Customer Reviews

The Presence of Whales: Contemporary Writings on the Whale

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Poignant and deeply satisfying. After reading just one chapter I ordered another copy to give as a gift.

This collection, described as "contemporary writings on the whale," is full of fine writing.

Not good. Fine.

Awed, as they all are by the size of whales, almost all the writers feel obliged to say something awesome. Since they don't have any really big thoughts, they fall back on "creative writing" as taught in the lit'ry schools.

Thus we get the inane adjective: "luminous sunlight" (Frank Stewart, the editor, a professor of English literature at the University of Hawaii); and the simile more obscure than the event it purports to clarify: wind rattles a hut until the "walls gyrated like a rocket during liftoff" (Diane Ackerman, writing for the New Yorker).

And padding, including half a paragraph devoted to explaining how "the spout's character changed with wind conditions" (Kenneth Brower).

And unclassifiable nonsense, of which my favorite instance is Charles Bergman's description of a leaping whale as "unavoidably phallic." Now there, despite what I just said, is a man with a big idea.

Despite this, the book is readable, thanks to the whales, about which it is possible to write badly but not dully.

The whales, however, are not the stars of "The Presence of Whales."

The star is Roger Payne, the scientist who turned humpback whales into recording artists in the '60s.

This apparently is because Payne and his wife, Katherine Payne, keep open house for vagrant nature writers, several of whom came away with the impression that Payne discovered the fact that cetaceans make a lot of noise.

Credit for that really is due to Kenneth Norris, one of the two writers in this book, along with Farley Mowat, whose writing is unpretentious. (Norris is not merely good; at his best, he's wonderful. He's the man who described humpback whales as "shaped like a big, grooved tadpole," which beats even the description I heard once from a crewman on the Maui Princess ferry: "Look for a black Cadillac with a radiator problem." None of the professional writers in "The Presence of Whales" comes close to that sort of mastery.)

I don't think that Payne, whose own contribution here is workmanlike, deliberately claimed credit not due. It's all too obvious that most of the writers came to Payne knowing next to nothing about whales, listened to the Paynes, and then did no more checking.

Stewart, with an indifference to consistency that is startling in an editor, lets all their statements stand as written, whether two years earlier or 30. As a result, many assertions about whales in one essay are contradicted in other essays.

K.C. Balcomb, a Washington investigator of killer whales, wrote (in 1991), "It is hard to imagine now, but 30 years ago it was generally thought by both laymen and scientists alike that killer whales hunting in packs were the most ruthless predators of the sea."

They may still, if they believe Gerard Gormley, writing for the Sierra Club in 1990, who describes how a pack of killer whales skins a minke whale and then eats the tongue, all so deftly that though the attack takes a long time, the minke whale stays conscious almost to the end. The killer whales do not bother to eat the blubber or the flesh, and the minke goes into shock and sinks, whereupon sharks rip it to pieces, coincidentally jolting the suffering whale into consciousness for a few last minutes of torment.

Gormley's is the most gruesome portrayal of a death I have ever read that was not inflicted by humans on humans, and many readers may also have seen a remarkable film of killer whales tossing a live sea lion pup back and forth while its mother snuffles pathetically on shore.

Balcomb doesn't say what his standards of ruthlessness are, but they must be pretty high.

As a result of this unselective selection, a casual reader is likely to come away from this book knowing less about whales than when he went in.

Even the essays by professional scientists are unreliable. The Paynes have been careful not to claim that humpback whale sounds are a language (and the fact that they are repeated over and over without variation suggests strongly that they are not); but their acolytes are not so careful. And who can blame them when Katherine Payne is so incautious as to write that the seasonal changes in humpback songs are "not unlike linguistic drift"? In fact, they are nothing like linguistic drift, a complex phenomenon that results from a number of things going on simultaneously, none of them demonstrably mimicked by whales.

Stewart didn't do Roger Payne any favors by reprinting Faith McNulty's 1974 essay, either. McNulty, another New Yorker stablehand, is a very fine writer indeed, describing whale songs as "a medley of ethereal calls such as tiny translucent fairies might make."

McNulty reports Payne as saying that "the whales can't afford to collide" because of their delicate skins, and that they have to "stay far apart while feeding." Those were airy speculations even in 1974, and today every schoolchild on Maui has seen the films contradicting such ideas.

Stewart also did no favors for W.S. Merwin by reprinting his 1967 poem (antipoem, really, since it has no metrical organization) "For a Coming Extinction." This effort is not rendered more comprehensible by its lack of punctuation, but it is about California gray whales. Unfortunately for the antipoet, but fortunately for the whales, they did not go extinct and today are so numerous as to constitute a nuisance.