Bambi, by Felix Salten (Knopf, 211 pages)
If all you know of Bambi is what Disney served up, you don’t know Bambi.
With many of Disney’s early movies, the stories weren’t written in-house — Snow White came from a German fairy tale, attributed to the Brothers Grimm, and Pinnochio was written by an Italian journalist in the 19th century. The source material for Bambi, which Disney released as an animated film in 1942, was a slim novel by the same name written by Felix Salten. It’s been re-released this year as a gold-embossed hardcover book, part of Alfred A. Knopf’s “Children’s Classics” series — which is fine, so long as this elegant, disturbing little book doesn’t fall into a child’s hands. This is not your 5-year-old’s Bambi, and Thumpers in the rear-view mirror are not as they seem.
That said, Salten’s Bambi, subtitled “A Life in the Woods,” is better than Disney’s, and I love that the foreword is the original one from 1928, which concludes, “I particularly recommend it to sportsmen.”
Like George Orwell with Animal Farm and E.B. White with Charlotte’s Web, Salten created characters who are fully animal but at the same time quite human. The book opens with an exchange between Bambi’s mother, exhausted from giving birth, and a magpie who keeps chattering about its own life. “Pardon, I wasn’t listening,” Bambi’s mother says after a while, and the magpie flies away thinking, “A stupid soul. Very nice, but stupid,” which, fair or unfair, could encapsulate a lot of conversations we all have in a grocery store line.
Soon enough, as Bambi enjoys his solitary time with his mother they encounter a ferret that has killed a mouse. And a “vast, unknown horror clutched at his heart” as the fawn gets a blurry view of some unknown horror that exists beyond his idyllic life. But his mother is not yet ready to speak of it, trying to keep Bambi innocent as long as possible while teaching him about the joys of the meadow, where “he rejoiced with his legs and with his whole body as he flung himself into the air,” and gazed at the sky, where “he saw the whole heaven stretching far and wide and he rejoiced without knowing why.”
He is introduced to three other deer, one of which, Faline, will become his mate, and catches his first glimpse of his father, who passes the cluster of deer with another proud stag without acknowledging them. Crushed, Bambi asks his mother why; she replies, “They don’t ever stay with us, only at times. … And we have to wait for them to speak to us. They do it whenever they like.”
Bambi’s mother herself grows increasingly colder to her son as he matures, once snapping at him, “Go away and let me be.” When he cries for her, a stag appears and tells him, “Your mother has no time for you now.” And this is before we ever get to the cruelty of man, the hunter, who is described throughout simply as “He.”
The word “Bambi” itself has become Bambi-ized, more associated with cartoon characters and porn stars than its source. But Saltzer’s book, while simply written, is gritty with the hard reality of animal life in which fear and death are constants. In one interaction with a squirrel, Bambi inquires about the rodent’s father, and the squirrel replies, “O, the owl caught him a month ago.” One chapter is a conversation between two autumn leaves, clinging to the top of a tree, contemplating their mortality. (“Can it really be true, that others come to take our places when we’re gone and after them still others, and more and more?”)
All this is to say, perhaps this was a “children’s” book when it was first published, five years before antibiotics were discovered and when many people still slaughtered their own meat and death had not been sanitized and swept aside to nursing homes and hospitals. Now, it’s nightmare-inducing stuff, particularly with the running theme of abandonment by parents, and a scene in which Bambi’s “Friend Hare” — which Disney named Thumper — is terrified and writhing in a trap.
In the end Salter’s Bambi is both a coming-of-age story and circle-of-life story, as the deer matures and accepts his role in the forest. Like every good story, it has a clear villain — the human — who is threaded with complexity. He both terrorizes the forest creatures and provides a safe and loving home for his dog, and even cares for an injured deer.
In one scene, a hunting dog and his wounded prey, a fox, have an emotionally charged conversation, the fox calling the dog a turncoat and renegade, since they are genetically brothers. The dog replies, “Do you think you can oppose Him, poor creatures like you? He’s all powerful. He’s above all of you. Everything we have comes from Him.”
And just when you think you’ve got the book’s theological implications figured out, Salter goes elsewhere, because this is, at its heart, a morality tale.
Stephen King once called Disney’s Bambi the first horror movie he ever saw because of its effect on him as a child. That genre doesn’t describeSalter’s Bambi the book, except maybe for vegans. But it’s a deeply affecting little book that, like A Christmas Carol and Animal Farm, shows that the impact of a book has nothing to do with its length. A —Jennifer Graham
