Lower Than the Angels

HIS MONKEY WIFE (259 pp.)--John Collier--Doubleday ($3.75).

It is nearly a century since man was urged to think of himself as the relative of apes rather than of angels; if there were a question in the matter, said Benjamin Disraeli, he was "on the side of the angels." British Novelist-Humorist John Collier is sardonically on the side of the apes.

In His Monkey Wife, first published in 1930, Collier wrote an improper parable to indicate his preferences and, incidentally, to pull man's leg. It has since become a minor classic in his own special fiction-fantasy style, and belongs on the same shelf as Swift's Houyhnhnms, Karel Capek's newts, and with all those who like to move to the other side of the zoo bars the better to observe mankind. Its reissue now is a lively event in a dull publishing season.

Just Another Intellectual. Collier's japes with apes begin with Alfred Fatigay, a tired African mission schoolmaster who leaves Boboma on the Upper Congo to return to England and marry his fiancee Amy, an intellectual sort of girl. For company he takes with him "a well-grown, sagacious, fine specimen" of a chimpanzee named Emily. All goes very well for a while ("In England the Primate takes precedence of all but Royal Dukes"). But Emily, no ordinary chimp, knows how to read. She takes a course in the British Museum, and she thinks she had better start at the beginning with The Origin of Species. Soon, except that she likes to enter her flat by climbing the drainpipe, and that she has a humble and loving heart (at the mission school she had heard the hymn, "He that is low need fear no fall"). Emily is indistinguishable from other intellectuals.

Poor Fatigay, however, is browbeaten by his fiancee Amy, and falls on evil times. Selling matches outside the Ritz, he is rescued from verminous destitution by Emily, who by now has taken to driving a Hispano-Suiza (an equipage which dates the book to Michael Arlen times). The cute chimp has managed to turn herself into Juanita Spaniola. a -L-100-a-week exotic dancer, and her vocabulary is more than 500 words--greater than that of today's J. Fred Muggs.

Monkeyshining Paradox. Emily, by impersonating the bride, thoughtfully intervenes to save Fatigay from marriage to the heartless Amy. ("Marriage between cousins is perfectly legal," says the clergyman when the imposture is discovered.) As Mr. and Mrs. Fatigay return to the Congo, the groom tells shipboard interviewers: "My message to your readers is simply this. It is true my wife is not a woman. She is an angel . . . Behind every great man there may be a woman, and beneath every performing flea a hot plate, but beside the only happy man I know of--there is a chimp."

Collier's verbal monkeyshines are so adroit as to make the reader forget the paradox that while man may be like a monkey, a monkey is not like a man. It is all prime fun among the primates, and calls to mind the verse of a British poet in which an ape reflects on the Darwinian version of the Fall of Man:

Indecent from the first, the Hairless

One

Hankered to do the Things That Are

Not Done;

When Man descended from the leafy

air,

Oh what a Fall, man semblable, mon

frere!

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