How to Bag A Jabberwock

World of young living language! Fold On

vivid fold of changing green

In sapient shoot and lyric leaf,

Exact, appropriate, unseen!

It is full summer, fertile earth

Fulfils her rhythm: line on line

In seas of light and liquid gold,

Grey-silver olive, changing vine […].

Michael Roberts’s ‘Earth, Impact’ (1936) has become something of an anchor point for those interested in relations between science and poetry in the 1930s. Alongside the poem’s engagement with physics and geology, there is the biological imaginary represented by these lines (ll. 13–20), in which language has the fine structure of organic life, and reading is a kind of parasitic investment in that life (‘Where commentary ivy clings / In deep interstices of mind’ (ll. 23–24)). These metaphors put into practice the aesthetics articulated in Roberts’s preface to New Signatures (1932), which compared scientific and poetic knowledge and technique. An interest in biology is something that Roberts shares with a circle of young writers in Cambridge and London, many of them significantly allied to Surrealism and informed about recent developments either by their education or by the popular scientific writings which are such a feature of the interwar period (see Bowler, 2009; Stableford, 1985). In this essay I will explore how three of these writers, Herbert Read, William Empson and W. H. Auden, as well as one predecessor, John Rodker, built on three developments in particular which seemed to have a bearing on the understanding of the human as animal: the emergence of endocrinology (the study of hormones); a fascination with the social life of insects; and the new concept of neoteny within evolutionary biology.

The period after 1900 saw major advances in the science of biological systems. Two things stand out in the shifting understanding of life in the period: firstly, a greater emphasis on the interactions of the biochemical and neurological systems, derived from the study of hormones and proteins and their role; secondly, a shift from a strictly mechanistic sense of bodily engineering (associated with Loeb, Beard and others) to a more holistic approach which stresses the interaction of the organism’s genetic makeup and environment within an evolutionary, homeostatic perspective (the idea of homeostasis was developed by Walter B. Cannon and popularised by J. B. S. Haldane and others). The new mathematical genetics linked to the rediscovery of the work of Gregor Mendel was also part of these developments. So too was the beginning of modern ecology, with Sir Arthur Tansley developing the notion of ‘ecosystem’ in the 1930s and Jakob von Uexküll that of ‘umwelt’ in Germany in the same period.

The discoveries of biology were quickly applied to notions of the human in a range of popular writing. One example is H. S. Jennings’s The Biological Basis of Human Nature, published by Faber in 1930. Jennings’s work was, Katy Price (2002) suggests, influential in Cambridge, which led the field in biology in England; and this provides a route into the work of William Empson and Hugh Sykes Davies, both discussed below. As well as a survey of current research, Jennings – a pioneering American geneticist whose first names, ‘Herbert Spencer’, suggest he was raised to the task – provides a chapter on ‘Biology and Selves’, in which he reflects on the way that genetics dissolves the self:

Thus any individual – you or I – is a knot of strands, of genes, that extend backward into the remote past, there forming other individuals, and that will extend forward into the future, forming still others. Every knot, every individual, is a new combination of strands, diverse from the combination forming any other, but containing strands that have been part of many earlier individuals. (1930, 290)

But even as the self is dissolved, it is expanded:

As a feeling, experiencing, knowing self, I, the ego, am identified with only one of the great number of knots into which the living strands are tied; my experiences cling to one of these exclusively. This fact arouses questions. Why should my experience not embrace the entire network, the entire organism, instead of one knot merely in its interlaced strands? (291)

Jennings also meditates on the wastefulness of nature, the near infinite combinations of genes discarded in each generation, and contrasts the accident of selfhood (this unlikely combination of genes) with the centrality of self in Cartesian thinking (295–96). The self is networked, relational and contingent. Within this framework, earlier studies of the organisation of insect life took on a new cogency, with the self-organising and long-lasting colony a model for social life.

