Of Will Self*
I LIKE WILL SELF BECAUSE he has publicly praised my work and because our political views are almost the same, though not exactly. I told him that the world’s overpopulation, increasing both malnutrition and warfare, should be cured by all loving couples giving birth to only one child who they could support for a generation or two. He pointed out that I thought so because I had only fathered one child, and he had fathered several he was able to support.
That disagreement apart, we are both democratic Socialists of the Anarchist sort Orwell joined in 1938 – fighters against the troops of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini who were not given weapons by the USSR because they rejected Stalin’s dictatorship. I do not suggest that either of us are capable of firing a gun, but Will’s public speaking and journalism shows he too sees the British electoral system now resembles that of the USA, giving voters in most of Britain the choice of only 2 major political parties, both led by millionaires who ensure government of the people by the rich, for the rich.
But while liking him, and having a friend who found his fiction shockingly amusing, I used to dislike it. Near the start of this century he told me and a large audience in a Southbank auditorium why I disliked it, saying he could only write about people he hated and despised. Of course no good author creates perfectly loveable characters because readers cannot believe in them, human perfection being impossible. For the same reason I could not believe in Will’s perfectly despicable characters. I wished he showed some great author’s sympathy for the folk he invented. King Lear is a horribly selfish old man at the start of his play and has probably been a horribly selfish king, absolute power corrupting absolutely. No wonder his older daughters are equally selfish, and he rejects the one too honest to fawn upon him. He only becomes tragic and pitiable when, a homeless outcast in a tempest, he realises that when a king he should have done something for outcasts, unlike Margaret Thatcher who said she wished to make life difficult for such people. Good old Shakespeare. Even his arch-villain, a bastard who blinded his father, decides before dying to be inconsistent and try to save Cordelia.
The Book of Dave was the first I read in which Will had mercy on his main characters. An indirect, highly inventive criticism of Old and New Testaments, it has a large cast, the most sympathetic being a small boy with a pet creature genetically programmed to like dying and becoming food for others. Then came Walking to Hollywood with its satire on installation art and a Jewish narrator I could identify with, in spite of or because of his occasional lunacy. But Umbrella is certainly his best book yet. I cannot decide whether to call it damnably, uncomfortably fascinating or damnably fascinating and uncomfortable. I damn it with exorbitant praise because I agree with the blurb in my review copy which says Umbrella “takes up the challenge of Modernism and demonstrates how it – and it alone – can unravel new and unsettling truths about our world.” It is a relief to read a critic who does not use the senseless Postmodern label, invented by critics who could not see that the multiple viewpoints and time-shifts in Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five and The Tin Drum made them just as modern as Joyce’s Ulysses and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
Umbrella is three hundred and ninety-seven pages not divided into chapters, with few indentations indicating paragraphs. Nearly every sentence is very long, with many insistent phrases in italics like this, punctuated by many dots like… that. Since deciding 25 years ago to persist with Ulysses, I have not read a book that needed such close reading before I saw the good of it. It is a story of sanity and madness and how, from the nineteenth century onward, doctors have been driven to mistaking one for the other. One of its great insights is put into the mouth of an old psychiatrist who discovers that in battle nine out of ten conscripted soldiers never fire a gun with lethal intent, so the biggest wars between the most civilized nations are, as he puts it, “perpetrated by a mere handful of psychopathic personalities, the rest being there to… make up the numbers.”
Umbrella not only uses the modern narrative shifts of Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five and The Tin Drum, it makes new for today’s Britain their humane and undeclared morality, which is the only one possible.
* This is a hitherto unpublished review of Self’s 9th novel Umbrella.
Of Bill Hamilton
Bob Kitts, the subject of essays starting here and here, was generous to both think highly of his friends and introduce them to each other. In 1955 perhaps, I met through him a daughter and son of a remarkable family, the Hamiltons: Mary, medical student, Bill, the student biologist. Both liked literature & art. Bob showed them my early poems. I am now ashamed of these, but Mary and Bill liked them, and we became friends. Mary, became a doctor, Bill a geneticist. In 1976 The Selfish Gene by Dawkins told me Bill was now both famous and controversial. His article on natural history in the T.L.S. proved him a good writer. This review of his official biography was rejected by London Review of Books, printed in The Scottish Review of Books.
WILLIAM HAMILTON’S NAME became known to the general public in 1976 through Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Written to popularize recent discoveries in Darwinian evolution, this book claimed these were mainly due to Hamilton. Some biologists questioned these discoveries in the following years, but when Bill’s funeral service was held in July 2000 at the Chapel of New College, Oxford, nobody contradicted Dawkins when he said biologists and geneticists mostly agreed that Bill was the world’s greatest evolutionary biologist since Darwin. Of course total agreement in any region of thought is impossible. Students of science in parts of Ireland, the USA and some Muslim states are taught that new kinds of plant and animal did not evolve from earlier ones, because God separately invented each. Otherwise, folk interested in biology will recognise the importance of Bill Hamilton and this biography.
