In Praise of Difficult Women

by Karen Karbo

  At that time—the 1960s—the defining characteristic of man was that he alone, among all the creatures on God’s green Earth, made tools. We called ourselves Man the Toolmaker, and that skill allegedly distinguished us from every other living thing. I find this odd. You would think biologists would have focused on something there was no chance of any other creature ever mastering. Why were we not Man the Terrible Joke Teller? Or Man the Insufferable Fishing Trip Yarn Spinner?

  In any case, Jane’s discovery was the talk of the scientific world, causing Leakey to proclaim, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.” Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould would call her observation “one of the great achievements of twentieth-century scholarship.”

  Already a legend at the age of 27, Jane would go on to make more discoveries. That chimps were not the benign vegetarians we thought them to be, but omnivores, like us. And also (somewhat sadly), they were wagers of war. Jane’s first article was published in 1963 and was featured on the December 1965 cover of National Geographic. Since then her work has appeared there more often than any other scientist. Even her mentor, Louis Leakey.

  A MERE WOMAN, and one without any credentials, had redefined what it means to be Man. Louis Leakey believed that Jane’s discovery should earn her acceptance into the Ph.D. program in ethology at Cambridge—despite the fact that before becoming, in a few short months, one of the most important field biologists on Earth, she’d never been to college. Leakey knew she would need a degree if she wanted to be taken seriously, and so he used his influence to convince the dons of her worthiness. It was no small feat: Jane was only the eighth person in the history of the university to enter a doctorate program without a degree.

  When the bigwigs in the ethology department at Cambridge learned what she’d been up to, they were appalled. Discovery notw­ithsta­nding, Jane was guilty of the most heinous crime in the kingdom of science: anthropomorphizing, or attributing human traits to animals. Naming the chimpanzees! Describing their behavior and interactions in humanlike terms! Could anything be sillier? Plus, it was plain old bad science, according to the thinking of the day, which prized cold, hard objectivity. I can just imagine a faculty meeting, wherein the grizzled old sexists pooh-poohed Jane’s work with barely disguised glee. Her first book, My Friends, the Wild Chimpanzees, was published before she finished her dissertation, and one of the Cambridge dons nearly gave himself a heart attack: “It’s—it’s—it’s for the general public!” For that intellectual crime, she was nearly kicked out of the program.

  In fairness, Robert Hinde, her direct adviser, took Jane’s achievement seriously. She praised his influence in a 2017 blog post, saying she could never thank him enough for teaching her to think critically. He was assigned to her, it appears, because he had been studying a colony of rhesus monkeys and he, too, had seen fit to name them. I’m presuming that none of his colleagues thought he was ridiculous or amateurish for doing so.

  Can you imagine yourself in this situation? Some of the most esteemed thinkers in your field at one of the most esteemed universities on the planet criticize your methodology. They probably have a point because your methodology, insofar as you had one, was Make It Up As You Go Along. Plus, these men are brilliant and powerful. I don’t know about you, but my knee-jerk reaction would be to cede them their point—or at least pretend to hear them out, then call my girlfriends and complain about being misunderstood.

  Jane Goodall not only did not go along with their assessment, she told them they were straight-up wrong. She was soft-spoken, but she refused to back down. She didn’t cite her thousands of hours of current research with chimpanzees, which gave her at least some ethological cred; instead, she referenced a relationship she’d had with her childhood pet, a black mutt named Rusty. “Fortunately, I thought back to my first teacher, when I was a child, who taught me that that wasn’t true,” she wrote years later. “You cannot share your life in a meaningful way with any kind of animal with a reasonably well-developed brain and not realize that animals have personalities.”

  It’s breathtaking, really, the way Jane stood her ground and wouldn’t let her superiors talk her out of her own experience and what she knew to be true. Every time I know I’m right about something, but begin to feel as if it would make life easier to simply pretend to believe that the other person (usually, a man) makes a good point, I remember Jane Goodall in this moment. So genteel, yet so impressively difficult.

