Darwin and the Beagle

Our book today is Alan Moorehead's Darwin and the Beagle, his 1969 tour through Charles Darwin's 1836 unexpected classic The Voyage of the Beagle, which was originally put out as just another memorandum in scientific circles. It was publisher John Murray who saw immediately that the book is something more than a valuable scientific treatise - it's also one of the most rip-snorting travel yarns ever written. Murray bought the rites to the book for a song, and it's been in print ever since, more popular with every passing generation. Anybody who reads the book can instantly tell you why: when Darwin got consumed in writing about evolution and the natural sciences, the literary world lost one heck of an adventure-writer. The Voyage of the Beagle is one of the world's small company of inexhaustible treasure-troves.

But for those of you who feel a little intimidated by it - and for all the rest of you, who are quite rightly of the opinion that no excuse is needed to revel in more of Alan Moorehead's prose - Darwin and the Beagle is the perfect compromise. Here is one of the greatest travel-writers of the modern era taking you carefully through Darwin's great book, giving you all the best bits, leaving out the spots where river-measurements might get a little tedious for the uninitiated, and serving the whole thing up in impeccable, nimble prose.

Moorehead is the author of a good many great books, including The Blue Nile and The White Nile, and he's very much worth your time as a writer in his own right. Our present book was almost certainly what the harried British legal profession used to call a 'money brief,' but forty years ago, that didn't necessarily mean it must stink (unlike the present age, where it's a mathematical certainty that any movie 'novelization' done by Peter David will, in fact, stink)(in the fullness of time, we here at Stevereads will be getting to the whole sub-genre of movie 'novelizations,' never you fear ...). Just look at Anthony Burgess' Shakespeare, written a year later than Darwin and the Beagle: it, too, is a genuine honest-to-gosh book, not just some mocked-up approximation of one.

Of course, the chief glory of Darwin and the Beagle isn't the prose, nor was it ever meant to be. No, the main selling-point of the book is its extremely copious illustrations - some in full color, many, many more in black-and-white, as full a pictorial representation of that epic voyage as any reader could want (and, incidentally, one that is entirely, proudly disdainful of including photographs). These are all contemporary illustrations, betraying no greater knowledge of the world than Darwin and his contemporaries had.

His contemporaries, in this case, meaning first and foremost his fellow voyagers in the Beagle. She was a little ship but intensely seaworthy, helmed by Captain Robert FitzRoy, a young, charming, mercurial man who took an instant liking to the 21-year-old naturalist Charles Darwin, who joined the crew for its circumnavigational voyage while having as little knowledge of what they'd be facing as anybody else.

What they'd be facing would include dozens of previously unknown animal species (all of which would be carefully, painstakingly described and sketched), dozens of previously unexamined aboriginal races (most of which FitzRoy sketched himself, betraying a typically Victorian talent for many trades), and the germs of ideas that, when fully realized, would completely change the world.

Moorehead keeps his eye on that prize, but he's happy to delineate its high and low points for his readers. And his sense of wonder never flags:

The Atlantic, now that they were about to leave it, made them a gift of some magical moments. One calm, dry day a myriad butterflies came streaming past them from far out at sea. It was like a snowstorm; as far as one could see, even with the aid of a telescope, the sky was filled with soft, white, fluttering wings, and it was not until evening that a wind came up and blew them away.

Such innocent wonder wasn't all of it, of course: a voyage to the ends of the Earth and back would hold many private awakenings for the sheltered young man the crew referred to affectionately as 'our flycatcher.' Later writers have made free to link each one of these little moments to the big theories Darwin would later hatch, and Moorehead is no exception, although the crackling immediacy of his prose saves him from being unbearable about it:

And now abruptly Darwin was made aware that the brutality in nature, the persecution of the weak by the strong, applied to human beings as well. They had entered a part of the forest where the track had become overgrown, and a negro slave with a sword had been sent ahead to cut a way through. Darwin was trying to speak to this man in broken Spanish, and was gesticulating to emphasize his meaning when he observed with a sense of shock that the man thought he was about to be struck. He cringed, dropped his hands, and held up his face, waiting submissively for the blow to fall. Darwin was horrified. Were all the slaves as terrified as this, so broken in spirit?