The result of such thinking is a ‘biological style’ that one might identify in interwar writing, born out of a mix of biology, sexology and medicine, and writings by Henri Bergson, Remy de Gourmont and other vitalists, as well as older ideas. Modernists were involved in the dissemination of some of this material, notably Pound in his translation of Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love (1922), with his preface drawing out an embodied and sexual poetics. Evolutionary thinking might also be applied to genre, in the wake of the work of Hippolyte Taine and Ferdinand Brunetière. Eden and Cedar Paul, translators of sexological works among other scientific and literary writings, wrote of kinds of poetic images in The Appreciation of Poetry: ‘As with all classifications that concern the world of organic life, the boundaries are ill-defined, the types merge into one another at the edges’ (1920, 9). Equally, biology could inform a theory of poetic production. Mina Loy wrote that ‘Poetic rhythm […] is the chart of a temperament’, ‘the spontaneous tempo of their response to life’, produced by a combination of inheritance and environment (the ‘recent fertilizer’ of the American language) (1996, 157–59). Hence Loy’s ‘The Dead’ (published in the 1919 Others anthology), with its sense of the boundary between organism and environment:

We have flowed out of ourselves

Beginning on the outside

That shrivable skin

Where you leave off

(ll. 1–4)

The declaration that ‘We are turned inside out / Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs’ (ll. 19–20) might even derive its sense of externality from the image of the hydra which, as biological writers noted in the period, can be turned inside out and survive.

One final introductory point concerns the legacy of nineteenth-century vitalist thinking, which both clashed with and appropriated the new science of life. Despite the tide turning against what Joseph Needham (1929) called the ‘Phoenix’ of vitalism, philosophical attempts to differentiate life from matter at a fundamental level continued (see for example Carr, 1929). As Peter Bowler (2009, 51) shows, the vitalism associated with J. Arthur Thomson was common at least up to 1930 – for example, as popularised by Ronald Campbell Macfie in the Harmondsworth Popular Science series of 1911–12 and John McKendrick’s The Principles of Physiology in the Home University Library. Various popular or mystical forms of vitalism circulated under the heading of ‘vibration’. A sense of the field is provided by the list of the publisher C. W. Daniel, which alongside tracts on Buddhism, pacifism, herbalism, eugenics and psychoanalysis includes Maryla de Chrapowicki’s Spectro-Biology (1938) and Edmond Szekely’s Cosmos, Man and Society – A Paneubiotic Synthesis (1937). While distinct from science, such ‘syntheses’ reflect the direction taken by biology itself towards a more systemic understanding of life.

My first area of consideration, endocrinology, is a product of the scientific medicine of the twentieth century. The origins of the investigation of the ‘ductless glands’ is in the nineteenth century, with the work of Johannes Mueller, Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard and others on the adrenal glands, as well as thyroid and testicular extracts. But it was the period after 1900 that saw a huge expansion of the field, including a closer understanding of the overall regulatory role of the pituitary gland. The first textbook of endocrinology, T. Swale Vincent’s Internal Secretions and the Ductless Glands, was published in 1912. The Association for the Study of Internal Secretions (later the Endocrine Society) was founded in the United States in 1917, and its journal Endocrinology the same year. W. M. Bayliss and E. H. Starling at University College London in 1902 demonstrated the role of chemical messengers in triggering pancreatic secretions in dogs. The term ‘hormone’ itself was first used by Starling (at the suggestion of W. B. Hardy at a dinner at Caius College) in his Croonian lectures in 1905:

These chemical messengers […] or ‘hormones’ (from ὁρμάω [ormao] = I excite or arouse), as we may call them, have to be carried from the organ where they are produced to the organ which they affect, by means of the blood stream, and the continually recurring physiological needs of the organism must determine their repeated production and circulation through the body. (1905; see Henderson, 2005)

Thyroid hormone was isolated in 1914–15, insulin in 1921; the early 1920s saw investigations of oestrin and progesterone; androgens and testosterone were isolated a decade later (see Hughes, 1977; Medvei, 1993). Otto Loewi’s famous 1921 experiments on the frog’s heart, which led to the discovery of ‘Vagusstoff’, were a crucial step, establishing the existence of neurotransmitters (that is, a chemical component of nerve activity) in feedback systems. The result was a new understanding of a single integrated ‘neurohormonal system’ (or the ‘neuro-endocrine system’ proposed by Walter B. Cannon at Harvard in the 1920s) rather than two separate systems. Walter Langdon-Brown’s The Integration of the Endocrine System (1935) represents one culmination of this process (Medvei, 1993, 415; see also Cawadias, 1940).

