Hopeful Monsters (8 page)

She said 'You don't have to play, you know!'

He said 'Oh I think I do!'

In fact Kammerer played tennis well. But he seemed to treat it not so much as a game - an activity in which someone had to win and someone to lose - as an exercise in practising some quite solitary proficiency. He stood halfway up the court near the service line and played most of his shots from there; he did not rush to the net nor come prancing back; he stayed roughly where he was and when balls came near him he volleyed or half-volleyed them for the most part expertly, and when balls did not come near him he turned and watched his partner solicitously. When it came to his turn to serve

he seemed reluctant and even slightly bewildered about this; but then he pulled off some quick cutting serves that went into the corners of his opponents' court and were quite often aces. He appeared to be somewhat apologetic about these: but not too much, as if he were anxious lest this might seem condescending.

My father on the other side of the net heaved and leaped and dashed about like a seal: I thought - Kammerer is a keeper at a zoo and he is throwing my father fish. When the score had reached something like six all my father said 'You've played quite a bit!'

Dr Kammerer said 'In my time.'

My father said 'Shall we play sudden death?'

Dr Kammerer looked to where my mother and I were sitting, and where Watson was coming out with tea-things on to the lawn. He put his hand on his heart. He said 'As a matter of fact, I think what I would love is some tea!'

My father said 'Ah, it's a business keeping fit!'

We sat on deckchairs on the lawn. Dr Kammerer sat next to my mother. He glanced at her sideways quickly from time to time; my mother seemed to know that he was doing this but to be pretending not to know; but in such a way that Dr Kammerer would know that she knew. I was thinking - If Dr Kammerer is some mutation, is it that he knows, without talking, what people are up to?

Sometime in the course of tea Dr Kammerer turned to me and said 'You do not like tennis?'

I said 'Not really.'

He said 'Why not?'

I said 'I don't think I like winning.'

He seemed to think about this. Then he said 'You are very lucky.'

My father, who had overheard this conversation, said 'Not winning would seem to be an accomplishment extraordinarily easy to achieve.'

Dr Kammerer said 'Oh no, it is very difficult! Very paradoxical!'

I was pleased about this. I thought - Dr Kammerer, my mother and I, we are each a mutation that knows what the others are up to?

After tea my father took Dr Kammerer off to his study. Before he went Dr Kammerer said to my mother 'I will see you before I go?'

She said'Yes.'

I thought - But will he be able to survive, in this environment!

While he was gone I talked with my mother about what she knew about Dr Kammerer. He came from a prosperous Viennese family;

he had originally trained to be a musician but had turned to biology because of a passionate love for animals. He was often able to keep delicate animals alive for his experiments in circumstances in which others could not.

One of the experiments for which he had become famous just before the First World War (I learned about these in the weeks or months following the visit of Dr Kammerer) was to do with two species of salamander (small newt-like amphibians) known as Sala-mandra atra and Salamandra maculosa. The former are found in the European Alps, and the latter in the Lowlands. The two species have different breeding characteristics: the alpine female gives birth on dry land to two fully formed young salamanders; the lowland species gives birth in water to up to fifty tadpole-like larvae which only months later turn into salamanders. Kammerer's experiment had been to take alpine salamanders and to put them in lowland conditions and see whether, as a first step, they would acquire the breeding characteristics of lowland salamanders; and then, if they did, to see what would be the breeding characteristics of the offspring of these salamanders in so-called 'neutral' conditions -would they have inherited the acquired characteristics of their parents, or would they have reverted to the original breeding habits of their ancestors? Kammerer claimed that he had, first, succeeded in getting alpine salamanders to breed in lowland conditions in a lowland manner - they had produced, that is, tadpole-like larvae -and then the offspring of these salamanders in so-called 'neutral' conditions had continued to produce larvae: and so from this Kammerer suggested that they had inherited the acquired characteristics of their parents.

