Eco-Modernism: Ecology, Environment and Nature in Literary Modernism [1 ed.] 1949979857, 9781949979855

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© 2022 Clemson University All rights reserved First Edition, 2022 ISBN: 978-1-949979-85-5 eISBN: 978-1-949979-86-2 Published by Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press Clemson University Press is located in Clemson, SC. For more information, please visit our website at www.clemson.edu/press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Diaper, Jeremy, editor. Title: Eco-modernism : ecology, environment, and nature in literary modernism / edited by Jeremy Diaper. Description: First edition. | Clemson, SC : Clemson University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Eco-Modernism explores the sustained engagement with ecology, environment, and nature in literary modernism. It features a broad range of chapters on key environmental contexts including ruralism and nature, ecological modernisms, modernist eco-poetics, agricultural and horticultural poetics, and climatic modernisms. This timely volume of essays provides an essential resource for students and scholars interested in studying the expanding fields of ecocriticism, modernism, and environmental humanities”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021037977 (print) | LCCN 2021037978 (ebook) | ISBN 9781949979855 (hardback) | ISBN 9781949979862 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Ecocriticism. | Ecology in literature. | Modernism (Literature) Classification: LCC PN98.E36 E25 2021 (print) | LCC PN98.E36 (ebook) | DDC 809/.9336--dc23/eng/20211130 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037977 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037978 Typeset in Minion Pro.



Contents

Acknowledgments

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Contributors

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Introduction: Eco-Modernism Jeremy Diaper

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Part I Ruralism and Nature

1 Modernism and the Rural Novel Dominic Head 2 Edith Sitwell: Modernist Experimentation and the Revitalization of Nature Poetry Elizabeth Black

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Part II Ecological Modernisms

3 “No poetic fantasy / but a biological reality”: The Ecological Visions of H.D.’s Trilogy Elizabeth O’Connor 4 Modernist Corpses and the Ecology of Burial Julia E. Daniel

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 Part III Modernist Ecopoetics

5 Nature, a Diligent Artist: An Ecocentric Reading of Marianne Moore’s “The Fish” Sharla Hutchison 6 Modernism’s Insect Vision Rachel Murray 7 Eco-consciousness and Ecopoetics in D. H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers and Apocalypse Fiona Becket

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Part IV Agricultural and Horticultural Poetics

8 Planting, Gardens, and Organicism in Literary Modernism Jeremy Diaper

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9 “A rose had flowered”: Virginia Woolf and the Nature of PostImpressionism Karina Jakubowicz

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10 “The earth-haunted mind”: Jean Toomer’s Cane, African American Writing, and Eco-Modernism Mary Weaks-Baxter

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Part V Climatic Modernisms

11 “Grain by grain”: Beckett’s Agripessimism and the Anthropocene Caitlin McIntyre

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12 “There all the time without you”: Joyce, Modernism, and the Anthropocene Peter Adkins

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Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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his collection was first conceived during my doctoral studies and I remain indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Birmingham’s College of Arts and Law for funding my postgraduate research. I am also especially grateful to a number of scholars for their invaluable guidance and assistance, including Julia E. Daniel, Frances Dickey, Steve Ellis, James Engell, Scott Freer, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Matthew Geary, Derek Gladwin, John Haffenden, Jason Harding, Alexandra Harris, Dan McKanan, Daniel Moore, Bonnie Kime Scott, and Marion Thain. My own chapter emerged from a keynote lecture delivered as part of the Botanical Modernisms Symposium held in the garden at Monk’s House, Rodmell, East Sussex in August 2019. This symposium provided me with the opportunity to reflect further on the significance of the environment to modernist writers and I am grateful to The National Trust and Jasmine McCrory for organizing and coordinating this event. I should also like to thank the anonymous readers of the original proposal for Eco-Modernism, who offered incisive suggestions that informed the development of the final collection. My sincere thanks and gratitude also go to John Morgenstern and Alison Mero for their continued enthusiasm about my research and for providing invaluable help and steadfast support throughout the publication process.

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My final and most important note of thanks goes to all the contributors to Eco-Modernism for their initial interest in this volume and for producing timely and insightful chapters, which I hope will provide a useful resource for scholars and students alike.

Contributors

Peter Adkins has taught English Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Kent and is a member of the Kent Animal Humanities Network. He is the author of The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Change in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2022) and co-editor of Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace: Aesthetics and Theory (Clemson University Press, 2020). He has published articles on James Joyce, the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf, posthumanism, and Victorian ecocriticism. Currently, he is working on a project that will examine how and why a wide variety of modernist writers became interested in vegetarianism and what their writing might have to say to contemporary debates around eating animals. Fiona Becket is Professor of Contemporary Poetics at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include modernism, pre-computer concrete and visual poetry, and contemporary digital and trans-medial poetry. Her books include D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), The Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence (Routledge, 2002), and, with Terry Gifford, Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism (Brill, 2007). She has published articles and book chapters on ecopoetics with reference to James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and a range of twentieth-century poets. Her recent work in the field of ecopoetics examines the displacement of human subjectivity in specific texts that engage with the creaturely. Her forthcoming book is Contemporary Visual Poetics: Women Writing the Posthuman (Routledge, 2023).

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Elizabeth Black is an academic and writer whose research interests centre on modernism, ecocriticism, poetry, and nature writing. Her first book, The Nature of Modernism: Ecocritical Approaches to the Poetry of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew, was published by Routledge in 2017. She has also published articles on subjects including Charlotte Mew and empathy, Edward Thomas’s ecocentric war poetry, and the relationship between nature and mental health. She works as an academic writing tutor at the University of Roehampton and is currently writing her second book: a nature memoir exploring the relationship between nature, walking, and grief. Julia E. Daniel is an Associate Professor of Literature in the English Department at Baylor University and serves as the co-editor of The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual. She is the author of Building Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning (UVA, 2017) and the coeditor of Modernism in the Green: Public Greens in Modern Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2020). She specializes in modern American poetry and drama, urban ecocriticism, and modern material culture, as seen in her pieces in The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land, Modernism and the Anthropocene, The New Wallace Stevens Studies, the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Modernist Poetry, Critical Quarterly, and Modern Drama. Jeremy Diaper is an independent postdoctoral researcher and higher education professional at Durham University. He is the author of T. S. Eliot and Organicism (Clemson University Press, 2018) and his research has been published in Literature & History, Agricultural History, Agricultural History Review, and the Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (UK). He has also contributed chapters to Religion and Myth in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016) and Gastro-Modernism: Food, Literature, Culture (Clemson University Press, 2019). Most recently, he has guest-edited a special issue of Modernist Cultures on “Modernism and the Environment.” Dominic Head is Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham. His published books include The Modernist Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 1992), The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Ian McEwan (Manchester University Press, 2007), and Modernity and the English Rural Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He has also edited The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, 3rd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and The Cambridge History of the English Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 2016). His ecocritical essays include “Problems in Ecocriticism and the Novel,” Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, 1 (1998), reprinted in Laurence Coupe (ed.), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (Routledge, 2000), and “The (Im)Possibility of

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Ecocriticism,” in Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, ed. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (Zed Books, 1998). Sharla Hutchison is a Professor of English at Fort Hays State University. Her research and teaching interests include poetry, modern literature, environmental studies, and gothic fiction. Karina Jakubowicz is an adjunct lecturer at Florida State University. She also teaches for Literature Cambridge and produces the Virginia Woolf Podcast. She is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, Cambridge University, and University College Dublin. Her research chiefly concerns the significance of gardens, horticulture, and landscape in early twentieth-century literature, and she has previously published articles on Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Katherine Mansfield, and Elizabeth von Arnim. She is the author of Garsington Manor and the Bloomsbury Group (Cecil Woolf, 2016), and Gardens in the Work of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Nature, and the Aesthetics of Space (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2022). Caitlin McIntyre is a Postdoctoral Associate at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she completed her PhD in 2021. She is also a Research Affiliate at the University of Manitoba’s Institute for the Humanities. Her research focuses on Irish and Caribbean modernism in a transatlantic context, and explores the modernist novel as an aesthetic response and resistance to the plantation. She was a recipient of a 2019–20 New York State Public Humanities Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in such journals as Humanities, Ecozon@, and ESC (English Studies in Canada). Rachel Murray is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield. Her research specializes in modernist literature, science, and animal studies. She is the author of The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). She has published articles on a range of authors and topics, including James Joyce and apiculture and Samuel Beckett’s worms—the latter of which won the British Society for Literature and Science and Journal for Literature and Science Essay Prize 2016. Her current research focuses on marine life in modern and contemporary literature. Elizabeth O’Connor completed her PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2019, where she researched the use of littoral and coastal imagery across H.D.’s body of work. Her research interests include littoral and archipelagic writers and writing in the twentieth century and marine animal studies. She currently works in student community engagement at the University of Birmingham’s Graduate School.

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Mary Weaks-Baxter is Andrew Sherratt College Professor and Director of the Jane Addams Center for Civic Engagement at Rockford University in Rockford, Illinois. A member of the English Department, she teaches courses in gender studies, rhetoric, and American and British literatures, including environmental literature. Her publications range from studies of the literature of the Southern US to a history of the role of American college women during World War II. She has published three co-edited collections and three monographs: Talking with Robert Penn Warren (University of Georgia Press, 1990), Southern Women’s Writing: Colonial to Contemporary (University Press of Florida, 1995), The History of Southern Women’s Literature (Louisiana State University Press, 2002), Reclaiming the American Farmer: The Reinvention of a Regional Mythology in 20th Century Southern Writing (Louisiana State University Press, 2006), the co-authored We are a College at War: Women Working for Victory in World War II (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), and Leaving the South: Border Crossing Narratives and the Remaking of Southern Identity (University Press of Mississippi, 2018).

Introduction Eco-Modernism Jeremy Diaper

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co-Modernism explores a breadth of ecological and ecocritical approaches to the study of modernist literature and the environment. In bringing together a diverse range of environmental responses to literary modernism, this collection of essays aims to establish that, contrary to previous urban-centric accounts, the modernists were far from ambivalent or antipathetic toward nature and the environment, but had a longstanding and deep-seated engagement with it. While ecocritical approaches to British Romanticism have continued to flourish since the 1990s, investigations of the modernist engagement with nature and the environment have only started to take root in recent years.1 A number of influential previous accounts, including Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 and Andrew Thacker’s Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism, focussed specifically on the rapid changes in technology, transportation, and mechanization, and elucidated how these altered the modernist understanding and experience.2 Elsewhere, a number of other important studies such as Desmond Harding’s Writing the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism and Andrew Thacker’s Modernism, Space and the City have conceived of modernism as a primarily urban and cosmopolitan movement, located on the axis of modernist cities such as London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and New York.3 Malcolm Bradbury’s categorization of modernism as “an art of cities” signals the previous critical focus on the development of modernism as synonymous with the city.4 In fact, as Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy succinctly points out: “to

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claim that nature is significant to modernism is to cut against the grain of a century of scholarship.”5 While historically the predominant critical focus has remained on exploring modernism as an urban and industrial artistic movement, a number of significant studies emerged in the last decade which have highlighted that modernism warrants further investigation from an environmental and ecocritical perspective. A key text in enabling modernist studies to embrace the wider critical dialogue surrounding ecocriticism was Lawrence Buell’s The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Buell addressed the issue of the “environmental unconscious” and affirmed that a text could still be considered to be engaging with ecological concerns even if it was not ostensibly concerned with the environment.6 Following Buell’s seminal study there has been a notable shift toward adopting an environmental and ecocritical framework, with a number of important reappraisals of modernist texts and authors emerging in the last decade or so. Perhaps the most significant development in ecocritical accounts of modernism to date has occurred in Woolf studies. One of the first examinations of modernism and the environment was Carol H. Cantrell’s article, “‘The Locus of Compossibility’: Virginia Woolf, Modernism and Place.”7 Cantrell indicated that modernist authors were “uniquely situated” to observe “the profound changes in human relations with the planet” owing to the rapidity of change following World War I. Despite the fact that ecocriticism was historically perceived as “hostile territory” for the modernist scholar, Cantrell opened up the possibilities for ecocritical exploration. Following on from Cantrell’s article, Christina Alt’s Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature and Bonnie Kime Scott’s In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and the Modernist Uses of Nature effectively served as catalysts for the greening of Woolf ’s modernism.8 These environmental studies of Woolf explored her engagement from a variety of different perspectives, including taxonomy, ethology, natural history, garden space, and environmental holism. Undoubtedly, as Kime Scott highlighted, Woolf was “fully and creatively engaged with the natural world” and she therefore remains a critical modernist author for “rethinking the sustained future of nature and culture combined.”9 Elsewhere, Kelly Sultzbach’s Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination: Forster, Woolf, and Auden expanded recent environmental readings of modernism by utilizing a breadth of ecocritical approaches, including pastoral ideology, ecophenomenology, animal studies, and their intersection

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with queer ecocriticism and eco-Marxism.10 By extending her analysis beyond Woolf to include Forster and Auden, Sultzbach’s book highlights the “multiple modes of modernist engagement with the environment” and reveals that these occurred at “junctures between not only human and animal, but also culture and nature, body and mind, as well as local and global identities.”11 In addition to the sustained environmental focus on Woolf, there has been a number of important studies that have expanded the greening of modernism through an exploration of environmental concerns in the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce.12 Since 2015, there has been a gradual advancement of environmental approaches to modernism. Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy’s Green Modernism: Nature and the English Novel, 1900 to 1930, for example, argued that the “green component” in modernism had continued to be “overlooked,” and sought to address this through a detailed consideration of green modernism in the work of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Mary Butts, and D. H. Lawrence.13 In McCarthy’s investigation of seminal modernist novels he maintains that “Nature can change the dominant readings of modernist novels and nature can broaden the archive for modernist studies.” His environmental reading of the modernist novel analyses “nature’s cultural function” and the modernists’ “emerging attention to nature’s material actuality.” Joshua Schuster’s The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics extended the critical discussion toward what he termed the ecology of modernism, with a particular focus on formal, aesthetic, scientific, and ethical aspects of ecology and environmentalism. Schuster examined how American modernists found “new ways of representing environs” through an investigation of Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, early black American blues, and John Cage.14 In contradistinction to McCarthy’s fundamental aim, which was “to insert green modernism into the heart of modernist studies,” Schuster questions the extent to which modernism can be considered green: “Modernism was never very green—if by green we mean an astute awareness of biodiversity, vigilance against pollution and overdevelopment, care for bioregional conservation, and an earth-focused activism that goes beyond human-centred interests.”15 This leads Schuster to conclude that American modernism, while “keenly attentive to environs,” was ultimately “ambivalent about environmentalism,” and that modernists never became “overt proponents on major environmentalist issues that existed at their time.” My own research in T. S. Eliot and Organicism, developed further in Chapter 8 of this book, challenges this particular claim,

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by highlighting that Eliot was an active and vocal proponent of the British organic husbandry movement and regularly engaged with agrarian issues in his social criticism. Another important contribution to the critical dialogue on modernism and ecocriticism that has emerged in the last five years is Elizabeth Black’s study The Nature of Modernism. Whereas many previous ecocritical studies have focussed on the novel, Black examines British modernist poetry and furthers the critical dialogue on environmental issues through close ecocritical readings of the poetry of Edith Sitwell, Charlotte Mew, T. S. Eliot, and Edward Thomas. By reassessing poetic representations of nature, Black illustrates that location, place, and environment were central modernist preoccupations and served to “challenge environmentally destructive aspects of modernity.”16 In 2020, there appeared a series of additional monographs and edited collections that further reinforced the relevance of the environment when considering modernist authors and artists. In Exhausted Ecologies: Modernism and Environmental Recovery, Andrew Kalaidjian investigated the “rhetoric of nature, as a place of rest, regeneration and recovery.”17 According to Kalaidjian, the modernists were not intending to “spread a spirit of respect for nature” but rather to “interrogate identity and community in relation to unsustainable exploitation.”18 Exhausted Ecologies highlights the modernist engagement with a diverse range of environmental discourses in the twentieth-century and reveals that their “ecological immersion” was informed by a breadth of scientific, economic, and political source material.19 Another important contribution to the field of environmental discussion is Modernism and its Environments by Michael Rubenstein and Justin Neuman, who set out to “present the newest and most innovative ideas in modernist studies and in the environmental humanities.”20 Unlike some of the previous ecocritical readings of modernism discussed above, which have principally focussed on what they perceive to be the green aspects of modernism, Rubenstein and Neuman examine “both the green and the gritty manifestations of the modernist imagination” through a series of categories, including energy, the city, the animal, the wilderness, and the weather.21 Some of the most recent scholarly contributions to environmental discussions of modernism have come from contributors to this collection. Rachel Murray’s The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form explores the influence of the insect world in the work of Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, Hilda Doolittle, and Samuel Beckett. Murray reveals how

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an engagement with etymological life forms provided a range of formal, linguistic, and aesthetic innovations and a means to find new forms of expression. For Murray, the entomological aesthetic of the insect form served as a means to reconsider “modernism’s reflexive attention to its own form— its relentless pursuit of novelty, its constant struggle to adapt, unmake and remake itself anew.”22 Elsewhere, Modernism in the Green: Public Greens in Modern Literature and Culture, edited by Julia E. Daniel and Margaret Konkol, explored “the creation, use and representation of the modern green.”23 This collection of essays on transatlantic modernist literature and cultures offered the first detailed exploration of the modernist representation of green spaces, including national parks, gardens, public commons, and roadways. Investigating the concepts of “public, green and modern,” the collection serves to refine further the nuances of the modernist engagement with nature and the greening of modernism. Crucially, as Daniel and Konkol highlight in their introduction, each of the chapters “deploy ‘green’ and ‘nature’ in ways that activate multiple definitions and valences of these terms.”24 From this brief overview of recent approaches to the environment, ecology, and nature in modernism, it is evident that since Bonnie Kime Scott’s earlier observation in The Hollow of the Wave that “proponents of the new modernist studies, seem little more interested than their predecessors in modernist uses of nature,” there has been a proliferation of ecocritical approaches that continues to fructify.25 Eco-Modernism offers a number of diverse approaches to the study of ecology, environment, and nature in literary modernism. The volume is organized into five main sections to reflect the breadth of scholarly approaches: “Ruralism and Nature,” “Ecological Modernisms,” “Modernist Ecopoetics,” “Agricultural and Horticultural Poetics,” and “Climatic Modernisms.” The first section, “Ruralism and Nature,” features two contributions that explore the modernist response to the contemporary rural novel and the presentation of the natural environment in modernist poetry. The opening chapter by Dominic Head analyzes E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910) in light of the interwar rural novel and writers such as A. G. Street, Sheila Kaye-Smith, and H. E. Bates. By examining Forster’s canonical modernist text in relation to the archetypal rural traits of interwar fiction, Head considers “the problem of dwelling in place” (15) and the town–country divide. The detailed examination of Forster’s text offers up engaging and thought-provoking comparisons of how nationalism and nostalgia are presented in rural interwar novels, including

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Kaye-Smith’s Sussex Gorse (1916), Street’s The Endless Furrow (1934), and Bates’s Spella Ho (1938). In Chapter 2, Elizabeth Black draws on recent ecocritical practices to reveal the importance of modernist experimentation in Edith Sitwell’s representation of nature, highlighting how Sitwell utilized sound, texture, and rhythm to replicate the natural world. Black argues that while poems such as Façade (1922) and Bucolic Comedies (1923) remain in sharp contrast to traditional forms of nature writing, Sitwell’s fantastical imagination provided a means of reconnection and enchantment with the natural world. Through a detailed examination of her poetry of the 1920s, Black highlights how Sitwell’s modernist experiments with form, rhythm, and patterns of sound mirrored the boundless energy and wonderment of the natural world. Black ultimately argues that “Sitwell produced a new form of nature poetry that is both unique in its challenge to conventional nature writing and representative of modernism’s broader preoccupation with the nonhuman world (33).” The second section contains three essays that offer ecological interpretations of modernism. In Chapter 3, Elizabeth O’Connor analyzes the ecological visions of H.D.’s Trilogy. Previous critical accounts of this poem have predominantly interpreted it in relation to its feminist concerns, its transformative approach to patriarchal myth, and its concerns with spirituality, mysticism, and the aftermath of war.26 Following on from recent analysis of landscape in H.D.’s early poems and ecocritical studies on Sea Garden, O’Connor provides the first detailed examination of H.D.’s presentation of the natural world in Trilogy.27 This chapter reveals extensive references to the shore, shellfish, and other species that abound throughout the three poems that comprise Trilogy (“The Walls Do Not Fall,” “Tribute to the Angels,” and “The Flowering of the Rod”) and emphasizes the role of the female spiritual leader in the regeneration of the natural world. In the final chapter within this section, Julia E. Daniel discusses the influence of chemical burials in the 1930s–40s on the modernist imagination. Through an ecological reading of the pastoral elegy and a consideration of the modernist preoccupation with the decomposition of corpses, Daniel highlights the relevance of the buried corpse to environmental readings of the poetry of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Muriel Rukeyser. Building on Timothy Morton’s consideration of “dark ecology,” Daniel examines the process of the bodies’ transition into the literal substance of the earth and contributes to continuing ecocritical discussions relating to dirt theory.

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The third section extends beyond the ecological to a focus on “Modernist Ecopoetics.” Sharla Hutchison’s chapter focuses specifically on an ecocentric reading of Marianne Moore. Recent ecocritical readings of Moore’s nature poems have revealed the significant influence of evolutionary biology and Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Other critics have also reflected on Moore’s environmental ethic, her engagement with natural science, museum exhibits, and nature education. Fundamentally, as Robin Schulze has argued, an examination of Moore requires “a profound poetic respect for nature’s otherness.”28 Another emergent trend has been to investigate Moore’s poetic representations of animals to subvert notions of human primacy. Drawing upon each facet of these recent ecocritical examinations of Moore’s poetry, Hutchison provides a detailed close reading and examination of “The Fish,” which has hitherto been overlooked in considerations of Moore’s environmental ethic. Hutchison explores the evolutionary biology at the heart of the poem and reveals that while “The Fish” might initially be perceived as a description of a seascape in which a magnificent cliff has been split by powerful waves, a closer reading reveals it to be a reflection on the gradual and life-sustaining changes that occur in nature over thousands of years. Through examining Moore’s creation of a Darwin-inspired aesthetic that amalgamates techniques from modern art and film, this chapter argues that Moore developed a framework for reconceiving human relationships to the environment. Hutchison concludes that “The Fish” functions much like a film montage sequence in which a variety of species are showcased in an arrangement of shots that emphasize a series of vantage points, angles, close-ups and underwater and aerial views. This innovative technique draws into close focus for the reader the vital role each organism plays in the ecosystem. In Chapter 6, Rachel Murray examines the inspiration modernist writing drew from insect vision and the compound eyes of invertebrates. Murray begins by identifying the emergence of insect optics in the early twentiethcentury, before exploring the pervasive influence of the compound eye on modernist writers of the period, including Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, and D. H. Lawrence. The chapter concludes by illustrating that the compound eye “helped modernist writers to find unexpected openings amid a constricted [and fragmented] reality, giving shape to more richly articulated modes of seeing, and establishing new points of connection between self and world (117).” Fiona Becket’s chapter then looks at eco-consciousness and ecopoetics

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in D. H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) and Apocalypse (1931). Becket probes Lawrence’s eco-consciousness, with a particular focus on the animal, the vegetal, “Nature,” and consciousness in his discursive writing. Becket maintains that any account of eco-modernism necessitates a consideration of the “intricate worlding” and “terraforming” of Lawrence’s poetry (136). The fourth section, “Agricultural and Horticultural Poetics,” explores the influences of soil science, cultivation, and gardening on a range of modernist authors, including T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Vita SackvilleWest. Chapter 8 draws on critical discussions in Alexandra Harris’s Romantic Moderns and my own research in T. S. Eliot and Organicism to offer an account of “Planting, Gardens, and Organicism in Literary Modernism.”29 It offers new horticultural readings of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Vita Sackville-West’s The Garden (1946). The chapter posits that the soil, cultivation, and gardening were a sustained influence in the work of Eliot, Woolf, and Sackville-West. Following a brief consideration of Eliot’s longstanding fascination with organic husbandry and agricultural issues in the 1930s–40s, it reveals how his conception of culture was inextricably linked to his engagement with issues relating to organic farming and gardening. In the next chapter, Karina Jakubowicz reconsiders the influence of PostImpressionism on Virginia Woolf ’s presentation of nature and the garden space. Following a detailed exploration of the significance of horticulture to the theories of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, Jakubowicz considers the “formative experiences” (161) that Woolf had in gardens, as described in “A Sketch of the Past” (1939), before proceeding to her portrayal of Mrs. Ramsay’s gardening in To the Lighthouse (1927). Jakubowicz concludes that in Woolf ’s writing and the work of the Post-Impressionists “the natural world was radically reshaped in accordance with a new aesthetic” (167). Mary Weaks-Baxter then explores eco-modernism in the context of African American writing. Crucially, this chapter engages with the problematic relationship of African Americans to agriculture and its disturbing historical associations with slavery. “The relationship to the earth,” writes Weaks-Baxter, is “defined by a rural past represented in African American culture and a connection to a landscape of historical reminders of the atrocities of slavery” (170). Beginning with a brief exploration of the approaches used to analyze African American literature through an ecocritical lens, Weaks-Baxter then proceeds to a detailed analysis of Jean Toomer’s seminal modernist work Cane (1923) in the context of

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African Americans’ “conflicted” relationship with the earth. Throughout this chapter, Weaks-Baxter explores a range of environmental issues including the connections between cityscapes and rurality, the landscape of the rural American South, agriculture as business, and the destruction of the natural landscape. Ultimately, the chapter concludes that in Cane, humanity seems “forever reaching toward but remain(ing) forever out of reach of a world in which unity and wholeness are validated and the gulf between races and between humans and the environment is mended” (183). The final section of this book, “Climatic Modernism,” explores the concept of the Anthropocene which is increasingly being used to frame our contemporary planetary moment, with the word foregrounding the way in which humans (“anthropos”) are now shaping global ecological and geological systems. Coined by Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000 as a means to refer to the scale of human impact and influence on environmental change, the term “Anthropocene” is a new ecocritical context to emerge in modernist scholarship.30 Following on from The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World, in which Matthew Griffiths argues that modernist writing was able to “articulate climate change and its complexities,” this section presents two interpretations of modernism in the emerging context of anthropocentrism.31 Caitlin McIntyre offers a re-reading of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957) and How It Is (1964) in relation to climate change, and interprets these works as depicting a disused agricultural landscape devastated by ecological disaster. McIntyre’s focus here is on “agripessimism,” which she terms “an aesthetic mode that focuses critique on agriculture’s colonial underpinnings and its long ecological afterlives” (189). In the final chapter of Eco-Modernism, Peter Adkins highlights that the Anthropocene is particularly pertinent to modernist studies. In this regard Adkins reveals that the antecedents of the Anthropocene concept were not only working at the interstices between aesthetics, philosophy, and science, but were also deeply influenced by Henri Bergson.32 Adkins reveals that Bergson, among others, prepared the ground for the Earth systems theories that today use similar terms to chart and explain anthropogenic planetary change and examine the early twentieth-century intellectual history of the Anthropocene.33 Following on from this, Adkins illustrates how a historically alert approach to the Anthropocene can inform a mode of ecocritical enquiry through a particular focus on the aesthetic innovations of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

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In the last few decades, modernist studies has witnessed such a proliferation of critical responses that it is now the tendency for scholars to refer to these various literary, political, stylistic, and theoretical perspectives under the all-encompassing term “modernisms.” And yet the scholarly response to the topic of modernism and the environment has until recently centered predominantly on the same canonical authors, namely Joyce and Woolf. Eco-Modernism provides a more prominent platform to authors who have only been afforded an incidental footnote in previous accounts of environmental modernism. As Michael Rubenstein and Justin Neuman have recently observed, “modernism has much more to say about the environment, and ecocriticism has much more to say about modernism, than has traditionally been understood in either modernist studies or the environmental humanities.”34 Furthermore, as Rubenstein and Neuman rightly attest, the current climate crisis facing the planet makes an understanding and awareness of the environment and humanity’s responsibility toward it more pressing than ever before. Eco-Modernism aims to present the latest ecocritical perspectives on the environment in modernism. This collection explores a range of critical approaches to examining the modernist engagement with the environment, as indicated by the full title, Eco-Modernism: Ecology, Environment, and Nature in Literary Modernsim. One of the primary aims of this collection is to highlight the multiplicity of responses to the modernist engagement with environmental thought, and to reaffirm that there remains no fixed or restrictive approach to ecocritical analyses of modernist literature. It is hoped that in offering a diverse and wide-ranging exploration of the modernist engagement with environmental and ecological concerns, Eco-Modernism will enable the scholarly conversation to enter into full bloom and encourage the discussion of environmental concerns and engagement with nature to proliferate further. As Timothy Clark has observed, ecocriticism encompasses a “plural school with practitioners across the world, both vastly extending its scope and reconsidering its basic concepts.”35 Any phrase utilized to encompass the modernist engagement with the environment should therefore be suitably broad and unrestrictive. Eco-Modernism has been conceived to enable and empower a plurality of ecocritical approaches, in keeping with the broader framework of ecocriticism. While such unrestricted approaches have received outright criticism from a number of scholars for being “theoretically unsophisticated,” this collection illustrates that the variety of

Introduction

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approaches and perspectives cannot adequately be constrained within a single theoretical framework, methodology, or critical program.36 In utilizing the term Eco-Modernism, this volume signals a move away from the expectation of a singular theoretical perspective that some scholars have called for in ecocriticism, and fosters a further proliferation in the diversity of theoretical responses. In this sense, the premise of the collection is aligned with Gillian Rudd’s perspective in stating that “ecocriticism cannot be a school that seeks to create and maintain a single, uniform outlook. Central to ecological thinking in general is a recognition of the importance of diversity—of species, of environment and even of approach.”37 With the publication of Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm’s seminal anthology The Ecocriticism Reader in 1996, ecocriticism fast became a catch-all critical term for scholars interested in studying literature and the environment.38 It is hoped that the term Eco-Modernism can be utilized in a similar fashion in the context of the gathering momentum of scholarship being undertaken by modernist scholars and students, in order to help cohere the breadth of critical approaches while enabling a range of perspectives in relation to the environment, nature, and ecology.

Part 1 Ruralism and Nature

C HA P T E R 1

Modernism and the Rural Novel Dominic Head

T

his chapter examines some points of intersection between modernism and the tradition of the rural novel in England. Taking E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) as a focal point, the discussion will examine the connections between Forster’s equivocal treatment of the immersion in the nonhuman, and comparable ambivalent concerns in three early twentiethcentury novels, each one revealing a genre-transcending dissonance, comparable to the effects found in Forster’s brand of modernism. These texts are Sheila Kaye-Smith’s Sussex Gorse (1916), where the attachment to place becomes obsessive, displacing the human drama; A. G. Street’s The Endless Furrow (1934), where patriotic duty is thoroughly dismantled, along with the idea of the dynastic novel, which is supplanted by the idea of responsibility to the land; and H. E. Bates’s reworking of the country house novel in Spella Ho (1938). The problem of dwelling in place is a central topic in this discussion. The psychological transformation brought about by the effects of modernity is encapsulated in the lament of Mrs. Wilcox in Forster’s Howards End: “Can what they call civilization be right, if people mayn’t die in the room where they were born?”1 The notion of a way of life swept aside by urbanization in the twentieth century has an even more intense purchase in the interwar era, revived by the experiences of writers following (or during) World War I: it pinpoints a self-conscious recognition of deracination that enhances our understanding of social and literary change. Yet even within modernity’s flux,

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the impossible dream of belonging in place remains a haunting presence, a paradox explored by both Forster and the rural novelists discussed here. The identification of an ambivalent rural strain in Forster resuscitates his place in the history of modernism; and the echoes of this complexity in the rural tradition oblige us to revalue key instances of a literary genre that is sometimes formulaic. The formal paradox of Howards End is that it is premised on the ideal of the beneficent rural retreat, through the impetus of mood and plot; and yet it systematically undermines the ideal thematically. Similarly, the idea of a spiritual home is a recurring feature in the rural tradition, with a nostalgic appeal, although it is not always treated straightforwardly: indeed, the constant reworking of a tradition, and its narrative forms, is an expression of the tussle with modernity prefigured by Forster, whose work shows that the selective amnesia often associated with the nostalgic impulse is more accurately seen as a product of alienating modernity. Artfully deployed, nostalgia becomes a potential bulwark against forgetting, rather than a selective method of memorialization, or at least it reveals the potential to function in this way. What is being remembered, of course, is a version of the past; but there is a disconnection between the imaginative effort of bringing the past to bear on the present within a novel, and the very different utopian/dystopian impulse to translate that theoretical “knowledge” into lived reality. The knowledge contained within literature complements empirical lived experience, but does so by preserving its separate identity within the artwork. A nostalgic performance is thereby produced: the literary text conjures a lost world in imagination, luring the reader to inhabit that past emotionally, while bringing it to bear intellectually on the present. What is sometimes seen—in Howards End and then later in the interwar vogue for the rural—as a turning away from the implications of industrial, urbanized modernity, might also be understood as a different form of response to it.2 The elements of contradiction and paradox that result from a response that is also a turning away have been well observed by critics of Forster. Concerning the treatment of space and place in Howards End, Andrew Thacker’s illuminating account remains an important critical touchstone, with its emphasis on how Forster “represents the spaces of modernity in a deeply ambivalent fashion” as he seeks “to connect together the modern metropolis, the new Edwardian suburbs, the pastoral landscape of the English countryside and the imperial domains upon which so much of the wealth of the European

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empires was based.”3 In Thacker’s reading, the ambivalence issues not only in a divided response to the complex spatiality of modernity, but in a novelistic form that is caught between provincial realism and experimentalism, the sign of its complex moment, “unable to retreat into an older narrative form, but as yet not fully cognisant of a new form.”4 This is a way of explaining the dissonant effects of the novel, notably its inconsistent narrative voice, the unresolved problems in the unification of the separate worlds of the Wilcoxes and Schlegels, and the lack of conviction surrounding the “only connect” epigraph as a governing motif. In Jed Esty’s survey of late modernism, a related paradox is the defining feature of an “anthropological turn” toward England in selected late works by Eliot, Woolf, and Forster, but which is also discernible in Forster’s earlier work. It is an argument that extends the idea of a particularized response to modernity, because Esty sees this strand of modernism as a reaction to the end of Empire.5 In this argument, an absence in imperial modernism, when “the anthropological visibility and wholeness of tribal societies in the colonial periphery drew attention away from comprehensive sociological knowledge of England itself,” brings a reaction, a dynamic that ushers in “a basic repair or reintegration of English culture itself,” specifically through “Anglocentric representations of meaningful time and bounded space.”6 A major component of this fresh interest in English cultural identity, for Esty, is a recuperation of traditional forms, or “Anglocentric rituals,” with their roots in traditional rural communities, such as the pageant-play. This formal shift away from the introversions of modernist narrative—however “universally significant” the “privately rendered mind” in modernist streamof-consciousness writing may have been—issues in a new enthusiasm for “the public performance of civic rituals.”7 This is a dynamic that reveals an unresolved tension, of course, between the legacy of Empire and the luxury of turning to “unspoilt” England, with its pre-industrial heritage. And yet, a crucial aspect of eco-modernism is laid bare here. It is tempting, in such cases, to discern a choice between retrograde preservationist sentiment on the one hand, and an idealized notion of repair and nurture on the other; but instead we find a form of compromised coexistence, in which questions of privilege and hegemony are determining factors. What Forster’s eco-modernism suggests, however, is that the pastoral/imperial dualism should be seen not as a choice, or an impasse, or the embodiment of privilege; rather, like the rural writers who came after him, he requires us to rethink the terms of this

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dualism. We need to think beyond the binary, and to embrace the representation of a paradoxical predicament: the opposition cannot be “resolved”; rather, the relationship between the opposing or contradictory forces must be continually renegotiated. And the effect of such a renegotiation might be a simultaneous evaluation of the binary components, an acknowledgment of the deleterious effects of imperial activities (and imperial thought), and a recuperation of the benignities of pastoral. Both processes are conceived as moderations of modernity, to reveal its dubious historical underpinnings on the one hand, and to ameliorate its effects on the other. But neither one is operative—or functional, in moral terms—without the other. As I have indicated, this dualism, illustrated so clearly in Howards End, is the essence of Forster’s eco-modernism. Such a refashioning of contradictory elements into an indivisible mode of ambivalence is a noted feature of Forster’s response to modernity, although it is also sometimes seen as an indication of his semi-detached relationship to literary modernism, a “reluctant” modernist as David Medalie calls him, observing that he remains partly reliant on traditional narrative forms, even while he is drawn in to an element of modernist innovation.8 A question I want to keep in view, then, is the extent to which Forster’s formal ambivalence maps onto his ambivalent pastoral strain, and—as a corollary to that idea—how literary modernism might be reconceived as a consequence. This line of inquiry suggests a greater degree of affinity between literary modernity and the rural than has usually been detected. If we consider Howards End in more detail we can see how binary choices are left unresolved, so that his treatment of the town–country nexus can seem confused. The rural retreat of the Wilcoxes, Howards End, may be taken to symbolize a rural life that is simpler, more enriching, than the life that is depicted in the book’s urban spaces. It also stands for stability in place, a buttress against the disorientating effects of urban life, governed by motion and exemplified in the motor car. This apparent opposition between the urban and the rural, and between motion and fixity, is seemingly underscored in the novel’s final chapter, when the “red rust” of suburbia is seen to be encroaching on the rural idyll of Howards End, and one of the Schlegel sisters, apparently espousing the author’s view, hopes that the current “craze for motion” may not be permanent, and “may be followed by a civilization that won’t be a movement, because it will rest on the earth.”9 Yet when we reflect on the novel’s unresolved complications, we realize that it has not presented us with such a clear-cut choice. Howards End cannot

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easily stand in opposition to the flux of modernity because the Wilcoxes have made their money in Africa, by investing in rubber, the key component of car tyres. This part of their property portfolio, then, is financed by an industry that makes possible the expansion of car ownership, and the consequent spread of suburbia (even though the railway mapped out the main concentrations of suburban expansion at this time). And the investment in Africa brings in the colonial frame that Esty sees as so important in the eventual turn toward England in late modernism, but which Forster already foreshadows here. David Bradshaw reminds us that “African rubber was also a deeply tainted commodity” because of the “barbarity” that accompanied its exploitation.10 We are then presented with a difficult paradox to negotiate: Howards End is held up as a place of spiritual repair and growth; and yet ownership of it is made possible by colonial brutality, and investment in an industry that helps undermine the values the house is made to enshrine. The interpretative issue at stake here is the difference between a reading that reveals contradiction, and a reading that attempts to retrieve a purposive consequence from an unavoidable paradox. To the extent that the paradox of Howards End can be characterized as the latter—so that Forster is seen as revealing the unavoidable predicament of post-imperial existence—it is a paradox that goes to the heart of the interwar rural tradition that was to follow. The idea of a spiritual home, that central problem of Howards End, is a recurring feature in the rural tradition, where it is also treated more richly than is often assumed. In this respect, Forster’s eco-modernism, and that strand of the rural tradition that reproduces elements of his ethos, anticipates the way in which one of the great conundrums of modernity was later articulated. I am referring to the problem of belonging, and specifically to the reaction to Martin Heidegger’s theory of dwelling. For Heidegger, being and dwelling are interdependent concepts: “Man’s relation to locations, and through locations to spaces, inheres in his dwelling. The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken.”11 In this understanding, dwelling involves putting down roots, thereby giving personal meaning to space, forging a link between a native home and a sustaining identity. In later twentieth-century reconceptualizations of space and place, Heideggerian dwelling is often a focus of critique, and a way of exposing the disappointments of modernity concerning notions of community and rootedness. These ideas are shown to be damagingly simplistic in later conceptualizations of space and place, in which the social production of space

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is emphasized, and place is conceived as an evolving spatio-temporal event. We have learned to understand this as a two-way process in which space is seen to be socially produced, even while it is recognized that social relations are also conditioned by the manner of their configuration in space.12 In social geography, this historical and political dimension to space is easy to identify in the context of urbanization; but it is equally pertinent to rural experience, although harder to see. Yet these ideas are already implicit in the work of the best interwar rural novelists, taking forward the Forsterian paradox about place and belonging in modernity; and the central issue here concerns how to inhabit place meaningfully, retrieving what is valuable in an idealized version of belonging in place that also threatens to derail that objective. And understanding the complexity of Forster’s nostalgia significantly enhances our understanding of the function of this kind of paradox. In broad terms, it is the change in human activity central to modernity, the shifting balance away from agriculture and toward industrialism, that informs the nostalgic mood of Howards End: the “tragedy” of Leonard Bast, although it is a tragedy with a satirical sheen, is one of deracination: he is someone of robust farming stock reduced—in the sense of losing touch with his rural roots—to the position of an unfulfilled office clerk with yearnings for rural adventure. Particularly illuminating in relation to this context is an essay by John Su on the nostalgia of Howards End, which articulates a function for nostalgia that stems from the novel’s inconclusive and contradictory nature.13 Su helps us see how modernity materially changes nostalgia so that the selective amnesiac qualities sometimes associated with it can now be explained by “the technologies of industrial modernization” and their alienating effects, which are illustrated most obviously in Howards End by the disorientating experience of traveling by car. In this situation, Su argues, the cultural function of nostalgia is “redeployed” so that Forster’s fiction can be read “as a response to an anxiety apparent everywhere in his political writings: the relative incapacity of individuals to interpret their world reliably.”14 This takes us to the heart of modernity, and the doubt about systemic explanations in Western culture. (Theosophy is one system of knowledge that is evoked in Howards End, but with a good dose of skepticism.)15 The uncertainty that concerns Su is signaled in Margaret Schlegel’s distinction between “the chaotic nature of daily life and the orderly sequence fabricated by historians,” which he relates to the opposition between fiction and history established in Aspects of the Novel: an opposition, that is, between “experiential and

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evidence-based” forms of knowledge.16 The lynchpin of Su’s argument is the connection between experience and nostalgia, since experience is a “form of knowledge produced by the deliberate imbrication of past and present.” But this is knowledge without an empirical basis because “experiential knowledge values precisely what cannot be verified as the most ‘true,’ not because it did or did not happen … but rather because it reveals unfulfilled human aspirations.”17 These components of nostalgia—the bringing to bear of the past on the future as an aspirational venture—point to the purposiveness of the nostalgia in Howards End, which functions “not to produce amnesia but to focalize particular events such that they can become experiential knowledge.” It is a process that serves to dismantle binary oppositions, so that we cannot actually make a choice between Schlegels and Wilcoxes, country and town, culture and capitalism, and so on. Instead, the “experiential knowledge” produced by the novel in Su’s terms obliges us to see the interdependence of forces that are apparently in opposition. This is the aesthetic effect produced by the nostalgia of Howards End, indicating that “the proper relationship between art and life” hinges on “a complementary rather than antagonistic relationship between empirical and experiential” forms of knowledge.18 This is a sophisticated extension of the idea that nostalgia’s purposive function is to help reshape a better present and future. One key element of how Su extends this idea is by making it necessary: “Experiential knowledge so often takes the form of an idealized past, not because experience is inaccurate but because it can only project a better world out of the materials and moments a person has lived—the past, in other words.” Far from “presenting a false consolation in an idealized or utopian future,” nostalgia makes us focus on “present dissatisfaction,” and has a special place in art: “experiential knowledge recognizes the unlikelihood that the world will be changed by knowledge; Forster insists that such knowledge must be preserved within art precisely because it may never be a lived reality.”19 Nostalgia in Howards End, we might argue, then, provides a repository of past experience, but also shows us a template for how we negotiate the present, fathoming the way to live well in light of the memories that have formed us, but in full awareness that the utopian aspirations the past may furnish us with do not function as a blueprint for the future. These qualities can also be found in the highly self-conscious interwar rural tradition that reveals such strong echoes of Forster, specifically the ways in which nostalgia is cultivated in that tradition. One such echo with

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the literary effects of Howards End, and the moments of disorientation it foregrounds, is the way in which selective amnesia is used productively. This feature of nostalgia, which can result in serious distortions of the past, can also be more reflectively structured as a reaction to the alienating effects of modernity. Nostalgia then reveals its potential as a tool of engagement with the contemporary moment, rather than a selective method of memorialization. This potential, paradoxically, has precisely to do with its theoretical emphasis, its distance from praxis. With this emphasis, the disconnection is preserved between experience and empiricism, between the experiential knowledge produced through the imaginative work of bringing the past to bear on the present within a novel, and the utopian desire to conjure a lived reality out of that experiential knowledge. This is not to refuse entirely a connection between the empirical world and the knowledge of experience drawn from the past; but it does require that readers recognize that experiential knowledge has a quite separate identity when preserved within a novel. The rural tradition in the English novel, in the spirit of Forster, produces this kind of effect in its most notable instances. Together, these instances comprise an important slice of literary history in which we can find a composite experiential knowledge, often oriented toward a critique of modernity, but with no presumption of translating that element of “complementarity” into lived existence. A good illustration here is Sheila Kaye-Smith’s Sussex Gorse a key twentieth-century English rural novel, which anticipates some of the interwar fictional treatments of farming and belonging, while also extending the way in which Forster knits together the seemingly contradictory elements of the continuing desire to belong in/to a particular place, in the era of modernity. Sussex Gorse is simultaneously difficult and compelling, its qualities refracted through the lens of the psychology of farming, focussed on the career of its protagonist Reuben Backfield, “almost a force of nature,” as Glen Cavaliero characterizes him.20 It is Backfield’s obsession with Boarzell Heath that supplies the engine of the narrative, his “single-minded determination to conquer it,” which W. J. Keith finds both “horrifying and impressive.”21 In an intensification of the human–landscape interaction associated most strongly, in the English rural tradition, with Hardy’s treatment of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native (1878), Kaye-Smith traces Backfield’s lifelong tussle with an inhospitable and infertile environment. He is driven by the desire to tame “several hundred acres of gorse-grown land,” to attach them to the family farm, and to subordinate the lives of his family members to this project: Backfield

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leads a “cruel and ruthless” life, which Dorothea Walker explains as girding him with the power to “fight the cruelty and ruthlessness of Boarzell.”22 This cruelty issues in a bleak human drama, with Backfield subjugating his family to his will, notably his first wife Naomi, who dies after giving birth to eight children—including six sons for the farm (in Backfield’s utilitarian view of things). In some respects, Sussex Gorse conforms to a recognizable convention in the farm novel, with the oppressed sons each seeking to escape from a life working on the farm, and from their father’s tyranny. His daughters are particularly unfortunate: one marries a farmer and becomes part of a rival camp in Backfield’s eyes, and is eventually impoverished; while the other becomes a prostitute. Two younger sons by Backfield’s second wife join the army (another convention of the farm novel), and go to war in South Africa, where one is killed. If there is something formulaic in Kaye-Smith’s deployment of such conventions—the harshness and cruelty of the human drama mirrored by an unforgiving landscape—she studiously avoids the tempering processes of reflection or personal growth that usually accompany the presentation of flawed character. Indeed, we begin to realize that Backfield is no Lear, whose tragic flaw will reveal to us his moral failings. On the contrary, Kaye-Smith persists with the unflinching portrayal, so that we are forced to wonder whether the flaw is also a strength after all. Backfield’s consistency is underscored in the treatment of Alice Jury, who is presented as the only character who understands him, and offers him his one chance of a loving relationship. Inevitably, he chooses Boarzell over her; and this throws into relief the tension that orders the book, a tension between two kinds of reading. As novel readers, we are trained to look for the moral code, which here invites us to see Backfield as a tragic figure, deprived of meaningful human relations by his obsession. Set alongside that story of flawed character, however—and, perhaps, emerging as a different kind of narrative logic—is our realization that Backfield has succeeded in the improbable task of taming nature on a grand scale, oblivious to his human failings. It is a different kind of fulfillment to that which we expect to see in the novel, with its (conventionally) social orientations. Kaye-Smith makes us ponder how rural fiction might diverge from the literature of mainstream modernity; but she also makes us see the human cost within modernity of prosecuting the idea of identifying with one place, over a lifetime, which emerges as something forced, a way of disregarding the new contingencies of life.

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Backfield’s obsession, then, is not presented as something to emulate. But there are rural novels in which part of the nostalgic effect is to encourage a process of identification with rural experiences. Even in such cases, though, there can remain an important separation of experience as refracted in the novelistic vision from empiricism—a separation of imagination from the life lived—a process that distances the nostalgic impulse from utopianism. And yet there is a different kind of risk in literary nostalgia of this kind. Its preservation within—and as one of the defining features of—a literary genre implies a particular kind of remembering; and this might facilitate the kind of risk Paul Ricoeur sees in obligatory or imposed memories, precisely through the disjunction between experiential and empirical knowledge that is resistant to utopianism. The concern here is that, if the rural tradition is seen as claiming a kind of authority in contradistinction to the directions actually taken by history, it might result in that kind of asserted collective memory in which, for Ricoeur, “commemoration rhymes with rememoration.”23 We might fear that the authority of critique that nostalgia garners to itself, in “ethico-political” memory, implies “a claim on behalf of memory in opposition to history.”24 It is not hard to understand how nostalgia, separated from history, could function as an abuse of memory in this way, or at least be received as having this function. This may help explain why the interwar rural tradition has been largely neglected or ignored, and has usually been treated dismissively when it has been acknowledged. Yet this precarious balance between a purposive critique of modernity on the one hand, and the dangerous falsification of memory on the other, may also be a distinctive feature of the nostalgia produced by the rural tradition, a corollary of the ambivalence I was accounting for at the beginning of this chapter. The starkest issue thrown into relief by falsifying the past within modernity is nationalism; but even this is susceptible to ambivalent treatment in the rural tradition, as an extension of the exploration of belonging in place. Again, the complexity here is anticipated by Forster. One of the puzzling moments in Howards End is the passage at the beginning of chapter 19, in which the narrator adopts the tone of a guidebook. “If one wanted to show a foreigner England,” the chapter begins, and proceeds to present what Andrew Thacker terms “a eulogy to the Dorset countryside, to Salisbury Plain, the Isle of Wight, and ‘all the glorious downs of central England.’” And yet that celebratory mode is qualified and altered as the passage progresses, as Thacker shows:

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Forster is, however, keen to represent something more than a merely pastoral version of Englishness. The ports of Portsmouth and Southampton … are included and, importantly, these spaces are linked back to the metropolis: ‘Nor is suburbia absent. Bournemouth’s ignoble coast cowers to the right, heralding the pine trees that mean, for all their beauty, red houses, and the Stock Exchange, and extend to the gates of London itself. So tremendous is the City’s trail!’ … Forster’s description is thus another example of the strongly geographical sense of connection that informs the text.25 Thacker’s point about the modernity of the novel’s geography is epitomized at the end of this passage, where the breathless exclamations of the narrator also signal a sense of confusion: How many villages appear in this view! How many castles! How many churches, vanquished or triumphant! How many ships, railways and roads! What incredible variety of men working beneath that lucent sky to what final end! The reason fails, like a wave on the Swanage beach; the imagination swells, spreads and deepens, until it becomes geographic and encircles England.26 There is a sense that the narrator is overwhelmed by the vista (“the reason fails”), and loses the celebratory momentum with which the passage begins; and so “to what final end [?]” becomes a rhetorical question, in which the nationalistic sentiment is displaced by a contrary and uncertain sense of place as an ever-shifting and fluid space within modernity. In short, the vista that provokes the thought about the identity of England is rethought as the passage unfolds, so that it cannot produce the quintessence of national identity. The geographic encircling simultaneously draws a boundary and gestures to the world beyond: the temptations of a narrow nationalism based on celebratory pastoral reveal their limits as they abut the forces of modernity. Nostalgia and nationalism are brought together frequently in the interwar rural and regional novel, but sometimes in ways that are more complex than they at first appear. A. G. Street’s The Endless Furrow is a development of Forster’s reflection on the elusiveness of the essence of England. Street’s novel spans the period 1866–1918, and gives a historical overview of how World War I impacted upon perceptions of rural England, and specifically the place

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of farming in the national story.27 Ostensibly, the novel concerns a heroic selfmade man, James Horton, son of an innkeeper, who overcomes huge material obstacles and class barriers while pursuing his aim to become a successful Wiltshire farmer, and seeking to realize his grandmother’s hopes that he will emulate his great-great-grandfather’s reputation as “the best farmer in England.”28 Horton makes his way as a grocer, then a baker, marrying a headmistress, setting up successive businesses, before finally realizing his ambition of crossing over from trade into farming—he benefits from the downturn in farming from 1879, which enables him to rent a farm in 1895—thus flouting the class conventions of English provincial society, where a tradesman is always the social inferior of a farmer.29 The novel appears to toe a predictably nationalistic line to the point where it seems to celebrate Horton “obeying the call of a piece of England’s land as countless men have done all down the ages, and will continue to do in the future no matter what changes may take place in the world” (254). Yet the novel is more interesting than this propagandistic assertion might suggest. Indeed, Street effectively undermines his dynastic narrative and the conventions that inform it, wrong-footing the reader in an unexpectedly affecting way. Horton’s ambition, as part of the project to reestablish the farming vocation of the Hortons, is to bequeath his farm to a son. James junior stands to take over the substantial farm, as an owner rather than a tenant, while landowners sell in anticipation of David Lloyd George’s land reform (321ff.). Again, this ambition is presented in the nationalistic tones of the period: “When a man owned a piece of England, he became a piece of England himself. He belonged. Nothing else could give a man such a feeling of complete satisfaction. James Horton looked upon his life’s work and saw that it was good” (340). The echo of God’s creation (Genesis 1:31) fairly obviously signals Horton’s hubris; and it is very significant that it is the satisfaction he takes in the notion of “belonging” that marks the point of his overreaching. From this point the catastrophe that Street has signaled occurs: the younger James, fighting in World War I, is killed in action and the dynastic story—and, so, the architecture of the novel—collapses. This is a radical formal gesture, requiring readers to relinquish their investment in the story, with the realization that “there would be no more Hortons now to farm Wiltshire’s land as it should be farmed” (366). Horton has a sudden revelation, on the day of his son’s death, in which the importance of the land is reconceived to oust the idea of dynastic belonging upon which his life has been built:

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What mattered it if his son was killed, if countless sons of other parents suffered a like fate? The land never died, and its needs must be served.… Now he was forced to realize that James Horton was just a man, a being who could work and plan for his own ends for a few years, but who, by comparison with the everlasting land, was a very little thing. (368–69) The novel ends by installing an impersonal and timeless principle of austere duty to the land, which makes the idea of duty to nation meaningless. In this way, Street—like other farmer-novelists of the 1930s, such as H. W. Freeman and Adrian Bell—gestures toward the importance of human continuity (presented through subsistence farming), an ethos that dwarfs the affiliation of national belonging and the world of modern nations in conflict. The experience of reading The Endless Furrow is of being enticed to identify with a straightforwardly nationalistic sentiment, bound up with Horton’s nostalgic ambitions to resurrect the farming achievements of his family, and then finding that sentiment supplanted by a forward-looking idealism, but an idealism that still depends on the nostalgic appeal of the farming life. In this way, it is the danger of “rememoration” that actually facilitates the positive effects of nostalgia in the imaginative realm. To an extent, this is another way of recognizing that nostalgia has unpredictable effects. But it also relates to the way in which nostalgia dismantles binary oppositions. Helpful here is Alastair Bonnett, who defines the kind of nostalgia that is “produced within modernity,” arguing that is has a distinctive nature because “the difficulty of dealing with sudden and massive social change is the condition, not of all nostalgia, but of its distinctly modern form.” The rural tradition may share elements of “cultural transgression” that Bonnett finds in some forms of nostalgia, notably the radical potential evident more obviously in other artistic responses to modernity, such as avant-garde modernist primitivism.30 This radical potential depends on the propensity of nostalgia to confound binary thinking. Indeed, Bonnett is wary of the impulse to resist the seemingly retrograde tendencies of nostalgia, and of attempts to discriminate between “good” and “bad” forms, where the “good” forms are those that are most obviously ironic or self-reflexive. Self-reflexive nostalgia can always be seen as more responsive to the present, with less investment in established tradition. But if we succumb to the temptation to pursue an instrumental process of selecting the most politically useful and self-reflexive forms of nostalgic

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expression, we miss its potentiality, we short-circuit the nostalgic challenge to “progressive” thinking: “the deployment of oppositional pasts,” as Bonnett puts it, does “not necessarily represent a break with an ingrained hostility towards attachments to the past,” the very hostility that any functioning nostalgia has to overcome.31 In other words, there are circumstances in which the temptation to distinguish between “good” and “bad” forms of nostalgia might also empty nostalgia of its true “anti-progressive” nature: a functioning nostalgia has, fundamentally, to challenge the rational hostility toward attachments to the past. The result is a kind of Janus-faced effect, which can involve a productive juxtaposition of past and present. In the rural novel of the 1930s, this is very much what happens: a pre-World War 1 society is reimagined, often without any sense of idealization, as a way of calibrating interwar anxieties about economic depression and global political stability. Summarized in this way, the rural nostalgia of the 1930s, for all its retrogressive sheen of “bad” nostalgia, also has a distinctly utilitarian function, redolent of the “good” forms of nostalgia that might be too easily progressive; but when one looks at the literary effects of particular novels, there is no progressive “message” to be extracted: the “good” and the “bad” nostalgic impulses are played off against each other. This difficult form of nostalgia is epitomized in the work of H. E. Bates, and I shall conclude this chapter with a consideration of one of his most troubling and brooding novels, Spella Ho, another rural-provincial novel that eludes, and implicitly interrogates, literary convention. It also engages with the several interlocking themes that I have considered in this chapter: the problem of dwelling in place; the interrogation of nationalism generated by the yearning to belong; and the uses of nostalgia to complicate and enrich these themes, in ambivalent novelistic forms and modes that underscore the paradoxes of modernity. In Spella Ho Bates inverts the country house novel in a way that generalizes the work’s reflection on place and identity within modernity. Bates felt “the Great House” to be one of the fascinations of “the English landscape,” enunciating the ordinary perspective of most people, living outside the social milieu of the country house and having greater familiarity with the surrounding countryside.32 As a class outsider, so to speak, Bates’s vision is quite different from that of Edwardian novelists such as Galsworthy and Ford, who used the country house as a way of framing epochal change; it

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also differs from other prominent interwar writers, some of whom (SackvilleWest, Lawrence, Isherwood, Waugh) translated “the apparent doom of the country house” into “the occasion of mordant comedy,” as Richard Gill puts it, while others (Bowen, Woolf, Waugh (again)) then turned “to the house with a new seriousness.” But what unites these treatments is an explicit and detailed presentation of the social mores and class dynamics of the country house as an institution.33 Bates denies us this kind of sociological purchase. Spella Ho(use) stands empty at the beginning of his novel, and is not made representative of any particular social moment: its lure is the generalized sense of grandeur it embodies, a shorthand for the long period of industrial modernity which Bates’s protagonist, Bruno Shadbolt, comes to embody as the agent of modernity in the machine age. It is he who eventually becomes the owner of the house, and at the end of the book, character and house merge;34 but there is a sense that he has been absorbed by the impersonal forces it is made to represent: “there was no record, except in his own mind, of things that had happened there. There was no record of the best in himself.”35 The outsider takes possession of the compelling country house, completing the transition from laborer to industrial magnate. Thus, the country house, emptied of its traditional attributes of class power, becomes the property of the ordinary man, a signal of a society in flux. But this is a moment not just of class mobility, but of profound ambivalence: Shadbolt improves living standards in Castor, but in the process he is responsible for increased pollution, and the destruction of rural land through unplanned, piecemeal development. In this there is a clear echo of Forster’s preoccupation with deracination and suburbanization in Howards End: Bates suggests that an improvement in standards of living, as conventionally defined, comes at the cost of the despoliation of the landscape, and by sapping the vitality of the traditional rural worker. And yet, as Dean Baldwin remarks, “Bates was no sentimentalist, pining over a golden past.”36 It is true that Bates betrays regret at the passing of a more fulfilling rural way of life, for all its hardships, overtaken by the alienation of industrialization; but, through the emblem of the dominant and impersonal big house—and the long history of industrial power it comes to embody—he registers that change as unstoppable. In all of this there is a complex deliberation on the problem of meaningful existence in place within the flux of modernity. In the later twentieth century, as we have seen, questions of dwelling are problematized to the extent that they complicate Heideggerian understanding, revealing its inapplicability.

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Bates was one of those earlier writers who had come to this conclusion on his own terms. His reflections on the problem of dwelling, crystallized in Spella Ho, often examined the intent to lend personal meaning to space, the notional connection between a native home and a sustaining identity. “Building” is the crucial third term in Heidegger’s account of rootedness (“Building Dwelling Thinking”) that signals this connection. For Heidegger, “Building is really dwelling,” an idea that incorporates, but is not exclusive to, the erection of actual structures: “Building as dwelling unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings.” Building, in other words, is the process by which “the where of the belonging” is rendered meaningful.37 Purposive existence—dwelling and building—then depend upon cultivation, preservation, and a sense of settled belonging in/to a fixed location. Spella Ho is an object lesson in the impossibility of this kind of dwelling where modernity transforms space too rapidly for fulfillment to be defined in these terms. Shadbolt’s desire to possess Spella House, and to root himself there, dissolves when he senses the resistance of the house to this endeavor. This is a recurring theme in twentieth-century rural fiction, especially where the overreaching ambitions of a central protagonist are linked to the dream of possessing a special place. This apparently irresolvable paradox—which focuses a persisting but unattainable need/desire—is at the heart of Howards End, and has become more pressing in subsequent fictional treatments. In the rural tradition, tales of overreaching—as in the career of Shadbolt in Spella Ho, or the life story of James Horton in The Endless Furrow, or the obsession of Reuben Backfield in Sussex Gorse—can seem simplistic or cautionary; but what these narratives really reveal is the trauma of the transition to modernity, the historical moment where the desire to be rooted in place becomes impossible for most people. That moment of social history generates powerful literary effects of the kind memorably enshrined in the ambivalence of Howards End. This now seems like a clearly circumscribed period of literary (and social) thought, even though the legacies of the early twentieth century, and this form of eco-modernism, have been apparent in the work of successive generations of novelists. Through modernity, however, the problem of belonging begins to resolve itself through necessity, and increasingly takes the guise of the more dilute conception of inhabitation, at least as far as the novelist is concerned. If inhabitation is more “dilute” than belonging, however, it is more morally compelling, allowing writers to avoid suggestions of exclusivity, and to illustrate

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for us the fluid and temporary nature of imagined attachments to place, which can be just as earnestly and powerfully felt, but more expressly textual and evanescent in nature. Bates’s own career, moving from the Northamptonshire setting of the rural writing that made his name to the Kent countryside that inspired his later Larkin novels in the 1950s and 1960s, exemplifies this developing propensity to relinquish particular attachments, and to forge new ones. The nomadic and diasporic consequences of modernity are represented in miniature by this dynamic, which also embodies a kind of resolution of the particular paradox of belonging embraced by Forster in Howards End, and which was extended so pervasively in the interwar rural novel.

C HA P T E R 2

Edith Sitwell Modernist Experimentation and the Revitalization of Nature Poetry Elizabeth Black

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he recent growth in recognition of the potential for reading modernist literature ecocritically has resulted in significant insights for both disciplines. However, while ecocritical discussions of modernism continue to gain momentum, some important modernist figures remain underexamined. Edith Sitwell is at the forefront of this marginalized group; a writer who achieved extraordinary levels of fame in her lifetime, but whose style and wit has vastly overshadowed her literary legacy. This absence of critical interest from ecocriticism or modernist studies matters, because by employing modernist techniques to create innovative ways of perceiving, representing, and engaging with the natural world, Sitwell produced a new form of nature poetry that is both unique in its challenge to conventional nature writing and representative of modernism’s broader preoccupation with the nonhuman world. Sitwell also exemplifies the complexities of approaching modernism from an ecocritical perspective. For ecocriticism, her highly stylized approach and focus on human experiences of place contradict the theory’s roots in realism and nature-centered texts, while for modernist studies her idiosyncratic development of modernist techniques makes her work difficult to categorize within the movement. Despite these challenges, as well as because of them, Sitwell’s poetry has huge potential

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for the study of eco-modernism. Her avant-garde experiments with rhyme, texture, synaesthesia, and imagery strive to replicate the multisensory experience of being embodied in the material world and to deconstruct dualisms between nature and culture. This results in poetry that remains relevant to the contemporary climate crisis, because it challenges inherited perceptions of nature and rejects dissociative aspects of modernity in order to encourage renewed attention to the natural world. This chapter foregrounds the importance of Edith Sitwell’s unique form of nature poetry and its strong connections to ecocritical theory. Focussing on poems from Façade (1922) and Bucolic Comedies (1923), it argues that Sitwell’s innovative use of modernist techniques challenged conventional perceptions of the natural world and contributed to the movement’s broader reexamination of human relationships to nature.

Edith Sitwell, Modernist Studies, and Ecocriticism Although the range of ecocritical approaches to modernism is varied, certain writers repeatedly feature as subjects for discussion. Virginia Woolf remains the most prominent figure for ecocritical analysis. Bonnie Kime Scott’s In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature analyzes several aspects of Woolf ’s engagement with the nonhuman. This includes an exploration of how Woolf ’s knowledge of natural history informs her creation of female characters with an interest in science, and how she depicts gardens as spaces of sexual freedom and awareness. For Kime Scott, the key to Woolf ’s ecocritical importance is her challenge to technological modernity: “That she was so fully and creatively engaged with the natural world, particularly in an age that so deliberately focussed on technical achievements and human competitions, makes her a resource for rethinking the sustained future of nature and culture combined.”1 J. Scott Bryson’s ecocritical analysis of To the Lighthouse (1927) also identifies significant aspects of Woolf ’s practice, such as her ambivalence toward ideas of the ordering function of art because such systems risk excluding nonhuman perspectives. For Bryson, Woolf ’s writing demonstrates important parallels between historical changes to human–nature relations and key modernist characteristics: the concept of “estrangement” being an example of an idea that “results directly from a fundamental uncertainty about the relationship between human and non-human nature.”2 Importantly, Bryson suggests that Woolf ’s concerns

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reflect a broader modernist anxiety regarding alienation from nature that motivates the movement’s rejection of the idea of the world as “a machine to be studied,” with the associated implication that “they themselves were merely mechanistic parts of a great machine, rather than central and significant members of an organic, interdependent, symbiotic world full of meaning.”3 The popularity of Virginia Woolf as an ecocritical subject raises the question of why Edith Sitwell, her friend and contemporary, has been widely ignored. There are clear parallels between the two writers in terms of their importance as ecocritical subjects, and their shared aims and practices. Carol H. Cantrell’s early ecocritical analysis of Woolf remains relevant in terms of identifying useful ecocritical approaches to literary modernism. Cantrell argues that phenomenology, and more specifically the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, offers a useful perspective on engaging with Woolf and modernism. Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the continuity between self and the world and his examination of how interactions between multiple perceivers shape language are identified as key approaches to understanding modernism. For Cantrell, this philosophy offers a strong link between modernism and ecocriticism by foregrounding their shared understanding that recognizing interconnections between humans and nonhumans can challenge dualistic or anthropocentric perceptions of the natural world. Cantrell recognizes that the emphasis Merleau-Ponty places on human perception of nature is problematic for ecocriticism, but argues that phenomenology still offers a balance between allowing that “the human observer is the starting point, not an irrelevance or nuisance” and recognizing the limits of human perception.4 Cantrell’s description of Woolf as an experimental writer whose literary development represented “a series of efforts to find more satisfactory ways of representing human relationships with the real” corresponds closely to Sitwell’s poetic aims.5 This makes the possibility of approaching her work from a phenomenological approach equally viable. Ruth Heholt describes the phenomenological experience as when “the division between landscape and the body is collapsed and the focus falls onto the experience of landscape rather than its depiction.”6 This multisensory experience of place is central to Sitwell’s early poetry, which depicts the continuous interplay between self and the world through a fluid, interactive relationship with nature grounded in understanding the human self as part of a community of living things. Like Woolf, this knowledge generates symbiotic exchanges between numerous centers of perception and informs a creative practice that “has as its subject

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the interactions among multiple lives and life-processes.”7 Both writers also recognize the need to move beyond conventional modes of language to represent nonhuman life, with Sitwell’s innovative experiments with sound and imagery echoing Woolf ’s understanding of language “as a process in itself rather than a mere vehicle for transporting thought or meaning.”8 Sitwell’s poem “Dark Song” from Façade exemplifies this phenomenological dissolution of boundaries between the human and nonhuman. In the poem, an exhausted servant girl’s desire for freedom connects her to the energies of bear, fire, and earth: identifying interconnections rather than divisions between the human and nonhuman. Sitwell describes the girl, “whose blood has the dark pulse and instinct of the earth,” as embodying the poem’s central subject of “the beginning of things and their relationship.”9 This interest in the chain of continuity reflects the phenomenological perspective in foregrounding fluency between self and the world: “All my blood / Is animal.”10 Sitwell’s poetry was often criticized for being disconnected from social realities, but “Dark Song” demonstrates clear opposition to the social structures that curtail individual freedom. Jack Lindsay recognizes this element in his description of the girl’s “obstinate spirit-of-life that will not be beaten down however it is cruelly oppressed,” arguing that this struggle for survival that connects her to all other living things makes the poem fundamentally ecological in revealing the “ultimate union of the girl and the earth.”11 The fire was furry as a bear And the flames purr … The brown bear rambles in his chain Captive to cruel men Through the dark and hairy wood. The maid sighed, ‘All my blood Is animal. They thought I sat Like a household cat; But through the dark woods rambled I … Oh, if my blood would die!’ The fire had a bear’s fur; It heard and knew … The dark earth furry as a bear, Grumbled too! (CP 149)

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Despite these parallels to Woolf, Sitwell is rarely discussed in modernist studies. This absence is largely due to the difficulty of categorizing her highly original development of modernist techniques within the wider movement, her combination of humor, fantasy, and folk tales being anomalous to the serious, ironic, urban character of much of literary modernism. Sitwell developed key aspects of modernist practice in highly individual ways. For example, while she shared the movement’s interest in the suggestive imagery and fragmentation of the French Symbolists, she combined these techniques with an English lexis and a country house setting that seemed anachronistic to modernist aesthetics. The emergence of New Modernist Studies and its subsequent deconstruction of monolithic definitions of the movement offered the possibility of renewed interest in Sitwell as part of its reexamination of marginalized writers, especially women. However, this expansion failed to include her, possibly because Sitwell’s defensive dismissal of women’s writing as “simply awful—incompetent, floppy, whining, arch, trivial, self-pitying” made it difficult to place her within female modernism. Sitwell’s relationship to women writers is far more nuanced than her offhand comment suggests, as is the depiction of gender in her writing.12 Reuel Denney put forward an early argument that Sitwell’s poetry offers a more progressive view of gender than many of her contemporaries: “Her poetry re-discovers women. By-passing suffragette terms, she celebrates women as workers with incomparable powers of creating their own worlds of work and feeling.”13 However, despite such insights, Sitwell remains largely absent from discussion of female modernism. In his critical biography of Sitwell, Richard Greene challenges the ongoing absence of critical attention, arguing that “Sitwell is a writer who matters—enormously.”14 For Greene, the dismissal of one of the “great poets of her generation” was due to gender, class, and personality rather than quality of work: “Sitwell was easiest to knock off the pedestal. She was a flamboyant, combative aristocrat and, better still, she was a woman; therefore, she served as a critical soft target.”15 Greene’s biography is particularly interesting in relation to place. It emphasizes the influence of childhood landscapes on Sitwell’s poetry, particularly the impression made by Scarborough, where she witnessed “Nature’s menace” in the regular shipwrecks that exposed the slim divide between fantasy and reality.16 Greene also considers the impact of Sitwell’s scientific reading on her environmental thinking, identifying the German philosopher Lorenz Oken as central to developing her understanding of the interconnections between human and nonhuman life, as well as shaping

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her opposition to reductive, mechanistic explanations of nature. For Sitwell, these ideas magnified the wonder of the natural world and strengthened her awareness of her relationship to all living things: “the animal contains all elements in itself.”17 She credited Oken and other natural scientists with having “a very great influence on my poetry.”18 These ideas are evident in her rejection of purely descriptive techniques in favor of replicating the patterns and structures of nature in the fabric of her poetry, and in her use of heightened imagery to depict microscopic details of the natural world. While new research on Sitwell remains limited, a notable feature of recent responses to her work is their recognition of her immense potential as a critical subject. The diverse range of possible topics and approaches is evident in The Many Façades of Edith Sitwell, which includes essays on subjects including her relationship with her brothers and their collective Sitwellianism, her underexamined prose work, Cecil Beaton’s photographic representation of her, and her relationship to gender, race, and the Empire.19 Yet while recent studies have drawn attention to the range and complexity of her writing, they do not examine the environmental aspects of the poetry. This may seem unsurprising given Sitwell’s abstract modernist experimentation and fantastical, heightened imagery. However, reconsidering the original purpose of ecocriticism challenges these assumptions. Cheryl Glotfelty’s early definition of ecocriticism is important in clarifying that “all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affects and is affected by it. Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artefacts of language and literature.”20 This recognition of the essential relationship between nature and culture has direct relevance to Sitwell’s use of modernist experimentation to examine both nature’s autonomous existence and its cultural representations. Sitwell’s poetry is grounded in two beliefs that are fundamental to ecocriticism. The first is that the complexity of nature goes beyond human language or knowledge, and therefore new ways of communicating the multisensory experience of being embodied in the material world must be created. Her poetry addresses this by going beyond conventional description to experiment with sound, speed, rhythm, and synaesthetic imagery to replicate the patterns and energy of nature. Ecocriticism has tended to favor more realist styles, but, as Kate Rigby argues, emphasizing the “enduring strangeness” of nature, even when this means foregrounding art’s essential artificiality or the

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inability of realism to represent nature in words, can produce more respectful responses to the physical world.21 The second principle connecting Sitwell to ecocriticism is her belief in ecological interconnectivity. Her poetry uses synaesthesia to dissolve boundaries between human and nonhuman life and reveal “the mesh” of all living things.22 This challenge to anthropocentric hierarchies is notable in a period when some of the loudest voices in the modernist movement were heralding the demise of nature and the supremacy of technological modernity. Such voices shaped perceptions of modernism as willfully disconnected from nature, but Edith Sitwell represents an emergent part of the movement that challenged dissociative aspects of modernity and foregrounded significant connections between past and present, tradition and avant-garde, Englishness and international ideas, and, vitally, nature and culture.

Edith Sitwell’s Revolutionary Nature Poetry In the absence of contemporaneous critical attention, Edith Sitwell wrote “Some Notes on My Own Poetry” to explain her poetic aims and strategies. The essay provides a detailed analysis of her use of modernist techniques to challenge conventional poetic language and create new ways of representing the living world. This innovation was partly motivated by her opposition to “the rhythmical flaccidity, the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns, of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.”23 For Sitwell, Georgian poetry was characterized by a dull uniformity, with Georgian poets denounced as rural fanatics “obsessed by the predilection for sheep” for whom “Birds became a cult. Any mention of the nest of a singing bird threw the community into a frenzy.”24 Interestingly, rather than distancing herself from her predecessors by rejecting nature as a central subject and exploring urban landscapes, Sitwell retained her poetic focus on the countryside: “The world I see is a country world, a universe of growing things, where magic and growth are one.”25 Instead her approach is distinguished by redirecting the creative energy of modernism to interrogate inherited perceptions of place and revitalize their traditional poetic representation. This belief in the need to challenge accepted knowledge was central to Sitwell’s allegiance to the modernist movement and to the character of her poetry: “one of the principal aims of the new poets is to increase consciousness … The modernist artist

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wishes us to see things for ourselves—not merely to believe that trees are green because we have been told so.”26 One striking aspect of “Some Notes on My Own Poetry” is the extent to which Sitwell’s technically advanced experiments with sound, texture, and imagery are directed toward better representing nature. Her complex experiments with the effect of rhythmic patterns on speed and rhyme, the impact of placing assonance and dissonance at different places in a line, and the application of “texture, in the subtle variations of thickness and thinness are motivated by an aim to convey the energy, individuality, and vitality of all living things.”27 In this aspect Sitwell firmly aligned herself with modernism’s rejection of “things that are in the mass”: lauding the movement as “passionately interested in the fulfilling of the destinies of the single individuals that make up the mass—whether these individuals are men, or leaves or waves of the sea.”28 This celebration of individuality is evident in Sitwell’s use of different formal and linguistic techniques to capture the essence and diversity of each individual lifeform: “here the ethereal quality of the plant world, the slow growth of the plant, the colour and scent of the rose are reconveyed by the different wave-lengths of the vowels.”29 While sound is the primary mode of communicating sense in the early poems, “Some Notes on My Own Poetry” describes the broadening of her poetic style to experiment with imagery. This results in images that are strange, but essentially accurate in their depiction of nature, as Sitwell explains: It was said that the images in these poems were strange. This was partly the result of condensement—partly because, where the language of one sense was insufficient to cover the meaning, the sensation, I used the language of another, and by this means attempted to pierce down the essence of the thing seen, by discovering in it attributes which at first sight appear alien but which are acutely related—by producing its quintessential colour (sharper, brighter than that seen by an eye grown stale) and by stripping it of all unessential details.30 While fantasy is a key element in encouraging reengagement with the natural world, the apparent artificiality of her images is often a result of microscopic description based on acute observations of nature. These images have an environmental aim in encouraging renewed attention to nature following the trauma of war: “In many of these poems the subject is the growth of

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consciousness. Sometimes it is like that of a person who has always been blind and who, suddenly endowed with sight, must learn to see.”31 However, as Reuel Denny observes, the poems also recognize the autonomy of nature beyond human perceptions: “Come to think of Sitwell as a naturalist, it seems that her poetry has always aimed not only at a realisation of the organic world, but at a sense of the impersonal mechanics we detect underlying the organic world.”32 The resulting poetry presents a clear critique of the homogenizing impulses of modernity and celebrates modernism’s power to challenge the normalcy of perception. Positioning herself firmly within the movement, Sitwell states that modernists “do not try to force our way of seeing upon people. What we try to do is to give the people their own way of seeing—to remove fear.”33

Façade Edith Sitwell’s 1922 collection Façade exemplifies her use of experimental poetic techniques to invigorate the depiction of nature. The collection gained notoriety as a result of a bizarre public performance of the work in which Sitwell recited the poems, set to music by William Walton, through a megaphone from behind a painted curtain. The chaotic performance drew a mixed response from the audience and enhanced her reputation as an eccentric; Sitwell’s claim that the curtain was meant to provide anonymity failing to diminish Stephen Spender’s conclusion that “personality and poetry form a single impression.”34 More damagingly, the performance accentuated the misreading of Sitwell’s work as nonsense poetry that was divorced from the social and political realities of a society reeling from the war and its after-effects. Dilys Powell’s criticism of the performance as “mere snobbery to a generation engrossed with the idea of a Marxist state” and the experiments with abstract pattern as “pointless for an age crying out for moral conflict” reflected much of the opposition at the time.35 Sitwell rejected the idea that the poet’s role was to “cure human ills, to comfort the dying world” in the guise of “some sort of moral quack doctor.”36 However, she also denied that focussing on formal and linguistic experimentation made her “an eccentric and heartless fool” who cared “nothing for the state of the world and the misery of my fellow-men.”37 Defending the poems, Sitwell described Façade as a collection of “abstract poems—that is, they are patterns in sound … virtuoso exercises in technique of an extreme difficulty.”38 She recognized that the poems’ complex rhythmic patterns and

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heightened imagery were strange, but argued that the need to “find rhymical expressions for the heightened speed of our time” had motivated her search for rhythms that were “concentrated, and frequently more violent than those of the poets who had preceded us immediately.”39 The main aspect of Façade that has been misunderstood is its humor. The musicality of the poems and their lively comedic energy is intended as a positive affirmation of the resilience of humanity following extreme suffering and not a disregard for that experience. Sitwell believed that art had the potential to inspire “increased vitality and a more passionate sense of life and power for living.”40 She described her poems as “hymns of praise to the glory of Life” that employed humor as a tool to revitalize culture and society.41 Sitwell was unapologetic about her use of comedy in Façade, describing it as “a work for the most part of gaiety” at which the “audience is meant to laugh.”42 She was aware that this aspect of her work distinguished it from the seriousness of most modernist works and understood how this impacted its reception: “It is certain that an empty work which appears to be serious, because it is dull and heavy and has no vitality, will be acclaimed as a masterpiece, while a work of this kind will be at first derided, and its author insulted.”43 The playful humor of the poems has an interesting relationship to ecocriticism. In “‘Are you serious?’ A Modest Proposal for Environmental Humour,” Michael Branch also acknowledges the “low cultural status of humour,” especially in environmental discourse.44 Citing Joyce Carol Oates’s observation that nature “inspires a painfully limited set of responses in ‘nature writers’ … reverence, awe, piety, mystical oneness,” Branch argues that the absence of humor from these responses has had a negative impact on environmental scholarship.45 Exploring alternative approaches, he suggests that practices that incorporate “the creativity, spontaneity, flexibility, playfulness and enjoyment that humour brings” may be more fruitful than conventionally polemic, elegiac, or morally outraged forms that have lost their affective power.46 For Branch, the strategic value of humor as an energizing force within nature writing is most prominent in satire: a mode that Sitwell later employed in Gold Coast Customs (1929). However, Sitwell’s early poetry preempts Branch’s encouragement to “seek an alternative approach that allows us to break free from the stultifying conventions of environmental discourse … without compromising the fierce moral seriousness of its aims.”47 This is evident in Façade’s use of humor to inspire resilience, reenchantment, and greater awareness of the natural world.

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While humor is an important aspect of Façade, the poems do not remain on a single note: “Some of the poems have a violent exhilaration, others have a veiled melancholy, a sadness masked by gaiety.”48 The collection balances a “tremendous delight in living” with an ominous “sense that evil forces twist this joyous thing to their own purposes.”49 These “areas of tension” extend to the landscapes of Façade, which appear idyllic but have an underlying potential for transgression and anarchy that challenges conventional perceptions of rural spaces.50 These intersections between light and dark reveal the multidimensional aspect of Sitwell’s poetry and its engagement with serious themes such as good and evil, creation and destruction, order and chaos. These concerns are informed by the poems’ social context, which demonstrates Sitwell’s understanding of how historical events can shape cultural perceptions of place. This can be seen in “Rain,” where grief and detachment from life drain the color and energy of the landscape: Beside the smooth black marble sea You and I drift aimlessly. Each blade of grass springs pale, alone, Tuneless as a quartertone … […] We are two ghosts today, each ghost For ever wandering and lost; No yesterday and no tomorrow Know we, neither joy nor sorrow, For this is the hour when like a swan The silence floats, so still and wan, […] (CP 134) Sitwell’s depiction of desolate landscapes that mirror the psychological state of their human inhabitants reflects aspects of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in foregrounding interconnections between people and place. Sitwell’s sensitivity to the communal grief of postwar society is combined with a personal sense of alienation and loneliness that colors perception of place, as seen in the delicately pallid winter landscape of “Bells of Grey Crystal.”

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Elizabeth Black Bells of grey crystal Break on each bough— The swans’ breath will mist all The cold airs now. Like tall pagodas Two people go, Trail their long codas Of talk through the snow. Lonely are these And lonely am I … The clouds, grey Chinese geese Sleek through the sky. (CP 135)

These darker aspects demonstrate Sitwell’s capacity for nuance in response to world events and personal experience. However, in the majority of the poems despair is overcome by positive affirmations of the resilience of life and the capacity for regeneration. This is evident in “When Cold December.” The poem opens with a description of the cold that uses taut syllables and short lines to convey the frozen brittleness of the season: When cold December Froze to grisamber The jangling bells on the sweet rose-trees— […] the bristling stars shine like a gilt porcupine— (CP 136) However, despite the thick snow and freezing conditions, hope for renewal through spring distinguishes the poem from The Waste Land. The stirring of new life beneath frozen ground offers comfort rather than pain as the slowed assonance of the final lines marks the promised unfurling of spring: Only the snow slides Like gilded myrrh— From the rose-branches—hides Rose-roots that stir. (CP 136)

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Bucolic Comedies In Bucolic Comedies (1923) Sitwell moves beyond Façade’s focus on rhythm and sound to consider the poetic possibilities of synaesthesia or “sensetransfusion.”51 David Abram identifies synaesthesia as a way of permitting the modern reader “primordial contact with the entities and elements that surround us.”52 For Abram, perception is inherently synaesthetic and participatory because the “interplay of the different senses” creates a crossover between body and earth that reflects “the reciprocal participation … that we commonly call perception.”53 Sitwell believed that the purpose of poetry was to increase the reader’s consciousness and create a heightened awareness of the world: “Sometimes you find a consciousness that has been like that of a blind person, becoming aware—intensely aware—of the nature of a tree, or of a flower, or of the way in which rain hangs or falls from certain objects, for the first time.”54 To replicate this sharpened sensitivity to nature and challenge conventional perceptions of place, Sitwell used synaesthesia as a primary way of encouraging awareness of the plurality, complexity, and beauty of the natural world. This use of innovative poetic techniques to encourage greater sensitivity toward nature can be seen in “Green Geese.” The opening line combines sibilance with the sound image of hissing geese to replicate the noise of the wind through the trees: “The trees were hissing like green geese” (23). The poem then continues to evoke the multisensory experience of a summer evening, through the description of rich scents and the use of elongated vowel sounds to convey the hazy warmth of the scene: “The moon smelt sweet as nutmeg-root / On the ripe peach-trees’ leaves and fruit” (23). The full sensual experience of being in nature is again seen in the description of how “The bee-wing’d warm afternoon light roves / Gilding her hair (wooden nutmegs and cloves)” (23). Throughout the poem the use of strange but evocative scent, sound, and visual imagery effectively communicates the sensual experience of being fully immersed in the garden and heightens the reader’s awareness of the diverse forms of life inhabiting it. The extensive use of synaesthesia in Bucolic Comedies was inspired by Sitwell’s desire to recapture the freshness of childhood impressions of the natural world:

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Elizabeth Black To me, as a child, glory was everywhere … Ever since my earliest childhood, seeing the immense design of the world, one image of wonder mirrored by another image of wonder—the pattern of the fern and of feather by the frost on the window-pane, the six rays of the snowflake mirrored in the rock-crystal’s six-rayed eternity— seeing the pattern on the scaly legs of birds mirrored in the pattern of knot-grass … These were the pattern used by me, consciously or unconsciously, in certain of my early poems, Bucolic Comedies.55

Sitwell used Jean Cocteau’s phrase to describe her work as “the poetry of childhood overtaken by a technician.”56 Victoria Glendinning also recognized the importance of childhood impressions to Sitwell’s poetry, describing her as thinking “magically, as a child thinks before it has learnt to conceptualise.”57 Sitwell believed that her lack of formal education saved her from knowing only the “dry reflections of the scholar who has no knowledge of the earth, who knows only … the small and unstirred dust of his schoolroom.”58 She felt that the experience of having learnt “from the world, not from maps” allowed for a more unmediated and less anthropocentric understanding of nature rooted in the belief that “all living beings, human, animal, or plants were my brothers.”59 The stately homes and gardens of Edith Sitwell’s childhood had a great influence on her affinity to the natural world. Although she spent the majority of her adult life in London, the gardens of her family estate of Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire and her grandmother’s house at Londesborough Lodge in Scarborough remained vital to Sitwell’s poetic imagination, to the extent that John Piper suggests that her “senses must have had some sudden blow” in a garden during childhood which she had been trying to recapture in poetry ever since.60 The significance of these places is also noted by Glendinning, who believed “the gardens, the lake, the bluebells in the woods in May, the carefully sited statues, the long vistas, the wilderness, the quietly coloured flowers and trees … were the stuff of childhood, the raw material of Edith’s inner life.”61 In many ways, gardens reflect the character of Sitwell’s poetry: both navigating boundaries between civilization and wildness, culture and nature, fantasy and reality, and human and nonhuman life. The peripheral space of the garden allowed Sitwell to challenge such dualisms explicitly through the introduction of fantastical characters in real places, and implicitly by blending seemingly incompatible approaches, such as the combination of

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the dreamlike images of French Symbolism with an essentially English lexis. The resulting poetic landscapes are both strange and familiar, demonstrating the potential for experimental or alternative poetic practices to encourage greater imaginative engagement with the natural world. The importance of gardens as spurs to the imagination can be seen in “Spring,” where Sitwell combines aspects of fantasy with detailed observations of nature to allow the reader “to feel nature’s fullness in sensuous terms.”62 Characteristically, she combines the use of specific sound patterns with striking imagery to replicate the vitality of the season and the regenerative energy of nature: By a maiden fair as an almond-tree, With hair like the waterfalls’ goat-locks; she Has lips like that jangling harsh pink rain, The flower-bells that spirt on the trees again. In Midas’ garden the simple flowers Laugh, and the tulips are bright as the showers, For Spring is here; the auriculas, And the Emily-coloured primulas. (CP 14) This celebration of spring reiterates the distinction between Sitwell and Eliot: Sitwell still finding hope in the season’s promise of new life in contrast to the denizens of Eliot’s “Unreal City,” rejecting April’s traditional associations with rebirth because they enforce a spiritual rebirth and renewal. However, while Sitwell’s celebration of spring connects the poem to traditional poetic responses to the seasons, the techniques used to communicate the sensuous experience of the nonhuman world remain uniquely innovative. After the “playful aestheticism” of her early poetry, events such as World War II, the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and personal circumstances including her reception into the Catholic Church brought a new gravity to Edith Sitwell’s poetry.63 Her environmental concerns continued throughout her life, but Façade and Bucolic Comedies are the strongest examples of her use of modernist techniques to reinvigorate nature poetry. Sitwell should be considered a central figure in discussions of eco-modernism because she

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recognized the need to revitalize conventional forms of poetry and reexamine human–nature relations following the trauma of war and modernity. Her linguistic and formal experiments produced a highly original form of nature poetry that encouraged new ways of perceiving and engaging with the natural world. This was combined with an explicit rejection of the homogenizing narratives of modernity and a celebration of the individuality, autonomy, and diversity of each living thing. Sitwell’s use of abstract sound experiments, heightened imagery, and elements of fantasy might initially appear incompatible with fundamental ecocritical objectives. However, closer analysis of her poetry demonstrates how alternative approaches to nature writing can bring new understanding of our physical, emotional, and cultural responses to the natural world. Sitwell’s poetic reexamination of nature is situated within the broader context of modernism’s underexamined engagement with the nonhuman. However, as a poet who championed individuality in every aspect of her life and work, Edith Sitwell should also be acknowledged for her unique contribution as a revolutionary nature poet.

Part II Ecological Modernisms

C HA P T E R 3

“No poetic fantasy / but a biological reality” The Ecological Visions of H.D.’s Trilogy Elizabeth O’Connor

H

.D.’s Trilogy, written in London during World War II, comprises three poems originally published as a series of single volumes, “The Walls Do Not Fall” (1944), “Tribute to the Angels” (1945), and “The Flowering of the Rod” (1946). Trilogy follows the passage of the Mage Kaspar to the birth of a second messiah, a hybrid of Eve, Lilian, Osiris, Venus, Mary Magdalene, and other figures. Judeo-Christian imagery is mixed with Ancient Egyptian, Greek, and other pagan belief systems as H.D. argues for the importance of poetry in wartime, and advocates a renewed postwar world in which old values are shed in favor of a female spiritual leader, whose arrival begets a restarting of historical time and human civilization. Its opening dedication, “for Karnak 1923 / from London 1942,” joins H.D.’s life in Blitztorn London to the Egyptian ruins at Karnak she visited with her mother and lifelong partner Bryher (the writer, born Annie Winifred Ellerman) in 1923. The dedication suggests physical comparison between the ancient ruins and the bombed-out buildings of the Blitz, placing the natural erosion and sand burial of ancient monuments alongside the manmade destruction of human settlements in war, and parallels the rise and fall of ancient civilizations with the destruction of H.D.’s contemporary culture and society. As Sarah Graham

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writes, “the epigraph neatly conveys that her poetry has both personal and global concerns.”1 Annette Kreis-Schinck’s comment that “the poem shuns easy access” is certainly true.2 The poem’s nonlinear format structures itself around the streams of consciousness of the poetic voice as it repeats imagery of natural cycles, visions of various gods, and metaphors of alchemical processes, and charts the journey of Kaspar the Mage to bring myrrh for the arrival of a female messiah through small, everyday moments of his life. The poem moves between an urge to communicate truthfully a civilian experience of war that is, as Claire Buck suggests, “scrupulously concerned with accuracy and fidelity to the experience,” and a will to obscure objective meaning through the poem’s detached voice and conglomeration of opposing religions, cultures, and symbols.3 This enigmatic and palimpsestic style allows space for the construction of new myths and ways of using language. Matthew Griffiths’s research on the relationship between modernist poetics and climate change has argued for the importance of this kind of deconstructive approach, that the “transgression of traditional boundaries of scale, self and perspective” typical of modernist writing finds ways to “elucidate resultant connections and tensions” in the relationship between human agency and climate change.4 H.D. is beginning to be read as a writer explicitly engaged and interested in landscape and ecology, but critical readings of Trilogy have thus far overlooked nature as an overarching theme. In this chapter, therefore, I aim to uncover the ways in which H.D.’s vision of a regenerated world after war is figured partly, but significantly, in environmental terms, revealing H.D. to be actively interested in the relationships between human and nonhuman ecologies. I shall begin by highlighting the context of Trilogy’s ecological visions, and specifically H.D.’s preoccupation with the ecological in her writing during World War II. This regeneration is introduced in Trilogy through a number of poems set at the shore, which I argue foreground the poem’s movement to a site of human evolutionary beginning, before the tree of life branches off. Finally, I shall examine Trilogy’s animal symbolism, namely the mollusk, worm, and flock of geese, which works to enact a renewal of cultural understandings of nature, specifically damaging cultural tropes that place the human in superiority over the nonhuman. Trilogy’s ultimate resolution is found in the dissolution of the human/nature distinction, imagining the

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human as a “biological entity,” part of an ecological web alongside “bird, insect and sea-plant cells.”5 At the same time as composing Trilogy, H.D. was also writing a memoir of her childhood in Pennsylvania, published posthumously as The Gift (1982), in which she displayed an awareness of the earth as an interrelated system, and engaged with the influence of human agency on the planet. The closing passage of the memoir recalls a family trip to the woods, where the young H.D. saw a landscape changed physically by the presence of the human: “we saw that the thousand-thousand little frogs lay like leaves on the track in the woods, that had just two marks in it, just as wide as the wheels on the man’s cart.”6 H.D. also points out a collective responsibility in the destruction of war, and therefore collective role in recovery, through imagery of environmental disaster: We must never forget how each one of us (through inertia, through indifference, through ignorance) is, in part, responsible for the world-calamity. For it seems, we are not able to stabilise our purpose, to affirm in positive or concrete terms, our debt to the past and our responsibility to the future, until we are forced to face up to the final realities in a shipwreck or an earthquake or a tornado. (TG 109–10) The notion of “responsibility” has a dual meaning in this passage, referring to both moral culpability (“responsible for the world-calamity”) and the ensuing resolution (“our responsibility to the future”), paralleling modern nuances of the word when used in an environmentalist context. “Each one of us” is implicated, which suggests that humankind shoulders a blame that the nonhuman does not. While natural disaster is here used as an analog for wartime destruction, it is telling that the war is conceived in this way in much of H.D.’s late writing. In her novel The Sword Went Out to Sea, also written during World War II, the midst of war in September 1940 is conceived as a “tidal wave” from “some volcanic region” that almost submerged Britain and then “branched off into rapids, currents and whirlpools of night and day attack.”7 While H.D.’s texts, and especially Trilogy, are not explicitly environmental, there is an awareness of the interconnectedness of the human and the nonhuman, and recognition that this relationship is often destructive and problematic.

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Cynthia Hogue reads The Sword Went Out to Sea as a “profoundly ecopoetic vision of a healed and restored earth,” and its writing of the American landscape has strong implications for H.D.’s ecological poetics in Trilogy.8 In one passage, H.D. projects the fate of the American buffalo onto humankind, recognizing humankind’s destruction of the environment and the commodification of animals. The language H.D. uses is modeled on the violence and trauma of war, but also links the destruction of the environment to patriarchal and colonial systems: I thought the almost extinct American buffalo was not extinct. I saw thousands of beautiful animals, driven across plains and into the opening of a secret cave. There were other caves, as well. I don’t know how these caves could have been secret, but they were. The Indians and a few white men had had a formal conference and decided to save the buffaloes. […] The earth was furrowed with the irrational assaults that man had made upon her. She was always mother earth. I felt that man was actually assaulting woman. (SWS 52–54) This critique makes humankind’s role in the extinction of the American buffalo an act of gendered violence, a “mother earth” assaulted in a patriarchal worldview. Similarly, the buffalo are saved by a dismantling of power structures when the “white men” and “Indians” collaborate to save the species. Annette Debo has argued that these remarks articulate a gynocentric view that has its roots in both Transcendentalism and an American environmental movement represented by contemporaries of H.D. such as Mary Austin.9 H.D.’s nature imagery in Trilogy, therefore, can be interpreted as an enactment of the same process, an interrogation and deconstruction of patriarchal systems in order to restart environmental renewal. In Trilogy, the female spiritual leader, encompassing a number of marginalized female figures from Western culture and history, is linked to the shore and a Venus-like marine birth. In “The Walls Do Not Fall,” humankind is imagined as regenerating at the shoreline, the cyclical tide renewing the ways humans live on the land. The journey to the shore also builds a conventional evolutionary image, where humankind returns to the sea, the place where life began, and the shore, where land-dwelling lifeforms first exited the water.

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Here, the end of one world and the start of the next is conceptualized with the imagery of crustaceans in moult, bringing the “I” of a single shellfish to the “we” of collective human responsibility and recovery: Yet we, the latter-day twice born, have our bad moments when dragging the forlorn husk of self after us, we are forced to confess to malaise and embarrassment; we pull at this dead shell, struggle but we must wait till the new Sun dries off the old-body humours10 The “husk of self ” is reminiscent of a shed exoskeleton, the coastal sun “drying out” the naked skin beneath. The metaphor plays into a pattern of metamorphosis and transformation imagery throughout Trilogy, usually concerning animal species, but applied here to the human. H.D. again reveals her naturalist’s eye, contrasting the ability to shed a shell with the ability to hold on to it. The cyclical tide and shedding of crustaceous exoskeletons is linked directly to human culture and ritual a few poems later, where humans are found gathered on the shore: coals for the world’s burning, for we must go forward, we are at the cross-roads, the tide is turning; it uncovers pebbles and shells, beautiful yet static, empty

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Elizabeth O’Connor old thought, old convention; let us go down to the sea, gather dry sea-weed, heap drift-wood, let us light a new fire and in the fragrance of burnt salt and incense chant new paeans to the new Sun of regeneration; we have always worshipped Him, we have always said, forever and ever, Amen. (WDNF 17)

The shoreline’s liminality here becomes a threshold from one worldview to another, crossing a historical time boundary, “for we must go forward,” and a renewal of culture to replace “empty / old thought, old convention.” There is a movement between the singular and the collective: pebbles and shells are washed up in scattered groups, and the “us” of the poem forms a multitude of individuals. The movement “forwards” of the poem’s opening and implied cultural move forward is challenged by the end, where humans making fire seem to evoke an image of early human settlements and evolutionary development. The shore itself becomes a manifestation of such time-sense, moving simultaneously forwards and backwards with the tide. There is also a sense of stasis, of remembering enduring forms and images of spirituality. The poem declares, “we have always worshipped Him” and “we have always said.” The words “Sun,” “Him,” and “Amen” are placed at the end of alternate lines and form a play on meaning between the worshiped “sun” and the notion of Christ as the Son of God, suggesting a small shift in spirituality rather than a complete upheaval and renewal. Trilogy’s first animal incarnation appears in the fourth poem of “The Walls Do Not Fall,” where the poet is transformed into a mollusk:

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There is a spell, for instance, in every sea-shell: continuous, the sea thrust is powerless against the coral, bone, stone, marble hewn from within by that craftsman, the shellfish: oyster, clam, mollusc (WDNF 4) The runes and hieroglyphs of the previous sections of “The Walls Do Not Fall” become the “spell” of the shell mollusk, taking the reader into the mind and perspective of a mollusk under the sea. A number of conflated terms overlap human civilization with the mollusk, and also transform the mollusk from one specific littoral species to another, a play on the idea of a magic metamorphic “spell” that also maps a littoral ecological web. H.D. lists oysters, clams, shellfish, and later in the same poem, octopus, sharks, and whales to illustrate the shellfish in a larger, vivid ecological system. The poem emphasizes the mollusk’s resilience and resistance to being predated and consumed by others, the mollusk becoming “immortal” and “indigestible”11 through closing its shell, conceiving its ecology as a kind of web rather than a hierarchical chain, species becoming incorporated into one another rather than destroyed. In a mollusk’s natural food chain, they are both predator and prey, eaten by whales, sharks, and octopus but filter-feeding and eventually ingesting the bodies of such predators. In Trilogy, the mollusk’s life within a web takes into account the fluid balance of such cycles. References to temples, fanes, and shrines directly recall the ancient ruins of Trilogy’s opening dedication, but these structures are also conflated with structures of coral “built” by the mollusk: is master-mason planning the stone marvel: yet that flabby, amorphous hermit within, like the planet

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Elizabeth O’Connor senses the finite, it limits its orbit of being, its house, temple, fane, shrine: (WDNF 4)

The building of the coral by the mollusk is not literal, but the conflation of the mollusk “builder”12 and the coral’s reef-building places the mollusk immediately within an ecological web, foregrounding its incorporation and transformation into various species within the same habitat. The description of “bone, stone, marble” similarly13 traces meaningful parallels between natural and manmade building materials and constructions, placing the coral structure and a marble temple in equal importance and poetic value. It is the shellfish’s ability to survive in hostile habitats that enraptures the poet. I sense my own limit, my shell-jaws snap shut at invasion of the limitless, ocean-weight; infinite water can not crack me, egg in egg-shell; closed in, complete, immortal full-circle, I know the pull of the tide, the lull as well as the moon; the octopus-darkness is powerless against her cold immortality; (WDNF 4) The mollusk’s natural instincts have an innate familiarity with the surrounding environment, a fluidity with minute changes in the surroundings: “I know

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the pull / of the tide, the lull // as well as the moon.” The mollusk is ruled by natural instinct, “prompted by hunger” to open according to the patterns of the “tide-flow.”14 The half-rhyme of “pull” and “lull” in these lines resonates and echoes the sounds of tidal movement. H.D.’s usually sparse mode of writing focuses in on a moment of physical sensory perception to evoke vividly the mind of the mollusk and its experience of the world. H.D.’s fascination with the mollusk’s self-knowledge and selfprotection, which becomes a personal symbol for the poet later in the section, is grounded in ecological fact. Helen Scales, in her popular study of shellfish life Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells, compares the strength of bivalve shells favorably against their gastropod relatives: As for the hard calcium carbonate shells secreted by the mantle, these are first and foremost a means of protection and a safe place to hide: a portable home. Bivalves are the best protected of all the molluscs; with their two halves closed shut, they are extremely difficult to get into.15 H.D. keenly identifies her mollusk and symbol of self-preservation as a bivalve, listing oysters and clams as its species and grounding her personal symbolism in ecological reality. H.D.’s mythology of the mollusk image is engaged directly with its biological life, blurring the lines between mythological and scientific observation. The poem’s entry into the shellfish’s life enacts a consciousness of prey and survival; the mollusk escapes the danger of the continuous “sea thrust” and its own vulnerability as a “flabby, amorphous hermit,” sensing “its limit” and shutting itself in its shell, where it cannot be eaten by whales or sharks and is enclosed from the surrounding water. There are clear connections to H.D.’s wartime experiences here: the sense of vulnerability and need for protection draw stark parallels with civilian experience of air raids and the need to take shelter underground. As the shellfish must live always on the lookout for predators, the civilian H.D. lives in fear of an enemy attack. H.D. writes often of the experience of war reverting her mental state to a “primitive” one in The Gift, a memoir of her childhood and war experience also written during World War II:

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Elizabeth O’Connor I am paralysed, frozen rather, like the rabbit in the woods when it senses the leaves moving with that special uncanny rustling […] My body is “frozen”; nerves, tendons, and flesh are curiously endowed, they regain the primitive instincts of the forest animal. (TG 110)

Fear of death in a wartime context here is conceived as a return to primeval forms, the onset of a “fight or flight” instinct that aligns war and civilian to predator and prey. H.D. uses the hierarchy of the food chain to illustrate a feeling of powerlessness, but does not portray her similarity to the rabbit as a form of negative regression. Her body becomes “curiously endowed” in its closeness to death, a new sense of instinct “regained” as something previously lost. Humankind beginning again from the point of prehistory is a subtle metamorphosis present throughout Trilogy, as the poem brings humans back to the sea, conflates them with underwater creatures, and visits the world “before Eve.”16 This too is presented as a positive movement “backwards,” where humankind regains a previously lost connection to the earth and systems of spirituality rooted in ecology. The speaker’s promise that “there is a spell ... in every sea-shell” reveals the mollusk to be much more than mere prey; the mollusk understands itself as its own being, senses its “own limit” as “the planet / sense[s] the finite.” There is a slippage between human and animal in these passages that illuminates the civilian experience of war while challenging conventional boundaries between human and animal experience. In the sixth poem of “The Walls Do Not Fall,” the speaker becomes a second animal incarnation, and follows the consciousness of a worm as it survives natural disasters and predatory hunts: In me (the worm) clearly is no righteousness, but this— persistence; I escaped spider-snare, bird claw, scavenger bird-beak, clung to grass-blade, the back of a leaf when storm-wind tore it from its stem;

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I escaped, I explored rose-thorn forest, was rain-swept down the valley of a leaf; (WDNF 6) The worm’s consciousness is immediately evoked in acutely observed detail: the blades of grass it divides as it slithers through them, its path over a leaf, its minute size overcome by the forces of wind and rain. Again, a sense of a rich ecological web is formed through predatory birds, hunting with claws and beaks, and the spider ensnaring the worm in its web. There is a rich sense of flora in the poem’s cataloging of vine leaf, mulberry, rose thorn, grass, and an immediate sense of climate in its descriptions of mist, wind, rain, valleys, forest. H.D. reveals her naturalist eye in detailing her worm’s surroundings. As with the mollusk poem, the worm is situated in the details of its ecological habitat, suggesting its place in a larger ecological web. In an analogous manner to the mollusk, the worm finds a transcendent consciousness through the process of survival: I profit by every calamity; I eat my way out of it; gorged on vine-leaf and mulberry, parasite, I find nourishment: when you cry in disgust, a worm on the leaf, a worm in the dust, a worm on the ear-of-wheat, I am yet unrepentant, for I know how the Lord God is about to manifest, when I,

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By “escaping” the dangers of its environment it is allowed access to a kind of “magnified beauty” that is unknown to others, that “dull eye[s] cannot focus.”17 The worm develops time-sense by measuring its life “by every calamity,” and dissociates itself from human limitation by finding “nourishment” in that which makes others “cry in disgust.” In the same way that the mollusk is able to build its own temples and shrines under the sea, the worm’s transcendence is a kind of religious apex: “I know how the Lord God / is about to manifest.” The worm’s religiosity is a direct challenge to conventional Christian tradition, where the worm carries associations with the serpent and the devil. The opening of this section, “In me [the worm] clearly / is no righteousness” alludes to Psalm 22, “I am a worm and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.”18 H.D.’s attention to the “hidden” beauty of the worm’s ecological life directly subverts the reference into a renegotiation of conventional power values and posits empathy between the human and nonhuman. H.D. reexamines the “magnified beauty” of the worm through the lens of its cultural mythology, ultimately becoming a poet who “rewrites” the worm image in order to realign the power balance between the lowly worm and the human whose “gorgon-great / dull eye”19 disregards it. Later in Trilogy, the worm is referred to again and becomes representative of a transcendental movement toward the reclamation of mythological power. H.D. rails against critics who call poems “trivial intellectual adornment” and poets “useless”; H.D.’s poets are “bearers of the secret wisdom,” and she conceives her defense in a regenerative nature image, “you have a long way to go / walk carefully, speak politely / to those who have done their wormcycle” (WDNF 8). The passage itself references Blake’s worm and Milton’s transformation of Satan into a serpent.20 H.D.’s poetic vision is able to shift our perspective of the worm as a cultural image, teasing out the processes of mythmaking through art. At the end of the above passage, the worm overcomes its hostile interlocutors in the act of creation, finding a manifestation of the divine when it spins its own “shroud,” or cocoon, aligning the dismissal of the worm with the dismissal of the role of the poet. In the worm’s transcendence, it begins to transform into different species, and H.D.’s Judeo-Christian references become ritualistic practices grounded in animal iconography. The worm becomes a silkworm, able to spin its own

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cocoon, and butterfly images later in the poem also hint at it being a caterpillar. The eating of mulberry leaves and wheat suggests a beetle or fly grub, and “the worm in the dust” recalls a worm on the ground, an earthworm. The worm’s biblical grounding also evokes parallels with a snake, its habitat of the grassy, rose-growing valley becoming a kind of Eden. The literal metamorphosis of the worm as it enters its cocoon brings about a regeneration of the worm’s cultural meaning, the word “shroud” signifying death, the act of its making rebirth. In the section following the worm poem, we are reminded that our conception of divinity has, throughout history, been illustrated through animal imagery, through a series of obscure, ritualistic images: Gods, goddesses wear the winged head-dress of horns, as the butterfly antennae, or the erect king-cobra crest to show how the worm turns. (WDNF 7) The implied or actual metamorphoses here of the worm “turning” into a cobra, and the visual slippage between horns, wings, and antennae, rebuilds the worm’s religious associations into something esoteric and obscure, away from the projected meanings of human consciousness. H.D. acknowledges that human spirituality is construed through animal imagery such as the biblical worm or the animals of Egyptian hieroglyphs, but shifts this spiritual relationship by interrogating the act of myth and ritual-making and causing it to slip between various animal conflations. In the above passage, where the significance of each ritual piece is unknown, or at least not related to any common myth, the concealment of shared human narrative shifts the focus onto the act of ritual-making itself. The preceding worm passage makes clear that H.D.’s aim is to reimagine and recenter creatures typically discarded or marginalized by cultural tropes: the “turning” of the worm signals a change in the worm’s cultural reception, influencing too the cultural lives of the fragile and romanticized butterfly, the feared cobra, the association of horns with the satanic.

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In line with its implicit upheaval of old power structures, Trilogy repeatedly returns to images of natural renewal, reincarnation, and resurrection: bees, eggs, pearls, shed exoskeletons, empty shells, a worm hatching from its cocoon into a butterfly. H.D. reveals distrust and uncertainty in wartime human society: “It is no madness to say / you will fall, you great cities” (FR 10), imagining each fallen civilization as a fallen lily petal. Yet where H.D. finds hope for survival and regeneration is precisely in her images of animals. In the mollusk poem, the coral is continuously being rebuilt by mollusks that survive through self-protection, time renews itself through the spiral patterns of gastropods, and the worm transcends death from bird beak and claw but also the disgust aimed at it by human narratives. In “The Flowering of the Rod,” one of H.D.’s final visions of a postwar world, both after World War II specifically and beyond the systems of power that beget war, is of an acceptance of the human as part of a sympathetic, harmonious ecological chain: No poetic fantasy but a biological reality, a fact: I am an entity like bird, insect, plant or sea-plant cell; I live, I am alive. (FR 9) This conception of the human in nature is one based on peace, on drawing out the connections between the human and the plant, the insect, the bird. This vision of an understanding and empathetic interspecies relationality is central to H.D.’s conception of postwar regeneration: literal survival in war begets life as a biological being. It is striking that H.D. achieves this sense of equilibrium between herself and animals through metaphor: she is led here by conceiving of human trauma and survival in the patterns of survival of mollusks, renewing both their cultural lives and her own. H.D. said that when she wrote “Tribute to the Angels” she “really DID feel that a new heaven and a new earth were about to materialize,” and that optimism is evident in the image of the human/nonhuman boundary dissolving to become “biological entities.”21 The final line of the poem is not only a statement of survival but

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a new recognition of what it means to “live” beyond the events of war: in her survival, H.D. emerges with new understanding of the slippage between human and nonhuman ways of being. If the central concern of Trilogy is, as Elizabeth Anderson writes, “the response of a poet to the physical, psychic, and spiritual desolation of her time,” her strategy is not only “the invocation of ancient wisdom allied with contemporary inspiration,” but the interrogation of accepted wisdom and images allied with the construction of a new mode of expression.22 H.D. weaves religious imagery with animals and nature to reveal the meaning and value we both project onto and take from animal ecologies, and to construct a divinity that separates itself from specific religious tradition and instead embraces the ritualistic cycles of the environment. In the image of the worm and the turning “worm-cycle,” H.D. extends the resonance she finds in the shore image to a worldwide view that reaches across habitats, elements, and human/nature divisions. She interrogates the ways in which human meaning is projected onto a natural image through religious and cultural associations (such as that of the worm in the Psalm), and in doing so constructs a space in which new meanings may appear, removing the oppressive portrayal of animals in “poetic fantasy” in favor of a portrayal of their biological lives. Marti Kheel has written of an environmentally minded search for an expanded self as a way of “transcending the concrete world of particularity in preference for something more enduring and abstract.”23 In the final part of Trilogy, “The Flowering of the Rod,” H.D. portrays a kind of transcendence through a flock of geese, manifesting the notion of being able to live communally with other species and a personal journey beyond the trauma of war. The flock migrates over littoral scenes, finally becoming Kaspar’s ecstatic vision that leads the Mage to Eve’s birth. The geese move between ecological portrayal (H.D. traces their migratory patterns from cold to warm climates along the American Northeast Coast) and being metaphors for the transcendence of postwar healing, but they also evade easy symbolism in the speaker’s uncertainty and unreliable memories. Kheel calls for a “deep holistic awareness of the interconnectedness of all life […] a lived awareness that we experience in relation to particular beings as well as to the larger whole.”24 Throughout Trilogy, H.D. emphasizes the need to live as both singular individuals and as multitudinous collectives: as an oyster and clam within a collective coral structure, a group of humans

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collected on the shore, one biological entity among many. H.D. moves from the symbolic singular organism to a collective group in this section: does the first wild-goose stop to explain to the others? no—he is off; […] does the first wild-goose care whether the others follow or not? I don’t think so—he is so happy to be off— he knows where he is going; so we must be drawn or we must fly, like the snow-geese of the Arctic circle, to the Carolinas or to Florida, or like those migratory flocks who still (they say) hover over the lost island, Atlantis; seeking what we once knew, we know ultimately what we will find happiness; today shalt thou be with me in Paradise. (FR 3) Like the self-preserving mollusk of “The Walls Do Not Fall,” this animal finds strength and hope in its individualistic outlook: it is the first to fly, and ends its journey in paradise. However, the single goose image is subsumed by the image of flocks around Atlantis, and then eclipsed by the poem’s “we” perspective, as the goose in flight becomes part of a multitude. The path of the goose’s flight is also intriguing, moving from the Arctic to the American East Coast, and mirroring other geese hovering above the mythological realm of Atlantis. The geese’s migration is rooted in ecological reality: snow geese do migrate to the eastern coasts of America in winter. There is

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a parallel movement for H.D. as her poetry moves between descriptions of physical and imaginative place, such as American coasts and classical Greek coastlines. The strange movement from air to water also moves the geese between ecological and imaginative depictions, one minute tracing natural migration patterns, and the next somehow underwater in a lost civilization. The goose is a liminal creature, flying over the liminal space of the shore and combining the elements of water, air, and earth. In the next poem, the goose becomes a collective group of geese that moves between a visual binary of blue and white, and also come to represent contradictory feelings of nostalgia and memory as they fly over a coastline: Blue-geese, white-geese, you may say, yes, I know this duality, this double nostalgia; I know the insatiable longing in winter, for palm-shadow and sand and burnt sea-drift; but in the summer, as I watch the wave till its edge of foam touches the hot sand and instantly vanishes like snow on the equator, I would cry out, stay, stay; then I remember delicate enduring frost and its mid-winter dawn-pattern; in the hot noon-sun, I think of the grey opalescent winter dawn; as the wave burns on the shingle, I think, you are less beautiful than frost; but it is also true that I pray, O, give me burning blue

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The passage is strikingly personal, as the poetic voice moves from the collective “we” back to an “I,” as the geese move from the individual of the preceding poem to this collective group of snow geese across the species’ two morphs (white and blue). The geese are plural and singular, individual and collective— each member of the flock is a whole animal, but their flight together in a V formation fuses their shapes into a single image. In their communal flight, the geese elude binary definition; there are both blue geese and white geese, male and female, a “duality” that is subsumed into the singular group effort of flight, the “eternal urge / to equilibrate.”25 The geese, the shingle, the pine trees, and the “brittle burnt sea-weed” evoke a shoreline reminiscent of H.D.’s East Coast American upbringing, linking their symbolic nostalgia to her personal memory. As with the mollusk, H.D.’s animal symbolism is rooted in the animals’ natural lives, using the notion of cyclical migration to characterize a state of mind which is rootless and moving between points of nostalgia and past dissatisfaction. The cyclical nature of the waves and tide similarly manifests a sense of transience; the landscape feels intangible in its constant cycles of seasons, tides, shadows, and bird migrations. Janice Robinson believes that H.D. wrote “The Flowering of the Rod” with a sense that “peace was imminent,” but the sense of peace brought by the geese is complex, difficult to accept.26 The speaker’s longing moves between the “beauty” of the frosted beach in winter and the vivid heat of summer, finding security in neither. The shore’s metaphorical power as a place of fluidity manifests here in a feeling of dissatisfaction, of “double nostalgia” and emotional disjointedness. Sarah Graham has written sensitively on the narratives of postwar trauma in Trilogy, particularly on civilian and female forms of war trauma often overlooked in narratives focussed on male soldiers’ shell-shock.27 Graham’s scholarship on “The Walls Do Not Fall” suggests that H.D.’s war trauma is communicated through “wall imagery and a concern with the disruption of various boundaries”; by “The Flowering of the Rod,” H.D. uses the fluid liminal boundary of the shore to restore healing by modeling a fluidity between the boundaries of individual and communal ways of living.28

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The image of the community subsumes the image of the individualist mollusk in The Sword Went Out to Sea: “in saving oneself, one creates a shell, not the isolated, highly individual spiral-shell I spoke of, but a minute coral shell, one of a million” (SWS 67). In their littoral and communal migrations, the geese mimic the transcendence narratives of the mollusk and the worm, which both move from a consciousness based on hunger, instinct, and survival to selfknowledge. The geese move over a littoral landscape and a fragmented self to Kaspar’s vision of a healed earth, where individual and collective concerns are addressed over an archipelago that also forms a cohesive place. At the end of “The Flowering of the Rod,” Trilogy closes with the image of Kaspar placing the fisherman’s jar on the floor of the ox stall with gifts from Melchior and Balthasar. In an act of deferring power, Kaspar bows only his head when the other kings bow low, showing that “his part in this ritual / was almost negligible” (FR 42). This small moment of self-negation by Kaspar encompasses Trilogy’s narrative of begetting a “self-out-of-self ” by dismantling power structures between genders and between the human and nonhuman, and signifies the new world borne by Eve. The shore’s cycles of tides and migratory birds allow for an interchange of old and new, allowing H.D.’s vision of humankind to return to evolutionary beginnings and start again. Susan Acheson asserts that “the whole point of [Trilogy] is that it is […] a new beginning.”29 H.D. conceives this beginning in a simultaneous forwards and backwards motion in “The Flowering of the Rod,” in which she renounces human progress as before and suggests a new direction into a better future that rejects the industrial: I am the first or the last to renounce iron, steel, metal; I have gone forward, I have gone backward, I have gone onward from bronze and iron, into the Golden Age. (FR 8) H.D.’s animal conflations signify metamorphosis and movement from one state to the next, not necessarily progressing forward but moving in an exploratory, nonlinear motion. It is one way that H.D. illustrates the overall

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trajectory of the poem to locate and build new possible worlds for humankind to inhabit: as the animals change from one state to the next, H.D.’s image of human culture is conceived in similarly fluid, liminal terms. The human element of Trilogy—its myth-making, its interrogation of patriarchal culture, its narrative of war trauma—has thus far dominated critical discourse. This chapter has revealed that H.D. was also interested and invested in the natural world on an ecological level, particularly linked to human destruction of the natural world, and human connections to the natural world sought and forged through myth and spiritual narrative. Natural history is, in Trilogy, linked inextricably to human history. Trilogy explores Western patriarchal dominion over spirituality and civilian life, but also understands the narratives of dominion and control exercised over nature within this system of power. The image of the littoral rituals, of the alchemical nature of the sea-tide, brings about a fundamental shift in the relationship between the human and the natural.

C HA P T E R 4

Modernist Corpses and the Ecology of Burial Julia E. Daniel

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n 1855, Walt Whitman could cast his eye over a field of grass and daringly affirm, “And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”1 Whitman presents the composting dead in language that transmutes the field of the pastoral elegy into a new form that reembodies the beloved. Little would Whitman know that he wrote these words during the last days of this kind of ecological burial, where the body was not artificially withheld from cycles of decay and regeneration. In some ways, the procession of another corpse much loved by Whitman heralded the beginning of the end; as Abraham Lincoln’s preserved body traveled by rail through several Northern cities, the nation was exposed not only to the remains of their president, but also to the new technology of chemical arterial embalming. That process would become a commonplace practice throughout England and the United States by the 1930s and 1940s.2 The advent of widespread chemical burial and its related professions and customs is an overlooked node of modern material culture. As we will see, it also had ramifications for the modernist environmental imagination. In the readings that follow, I argue that the buried corpse is an overlooked site for the modernist dismantling of the nature/culture divide, particularly in a moment when practices of sanitized burial forestalled cycles of decay and regeneration facilitated by unimpeded earth burial.3 This disruption of the composting action in which body becomes earth has not only ecological and cultural consequences, but also poetic ones, as the authors in this chapter

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reconsider the pastoral elegy in light of modernized funerary practices. Specifically, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, and Muriel Rukeyser offer three different reactions to the pastoral elegy in their deeply ecological presentation of burial. In “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” (1921), Williams writes a vacant pastoral elegy in which the body of the beloved is notably absent from the flowering action of the pastoral field, with tragic consequences for the widow. In contrast, Eliot offers a restorative response to the pastoral elegy in “East Coker” as he advocates for a return to local earth burial as part of the soil ethic that informs Four Quartets (1943). In contrast to the pastoral regenerative longing in Williams and Eliot, Rukeyser presents a toxic pastoral elegy in her long poem documenting the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster, when over 700 miners slowly died of silicosis, the majority of whom were black. In The Book of the Dead (1938), the othered corpses of these black miners decompose in a traditional earth burial but only because of the racist segregation of interment sites. Rukeyser turns their abandonment in a local cornfield into pastoral elegy with a vengeance, as their contaminated bodies return as corn in an ecological site that materializes a cry for justice. These vacant, restorative, and toxic pastoral elegies each demonstrate differing responses to the modern technologies and social practices that sought to veil the unseemly biotic actions of burial. These poets force us to look at where the bodies are hidden and, in doing so, remind us that we are made of and return to the dirt below our feet. In my focus on the grim material of dying and dirt, this conversation falls under the gray shadow of what Timothy Morton calls “dark ecology.”4 Dark ecology troubles our notion of nature as a green, untainted ante/anti-human landscape through an ecosystemic awareness attuned to the uncanny, unclean, semi-sweetness of what we consider the filth, discomfort, and abjection of the natural world. In tracing the ways bodies become earth and earth becomes bodies, these poets also follow what Morton describes as the essentially looping character of dark ecological thought: “Ecological awareness is weird: it has a twisting, looping form.”5 More specifically, this chapter contributes to emerging discussions in dirt theory, a form of material ecocriticism that considers the life and representation of dirt in both its wily, micro-particulate form and its massive, macroscale vitality. As Heather Sullivan has argued, when we let our critical terms play in the mud, dirt emerges as a prime site for our entanglement in nature, as a living, transcorporeal matrix that is more process than place.6 The decaying body turned vivifying dirt is both the

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undoing of an individuality rooted in the human body and, simultaneously, a kind of preservation of it through the flowering facilitated by decay. In their focus on a composting reality, these poets take dirt seriously and, in doing so, recuperate and revise poetic traditions that find consolation in our bodily return to the earth. The earth-becoming bodies of Williams, Eliot, and Rukeyser owe much to the long history of representing burial in the pastoral elegy, while each of them also reacts to the genre by moving its plot of burial and consoling transformation into the real, rotting world. While none of these poets hew closely to the formal structures of the classical or Elizabethan pastoral elegy, their bodies and graves are colored by the green ideals and blue moods of the genre. In The English Elegy, Peter Sacks details how the pastoral elegy moves from rage and grief to consolation “through use of pastoral contextualization [and] the myth of the vegetation deity.”7 The genre relies on the purity of the pastoral space to double as the consoling ground of burial and funerary procession in order eventually to celebrate the refiguring of the dead as sustained in a new biotic form, a risen vegetation deity, which is reframed as resurrection in subsequent Christian versions, like those of Milton. The function of the vegetation deity, according to Sacks, is “not so much to humanize nature, although this is partly the case, as to naturalize man.”8 However, despite the ecological links among burial, decay, and vegetative growth that undergird this tradition, the landscape remains largely frozen in its idealized pastoral role as an aesthetic elsewhere, a pure field beyond civilization into which the mourning speaker retreats. Any biotic life tends to serve as little more than floral symbolism or set pieces for the pathetic fallacy. Small wonder, then, given this high affectation and lingering smell of Victorianism, that the pastoral elegy did not enjoy much popularity among modernists. As Sandra M. Gilbert has demonstrated, while modernists wrote frequently about grief and death, “such elegies—or, rather, anti-elegies— replac[ed] the pastoral.”9 While Gilbert links this neglect and/or revision to the trauma of modernized warfare, we might add that the pastoral landscapes themselves were little more than a rustic backdrop in a world of increasing urbanism, technology, and pollution. And with the advent of modernized, chemical burial practices, the literal process of composting at the heart of the pastoral elegy was eventually erased from everyday life. A host of social, economic, and technological shifts brought about sweeping changes to the way bodies were buried in America and England

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between the late 1800s and the 1940s. As death shifted from the home to the hospital, community practices of preparing the body fell out of popular use, and the public lost its more intimate and domestic forms of contact with the dead. This, coupled with the gradual loss of parlor spaces where the home wake was once hosted, moved the dead into the hands of new professionals: the funeral director and the modern undertaker.10 In 1882, the National Funeral Directors Association was formed to create a code of professional ethics for what was, at the time, a burgeoning but disorganized field of practitioners. For example, in the United States, the funerary profession exploded seemingly overnight, as 9,000 registered professionals in 1890 grew to nearly 24,000 in 1920, despite a 7 percent drop in the mortality rate.11 As the field grew, so did the widespread use of technologies to sterilize the dead. The modernization of burial included “arterial” embalming, in which the cadaver is injected with a stable solution, typically formaldehyde, to preserve the body from decay and to sterilize any lingering contagious diseases. Caskets were also settled into lead-lined niches in the ground to prevent the body from mingling with the soil as it putrefied. This was partly a response to fears over the spread of influenza, tuberculosis, cholera, and other contagions.12 Ironically, the process introduced new environmental toxins into bodies and earth, as undertakers worked closely with carcinogenic embalming materials and lead grave liners buckled and leached arsenic, formaldehyde, and mercury into the earth and ground water. Embalmed bodies also changed the process of mourning. Through the embalmed corpse, funeral directors offered the bereaved a closeness to a beautified body while keeping the reality of decomposition at a distance, offering families what Gary Laderman has called a “therapeutic ‘memory image’” in their last interaction with the dead.13 Formal wakes in rented industry parlors, complete with satin-lined open caskets and costly floral arrangements, also spread bourgeois ideals of propriety while offering clean, peaceful, and cosmetic bodies to the public.14 By the 1940s, the standard of burial had shifted almost entirely to embalmed cadavers buried in lined graves, when barely a generation previously mourners had cleaned, laid out, and buried their dead in wooden caskets directly in the ground.15 And yet, while the pastoral elegy became increasingly outmoded in the wake of modernized burial, among other cultural and aesthetic forces, some modernists revised the genre as a reaction to these new funerary practices and their ecological consequences. One form of response was a

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vacant pastoral elegy, in which the green field holds no body and, therefore, no consolation for the viewer. In William Carlos Williams’s “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” the mourning wife looks out over what should be the conventional environment of the pastoral elegy as she grapples with the grief of her husband’s death. However, unlike in Whitman, the grass here offers no consolation precisely because of the painful and glaring absence of the husband’s composting body.16 Williams renders her interior monologue in terse, tight lines that flatten the vitality of the springtime yard into a plain of grief: Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year.17 Without the husband’s buried body at the core of this pastoral elegy, the regenerative action of the lawn in spring becomes not a comfort but a frigid pyre. The metaphor, “Sorrow is my own yard,” follows classical conventions of the pastoral elegy in its heavy reliance on the pathetic fallacy, as the yard symbolizes her sorrow. Williams plays against this, however, by eschewing the typical autumnal setting of the classical elegy, where the landscape withers in sympathy to then arise with springtime life. Here, rather, the springtime field jars against the widow’s grief even as it admits of the chill of her sorrow. The lawn also remains strangely the same, as the newly sprouted grass “flames as it has flamed / often before.” The wife’s ecological imagination already understood the growing grass not as a static element of her standard American lawn but as a wild, fiery kinetic process. She has an intimacy with her environment, knowing what it has done “often before,” that parallels the thirty-five-year intimacy of life with her husband. The difference now is an entropic spread of “cold fire” from her position of mourning, even as that cold claustrophobically “closes round me this year.” Here, the lawn shares in the chill of her grief even as its ecological way of being, its flaming out into newness, refuses to change in the face of human emotions. As Williams evokes and undoes the pathetic fallacy in the same gesture, he begins a pattern of repeating words that will continue throughout the poem, starting with the repetition of “flame.”18 The

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stale echo of “flames as it has flamed” undercuts any newness heralded by the new grass. The result is a closed verbal ecosystem that feels unproductive, even as the language describes a hyperabundant natural world: “The plumtree is white today / with masses of flowers. / Masses of flowers / load the cherry branches.”19 Williams amplifies the enclosed sensation of the encroaching cold fire with a smothering load of masses upon masses of flowers. The very blossoms that would offer hope in the pastoral elegy, a foretaste of future nourishing fruit and a transformation of the beloved into a new species of beauty, instead overwhelms the widow. Williams also inverts the usual spatiality of the pastoral elegy by crafting a modern version that ultimately sinks into the mud. The downward pull of Williams’s lyric grows stronger as the short lines progress from the dense masses of blooms to the son’s remarks about more blossoming trees “at the edge of the heavy woods.”20 The heaviness of the woods bodes ill as a gravitational pull that drags the speaker downward. As Gilbert notes, the general motion of the pastoral elegy moves down to spring up; a burial in the earth culminates in a rising action of upwelling new life.21 Williams flips this structure by beginning with the wife looking out on the landscape only to then plunge down into it. When the regenerative promise of the beloved’s ground burial is withheld here, the economy of earth-becoming bodies alters. The wife craves a suicide by water, where her body might sink into the earth: “I feel that I would like / to go there / and fall into those flowers / and sink into the marsh near them.”22 When the modern pastoral elegy cannot console, when the husband’s body cannot return to the earth, the wife imagines giving her body to the weight, sink, and gravity of an ecosystem beyond the edges of her property, a semi-pastoral space beyond the civilizing semi-domestic space of her “own yard.” Rather than ending with a romanticized falling into flowers, a billowy aestheticized image of a clean, fragrant death, Williams unexpectedly expands the biome of the poem to include the dark, pliant muck of the wet marsh. The late inclusion of the marsh is something of a surprise, as the repetitive language of the poem and the tight focus on the yard and flowering trees do not prepare the reader for this sudden slip into dark, abject earth. Through a chain of conjunctions, “and fall into those flowers / and sink into the marsh,” Williams undercuts a split between the purity of the white blossoms and the filth of the marsh, as both become the stuff of a wild burial that welcomes the falling, sinking body of the wife. In this vacant pastoral elegy, the absent husband’s composting corpse rewrites the ultimate purpose

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of the genre. As Sacks argues, the elegist must assert “his own surviving powers” through the rituals around which the genre is structured.23 In her lament without a burial, without a vegetation myth, and without a composting body, the widow cannot assert those powers of survival, and so falls down into death and earth, where her husband cannot. In contrast to the vacancy of Williams’s pastoral elegy, T. S. Eliot advocates for a return to earth burial in his modern, regenerative response to the genre. Eliot represents dynamic composting cycles throughout Four Quartets as an ecological circuit threatened by poor human management. As Jeremy Diaper has argued, Eliot’s presentation of a dirt-entangled culture in Four Quartets occurs within the context of his participation in the organicist movement, which advocated for a return to local, organic farming practices in response to industrial farming techniques that, among other ills, were already resulting in widespread soil depletion.24 Building on Diaper’s previous contextual research and his chapter in this collection, we may expand Eliot’s dirt ethics in Four Quartets beyond the organicist concern for producing healthy food from healthy soil to include the return of the body to that same soil in death. Eliot leans more into the pastoral than the elegiac mood, as his presentation of the composting dead emphasizes the restorative aspect of this material process, rather than its answer to an individual lyric mourner. If there is anything to be mourned in “East Coker,” it is not the dead themselves but a modern abhorrence of living dirt, typified in attitudes that treat the earth like an inert parcel of real estate and the dead like embarrassing contaminants. In “East Coker,” the quartet associated with the element of earth, Eliot traces the way our bodies and the soil are enmeshed through the dirty business of composting. While critics tend to read much of Four Quartets symbolically or philosophically, following the dead demonstrates how issues of materiality are central to the poem.25 “East Coker” begins: In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.26

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Structurally, the opening stanzas of each quartet present the reader with a problem, whether the quandary of the path not taken in “Burnt Norton” or the rage of the river god in “The Dry Salvages.” However, the descriptive tone here makes it difficult to define a crisis. Houses, factories, stones, and leaves all seem braided into an amoral, unending cycle of generation and decay. However, when read in light of the soil crisis, there is a significant break between the second and third sentences in the stanza, with the first critiquing modern land practices and the second advocating for an organic revival, inclusive of earth burial. In contrast to the time-elapse of housing, transportation, and industrial development that occurs on top of dirt, the active composting of dead human, animal, and plant matter goes into and becomes the earth. Moreover, the regenerative forces for the houses are troublingly non-corporeal; bodiless agents extend, remove, and restore in waves of passive verbs. In contrast, the third sentence lives in nouns, with the first two lines possessed of tight parallel structure as materials transmute in orderly fashion from one phase to another through the action of earth, full of not only corn but “man” as well. Wood, leaf, bone, or flesh upwell and sink as moments in a process, not as inert industrial material, in a cycle facilitated by dirt. What can be lost by contemporary readers is that the “flesh” and “Bone of man” have been withheld from the action of earth with the advent of sanitized burial. Earth burial would have already felt like a thing of the past by the 1940s, and so one might critique Eliot for here dipping into pastoral nostalgia. However, by attending to the actual materiality of earth-bodies, he makes the past present. The line insists that earth is “already” the bone and flesh of human bodies, among other organic matter. Despite modernized attempts to sterilize burial, the soil of the English countryside is currently and materially the very stuff of generations of the dead. Eliot then upholds the earth’s conciliatory composting by disrupting the burial ritual he evokes: “Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth / Which is already flesh, fur and faeces.” In the Anglican Order of the Burial of the Dead, at the graveside the priest says: “we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” a reminder of how God consigns the clay-made Adam back to the earth.27 Eliot’s reconfiguration of the burial formula resists parallelism, ashes to ashes, in favor of transformation, ashes to earth. In terms of the burial rite, a period feels appropriate at the end of earth, but the enjambment

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sweeps the reader back into the soil to discover a preexisting unity of human, animal, and plant matter. “Earth” is not the end of the burial rite or the material cycle but is rather its unending and ongoing beginning. The first sentence of “East Coker,” “In my beginning is my end,” is just as much a material statement as it is a biographical or a spiritual one; our bodies begin and end in dirt.28 By explicitly echoing and rewriting the burial rite, Eliot reminds readers that the contemporary language used in the graveside ritual only makes sense when it is united with an older form of ecological earth burial. Eliot emphasizes this fact again when he returns to the open field, this time peopled by rustic dancers: Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth Mirth of those long since under earth Nourishing the corn.29 Organicists touted the health benefits of eating organic, linking the physical make-up of our bodies to the health of the soil, and so it is also fitting that physically these country feet are literally made of wholesome earth and loam.30 In this revised pastoral elegy, Eliot replaces mourning with the regenerative promise of the composting dead, in keeping with the vegetative myth that structures the genre and the likes of which fascinated Eliot throughout his career.31 The open field, a fallow space that safeguards the soil’s fertility, places the dirt-composed bodies of the dancers in contact with the nourishing soil. As in the first sentences of “East Coker,” Eliot makes their past bodies materially present through his ecological view of death. Though they are “long since under earth,” they continue on in the imperfect tense, “Nourishing the corn.” Eliot undercuts the remote, simplified, and idealized past of the pastoral by insisting on the ecological present-ness of their earth-becoming bodies as they enrich our daily bread. Like the first farmer, Adam, these rural dancers will also be consigned to the earth in death: “Feet rising and falling. Eating and drinking. Dung and death.” While scholars have read the alliterative drumming of “Dung and death” as a negative turn in the stanza, the end of this section is macabre only if our orientation to burial and dirt is amiss. The nitrogen rich feces and mirthfully composting bodies of the lines above are the very stuff of soil, of which the feast and the feet are made.

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Whereas Eliot presents a vision of the composting body as an ideal worth returning to in a modern time that has largely abandoned earth burial, Muriel Rukeyser presents a toxic pastoral elegy in which the racially othered bodies of black miners do indeed return to the earth, under the corn, but find their way back to the soil through industrial pollution and burial segregation. As Cecily Parks has argued, Rukeyser is a major, if unfortunately overlooked, modernist with deep ecological thought that informs her entire oeuvre.32 The Book of the Dead combines Rukeyser’s vision of social and ecological justice in her depiction of the dead in the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster. In 1930, the Union Carbide corporation undertook a massive mining project in order to divert water through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia to generate power for its metalworks plant. The three-mile-long tunnel intersected with a wide vein of silica, the major component in glass production, that the plant also processed. The 2,900 miners who worked on the project were given no masks and, because of the cheap dry-drilling technique used on site, they inhaled deadly particles that hung so thickly in the air that workers could barely see their way through the white fog. More than 700 workers, over 75 percent of whom were black migrant laborers, died within a year of working on the project, and countless more died years afterwards, in what remains the largest mortality event from silicosis in the United States.33 The plight of the miners began to receive public attention as widows sought financial compensation from Union Carbide and as the workers fought for safety measures. Rukeyser’s long documentary poem, The Book of the Dead, weaves together court testimonies, board meeting minutes, interviews, and newspaper quotations with ecologically attuned verse that follows the toxic drift of silica through broken earth, drifting air, breathing bodies, and, ironically, back to composting earth again as the silica-ravaged lungs become soil in a cornfield. Much of what the speaker describes throughout the poem is an overlapping ecology and economy of land, water, power, cash, glass, and laboring bodies set in the hauntingly beautiful and yet deadly West Virginia landscape: “The hills of glass, the fatal brilliant plain.”34 Rukeyser plays with hard and soft textures as she imagines the silica becoming a murderous glass not only in the hills but also within the spongy lungs of the workers: “hundreds breathed value, filled their lungs full of glass” (BotD 71). The deep inhale of glass after the comma torques “value” into labor commentary; in their inhalation of a valuable fabrication material, the breath of the miners is completely devalued. The inhaled value is literally monetized silicate that, with tragic irony, fills the

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town in the form of consumer goods: Rukeyser lists countless windows, glass beer steins, even the glass of the documentarian’s camera lens. In a toxic metapoetics, the silica also lodges within the poem. In the testimony of the social worker, Phillipa Allen, a silicate particle contaminates the lines: It was so pure that SiO₂ they used it without refining. (BotD 67) Here, in a dark twist on the pastoral, the purity of earth becomes literal poison, as the silicate lodges in the middle of Allen’s sentence. Its right justification on the page creates a field of whiteness that mimics both look of the silicate dust and the timing of an interrupted breath. Body and earth, dust and breath, combine in the metapoetics of the page. The glass-becoming lungs of the workers soon lead to earth-becoming bodies. Because of the documentary nature of The Book of the Dead, Rukeyser pivots away from the kind of lyric voice common in the pastoral elegy, such as the widow speaker in Williams, toward a restrained, yet mournful omniscient speaker who then recedes as other voices well up to describe the disaster. The last lines of the poem, however, orient the entire project as an elegy for the beloved men who have died not only at Hawk’s Nest but from any form of toxic industrial labor, particularly mining: “communication to these many men, / as epilogue, seeds of unending love” (BotD 123). The hopeful appearance of “seeds” in the last line of the poem draws upon and transfigures earlier, vexed images of cornfields lined with dead workers. In her section, “The Cornfield,” Rukeyser combines an economic and racial critique of funerary practices with a toxic pastoral elegy where the dead are revivified only to accuse the living. Just like the Union Carbide corporation, the funeral parlor of H. C. White commodifies the bodies of the miners.35 And business is booming: “White’s undertaking business thriving and / his mother’s cornfield put to a new use” (BotD 72). The bitter use of “thriving” against the reality of White’s business also seeps into the brief mention of the similarly thriving cornfield. Rukeyser specifically condemns the funerary industry’s collaboration with the mining industry. We learn later in the section that because there was no cemetery for the black community due to the segregation of graveyards, the corporation paid White “$55 / a head” to bury black miners “five at a time, / pine boxes” (BotD 95) out in his mother’s cornfield. The racial and class prejudice that

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prevents these workers from a formal burial in “satin-lined, silk-lined” (BotD 95) caskets is the same that prevents them from receiving a full wake following embalming. White is also in such a rush to bury these devalued bodies that the families are given no time to prepare the dead: “At seven his wife took clothes to dress her dead / husband, and at the undertaker’s / they told her the husband was already buried” (BotD 95). Here, unlike Eliot’s celebratory depiction of earth burial, Rukeyser frames the lack of access to modern funerary practices as a social injustice to be mourned, a last insult to the black community who are denied dignity in death. And yet the ecological nature of this earth burial allows for a haunting justice. Whereas Sarah Grieve argues that, in her poetics of witness, “Rukeyser treats the environment ([…] often described as land, water, and air) as worthy of notice alongside the miners,” Rukeyser’s vision of the cornfield materially disintegrates any distinction between environment and miner in a transcorporeal presentation of dirt-becoming bodies.36 This unity differs from the relatively inert use of corpses as material evidence in court, ranging from X-rays to a son’s request that his corpse be autopsied to help his mother win a suit: “I want you to have them open me up and / see if that dust killed me” (BotD 80). The body becomes debatable fact and testimony in a legal discourse, a material that must be spoken for rather than one that speaks. The black miners who are buried in the field, however, body forth a cry for justice through their pastoral transformation in the decay and regrowth of the cornfield. Rather than functioning as inert evidence, their bodies become living witnesses as the ecosystem of the cornfield promises an almost apocalyptic reckoning by the end of the section. It begins by using the corn as an emblem and materialization of truth: “Swear by the corn, / the found-land corn, those who like ritual” (BotD 94).37 Swearing by the corn becomes a way of swearing by the bodies, as opposed to the lying oaths of the affidavits signed by the undertaker confirming death by tuberculosis rather than silicosis: “Affidavits. / He signs all papers. […] / Shows the sworn papers. Swear by the corn” (BotD 94). The fruitful land here does not offer the pastoral consolation of new life as much as it serves as a ground for justice. The miners’ bodies turned corn become like the vegetative god as described by Sacks in a new and yet ancient ritual that supersedes human courts. As with the common elegy, the field here is in a state of late autumnal mourning, with the remnants of a harvest mixing with early snow: “old

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cornstalks, snow, the planted home.” The spears of old cornstalks parallel the small wooden stakes that serve as poor, weathered grave markers at the edge of the field. At this moment in the section, there is no new corn, just as there is no record of the dead: “Under the mounds, / all the anonymous.” But Rukeyser moves from fallow earth and erased gravestones to the cry of a composite beloved dead, a black vegetative figure imagined as both the nation and the first biblical victim of murder: “Abel America, calling from under the corn, / Earth, uncover my blood!” (BotD 96). The line echoes Cain’s fratricide of Abel: “Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”38 The biblical allusion does more than insist on the common brotherhood between the black and white communities. Rukeyser amends the cry of Abel to address not God but a capitalized “Earth” as the force that can uncover the blood of all the wronged dead. Earth becomes the process and power by and through which murder will out. Earth does hold an answer to this cry, but it is less a process of uncovering and more an ecological act of transformation as these black bodies become “corn to keep.” Rukeyser presents them explicitly as a crop waiting for a harvest just on the horizon: Think of your gardens. But here is corn to keep. Marked pointed sticks to name the crop beneath. Sowing is over, harvest is coming ripe. (BotD 96) Rukeyser uses the garden as a counterpoint to the field that represents those who would prefer to look away and tend to their own affairs, “those given to keeping their own garden” (BotD 96). The “But” moves from the decorative, floral elsewhere of the readers’ symbolic “gardens” to a literal, emplaced “here,” a real field in West Virginia still pushing up corn, a harvest the reader must “keep.” “Sowing is over, harvest is coming ripe” may be read as a symbolic, nigh apocalyptic statement about a coming harvest of justice after the violence that has been sown. But more materially, it is also a statement about the literal ecological afterlives of the beloved dead, those who are “the crop beneath.” Their composting bodies will, in the words of Eliot, nourish the corn. But here is no pastoral cleanliness, and the nourishment that Eliot celebrates becomes grotesque condemnation in Rukeyser. Whereas one of Cain’s many punishments was to fruitlessly work the land for his food, here instead punishment is a

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condemning harvest as the Whites (and, by extension, the whites) will consume the corn, ingesting the refigured, silicate-contaminated flesh of their victims. The section, however, does not end here. The final lines immediately following the promise that “harvest is coming ripe” shift back to a conversation between an anonymous interviewer and an unknown person being deposed. Earlier in the section, he is asked “Do they seem to fear death?” Rukeyser withholds the answer until the final lines: “—No, sir; they want to go on. / They want to live as long as they can” (BotD 96). “They” floats for a moment without a clear antecedent. In the context of the interview, which was dropped several lines prior, it refers to all the working miners who know they are dying. But following the image of the cornfield, “they” also refers back to the anonymous many gathered under the name of Abel. The pastoral elegiac longing usually voiced by the survivor slides into the register of the deceased, as the ripening dead “want to go on” and “live as long as they can.” The cornfield becomes a site where that longing finds a kind of fulfillment, albeit in new form. Such are the “seeds of unending love.” Much remains to be done with the ecological valences and implications of the modernist corpse. For example, this study intentionally overlooks the representation of the wartime dead, especially those who died in the earth of the trenches. While much scholarship has considered modernist figurations of the dead soldier through the lenses of trauma or gender studies, very little has been said from an ecocritical standpoint. And because of my tight focus on works reacting to the tradition of the pastoral elegy, this chapter has considered only poetic texts, but we might widen the field to ask how materialist representations of the corpse–earth dynamic in novels or plays could expand the ecological turn in modernist studies. Such studies offer a timely palliative to our own environmental imagination as the inheritors of chemical burial. Environmentalists, funerary professionals, and the public at large are increasingly alarmed by the ecosystemic toxic impacts of modern burial, as witnessed by the green burial movement. Poets like Williams, Eliot, and Rukeyser offer us imaginative tools to reconsider our attitudes toward the mingling of the dead and the dirt, let alone the ethical and environmental consequences of our own burials.

Part III Modernist Ecopoetics

C HA P T E R 5

Nature, a Diligent Artist An Ecocentric Reading of Marianne Moore’s “The Fish”

Sharla Hutchison

N

ot long after Marianne Moore’s 1917 vacation to Monhegan Island, Maine, she composed and published “The Fish” (1918), a poem directly influenced by her time spent there.1 Moore vacationed with her family at Monhegan on five separate occasions (1901, 1902, 1904, 1917, 1929), staying weeks at a time.2 The island’s east side shoulders the Atlantic Ocean, allowing for spectacular, panoramic views of the surf rolling and exploding against the boulders and cliffs. In Moore’s unpublished notes about Monhegan, she writes about using the island’s system of nature trails to reach observation points in full view of the cliffs and ocean at Whitehead, Burnthead, and Blackhead.3 In a 1918 letter to her brother, John Warner Moore, she comments on her perspective of the ocean as a powerful, relentless, and regenerative force: “Life is a good deal like the ocean … self-restorative and continuous in its nature.”4 If there is a central image that defines Moore’s “The Fish,” it is the slow and steady erosion of a giant cliff by the constant force of the ocean’s waves. Although such an image seems more destructive than “selfrestorative,” the remark Moore makes to her brother suggests her observations of the Atlantic speak to her sense that the cliff and sea represent the restorative

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possibilities of nature in evolution.5 The principles of evolutionary biology imagined in the seascape, an image of survival and adaptation in flux, offer a fruitful path for understanding the poem. To date, several scholars have investigated the Darwin-inspired environmental ethic that emerges in Moore’s nature poems. That Darwin’s work armed Moore with a scientific basis by which she argues against human misuse of the environment is a point on which most critics agree. There are, however, a few different conversations about Darwin’s notion of evolutionary health as it relates to Moore’s poetics in terms of ethical orientation, artistic innovation, or both. Drawing on Darwin’s The Variations of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), Robin G. Schulze’s recent study, The Degenerate Muse, looks at Moore’s early nature poems as a celebration of biological diversity and evolutionary vigor manifested in species that maintain the ability to resist human domestication, ultimately becoming a model for a radically plural and individually unique modern American poetry.6 Putting principles of evolutionary health into poetic practice, Elizabeth Calland discusses the importance of Moore’s “post-Darwinian aesthetics,” a biological aesthetic informed by Moore’s preoccupation with animal markings that illustrate protective adaptations in camouflage and mimicry.7 More recently, Heather Cass White explores Moore’s lament of the human, moral failings responsible for environmental losses produced through artificial selection.8 And as I have previously argued, Darwin’s ideas about natural selection, especially when coupled with Moore’s use of modernist collage techniques, vocalize a complementary preference for variations of the ordinary, thereby asking humans to reconceive of their relationship with the environment to favor biodiversity—another form of variation—as a sign of health and artistic beauty.9 “The Fish” combines observations of rugged coastal habitats like Monhegan with reflections about natural selection, introducing epiphanies about the unparalleled power of nature to shape, define, and restore the lives of its inhabitants. Keeping in mind Charles Darwin’s idea that natural selection functions as a diligent and “scrutinising” artist, I pay close attention to Moore’s sea creatures, which conjure images of human art as it is measured against nature’s craftsmanship. In her poem, Moore makes an ethical overture as she defers to nature as a teacher and artist, organizing her poem around ideas integral to the biological sciences while also capturing some of the ecological complexities of animal habitats. That overture also

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translates into artistic innovation as Moore, following Darwin’s lead, gives up her role as the artist in charge who imposes her views on the seascape and, instead, incorporates nature’s designs into a visual poetics that exposes the limitations of a human-centered vision of the natural world.

Natural Selection and Superior Workmanship Approximately midway through The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin introduces his metaphor explaining natural selection. He personifies natural selection as the ultimate artist, an idea he briefly alludes to earlier with an analogy using the following logic: Just as natural selection is superior to artificial selection, so, too, is it true that nature’s art forms are superior to human ones.10 Throughout his argument, Darwin methodically demonstrates how evolution occurs through natural selection by a slow accumulation of inherited modifications that improve the odds of a species’ survival, and therefore produces a superior form of evolutionary fitness. In personifying natural selection as an artist, he purposefully differentiates it from artificial selection on the basis that “Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends” (Origin 91). He characterizes the outcomes of artificial selection as “monstrous,” “obvious,” short-lived, and unuseful. As an art form, artificial selection, he insists, results in “poor workmanship.” By contrast, natural selection works slowly and carefully, generating results “‘truer’ in character,” and “better adapted to the complex conditions of life.” Organisms produced by natural selection are like artworks that “bear the stamp of higher workmanship” (Origin 91). He continues to describe how natural selection, as an artist, also functions as an attentive critic, constantly “scrutinising” its work of art to edit unuseful traits and improve upon helpful ones (Origin 92). As Darwin’s metaphor explains, evolutionary fitness, the endgame of natural selection’s artistry, is healthier, more functional, longer lasting, better crafted, and, consequently, far more beautiful than artificial selection. Darwin’s metaphor underlines a fundamental scientific and ethical principle to which he returns. By redefining artistic beauty according to notions of evolutionary fitness, Darwin advances the argument that biodiversity signifies the highest achievement in terms of biology and art (Origin 114). The implications of Darwin’s metaphor surface time and again when he debunks the anthropocentric notion that nature’s purpose is to please

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humans. Nature’s beauty, he argues, was not made for human gratification (Origin 189). To verify his point, Darwin first shows his reader that human ideas about beauty are culturally subjective and historically dependent. He refers to the fact that some of the most universally admired organisms, such as the ammonites, appeared in earth’s timeline millions of years before the arrival of humans. A human-derived idea of beauty, anachronistically applied, begs Darwin’s rhetorical question: How can nature exist only to please humans if its pleasurable attributes preceded the existence of humans (189)? So, to Darwin’s point, not only are humans not the center of the universe, but they also inaccurately subject the natural world to their own preferences. The real sting, however, lives in the fact that humans are also latecomers to the show. In other words, humans, like all other species, happen to be uniquely fitted to a specific ecological moment in earth’s history, and like all other species, humans are subject to the laws of nature, including extinction, regardless of their elaborate intellectual activities. Scholars like Bryan Moore fully recognize Darwin’s metaphor as a hallmark of ecological science, referring to it as a form of “ecocentric personification”11 that makes modern nature writing possible.12 Darwin’s Origin of Species compiles a variety of magnificent descriptions about the way natural selection sculpts different flora and fauna. With this in mind, it is difficult to ignore the influence that Darwin exercises on subsequent nature writers, many of whom employ his metaphor about natural selection. None of Darwin’s ideas were lost on Marianne Moore. She attended Bryn Mawr from 1905 to 1909, and although she did not declare a biology major, she did enroll in a hefty load of science classes, including “General Biology, Plants, Vertebrates, Embryology, Animal Physiology, Zoology, Comparative Anatomy, and Theoretical Issues (which included Darwinian theory).”13 Her scientific studies at Bryn Mawr incorporated the study of Darwin, but her interest in evolutionary biology did not stop there. Schulze records that Moore read and commented on “some one hundred and fifty books” pertaining to evolutionary biology and nature “between the years 1910 and 1920.”14 It is also worth noting that Moore carefully read all of Darwin’s ground-breaking studies: The Origin of Species, The Variation of Plants and Animals Under Domestication (1868), and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).15 Much like Darwin in The Origin of Species, Moore’s observations about the sea in “The Fish” persuade us to view nature as the artist. The creatures

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cataloged in the poem emerge as integral inhabitants of an ecological niche and as works of art valued more for the natural, innovative craftsmanship they exhibit than merely for the visual interest they hold. The poem features some of earth’s ancient species, and given the emphasis placed on a sea that “grows old,” we must consider the longevity of certain animals equipped to survive across epochs. That is, Moore highlights the notion that evaluations of animal life should not be based on a set of arbitrary human preferences but should, instead, be built on evolutionary science.

“The Fish” First published in the August 1918 edition of the Egoist, “The Fish” holds the reputation of exemplifying a high modernist aesthetic. Moore revised the poem several times after its initial publication. The analysis here cites the version published in Observations (1924). Since most of the revisions focus on the arrangement of lines, stanza forms, rhyme, and syllabic meter, the line numbers corresponding to the language can vary, but the language and images remain consistent. The 1918 version, a thirty-two line poem with eight quatrains featuring 4–8–7–8 syllabic meter, uses a flush left margin with capitalization at the beginning of each line.16 The 1924 version, a fortyeight line poem of eight sestets with a 1–3–8–1–6–9 syllabic meter and aaxbbx rhyme scheme, incorporates left margin indentation that, according to Schulze and Cristanne Miller, appears to carve the undulating shape of waves into the side of the poem.17 The 1924 version of the poem represents Moore’s earliest self-selected collection of verse, and it provides a visual sense of the way Moore uses the space on the page to impress upon the reader the sculptural elements of the poem.18 Critics often contextualize the poem’s artistic experiments within the framework of modernist developments. Scholars within modernist studies tend to view “The Fish” as either a poetic adaptation of Moore’s interest in modern visual art or as an expression of modern mechanization and warfare. Both Linda Leavell and Elisabeth W. Joyce compare Moore’s seascape to cubist compositions in which positive and negative space merge, so that cliff and sea define one another, eliminating the privilege of foreground over background, or subject over setting.19 Susan McCabe compares Moore’s assemblage of images in “The Fish” to the splicing effects of film montage that juxtapose varied perspectives—close-up shots, panoramic views, and varied angles—as

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a means to convey the mechanized features of modern art.20 Conversely, Victoria Bazin observes patterns of “submerged” bodies and violent explosions in the poem, and so argues that it is about the destruction wrought by the mechanized warfare that defined World War I.21 Similarly, John Slatin draws on Moore’s comparison between soldiers and fish in another poem, “Reinforcements,” to suggest “The Fish” be read as an elegy about men “lost at sea” during World War I.22 To date, there are not many ecocritical readings of “The Fish.” Linda Leavell points to Monhegan’s tidepools as a source of inspiration for the various sea creatures listed in the poem,23 and Josh A. Weinstein examines ways the subtle patterns in poetic devices create an ecopoetics by gesturing to the difficult-to-discern ecological patterns found in nature, thereby offering a means to discover the “organic whole” in an ocean environment.24 More recently, Hannah M. Strømmen mentions “The Fish” as one of Moore’s poems that considers the human–animal relation as an ecologically coterminous one, but it is one, she asserts, that the poet displays with an emphasis on human limits in knowing the nonhuman, or the failures of a controlling human gaze.25 In a discussion of Moore’s animal poems, Randy Malamud contends that “The Fish” is not a poem about a fish but instead a poem about a fish’s habitat; consequently, the poem suggests that an observer cannot really “see” a fish outside the habitat to which it belongs.26 The following analysis expounds on these ideas by examining Moore’s use of multiple perspectives to highlight the unique complexities of viewing marine life in an intertidal habitat, a place where natural selection acts as a guiding paradigm to understand life in a constantly changing environment. Observations about the visual and tactile features of marine animals recorded in the poem signal that Moore, following Darwin, understood each animal’s evolutionary design to be a work of art. That is, Darwin’s metaphor about natural selection can be seen in Moore’s enumerations of sea creatures crafted to survive in different intertidal locations. To imagine a literal setting for “The Fish,” one envisions a scene much like what can be found along Monhegan’s east side: a rocky coastline with a giant cliff overlooking rolling waves and light-dazzling waters that turn turquoise closer to shore. In the very first lines of “The Fish,” Moore compares the ocean waters to black jade that allows light to pass across and through its surface, rendering, in smooth, polished curves alight with prismatic facets, the refractive and fluid qualities of waves. Similar to a finely crafted jade sculpture, the complex

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design of the waves shimmers with light. Below the surface, fish swim with hydrodynamic bodies honed by years of evolution in an ocean environment. By mentioning “jade” in the opening, a well-known sculptural medium, and then later alluding to a sculptural element of architecture, “cornice,” an implicit comparison is made between the artistry that evolves in nature—waves, cliffs, animals—and that crafted by humans—jade sculpture, hand fans, gardens, and architectural decoration. Moore organizes “The Fish” using evolutionary biology as a model of nature education and aesthetic innovation. First, the poem uses a variety of angles and perspectives to emphasize the way ecological niches form in intertidal habitats. Second, Moore uses what Hugh Kenner famously calls “optical puns,”27 and in many cases these visual puns stage ways that culturally mediated views become projected onto animals, while at times pointing to an animal’s evolutionary adaptations, thereby offering an alternative model for understanding the beauty and value of nature’s designs. Literally, the poem is about the rugged environment along a coast where the steady force of waves erodes cliff and rocks, the very type of conditions in which submarine animals evolved to survive. Figuratively, the poem meditates on Darwin’s notion that natural selection works as a diligent artist, and in this regard, the poem extends moral consideration and artistic inspiration to the landscape and its inhabitants. Using multiple perspectives, Moore groups images of marine animals according to tidal zones, an idea reinforced by varied angles. Like a film montage sequence, the poem alternates a series of vantage points that emphasize, through close-ups, eye-level angles, wide views, and vertical perspectives, the size and scale of the ecological system that comprises the high, middle, and lower intertidal zones along a rocky coast with a giant cliff. The poem begins underwater at high tide, at which time a school of fish swims from the subtidal zone into the low zone. The perspective, still underwater, follows a vertical ascent, and it gravitates to a mid-tidal zone, stopping to focus on a mussel bed covering the rocks. Next, the point of view rises with the rolling waves that crash against the boulders and rocks, marking the high tide zone where barnacles thrive. The eye rises vertically in the first two stanzas, accentuating the scale and magnitude of the ocean’s reach as well as the species that inhabit different locations along the way. At the vertical peak of waves crashing against rock, the perspective pivots and descends downward, returning to the “turquoise” water where light moves “in and out” of the rocky landscape submerged at high tide. The perspective travels to the

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low tidal region and tidepools, where sea stars, crabs, sea cucumbers, and a jellyfish come into focus. In the final three stanzas, the poem offers a wide view of the cliff, a “defiant edifice,” that fronts the crashing waves that grind up the cliff ’s rock and return its minerals to the sea. Both Catherine Paul and Anne Raine have commented on the role nature education plays in the organizational methods of Moore’s poetry, arguing that the poet’s work, particularly from the 1930s, resembles museum displays arranged to promote lessons about species and their habitats.28 Of course, Moore’s knowledge of natural science originated much earlier, and given her time observing the cliffs and Atlantic Ocean at Monhegan, one can see how her scientific knowledge and personal observations influence a patterned presentation of the landscape. Moore’s poem creates a visual display that contains close-up views of animals against the ecological realities that comprise their conditions of life where the cliff and sea meet. As Kenner has argued, Moore’s “The Fish,” a poem full of “optical puns,” is a “poem to see with the eye.”29 This historically modernist understanding of Moore’s poetics complements her environmental sensibilities in a couple of ways. First, as already mentioned, Moore places an emphasis on looking at nature’s “systems” by grouping animals according to habitat location. Second, the optical puns of the poem can also be understood to introduce what Randy Malamud refers to as Moore’s “dialectical trope[s].”30 Malamud contends that Moore’s poetry contains a fundamental tension between appreciating the “real” animal and the “domesticated” animal that suits human tastes.31 Her poems, in Malamud’s view, capture a sense of how human vision frames nature while also pointing to the possibilities of what lies beyond the frame, the animal, independent of human reach, as its own being deserving of respect.32 To a certain extent, the optical puns of the poem work similarly. As “dualisms,” they demonstrate a human view projected onto nature’s creatures while also alluding to the realities that lie beyond those reference points, and according to a Darwinian environmental view, what lies beyond those reference points is nature’s ethical and aesthetic handicraft. In the first stanza, an optical pun connects a mussel shell with a crow’s wing and a hand fan, and these references unfold a series of echoes in shape, line, color, and texture, all of which draw attention to the unique aesthetics born from evolution. Such visual attention reflects Moore’s lifelong interest in the design of natural organisms and the repeating patterns found

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there,33 an observation that Leavell first makes in her analysis of Moore’s poetic desire to group natural organisms according to a modern, abstract aesthetic.34 Here, that aesthetic translates into an ecocentric perspective. The poem’s speaker appears to make a casual set of observations about the mussel, but the comparisons prove to be more educational: wade through black jade. Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps; opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.35 The comparison of the crow’s feathers with the mussel shells calls close-up attention to the beauty of the deeply saturated blue-black color and the shiny, iridescent shimmer in both the hard shell and the soft feather. The minutely detailed, serried lines etched into the wedge-like shell remind one of the semi-concentric, scalloped edges of layered feathers in a bird’s wing. With the allusion to a hand fan, one immediately imagines the sculptural design of a folding fan with its half-circle shape and lined pleats that, when open, recall the “fanning” effect of the shell “opening and shutting itself.” The fan’s pleated lines, when spread, repeat in the shell’s grooves and in the feathers that span out in a wing. The visual affinities between the fan-like features of the crow and mussel point to the beauty of each animal designed to thrive in an environment where land and sea meet. A mussel’s shell is as important to its survival as a crow’s wings are to its ability to hunt for food and escape danger. The hard shell protects the mussel, and during low tides, it seals in water to stave off desiccation. In a colony, the mussels, grouped together, do not float away like so many flimsy ashes “heaped” together. Instead, they securely entangle with the help of byssus threads, silky strings spun from a secretion produced by a gland in the mussel’s foot.36 In this case, the optical puns comparing the mussel to a fan and the mussel colony to an ash heap highlight a human-mediated view of the mussel as well as the evolutionary adaptations made in

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the development of a sessile species dependent upon rocks and tides. The byssus threads of the blue mussel “fan out” and attach to substrates like rock, so that it is not washed away by the drag and pull of wave action,37 and at the same time, the byssus threads give the animal the stability it needs to feed underwater, allowing the ocean to wash food into its feeding siphon.38 In the “crow-blue mussel-shells” covering rocks, one finds an evolutionary success story. As a species, the common blue mussel (Mytilus edulis) is millions of years old, its origins extending to the Devonian period and its development as a genus to the Pliocene, when humans started to walk the earth.39 Its form, clearly adapted to tolerate the tides, dominates an intertidal topography, from subtidal to middle tidal areas.40 So, considering the details of natural selection’s artistry, the optical pun comparing the mussel shell to a folding fan punctuates Darwin’s principle that nature’s designs, unlike a folding fan, are not made to satisfy human pleasure. Instead, nature selects only for the good “of the being which she tends,” working out slow changes that help the longevity of the species in question.41 When shifting perspective from the mussel colony, the poem’s speaker moves visual attention to the surface water, where a “barnacle encrusted” wave rides into shore and crashes against rock. Although a barnacle can live nearly anywhere in an ocean environment, barnacle colonies mark the high tide zone in the intertidal shoreline region, and in this habitat, the barnacle depends upon a tidal ecosystem that includes wave and rock. Moore visualizes such an interdependency with her optical pun, a wave “encrusted” by barnacles. The visual echo compares the soft, white foam of the wave crashing into rock to the snowy, hard texture of mature barnacle shells covering rocks. Given Moore’s image-rich catalog of sea species, it is difficult not to reflect on her long-lasting scientific interests. Moore’s lecture notebooks from college provide ample evidence of an extensive knowledge of marine animals. In these notebooks, Moore recorded detailed notes and drawings on the anatomy, adaptive functions, and reproductive cycles of a vast array of sea creatures: fish, sea anemones, sea squirts, sea urchins, shrimp, sea stars, various bivalves, sea cucumbers, jellyfish, and so on.42 Moore’s reading diary from 1916 lists G. A. Boulenger’s Animal Life by the Sea Shore (1905) among her interests, and Boulenger’s guide enumerates a variety of species from shoreline and intertidal habitats, specifying some of the unique adaptive features of such animals.43 We should not be surprised, then, that the small barnacle acquires a solo performance in the poem. In fact, McCabe suggests that Moore’s description

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of the barnacle’s surf-riding journey resembles later nature films in which the camera takes up the viewpoint of the creature filmed.44 In an investigation of habitat, the optical pun also suggests how barnacles do, as tiny larvae, “encrust” waves, or ride the water, as they are delivered to the rocks to which they attach.45 As mature, sessile creatures, they depend on the waves to bring food during flow tides, at which time the animal opens its armored doors to feed on plankton.46 Accordingly, the visual pun introduced in the second stanza compares a white, foam-covered wave with a raised, ivory-textured barnacle colony assembled along parts of the rocky shoreline. The poem communicates an ecological interdependence between sea, land, and the life cycle of a barnacle in an image that makes it difficult to differentiate between the wave’s foam exploding against rock and the immobile, white, textured barnacle colony. The poem’s later mention of “cornice” further develops the optical pun by comparing a barnacle colony running lengthwise on a rock’s edifice to a cornice that sculpturally crowns the upper architecture of a building. At wide angle and on closer inspection, a barnacle colony amid rock emphasizes the importance of nature’s architecture. In stanzas four and five, the poem reveals a tidepool full of sea creatures: sea stars, a jellyfish, sea cucumbers, and a crab. The relentless waves that “drive” into the cliff like a “wedge / of iron” eroding the “iron edge” of the cliff ’s form (TF 41), generate a tidepool basin in which life flourishes. The poem explores this habitat at high tide, and draws out visual comparisons between the shapes and markings of its animal inhabitants and the flora one finds in a garden: “stars // pink / rice grains, ink / besplattered jelly-fish, crabs like / green / lilies and submarine / toadstools, slide each on the other” (TF 41–42). The tidepool resembles a garden complete with colorful displays of animals that appear to grow out of their rocky environment like plants in summer soil. The bright pink sea stars look like flattened blossoms. The sea cucumber, oblong in shape, recalls the design of a submarine, while its color and markings, variations of brown and orange with slightly raised, spotted marks, resemble the cap of a toadstool. The green crab’s yellowish color and black speckled body feature legs that arch and curve, mirroring the shape and freckles of a tiger lily’s petals that curve backward. Beyond whimsical, Moore’s visual analogies—“pink / rice grains” that signify sea stars and “crabs like / green /lilies”—expose the fallacy of a singularly human-centered vision of the natural world.

