A Guardian article points to discrepancies between the fancies behind, for instance, the PBS presentation of their youth on Corfu, and what biographers have discovered.
'When [Gerald Durrell's] My Family and Other Animals was published in 1956 it was as if someone had flung back the curtains, thrown up the windows and let in a stream of bright light. British readers, having only in recent years torn up their ration books, were transfixed by the naturalist Gerald Durrell’s account of his biophiliac childhood on prewar Corfu in the bosom of his eccentric family... [Durrell painted] what paradise might look like from “Pudding Island”, the scornful epithet for England coined by Lawrence Durrell, the eldest sibling and catalyst for the whole shambolic enterprise. No wonder a grey postwar Britain greedily devoured the Durrell myth....
'..... [B]iographers of the Durrells (Douglas Botting on Gerald, Ian MacNiven on Lawrence, Joanna Hodgkin on Lawrence’s first wife, Nancy) have .... pointed out the confabulations and elisions that make My Family such an unreliable guide. We know what actually happened between 1935 and 1939, when Anglo-Indian widow Louisa Durrell and her four children set up home in a series of ice-cream colour villas along the eastern coastline of Corfu. ...
'[This is partly because of] the notes that Gerald Durrell left for his autobiography, unpublished at the time of his death in 1995, which were mined by Botting for his authorised work of 1999. And that’s not forgetting the late David Hughes’s fine Boswellian account of his long friendship with the naturalist, which remains the closest we are likely to get to a sense of what it was like to bask in the sun of Gerald’s fitful brilliance.
'Finally there is Lawrence Durrell’s lengthy correspondence with Henry Miller from the late 1930s on which all Durrell biographers are obliged to draw. These letters nail once and for all the old canard that the four siblings plus “Mother” lived together in hilarious uproar among those crumbling Venetian piles. Far from being the irascible bachelor “Larry” of My Family, Lawrence was actually the irascible husband of Nancy Myers with whom he lived mostly on the other side of the island. Indeed, for significant stretches of time the uncomfortable young couple were not on Corfu at all, but busy hobnobbing with Miller in Paris and TS Eliot in London, in service of Lawrence’s already promising literary career.
'....[W]hen the Durrells arrived in Corfu in 1935 they were still mourning the death of their father and husband seven years earlier. The loss of Lawrence Samuel Durrell, an Anglo-Indian railway engineer, at the age of just 43, had left his widow suicidal and permanently tipsy. ... Louisa continued to drink heavily, which puts a slightly different complexion on all that charming dottiness that Mother exhibits in My Family....[and] all three brothers developed into alcoholics with severe psychological problems of their own. Gerald, the wide-eyed child through whom My Family is filtered, suffered from cirrhosis of the liver and died following a transplant operation. Lawrence worked his way through four marriages and many, many bottles of wine. Saddest of all was Leslie, the middle brother, who died of a heart attack in a pub in Notting Hill, London, having spent part of his life one step ahead of the law. None of his siblings attended the funeral.
'..... On returning to Britain on the outbreak of war they discovered that their Greek maid was pregnant by Leslie. Lawrence and Gerald insisted that he couldn’t possibly marry the girl. Maria Kondos and her baby son were left to eke out a difficult life in a Bournemouth council house...[And yet, somehow] out of such an unhappy mulch emerged two of the leading British writers of the mid-20th century....'
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