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A Horse Is a Horse
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13648 |
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BOOK WORLD
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8 / 1988 |
3,775 Words |
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James J. Thompson, Jr
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TRAVELLER
Richard Adams
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988
Cloth. 248 pp., $18.95
Someone once suggested that the perfect book title would be Lincoln's Doctor's Dog. Obvious reason: Lincoln and the Civil War continue to spellbind Americans; medicine remains a perenially popular topic; and, of course, everyone dotes on dogs. Richard Adams, the English novelist who won renown with the infamous bunny book, Watership Down, has an equally hot ticket: General Lee's horse. Adams goes one better than the apocryphal medico's canine, for in Traveller the General's faithful mount talks. Not to the General himself, mind you, but to cats, dogs, goats, and other horses. Something of a snob, though, Traveller disdains conversation with artillery horses and mules. Whether he talks with bunnies is problematic, for none appear in the novel.
Most everyone has fallen victim to one of those garrulous World War II veterans who haunts bars, cadging drinks and glazing the patrons' eyes with tales of how he licked Hitler or singlehandedly smashed Hirohito's maniacal hordes. Although Traveller is a teetotaler, and his reminiscing takes place in a stable, the effect is similar at times. The captive audience is a cat, Tom the Nipper, one of the Lee family's felines. Poor Tom. Every time he ventures into the stable to snap up a tasty morsel of mouse, Traveller collars him and forces the hapless tabby to audit his yarns.
Perhaps Tom was not so reluctant a listener after all, for he appears to have lent a hand to the enterprise. Traveller did not write these memoirs; he could talk, but obviously he could not grasp a pen with a hoof. Tom must have picked up a pen in his little paw and copied down his friend's recollections. Out of this partnership came history's only equine memoirs, set down on paper by its sole feline amanuensis. Adams does not reveal how he happened upon the results of this collaboration. Neither the Library of Congress nor the Virginia State Library lists such a manuscript among its holdings.
Speak, Traveller
Traveller's monologues occur between April 1866 and October 1870. Time hangs heavily upon the horse's broad shoulders. His beloved master is busy administering Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, leaving Traveller to fill long hours with remembrance. For Tom the Nipper's edification, he ranges across his entire life (he seems blessed with total recall), beginning with his boyhood (oops!--anthropomorphism can infect the most resistant of minds: I mean "foal-hood") on a farm in western Virginia.
In recollecting these early years, Traveller sounds like a character out of Thomas Nelson Page, the most famous chronicler of the vanished idyll of prewar Virginia. Since Page did not begin composing his bittersweet tales of lost splendor until the 1880s, a question arises: Did Page somehow latch on to Tom's manuscript and find there the inspiration for his fictional rendering of antebellum Virginia?
In his most widely read story, "Marse Chan," published in 1885 in a volume entitled In Ole Virginia, Page has an elderly black man--a former slave named Sam--recount in tender
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