  IN 1986, AFTER PUBLISHING The Chimpanzees of Gombe, which summarized 25 years’ worth of research, Jane concluded her life in the field and became an activist. Her marriage to Hugo van Lawick had ended in 1974; a year later, she married Tanzanian Parliament member Derek Bryceson. Her new husband was also director of national parks and helped preserve the integrity of Gombe, keeping it wild and isolated from animal-loving tourists and well-meaning supporters. As a result, when Jane departed, Gombe was thriving, and continued to thrive. It had evolved into a flourishing research station staffed primarily by native Tanzanians.

  Jane had spent enough time in Africa to experience the chimpanzees’ diminishing habitat firsthand—channeling the same zeal with which she threw herself into studying the chimps, she now devoted herself to their conservation. She’s still at it today, still wearing slacks and comfortable shoes, her blond hair gone gray and still held back in its low ponytail. Her look has changed very little in 50 years. She’s simply older, but no less beautiful and intimidating.

  When Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder From the World of Plants appeared in 2014, Jane was interviewed on both The Colbert Report and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.

  It’s not as if Jane Goodall doesn’t have a sense of humor. In 1987, celebrity cartoonist Gary Larson drew a comic that showed two chimps sitting on a branch. One pulls a long, clearly human, hair off the back of the other and says, “Well, well—another blond hair. Conducting more ‘research’ with that Jane Goodall tramp?” The Jane Goodall Institute quickly shot off a letter of objection, without stopping to think that Jane might find it hilarious, which she did.*5

  Still, her dry sense of humor can sometimes be misinterpreted. During a 2014 interview with comedian John Oliver she simply refused to give in. He tried to lure her into admitting that during her time at Gombe she was tempted to dress a chimp up like a butler. She said no. He kept pressing her in his faux hard-hitting journalistic way, and she neither smiled nor acquiesced. Though in the end, she rewarded him with a few chimp gestures that had the audience roaring.

  Jane was polite and utterly unmovable. It was as if Oliver was trying to get her to mock her family, and she was not about to do that. It’s a terrific, awkward moment of television where a woman refused to smile, become giddy and jokey to relieve a tense moment and make everyone feel better. It would have been so easy for her to go along with the joke, to make light of her life’s work. But being difficult, she wasn’t about to give in. Difficult women aren’t all swashbuckling extroverts who shoot off their mouths and shout down their adversaries. Sometimes they just sit quietly and refuse to pretend to be agreeable.

  Jane Goodall’s life story inspires me still—perhaps even more than when I was a girl. Back then, I thought if you were the right kind of girl (who got to go camping), you could find the path to an incredible life and hike straight to the top. I didn’t understand the concept of female self-sabotage. I had no idea that brilliant, capable women might hobble themselves by indulging in self-defeating ambivalence, chewing their cuticles with self-doubt. Unlike many accommodating women I know (me), difficult women don’t gum up the works with second-guessing, a terrible and counterproductive habit that generally goes something like this: Make decision, regret decision, beat self up for making wrong decision in the first place, further beat self up for regretting having made wrong decision in the first place. Drink too much wine. Sleep it off. Do nothing.

  Jane, with her calm, steady ways, sat in tha
t jungle—frustrated at first, but moving forward, trusting that she’d made the right choice. She always seemed to trust herself, which made her a difficult woman.

  *1This was easier than you might expect: Expats tend to stick together and run in the same circles in very foreign lands.

  *2He’d already tried to enlist his secretary for the primate-observing fun. After four months in the wilds of Uganda, she fled.

  *3That woman was limber. If I met her, I would ask her how her knees are holding up because she was a pretzel in her youth.

  *4The chimpanzee genome was sequenced in 2005.

  *5Later she would write the introduction to The Far Side Gallery 5, and Larson donated the profits from a T-shirt with the cartoon on it to the Jane Goodall Institute. Later still—and this may be apocryphal—Larson visited Gombe and was attacked by Frodo the chimp.

