The Peripatetic Reviewer

THE PURSUIT OF WILDERNESS by Paul Brooks Houghton Mifflin, $6.95

John Muir, the Scottish-American naturalist, who was instrumental in preserving the Yosemite National Park, contributed many papers to The Atlantic. In 1875 he guided Emerson to the Mariposa Grove; thirty-two years later he took Theodore Roosevelt to the same spot. They camped out beneath the sequoias, and their talk enlarged the concept of our national parks.

Conservation has been building up political muscle since then, and its volunteers are at work in many communities. In the past decade citizens’ committees in Greater Boston have preserved Beacon Hill as a national monument, have supported legislation sealing off 45,000 acres of salt marsh from the bulldozer, have resuscitated the American and English elms on the Mall, and have saved the Garden in the Woods, the wildflower sanctuary in Sudbury. But when the projects for exploitation are on a larger scale, such as General Pick’s fantasy of damming and flooding the Missouri River Valley, when they have the backing of the Army Corps of Engineers and the partisan support of local representatives in Congress, then we need the leadership of the Sierra Club, the combined strength of many organizations, and the persistent questioning of Henry M. Jackson of Washington, chairman of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, to head off disaster. In this “second American Revolution,” as Paul Brooks calls it, “we are fighting for the rights of the land itself,” and his book. The Pursuit of Wilderness, is a most timely exposure of how close we have come to losing three unique preserves in Alaska, the Everglades, and the North Cascades. In each case there was an inevitable conflict between those who wished to exploit for quick profit and those who wished to protect a natural heritage. “Of course we are going ahead and mine,” the Kennecott Copper Company replied to all criticism of their plan to excavate Miners Ridge in the Cascades, “You can’t desert property.” And the lumbermen cutting in the same area against the faint protest of the Forest Service were of the same persuasion. In Alaska, it was Dr. Edward Teller, director of the Lawrence Laboratory, who sponsored Project Chariot, which would blast out a harbor north of the Arctic Circle by exploding five atomic bombs, with minimal apprehension of the consequences to the area. Alaska was also to be the site of the Rampart Dam, which would create a lake the size of New Jersey and hydroelectric power no one could use, while blotting out our greatest fish and wildlife refuge. The worst of the boondoggles was the Miami nightmare, the idea of gouging out a jetport on the periphery of the Everglades. As Mr. Brooks makes clear, the first round in each fight has been won by the conservationists, but the attacks undoubtedly will be renewed.

Mr. Brooks speaks with firsthand knowledge of all of these threatened areas. He has camped or canoed in them, questioned the natives, and considered the enormity. He shows how the promotors have used the tricky exaggeration of Madison Avenue, and how contemptuous they have been of the opposition until their pretensions were exploded. In his clear, firm prose he questions the experimentations of the AEC, the timidity of the Forest Service, and the recklessness of the Army Engineers. who were willing to “pull the plug” in Canal III of the Everglades “to see whether the result would be as disastrous as ecologists claimed.” The Engineers are indeed elite, but I wonder if the time has not come when a nonpartisan national commission should be empowered to scrutinize their undertakings.

IMAGES AND SHADOWS by Iris Origo Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $8.50

In her memoir, Images and Shadows, Iris Origo, Marchesa Origo when at home in southern Tuscany, describes in her cool Chablis style the excitement and misgiving of being brought up in three quite different worlds where wealth was the common denominator. Her father was an American, Bayard Cutting, who according to the school magazine at Groton was “by far the most remarkable scholar we ever had,” and his family home, Westbrook, was one of the most luxurious, well-kept seigniories on the South Shore of Long Island. As she grew older. Iris was shuttled back and forth between the United States, where her father’s promising career was cut short by tuberculosis, and Desart Court, her mother’s home in Ireland, where she came under the influence of her most beloved elder, her English grandfather. She was happy in the freedom of this hospitable, Anglo-Irish country house, with its untidy garden and great beeches, its hunts and birthday picnics, and most important, in her closeness to Gabba, her grandfather, who brought order to this charming domain until it was burned to the ground in “The Troubles.”

Iris’ mother, Sybil Desart, was a vivacious beauty, so enmeshed in her own social career that she delegated her daughter’s education to a relay of governesses. She was a lion-tamer, vain, egotistical, with real and fancied illnesses, and after Bayard Cutting’s death, she maintained a salon at the Villa Medici in Florence. Here she was remarried, first to Geoffrey Scott, and when that ended in divorce, to Percy Lubbock.

