Bring ’em Back Alive 383 He made his first trip to Cameroon in 1947, taking orders from British zoos to bring back the animals they wanted. He would later return to Cameroon and West Africa several times and then branch out to South America, and later the islands of Madagascar and Mauritius; he never had a permanent foreign base like Buck in Singapore. Although his trips to Cameroon and Guyana gained him renown as an animal collector, they did not financially sustain him and his wife Jacquie, whom he married in 1951. Noting the popularity of Durrell’s radio broadcasts about animals, she, along with his literary brother, Lawrence, pressed him to write about his adventures. 6 Beginning in 1953 with The Overloaded Ark, he downplays the dangers of the Cameroon jungle, and instead, extolls its botanical beauties and the quirky endearing qualities of the animals and people he meets. He produced three travelogue-capture books in quick succession and their combination of humor, zest, scientific detail, sensitivity, and poetry heralded a new kind of nature writing, a unique product of Durrell’s empathy for animals and his ironic view of human behavior. The financial and critical success of his books encouraged him to propose his own new kind of zoo, one specifically for the captive breeding of endangered species. Like Buck, Durrell discovered that it was storytelling, not the actual collecting, that would be profitable enough to help him reach his goal. In the process of writing, Durrell learned to limit his faithfulness to the facts as they were recorded in his diaries and to borrow techniques from fiction—reorganization, selection, compression, inversion—to enhance the tale and present himself and his experiences to best effect—as Anthony did for Buck. Durrell’s narrative trajectory picks up on the tail end of Buck’s, beginning after World War II when countries of the Global South were not accepting the yoke that colonial powers were trying to reimpose, including decisions about who should determine what 6 J. Durrell (1967) mentions her role in persuading him to write in Beasts in my Bed.
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