Adventure classics -- Bambi: a war in the woods

Bambi

by Felix Salten

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The first thing you should know about Felix Salten’s dark vision of Bambi (originally subtitled A Life in the Woods) is that it isn’t a children’s book. Salten’s European woods of the 1920’s are the descendents of the forbidding forest where Dante lost his way, the wolf-haunted forests of the Brothers Grimm. And over their sweet thickets hedged by “hazel bushes, dogwoods, black-thorn and young elders” where fawns come into the world hangs the shadow of one world war, and the clamor of another drowns the forest’s myriad voices.

John Galsworthy’s enthusiastic foreword to the 1929 English translation recommends the book, ironically, I must suppose, “to sportsmen.” The Nazis who would later overrun Salten’s native Austria, although seldom masters of subtlety, understood better. They banned the book.

Some writers, after the gentler Disney movie version came out in 1942, considered Bambi an anti-fascist allegory, it’s more realistic to think of it as an anti-war allegory, but from a civilian standpoint. Salten, after all, was nearly fifty when the First World War ended. And except for a single mass hunt in which Bambi’s mother perishes, there’s relatively little direct carnage. Instead, Salten gives us background fear, food shortages, and betrayals by other “civilians” in the forest.

But don’t let the darkness keep you from enjoying the book. Between episodes of darkness, lovers frolic, children are born, and life goes on, often with great beauty and delight. Although I often dislike, as Galsworthy wrote, “the method which places human words in the mouths of dumb creatures, it is the triumph of this book that, behind the conversation, one feels the real sensations of the creatures who speak.”

To achieve this illusion of getting behind the conversation, Salten relies less on putting human words in the mouths of animals than of allowing humans to feel the emotions of the animals.

“All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain,” writes twenty-first century animal behavioral scientist Temple Grandin in her 2009 Animals Make Us Human. Grandin actually is only considering the emotions of mammals, but Salten extends our sympathies to owls, magpies, jays and ducks, even to a crowd of midges, marveling at the ancient beetles “who live forever almost. They see the sun thirty or forty times, we don’t know exactly how many. Our lives are long enough, but we see the daylight only once or twice.“

Hungarian-born Salten’s family moved to Vienna when he was a child, seeking the citizenship the city granted to Jews in the late nineteenth century. He dropped out of school at sixteen to help support his family, eventually becoming known as a prolific writer of plays, fiction, and journalism. and was soon was a poet, playwright, and journalist. And he must also have loved the woods, however dark they were, and the creatures who inhabited them.

From the opening sentence, “He came into the world in the middle of the thicket, in one of those little, hidden forest glades which seem to be entirely open, but are really screened in on all sides,” to the tenderness of an adult Bambi’s interaction with a pair of fawns, fawns who readers realize, although Bambi did not, are his own children, Bambi is, in Galsworthy’s words, “a delicious book.”

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a February of animal adventures with Albert Payson Terhune’s short story, “One Minute Longer.”)

Adventure classics -- When the twentieth century began

The Guns of August

by Barbara W. Tuchman

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“I had always thought in my acquaintance with history up to that point,” Barbara Tuchman wrote, “that 1914 was the hour when the clock struck, so to speak, the date that ended the nineteenth century and began our own age, ‘the Terrible Twentieth’”.

In 1962, with a second world war in history’s rear view mirror, and two halves of the world facing down each other with nuclear arms, a history of World War I hardly seemed likely to be a best seller. Tuchman admitted, “In moments of depression during the course of writing, I had said to (literary agent Cecil) Scott, ‘Who is going to read this?’ and he had replied, ‘Two people: you will and I will.’”

Instead, to Tuchman’s amazement, The Guns of August “took off like a runaway horse,” becoming a Book of the Month Club pick and earning her a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

Although the main narrative is limited to the first month of World War I, the book opens with the famously opulent description of the equally opulent funeral procession of Edward VII of England, a procession whose nine kings included the new king, George V, flanked by his cousin and bitter rival, German emperor William II. “Few observers,” Tuchman wrote, “had eyes for the ninth king, the only one among them who was to achieve greatness as a man,” Albert, King of the Belgians. The violation of his country’s neutrality in the opening days of World War I would set public opinion on fire. Riding next to Albert was the soon to be assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, whose death would spark the looming conflict. That funeral procession ranks among the most awe-inspiring and inauspicious gathering of world leaders in history.

Tuchman closes on the eve of the First Battle of the Marne, September 1914, with the
order of French General Joseph Joffre to his retreating soldiers: “Now, as the battle is joined on which the safety of the country depends, everyone must be reminded that this is no longer the time for looking back. . . .”

“Ordinarily,” Tuchman wrote, “the French language, especially in public pronouncements, requires an effort if it is not to sound splendid, but this time the words were flat, almost tired. . . It did not shout ‘Forward!’ or summon men to glory. After the first thirty days of war in 1914, there was a premonition that little glory lay ahead.”

Tuchman’s works would bring her a second Pulitzer and make her one of the best known of American historians. She would also live to see Saturday Review name her one of the “most overrated“ figures in the arts for turning from “writing history as a moral lesson to writing moral lessons as history.”
It was a judgment that smelled like sour grapes for a woman whose intention, she proclaimed in her 1963 address at Radcliffe College, was “to write history so as to enthrall the reader and make the subject as captivating and exciting to him as it is to me.”

And how does a writer do that, when after all, everybody knows how the war turned out? “I worried about this a good deal at the beginning, but after a while the actual process of writing, as so often happens, produced the solution. I found that if one writes as of the time, without using the benefit of hindsight, resisting always the temptation to refer to events still ahead, the suspense will build itself up naturally. . . Even though one knows the outcome, the suspense is almost unbearable, because one knows that if (Joffre) had made the wrong decision, you and I might not be here today--or, if we were, history would have been written by others.”

Tuchman’s works are widely available, with a used paperback of The Guns of August going for as little as $1.02 on Amazon. I splurged, paying $7 after wandering happily through the huge history section in the basement of Recycled Books in Denton, Texas.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a January of true adventures with James D. Watson’s short, gossipy and surprisingly funny account of the discovery of the structure of life’s building block, in The Double Helix.)