The Peripatetic Reviewer

THE change from green to brown comes with such dismaying swiftness in the New England summer. One minute we are rejoicing in the tender unfolding foliage and the fresh turf of late May, and then, almost before we have adjusted our wardrobe and chemistry to the summer’s heat, the brown patches begin to appear in the Public Garden and on golf links. Sprinklers take up their losing battle on the lawns. The hay comes in from the buff-colored pastures, and the leaves on elm and oak have a sundrenched, dusty look.

In the North country from which I have just returned, there was a more sinister change from green to brown in the work of the budworm which ravages the spring growth of the balsam-fir and spruce, and which by now has infested more than five thousand square miles of forest in New Brunswick. As many as a quarter of a million budworms may be found on one tree, and under such an attack that tree will probably be dead in four years.

This is an old story. Less than half a century ago, the budworm ate his way through the New Brunswick forest as he is threatening to do today. The lumbermen cut as much as they could save, but in the past t he budworm could only destroy himself by destroying the forest on which he fed. So the trees came down, the pools in the great salmon rivers were denuded, and until the new growth had taken hold, the runoff was so fast that many a river was shriveled by early summer.

In the summer of 1951, the alarm was sounded by Dr. R. E. Balch, head of the Dominion Entomological Laboratory at Fredericton; he said that if the epidemic ran its normal course, there would be widespread tree mortality throughout the balsamspruce forests of the Upsalquitch watershed in northern New Brunswick. He also warned that there was no telling how far the contagion would spread. His words fired the initiative of Barney Flieger, forester, artist, and a moving spirit in the Canadian International Paper Company, and in September the decision was taken to prepare Operation Budworm lor the spring of ‘52. A sixty-acre airstrip was bulldozed out of the solid bush on a high plateau deep in the infected forest, and Budworm City, a town for a hundred and fifty men, was built and chinked before the heavy snows. When the woods roads were frozen into hard, solid highways of snow and ice, supplies including more than forty-five hundred drums of special DDT spray and gasoline flowed in. In May the forest entomologists arrived, and on May 29 came twenty-one planes with souped-up engines and underbelly tanks, many of them flown from the Pacific coast — flown by combat veterans, ex-barnstormers, racers, and carnival stunters; cool, experienced pilots w ho could be trusted to spray at fifty feet above treetop level.

The budworm is most vulnerable in the first three weeks of June, when it is in the pupa stage. On June 13, the entomologists reported that the insects were ready for it, and the next day fortunately provided almost perfect conditions for spraying — clear, dry, with no wind drift. The planes worked mostly in tandem, cutting their white swaths just above the tips of the conifers. In this first spring there were only thirty hours when conditions were right, but ground crews and air crews crowded three thousand landings and take-offs into this time. It took exactly three minutes to refuel and refill the spray tanks of these light planes.

The pilots drew by lot for their areas; and by late August, when the final reports were in, Dr. Balch concluded that 99.8 per cent of the budworms in the sprayed plots were killed.

This year four of the big pulp and paper companies combined forces with the Province of New Brunswick and the Dominion in a nonprofit corporation, Forest Protection Limited. Six airstrips were built, seventy-seven planes went into the spraying, and one and a half million acres were covered. I saw it in operation, and like many others in the fight I kept wondering about the long-term results.

I wondered what the effect would be on the fish. Conservationists believe that the effect on the wild life is negligible and that the only fish damaged were the trout in some stocked lakes with screened outlets. Yet on the Tobique where I fished while the planes were overhead, the suckers were dying along the shore by the thousands. This was good riddance though it might also be ominous; our guides comforted us by pointing out that the parr, the small salmon, were bouncing with energy, and that the trout, who are surface feeders, were taking the flies we had intended for salmon.

I kept wondering about the fish and about the birds, and, of course, most of all about the trees. The old trees with their wider spread are more effectively drenched by the spray; the young trees are more resistant. It was a shock to see literally millions of bud worms dripping down on shining silk threads as the poison struck home. Only then did you appreciate their multitude and their virulence.

It is the aim of the sprayers to tide the trees over until the new foliage is protected. But the brown moth which the budworm hatches is a traveling Typhoid Mary, and thus far no spray has been effective in giving immunity to soon-tobe-infested areas, nor are the moths themselves susceptible to the DDT shots. So this might be a long battle on a gigantic front. To those of us who love a particular stream, as I love the Northwest Miramichi, this fight lakes on a personal meaning. For to save the trees is to save the river as it is — to save it for the birds, for the salmon who cannot travel up a stream reduced to bedroc k, and incidentally to save it for the angler.

Alan Paton, the author of Cry, the Beloved Country, speaks with the voice and the conscience of the divided peoples in South Africa today. He was forty-throe when he began his first novel; for eleven years he had been principal of a reformatory for colored boys near Johannesburg where he had educated his staff and the 650 young African inmates to a system of graduated freedom. He and his wife became members of the Torch Commando, and for the year past they have been working with a community of colored tubercular patients. Out of such experience and sympathy have come his two books and his election as a vice president of the new Liberal Party in the Union.

