Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir

by Matthew Chapman

"When Darwin called his second book The Descent of Man instead of The Ascent of Man he was thinking of his progeny."

So declares Darwin's great-great grandson Matthew Chapman as he leaves behind his stressful career as a Hollywood screenwriter and travels to Dayton, Tennessee where in 1925 creationist opposition to the teaching of evolution in schools was played out in a famous legal drama, the Scopes Monkey Trial.

The purpose of this journey is to see if opinions have changed in the seventy- five intervening years. A defiant atheist, Chapman is confronted not only by the fundamentalist beliefs that continue to banish the theory of evolution but by his own spiritual malaise as the outward journey becomes an inward quest, a tragicomic "accidental memoir".

"First there was Charles Darwin, two yards long and nobody's fool. Then there was his son, my great-grandfather, Sir Francis Darwin, an eminent botanist. Then came my grandmother Frances, a modest poet who spent a considerable amount of time in rest-homes for depression From her issued my beloved mother, Clare, who was extremely short, failed to complete medical school, and eventually became an alcoholic. Then we get down to me. I'm in the movie business."

Trials of the Monkey combines travel writing and reportage, as Chapman records his encounters in the South, with history and the accidental memoir of a man full of mid-life doubts in a genre-breaking first book that is darkly funny, provocative and poignant.

Genres: Science, Evolution, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Biography, Memoir, History

384 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1999

About the author

Matthew Chapman is the Great Great Grandson of Charles Darwin.

Reviews

[Eric_W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Matthew Chapman is the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. He's also a screenwriter and director of some note — at least to his lights. He's also an avowed atheist who decided to investigate the site of the famous "monkey trial," the infamous battle between religion and science in Dayton, Tennessee immortalized in the wonderful film Inherit the Wind. The book becomes a combination historical narrative/ memoir/personal voyage. He explains his interest in the Scopes trial this way: After a bus driver explains he belongs to the Pentecostal Church, where people speak in tongues and "fall over backwards" — 'It's amazin,' I ain't never seen one git hurt' — using that as incontrovertible evidence of the existence of God, Chapman is compelled to observe that "It requires so little proof on the one hand and so much on the other. People will inform you that Jesus was born of an angel-impregnated virgin and walked on water 'because it's in the Bible,' but think nothing of telling you with a sniff of contempt that evolution is 'just a theory, ain't no proof.' The inherent unfairness of this double standard is one of the things that attracts me to the Scopes Trial."

There are books about the Scopes trial that provide much more detail of how George Rappleyea, a Dayton resident, wanted to take advantage of the controversy surrounding passage of the Tennessee law that forbade the teaching of evolution, by hosting a trial in Dayton, a town that had suffered a severe economic downturn after a local mine closed. Inherit the Wind provides a good feel for the climate (pun intended) of the trial and community, but simplifies tremendously. The defense and prosecution each had four to five lawyers and one of the famous speeches for the defense was actually given by Dudley Malone rather than by Charles Darrow, one of my heroes — but those are minor quibbles.

Chapman, an open-minded, good-humored fellow, recounts his delinquent childhood and his musings about life in general as he visits with the Bryan College professor who teaches "proof" of creation and with a local minister, attending his church. He confronts his preconceptions of the South, his "neurotic city-dweller" northernness — fearing the banjo-toting violent, redneck with the gun rack in the truck. What he finds most disturbing, however is the pervasive religiosity. "I feel adrift. It makes me uneasy. What I find disturbing is not so much the belief in God, but the habit of credulity which it engenders. If they can believe in God --who never shows his face — simply because it makes them feel good, what else might they be persuaded to believe in? What's the difference between religious evangelism and political propaganda? Might one prepare you for the other? Was it not credulity as much as 'evil' which made the attempted extermination of the Jews possible?

