2.27 The Poet With the Tiny Little Brain

Lord Byron had one twice the size of his - but as we all know - it's not all about size, Its how you use it that counts.

Monsieur France wearing a coat specially designed to accentuate the diminutive dimensions of his head.

As I pointed out the other week, Lord Byron had quite a sizeable brain which weighed over four pounds. In researching for the article about it, I discovered that it was not uncommon in olden times for the brains of poets and other notables to be posthumously removed, weighed and inspected to see if they were any different to the brains of the rest of us. The theory was that their brains would be larger than average because of all the extra room needed for the amount of stuff packed into to them. This theory was blown out of the water in 1924 when scientists cracked open the nut of the French poet Anatole France¹ and discovered that his brain weighed only two pounds and two ounces. The average human brain weighs almost three pounds.

And yet Anatole was no slouch. He might not be as internationally well known and revered today as Lord Byron, but in the first quarter of the twentieth century, he was a massive figure. He was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, having written a number of best selling novels in addition to his poetry, plays, memoirs criticism and journalism. When he died, at the age of 80 in 1924, it made newspapers around the globe. The New York Times noting that he had been universally accorded the title of the greatest living man of letters in France for more than a score of years.

Two days after his death his brain was sent to the Medical College in the city of Tours, about 150 miles to the west of Paris, to be examined by Professor Guillaume Louis and his chief assistant, Dr Dubréuil Chambardel. Three years elapsed before they were ready to publish their findings. The headline was that when stripped of its membranes, the weight of France’s brain was some 25% less than they would have expected to find in a man of mediocre ability. They then went on to say that despite the fact that there was …nothing in its external configuration that would lead an expert anatomist to infer that it had been the seat of genius… it was of an admirable form, representing a piece of real goldsmiths work, the convolutions being long and sharply delineated, well folded, pressed tightly together showing a very unusual degree of complexity. They compared it to the work of the 18th century Parisian clockmaker Julien Leroy, who had produced marvellous precision engineered clocks and watches during the reign of Louis XV.

The conclusion was that as far as brains go - size is in fact no indication of effectiveness. If Professor Louis and Doctor Chambardel had lived into the age of mobile telephones, they would have compared it to an iPhone, packing a great deal of knowledge and ability into a small and beautiful design. In comparison, Lord Byron’s brain must have looked like a lumbering desktop PC with a whirring hard disk drive. To continue the analogy, people such as you and I are blessed with brains like the large Nokia phones of the early 1990s, quite wonderful in their own way, but unremarkable compared to the geniuses of the world.

I suspect that there is a further question on your lips. If there is no correlation between brain size and intellect, what about the other organs of the body? You will recall the legend that Lord Byron was also blessed with a penis that would be the envy of most men, and was known for putting it to good use throughout his life. Unfortunately, there is no record of what happened to Anatole’s organ of increase after his death. Perhaps the academics at the Tours Medical College turned their noses up at it. Perhaps it remained, like Byron’s attached to his body never to be seen again, unless someone disturbed him in his final resting place.

What is known is that he had a fairly spectacular sex life with two marriages (the second of which took place when he was 76) and a string of affairs including a lengthy one with a woman who ran a fashionable literary salon in the centre of Paris and another one which ended with his devastated lover taking her own life with an overdose of sleeping tablets when he refused to see her again. Perhaps he was not as well endowed in the trouser department as Lord Byron, but what is true of brains is probably true of penises. It’s not the size that matters, but what you can achieve with it.

Perhaps I should end on that note, but if I did, there would be an outcry. Where is the poem? People would ask, and unsubscribe from this Substack in droves.

Amazingly, seeing as I had been examining Trees by Joyce Kilmer last week, one of France’s best known poems is about a tree. Le Chêne Abandonné or The Abandoned Oak, describes an elderly oak tree. It was written in 1873 when France was just 29 years of age².

Working from the translation provided by google, augmented by my 1970s secondary school knowledge of French³ and a little Duolingo learning, I have provided the poem below. I did attempt to reproduce the rhyme scheme (ABBA) of the original French poem, but it proved so difficult to achieve that I ended up working in blank verse. It is probably very literal, but gives a flavour of the piece⁴. It does seem rather grim compared to Joyce Kilmer’s more joyous tribute to our timber limbed friends. The lines bring to mind an elderly king on his deathbed with his subjects and courtiers already looking to how they will survive after he is gone.

Le Chêne Abandonné - The Abandoned Oak – by Anatole France

In the warm forest, bathed in a vermilion light,
The great gnarled oak, the father of his tribe,
Bows his rough hide over the horizon
The sole survivor of his generation, he basks in the sun.

Once robust, he took nourishment through his flourishing centuries
From the dung of the sons who he smothered under his shade,
The sap once bubbled through his powerful limbs,
And he breathed the sky with his dark green, vibrant head.

But his proudest branches are now dead, black skeletons
Sinisterly erect on his crown;
And in the depths of his open chest
The larvae have dug vast tunnels.

The sap of spring comes to irritate the ulcer
Lazily oozing from his acrid tissues.
A whole world swarms in his mossy limbs,
And the tawny rust of lichen encircles him.

Constantly, mortified wood that once sprouted from him
Snaps away from his body and falls. A stormy wind
Can finish the age-old work bringing death,
Perhaps he will collapse today.

Already the emerald-ringed caterpillar
Slowly deserts his uncertain foliage;
Beetles raise their azure wing cases and prepare to flee
Whole populations prowl restlessly on his bark;

Yesterday, a swarm of bees deserted
Leaving their clay dwelling suspended from his branches;
This morning, the hornets, a distraught colony,
Transported their city to other, fresher realms;

A lizard, on the trunk, at the edge of a crack,
Darts its sharp head, observes, hesitates, and darts away;
Now darkness enfolds the tree with a deathly cold,
Nightfall gathering the pale mould onto his flesh.

1. Anatole France was in fact a pseudonym, his real name was Jacques Anatole Thibault. And there was me thinking that it must have been nice to be born with have the country of your birth as your surname. The thought had put me in mind of a football card which I owned in the early Seventies, featuring Mike England of Tottenham Hotspur. I was impressed by his name until it was pointed out to me that he was Welsh. Indeed, he played for the Welsh national team 44 times, and was its manager in the 1980s.

2. Kilmer wrote Trees when he was 26, just three years younger that France was when he wrote The Abandoned Oak. Before we form a theory based on this information it is worth noting that Philip Larkin was 54 when he wrote his poem The Trees. It is impossible to triangulate reliably from this information, as despite extensive research, I can find no evidence of the size of Larkin’s brain, or indeed any of his other organs.

3. Merci, Mr Theakstone.

4. Three cheers for real human translators everywhere, including my good friend Ian Parks, who diligently and sensitively translated a number of the poems of Constantine Cavafy from the original Greek. My stuttering French cannot help me perform a similar task on Anatole France just yet… but maybe one day…