The driver laughed.
“Taking this old bugger far?” asked Dirk, with the air of one seasoned rhinoceros delivery driver comparing notes with another. He gave the truck an appraising glance.
“Just out to Malibu,” said the driver. “Way up Topanga Canyon.”
Dirk gave a knowing cluck as if to say, “Don’t talk to me about Topanga Canyon, I once had to take a whole herd of wildebeest to Cardiff in a minibus. You want trouble? That was trouble.” He sucked deeply on his cigarette.
“Must have been some party,” he remarked.
“Party?” said the driver.
“I’ve always found that a rhinoceros makes a pretty poor kind of party guest,” said Dirk. “Try it if you must, but brace yourself.” It was Dirk’s view that asking direct questions made people wary. It was more effective to talk complete nonsense and let people correct him.
“What do you mean, ‘party’?” said the driver.
“The party the other rhinoceros was attending,” said Dirk, tapping the side of his nose, “when it died.”
“Attending?” said the driver with a frown. “I wouldn’t say that it was actually attending the party.”
Dirk raised an encouraging eyebrow.
“It charged down out of the hills, smashed through the perimeter fence, crashed through the plate-glass windows into the house, took a couple of turns around the main room injuring about seventeen people, hurtled back out into the garden where somebody shot it, whereupon it toppled slowly into a swimming pool full of mostly naked screenwriters, taking half a hundredweight of avocado dip and some kind of Polynesian fruit melange with it.”
Dirk took a moment or two to digest this information. Then, “Whose house was this?” he said.
“Just some movie people. Apparently they’d had Bruce Willis round only the previous week. Now this.”
“Seems a bit rough on the old rhino as well,” said Dirk. “And now here’s another one.”
Excerpts from an Interview with the Daily Nexus, April 5, 2000
How does Douglas Adams arrive for coffee? If he were like the Montecitans stopping by Pierre Lafond’s, he would show up in an SUV, a luxury car, or a luxury SUV. The basic cup of coffee at Pierre Lafond’s costs $1.25 and is called “organic French roast.” It tastes exactly like McDonald’s coffee or organic crankcase fluid, not that the drivers of SUVs seem to care.
I expected more from Adams than an SUV. I wanted to see him skip out of a spaceship, materialize, or even just walk. This is a guy who wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and has managed to make life, the universe and everything much more entertaining. So, I wondered, how would he arrive?
Black Mercedes.
Adams is six feet five inches tall, with intensely round eyes. He hadn’t had a good day. His daughter was sick, and the croissant he was eating at 5:00 P.M. was lunch. Life hasn’t been bad for the forty-nine-year-old Adams, though. He travels the world, his nine books have sold over 15 million copies, and the oft-delayed Hitchhiker’s movie is now being produced by Disney and has the director of Austin Powers signed on.
“The perennial movie, which has been about to be made for about twenty years and is even more about to be made now,” Adams said. “But we shall see. I wish I had never thought of doing it as a movie. I’d have about ten years of my life back.
For the first time in over a decade, Adams is working on a book.
“There was a point where I just got massively fed up with it. My books tend to use up ideas at a ferocious rate,” he said. “I never intended to be a novelist to begin with. So I decided to go and do a whole bunch of other things. . . . The consequence of that is I have a huge backlog of story ideas, and now the sort of panic is, ‘Can I do them all in the rest of my career, given the speed at which they’re arriving at the moment?’ The other panic, of course, is the perennial writer’s problem of application. I think I have more fear of writing than most writers.”
The new book is not a Hitchhiker’s book—there are already five of those—or a Dirk Gently book, but “it will be recognizable in style to anyone who knows those books.
“Since then, I’ve now got lots and lots of different story lines waiting for me to turn them into books. One of them I shall apply the title Salmon of Doubt to, but I don’t know which one yet.”
In 1990, Adams, with zoologist Mark Carwardine, wrote Last Chance to See. It’s one of his hardest books to find, and his favorite. When Adams—who has lived in Santa Barbara for the last two years—speaks today at UCSB, it’s the book he’ll talk about.
“I do talks around most of the rest of the country,” Adams said. “So I was very keen to do one here, just to sort of say, ‘Hi, here I am.’ ”
Adams gives a lot of speeches, usually about high technology to large companies.
“I actually much prefer doing this particular one, which I only ever usually get to do at colleges because it’s funny, but big corporations don’t particularly like to hear about protecting endangered wildlife,” he said. “You lose a lot of money to endangered wildlife.”
Last Chance to See started as a magazine article for the World Wildlife Fund. The group sent Adams to Madagascar, where he met Carwardine. Adams wrote about the aye-aye, an endangered species of nocturnal lemur that looks like a cross between a bat, a monkey, and a very surprised infant.
“At the time, it was thought that there were only about fifteen. They’ve found a few more so it’s not quite so endangered, just very, very, very endangered,” Adams said. “The whole thing was completely magical.”
