'There are a lot of people I have met who consider this a reference to [sic] sharks, which is a disaster. However well-written and advertised it was, it is a bad book. Sharks don't behave like that.' So said Jacques Cousteau of the novel Jaws in an interview with the Miami Herald in the 1970s. As an avid diver, Benchley had great admiration for Cousteau and it was the Frenchman's criticism of the book - above any others - that cut him to the quick. Even as late as 1999 in an online Time interview Benchley could not help raking over these coals. "I never met Cousteau," he said. "He spent a lot of time and energy criticizing Jaws and I wrote him once or twice, but he never wrote back." Benchley alludes to this unanswered correspondence in a letter he wrote to Spielberg, which is quoted in Carl Gottlieb's The Jaws Log.
In fact, the author came to regret the way his novel had demonised the Great White in the public imagination and he was later the first to admit that he had got some things wrong. "My research for the book was thorough and good, for the time. I read papers, watched all the documentaries, talked to all the experts [but not Cousteau]. I realize now, though, that I was very much a prisoner of traditional conceptions. And misconceptions."
Benchley did get some things right. The biological details - the shark's lack of a flotation bladder that compels it to always keep moving, the mucus-filled canals that send signals of water activity to its brain, the rows of triangular serrated teeth - these facts could have been copied out of National Geographic. Where Benchley got it seriously wrong was the way in which his shark behaves. This gross misconception comes to a head in the book's final chapter when Quint, purely on a hunch, orders Brody to start chumming and, almost immediately, the shark appears.
" 'He was waiting for us!" yelled Brody.
'I know,' said Quint.
'How did he -'
'It don't matter,' said Quint. 'We've got him now.' "
It clearly did matter to Jacques Cousteau. Sharks didn't behave like that. Indeed, Benchley was being more than a bit disingenuous when he claimed that they did. By making the shark a vengeful creature with enough cunning to outwit its hunters, Benchley was drawing not on scientific fact but on a well-established monster movie convention. Given that he was writing a work of popular entertainment, there should have been no shame in that. The spat between the two men was nothing more than a storm in a teacup. If Cousteau's words still rankled after all those years, at least Benchley could have taken some comfort from the fact that his later commitment to marine conservation would have met with the approval of the old Frenchman of the sea.
