Wish You Were Here (37 page)

“Hang on, can I write this down?” said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.

Writing this novel was agony. Here and there it reads as if Douglas is faking his own voice (the Sandwich Maker passage, for instance). Sometimes, trying in vain to create something fresh, he lay on the floor in misery. Sue Freestone gave him affection and encouragement. Michael Bywater came round to entertain, chivvy, irritate and stimulate him into writing. Michael says he even wrote some stuff that Douglas rewrote. Both Michael and Sue helped him plot the book, and by way of reward they promised he could destroy everything so utterly that another title would be out of the question. Together they exhorted him to rise from the dead.

Eventually, Michael says, Douglas announced that he just could not do it. “Don’t do it then,” said Michael. “We’re not going to stop being your friends because you didn’t finish
Mostly Harmless,
you schmuck.” Jane, at home after a day’s combat in the legal arena, took a pragmatic line. Her support and tough mindedness were crucial. The conversation went something like this:

Douglas (prostrate): “I can’t write this book. I just can’t do it any more.”

Jane: “So?”

Douglas: “I’ll be in breach of contract. I’ll have to give the money back . . .”

Jane: “So?”

Douglas: “But I haven’t got the money any more. I’ll be bankrupt . . .”

Jane: “Yes. And so? I can help you do that. It’s not the end of the world.”

So Douglas had, as Michael said, “all the ducks in a row. Everyone he cares about has said: you don’t have to do the bloody thing. If you can’t do it, you can’t do it. You just say: I can’t do it and I can’t pay back your advance. Your problem.”

Page by excruciating page, Douglas wrote a terrific book. Not surprisingly, it was the darkest of the canon, but before Douglas fell into the pit with his fiction-writing, his life took a surprising and enjoyable turn.

TWELVE

LAST CHANCE TO SEE

“The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realized that it was a system at all.”

D
OUGLAS
A
DAMS
,
Last Chance to See
Pan edition, p. 192

I
n 1985 Douglas had received a call from the
Observer
magazine, the colour supplement published every week with the
Observer,
one of Britain’s quality Sunday newspapers.

“Do you fancy going to Madagascar?” asked a voice on the other end of the line. “Umm,” said Douglas, “who’s that again, please?”

“The
Observer
magazine. You know, the
Observer.
Rather a good Sunday broadsheet. Do you fancy going to Madagascar with a zoologist to look for the aye-aye?”

“Aye-aye what?” said Douglas.

“The aye-aye. A rare, very shy nocturnal lemur. It’s got beautiful eyes.”

“Have you got the right person? I’m a humorous science fiction writer . . .”

Later Douglas was to joke that he said “yes!” before they found out they had the wrong person. But they did have the right person. The World Wildlife Fund and the
Observer
had got together with a scheme to send writers and experts out into the world to find endangered species. The writers would have that freshness of perception that comes from complete ignorance of the subject (but, please God, they could write) and the experts would furnish the background and specialist knowledge. Douglas would be the eyes through which the urban Sunday newspaper-reader would see something wonderful that was quite outside his or her everyday experience. The epitome of Islington Man would voyage—if not to the Heart of Darkness—then to well beyond the restaurant belt.

Douglas didn’t hesitate for a femtosecond. He had just returned from a promo visit to the US and was in a state of trance—endless homogenous hotels, airports and freeways had left him anaesthetised. He claimed that concrete floors, complete with giant poisonous spiders, would be a relief. The zoologist who had been paired with Douglas, Mark Carwardine, confirms that his companion liked third-world travelling as a corrective to all that voyaging through American Express-land on expenses. He relished it, said Mark, but for only two weeks:

He would get more and more scruffy and ravaged looking. He wouldn’t shave. His hair would need washing. He’d get terribly tired and look much older. Then we’d get to some nice hotel, he’d have a shower, clean himself up, get some decent sleep and he’d be restored. Ten years younger again. The transformation was almost funny.

Packing for Douglas was a major industrial undertaking. His fertile imagination could scarcely conceive of circumstances in which there was anything he would not need, so he carried astonishing quantities of luggage. Of course pants and socks and all the boring stuff, but in addition a computer was essential, and books,*
 
¹⁷⁹
plus ultra-bright halogen torches charged for seventeen hours from the mains, a medical kit, and his collection of cameras with lenses that ranged from extreme close-up to telephotos so long you could pick up the bacteria on someone’s nose at half a mile. Burdened with all this kit, Douglas and Jane flew to Paris where they met up with the expedition’s affable photographer, Alain le Garsmeur. Together they caught a connection to Antananarivo (pronounced Tananarive) airport in Madagascar.

