Free The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Page A

the snails’ obviously pleasurable, lengthy, lusty, and slimy embrace.
In Patricia Highsmith’s short story “The Snail-Watcher,” the main character observes two snails in love and is enthralled:
Mr. Knoppert had wandered into the kitchen one evening for a bite of something before dinner, and had happened to notice that a couple of snails in the china bowl on the drainboard were behaving very oddly. Standing more or less on their tails . . . their faces came together in a kiss of voluptuous intensity.
    Fascinated by what he’s seen, Mr. Knoppert begins to read everything he can find on snails:
[He came] across a sentence in Darwin’s Origin of Species on a page given to gastropoda. The sentence was in French . . . [and] the word sensualité made him tense like a bloodhound that has suddenly found the scent.
    I decided to follow in the research footsteps of Mr. Knoppert. Since he had turned to Charles Darwin for information on snail romance, so would I. My own research suggested that Mr. Knoppert may have been looking in the wrong book, as it was in The Descent of Man that I found the sentence, in the chapter on molluscs. It was a quote from Darwin’s colleague the Swiss American zoologist Louis Agassiz. Apparently too explicit for Victorian England, Agassiz’s observations had remained in the language of romance. The sentence did not contain the word sensualité, but it left me as curious as Mr. Knoppert, so I sent the quote off to several French-speaking friends with the resulting translation: “Whoever has had the opportunity to observe the lovemaking of snails will not question the seductiveness of their movements and airs, which anticipates the amorous embrace of these hermaphrodites.”
The Victorian naturalists were eager to weigh in on a snail’s love life. “The snail is, in fact, a very model lover. [It] will spend hours . . . paying attentions the most assiduous to the object of [its] affections,” proclaimed the author of “Snails and Their Houses.” Also smitten, the naturalist Lorenz Oken was much blunter: “Circumspection in feeling, dainty voracity, and immoderate lust appear to constitute the spiritual character of the . . . Snails.”
And then William Kirby mentioned something that sounded implausible: A snail’s “courtship is singular, and realizes the Pagan fable of Cupid’s arrows, for, previous to their union, each snail throws a winged dart or arrow at its partner.” I read more about these curious darts in Gerald Durrell’s autobiography Birds, Beasts, and Relatives. Durrell was ten years old and living with his family on the Greek island of Corfu when he happened into a forest just after a rainstorm: “On a myrtle branch there were two fat, honey- and amber-coloured snails gliding smoothly towards each other, their horns waving provocatively.” Durrell is intrigued:
As I watched them they glided up to each other until their horns touched. Then they paused and gazed long and earnestly into each other’s eyes. One of them then shifted his position slightly so that he could glide alongside the other one. When he was alongside, something happened that made me doubt the evidence of my own eyes. From his side, and almost simultaneously from the side of the other snail, there shot what appeared to be two minute, fragile white darts . . . The dart from snail one pierced the side of snail two and disappeared, and the dart from snail two performed a similar function on snail one . . . Peering at them so closely that my nose was almost touching them . . . [I watched as] presently their bodies were pressed tightly together. I knew they must be mating, but their bodies had become so amalgamated that I could not see the precise nature of the act. They stayed rapturously side by side . . . and then, without so much as a nod or a thank you, they glided away in opposite directions.
The “love darts” Durrell describes are tiny, beautifully made arrows of calcium carbonate, and they look as if