The Kingdom of Speech

by Tom Wolfe

  But what happens to someone like Darwin, who has been honored, who is highly esteemed, who has the highest credentials in his field…when he announces that man is not made in the image of God but is, in fact, nothing but an animal? He could see, feel, the Church and thousands, tens of thousands, of believers descending upon…me…with the Wrath of God. He was aware of what had happened to Mr. Vestiges, all too aware. It terrified him.

  So in the two decades between 1838—back when he was twenty-nine years old—and 1858 he hadn’t told a soul other than Lyell about his Ahura! moment, and he didn’t even tell Lyell until 1856. For the twenty years before that, his career had been devoted…secretly…to compiling evidence to support what in due course, he calculated, would shake the world: his revelation of the actual origins of man—and, while he was at it, all animals and plants: his Theory of Evolution through natural selection. He was bringing forth, for all mankind to marvel at…the true story of creation! Man was not created in the image of God, as the Church taught. Man was an animal, descended straight from other animals, most notably the orangutans.

  Darwin was afraid of not one but two things: one, the Wrath of the Godly, and two, some enterprising competitor getting wind of his idea and forestalling him by writing it up himself. And sure enough, up from nowhere pops this little flycatcher Wallace with a scholarly paper, ready for publication, on the evolution of species through natural selection! He racked his brain to recall whether or not he had written something in a letter that tipped Wallace off. But he couldn’t recall a thing.

  Oh, Lyell had warned himj…Lyell had warned him…and now all my work, all my dreams—all my dreams—

  Then he caught hold of himself. He mustn’t give in to this horrible feeling overwhelming his solar plexus. There was something more important than priority and glory and applause and universal admiration and an awesome place in history…namely, his honor as a Gentleman and a scholar. He summoned up every tensor of his soul and did what he had to do, and he did it like a man. He dispatched Wallace’s paper to Lyell along with a letter saying, “It seems to me well worth reading…Please return to me the M.S. which he does not say he wishes me to publish; but I shall of course at once write & offer to send it to any Journal. So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.”k

  Coming from the pen of a Gentleman as ever-composed and self-possessed-to-the-point-of-phlegmatic as Darwin, that word “smashed” rose up from the page like a howl, a howl plus the riiiippp of those tensors in his soul going haywire and tearing the damned thing to pieces. What he howled was, “My whole life is about to be smashed and reduced to dust, to a mere footnote to the triumph of another man!”

  a It was a scholarly article in Frontiers in Psychology (“The Mystery of Language Evolution,” May 7, 2014, available at: dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00401).

  b They were: Marc D. Hauser, Charles Yang, Robert C. Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael J. Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky, and Richard C. Lewontin.

  c This experience is recounted by Ernest H. Rann, who interviewed Wallace for the article “Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace at Home,” The Pall Mall Magazine (March 1909).

  d Sir Charles Lyell was knighted in 1848 and made a baronet in 1864. He received the Copley Medal for his scientific work in 1858. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

  e Emma Darwin wrote in her diary about hiring servants for her move to Down House. She also documented many details about Charles’s health and their family life. Her complete diaries are available digitally at Darwin Online (Darwin-online.org.uk).

  f Michabo is a prominent figure in Algonquian folklore. The Powhatan Museum, in Washington, DC, provides more information on his role and mythology.

  g The Utah Department of Heritage & Arts and the Navajo Nation’s websites contain retellings very similar to this version.

  h Darwin used similar language in a letter to J. D. Hooker dated February 1, 1871, and also in The Origin of Species.

  i Darwin preferred the term “transmutation.”

  j Lyell had encouraged Darwin to publish his ideas on evolution before someone beat him to it. This is clear in a letter Darwin wrote to Lyell on June 18, 1858, after receiving Wallace’s paper.

  k From the letter of June 18, 1858.

  Chapter II

  Gentlemen and Old Pals

  Oh, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie…said Lyell, shaking his head. Who was it who warned you two years ago about this fellow Wallace? Who was it who told you you’d better get busy and publish this pet theory of yours?…So why should I even bother, this late in the game?