  CHAPTER 17

  VITA SACKVILLE-WEST

  Self-Assured

  IN MY EARLY 20s I worked as a secretary at a talent agency on Sunset Boulevard. My job consisted primarily of getting yelled at by my boss for failing to answer his endlessly ringing phones fast enough. Rather than being an entrée into the glamorous world of Hollywood, the experience plunged me into despair. I distracted myself from my misery by assigning myself a task: reading Virginia Woolf’s entire oeuvre, including the five volumes of her diaries and the six volumes of her letters.*1 As I would discover, the most flamboyant and desperately glamorous character in Virginia’s life was the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West: popular novelist, poet, gardener, and wife of writer Sir Harold Nicolson, with whom she enjoyed what would become an open marriage for the ages.*2

  Vita was self-assured. Vita was magnetic. Vita was gender fluid, as we call it in our time, known for stirring up passions people didn’t know they possessed. In an oil portrait of her painted in 1910, when Vita was 18, she resembles a handsome musketeer in puffy shirt and jaunty velvet Edwardian hat. London’s infamous literary clique the Bloomsbury Group—of which Virginia (and tangentially, Vita) were a part—spent most of their time discussing the Meaning of Art and engaging in secret trysts with other members of the group. Next, they’d scamper back to their desks to scribble madly in their diaries, put forth some steamy love letters, and then work up a novel with the secret lover as the main character. The greatest piece of literature to emerge from all of this carrying-on was the satirical romp Orlando, Woolf’s most accessible and popular novel. Vita served as the inspiration for the eponymous Orlando, a handsome British nobleman born under the reign of Elizabeth I who mysteriously changed into a woman at age 30, then lived for another few centuries without aging a day. (Oh, if only.) Vita’s son, the writer Nigel Nicolson, would call Orlando “The longest and most charming love letter in literature, in which [Virginia] explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her, and ends by photographing her in the mud at Long Barn, with dogs, awaiting Virginia’s arrival the next day.”

  VITA’S FULL NAME WAS the Honourable Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson. Born in 1892, at the end of the Victorian era, she was the only child of Lionel Edward Sackville-West, third Baron Sackville, and his cousin, Victoria Josefa Dolores Catalina Sackville-West, Baroness Sackville (who was the illegitimate child of the second Baron Sackville-West, also called Lionel, and the notorious Spanish flamenco dancer, Pepita).

  Vita was born at Knole, in West Kent. The estate is one of the largest houses in England. Elizabeth I bequeathed it to some earlier Sackville cousin, and the family had lived there since 1603. With 365 rooms, 50 staircases, and many courtyards, towers, and battlements, all set within a thousand-acre park, the house makes Downton Abbey look like a split-level in Teaneck.

  Vita loved her home the way other young girls love ponies. But because she was an only child, and female, the house and the title that went with it was passed on to her father’s nephew. Even though I’ve suffered some not dissimilar ridiculousness—years ago my stepbrother was made trustee of our parents’ living trust because he was male, and not in the arts—it’s hard to feel too bad for the extremely wealthy, privileged, well-connected Vita. On the other hand, what the hell? I don’t blame her for being pissed, and carrying the scar from this injustice for her entire life.

  Vita was lanky and dark haired, with dramatic, hooded eyes. In some photos she looks not unlike Oscar Wilde. Indeed, despite my fascination with her, I’ve sometimes mistaken her for Wilde (especially in one picture, where he sports center-parted hair and chin-length curls). Vita thought of herself as ugly, “rough and secret.” She was gawky, and lonely in her huge house that was as big as a town. Her favorite companion was a giant tortoise, his shell monogrammed in diamonds, who slowly roamed the long halls.

  Vita knew she loved women from an early age—and also, that she loved them with a distinctly male attitude. No cuddling and sharing girlish secrets for her, although she settled for that more than once. At Helen Wolff’s School for Girls in Park Lane, she fell hard for a classmate, Rosamund Grosvenor. Rosamund was a standard-issue society girly girl of the time, feminine and kittenish, without a thought in her head. Vita was madly attracted to her, even though she wasn’t much interested in engaging her in conversation.

