How to read (rather than read about) Charles Darwin

 

Christmas Day at Port Desire, 1833, by the expedition draughtsman, Conrad Martens

We are reading Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), which skilfully blends travelogue, notes on geology and zoology, as well as climate, ethnography, and even recent politics. Darwin writes in a wonderfully accessible way, but his book, although intended for a general audience, was published over 175 years ago, and so not surprisingly, many of the names, ideas, and thinking within it are now superseded: names of species, for example. Darwin’s epic journey was so wide-ranging that the details of the journey are fascinating in their own right, but the fact that Darwin was able to identify birds, plants, mammals, and insects, as well as making educated guesses about the formation of rocks, means that he combines a unique eye-witness account with an inspiring intellectual curiosity. He is not lecturing, but sharing with us what he has read (he appears to have done his homework before every field trip, so he has an idea of what he expects to see), but also what it means. For many of the rock formations or fauna and flora he has to guess, but his thought process is compelling. We can make it even more of a gripping experience by comparing what he thought with what is currently known

Unfortunately, this is where reading Darwin becomes challenging. Quite what did he see? Exactly where did he go? I am a general reader, but the Voyage is probably among the top 20 science books for general readers. (The Internet tells me Darwin’s Voyage is the 226th greatest nonfiction book of all time, which is some honour – one day I will look at the 225 above it). But I get no help from the edited editions I have been reading. Where is a good annotated edition? What do I mean by annotated?

• It should include a reasonably detailed map that shows where Darwin went. It is surprisingly difficult to recreate exactly where Darwin travelled from the text of the Voyage, because he frequently went back as well as forward.
• It should include a chronology. The original text simply states “June 1” or whatever, so I lose track of what year I is.
• It should explain differences in terminology – for example, all the names of individual islands in the Galapagos are now referred to by Spanish, not English names. So Darwin’s Albemarle Island is today Isabela Island, and so on. That’s fine, and Wikipedia provides both names, helpfully. But none of the editions of the text I have looked at provide the modern equivalents. 

The Arden edition of Shakespeare, Hamlet (1899). There is a clear division of text, textual variants, and editorial notes, which cover both problems of word meanings ("bruit") and encyclopedic background ("Wittenberg")

Here is an annotated edition of a literary text, one of the most famous annotated editions: the Arden edition of Shakespeare, one volume for each play. The interested reader can consult on the same page explanations of unusual words in the text; even if the modern-day editor cannot solve all the problems, he or she can at least indicate potential explanations. Amazingly, there seems to be no equivalent for Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle.

The actuality of the Beagle journey is that there are several sources, a mixture of journals and letters done during the voyage, as well as accounts written after the end. Captain FitzRoy wrote an account, for example, and Darwin kept more than one journal. Some editions make use of this material. I tried three editions.

Penguin Classics edition (1989)

The Penguin Classics edition, edited and abridged by Janet Brown and Michael Neve (1989) has two editors credited, yet the text appears to be without any annotations. Darwin writes, for example, about a kingfisher in the Cape Verde Islands, which he calls Dacelo jagoensis, but the genus Dacelo, according to Wikipedia, applies only to four species of the Australian/New Guinea bird the Kookaburra. Has nobody checked to see which bird Darwin was referring to? Darwin’s visit to the Cape Verde region includes visits to Praya (modern Praia) and to St Paul and St Jago. Where are they? Wikipedia is my friend, but it doesn’t answer every question I have. 

Better than the Penguin edition is The Voyage of the Beagle: The Illustrated Edition, published by Zenith Press, and copyright Quarto, 2015 (presumably a packaged title that was then published by a US publisher). This edition is based on the second edition of Darwin’s book, and is also abridged (but you only discover this on page 481). But here again, while an attempt has been made to include some illustrations (which vary wildly from standard picture agency shots to drawings by the official artist on the voyage) yet I have found no annotations of the text itself. This is tantalizing indeed, for it is clear from the illustrations that someone knowledgeable has identified the modern name for a species described by Darwin – yet they have not identified that the modern and old names are of the same thing. Two completely different names are used in close proximity, for example, the Galapagos land iguana is described as Conolopholus subcristatus in a photo, then, two lines further down, as Amblyrynchus Demarlii by Darwin. They are presumably describing the same thing.

