My old man was a handful
John Michell
PARADISE FEVER by Ptolemy Tompkins
Bloomsbury, £12.99, pp. 286
Ptolemy has a remarkable father, Peter Tompkins, who drove him crazy while pro- viding the material for this brilliant book. Peter is a United States citizen, but most of his childhood was spent in Europe, at an English public school, Stowe, and in Italy where he grew up speaking the language. This qualified him as a spy and, with his great nerve and courage, made him a very successful one. In the second world war he infiltrated the staffs of German comman- ders, posing as an Italian fascist, and the information he acquired played a crucial part in the Allies' victory at Anzio. After the war, when he took to writing, the spy's mentality stayed with him, causing him to suspect that the experts in every field, from ancient history to modern medicine, con- spired to conceal from the general public the essential and shocking truths behind their various subjects.
Peter's first big hit was Secrets of the Great Pyramid in 1971. It is a detailed sum- mary of all the wondrous observations and theories contained in the voluminous Pyra- mid literature, and it is the primary source of all subsequent writings on that intriguing subject. While researching for it in the late 1960s, Peter had privileged access to the shelves in the Library of Congress. Some- times he took his little son, aged six or seven, along with him, and Ptolemy's early impression of his father is of a stooping, grizzle-bearded, corduroy-trousered giant, with an armful of books stalking the corri- dors of Washington DC's great library, determined to bust the official Egyptolo- gists' racket.
To be near the library, Peter bought a large cow-barn outside the city and converted it, largely by his own slap- dash carpentry, into a residence for his wife and family. The Pyramid book was a best- seller and was followed by another, The Secret Life of Plants, written in partnership with Christopher Bird. This inspired the talking-to-plants fad and tuned in with other themes of the incipient New Age movement. Peter Tompkins became a celebrity, appearing regularly on television shows to debate some radical New Age viewpoint with an official scientist hired to oppose it. The barn was besieged by spiri- tual questers and visionaries, hippies, neu- rotics, parasites and every category of crackpot, and all were made welcome. Peter is a generous host; he enjoyed or tol- erated his odd visitors, and some — people who communicated with ants, read prophe- cies in rocks or remembered past lives in ancient Egypt — stayed on for months. Many of them were young women who shared Peter's antipathy to sexual and sar- torial conventions and spent their days naked.
When Ptolemy was eight, his father brought home a mistress, denounced the bourgeois form of marriage and decreed that he, the mistress, Ptolemy and his mother must live together in harmony, without bickering. Violent quarrels broke out, with Peter himself joining in, but Ptolemy was used to adult craziness and kept his own interests in mind. When his mother announced that she was leaving, his reaction was, then who's going to drive me to school?
As an old friend and admirer of Peter Tompkins I was enthralled by this vivid account of what it was like to be his son, to be told that everything the teachers say is wrong, to read comics and watch horror movies while learning access to the Akashic records and being taken on diving expedi- tions in search of Atlantis. Ptolemy grows up, travels around, finds his own girl- friends, becomes a writer and then a drunk and a heroin addict. Suddenly he is 35, vis- iting his parents, trying to break his habit and find something worth doing. Peter sug- gests a book on Atlantis and produces crates full of clippings and data in proof of the lost continent. But Ptolemy has been brought up with Atlantis and has seen its obsessional effect on his father. He would like to write about Atlantis, but metaphorically. 'Metaphorically? Academic `He wants a typewriter ribbon!' gobbledygook!' roars Peter. It is his son's duty to nail down Atlantis, to study the ancient map which shows an ice-free Antarctica and the geologists' reports of catastrophic inundations in about 12,000 BC. Ptolemy has left his drugs in New York, but he has found his father's pain- killer pills and acquired a large bottle of Bourbon. These give him a new slant on the Atlanteans and produce a crisis. In the last chapter of the book he is being driven to hospital by a loyal girlfriend.
It is a great book and I am still thinking and laughing about it. Ptolemy is a very funny writer. He does not tell jokes or labour for comic effects, but his sharp writ- ing brings humour to every episode in. his life with Peter Tompkins. If I were Peter I would be proud to have a son who can write so wittily and affectionately about his obstinate, intolerable, lovable and much- loved father. I just hope that he stays the course and proves as good a survivor as his old man.
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