War with the Newts

Front matter

|KAREL ČAPEK

|Here is an often excoriating, but always funny, novel about mankind’s dangerous ability to pervert the best things of the world—a good-humored satire by the famous author of R. U. R. With an introduction by Lewis Gannett complete and unabridged | |

WAR WITH THE NEWTS

Karel Čapek

was all his life obsessed by a worry about modern barbarism, the world-wide lack of regard for not only the individual but even the entire human race in the face of the enormous techniques science had put into the inept and careless hands of mankind. WAR WITH THE NEWTS, written when the black cloud of Nazism was steadily enveloping Europe, is his most thorough and, at the same time, his most comic exploration of the subject. Čapek himself was a victim of modern barbarism: when his country was swallowed by the totalitarian monster, he, too, expired with it.

Introduction

KAREL ČAPEK (you can pronounce it something like “Chop-ek” if you want to sound sophisticated) was a Czech, and he wrote in Czech, and to most of us the Czech language is as remote as Navaho or Tibetan. Yet Čapek’s writings were translated and read—indeed, are still read-all over the world; he is the only writer in Czech of whom that can be said. But, oddly, even more than for any one of his plays or essays or novels, he is remembered for a word he invented. He was the only Czech, and one of the few men of any tongue, who ever invented and put into circulation, at a date which can be precisely identified, a world word.

His word “robot” is used and understood in Tokyo, Cape Town and Buenos Aires as well as in Berlin, Paris, London and New York—and Prague. It is true that “O.K.” is also understood in all the capitals of the world, and may have been sired by the not over-schooled Andrew Jackson, as meaning “Oll Korrect.” But that is a legend which cannot be proved, much less dated. There is no doubt that the word “robot” was born on January 26, 1921, when Čapek’s play, R.U.R. had its premiere at the National Theatre in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Americans first heard it when the Theatre Guild produced R.U.R. on October 9, 1922; but before that the play had been produced, and Čapek’s word had passed from mouth to mouth, in Vienna. Berlin, Paris and London.

By 1933 the dignified Shorter Oxford English Dictionary had accepted the word “robot,” identified its source, and noted its evolution. In its pages Čapek has his niche of fame:

Robot. 1923. (Czech robot-, stem of robotiti, to work, drudge = Russ. rabotať, to work, f. rabota, work. The orig. Slavonic stem is related to G. arbeit, work.) One of the mechanical men and women in the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek; hence, a living being that acts automatically (without volition). b. A machine devised to function in place of a living agent; one which acts automatically or with a minimum of external impulse 1925.

“Robots … persons all of whose activities were imposed on them and who were not allowed ‘even the luxury of original sin’.” G. B. Shaw. Hence Robotesque, Robotian, adjs. Robotism, Robotry, nouns. Robotize, v. trans., to mechanicalize.

Čapek’s idea, if not his word, was, of course, in the air, all over the industrial world; and it is even more in the air today, when another new word, related in idea, “automation,” is apparently also joining the world vocabulary. This idea of the mechanized subhuman obsessed Čapek. After reading and meditating upon Fabre’s Social Life in the Insect World, he used it in a satiric play which, like R.U.R., had an impact on the New York stage, The Insect Comedy, here called The World We Live In. Aldous Huxley utilized somewhat the same basic theme, a decade after Čapek, in his Brave New World, and the works of George Orwell, appearing after Čapek’s death, also seem to owe something to the Czech. Čapek himself developed the theme again, elaborating it and playing with it, in his final novel, War with the Newts, published in Czech in Prague in 1936, in English in 1937, the year before Čapek died.

Karel Čapek was born at Male Svatonice in Bohemia, then a part of Austria, on January 9, 1890. His father was a doctor, and in his early student years at the Caroline University in Prague (later he studied also in Berlin and at the Sorbonne in Paris) he majored in biology. The rising tide of Czech nationalism, and the influence of his great friend, Professor Tomas Masaryk, the “father” and first president of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, turned Čapek for a time to philosophy, and he wrote on William James’s pragmatism in Czech; but another of his first published works was an anthology (in his own Czech translations) of French poetry. He was a versatile cosmopolitan, and in the strange interlude of hope which followed the peace of 1919, when Czechoslovakia seemed to be the cornerstone of democracy in Central Europe, he was the central figure in the literary life of Prague, and a welcome visitor in all the capitals of the world.

