Timid Giant

CHARLES DARWIN -- Geoffrey West --Yale University Press ($3.50).

Until he began gathering material for this biography, Author West shared the conventional view of his subject: Darwinism he took for granted; Darwin the man he regarded with "faint distaste" as a too typical Victorian. When he became better acquainted with his material, he changed his mind. He became fond of Darwin the man, and he made a shocking discovery about Darwinism. He discovered that Fascists, Communists and rugged individualists all claim direct descent from Darwin's theory of the Survival of the Fittest. What these monstrous descendants ignore, decided Author West, is that Darwin got his Survival theory from the now obsolete Malthusian theory. More important, he decided, they ignore the fact that Darwin's conclusions were apt to be unconscious alibis for a now equally obsolete stage of capitalism.

With this shrewd focus, sharpened by careful writing, Author West sets out to bring Darwin into modern perspective, succeeds in making this newest biography of Darwin the freshest yet written. But with all his shrewdness Author West cannot quite clear up the great Darwin paradox: the contrast between his revolutionary work and the conventional Victorian who produced it.

As a youth dreamy Charles distinguished himself only by his fibs, his cribbing in school (where he got the nickname "Gas"), his passion for hunting, his aimless wandering from university to university in search of a profession. A passive resister rather than a rebel, always intimidated by his big, bumbling father, he decided at last on a Church career. Natural history was merely a desultory hobby that accidentally got him an appointment as naturalist on the five-year voyage of the Beagle. And although he was no more interested in the Church than he had been in his other blind alleys, he was 40 years old before he got up nerve enough to say he was going to be a naturalist instead.

His least cautious move was his marriage to Emma Wedgwood. It took him only three years to decide on that plunge. On the one hand, debated Darwin, was the "terrible loss of time"; on the other "a nice soft wife on a sofa, with good fire and books and music perhaps. . . ." Handsome, untidy, cheerful, unsentimental Emma was not soft, but she was, for Darwin, more than nice. Their marriage was as blissful as the Brownings'. They both agreed that Tennyson's poetry was usually silly, detested the same people, chiefly the Carlyles.

A semi-invalid racked with stomach trouble and boils, Darwin retired to the country, rarely budged for 40 years. It took him 20 years to work up nerve enough to publish the Origin of Species.

Lying low while Huxley fought evolution's battles, ridden by an anxiety neurosis until he became famous, he spent his old age reading romantic novels, died quietly at 73, concerned for the future of his investments, never realized how completely he had revolutionized the whole field of human thought.

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