The Biographer's Tale (6 page)

It was true that the foul papers were even shuffled as to order; pages 10–13 seemed to belong between pages 26 and 27. The
reference to the Maelstrøm followed, naturally it seemed, some references to fjords, but after some thought, and consultation of syntax and common sense, I became convinced that it too had become misplaced, and should have been attached to what appeared to be a quite different narrative. I decided that what I had before me was three sections of three different biographical accounts. It was possible, of course, that they were meant to form parts of one book. Ms. Middleton confirmed, what I knew, really, that there had been no label or title on the package. The heroes, or central figures, of the passages were referred to with initials only, CL, FG and HI. This may have been a device to assist a poor typist, but I read it, involuntarily, as part of a teasing reticence, not to say wilful concealment that I was beginning to ascribe to my fictive Destry-Scholes, with his thin buttocks, speckled tweed trousers and cramped, identity-less dwellings. So we piece things together. I shall transcribe the narratives as I found them. The subjects were reasonably easy to identify, and I do not propose to mystify anyone. Anyone? Who is going to read this? I give them baldly, out of their original crumpled chaos. There were no headings. The Roman numerals are mine, as Miss Middleton's (not transcribed) were Arabic.

A
S HE STRUCK OUT
of the country of the Lapps, he noted a horse's jawbone hanging by the roadside.

“By the road hung a
maxilla inferiori equi
, which had
6
incisores sat obtusos et detritos
2
caninos et distincto spatio
,
12
molares utrinque
. If I knew how many
dentes et quales
, and how many dugs each animal had, and
ubi
, I think I could devise a
methodum naturalissimum omnium quadripedum.”

T
HE MENTION
of dugs and teeth suggests he was thinking of clarifications beyond the simple quadruped, though he had not, at this early point, conceived of the mammal. He noted it in his little notebook and continued on his way north. He was wearing, he tells us, “a little unpleated coat of West Gothland cloth with facings and a collar of worsted shag, neat leather breeches—purchased secondhand at an auction—a pig-tailed wig, a cap of green fustian, a pair of
top boots and a small leather bag, nearly two feet long and not quite so wide, with hooks on one side so it can be shut and hung up.” In this bag he carried a shirt, two pairs of half-sleeves, two nightcaps, an inkhorn, a pen-case, a magnifying glass and a small spy-glass, a gauze veil as protection from midges, his journal and a stock of sheets of paper stitched together, to press plants between (both in folio), a comb, and his manuscripts on ornithology, his
Flora Uplandica
, his
Characteres Generici
. He had a short sword, and a small fowling-piece between his thigh and the saddle. It was Friday, 12 May 1732. He was twenty-five years old, all but about half a day.

He travelled north round the Gulf of Bothnia on the coastal route to Umeå (about 400 miles), dismounting frequently to study a flower or a stone, or to snatch a young horned owl from its nest. Then he turned inland, travelling now due west into the country inhabited by the Lycksele Lapps. He set off up the River Umeå by boat, in perfect weather, noting:

“It was an immense joy to observe at sunrise the tranquil stream, disturbed neither by the Naiads with their floods and torrents, nor by the soughing of Aeolus, and to see how the woods on either side of it were reflected to provide for the traveller a subterranean kingdom below the surface … Such of the giant firs as still defied Neptune smiled in the waters, deceptive in their reflection; but he and his brother Aeolus had taken revenge on many of them, Neptune devouring their roots and Aeolus casting down their summits.”

He was disposed at times to think of the Lapps as innocent inhabitants of a primitive paradise, or of the late
pastoral simplicity of Ovid's Silver Age. “Their soil is unwounded by the plough, their lives by the clash of arms. They have not found their way into the bowels of the earth; they do not wage wars to establish territorial boundaries. They wander from place to place, live in tents, lead the patriarchal life of the shepherds of old.” He took note, when he managed to reach the Lapp people, of their relations with the reindeer, “their estate, their cow, their companion and their friend.” He solved the problem of the clacking sound their hooves made on snow (their hooves were hollow) and correctly ascribed the pattern of small holes on most reindeer skins to the amorous activities of the gadfly,
Oestrus tarandi
, who deposits her eggs under their skins, and causes their frequent shifting flights across the snow. He observed that the gadfly was completely covered with hairs—a providence of the Creator, so that she could survive in the icy mountains.

