Companionable forms

ITHACA, N.Y., the Patent Office — When I was 8 years old, I heard that in the garden of a neighbor’s house lived a tree that bore both lemons and grapefruit, so I went and knocked on the door. A 10-year-old boy with a moustache answered. I had seen butlers on PBS’s “Masterpiece Theatre,” and my first thought was, here was one of them. He raised his eyebrows quizzically. I asked if it was true about the tree, and he waved me in.

By the time we reached the backyard, host had replaced tree as my chief source of fascination. He spoke politely and precisely, explaining how two saplings of different species can be grafted to grow together. Then he introduced me to his chickens, each by name, like children, and detailed their laying habits. He finished with an affectionate gesture to a bandy-legged barred rock hen that stood close by his side and said, “this is Crip, and I’m Chris,” as if they were a couple.

There is no eccentricity purer than that of the aspiring conformist. Chris ironed denim, addressed grown-ups by their first names and was passionate — in an oddly technocratic way — about gardening and geopolitics. His bedside reading was a 24-volume encyclopedia called “Weapons and Warfare,” and his first crush was on Margaret Thatcher. He was happiest sitting cross-legged in his garden, cradling Crip and posing mild-mannered questions to various insects.

Crip was younger than the other hens. Shortly after joining the brood, her legs had mysteriously unsprung, and she’d dropped down low like a modified Chevy Impala at a red light. Chris let her live free range in the garden when it became clear that her coopmates were menacing her.

Notwithstanding the name he gave her — Cripple, later shortened to Crip — Chris treated her with gentle solicitousness. He’d sit down cross-legged on the lawn and begin singing, “Crippy crippy Crip, ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, criiiiiiiippy crippy Crip,” and she’d emerge from a shrub, chassis low and gently bouncing, and take a little trip to see her groom. He’d then stroke her and speak to her until she slept.

This image of Chris, the first friend to reinvent the world for me, sitting there in crisply pressed jeans interviewing a praying mantis, holding forth on the Cold War and cooing atonally to a handicapped hen crapping drowsily in his lap, came back to me in recent days as I read Donna Haraway’s very peculiar book “When Species Meet.”

Haraway is a professor of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz whose career-long interest in cyborgs took a shift when —

I found myself in unexpected and out-of-bounds love with a hot red dog I named Cayenne.

She means it, reader! She and the hot red dog are intimate. The “sticky threads proliferating from this woman-dog tangle” lead her into the philosophy, anthropology and ecology of “companion species,” a warm elastic term in her hands, stretching to cover everything from the microbes in her colon to — in the book’s most moving passages — the dying body of her father the sportswriter: “I and all those who lived entangled with him become his flesh; we are kin to the dead because their bodies have touched us.”

She calls her vision “post-humanist,” in the sense that it rejects the bounded perfection of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” (her example) in favor of the “multipartner mud dance issuing from and in entangled species.” But lay readers might well see these raptures of connectedness, and her exuberant determination to catch, register and return the gaze of every sentient thing, as essentially Whitmanian. I’m sure she’d be horrified to hear it! But I’ll risk that, and more. For all the taffylike jargon gumming up some of these pages, Haraway is a great lyricist, in a tradition running from Ovid to Nabokov. The quasi-illicit love seen obliquely in this book is world- and word-transforming, fattening every grape on the vine.

Even as I say this, I know I’m failing her as a reader. She wants us to venture into a realm of “material semiosis” beyond human-centered language (this is the through line from the cybernetic tangles in her “Cyborg Manifesto” to the bio-bacterial ones in her “Companion Species Manifesto”), and I, for one, cannot. Whenever I confront the unfamiliar — a foreign city, photographs of outer space or the inscrutable eyes of an animal — I go all literary. I am hopeless. I am the pathetic fallacy incarnate. My favorite nature writer (shoot me now and get it over with, reader) is Saul Bellow. Not so much on the strength of the lizard-hunting eagle in “The Adventures of Augie March” or the dying lab monkey in “Herzog”; no, it’s the closing images of his underrated-because-grossly-politically-incorrect masterpiece “Henderson the Rain King” that get me: a middle-aged pig farmer and a lion cub running circles around a twin-prop plane refueling in an Arctic ice field, and the same man’s younger self riding a roller coaster with a circus bear.

So the intimation early on in “When Species Meet” that the woman-dog tangle includes some “potent transfections” (“Her saliva must have the viral vectors. Surely, her darter-tongue kisses have been irresistible”), along with her forewarning that such meetings’ “outcomes are not guaranteed,” inevitably put me in mind of the journalist Basil Murray, who — despite gentle breeding, as son of the great humanist scholar Gilbert Murray — allegedly died in scandalous circumstances involving an ape in a hotel room in Valencia during the Spanish Civil War.

After a rakish and misspent London youth — he was described as “satanic” by an admiring Evelyn Waugh, who made him the model for his Basil Seal character — Murray set off for Spain to support the Republican cause. He promptly fell in love with a woman “of whom one may say that had she had the words ‘I am a Nazi spy’ printed on her hat,” according to his colleague Claud Cockburn. Long story short, she abandoned him, and Murray, in Cockburn’s charming account of his final days, purchased from a sidewalk impresario a performing ape, “the first living creature that — since the defection of the Nazi agent — had looked at him with friendly sympathy.” The two shacked up in the Victoria Hotel, where Murray was found dead and naked two days later. The ape, in an apparent excess of friendly sympathy, had bitten her bedmate to death trying to rouse him from a drunken stupor.

It was now her turn to be disconsolate. The British government sent a cruiser to collect Murray’s remains and was met quayside by a retinue of Republican officials, in turn joined unawares by the ape. She followed her late flame’s body onto the companionway and “in a gesture suitable for solemn occasions (learned, no doubt, from the owner of the menagerie),” raised her hand in a fascist salute, whereupon she was promptly shot dead by a British warrant officer.

I became obsessed with this story some years back, fixating especially on the moment when Basil and the ape first met each other’s gaze. Musing on it, I hatched a rather crackpot theory. If the purest eccentricity is that of the aspiring conformist, then that of a deliberate rogue like Murray — who seemed to approach life as performance art — is a close runner-up. Six years before Murray met his ape, Waugh’s contemporary John Collier published his great comic novel “His Monkey Wife (Or, Married to a Chimp),” whose protagonist takes a simian bride after a near miss with a faithless human. Murray’s antics inspired literature; perhaps they also took inspiration from it?

I tried doggedly to track down connections. I ransacked Waugh’s letters and the Basil Seal books. The only place I found Collier and Murray together was in the 1934 volume of “The Evening Standard Book of Strange Stories,” to which both had contributed. Those stories yielded no clues. What was I looking for, anyway? My friend Hubert Murray, who first told me the alleged circumstances of his uncle Basil’s demise, basically shrugged. For Hubert, the Valencia episode was in a different genre, that of contentious family lore, in which the question of influence was neither here nor there.

But if the borders between the human and the nonhuman are blurry, those between life and literature are blurrier. If you look long enough at something, or someone, you love very much but don’t understand — whether it’s a hot red dog, an orphaned circus ape, a dying body or a boy with a moustache cradling a crippled hen — you do what you have to do, and turn it into a story.