A Reading Diary (4 page)

I knew nothing of either the book or the author; I shared the uncertainty of the protagonist—“Edward Prendick, a private gentleman”—the uncertainty of what would happen next. I loved the device (which I didn’t know was a device) of reading what was meant to be Prendick’s own narrative, “found among his papers” after his death. It was like overhearing a private confession, except that I knew I would be told both the beginning (one beginning) and some kind of end. When we are young, stories never seemed to conclude on the book’s last page.

I don’t like people summing up books for me. Tempt me with a title, a scene, a quotation, yes, but not the whole story. Fellow enthusiasts, jacket blurbs, teachers and histories of literature destroy much of our reading pleasure by ratting on the plot. And as one grows older, memory too can spoil much of the pleasure of being ignorant of what will happen next. I can barely recall what it was like not to know that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were one and the same person, or that Crusoe would meet his man Friday.

Lector virgo
. That summer, for a few blissful days, I was like Prendick. I knew nothing of the island’s history, I
dreaded the strange Dr. Moreau, I wrongly suspected the beastly inhabitants of having once been normal human beings, I failed to guess what hideous experiments were going on in the House of Pain. When revelation came, halfway through the book, it proved to be much more dreadful than what I had imagined, and I read on, scared and grateful, to the apocalyptic end.

Such innocent reading, even of books I open for the first time, may no longer be possible.

I’m supposed to be giving a talk tonight, and my publisher has set me up in a small hotel near Soho Square, where Hazlitt once lived. The manager is not terribly friendly; I don’t think Hazlitt, not the most patient of men, would have put up with her.

On the second page of
Dr. Moreau
there is a mention of a schooner that sets off from Africa with a puma aboard, and I suddenly remember my first Karl May novel,
The Treasure of the Silver Lake
, which I read when I was six, entranced by the opening scene, in which a panther escapes from its cage aboard a ship crossing a North American lake. In my mind, the two scenes are identical.

Note: Reading sometimes consists of making connections, putting together anthologies.

The Soho street outside my window is unbelievably noisy, probably as loud as when Hazlitt lived here. The loudness has an animal quality to it, an idea prompted no doubt by Wells’s novel. If I didn’t know I was in a city, I might put snouts or beaks to the different screechings, honkings, rumblings, growlings, cacklings, snarlings I hear. The noise is compounded by the smelly heat that rises from the pavement. London is not at its most pleasant in July. I like Swift’s curse concerning London, in his
Stella
journal: “May my enemies live here in summer!”

Though the setting of
Dr. Moreau
is, of course, the terrible island, in the background is always the idea of its supposed contrast, the civilized city in which Prendick attempts to hide just before the end. I say “supposed” because, for Prendick, London becomes another version of the island nightmare. In his first conversations with Moreau’s assistant, Montgomery, Prendick imagines him as “a man who had loved life there, and had been suddenly and irrevocably cut off from it.”

I walk through London in the early morning. The patchwork architecture of Soho has an appealing earthiness, a
sense of creation by need rather than by committee, a natural hodgepodge quality. Also an obvious hierarchy (rich-poor, expensive-cheap) that the shop signs attempt to conceal.

Aristotle, in the second book of the
Politics
, discussing the six types of political systems which he had imagined for six different kinds of citizens, noted that these systems required a concrete setting of symbolic value in which to develop. The first man to realize this, said Aristotle, was the architect Hippodamus of Miletus, a contemporary of Pericles who, even though he knew nothing of politics, was able to draw up the map of an ideal, well-governed city. Hippodamus’s city—or Aristotle’s city, since a distance of twenty centuries allows us to confuse an author with his sources—was apparently a reflection of the Greek demographic ideal: a limited number of citizens divided by the roles they play within society.

A list of the characteristics of Aristotle’s ideal city would include the following:

• patriarchal, since women have no ruling powers
  
• democratic, in the sense that affairs of the state are publicly debated, but only by citizens
  
• military but not expansionist, since the ideal state is by definition a limited space
  
• elitist, designed for the happiness not of all humanity
  but of the select citizens whom the fates have caused to be born on this particular soil, who are therefore justified in using slaves to work under them
  

Behind the Western notion of a perfect city is the idea of privilege. Moreau, no doubt, would approve.

I’m still wondering about the “meaning” of a city like London. Wells didn’t like it. In an essay on the future of America, he described London as “a bowl of viscid human fluid [that] boils sullenly over the rim of its encircling hills and slops messily and uglily into the home counties.”

With its broken-down transit system and its outrageously high prices, London must be one of the world’s most uncomfortable cities for someone with little money to live in. By what advertising means has the British Tourist Board convinced the world that this is not so?

Dr. Moreau believes that man’s will rules life; for Montgomery it’s chance. Prendick apparently believes in fate, which is not the same thing. He also believes (or discovers) that fate blurs the line between man and beast. (The famous ending of
Animal Farm:
“The creatures outside looked from
pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”)

A pedantic note: the reality of the novel is Kantian. The protagonist sees the world as he imagines it to be, while the reader knows there is a world-in-itself, unknowable to the protagonist. The drama arises from the tension between what the protagonist believes and what the reader knows.

Prendick’s first walk in the forest (coming upon the strange “savages,” then pursued by “the Thing”) has an ancient, true ring to it. The forest becomes the tangled place of fairy tales, Dante’s dark jungle in which he meets the three wild beasts, the woods through which Orestes is pursued by the Furies.

The book is full of perfect nightmares. “Then something cold touched my hand. I started violently and saw close to me a dim pinkish thing, looking more like a flayed child than anything else in the world.”

