FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT IN THE WILD KINGDOM

...Walking his collie by the Lower East Side or hiking a grouse trail in New Hampshire can work equally well for Hoagland, and for us through his writing, to re-establish a sense of belonging to, rather than brmalizing the rest of nature...

...His essays enthusiastically celebrate public performers of all kindswanimal trainers, strippers, cowboys, wrestlers, trapeze artists--and by extension explain his own nature writing...

...It's the best one in town...

...In captivity when they are quarreling in a cage, the snarls sound gutteral and their jaws chop, but scientists watching pet wolves in the woods speak of their flowing joy, of such delight in running that they melt into the woods like sunlight, like running water...

...our range of feeling, stretched and freshened...

...Edward Hoagland could claim the prize with his essays...

...Hoagland, who sots out in one essay to describe the New England Wilderness, had to admit finally that there is none left...

...501 sensational...

...Hurrah for Hoagland...

...It happens so fast, tossed off effortlessly...

...Another essay begins "Wolves have marvelous legs...

...Extinct species, human overpopulation and pollution show that a monarchy doesn't work very ,well...

...There's joy, and there are autobiographical musings which often sharpen to perceptive cultural analysis...

...Peter Matthiessen attracted many readers with Blue Meridian, The Search /or the Great White Shark...

...Hoagland's personal essays 'dramatize a hard-won and tough-minded optimism, as rare these 4 August 1978:500 days as the snail darter or the Santa Cruz salamander...

...It has become .fashionable these days to appropriate this tinsel world and its fascinating freaks as a literary symbol of the fraudulent: Life is a Funhouse...

...A great tradition starting with Orpheus...

...But George Crumb's "Vox Balaen,ae" aside, today's translators of great apes or wood storks are more likely to use a pen than a lyre, and the best of these literary naturalists is Edward Hoagland...

...All Hoagland's essays, in one way or another, share with us this not very fashionable thought: "There is a simple, underlying basis to fife which we s almost daily: that life is good...

...But the passage works...

...Scientists watching pet wolves in the woods," instead of scientists dismembering animals at the Yerkes Primate Research Center...

...Writers can be categorized by many criteria," Hoagland explains, "one of which is whether they prefer subject matter that they rejoice in or subject matter they deplore and wish to savage with ironies . . . I'm of the first type...

...In spite of everything, he ,believes, this kinship is important, and we can even dare to be hopeful about it...

...James Herriot's veterinary skills, let alone Eiseley's scientific reputation, command our respect...

...Titles of Hoagland's essay collections, The Courage o/Turtles, Walking the Dead Diamond River, and Red Wolves and Black Bears, indicate his loyalties...

...That and dramatic use of very private experience for public illumination...

...No dilettante, Hoagland takes the writer's responsibility very seriously, which he claims is "to swim upstream _9 . . unearth ideas t.hat have been laid aside, reaffirm the unfashionable...

...Hoagland...

...The language doesn't get in the way, solemn or pretty or sentimental--common temptations in this genre...

...Not so for Hoagland, just one of many things his writing makes us see and appreciate differently...

...Commonweal: 503...

...NOt only that, bet he feels he's a villa, in, contaminating the wild by his very presence and contributing to its death...

...To see Hoagland as just a nature essayist is a good beginning, but there's more to his writing than loving observations on wilderness controlled by special rhetorical uses of self-scrutiny and metaphor...

...His subjects...

...And now that John Gardner's On Moral Fiction has encouraged us to speak up, we can add moral reasons, too...

...One disarming tactic is immediately unsettling...

...No tough guy in the Hemingway tradition, he's vulnerable, like us, and he hurts, Hoagland's self-scrutiny risks our good opinion, but the resulting intimacy we have been maneuvered into is worth it...

...We recognize and begin to trust him up close...

...Defying modesty, like gravity, he exploi'ts his deformities, snatches our attention, conjures up all these animals and places and people, and his show astonishes us into delight...

...indestructibly made out of metal...

...Etc...

...And his essays range over much of human experience...

...Our intuitive sympathies are being manipulated and reconstrucated...

...At the very least Hoagland has a sense of humor and self-mockery...

...Having written about North American wildlife, I had wanted to find out if there was something to say about these floral giraffes and priapic rhinos, the airborne extravaganzas of kites, storks, and vultures . . . . Apart from retailing a few late discoveries about animal behavior, however, there seemed to be nothing fresh to convey...

