ON a warm sunny afternoon the most attractive site in Greater New York is that heavily wooded tract of three hundred acres, once the country estate of the Lydig family, and now the lair of some twenty-five hundred creatures, not counting birds and insects, who compose the community operated by the New York Zoological Society. It is a little city in itself and is beset by most of the management problems of the big; it is a garden spot in which those mammals in clothing have a chance to see how those mammals in fur live; it is a natural theater where the beauty and comedy of the circus are daily reproduced with such spontaneity as to make one wonder which are the performers and which the spectators.
As you pass the great gates and climb the steps to the plaza, you first hear the voices of the sea lions demanding their lunch. These clowns jet and whoosh about, throwing themselves halfout of the water for a crumb of popcorn and loudly protesting that they haven’t been fed since the beginning of Lent. No one believes them, and when the keeper appears shortly after noon to scatter handfuls of fingerlings, their sham is over and the din is terrific. One big grandfather keeps hurling himself onto the cement embankment to be closer to the source of supply; and one whom I call Pavlova keeps waddling up to the top of the rock island for the sheer joy of diving in to dinner.
In the lion house you meet the three boys who were born in the Park, hand fed and literally housebroken by that most diminutive and charming of housemothers, Mrs. Martini. Mrs. Martini stands exactly 4 feet, 10 inches, and weighs 100 pounds. Raipur, the biggest of her boys, now weighs 584 pounds. Rajpur was asleep when first I saw him; he had been fed, and there he lay in that wonderful feline repose, the most bright, powerful, and immaculate tiger Blake could have imagined. Then the keeper passed his bars, and Rajpur’s nostrils twitched and he came to. The keeper retraced bis steps, and now Rajpur was on his feet, slowly pacing, rubbing his glossy coat against the bars like a cat against your legs. The keeper reached in and scratched him behind the ears. Rajpur turned his head and the massage continued until the hind quarters collapsed in surrender and he lolled back his head as the fingers gave pleasure. That’s how you lose an arm,” said a spectator as the big jaws opened and closed, but what he didn’t realize was that Rajpur was grinning.
Mrs. Martini, who trained the boys (dressed in leather apron and gauntlets), is no longer allowed inside the cages, much to her regret and theirs. But. she finds consolation in her Nursery, where the walls are painted pink and the baby scales, nipples, hotwater bottles, and diminutive cages are ready for the newborns. Here you see the little fellows: the beedy-eved marmosets who, as they cling to the wire, look like miniature Tibetans; the lemur with his pale-blue fur and beautiful ringed tail; Pete, the, woolly monkey, with his little wise face, who cried so piteously when Mrs. Martini put him back in his abode; the grumbling pair of ocelots; and Josephine, the white-faced chimpanzee who needed a fan.
The visitor can soon see with what respect and imagination this community is tended. For instance, one new annex —the Jewel Room — has been especially planned for birds of iridescent plumage. Twelve and I found ourselves in a darkened corridor watching the birds in their warmly lit and native vegetation like animated canvases along the wall. Here we saw the hummingbirds, the purple sugarbird, the orange cock of the rock, the green tanager, THE fairy bluebird, AND Rothschild’s myna from Bali—fending, chirping, and singing, the more unconcernedly, I am sure, because they could not see us.
The oldest of the birds was of course the parrot. Few of the mammals are older than sixteen, and among the youngest are the three elephants newly arrived from the Belgian Congo. The only two who stirred our pity were the mother tiger who ya wned and roared with such obvious boredom, and the panda bear who lost his mate a year back, and whose lumbering, pigeon-toed vigil seemed endless and pathetic.
The animals who live forever
The love of animals unites all the children of the world, and I know of no other touchstone which is so sure to bring together the affection of children and parents. Each year, at this time, booksellers and publishers set aside a special week for the celebration of books for children. I should like to make my contribution by recalling those animal stories which continue to touch the hearts of young and old, stories of animals who live forever.