Scientific commentators were quick to apply these ideas to materialistic understandings of consciousness, now inflected by biochemistry and a conception of the body as a homeostatic system. In a 1927 essay on ‘Biochemistry and Mental Phenomena’, for example, Needham – then a junior colleague of Langdon-Brown’s at Cambridge – discussed proteins and hormones as message-carriers before concluding that ‘the physio-chemical expression of the emotions may originate in the varying percentage relationships of the hormones of the body’ (1927, 296). Popular books covering these topics included Ritchie Calder’s Birth of the Future (1934), which discussed chemicals and the brain, D. F. Fraser-Harris’s The ABC of Nerves (1928) and Bryan H. C. Matthews’s Electricity in Our Bodies (1931) –all representing versions of what Bowler calls ‘the new materialism’ (2009, 50). The scientific understanding of hormones is not, however, inevitably linked to a strict materialism, since in some popular writings the work of glands remained linked to earlier notions of animal spirits.

These developments often enter the popular culture of the 1930s as threats to human agency. Charles Duff’s satirical play Mind Products Limited: A Melodrama of the Future (1932), published in Eugene Jolas’s transition series, invokes a future (the 1960s) in which social life has become manipulated by an endocrinologist in league with a ruthless businessman. Dr Zabuka explains:

My experiments dating back over twenty years have led me inevitably to conclude that man is simply so much matter acting under a mind which is a chemical composition governed up to a point by the inherited chemical parts, some of which are in the glands, then by past external stimuli.[…] (1932, 17)

But the result of the mass production of mood-changing chemicals is chaos, as striking workers and soldiers get hold of the ‘Ferocity Mixture’ and other products, rather than the various ‘Mind-Stupefying’ preparations manufactured to pacify the workers. Real-world anxieties are enacted: a German extremist group starts to make versions of the chemicals and manipulate the populace; the Spanish Cabinet has its memory wiped; Brazil has a revolution when sailors get hold of the Ingenuity Syrup. The UK descends into bloody chaos, leaving a few survivors to assert the possibility of freedom not at the mercy of chemicals. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published the same year, promotes a similar vision of pharmaceutical control, and Karel Čapek’s earlier R.U.R. (1921) references both biochemistry and genetics, since its ‘robots’ are in fact androids, simplified biological beings.

With this set of fears in mind, we can turn to the work of John Rodker. As Andrew Crozier reports, Rodker studied science for entry to Imperial College in his early life, dissecting plants and animals. A biological mode of thinking permeates his work, but in a way which directs the topic towards satire rather than dystopia (Rodker, 1996, ix). Rodker persistently referred to the body in biological and indeed hormonal terms; in the 1930s he was to translate, from a French version, Sex in Human Relationships by the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, with its declaration that ‘For every individual, love is determined by the interactions of his psycho-glandular constitution’ (1935, 5). His theatre manifesto, published in the Egoist in 1914, argues for a theatre of ‘primitive emotions’ – ‘words are a waste product of emotion and do not concern it’ (1996, 177) – articulating the epiphenomenal view associated with William James and Carl Lange, which sees emotions as interpretations of bodily changes. Later, his Memoirs of Other Fronts comments on the lack of young men in the towns in the year 1916 in these terms: ‘their absence the starvation of the psyche of us all like the gland deficiency it was’ (cited 1996, xv). Rodker’s ‘Hymn to Love’ (1920) begins with a world gone sexological, in contrast to the nuns evoked in the opening line:

Ave Maria, Stella Maris

Ah Paris

Yet even in London,

Brantôme, Whitman,

Vatsyayana.

Even so

can it be merely

a matter of (quoting De Gourmont)

mucous surfaces?

O impossible virginity

of ductless glands!

(ll. 1–11)

The sexual memoirs of Brantôme, the candour of Whitman and the supposed author of the Kama Sutra form an extravagant list, alongside Gourmont. The poem goes on to depict love as an unstoppable series of encounters culminating in cynicism and the decline of lust into ‘play’. The final image of ‘yellow and wrinkled’ lovers compared to ‘Ascidians’ (sea squirts) rising to the surface in the full moon (ll. 45–50) is biologically inaccurate – sea squirts are fixed creatures, unlike squids, for example –but nicely evokes the idea of a hardened exoskeleton. Moreover, a feature of the Ascidians is ‘retrogressive metamorphosis’, the fact that the larvae are more complex than the mature creature. That and the resemblance between sea squirts and genitalia suggest an ageing of the human towards the animal – a thematics pursued later in this essay.