It seems to me now (you think it could not have struck me like this at the time?) that there was a dubiousness about these experiments and the claims that Kammerer seemed to make from them: for instance, what could have been the 'neutral' conditions in which offspring were placed that would have been suitable for demonstrating their inheriting (or not) the acquired characteristics? Might not the conditions provided be simply those that encourage the emergence of either one set of characteristics or the other? But what was striking about the objections to Kammerer on the part of mainstream biologists (this was what much later came particularly to interest me) was that they did not point out rationally, as they might so easily have done, the flaws in his arguments and procedures; they seemed intent on impugning emotionally his honesty

and even his sanity; they claimed that he was 'cooking' his results -even those that were so obviously tentative.

One of the difficulties about all this in 1923 was that Kammerer's experiments with salamanders had been done before the First World War; during the war his laboratory had been dismantled and most of his specimens destroyed; in the post-war inflation in Vienna he had found it impossible to get money to set up his experiments again. And then there was the fact that when other biologists tried to repeat his experiments, they could not keep alive long enough to get any results the animals that Kammerer had managed to keep alive through several generations. It was perhaps annoyance at this that drove mainstream biologists to hint that Kammerer must be a charlatan.

Nevertheless his reputation was still such that he was invited to Cambridge in 1923: he was only the second ex-enemy-alien to be invited to Cambridge since the war. (The first - you will be pleased at the coincidence! - had been Einstein.)

I picked up bits and pieces about all this at the time: I learned details later. But the picture I had in my mind about Kammerer did not have to be much amended later.

At the end of that day when he had played tennis on the lawn and after he had gone along with the rest of my father's guests - I had not properly said goodbye to him: I minded about this: I had run out on to the drive just in time to wave as he drove away; I think he waved to me; but of course it was more probable that he was waving to my mother -

- At the end of this day, when my mother and father and I were settling down to some plates of cold meat for supper, my father said -

'Well, what's the verdict?'

My mother said The verdict about what?'

'Dr Kammerer, of course.'

'He is certainly very charming.'

'Yes, "charming" is the word I would use myself

'You use it with a certain distaste.'

'It is not a word held in high regard in scientific circles.'

'But this afternoon we were not in scientific circles.'

'No indeed we were not.'

And so on.

This was the sort of conversation that had to be suspended while Watson the parlourmaid came in with dishes. Watson was a tall

craggy woman like a member of a military band. She would bang her plates and cutlery about at the sideboard like percussion.

The word 'charming' was one I had not heard my mother use before. I thought - Well, no, you could not call my father's friends charming: and my mother's friends, well, but their charm is like that of witches around a lukewarm cauldron. But Dr Kammerer was like a wizard with his hands round a crystal ball -

My mother said 'He played tennis very well.'

My father said 'He never moved.'

'How lovely to find someone who hardly needs to move!'

'Well in his line of business he certainly moves one or two pieces around on the board, when no one is looking, I can tell you!'

When my father and my mother went on like this I usually switched my attention off: but every now and then I cared about something enough to want to try to divert them.

I said 'But why do you think Dr Kammerer was able to keep his salamanders alive in captivity, while others could not?'

My father said 'That is indeed a subject on which we have little information.'

My mother said 'Perhaps he loved them.'

My father said 'Loved them!'

My mother said 'Haven't you heard that things are sometimes helped to stay alive if they are loved?'

Perhaps Watson clattered in or out again at this point with some dishes. I sometimes wondered - Might one of the reasons why people employ servants be so that they can be rescued at regular intervals from their dreadful conversations?

But now my father ploughed on. 'Yes indeed Dr Kammerer is said to have an amazing way with animals. Once, when he was out on one of his walks looking for specimens, he is said to have picked up a toad and to have kissed it.'

My mother said 'I'm sure it turned into a princess.'

Watson had become curiously quiet at the sideboard.

I said 'But you haven't answered my question.'

My father said 'What was your question?'

'Why do you think Dr Kammerer could keep his salamanders alive while you could not.'

