And a little sequel to that story. Many years later, after Colyear’s death, I chanced to meet the distinguished Hungarian scientist Nicolas Kurti (a physicist who incidentally happened to be a pioneer of scientific cookery, injecting meat with a hypodermic syringe, all that sort of thing). His eyes lit up when I spoke my name.
‘Dawkins? Did you say Dawkins? Are you any relation of the Dawkins who broke the arm at the Oxford station car park?’
‘Er, yes, I’m his nephew.’
‘Come, let me shake your hand. Your uncle was a hero.’
If the magistrates who imposed Colyear’s fine should happen to read this, I hope you feel thoroughly ashamed. You were only doing your duty and upholding the law? Yeah, right.
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996) was the book in which my colour biomorphs made their debut (see pages 386–8), and the book was also illustrated by Lalla’s beautiful drawings of real animals. But her contribution didn’t end there. This was the book that initiated – by accident – our by now long tradition of joint readings. We’d been promoting the book in Australia and New Zealand . . . but wait (I’ll come back to the joint readings): pleasantly triggered memories are worth recalling in another digression. And even, for good measure, digression nested within digression.
What is a Life if, full of stress,
We have no freedom to digress?
But if the prospect you enrages
You’d better skip the next few pages.
Lalla and I flew via Hong Kong and Sydney to Christchurch (dear Christchurch, has your nostalgically dated Britishness survived the earthquakes?). In between my talks promoting Climbing Mount Improbable, we hired a car and drove over the Southern Alps, via the Franz Josef glacier to the rainforest on the western side of the South Island with its unique tree ferns. Unfortunately we didn’t get down to Fiordland (of which Douglas Adams said that one’s first impulse ‘is simply to burst into spontaneous applause’). Crossing back to the east side through sensuously rolling ‘sheep may safely graze’ pastures and tall hedges, we came to Dunedin, where I gave another talk and where we were looked after by my former New College colleague Peter Skegg. A professor of law, Peter is also a published ornithologist, and he gave us an expert tour of the protected royal albatross colony on the Otago peninsula. The sight of the great birds laboriously taking off along their runways like Boeings at an airport was familiar to Peter but new to Lalla and me, and we were entranced.
After more lectures in Wellington (where we had dinner with the philosopher Kim Sterelny) and Auckland, we flew back to Australia. In Melbourne we were met by Roland Seidel of the Australian Skeptics, wearing the differently coloured socks which, along with his pink suit, were his trademark fashion statement – not to be confused with the Stephen Potter ‘woomanship’ ploy in which odd socks are worn to arouse maternal instincts (‘Buy our patent Oddsox brand’). Roland took us to his house in the eucalyptus forests of the Dandenong Hills outside the city. From the wooden veranda Lalla was delighted to have kookaburras swoop down to feed from her hand with their insolently truculent beaks.
We spent a few days on Heron Island (see picture section) in the Great Barrier Reef, where I was taken snorkelling by the wife of the research station manager. She soothed my panic when I suddenly came face to face with a shark by saying: ‘It’s OK, it’s quite harmless.’ But she then rather spoiled it by adding: ‘But I wish it would go away and be harmless somewhere else.’
In Canberra the Australian National University gave me an honorary doctorate – and even let me keep the robe. Its colour scheme is almost identical to the Oxford DPhil, which I suppose is convenient, although a bit coals to Newcastle. While on the subject of honorary degrees, I long coveted a Spanish one, because you get a wonderful hat like a tasselled lampshade. Unlike the subject of Peter Medawar’s characteristic joke, I don’t aspire to collect honorary degrees through the alphabet (‘Yale and Zimbabwe are unaccountably dragging their feet’) but I was delighted when Valencia came through, and I now wear the enviable lampshade hat annually to the Vice-Chancellor’s Encaenia Garden Party in Oxford: a splendidly anachronistic lekking ceremony for colourful academics. Among other honorary doctorates, I take particular pleasure from the ones at Juliet’s two alma maters, St Andrews and Sussex, the latter presented to me by Lalla’s dear friend Richard Attenborough, as Chancellor (see picture section). When my friend Paula Kirby saw the photograph she said: ‘Very nice, but why have you come dressed as Liquorice Allsorts?’
