Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green 9781409418221, 2012003109, 9781315578675

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ECOLOGY AND THe LITeRATURe OF THe BRITISH LeFT Premised on the belief that a social and an ecological agenda are compatible, this collection offers readings in the ecology of left and radical writing from the Romantic period to the present. While early ecocriticism tended to elide the bitter divisions within and between societies, recent practitioners of ecofeminism, environmental justice, and social ecology have argued that the social, the economic and the environmental have to be seen as part of the same process. Taking up this challenge, the contributors trace the origins of an environmental sensibility and of the modern left to their roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, charting the ways in which the literary imagination responds to the political, industrial and agrarian revolutions. Topics include Samuel Taylor Coleridge's credentials as a green writer, the interaction between John Ruskin's religious and political ideas and his changing view of nature, William Morris and the Garden City movement, H. G. Wells and the Fabians, the devastated landscapes in the poetry and fiction of the First World War, and the leftist pastoral poetry of the 1930s. In historicizing and connecting environmentally sensitive literature with socialist thought, these essays explore the interactive vision of nature and society in the work of writers ranging from William Wordsworth and John Clare to John Berger and John Burnside.

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Ecology and the Literature of the British Left The Red and the Green

Edited by JOHN RIGNALL University of Warwick, UK and H. GUSTAV KLAUS University of Rostock, Germany with VALeNTINe CUNNINGHAm University of Oxford, UK

First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © The editors and contributors 2012 John Rignall and H. Gustav Klaus have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Ecology and the literature of the British left: the red and the green. 1. English literature – History and criticism. 2. Ecology in literature. 3. Right and left (Political science) in literature. 4. Radicalism in literature. 5. Politics and literature – Great Britain – History. I. Rignall, John, 1942– II. Klaus, H. Gustav, 1944– III. Cunningham, Valentine. 820.9’36-dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ecology and the literature of the British Left : the red and the green / edited by John Rignall and H. Gustav Klaus and Valentine Cunningham. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-1822-1 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Radicalism in literature. 3. English literature—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Ecology in literature. 5. Politics and literature—Great Britain—History. 6. Radicalism—Great Britain— History. 7. Romanticism—England. I. Rignall, John, 1942– II. Klaus, H. Gustav, 1944– III. Cunningham, Valentine. PR468.R33E26 2012 820.9’355—dc23 2012003109 ISBN: 9781409418221 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315578675 (ebk)

Contents Notes on Contributors vii Acknowledgements xi Introduction: The Red and the Green H. Gustav Klaus and John Rignall

1

1 Contemporary Ecocriticism between Red and Green   Richard Kerridge

17

2 Was Coleridge Green?   Seamus Perry

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3 ‘Wastes of corn’: Changes in Rural Land Use in Wordsworth’s Early Poetry   Helena Kelly

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4 John Clare’s Weeds   Mina Gorji

61

5 John Clare & … & … & … Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizome   Simon Kövesi

75

6 Graeco-Roman Pastoral and Social Class in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Bothie and Thomas Hardy’s Under The Greenwood Tree   Stephen Harrison

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7 Landscape, Labour and History in Later Nineteenth-Century Writing  101 John Rignall 8 Fallen Nature: Ruskin’s Political Apocalypse   Dinah Birch

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9 William Morris and the Garden City   Anna Vaninskaya

125

10 H.G. Wells, Fabianism and the ‘Shape of Things to Come’   John Sloan

137

11 Guardianship and Fellowship: Radicalism and the Ecological Imagination 1880–1940   William Greenslade 12 Felled Trees—Fallen Soldiers   H. Gustav Klaus

151 165

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13 Marxist Cricket? Some Versions of Pastoral in the Poetry of the Thirties   Valentine Cunningham 14 Eco-anarchism, the New Left and Romanticism   James Radcliffe 15 A Huge Lacuna vis-à-vis the Peasants: Red and Green in John Berger’s Trilogy Into Their Labours   Christian Schmitt-Kilb

177 193

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16 Green Links: Ecosocialism and Contemporary Scottish Writing   Graeme Macdonald

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Bibliography   Index  

241 259

Notes on Contributors Dinah Birch is Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University. She has published widely on nineteenth-century literature, and has edited novels by Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Her books include Ruskin’s Myths (1988), Ruskin on Turner (1990) and Our Victorian Education (2007). She is the general editor of the seventh edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009) and reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books. Valentine Cunningham is Professor of English Literature at Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in English at Corpus Christi College. His many publications include British Writers of the Thirties (1988), In the Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts, and History (1994), and Reading after Theory (2002). Mina Gorji is a University Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. Her published works include a monograph on John Clare, John Clare and the Place of Poetry (2008), an edited collection on rudeness in modern British culture, Rude Britannia (2006), and essays on literary allusion, the poetics of mess and William Hone’s Everyday Book. William Greenslade is Professor of English at the University of the West of England. His research focuses on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature and culture. His publications include Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–1940 (1994) and, as editor, Thomas Hardy’s ‘Facts’ Notebook: A Critical Edition (2004), and contributions to Keith Wilson (ed.), A Companion to Thomas Hardy (2009); Patrick Parrinder and Andrzej Gąsiorek (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 4: The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880–1940 (2010); and Gail Marshall (ed.), Shakespeare and the Nineteenth Century (2011). Stephen Harrison is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has published widely on Latin literature, and has also written on the modern reception of Virgil, Horace, the ancient novel and ancient epic. Helena Kelly completed her D.Phil at the University of Oxford in 2009 with a thesis on literary responses to the enclosures around the turn of the nineteenth century. A former law student, she has published in Notes and Queries and Persuasions and is currently engaged in editing Elizabeth Hervey’s 1796 novel The History of Ned Evans for the Chawton House Library Series.

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Richard Kerridge lectures in English Literature and Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, where he leads the MA in Creative Writing and co-ordinates research in the School of Humanities and Cultural Industries. He was one of the first teachers of ecocriticism in Britain, and co-edited Writing the Environment (1998), the first collection of ecocritical articles published in this country. In 1999–2003, he was the founding chair of the UK branch of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), and in 2006–2009 he was an elected member of the ASLE Executive Council in the USA. He has published numerous ecocritical articles and has just completed Beginning Ecocriticism for Manchester University Press. In 1990 and 1991 he received the BBC Wildlife Award for Nature Writing. H. Gustav Klaus is Emeritus Professor of the Literature of the British Isles at the University of Rostock, Germany. He has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century working-class writing. His books include Factory Girl (1998), James Kelman (2004) and (as co-editor) British Industrial Fictions (2000) and ‘To Hell with Culture’ (2005). Simon Kövesi is head of the Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes University. He has edited two collections of John Clare’s verse (1999 and 2001) and is editor of the John Clare Society Journal. He is assistant general editor of Eighteenth-Century Labouring-Class Poets (3 vols, 2003), and author of a monograph, James Kelman (2007), about the contemporary Scottish writer. Graeme Macdonald is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. He is editor of PostTheory: New Directions in Criticism (1999) and Scottish and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Readings and Critical Contexts (2011). He has published several journal articles and book chapters on contemporary Scottish Literature, most recently on ‘Race and Racism in Devolutionary Scottish Literature’ in Orbis Litterarum and on ‘Postcolonialism and Scottish Studies’ in New Formations. He is currently completing a monograph, Shifting Territory: Scottish and World Literature since 1968. Seamus Perry is a Fellow of Balliol College, where he is Tutor in English Literature, and a Lecturer in the English Faculty in the University of Oxford. He is author of Coleridge and the Uses of Division (1999) and Alfred Tennyson (2005). James Radcliffe is Principal Lecturer in Research and Management in Healthcare Services at Staffordshire University. As a political scientist he has a long-standing interest in environmental politics. He is author of Green Politics: Dictatorship or Democracy? (2000) and ‘Environment’, in D. MacIver (ed.), Issues in World Politics (2005).

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John Rignall is Emeritus Reader in the English Department at the University of Warwick. His publications include Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator (1992), George Eliot, European Novelist (2011) and, as editor, George Eliot and Europe (1997) and the Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot (2000). Christian Schmitt-Kilb is Professor of English Literature at the University of Rostock, Germany. He has published on literature and culture in the sixteenth century as well as on contemporary theory, fiction, drama and poetry. He is an editor of the Journal for the Study of British Cultures. John Sloan is Fellow and Tutor in English, Harris Manchester College, Oxford, and Lecturer in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. He is a specialist in the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and has published George Gissing: The Cultural Challenge (1989); John Davidson: First of the Moderns—A Literary Biography (1995); Oscar Wilde (2003), and as editor, The Selected Poems and Prose of John Davidson (1995), and Oscar Wilde’s The Complete Short Stories for Oxford World’s Classics. Anna Vaninskaya is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914 (2010), as well as more than 20 articles and book chapters on topics ranging from Chesterton, Orwell, Tolkien and Stoppard, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialism, education, popular reading, historical cultures and Anglo-Russian relations.

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Acknowledgements The 16 chapters of this volume began life as papers at a conference on ‘The Red and the Green: Ecology and the Literature of the Left’ held at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in March 2007. The editors would like to acknowledge with gratitude the financial assistance provided to the conference by the Passmore Edwards Fund. John Berger’s Pig Earth and Once in Europa are cited by kind permission of Bloomsbury Publishing.

