Rereadings

by Anne Fadiman

  I was tempted to can the whole thing right there. I was tempted to do this many times, in fact. Even if I didn’t heave the book into the underbrush, I could have taken it home and put it on a shelf, which would have amounted to the same thing.

  Why I persisted in carrying it around and consulting its crowded pages at every opportunity, I have no idea. The book was stubborn; well, I was stubborn too; that was part of it. And I had no choice, really, not if I wanted to get in. A landscape may be handsome in the aggregate, but this book led to the particulars, and that’s what I wanted. A less complete guide would have been easier to start with, but more frustrating in the end. A more complete book—one of the official Floras—would have been impossible for me to use. So I continued to wrestle with the Peterson’s, and thus by slow degrees the crowd of plant stuff in the world became composed of individuals. As it did, the book changed: its cover was stained by water and snack food, the spine grew invitingly lax, some of the margins sprouted cryptic annotations.

  By the time the next summer came, I had bought the field guide some accompaniments: bug dope and a hand lens and a small notebook. I had fully discovered the joy of the hunt, and every new species had its trophy of data—name and place and date—to be jotted down. If I’d found a flower before, I was happy to see it again, just as one is uplifted by the singing of a familiar hymn. I often addressed it with enthusiasm: “Hi there, Solidago hispida!” I did this silently, of course, but as I’ve gotten older and less inhibited, I’ve sometimes forgotten myself and let fly. And why not? I discovered early on that a plant’s Latin name is a name of power by which it can be uniquely identified among different spoken tongues, across continents, and through time. The genus name lashes it firmly to its closest kin, while its species name describes a personal attribute—rubrum meaning red, officinale meaning medicinal, odoratus meaning smelly, and so on. It all makes such delightful sense! The Latin rolls off the tongue in a satisfying way, a fossil language that is still, here in the Realm of Living Things, alive and liquid and irreducible.

  For a while I was curious about that single letter that plants have after their binomial—rather like British peers, I thought—and was amused to find out that this was the initial of the sainted immortal who had “discovered” the species and named it for posterity. Though the Peterson’s lacks this sophistication, other botany texts include it, and at that time I was meticulous in noting it down. I remember climbing Mount Washington the summer after I bought the Peterson’s (I see this from my notebook) and finding the pincushion plant, Diapensia lapponica L. By then I knew that L stood for Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who invented this luscious nomenclature more than two centuries ago. He named this very plant, himself, from a specimen that must have come “from Lapland” (lapponica)—and here it was in New Hampshire! I stood there on the peak, hair streaming in the wind (metaphorically speaking; knowing the weather for which the White Mountains are famous, I was probably hunched in the fog). I had entered the land of the musk ox and the reindeer, the circumpolar North, and hovered in the presence of the Great Botanist Himself. His Diapensia bloomed at my feet, each mound so neat and white that my retinas effervesced with joy.

  Somewhere in its second year, the book’s dust jacket, with all its pretty colors, began to disintegrate. I tore it up and used the bits to mark sites of future searches and past victories. When I ran out of dust jacket, I used whatever came handy—sticks, matchbook covers, strips torn from a package of peanut M&M’s. This became part of the field guide’s natural habiliments, a frill of bookmarks, like the topknot of a distressed parrot.

  I became more successful at identifying plants in the field, though my hiking companions still tended to be mystified by my enthusiasms. Three years later I climbed the same little mountain—in the Camden Hills in Maine—where I had carried the Peterson’s on its first outing. The yellow flower was still there by the trailside.

  “Geum virginianum!” I pantingly announced (the delightful little rough avens—best identified from the White section, even though this one was Yellow).

  “Jim who?” said someone.

  “Virgin what?” snorted another.

  In wintertime, while the book rested on a shelf, the green of its spine was a consolation, promising that the weather would one day be warm and that I would be out in it. Finally I decided that I was not out in it enough, so in the early 1970s I moved to a farm in rural Vermont. The back-to-the-land movement was at its height, and for some of us who were of college and draft age, rural hardships seemed better than alternatives elsewhere. What I remember was our pride in growing vegetables and cutting wood, our desire for everything natural. So during that first summer in the Green Mountains, I went to the local college and signed up for a course in field ecology.

  The first day of class I met Julie, another refugee from points south who—miracle of miracles!—shared my interest in rambling around outdoors. Three afternoons a week, after class, we took field trips of our own. We followed river valleys and plunged into bogs and climbed mountains without worrying too much about inclement weather or property boundaries. We always took the Peterson’s along. After a while it wasn’t enough for us just to name things; we wanted to know what they were good for. So the guide got cross-referenced to Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and to Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World and—when questions of identity were dicey—to the college’s herbarium. Our houses filled with rustling bunches of drying herbs—self-heal, yarrow, mullein, goldenseal, boneset, bergamot. Our neighbors thought these were, you know, drugs or something, which I suppose they were. We compounded herb teas with which we dosed ourselves and our long-suffering friends; every bunch of field flowers on a kitchen table became an opportunity for declamations in Latin; swims in the local pond were voyages of discovery to insect-eating sundews, rare stands of wild azaleas, peculiar bladderworts floating on balls of captured air. At night I would pore over the pages of my Peterson’s, catching up on my notes, studying the shapes and habitats of unfamiliar plants so that I might recognize them when I saw them in the flesh. Surprisingly, this often worked. I would notice the latest grail as soon as it hove into view and would fling myself on it with a cry of recognition. That summer, my field guide got the greatest sustained workout of its long life. Its pages grew spotted with plant juice from having specimens thrust into them, annotations threatened to swamp the text, and the cover began, ever so gently, to decorticate from the binding.

  The book got used, of course, after that, but not with such intensity. It isn’t that we actually found everything in there—oh my God no! It would take a dozen summers like that one, as unfettered as we were, to find all the flowers in that book. And the book is not complete, we discovered that. There’s more out there than you can imagine—more than anyone could encompass—some of it rare, much of it secretive, all of it meaningful.

  We identified individual plants in our rambles, but from the particulars we began to know wholes. Bogs held one community, montane forests held another, and the plants they held in common were clues to intricate dramas of climate change and continental drift. So from plant communities it followed that the grand schemes of things, when they came our way, arrived rooted in real place and personal experience: quaternary geology, biogeography, evolutionary biology all lay on the road that we had begun to travel.

  In the next few years, both of us would earn undergraduate degrees in botany. Julie went on to get her Ph.D. and was hired by the U.S. Geological Survey; I grew by stages into a nature writer and illustrator. Both of us think of that wild summer as having been the real beginning of our careers.

  By the time summer came to an end, the wildflower guide had been joined by one of the official Floras, plus other volumes from the Peterson series: Trees and Shrubs, Ferns, Animal Tracks, Birds—those were early ones. Nowadays, as I pass my half-century mark, my bookshelves are full of biological reference works. There are handbooks and encyclopedias and vintage tomes, boxes of periodicals and papers and
diskettes, field guides to an array of subjects and places. In all this diversity, plant and flower guides still have the upper hand. And among these, my original Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-Central North America—its full title—reigns as the great-grandmarm. It’s in smithereens now and buckled by damp, held together with a trio of rubber bands. In spite of its copious annotations and cross-references, I tend to use a newer model, though I do take the old one along from time to time, just to let it smell the Diapensia, so to speak, much as I might take an arthritic family dog for a ramble, out of kindness, and because of happy memories of adventurous times when both of us were less marked up.

  Rereading this book has been interesting, partly because I never really read it to begin with. Not beginning to end, like other books. I studied it, argued with it, carried it around—but I didn’t read it. Well, I’ve read it now! In the process, I’ve discovered a couple of things that I never knew were there.

