Desmond Morris, Bestselling Author on Primate Behavior, RIP

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In turning to the NY Times’ Obituary section today, I see that a bestselling author for many decades, Desmond Morris, has died, age 98. Douglas Martin has written an excellent obituary headlined, “Desmond Morris, 98, Dies; Explored Humans’ Animal Instincts in ‘The Naked Ape,’” linked to here (no paywall).

My wife Kyle Gallup and I had the good fortune to meet Mr. Morris in Oxford, England, in 1991, when I was republishing two of his most popular books, The Human Zoo and The Naked Ape as part of the Kodansha Globe nonfiction trade paperback imprint, a series I headed up, which focused on books of natural history, cross-cultural studies, anthropology, adventure, and beyond. It was a  sort of nonfiction precursor to the NYRB series of today.

Kyle and I happened to be visiting Britain and traveled from London to see Morris in Oxford, where we also were meeting a librarian I knew at the famous university, A. J. Flavell. After Mr Flavell gave us a fascinating tour of the Bodleian Library, including its many stacks below ground level, we met up with Desmond, who offered to drive us around Oxford’s picturesque environs in a cream-colored Rolls Royce he owned. He was a very gracious host.

Douglas Martin reports that Morris “graduated with highest honors in zoology from the University of Birmingham in 1951. By the early 1950s, he was selling his surrealist paintings in London and Belgium and had directed two surrealist films. Dr. Morris subsequently attended the University of Oxford, where he studied under the animal behaviorists and future Nobel laureates Nikolaas Tinbergen, Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz [Kodansha Globe would also publish Lorenz’s book Man Meets Dog]. Dr. Morris received a doctorate in 1954 with a thesis titled “The Reproductive Behavior of the Ten-Spined Stickleback.” Martin adds that Morris became curator of mammals at the London Zoo in 1959. Though he became a popularizer of serious science, he definitely had the full academic background to go with it.

Arguably, his books mainstreamed the study of animal and human behavior like no writer before him had done. As mentioned, he also was a painter and also made a study of the question of possible picture-making among non-human primates. In 2018, he returned to art, publishing a book titled The Lives of the Surrealists. I was privileged to work with him back in the day.

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Some Thoughts for Passover—”What Price Freedom?”

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I’m sharing an essay I wrote in 1995 for the weekly newsletter of B’Nai Jeshurun, a synagogue congregation where I was then active, titled “What Price Freedom?” In it I sought to understand and explain why in the Passover narrative God continually hardens Pharaoh’s heart, and why the plagues then descend on the Egyptians, right up to the tenth plague when their firstborn children die. To summarize my argument, I’ll cite these lines from the second paragraph:

“I believe that God was determined to utterly break the back of the dictatorship and enact a greater liberation than could have been achieved if Pharaoh had simply let the captive Israelites go free when Moses first demanded their release. Indeed, had this occurred the Israelites would have left Mitzrayim [the narrow place], but the tyrannical state would have impressed some other poor souls into slavery, and the oppressive regime would have continued to hum along without a hitch in the gears of its evil machinery. Instead, by repeatedly hardening Pharaoh’s heart, and by upping the ante each time with increasingly devastating consequences, until God finally strikes deep into the heart of every Egyptian home… God creates an exodus that frees not only the Israelites, but also the mixed multitude (the “erev rav”) that benefits from God’s liberating deeds.”

Even with that distillation of my essay, I invite you to read it, attached herewith.

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Two Poems, “Creature Comforts” and “Love’s Mantle”

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I’m delighted that under the rubric “Two Poems to End the Winter, The Seaboard Review of Books has published two poems today, one of mine, “Creature Comforts,” and another, “Love’s Mantle,” by my friend and agency client Alexis Greene. “Creature Comforts” explores nature, the animal kingdom, the wild, and our place in the world vis-a-vis animals. It’s composed in rhyming verse, and was written as a series of reflections that came to me one day some years ago when I was on a walk with my black Labrador dog, Noah, pictured here, who was a boon companion of mine for a long time. It was a very rainy day and Noah sniffed a rabbit. That’s what moved me to write the poem.

“Love’s Mantle” by Alexis Greene explores themes adjacent to those in my poem, though in a different and distinctive manner. I believe she was moved to write it this past winter while she’s been contending with an illness, and I think she sees this poem as a kind of valedictory statement of hers, about life and how she views the world. I’ll add that earlier this year, Alexis published a personal essay about her lifelong experiences of live theater on this website, and on the website The Arts Fuse.

Below are the first two stanzas of “Creature Comforts”:

The tide washed over the driveway
Stirs in me a notion
How in such a live way,
Rain may play at being an ocean.

The asphalt sluice is shined a fluid black
While snow on the lawn holds one sogg’d rabbit track.
Snout wet, Noah sniffs the clue of rodent visitation
And careens in hope for a sign of the hare’s habitation.

Here are the first two stanzas of “Love’s Mantle”:

Snow descends in icy flakes,
Coating the hills and drifting ’round lakes.
Covering houses and fields and trees,
Snow whitens the world as far as you can see.

Cold to the touch.
Wet on your skin,
Snow, winter’s blanket,
Protects the life within.

Thanks for reading the rest of “Creature Comforts” and “Love’s Mantle” at The Seaboard Review of Books, linked to here.

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