The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
We’re all taxidermists now
The stuffing of dead animals is more than a niche pursuit, says novelist Kristen Arnett, it’s a metaphor for modern life
Igrew up with dead animals, but they never felt exactly dead. This was in Florida, a state where people fish and hunt, and a lot of dead animals result from those trips. You see them in family photos: an uncle proudly displaying a downed buck, grandpa in an orange hat, one foot stomped on the back of a feral hog. You see them in the flesh: deer mounts in the church rectory; a bearskin rug draped across the foot of a friend’s bed; a shellacked bass my dad caught one day on the lake. They were frozen between life and death, in a mounted state of limbo.
Sometimes we’d throw a Father Christmas hat on that fish in our living room in December, try to make it look festive. It felt like a stuffed animal to me, a kind of fishy teddy bear. My brother even named him: “Mister Chomp.” I loved that fish, but I never wondered how it got made.
Then one day I began looking up pictures of bad taxidermy for fun. I love puns, adore a bad joke. The worse it is, the funnier it feels. So for me, images of really bad taxidermy online seemed hysterical. There were pictures of mountain goats or cougars painstakingly rendered, but screwed up in some hilarious way. One specific lioness, dainty and beautiful, had crossed eyes that made her look like she was staring in two directions at once. Since I found these pictures so funny, I began to unpack the joke for myself. Instead of a joke, I discovered a new passion.
The more I dove into the craft of taxidermy, the less I understood it. I found myself on web forums; places where professional taxidermists and hobbyists alike traded tips with each other. In one instance, a forum member talked about using Windex window cleaner to make eyeballs appear “glossy and authentic”. In another, a user discussed which foam fillers made a deer look “meaty”.
As an outsider to this community, I was fascinated. They supported one another in their work and shared their creations. These forum members were mostly hunters, people who exuded a traditional kind of masculinity. But when it came to talking about the animals they’d taxidermied, they spoke about them with tenderness. One piece – an oversized boar with long, sharp tusks – was presented by a user who lovingly described the way he’d sculpted the pose. “I wanted the body to look alive,” he wrote. “I wanted him to look like he could run right through your house.”
I began to understand that taxidermy as a concept was larger than the killing and mounting of a creature. Taxidermy became… everything. I thought about it night and day. I took an old taxidermy guide into the bath with me, slopping wine and water on its yellowing pages. I discussed different skinning techniques with friends over a beer. I revisited the dead bodies of my childhood, looked at old pictures of family members posed with their kills.
Nostalgia, I realised, was a mental form of taxidermy. The roles played inside a family were taxidermy. Intimacy could be taxidermy – the delicate positioning and repositioning of other people in our lives. So much of how we move through life is constructed, posed, presented. It’s cutting, scraping, and finally reassembling. The discovery that taxidermy is a kind of memorykeeping felt like a revelation.
Because taxidermy took up so much of my life, I decided to write a novel about it. A Florida novel, a queer novel. One full of family and dead things, art and love. Since I’d never done any taxidermy, I was nervous that people would read it and consider me a fraud. I’m definitely not a hunter; I’ve never killed anything bigger than a bug.
What I found was a world of people willing to share the things they made and their passion for making them. Not only did they enjoy the taxidermy, they saw it as an extension of themselves. It’s the act of preservation, and aren’t people always looking to maintain the things they cherish? We embrace our memories. We tend to them. We curate. And that is taxidermy.
Kristen Arnett is the author of Mostly Dead Things (Corsair)
In Thailand, The King and I – Walter Lang’s 1956 film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical – is banned. The reason? It portrays the historical King Mongkut of Siam (1804-68) as vain, bad-tempered and autocratic. That may be unfair to Mongkut, but it’s a spot-on description of Yul Brynner, the actor who won an Oscar for the role, which he played 4,625 times on stage as well. Brynner’s career is a litany of bitter rivalries with his co-stars, and egotistical, imperious behaviour. As he once admitted, “The king takes me over.”
Take his bile toward Ingrid Bergman on the set of Anastasia (1956). The Swedish actress, who was a couple of inches taller than Brynner’s 5ft 8in, asked whether he would like a prop to conceal the disparity in their height. He fixed her with a gimlet stare and hissed: “I am not going to play this on a box, I’m going to show the world what a big horse you are.”
Four years later, filming The Magnificent Seven, he reportedly fashioned a small mound of earth to stand on in his scenes with
Steve McQueen, so he would appear to be the taller. Before the cameras rolled, McQueen would kick the dirt over surreptitiously. “We didn’t get along,” said McQueen. “Brynner… doesn’t ride well and knows nothing about guns, so maybe he thought I represented a threat. I was in my element. He wasn’t. When you work in a scene with Yul, you’re supposed to stand perfectly still, 10ft away. Well, I don’t work that way.”
Brynner liked to cultivate his mystique, taking great pleasure in the fact that there were “10 or 12 stories in circulation about my early life”. One story was that his father, Boris, was a Mongol and Brynner himself claimed that he was born Taidje Khan, on Sakhalin Island, off the coast of Siberia.
Later biographers confirmed that he was in fact born Yuliy Borisovich Briner in Vladivostok on July 11 1920. After his father, a mining engineer, abandoned the family, Brynner’s mother took him and his sister first to Beijing then, in 1932, to Paris. After leaving school at 16, he played guitar in a travelling gipsy troupe before working as a trapeze artist with the
Cirque d’Hiver. His time as a circus acrobat came to an abrupt end in 1937 when he fell from the parallel bars, suffering 49 fractures.
The multilingual Brynner (he already spoke English, French, Japanese, Hungarian and some Russian) then turned his attention to the stage, and in 1940 moved to America. It took him a decade of scuffling around – driving the bus for an actors’ company, playing small roles on Broadway and working as a French-speaking radio announcer for the US Office of War – before he landed the role on stage in The King and I.
During that time, Brynner had a passionate affair with the actor Hurd Hatfield – best known for playing the title role in the 1945 film The Picture of Dorian Gray
– and posed for naked full-frontal portraits for the noted gay photographer George Platt Lynes. Brynner, who would go on to have four marriages and a string of affairs with high-profile actresses including Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland and Joan Crawford, never publicly admitted his bisexuality. His male lovers (one of whom, it is said, was Jean Cocteau) were kept out of the press.
At first, audience reaction to Brynner in The King and I was far from positive. One angry spectator threw a shoe at him on stage. “And it was a perfectly serviceable shoe. The man must have really hated me,” recalled Brynner. His performances, however, were so mesmerising that Broadway was soon won over. Brynner had been proud of his locks – he claimed his hair was so luxuriant that he had not needed a fake wig to play a clown in his circus days – but he decided that shaving his head would be better for publicity. The stunt worked, and he remained entirely bald for the rest of his life.
The film of The King and I made Brynner’s piercing gaze and shiny pate world famous – and his oversized ego seemed to explode. As Frank Langella, who was starring as Dracula on Broadway around the corner from The King and I, recorded in his 2012 memoir Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women as I Knew Them, “Yul was never far from a full-length mirror, and the word ‘I’ passed Yul’s lips more often than perhaps any actor I have ever known.” Langella said Brynner would complain about his