...A novelist...

...Hoagland even has a rhetorical theory--the ambush, adapted from Robert Rogers's Twenty-First Rule of Ranger Warfare which he quotes, "If the enemy pursue your rear, take a circle till you come to your own tracks, and there form an ambush to receive them and give them the first fire...

...A hat-trick...

...To write about animals anywhere nowadays is to write of the end of the 4 August 1978:502 world, yet I don't necessarily believe in the end of the world...

...But As far as that goes, one cannot live intelligently withot~t realizing that we and our friends and loved ones are all dying...

...His verbal hat-tricks are ingenious appeals to the imagination...

...The essays of Edward lloagland I n one of John Gardner's fairy tales, a spell cast by a wicked witch could be broken only by "someone with a proper sense of val*ues--for instance, someone who knew that, whatever one might think at first glance, people are better than sea gulls...

...no matter what currently unfashionable ideals a person may harbor in secret, from self-sacrifice and wanting to fall in love to wanting to fight in a war, there will continue to be opportunities to carry them out...

...Since this piece is so widely reproduced, most of us will remember how the small songbirds "took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing...

...It is not an impossible leap...

...But that's it...

...Pets and wild creatures can help us learn much about ourselves and others --communication theory, ecological responsibility, tenderness and wonder...

...Whales have Greenpeace, dolphins have John Lilly, P, upfish had (there probably aren't any left now) bumperstickers...

...So, too, Hoagland's essays...

...Hardly Commonweal...

...Jokes, too...

...Where is home...

...But sea gulls and other animals are important, too...

...Wt~rdsworth and the speed of light...

...Indeed, with our growing ecological consciousness, it is turning out not to be a Kingdom at all, 'but a very compl,icated sort of Commune...

...Having escaped to ,the woods as an urban refugee, this misfit is tormented by loneliness...

...The clich6 of glib approval...

...This poetic, evocative reporting about wolves is clear and vivid, but more than description is happening here...

...He's a literary stunt man,performing for us, taking deliberate risks, startling our imaginations with technical sleight of hand, and sharing w~th us his own "']ubilation of discovery...

...Wordsworth walked 186,000 miles in his lifetime, Hoagland tells us deadpan, adding a few thousand to DeQuincey's original measurements...

...Speak of joy," ralher than write jargon about recombining DNA in Cambridge laboratories...

...To live is to see," writes Hoagland, "and traveling sometimes speeds up the process...

...R2-,D2 had C-3PO...

...9 . . Any careful study of living things, whether wolves, bear or man, reminds one of the same direct truth...

...and Barnum & Bailey, where he bedded down in the giraffe's straw, or taking care of retired MGM lions in California, getting fired from that job for crawling into her cage with a lady mountain lion...

...Loren Eiseley's Immense Journey to the throne, for instance, may be benevolent, but it's out of d~te...

...The understanding Hoagland achieves, along with an "exuberant release" from his sense of guilty failure, is the "commonality of animals and men," a perception of the interlocking set of relationships which define our place in the world...

...he asks constantly, ,trying to fit us all in, and generating these essays about the blighted world that, dispossessed and guilty, we nonetheless share with others (furry, fishy and human others...

...Hoagland is an impresario, and he puts on quite a show, featuring his rural Vermont farmhouse and the bears and other neighbors who live there, or Manhattan's melting pot, as he travels and the seasons change...

...Until recently when he began to be commissioned to write specifically about wild places and animals, Hoagland wasn't out in the bush preparing a travelogue, but esoa~ping...

...They sang because life is sweet and sun~ght beautiful...

...The city is dying irreversibly . . . . And my mountain is dying, too...

...He's good, for political and aesthetic reasons...

...Turtles are a kind of bird with the governor turned low...

...He wagged his invisible tail and whimpered at being left behind, behaving like all these other creatures who claim our attention but cannot talk, at least to us...

...If human nature eventually is going to take the place of nature everywhere, those of us who have been naturalists will have to transpose the faith in nature which is inherent in the profession to a faith in man--if necessary, man alone in the world...

...This guilty monster, as he sometimes sees himself, openly reports his stutter, asthma, murderous impulse's, tormented kinky fantasies...