Chapman goes on a field trip with some of the Bryan College geology students to visit a cave that their professor explains has evidence of the creationist theory of creation. On the way back in the van, he engages in a discussion with the students about hell, and they reveal a certainty that those who do not accept Jesus as their personal savior will be consigned to an everlasting hell. "I'm not saying these kids are Nazis — I like them, in fact — but . . . believing in a literal hell, a burning lake, an inferno of unimaginable suffering, they accept with equanimity that seven-eighths of the world, including me, will end up in it. Forever. . . "Either they don't really believe this or in fact there is something Nazi-like about them: their Final Solution is one of extraordinary scope and brutality; a holocaust of souls which makes the Führer's merely physical extermination of the Jews seem positively amateur. 'Our Father' is far more ambitious: he's going for the eternal destruction of not just Jews, but Hindus, Homos, Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, atheists, agnostics, and presumably Scientologists and others on the lunatic fringe. Seven-eighths of the people He creates, He then destroys. The only place you get worse odds is the abattoir. The girl I'm looking at as I'm thinking this is an accounting major. How on earth can she become an accountant? Then what? A mother? Little League? A nice home? One of those vans with a sliding door down the side? Knowing what she knows, how can she even contemplate this? How could you enjoy the comforts of a suburban life knowing that your God is going to flambé just about everyone you meet? But there she sits, as optimistic and contented as any teenager I ever met."

[Shomeret · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book disappointing. I had expectations that weren't met. The author shouldn't have boosted those expectations by using the title Trials of the Monkey. It seemed to me that the author was bent on self-promotion, but he wasn't very successful in that purpose either. The best I could say about this book is that it was intermittently interesting.

[JulieK · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's kind of hard to like a memoir when the author works so hard to portray himself as unlikeable.

[Jonathan O'Brien · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard book to review. It doesn't really have a center. It feels "accidental" like the subtitle says. I think it's what you would expect a Hollywood screenwriter to write if they wrote a memoir--it's silly, trite, ridiculous, offensive, raunchy, and haughty but also funny and poignant at times. The author shows himself as a compulsive, sex-craving lunatic but he also has some real insights and emotion to share. I found the portions at the end where he talks about his mother the most potent and interesting. If you're looking for a thorough explication of the Scopes trial, he does talk a bit about what happened at that event, but this is not really the book for a solid summary of the trial. The fact that the author is a descendant of Darwin does add a layer of interest to the narrative, but I don't think the author ever really got around to why he went to Dayton, Tennessee, to examine the Scopes trial. It feels a bit self-absorbed frankly, though I do like his honest picture of the ridiculousness of Southern evangelical piety but also the empathetic way that he reads the interactions he experienced in the South. There is some humanity here if you can wade through the muck.

[Anna Engel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled with the first chapter and finally convinced myself to read at least another couple of chapters before making a decision. By the end of one commute's worth of reading, I was ready to put it away.

Mainly, I was struck by how often he felt compelled to describe women – almost always exclusively physically, sometimes with a minor comment about her intelligence or personality. Why do so many male authors feel compelled to put women into buckets?

• Bucket 1: attractive, but fat
• Bucket 2: described only as [race]
• Bucket 3: too fat to fit in the bus bathroom
• Bucket 4: women he's known biblically, who were invariably gorgeous

Also, he needs to stop humble-bragging. By the end of the first chapter, he told us multiple times that he was a screenwriter earning a million per year, but that he struggled financially.

All in all, the book didn't compel me.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

[re-post from my old blog]

Through a strange serendipity (is there any other kind?), I started reading Trials of the Monkey at about the same time as I was watching the Nova show Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial. In Judgment Day, the author of Trials, is interviewed. An avowed atheist and great-great-grandson of Darwin himself, Matthew Chapman is now a successful screenwriter, living in New York City.

He was feeling closed in by the rat race that is Hollywood and began casting about for something else to do. As the annual recreation of the famous Scopes Trial was coming up, he decided to write a book about current views in that area of Tennessee. So he embarked on a bus journey there, and began writing his book.

Which quickly evolved (nyuk nyuk) into an autobiographical sketch, leading to the subtitle of the book - An Accidental Memoir. This surprised him as much as his editor, but it leads to a very interesting description of his growing up in England as the son of a very colorful parents, including his mother, an alcoholic great granddaughter of Darwin. Through some very colorful vignettes, Chapman describes his childhood, complete with his unnatural fixation on girls from an early age, which leads to his expulsion from several schools. His is a brutally honest book, often painting himself with almost painful glee as a very warped child!

Interspersed with these autobiographical chapters are the descriptions of his first trip to Dayton, Tennessee, a few months before the trial recreation. As someone who has lived most of his life in the nearly secular (at least, relatively speaking) Northeast US, I found the description of Dayton, with its 45 churches for a population of about 6,000 and its never ending series of religious billboards, to be particularly scary. There are some pretty funny (yet eerie) chapters of him poking about into tent revivals, interviewing the head creation "scientist" at the local Bryan College and other outrageous examples of religion gone wild that I just never have to deal with here.

Chapman also gives an excellent overview of the Scopes Trial itself, complete with thumbnail biographies of the three main contestants - Scopes, Bryan and Darrow. He also gleefully quotes HL Mencken all over the place:

Today, with the curtain barely rung up and the worst buffooneries to come, it is obvious to even the town boomers that getting upon the map, like patriotism, is not enough... Two months ago the town was obscure and happy. Today it is a universal joke.

There is one chapter ("Spelunking with the Christians") that has to be one of the funniest chapters I have read in a very long time. I haven't laughed so hard reading a book since my first reading of A Confederacy of Dunces. I had tears running down my cheeks, as his description of the ride over to the cave in a van full of devout Christian teenagers, lead by his "favorite Creationist" was so full of acid descriptions. And the actual cave trip...

I expected a big yawning mouth with a souvenir shop to one side. I thought we'd plod dutifully within, along well-defined paths until it was almost dark - and then turn around an exit, going "Boy, was that something or what?" [ed. note- that's been my cave experiences] But clearly this is to be an experience of an altogether different order and magnitude.

It's a slit!

The entrance to the cave is a ragged horizontal slit, like a mouth clumsily hacked into a pumpkin at Halloween. Even more alarming, it's at ground level. Doughty Christians insert themselves into it with difficulty, slither down in steep descent - and disappear. This is not for tourists. This nasty, malevolent gash which at its highest is no more than three feet, can only be an invitation to something worse. There's no souvenir shop and not a single reassuring sign saying 'Mind Your Head' or 'Don't Touch The Stalactites'. It's a real cave, one of those narrow, lethal warrens into which children fall and emerge alive only when the TV movie lies about it a year later. It's a perfect cave for adrenaline deficient professional spelunkers with miners' helmets, ropes and pitons. It's not a cave for a gang of infantile Christians and a middle-aged atheist with a panic attack.

And it just gets funnier. There's a bit of a twist at the end, but it wraps up nicely and he seems to have been better off having written the book. Combined with Judgement Day (and some of the grotesque polls that have come about, like how many people still prefer creationism to evolution), it was a real eyeopener and made me quite sad for the state of education here. One thing that really struck home was the remarkable similarities between the Scopes Trial and the Dover Trial. Here it is, over 80 years later, and the evolution side still has to bring on scientists to point out just how solid and beautiful a theory evolution truly is. Nearly the exact same testimony, showing the power of evolution and how, over the intervening years, it has become even more of a bedrock theory, was brought out for the Dover Trial. And still, perhaps due in part to the guilty finding at the Scope Trial, education is so lacking in some areas they just have never been exposed to the grace of evolution. Sad and disheartening.

But read this book. Trials of the Monkey is incredibly funny and enlightening. Chapman's story is a little less so, as he seems like a odd duck (a fact of which he seems to find truly ironic, given his heredity!). But solid writing and wonderful insights have me penciled in for his next book, which is on the Dover trials.

[Hashintha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having lived in the south I can relate to the naive and conservative perspectives of those living in Dayton, Tennessee that Chapman speaks of. I think the writing clearly demonstrates the differences in the cultures between the North and the South and why the Scopes Trial was perceived so differently in the same country. It’s makes it all the more clear why the South is what it is.

[Dimmesdale · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
Well- written, but the author fails to pull it all together; he seems to want to add in the life stories, whether related to any larger unifying purpose or not, of everyone he meets as he travels South, returns to New York, attends a funeral, goes back to Dayton Tennessee, recalls his childhood and family, etc. It has its moments, but as a whole it is a bit disjointed.

[Kendra · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dnf.

As much as I live this kind of stuff, the memoir part was just boring and I found myself skimming and skipping ahead.

Finally decided to call it quits.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Matthew Chapman obviously suffers from ADD,(actually he seems more like a direct descendent of the Bonobo Ape than Darwin :) probably some mild dyslexia, and has a family history of addiction with depression which stem from neurological and biological disorders rather than from spiritual lack.

Chapman's spirit seems fine, even if it is somewhat overworked by doing the work he loves, sometimes grudgingly, to gain what he and his wife both desire.

His meandering book wanders about in various tenses to bring forward the history of his life, and how it is connected with the Scopes Trial through his ancestor, the famed Charles Darwin, eminent botanist and evolutionist.

In his book, Chapman reveals his insecurities and rebellions and adroitly describes the chaotic and often humorous events that arise because of them. Though he is funny, albeit sometimes shallow and equally haughty, his humor, his starts and stops at success, and his neurosis over such seem to spring from a soul unable to accept his neurological and biological differences to such a degree that he descends into panic and anxiety and then wonders if he’s not in some kind of spiritual limbo.

And that's where he leaves us. In the last chapter he writes, "Must the skeptical virgin starve out in the cold while the whores gorge themselves at the fires of belief? Is it possible for rationality to somehow provide the comforts of faith?"

I have the feeling by the time he is 65 or 70, he will have survived his quest and will have found his answers.

In the meantime, I hope he continues his wandering adventures and lives (he falls out of trees, has car accidents, forget things, and almost spent two years in jail) to share them with his fans.

[Richard Gilbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very enjoyable stealth memoir, funny and poignant, while also an interestingly reported foray into the Bible Belt by a doubting English descendant of Darwin. I admire the way Chapman writes honestly about himself even as he skewers others, especially Bible thumpers, but always with a compassionate wink. He both discerns and forgives others' crutches and foibles, having racked up so many disasters himself. He isn't afraid to talk at length with people who are stunningly different from him. Some of these folks are scary barflies, and others are sweet true believers.

Though the surface story concerns Chapman's attempt to cover the reenactment of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, it's ultimately as much about Chapman's perspective, from weary middle age, on his own misspent youth—which by work, willpower, and talent he redeemed. Chapman became a Hollywood screenwriter and director. His memoir is long and at times dense but along with Chapman's appealing voice and compelling stories it offers an effective braided structure, alternating between Chapman's road trips into the American south and tales of his chaotic boarding school days and dreadful early jobs.

He's haunted by his mother, a depressive who smoked and drank herself to death in the Darwin family tradition. Chapman cannot accept facile literalist religion, like most of us, but I found true and moving his yearning for spiritual solace.

[Alyssa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chapman describes this work as an accidental memoir. I suppose I'm grateful for that accident and lucky to have found it at a thrift store. A descendant of Charles Darwin and stanch atheist, he travels to Dayton, TN where he originally plans to do research for a book about the Scopes Trial of 1925. Trying not to sound too cliche, but it becomes more of a spiritual journal rather than a work trip. The book is filled with personal stories of lost faith, the challenges of dealing with an alcoholic mother, and anxiety over finding his own path. Most of all, I enjoyed the theories on life and his honest reactions to born again fundamentalists/creationists as well as his unapologetic sexual appetite. I learned details about the Scopes Trial which ended in a conviction and that the TN Butler Law, outlawing teaching evolution in public schools, was not overturned until 1967.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an interesting book concerning the famous Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Dayton TN 1925. The author decides to write a book about the re-enactment of the trial that is performed every year. He wants to see if anything has changed in 75 years. Oh, and the author just happens to be the great great grandson of Charles Darwin. The book is really 3 stories. There is the historic account of the actual trial, the authors interaction with the people of Dayton and a memoir of the authors life. The book was educational, amusing, and a little sad. Matthew Chapman is a good writer and I'm looking forward to reading "40 days and 40 nights".
jp

[Suzanne]

Matthew Chapman, Hollywood screenwriter, director (and great great grandson of Charles Darwin) heads to the Bible Belt of Dayton, Tennessee to investigate the annual re-enactment of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Prepared to be amused by the religious bigotry of Fundamentalism, he is instead challenged by the purpose and contentment he finds in some of the believers, forcing him to question the lack of meaning and satisfaction in his own atheism, and changing him to a wistful agnostic. At times laugh out loud funny, at other times deadly serious, this is as poignant an evaluation of spirituality as one is likely to find in current literature.

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging account--part confession, part historical sleuthing, part biography. Chapman, a descendent of Charles Darwin, visits Dayton, Tennessee, where the Monkey Trial took place. He comes away with a changed perspective. More comments may be found on my blog: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book really made me think quite a bit, although it was slightly longer than I think was necessary.. then again maybe I just didn't like how long the author forced me to reflect on these concepts

[Colby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love evolution!

[Andrew Graham]

Very funny!

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting story of classist england, sex drives and the drive for life's meaning.

[Sandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time.

[Sigurdur Guttormsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read, thought - provoking, funny (hilarious at times) and surprisingly touching.