Bog Myrtle & Peat

Henry Williamson made no secret of his inspiration for Tarka the Otter. In a letter to TE Lawrence, he explained that he’d based the story on a book by the Cornish writer JC Tregarthen. Celebrated in his day as a sporting naturalist, Tregarthen’s work focussed on the landscape of the far southwest – he wrote clearly and endlessly about hunting with hounds and terriers, and his 1909 book The Life Story of an Otter sees the world through the eyes of an unnamed male otter, from his birth in a quivering bog to his eventual death in the jaws of an otterhound. Even from this narrow description, there are plenty of obvious overlaps with Williamson’s book which was published eighteen years later – but the similarities really are endless, and in many ways Tarka is just a shot-by-shot remake of Tregarthen’s earlier work. 

Both books follow the wide-ranging movement of otters from moor-tops to the sea-shore. There are periods of intense frost and cold which drive otters to the brink of desperation; gin traps spring in the darkness and there’s a recognisably constant fear of men and their dogs which runs in equal measures between Williamson and Tregarthen. Both writers include scenes in which otters attack conger eels, and there are several identical near-misses with the local otterhounds; Tarka’s nemesis “Deadlock” is matched by Tregarthen’s hound “Dosmary”. Texturally, the dynamics are exactly the same – the rough gentility of rural folk, the unthinking brutality and conservatism of labourers, the terrors of humanity and the joys of life in the wild without sentimentality or anthropomorphism. At times, the books are so similar that they can be read as two pieces of homework submitted to the same exercise – the difference is that Tregarthen got a C and Williamson gets an A*.

There are moments of excitement and tension in The Life Story Of An Otter, but they tend to dissipate suddenly. The narrative moves unevenly and the growing compression of several pages is often released without effect in the space of a single sentence. When Tregarthen’s otter is held at bay in the crag of a high moorland waterfall, we’re on tenterhooks to see what happens next – and then it’s just… kind of… over. In the same way, we get moments of beauty and wonder from Tregarthen; glimpses of the bleak saltmarsh at dawn, or the binding bitterness of deep frost – but more often than not, these descriptions form part of longer and more perfunctory lists in which the otter “did this and then this and then this…”

Williamson is unquestionably the better writer, and he is free to populate Tregarthen’s story with wonder, detail and vividly expressed natural colour. Neither book indulges in anthropomorphism, but Williamson certainly comes closer to this point – after all, his protagonist is named and the onomatopoeic words he uses to designate specific natural sounds make Tarka feel more bright and childish than Tregarthen’s pragmatic anonymity. Knowing that Williamson published Tarka immediately after his The Flax of Dreams tetraology, the idea to rewrite The Life Story of an Otter seems like a perfect fit and a great idea for a young writer on the rise – but remembering that Williamson wrote Tarka to boost his own profile, we can’t ignore the fact that while otters were firmly on his radar, they were not his specific area of interest. 

By choosing to write a story about otters, he was creating an opportunity to write expansively from a rich and natural perspective – but he could not be thought of as an expert on otters. Some of his earliest attempts to write about otter-hunting were factually nonsensical – letters show how a local otter-hunting enthusiast broke the news to Williamson that people were actually laughing at his ignorance on the subject. He was gently advised to stay away from otters and otter hunting, not least because the subject had already been fully covered by other writers. Williamson’s response was to double-down on the project, piling into the detail and building it up from the foundations. He wrote to otter experts and hunting enthusiasts for advice and guidance on otters as he brought his book together, and it’s likely that Tregarthen criss-crossed his path during this time. After all, it’s no great leap from his Cornwall to Williamson’s Devon, no matter what the locals tell you.

Here’s where the two books diverge most finally – because while Williamson was an expert writer who sometimes wrote about otters, Tregarthen was an otter-expert who sometimes wrote books. In the brief preface to The Life Story of an Otter, Tregarthen acknowledges the limitations of his wisdom, offering his book as the fruit of many years spent watching otters. Even when some of his theories are wrong (including the idea that otters can detect the presence of fish in a pool by sniffing the air above it), they’re still a reflection of his own practical, first-hand experience. He loves his subject, and while recent research has dramatically improved our understanding of these animals, Tregarthen’s passion is still valid and attractive. By contrast, where Williamson is wrong, it’s the regurgitation of another person’s error – his passion is not for specific accuracy but instead for a more general expression of nature and landscape.

The Life Story of an Otter is beautiful in parts, and it’s certainly worth reading in its own right. None of Tregarthen’s hunters have any qualms about the act of killing an otter – provided it’s in “good sport”. His kills are practical and perfunctory acts which end with “…and it was dead”. That’s fair, but it also helps to highlight Williamson’s own representations of killing. He didn’t like to see otters being pulled apart by dogs, but his otter hunting scenes represent a complex balancing act between nature’s mysterious wonder and the deep-seated habits and traditions of county people. His condemnation of killing is always softened by his caveat that “I am not of this situation – I am the artist… I am merely observing”.

Williamson’s moral and aesthetic ambiguities explain why we’re so able to forgive books like Tarka. It’s easy to reread his story as a battle between good wildlife and bad people, and a sense of narrative ambivalence permits a great deal of subjective interpretation. By contrast, Tregarthen’s book is full-throated in its approval of otter hunting. The book closes with an avowal that the glorious death of this specific otter will live for generations in the memory of local otter hunting folk, just as its stuffed skin will be displayed for many years in the hall of the squire’s big house. Too simple to be reinterpreted as anything but a cracking old hunting yarn, modern readers are content to let stories like these fade away.