This is the fourth Oxford University Press publication about Bill’s life and work. The first three were the trilogy of his collected papers titled, Narrow Roads of Geneland. Bill edited the first two, Evolution of Social Behaviour and The Evolution of Sex, in which his scientific papers were printed in the order they were written, each with his preface explaining the circumstances, with teachers who doubted the value of his research and colleagues who valued it. Not all good scientists believe that the personal struggles producing their best ideas may cast light on them. Kepler did, thinking the mental process by which he found planetary orbits were not circular but elliptical as interesting as the discovery.
Last Words, the trilogy’s third volume, was edited by Mark Ridley with each paper introduced by a coauthor or colleague because Bill had died of a disease contracted in Africa. Even without his introductions to Last Words these collected papers are a scientific record and self-portrait – a scientist’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Like all autobiographies it omits much that the author took for granted or thought unimportant, hence our need of Ullica Segerstrale’s biography.
It is an excellent account of a character 19th century writers called an original, meaning not easily classified. As a lecturer Bill had some traits attributed to absent-minded-professors – no respect for merely conventional manners and appearances, with carelessness over a pay cheque. This combined with practical though unconventional efficiency on expeditions in equatorial rainforests, and with unusual physical strength few noticed because he never flaunted it. Once, perhaps, he quietly enjoyed disturbing an audience by explaining how he had plugged a leak in a boat while swimming under it in Brazil, ending with the casual remark, “The danger of piranhas is greatly exaggerated.” (When I mentioned this to his wife Christine last year she said impatiently, “There is no danger from piranhas if you aren’t bleeding.”)
Ms Segerstrale shows that Bill’s originality as a thinker derived (as often happens) from highly original parents. Both were New Zealanders who, from the mid 1930s onward, brought up six children in Oaklea, five acres of Kentish woodland surrounding an ordinary two-storey house with useful outbuildings. Here their offspring found space to develop their own interests and hobbies, with parents
who gladly helped when they wanted help. This gave the children freedoms their parents had enjoyed as youngsters in New Zealand, and perhaps colonial prejudices against what they called posh. They used thriftily mended broken china, dined without tablecloths when guests were not present, avoided hotels and restaurants by travelling in a car with tents and camping equipment. This came easy to a family whose engineer dad had supervised building a road for the British Empire through the mountains of Kurdistan and used prefabricated bridges of his own invention. Life at Oaklea was both tougher and more varied than that of most middle-class British children. Bill’s love of natural history began in the woods of Oaklea.
More about his parents. His mother Bettina, had qualified as a general medical doctor who meant to work as a missionary, but after marriage abandoned that, becoming a full-time housekeeping mother. She loved art and literature, read poems and stories to her children, also the Bible which she thought should be part of everyone’s education. Her husband’s influence may have made her more of an agnostic than a Church Christian. A sentence here of Nature’s Oracle may be misleading: “Archie and Bettina often attended a church on Sunday, sometimes taking the children.” Their eldest child, Mary Bliss, tells me her father was an outspoken Atheist who never went to church. From Archie, Bill picked up engineering skills which, like natural history, stimulated an intelligent imagination also fed by paintings, poetry, the novels of Dostoyevsky and Kafka. Two of his closest friends and scientific colleagues, Hugh Ingram and Colin Hudson were practicing Christians, and in later life George Price. Bill greatly sympathised with Price, helped publicised his discoveries, could not save him from suicide when Price found living as Jesus commanded and giving all he had to the poor was too difficult.
Bill’s lack of snobbery and remarkable absence of prejudices came from his family being a small republic which quietly supported its members while expecting each to earn their independence, so at the start of her book Ms Segerstrale concentrates on family matters. After Bill’s professional studies get underway she gives them priority, mentioning lecturers who thought his ideas unimportant or suspect, others who valued them and all his helpful colleagues. Bill had no small talk of the kind most young people use in mating games, so was surprised to learn later that he could be ‘a ladies man’, after meeting women with educations more like his own. Apart from his wife Christine, Ms Segerstrale says nothing about other women in his life. She mentions an early proposal of marriage being turned down – the woman refused to accept his condition that of the two children she would bear, the second must have a different father. Bill was not proposing a ménage a trois, but his faith in altruistic kinship made him sure different fathers would give both children a broader range of support in life. He forgot that most women willing to wed one man are instinctively monogamous. He may have abandoned that idea when Christine accepted him. Ms Segestrale leaves later biographers to scavenge for names and details which she rightly thinks gossip irrelevant to Bill’s main story. Here comes some gossip of my own.
I met Bill through friendship with his sister Mary when I was a studying mural design at Glasgow School of Art and he studying genetics at Cambridge University. We were both keen on the work of William Blake and Samuel Palmer. (Palmer’s best paintings were made near Oaklea, at Shoreham where Blake had visited him.) We also discussed behavior uniquely human – our capacity to eat when not hungry, drink when not thirsty, fuck in almost any season of the year and, alas, hurt or kill other people after making them helpless. It is also obvious that some of us enjoy doing so. Theists blame these traits upon the fall of man and original sin and Atheists upon the nature of things, often called Nature for short. Bill and I were Darwinian enough to think these capacities were inherited from a time when they helped people survive, but we now worried about human survival in a world where belligerent nations threatened each other with nuclear weapons. As a Socialist I thought this belligerence mainly due to needless competition causing poverty and overcrowding. Bill also thought overpopulation dangerous, but believed belligerence had a profounder genetic source.