  But…we are Gentlemen and old pals, after all…and I think I know of a way to get you out of this predicament. It so happens there is a meeting of the Linnean Society, postponed from last month in deference to the death of one of our beloved former Linnean presidents, coming up thirteen days from now, July 1. Unfortunately, we don’t have any way to notify Wallace in time, do we. But that’s not our fault. We didn’t schedule the meeting. That’s just the way it goes sometimes. We’ll bring our good friend Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, the botanist, in on this. All three of us are on the society’s council.a We can make the whole thing seem like the most routine scholarly meeting in the world…the usual learnéd papers learnéd papers learnéd papers, the usual drone drone drone humm drumm humm…The main thing, Charlie, is to establish your priority. We’ll present your work and Wallace’s. Now, that’s fair, isn’t it? Even-steven and all that? Well, to be perfectly frank, there is one slight hitch. You’ve never published a line of your work on Evolution. Not one line. As far as the scientific world at large is aware, you have never done any. You don’t even have a paper to present at the meeting…hmmm…Ahh! I know! We can help you create an abstract overnight! An abstract. Get it?

  “Abstract” was the conventional word in scientific publications for a summary of an article. It usually ran right below the title. After that came the article itself.

  Now do you get it, Charlie? All we need is for you to give us an abstract of a scholarly paper of yours that doesn’t exist!

  Darwin was aghast. “I should be extremely glad now to publish a sketch of my general views in about a dozen pages or so,” he wrote to Lyell. “But I cannot persuade myself that I can do so honourably…I would far rather burn my whole book than that he or any man should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit.”b

  In fact, he said, he had been intending to write Wallace relinquishing all claim of priority when Lyell’s letter arrived. So how could he possibly concoct his own essay overnight and raise his hand and claim priority himself? How very paltry. Darwin had taken to repeating this word, “paltry,” over the last few days. It meant “small-minded,” “mean,” “vile,” “despicable.” Not a pretty word, but a lot better than “dishonest”—

  —hold on a second: what’s that? A tiny hole…or is he just seeing things?…no, there’s a tiny hole in Lyell’s letter, the tiniest hole you ever saw in your life…and through that hole shines a little gleam of light, so little he wonders if it could possibly be real…but it is real! It emits the faintest of glimmers—the faintest of glimmers, but an honourable glimmer!

  Darwin pivots 180 degrees. His heart turns clear around.

  Or that “was my first impression,” he says to Lyell, suddenly switching gears, “& I should have certainly acted on it, had it not been for your letter.”31 But your letter…your letter…your letter has shown the way. Even Stephen, you have ruled, Even Stephen! And who am I to presume to overrule Sir Charles Lyell? You are the dean of British naturalists, my old friend. There is no greater or wiser man in this entire field. Everyone, including Wallace, will be better off in the end if we leave all this in your accomplished hands.

  Yes, Sir Charles Lyell had made his decision. The two papers, Wallace’s and Darwin’s, would be made public simultaneously before the Linnean Society. With a single stroke Sir Charles had made the question of priority disappear. He, Darwin, would not be claiming priority. Just the opposi
te. He was extending a magnanimous hand to a newcomer. He would be making room on the stage for a lowly flycatcher to be heard.

  The one remaining catch was that Lyell and Hooker expected Darwin to write his own abstract. He couldn’t do that—he mustn’t do that. He begged off with some pathetic excuse. He didn’t have the courage to tell them that his own conscience must be kept clear. His own conscience had to believe he had nothing to do with this project. It wasn’t his idea. It was entirely theirs, Lyell’s and Hooker’s. I, Charles Darwin, had nothing to do with it! Above all, let no man be able to say I wrote an abstract for myself after reading Wallace’s paper. There mustn’t be a hint of any such paltriness before an august body like the Linnean.

  So it fell upon Lyell’s and Hooker’s shoulders, the task of concocting for Charlie an abstract out of what they could lay their hands on quickly…let’s see…we have a copy of a letter he sent last year to an American botanist at Harvard named Asa Gray giving a halfway outline of his concept of natural selection…and there’s some sort of abortive “sketch,” as he calls it, that he has at home for a book on transmutation he’s been telling himself…for the past fourteen or fifteen years…he’s going to write someday.c And of course we have Wallace’s paper for…hmmmm…how should one put it?…for “background” or “context” or maybe something along the lines of “corroborative research” or “heuristic monitoring.” We’ll think of a term. In any case, we’re in a position to make sure there will be no important points in Wallace’s paper that aren’t also in Charlie’s. Hooker’s wife, Frances, is a bright little number. We’ll get her to read Wallace’s letter and then pull together some extracts from Charlie’s “sketch”…and, while she’s at it, shape things up a bit…where necessary.d There is more than one way to swat a flycatcher.

