Allegorizings

by Allegorizings (retail) (epub)

  Generally speaking, people have been sympathetic when I fall over. Sometimes, though, they have thought it more polite not to notice my misadventures, and I was amused by the responses of the shoppers in that store at Wales. The night before, as it happened, I had appeared in a BBC Wales television film, and when passing customers saw me in the hands of the first-aid folk, my blood streaming all over the place, my clothes torn, my face ghastly with pallor, “Enjoyed the programme” was all most of them said, as they proceeded towards the check-out.

  That’s what I shall say, too, when I fall for the last time.

  The Managing Director

  TO MY MIND the Managing Director of the London Zoo has in his charge an evil institution.

  I don’t know who he is, and I dare say that personally he is a most amiable fellow, but he is an ex-officio villain to me because he directs a prison, no more, no less, in which more than eight thousand totally innocent creatures, most of them far from their native habitats, are incarcerated against their will, without trial and with no possibility of parole, for the term of their natural lives. He has had many predecessors, too—the zoo’s first bears, emus, kangaroos, llamas, zebras and turtles were first herded into Regent’s Park in 1828, and in 1832 an elephant, an alligator and a hundred rattlesnakes were transferred here from the royal menagerie in the Tower of London.

  All kinds of penal innovations have been developed on this cursed ground down the years—the world’s first reptile house was here, the first koala bear to live outside Australia grew up imprisoned here, a baby hippopotamus was reared in a cage in 1874, and a polar bear cub soon after World War II (when all the dangerous snakes were decapitated, for safety’s sake). Regent’s Park has been a Dartmoor to the animal world, or perhaps a Guantánamo Bay.

  I suspect the Managing Director recognizes no wickedness in all this. He has evidently not experienced the revelatory flash that occurs when you break through the species barrier, the ancient construction of assumptions, part atavism, part religion, which postulates a fundamental difference of privilege between mankind and the rest of the animal kingdom. He possibly believes, like many Christians, that only human animals possess souls; or perhaps he simply feels, as white racists do about coloured people, that a great organic gulf lies between his own species and all others. I would love to convert him—you know what we zealots are!

  The argument that zoos are fun for humans is presumably the basis for the Managing Director’s involvement in the business—in the past, at least, “experience of leisure development” was considered a useful qualification for the job: but the idea that any animals, in any circumstances, may properly be subjected to perpetual confinement can surely no longer be condoned by civilized minds. You might as well organize conducted tours of maximum-security jails, or bring back public hangings.

  And to claim, as the Managing Director probably would, that zoos are necessary for the survival of endangered species is like saying that the last of the Tasmanian aboriginals, before that unhappy people was made extinct, should have been locked up in England for breeding purposes. The Managing Director would presently come to realize, once I had my hands on him, that all the scientific research in the world, all the alleged benefits to conservation, cannot make up for the imprisonment of a single animal in a zoo.

  It is the fact of imprisonment, not its conditions, that makes the London Zoo an incubus of horror in the heart of the city. Sentimentalists like to say that animals born in captivity know nothing else anyway—a horrifically Nazi-like argument. In the London Zoo they produce taped gibbon calls to deceive their captive apes into a few moments of happiness, and they actually employ an animal psychologist to assimilate wild creatures into a life under lock, key and constant scrutiny.

  “If an imprisoned animal behaves similarly to the way it does in the wild,” this practitioner was once quoted as decreeing, “we can assume a degree of contentment.” Assume! The impertinence of it! A few years ago zoo apologists used to claim that animals did not share human emotions such as despair or loneliness. By now even they admit that polar bears can be driven crazy by captivity, and yet that egregious savant dared to suggest that we could “assume” contentment.

  The Managing Director would say, no doubt, that a visit to the zoo makes a happily educational outing, and he is abetted by all the subscribers, benefactors and employees of the Royal Zoological Society, by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which is too purblind and feeble to demand the abolition of zoos, and by any parents insensitive enough to allow their children, licking ice-creams, to stare through the bars, over the ditches or through the prison glass at their helpless fellow creatures.

