Balcony in the Forest

I recently read this beautiful novel and will mention it here for the way it evokes the Ardennes forest landscape during the winter of 1939-40. Its hero, Grange, is a lieutenant in the French army posted to a concrete bunker on the Belgian border. 

Ostensibly readying for war, Grange instead spends his time observing the change in seasons, falling in love with a young free-spirited widow, and contemplating the absurd stasis of his present condition. This novel of long takes, dream states, and little dramatic action culminates abruptly in battle, an event that is as much the real incursion of the German army into France as it is the sudden intrusion of death into the suspended disbelief of life.

At the start of the book, Grange takes up his appointment and travels in an empty train along the River Meuse. "A train for the Domain of Arnheim", he thinks, referring to the Poe story with its uncannily perfect landscape which I wrote about here some years ago. The forest has a different quality of strangeness. As he is driven up to the blockhouse in an army truck, Grange observes the denseness of the trees, with just an occasional path like an animal trail. On this watershed there are no streams but at one point 'a thread of clear water ran: it added to the silence of the fairy-tale forest.'

The dreaminess of this world is partly down to the way Grange experiences the landscape on night patrol. Here is an example: 

There was a powerful charm in standing here, so long after midnight had sounded from the earth's churches, deep in this placeless gelatin masked by pools of fog and steeped in the vague sweat of dreams, at the hour when the mist floated out of the forest like spirits. Grange gestured to Hervouët and both men held their breath for a moment, listening to the great respiration of the woods around them that made a kind of low and intermittent music, the long, deep murmur of an undertow that came from the groves of firs near Les Fraitures; over this tidal undulation they could hear the crackle of branches along some nocturnal creature's course, the trickling of a spring, or sometimes a dog's high-pitched howl roused by the moon, such sounds rising at one moment or another out of the smoking vat of the forest. As far as the eye could reach a fine blue vapor floated over the forest - not the dense fumes of sleep but rather a lucid, quickening exhalation that disengaged the mind, making all the paths of insomnia dance before it. The dry and sonorous night slept with its eyes wide open; the secretly wakened earth was full of portents once again, as in the age when shields were hung in the branches of oaks.

I looked up reviews of the NYRB reprint (the translation was first published back in 1959), but couldn't find much online. There is one in the TLS that says 'for all its oneiric qualities, A Balcony in the Forest presents Grange’s fantasies in prose that is lyric, yet precise; Richard Howard’s translation of 1959 still seems fresh. Unfortunately…' - and unfortunately at this point the paywall kicks in so I cannot see what the caveat is! It might concern the young widow Mona, who has been criticised as a male fantasy figure, although I confess I was captivated by her and reminded of the women in Nerval's Sylvie, a book whose admirers included Julien Gracq. There are some excellent articles on Gracq online, for example, Seth Lerer's in the Yale Review and Paul Dean's in Literary Matters, which has a detailed discussion of Balcony in the Forest (which would spoil the story if you want to read it). I have written briefly here before about Gracq's 1976 book of fluvial reveries, The Narrow Waters.

Finally, I will mention that the NYRB paperback has an excellent cover that uses a detail from Peter Doig's etching Concrete Cabin (1996). Doig's cabin is surrounded by trees but very different to the bunker Grange and his four men inhabit. It is Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Briey-en-Fôret, northeast France (further south than the setting for the novel), partly derelict when Doig visited it in 1991. As an essay on the Christies site puts it, 'the strange, displaced nostalgia that haunts so many of his landscape paintings has here been transferred from the isolated barns and houses of Canada to a large building in France.' Doig's paintings and etching now preserve a memory of Le Corbusier's building before it's renovation (and perhaps also prefigure a time when it will fall into ruin again).

Empty places

In my last blog post I talked about how disability can impose restrictions on how a landscape is seen and said I would say more about this in connection with Edward Burra, the subject of a current retrospective at Tate Britain. The wall captions explain all this clearly: 

By the 1960s, Burra's already frail health had begun to decline making travelling abroad difficult. Instead, he embarked on driving tours of Britain with his sister Anne. 

