#254: TIMOTHY. Gilbert White was born in 1720; I assume he must have been one of those mythic babies born with their eyes fully open. The revolutions of the eighteenth century world raged on around him, but I don’t remember his ever referencing any of them. He led what we would probably miscall an uneventful life: born in Selborne, in Hampshire; educated at Oriel, and went from there to various curacies; returned to Selborne in 1758 and stayed there. By adolescence he had taken up the observation of the fauna and flora around him, and, in the manner of the day, corresponded with people that he as an amateur esteemed as true scientists. He gathered up these letters and published them as The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, in 1789; he had scarcely four more years to live.
In the History we can find a kind of primer of the observational methods of the natural sciences. He had not only a sharp eye, publishing the first known descriptions of the harvest mouse and the noctule bat: he was able to sort willow wrens into three separate species in part by hearing their songs. But what has instated the History as a literary as well as scientific classic—what has insured that it is still a book that is read, not just consulted—is the intimacy of White’s observation. He sees what is around him and it becomes, as well as comes out of, his life, recorded with the specific graces of eighteenth-century English prose. The History is informed throughout with an emotional as well as intellectual completeness, a sense of interconnection that has gained White the title of being the first ecologist. Here is one famous passage: “Earthworms, though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm. For, to say nothing of half the birds, and some quadrupeds, which are almost entirely supported by them, worms seem to be the great promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely without them.” In that perception, in those sentences we can hear the curate, the gentleman and the scientist. It was a remarkable, rarely repeated combination of gifts.
One of the most memorable creatures in White’s History and his journals—perhaps the most notable eighteenth-century British literary beast, to put with Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffry—is the tortoise Timothy, inherited by White from his aunt Rebecca Snooke in 1780. Timothy wanders in and out of White’s pages, digging in and vanishing for hibernation (“Timothy is buried we know not where in the laurel hedge.”), being carted off in a crate to Jack Burbey’s shop to be weighed, dining “voraciously” on coss lettuce, avoiding the July sun “under the shade of the vast, expanded leaves of the monk’s rhubarb.” In 1946 Sylvia Townsend Warner gathered the bits about Timothy and published them as The Portrait of a Tortoise. But Timothy’s true apotheosis came just recently (in 2006) with Verlyn Klinkenborg’s little wonder of a novel Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, in which Timothy narrates a life spent in the strange, cool clime of a Hampshire garden.
Irony, I suppose, is one way we deal with the unfamiliar or disconcerting. The humans in Klinkenborg’s novel address Timothy with a real but somewhat ironic affection, knowing him as alien; Timothy returns the favor, watching these odd, stilt-legged creatures, who race about so madly and have to get by on eight hours of sleep a night (some of the most lyric pages of the book are Timothy’s paean to a semi-oblivious hibernation). This boomerang effect gives the book an almost unique tone: humor with a depth charge. At one point Timothy meditates on how White’s need for specimens have turned the local animals into potential profits for a local boy:
Daniel Wheeler’s boy comes into the garden. He sizes me up,
thinks avoirdupois and shillings and scarcity. I weigh six pounds
and thirteen ounces and am extremely rare. Original price half a
crown, more than fifty years ago. Undervalued even then.
But Daniel Webster’s boy has no market for me. I live in the
asparagus of his only buyer. I size him up too. Shanks like
hop-poles. Malevolent squint. No market for him either. Not
if England is at peace.
Klinkenborg has pulled off a marvelous mixture of immersion in the well-peopled and creaturely world of the eighteenth-century curate White—“Deep in superstition and knowledge, the two almost inseparable.”—with the startlingly vivid imaginative recreation of it in Timothy’s eyes and from that vantage point, somewhat like the lowering of the camera angles in “Time Bandits” to a child’s height. Mrs. Rebecca Snooke is recognized by the “dew-damp hem of her garden dress.” “Young of this village hang by their knees—that puzzling joint—from tree-limbs. I watch in amazement.” We receive the vision of the tale with hardly less amazement than Timothy’s own.
And, by the end, we are moved by it as well. Time sweeps slowly on, catching up with White and even, eventually, with so long-lived a creature as a tortoise. Among the humans, “Mrs. John White welcomes the ripening sun, even as she prepares to begin another life. The villages notice what they have always noticed.” Timothy says, “I am slowly eroding. This England is washing me away.” Lengthy lives in a Hampshire village begin to gather the weight of the past, rather as they do in Flora Thompson’s beautiful retrospective book Still Glides the Stream, which evokes that weight as few other books do. Timothy says, “Present vanishes outright without leaving a trace.” Klinkenborg has gathered the traces of Timothy and wonderfully allowed them to hang on a while longer.
There are almost innumerable editions of White’s History: my own copy is one of the old Oxford World’s Classics, with Edmund H. New’s marvelous drawings. (New also did a lovely edition of The Compleat Angler.) White’s Journals have now been transcribed and put online at https://naturalhistoryofselborne.com. Sylvia Warner’s Portrait of a Tortoise is out of print but still available cheaply secondhand. Klinkenborg’s Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Tortoise is published by Vintage.
When in 2004 St. Mary’s Church in Selborne installed a stained glass window to commemorate White, Si Griffith’s design had no image of White himself but an image of Saint Francis, crowded closely around by the birds White so precisely and lovingly described—a portrait of different and appropriate kind.
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