  Just as a concentration camp commandant could not claim that he merely acted under orders, so the Managing Director cannot claim that the state of contemporary society, or the general consensus, or the needs of science, give sanction to his job. But he may not be irredeemable. Few villains are. Perhaps he will see the light one day and recognize that the only proper thing to do with his zoo is to close it down. It will have to linger on for a few years, I suppose, as a kind of hospice for its present poor inmates, until one by one they escape at last into death.

  After that there should only be a memorial plaque on the spot, remenbering the thousands of animals whose lives have been ruined in this fateful place—and perhaps paying tribute, too, to the very last of all the Managing Directors, the Liberator of Regent’s Park.

  King of the Beasts

  IT IS RAINING hard in Wales as I write. Well, no, it is not actually raining hard, it is raining morosely, which is much worse, and is plunging us one and all into gloom. Nothing goes right for us these days. We lose all our rugby matches. The postal charges are going up. The sheep are huddled reproachfully in the field outside. The only being that seems to be perfectly settled in his circumstances is my cat Ibsen.

  Is the cat Creation’s supreme invention? I rather think so. Whether it be one of the bigger models, a Siberian tiger, say, or one of the elegant boutique breeds like an Abyssinian, the feline range provides the perfect complement to any lifestyle. Some people detest all cats, I know, and come out in eczema when one approaches, but the most rabid felinophobe must surely admit that, as books furnish a room, so cats complete any mis-en-scène.

  Take my Ibsen. He is not Welsh at all, being descended from a long line of Norwegian Forest Cats. Among his ancestors were probably some of those Giant Cats who, as everyone knows, pulled the chariot of the love-goddess Freya through the northern wildernesses of antiquity. He is very large and hairy, kindly intelligent, smells of damp hay and has big feet. He could not possibly be called anything but Ibsen, because if there is one thing more than another that he looks like, it is a feline version of a Norwegian playwright.

  Of course being a true aristocrat, he blends limpidly and genially into any background. For centuries his ancestors, expelled from Valhalla with the decline of the old gods, became regular Norwegian farm cats, tough, fierce mousers, mighty breeders. Like old-fashioned human patricians in changing cultures, Ibsen’s forebears went back to the bog—losing, I would guess, some subtleties of intellect or expression (he does have a distincly plebeian miaow), but retaining those grand old qualities of resolution and independent loyalty that endeared them to the celestial Freya.

  Fifty or sixty years ago, though, connoisseurs of true breeding recognized in the workaday Norwegian farmyard cats some echo of ancient distinction. They were plucked from their humble hunting-grounds, given the lofty honorific of Norwegian Forest Cats, brushed by breeders, displayed at cat shows, neutered and sold for ridiculous prices.

  Did they care? Did they hell. By sheer force of character, mysteriously transmuted to their owners, they resisted all preposterous ideas of selective breeding or mutation. Whisked as many of them have been from haystack to villa, they remain unaffected. They don’t come in fancy colours. They are seldom dressed up in ribbons. They prefer to be in the yard or the woods, with an occasional
dip in a river, if there’s one nearby. If they could write, they would certainly be writing majestic stage plays of psychological import.

  No, no, I know, not every cat is an Ibsen. But every cat, in my view, however pitifully it has been domesticated, de-clawed, in-bred, emasculated or infantilized, remains in its heart of hearts the animal it always was. A Cat is a Cat is a Cat. The sheep may crouch, the humans may grumble, but the cat, within whatever persona he happened to inhabit, remains nobly impervious to the frivolities of time. If Freya herself, in her fog-horn Wagnerian voice, summoned Ibsen to return to his chariot duties, he might go in the end, but only after a protracted yawn, a stretching of front legs first, back legs afterwards, and an apologetic flick of the whiskers to me.

  Ah, California!