To return, finally, to the entry point of this multiple digression, after Australia Lalla and I flew to California to continue the promotional tour for Climbing Mount Improbable. But the many speaking engagements down under had conspired with the cold that typically follows a long flight to give me laryngitis, and I could scarcely speak: so Lalla stepped in and read selected passages from the book in her beautiful voice (it’s not for nothing that the BBC cast her in Shakespeare). After her readings we turned the amplifier up so that I could croak out answers to a few questions from the floor. As we wended our way back east, my voice gradually returned. However, so well were Lalla’s readings received that they had to continue, and thus the tradition became established – one that we continued when promoting subsequent books, the two of us reading alternate passages. We have now recorded most of my backlist of books as a double act, under the erudite guidance of Nicholas Jones of Strathmore audio publishing. It seems to work well: the change of voice every few paragraphs serves to stop the listener nodding off, and it’s especially useful for distinguishing quotations from the surrounding prose, dispensing with the intrusively spoken word ‘quote’.
I recorded Darwin’s Origin of Species on my own, and also An Appetite for Wonder, except that Lalla read the extracts from my mother’s diaries. Recording the Origin was a very interesting experience. I made no attempt to play the part of a Victorian paterfamilias but read it entirely in my own voice. My aim was to work hard at understanding every sentence so completely as to give the correct stresses to both words and syllables, and thereby aid my listeners’ understanding. It was quite difficult, as Victorian sentences are often longer than modern ears are acclimatized to. I came away from the experience with an even deeper admiration for Darwin’s wisdom and intellect than I had had before – and that’s saying a lot.
I think I have learned something of the art of reading aloud from Lalla, and in doing so may have deepened my lifelong love of poetry. It was Lalla who persuaded me that there was a book to be written on the poetry of science, and that I should write it. Unweaving the Rainbow, a reply to Keats’s Romantic hostility to Newtonian science, came out in 1998, two years after Climbing Mount Improbable, and is dedicated to her. Climbing Mount Improbable was dedicated to Robert Winston, who had so generously helped Lalla and me in our four attempts – alas, unsuccessful – to have a child by IVF. Before publication, it was a pleasure to announce the dedication (‘A good doctor and a good man’) at a debate on religion in London organized by a rabbi, where Robert (one of the most respected members of England’s Jewish community) and I were speaking on opposite sides.
I think of Climbing Mount Improbable as my most under-rated book, but I can’t blame the publishers for failing to push it. They sent pre-publication copies out to a starry list of readers who supplied lovely warm quotes for the jacket. Perhaps the puff that pleased me the most was the one from David Attenborough, who said, among other things, that he enjoyed it so much it was all he could do to stop himself waking the perfect stranger slumbering next to him in order to read out favourite passages. This the publishers refused to print, reducing his recommendation to the single word ‘Dazzling’. What were they afraid of? They had only to explain that he was reading it on a long-haul night flight.
Let me digress a little on this marvellous man. Whenever the possibility comes up of Britain having an elected rather than a hereditary head of state, the awkward question is raised: it’s all very well getting rid of the Queen, but just think what we migh
t get as an alternative: King Tony Blair? King Justin Bieber? Such dire speculations are brought to a swift end when somebody points out that there is one potential figurehead behind whom everyone could unite: King David Attenborough.
Everyone knows how charming and friendly he is. Less well known is that he is a hilarious raconteur with a gift for mimicry. He could have been an actor like his brother Richard. Put him in the company of that other priceless storyteller, his friend and fellow antiquities collector Desmond Morris, then sit back and enjoy the cabaret. Also unforgettable is David’s imitation of the older fellows of the Zoological Society when Desmond’s glamorous wife Ramona appeared in their clubhouse and walked across their field of view. They slowly swivelled, agog in their chairs as their eyes followed her progress. David holds an imaginary coffee cup in his hand, and as he turns in hilarious imitation of Ramona’s goggle-eyed admirers, the mimed cup slowly inverts until its contents spill all over their trousers.
