From The Unquiet Grave, a peculiar melancholy montage - part memoir, part scrapbook of European culture refracted through the interwar years with a heavy dose of psychoanalysis - published in 1944 by Cyril Connolly under the pseudonym 'Palinurus':
Graves of the Lemurs
Whoopee. Gentle and fearless, he passed four leafy years in the South of France. He would chase large dogs, advancing backwards and glaring through his hind legs, then jump chittering at them and pull their tails. He died through eating a poisoned fig laid down for rats. The children who saw him take the fruit tried to coax it from him, but he ran up a tree with it. There they watched him eat and die.
Polyp. Most gifted of lemurs, who hated aeroplanes in the sky, on the screen and even on the wireless. How he would have hated this war! He could play in the snow or swim in a river or conduct himself in a nightclub; he judged human beings by their voices; biting some, purring over others, while for one or two well-seasoned old ladies he would brandish a black prickle-studded penis, shaped like a eucalyptus seed. Using his tail as an aerial, he would lollop through long grass to welcome his owners, embracing them with little cries and offering them a lustration from his purple tongue and currycomb teeth. His manners were those of some spoiled young Maharajah, his intelligence not inferior, his heart all delicacy, -- women, gin and muscats were his only weaknesses. Alas, he died of pneumonia while we scolded him for coughing, and with him vanished the sea-purple cicada kingdom of calanque and stone-pine and the concept of life as an arrogant private dream shared by two.
I picked up a copy of this in a secondhand bookstore in Newtown a few years ago, read it with pleasure and then forgot about it until I was rearranging my shelves this week so that all of the NYRB Classics are together.
The only reason I know the name Cyril Connolly was from the end of the Monty Python song "Eric the Half a Bee". So it was startling and satisfying to find, near the end, a set of fond reminiscences about the author's pet lemurs, which seems likely to be the origin of the long diatribe in the "Fish Licence" sketch about notable people who kept odd pets - "Marcel Proust had an 'addock!"