The Peripatetic Reviewer

I HAVE always had a soft spot for animal stories, and over the years I have come to realize that there are only a handful which have penetrated without false pity or pretense into the very lair of an animal’s existence, RING OF BRIGHT WATER by GAVIN MAXWELL (Dutton, $5.00) makes good this penetration with such accuracy of observation and such delight in the telling that I found myself laughing aloud as I read.

As a young man, Gavin Maxwell lived for the gun. “At Oxford,”he writes, “we wore tweed shooting suits and heavy shooting shoes studded with nails and dull with dubbin, and at our heels trotted spaniels or Labrador retrievers. Some of us were Englishmen, but the majority were Scots. . . . [Our] rooms were hung with the heads of stags killed during the vac. and there was endless talk of the Highlands.”Like many others, he came to his fondness for wild animals and birds by way of bloodthirstiness, The geese he wing-tipped or otherwise lightly wounded he kept and tamed at his grandfather’s estate, Monreith. As time permitted, he began adding other wild specimens to the flock, and his was the only major collection of rare wild fowl left in all Europe after the war.

Five years in the Scots Guards, from which he was invalided home as a major, further diminished Maxwell’s bloodthirstiness, and at the war’s end he bought the Island of Soay, on which he tried to found a new industry by catching and processing for oil the great basking sharks that appear in Hebridean waters during the summer. At the end of five years, that experiment had exhausted his bank account, and he had to find some more economical way of coming to terms with himself in the Highlands. What he found was a sturdy, empty cottage on a lonely cove of the West Highlands; and with rucksack and sleeping bag, he moved in and took possession. That was in 1949, and it marks the beginning of Ring of Bright Water.

Camusfeàrna, as he calls the cottage, was furnished largely by the jetsam which he collected with the avidity of a beachcomber: the fish boxes, which were adapted to form seats and tables and shelves; the fish baskets, which held the firewood; the wooden tubs; and, oddly, the rubber hotwater bottles which floated ashore undamaged in such prolusion that Camusfearna is now overstocked. Those that were damaged, he cut to make table mats or repair patches for his sea books. Provisions were hauled in over the singletrack bumpy road. He made his peace with the MacKinnons, his nearest neighbors, and found in Morag MacKinnon, “a woman of fine-drawn iron beauty softened by humour,”a kindred love of living creatures. Animals responded instinctively to Morag, and for this and other reasons she was to prove herself an invaluable ally in times to come.

The very first sight on his very first morning, as he went down to the burn for water, was a group of five stags, one of them a thirteen-pointer who gazed at him unconcerned from the primrose bank. He was to hear them roaring on September nights when they were in rut, and later they came down to winter close to the cottage. He marked the big footprints of wildcats; he watched for the coming of the swan and seal; and in his solitude he began to write and paint. When the winter shut him in, he had the warmth of his fire for consolation and the companionship of Jonnie, his veteran spaniel.

But after Jonnie’s death, the loneliness became inconsolable, and for distraction, in 1956 Maxwell made a two-month visit to the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. It was there that he had the notion of keeping an otter instead of a dog, and as otters are quite common in the Tigris marshes and are often tamed by the Arabs, he decided to fly one home with him to London. The first cub offered him was fever-ridden and soon died. But his next acquisition, which he named Mijbil after the sheik whom he had been visiting, was a male, short-haired, chocolate brown, weaned, and in robust health. “With the opening of that sack,” says the author, “began a phase of my life that in the essential sense has not yet ended. ... It is, in effect, a thraldom to otters, an otter fixation, that I have since found to be shared by most other people who have ever owned one.” Their long flight to Britain was a series of exasperations, but once they had reached Maxwell’s studio in London, they approached a partnership which is a joy to follow. Mijbil’s eating; his rapture with water and his swiftness in manipulating the bathroom taps; his language, the cluttering of pleasure, the low humming of anger; his love of toys, especially rubber things that squeaked; his mischief and his joyousness; his behavior on the London streets; and his method of waking his master at precisely 8:20 A.M. — these are told not by an Olympian but by a naturalist of extraordinary patience who makes the effort of putting himself in the animal’s position.

But it was at Camusfeàrna, in June, that Mij really entered into his native elements. Here was his water ballet; his pursuit of elvers, eels, and trout; his growing confidence as he mastered and hunted in the deeps; his exploration of waterfall and cliffs; his baiting of cattle, when he would seize the tufts of their tails and yank with all his strength; and his return from each foray to the author, on whom he rapturously dried himself — all this is recorded in a painter’s prose.

