This is a successful Hollywood screenwriter's book about writing a book and how it became different from what he promised - evidently better. It is a clever, provocative and very entertaining hotchpotch of confession and redneck theology, a genre all his own.
When Duckworth invited him to write a book, Matthew Chapman, Charles Darwin's great-great-grandson, proposed Darwinism and its most notoriously vociferous opponents as his subject. Born in England, he says he now has to earn at least half a million dollars a year to support his wife and daughter and himself in their accustomed style on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Making golden ends meet is a hard grind. He welcomed a break, even a trip in a Greyhound bus.
His plan was to visit the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, at the time of the annual re-enactment of what Daytonians called "the world's most famous court trial." In 1925, a jury convicted a local public-school biology teacher of breaking the state law (repealed in 1967) against teaching Darwin's theory of evolution. Down there in the Bible Belt, Christian fundamentalists believed in the literal truth of the Book of Genesis and Bishop Ussher's 17th-century calculation that God created the world and the first man in one week in 4004 B.C. Chapman wondered how Dayton public opinion had changed in the 75 years since the trial.
A young teacher who believed in evolution, John T. Scopes, vo1untarily submitted to the trial as a way of exposing local antiscientific prejudice. Two nationally celebrated lawyers of great histrionic talent agreed to take on the case. William Jennings Bryan spoke for the prosecution. Clarence Darrow for the defence. The bizarre controversy attracted great press and radio coverage.
H.L. Mencken, of the Baltimore Evening Sun, America's pre-eminent master of journalistic invective, wrote some of the most scathingly derisive articles of his career, which was noted for his contempt of the masses he called "the booboisie." He dismissed prosecutor Bryan as "a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without shame or dignity, the Fundamentalist Pope."
Bryan won the case, of course; Scopes had indeed taught Darwinism. But Darrow's powerful speeches against the creationists' ignorance and bigotry left the prosecutor's national reputation and self-esteem in tatters. It was not enough that Dayton still revered him. He died soon after the trial, unable to appreciate the establishment of Bryan College.
Chapman made a preliminary reconnaissance of Dayton and a second visit to witness the re-enactment of the trial. Astonishingly, he got the trial dates wrong and missed the whole event. At first, it seemed as if the heart had dropped from his synopsis and there could be no book. At the age of 50, he was going through a sort of menopausal crisis. This itself became the motivation of a revised book.
In between chapters about the continuing fundamentalism of modern Dayton depicted with a screen-writer's acute eyes and ears for scenes, characters and dialogue, there are chapters about his incomplete education, 30 pointless jobs, heavy drinking and ideological emptiness.
"The inhabitants of Dayton," he acknowledges, ". . . though they often disagreed with me, were usually kind and welcoming." As well as brilliantly salvaging a threatened literary project, he used his Dayton experience to achieve a certain cautious progress: "If I went down an atheist, I came back an agnostic."
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic