“Once I would have supposed all those things, but I don’t any longer. People triumph over worse families than his could have been, and do astonishing things with ruined bodies, and I’m sick to death of people squealing about their mothers. Everybody has to have a mother, and not everybody is going to draw the Grand Prize—whatever that may be. What’s a perfect mother? We hear too much about loving mothers making homosexuals, and neglectful mothers making crooks, and commonplace mothers stifling intelligence. The whole mother business needs radical re-examination.”
“You sound as if in a minute you were going to give me a lecture about Original Sin.”
“And why not? We’ve had psychology and we’ve had sociology and we’re still just where we were, for all practical purposes. Some of the harsh old theological notions of things are every bit as good, not because they really explain anything, but because at bottom they admit they can’t explain a lot of things, so they foist them off on God, who may be cruel and incalculable but at least He takes the guilt for a lot of human misery.”
“So you think there’s no explanation for Parlabane? For his failure to live up to expectation? For what he is now?”
“You’ve lived in a university longer than I have, Clem, and you’ve seen lots of splendidly promising young people disappear into mediocrity. We put too much value on a certain kind of examination-passing brain and a ready tongue.”
“In a minute you’ll be saying that character is more important than intelligence. I know several people of splendid character who haven’t got the wits of a hen.”
“Stop telling me what I’m going to say in a minute, Clem, and take a good look at yourself: certainly one of the most brilliant men in this university and a man of international reputation, and the first time you get into a tiny moral mess with a girl you become a complete simpleton.”
“You presume on your cloth to insult me.”
“Balls! I’m not wearing my cloth; I only put on the full rig on Sundays. Have another drink.”
“You don’t suppose, do you, that this discussion is degenerating into mere whisky-talk?”
“Very likely. But before we sink below the surface, let me tell you what twenty years of the cloth, as you so old-fashionedly call it, have taught me. Intellectual endowment is a factor in a man’s fate, and so is character, and so is industry, and so is courage, but they can all go right down the drain without another factor that nobody likes to admit, and that’s sheer, bald-headed Luck.”
“I would have expected you to say God’s Saving Grace.”
“Certainly you can call it that if you like, and the way He sprinkles it around is beyond human comprehension. God’s a rum old joker, Clem, and we must never forget it.”
“He’s treated us well, wouldn’t you say, Simon? Here’s to the Rum Old Joker!”
“The Rum Old Joker! And long may he smile on us.”
(3)
THE LABORATORIES OF Professor Ozias Froats looked more than anything else like the kitchens of a first-rate hotel. Clean metal tables, sinks, an array of cabinets like big refrigerators, and a few instruments that looked as if they were concerned with very accurate calculations. I cannot say what I expected; by the time I visited him the hullabaloo stirred up by Murray Brown had so coloured the public conception of his work that I would not have been surprised if I had found Ozy in the sort of surroundings one associates with the Mad Scientist in a bad movie.
“Come on in, Simon. You don’t mind if I call you Simon, do you? Call me Ozy; you always did.”
It was a name he had lifted from the joke-name of a rube undergraduate to the honoured pet-name of a first-rate footballer. In the great days when he and Boom-Boom Glazebrook were the stars of the University team the crowd used to sing a revised version of a song that had been popular years earlier—
Ozy Froats, and dozy doats
And little Lambsie divy—
and if he was injured in the game the cheer-leaders, led by his own sweetheart, Peppy Peggy, brought him to his feet with the long, yearning cry, ‘Come o-o-o-o-n Ozy! Come O-O-O-O-N OZY!’ But everybody knew that Ozy was a star in biology, as well as football, and a Very Big Man On Campus. What he had been doing since graduation, and a Rhodes Scholarship, only God and biologists knew, but the President had named him as another Ornament to the University. So I was glad he had not wholly forgotten me.
“Murray Brown is giving you a rough time, Ozy.”
“Yes. You saw that there was a parade outside the Legislature yesterday. People wanting education grants cut. Some of the signs read, ‘Get the Shit Out of Our Varsity’. That meant me. I’m Murray’s great peeve.”
“Well, do you actually work with—?”
“Sure I do. And a very good thing, too. Time somebody got to grips with it.—God, people are so stupid.”
“They don’t understand, and they’re overtaxed and scared about inflation. The universities are always an easy mark. Cut the frills away from education. Teach students a trade so they can make a living. You can’t persuade most of the public that education and making a living aren’t the same thing. And when the public sees people happily doing what they like best and getting paid for it, they are envious, and want to put a stop to it. Fire the unprofitable professors. Education and religion are two subjects on which everybody considers himself an expert; everybody does what he calls using his common sense.—I suppose your work costs a lot of money?”
“Not as much as lots of things, but quite a bit. It isn’t public money, most of it. I get grants from foundations, and the National Research Council, and so forth, but the University backs me, and pays me, and I suppose I’m a natural scapegoat for people like Brown.”
“Your work is offensive because of what you work with. Though I should think it was cheap.”
“Oh no, not at all. I’m not a night-soil man, Simon. The stuff has to be special, and it costs three dollars a bucket, and if you multiply that by a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five—and that’s the smallest test-group I can use—it’s three hundred dollars or more a day, seven days a week, just for starters.”
“A hundred buckets a day! Quite a heap.”
“If I was in cancer research you wouldn’t hear a word said. Cancer’s all the rage, you know, and has been for years. You can get any money for it.”
“I don’t suppose you could say this was related to cancer research?”
“Simon! And you a parson! That’d be a lie! I don’t know what it’s related to. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“Pure science?”
“Nearly. Of course I have an idea or two, but I’m working from the known toward the unknown. I’m in a neglected field and an unpopular one because nobody really likes messing with the stuff. But sooner or later somebody had to, and it turns out to be me. I suppose you want to hear about it?”
“I’d be delighted. But I didn’t come to pry, you know. Just a friendly visit.”
“I’m glad to tell you all I can. But will you wait a few minutes; there’s somebody else coming—a girl Hollier wants to know about my work, because of something she’s doing in his line, whatever that is. Anyway, she should be here soon.”
Shortly she appeared, and it was my New Testament Greek student and the thorn in the flesh of Professor Hollier, that unexpected puritan: Miss Theotoky. A queer group we made: I was in my clerical clothes and back-to-front collar, because I had been at a committee dinner where it seemed appropriate, and Maria was looking like the Magdalen in a medieval illumination, though not so gloomy, and Ozias Froats looked like what was left of a great footballer who had been transformed into a controversial research scientist. He was still a giant and still very strong, but his hair was leaving him, and he had what seemed to be a melon concealed in the front of his trousers, when his white lab-coat revealed it. There were pleasantries, and then Ozy got down to his explanation.
“People have always been interested in their faeces; primitive people take a look after they’ve had a moti
on, to see if it tells them anything, and there are more civilized people who do that than you’d suppose. Usually they are frightened; they’ve heard that cancer can give you blood in your stools, and you’d be amazed how many of them rush off to the doctor in a sweat when they’ve forgotten the Harvard beets they ate the day before. In the old days doctors looked at the stuff, just the way they looked at urine. They couldn’t cut into anybody, but they made quite a lot of those examinations.”
“Scatomancy, they called it,” said Maria. “Could they have learned anything?”
“Not much,” said Ozy; “though if you know what you are doing you can find out a few things by smell—the faeces of a drug-addict, for instance, are easy to identify. Of course when real investigative science got going they did some work on faeces—you know, measured the amounts of nitrogen and ether extract and neutral fat and cholalic acid, and all the inspissated mucus and bile and bacteria, and the large amounts of dead bacteria. The quantity of food residue is quite small. That work was useful in a restricted area as a diagnostic process, but nobody carried it very far. What really got me going on it was Osler.
