406 EURAMERICA place and funding to launch his now world-famous Jersey Zoo—the first institution devoted to captive breeding. Unlike the extrovert Buck, reveling in his glory, Durrell, professed to be a shy man, going public only on behalf of animals. He had to turn on the charm with famous sponsors, such as the zoo’s Royal Patron, Princess Anne, who in 1984 inaugurated his other unique institution—the International Training Centre—that educates naturalist-zookeepers from extinction hotspots in poor countries. The zoo was Durrell’s animal kingdom, as he virtually lived in it, but the zoo staff expressed surprise that he was not more often with the animals. His biographer Botting suggests that he was too anxious about finding the money needed to keep it going, and was overworked from writing more books, taking more televised expeditions and making more lecture appearances. In The Stationary Ark, his least funny book, G. Durrell describes all that goes into the running the Jersey Zoo according to his ideals, and explains why he depends upon humor: If anyone objects to what may seem, on the surface, a frivolous attitude, I can only point out that if I did not find the antics of myself and my fellow animals—from politicians to peacocks—irresistibly comic, I would not have the heart to do what I am doing. The present world looks so dark, that one needs the fireflies of humour to light one’s way. (1976: 9) His humorous depictions of this vast and varied world mask not only his immediate worry about maintaining the zoo, but also the burden of his prescient despair over extinction, always haunted by the echo “too little . . . too late.” X. Their Legacies Today Humor, however, might be Durrell’s unique legacy—for his books are still read around the world for the joy they transmit, thanks to his ability to express his rapport with animals with
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