Burra observed fields, mountains and valleys as passing impressions through his car window. His attention was also caught by smog-belching power stations and collieries as well as newly built motorways, which had become a common feature of Britain's changing landscapes. His sister would stop periodically so he could study the view intensely. Burra's friend Billy Chappell sometimes joined them. Chappell was struck by the artist's uncanny memory and eye for detail: 

It fascinated me to watch Edward when the car halted by some especially splendid spread of hills, moorland, and deep valleys. He sat very still and his face appeared completely impassive... I do not remember Edward ever making any sort of note: not even the faintest scribble; yet weeks, even months later, the shapes, the tones, the actual atmosphere; and the colour of the clouded skies looming above those moors, hills, and valleys he had looked at so intently, would appear on paper. 

The painting below actually resembles the view from a car window. Here and in other late landscapes Burra makes use of the properties of watercolour - the way that road shades from dark blue to white is really beautiful. Earlier work could at first be mistaken for oil or acrylic, but for health reasons he mostly used watercolours throughout his career. As a Guardian article about an earlier Burra show at Pallant House explains, 'a lifelong struggle with rheumatoid arthritis and a debilitating blood disease meant that he was never able to use an easel in the conventional way. Instead he opted to sit, working mostly in unfashionable watercolour on thick paper laid flat on a table.' 

Edward Burra, English Countryside, 1965-67

Laura Cumming's review of the current exhibition expresses a preference for these late landscapes over his pre-war scenes of 'seedy nightclubs'. But Burra's vision of England can be pretty bleak and depressing. Christopher Neve writes vividly about this in Unquiet Landscape (1990), so I will end here by quoting him. 

Beginning in 1965, Burra was driven on regular car journeys around England by his sister Anne. It was she who chose where to stop. They went to empty places where he could see a long way, in East Anglia, on the Yorkshire moors and in the Welsh borders. He sat wherever she chose and watched impassively from lay-bys, just as he had watched human antics through the fumes of nightclubs, memorizing the faces of waiters so that a long time later he could make accurate and compelling pictures from what he had seen. 

Was it disenchantment with people that led him repeatedly to paint these empty places, or a fascinated disenchantment with the places themselves? He seemed to dread them. They swell, stretch, curve, crease. Bruised clouds stack over them and break open. Floods and fields make their puddles of watercolour. Trees are abruptly lit up in negative as if by a nuclear blast. Rock outcrops are swollen with disease. Chasms dwarf. Bile-yellow and a punishing green can hardly contain themselves. It is as though Cotman were reborn specifically to see England in its worst light... 

Lochan Eck

 

Alec Finlay has two new books out - here I am holding one of them, ready for borrowing at the National Poetry Library in London. Not Sealions but Lions by the Sea features condensed landscapes in the form of ‘place-name poems’, one of which uses a phrase I gave as a title to my book on cliffs: 'the first light greets / the frozen air' (Abergeldie - Brightmouth). These originally appeared in gathering: a place-aware guide to the Cairngorms - there is more information on the Hauser & Wirth website. I was interested to read some of the autobiographical poems in Sealions, including one about Sweeney's Bothy, an artist retreat on the Isle of Eigg which I described here in 2014. There is also a group of poems about Stonypath, the garden designed and maintained by Alec's parents Sue and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Here is one in which he remembers the lochan named in his honour.

