Hopeful Monsters (10 page)

I thought - But if all this is what happens in fairy stories -

- What happened in early childhood?

My mother got up suddenly and kissed me and left the room.

For a day or two I continued to keep clear of my mother and Hans; I went off on my own on my bicycle; I kept banging away at balls that came at odd angles off walls. Then Hans began to go during the day into Cambridge; my mother would drive him in and then return and look for me. But I would be climbing up trees or over walls. I would try to eat with Mrs Elgin and Watson in the kitchen. I would explain that I had to do holiday work in the evenings. Sometimes I found Hans watching me.

You think children do not know why they are doing these things? Surely it is often a question more of power than of sexuality. Certainly by acting like this I was managing to get my mother's and even Hans's attention directed more and more towards me. So

one night there were Hans's footsteps tramping up the stairs to my room. I assumed, yes, that my mother had told him to come and try to make friends with me.

He knocked and said 'May I come in?'

I was sitting up in bed. Perhaps I had my legs underneath me and my eyes cast down like a mermaid.

Hans said 'I felt I should like very much to have a talk about your work. Your mother tells me that you are interested in biology.'

I said 'What I am interested in is physics.'

Hans said 'Ah that is my subject!'

I thought - Oh I thought it was biology.

He said 'There are some extraordinary affairs occurring at your University of Cambridge! Your Professor Rutherford, some years ago, has bombardiered the nucleus of a nitrogen atom with particles alpha; a proton emerged, and the nucleus of the nitrogen atom was changed into oxygen, wonder of wonders!'

I said 'It sounds like a fairy story.'

He said 'Indeed, it is the transformation that alchemists dreamed about!'

I said 'But couldn't you do that in biology?'

He said 'Do what?'

I said 'Bombard - it is "bombard", by the way, not "bombardier" - bombard, yes, wherever it is, so that there are, when you might want them, these mutations.'

He said 'That is an extraordinary interesting idea!' He sat down on the bed beside me.

I thought - Oh well, here we are: and what do those mermaids and sirens do? Smooth down with a hand the soft sea of the bedclothes beside them -

(Of course, children learn these things! From relationships at school, if not from their mothers.)

Hans said 'Perhaps you will be a great scientist one day.' He leaned on an elbow so that he was reclining almost behind me.

I said 'But do they exist, these atoms, particles; can you touch them, measure them?'

Hans said 'No, but you can measure their effects.'

I said 'My father says it is not scientific what you can't test, measure.'

Hans said 'You can measure the collective effect. You cannot measure the individual within that effect.'

I said 'You cannot measure the individual?'

Hans said 'No.' Then 'The individual is sacred. The individual goes his own way.'

I looked up from under my eyelashes. Hans had put his hand round behind me. I thought - But this is ridiculous.

Then - But what are we after in this story we are engaged in? What is being told us by a stone, a ring, a bird, a pool of water, a tree?

After a while my mother was calling to Hans from the first-floor landing.

Sometime during these days I went to visit my father's laboratory in Cambridge. My father's chief assistant was Miss Box, a pretty brown-haired lady. I suppose this was a time, yes, when I was beginning to be haunted by sex. Miss Box spent much of her time in a specially heated room where there were the glass cases which were the settings for my father's experiments with newts and toads and salamanders. Miss Box took me round; I was particularly interested in the salamanders which were small bright lizards that lay or stood so still that it was as if they were made of enamel. When Miss Box lifted the lid off one of the cases there was the smell of sand and piss. Miss Box had soft gold hair under her armpits. I wondered if my father ever went and sat on Miss Box's bed at night.

I said Td like to do an experiment with salamanders.'

She said 'You wouldn't have time.'

I said 'I wouldn't want to see what they passed on to their offspring. I'd just like to see if I could make them stay alive long enough to breed.'

Miss Box said 'It's difficult.'

I thought - But who would want to live and have offspring in a place like this, which is like the waiting-room of a railway station?

I said 'Do you go home at night?'

Miss Box said 'Of course I go home at night!' She looked at me as if I had made an improper suggestion.

I said 'I mean, I just thought that the salamanders might need to have someone with them at night.'

When I got home there were my mother and Hans on the lawn; he had apparently hit a croquet ball so that it had caught her on the ankle; she was leaning back on her elbows with her foot out on the grass. Hans was kneeling in front of her putting a hand forward, taking it back; putting a hand forward, taking it back. I thought -Oh carry on, do, in your glass case; and she'll have you head over heels, or whatever you want, in the shrubbery.

I suppose I was quite angry with my mother at the time. I had begun to feel sympathy with my father. For all his faults, one could have a straight conversation with him: with my mother journeys through the maze were tortuous.