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Introduction The Red and the Green H. Gustav Klaus and John Rignall

les mythes sur lesquelles nous vivons sont contradictoires (Malraux)

I An ‘environmental sensibility’ and a ‘leftist position’ have this much in common: they are progeny of the Age of Revolution alias the Romantic period. There is no necessary connection between the two attitudes, and for much of the nineteenth century they developed in separate ways, indifferent, if not inimical to each other. However, as a historian of environmental ideas has observed, ‘Many of those who espoused ecologism … were originally radicals of various kinds’.1 The reference is to the twentieth century, but it is also applicable to the first generation of British Romantic poets: Blake and Burns, Coleridge and Wordsworth—all of whom have in recent criticism been credited with environmental values—had at one stage or another been supporters of the French Revolution. It was in the French Assembly that the more radical elements first sat on the left, as seen from the president’s chair. They included the spokesmen of the red-bonneted ‘Sansculottes’, defined like the ‘men without shirt’ of the English Revolution by what they did not have or did not wear. As a consequence, they demanded not just political changes but also social and economic rights including a kind of living wage and protective social measures. But ‘Red’ did not become the powerful symbol of the Left until the events of 1848–9, and especially the bloodily suppressed Parisian workers’ insurrection of June 1848. Fling out ‘The Red Banner’, Gerald Massey wrote in his poem of that title, published by The Red Republican of 1850, organ of the Chartist Left. ‘Red is the emblem of Justice and Right | By martyrs’ blood dyed’, asserted Alfred Fennel in the same year in what was to become the anthem of the British labour movement, ‘The Red Flag’.2 By then poets had, in response to the industrial and agrarian revolutions, already found ‘A language that is ever green’ (Clare) in which to write about ‘this Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 20. 2 Gerald Massey, ‘The Red Banner’, The Red Republican 1/1 (1850): p. 8; Alfred Fennel, ‘The Red Flag’, The Democratic Review (April 1850): p. 434. Both journals were edited by G. Julian Harney. 1

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green earth’ (Wordsworth),3 and human interaction with it. But for well over a hundred years any ecopolitical connotations of the colour were eclipsed by its association with Ireland and her struggle for independence. Iris Murdoch’s 1965 novel The Red and the Green still referred to a group of Dubliners on the eve of the Easter Rising, with shades of green distinguishing the uniforms of the Volunteers from those of the Citizen Army. In any case, poets like Clare and Wordsworth were no more aware of being Green than they were of being Romantic. The categories only came into being in the later nineteenth century, after both the ‘Green’ and the ‘Left’ positions had suffered a ‘scientific turn’. Socialism, by this time a wellestablished term though originally purely associated with Owenism, was declared to have outstripped its Romantic and utopian origins, while the environmental cast of mind became associated with the newly coined concept of ‘ecology’.4 But the latter’s followers were so exiguous that as yet there was no name for them. By contrast, the Left had not just proliferated in numbers but had fragmented into many different designations (Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, Social Democrats, Marxists, Syndicalists). II The ‘Left’ is, indeed, an umbrella term that covers a range of ideologies and positions, though the borderline between it and other broad political formations is not so blurred as those who would wish the Right-Left distinction away, or regard it as meaningless, have argued. More than 40 years ago, David Caute listed and examined a number of attitudes that have become associated with the Left, among them ‘optimism, a faith in science and rationality, love of liberty, egalitarianism, sympathy for the oppressed, anti-racism, pacifism, anti-clericalism, [and] hostility to authority’,5 only to conclude that while the Left frequently exhibited several such qualities, some of them, taken by themselves, have been neither its exclusive property nor consistently been pursued on those occasions when the Left was in power. Instead of a bundle of ideals and principles, Caute therefore proposed the notion of ‘popular sovereignty’, including crucially (and in contradistinction to liberalism) control of the economy, as the yardstick by which to measure the Left’s progress. Orientation towards this overriding goal is not meant to camouflage John Clare, ‘Pastoral Poesy’, in John Clare, Selected Poems, ed. J.W. and Ann Tibble (London: J.M. Dent, 1965), p. 186; William Wordsworth, ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, in William Wordsworth, Selected Poetry, ed. Stephen Gill and Duncan Wu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 59. Cf. Seamus Perry’s discussion of Coleridge’s ‘greenery’ in Chapter 2. 4 Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific [1880], trans. Edward Aveling (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892); Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin: Reimer, 1866). 5 David Caute, The Left in Europe since 1789 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966), p. 12. 3

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the Left’s poor record in some areas such as the equality between the sexes and races, but merely serves to provide a concept capacious enough to be adaptable to historical change. Caute insisted on a dynamic definition of the Left. What counted as a revolutionary leftist position in 1793, the abolition of all feudal privileges, was no longer one in 1848 when universal manhood suffrage was on the agenda. What was a Left position in the 1840s, the Six Points of Chartism including the call for one man, one vote, was no longer one by the turn of the century when it was a question of extending the franchise to women. And so on. But do ecological concerns have a place in this model? Despite its anthropocentric ring, there is no reason why the concept of ‘popular sovereignty’ should not be able to accommodate a commitment to ‘environmental justice’ in the double sense of balanced relations with the nonhuman world and a heightened vigilance towards the pollution and degradation of impoverished neighbourhoods, regions and countries. Historicizing is also necessary when it comes to an understanding of nineteenthcentury socialist thinkers’ attitudes to the natural environment. It is certainly not true that the founding fathers of Marxism skipped over the problem of lasting environmental damage. In writing about modern agriculture Marx noted, All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. … Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the labourer.6

Engels, from his early observations about the havoc wreaked by industrialism upon the natural and built environment of Manchester to his late fragment Dialectics of Nature (written intermittently 1873–86), in which he incidentally refers to Ernst Haeckel’s Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866), where the term ‘ecology’ makes its first appearance, was particularly sensitive to ecological issues: Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. …

6 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production [1887], trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Institut für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung (Berlin: Dietz, 1990), pp. 442–3.

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Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature— but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.7

Between them, Marx and Engels also corresponded over the proposition of the Ukrainian Socialist Serge Podolinsky that energy (in which he included labour), not labour itself, should be taken into account in any theory of the production of value. Engels, while intrigued by the ‘very valuable discovery’ that ‘human labour is capable of retaining solar energy on the earth’s surface and harnessing it for a longer period than would otherwise have been the case’, eventually came to reject the idea because he concluded that not only had Podolinsky confused ‘the physical with the economic’ labour but what Podolinsky has completely forgotten is that the working individual is not only a stabiliser of present but also, and to a far greater extent, a squanderer of past, solar heat. As to what we have done in the way of squandering our reserves of energy, our coal, ore, forests, etc., you are better informed than I am.8

However, when all is said and done, it remains the case that such local insights were not central to the main body of Marx and Engels’s work. Nor did they guide the economic policies of countries run by Communist or Social Democratic governments in the twentieth century. In varying degrees, socialists of all persuasion came to see unlimited economic growth, no matter its environmental consequences, as the key to solving the problems of hunger, poverty and social inequality. As John Berger put it in a discussion of a related issue: ‘There is, it seems to me, a huge, huge lacuna in Marxist theory vis-à-vis the countryside and peasants … in one sense perhaps one of the only, really important fundamental points where there is almost total agreement between Marxism and bourgeois economics, or capitalist economics rather, is that in the name of progress peasants have to be eliminated’.9 The anarchist Left’s contribution to the ecological debate, included here despite this faction’s attachment to its own black flag, is not an overwhelming success story Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature, trans. Clemens Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1973), pp. 291–2. 8 Letter to Marx, 19 December 1882, trans. Peter and Betty Ross, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 46: Letters January 1880–March 1883 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1992), pp. 410–12. 9 John Berger and Jean Mohr, ‘Images from a Peasant Woman’s Memory: “If Each Time”’, in Kathleen Parkinson and Martin Priestman (eds), Peasants and Countrymen in Literature: A Symposium Organised by the English Department of the Roehampton Institute in February 1981 (London: Roehampton Institute of Higher Education, 1982), p. 15. Berger and Mohr were individually answering questions from the conference floor. See also Chapter 15 by Christian Schmitt-Kilb. 7

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either, although through its sheer distance from the corridors of power Anarchism was at least spared implication in environmental blunders. As geographers, both Elisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin were alert to the impact of the environment on people. They were also united in their opposition to scarcity-ecology, rejecting the claims of the Neo-Malthusians of their day that the earth could not feed her population. It was Reclus who suggested the title of La conquête du pain for one of Kropotkin’s books and wrote the Preface to the original edition. In it, Kropotkin advocated, for example, physiological instead of chemical manuring and homegrown produce instead of half-ripe imported food. Furthermore, both authors looked at the animal kingdom for inspiration and guidance. A vegetarian, Reclus felt all the more strongly that ‘the customs of animals will help us to penetrate deeper into the science of life, will enlarge both our knowledge of the world and our love’.10 Kropotkin went a step further in his Mutual Aid as a Law of Nature and a Factor of Evolution (the originally planned full title)11 when he suggested that humans would do well to take up the example of other sociable species, for ‘under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life. Those species which willingly or unwillingly abandon it are doomed to decay’.12 The conclusion Social Darwinists had drawn from evolution, namely that the spirit of competitiveness was an inborn human tendency, hence a fundamental social principle, needed rebuttal, even though Kropotkin fell into the ‘naturalistic’ error of approaching the study of nature and society in the same manner when he maintained that ‘there is no reason why we should, when we pass from the flower to man, or from a village of beavers to a human town, abandon the method which till then has been so useful’.13 It was an error to which Patrick Geddes did not succumb in his city planning. Familiar with Ruskin and Darwin—he had studied under the latter’s great popularizer T.H. Huxley—and in contact with Reclus and Kropotkin, Geddes related the life sciences to the social sciences rather than conflating them. Starting from his biological observations that organisms survived best in a suitable environment, he undertook to shape the built environment according to human needs and impulses. Like some of the writers discussed in this book he was more a ‘conservative revolutionary’ than a man of the Left, applying to urban renewal the principle of ‘conservative surgery’: that is, privileging restoration wherever possible over demolition. His City Development: A Study of the Parks, Gardens and Culture Institutes: A Report to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust (1904) became a blueprint for regionalism, but as with so many of his projects he overreached Elisée Reclus, ‘The Great Kinship’ [1897], trans. Edward Carpenter (1900), quoted from Marie Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Elisée Reclus and NineteenthCentury European Anarchism (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 251. 11 Peter Kropotkin, ‘Introduction’, Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution (Boston: Extending Horizon Books, 1955 [1902]), p. xiv. 12 Ibid., p. 57. 13 Peter Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchism (London: Freedom Press, 1912), p. 40. 10

