Lolling About the Literary – A Writer’s Diary
Jenny Kingsley considers the importance of our relationship to the natural world through the work of two very different authors
The other day I went to a talk at the Royal Geographic Society given by Robert Macfarlane. He spoke about his recently published book, Wild Places (Granta, 2007). (Dr Macfarlane is a lecturer in post-Second World War literature
at Cambridge. You may have seen excerpts from the book in various newspapers or magazines at the time of publication, or indeed have read it for yourself.)
The author’s enthusiasm, and the rhythms of his prose, compelled the audience to travel with him as spiritual companions; so we swam, dived, fished, chewed samphire, alternately walked and meandered, climbed and got thoroughly cold, wet and hungry alongside Macfarlane as he spoke. We journeyed to the island of Ynys Enlli off the west coast of Ireland where for centuries devout itinerants – peregrini – travelled to satisfy their longing for what Macfarlane calls a ‘correspondence between belief and place, -between inner and outer landscapes’ – what one senses Macfarlane is also seeking and what he inspires us as readers to covet with him. We visit the emptied and empty coasts of Scotland, the Lake District, the Peak District, the flat lands of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, and the holloways of Dorset. Macfarlane reflects upon the natural world with a sense of wonderment that he claims to find difficult to express on paper, though he seems to have overcome his frustration brilliantly in his book.
What is particularly refreshing about Dr Macfarlane, both as a writer and as a person, is that he doesn’t exude the stale air of an intellectual too high up in the tower to relate to the ‘ordinary’ reader. He converses warmly with his audience, and the spirited narrative is accented with tantalising snippets of knowledge: ecological, geographical and social history, literary anecdotes and quotations. The reader acquires a little of the unfamiliar language of cartography, a discipline which, as we discover, wasn’t always a route to precision – the earliest maps represented spatial relationships with symbols or pictures of ‘human figures, animals, settlements, dwellings, paths both zig-zag (uphill) and straight (along the flat)’. We discover that Constable loved the elm more than any other tree as Macfarlane discourses on Dutch Elm Disease. We read about life in Barnhill, the cottage on Jura where George Orwell tended his orchard and vegetables as he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, and are horrified by tales of the potato famine, of a time when paths were littered with corpses ‘as numerous as the sheaves of corn in an autumn field’, as one source wrote. The book is a lesson on the nature of humanity as well as the expanses of terrain it penetrates.
Macfarlane shows that not only are there are wild places within our borders, but that wild places are essential nutrients of the spirit. He quotes the historian and novelist Wallace Stegner who writes that without wild places we would be ‘committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong dive into our technological termite life, the Brave New World of a completely man-made controlled -environment’. Macfarlane juxtaposes this with more negative perceptions of wildness as a dangerous -phenomenon, challenging the ‘order-bringing pursuits of human cultivation and agriculture’ and warranting containment and -constraint. For these preachers – often American, writing on the subject of western expansion – the desire to tame the wild underpins their words.
I ask Macfarlane whether he thinks people ought to consider journeys home when it comes to a holiday. ‘We should explore the undiscovered country of the nearby,’ he says. ‘Since the boom in air travel we’ve become promiscuous fliers, too -easily convinced that to go abroad is the prerequisite for pleasure or adventure. We don’t need to cross a national border to enter a new world. I’d happily spend the rest of my life travelling within Britain and Ireland. The landscape is of inexhaustible interest and variety.’
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Macfarlane quotes WH Auden, ‘A culture is no better than its woods,’ a wisdom that could equally have been voiced by Jean Giono (1895–1970), one of France’s greatest writers, and another author who has been occupying my thoughts lately. He wrote The Man Who Planted Trees (Chelsea Green, 1985), a splendidly poignant eco-fable and a tribute to trees, earthly rejuvenation, and mankind’s indomitable sense of goodwill. Like Dr Macfarlane, Giono sees nature as a force through which we can rediscover the earthly joys and values we’ve lost sight of as residents of an industrialised and developed world.
The tale begins just before the start of World War I. Elséard, a lonely widowed shepherd who has also lost a son, lives in a barren region of Provence, where nothing grows but lavender, and the climate is harsh all year round. The few inhabitants earn their living as charcoal burners. The shepherd begins collecting acorns from oak thickets, planting a few every day. From the first one hundred thousand acorns, twenty thousand trees sprout, and thousands and thousands more eventually take root. By nurturing seedlings from beech nuts, he also plants beech trees, and later birches too.
Elséard does not know to whom, if anyone, the land belongs but this does not deter him from the desire to breathe life back into it. He believes that the area is drying and dying for want of trees, and, rewardingly, in time, he is proved right: water began to flow in the once arid brooks. ‘The wind too scattered seeds. [And] as the water reappeared so there appeared willows, rushes, meadows, gardens, flowers, and a certain purpose in being alive,’ wrote Giono. Eventually people from the plains settle in the once stark land ‘bringing youth, motion, the spirit of adventure’, all thanks to the efforts of this solitary shepherd with a remarkable spirit of benevolence.
The book was a long-ago birthday present from my partner, and I was reminded of its beauty on a recent trip to an enchanting theatrical adaptation by the Puppet State Theatre Company at the Unicorn Theatre in Southwark. The production was a ‘sell out’ last year at the Edinburgh Fringe, and I went with the primary school class with whom I do weekly ‘guided reading’ on a volunteer basis. I am also a school governor at this lovely church school with literacy as my remit; I am there to ensure that the school is doing all it can to equip pupils with decent reading skills.
I participate rather than observe and pontificate. Frankly, I feel what is politically incorrect: that all this testing and testing and testing counts for very little if children do not develop an innate love of reading. If you can read and have the will, you can accomplish anything. Giono was the son of cobbler and laundress. His family of three were very poor, and at the age of sixteen Giono became their sole support. But he was blessed with a waterfall of creative energy, and just enough spare pennies to invest in the cheapest book he could find – a copy of Virgil’s poems. And so we have The Man Who Planted Trees and many other wondrous works by this inspired author. I can only hope that the theatre trip planted a few similar acorns in young minds.
