Books: Six-Legged Hero

THE COMPLEAT FLEA by Brendan Lehane. 126 pages. Viking. $5.95.

Max Beerbohm, a self-described miniaturist, once devoted an essay to a minister who asked a single meek question of Dr. Johnson. But in this age of miniaturization, Brendan Lehane has gone the Incomparable Max one less. He has devoted an entire book to a subject even more insignificant than an 18th century clergyman—the flea.

A British journalist, Lehane became interested in the flea while in Dublin. The insects’ concern was only skin-deep, but Lehane’s soon reached the proportions of an idée fixe. In The Compleat Flea, he traces the bug’s literary ancestry beyond the Bible (“After whom dost thou pursue?” asks David of Saul, “after a dead dog, after a flea.”).

The six-legged hero appears as a villain in Chaucer, Shakespeare and John Donne. Accordingly, the book lives up and down to its title. It even includes a bit of anonymous erotica—”The Autobiography of a Flea,” whose expository style even Nabokov might envy. “I was engaged,” begins the flea, “upon professional business connected with the plump white leg of a young lady of some 14 years of age …”

Lehane also chronicles the vita activa of the flea as vaudevillian; the flea as athlete (one “can jump about 150 times its own length along, and about 80 times its length up”); the flea as spreader of plague and, in the case of the male, even as sexual tyrant. In mating, says Lehane, a man obviously sympathetic to the underflea, “he grasps her abdomen with his antennae, and sensuously brushes her parts with a wispy membrane. Then violence comes. Copulation lasts about three hours, sometimes as long as nine. … So sharp and indelicate are the hooks and spines of his organs that the female may in all likelihood have suffered injury. But she is pregnant, and he is satisfied, and within hours a new batch of eggs will drop into the world.”

The mixed blessings of DDT and civic sanitation have given the flea a bleak outlook for the downhill third of the 20th century. Lehane’s future looks far more promising.