Too Late the Phalarope (Scribner’s, $3.50) is a novel in the Dutch tradition, a warmly lit, homely portrait of the van Vlaanderen family, Afrikaners, outwardly so stern, proud, and pious, yet inwardly at war with themselves. Their household is ruled by the patriarch, six foot three, with heavy-lidded eyes and lame leg, uncompromising (hating everything English and Smuts because he was reconciled), reading only the Bible, and a Boer to the bone. His favorite son, Pieter, a man of equal strength, is an Afrikaner of today. To his father’s disgust he fought with, not against, the English and was decorated. Now a police official and star athlete, he is idolized by black and white alike and baffling only to the old man. For Pieter is a man of two characters; his grave coldness he has inherited from his father, his tenderness and suppressed laughter from his mother. It is his tragedy that Nella, Pieter’s little country wife, cannot give him what he wants. She can rouse but not requite his passion. So he begins to shut himself off, and the black mood so easily provoked by his father makes him more vulnerable than even his diary acknowledges to the temptations of the flesh. All this is seen and recorded by Tante Sophie, the maiden aunt, a second mother to Pieter, whose love would save him if only she could break through his reserve. She tells us that this is to be a tale of destruction: we know from the first time he comes in close touch with the girl Stephanie that the color taboo will be broken.

Pieter’s fate is as inescapable as Macbeth’s, and it is Mr. Pa ton’s skill to show us, in scenes like the first preaching of the young dominee, the formal jollity of the father’s birthday party, the heartrending talk between Pieter and his most accessible friend, kappie, why the golden lad was goaded to the point of desperation — all this in a prose that is Biblical in rhythm and clarity and intuitive in its discernment of human motives.

Summer is t he t ime for dip reading; and this year the book I have had the most pleasure dipping, or rather swimming in, is a charming and unpretentious volume from England, Period Piece, “A Cambridge Childhood,” by Gwen Raverat (Norton, $3.75). Gwen’s mother, Maud Du Puy, came from Philadelphia to spend the summer of 1883 in Cambridge, England, with her aunt, Mrs. Jebb. Maud was twenty-two, tall, w it h dark blue eyes and a lovely complexion, and it wasn’t long before she was being courted by the more eligible Fellows in that sleepy, beautiful university town. The one she chose was George Darwin, son of the great Charles, a frail scholar, sixteen years her elder, to whom she brought health, happiness, and four children. Gwen was the oldest, and her memoir is the affectionate, high-spirited account of life as it was lived in the Darwin circle, in Grandmother’s old house in Kensington Square, and in Down House in Kent. But Cambridge was the Darwin capital, and Gwen with her brothers and sister was brought up in Newnham Grange, a sprawling eighteenth-century house a branch of the Cam, from whose bay windows one saw the Millpool and Queens’ College.

“This is a circular book,” she writes. “It does not begin at the beginning and go on to the end; it is all going on at the same time, sticking out like the spokes of a wheel from the hub, which is me.”Her drawings, her delicious wit and judgment, give every incentive for turning these pages. For though she writes as one who has survived the Blitz, seen servants disappear, and is soon to be seventy, she also writes as a girl in springtime, brimming with zest and alive to the idiosyncrasies of such dear people as Aunt Etty, who made a cult of ill health and who used to order dinner in bed in her patent anti-cold mask (“an ordinary wire kitchen-strainer, stuffed with antiseptic cottonwool, and tied on like a snout, with elastic over her ears”). The Darwins all held strong views on religion, and it was Aunt Etty who burst into Gwen’s bedroom one night to exclaim without preamble, “I could swallow the Pope of Rome, but what I can not swallow is the Celibacy of the Clergy.”

Gwen’s memory is as true as her ear, and her phrases are turned with a twist of humor which preserves the imperishable Victorian character. She speaks of the Sunday picnics on the Cam when their boat passed through the pools where the undergraduates were bathing in the altogether, and where the ladies of the party hid their faces in their parasols, but not Gwen. She speaks of Uncle Richard, worth a chapter in himself, who “indulged in a special kind of intellect ual sandwich, by reading certain passages of Greek plays, while listening to certain pieces of music.” She is constantly comparing the now with the then, and not always to the advantage of the Golden Age. She tells us that she remembers very well the smell of the Cam, for all the sewerage went into the river, and how Queen Victoria, while being shown over Trinity by the Master, asked as she looked down from the bridge. “What are all those pieces of paper floating down the river?” To which Dr. Whewell, with great presence of mind, replied, “Those, ma’am, are notices that bathing is forbidden.”Punch calls this enchanting family memoir a classic, and I really think it is.

Another book which I have enjoyed piecemeal is America Rebels, “Narratives of the Patriots,” edited by Richard M. Dorson (Pantheon, $.5.00). This is certainly the best selection we shall have from the eyewitnesses and participants in the American Revolution. Some of the veterans set down their memories as a monument for their grandchildren; others, like those who had been long captive, because they were hard up and needed money; others because they were caught in t he thick of it, like Jonas Clark who, having seen what took place at Lexington and Concord, preached a sermon to commemorate the murder and bloodshed on the anniversary in 1776. My special favorites are these: Ethan Allen and Thomas Dring for their description of what happened to American prisoners of war in England and in the Hell-ships in New York Harbor; Baroness von Riedesel for her spirited and captivating account of Burgoyne’s disaster at Saratoga; Albigence Waldo, the Connecticut surgeon, for his stark, sick impressions of Valley Forge; Nathaniel Fanning for his incomparable recollection of John Paul Jones and the Bonhomme Richard; Sally Wister for her flirtatious picture of General Smallwood’s headquarters; and James Thacher, the Barnstable physician whose diary of Yorktow n makes us see that momentous surrender in fresh light.