My mother still came up to my room, of course, to say goodnight. One evening there was some sort of glow about her. I thought - Perhaps she and Hans have got wherever they want to get to.

She said 'I've got a new book for you.'

I said 'What?'

She said 'It's called Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It's by Dr Freud.'

I said'Oh yes.'

She said 'He seems to have changed his ideas slightly. He says that basically there are two instincts, the life instinct and the death instinct.'

I thought I might say - Oh how brilliant!

She said 'And they're not particularly to do with sex. But a battle goes on between the two.'

I said 'And which was the instinct that made King Oedipus want whatever he wanted.'

She said "Don't be difficult.'

I said 'I'm not being difficult!'

She said 'On the deepest level, everything is paradoxical.'

I had become interested in this word 'paradoxical': I had looked it up in my father's dictionary. This had said that a paradox was something seemingly self-contradictory or absurd, but possibly well-founded and essentially true. I had thought - Yes! And there had been something like that white light coming down.

I said to my mother 'Is that why we find it difficult, you and I, to talk about things?'

She said 'I didn't know we did find it difficult to talk about things.' She was looking through some of the work I had been doing recently in German with Hans.

I said 'Are you in love with Hans?'

She said 'No, I'm not in love with Hans.' Then - 'Hans is a boy.' Then - 'I'm very fond of Hans.' Then - 'Aren't you?'

I thought - I've got her blushing!

Then there were evenings, yes, when Hans and I would work late in my room: he would read to me bits from Goethe or Schiller; he would not do much more than lean against me, rest his hand on my knee, half tumble sometimes on top of me. He would tell me

stories of walking-tours he went on with his friends in the Black Forest; how they would go singing over the hills during the day and there would be music and discussions round the camp fire at night; and sometimes at midnight they would bathe in moonlit lakes - of course, with no clothes on. This, Hans explained, was to do with the spirit of the Greeks (ah, what signals are given by a mention of the spirit of the Greeks!) - a perfect blending of passion and form, didn't I think? Hans's soft face as he leaned close to me was like an apple which wasps have been at. He said 'One day, when you are old enough, you must come with me on one of these walks in the Black Forest!'

I said 'How old would I have to be?'

He said 'I will ask your mother.'

I thought - For goodness' sake don't ask my mother!

But I had been given an image of this place called the Black Forest - which was where fauns and satyrs played, and witches.

Then there was one particular night just before the end of Hans's visit to us -

- Oh sometime before this, yes, I had been behaving as if I were more at ease with Hans and my mother; I no longer had meals with Mrs Elgin and Watson in the kitchen; Hans would practise on his own his croquet shots on the lawn; my mother would read out to me bits of letters that she had had from my father in America. She would say 'He seems to be having a good time!' and would look through the window at Hans on the lawn. I would think - Well aren't we all having a good time -

Then there was this particular night when Hans had come up to my room and he was reclining on my bed and was reminiscing, I suppose, about white and gold bodies flitting in the moonlight of the Black Forest; and I was at the washbasin, perhaps with one arm raised like some Greek statue by a fountain; and perhaps it was true that just before this I had had to hop out from underneath one of Hans's vague lunges at me on the bed; and then the door banged open and there was my mother on the threshold, all flashing eyes and hair like snakes and marble forehead; and she was glaring at Hans and pointing to the door; and he was getting up and going meekly past her even if with his tail, as it were, I suppose not exactly between his legs. And I with such sad, affected innocence was turning to my mother - a toothbrush halfway to my mouth (what else?) - and wide-eyed was suggesting - Have you gone mad? What on earth do you think you are up to? And my mother had to

sit on the edge of my bed and explain how she had been concerned about my not getting enough sleep; she had been angry with Hans because she thought he was preventing me from getting enough sleep; she was sorry she had over-reacted; and so on. And I was thinking - Oh yes; but aren't you listening to what is going on behind your words? (Oh so-called 'innocence', to be sure, can be cunning!) And then my mother was kissing me goodnight. And there were sounds of her going on and on talking with Hans through the night. And I was thinking - But the point of a fairy story is that someone has to win and there is something to be won, isn't it?

Then - Who was my mother jealous of: me or Hans?

Or - But is this an area where things are paradoxical?

This incident occurred only a day or two before Hans was due to leave us anyway. Before he went he managed to make with me a few half-whispered plans about possible future walks in the Black Forest.

Then when he had gone it seemed that I had nothing much to do. My mother went to London for a few days: I did not question why she had gone. But I did sometimes wonder, because I was lonely -Who is it after all who might have landed up in the shrubbery?

Then - But of course there is more going on than anyone quite knows about in a fairy story.

