The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men

by Georges T. Dodds

  The Missing Link

  And Other Tales of Ape-Men

  Selected and adapted in English by

  Georges T. Dodds

  Edited and annotated by

  Paul Wessels

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Table of Contents

  Introduction 4

  Emile Dodillon: Hemo 10

  Marcel Roland: Almost a Man 183

  C. M. de Pougens: Jocko 271

  Léo d’Hampol: The Missing Link 310

  Grégoire Le Roy : The Strange Adventure of Brother Levrai 323

  Marcel Roland: The Missing Link 346

  Introduction

  Neither Man, Nor Beast…

  The purpose of this introduction is not to exhaustively review the theme of Man-Apes and Missing Links, but to provide some context to the works selected by Georges T. Dodds, and suggest other French works of likely interest in the same vein.

  Not unexpectedly, the obvious similarities between men and apes have always proved too fascinating for storytellers to resist. The notion that the ape was but an imperfect avatar of man can be found in medieval romances such as Le Roman de Renard, a compilation of animal-centered tales from the 12th and 13th centuries in which the character of Eme the Ape is a wise companion to Noble, the Lion-King, and interacts with other talking animals. He and his wife, Rukenawe, have two children, Bytelouse and Fulerome, whom the wily Renard ends up devouring.

  The presence of wild creatures spotted by explorers in faraway jungles who might have been either primitive men or apes, was also a staple of so-called “traveler’s tales” that, in turn, inspired numerous works of fiction. In the 18th century, Rabelais, Restif de la Bretonne and the Chevalier de Mouhy all imagined various societies of animal-men in imaginary countries located in Africa or beyond.

  The character of the 18th century Man-Ape, inspired by the social theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the condition of Natural Man, reached its apex with the hugely popular novella Jocko (1824) by C.M. de Pougens (included in this volume), which was plagiarized and turned into a stage play. t took Edgar Allan Poe to present a strikingly contrasted image of the Man-Ape in his classic The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), in which an abused orangutan ends up killing two women.

  The tradition of the traveler’s tale was still very much alive, but with a satirical spin, in Léon Gozlan’s Les Émotions de Polydore Marasquin ou Trois Mois dans le Royaume des Singes [The Emotions of Polydore Marasquin or Three Months in the Kingdom of the Apes] (1856) in which a castaway arrives on an island inhabited by intelligent monkeys and becomes their leader by putting on the skin of a dead gorilla.

  Although the idea that man and ape were related was not invented by Charles Darwin, his On the Origin of Species (1859) provided a theoretical formalization of this evolutionary connection. But this must not be confused with what came to be known as “the missing link.” Indeed, the meaning attached to the term itself shifts fairly dramatically within its 250 years of existence. A German biologist, Ernst Haeckel, in a moment of over-zealous enthusiasm for the ideas of Darwin, mistakenly took Darwin’s common ancestor theory to be a unilinear and polygenic fact of emergence (the missing link or “stage 21” of his Chain of the Animal Ancestors of Man), rather than a multilinear, monogenist account of natural selection.

  This fueled the imagination of many, thereby establishing in fiction what could not be supported by fact. Nevertheless, the “missing link” gained a momentum in France through the popular works of Thomas Huxley and Charles Lyell, amongst others, even though Huxley’s (not to mention Haeckel’s) work on embryology showed clearly that there were very significant differences during the late phases of embryonic development in man and ape. Lyell’s Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863) reportedly inspired both Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Certainly, the former’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) reflect this.

  In the absence of immediately available fossil evidence, and due to the competitive historical conjuncture of New Imperialism and the exciting developments in European theories of evolution, the popular imagination sought pseudo-scientific confirmation of the literal missing link in the physical existence of black people. This was facilitated by the ancient idea of a “Chain of Being” or hierarchy of perfection from mud to God, of which Haeckel’s Chain of the Animal Ancestors of Man was a relatively new variation. This introduced a racial competition, racism, into the misinterpretation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, attested to by the idea of a literal missing link in the form of “the savage Hotentot, or stupid native of Nova Zembla.” Only the popular version of the “missing link” has survived the test of time, science (and morality) having rejected theories of racial anthropology.