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To think of any one of these animals is to imagine the sculptural features of their bodily designs, and consequently their evolution to endure this environment. Visual cues comparing them to domestic arts—cooking, writing, gardening—work to underline how nature becomes harnessed to serve human gratification, a view imposed on the inhabitants of the tidepool. Yet another visual pun comparing the kinetic motion of the sea’s ecosystem to “sliding”—an action reminiscent of a flattened human body moving on a slippery surface—attends to the animal’s evolutionary development in a wild environment rather than a domestic one. So rather than reflect human designs created with natural resources, here, nature, as represented by the sea, carves out rock and establishes a plot by which the sea star, sea cucumber, and crab secure themselves during low and high tides. Underneath the water, these organisms exercise the functionality of their designs when the body of the ocean “slides” across their environment. Likewise, the sea star and sea cucumber, both echinoderms, ambulate using tube feet, appearing to “slide” over their environment and other organisms around them, each creature using those same tube feet to fasten itself securely to withstand the push and pull of wave action.47 The crab’s sideways motion gives the impression of sliding when underwater, and the jellyfish pushes itself across the water by contracting and releasing muscles, so it, too, appears to slide through the water. To the human eye, it appears the animals “slide,” but they actually coordinate their bodies to survive the flux of the environment. The last three stanzas of the poem include a view of the imposing, large cliff that defines the shoreline. This “defiant edifice” withstands the crashing, pounding waves that grind away its structure until it slowly crumbles, piece by piece, into the ocean, where its minerals return to the silt and sand comprising the soil and water of sea habitats. Quite literally, the sea carves out crevices and basins that become homes for species. The sea, as an ecosystem of sculpted bodies, “grows old in it” (TF 42), just as the rocky cliff and its minerals, recycled in the ocean’s ecosystems, grow old in the sea. Both sea and cliff continue to “live on,” each in the other, through the cycles of destruction and regeneration, both adapting, changing, and defining one another ever so slowly, just as natural selection and the conditions of life influence one another. Moore’s central image complements marine biologist Rachel Carson’s idea that shoreline topography participates in the earth’s “epic,” geological

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poetry, recycling life through water, minerals, and an intricate food chain.48 From Carson’s view, the sea becomes a sculptress, shaping the most rugged shores into uniquely formed rocks and caves.49 To these ends, both Moore and Carson share Darwin’s sense that the human ability to shape nature shrinks in comparison to the work nature completes through “whole geologic periods.”50 To borrow Moore’s language, the ocean represents the “continuous” and “self-restorative” functions of life. About the cliff, the speaker observes, “All / external / marks of abuse are present on / this / defiant edifice— / all the physical features of // ac- /cident— lack / of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns / and / hatchet strokes…” (TF 42). Clearly, the cliff ’s edifice has taken thousands of years of “natural” abuse by the waves. Missing from the face of the cliff, what it “lacks,” are the purposeful marks of abuse produced by human construction efforts: “cornice,” “dynamite grooves,” “burns,” and “hatchet strokes.” What stands out about the cliff, then, is the absence of human interference. By emphasizing that the seascape lacks the touch of human design, Moore captures the indisputable magnitude of natural forces. The sea that “grows old” among the rocks also refers to the evolution of ancient marine species that warrant closer observation and evoke awe because they have the ability to survive in extreme environments. Because of their adaptive designs, they have, in fact, survived for long periods. At the same time, the series of images denoting human construction efforts are included in a catalog of potentially destructive tools (“dynamite” and “hatchet”), conjuring questions about the future of such ecosystems should humans encroach upon them and rapidly alter them. Explaining the principle of natural selection, Darwin continually emphasizes the ever-so-slow pace of the small, successive changes that mark a species’ evolution and culminate in successful adaptation. As Darwin remarks, “We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages…”51 In other words, natural selection occurs over millions of years, so modifications remain imperceptible to the eye in the short term. Returning to Moore’s “The Fish,” we can consider her vision of ecological and biological change as the slow hand of nature sculpting the cliff and the aquatic animals that live on the shoreline. One way to imagine a long history of earthly modification comes from observations about Monhegan’s cliffs, rocky coastline, and intertidal habitats. Waves eroding rock enact incremental change, and similarly, the sea and its environment along the shore slowly shape the species that live there.

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In its echoes of earthly evolution, Moore’s poem expresses a view of coastal habitats as a vital part of life’s ecology and an excellent place to learn about evolutionary biology. Such a vision aligns with ideas held by Carson, who believed that the harsh environments of intertidal areas produce some of the most spectacular forms of adaptation and survival.52 Carson’s sea trilogy—Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955)—characterizes the sea as the earth’s womb, a storehouse of ecological resources, and a recycler of life. In The Edge of the Sea, Carson maintains confidence in the powerful abilities of the sea to restore ecological balance no matter the threat, and she takes comfort in the knowledge that sea life will live on well after human extinction.53 Carson, like Darwin and Moore before her, also references the earth’s flora and fauna as the artistic outcome of an evolutionary history that carefully sculpts its designs. By contrast, “The Fish” indicates that Moore, while interested in the restorative possibilities of the ocean, remains less confident about the ability of the sea to overcome the quick and destructive changes that humans can bring to such environments. In this sense, “The Fish” anticipates a later thematic pattern found in Moore’s animal poems from the 1930s, one Schulze describes as a dark realization that human encroachment makes it less likely that animals and their environments will escape unscathed.54 Moore’s observations of nature in “The Fish” include her study of evolutionary science, and her conclusions about the beauty of evolutionary fitness, much like Darwin’s, call attention to the ethical consideration of nature. In appreciation of nature’s efforts, the poem also prompts audiences to consider how the misuse of the environment might damage a species’ hard-won advantages wrought by natural selection’s craftsmanship. At the end of the poem, Moore compares the slow work of nature as it whittles down a giant cliff to those quick, destructive, and fast-paced changes introduced by human construction efforts. Although the cliff currently fronts the wave action that demolishes its “edifice” as forcefully as any hatchet stroke or dynamite explosion, the absence of human interference in this dangerous landscape is what “stands out.” Given that dynamite was frequently used in mining, railroad construction, and other landscape-altering efforts, the specter of human development seems salient here, even though Monhegan, to this day, remains “unpopulated.”55 Perhaps, then, the poem prepares us to question the worth of such efforts more broadly. As an example under observation, the seascape in “The Fish” gives us a habitat that took nature thousands of

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years to craft. Similar habitats can be spoiled by human encroachment in a short period of time. In The Origin of Species, Darwin stresses the potentially tenuous survival of even the most well-adapted species due to “fortuitous destruction,” such as chance predation or catastrophic changes in weather.56 So the poem raises an important question about what is lost through quick, catastrophic changes to a habitat, and it is here that Moore scrutinizes the role human manipulation plays in initiating such change. Providing an ecocentric reading of “The Fish” brings to bear Moore’s well-documented interest in nature education and evolutionary science on this enigmatic classic of literary modernism. Moore’s extended stays at Monhegan allowed for the kind of informal nature education touted by Liberty Hyde Bailey, a pioneer of the nature-study movement and a favorite among the nature writers Moore read.57 In The Nature-Study Idea (1903), Bailey advocates for nature as a classroom in which learning occurs from direct observation. According to Bailey, the study of natural selection is the “central theme in the study of living things,” and consequently, he argues, it is in the epiphany that all living things struggle to survive that we realize a new respect and sympathy toward the environment.58 If the primary goal of nature-study education, as Bailey explains, is to teach “nature relations” as a set of living connections among organisms, one that creates knowledge-based sympathy toward nature,59 then it appears Moore’s reflections on the habitat rendered in “The Fish” produce sympathy on two fronts—as an artist and as a naturalist. First, Moore humbly defers to nature’s artistic designs as a guiding source for the poem’s organization according to habitat. By comparing human artistic endeavors to nature’s subtly detailed orchestration of forces that culminates in the biotic and abiotic designs of an ecosystem, Moore, like Darwin, concedes to the ethical superiority of nature’s artistry as that which works toward the goal of evolutionary health. Artist to artist, the poem’s speaker observes the benefit of what the landscape lacks—a human makeover based on ideas about what constitutes art. In viewing nature as an ethical artist, as Darwin does, the poet here also views the potential destruction of the seascape with a sense of the losses that may not be recovered—the loss of life, the loss of beauty, and the irrevocable losses of natural selection’s hard work.

C HA P T E R 6

Modernism’s Insect Vision Rachel Murray

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n her poem “Advent 1966,” Denise Levertov bears witness to the horrors of the Vietnam war, describing the burnt corpses of innocent children, “their names forgotten, / their sex unknown.”1 Confronted with these searing images of human destruction, the speaker’s “clear caressive sight … is blurred”: There is a cataract filming over my inner eyes. Or else a monstrous insect has entered my head, and looks out from my sockets with multiple vision2 Levertov is describing the compound eye of invertebrates, which, in contrast to the single lens structure of the human eye, consists of thousands of tiny visual receptors known as ommatidia. The poet’s reference to this multifaceted organ signals the breakdown of a coherent perspective in the face of the “repeated” piling up of images of bodily destruction: unable to convert the loss of life into something redemptive and singular (a “unique Holy Infant”), the speaker is presented instead with the image of “senseless figures aflame.”3 For Levertov, insect vision entails a reduction in sight, a dimming of the poet’s “inner eyes” in the face of mass suffering and death. At the same time, the eye of this creature, however “monstrous” and distorted, enables the poet to see what is before her, allowing her to behold this intolerable spectacle, albeit blearily.

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Indeed, as she notes at one point, it “will not permit me to look elsewhere.” Consequently, while the insect eye might be “dulled and unfocussed,” it offers a way of apprehending that which exceeds or overpowers individual sight, coming to the poet’s aid when human vision begins to disintegrate under the strain of senseless violence.4 Levertov’s “multiple vision” corresponds to a dynamic often seen in modernist writing, which frequently turns to the insect world to express the derangements of vision brought about by the dehumanizing effects of industrial modernity on individual subjectivity. In his interwar novel Kangaroo (1923), D. H. Lawrence’s protagonist likens himself to a fly observing the city crowds through his compound eye, remarking: “All these people are just facets: just bits,” and “you can fit the bits together … yet it won’t bring the bug to life.”5 Lawrence’s fly analogy evokes the disfiguring impact of mass existence on the human sensorium; like the “senseless figures” of “Advent 1966,” human subjects appear indeterminate and fragmented—“just bits.” And yet, while writers such as Lawrence adopt the insect-eye view to represent what Andreas Huyssen describes as “the centrality of disturbances of the visual field in a rapidly modernizing urban culture,” my sense is that modernism’s insect vision also constitutes a reflection on the paradoxical enhancements of perception afforded by a reduced existence.6 After outlining some of the key developments in the study of insect optics at the turn of the twentieth century, this chapter identifies a shared preoccupation in the interwar writing of Wyndham Lewis and Virginia Woolf with the aesthetic possibilities of the compound eye. Learning about the perceptual powers of invertebrates helped these writers to articulate a kind of double vision: a sense that while the human subject’s powers of sight had been drastically diminished by the combined effects of urban modernity and industrialized warfare, these limitations might also open up new ways of seeing.

Through a Fly’s Eye Prior to the seventeenth century, little was known about insect vision; too small to be examined with the naked eye, this complex, multifaceted structure remained largely imperceptible to humans. Following the invention of the microscope, however, it was discovered that the eyes of invertebrates consist of thousands of individual lenses, resembling a tiny cluster of soap bubbles or, according to one early modern scientist, the surface of a raspberry.7 The

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first magnified images of the compound eye appeared in Robert Hooke’s popular scientific study Micrographia (1665), which contains finely detailed illustrations of the “eye-pearls” of a grey drone-fly.8 In the late seventeenth century, further experiments into insect optics were conducted by the Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who concluded in a letter to the Royal Society that the eye of a dragonfly perceives “not one image, but some hundred images” reflected in each of its ommatidia.9 Leeuwenhoek’s belief that the insect sees a kaleidoscopic image of the world was not disproved for several centuries, and this misapprehension still persists in the popular imagination. In 1826, the German anatomist Johannes Müller sought to challenge this view, arguing that the individual facets combine to form a single image, the resolution of which depends on the number of ommatidia. It was not until the late nineteenth century, however, that Müller’s mosaic theory began to gain traction, when the Viennese physiologist Sigmund Exner published the first comprehensive study of insect vision, The Physiology of the Compound Eyes of Insects and Crustaceans (1891). Building on Müller’s findings, Exner revealed that the insect eye produces a single, low-resolution image, but that this lack of optical clarity is compensated for by an expanded visual field as well as an increased sensitivity to movement. In contrast to the single lens structure of the human eye, Exner notes, the compound eye is better at reacting to its surroundings than building up a clear impression of them: The insect knows its enemies not by their form but only by movements. A fly sits fearlessly on any stuffed bird, but a whole swarm of flies takes off when a handkerchief is waved in the room. Conversely the dragonfly recognizes its prey mainly from movements, since it dives onto a paper ball thrown into the air just as it does onto flying insects.10 This mode of vision may be somewhat imprecise, but it is also capable of discerning movements and patterns that go undetected by the human observer—the swatting hand and the waving handkerchief. Consequently, while Exner acknowledges the inferiority of insect vision when it comes to image formation, he also emphasizes the superiority of the compound eye both in recognizing and reacting to changes in its environment. Exner’s findings marked a significant departure from the framework of vision that had underpinned Western scientific thought since the

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Enlightenment.11 As Christoph Hoffmann explains, since the beginning of the seventeenth century the field of eye studies had been dominated by a tendency to equate the visual process with the formation of static images in the back of the eye. This focus on the depiction of forms and objects—on what the eye perceives rather than how perception occurs—was heavily skewed toward the single-lens eye, thus neglecting the diverse ocular capacities of nonhuman creatures. Following the publication of Exner’s study of the compound eye, however, “seeing no longer signified just one particular mode of perception but, depending on the type of eye involved, at least two distinct modes.”12 The author’s findings therefore enacted an important shift in the late nineteenth century from a single, somewhat narrow understanding of the function of the eye to a wider, more multifaceted conception of vision. Exner’s study was highly influential in the field of physiological optics and has become the basis of all subsequent compound eye research.13 Beyond the scientific community, the book is renowned for its portrayal of a pioneering experiment in insect vision.14 Opposite the title page, the author included a photograph depicting “the erect retinal image in the eye of a firefly (Lampyris spldl.)” (Figure 1).15 Made with the help of the Austrian photographer Josef Maria Eder, who carefully detached the lens structure from the surrounding tissue and placed it under a microphotographic apparatus, it features the window of Exner’s laboratory room, the letter R stamped across the glass, a church steeple faintly visible in the distance. The windowpanes evoke the multiple facets of the firefly’s eye, while the central strip of light takes on a convex appearance against the surrounding blackness like a reflection seen in the human eye. The resulting image resembles a mise-en-abîme of the process that produced it: the compound eye framed through the single lens. This image caught the eye of several writers and thinkers, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who cited Exner’s “most remarkable experiment” in a lecture on animal perception.16 Some even sought to replicate the procedure: one 1898 article for the popular science magazine Knowledge, entitled “How to Photograph Through a Fly’s Eye,” provides readers with detailed instructions on how to mount the “eye lenses” of a dragonfly onto a microphotographic apparatus.17 Another article for the journal Popular Science Monthly, “How Insects See Us” (1929), features a blurry self-portrait of the British entomologist Harry Eltringham, taken through the eye of a glow worm (Figure 2). The accompanying text explains that once enlarged

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Figure 1. Microphotograph of the retinal image of a firefly, 120 times enlarged. 500 times “the photograph was easily recognised as the Oxford professor by all who knew him.”18 The author of “How to Photograph Through a Fly’s Eye” also marvels at the ability of the insect eye to produce “a recognisable photograph” with an infinitesimal apparatus. Implicit in both articles is an awareness, shared by many during this period, that insects are equipped with an enlarged visual faculty that belies their diminutive status.19 Yet this emphasis on the ability of the insect eye to produce “recognisable” images also exposes the limitations of these experiments in insect vision. Not only is the notion of being able to see from an insect’s perspective by simply cutting off and peering through its lenses clearly lacking, but as Exner’s study reveals, the compound eye is not particularly suited to the identification of static images. Rather than capturing “how insects see us,” the photograph of Eltringham, in particular, presents an image of the human eye squinting to see itself from another angle. By turning the lens back on himself, the author ensures that the entomological perspective remains out of focus. Exner’s study exhibits a curious tension between word and image; as Hoffmann sees it: “the picture of the retinal image of the glowworm depicts nothing of what, according to Exner, principally characterises vision with the compound eye, that is, no change and no motion.”20 A similar disparity can be

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Figure 2. An insect-eye view of an entomologist. found in the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s influential study, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (1934). Arguing that all creatures inhabit a unique subjective life world (or Umwelt) consisting of a variety of perceptual cues, Uexküll posits that these worlds remain “unknown” and “invisible” to humans.21 From the tick to the sea urchin, each animal “has an environment just as richly articulated as it is,” the specificity of which may be revealed only “to our mind’s eye and not to our body’s.”22 Intriguingly, however, despite emphasizing the impossibility of subjecting these enclosed bubbles of perception to empirical observation, Uexküll attempts to represent the world as it appears to various species of invertebrates, including a series of illustrations of a bee’s-eye view of a flowering meadow as well as a village street seen from the perspective of a fly. The latter image consists of a photograph looking down a rural street followed by a watercolor painting depicting the same scene through a “fly’s eye.”23 In his reading of

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the painting, Jon Day describes how objects are “simplified in form so as to become almost abstract symbols,” while human figures in the foreground are “reduced to simple blocks of colour.”24 Observing the likeness of this image to the techniques of Impressionism, Day is struck by the way that Uexküll’s “attempts to inhabit alien consciousness” fall back on existing, and by now somewhat conventional, representative schema.25 What is noteworthy about this reliance on recognizable visual tropes is that it deprives the reader of the sense of unfamiliarity required to produce an alteration of perspective. Although Uexküll cites Exner’s study of the compound eye a few pages later, there is little evidence in the image to suggest an awareness of a fly’s unique visual powers. Like its predecessors, the image tells us more about the process of simplification involved in human attempts to represent nonhuman ways of seeing than what the world looks like to a fly. In a dynamic that recalls the bleary self-portrait of the entomologist, the human figures in the foreground are “reduced” by this procedure. The individuals involved were hardly oblivious to this outcome: as Caroline Hovanec notes, when contemplating the compound eye, scientists from this period often acknowledged the futility of their attempts to understand a visual experience that was so radically different from their own.26 After reflecting on the eyesight of bees, the comparative psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan conceded: “must one not infer that the nature of the sense-experience of this insect is a secret she keeps to herself?”27 Curiously, however, the epistemological challenge posed by invertebrate vision appears to have galvanized the imaginative processes of writers and thinkers during this period, prompting a range of innovative thought experiments.28 The difficulty of representing what the compound eye sees was a particular source of interest to Wyndham Lewis and Virginia Woolf, with both writers recognizing something creatively enhancing about its exposure of the limitations of human vision.

Eye-playfulness Sometime during the early 1920s, Wyndham Lewis began work on a new novel, a sprawling, satirical epic called Joint. The narrative details the exploits of Irish schoolmaster Thomas Patrick Cinder, known as Joint, his wife Plateglass, a maidservant called Acushla, and a student named Archie. Lewis abandoned the text at some point during the mid-1920s, with parts of the

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work later resurfacing in two satirical novels: The Childermass (1928) and The Apes of God (1930). Yet while the novel only survives as a “disjointed heap of typed and handwritten pages” in the archives at Cornell University, it contains some of the author’s most fully developed ideas about the centrality of the insect world, and in particular the insect eye, to his unique aesthetic vision.29 Amid the various notebooks, drafts, and loose jottings that comprise the Joint manuscript is an annotated typescript entitled “ESSAY. (entomology) for Semester VI.” Written as a piece of schoolwork by Archie, this four-page document contains highly detailed readings of a number of entomological texts, including John Lubbock’s Ants, Bees, and Wasps: A Record of Observations on the Habits of Social Hymenoptera (1898) and Jean-Henri Fabre’s popular study The Sacred Beetle and Others (1918). Lewis’s surviving library contains an annotated copy of Lubbock’s book, as well as the issues of the literary magazine The English Review (1908–37), which published some of the first English translations of Fabre’s insect studies, as well as his own early stories.30 Archie’s essay also includes a number of references to Auguste Forel’s popular study The Senses of Insects (1908), which draws heavily on Exner’s account of the compound eye. After quoting a passage from Forel on the extent to which insects “perceive form,” Archie wonders: “Can the insect focus his attention, with an acuity unknown to us, on the visual sequence?”31 Unencumbered by an “informative ‘consciousness’,” he adds, these creatures have been able to develop a more refined aesthetic sense: When they see an orange, they do not see the pips inside it, the convergent septa. Valencian groves, Covent Garden, cornets of gilded tissue paper, the greengrocer’s shop etc; but only the surface of the find. Is their … principal sense of orientation, purely visual?32 Lewis is describing a form of perception unimpeded by cognition, in which the insect is able to apprehend the object in its fullness and specificity without deviating into the realm of abstraction. What appears to be a diminished perceptual capacity, in which the eye recognizes “only the surface of the find,” corresponds to an “acuity” of attention that surpasses that of the distracted human observer, whose focus is undermined by a host of competing associations: “cornets of gilded tissue paper, the greengrocer’s shop etc.” For Lewis, the insect’s superficial gaze constitutes a deeper engagement with the

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world; as Kevin Rulo aptly notes in his reading of the passage: “the insect sees more, paradoxically, by seeing less.”33 Lewis also emphasizes the superiority of insect vision as a way not only of apprehending, but also of reckoning with an unstable and threatening environment—what he refers to elsewhere in his writing as a “boiling and shifting world.”34 Drawing on Forel’s account of the ways in which the eyes of certain insects are able to “measure the distance and reach of their enemy,” Archie writes: Dragon-flies, with the 12,000 facetted eye: are their movements (myriad-like movements, swiftness, veniculous miraculous brakes etc) not the equivalent of their sight. In other words, do they move like that because of their multiplied sight? In the optic thalami is to be found the secret of their skittishness. It is Eye-playfulness. The dragonfly is an embodied EYE: an eye that eats, sleeps, hunts and conducts love affairs.35 Archie interprets dragonflies’ “myriad-like movements” as a “sporting instinct” with which “they coquet with their hunter.”36 In other words, the eye is so advanced that the dragonfly can afford to play with its predator; so confident is the creature in its ability to measure the reach and distance of the enemy that it can effectively dance with death. Survival is here transformed into an art form, as an act of necessity is recast as a frolic—a form of levity in the face of deathly violence. Lewis wrote this passage not long after he had served as an artillery officer on the Western Front, where he spent much of his time at his observation post surveying the enemy lines for signs of movement. Although the author is extrapolating quite heavily from his source material, his account, via Forel, of the dragonfly’s “Eye-playfulness”—a pleasing compound which captures both the creature’s coquettish movement and the effect of its skittishness on the onlooker—sheds light on an important aspect of his postwar writing. Rather than passively taking in the world, the compound eye actively engages with its surroundings, stalking and seducing its prey. It is an eye, moreover, that remains playfully in excess of human sight, while also motioning toward an expanded definition of the human visual sense. With “the peculiarities of their mosaic vision,” Archie notes, “the insect sees a different world to us, and possesses other means of apprehending it.”37 While these “other means” may

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not be fully available to the human onlooker, Lewis’s writing seeks to mimic the insect eye’s “myriad-like movements” in the face of danger, turning an increased vigilance in the face of environmental instability into a key feature of his interwar style. This dynamic is also evident in Lewis’s short story “Bestre” (1922), which appeared in his short-lived magazine The Tyro: A Review of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture and Design in the same period that he was writing Joint.38 The story is told from the perspective of traveling Englishman Ker-Orr, and focuses on the eponymous Breton innkeeper Bestre, who, “regarding the material world as so many ambushes for his body,” launches a series of warlike campaigns against his neighbors.39 Bestre’s battles consist of a series of staring contests so hostile that they are likened to “phases of a combat or courtship in the insect-world” (62). In a description that calls to mind Lewis’s account of the dragonfly as an “embodied eye,” Ker-Orr observes: “Bestre sacrifices the claims any individual portion of his anatomy might have to independent expressiveness to a tyrannical appropriation by his eye. The Eye was his chosen weapon … What he selected as an arm in his duels, then, was the Eye” (59). Lewis’s interest in the strangeness of insect perception helps to focalize Bestre’s ocular assault: the innkeeper succeeds in weaponizing his gaze by ensuring its mobility, as it flits between active and passive positions. The author’s somewhat disorientating pun on the word “arm” to refer to Bestre’s eye is suggestive of the innkeeper’s inversion of the function of an organ that takes in the world to one that strikes out at it. Crucially, Bestre’s metonymic “Eye” has the ability to disrupt subject and object positions, destabilizing the perspective of the onlooker and disrupting the power dynamics that inhere in the act of observation. Initially, Ker-Orr approaches Bestre “as an entomologist would take a Narbonne Lycosa [wolf spider], to study,” recalling: “I went laughing after [him], tapping him, setting traps for the game.”40 Early on in his pursuit, however, Ker-Orr finds himself suddenly outwitted by his catch: As I bent over my work, an odiously grinning face peered in at my window. The impression of an intrusion was so strong, that I did not even realise at first that it was I who was the intruder. That the window was not my window, and that the face was not peering in but out: that, in fact, it was I myself who was guilty of peering into somebody else’s window [original emphasis].41

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Bestre is at this point lying in wait for someone else, and this moment of parallel misrecognition adds to the general atmosphere of disorientation. The reversal that takes place during this passage is symptomatic of the ways in which Bestre inverts a sense of being preyed upon by others into a predatory impulse. The breakdown of Ker-Orr’s entomological gaze also extends to the text as a whole: over the course of the narrative it becomes increasingly difficult to fix an image of Bestre—his presence is unmistakable and yet curiously protean; he is both “corpulent and ox-like” and “nimble as a flea.”42 In his refusal to take on a definitive outline, Bestre confounds the gaze of the onlooker, the reader included, dissolving the distinction between inside and outside, subject and object, observer and observed. The effect is profoundly unsettling for all involved, and yet the text seems to suggest that the breakdown of a coherent perspective is necessary as a means of artistic survival. In the final lines of “Bestre,” Ker-Orr offers a crucial insight into the innkeeper’s behaviour: I have noticed that the … more restrictions reality has put on him, the more unbridled is his gusto as historian of the deeds immediately afterwards. Then he had the common impulse to avenge the self that has been perishing under the famine and knout of a bad reality, by glorifying it and surfeiting it on its return to the imagination.43 This observation helps to make sense of Lewis’s preoccupation with insect perception in the interwar period, with the text establishing a direct correlation between the degree of constraint imposed on Bestre by his circumstances and the strength of his impulse to transform this sense of impoverishment (“the famine and knout of a bad reality”) into a source of triumph through the act of storytelling. The narrator’s use of comparative adjectives—“the more restrictions … the more unbridled”—indicates a recognition of the paradoxical enhancements of vision afforded by a limited perspective. In an earlier version of the story, the narrator wonders: “Has Bestre discovered the only type of action compatible with artistic creation?”44 This question may help to uncover the secret not only of Bestre’s skittishness but of Lewis’s interwar writing more generally: like the dragonfly

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that coquets with its hunter, these disturbances of vision appear designed to convert a sense of personal privation into a form of aesthetic surfeit.

Articulate Eyes Lewis’s fascination with the “multiplied sight” of insects may also be linked to an anxiety expressed by many during this period about the perceived inability of the human eye to adapt to the sensory conditions of modernity. In 1893, the physiologist W. F. Southard warned that the eyesight of “modern man” had “given way under stress and ceaseless burden of the varied avocations and professions of modern life.”45 In an essay published alongside “Bestre” in The Tyro, Lewis articulates a similar concern, writing: “we are given by the eye too much: a surfeit of information and ‘hard fact,’ that does not, taken literally, tally with our completer values for the objects in question.”46 The author’s use of the word “surfeit” in this context is intriguing; here it seems to suggest the opposite of Bestre’s attempts to convert an impoverished reality into something more creatively fulfilling, “glorifying and surfeiting it on its return to the imagination.” And yet the effect is much the same: bombarded by a host of competing sensations, the eye is effectively blinded—too much stimulation results in too little vision. For Lewis, what Georg Simmel referred to as the “rapid telescoping of changing images” and “violent stimuli” that assail the modern city-dweller has resulted in the impairment not only of the visual, but also the aesthetic sense.47 Virginia Woolf echoes these anxieties in her essay “Walter Sickert: A Conversation” (1934), which takes the form of a London dinner party conversation between a group of friends who have recently attended an exhibition of Sickert’s paintings. We join the assembled guests in the midst of a discussion about “the change wrought upon our senses by modern conditions,” including the deleterious effects of traffic lights and office environments on the onlooker. “We shall very soon lose our sense of colour,” warns one member of the group, adding that for the average motorist “red is not a colour but simply a danger signal.” Another worries that days spent in an office will inevitably result in an “atrophy of the eye.”48 The quickfire pace of the discussion mimics the optical malady that it describes, with the narrator describing how the conversation flits “hither and thither” from topic to topic and “seldom sticks to the point,” as though unable to achieve the kind of focus that its participants are seeking to wrest from the motion-blur of

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metropolitan life.49 That is, until the talk turns to insects, and in particular to “those insects, said still to be found in the primeval forests of South America, in whom the eye is so developed that they are all eye, the body a tuft of feather, serving merely to connect the two great chambers of vision.”50 From this point onward there is marked slowing of the conversational pace, with the guests lingering for several paragraphs in these vast optical chambers. The dilatory feel of this discussion hints at a gradual widening of vision, as the seemingly tangential topic of insect perception expands to form the focal point of the conversation. In an inversion of received ideas of evolutionary progress, Woolf ’s speaker asserts that it is the “primeval” gaze of the insect that is most “developed,” whereas human sight has “shrivelled” over time.51 At stake in this account of insect vision is a way of seeing that has been enhanced rather than diminished by its exposure to its surroundings, expanding over time to fill the entire surface area of the body. Woolf ’s description of the insect as “all eye” bears a striking resemblance to Lewis’s description of the dragonfly as an “embodied EYE” capable of eating, courting, and hunting. Her essay goes on to describe how these little creatures are capable of “drinking crimson until they became crimson; then flitting on to violet; then to a vivid green, and becoming for the moment the thing they saw.”52 For both authors, the insect eye appears to represent a mode of responsiveness to the world—an aesthetic of engagement rather than retreat, in which the boundaries between self and surroundings are productively blurred. It would be mistaken, however, to suggest that their accounts of insect vision are fully aligned. Lewis’s emphasis on the adaptability of the insect eye to hostile conditions still implies a degree of separation between the organism and its surroundings, whereas Woolf ’s partygoer discerns a “primeval” connectedness between subject and world in these “great chambers of vision.” The source of Woolf ’s insect anecdote is also more difficult to pinpoint. All we are told is that somebody “had met a man whose business it was to explore the wilder parts of the world in search of cactuses and from him had heard of these insects.”53 Like Lewis, however, Woolf ’s appetite for entomology was voracious; in addition to reading works by Jean-Henri Fabre, Eleanor Ormerod, and F. O. Morris, she participated in the Victorian hobby of insect collecting as a child, netting butterflies and sugaring for moths.54 The Woolfs also owned a copy of Frederick Gamble’s popular zoological study The Animal World (1911), which outlines the key developments in the study of insect perception, including the recent craze for photographing through the eye of

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a fly.55 In a section on the “Senses of Arthropods,” Gamble makes reference to contemporary discoveries regarding “colour-vision” in invertebrates, describing how bees are drawn toward the hues of certain flowers in their quest for pollen.56 Gamble’s account of the insects’ “colour appreciation” resonates with Woolf ’s exploration of a mode of chromatic perception modeled on the compound eye.57 “On first entering a picture gallery,” remarks one of her guests: I became completely and solely an insect—all eye. I flew from colour to colour, from red to blue, from yellow to green. Colours went spirally through my body lighting a flare as if a rocket fell through the night and lit up greens and browns, grass and trees, and there in the grass a white bird. Colour warmed, thrilled, chafed, burnt, soothed, fed and finally exhausted me.58 Art is presented as the catalyst for this metamorphosis, with Woolf emphasizing that it is only when the subject is safe from “the perils of the street” that this sensory apparatus may be restored.59 In this state of heightened perception, nonhuman life takes center stage, with the speaker noticing “grass and trees, and there in the grass a white bird.” Significantly, however, the focus is not so much on what is seen as how the insect eye experiences its surroundings: here and elsewhere, Woolf ’s emphasis is on the responsiveness of the eye to external stimuli, with her enumeration of verbs—“thrilled, chafed, burnt, soothed”—evoking the multitude of sensations that make up this compound engagement with the world. The essay describes how the eye of the insect is so sensitive to its environment that it is able to take on its features, “drinking, eating, indeed becoming colour.”60 A version of this image can also be found in Woolf ’s essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1930), which describes a mode of heightened perceptiveness in which, “like a butterfly,” the eye “seeks colour and basks in warmth.”61 Both texts evoke a form of denuded vision, in which the eye is able to “simplify sufficient to see colour only;” and yet, as we saw in Lewis, the paring back of the visual sense results in a fuller engagement with the surrounding world.62 Nicholas Gaskill identifies a similar dynamic at work in the color experiments of early twentieth-century artists such as Walter Rimmington and Wassily Kandinsky. In appealing to “an evolving ‘colour sense’ that had been damaged by mass culture,” he posits, their work “constitute[s] a meditation on how to produce more articulate eyes with

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more subtle connections to an articulated world.”63 As well as describing the process of giving meaningful expression to something, Gaskill’s use of the word “articulate” draws on Bruno Latour’s use of the term to describe how sensory awareness is acquired through the interaction between the organism and its environment, “a dynamic process whereby both ‘a sensory medium and a sensitive world,’ … are reciprocally produced.”64 As a biological term, moreover, the term “articulated” refers to “invertebrate animals,” whose bodies are “composed of jointed segments.”65 This additional meaning, I want to suggest, reflects an important aspect of modernist writers’ recourse to the insect world in search of ways of redefining the relationship between self and world in the modern era. For Woolf in particular, insect vision appears representative of a relationship between the subject and its environment that is predicated on mutuality instead of mastery, and which stresses the eye’s involvement in rather than its detachment from the surrounding world. Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Woolf wrote in her reading notebook: “The point of view of any individual is bound to be not a bird’s eye view but an insect’s eye view, the view of an insect too on a green blade, which oscillates violently with local gusts of wind.”66 Faced with a new outbreak of military aggression, Woolf saw in the insect an image of the modern subject as an imperiled organism caught up in the violent oscillations of history, politics, and mass society—one whose frame of vision trembles with the intensity of these “local gusts.” A panoptic mode of vision is here replaced by a state of optical precariousness, as the avian elevation descends to a position scarcely above ground level. In the work of Woolf, as well as Lewis, however, insect vision constitutes a way of seeing in which the conditions of life do not exceed the subject’s capacity either to behold them or withstand them. To see the world with an “insect’s eye view,” we might conclude, is to acknowledge one’s own vulnerability to larger social, political, and military-industrial forces, but it is also to recognize one’s own status “among” as opposed to above life on earth. This way of seeing, though circumscribed, serves to shatter the illusion that there can be a single, objective view of the world (a bird’s-eye view), or that a totalizing perspective can be anything other than exclusionary and harmful. Rather than foreclosing sight, the compound eye seems to have helped modernist writers to find unexpected openings amid a constricted (and fragmented) reality, giving shape to more richly articulated modes of seeing, and establishing new points of connection between self and world.

C HA P T E R 7

Eco-consciousness and Ecopoetics in D. H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers and Apocalypse Fiona Becket

I

t has been asserted that the other-than-human subject emerges in the field of modernism, with significant implications for how the human is read. Bonnie Kime Scott, in a thought-piece called “Green,” posits that an understanding of modernism’s engagement with the nonhuman helps us to plan for “a culture that invests itself in nature.”1 Kime Scott outlines the usefulness of criticism that destabilizes the mode of “modernist techne”2 exemplified by Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and Wyndham Lewis in their theorizations of modernist practice, and makes a case for criticism that pays serious attention to the function of nonhuman nature in modernist texts, with respect to subjectivity, gender, and consciousness. Interventions in the debate include Kime Scott’s monograph on Virginia Woolf, which invokes aspects of ecofeminist thought to illuminate Woolf ’s practice.3 Elsewhere, Alison Lacivita has combined ecocriticism and genetic criticism to present Finnegans Wake (1939) as an exemplary work of “ecological modernism” in which “Joyce’s idea of a ‘universal history’ is inextricably bound to the environment.” Elizabeth Black also included Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew in her study The Nature of Modernism, assessing them as critically underrated despite their work demonstrating an “environmental consciousness” that stimulates a timely reappraisal of

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individuals in relation to place.4 Carrie Rohman further contextualizes the question by showing how modernism is ideally placed to capitalize on the insights, post-Darwin, pertaining to human animality, and to contest the power of the unitary, totalizing structures of Freudian psychoanalysis, with profound implications for the decentered human subject.5 In this chapter I shall place some emphasis on the ways in which Lawrence theorizes the animal, the vegetal, “Nature,” and consciousness in his discursive writing, which on occasions unexpectedly and deliberately brings oikos and demos into close alignment, and not always happily. Much of my attention will be directed at the poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) and the philosophy of Lawrence’s final book Apocalypse, posthumously published in 1931. I also focus on aspects of his two highly idiosyncratic books on the unconscious, as well as some of his later discursive writing, invoked here to understand better the distinctions in Lawrence between creatureliness and beastliness, ethical engagement and alienation. Eco-consciousness in Lawrence describes his philosophy of the interconnectedness of human and more-than-human being, but it does not, as we shall see, reconcile the contradictions and counter-positions that characterize his writing on species and the decentered human subject, or world building. For Rohman, in the context of British modernism, D. H. Lawrence is the writer who is most committed to putting the animal at the heart of his critique of Western humanism: “His work understands animality as spontaneity, the unknowable, the bodily, and the pure. Essentially, the animal possesses the kind of being that Lawrence wants to recuperate in humans, a being that rejects mechanistic forms of self-consciousness and embraces radical mystery.”6 Coming after close readings of Lawrence’s “Snake” and “Fish” and, in a later study, “Tortoise Shout,” it is a meaningful claim, although we can return to Birds, Beasts and Flowers, where these poems are collected, in its entirety to see if more is at stake than ontological recuperation. With respect to modernist practice more broadly, Rohman has also progressed the concept of bioaesthetics as dependent upon the non-separability of the ontological and the aesthetic.7 Her argument prioritizes species inclusivity as the proper counterweight to human exceptionalism. In this instance the matter goes significantly beyond questions of representation: “The aesthetic capacity is animal; it doesn’t just approach animals or hold them in its purview.”8 Diverging from Rohman’s perspective, Andrew Kalaidjian examines the contrast with the “pastoral turn” of the Georgian poetry championed

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by Harold Munro and Edward Marsh and “a new, peculiarly modernist environmental aesthetics” evident in the inversions of the pastoral that he finds in Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1936).9 Kalaidjian casts the “dark pastoral” as the antithesis of freedom in nature in a study influenced by Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiotic development of Umwelt. Although writing from different standpoints, Kalaidjian and Rohman (who has also written on Nightwood) are representative of critics who perceive in modernist writing the creative expression of interrelated modes of animal and human meaningmaking.10 Kalaidjian concludes that Barnes’s novel “ends with a ‘letting be’ of animal and human, a dark pastoral dénouement that does not find safety in nature, but rather affirms the interdependence of all life that persists despite— or rather because of—the manifold modes of existence in the world.”11 This coherent shift from the Georgian poets in 1911–12 toward a modernist aesthetic that engages with the nonhuman can be developed with reference to other movements, such as Imagism.12 A revised understanding of the place of other-than-human nature in an analysis of modernist literature and aesthetics is one point of entry into the field. Modernism’s shaping of animality especially, and ecological consciousness more broadly, is gaining particular traction. My approach engenders a fresh consideration of Birds, Beasts and Flowers which, as a whole, constitutes one of the most consistent attempts within modernism to consider questions that were beginning to be examined in the context of the humanities, the social sciences, and zoological sciences only much later in the twentieth century.13 It is likely that the significance of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, taken in its entirety, has been largely overlooked in ecocritical studies because Lawrence is not routinely associated with complex worlding.14 Ecopoiesis is a relatively recent word, created by biophysicist and geneticist Robert Haynes.15 Comprised of oikos and poiesis it originally referred to terraforming—world building, with sustainability as a primary goal. It is a response to the fragility of planetary life and the actual challenges of literal “worlding.” In this context, ecopoiesis becomes an anthropocentric conceit. Transferred to the anthropocentric activity of writing poetry, via its derivative “ecopoetics,” it helps to get a purchase on the impossibility, as Timothy Morton argues, of speaking the ecological subject.16 If Birds, Beasts and Flowers is an effective example of textual and literary ecopoiesis, terraforming, it is not only because its preoccupation is with (and not with) the nonhuman, but also because the poet enjoys the creative opportunity of not speaking the

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ecological subject. In “Peace,” the poem does not speak lava; in “The Ass,” “He-Goat,” and “She-Goat,” for instance, it does not speak ass, he-goat, and she-goat, but the poems get closer to not-speaking them than the poems of any other modernist poet drawn to the complex otherness of the nonhuman. The poems that constitute the volume as “art-speech” (unlike examples from much of the polemical writing) collectively examine the grounds for, and sometimes against, collaborative, cooperative cohabitation.17 Thus far, this chapter has tried to avoid the binary opposition of animal and human that cultural posthumanism challenges. Yet, as Bonnie Kime Scott reminds us, Donna Haraway has commented on the persistence of this binary even in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in formulations of “becoming-animal” which are increasingly influential in current theorizations of animality in modernism.18 In his essay “Animal Body, Inhuman Face” Alphonso Lingis, contemplating “the question of the animal,” argues that the animal has a face which is as overlooked in modern thought as the animality of humans. Lingis emphasizes the formation of animal ethics by a concentration on multiplicities (as theorized in Deleuze and Guattari’s influential text A Thousand Plateaus) and the principle of the radical interdependency of multiple species: “anaerobic bacteria […] Macrophages in our bloodstream […] They, and not some Aristotelian form, are true agencies of our individuation as organisms.”19 Focussing on the infinitesimally and imperceptively small, and reminding us of the necessary porosity of human and animal bodies, Lingis usefully pans outward to declare “We also live in symbiosis with rice, wheat, and corn fields […] move and feel in symbiosis with other mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish.”20 Lawrence’s unwavering skepticism with respect to the unitary psychoanalytic subject (the “old stable ego”) is praised by Deleuze and Guattari, who perceive in Lawrence’s essays and books on the unconscious and society a challenge to the “law of the great Phallus.”21 They alight on the language of “flows-schizzes” in Lawrence’s writing about recurrent themes: consciousness, sexuality, men, women, family, mothering, education, the requirement that we acknowledge a fluid relationality between all the elements of the cosmos. In Anti-Oedipus they warn against dismissing the “pantheism of flows” that characterizes Lawrence’s discursive writing, asserting that “it is not easy to de-oedipalize even nature, even landscapes, to the extent that Lawrence could.”22 The censorship of his work—including

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his paintings—offered Lawrence the clearest proof, if any were needed, that the social construction of sexuality as perverted and degraded was of a piece with “Freudianism” and the oedipal formations from which capitalism, colonialism and fascism proceeded.

“What does it matter / What we call human…” In his final discursive book, Apocalypse, Lawrence gives expression to a cultural condition which, in our moment, we might be tempted to call ecological estrangement. “We have lost the cosmos,” he exclaims, “by coming out of responsive connection with it, and this is our chief tragedy. What is our petty little love of nature—Nature!!—compared to the ancient magnificent living with the cosmos, and being honoured by the cosmos!”23 It is a lament that requires careful scrutiny both in the context of the language and thought of Apocalypse regarding the power of the “living relation” in Lawrence’s lexicon, and with respect to a broader awareness in Lawrence’s writing about “Nature” as a closed and monolithic, humanist category set apart from “Man,” and a domain that is subject to diverse forms of mastery. In particular, “responsive connection” as something lost is significant. As we have seen, critics have begun to formulate the ways in which Lawrence’s work challenges received notions of human exceptionality, heightening the sense of an amplification of the relationality of all forms, living and non-living (for in what sense is the non-sentient sun alive?) in his work. Certainly, the most powerful and enduringly positive imagery to characterize Apocalypse is derived, via Lawrence’s critique of diverse myth systems, from a holism that resonates throughout his writing. Here it does so with respect to the interconnectedness of the human animal and all the elements of the “cosmos” (a notion that Lawrence borrows from his reading of pre-Socratic philosophy): “I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea” (A 149). This declaration reappraises the materiality of the sun, earth, and blood as actualities and as unitary symbols. It suggests the interrelationality of elements and ideas that we encounter consistently throughout Lawrence’s work. Once light has entered the eye, or once the downward pressure of a step meets the upward pressure of the earth, or the course of the blood is perceived, who can say with conviction where Nature “ends” and where Man “begins”? In Apocalypse, then, the dominant belief

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is in an impersonal ontological mode defined by a radical interdependency, in ways that cast doubt on the grip of transcendental subjectivity and move closer to the construction of—or expression of—ecological subjectivity. Apocalypse concludes with a statement of connectivity and kinship: So that my individualism is really an illusion. I am a part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched. What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. (A 149) The distinction between “inorganic” and “organic” connections inflects much of the writing in Birds, Beasts and Flowers and is radically inclusive: the alienating power of capital is an underlying preoccupation of the collection, although, as we shall see, Lawrence cannot be held up as a champion of egalitarian ideals. In the context of his oeuvre this perspective from Apocalypse fittingly seems to have the last word, significantly detached from the personal philosophy of individual selfhood that dominates the most effective of Lawrence’s fictional works. Poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers consistently address the “inorganic connections” forged by industrial capitalism—“The American Eagle,” “The Revolutionary,” and “The Evening Land” position industrial democratic America, its institutions and values, in a state of tension between the “nascent demon people” and the “Two spectres” of idealism and mechanized modernity. This is the force of the speculation in “The American Eagle” as to whether, having been hatched by the “dove of Liberty,” the eagle is reducible to “a sort of prosperity-gander / Fathering endless ten-dollar golden eggs” (P 365). Environmental consciousness in Lawrence is different from a consciousness of environment. At the level of language, and in the context of a highly personal mode of creativity with metaphor, the suffix “consciousness” is common in Lawrence’s discursive writing and, on occasion, finds its way into his fiction and poetry. The most commonly recognized and acknowledged formulation is “blood-consciousness,” in which, as has been observed before, the first term “blood” attracts more critical notice than

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the term “consciousness” to which it is attached by a hyphen.24 This act of misplaced attention is an effect of reading that Lawrence brings on himself, so associated is the formulation with the grievous, overly conscious, apparently regenerative “column of blood” primitivism of The Plumed Serpent (1926), for example, which is closely related to the apotheosis of masculinity in Lawrence’s writing.25 As a principal term in Lawrence’s lexicon, “blood-consciousness” goes through a series of modulations. The irritating whine of the mosquito in the poet’s ear in “Mosquito” “shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you” (P 288, emphasis added): this non-cerebral response is, in context, profoundly human as distinct from instinctively nonhuman. It can be argued that “blood-consciousness” is less a feature of Birds, Beasts and Flowers than might be expected, in part because what are being staged and restaged are highly self-conscious encounters with the creaturely. Where “blood-consciousness” is highlighted in this collection, it is in the insistent atavism of Lawrence’s encounters with the immigrant poor or groups of indigenous people in the course of his nomadic journeying across continents. In “Elephant,” “The hot dark blood of itself a-laughing, wet, half-devilish, / men all motion” (P 341) distances the dancers at the Perahera festival in Kandy from the “pale and dejected fragment” (P 340) of the visiting Prince of Wales, but associates them with “the dark mountain of blood” (P 341); in “Cypresses,” the trees embody a “Dusky, slim marrowthought of slender, flickering men of Etruria” (P 250, emphasis added). The early champions of Lawrence’s “vision” tended to see in “bloodconsciousness” an expression of the positive efficacy of “life-blood” in a mode of vitalism. However, the dynamic operations of the metaphor reside in the often overlooked second term, “-consciousness.” This hyphenated construction shows Lawrence developing an anti-Cartesian language to counter the predominance of “Freudianism” in the mapping of the instincts and the location of the instinctual life “in the head” (another distinctly Lawrentian formulation to describe a mode of overbearing modern selfconsciousness).26 In his two short books on the unconscious, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Lawrence attempts to provide a mapping of the body that accommodates a non-cerebral basis of feeling. Hence, the lifeblood, for Lawrence, must be acknowledged as primary in a materialist genealogy of feeling: “bloodconsciousness,” asserts Lawrence in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, “is the very source and origin of us” (FUPU 183). The idea that opposes

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this concept in Lawrence’s writing is “mental-consciousness” (sometimes equated with “ideal consciousness”), which is indicative of the “ego-bound” social or “ideal” self and is subject to an infinity of contingencies. “Mental consciousness,” with or without the hyphen, is also frequently gendered to heighten the misogyny with which Lawrence has become associated (the poems “Ego-bound,” “Jealousy,” and “Ego-bound Women,” not in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, comprise a malicious trinity in this regard [P 411–12]). The question of agency in Lawrence’s writing is directly related to the power of these opposed concepts of consciousness in the formulation of his thought. To this taxonomy of idiosyncratic metaphors, Lawrence adds a third, lessused formulation, the botanical sounding “sap-consciousness,” of particular interest to those in the field of critical plant studies.27 In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious he opposes to “ideal consciousness” in humans, an other-than-human mode of consciousness: “We are forced to attribute to a star-fish, or to a nettle, its own peculiar and integral consciousness. This throws us at once out of the ideal castle of the brain [the well-defended, non-traversable walls of the social and psychological self] into the flux of sap-consciousness” (FUPU 217). “Flux” signifies an organic flow implicated in affective experience, nonverbal, and bears no relation (other than at the level of metaphor) to the modernist “stream of consciousness” about which Lawrence was scathing (and which he recasts in “St John” [P 283]). The idea of a genus-specific mode of consciousness (nettle, starfish) is reprised in some of the poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, which also extensively practices an iconoclastic mode of re-creaturing at a level of metaphor that reaches out to the multiple, polymorphous ecological subject: the “pensive slim-muzzled greyhound buds” of cyclamens (P 265); the “anaconda head” of the she-goat (P 338); the poetic association of a mosquito and a heron in flight (P 287). Broadly speaking, for Lawrence, in modern human subjects, “our petty little love of nature—Nature!!” is derived from an overdeveloped “mental consciousness” which is in turn derived from, and nourishes, a belief in human species-superiority. In his essay “…Love Was Once a Little Boy,” Lawrence asserts that there is no egoism in Nature to counter or confound the predations of Man and to “beware of […] people who love Nature, or flowers, or dogs” because nothing that is nonhuman can overthrow the tyranny of the ego (RDP 336). When Lawrence, in common with later environmental philosophers, capitalizes Nature, he does so to indicate its constructedness

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as a unitary concept that produces a state of alienation, which destroys natural diversity and transforms the earth into an object subordinate to the ego. The line in Lawrence’s poem “Men in New Mexico”—“White men make gold-mines and the mountains unmake them / In their sleep” (P 359)— carries a productive ambiguity about who or what is unmade; who or what sleeps. The white men are “mad with somnambulism” (P 360). There is “A black membrane over the face” of the indigenous men, and the mountains are “under the blanket” (P 360). The old planetary body is paralyzed as if in sleep, “Though the mind is awake” (P 360). The metaphor of parasomnia is critical with respect to the inequalities and injustices of modern America. In “The Evening Land”—deliberately and mischievously placed in the “Fruits” section of Birds, Beasts and Flowers—Lawrence anticipates his time to come in the United States with ambivalence. At stake, as always, is whether the projected encounter will be symbiotic or parasitic—whether the poet’s soul will be enlarged or shrivel. He fears in modern, inorganic, capitalist, democratic America the displacement even of an emaciated idealism by the rise of an automaton selfhood, the negation implicit in “the iron click of your human contact” (P 242); Your more-than-European idealism, Like a be-aureoled bleached skeleton hovering Its cage-ribs in the social heaven, beneficent. And then your rapid resurrection Into machine-uprisen perfect man. (P 242) The poem enacts the tension felt by the poet between the attraction of America’s “demonish, New World / nature” (P 243) and recoil from its inhuman modern will: “The winding-sheet of your self-less ideal love” (P 242) spoken in the language of Lawrence’s critique of Whitman. With the tension unresolved, the poem asks the question that resonates through the body of poems: “What does it matter / What we call human, and what we don’t call human?” (P 243). It is a question and a poem that preceded the formation of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, but one that was relocated to it and that informs the exploration of poetic, political, religious, ethical, and natural matter in that volume. Specifically, it challenges what goes under

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the sign of the human and has wider ramifications for how the ecological subject unfolds into the open ground of poetry.

