Life of a Non-Pukka Sahib

SNAKE MAN (269 pp.)--Alan Wykes--Simon & Schuster ($4.50).

An animal may be a publisher's best friend these days. Of late, zoophilous readers have embraced a lioness (Born Free), an otter (Ring of Bright Water) and an entire menagerie (A Zoo in My Luggage). A while back, in his pre-otter period, Gavin Maxwell was out shark hunting (Harpoon at a Venture), and that confirmed medievalist, T. H. White (The Once and Future King), was engaged in the bruising task of training The Goshawk. Now snakes, perhaps the oddest pets of all, have slithered upon the literary scene in the company of a legendary eccentric, C.J.P. Ionides, the Snake Man of British East Africa.

Mere love of animals scarcely seems to account for the popularity of these books. It may be noted that most of the nature men are British and resolute mavericks, who have turned their backs on modern, industrialized urban life. Each is very much his own man in a world of courage, cunning, and solitude--qualities that invade the suburban commuter's mind in recurring fantasies of Mittyland. The pull of the books is the lure of a lost horizon, a kind of pre-Eden, with free men and animals sharing the primordial rhythms of Nature.

Poacher & Herpetologist. Snake-fashion, CJ.P. (for Constantine John Philip) Ionides sheds skins of identity almost from birth. He first shed the name Constantine, which he detested, and became Bobby, because he was always "bobbitting about." In 1917 he was thrown out of Rugby on circumstantial evidence of thievery. Though innocent, Ionides was scarcely helped by the fact that he was a known poacher of pheasants and that his desk drawer contained two loaded revolvers. Though his family was proper Edwardian and had been in England for generations, he was also tagged as "the Greek" and as "Ironhides" for his stoic composure under the most severe canings.

At Sandhurst, Ionides tempered his rebel traits to the extent of graduating 153rd in a class of 155. He was delighted, since all he wanted of the army was free transportation to Africa to begin his career as a naturalist. The regiment went to India instead. When his application for transfer to Africa finally came through in 1926, Ionides became successively an ivory poacher, a big game hunter, a game warden, and a devout herpetologist. Piecing all these lives of a non-pukka sahib together, Biographer Alan Wykes, a London magazine editor, has drawn a fascinating profile of a man with all the imperious instincts of an aristocrat and not an inhibiting trace of the code of a gentleman. Snake Man neatly blends action and memory, talk and adventure, snake lore and Ionides lore.

Faun in Old Felt. In his 35 years in Africa, Ionides has lived for ten days on the partial contents of two ostrich eggs, been trampled by a charging elephant resulting in total deafness of one ear, climbed a 100-ft. tree, despite acrophobia, and with only one arm free, brought down a writhing mamba. He has been bitten by snakes half a dozen times, recorded his numbed sensations and degrees of pain with cool scientific exactitude, and never used antivenin. He has had an entire native village flogged for disobedience and has no qualms about flogging ("It is simple and effective and very widely understood"). He has also spent an entire year in tortuous bureaucratic negotiation to have a tribe restored to its ancestral village. He smokes incessantly, sleeps with his mosquito boots on, and has worn the same conical felt hat, begrimed with sweat and snake venom, since 1940. Peering out from its ragged brim with his satyrlike half-smile, the snake man looks rather like an ageless faun out of pagan mythology. At his death, he intends to have his body thrown to the hyenas since "one of the most stupid premises is that life is, in some peculiar way, sacred."

Behind the slightly raffish, egocentric cast of Ionides' character lies solid achievement as a naturalist. No less than four separate species of snake bear his Latinized name as their discoverer, and 22 species of rare mammals have been hunted down by Ionides for zoos and museums, including the Addra gazelle, the sassaby, the Nubian ibex and the scimitar-horned white oryx.

Living Book. Naturally, Ionides is a living book of knowledge on the ways of the snake. A spitting cobra spits in one's eye. Ionides was temporarily blinded and in pain for two days. Love among the serpents is pretty snaky. Rival males get all intertwined in a knot. "Nobody knows how the winner wins, or why," but the suitors are good sports--they never bite each other. The snake with the deadliest bite is the Gaboon viper, a hideous flat-headed creature whose two-inch fangs can bring agonizing death in three seconds.

More memorable than any of "the suborder Serpentes" is CJ.P. Ionides himself, utterly fearless, wily as Ulysses, not wholly admirable and yet strangely endearing, a kind of outcast hero with the rare courage to be his remarkable self.

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