“Osler was always throwing off wonderful ideas and insights that he didn’t follow up; I suppose he expected other people would deal with them when they got around to it. As a student I was caught by his brief remarks on what was then called catarrhal enteritis; he mentioned changes in the constitution of the intestinal secretion—said, ‘We know too little about the succus entericus to be able to speak of influences induced by change in its quantity or quality.’ He wrote that in 1896. But he proposed some associations between diarrhoea and cancer, and anaemia, and some kidney ailments, and what he said stuck in my mind.
“It wasn’t till about ten years ago that I came on a book that brought back what Osler had said, though the application was radically different. It was a proposal for what the author named Constitutional Psychology—a man called W.H. Sheldon, a respected Harvard scientist. Roughly, what he said was that there was a fundamental connection between physique and temperament. Not a new idea, of course.”
“Renaissance writing is full of it,” said Maria.
“You wouldn’t call it scientific, though. You wouldn’t be able to go that far.”
“It was pretty good,” said Maria. “Paracelsus said that there were more than a hundred, and probably more than a thousand, kinds of stomach, so that if you collected a thousand people it would be as foolish to say they were alike in body, and treat them as if they were alike in body, as it would be to suppose they were identical in spirit. ‘There are a hundred forms of health,’ he said, ‘and the man who can lift fifty pounds may be as able-bodied as a man who can lift three hundred pounds.’ ”
“He may have said it, but he couldn’t prove it.”
“He knew it by insight.”
“Now, now, Miss Theotoky, that’ll never do. You have to prove things like that experimentally.”
“Did Sheldon prove what Paracelsus said experimentally?”
“He certainly did!”
“That just proves Paracelsus was the greater man; he didn’t have to fag away in a lab to get the right answer.”
“We don’t know if Sheldon got the completely right answer; we don’t have any answers yet—just careful findings. Now—”
“She’s teasing you, Ozy,” I said. “Maria, you be quiet and let the great man talk. Perhaps we’ll give Paracelsus an innings later. You know, of course, that Professor Froats is under great criticism at present, of a kind that could be harmful.”
“So was Paracelsus—hounded from one country to another, and laughed at by all the universities. And he didn’t have academic tenure, either. But I’m sorry; please don’t let me interrupt.”
What a contentious girl she was! But refreshing. I had a sneaking feeling for Paracelsus myself. But I wanted to hear about Sheldon, and on Ozy went.
“He wasn’t just saying that people are different, you know. He showed how they were different. He worked on four thousand college students, altogether. Not the best sample, of course—all young, all intelligent—not enough variety, which is what I’m trying to achieve. But he finally divided his four thousand guinea pigs into three main groups.
“They were the endomorphs, who had soft, rounded bodies, and the mesomorphs, who were muscular and bony, and then the ectomorphs, who were fragile and skinny. He did extensive research into their temperaments and their backgrounds and the way they lived and what they wanted from life, and he found that the fatties were viscerotonics, or gut-people, who loved comfort in all its forms; and the muscular, tough types were somatotonics, whose pleasure was in exercise and exertion; and the skinnies were cerebrotonics, who were intellectual and nervous—head-people, in fact.
“So far this is not big news. I suppose Paracelsus could have done that by simple observation. But Sheldon showed by measurements and a variety of tests that everybody contains some elements of all three types, and it is the mixture that influences—influences, I said, not wholly determines—temperament. He devised a scale running from one to seven to assess the quantity of such elements contained in a single subject. So you see that a 711 would be a maximum endomorph—a fatty with hardly any muscle or nerve—a real slob. And a 117 would be a physical wreck, all brain and nerve and a physical liability. Big brain, by the way, doesn’t necessarily mean a capacious or well-managed intellect. The perfectly balanced creature would be a 444 but you don’t see many and when you do you’ve probably found the secretary of an athletic club with a rich membership and first-class catering.”
“Do you go around spotting the types?” said Maria.
“Certainly not. You can’t type people without careful examination, and that means exact measurement. Want to see?”
Of course we did want to see. Obviously Ozy was loving every minute of this, and in no time he had a screen set up, and a lantern, and was showing us slides of men and women of all ages and appearance, photographed naked against a grid of which the horizontal and lateral lines made it possible to judge with accuracy where they bulged and where they were wanting.