I thought this quite brave. I knew that my father had tried, and failed, to reproduce some of Kammerer's experiments. To be able to ask a question like this, I was probably on the edge of tears.

My father said 'Are you suggesting that there was some flaw in

my handling of the breeding experiment? Do tell us. Do give us the benefit of your experience.'

My mother said 4 It is interesting you should put it like that.'

My father said 'Like what.'

My mother said '"Are you suggesting some flaw in my handling of the breeding - "' Then she broke off and said 'Oh never mind!'

My father said 'Oh we're now going to have your expertise about the hidden meaning behind the meaning of words, are we?'

My mother said 'Max asked you a question which you would not answer.' I did not think my mother was on the point of tears.

Watson had completed her performance at the sideboard. But we anyway ate the rest of the meal in silence.

I would think - Well, God protect me from inheriting any of the acquired characteristics of my father!

And - There is no reason, is there, why I should not be a mutation?

After such an evening my mother would come up to say goodnight to me in my room and she would lie back on the bed as if she were exhausted. She would say 'What a comfort you are to your old mother!'

On this occasion I wanted to say - But what do you really feel about Dr Kammerer? It is different from what you feel about my father?

But sometimes with my mother sprawled on my bed like this my mind went blank; it was as if we were somehow on hot sand; as if I were an insect that could be crawling on her.

I do not know if I make sense in my descriptions of my mother: she was this large blonde woman who was sometimes girlish and sometimes queenly; sometimes apparently a victim and often victorious. In relation to my father she often seemed to be all these things at once: she would sit with her legs curled underneath her and her eyes cast sadly down like a mermaid on a rock; then, as if glistening with spray, she would be a siren luring helpless sailors to their doom. In arguments with my father she would sometimes seem to yield to his heavier weight; then suddenly, with a ju-jitsu-like flick of her wrist, as it were, it was as if she had him flying over her head and into the shrubbery. Or more prosaically, he would be rushing out to his car to go to Cambridge. There are tricks like this that people can do who practise psychoanalysis: opponents can attack you; you can say 'Now it is interesting why you say that!' and there they are, in the air on their way into the shrubbery.

This evening when my mother was lying on her back in my room she looked at me with her eyes that even I could tell were somewhat wicked; and she said 'Shall we ask him again?'

I said 'Who?'

She said 'Dr Kammerer, of course.' Then - 'I know he liked you. Did you like him?'

I said 'Yes.'

I wanted to explain - It was somehow as if we all three, she and I and he, were agents in an occupied territory.

Sometimes when my mother came up to talk to me in my bedroom like this she would after a time start pulling her skirt up and say 'I must pee.'

This sort of thing between mother and son was, I suppose, unusual for the time: perhaps it came from ideas that arose out of psychoanalysis about the need for relationships between parents and children to be open. My mother would go next door to the bathroom and would expect me to go on chatting through the half-open door while she sat on the lavatory.

I said 'What did you think was so special about Dr Kammerer?'

She said 'He didn't show off. At least not to others.'

She sat with her legs apart: her arms hung down between her knees.

I said 'And that's a good thing?'

She said'Yes.'

I said 'Why?'

She said 'I think he was interested in getting on with what he wanted.'

She gave herself a wipe with some paper between her legs.

My mother's interest in psychoanalysis had begun, I suppose, when she had found herself on the edge of the Bloomsbury Group and, possessing like other women in the group considerable energy which she did not want to expend in social or domestic chores or on the taking of buns and tea to the poor of the village - but, unlike some women in the group, finding that she had no literary or artistic talent - she had turned to what seemed to be the latest intellectual challenge, which was psychoanalysis. And what more effective business indeed can be turned to by people who have creative energy but no artistic talent (you think I am having a dig at you? but I am having a dig at myself! you know how I admire psychoanalysis!) than this discipline which can make people feel, if they wish, that they are creative in a way even superior to those