Philoprogenitive Bird

As a Dartmouth undergraduate, he gave President Hopkins a headache by his championship of the Vermont marble quarry strikers. Tough-minded, bellicose, Budd Schulberg praises boxing passionately and exposes extortion on the waterfront. He writes about failed writers and Puerto Rican Harlem.

Swans! For Heaven's sake! At best, only black specks hardly to be noticed against a lowering Schulberg horizon! Yet this book makes Budd seem like a poetic ornithologist. A never-outgrown adolescent joy is his own racing pigeons heading for home at 60 miles an hour, specks in a luminous sky. Florida and the Everglades entrance him with flocks of white ibis floating over bright-green landscapes. In Mazatlan on the Pacific a wild parrot and he share drinks, and on Long Island he pals around with mallard ducks and herring gulls.

He buys his house on Aspatuck Inlet because he glimpses two swans whose snow-white feathers catch the rays of the sun. The real estate woman warns him. Mean, swans are, killer birds, breaking windows, chasing human beings across lawns, ripping their flesh with cruel beaks, and even beating them to death with wings. Unimpressed with such scare talk, Budd moves in and writes a Schulberg Lohengrin with roles filled by the cob dubbed Loh and the pen dubbed Grin.

With gentleness and humor, Budd and his wife Geraldine, whose photographs are poetic and dramatic, make friends with Loh and Grin, tell how the tiny stray cat Cricket engages in hit-and-run tactics, how Grin attacks when given hard toast instead of soft bread, and how Budd feeding yum-yum corn may pat Loh's back but get a hiss from Grin, an old-fashioned girl: no petting even if platonic.

Shameless voyeurs, the Schulbergs watch the mating dance, circles of swimming, beaks almost touching, like old-fashioned film kissing. Nest building is a division of labor with bullrush stalks, globs of floating leaves, reeds, and algae. Proud male, Loh guards the nest six feet away. After the babies are born, tiny and fluffy, Loh, "a revved-up feathered mess of paternal anxiety, flies crazily up and down the river in search of real or imagined enemies."

Next the maternal triumph: the entire Loh'n'Grin flotilla sails up, with Grin leading her seven awkward babies up the lawn for Schulberg inspection. Later come underwater lessons about how webbed feet can loosen underwater grasses and bottom plants that float upward. Then flying lessons, all nine swans, airborne, in formation up and down river. Finally the comic-tragic spectacle of grown cygnets, some larger than their parents, being driven off by their father and mother to fend for themselves.

Budd and Geraldine watch the second honeymoon, nest rebuilt, eggs laid, and hatched. Alas, farewell to idyllic and triumphant rearing! Close to the nest potential killers, giant gulls, perch "living death waiting to devour new life." What can Budd and Geraldine do? What indeed! Read the book. As the poet asked: ... "the last days shall we be very terrorized or merry?"

SWAN WATCH. By BuddSchulberg '36. Photographs byGeraldine Brooks. Delacorte, 1975.151 pp. $8.95.