First and earliest are those books to be read aloud to the very young, books which blend realism with fantasy, and in which the note of mortality, which children shrink from, is subdued. The Just So Stories, Story of Babar, the Little Elephant, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, and Stuart Little, that endearing mouse of E. B. White’s, are in a class by themselves.
The dog stories come next, and here we expect reality, not the love affairs of a hero and heroine wrapped up in fur, but the devotion, the courage, and saddest to relate, the growing old and scarred of a friend who ought to live forever. The best, of those stories are told from the canine point of view, told in terms of hunger, scent, and devotion, as Virginia Woolf portrayed Flush, the Brownings’ Spaniel. I remember the sadness which almost stopped me from finishing Bob, Son of Battle, that classic of Alfred Ollivant. I remember The Bar Sinister by Richard Harding Davis, that clean, fighting tale of a bull terrier who resembled my own “ Mr. Dooley.” (Mr. Dooley died of swallowing a chicken bone.)
I enjoyed the story of Lobo the wolf by Ernest Thompson Seton even though the mating was sentimentally sad, and I was swept away by the hunt and struggle in Reynard the Fox by John Masefield.
Mr. Masefield’s Right Royal is more a poem of horsey men than of horseflesh. But in The Maltese Cat, Kipling’s swift story of a polo pony, in Black Beauty, inMy Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara, and in The Red Pony by John Steinbeck, it is the horse who takes command.
Is it curious or characteristic that there is so little literature about cats? We have glimpses of them in short st ories from time to time, but nothing I have read of the feline nature can compare with Kipling’s classic picture of the mongoose Rikki-tikki-tavi.
White Fang by Jack London was the first book that took me into the wilds. And here let me pause to pay my respects to Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, whose stories, with their superb illustrations by Charles Livingston Bull, gave me my first and unforgettable awe of the Canadian forests. His Red Fox, Haunters of the Silences, andKindred of the Wild are true to nature.Bambi, by Felix Salten is one of the most touching stories of our time for any age. Observant but not so well known is One Day ON Beetle Rock by Sally Carrighar, a beautifully written account of the animal life on the High Sierras from sunrise to dusk on a June day.
The best nature writer in England today is Henry Williamson. His two years’ hermitage on the Devon moors sharpened his senses and brought him the source material for books of remarkable authenticity. Begin with The Old Stag and then read Tarka the Otter.
And it you suffer as I do from the spring fever of fishing, feast your eyes - and those of your oldest boy — on Return to the River, Roderick L. HaigBrown’s story of a Columbia River Chinook.
I rest my case.
Mexico and Moscow
My reading of fiction this spring has been refreshed by the discovery of two new writers whose talent and originality invite the mind after what Conrad Aiken rightly calls “ a long walk in the desert of contemporary prose.” Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry is to be read and savored slowly.
Scenically it is a story of Mexico, of a feast day in a small mountain town, half resort and half peasant village, and of how the spirit of the place, the mood and color of the heights, affect a quartet of lovers. In character it is, like Brideshead Revisited, the story of a man’s — in this case the British Consul’s disintegration, of the rescue which is attempted by his divorced wife Yvonne, and of how his half brother Hugh, and his friend, the French film producer, Jacques Laruelle, do their best - and worst - to intervene. In its picture of Geoffrey’s deterioration through drink, and in its delineation of Yvonne’s attempts at reconciliation, the novel threads together past and present with a subtlety of transition which reminds me of Conrad.
Mr. Lowry is a stylist of versatility and power. He has the gift of balancing the spoken word and the hidden thought; the faculty of lighting up the inner life of those who are devoted yet opposed. In his massing of effect, in his capture and sudden break of a mood, in his delineation of love proffered and withheld, his style is as supple and as strong as silk. Thus he describes the lovers: “For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts.” Then a little later he notes this gesture of their reconciliation: “as he approached she turned this hand palm upward in an involuntary movement, of irritation perhaps, but it was like an unconscious gesture of appeal: it was more: it seemed to epitomize, suddenly, all the old supplication, the whole queer secret dumb-show of incommunicable tendernesses and loyalties and eternal hopes of their marriage.” Here at last is a novelist to enjoy, to praise, and to reread.