In Rodker’s poems, desire flows around the body like animal spirits; it takes on electrical properties, but always within the context of the bloodstream and glandular life. Emotion ‘floods’ the self; it ‘wells up’, as in the ‘clear / White flood of passion’ of ‘Because Some Lover’ (ll. 6–7); it seeps into and permeates the body. This is from ‘“The Pale Hysterical Ecstasy”’ (the brackets are Rodker’s):

White face puffs out – cobra’s hood,

age wrinkles at lip corner

glands flash open [though ductless]

a black draught for blood stream

the spate boils on the dams.

(ll. 1–5)

There is a hypothetical intertext here – possibly direct, but equally a matter of a well trodden pathway linking Mesmerism and hormones – signalled by the ‘flashing open’ of glands. The text in question is Swedenborg on the Ductless Glands, with Modern Confirmations, a lecture prepared for the 1910 International Swedenborg Congress in London by David Goyder, a consultant at the Bradford Royal Infirmary whose father had been a Swedenborgian minister. Goyder sees Swedenborg, as some medical historians have since, as a pioneer in the study of the ductless glands; he derives from Swedenborg’s Mesmerism an account of the ‘flash’ of the animal spirits in what is a ‘dynamic, penetrative power; he speaks of it as “flashing through the nerves”’ (Goyder, 1910, 3). Goyder explains that, in his anatomy, Swedenborg noted the ductless glands’ influence in foetal life, seeing them as having ‘a larger amount of animal spirit than is conveyed to the other organs’ (1910, 6) and as rejuvenating red blood cells. This is a version of the anti-toxic theory of hormones popular at the turn of the century: as physiologists noted, if one remove the ductless glands, the body breaks down, thus they are health-giving glands. Goyder argues that for Swedenborg ‘life is molecular as well as somatic. Every bodily organ has a special quality of life of its own’ and each cell of the gland has ‘the office of the complete organ’ within it (13) – an argument one might link to the human-become-genital of ‘Hymn to Love’, ‘Married’ and other poems by Rodker.

The reference to ‘flashing’ glands in Rodker and the evocation of toxicity hint of a link. Rodker would have been exposed to Swendenborg via his wife: Mary Butts’s great-grandfather Captain Thomas Butts had been one of Blake’s most active patrons (the family’s paintings form the core of the Tate collection), and she described him as a keen Swedenborgian (Butts, 1988, 16, 164; 2002, 3). She had an intense interest in the mystical tradition herself, and Rodker was later engaged with alchemy and the occult as a publisher. Even if there is no direct link to Goyder’s pamphlet, the word ‘flash’ recurs in his poetry describing the body and emotions: the ‘flash’ of desire in ‘The Dancer Dancing’ (l. 6); or ‘Chryselephantine’, with its depiction of the osmosis associated with cellular life and automatic responses to hormonal messages:

And fire thrills, floods –

wavers through you,

in subtle osmoses;

and though you did not know me yesterday

yet you have yielded in a flash

(ll. 14–18)

The word seems to have been catching: Ford Madox Ford wrote to Rodker of the ‘amazing flashes of psychological projections’ in Montagnes Russes, the novel he published in French translation in Paris (cited by Patterson, 2003, 97).

Rodker’s biologism is of course overlaid with his Baudelairian scorn and desire to shock – the ‘alchemical vagina’ of ‘Hymn to Heat’ (l. 18), the mutilated bodily parts of ‘War Museum – Royal College of Surgeons’ – and with his fascination with the love-death of the males of certain species of worm and insect (a preoccupation that links him to the Surrealists). Most fundamentally, his work registers a fear of the dissolving of the human into tissue and death: the ‘mush / jelly that sweats and shuddering / speaks with a voice like madness // and dies’ of ‘Out of the Water’ (ll. 9–12); the ‘Body linings’ which ‘peel / from the deep core in siroccos of Alkali’ in ‘Wild West Remittance Man’ (ll. 13–15). The pervasive references to rotting leaves, trees and fern in his poetry – often as a background to sex – suggest the ends of the biological in death, just as regression is always a possibility. The ‘systole and diastole’ of embryonic life described in his prose poem ‘Chanson on Petit Hypertropique’ subject the individual to the ‘continuous and singing buzz of life’ (1996, 62), a flux of impulses rising and falling away from moments of organisation.