Creatureliness There remains a strong sense of the futility of trying to reconcile the many contradictions that characterize Lawrence’s constantly shifting position on the nonhuman. This is not to denigrate an artist who was consistently capable of radical reappraisals of humanity, and who was interested in the creative potential of the limits of human understanding about nonhuman life. It is, instead, to acknowledge the complexity of his analysis of universal coexistence, how kinship is perceived, and his enjoyment in extending the apparent limits of language. The prefaces ahead of each section of Birds, Beasts and Flowers (which were not included in the first editions) are influenced by Lawrence’s reading of John Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy.28 Pre-Socratic ideas helped to shape and give expression to the interconnected “cosmos” that underpins Birds, Beasts and Flowers. One of the ways in which the volume disrupts access to the vegetal and animal other is in the nearness of and, therefore, the distance between the section prefaces and the poems with which they are associated in the text. The prefaces are written mainly in a mode of portentous faux-mythic pronouncements, with highly codified connections to the section poems serving to undermine the concept of taxonomy. All the poems in the volume deviate radically from being unequivocally “natural” histories. The “stories” of nature being told here follow the logic of the “stemless flower-mesh” (P 251) as opposed to rigid, hierarchical— arboreal—systems of classification. While there is no doubt that Birds, Beasts and Flowers has a much-discussed mythopoeic dynamism and a fascination with archetypes and, in its formation, made pronounced swerves into a tedious rhetoric of restorative manliness—Lawrence’s “Overweening men, full of screams of life, commanding a wide / field of vision” (P2 1073) was revised, in “The American Eagle” to “Overweening bird, full of screams of life, commanding a lucrative / obedience”—it is the concentration on the multiplicity of nonhuman life, its connections, ecologies, and voice, which extend modernism’s environments. “Snake” first came to general attention when it was published in the fifth and last anthology of Georgian Poetry 1920–22, in the company of pastoral

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revivals and poetry that gazed upon, and walked with, animals and birds and strode or wandered through beloved landscapes. They included Martin Armstrong’s “The Buzzards,” William H. Davies’s “The Captive Lion,” “The Moth” by Walter de la Mare, and Vita Sackville-West who “with the kestrels shared the cleanly day.”29 “Snake,” in keeping with many of the poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, as is very well known, stages an encounter between “anthropos” and an other-than-human being which stimulates questions about supremacy and conflict—without turning the snake into a mere cipher or motif. As is also well known, Jacques Derrida introduced this poem in a seminar on sovereignty, hospitality, and ethics in response to Lévinas’s uncertainty as to whether the animal has a face, and whether it can, therefore, be included in the “space of the ethical that Lévinas analyses and proposes.”30 In “Snake,” having failed to override his conditioning and therefore having tried to kill the creature, the poet is aroused to a feeling of remorse and believes that he now has “something to expiate: / A pettiness” (P 305). While this suggests that the creature requires recognition in some way, the expiation is deferred, postponed implicitly to the moment of the next creaturely encounter, and not enacted. Not all the poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers chart the dilemmas exposed in “Snake”; that much is obvious. In the botanical sections the nonhuman is renatured for us in language that implicates myth, politics, and kinship (abstracted) in unexpected, and at times controversial, configurations. “The Evangelistic Beasts” section brings an apocalyptic scale to its reformation of the symbols of the evangelists, grafting together pre-Christian iconography, theology, and the specific animal ontologies in each case. That section is a point where the categories pivot toward the animal and, ultimately, to the radical inclusion of the “Ghosts” section as not separable from Lawrence’s ecologizing impulse. It is in these ways that Birds, Beasts and Flowers represents a radical mode of rewriting contemporary nature poetry, especially that with which Lawrence had been associated. The Georgian Poetry anthologies were, crucially, produced to revive poetry and make it modern—“new”—in contrast to the verse of the preceding generation, and an aspect of this modernity was the consideration given to humankind’s co-dwellers on the earth. Partly it is an effect of overdone, mannered language and partly of the persistent human scale, but Harold Monro’s poem “Goldfish,” for instance, keeps the fish (plural) at a distance:

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Armstrong’s “The Buzzard” offers descriptions of the buzzard and his mate in flight, with the human onlookers “tranced;” Robert Graves’s “The Voice of Beauty Drowned” uses birdsong to highlight the challenges of poetic creativity. The newness of Lawrence’s exploration of the limits of his knowledge of the nonhuman other took the poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers to a different level. What is also evident is not only Lawrence’s inclusion of poems that offer barely codified commentaries on his dislike of instrumentalist and dehumanizing capitalism and other forms of hierarchical social control, including “bolshevism” (unless of the “salvia-savage” kind [P 269]), but also the volume’s uncompromising multispecies formation. The encounters with creatures and plants can be positively heuristic and stimulate ethical enquiry. Many of the poems—“The Red Wolf ” is one example—rely on a response to cultures, landscapes, and beings defined by Lawrence’s persistent recourse to atavism. The creatural suggests an alternative to this and can be read in “Humming-Bird,” the creature “storied” as primordial and monstrous in a ludic adaptation of evolutionary logic: “Probably he was big / As mosses, and little lizards, they say, were once big” (P 324). There are other suggestions, too, of the evolutionary connections between birds and dinosaurs in the “Birds” section.32 Lawrence does not explicitly propose a different future relation between humans and nonhumans. He does not, therefore, directly address questions of animal or environmental ethics. Of all the poems in the collection, only one, “Mountain Lion,” unequivocally expresses a sense of loss at the willful destruction of an animal killed by trappers. In “the open” (P 352), her significance is reduced to a pelt with a market value and, potentially, to meat. As the poem makes patent, she has a face: “And stripes on the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays, / Dark, keen, fine rays in the brilliant frost of her face” (P 351). It is not the intention here to suggest anachronistically, or in an aspecies manner, that in this detail Lawrence appears to preempt later discussions about the face (visage, which speaks and signifies the presence of the human and which, as we have seen, provokes ethical consideration). In

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“Fish,” the creatures have “no lips; / No tender muzzles” (P 290); the “Almost fish-voice” (P 290) operates by negation “To speak endless inaudible wavelets into the wave” (P 291). The poem tracks the dialectical opposition between the inseparability of the fish from its element and its discrete distinction from the wash of the waters: “Things of one element. / Aqueous, / Each by itself” (P 294, emphasis added). The poet acknowledges that “fishes” define the parameters of his knowledge, certainly, but crucially comes the revelation that the fish he catches to eat, even in its dying seconds, decenters him: “And my heart accused itself / Thinking: I am not the measure of creation” (P 293). Well-established prejudices persist in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. The mountain lion is a high-order mammal and one whose physical beauty after death warrants a paean of praise. It contrasts keenly with “Mosquito” in the “Creatures” section, in which the poet asks, “Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?” (P 289). In the context of this passing shamanistic identification, the encounter becomes gladiatorial in its exploration of their creaturely differences: “Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air / In circles and evasions, enveloping me” (P 287). This blood-sucking creature (she must be female despite the epithet “Monsieur”) is described as “A nothingness,” with an “evil little aura;” invisible, with an “anaesthetic power,” “enspasmed in oblivion,” and “Obscenely ecstasied” when blood “gorging” (P 288). There is nothing in the poem to suggest disease or perspective (not seriously infected, the “host,” being a large mammal, can bear the blood loss). At the mosquito’s demise there is a triumphalist tone of a kind absent from “Mountain Lion”: “Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes / Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you!” (P 289). The blood takes on an abject form in this repellent creature, and has resonance elsewhere: the gothic mosquito, through which others’ blood flows, becomes elementally antithetical, “a dull clot of air” (P 287). Similarly, in “Man and Bat,” the trapped pipistrello is repeatedly described as a “clot,” signifying something repulsive and unclean, something psychologically disturbing. Yet the measure of the human in both poems resides in “wide-eyed responsibility / In life” (P 300). Mosquito and bat are creatures of the air, aerialists. In a passage from Apocalypse quoted earlier, the knowledge Lawrence’s feet have of being part of the earth, dynamically of it, recalls the description in “Kangaroo” of the mother with her roo: “And all her weight, all her blood, dripping sack-wise down / towards the earth’s centre” (P 345). Here the chthonic connection that is amplified in her hopping motion magnifies her center of gravity. In

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common with a very few creatures of the northern hemisphere, she is “bellyplumbed to the earth’s mid-navel,” only, in her case, with more intensity: But the yellow antipodal Kangaroo, when she sits up, Who can unseat her, like a liquid drop that is heavy, and just touches earth. (P 344) The implication is that, like all her species, she is magnetized dynamically toward the planet’s core, constituted by the forces that animate her: the injunction to the kangaroo is “Leap then, and come down on the line that draws to the earth’s deep, / heavy centre” (P 345, emphasis added). This kinship with earthly forces is represented implicitly as a property of the ecological subject, as it cannot be, again implicitly, for automata. In “Fish,” the multiplicity “swarm in companies” and “drive in shoals,” “Many suspended together, forever apart” (P 291), with, crucially, “A magnetism in the water between them only” (P 292, emphasis added). This kinetic swarm is also suggested in “Bat” in “A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches” (P 294), and there are many other examples, including the fragile stems of the almond trees in Sicily, their “Grey, lavender, sensitive steel, curving thinly and brittly up in a / parabola” (P 253). The impersonal language recalls Lawrence’s description in 1914 of the “inhuman” element to characterization which he developed in the Brangwen novels and expressed in terms of the solid-state allotropes of carbon: “my theme is carbon.”33 In Birds, Beasts and Flowers, these examples demonstrate the degree to which “carbon” remains for Lawrence an effective ecopoetic metaphor: the individual creature or species is not converted by an allotropic poetics into something elsewhere, but reappraised in planetary and bodily contexts that recall the molecular, interdependent ecologies described by Alphonso Lingis, as signaled earlier. This introduces a third term: “inhuman.” Lawrence’s 1914 theory of subjectivity, selfhood, and being was not a statement of ecological subjectivity so much as of inhuman impersonality which required a new language. For this reason, the animality of human subjects in the Brangwen novels is not the same as the ecological interconnectedness of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, with its implicit interrogation of modes of coexistence alongside its alignment of unexpected, often oxymoronic, associations.

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Beastliness Rosi Braidotti describes the oedipal relationship with nonhuman animals, such as domestic pets, that humans construct as familial: “As a mode of relation, it is […] neurotic in that it is saturated with projections, taboos and fantasies. It is also a token of the human subject’s sense of supreme ontological entitlement.”34 In the absence of personhood, these animals lack any control over their bodies: they are sterilized, culled, relocated, genetically modified, and commodified. In the final section of this chapter I shall illustrate how encounters with animals whose subjugation is highly visible—first, animals constructed as pests; then, domestic and semi-domestic dogs—return us to the ways in which Lawrence reconciles himself to speciesism based on this sense of ontological entitlement. It is notable in Lawrence how the dogmatism of the discursive writing attempts to disturb the “art-speech” of the poetry or, more positively, how the “art-speech” of the poetry subtly dismantles the dogma. “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine” (1925) is part autobiography and part polemical essay. It opens with accounts of encounters with creatures, wild and domesticated, on Kiowa Ranch, Taos County, New Mexico, where for two years the Lawrences lived. The veracity of these encounters is in some details questionable: they, too, are “storied.” A chance meeting with a porcupine, an indigenous species at home in wooded areas of North America, casts the creature as vermin, destroying pine trees—“Everyone says, porcupines should be killed; the Indians, Mexicans, Americans all say the same.”35 This is not a “Snake” encounter with “one of the lords / Of life” (P 305), raising questions of hospitality and accommodation. The porcupine poses no threat to life but is conveniently re-creatured as repugnant, “a great tick,” its back “a round bear-like mound,” its movement “a lumbering, beetle’s, squalid motion, unpleasant” (RDP 349). At this time the resistance to killing is stronger than the narrator’s feelings of repulsion, a repulsion that is unexpectedly based on its creatureliness. So, it is this creatureliness that potentially exempts it from preservation—if it is vermin it could, should, be killed. In an encounter with a different porcupine Lawrence takes up a gun and shoots the animal twice, inexpertly, and finally clubs it to death with a cedar pole, an act that is made easier because it is dark, and he cannot see her face. The essay develops as a polemic advocating discrimination between species, races, and types based on existential inequality, to justify the mastery, the subjugation, of the “lower”

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order of life by the “higher”: the emphasis is on cycles of subjugation that define existence. “Being,” Lawrence asserts, is the property not of species (which can and should eradicate each other) but of individuals; only the individual can be “vividly alive” (RDP 357), whether a dandelion or a mountain lion. Prior to this assertion of a rationale for nurturing a philosophy of existential inequality (a philosophy in which Lawrence underplays collectivities such as those that cause pandemics), Lawrence describes an encounter with a trespasser, possibly a sheepdog, which has strayed, injured, onto the ranch distressed by a swollen muzzle which is stuck painfully with a great number of porcupine quills. The description of Lawrence’s attempt to extract the quills, which, left alone, will likely kill the dog, highlights the power of empathy to inaugurate an unforeseen episode of cross-species relationality. With the passing of time, and finding the dog’s only partial cooperation tiresome, and with the onerous task of quill extraction not completed, the nerve-worn writer-rancher picks up first a stone and then “a good stick” (RDP 352) and hits the dog in order to rid himself of its maddening presence. In doing so he strikes it on its punctured, spongy snout, extracting a yelp of pain before the dog takes off. In a variation on the theme of “Snake,” the narrator stands back feeling “pangs of regret, at having hit him, unintentionally, on his sore nose” (RDP 352). The violence meted out to the dog in this example is in inverse proportion to the empathy shown it—minor irritation developed into a vicious impulse, with nothing, it seems, to provide the rationale for an “expiation” of the kind promised at the closing of “Snake.” This is in part because the dog has exhibited tendencies that Lawrence has elsewhere described as contemptible qualities in humans, predominantly through its display of dejection and its self-effacing wretchedness. At the point at which the narrator prepares to strike the dog, the environment acquires an animallike actuality: “Already in the heat was that sting-like biting of electricity, the thunder gathering in the sheer sunshine […] and making one’s whole body feel dislocated” (RDP 352). Dislocated, dispersed, perhaps atomized, and more a part of the biting electricity than apart from it. In Birds, Beasts and Flowers a different dog, a familiar, “Bibbles,” is the eponymous subject of a poem which, while it appears to exemplify the poet’s desire for mastery developed with reference to what is evidently a highly conditional attachment to a pet—the Lawrences’ “black little bitch” (P 346)— is also of a piece with Lawrence’s critique in Studies in Classic American Literature of Whitman’s egotistical idealism, the “One Identity” not separable

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from America’s “catastrophe” of “exaggerate love” described in “The Evening Land” (P 242). Hence, of Bibbles: Don’t you love everybody!!! Just everybody. You love ’em all. Believe in the One Identity, don’t you, You little Walt-Whitmanesque bitch? (P 346) Bibbles, inscribed in this way, is negatively humanized to embody a discredited love-ideal that Lawrence associates with modern America (in which Whitman, whose influence is evident in Lawrence, is implicated). Consequently, Bibbles is expected to carry a great deal of freight, being subject to moralizing judgments disproportionate to her familial function. In the moment, she is judged to be unworthy because she appears insensitive to the difference between the proprietorial hand that feeds her and the kindness of strangers. The poem builds its theme by deploying speciesism, racism, and sexism: she is denigrated as black, impure, a bitch, capricious. Her “nemesis” is welcomed using a barely disguised rape narrative. Bibbles, “miserable little bitch of love-tricks,” is accused of approaching people indiscriminately for love—“Me or the Mexican who comes to chop wood” (P 349), but: Now you’ve come sex-alive, and the great ranch-dogs are all after you. They’re after what they can get, and don’t you turn tail! (P 350) As the poem’s final lines confirm, the subject animal must substitute for “exaggerate love” personal loyalty, a quality most prized in friends and, in Lawrence’s case, “Madame.”36 It is a matter of record that, on finding Bibbles fugitive in the company of his neighbors, the artists Knud Merrild and Kai Gótzsche, Lawrence brutally pursued and kicked her in what reads then, and today, as an episode of animal cruelty, far in excess of the “skelp” she gets in the poem “with a juniper twig” (P 349).37 Whether or not, or to what extent, Lawrence abused his dog is not, though, the point here. The poem’s nasty master/slave address to Bibbles is closely aligned to the essay in “Reflections” in which species egalitarianism and, in current terms, cooperation is regarded as, at the very least, troubling: existence depends on the subjugation of lower orders (species, races) by higher orders (species, races). It is a hierarchy based

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on the throw of those ontological dice and is a theme Lawrence continues to develop in “Aristocracy.”38 When creation fails, argues Lawrence, the result, as for the ichthyosaurus, is extinction (RDP 360). He does not speculate whether the ichthyosaurus counted, whether it had significance, whether it cooperated with fellow species, in short, whether it had meaning ecologically. Extinction, he warns, might yet be humankind’s bad destiny, not as a result of poor custodianship of the Earth, but of the Self ’s inability to connect with the universe (the preserve of the “natural aristocracy” like Caesar, Galileo, and Shelley) (RDP 368–70). In his time, Lawrence asserts, “To men, the sun is becoming stale, and the earth sterile. But the sun itself will never become stale, nor the earth barren. It is only that the clue is missing inside men” (RDP 360). Clueless man can achieve a vital relationality “only with his own cheap little species” (RDP 371), and in “Aristocracy” the political accents of Birds, Beasts and Flowers and the encounters in “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine” align: “The democratic mass, capitalist and proletariat alike, are a vast, sluggish, ghastlily, greedy porcupine, lumbering with inertia” (RDP 376). The radical connectivity of Apocalypse is a step away from the hierarchical program of “Reflections” and its culling of porcupines, as is the creation of the ecological subject in Birds, Beasts and Flowers for whom Lawrence, of course, knows he cannot speak. Oikos, in Lawrence’s writing, is called upon to accommodate a response to nature that produced sacred trees, Orphic farewells, and Mithraic bulls (whose blood flows atavistically in Lawrence’s veins when he unexpectedly encounters Susan, his ranch cow). It is called upon to accommodate the less symbolic, highly connective, “stemless flower-mesh” of Birds, Beasts and Flowers which implicates the bare fig trees with the “sweet-myriad-limbed octopus” and the “sweet-fleshed sea-anemone” (P 251), as well as with Demos (P 252). Such highly self-conscious signifying networks, which can align and oppose the organic and the inorganic, make it possible not only to propose the development of an eco-consciousness as a significant aspect of Lawrence’s poetics, but also to proceed with caution in the face of ecocritical appropriations of Lawrence, particularly as representative of a tendency within British modernism. By the same token, a version of eco-modernism that fails to take account of the intricate worlding, the terraforming, of Lawrence’s poetry risks pushing to the margins an act of significant cultural investment in ecological subjectivity.

Part IV Agricultural and Horticultural Poetics

C HA P T E R 8

Planting, Gardens, and Organicism in Literary Modernism Jeremy Diaper

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he barren setting of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is permeated with “endless plains,” “cracked earth,” and the imagery of the desert. Based on an initial reading, therefore, it might not seem especially germane to a consideration of planting and gardens in literary modernism.1 There is, however, a horticultural language and imagery that remains latent beneath the “dead land” (CPP 37) of Eliot’s seminal modernist poem. In this chapter, I shall build on my monograph T. S. Eliot and Organicism by continuing to nurture a new means of interpreting modernist literature, through exploring the longstanding influence of the soil, cultivation, and gardening. My main focus here will be on revealing the significance of the soil in the work of Eliot, but I will also branch out beyond this to illustrate how gardens, planting, and horticulture provided a source of inspiration to other literary modernists, including Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. I will begin with an examination of Eliot’s The Waste Land, before exploring Sackville-West’s own literary response to Eliot’s “dead land.” Following on from this, I will consider Eliot’s personal attachment and fondness for plants, before exploring how the influence of the organic husbandry movement fostered a sustained consideration of agricultural and horticultural issues in his social criticism of the 1930s–50s. This chapter concludes by illustrating how gardens

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in Eliot’s Four Quartets became representative of an elusive Edenic state of spiritual tranquility. The oft-cited opening lines of The Waste Land encapsulate the painful process of spiritual rebirth: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land / mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain” (CPP 61). With the “breeding” and “stirring” of this passage we encounter the language of the gardener, but this is far from an image of fecundity. The month of April and the season of spring is traditionally a period of fertility and a point that should facilitate the rebirth of natural processes. But for the denizens of Eliot’s “Unreal City” (CPP 62), the prospect of regeneration is one that requires a demanding renunciation of worldly and material goods. “Dull roots” are incapable of bearing any fruit, and the spiritual process of renewal yields only a mixture of the temporal concerns of “Memory and desire.” The growth of the lilacs here is not a symbol of fertility, but a sinister perversion of the pastoral. Indeed, as Alexandra Harris succinctly puts it, the opening of The Waste Land can be interpreted as “a kind of nightmare inversion of gardening, in which the flourishing of plants is dreaded.”2 This analogy, though, can be extended beyond the opening lines of the poem. In fact, throughout Eliot’s “Unreal City” we see a series of distorted symbols of fertility and rebirth, and a range of disturbing depictions of gardens. We might recall here, for example, the commonly cited hyacinth garden episode in the original manuscript of the poem. In this passage, Eliot takes the celestial garden traditionally conceived of as a prelapsarian paradise, with its fresh blossoming flowers and transcendent lovers, and inverts it to convey the soulless apathy and deadening sensual experience of the city, where man is neither “Living nor dead” (CPP 62). Elsewhere in the poem, Eliot associates the hyacinth garden with the memory of Phlebias, the drowned Phoenician sailor. Here the appearance of the “pearls that were his eyes” (CPP 65) recalls another instance in Eliot’s poetry where flowers and death converge in a strikingly sinister image. In “Whispers of Mortality” from Eliot’s Poems (1920), he draws together descriptions of death and mourning by depicting flowers emerging from dead eyes: “Daffodil bulbs instead of balls / Stared from the sockets of the eyes! He knew that thought clings round dead limbs / Tightening its lusts and luxuries” (CPP 52). Recalling Act V, Scene 4 of John Webster’s The White Devil (1612)—in which flowers grow from a skull—Eliot’s bulbs have other obvious literary associations, and may be seen as a sardonic allusion

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to Wordsworth’s romanticization of daffodils. The yellow, nodding flowers of the bulbous plant, which have a perennial affiliation with Easter, might also serve as a precursor to the opening of “The Burial of the Dead” in its contortion of the birth of spring. Certainly, The Waste Land offers little hope of regeneration and is symptomatic of a deep-seated spiritual malaise where there is a marked absence of growth or fecundity. The “dried tubers” of The Waste Land have only “a little life” (CPP 61) and the limited foliage in the poem are “the last fingers of leaf ” (CPP 67) submerged within the brown muddy waters of the Thames. The over-abiding association that emerges in Eliot’s use of horticultural imagery in his early city poems, therefore, is not with growth and rebirth, but with death and decay. This is particularly manifest in the Stetson episode: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” (CPP 63). Here even Stetson’s routine tending of a suburban garden carries with it repellent undertones of the burying of a corpse. The follow-up question—“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?” (CPP 63)—ensures the language of horticulture is conjoined with cadaverous and deathly connotations once more. In this instance the “bed” can simultaneously be conceived as a flower bed or garden plot from which plants sprout, or indeed the “bed” in which a body is laid in its final resting place. As I myself, and others such as Crawford and Ellis, have argued elsewhere, the planting of the corpse also alludes to the primitive fertility rites of ancient vegetation ceremonies, in which the deaths and resurrection of the mythical gods Adonis, Attis, and Osiris were integral to the annual harvest and the flowering of produce.3 As part of these symbolic rituals, the burying of corn-god effigies during the sowing season and subsequent digging up of the corpses were seen as integral to the successful sprouting of crops. However, that the corpse in Stetson’s garden is yet to sprout is indicative of the lack of fecundity, in both a telluric and spiritual sense. Through Eliot’s initial allusion to the agricultural rituals of primitive societies, he illustrates that contemporary London is grossly out of touch with nature and the regeneration of the soil. In “Interlude in London,” for instance, Londoners are seen to “hibernate among the bricks” and are capable only of “inspiring mouldy flowerpots.”4 Elsewhere, the discourse of horticulture is used to convey the unhealthiness of the city where the drab and dreary conditions cultivate nothing more than a suburban ennui. Take, for example,

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“Morning at the Window,” in which the “the damp souls of housemaids” are envisaged as “sprouting despondently at area gates” (CPP 27). Thus far, I have shown that a barrenness permeates Eliot’s early city poems. It is a poetic setting in which the horticultural references are seemingly incongruous with the dreary urban surroundings, and where lilacs struggle to flower and dried tubers remain inert. The non-growths in the poem serve to reinforce the barrenness of a whole generation in the aftermath of World War I. But the planting and horticultural imagery in The Waste Land also serves to highlight that spiritual rebirth remains a painful process of worldly abnegation and the renunciation of self. In this context, the soil of The Waste Land has succumbed to spiritual exhaustion and is incapable of bearing fruit without fertilization and a spiritual purgation and purification. From Eliot’s opening poems and their use of ambivalent natural imagery, it is apparent that his engagement with the horticultural is distinct from the botanical representations found in the work of other writers, and some comparisons at this stage are especially fruitful. For other modernists such as Vita Sackville-West, the emergence of horticultural language in their literary work sprang first and foremost from a practical interest in and knowledge of gardening. Writing in The Women’s Land Army in 1944, she concluded that “in the more expert branches the possibilities and range of interest” in gardening were “unlimited.”5 For fifteen years, from 1946 to 1961, she gained fame as the co-creator of the garden at Sissinghurst in Kent, which she tended with her husband Harold Nicolson. Her archetypal English style of gardening even earned her the nickname the “English Rose,” and it was plants that she considered to be her own individual contribution to the garden at Sissinghurst, characterizing her style in the journal of the Royal Horticultural Society as “maximum informality in planting.”6 In addition to being an avid horticulturalist, Sackville-West wrote a gardening column for The Observer, which was both extensive in its practical gardening advice, and effusive in its love of plants—eventually earning her the Veitch Memorial Medal, an international prize awarded by the Royal Horticultural Society. Over half a decade through the war Sackville-West worked on a long poem called The Garden (1946), which coincided with her efforts to craft a physical garden outside. Interestingly, the poem can be conceived of as a direct response to the barrenness of Eliot’s The Waste Land. She cites the first four lines in order to put forward a vision of fertility that was directly opposed to Eliot’s poem. The garden is portrayed in Sackville-West’s poem as

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“the rich and hopeful, the solvent land,” and not what she terms “some poor desert strewn with nibbled bones, a land of death, sterility and stones.”7 Whereas Eliot’s conception of spring brought an agonizing sense of dread, The Garden extols April as the “angel of the months” and “the young Love of the year” (G 132), and the poem blossoms with images of fresh growth and abundance, from the “Lady Tulip” with her “streak of pink that ribs her white” through to the “Fecund Diana” and “indigo Grape hyacinth” (G 133). While for Eliot the desert landscape of The Waste Land presented a fragmentary and disjointed experience, in The Garden the “lavender petals sheathed in silver floss” (G 132) form part of a cohesive and enriching tapestry woven by Nature. Furthermore, for Sackville-West gardening became inextricably linked with the act of writing itself and formed part of the same creative impulse: “My garden all is overblown with roses, / My spirit all is overblown with rhyme,” she wrote in “Sonnet” from Orchard and Vineyard (1921).8 In The Garden, she also conceives of the role of the horticulturalist as synonymous with that of the poet: “But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with colour nicely flung” (G 125). Both the poet and gardener, then, have a vital role to play in enabling “fresh growth” (G 124) to break through “untrammelled,” (G 125) and to enable the flowering of a fertile present from a past age of disillusionment. Fittingly, when Sackville-West’s poem was recognized with the Heinemann prize in 1946, she used the £100 award to purchase a mass of azaleas for the garden, which reaffirmed this vision of replenishment. As Karina Jakubowicz illustrates in her chapter in this collection, the influence of Post-Impressionism can clearly be seen in Virginia Woolf ’s depictions of nature and garden spaces. The horticultural also had a particularly personal significance for Woolf. In a letter to friends announcing the purchase of her house, she recognized at an early stage that for herself and Leonard the garden would become the “pride” of their hearts.9 It is telling that there are very few entries in Woolf ’s diary that do not contain some form of allusion to the garden, with frequent references to their cherished orchard and its “infinity of fruit-bearing trees.”10 And, of course, her morning walk through the Italian garden, inspired in part by a trip to Tuscany in 1933, was also an integral means to enable her creativity to flourish en route to her wooden writing lodge.

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Woolf ’s engagement with the botanical is ever-present in her fiction, and it was the garden that served as the basis from which her ideas continued to germinate. Even when describing her first meeting with T. S. Eliot and his own creative impetus, the garden was subconsciously present. Woolf opined that Eliot “believed in living phrases” and was keen to ensure that “new poetry” was able to “flower in the stem of the oldest.”11 Although Woolf gained experience of a number of routine gardening tasks, it is fair to conclude that her principal engagement with the garden was through the sense of serenity and calmness that the salubrious setting afforded her, and its foliage and vegetation provided a continued source of creative inspiration. It is worth noting, however, that the garden also caused an element of friction in her marriage. Such was the extent of Leonard’s immersion in the world of gardening that Virginia would have to entreat him to book time for walks, which points to the occasional tension it created but also serves to underscore its importance. During Eliot’s first marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood the garden also took on a deep-seated significance. Robert Crawford observes in Young Eliot, for example, that when they lived in their neo-Georgian flat at 18 Crawford Mansions, Marylebone, Vivienne would often spend more time in the garden than with Tom himself.12 The significance of the garden to Vivienne’s overall sense of happiness and wellbeing was something Eliot recalled to Bertrand Russell in a letter of 1919. Reflecting on the possibility of moving into Russell’s apartment at Marlow House, Eliot noted that he had lost sight of how attached Vivienne was to the garden at Crawford Mansions and that she was extraordinarily upset at the thought of parting with it. He went on to stress that “The garden in particular is such a great joy and source of activity to her that … I am sure it would be a mistake to deprive her of this interest. She is always thinking about the garden.”13 Vivienne’s own letters also testify to a continued interest in plants. Writing in 1925 to Mary Hutchison—the elegant socialite and member of the Bloomsbury group—Vivienne thanked her profusely for a recent gift of violets and snowdrops, which she excitedly indicated would be planted in the garden. Elsewhere, she relayed that she very much looked forward to seeing Mary’s own garden at her new address in Regent’s Park. Surprisingly, what also emerges from a perusal of Eliot’s voluminous correspondence is a warm appreciation of flowers. This affection for flowers is particularly pronounced in his letters to his mother. In July 1918, Eliot commented that “the gardens of Marlow are brilliant with hollyhocks now,

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which start after the foxgloves and lupins and larkspur are over.”14 Moreover, he relayed with delight that conditions in the United Kingdom helped to foster the flowering of plants for much of the year, noting that “In England there is continuous bloom one flower to another, from March nearly to December.”15 This detailed exposition of gardening conditions is also noticeable in a letter to his mother of 1929, in which Eliot enclosed the first snowdrop of the season. He noted: “Various bulbs are poking their way up, but everything is very late, and the wallflowers which we put in the autumn are all dead from the frost.”16 In fact, for Eliot, the garden served as a great relief from the hustle and bustle of the city, and he lamented his periods in the capital when he did not have access to such respite. In a letter of October 1923 he even went so far as to suggest that “It would not be so bad in London if we had a house and a little garden of our own.”17 Such references to gardens and flowers were not isolated to Eliot’s personal correspondence. Often his fondness for the horticultural informed and inspired his way of thinking about poetry and the role of the editor. Responding to the assertion that his poem Ash Wednesday (1930) was “obscure,” he drew an intriguing analogy between poetry and flowers. In arguing that there were two types of obscurity, he suggested that the preferred form of opacity was akin to the complexity and intricacy of a plant. The “good” form of obscurity, he observed, was “that which is the obscurity of any flower: something simple and to be simply enjoyed, but merely incomprehensible as anything living is incomprehensible.”18 Even his quotidian duties as editor of The Criterion resulted in horticultural comparisons. When apologizing for the delay in responding to F. R. Leavis’s pamphlet on “Culture and Authority” in 1932, Eliot acknowledged that the importance of a prompt response was akin to the timing of preparing one’s flowers: “I am only too well aware,” he stated, “that delay in dealing with a pamphlet is like delay in planting flower-beds.”19 However, at this point it is important to recognize that Eliot’s interest in the soil went beyond gardening and the planting of the flower beds, and I shall now turn toward his deep-seated concern with the cultivation of the soil. As we saw in Eliot’s city poems, he consistently alluded to a parched and exhausted soil, but this came to have a more pronounced and foreboding undertone as he became ever more aware of the crisis in Britain’s agriculture in the late 1930s. In his reflections on culture’s significant role in the formation and development of a healthy civilization, Eliot discussed at length the interconnected issues of the environment, agriculture, the soil, and culture.

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As editor of The Criterion, a board member of the New English Weekly and a director of Faber and Faber, Eliot frequently engaged with the central tenets of the organic husbandry movement. Some of Eliot’s most noteworthy agricultural pronouncements appeared in the pages of The Criterion, which under his editorship became a forum for informed discussion on issues relating to agriculture. A range of agricultural authorities featured in Eliot’s periodical, including Viscount Lymington, H. J. Massingham, K. E. Barlow, and Rolf Gardiner.20 As its longtime editor Philip Mairet observed, the notable agriculturalists who contributed to the New English Weekly also featured in Eliot’s Criterion.21 It is especially telling, then, that Eliot’s oft-cited comment in his Criterion commentary of October 1938 should emerge in a journal in which rigorous agricultural debate recurred throughout the 1930s. Eliot’s observation that “to understand thoroughly what is wrong with agriculture is to understand what is wrong with nearly everything else” revealed a clear interest in the soil.22 From farming mechanization to soil fertility, agricultural issues were regularly considered in The Criterion, and a number of the founding texts of the organic husbandry movement, such as Lymington’s Horn, Hoof and Corn (1932), were reviewed favourably in the Review section of the journal.23 Eliot’s social criticism of this period regularly featured agricultural pronouncements, which were influenced by his breadth of engagement in organic circles. In addition to his sustained engagement with the main agricultural journals of the period, Eliot was in regular correspondence with a range of agriculturalists.24 In fact, in Prose Literature since 1939, his longtime friend John Hayward considered Eliot’s social criticism as part of the agricultural literature of the 1930s and 1940s. Hayward observed that “the practice and particularly the theory of agriculture” was a prominent subject matter in much writing between 1939 and 1945, and highlighted that many of these texts offered “blueprints … of a brave new world.”25 Among the vast amount of “agronomical literature” published in the 1930s and 1940s, Hayward included Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), alongside influential agricultural texts such as Lady E. B. Balfour’s The Living Soil (1943), Michael Graham’s Soil and Sense (1941), and Sir Edward John Russell’s Agriculture Today and Tomorrow (1945).26 Eliot himself was knowledgeable about the organic issues of the period and kept a number of notable agricultural authorities apprised of important publications. Writing to the ninth earl of Portsmouth (Viscount Lymington) in 1949, for example, Eliot sent a copy of Fairfield Osborn’s Our

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Plundered Planet, published by Faber and Faber.27 Osborn’s book was one of many agricultural texts published by Faber that espoused the organic cause during Eliot’s membership of its board of directors.28 Although Eliot proclaimed himself to be “merely a smatterer in a few very narrow fields,” it is clear from his role as a director of Faber, and from the agricultural content of The Criterion, that he had a profound interest in the organic texts of the period.29 What is remarkable, though, is not just Eliot’s approbation of the traditional forms of agriculture practiced by the organicists, but his in-depth knowledge of the biological processes inherent to organic methods of husbandry. In his essay on “Cultural Diversity and European Unity,” which was published in the summer of 1945, he revealed his awareness of the breadth of agricultural texts written in the 1930s–1940s and commented that “investigations of agricultural scientists in recent years tend towards getting us back to a more natural form of cultivation.”30 In spite of Eliot’s insistence that he lacked practical knowledge, his comments in this essay reveal his detailed understanding of the importance of organic husbandry: It is pretty widely maintained that artificial, chemical fertilisers have only a very limited value; that their abuse adds to the spread of diseases among both plants and animals; and that when the land receives its natural return of manure and decaying vegetation instead of chemicals, it produces healthy plants which do not need to be sprayed with other chemicals to rid them of blight and insects.31 In this section of the essay, Eliot highlights the key organic issues repeatedly highlighted in The Criterion and New English Weekly and argues for the importance of the practices of organic husbandry and avoiding a reliance on artificial fertilizer. That Eliot’s essay was subsequently reprinted in 1946 in John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi magazine, a journal that became almost exclusively focussed on agricultural issues in the 1940s, serves to reinforce that Eliot was actively contributing to the agricultural discussions and debates of the period.32 Crucially, while the principal focus of the organic husbandry movement was on ensuring a sound approach to agriculture, the organicists recognized that organic farming and gardening were closely aligned. Many seminal organic texts of the period that were published by Faber, such as Ben Easey’s Practical

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Organic Gardening (1955), also discussed horticulture in conjunction with the broader agricultural debates of the period.33 This was also evident in Albert Howard’s influential organic text, Farming and Gardening for Health or Disease (1945). As the title indicates, Howard believed that organic manure was essential to the right treatment of the soil, in both gardens and farms. According to Howard, the fundamental problem was “the failure to realize that the problems of the farm and garden are biological rather than chemical.”34 In the concluding summary of his text, Howard highlighted that the restoration of soil fertility through composting was of critical importance and placed an equal emphasis on organic farming and gardening for the future of society: “We must in our future planning pay great attention to food—the product of sun, soil, plant, and livestock—in other words to farming and gardening.”35 Elsewhere, in From Vegetable Waste to Fertile Soil (1955), Maye E. Bruce highlighted the direct similarities between gardens and farms, and recognized that both required a fertile soil that was nurtured through organic waste and that healthy soil could not be maintained through a reliance on artificial fertilizers.36 The organicists also regularly utilized horticultural language and imagery to encapsulate the importance of maintaining natural laws. As F. C. King stated in Gardening with Compost (1944), nature came to exemplify “the supreme gardener.”37 The association of organicism with gardening is most clearly discernible in Lawrence Hills, who was a member of the Soil Association and gardening columnist for the Observer in the 1950s to 1960s. Influenced by Albert Howard’s approach, Hills put his ideas on organic gardening into practice at the Henry Doubleday Research Association (originally based on his land in Bocking), which has now become Garden Organic, the UK charity responsible for promoting organic gardening. In Eliot’s essay on “Cultural Diversity and European Unity,” we can see the organic influence on his cultural criticism. Reaffirming arguments frequently reiterated in the seminal organic publications of the period, Eliot recognized that “the growth of a plant” could be fostered by what he referred to as a “wise gardener,” who would be able to “replenish the soil.”38 However, while the gardener might be able to “reduce pests,” Eliot asserted that there would always be factors that the gardener could not account for, from poorquality soil to a lack of rain.39 Eliot was adamant that culture had to be left to grow naturally. Again, he utilized a horticultural analogy, but this time with reference to trees:

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culture, like a tree, takes a long time growing; you can do something to help or hinder it, but you have to let it follow its own nature in growing. You can destroy it, and then you have to wait for another tree to grow, and it will take as long in growing as the one that you cut down.40 Through this arboreal analogy, Eliot reaffirmed that culture could not be artificially meddled with or constructed; it could only be nurtured to enable natural growth. In an analogous manner to the organic farmer and gardener, a healthy flourishing culture could only be achieved through an organic form of cultivation.41 Eliot’s reflections on the growth of culture in his essay were preceded by his engagement with Karl Mannheim’s “Moot” paper given in 1941. The Moot Group was established by J. H. Oldham in 1938 and served as a forum for discussion and debate on a wide range of issues from a Christian perspective, including education, culture, and social reconstruction. Alongside Eliot and the sociologist Mannheim, the membership of the group included other prominent intellectuals such as John Middleton Murry and Alec Vidler.42 Responding to Mannheim’s paper, Eliot compared the growth of culture to that of potatoes, and reiterated the importance of cultivating vegetables through a healthy and fertile organic soil: I quite agree that “real culture is something that has to be produced again and again, etc.” but the same thing is true of real potatoes: out of the same soil, fertilized by the excrement of men and animals (some of whom have eaten potatoes) and by decaying vegetation. I mean that what makes me uneasy is the suspicion of machineshop imagery, rather than the imagery of the natural cycle; and the suggestion that we are at a point where our past culture must be scrapped. I mean by culture something which grows from the depths and flowers at the top (I ought to have thought of something more apposite than potatoes). I agree that our present culture is rather undernourished by lacking deep roots in good soil. Soil and vegetables are two different things, but what I mean by culture is neither one nor the other, but that which includes both.43

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These comments on culture also heralded his later observations in his most substantive discussion of the topic in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948). Once again revealing the continued influence of organic thought on his social criticism, Eliot opined that an authentic culture should “grow… from the soil.”44 As I have illustrated in this chapter, Eliot became engrossed in the breadth of organic writing, and the influence of horticulture, planting, and gardens is evident in his poetry and social criticism. From the “dead land” of The Waste Land to the significant soil of the Four Quartets, this is the trajectory I have outlined. We have seen that Eliot’s conception of culture, and his engagement with agricultural and horticultural ideas, remained rooted in the central influence of the organic husbandry movement and its recurrent emphasis on the vitality of the living soil. Nevertheless, we should be mindful not to take away an image of Eliot tending his allotment garden in a state of bucolic bliss. His prolonged engagement with agriculture and horticulture was always with the ultimate aim of reorienting society and culture on a mass scale. Unlike other modernists such as Sackville-West and Woolf, it would not do to content oneself with what he alluded to as the “individual Gods” of the “allotment Garden.”45 It is apposite, therefore, that the most iconic garden in Eliot’s oeuvre—the rose garden of the Four Quartets—ultimately surpasses the terrestrial realm. The opening quartet, “Burnt Norton,” records an autumnal visit to a manor house in rural Gloucestershire with his close friend and correspondent Emily Hale. The initial imagery is taken predominantly from the actual gardens at Burnt Norton, where they enter the rose garden through a gate: “along the empty alley, into the box circle, / To look down into the drained pool. / Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged” (CPP 172). Eliot’s description of the rose garden is entirely unconcerned with the natural aspects of foliage, or with providing florid descriptions of plants, in the manner seen earlier in Sackville-West’s poem The Garden. Rather, the roses are described tersely as merely having “the look of flowers that are looked at” (CPP 172). In Four Quartets, the significance of the garden is not to be found in its earthly plants or vegetation, but as the site of a mystical transfiguration in which the “dry pool” is transformed, as the religious lotus rose rises from a pool of water where “the surface glittered out of heart of light” (CPP 172). Unlike the inert vegetation in The Waste Land which is contorted by the distorted seasons, or the “parched eviscerate soil” (CPP 193) of “Little Gidding,” which

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is exhausted through human misuse, the lotus rose is located “in and out of time” (CPP 190), in a moment of divine revelation that transcends any earthly concerns. In a similar manner to Ash Wednesday, with the symbolic elements of the pool, the ‘white light’ (CPP 94) and ‘the spirit of the fountain’ (CPP 98), the garden is ultimately transformed into an altogether higher reality. At the end of the first section of “Burnt Norton,” we are ushered out of the visionary garden in a reenactment of the Fall. Such moments of “sudden illumination” where “We had the experience but missed the meaning” (CPP 186) can only be fully understood at the end of our exploring, when the rose garden will be returned to once more, not through the gate at “Burnt Norton,” but through the purgatorial or paradisal flames where “the fire and the rose are one” (CPP 198).

C HA P T E R 9

“A rose had flowered” Virginia Woolf and the Nature of Post-Impressionism Karina Jakubowicz

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hen Virginia Woolf claimed that “on or about December 1910 human character changed,” she coined a phrase that would come to encapsulate the spirit of the age. It has been quoted by critics who echo Woolf ’s belief that “all human relations” shifted at this time, transforming “religion, conduct, politics, and literature.”1 Several commentators have pinned her choice of date on specific events, with the majority drawing links to the first Post-Impressionist exhibition, which opened at the Grafton Galleries on November 5 of that year.2 The appeal of connecting Woolf ’s statement to the exhibition lies partly in the abrupt challenge it posed to the values of Edwardian Britain. Organized by Roger Fry as an introduction to the new French masters, the show scandalized London society with paintings by artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Paul Gauguin. As the negative reviews rolled off the press, the Galleries swelled with guests and the paintings gained nationwide attention. The shockwaves they caused impressed the twentyeight-year-old Virginia Stephen, who was developing a deep appreciation for iconoclasm. Only a few months earlier she had taken part in the Dreadnought Hoax, where she had dressed as a male member of the Abyssinian royal family in order to gain entry to the Royal Navy’s flagship.3 The exhibition was

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similarly heterodox and retrospectively dubbed an “Art Quake”: “an assault along the whole academic front of art.”4 The radical nature of this historical moment is certainly in sympathy with Woolf ’s famous assertion, matching her account of a rupture between past and present. The Post-Impressionists’ desire to capture arresting images rather than minutely realistic ones is in the spirit of a pronouncement that dates human progress to a particular month while also vaguely gesturing to a period “on or about” this time. In the lines that follow her initial statement, Woolf attempts to be more explicit: I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden or definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless.5 Having gestured to the horizons of the future, she now turns to a landscape more commonly associated with the past. The rhythms of a country garden show changes occurring on a minor scale: hens lay eggs, flowers bloom. That the early twentieth century transformations in human behavior are deemed to be less “sudden or definite” than even the blooming of flowers places the events of 1910 into a more sobering perspective. Woolf suggests that while these cultural developments gradually dawned on society around a certain date, animals and plants enact more obvious transformations—their quiet revolutions happen overnight. It is the revolutionary quality of the natural world that is of interest in this chapter. I argue that, rather than being antithetical to the changes of 1910, nature had a significant role to play in the modern culture Woolf describes, not least of all in regard to Post-Impressionist art. This chapter explains how she portrays nature in light of this movement and makes it a part of her own modernist aesthetic. Consequently, as the title suggests, I will also touch on the nature of Post-Impressionism, taking into account its features and qualities while also assessing the importance of the natural world to the advocates of the movement.6 Whereas previous studies of Woolf and PostImpressionism have concentrated on formalism or on the impressionist quality of her writing, this chapter considers the effect the movement had on her choice and treatment of subject matter. It argues that she blends nature, art, and personal significance in a way that emulates Post-Impressionist

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aims. It will end by concentrating on gardens, a domestic, personal iteration of the natural world that was common in Post-Impressionist paintings, and consider their role in Woolf ’s 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse.

Virginia Woolf as Post-Impressionist The wealth of critical material on Woolf and Post-Impressionism tends to focus on two areas: the painterly qualities of her narratives, and her interest in the aesthetic theories of formalists such as Clive Bell and Roger Fry. These interpretations are united by an emphasis on the style and design of Woolf ’s work. For example, Henry R. Harrington argues To the Lighthouse can be read like a Post-Impressionist painting, positing that Lily Briscoe paints the garden in a way that renders the novel’s meaning in miniature. He makes a detailed study of both the structure of the painting and the text while explaining Fry’s influence on both.7 A similar approach is used by Jonathan Quick, who claims that Woolf ’s early work expresses and abides by Fry’s formalism. The question in both cases is not what is presented, but how it is presented. Harrington sees Woolf ’s lighthouse as a “central line” in the painting and text; Quick also suggests her short story “Blue and Green” is about the “problem of spatial design.”8 According to these readings, Woolf chose to depict a lighthouse for its color and shape, or at least for its ability to adhere to the tenets of Fry’s beliefs. Quick and Harrington’s critical readings not only refer to the formalism of Fry and Bell, but echo their methodologies. Fry posited that the most noteworthy aspect of an artwork is its form, a term he used not only to indicate line, shape, and composition, but also color and brushwork. This notion laid the groundwork for Bell’s concept of significant form. Bell placed the same emphasis on lines and colors but stressed the importance of emotion. Significant form occurs when the artist perceives objects “as pure forms in relation to one another, and feels emotion for them as such.”9 While Fry cautioned against Bell’s advice, feeling that to restrict emotional response to formal elements alone was too stringent, he agreed that form could (and should) move the viewer, and his writings emphasized this above the impact of symbolic and personal meanings. Formalists elevated one aspect of artistic composition while seeming to ignore others. In Cézanne and Formalism in Bloomsbury, Beverly H. Twitchell

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explains that form was “seen as an end rather than a means,” and “nearly rendered subject matter altogether invisible.”10 There is something inherently illogical about viewing art in this way. Form is content: it is an expression and dimension of all the other elements within a painting. To ignore this is to ignore the true meaning of form, which must be read in relation to other features to be fully understood. Post-Impressionist readings of Woolf ’s work have tended to suffer from this same oversight, with critics failing to see the emotional, symbolic, and aesthetic reasoning behind her choice of subject. These approaches have the added disadvantage of reinforcing a limited view of Post-Impressionist art. Much as formalists might argue to the contrary, subject matter clearly did matter to many painters within the movement. There are clear reasons why Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec chose to depict Parisian prostitutes, just as there were several factors that led Gauguin to move to Tahiti; these go well beyond aesthetic ideals, crossing over into personal, financial, and political considerations. The question of whether or not to depict the natural world and how to do so was a significant issue, one which often related to the aesthetic philosophies of each artist.

The Relation of Art to N/nature Few Post-Impressionists spread their focus across urban and rural subjects. As art historian Belinda Thompson writes, most “tended to specialise in one or the other for practical as well as artistic and ideological reasons.”11 The version of Post-Impressionism that was presented to the British public in 1910 fell chiefly into the rural rather than urban mode. With the exception of the portraits, and eight paintings by Edouard Manet, the pieces chiefly concerned organic, primitive, or pastoral themes. Figures were often presented in a natural setting, and even religious individuals, such as the couple in Adam et Eve (1902) by Gauguin, were rendered as temporal characters existing in an earthly landscape. The exhibition was also dominated by artists who made nature part of their personal, artistic philosophies. Gauguin saw it as integral to his primitivism, a vital part of reaching back to the “childhood of mankind,”12 while Matisse felt “an artist must possess nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm.”13 Cézanne would come to be celebrated for his dynamic depictions of landscapes, flowers, and fruit, and two of his contributions to the exhibition, Nature Morte (1862–64)14 and Les Pétunias (1879–80), were

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indicative of this.15 It was Cézanne who famously wanted to “astonish Paris with an apple.”16 He certainly succeeded in astonishing Woolf when her friend John Maynard Keynes purchased his Still Life with Apples (c. 1878) in 1918. Staring at the piece on Keynes’s wall, she felt the apples got “redder & rounder & greener,” prompting her to ask, “what can 6 apples not be?”17 The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1912–13) took a more abstract turn, but similar subjects dominated. Cubist works by Picasso and Braque joined those of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, with the latter pair setting the tone for an English branch of the Post-Impressionist school. Many other members of this group, including Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, and Dorothy Brett, also gravitated toward rural or organic themes.18 This inclination would be seen in art across the country in the coming decades. In his study of British landscape painting between 1920 and 1950, Ian Jeffrey notes that “there was a constant negotiation between pastoral and modernizing tendencies, with the pastoral usually in the ascendant.”19 It was also present in interior design, not least of all in Fry’s own Omega Workshops, where artists such as Grant and Bell decorated homewares with motifs of figures, flowers, and fruit.20 Nature also had a subtle role in Fry’s aesthetic theories. This was evidenced in his concept of natural form which, alongside rhythm and color, was one of the three elements of painting he felt were responsible for rousing emotion. He took the idea from Leonardo da Vinci, who wrote that “natural forms” (forms found in nature) contain “emotional elements ready made up for us, and all that art need do is to imitate Nature.”21 Fry agreed with harnessing the emotional force of natural forms, but felt that any further likeness to nature was unnecessary: We may then dispense once for all with the idea of likeness to Nature, of correctness or incorrectness as a test, and consider only whether the emotional elements inherent in natural form are adequately discovered.22 Fry appeared to use nature to mean reality, but his capitalization suggests he was gesturing toward subjects that exist in the natural world, including people and plants. The notion of “natural” forms also indicates (although does not stipulate) a preference for shapes and lines that occur “naturally.” This is reflected in Fry’s own paintings, which were chiefly rural landscapes and portraits rendered in flowing lines.

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Fry’s inclination to use the term “Nature” in lieu of “reality” is telling.23 Like many of his contemporaries, Fry used “nature” to denote the objective world from which the artist draws their inspiration. This term is not always capitalized in his work, but in those instances when it is, Fry suggests that the natural world is the subject in question. For Da Vinci, Nature predominantly was the reality depicted by artists, but at a time when Futurist and Vorticist painters were portraying motor cars, bomber planes, and skyscrapers, this conflation betrays a certain bias. It would seem that Fry saw the natural world, whether in the shape of a landscape, body, or object, as the most likely source of inspiration for the modern artist.24 Fry’s writings set the tone for the reception of Post-Impressionism in Britain, and both the supporters and detractors of the movement invoked nature in order to justify their opinions. Writing in the introduction to the catalog for the first exhibition, Desmond McCarthy explained his admiration for the artists using the example of a tree. When previous artists painted a tree, he stated, their “work often completely failed to express a tree, […] the ‘treeness’ of the tree was not rendered at all.” The Post-Impressionists, on the other hand, had an “independent, not to say rebellious” attitude to their subject matter. It was this “simplification of nature” that he claimed would “shock and disconcert [their] contemporaries.”25 Trees reappeared in Clive Bell’s introduction to the catalog for the second exhibition. “A literary artist who wishes to express what he feels for a forest thinks himself under no obligation to give an account of its flora and fauna,” he argued. “The PostImpressionist claims similar privileges.”26 The critics who attended the first exhibition were struck by the artists’ handling of nature, though not quite in the way that McCarthy had hoped. The Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Holiday put it bluntly when he stated, “No young painter who has fallen in love with Nature will be seduced from his pure affection by such stuff as this.”27 Another quipped that Cézanne “sees though he does not seize the true aspects of Nature.”28 Some critics went further. One painter was criticized for portraying “Nature as suffering from measles.”29 Gauguin was accused of painting “drunken palm trees,” and a landscape by Matisse was deemed “epileptic.”30 These comments implied that such interpretations of the natural world were diseased and intoxicated, even that they constituted a mockery of the natural order. By associating the painters with illness, the critics echoed to the wider consensus that the Post-Impressionists were mentally unstable. In one of

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several accusations aimed at Van Gogh, the paintings were described as “the visualised ravings of an adult maniac.”31 Another critic dubbed the whole exhibition “paint run mad.”32 In his review, Sir William Blake Richmond posited that the artists had an abnormal and unhealthy attitude toward art: The greater the artist, the more intense the vision, the loftier the imagination, the more modestly he will subjugate himself to Nature. […] Nature is not only the stern mentor, but the confiding friend of the true artist, the friend that keeps him straight and sane.33 The physician T. B. Hyslop was more heavy-handed in his article, “Postillusionism and the Art of the Insane” (1911), in which he argued for the connection between Post-Impressionism, delusion, and degeneracy. “Degenerates often turn their unhealthy impulses towards art,” he wrote, and “portray the reflections of their minds” through “faulty delineation, erroneous perspective, and perverted colouring.” “As long as they are in asylums,” he concludes, “both they and their works are harmless.”34 In light of his opinions, it is surprising that one of his patients was Vanessa Bell, who had asked for his advice during her first pregnancy. Shortly after publishing his article on madness and art, he was asked to assist yet another alleged PostImpressionist—Bell’s sister, Virginia Woolf.

Gardens of Passion and Disillusion Woolf ’s relationship with Post-Impressionism was greatly influenced by her friendship with Roger Fry. They met in the spring of 1910, after he accepted Clive Bell’s help with planning the First Post-Impressionist exhibition. Although Woolf could be disdainful of the movement (calling the artists a “modest sample of painters, innocent even of indecency”),35 she was fond of Fry and clearly intrigued by his ideas. Like him, she felt that styles in painting could be extended to literature, and in 1917 she found herself wondering whether “some writer will come along and do in words what [Post-Impressionists] have done in paint?”36 Fry raised the possibility of a literary Post-Impressionism in his review of an exhibition at the Mansard Gallery in 1919. Considering a painting of town houses by Léopold Survage, he attempted to “translate” the image into prose. What he describes is a battle between the built and organic spheres,

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represented by the painting’s depiction of houses and leaves. He writes that “the leaves of trees push” into the houses; the houses “try to deny the leaves, but the leaves are harder than the houses and more persistent.” He concludes this experiment with a realization: “I see, now that I have done it […] that Survage is almost precisely the same thing in paint that Mrs. Virginia Woolf is in prose.”37 Jonathan Quick surmises that the piece Fry had in mind was “Kew Gardens,”38 which had been published a few months earlier. If Woolf ’s portrayal of the garden space formed a covert part of Fry’s understanding of her as a Post-Impressionist, then it neatly reflects her own use of gardens in her framing of Fry’s life and work. When tasked with writing Fry’s biography after his death in 1934, she chose to begin with a description of the garden at his childhood home in Highgate, London. Using a combination of Fry’s biographical notes and her own narrative, she frames this space as the cradle of his imaginative and artistic inclinations. Woolf quotes Fry’s assertion that it was “the imagined background for almost any garden scene that I read of in books,” adding that “the serpent of Eden still bends down to Eve from the fork of a peculiarly withered and soot begrimed old Apple tree which stuck out of the lawn.”39 In keeping with the references to Eden, Fry attested to the garden being the scene of his “first passion and [his] first great disillusion.” The passion was “a bushy plant of large oriental poppies” with a red “redder than anything I could imagine.”40 His disillusionment came when he was ridiculed for trying to catch the poppies bursting into flower. This feeling was compounded when he was punished by his mother for picking one, the shock of which, Woolf writes, “was still tingling fifty years later.”41 Woolf uses these formative scenes to demonstrates Fry’s emotional and aesthetic sensitivity. Their perceived importance can be seen in the fact that she not only begins the book with the garden but ends with it too. Recalling Fry’s relationships with artworks over the course of his life, she writes: They bring to mind the little boy who sat in his own private and particular garden at Highgate, watching for the bud to burst into flower. […] What was true of the child in the garden was true of the man all through his life. There was always some bud about to burst into flower; there was always some flower that gave him pure delight.42

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Woolf presents every gallery and artwork Fry ever encountered as a garden or flower that drew his admiration. His childhood garden is thus placed at the root of the career that came afterward, a symbol of his constant devotion to beauty in art and life. Woolf had her own equivalent of Fry’s childhood refuge, the gardens at Talland House in St. Ives, Cornwall. The gardens not only served as the backdrop for summer holidays, bug-hunting and games of cricket, but for euphoric moments of realization and awe. Woolf termed these states “moments of being,”43 where days of “non-being” would be interrupted by the “sudden violent shock” of perception, and she would be struck by intense fear or emotion followed by intellectual insight.44 In each of these moments Woolf experienced a kind of paralysis; the need to stop and consider a complex idea. In one example she recalls fighting with her brother on the lawn. Feeling suddenly struck by the “hopeless sadness” of her own “powerlessness,” she stopped fighting, and “slunk off alone” to contemplate her discovery.45 In another instance, she was looking at the flower bed by the front door: “That is the whole”, I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower.46 Just as Fry’s attraction to the poppies reveals his keen aesthetic sensibilities, in particular his interest in color, so Woolf ’s flower provides a formative experience that impacts her philosophical, intellectual, and aesthetic views. As with Fry’s passion and disillusion, Woolf ’s garden experiences equipped her with a keen aesthetic sense while also conveying tragic realities and universal truths. In the aptly titled “Sketch of the Past,” Woolf expressed the desire to paint these moments: If I were a painter I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green. […] I should make a picture that was globular, semi-transparent; I should make curved shapes, showing the light through, but not giving a clear outline.47

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By the time she wrote these words in 1939, Woolf had already “painted” a version of these memories in To the Lighthouse, a novel inspired by her memories of St. Ives and seen partly through the eyes of a Post-Impressionist painter, Lily Briscoe.

To the Lighthouse The garden in To the Lighthouse is a space where memory is islanded. At the end of the novel, while far out to sea, James Ramsay looks back at the shore and sees the landscape as a hanging garden. All his memories are set in this childish paradise: Everything tended to set itself in a garden where there was none of this gloom […] All was blowing, all was growing; and over all those plates and bowls and tall brandishing red and yellow flowers a very thin yellow veil would be drawn, like a vine leaf at night. (TL 250) He recalls “how all those paths and the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there, were gone: were rubbed out; were past; were unreal” (TL 225). The space is highly emotional, not a mere mass of forms and colors but a site of deep personal significance.48 It forms a key part of a novel that Woolf saw as an “elegy” for her past, a way of processing the loss of both her parents.49 It represents loss for the characters too. For Lily, the garden is very much a landscape of passion and disillusion, symbolizing her love of Mrs. Ramsay and her disaffection with what she represents. Eventually, it comes to stand for the immense absence that remains after Mrs. Ramsay’s death. By completing a second painting at the end of the novel she is eventually able to have her “vision” and reconcile the past with the present. The garden was a core element of Woolf ’s narrative from an early stage. Planning the book’s structure in 1925, she conceived of three parts, the first described as “father & mother & child in the garden” with the second and third being “the death; the sail to the lighthouse.” In this early sketch there are two spaces (the garden and the lighthouse) bridged by a section later titled “Time Passes.” The garden space would come to dominate most of the text, being the subject of Lily’s painting in the first section, an expression of time passing in the second, and a symbol of loss in the third. There is a sense of this in Woolf ’s plans, as she goes on to add: “when I begin it I shall enrich it

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in all sorts of ways; thicken it; give it branches & roots which I do not perceive now.”50 The garden itself acts like these branches and roots, connecting each section of the novel and providing them with a sensory and emotional depth. Lily’s painting is an engagement with Mrs. Ramsay; both with her individual personality and with what she represents as a mother, wife, and hostess. It is fitting, then, that it depicts a space that Mrs. Ramsay carefully sustains and curates for the benefit of others. The garden is where her children play and her husband works, it anchors Lily’s painting and even provides a point of departure at the novel’s end, serving as a focal point for the grief of others. Gardening is one of the multiple ways Mrs. Ramsay tirelessly anticipates the needs of her guests. Yet unlike the cleaning or the cooking, which is done by servants according to her instructions, the garden requires creativity, renewal, and adjustment. Her gardener, Mr. Kennedy,51 is not very useful, and consequently many plants had been “put in with her own hands.”52 The garden is thus the closest thing that Mrs. Ramsay has to an artwork of her own. It forms a vital part of her wider creation, that image of domestic cohesion which is represented in Lily’s first painting. The garden is a site of conversation between the two women, a space where the ideologies of domesticity and motherhood clash with those of the independent woman and modern artist. Mrs. Ramsay’s garden and Lily’s painting exist in tandem. They both represent their prospective “visions,” and each women respects, although they do not fully endorse, the other’s project. Mrs. Ramsay poses for the painting but does not think Lily a great artist; Lily paints Mrs. Ramsay and her garden, but does not approve of her always doing things for others. Although Lily is critical, she is the person most aware of Mrs. Ramsay’s work. Unlike Mr. Ramsay, who “never looked at things,” Lily has “x-ray vision” (TL 123) and studies Mrs. Ramsay’s efforts in great detail. In reading the garden and painting side by side it is possible to see that Lily and Mrs. Ramsay’s uses of nature are indicative of their own natures. Much as the Impressionists were seen to adhere to naturalism, so Mrs. Ramsay is seen to reinforce the status quo, coaxing nature to support an established view of the natural order. Lily is a true Post-Impressionist, fusing social and aesthetic change in the treatment of her subject. Just as Van Gogh’s and Matisse’s portrayals of trees and flowers were seen as “unnatural” by conservative critics, so Lily’s work can be read as a more subtle challenge to conventional ideas of womanhood.

