BOOKS

In My Ark

By WILLIAM GOLDING

IaEntEmarlit walking in a steep Welsh valley and turning aside to see if the nuts were ripe. I,lifted a leaf and found it covered a red squirrel about the length of my thumb. He held a nut in Ilis forepaws, and in proportion it was much larger than a rugby football. We looked at each Other for perhaps half a minute in mutual astonishment; then he dropped the nut and left. I remember, off Cape Trafalgar, watching the d-YIPhios outspeeding us at twenty-eight knots. ; he sea was alive with them, leaping and turning rmn horizon to horizon. I remember watching nligrant starlings coming in over the downs, a

gossamer, a scarf, then a whole sky-concealing blanket and a tempest of song. They dropped on Part of Savernake forest and the bare trees seemed to be covered at once with an abundant

and noisy foliage. I remember these things as any than would; but I do not love squirrels or dol- Phins or starlings. I am glad they are there, more or less, but I do not dwell on them. Dogs bore me and I view our present national devotion to thC horSe with an indifference tempered by the ren, ection that it is a curious love of horses which raids them r . breaks them in. loads them with Aness, dumps a human weight on their backs -tiu sets them at the jumps of the Grand National the cross-country course of the Olympic siaMes. I can only suppose that a sufficiently Profound telepathic sense has discovered that the horses like it. I feel myself more attuned to a certain placid akFriculturalist. He received a command out of the Inue to build a boat. He was no boat-builder but ne did as he was told. Then. as if that were not enough. he was told - -though he was no zoologist efither- -

, to take two of every animal and give them

wre'ght space. He did not love animals. His heart , as in viticulture. The vine stays in one place and

roes not scream when you prune it. But,- adain, in,lie set to. When he ntade his farmer's landfall, hard

a. od fast aground on the top of a mountain, he tiurned the animals loose with an unrecorded but Anevitable relief, and neither he nor his descen- `diants took any further notice of them. He had . t one his duty. He was not asked to love them. ,(,) distinguish between the itsy-bitsy furry things. 'Pe cuddly-wuddlies, thc nasty creatures that re- 'use to be tamed and useful, or the splendid stlallions saying 'Ha! Ha! He merely ensured e continuance of the lot as far as he could. oecause he was told to out of the blue. They did not belong to him. They belonged to Adam; but Was ,as i , n Paradise. Adam was fougdonworthy in own them, as we might do well teMmember. _ I would preserve a dinosaur in my ark if I e_o,‘tlld, but not out of affection. Our manipulation I'_'t the world has grown explosive. Animals arc pital, but they are not ours. I do not know !Mose they are, nor whose we are, except that 7..e do not belong tO ourselves. Once in a way, I :_nle.11 purpose in the world and guess it may ;:clude not only Adam but also the delectable 1 Mb and the loathsome spider. So the positive love of animals has always amazed me. I had told myself that these lovers must be persons of superabundant affections, who, having exhausted the possibilities of loving their own species. have enough left for the brute creation. In fact I had supposed them Franciscan. It was only another proof, I thought, of my own inadequacy as a person that I should find a human family and friends and certain others to be more than sufficient objects for my own affec- tions. Dogs would find an arid space round my feet.

But now Gavin Maxwell has blown the gaff. In his latest book,* he confesses honestly that he prefers animals to human beings. He would be a willing Noah, passionately collecting his pairs, but regarding Shem, Ham and Japheth as little more than cage-cleaners or hands for working ship. This put me out of sympathy with his book, or at best made me read it as the record of an aberration which I would try to understand. And I was curious, because rumour 'of his otters had reached me from one source and another.

Let me say at once that The Ring of Bright Water is an excellent and most individual book. Only about half of it is concerned with otters; and Maxwell's deep involvement in their lives catches at the reader whether he is familiar with animals or not. One shares a passionate sorrow at the death of Mijbil even while finding it excessive: one is glad at the extraordinary chain of events which brought Edal to take Mijbil's place. But beyond that this reader, at any rate, cannot go. A man's bed seems a preposterous place for an otter; and Maxwell's positive servi- tude to an otter's comfort and safety is humiliat- ing in some curious way. It is the human obverse of that other unnatural world, the world of per- forming elephants and fleas, in which animals do grotesquely what they should never be asked to do at all. An otter bitch- if that is the right term—should be introduced to a dog otter and given the liberty of a river. They are,not, as Mr. C. S. Lewis would say, they are not `I-Inau.' They do not lie awake all night and weep for their sins; and perhaps they have the best of it. Let them be.

The book itself divides into halves. It is partly about otters and partly about a place; and when Gavin Maxwell occupies himself with the hills and the waterfall and beach of Camusfearna his book becomes engrossing and magnificent. His prose, overcharged at times, is nevertheless a fit vehicle for the individual nature of his seeing. Details are held and focused close to the eye in

a way which is at once poetic and childlike—

or perhaps the one because the other. He is a traveller who has made himself a permanent home, a place of return on the remote western shores of Scotland. There is only one cottage within miles. The sea and mountains, the seals and stags, the wild cats and mackerel are his more

* THE RING OF BRIGHT WATER. By Gayill,Maxwell.

(Longmans, 25s.)

immediate neighbours. What is so splendid about this book is the way in which he has actualised for us not only the bare bones of the place but its very atmosphere, the immediacy of a nature which today is only too seldom untouched. We understand how he lives as a man among real things, how he allows them their impact, strips the labels from them, does not confine them by preconceptions or dreary systems.

For the ring of bright water is many things. It is the astonishingly colourful stretch pf water inside the Hebrides; and then again it may be the pock and spreading circle where a fish has leapt or a heron stood. But more than this, it chimes with river Ocean which circled the known world, home, as the Gnostics thought, of myster- ious spirits and unfathomable secrets of creation. Maxwell has the great gift of intransigence in the face of popular belief. He recognises mystery and he values it, as any man must ,whose mind has not come to a full stop.

There is perpetual mystery and excitement in living on the seashore, which is in part a return to childhood and in part because for all of us the sea's edge remains the edge of' the unknown; the child sees the bright shells, the vivid weeds and red sea-anemones of the rock pools with wonder and with a child's eye for minutix; the adult who retains wonder brings to his gaze. - some partial knowledge which can but increase it, and he brings. too, the eye of association and of symbolism, so that at the edge of the ocean he Stands at the brink of his own unconscious.

We stand, then,-on the shore, not as our Vic- torian fathers stood, lassoing phenomena with Latin names, listing, docketing and systematising. Belsen and Hiroshima have gone some way to- wards teaching us humility. We would take help and a clue from anywhere we could. It is not the complete specimen for the collector's cabinet that excites us. It is the fragment, -the hint. For the universe has blown wide open, is a door from which man does not know whether blessing or menace will come. We pore, therefore, over the natural language of nature, the limy wormcasts in a shell, 'strange hieroglyphics that even in their simplest form may appear urgently significant, the symbols of some forgotten alphabet, the appearance of Hindoo temple carving, or of Rodin's Gates of Hell, precise in every riotous ramification.' We walk among the layers of dis- integrating coral, along the straggling line of 'brown sea-wrack, dizzy with jumping sand hoppers.' We stand among the flotsam, the odd shoes and tins, hot-water bottles and skulls of sheep or deer. We know nothing. We look daily at the appalling mystery of plain stuff. We stand where any upright food-gatherer has stood, on the edge of our own unconscious, and hope, perhaps, for the terror and excitement of the print of a single foot.