Contrarily, it seems fitting that the conception of evolution should have come upon Darwin as slowly and gradually as the reality of evolution by natural selection takes place in the world, but still, popularizers love their bright lights on the road to Damascus, and in a way it's comforting - great ideas are inherently dramatic, they should crack like thunderbolts, not creep like moss. And if Moorehead succumbs to this particular temptation a couple of times, those times certainly do his wonderful book no harm. Here you'll get the fascinating story of the Beagle told to you by an enthusiastic guide who wants to make sure you miss nothing good, and surely that's reason enough to read the book? It's currently out of print, but second-hand copies turn up regularly at the four great used bookstores still left in the United States. So give a look - you'll be pleased you did.

In the Penny Press! Darwin on the shortlist!

Our tour of the Penny Press today begins with the New Yorker, of course (some of you will know that I very annoyingly read the New Yorker on Fridays, religiously, which invariably means I want to talk about it long after those few of you who read it have forgotten what you skimmed).

It couldn't possibly equal last week's jam-packed issue, and it didn't - but it was damn close. Another wonderful issue.

The biggest surprise was a second consecutive week of my LIKING the fiction - usually, I hate the New Yorker's timid, pallid, plotless fiction. But this week's short story, "Stairway to Heaven" by Aleksandar Hemon, was pretty good (despite the young-author enabling validation of smoking).

By far the best thing in this issue was Adam Gopnik's "Rewriting Nature" piece about Charles Darwin and On the Origin of Species.

Gopnik is a problematically sporadic writer, for a fairly simple reason: on the one hand, he's an impeccably refined prose stylist. And on the other hand, he's a feckin liar.

In a civilized society (you know, one with some legal equivalent of habeas corpus), this wouldn't work out to a problem - the lying would overcompensate for any amount of writing-skill, and the author would be out-of-hand condemned.

But this isn't a civilized society - it's Byzantium: corrupt beyond redemption, choked by religious zealotry, and threatened on all sides by barbarians with an iron lock on eventual victory.

So we can forgive Gopnik for being a feckin liar - we can like his prose despite the fact that in every piece he writes, he includes at least one howling wopper.

This time around, it's one little tossed-off phrase in his review of From So Simple a Beginning edited by Edward O. Wilson:

And Wilson's collection, read right through, shows that Darwin really was one of the great natural English prose stylists.

'Wilson's collection,' in this case, is a 2,700 page volume that includes The Voyage of the HMS Beagle, On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.

In other words, that 'read right through' is pure unadulterated codswollop. When Gopnik insinuates that he read 2,700 pages of Darwin's prose style, I'm tempted to offer him Rumpole's response: Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.

Still, the article itself is pure gold. Here's Gopnik on the essential dilemma Darwin faced:

He sensed that his account would end any intellectually credible idea of divine creation, and he wanted to break belief without harming the believer, particularly his wife, Emma, whom he loved devotedly and with whom he had shared, before he sat down to write, a private tragedy that seemed tolerable to her only through faith. The problem he faced was also a rhetorical one: how to say something that had never been said before in a way that made it sound like something everybody had always known.

Gopnik concentrates on what he calls 'the single most explosive sentence in English' ("We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.") - he comes back over and over to the novelistic bravura Darwin brings to all of his prose:

Analogy is avoided, and then the most unsettling analogy of all is grandly asserted, and without apology. They're us; we're them.

Over in the New York Review of Books, Paul Kennedy reviews Niall Ferguson's The War of the World to largely favorable conclusions. I myself have written a review of said book, and it's clear to me now that the forum for which that review was intended isn't going to run it. So I'll get to work on transcribing it here as soon as possible, so that all you worshipful Stevereads acolytes can drool over it.