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himself; the ambitious scheme never came to fruition. By 1914 he considered himself one of ‘the practical Eutopians already at work’, up against the present dominant civilisation—of coal and steam, of machinery and cheap products, of expanding markets and widening empires—themselves groaning under ever-increasing armaments, torn by fiscal disputes, and ruled by financiers’ assumed omnipotence … [an] order of things—avowedly mechanical, militarist, and monetarist at best, and thus too readily becoming debased, violent and venal.14

After the First World War he turned ‘Green’, pleading for massive re-afforestation: [T]his is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent on the leaves. By leaves we live. Some people have strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of coins. Whereas the world is mainly a vast leaf-colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fulness of our harvests.15

Geddes apart, all these thinkers and activists were political exiles. The mature work of Marx and Engels was elaborated in Britain where they spent the greater part of their lives. Kropotkin was treated like an honorary Briton during his 30year stay in the country. Reclus, banished from France after his involvement in the Commune of Paris, lived in Switzerland and later taught at the New University of Brussels. But Geddes also went into the diaspora to propagate his ideas of town and village planning, working in places as far apart as India, France and the United States, where Lewis Mumford became an enthusiastic, if independentminded follower. If Mumford has some claim to be ‘the pioneer American social ecologist’, part of the credit goes to Geddes.16 III Throughout the nineteenth century the land exercised a pull on radicals at both extremes of the political spectrum. Examples on the Left include the agrarian Socialism of Thomas Spence and his followers, the Chartist Land Plan and the Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson, Sex (London: Williams and Norgate, 1923 [1914]), pp. 239–41. Geddes distinguished an attainable ‘eutopia’ from its abstract idealized cousin ‘utopia’. 15 From Geddes’s farewell lecture to his Dundee students, ‘Biology and Its Social Bearings’, according to the notes taken by Amelia Defries, The Interpreter: Geddes, the Man and His Gospel (London: Routledge, 1927), p. 175. We were first alerted to this reference by Malcolm Tait’s short article on the author, ‘A Man of All Reason’, Discover NLS, 11 (2009): p. 24. 16 Ramachandra Guha and J. Martínez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (London: Earthscan, 1997), pp. 200, 197. 14

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rural communities of Anarchism in the 1890s. But the footprints of conservative thinkers have undoubtedly left a deeper mark on the terrain of ecology, as they have done in the field of culture more generally. This is not surprising given the essentially conservative and often pessimistic impulse behind much environmental concern. A vivid realization of irretrievable loss, a horrifying apocalyptic scenario can deliver more poignant images of human and natural predicament than the basically optimistic, but necessarily speculative vistas of the future opened up by the project of human liberation. (The early radical working-class movement had drawn part of its strength precisely from the evocation of a ‘lost birthright’ whose restoration justified the deployment of revolutionary means.) Just as in the first half of the nineteenth century a critique of industrialism had provided the common ground on which romantic anti-capitalism, with its heightened environmental sensibility, and the burgeoning labour movement could meet, with ‘alienation’ figuring as a key component in both accounts, so in the last third of the century evolution and science appeared as a point of intersection between Green and Red perspectives. Marxist, Anarchist or, indeed, Fabian analyses were keen to claim science (and technology) in support of their positions, citing ‘laws’ of nature and of historical progressive development. In turn, the new biology and its holistic view of organisms gave birth not just to the concept of ecology, but to a new scientifically grounded reverence for the order of nature and the wisdom to be derived from it. But just as the backward-looking tendency of romantic anti-capitalism could ultimately not be brought in line with the forwardlooking perspective of the Left, so the natural sciences failed to bridge effectively the distance between those who were profoundly concerned with ecological questions and those who were so deeply immersed in political and trade-union struggles that they tended to relegate the former issues to the bottom rank of priorities as ‘second-order contradictions’, if they did not ignore them altogether. The one persuasive fusion of ‘Red’ and ‘Green’ ideas was brought about, not by recourse to ‘scientism’, but in the form of a utopia—the genre only recently discredited by Engels—in William Morris’s News from Nowhere. It is significant that Morris holds on to the utopian dimension within historical materialism at the moment of its theoretical repression. There were, it is true, also a string of back-to-the-land schemes suffused with anarchist ideas of a Tolstoyan or Kropotkinian stamp. These settlements propagated a simple and useful agricultural life as the only sane and natural one. Production was for self-support and the local market, with, in one case, sandalmaking complementing the income of the community. As in similar communities earlier in the century, diet received special attention, with some places insisting on vegetarianism and teetotalism. However, these mostly short-lived experiments were alternative rather than oppositional ventures, content to lead a modest existence in a hostile or indifferent environment in the hope that their spirited example might encourage others.17 17 Cf. Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Longman, 1979), pp. 181–210. See also Chapter 9 by Anna Vaninskaya.

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The belief in the regenerative power of contact with the land also fuelled the left-libertarian communes set up during the counter-cultural drive in late 1960s and ‘70s America. One of several thinkers who equipped them with fresh theoretical armour was Theodore Roszak, who himself harks back to the Romantics (see James Radcliffe’s discussion in Chapter 14). In Europe, by contrast, Green ideas had enjoyed a vogue in the first decades of the twentieth century, in some countries like Germany as part of an amalgam that included youth and scout movements, nudism and eugenics. But when, for example, attachment to the soil and even organic farming were incorporated, as a hidden agenda, into Nazi (and other versions of extreme rightwing) ideology and agricultural policy, Green issues became almost irremediably tainted for more than a generation. In Britain the challenge to free environmentalism from its nostalgic ruralist ballast and give it a distinct forward-looking leftist orientation was taken up by the late Raymond Williams. Over a series of lectures, articles and books (including fiction) he developed the position of an ‘ecologically conscious socialism’.18 His 1971 lecture ‘Ideas of Nature’ noted the missing dimension of human labour in the discussion of nature: ‘A considerable part of what we call natural landscape … is the product of human design and human labour, and in admiring it as natural it seems to me to matter very much whether we suppress that fact of labour or acknowledge it’.19 In tracing the history of humanity’s triumphalist attitude to the physical world, Williams turned his critical eye on the telling language in which we have become used to dress this relationship: ‘the conquest of nature, the domination of nature, the exploitation of nature—[these terms] are derived from real human practices: relations between men and men’.20 One of the key insights of The Country and the City (1973) concerned the elusiveness of the idyllic rural past. What one generation nostalgically located in not-too-distant bygone days turned out, on inspection of that period, from the perspective of its contemporaries to have already vanished at an earlier stage, from which in turn it appeared just to have slipped further into the past, and so on almost ad infinitum. In any case, Williams reminded his readers, it was an error to assume that environmental damage had set in with industrialization: Since the dramatic physical transformations of the Industrial Revolution we have found it easy to forget how profoundly and still visibly agriculture altered the land. Some of the earliest and most remarkable environmental effects, negative as well as positive, followed from agricultural practice: making land fertile but also, in places, overgrazing it to a desert; clearing good land but also, in places, with the felling of trees, destroying it or creating erosion. Some of these uses 18 Raymond Williams, ‘Socialism and Ecology’ [1982], in his Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, ed. Robin Gable (London: Verso, 1989), p. 225. 19 Raymond Williams, ‘Ideas of Nature’, in Jonathan Benthall (ed.), Ecology in Theory and Practice (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 157. 20 Ibid., p. 163.

Introduction

9

preceded any capitalist order, but the capitalist mode of production is still, in world history, the most effective and powerful agency for all these kinds of physical and social transformation.21

Williams also questioned the very notion of ‘growth’, which, in the public discourse, has been stripped of all human and social considerations. Nakedly economist, it has effaced ‘the full effects of certain kinds of production; the relations between certain forms of production and consequent forms of distribution: all these real considerations have been overridden by an appropriation of the idea of growth as indiscriminate expanded production’.22 Unequal distribution already starts with the control over the earth’s resources, and it extends to the way in which the economies of the poor countries remain geared to, not to say coerced into, the consumerist desires of the rich. In 1982 Williams predicted open military intervention on the part of the prosperous countries, and especially the United States, to assure what they regard as the supplies of raw materials and commodities necessary to the maintenance of their way of living. But he also rightly foresaw that the eventually inevitable reduction of our high levels of consumption would cause grave problems. ‘There would, in my judgement, be major disturbances in any serious programme for resource saving, resource management and above all in the diminution of radical poverty in the poorest parts of the world’.23 IV For literary scholars Williams’s work, and especially The Country and the City, has remained a major, if not unchallenged, point of reference during the new lease of life ecocriticism has enjoyed since the 1990s.24 But environmentalism, as a cause, is still a contentious issue, polarizing opinion within the Left and the Right. This has led many activists and thinkers to argue that the movement would do well to steer its own independent course. However, the editors and most of the contributors to the present collection share the conviction that a social and an ecological agenda are not separable or irreconcilable concerns but require to be brought together and thought through together. André Malraux’s dictum that serves as the epigraph to this introduction highlights the tensions and contradictions within and between Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973),

21

p. 293.

