The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Perfect distillations’
Lucy Davies on the modest parson whose pin-sharp notes on his local countryside inspired countless writers and artists
Around the time that Captain Cook and his ilk set sail for vast, spice-rich continents at the ends of the earth, or were traversing the Arctic Archipelago for the Northwest Passage, a middle-aged parson named Gilbert White set out to make a survey of his own: of the hedgerows and woodland of his Hampshire parish of Selborne.
Every day from the mid-1760s until the week before his death in 1793, White recorded in his journals the infinitesimal changes that he observed on his rambles. He later transposed some of his findings to a correspondence that he struck up with two similarly curious naturalists, and, in 1789, published those letters as a book – The Natural History of Selborne
– which has never been out of print since. Its 300-odd editions have been illustrated by the likes of Eric Ravilious, John Nash and John Piper. An exhibition of these illustrations, along with examples by several dozens of other artists, will open at Pallant House
Gallery in Chichester, once lockdown lifts.
The show, held in the tercentenary of White’s birth, salutes the book’s afterlife, which would have surprised its author. Late in life, White feared that, as tastes changed, his little book might sink into oblivion; that future generations might dismiss the unremarkable life of an old country parson. How wrong he was. Selborne has inspired untold poets, novelists, artists and fellow naturalists, everywhere and in every century.
Wordsworth read it as a youth; Coleridge annotated his copy of “this sweet delightful book”. Darwin, Ruskin, Thoreau and Hawthorne were fans, as were George Eliot, Carlyle and Auden.
Writing to a friend in 1936, Ravilious said: “‘There are bustards on the wide downs near Brightelstone’. Isn’t that a beautiful statement?’ … I read [Selborne] every minute I can spare from engraving and other jobs.”
Open any page and you see why. There is a gentle, yet pin-sharp attentiveness to White’s prose, combined with a reverence – even rapture – as his mind roams, retrieving small surprises everywhere he and his horse walk. He notes the “wild and desultory flight” of a “missile-thrush”, a sky of “vast, swaggering, rocklike clouds”. The murmur of rooks reminds him of “the rushing of the wind in tall trees, or the tumbling of the tide upon a pebbly shore”. The grasshopper lark “sings on the top of a twig, gaping and shivering with its wings”.
“It’s interesting, because he doesn’t set out to be a writer,” Pallant House director Simon Martin tells me. “It’s just that in wanting to create a truthful account – to convey exactly what he has seen to someone else who hasn’t – he has to be very particular in his turn of phrase.”
“The text is so visual and White’s vision is so particular,” says Mark Hearld, one of 11 contemporary artists Martin has commissioned to make new work in response to Selborne. “Each letter is a perfect distillation of a single moment.
You can imagine White writing it every time.”
Virginia Woolf, too, observed how real White’s world feels when one is reading the books. “By some apparently unconscious device,” she wrote, “the author has a door left open, through which we hear distant sounds, a dog barking, cartwheels creaking.”
The Natural History of Selborne (Little Toller, £14); pallant.org.uk
America’s obsession with big cats is all the rage, thanks to the mass devouring under quarantine of Netflix’s seven-part documentary series Tiger King. This wild saga about Oklahoma zookeeper Joe Exotic, his several husbands, and his violent feuding with animal rights groups has been jaw-droppingly sensational viewing.
Thanks to it, a once-forgotten 1981 film called Roar, sometimes dubbed “the most dangerous movie ever made”, has clawed everyone’s attention back, with the distributor craftily re-releasing it to video-on-demand in the US.
Eleven years in the making and costing a then-exorbitant
$17 million, Roar was an insane project from inception right through its legendarily disastrous production in southern California, which involved 71 lions, 26 tigers, a tigon, nine black panthers, 10 cougars, two jaguars, four leopards, two elephants, six black swans, four Canada geese, four cranes, two peacocks, seven flamingos and a marabou stork.
It took 34 years for the film to get a theatrical release in America. When it came out, in 2015, it was under the catchy tag-line: “No animals were harmed in the making of this film. 70 members of the cast and crew were.”
The idea was cooked up when Roar’s two leads, Tippi Hedren and her husband, Noel Marshall, were on safari in Mozambique, where Hedren, in her post-Hitchcock afterglow, had shot the adventure film Satan’s Harvest in 1969. During their travels, they came across an abandoned plantation house in Gorongoza National Park that had been overrun by lions.
“They were sitting in the windows, they were going in and out of the doors, they were sitting on the verandas,” remembers Hedren. “It was such a unique thing to see, and we thought, ‘For a movie, let us use the great cats as our stars.’ ”
Marshall, buoyed by his financial success as a co-producer on The Exorcist, became obsessed with bringing Roar to fruition. They began to purchase young lions – illegally – from zoos and circuses in the USA, and brought them up – in their Los Angeles home.
