The Naturalist as Narcissist
COHN, JULES
The Naturalist as Narcissist Edward Hoagland's safari to himself. BY JULES COHN In all his books of nature and travel observation, Edward Hoagland subjects wild creatures and faraway places to...
...He went to Harvard, too, and, born to the manor, partook of the educational advantages available at private country and city clubs, where he witnessed bigotry that he says dismayed him...
...Like Mobutu or Mussolini," we've all been cruel and grandiose, have lied, and postured...
...It was, you see, not Hoagland but the social disaster of the rise of conservatism in America that destroyed his marriage...
...And in the "integrated housing" (in point of fact a 1,300-square-foot duplex, river views, in a publicly subsidized high-rise) where he lived with his second wife, "our neighbor James Beard" was sometimes telephoned for culinary advice...
...Compass Points is Hoagland's memoir, and it mostly reveals how difficult it is for a serious idea to penetrate the mind of a well-bred, well-educated, well-traveled, and well-off American writer of the liberal persuasion...
...The problem, really, was that she was not a liberal, was unstintingly loyal to Israel, had come under the influence of neoconservatives, and probably voted for Reagan...
...Born "into the Protestant Establishment" in 1932, Edward Hoagland was reared in New York City and New Canaan, Connecticut, by parents whose roots in this country he proudly traces to the seventeenth century...
...He is a longtime member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters, and of the Manhattan literati (in the Lion's Den division, a Greenwich Village bar popular with writers and editors...
...The flow of his prose has encircled Alaska's fjords and Kilimanjaro, run with the Stikine River, and spilled over septic systems in rural Vermont...
...From the beginning of his career he had time and money to roam and write...
...Street lawyer who later became an executive at Standard Oil...
...Whether the topic is trivial or profound, Hoagland's polished prose can coat it with slickness...
...When he was not on the trail with alligator hunters or muskrat skinners, Elie Wiesel's "incessant Park Avenue parties" provided opportunities for urban hobnobbing...
...His memoir abounds with details about the habits, plumage, and distressing behavior of some of the species, as well as the deplorable opinions of the “sleek and tony neoconservatives who were tailored like WASPS...
...I went to a kind of Yeshi-va called Deerfield Academy," he writes, in a preppy's mindless one-liner...
...But thanks to those lost trees, Ted Hoagland never needed to be held down by a job...
...In his relentlessly elegant prose, she is memorialized and embalmed, along with the hawk in a basswood tree and “the yellow miracle of moss...
...They had a reasonably contented life, according to him, until “social change” tore them apart...
...And there at a stoplight, this guy, who had done pretty well “riding the neoconservative wave,” who had taken rabbinical training for awhile, and whose father, “if I recall, had had a horse and wagon hauling junk in Winnipeg fifty years before,” had the cheek to be impatient with a few people who delayed them by asking for a handout...
...Toward the end of his account of the “directions” of his life, Hoagland describes the moment when he knew he was traveling with the wrong crowd...
...I mean, what more do you need to believe...
...Hoagland's unabashed assumption is that all history revolves around himself...
...North, south, east, or west, he’s secure in his attitudes, proud of his prejudices...
...He was riding uptown in the fancy car of a nouveau neoconservative with a nice tan but a bad attitude...
...That second wife was Marion Magid, for many years a distinguished editor at Commentary...
...There was also a trust fund that bankrolled the early writing career of this celebrant of nature...
...His father was a Wall Jules Cohn is a writer in New York City...
...From the beginning, Hoagland has been held by pious liberal attitudes: In 1967 he tore his draft card in half and mailed it to Lyndon Johnson...
...The indefatigable stylist has slummed in fleabag hotels to write about prostitutes and homelessness, joined the circus to describe roustabouts and freaks...
...Before he was camping out with Cajun trappers or roughing it on the untrammeled Omineca River in British Columbia, he attended school with the sons of (according to his own score sheet) Charles Lindbergh, Nelson Rockefeller, Joseph Kennedy, and the Aga Khan...
...A famous supporter of environmental causes ("I care wholeheartedly about what's happening to the frogs"), Hoagland establishes his family pedigree, reports on his colorful career as a gentleman journalist, and describes a slew of mentors, cronies, and girlfriends—along with two marriages, two divorces, and some painful medical problems...
...It was this marriage that brought him into contact with members of the “Jewish Establishment” and provided more exotic ecological material for his authorial mill...
...What a pity that the money came from logging operations among "primeval Douglas firs...
...He has rendered African elephant handlers, racetrack grooms, and now in Compass Points, Norman Podhoretz...
...In the self-mocking style characteristic of gloating Harvard grads and country-club golfers, Hoagland boasts, "I was not much use at anything except writing...
...The 1960s, for example, were good because they brought him sexual liberation...
...BY JULES COHN In all his books of nature and travel observation, Edward Hoagland subjects wild creatures and faraway places to his writerly mannerisms...
...Commentary’s editor-in-chief, Norman Podhoretz, was “abrasive and ingratiating,” and “shaped like a fireplug...
...He slathers his first wife with tender words while recounting how he abandoned her...
...As a title for his memoir, Compass Points is strangely appropriate—for Hoagland has always had only himself for a compass...
...Though Hoagland's work lacks moral weight, his standing in the literary firmament is solid...
...In Compass Points he betrays her again, disclosing intimate details about her for no reason other than authorial vanity and service to the Great God Writing...
...His regard for his second wife (who died a few years ago) is coupled with the confession that he betrayed their marriage...
...And his present book is a compendium of the specious slogans, feel-good attitudes, and moral relativism that still reigns among the liberal gentry...
...Famous names are dropped in Compass Points as readily as references to tundras, ice floes, and African rock pythons: Archibald MacLeish, John Berryman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jessica Lange (she was a waitress in another Village joint), and Cynthia Ozick...
...Sunshine and drifting water under a shifting mosaic of leaves...
...And now, in Compass Points, he focuses again on exotic creatures and strange locales—except this time, the creatures are his friends and family, and the locales are the American scenes in which he's lived...
Vol. 6 • July 2001 • No. 41