He became, in the early 1920’s, art director of the National Art Theater of Prague, where his Insect Comedy and R.U.R. were first produced. With success he built his own theatre. He put Shelley’s Cenci on the stage for the first time, a century too late for Shelley to see it. He was also one of the editors of Livode Noviny, the chief organ of the liberal democratic views of Masaryk and of his successor in the presidency, Dr. Eduard Beneš. This paper was also, after the pattern of the great Vienna newspapers of the period, a forum for the avantgarde as well as for the rear guard in art, music and literature. Many of Čapek’s books, which appeared in English translation in this country in the 1930’s, were based on columns—feuilletons, to use the European word—which he wrote for that paper.

Čapek did an infinite variety of things, and whatever he did he did with passion and charm. “Let none think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation,” he wrote in The Gardener’s Year, which appeared in the United States in 1931. “It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart.” His gardener’s prayer could be a text for many garden books:

“O Lord, grant that in some way it may rain every day, say from about midnight until three o’clock in the morning, but, You see, it must be gentle and warm so that it can soak in; grant that at the same time it shall not rain on campion, alyssum, helianthemum, lavender and the others which You, in Your infinite wisdom, know are drought-loving plants—I will write their names on a bit of paper if You like—and grant that the sun may shine the whole day long, but not everywhere (not, for instance, on spiraea, or on gentian, plantain lily and rhododendron), and not too much; that there may be plenty of dew and little wind, enough worms, no plant-lice and snails, no mildew, and that once a week thin liquid manure may fall down from heaven. Amen.”.

He was an insatiable trayeler. His travel books—Letters from Italy (1924), Letters from Spain (1932), Letters from Holland (1933), Travels in the North (1939) and others—he illustrated himself, with evocative sketches which one critic (this one) somewhat extravagantly said had in them something of Van Loon, something of Covarrubias, a bit of Rockwell Kent and a hint of Thurber.

His prose too was evocative: Spain, he said, had never ceased to be Moorish, and in the Moorish castles and palaces one could detect signs of a people who had once been tent-dwellers. “The Moorish patio is a cozy representation of an oasis; the gurgling fountain in the Spanish courtyard to this very day still gratifies the desert dream of cool springs; the garden, represented by the contents of the flowerpots, is a portable garden. The tent-dweller packs up his home and all his luxuries so that he can load them on asses; that is why his home is made of textiles and his luxuries are of filigree… The Moor even built lacework archways.”

Čapek interpreted Dutch character in terms of a nation (even the nuns) on bicycles: a people of individuals looking out each for himself, pedaling hard whenever he discovers a bit of elbow room, but treading, on the whole, slowly and steadily. Denmark was to him “a small slice of bread, but thickly spread with butter.”

He wrote other books—among them a better life of President Masaryk (with the latter’s collaboration) than the one Masaryk wrote alone. But his most characteristic books were concerned with the impact of science on the mind and character of man. The mindless and soulless mechanical perfection of the colonies of the so-called social insects fascinated and appalled him. In R.U.R. he melodramatically imagined the dire possibilities which would ensue if science should succeed in creating a form of subhuman life capable of performing the work of the world—and, ultimately, to much more. A novel in 1937, The Absolute at Large or The Manufacture of the Absolute (the English and American titles differed), was, ahead of its time, concerned with atom-splitting.

War with the Newts was the final product of Čapek’s lush imagination and of his obsession with mechanical man. In it, as readers of this volume will quickly observe for themselves, he conceived a Dutch sea captain observing the antics of a little-known species of newt or salamander found only on an island off the coast of Sumatra. (This was written a decade after Douglas Burden had excited the West by bringing back from the island of Komodo, at the other end of Java, specimens of a race of “dragon lizards” larger than man, a fierce form of life which, conceivably, may have given rise to the worldwide legend of the dragon.) Čapek’s newts were merely as big as a ten-year-old boy, but they had a parrot-like capacity to repeat human sounds when they heard them and a beaver-like talent for building dams. And, like the rabbits introduced into rabbitless Australia, when transplanted to regions that had never known them, they proliferated in what we would today call “an explosion of population,” with results which only a man of Čapek’s fertile scientific imagination could conceive.

