Creatures from the vasty deep
Peter Levi
WHALE NATION by Jasper Heathcote Williams
Cape, £15, £8.95, pp. 191
Whales are powerful and subtle crea- tures, the thought of them gives pleasure, and the Inuit are quite right to say one should be worthy of the death of the whale that feeds one. They are also sexual symbols of alarming force: just the subject- matter for someone like Ted Hughes. But the old sage has gone out of his mind about this whale poem, which is by a little known writer called Heathcote Williams, who is crazy about whales, with heavy hints of Greenpeace, Save the Whale, hatred of expanding economies and so on. Hughes calls this long whale poem by Williams 'overwhelming . . . brilliant, cunning, dramatic and wonderfully moving, a steady accumulation of grandeur and dreadful- ness'.
The trouble is that Heathcote Williams is not really writing poetry at all. Here and there he touches the strings, so to speak, but mostly he writes in heightened prose, chopped into poetic-looking lengths, so that the result is monotonous and hysteric- al. It is a sad and, I fear, a revealing fact that Ted Hughes should take this tone to be poetry. The work is best read as if it were by Ginsberg, but it lacks the inner rhythmic vitality of Ginsberg's verse. The lines lie still on the page as if they wanted an essential component.
Like Buddhists, They are not compulsive eaters.
They can go for eight months without food; And they do not work to eat.
They play to eat.
As a style of rhetoric, these lines may owe something to James Agee's book of 'poems' and photographs of the American poor. If you were carried away by the subject matter, the awful poetic prose plucked at the heartstrings; if not, it was indigestible. The same seems to be hap- pening here. The American rights sold for a hundred thousand dollars and transla- tions are appearing in at least five lan- guages this year. The pictures are lavishly supplied from a variety of sources. The greatest whale photographer of all is not present though. He is called Eliot Porter; he fell through the Arctic ice when he was over 70, photographing a leaping whale, but he survived, and he got his photo- graph.
Still, thousands or millions of readers likF the National Geographic Magazine, add they will probably like this book. A few of the pictures and a lot of the facts are spectacular.
After dinner, music: Ethereal music, that carries for miles, A siren's song, Leading sailors to believe As the sounds infiltrated through the wooden hull, That their vessels were haunted By spirits of the deep.
I am quite ready to believe this is true, or might be true, but it seems odd enough to warrant the citation of evidence. Yet that would mean a different kind of book altogether. In general, the argument of the verses is true enough, though somewhat twisted, as one might expect, against civi- lisation and in favour of sea-creatures. It lasts a hundred pages, most of which is photography. We are then offered nearly another hundred of quotations about the whale, not unlike the quotations in Bruce Chatwin's Songlines, but more dispersed in their effect. Some are gruesome. There was a fashion for making golf-bags from the skin of a whale's penis, which is six to eight feet long. I can add to this that Niarchos, or was it Onassis, had the bar-stools on his yacht covered with the scrotal skin of whales. This book says their balls hold seven gallons each, so we have the small comfort that not every bar-stool indicates another whale massacred.
There is no doubt about the injustice and devastation inflicted on whales in the last 200 years. Within 27 years of the discovery of Alaska, the last seaweed-grazing sea- cow was clubbed to death there. Even in the 50 years or so before 1720, the Dutch alone took about 33,000 whales, a catch then worth 30 million pounds. Between 1909 and 1935, 328,177 blue whales were slaughtered in the Antarctic: a single blue whale weighs about 90 tons. The Japanese are particularly big whale-consumers at present and the Russian whale-kill is sold to Japan for the ready money that Russia needs. So one has to be on the side of this book, awful as it is. If it were written austerely in prose I would be applauding it, but as things are it is a propaganda exercise for school-children. No bad thing that children should learn about whales, but I would prefer that they should be taught to distinguish between poetry and captions for photographs, and between poetry and propaganda. For £15 you could buy much better books.
Edward Lear: the Corfu years, edited by Philip Sherrard, published by Denise Har- vey and Co., costs f21 not f40 as we said last week.
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