He was himself a genuinely devout Christian, and made considerable efforts to reach the scattered churches in these remote lands, where, he remarked, churchgoers often had to “wade up to the armpits through icy water, arriving half dead from cold and exhaustion.” The parish priests at UmeÃ¥ punished their parishioners, who had to travel two whole days, if they missed major festivals. He arrived at Granön church to find it empty, as the pike had chosen that day to rise. At Jokkmokk he took against the ignorant priest and schoolmaster, who assured him that clouds in Lapland sweep over mountains, bearing away stones, trees and animals. CL tried to explain that it was the violent winds that moved the objects, and that clouds were composed of mist, of water
bubbles. The two men sneered at the savant's ignorance, and assured him that the clouds were solid, leaving solid and slimy traces of their passage on the mountains. These, CL replied, were vegetable, known as
nostoc
. The two men continued to mock.

N
EVERTHELESS
, the scientist himself cherished unfounded beliefs, which we may call credulous, or mythical, or magical. These cross his scientific course in strange and beautiful ways, inspiring his curiosity, opening new roads, conducing also to new errors. Here was a man who not only adopted the prevailing scientific view of the time, that Man was an animal, but included the creature in his
Systema naturae
first under anthropomorphs, and later, when it was objected that anthropomorphs simply meant “man-like,” under a new category,
primates
, which included monkeys and apes, and also the sloth, and the bat.
Primates
were a subsection of
Mammalia
(hence his interest in the dugs of the dead horse and its fellows);
Mammalia
included whales, which his great friend and fellow-taxonomer, Artedi, had included in his
Ichthyologia
. CL was not inclined to the view that Man alone had a soul, and that other living things were simply machines,
bruta, bestiae
. He wrote in his
Diaetia Naturalis
, “One should not vent one's wrath on animals. Theology decrees that man has a soul and that the animals are mere
automata mechanica
, but I believe they would better advise that animals have a soul, and the difference is in its nobility …” We feel, he said, greater compassion for a dog than an insect, and more still for an ape. Indeed, he applied the adjective
sapiens
, first of all, not to
Homo sapiens
but to a species of monkey,
Simia sapiens
, which was said to be able to learn to play backgammon excellently well, and to keep watchmen posted on the lookout for tigers, so that the rest of the group could sleep safely. He kept monkeys and mourned the death of his own tamed friend, the raccoon Sjupp, in 1747; he subsequently dissected Sjupp, paying particular attention to his sexual organs.

During his lifetime the boundaries between
Homo sapiens
and his fellow anthropomorphs were drawn and redrawn. At varying stages the
Systema naturae
contained creatures such as the tailed man,
Homo caudatus
, the pygmy, and the satyr, which is also the orang-outan and
Homo sylvestris
, which walks bolt upright in the forest, has hands for feet, has arboreal claws, and is full of lust, so that women of our species dare not walk alone in its vicinity. It also has good table manners, and sleeps at night on a pillow under a quilt “like a respectable old lady.” CL sometimes referred to
Homo sapiens
as
Homo diurnus
, and gives a detailed description of his strange double and opposite,
Homo troglodytes
or
Homo nocturnus
, “the child of darkness which turns day into night and night into day and appears to be our closest relative.”

The troglodytes are short (the height of a nine-year-old boy) and white as snow, since they are active only at night; they have white fuzzy hair, round eyes with orange pupils and irises and a transparent micturating membrane, like those of bears and owls. They live in caves and holes, and are quite blind by day, stumbling, if they are dug out, as though their eyes have been put out. They have a language, guttural and impenetrable, but never learn more than “yes” or “no” in the speech of
Homo sapiens
or
diurnus
. At night they see
well, and make thieving raids; populations of men, where they see them, exterminate them as vermin and refer to them as
blafards
, cockroaches. CL as always, was interested for classificatory reasons in their genitalia (they were said to have a fold of skin which fell forwards over the sexual organs of the female, as in the Hottentot). He begged for details, particularly of the
nymphae
(labia) and clitoris of a ten-year-old female troglodyte on show in London in 1758, but could not be satisfied, for the sake of the child's modesty.

