The Biographer's Tale (8 page)

If we look at the painting he commissioned of himself in the Lapp costume he brought back from his journey, it is difficult, almost impossible, to recognise the face of the genial genius in the frizzed and curled wig who appears on medals and in frontispieces, decorated with orders and medals, framed in garlands of flowers and sweetly discreet flying
putti
. He wears his flat pyramidal bonnet and his huge flat-footed fur boots, and looks out of huge, wary dark eyes at the looker-in, as though he was an alert wild creature that might shy away. He wears also his reindeer-skin garment and great fur-cuffed gloves. Round his waist hang the implements of Lapp life, a netting-needle, a straw snuff-box, a cartridge box, a knife, a receptacle also made from furred hide. At his side hangs the Lapp drum, with its mysterious signs facing the viewer, like a clock-face. In his right hand he carries the small pink plant he found near Gävle then named
Campanula serpyllifolia
, but later renamed
Linnaea borealis
, “a plant of Lapland, lowly, insignificant, disregarded, flowering but for a brief space—from Linnaeus, who resembles it.”

Naming is a difficult art. The names of magicians who undertake the
hamfar
must not be spoken; nor must the names of the beasts who are their
hamrs
. CL himself, in the fragments, shows his awareness of this, and also of the fact that the creatures were named by circumlocution, indirection and euphemism. He left—if the fragment is his, and autobiographical, and not some record of some old saying, a verse which resembles some of his more conventional poems and paradoxes:

Linnaeus in His Lapland Dress
, mezzotint by Dunkarton after a painting by Martin Hoffman, from Thornton's
Temple of Flora

Northern languages named men for beasts. Björn, the bear, Ari or Örn, the eagle, Hrútr, the ram, Kalfr, the calf, Hundr, the dog, Ormr, the serpent. Did he meditate on these when he made his system of double names for plants and animals, bringing order to the rampant world of creatures and things? Did he muse on his own polymorphous nomenclature? It has been said that he was named originally for flax, lin, linen. It is almost certain his father took his name from a large and venerated lime tree in Småland—Swedish
lind
, Latin
tilia
(French
tilleul
, English linden …). Some of the family were called Tiliander.
Tilia
(and
Papaver
, the opium poppy) in CL's sexual system belong to the
Polyandria
with “twenty males or more in the same bed with the female.”

Paradise, CL believed, was an island,
the
island, the part of the earth's crust that rose above the waves, as the primal waters receded. In it the Creator had planted two seeds of every species, one male, one female (one seed sufficed for hermaphrodites). The island of Paradise, both because it thrust upwards from the seabed, and because created Nature required it, “was in form a high mountain peak, with the flora and fauna ideally placed in ascending or descending strata, to suit the climate they required. Adam the gardener
wandered this mountain, noting and naming all things, plants, beasts, insects, birds, and the fish in the descending funnels and troughs of the surrounding sea.” Even as a young man, CL thought of himself, as he journeyed over the fells, swamps and mountains, as the second Adam, the separator, the taxonomist, the Namer of species. Wrapped in his deerskins, he noted the nature and vagaries of mountain climates. After a few days in Norway, he said, he felt heavy, but the mountain air revived him—he was advised to put a wet sponge to his nose, to make the light air thicker. He believed the air only appeared thin because of the compression of his lungs by the effort of climbing—one is breathless
ab accelerata circulatione sanguinis
. But he checked his barometer, and found that the air pressure was weaker. This, for some reason, appeared to him to be
contra rationem
, against reason. But he recorded it. He recorded the delights and salutary benefits of iced snow-water.

He kept those liquid brown eyes open wide in the land of the arctic sun. Early in his journey he had named a pretty plant,
Andromeda polifolia
(bog rosemary), for the chained princess, blushing with blood-red shame (“as soon as she flowers her petals become flesh-coloured”) but pale after fertilisation. He had written lyrically of her drenching by “poisonous dragons and beasts—i.e., evil toads and frogs” during their mating. He had made an amateurish drawing of maiden and flower on boggy rocks, and of unrecognisable amphibians. Having created the genus
Andromeda
with this poetic fancy, he nearly, but not quite, failed to see another, in his confusion on a mountain summit. His notes are the precise notes of a scientist:

“At midnight—if such I may call it when the sun never sets—I was walking rapidly, facing the icy wind and sweating profusely … but always on the alert, when I saw as it were the shadow of this plant, but did not stoop to examine it because I took it to be an
Empetrum
. A moment later, however, I suddenly thought that it might be something new and retraced my steps; I would again have taken it for an
Empetrum
had not its greater height made me examine it more carefully.

First Swedish illustration of
Linnaea borealis
, a woodcut published by Rudbeck the Younger in
Acta Literaria Sueciae
, 1720–24

“I don't know what it is that at night in our mountains disturbs our vision and makes objects far less distinct than by day, for the sun is just as bright. But from being near the horizon its rays are so level that a hat affords no protection to the eyes. Moreover, the shadows are so extended, and by gusts of wind made so confused, that things not really a bit alike can hardly be told apart …

“The
Andromeda
was over, and setting seed; but after a long search I managed to find a single plant still flowering; the flower was white, shaped like a lily of the valley but with five sharper divisions.”

