The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

THE links between man and his prehuman ancestors which Charles Darwin described nearly a hundred years ago in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals probably offended more people than did his Origin of Species. The Victorians reacted in two ways to the resemblances which Darwin specified: those of nonscientific bent made the mistake of reasoning that animals must think as we do and ought to have the same moral standards, while the biologists backed away with an ever-deepening distrust for anthropomorphism — the attributing of human emotions to animals. Only recently have we come to realize that the point is not that the animals are like us, but that we are like them. Indeed, the whole process of evolution is denied if we assume that human beings suddenly acquired traits that were not foreshadowed in prehuman species.

Each of us has stored away in memory actual happenings which remind us of the family link between the animal world and our own. There is no doubt that dogs grin at us in welcome and that they enjoy teasing us when in a playful mood. Mickey, my black cocker spaniel, who lived to the great age of seventeen, used to tease my daughter, Sara, repeatedly about her dollhouse. The open rooms were of just the right height for his inspection, and the inmates, miniature dolls known as Mr, and Mrs. Brewster, were to his taste. He would stand gazing into their living room until he was sure that Sara was watching him; then with a quick dart he would seize one of the dolls and be off on a mad dash through the apartment, with much screaming until he was cornered by Sara or my wife. Mickey himself was teased to the point of fury by the gray squirrels who inhabited our old apple tree at West Manchester. They knew to an inch just how much yardage to allow in the backyard when he was stalking; and when he was sleeping on the sun-warmed porch, I have watched while one of the squirrels stole out on a limb and nipped off a hard green apple, which landed with a thump a whisker from Mickey’s nose. I treasure such natural comedy. I remember the two lambs which I saw chasing a rabbit for dear life in and out of a great flock on the Welsh downs. Or Pete, the chimpanzee, sucking up a great mouthful of water which he blasted at Fairfield Osborn, the director of the Bronx Zoological Garden; the glass wall saved all of us from a wetting, but Pete was having his fun just the same. And who that has ever seen them can forget the porpoises in Marineland or doubt their love for play!

SALLY CARRIGHAR is one of the new breed of ethologists — that is to say, scientists who since the 1920s have been making a study of animals’ normal behavior. In 1944 she broke into the limelight with her first book, One Day on Beetle Rock, which was centered in the High Sierras; two years later came One Day at Teton Marsh, which told of her observation in the Jackson Hole Country. During the fifties she lived in Alaska, a wonderful laboratory for an ethologist, whence came her Icebound Summer and Moonlight at Midday. Now, in WILD HERITAGE (Houghton Mifflin, $5.95), Miss Carrighar has coordinated her own research with the findings of other modern biologists, while making an arresting and vivid survey of the habits and the tendencies of animals in those four fields that we share so notably with them: parenthood, sex, aggressiveness, and play, implying but never preaching about the similarity between our human and their subhuman natures. Her book is delightfully written, packed with episodes one pauses to enjoy for a second time, and well illustrated by Rachel S. Horne. The study of animals has come a long way since Darwin, but not until our time have they been written about with such beauty and perception.

The chapter on sex, an abridgment of which appeared in the Atlantic, is the most fascinating and provocative portion of Wild Heritage, and here, as throughout her text, Miss Carrighar supplements her own findings with the absorbing testimony she has garnered from other behaviorists. Thus the ballet and pursuit of the pronghorn antelopes, which she herself has observed in northwestern Wyoming, is shortly followed by the graphic description of the mating habits of monkeys, in which she is quoting C. R. Carpenter, who spent hundreds of hours observing twenty-one gibbon families in Thailand, Robert H. Yerkes, who spent a lifetime studying chimpanzees in captivity, and George B. Schaller, who lived in peaceful observation of several groups of enormous gorillas in Africa. The passages she selects are not only colorful; they tend to corroborate a central line of reasoning, as, for example, in the chapter where she shows the remarkable and instinctive obedience with which most species mate at the moment most propitious for healthy offspring.

Threaded together through page after page are stories as amusing as that of the pack rats who stole three twenty-dollar gold pieces and his gold-rimmed spectacles from the hat of Professor W. F. Dean while he was sleeping in his camp in Sequoia National Park, leaving in their stead a round ball of horse dung. She tells of overcrowding and of how the sea otters took up their habitat in the open ocean rather than endure human aggression ashore; she tells of the restraint when food is scant, and quotes Dr. Adolph Murie’s account of how first a wolverine, then a wolf, then a red fox took turns with the same carcass; she writes about the lemmings and of those who feed on them, and with affection describes her own captive colony of lemmings which she studied in north Alaska. She tells of flying squirrels gliding around in the autumn moonlight, as many as two hundred, which Audubon saw swooping back and forth through the tops of an oak forest; she tells of the black whales which she and a Coast Guard officer saw leaping clear out of water during a summer midnight up near the Arctic Circle, some with almost no splash, others coming down in a great belly flop; she tells us that nightingales do not sing to stake out their territory as was once thought: they sing to females, they sing on migration, and some of the females sing “simply to give themselves expression.” There must be an element of speculation in some of this, but it pleases me to believe.

