Peterson, All Things Reconsidered: My Birding Adventures
ByRoger Tory Peterson spent the last 50 years of his life recycling.
His reputation (and his fortune) made with the brilliance of the 1947 Field Guide, Peterson seemed largely to coast after that as a writer, cobbling together books, articles, and those notorious Forewords out of material and ideas dating back in many cases to the 1920s. Read a little of any of them, and the next one and the next one and the one after that are basically the same. It’s déjà lu all over again.
Ten years after his death at the age of 87, Peterson’s project of self-plagiarism takes a new twist with this posthumous volume, a reprinting of more than 40 brief essays published between 1988 and 1996 in Bird Watcher’s Digest. The essays are preceded by a short, laudatory introduction by Bill Thompson III, which quickly rehearses Peterson’s significance to the history of North American birding.
Much of Peterson’s prose here will be familiar to anyone who started birding before 1980, and many of the passages (and even some entire essays) are immediately recognizable as verbatim borrowings from Birds over America, Wild America, and other works Peterson published half a century ago. Reading these assembled pieces one after the other, one gains a clear image of their author glancing in annoyance at the calendar and its angry deadlines, reaching to his desk drawer and his bookshelves for a chunk of prose to courier to the offices of BWD. We are even afforded a rare glimpse into the writer’s conscience in those passages where Peterson assures us that he is working hard on bigger projects, a tacit excuse for re-using decades-old material.
Most of the pleasure to be had in reading this book is in these metatextual musings, where the curtain billows to allow a glimpse, just a glimpse, of the aging Peterson behind the words he first crafted as a young man on the cutting edge of birding. The picture that emerges is as clear as it is complex. Peterson comes through as not just proud but vain, insisting with no great subtlety on his accomplishments (which were quite real); at the same time, there is a certain touching cluelessness in his overestimation of his significance as a painter. Peterson’s obsession with photography (and photographic equipment) comes through with equal clarity, and there are passages that nearly whine about having so little time to indulge what truly was his “real” hobby. In the most readable essays, we see Peterson marking the deaths of friends and colleagues; and yet, other essays are peopled by the long-dead, walking and talking through the pages as if they were still the hale and hearty companions of Peterson’s long-ago youth. Most poignant, though, are the writer’s continual references to revising his field guides: by the late 1980s, the birding world had largely passed the Peterson model by, and the appearance of “the new Western” in 1990 and the publication of the updated European guide three years later inspired the birding community to nothing more than bibliographic footnotes.
All this said, this remains an important book. Not for those of us raised on Peterson: we’ve seen it all, read it all, before, and there is no joy to be had from this volume’s all too clear confirmation that the master had run out of things to say.
But hard as it may be for the rest of us to believe, there are birders, millions of birders, whose initiation into the sport came after the death of Roger Tory Peterson, and for whom the familiar name is really nothing more than that, words once seen on the cover of a field guide they passed by on the eager way to their first Sibley. I very much hope that those birders will take up this attractively produced and handsomely illustrated volume, and that they let it be their introduction to the man who was American birding in the mid-twentieth century. If it is true that we can understand where we are only by knowing where we have come from, then a clear understanding of Roger Tory Peterson’s contributions to our hobby is a prerequisite for every thoughtful birder. This collection of essays is a fine place to start.
3 Comments
September 5th, 2006 at 6:52 am
Great post — you put Peterson in perspective for 2006 in a nice way.
September 6th, 2006 at 10:58 am
A few, random remarks on Roger Tory Peterson’s prose:
More than once, Peterson wrote that he wanted to emulate Peter Matthiessen, to write more subjective and introspective essays. When he asked Paul Brooks, his editor at Houghton Mifflin, how to go about this, Brooks reportedly said, “If you don’t know, it would take too long to tell youâ€â€”a case of a friend and editor kindly saying “let it be.â€
Peterson’s strength was writing with care and clarity. Rough drafts (housed in the Roger Tory Peterson Institute) show that he revised often and well—particularly on the sentence level. But for the most part, he avoided “writerly†and literary devices such as ornamentation, irony, indirection, and what he disparagingly called “subconscious content.â€
But there are essays out there that are memorable for their style and impact. Birds Over America, which won the Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing in 1950, contains his best prose—most notably in “Trailing America’s Rarest Bird†and “Rain Shadows of the Mexican Border.†“High Seas in a Rowboat,†published in Audubon Magazine (Jan/Feb 1962) is another good example.
As for the pieces that appeared in Bird Watcher’s Digest, the most expressive moments occur in the company of death, his friends’ and his own, especially in the retelling of his near-drowning “Capsized by a Rogue Wave.†In these pieces on mortality, he makes a consistent correspondence between species’ mortality and human mortality, between species’ recovery and “resurrection.â€
I’ve not seen the posthumous collection of essays in question, but I have read all of Peterson’s BWD pieces. They were published in a period in his life when writing wasn’t a prime interest. Peterson was a man of passion, and his passions shifted. In his later years, it was photography, during his association with Mill Pond Press in the late 1970s-early 1980s, it was painting. His peak writing years occurred after his Army discharge through the next two decades. An even better posthumous collection might have selected essays from other sources as well in order to give readers a clear picture of Peterson’s periodical writing.
September 8th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
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