Of course, in the pearl-fishing world into which Čapek introduces us, no one could know of what these newts were capable. The natives called them “devils,” and kept aloof from them. And when Captain van Toch took to spending days watching (and, secretly, training) them, the members of his crew assumed that he must be visiting a girl. The two men who sneaked around the bend to spy on him, and saw him apparently talking to strange, seal-like creatures, thought him dotty. So did those to whom he talked when he returned to the West and tried to raise capital to exploit the newts’ pearl-fishing talents. Yet there was that odd and convincing fact: he had a lot of pearls.

War with the Newts, when it appeared, was inevitably called “Wellsian.” But if Čapek was something of an H. G. Wells, he was at once more elfin and more scientific, decidedly a Czech Wells. He wrote with a down-to-earth sense of humor which reminds one rather of his fellow-Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, author of The Good Soldier: Schweik, than of the earnestly English Mr. Wells. Čapek’s wry satiric wit darted in every direction. He lampooned science, religion, nationalism, racism, linguistics, communism, capitalism, businessmen, intellectuals. He satirized even pedestrian Czechs such as Povondra, the porter, who felt himself responsible for all newt history because he had once let Captain van Toch, the newt man, in to the office of Bondy, the international capitalist, with results which only a reader of War with the Newts can imagine.

Čapek, unlike Wells, had no isms of his own. He was even willing to share with his readers the secret that the author himself didn’t always know what would happen next. His biological training is clear in the long chapter, “Along the Steps of Civilization,” in which Čapek amused himself with a long parody of international science and international journalism. But above all, he had fun, he had gusto, and he had that rarest of talents—the capacity to make a reader think while laughing.

War with the Newts was Čapek’s last fun, and in a sense it was the final flowering of the Europe of the between-the-wars period. It appeared in Prague in 1936, when it was still possible to laugh at Adolf Hitler, and Czechoslovakia still seemed the bright hope of European peace and democracy. By the time the book appeared in England and America, Hitler’s shadow was already black across all Central Europe. The following year, 1938, was the year of doom. In September, 1938, at the famous and infamous Munich Conference, Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier, speaking for England and France, assured Hitler that they would not interfere if he carved a slice out of the staunch little republic of Czechoslovakia, and went home to assure their cheering people—and America—that they had saved peace for the world.

Čapek understood. “We have lost,” he told Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika that autumn. She tried to cheer him up by telling him that his Newts was being read all over the world.

“Your story of those sly, clever creatures which were first trained by man for all sorts of uses, and which finally, turning into a mob without soul or morals but with dangerous technical skill, plunge the world into ruin,” Erika Mann remembered saying to him, “this story is so contemporary and exciting, so comical and entertaining, that it wins friends everywhere.”

Čapek could not even smile. “Perhaps,” he said, wanly. Three months after Munich, on Christmas Day, 1938, he died, almost literally of a broken heart. He died with his country.

His newts still seem “contemporary and exciting.”

Chapter 1

First Book

2em

1

IF you were to look for the little island of Tanah Masa on the map, you would find it right on the equator, a bit to the west of Sumatra; but if on board the ship Kandong Bandoeng you were to ask Captain J. van Toch what is this Tanah Masa before which he has just dropped anchor, he would curse for a while, and then tell you that it is the dirtiest hole in all the Straits, even worse than Tanah Bala and at least as damned as Pini, or Banjak; that the only—I beg your pardon—man who lives there—not counting, of course, those lousy Bataks—is a drunken commercial agent, a cross between a Cuban and a Portuguese, and a bigger thief, heathen, and swine than a pure Cuban and a pure white man put together; and if there is anything damned in this world, then it is the damned life on this damned Tanah Masa, sir. At that you would naturally inquire why he had dropped the damned anchor as if he intended to stay there three damned days; and he would snort irritably, and mutter something to the effect that the Kandong Bandoeng wouldn’t come here just for damned copra or palm oil, that’s common sense, and besides it’s nothing to do with you, sir; I have my damned orders, sir, and you’ll kindly mind your own business, sir. And he would curse vehemently and freely as is in keeping with an elderly but still for his age an active captain of a boat.

