`Contractility is a Virtue'

Viewed with a careless eye they might be mistaken for buttons, and their color for humble brown. Observed closely, in the right light, snail shells are modestly iridescent spirals, elegant renderings of the Fibonacci sequence. With daily spring rain, flotillas ascend fences, walls, trees and, best of all for observation, windows. The journey is hazardous. Weather is volatile in Houston. Parching sun follows days of rain, leaving desiccated snails epoxied to the glass. They are not slow but methodical, a quality I admire. They can slide unhurt along the edge of a razor. So much for vulgar clichés -- “snail’s pace,” “snail mail.”

During my first visit to France, in 1973, after a lifetime of jokes and revulsion from a distance, I ate escargot twice. In Paris, the snails were prepared with minced garlic and served in the shell. Savory on the palate but the mind kept butting in. The second time, at a café somewhere in the south, they were served alive, in the shell. My companion, an Algerian-born Frenchman, instructed me in technique: shell in the left hand, lemon wedge in the right. Squeeze the lemon in the aperture, the creatures distends his head, slurp. With much beer and wine and who knows what else, I convinced myself I enjoyed it, just as I pretended the horsemeat I had been served in another French café rivaled filet mignon. I’ve returned to France but haven’t eaten snail in 34 years. No gastropods for this gastronome. Their only known predator around my house are my kids.

Shakespeare cites the snail nine times, usually as a synonym for slowness, never as foodstuff. My favorite is in King Lear, Act I, Scene 5:

“Fool: Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell?

“King Lear: No.

“Fool: Nor I neither, but I can tell why a snail has a house.

“King Lear: Why?

“Fool: Why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns without a case.”

The best poetic deployments of the snail is an early, Jamesian poem by Marianne Moore, “To a Snail”:

“If `compression is the first grace of style,’
you have it. Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue. It is not
the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, `a method of conclusions’;
`a knowledge of principles,’
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.”

This seems true of the snail, true of superior writing, and true of Marianne Moore.