Mark Carwardine is a delightful person, tall, dark, passionate about his subject. He has the slightly melancholy air of a man who is a committed environmentalist on a planet whose dominant species seems hellbent on its destruction. “We don’t even know what’s out there,” he said, “or what it could do before we wipe it out. Who would have thought that the Madagascar periwinkle, for instance, would provide us with a drug for leukaemia?”

Then only in his late twenties, he was five years younger than Douglas. Mark is a trained zoologist with many books to his credit, and now he presents the excellent BBC Radio Four programme,
Nature,
from the famous Bristol Studios whence the best natural history programming has emanated for decades. From time to time he also takes parties of people out in tiny inflatable boats to see the great whales. A living creature the size of a submarine surfacing smoothly alongside you is such an astonishing experience that the cliché about it being life-changing is literally true. On one such trip recently a nurse and a policewoman decided to retrain as marine biologists.

Mark and Douglas had never met before, but they hit it off. Douglas had a real talent for friendship, and even when he was being egotistical he was so transparent that he was forgivable. Both men were severely put to the test, especially on their travels in 1987/88 when they were away from home on and off for eighteen months, often in stressful circumstances. Their relationship, especially when they were both short of sleep, oscillated between extremes of affection and irritation. In the end affection always won out.

From Antananarivo, via the Hilton, where just some of the luggage was left for safe-keeping, Mark, Alain and Douglas flew by an old propeller plane with rattly windows, like a bus, to Diégo-Saurez. Then they took a battered truck to the coast where they caught a tiny boat to Nosy Mangabé, the last refuge of the aye-aye. Each change of transport had moved them forward in space and backwards in time and technology. The Malagasy boatman who took them to the idyllic, tiny off-shore island was dismayed by Douglas’s minor Alp of stuff, and when they arrived he suggested to Douglas that he nip over the side to help get them ashore. The water was so clear and sparkling that the sand looked as if it were only a few feet below the boat, but Douglas disappeared up to his neck to the merriment of (nearly) all.

The aye-aye has always been elusive. Gerald Durrell wrote an amusing account of trying to find one two generations ago, and it hasn’t got any easier in the meantime. Douglas and Mark knew where to look, but they were still fortunate. The dizzying instant when Douglas saw one is so beautifully described in
Last Chance to See
that there is little point in recounting it here. It’s a moment when a monkey (albeit Douglas was a highly evolved form of monkey) looks at a lemur and the lemur—that 60 million years ago had been top primate—looks back at him with serene incomprehension. Douglas was surprised to find himself utterly captivated. The sense of history on the evolutionary scale was suddenly dizzying. Here he was gazing at a graceful species with its origins in the era when all the continents were together in the huge supercontinent, Gondwana. Isolation had saved it from the monkeys when Madagascar became an island by splitting from Africa and turning into “a life raft from a different time.” Just possibly the aye-aye might be saved again by a retreat to a much smaller island—this time, as Mark points out, with the help of the monkeys.

What Douglas called “twig technology” had got him to the refuge. The technology of a tool-using opposable-thumbed animal holding a stick can also eventually build a Boeing 747. The aye-aye deployed twig technology too in the form of a long middle finger resembling a twig that it could use for probing for grubs. There is a telling example of convergent evolution when an unrelated species (the Long-Fingered Possum from Papua New Guinea) devised a similar strategy to address the same problem. (Douglas was very intrigued by the implications of convergence. What need is there to posit a designer if the operation of random forces, constrained by the reality of the world, produces the same elegant solution, as if there were no choice in the matter?) We monkeys have been more ambitious. Clever primates that we are, we’ve designed twig mechanisms capable of carrying a few of us to our nearby satellite and for killing each other with an ingenuity unrivalled by less intelligent species.

This first trip to Madagascar was hugely enjoyable for Douglas. Rick Paxton recalls that Douglas was so fired up about it when he returned to St. Alban’s Place that he went round to their house straight from the airport and talked with wild-eyed energy for hours nonstop, in a state of rapture. Typical writer, though: he returned the following evening after a day of revivifying sleep, showers and pampering and asked, rather plaintively, if Rick and Heidi could remember much of what he had said in his exalted state.