But if instead of asking impertinent questions you let Captain J. van Toch growl and curse away to himself, you might discover more. Doesn’t his manner show that he wants to get something off his chest? Let him be, his temper will work itself off. “Well, look here, sir,” bursts out the captain. “Those fellers of ours there in Amsterdam, those damned Jews up there will get it into their heads, pearls, they say, man, keep your eyes open for pearls. People are like mad for pearls, they say, and all that.” Here the captain expectorates indignantly. “Just so, to put money into pearls! That comes from people like you always wanting to have wars, or whatnot. Flight from gold, that’s all it is. And that’s called the crisis, sir.” Captain van Toch hesitates a little, wondering if he oughtn’t to begin a discussion with you about problems of economics; for in these days people don’t talk about anything else. Here, however, in front of Tanah Masa it’s too hot and enervating for that; and Captain van Toch waves his hand and mumbles: “You say pearls! In Ceylon, sir, they cleared up the whole lot five years ago; in Formosa you’re not allowed to fish for them. And so here we are, Captain van Toch, on the look-out for new fishing-grounds. Sail to those damned little islands; maybe you’ll find whole banks of shells there.” The captain blows contemptuously into a sky-blue handkerchief. “Those rats in Europe imagine that there’s something to be found here that nobody knows about yet! Jesus Christ, what mugs they are! It’s a wonder they don’t ask us to look into these Bataks’ snouts to see if they’re not snivelling pearls. New fishing places! There’s a new brothel in Padang, yes, but new fishing places? Sir, I know all these islands here like the palm of my hand—from Ceylon as far as that damned Clipperton Island… If anybody thinks that he can still find something that he can make money out of, then good luck to him, sir! For thirty years I’ve been around in these parts of the world, and now these fellers want me to discover something here!” Captain van Toch nearly chokes with this defiant statement. “Let them send some greenhorn here, he’ll find things that’ll make them blink their eyes; to ask someone who knows the place like Captain van Toch… You’ll grant that, sir. In Europe, there you might still come across some odd thing; but here—don’t people come here just to sniff and nose out what can be devoured? and not even devoured, what can be bought and sold? Sir, if in the whole of the damned tropics there was anything left worth a brass farthing, three agents would be trying to get something out of it and signal with dirty handkerchiefs to boats of seven nationalities to stop. That’s it, sir. I know what it’s like here better than the Colonial Office of Her Majesty the Queen. I beg your pardon.” Captain van Toch with all his might tries to master his righteous indignation, in which after more blasphemy he succeeds. “Do you see those miserable sluggards over there? They’re pearl fishers from Ceylon, may God not punish me, Sinhalese as the Lord created them; but why he did it I don’t know. That’s what I’m shipping with me now, sir; and when I find a stretch of shore somewhere on which there’s no Agency or Baťa or Custom Office posted up, I let them loose into the water to look for shells. That smaller rascal can dive as much as forty fathoms deep; over there on Princes Island he fished up from a depth of forty-five fathoms the handle of a cinema contraption, sir, but pearls—no, not a oner! Hopeless paralytics, these Sinhalese. Well, this is the sort of damned job I have, sir: make out as if I were buying palm oil, and at the same time look for new fishing places for pearl-oysters. Perhaps they’ll want me to discover a virgin continent yet, eh? Surely that’s no job for a decent mercantile captain, sir. J. van Toch isn’t a damned adventurer, sir. No, sir.” And so on; the sea is big, and the ocean of time has no limits; spit into it, man, and it won’t give; curse your fate, and you won’t move it. And so, after much preparation and fussing, at last we have reached that J. van Toch, the captain of a Dutch ship Kandong Bandoeng, who sighing and cursing climbs down into a boat to get across to the kampong on Tanah Masa and have a parley with the drunken cross between a Cuban and a Portuguese about some business affairs.

