Weatherland

I only recently got round to reading Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies and can highly recommend it to readers of this blog.  A book like this will cover some familiar ground – Gawain’s winter journey, Lear goading the storm, Turner’s light, Constable’s clouds, Dickens’ fog – but it is written so well that you never feel like you’re just being told things you already know.  On the Wordsworths, to choose just one example, she points out that their appreciation of weather turned on ‘very specific moments of transformation – when the sun suddenly strikes through cloud, for example, or when a figure is glimpsed through fog.’  She quotes Dorothy noting ‘her favourite birch tree coming to life: “it was yielding to the gusty wind with all its tender twigs, the sun upon it and it glanced in the wind like a flying sunshine show […] It was like a spirit of water.” The earth-rooted tree takes flight in air, dissolves into a water spirit and, and glitters in the sun.’

The whole history of English literature seems to be contained in the book but it cannot of course be completely comprehensive.  There is no George Eliot for instance - just as I was finishing Weatherland, Mrs Plinius was rereading Middlemarch and reminded me that the love between Will and Dorothea finally surfaces during a thunderstorm.  This though is an example of ‘significant weather’, a novelist’s device deplored by Julian Barnes who, I learnt from Weatherland, originally intended his novel Metroland to be called No Weather, since he was determined to avoid using it as a symbol of anything.  The book's scope is restricted to England and there are moments when Alexandra Harris comes across as very English herself (as she did in Romantic Moderns - see my post on 'The bracing glory of our clouds').  She refers, for example, to Milton’s Paradise, where the seasons are fixed and bountiful and ‘Eve lays out a spread for the visiting archangel Raphael’, observing that Eve may have been ‘the only picnicker in history to remain completely free from concerns about the weather.’  Hard to imagine, say, a Californian academic writing this!

Abraham Hondius, The Frozen Thames, 1677

 Source: Wikimedia Commons

Weatherland takes inspiration at various points from Virginia Woolf's Orlando, a book I have referred to here before.  My favourite scenes in Orlando concern the icing over of the Thames, when birds suddenly freeze in the air and Orlando falls in love with a Muscovite princess.  Woolf herself had read an evocative account of the winter of 1608 in Thomas Dekker's The Great Frost: Cold Doings in London, which refers to a new 'pavement of glass' and fish trapped below a thick roof of ice.  Here, from Weatherland's chapter 'On Freezeland Street', are three more responses to those surreal transformations of the city, which only came to an end when the demolition of London Bridge made the river swifter, deeper and permanently liquid. 

• Poetry: John Taylor, Thames boatman and self-styled water-poet, composed The Cold Tearme: Or the Frozen Age: Or the Metamorphosis of the River of Thames in 1621.  He compared the ice to a pastry crust and the freezing wind to a barber's razor, 'turning Thames streames, to hard congealed flakes, / And pearled water drops to Christall cakes.'  He describes visitors coming to the Frost Fair, 'Some for two Pots at Tables, Cards or Dice: / Some slipping in betwixt two cakes of Ice.'  Here he added a rueful note in the margin, 'Witnesse my selfe'.  

• Painting: the view reproduced above is by one of the many artists who came over to England from the Low Countries in the seventeenth century.  'While Englishmen produced diagrammatic engravings of the Frost Fairs, labelling the attractions, Hondius produced an essay in atmosphere.  His expansive sky, worthy of the Netherlands, is flushed with the apricot pinks of a winter sunset.'  Alexandra Harris imagines the effect the frozen river would have had on his imagination.  At around the same time he painted a ship stuck in the pack ice of Greenland, Arctic Adventure.  'The Thames was a noisy, busy river, but in its frozen state it transported Hondius to the desolate edges of the world.'

• Music: John Dryden may have been inspired by the Frost Fair of 1683-4 when he wrote the libretto for Purcell's King Arthur.  Together 'they wanted to freeze and melt the human voice, dramatising in the process the freezing and melting of the the heart.'  The evil Saxon magician Osmond strikes his wand on the ground and magically summons up 'a prospect of winter in frozen countries.'  Then the personification of Cold sings slowly in C minor, chosen as the coldest key, and is followed by a chorus of cold people, whose stuttering singing mimics the chattering of teeth.  The whole masque is conjured to demonstrate the warmth of love, but it is a deception played on Emmeline, who is betrothed to Arthur.  His plan is foiled though and at the end of the opera he is cast into a dungeon whilst Arthur and Emmeline are reunited.  

There are numerous versions of the 'Cold Song' online, some pretty strange.  I've chosen here a  concert version by Andreas Scholl; you can also see a video for this where the singer is dressed in a pale suit, looking lost near some tower blocks.  Incidentally, the Prelude to the Frost Scene was the basis for Michael Nyman's 'Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds' in The Draughtsman's Contract and was recently used again by the Pet Shop Boys in 'Love Is a Bourgeois Construct'.