  Darwin’s work, rightly or wrongly, led to the creation of the sub-genre of prehistoric fiction with Samuel Berthoud’s L’Homme Depuis Cinq Mille Ans [Five Thousand Years of Man] (1865), Elie Berthet’s Le Monde Inconnu (1876; rev. as Paris Avant l’Histoire; tr. as The Pre-Historic World, 1879), and, of course, J.-H. Rosny Aîné’s classic Vamireh (1892), Eyrimah (1893) and Nomai (1897), which became key works in that subgenre.1 As the stories collected in the present volume show, some writers incorporated racist theories into their fiction uncritically, whilst others did so to undermine such views through various means of ridicule. Interestingly, a master of the genre, Rosny Aîné, often repeated Darwin’s mantra that black people had more to fear from White Imperialism than from any perceived slip on the evolutionary ladder.

  From the standpoint of the fictional evolution of the Ape-Man Albert Robida’s Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul dans les 5 ou 6 parties du monde et dans tous les pays connus et même inconnus de M. Jules Verne [The Very Extraordinary Voyages of Saturnin Farandoul in the World’s five or six Continents, and in all the Countries known—and even unknown—to Mr. Jules Verne] (1879),2 is a mammoth, riotous and rollicking homage to Jules Verne in which the indomitable Saturnin Farandoul, a young man raised by apes on a Pacific Island, teams up with various Vernian heroes. Whereas Polydore Marasquin was a fake, a man dressed in a monkey skin, Farandoul is a quintessential Ape-Man, predicting Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan. Farandoul, too, is a Rousseauesque character, a “noble savage,” born into natural freedom and goodness, and civilization can only threaten to turn him into the same kind of morally-defective, money-grubbing, luxury-loving, war-mongering boor that it has made of almost all of us.

  One writer who fully embraced the perceived consequences of Darwin’s work as extrapolated by Haeckel, was Emile Dodillon with Hemo (1886) (included in this volume). Dodillon was careful to never categorically state that Jan Maas’ experiment to create a true Man-Ape hybrid had succeeded. The reader remains free to believe that the title character is only an ape more evolved than others.

  In Marcel Roland’s Le Presqu’Homme [Almost a Man] (1905) (included in this volume), the broad influence of Darwin’s ideas are also manifest, but relatively unexploited from a purely dramatic standpoint. The consequences of the discovery of a creature who is half-man and half-beast is better left to Jules Lermina with To-Ho le Tueur d’Or [To-Ho and the Gold Destroyers] (1905)3 in which a 10-year-old boy is rescued during the bloody Dutch-Aceh War in Sumatra by To-Ho, a member of a peaceful tribe of ape-men who secretly live hidden in the jungle.

  Included in this volume are three more, lesser known stories in the same vein: Léo d’Hampol’s Le Missing Link (1910), Grégoire Le Roy’s L’Étrange aventure de l’abbé Levrai [The Strange Adventure of Brother Levrai] (1913) and Marcel Roland’s L’Echelon [The Missing Link] (1914).

  Gaston Leroux�
� Balaoo (1911) is another important work on the same theme. In it, we meet Professor Coriolis Boussac-Saint-Aubin, a dedicated follower of Darwin, who returns from Indonesia with a mysterious servant who is, in reality, Balaoo, an anthropoid “humanized” by Coriolis’ science à la Doctor Moreau. Unfortunately, while Balaoo passes for a human, even studying Law, he remains at heart a savage and unpredictable creature and kills several people. Worse, he falls in love with Coriolis’ daughter, Madeleine, to the scientist’s great dismay. Coriolis instead forces her to marry her cousin Patrick. A series of adventures ensue during which Balaoo redeems himself by being noble, generous, rescuing Madeleine, returning her to her fiancé and departing with a broken heart to return to his native jungle.

  According to Leroux, Balaoo is not a mere jumped up ape, but a new and heretofore unknown breed of anthropoid, cousin to To-Ho’s or Burroughs’ Great Apes. As usual, Leroux attempts to bolster the credibility of his story with pseudo-scientific quotes from the fabulist Louis Jacolliot and a professor who allegedly spent seven years studying the language of apes. But this very attempt to suspend the reader’s disbelief is what makes Balaoo a truly ground-breaking novel in the genre.

