Nature Is Your Guide

            I’m reading a delightful little book by Harold Gatty called Nature Is Your Guide: How to Find Your Way on Land or Sea by Observing Nature (1958). Dover found that title unwieldy and retitled it Finding Your Way without Map or Compass. Neither title does justice to what Gatty gives us. He describes navigation by the Polynesians, the Arabs, and the Scandinavians using migratory routes of birds as guides—and sometimes the birds themselves, as in the land-finding bird releases described in Gilgamesh and Genesis—as well as observations of stars, the use of sea movements such as swells, and the construction of a pre-compass directional device called the pelorus, like a compass card without the needle, that could be oriented by the stars and used to steer a very accurate course over long distances.

            Gatty emphasizes observation more than its practical use in navigation. He praises the lifetime habit of seemingly aimless poking around and looking that turned Gilbert White into the prototype of the naturalist and Charles Darwin into the preeminent biological thinker of the nineteenth century. Baden-Powell and the whole scouting movement also come in for admiring notice. This section reminded me of Russell Hoban’s character Tom, who just looks around and messes around and eventually beats the professionals in Hoban’s delightful children’s classic, How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen (1974).

            When Gatty is describing all of the methods one can use to keep from traveling in circles when in the wild, he mentions a navigational trick long-distance flyers can use when their destination is on a natural line such as a river or coastline. The method is one of intentional error: purposely steering to one or the other side of the target far enough to overcome an error that might occur through wind, for example. Then, when the river or coast is reached, the flyer turns the other way along it and soon encounters the target. This reminded me of a harrowing experience Ernest Gann describes in Fate Is the Hunter (1961): he and a copilot were flying toward Corumbá in Brazil using a map with few details over jungle that had no landmarks anyway. They headed straight for the city, which is on the River Paraguay, knowing that winds could push them off course one way or the other. Short of fuel, they come upon the river, but see no town or airfield. Which way to turn? They have fuel enough to explore only one direction. They choose, for no particular reason, south, and they land safely at Corumbá. The episode illustrates Gann’s thesis, expressed in the book’s title, that only fate kept him from joining the 400 dead flyer friends to whom he dedicates the book; listing their names takes four pages at the beginning.

            Why didn’t Gann use the intentional error technique Gatty describes? Gatty was Wiley Post’s navigator in their 1931 round-the-world flight and used the technique to find an airfield on the Amur River in Siberia, where they needed to refuel. Gann’s flight was some years later. Wouldn’t he have known about the method? Or perhaps he did know about and used it, but thought the “which way?” narrative had more suspense and more of the fateful in it.

            Gatty’s book will tell you about the orienting power of shrubs and trees, hills and rivers in ordinary terrain, as well as how to read ocean swells and the color of the sea, finding direction from sand dunes in deserts, and a good deal more particular information. He has a detailed section on sea birds, especially the pelagic ones, complete with pictures. My favorite part of the book is its last chapters, devoted to what can be learned from the moon and the sun, as well as how to find your way around the night sky.   

Brave New World, finally

            I finally read Brave New World after resisting it for many years. I found a good deal of it dated, not surprisingly, but also jejune, although the latter reaction might have had something to do with Michael York’s reading with its audible chewing of the scenery. There’s too much whining and not enough of the humor I found in Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, and Point Counterpoint, all books that I loved and have reread.

Didion on the South

            A very quirky little book by Joan Didion, called South and West: From a Notebook (2017), is mostly about the South. Her “Notes on the South,” taken during a 1970 visit, reveal some strange impressions about the region, which she formed during a road trip starting in New Orleans, continuing along the Gulf Coast as far as Biloxi, up to Hattiesburg and Meridian, on to Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, back to Oxford, and then down the delta and back to New Orleans. “The idea was to start in New Orleans and from there we had no plan,” she writes about the trip she took with her husband John Gregory Dunne. Her general impression of the South might be summed up in her peculiar, repeated reaction to the light there: New Orleans “is dark…the atmosphere absorbs its own light, never reflects it but sucks it in until random objects glow with a morbid luminescence.” And on the Gulf Coast “the light is odd…light entirely absorbed by what it strikes.”

            New Orleans is preoccupied “with race, class, heritage, style, and the absence of style.” She does nail that feature the deep South shares with fundamentalists everywhere: “the solidarity engendered by outside disapproval.” And yet, she believes that the South, not California, is for America “the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.”

            But her method is to present in detail her observations of the backwardness, prejudice, ignorance, and squalor of each tiny gas station-cum-eating joint in rural Mississippi and Alabama where they stopped—and then to record interviews with the country-club set, which in this case includes Hodding Carter III. The method leaves out the whole huge middle, and she acknowledges it.

            In the very short “California Notes,” Didion uses an informal commission to observe and write about the 1976 Patty Hearst trial to ignore the trial and look at some of her own misapprehensions about her class and its tastes, which she absorbed growing up in California. Though she does not say it expressly, she must have realized that she could not look at Patty Hearst and her background with the objectivity she had once imagined she possessed. Her account of the trial was never written.

Election 2016

I am renaming Orozco's print, "Election 2016."

Like all right-thinking people, I conclude, when an election goes my way, that a good system is working as it should. When it doesn’t go my way, I bemoan a deranged system where the δημος, the mob, can be unduly influenced by a δημηγορος, a demagogue. In the case of the election of 2016, it was hardly any skill of a demagogue that did the trick. Anybody can see through that guy—unless you’re in love. Proust says more than once in In Search of Lost Time that the beloved is never a real person but always the imaginary creation of the lover. The electorate fell in love with a figure of their own imagining, a combination of wealth, celebrity, and take-me-back nostalgia, who was going to restore a past that meant different things to everyone who imagined that the promiser could bring it back. For one guy it meant a time when you didn’t have to have a college degree to get a good job. For another guy it was a time when everyone “knew his place.” For one woman it was a time when the faces all looked like hers. 

Suite Française

The last couple of years have begun for me with reading about the beginning of WWII. At the beginning of 2016 I read A. J. Liebling’s The Road Back to Paris about the fall of Paris (Liebling was there until a day or two before the Germans marched in) and the beginning of the war before the U. S. entered the European theater and the Germans began to be pushed back in North Africa.  At the beginning of this year I read Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, about Parisians fleeing the city just before the Germans marched in, and the people in provincial France coping with the occupation. These were two completed novels of a projected five that Némirovsky wrote in 1942, just before she was sent to Auschwitz, and which weren’t published until 2004. In the first novel, Storm in June, Némirovsky follows four groups of people as they attempt to get out of Paris and to what they hope is the safety of Nîmes, Tours, or Vichy. In the second novel, Dolce, she shows us the people in and around the village of Bussy: the local aristocracy, the families of the village, and the farmers, as they cope with German officers living in their houses. Némirovsky skewers the provincials and their stinginess, one farmer’s truculent, jealous and resentful nature, the haughtiness of the local aristocracy, and the minute hierarchical gradations among the bourgeoisie. She strikes me as owing more to Flaubert than to any Russian novelist. She delights in careful description, often, as in Flaubert, choosing the physical details that give insight into a venal, selfish, or weak character. Clarity and precise word choice, lyrical passages, but mostly lucid and simple storytelling characterize her writing. By 1942 Némirovsky had been a successful novelist for thirteen years and though writing in a tense and deteriorating situation, she got her adopted countrymen down on the page with grace and precision.