Hedren’s daughter Melanie Griffith – who would eventually co-star in Roar, be clawed across the face, and need plastic surgery – spent much of her adolescence cohabiting with this feline menagerie. In time, the family bought 40 acres of scrub in the Santa Clarita valley, and built a Portuguese-style two-storey ranch that would serve, not only as the compound for their growing zoo, but as the film’s main set.
Marshall had written a flexible script about a naturalist (played by himself ) studying wildlife on a reserve in Tanzania (Santa Clarita with added cottonwoods). It was full of weird slapstick routines and moments of human peril not unlike The Birds, particularly when Hedren and her daughter arrive at the unattended ranch.
And so the filming began, with a large crew including the Dutch cinematographer Jan de Bont, later to shoot Die Hard (1988) and direct Speed (1994) and Twister (1996). It quickly became clear that razzing up the lions to perform ferociously on camera was going to have some safety implications.
Marshall, who saw the animals as family, would fling himself into their midst and roll around in take after take. One bit into his hand so deeply it caused a 50ft arterial spray and he needed immediate hospital treatment. Determined to get the wound on film, he asked a crew member to squirt some fake blood on top. Later, he would be bitten through the leg and dragged off-camera, narrowly avoiding the need for amputation.
Hedren, when an elephant called Tembo tried to pick her up, slipped and broke her ankle on one of his tusks. And while de Bont was hiding in a camouflaged pit to get close-ups, a lioness detected movement and swiped down with her claws. This took the back of his scalp off, needing 220 stitches.
Even amid this carnage, the shoot limped on. They were 95 per cent done with it when the worst flooding in years – 19in of rain over 24 hours – hit the valley and a dam burst upriver. The facilities were devastated and many animals were swept away, or escaped, and – giving the lie to the movie’s tag-line – were shot by local police.
And still Marshall wouldn’t give up the ghost. At staggering cost, he rebuilt the set and got the final footage. The MGM lab – where, under the lion logo, Roar was being processed – received over a million feet of film: double the amount processed for Gone with the Wind, and somewhere right up in the Apocalypse Now/Heaven’s Gate ballpark.
For foreign release, Roar was variously packaged as a suspense thriller, “a ferocious comedy” or a family adventure. It did quite well in Germany and Japan. But Marshall rejected all presales in America as insufficiently lucrative, and so it simply sat on the shelf unwatched. Marshall died in 2010; Hedren, who is still alive, set up the Shambala Preserve, an 80-acre wildcat habitat, in 1983. Roar is a monument to its makers’ folly, and a film which can’t hold a candle to its own mad production story.
Few young poets examine flora and fauna with a sharper eye than Isabel Galleymore. Her collection Significant Other (Carcanet, £9.99) was, for this reader, one of the best debuts of last year. This poem comes from Cyanic Pollens, a new pamphlet out in June from Guillemot, a small press that specialises in exquisite limited editions.
Cyanic Pollens is inspired by her stint in 2016 as poet-in-residence at a research centre in the
Peruvian Amazon, fending off not only poisonous insects but also the amorous advances of her unimprovably named guide, Elvis.
In Galleymore’s poetry, the natural and the erotic are often intertwined, sometimes in unsettling ways. In her jungle, poison “stiffens” and wings “unbutton”. The “long-tailed hermit” hummingbird may be beautiful, but I’m not sure I’d want it to “trap” or “tongue” me. When she mentions how to avoid being “bitten” (with a gorgeous assonant rhyme on “stiffens”), the suggested preventative measure might well bring risks of its own.
At times, Galleymore’s writing shows the influence of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop – and it’s Bishop who provides the pamphlet’s epigraph: “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?”
Sometimes, the idea of communing with nature is better than the reality. Galleymore went to the rainforest so we don’t have to; stay at home and think of it instead.
Tristram Fane Saunders
One lion severed the producer’s artery, another scalped the cinematographer
‘AS IF I WERE ONE OF THE MANY FLOWERS’
As if I were one of the many
flowers the long-tailed hermit traps
and tongues,
I can’t stop the air indulging
in me.
At night, wings unbutton to
hairy chests.
Poison choruses or stiffens. I’m told the more I let myself
be touched the less I will be bitten.
from Cyanic Pollens (Guillemot, £6)
ANSWERS
A T H White
H Alexandre Dumas
O Baroness Orczy
O Donna Tartt
T Giuseppe di Lampedusa T John Updike