III

My second topic is one raised on occasion by Rodker, the social life of insects – a topic which receives a rich vein of commentary in scientific and popular writing between 1880 and 1940, focussing in particular on ants, termites and bees. The origins of this work are in the nineteenth-century Swiss and French investigations of insect intelligence and insect society by Félix Dujardin and Jean-Henri Fabre, and in Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee (1901), The Glass Spider (1923) and The Life of the White Ant (1926) it remained a popular presence in English translation in the twentieth century. Maeterlinck’s work was followed up by Auguste Forel in The Social World of the Ants Compared to that of Man, translated by C. K. Ogden in 1928, and by W. M. Wheeler in Social Life Among the Insects (1923).

As Charlotte Sleigh (2007) has shown, studies of ants’ lives were quickly applied to human societies, influencing such fields as linguistics (via Ogden’s Basic English) and the development of cybernetics. Fabre, Wheeler and others reinforced the notion that human life is organised along lines with deep sources in evolutionary history. Expressing his suspicion of Darwin’s grand theory, Fabre nevertheless grounds his own observations in the continuity of nature:

The laudator temporis acti is out of favour just now: the world is on the move. Yes, but sometimes it moves backwards. When I was a boy, our twopenny textbooks told us that man was a reasonin animal; nowadays, there are learned volumes to prove to us that human reason is but a higher rung in the ladder whose foot reaches down to the bottommost depths of animal life.[…] It begins with zero in the glair of a cell and ascends until we come to the mighty brain of a Newton. The noble faculty of which we were so proud is a zoological attribute. All have a larger or smaller share of it, from the live atom to the anthropoid ape, that hideous caricature of man. (1914, 158)

In all these texts, there is an implicit comparison with human societies, and the suggestion that the instinctual behaviour of insect societies might tell us something of our own blind actions and closeness to the earth – for Forel lessons about co-operation and work, for Wheeler darker lessons about cast and subordination. In his 1936 Maudsley lecture on ‘The Biology of Social Life’, the endocrinologist Langdon-Brown follows Forel in making biological organisation a parallel to social life: cancer is ‘cell anarchy’; ants and bees represent a new, co-operative ideal; the sense of the ‘tribe’ and finally ‘internationalism’ are indications of an evolutionary drive towards the larger unit, underpinned by the ‘nervous system’ of modern communication. But he also flags the possibility of regression, with an implicit eye to Nazi Germany: ‘Whole nations which apparently feel unable to maintain the ideals that we regard as the higher ones actually seem to gain a new hope and a new faith by departing from them.[…] Depreciation of ideals, like depreciation of currency, seems to give them a new stability’ (1938, 26).

The result of such thinking is a reformulation of human actions and mind towards notions of a latent evolutionary pragmatics rather than rational action. As Wheeler commented in a review of The Social World of the Ants, ‘“intelligence” is used by Forel in its modern sense of “behavioristic adaptability” and not in the scholastic sense as a synonym for “ratiocination”’ (1930, 172). Wheeler’s work was focussed on the notions of a ‘hive mind’ or ‘super-organism’ in which the individual is subsumed. Central to his thinking, Sleigh argues, is what he called tropallexis, the economics of mutual feeding: between worker and queen; between worker and the larvae, which exude an oily substance; and the parasitism between different species. This is a topic, she suggests, reflected in Huxley’s depiction of soma in Brave New World, via his brother Julian’s book on ants (2007, 87–89, 220). It is also a topic taken up by a number of poets.

Herbert Read’s autobiography notes the decisive influence of Bergson and Freud on his thinking, pushing his writings on art towards an understanding of it as a form of life: what he calls ‘genetic criticism’ involves ‘a complete analysis of the circumstances in which [the artwork] came into existence’ (1963, 179, 277). Read’s only novel The Green Child (1935), incorporated into Surrealism in the Bulletin of the 1936 London exhibition (which Read co-organised), is notable for its radical split between the realistic middle section, dealing with the career of its hero, Olivero, as a politician in South America, and the fabulous outer sections, dealing with the mysterious Green Child. Olivero returns to his English village and frees the Green Child from the cruel miller. Together they follow an uphill-flowing stream to its source, sinking into the underground world from which the Green Child comes – a series of caves not unlike an ant colony. Her people’s lives are predicated on an ascent up the levels in the colony, in which they explore a hierarchy of actions: the pleasures of play and sensuality; work and leadership; and finally solitary thought in caves where they are fed by worker assistants, who at their death remove them to be mineralised in the ‘petrifying-trough’. As they move into the final stage they choose a small animal companion, a reptile or an insect (Olivero selects a jewel-like beetle), and spend their time contemplating crystals, emblems of timelessness: ‘When the last vital element had received its crystalline form, then the sense of time would disappear’. The soul is stilled, leaving a body which has achieved ‘a state of crystalline purity’ (1945, 126, 136). The movement is away from the human, via the perceived selflessness of insect life, to the object-world.

Read’s poetry registers a similar tendency to dissolve the human into other categories. ‘The Retreat’ refers to the instinctive life of the young as a kind of dragonfly’s flight ‘on quivering wings’ (l. 26), supplanted by the self-consciousness of maturity. The poem depicts dualism dissolving into a universal energy:

Not mind and matter, co-distinct

In man alone, or alone in living things,

But a tympanum for the rhythms of ether,

An element

Incarnate in everything. Life is but a lesser lesion

Of this extensive energy, and so life is less

A thing to wonder at and worship –

Is but one mechanism more to manifest the force

Active even in the gulfs of uncreated space.

(ll. 43–51)

The result of this cosmic vision is to render human ‘agonies […] / Perspectively doomed and wrought / To the little loudness of an insect’s cry’ (ll. 52–55). Like The Green Child, ‘The Retreat’ enjoins the reader to attend to the ‘rhythm’ and ‘structure’ of the universe and ultimately equates understanding with death.

A reduction of pain to ‘an insect’s cry’ is, more reductively, what happens in Read’s satire ‘Lepidoptera’, which compares its urban subjects to moths. ‘These pink chrysalid faces’ (l. 1) are ‘torpid’ (l. 6) in daylight, but at night:

[…] stript of their drab or tinsel sheaths,

They ape Narcissus in mildewed mirrors,

Display their graces to the sick glare of gas-jets.

(ll. 8–10)

The insect thus signals in Read’s work a discomfort with the human. His work registers the Surrealist pull back towards the insect and beyond that to matter itself – as in Roger Caillois’s fascination with the praying mantis as the confluence of eros, thanatos and a mimicry which both evokes the human through prayer and erect posture and approximates the organism to the object-world (2003, 69–81, 92–103). For Caillois, ‘the mimicry of mantises illustrates, sometimes hauntingly, the human desire to recover its original insensate condition’ (79); ‘the insect loses its identity and returns to the plant kingdom’ (80). The mantis thus becomes an ‘objective ideogram’ for our biological condition, an illustration of the rootedness of myth in biological history.

But arguably the poet who responds most avidly to writings on the insect worlds is William Empson, who was an admirer of J. B. S. Haldane, reviewed texts on biology and eugenics, and published J. O. Giršavičius on ‘Biochemistry’ – an article which stressed the ‘dynamic mechanism’ of the organism – in Experiment, the small magazine he founded at Cambridge with Bronowski and others (see Haffenden, 2005, 167–68, 376). His poems intersect at times with the issues discussed above: ‘Missing Dates’, for example, with its play on blood toxicity and experiments with rejuvenating transfusions. Empson reviewed Maeterlinck’s The Life of the White Ant in Granta in 1927 (see Chapter 7) and was clearly familiar with Fabre and Wheeler (Empson, 2000, 156). In a range of his early work, from ‘The Ants’, where the London underground becomes an ant-nest, through ‘Value Is an Activity’ (earlier called ‘Inhabitants’), which has fungus-growing termites or white ants, to the scorpion ringed with fire in ‘Plenum and Vacuum’, to ‘Arachne’, ‘High Dive’ (the ‘termite city’ again), ‘Letter IV’ (the cicada) and ‘UFA Nightmare’ (the weevil), Empson uses insect societies to reflect on human automaticity, blindness and enclosure, and notions of hierarchy – though in a manner less fixated on the flight from the human than was the case in Read, and more fascinated by the way that the comparisons he deploys intimate collective forms of life organised by their environment, like that of the Tube or the city as portrayed in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis.

