Kid brother strikes back

Gerald Durrell and his
pet owl Ulysses

I'm the oldest of three siblings -- I have a brother three years younger and a sister eight years younger.  As the eldest, I had certain responsibilities during our childhood.  As my parents were unable, or unwilling, to administer the firm discipline that the younger kids clearly required, it fell upon me to do so.  When necessary, like Lloyd the bartender, I "corrected" them.* 

I suppose there was occasional resentment.  But I was the oldest.  Resentment happens.

Four weeks ago, I discussed in this blog the book Prospero's Cell, by Lawrence Durrell.  Durrell wrote of his three years or so living on Corfu at the end of the 1930s.  Lawrence was already a promising poet, and went on to write a number of excellent travel books (those about his life on Rhodes and on Cyprus having been discussed in earlier posts on this blog), and -- his best known work -- the Alexandria Quartet novels.

What Lawrence didn't mention in Prospero's Cell, so far as I can recall, was the fact that his family was also living on Corfu at the same time.  He spoke frequently of his wife Nancy -- who he coyly called simply "N." -- but nothing about his mother, his two brothers Leslie and Gerald, and his sister Margo.  Prospero was a high-minded book, discussing the joys and difficulties of living as an expat in a foreign culture, and the history of Corfu and its natural environment.  It was an intellectual book, describing Lawrence's long philosophical conversations with fellow intellectuals, Greek and otherwise, also living on Corfu.

And then, more than a decade after Prospero's Cell, the family struck back. In 1956, the youngest son, Gerry, published the extremely popular memoir, My Family and Other Animals.  Gerry had been ten years old when the family first moved to Corfu, and was 15 when they left at the beginning of World War II.  My Family was the first of three books about Gerry's young life on Corfu -- collected together as the Corfu Trilogy. 

Gerry is an entertaining writer both because of his precocious and intense interest in nature, and because of his sense of humor in describing the family's problems in dealing with the local Greeks, and even more their difficulties in dealing with each other.  As Gerry views the family, only he himself (surrounding himself and his family's house with a menagerie of marine and insect specimens, dead and alive) bore any semblance to normality.  The number two son, Leslie, was a total gun nut, and sister Margo was a bundle of adolescent neuroses and body image pathologies.

And Larry?  Big brother?  Larry the writer lived in his own personal cloud, watching as others worked and strived, making clever and acerbic comments about their efforts.

It was Larry, of course, who started it.  The rest of us felt too apathetic to think of anything except our own ills, but Larry was designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blond firework, exploding ideas in other people's minds, and then curling up with catlike unctuousness, and refusing to take any blame for the consequences.

Gerry nails the flavor of Larry's personality.  Or at least he nails the impression he wishes to convey of Larry's personality.

"I ask you!  Isn't it laughable that future generations should be deprived of my work simply because some horny-handed idiot has tied that stinking beast of burden near my window?" Larry asked.
"Yes, dear," said Mother, "why don't you move it if it disturbs you?"
"My dear Mother, I can't be expected to spend my time chasing donkeys about the olive groves.  I threw a pamphlet on Theosophy at it; what more do you expect me to do?"

Gerry is a very funny writer, and he went on to become a distinguished naturalist, zoo curator, and advocate for wildlife.  But he was also, in my big brother's opinion, a sniveling little liar.

Gerald Durrell never mentions in his book -- in fact he describes totally to the contrary -- that Lawrence was married and living on Corfu before his family moved there, and that he lived with Nancy some distance from the rest of the family.  In the book, Larry is always skulking about the house, muttering complaints and issuing airy intellectual fiats. Larry cannot abide his young brother's fascination with smelly animals and creepy insects, especially whenever said naturalist's exhibits tend to touch upon Larry's tender sensibilities.   

I suppose that Gerald would argue that his description of his big brother conveys some larger truth, some evaluation of Larry's personality based on close observation before Larry married and fled the family home in England for life on Corfu.  The "Larry" persona is too well-drawn and consistent to be totally a product of a resentful younger brother's imagination.

I, of course, relate to Larry/Lawrence not only as an older brother, but as an older brother who likes to stand around making witty observations while my siblings and other relatives do all the work that I am commenting upon so cleverly.  Can't help it.  I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam.  But Lawrence perhaps gave his younger brother unknowing permission for the liberties the young twerp takes with the facts.  Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet is a study of the same facts as observed by three different individuals, with the fourth volume presenting in part a (possibly) more objective view. 

Every person sees life from his own perspective, as the Quartet emphasizes, and family life is no different.  A 23-year-old intellectual and writer will necessarily view family life on Corfu differently from a 10-year-old naturalist.  Luckily for Larry and Gerry, neither Leslie the gun nut, nor Margo the girl with "spots," chose to write from their own viewpoint.

A friend has described my own family as a group of disparate individuals with nothing in common but a bunch of collective memories and the same weird sense of humor.  That's been enough to hold us all together.  But, of course, none of us so far has chosen to write a book about it.
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*I'm fantasizing. Wildly.