Neither of these two editions includes a usable map or chronology. Nor does the third edition, The Beagle Record (Cambridge, 1979), although this tries to do something rather different. It contains selections from the various letters and journals by the participants, plus a wonderful collection of contemporary images. However, here again, no attempt is made to link old and new species names.   

Do editions of classic science texts not include annotation? I was astonished to read on the endpaper of The Beagle Record an ecstatic endorsement for an edition of Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection by R C Stauffer: 

I cannot praise highly enough the meticulous work of Stauffer … in rendering the text right down to the details of Darwin’s misspellings … Stauffer has even attained the ideal of scholarly selflessness by adding not a word of commentary on ideas or concepts … What can I say except that Natural Selection is a joy to read?

This comment is by none other than Stephen Jay Gould. A joy to read it may be, for scholars as familiar with the literature as Gould. While there are any number of books about Darwin, where are the texts of Darwin’s words, made accessible for the common reader? I would quite enjoy a word or two of commentary on ideas and concepts. Or am I alone? 

 

Ruggles of Red Gap and national stereotypes

Ruggles of Red Gap. Laughton (centre), at this point still a butler, has been asked to drink with two noisy and raucous Americans, who have just annoyed the entire cafe by jumping on each other's backs and running around. I’m with Laughton here: I'd rather be somewhere else.

The 1935 Hollywood comedy, Ruggles of Red Gap is rated positively by all the reviews I have read, and yet I found the film deeply disturbing. Perhaps I am over-reacting; there are plenty of other films of that decade in the US that have similar sentiments. My appalled fascination in the film is from its success as a work of propaganda, both at the time of its release (it was very successful) but also today. In its way, this film is as insidious as the Catholic Church instilling an outdated morality on generations of believers. In this case, the believers are the American public, and the power providing the propaganda is the Hollywood studio. 

The plot is simple. We are in Paris. Charles Laughton plays Ruggles, a butler to English aristocrat the Earl of Burnstead, memorably played by Roland Young. Ruggles finds himself traded in a game of poker and won by Egbert and Effie Floud, a nouveau riche couple from the American West. Effie is a would-be social climber, but her husband, Egbert, prefers check suits, and the saloon rather than the Parisian café.   

Ruggles travels with the Flouds back to their home town of Red Gap, in Washington State, and for the remainder of the film we are entertained by an English butler trying to come to terms with the raw West. We pass over in silence the fact that Ruggles has been won in a card game, which sounds like slavery to me (in fact, Laughton himself calls it “the country of slavery”). In the end, Ruggles declares his freedom and gives up being a butler. He opens a restaurant and decides who can eat (and who can’t eat) in it. We are expected to be entertained by the rip-roaring genuineness and bonhomie of the uncultured but genuine Americans, contrasted to Laughton’s excessive reserve after a lifetime of service. 

Leo McCarey is the director. You would expect him to be a master of comedy: He paired Laurel with Hardy, back in the 1920s, and directed many of their best early films. Hence, you would expect him to have a sense of comic timing. 

My claim is that Hollywood was responsible for much of the complacency, populist xenophobia, and blatant dishonesty of much of the 20th-century USA. It’s all here: misogyny, racism, but worst of all, a smug satisfaction with mythical American values that did not represent the American people, yet were foisted on them by the studios. 

1. The land of equality. This is a theme repeated by many of the characters, and even, by the end, by Ruggles himself. Yet when Ruggles first arrives at Red Gap, where everyone is supposedly equal, he encounters black and Chinese servants. Clearly, the land of equality is not for everyone. And not mentioned is the fabulous wealth of the Flouds, who can afford to destroy all the clothes they have just purchased, not once but twice in the film. The vast inequality in income seems to be countered by Egbert Floud’s fondness for drinking in the saloon: in other words, he is one of us.  
2. Laughton’s character is not fully fleshed out. The story attempts to show his “gradual liberation from generations of class predestination” [Village Voice] yet fails miserably at that one attempt of character development. We enjoy Laughton’s reserved British butler, but his attempts to look drunk, and his transformation to independent thinking, don’t convince. Comedy is not Laughton’s forte.
3. The so-called “liberal” American values celebrated seem to comprise boorish behaviour, heavy drinking, treating sales people (in Paris, of course), and ignoring others. The scene depicted in the still from the movie shows Laughton drinking with two back-slapping Americans, who greet each other so loudly that they bring an entire café to a standstill by their antics.
4. You will say the film is a caricature both of Americans and of Europeans. But by the film’s own terms, that caricature is what Laughton chooses to be part of. The film attempts to be both serious and caricature, and fails to reconcile the two. Laughton displays his new-found fondness for equality by bodily ejecting a diner from his restaurant – just like throwing someone out of the saloon. 