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Lily’s depiction of the natural world has several Post-Impressionist qualities. Not only does she pay particular attention to color, form, and design, but she is descriptive without being too precise. In one instance, she considers connecting a “mass on the right hand with that on the left […] by bringing the line of the branch, or introducing an object into the foreground.” She muses on her various options, keeping in mind that “the unity of the whole might be broken” (TL 73–74) if she goes too far. What distinguishes Lily from a strict formalist painter is that her motives in adapting nature are not always aesthetic. Sitting at dinner, she settles the question of a troublesome tree, deciding to move it “further towards the middle” (TL 125) of her picture.53 Looking back on this moment many years later she recalls having come to another realization: “it had flashed upon her that she would move the tree to the middle, and need never marry anybody, and she had felt an enormous exultation” (TL 237–38). In this one move she resolves to draw a line down the painting and another under the question of her future. In depicting Mrs. Ramsay’s world she positions herself in relation to it, rallying against the older woman’s matchmaking tendencies. Throughout the painting process, Lily represents Mrs. Ramsay’s space while staking out her own. She crafts, tends to the domestic sphere, but unlike a housewife she is not beholden to it. Suitably, she sits outside of the house, looking inward, depicting Mrs. Ramsay behind the window and enveloping this motherly scene with a wider perspective. In completing her second painting she focuses harder on the lighthouse beyond, her attention drawn toward the parameters of the garden space. The garden is a pivot, a site of negotiation on the borderlands of the home where she positions herself in relation to the questions of motherhood and marriage. Just as Lily’s painting serves her priorities, the garden forms part of Mrs. Ramsay’s wider efforts to support and please her family and guests. In this, it is like the green shawl that she wraps around the sheep’s skull in her children’s bedroom to protect and appease. Woolf comments that the scarf, once tied round the skull, resembles a “bird’s nest” or a mountain “with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing” (TL 154–55). The garden is an extension of this nest or miniature landscape, a way of surrounding her family and guests with a green layer of beauty and protection. Her work is made to be admired and, like Lily, she is greatly affected by the opinions of others. She is disappointed when Mr. Ramsay ignores what she has done. “He did not look at the flowers,” and when glancing in

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their direction, only notices “something red, something brown” (TL 91). She admits that he is intelligent but wonders at his apathy: “did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view? No” (TL 96). Nor is he willing to invest in them. Mrs. Ramsay tries to tell him about the cost of repairing the greenhouse but finds she’s too afraid of his retribution to go through with it. As with the many other gestures she makes to ensure his comfort, Mr. Ramsay benefits from the garden without recognizing its importance. Staring fixedly at a pot of geraniums in a bid to solve a philosophical problem, he is able to use the plants to his advantage without truly “seeing” that they are there. Despite the garden being something of an obligation, Mrs. Ramsay treats it as a creative project, perfecting and adjusting, just as Lily arranges the scene on her canvas. As she walks round it, she cannot help thinking about what should change. She starts “considering the dahlias in the big bed” and wondering “about next year’s flowers.” She frets, as Lily does, about having made the right decisions, wondering if “it was any use sending down bulbs” to the gardener, and if he bothered planting them (TL 90). She also worries about the state of her evening primroses which had been damaged by “some creature” (TL 97). She does all this in the same fashion that Lily paints, outwardly calm, but inwardly fraught with dozens of decisions. The two women are in pursuit of two distinct “visions”: Mrs. Ramsay craves domestic bliss, while Lily desires artistic fulfilment coupled with personal independence. Lily will come to realize her aim many years later, but Mrs. Ramsay’s project is brought to fruition when Paul and Minta announce their engagement and her matchmaking efforts are rewarded. Still reeling from the news, she looks out the window and uses “the branches of the elm trees to stabilize her position.” As in Lily’s painting, Mrs. Ramsay centers her attention on trees, still thinking of what she had yet to “get right,” even as she acknowledges her achievement: She must get that right and that right, she thought, insensibly, approving of the dignity of the trees’ stillness, and now again of the superb upward rise […] It was windy, so that the leaves now and then brushed open a star, and the stars […] flash[ed] out between the edges of the leaves. Yes, that was done then, accomplished. (TL 152) The terms in which she understands her triumph (“Yes, that was done then”) mirror Lily’s thoughts at the end of the book: “Yes, […] I have had my vision”

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(TL 281). As Jane Goldman notes, there is a paradox in the two women identifying trees with their opposing aims.54 Mrs. Ramsay sees the tree as a sign of continuity, a signal that “Paul and Minta would carry it on when she was dead” (TL 153), while Lily uproots this symbol of the old order, using it to symbolize her commitment to an unmarried life. When Mrs. Ramsay dies both continuity and harmony fall into disarray, and her garden descends into chaos. Above all, it loses form: Giant artichokes towered among rose; a fringed carnation flowered among the cabbages; while the gentle tapping of a weed at the window had become […] a drumming from sturdy trees and thorned briars which made the whole room green in summer. (TL 187) These overblown flowers have a tendency to cross boundaries, creep in through the windows, and invade the house. “What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature?” (TL 187), the narrator asks. Without Mrs. Ramsay to create form in the natural world the garden has come undone. As, appropriately, has the shawl, which hangs up in the house, and “idly, aimlessly, […] swung to and fro” (TL 187). In order to complete her painting, Lily must put the pieces back together. She must see through the disorder and back to the memory of Mrs. Ramsay world. This is an aesthetic and emotional project, one fueled by her memory of a unity that has since been lost. She looked “from the canvas to the garden” finding there was something “she remembered in the relations of those lines cutting across, slicing down, and in the mass of the hedge with its green cave of blues and browns” (TL 212). Lily paints using her memories. The shawl may be undone, but the scene had “tied a knot in her mind” all those years ago, so she often “found herself painting that picture” in her mind, “untying the knot in imagination” (TL 212). It is this imaginative element that leads her, and though her easel has been “rammed into the earth” (TL 213), her work is also disconnected from the present. Instead of capturing an impression of reality, Lily is painting with emotion, imagination, and memory. As “she dipped into the blue paint, she dipped too into the past there” (TL 232). Whereas in the first painting she comes to terms with Mrs. Ramsay’s presence, it is her absence that haunts the later piece. As this loss rounds on her with full force she cannot help but cry out Mrs. Ramsay’s name while “the whole wave and whisper of the garden

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became like curves and arabesques flourishing round a center of complete emptiness” (TL 241). This emotional connection with the landscape allows Lily to finish her picture, to express her feelings for Mrs. Ramsay and complete her vision. In writing this journey, Woolf simultaneously completes her own tribute to the past, having embedded her own grief and the landscape of St. Ives into her portrayal of Mrs. Ramsay and her garden. When Woolf wrote about the great changes of 1910, she described the advent of a liberating era defined by artistic and personal freedoms. It would be easy to assume that the preoccupation with gardens and flowers that helped define the Victorian and Edwardian eras would be absent from this bold new age. Nevertheless, they remained and in Woolf ’s writing as in the work of many Post-Impressionists, the natural world was radically reshaped in accordance with a new aesthetic. Although formalist interpretations can obscure the importance of subject matter, it is clear that the subject did matter to many writers and artists working in a Post-Impressionist vein. They wrought images that were deemed “unnatural” by critics, judgments connected to the belief that these portrayals were not sufficiently naturalistic or realistic. Many defined their careers by painting the natural world in bold, surprising ways, conversing with the past by depicting timeless themes. For Lily Briscoe, intervening in what is deemed “natural” is part of her role as a modern artist and a modern woman. She takes the scene offered to her by Mrs. Ramsay and reworks it, making aesthetic and personal decisions that express her individuality and embody the spirit of a new generation.

C HA P T E R 1 0

“The earth-haunted mind” Jean Toomer’s Cane, African American Writing, and Eco-Modernism Mary Weaks-Baxter

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he earth-haunted mind.” Elizabeth Black opens her introduction to The Nature of Modernism with this phrase that she considers to be “a distinct but under recognised aspect of modernism.” Taking the phrase from war poet Edgell Rickwood’s poem “Terminology,” published in his 1928 collection Invocation to Angels, Black describes what she sees as a clear tension at work in modern poetry, that is, “the strong pull towards the natural world … and the accompanying sense of disconnection from nature that unsettles the modern psyche.” Providing context for Rickwood’s poetry, Black points to his first-hand view of war as an officer in the British Army during World War I and his belief that capitalism was what severed the human connection to the land. According to Black, Rickwood viewed this “central part of the modern condition” as bound “to a wider sense of dislocation from past, tradition and place in modern life”—what she describes as “being haunted by the perceived loss of some vital connection to the earth.”1 In many ways this phrase “earth-haunted mind” even more fully encapsulates the experience and context for African American writers of

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the modern period, especially those who wrote about the lives of African Americans in the American South. The phrase also suggests the conflicted nature of African American writing of the modern period, especially in the sense of the double-consciousness experienced by African Americans that W. E. B. Du Bois described in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. At once of the United States as citizen but also excluded from full participation in the rights of citizenship, the African American is both “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”2 The phrase “earth-haunted mind” likewise reflects the conflicted nature of the African American to the nation’s land itself, especially that of the American South. Deeply cut into that relationship to the earth and into African American literature are the tree as a symbol of lynching, the agricultural field as a site of the shackles of forced labor, the swamp as a place of escape from slavery, and rivers—especially the Ohio and the Mississippi—as both a means of escape and the torturous journey deeper into slave territory. That relationship to the earth—a connection historically imposed because of the unnatural bond of slavery—is, in effect, a relationship that is defined by a rural past represented in African American culture and a connection to a landscape of historical reminders of the atrocities of slavery. As a result, eco-modernism in the context of African American writing must be viewed with a markedly different lens than writing by white authors of the same time period. Because African American writing is foregrounded by the history of slavery, the intersection of eco and modernism in African American writing expresses very different experiences and literary representations of modernism from those by other American writers, and frames a literature unique to the period. Ecocritical reflections on African American literature can be traced back to Melvin Dixon’s 1987 book Ride Out the Wilderness. With the goal of analyzing “images of journeys, conquered spaces, imagined havens, and places of refuge,” Dixon focuses on the wilderness, the underground, and the mountaintop, and concludes that such nature-focussed images “have produced not only a deliverance from slavery to freedom, but, more important, a transformation from rootlessness to rootedness.”3 Although in many ways Dixon’s reading of African American literature proved narrow in its approach, in the 1990s scholar Lawrence Buell suggested a reading of African American literature that was evidently erroneous. Writing in the context of Dixon’s observations and describing

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“the countryside” as a place to “escape from, an area of chance violence and enslavement,” Buell made the case in The Environmental Imagination that African American writers have had a “tepid … interest to date in environmental causes.”4 Since then, others have called for a reassessment of the strategies used to analyze African American writing in an ecocritical context. Michael Bennett, for example, points to writers from Frederick Douglass to Toni Morrison, noting “a profound antipathy toward the ecological niches usually focused on in ecocriticism: pastoral space and wilderness,” and making the case that “Buell has it backwards.”5 Instead of seeing the wilderness as a place to escape into and urban spaces as places to flee, Bennett asserts in “Manufacturing the Ghetto” that analyses of landscapes should not be “universal.” Pointing to The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), for example, Bennett reads the work as an anti-pastoral that identifies the urban space, “the Promised Land waiting beyond this mortal coil”—not the rural—as a place of healing and safety. Consideration of African American texts, Bennett asserts, should present a broader definition of ecological space in order to reflect more fully the presence and impact of environmental justice issues faced by persons of color, women, and socio-economically disadvantaged persons.6 In response to this theoretical history of African American writing, Scott Hicks outlines some critical approaches important in an ecocritical reading of African American literature: “we must attend to the radical reimaginings of the pastoral convention … [and] revised ways of thinking about space and place.”7 Such “radical reimaginings” frame eco-modernism in an entirely different context when it is applied to modernist African American writers such as Jean Toomer and his groundbreaking work Cane (1923). My focus in this chapter is on Toomer’s book—part fiction, part poetry, and part drama—because it is the seminal work of modernist African American writing and a key text in understanding the ways in which race shapes modernist themes. I propose to look at Cane in light of African Americans’ conflicted relationship with the earth and to examine Toomer’s representation of flow into the cityscape not as a distancing from the earth by modern disruption and dislocation, but instead with the urban as part of the ecosystem. I also want to emphasize here the function of bodies in the natural world and the role that the African American body is forced into in an ecosystem controlled by an historical framework of slavery and racism, the context of Jim Crow, and continuing racist economic and governmental

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systems. The natural world in African American writing is a space that is historically one of terror and fear, a place that was the site of the torture and destruction of black bodies and psyches. Yet in Cane, it is through that same landscape that Toomer struggles to reestablish his connections to his African American heritage and a folk culture associated with the Southern earth. However, the images that were typically connected with the decline of the human relationship to the earth—including railroads and roads— also establish for him a connection to an urban landscape that was just as vital. Those passageways that represented modernization and the attraction of the industrialized cities of the North were also the roads to freedom out of the South for millions of African Americans during the Great Migration. In effect, Cane represents the conflicted nature of the African American relationship with the earth and is central to understanding the African American as “America’s harbinger of and metaphor for modernity itself,”8 with the fragmentation and the conflicted binaries that mark the African American identity as “always split, or doubled, or divided.”9 My intent is to show how those binaries and double-consciousness are reflected in the natural world, in the human and the not-human, in the divide that, for the modernist, would never be escaped or healed. Although other scholars, such as Lucinda MacKethan, have noted that in Cane, Toomer wrote “a version of Southern pastoral perceived with the black man’s double vision of deep belonging and forced alienation,” I write here in the fuller context of more recent reframings of African American literature within an ecocritical perspective.10 Cane reconnected Toomer to a familial past that he did not know. Toomer attended the University of Wisconsin to study agriculture, but only stayed for one year before leaving the program. In 1921, he took his first trip South to the home region of his father and grandfather, to accept a three-month position as the acting principal of Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute, an African American school located in Sparta, Georgia. The book grew out of his time spent in Georgia, and he is said to have started composing it on his train ride home back North. Although some of the pieces included in the book had been published before, it seems to have been this trip South that prompted him to start bringing together those pieces that would become Cane. Toomer made at least one more trip South to Spartanburg, South Carolina, with Waldo Frank, his friend, as he started publishing his work about his time in Georgia.

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Capturing African American folk culture in the South, Cane laments the passing of a people and a way of life as “the sun is setting on / A song-lit race of slaves.” In the words the “son” has “returned to thee,” Toomer alludes to his own physical return to the South and his aspiration to write of and for the South. Although the sun is setting, there is still time to capture a way of life that is quickly fading, for “it has not set … it is not too late yet / To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone.”11 The “swan-song” of African American folk culture living on the land, Cane exemplifies what Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., call the “signal elements” of modernism: “hybridity, alienation, fragmentation, dislocation, migration, fluidity, experimentation.”12 Yet while Byrd and Gates state emphatically that “Cane is a book about nothing if not fragmentation … Everybody and everything is hopelessly, inescapably fragmented,” through an ecocritical reading of the book, I hope to reveal, too, the tensions and complexities of one of the key texts of African American modernism.13 In fact, the condition of the African American in the contemporary world was a result of the modernization that brought about the institutional enslavement of African Americans. My aim is to show how an ecocritical reading further elucidates the text, complicated by the fact that the Atlantic slave trade was the frame of power that created the modern Western world. Identified by Toomer’s friend Waldo Frank as a book about the “dawn of direct and unafraid creation,” Cane represents fragments of a fading world that Toomer attempts to recapture in images of the natural world, including sunsets, dusk, and autumn.14 The modern world intrudes with the railroad, the factory, lumbered trees, and smoke. Organized into three distinct sections, Cane begins with a collection of prose and poetry pieces that focus on African American lives in the rural South, with the sense of an outsider looking in, sometimes from a train, but other times seeing deeply into the individual stories of struggle against power systems that attempt to destroy human lives and disconnect humans from Nature. In Cane, Toomer struggles to create and sustain a unity and wholeness through a return to the Southern earth. The view of the environment as a place of interconnection also establishes a link to a distant African past. In search of a “useable past,” Toomer and his character Kabnis in Cane travel into and live in the Southern landscape and with the African American’s connection to that land. Yet if the folk-spirit was “walking in to die on the modern desert,” as Toomer claimed, there is still hope, as he asserts in Cane’s “Song of the Son,” that “one seed”

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“becomes an everlasting song” (C 16). Out of that “one seed” emerges a book that focuses on the tension between bringing together those fragments by using the human connection to the earth and the interconnectedness of all things. If the eco-modernist condition is typically characterized by fragmentation, the loss of human connection to the natural world, and the destruction of natural landscapes, the urge of the eco-modernist writer is to find some meaning in those shards, to create a myth to be lived by. Toomer frames that promise in common themes set forth by eco-modernists, what Lee Rozelle defines as “myths of interconnectivity.”15 Toomer envisions a web of interconnections—no longer a city/rural divide, but instead claiming the city landscape and the flow of the African American between the city and the rural setting. At the center of Cane is what Toomer sees as the potential in bridging the divide between races in the figure of the mixed-race person. Boundaries between earth and human, between African Americans in the South and in the North, between the city and the rural, and between the races no longer remain in this mythology. Toomer saw in the bi-racial what he called “an aristocracy—such as never existed before and perhaps never will exist again in America—midway between the white and Negro worlds.”16 Breaking down social constructions of race, he described his body as holding “many bloods, some dark blood, all blended in the fire of six or more generations. I was, then, either a new type of man or the very oldest.”17 Identifying Toomer as “a pioneering theorist of hybridity”18 and explaining that he held the belief that “racial mixture … possesses potential to unify humankind,” Byrd and Gates identify Toomer as a “prophet” “of a new order in which the mixed-race person is a pivotal figure, a metaphor or harbinger of a hybrid culture and a fusion of many ethnic and genetic strands.”19 Cane looks at binaries of race that humans have constructed and, correspondingly, the binaries that have been created by humans that distance them from the natural world. Reflecting on human structures that situate nature in opposition to human society and the rural in opposition to the urban, Cane explores the margins between these defined spaces and reflects upon the interconnectedness of all things. The first section of Cane makes a clear connection between the rural Southern earth and Africa. In “Carma,” for example, the title character dressed in overalls and “strong as any man” stands behind a mule to drive a wagon back home—a stance and posture that Toomer links to an African past. With the cane leaves “swaying, rusty with talk / Scratching choruses

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above the guinea’s squawk,” Carma does not actually sing, but her body “is a song.” That song—the repeated lines of “Wind is in the cane”—seems to lift her out of the moment as “She is in the forest, dancing. Torches flare … juju men, greegree, witch-doctors … torches go out … The Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa” (C 14). Carma drives a mule that pulls not a wagon homeward, but instead “a Georgia chariot down an old dust road.” In “Georgia Dusk,” once again Toomer raises the “chorus of the cane”—along with the pine trees that are strumming guitars—as “caroling a vesper to the stars.” The men “with vestiges of pomp, / Race memories of king and caravan / High-priests, an ostrich, and a juju-man, / Go singing through the footpaths of the swamp” (C 17). Cane also represents the destruction of this rural culture and thus this connection to Africa, and the commodification of black bodies upon which the slave system of the South was built. The cane of the title focuses on a cash crop that was one of the most profitable in the slave system. Sugar cane was first introduced to the Americas by the Portuguese, who transported the plant from the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman points to cane as a transplanted species just as slaves were taken from Africa and physically moved to the Americas to plant and harvest the crop. “The success of the cash crop system in the South,” according to Taylor-Wiseman, “depended on the importation of non-native bodies.”20 Toomer reflects on the lack of agency of African Americans, the way in which African American bodies have been and are commodified. In effect, the equivalent impact of industrialization and capitalism on black lives has been a parallel devaluing of the natural world. The South that Toomer recreates in Cane is one that tortures and breaks black bodies in the same way that nature is destroyed and used for profit. Strikingly, the book reflects a conflicted nature to this relationship, one that at once ties the African American to a rural culture and correspondingly back to the land of Africa, but also to an agricultural system linked to the historical framework of slavery and capitalism. Toomer contrasts rurality with agriculture for profit in Cane, making a clear distinction between folk culture and the human relationship to the land and nature as commodity. In consideration of the ways in which communities of color are more detrimentally impacted by environmental issues, Toomer portrays this injustice in Cane in his focus on trees and lumbering. As Taylor-Wiseman notes, not only do trees in Cane possess creative abilities and have the ability to communicate, but they also

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protest against racism and against lumbering as a destructive industry. In “Georgia Dusk,” for example, “the pine trees are guitars, / Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain… / Their voices rise … the chorus of the cane.” Elsewhere, throughout the book, the pines “whisper to Jesus” (C 17). Describing the trees “imagined as compatriots and fellow musicianpoets,” Taylor-Wiseman asserts that this binding together of human and tree “suggests a shared materiality that only amplifies the injustices that the companionable trees and black bodies face.” Pointing to the poem “Portrait in Georgia” and the prose piece “Blood Burning Moon” that follow consecutively, Taylor-Wiseman identifies the lynched woman’s body described as “white as the ash / of black flesh after flame” and the “ghost of a yell” from Tom Burwell as representative of the “violence and shared materiality and vulnerability of human and nonhuman.”21 These images resonate throughout Cane. Smoke, from sawdust piles of lumbered trees and burning black bodies, such as Tom Burwell’s, is “trapped between the covers of the book” (C 30, 37). Everpresent and overpowering, the smoke, Taylor-Wiseman says, “infiltrates the atmosphere and human bodies—it burns eyes and acts on taste buds,” “signifies the physical and chemical transformation of the trees (and other organic matter),” and “conjures the entangled violence that human and nonhuman are subjected to by the forces of capitalism and empire.”22 Perhaps the most pointed assertion of agriculture as based not in an idyllic human connection to the land but instead as a system with the objective of monetary gain is the poem “Reapers” in the first section. Framing the poem in the same way that she discusses the focus in Cane on the lumber industry, Taylor-Wiseman points to “Reapers” as “obviously critical of agriculture as business.” Associating the scythes carried by black reapers in the poem with the Grim Reaper, she focuses on the mechanized farming represented in the poem by a mower stained in blood that overruns and kills a rat in the field. Contrasting the “squealing” of the rat with the silence of the scythes, the poem notably refers to the rat with the pronoun “his”—not “its”—to suggest empathy for the rat who has been victimized by the same system that abuses the earth and disregards the importance of black bodies. In contrast to the Jeffersonian vision of the farmer working the land, the mower of “Reapers,” according to Taylor-Wiseman, is “a symbol of the ceaseless drive of capitalism to use up resources and discard the waste.”23 Notably, then, Cane can be read as a work of environmental justice, seeking

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to show that those in the most difficult socio-economic situations are the ones who suffer most from the destruction of the environment. Critical reflections on this parallel abuse and destruction of black bodies and the natural environment have also examined Cane from a gendered approach, especially in consideration of the number of chapters in the first section that focus on women. In the context of maternal ecocriticism, for example, Anissa Janine Wardi examines images of failed motherhood, looking at what she describes as an “assemblage of the agrarian South, African American women, and scenes of violence [that] coalesce and construct a narrative of violated fertility and mothering.”24 Explaining that she focuses on the “mother-body” to reflect on the representation of the violation of mothering, Wardi says that she also aims to examine Toomer’s depiction of the post-Reconstruction South and the brokenness and violence against African American communities. Her examples from Cane include Karintha, who is “unmistakably place[d] alongside fauna.” Depicted “not [as] a woman with agency who chooses a partner but one who is selected for mating,” Wardi explains, Karintha is “a mere vessel for male desire.”25 At the end of Karintha’s story, a sawdust pile becomes the funeral pyre for her child. Pointing in Cane to “aborted acts of reproduction,” “stolen motherhood,” and “a ruthless re-enactment of the denial of motherhood,” Wardi examines what she describes as an “assemblage of the tree, the baby’s corpse, and the mother-body” to show “the land, stream, and trees are put into the service of barbarous acts of white supremacy.”26 Parallel to the human destruction of the ecosystem, according to Wardi, is Toomer’s “ideological stance in Cane, in which white, patriarchal, hegemonic culture destroys both human and plant communities by desecrating and denying the mother-body.”27 Reflective of Toomer’s own attempt to reconcile with this Southern landscape, the second section of Cane shows the vitality and life of African American culture flooding into the Northern city. Set in the period of migration of African Americans from the South, the book proposes promise and potential for the races coming together as it shifts in the second part to the cityscape. Situated in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, the section at first claims the potential of the mass migrations into the cities and the carrying of folk culture into those urban spaces. I focus my claim here within the frame of Michael Bennett’s argument that ecology has long been associated with pristine landscapes of the wilderness, while the cityscape has been ghettoized. Whereas race has been used to label the cityscape as other—as not part of

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ecology—Bennett’s evaluation points out that the city should be reexamined as a space that is part of the earth’s ecology.28 Recent work in the field of urban ecology points to the overwhelming agreement that cities cannot be set off as anomalies in the landscape but must be recognized as part of natural ecology. Such is the case in Cane. In section two of the book, starting with “Seventh Street,” a mix of poetry and prose, Toomer opens with a description of the “wedges” that divide the “white and whitewashed wood of Washington. Stale soggy wood of Washington” (C 41) from what Toomer described in a letter to Waldo Frank as the “jagged, strident, modern.”29 In the “shanties, brick office buildings, theaters, drug stores, restaurants, and cabarets” (C 41) of Seventh Street, the flow of blood, the flow and vitality of the African American, becomes part of the city. In that same letter to Frank, Toomer describes “Seventh Street” as “the song of a crude new life. Of a new people.”30 And this flow is one that cannot be stopped. Representing the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South and northward into urban settings, section two of Cane seeks to show the hybridity of Northern urban spaces for African Americans. At once distanced from the South and physically in the North, the historical and cultural memories of the South remain, yoking the Northern cityscape with images of the South. Into the city flows the “canebrake loves and mangrove feastings” of Dorris’s singing, as the soil of the South “falls like a fertile shower upon the lean streets of the city” of Washington (C 54, 47). But in this section as well is the “life” water of “Deep River” in “Rhobert” that has been “drawn off ” (C 49), with only remainders of mud, despite the persona’s desire to hear the Howard Glee Club sing the song. If Toomer aims to bridge, to show connections, to aim for a mending through showing the interconnections between human and nature and between races and regions, this section also shows the fracturing and fragmentation of the modern world. In “Calling Jesus,” the persona hopes that Nora’s soul, “like a little thrust-tailed dog, that follows her, whimpering,” will find some comfort in the night, hoping that someone (perhaps the “bare feet of Christ”?) “moving across bales of southern cotton, will steal in and cover it that it need not shiver, and carry it to her where she sleeps: cradled in dream-fluted cane” (C 56). Yet on the next page in “Box Seat,” Toomer laments the “root-life of a withered people” (C 57). In “Harvest Song,” the harvester’s throat is dry and he “fear[s] to call” “Eoho, my brothers!” His harvest is only a “stubble” (C 69).

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Even within the larger structure of the book, the apparent attempts at wholeness ultimately reflect a broken character. Each of the three sections opens with a visual element, curved lines that reflect an urge toward unity rather than division. In addressing the structure of the book, Toomer himself noted this desire to represent a circle, the completion of a cycle. Sending the completed manuscript to Waldo Frank in December 1922, Toomer wrote the following note: The book is done. From three angles, CANE’s design is a circle. Aesthetically, from simple forms to complex ones, and back to simple forms. Regionally, from the South up into the North, and back into the South again. Or, from the North down into the South, and then a return North. From the point of view of the spiritual entity behind the work, the curve really starts with Bona and Paul (awakening), plunges into Kabnis, emerges in Karintha etc. swings upward into Theatre and Box Seat, and ends (pauses) in Harvest Song. Whew!31 Ultimately, though, the broken pieces do not form a circle, leaving the ending not with a sense of wholeness, but of continued brokenness. The larger sense of the book itself as a “seed” that can bring new life also suggests a seed thrown into sterile soil. Wardi notes that while the phrase “African Diaspora” can be defined as “the scattering of seeds,” instead Toomer “mourns the dislocation of the family and specifically locates that as the fragmentation of the mother-body.”32 Closing with the third section entitled “Kabnis,” the book circles back around to a Southern setting, but in doing so, there remains a tenuousness, a recognition that despite claims to and desire for a wholeness, the world remains broken. In contrast to the traveler in section one of the book who views the South from the distance of a train car, in this section, Kabnis is a character directly situated in the storyline. “Kabnis” is in large part autobiographical, with Toomer having at one point claimed that Kabnis “is me.”33 The section opens with Kabnis, who is in the South to teach, struggling to fall asleep as the night winds “whisper” through the cracks in the walls of the cabin where he is living. At once drawn to the South but equally repelled by it, a yearning Kabnis laments, “If I could feel that I came to the South to

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face it. If I, the dream … could become the face of the South. How my lips would sing for it, my songs being the lips of its soul” (C 81). Overcome by the cultural memories of the lynching and murder of African Americans, he hears the rustling of leaves and the scraping sound of a tree against the cabin and tries to comfort himself by imagining that the ghosts “down this way” (C 84) drag trees instead of rattling chains, symbolically recalling not only the chains and bonds of slavery but also the associations of lynching. In the second section of “Kabnis,” set the following day, Kabnis is out in the community for the first time, visiting with Halsey, a mixed-race businessman who owns a wagon shop, and teacher and preacher Professor Layman. As the three men sit at the fireside, Kabnis feels compelled to tell them he has not been out visiting yet because he does not “like folks down this way.” Explaining that in the North, there is much misunderstanding about the South, he says he has discovered that “Things are not half bad” and tells them about his own personal claim to the South—his family is from Georgia. Intent on making sure that Kabnis understands the realities of the South for African Americans, Halsey reminds him to “kindly remember youre in th land of cotton—hell of a land. Th white folks get th boll; th niggers get th stalk. An don’t you dare touch th boll, or even look at it” (C 86–87). With the sound of singing from the nearby church in the background, Halsey and Layman tell Kabnis the story of Mame Lamkins, a story Toomer based on the 1915 lynching of Mary Turner in Valdosta, Georgia. Mame, who was pregnant, tried to hide her husband from a mob of white men who were threatening him. The white men killed Mame in the middle of a public street. When one of the men realized Mame was pregnant, they cut open her stomach, stabbed the living child with a knife, and impaled the child’s body on a tree. As Layman finishes telling the story, the voice of a woman shouts that she has found Jesus, and a stone wrapped in paper is thrown through the window. Reading the message “You northern nigger, its time fer y t leave” (C 91), Kabnis is overcome by fear and runs madly out of the house. The narrative of Kabnis’s trip South is instrumental in representing Toomer’s desire to cross boundaries—to show the power of mending, of bringing together the broken shards of the whole—and the ultimate failure of this endeavor at the core of the book. Emphasizing this ill-fated desire to seek wholeness, by the opening of the third section, Kabnis has become a “scarecrow replica” of himself. “Fantastically plastered with red Georgia mud,” Kabnis “skirts the big house” and then goes running to the security

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of his cabin, quickly slamming the door behind him in case someone is following. Proclaiming to himself that he “saw their eyes flaring from the cane. Hounds. Shouts,” he checks under his bed and in the closet, making sure he is alone. There is the sound of barking dogs in pursuit, but the voices he hears outside the cabin calling for him are Halsey and Layman. Assuring Kabnis that no one is after him, Halsey explains that “white folks aint in fer all them theatrics these days. Theys more direct than that. If what they wanted was t get y, theyd have just marched right in an took y where y sat” (C 92). Trying to help him regain his composure, Layman and Halsey start a fire and offer him some corn licker. It’s in this section that readers are introduced to Hanby, the principal of Kabnis’s school, who asks for Kabnis’s resignation because he is drinking on school grounds, and Lewis, a friend to Kabnis who also is in the South for a short time and has been identified as a portrayal of Toomer’s friend Waldo Frank or a part of Toomer himself. The sections notably build as Kabnis searches for answers Toomer can use to create the mythos he believed could heal the brokenness of the racial divide. Section four of “Kabnis” introduces the Hole, the cellar of Halsey’s workshop. The Hole is presented as a potential site of a mystical experience that is Kabnis’s ultimate goal. By this point, Kabnis has spent a month in the South and his departure is coming soon. He is working in Halsey’s shop now that he has lost his school position, but at the shop he “begins to out and out botch the job” (100). In contrast, Halsey is represented as a skilled craftsman and successful businessman. He is from and of the South, was sent overseas as a serviceman in World War I, returned home, traveled up North but came back, and went to school. The mystical center of “Kabnis” is “father,” who lives in Halsey’s cellar. Going down into the Hole for an evening of partying with Lewis, Halsey, and two women, Cora and Stella, Kabnis struggles with his own recognition of his familial ties to the South and with that same “pain and beauty of the South” that Lewis has encountered and faced. The old man in the Hole symbolizes the African American past, standing for the “Slave boy whom some Christian mistress taught to read the Bible. Black man who saw Jesus in the ricefields … Dead blind father of a muted folk who feel their way upward to a life that crushes or absorbs them.” Down in the Hole, hidden away in a sort of burrow in the earth, where he wastes away because he will not eat, the old man is correspondingly associated with the forge of Halsey’s shop. Lewis and Kabnis frame a story for the old man as one who “rules over”

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the forge, like a “Black Vulcan,” but then quickly associate him with a “mute John the Baptist of a new religion” (C 104). Described by Byrd and Gates as Kabnis’s alter ego,34 Lewis sees Kabnis as “a promise of soil-soaked beauty; uprooted, thinning out. Suspended a few feet above the soil whose touch would resurrect him” (C 96). The fifth section is framed at the opening by the womb-song that the night “throbs evenly against the torso of the South” (103) and at the end by Stella’s desire to comfort Kabnis by nursing him and mothering him. The image of the night as the “soft belly of a pregnant Negress” (C 103) suggests the potential of Kabnis finding some resolution to the internal conflicts he finds between himself and the recognition of the realities of the place that his family comes from. The section sets up the essential struggle at the core of the book. Scholars have, however, taken multiple approaches to the ending of Cane. Grounding her reading of the ending of the book in earlier imagery, Catherine Innes looks at the representation of dusk as a “central symbol of fusion” and sees it as imagery that carries through to represent “racial fusion” and Toomer’s “striving for cosmic consciousness.”35 Innes reads the ending of Cane in a positive way, noting that the book’s theme of “fusion of opposites” such as dawn and dusk, black and white, city and rural is reflected in “another major motif which will be sounded more clearly and triumphantly at the end of the work—that of redemption.” While the opening line of the book focuses on dusk in a prose piece about Karintha whose “skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon,”36 the book ends with the rising sun. Innes frames this imagery as holding “connotations of a fading beauty and a new promise.”37 Yet even as the ending of the book seems to claim some hope—some mending of the divide between races, between humanity and the natural world—Toomer’s own words on the book offer a more complex reading. As I noted above, Toomer described the book as a curve that “ends (pauses) in Harvest Song.”38 Located in the cityscape section of the book, “Harvest Song” tells the story of a persona who is a reaper at harvest, but who, despite the promise of harvest, still hungers. Having worked in the fields all day, his oats have been cradled, but he is too tired and cold to bind them together. He cracks a grain between his teeth, but he cannot taste it. His throat is dry. Afraid to call his brothers with “Eoho,” he is fearful that he won’t be able to taste the grain. “I am a deaf man who strains to hear the calls of other harvesters / whose throats are also dry,” he says (C 69). In effect, the hunger and thirst he experiences will never

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be quenched. Likewise, Toomer’s characters and personas, including Kabnis and, indeed, Toomer himself, seem forever reaching toward but remain forever out of reach of a world in which unity and wholeness are validated and the gulf between races and between humans and the environment is mended. Thus, in many respects, Cane reflects the human unwillingness to bridge that gulf and to look to the spaces in between for answers and to recognize that in looking to those spaces, there can also be a healing for human societies and for the earth. Yet perhaps the inability of people to embrace those spaces suggests the deep-rooted prejudices of the modern period. Such prejudices distance humans from their fellow beings and separate humankind from the very earth which they inhabit. As for Toomer, after Cane, he published little of his own writing. Within a year of its publication he had taken another deeply personal turn in his search for the answers that he had hoped to find in writing Cane by becoming a follower of George Gurdjieff. Believing that humans lived in a state of “waking sleep,” Gurdjieff asserted that humans lack a unified consciousness, but by following his practices, they could attain a higher level of consciousness and unity. Although Toomer later converted to the Society of Friends, he remained committed to Gurdjieffianism for the rest of his life, continuing a search that in many ways was begun by his trip South and by his groundbreaking book Cane.

Part V Climatic Modernisms

C HA P T E R 1 1

“Grain by grain” Beckett’s Agripessimism and the Anthropocene Caitlin McIntyre

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amuel Beckett’s play, debuting in French as Fin de Partie and later in English as Endgame in 1957, though taking place in a sparse and purgatorial setting, is not prima facie about global warming. Arguably, the publication of the play antedates the formation of the environmentalist movement, anticipating the serialization in The New Yorker of Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking Silent Spring by five years. The play—featuring four characters: Hamm, who is blind and cannot stand up; his servant Clov, who cannot sit down; and Nagg and Nell, who are conceivably Hamm’s parents, living in sawdust-lined dustbins, all in a room with two windows—has prompted rich critical engagement. Readings have centered on psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and language games; some have read the play as a performance of a chess game, or as an absurd deflation of the myth of Noah’s ark.1 Hugh Kenner has read the set with its two high-set windows as “the inside of an immense skull.”2 Yet the setting of the play, in a time and place unmarked but for the fact that “[t]here’s no more nature,”3 is rooted in some kind of climate crisis. Indeed, Hamm’s recollection in a “narrative tone” of his previous life as a landlord and his earliest encounter with a child who is presumably Clov documents increasing climate disruption:

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Caitlin McIntyre It was an extra-ordinarily bitter day, I remember, zero by the thermometer. But considering it was Christmas Eve there was nothing … extra-ordinary about that. Seasonable weather, for once in a way. (E 59) It was a glorious bright day, I remember, fifty by the heliometer, but the sun was already sinking down into the … down among the dead. (E 59) It was a howling wild day, I remember, a hundred by the anemometer. The wind was tearing up the dead pines and sweeping them … away. (E 60) It was an exceedingly dry day, I remember, zero by the hygrometer. Ideal weather, for my lumbago. (E 60)

These vignettes hint at some of the ecological valences that this chapter will examine in Beckett’s writing: the increasing inhospitality and barrenness of the surrounds; the collapsing of time, where disparate events (cold and tempestuous, yet bright and “ideal”) occur simultaneously; and the unlikely humor prompted by a climate in extremis. Hamm’s outburst after this enumeration sets the stage for the climate crisis occurring in Endgame: “But what in God’s name do you imagine? That the earth will awake in the spring? That the rivers and seas will run with fish again? That there’s manna in heaven still for imbeciles like you?” (E 61). His exclamation marks a shift from the past time of recollection to the present time of dialogue, reinforced by the accompanying stage direction that cancels his narrative tone: “[Pause. Violently].” More than just nostalgia for climates past, Endgame is suffused with gestures to the atmospherics of environmental upheaval besetting the characters. This chapter seeks to put such scenes in focus to reveal the play’s impact as a performance of climatic upheaval. Endgame’s insistence on compressed time hearkens to conceptions of climate change in deeper timescales, and the scalar shifts of the characters’ self-conception range away from the immediate environment of the play to the scope of the planetary (for example, Hamm knows that the “earth” no longer awakens in the spring). In other words, the play is a performance in the register of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which human activity in the biosphere, hydrosphere,

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and geosphere reaches such a pitch that it has altered planetary systems, supplanting the Holocene. Specifically, I argue that Endgame positions the core of this Anthropocenic activity in agricultural practice, as evidenced by the rusty cans of insecticide and nonsensical accumulations of piles of grain that appear on stage as props or in dialogue. In reading these scenes, this chapter will highlight how Beckett’s 1957 play is articulated between the long history of agriculture and, proleptically, the ecological devastation wrought by postwar Green Revolution agrichemicals and biotechnology.4 The play’s meditation on agriculture’s effects, I propose, provides a key to reading the post-apocalyptic mud world of Beckett’s novel How It Is (published first in French as Comment C’est, and then in English in 1964), arguably one of Beckett’s most challenging texts in terms of formal experimentation, which thereby emerges as a kind of sequel to the play’s action. In reading these texts together, I argue that Beckett’s exploration of the agricultural underpinnings of ecological catastrophe reveal what I am terming agripessimism, an aesthetic mode that focuses critique on agriculture’s colonial underpinnings and its long ecological afterlives.5

Agriculture and the Anthropocene In reading the insistence on agriculture as central to the manifestation of the Anthropocene in Beckett’s writing, I posit these texts as interlocutors in the field of Anthropocene studies. When the Anthropocene is supposed to have begun is a matter of some debate among atmospheric scientists, geologists, social scientists, and humanists. Foundational writings in the field point to the birth of the steam engine in the eighteenth century as the event that accelerated carbon dioxide emissions indefinitely.6 Using stratigraphic criteria, the Working Group on the Anthropocene at the International Geological Congress in 2016 ruled that the epoch began in 1950, and is marked not only by the global spread of radioactive particles, but also the residues of increasingly industrialized postwar agriculture, namely evidence of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and even the surfeit of fossilized chicken bones.7 This postwar definition alone affirms the ecological value of Beckett’s later writing: beyond reading these texts for ecological resonances, they were also produced in and reflective of an era of massive planetary change. In response to these scientific definitions of the Anthropocene, many humanists have suggested that the term is too monolithic, obfuscating not

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only the differential responsibility for carbon emissions and other global disruptions to biota, but also vulnerability to such climate upheaval. Jason Moore notably has written that the “Anthropocene makes for an easy story,” where “the mosaic of human activity in the web of life is reduced to an abstract Humanity: a homogenous acting unit.”8 This homogeneity, Moore argues, “does not challenge the naturalized inequalities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and production”; he proposes amending the epochal nomenclature to “capitalocene.”9 For Moore, the capitalocene begins with the European colonization of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade.10 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing takes this view as well, writing that the “most convincing Anthropocene time line begins not with our species but rather with the advent of modern capitalism, which has directed long-distance destruction of landscapes and ecologies,” while also pointing to the colonial “landscape model” of the plantation, which underwrites “later industrialization and modernization.”11 Along these lines, Donna Haraway has referred to the Plantationocene to denote the uneven colonial and agricultural origins of global capitalism.12 Political scientist James Scott takes an even broader view of the Anthropocene’s durée, and positions the late twentieth-century epochal start date as a “thick Anthropocene,” subtended by the state formation and subsequent social stratification enabled by post-Mesopotamian agriculture. This “thin” Anthropocene, as he terms it, even “dates from the use of fire by Homo erectus roughly half a million years ago and extends up through clearances for agriculture and grazing and the resulting deforestation, and siltation.”13 Similarly, Timothy Morton argues that Mesopotamian agriculture inaugurated ecocidal patterns by exempting the human from ecological vulnerability, where the drive to preserve the human population (and to alleviate anxiety about the source of the next meal) comes at the expense of whatever else exists in the way of crop production.14 Morton terms this constellation of feelings and comportments adhering to postMesopotamian agriculture “agrilogistics,” where agriculture is an algorithm or program being executed despite its attendant effects.15 For Morton, agrilogistics is constantly performed as a “self-reinforcing loop”16 centered on tragedy: the original anxiety about human survival that results in agriculture leads to the crises that inevitably result from these solutions (infestation, drought, flood, social collapse), followed by the agrilogistical measure taken to alleviate these tragedies (more chemicals, more violence).

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The hideous product of this war is performed in Endgame, where there is almost nothing left to kill or grow. Dipesh Chakrabarty acknowledges the incommensurability of sociopolitical critiques that emphasize power and difference with the registers of climate science that necessitate the formulation of the actions of one species, “a collectivity whose commitment to fossil-fuel based, energy-consuming civilization is now a threat to that civilization itself.”17 Importantly, he notes that “[t]hese views of the human do not supersede one another … They are simply disjunctive.” The emergency of climate change and concomitant social precarity need to be thought together and simultaneously, in spite and because of their productive tensions. Moreover, Morton has also connected the threads of the Anthropocene together: he argues that there is not a 12,000year leap from Mesopotamia to current post-industrial carbon culture. Instead, agriculture is “the smoking gun behind the smoking chimneys responsible for the Sixth Mass Extinction Event.”18 The ecological effects of agriculture are cumulative and culminate in today’s era of climate crisis. But this accumulation is not linear: Morton observes that “it might be best to see history as a nested series of catastrophes that are still playing out rather than a sequence of events based on a conception of time as a succession of atomic instants.”19 What is so compelling about Beckett’s writing is that it reinforces that there is no definitive Anthropocene, and allows these timescales to overlap and inform one another, with agriculture ultimately underwriting ecological collapse. Moreover, as I will explore in the detailed readings below, the stage of Endgame and the pages of How It Is equally depict the oppressive dynamics of power that subtend the Anthropocene and persist in the imagined worlds of its after-effects. Images of climate measurement and references to the gray, barren landscape in Endgame occur alongside scenes of bitter cruelty, including Hamm’s power over Clov, and Bom’s (the narrator of How It Is) brutal torture of Pim.

Greening Beckett The ecological resonances of Beckett’s oeuvre have attracted increasing scholarly attention, forming a community of approaches and investments of which this chapter is a part. Theodor Adorno’s acclaimed essay “Trying to Understand Endgame” identifies the problematic climate in the play.20 Adorno is interested in the play’s unintelligibility, emergent in the aftermath

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of World War II and the “drama of the atomic age.”21 For Adorno, the annihilation denoted by this atomic age is bound up in climate, as reflected in the play’s setting. He writes: “[t]he condition presented in the play is nothing other than that in which ‘there’s no more nature,’” wherein the absence of nature is the exposure of “the phantom of an anthropocentrically dominated world.”22 His connection of war and nature points to a geological connection between the supposed end of nature and the aftermath of World War II. Prominent ecocritic Greg Garrard has also written about Endgame; his essay “Endgame: Beckett’s ‘Ecological Thought’” seeks to correct what he perceives as ecocriticism’s antipathy to modernism. He locates this hostility in canonical ecocriticism’s commitment to conservation and realist genres in which natural verisimilitude is used persuasively in the service of conservation.23 Yet Garrard argues that realist literary interpretations of nature are not engendering enough meaningful or productive action, given the ongoing prevalence and escalation of climate change. Garrard assesses the specificity of the play’s setting at the end of nature in contrast to its non-specific surrounding environment as a productive, non-representational ecological aesthetic.24 More broadly, ecocritical readings of the Theater of the Absurd model environmental interpretations of Beckett’s drama. Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh associate the critical import of the Theater of the Absurd with its “ability to express an emergent sense of ecological and environmental anxiety that today has become so palpable and potentially catastrophic.”25 They elaborate on the material effects of the atomic age beyond its existential threats: the presence of radiation in the atmosphere, the accumulation of chemicals in food crops, the spread of exhaust gases from vehicles and industry.26 Importantly for this chapter, they consider the “affective and allegorical” aspect of the Anthropocene in Absurdist theater: while these plays antedate the definition of this epoch, they nonetheless “captur[e] the conceptual meaning of the Anthropocene in its nascent form, [by] marking … a shift in consciousness that places limits on human mastery as well as foreclosing any possibility of transcending the Earth.”27 Beyond this political contextualization, Lavery and Finburgh endeavor to revisit the critical commonplace that the Absurdist stage is concerned only with the human condition. In opposition to the presumption that the theater “is the anthropocentric art form par excellence,” they consider the theater as an ecosystem, where actors, sets, and audience are thrown into an assemblage

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with “bodies, objects, lights and fabrics” that affect and are affected by one another.28 Likewise, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr provides an ecological reading of Beckett that elicits productive comparison with the scope of the Anthropocene in her analysis of Absurdist theater and evolutionary theory. In her chapter “Beckett’s Old Muckball,” she demonstrates how Beckett explored the concept of evolution beyond its component parts (i.e. natural selection or mutation), and instead brings to the stage the broader implications of Darwin’s theory, namely “thinking about humans as a species” and “the interconnections between us, the animal kingdom, and the environment.”29 She argues that the “earth and its processes are the mainstay of [Beckett’s] theatre,” starting from a close reading of Krapp’s phrase “old muckball” to highlight the simultaneity of the “monumental and macrocosmic” of a planet and the small, “familiar, predictable, and oddly intimate” scales denoted by the term of endearment “old.”30

“Nature has forgotten us” Early in Endgame appears perhaps the most frequently analyzed exchange in ecological readings of Beckett. For Hamm and Clov, the end of nature is specifically manifested in the failure of plant growth: Hamm: Did your seeds come up? Clov: No. Hamm: Did you scratch round them to see if they had sprouted? Clov: They haven’t sprouted. Hamm: Perhaps it’s still too early. Clov: If they were going to sprout they would have sprouted. [Violently.] They’ll never sprout! (E 20) Among the litany of objects that are “no more” in the play, including Turkish Delight, bicycle wheels, pap, sawdust, gulls, painkillers, waves (E 64, 15, 16, 24, 38, 39), the absence of nature and of growing plants is the most sweeping and catastrophic. The crisis at hand is an agricultural one: the instrumental growing of plants by humans is a domination of nature that can no longer take place at nature’s end. This is Adorno’s take on this exchange: he writes that this

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scene depicts “the phase of completed reification of the world, which leaves no remainder of what was not made by humans; it is permanent catastrophe, along with a catastrophic event caused by humans themselves, in which nature has been extinguished out and nothing grows any longer.”31 This scene marks the beginning and the end of the Anthropocene, the reification of the world by agriculture and ultimately the apocalypse engendered by that reification. Revealed in this exchange is how human mastery over nonhuman environments is illusory, as is the divide between nature and agriculture. Absent a functioning ecosystem, plants will no longer grow according to the planned logic of agriculture. While collapsing vastly distant moments in geological time (the outset of the Holocene and the post-atomic present of the play), this moment also oscillates between generalized agricultural practice and the specificity of historical impositions on colonized land. Specifically, Julieann Ulin has convincingly contextualized the failure of plants to grow in the nineteenth-century agricultural crisis of the Famine, and suggests that Endgame is “Beckett’s most Irish play, in which there are significant textual correspondences with Famine Ireland that would have been readily available to an Irish audience.”32 Ulin’s insight into the colonial and political reverberations of the scene highlights Charkrabarty’s call for recognition of the simultaneous but disjunctive registers of the Anthropocene: Beckett’s scene shows how we must be critical of our species’ action, and also mindful of stratified difference and colonial violence in tandem. The oscillation between scales of the Anthropocene from the long history of agriculture through the postwar Green Revolution is evident in the appearance of parasites and vermin in the play. The reference to a rat running loose in the offstage kitchen is particularly odd, not only because of the rat’s living state (he is “half ” exterminated, and later, Clov announces “If I don’t kill that rat he’ll die” [E 62, 76]) but also because the rat raises the question of how there can be vermin if there are no longer agricultural plants or seemingly any stored provisions to safeguard. The infiltration of Clov’s pants by a flea more forcefully connects the disjunctive registers of the Anthropocene: Clov: [anguished, scratching himself] I have a flea! Hamm: A flea! Are there still fleas? Clov: On me there’s one.

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[Scratching.]

Unless it’s a crablouse.

Hamm: [very perturbed] But humanity might start from there all over again!

Catch him, for the love of God!

Clov: I’ll go and get the powder. [Exit Clov.] Hamm: A flea! This is awful! What a day! [Enter Clov with a sprinkling-tin.] Clov: I’m back again with the insecticide. (E 41) Insecticide is clearly and poignantly an agrilogistical tool to clear crops of competing lifeforms and the escalating aftermaths of monoculture (plagues, infestations, etc.). The presence of a can of insecticide metonymizes not only agriculture (in both its Mesopotamian and Green Revolution manifestations), but of course the violence of war; one referent for Beckett and Adorno is the Nazis’ use of insecticide in the death camps for the extermination of humans.33 In this conflation of war and chemicals, human and nonhuman extermination, Clov’s flea is a moment of ecological and agricultural paradox: Clov and Hamm kill the very last present member of another species, using a tool of agricultural domination, while bemoaning the death of nature and the absence of other species. In short, they perform the self-reinforcing loop of agricultural crisis and response. However, they are ostensibly also aware of the fact that they are in an agrilogistical loop: Hamm’s fear that “humanity might start from there all over again!” suggests his fear of rewinding and replaying the tape of human history which has culminated in this post-catastrophic scene. Ulrika Maude and Steven Connor’s contributions in Beckett’s Animals make sense of the poignancy of this conflation of humanity with the flea. Maude argues that the collapsing of these species forces us to “encounter the animal within”:34 if fleas are a parasite, how is humanity also parasitic? Connor’s discussion of flies in other Beckett texts considers the eco-niche of the parasite: he writes that flies can been seen as “familiars and fellow travellers” in that they subsist “in and off our deaths” and bodies, and are thus composed of human material.35 Fleas’ shared composition and bodily intimacy with humans gestures toward a broader Anthropocenic implication,

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that the subject (the being in opposition to or exterminating nature) collapses into the object (what is dominated in nature), resulting in a situation where the can of insecticide embodies a middle voice of ecological vulnerability, where extermination of the other has a negative effect on the subject. Sown throughout the play is the recurring image of the pile of grain. The first words uttered on stage, Clov’s, about how “it” (perhaps nature) is “nearly finished,” are followed by his observation that “Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap” (E 8). The pile of grain reappears in Hamm’s words near the close of the play: “Moment upon moment, pattering down, like millet grains of…” (E 78). Clov’s image of accumulating piles of grain are a performance of measuring time and the Sorites paradox: at what point does a heap become a heap?36 This is a fruitful image for the piling up of nested Anthropocenes. Clov’s “grain upon grain” allows us to inquire about when human exploitation of ecosystems and of each other gives way to a critical mass of consequences. The agricultural and agripessimistic overtones of the piles lie in their recollection of grain accumulation and storage that in part facilitated the growth of the Mesopotamian state.37 This connection is reinforced by Hamm’s recollection of bragging about his stockpiles to a man begging on his estate: “Corn, yes, I have corn, it’s true, in my granaries” (E 60). Yet he refuses to share his bounty, and instead chastises the man and offers him a job as an agricultural laborer (E 68). The piles of grain point to the earliest modes of agricultural practice and how it instantiates social inequalities and exploitation: Hamm’s granaries allow him to exert power over the begging man, and he continues to exert power over Clov. A poignant contrast between Hamm’s granary piles and Clov’s subservience to him is Hamm’s violent series of threats and insults hurled at Clov, among which he states: “Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all ages wouldn’t fill it, and there you’ll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe” (E 44). In Hamm’s threat, Clov’s bodily being would be reduced to a mere speck, the opposite of the stockpile which underwrites Hamm’s violence. Hamm’s jealous control of his granaries bears Famine overtones, as with the sprouting seeds scene discussed above, thereby adding another temporal/historical marker to this rich image of accumulation. Moreover, the historical framing for Ulin is the source of the play’s Absurd plotlessness. She argues that Hamm’s documentation of weather-monitoring instruments and cruel but repetitive anecdotes about granaries “refus[e] to advance plot or confer meaning.”38 Seán Kennedy has

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also pointed to these kinds of scenes in Beckett’s work, featuring a clownish landlord engaging in “little more than an absurd performance of propriety,” that add up to a pile of “ritualized inanities.”39 As the landlord “plot” is divested of its force, so too is the theatrical plot emptied of meaningful action, the traditional plot through climax and dénouement. Hamm and Clov are left at the end of the play much as they are in the beginning, but surrounded by a mounting climate disaster.

