The Peripatetic Reviewer

THE water was high when we reached the Northwest Miramichi this year, so high and powerful that only the veteran salmon were able to take the falls to the upper pools. In the pools of the lower camp those fighting freshmen, the grilse, and the sea trout lay in clusters waiting for the headwaters to subside. If the fishing was good, so were the flies; black flies, moose flies, mosquitoes, gnats, and their smaller cousins they were all there waiting to smile upon the moist and excited fishermen. But with a judicious mixture of DDT and Flit in a Flit gun, we sprayed our hat brims, bandannas, shirt sleeves, and trouser legs to gain about eighty minutes’ immunity for each third of the day. It was like fishing with an aureole, the bugs hoxering but not daring to alight until, after an hour or so, your esprit de corps began to disperse your immunity. Then look out for the back of your neck!

Trees are an indivisible part of any stream, and the trees in New Brunswick need a doctor. The black spruce suffered sexerely from the blight of the 1920’s. Two years ago the white birch were attacked and today, in the north country I know, not one of them survives. The flickering heartshaped leaves that caught the sun and wind are gone; against the dark green conifers stand the white skeletons ready to topple under the snows of winter. Nothing so graceful will fill the void in my time. Perhaps nothing will fill it. The guides were fearful that the Canadian white pines were next on the firing line. The borers were at them. If this is to be the fate of the north woods — so far, one would have thought, beyond the reach of infection what glimmering chance is there for the vulnerable shade trees of our suburban towns?

I am thinking of the American elm, the most characteristic tree of the New England communities. I have come to love the elms of Chestnut Street, Salem, and of High Street, Newburyport; of Williamstown and Rowley and the Harvard Yard; the elms of Manchester, Vermont, and of the Ipswich Green. It is touch and go if we can save them: if we do, it will be thanks to our foresters, to DDT, and least of all to our unvigilant citizens.

The Dutch elm disease was first observed in the Netherlands; since 1919 it has killed literally thousands of the great elms in Europe. The disease is carried by the bark beetles that invade weakened or damaged elms, feeding in the bark of small branches commonly in crotches. The young beetles develop from the egg stage in the dying tree, and when aided by a favorable wind they have been known to carry the infected fungus at least two miles. Stop the beetle and you stop the spread of the disease. For this, DDT, while not infallible, is the best weapon at hand. Naturally, you do away with every infected elm regardless of its age or former beauty. For too many towns this has been a desperate remedy.

Ask the residents of Boydon Road, Columbus, Ohio, who have stumps instead of elms the length of their once shaded street.. (Ohio xvas our first state hit, and in 1990.) Ask the citizens of northern New Jersey what substitute they have found. Ask the Connecticut Yankees who spent their entire park appropriation last year just to remove the dead trees from their toxvns. Or if you are complacent and don’t feel that this is your light, just sit back for another decade and then ask yourself how it looks to be without the elm.

To date, the hark beetle has been winning. He invaded Massachusetts in 1941 when the disease was first spotted in the Berkshires. One tree was lost that year. In six years the disease has spread to forty-eight cities and towns, including Plymouth, Quincy, Hingham, and Milton. Last year we lost 296 superb trees, and this year the killing is nearly twice as fast. Now the cry goes up from Providence. But why worry? We can always put up new billboards. It’s a good year for baseball. We never had more to spend on the horses. In beauty parlors alone we spent 541 millions last year. Eight and a half billions on liquor. But contribute ¹ a five-spot to save the elms? Don’t be silly.

I sometimes wonder if we deserve the country we’ve got.

Three years ago, spurred by the example of Leslie P. Thompson, I began to keep a fishing diary. My first concern was to note the size and species of the monsters brought to my net, but as my interest deepened I began to make note of the lime and the climatic conditions, and if I was after sea fish, of the tide; I tried to calculate the underwater architecture. There is in all of us an impulse to take note of what we love best in nature, but unless impulse teams up with habit, nothing gets written.

John Kieran’s Footnotes on Nature is a book of the seasons, enriched by recollection, of a city dweller who refreshes his spirit by walking and by bird-watching in the woods and fields of New York and New England. Most of us have come to know Mr. Kieran as that delightfully human encyclopedia on “Information Please.” In this pleasantly confiding book he shows us the origin and orderliness of his knowledge. When he was eleven his father bought a forty-acre farm in Dutchess County, New York; there, during ihe long summer vacations, young John acquired his early knowledge of trees and birds, the wild flowers and the streams, and there as a young schoolteacher (to me a significant admission) his antenna reached out for a closer and closer observation. The “want to know” was natural in live boy as it was persistent in the man; and being blessed with clear eyes and a fine memory, Mr. Kieran has been able to gratify his insatiable curiosity about our flora and fauna. Often in the company of a friendly quartet, the Dramatic Critic (Brooks Atkinson), the Artist, Herman the Magician (“He loves to catch fish, eat fish and talk about fish”), and the Astronomer, he has walked down the years on the shores of Long Island Sound and the Hudson enjoying the experiences and making the notes which compose this book. When his duties as a sports writer took him afield, as to that hottest of all baseball towns, St. Louis, he would spend the morning wandering through Forest Park, and the afternoon writing about the sweating Cardinals.