Raymond Williams, Towards 2000 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983), pp. 213–4. Williams, ‘Socialism and Ecology’, p. 219. Williams’s position is sketched at

22 23

greater length in H. Gustav Klaus, ‘Williams and Ecology’, in Monika Seidl, Roman Horak and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), About Raymond Williams (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 141–52. 24 For a discussion of the first and second waves of ecocriticism, see Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 17–28.

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our commitments and desires, but it also suggests that a cohabitation of conflicting impulses is possible. Environmentalism can be said to expose many ambivalences in left-wing culture towards capitalism and economic growth, but these must be faced squarely rather than shied away from. This collection of essays begins with Richard Kerridge’s survey of ecocriticism in relation to left-wing thought, but its principal focus is on literary texts, on the writing not only of that lineage of authors that has come to enjoy near-canonical status in Green Studies (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare, Ruskin, Jefferies, Morris, Hardy and Edward Thomas) but also from hands less often associated with ecological issues (E.M. Forster, H.G. Wells, some of the First World War poets) and from writers of the Left more renowned for their relentless social concern (Grassic Gibbon, Barke, the 1930s’ poets, Berger), right up to the riches of contemporary Scottish poetry and fiction with an ecosocialist bent. In the opening chapter Richard Kerridge examines the troubled relationship between environmentalism and the Left and sets out the principal grounds for both attraction and reservation on either side. Environmentalists may often find themselves opposed to free-market capitalism in defending the public environmental interest, but the state-run industries of the former Soviet bloc were also notorious for their pollution of the natural world, and the historical commitment of the Left to the emancipatory potential of mastering nature by industrial and technological means has always been problematic in its implications for the environment. Starting with Jonathan Bate’s pioneering work of ecocriticism, Romantic Ecology (1991), which claimed that the revolutionary torch was passing from Reds to Greens, Kerridge surveys the different ways in which ecocritics have negotiated the difficult relationship between red and green, working on occasions with poststructuralist and postcolonial concepts, but perhaps most profitably with the dialectical tradition of Marxism which can best accommodate the large sense of relations that comes from ecological thinking. It is in the light of Marx’s concept of alienation as it informs John Berger’s essay ‘Why Look at Animals’ in About Looking (1977) that he then analyses a contemporary novel, Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream, to show a politically informed ecocriticism in practice. The collection then goes back to the beginnings of green thinking in the Romantic period and works its way chronologically up to the present, which is reached in the final chapter with Graeme Macdonald’s examination of recent Scottish writing. It was Coleridge who coined the word ‘greenery’, and in teasing out the implications of that term as it appears in ‘Kubla Khan’ and an early notebook entry, Seamus Perry shows how it carries suggestions of both culture and nature that point to a central ambivalence in the poet’s writing. It might seem that Coleridge moves away from the leftist environmentalism of his youth visible in ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘The Ancient Mariner’—that study of ecological transgression—and embraces a philosophical humanism that stresses the formative powers of the human mind, but Perry’s reading demonstrates how the tension between his contradictory views of nature is never resolved and argues that his significance for later ecological thinkers may be not as either an advocate

Introduction

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of environmental values or as an apostate, but in the way that nature remains a live and persistent problem throughout his long and complicated intellectual life. Wordsworth’s youthful radicalism and his ecological credentials are both wellestablished, and Helena Kelly brings the two together in exploring his response to the action of enclosure in four poems associated with the poet’s residence at Racedown Lodge in Dorset with his sister Dorothy in the mid-1790s. Their father had been both an enthusiastic proponent of enclosure and a victim of his greedy enclosing employer, Sir James Lowther, and Kelly suggests that this may lie at the root of the poet’s conflicting attitudes towards the process. The emphasis in these poems falls on the destructive effects of enclosure which has turned Salisbury Plain, for instance, into ‘wastes of corn’, cultivated land which has been emptied of its human population that once lived in harmony with nature on the commons. Wordsworth here is on the side of the green past and takes a radical view of landuse that owes much to William Godwin; and it is only in ‘The Ruined Cottage’ that a more critical attitude to unenclosed common land can be discerned which points to the poet’s later conservatism. The peasant life that Wordsworth writes about was one that John Clare experienced at first hand, and the two chapters on him here bring out in different ways his radical otherness. Mina Gorji shows how he took pleasure in writing about scenes that other poets had not thought worth celebrating and she focuses in particular on the significance of weeds in his writing, demonstrating how they bring together his social, literary and ecological preoccupations. Opposed to enclosure like the young Wordsworth (who also shared his affection for weeds), Clare wrote elegies for the wild and weedy landscapes destroyed by the agricultural improvement of once common land, but he also celebrated the tenacious endurance of weeds and their embodiment of a beauty that lies outside the system of productivity and profit. Representing the beauty of the uncultivated, the weed has radical implications in both literary and social terms, making a claim for the value of the humble and disregarded in both the aesthetic and the social sphere. In Gorji’s close reading, ‘The Ragwort’ thus emerges as a poem that is at once green in its celebration of a wild landscape and an uncultivated flower, and red in its challenge to a hierarchy of values which demeans the low and neglected. After setting out how the ways in which Clare has been claimed by both left and right and how the poet himself refused any overt political alignment, Simon Kövesi argues that his true radicalism lies in the very structure of his poetry with its almost anarchic levelling of hierarchies. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome as a model of non-hierarchical connectedness, Kövesi focuses on Clare’s use of the ampersand and presents a reading of one untitled sonnet as an illustration of a view of the world in which man is neither dominant nor central, but just one link in a chain of fluid connections among animal, vegetable and human elements. Profoundly ecological in its stress on interdependency and socially radical in its rejection of hierarchy, Clare’s poem expresses a vision that unites green and red perspectives. Although literary pastoral is not necessarily green in the sense of ecological, since it can be marked by a deliberate aestheticizing distance from the natural

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world, Stephen Harrison shows how Arthur Hugh Clough and Thomas Hardy use their knowledge of classical pastoral to create an idyllic, naturally regulated rural setting for narratives that deal with the contrasting issues of class and money in nineteenth-century society. In The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) Clough’s allusions to Virgil’s Eclogues help fashion the fantastic pastoral world in which an Oxford undergraduate with radical leanings can woo and wed a Scottish crofter’s daughter, even though that marriage in defiance of the conventions of bourgeois society necessitates emigration to New Zealand at the end of the poem. In the plot and structure of Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Hardy draws suggestive parallels with the second-century Greek pastoral novel Daphnis and Chloe and, like Clough, explores contemporary class tensions against the background of a rustic existence whose harmonious relation to nature is informed by knowledge of the classical pastoral tradition. This use of classical pastoral in relation to contemporary social and political issues will be seen again later in Valentine Cunningham’s discussion of the poetry of the 1930s. One feature of rural life that pastoral usually omits is the presence of labour, and in examining the representation of landscape in later nineteenth-century writing, John Rignall addresses the question of how far literary landscape incorporates the people who work the land, and their history of hardship and exploitation. Can landscape serve as what Theodor Adorno terms a Kulturlandschaft, a cultural landscape that gives expression to past historical suffering? And can such a radical understanding of history coexist with an ecological sense of the interdependence of man and nature? Can green and red be combined? One answer can be found in the work of Richard Jefferies and Thomas Hardy. In contrast to the more conservative vision of earlier writers like George Eliot, they present a radical view of the past and the role of the working class in the creation of the English landscape, and Rignall argues that this is combined with an ecological understanding of the natural world in so far as the land, and the lives of those who have acted or worked upon it, are made present in the same imaginative process. When John Ruskin celebrated contemporary landscape painting in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), he, like Clare, found nature’s truth to lie in the unassuming beauty of grass and weeds, which provided evidence of the Divine power to the attentive mind. But his belief in nature and man’s communion with it deserted him in middle age, and Dinah Birch explores this change and shows how Ruskin turned it into a political narrative of a fallen world which insists on man’s responsibility for that fall and urges action to redeem it. This later Ruskin of Fors Clavigera (1871–84) and The Storm-cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884) has been claimed by both Greens and Reds, as the first environmentalist and as a powerfully seminal critic of political economy and industrial capitalism, but Birch’s careful discrimination makes it clear that his biblical sense of apocalypse cannot be simply identified with either environmentalism or socialism. Nevertheless his insistence on the interconnectedness of man and nature remains enduringly important. Ruskin’s influence on the more political William Morris is one of the ways that his thinking fed into early socialism, and Anna Vaninskaya examines how far

