'I feel that if I leave the ship for too long or go too far, it may sail without me, and that then I would be lost in the real world'
Redmond O'Hanlon ? naturalist, explorer, bestselling writer ? is travelling again. Last year he completed a long expedition that offered him particular intellectual pleasure: he was on board the Dutch clipper Stad Amsterdam as it retraced the route of HMS Beagle around the world, from Plymouth to Salvador de Bahia to the Gal�pagos and on ? "the most important voyage ever made," he insists, "far more so than man's journey to the moon".
He was recruited as one of the presenters of a documentary series made by the Dutch broadcaster VPRO to celebrate the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. Not surprisingly, O'Hanlon, a figure of legendary bonhomie with a huge knowledge of natural history, became the star of the show. (Watch the YouTube footage entitled "Rough Cut: Redmond on Alfred Russel Wallace" for a display of his erudition.)
His enthusiasm is catching: he would, he jokes in one early episode, have done anything to be on board, even become a stowaway. As a schoolboy, he read On the Origin of Species in bed with a torch; his first published words were about Darwin; he even grew his side-whiskers in homage to him. "If I could choose a century to live in," he reflects, "I would certainly choose the 19th, the best of all times, when there was still a whole world to discover."
Yet O'Hanlon is celebrated most of all for his perilous jungle mountain treks and exhausting paddles through river swamps ? for sucking out monkey's eyes and dancing, drugged, for local tribes. In short, for having a really, comically terrible time. Isn't a trip among scientists on a well-equipped clipper a little tame? Rather, as perhaps befits a 64-year-old, he's delighted with the comforts of film-making, in contrast not only to the rigours of previous adventures, but as a way of circumventing the agonies of writing: "It's all done for you: no more privations, no more suffering, never being alone, no chance to get really depressed, a lot of drinking. Wonderful."
Sailing around the world is, after all, still boys' own stuff, and O'Hanlon, mischievous and laddish but very learned, became popular with the crew. The series shows him as something of an eccentric throwback, contentedly leafing through Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, consulting Lyell's Principles of Geology on the shores of Cape Verde and lying in a hammock turning the pages of other august volumes, which turn out to be deteriorating rapidly in the sea air. He isn't even irked that the wind blew off several pages from his precious first edition of On the Origin of Species: "It was worth ?40,000, and nothing now, but then again I got it for �5 in the 1970s, before Darwin had been rediscovered."
Each of the wonderfully recounted jungle adventures that made O'Hanlon's name is centred on a near-impossible quest ? to find a rare rhinoceros (Into the Heart of Borneo, 1984), to reach one of South America's highest peaks (In Trouble Again, 1988), and to catch sight of Lake Tele's mythical dinosaur (Congo Journey, 1996). For the Beagle series, he sets out on another quest, to Bacan Island, Indonesia, to spot the emerald-breasted bird of paradise known as Wallace's standardwing. Though hardly one of his sustained exercises in self-deprivation, the night-time journey has a familiar ring: "the hills are nothing but mud, you scramble your way up, and slip down again. I thought I was definitely going to die." But with dawn came the successful sighting of the plumed bird, and into the bargain O'Hanlon suffered the very direct sexual advances of a female orangutan ("her hair was so soft . . . I still dream about her now and then").
On previous expeditions, he contracted malaria and numerous other illnesses; this journey, too, was marked by a medical emergency. He is fond of sleep (his friend Ian McEwan likens him to Oblomov, Goncharov's character who refuses to leave his bed) and, travelling back on the plane, was exhausted after his Indonesian exploits: "I'm used to lying around all day with the cat." He slept for 17 hours straight and developed deep-vein thrombosis. In hospital he was visited by James Fenton, with whom he made the trip to Borneo in 1983. As O'Hanlon tells it, Fenton smuggled himself into the ward, breaking all the rules preventing visitors. The poet doesn't recall any infraction, but then "Redmond has a way of remembering these things, so . . ."
O'Hanlon has long had a public profile in the Netherlands, but was chosen as a presenter of the Beagle series in large part thanks to his Dutch publisher, Emile Brugman. Brugman has, over the years, heard hundreds of O'Hanlon's hair-raising anecdotes, but began to despair that he would ever read the autobiography for which he had long hoped. So he sent a Flemish journalist and travel writer, Rudi Rotthier, to tape hours of conversations with his author and write up a sort of ghosted memoir, with commentary. ("Emile said: well, if you're not going to write, we know you can certainly talk.") Published in 2009 as God, Darwin en natuur, it reminded the TV producers of O'Hanlon's extraordinary presence and assured him a passage on board the Stad Amsterdam. The book has now been translated and is published in Britain this month as The Fetish Room: The Education of a Naturalist.
It is definitively not an O'Hanlon production, but is notable for its sustained exploration of a different, more troubling side to the writer, who often appears a little unhinged in his books as he delves deeper into the discomforting unknown, but always for the sake of a telling the tale afterwards. For The Fetish Room, O'Hanlon undertakes another, differently traumatic, journey ? back to his childhood house, his school (Marlborough College) and Oxford. He's been recounting much of the book's substance for years to friends and interviewers: being beaten by his mother; his evangelical parents burning his books when he was a student (they considered them "vile, indecent, an absurd waste of time"); the self-immolation, aged 24, of his close friend Douglas Winchester (O'Hanlon keeps the remains of his charred foot in a Maxwell House coffee jar). But assembled together here, in a more pedestrian context, they bring into focus someone who admits having found it hard to keep, in his own phrase, "on an even keel".
He is candid about his depressive tendencies and lightly calls himself an "alcoholic". McEwan says O'Hanlon is "remarkably unchanged" since the mid-70s: "he has this wonderful carapace of comedy that protects a very serious spirit; there's all the mischief, fun and fizziness, but inside there's a darker quality." Julian Barnes, in his memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of, relates his admission to his friend "R" that he thinks a great deal about death. The response came back: "Your death-thoughts seem HEALTHY . . . Mine are v. v. sicko. Always have been = DO IT NOW type. Shotgun-in-mouth. Much improved since the Thames Valley Police came and removed my twelve-bore because they'd heard me on Desert Island Discs. Now only have [his son's] airgun. No good. No blasto. So we WILL HAVE OLD AGE TOGETHER."
The environmentalist Tim Flannery, meanwhile, admits to being "a little scared of Redmond at times, especially of being in the bush with him. On our last adventure on the Hawkesbury River near Sydney, we were kayaking when we almost lost him to a quaking pit of bottomless mud, after he inexplicably upset his kayak. 'I'm sunk up to my failing penis,' he moaned over and over as I tried to haul him in."
O'Hanlon's house in Oxfordshire is notoriously messy and chaotic, with tilting piles of books and drifts of magazines: his attempts to tidy it up bring on panic attacks. When he moved to the house, he felt it necessary exactly to reproduce the look of his previous study; otherwise he felt unsafe. He likes to stack up around himself everything he has ever valued, as if he fears it'll all be taken away: stuffed animals, skulls, a giant pelican, a mummified frog, hundreds of photographs of pygmies, a pair of buffalo horns and lots of cabinets ? for beetles, butterflies, birds' eggs and an alarming spider. (Will Self included a description of the cottage in his novel Great Apes ? a "great simulacrum of his own mind".) And then there's the fetish room . . .
O'Hanlon's father was a believer in natural theology, and encouraged his son's interest in birds and entomology. The writer remembers the view from the vicarage study window, "the yew, the bushes where we played jungles, the huge copper beech, the conker tree, and . . . a stream where I'd catch minnows in Lucozade bottles baited with bread." When he was four, playing in the garden, a mistle thrush's egg fell to the ground in front of him. It was a magical, life-transforming moment. "I thought that God had given me a present . . . For the first time in my life I comprehended how wonderful birds were." It took On the Origin of Species to remove his thoughts of religion; it was another "revelation ? Darwin liberated me from God."
O'Hanlon was hopeless at maths, so didn't read science at university, taking English instead. He was rusticated from Oxford for writing a druggy, supposedly pornographic novel ("I didn't know enough for it to be properly pornographic"), but used his time away from college to get married to a fellow student, Belinda Harty ? they've now been together for 44 years and have two children. Belinda opened a successful clothes shop, which over four decades helped them pay the bills (in the 60s it was, according to rumour, used by Howard Marks to launder the money from his drug deals).
Having got a distinguished first, O'Hanlon was briefly a don, but was sacked after he taught his students literature from the wrong century. His doctorate on Conrad and Darwin took him seven years (Galen Strawson, a former friend, speaks of 36-hour sleep cycles and barbed wire on the stairs), but he was by then part of a remarkable group of writers which used to meet fortnightly at Fenton's house: it included Barnes, McEwan, Craig Raine, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and Timothy Garton-Ash. On one occasion O'Hanlon took along Bruce Chatwin, who was keen to impress. He "did everything he could to attract Fenton's attention. [In a high plaintive voice]: 'When I visited Somerset Maugham, we were standing by the pond. He took me from behind and fucked me on the spot.' Fenton opened a lazy eye. Then shut it again."
O'Hanlon recalls McEwan in hippier days, driving an MG with a "Give Peace a Chance" sticker on the back. They still go on walks together, the novelist in awe of the naturalist's ornithological prowess, the naturalist noting that the novelist is "disgustingly fit and extremely competitive". O'Hanlon told Rotthier that he is "happy that my friends are doing so well. Their value in the stock exchange of public esteem rises year by year. In that respect, I have made the best investment in friendship that you can imagine."
When his friend Jeremy Treglown took over the editorship of the TLS in 1981, O'Hanlon became natural history editor, a position he held for decades and clearly loved. He is still amazed that "EO Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould . . . would listen to me and be prepared to do what I asked". He seems eventually to have become a kind of Father Christmas figure in the office, distributing Crunchie bars and Flakes on his monthly visits, as well as proving an unparalleled source of gossip.
Fenton recalls that, around this time, when he first suggested an easy jungle-walking trip to the east, O'Hanlon wasn't sure he could do it. Having been convinced, however, he "really got the bit between this teeth", trained with the SAS and planned a journey that was, the poet says, "wildly illegal, physically impossible and incredibly expensive". The route they eventually followed ? up the Baleh River through a primary jungle unexplored by westerners since the 1920s ? was merely "foolhardy". They faced, among other delights, headhunters, wild boar ticks and a bowl of spaghetti that turned out to be parasitic fish worms. The poet suffered in another way, too ? from the fact, as McEwan puts it, that the comedy of O'Hanlon's books "derives from taking along a companion and watching him suffer". Fenton himself sums up the method as "it's not enough to succeed; somebody else must be seen to fail".
A few years after the Borneo trip, O'Hanlon asked Fenton to come with him on another expedition, this time to the Brazilian rainforest. The poet's reply to his friend is now renowned: "'Are you listening seriously?' 'Yes' 'Are you listening comfortably?' 'Yes.' 'Then I want you to know,' said James, shutting his eyes and pressing his palms over his face and the top of his bald head, 'that I would not come with you to High Wycombe.'" Instead, O'Hanlon asked along an old "boozing mate", Simon Stockton, a casino manager, who cracked halfway through the expedition and returned home.
A similar thing happened to the American zoologist Lary Shaffer, who accompanied O'Hanlon to the Congo. Undermined by bureaucrats, made ill by eating rancid elephant meat and attacked by armies of ants, Shaffer declined O'Hanlon's invitation to accompany him on the journey's final leg. Before they parted, he wrote a note that he asked O'Hanlon to sign: "I, Redmond, declare that I am going on the Lake Tele death trip of my own free will and hereby forgive Lary his escape." Forging ahead after Shaffer's departure, O'Hanlon enters his own heart of darkness and becomes dislocated from reality; he comes to depend on a magic talisman, a lump of string and monkey fur wrapped around the severed finger of a dead child.
O'Hanlon always speculated that his travels were connected to a Protestant notion of virtue in suffering. To write his next book, he set out to face "the ultimate fear" and so sailed on an Orkney trawler to Arctic fishing grounds in the depths of winter. Claustrophobia, anxiety and sleep deprivation turn the narrative of Trawler (2003) into another spellbinding but unnerving study of derangement. As the trawler's net brings up strange, monstrous beasts ? sea bats, snotfish, translucent giant octopuses, hideous hagfish ? traumas emerge from the depths of the fishermens' subconscious.
O'Hanlon had long been recognised as a great talker ("I did Wogan six times ? whenever somebody hadn't turned up. I was told only Joan Collins did more"), but writing became increasingly hard ? and hard, too, on his family. McEwan says that a page of one of O'Hanlon's books represents about a week of his writing life. He writes at night ? partly because this is when "books come off the shelves and speak to you directly", and partly for fear of interruption. "You are en route somewhere, on a journey, and in your imagination you experience it more intensely than when you were really there. If someone opens the door or asks a question at a moment like that, it's like being shot in the head."
In The Fetish Room, O'Hanlon tells Rotthier he has given up writing, yet he says now he "might have to" take up his pen again, because "they want me to write the official book of the clipper" (he has in fact already started it). And he is at work on a new TV series on naturalists, which requires much reading and research. Darwin is yet again proving a source of inspiration. "I love every second," he says in his cabin on the Stad Amsterdam. "I feel comfortable in my limited space and fear that if I leave the ship for too long or go too far, it may sail without me, and that then I would be lost in the real world that I have been trying to escape all my life. Here I can muse in my books, imagine myself to be in the 19th century and compliment myself daily that I am that fortunate child who sails the oceans of the world."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/mar/28/redmond-ohanlon-life-in-books
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