Anatomy of Restlessness (17 page)

But Fanny turned him into a writer. Always claiming second sight, she said she knew she was marrying a genius ‘if he lives and works!' She used her flair for organisation to get him down to work and write money-making books. Had he remained well and single and lived in England, the chances are he would have struck, like his friend W. E. Henley, a mediocre figure with such talent as he had sucked dry in incestuous coteries. Fanny unscrupulously used the sickbed (his sheets were stained with ink and blood and gravy) and a series of sanatoria to protect Stevenson from his friends: and once they had moved to the South Seas, she could gloat with satisfaction over the fact that she had, at last, wheedled him out of the orbit of literary London.

Here she miscalculated. The South Pacific suited his health far better than she could have imagined. His lungs stopped bleeding. He now put on weight and muscle. He too became nut-brown and swam and did manual work. His ocean cruises, first on the yacht and then on rough copra schooners, toughened him and gave him confidence as a man. But she could not take it. After a rough passage to Hawaii, he wrote with evident pleasure: ‘My wife is no great shakes. She is the one who has suffered most.' And, when they settled in Samoa and began building the house he continued to emerge from the cycle of unmanning prostration. He also mastered his fear of the opposite sex. At the time of his death he was creating, for the first time, two flesh-and-blood women – Kirstie and Christina Elliott in
Weir of Hermiston.

But Louis's recovery drove Fanny frantic. She turned Vailima into emotional bedlam. She screamed and threw tantrums. They had to give her laudanum and even hold her down. Since she had lost absolute control over her husband, she launched into schemes for extending the house from a modest hide-out into a grandiose establishment. Her extravagance, combined with his Scottish fear of ruin, pressed him to earn more and more royalties. He reacted by cloistering himself with his step-daughter, the beautiful Belle Strong, who became his amanuensis and to whom he was evidently attracted. He became morose and pined for Scotland and then he cracked under the strain. The cerebral haemorrhage, which killed him, left Fanny free to play the role of martyr's widow. It was a role which suited her talent for drama, which she enjoyed, and from which she knew how to profit. The legend of ‘RLS' was secure.

 

Admirers of
King Solomon's Ring
and
Man Meets Dog
will be relieved that Konrad Lorenz has reverted to his earlier vein. His last two books must have been a bitter disappointment, even to those who accepted
On Aggression
as a work of oracular significance. One of them, entitled
Behind the Mirror
, purported to be a ‘search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge', but was impenetrable to the non-academic reader. The other,
Civilised Man's Eight Deadly Sins
, was easy enough – a diatribe in the language of the world-saver that dragged out the musty metaphors of social Darwinism and could have been written in the late 30s. Overpopulation and the ruin of the landscape were galloping cancers. He inveighed against the inertia of public opinion; the universal mania for the new; the lack of courtship rituals that made for stable marriages; and he feared that our civilisation would fall to the less pampered peoples of the East.

The Year of the Greylag Goose,
however, proves he has not lost his light touch or ability to charm. He presents the book as the record of four seasons spent studying his favourite bird in the ‘fairytale surroundings' of Lake Alm in Austria. The result is extremely pretty and will doubtless beguile a wide audience, partly through the colour photographs of Sybille and Klaus Kalas, partly through Lorenz's special gift of getting under the skin of other creatures. The mountains are beautiful; the air is crystalline, and the greylag itself is a marvellous bird of muted greys and whites, with a beak the colour of red coral and slightly paler feet. On page after page exquisite images illustrate the flowers, the other animals of Lake Alm, and the geese themselves, courting, mating, nesting, hatching, fighting, swimming, moulting, flying, or feeding in the snow. On the last three spreads, a goose closes its eyelids and drifts into the deepest sleep.

Lorenz himself, in bathing shorts, sou‘wester, or anorak, appears as the venerable, white-bearded naturalist, the Nobel Prize Winner who has never lost his capacity to marvel at the wonders of nature. When wild geese answer his call, he feels he has stepped back into a ‘paradise of peaceful coexistence' with his fellow creatures. On the other hand, his knowledge of evolution has earned him the right to preach sermons that will be understood by anyone who takes the trouble to read between the lines. In the postscript, he hopes that the book ‘will inspire overworked people who are alienated by nature with a sense of what is good and of their duty to protect and preserve nature's living things'.

Lorenz grew up at Altenberg on the Danube, and still lives in the fantastical neo-baroque mansion built by his father, a rich Viennese surgeon. His love affair with greylag geese began when he was a little boy watching them migrate down-river. By the age of six he had absorbed a popular account of Darwinism by Wilhelm Boelsche (through whose chief work,
Vom Bazillus zum Affenmenschen,
Hitler first latched onto the idea of evolution). He decided to become a palaeontologist and, in the garden, played at being an iguanadon with the girl who became his wife. Later, as a young scientist, he kept a flock of greylags in and around the house; and one of the funniest passages in
King Solomon's Ring
describes Lorenz Senior entertaining the geese to tea in his study, where they made messes on the Persian carpet. Frau Lorenz once asked a psychiatrist friend, ‘What is this mania of Konrad's for geese?' ‘It's a perversion,' he said. ‘Same as any other.'

Lorenz has always been at pains to preface his books with avowals of scientific objectivity. At the start of
On Aggression
, he promised to lead his readers ‘by the route which I took myself... for reasons of principle. Inductive natural science always starts without preconceptions and proceeds from this to the abstract laws they all obey.' In the new book, the observer is the lens of the camera, ‘the very symbol of objectivity'. Yet, though Lorenz claims to have written the text around the photographs, that doesn't stop him repeating the ingrained prejudices he has been hammering out for more than forty years, with the persistence of the Vicar of Bray.

His professional colleagues prefer to distinguish two Lorenzes. One is the ‘Father of Ethology' (the book jacket calls him the ‘Father of the Greylag Geese'), who pioneered the study of ‘blocks' of genetically inherited behaviour in the vertebrates and contributed the valuable concept of ‘imprinting'. The second Lorenz is the blustering philosopher-politician, whose argument from animals to man rests on rather shaky foundations. Yet his theses are so closely worked, and his career is so much of one piece, that I find it impossible to divide the Lorenzes.

His message is that all human behaviour is biologically determined: that when we speak of love, hate, anger, grief, ambition, loyalty, friendship, and so forth, we are speaking on precisely the same level as the ethologist who uses ‘aggressivity', ‘rank-order drive', ‘male bonding', or ‘territoriality' to describe the behaviour of other species. Once the ‘drives', or appetites, of human beings are isolated, it will be possible to propose a biology of ethics that will supplant the half-truths of religion or secular morality. We are not free, but bound by evolutionary law. The function of reason is not to free us from our instinct, but to protect us from our own sins against nature. ‘Animals', he writes in this book, ‘do not
need
a sense of moral responsibility, since under natural conditions their inclinations lead them to what is
right.'
Man, however, is a domesticated species, whose innate schemes of behaviour have been blunted by the process of becoming human, and tend to get hopelessly brutalised in the conditions of the big modem city.

Now it happens that the family life of the greylag goose is an ideal mirror for Lorenz to show up the flaws of instinct in man. He quotes his father as saying: ‘After the dog, the greylag goose is the most suitable animal for association with human beings.' In fact, he never tires of quoting his father as a reservoir of sound, old-fashioned common sense; and it must have been most reassuring for both to find that greylag society should conform to ideals of an upper-middle-class family in the late Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The geese are monogamous. They fall in love and stay in love. They have long courtship rituals that end in a kind of marriage ceremony. The ganders work off their aggressive drives in fights that establish a hierarchy of breeding. Defeated rivals go off alone, get depressed, and are liable to accidents. Sometimes a gander seduces another gander's goose and a divorce results. If one partner dies the survivor goes into mourning. Low-ranking geese look up to their elders and betters and stand around, as spectators, when the aristocrats fight. The whole goose colony drums up militant enthusiasm when threatened by an outside menace.

