On a Wing and in Verse

Despite the Victorian grandeur of its title and the quixotic presumption of a novel written in verse, “Darlington’s Fall” is a modest little book. Brad Leit- hauser, novelist, poet, professor, husband, father, brother and demi-centurian, has allowed himself to fall under the spell of the story of a Midwestern naturalist who dreams great dreams. The result is charming and quite wonderful.

The story itself is modest. At the tail end of the 19th century, when caricatures of Darwin are still making the evening paper, Russ Darlington, motherless son of a Hoosier millionaire, develops a major jones for butterflies. Under the tutelage of a misshapen and misanthropic professor at the local university, Russ grows from a dreamy boy of 10 to an intense academic. He even discovers and captures an unnamed species of butterfly. It takes him a little longer to capture the birds and the bees in the form of the local college belle.

He (with stammering urgency): How are you, Pauline?

She (smiling brightly): Cold, I s’pose. Refrigerated.

But tell me (mock-solemnly), how are all the bugs?

He (treating the question gravely): Complicated.

She: Isn’t everything? (But now the girl blinks, shrugs,

And, looking away, finds a tone that instantly

Evokes for them a new level of intimacy.)

You’re the expert: Is there, anywhere in Nature,

Such a thing as a really simple creature?

He (hoping to match her gravity): Not that I’ve seen.

Capture Pauline he does. But marital bliss evades the couple. With his eye on nature, Russ heads off on the eve of the Great War to the Pacific islands, a heart of darkness where “He can’t shake the sense that here the leaves are cruel.” Yet Darlington is no Marlowe. Thousands of miles from Pauline and Indiana, the Midwestern schlemiel can’t quite get it right. Reaching for yet another unnamed, fluttering rarity, Darlington falls. Broken in back and in spirit, he returns to Indiana and pulls in his wings.

But Darlington’s is not the only story of the novel. A third of the way through the book, the narrator reveals his own existence. He is a late 20th century researcher into the life of Russ Darlington, to which he’d hoped to bring the quickness of a lizard, “its quick-eyed/Watchfulness and cool proclivity/For snug retreats.” To an extent, he is successful, slippery and sneaky. It takes another thousand lines for him to reveal that Darlington is family--the uncle of the narrator’s crazy aunt from Surrey (“the family’s leading expat oddball”) who gave him, as a college graduation present, a copy of Darlington’s long-forgotten biology textbook.

Family--a word modest, yet, in the Darwinian sense, the explanation for madness beyond propriety, from the suicidal matings of the praying mantis to the gut-wrenching trek that the narrator makes to the Malaysian jungle where Darlington met his own fall. And perhaps it is not altogether accidental that Leithauser invited his brother, Mark, to contribute a dozen illustrations to the volume, line drawings as gothic as the abecedary of Edward Gorey or the murals of New York’s Museum of Natural History.

Leithauser interweaves the familial story of the narrator with the story of his subject--for Darlington survives his return and survives spectacularly--with threads of 10-line stanzas. “I vowed,” he writes in an introductory note, “that nearly every line would have an exact, or perfect, rhyme.” (Author’s note) Without a prescribed structure to either stanza or line, these rhymes land with a pleasantly random butterfly motion, pushing the story forward with only the faintest, poetic sashaying of wings.

Even when the narrator lets loose a gust of philosophy, over, say, the subject of mortality, the air blows swiftly past:

Behold the helix, like a vine trained round

A spiral staircase long since dropped away,

A shoot flourishing free of wall and ground,

Itself its own nourishment and mainstay--

A kinked plait leading everywhere and nowhere,

For life goes everywhere (into the desert air,

The hot springs, ice caves, broken benthic slime,

The toxic sump, the steel-factory air vent)

And nowhere (ninety-nine point nine percent

Of species having gone extinct with time).

It is a sentiment about as deep and difficult as a field of Indiana corn, just right for an ordinary novel in verse about ordinary men.