Now let me look at this timing again. I think the summer when Hans came to stay must have been in 1925, when I was nearly thirteen, because it was after Hans's visit, and after my father had got back from his tour of America, that my mother and father started talking about sending me away to a boarding-school. Up to this time I had been going to the day-school in Cambridge. I could hear my father's and mother's voices from behind closed doors -'Max is too old to be hanging all day around his mother'; 'Yes, I agree, I have tried to encourage him to spend more time with people of his own age.' I thought - Well at least Hans's visit has given them something to agree about. It was decided that next year I should go to a boarding-school.

(It matters that I try to get the timing right? One's mind makes patterns: but what coincidences there are between these and the outside world!)

After he had been away my father would make a point of coming up and talking to me in my room. He would stand with his hands

in his pockets and his head seeming to be pressed against the sloping ceiling. He was like an elephant that has wandered into a cave in the jungle.

He would look at the books I was reading. There were the fantasy adventure stories; the encyclopaedias which tried to explain the way the world worked. I would go on asking my father questions about this: I would say 'But what are these things that you can't taste, touch, smell: what are atoms: what are those things you work with - can you see, touch, genes?'

My father would say 'No.'

I would say 'Then what is it that scientists think they are testing, measuring?'

When my father sat on the end of my bed it was as if it might collapse, like some beanstalk.

He said, as Hans had done 'You set up experiments. You observe results. You measure the results. Of course, you may not be able to talk about what it is that is causing them.'

'Why not?'

'Why should you?'

'You mean, you make up words for this.'

'Whenever you speak you make up words anyway.'

'The things might not exist.'

'Something must exist. Or how would there be the results?'

I thought - But then why not talk about how we don't know what exists; wouldn't things then seem more like being on a journey in a fairy story?

When my father bent down to kiss me goodnight, there was the impression of the roof of the cave in the jungle being in danger of caving in.

I was still on my own much of this time: my mother often went up to London. (It still did not occur to me to ask her what she did.) There was a week or so left of the summer holidays. I was considering the question: But if you are a scientist doing an experiment, then would not part of it be to see in what way you yourself are part of the experiment? I mean if you make up words for what you taste, touch, see -

- But if you see this, is not the experiment different?

Then - Do other people think like this?

One day I knocked on the door of my father's study.

'Yes?'

'You know those experiments you have been doing with salamanders -'

'Presumably.'

'I'd like to try one.'

'We're packing them up.'

'I know. I'd like to take one over.'

In his own room my father seemed smaller, more compact. He was in one of those chairs that tipped back so that he could put his feet up on his desk. I thought - With one flick, could I get him flying into the shrubbery?

He said 'You wouldn't have time.'

'I've talked to Miss Box.'

'You've talked to Miss Box?'

'Yes. I know I wouldn't have time to do the whole experiment -'

'What did you make of Miss Box?'

'I like her. I thought I could just see if I could get one or two salamanders to stay alive - '

He said 'What did you talk about with Miss Box?'

I thought - This is ridiculous.

Then - You mean, my father does carry on with Miss Box? They lie about on damp sand as if in one of their experiments -

My father said 'Sorry. You want to do some experiment - '

I said 'Yes. I just want to see if I can look after two salamanders and perhaps get them to breed. I mean, those highland salamanders in lowland conditions, or whatever it is, or vice versa.

My father said 'Nothing to do with the inheritance of acquired characteristics.'

I said 'No, nothing to do with the inheritance of acquired characteristics.'

He said 'Then try it vice versa.'

I thought - But why don't you want me to have inherited any of your characteristics?

He said 'We have got some set-up like that, as a matter of fact.'

I was going out of the door when I thought it was worthwhile stopping and saying 'But I don't see in fact how you could ever tell.'

He said 'Ever tell what?'

'What it was that was influencing things: I mean about heredity, and characteristics.'

'Why not?'

'Well, you can measure results, but you can't measure what is causing them. You can do statistics, but how can you measure what is individual?'

He said 'Who have you been talking to?'

I said 'Hans.'

He said 'Oh yes, I've been wanting to ask you about Hans.'

But my father did not, really, want to ask me about Hans. He turned away and looked out of the window. I thought - He wants me to think he wants to talk about Hans. Then - But how would anyone know what was going on in that experiment?

Anyway, it was arranged that as soon as I had got the equipment for my experiment ready, I could pick up two salamanders from Miss Box.

