Review: Both by Douglas Crase

Taxonomy, the classification of living things, seems to take an almost perverse pleasure in detail. To distinguish the infinite variety of life is a practice of extreme nuance, often relying on obscure details, some that can only be seen with the aide of magnifying instruments. But it is also an exceptionally passionate field, where naming rights are granted and withdrawn, and heated fights are adjudicated, perhaps none more so than whether groups of species should be separated (“splitters”) or kept together (“lumpers”).

So it is fitting the taxonomic detail that poet and writer Douglas Crase has accumulated about the subjects of this biography of two, the botanist Rupert Barneby and his life partner the poet-artist-linguist-botanist Dwight Ripley. The two, three years apart, met at school in England in the 1920s, Barneby a descendant of the landed British gentry, Ripley the sole inheritor of his great-grandfather’s US railway fortune. They were immediately inseparable. “Together when young,” Crase writes, “they must have looked like ideal casting for Brideshead Revisited”. Barneby was disinherited when he refused to stop seeing Ripley, and from then they lived off the latter’s largesse.

Although they both studied languages, it was plants that brought them together, establishing a renowned garden at Ripley’s family house with plants collected from around the Mediterranean, particularly Spain. Barneby did the taxonomy; Ripley had the green thumb:

Rupert saw each plant ecologically in place where he and Dwight collected it, watched it assert it assert its horticultural needs in their gardens, examined beneath his microscope its structures of evolutionary response, and felt in his own hand the drawings he made of it.

As World War II approached, they left for the US, following in the footsteps of Christopher Isherwood and W H Auden. They would be fictionalised in Isherwood’s novel Down There On A Visit. In the US they discovered the allure of Nevada and its botanical wilds. Not for Barneby and Ripley the delicate blooms of the English cottage garden; they preferred the plants of hard places, thorny, fleshy, inconspicuous plants that thrived in the uncompromising landscapes of the desert. It was here that they made the collections that would be their contribution to botany, including Barneby’s first taxonomic paper — the identification of Cymopterus ripleyi, a member of the parsley family — collected from Frenchman Flat, a site subsequently, and quite literally, nuked when it was designated for nuclear weapons testing (the plant, it almost goes without saying, did not survive). Later in his life Barneby was asked by the US government to tally the species found on the testing grounds — the kind of grim, existential irony that Ripley in particular seems to have wrestled with for much of his life.

As thrilling as it is, taxonomy is also too often a colonial project — naming a thing is a way to take possession — and the expansion of empire was accompanied by botanists whose names litter national collections around the world, like Banks in Australia. The plants of Nevada of course were already known and named. These themes are unexplored in Crase’s biography. So too is Barneby and Ripley’s wealth, the latter derived from the railroads that pushed the frontier westwards. The bombing of the Nevada flats and Ripley’s suffering as a result bring this full circle in a fashion.

Crase came to the couple in the 1970s when he was introduced through his own partner to Barneby, then living at and working for the New York Botanical Garden. Ripley had died three years earlier from alcoholism; they had been together 48 years. Crase constructs his biography from their field journals, letters, and a suitcase of Ripley’s drawings left to him and his partner. Erudite and nimble, Crase presents us these two characters, or rather, allows them to present themselves as he saw them, an enduring love and lifetimes of experience. They moved among a milieu that included Peggy Guggenheim (briefly Ripley’s lover, until she found him in her bed with a cab driver), and Ripley founded the gallery that first showed Grace Hartigan and published Frank O’Hara. Their art collection included Miró and Jackson Pollock.

Their achievements may seem esoteric. Barneby, described as “the most accomplished legume taxonomist since Bentham”, made his name with his work on Astragalus, the milkvetches. An avowed non-botanist, Crase still conveys with infectious spirit the plants’ allure; it is, after all, the largest genus of plants, and fiendishly complicated. Barneby “found the disorder irresistible, perhaps because the task of correcting it would demand Proustian stamina” (his other great love in life was Proust). Ripley, along with poetry and an unpublished novel, produced several hundred hard-to-categorise drawings. They were playful, colourful, fusing his linguistic and botanical background through the old tradition of Surrealism and the new tradition of Abstract Expressionism. They were praised but not successful:

Frivolity was impermissible, as if pleasure rather than economic and ideological rigidity had been the cause of the world’s disasters, as if intelligent pleasure was not an ornament of civilisation that people should desire for others and deserve for themselves.

They seemed to feel throughout their lives on the edge, as if their scientific interests made them outsiders to their Bohemian friends and artistic trends. But Crase argues that they belonged in the Avant Garde, that its spirit and objectives can be seen in Barneby’s taxonomic descriptions and Ripley’s pencil. It is a profound and loving tribute to curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge.

Gay rating: 5/5 for queer subjects, relationships and themes.