A third of all butterflies are lycaenids – blues, coppers, hair-streaks, harvesters and azures. And they are known for their often complex associations with particular ants, plants and parasites. The caterpillars secrete sweet ‘honeydew’ from their glands, which is milked by the ants, who then defend the caterpillars from predators. Some ants shepherd the caterpillars into their nest below ground to form their chrysalis. Other caterpillars have turned carnivore, eating ant larvae instead of leaves. It is just the sort of story Edith would have found fascinating.
When Vladimir Nabokov fled the Russian revolution in 1941, he harboured a lifelong love of lepidoptery. He studied zoology and comparative languages at Cambridge, emigrated to America, volunteered to curate the lepidoptery collection at the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology and revised the systematics of New World Lycaenid butterflies, particularly those of the largest Polyommatus ‘blues’. He proposed that these blue butterflies had arrived in the New World from Europe in successive waves, each giving rise to particular groups. At the same time Nabokov was also employed at Wellesley College as a lecturer in comparative languages, and wrote novels. Lolita, his first and most famous English-language novel, was composed while on a summer butterfly-collecting trip across the western states.
Some claim that Nabokov’s science stimulated his writing, or that his writing stimulated his science. Steven J. Gould suggested instead that they are both manifestations of the same thing: that all of Nabokov’s work, whether literary or biological, was stimulated by his love of detail, contemplation and symmetry. Nabokov himself is often said to have expressed it more controversially.
‘A writer should have the precision of a poet,’ he declared, ‘and the imagination of a scientist.’
Not everyone favoured the famed Russian writer who ‘dabbled’ in science. Some dismissed him as an amateur. In the shadow of Nabokov’s overwhelming literary legacy, his lepidopteran theory lay on the periphery of scientific thinking. But old scientific papers never die. They are always retrievable, connected through a web of systematic referencing and a punctilious obligation to acknowledge predecessors in the history of ideas. When Nabokov’s theory was retrieved and exposed to twenty-first-century technology, DNA analysis proved his theory right.
‘Our results show that Nabokov’s inferences based on morphological characters (primarily of the male genitalia) were uncannily correct,’ the authors concluded.
Nabokov would surely have been delighted.
‘The pleasures and rewards of literary inspirations are nothing,’ he once wrote, ‘beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.’
I am often told that scientists can’t write. I don’t know what that means. Science, like any academic discipline, is as much a literary art as it is a creative act. All academics are writers of a highly specialised, stylised and structured writing intended for a very particular audience, even if not of great mass appeal. Academics generally do not write in an engaging, readable style. They don’t need to. Their audience will dig through the most complex impenetrable prose to find the jewel of an idea within. They are ‘high-motivation readers’. To write for the general public is to write for a low-motivation audience. An audience that will flick the page, drop the book, click to the next screen at the slightest hint of boredom. Both approaches take skill to do well.
Scientific writing is not intended to be beautiful or to elicit emotional responses in the reader. Just because the writing is difficult for the non-expert to read does not make it bad or poorly written. It remains literary in the sense of being valued for quality of form. Scientific writing conveys information – precisely, accurately, unambiguously – so that it can be readily located, understood and replicated with minimal transmission errors. Its beauty lies both in its clarity and its density. The sheer volume of information packed into a single sentence of scientific writing is both its greatest achievement and its greatest downfall.
I wonder if Nabokov wrote his scientific papers differently from other scientists.
‘Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple – these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.’
This sentence in Nabokov’s Ada drills directly into the primitive limbic centres of my brain, recalling a giddying visceral mix of heat, sound, scent and physiology that requires no conscious explanation. A body memory.
But Nabokov, the scientist, also wrote this monster.
‘In a way the initial blunder was Swinhoe’s who while correctly giving a subfamilial ending to the group which Tutt’s intuition and Chapman’s science had recognized (“tribe” Plebeidi which exactly corresponds to the Plebejinae of Stempffer) as different from other “tribes” (i.e., subfamilies) within the Lycaenidae failed to live up to the generic diagnoses which he simply copied from Chapman’s notes in Tutt and tried to combine genitalic data he had not verified or did not understand with the obsolete “naked v. hairy eyes” system (which at Butler’s hands had resulted in probably the most ludicrous assembly of species ever concocted, see for example Butler 1900, Entom. 33: 124), so that in the case of several Indian forms which Chapman had not diagnosed, Swinhoe placed intragenerically allied species in different subfamilies and species belonging to different Tuttian “tribes” in the same subfamily.’
Scientific sentences are nearly always overloaded – to breaking point – with information. It is hard to make a B-double truck as exquisite as a Lamborghini even if, like Nabokov, you are clearly able to. Their function is entirely different. One is the heavy lifter of the intellect, while the other snatches our breath with reckless breakneck speed. Both require immense literary skill to achieve. It is the requirement of the genre, not the skill of the writer, that dictates the abundance of information and the particular style of the form. Small wonder scientists also number among great writers: Nabokov and Asimov, Vernor Vinge, Lewis Carroll and Primo Levi.
