The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  For her part, she asked for certain conditions: that she would provide for herself financially from the proceeds of her own work; that I would pay for one half of our household expenses—no more; and that we would have no sexual intercourse. In explaining this last stipulation, she said that, with the images of all the other women flashing through her mind, she couldn’t possibly make love to me, for a psychological barrier would spring up as soon as I made advances.

  They never had children: Frida’s physical condition made it impossible. But she was desperately maternal: She even kept one of her aborted fetuses in a jar by her bedside. Her child substitutes were her pet monkeys, on whom she lavished her affection, particularly the spider monkey, Don Fulang Chang. Her beautiful self-portrait, Fulang Chang and I (1937), was bought for $1 million by Frida Kahlo’s number one fan, Madonna, in 1988. Monkeys appear in several of her other paintings. Instead of their usual symbolic baggage of lasciviousness or stupidity, Frida’s monkeys represent natural grace and childlike mischief. They kept her company during Diego’s long absences, along with the rest of her menagerie—Granizo the deer, Bonito the parrot, a miniature hairless dog called Señor Xolotl, and an eagle by the name of Gertrude Caca Blanca.

  Frida’s work was not widely recognized while she was alive. Her commercial breakthrough came in 1938, when she accompanied Diego on a tour of the United States (or “Gringolandia” as she called it). She held her first solo exhibition in New York and her first significant sale was to the Hollywood tough-guy actor Edward G. Robinson, who bought four paintings for $200 each. In 1939 Frida went to Paris, becoming the first twentieth-century Mexican artist to have a work purchased by the Louvre. Only one Mexican show was organized in her lifetime, and that didn’t take place until 1953. Forbidden to attend by her doctors, Frida had herself transported to the gallery, still in bed, on a truck, and was wheeled triumphantly into the party.

  Shortly afterward, her health began to deteriorate sharply, the decline being exacerbated by her drinking and overuse of sleeping pills. In August of that year her damaged right leg was amputated because of gangrene. A year later she was dead, seemingly of pneumonia, though some friends believed she may have taken an overdose. A few days before she died, she wrote in her diary: “I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to come back.”

  Since then, she has never been away. Frida Kahlo is a one-woman international industry: Feted by feminist critics, her monobrowed, mustachioed visage is used to sell exhibitions, prints, tote bags, mouse mats, and watches all over the world. In 2001, she became the first Hispanic woman to be featured on a U.S. postage stamp—surely the only America-loathing, unrepentant Stalinist to have been so honored. None of this would have surprised Diego. In comparison to Frida’s work, his own socialist realist murals now look rather old-fashioned and politically naive. For all his many sins, Diego understood better than anyone the quality of his wife’s astonishing paintings:

  I recommend her to you, not as a husband but as an enthusiastic admirer of her work, acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly’s wing, loveable as a beautiful smile, and profound and cruel as the bitterness of life.

  Cruelty and bitterness are more or less the whole story of Jiang Qing (pronounced “jang ching”), Madame Mao (1914–91), wife of Chairman Mao, poster girl for the Cultural Revolution and one of the infamous Gang of Four. So far, we have had monkeys as intimate companions, substitute children, artists’ muses, and living embodiments of royal wealth and privilege. Madame Mao’s monkey was far more sinister. Hers was the monkey as henchman and accomplice in crime.

  Jiang Qing was born Li Jinhai, one of eight names she bore during her life. Her youth in Shandong province in eastern China was tarnished by poverty and neglect. She later blamed her persistent ill health on the fact that she spent most of her childhood hungry. Her mother was a concubine with little love to spare for her pretty daughter, but she didn’t subject her to the grisly ritual of foot binding, either. Jiang’s father was a violent and abusive alcoholic who drove mother and daughter out of the family home, though not before Jiang had demonstrated her fighting spirit, attacking him and biting him viciously on his arms. At the age of fourteen, after being expelled from school for spitting at a teacher, she ran away to Beijing and became an actress.