  During the period between the two World Wars, one work merits a mention: H.-J. Magog’s L’Homme qui Devint Gorille [The Man Who Became a Gorilla] (1921; rev. as La Fiancée du Monstre [The Monster’s Fiancée] and Le Gorille Policier [The Policeman Gorilla], 1930). What makes it significant is that it used a theme arguably introduced by Maurice Renard in his classic Le Docteur Lerne [Doctor Lerne] (1908), that of a “consciousness” transplant between two persons of different species—Renard wasn’t categorically postulating actual brain transplants. Magog goes one step further: a villain who wants to get rid of a rival (Roland) enlists the help of two mad scientists to transplant the brain of his victim into the body of a gorilla, and vice-versa. Roland’s body with the ape brain is quickly locked up in a lunatic asylum, while the gorilla with Roland’s brain, initially sold to a circus, succeeds in gaining the trust of his keepers and then proceeds to get revenge. All is put right at the end.

  Eventually, the popularity of Tarzan fostered a plethora of French (and other European) imitators, especially in the comics, such as Akim or Zembla, which came with their own hordes of Man-Apes to fight, such as Zembla’s Boor or the intelligent man-apes of the secret city of Anthar.4 Transplants of human brains into ape bodies, popularized by pulps and serials, also found their way into French popular culture such as Maurice Tillieux and Will’s L’Ombre sans Corps [The Shadowless Body], a Tif & Tondu adventure published in 1970. The humanized apes from Pierre Boulle’s classic novel La Planète des Singes [Planet of the Apes] (1963) were the vanguard of other alien apes, such as Max-André Rayjean’s Les Singes d’Ulgor [The Apes of Ulgor] (1979), who were all heralding grim portents about the future of our own species.

  Now let’s turn back the clock to a simpler time, when men and apes took the first steps towards each other.

  Jean-Marc Lofficier

  Emile Dodillon, (1848-1914) was a French author of the late 19th century. His other works include Les Forgerons de Montglas [The Smiths of Montglas] (1882), and Jean Lamy (1903). Hemo, originally published in 1886, is a scathing, radical satire of the mores of the day.

  Emile Dodillon: Hemo

  CHAPTER I

  Jan was the last born of Philip Maas, and Philip Maas was the custodian of the main temple in Rotterdam. Formerly dedicated to Saint Lawrence, the huge building has maintained its Catholic name. It remains the Great Church, with an amphitheatric interior for professing grave things such as are common in Protestant churches, walls cold and unadorned under their whitewash, pews arranged in tiers. In the Great Church, guides, printed or living, wishing to show the “curiosities,” describe a half-dozen marble mausoleums and the copper grille separating the nave from the choir. Forced to mention the 1,25 franc entrance fee, these guides would likely fare better were they to omit mentioning ahead of time that there was nothing to see. However, this emptiness was a good reform, as, unlike in Italy or as in former times in Belgium, one avoided the triple tedium of being forced to run between several chapels, to admire one masterpiece and a couple of crusts. When the Joanne and Baedeker travel guides mistakenly failed to incite travelers to the daily use of their gullibility in favor of recommending the packing of flannels, the only result was a daily decline in the gullibility of tourists. As the visitors, aside the lure of the tombs, the organ and the metal work, are never abundant in the Great Church, Philip Maas, the caretaker, seldom added tips to his meager fixed income.

  Now his family was large: first, his wife, then, between Adrian his eldest and Jan his last, ten other children. A thin partition divided his caretaker’s quarters, in a corner recess of the aisle, into two rooms. With one alcove and a closet that could fill each of the two rooms, they could already barely fit the first child’s crib; for the others, Philip had to look in the city for supplemental housing, or give up his position. He rented one of those basements that impart such a distinctive look to the cities of his country, a kind of cave from which one reached the street by way of steep steps between the foot of the house and the top of the sidewalk, and into which the daydreaming loiterer is at risk of tumbling while browsing along the shops. It was in an alley between the square and the street that housed the city’s richest stores. From there, by climbing the stairs and extending their neck a bit to the left, one of the children kept watch on the caretaker’s quarters, as well as he would have beside the church, near the door.