H
E WAS INTERESTED
in the unconscious mind. What he was interested in was not the Freudian Id, but more what William James called “the deep well of unconscious cerebration.” He was a profoundly and delightfully rational man. He conducted many experiments on the activities of the mind, including a word-association test of 100 words to which he submitted himself several times, writing down his immediate responses to each, controlled every four seconds by a stopwatch. He divided the associations (which he found remarkably constant) into groups: those—“abbey, aborigines, abyss”—which gave rise to visual images, those—“abasement, abhorrence, ablution”—which induced represented histrionic scenes, and those more abstract words—“afternoon, ability, abnormal”—to which the most probable responses were purely verbal, quotations or definitions. He was later to conclude that most powerful intellectuals neither formed, nor thought with, mental images, which
were much more common amongst women and children. He thought that the paucity and steady recurrence of his personal associations suggested that “the mind is apparently always engaged in mumbling over its old stores, and if any one of these is wholly neglected for a while, it is apt to be forgotten, perhaps irrecoverably.”

He concluded:

“Perhaps the strongest impression left by these experiments regards the multifariousness of the work done by the mind in a state of half-unconsciousness, and the valid reason they afford for believing in the existence of still deeper strata of mental operations, sunk wholly below the level of consciousness, which may account for such mental phenomena as cannot otherwise be explained.”

His father had greatly desired him to become a medical man, and he spent many years as a medical student and clinical clerk. During his time in the dispensary he made another taxonomic or statistical experiment, deciding to work through his pharmacological supplies from A to Z, taking two drops of each and studying the effects on his own constitution. He was stopped by the effects of croton oil. “I had foolishly believed that two drops of it could have no notable effects as purgative and emetic; but indeed they had, and I can recall them now.” A description of his first operation on a young man's jaw suggests an optimistic humour.

“A boy came in looking very deplorable, walked up to me and opened his mouth. I looked awfully wise and the boy sat down in perfect confidence. I did not manage the first proceedings well, for first I put in the key (that is the tooth instrument) the wrong way, then I could not catch hold of the right
tooth with it. At last I got hold. I then took my breath to enable me to give a harder wrench; one—two—three and away I went. A confused sort of murmur something like that of a bee in a foxglove proceeded from the boy's mouth, he kicked at me awfully, I wrenched the harder. When, hang the thing,—crash went the tooth. It really was dreadfully decayed—and out came my instrument. I seized hold of the broken bits—the boy's hands were of course over his mouth and eyes from the pain, so he could see nothing—and immediately threw them on the fire and most unconcernedly took another survey of the gentleman's jaws. The tooth was snapped right off. Well, I pacified him, told him that one half the tooth was out and I would take out the other (knowing full well that he would not let me touch it again) and that it was a
double
one. But, as I had expected, he would not let me proceed.”

On his tours of the wards he noted healing and decay, communal hysteria in the female wards (infecting the nurses) and the physical and mental effects of
delirium tremens
elsewhere.

“The struggles were sometimes terrible, yet the pulse was feeble and the reserve of strength almost nil. The visions of the patients seemed indistinguishable by them from realities; in the few cases I saw they were wholly of fish or of creeping things. One of the men implored me to take away the creature that was crawling over his counterpane, following its imagined movements with his finger, and staring as at a ghost. Poor humanity! I often feel that the tableland of sanity, on which most of us dwell, is small in area, with unfenced precipices on every side, over any one of which we may fall.”

As we shall see, he experienced the falls from the tableland more than once, himself. At various stages in his life he suffered from a kind of nervous collapse. At Cambridge he had to abandon his mathematical tripos and go home for a term.

“A mill seemed to be working inside my head; I could not banish obsessing ideas; at times I could hardly read a book and found it painful even to look at a printed page … I had been much too zealous, had worked too irregularly and in too many directions, and had done myself serious harm. It was as though I had tried to make a steam-engine perform more work than it was constructed for, by tampering with its safety valve and thereby straining its mechanism.”

He had a more serious episode much later, after thirteen years of marriage. He remarks with his usual judicious good sense:

“Those who have not suffered from mental breakdown can hardly realise the incapacity it causes, or, when the worst is past, the closeness of analogy between a sprained brain and a sprained joint. In both cases, after recovery seems to others to be complete, there remains for a long time an impossibility of performing certain minor actions without pain and serious mischief, mental in the one and bodily in the other. This was a frequent experience with me respecting small problems, which successively obsessed me, day and night, as I tried in vain to think them out. These affected mere twigs, so to speak, rather than large boughs of the mental processes, but for all that most painfully.” He had, as this passage shows, an unusual capacity of self-observation, standing beside himself, so to speak, taking his own pulse, observing his own symptoms.