If you think I am exaggerating, ask yourself: how many American comedies include a complete retelling of the Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln? Let’s look at that scene in detail. We are in the Red Gap saloon. One character is not able to remember any of the words from Lincoln’s famous speech. It is funny, of course, that nobody in the saloon can remember even one word of perhaps the most quoted speech in US history. But then follows a blatant betrayal of the principles of film-making: don’t repeat the point too many times. The camera follows the bartender as he asks everyone in the saloon if they know the words. Nobody does. OK, it’s funny, we get the point, so why does the film have to repeat the question six or seven times? Twice, at most three, would have been plenty. 

It gets worse. With each repetition of the question, we laugh less. By the fifth or six time, we start to question the director’s ability to gauge his audience’s  response, so we should not feel too surprised when the climax of the scene, presumably what the director (or studio) must have felt was the film’s most important moment, is when Laughton quietly reveals he knows the address in full. The full Gettysburg address is only 272 words, and took Lincoln just two minutes to recite, but two minutes in a comedy is at least a minute too long. Mercifully, the rendition begins with Laughton speaking so softly, it is several sentences before you realise what he is saying. Unfortunately, once we do recognize the speech, it becomes clear he is going to recite the whole thing. At this point, Laughton switches gear to his classical serious theatre pose (which means he takes even longer over the speech, another error in the comedy) – but his delivery is aimed at the viewer, not the other characters. Yet, unbelievably, in case we didn’t get the message that is so clumsily imposed on us by the director, the camera moves around the room to show the raucous drinkers and gamblers in the saloon, silenced and transfixed by Lincoln’s words. It is simply not believable; a grotesque error of timing; an offense to the audience that the director so blatantly instructs us how to respond by depicting an utterly improbable silence and reverence. I don’t doubt that the Gettysburg Address is moving, but if I recited it in a Western saloon, it would be laughed down. Unless, of course, you are a Hollywood studio boss, shamelessly and crassly exploiting the vast entertainment machine you have created to try to influence popular feeling. And what happened to the “lowbrow good, highbrow not to be trusted” tone of the movie? 

The worst aspect of Lincoln’s address is that his words about equality did not apply in Red Gap, and were still being forgotten for over a hundred years after he said them. 

It is one of the most blatant and sickening examples of club-footed populism in Hollywood cinema. The worst of it is that, here in the 21st century, almost one hundred years after the film, critics praise the film to the skies, and, specifically, that recitation of the Gettysburg Address! Here are some comments by others on the film: 

In its optimism and faith in the American principle of equal opportunity, Ruggles of Red Gap ranks among other great movies about outsiders who transform their lives through political study [Kozak’s Classic Cinema, June 30 2018) 

Its big scene – Laughton … reciting the Gettysburg Address in a saloon, as the camera pans across the awed faces of the cowhands. It’s a bit much, but it works like magic. [Pauline Kael, New Yorker, 2007] 

this is the archetypal film they don't make any more, partly because comedy has now grown too raucous to favour the quiet drollery of players like Charlie Ruggles and Mary Boland [Time Out, 2012] 

The director celebrates the friendship, openness, spontaneity, joie to vivre, and solidarity of the Americans. [Guide des Films, Laffont, Paris, 1997] [perhaps the French reviewer is warming to a mythical image of a republic]

Ruggles of Red Gap left me feeling uncomfortable, in the same way that, in a night out with a group of friends, they drink too much and start behaving badly to bystanders, and you feel you either tolerate uncomfortably their bad behaviour, and feel uneasy about it, or become ostracised for standing up for the rights of others. It’s not a situation I want to be in, and I certainly don’t want to be celebrating a piece of back-slapping populism that leaves a bad taste in the mouth. 