‘The corpus of scientific writing is one of the more remarkable of human literary accomplishments,’ concludes historian of science Charles Bazerman, ‘[and] gives us increasingly immense control of the material world in which we reside. These symbolic representations have literally helped us move mountains and to know when mountains might move on their own.’
The intersection between science and literature is a productive one. Edgar Allan Poe taught himself physics – culminating in that peculiar ‘prose poem’ Eureka, which anticipated concepts of modern physics in a messy mix of mysticism and spirituality. Aldous Huxley, from a family of famous biologists, was said to have declared that ‘even if I could be Shakespeare I think that I should still choose to be Faraday’.
There are so many scientists who ended up successful popular writers: Colleen McCullough, Diana Gabaldon, Toni Jordan and Barbara Kingsolver, to name but a few. But the writers who interest me most are the exceptional writers of science. Not so much the communicators, educators and journalists who popularise the work of scientists for the public, but the scientists themselves who can write for both their academic colleagues and for a broader audience. They synthesise, rather than simplify. These are the writers so skilled they can take us with them on their complicated journeys into understanding the world around us. Perhaps not always an easy stroll in the park. Sometimes the going is rough and our feet struggle to find their place, but our knowledgeable guides are there to turn back, help us find our footing, and continue on, up the mountain, gasping and exhilarated, to witness the view from the peaks.
Their science is their passion, their content, their message and their focus, and their writing – lyrical, persuasive, influential, informative, educative and beautiful – provides the most exquisite manifestation of their thoughts. It is here that we find the nature writ
ers and the science writers, often excluded from the folds of literature because of the topic, rather than their form. It is here that I find the writers, scientists and naturalists who inspired me: Rachel Carson, Gerald Durrell, Jane Goodall, S. J. Gould, Sarah Hrdy, Niko Tinbergen, Dian Fossey, Konrad Lorenz, E. O. Wilson and Isobel Bennett.
And Edith Coleman.
Literature is rarely so much about the reality of a particular place or country, as it is about the myth of a place, the image that people want to portray about their place in the world. The pioneering, wildwest frontier mythology of the United States is a powerful one.
‘America wanted its nature lessons streaked with adventure,’ wrote Thomas F. O’Connell, ‘its landscapes portrayed in high colours and cased in big frames. The time did not seem right for small pictures of nature in day-to-day dress in long-settled and more familiar Eastern neighbourhoods.’
The myth of American nature writing is the land of the blessed – of wild beauty and natural abundance, of Grand Canyons, Rocky Mountains and Valleys of Monuments. A New World emphatically, insistently, better than the Old. Cultural swagger rather than cultural cringe. By contrast, the myth of British nature writing is that of the pastoral – the yeoman farmer at one with the rural nature of hedgerows and meadows. So what is the Australian myth we perpetuate with our writing: the struggling farmer, the bush-weary battler, the determined digger? Nature writing of the battlefield.
The myth of the blessed, the myth of the pastoral and the myth of the battler. No wonder naturalists like Edith, obstinately investigating the ultra-realist minutiae of the natural world, are so often overlooked as nature writers.
Charles Percy Snow, the novelist and scientist better known as C. P. Snow, wrote a famous essay calling for stronger connections between the arts (or the ‘literary intellectuals’) and the sciences. But like inaptly timed marriage advice, he instead bequeathed us a potent metaphor for eternal separation. The concept of ‘two cultures’ seems only to have become more entrenched. Science and literature stand back to back, eternally circling, viewing exactly the same world from very different perspectives, as if unable or unwilling to recognise the presence of the other.
Edith was a taxonomist and a botanist: a very specific and focused science. She was not afraid of the specialist language you need to ‘see’ the world she described. But she kept the door firmly ajar on the larger world, allowing us to move freely between the minutiae and the general, restoring our perspective when the proximity of detail threatened to overwhelm us. Her scientific papers are always accessible, as if she did not wish to leave anyone behind. Anyone can do this, her papers say, if you are patient, if you are observant.
Edith seemed oblivious to the ivory-tower battleground between science and literature, effortlessly striding across both terrains simultaneously, coaxing a broad audience of academics and enthusiasts along with her. Whatever it is she did, however you care to classify it, it is a thoroughly singular achievement.
I come across a poem by the East Gippsland writer Louise Crisp:
Purple eyebright ringed around closely
in heathy dry forest
lilac, pink or white
‘it comes and goes’
but when it’s gone, gladness
goes with it
the yellow spot behind the lower lobe
a guide to pollinating insects
And I fall through the gaps into something much bigger than just those few words. This different thing she does with those words, which is so close to what Edith did and yet so entirely dissimilar.
I teach my science students to leave no gaps, no logical leaps, no steps unexplained in their writing. It should read like a formula: A leads to B; then B leads to C; then C leads to D. It is thought made manifest. Science writing creates a chain that effortlessly links us through a mind-bendingly complex logical progression to a conclusion. Like guides building a walking trail up a mountain, we provide the chain so that others may safely follow, arriving at the same destination, admiring the view. Gaps are not helpful here.
But gaps set us thinking, send us off in new unexplored directions. They find the mountain no-one knew was there.
