Oh! blame not the bird, if he fly to the
bowers
Peter Levi
WHISTLING IN THE DARK IN PURSUIT OF THE NIGHTINGALE by Richard Mabey
Sinclair-Stevenson, £9.99, pp. 120
The loss of Geoffrey Grigson has dis- covered our weakness, just as his book reviews and books so often did. We have at present few country writers left of any merit, the elders are mossy-toed and soft- witted, and where the juniors used to issue trumpet-calls of defiance, being the children of the doctor or the vicar, now they combine in a vague chorus of owl- hoots, being weighed down by the chips on their shoulders. Of those still at work I must say that Richard Mabey is by far the best. For some reason I recall his Gilbert White more clearly than other books, and it is high time that his Frampton Flora was republished with new and better printed photographs, but the present work, which is a mere lark's skeleton of a book of scarcely 120 pages, is pure pleasure to read. It stimulates, nudges, tells stories, argues and gleefully offends. It is a small classic, and the easiest read I have come across in a long time. It is about nightingales all over Europe. Of course, it observes the ortho- dox doctrine that the best birds are dying out, but having stated the statistics Mabey disregards them to tell of his own encoun- ters with these extraordinary creatures.
It is easy to understand his obsession. He accuses the poet Cowper of mistaking a robin on New Year's Day for a nightingale. It could have escaped from a cage, per- haps, but it is easy to be mistaken, and from the beginning of spring to lie awake hopefully listening to thrushes that utter the mysterious sounds and silences, won- dering if they might be nightingales. We are lucky enough still to have the real thing here, five or six at once last year, I believe, on the edge of the Severn 20 or 30 miles north of Bristol. But although they seem so unmistakable, they are queer birds: they imitate and are imitated by blackbirds and thrushes, they have a strange, low gurgling song hardly audible from ten feet, which may come from singing with their mouths full. They can also sing with it shut, Richard assures us. John Clare has best transcribed their notes in English, though Aristophanes in the do do tio tinx chorus is as good, and there is a German quoted by D'Arcy Thompson on Greek Birds who would be a contender. The curious gurgling or jargoning jug jug voice is the subtlest, but it is the big, clear, loudest notes which are a simple miracle. It is surely this pas- sionate and commanding rhetoric of sounds which associates the birds with lovers, like Romeo and Chaucer's squire, who 'slept no more than doth the nightin- gale' in amorous pursuit. The longest recorded song of a single male nightingale went on for 231/, hours. Meanwhile, his wife sat brooding.
Foreign nightingales give rise to some problems, as you might expect. I do not know how 30 or so can have been found dead on a Spanish beach as a result of a thunderstorm. Can the trouble have been poison? Their usual diet is fruit and small grubs, and I read somewhere 30 or 40 years ago that their inability to chew hard objects like nuts is what drives them to feed and sing in the dark when softer food is abroad that gives a mellowness to their song. At that time, I wrote a poem about 'a nightin- gale unable to chew nuts', but today I won- der. Their only obvious difference from other birds is their huge larynx. Richard Mabey does mention central Asian nightin- gales, but if he means the bulbul, I was told in Afghanistan that it was only 'a cousin', and I certainly heard them singing terribly high up, so they seem hardier than our nightingales. Still, even ours 20 years ago used to breed higher above sea-level, in the Cotswolds, than Richard allows. I can also add a regular nightingale among the fells in Lancashire, where I used to sleep on the roof, to his Yorkshire case. But I wish he had dealt with Russian nightingales, partic- ularly the terrifying forest nightingale of folklore that Pasternak quotes:
At the nightingale's whistle, that wild forest voice, The grass was atrembling, the petals were shed.
And all the dark forest was bowed to the ground, And all the good people were falling down dead.
But it is a sign of indecent happiness in a reviewer that must irritate the writer of a book like this, when the reviewer cannot resist joining in, not as badly, we hope, as a soccer crowd invading the pitch, but at least like a little boy jumping with excite- ment to throw the ball back to the crick- eters. For example, it was more important to say how brilliantly Richard Mabey deals with Coleridge and Clare as well as Keats, how well he quotes Hazlitt, how carefully he lays down a Dryden adaptation of a 15th-century original which will be useful later. I am only not sure how the nightin- gale entered 'the maudlin associations of pastoral poetry', since Virgil's Philomela in the Eclogues is the swallow, and Theocritus had no influence in English until too late. It is an odd fact that there are no song- birds at all in the Eclogues except for moaning doves and a croaking raven: maybe it was the nightingale Philomela who rather queerly sits in a poplar tree in the Georgics lamenting that got transferred to pastoral poetry? Mabey is strong on sci- entific observation, and severe on 'gushing amateurs', but I should like to hear his view of that strange and very beautiful passage in the Georgics, since Virgil was undoubt- edly an amateur, and the nightingale also gushes. His book reminded me of the absurdly neglected first book of Oliver Bernard, and a poem that has haunted me for 30 years. 'A nightingale the other night taught me a complex stanza form .
Alas, the perfect call and the surround- ing silence, which a nightingale singing by day is still able to create in the woods as if it were midnight, do not teach a stanza form, though if they did it would certainly be complex. The bird's voice is an example of the difficulty of writing about natura nat- urata. To be any good you must find some- thing else to talk about, no matter what: a quest, a self-portrait, observations of a world or a place; but undiluted natural his- tory swiftly becomes boring or too techni- cal. Richard Mabey in this highly specific, slightly crotchety, wonderfully warm book has hit the target in the centre. You could write a travel book about the great auk or the two-ton sloth as Bruce Chatwin did without ever meeting one, you could track a rare swan to its Arctic pools, or if you were a genius discourse on the robin and the wren in your own garden, but the nightingale has everything: it is rare, exotic, shy and queer enough to make compelling reading. I cannot remember liking a book about nature as much as this for a number of years.
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