Our talks in the 1950s have no place in Bill’s biography because they did not influence his work, which explained selfish belligerence and xenophobia indirectly. He saw there was more to be learned about the nature of human and other animals by investigating capacities for self-sacrifice. Most birds live upon insects and seeds, only a minority of bigger ones are predators, yet many smaller birds give a special cry if they see a hawk circling overhead, a cry warning others in earshot of the predator, though the cry will first attract the hawk’s attention to itself. Most people incline to call individuals who risk or lose their lives helping others heroes or idiots, but a species without these self-sacrificers is in danger of extinction. Every healthy meerkat community has a member who stands on its hind legs with raised head like a human sentry, looking out for predators while the rest seek nourishment with four feet on the ground. A meerkat community too small to support a sentinel is soon killed off.
While studying altruism genetically at Cambridge Bill wished to attend anthropology lectures as a second subject but the anthropology department rejected him because he was a scientist. Anthropologists saw themselves as an arts faculty working at an interface between history and philosophy. So did most biologists who believed human societies could never undergo experimental proofs required by exact sciences. This disgruntled Bill with Cambridge. He decided that evidence for genetic altruism could be best investigated in places where animal life was thickest, among the social insects of South America. Nature’s Oracle tells how Bill’s investigations were first dismissed as “politically incorrect”, though that phrase was not yet in general use. A historical excursion is needed to explain why.
Malthus’ Essay on the Principal of Population was published in 1798 when the French Revolution was underway, and still welcomed by many critics of the British government. Among these was Tom Paine who had strongly supported the war for American independence. His book The Rights of Man said hereditary monarchs and aristocracies used taxation to promote warfare while supporting a hoard of unproductive parasites. He said a democratic government could use taxation to abolish hereditary bosses and poverty by setting up what was called a Welfare State over a century later. Malthus argued against this that in every land more people were born than there was food enough to feed, so death from warfare and poverty were needed to keep efficient societies working. He said that if a widespread sharing of social wealth ever produced a wholly well-fed generation, their numbers would increase so much that the next would be decimated by famine.
This argument seemed conclusive to land owners, employers and politicians who had no wish to pay better wages or improve working-class conditions. It was attacked by those who saw it used to justify widespread corruption and selfishness in what Harold Wilson once called “the commanding heights of the economy.” Malthus’ justification of warfare was ancient – in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale Mars the war-god is praised for cutting down Nature’s excess – but his essay was probably first to suggest that deaths from poverty were good for a nation.
The link between population and food supply in Malthus’ essay gave Charles Darwin a clue to The Origin of Species. This book persuaded Herbert Spencer to invent the phrase survival of the fittest, which became popular with thinkers called Social Darwinists. These tended to talk as if much money, inherited or earned, was an obvious sign of people fittest to survive. This contradicted Dean Swift’s remark, that if you want to know what God thinks about money, look at those who have most. Only the sycophants of multi-millionaires can believe they show human nature at its best. By the 1890s it was also proved that working-class families with good wages tended to have less, not more children than their poorer neighbours.
Darwin never wrote or said a word that would identify him with those called Social Darwinists, but his distant cousin Francis Galton was a good scientist, meteorologist and investigator of hereditary traits who added the word eugenics
to the English language. Galton worried about the general health of the British people. He saw the aristocracy threatened by the dangers of inbreeding, which the European royal families had made notorious. He saw workers in the cities plagued by tuberculosis and a host of other diseases which he thought might become hereditary. Since the 14th century Black Death London’s population had grown steadily bigger, though parish registers showed that the death rate there always exceeded the birth rate. This proved that the expansion had been caused by people constantly arriving from healthier places outside. Stockbreeders knew how to strengthen traits they approved of in horses, cattle and fowls. Galton thought public health should be improved by breeding people in the same way, and endowed a Eugenic Society to foster a healthier, more intelligent race of Britons.
Galton was no more a Fascist than other prosperous Victorians blind to the fact that people of any intelligence will always chose mates for reasons that have nothing to do with public health, so eugenics never became a science. But its arguments were welcomed by people who liked dividing humanity into their own race, class or religion and those outside it, usually folk they wanted to exploit. That is how all imperial governments divide the human race. Four enforced eugenic laws. Nazi Germany set out to kill all Jews, gypsies and (before the Catholic Church protested) the incurably sick. For some decades before the 20th century ended the USA, Norway and Sweden forcibly, legally sterilised those judged mentally subnormal for reasons later found inadequate.
Fascism was defeated after World War Two and Social Darwinism rejected, but a scientist studying genetic traits common to mankind and other animals was suspected of Nazi tendencies, especially when he related these to birth, death rates and food supplies. On leaving Cambridge Bill decided his best chance of a regular income was in secondary school education, and applied to train as a teacher of science at Moray House in Edinburgh University. He was told his degree in genetics only qualified him for training to teach in primary schools. Bill appealed against this decision because his degree had depended on passes in three other sciences, but the appeal was dismissed.
Of Me and Others Page 38
