Natural History

I was briefly interested in Ted Hughes after the publication of Crow in 1970, with the Leonard Baskin drawing on the cover. It was Baskin who suggested the crow theme to Hughes, and it was Baskin’s drawing that first attracted me to the English poet. That’s when I developed a taste for writer/artist pairings. In 1967, Baskin had designed the five-cent stamp commemorating Thoreau’s 150th birthday, and I also had a copy of his drawing of Sacco and Vanzetti. I liked the emphatic angularity of Baskin’s drawings, and I especially liked the way he drew Crow and other animals. I’ve just found another writer-artist collaboration devoted to them: Jules Renard’s Natural History, with lithographs by Walter Stein.

This was not a living collaboration. Renard died in 1910. Fifty years later, the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts at the Harvard College Library paired him with Stein. It must have been a daunting assignment: During Renard’s lifetime his book had been illustrated by Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard. It’s an austerely sumptuous volume, published in an edition of 600. The copy I have, from the Fondren Library at Rice University is numbered 281 and signed by Stein and Philip Hofer, the founder and longtime curator of the Department of Printing and Graphics Arts.

Stein illustrates 27 of Renard’s brief prose renderings of animals. Their scratchy, black-and-white detail, combined with Stein’s gentle, intimate touch, makes the lithographs more interesting to look at than Renard’s prose poems are to read. Stein’s wasp, for instance, is exquisite, with a perfectly drawn petiole, the narrow band between the insect's abdomen and thorax, and the origin of the expression “wasp-waisted.” Renard writes: “She will end, finally, by spoiling her waistline!” which works neither as natural history nor human satire. There’s a little more substance to “The Cat,” which confirms my observations of every cat I have ever owned – their casually innocent sadism:

“Mine does not eat mice. Indeed, he does not care for them. He only catches one in order to play with it.

“When he is tired of amusing himself, he spares its life, and goes away to dream for a bit, ever so innocent, sitting on the loop of his tail, his head pulled tight down on his shoulders like a closed fist.

“But due to his claws – the mouse is dead.”

Sometimes, Renard plays with sentimental conceits, as in “The Butterfly”:

“This exquisite little love letter, folded in two, is looking for the address of a flower!”

About eight years ago I spent a summer day in an upstate New York marsh, in the company of a neuroethologist, a biologist who studies how an animal’s nervous system determines its behavior. He was devoted to dragonflies, jewel-like creatures that rank among nature’s most efficient hunters. His research showed their kill rate topped 97 percent. Eighty percent of their brain is devoted to vision, and their field of vision is 360 degrees. Here’s Renard on “The Dragon Fly”:

“She takes good care of her eyesight.

“From one bank of the river to the other she hardly does anything except bathe her swollen eyes.

“And she crackles, ever so slightly, as though flying powered by an electric current.”

I learned online that Stein was born in 1924 and apparently is till alive. In 1966, the poet Richard Howard translated Renard’s Natural History in an edition that includes the illustrations by Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard and Stein, which I hope to find. The edition I found in my university library was shelved in the PQ section, according to the Library of Congress system –French literature, though it could have been in zoology. Stein’s drawings, if not Renard’s prose, could serve as a rudimentary field guide.