Introduction

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Morris in his turn influenced the Garden City movement. Although he was seen as one of its patron saints by later critics such as George Orwell, Vaninskaya argues that he was in fact more of a precursor to Orwell in his critical distance from bohemian advocates of the simple life, since his commitment to revolutionary Marxism was incompatible with the cranky socialism of commune and Garden City. Only in News from Nowhere (1891) does he envision an environmentally aware society that can be compared to the green ideal of the Garden City, but Vaninskaya sets out the ways in which he is at once more red and more green than Ebenezer Howard in Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1898/1902). Although he could be satirical about progressives, H.G. Wells approved of the Garden City movement and, like other early Fabians, saw the need for social planning and reconstruction. His early scientific romances have often been read as dystopian and pessimistic, but John Sloan argues that Wells’s belief in science always implied a faith in human powers of initiative and invention and that the romances can be taken as ecological warnings testifying to his enduring environmental concern. Thus the final lesson of The War of the Worlds (1898) is the need for human responsibility towards nature, and Wells’s scientific eschatology in general serves as a call to preventative action. In this respect he anticipates contemporary green thinking, and Sloan’s stress on the continuity between Wells’s early works and his later ones brings out the ways in which, with his criticism of uncontrolled capitalism and his concern for the environment, he was consistently challenging in his coupling of socialism and ecology, the red and the green. Covering the same period as Sloan, William Greenslade examines the interweaving strands of ecological thinking and radical politics between 1880 and 1940, focusing on the notion of guardianship, as opposed to mastery, of the earth. Noting the efflorescence of environmental pressure groups in the last decades of the nineteenth century, he shows how the movement for land reform gave particular impetus to politico-ecological thinking by stressing what Marx saw to be the double exploitation of nature and labour. Red and green came together in Edward Carpenter’s simple-life socialism and in the new-life socialism of the Fellowship of the New Life, founded in 1882, and taken up by the Independent Labour Party from 1893. However, this utopian and libertarian version of socialism lost ground after the First World War, becoming the butt of George Orwell’s disdainful mockery and out of touch with the political realities of the inter-war years. Ecological commitment became little more than a rearguard action against the modernizing force of the state and often associated with the romantic conservatism of the political right. Nevertheless, Greenslade argues that a form of diffused ecological awareness derived from new-life socialism lives on in E.M. Forster’s fiction and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), where the principle of guardianship can still be seen to operate. The First World War that marked the beginning of the end for new-life socialism was both a human and an environmental disaster, and H. Gustav Klaus traces the conjunction of the two in the motif of ‘felled trees—fallen soldiers’ that recurs in the poetry of the war and in post-war novels in which the conflict still

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reverberates. The linking of trees and soldiers by violent death that is movingly present in poems by Edward Thomas and Edmund Blunden, Ivor Gurney and Margaret Postgate, gives rise to a criticism of the social forces responsible for the war in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), and that criticism becomes more explicitly political in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932) and James Barke’s The World His Pillow (1933). Here the destruction of the green world is seen from a red perspective, and the meeting of environmental concern and socialist commitment springs directly out of lived experience. The assumption that the Left was insensitive to environmental matters in the inter-war years is also challenged by Valentine Cunningham’s examination of leftwing pastoral in the 1930s. Since many writers of the Left, like C. Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Rex Warner, were classicists, their versions of pastoral were fed by a knowledge of the pastoral tradition in Greek and Latin, and although pastoral is not necessarily green in the sense of environmentalist, it serves in this case to lament the despoliation of the English countryside by modern industrial capitalism. There is an affinity here with conservative nostalgia for an older, rural England, and Cunningham traces the intriguing connections between Left and Right in relation to the environment. Edmund Blunden’s celebration of village cricket could, for instance, be endorsed by leftist Orwell as a form of social pastoral that cuts across class divisions and offers resistance to the modernizing urban world. William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) maintained that proletarian literature had a suggestion of pastoral about it, while C. Day Lewis, in his dedicatory verses to his translation of Virgil’s Georgics (1940) addressed to another poet of the Left, Stephen Spender, saw Virgil as offering a vision of a pastoral utopia that lay beyond a world at war and could be appreciated by a socialist. Pastoralism could be red as well as green. After the Second World War the beginnings of the modern green movement coincided with the emergence of a new radicalism, and James Radcliffe explores the connection between green thinking and the New Left, focusing particularly on the work of Theodore Roszak, the chronicler of the counter-culture of the 1960s and a pioneer of eco-anarchism. Arguing for the seminal importance of Marx’s concept of alienation, Radcliffe shows how Roszak’s thinking chimes with that of anarchists like Murray Bookchin and Paul Goodman who saw that man’s destructive domination of nature is rooted in the domination of man by man. For Roszak an alternative to that domination and to the scientific method that lies at the heart of modern technocratic society can be derived from writers of the Romantic period, and Radcliffe examines Roszak’s reading of Blake, Wordsworth and Goethe in Where the Wasteland Ends (1972), which presents a sacramental vision of the world as opposed to one governed by science and rationalism. Ultimately, Roszak argues for a radical break with urban industrialism and the development of small-scale communities that practise a new ecology and a new democracy. It is the small-scale community of a French village that is the focus of John Berger’s trilogy Into Their Labours (1979–90), which Christian Schmitt-Kilb

Introduction

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examines as a work that combines red and green perspectives in its representation of peasant life. Starting from Berger’s observation that a great lacuna in Marxist theory is the notion that, in the name of progress, peasants have to be eliminated, Schmitt-Kilb defends him against those critics who take him to be either an unreconstructed utopian socialist or a nostalgic reactionary, arguing instead that his trilogy not only successfully finds a textual form for a peasant perspective on the world but also makes a case for the ecological good sense of the peasant life and its careful handling of natural resources. Berger’s trilogy thus emerges not as the work of either a traditional socialist or an idealizer of the peasantry, but as the product of a developing green socialism that is moving away from the ideal of the conquest of nature towards one of reconciliation with it. The meeting of socialist and ecological concerns is the subject of the final chapter in this collection, which brings the discussion back to the present day, Graeme Macdonald’s account of recent Scottish writing which takes as its starting point reactions to the contentious subject of golf-course development on once common land. Placing this contemporary controversy in the wider context of Scottish writing that has for 40 years or more opposed the exploitation and despoliation of land for commercial purposes from a leftist position, Macdonald reads George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe (1972) as a work of ecosocialism and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) as a vision of ecological apocalypse. The fiction of James Kelman and John Burnside focuses on the impact of a toxic industrial environment on the body of working-class life, and Macdonald shows how Burnside’s work, including his poetry, repeatedly provokes us to consider the consequences of human incursion into the natural world. Recent Scottish ecowriting thus emerges as a body of work that insists on the incompatibility of the pursuit of profit with a sustainable environment and suggests that a green future will have to be red. This collection, then, brings together a number of different writers, some of them politically radical, others only radical in their ability to cut to the root of a problem, but all of them combining red and green perspectives in their attempts to understand a world where the development of society under capitalism has wrought damage on both man and nature.

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Chapter 1

Contemporary Ecocriticism between Red and Green Richard Kerridge

Environmentalism and ‘the Left’ have always had a troubled relationship. There are compelling reasons to make common cause, but many grounds on both sides for reservation and suspicion. All depends, of course, on which version of environmentalism is in play, and which version of socialism. Many environmentalists would also call themselves socialists, but many would not, and it is by no means an easy combination of identities. The two allegiances will often pull in different directions. In this introductory essay, I will set out some of the main grounds of attraction and reservation on the environmentalist side, and then, writing more specifically as a literary and cultural ecocritic, I will examine two novels, my readings of which will explore aspects of the relationship. Because of the present ascendancy of neo-liberal capitalist values, environmentalists frequently, in the battles in which they are currently engaged, find the anti-capitalist aspect of their thinking coming to the fore. The extent to which environmentalists will see their movement as belonging to the Left, in a broad sense of that term, is the extent to which they will see it as an anti-capitalist movement. There are fundamental antagonisms between environmentalism and the principle of the free market. Most obviously, environmentalists are usually campaigning for regulation, by governments and international treaties, that will restrain the commercial activities of private businesses on the grounds of the environmental damage or risk involved in this or that industrial project. This generally places environmentalists in direct opposition to the neo-liberal agenda of deregulation and a global free market, though the environmental movement has its own difficult negotiations to make between global and local perspectives. Their fundamental objection to capitalism is that it makes market value and private profit-value the supreme kinds of value, and does not admit the environmental public interest, present or long-term, into its system of valuation. A forest, for example, can be sold in an unregulated free market purely for the immediate cash-value of the timber, without regard to the ecosystem services the living forest provides in keeping carbon out of the atmosphere and maintaining biodiversity. These are public goods (taking the ‘public’ to include future generations and perhaps nonhuman creatures) whether or not there is a paying public able to purchase them. Environmentalists also challenge corporations about hazards and damage to human health resulting from industrial or agrochemical

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pollution, as in the infamous Bhopal disaster, or the Love Canal case that inspired the American Environmental Justice movement. In such campaigns, environmentalists frequently find themselves on the same side, facing the same antagonist as trade unionists fighting for safer working conditions, or feminist and anti-racist organizations, since women and people of colour are often in the front line of vulnerability to environmental hazards. Opponents on the contemporary political Right—and they are its most conspicuous opponents these days— generally position environmentalism on the Left. The Tea Party movement in the United States, for example, campaigns aggressively against measures to prevent global warming, claiming that the warnings of disaster are a giant scientific fraud, perpetrated as an excuse for imposing restrictions on the free market. On the same basis they oppose welfare provision and union rights. Environmental regulation is lumped together with these traditional causes of the Left. Some on the Right regard environmentalism as little more than a disguise for a socialist agenda they believe to have been defeated in its undisguised form. If resources are now revealed as finite, and endless economic growth as too dangerous a strategy, then the narrative of cornucopian, wealth-cascading capitalism comes to an end, and redistribution comes back into the picture; so the argument goes. But one can easily imagine a scenario with different alignments. In the countries of the Soviet bloc, in the run-up to 1989, it was the extremes of pollution and environmental degradation brought about by state-run industries that provoked a strong environmental movement into life. Jonathan Bate began the first avowedly ecocritical book published in Britain, Romantic Ecology (1991), with a statement from Luboš Beniak that ‘[t]he air pollution, more than the existence of the Iron Curtain, brought about the revolution in Czechoslovakia’.1 Bate’s argument in his introduction was that the Marxist historicism then dominant in studies of Romanticism rested on ‘the crude old model of Left and Right’. The revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe challenged this model, in Bate’s view. They could not ‘be constructed as anything so simple as a triumph of the Right, let alone of international capitalism’:2 It is not difficult to assimilate nationalism and religion, two of the driving forces of the 1989 revolutions, into a Left-Right model, but the political significance of air pollution demands a rethinking of the categories. The political map has been redrawn, and it is time for literary criticism to politicize itself in a new way’.3

In two landscapes—the specialist field of Romantic literary studies and the wider one of political interpretations of the 1989 upheavals—Bate defines an emergent political environmentalism, identified as a transformative new element, in specific contrast to the Marxist models (classical and deconstructionist) in literary criticism 1 Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 1. 2 Ibid., p. 3. 3 Ibid., pp. 3–4.

