All this I did without you

All this I did without you

(摘自 Gerald Durrell: An Authorized Biography by Douglas Botting

-1999)：

My darling McGeorge, You said that things seemed clearer when

they were written down. Well, herewith a very boring letter in which

I will try and put everything down so that you may read and re-read it

in horror at your folly in getting involved with me.

Deep breath.

To begin with I love you with a depth and passion that I have felt

for no one else in this life and if it astonishes you it astonishes me as

well. Not, I hasten to say, because you are not worth loving. Far from

it. It’s just that, first of all, I swore I would not get involved with

another woman. Secondly, I have never had such a feeling before and

it is almost frightening. Thirdly, I would never have thought it possible

that another human being could occupy my waking (and sleeping)

thoughts to the exclusion of almost everything else. Fourthly, I never

thought that – even if one was in love – one could get so completely

besotted with another person, so that a minute away from them felt

like a thousand years. Fifthly, I never hoped, aspired, dreamed that

one could find everything one wanted in one person. I was not such

an idiot as to believe this was possible. Yet in you I have found

everything I want: you are beautiful, gay, giving, gentle, idiotically

and deliciously feminine, sexy, wonderfully intelligent and

wonderfully silly as well. I want nothing else in this life than to be

with you, to listen and watch you (your beautiful voice, your beauty),

to argue with you, to laugh with you, to show you things and share

things with you, to explore your magnificent mind, to explore your

wonderful body, to help you, protect you, serve you, and bash you on

the head when I think you are wrong … Not to put too fine a point on

it I consider that I am the only man outside mythology to have found

the crock of gold at the rainbow’s end. But – having said all that – let

us consider things in detail. Don’t let this become public but … well,

I have one or two faults. Minor ones, I hasten to say. For example, I

am inclined to be overbearing. I do it for the best possible motives (all

tyrants say that) but I do tend (without thinking) to tread people

underfoot. You must tell me when I am doing it to you, my sweet,

because it can be a very bad thing in a marriage. Right. Second

blemish. This, actually, is not so much a blemish of character as a

blemish of circumstance. Darling I want you to be you in your own

right and I will do everything I can to help you in this. But you must

take into consideration that I am also me in my own right and that I

have a headstart on you … What I am trying to say is that you must

not feel offended if you are sometimes treated simply as my wife.

Always remember that what you lose on the swings you gain on the

roundabouts. But I am an established ‘creature’ in the world, and so –

on occasions – you will have to live in my shadow. Nothing gives me

less pleasure than this but it is a fact of life that has to be faced. Third

(and very important and nasty) blemish: jealousy. I don’t think you

know what jealousy is (thank God) in the real sense of the word. I

know that you have felt jealousy over Lincoln’s wife and child, but

this is what I call normal jealousy, and this – to my regret – is not what

I’ve got.

What I have got is a black monster that can pervert my good

sense, my good humour and any goodness that I have in my make-up.

It is really a Jekyll and Hyde situation … my Hyde is stronger than

my good sense and defeats me, hard though I try. As I told you, I have

always known that this lurks within me, but I could control it, and my

monster slumbered and nothing happened to awake it. Then I met you

and I felt my monster stir and become half awake when you told me

of Lincoln and others you have known, and with your letter my

monster came out of its lair, black, irrational, bigoted, stupid, evil,

malevolent. You will never know how terribly corrosive jealousy is;

it is a physical pain as though you had swallowed acid or red hot coals.

It is the most terrible of feelings. But you can’t help it – at least I can’t,

and God knows I’ve tried. I don’t want any ex-boyfriends sitting in

church when I marry you. On our wedding day I want nothing but

happiness, both for you and me, and I know I won’t be happy if there

is a church full of your ex-conquests. When I marry you I will have

no past, only a future: I don’t want to drag my past into our future and

I don’t want you to do it, either. Remember I am jealous of you

because I love you. You are never jealous of something you don’t care

about.

O.K. enough about jealousy. Now let me tell you something …

I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods

forest and mountains with honey coloured light, at sea where it rises

and sets like a blood orange in a multicoloured nest of cloud, slipping

in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest

moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons

like baby swans’ feathers. I have seen seas as smooth as if painted,

coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass

or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and

murderously. I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and

wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath;

winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of

seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor, the

smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the

sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a

kitten. I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of

a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot,

drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into

silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends. I

have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into

your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated

as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have

heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves

like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the

hoarse street vendor cries of the mating Fur seals as they sang to their

sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the

Rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the Bat and the belling roar of the

Red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard Wolves baying at

a winter’s moon, Red howlers making the forest vibrate with their

roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr and grunt of a hundred

multi-coloured reef fishes. I have seen hummingbirds flashing like

opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen

flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing

silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen Spoonbills flying

home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen Whales,

black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles

of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and

sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched

Tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed

by an angry Raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain

in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of

Dolphins.

I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful

things … but – All this I did without you. This was my loss. All this

I want to do with you. This will be my gain. All this I would gladly

have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your

laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your

sweet, ever surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it

is my privilege to delve.

Letter to his fiancée Lee, (31 July 1978), published in Gerald

Durrell: An Authorized Biography by Douglas Botting (1999)