by Nick Webb
Polly was happy there too. She was tall for her age, earnest, pretty and bespectacled. The outdoors life suited her, she loved riding and had also made friends with the Ogle boys, particularly the seven-year-old Joshua. Tom, Chris’s youngest boy who was then five, was very fond of Douglas and missed him a lot when he died. “He had great farts,” he said, and indeed Douglas was capable of the odd duvet-billowing eructation. It always amused him; one of the most memorable definitions in The Meaning of Liff was the Affcot—the sort of fart you hope people will still talk about after.
The families were close. Chris is in the clothing business and successful in a field far removed from Douglas’s own, something that was probably good for Douglas as the media world operates in an orgy of self-regard that can become oppressive. Douglas and Chris otherwise had much in common: their love for their children, an enthusiasm bordering on the reckless for Apple Macs, Mercedes cars, and good food and wine. They even sported the same make of fine but obscure wrist watch (an Ulysse Nardin).
In 2000, the families had enjoyed a blissful holiday together in Fiji. Douglas, a keen diver, had been so overjoyed with the experience that he had to call someone to share it. (Throughout his life if he found something pleasurable he would encourage others to try it.) He was thrilled to learn that his state-of-the-art cell phone would work there, so he stood clutching his high-tech gizmo in thigh-deep water in a cove on a tiny island, and rang Sophie Astin, his assistant in The Digital Village. With a certain edge to her voice, she reminded a contrite Douglas that the world was round even for him. In London it was darkest night; she had been fast asleep. Later Douglas discovered that the coverage was so good because they were only twenty minutes away from Castaway Island where Tom Hanks had starred in the movie of the same name. Apparently, he had arranged for a local satellite relay to be installed so he could ring his agent. “What a pity,” Douglas said afterwards, with his writer’s magpie instinct for an anecdote, “that Tom Hanks had never made a road movie on the Pacific Coast Highway.” Mobile coverage is notoriously patchy along that route.
Above all, by 2001 the long pause between books had topped up Douglas’s creative batteries. Writing had always been difficult, but now he had a treasure store of new ideas and was buckling down to the long-awaited book with extraordinary application.
Douglas liked cars, and, following a disastrous young-man’s flirtation with Porsches, he developed a fondness for solidly engineered, luxury saloons like the Lexus or Mercedes. It amused him that they could look so respectable, but deliver an unnecessary quantity of horsepower if the driver were feeling daft enough. That final Friday, 11 May, he glided down to the gym in his Mercedes 500 as usual, in order to take some exercise and return home in good time for the arrival from England of his mother, Janet. She was already in the air, on a British Airways 747.
In the gym, Peter, his personal trainer, put him through a routine that had been especially devised for him—twenty minutes on an aerobic stair machine to be followed by stomach crunches. If you have tried a stair machine, you will know that pretty soon rivulets of sweat run like molten lead down your back; the thighs seem on the point of spontaneous combustion. But although the regimen was hard work, it was not dangerously excessive for a chap of Douglas’s age and general state of health. He wore a heart monitor and Peter was there to keep an eye on him.
It was Douglas’s habit to stop by after his exercise sessions at the Ogles’ house, handily just opposite Platinum Fitness. They’d have a coffee, boast about their children and shoot the breeze.
Chris Ogle relished Douglas’s appearances, looking righteously exercised, at his home. With the anguished clarity of retrospect he suspects that Douglas may have suffered a minor heart attack shortly before 11 May. After his session in the gym the week before he died, Douglas had as usual called by, but in an uncharacteristically distressed state. He was pale and very tired. He had to lie down, and he slept for hours while Chris busied himself preparing for a business trip to South Africa. Waking much revived, Douglas was still concerned about a slight tingling in his arm. However, his local hospital did some tests and could not detect anything serious. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut, an author much admired by Douglas, so aptly observed. So it goes . . .
But the health scare the previous week hadn’t put Douglas off his regime. So on this day, as usual, he had finished with the torture of the step machine, and was ready for the stomach crunches. The very term sounds mediaeval.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fans will recall that Douglas attributed to the humble towel a miraculous potential for reassurance and utility. “There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is,”* 5 the Narrator observes with admiration. The role of the towel traces its lineage back to the summer of 1978 when Douglas and various pals were on holiday in Corfu. Douglas was supposed to be writing, but a certain amount of hedonism and frolicking on the beach also featured. Douglas’s towel—he needed one the size of a marquee’s groundsheet—was forever going missing. Perhaps it had some homing instinct for the sea, like a baby turtle. Finding it became synonymous with being a really together, cool kind of guy.
You may be touched to learn that, feeling faint from the rigours of the machine, Douglas picked up his towel from Peter and clutched it to himself before lying down on a bench. In these circumstances specialists advise that becoming horizontal may not be expedient, but the piercing clarity of retrospect takes no account of the reality of an enormous, sweaty man, probably feeling a little woozy, poised to topple like an uprooted tree.
