FOR THOSE WHO LIKE ZOOS AND THOSE WHO DON’T

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 148, 18 March 1939, Page 2 (Supplement)

FOR THOSE WHO LIKE ZOOS AND THOSE WHO DON’T

An Entertaining Record ByLouis MacNeice

“Zoo,” by Louis MacNeice (London: Michael Joseph). Those who read “I Crossed the Minch,” Mr. MacNeice’s account of his visits to the Outer Hebrides, will be expecting something unusual whenever he puts pen to paper. “Zoo” will be no disappointment. Mr. MacNeice has a style irll his own and a capricious wit to salt it. He has a mind with a quick in it and no matter how he sets out to think or what mundane object attracts his attention, his thoughts are always different from anyone elses. This is natural to Mr. MacNeice; he does not attempt to be different. He just is. He-sets out to write about the London Zoological Gardens because he likes zoos. He goes to live near Regent Park and gets to know the Zoo wen. He studies the people who visit the Zoo, for he seems to know the- animals by heart. , , , „ Something of what he feels about zoos and what he gains from visiting them can be seen in the following extract from his book: — I get from the Zoo a pleasure not essentially different in kind from what I get when going to sports or the movies. All these entertainments fulfil the two functions of pleasing the two PaHs of the child in me; they excite my childlike curiosity and give me, if I like them, a childlike physical pleasure. . The pleasure of dappled things, the beauty of adaption to purpose, the glory of extravagance, classic -elegance or romantic nonsense and grotesquerie-all these we get from the Zoo We react to these with the same delight_ as to new potatoes in April speckled with chopped parsley or to the lights at night on the Thames of Battersea Power House, or to cars sweeping their shadows from lamppost to lamp-post down Haverstock HiH or to brewers’ drays or to lighthouses and searchlights or to a newly-cut lawn or to a hot towel or a friction at the barber s or to Moran’s two classic tries at Twickenham in 1937 or to the smell of dustingpowder in a warm bathroom or to the tun of shelling peas into a china bowl or or shuffling one’s feet through dead leaves when they are crisp or to the noise of rain or the crackling of a newly-lit fire or the jokes of a street-hawker or the silence of snow in moonlight or the purring of a powerful car.

■This sort of writing may not, perhaps, tell you anything more about zoos than you knew before, but it does tell you something about Mr. McNelce and that is an experience not to be readily forgone. He has a personality which grows upon acquaintance, and it reflects itself in every line of his stimulating prose. “Zoo” is full of a number of rare things. It gets under way with an almost boring inventory of what is in the Zoo and where. After thus showing that he knows the Zoo quite well enough to write about it, Mr. MacNeice allows the book to become mostly personal digression in and. around the Zoo, and this, as those who have met Mr. MacNeice before will know, is altogether diverting. We learn all about all the dogs he has kept and his ginger cat. We hear about a visit to Ireland and one to the Paris Zoo. There is an ably-constructed examipation paper on Zoos (with answers), and with all this and many other things there are the visits to the Zoo and “impressions” at various seasons of the year. The book is refreshing—enjoyable even to those who have never been to a zoo and hope never to go. i Nancy Sharp has drawn very real and homely pictures of the animals for Mr. MacNeice. Her work is a fitting complement to his, with just the right amount of impressionism.