a bonobo humanity?

As some of my posts might indicate, I’ve become a bit of a Darwin obsessive over the years, and I think I’m often more interested in personalities than ideas. I’ve even become quite protective of him, even though I have every reason to be pissed off by the privileges he benefitted from. Darwin was brought up amongst the ‘whig aristocracy’, his father being a wealthy doctor and a smart investor, closely associated with his wife’s Wedgwood wealth, and I really mean wealth. Basically, he inherited smarts as well as wealth. I only inherited smarts, but comparisons are odorous, I’m told. 

So Darwin was born with ‘connections’, and lived in a large Shrewsbury estate with servants and plenty of land for hunting and collecting and an inheritance that included grandad Erasmus with his many intellectual and sensual pursuits. Some 150 or so years later, I lived in a rental purchase home in Elizabeth, a working class region north of Adelaide, South Australia, where I started my first job at 15 or 16 in a washing-machine factory. I’d recently left school after having been slapped very forcefully in the face by the headmaster for chewing gum while he was talking to me. I’ve had fantasies ever since of slicing his penis off, ripping his intestines out and observing his reaction. Sorry about that – but Edward II, the so-called ‘hammer of the Scots’, got away with doing that kinda thing to William Wallace… that’s the upper classes for you.

As a young man, Darwin was sent to Edinburgh to finish his education. He mostly studied medicine and the natural sciences, but he couldn’t cope with dissection, not to mention the Scots’ murder of the language, and after some family discussion he transferred to Cambridge. In both institutions, his family name and fame provided him with a number of intellectual connections, and that’s how he got the Beagle assignment. This was definitely the making of him as a naturalist, though his role was supposed to be that of a gentleman’s gentleman to Captain Fitzroy, who, as a Tory toff, didn’t much like the idea of being cooped up for some years in an almost embarrassingly tiny boat with a lot of unlettered sea urchins. The voyage lasted nearly five years and ultimately circumnavigated the globe. Darwin was 22 years old when it set out. 

In my five years from the age of 22 I spent much of my time on the dole, having previously worked in two washing-machine factories, a factory that made mobile classrooms for over-crowded schools, a factory making metal pipes for various purposes, a foundry making metal baskets also for various purposes, and a stint as a nurse’s aid in an institute quaintly named The Home for Incurables. 

So, after all that, at 22 I moved into a share-house with an art student of the same age, and a much older social worker (at 28!) who was openly homosexual and never wore clothes in the house. It was a very happy period for me, I began to write a regular diary and found myself on the fringes of an arty-farty crowd. My main literary influences then were, I’d say, two very different self-obsessives, Michel de Montaigne and Franz Kafka, and I began to take a little pride in my intellect.

In my 24th year I enrolled in a College of Advanced Education (CAE), an education facility created in the 70s and 80s, above high school but not quite a university, doing a thing called Communication Studies. A couple of essays I wrote caused enough interest that the head of the college invited me into his office and suggested that, with his help, I could be transferred to Flinders University, perhaps to study philosophy. On further questioning, though, he found that I was failing in at least one subject, mathematics, which I was more or less completely ignoring, and he changed his mind. I dropped out of the college at the end of my first year. 

Over the next few years I moved from share-house to share-house and lived with a number of interesting characters. It was a carefree, easy-going time of reading, writing, and chit-chat. I lucked into a job as a kitchen-hand in a swank French restaurant and became quite interested in cooking, which raised my status among share-house comrades.

And then Darwin arrived back in England. He’d gained much self-confidence and something of a reputation, having sent off some intriguing fossil specimens from his labours in South America, and soon made contact with Charles Lyell, whose first volume of Principles of Geology he’d read on his travels, as well as his erstwhile associates Henslow, Sedgwick and Fox. He published his ‘Journal of researches’ in 1839, and subsequent geological and biological works earned him membership of the Geological Society and the Royal Society, and acquaintance with such worthies as William Whewell, Richard Owen and John Gould, and later with up-and-comers Joseph Hooker and Thomas Huxley, among many others. Also in 1839, at the age of 29, he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood.

At the age of 29 I started studies at Adelaide University, where I remained for nine years, shifting from subject to subject – a little philosophy, a very little biology, a major in French, and some months of teacher training, until finally, forced for financial reasons to get a factory job once more, at Rupert Murdoch-owned Griffin Press (now defunct), chucking unbound books onto a conveyor belt during the afternoon and attending university classes, very bleary-eyed, in the mornings. I earned enough to go full-time again and obtain a fairly useless but quite easy Honours degree in English, thus ending my university career, aged 38, as unemployable as before. 

