The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

NATURALISTS respond to a calling which is an exceptionally happy one for our time. To their study of nature they bring endless patience and the observation of what is ageless and of what is minute, and at heart they are optimists, for their faith is based on the evolutionary process and on the long view. What they fight against is extermination, whether of the redwoods or the baldheaded eagle or a natural habitat as indispensable to our undersea life as the salt marsh. Their enemies are those who have thought only for the present: the operators of bulldozers, the hit-andrun contractors, and the engineers, highway or hydroelectric.

Naturalists know how to handle themselves in a controversy: Darwin did, and so did Rachel Carson when toward the close of her life she was showered with abuse by the interests which chose not to credit her warnings. Because of their passionate belief in the continuity of life and because their senses are as well tuned as a Stradivarius, they write better than the scientists in other disciplines. Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir set the early standard in America; Forbush, William Beebe, and Thomas Barbour carried on the great tradition; Sally Carrighar, Joseph Wood Krutch, Rachel Carson, and Edwin Way Teale have been our most eloquent contemporaries. Every one of those I have mentioned has opened the minds and the eyes of thousands to wonders they would otherwise have missed in this country; what is more, they have made millions of converts: disciples who side with them in their many-fronted struggle for conservation, amateurs whose hobby it is to acquire and then record a special knowledge, as Edgar Monsanto Queeny did in his great work on ducks, and as Crawford H. Greenewalt has done in his beautifully illustrated volume on hummingbirds. The size of this army of adherents is generally underestimated by Congress, but not by Secretary of the Interior Udall. One characteristic they have in common is tenacity, and it will be needed as our wilderness continues to shrink and as the fight to defend our national parks grows sharper.

On a summer day in 1945 EDWIN WAY TEALE blocked out on a single sheet of paper the plan for a new kind of book: he would begin with the first burst of spring in the Florida Keys, and then keep pace as the season moved north, watching it transform the country and rousing the inhabitants all the way to upper Canada. So began his natural history of the four American seasons. Following the publication of North With the Spring in 1951, he reversed his field and set out in pursuit of autumn, moving across the continent from East to West. By now fellow naturalists knew what he was up to, and through the intercom he alerted them to be ready to show him what was rare or of special interest in their domain. The book on summer came next, and at last, twenty years after his beginning, he brings the series to a close with WANDERING THROUGH WINTER (Dodd, Mead, $6.50). Each volume can be enjoyed in itself; taken together they compose as thorough, as sympathetic, and as delightful a survey of the United States as has ever been written.

Mr. Teale grew with the undertaking. He began as an acknowledged authority on insects; now that he has traversed well over a hundred thousand miles of our land, he has a complete knowledge of our birds, and with so much camping out, he has developed a familiarity with the trees and the stars. He is as gregarious as he is hardy, and what he draws from personal encounters is as rich as what he finds in solitary observation. It would be unjust if I did not add that Nellie, his wife, has accompanied him on most of the trips and has added her share to his field notes.

Wandering Through Winter (God knows, it is hard enough to live through it in New England) is best appreciated at the rate of six or eight pages of an evening, for this way one squeezes the most out of each episode. Mr. Teale begins with the coming of winter to the very southwest corner of the mainland where California joins Mexico and the land meets the sea; here he watches the migration of the great gray whales, forty-five feet long and patched with barnacles as they come down from the Bering Sea to the warm coastal bays where they will bear their calves. Then he and Nellie point the car north and head inland, and now a sampling is in order. I like his description of the elephant trees in the Anza Desert; of hummingbirds, mourning doves, the sage sparrow, robins, linnets, and California thrashers which he finds feeding in the mistletoe on Christmas dawn at Yaqui Well. I like his account of how strong the wind is after midnight on the desert floor, strong enough almost to roll him in his sleeping bag. I like his picture of the kit fox that came within the circle of their electric torch and the pack rat tugging Doctor Jaeger’s hair as he was sleeping, under the mistaken notion that it was building material for a nest. I like his story of the old Chinaman who divided the winter into “oneshirt, two-shirt and three-shirt days.” I like Teale’s amplitude and gusto for whatever nature has to offer.

THE RED AND THE GREEN by IRIS MURDOCH (Viking, $5.00) is a story involving the rather jealous members of an Anglo-Irish family in the week leading up to the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. The cat’s-paw in the story is Second Lieutenant Andrew Chase-White, recently commissioned in a famous English cavalry regiment and home on sick leave after a brief appearance in France. His antagonist is Pat Dumay, who is a year older, a passionate Irish patriot, and of savage independence. Supporting these two cousins in their half-concealed rivalry are a strange set of elders: Uncle Barnabas, an unfrocked priest who despises his wife and finds consolation in the bottle and in writing a venomous memoir; Millicent, Lady Kinnard, who is running out of money and out of lovers; and Christopher Bellman, who is willing to bail out Millie if she will marry him.