  The details of this part of her life are hazy, not least because she rigorously repressed any mention of them when she came to power, but it seems she married and separated at least twice, became a communist, and was at some point arrested for terrorism. Her enemies always alleged she slept with her captors to ensure her escape. Under the stage name Lan Ping (“Blue Apple”), she landed some major roles, including Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, whose self-discovery and rejection of men seemed to resonate with the young actress’s own experience. Jiang developed a love for Hollywood films, copied Garbo in her dress, and wore makeup and high heels. She was also spiteful and had a long memory. Decades after being beaten to a leading role by a girl called Wang Ying (who went on to become a famous actress and performed at the White House for the Roosevelts) Jiang had her arrested and imprisoned, making sure she died in jail.

  In 1937 she forsook the stage and volunteered for the revolution, at that time based in the Yunnan caves, the endpoint of the Long March, deep in central China. She soon made herself known to Mao, sitting in the front row of his lectures. Mao, in turn, came to see her perform in an opera organized for his troops. Appearing backstage after the show, he placed his coat around her shoulders. The next day, Jiang visited the Leader to return his coat and ended up staying the night.

  The relationship was not a popular one with the Communist high command. Mao was technically still married to a senior party official and Jiang’s past was a heady mix of sex, deceit, and Western-style debauchery. She seemed an unnecessarily controversial addition to the Great Leader’s burgeoning cult, especially when rumors circulated that one of Jiang’s former lovers had tried to commit suicide by swallowing a bottle of surgical spirit and crushed match heads. This didn’t bother Mao. He cut a deal with the party where he got to keep Jiang as his partner on condition that she would not be acknowledged publicly as his wife or hold any political office for twenty years.

  The marriage does not seem to have been a particularly happy one. Mao soon lost interest in Jiang sexually (at twenty-three she was a little old for his taste: he had an insatiable preference for teenage virgins). At the same time, he saw that she was fanatically loyal and ruthless enough to be useful to him. As she later commented: “Whoever Chairman Mao asked me to bite, I bit.” So it was that, in 1963, when the twenty-year “ban” had passed, Mao chose Jiang to head up his Ministry of Culture.

  These were the years of her greatest influence. As the “Great Flag-carrier of the Proletarian Culture” she oversaw the Cultural Revolution, totally suppressing all traditional cultural activities and organizing mass rallies in which her enemies were humiliated and physically abused by the infamous Red Guards. She drew up the “Kill Culture” manifesto and in 1966 took over as head of the “Revolution Small Group,” responsible for ensuring that the only books, paintings, and films available in China were for propaganda purposes. Jiang herself had a hand in producing the handful of films available. The Revolution Small Group even banned the piano, denouncing it as the most dangerous of all Western instruments.

  In her heyday, Jiang—or Madame Mao, as the Western media dubbed her—behaved like the Chairman’s empress-in-waiting: an unsavory combination of paranoia, excess, and hypochondria. She made sure that people who knew about her past were imprisoned or killed. While Chinese peasants struggled in appalling poverty, she would instruct warships to cruise up and down rivers so she could practice her hobby of photography, and roads were built specifically for her to visit beauty spots. Though the masses were fed a bland diet of Maoist propaganda, she busily imported Western films (The Sound of Music was her favorite).

  Life with Madame was a nightmare. Her rooms had to be kept an exac
t 70.7°F in winter and exactly 78.8°F in summer. She had an intense fear of strangers and of unexpected sounds, and lived in constant terror of assassination. Servants were jailed for phantom indiscretions. Her nerves were so bad she took three doses of sleeping pills every night, ordering her staff to remove all birds and cicadas from around her house so they wouldn’t disturb her. Servants had to walk with arms aloft and legs apart in case she heard their clothes rustling. At one point, she heard of a technique for promoting youth and vigor that involved transfusions of the blood from healthy young men. She put dozens of guards through a physical checkup before choosing the best for her “new program.” Fortunately for them, Mao got wind of her plans and put a stop to them—on health grounds: She might be opening herself to infection.