Madagascar also marked a profound expansion of Douglas’s view of the world. If you look at the world on the cosmological scale, as he did, you might be forgiven for believing like Descartes that, despite the lacunae in theory, the universe is a huge machine in which humankind is an infinitesimally tiny component. Douglas never found it demeaning to think of himself as a machine of enormous complexity. But life defies the mechanical model; it has—to use the current scientific jargon—emergent properties that are not fully understood. It will obey the laws of physics, but it will never be predictable. A profound tremor in his certainties ran through Douglas when he looked at the aye-aye (and even more so when some years later he gazed into the eyes of a gorilla). He woke up to the variety of life, and for the first time understood his, and mankind’s, continuity with the other animals emotionally and not just intellectually. This delicate little creature with its huge eyes and giant finger was a distant cousin. Douglas and it shared some ancestral DNA.*
 
¹⁸⁰

Douglas plunged into learning more with characteristic enthusiasm. Mark recalls that he was an enviably quick study. Mark only needed to tell Douglas something once for the information to lodge on some burr in his brain. He consumed books at a prodigious rate—and remembered them.

On his first visit to Madagascar, Douglas’s awareness of ecology changed up a gear. He wasn’t a fierce Green activist in the sense that he would ever dream of zipping up and down in a little rubber boat while Japanese whalers bore down upon him. He gave money to Greenpeace, but he was not an eco-warrior. His amazement was more intellectual. The sheer improbability of life reignited his sense of wonder. That living things as disparate as an aye-aye and a daisy, a rhino and an oyster should have evolved in a comparatively short time is beyond surprising, and the fact an animal has appeared that can dimly understand the process is perhaps the most surprising thing of all. Einstein said that we should seek to explain the universe as simply as possible—but not one bit more simply.

Douglas was incandescent with admiration for what nature and Darwinian processes had achieved, and he understood those processes well enough to realize that there was no great teleological endgame towards which they were striving. In
Mostly Harmless
he observes, “Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.”

Everything is contingent. The endless shuffling of the genetic pack and untold billions of biological accidents produced variations. Most were eliminated promptly by a harsh environment or predation; very few were advantageous and conferred some reproductive advantage. Flukishly this blind churning produced a self-aware primate and a breathtaking variety of other flora and fauna. There is no reason why such an unlikely thing should endure. The Earth Mother does not exist save as a comforting metaphor. We do not have to be.

Douglas knew this. He was profoundly influenced by his friend Richard Dawkins and intrigued by the strange details of what Mark Carwardine had to tell him about various endangered species. His fascination was quite unconventional; it wasn’t so much a matter of observing the strange behaviours, bizarre instincts, off-beat mating procedures*
 
¹⁸¹
and so on that these rare creatures might manifest. What he wanted to imagine was the world as these animals might perceive it. It was for that reason that Douglas was so stricken by the fate of the Yangtze dolphin which assembles its model of its environment through sound. The poor animal has almost certainly vanished from the Earth now and the last remnants of its doomed species were maddened and, as it were, blinded by mankind’s marine engines before extinction. Or what, Douglas wondered, does the world “look” like (we humans are locked into our visual paradigm) if it is mapped mainly by smell? The rhinos with their colossal nasal membranes*
 
¹⁸²
(larger than their brains) and terrible eyesight would have seen Douglas like some obsolete computer screen without enough pixels, but they could have smelled him on the wind half a kilometre away. Sight is effectively instantaneous, but smell isn’t. Douglas’s insight here was to realize that as a result a rhino’s view of the world is rich with the sense data of things past—in a way they “see” in time.

Douglas’s determination to master the complexities of zoology was paralleled by his desire to be at least passable in photography. Alain le Garsmeur put up with Douglas standing behind him when he took pictures. Douglas wanted to learn from a professional. Amateurs sometimes delude themselves into thinking photography is all about equipment, but it’s not. Douglas favoured motordrive Nikon F3s with those fast, eye-wateringly expensive ED lenses. In the gadget shop in
The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul,
Dirk describes how he could move from total ignorance of something to total desire for it, and then to actually owning it—all within forty seconds. That was Douglas in a camera shop. But you can have the snazziest equipment on the market and still take pictures of people with telegraph poles sprouting from their heads. Photography is about having an eye, and a good technique for acquiring one is to observe an expert. Douglas’s photography improved beyond all measure. This may be why he dedicates the book to Alain, who was good-natured beyond the call. Taking photographs while a Douglas-shaped man-mountain looms over you cannot be easy.

Douglas took a cavalier attitude to money and equipment which on one occasion made Mark terribly angry. They were flying into Beijing; as usual Douglas was pile-driven into the ground by his burden of kit. One of the larger bits was an excellent 400mm Nikkor telephoto lens that Mark coveted but could never have afforded to buy. Later, on location on the Yangtze, Mark noticed it was missing. It was heavy. Douglas had decided to leave it on the plane.