LOCHAN ECK 

I miss the skimming
swallows
over the dark lochan 

the waters where I swam
eye-to-eye 
with the blue dragonfly

Alec's other recent collection The Walkative Revolution, published by the Guillemot Press, is a book that takes on ableist attitudes to walking. It is a welcome change from reading about the arduous treks of certain nature writers, which can make even those of us without disabilities feel like we are missing out (see also my comments on the miles clocked up by Richard Long...)  ME and long Covid have reduced Alec's ability to walk, but 'as a ‘not-walker’, the joys of toddling into the fringe of a wood, or along a short beach, are heartfelt and healing. Like so much writing, these texts attempt to heal the experience of exile.' There are poems about paths and proxy walks, a manifesto for minor walks and designs for walking sticks (including a fork-shaped one for Sweeney with the words TIME and TINE). One of the poems concludes 'a chapter of autobiography: Landscapes I Have Sat In' - which reminded me of the Tate's current Edward Burra exhibition, for reasons I'll explain in my next blog post. The book ends with a poem to celebrate the inaugural Day of Access (June 15, 2019), when four disabled people were driven up to an altitude of 720m. 

The Walkative Revolution also describes a new form of 'disability poetics' that Alec has devised: the conspectus. This is explained on the Day of Access blog: 

'Conspectus arose from a frustration that my disability, ME, prevented me walking over and through hilly landscapes. I loved to be in wild places, but my experience of them was bittersweet. ... I found myself, sat on a hillock, an OS map in my hand, knowing I couldn't walk any further, trying to find a new way to belong in the landscape. I began to identify the various summits that surrounded me, picking them out by name. Although I was experiencing distance, altitude, and inaccessibility, from a static viewpoint, I could feel an imaginative connection to the landscape.'

Thus arose a form of 'visual poem / composed from the names of hills / defining the view from a single location ... the conspectus is a place to gaze at the landscape; / a viewpoint where the terrain opens itself to the viewer; / where the eye threads in and out of the circle of hills; /where place-names suggest an ecological narrative.'

A Tour to Aavasaksa

It is possible that you are not a regular reader of Finnish gaming website Playlab! and so may have missed an article they ran by Sini Jaatinen on 'Lustfärd till Avasaka', the oldest Finnish board game. It is set out like Snakes and Ladders and players start with 25 marks each which they spend or augment on their journey - the first one back to Helsinki wins everything in the bank.

'The game is quite simple and not so exciting but the nostalgic elements make it interesting and you want to play it more than once. ... Each frame represents place in Finland in 1862, for example Tampere, Vyborg, Tornio and Oulu. There is some small information about the place and the actions that you should take in the rule book. ... Some of the facts that are given are now outdated, for example Tornio is not the most north city of Finland at the moment and Vyborg is not part of Finland. When playing with the children I feel that it is important that the adult sets the facts right. But the historical facts are still valid and you can also learn about the living in 1862.' 

This article doesn't mention that the game was designed by Hilda Olson (1832-1916), an artist who features in the exhibition 'Crossing Borders: Travelling Women Artists in the 1800s', currently showing at Helsinki's Ateneum. The photo above is a page from the exhibition catalogue showing her board game and its fifty six landscapes. I couldn't see anything about her in this catalogue, which I flicked through while drinking tea in the museum cafe, but one of the wall texts next to an illustration of a spider had this to say.

'Hilda Olson was the first Finnish woman to work as a scientific illustrator. She took part in expeditions led by Professor of Zoology Alexander von Nordmann to Aland, to Crimea and other parts of present-day Ukraine and southern Russia. Olson translated short stories from English for newspapers while also designing lottery tickets and Finland's first board game, A Tour to Aavasaksa. After the deaths of von Nordmann and her mother, Olson moved to London and supported herself by drawing models for a wallpaper manufacturer. In her spare time, she travelled in England, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, and painted landscapes.'

I wondered where she lived in London and found online a short biography of her that says she died at 40 Whitehead's Grove in Chelsea. 'When she moved to England, she seems to have acclimatized herself to her new homeland quite quickly. In a letter, she says of the London air: "Fog and wet every day, but we are so used to those things and hardly notice the sky."' However, her work as a pattern-maker didn't leave much time to develop her painting. She may not have become a major artist but she is certainly an interesting figure, who left the small, insular town of Nykarleby to forge a new life in Helsinki and then travelled throughout Europe. Hilda Olson may be having a moment this year because there is also a small exhibition in Helsinki's Natural History Museum, 'Hilda's Spiders', featuring illustrations she did for von Nordmann in Russia.  

