Pictures of Waugh and Thomas
The DNA of men and butterflies is chemically identical and is the same thing: a recipe for proteins written in a four-letter code. We use the same chemical and same code because we descend from the same ancient ancestor, and although evolution has edited and expanded the recipe of that ancestor much less than many realize, one of the most important changes in our lineage has been in the DNA coding for the tiny ancestral brain. Our brains stopped being tiny a long time ago, but it’s only recently that they got big enough to accommodate something entirely new: the faculty of language.
Like the human brain as a whole, the language faculty must have evolved: variations in the DNA of our languageless ancestors were selected over evolutionary time to code for a specialized region of the brain. But many people, confronted with the complexity of language, resort to the argument from emotion and deny that it could have evolved: because we have no good idea how it could have done so, they argue that some mysterious force, such as the supernatural, must have created it ex nihilo. The same argument from emotion applies to the complexity of the eye, and it is just as invalid there as it is here. There is no good philosophical or scientific objection to the proposition that language evolved, and one of the most exciting challenges now facing science is the task of discovering precisely how it did so.
However, many scientists stop short at the proposition that language is an evolved faculty encoded in our genes. The reasoning goes that any normal child of any race can learn any natural language simply by being exposed to it, therefore the language faculty is identical in the brains of all races and by logical extension so are the genes underlying it. Genes influence only the brute fact of language, not the different forms it takes in different parts of the world, which are contingent products of history and culture. This argument is in fact invalid too: one cannot argue from the adaptability of a faculty that it has an identical form in all races or that identical genes underlie it. To use a crude analogy: one can open a tin of paint with a screwdriver or with a knife, but it does not follow that a screwdriver is the same as a knife.
Similarly, just because a racially Chinese child can learn English perfectly or a racially English child learn Chinese perfectly, it does not follow that the language faculty, and the language genes, of the English and Chinese are identical. There may be subtle differences that partly account for differences in the English and Chinese languages: genetically based preferences for certain sounds or certain grammatical forms, for example. These preferences would only be fully apparent in isolation. If the English or the Chinese were the only race on earth, their language might reflect their language genes perfectly, though it would still be contingent to some extent: only the faculty of language is encoded in the genes, not any particular manifestation of that faculty.
These arguments about races also apply to individuals within races: in the sixteenth century racially English children learnt the same language, English, but it does not follow that the language faculty of each child was identical. As adults, they certainly didn’t have identical faculties: after all, one of those children grew up into William Shakespeare. But how far was Shakespeare born to linguistic greatness by inheriting particular genes, and how far did he have linguistic greatness thrust upon him by his environment? Well, can we suppose that any child subject to Shakespeare’s environment could have grown up to write Hamlet or Macbeth?
I think not, but we should note that literary greatness, to the extent that it is a product of the genes, could not depend solely on genes for language.1 Some “mute inglorious Miltons” have been mute not because they were born poor but because they preferred other things to literature, and some of those preferences will have been influenced by their genes. Then again, some great writers have become great writers because they were not able to follow their preferences. Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) described the genesis of his career like this:
I keep seeing books … about young men who have literary souls but are thwarted and even made to go into the family business and become mere money-makers and breeders of children instead of great writers. My plight is the exact opposite. I was driven into writing because I found it was the only way a lazy and ill-educated man could make a decent living.2But not all lazy and ill-educated men could have made a decent living from writing in Waugh’s day: he had to have the talent, and his talent, it turned out, was sublime. All his biographers have noted that his father and elder brother were writers too and some have noted writers among his ancestors, but none to my knowledge have tried to place him in any larger genetic pattern.
Nevertheless, there is an obvious piece of evidence that, as a writer, he belongs to one: his similarities with the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-53). They looked and acted so much alike that Waugh’s biographer Christopher Sykes described how Waugh would try to avoid Thomas when they both lived in London.3 Both wore check suits, both were short and overweight, both drank heavily, both revelled in fantasy and parody, and both had an exceptional literary talent. These similarities would seem to have a genetic basis: Waugh and Thomas were, in traditional terms, of the same blood. Even the surname “Waugh” is etymologically identical with the word “Welsh”: they both come from the Anglo-Saxon wealh, meaning “foreigner” and applied by the Anglo-Saxons to the Celts.
Were Waugh and Thomas therefore Celtic writers in a genetic sense? Perhaps they were, but if so they were not unique. Literature in English has been dominated by writers either from Celtic regions or with ancestors from Celtic regions. Scotland, indeed, has had a hugely disproportionate influence on English-speaking culture as a whole, from football and other forms of art to politics and other forms of crime,4 while Ireland and perhaps Wales have had a disproportionate influence on literature and music. How far this has been genetic is something science may be able to tell us in the near future, but the patterns are already visible: the great writers Evelyn Waugh and Dylan Thomas really might have been separated at birth.
However, I don’t think these genetic influences are simply racial: there also seem to be sexual patterns in literature, which is one of the few forms of culture that would seriously miss the contribution of women. Music and the visual arts, like mathematics and science, have never depended on women, and the greatest composers and artists, like the greatest mathematicians and scientists, have all been men. In literature the same is true only of poetry;5 elsewhere women have competed on much more equal terms with men. The faculty of language is common to both sexes, and though there are important and even fundamental differences between male and female language both within literature and outside it, literature is the most hermaphroditic of the arts.
And perhaps it is hermaphroditic in a deeper sense. Something that struck me when I first studied the Bloomsbury Women’s Literature A-Z (1992) in the late 1990s was the “masculinized” appearance of many of the writers included, regardless of their race: their faces were broad and masculine and some could almost have passed as men. Relatively few writers had photos with their entries, of course, and perhaps the editrix of the book was being selective, but the same pattern seems to exist among female politicians.
The masculinization of female writers may, I suggest, be apparent from their faces, and the feminization of male writers may be apparent from their behavior. Evelyn Waugh, for example, went through an “intensely homosexual” phase at Oxford, and Shakespeare has sometimes been identified as bisexual. This theory of literary hermaphroditism would therefore be supported if homosexuality is more common among writers of either sex than in the population at large, and if it is distributed unevenly in the different genres of writing. I would suggest that one of the most hermaphroditic genres is the literary novel, and I would predict that female writers of romantic fiction and male writers of thrillers are less inclined to homosexuality than literary novelists of their respective sexes.
And the readers of romantic fiction, thrillers, and literary novels may reflect the sexuality of those who write them, which is a remainder that writers, like races, do not exist in a vacuum. Writers have an audience, or at least have to acquire one, which is why they are a minority of a self-selected minority. Many are called to writing but few are chosen by enough readers to become successful, and those few are not always chosen purely on their literary merits. Evelyn Waugh was, or least deserved to be, but he may have been helped by the fact that he was good-looking at the start of his career. However, his good looks may have been a reflection of his literary talent too. Faces, like brains, are influenced by the genes, and differences in both faces and brains will reflect differences in genes.
A “good” face may therefore go with a good brain in some statistically significant sense, just as a female writer’s masculinized face may go with a masculinized brain. Even the fact that Waugh, unlike his brother Alec, retained his hair as an adult may have indirect literary significance. Baldness is a function of testosterone levels, and Alec may have been less good as a writer because he had more testosterone and so less feminine insight and sensitivity than Evelyn. This is not to suggest that no great writer can be ugly or bald, because that is patently false and biology is a matter of trends and tendencies, not of Platonic absolutes. But the allegedly bald Shakespeare did note that there’s no art to finding the mind’s construction in the face, and the mind and its contents – language and literary skill – are products of the brain, just as the brain, and the face, are products of the genes. The barbarians of biology and neuro-science are now almost at the gates of literature, but then the barbarians of postmodernism are already wreaking havoc within the city, and here as elsewhere Darwin will be considerably more fruitful than Derrida.
NOTES
1. Nor, in fact, can the language faculty depend solely on genes for language: language is collaboration of brain modules, not a brain module in isolation.
2. “General Conversation: Myself…”, Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, March 1937, collected in The Essays, Articles & Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher.
3. See brief discussion of Waugh and Dylan Thomas.
4. Waugh describes his Scottish ancestry in his autobiography A Little Learning (1964).
5. Poetry could be seen as a literary form of music or even mathematics, which have important neurological similarities.
6. Writing is also a craft: a writer creates a structure, and Evelyn Waugh sometimes compared writing novels to carpentry. Men are good at ball games and building things, that is, at manipulating objects in space, and perhaps linguistic construction is also a “masculine” strength.