The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

WHEN Route 128, the throughway encircling Boston, was completed, it drove the wildlife which had survived in surprising proximity to the Boston Statchouse into smaller pockets of marsh and pine land. The deer who had visited our wood lot only twenty-eight miles from town each spring and fall ceased to call. The only natives undisturbed by gasoline’s blessing were the gray squirrels, who have multiplied; the rabbits, who make a mockery of our rock garden; the chipmunk; and the raccoon. Our sentiments toward the latter are cordial, since we have no green corn to lose.

The raccoons appeal to us because of their little hands, their boldness, their cleanliness, and their desire to fraternize. We appeal to them because of the iron pig in our backyard, not far from the pool in the rock garden. Who else in the neighborhood has a repository of food and the means to wash it so close at hand? Fish nights, when we have had broiled grilse or boiled salmon from the Miramichi, or school stripers caught that afternoon in Ipswich Bay, or lobster and steamed clams from Essex, provide their favorite repasts.

A biped opens the lid of the pig by stepping on a pedal, but this is too much for them. After he has cased the joint Father Raccy cleverly inserts his fingers under the rim and lifts until the opening is big enough for his head; then, head-down and with the lid propped on his shoulders, he makes his choice. When he has all he can carry to the pool, he backs out, the iron lid clangs shut, and we know that the second serving has begun.

I have no way of guessing how many heads of households have passed on the secrets of the pig since we began watching the raccoons two decades ago. Our vantage point is a window at ground level, close to the cellar stairs and giving full view of the pig within its small stockade. Here, at nightfall, seated on the stairs, we see the Old Man’s dexterity and can hardly repress our laughter at Mother’s antics. She is more tentative about the heavy lid, with the result that it slams down on her fingers; when this happens she recoils and wrings her hands with as much exasperation as I might. They converse in a whirring, whickering talk, and I cannot report any concern on his part after she has muffed. He just assumes the male prerogative of doing things better and savoring the reward.

One July night, when the steady clanging of the lid denoted a good time all around, there fell a sudden silence in which the whickering of the parents, more audible than usual, broke into our reading. We went out to see what was the trouble, and young Ted, tiptoeing on the back porch, heard a distinct commotion within the pig. After turning the porch light on, he descended and stepped on the pedal: the cover lifted, and within was the biggest of the kids. Evidently he was emulating the Old Man’s example until the weight of the lid caused him to lose his balance and tumble in. Now he scrabbled up and out, and since his exit was blocked by a giant he went close to Ted and gently climbed up his pant leg to the knee. While this was going on a great whirring broke out on the branches of the spruce above us; we looked up, and there was the rest of the litter, their little heads outlined against the dark boughs. In the instant of distraction, the bold one slipped away to join his parents in the rock garden.

We traced the hollow tree where they lived by the simple expedient of filling a little white jar with the bacon fat they love and leaving it on the back steps. It was gone the next morning, with greasy footprints to express their interest; days later I spotted it at the foot of their dead pine, five hundred yards uphill from the house and in the densest part of the woods. But there are many questions we still seek to answer. How far do they forage? What pact have they with the dogs, cold war or coexistence? Do the nonresident privileges they enjoy with us scare away the chipmunks?

We have never tempted them within our screen door, fearing that further domestication would make them vulnerable in the winter; but do they miss us when we’re gone and cheer when our lights first go on in the spring?

In the spring of 1918, in his twelfth year, STERLING NORTH was scouting through some neighboring woods in Wisconsin when his faithful, drooling Saint Bernard began sniffing critically at the base of a rotten stump. “Dig ‘em out. Wowser,” he said, and in time up came a furious mother raccoon and her four cubs. Three of them escaped with their mother into the brush. The fourth went home in Sterling’s cap to be trained as a pet. The true story of their friendship and adventures in what the author terms “A Better Era" is entitled RASCAL (Dutton, $3.95), the winner of the Dutton Animal Book Award for 1963.

The boy had a way with animals. He had already raised four pet skunks to the point where they were being distrusted by the village, and he could call to his shoulder Poe-the-Crow, who lived in the Methodist Church steeple and who had a craving for anything bright, from pennies to engagement rings. Sterling’s father was a tolerant man, well aware of his son’s resourcefulness. At his suggestion the skunks were liberated, and the boy’s attention centered on this tiny bit of fur named Rascal. They were to have nearly a year together from the first evening when the little raccoon sipped warm milk through a straw, and it was to be a halcyon time. The raccoon, who grew to be a two-pounder in no time, slept with the boy and rode with him in his bicycle basket; together they fished and explored the lake country. made special expeditions into the wilds of the Brule River, and went to the state fair, where Rascal aided his master in the pie-eating contest until they were both disqualified. In any good animal story there is a magic transition which makes contemporaries of pet and master, and that secret, with all of its endearment, is in this book and never mawkish. The author warns us that Rascal will have to be returned to the wilds when full-grown, and the final scene of liberation is handled simply. This book is a delightful pacemaker for an unusual series.

When Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis met at a dinner party at her Berlin flat in July, 1927, the spark was instantaneous, and by the time coffee had been served, he had maneuvered her into a corner and asked her to marry him. “I

don’t even know you, Mr. Lewis,” she said with a quick laugh. The party was to celebrate her thirty-third birthday; the heartbreak of her disastrous first marriage to an ersatz Hungarian poet was past. She was surrounded by friends, and was at her fresh and vibrant best. Lewis at forty-two was our most provocative novelist, a somewhat mangy lion who was seeking a divorce from his first wife, Grace Hegger, and who, despite the enormous success of his four big novels (Elmer Gantry had just been published), was drinking hard. On this particular evening he was on good behavior. He told Dorothy of an idyllic farm in Vermont where he would like to live and work, and the appeal of his eyes and words was irresistible. He was to go on proposing until at last she consented, and the story of their thirteen years together, of the attraction that held them until his drinking bouts and the demands of her career started the inevitable separation, has been told with compassionate understanding by one of their closest friends, VINCENT SHEEAN, in his volume of reminiscence with letters, DOROTHY AND RED (Houghton Mifflin. $6.95).

A minister’s daughter, Dorothy lived with “a sense of historic mission.”and from the first she was determined that her marriage with Hal, as she preferred to call him, would be a creative one, even if it meant subordinating her own career. She brought to him a sympathy and an intellectual admiration which for a time appeased his stormy vulnerability. They did, indeed, find their Twin Farms in Vermont, but on everything to do with the running of the place, as Mr. Sheean points out, they were at odds. Dorothy was proud to bear him a child, yet somehow she never seemed to be able to keep young Michael and his boisterous friends from raising bedlam within Hal’s hearing, and he had a very short temper with children. The house parties here and abroad, some of them stretching on for ten days, which in her extravagant way Dorothy engineered, sound ghastly to me, and Red would fling away from them drunk and disgusted. The publication of her book I Saw Hitler in 1931 led to her expulsion the following year from Nazi Germany; now she was an international celebrity, and her absorption in Central Europe, her prophetic warning of what was coming, her strenuous assignments, created longer and longer absences.

This book is full of the stress of living and warm with love. At the core of it are Dorothy’s letters and journals, and at the end the account of her visit to Sauk Centre at the time of the Sinclair Lewis Celebration, an essay which originally appeared in this magazine, and surely the most touching epitaph that ever will be written about the troubled “Red.”

Ireland with a difference comes to us from several gifted pens, from Sean O’Faolain and Mary Lavin, and in terms of outrageous and uproarious comedy, from Brendan Behan and HONOR Tracy. In her new novel, THE FIRST DAY OF FRIDAY (Random House, $4.95), Miss Tracy tells of the tribulations which beset young Michael Duff in his daily round as the owner and operator of a large impoverished country place. Michael is a Protestant and, by Irish standards, the most attractive bachelor in a hundred miles. He takes each day as it comes, and his gaiety is never quite extinguished by the realization that things are likely to go from bad to worse. To “help" him with the farming he has three hands, the most alcoholic of whom is Tomo, who in his search for his master’s liquor inadvertently leads the big Hereford bull into the kitchen. The house, with its many dusty, closed-up rooms, is kept in permanent disarray by the priceless cook. Atracta, and her triplets and by Michael’s mother, Mrs. Duff, a charming mind-wanderer who lives in the past except when aroused by the vagaries of the television set. The bull, with difficulty and much broken crockery, is removed from the kitchen, and Tomo, when sobered, is made to clean up the mess; the wall has been breached, and instead of shoring it up the villagers widen the opening as they wander in and out to gather their firewood; the river rises, and the master sends his groom to request that Michael dig out a vixen and her cubs who have gone to earth on the bank.

What restores Michael’s sanity in all this is his affection for Dulcinea, to whom he has been engaged for years and whom he hopes devotedly to marry. Dulcinea is as pretty as she is spirited, and despite the harassment of her pedantic father, who has no intention of freeing her for matrimony, she and Michael have snatched-at moments of sheer happiness which keep their love alive. This is a feckless story told with a smiling turn of phrase, one short sample of which will give its taste.

Michael and Mrs. Duff are watching on television the shadowy figure of the Duke of Edinburgh opening a boot factory in the Midlands.

“I am not sure if I should want to live in England,” she said, when the Duke had finished speaking. “The climate over there appears to be worse than our own. ... At least, in Ireland, it does not rain indoors.”

“That isn’t rain. Mother,” Michael replied. “It is interference.”

“Really? How very odd. Why does the Duke put up with it?”

“Hush.”