Life of our life, the garden lives and sings

Another great American environmentalist has been since early last year among my favourite poets. Wendell Berry is a Kentucky farmer, essayist and poet who has had much to say about conservation, climate and creation. Like Ansel Adams, he calls beauty as witness to our responsibility. Here's his “Speech to the Garden Club of America” - a speech in verse. 

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
There are so many outcomes that are worse.
But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
By a sustained explosion through the air,
Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
Than we should go. The world may end in fire
As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

Live lifted up in light

Ben’s Autumn photos made me think of his favourite photographer, Ansel Adams, who died on 22 April 1984, and Adams’ collaboration with writer and critic Nancy Wynne Newhall. She also worked with Edward Weston, but it was the text she wrote for the 1960 exhibition This is the American Earth that earned her the most acclaim. Adams’ photographs of the American West, particularly of Yosemite, made an inestimable contribution to conservation in the middle decades of the last century - and all in black and white. He combined a conservationist’s zeal with an extraordinary sensitivity to the spiritual and the sublime. He complained that sublime photographs were all too often accompanied by lacklustre text. So when he found Nancy Newhall, he rejoiced. He called the text she wrote for American Earth “paeonic and evocative ... explicit and miraculous.” Her lines should be read “as though they were parts of Genesis.” She certainly added lustre to Adams’ already luminous world.

You shall know the night - its space, its light, its music.

You shall see earth sink in darkness and the universe appear. 

No roof shall shut you from the presence of the moon.

You shall see mountains rise in the transparent shadow before dawn.

You shall see - and feel! - first light, and hear a ripple in the stillness.

You shall enter the living shelter of the forest.

You shall walk where only the wind has walked before.

You shall know immensity,

and see continuing the primeval forces of the world.

You shall know not one small segment but the whole of life, strange, miraculous, living, dying, changing.

You shall face immortal challenges; you shall dare,

delighting, to pit your skill, courage, and wisdom

against colossal facts.

You shall live lifted up in light;

you shall move among clouds.

You shall see storms arise, and, drenched and deafened,

shall exult in them.

You shall top a rise and behold creation.

And you shall need the tongues of angels

to tell what you have seen.

Were all learning lost, all music stilled, 

Man, if these resources still remained to him,

could again hear singing in himself 

and rebuild anew the habitations of his thought.

Tenderly now

let all men

turn to the earth. 

Fair Silence, fall, and set me free

This poem resonates with me today. It’s CS Lewis: ‘The Apologist’s Evening Prayer.’ As religion becomes more and more a public possession, we need reminding that the public square is not its natural home. The narrow gate and the needle’s eye are good correctives.  

From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories that I seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,     
Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.     

Thoughts are but coins.  Let me not trust, instead     
Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.
From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,     
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.     
Lord of the narrow gate and needle's eye,     
Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.

On Dickens (Part 2): Heavenly creatures

Reading Dickens at university, I found myself searching, thirsting in the end, for a female character that united strength with charm in something resembling reality. All I could see were grotesques at one extreme, coquettes at the other, and in the middle spineless, simpering, mawkish Agnes Wickfield or Ada Clare - veritable Victorian angels. Though there were many to amuse, I couldn’t find a single female character that inspired admiration. The only one that came close was Mrs Bagnet in Bleak House, but even she was a caricature. 

Miriam Margulyes’ one-woman show places the women in Dickens’ life alongside the women in his books. As an answer to my question about where these women came from, it’s illuminating, and a little bit scary. A writer of comic genius and apparently boundless sympathy, he was a man of strong, strange and often cruel passion towards women. 

It begins with his mother, who famously sent him back to the blacking factory after his father rescued him. He wrote with palpable bitterness, “I never afterwards forgot, I never can forget, I never shall forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.” She is punished for this in the character of Mrs Nickleby, one of the most unwise, unfeeling mothers to be found in his work.