On one occasion the Guardian interviewed David and me together. I can’t remember the pretext, perhaps some regular spot involving double interviews. Before the interview itself, a photographer had been commissioned to take a picture of us together. For this purpose we sat outside in David’s garden and talked, while the photographer snapped away. It was a marvellous conversation. At a conservative estimate we were both roaring with laughter 95 per cent of the time, and the photographer must have taken well over a hundred photographs. So when the picture editors came to choose the one to print, what did they go for? We were shown facing each other like a couple of prize-fighters, jutting out our chins in a classic primate aggressive display, exactly as though we were about to come to blows. It must have been a really tough job to find that one grim picture among at least a hundred smiling, friendly, laughing ones. Well, that’s journalism. Perhaps there was a fashion at the time for ‘edgy’.
Lalla reminds me of a Sunday Times journalist (whom I shall not name) who came to interview me in our home. Lalla was working upstairs and she could hear almost non-stop friendly laughter coming from the room below throughout the interview. But when the interview was printed, the first sentence was: ‘The trouble with Richard Dawkins is, he has no sense of humour.’ He’s an atheist, you see, and everyone knows they have no sense of humour. (Actually, that journalist is probably an atheist too, and so are most of his colleagues on the paper: they just don’t come out and say so.) Perish the thought that the public face of atheism should be allowed to laugh and smile; no, the trademark snarl must at all times be preserved.
Nor are atheists supposed to have any poetic sensibility. And this brings me back to Unweaving the Rainbow, the book in which, more than any other, I attempted to extol the poetry of science. As I’ve already hinted, this was the book where Lalla’s influence on my writing first made itself strongly felt. She urged me, as the newly appointed Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, to reach out to poets and artists. Although it contains sentences that originated in the Christmas Lectures, the real spirit of the book germinated in my 1996 Richard Dimbleby Lecture, which opened with words suggested by Lalla, and it carried her inspiration through to the end. Indeed, the title of my Dimbleby Lecture became the subtitle of the book: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder.
The annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture, televised by the BBC, commemorates a great broadcaster, and luminary of that once great institution. It was an honour to be invited to be the Dimbleby Lecturer for 1996, and I accepted with my customary misgivings and trepidation. My early drafts of the lecture seemed to be going nowhere, which only served to enhance those misgivings. Lalla rescued me from my despond with an inspired opening which I adopted, word for word, and which immediately set the tone for the rest of the lecture: ‘You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being.’
The British publisher of Unweaving the Rainbow was again Penguin. In America, John Brockman switched me to Houghton Mifflin and they sent me on a book tour to promote it, of which the high spot was an event in the Herbst Theater, San Francisco. John Cleese agreed to interview me on stage and he did it wonderfully. His copy of the book was a thicket of yellow post-it notes: he had really done his homework. You can’t be as funny as he is, in the particular way of being funny that he epitomizes, unless you are very intelligent. And his intelligence shone through that evening on stage. I got the impression the audience were expecting him to be funny, to the extent that, no matter how serious his words and his intentions, they simply laughed at everything he said. Admittedly they didn’t get many clues in his tone of voice, for his serious voice is indistinguishable from the voice he uses when doing serious comedy, as for instance in the Argument Clinic sketch, or the deadpan voice in which he said to Michael Palin as the aspiring silly-walk developer, ‘That’s it, is it? It’s not very silly, is it?’ I much enjoyed the San Francisco audience’s laughter and probably joined in. But afterwards I wondered whether John was a bit frustrated that people laugh at everything he says, even when he’s actually being serious.