As John Haffenden points out, Haldane’s essay ‘On Being the Right Size’ in Possible Worlds (1927) is one source of Empson’s sense of the chain of being as a series of bold poetic comparisons across organisms whose conditions of life were radically different (Empson, 2000, 158). In Possible Worlds Haldane stresses Wheeler’s finding that ant colonies work on an economic principle, rather than needing the postulate of complicated instinctual routines: workers are rewarded directly with food for what they bring to the larvae. In ‘The Ants’, this automatic exchange is analogous to the woman/tree’s blindness and indifference to masculine/ant love: ‘We ants may tap your aphids for your dew. / You may not wish their sucking or our care’ (ll. 5–6). This ‘all-but freedom’ (l. 7) becomes a metaphor for the love sonnet itself and its proposed exchanges of honeyed words; its tunnel vision and its parasitism; and ultimately even for its status, Empson later thought, as an avoidance of actual sexual encounter. Empson also seems to have been fascinated by the fact that termites happily eat and build from their excrement, an image for his resolutely non-transcendental worldview.

My third and final topic is from evolutionary biology. I mentioned Caillois’s work on insect mimicry, which he came to see as the opposite of Bergson’s elan vital: as a drive towards a ‘diminished existence’ in which ‘life seems to lose ground, to blur the line between organism and environment’ (2003, 102–03). Another version of that drive is the return to the ape, a topic in fantasies of degeneration since Wells’s The Time Machine. What we can consider here is a particular version of that reversion, one fixated on the idea that the ape is not buried deep within us, as it were, but rather is us. This is the theory of neoteny, developed by the Dutch anatomist Louis Bolk, Walter Garstang and others in the 1920s, in which man is a retarded ape, in Bolk’s words ‘a primate fetus that has become sexually mature’ (cited by Gould, 1977, 361). In evolution as imagined by Bolk, the ape is not (or not only) the origin of the human, but also that which lies ahead of us, the terminus of an arrested development which we repress or delay. The best-known literary representation of this theory is Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer, which was indebted to his brother Julian’s experiments on neoteny in the axolotl in its depiction of a millionaire who funds research into the secrets of extended life, only to discover the 200-year-old Earl of Gonister, who has grown into an ape (see Gould, 1977, 352–53). In his essays on literature, Langdon-Brown applied neoteny rather directly to the extended childhood of J. M. Barrie in Peter Pan, to Swinburne and others (1938, 123–51).

Surrealism also used these ideas. Hugh Sykes Davies’s lecture on ‘Biology and Surrealism’ at the 1936 London exhibition argued that psychoanalysis was grounded in human ‘physical and biological nature’, and referred in particular (though this section of the record of the lecture was summarised rather than reproduced in the printed text of the London Bulletin of Surrealism) to the ‘retardation theory as advanced by Bolk and others, and an explanation of its bearing on psychoanalysis, after [Géza] Róheim. The conclusions being that repressions are not only the result of education and social conditions, but also, in the first instance, of the physical nature of man’ (1936, 14). The idea of retardation suggested that maturity is delayed in humans, creating the period of sexual latency that Freud said preceded the Oedipus complex. For Bolk, this is a function of the endocrine system, producing such effects as hairlessness, lack of pigmentation, the larger weight of the brain, labia majora etc. As a result, for Róheim ‘The outstanding difference between man and his animal brethren consists in the infantile morphological characters of human beings, in the prolongation of infancy. This prolonged infancy explains the traumatic character of sexual experiences which do not produce the like effect in our simian brethren’ (1943, 17, 20; see also 1934). According to Róheim, the origin of civilisation is in retardation; it is a structure erected to ritualistically protect the immature ego from the libidinal energies which it is not ready to deal with. As Paul A. Robinson comments, ‘the paradox of civilization was that man became civilized only in order to remain an infant’ (1969, 117). For Surrealism, this suggests the possibility of a more integrative approach than that suggested by Freud’s traumatised subject: a move forward to maturity in which id and ego are incorporated, in which instinctual life is integrated rather than hopelessly fended off. In Davies’s later work the continuity of animal and human is asserted: ‘Nine tenths, ninety nine hundredths of human behavior is purely animal’, says his rat-obsessed zoologist in The Papers of Andrew Melmoth (1960, 40).

