THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 19, 1994 TAG: 9406150430
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
DATELINE: 940619 LENGTH: Medium
FARLEY MOWAT
{REST} Houghton Mifflin. 256 pp. $21.95.
\ \ NOVELIST JUDITH KRANTZ said, ``Most writers had unhappy childhoods.'' Born Naked, the childhood memoir of Canadian nature-lore author Farley Mowat, presents budding author as feral child.
I'm exaggerating. Mowat (Never Cry Wolf) was raised by parents; his father Angus, an avid sailor, hoped Farley would be born with a caul (``Neptune puts his mark on those fated to go down to the sea in ships.''). Mowat reveals, ``Alas, I had not even the vestige of a caul. I came into the world just like every other landlubber does - stark naked.''
Tolerant parents let him roam ``half or altogether naked,'' exploring woods, river banks, factory dumps and land teeming with fox, rabbits, raccoons. The woods also held hobo jungles of unemployed men. The stuff of modern parental nightmares, but Mowat says, ``We were never offered any harm.''
During the Depression, the family left Ontario for remote Saskatoon, where Mowat lived the charmed life of a semi-nudist with unlimited outdoor access. Before Angus found regular employment as a librarian, the family had subsisted on oatmeal, soda biscuits and honey. (Raising bees had been an ill-fated entrepreneurial scheme.) Mowat's earliest memory is of peering out of an improvised wooden-crate playpen, watching a large honey bee on an anthill ``resolutely and briskly directing the ant traffic away from me, much as a policeman might direct members of an unruly crowd away from some important personage.'' Expert apiarists scoff, but he insists, ``I know I was taken under the protection of the bees, and the proof is that I have never been stung by one, not then or ever.''
In frozen Saskatoon, Mowat's fascination for animals (``the Others'') grew. He observed wild ones and kept pets - an owl named Wol, a black squirrel named Jitters and a Florida alligator named Limpopo that thrived on boiled eggs, hot dogs and tadpoles. Before their next move, Mowat sadly released the 2-foot reptile into the St. Clair River, with a bon voyage gift of six weiners. Perhaps, Mowat muses, Limpopo was the 6-foot gator found years later in the Detroit sewer system.
In Saskatoon Mowat became a registered ornithologist - at 14. Besides bird-banding, he tried amateur taxidermy and camping trips in weather so brutal that he and his dog Mutt slept burrowed in haystacks to avoid freezing to death. He accompanied an uncle to Hudson Bay to collect egg specimens, an expedition that involved dangling from cliffs and facing grizzly bears. He was a teenage nature columnist for the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, until fired for a graphic story on the underwater mating practices of ruddy ducks.
Sometimes Mowat seems disingenuous. He reveals that his father was a temperamental womanizer (``His interest in women was surpassed only by his passion for boats''), and that as a child he was labeled ``puny . . . a sickly runt,'' but denies such things bothered him. And Born Naked lacks the delightful narrative irony of Never Cry Wolf. Still, it's an engaging account of an eccentric childhood, a funny, touching, surprising look at the birth of talent, dedication and the desire to create and preserve. by CNB