Then there’s his first love, Maria Beadnell, on whom Dora Spenlow in David Copperfield is based. Pretty, silly, shallow and utterly self-absorbed, Dora dies early in their marriage. After a horrifying reunion with Maria years afterward, Dickens resurrected Dora as Little Dorrit’s Flora Finching. Flora is Dora twenty years older, fatter and giddier. A spoiled and artless girl might be enchanting, but to be spoiled and artless in rotund middle age was unforgivable. 

Catherine Hogarth DickensPerhaps most disquieting is Dickens’ ultimate marriage to Catherine Hogarth, who doesn’t seem to have warranted a literary vengeance, though Dickens came to regard his marriage to her as his greatest mistake. Two of Catherine’s sisters lived with the couple, first Mary and then Georgina; Dickens was deeply attached to both these women, but less and less to his wife, from whom he separated after 22 years of marriage. It’s hard to imagine and impossible to guess what estranged them, but it looks as though an original personal incompatibility was compounded by Catherine’s severe depression. 

This seems to have begun after the birth of their first baby, whom Catherine had trouble breast-feeding. Mary wrote, “every time she sees her baby she has a fit of crying.” Not long afterwards, Mary died suddenly, causing Catherine to have the first of several miscarriages, and causing Dickens acute misery from which he never recovered. He wore her ring and carried a lock of her hair, called her a “perfect creature,” and expressed a wish to be buried in her grave. Whatever state of mind this portended in Dickens, it cannot have conduced to Catherine’s mental health. Nine more children followed, including a baby girl that died at nine months. Dickens seemed baffled by the arrival of so many children. Of their last, a son, he said: “on the whole I could have dispensed with him.”  Soon after this they separated, surrounded by rumours of Dickens' infidelity. 

Perhaps the most heart-tearing glimpse into the truth of their marriage comes from a comment Dickens’ friend Henry Morley made after he had met Mrs Dickens. “One sees in five minutes that she loves her husband and her children, and has a warm heart for anybody who won't be satirical.” How was such a temper to be the wife of the greatest satirist of the age? 

It seems she looked in vain, as I did, for something in Dickens that would allow women who were less than angelic to escape satire. 

Pride and prejudice and portraiture

First Impressions was the title Jane Austen originally gave to her best-loved novel, in which the thread of impressions, reflections, and portraiture runs through the narrative in interesting ways. In one of their early encounters at Netherfield, Elizabeth tells Darcy she’s trying to “take his likeness.” He replies gravely, “I could wish, Miss Bennet, that you were not to sketch my character at the present moment, as there is reason to fear that the performance would reflect no credit on either." 

Disliking Darcy, and falling for Wickham, “whose very countenance may vouch for his being amiable,” Elizabeth is led astray by appearances. When she learns the truth about Wickham, she tells Jane: “One has all the goodness, the other all the appearance of it.” 

Months later, she contemplates the miniatures of Darcy and Wickham at Pemberly. How differently she sees both images, now that her eyes have been opened to the true characters of both men. Seeing them thus side by side she no longer deceives herself about the appearance of either, admitting to the housekeeper that Darcy is indeed very handsome, and nudging her aunt towards the possibility of Wickham's waywardness. When she stands before Darcy’s large portrait in the gallery upstairs, his image and his character come together for the first time. 

“She stood several minutes before the picture, in earnest contemplation, and returned to it again before they quitted the gallery...There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth's mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original than she had ever felt at the height of their acquaintance."

This is a turning point, and when Darcy appears in the flesh soon afterwards, she beholds him changed; both from within and in her own perception of him. From this moment she begins to think she could be happy with him, but within another day or two, Wickham has intervened to separate them - in part because she has never unfolded his true character to anyone but Jane. 

This game of hide and seek is the engine of the novel. His pride and her prejudice are the masks they both wear, that must fall away before they can come together. Their first impressions must be replaced by the portraiture of genuine understanding, and patient skill.