I had tried to keep up with what had been happening to Dr Kammerer during these two years: I knew from the papers in my father's study that he had achieved extraordinary notoriety: for a time (do you not think?) he was quite like Einstein. But there were, in spite of the difficulties, actual stars in the sky for Einstein's theories to be tested against; whereas Kammerer's specimens had died, and other experimenters had found it impossible to keep their specimens alive, so that the hostility to Kammerer that came naturally with the notoriety had nothing to stop it; it spread like fire. I gathered from my father's papers that Kammerer was in danger of falling into terrible disrepute. Perhaps it was because of this that I wanted to see if I, like he, could at least keep some salamanders alive.

I discovered that my mother had kept her own small heap of newspaper cuttings about Kammerer: they were in a drawer of her desk: she seemed to have got some psychoanalyst friend to send her them from Vienna. Some of them gave details of Kammerer's private life (I could put to good use here the German I had learned from Hans). The cuttings referred to Kammerer as a Don Juan, a Byron, a Lothario: he had left his wife, married a painter, then later his wife had taken him back. There were innumerable women, the writer suggested, who were dying for the love of Kammerer: how terrible it was to let oneself be loved thus by women!

I thought - Well, what is all this about death instinct; life instinct: was it not Kammerer's salamanders that had been able to stay alive, and other people's that were dying?

I tried to talk to my mother about this. I could not let her know that I had been going through the drawers of her desk.

'Did you ever see Dr Kammerer again?'

'No, why do you ask that?'

'I expect a lot of people fall in love with him, don't they - '

'Why do you say that too - '

'I remember your saying that you thought his salamanders must love him.'

'What I think I said, surely, was that he must love them.'

'What do you think he does to make things love him?'

'Perhaps he just makes people think he loves them!'

'But then why do people talk about dying for love - '

'Hey, hold on, what have you been reading - '

My mother had become dreamy again; glowing; as if she was listening to music round some corner.

I thought - Dr Kammerer himself couldn't have sent her those cuttings from Vienna?

Then suddenly - She couldn't have been meeting Dr Kammerer in London?

She said 'Perhaps what you think is love isn't true. Or perhaps sometimes you love, or want to love, and then there is no set-up, or framework, in which you can.'

I said 'I see.' Then - 'Can't you make a framework?'

She said 'How?'

I said 'I don't know.' Then - 'Do you think Dr Kammerer made one?'

She said 'For whom?'

I said 'For his salamanders.'

That autumn, in my evenings and weekends away from school, I set about preparing my experiment with my salamanders. My idea was: how can animals be expected to live - let alone reproduce; let alone be recipient to a chance mutation - if they are kept in glass boxes like those which contain sandwiches in a railway station. Kammerer had perhaps loved his salamanders: but what was love? I wanted to provide for my salamanders a suitable setting. Was it not something like this that my mother's psychoanalysis books were suggesting too - that settings are important, but human beings for the most part are no good at providing settings for love: they liked running things down, displaying jealousy and envy. Well perhaps I did too: but if I saw this, could I not provide at least my salamanders with some setting in which love could operate?

I obtained materials from Miss Box and constructed a glass case that was larger than the ones in which she and my father had kept

their salamanders. I went out each evening to gather objects which would be fitting for my salamanders' setting. I found clean white sand and stones shining with crystals: I picked out sticks that were shaped and polished like ivory. I put on the sand some shells and even a starfish. I thought - Why should not landlocked salamanders have a glimpse of something outlandish from the sea? I collected red earth, and alpine plants, and one or two very tiny and expensive trees: I made a shelter of wire and bark and moss and leaves and coral. I constructed a mountain stream out of Plasticine and silver paper and a hidden electric motor and a pump: I bought (with money borrowed from my mother) a lamp that shone like the sun. I was aiming to produce for my salamanders a setting that would be surpassingly etherial and strange. I looked down on my creation from above. I thought - I think I am God, and this is my Garden of Eden.

The two salamanders that I was going to pick up when my garden was ready were another breed of lowland salamanders, known as Salamandra salamandra, or Fire Salamanders: their usual habitat was dark and damp woods. They stayed for the most part during the day under rotting bark or leaves; they came out in the evenings to get food. I learned what I could about them from books lent to me by Miss Box: my father, when he overheard me talking to Miss Box, would smile and look away (I thought - His feelings about Miss Box are what are called 'paradoxical'?). My plan had been originally to make for these lowland salamanders something that could be called an alpine setting. But my enthusiasm had now gone beyond this: I wanted to make for them something beautiful like a setting for jewels, or the inside of a painting. Then I would see how my salamanders might stay alive! The inside of a painting, it seemed to me, was to do with what is immortal.

