Coming to Roost

THE RABBIT HAS suffered greatly at the hands of Hugh Hefner. Even before Hefner clongated it, stuffed it-into a smoking jacket, and plastered it all over the newsstands and his DC-9, the rabbit's reputation rested mainly on a swift (wham, bam, thank-you ma'am), productive (litters the year round) procreation. Then Hefner air-brushed its aura and made the rabbit the symbol of his whole slick fantasy world. But when you're inventing fantasy to entertain your children during a long, boring car trip you leave out the details that enrapture the slavering American male. You retrograde modern romance, back to Northrop Frye's original "love and adventure" formula, away from modern "lust and bloodlust." And you even leave out most of the "love," to concentrate on your heroes-intrepid rabbits surviving against all obstacles. Richard Adams wrote that fantasy and called it Watership Down: it won both British awards for children's fiction in 1972, and then came to roost in the best seller lists for well over a year. Among other hyperbolic comments was this one in The St, Louis Post-Dispatch: "Anyone who can read English should read this book."

Richard Adams is a small, white-haired, opinionated Englishman who's "on tour now and working hard at it." He enjoys telling the "actually very well known story" about the origins of Watership Down, how his children persuaded him to write down the tale, how publisher after publisher rejected it because it was too long and intricate to be children's literature. His eyes gleam, and it's impossible to interrupt him as he goes over the history of the two children's fiction awards (about this time his agent, a rather large woman, stops paying attention to the interview); then he says that only four other writers have even sold a million paperback copies in England-Homer, Chaucer, George Orwell, and D.H. Lawrence-but he discounts Lawrence because he thinks the book was Lady Chatterly's Lover.

FOR TWENTY-FIVE years, Richard Adams was a bureaucrat in Great Britain's Ministry for Housing and Local Government, mediating between federal housing policy and local sensibilities. This strong dose of reality perhaps explains the difference between England's two most famous modern fantasies-Watership Down and J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkein, a professor of English, invented a whole mythological world for his fairy-tale creatures to inhabit; they in turn, are more concerned with forces of good and evil than with practical necessities like food, clothing, and shieter. Adams's rabbits, on the other hand, are part of the natural world of the English countryside-their enemies are bulldozers and carnivores and bad weather, not trolls and sorcerors. Watership Down is a fantasy in which the rabbits talk to each other, and otherwise behave inteligently in their own rabbit-like ways. One of them, Cassandra-like, prophesies the future and sets them off on their adventure. Adams has that streak of Pessimism too, he's just more cautious. Even after the "most extraordinary phenomemon" of Watership's success. Adams didn't quit his Civil Service job. He waited until the publishers accepted his second novel. Shardik, and told him that it was "great, that they'd start with 100,000 copies, and all that sort of thing." Adams says, "I thought, well here we go, apparently I was meant to be a novelist, so I retired."

Being a novelist, according to Adams, means writing stories in which "the reader should want to turn the page." When you ask him about sociological parables or allegories in Watership Down, he replies. "The book has no ulterior motive. It's simply a cliffhanger about rabbits." He admits, however, that the book was inspired by the English countryside, which he loves, in his own curious way. He denies having been influenced by the ecology movement of the past decade: I've known and loved this countryside since about 1925. And I look back to more pleasant days when there wasn't so much damn fuss about the ecology and there were far fewer cars and people. In those days you could hear yourself think and get about."

ADAMS DOES HAVE his causes, though. His new novel. Shardik, is a retelling of the divine incarnation story in an attempt to make a moral point. The bear Shardik has such an awesome destructive force that it is perceived as a god of conquest and bloodshed by humans who set up an empire based on the enslavement of the conquered. Brutality is commonplace in this society: slavers drown a little girl, for instance, and hack off a boy's hand. The great bear finally kills the chief slave trader, but undergoes great suffering in doing so, and ends the book perceived as a god of sacrifice. The empire disintegrates, and the hero is reduced to ordinary business, "picking up the pieces," what Adams says "we're all here for." He claims his concern in Shardik is to direct attention to the suffering of children; he notes in the front of the book that "every single thing that happens to the kids is something that I know to have happened in my personal experience." But he makes his point so quietly, his "exciting story" ends on such a subdued note, that some have called it anticlimactic. Adams retorts that "the moment when a society realizes that the most important people in that society are the most vulnerable ones is a great step forward in human development, and people who find it anticlimactic just haven't gotten that far themselves."

The same sort of vigorous but slightly-off-target counterattack is Adams's reaction to charges of sexism in Watership Down. He doesn't explain the lack of strong female characters by arguing that female rabbits are subservient in nature. Instead he says, "That's just the way the story broke." He goes on:

I have two daughters, and am thoroughly in favour of sexual integration and equality of opportunity, and the further it goes the better. As a matter of fact, it has gone considerably further in England than it has in America. I think that when you Americans talk about women's lib, that what they're really after is equal pay and an equal cut of the economic cake. What they're really after is money, like all Americans. In England, we've had equality of pay and equality of opportunity among the sexes all my adult life. There are one or two branches of English life, let us say the Stock Exchange, where...but women are perfectly free to become stockbrokers. I just wonder whether they'd have very many clients.

RICHARD ADAMS IS currently at work on his third novel, between interviews and book-signings. He calls it "an anthropomorphic fantasy like Watership Down; it's about two dogs who escape from an experimental station-sort of an animals' Catch-22, really-a black comedy with elements of the absurd, in which the heroes and the victims are animals." He says that for some years he has been upset and disgusted by the enormous number of experiments carried out on animals, many of which seem quite unnecessary to him. "If you experiment to cure a specific disease, say work with cows in order to cure cow diseases. I would accept it. But many of them seem just to advance knowledge in a general way." Adams recognizes that "general knowledge" and "eventual cures" blend together in a large gray area; but he doesn't feel an obligation to prepare a blueprint or say what ought to be done, just that "what is going on is damn well not good enough for me." He says he doesn't know any better than anyone else where the line should be drawn-he just believes we ought to think far more about it than we do now.

The little white-haired man, like Northrop Frye, sees a decline in imaginative morals these days. He's seen a lot of suffering and says the two world wars have had a "very brutalizing effect." He's tried to express his loves and his worries, and at the least, has entertained people. Right now he's doing the things he likes to do, because he has the money. And he's getting new ideas all the time.

Having seen a number of erotic movies, including the much advertised Deep Throat, they seem to me to be so lacking in style, and taste, and beauty. I mean, physical sex is a beautiful thing, it ought to be really. And I thought it would be rather fun to write an erotic novel that had a bit of style and taste.

Would it have animals in it? "I'm sure that could be arranged, if that's what turns you on."

And Hugh Hefner wins again.