  First of all, in the introduction, I discovered a Roger Tory Peterson that I didn’t know existed. I met him a time or two; he was an acquaintance of my father’s, and his son was a friend of mine. I thought of him as a grand old man, an artist, somewhat supercilious, perhaps, but why shouldn’t he have been? I’d never thought of him as actually doing writing or illustrating, not the way I did. But here he is, in the introduction, getting talked into making the drawings because the original illustrator was detained in a publishing wrangle. That’s exactly what happened to me! That’s how I started my own career as an illustrator. By mistake. And look, here he is driving thousands of miles in his station wagon and spending nights in motels drawing his subjects into the wee hours. As for the rare plants—look here: “I often drew them while lying flat on the ground.” He was suddenly a colleague, getting dirty, finding—in the light of life—that his book needed to be changed. In the process of drawing, he got an education. As a result, there are more plants in the book than were originally intended, and fewer words. He had no botanical pretensions. He did have an artist’s trained eye and he gypsied over the whole territory. So there you are. He drew fifteen hundred plants for this book. I am forever amazed.

  They are wonderful drawings, and the very first page of the pictorial guide is, for some reason, chockablock with flowers I know well. I could write an entire essay on the contents of this first page alone, six “WHITE Miscellaneous Flowering Shrubs,” all with interesting lifestyles and personal associations. For example, here’s Labrador-tea. Its text is particularly crisp:

  LABRADOR-TEA

  Ledum groenlandicum

  HEATH FAMILY

  (Ericaceae)

  Note the white or rusty wool on underside of untoothed leaves. Leaves leathery, with rolled edges; fragrant. A low shrub (to 3 ft.). Cold bogs.

  Canada, n. U.S.

  MAY—JUNE

  Note that it grows in Labrador and that the type specimen likely came from Greenland (groenland) and that it’s related to the heather on the Scottish moors that were once inhabited by my personal antecedents. Its habitat is also a giveaway: this is a tundra denizen that has hung on here under our postglacial spruces. My annotation says: “Bear Swamp 6/12/73.” Bear Swamp in Vermont is a kind of botanist’s wet dream, filled with rare plants and anomalous associations, and since I lived on its borders for more than twelve years, its name alone conjures up dozens of the most intense memories. I also remember that Labrador-tea was one of the items that Julie and I collected and brewed up. I can still taste it. Though the power of my memory is not what it used to be when it comes to things like dentist appointments and bank balances, my capacity for botanical minutiae seems undiminished. I last saw Labrador-tea just three weeks ago, on Deer Isle in Maine. I remember the path, the autumn light on the dark leaves, and the feel of the tips I reached out to touch as I passed, releasing a cloud of scent. I was tempted to pick some to brew and drink, and resisted.

  If this is what the first page conjured up, I think you can see that rereading this book has been like watching my life pass before my eyes. The text is dull for the same reasons that it’s so useful in the heat of identification, so I haven’t enjoyed the reading part, exactly. But I took pleasure in the drawings. I found myself poring over the images of those plants that I’ve wanted to find and never have—pasqueflower, whorled pogonia, atamasco-lily—and the creepy ones like dodder and water-dragon. I found fragments of chopstick wrappers and Band-Aid papers doing their duty as bookmarks. I found the aster too. There are forty-four species in the book, but the one that got me started so long ago was a New England aster, Aster novae-angliae. It’s wonderful enough when it’s purple, but the pink form knocks my socks off every time.

  The other thing I discovered was a plant that, I swear to you, I have never seen in there before. (This has often happened; I suspect it always will. Little Peterson djinns must come and put new stuff in the field guide overnight.) What I noticed this time was bur cucumber, Sicyos angulatus. Though there are only twelve wild cucurbits in the field guide’s area, I could tell it was a member of the cucumber family right away. I’m so comfy with most plant families that I can usually assign a plant to its own on sight, a kind of gestalt botanizing that people can find impressive and that can lead me to think I know a thing or two. But this was something new. I studied the drawing: prickly, star-shaped clusters of fruit, very funny-looking. Fat, cucumbery leaves.

  Then, just yesterday, I was stopped at a traffic light down by the grade school. A vine was tangled in the fence there. I stared at it with my mouth open while the light turned green and everybody honked at me. There it was, bur cucumber, large as life.