  In this grotesque atmosphere, where even her only child’s nurse was thrown into prison and tortured for attempting to poison her mistress (Jiang had succumbed to a nasty bout of diarrhea), the role of her pet monkey is clear. It was absolutely loyal, never answered back, and yet was capable of capricious acts of violence. Like Mrs. Coulter’s sinister golden monkey demon in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Jiang’s monkey was her constant companion, dressed in silk and fed the finest food. She took particular pleasure in setting it on people as they strolled through her orchid garden in Canton, laughing at their discomfort as it leaped onto their heads and shoulders and savagely punishing anyone who didn’t make a fuss of the beast. Men, she once remarked, contributed nothing more to history than “a drop of sperm.” Monkeys seemed preferable by far as companions.

  For all her delusions of grandeur, it seems unlikely that Mao ever seriously considered this spoiled borderline psychotic as his successor. He had used her remorselessly to engineer a culture of fear, but toward the end of his life, she was reduced to asking his girlfriends to put in a good word for her. Within weeks of Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, Madame Mao and the rest of the Gang of Four were arrested in a bloodless coup. Her trial in 1980 was televised each night and attracted huge audiences. She was convicted of “counter revolutionary crimes” and sentenced to death, although this was later commuted to life imprisonment. Jiang hanged herself in a hospital bathroom in 1991.

  Her passing went unmourned: Even her daughter refused to write to the authorities to request her release (this occasioned one of Jiang’s last outbursts, throwing a watermelon on the ground and accusing her daughter of being “heartless”). As the living personification of the brutal persecutions and mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, almost no one in China has ever been more despised. Mao himself captured her self-inflicted isolation: “Few people suit her taste—only one: she herself.” The fate of her monkey is not recorded.

  The high-water mark for the monkey as domestic pet was reached in Victorian England. The spoils of empire included a regular stream of outlandish wildlife arriving to swell the households of the moneyed classes, and monkeys, despite (or maybe because of) Darwin’s efforts, became must-have accessories. Arthur Henry Patterson’s 1888 Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Manage Them captures the mood:

  Where a fancier is not addicted to balancing the matter of pet-purchase and pet-keeping upon the snap of his purse, a series of monkeys, in a properly-arranged domicile, not only affords himself considerable interest and entertainment, but gives unlimited fun to a large circle of ever-ready-to-be-amused acquaintances.

  One of the most complete accounts of monkey stewardship is to be found in the work of Frank Buckland (1826–80), the David Attenborough of the mid-nineteenth century. He was the son of William Buckland (1784–1856), dean of Westminster, the man who made geology and paleontology respectable academic disciplines and was the first to describe a dinosaur, twenty years before the word “dinosaur” itself was coined. (Buckland called his find “the Great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield.”)

  The Bucklands’ domestic arrangements were idiosyncratic even by Victorian standards. Part museum, part zoological garden, live and dead animals jostled for space with geological samples. Owls and jackdaws flew free, snakes and toads were scattered through the rooms in cages, and the children were allowed to ride their ponies inside the house. Raised in this atmosphere, it is hardly surprising that young Frank decided his vocation was to become “a high priest of nature and a benefactor of mankind.” Even at the age of four, asked to identify an ancient fossil by his father, he piped up at once: “They are the vertebway of an icthyosawus.” At his university, he impressed his peers by climbing into the fountain of Christ Church, Oxford, and by riding astride first a large turtle and then an ailing crocodile.

  Both of these were destined for the table. Zoophagy, the eating of unusual animals, was another passion Frank Buckland shared with his father. The dean set the bar high; he claimed to have eaten through the whole of creation from mouse to bison. Hedgehog, rat, puppy, potted ostrich, tortoise, and pickled horse tongue were regulars on the menu at home, with roast or battered mouse a house speciality. John Ruskin was an eager dinner guest:

  I have always regretted a day of unlucky engagement on which I missed a delicate toast of mice; and remembered, with delight, being waited upon one hot summer morning by two graceful and polite little Carolina lizards, who kept off the flies.