He believed also, as did Artedi, in sirens and mermaids, and in the sea-cows, the cattle of the undines—he examined a calf found on the seashore, and concluded that it must have been born prematurely, since it had not developed suitable lungs for underwater breathing. He believed to the end of his life that swallows spent the winter on the bottom of lakes, beneath the ice.

He also believed in, and indeed, claimed emphatically that he had been attacked by, a pestilential creature called
Furia infernalis
, the Fury from Hell, or “the shot.” The Fury was wingless, and fell from the skies in Lapland, where one had once been observed when it landed in the plate of a vicar. CL, in the days of his fame, offered a gold medal for a preserved Fury, and despatched his students into the Lapp wastes in search of the creature. CL gave each of his students a farmyard beast to shadow, one a cow, one a pig, one a goose, one an ass, requiring each student to count and describe the hundreds of species of plants consumed as they vanished down their familiars' throats (the students had nicknames derived from “their” beasts, the Oxman, Lord Swine, Rooster, Balaam [from the speaking Ass] and so on). Such a
teacher was a true scientist; but the same teacher despatched the same students to hunt the Furies among the Sami witches, or as we would now say, shamans.

CL was an inhabitant of that borderland between magic and science, religion and philosophy, observation and belief, where most of our fellow men still wander, questing and amazed. It is true that he had his necessary armour of scepticism. The tone of his observations in the court building at Jönköping is robust. He saw there,

“a large collection of witches' paraphernalia, such as treatises on black magic which we read and found to be full of deceit and vanities, antiquated and false receipts, idolatry, superstitious prayers and invocation of devils … We blew the sacred horn without conjuring up the devil, and milked the milking-sticks without drawing milk. Here were to be seen sorceries, made neither by witches nor by devils but from the triple stomach of a ruminant animal. Here were eagles' feet with outstretched claws, with which wizards tore the stomachs of those who had colic; I should think that they no more deserved to be burned than do the Chinese who pierce a hole right in the belly … And here also we were able to see the genuine instruments of wizards; knives, hammers, cudgels and iron bullets by the use of which men have been killed by their enemies.”

But the same man saved his eight-year-old sister, Emerentia, from death by smallpox, by killing and flaying a sheep, and laying the child in the skin, to “draw her from death.” The inspiration, he claimed, was biblical, drawn from King David, who “when old took two young girls into his bed so that by their healthy transpiration they might revive him.”
Later, in his medical notes,
Lachesis Naturalis
, CL endorsed David's advice, prescribing a bed-rest between two young people as a quick cure for a cold.

I
N
1935, workmen repairing the house in the Botanic Garden at Uppsala found under the floorboards, buried in a pile of rubbish, a little notebook which proved to be the notebook he had carried on that memorable journey, noting distances, phrases, descriptions of people. They found also a kind of writing-tablet on which jottings could be made in pencil and erased. CL records, in his public account, how he showed a Lapp some of his drawings. The man “was alarmed at the sight, took off his cap, bowed, and remained with his head down and his hand on his breast as if in veneration, muttering to himself and trembling as if he were just going to faint …” Scholars have generally supposed that the Lapp thought that the drawings were magical, like the drawings on the Lapp drums which are used in the
sejdhr
, or shamanic ritual. CL, a poor draughtsman, drew reindeer, anatomised, horned, pulling sledges. He drew also owls, naked women and
female pudenda
, intent on his classification. There are some pages, in a private collection, which I have been able to see, apparently detached from the notebook, which are written in an agitated hand, with fragmentary disjointed sentences, and hastily sketched drawings, which suggest that CL had experiences of Samic magic, of the
sejdhr
itself, which had affected him profoundly, although he was too cautious, or too shaken, to record them for the general public. He was, and remained, a respectable, God-fearing
bourgeois, however great his international reputation. His ideas on the sexual life of plants aroused opprobrium amongst the respectable—a hostile spiritual atmosphere not so distant from one of the forms of northern magic,
nídh
, a series of magical acts designed to ruin a man's life and reputation by destroying him with sexual taunts and humiliations. Magic is closely entwined with science; alchemy, the occult sciences, astrology, however strange or to modern men unacceptable their systems of belief or projects, resemble the true sciences in their preoccupation with techniques of studying, and changing, the physical world. Magic, like science, is concerned with
matter
, with the world of
things
, of rocks, stones, trees, creatures, also clouds, rain, wind and water vapour.