All the women in the story are jealous of Millie and with good reason, for she has lived a fast life, kept her figure, and is still able to attract a roving eye. Hilda, Andrew’s mother, freshly arrived from London, envies Millie because of her style, her title, and her way with men; Kathleen, Millie’s sister-in-law, envies her because she is kind to Barney; and Pat, the dour rebel, puts up with her because Millie has allowed him to hide his Enfield rifles in her cellar.

In their Irish, errant way, these people, so often at cross-purposes, work themselves up into a family tizzy as the week advances inexorably toward the shooting which has been scheduled for Easter. The only calm, clear-headed individual among them is Frances, Andrew’s fiancée. She sees through the pretense of the young officer, his bleak immaturity, and wants no more of him; she responds to Pat’s darkhaired magnetism but knows that his only thought is for the revolution, and rightly she determines to get out of Dublin as soon as possible. The men, however, go their troubled way and wind up, most of them, in Millie’s bedroom with a mixture of motives that rarely does them credit.

In the staging of her story, Miss Murdoch is curiously shy, not to say amateur. The confrontation in Millie’s presence is carried out in a manner that is neither drama nor plausible comedy. And instead of letting us witness even a glimpse of Pat’s heroism on Easter and after, the denouement is summed up in a letter written to Frances in 1938 when all the principals are dead. Her comments on them to her grown son prompt him to remark, “Heroic lot, weren’t they.” “They were inconceivably brave men,” said Frances, words which are ironically at odds with the motives we have seen. But this is too easy a way out, an anticlimax that does small justice to the good writing that preceded it.

One little suspects from the quiet title of JOHN UPDIKE’S new novel, OF THE FARM (Knopf, $3.95), what a hot conflict of will and temperament is about to erupt in the placid-looking farmhouse in southeastern Pennsylvania to which Joey Robinson has just brought his second wife and his stepson, Richard. Joey is thirty-five, doing very well as an advertising consultant in New York, and well able to afford his divorce and remarriage to Peggy, who with her wide thighs and her red hair has him thoroughly enthralled. He has planned this visit to his mother, not as a peace offering but as a necessity, for the old lady is very ill with emphysema, and the disposition of the farm, where he grew up, is at stake.

The following books by members of the Atlantic staff have appeared in recent months:

BOSTON: CRADLE OF LIBERTY by Edward Weeks. $3.95.

A ROUGH MAP OF GREECE by Phoebe-Lou Adams, winner of the Hedman Memorial Award for International Travel. $4.95.

THE BREAKING OF THE DAY and Other Poems by Peter Davison. $3.00.

Joey’s mother has a will of iron: with it she compelled his father, a bumbler in most things, to buy the place, and with it as a widow she has held on to the eighty acres. Joey shares some of her love for the farm, as he shares some of her streak of cruelty. He resents her possessiveness, is astute enough to realize that she poisoned his first marriage with Joan, and is determined that the same needling shall not be given to Peggy. But it is.

Mr. Updike, who received the National Book Award for his novel The Centaur, is a stylist with a sure touch, and this short novel demands the very best of his craftsmanship. The story is told through several layers of experience, for as Joey and his mother enter into their duel of willpower, the son’s mind reaches back through the innocence of his marriage to Joan to nostalgia of his boyhood. Peggy knows that she is being deliberately shut out, knows that she is being derided by her mother-in-law and that sex and candor are her own strongest weapons. “What shall I do to get through this terrible visit,” she exclaims, and the reader feels for her. The anger and the difference of the two generations again and again break through the surface. The method obscures some characters, notably Joan and the father, but Peggy and the mother are powerfully drawn, and it is their antagonism and their fight over Joey which fire our interest.

We are living in an epoch which has seen the breakup of many great estates, the destruction of privately held woods and streams, and the continual depredation of our national parks. It would seem on the evidence that the preservation of these parks is not nearly as simple a responsibility as was envisioned in 1910; it would seem that highways, dams, the mining and lumber interests, if their lobby be powerful enough, can make inroads which threaten too many of our national monuments. DEVEREUX BUTCHER is a fighter against all this. His book, OUR NATIONAL PARKS IN COLOR (Clarkson N. Potter, $5.95), defines our twenty-eight national parks with color photographs taken by the author, and those of the high peaks and silent waters at dusk are what most touched me. His account flows out of his experience in this wilderness, and it is informed by his passionate belief that there is a better way to save this national heritage — and that the time is now.