  Buckland senior confessed himself gastronomically defeated on only two occasions—by boiled mole and a ragout of bluebottles. Young Frank pushed it even further, making pies from rhinos (“like very tough beef”), frying earwigs (“horribly bitter”), stewing the head of a porpoise (“like broiled lamp wick”), and consuming chops from a panther that had been buried for several days (“not very good”). He did favorably surprise guests, though, with his accidentally roasted giraffe (the happy result of a zoo fire), raw sea slugs, and kangaroo ham (at least, until he told his guests what they were eating). There was a serious purpose to his hobby. In 1859, Frank founded the Society for the Acclimatization of Animals to the United Kingdom, which set out to import exotic species as alternative, high-yielding food sources. We owe the contemporary fashion for farming ostrich, water buffalo, and bison to Frank Buckland’s manic enthusiasm.

  The most bizarre comestible that ever found its way into a Buckland stomach was the heart of Louis XIV. Although the consumption of this withered and leathery object is often attributed to Frank, the only firsthand account occurs in the autobiography of the English raconteur and travel writer Augustus Hare (1834–1903). He makes it clear that William was the one guilty of royal cardiophagy:

  Talk of strange relics led to mention of the heart of a French King preserved at Nuneham in a silver casket. Dr. Buckland, while looking at it, exclaimed, “I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before,” and, before anyone could hinder him, he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was lost for ever.

  Not that this proves it actually happened, and certainly the various colorful embroideries to the tale—that it was sautéed and roasted; that it was served with a side helping of French beans; that Buckland considered its flavor would have been improved with a gravy made from marmoset’s blood; that he ate it for Christmas dinner—really don’t stand up to scrutiny. But the incident may explain Charles Darwin’s “strong prejudice” toward the older Buckland. He disliked his “coarse joking manner” and “undignified buffoonery.” The Bucklands, in turn, both rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution, maintaining a creationist line despite having been personally responsible for putting back the geological age of the earth by millions of years.

  Eccentricity and good humor characterized the son’s life every bit as much as his father’s. Frank shared his rooms at Christ Church with marmots; guinea pigs; a chameleon; several snakes; a jackal; an eagle; his monkey, Jacko; and a bear called Tiglath-Pileser, named after an ancient Assyrian king. After the bear made several appearances in a scholar’s cap and gown at college drinks parties, the dean of Christ Church gave Frank the ultimatum to remove either “Tig” or himself from the college. The bear was duly rusticated; the expulsion of Jacko an
d the increasingly bad-tempered eagle followed in quick succession.

  Frank graduated in medicine and in 1854 became assistant surgeon to the 2nd Life Guards. He served with the regiment for ten years but failed to gain promotion, probably because his real interests lay elsewhere, writing racy, readable accounts of his adventures for The Field magazine. The many reminiscences of Frank at this time make him seem thoroughly likable: He was a 4½-foot-tall, barrel-chested, cigar-smoking, ginger-haired ball of energy, the self-appointed curator of all that was odd, grotesque, or inexplicable. He was also a walking zoo. Wherever he appeared, he might be expected to produce a writhing ball of slow worms from inside his coat or a matchbox full of baby toads. Once, arriving at Southampton docks, he was charged five shillings for trying to smuggle his monkey onto a train. The clerk insisted on treating it as a dog, and issued it with a dog ticket. Buckland rallied by producing a tortoise from his pocket. “Perhaps you’ll call that a dog, too?” he asked. “No,” said the clerk, “we make no charge for them, they’re insects.”

  As well as curiosities of natural history, Frank wrote up reports of mummies preserved in guano, fossilized mermaids, singing Siamese twins, unnaturally fat babies, impossibly tiny babies, the “Human Frog” (who could smoke underwater), and the man who walked on his head. His journalism is marked by a very un-Victorian sense of sympathy for his subjects. Observing the poor mummified corpse of Julia Pastrana, the Mexican bearded lady, he wrote:

  Her features were simply hideous on account of the profusion of hair growing on her forehead, and her black beard; but her figure was exceedingly good and graceful, and her tiny foot and well-turned ankle, bien chaussée, perfection itself.