So magical that Adams and Carwardine spent the next year traveling the world and seeing endangered animals, like flightless kakapo parrots in New Zealand and baiji river dolphins in China. The last twenty dolphins will become extinct when the Chinese government completes the Three Gorges Dam and destroys the dolphins’ habitat.
“It’s a desperate thing, not only because another species is lost and the tragedy of that, but because I don’t know why we keep building these fucking dams,” Adams said in a surprisingly forceful British whisper. “Not only do they cause environmental and social disasters, they, with very few exceptions, all fail to do what they were supposed to do in the first place. Look at the Amazon, where they’ve all silted up. What is the reaction to that? They’re going to build another eighty of them. It’s just balmy. We must have beaver genes or something. . . . There’s just this kind of sensational desire to build dams, and maybe that should be looked at and excised from human nature. Maybe the Human Genome Project can locate the beaver/dam-building gene and cut that out.”
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, intergalactic bulldozers destroyed the Earth and humanity. A very different sort of bulldozer destroyed the most successful species the planet had ever known. Sixty-five million years ago, a six-mile-wide asteroid slammed into the Yucatán peninsula, created a one-hundred-mile crater, and sent a cloud of searing vapor and dust into the air. That was pretty much it for the dinosaurs.
“I’m rather obsessed with the idea of that comet coming down and it being the single event to which we owe our very existence,” Adams said. “It is arguably the single most dramatic thing to have ever occurred in the world and certainly the one that was the most dramatic event in our lives, in that it paved the way for our existence, and no one was there to see it.”
Dinosaur-killing rocks are classic physics. The newer physics is a little too outlandish for Adams, a man who wrote that the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. A computer came up with that answer, and Adams said computers will change everything.
“Now that we’ve built computers, first we made them room-size, then desk-size and in briefcases and in pockets, soon they’ll be as plentiful as dust—you can sprinkle computers all over the place. Gradually, the whole environment will become something far more responsive and smart, and we’ll be living in a way that’s very hard for people living on the planet just now to understand,” Adams said. “I guess my six-year-o
ld daughter will get a much better handle on it.”
Adams has done a bit of everything, from radio to television to designing computer games. Not all of them worked out.
“These are life’s little learning experiences,” he said. “You know what a learning experience is? A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.’
“At the end of all this being-determined-to-be-a-jack-of-all-trades, I think I’m better off just sitting down and putting a hundred thousand words in a cunning order.”
Adams writes “slowly and painfully.”
“People assume you sit in a room, looking pensive and writing great thoughts,” he said. “But you mostly sit in a room looking panic-stricken and hoping they haven’t put a guard on the door yet.”
Adams will probably be writing for the next few years, before his daughter grows up.
“I think what I’ll do, because there has been talk about me doing a big TV documentary series, is that I’ll wait until her hormones kick in, and then I shall go off like a shot,” he said. “I think when she’s about thirteen I’ll go off and do a big documentary series and come back when she’s become civilized.”
The interview ended when Adams’s cell phone rang from inside his pocket. In the other pocket there was a little bit of padded cotton, red trimmed with a giraffe on it. It looked like it belonged to his daughter. His wife and daughter were supposed to have flown to London that night, but his daughter came down with an ear infection. “A serious one, actually.”
It was time for Adams to climb into his black Mercedes to go home and see her.
And so he did.
Interview conducted by Brendan Buhler, Artsweek
Epilogue
A LAMENT FOR Douglas Adams, best known as author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who died on Saturday, aged forty-nine, from a heart attack.
This is not an obituary; there’ll be time enough for them. It is not a tribute, not a considered assessment of a brilliant life, not a eulogy. It is a keening lament, written too soon to be balanced, too soon to be carefully thought through. Douglas, you cannot be dead.
A sunny Friday morning in May, ten past seven, shuffle out of bed, log in to e-mail as usual. The usual blue bold headings drop into place, mostly junk, some expected, and my gaze absently follows them down the page. The name Douglas Adams catches my eye and I smile. That one, at least, will be good for a laugh. Then I do the classic double-take, back up the screen.
What did that heading actually say? Douglas Adams died of a heart attack a few hours ago. Then that other cliché, the words swelling before my eyes.
It must be part of the joke. It must be some other Douglas Adams. This is too ridiculous to be true. I must still be asleep. I open the message, from a well-known German software designer. It is no joke, I am fully awake. And it is the right—or rather the wrong—Douglas Adams. A sudden heart attack, in the gym in Santa Barbara. “Man, man, man, man oh man,” the message concludes. Man indeed, what a man. A giant of a man, surely nearer seven foot than six, broad-shouldered, and he did not stoop like some very tall men who feel uncomfortable with their height. But nor did he swagger with the macho assertiveness that can be intimidating in a big man. He neither apologised for his height, nor flaunted it. It was part of the joke against himself.