At one point in his review, just before launching on a shortlist of other notable histories of the 20th Century, Kennedy writes: "All shortlists are artificial creations" ...

... which might be true of all OTHER, LESSER shortlists, but which, as I'm sure you'd all agree, certainly ISN'T true here at Stevereads. Our shortlists are so authoritative as to be oracular.
For instance:

Top Five Science Fiction Movies of All Time:

5. Silent Running
4. Blade Runner
3. Starship Troopers
2. Pitch Black
1. Alien

Or what about this:

Top 5 Most Consistently Well-Written Star Trek Characters:

5. Bones McCoy
4. Worf
3. Captain Janeway
2. Trip Tucker
1. Quark

See? Oracular!

In the Penny Press! the TLS!

This week's issue of the mighty TLS is a double issue, which immediately prompts the wintry knowledge that there'll be no TLS NEXT week. But at least for now, we can dig in and feast!

Ah, the TLS! The smartest, meatiest literary publication on Earth (Stevereads yields the honor!) - and yet, as enjoyable as it always is, it has its prejudices ... like a beloved grandparent whose well-worn anecdotes sometimes feature 'japs' or 'kikes.' The discordant notes cause a bit of an internal wince, but they don't kill the affection.

And so it is with Adam Kuper's review of the University of Illinois' Killing Animals in this current issue. The TLS' house line regarding books about what could sloppily be termed 'animal rights' can be summed up as bemusedly Tory: the people who write such books are obviously a little dotty, but they aren't doing anybody any harm, so we might as well pat them on the head from time to time with a review or two.

These are the only occasions when the TLS makes me sigh.

Kuper treats this anthology of animal rights essays with the strained toleration of a parent for a slightly wayward child, and you can tell right from the start that his condescension will cause him to mis-state and oversimplify everything in the book. You know going into the review that you won't be reading a fair review of the book under consideration, but you read it anyway - hoping, I guess.

But there's no hope here. The review is full of snide parenthetical asides (one hopes the book's editors won't stoop to respond) and mandarin deplorings of touchy-feely enthusiasms gone too far. This ought to suffice as an example, though it's distasteful to quote so much of it:

Clare Palmer's essay on the killing of cats and dogs in animal shelters is somewhat out of place here, since her facts are relevant to the United States. Palmer tells us that pets in America are kept for an average of only two years (does this include goldfish?), and gently mocks a new politically correct vocabulary in which pets are referred to as companion animals, while owners are termed guardians. On average, six out of ten stray dogs and eight out of ten stray cats are killed in animal shelters in the US because they are difficult or cannot be placed with new owners. But what is to be done with the stream of animals that are brought to these shelters? As Palmer herself asks, are we supposed to fund an animal welfare state? While she advocates a programme of education for companion animal guardians, it may be that sex educations for pets will be required.

... at which point, everyone at the squire's table burbled over with laughter ... and then Mimsy mentioned something about flower-children over in Pennington-by-the-Marsh ...

Ecch.

There's no end of things wrong with that passage, but note for instance how the reader is invited to read 'because they are difficult AND cannot be placed with new owners" ... the not-so-subtle BLAMING of the glut in animal shelters on the animals themselves, who, if they tried a little harder, might be less 'difficult.'

And that oh-so-clever little bit of mockery about sex education for pets - which manages not only to mock the idea of sex education for HUMANS but also to willfully ignore the possibility that human 'guardians' might take responsibility for the problem. Gawd forbid.

The review of course quotes Dr. Johnson (the calm-tide safe haven for all idiot quote-hunters): "There is much talk of the misery which we cause to the brute creation, but they are recompensed by existence. If they were not useful to man, and therefore protected by him, they would not be nearly so numerous."

