What the tortoise knew

TIMOTHY; OR, NOTES OF AN ABJECT REPTILE

By Verlyn Klinkenborg

Knopf, $16.95, 177 pages

In the late-18th century, curate and naturalist Gilbert White took to writing a natural history of his parish. Within the thick, patchwork volume that became “The Natural History of Selborne” — in print to this day — are his close observations of plants and animals, time and seasons and gentle speculations about how the world works. In it also is the following passage, which serves as the preface to Verlyn Klinkenborg’s remarkable new book:

A very intelligent and observant person has assured me that, in the former part of his life, keeping but one horse, he happened also on a time to have but one solitary hen. These two incongruous animals spent much of their time together in a lovely orchard where they saw no creature but each other. By degrees an apparent regard began to take place between these two sequestered individuals. The fowl would approach the quadruped with notes of complacency, rubbing herself gently against his legs: while the horse would look down with satisfaction and move with the greatest caution and circumspection lest he should trample on his diminutive companion. Thus, by mutual good offices each seemed to console vacant hours of the other …

Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne, 1789

Along with his observations about the doings of horse and hen, White also wrote about a tortoise who lived in his garden for over 13 years. White called the tortoise Timothy, and closely followed the patterns of his days among the other creatures who lived at Selborne.

Now, in this fanciful novel, Mr. Klinkenborg gives Timothy a chance to talk, and what the engaging reptile has to say will stay with readers long after they close the pages of this astonishing book.

Timothy begins:

“I was gone for more than a week before they found me. A rustling in the bean-field, heavy steps nearby. A shout — the boy’s voice — more shouts. Thomas catches me up in his hands with sickening haste. I weigh six pounds thirteen ounces. He lifts me as though I weigh nothing at all.”

Driven by “antic blood,” Timothy’s escape through the wicket gate of White’s garden forms the central action of the book. Though readers come to learn that Timothy’s narrative in fact begins nine years after that big event and after “forty-four years spent among the humans” it is escape and freedom to which the tortoise will return throughout the narrative.

Timothy does not have good memories of his first capture:

“Deeply inertial creatures, we tortoises are. Used to the steady gradations of our own locomotion. Mild accelerations. Step by step measure of uneven terrain. The rise and fall of a ship’s progress is unpleasant. Still worse the way I was basketed to Ringmer, panniered beside a servant’s hip Earthbed and boxed for the violent ride to Selborne by post-chaise … .”

If yearning to be free is the core theme of the book, it is freedom as Timothy sees it, not as it is defined by humans. For as noted throughout the book, what humans think and what Timothy knows are two different matters entirely.

“’Out! Daniel Wheeler’s boy shouted when they found me, stumbling over his heels. “’Timothy got out!’”

“The boy is mistaken, There is no Out! Humans believe the asparagus is In … But I am always Out.

“And I was In there , too, as always. In under unhedged stars, dark of the moon. Among chiding of field crickets stirring of long grasses, gleaming wind… . Beyond sigh of humans. Within my beloved shell.

“Great tottering beasts. They are out.”

Though it is that single escape that seems to be the most important event in Timothy’s life, more of that life is spent with the tortoise doing his own exploring, observing and hibernating. And then debating in his own mind Gilbert White’s record of the tortoise’s hibernation:

“Timothy the tortoise begins to stir,” [White] writes; ’”heaves up the mould that lies over his back’

“’Timothy the tortoise heaves up the sod under which he is buried.’

“’TImothy the tortoise heaves-up the earth.’”

Of this record Timothy wryly observes, “No other news in Selborne? No mad dog a-biting? No cow a-springing on a barn floor? What makes my rising momentous to anyone but me?”

Or this, “Mr. Gilbert White writes to nephew Samuel Barker, “When a man first rouses himself from a deep sleep he does not look very wise; but nothing can be more squalid and stupid than our friend, when he first comes crawling out of his hibernacula.”

And Timothy then mutters, “Who watches the curate wake? How wise does he look at bed-break? Who judges him so dispassionately?”

Timothy clearly has some scores to settle. But all is not bitterness. Timothy writes of his affection for Miss Rebecca Snooke, who, White has noticed, has some effect on the tortoise.

Timothy notes, “’I was much taken,’ Mr. Gilbert White wrote of me, ’with its sagacity in discerning those that do it kind offices: for as soon as the good old lady comes in sight who has waited on it for more than thirty years, it hobbles towards its benfactress with awkward alacrity but remains inattentive to strangers. Thus not only the ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib but the most abject reptile and torpid of beings distinguishes the hand that feeds it, and is touched with the feelings of gratitude!’”

To which Timothy begs to differ. “But place Mr. Rebecca Snooke in a brick box apart from her natural kind. Where she cannot eat her natural food or dig her natural bed. Let her be fed twice a day, albeit cheerfully, by one who keeps her there. Be kind and withhold rains, killing frosts … . Would she say she has been waited on? Or would another word occur to her?”

There is one great irony to Timothy’s story that I will leave for readers to discover. It casts doubt on some of White’s powers of observation but in the final analysis does not diminish his great gift. Mr. Klinkenborg credits the quiet poetry of Gilbert White’s journals for Timothy’s language. And so must we.