The Ottawa Journal from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • Page 52

52 'Saturday, -May 22, 1971 THfl RA XPfDITlONs. By Thor Heyerdohl, Irons-loted by Patricia Cramptoit. Allen and Unwln, UK. 334 BOOM. THB HUMAN ANIMAL.

By Ham Han. Hodder on-' Stoughton, UK. 244 paau. MAN'S NATURAL HISTORY. By J.

Welner. weidenfeld and Nocolson, UK. 247 pooli. JHERE are some mea-who cannot rest until they have puzzledout for themselves why men of different races living at opposite ends of the earth, 'should stiff do some things in the same way when in every other respect they are utterly dissimilar. But their curiosity does not drive all of them to the extremes that it does Thor Heyerdahl.

There are pyramids in Egypt, and there are Identical pyramids in parts of Latin America, carrying the same carvings and paintings of bird-headed men. Evolution, say the experts. Nonsense, says Thor Heyerdahl; the stone age men who came overland from Europe via the Arctic to colonize North and subsequently South America have left nothing like this behind them in any other part of the continent. The pyramid builders came across the Atlantic from Egypt in boats made of bundles of reed, riding the winds and the currents, and you can see drawings of these vessels in the pyramids of both countries. Don't be daft, said the experts; reeds absorb water and sink.

But a stubborn man Is going to search until he finds places where boats are built of, papyrus, but in a way that prevents them from shipping water like a soggy haystack. And a stubborn man will bring the boat-builders halfway across the world to construct an ocean-sized reed boat for him and prove that the could and did sail the Atlantic bringing their masons, their goldsmiths and their weavers of fine cotton to Mexico and Peru, where the legend of fair-headed sailors persists to this day. The search for the right boat-builders, and then for papyrus of a quality they could use, was a small odyssey In Itself, infinitely more complicated than the mere- chopping down of balsa logs to make the raft for Thor Heyerdahl's earlier and historic Kon-TikI voyage across the Pacific. The expedition was more hazardous rafts do at least float. But when the first papyrus Ra was launched like a golden swan, it was not even certain that The Ottawa Journal LITERATURE AND LIFE Madness Under Aurora Borealis By DILLON O'LEARY WIIRD ANO'THAOIC SHORIS.

By Chouncey C. Loomll. 347 pogts. Alfred A. Krwpf.

II0-7J. JT IS not inconceivable that some year soon the Greek tragedies of 19th century Arctic exploration will be played again in missions to the moon or Mars, as dramas of heroism and horror. The heroic era of moon missions is with us; much as the heroic period of Arctic exploration began soon after the Napoleonic wars when the British navy, for prestige purposes, and in the so-called "interest of science." took up the challenge of penetrating the Icy jigsaw of Polar waters. In those days, the outfitting of an Arctic expedition began with all the publicity blaze of a current moon shot: newspaper and magazine Interviews with the explorers, and descriptions of their equipment. The latter, then as today, was always described as a marvel of modern science and engineering.

Heroism, in the meaning of Victorian romantics, ended with the 1845 expedition of Sir John Franklin, who commanded two naval ships, Erebus and Terror, with a complement of 129 men. It. was last seen by an American whaler in Baffin Bay, sailing into Arctic mists and Ice packs. At that time, before radio, an Arctic expedition lost all contact with civilization once it sailed beyond die northern outposts; it might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. The horror began, when the Franklin party to reappear after three years.

Successive search and rescue parties found evidence of its end: equipment, graves, corpses strewing a desperate last overland march, and evidence of cannibalism bodies with limbs sawed off, or stripped of flesh. In Britain the Victorian public, with its Idealized concepts of British heroism, especially as it was symbolized in the navy, could scarcely believe the horror. Today such facts are only too credible, after Freud's insights have been reinforced by Stalin's purges, Belsen and Dachau, Hiroshima and Mi Lai. Charles Francis Hall, an American, was one of those who searched for Franklin and his men in the 1860s, with an obsessive belief that he would find some of them alive. He failed in that.

But he became the first true Arctic explorer, by realizing that survival there meant living with, and as, the Eskimos. Franklin's tragic end had lured Hall north. Like Franklin, he died there. Horror was -renewed in Hall's' third expedition, designed to reach the North Pole for the first time: in this case, however, all but Hall survived. But the story reeks of paranoiac hatreds and madness among men hemmed in by ice and fear, of drunkeness and a collapse of discipline, of mutiny, threatened cannibalism and, eventually, of the almost certain fact that Hall was murdered.