  When they were finished, Darwin had two papers to his name, both very short—first, an abstract of his letter to Asa Gray and, second, the extract of his unpublished sketch, tidied up by Mrs. Hooker. Combined, they were almost as long as Wallace’s twenty pages.

  To put the matter in perspective, one has only to imagine what would have happened had the roles been reversed. Suppose Darwin is the one who has just written a formal twenty-page scientific treatise for publication…and somehow Wallace gets his hands on it ahead of time…and announces that he made this same astounding epochal discovery twenty-one years ago but just never got around to writing it up and claiming priority…a horse laugh? He wouldn’t have rated anything that hearty. Maybe a single halfway-curled upper lip, if anybody deigned to notice at all.

  At the Linnean Society meeting on July 1, neither party was present…not Wallace, because the Gentlemen had been more than content to leave the flycatcher in the dark in equatorial Asia, 7,200 miles away…and not Darwin, because his infant son, Charles Waring Darwin, his and Emma’s tenth child after nearly twenty years of marriage, had died of scarlet fever on June 28.e He couldn’t very well show up in public three days later, on July 1, advancing his career beneath a banner saying HUMAN BEINGS ARE NOTHING BUT ANIMALS.

  At Linnean Society meetings, papers on a single subject were read in alphabetical order, by author, and—wouldn’t you know it?—D comes before W.32 That was just the way it goes sometimes, too. So the society heard two of its most distinguished members, Sir Charles Lyell and Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, peers of the realm, do the introductions, which were spent pointing out that Darwin, who clearly had priority, was all for including Wallace on the program.f Both authors may “fairly claim the merit of being original thinkers in this important line of inquiry,” Lyell and Hooker begin, but Darwin was the first…it just took him twenty-one years to get around to writing his thoughts down. Then the Linneans heard not one but two papers by their renowned colleague Charles Darwin, member of the Royal Society of London, famous for his many years of worldwide explorations…and then one by some little flycatcher named Wallace. It was not hard to get the impression that the distinguished Mr. Charles Darwin, with his big heart, was giving a pat on the head to this obscure but promising young man off catching flies in the tropical bowels of Asia.

  That impression never changed. Wallace was an outsider and not a Gentleman, not the Linnean Society sort. An undersecretary read the introduction and all three papers aloud. They prompted no questions or discussion; none at all. Most of the twenty-five or thirty Linneans on hand appeared bored, if not put to sleep, by the drizzle drizzle of species transmutation biogeographical variations injurious adaptations drizzle drizzle…when, O Lord, will the fog clear out? They had come to hear Lyell, a gentleman among Gentlemen, deliver a promised eulogy of the society’s lately departed former president, which he did, first thing. As for the rest of the program, they did their best to endure…the first public revelation of a doctrine that would turn the study of man upside down—and kill God, if Nietzsche had anything to say about it. At the moment, however, the Gentlemen of the Linnean Society greeted the news with yawns so big they couldn’t cover them with their bare hands.

  In his annual state-of-the-society speech the following spring, the society’s president said, “The year which has passed…has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear.”33

  It was not until three months later, in October of 1858, that Wallace, by then off to New Guinea for more flycatching, had any idea that a meeting of the Linnean Society involving his work had ever taken place. The news arrived in letters (both in the same envelope) from Hooker and Darwin, implying how generous Darwin had been throughout and how highly he thought of Wallace.g He had given him equal credit not only before the Linnean Society but also in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society. Wallace’s paper and Darwin’s “abstracts” would be running even-steven in its prestigious pages. Once it was published, Darwin got the courage to send Wallace a copy. The truth was, the very layout and look of the Journal were so unbalanced in Darwin’s favor that Darwin himself sucked in a great guilty two-whole-lobes load of air and averted his eyes the moment he saw it. The distinguished Mr. Darwin’s name was placed first on the contents page and at the top of page after page after that—the strictures of alphabetical order again,34 wouldn’t you know it—and the unknown Mr. Wallace’s followed…another generous pat on the head for an obscure young man who certainly had worked-hard-you-had-to-hand-him-that.