I will end this post with a photograph I took in the Ateneum of a screen that allows visitors to experience Lustfärd till Avasaka (apologies for the reflections). Here we have landed on square 32, Aavasaksa (spelled with two As now). This had become tourist destination, known as one of the southernmost points where you could see the midnight sun. The game board caption reads 'Hurrah, three cheers for Aavasaksa and the Northern Midsummer Night's Sun! See the Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans and Russians sitting and marvelling at a sun that shows us its golden orb all through the night. A rich Englishman buys your fishing rod for 2 marks.'

Sun-gilt lands of bright green pastures

A 19th century painting showing John Scott looking through a telescope at the Ware valley

In 2007 I wrote here about a prospect poem by John Scott of Amwell; I then added a postscript with more information in 2015. This is a further postscript really, but I'm writing a fresh blog post because I recently visited Ware and saw the summer house and grotto he built there. These are preserved in a fragment of what was once his extensive garden, leading down to the New River, which flows here alongside the Lea (they are now separated by the railway). For £2 you can enter and look around - the picture below shows the flint summer house, an 'airy octagon,' which would have provided a prospect of the vale. Scott wrote of the evening view here, of 'sun-gilt lands, / Of bright green pastures, stretch'd by rivers clear, / And willow groves, or other islands clear.' Today this prospect is obscured by trees and 1960s houses, although it could have been worse. The local developer was planning to bulldoze the grotto 'and erect Nos. 30-32 Scott’s Road on the site. The porch and dome of the Council Chamber were demolished, the summerhouse was damaged and the grotto was heavily vandalised.' The restoration work that has happened since then is really impressive.

The grotto is more extensive than I was expecting, with several passages, ventilation shafts and chambers all decorated with shells. Scott bought exotic shells from the Caribbean and South Pacific but also used cockle shells, white quartz and fossils from the beaches of Devon. The 'Council Chamber' is a nineteenth century name for the room shown below, with arched niches that you could imagine a group of illuminati sitting in to debate esoteric philosophical questions. Scott was clearly inspired by Pope, whose 'shell temple' at his Twickenham villa had started as a tunnel under the inconveniently sited road to Hampton Court. Samuel Johnson came to stay with Scott in 1773 and although he wasn't a fan of landscape gardening, he seems to have approved of the grotto, calling it a 'Fairy Hall'.

David Perman's detailed biography of Scott provides further information on the grotto and Scott's nature poetry, which was generally rather conventional, looking backwards to the era of James Thomson rather than anticipating the Romantic period to come. In reading this I was very surprised to learn that Scott had seemingly written about the great Chinese poet Li Bai in: 'Li-po : or, The good governor : a Chinese eclogue'. He can't have known the poetry, but maybe he had come across the name in a history of China? Regrettably, Scott doesn't actually refer to him as a poet and the details in the poem are hazy and don't correspond to the real life of Li Bai. The poem begins with the design of a pavilion - like Scott, Chinese literati were keen on building homes with good views and this Li-Po does not neglect to include a grotto. 'Bright shells and corals varied lustre shed; / From sparry grottos chrystal drops distill'd / On sounding brass, and air with music fill'd...' I'll conclude here with the landscape beyond the garden of Li-Po, a description familiar from eighteenth century chinoiserie, but also perhaps an imaginary equivalent to the river view Scott was able to enjoy.

The distant prospects well the sight might please, 

With pointed mountains, and romantic trees: 

From craggy cliffs, between the verdant shades, 

The silver rills rush'd down in bright cascades; 

O'er terrac'd steeps rich cotton harvests wav'd, 

And smooth canals the rice-clad valley lav'd; 

Long rows of cypress parted all the land, 

And tall pagodas crown'd the river's strand!

