The lady doth protest too much
Mary Keen
Mil 1 ERFLY COOING LIKE A DOVE by Miriam Rothschild Doubleday, 125, pp. 215 People hardly talk about the two cultures any more. Does this mean that artists and scientists now share a common language, and, if they do, why then is Miriam Roths- child so anxious to prove in an unscientific way that she loves poetry and painting just as much as fleas and that she has, like the rest of us, a Soul? 'This book is a combina- tion of mood and spontaneous pleasure it lacks structure, let alone erudition,' she writes in the Preface — which follows the Foreword and precedes the Introduction to her choice of poems and paintings dis- played between facts and speculations about natural phenomena. Non-scientists do not preface their commonplace books with such apologies and reservations. Sub- jective they may be, and even self- absorbed, but are they as self-conscious as the distinguished Miss Rothschild, who had to be 'relentlessly and affectionately coerced into print' and who needed an anonymous collaborator to get her to the point of writing what she describes as 'this crazy book'?
I swung between irritation and fascina- tion as the book progressed. Not so much crazy as embarrassing are some of her early revelations of 'anxious queries' to 'stout nursemaids' about the souls of dogs. Do scientists always rely on adjectives to make a point, or do they save them up for their artistic days? The description of the library shelves, seen at their best behind Blue Moon,
a nervous rose, whose smoky reticence makes her the ideal companion for the thin erudite books of reference that flank the fireplace,
embarrassed me. I wished that some clever copy editor at Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' direction had pencilled out the adjectives about the books. Then the account of the guests, on arrival at the courtyard, who look at the tangle of unkempt plants and wonder uneasily if they have come to the right address. Can anyone really live here?
reminded me of an Angus Wilson story. This insistence on writing a 'crazy' book, and being seen as a dotty genius, does not suit the titanically brainy Miss Rothschild, and the relentless and affectionate coercers into print should not have betrayed her to her fans by lack of editing.
The banality is made worse when you find that Miriam Rothschild can write with almost poetic originality. Butterflies are
casual fragments of the sky, quietly opening and shutting their wings among the yellow vetches on chalk downland,
while in the tropics they are
large sweeping flyers of improbable brilliance, like bright triangles of metallic material sprayed forth by some hidden volcano.
Hayfield flowers she describes as 'minus- cule stars in a green firmament' and trees as 'the vastest breathers of the air'. The nature rather than art, and the facts, of course, are fascinating. After a couple of pages of other writers' overblown quota- tions about butterflies and roses, the scien- tist appears:
All this is pure poets' fancy or licence, for roses do not attract moths or butterflies. Neither their scent nor their nectar nor their pollen appeals to them. They pass by in- differently on mealy wings. Roses are beetle flowers, evolved and specialised to allure the iridescent chafers and Longicorns, not care- less butterflies.
There are disgusting facts about camels and strange ones about silkworms. 'The silkworm can in some ways be compared to a chicken', and some of its kind 'only copu- late at four o'clock sharp in the afternoon'. News, too, was the information about the lactation of doves and pigeons. In autumn there might be ten million of them, appar- ently, in the United Kingdom alone, all engaged in the production of milk for their young. There is a moth which can murder a man and an albatross that can fly 6,629 kilometres in 12 days. Hoopoes, I learned, are inedible even to hornets, and although Proust was 'the first and greatest urban naturalist the world has ever known', his apple blossom was purchased from the florist. These chinks of clarity had me spell- bound and I wanted less Browning, Victor Hugo, Pablo Neruda, Old Uncle Nabokov and all, and much more Miriam Roths- child. Only when the author dwelt on the butterfly as a symbol of the soul or the dove as a symbol of innocence did I feel that the literary and scientific strands meshed comfortably, for it was sometimes hard to see why the Art was there. It seemed that instead of the poetry providing nuggets of gold from the dross of scientific fact it was often the other way around.
There was, too, one howler which no editor should have left uncorrected. Among a run of quotations on middle-aged butterfly-hunters comes this: The more absurd aspect of the sober adult man galumphing along after a fragile insect . . . was well described in Coriolanus, 'I saw him run after a gilded butterfly....'
But this is Valeria speaking about her little boy, not about a grown man. Mammocking (which is what young Martins did to the butterfly when he finally caught it) is a fate too good for Doubleday. With a little tact and guidance this book could have been as consistently brilliant, entertaining and informative as we know Miriam Roths- child to be.
Previous page