  Wallace hadn’t a clue that his paper was going to be published. He had sent it to Lyell for an expert opinion before publication. After all, he would be presenting the world with a radical discovery: how Evolution occurred through natural selection. He hadn’t the faintest notion that the Linnean Society—meaning three of its officers, Darwin, Lyell, and Hooker—had their hands on it and would do with it as they pleased. They hadn’t asked for permission and never gave him a chance to edit or proofread his own work. They would never have dared pull any such sleight of hand on a Gentleman—any gentleman, no matter how obviously clueless he might be.

  Wallace’s reply, a letter to Hooker, got straight to the sore point. “I was very much surprised to find that the same idea had occurred to Darwin.”35 But then he gave up. He knew nothing at this juncture about exactly how it had “occurred” to Darwin, and he didn’t have the nerve to insist on finding out. He realized there was no way that he, all by himself on the wrong side of the class divide, was going to prevail against the Gentlemen. He was a flycatcher. He might as well be content to keep his mouth shut and salvage what he could from the wreckage of his plans and let them dress him up in their flattery and pluck him up from obscurity and put him on the Big Stage. He couldn’t have sounded more grateful. By the time Wallace got the letters from Darwin and Hooker, Darwin had already been writing for three months, faster than he had ever written in his life, to scoop Wallace by publishing that most solid, hard-shelled claim to priority: a book.

  Three months’ head start—but where was he ever going to find the energy to finish the
race? Throughout the voyage of the Beagle…way back when…Darwin had been in his twenties, enjoying the heedless animal health of youth. Today, in October of 1858, going on twenty-two years later, he was almost fifty…and afflicted with what his doctors told him was dyspepsia. But very likely their real diagnosis was hypochondria…referring to some recurring imaginary malady unlikely to kill you even if it were real. In Darwin’s case it consisted of sudden, uncontrollable vomiting and every sort of pain in his distended belly and bowels, every known belch, retch, heave, gas-pass, watery rush, and loathsome gush, plus foul wind erupting from one end of his digestive tract and foul sounds eructing grrrrekkk from the other. And where was he going to find the time? Half the time he seemed to be laid up in the Ilkley spa, in the Yorkshire Dales, taking “the waters” and “the cure,” wrapped up in wet sheets from head to toe like a mummy in order to douse the fiery itch of his chronic eczema.h

  Only his atrial-fluttering fear of Wallace somehow smashing his whole life by producing a book of his own, once again forestalling me and establishing my own priority, this time beyond the reach of any more monkey business by my Gentleman sidekicks—only this kept him out of Ilkley’s sopping cemetery long enough to write his hard-shelled claim to priority. The flycatcher was still in Malay, so far as Darwin knew. But that hadn’t kept him from being the actual creator of the Theory of Evolution the first time around. So who knew what he was concocting right now?

  Darwin gave his book a twenty-one-word academic title, but common usage would quickly pare it down to four: The Origin of Species. Late September of 1859…and Darwin was going over the last details for publication, set to take place in two months, which would be late November—and no sign of Wallace anywhere, so far. He began to let his breath out slowly and slowly let his hopes rise. But he remained at Ilkley still, wrapped up in the spa’s wet mummy sheets, still enduring a raging case of eczema and still trembling…for a reason that had nothing to do with Wallace. He hadn’t dared push his theory all the way to its shocking conclusion, which would be the news, the revelation, that man did not come into this world in the image of God but out of the loins of an orangutan or some other big ape. Man was an animal and nothing but an animal. If he took it that far, all the way at once…he shuddered to think of how violent the reaction would be—the rage! the fury!—from the Church and the clueless Christian middle classes. He could see all his honors and medals and elite memberships crashing to earth amid the ruins of the reputation he had so single-mindedly aspired to ever since the Beagle returned home twenty-two years ago. So in The Origin of Species he drove the Theory of Evolution right up to Homo sapiens’s front door but not one inch closer…unless you counted a single, soft, one-knuckle tap two pages from the end of the book, offering a cryptic hint as to where he might be heading in a sequel, if he should he ever write one.