He really does seem to be permanently funny, as Lalla and I discovered when he and his wife invited us to stay, for a holiday. Here’s just one of many wonderful stories he told. He overheard a woman saying, on the top deck of a bus (and he has no idea of the context):
‘I washed it for her when she was born. I washed it for her when she got married. I washed it for her for Winston Churchill’s funeral. And I’m not going to wash it for her again.’
Do very funny people have more than their fair share of funny things happen to them? It’s hard to see why things should work out like that, but it’s a question I’m prompted to ask, not just about John Cleese but other humour magnets I have known such as Douglas Adams, Desmond Morris, David Attenborough, Terry Jones. Perhaps they just have a good ear and eye for the humorous and notice funny things more than the rest of us.
The Ancestor’s Tale and A Devil’s Chaplain
The next book I proposed to John Brockman was The God Delusion but he was not enthusiastic. You can’t sell a book attacking religion in America, was his view, and in those days (the 1990s) he might have been right. George W. Bush later came along to change his mind. But meanwhile, back in 1997, at another of those idyllic Cotswold weekends, Anthony Cheetham had a proposal for me which was exciting and intimidating at the same time. A complete history of life, on a grand scale: an evolutionist’s equivalent, as he put it, of Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art.
I was aghast at the ambitiousness of the project. It would require a huge amount of reading, rekindling knowledge that had lain dormant since undergraduate days (and I ruefully recalled Harold Pusey’s remark, quoted earlier, to the effect that at the time of Oxford finals you hold in your head more concentrated knowledge than you ever will again). Moreover, much of that undergraduate knowledge would now be out of date, superseded by the mass of new information flooding in especially from the world’s molecular biology labs. Would I have the stamina to do justice to Anthony’s proposal? It seemed a tall order. On the other hand, I was now two years into my professorship of Public Understanding of Science (of which more in a later chapter), which had freed me of the burden of tutorial teaching. Didn’t I owe it to Charles Simonyi, my benefactor, to produce something big, something worthy of the extra time granted me each day by his generosity, an opus sufficiently magnum to give my successors something to live up to?
I dithered sleeplessly for several days and nights. On bright mornings I thought I could do it and even made some rough notes of a plan. Dark nights raised the spectre of a millstone that might weigh me down for years. Lalla was in favour of my taking the plunge. I could pace myself over several years, she pointed out, break the book down into chapters and take it one chapter at a time, that’s the way to tame a task. This stiffened my resolve, and in March 1997 I signed the contract with Anthony. At the same time, John made a deal with Houghton Mifflin as the American publishers, where my editor was Eamon Dolan.
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sp; I began writing in fairly high spirits, cheerfully facing the long and winding road ahead while not underestimating its length or the burden I would have to tote along it. However, two years later the sheer magnitude of the task before me pushed me back into despair. Lalla tried to encourage me. She vacated her art room, where she was wont to produce her lovely creations, so that I could have a whole wall on which to pin a huge map of the book – a plan of the history of life. That change of scene revived my flagging spirits, but only temporarily, and the contractual deadline loomed oppressively. I fell back into a cowardly yearning to abandon the project and return the publishers’ advance. I was on the point of doing so when Lalla, in what amounted to a mercy mission to rescue me from my abject mental state, dashed over alone to see Anthony in the Cotswolds, and it was as a result of this crisis meeting that he wrote to me as follows, in February 1999 (I should explain that Ancestral Voices was the working title of the book at that stage; we later abandoned it because Coleridge’s evocative phrase had been used too often already):
Dear Richard . . .
Re: Ancestral Voices.
I don’t want you to lose a moment’s sleep or suffer a pang of regret over this project. If the deadline is troubling you we shall change it. This book is too important to me and I am sure to you as well to treat it as if it was an article for a Sunday newspaper. I suggest we have a private agreement between us that, provided it is to be your next book, the delivery timetable is up to you rather than to us or to the date shown in the contract . . .
Best wishes
Anthony
Brief Candle in the Dark Page 15