Chauncey C. Loomis has written Hall's biography in Weird and Tragic Shores, a magnificent book ahout a strange Its pages are a blend of adventure saga, psychological and detective thriller. Loomis is the detective, tracking down the reason for Hall's death: by poisoning, as Hall charged in his last tortured days on Greenland's northern shores, and others suspected. In searching out Hall's fate, as Hall sought after Frankliri's. Loomis is somewhat the romantic like the protagonist of his book, albeit a more realistic and modern one.

Loomis is a professor of literature who, while publishing critiques of Thackeray, Mark Twain and Joyce, yet finds time for five Arctic expeditions; he is fascinated by Polar life, and writes vividly of its beauties and terrors. was he who in 1968 arranged to have Hall's body disinterred briefly for an autopsy that proved Hall had been dosed with arsenic. He assisted at the permafrost grave site. The autopsy was climax to Loomis' long research through the voluminous Hall papers, through the papers of others on- Hall's last journey as commander of the U.S. naval ship Polaris, and through the records of the U.S.

naval inquiry that was designed to whitewash the disgrace of the expedition's failure, rather than to ascertain its reasons, and the nature of Hall's death. Hall was not altogether admirable, though a brave and interesting man. He had a certain Victorian sense of God-given mission, and exuded a priggish Christianity. He was vain, suspicious and quarrelsome; on his second expedition he shot and killed a party member whom he accused of mutiny. Oddly, however, he was like Paul Gaugin in his 19th century romanticism.

Both men in late years abandoned successful careers, wives and children, to seek some undefinable aspiration in exile: one as artist in Tahiti, the other as explorer in the Arctic. Paper Boatmen the fish would refrain from nibbling at It for lunch, the boat Itself was wildly unscientific, built under the supervision of two illiterate Africans from Lake Chad to drawings taken from the walls of the pyramids. For want of ropes in the right places the first Ra became waterlogged and rudderless almost before it was clear of the African coast. Yet even in that condition it sailed more than 3.000 miles and was well over halfway across the Atlantic and approaching the West Indies before it began to disintegrate. The second Ra.

built within the year, reached Barbados in 57 days. It is a hard way to prove a theory, and a dangerous one that calls for blind faith in the technology of lost civilizations. Thor Heyerdahl's belief in the glories of empires long dead sustained him when towering Atlantic seas crashed over his paper boat and the water ran away between the separate reeds. Of his original international crew of seven, only one. the American, was a sailor and the -rest came mainly for the ride, with a duck and a monkey for company.

Irrepressibly ootimistic, their bigeest shock was the foul heaps of oil. dead fish and plastic mugs that they sailed through in- mid-ocean, sometimes for days on end. This is a quite different aspect of the Ra voyages, and the last has not. one hopes, been heard of it. On a much less spectacular scale, that other web-footed Scandinavian, Hans Hass, has also been trying to find explanations for similarities between people of different races.

He defines man's, first great leap forward In terms of the evolution of a whole series of specialized, detachable, artificial organs, the artifacts on which civilization is built. But for the great variety of cultures that were able to develop once mankind had these artificial organs to command, a huge range of basic human expressions continues unchanged down through the generations. To canture the all-but-unconscious facial signals we still make to each other, Hans Hass designed a trick camera with a dummy lens looking straight ahead, while the real lens pointed at right angles, photographing the passers-by. If you want to bone up on the evolutionary process that both men are talking about, "Man's Natural History," by J. S.

Weiner in the Weidenfeld and Nicolson natural history series, does it well enough for people who are happy to read about themselves as hominids. But there Is hone of the sweep and vision here, or the sheer physical excitement, of Thor Heyerdahl's paper ships. (A Journal-Economist Review) Moncton People THC PIP.ST HUNDRSJO. By I. W.

Lorroeey. U.N. Moncton PublliMnf Co. Ltd. J-JOW The Bend, curving shore of the Petitcodiac River, became the city of Moncton, New Brunswick's second-largest urban community, is the subject of a book by newspaperman E.

W. Larracey, vice-president and assistant to the publisher of the Moncton Times and The Transcript. Titled The First Hundred, It deals with the 1 100-year segment of Moncton'i history between 1 1766 and 1866. Jt also includes a chapter on the period 1698 to 1758 when French Acadians established the first settlement in this part -of southeastern New Brunswick. However, The First Hundred is not history, la the usual sense.

It Is more narrative 1 about people and how their activities helped make Moncton the place it is today. The'story begins with the arrival of Jacob Trites, "the father of Moncton," and a shipload of Pennsylvania settlers in 1766. It ends in the ship-building era as Moncton pauses before becoming the railway hub of the east in the 1870s. C. Alexander Pincombe, Moncton historian, says in a foreword: "Historical scholars may not fully 'approve of the liberty taken with facts in order to make the narrative more interesting." But he says Mr.

Larracey has written in "superb fashion" the story of Moncton to the days of the Iron horse. "His account of 'the shipbuilding era is descriptive writing at its best." (Canadian Press) Writer Notebook: Lozvry's Last Novel Classic or Failure? By WILFRED EGGLESTON JT IS a dubious kindness to a great author to publish a lot of posthumous manu- script. But I suppose every case must be judged on its merits. It would be a shame to deprive readers of classics just because publishers lacked the vision to accept them during the writer's lifetime. But there is a strong temptation as with Ernest Hemingway's Islands in the Stream to "cash in" on a sure-fire international market for an aborted work which the mere attachment of a famous name will virtually guarantee a best-seller.

The doubts arise again with the publication of what is called Malcolm Lowry's "last novel" October Ferry to Gabriola. Here the publisher did not make a commercial mistake, I fancy. I ordered a copy as soon as it was announced and had to wait a couple of months for a second printing to become available. JT MAY be, of course, that posterity will decide that this was a major novel and that it will not be felt unworthy to stand beside that outstanding poetic quasi-auto-biography Under the Volcano. Lowry died in 1957, so that Ferry to Gabriola has been under publishing scrutiny for a long time.

I will confess that I had troubled reservations while reading the earlier pages. Was it just a failure which the publishers of his own day had wisely advised him to regard as a literary exercise and which just simply did not come off? But it improves and grows and now and again reaches heights which mark the supreme artist. Lowry is a sort of genius with endless fascinations and spiritual intuitions, so that at times his failures hold more appeal than the triumphs of a lesser artist. Unlike Hemingway's Islands in the Stream, which was in a sense put together from unfinished segments left in Hemingway's workshop when he died, this novel of Malcolm Lowry's is essentially a completed but rejected script which left his hand presumably in a form which satisfied AN ovei JN HIS book Goddam Gypsy Ronald Lee tells there is a Romany saying: "There is not to love, not to hate, there is only to understand." Then he adds "Perhaps, after all, we Gypsies really were the bastard sons of Abraham and tfagar, the Egyptian, cursed to roam the world as pariahs with every man's hand against us." If at once you detect certain sharp contradictions between the coolness of detachment in the Romany adage and the expectation of abuse in the Ronald Lee addendum, then you are identifying the cleavage that runs right through his whole book. Though there is already a small body of Gypsy literature this is the first time, to my knowledge, that a Canadian of Roman) birth has written a full-scale story involving his own people.

Not unexpectedly, (Mr. Lee has chosen that hybrid form, an autobiographical novel, in which he can use the basic structure of his personal experience revised and reshaped as fiction, in his introductory words "a parallel rather than an actuality." Thus the of the story, "Yanko" to his Montreal fellow Gypsies, has like the author been brought up by Gazhe (non-Gypsies) and has fnany Gazhe friends. He has reverted tewthe Romanl world when he joined a Coppersmith Gypsy, that is a and travelled about Quebec on repeating jobs that are one of the ancient crafts of his people declining craft as we change the material of our utensil. Like his creator, "Yanko' has married an Indian girl, a Mohiawk, by taste and talent that he would tike to make Into career both a painter and a model shipbuilder, linguist coflecting materia) for i A Wilfrid Eggleston his own high artistic standards. YOU can follow the pre-publication fortunes of this novel for a while, anyway, in the Selected Letters.

On Nov. 14, 1950, Lowry writes from Vancouver to his New York agent, Harold Mat-son, alerting him to a bundle of short stories about to be mailed: "These are, in their probable order of arrival: 'October Ferry to a story which you've had before, but which was no damned good. This we decided we couldn't collaborate on, so I have completely rewritten it by myself and finally I'm extremely pleased with it and feel it will be as good as anything I've done, and saleable also." The Lowrys were desperately hard up for a little ready cash and it was a blow when Matson was unable to find a market for Gabriola or for that matter any of the other stories. A year later he is writing Matson again. By now he thinks, of Gabriola as a "novella" which is to form part of a book to be called Hear Us Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place.