One of the great wits of our age, his sophisticated humour was founded in a deep, amalgamated knowledge of literature and science, two of my great loves. And he introduced me to my wife—at his fortieth birthday party.
He was exactly her age, they had worked together on Dr. Who. Should I tell her now, or let her sleep a bit longer before shattering her day? He initiated our togetherness and was a recurrently important part of it. I must tell her now.
Douglas and I met because I sent him an unsolicited fan letter—I think it is the only time I have ever written one. I had adored The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Then I read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
As soon as I finished it, I turned back to page one and read it straight through again—the only time I have ever done that, and I wrote to tell him so. He replied that he was a fan of my books, and he invited me to his house in London. I have seldom met a more congenial spirit. Obviously I knew he would be funny. What I didn’t know was how deeply read he was in science. I should have guessed, for you can’t understand many of the jokes in Hitchhiker if you don’t know a lot of advanced science. And in modern electronic technology he was a real expert. We talked science a lot, in private, and even in public at literary festivals and on the wireless or television. And he became my guru on all technical problems. Rather than struggle with some ill-written and incomprehensible manual in Pacific Rim English, I would fire off an e-mail to Douglas. He would reply, often within minutes, whether in London or Santa Barbara, or some hotel room anywhere in the world. Unlike most staff of professional helplines, Douglas understood exactly my problem, knew exactly why it was troubling me, and always had the solution ready, lucidly and amusingly explained. Our frequent e-mail exchanges brimmed with literary and scientific jokes and affectionately sardonic little asides. His technophilia shone through, but so did his rich sense of the absurd. The whole world was one big Monty Python sketch, and the follies of humanity were as comic in the world’s silicon valleys as anywhere else.
He laughed at himself with equal good humour. At, for example, his epic bouts of writer’s block (“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by”) when, according to legend, his publisher and book agent would lock him in a hotel room, with no telephone and nothing to do but write, releasing him only for supervised walks. If his enthusiasm ran away with him and he advanced a biological theory too eccentric for my professional scepticism to let pass, his mien at my dismissal of it would always be more humorously self-mocking than genuinely crestfallen. And he would have another go.
He laughed at his own jokes, which good comedians are supposed not to, but he did it with such charm that the jokes became even funnier. He was gently able to poke fun without wounding, and it would be aimed not at individuals but at their absurd ideas. To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow preordained for us, because we are so well suited to live in it, he mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle. Or there’s this parable, which he told with huge enjoyment, whose moral leaps out with no further explanation. A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained about high-frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, transmitters and receivers, amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. “But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?”
Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender (he once climbed Kilimanjaro in a rhino suit to raise money to fight the cretinous trade in rhino horn), Apple Computers has lost its most eloquent apologist. And I have lost an irreplaceable intellectual companion and one of the kindest and funniest men I ever met. The day Douglas died, I officially received a happy piece of news, which would have delighted him. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone during the weeks I have secretly known about it, and now that I am allowed to, it is too late.
The sun is shining, life must go on, seize the day and all those clichés.
We shall plant a tree this very day: a Douglas fir, tall, upright, evergreen. It is the wrong time of year, but we’ll give it our best shot.
Off to the arboretum.
Richard Dawkins, in The Guardian,
> MAY 14, 2001
(Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.)
Douglas Noel Adams
1952–2001
The Order of Service for His Memorial
Schübler Chorales—J. S. Bach
Shepherd’s Farewell, from The Childhood of Christ
—Hector Berlioz
Welcome to the Church by Reverend Antony Hurst,
on behalf of St. Martin-in-the-Fields
Introduction and opening prayer by Stephen Coles
JONNY BROCK
Three Kings from Persian Lands—Peter Cornelius
ED VICTOR
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord—
Traditional American melody & words by Julia Ward Howe
MARK CARWARDINE
Gone Dancing—Robbie McIntosh
Te Fovemus—The Chameleon Arts Chorus (by P. Wickens)
JAMES THRIFT, SUE ADAMS, JANE GARNIER
Rockstar—Margo Buchanan
Prayers of Thanksgiving by Stephen Coles
Holding On—Gary Brooker
Wish You Were Here—David Gilmour
RICHARD DAWKINS
For the beauty of the earth—Music by Conrad Kocher & words by Folliott S. Pierpoint
ROBBIE STAMP
Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust from Cantata No 170
—J. S. Bach
Aria
Contented rest, beloved heart’s desire,
You are not found in the sins of hell,
But only in heavenly concord;
You alone fortify the feeble heart.
Contented rest, beloved heart’s desire,
Therefore none but the gifts of virtue
Shall have their abode in my heart.
SIMON JONES
For all the Saints who from their labours rest—
Music by R. Vaughan Williams & words by William W. How
The Salmon of Doubt Page 27