The hereditary principle is confirmed in that well-born goslings shoo off a grown-up commoner, providing they are on their own home ground. Sometimes two, and even three, ganders will form a homosexual bond, though none will consent to the passive role. These blood-brothers are stronger than ‘any normal pair in courage and fighting strength', and ‘always occupy a high rank in the social hierarchy'. It goes without saying that full-blooded greylags are superior – morally and physically—to the farmyard geese, whose services are sometimes enlisted at Lake Alm to hatch a clutch of eggs: ‘These creatures, rendered stupid by many years of domestication, are incapable of reliable incubation: they have lost the well-defined instinctive behaviour patterns a wild goose exhibits.'

Lorenz shows no sign of abandoning his view of the Big City as a magnified barnyard that favours the selection of genetic deviants, whose unscrupulous behaviour is as repugnant as their stunted appearance. When I called on him a few years ago, he said, ‘Since I have lived here at Altenberg, I have noticed a progressive
cochonification
of the boys swimming in the Danube. How would you say that in English? Porkification! Fat boys and fat men! The same in domesticated animals ... Complete unselectivity of feeding habits!'

‘But surely', I said, ‘that's the fault of the food manufacturers. It's not genetic.'

‘I don't care if it's cultural devolution, or genetic devolution, I know cultural devolution moves ten times faster than genetic devolution.
But a culture behaves exactly like a species!'

Now if you let Lorenz carry you any further with this argument, you might find yourself drawn to the conclusion that the finest specimens of humanity, ‘the strong, manly men' he is always hoping for, have a duty to suppress the inferiors—and that that, briefly, is what the ‘aggressive drive' is for. But those who were taken in by
On Aggression
might have had second thoughts had they known large chunks of it closely resemble a paper, written in 1942, with the Final Solution in full swing, when he was Professor of Psychology at the University of Konigsberg in East Prussia.

‘The Innate Forms of Possible Experience',
⁴⁵
which has been omitted from the two volumes of his collected papers published in English, evoked
Gestalt
perception and the principles of ethology to recommend a ‘self-conscious scientifically based race policy' to eliminate the degenerates who preyed on the healthy body of society like the profiteering growth of a malignant cancer. The arbiters of this scheme were to be ‘our best individuals'
(Führer-Individuen)
whose intolerant value judgements would decide who was – or was not – stricken with decay. Lorenz rejected Spengler's pessimistic conclusion that nations declined through a logic inherent in time. Applied biology would forestall Spengler's ‘inevitable fate'.

Then, as now, the greylag goose is pressed into the argument. A pure-blooded gander has ‘a more sharply contoured head, straighter posture, redder feet, broader shoulders', etc., whereas a barnyard goose develops a stunted appearance, not to mention a complete breakdown of morals. Similiarly, he says, we admire in men tight hips, wide shoulders and an eagle-like stare.
⁴⁶
And we recoil from the features of decay: ‘Loss of muscle, shortening of the extremities, growth of fat and a quantitative increase of eating and copulation drives.' ‘Not one feature of domestication do we
instinctively
approve of.'

Again, he illustrated the text with photographs; a fish from the stream, a wild greylag gander, a wolf and a bust portrait of Pericles – all long-featured – are juxtaposed against a pop-eyed goldfish, a domesticated goose, an Old English Bulldog (the date is 1942) and a marble head of Socrates – all of which had the squashed-up features of genetic decay.

The lesson of this paper was that it was positively heroic to act with intolerance: attempts to discover why you rejected a person simply obscured your original judgement. And he exhorted the racial biologists to be quick: ‘There is indeed need to hurry!'—though there were more than two years left.

I quote this passage if only for the style: