The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man: Essential Stories

A REPORT FOR AN ACADEMY

GENTLEMEN, eminent members of the academy!

You have done me the honour of asking me to present a report on my simian past.

Unfortunately, however, I won’t be able to carry out that request in the sense in which it was intended. Nearly five years now separate me from my simian state, a short time when measured by the calendar, but practically endless if you galloped through it like I did, sometimes accompanied by admirable people, by advice, acclaim and orchestral music, but fundamentally alone, because anyone accompanying me, to pursue my metaphor, stayed safely offstage in the orchestra’s pit. That effort would have been impossible if I’d stubbornly tried to cling on to my origins, to memories of my youth. In fact, my highest law was to relinquish any wilfulness I found within myself; I, a free ape, bent my neck to that yoke. As a result, whatever memories I had became ever more closed off from me. Although at first I could still—had the humans wished it—have gone back through the high, wide arch that the sky forms over the earth, the way back became lower and narrower the more I drove my development forward; I started to feel more comfortable and more embedded in the human world; the storm chasing me from out of my past began to settle; today it’s no more than a breeze to cool my heels; the distant gap through which it comes and through which I once came has shrunk so small that even if I had the strength and the willpower to get back to it, I would have to scrape the hide off my body just to squeeze through. To put it frankly, even though I do like to use figures of speech for these things, to put it frankly: your own simian heritage, gentlemen, insofar as you have something like that in your past, is no more remote from you than mine is from me. Yet everyone who walks this earth feels that little tickle at his heel, from a little chimpanzee to the great Achilles.

But I can perhaps answer your invitation in a more limited sense, and will do so with great pleasure. The first thing I learnt was: shake hands; shaking hands leads to openness; and now that I’m at the high point of my career, I’d like to add some candid speech to that first frank handshake. I won’t be able to tell the academy anything substantively new and I will fall far short of what was asked of me, which I wouldn’t be able to provide with the best will in the world—nevertheless, let me sketch the course of how someone born an ape was able to enter the human world and thrive in it. But even the little that follows I wouldn’t be willing to explain if I weren’t completely sure of myself and my position, and if I hadn’t unshakeably established myself on every great variety stage in the civilized world.

I come from the Gold Coast. For an account of how I was captured I have to rely on the reports of others. A hunting expedition mounted by the Hagenbeck Company—with whose leader I’ve since shared many a fine bottle of claret—was waiting in a riverbank hide when I and the rest of my troop arrived for an evening drink. Shots were fired; I was the only one hit, and I was hit twice.

Once in the cheek; that one just glanced me, but it left me with a big hairless red scar that earned me the disgusting and wholly unsuitable name Red Peter, which really might have been dreamt up by an ape and which implied that the only difference between me and a recently deceased, moderately well-known performing ape called Peter was the red mark on my cheek. That’s just by the by.

The second shot struck me below the hip. It was more serious, that’s why I still limp a little to this day. I recently read in a piece by one of the ten thousand windbags who air their opinions of me in the newspapers that my simian nature has not yet been entirely suppressed; the proof being that, when I have visitors, I still like to pull down my trousers to show them where that shot hit me. That hack deserves to have every finger on his writing hand shot off one at a time. I, I can pull down my trousers in front of whomever I please; you’d find nothing but a well-groomed pelt and a scar left by—let me use this specific word for this specific situation, because I don’t want to be misunderstood—the scar left by a criminal assault. All this is in the open; there’s nothing to hide; any high-minded person would drop the constraints of politeness when it’s a matter of demonstrating the truth. If, on the other hand, that scribbler were to pull down his trousers when he had visitors, it would appear in a very different light, and I take it as a sign of vestigial good sense that he doesn’t do it. But I’d like him to spare me his delicacy of feeling!

After those shots I came round—and this is where my own memories gradually take over—in a cage below decks on the Hagenbeck steamer. It wasn’t the classic cage with four barred sides; rather, it was three-sided and fixed to a crate, with the crate making a wall. It was too low to stand up in and too narrow to sit down. So I crouched with bent, shaking knees and, probably because at first I wanted to stay in the dark and not see anyone, I faced the crate while the thin bars behind me cut into my flesh. It’s considered good practice to keep wild animals in this kind of accommodation during their first moments in captivity, and after my experiences I can’t now deny that from the human perspective that is correct.

Back then I couldn’t think like that. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have a way out; at least there was no way out directly ahead of me; directly ahead of me was the crate, with each board nailed firmly to the next. There was in fact one small gap between them, something I greeted with rapturous howls of unreason when I first discovered it, but which was not nearly big enough to fit even just my tail through and which all my simian strength was unable to widen.

I was told later that I made unusually little noise, leading the hunters to conclude that either I would soon give up the ghost or, if I managed to survive the difficult first phase, I would take very well to training. I survived the first phase. Muted sobbing, painful searches for fleas, weary licking of coconuts, knocking my skull against the crate, sticking out my tongue when someone came—these were the first occupations of my new life. But all of them came with the same feeling: no way out. Of course I now only have human words to sketch an ape’s emotions, but even if I can no longer precisely describe the old simian truths, the gist is correct, there’s no doubt about that.

Until that moment I had always had so many ways out, and now I had none. I’d been run to ground. I would have been no less free if I’d been nailed to the floor. Why was that? Scratch the flesh between your toes until it starts to bleed, and you still won’t understand. Push yourself backwards against the bars until they almost cut you in two, and you won’t understand. I had no way out, but I had to make myself one, because I couldn’t live without it. To be pressed up against that crate for the foreseeable—it would have been the end of me. For Hagenbeck, however, the place for apes was next to that crate—so I ceased to be an ape. A lucid, beautiful deduction, one that I must have somehow gestated in my stomach, because apes think with their bellies.

I’m afraid it will be hard to understand exactly what I mean by a way out. I’m using the term in its most everyday and fullest sense. I’m intentionally not saying freedom. I don’t mean that magnificent feeling of having freedom all around you. I may have known it as an ape and I’ve met humans who long for it. For my part, I’ve never demanded freedom, neither then nor now. Incidentally, for humans the idea of freedom is all too often a means of deceiving themselves. And although freedom is among the most exalted of feelings, so is the illusion of freedom among the most exalted of illusions. Often in variety shows, while waiting to go on, I’ve seen some pair of performers doing their work on the trapeze. They swing about, they rock back and forth, they jump around, they glide into each other’s arms. I saw one hold the other by clamping her hair in his mouth. ‘This is another example of human freedom,’ I thought, ‘movement as self-congratulation.’ What a mockery of sacred nature! A troop of apes would have laughed hard enough to blow down the building.

No, I didn’t want freedom. Just a way out; right, left, wherever; I wanted nothing else; even if the way out proved to be an illusion, what I wanted was modest, the illusion would not be any bigger. Onwards, onwards! Anything but to stand still, arms lifted, pressed against the side of a crate.

Today I see clearly that I could never have got away if I hadn’t had the greatest inner calm. It’s quite possible that I owe everything I’ve become to the calm that came over me after the first few days on board. And that calm I owe, in turn, to the people on that ship.

They are good people, in spite of everything. To this day I still fondly remember the noise of their heavy footsteps echoing in my half-sleep. They were in the habit of doing everything extremely slowly. If one of them wanted to rub his eyes, he lifted his hand as if it were a dumbbell. Their jokes were crude but cheerful. Their laughter always came mixed with a coughing that sounded dangerous but meant nothing. They always had something in their mouths they could spit, and where they spat didn’t matter to them. They constantly complained that my fleas would jump across onto them; but they were never actually angry about it; they accepted as facts of life that fleas thrive in fur and that fleas are jumpers; they made their peace with it. When they were off duty, they would sometimes sit in a semicircle around me; hardly speaking, just grunting at each other; smoking their pipes as they lay stretched out on crates; slapping their thighs whenever I made the slightest movement; and now and then one of them would take a stick and scratch me where I liked it. If today I were invited to travel on that ship again I would certainly decline, but it’s equally true that my memories of my time below decks are not all horrible.

The main effect of the calm I learnt among that circle of humans was to keep me from attempting any kind of escape. Looking back today, it seems as if I must have intuited at least that I had to find a way out if I wanted to live, but that that way out couldn’t be found by escaping. I don’t know any more whether escape was possible, but I imagine it was; for an ape, escape should always be possible. These days, my teeth are so weak I have to be careful just cracking a nut, but back then I should have managed eventually to bite through the lock. I didn’t do it. What would I have gained? As soon as I’d stuck my head out of the cage, they’d have caught me again and locked me into somewhere even worse; or I would have crept in with the other animals, the giant constrictors, say, and sighed my last in their embrace; or I might even have managed to creep up onto the deck and throw myself overboard, where I would have bobbed around for a while before drowning. Acts of despair, all of them. I wasn’t calculating in this human way, but under the influence of my surroundings I behaved as though I was.

As I say, I didn’t calculate, but I quietly watched what was happening around me. I saw these humans come and go, always the same faces, the same movements; sometimes it seemed to me as if there were only one of them. This human or these humans could go where they wanted. A distant goal dawned on me. Nobody promised me that if I could become like them my cage would be opened. Promises aren’t made on such seemingly impossible conditions. But if you succeed in fulfilling those conditions, those promises seem to retrospectively appear precisely where you previously searched for them in vain. Now, it has to be said that there was nothing very appealing about these humans in themselves. If I’d been a devotee of the freedom described earlier, I’m sure I would have preferred the ocean to the way out that I glimpsed in their dull faces. In any case, I watched them for a long time before I began to think of these things; in fact I think it was this mass of observations that pushed me in that direction.

It was so easy to imitate the humans. Spitting I managed after only a few days. After that we spat in each other’s faces; the only difference was that I licked my face clean afterwards; they didn’t. I could soon smoke a pipe like an old hand; if I then also tamped down the bowl with my thumb, the whole crew started cheering; the only thing was that for a long time I couldn’t grasp the difference between the pipe being full or empty.

What I had most trouble with was the rum bottle. Just the smell tormented me; I forced myself towards it with everything that I had, but weeks went by before I could overcome my own resistance. Strangely enough, the humans took this inner struggle more seriously than anything else about me. It’s hard to distinguish between them in my memories, but there was one who came again and again, by himself or with the others, at all hours of day and night; he’d stand in front of me with a bottle and give me lessons. He didn’t understand me and he wanted to solve the riddle of what I was. He slowly uncorked the bottle and looked at me to check whether I’d understood; I admit that I always watched him with greedy, savage attention; no teacher on earth could have found a pupil like me; after the bottle had been uncorked, he lifted it to his mouth; I follow with my eyes; he nods, he’s pleased with me, and he puts the bottle to his lips; I’m delighted by incipient understanding and screech and scratch myself from head to toe; that makes him happy, he lifts the bottle and takes another swig; I’m impatient and desperate to imitate him, so I soil my cage, which he finds very satisfying; and then, holding out the bottle at arm’s length before swinging it up to his mouth, and bending backwards exaggeratedly to help me understand, he empties it in one. Worn out by such a powerful sense of need, I can’t follow what he’s doing any more and just hang weakly from the bars, while he ends the theory lesson by rubbing his belly and grinning.

Only now do we move onto the practical lesson. Aren’t I already too exhausted from the theory part? Yes, I’m completely drained. That’s the way it goes. Nevertheless, I grab the proffered bottle as well as I can; uncork it, trembling; getting that to work makes me stronger; I lift the bottle, I’m already all but indistinguishable from the original; I put it to my mouth and—throw it away in disgust, in disgust, although it’s empty and holds nothing more than the smell of what used to be inside; in disgust I throw the bottle on the floor. To the chagrin of my teacher, to my own greater chagrin, I remember—after I’ve thrown away the bottle—to rub my belly and give an exemplary grin.

All too often my lessons ran along these lines. And it’s to the credit of my teacher that he was never angry with me; sometimes he did hold his burning pipe against my fur at some hard-to-reach spot until it began to smoulder, but he always extinguished it himself with a big, kindly hand; he wasn’t angry with me, he understood that we were fighting on the same side against my simian nature and that my part of the struggle was harder.

So it was a victory for him as well as me when, one evening, in front of a big audience—it must have been some kind of celebration, a gramophone was playing, an officer was strolling around among the crew—on that evening, when I wasn’t being watched, I reached for a bottle of rum accidentally left near my cage, opened it in textbook style, then, under the growing attention of the crowd, put it to my mouth and, without hesitating, without pulling my mouth away, like a first-class drinker, my eyes bulging, my Adam’s apple bobbing, drank the whole thing dry; then threw the bottle away, not in desperation but as a flourish; admittedly forgot to rub my belly, but instead, because I couldn’t stop myself, because I was urged on by something inside me, because my senses were reeling, I shouted “Hello!”, breaking into human speech, making the leap into human society with that shout, and experiencing its echo—“Listen to that, he speaks!”—like a kiss pressed against my entire sweat-drenched body.

As I said earlier, I felt no longing to be like the humans; I imitated them because I was looking for a way out, and for no other reason. And even that victory didn’t help me much. My voice immediately gave out again and only came back after months; my resistance to the rum bottle actually grew stronger; but my course had been set once and for all.

When I was handed over to my first trainer, in Hamburg, I soon recognized that there were two possibilities for me: the zoo or the variety shows. I didn’t hesitate. I said to myself: strain every nerve to get into the variety shows; that’s the way out; the zoo is just a different cage; if you end up in there, you’re lost.

And I learnt, gentlemen. Oh, how you can learn when you have to; you learn because you want a way out; you learn ruthlessly. You hold the whip over your own head; you lacerate yourself at the slightest reluctance. My simian self, tumbling over itself in haste, rushed out of me so quickly that my first teacher became almost monkeyish in turn, soon having to give up the lessons and move into a psychiatric hospital. I’m glad to say he was quickly released again.

But I used up very many teachers, sometimes more than one teacher at once. As I became more confident in my abilities and the public began to follow my progress, when my future started to glitter, I took on my own teachers, had them set up in five connecting rooms, and learnt from all of them at once by leaping uninterruptedly from one room into the next.

What progress I made! Enlightenment broke into my awakening mind from every angle! I can’t deny that it was a joy. But I can also admit that I never overestimated it, not even then and certainly not today. Through an effort that has never yet been paralleled anywhere in the world, I’ve reached the educational level of the average European. In itself, that’s nothing at all, but it meant something insofar as it helped me get out of the cage and gave me this particular way out, the human way out. There’s a wonderful idiom I love: to make yourself scarce. That’s what I’ve done. I’ve made myself scarce. I had no other way open to me, since grand freedom wasn’t on offer.

When I look back over my development and what I’ve achieved so far, I neither criticize myself nor am I content. Hands in my pockets, a bottle of wine on the table, I half sit, half lie in a rocking chair and look out of the window. If someone visits, I welcome them in politely. My manager sits in the front room; if I call, he comes in and listens to what I have to say. In the evenings, I almost always have a show, and my successes there probably won’t be surpassed. When I come home late from a banquet, from a learned society, from some cosy get-together, I have a little half-trained chimp waiting for me, and I let her look after me in the simian style. I never see her during the day; she has the bewilderment of a trained animal in her eye; only I can see it and I can’t bear to look at it.

Overall, I’ve certainly achieved what I wanted to achieve. I would never say that it hasn’t been worth the effort. Nor am I looking for anyone’s approval; I just want to spread what I’ve learnt. All I do is report on what I’ve experienced; even for you, gentlemen, members of the academy, all I’ve done is report.