(Such a book did of course appear four years after Lowry's death, but Gabriola was not included). Of it, in November, 1951, he writes: "Another novella, a first version of which we wrote in collaboration for you though it didn't come off. This I've completely redrafted and largely rewritten, and it deals if the Week Dcroihy Bishop a Romani dictionary, an Expo museum employee during that heady Centennial Year, and at the close of Goddam Gypsy is shaking Canadian dust from his feet to live and work in England. "pHEj, modern Gypsy," says Mr. Lee, "is almost invisible to anyone who is not himself a Gypsy or in some way connected with Gypsies.

Only the fortune-telling parlors, or in our large cities witness his existence "How many Gypsies are there today? No census exists, but estimates range from as high as 12 million, with some 25,000 living in Canada end a million and a quarter in the United States." Thus the unique, position of the author, literate and observant, who can walk through doors closed to the rest of us, doors invisible in fact to most of the rest of us. It enables him to recreate Montreal Romany life, he music, the exuberant parties, the wedding rituals, the rackets, the disciplines of the Elders, the with the theme of eviction, which Is related to man's dispossession, but this theme is universalized. This I believe to be a hell of a fine thing." pOURTEEN months later, and Gabriola has quickened into active life. He writes Matson about "work in progress" which includes "a rewritten (and I hope terrific) October Ferry to Gabriola as the current and besetting problem that has engrossed and forestalled, obsessed and delighted me for months and is still a problem child, for it grew almost to a novel on its own and is still not quite subdued end cut to size, though I hope to have results soon." A bit later he writes to Albert Erskine that Gabriola "has cost htm more pains than all the Volcano put together." He finds that his "daemon" has taken over, "And in Gabriola- he has turned out what set out to be an innocent and beautiful story of human longing into quite one of the most guilt-laden and In places quite Satanically horrendous documents it has even been my unfortunate lot to read, let alone have to imagine I wrote. One saving grace is that it is in places incredibly funny, I think; but here again I have a feeling you don't altogether always approve of my humor, alack." UNHAPPILY.

publishers' readers took what Lowry called a "dim" view of it, it a "bad" book, he said, even though Lowry himself had faith in it "as a By 1954 this "novella" had become a novel of 500 pages. Lowry was still at work on it a few weeks before he died. Who was right, the publi-. shers' readers of 1953 or the author himself? It is easy to discover and expose the organic flaws in the nature of the novel; but personally. I respect Lowry's appraisal of his own work.

He magnificently justified Under the Volcano in a 50 or 60 page letter to Jonathan Cape before it was accepted. If he thought that October Ferry to Gabriola deserved mention in the same breath as the Volcano, it is not to be brushed aside lightly. Reviewed for The Journal bv Dorothy B'np police raids, the hurt to pride from Gazhe treatment, the understandable bitterness. The Rom are among the world's most fascinatingly persistent people, nomadic, totally countryless, "living In the sanctuary of our own aloofness," "the world's oldest living nonconformists." That Ronald Lee can give a fleeting but honest, unapolc-getic glimpse into the mysteries of Gypsy Hfe against a background of the Montreal we know is the unique attraction of Goddam Gypsy, the positive quality of it that I hope will give It a wide reading. QODDAM GYPSY in married internally by the fact that Mr.

Lee not only, and rightly envelops "Yanko" with the bitterness of the intelligent proud rejected man but as author and creator he is also enveloped by that bitterness. This makes today's protest literature. 4t doesn't make an art that survives into tomorrow. Externally the book is nearly roadblocked from intelligent readers by a dustjacket blurb that like the squib we often call such things blows off into noisy excessive claims and cheap fad-protest diction. Emotionally overcharged and therefore false, it is the year's worst publishing ad copy (so I hope) and patently unfair to the text that follows.

Fortunately the publishers, as if sharing the book's own cleavages of spirit, have shown genuine respect for Mr. Lee's manuscript in attractive paper and typography, In generous spacing, end in (he bright to rot card illustrations of Louis Thomas. GYPSY. By Ronald Lee. 1H pagos.

Tundra Books of Montreal, An Attic Salt Shaker By E.E.E. QEORGE HALAS, owner of the Chicago Bears, has always taken a special interest in the doctoring of injuries, recalls Clyde (Bulldog) Turner, the Bears former all-league centre, in "The Game That Was," by Myron Cope. "If he heard of someone who could cure a pulled muscle or a wrenched ankle, he'd send for him, He used to fly in a doctor from Detroit to work on the boys. They couldn't stand him, he was so rough. "One time, when Hamp Pool had a shoulder injury, Halas called in this doctor and told Hamp to go see him.

Hamp went and the doc said, What's ailing you, 'I've got a little trouble with my shoulder." 'Which "Hamp showed him the wrong shoulder. So the doc worked on it and worked on it and worked on it and then went back to Detroit. But Hamp couldn't keep his mouth shut. He told a few guys what he had done. Halas got word of it and fined him $200.

gIR WILLIAM EDEN, father of Lord Avon, commissioned James M. Whistler to paint a portrait of his wife. When the painting was completed and paid for. Whistler, for some unaccountable reason, failed to deliver it. There were some angry scenes.

Then Eden brought suit. The court ordered the painter to return his fee. But Sir William never did get the painting. Whistler, in a moment of spite, scraped out Lady Eden's face and substituted another. QVER the years, Igor Strav-.

insky rarely saw eye to eye with the world's leading conductors, many of whom, he held In low esteem, relates Arnold Dobrin in "Igor Stravinsky." "Most often, when he was dissatisfied with a conductor's rendition of his work, he would make some uncomplimentary remark and let it go at that. "However, if that failed to relieve his discontent, he would try something else. In a Cling cabinet under his piano, Stravinsky kept a collection of photographs of the maestros, showing them in highly contorted and unflattering poses. "Whenever conductor really distressed him, he would pull out the man's photo from the file, burst into laughter at the ridiculous pose and feel better at once." early paintings of Pablo Picasso were sold for food money. As his fame grew, the value of these pictures skyrocketed.

Once, years later, a visitor to his studio asked the artist to show him some of the works of his youth. "I don't have any," confessed the painter. "Oh? You did not have the sentiment to hold on to a few?" "It wasn't that," explained Picasso. "When I painted them, I couldn't afford to keep them, and now I can't afford to buy them." JN 1914, painter Marc Chagall took leave of his beloved Paris and went to Russia to marry his fiancee. Expecting to return in a short while, he left behind in his studio more than 150 of' his canvases, reports Jean Crespelle in "Chjigall." "It wasn't until 1923 that he returned, to find his studio occupied by another tenant and all his paintings gone.

He soon learned what had happened to them. His artist friends, desperate for money, had helped themselves to the pictures and had sold them. "Chagall, stunned by the loss of the bulk of his early work, set out wtih grim determination Jo recreate the paintings. For the next 15 years, he devoted all his spare time to this project. From memory, from photographs, he slowly but steadily duplicated the stolen canvases.

"This did not endear him to collectors who were forced to stand by, in helpless dismay, as replicas of works in their possession began appearing. It got so that dealers refused to exhibit the early paintings, for fear that Chagall would take advantage of the occasion to copy them." CHESS By D. M. DAIN Bloc 12 Ploco 1 HI nan JiP A 111 mm Whltt 1J Pltcos Block lo ploy and win. Si? V.

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a set-up which he hod proviouty objected to becouM ol th nolos lector, Th lighting orrongemonri were ottered to conform to his otonrjords. Th first game, dfrrd to Sunday, Moy 14, was adfoumed at th 40m move Fischer two pawns down. In the other matches going In various ports of Eurooe the scores ore: Korchnol, 1' GeMor, Vit Fetrotlan, 1'4-Huebner, lVi (3 draws)! Larson 1, Uhlmann, I (a win opiec). An interesting match was held of Skoal. Yugoslavia between V.

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Now a piece of meat for the wolves but th pursuit (c) A finesse gains a tempo, (d) 35. PxP, P-OS (O). End Family Arguments THE 1971 WORLD ALMANAC nd Book of Facta No point In arguing about facts when The World Almanac has a million of them I It's the book people reach for when they want answers the famous single-volume reference essential for home, school or office. Quote The Authority NOW ON SALE AT BOOKSTORES, NEWSSTANDS, SUPERMARKETS AND OTHER STORES, $2.00 "-lit i -4 A j.tJ.j 4VfU 1 1 Tiil.ill.-lii'V t.4,,.4..f.i4, A ,1 i.t.k.U,i,4.U,iU...i 1 tj tt.