  LUC SANTE

  A Companion of the Prophet

  Arthur Rimbaud, by Enid Starkie

  On New Year’s Eve, 1973, I sat on my bed in my room in my parents’ house in New Jersey, bawling like an infant. I hadn’t cried so hard in years, probably not since turning twelve, when I had made a pact with myself never to cry again. Now I was nineteen and halfway through sophomore year of college. I was sad because I didn’t have a girlfriend and hadn’t been invited to a party, and because I imagined I was nothing. None of these feelings was new or unexpected, of course. I carried them around routinely; misery and isolation were crucial parts of my self-definition. What drew all the hurt to the surface that night and caused me to dissolve into hot tears was a book I’d read before: Enid Starkie’s biography of Arthur Rimbaud. I must have known what I was doing when I pulled it off the shelf, must have deliberately intended to use it as an instrument of mortification. I had to check a date: 1873. By the end of 1873 Rimbaud had finished A Season in Hell, which meant he had written all his major works, or very nearly. He would polish off the partly completed Illuminations the following year, but by 1875 he had ceased to make or care about literature. The year mattered to me because Rimbaud was born in 1854, at one end of the Ardennes mountains, and I was born in 1954 at the other.

  At some point before adolescence, I had decided to become a child prodigy—an ambition probably inspired by garbled reports of the sorts of things that well-meaning teachers tell anxious parents of frustratingly underachieving pupils. I surely possessed gifts, but I daydreamed, wasted time, failed to work. Still, by nine or ten I commanded a vast fund of the kind of knowledge that impresses the pikers—catalogs of trivia. I wasn’t one of those scary kids who know everything on earth about snakes or ancient Egypt or the F-111 jet fighter. I was a generalist, with interests in art and history and an age-appropriate obsession with all manifestations of the uncanny; I thought I might someday be a cartoonist or a historian or a researcher of the paranormal. Then, not long before my tenth birthday, a teacher told me I had talent as a writer, and for some reason that changed everything. I suddenly knew what I would be, and even though visual art continued to tug at me, I never really deviated from my course. I knew that I would soon be an impossibly young writer of astounding gifts and wisdom far beyond his years.

  I quickly acquired some secondhand books, all o
f them titled something like How to Write for Publication, and had my parents get me a subscription to Writer’s Digest. These sources gave counsel on how to compose a cover letter, how to begin a factual account with a dramatic anecdote, how to prepare a special calendar to assist in writing seasonally themed sketches six months in advance. I followed their suggestions, submitting light verse to Gourmet and historical filler items to Boating, and happily collected rejection slips as if they were stamps. Imagining my work being read by busy people in skyscraper offices was a thought imbued with the kind of magic that attended the sending away of box tops in exchange for plastic figurines. I read indiscriminately, Sherlock Holmes and hot-rod novels, UFO exposes and accounts of the Civil War, Dickens and Bob Hope, Horatio Hornblower and Worlds in Collision. All of it was literature, and all of it was good. I imagined a worldwide communion of writers past and present seated at their desks, assembling words at the gratifying potential rate of ten cents per, C. S. Forester and Immanuel Velikovsky and Arthur Conan Doyle and Franklin W. Dixon all stamping self-addressed envelopes, filing away carbon copies, letting the steel jaw of the mailbox slap shut while murmuring a little prayer.

  Then, at age thirteen, in Montreal with my family for Expo 67, I found myself in a French-language bookstore. For some reason I picked up a fat anthology called Le livre d’or de la poésie française, probably because it had been published in my native town in Belgium. I hadn’t previously been much interested in poetry, but I was immediately drawn by the fact that the book’s latter half was a regular riot of jagged lines, very long lines, very short lines, even entire blocks of prose. Poetry in regular stanzas, appropriately rhymed and metered, had always appeared obedient, pious, well-groomed, but this stuff clearly refused to be shepherded into church in ordered rows. Leafing through the book in search of more, I found an odd chain of prose passages interspersed with thin columns of verse. It was headed: “DÉLIRES / ii / Alchimie du verbe.”