He lay down. Peter glanced away for a second. When he looked back he thought that Douglas was messing about. Still holding on to his towel, he had rolled quietly off the bench. He had fainted. Peter called an ambulance, which efficiently speeded Douglas off to hospital. He never regained consciousness.
He had suffered a catastrophic cardiac arrest. Astonishingly—nearly instantaneously as it turned out, and mercifully without pain—his huge heart had failed him. Jane said he just stopped, like one of his beloved computers crashing and failing to reboot.
He was dead.
••••••
“I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.” “But,” says Man, “the Babel Fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It proves you exist, and so therefore you don’t. QED.” “Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. “Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore he proves that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.
Most leading theologians claim this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book Well, That About Wraps It Up For God.
FIT THE FIRST, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
It may seem odd to start with an account of Douglas Adams’s world view, but it underpinned much of what he did. It is a key—not The Key, as such things do not exist outside self-help paperbacks—to how he thought.
Douglas published his first piece of commercial writing when he was twelve. It was a fan letter to the Eagle,* 6 the smashing—and quite high-minded—boys’ comic. It was 1965, the year Churchill died and the Beatles released Rubber Soul. Wily Harold Wilson was Labour Prime Minister. The Vietnamese War had started in earnest with a massive build-up of American troops and the heavy bombing of North Vietnam. It would be six years before Intel developed the first silicon chip. Marijuana was still a gesture of defiance, not just a recreational option, and long hair on men was considered by some to be a dangerous threat to the fabric of society. It was the sixties: in the West a whole range of flukishly favourable circumstances conspired to produce massive social change and the most spoilt generation in the history of the world.
Little of this upheaval reached Essex, however, where Douglas attended a school that was proud of having cherished the same values since 1558. His contribution to the
boys’ comic earned him ten shillings. In those days, before the decimal digits had fingered the eccentric British currency, ten bob (as shillings were known) was 50p in today’s money. It was an amount large enough to have its own pretty brown note; with it you could buy twenty 6d (old pennies) chocolate bars. Douglas’s letter, characteristically playful, described a state of high anxiety, the source of which—after some sneaky authorial misdirection—turned out to be the arrival of the Eagle itself.
Dan Dare was the Eagle’s most famous creation. An intrepid space pilot with a fine line in unflappability and cocked eyebrows, his origins lay in the fighter aces of the Second World War. Week by week Dan Dare, and his well-upholstered sidekick, Digby (what is it about heroes that they so often need a plump git as a foil?), would fight to save the universe from the evil attentions of the Treens and their mastermind, the Mekon, a small, green hominid whose vast cranium was swollen with malevolent intelligence. The Mekon travelled by anti-gravity saucer—which was just as well as it was by no means clear whether his spindly limbs would support the weight of that enormous head. The artwork, by Frank Hampson, was superb and mint copies of the comic are prized on the collectors’ market. Years later the Mekon reappeared oddly in Douglas’s life, played by Rick Wakeman, the legendary rock keyboard player, who performed as the malign alien in a production of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at the Roundhouse, one of London’s largest venues for alternative theatre.
The Eagle fired the imaginations of a generation of British youngsters. It wasn’t just Dan Dare whose adventures took the readers off-planet. Nearly every week in the centre of the comic was a double-page spread, in full colour, of a machine cut away in three dimensions to reveal its inner workings. These were artefacts with glamour: ocean liners, locomotives, record-breaking cars, jet fighters and so on. Also, executed with the same matter-of-fact verisimilitude—as if such things existed already—there were interplanetary shuttles, space stations and starships. The Eagle just took it for granted that such marvels were coming, and so did its readers. The world did not stop at the corner shop, or even at the edge of the atmosphere.
Douglas loved that comic. He was a boy who lived very intensely in his own head. At twelve he was already six feet tall. As an adolescent, and later as a man, he did not fit comfortably into the world.
Schools in those days—and it lingers on still—were firmly in the grip of the idea that a profound dichotomy exists between Art and Science. The British educational system pivots around that great divide. Very few children understand that a decision at thirteen to drop, say, physics is an existential moment destined to affect their whole lives. Their thinking is more along the lines of, “What subjects do I like the most or tyrannize me the least?” From such factors as the scariness of the chemistry teacher are our futures determined.
C.P. Snow famously labelled this great divide the Two Cultures, and it has a long and ignoble history. Some commentators attribute Britain’s decline as a world power to the tradition that its best brains learned Latin and Greek with a view to doing something mandarin in the Civil Service, rather than studying trade, technology or engineering.
A cultured gent, the sentiment ran, was a bundle of sensibility, sustained in town by a distant estate, who could talk fluently on any subject without doing it much damage or, God forbid, giving offence. Even today you can meet Brits at dinner parties who can—amusingly—say nothing all evening, but who nevertheless are quite sure that you’re a better person if you appreciate quattrocento painting and have no clue how a television functions. John Brockman in the introduction to his book, The Third Culture, argues that such scientific illiterates are pitiably disabled when it comes to understanding how the world works.
