The truth about Corfu’s eccentric expat family was much darker than the comic myth – but do we need another biography of the family?

When 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. Here was the comic opera version of Elizabeth David’s wildly popular Mediterranean cookbooks – the same colours, textures and sand-between-the-toes lyricism but with an added helping of wacky local characters, naughty fauna and ribald – “Rabelaisian” was the word the Durrells liked to use about themselves – humour. Add at a favourable rate of exchange, cheap domestic service and good rough wine with every meal and you had the makings of 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 and has been letting the juices run down its chin ever since. Last year’s ITV serial The Durrells, based on My Family and its two sequels, averaged 7 million viewers.

The series is returning to our screens again, which must explain the publication of Michael Haag’s pointless book; while his introduction promises “a new and revealing narrative”, it is hard to see what he adds to the well-known story. Previous biographers of the Durrells (Douglas Botting on Gerald, Ian MacNiven on Lawrence, Joanna Hodgkin on Lawrence’s first wife, Nancy) have already 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. That doesn’t stop Haag, though, embarking on the time-honoured task of pointing out those places where My Family departs most egregiously from what might optimistically be called the documentary record. It would have been far more productive, surely, to abandon that thankless project for good and accept the Durrell myth as a magic-realist fable composed of multiple retellings, rather like Lawrence Durrell’s tetralogy The Alexandria Quartet, but with more creepy crawlies and better jokes.

It isn’t even as though Haag has unearthed particularly significant fresh material, although some of the photographs are new. Instead he fillets well-known sources such as Whatever Happened to Margo?, the memoir published late in life by Margaret Durrell, the only girl in the family. There are also 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.

Although Haag quotes, as so many have before him, the serio-comic wail of Margo Durrell, “I never know what’s fact and what’s fiction in my family”, he fails to wonder why the Durrells, Margo included, felt compelled to rewrite their family life so exhaustively. What, for instance, should we make of Gerald’s insistence on eliminating from My Family the wives of the three male mentors who were crucial to his growing self – his eldest brother Lawrence, his tutor George Wilkinson and the local polymath Dr Theo Stephanides? One absent wife looks like carelessness, or perhaps a desire for narrative clarity, but three suggests the desperate wish of a fatherless child to ensure that he has the undivided attention of his caregivers.

The most Haag is willing to concede is that when 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. But what Haag fails to say is that Louisa continued to drink heavily, which puts a slightly different complexion on all that charming dottiness that Mother exhibits in My Family. And despite insisting on including the post-Corfu lives of the Durrells in his book, Haag also neglects to mention that 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.

Nor does Haag probe deeply into why the Durrells were so thoroughly disliked on the island. It wasn’t just the Anglophile gentry of Corfu Town who thought there was something vulgar and cartoonish about them. When Lawrence and Nancy, together with their stream of guests, insisted on swimming naked in the sea the local peasants pelted them with rocks and daubed angry graffiti near their house. Yet this épater les bourgeois attitude didn’t stop the Durrells coming over all blimpish when it suited them. 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.

You might excuse all this, as the Durrells did, as just so much “Rabelaisian” good cheer. Alternatively you could frame it as the familiar colonial story of a serially expat family never quite shaking off the expectation that the world is run for their convenience (animals, obviously, being the honourable exception). But Haag has no interest in exploring any of this, not even the startling fact that out of such an unhappy mulch emerged two of the leading British writers of the mid-20th century. Instead, he aligns his own writing project closely with the money-spinner that is My Family and Other Animals, reluctant to let any light in on the dark magic that is the Durrell myth.

The Durrells of Corfu is published by Profile. To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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