“Primeval mud impenetrable dark” There has been sustained critical attention to Endgame’s circular plot and structure. Ruby Cohn notes that Beckett’s revisions of the play increasingly reinforced a failure of plot “whose end echoes its beginning.”40 In dialogue with such readings, Shepherd-Barr has argued that close attention to the endings of Beckett’s plays reveals instead “infinitesimal changes,” so that what appears to be a loop (Hamm and Clov ending Endgame much as they began it, or the ostensibly repetitive acts of Waiting for Godot (1955), for example) are actually repetitions with a slight difference. This is a critical distinction for Shepherd-Barr, who traces onto such infinitesimal changes patterns of ecological growth or extinction. For her, this movement toward slight environmental change or loss is an enactment of the evolutionary processes of “biological variation.”41 Taking up Shepherd-Barr’s observation, Endgame ends with the sense that continued inching toward the complete end of nature is what has happened. If the cycle starts anew, it will feature more signs of looming extinction. In this view, How It Is offers a glimpse beyond the pale of Endgame’s house, an imagining of a thoroughly post-agricultural world, where the only life left is human life. That the novel can be read as a continuation of Endgame’s dramatic action is reinforced by the title in the original French, Comment C’est, a homophone for the word commencer, meaning “to begin.” The novel documents the “ill-said ill-heard ill-recaptured ill-murmured” life story of a solitary male narrator, Bom, crawling through mud, recounting—as prompted by an outside “ancient voice”—his previous life and his brutal encounters with fellow crawler Pim.42 Bom and Pim are encompassed in a world where millions of people crawl through the mud to form into temporary couples of tormentor and victim, in an “immense circuit” (HII 90). Commentators have read the play “Act Without Words I” as Endgame’s successor, and with good reason: the short play’s depiction of a

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man in the desert continues Endgame’s apocalyptic setting; the plays debuted on the same evening at London’s Royal Court Theatre; and they are published as one volume by Grove Press. Yet the novel’s fixation on mud and violence at the planetary scale make How It Is a fully realized agripessimistic vision, productively read as a sequel to Endgame. The world in which How It Is unfolds is a huge expanse of mud, where the potential for agricultural growth is simultaneously present and absent. Bom details the meager means for survival in the mud plain: “centuries I can see me quite tiny the same as now more or less only tinier quite tiny no more objects no more food and I live the air sustains me the mud I live on” (HII 9). Here, there is no more food or food production; the only “crop” sustained by the soil is humans. Tin cans of food survive, no longer tethered to any kind of food production, and yet bearing the trace of agriculture: the narrator describes how “with the gesture of one dealing cards and also to be observed among certain sowers of seed I throw away the empty tins they fall without a sound” (HII 4). The mud appears to the narrator as “primeval mud impenetrable dark” (HII 4), which suggests a beginning or potentiality of fertility and development, yet the mud is “impenetrable,” and the only seeds, as aforementioned, are tin cans. The human domination of the landscape is so totalized that Bom wonders whether even the mud has an anthropocentric origin. He makes a “quick supposition” that even the mud is not “dirt” but wonders: if this so-called mud were nothing more than all of our shit yes all if there are not billions of us at the moment and why not the moment there are two there were yes billions of us crawling and shitting in their shit hugging like a treasure in their arms the wherewithal to crawl and shit a little more (HII 36) Not only is even the mud a human product, but it is a landscape of totalized pollution. Moreover, the ecological work of transforming waste into mud or soil is now the purview of humans, who are the “migration of slime-worms” (HII 83). The mud world allows for no growth, digestion, or decomposition beyond the human. The novel’s frequent references to the planetary scale render its engagement with geological frames even more explicit than Endgame’s. The expanse of mud is a ruin covering the entire planet: Bom notes that the

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mud occupies “what all lands midnight sun midday night all latitudes all longitudes,” repeating again that at “all longitudes” is “a ruin land strewn with ruin all ages” (HII 61–62). The word “earth” appears at least fifteen times, and is always contrasted to the mud in which Bom now exists: he recalls a “few images on and off in the mud earth sky a few creatures in the light some still standing” (HII 2). Likewise, Bom recounts that the couplings occur at a moment when “no sun no earth nothing turning the same instant always everywhere” (HII 83). The mud in which the novel is set is undeniably terrestrial, so the opposition between the present time of mud and the past time of a rotating earth hints at a total failure of planetary systems. While the gap between mud plain and earth has generated many readings of its eschatological or philosophical symbolism, the extinction of earth is also a material depiction of the realities of the Anthropocene. On that point, the novel contains a diverse vocabulary of geological time:43 late in the novel, the narrator reflects on “these aeons my God” (HII 102), conflating the length of time he has been murmuring with the unit of time encompassing the formation of the earth and the appearance of the smallest forms of life. “Period” makes a frequent appearance as well, often serving dual purpose as a marker of the novel’s time in a geological frame as well as punctuation, since the novel is organized in three suites of paragraphs with “no commas” (HII 51): for example, “rats no rats this time I’ve sickened them what else at this period part one before Pim vast stretch of time” (HII 10). “Age” appears at least eleven times in its geological connotation, especially in conjunction with remembrances of the earth past as a “golden age” (HII 33). The word “species” appears at least nine times, thrice alongside a “golden age”: “part one before Pim the golden age the good moments the losses of the species I was young I clung on to the species we’re talking of the species the human” (HII 33). The condition of How It Is, to borrow a phrase from Lavery and Finburgh, is “geopathological.”44 The novel does compelling Anthropocenic work, drawing together the vastness of geological time and thereby highlighting the cognitive complexities and repetitions involved with such imagining, from a position after geological time, as we know it, has stopped. It also imagines the causal scale of the Anthropocene, that is, what happens when characters who have previously “clung” to the safety of the human species find themselves surrounded by nothing else. Along with the utter devastation of the landscape in How It Is comes the shattering of the novel form. Just as Endgame’s clownish characters

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and non-cathartic plot gave theatrical form to Beckett’s agripessimism, the experimentation in How It Is also undermines the realist novel plot. The very first words of the novel explicitly state its action (or lack thereof): “how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it” (HII 1). The form itself of the novel is pitched at agripessimistic registers, if we see the streams of unpunctuated paragraphs as accumulating like Clov’s “grain upon grain” instead of cohering into a unified narration. This accumulation is attenuated by the extensive presence of meaningless permutations through the narrator’s calculations regarding the combinations of pairs of victim and tormentor in the mudscape. Julian Murphet suggests that “permutational analysis is the very opposite of a narrative sequence” since “permutation changes precisely none of its constituent elements,” the presence of which in Beckett’s writing constitutes his “humiliation of the novel form.”45 My positioning of Beckett’s formal experimentation as agripessimistic pushes on the etymology of humiliation as of or pertaining to the earth, or humus, and sees the dismantling of the novel as a way to explore the grounds of plot and setting. Beckett further evacuates the plot of this novel when the narrator refutes it all at the end. The narration ends with the statements: “all these calculations yes explanations yes the whole story from beginning to end yes completely false yes,” and “all this business of above yes light yes skies yes a little blue yes a little white yes the earth turning yes and less bright yes little scenes yes all balls yes the woman yes the dog yes the prayers yes the homes yes all balls yes” (HII 109–10). This refutation challenges the possibility of the novel form as a vehicle for plot and meaning. It is interesting that in addition to the “whole story from beginning to end” as “completely false,” also “completely balls” are the existence and veracity of the glimmers of life on earth above/before, the clouds and the little blue, calling into question the novel’s acceptance of an outside of the agripessimistic nightmare of the “primeval mud impenetrable dark.” This hopelessness appears to be the note on which How It Is ends. Yet Murphet contends that Beckett’s mortification of the novel allowed for the “painstaking clearing of the wreckage that he had made of the novel, so that new formal shoots could take root on ground now vacant and fertilized.”46 The reader, along with Bom, is left wondering “part four what that will be” (HII 91). These “new formal shoots” would involve comedy, as Morton writes: “How does one get out of a self-reinforcing loop? To get beyond is not to cast the argument away, but to find an alternative to horror as the host for

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the argument. What we need to do is to find within horror some form of laughter.”47 After the extermination of the flea in Endgame, Hamm yearns to escape the agripessimistic trap: “Let’s go from here, the two of us! South! You can make a raft and the currents will carry us far away, far away, to other … mammals!” only to worry whether there “will be sharks” (E 42–43). His desire to escape the loop of agrilogistics is a desire to commune with other animals, but he is held back by a fear of sharks that is absurd and comical, given the play’s context. Yet this moment suggests that there is a possibility for human characters to proceed differently with feelings of ecological vulnerability. Not giving in to the totalization of despair is an ethical project. As Tsing writes, histories of destruction are part and parcel of the capitalocene: “[t]he story of decline offers no leftovers, no excess, nothing that escapes progress. Progress still controls us even in tales of ruination.”48 While humor provides a glimmer of formal shoots and a possibility for “leftovers” in Beckett’s agripessimistic worldview, the real affective charge of these works lies in their diagnosis of the feelings of negativity and impasse that define life in the Anthropocene. As Lavery and Finburgh observe, Beckett’s theater “provokes a mood of unease, a kind of haunting that communicates a sociohistorical atmosphere that the audience might otherwise prefer to repress or ignore.”49 These works do not present themselves as a “set of instructions that audiences could identify and act on.”50 Instead, Endgame and How It Is are ultimately Anthropocenic because they articulate species feelings including “despair, resignation, climate grief, and solastalgia, as well as familiar feelings like disappointment and anxiety.”51 In characterizing and performing these affects, following Lavery and Finburgh, these texts show how “things ought to be otherwise, even when no direct green message is forthcoming.”52 Ultimately, any environmental action or feeling can seem futile. Or, as Hamm explains, “use your head, you’re on earth! There’s no cure for that!”53

C HA P T E R 1 2

“There all the time without you” Joyce, Modernism, and the Anthropocene Peter Adkins

T

he opening sentences of the “Proteus” are some of the most notoriously difficult in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922):

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane.1

The reported thoughts of Stephen Dedalus as he walks along Sandymount Strand, the stretch of coastline just south of Dublin, open an episode that centers on the protean relationship between the senses and knowledge. Gazing at the shoreline, Stephen’s thoughts converge on the sense-making operations that condition and limit our knowledge of the material world around us. As he acknowledges a few sentences later when walking a short distance with his eyes closed, it is not the visibility of the world that is ineluctable, rather the fact that we necessarily come to experience that world through a mediating

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modality that shapes our understanding of it. On reopening his eyes, however, Dublin’s shoreline is briefly glimpsed in terms of a geological sublimity that temporally and spatially diminishes the human: “See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”2 An ironic refashioning of the Christian promise of a “world without end” found in the Gloria Patri doxology, the vastness of time and space suddenly seems to push back against the human as the measure of all things.3 And yet, as is implied in Stephen’s affirmation of “see[ing] now,” this vision is simultaneously testament to human knowledge and insight. Being able to “see” the world before and after human life demonstrates not only the human species’ diminutiveness, but, paradoxically, its ever-growing power to know and thereby master that world. Stephen’s blasphemous vision of Sandymount in terms of indifferent and inhuman scales of time and space speaks to the legacy of nineteenth-century geology, whose stratigraphic evidence had challenged an orthodox Christian perspective that the planet was 6,000 years old. Indeed, by the early twentieth century, the idea that the planet was many millions, perhaps billions, of years old and that humans were only a very recent phenomenon was a fairly settled scientific idea.4 Moreover, Joyce’s education seems to have introduced him to such ideas. A university essay he wrote in 1899 describes man “as an infinitely small actor, playing a most uninteresting part in the drama of worlds.”5 In this, as in Stephen’s thoughts, we can read the emergence of what might be called an Anthropocene consciousness, where the ability to imagine a universe in which the human is no longer at the center both reflects a new non-anthropocentric grasp of the world and humanity’s increasing ability to understand and influence that world through an expanding knowledge of it. It is in this sense that we find Joyce seeming to intuit what Sverre Raffnsøe describes as one of the central paradoxes of the Anthropocene. That is, at the same time that the “world seems to have turned towards the human, insofar as the human being is perceived as having a decisive impact on even very fundamental conditions in the world […] the human being simultaneously turns outwards, towards its surroundings,” recognizing its own precarity on a planet that has existed long before it and will continue to exist long after.6 Combining the Greek term for man (“Anthropos”) and the unit of time used in geology to differentiate between recent geological epochs (“cene”), the Anthropocene originated out of the earth sciences in the early 2000s amid calls to recognize that we have entered a new phase of planetary history. As its name suggests, this new epoch is defined by the fact that for the first

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time in the history of the earth a single species will have marked the planet so profoundly that its influence will be observable for millions of years into the future.7 For Paul Crutzen, the climate scientist usually credited with having coined the term, “the rapid expansion of mankind in numbers and per capita exploitation of Earth’s resources” is such that humanity must now be considered a telluric force.8 At exactly what point in the earth’s history the Anthropocene began, however, is a point of contention. The most recent proposal put forward to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the official body that ratifies geochronological divisions, argues for 1945 as the entry point into the Anthropocene, with the detonation of the first atom bomb representing a threshold event of both material and symbolic magnitude. Taking this date as authoritative would seem to suggest that we should understand the busy period of modernist activity in the early decades of the twentieth century as taking place during the immediate prelude to the Anthropocene, yet safely ensconced outside of its parameters. Such a stark division, however, is not supported by the historical record, with the early twentieth century presenting other threshold events that could just as easily be submitted in support of an earlier transition into the Anthropocene.9 These include atmospheric carbon dioxide surpassing three hundred parts per million shortly after the turn of the twentieth century; the widespread introduction of liquid fuels during the same period; and the exponential increase of lead and sulfate in the atmosphere during both World Wars.10 The implications of the Anthropocene, however, far exceed questions pertaining to its precise origins. It represents not only a new way of dividing planetary history but, as the ecocritic Timothy Clark argues, “a cultural threshold” that requires us to revise how we conceptualize the human’s relation to the planet.11 Converging human and planetary history, the Anthropocene challenges a worldview that would see humans as autonomous from the nonhuman world, and insists on reevaluating the ontological, ethical, and even aesthetic sureties through which humans have previously defined themselves.12 Yet, as Stephen’s glimpse of a world after humans in Ulysses also affirms, the Anthropocene does not readily dissolve all differences between the human and the nonhuman. Rather, it points to the necessity of relocating the human within a non-hierarchical worldview without losing sight of the all-too-human differences that enable such an insight. In this chapter I am going to argue that although the Anthropocene has arrived as a recent rupture in our thinking about the human and the

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nonhuman, it is a rupture whose reverberations can be traced back to the early twentieth century. By showing how debates around the convergence of planetary and human evolution were already taking place during this period, with figures such as Henri Bergson laying the conceptual groundwork for rethinking the relationship between subjectivity and materiality, this chapter will suggest that Joyce’s modernism should be located within a cultural moment that was imagining afresh humankind’s position on the planet. As Matthew Griffiths has argued, modernism’s capacity to “disrupt previously cherished conceptions of the world” remains a generative source for approaching urgent contemporary questions around planetary change.13 In arguing that the literature of the early twentieth century is already theorizing the implications of the Anthropocene, this chapter aims to demonstrate how our emergent planetary epoch might not only inform a new understanding of modernism, but also how, in turn, we might benefit from the willingness to rethink the human and the nonhuman that we find in modernist texts.

A Modernist Anthropocene The early twentieth century was a period during which science, philosophy, and geography were establishing a modern understanding of the earth, its environments, and its geophysical systems. Where nineteenth-century uniformitarian accounts had often insisted on seeing planetary changes in terms of gradual and unidirectional geological development, the first few decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence of theories that insisted on a less mechanistic understanding of natural history and, crucially, humanity’s increasing role in shaping that history. For the Cambridge geographer R. L. Sherlock, the human now had to be considered not only a biological agent but a geological one as well, with the “work of Man resembl[ing] that of natural agents that are known to have acted with exceptional power at intervals in the earth’s history.”14 The Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky was arriving at similar conclusions, publishing research showing how human actions influenced atmospheric composition to the extent that planetary conditions were in the process of being transformed.15 The sense that the human was now shaping planetary history was also making itself felt in cultural spheres. As Ted Howell has argued, in the impending sense of catastrophe that we find in works such as E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) we can read an articulation of the

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potentially apocalyptic consequences of environmental changes brought about by the rise of car culture, urban development, and suburban sprawl.16 In this light, the fearful “handful of dust” in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) or Virginia Woolf ’s description in “Thunder at Wembley” (1924) of “livid” storm clouds gathering over the British Empire Exhibition as “Humanity rush[es] to destruction” suggest themselves as prescient of precisely the paradox sketched out in my introduction, where Anthropos’s taking on of ever more power is that which renders the species all the more vulnerable to extinction.17 Perhaps most remarkable of all in this context is the fact that the word Anthropocene was itself first used in that annus mirabilis of modernism, 1922. Coined by the Russian geologist Aleksei Pavlov, it was suggested to be a more fitting term than the Holocene (the name for our current geological epoch), since it recognized humanity’s longstanding influence on the earth. The term, however, did not attract the attention of the international scientific community. Hampered by inconsistent translation (being sometimes rendered as the “Anthropogene”) and Western prejudice against Soviet science, Pavlov’s term would have to wait another eight decades to gain recognition when Crutzen arrived at the term.18 The early twentieth century, then, was a period rich in what members of the Anthropocene Working Group have called “antecedents of the Anthropocene concept.”19 Moreover, and significant for understanding how modernist literature and science can be seen to intersect in relation to the Anthropocene, a key influence on many of these antecedents was Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, published in French in 1907 and translated into English in 1911. An attempt to offer a theory of evolution that could account for how “the intellectual form of the living being has been gradually modelled on the reciprocal actions and reactions of certain bodies and their material environments,” Bergson looked to break away from mechanistic models put forward in the nineteenth century.20 Arguing that variation and adaptation do not occur through the accumulation of learned traits and behaviors, Bergson instead presented evolution as motored by élan vital, a vital impetus that runs through all life, acting as a differentiating force that creates change. As Elizabeth Grosz has recently argued, we should not see this aspect of Bergson’s evolutionary theory as an extension of nineteenth-century vitalism in which spirit and matter are seen in dichotomous or oppositional terms. Rather, life for Bergson is “an extension and elaboration of matter through attenuating divergence or difference,” in which vitality and matter

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are “intimately implicated in each other, different degrees of one and the same force.”21 As Grosz argues, rather than seeing life as a “vital spark added to the inertia of the inorganic,” life is shown to be “that tendency, in matter itself, to prolong, delay, detour.”22 Bergson’s theory, then, not only intensifies Darwin’s decentering of the human in relation to other species, but in its attention to materiality poses the question of whether the category of species should be understood as the basic unit of evolution. As he writes in the introduction to Creative Evolution, it is far from clear “where individuality begins and ends, whether the living being is one or many, whether it is the cells which associate themselves into the organism or the organism which dissociates itself into the cells.”23 Matter and life are, as such, not opposites, but co-constitutive of one another. Making porous the dividing line between the organic and inorganic, or the biological and the geological, Bergson, like Crutzen in his early articles on the Anthropocene, outlines a geology of “mankind.”24 The widespread popularity of Bergson’s philosophy in the British society of the 1910s and his specific influence on Anglo-American modernism is well documented. We know that Eliot attended Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France in Paris in 1910 and 1911, that Joyce had a copy of Creative Evolution in his library when he began work on Ulysses, and that T. E. Hulme’s readings in Bergson likely had a decisive influence on the emergence of Imagism.25 As Jeff Wallace has argued in the context of D. H. Lawrence’s oeuvre, Bergson’s “doubled or distinctly ambivalent stance towards science” and his “material definition of mind” were part of modernism’s intellectual climate, contributing to the revision of the human that became a prevalent site of anxiety for a whole range of modernist writers.26 Yet while many accounts of Bergson and modernism have tended to focus on questions of temporality, tracing the influence of durée on modernist innovations, Bergson’s relevance for understanding modernism and the Anthropocene resides in understanding the influence of an evolutionary model of “becoming” that interweaves the human with the geological without dissolving difference. The human might be situated within a continuum of inhuman materiality but, as Bergson’s above quoted interest in “the intellectual form of the living being” suggests, this does not amount to neglecting the question of where to locate thought itself; human difference (not to be confused with anthropocentrism) is to be rethought rather than discarded. For Bergson, this requires acknowledging how the development of human intelligence has produced an overly refined way of knowing that reduces life to “general frames of … understanding” in

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which the “irreducible and inexplicable” are necessarily excluded, as reality is condensed to a set of concepts or ideas that can contain them.27 As such, a philosophy that takes into account the fact that human knowledge is itself constituted by and continuous with the processes it is looking to describe necessarily requires that intellect be joined by intuition. Ontology and epistemology cannot be considered separate endeavors since a “theory of knowledge and [a] theory of life” are inseparable.28 In a very clear sense, we can see Bergson’s Creative Evolution as returning to one of the troublesome knots tying together the idea of the Anthropocene. The production of new knowledge, such as scientific discoveries and philosophical concepts, arises from humanity’s more-than-human entanglements with the world and influences how humanity then manipulates the world. There is no position outside of this unceasing evolutionary feedback loop. If the Anthropocene draws attention to the way in which the human species is deeply embedded in the planet’s geophysical systems, then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Bergson was already exploring similar ideas.

Joyce, Bergson, and the “Noosphere” As mentioned above, Joyce procured a copy of Creative Evolution while working on the early episodes of Ulysses in Trieste, and the degree to which his innovations are indebted to Bergson’s philosophy have been much commented on, perhaps most notably in Wyndham Lewis’s criticism of the novel for being too “strictly of the school of Bergson–Einstein” in what he interpreted as its privileging of time over space.29 Yet while much consideration has been given to the way in which a Bergsonian temporality can be identified in the structure and style of Ulysses, less attention has been paid to the manner in which the broader implications of Bergson’s evolutionary theory are also explored in Joyce’s novel. As Joyce explained to the artist Frank Budgen, “Proteus” was premised on capturing the way that “[e]verything changes— sea, sky, man, animals,” and the episode employs evolutionary overtones through the structural juxtaposition of the human and the geological, with Stephen “walking into eternity along Sandymount Strand” as his feet “sink slowly in the quaking soil.”30 Indeed, in an episode that is, on one level, so clearly about the protean development of Joyce’s semi-autobiographical protagonist, he is also at pains to locate Stephen within a dynamic physical environment that is decidedly impersonal. The “nipping and eager airs” and

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“grainy sand” play an active part in shaping Stephen’s inner life, triggering and influencing thoughts and memories, while images of human body parts being absorbed into the sand become a repeated motif.31 The south Dublin coastline is presented as a place of primordial origins, where “piled stones” appear as “mammoth skulls” and the ocean takes on the shape of “the flood.”32 As John Brannigan has argued, in Stephen’s observation that “like Algy” he is “coming down to our mighty mother” we might detect an ironic reference not only to Algernon Charles Swinburne, but also to the evolutionary theory that all life can be traced back to simple marine organisms such as algae.33 Contrary to Brannigan’s Darwinian reading, however, this reference just as likely suggests the influence of Bergson’s Creative Evolution, where algae are held up as the prime example of “unicellular organisms which may be said to hesitate between the vegetable form and animality.”34 For Bergson, if the fact of consciousness is commonly held to be what separates the animal from the vegetable, their shared origins in marine organisms that defy such easy classification is of significance. Instead of an essential distinction between the animal and the vegetable, Bergson situates both as organisms whose differing tendencies took separate routes, with each branch continuing to split into different kingdoms and species. For Stephen, looking out at the sea as a locus of both human origins and a domain inhospitable to human life, we might read Joyce as further exploring that hesitation between the human and the nonhuman so clearly implicated in Bergson’s theory of evolution. Moreover, the entangled relationship between materiality and subjectivity (encompassing language, memory, and identity) is expressed not only through the episode’s littoral setting and evolutionary allusions, but in its formal qualities too. Take, for instance, the free indirect discourse in the following passage: His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razor shells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the ship worm, lost Armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a midden of man’s ashes. He coasted them, walking warily. A porterbottle stood up, stagged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach a dryingline

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with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.35 Euphony and parataxis combine to inflect the third-person narration with qualities that we associate with Stephen’s interior monologue, with Dublin presented as a living palimpsest in which the material remainders of the past (its early settlement as a midden town, involvement in the Napoleonic Wars, and subsequent industrialism) are transposed upon both matter from the far geological past and still unfolding environmental processes (most notably the seeping of raw sewage from the city). In the same way that in Grosz’s reading of Bergson a geometric understanding of materiality is rejected in favor of an understanding of space as “an aggregate of the multiplicity of movements, a map not of locations, points, but of trajectories,” Sandymount is recast as a site of multiple converging temporalities.36 As in the earlier vision of a “world without end,” it is a moment that intensifies what Brannigan has called Stephen’s exposure to “the longue durée of geological time,” as human history and natural history are intertwined.37 Yet it is the blurring of the third and the first person that is perhaps most notable in this respect, producing an intertwining of a subjective and objective narrative perspective. Instead of an opposition between the two, we find a materiality suffused with subjectivity and vice versa, with the final image of the “human shell” standing as a figure that recognizes precisely this mingling of life and matter (later Stephen will return to this image, when he thinks of his teeth as shells).38 Joyce’s depiction of the dynamic co-production of mind and matter was not the only attempt to build on the startling implications of Bergson’s philosophy in the years immediately after the publication of Creative Evolution. Concurrent with Joyce working on Ulysses, another group of individuals were developing a theory that, like Joyce’s innovations in subjectivity, intended to put pressure on how we understand consciousness. The aforementioned geologist Vernadsky, natural philosopher Edouard Le Roy, and paleontologist and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin were together developing the concept of the “noosphere,” premised on examining how cognition influences biological and geological processes (“noo” deriving from the Greek for mind, nous). In attempting to map cognition within broader geophysical systems, the concept of the “noosphere” was situated as a corrective to the idea of the “biosphere” that had been developed during the nineteenth century and which they saw as limited by a mechanistic

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understanding of life.39 And although the “noosphere” would go on to mean quite different things for each of these three figures, taking on a mystical transcendental quality in Teilhard de Chardin’s later work while remaining a geological concept for Vernadsky, at its core was an understanding of life informed by their respective readings of Creative Evolution. For Le Roy, whose reputation outside of France remains primarily as a disciple of Bergson rather than for his own work, Bergsonism implies that “[t]he curtain drawn between ourselves and reality, enveloping everything including ourselves in its illusive folds, seems of a sudden to fall.”40 To exclude human experience and consciousness from biological and geological processes was an oversight that therefore needed correcting, especially since the human was playing an increasingly decisive role in such processes. While the concept of the “noosphere” drew upon Bergson’s key insight that life is creative—in the sense that through its ceaseless differentiation it produces genuinely new forms of existence—it also pushed beyond Bergson, aiming to map the evolutionary moment at which a single cognitively developed species could alter the biosphere. For Le Roy, Anthropos’s emergence in evolutionary history marked the “hominization” of planetary life, in which “mankind becomes the key itself of transformational explanations.”41 While it is unclear whether Joyce was aware of the concept of the “noosphere,” which was being discussed and developed in Paris at the same time that he was also in the French capital finishing Ulysses, the parallels between his interest in materiality and what Le Roy describes as the “transindividual becoming” of the “noosphere” show the degree to which Bergson’s proto-Anthropocene evolutionary theory was being worked through in a variety of modernist contexts.42 Yet while for Le Roy the hominization of planetary life, or the moment at which the human becomes a geological agent, readily reinscribes human exceptionalism and celebrates the human mind as that which might overcome its environment, Ulysses is less ready to revert to anthropocentric narratives. We see this not least in the way in which the novel repeatedly undermines the exceptionalism of what are commonly held up as exclusive features of human subjectivity, such as symbolism and language. Stephen, for instance, observes on Sandymount that “these heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here. And these, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren of weasel rats.”43 An example of the earth itself producing signifiers that extend beyond the human, this is not only “lithic striation as a form of language,” as Hunter Dukes has shown, but the dynamic play of

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water, air, and minerals combining to produce a scene of writing in which it is far from clear where meaning originates.44 As earlier, where natural and discarded manmade objects presented themselves as uncertain “signatures” to be “read,” it cannot be decided in advance whether meaning resides in the inhuman materials themselves or the active gaze of the human interpreting them. This more-than-human indeterminacy of signs, writers, and readers comes up again later in the text when Bloom, also on Sandymount Strand, sees “rocks with lines and scars and letters” and is reminded of Martha Clifford’s substitution of “world” for word.45 In both instances, language, even consciousness, is presented not as self-enclosed within the human, but as continuous with and even constituted by an inhuman materiality that exceeds it. Where Le Roy sees the “noosphere” as demonstrating the hominization of life, a process of dynamic anthropomorphism, Joyce draws on the less reassuring implications of Bergsonism, presenting human thought and nonhuman materiality as intimately co-involved. If, as it is frequently read, “Proteus” is an episode in which human thought is at the forefront, it is nonetheless the case that Joyce wholly couches the mind within a materiality that dissolves any opposition between the two.

Human Life in the Anthropocene Although Joyce deconstructs the opposition between human and nonhuman life in Ulysses, he remains alert to the fact that the idea of “the human” nonetheless remains an important cultural and biological category. Joyce’s writing intensifies rather than diminishes what it means to be human. One of the means through which he achieves this intensification is by examining the cultural prevalence of worldviews that rest on human exceptionalism. We find evidence of anthropocentrism in Joyce’s depiction of the young Stephen. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Stephen writes on the flyleaf of his geography book: Stephen Dedalus Class of Elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland

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Here expanses of inhuman time and space are organized within a literal hierarchy that keeps the human top and center, pointing not only to the omnipresence of a geological sublime in the education system by the late nineteenth century, but also the recourse to an anthropocentric ordering that minimizes any decentering of human life implied therein. This is intensified later in A Portrait when Stephen recounts Percy Bysshe Shelley’s fragment “To the Moon.” Reflecting on what he sees as the poem’s evocation of “vast inhuman cycles of activity,” Stephen’s “human and ineffectual grieving” is diminished as, paradoxically, the encounter with an inhuman imaginary provides the ground for an epiphany in which his own sense of aesthetic mastery comes into focus.47 In both instances, the tacit acknowledgment of a world beyond the human is precisely that which motivates a transcendent sense of human exceptionalism. While the older Stephen of “Proteus” has graduated from geography schoolbooks to the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas, the impulse for mastery remains the same. Seeing his shadow “bent” over the rocks on the beach, Stephen’s thoughts turn to the cosmological: Why not endless till the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there with his augur’s rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars. I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back. Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches me here? Who ever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field.48 Here the finitude of Stephen’s shadow is held in contrast to the inhuman, and seemingly infinite, scale of the universe. Yet the “darkly” perceived presence of a universe that cannot be seen “behind this light,” precisely that which tests the modality of perception itself, gives rise not to a sense of the nonhuman world’s agency over and above the human, but of Stephen’s own ability as an artist to make sense of and master the materiality around him. While the “written words” that Stephen composes will exist irrespective of whether

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anyone reads them, with the “white field” of his torn piece of paper suggesting further parallels between human and nonhuman signs, it is his agency as an artificer of raw matter that is ultimately emphasized, as he casts himself in an active role, “walking,” “throw[ing],” and writing to the background of an “uncouth” material universe at whose center is a “manshape ineluctable.” In all of these respects, Stephen’s self-fashioned relationship with the material world reiterates the assertion of anthropocentrism that we find in the early proponents of the “noosphere.” Le Roy looked to resolve what he calls the “problem of mankind,” or how to define human difference when biologically speaking the human is very close to other species, by emphasizing the “invention of artificial tools,” seeing these extensions of the human as mankind’s “real organs […] real functions.”49 Stephen, whose name recalls the great craftsman and artificer of Greek mythology, Daedalus, similarly resituates the human as a locus of exceptionalism through his ability both to ask questions of the universe and subject it to the craft, or techne, of his poetry. This is, in the words of Teilhard de Chardin, not “undue anthropocentrism” but recognition of the “revolutionary effects of hominization” in which “reflexive awareness must be held […] as a super-stage of consciousness.”50 Yet in contrast to proponents of the “noosphere” concept, the ironic distance between character and author in both A Portrait and Ulysses invites a critical perspective on Stephen’s ability to switch between a geological sublime that would seem to displace the human and a more conservative anthropocentrism. Timothy Clark has argued that one of the central problems facing the genre of the novel in the Anthropocene is that geological processes take place at a scale that greatly exceeds the normative human scales that form the basic units of narrative. As Clark argues, it is “difficult to imagine what a novel’s interior monologue would look like if one tried to present it over a geological time scale.”51 Ulysses does not attempt such a feat, but it does stage the point that Clark is himself making. If the Anthropocene poses a fundamental problem to human understanding since it operates at a level that confounds immediate sensory perception, in “Proteus” Joyce’s free indirect discourse can be seen to show the cognitive processes through which such scales are assimilated and subsumed within anthropocentric frameworks. Here, then, the “ineluctable modality of the visible” takes on a further and decidedly proto-environmentalist implication, even if Joyce himself was not intentionally writing with an environmental politics in mind,52 bringing to light the ways in which our limited modes of sensory perception produce a

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distorted Anthropocene consciousness in which recognition of the vast scale of nonhuman life can entrench the human’s sense of mastery over the world. The question of modality, understood as the scales and forms through which we frame the world, becomes increasingly explicit in Ulysses as the novel progresses. While the earlier episodes might be seen as working toward an intensification of realism, mixing omniscient narration with interior monologue and free indirect discourse, the later episodes inhabit highly stylized and even self-referential forms that break with all claims to verisimilitude. Here, different modalities are played off against one another, as the philological fireworks of “Oxen of the Sun” are followed by the psychodrama of “Circe,” and the overwrought prose of “Eumaeus” is followed by the catechistic questions and answers of “Ithaca.” Each episode implicitly insists on seeing the human and, by extension, the nonhuman world through a different modality, and, thereby, insists on a new way of making sense of the narrative. For Bergson in Creative Evolution, the question of modality is similarly paramount. In a discussion of whether foundational laws exist in nature, Bergson suggests that “reality is ordered exactly to the degree in which it satisfies our thoughts,” not in the sense of idealism, but rather as a way of recognizing that are two kinds of order in the world.53 There is the order imposed on reality through reason and rationality by the human intellect, and there is the order produced by that reality itself, which will always exceed human frames of knowledge. Rather than seeing the former as order and the latter as disorder, which Bergson suggests philosophy has historically tended to do, instead, he argues, we should see them as contingent upon one another, much in the same way that “verse is contingent in relation to prose and prose in relation to verse.”54 We make sense of one through its difference from the other, and it is these modes of contingent order that undergird how we conceptualize the world around us. Here, then, we find, as in Ulysses, an acknowledgment that forms of order, those ineluctable modalities through which we make sense of the reality around us, are conditional and mutable. In the break with realism midway through Ulysses and the increasingly schematic structure of the book thereafter, we find a way of writing that registers the contingency of how we understand human life and the world beyond it. The question and answer form of “Ithaca,” for instance, reflects a will to order the world according to a scientific rationale. The tension that Bergson

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identifies between rationality and vitalism can be recognized in Bloom’s attempt to discern a “natural, as distinct from human law” beneath the “fact of vital growth.”55 Here, as throughout the chapter, we find a parody of reductionism, an effort to find the rationality that characterizes human thought (metonymically captured in Bloom’s bookcase where the “necessity of order” is reflected in there being “a place for everything and everything in its place”)56 in the world beyond. This trust in an underlying rational order means that even when Bloom seemingly acknowledges non-anthropocentric realities, such as the possible “annihilation of the planet” via collision with other planets or the “inevitable” future extinction of the human species, such facts are reduced to propositions within human knowledge.57 Embodying what Claire Colebrook describes as a form of scientism that by disavowing the centrality of human life reentrenches anthropocentrism through its assertion that “it is man who [can] read the conditions” of the planet and “discern its proper order,” the incessant ordering of “Ithaca” parodies an attempt to master the world through rational propositions.58 Indeed, we might read the oversized full stop that in certain editions of Ulysses draws the episode to a close as one final attempt at reductive ordering. Providing the answer to the episode’s final question of “Where?,” it is one last example of the hyperbolic scientific rationalism and reductionism that has characterized the episode, not only operating as a final act of containment and certainty but offering a visual representation of all planetary space squeezed into one neat circular mark.59 In an important sense, it is this scientific and ordered view of the planet that the final episode, “Penelope,” stands in opposition to, with Joyce writing in his notes for the episode that Molly Bloom should have “no science words.”60 Nonetheless, Molly also has an interest in the same planetary questions that preoccupy Bloom, questioning what she calls the “bad conscience” of atheists who, despite insisting on an objective basis for their claims, cannot say “who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all […] they dont know neither do I so there you are.”61 Here, the designation “no science words” presents itself not as a lack (although it is true that Molly has been denied a formal education) so much as a suspicion of the authority imbued in words that have been deemed scientific. Molly’s description of the universe, like Bloom’s, asserts its prior existence to and diminishing effect on the figure of the human, but closer to Bergson than Bloom, she affirms its ability to escape endlessly any empirical

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definition that might assimilate it within an epistemological structure. While Molly ultimately affirms a deistic view of the universe, she, in a manner far less self-aware than either Bloom or Stephen, envisions the human as continuous with the universe and wholly without the possibility of recourse to transcendent mastery over it. For Joyce, who saw Molly as speaking as the classical Earth Mother goddess Gaia, this final monologue was to function within the cosmology of the novel as an attempt to “depict the earth which is prehuman and presumably posthuman.” No longer constrained to a “human apparition,” Molly’s expansive monologue could instead take the form of the earth herself speaking.62 While the sexual politics of such a decision deserve to come under scrutiny, with the question of Joyce’s complicity with a long tradition of associating women with the earth contributing to the episode’s polarized reputation among feminist critics, it nonetheless recasts the relationship between the human and the planetary one final time.63 Richard Ellmann describes how Joyce almost concluded Molly’s monologue with the words “I will” but decided them to be “too Luciferian,” while the word “yes” invoked a “submission to a world beyond him” as an “acknowledgement of the universe.”64 As this chapter has shown, Joyce was writing at a time when ideas about the human, the nonhuman, and the planetary were being revised in philosophy, science, and literature. In the narrative preoccupations and stylistic vicissitudes that characterize Ulysses we can see Joyce contributing to this moment of revision. Although Ulysses is far from what one might call an environmental novel, in the sense of a text that offers a clear ecological politics, it does, nonetheless, engage with what Clark has described as the increasing urgency for fiction to accommodate “counterintuitive relations of scale, effect, perception, knowledge, representation and calculability.”65 Comparable to the radical implications of Bergson’s philosophy, Joyce’s novel makes clear that while the human and the nonhuman must now be considered continuous with one another, such an insight cannot dissolve the problem of where to locate human difference. As the critical discussions surrounding the Anthropocene have emphasized, recognizing the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman does not in itself diminish humanity’s increasing power to shape the planet for the worse. As such, while Ulysses’s modernist modes of literary representation portray the ineluctable modalities that mediate and complicate our relationship with the nonhuman world, they also demonstrate the creative possibilities for imagining new aesthetic configurations in the Anthropocene.

Notes

Introduction: Eco-Modernism Jeremy Diaper 1

2

3

4 5 6 7

See, for example, Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991); James McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Ken Hiltner, What Else is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the Environment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Desmond Harding, Writing the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism (London: Routledge, 2003); Andrew Thacker, Modernism, Space and the City: Outsiders and Affect in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and London (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Malcolm Bradbury, “The Cities of Modernism,” in Modernism 1890–1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 96. Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, Green Modernism: Nature and the English Novel, 1900 to 1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 2. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 44. Carol H. Cantrell, “The Locus of Compossibility: Virginia Woolf, Modernism, and Place,” in The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism 1993–2003, ed. Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 34.

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Christina Alt, Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Bonnie Kime Scott, In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). For other important environmental considerations of Woolf, see Kristin Czarnecki, ed., “Virginia Woolf and Nature,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany (special issue, 2010), 79; Diana L. Swanson, ed., “Eco-Woolf,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany no. 81 (Spring 2012), 8–20. See also Bonnie Kime Scott, “Ecocritical Woolf,” in A Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Jessica Berman (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 319–32. 9 Kime Scott, In the Hollow of the Wave, 220. 10 Kelly Sultzbach, Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination: Forster, Woolf and Auden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 3. 11 Sultzbach, Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination, 3. 12 See Jeremy Diaper, T. S. Eliot and Organicism (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2018); Jeremy Diaper, “‘Must England’s Beauty Perish?’: The Literary Ruralism of the Criterion,” Peer English 11 (2018): 19–42; Steve Ellis, “Eliot and Earth,” Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society UK (2012): 1–8; Gabrielle McIntire, “The Waste Land as Ecocritique,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Waste Land, ed. Gabrielle McIntire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 178–93; Alf Seegert, “Technology and the Fleshly Interface in Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’: An Ecocritical Appraisal of a One Hundred Year Old Future,” Journal of Ecocriticism 2, no. 1 (2010): 33–54; Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin, eds., Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014). 13 McCarthy, Green Modernism, 2. 14 Joshua Schuster, The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and AvantGarde Poetics (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2015), x. 15 McCarthy, Green Modernism, 2; Schuster, The Ecology of Modernism, 3. 16 Elizabeth Black, The Nature of Modernism: Ecocritical Approaches to the Poetry of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew (London: Routledge, 2018), 202. 17 Andrew Kalaidjian, Exhausted Ecologies: Modernism and Environmental Recovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 2. 18 Kalaidjian, Exhausted Ecologies, 3. 19 Kalaidjian, Exhausted Ecologies, 4. 20 Michael Rubenstein and Justin Neuman, Modernism and its Environments (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 3. 21 Rubenstein and Neuman, Modernism and its Environments, 3. 22 Rachel Murray, The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). 23 Julia E. Daniel and Margaret Konkol, eds., Modernism in the Green: Public Greens in Modern Literature and Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 1. 24 Daniel and Konkol, eds., Modernism in the Green, 3. 8

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25 Kime Scott, In the Hollow of the Wave, 2. 26 Susan Gubar, “The Echoing Spell of H. D.’s ‘Trilogy,’” Contemporary Literature 19, no. 2 (1978): 196–218; Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H. D. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1981). 27 See, for example, Annette Debo, The American H.D. (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2012). 28 Robin G. Schulze, “Marianne Moore’s, ‘Imperious Ox, Imperial Dish’ and the Poetry of the Natural World,” Twentieth Century Literature 44, no. 1 (1998): 3. 29 Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames and Hudson, 2010); Diaper, T. S. Eliot and Organicism. 30 John Hegglund and John McIntyre, eds., Modernism and the Anthropocene: Material Ecologies of Twentieth-Century Literature (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021); Ted Howell, “An Imperialist Inherits the Earth: Howards End in the Anthropocene,” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 4 (2016): 547–72. 31 Matthew Griffiths, The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 22. 32 Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison, eds., Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 33 Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369 (2011): 844. 34 Rubenstein and Neuman, Modernism and its Environments, 2. 35 Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 202. 36 Patrick Murphy, Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 165. 37 Gillian Rudd, Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 3–4. 38 Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996).

Chapter 1 Modernism and the Rural Novel Dominic Head 1 2

3

E. M. Forster, Howards End (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 81. On Forster’s significance to the development of ruralism in the 1930s, see Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 230. In Cunningham’s account, Howards End is a key precursor to what he sees as the falsified ruralism of the 1930s. Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 48–49.

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4 Thacker, Moving Through Modernity, 50, 52–53. 5 Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 2. 6 Esty, A Shrinking Island, 7. 7 Esty, A Shrinking Island, 17. 8 David Medalie, E. M. Forster’s Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 1. 9 Forster, Howards End, 337. 10 David Bradshaw, “Howards End,” in The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster, ed. David Bradshaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 164. 11 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (1971) (London: Perennial, 2001), 155. 12 Neal Alexander offers a lucid overview of geographical understandings of space and place in Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010). 13 John J. Su, “The Beloved Republic: Nostalgia and the Political Aesthetic of E. M. Forster,” in Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics, ed. Tammy Clewell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 200. 14 Su, “The Beloved Republic,” 206. 15 On this point, see Christina Root, “‘Her Way of Walking’: Explorations of Nature and the Unseen in Forster’s Howards End and Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways,” in Only Connect: E. M. Forster’s Legacies in British Fiction, ed. Elsa Cavalié and Laurent Mellet (Bern: Peter Lang, 2017), 145–60. 16 Su, “The Beloved Republic,” 207, 208. See E. M. Forster, “Aspects of the Novel” and Related Writings (1927) (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), 44. 17 Su, “The Beloved Republic,” 208. 18 Su, “The Beloved Republic,” 210. 19 Su, “The Beloved Republic,” 211–12. 20 Glen Cavaliero, The Rural Tradition in the English Novel, 1900–1939 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978), 74. 21 W. J. Keith, Regions of the Imagination: The Development of British Rural Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 118. 22 Dorothea Walker, Sheila Kaye-Smith (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 27. 23 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 57. 24 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 86–87. 25 Thacker, Moving Through Modernity, 60. See Forster, Howards End, 164–65. 26 Forster, Howards End, 164–65. 27 The majority of A. G. Street’s novels on farming were published by Faber and Faber, including his first book, Farmer’s Glory (1932). In his role as a director at the independent publishing house in London, T. S. Eliot was responsible for commissioning a number of agricultural texts and also attended the Wednesday committee meetings when decisions were made on the publication of manuscripts.

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28 A. G. Street, The Endless Furrow (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 217. Subsequent page references to this edition are given in parentheses. 29 Street makes the earlier depression in farming mirror the depression of the 1920s and 1930s, which would have been prominent in his readers’ minds. Richard Perren’s Agriculture in Depression, 1870–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) illuminates the whole period very well. 30 Alastair Bonnett, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (London: Continuum, 2010), 19, 20, 30. 31 Bonnett, Left in the Past, 210. 32 H. E. Bates, The Blossoming World (London: Michael Joseph, 1971), 123. 33 Richard Gill, Happy Rural Seat: The English Country House and the Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 135–36. 34 H. E. Bates, Spella Ho (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938), 414. 35 Bates, Spella Ho, 400. 36 Dean Baldwin, H.E. Bates: A Literary Life (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1987), 132. 37 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 146, 152.

Chapter 2 Edith Sitwell: Modernist Experimentation and the Revitalization of Nature Poetry Elizabeth Black Bonnie Kime Scott, In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 220. 2 J. Scott Bryson, “Modernism and Ecological Criticism,” in Modernism, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 591. 3 Bryson, “Modernism and Ecological Criticism,” 592. 4 Carol H. Cantrell, “‘The locus of compossibility’: Virginia Woolf, Modernism, and Place,” in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, ed. Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 27. 5 Cantrell, “The locus of compossibility,” 32. 6 Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing, eds., Haunted Landscapes: Super-nature and the Environment (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), 3. 7 Cantrell, “The locus of compossibility,” 33. 8 Cantrell, “The locus of compossibility,” 35. 9 Edith Sitwell, “Some Notes on My Own Poetry,” in Collected Poems with a Long Introductory Essay by Edith Sitwell (London: Duckworth, 1936), xxviii. 10 Edith Sitwell, “Dark Song,” in Collected Poems, 149. Subsequent page references to Collected Poems are given as CP in parentheses in the text. 11 Jack Lindsay, “Introduction,” in Façade, and Other Poems, 1920–1935; With an Introductory Essay by Jack Lindsay (London: Duckworth, 1971), 18. 1

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Notes to pages 36–40

12 Edith Sitwell, letter to Maurice Bowra, in Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell, ed. Richard Greene (London: Virago, 1928), 116. 13 Reuel Denney, “Ideas of Nature: The Poetry of Edith Sitwell,” Chicago Review 3, no. 2 (1949): 6. 14 Richard Greene, Edith Sitwell: Avant-Garde Poet, English Genius (London: Virago, 2011), 5. 15 Greene, Edith Sitwell, 5. 16 Greene, Edith Sitwell, 20. 17 Edith Sitwell, Taken Care Of: An Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1965), 44. 18 Sitwell, Taken Care Of, 288. 19 Edith Sitwell’s editorial skills are central to Leah Budke’s argument that Wheels created an “egalitarian space” for poets to criticize “gender and social norms” “Reading Edith Sitwell’s Annual Poetry Anthology Wheels Through the Lens of Female Aestheticism,” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 61, no. 2 (2018): 233. Jane Dowson also praises the series for supporting innovation and providing “a collective opposition to the stereotyped complacency of the country gentleman associated with the Georgians” (Women, Modernism and British Poetry, 1910–1939: Resisting Femininity [London: Routledge, 2016], 93). Deryn Rees-Jones focuses on Sitwell’s performative strategies, arguing that she created a highly stylized self to assert control over how she was perceived (Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets [Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2005]). In Poetry off the Page, Laura Severin also views Sitwell’s avant-garde performances and “elaborate personas” as having a gendered aspect in creating spaces where women could exist “outside the boundaries of ‘normal’ femininity” (Poetry off the Page: Twentieth-century British Women Poets in Performance [London: Routledge, 2004], 44). Marsha Bryant highlights Sitwell’s under-recognized literary legacy by examining her influence on Sylvia Plath’s literary formation; (“Queen Bees: Edith Sitwell, Sylvia Plath and Cross-Atlantic Affiliations,” Feminist Modernist Studies 2, no. 2 [2019]: 194–211). 20 Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xix. 21 Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 116–18. 22 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 15. 23 Sitwell, “Some Notes on My Own Poetry,” xv. 24 Edith Sitwell, Aspects of Modern Poetry (London: Duckworth, 1934), 19. 25 Sitwell, “Some Notes on My Own Poetry,” xxxii. 26 Edith Sitwell, “Modern Poetry,” Time and Tide, March 1928, 308–309. 27 Sitwell, “Some Notes on My Own Poetry,” xvi. 28 Edith Sitwell, letter to Maurice Bowra, in Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell, 83. 29 Sitwell, “Some Notes on My Own Poetry,” xxxiii. 30 Sitwell, “Some Notes on My Own Poetry,” xix.

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31 Sitwell “Some Notes on My Own Poetry,” xxxi. 32 Denney, “Ideas of Nature,” 6. 33 Edith Sitwell, “Experiment in Poetry,” in Tradition and Experiment in Present-day Literature. Addresses Delivered at the City Literary Institute (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 82. 34 Elizabeth Salter and Allanah Harper, eds., Edith Sitwell: Fire of the Mind: An Anthology (London: Michael Joseph, 1976), 13. 35 Dilys Powell, Descent from Parnassus (London: Cresset Press, 1934), 104. 36 Edith Sitwell, Alexander Pope (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948), 12. 37 Sitwell, Taken Care Of, 123. 38 Sitwell, “Some Notes on My Own Poetry,” xvi. 39 Sitwell, “Some Notes on My Own Poetry,” xv. 40 Sitwell, “Experiment in Poetry,” 82. 41 Sitwell, “Some Notes on My Own Poetry,” xlvi. 42 Sitwell, Taken Care Of, 123. 43 Sitwell, “Some Notes on My Own Poetry,” xvii. 44 Michael Branch, “‘Are you serious?’: A Modest Proposal for Environmental Humour,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. Greg Garrard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 379. 45 Branch, “‘Are you serious?’,” 380. 46 Branch, “‘Are you serious?’,” 380. 47 Branch, “‘Are you serious?’,” 387. 48 Sitwell, “Some Notes on My Own Poetry,” xvii. 49 Lindsay, “Introduction,” 16. 50 Deborah Tyler-Bennett, Edith Sitwell: The Forgotten Modernist (Sheffield: Perpetuity Press, 1996), 24. 51 Sitwell, Taken Care Of, 49. 52 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-thanhuman World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 60. 53 Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 128. 54 Sitwell, Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell, 96. 55 Sitwell, Taken Care Of, 44. 56 Sitwell, “Some Notes on My Own Poetry,” xvii. 57 Victoria Glendinning, Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), 92. 58 Edith Sitwell, The Pleasures of Poetry: A Critical Anthology (London: Duckworth, 1934), 235. 59 Sitwell, Taken Care Of, 44. 60 Jose Garcia Villa, A Celebration for Edith Sitwell (New York: New Directions, 1948), 54. 61 Glendinning, Edith Sitwell, 12–13. 62 Denney, “Ideas of Nature,” 6. 63 Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (London: Phoenix, 1999), 781.

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Notes to pages 47–60 Chapter 3 “No poetic fantasy / but a biological reality”: The Ecological Visions of H.D.’s Trilogy Elizabeth O’Connor

Sarah Graham, “‘We have a secret. We are alive’: H.D.’s Trilogy as a Response to War,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44, no. 2 (2002): 210. 2 Annette Kreis-Schinck, We are Voyagers, Discoverers: H.D.’s Trilogy and Modern Religious Verse (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1990), 71. 3 Claire Buck, H.D. and Freud: Bisexuality and a Feminine Discourse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 139. 4 Matthew Griffiths, The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 37. 5 H.D., “The Flowering of the Rod,” in Trilogy (Manchester: Carcanet, (1973), [9], 125. Hereafter cited as FR in parentheses in the text. 6 H.D., The Gift, ed. Jane Augustine (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), 123. Subsequent page references to this edition are abbreviated as TG and page numbers are given in parentheses in the text. 7 H.D., The Sword Went Out to Sea, ed. Cynthia Hogue and Julia Vandive (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2007), 13–14. Subsequent page references to this edition are abbreviated as SWS and page numbers are given in parentheses in the text. 8 Cynthia Hogue, “(Re)Storing Happiness: Toward an Ecopoetic Reading of H.D.’s The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18, no. 4 (2011): 841. 9 Annette Debo, The American H.D. (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 128. 10 H.D, “The Walls Do Not Fall,” in Trilogy (Manchester: Carcanet, 1973), 14. Subsequent page references to this edition are abbreviated as WDNF and page numbers are given in parentheses in the text. 11 H.D., “The Walls Do Not Fall,” [4] 9. 12 H.D., “The Walls Do Not Fall,” [4] 8. 13 H.D., “The Walls Do Not Fall,” [4] 8. 14 H.D., “The Walls Do Not Fall,” [4] 8. 15 Helen Scales, Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Sea Shells (London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2015), 43. 16 H.D., “The Flowering of the Rod” (1946), in Trilogy, [32]. Hereafter cited as FR in parentheses in the text. 17 H.D., “The Walls Do Not Fall,” [6] 11. 18 Psalm 22:6. 19 H.D., “The Walls Do Not Fall,” [6] 12. 1

Notes to pages 62–71

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20 William Blake, “Invisible Worm” in “The Sick Rose” (1789), in Songs of Innocence and Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 147, and John Milton, “Thus the orb he roamed / With narrow search and with inspection deep / Considered every creature: which of all / Most opportune might serve his wiles and found / The serpent subtlest beast of all the field,” Paradise Lost (1674) (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 199, Book Nine, l. 86. 21 H.D. to Norman Holmes Pearson, December 1944, quoted in his introduction to Trilogy, ix. 22 Elizabeth Anderson, “Burnt and Blossoming: Material Mysticism in Trilogy and Four Quartets,” Christianity and Literature 62, no. 1 (2012): 123. 23 Marti Kheel, “Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology: Reflections on Identity and Difference,” in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club Publishers, 1990), 136. 24 Kheel, “Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology,” 136–37, italics in original. 25 H.D., “The Flowering of the Rod,” [5], 119. 26 Janice S. Robinson, H.D.: The Life and Work of an American Poet (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 328. 27 Sarah Graham, “Falling Walls: Trauma and Testimony in H.D.’s Trilogy,” English: Journal of the English Association 56, no. 216 (2007): 299–319. 28 Graham, “Falling Walls,” 300. 29 Susan Acheson, “H.D. and the Age of Aquarius: Liturgy, Astrology and Gnosis in Trilogy,” Sagetrieb 15, nos. 1–2 (1996): 146. Chapter 4 Modernist Corpses and the Ecology of Burial Julia E. Daniel Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass,” in The Complete Poems (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), line 110. 2 See Rose Eveleth, “How Lincoln’s Assassination Launched the Funeral Industry,” Smithsonian Magazine Online, 2013, accessed July 11, 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-lincolns-assassinationlaunched-the-funeral-industry-21147558/. 3 Throughout, I will refer to “earth burial” as the interment of a human cadaver in the earth in a manner that does not seek to forestall the process of composting. I will refer to chemical or sanitized burial to describe the modern practice of a ground burial for a cadaver that has undergone arterial embalming with a stabilizing chemical solution, as opposed to ancient embalming practices, which I will discuss in more detail later on. 4 Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 5 Morton, Dark Ecology, 7.