Ruggles encounters American liberal values

Turning non-fiction into narrative

Photo by Ben Griffiths on Unsplash

An interesting article by Michael Gorra (TLS, 2 October 2020) explains the thinking behind his 2012 book Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the making of an American Masterpiece:

I wanted to tell the story, not of a life but of a work. I wanted to turn criticism itself into a narrative act.

I haven’t read Gorra’s book, but I am fascinated by what he was trying to do. Gorra articulates something that has been taking place for several years in non-fiction publishing, although I haven’t seen it so clearly stated as here. 

1. “Literary Criticism in the 1950s had an artificially large audience, one fed by the paperback revolution, the expansion of higher education, and the mid-century aspirations of middlebrow culture …[but] these conditions will not return”.
2. But the general public still reads – just different things. Gorra states “A lot of people will sit still for the time it takes to read a 2,000-word review”. This is true (it tallies with my estimate for review length of around 1,400 words for a review in the TLS, and 3,000 words for reviews in the London Review of Books; the former is similar in length to a blog post, but the latter strays into essay territory, and I get bored).
3. Beyond that, readers want narrative! “If readers go for biography, they do so … because they want narrative, and prefer that narrative to discursive forms of argument.”.
4. “I wanted to turn criticism itself into a narrative act … hoping it might then reclaim some fraction of the readership that critics such as Edmund Wilson once had.”

Gorra is correct that the lit crit market for books has all but disappeared. as a book genre for non-specialists has more or less disappeared.  Critics who wrote for a wide audience, such as Edmund Wilson or John Bayley, have no successors. Books of literary criticism published today are typically by academics looking to gain or keep a tenured position. 

I can think of several examples of non-fiction books, not all of them literary, that combine narrative with more of an exposition. Frances Pryor’s The Fens (2019) is an excellent combination of the author’s archaeological excavations, with the work of others, combined with his own experience of living in the Fens. It makes for a remarkable work, that as a reader you relate to, rather than simply following a researcher’s project (for example Cat Jarman’s River Kings, 2021, which simply doesn’t have the same tone of personal involvement as Pryor’s work). 

Most lit crit titles (and humanities works generally) have no narrative drive. But it’s surprising to think of classic non-fiction books you have read, and to realise how many of them did have some kind of story-telling thread to them. Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment (1966-69); Paul Hazard’s The European Mind 1680-1715; R.R. Palmer’s Twelve who ruled (1970) and yes, the biggest page-turner of all, Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station (1940), all have an addictive quality – even over multiple volumes, in Gay’s case. 

One note of caution: when autobiography takes over, and the author starts describing the queues at the airport as they fly off to their latest excavation, this reader is not overwhelmed with engagement. Yes, I want a narrative, and yes, I want to learn things, but no, I don’t want a blow-by-blow account of the minutiae of the writing and research process – unless it is, say, Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, which is a classic narration that reveals the author’s thinking as he begins to formulate his ideas about evolution. 

Excitingly, Michael Gorra continues his article about narrative criticism by giving several examples of works that he likes. I’m not familiar with most of the books he mentions, but they will certainly be worth following up. Gorra broadens his discussion to include books about films and their making, as well as texts about art. He mentions Julian Barnes, one of the few writers on literary topics I find worth reading when I don’t have to read fiction for examination purposes. Barnes on Flaubert’s parrot (in the book of the same name), and on Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa, are examples of the approach Gorra advocates. 

On reflection, the mixing of genres has been around for many years. Novelists have frequently used their engagement with the reader to air their interests and prejudices about topics they feel are important. How many readers of Anna Karenina enjoy all the lengthy chapters about land reform and the organisation of local government? Clearly, Tolstoy thought they were important for him. Better at combining social issues with fiction is Dickens, in Hard Times and Bleak House, for example. A less successful (because too obvious) mixture of fiction and presentation of the 19th-century debate about evolution is Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered (2018), which leaves me slightly uncomfortable because I feel the joins between the two aspects are too visible. Reading Darwin himself adds the process of genuine discovery to a historical narrative.

My thanks to Michael Gorra for outlining this approach. I certainly intend to follow up his recommendations for further reading. And don’t be surprised if my account of what I have read takes the form of a narrative…