The mother-daughter relationship was a taut one, and we speculate on what would have happened to the lonely Iris had she been permitted to go to Oxford at eighteen as she wished instead of being forced to make three debuts. Thrown onto her own resources, pining for friends, Iris found her consolation in books. It was the older men from whom she learned, the best of them, Professor Monti, who taught her Greek and Latin together as living languages, and who lifted her spirits. From her three exposures, the New York of Edith Wharton, the Ireland of Somerville and Ross, and the decorative days at Fiesole, Iris rightly decided that if she was to continue to live in Italy, it would be as an Italian, and her marriage to Antonio Origo in the Villa Medici chapel in March of 1924 marked her happy entrance into her own world. With her husband she devoted herself to building up the roads, the ditches, the farms and forest of their long-neglected estate, La Foce, which had cost their last penny to purchase; here she nursed her children, and after the tragic death of their only son. here, “in an effort to find some impersonal work,” she turned to writing biography. Miss Origo has subtitled Images and Shadows “Part of a Life,” and I think it regretful that some of the most distinctive parts of her maturity, such as the ripening friendship with Berenson and her own and Antonio’s activity in the Resistance are omitted because she has treated them elsewhere. It is exceedingly difficult to recast, yet these realities would have rounded out and strengthened the more contemporary phases of this elegant, evocative book.

THE HEIRS OF THE KINGDOM by Zoé Oldenbourg Pantheon, $ 10.00

A historical novel is the art of persuading one’s contemporaries to believe in a time and a place and a girl at several centuries remove. Mme. Zoé Oldenbourg is a French master of this genre who has assimilated the Middle Ages so thoroughly that one follows the large tapestry of her narratives with credulity. The Heirs of the Kingdom, faultlessly translated by Anne Carter, is the story of the First Crusade, not of the great princes, their knights and their ladies, but of the poorest of the poor, who, inspired by the evangelism of Little Peter, a monk with a vision, left their crafts and the safety of home for the perilous and exhausting march from Flanders to Jerusalem. They were always at the tail of the procession, hungry and footsore, their comelier women preyed upon by the soldiers, and all of them exposed to the guerrilla tactics of the Turks. It is Mme. Oldenbourg’s achievement to make us think and feel as these rugged pilgrims must have done.

In so vast a tapestry our attention is confined to a group of weavers from Arras, numbering two hundred at their departure; their leaders are Brother Barnabé, a monk too rebellious for the monastery, and Baudry, the sturdy mason; and in the little company our attention is centered on Alix of the Thirty Pieces, the queenly harlot who has renounced her sins; Sir Evrard, a soldier of fortune now converted, who will fight only as a protector of the poor; and Jacques and Marie, the newlyweds, whose youth and innocence are to be tried. No romance this, but the story of a group whose characters are consistent throughout the long exposure. We see the credulous hope with which they are imbued and the hard, bloodstained reality which so often blots their visions; we see the births, the feuds, the lechery, and the ever-renewed trust in their leaders; and we see the incredible splendor of Constantinople through which the pilgrims are herded like immigrants, and the harsh and brutal sieges. We feel the heat and thirst as they approach Jerusalem, and the appalling revulsion after Jerusalem has fallen, when the pilgrims are paid to bury the dead. “To each his own reward,” one of them remarks. “The knights have honor, the soldiers wealth, and the poor have Jesus Christ.” With its animated portrayal of human nature, this book is like a Brueghel in prose.

SELECTIVE TROUT by Doug Swisher and Carl Richards Crown, $6.95

Because the stream is a fine and private place and because fly fishermen usually guard their secrets, the Swisher-Richards volume in which they have defined and craftily illustrated their no-hackle dry flies is certain to be the most revolutionary and popular fishing book of this year. These two Michigan anglers, the one a plastics salesman, the other a dentist, at home on the Au Sable River in Michigan found that they shared an interest in the life of the insects on which trout feed, and a curiosity to match their home-tied flies with the hatches they found on their neighborhood streams. Encouraged by success, they began collecting, photographing, and studying the local fly hatches, and the imitations they devised, often at wide variance from the traditional patterns, emboldened them to apply their “no-hackle” principle to streams in the East and Far West as well as their home waters. The drawings, the colorplates, and the common sense have been most persuasively arranged for the three seasons, early, middle, and late. They offer fresh hope for those who have never done well with nymphs, and their reasoning is hard to refute.