And of course the haunting ending, in which Prendick describes his attempt to live again in the city after his escape from the terrible island: “I could not get away from men; their voices came through windows; locked doors
were flimsy safeguards. I would go out into the streets to fight my delusion, and prowling women would mew after me, furtive craving men glance jealously at me, weary pale workers go coughing by me, with tired eyes and eager paces like wounded deer dripping blood. …”

In Covent Garden. Out of curiosity, I ask at a bookstore for
The Island of Dr. Moreau
. The clerk wants to know who the author is. I tell him. “Is it recent?” he asks. I explain that it isn’t. “If it’s more than a month old,” he says, “we probably don’t have it. But we can maybe order it for you.” He looks the title up on the computer. “I can’t find it,” he says. “It’s probably out of print.”
Sic transit
.

By the time Wells wrote his “scientific romances”
(The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, The First Men in the Moon, The Island of Dr. Moreau)
, the utopian ideal had long faded into its shadow image: the dystopia, the place that allows our worst qualities to bloom unhampered, like carnivorous plants.

I remember that as a child I had a vaguely medieval sense of the universe; science and magic presented hazy borders, and the marvels advertised daily in the papers of
my childhood (Dr. Salk’s polio vaccine, the first television sets in Buenos Aires, the primitive computers, space travel) shared an imaginary bookshelf with Enid Blyton’s Wishing Chair and Pinocchio’s Land of Laughs. Later, in my adolescence, I trusted those early television series
(The Twilight Zone, Boris Karloff Presents)
that depicted the world of science as a dangerous realm of the mind in which unspeakable deeds went unpunished and the stuff of nightmares roamed undisturbed. To me, those series darkly reflected the secret world of adolescence.

Henry James Sr., in a letter to his sons William and Henry: “Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.”

Just watched
The Bride of Frankenstein
on late-night TV, to the sound of police sirens outside my window.

List of mad scientists:

• Dr. Frankenstein
  
• Rabbi Loew of Prague
  
• Dr. Moreau
  
• Dr. Caligari
  
• Dr. Jekyll
  
• Captain Nemo
  
• the Wizard of Oz
  

Do mad women scientists appear only in fairy tales and myths? Circe? Medea? Snow White’s evil stepmother? Hansel and Gretel’s witch? Cinderella’s fairy godmother?

As these doctors find out, the mad experiments are never final; the thing created always seems to want to return to its original state. Moreau: “Somehow the things drift back again, the stubborn beast flesh grows, day by day, back again. …”

Note: Keep the allegorical reading out of Wells—Moreau as God, the beast-folk as men. Such a translation seems suspiciously easy. Stay with the pure horror of the adventure.

Here and there, Wells indulges in rhetorical commonplaces: “What could it mean? A locked enclosure on a lonely island, a notorious vivisector, and these crippled and
distorted men? …” But also beautifully prepared revelations, such as the careful laying out of the beast theme: the dreadful proposal, on the dinghy, to draw lots to see who will be eaten; the medicine that “tasted like blood” and made Prendick feel stronger; the filthy deck strewn with “scraps of carrot, shreds of green stuff,” like a cage. …

Wells is a brilliant name-giver: “The House of Pain.” The first time Prendick hears an animal in agony, he finds the cries “irritating,” what he calls “the exquisite expression of suffering.” One of the Argentinian torturers during the military dictatorship (a cultured man) later declared that he grew accustomed to the “expression of suffering” quite quickly. The sound of the victim, he said, became detached from the person himself, became, as it were, incorporeal, so that it fired in the torturer no feeling of pity or regret, or even the impulse to stop the pain. It was, he said, just “hanging somewhere about.”

Dickens, in
Hard Times:
“ ‘Are you in pain, dear mother?’ ‘I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, ‘but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.’ ”

Crossed back to Paris today. As I disembark at the Gare du Nord, I remember Chesterton’s observation: “London is far
more difficult to see properly than any other place. London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.”

In the first volume of his
Experiment in Autobiography
, Wells recalls how, at the age of seven, in an old issue of
Chambers’ Journal
, he read of a man broken on a wheel. That night he had a horrible dream in which God Himself was turning the instrument of torture. God, the boy concluded, being responsible for everything in the world, must also be responsible for all its evil. Next morning Wells decided that he could no longer believe in the Almighty. The nightmare probably gave him the character of Moreau; in turn, Moreau gave me a healthy fear of doctors and a general distrust of figures of authority.

Borges, when asked if he believed in God: “If the word
God
means a being that exists outside time, I’m not sure I believe in Him. But if it means something in us that is on the side of justice, then yes, I do believe that, in spite of all the crimes, there is a moral purpose to the world.”

I remember seeing a photograph of a human ear grafted onto a rat’s back, an image that seemed out of Bosch. Dr. Moreau says, “To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter.” But the matter
is
ethical, ultimately
reflecting our refusal to accept the brutality of death as the concluding chapter.

Vachel Lindsay’s “The Leaden-Eyed”:

The “gods to serve” troubles me. But those ox-like poor and those who die like sheep are creatures in Moreau’s nightmare. “And even it seemed that I, too, was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain, that sent it to wander alone, like a sheep stricken with the gid.”

Reluctantly finished
The Island of Dr. Moreau
. Though it has lost nothing of its wonderful horror, as I grow older it seems to have become a far more difficult and complex
book, crowded with literary allusions. The mad scientist as a Blakean Nobodaddy; the beastly creatures echoing, in reverse, the existential plight of Kafka’s metamorphosed Gregor; the island, once as far away as Prospero’s, now mapped by post-colonial explorers who see Moreau as the arch-imperialist—all these are now part of my reading of the story, which the story dutifully accepts and almost immediately outgrows.