{"id":36347,"date":"2012-07-31T16:52:08","date_gmt":"2012-07-31T20:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=36347"},"modified":"2019-04-09T17:18:00","modified_gmt":"2019-04-09T21:18:00","slug":"a-snail%e2%80%99s-pace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/07\/31\/a-snail%e2%80%99s-pace\/","title":{"rendered":"A Snail\u2019s Pace"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Edward Lear, self-portrait as snail.<\/p><\/div>\n

When John Ashbery reviewed Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s Complete Poems<\/em> in 1969 for The New York Times<\/em>, his review was accompanied by an illustration: two giant snails stretching from under their shells to touch one another. Ashbery never mentions the mollusks in his review, but beneath the image is an excerpt of Bishop\u2019s prose poem \u201cGiant Snail.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI give the impression of mysterious ease, but it is only with the greatest effort of my will,\u201d Bishop\u2019s mollusca persona muses, and one senses how very likely a proxy it is for the poet herself.<\/p>\n

Bishop is not the only writer to have found solace or some of herself in a snail. Her coil-shelled critter was an homage to a paean by her mentor Marianne Moore. Moore\u2019s \u201cTo a Snail\u201d is a discourse on poetics that culminates \u201cin the absence of feet\u201d and \u201cthe curious phenomenon of your occiptal horn.\u201d Moore seized on the snail\u2019s self-sufficiency and endless ability to contract, praising its \u201cgrace\u201d and \u201cmodesty.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Moore\u2019s praise of the snail was self-promoting, while Bishop\u2019s portrait of the mollusk is tinged with sorrow. \u201cBut O! I am too big. I feel it. Pity me,\u201d Bishop\u2019s snail wallows before collapsing in defeat: \u201cAll night I shall be like a sleeping ear.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bishop\u2019s snail was on a self-determined journey: \u201cI have set myself a goal, a \/ certain rock, but it may well be dawn before I get there.\u201d He shares that determination with the snail one finds in Virginia Woolf\u2019s short story \u201cKew Gardens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although their destinations differ, Bishop\u2019s snail labors with the same ferocity as Woolf\u2019s: \u201cIt appeared to have a definite goal in front of it,\u201d Woolf writes, \u201cdiffering in this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it.\u201d Moving from one side of the flowerbed to another, traversing a tiny terrain that Woolf magnifies into cliffs, lakes, and boulders, the snail finds himself in the path of the many human characters of the story.<\/p>\n

Woolf begins \u201cKew Gardens\u201d with the snail\u2019s perspective and returns to it after each human encounter: Simon and his wife Eleanor as they reveal to each other previous romantic encounters in the garden; William and an old man who is blabbering about heaven, war, and electricity before he retreats into silent thoughts of women he has known; two lower-class women who watch the old man attempting to discern whether he is \u201cmad\u201d or merely \u201ceccentric\u201d until they tire and decide to have their tea; and finally young Trissie and her unnamed male companion who debate the admission price for Kew Gardens.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne couple after another,\u201d the narrator observes, \u201cwith much the same irregular and aimless movement passed the flower-bed.\u201d The aimlessness of the couples contrasts the snail\u2019s determination, which for any artist, especially for Woolf and for Bishop, is enviable.<\/p>\n

Snail envy animated the life of Patricia Highsmith, whose obsession with snails and their slimy sexual habits fills Joan Schenkar\u2019s recent biography The Talented Miss Highsmith<\/em>. A friend described Highsmith as \u201cthe woman who produced snails from her handbag and encouraged them to leave sticky trails all over her host\u2019s tabletop.\u201d She kept them as pets and carried them across borders in cheese cartons when she traveled, while her own fiction includes enough mentions of mollusks to merit a dissertation. There\u2019s the short story \u201cTwo Disagreeable Pigeons\u201d whose eponymous couple make their way around London harboring the hope that \u201crain would bring the worms out, maybe a snail or two.\u201d Vic, the keeper of aquaria in the novel Deep Water<\/em>, has a thousand or so snails that are mostly the product of one mating pair, Edgar and Hortense. Hortense takes her name from Highsmith\u2019s own favorite gastropod, one of the three hundred snails that flew with her from New York to Paris, Rome, and Venice.<\/p>\n