Contemporary Ecocriticism between Red and Green

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and the statist command-economy as exemplified by the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. He further argues, Let us suppose that we want to politicize Romanticism more pragmatically, in a way that speaks to our present discontents. In order to do so, I suggest that we make the move which many ex-Marxists have made, predominantly in Germany but increasingly in Britain: the move from red to green.4

Critics should ‘pause to consider the possibility that the revolutionary torch now burns in the hands of greens rather than reds’. Bate’s argument hovers here, between literary study and wider political implications, and between the notions of a break with the Marxist Left and continuities of radical critique. ‘Ex-Marxists’ are said to be the ones moving from red to green, as if the move necessarily meant leaving Marxism behind, but the image of handing on the torch is more ambiguous, implying continuity as well as succession. If social democratic values had been more successful in Western politics in the last 30 years, environmentalism would more frequently have been a revolt against state-controlled industrial policies legitimated by social democratic arguments. The clash between environmentalists protesting about pollution and workers wanting to defend their jobs in the industries concerned is familiar. From the Left, the accusation sometimes comes that environmentalism, with its ‘politics of scarcity’, constitutes a conservative tactic of resistance to the improvements in poor people’s material standards of living brought about by industrial growth, and the gains in social and cultural equality, democratic participation and civil liberty that accompany those improvements. Specifically, environmentalism is sometimes accused of being part of a conservative attempt to contain or reverse the gains of the 1960s and 1970s in the developed West, and postcolonial economic development in the rest of the world. That each of the major political antagonists is inclined to regard environmentalism as the other in disguise is perhaps evidence of a pervasive cultural failure, still, to accept the environmental considerations themselves as real. Andrew Ross, a cultural critic wary of environmentalism but not unsympathetic, expressed concern in 1994 that environmentalists, with their emphasis on limits, restraint and respect for ‘nature’, might be colluding inadvertently with conservative attacks upon feminism, workers’ rights and sexual freedom. Mindful of how ‘nature’ had frequently been invoked in support of traditional conceptions of gender and to declare homosexuality ‘unnatural’, he observed that many of ‘the classical liberties and rights that are a constitutional part of Western modernity today were won on the back of an expansionist liberal economy’.5 Economic recession, by contrast, was usually a time when freedoms were restricted and the gains made by oppressed groups came under threat. Ross warned environmentalists to be careful to define themselves against these conservative ideologies, and to Ibid., pp. 8–9. Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society

4 5

(London: Verso, 1994), p. 264.

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develop ‘green’ forms of hedonism consistent with the freedoms gained from the 1960s onwards, on the basis of the post-war economic expansion. Postcolonial critic William Slaymaker says that ‘there is good cause to worry that environmentalism and ecologism are new forms of dominating discourses issuing from Western or First World centres’, and that ecological science and conservation policy have at times been used as a source of ‘expert “neutral” knowledge for purposes of dominating global resources’.6 The climate scientist and analyst of the cultural framing of climate change Mike Hulme points to the same danger: climate change can be used ‘as justification for the commodification of the atmosphere and, especially, for the commodification of the gas, carbon dioxide. In this frame, climate change is viewed as the latest rationale for converting a public commons into a privatised asset—in this case, the global atmosphere’.7 The suspicions of environmentalism expressed on Left and Right can even come together. Channel 4, the British television company, has run two memorable attacks on environmentalism. ‘Against Nature’, a series of documentaries broadcast in 1997, depicted environmentalism as a conservative ideology of hostility to modernity and a ruse for resisting the industrialization of developing countries. More famously, in 2007, ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ alleged that a powerful scientific consensus was unfairly suppressing alternatives to the anthropogenic global-warming theory, especially the theory that sunspot fluctuations might be responsible. Martin Durkin, the producer of both, selfidentifies as a Marxist, and several contributors and members of the production team were leading figures in the Revolutionary Communist Party and its journal Living Marxism. Their objections to environmentalism are classical Left objections, but this has not stopped commentators from the anti-environmentalist Right citing the programmes enthusiastically, especially ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’. David Harvey, the Marxist geographer who has worked over a 20-year period to construct a subtle dialectical account of the concerns of Marxism and environmentalism, begins Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996) with a revealing case. He tells the story of his involvement as an academic researcher, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in a campaign at the Cowley car factory in Oxford; an effort led by the shop-stewards to preserve working conditions, jobs and ultimately the factory itself. Harvey carried out research in support of the campaign, and wrote analytically about its problems. The tensions between his sympathy for the workers’ hopes and his environmentalist perspectives became painful: I … thought some consideration should be given to the future of socialism in Oxford under conditions in which the working-class solidarities that had been built around the plant were plainly weakening and even threatened with 6 Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson (eds), African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 685. 7 Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. xxvii.

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elimination. … There were also important ecological issues to be considered deriving not only from the plant itself (the paint shop was a notorious pollution source) but also from the nature of the product. Making Rover cars for the ultra rich and so contributing to ecological degradation hardly seemed a worthy longterm socialist objective. The ecological issue ought not to be ducked, I felt, even though it was plain that the bourgeois north Oxford heritage interests would likely use it to get rid of the car plant altogether if given the chance. The problem of time-horizon and class interests needed to be explicitly debated rather than buried.8

For support for his sense of the painful difficulty, yet necessity, of introducing new, complicating environmental criteria at a moment when heroic old solidarities are under cruel pressure, Harvey turns to the novels of Raymond Williams, acutely sensitive to such dilemmas and their grounding in the relations between physical places (Cowley and bourgeois north Oxford for Harvey; South Wales and Cambridge for Williams). Harvey cites Williams’s view that ‘you cannot just say to people who have committed their lives and their communities to certain kinds of production that this has all got to be changed. You can’t just say: come out of the harmful industries … let us do something better. Everything will have to be done by negotiation’.9 Like Williams, Harvey suggests that this negotiation must be continuous and dialectical, as each side responds to the other and material conditions change. The essays in this book explore various instances of that process. Dialectical thinking, for Harvey, holds ‘that elements, things, structures, and systems do not exist outside of or prior to the processes, flows, and relations that create, sustain or undermine them’.10 Harvey relates this description of dialectics to the poststructuralist, Foucauldian principle that all concepts are discursive— they do not have an abstract existence, outside time and space, but are always in a moment of being generated and used in a context of power relations. He also relates it to ecological and evolutionary thinking, with its perception of the world as evolutionary ecosystem in which lines of connection extend in all directions. By continuously adapting to each other, the different creatures and elements are shaping and reshaping each other and the physical world they inhabit—their local ecosystem and beyond it the global ecosystem or biosphere. The question Harvey poses and partially answers—a more than partial answer would be inconsistent with the need for continuous negotiation—is how the large sense of relations brought about by the Marxist dialectical tradition, with its emphasis on contradiction as the dynamic force, can accommodate the large sense of relations that comes from ecological thinking. Timothy Morton, an ecocritical theorist attempting to combine ecological insights with those of poststructuralism, calls this principle of interconnection ‘the 8 David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 21–2. 9 Ibid., p. 41. 10 Ibid., p. 49.

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ecological thought’, and takes it into human affairs and culture: ‘The ecological thought is a thought about ecology, but it’s also a thinking that is ecological’.11 Harvey’s account reveals the possibility of a creative relationship between Marxist dialectical thinking and this ‘ecological thought’, which finds an analogue in culture for the ecological concept of the ‘niche’—the set of conditions, including climate, food, shelter and the numbers of competitors and predators, that makes it possible for a species to survive in an ecosystem (its ‘place’ in that system, as it were). Such an approach to culture will look at the different cultural zones or niches that certain activities occupy, the most obvious examples being such demarcated ‘spaces’ as work and leisure, public and private or social and domestic. The search will be for interconnections, but also for barriers that keep things apart, permitting the coexistence, in separate spaces, of supposedly incompatible forces. For environmentalists, the most important example of this coexistence will be the way environmental values and concerns can be professed and felt deeply by people without decisively changing those people’s behaviour, and the way this personal inconsistency is mirrored by that of politicians who express belief in the terrible danger of global warming but do not take action as if they really believed. In public culture, what are the spaces in which environmentalism flourishes, and why does its flourishing there have so little effect elsewhere? Ross asks for more attention to ‘the ecology of images’—‘the economy of their production and circulation’,12 while the ecocritic Greg Garrard suggests that ecocriticism needs to draw upon the foundational Marxist account of the relationship between economic base and cultural superstructure, and the ‘tremendous intellectual labour [that] Marxist literary theorists [have] dedicated to explicating and refining this metaphor’ through further ‘metaphorisations’ including ‘“expression”, “reflection”, “mediation”, “homology” and then, in Antonio Gramsci’s work, “hegemony”, each meant to confront the host of problems the founding metaphor threw up, such as that changes in cultural superstructure might lag behind, or predate, fundamental changes in productive relations’.13 Before moving to a literary reading that illustrates these dialectical relationships, I will describe some of the main positions between which the dialectics must take place. One kind of environmentalism is concerned with nature and wilderness: anxious to protect wildlife and wild habitats such as rainforests. Conservationists and enthusiasts for wildlife have been around since long before the global ecological threats became apparent. They wish to preserve wilderness and wildlife primarily because they love it. Ecological reasons came later, and bestowed on these enthusiasms a kind of vindication: what had been a personal love was now the world’s need. 11 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 7. 12 Ross, Chicago Gangster, p. 171. 13 Greg Garrard, ‘Literary Theory 101’, ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment) 17/ 4 (Autumn 2010): http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/.

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Another kind of environmentalism is concerned with the hurt done to people by pollution and environmental damage, and the connection between that hurt and other kinds of social injustice. This is what in America is called the Environmental Justice movement, and its roots are in the efforts of poor communities across the world to defend themselves against the dumping of toxic waste, the deadly contamination of their air, food and water, the loss of their lands and livelihoods and the indifference of governments and corporations. From country to country, it is the oppressed groups—the poor, women, workers on low pay, people of colour, people of indigenous precolonial cultures—who suffer the effects of environmental damage disproportionately. These groups are on the environmental front line and will be the most vulnerable if global warming has the consequences feared. Postcolonialist environmentalists Ramachandra Guha and Juan MartínezAlier have contrasted what they call the ‘full-stomach’ environmentalism of the North with the ‘empty-belly’ environmentalism of the South.14 Nevertheless, it seems likely that an alliance between the environmentalisms of rich and poor, however troubled it may sometimes be, represents the best chance of integrating ecological and social priorities, and of finding an environmentalism that knows what to value in traditional, preindustrial cultures and also in modernity. The emerging postcolonial ecocriticism is especially concerned with the possibilities and problems of this alliance. An environmental movement in which conservationists find common cause with Environmental Justice campaigners will not be a movement of the rich, imposing protectionist restraints on the economic aspirations of the poor under cover of ecological reasons, but a movement attempting to oblige the rich to accept the cost of environmental improvement. And older conceptions of egalitarian justice now have to bring ecological considerations into the equation. As Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin say, in Postcolonial Ecocriticism, ‘one of the axioms of postcolonial ecocriticism is that there is no social justice without ecological justice’.15 Environmentalists of the Left will say the reverse is also true. Their common cause with this kind of environmentalism is clear. As for the first kind, whilst not necessarily unsympathetic to it, they will be wary of conflicts between the interests of nature-conservation and those of the people of the places concerned. Left-wing environmentalists will want to insist, as David Harvey puts it, on the need to be concerned not only with ecological projects themselves but also ‘the social relations needed to initiate, implement and manage them’.16 To some extent, the need to respond to the threat of climate change, taking global perspectives and acknowledging the vital ecosystem services provided by wild

14 Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martínez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (London: Earthscan, 1997), p. xxi. 15 Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), p. 35. 16 Harvey, Justice, p. 199.

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landscapes such as rainforests and icecaps, has made the two environmentalisms more integral to each other, but tensions between them remain. If we look, in turn, at Marxism and social democracy, from the environmentalist viewpoint, appraising which aspects are encouraging and which threatening, then the greatest suspicion attaches to the Left’s confidence in the emancipatory project of dominating nature by industrial and technological means. Around this question, too, there is a split in environmentalism itself, dramatically set out by James Lovelock in The Revenge of Gaia (2006), his most dire forecast of abrupt climate crisis to come. Lovelock argues that the emergency of global warming calls for the simultaneous enactment of two conflicting responses. One is a deep change in human values, an acceptance of ‘deep ecological’ principles, necessary to enable humanity to adapt to the new conditions and live peaceably in them. The other, at least as an interim measure to preserve civilization through the first critical period, is a ruthless technological instrumentalism. Overriding all objections, governments must take measures to prevent collapse, such as the building of nuclear power stations and flood defences. This is the startling dialectic Lovelock envisages; one that will demand radical accommodations of both sides, in the face of the emergency. Their joint-implications will have to be worked through, rather than their implications as alternatives. In the meantime, in our pre-crisis phase, we have the opportunity to explore the dialectic in gentler terms. John Bellamy Foster, in Marx’s Ecology, shows part of the way, with his reading of Marx’s diagnosis of alienation under capitalism. Foster reads Marx’s theory as resting on the notion of a ‘rift’ that industrial society has brought about in ‘the metabolic relation between humans and the earth’.17 The clearest illustration of this rift is in the way populations concentrated in cities no longer replenish the soil with their human waste, which instead makes the air and water foul and dangerous. Foster summarizes Marx’s view that ‘[t]he precondition of capitalism is the removal of the mass of the population from the soil’, the result of which is ‘systematic alienation from all forms of naturally based need’, which clears the way for ‘the search for exchange-value (that is, profit) rather than the servicing of genuine, universal, natural needs’.18 Thus, ‘Marx continually insists that the alienation from the earth is sine qua non of the capitalist system’, while Engels writes that ‘[t]he present poisoning of the air, water and land can be put an end to only by the fusion of town and country’.19 This expanded sense of ‘alienation’— alienation from our natural being on the earth, as well as from the products of our labour—and the associated idea of ‘commodity-fetishism’ offer great purchase to environmentalists, as I shall explore in the following readings.

17 John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), p. 175. 18 Ibid., p. 174. 19 Ibid., p. 175.

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Alienation from Nature: John Berger and Lydia Millet Jonathan Bate sees the ‘green’ tradition in Romantic and late-Romantic poetry, from William Wordsworth to Edward Thomas, as preoccupied with the alienation of the modern, self-conscious protagonist, and the redemptive possibility of unalienated labour. David Harvey sees the potential of bringing together these two accounts of alienation, the environmentalist and the Marxist: How to recuperate an unalienated relation to nature (as well as unalienated forms of social relations) in the face of contemporary divisions of labour and technological-social organization, then becomes part of a project that binds Marxists and ecologists ineluctably together.20

In the past four decades, this combined analysis of alienation has found an eloquent voice in the Marxist cultural critic and novelist John Berger. I want here to look at how one of Berger’s most famous essays, ‘Why Look at Animals?’, in About Looking (1977), seems to lie behind—and has surely directly influenced—a present-day novel concerned with perceptions of ecological crisis as terminal. Berger argues in the essay that industrialization, with its distancing of all but a tiny minority of people from work that involves living closely with animals, has had the effect of estranging us from animals, so that their power to meet our gaze and exchange looks with us has disappeared from ordinary life. From their first position beside man ‘at the centre of his world’, when they provided humans with their first metaphors and symbols, animals have ‘been emptied of experience and secrets’.21 Most farm animals have been made into raw material, ‘processed like manufactured commodities’. Wild animals, when they are not pests to be exterminated, become, in zoos and nature reserves, the object of a wistful Romantic gaze, because we are hungry, Berger suggests, for what has been marginalized: that is, for an authenticity of experience not available in a commodified world. Animals in zoos, however, are usually an anti-climactic disappointment, because the zoo’s feeble attempts to simulate a wild environment to frame each creature fail to disguise the fact that the enclosure is not ‘real’ space, subject to real ecological conditions, where our paths and the animal’s might cross. Berger says little about nature reserves and safari holidays and nothing about television wildlife documentaries, but presumably feels these to be only slightly better—or worse, in that they dupe us more effectively. A more traditional Marxist position would see this fading of the mythic relation to nature as a loss, certainly, but also as a liberating demystification that permits no Romantic illusions. The failure of zoos, as Berger sees it, to mask the alienation of humanity from nature could, in this classical Marxist view, be a promising sign, symptomatic of the larger failure of capitalism to mask the general alienation of the workers: a sign of the system’s impending breakdown. Berger’s view is Harvey, Justice, p. 198. John Berger, About Looking (London: Writers and Readers, 1980 [1977]), p. 10.

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not exactly incompatible with this, but has no tone of confidence; rather, one of scrupulous mournful resignation, acutely sensitive to loss. He laments the forcing apart, in industrial capitalism, of two human attitudes to animals: the reverent sense of their mysterious combination of kinship and otherness, and the pragmatic sense, accepting of shared mortality, that is brought into being by daily work with them. Capitalism has sundered these two attitudes, compartmentalizing them, so that they cease to act upon each other and each, in its compartment, becomes more extreme. That is why it is possible for nature reserves and factory farms to exist in the same society. The peasant who ‘becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork’22 is a vanishing species. Berger presumably does not see the new specialist organic welfare-friendly pig-rearer who markets his expensive meat on the Internet as an authentic bearer of this peasant wisdom. Or does he? It is a significant question, for the possible fusion of environmentalist and Marxist values. This figure had barely appeared in the 1970s when Berger ended his essay with the declaration that the loss of this double view of animals, the view once mediated by myth, ‘is now irredeemable for the culture of capitalism’.23 Lydia Millet’s novel How the Dead Dream (2008) picks up many cues from ‘Why Look at Animals?’. Millet is a writer of farcical apocalyptic satires of consumerism, somewhat in the manner of Don DeLillo (who provides the novel’s epigraph) crossed with Carl Hiaasen. My favourite title among her works is George Bush, Dark Prince of Love (this is George Bush the elder, but it’s still funny). In Infant Monkey Love, a collection of short stories, she has one about Noam Chomsky attempting to dispose of a hamster cage at a landfill site. Millet once worked as a copy editor for Hustler, and in 2004 published an essay called ‘Die, Baby Harp Seal!’, in which she argued that images of wild nature in popular culture—wild animals in television documentaries and landscape photographs on calendars and adverts—are a kind of pornography: ‘Tarted up into perfectly circumscribed simulations of the wild, these props of mainstream environmentalism serve as surrogates for real involvement with wilderness the way porn models serve as surrogates for real women’. Her view here is consistent with the characteristic stance taken by American first-wave ecocriticism: physical contact with wilderness is the antidote to modes of critical thinking that have become too abstract, theoretical and culturalconstructionist. Occasionally one still hears the combative proposition that to test the real mettle of a theorist’s ideas you should drop the theorist into some grizzlyinfested wilderness and let them try to survive there for a week. S.K. Robisch gave full throat to this view in a recent contribution to ISLE, in reply to a previous article: Every post-structuralist or culture maven who denies the existence of wilderness or nature should be dropped ten days into the Frank Church Wilderness with a knife and made to find his or her way out. Then I’ll be glad to hold some food and water behind my back and have a long conversation about theory and

Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 26.