The Shores of Vaikus

This is a photograph I took at Käsmu in northern Estonia a few days ago. We went there from Tallinn on the bus (there's just one a day, leaving at 10:20, and one back in the early evening, but it is pretty easy to do and for some reason the driver handed out a small chocolate to every passenger). I wanted to see the erratic boulders which feature on the cover of The Shores of Vaikus, the latest volume of poems by Philip Gross (who I last discussed here fifteen years ago). Indeed it looks like Gross photographed the same view, although Bloodaxe have used poetic licence to reverse the image, so that the smaller boulders on the right feature on the book's back cover. The collection includes a poem 'Erratics' which I read to Mrs. Plinius after we had walked to the end of the promontory. We were here in the middle of the day whereas Gross describes the rocks' pink-bronze granite holding the warmth of evening, and the stillness of the water, its 'bay-wide swell too slight / to notice, almost, but for up-ripples of light...'   

Cover photo by Philip Gross for The Shores of Vaikus 

Glacial erratics seem obviously poetic - wanderers, messages from elsewhere. 'But then,' the poem says, 'all granite is in exile. Imagine the grief of magma, expelled from the Earth's core.' These rocks 'rode / the ice train down / from Finland' to stand waist-deep in the Baltic. They have names - in the photo below I am standing for scale next to Matsukivi, the largest erratic in Käsmu. In the forest 'you become aware of them, like grey beasts, something older than the elk. ... You might, if you've troubled to come so far, consult one.' Gross imagines staying with one till nightfall, until your bones start to hear the stone's voice. It's a lovely idea, but we couldn't linger too long in the woods as we were getting mercilessly bitten by midges. Also, we had a bus to catch, and nightfall in early July doesn't occur in northern Estonia until just before midnight. 

Pasture (and a Some Landscapes email feed)

Thanks for continuing to read this blog. Google's Blogger service has long since been overtaken by newer platforms (WordPress, Substack), but it would be hard to migrate to them, exporting all the stuff I have written. I find Blogger still serves my basic purpose, to provide ad-free, paid-subscription-free observations on landscape and culture that I can write quickly between a busy job and other commitments and projects. Unfortunately it has now been some years since Blogger provided an email feed feature to send new posts to anyone interested in getting them in their inbox. I've been told that the service they outsourced this to, Follow.It, is now full of spammy adverts and doesn't even have the content of the blog post - you have to click through to it. So, from today I am going to take matters into my own hands and create a list of subscribers so I can email them each new post when I publish it. Please feel free to unsubscribe from that annoying Follow.It service. 

If you want to be a subscriber, please email me at somelandscapes@gmail.com and I will add you to a blind carbon copy email list.

Līga Purmale, Pasture, 1980

Now I don't want this to be just a technical update, so I will also include a couple of attractive landscape paintings I saw in Riga last week. These are by Līga Purmale, who has a mere five line stub on Wikipedia, although you can read more about her on the exhibition website. She was born in 1948 and studied in the impressive-sounding Monumental Painting Workshop at the Teodors Zaļkalns Art Academy of the Latvian SSR. This institution is now just the Art Academy of Latvia, Zaļkalns name having been dropped as he was a big favourite in the USSR (awarded the Hero of Socialist Labour in 1971). Purmale and her partner Miervaldis Polis started their careers painting in a photo-realist style, using effects like colour solarisation. Her 'Misty Landscapes' period came in the eighties and Pasture, above, reminded me of contemporary works by Gerhard Richter. The 'untruthful' beauty Richter achieved was a means of questioning how to paint landscape in a post-Nazi, post-Romantic, post-religious West Germany. I wonder if there was anything similar going on here, in what was still the Latvian SSR. As the decade went on, Purmale's paintings got mistier and emptier. I particularly like the near abstract image of branches in a garden below. Eventually she moved away from this approach onto other things, painting fragments of urban space, images inspired by cinema and mass media and, more recently, compositions that draw on old photographs of her family in the early twentieth century.   

Līga Purmale, Garden in the Evening, 1989