The breeding habits of these lowland salamanders was that they mated in the spring and then fifty or more tadpole-like larvae were born in water the following year. I had been told by Miss Box that the two salamanders designated for me had been together for some time. I did not know if they had mated: I assumed they were male and female. The point of my experiment had at one time been to see whether these lowland salamanders, in their new setting, might produce offspring in the manner of alpine salamanders - which was to give birth not to larvae but to two fully formed offspring. But this was what I had put out of my mind: my plan now was not to expect, but just to let things occur on their own. I thought - Things

grow, develop on their own, don't they; once you have provided a setting.

The day came when my garden (in the books it was called an 'aquaterrareum') was ready: I bicycled in to Miss Box to pick up my salamanders. They were two small bright lizards about six inches long: their skin was mainly black but had golden patches and hoops. They seemed to sit, or lie, or stand, completely still, even when I was transporting them in a cardboard box on my bicycle from the laboratory. And then, when they were in the bright fair world that I had constructed for them, they were, yes, like jewels! they were so beautiful.

I had set up my aquaterrareum in my bedroom: I wanted it here rather than in the room with my chemistry set next door because I wanted to be with my salamanders at night. I do not know why I felt particular about this. Perhaps I felt - What strange influences, chances, flit about beneath the moon at night.

My salamanders sat or stood or lay sometimes parallel, sometimes apart, sometimes with their noses close together like an arrow. I hardly ever saw them move. They would be, yes, on the silver sand, by the stones like gold or diamonds, like things made immortal by a painting.

My mother came up to look at my aquaterrareum. She had that expression on her face that my father sometimes had when it was as if he could not make up his mind whether to be deprecating or impressed. She said 'That's beautiful!'

I said 'Yes.'

'What are they called?'

'Adam and Eve.'

'What good names!'

I said 'I think they might also be what are called "hopeful monsters".'

She said 'What are hopeful monsters?'

I said 'They are things born perhaps slightly before their time; when it's not known if the environment is quite ready for them.'

She said 'So you have made an environment that might be ready for them!'

I said 'Yes.'

She put her arms round me and hugged me. She said 'You are my hopeful monster!'

I thought I might say - But hopeful monsters, don't you know, nearly always die young.

- Because the Gods love them?

Then - But was God ever with his mother, by that garden, looking down?

Much of my spare time that winter was spent in collecting food for my salamanders: I got worms from the herbaceous borders, slugs from underneath stones, insects from behind the bark of trees. I dropped these like manna into my salamanders' garden. I once put a long black centipede in and it crawled over their still tails: I wondered - But have I introduced a snake into their garden! Then -Poor snake! But my salamanders paid no attention to it, and after a time it died.

I seldom saw my salamanders eat. Sometimes at night I imagined I had glimpsed a tongue flashing out; but it seemed to have travelled faster then light. I thought - Perhaps their tongues move in the jumps that Hans used to talk about; the jumps of those particles that are on one level and then instantaneously they are on another.

I had one or two letters from Hans: my mother also had one or two letters from him. We would eye each other's letters over the breakfast table.

Throughout that winter I cared for my salamanders; then in the spring they seemed to be spending more and more time within their shelter; there would be just their tails sticking out, like fishes that have managed to crawl up on to dry land. I thought - They can do whatever they want! I am not that fussy old God of the Garden of Eden.

Except when I was at school I was on my own a lot of that summer. My mother was going up to a new series of lectures in London; my father was working in Cambridge. Then halfway through the summer term there was a fire in my day-school and the school was closed. It was thought to be not worth while to send me anywhere else, because I was due to go to boarding-school anyway in the autumn.

So I went out on my bicycle and explored the countryside. I still collected food for my salamanders, though I was now not caring about them quite as much, since I knew I would have to leave them when I went away to school. However I felt that in some way just by riding about the countryside I was keeping in touch with my salamanders: I too was finding myself in a strange world; I thought it beautiful, but there now seemed to be something frightening growing in myself. I wondered - In learning about myself, might I not be discovering something for my salamanders -

- What is going on here might be connected to what is going on there -

- For something interesting to happen, should not that old God in Eden have been trying to find out more about himself, rather than hanging about and nagging his salamanders?

On my journeys on my bicycle I came across a country house that was empty and had fallen into disrepair: there was a lake and a boathouse and a punt: I could push myself across to an island where there was another rotting boathouse with a loft which had a table and a few broken chairs. Here it seemed that a hermit might once have lived: there was a crucifix with one arm dangling away from the wall. I felt as if I might have come to some aquaterrareum prepared for myself; the inside of a picture, yes; but of something rotting like that which was going on in my own head. I would sit cross-legged on the floor and close my eyes and try to breathe slower and slower; I had read about this in a book I had borrowed from my mother; I felt I needed to find some stillness, or suffer some explosion.