Benjamin Hale: The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

The world is large. I know that I am not fit to live in human society. But then again, who is? There may still come a day, Gwen, when Bruno Littlemore is free to walk the world again.

Today, Gwen, this Scheherazade will officially fall silent for you for the last time, but I hope this will not be your last visit, because, as you’ve probably noticed, I have fallen in love with you.

That aside, earlier this morning, before you came to me today to complete your project, I was reading the Book of Psalms. No, please don’t expect this narrative to end with some sort of Dostoyevskian last-minute prison conversion. Unlike Hilarious Lily, I have never been a religious ape. I was and remain the chimp of the perverse. But in my long hours of solitude and quiet reflection I have taken to reading the Bible. I admit sometimes it can be very beautiful. There is a dark and primitive energy in its words that sometimes, if I allow them to, can put a shiver in my spine, can make me feel as if my blood has turned to ice. And sometimes, too, I read it only to enrage me. I read it to make my blood sing out with violent fury in my heart at all humankind. It is an unusual text that can produce both awe and rage in me at once.

And I was flipping through the double-column-texted, tissue-thin and gold-edged pages of that famous book — the “Good Book”—and I landed on the Psalms (which as it so happens I read often, because they come right after Job, which is the book of the Bible I reread the most), and I came across this:

When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,

the moon and the stars which thou hast established;

what is man that thou art mindful of him,

and the son of man that thou dost care for him?

Yet thou hast made him little less than angels,

and dost crown him with glory and honor.

Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands;

thou hast put all things under his feet,

all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field,

the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,

whatever passes along the paths of the sea.

When I read those words, it was not that feeling of awe that came to me, but a feeling of rage.

Little less than angels ?

No! No, no, NO! Not little less than angels! Little more than apes! No! Nothing more than apes! Apes! Just apes! Arrogant, self-deluding, talking… apes! And now I am one of you. I am one of you, and I cannot ever go back! Go tell your God what I would give to unlearn your language! To go back to being an animal!

No, I can never go back! I can never go back again. I cannot unlearn my humanity. For evolution, perversely, moves forward. I do not mean it progresses, but only that it cannot be turned back like the hands of a clock. We cannot walk backward through time. We cannot put all our words into a pot and boil them down to a salty residue of grunts and howls and shrieks and gestures, we cannot retreat back across the ancient savannahs, grow our arms long again and climb back into the trees, let our spines stretch out into tails and let our stereoscopic eyes slowly recede to the sides of our heads, shake off our hair, cool our blood and drain our breasts of milk, turn our hot weak flesh to cold slimy scales, sprout spikes and horns and webs and flippers and fins, become fish, and go slithering on our disgusting bellies back into the sea.

If only we could! If only we could spare ourselves from all our suffering, from all our knowledge of death. If only we could spare the earth all our desecration. And, yes, I know we would also discard a lot of beauty and music and greatness and joy and blah blah blah and so on. Beware! That’s how you get hooked! That’s what seduces you! — what seduced me! Beware, you little fish!

Who, though — who among the host of devils could fault that sea creature of many years ago for gazing out through the mediary muck of its existence upon that muddy bank and open air and sunshine, and innocently wondering what beauty and music and greatness and joy might lie in wait up there? There, there would this monster make a man.

So go ahead, you stupid fish, you silent-minded monster. Crawl up out of the water. See what is up there. There may be some profit in it, after all. As I, Bruno, would like to say to the whole world, to scream and rattle up and down the Great Chain of Being from the simplest life-forms all the way to the upper links where the angels crowd around the heavenly throne with wings beating and mouths open wide in glorious song, but especially, especially to humankind, to this animal, man, who thinks he is the measure of all things: you taught me language, and my profit on it is, I know how to curse.

The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore would not exist without the gracious support of its allies. To my agent, Brian DeFiore, thank you for recognizing the potential of this freak show of a novel, and for your spectacular job of shaping it up and selling it; and enormous thanks to my editor, Cary Goldstein, for his tremendous enthusiasm for this book and his careful, incisive edits.

Thank you to the University of Iowa Provost’s Fellowship and the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, and thanks to the fantastic teachers who helped me evolve as a writer: Brian Morton, Paul Lisicky, Brooke Stevens, Ethan Canin, and especially Edward Carey and Lan Samantha Chang, who held this book when it was just a baby.

Particular thanks to Jonathan Ames — the first person to read this whole thing straight through in the scattershot and inchoate state it was in at the time — for being an early advocate of Bruno’s, and for his continued friendship and support further along.

Infinite love and thanks to my parents, Charley and Leigh — who raised me in a house full of books, and who for better or worse made me who I am — and to my brothers, James and John.

Special shout-outs to Jim Mattson, Nimo Johnson, Kate “Hunter Hero” Sachs, Sergei Tsimberov, Roman Skaskiw, Kevin Holden, Andre Perry, Diana Thow, Cara Ellis, Andres Restrepo, John Benjamin, Sam Cooper, Graham Webster, Colin Heintze, Sarah Heyward, Jenny Zhang, Anthony Swofford, Sam Seigle, Gwenda-lin Grewal, and überthanks to Chris Wiley for his unflagging friendship, his apartment, a humdinger of a celebratory dinner, and countless other good turns.

Anna North, I cannot ever thank you enough.

Rock over London, rock on, Chicago.

Thanks to the Great Ape Trust and William Fields for his generous help with my research, and, with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Duane Rumbaugh, for continuing the fascinating and important pursuit of ape language research.

And thanks to Jane Goodall, who, when I was a teenager, I heard say, “All living things on this planet are far, far closer together than they are apart.”

Great apes are in serious danger. It will be an unforgivable shame on our species if we allow this vital window into understanding ourselves to close forever. To learn about nonfictional ape language research and to support great ape habitat conservation, I urge you to visit www.greatapetrust.org.

TWELVE was established in August 2005 with the objective of publishing no more than one book per month. We strive to publish the singular book, by authors who have a unique perspective and compelling authority. Works that explain our culture; that illuminate, inspire, provoke, and entertain. We seek to establish communities of conversation surrounding our books. Talented authors deserve attention not only from publishers, but from readers as well. To sell the book is only the beginning of our mission. To build avid audiences of readers who are enriched by these works — that is our ultimate purpose.