![]() He’s often cast in the role of the lovable fool, a foil. In My Family, Spiro is a primarily a comic figure, and one that is constantly in the background: he drives young Gerry about, helps Mother with the shopping, and even brings the family’s mail. Prodigious drinker of beer, he resembles a cask with legs coiner of oaths and roaring blasphemies, he adores little children and never rides out in his battered Dodge without two at least sitting beside him listening to his stories. His devotion to England is so flamboyant that he is known locally as Spiro Americanos. ![]() …his Brooklyn drawl, his boasting, his coyness he combines the air of a chief conspirator with a voice like a bass viol. Lawrence’s description of Spiro Americanos, the Corfiot taxi driver who became a friend of the family, is like a deft and beautiful pencil sketch compared with Gerald’s later comic caricature: Though Gerald’s memoir is structured around his nuclear family, and Lawrence’s does not mention his mother or siblings (except for Leslie), there are several characters and situations that appear in both books. ![]() Lawrence’s Corfu memoir, Prospero’s Cell, was published in 1945, eleven years before his younger brother Gerald’s more famous memoir, My Family and Other Animals. Spiro and Gerry, with the ‘battered old Dodge’ in the background ![]()
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