We can also bring neoteny to bear on Auden’s poem ‘They’ (originally called ‘The Crisis’). Auden began his Oxford career in biology before switching to English; his journals meditate on man and insect, tools, organ specialisation and instinct in a way clearly informed by contemporary debates, and later work was to incorporate learned footnotes to texts like Hans Spemann’s Embryonic Development (Auden, 1941, 85). ‘Psychology and Art To-day’ (1977, 332–42), his extended piece in The Arts To-day in 1935, takes its shape as much as anything else from the form of the medical casebook, mixing general considerations and typologies of pathology with readings of dreams, summaries of Freud, commentaries on D. H. Lawrence.

‘They’ (dated April 1939) is usually read as a poem about the atavism of Europe, written in the shadow of war. In ‘The Creatures’ (1936), Auden had said of animals ‘They are our past and our future: the poles between which our desire unceasingly is discharged’ (l. 1). ‘They’ places the animal in the future: it speaks of the emergence of the repressed, recalling T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney – the ‘Terrible Presences’ that ‘when the blond boy / Bites eagerly into the shining / Apple, emerge in their shocking fury’, causing us to realise that ‘the sky / Nurses no one’ (ll. 5–10), interrupting an infantile state. This is in part the bourgeois dream of patrimony over a compliant and dependent society:

But those who come are not even children with

The big indiscriminate eyes we had lost,

Occupying our narrow spaces

With their anarchist vivid abandon.

(ll. 29–32)

The terror of adult sexuality which follows (‘all our whiteness shrinks / From the hairy and clumsy bridegroom’ (ll. 42–43)) culminates in a vision of the animal:

O the striped and vigorous tiger can move

With style through the borough of murder; the ape

Is really at home in the parish

Of grimacing and licking: but we have

Failed as their pupils. Our tears well from a love

We have never outgrown.[…]

(ll. 49–54)

This is to assert a difference from the animal informed by neoteny: a willed failure to enter a savage maturity, implicitly leaving the field to those animals in human form that stalk the ‘borough of murder’. Writing in the anthology I Believe in 1939, the same year as ‘They’, Auden seemed to seek to abrogate ‘The Creatures’ and ‘They’ in rejecting the animal world as a metaphor for the state:

Another false analogy is with the animal kingdom. Observed from the outside (how it appears to them no one knows), the individual animal seems to be sacrificed to the continuance of the species. This observation is used to deny the individual any rights against the state. But there is a fundamental difference between man and all other animals in that an animal which has reached maturity does not continue to evolve, but a man does. (1977, 374)

The analogy between body and state is ruled out for similar reasons: the body is ‘determined and fixed’ (374), whereas human generations throw up new possibilities; and this despite the fact that Auden is pessimistic about any ideas of moral progression. (One might consider the role of automaticity – metrical, stanzaic and narrative – in his satire: Victor, Miss Gee and others and their clockwork versification signal the human without evolution.) But we have to read this as a willed rational counter, I think, to the anxieties of ‘They’ – anxieties which fixate on the idea of the childishness of hope and love, and the vulnerability of civilisation in general in the face of the liberated desire of an animality which has been deferred and is all too likely to return.

It should be clear from the material considered here that the scientifically inflected poetry of the interwar period resonates with developments in biology, in ways which can be loose and opportunistic or more systematic. Many of these writers were in touch with the Cambridge biology of the interwar years – some, like Empson, swam in the river at the bottom of J. B. S. Haldane’s garden – and others were part of or at least linked to the Surrealism of the 1936 London exhibition and the Surrealist fascination with the biological grounding of the self. The deepest implication of biology, I would tentatively suggest, is a sense of the human as falling away into the animal. The human is destabilised, whether by the chemicals flashing through the body, by a view of humans as insects, or by the sense of civilisation as the tentative deferring of a savage maturity. At the same time, there is a comforting sense in which the discoveries of biology linked ‘man’ to the world, dispelling the ghost of dualisms past and prompting a renewed fascination with the minutiae of human emotion and behaviour in an expanded chemical and environmental context.