Keep Shaking the Box: Sophie Mayer on Ruth Padel’s Darwin

Darwin: A Life in Poems, Chatto and Windus 2009, £12.99

Richard Holmes concludes his Guardian review of Darwin: A Life in Poems with the witty claim that Ruth Padel “may have evolved a new species of biography — by poetic selection.” As several reviewers point out, Padel also equals and mirrors Darwin’s delight in the sheer proliferation of biological life and its diversity, working across an array of poetic forms and a treasure-trove of language both scientific and art-historical. A collector of precise differences like her ancestor, Padel has a trick with a list: “polyps, plankton, jellyfish. Sea butterflies, the pteropods” (29); “Follicle, pinnacle; whorl, bole and thorn” (30); “palm, fluff, prickle, matte and plume; / bobbled; shaggy plush” (32) — all describing, even mimicking, Darwin’s first encounters with particular biospheres. The gnarled evolution of English itself made visible in the clash of Latinate “Follicle, pinnacle” and Saxon “whorl, bole and thorn.”

Padel, meanwhile, stakes a curious claim for the place of her book in the chain of poetic evolution. Only one literary work (other than the Bible) gets name-checked, Darwin’s favoured Paradise Lost, an almost over-determined intertext for Darwin’s attempt to justify the ways of the world not being God’s. Padel’s thick descriptions of tropical jungles are elaborately Miltonian, suggesting the strange engines on the plains of Hell as much as the fecundity of the garden of Eden. Padel, in a sense, puts Darwin forward as, in a sense, Satan, Eve and Adam all in one: the tempter, the tempted and the first man, given the task of naming.

Or rather, seeing. There’s a biography of poetic selection that ghosts behind Padel’s book through direct quotations and references, a book that’s directly concerned with seeing difference and seeing differently: Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. Carson and Padel, both of them classicists, feminists and poets, have written in praise of each others’ work, but — to my knowledge — no one has yet elucidated the connections between their books, Padel’s clearly an act of homage to Autobiography of Red as much as it is to her ancestor. This raises two questions: in what ways does Darwin: A Life in Poems offer this homage, and why?

References to Carson’s text are rife throughout the book, not least in its investigation of biography in verse. To achieve the “poetic selection” that Holmes describes, Padel takes on Carson’s form of the snapshot, the hot moments that shape and are shaped by her protagonist Geryon’s emerging practice as a photographer. Darwin is no photographer, but his lifetime practice of writing letters and notes provides the spine for Padel’s selective framing. The work of selection from these materials is overt in Darwin, as Holmes suggests, operating as a quasi-scientific principle to invest moments of personal and scientific significance, as if mapping an exact evolution of Darwin’s thought through its stages. Each poem is heavy with significance, as Darwin’s personal life carries the portentous weight of his contribution to modern thought. Carson’s photographs, on the other hand, record Geryon “in the off hours,” as she titled the collection that followed Autobiography, which presented flash-fast biographies of eminent men and women, including Virginia Wool and Audubon as they engage in the process of becoming themselves rather more obliquely.

Padel follows Carson’s curiosity about the location of the creative process and the formation of the self. Writing of the young Darwin, Padel echoes Carson’s account of Geryon, the red monster killed by Herakles whom Carson updates to late twentieth century North America. From the first poem, recounting Geryon’s first day at school, Carson torques her prepositions and verbs to suggest the uncanny mode of experiencing that sets Geryon apart from others.

Children poured around him
and the intolerable red assault of grass and the smell of grass everywhere
was pulling him towards it
like a strong sea (Carson, 23).

Padel also begins with Darwin’s schooldays, his ability to “look inside the blossom / and discover the name of the plant” (3), a skill that sets him apart from the other boys. That ability, and its definitional idiosyncracy, is revealed more implicitly in Padel’s Carsonian phrase-making as she charts Darwin’s sensory and intellectual development: “Bits of the world blow towards him and come apart / on the wind” (4) or “The world poured back and forth a daft number of times / between mountains and the drill-holes of his eyes” (9). This strange relation between world and self has its roots in Padel’s studies In and Out of the Greek Mind and Whom Gods Destroy, which consider the classical Greek model of emotion, affect and madness as external forces that enter the human body and mind.

