Clarence Day's "This Simian World" -- Garbo

In this series, I've been looking at the work of humorists and essayists whose work I encountered while pulling books off the shelf in the 800s section of the Indianapolis Public Library in the early 1970s.

"The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall, nations perish, civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead."

Good thing Clarence Day felt that way, as he died shortly after his 1935 book Life With Father became a bestseller. The book, happily for Day's legacy, has stayed in print into the 21st century. And because the book became a film, in the future it will probably be streaming video and/or YouTube which keeps Clarence Day in people's hearts, rather than the printed page. (Maybe the electronic page, though. . .)

Life With Father made such a good film becausei it was based on the successful Broadway show, adapted from the book by stage geniuses Howard Lindsay and
Russel Crouse. Because Warner Brothers added a star-studded cast (William Powell, Irene Dunne, Elizabeth Taylor, ZaSu Pitts), a film adaptation by Donald Ogden Stewart, and direction by Michael Curtiz, "Life With Father" was a movie a lot of people went to see.

And here it is on YouTube! I don't have any popcorn for you, and the video is kinda low-res but it's frrreeeee.

Now let's back up, and start with a time when Clarence Day, a partner in a brockerage firm, began writing humorous essays. The first volume of his linked mini-essays, This Simian World, was published in 1920. Day himself did the illustrations for the book.

These essays where written within the cultural climate which would soon bring another Clarence to prominence: in 1925, Clarence Darrow battled creationists to defend the teaching of evolution in public schools

The NPR website has a good timeline summary of the "monkey trial." Clarence Day was writing This Simian World not long before the famous court case, just as America was beginning to grapple with the scientific assertion that humans had evolved from apes.

Before the teaching-evolution-in-schools argument ever went to the courts, the monkey-human connection had already become a huge focus of popular culture.

At the turn of the 20th century, H. G. Wells' mad-science book The Island of Doctor Moreau explored the (incorrect) idea that the evolutionary process could be sped up by surgical modification. This video clip offers a brief look at how the reading public reacted to Wells' highly-controversial book:

If you never got farther down on your H. G. Wells reading list than The War of the Worlds, you can listen to the audiobook version version of The Island of Doctor Moreau on YouTube.

Twelve years after Clarence Day's book This Simian World was published, the first (and best) film version of The Island of Doctor Moreau hit movie theaters, with the title "Island of Lost Souls." This site offers a brief but thoughtful look at the film, which features ape-like creatures becoming transformed (painfully) into human-like beings.

Woo-hoo! Here's the moment in which I get to insert a link to the DEVO video "Jocko Homo" into a blog post. The short art film is a send-up of mad science in general and "Island of Lost Souls" in particular. In this music video version, DEVO has humans devolve rather than having the apes evolve. A repeated lyric line comes right from film dialogue: 'Are we not men?' And of course the movie uses the creatures' chant as a source:

This Simian World was written not only when, in literature, H. G. Wells had shaken the world with The Island of Doctor Moreau, but when the Marx Brothers, appeared in "Cocoanuts," first on Broadway, and then in Hollywood. The theme of science and monkeys pops up in the topical musical.

Irving Berlin wrote the number "Monkey-Doodle-Doo" about the scandalous monkey-glands craze. Say what?

Anyone who's been to the zoo sees that monkeys are both highly sexual and shameless, and a strange offshoot of slow acceptance of the ape-into-man scientific theory was experimentation with injecting men with (or surgically implanting within men) material from male monkey reproductive organs. (Obviously, Viagra hadn't been invented yet.)

Here, a cultural historian looks at the lyrics of "Monkey-Doodle-Doo" in depth -- or attempts to -- being interrupted often by appreciative laughter from the audience.

Irving Berlin wasn't the only songwriter cashing in on the evolution craze in the 1920s. There were a lot of jazz/blues numbers with a monkey theme, including this ditty, which begins "Your mother was an ape, so you must be a monkey man."

So back to Clarence Day. (Remember him?) In his humorous essays, Day really put some thought into his writing. While so many other people of his time were intensely reactive (waving Bibles or searching mail-order ads for monkey gland serum -- perhaps both) and/or making light of new, startling scientific insights, in his book Day wonders about whether human beings really do behave so differently than members of the animal kingdom.

Not such a groundbreaking thought now, but in Day's time, animated cartoons were primitive and a rarity; Mickey Mouse in "Steamboat Willie" would be eight years in the future. People in 1920 had not watched hours and hours of cartoon animals, dressed like people singing and dancing and talking on the telephone.

The influence of church teachings was also very strong in the world of 1920 America. Clarence Day wrote at a time when nearly everyone around him firmly believed that the Earth and all the creatures on it were created by God solely for the use of humans, who were free to do as they liked with their living gifts.

So Clarence Day's thoughtful perspective set him apart from most writers of his day, at least when it came to the topic of evolution. In one of my favorite sections of This Simian World, Day has just been speculating about how human evolution would have gone if animals other than monkeys had been our ancestors. After going through a list of potential candidates, he arrives at our lost elephantine heritage:

Goats, then? Bears or turtles? Wolves, whales, crows? Each had brains and pride, and would have been glad to rule the world if they could; but each had their defects, and their weaknesses for such a position.

The elephant? Ah! Evolution has had its tragedies, hasn't it, as well as its triumphs; and well should the elephant know it. He had the best chance of all. Wiser even than the lion, or the wisest of apes, his wisdom furthermore was benign where theirs was sinister. Consider his dignity, his poise and skill. He was plastic, too. He had learned to eat many foods and endure many climates. Once, some say, this race explored the globe. Their bones are found everywhere, in South America even; so the elephants' Columbus may have found some road here before ours. They are cosmopolitans, these suave and well-bred beings. They have rich emotional natures, long memories, loyalty; they are steady and sure; and not narrow, not self-absorbed, for they seem interested in everything. What was it then, that put them out of the race?

Could it have been a quite natural belief that they had already won?

And when they saw that they hadn't, and that the monkey-men were getting ahead, were they too great-minded and decent to exterminate their puny rivals?

It may have been their tolerance and patience that betrayed them. They wait too long before they resent an imposition or insult. Just as ants are too energetic and cats too shrewd for their own highest good, so the elephants suffer from too much patience. Their exhibitions of it may seem superb,--such power and such restraint, combined, are noble,--but a quality carried to excess defeats itself. Kings who won't lift their scepters must yield in the end; and, the worst of it is, to upstarts who snatch at their crowns.

I fancy the elephants would have been gentler masters than we: more live-and-let-live in allowing other species to stay here. Our way is to kill good and bad, male and female and babies, till the few last survivors lie hidden away from our guns. All species must surrender unconditionally--those are our terms--and come and live in barns alongside us; or on us, as parasites. The creatures that want to live a life of their own, we call wild. If wild, then no matter how harmless we treat them as outlaws, and those of us who are specially well brought up shoot them for fun. Some might be our friends. We don't wish it. We keep them all terrorized. When one of us conquering monkey-men enters the woods, most animals that scent him slink away, or race off in a panic. It is not that we have planned this deliberately: but they know what we're like. Race by race they have been slaughtered. Soon all will be gone. We give neither freedom nor life-room to those we defeat.

If we had been as strong as the elephants, we might have been kinder. When great power comes naturally to people, it is used more urbanely. We use it as parvenus do, because that's what we are. The elephant, being born to it, is easy-going, confident, tolerant. He would have been a more humane king.

A race descended from elephants would have had to build on a large scale. Imagine a crowd of huge, wrinkled, slow-moving elephant-men getting into a vast elephant omnibus.

And would they have ever tried airships?

When I read Clarence Day now, I'm doing it 46 years after I first pulled This Simian World off a gray metal library shelf and began examining the worn library binding with innocent, clueless curiosity. Today I know a bit more about history, the arts, science, and human nature than I did wehn I was 17.

I'd started out in the 800's section of the library to find out how to be funny. But I'd been drawn in by the chance to know more about the world as seen by people of an age well before mine. I found a lot of the references mysterious or confusing and I had some of it all wrong in my mind, but I would compare my experience to that of people outside the US who taught themselves English from watching American TV. They got a lot more than vocabulary by soaking up sitcoms and cop shows and Judge Judy.

Even if I didn't always "get" Clarence Day's work, I thought it was good stuff then and I still think it's very funny, insightful, and readable. I'm not the only reader who thinks so, either. Check out these fairly-recent Amazon reviews of This Simian Life: