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He Tarzan

Andrei Navrozov on the gruff, grumpy, chest-thumping genius of Gusov, a Russian photographer with no first name who is coming soon to a park bench near you
 

'EVERY TIME A  friend succeeds, I die a little,’ said the American controversialist Gore Vidal, and certainly as a lifelong acquaintance of Gusov’s I cannot help feeling jaundiced. Because success, for this wild-eyed, greyish-hirsute practitioner of the photographic craft, has never meant money, or fame, or women, but precisely this: to roam London’s parks and to pretend that one is finally alone in one’s own world, to thrill that despicable mankind does not often breach its Edwardian cast-iron confines, to celebrate it as the last refuge of misanthropy in a society that becomes ever less human as it grows more open. And now he’s gone out and done it, the lucky... bohemian!

Gusov is the Russian-by-birth, British-by-adoption snapper of Boris Berezovsky and Jude Law, President Lukashenko and Andrea Bocelli, Valery Gergiev and Sir Ian McKellen, a fierce freelance who wants to be addressed by his surname alone and whose only professional affiliation is with Spear’s as a contributing editor. The Royal Parks Foundation is the charity that looks after eight of London’s parks, including Regent’s Park, Hyde Park, Green Park, St James’s Park, Richmond Park and Kensington Gardens, as well as a variety of smaller, yet no less notable, green spaces, such as the gardens of Nos. 10, 11 and 12 Downing Street. Now the Foundation is about to publish the diary of Gusov’s year of roaming its purlieus, entitled A Journey through the Parks.

It was an old essay of Vidal’s that had made me think of his joke about what happens when a friend succeeds, a magazine piece on Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan. Tarzan of the Apes, the first novel in Burroughs’ series, appeared in 1914, as the world found itself on the brink of the greatest catastrophe in history. Never had misanthropy felt more at home in the mind of even a temperate disposition, never had attraction of wilder places and peoples been more justified in the heart of even a stout advocate of enlightenment. For it was plain to see that mankind had lost control over the civilisation that it had been piloting, and the rebirth of the noble savage was inevitable in response to the apocalyptic disillusionment that would befall it.

From the epistemology of the bon sauvage, rendered into the English of Romantic sentiment as ‘nature’s gentleman’, to the Hollywood antics of Crocodile Dundee, from quitting the real world in Where the Wild Things Are to refusing to enter it with Peter Pan — all these trends are evidence that Tarzan actually belongs to a vast family of the imagination, an aristocracy of daydreaming. From Plato’s Republic to Bond-land, our imagination has always ‘tried to imagine something better for itself than the existing society’, wrote Vidal in his essay. ‘Man left Eden when we got up off all fours, endowing most of his descendants with nostalgia as well as chronic backache.’

Although he can traverse human society and might easily pass for a civilised individual, my friend Gusov likes to ‘strip off the thin veneer of civilisation’, as Burroughs would have it. He is scornful of the hypocrisy of human culture, unless it produces artefacts grounded, rooted and grown in harmony with nature. It is not surprising that, as an inveterate roulette player as well as an accomplished wildlife photographer, Gusov venerates the memory of John Aspinall, probably the one man in England in whose splendidly appointed gambling den Lord Greystoke, had he appeared in London in the closing years of the 20th century, would have found succour or even refuge.

For Gusov, the solemn stone of the buildings that enclose Green Park whispers, the way a seashell may whisper of the waves of a distant sea, Aspinall’s tales of nature and adventure, humanity and hazard. Unlike his creator Burroughs, Gusov has been to Tarzan’s Africa, travelling there on numerous occasions as a guest of a close friend of Aspinall’s, Shamwari’s benevolent demiurge Adrian Gardiner.

That some small though by no means insignificant part of what is to become the permanent record of London’s parks is now in the hands of an unusual, not to say eccentric, figure — a foreigner and a misanthrope, to name but two of the qualities that would render his candidacy for the job of scribe unacceptable in any country save Britain — is a measure of the bountiful liberality of a culture that demurs even when it comes to affirming the identity of its greatest poet. As every Russian in London from Alexander Herzen in the 1850s onward is only too well aware, England is like that.

As the English identity only became more robust through the uncertainty about the historicity of Shakespeare, or as the Oxford English Dictionary only became more precise for its collaboration with an inmate of the Broadmoor institution for the criminally insane, so, too, I have little doubt that history will look with favour — though perhaps with a raised eyebrow as well — upon the appointment by the Royal Parks Foundation of my colourful friend, the Tarzan of the 21st century, as its chronicler.