Desmond Morris in Malta

Forty years after The Naked Ape, and as controversial as ever, Desmond Morris talks to Stephen Moss about sexual politics, homosexuality, and his second life as a surrealist painter. From The Guardian:

..He didn't stay at the ICA long. The runaway success of The Naked Ape allowed him to run away - he says he knew it was a sensation when he heard Burt Lancaster had bought the film rights. He quit his job and, with his wife Ramona, went to live in Malta, where he started painting again in earnest, lived a life of sunny, self-conscious hedonism, and produced a son, Jason.

Morris was almost 40 when he left for Malta - burned out, he says, after 15 years of frenetic activity. "A few months before I wrote The Naked Ape my health collapsed. When I recovered I said, 'Right, that's it,' and I cut out a lot of things. I realised that I had to cut down. I was trying to live like a machine when in fact I was just an animal. I focused all my efforts on one thing, which was The Naked Ape. I sat down and wrote it in the autumn of 1966. I hadn't any hopes for it; I didn't expect it to do anything. People say I must have known what I was doing. They think I deliberately wrote it to make a shocking bestseller, but it wasn't like that."

Intentional or not, that was what it became, and he was determined to enjoy the money and freedom it brought him. "I didn't intend to stay in Malta for very long, but it stretched for five or six years. I had a studio and painted. I wrote in the winter, painted in the summer. We had all our friends out to stay. My childlike curiosity, which I've maintained all my life, demands new experiences, and this was something I'd never experienced before. My mother was horrified. She said, 'Put the money in the bank,' as mothers do, but I said, 'No, I'm going to spend it all, and when it's all spent I'll come back to work, because I like work.' And that's what I did. I spent most of it, and then came back and started research again here at Oxford."

In 1973 he returned to the UK with his family to take up a research fellowship at Wolfson College, seeking to combine hard science with populist books. The Human Zoo and Intimate Behaviour, both written in Malta, were followed by Manwatching (which developed the concept of "body language"), The Soccer Tribe, Catwatching, Dogwatching and Babywatching. He resumed his TV career and travelled widely - a map of the world in the corridor that connects his art-world with his science-world is covered with pins marking the places he has visited...