HECTOR BOLITHO’S portrait of ALBERT, PRINCE CONSORT (Bobbs-Merrill, $5.95) is surprising in the warmth of the admiration and in the fresh light that it throws upon the Prince’s conquest of Queen Victoria and her political advisers. That he made the Queen rapturously happy (her nature being more passionate than his), that he lived in the white glare of royalty with exemplary dedication, and that he bore down upon his eldest son, Bertie (Edward VII), with severe and sometimes petulant discipline is common knowledge. What is not so well known is the skill with which he tidied up Windsor Castle with its centuries of memorabilia, the sensitive appreciation with which he drew scientists, musicians, and artists to Court, his liberality toward Labor, the reasonableness with which he moderated the Queen’s imperious will, and the deep affection which he bore for his elder brother, the amorous Prince Ernest, and for his own eldest daughter, Victoria, who was to be the mother of the Kaiser.

“The Prince Consort,” writes Mr. Bolitho, “was — strange among princes — both an intellectual and an artist.” As a student he collected DÜrer and Van Dyck drawings, loved music, was happy among scholars, and had little liking for the hunt. He early attracted the two older advisers, Stockmar and Prince Leopold, who guided him to maturity, and as the son of rather licentious parents, he developed a cool, almost puritanical compulsion for morality. His intellectualism did not make him easy company for the hard-riding English aristocracy. To show that he could, in the fall of 1843 he hunted with the Belvoir and “rode so boldly” that his critics were momentarily hushed. Then, as he wrote his brother, “I fell into a ditch near the railway station at Slough,” and the faultfinding was resumed.

When she married him, Victoria was determined to have her own way; she did not share her political decisions with Albert, and the contents of the sacred red boxes were kept from his eyes. But as she fell more deeply in love, she came to realize that his judgment was better than hers, and so did her Prime Ministers. Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell each came to respect and to confide in Albert, and they loaded upon him the minutiae of government as well as the more formal but taxing negotiations with a deceitful head of state like Napoleon III. Albert’s failing health and his worry over political affairs he confided to his daughter in Prussia, but the Queen seemed unaware until he had reached the point of no return.

Mr. Bolitho, when he first wrote about Albert in 1932, had been given access to the Prince’s letters to his brother covering the whole of his twenty-two years in England; working at Windsor he had access to the Queen’s journal and to her three surviving children. His book incorporates much new material; it is lively but concise, intimate in its interior account of Windsor and Balmoral, and wise in its discretion.

THE GULL REEF CLUB

In his new novel, DON’T STOP TIIE CARNIVAL (Doubleday, $4.95), HERMAN WOUK has applied his assorted talents to an area that is very much on the make, the island resorts in the Caribbean. The story begins at the Gull Reef Club, which is up for sale and is being inspected by Norman Paperman, a Broadway press agent who has suffered a heart attack and who is looking for a place where he can invest his savings and take things easy. With him is his adviser, the coarse, shrewd operator Lester Atlas, who has “the physique of a debauched gorilla” and who is here to appraise the property. It occurs to Paperman that they may be the first Jews the club has admitted.

In his noisy, repulsive way, the operator tapes the joint and tells Paperman that what he will be selling is “sleep,” and that with the addition of a dozen bedrooms, he can’t fail to clear twenty-five grand a year. When the sale has been consummated, the white habitués and the colored natives of Kinja double-cross, baffle, and exasperate the new owner, ably assisted by nature. Water gives out: there is an earthquake that shatters the cistern; the help is a problem, especially when black Sheila, the cook, and her Hippolyte infuriate Atlas — indeed, this is not the haven which the ineffectual little New Yorker had pictured for himself. Some consolation is waiting for him in the person of Iris Tramm, a onetime actress whom he had much admired back in the thirties, but he has passed the age when that kind of bed comfort is enough. The question is, Can the poor guy get the Gull Reef Club off his back before he has another heart attack/

This is a clever novel. The characters are well observed, the women in particular: Sheila, the cook, Mrs. Ball, the former owner of the club, Iris, the siren, and Henny, Paperman’s wife, an ex-secretary from Manhattan. The men are diverse, each momentarily plausible: Church Wagner, the sex addict. Bob Cohn, the frogman, the Negro Governor Sanders, the theatrical crowd from New York — they come and go, with Paperman the only one to enlist even halfhearted sympathy. If the author doesn’t care, why should we? The book is not nearly so amusing as Noel Coward’s novel Pomp and Circumstance, also about an island in the Caribbean, partly because Mr. Wouk lacks Coward’s superb sense of humor, and partly because he is so much more windy in achieving his effects.