Observing the observer

WHEN Jane Goodall was growing up, she wanted to be a journalist -- an ambitious goal for a girl of modest means with no hope of higher education. Instead, she went to secretarial school, suffered through dull days in dreary jobs and dreamed of travel. When a friend invited her, at age 22, to visit Africa, Goodall’s life took a turn that would end in her becoming one of the most influential primate researchers in the world. Her life (to paraphrase John Lennon) happened while she was making other plans.

Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born in London on April 3, 1934; her father, Mortimer, was a race car driver who never permanently returned to the family after shipping out to France at the start of World War II. He divorced Jane’s mother, Vanne, in 1950, consigning Jane to the fate of so many children who cathect with the animal kingdom to compensate for missing parents and end up (like Goodall and her contemporary in the primate field, Dian Fossey) as biologists, trainers or animal behaviorists.

It’s a phenomenon Dale Peterson doesn’t make nearly enough of in his comprehensive and masterful biography, “Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man,” but he provides plenty of evidence for the reader to draw such conclusions, dissecting Goodall’s life like an assiduous biologist sorting through the innards of some rare new animal. Readers may wonder why -- after Goodall has written so prolifically about herself both for children (“My Life With the Chimpanzees”) and adults (several variations on autobiography, including two volumes of her letters) -- the world needs a new, 700-plus-page book about her, even one written by a close friend and collaborator. (Peterson edited the letters and co-wrote her 1993 book “Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People.”) The only answer is that Peterson provides copious detail, more than most of us would consider relevant. Nothing -- not Goodall’s diet, her wardrobe or the many permutations of this charismatic and beautiful young woman’s on-again, off-again love affairs -- escapes mention. It’s as if Peterson were out in the field himself, marveling at the eccentricities of the typical British ethologist.

Occasionally, those specifics become tedious (“Jane fried up bacon and eggs while Vanne mended a tear in her jeans”), but once you surrender to Peterson’s agenda, his biography takes you deeply and completely into Goodall’s many worlds, from her modest upbringing among the dogs and horses of the English countryside to her sojourns in the outback bonding with her beloved apes in Gombe, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. She is a woman who perches sturdily on the decks of ships in roiling seas while lesser passengers retch, who sweats bravely through malarial fevers with good humor and without medical attention, who holds to the truth of her own observations even as the scientific world scoffs at her habit of naming her subjects and treating apes as individuals. Who stalwartly fends off the attentions of inappropriate (in other words, married) suitors, even if one of them is a famous scientist in a position to advance her career.

Given her family’s economic status, Goodall’s ascent into primate research was a result of happy circumstance, innate gifts (observation, tenacity, keen eyesight) and, most of all, an alliance with the renowned anthropologist Louis Leakey. At the natural history museum in Nairobi, where he was curator, Leakey hired her as his secretary. In short order, she began accompanying her new mentor on digs and resisting his advances, while Leakey’s wife, Mary, drowned her jealous anxieties in alcohol. According to Peterson, Goodall did everything she could to allay Mary’s fears while still remaining Leakey’s devoted protegee, but there would be many years, painful for everyone, before Leakey gave up. “He really does behave like a child over this,” Jane wrote in a letter home, “and I begin to see why Mary has taken to the brandy.”

Today, Leakey’s attentions to Goodall would be deemed sexual harassment, for which his employee might have sued him. The rewards for enduring them, however, were considerable. As his personal secretary, Goodall helped to examine unearthed ancient human skeletons, hobnobbed with international scientific stars and landed her first field assignment, observing vervet monkeys in the wild.

After Goodall refused Leakey for the last time and returned to England, he offered a post he’d promised her, observing chimps in Gombe, to a better-credentialed researcher, an American named Cathryn Hosea. Hosea declined, however, put off by Leakey’s insistence that she commit for five years, and Goodall officially launched her illustrious career. Within just a few months, under her perceptive gaze, the elusive chimps (thought not to be meat eaters) had killed and consumed prey and used tools -- sticks with which to gather termites. All were observations that had eluded researchers before her. Even the spurned Leakey was impressed; in time, he would secure her entry into Cambridge University’s doctoral program in ethology, where she thrived despite her lack of previous schooling and her refusal to abandon her own modus operandi even as she acquired the quantitative skills of the scientific method.

Peterson makes clear that it was precisely Goodall’s freedom from academic cant that allowed her to study her chimps “without serious precedent, established preconception, or standard method” -- to attach to them, lure them with food and regard them as unique individuals with emotions and strategies all too familiar to any human. Her relative naivete allowed her to break new ground. Leakey declared in 1963 that her evidence of tool-wielding chimps had forced scientists either to “accept chimpanzees as man, by definition, or else ... redefine ‘man.’ ” In her subsequent writings for National Geographic, in her books and in her many lectures, Goodall would, in her way, get the scientific establishment to redefine itself. That “fading year, 1963,” Peterson writes, “turned out to be Jane’s last really private and peaceful moment in the forest.”

Peterson’s descriptions of Goodall’s days in the field with the chimps, who came to accept her, hold her hand (sometimes too tightly) and treat her as one of their kind, are by far the book’s liveliest moments, more engaging than his intricate accounts of her lackluster marriage to wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick (they divorced in 1974) and the birth of their son. Those segments of Peterson’s book end around Page 500, and at about the same point Leakey dies; thereafter, Peterson’s material dries up.

Nothing if not a determined biographer, however, he soldiers on, spending his last 200 or so pages demonstrating Goodall’s continuing greatness. She did not take her international celebrity for granted, nor did she squander it; instead, she worked persistently for peace and economic justice around the globe, understanding that native species were most threatened in countries torn by civil strife and that a humane people resisted unnecessary wars. The book’s penultimate chapter ends with a correspondence between Goodall and then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell less than two weeks before U.S. troops invaded Iraq in March 2003. “I am praying for some kind of Divine intervention in the days ahead,” she wrote. “In so many of the places where I spend time around the world, I fear the anger against our two countries will erupt. And a world with even more terrorism & hatred is horrible to contemplate.” Sadly, however, unlike the primate researchers of the 1960s, the leaders of the Western world to whom she appealed were not swayed by her words. *