by Matthew Cobb
US author Tom Wolfe has a new novel Back to Blood, which has just appeared in the UK [JAC note: there’s a mixed review of it in today’s New York Times.] I’ve seen it in Waterstone’s (a major UK chain of bookshops), but haven’t read it. I’m not sure I’ll bother, as although I enjoyed The Bonfire of the Vanities, I found A Man in Full over-long and unfocused (though it did tell me more than I wanted to know about reproduction in horses). I find his journalistic writing – in particular The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Right Stuff, both of which remain inspirations to me – to be far more enthralling.
So I was particularly intrigued to read an interview with Wolfe in The Daily Telegraph in which Wolfe announces that his next book (he’s 81!) will be a non-fiction work on the theory of evolution, The Human Beast. (Most of the interview is about Back to Blood, which is about immigration, and prompted some pretty vile comments from loony readers.) It’s hard to tell from the snippets given in the interview whether this will be way off target or insightful, but Wolfe has been trailing this for several years now, and I fear the worst. In 2006 he gave this Jefferson Lecture in which he proclaims:
No evolutionist has come up with even an interesting guess as to when speech began, but it was at least 11,000 years ago, which is to say, 9000 B.C. It seems to be the consensus . . . in the notoriously capricious field of evolutionary chronology . . . that 9000 B.C. was about when the human beast began farming, and the beast couldn’t have farmed without speech
Leaving aside the sideswipe about ‘evolutionary chronology’, the fact that we don’t know precisely when we started speaking, and the truism that we’d have had a hard time farming without speech, Wolfe’s dating is way off. Think about it – we’d have a hard time creating the art at Lascaux, the Willendorf Venus, or honing and developing our tools, without speech. Even if we assume that only our species spoke (ie not Neanderthals or our ancestors), that would put the date, capriciously, at around 100,000 years ago… I hope that Wolfe has done some more research in the intervening years.
The Telegraph interview, by Richard Grant, concludes with a detail that I still can’t decide whether it was right or rude to include. Grant is correct to state that Wolfe would certainly not have omitted the image. What do readers think, about Wolfe, his next book, or the etiquette of revealing human frailty?
Titled The Human Beast, it will be a non-fiction book about the theory of evolution, its history, its shortcomings and the ways in which some contemporary neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists have taken it to absurd conclusions. The story begins in the aching, splitting, fevered head of the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. He came up with idea of natural selection on his malarial sickbed while collecting specimens in Malaya, and wrote it down in a letter that reached London before Darwin had published a word.
By the time Wolfe starts telling the story of Wallace and Darwin, he has already been talking for two hours, sitting there on the elegant antique sofa with his white trouser cuffs riding up over those Argyle socks. It has been more of a discursive, wandering monologue than an interview, consistently funny and engaging, but sometimes he has needed a reminder of what he was talking about five minutes ago that led him to where he is now. I’ve given up trying to steer him back to my original list of questions. It seems too rude to interrupt an elderly gentleman, especially one you have admired so greatly, as he relives his battles and skirmishes and famous ripostes.
‘Where was I? Oh yeah, Alfred Russel Wallace. Well, Darwin was an honest man up to a point, and when he read Wallace’s letter he saw that his life’s work had been negated…’
At that moment, a large drop of blood falls out of Wolfe’s nose and lands on his white silk tie. I watch transfixed, but he hasn’t noticed. The monologue continues. ‘Now Zola was obviously writing under the influence of Darwin, who said that there was no cardinal distinction – Nietzsche’s term – between man and beast…’
Another drop of blood falls and skids off his tie on to his trousers.
Um, you’ve got a nosebleed, I interrupt.
‘What?’ he says.
You have a nosebleed.
‘Really? My God. Sorry.’
He dabs at his nose, sees the blood on the handkerchief, and gets up, looking mortified. ‘Let me take care of this,’ he says, and exits the room.
I was going to withhold the nosebleed incident from this article, out of respect, but then it occurred to me that Tom Wolfe would never waste an image like that. The aged writer rambling away about ancient controversies, totally oblivious to the globs of blood falling from his nose and landing with shocking redness on his trademark white suit. Oh, the betrayal of the flesh!
Returning without his tie, and apologising for ‘the dramatic interruption’, he finished up his disquisition on The Human Beast with a wad of cotton stuffed up his treacherous left nostril.
