The Marcus Welby of the Barnyard

By Stefan Kanfer

THE LORD GOD MADE THEM ALL

by James Herriot; St. Martin's Press; 373 pages; $13.95

He is the most celebrated resident of Yorkshire since Lassie, and for many of the same reasons. A friend to farmers and their livestock, as benign as the summer climate, he has made loyalty and kindness the crowning virtues.

Yet outside his own turf, James Alfred Wight passes unnoticed among the readers who have made him famous. Only under his pseudonym is he recognized as the Marcus Welby of the barnyard and the author of four bestsellers about an amiable animal doctor named James Herriot. The fourth, The Lord God Made Them All, revisits the peaceable kingdom of rural England, celebrates simple pleasures and, as before, pours time back and forth like sand in a kitchen hourglass.

Nearly 100 visitors jam the cobblestone street in the little village of Thirsk, attempting to glimpse their hero. Most are Americans, but there are also French, Italians, even Japanese--after all, the volumes have been translated into twelve languages. The crowd expects his office to be bucolic and full of ewes and kine. Instead, it is a white-walled infirmary redolent of disinfectant, with nothing to distinguish it but a red door. They hope that Herriot will resemble Simon Ward, the actor who impersonated him in the TV adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small. But they see a ruddy, pleasant, 64-year-old grandfather, caparisoned in jacket and tie even when stepping through the mire of cattle pens. His voice bears no taint of the Yorkshire dialect permeating his books. When someone asks him a question, Herriot replies "Aye" in the accent that betrays his Glasgow origins.

All four Herriot books are bolts cut from the same Scottish tweed, carefully interweaving the local patois (Owt a gurt cow wi' nawbut a stone in t'kidney) and technical jargon ("You can get hypertrophy of the rumenal walls and inhibition of cellulose-digesting bacteria with a low pH"). Each volume has become increasingly formulaic. But it is Herriot's original formula, an unfailing blend of exotica--for The Lord God Made Them All, a recollection of trips to Russia and Turkey--and accounts of extraordinary happenings to ordinary people and creatures. Volume IV of the tetralogy offers a series of bright anecdotes about two brothers who let themselves get talked into buying insurance and then manage to have a series of profitable accidents. As always, a poignant theme is introduced: the tale of a doomed, appealing mongrel born too soon for miracle drugs.

The book's best chapter could stand alone in any anthology of humor. Back in the '40s, the untried Herriot attempts to test a bull for fertility. His instrument: a vulcanized rubber tube filled with warm water. The bull, eying a potential mate near by, is in no mood for experiments and furiously charges the young vet: "I met him with a backhanded slash. The elastic came off and the water fountained in the bull's eyes ... I have often wondered since that day if I am the only veterinary surgeon to have used an artificial vagina as a defensive weapon."

"Easy, old girl," says Herriot as he cleans out a cow's afterbirth. He removes the arm-length plastic gloves. "Wonderful things, these. In the old days I was up to my arms in blood and dirt. And no time to write more than a prescription. No antibiotics then, and the farmers very witchcrafty. Full of folk remedies and possessed of hands too big for their animals." He regards his own small fingers. "That's why they came to me: I could operate on a sheep or goat without mangling the poor thing. Then it was large beasts. Today it's also dogs, cats, parakeets. And hamsters. I don't like to treat them; they bite." After one decade of practice, Herriot had compiled enough material to fill a book. After 30 years, he had enough for a library. But he never attempted a memoir until his wife informed him that people over 50 simply didn't become writers.

"That was all I needed. The children were grown: Jim was a vet in my office, and Rosie was a doctor a few miles away. My evenings were my own, and I had no excuse for putting it off. I sat before the TV set and began typing my stories." His nom de plume came from a televised soccer player; his ideas from old notebooks. The first version was not promising. "What I turned out was like the essays of Macaulay. Awful. A simple style takes a lot of work."

If Only They Could Talk and it Shouldn't Happen to a Vet were modest hits in England. Thomas McCormack, president of St. Martin's Press, thought they could be something more across the pond. He combined the books and added three chapters, ending with the marriage of the young vet and the farmer's daughter. The new title came from an Anglican hymn: All Creatures Great and Small. The rest is history, geography and mathematics. The book hit bestseller lists before the reviews were in. Herriot went on to prove that despite his obscure locale and inarticulate subjects, the right story teller could make a Yorkshire cow a moveable beast. Today some 2 1/2 million copies of his works are in print, making their author the most unlikely literary superstar since Joy Adamson wrote about a lion who was born free.

At the close of The Lord God Made Them All, Herriot recalls a colleague's old prediction: "I tell you this, James. There are great days ahead!" But the days have not been cloudless. Recognition has brought gawkers, who have altered his little home town (even the local stationer offers soft-center candies FROM THE TOWN OF THE VET). Fans have sometimes tracked him to the unpretentious fieldstone home he shares with his wife of 40 years. Joan Wight-- Helen in the books-- is a handsome, white-haired woman who does not suffer tourists lightly: "Alf is too kind. I send them packing." And there have been lampoons of the now familiar Herriot style. Monty Python kidded the title verse: "All things gross and angrenous. All creatures gross and squat." Nature Writer Edward Hoagland parodied the books in the New York Times: " 'It's time t'awd bitch was up,' I said. I put my arm up her lug end to untwist her uterus ... 'If tha'll just wipe off the fly that's on my snout, Colonel,' I said.

I'll kill nowt gurt nor small! They's gentle things!' he roared, and took a bite of his stirk sandwich."

But these are merry critiques, the tribute that humor pays to celebrity. Far more disturbing to the veteran veterinarian is an English tax structure that puts him in the 83% tax bracket. "They keep telling me to retire," he says. "Go to the Isle of Wight or some such. But this is the only job I've ever had. And this is the only place I ever loved. I came here 44 years ago and smelled the summer. I never wanted anything else." Today his idea of luxury is a sun lamp, and "out of town" means the city of York, some 30 miles away.

"We traveled when we were poor," recalls Herriot. "France, Spain, all that. Once, to promote a book, I went to the U.S. It was the urbanized there who got the biggest kick out of my work. I remember this man in Beverly Hills who had a party for us. He had a swimming pool up in the hills and he kept saying to me, 'I've missed out on life.' I've stayed put, but thank God, I haven't missed out." --By Stefan Kanfer

Excerpt

"I dropped the little dog onto the grass and fell down on my knees by her side in an attitude of prayer. I waited and watched as my heart hammered, but those ribs were not moving and the eyes stared sightlessly ahead.

Oh, this just couldn't happen! I seized Venus by a hind leg in either hand and began to whirl her round and round my head. Sometimes higher, sometimes lower, but attaining a remarkable speed as I put all my strength into the swing... At last, the chest wall gave a heave and the eyes blinked.

Jimmy was disappointed. 'Aren't you going to do any more, Daddy?'

'No, son, no.' I sat up and dragged Venus onto my lap. 'It's all over now.'

'Do you always do that to make them breathe?'

'No, thank heaven, not often.' I got slowly to my feet and carried the little animal back to the consulting room."

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