  She was a woman with urges, and she was determined to indulge them. This was a radical act for a female born in the Victorian era, when one’s success as a woman could be measured by the degree to which she was able to keep basic human yearning under wraps. When it came to sex, most well-bred girls only received the memo about the calisthenics to come on their wedding night.

  A little context: Being a person who loved someone of their own gender wasn’t merely a scandal in England, it was also illegal. We’re not talking community service for a sex act in a public restroom: Oscar Wilde did two years of hard labor in prison for “gross indecency.” Homosexuality remained illegal in Britain until 1967. Even then, the Sexual Offences Act only applied to decriminalizing sex between men. I’ve never understood this. Were men simply unwilling to extrapolate that if males could love other males, then females could certainly love other females? Or did misogyny render the idea inconceivable: How could a lowly woman possibly prefer another woman when a man was around?

  In a basic cultural sense, then, lesbianism wasn’t even a thing when Vita was sorting herself out. It would be like standing in your bedroom as a teenager, staring at yourself in the mirror and thinking, maybe I really am a mermaid. Yet Vita thrashed on ahead, desiring, feeling by turns ashamed, embarrassed, confused, rapturous, and content. It wasn’t easy, but it was who she was. It would be a betrayal of her fundamental self to pretend otherwise. She refused to be trapped by the mores of the day, which made her difficult.

  Violet Keppel was another girl at Vita’s school. Her beauty was delicate, and oddly modern. In pictures and portraits, Vita looks of her time. But Violet looks as if she could guest star on Girls. They met in 1904, at the bedside of another girl who’d broken her leg. Both of their mothers had pressed them to visit. Afterward, in the hallway, Violet gave Vita a kiss. Vita was 12 and Violet, 10.

  Vita was always a terrible snob, and might have looked down on Violet as being “bedint,” or tasteless (as was anything not of the aristocracy). But her mother, Alice, was King Edward VII’s favorite mistress, which earned Violet the necessary upper-class cred.

  The love affair of Vita and Violet lasted for more than a decade, through their teens and into both of their marriages. They would meet in London, where Violet lived with her mother in Portman Square (Alice had been installed there by the king), and exchanged hundreds of sweet, urgent letters. (I’m a little sad that letters don’t fly back and forth between lovers anymore. Snapchat, I’m sorry to say, is just not the same.) Vita called Violet an “unexploded bomb.” Violet said she loved Vita “because you have never yielded i
n anything; I love you because you never capitulate. I love you for your wonderful intelligence, for your literary aspirations, for your unconscious coquetry.”

  Despite her love for Violet, Vita never expected to forgo marriage. She was too snobbish, too attached to her station in life and privilege. In any case, her mother—the battle-ax Lady Sackville—would have had her daughter’s head on a pike to even suggest such a thing. In March 1913, Vita married writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson, son of Arthur Nicolson, first Baron Carnock, at the Knole chapel. (Vita’s parents opposed the union because Nicolson earned only £250 a year, and his father had only been made a peer under Queen Victoria—practically trailer trash.)

  Nicolson was charming, winsome, and clever. The first words Vita ever heard Harold say were “What fun,” in response to an unheard question the hostess of the party posed. He was also gay, but this was a detail men kept to themselves. Vita also didn’t mention her predilection for women, or her love for Violet. As repressed and pathetic as this sounds, this secretiveness was perfectly in keeping with the times.

  Over the next four years, Vita would give birth to two sons, Benedict and Nigel. But she never gave up on Violet. During World War I, when Harold was busy at the Foreign Office in London on war matters and the boys were with their nanny, Vita and Violet would go to Paris, where they sometimes posed as a hetero couple on vacation: Julian and Eve. Vita, as Julian, made a handsome man, at once rakish and soulful. She felt bold and liberated by her attire. As Julian, Vita called herself “a person translated.” Given Vita’s No Sex Please: We’re British upbringing, the courage it took to “translate” herself into someone who felt true to who she really was took a lot of guts. Not because other people might discover her predilection—although of course there was that—but because it would put her in deeper touch with her true self. And let’s face it: That can be downright terrifying.