Into his thirties, married and with children in quick succession, Darwin became more and more interested, even obsessed, with the dangerous concept of the transmutation of species. Lamarck had been one of the first to broach the idea, with the publication of Philosophie zoologique in 1809, which was much ridiculed in British intellectual circles in the 1830s and 40s, including by Darwin himself, albeit with a difference. Lamarck may have missed the causal principles of transmutation (as did Darwin, since genes were unknown in his day), but the extent to which he ‘got it right’ is still debated. But Darwin was certainly on the trail of an evolutionary theory, as many of his notes show. The appearance, in 1844 of the controversial bestseller, Vestiges of the natural history of creation, published anonymously by Robert Chambers (another very clever Scot), which Darwin and many of his natural philosophy friends devoured, taught him above all else how fractious the topic of species and their origins could be, and he was constitutionally averse to controversy. Having moved with Emma and his growing brood to a rambling country estate in Kent, courtesy of his wealthy family, he made a decision, of sorts, to narrow his biological focus to one particular class of Crustacean, barnacles – though he didn’t give up on his other species explorations and their human connections.

So, having finished with university, and being somewhat buoyed by the odd academic compliment on my writing abilities (though I received a bare pass and a screed of sarcastic comments from a philosophy lecturer for an overdue essay I wrote, methinks under the affluence of inkahol), I had the bright idea of writing to the editor of a local news-and culture rag, The Adelaide Review, offering my services as a journalist-writer of sorts. I made the letter très jazzy and up-beat, suggesting a number of possible topics, including something about my mis-spent youth in working-class Elizabeth. To my great surprise the editor called me more or less instanter, quoted with amusement some witty line I’d written, and asked me to send a piece on Elizabeth. It was published in the next issue, and I found myself a published writer, in miniature. I was rather nonplussed at how easy it had been. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? Could I make my living as a writer somehow? The Adelaide Review piece was a one-off, I quickly realised, but maybe I could expand it into a memoir-novel of hijinks and wit, or what might pass for it. I had recently moved into a share-house with an older, twice-married woman (I’d been desperate to move out of a house I shared with another older woman whose interest in me I was unable to reciprocate), and we began a romantic liaison – again my cooking skills appeared to be key. I think, though, that I’d already written most of my Elizabeth novel by the time we became a couple. I suppose I should check my journals, which I never read.

So we were now in the mid 1990s, and, perhaps through the auspices of The Adelaide Review, my expanded writings about my Elizabethan childhood were sent to and accepted by Wakefield Press, and I was given a State grant to help me along. I bought my first computer and began to navigate that Great New Thing, the internet. The novel was completed in 1996, my fortieth year, but it was put through an exhaustive editing process, which I like to think, for vanity’s sake, was standard practice. It was published in  late 1997, and for a brief period my life became public. I was written up in the The Advertiser’s Weekend Magazine, together with a full-page pic of my handsome dial, and I was interviewed on local TV and radio. Over the next week or two I received two dismissive reviews, one in Adelaide University’s weekly rag, On Dit, which was a real piss-off (private school kid, no doubt), and one tiny positive one, from somewhere. And so began and ended my public career as a writer. 

So that’s it about me. Darwin ended his love-hate affair with barnacles in about 1849, his fortieth year, but his explorations and speculations re speciation continued apace. He’d also managed to father a large family. I’m not sure how this was done, having no experience in the matter. He suffered the death of his favourite child, Annie, from scarlet fever, and he suffered his own aches and pains – biliousness, flatulence –  for which he tried the water cures that had become super-popular in mid-nineteenth century England, especially among the upper classes. They seemed to work for him, and his embarrassments aren’t so much mentioned into the 1850s (all this from Janet Browne’s bio). He grew and crossed various plant species, raised pigeons, and kept up a rich correspondence with breeders and fanciers throughout Britain, and overseas. He became particularly interested in how seeds could be dispersed over long distances, in sea-water, or in the feathers of birds, or even via the poop of any number of species. He worried, though, that he was unable to see the forest for the trees. He was building up a great load of possibly related information, for a thesis he clearly trembled over, but was driven by….

References

Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, 1995

Stewart Henderson, In Elizabeth, 1997