How do you get a 300-pound boar back into his pen? Can chickens be herded like sheep? Where would you find the answers to these questions—in some rural miscellany, a 4-H booth, or the New York Times? The latter, assuming you were on the lookout for Verlyn Klinkenborg's occasional op-ed pieces on nature and rural living that have been appearing there since 1995.
Klinkenborg's "Rural Life" is an idiosyncratic beat in times like these, but it offers Times readers (who may have seen a live pig once or twice but have probably never named one, cared for it, and later eaten it) a welcome break from articles about economics, foreign policy and political scandals. Not that country life is uneventful: as Klinkenborg shows in his columns and his books Making Hay and The Rural Life, there are fences to patch, animals to chase, crops to harvest and "walloping" storms to weather.
With his new book, Timothy; or, Notes from an Abject Reptile (Knopf, February), he tackles nature from the perspective of a wise, grave, and sometimes wry tortoise named Timothy, who lived in the lush, manicured garden of English curate Gilbert White from 1780 until White's death in 1793. (Timothy, whose original home was most likely the coast of Turkey, died a year after White.) In Timothy, Klinkenborg fuses gorgeous and meticulous observations about the natural world with penetrating philosophical questions.
White, a dedicated amateur naturalist, frequently mentioned Timothy in his journals and letters; the landmark volume in which Timothy appears, White's The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, was published in 1789. Often regarded as the first classic of natural history, it's only recently gone out of print after more than 200 years.
Klinkenborg was re-reading White's journals a few winters ago when the idea of nature observing the naturalist struck him. "I don't usually have these moments where I realize how a whole book will work," he says, "but in this case I did."
Of Timothy's hibernation, Gilbert White writes, "When one reflects on the state of this strange being, it is a matter of wonder to find that Providence should bestow such a profusion of days, such a seeming waste of longevity, on a reptile that appears to relish it so little as to squander more than two-thirds of its existence in a joyless stupor, and be lost to all sensation for months together in the profoundest of slumbers." Of White's wakefulness, Klinkenborg, channeling Timothy, writes, "Humans of Selborne wake all winter. Above ground, eating and eating, breathing and shitting, talking and talking…. Such a bulk of being to regulate. Disorder stalks them day and night. They stalk it back."
And so Timothy becomes a companion to White's work, full of wisdom that both complements and challenges White's: the tortoise view allows Klinkenborg to consider nature, the divine, maternal love, sex and time in ways that challenge our assumption that human beings are the most important creatures on earth.
That such serious topics arise in such a slender, lovely, and readable book isn't surprising considering Klinkenborg's background: he has taught creative writing at Harvard, Bennington and Pomona (his alma mater), and he received his Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton. "That's one of the things that's a little odd about this job," Klinkenborg says of his work at the Times. "It's my rural life that has the most visibility and the fact that I'm a highly trained academic is completely lost." He laughs. "I'm saying that ironically, of course."
So how did the academic become a newspaperman, albeit one with a sunny, quiet, professorial office in an upstate farmhouse, far removed from the newsroom floor? That was a bit of luck, Klinkenborg says. Howell Raines, then the editor of the Times editorial page, heard about Klinkenborg through "fishing buddies," and asked him if he might be interested in reviving the tradition of nature writing on the editorial page. What began as a freelance assignment in 1995 became, after a "stunning" 1997 invitation to join the editorial board, a full-time job with a much broader canvas.
In signed and unsigned pieces, Klinkenborg has written about 9/11, the redevelopment of lower Manhattan, museum exhibitions, environmental and land-use issues, what it feels like to drive through Wyoming in the middle of the night, and Darwin's theory of evolution ("Under the kind of scrutiny that Darwin bestowed on himself," he writes, "the notion of intelligent design vanishes in a puff of smoke like the bunkum it is"). He also writes about "the quirky things you notice about how people live in the city, how people behave. Basically whatever I happen to notice as long as I can frame it in an editorial in some way."
And, very recently, Klinkenborg has become a blogger: subscribers to Times Select on the Web can read about his life upstate in three or four new posts a week. "It struck me as a way to connect readers to the place we actually live a little more intimately than they were through The Rural Life essays," he says, and judging by subscribers' comments, he already has an appreciative audience. "I live vicariously through your columns. They are evocative of my boyhood in rural Fulton County, NY," writes one reader. "To have this blog with a cup of coffee in the morning is a dream come true," writes another.
He ought to find an appreciative audience for Timothy, too, even if readers can't quite figure out what sort of book it is. It's not explicitly a work of fiction—the words "A Novel" were inked out on the galley—but its narrator is a tortoise. "People are starting to talk about it as if it were fiction, and to me it's actually a work of scholarship. It arose on the foundation of scholarship, learning as much as I could about Gilbert White's world, about tortoises, about the world Timothy came from in Turkey, and really getting a feel for the pattern of that life Timothy would have been imbedded in in that garden," Klinkenborg says.
In other words, what happens in the book really happened: neighbors came to call, Timothy briefly escaped his garden home, Gilbert White puttered about in his vegetables. But "the organizing consciousness" is fictive. "If I'd set out to write a novel in which a tortoise tells the story, I wouldn't have been able to do it. But to write a work of scholarship and imagination and, I hope, poetry that tried to be as true and as good be and was accidentally fiction… well, that's a different story."
But it also takes so seriously an animal's perspective that it calls into question the fact that earlier, at Le Madeleine on 43rd Street, Klinkenborg ordered a salmon sandwich for lunch. Wouldn't such a convincing act of ventriloquism nudge him toward vegetarianism?
"Even though I get to enjoy the pleasure of being in a turtle's perspective here, most of the time I have to see things from a human perspective," he says. On his small farm in New York's Columbia County, he and his wife keep horses and raise heritage breeds of pigs, chickens, ducks and geese. "All these animals exist in the form they do and the shape they do because of their collaboration with humans over the centuries. And we exist in the form we do because of our collaboration with them. For me, the commitment to the animals we raise is also a commitment to the coherence of agriculture and the coherence of a relationship to the land."
"Often when I give readings, somebody will say, 'You eat your own animals?' My answer to that is always, "Yes, whose animals do you eat?'"