Such happiness is too good to last, and when, for reasons which the author will explain more touchingly than I, Mijbil disappeared, he left behind him a vacuum which could be filled only by another otter. After some delay it was, with Edal, a silver-gray female from the Niger Delta region of West Africa. She took to Camusfeàrna as Mij had before her, but with a feminine delicacy and difference. She had to be taught to swim, would often panic in deep water, and was uneasy out of sight of home; her language was different; her hands more dexterous; and her love affair with Jimmy Watt, a young summer visitor, was quite simply explained by Morag. “It is youth,” she said, “she thinks he is another otter.”

Mr. Maxwell has not minimized the rudimentary exposure of that lonely life in the drenching winter gales and blizzards, when the supply of paraffin had run out, when the cliff was too treacherous to climb, when there were no candles within a hundred miles, nothing but wet wood, and little of that — “days when I would rather creep back to bed than face the physical difficulties of life awake.” That was the worst; and the best was in June, with the wild roses against the impeccably blue sky, the hospitality of the MacKinnon household within reach, and Morag’s scones and gingerbread and cups of tea that tasted like nectar, the sun shining on the snow-covered hills of Skye, and Edal the otter emulating the Modigliani nude above her self-chosen bed. In an era when we all live so close by, a book like this is a passkey to a remote and lovely experience.

I feel as if I owe an apology to Atlantic readers and the author for having been so slow to report on NOËL COWARD’S first novel, POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE (Doubleday, $4.50). This dramatist, who has provided us with more and better comedy than any other living playwright, now adds an extra dimension to our pleasure in his plausible, amusing, and deftly characterized story of a tropical island colony — he places it in the South Seas, but it could as easily be in the Bahamas— which is preparing for the visitation of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, and which, in the interim, has been turned inside out by the arrival of an amorous and unexpected duchess. The story is told by Grizelda Craigie, a gay young matron, an avid reader with a witty way of putting things; clumsy with her hands, not particularly good with food or cooking or her garden, but very good with people. She keeps her husband, Robin, in a happy state; she is the natural confidante for the lover of the duchess and is the eyes and ears of the Government House on the innumerable committees that are fussing over the Royal Coming. Their arrival is to be celebrated by a water pageant, a monstrosity which is to combine the native and English talent on Samola, and to its rehearsals Grizel brings an attention as skeptical and as mischievous as Mr. Coward’s, had he been there. The food and talk, the love affairs and the jealousies, the island beauty and the social sniping are disclosed in Grizel’s witty prose, which invites the imagination and is a pleasure to read aloud.

Early in his career, beginning in 1935, Mr. Paton served as principal of the Diepkloff Reformatory in Johannesburg. It was a large institution, with some six hundred boys, of whom more than a hundred were from eleven to fourteen, and to its administration he brought a new strain of mercy: he granted a measure of freedom to the boys who deserved it, and when a handful of the “free” boys absconded, as, of course, they did, he grieved and he dealt with them firmly when they were returned, but he did not withdraw the incentive of freedom. Admirers have long been awaiting the short stories which would express this phase of his life, and they are now presented in TALES FROM A TROUBLED LAND (Scribner’s, S3.50).

Not all are about the reformatory. The lead story, “Life for a Life,” is about the inquisition of a colored couple who have sent their son to a university, and its picture of restraint under torture strikes the note of pity at the outset. “Sponono,” the second, and longer, tale, is of a wayward, charming, elusive youngster who knows his Bible, though he cannot obey it, and who needs forgiveness, as he keeps reminding the principal, “unto seventy times seven,” long after his initial release. This is the heartbreak of the borderline boy who might have been saved, if only. . . .

The beauty of these tales is that they are about people who emerge in so little space; young people whose predicaments are rather strikingly like those of our juveniles and with whom our sympathy is almost instantly engaged. I give three stars to “Death of a Tsotsi” and “A Drink in the Passage”; the humility and compassion in each are what our troubled land, as well as Mr. Paton’s, so badly needs.

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE, Peck’s Bad Boy of Punch and the BBC, has had his fun in a literary whodunit, AFFAIRS OF THE HEART (Walker, $3.50). The book involves a preposterous literary agent, a writer of detective novels, Routledge, who drops dead while reading a book on poisons at the British Museum, several of his mistresses, the murdered man’s collaborator, and a literary hack who, for no good reason, is employed by the victim’s widow to make a record of the case. The plot creaks along like a not very well conceived charade, but the incidental effects, the parody, the scoffing, and the satire are highly professional. Mr. Muggeridge’s description of the literary boardinghouse in Bayswater where Mr. Waghorn and Miss Finch are engaged in their lifelong novels; his etchings of the museum reading room and of luncheon at the Geranium; his scorn of the Post-Raphaelites; his joy in the greeter at the Golders Green Crematorium; and his detection of Routledge’s marital and extramarital love life are what give this book its spice.