  I ARRIVED IN California once when a presidential election was seething all over the United States. In California it was an election sui generis, because the State is so big, so rich, and so different that national issues here are inextricably entangled with issues peculiar to itself. Feelings, of course, ran high enough on the rivalry for the White House, and I made straight for San Francisco, where a large proportion of the citizenry would undoubtedly like to pelt the incumbent President with rotten eggs. “I hate him, hate him, hate him, HATE HIM,” cried a civilized acquaintance of mine at the bar of the Pan-Pacific Hotel, and nobody even looked up.

  Still, an almost hallucinatory profusion of local paradoxes and ambiguities swirled around the State that day. For a start the Governor of California was the charismatically macho film actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he didn’t elucidate matters by being an almost iconically Republican Governor of a vehemently Democratic State. Then hardly had I arrived there than the California Supreme Court declared illegal the granting of licences for single-sex marriages by the glamorously popular Democratic Mayor of San Francisco. He had started authorizing them six months before, and since then 3,955 gay couples, men and women, had pledged their vows at City Hall.

  Were the justices right? Of course they were—they were merely upholding the Constitution. Of course they weren’t—had they no sense of natural justice? They were pandering to the evangelical Right. They were showing that the law cannot be flouted even by trendy celebrities. Either way, 7,910 unhappy citizens were left in a legal limbo. My informant at the Pan-Pacific was appalled, but Cissie Bonini and Lora Pertie were philosophical about it, so the San Francisco Chronicle told me, as they hung their matching wedding dresses on their bedroom wall—said Cissie, thirty-eight, “We’ll be married as many times as we need to for it to be legal.”

  The plethora of local excitements almost pushed the election off California’s front pages. There had been political scams and scandals. There had been a fierce debate about the labelling of canned tuna. There had been endemically Californian arguments about protecting the environment, climate change, whales, ecosystems, bio-regions and such. All over the State Indian tribes had been building, wanting to build or vociferously arguing their right to build gigantic gambling casinos. A couple of high-profile murder cases had been running well, there were the inevitable forest fires, a prisoner died in Solano State Prison after the removal of a wisdom tooth, a shark killed a diver, and enigmatic in the middle of it all was Schwarzenegger.

  Ah, California! Sail on, sail on, O ship of this particular State—for my money it’s above all upon the American-ness you represent, wise and frivolous, kind and disputatious, on the whole trying so earnestly to be good, that humanity with all its fears, with all its hopes of future years, hangs breathless now.

  The Mountaineer

  TENZING NORGAY WAS one of the first two men to stand upon the summit of the world—with the New Zealander Edmund Hillary he reached the top of Mount Everest on May 29, 1953, and became for a few years one of the most famous humans alive.

  It seems to me that Tenzing possessed to a remarkable degree the quality of allegory. He always meant more than he was. He was not exactly larger than life, as so many public figures are said to be—if anything it might be said that he was smaller, being a light-footed man of exceptional neatness. I got to know him when I was a reporter with the 1953 expedition, and he was in the prime of his young manhood, and actually seemed to me like a figure of life itself: springy, darting, always eager, never apparently tired.

  I did not know just how symbolical he was to become, but now I discern three allegorical themes to the story of Tenzing Norgay.

  IN 1953 HE was already the most distinguished of the Sherpas, the people living in the high mountain valleys around Everest who had become celebrated as the indomitable high-altitude porters of Himalayan climbing. Tenzing was, so to speak, an aristocrat among aristocrats: he did not climb simply for the money, like most of his peers, but was impelled by the classic mountaineering urge to reach the top of a hill just because it was there.

  This was an allegory in itself. Tenzing was the son of an itinerant yak-herder in the south-eastern valleys of Tibet, and was probably born in a tent. And if this almost mythologically underprivileged origin was not enough, even when as a young man he had moved to the marginally more comfortable Sherpa country, he was considered a second-class citizen as an immigrant from the north—not quite the real thing to the intensely class-conscious Sherpas.

