Questing
Brian Inglis
The Wolf Children Charles Maclean (Allen Lane £4.95) If there is a circle in hell reserved for those who, like the gentleman from Porlock, unwittingly deprive posterity of something of great value, then one of its inhabitants must surely be a Mr Goffin, of the Oxford University Press. In 1935 he received the MS of a diary which had been kept by the Revd. J. A. L. Singh of Midnapore, in Bengal, describing the discovery and upbringing of two girls who had been found in a wolf's lair. 'The general judgment', Gottin wrote back with the rejection slip, 'is that the story falls between two stools; it just misses both the scientific and the more popular markets'.
It seems barely credible, now that Charles Maclean has told the full story — or as much of it as he has been able to unearth — that anybody could have been so obtuse. Singh, admittedly, had tried to put the diary into shape; and he was not a good editor. His command of the English language was erratic. And, not being a scientist, he had understandably not attempted to adapt to the Procrustean requirements of scientific journals. But it was, and is, so fascinating a story that its rejection remains baffling.
Not that we have had to wait until now for the story. Thanks to the activity of Dr Robert Zingg, a Denver anthropologist, the diary — which Zingg immediately recognised as 'a scientific document of primary importance' — reached Arnold Gesell of Yale, and through him a wider public. But no attempt was made to check on the facts until chance brought Zingg to Bengal near the end of the war; and by that time Singh and the girl were dead, and vital witnesses scattered.
There is no dispute about Singh's account of the upbringing of the two girls. They were taken into his orphanage in 1920; Kamala, it was estimated, being about six; Amala about three. They behaved precisely as wolves in children's guise could be expected to behave. They were sleepy in the daytime, awake at night. They ran — very fast — on all fours, but could not stand upright. They ate meat, voraciously. They lapped from pools of water. They howled at night. And they were deeply suspicious of people. For all this there is no lack of testimony. But were they wolf children? Might they not simply have been children who were brought up by parents who had treated them as little animals, and who became autistic as a result?
Maclean himself was inclined to dismiss the wolf-children idea when he began his research, because Singh himself was on record as having admitted, in effect, that the account in his diary, in which he described how he and others had actually found the girls in a wolf's den, and captured them, was false. At first, he had said that he had simply accepted them from villagers. The obvious explanation was that Singh, seeing the chance of making some money out of the wolf-children story, had amended his diary later to include the episode. But there was another possibility: that Singh had originally felt the need to protect the girls and the orphanage from the deluge of publicity it would have received. And on the record both of the diary and of Singh's life, this supposition — that he was a white-liar, only — fits the facts better than the presumption that he faked his own diary. Nothing in his career suggests that he would have been capable of such a deed.
If it is conceded that the girls had been reared Mowgli-fashion, the implications for child psychology are striking. It is always difficult to disturb the believers in heredity, in the nature v nurture controversy; but there could hardly be more positive evidence of the validity both of the old Jesuit maxim about the need to catch children in their formative years, and of Freud's parallel view. Amala and Kamala were, to all intents, little wolves. Amala lived only a year in captivity — as it must have been, to her. Kamala survived until 1929, by which time she was reasonably tame, capable of uttering a few half-words and responding to affection, but never properly house-trained.
Primitive behaviourism also takes a knock. Mrs Singh, who sounds to have been a marvellous woman, found by trial and error that though reward — in the shape of raw meat — was a handy aid to training, the children responded best to the arousal of curiosity. This is very much what the zoologists who have been training chimpanzees to 'talk' — to communicate have been finding. Love was the key, Mrs Singh felt, to winning their confidence; and having at last won it, she watched and waited and exploited any sign of interest Kamala displayed. Unluckily for Zingg, though, the descriptions of the two wolf-children in the diary were of a kind calculated to irritate the scientific Establishment, without gaining him any solid rebel support. Even Gesell eventually backed down, evidently feeling that he had put too much faith in the document. 'No scientist can accept any statement as true', Ashley Montague argued, in his characteristic dogmatic fashion, 'until it has been independently confirmed by others'; as such confirmation was lacking, the story was unacceptable. And it has remained unacceptable ever since.
Montague in fact went further. Even if the statement that the children were found together with the wolves in their den were fully corroborated, he insisted, 'that in itself would not constitute evidence that they were brought there by wolves, nor that they had been suckled or reared by them'. Was he asking us to believe that the children might have been trained by their parents to behave like wolves, and then set down in the den, to live there with the wolves (for children and wolves had been seen out hunting together)? Or just that the children, tired of living like animals at home, had sought out the wolves as foster parents? Or what?
In his introduction Maclean describes how at one point he intended to follow the pattern of The Quest for Corvo, inviting the reader 'to share every break-through, setback and dead end'. Perhaps wisely, he decided against it; because the crucial evidence — from the two Englishmen, Henry Richards and Peter Rose, who according to the diary witnessed the capture — has never been obtained. It is just possible that it still could be found, for surely they must have talked and written of their experience. There may be a letter or a diary which would confirm or modify Singh's account.
But even if Singh did invent the story of the capture, there is no excuse for the kind of rancorous denigration by such professional sceptics as Bergen Evans ('Gesell is probably senile,' Evans wrote, 'possibly dishonest, and certainly illiterate'). The recovery of the children from the wolf's lair may have happened as told — and it is certainly circumstantial — even if Singh was not himself present. In any case, why should he invent Richards and Rose as witnesses, if they did not exist, thereby leaving himself open to exposure? And if they did exist, and were not witnesses, exposure would be even more probable. Perhaps The Wolf Children, admirable though it is in its present form (apart from a tendency by the author to overdo the local colour, in his laudable attempt to translate us to Midnapore), will eventually acquire a postscript: The Quest for Richards and Rose'.
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