The bracing glories of our clouds

I have enjoyed reading Romantic Moderns, which has much to say about the revival of interest in the English landscape before and during the war.  Alexandra Harris acknowledges her debt to Kitty Hauser, whose Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology and the British Landscape, 1927-1955 begins with a discussion of the 'topophilia' characteristic of writers and artists in this period.  In 1947 Auden defined this topophilia as having 'little in common with nature love.  Wild or unhumanized nature holds no charms for the average topophil because it is lacking in history' (cf. Sebald vs. Mabey in my recent 'After Nature' post).  What unites 'topophils', Hauser writes, 'is an interest, sometimes amounting to an obsession, with local landscapes marked by time, places where the past is tangible.  For some, such as Betjeman, John Piper and Geoffrey Grigson, this topophilia - as Auden suggests - is eclectic, including medieval churches, Gothic and mock Gothic architecture, Regency terraces and ancient sites.  Some topophils of this generation, such as Paul Nash with his fascination with the genius loci, made atmospheric prehistoric landscapes a particular focus. Others, like painter Graham Sutherland, were attracted to scarred nature and geological vistas.  In the Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot looked for redemption and history in an English village: 'History is now and England'.  And with an eye to continental Surrealism, photographers and film makers including Bill Brandt, Humphrey Jennings, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger found in pockets of the British landscape curious and moody survivals from the past.' 

All of these writers and artists feature in Romantic Moderns, along with others less directly concerned with landscape but whose work looked nostalgically at a fast vanishing world of country houses and village traditions.  The Bright Young Things, for example - Evelyn Waugh, Cecil Beaton, Rex Whistler, the Sitwells -  whose work has never appealed much to me, are discussed alongside Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden in an interesting chapter on the 1930s Georgian Revival.  Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian, praises the book's 'tactful generosity towards people and places, sights and sounds, that have tended to get written off as embarrassing or just plain wrong. Never has this seemed more important than now, as we work through our own complicated millennial feelings about the romance of the past. Thanks to Harris it no longer seems entirely shaming to admit to a secret Cath Kidston habit. Taking tea in the stable block of a National Trust property becomes a dignified activity, rather than something to pretend to find a chore.'

I'm no stranger to National Trust tea shops but have always been constrained in where I could go by not owning a car.  Motorists of the 1930s were encouraged to discover the landscape of Britian by the posters for Shell-Mex designed by artists like Vanessa Bell, Graham Sutherland and Frank Dobson (whose depiction of the Cerne Abbas giant is reproduced in Romantic Moderns - the giant's most famous feature is obscured by the shadow of a strategically placed cloud).  In 1934 Cyril Connolly titled his review of an exhibition of Shell-Mex commissioned artwork 'The New Medici'.  He observed that it was 'not the awe-inspiring or exceptional which now seems important, but what is most cheerful and genuine in our countryside - England is merry again - farewell romantic caves and peaks, welcome the bracing glories of our clouds, the cirrus and the cumulus, the cold pastoral of the chalk.'  The Shell County Guides that John Betjamen commissioned also looked beyond the obvious - a fact typified by John Piper's Oxon which deliberately excluded the city of Oxford.  As Alexandra Harris says, 'Piper's Oxfordshire is not a land of touristic sensation.  Old England is allowed to be almost a modern lived-in country.  A photograph of clustered advertisements which would have troubled purist preservationists is captioned 'a tree of knowledge', and an oval photograph with faded edges evokes nostalgia only to affront it with a big sign advertising a 'super cinema.''  It almost sounds like a journey through Oxfordshire's edgelands, prompting the thought that we could have a new series of county guides for the psychogeographically inclined pedestrian, written by Iain Sinclair, Rachel Lichtenstein, Patrick Keiller and so on.

Romantic Moderns won the Guardian First Book Award and Alexandra Harris can be seen talking about it on the Guardian website.  Thames and Hudson have now signed her up for two more books - a short biography of Virginia Woolf and another one, The Weather Glass, which I am looking forward to as it will apparently 'explore the British preoccupation with the weather, from Beowulf onwards'.  In Romantic Moderns these interests come together in a chapter called 'The Weather Forecast', where there is a discussion of Woolf's unfinished history of literature, 'Reading at Random'.  She makes this sound fascinating: it was to be a book 'shaped by views from windows and stretches of country ... a passionate exercise in literary geography.'  Harris argues that the twentieth century threatened to alienate people from the weather, as Modernist art looked beyond the incidentals of atmosphere to uncover clear cut shapes and colours.  She contrasts this with the rain-filled lithographs of her book's other main protagonist, John Piper (of whose drawings of Windsor George VI said, "You seem to have very bad luck with your weather, Mr. Piper").  Working outside, Piper 'loved the odd splashes that arrived unexpectedly in his paintings.'  These blots have the effect of confirming 'the allegiance between art and the world beyond the painting.  And, like the sand found in a half-read book, they are the souvenirs of a time and place, nature's signature added next to that of the artist.'