  The father, as an old man, was returning to his old trade as tailor. Nevertheless, in a basement, particularly a basement in Holland, it is altogether too dark for sewing. Not to mention that this brave little caretaker-man, always with a slight cough, was so vibrant, so nervous, so perpetually in motion, that he could not stay put a quarter of an hour without jumping up suddenly from his rest, like the little devil in a jack-in-the-box. He found employment more gainful and more to his tastes: the raising of song birds.

  Compared with the many stores where birds from the islands press the ruffles of their fine multicolored striations against the support rods of their aviaries, motionless as the skylarks skewered and barded by the dozen food purveyors’ where innumerable species of parrots chirp and perform gymnastics on the end of the fine chain that holds them, like a galley-slave, to their perch; next to the famous market in Anvers, where showmen and circuses from all over Europe supply themselves in animals of all sorts, Philip, Philip Maas of the narrow roadway to the Church, in Rotterdam, patiently developed a most deserved reputation. There were a dozen cages, hung, on pleasant days, on the bar of the rail surrounding the top step of the sunken entrance-way that led to his home, and brought in, at night or in winter, to the room downstairs. And each held but one bird of drab plumage, but which he knew how to make into an incomparable artist.

  To the starlings he gave hemp seed and biscuits; to the robins, a mixture of poppy flour and chopped calves’ heart. The heart cost him less than a quarter florin, roughly 0,50 franc per week; the poppy flour, six sous a pound, and he did not even use a pound a month. As the robins, at the time of their migration, tore out their feathers, flayed themselves, tore themselves apart trying to take flight, Philip padded the wires of their cage roofs in cotton batting, and was often forced to blind them. Good and gentle, he hesitated, disturbed at no longer seeing them shake themselves, shift their eyes and puff up their crop in anticipation when he shouted “Attention” to them when showing them their treat, a cockroach—an insect that thrives in moist places. He was only comforted from this horrible operation by hearing them sing better later on, and in selling them at a higher price.

  His triumph was the common lark, the grey lark, with the dark speckling of the throat and chest, and with the forked tongue; sober, retaining any music one whistled to it, and quiet at night. He had some that knew the national anthems of all the countries; an Englishman, brought by the child who was on lookout at the Gr
eat Church that day, had bought one which repeated God Save the Queen like a flageolet of the queen’s Scottish guard, 75 florins, more than 150 francs. The robins learned these melodies, but with greater difficulty because of their habit of always returning to the banality of their usual serenades.

  With only one child more per year, their living quarters took on the appearance of a rabbit-hutch to the extent that Philip took advantage of the fortune he had made with the Englishman, to annex the ground floor. Thus emerging from a cave, the light of the new rooms was an endless joy to all. The birds themselves sang louder. A number of windows opened on the alley. When the fog broke up, there were summer days during which, unless one had to work, one did not need to light the lamps before 3 p.m. The house was finally ready for honest and peaceful happiness. But then Death entered the premises.

  Adrian, the eldest child, was married and living in Haarlem. The others, except the last few, were still in school, working here and there in the city, only returning to the family domicile to eat and sleep. Nearing 20, the youngest son fell sick, lingered awhile, then died of consumption. A daughter, the third eldest, began coughing at the same age, and followed her brother from the heavy Utrecht-velvet armchair where he had sat for hours under a pile of covers, to the cemetery. Then it was another daughter; she did not live much past the fatal age. Then a son. One daughter returned to the status of eldest; when the disease began, terrified, she, one dark December night, went and drowned herself in the Meuse. Her corpse was found the next day, crushed between the sides of two of the many barges tied up at the Boompjes docks. Three younger ones, taken on as ship’s boys as soon as they could climb the rigging, sought in vain to escape. The sickness boarded with them, allowed them to grow, develop, to think themselves safe, to laugh and cry, even to forget, and, at the fated time took them and laid them to rest forever. Two had died in the East-Indies, at Batavia, the third on the open seas. The poor mother, the least touched, went mad and was committed to an asylum. When the old custodian, long on the brink of death, finally died, there only remained the eldest and youngest sons, Adrian, 37 and Jan less than a third his age, to serve as pallbearers.