“Sorry, Captain,” said the cross between a Cuban and a Portuguese at last, “but there aren’t any shells growing here on Tanah Masa. These dirty Bataks,” he said, with infinite disgust, “eat even jelly-fish; they live more in the water than on land; the women here stink like fish, you can’t imagine—what did I want to say? Aha, you were asking about the women.”

“And isn’t there a strip of coast here,” inquired the captain, “where these Bataks don’t crawl into the water?”

The cross between the Cuban and the Portuguese shook his head. “There isn’t. Unless it’s Devil Bay, but that’s no good for you.”

“Why?”

“Because … nobody must go there, sir. Will you have another one, Captain?”

“Thanks. Are there any sharks there?”

“Sharks, and all the rest,” the half-breed mumbled. “A nasty place, sir. The Bataks wouldn’t like anybody to stick his nose in there.”

“Why?”

There are devils there, sir. Sea devils.”

“What is a sea devil like? Is it a fish?”

“No, not a fish,” the half-breed objected evasively. “Just a devil, sir. A deep-sea devil. The Bataks call it ‘tapa.’ Tapa. They have their town there, they say, those devils. Will you have another one?”

“And what does it look like … that sea devil?”

The cross between a Cuban and a Portuguese shrugged his shoulders.

“Like a devil, sir. I saw one once … that is, only its head. I was coming back in a boat from Cape Haarlem and suddenly it stuck out such a mug from the water in front of me.”

“Well, and what does it look like?”

“It has a muzzle… Like a Batak, sir, but absolutely bald.”

“Wasn’t it really a Batak?”

“No, sir, it wasn’t. In that place no Batak would ever crawl into the water, you know! And then … it blinked at me with its bottom eyelids, sir.” The half-breed shivered with terror. “With its bottom eyelids which come up right over its eyes. That’s tapa.”

Captain J. van Toch toyed with the glass of palm wine in his fat fingers. “And you hadn’t had a drop too much? You weren’t drunk?”

“I was, sir. Otherwise I shouldn’t have rowed that way. The Bataks don’t like it when somebody upsets those devils.”

Captain van Toch shook his head. “Man, there aren’t any devils. And if there were, they would look like Europeans. That thing must have been some kind of fish or something.”

“A fish,” stammered the cross between a Cuban and a Portuguese. “A fish hasn’t got any hands, sir. I’m not a Batak, sir. I went to school in Badjoeng … maybe I still know the Ten Commandments and other scientific doctrines; an educated man would know what a devil is like and what is a beast, wouldn’t he? You ask the Bataks, sir.”

“These are just Negro superstitions,” explained the captain with the breezy superiority of an educated man. “Scientifically it’s pure nonsense. A devil can’t live in water, can he? What would he do there? You mustn’t believe the natives’ tales, my lad. Somebody called that bay Devil Bay, and ever since then the Bataks have been scared of it. That’s it,” said the captain, hitting the table with the fat palm of his hand. “There’s nothing there, my lad, it’s scientifically clear, isn’t it?”

“It is, sir,” the half-breed consented, who went to school in Badjoeng. “But no sensible man has any business in Devil Bay.”

Captain J. van Toch turned crimson. “What?” he bawled. “You dirty Cuban, you think that I shall be frightened of your devils? We’ll see about that,” he cried, rising with all the greatness of his honest fourteen stone. “I’m not going to waste my time here with you when I have my business to look after. But remember there aren’t any devils in Dutch colonies; if there are any anywhere, then they’re in the French ones. There might be some there. And now fetch me the mayor of this damned kampong here.”

It was no trouble to find the above-mentioned dignitary: he was squatting beside the half-breed’s shop chewing a stick of sugar-cane. He was an elderly gentleman and naked, but far thinner than mayors are in Europe. A bit further behind him, and keeping at a respectful distance, the whole village was crouching together, women and children and all, clearly expecting to be filmed.

“Well, listen, my lad,” said Captain van Toch, addressing him in Malay (he might just as well have spoken to him in Dutch or English, for the venerable old Batak didn’t know a single word of Malay, and the cross between a Cuban and a Portuguese had to translate all the captain’s speech into Batavian; but for some reason the captain felt that Malay was more suitable). “Well, listen, my boy, I shall need a few big strong brave boys to go hunting with me.”