1

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Notes to pages 72–74

Heather Sullivan, “Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19, no. 3 (2012): 515–31. 7 Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Readings in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 2. 8 Sacks, The English Elegy, 20. 9 Sandra M. Gilbert, “‘Rats’ Alley’: The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti) Pastoral Elegy,” New Literary History 30, no. 1 (1999): 183. 10 Jeremiah Chiappelli and Ted Chiappelli, “Drinking Grandma: The Problem of Embalming,” Journal of Environmental Health 71, no. 5 (2008): 24–29. Jeremiah and Ted Chiappelli cite not only the loss of parlor space in dense urban homes, loss of contact with the dead, and a desire to aestheticize death in open-casket wakes as cultural drivers for chemical burial, but the rise of the funerary industry itself: “The most likely reason for the practice of embalming is that it fueled the funerary industry” (24). For a complete history of embalming and the rise of the funerary industry in the United States, see Gary Laderman, Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 11 Laderman, Rest in Peace, 19. 12 Thomas Laqueur traces a parallel transition from graveyards attached to parishes to modern, for-profit lawn cemeteries. In doing so, he provides a history of how cultural attitudes toward real and perceived contagion in England, along with complex political pressures, contributed to this modernization. For more on disease and modern burial, see his chapter “The Cemetery and the New Regime,” in The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 211–36. Whereas the Victorian graveyard served as a memento mori, the transition into lawn cemeteries landscaped according to pastoral ideals further erased the dark matter of dying from the public imagination, as well as loosening church control over the treatment of the dead. For more on graveyard and cemetery architecture, see James Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1980). 13 Laderman, Rest in Peace, 22. 14 With the rise of the industry in the 1920s and 1930s came concerns about the skyrocketing costs of burial. For example, Quincy Dowd’s Funeral Management and Costs: A World-Survey of Burial and Cremation (1921) lambasted the expense and class pretenses that now came with modernized wakes and burials. The cost was felt most heavily by working-class families who felt pressured to give their loved ones a “proper burial.” 15 With, of course, multiple variations. Class heavily inflected burial customs in the Victorian and modern periods (as it does today). Well-off families might have their dead interred in mausoleums or columbaria, with the ashes of prestigious members meriting a space within the church walls or floors. Environment was also a factor in burial practices, as low-lying marshy or coastal eras often required bodies to be entombed, as in the graveyards of New Orleans. Certain religious groups also 6

Notes to pages 75–77

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received dispensation from some funerary codes, such as Orthodox Jewish or Muslim communities. The spread of sanitized burial also occurred unevenly across racial lines, as black communities, particularly in the American South, were not given access to these new methods until much later. With these caveats in mind, it is nonetheless the case that by the 1940s, the general assumption across classes in the United States and England was that the dead would receive some kind of modernized, sterile burial overseen by a professional funeral director and undertaker. For more on race and burial in America, see Suzanne Smith, To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). For more on the history of burial in England and the US, see Paul C. Jupp and Claire Gittings, Death in England: An Illustrated History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Quincy L. Dowd, Funeral Management and Costs: A World-Survey of Burial and Cremation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1921); Robert W. Habenstein and Williams M. Lamers, The History of American Funeral Directing (Milwaukee, WI: Bulfin Printers, 1955). 16 This is not to say that the Western pastoral elegy is the only mode of mourning evoked in the poem. See, for example, Vincent Yang, “Chinese Nature Imagery in Williams’s ‘The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,’” Comparative Literature Studies 20, no. 2 (1983): 194–202. 17 William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1985), 34. 18 “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” is unfortunately an overlooked piece in Williams scholarship, but some critics have noted the repetition here. Steve Harvey argues that she “dwells on the literal and the obvious” because of her broken emotional state and that the repetition creates a feeling of affective claustrophobia. He, however, does not connect this with the pastoral elegy or with the wider ecological vision of the poem. For more, see Steve Harvey, “Williams’s ‘The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,’” The Explicator 45, no. 2 (1987): 49–50. 19 Williams, Selected Poems, 34. 20 Williams, Selected Poems, 34. 21 Gilbert specifically mentions Milton’s Lycidas as “a spirit that has at first ‘sunk low’ but will soon enough ‘mount high,’” in “‘Rats’ Alley’: The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti) Pastoral Elegy,” 182. 22 Williams, Selected Poems, 34. 23 Sacks, English Elegy, 2. 24 Jeremy Diaper, T. S. Eliot and Organicism (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2018). 25 For example, Lee Oser, “Coming to Terms with Four Quartets,” in The Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. David Chinitz (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009): 216–27, argues that Four Quartets makes “little or no claim on the body” and reads the following passages as primarily “intellectual” (221). 26 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace, 1967), 123.

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27 “An Order for the Burial of the Dead (Alternative Services: Series One),” The Church of England, accessed July 2, 2020, https://www.churchofengland. org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/common-worship/ death-and-dying/order-burial-dead. 28 Eliot’s alteration of the burial rite also occurred at a time when the Church of England was debating the theology and liturgy of cremation. At the Canterbury Convocation from 1942–44, some clergy argued that the ashes must also then receive ground burial, while others sought to amend the ritual to include the placement of cremated remains in columbaria or other funerary sites. While Eliot’s language supports the former, the bishops ultimately included cremation in all forms as acceptable for Anglican burial, as it remains today. For more on the theology of ground burial and cremation in the Church of England, see “Catholic Church,” in The Encyclopedia of Cremation, ed. Douglas J. Davies and Lewis H. Mates (London: Routledge, 2005), 115. See also Francis Knight, “Cremation and Christianity: English Anglican and Roman Catholic Attitudes to Cremation since 1885,” Mortality 23 (2018): 301–19. 29 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 123. 30 In another ecocritical treatment of “East Coker,” Etienne Terblanche reads these and the following lines as a vision of human–nature unity, primarily by tracing the flow of elements throughout Four Quartets alongside a consideration of Eliot’s Buddhist influences. For more, see Etienne Terblanche, T. S. Eliot, Nature, Earth: In the Name of the Lotos Rose (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016). 31 For more on Eliot and fertility myths, see Marc Manganaro, “Mind, Myth, and Culture: Eliot and Anthropology,” in A Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. David E. Chinitz (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 79–90. 32 Cecily Parks, “The Anticipation of Ecopoetics in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry,” Textual Practice 32, nos. 7–8 (2018): 1232. 33 For more on the history, economics, and environmental and health impacts of the Gauley mining disaster, see Tim Dayton, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 16–21. See also the National Park Service’s guide to the Hawk’s Nest Workers Memorial Cemetery: “The Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster: Summersville, WV,” National Park Service, last modified January 22, 2020, https://www.nps.gov/neri/planyourvisit/ the-hawks-nest-tunnel-disaster-summersville-wv.htm. 34 Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2018), 117. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the text. 35 While the name seems unbearably symbolic, it is historically correct. The White family ran the funeral parlor in Summerset, WV, where most of the white workers from the mine were waked. The bodies of the black laborers were buried in Martha White’s cornfield, where a memorial stands today. 36 Sarah Grieve, “Environmental Justice Witnessing in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 26, no. 4 (2019).

Notes to pages 82–90

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37 In a later section, Rukeyser details the long history of colonization in the area; thus the “found-land corn” is also situated as another instance of racial injustice as white settlers “found” this land by wresting it from indigenous peoples. 38 Genesis 4:10 NIV.

Chapter 5 Nature, a Diligent Artist: An Ecocentric Reading of Marianne Moore’s “The Fish” Sharla Hutchison Linda Leavell, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), 157. 2 Leavell, Holding On Upside Down, 48–50. 3 Rosenbach Museum III: 04:10. 4 Leavell, Holding On Upside Down, 160. 5 See Darlene Williams Erickson, Illusion Is More Precise Than Precision: The Poetry of Marianne Moore (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1992). Erikson refers to the sea and cliff as “locked in a mutually destructive and mutually nurturing embrace,” but she does not elaborate on this point from an ecocentric perspective (136). 6 Robin G. Schulze, The Degenerate Muse: American Nature, Modernist Poetry, and the Problem of Cultural Hygiene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 238. 7 Elizabeth Calland, “Marianne Moore’s Animologies: Toward a Post Darwinian Poetics of Embodiment” (PhD diss., University of Colorado, 2004), 173. 8 Heather Cass White, “‘Pigeons’ and the Future of Moore Criticism,” Twentieth-Century Literature 63, no. 4 (2017): 401. 9 Sharla Hutchison, “The EcoPoetics of Marianne Moore’s ‘The Sycamore,’” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18, no. 4 (2011): 766. 10 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: Signet, 2003), 75. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the text. 11 Bryan L. Moore, Ecology and Literature: Ecocentric Personification from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 10. 12 Moore, Ecology and Literature, 97. 13 David Anderson, “The Woman in the Tricorn Hat: Political Theory and Biological Portraiture in Marianne Moore’s Poetry,” Journal of Modern Literature 22, no. 1 (1998): 33. 14 Robin G. Schulze, “Textual Darwinism: Marianne Moore, the Text of Evolution, and the Evolving Text,” Text: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Textual Studies 11 (1998): 276. 15 Schulze, “Textual Darwinism,” 274, 283. See also Schulze, The Degenerate Muse, 176. 16 Robin G. Schulze, ed., Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907–1924 (Berkeley, CA: California Press, 2002), 235. 1

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Notes to pages 91–95

17 Schulze, ed., Becoming Marianne Moore, 235. See also Cristanne Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75. 18 Marianne Moore, Observations, ed. Linda Leavell (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018), vii. 19 Linda Leavell, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 76. See Elisabeth N. Joyce, Cultural Critique and Abstraction: Marianne Moore and the Avant-Garde (London: Associated University Presses, 1998), 58. 20 Susan McCabe, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 191. 21 Victoria Bazin, Marianne Moore and the Cultures of Modernity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2010), 69. 22 John M. Slatin, The Savage’s Romance: The Poetry of Marianne Moore (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), 76. 23 Leavell, Holding On Upside Down, 51. 24 Josh A. Weinstein, “Marianne Moore’s Ecopoetic Architectonics,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17, no. 2 (2010): 378–79, 385. 25 Hannah M. Strømmen, “Animal Poetics: Marianne Moore, Ted Hughes, and The Song of Songs,” Literature and Theology 31, no. 4 (2017): 410. 26 Randy Malamud, Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 109. 27 Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 99. 28 Catherine Paul, “‘Discovery, Not Salvage’: Marianne Moore’s Curatorial Methods,” in The Critical Response to Marianne Moore, ed. Elizabeth Gregory (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 164. See also Anne Raine, “Still Life in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Nature, Modernity, and Marianne Moore,” in Gregory, ed., The Critical Response to Marianne Moore, 176. 29 Kenner, A Homemade World, 99. 30 Malamud, Poetic Animals and Animal Souls, 107. 31 Malamud, Poetic Animals and Animal Souls, 115. 32 Malamud, Poetic Animals and Animal Souls, 107. 33 Leavell, Holding On Upside Down, 33. 34 Leavell, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts, 88–89. 35 Marianne Moore, “The Fish,” in Observations (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), 41. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the text. 36 Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 16, 101. 37 Raymond Seed and Thomas H. Suchanek, “Population and Community Ecology of Mytilis,” in The Mussel Mytilis: Ecology, Physiology, Genetics and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Gosling (London: Elsevier, 1992), 87–93. 38 See Seed and Suchanek, “Population and Community of Mytilis,” 118.

Notes to pages 95–104

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39 R. Seed, “Ecology,” in Marine Mussels: Their Ecology and Physiology, ed. B. L. Bayne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 13. 40 Seed and Suchanek, “Population and Community Ecology of Mytilis,” 93. 41 Darwin, The Origin of Species, 91. 42 Rosenbach, VII 05:04, 05:05, 05:06. 43 Rosenbach, Reading Diary 1916–1921; VII: 01:02 and VII: 11:01. 44 McCabe, Cinematic Modernism, 209. 45 Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 53–54. 46 Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 16, 32–33, 45. 47 Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 140. 48 Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 75–77. 49 Carson, The Sea Around Us, 121. 50 Darwin, The Origin of Species, 90. 51 Darwin, The Origin of Species, 92. 52 Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 11. 53 Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 250. 54 Schulze, The Degenerate Muse, 238–39. 55 Joshua Schuster, The Ecology of Modernism (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2015), 10. 56 Darwin, The Origin of Species, 94, 97. 57 Schulze, The Degenerate Muse, 184. 58 Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Nature-Study Idea (Wolcott, NY: Scholar’s Choice, 2019), 48. 59 Hyde Bailey, The Nature-Study Idea, 45, 27.

Chapter 6 Modernism’s Insect Vision Rachel Murray Denise Levertov, “Advent 1966,” in To Stay Alive (New York: New Directions, 1971), 16. 2 Levertov, “Advent 1966,” 16. 3 Levertov, “Advent 1966,” 16. 4 Levertov, “Advent 1966,” 16. 5 D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 277. 6 Andreas Huyssen, “The Disturbance of Vision in Vienna Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 5, no. 3 (1998): 35. 7 D. E. Nilsson, “Optics and Evolution of the Compound Eye,” in Facets of Vision, ed. D. G. Stavenga and R. C. Hardie (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1987), 31. 1

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Notes to pages 104–9

Robert Hooke, Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (London: John Martyn, 1667), 175, 179. 9 Michael F. Land, “Eyes and Vision,” in Encyclopedia of Insects, eds. Vincent H. Resh and Ring T. Cardé (San Diego, CA: Elsevier, 2009), 345. 10 Sigmund Exner, The Physiology of the Compound Eyes of Insects and Crustaceans, trans. R. C. Hardie (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1989), 126. 11 Christoph Hoffmann, “Does a Glowworm See? Sigmund Exner’s Study of the Compound Eye,” Representations 138 (2017): 39. 12 Hoffmann, “Does a Glowworm See?,” 54. 13 According to Nilsson, Exner’s account of the compound eye was so ahead of its time that it took the scientific community eighty years to catch up with his findings. See Nilsson, “Optics and Evolution of the Compound Eye,” 32. 14 The image was reproduced in V. B. Wigglesworth’s popular study The Life of Insects (1964), as well as in more recent cultural histories of vision. See for example Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900, ed. Corey Keller (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 30; Simon Ings, A Natural History of Seeing: The Art and Science of Vision (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 148–49; and Hoffmann, “Does a Glowworm See?,” 58 n.60. 15 In Sigmund Exner, Die Physiologie der facettirten Augen von Krebsen und Insecten (Leipzig: Franz Deuticke, 1891), opposite title page. 16 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 230. 17 Fred Saxby, “How to Photograph Through a Fly’s Eye,” Knowledge: An Illustrated Magazine of Science, August 1898, 187–89; Steven Connor, Fly (London: Reaktion, 2006), 88–89. 18 Anon., “How Insects See Us,” Popular Science Monthly, May 1929, 46. 19 Saxby, “How to Photograph Through a Fly’s Eye,” 189. 20 Hoffmann, “Does a Glowworm See?,” 50. 21 Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neill (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 42. 22 Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, 50, 42. 23 Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, 65. 24 Jon Day, Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 62. 25 Day, Novel Sensations, 62. 26 Caroline Hovanec, Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology and British Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 166. 27 C. Lloyd Morgan, An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (London: Walter Scott, 1894), 159. 28 See Hovanec, Animal Subjects, 159–95.

Notes to pages 109–14

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29 Geoff Gilbert, “Words, flies, Jews, Joyce, Joint: Wyndham Lewis and Obscenity,” Critical Quarterly 4, no. 46 (2004): 3. 30 Lewis’s surviving library is searchable online. See “Wyndham Lewis Author Library,” Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, accessed May 7, 2020, http://catalog.lib.utexas.edu/search/x. Initially intended to appear in the magazine for a “few months” in 1912, the popularity of Fabre’s insect studies was such that they appeared intermittently in The English Review until 1922. See editorial note, Jean-Henri Fabre, “The Weaving Spider: The Banded Epeira,” trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, The English Review, November 1912, 519. 31 Wyndham Lewis, “ESSAY. (entomology),” MS Joint (Unpublished), Box 16, Folder 12, Wyndham Lewis Collection, Cornell University Library, n.p. By permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity). Lewis quotes from Auguste Forel, The Senses of Insects (London: Metheun, 1908), 26. 32 Lewis, “ESSAY. (entomology),” n.p. 33 Kevin Rulo, “Between Old and New: Wyndham Lewis’s Modernist ‘Joint,’” The Review of English Studies 65, no. 750 (2013): 509. 34 Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), 132. 35 Quoting Forel, The Senses of Insects, 11. 36 Lewis, “ESSAY. (entomology),” n.p. 37 Lewis, “ESSAY. (entomology),” n.p. 38 A later version of “Bestre” appears in Lewis’s 1927 short story collection The Wild Body, ‘A Soldier of Humour’ and Other Stories (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927). 39 Wyndham Lewis, “Bestre,” The Tyro: A Review of The Arts of Painting, Sculpture and Design, no. 2 (1922), 60. Subsequent page references are given in parentheses in the text. 40 “Bestre,” 56. 41 “Bestre,” 53. 42 “Bestre,” 56. 43 “Bestre,” 63. 44 Wyndham Lewis, “Some Innkeepers and Bestre,” in The Complete Wild Body, ed. Bernard Lafourcade (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1984), 321. 45 W. F. Southard, The Modern Eye: With an Analysis of 1300 Errors of Refraction (San Francisco: W. A. Woodward, 1893), 4. See Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 40–41. 46 Wyndham Lewis, “Essay on the Objective of Plastic Art in our Time,” The Tyro, no. 2, 36. Emphasis in the original. 47 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Sophie Bridge and Gary Watson (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2002), 11.

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Notes to pages 114–17

48 Virginia Woolf, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation,” in Virginia Woolf: Collected Essays, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), 233–34. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the text. 49 Woolf, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation,” 233. 50 Woolf, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation,” 234. 51 Woolf, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation,” 234–35. 52 Woolf, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation,” 234. 53 Woolf, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation,” 234. 54 Christina Alt, Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 32–36; Bonnie Kime Scott, In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and the Modernist Uses of Nature (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 42–70. 55 For details of books owned by Virginia Woolf, see “The Library of Virginia and Leonard Woolf: A Short-Title Catalog,” Washington State University, accessed April 21, 2020, http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu/masc/onlinebooks/woolflibrary/woolflibraryonline.htm. 56 Frederick Gamble, The Animal World (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 147. Lewis refers to the colour-vision of insects in his essay on entomology, writing of their “ultra-violet sight, which we do not possess,” “ESSAY. (entomology),” n.p. 57 Gamble, The Animal World, 149. 58 Woolf, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation,” 234–35. 59 Woolf, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation,” 234. 60 Woolf, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation,” 234. 61 Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” in Virginia Woolf: Collected Essays, vol. 4, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), 156. 62 Woolf, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation,” 235. 63 Nicholas Gaskill, “The Articulate Eye: Color-Music, The Color-Sense, and the Language of Abstraction,” Configurations 25, no. 4 (2017): 475, 494. 64 Gaskill, “The Articulate Eye,” 493; Bruno Latour, “How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies,” Body & Society 10, nos. 2–3 (2004): 207. 65 “articulate, adj. and n.,” OED Online, September 2020, accessed October 9, 2020,https:// www.oed.com/view/Entry/11189?rskey=pvBUfS&result=1&isAdvanced=false. 66 That Woolf had recent world events in mind when she made these remarks is hinted at by the rest of the entry, which consists of her reading notes from Sigmund Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), and includes references to the herd instinct, Hitlerism, and the relation of women “to war and society”; (Woolf, quoted in Brenda R. Silver, Virginia Woolf ’s Reading Notebooks [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983], 116, 117).

Notes to pages 119–21

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Chapter 7 Eco-consciousness and Ecopoetics in D. H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers and Apocalypse Fiona Becket Bonnie Kime Scott, “Green,” in Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate, ed. Stephen Ross (London: Routledge, 2009), 223. 2 Kime Scott, “Green,” 219. 3 Bonnie Kime Scott, In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012). 4 Alison Lacivita, The Ecology of Finnegans Wake (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015), 229; Elizabeth Black, The Nature of Modernism: Ecocritical Approaches to the Poetry of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew (London: Routledge, 2018). 5 Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 6 Rohman, Stalking the Subject, 101. 7 Carrie Rohman, Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 8 Rohman, Choreographies of the Living, 147. 9 Andrew Kalaidjian, “The Black Sheep: Djuna Barnes’s Dark Pastoral,” in Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature, ed. David Herman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 80. 10 Rohman, Stalking the Subject, 133–58. 11 Kalaidjian, “The Black Sheep: Djuna Barnes’s Dark Pastoral,” 84. 12 A useful synopsis of this direction is provided in chapter 1 of Kime Scott’s In the Hollow of the Wave, “Towards a Greening of Modernism,” 13–42. 13 References will be to Birds, Beasts and Flowers in The Poems: D. H. Lawrence, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Hereafter cited as P in parentheses in the text. References to The Poems, vol. 2, “Notes and Apparatus” are hereafter cited as P2. 14 Sandra M. Gilbert, Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 2nd ed. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 330. 15 Robert H. Haynes, “Ecce Ecopoiesis: Playing God on Mars,” in Moral Expertise: Studies in Practical and Professional Ethics, ed. Don MacNiven (London: Routledge, 1990), 161–63. 16 Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (London: Verso, 2017), Kindle, location 119: “I cannot speak the ecological subject, but this is exactly what I’m required to do. I can’t speak it because language, and in particular grammar, is fossilized human thoughts: thoughts, for example, about humans and nonhumans.” 17 “Art-speech,” wrote Lawrence, “is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day” (D. H. Lawrence, 1

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18 19 20

21 22

23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30

31 32

33 34 35

36

Notes to pages 121–30 Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 14). Kime Scott, In the Hollow of the Wave, 233–34. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1992). Lingis Alphonso, “Animal Body, Inhuman Face,” in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 166. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, eds., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 183. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1984), 351. D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 76. Hereafter cited as A in parentheses in the text. Fiona Becket, D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), chapters 4 and 5. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 159–76. D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 125. Hereafter cited as FUPU in parentheses in the text. See, for instance, Michael Marder, Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (1892) (London: A. & C. Black, 1908). Edward Marsh, ed., Georgian Poetry 1920–22 (London: The Poetry Bookshop, 1922). Jacques Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, vol. 1, eds. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 237. Edward Marsh, ed., Georgian Poetry 1918–1919 (London: The Poetry Bookshop, 1919), 100. The significance of Archaeopteryx, a fossil with bird-like characteristics in which traits of ancestral reptiles could be observed, was uncovered and developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Letter to Edward Garnett, June 5, 1914, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2, 183. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 68. D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 349. Hereafter cited as RDP in parentheses in the text. In “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine,” the soubriquet for Frieda Lawrence.

Notes to pages 132–44

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37 See David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 92–98. 38 See “Aristocracy,” in RDP, 367–76.

Chapter 8 Planting, Gardens, and Organicism in Literary Modernism Jeremy Diaper 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16

T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 73, 48. Hereafter cited as CPP in parentheses in the text. Alexandra Harris, “Planting in The Waste Land,” Annual T. S. Eliot Lecture, University of Cambridge, November 2011, 7. Cited in Jeremy Diaper, “‘A Wrong Attitude Towards Nature’: T. S. Eliot and Agriculture” (PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 2015), 235. Jeremy Diaper, T. S. Eliot and Organicism (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2018), 11. T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 16. Vita Sackville-West, The Women’s Land Army (London: Michael Joseph, 1944), 45. Vita Sackville-West, “The garden at Sissinghurst Castle, Cranbrook, Kent,” Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society 78 (November 1953), 400–408. Vita Sackville-West, The Garden (London: Michael Joseph, 1946), 63. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are cited as G in parentheses in the text. Vita Sackville-West, “Sonnet,” in Orchard and Vineyard (London: Bodley Head, 1921), lines 3–4. Letter from Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell, July 17, 1919 in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2: 1912–1922: The Question of Things Happening, ed. Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), 379. Cited in Katherine Hill-Miller, From the Lighthouse to Monk’s House: A Guide to Virginia Woolf ’s Literary Landscapes (London: Duckworth, 2001), 245. Virginia Woolf, Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1: 1915–1999, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 218–19. Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land (London: Vintage, 2015). Eliot to Bertrand Russell, February 14, 1919, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 1: 1898–1922, eds. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 322. Eliot to his mother, July 28, 1918, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 1: 1898–1922, 272. Eliot to his mother, July 28, 1918, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 1: 1898–1922. Eliot to his mother, March 10, 1929, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 4: 1928–29, eds. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), 463.

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Notes to pages 144–47

17 T. S. Eliot to his mother, October 1923, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 2: 1923– 1925, eds. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 255. 18 T. S. Eliot to G. W. S. Curtis, June 17, 1930, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 5: 1930–1931, 220. 19 T. S. Eliot to F. R. Leavis, May 18, 1932, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 6: 1932– 1933, eds. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2016). 20 For a comprehensive discussion of the agricultural character of The Criterion, see Jeremy Diaper, “The Criterion: An Inter-War Platform for Agricultural Discussion,” Agricultural History Review 61, no. 2 (2013): 282–300. See also Jeremy Diaper, ‘“In Conformity with Nature’: T. S. Eliot’s Religious Agrarianism,” in Religion and Myth in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry, ed. Michael Bell and Scott Freer (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 123–26. 21 Philip Mairet, “Memories of T. S. E.,” in T. S. Eliot: A Symposium for his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Neville Braybrooke (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958), 39. For more on the New English Weekly, see Philip Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement (Edinburgh: Floris, 2001), 164–89; Jeremy Diaper, “The New English Weekly and the British Organic Husbandry Movement: A Reassessment,” Agricultural History 88, no. 3 (2014): 336–53. 22 T. S. Eliot, “A Commentary,” The Criterion 18 (1938): 59–60. 23 Rolf Gardiner, review of Horn, Hoof and Corn: The Future of British Agriculture, by Viscount Lymington, The Criterion 12 (1932): 134. 24 T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 7; Eliot, “Virgil and the Christian World,” in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 125–26. 25 John Hayward, Prose Literature since 1939 (London: Longmans Green, 1947), 14. 26 Hayward, Prose Literature since 1939, 50. 27 For more on Viscount Lymington, see Philip Conford, “Organic Society: Agriculture and Radical Politics in the Career of Gerard Wallop, ninth Earl of Portsmouth (1898–1984),” Agricultural History Review 53, no. 1 (2005): 78–96. 28 Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 75. 29 T. S. Eliot, “English Poets as Letter Writers,” Sprague Memorial Hall, Yale University (February 23, 1933), in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 4: English Lion, 1930–1933, ed. Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 846. 30 T. S. Eliot, “Cultural Diversity and European Unity,” Review-45, 2 (1945), in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 6: The War Years, 1940–1946, ed. David E. Chinitz and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 636. 31 Eliot, “Cultural Diversity and European Unity,” 636. 32 T. S. Eliot, “Cultural Diversity and European Unity,” The Adelphi, July/September 1946, 149–58.

Notes to pages 147–53

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33 F. C. King, Gardening with Compost (London: Faber and Faber, 1944); Ben Easey, Practical Organic Gardening (London: Faber and Faber, 1955). 34 Albert Howard, Farming and Gardening for Health or Disease (London: Faber and Faber, 1945), 5. 35 Howard, Farming and Gardening for Health or Disease, 234. 36 Maye E. Bruce, From Vegetable Waste to Fertile Soil: Quick Return Compost (London: Faber and Faber, 1940), 9. 37 King, Gardening with Compost, 13. 38 Eliot, “Cultural Diversity and European Unity,” 636. 39 Eliot, “Cultural Diversity and European Unity,” 636. 40 Eliot, “Cultural Diversity and European Unity,” 627. 41 Eliot, “Cultural Diversity and European Unity,” 636. 42 For more on J. H. Oldham’s Moot Group, see Roger Kojecký, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 163–97; William Taylor and Marjorie Reeves, “Intellectuals in Debate: The Moot,” in Christian Thinking and Social Order: Conviction Politics from the 1930s to the Present Day, ed. Marjorie Reeves (London: Cassell, 1999), 24–48. 43 T. S. Eliot “Notes on Mannheim’s Paper,” Records of the Moot, Institute of Education, University of London, MOO/35, file 6, paper no 35, 10 January 1941, 2. 44 T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 19. 45 T. S. Eliot to Bonamy Dobrée, August 21, 1926, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 3: 1926–1927, eds. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 262.

Chapter 9 “A rose had flowered”: Virginia Woolf and the Nature of Post-Impressionism Karina Jakubowicz 1 2

3 4 5

Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924), in Collected Essays: Vol. 1, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966), 320. Peter Stansky argues that Woolf made her famous assertion, “no doubt remembering” the impact the exhibition (On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and its Intimate World [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996], 2). J. B. Bullen writes that Woolf ’s “exaggerated sense of change” was related to her feelings about living in a “Post-Impressionist age.” J. B. Bullen, The Post Impressionists in England: The Critical Reception (London: Routledge, 1988), 1. The Dreadnought Hoax occurred on February 7, 1910. Desmond McCarthy, “The Art Quake of 1910,” The Listener, 1 February 1945, 123. Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” 320.

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Notes to pages 153–57

The term “nature” is a notoriously difficult one, but throughout this chapter it is used to indicate natural phenomena (plants, animals, bodies) as opposed to highly artificial, manmade objects (houses, machines, automobiles). 7 Henry R Harrington, “The Central Line Down the Middle of ‘To the Lighthouse,’” Contemporary Literature 21, no. 3 (1980): 363–82. 8 Jonathan Quick, “Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and Post-Impressionism,” The Massachusetts Review (winter 1985): 562. 9 Clive Bell, Art (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914), 51. 10 Beverly Twitchell, Cézanne and Formalism in Bloomsbury (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987), 14. 11 Belinda Thompson, The Post-Impressionists (Oxford: Phaidon, 1983), 132. 12 Paul Gauguin, Intimate Journals, trans. Van Wyck Brooks (New York: Crown Publishers, 1936), 41. 13 Henri Matisse and Jack D. Flam, Matisse on Art (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 182. 14 Nature Morte (named after the Italian term for “still life”) is now known as Peaches on a Plate. In her checklist of paintings from the exhibition, Anna Gruetzner Robins suggests this painting could also be Compotier, Plate and Apples (1879– 80). Anna Gruetzner Robins, “Manet and the Post-Impressionists: A Checklist of Exhibits,” The Burlington Magazine, December 2010, 785. 15 Cézanne’s painting Les Pétunias is now known as Les Bégonias. 16 Ulrike Becks-Malorny, Paul Cézanne, 1839–1906: Pioneer of Modernism (Cologne: Taschen, 2001), 55. 17 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Vol. 1, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 140. 18 Wyndham Lewis, whose work was included in the second exhibition, was a striking exception. He distanced himself from Bloomsbury artists by cultivating a highly abstract, industrial style that “relegated nature to an inferior, feminine position.” Bonnie Kime Scott, In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 127. 19 Ian Jeffrey, The British Landscape, 1920–1950 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 7. For the prevalence of gardens, see also Clare A. P. Willsdon et al., Painting the Modern Garden Monet to Matisse, Royal Academy of Arts (London: Thames and Hudson, 2015). 20 Kime Scott, In the Hollow of the Wave, 127. 21 Quoted in Roger Fry, Vision and Design (London: Chatto and Windus, 1920), 24. 22 Fry, Vision and Design, 25. 23 Peter Adkins touches on Fry’s use of the term nature in his chapter on “Bloomsbury and Nature” in The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group, ed. Derek Ryan and Stephen Ross (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 225–38. 24 This preference is repeated in his discussion of the imaginative life. Fry argues that to express the imaginative life, an artistic object must have order and variety,

Notes to pages 157–61

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adding that “many things in nature such as flowers, possess these two qualities,” and “there is beauty in Nature” that may inspire “the imaginative life.” Fry, Vision and Design, 19. 25 Desmond McCarthy, “‘The Post Impressionists,’ an introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition, ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’” (1910), in Bullen, The Post Impressionists in England, 96. 26 Clive Bell, “‘The English Group’ an Introduction to the Catalogue of the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition” (1912), in Bullen, The Post Impressionists in England, 350. 27 Henry Holiday, “Post-Impressionism” (1910), in Bullen, The Post Impressionists in England, 144. 28 Robert Ross, “The Post-Impressionists at the Grafton: The Twilight of the Idols” (1910), in Bullen, The Post Impressionists in England, 102. 29 Ebenezer Wake Cook, “The Post-Impressionists” (1910), in Bullen, The Post Impressionists in England, 119–20. 30 Unsigned review, “Paint Run Mad: Post-Impressionists at Grafton Galleries” (1910), in Bullen, The Post Impressionists in England, 106. 31 Ross, “The Post-Impressionists at the Grafton,” 103. 32 Unsigned review, “Paint Run Mad,” 105. 33 William Blake Richmond, “Post-Impressionists” (1910), in Bullen, The Post Impressionists in England, 116–17. 34 T. B. Hyslop, “Post-illusionism and the Art of the Insane,” Nineteenth Century (February 1911), 210. 35 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1 1888–1912, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975), 440. 36 Virginia Woolf, “Books and Persons” (1917), in Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1972), 130. 37 Roger Fry, “Modern French Art at the Mansard Gallery” (1919), in The Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 342. 38 Quick, “Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and Post-Impressionism,” 557. 39 Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry (London: Vintage, 2003), 11. 40 Woolf, Roger Fry, 15. 41 Woolf, Roger Fry, 16. 42 Woolf, Roger Fry, 294. 43 Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being (London: Triad/ Granada, 1978), 87. 44 Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” 79. 45 Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” 80. 46 Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” 80. 47 Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” 74. 48 Jane Goldman makes a similar point in her feminist reading of PostImpressionism in the novel, suggesting that while it can be read in light of Bell and Fry’s formalism, the significance behind the narrative (in particular its

244

Notes to pages 161–71

feminist implications) show there are meanings and emotions associated with more than just its formal qualities. See Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 49 Virginia Woolf, Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), 34. 50 Woolf, Diary, Vol. 3, 36. 51 Kennedy was the name of the family who rented Talland House to the Stephens. One year after the publication of To the Lighthouse, a member of this family, Richard Kennedy, would join the Hogarth Press as a manager. 52 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 91. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are cited as TL in parentheses in the text. 53 Goldman argues that the erasure of the tree’s centrality in Lily’s second painting is a rejection of a pastoral tradition in which the tree is a “natural, unifying sign of an old-order status quo.” Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf, 170. 54 Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf, 170.

Chapter 10 “The earth-haunted mind”: Jean Toomer’s Cane, African American Writing, and Eco-Modernism Mary Weaks-Baxter 1 Elizabeth Black, “Introduction,” in The Nature of Modernism: Ecocritical Approaches to the Poetry of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew (London: Routledge, 2018), 1. 2 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: McClurg, 1903), 3. 3 Melvin Dixon, Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 2–3. 4 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 17. 5 Michael Bennett, “Anti-Pastoralism, Frederick Douglass, and the Nature of Slavery,” in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, eds. Kathleen R. Wallace and Karla Armbruster (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 208. 6 Michael Bennett, “Manufacturing the Ghetto,” in The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments, eds. Michael Bennett and David W. Teague (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 197–99. 7 Scott Hicks, “W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright: Toward an Ecocriticism of Color,” Callaloo 29, no. 1 (2006): 212.

Notes to pages 171–79

245

Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Introduction,” in Jean Toomer, Cane: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, eds. Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), lxiii. 9 Byrd and Gates, “Introduction,” lxiv. 10 Lucinda MacKethan, “Jean Toomer’s Cane: A Pastoral Problem,” Mississippi Quarterly 35 (1975): 423–34. Reprinted in Jean Toomer, Cane: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. Darwin T. Turner (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 231. 11 Jean Toomer, Cane: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, eds. Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 16. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are cited as C in parentheses in the text. 12 Byrd and Gates, “Introduction,” xxi–xxii. 13 Byrd and Gates, “Introduction,” lxiii. 14 Kathleen Pfeiffer, Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank (Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 170. 15 Lee Rozelle, “Ecocritical City: Modernist Reactions to Urban Environments in ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ and ‘Paterson,’” Twentieth Century Literature 48, no. 1 (2002): 102. 16 Darwin Turner, The Wayward and the Seeking (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980), 84. 17 Turner, The Wayward and the Seeking, 93. 18 Byrd and Gates, “Introduction,” xxxviii. 19 Byrd and Gates, “Introduction,” xxxix. 20 Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman, “Reading Cane in the Anthropocene: Toomer on Race, Power, and Nature,” Mississippi Quarterly 70/71, no. 3 (2017/2018): 274. 21 Taylor-Wiseman, “Reading Cane in the Anthropocene,” 274–75. 22 Taylor-Wiseman, “Reading Cane in the Anthropocene,” 275–77. 23 Taylor-Wiseman, “Reading Cane in the Anthropocene,” 278. 24 Anissa Janine Wardi, “Maternal Ecocriticism and the Ecology of Motherhood in Jean Toomer’s Cane,” Journal of the Motherhood Initiative 7, no. 1 (2016): 23. 25 Wardi, “Maternal Ecocriticism,” 24. 26 Wardi, “Maternal Ecocriticism,” 27–28. 27 Wardi, “Maternal Ecocriticism,” 32. 28 Bennett, “Manufacturing the Ghetto,” 182. 29 Frederik L. Rusch, ed., A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 25. 30 Rusch, ed., A Jean Toomer Reader, 25. 31 Jean Toomer, “To Waldo Frank,” in Cane: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, eds. Byrd and Gates, 162–63. 32 Wardi, “Maternal Ecocriticism,” 29. 33 Jean Toomer, The Letters of Jean Toomer, ed. Mark Whalan (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), 116. 34 Byrd and Gates, “Introduction,” lxiii. 8

246

Notes to pages 179–90

35 Catherine Innes, “The Unity of Jean Toomer’s Cane,” CLA Journal 15 (March 1972): 308, 309. 36 Innes, “The Unity of Jean Toomer’s Cane,” 307. 37 Innes, “The Unity of Jean Toomer’s Cane,” 310. 38 Toomer, “To Waldo Frank,” 162–63.

Chapter 11 “Grain by grain”: Beckett’s Agripessimism and the Anthropocene Caitlin McIntyre 1

Stanley Cavell and Emilie Morin have helpful synopses of these main lines. See Stanley Cavell, “Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame,” in Endgame: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), 59–77; and Emilie Morin, “Endgame and the Shorter Plays: Religious, Political, and Other Readings,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 60–72. 2 Hugh Kenner, “Life in the Box,” in Endgame: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), 41. 3 Samuel Beckett, Endgame & Act Without Words I (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 18. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are cited as E in parentheses in the text. 4 Conversely, Mark Byron offers a positive interpretation of agriculture and earthworks in Beckett’s writing; Mark Byron, “Worldy Corrasions: Philology and Narrative in Worstward Ho,” Journal of Beckett Studies 26, no. 1 (2017): 53–68. 5 I am clearly indebted to the rich field of Afropessimism, which posits that Blackness was forged in the transatlantic slave trade, resulting in social death and entrenching policies and laws of anti-Blackness that persist today. Paul Gilroy, Saidiya Hartman, and Frantz Fanon are major writers in this theoretical field. 6 Paul Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415, no. 23 (2002): 23. 7 Damian Carrington, “The Anthropocene Epoch: Scientists Declare Dawn of HumanInfluenced Age,” Guardian, August 29, 2016, accessed May 23, 2022, https:// www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declare-anthropocene-epochexperts-urge-geological-congress-human-impact-earth 8 Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (London: Verso, 2015), 170. 9 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 170, 173. 10 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 9. 11 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 19, 39. 12 Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–265.

Notes to pages 190–95

247

13 James Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 19. 14 Timothy Morton, “She Stood in Tears amid the Alien Corn: Thinking through Agrilogistics,” Diacritics 41, no. 3 (2014): 97. 15 Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 66. 16 Morton, “Agrilogistics,” 104. 17 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History 43, no. 1 (2012): 2. 18 Morton, Dark Ecology, 43. 19 Morton, Dark Ecology, 69. 20 Theodor Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in Endgame: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), 9–40. 21 Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 13. 22 Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 13, 37. 23 Greg Garrard, “Endgame: Beckett’s ‘Ecological Thought,’” Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui 23 (2012): 386. 24 Garrard, “Endgame: Beckett’s ‘Ecological Thought,’” 391. 25 Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh, “Introduction: Greening the Absurd,” in Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd: Ecology, the Environment, and the Greening of the Modern Stage, eds. Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), 1. 26 Lavery and Finburgh, “Introduction: Greening the Absurd,” 2. 27 Lavery and Finburgh, “Introduction: Greening the Absurd,” 34. 28 Lavery and Finburgh, “Introduction: Greening the Absurd,” 37. The theater as an ecosystem is also explored in a solo piece by Lavery. Through a reading of Beckett’s Footfalls, he imagines the theater as a garden, an enclosed space where time and space can be shifted to “cultivate a space for the inhuman.” Carl Lavery, “Ecology in Beckett’s Theatre Garden: Or How to Cultivate the Oikos,” Contemporary Theatre Review 28, no. 1 (2018): 17–18. 29 Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, “Beckett’s Old Muckball,” in Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 254. 30 Shepherd-Barr, “Beckett’s Old Muckball,” 241. 31 Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 13. 32 Julieann Ulin, “‘Buried! Who would have buried her?’: Famine Ghost Graves in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame,” in Hungry Words: Images of Famine in the Irish Canon, eds. George Cusack and Sarah Goss (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 199. 33 Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 35. 34 Ulrika Maude, “Pavlov’s Dogs and Other Animals in Samuel Beckett,” in Beckett and Animals, ed. Mary Bryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 92. 35 Steven Connor, “Making Flies Mean Something,” in Beckett and Animals, ed. Mary Bryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 140.

248

Notes to pages 196–204

36 For a fascinating discussion of the recurrence of the particulate in Beckett’s work, see Connor, “Making Flies Mean Something,” 147. There, he argues that Beckett’s writing reveals a “highly developed feeling for the pulverous or particulate, which is drawn to and organises itself around the diffuse movements and massings of comminated matter, its siftings, shiftings, slippages, stirrings, swellings, erosions, undulations, dissolutions, agglomerations and agitations.” 37 See, for example, Morton, Dark Ecology, 44. 38 Ulin, “‘Buried! Who would have buried her?,’” 214. 39 Seán Kennedy, “Edmund Spenser, Famine Memory and the Discontents of Humanism in Endgame,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 24 (2012): 116. 40 Ruby Cohn, “The Play That Was Rewritten: Fin de Partie,” in Endgame: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), 120. 41 Shepherd-Barr, “Beckett’s Old Muckball,” 249. 42 Samuel Beckett, How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 1. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are cited as HII in parentheses in the text. 43 Geological time relates stratigraphic changes or events to units of time. In decreasing order of scale, the major units are Eon, Era, Period, Epoch, Age. 44 Lavery and Finburgh, “Introduction: Greening the Absurd,” 27. They apply this epithet to Harold Pinter’s works. 45 Julian Murphet, “On the Mortification of Novelistic Discourse in Three Novels,” Journal of Beckett Studies 26, no. 1 (2017): 43, 39. 46 Murphet, “On the Mortification of Novelistic Discourse in Three Novels,” 42. 47 Morton, “Agrilogistics,” 104. 48 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 21. 49 Lavery and Finburgh, “Introduction: Greening the Absurd,” 11. 50 Lavery and Finburgh, “Introduction: Greening the Absurd,” 11. 51 Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino, “Toward an Affective Ecocriticism: Placing Feeling in the Anthropocene,” in Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, eds. Kyle Bladow and Jenifer Ladino (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2018): 11. 52 Lavery and Finburgh, “Introduction: Greening the Absurd,” 11. 53 Beckett, Endgame, 61.

Chapter 12 “There all the time without you”: Joyce, Modernism, and the Anthropocene Peter Adkins 1 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 31. 2 Joyce, Ulysses, 31.

Notes to pages 204–7 3

4

5 6 7 8

9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16

249

“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.” Quoted in Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 34. Contemporary measurements estimate the Earth to be approximately 4.5 billion years old. In 1913, Arthur Holmes’s The Age of the Earth extended previous measurements of the Earth’s age beyond the billion-year mark. James Joyce, “The Study of Languages,” in Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 14. Sverre Raffnsøe, Philosophy of the Anthropocene: The Human Turn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), xiii. Simon Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519 (2015): 171. As Crutzen also points out in his initial position paper, it does not follow that all humans are equally responsible or culpable, since anthropogenic changes to the planet’s composition have “largely been driven by only 25% of the world’s population.” Paul Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (2002): 23. The degree to which the notion of an Anthropocene universalizes the figure of the human and glosses over crucial differences has been much debated within criticism on the Anthropocene. See, for instance, Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 111–45. Crutzen originally suggested that the Anthropocene should be seen as beginning with the advent of industrialism; other environmental historians have pointed to threshold moments such as the advent of agriculture or the global circulation of biota after Columbus’s voyage to America in 1492. Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), 99; William Ruddiman et al., “Defining the Epoch We Live In: Is a Formally Designated ‘Anthropocene’ a Good Idea?,” Science 348, no. 6230 (2015): 39. Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 9. For the most influential articulation of this, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. Matthew Griffiths, The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 10. R. L. Sherlock, Man as Geological Agent: An Account of His Action on Inanimate Nature (London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1922), 325. Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 15. Ted Howell, “An Imperialist Inherits the Earth: Howards End in the Anthropocene,” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 4 (2016): 549.

250

Notes to pages 207–11

17 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), 64; Virginia Woolf, “Thunder at Wembley,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Harcourt Brace, 1988), 414. For a reading of climate change in Eliot’s The Waste Land, see Griffiths, The New Poetics of Climate Change. I discuss Woolf and climate change in my forthcoming monograph The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Change in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes. 18 Lewis and Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” 173. 19 Will Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369 (2011): 844. 20 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1960), xi. 21 Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 30–31. 22 Grosz, Becoming Undone, 35. 23 Bergson, Creative Evolution, x. 24 Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” 23. 25 For an overview, see Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison, eds., Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); and Mary Ann Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 1996). 26 Jeff Wallace, D.H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 14. 27 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 160. 28 Bergson, Creative Evolution, xiii. 29 Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), 87. 30 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses and Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 49; Joyce, Ulysses, 31, 37. 31 Joyce, Ulysses, 32, 34. It is in this respect that Garry Leonard locates a tension between the development of the Cartesian mind and the natural world in “Proteus.” See “Ineluctable Modality of the Visible: ‘Nature’ and Spectacle in ‘Proteus’,” in Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce, eds. Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 246–67. 32 Joyce, Ulysses, 35, 37. 33 John Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890–1970 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 89. 34 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 118–24. 35 Joyce, Ulysses, 34. 36 Grosz, Becoming Undone, 30. 37 Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism, 89. 38 Joyce, Ulysses, 42.

Notes to pages 212–18

251

39 Paul R. Samson and David Pitt, “Introduction: Sketching the Noosphere,” in The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader: Global Environment, Society and Change, eds. Paul R. Samson and David Pitt (London: Routledge, 1999), 2. 40 Edouard Le Roy quoted in Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison, “‘About the Year 1910’: Bergson and Literary Modernism,” in Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism, eds. Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 4. 41 Edouard Le Roy, “From the Origins of Humanity and the Evolution of Mind,” in The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader: Global Environment, Society and Change, eds. Paul R. Samson and David Pitt (London: Routledge, 1999), 70. 42 Le Roy, “The Origins of Humanity,” 65. 43 Joyce, Ulysses, 37. 44 Hunter Dukes, “Ulysses and the Signature of Things,” Humanities 6 (2017), n.p. 45 Joyce, Ulysses, 312. 46 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 12. 47 Joyce, A Portrait, 80. 48 Joyce, Ulysses, 40. 49 Le Roy, “The Origins of Humanity,” 60–61. 50 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “The Phenomenon of Man,” in The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader: Global Environment, Society and Change, eds. Paul R. Samson and David Pitt (London: Routledge, 1999), 77. 51 Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, 77. 52 Alison Lacivita has convincingly argued that Joyce was interested in environmental politics while working on Finnegans Wake. See Alison Lacivita, The Ecology of Finnegans Wake (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015). 53 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 232–35. 54 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 235. 55 Joyce, Ulysses, 572. 56 Joyce, Ulysses, 583. 57 Joyce, Ulysses, 603, 556. 58 Claire Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2014), 57. 59 Joyce, Ulysses, 607. 60 James Joyce, Joyce’s Ulysses Notesheets in the British Museum, ed. Phillip Herring (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 491. 61 Joyce, Ulysses, 643. 62 James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 180. 63 For an overview of the critical reception of “Penelope,” see Kathleen McCormick, “Reproducing Molly Bloom: A Revisionist History of ‘Penelope’, 1922–1970,” in Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on “Penelope” and Cultural Studies, ed. Richard Pearce (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 17–39.

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Notes to page 218

64 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 522. 65 Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, 13.

Index

The Adelphi 147 African American writing 8, 169–170 Afropessimism 246n agriculture 20, 145–47, 150, 172, 175, 176, 189–91, 194, 195, 198 agriculture for profit 9, 175, 176 agricultural crisis 193–95 agricultural laborer 196 agrilogistics 190, 195, 201 agripessimism 187–203 American buffalo 54 Anthropocene 9, 187–202, 203–18, 249n artificial fertilizers and chemicals 146, 147, 189 Atlantic Ocean 87, 94 Auden, W. H. 3 Bates, H. E. 5, 6, 15, 28–31 Spella Ho 6, 15, 28–30 Beckett, Samuel 4, 187–203 Endgame 9, 187, 188, 191–92, 193–97, 199, 201 Footfalls 247n How It Is 9, 189, 191, 197, 198–200 Waiting for Godot 197 Bell, Adrian 27 Bell, Clive 8, 155, 158, 159 Bergson, Henri 9, 206–13, 216–18

Bruce, Maye E. 148 burial practices 74, 227n, 228n, 229n, Butts, Mary 3 Capitalocene 190, 201 Carson, Rachel 98–100, 187 chemical burial 6, 71, 73, 84, 228n cliffs 7, 87, 91–94, 97–100, 231n climate crisis 9, 10, 34, 52, 187–88, 191, 192, 197, 250n coastline 67, 92, 99, 203–4, 210 Cocteau, Jean 46 composting 71, 73, 75–81, 83, 148 Conrad, Joseph 3 corn 72, 78, 79, 80, 81–84, 146, 196 cornfield 81–84, 122, 230n corn-god 141 country house 15, 28–29, 37 countryside 16, 24, 28, 31, 39, 78, 171 The Criterion 126, 145, 146, 147, 240n crop 83, 141, 175, 190, 192 crow 94–95 Crutzen, Paul 9, 205, 207, 208, 249n cultivation of the soil 8, 139, 145, 147, 149 culture 2, 3, 5, 8, 21, 34, 38, 39, 42, 46, 51, 55, 56, 70, 71, 77, 119, 130, 145, 148, 149, 150, 154

254 Eco-Modernism

dark ecology 6, 72 Darwin, Charles 7, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 99, 100, 101, 120, 193, 208 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 7, 90 The Origin of Species 89–90, 101 The Variations of Animals and Plants Under Domestication 88 dirt theory 6, 72 Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.) 4, 51–70 The Sword Went Out to Sea 53–54, 69 Trilogy 54–55, 60, 62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70 dragonfly 105, 106, 111–15 Earth 8, 18, 36, 45, 46, 53, 54, 64, 67, 69, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83, 90, 91, 96, 99, 100, 117, 123, 124, 127, 129, 131, 132, 136, 161, 166, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 176, 178, 183, 188, 192, 193, 99, 200, 204, 205, 207, 212 earth burial 71, 72, 77–84, 227n Earth mother goddess 218 earthquake 53 earthworm 63 ecocriticism 2–5, 10–11, 33, 34–39, 119, 171, 177, 192 ecology 2, 3, 5, 6, 52, 57, 60, 80, 100, 170, 178 ecological interconnectivity 39 ecopoiesis 121 Egoist 91 Eliot, T. S. 72 Ash Wednesday 145 “The Burial of the Dead” 141 “Burnt Norton” 78, 150–51 “Cultural Diversity and European Unity” 147–48 “The Dry Salvages” 78 “East Coker” 72, 77, 79 Faber and Faber 146–148, 222n Four Quartets 72, 77, 140, 150 “Interlude in London” 141

“Morning at the Window” 142 Notes Towards the Definition of Culture 150 The Waste Land 8, 43, 44, 139, 140, 141, 142, 145, 150, 207, 141, 142, 150, 207 “Whispers of Mortality” 140, “Little Gidding” 150 environmental destruction 9, 29, 43, 53, 54, 174, 177, 190, 201 Exner, Sigmund 105–10 exoskeleton 55, 64 Faber and Faber 146–48, 222n farm novelists 23, 27 farming 25 fertility myths 230n fertility rites 141 field 71, 72, 75, 79, 82, 122 flowers 45, 47, 76, 108, 116, 126, 136, 140, 141, 142, 144–45, 149, 150, 154, 156, 157, 160–67 Ford, Ford Madox 3 Forster, E. M. 3, 5 Howards End 15–22, 24, 29–30, 206 Freeman H. W. 27 Fry, Roger 155, 157, 159–61 gardens 8, 46–47, 83, 139, 140, 143–45, 148, 150, 154, 160–65, 167, 247n geese 52, 66–69 Georgian poetry 128–29 grain 182, 189, 196, 200 green modernism 2, 3, 4, 5, 40, 119, 191–93 Gurdjieff, George 183 Hardy, Thomas 22 harvest 82–84, 141, 175, 178, 182 Heidegger, Martin 19, 29–30, 106 Hills, Lawrence 148 horticulture 141–45, 148, 150 Howard, Albert 148 Hyde Bailey, Liberty 101

Index 255

insect vision 103–11 insecticide 195–96 insects 5, 7 Joyce, James 3 Finnegans Wake 3, 119 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 213–15 Ulysses 203, 205, 212–13, 215–17 Kaye-Smith, Sheila 5, 15 Sussex Gorse 6, 15, 22–24 landscape 6, 9, 16, 22, 23, 28, 35, 37, 43, 47, 52, 53, 54, 68, 69, 73, 75, 80, 93, 94, 100, 122, 129, 154, 156, 157, 158, 162, 164, 167, 172, 174, 177 Lawrence, D. H. 3, 7 Apocalypse 8, 120, 123–24, 131, 136 Birds, Beasts and Flowers 8, 120–22, 127–36 Fantasia of the Unconscious 125 Kangaroo 104, 132 The Plumed Serpent 12, 125 Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious 125–26 “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays” 133, 136 “Snake” 128–29, 133–34 Levertov, Denise 103 Lewis, Wyndham 4, 7, 109 “Bestre” 112–14 Joint 109–12 The Apes of God 110 The Childermass 109 maternal ecocriticism 177 Mew, Charlotte 4, 119, mollusk 52, 57–59, 62, 69 Moore, Marianne 3 “The Fish” 7, 87–88, 91, 100 Observations 91 mussel shells 94–96

nationalism 25–28 natural selection 89–90, 99 nature 126–27, 157–59, 242n nature poetry 6, 33–48 New English Weekly 146–47 noosphere 210–13, 215 ocean 55, 87, 91–95 organic husbandry 4, 8 77, 79, 146–49 pastoral elegy 73, 75–77, 81, 229n Plantationocene 190 pollen 116 Post-Impressionism 153–68 river 170, 178 Romanticism 1 Rukeyser, Muriel 6, 72, 80, 81 The Book of the Dead 80–84 rural nostalgia 20–28 Sackville-West, Vita 8, 139, 142, 150 The Garden 142–43 Orchard and Vineyard 143 scythe 176 sea 7, 40, 43, 54, 56, 57, 60, 62, 67, 70, 87, 88, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 123, 162, 188, 209, 210, 214, 231n sea creatures 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 108, 136, 203 seascape 88, 89, 91, 99, 100, 101 seeds 81, 84, 143, 179, 193, 196, 198 shellfish 6, 55, 58, 59 shore 6, 52, 54–56, 69, 99 Sitwell, Edith 3, 33–48 “Bells of Grey Crystal” 43 Bucolic Comedies 6, 34, 45–47 “Dark Song” 36–37 Façade 6, 34, 36, 41–47 Gold Coast Customs 43 “Green Geese” 45 “Rain” 43 “Some Notes on My Own Poetry” 39–40 “Spring” 70

256

Eco-Modernism

“When Cold December” 44 soil 139, 145 Soil Association 148 soil erosion 6, 8, 17, 22, 23, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 87, 88, 89, 90, 95, 112, 185, 189 soil fertility 79, 148–49 Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute 172 Street, A. G. 5, 15, 223n The Endless Furrow 6, 25 sugar cane 175 sun 55, 56, 67, 123, 124, 134, 136, 148, 172, 173, 188 Thomas, Edward 4 tidepools 92, 94, 97 Toomer, Jean 8 Cane 165–84 trees 148–49, 158, 163, 165, 166, 170, 175, 176, 177,180, 244n

urban landscape 172 urban life 1, 18 waves 7, 25, 40, 53, 67, 68, 87, 91–93, 96–100, 131 weather 4, 10, 188 weather-monitoring instruments 196 wilderness 4, 46, 170, 171 Williams, William Carlos 6, 72 “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” 72, 75 woods 53, 76 Woolf, Virginia 2–3, 7, 10, 17, 29, 34–37, 104, 150, 154 To the Lighthouse 34, 155, 162–67 “Walter Sickert: A Conversation” 114 worms 52, 60–65