There is always more than one map to a landscape, an ecosystem, a species, a life. And there is always the map that has not yet been found.
Where does Edith fit into the taxonomy of Australian nature writing? I think she is too quickly dismissed, like so many others, as ‘straight natural history writing’, as a scientist who can’t write.
That we ignore ‘straight’ natural history as if it is not nature writing makes no sense to me. It’s all about definition. If you exclude the dispassionate, the ostensibly impersonal, the objective from the mix, then you exclude the most clear-eyed and incisive of our observers. This feels like a border war to me, a marking of territory, pulling rank and establishing hierarchies. I suddenly lose interest in this debate.
There is no taxonomy of nature writing. We’re all just a bastard breed of mongrels. There are no heirs, no lineages, no inheritances. The ‘vaunted crown to dust is turned’. There is no line of descent. It is a field open to all contenders. We hybridise, mimic, interbreed and adapt. There is no phylogeny, only ontogeny. We adapt and respond to the environment we find ourselves in and any similarities are purely circumstantial, reflecting no shared inheritance.
Nature writing is what you make of it and wherever you find it. It’s not a genre of writing, not a form or a style, not a lyric, or even a literature. ‘The fish is just a fish. The sharks are all sharks – no better and no worse.’ It’s a field guide, a nature documentary, a poem and an essay; it’s a scientific paper and a magazine article, a blog and a taxonomic description. The members of this family form no hierarchy. They shift and move in relation to each other, flowing from one into the other and back again. There are no defined species constructs here, precluding the genetic transfers of information. Nature writing defies classification, order and reduction. If anything, it’s an ecology, unrelentingly complex, interrelated, multi-scaled and eternally changing. It’s an attempt to grapple with the complexity of nature and our place in it. For me, nature writing is just that – writing about nature. However you want to attempt it, whatever form it takes. I don’t need anything else.
In the midst of my research I am contacted by Jim Endersby, who is writing about Edith and the discovery of pseudocopulation. He thinks her discovery originates not just in the technical annals of science, but in fiction and popular science. At the turn of the century plants were depicted as passive and unmoving. In fiction, however, plants, and particularly orchids, are depicted as active agents, frequently both predatory and sexual. H. G. Wells is the first, and best known, of this genre. ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ was the first of many tales of murderously seductive orchids. The other influence, of course, is Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, although his theory was not initially taken up by the scientific establishment, particularly in Australia. The legwork for the dissemination of Darwin’s theory was done by the great science writers, like T. H. Huxley, Alfred Russel Wallace and Grant Allen. Was Edith influenced in her thinking by her immersion in English literature: science fiction and nature writing? Did her status on the periphery of science, rather than at the centre, free her from scientific conservatism?
‘She did read quite a lot of H. G. Wells,’ says Peter. ‘I think from memory that all or most of my copies of his work were hers.’
Canadian writer Grant Allen is an even more obvious inspiration for her work on pollination.
‘To-day, in the words of Grant Allen, half the flora of the earth has taken the imprint of the dislikes and necessities of the ubiquitous insects,’ she wrote, quoting his words from The Colour Sense. I track down the source of the quote (via Alfred R. Wallace’s The World of Life, for he too was a fan of Allen’s) and I am enchanted by his unabashedly ecocentric view in the midst of the Industrial Revolution.
‘While man has only tilled a
few level plains, a few great river-valleys, a few peninsular mountain slopes, leaving the vast mass of earth untouched by his hand, the insect has spread himself over every land in a thousand shapes, and has made the whole flowering creation subservient to his daily wants. His buttercup, his dandelion, and his meadow-sweet grow thick in every English field. His thyme clothes the hill-side; his heather purples the bleak grey moorland. High up among the Alpine heights his gentian spreads itself in lakes of blue; amid the snows of the Himalayas his rhododendrons gleam with crimson light. The insect has thus turned the whole surface of the earth into a bound-less flower-garden, which supplies him from year to year with pollen or honey, and itself in turn gains perpetuation by the baits it offers for his allurement.’
The story turns full circle, science inspiring fiction and fiction inspiring science. Not in opposition, not back to back, but in an enriching and fruitful collaboration.
An unknown woman reading by Lake Bolac, Victoria
Some nature writers look at the lake and see only the reflections of the birds and the sky, or themselves, in the gleaming surface.
‘Occasionally I lean forward and gaze into the water,’ writes Mary Oliver. ‘The water of a pond is a mirror of roughness and honesty – it gives back not only my own gaze, but the nimbus of the world trailing into the picture on all sides. The swallows, singing a little as they fly back and forth across the pond, are flying therefore over my shoulders, and through my hair. A turtle passes slowly across the muddy bottom, touching my cheekbone.’
Seeing just what is there – the world as it is and no more, not as it ought to be or as we think it might be – is a very particular artistic skill. The reflections are beautiful, but I want to see beyond the surface and the reflections. I want to know where the water came from. Why this turtle is subtly different from the turtles in another pond. I want to look through the layers of time and place, through history and prehistory. I want to see this place through the turtle’s eyes, through time’s eye, not just my own. It is the eye, not the I, that interests me most.
The Wasp and the Orchid Page 20