“This isn’t what I’d do for the public,” said Ozy. “Then the faces would be blacked out and also the genitals. But this is among friends.”
Indeed it was. I recognized a paunchy University policeman, and a fellow from Physical Plant who pruned trees. And wasn’t that one of the secretaries from the President’s office? And a girl from the Alumni House? Several students I had seen flashed by, and—really, this is hardly the place for me—Professor Agnes Marley, heavier in the hams than her tweeds admitted, and with a decidedly poor bosom. All of these unhappy creatures had been photographed in a hard, cruel light. And in big black figures at the bottom right-hand corner of each picture was their ratio of elements, determined by Sheldon’s scale. Ozy switched on the lights again.
“You see how it goes?” he said. “By the way, I hope you didn’t recognize any of those people. No harm done if you did, but people are sometimes sensitive. Everybody wants to be typed, just as they want to have their fortunes told. Me, now, I’m a 271; not much fat, but enough, as you see, to make some trouble when I’m tied to sedentary work; I’m a seven in frame and muscle—I’d be a Hercules if I had a few more units on either end of my scale. I’m only a one in the cerebrotonic aspect, which doesn’t mean I’m dumb, thank God, but I’ve never been what you’d call nervy or sensitive. That’s why this Brown thing doesn’t bother me too much.—By the way, I suppose you noticed the varying hirsutism of those people? The women are sensitive about it, but it’s extremely revealing to a scientist in my kind of work.
“Typing at a glance—I’d never attempt it seriously. But you can tell a lot about typology by the kind of things people say. Christ, now; tradition and all the pictures represent Him as a cerebrotonic ectomorph, and that raises a theological point that should interest you, Simon. If Christ was really the Son of Man, and assumed human flesh, you’d have thought he’d be a 444, wouldn’t you? A man
who felt for everybody. But no—a nervy, thin type. Must have been tough, though; great walker, spell-binding orator, which takes strength, put up with a scourging and a lot of rough-house from soldiers; at least a three in the mesomorphic range.
“It’s fascinating, isn’t it? There you are, Simon, a professional propagandist and interpreter of a prophet who wasn’t, literally, your type at all. Just off the top of my head, I’d put you down as a 425—soft, but chunky and possessed of great energy. You write a good deal, don’t you?”
I thought of The New Aubrey, and nodded.
“Of course. That’s your type, when it’s combined with superior intelligence. Enough muscle to see you through; sensitive but not ridden with nerves, and a huge gut. Because that’s what makes your type come out so far in front, you see? Some of you viscerotonics have a gut that is almost double the length of the gut in a real cerebrotonic. They haven’t got a lot of gut, but they’re beggars for sex. The muscular ones aren’t sexy to nearly the same extent and the fatties would just as soon eat. It’s the little, skinny ones who can never let it alone. I could tell you astonishing things. But you’re a gut-man, Simon. And just right for your kind of parson: fond of ceremony and ritual, and of course a big eater. Fart much?”
How much is much? I did not take up this lead.
“I expect you do, but on the sly, because of that five at your cerebrotonic end. But writers—look at them. Balzac, Dumas, Trollope, Thackeray, Dickens in his later years, Henry James (a lifelong sufferer from constipation, by the way), Hugo, Goethe—at least forty feet of gut in every one of them.”
Ozy had quite forgotten about scientific calm and was warming to his great theme.
“You’ll want to know, though, what this has to do with faeces. I just got a hunch, remembering Osler, that there might be variations in composition, according to type, and that might be interesting. Because what people forget, or don’t consider, is that the bowel movement is a real creation; everybody produces the stuff in an incidence that ranges within normality from three times a day to about once every ten days, with, say, once every forty-eight hours as a mean. There it is, and it’d be damned funny if there was nothing individual or characteristic about it, and it might just be that it varied according to health. You know the old country saying: ‘Every man’s dung smells sweet in his own nose’. But not in anybody else’s nose. It’s a creation, a highly characteristic product. So let’s get to work, I thought.
The Rebel Angels Page 12