Another one of her characters, Professor Avery Clavering, leaves the safety of tenure at a California university to search for a giant snail species not yet named. \u201cThe Quest for Blank Clavering<\/em>\u201d chronicles the professor\u2019s efforts, including the uncanny moment when he spies his first fifteen-foot-tall mollusk: \u201cIt resembled a peach-colored sail filled with wind, and the sunlight made nacreous, silvery patches gleam and twinkle as the great thing stirred.\u201d The hunter becomes the hunted when Clavering\u2019s snails chase him into the sea, leaving him to decide between drowning and being devoured.<\/p>\n

Highsmith\u2019s first foray into gastropods was \u201cThe Snail-Watcher\u201d with a Mr. Knoppert who delights, like the author herself, in watching the creatures mate. Rescuing his first gastropods from his wife\u2019s gustatory intentions, Mr. Knoppert soon has more than eleven hundred of the beasts in his study. Within a few hundred words, Mr. Knoppert\u2019s curiosities take over his study and then overtake him in another one of Highsmith\u2019s death-by-snails d\u00e9nouements. The punishment for voyeurism is clear, though Highsmith herself, Joan Schenkar tells us in the biography, \u201cfound it \u2018relaxing\u2019 to watch her sails mate because their copulation had \u2018an aesthetic quality, nothing more bestial in it than necking, really.\u2019\u201d Highsmith was also drawn to the androgyny of the hermaphroditic creatures, remarking how \u201cit is quite impossible to tell which is the male and which is the female, because their behavior and appearance is exactly the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, then, Snail was the pseudonym chosen by the French writer H\u00e9l\u00e8ne van Zuylen van Nijevelt\u00a0when she entered the 1898 Paris\u2013Amsterdam\u2013Paris motor race, becoming the first women to drive in an international race. A socialite from the Rothschild family, she had been disinherited by her family for marrying a Catholic man who raced under the name Escargot, and copublished most of her stories and poems under the nom de plume Paule Riversdale with her lover Ren\u00e9e Vivien.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not only the androgyny and arduous ethic of snails that attracts artists. Gastropods were the source of one of the rarest dyes in antiquity. Thousands of snails are needed to produce a single pound of Tyrian purple dye. Pliny wrote one of the most careful descriptions of the process, devoting five chapters of his Historia Naturalis<\/em> to the production of this deep, deep purple hue. Created from the mucous of Mediterranean sea snails, Tyrian purple became synonymous with royalty, with several emperors legislating that only the emperor himself could wear the color.<\/p>\n

The poet Dan Chiasson was moved by the color in his revisioning of Pliny\u2019s ancient record. \u201cMaking Purple,\u201d one of the poems in Chiasson\u2019s Natural History<\/em> joins Bishop and Moore in rendering the dramatic monologue of a snail:<\/p>\n

Imagine yourself suffusing a woman\u2019s gown or sheets
\nyour bloodstream running through her inkwell.
\nThose rich dyes once were your ideas, your love
\nof broccoli rabe. Half-killed cockles attract purples,
\nthe reef is littered with the open mouths waiting to snap.
\nI am trying to make my pain attractive, my yearning
\npretty. A man caught me in a fine-ply lobster pot.
\nHe scalded me until I nearly died, then threw me back.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI am trying to make my pain attractive, my yearning \/ pretty,\u201d Chiasson\u2019s critter cries, echoing the suffering sounds of those earlier snails crawling their way through the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. Those plaintive declarations go far towards explaining why snails are both muse and mirror for so many artists: their enigmatic efforts to become beautiful, while never seeming to tire of their slow struggle.<\/p>\n

Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland.<\/em><\/p>\n

[tweetbutton]<\/p>\n

[facebook_ilike]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When John Ashbery reviewed Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s Complete Poems in 1969 for The New York Times, his review was accompanied by an illustration: two giant snails stretching from under their shells to touch one another. Ashbery never mentions the mollusks in his review, but beneath the image is an excerpt of Bishop\u2019s prose poem \u201cGiant Snail.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":383,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[1051,280,629,8302,8299,5234,2006,8298,1825,8300,8303,8301,8297,969],"class_list":["post-36347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-animals","tag-dan-chiasson","tag-elizabeth-bishop","tag-gastropods","tag-helene-van-zuylen-van-nijevelt","tag-john-ashbery","tag-marianne-moore","tag-mollusks","tag-patricia-highsmith","tag-paule-riversdale","tag-pliny","tag-renee-vivien","tag-snails","tag-virginia-woolf"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Snail\u2019s Pace by Casey N. 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