...This claim literally invites us to join him, to watch and truly marvel with him as out of his hat he pulls these wolves in their astonishing uniqueness: Wolves have marvelous legs...

...But when Hoagland tracked down an endangered species it was the scruffy Texas red wolf, or a mountain lion that may or may not have even been there...

...Rover...

...Spokesmen and interpreters spring up...

...R2-D2 was the best possible pet--affectionate, intelligent and ELLEN STRENSKI is all associate professor o/ English at Mohegan Community College in Connecticut...

...For him, people are good...

...Traveling has recently taken him to Africa, and forced some uncomfortable adjustments: I . . . had come to look at the animals...

...This rhetorical strategy is based on his own grateful appreciation of other public performers, especially the carnival and circus people he came to know and love, traveling one summer with gingling B~os...

...Hoagland performs for us, an illusionist...

...Like any good artist, Hoagland makes it look easy, and we wonder where he gets such authority...

...Hoagland presents a cooperative alternative, which is especially attractive because you don't have to move to Eagle, Alaska, to experience it...

...He opens up experience...

...The first thing one notices about them is how high they are set on their skinny legs, and the instant, blurred gait these can switch into, bicycling'~away, carrying them as much as forty miles in a day...

...Just think of Eiseley's "Judgment of the Birds" which takes place in a "glade lit like some vast cathedral...

...He is, by choice, a foreign correspondent in the Wild Kingdom, writing back to The Village Voice, Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker and other magazines where his pieces first appeared...

...And Hoagland, for all his selfdoubt, does profess a most welcome faith: "I believe in glee .and in the exuberance I feel with friends and animals and in the fields, and in other emotions besides that...

...Worse yet...

...A circus clown is performing, apparently in trouble on a high wire, and "the band plays music representing the wry look we wear while watching a stranger's funeral procession pass...

...Hoagland works in words not on the high wire...

...They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven...

...But one's ideals, no...

...Everyone from Grizzly Adams and other "wildlife managers" to dog walkers, we're all interested in animals now, not just for hides and tallow, but as kin: Washoe, Baretta's cockatoo, nameless wolves and whales, even R2-D2...

...I'm on the brink of embarking upon st, ill another trip to some .bleak national swamp or public forest, and I think, Good God, .who needs it7 But excitement, the hope of visions and some further understanding---that old, old boondoggle perpetrated by the wilderness---draws me on...

...Reports from the field have been conflicting (Descartes, Beatrix Potter...

...But Hoagland is no simpleton mooning over the picturesque...

...Anyway, turtles and dogs give him as much pleasure...

...After all, generous intentions alone don't guarantee an audience...

...With brindled coats in smoky shades, brushy tails, light-filled eyes, intense sharp faces which are more focused than an intelligent dog's but also less various, they are electric on first sighting, bending that bushy head around to look back as they run...

...Hoagland's generous affirmation is sometimes obvious and ecstatic, at other times patient and implied in his curiosity about all life, his delight in its variety, and his insistence that "life is precious . . . precious and wretched perhaps, but the operative word is precious...

...As the rest of Hoagland's essay goes on to tell, scientists watch wild wolves in the woods from helicopters, and there aren't any "pet" wolves there to watch anyway...

...He values this conviction, fights for it, and has a deli'berate method that goes far beyond show- and-tell ambitions fox breaking through our habitual pious or bored responses and getting it across to us...

...And reading Hoagland on anything, tugboats or turtles, makes us feel differently about possibilities for ourselves-for all of us: bears, kids, train conductors, the AMC...

...About the circus, Hoagland explains, "Put as simply as possible, wh~t these people are ,trying to do is entertain, astonish and, yes, enlighten us with their trim tumbles, with the tricks, innocence, pathos, forlornness and perfection of their bodies...

...It makes us feel and hope and think differently about wolves and the people who study or care for them...

...The last sentence particularly rearranges associations stored in our memories...

...Hoagland's own ideals are strengthened and illuminated by his experience of nature, even as he escapes to it, an honorable justification in the flowerin-the-crannied-wall tradition...

...In fact, bookstores shelve his essay collections variously under "Nature" as well as "Autobiography," "Essays," "Sociology," and, oddly, "Fiction...

...Hoagland is good, first, because his egalitarian sympathies are ideologically pure, unlike others with aristocratic pretensions...

...Even Lord Kenneth Clark has turned from Civilization to Aninmls and Men...