The half-breed translated, and the mayor nodded his head to signify that he almost understood; then he turned to the wider auditory and delivered an oration that was an obvious success.

“The chief says,” the half-breed interpreted, “that the whole village will go hunting with the tuan captain wherever tuan would like to go.”

“So you see. Then tell them that we are going fishing for shells in Devil Bay.”

A quarter of an hour of excited discussion followed in which the whole village took part, especially the old women. Finally the half-breed turned to the captain. “They say, sir, that you can’t go to Devil Bay.”

The captain grew red in the face. “And why not?”

The half-breed shrugged his shoulders. “Because there are tapa-tapa there. Devils, sir.”

The captain began to turn purple. “So tell them that if they don’t go … that I shall knock all their teeth out … that I shall slit their ears … that I shall hang them … and that I shall burn their lousy kampong—do you understand?”

The half-breed translated it faithfully, whereupon again a somewhat lengthy and lively debate ensued. At last the half-breed turned to the captain. “They say, sir, that they will go to complain to the police at Padang that tuan threatened them. There are regulations about it. The mayor won’t leave it at that.”

Captain J. van Toch began to turn blue. “Well, tell him,” he roared, “that he is …” And he kept on talking without giving himself time to take breath for at least eleven minutes.

The half-breed translated as much as his stock of words would permit; and after a fresh, long, but meaty conference of the Bataks he interpreted to the captain: “They say, sir, that they would be willing to refrain from legal proceedings if tuan captain deposits a fee at the local offices. They say,” he hesitated, “two hundred rupees; but that’s a bit too much, sir. Offer them five.”

Captain van Toch’s face began to break into russet blotches. First he threatened to massacre all the Bataks in the world, then he made a reduction to three hundred kicks, finally he would have been satisfied if he could have stuffed the mayor for the museum in Amsterdam; on the other side the Bataks went down from two hundred rupees to an iron pump with a wheel, and at last stood firm at the captain’s giving the mayor by way of a fee a smart petrol lighter. “Let them have it, sir?” pleaded the cross between a Cuban and a Portuguese (“I’ve got three lighters in my store, but they haven’t got a wick”). Thus peace was re-established on Tanah Masa; but Captain J. van Toch knew that now the prestige of the white race was at stake.

In the afternoon a boat put off from the Dutch ship Kandong Bandoeng, in which among others were present Captain van Toch, a Swede called Jensen, an Icelander called Gudmundson, a Finn named Gillemainen, and two Sinhalese pearl fishers. The boat headed straight for Devil Bay.

By three o’clock when the ebb was just at the turn the captain was standing on the shore, the boat hovered about a hundred yards away to look out for sharks, and both the Sinhalese divers were waiting with knives in their hands for the signal to jump into the water.

“And now you,” the captain commanded the taller naked one. The Sinhalese slipped into the water, waded a few steps, and then sank below. The captain glanced at his watch.

After four minutes and twenty seconds about sixty yards to the left a brown head emerged; with strange, desperate, and yet paralysed haste the diver scrambled up on the boulders with the knife for cutting off the shells in one hand and in the other the shell of a pearl oyster.

The captain frowned. “Well, what’s wrong?” he demanded sharply.

The Sinhalese was still clambering over the boulders gasping loudly with terror.

“What’s happened?” the captain shouted.

“Sahib, sahib,” the diver managed to groan, and sank down on the shore gasping out raucously. “Sahib … sahib …”

“Sharks?”

“Djins,” moaned the diver. “Devils, sir. Thousands, thousands of devils!” He dug his fists into his eyes. “All devils, sir!”

“Let me see that shell,” the captain commanded, and then opened it with the knife. In it there was a small clear pearl. “And that was all you found?”

The Sinhalese took three more shells out of the bag which he had slung round his neck. “There are plenty of shells, sir, but those devils keep guard over them… They watched me while I was cutting them off …” His shaggy hair stood up on end with horror. “Sahib, not here!”