Birds have been the primary object of his search and he has the collector’s passion for listing each day’s finds as he spots them through the glasses. There are passages when I wished that he might have paused to tell us more about the individual within the plumage, but any real threat of tedium is interrupted by the episodes, the gregarious quotations, and the flash-backs of boyhood which flow so easily from his rich and eager mind.

Seafarers who learned to sail long before motors were invented are today men who have had no less than sixty years’ experience on salt water. The Atlantic has been fortunate in having two such among its contributors this past decade: Bill Adams, an Englishman trained in sail who finally came ashore in California, and Llewellyn Howland, who learned the discipline of the sea in New Bedford and on the Cape. Mr. Howland is conservative as all good “sailors” are. His book Sou’t West and By West of Cape Cod is endowed with the tradition, the taste, and the resourcefulness which were all part of his seagoing education. He early learned the creed that there is a right way and a wrong way of doing things on shipboard, and this he learned from a ripe and active elder of New Bedford whom he calls the Skipper and who is the magnetic central figure in this delightful collection of tales. The Skipper’s memory carries us back to the early 1800’s; and man and boy, the emphasis of their experience falls on the hardihood, the taut discipline, the formality ashore, and the sudden sweet rewards of the sailor’s life.

Mr. Howland’s prose is tasty enough to make the mouth water, as in his memorable description of a Clambake (it ought to be memorized by those on the coast) or in his stories of Journey Cakes and Thumblings — those small codfish croquettes about the size of a big man’s thumb. (Did I say “codfish “? I meant “a batter of mashed potato, shredded salt codfish, a mere trace of garlic, and cream — all whipped into a consistency. . . .”) He can make you feel the ruthless cruelty of the sea and ice as in “Sim,” the most powerful story in the volume: make you share the glory that was Trafalgar; make you appreciate the skill and beauty of the terns as in “Wind and Wings,” and remember the timeless delight of an old-fashioned Christmas as in “Holly Days.” One emerges from this book with the realization that the “right way” is not only the safest, but the most rewarding.

The Harder They Fall is the story of an American heavyweight and of how he got his. In it Budd Schulberg gives us an ugly, intimate piolure of the boxing fraternity, of the professional gamblers who control the racket, of the punch-drunk boxers who are fixed, and of the bums, lushes, and grifters who add color and corruption to a hard business. It is the story of an oxlike peasant from Argentina who was built up to be “The Man Mountain of the Andes” and then betrayed; and incidentally it is the story of the American fans and of their mass talent for self-hypnosis. “Sure, the game is crooked, but that was a good fight.”

The story comes to us through ihe honest, disillusioned gaze of Eddie Lewis, a Princetonian no longer young, who for ten years had been meaning to finish his play about the ring and who meantime was writing well-paid publicity for Nick Latka, the gambler. We see Toro Molina, the gentle bewildered giant, led into Nick’s stable and his contract sold and divided; we see Danny, the old Trish trainer, and George Blount, the good Negro veteran, try to instill some fight in him; we see Ruby, Nick’s wife, cut the locks of Samson; we watch the buildup on the West Coast and the excitement which reaches back to Broadway after the sixih phony knockout; and knowing what happened to Firpo and Camera, we can guess the end though not the full measure of the degradation and dignity with which Molina goes down.

Not since Hemingway’s “Fifty Grand ” has there been a story so idiomatic, so physically cruel, so underscored with the disgust of the corrupted. The atmosphere at Stillman’s gym, the Sunday luncheon at Nick’s country place, Barney Winch playing gin rummy, the sparring of George Blount — these are descriptions or bits of low comedy incomparably well done. I cannot question the tough reality of the episodes—not even the corny scenes with Shirley, a boxer’s widow, who would probably be even cornier in real life. But I do wonder whether ihere is enough change of pace and enough high relief in the book to keep ihe reader coming. Even Eddie’s affair with Beth, the Smith graduate, is dragged down to the low level of Nick’s society, and that level is so low that as the story progresses, disgust begins to take the place of pity: disgust with Molina’s stupidity, with Eddie’s futility, and with the rapacily of Nick’s ruthless success.