BY PHOEBE ADAMS
FARLEY MOWAT began as a biologist and has become, through refusal to be pigeonholed, amateur anthropologist among Canadian Indians and Eskimos, meteorologist, cartographer, historian of seagoing tugboats, friend of practicing and retired fishermen, owner and skipper of an antique schooner, and resident of Newfoundland. In the last capacity, he undertook to write a history of that place, beginning with a chapter on the arrival of the Norse, who, he complains, “ended up by pirating the entire book right out from under me — an act which is perfectly consistent with Viking character.” The result of this ghostly raid is WESTVIKING (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $8.95), an unorthodox but splendidly convincing reconstruction of the Norse explorations south and west from Greenland. The old saga accounts of these affairs are inconsistent, sometimes flatly contradicting each other, a fact which has caused much courteous academic wrangling about the respective ages and therefore authority of the various versions. Mr. Mowat, lacking antique Scandinavian (no doubt his hide will be nailed to the church door for this), has, so to speak, backtracked the problem from the Northern seas, which he knows, to the library, where he has obviously rummaged himself into a very considerable acquaintance. Out of personal experience of the persistence and reliability of oral sailing directions, Mr. Mowat assumes that where practical sailing directions survive in the sagas at all, they are basically accurate records of the original reports by men like Bjarni Herjolfsson and Thorfinn Karlsefni. Applying these sailing directions to the Greenland-Baffinland-Newfoundland coasts, taking into consideration currents, prevailing winds, and permanent geographical features, Mr. Mowat has pinned down the Norse routes and followed them to landings neatly checked out against climatic history, archaeological findings on Dorset Eskimos and Beothuk Indians, the shape of the countryside, and the nature of the harbors.
Westviking is altogether a formidable combination of historical investigation and practical knowledge, with every assumption backed by a long file of good reasons. The writing is brisk, clear (even on such abstruse matters as navigating instruments and rate of drift), and streaked with gingery humor, for the Vikings did not succeed in deflecting all Mr. Mowat’s attention from modern Newfoundland. “Up until a few years ago this haven was still called Tickle Cove Pond, while the tiny fishing community alongside the channel . . . was called Tickle Cove. Some doltish bureaucrat has recently decided that these names do not carry sufficient dignity, and so the settlement has been renamed Bellevue, while the pond has become Broad Lake. At the same time the name of the nearby hamlet of Famish Gut has been changed to Fair Haven. Being under no obligation to abet this stupidity, I will continue to use the original names.”
THE KING WHO SAVED HIMSELF FROM BEING SAVED (Lippincott, $2.95) is a sardonic pseudo-ballad by JOHN CIARDI, with drawings by Edward Gorey, all mischievously calculated to cheer readers who take an unenthusiastic view of promiscuous dogooding.
It is no justice to BRIAN MOORE’S THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM (Viking, $4.95) to discuss the theme, which is that overworked business of the muddleheaded Adolescent who Achieves Maturity in a Crisis. The notable thing about the novel is Mr. Moore’s skill in making the old tale new, the unpleasant characters irresistibly interesting, the dreary Belfast setting constantly surprising and amusing. It’s as much a tour de force as refloating a burst balloon, and a very readable book indeed.
FERNANDO KRAHN, whose cartoons enliven the supplement in this magazine, has published a collection of drawings called THE POSSIBLE WORLDS OF FERNANDO KRAHN (Dutton, $2.95). The possible worlds encompass cavemen with cudgels, and robots with rusty hinges, but in all these worlds the inhabitants struggle hopelessly and hilariously against art, love, time, fate, technology, and Murphy’s Law.
The Chumash tribe once inhabited the California coast between San Luis Obispo and Point Mugu, holding an irregular territory that reached, at some points, forty miles inland. They were peaceable, as Indians went, and the priests of the early Spanish missions Christianized large numbers of them with little trouble. Unfortunately, while prayers may have done the Chumash no harm, the European clothes and houses which the padres considered indispensable elements of conversion were distinctly lethal. The Chumash, in less than sixty years, were exterminated. They left behind fragments of elegant basketry, pipes, bowls, and cooking pots of sandstone or steatite, all of beautifully simple shape, and rock paintings scattered through the less accessible inland regions of their territory.
CAMPBELL GRANT of the Santa Barbara Museum has spent years locating and studying these paintings; his findings are presented in THE ROCK PAINTINGS OF THE CHUMASH (University of California Press, $10.00). Rough rock surfaces, erosion, irregular light, and unhandy location make photography of cave paintings a terrible business, and Mr. Grant, an artist himself, has followed the standard practice of copying the paintings instead of trying to reproduce them on film. The soft blur of rock painting is, naturally, lost by this method, but the brilliant color and the delicate, intricate, fanciful inventiveness of the designs survive very well. Strange little buglike figures romp across the plates, and spangles of dots, and designs that suggest the explosive disintegration of an internal-combustion engine. Mr. Grant makes no guess as to the meaning of the paintings beyond the assumption that the matter must have been important for the Chumash to have taken so much trouble with it. The text is informative without becoming oppressively scholarly, and arouses real regret that these Indians did not survive to explain their beguiling works.
FAMILY (Macmillan, $10.00) reinforces a lot of technically excellent photographs of cunning children and unaccountable adults, taken by Ken Heyman, with a discourse on elementary domestic anthropology by Margaret Mead. “As far back as our knowledge takes us, human beings have lived in families,” Miss Mead informs her readers, and while quotation out of context is admittedly a dirty trick, this sentence is truly a fair example of the astounding revelations to be found in this text.