  Yet already, when I first met him half a century ago, he had become a prince among them, a star and a cynosure. He had reached this eminence by force of personality, by extreme professionalism, and by exceptional responsiveness to the world at large. He had mixed easily with foreigners—Britons, Swiss, Frenchmen, Americans—and readily adopted some of their ways. Although when I first knew him he had never been out of the Indian subcontinent and had never seen the sea, he was already a true cosmopolitan.

  SUCH WAS THE original allegory of Tenzing—this fable-like emergence from the stony wastes of Tibet, where the yak herds roamed, to a status of honour among his own people and among the foreigners who met him. The second allegory is, of course, the arrival of glory. A kind of apotheosis befell Tenzing when he reached the top of Everest. It was as though a halo had settled upon him. He became not merely the most famous of all mountaineers, but one of the most famous of all adventurers, up there with the great explorers of the past.

  He was a man out of another world, the new world of a renascent Asia. He dined with kings and princes. He was honoured with medals. He rode above the petty jealousies, personal and political, which beset him the moment he returned from the mountain, and he seemed to face the world at large with a grand serenity. Nobody had met anyone quite like him before. Wherever he went in those years of his blazing fame he was treated as a being fabulous in himself—like a unicorn perhaps, or some elegant creature of the high snows.

  I dare say there will never be quite such a phenomenon again. Brilliant people out of Asia are commonplace now, and Himalayan valleys do not seem so remote as they did half a century ago. Then Tenzing seemed to most people sui generis, and I shall never forget the old English gentleman who, observing Tenzing in the full flush of splendour at an official banquet in London, remarked to me how good it was to see that Mr. Tenzing knew a decent claret when he had one.

  YET IN ALLEGORY as in all else, pride really does precede a fall. Tenzing never fell from grace, or perhaps from pride either, but the last part of his life was a story of decline. Perhaps it was inevitable. Age crept in, of course, weakening the feline grace of his physique, and with it came ill health. His family affairs grew unhappily complex. His fame began to fade, and with it his confidence. In his last years he was plagued by depression—the very last condition I would ever have foretold for him.

  But here is that third, last allegory. In all his years of hardship and success, of magnificent strength and debilitating old age, happiness and disillusion, Tenzing seems to have remained essentially himself. He seldom let himself down. He looked fortune and history in the eye, and remained a man for a’ that. I prefer to remember him always as I saw him fifty-odd years ago, when in the aftermath of his gr
eat climb we met by chance near a yak herder’s hut in the lee of Everest. I was on my way home. He was going to a neighbouring village to see his aged mother, and tell her the news of the ascent. We had breakfast together beside one of the clear streams that came rushing out of the Khumbu glacier.

  He really was like some legendary mountain creature then—brown as a nut, supple as a willow, and when he stripped to the waist to wash himself in the icy water of the stream, how slim and sinewy he looked as he grinned at me through his shivers, rather like a deer that had come splashing out of the shallows, and was shaking the water from its antlers!

  I did not expect ever to meet him again, having no notion of the astonishments to come, so he gave me a souvenir of our association. It was a photograph of him, squatting in an open-necked shirt beside a litter of Tibetan terriers given him, he told me, by the Dalai Lama. I asked him to sign it for me, so then and there he did—just the one word, TENZING.

  It was a kingly sort of signature, I thought. It was the only word he could write.

  Riding the Icon

  “ICON” HAS BECOME a cliché word of our times. It long ago lost its religious connotation, at least in the populist West, and is applied nowadays not just to the computer symbols that first propelled it into the popular vernacular, but to footballers, buildings, trendy restaurants or yeast extracts. Not long ago I took a ride on a train called the California Zephyr, which had once been an icon itself. I did it for old times’ sake, because I remembered with pleasure and affection my first journey on it, fifty years before when this Flagship of the Western Railroads was all glitter, speed, assurance and marvellous competence. The Zephyr had seemed to me then a very emblem of our achievement—of our civilization, even, up there with the art and the philosophy.