On December 16 the University of Malta decided to silence once and for all the weary barbs about lack of original thought and enterprise. It conferred an honoris causa doctorate on an ape, and a naked one at that.
I mean no offence to Desmond Morris. Now 87 and still writing books and oozing charm, he first rose to fame in 1967 with a book that argued a simple line: humans were a type of hairless ape.
There are 23 species of apes in the superfamily Hominoidea, of which seven belong to the family Hominidae, the ‘great apes’.
We happen to be among those seven, and that’s about as much greatness as Morris will heap on us. Our hairlessness does not absolve us of the original sin of animality. On the contrary, it is a diagnostic feature of our species, just as short legs and long reddish hair characterise the orangutan and an orange breast the robin. Thus The Naked Ape.
It follows that human behaviour can be studied using the methods of zoology. Which is why Morris, a zoologist who had cut his teeth studying a type of fish, felt qualified for the job. Certainly The Naked Ape was a massive success, and it also brought its author to Malta.
When Morris moved here in 1968, he discovered that his bestseller was high on the evolutionary scale of banned books to burn on a holy afternoon. Far from special relationships and manufacture in the Godly image, the book viewed humans as a species of animal, and it also supported the theory of evolution and discussed matters of sex and reproduction in some detail. As Morris puts it, it qualified for a triple burning if that were possible.
One might add that well after that particular conflagration, the school textbook Science for the Seventies came in two editions, the standard one for standard schoolchildren and the Malta one for non-standard Maltese ones. The latter was published with a good dozen pages missing, and I’m afraid there are no prizes for guessing what those pages contained.
Morris did not come to Malta to work, but rather to rest and to enjoy, together with his wife Ramona, the windfall provided by The Naked Ape. The overworked scholar had suddenly and unexpectedly found himself a man of means and leisure, and he proceeded to conjoin the two as effectively as possible and in considerable style.
I have always wanted to build a hotel on Filfla. Think how exotic it would be
There was the 30-roomed Villa Apap Bologna (now the residence of the US ambassador), a Rolls Royce with chauffeur, a boat, very many parties, and eventually even a son, Jason. There was also plenty of sunshine – in sum, a setup that was not ideal for Morris to care too much about things like the political storm clouds of the late Sixties.
Even so, his light-hearted observations on Maltese life can be very telling indeed.
His vignette on the man who was heaven-bent on burning his books is a gem.
As Morris puts it, a colourful enemy is more fun than a colourless friend. I would add that it’s truest when the colourful enemy is also a primate.
Morris’s first encounter with Archbishop Michael Gonzi saw a ripple of passers-by fall on their knees as the pastoral Cadillac drove past in Valletta. Some time later, Morris witnessed an intriguing scene in the first-class section of a flight to Rome.
It seems Gonzi could not understand the mundane vanity of seat numbers, and proceeded to sit where he pleased. It turned out he had chosen the seat that belonged to the American ambassador, whose form of protest was a heated conversation with the air-hostess. Missing the point, or maybe not, Gonzi assured everyone there was no cause for concern since God would not let anything happen to a plane that had the Archbishop of Malta on it.
Perhaps typically for an Englishman trekking deep in the territory of what was once called ‘popery’, Morris found Gonzi and the flamboyance of Catholic pageantry wonderfully exotic. He decided to enjoy it as a detached observer.
Anthony Burgess, who at the time lived up the road from Morris in Lija, was not so wise or restrained. Appalled at the censorship of books and ideas, Burgess gave a public lecture in which he denounced the rot. It was a J’Accuse moment that cost him his peace. Returning from a trip abroad some time later, he found the doors to his double-fronted house on Main Street had been securely padlocked.
There is more than a hint of a sigh in Morris’s descriptions of the great questions of the day. They included the mini-skirt, which was attractive among other reasons as a symbol of the break with the past.
Not for the last time, women’s bodies had become a theatre of war over the values of freedom and choice. A hairless ape, then, but one which took the nuances of covering up very seriously.
Morris’s newfound fame, as well as his deeper-rooted reputation as an Oxford scientist and broadcaster, brought to Malta some very notable names as his guests.
David Attenborough stayed long enough to spend time on the roof of the Villa Apap Bologna scanning the countryside through his binoculars. When Morris asked him what the curiosity was about, Attenborough replied that he was looking for phosphate nodules. There was a better chance of finding fossils, and especially those of extinct giant sharks, among that kind of sedimentary deposit.
It was with Attenborough that Morris visited Filfla and dropped anchor on an unexploded bomb. Thankfully, both men still had very much to do, and the fuse behaved.
The anecdote that followed is told by Morris in the autobiographical The Naked Eye. It is worth quoting in full.
“Back on land that evening, we are at a party and I mention to a Maltese businessman that it seems a pity that Filfla island should still be used as a naval target. ‘Yes, yes, I have always wanted to build a hotel on Filfla. Think how exotic it would be: a building standing on its own, rising up out of the sea, covering the whole plateau – so remote and romantic’.”
Plus ça change, history repeating itself, or coincidence? Whichever of the three, 50 years begin to seem like rather a short time.
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