To which Kuper adds: "Should everyone adopt the Jewish and Muslim taboo on eating pigs, there would soon be only a handful of pigs in existence, and they would be in zoos."

Spoken, it need hardly be pointed out, like a human. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that those few pigs wandering around in future zoos - fed every day, washed every week, able to cavort for the cameras of paying customers, wouldn't MIND being the only pigs left on Earth, if the alternative were to live their entire lives in a pen the size of a mailbox, unable to turn around, pumped full of steroids, skin burned off their hind legs by the urine they can't avoid spraying on themselves, never seeing or touching another pig (or another living being) - at least until the last four hours of their lives, where those behind get to hear those in front screaming while they're being slaughtered.

But at least they're ALIVE ...

Luckily, the rest of the issue isn't nearly so bad, although there are dim spots elsewhere as well.

Take, for instance, John Taylor Bonner's review of two massive Darwin compendiums, From So Simple a Beginning and The Indelible Stamp.

Bonner writes that Darwin's theory of natural selection met with mixed responses even among biologists of the time: "There was a strong feeling, not always openly expressed, that despite the obvious common sense of natural selection, there must be something else ... the fact that evolution went from simple to complex made it seem that there was something more than directionless natural selection."

He goes on:

What I find fascinating is that this is no more of a scientific explanation than saying it was ordained by God. In both cases there is a mystical force that is beyond the reach of science. It is a quirk of the human mind: there are some things, such as the intricate marvels of evolution, that need more than a bare Darwinian explanation. Natural selection is too simple a principle to account for the vastness of organic evolution. We think today that the current advocates of William Paley's intelligent design err in confusing science and religion, but some biologists over the years, and maybe even now, commit the same sin.

Bonner claims to be a scientist himself, so he ought to know better than to say so glibly that evolution goes from simple to complex. I'm sure my young friend Elmo would leap to the same example that occurred to me: the three-toed tree-sloth. Today, after millions of years of evolution, it a) can barely see, b) can barely move, and c) can only live on one kind of leaf from one kind of tree. Things don't get any simpler than that. Judging from tree sloth dental developement, its evolutionary ancestors were wild and crazy guys. In this case - as in so many cases (they're virtually innumerable in the insect kingdom) - natural selection worked from complex to simple, in order to exploit a very specific niche.

And of course Bonner is right to chide present-day evolutionary biologists who've lost sight of the fact that evolution by natural selection is an entirely BLIND process. Or rather, purblind - it addresses any organism's immediate needs, often (in fact, in the overall track-record of life on Earth) with fatal long-term results. Almost nothing is dinosaur-and-meteor. Almost everything is evolution-and-dead end.

Actually, looking over our table of contents, I'm forced to realize that quite a few reviewers this time around irked the daylights out of me. Take John Ray's review of Rescuing the Past, a book about the whole question of whether or not countries can demand back their great works of art currently housed elsewhere. I'm glad Ray is an amusing writer, but he's still as irritating as a late-night drunken phone call:

One of my favorite paintings is the view by Monet of Antibes which is now in the galleries of the Courtland Institute in Somerset House. I would like the original, and would try my best to dust it regularly. It may be that if I hire some teams of private investigators, and then sex up a dossier or two, I can demonstrate publicly, or at any rate to myself, that there are academics in the world of London art-history whose ethical lives sometimes fall short of that of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. I think I can see the pine tree in the middle of the painting hanging its branches in dejection, waiting to be rescued from all the mediocrity and sleaze. Clearly Monet's work of beauty would be better off in a purer environment, namely on the walls of somebody like me. In practice this will not happen, but what if I had the money and political influence to seriously challenge ownership of works of art on moral grounds which just happen to benefit me?

He goes on (and hence, so do I, ya attention-deficited little twerps ...):

Suppose I find a toddler clutching a teddy bear. I recognize the bear as one of an extremely rare transitional design, which perfectly fills the remaining gap in my collection. Intellectually, I can make sense of that bear in a way that the toddler cannot. Obviously my claim to ownership of the toy is superior, because I am a philosopher of these things. Can we demand that he sell it to me, on the grounds that he does not know what he is carrying, and the bear does not deserve such a fate?

