Desmond Morris, at 68, is still pursuing his provocative studies of the naked ape. He spoke to Andrew Billen in Oxford
DR DESMOND MORRIS has made a career out of watching people. He has the eye of a zoologist trained in the tradition of Julian Huxley and Darwin, but he also possesses highly developed showbiz skills.
His observations tend to make news. He is a scientist who can spot homosexual tendencies in a 10-spined stickleback. A critic of Morris’s 1967 best-seller, The Naked Ape, Richard Boston, concluded: “Sensationalism is as necessary to the manufactured best- seller as mustard is to a good ham sandwich, and Morris shows himself to be a venerable Colmans [mustard].”
I know the passages he meant: “By the time orgasm has been reached, the breast of the average female will have increased by anything up to 25% of its normal dimensions. It becomes firmer, more rounded and more protuberant.” I ask Morris if he does not sometimes pep things up a bit.
“They don’t need pepping up,” he insists. “We are a pretty pepped-up species. That was the whole point. We are a very sexy species. If you read about sex before The Naked Ape, all you find are these euphemisms, like `member’ for `penis’. I thought: `To hell with it: I am going to tell it how it is.'”
The latest excitement is over his next television project. The Opposite Sex is the successor to The Human Animal, which deployed an endoscopic camera to film the female orgasm. Morris has concluded there is no point in trying to break television’s erect-penis taboo. He will lecture on the subject in front of a giant phallus in an art gallery.
Morris is 68, but does not look very different from the well-spoken curator of mammals at London Zoo who introduced the first edition of Zootime for Granada in 1956. Zootime could not have been simpler television. Morris placed an animal on his desk and talked about it. Once an undoctored (and therefore lethal) cobra escaped on air. Another time, a vampire bat, emboldened by drinking a bowl of blood, flew off and landed on camera two. We children loved it.
Morris says the only thing he regrets about his 11 years on Zootime was adopting an infant chimp called Congo. Morris became Congo’s pseudo-mother, even teaching him to paint. When he became violent and Morris was forced to part with him, he says it broke both their hearts, and Congo eventually succumbed to disease, although Morris continued to thrive.
As he was pursuing his academic and broadcasting careers, yet another was running alongside – that of a surrealist painter. He calls himself the youngest and last surrealist, exhibiting alongside Mir in 1950. He still paints: strange landscapes of objects that nearly look like people and almost look like trees but on second glance aren’t either. He calls these “biomorphs”, and they seem to have been half-inspired by the pond water he would examine under a microscope as a child.
Yet despite this obvious connection between his science and his art, when Morris shows me round his studio in Oxford, the point he is keenest to stress is that there is a total divide between the careers. There are, I must see, two workrooms: one full of brushes and biomorphs, another filled with books and computers.
“It is”, he says, “a double life, really. My library being next to my studio is like the two hemispheres of my brain, the right and the left, the analytical, rational half and the other, intuitive and emotional. People ask: `How do you manage to be so objective about people?’, and I think one of the reasons I was able to be was that I had already given the other side of my brain full expression. If you do not allow both sides free expression, the risk is they get muddled up, and you allow emotion to get into your scientific work and scientific reasoning to get into your emotional aspects.”
All the same, contemporaries have not always been convinced by his science. The Naked Ape’s thesis is that man is a risen ape, not a fallen angel, and few would claim now that the central theory has proved erroneous. But stubbornly, 30 years on, some of the details still fail to convince.
Is he sticking, I ask, to his claim that female breasts developed as imitation buttocks, “in order to shift the interest of the male to the front”? “Oh yes. I cannot see any other reason.” But they are not very like buttocks, are they? Breasts aren’t very round and they have these nipples in the middle.
“Well,” he says, “the trouble is that in other primate species breasts go flat when they aren’t lactating. So you have to figure out why women’s breasts don’t go flat, because they are a bloody nuisance, as any woman running for a bus will tell you.”
But must there be a practical, naturally selected, reason for everything? I mean, why do men have nipples? “The producer of this new series keeps saying: `You’ve got to explain why men have nipples.’ Well, I don’t know why men have nipples.”
So how much is actually guesswork?
“In the case of breasts, there is a comparative method. You compare 20 species and you find that only one has hemispherical buttocks and only one has hemispherical breasts, and it is the same one. Then you look at another species, the gelada baboon, and you find it has mimicry, again in the chest region, but a different pattern – the nipples have come close together to create a pseudo-genital patch. Then you look at the mandrill and see it has a red and blue face and the same colours on its genitals. Then you think: `Why should one end of an animal be the same as another?'”
If, as he says, human lips ape the vaginal labia (to send out ancient sexual signals to the male), why do men also have protruding lips? “The same reason they have nipples,” he chuckles.
The other problem with his theories is that they do not always correspond to his life. Morris, as a teenager, went out with the late actress Diana Dors. They were both on a television show, once, and Morris talked about the sexual signals given off by her bee-stung lips and flattered her by noting that blondes have “fewer sweat glands per square inch of skin”. Ask him what he really liked about her, and he says it was her personality.
He met his wife, Ramona, in 1949 and they married while still students. Although she is another ravishing blonde, he attributes the success of the marriage to her “very good brain”.
Morris was brought up in Wiltshire during World War II, while upstairs his father lay dying from wounds inflicted during World War I. Desmond went off to his grandmother’s pond and immersed himself in its alternative universe. “I did not want to understand human beings at all. I thought they were so awful.”
Morris, in his 1979 memoirs, recalls discovering a 17th-century book by one Nehemiah Grew called The Comparative Anatomy of Stomachs and Guts Begun. “I loved the names of animals listed in the book,” he writes. “They included: the Blobber-lip’d Snail; the Tobacco-pipe Fish; the Spiked Pune … The Whame; the Humgum; The Black Gaping Cockle; The Egyptian Glob-Fish; and the Great Speckled Loon of Norway.”
A career’s span later, Morris has not forgotten Grew’s lesson: that the natural world can be screamingly absurd. His new books, Illustrated Dogwatching and Cat World: A Feline Encyclopedia, look like safe Christmas presents for auntie, but are actually full of bizarre and scurrilous facts to tickle a schoolboy’s fancy. Did you know, for example, that female cats are masochists and scream during mating because the male has sharp spikes on the end of his penis? And a dog’s ejaculation lasts 40 minutes?
It was Morris’s commercial breakthrough to realise that such observations are even funnier when made about human beings. It is not, however, until after we have said goodbye that I realise how misleading it is for Morris to tell himself that his scientific work is all analysis and his painting all imagination. Naked apes, bottoms growing out of chests, mouths that look like vaginas – what are these, if not surrealist images?