A place crowned by a single oak tree

Marcus Gheeraerts the younger, Queen Elizabeth I, c1592

Source: Wikimedia Commons 

The reader of Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) soon realises that its hero/heroine is no ordinary person - here is the novel's fifth paragraph:

'So, after a long silence, 'I am alone', he breathed at last, opening his lips for the first time in this record. He had walked very quickly uphill through ferns and hawthorn bushes, startling deer and wild birds, to a place crowned by a single oak tree. It was very high, so high indeed that nineteen English counties could be seen beneath; and on clear days thirty or perhaps forty, if the weather was very fine. Sometimes one could see the English Channel, wave reiterating upon wave. Rivers could be seen and pleasure boats gliding on them; and galleons setting out to sea; and armadas with puffs of smoke from which came the dull thud of cannon firing; and forts on the coast; and castles among the meadows; and here a watch tower; and there a fortress; and again some vast mansion like that of Orlando's father, massed like a town in the valley circled by walls. To the east there were the spires of London and the smoke of the city; and perhaps on the very sky line, when the wind was in the right quarter, the craggy top and serrated edges of Snowdon herself showed mountainous among the clouds. For a moment Orlando stood counting, gazing, recognizing. That was his father's house; that his uncle's. His aunt owned those three great turrets among the trees there. The heath was theirs and the forest; the pheasant and the deer, the fox, the badger, and the butterfly.'

It is a fantastic view in every sense, compressing history and geography so that Snowdon, the Spanish Armada, and the city of London can all be picked out in the distance. Like Queen Elizabeth I standing on the map of England in 'The Ditchley Portrait' (above), Orlando is able to survey the whole country from beneath the oak tree. Here is an extreme version of the aristocratic prospects found in poetry and painting - Orlando gazing and counting, taking visual possession of the landscape ("the heath was theirs and the forest...") The gaze comes eventually to focus in on a butterfly, an early hint of Orlando's persistent love for the natural world (later in the book it is said that 'the English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her'). The symbol of the oak tree runs through the novel in the form of a poem, which Orlando works on for centuries as she observes the changes in literary fashion from Shakespeare's time to Virginia Woolf's present day.  At the end of the book, Orlando thinks of burying a copy of 'The Oak Tree' but decides against it, as 'no luck ever attends these symbolical celebrations'. 

'So she let her book lie unburied and dishevelled on the ground, and watched the vast view, varied like an ocean floor this evening with the sun lightening it and the shadows darkening it. There was a village with a church tower among elm trees; a grey domed manor house in a park; a spark of light burning on some glass-house; a farmyard with yellow corn stacks. The fields were marked with black tree clumps, and beyond the fields stretched long woodlands, and there was the gleam of a river, and then hills again. In the far distance Snowdon's crags broke white among the clouds; she saw the far Scottish hills and the wild tides that swirl about the Hebrides. She listened for the sound of gun-firing out at sea. No--only the wind blew. There was no war to-day. Drake had gone; Nelson had gone. 'And there', she thought, letting her eyes, which had been looking at these far distances, drop once more to the land beneath her, 'was my land once: that Castle between the downs was mine; and all that moor running almost to the sea was mine...' 

In an amusing preface to Orlando, Woolf thanks all her friends and various experts - including Arthur Waley for help with the non-existent Chinese element of the book.  She concludes: 'Finally, I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion.'  I will venture to say no more about Orlando lest I provoke similar corrections from the experts - I'm very conscious of my ignorance when it comes to Virginia Woolf and others will know a lot more about this book than me (not least Mrs Plinius, who is a Woolf aficionado).  However, I'll risk a few more words about the place where one might hope to find Orlando's oak tree: at Knole, the ancestral home of Vita Sackville-West.

As the National Trust Knole site explains, Orlando is dedicated to Vita Sackville-West 'and, in the words of Vita's son, Nigel Nicolson, it is 'the longest and most charming love letter in literature'. Vita is the eponymous hero/heroine (Orlando changes gender over the four centuries in which the novel is set) and Orlando's ancestral home is a house, like Knole, with a legendary 365 rooms. The pages are threaded through with similarly specific references to Knole and to its past and present incumbents. It ends with Orlando taking possession of the house whereas, in fact, Vita had been denied ownership of her beloved Knole because the house was passed through the male line.'  In her book Knole and the Sackvilles (1922), Vita Sackville-West wrote of the house that "it has the tone of England; it melts into the green of the garden turf, into the tawnier green of the park beyond, into the blue of the pale English sky."  The park surrounding the house has remained largely unchanged since the time of Elizabeth I, although it did lose 70% of its trees in The Great Storm of 1987.  We explored it and took the photograph below on a summer's day last year.

Knole Deer Park

Photographed by me in 2009