Ray, obviously, comes down squarely against the idea that there can ever be a superior RIGHT to ownership - while deploring the author's insinuation that artworks' home countries are rude, undeveloped places, Ray unconsciously AGREES with the author by representing such countries as a child with a teddy bear. The upshot of his analogy goes something like this: OK, I accept that the child doesn't understand the significance - or even, on most levels, the beauty (and, by implication, the fragility) of what he's got ... but nevertheless! It's HIS, and we can't up and take it from him under any circumstances, even if it means we have to stand by and watch him rip it to shreds.

To which I say: horsepoop.

The world's great works of art belong to the world. If the country wherein they just so happen to originate can't PRESERVE them (and failure here is exceedingly easy to determine: you turn your head, open your eyes, and LOOK at the fucking thing), they forfeit the right to KEEP them. Any other viewpoint - especially if it involves the words 'cultural imperialism" - is just nonsense. What, there's supposed to be some kind of VIRTUE in watching a masterpiece disintegrate?

Nope, Ray is wrong. Screw the little kid - snatch that teddy bear away!

But look! There's a light at the end of the tunnel! The only other irritating thing in this TLS is a review of Roger Scruton's new memoir Gentle Regrets by A.N.Wilson.

I'm sorry - did I call it a review? I meant something closer to a sweaty, urgent, yearning hand-job. Words can be so funny, huh?

I honestly don't know what would possess the ordinarily-astute Wilson to go on at such enormous length so fulsomely praising such a monumental boob as Scruton. I assume there were Polaroids in Scruton's possession, and I assume they've now been destroyed.

Audiences were "awestruck" by his opera 'Violet'? Iris Murdoch "especially admired" his novel "Fortnight's Anger"? Scruton is "much better than Bertrand Russell at summarizing other philosophers' viewpoints"? "Professor Scruton draws a portrait of that most fascinating of beings, himself"?

What the Hell did Wilson DO, anyway? Even sheep-shagging wouldn't account for this kind of genuflection. The world may never know.

Ah, but other authors bring joy! Ruth Scurr turns in a delightful review of the diary of John Evelyn, a book you should all read (although not before you read Pepys!).

There are excellent pieces on Christopher Marlowe's poetry, and on the life and trials of Edmund Campion (including a delightful foray into whether or not Philip Sidney was a secret Catholic) ... EVER so much to delight the serious reader of history and literature, in an age where the most you can expect from most other readers along those lines will be their appreciation of Undaunted Courage or DaVinci Code.

And of course the dessert is J.C.'s "NB" column, where dry wit reigns supreme. For instance, in sampling the contents of the latest Whitaker's Almanack Pocket Reference, there's this:

The Almanack offers a catalogue of over sixty phobias, all relating to things you felt fine about until you learned of the existence of a phobia. Here are some, concerning which we invite you to provide real-life cases:

venustaphobia - fear of beautiful women
pogonophobia - fear of beards
oenophobia - fear of wine
peladophobia - fear of baldness
chorophobia - fear of dancing

Ergasiophobia (fear of work), dentophobia (the dentist) and gamophobia (marriage) are more plausible; given that rhytiphobia (fear of getting wrinkles) is practically universal, we are surprised not to have seen the word before.

To which I join J.C. in asking for examples - but from you, my legion of loyal readers! Confession time! How many of the phobias J.C. lists have haunted your darkest hours? Or what other fears might take their place (you can browse the list at www.phobialist.com)?

In the spirit of cooperation, I'll admit that I myself sometimes experience touches of two of the phobias listed (and, needless to say, I very much do NOT ever experience one of those on the list!). And judging from previous comments, my friend Beepy has at least begun to deal with the heartbreak of pogonophobia...