Books: All in the Family

• Share

THE SOUL OF THE APE by Eugene Marais. 226 pages. Atheneum. $5.95.

"There's an awful lot of popular interest in low-level analogies with the animal world," growled Margaret Mead the other day. Exactly so. Konrad Lorenz's speculations about aggression were the relatively cautious summation of a lifetime's research, but he threw open the window to a swarm of parasites who in the years since have all but sucked dry the modern study of animal behavior.

So many people have rushed to publish the intimate memoirs of their years living with families of apes, lions and gorillas that Africa resembles Washington after a change of Administration. Practically the only volume of the sort still unpublished is a combined gorilla cookbook and grooming and marriage manual entitled The Way to an Ape's Heart.

Mopping up after the invaders of animal privacy have come the generalists. They include Playwright Robert Ardrey, whose The Territorial Imperative was rashly naive, and Zoologist Desmond Morris, whose The Naked Ape was at least brashly amusing. Now publishers are packaging curiosities and precursors. Despite considerable charm and insight, The Soul of the Ape is one such.

Eugene Marais was an Afrikaner best remembered by his countrymen as one of their early poets, but he was also a journalist, self-taught naturalist and morphine addict. Such fame as he enjoyed outside Africa came mainly from the scandal caused when famous Belgian Writer Maurice Maeterlinck stole a lengthy excerpt of Marais's Afrikaans text. The Soul of the White Ant, and published it under his own name. Marais shot himself in 1936. Shortly after, his complete study of white ants, i.e., termites, and a slim, chatty book of reminiscences about baboons were published in Europe. Marais had studied baboons in the Transvaal for three years just after the Boer War, when the absence of farmers with guns made the beasts approachable. He began, but never completed, a serious text based on his scientific observations of them. Now that text has been rediscovered by his son.

Self-Educated Naturalist. Marais's reputation is likely to suffer from the publication. After 54 pages of overheated, condescending preface, Robert Ardrey bumps to a comic conclusion: "Had Marais been enabled to finish his manuscript, polish the rough parts, rethink a few conclusions, add further ideas that had come to him, then beyond all question he would have left us more than we shall find in the following pages." Too true. There is a provocative chapter on the sex life of baboons, whose customs find some resonances in human behavior. Baboons also become addicted to intoxicants, it appears, and feel let down just as evening falls. But Marais too often labors over speculations about the origins of the human unconscious in ancient animal instincts. Marais was a self-educated naturalist who had read Darwin but came to grief over the noninheritance of acquired characteristics—a turn-of-the-century incomprehension he shared with Bernard Shaw.