Jan Bondeson
THE CAT ORCHESTRA AND THE ELEPHANT BUTLER
The strange history of amazing animals
314pp.Tempus.£20.
0 7524 3934 0
A sterling February it was, this year, for the British creature-loving public, what with Chandi the Dancing Dog doing so well with the phone-voters on When Will I Be Famous?, BBC1’s Saturday prime-time slot-filler, and the wholesale slaughter of nearly 160,000 Bernard Matthews “products”. Animals “first entered the imagination as messengers and promises”, John Berger wrote. We roast them, mince them, boil them, kill them, throw them away, but when we invest them with meaning, we show them more love than we show anything else. Plus ça change; in the 1880s, when P. T. Barnum purchased Jumbo the elephant, the public outcry in Britain raised a huge Keep Jumbo In England fund, causing the Editor of Punch to comment that “while ample funds were available to keep Jumbo on the right side of the Atlantic, a mission dedicated to giving a dinner of Irish stew to the starving children of the East End on every Wednesday was failing due to lack of funds”.
Jan Bondeson’s latest book is all about such animal distractions and the animal instincts they reveal in the human race. Roll up! This little piggy plays the glockenspiel. These little piggies are Louis XI’s pig orchestra, “conducted” by means of a gallery where the sitting pigs are pierced by spikes to make them squeal. This little piggy can count and spell and is, as Robert Southey put it, “a far greater object of admiration to the English nation than ever was Sir Isaac Newton”. Ah, gravity: the tremble of the newly finished Brooklyn Bridge under the magnificent tread of Jumbo, first elephant to improve sales in everything from toothpaste to spool cotton; the frogs, fish, worms, lemmings, which all fell from clear skies; the weight of the law on the backs of the Jutland rats, tried in court and given a week to leave their village – which they promptly did; the story of Marocco, a several-trick pony, who could tell the maids from the whores in his audiences, and who defied the usual gravities to become the only horse ever to dance a jig on the roof of St Paul’s.
The Cat Orchestra and the Elephant Butler is a reissue, with some revisions, of Bondeson’s The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays on Natural and Unnatural History (1999). The original Feejee-mermaid chapter, particularly interesting for its reading of “mermaid hysteria in London” and its information about the construction of fake mermaids out of ape and fish, has disappeared, replaced on the bill by Munito, the Wonderful Dog, who could answer questions on Ovid, and performed wearing spectacles given to him by the Queen of Spain. This edition swings between being a history of performing creatures and an analysis of more mythical natural phenomena, such as the vegetable lamb, the barnacle goose and the terrifying snake-bird basilisk: one part unnaturally crowing, snake-appendaged hen, one part medusa – a creation of gender paranoia if ever there was one. The book captures the real gravity of Jumbo’s hapless end in a train collision, and the equally sad end of his keeper, Matthew Scott. It has an enviable opening sentence: “The first person to exhibit performing cats with any degree of success was the Scotsman Samuel Bissett”. The combination of curious and down-to-earth comes as naturally to Bondeson as it did to Bissett, who began as a shoemaker, became a broker, then started making real money persuading dogs to dance with monkeys, hares to beat drums, and cats to sit “demurely with their music books open in front of them” and “mew in different keys”. German cats, Bondeson’s short cat-history reveals, were particularly good at singing “O Tannenbaum” and saying the word “nein”.
Bondeson, who is also a rheumatologist, places his work firmly in the company of “old natural history books intended for the general public”. His other books most often end up subject-categorized as “Medicine / History”. His fascination, over ten years of publishing books with subheadings such as “The true stories behind famous historical mysteries” or “The terrifying history of our most primal fear”, has ostensibly been sideshow freakery: pig-faced women, spontaneous combustion, and Siamese twins. But his true interest is in questions of civilization and generation, humanity and inhumanity. While Bondeson clearly hopes that wonders will never cease, his urge is towards demystification, and even, in the case of one of his recent books, Blood on the Snow: The killing of Olof Palme (2005), the “truth” beyond contemporary political mythmaking. He is, most of all, a natural Hunterian, drawn to John Hunter’s versatility as a doctor, collector, lover of all curiosities great and small. Hunter, as it happens, also liked to handle “both tame and wild beasts” – a sideline that may explain Bondeson’s interest in this particular animal magic.
His writing is charming, repetitive, gently formulaic. He loves literary culture and interjects a Dickens moment, a Shakespeare reference, a Coleridge quote, wherever he can. Bondeson’s curiosity is infectious, and he has the good fortune of wonderful material which in turn leads to the occasional unforgettable sentence, like this oddly poetic one about a victim of spontaneous combustion: “Only her fingertips and the cranium remained”. Or this, about a nineteenth-century taxidermist whose father was a hairdresser: “He was apprenticed to his father, and attended to the hair of the living by daytime and the fur of the dead by night”. It all adds up to a delightful if slightly perfunctory read whose real gift is itself half-ape, half-fish, a combination of cornucopia and cultural revelation. Take the biggest elephant in the world, “a fairy tale created by Barnum’s craving for publicity and the newspapers’ need to sell copies; in that respect, Jumbo was a worthy forerunner of the present day TV pseudo-celebrities”. There will never be a Pig Brother; pigs are far too clever for that. Animals don’t want to be famous, though they will willingly work for food; the pigs famed for their cleverness were notoriously thin. Perhaps the human need for fame is itself a kind of nourishment deficiency.
But if dogs have a heaven, there’s one thing I know. Toby the Sapient Pig is there too, and Mrs Midnight and her Animal Comedians, every one a legend on more than two legs; like Murphy the Hypnodog, or Jumbo, whose trunk sought out Matthew Scott’s hand as he died; or Chunee, the other famous elephant, who lived on the first floor of a menagerie on the Strand and whose eyes and trunk were sliced off his corpse for high-paying gentlemen on his untimely death. Or the pig trained by his master to fire a gun at a target, who turned and shot the trainer instead. Or Billy, the eighteenth-century circus horse who could make and serve a good cup of tea, who died at the age of forty-two, and whose hide lived on as the skin of a drum, beaten at thrilling moments of suspense in the ring for years after.
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Ali Smith's most recent novel, The Accidental, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her collection The Whole Story and Other Stories appeared in 2003.