A Room on the Route is the most impressive novel I have read about Russia since Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Its author, Godfrey Blunden, an Australian born in 1906, made notes for it during his stay in Russia as a war correspondent in 1942 and 1943, when he lived — as closely as an alien can — the life of a Muscovite during those months of tension which saw the German advance and the costly eventual relief of Stalingrad. The story he tells is the story of James Ferguson, an English journalist who is admitted to a Russian household on terms of semi-confidence and who, under the influence of the vodka and hospitality, begins to piece together the once human but now broken and fearful lives of the Russians who forgather in that small apartment.
Rachel, grieving for her son in Siberia; Mary Anderson, the American girl who married a Communist and who is now shut off from both countries; Gregor, the hard-skulled Lett of the NKVD, who has had to turn in his uniform and who is “waiting”; Vitalia, the seductive, stupid spy; Boris, the cynical intellectual; and Mitka, the joking, resourceful peasant, — these are pictured as if in self-confession to the visiting democrat. Whether such confidences could ever have been gained by an outsider is a question. But the pictures Mr. Blunden gives us of courage, endurance, and dedication, of how the early certitude of the Revolutionaries collapses under the fear and torture of the inexorable and impersonal State, are strong and vivid pictures no one of us can readily forget. For its human touches and its terse and mounting action, this novel is certainly exceptional.
Heavenly rivers
A River Goes with Heaven is the title of a novel published over a decade ago, and with that sentiment I am sure Roderick L. Haig-Brown agrees. As a boy in England he did his earliest fishing between the chalk hills of Dorset; he marked “any change in the river Frome or the fish that swam in it or the duns that hatched from its weed beds.” The fly rod came to be a natural extension of his wrist, and when his education, begun at the Charterhouse, was broadened to include the logging camps of British Columbia, his destination was fixed for life. The Canadian woods and waters he found irresistibly attractive, and to the banks of the Campbell River he brought his wife and children to farm, to fish, and to hunt — wars permitting — to their hearts’ content. And in this Canadian paradise he has written two of the most delightful and graphic books on fishing it has ever been my pleasure to enjoy: Return to the River (1941), and more recently, A River Never Sleeps.
A River Never Sleeps is the biography not of one river but of the many streams Mr. Haig-Brown has fished with such zest. It is the calendar of his angling: beginning in January with the search for steelheads on days so cold that the ice formed in the ferrules; pausing over the roach, the salmon, and the pike which rewarded his February patience in England and Scotland; remembering the trout rises, the beauties netted and lost on his favorite April streams — so he passes down the seasons to the sea-run cutthroats and the gleaming salmon of October. The rivers most dear to him are the Columbia, the Campbell, the Dart, the Frome, and the Stamp. He writes of them and of the companions who made their fishing memorable, with his senses always on the alert, and with that splitvision which lakes in the flash of action and the sudden pause of beauty.
His prose gives the natural sense of participation. Listen. “The fly rolled over in a satisfying curve and laid itself in the water within inches of the sycamore’s upstream root. I kept the rod point high to give it a chance to come slowly over the deep water. Then two things happened at once: the sun broke through the clouds, and I saw a big salmon rise slowly, slowly through the water, seeming to balance through his whole rise with head and tail absolutely level. He had judged the swim of the fly perfectly, and I saw his gills show scarlet as he opened his mouth to take it. The pull of the line struck him, and he went away upstream at once in a run that made Gerry’s rod bend like a birch sapling in a gale of wind.”
Mr. Haig-Brown is a perfect example of a man who does what he likes best, and does it supremely well. I wish I could fish—and write about it - half as skillfully as he.