Douglas was well educated, but caught in the traditional system. The fork in the road labelled Art in one direction and Science in the other later struck him as absurd. Why not go straight on? But at the time the system obliged him to choose and, with his love of language and his finely attuned ear for the rhythm of a sentence, it is not surprising that he took the arts route.
But in another time, or under a less rigid educational tradition, the river that carried him off to Cambridge could have swept him into the great sea of science. Douglas stood on the bridge between art and science, waving madly in both directions. Cultured and well-read scientists abound, but arts people who can define Planck’s Constant are rare beasts.
In his lectures, he was wont to observe that, in order to understand the human condition and how the world worked, in the nineteenth century you had to read the great novels of the time, but in the twentieth century the path to that kind of enlightenment came from reading science.
Douglas himself expressed it well in his response to a question about how his reading habits had changed:* 7
I read much more science than novels. I think the role of the novel has changed a little bit. In the nineteenth century, the novel was where you went to get your serious reflections and questionings about life. You’d go to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Nowadays, of course, you know the scientists actually tell us much more about such issues than you would ever get from novelists. So I think that for the real solid red meat of what I read I go to science books, and read some novels as light relief.
Human beings are born with a sense of wonder. Occasionally one encounters kids who seem destined to be tomorrow’s actuaries right from the off, but by and large it’s true. Babies burble with glee as they discover a new sensation. How they laugh when they discover that banging a saucepan correlates with a bloody awful noise. But somewhere on the path to adulthood the world becomes familiar and fades to grey. Is it routine that does us the mischief, or the cynical knowingness we call sophistication? We diminish; as we age the level of our world goes down as if we were goldfish in a slowly leaking bowl. Douglas, with his wild enthusiasms, resisted this shrinkage passionately.
He continued:
The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous, extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened—it’s just wonderful. And I feel, you know, that the opportunity to spend seventy or eighty years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.
Douglas never ceased to perceive the world in all its strangeness—and the more he read science (and he inhaled it wholesale in volume) the more mind-buggeringly* 8 improbable it all appeared. The Krikkitmen in Life, the Universe and Everything had never seen the stars because their planet moved through an impenetrable cloud of dust. They were convinced that they were alone—if only because they could not see any universe to observe outside themselves. In this respect they had a lot more justification than we who are Earth-bound and refuse to look up. The night sky is heartbreakingly wonderful, and there’s more beauty and complexity if we look the other way, down the size scale.* 9 Unfortunately, the Krikkitmen suffer a spasm of xenophobia when they discover that there is life elsewhere—indeed that the universe is teeming with the filthy stuff. Their mission, with a sardonic backwards glance at the much-parodied opening words of Star Trek, is to seek it out and destroy it.* 10 Douglas’s view of the Krikkitmen would be similar to his view of people who resolutely decline to learn what science can tell us about the universe we inhabit.
Of life, the universe and everything, it’s life that’s such an extraordinary predicament of matter. As far as we can tell, it’s hugely outnumbered by inanimate material. Einstein said that the greatest mystery of the universe is that we can comprehend it. We struggle to describe how unlikely it is that some minute configuration of stuff on a speck of rock revolving around an undistinguished G-type star (in what Douglas called the unfashionable western spiral arm of the galaxy) should have stirred into life. For that stuff to evolve further to the extent that it became sentient is amazing. The fact that
we human beings have compelling theoretical reasons to believe that we can make observations, and draw conclusions, that are relevant to the whole cosmos is improbable to such an extent that language can scarcely accommodate it. Douglas went through life shaking his head at the sheer implausibility that some organic molecule could self-organize into a stable form of slightly higher order, and eventually—via a process of great beauty but entirely without external purpose—turn into creatures as disparate as you, the reader, the possessor of the most complex thing we yet know of in the universe (the three-pound lump of human brain), and, say, a sulphur-metabolizing worm at a submarine volcanic vent. What is more, the journey took less than four billion* 11 years.
The process by which this happened is called evolutionary biology. It was one of Douglas’s intense enthusiasms and integral to his view of the world. Jokes about evolution abound in all Douglas’s books. The Vogons are the only creatures who decide to do without it (“Evolution,” they thought. “Who needs it?”), because they rectify their grosser anatomical inconveniences surgically.* 12 Remember the Haggunenons of Vicissitus Three, whose chromosomes were so impatient that they quite frequently evolved several times over lunch so that if they were unable to reach a coffee spoon they would mutate into something with longer arms?* 13 Or the cavemen from the early Earth who were outevolved by a bunch of telephone sanitizers? Think of his contention that coming down from the trees was a big mistake, or that our troubles began in earnest when we emerged from the sea.