Padel’s Darwin seems, like Carson’s Geryon, to be assailed at all times by a feedback circuit of the sensory world that blows or pours or pounds (13) or explodes (94) or — in a reference to Carson’s brilliant essay in Decreation on the nature of documentary — foams (62) between his eyes/mind and the surface or depth of the world. His experiences become and inform “pieces of theory / [that] fall at him out of a box. He keeps /shaking the box” (62), echoing Carson’s assertion that “the fragments of the Geryoneis itself read as if Stesichorus had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat... You can of course keep shaking the box.” (Carson, 6-7). Padel shakes the box of Darwin’s letters, family memoirs and the cultural understanding of evolution, and shaking up the connection between text and meat, mind and body, culture and nature.

The active and emotive nature of intellectual discovery — the mind’s embodiment — recurs throughout Padel’s account, often in direct quotations that align the young Darwin with Carson’s winged red monster, as when Darwin goes “bouncing on hot springs // of excitement” (12) in homage to “Herakles’ voice bouncing through Geryon on hot gold springs” (Carson, 73). Darwin’s reaction to Emma accepting his proposal — “Bees / shifted honey-bags up his spine. He was roses / burning alive” (65) — entwines two of Geryon’s signature (expressions of) sensations, which remake the natural world as entangled with the human body. Darwin’s bee of reciprocal love is a homely relation of Carson’s uncanny “Reddish yellow small alive animal / Not a bee [that] moved up Geryon’s spine on the inside” (Carson, 11), while his roses are illuminated by reference to Geryon’s seventh grade science project about “the noise that colors make” (Carson, 84). To make visible the roaring of the roses as he hears it, Geryon photographs his mother’s rose bush on fire - an unconventional scientific experiment, one that suggests realms of science beyond Darwin’s familiar honey (or love)-making bee.

Both Geryon and Darwin are depicted as concerned with the relation between the visible world and the metaphors (including religion, science and love) that humans use to describe, harness, change or conserve it. With Geryon, of course, Carson has more latitude for invention, but Padel — working with extraordinary material — does not quite convey just how remarkably odd Darwin’s insights were, how counter-intuitive and controversial. This is partially because the later years of his career, post-Beagle, are framed — one could even say boxed-in — by his life with Emma and their brood of children. Darwin’s internal conflict between his discoveries and the prevailing culture of doctrinal Christianity is rendered a domestic drama, a line also taken by Jon Amiel’s Darwin biopic Creation (2009) which, in true Hollywood fashion, imagines that audiences can only grasp the most astonishing creative or scientific thinking if it’s embedded in a conventional and star-studded (Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connolly as the Darwins) love story.

Padel’s narration of life chez Darwin is more thoughtful and original, paralleling as it does events in Afghanistan and Emma’s first confinement in 1839 (78), and showing how Darwin’s work is utilitarian displays.

Evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden has argued that Darwin ignored his own evidence for the diversity of successful non-combative, non-heteronormative reproductive systems he observed. Padel’s drops of red - seen only before Darwin settles down with Emma — suggest the discarded possibility, the monstrous strangenessentwined with paternity, as he uses his children both as subjects of study (83-5) and as students (89-90). These increasingly Victorian portraits of the paterfamilias adhering to convention, however, culminating in the “hearse with [Emma’s] spray of white lilies”, overtake the publicly-engaged scientist: The Descent of Man is published in the pre-penultimate poem of the book. For all her love of variety, Padel falls into Darwin’s trap of natural selection, which argues (as Padel notes in “Survival of the Fittest,” 108-09, as well as in the arc of her narrative) for monogamous heterosexual coupling as the motor of vertebrate life. Of course, the Darwins’ monogamy and fertility is a fact, as is sexual reproduction — but Padel sets it wholesale as the determining fact of both Darwin’s life and evolution.

Amidst the monochrome of sexual selection appears a trace of Geryon’s monstrous difference, his insistence on the intractable weirdness of the world, on the need to keep shaking the box and celebrating the infinite variety in which the pieces descend. Monster, after all, comes from the verb monstrare, to show. A trail of red traverses the poems, a signature like the drops of red lava in the photograph “Red Patience” that Geryon admires (Carson, 51-2). Darwin sees “a bright rug / of dark-hearted poppies” (18), an octopus that turns “red — as a hyacinth” (30), and red stains in the snow (43), all of which turn out to be crucial to the understanding of evolution’s weird indirectness, its queer tangents and non-

of Darwin’s project under its patina of the respectable figure of middle-class father and scientist. Padel’s references to Autobiography of Red have a similar effect, leaving traces of a far stronger and stranger, less novelistic project, one where the roses might have been actually — not just metaphorically — on fire.