand that saving animals from extinction cannot be done without respect and care for our fellow human beings, for what E. O. Wilson called “biophilia.”
After Gerald died in 1995, the beautiful conservation zoo and successful wildlife conservation academy he founded on the Isle of Jersey continued to flourish, but most of the books fell out of print. In the days before the instant gratification offered by Amazon, I scoured second-hand bookstores in every city I visited to find them. That quest inspired my research about this brilliant writer and dedicated animal conservationist. (Eventually, I found almost all of those out-of-print books, and, now, many of them are once again available in print or as E-books.)
My Family and Other Animals has remained in print during all that time, and two BBC miniseries based on the Corfu Trilogy have kept the Durrell name alive beyond the conservation circles in which Gerald moved during his lifetime.
I hope you will read my book, which reflects my love of both Gerald’s literary qualities and contributions to global conservation efforts (not to mention the wonderful stories about individual animals he knew). The official biographies of Lawrence and Gerald can also enrich your understanding of Gerald’s literary and conservation contributions; The Durrells of Corfu by Michael Haag is a family biography covering the years the Durrells lived on the Greek island of Corfu. If you can, visit the Jersey zoo, and stay in one of the yurts on the campus.
Gerald was not just passionate about animals: he showed us their beauty and complexity, and he gave them a voice in a world that values them too little.
Mary Sanders Pollock, author of The Evolution of Gerald Durrell, is Professor of English Emerita at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, USA, where she has taught British literature, literary theory, and environmental studies; she is past director of the Gender Studies program at that institution.