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epistemology until the survivor acknowledges the representational value of words like ‘giardia’ and ‘mullein’ and ‘grizzly bear’ and ‘shelter’. Hypothermia’s a great way to theorize ecophobia.24

The comic vision conjured up here seems close to the stories in Infant Monkey Love. Millet’s Noam Chomsky story is a mild version of this vengeful fantasy. In How the Dead Dream, she does explore that dropped-into-wilderness scenario, though with a millionaire real estate developer rather than a poststructuralist theorist. The scenario comes about as the culmination of a desperate and absurd quest on the part of a consumerist self desperately alienated from authentic feeling—feeling in the context of reciprocity of bodily recognition and acknowledged mortality. Millet’s protagonist, T., a property developer in the American Southwest, tries to bring his feelings to life in contrived encounters with wild animals. What he seeks seems to be a version of the emotional release and reinvigoration that firstwave ecocritics believed ventures into wilderness could provide, or the sensuous reawakening described by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous. T. is represented from the beginning as a naïve believer in capitalist values, whose successful career is a flawless application of those values. He is not malevolent, personally; on the contrary, he is a nice, considerate son, husband, friend and employer, but strangely numb emotionally. Personal malevolence would be an adulteration of those values—the intrusion of other motives into the purely financial transaction. From early childhood, he substitutes money for all other objects of affection, initially fetishizing the material notes and coins. At school, he makes financial agreements instead of friendships, buying off bullies on behalf of victims, having suggested the arrangement to both sides, and taking a commission from the victims. When the mother of one of the victims confronts him about this, he defends the transaction calmly as a rational one, without understanding the reasons for her anger. Later, when he is beginning his business career, his sex life consists of a weekly appointment with a neighbour, timed to enable them to watch a sitcom beforehand. No emotional discourse takes place: When they passed in the hallway in the days between, she slouched past him with her head down and her doe eyes averted. ‘Hey’, he said once, for an experiment. She nodded almost imperceptibly and shrank back against the wall.25

This sexual experience comes along with minimal responsibility on T.’s part, and no emotional engagement in the form of desire, anxiety or negotiation. He and his neighbour seem to know their parts in advance, without need of discussion. This is also true, a little later, of T.’s courtship and marriage: 24 S.K. Robisch, ‘The Woodshed: A Response to “Ecocriticism and Ecophobia”’, ISLE 16 /4 (Autumn 2009): http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/16/4/697. 25 Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008), p. 27. Further page references to this text will be given in the text.

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Ecology and the Literature of the British Left / Kerridge She came with an investor to a cocktail-hour meeting one Friday, and in minutes he was converted. … In the privacy of the bathroom, where he removed himself for a pause, he felt giddy, liberated and captive, both. … Outside the room was the rest of his existence. For years, he had been detached, and now in a stroke of time he was not. … Do not embarrass yourself, he told himself strictly, but could not help smiling. There she was at the bar: their faces met before he got there. This was how he lost his autonomy—he had moved along at a steady pace and then he was flung. (pp. 57–8)

T.’s feeling is euphoric, but the novel creates a sense of his passiveness here too, as if he sleepwalks into the marriage with Beth. Everything fits into place instantly, with no friction. There is no process of getting to know each other; no grit in the relationship. It is as if T. and Beth had been scheduled for the other, and each recognized the other instantly as the scheduled partner, without any need for questioning engagement. Getting flung out of his steady pace was part of the schedule. Nothing about either person surprises the other; there is nothing that needs getting used to, or seems awkward and calls for negotiation. T.’s vision of his future with Beth has the same mood and idiom as his vision of a completed housing estate on a new desert property: It was not only that he would benefit from having her at his side, it was the shock of how the world glowed with it—how she lent her surroundings the style of her presence, its effortless assertion of grace. In the desert subdivisions would spread, life radiate outward from the sand as the tone of her flesh shone on the planes of her face, through buildings and cables and gas mains and roads. (pp. 60–61)

It is capitalist euphoria: the idiom of the sales promotion and the imagery of the glossy brochure has seemingly colonized every recess of the emotional lives of these characters, who have no consciousness that there is any damage done by their lives, or any emotional cost to pay. Nemesis is surely coming. The novel suggests that this emotional numbness on T.’s part comes from repression—of his more vulnerable emotions and his knowledge of what Americanstyle consumerism is doing to the world. How the Dead Dream—the title says it, really—is consistent with David Abram’s thesis that the modern commodification of our physical, emotional and moral life dulls our physical senses as well as our emotional and moral understanding. For Abram, those senses—physical first, so that emotional and moral can follow—can be reawakened, by contact with wild nature and by learning from indigenous peoples whose daily lives and traditional cultures involve them, still, in close responsive contact with the ecosystems with which those cultures coevolved. Millet’s view, as expressed in the novel, is darker. At university, T. is wryly sceptical when a fellow student expresses a wish for a preindustrial way of life:

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‘Sometimes I wish I was like a peasant or a farmer. Like in Guatemala.’



‘Trust me, Ian. You don’t wish that.’

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‘But it’s like, things would be way easier. You just get up and eat beans and then you work all day, like, hoeing shit. Whatever. Then at the end of the day you’re all tired and sweaty and you just take a hot shower and crash.’

‘I’m not sure you’d like the part in the middle there, Ian.’ (p. 17)

Set against Ian’s careless naïveté, T.’s put-down seems realistic and witty, but the exchange has no room for the possibility that Ian, for all his thoughtlessness, is expressing a real sense of lack. T. will learn, but in a world in which the conditions that might make possible the reawakening Abram advocates have been pushed so far to the margins that the searcher for that reawakening has to travel too far. Return may not be possible. Animals, in Millet’s work, are a limit-case for commodification. They are commodified in various ways—as mere units of production in factory farms, as pets, as the necessary quarry in the pseudo-primitive pastime of hunting, as evidence that wildness still exists. But they resist all these reductive, instrumentalist definitions. Always they have an excess about them that questions the commodification. For T., it is the death of an animal that begins to awake his feelings. A coyote runs into the road and is mortally hurt under the wheels of his car. This is a commonplace event, yet a primal one, causing him extraordinary grief and disturbance. At first the event seems contained; it makes little difference. But his emotional composure has begun to slide. The raw contingency and mortality revealed by the animal’s death has given him a glimpse of the material and emotional realities his consumer way of life is concealing from him. This contingent, embodied and mortal world is shut off by the cycle of consumer desire, gratification and renewed desire. T.’s mother even carries commodity fetishism with her into the afterlife, when she suffers a stroke and goes into a coma for several days, emerging with news of the life to come: ‘I was surprised. I thought it would be heaven, T. But it was bad, very bad,’ said his mother, and moved her feet suddenly beneath the sheet. ‘It was the International House of Pancakes.’

‘I’m surprised too,’ said T.



‘I thought it would be more expensive than that.’ …

‘I don’t want to go back there again,’ she said, and closed her eyes. ‘I must have done something wrong, T. Something very wrong to go there.’ (p. 69)

This is the worst she can imagine—eternity as a customer in a distressingly cheap fast food breakfast diner. Shuddering, she can barely speak about it, and vows to improve her life so as to avoid the fate that a kind providence has enabled

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her to glimpse in time. She responds to it, in other words, as if to a real hell. But this form of alienation persists with her—this incongruity between emotions and their ostensible objects, as if her emotions possess a secret knowledge, registering a reality that her consumerized consciousness knows it is avoiding but cannot directly comprehend. What finally breaks T.’s composure and throws him into a search for a life that permits emotional engagement with mortality is the instantaneous death of his wife, struck down at the wheel of her car by a form of sudden adult death syndrome. The condition has no advance symptoms and leaves no visible marks on the victim’s body. Beth is wholly there one minute and wholly gone the next, with no stages of transition. In this, her exit from his life resembles her arrival in it. This form of death has no advance manifestations, and seems thus to collude with the repressions that have characterized T.’s life. In a way, it is death without mortality as a condition of life; death as an abrupt intrusion of an utterly repressed real. T.’s slowly developing response is to become obsessed with endangered animals. This obsession takes a peculiar form. He breaks into zoos at night and climbs into the enclosures to be with the animals. At first, he wants to connect with them emotionally. They seem to withhold this, and after a while he is content simply to be in their presence, inert, for hours at a time. One of Berger’s passages seems very close at this moment. Animals were no longer part of work; relations with them were no longer integrated with the daily tasks and sources of meaning. In zoos, ‘isolated from each other and without interaction between species’,26 animals are in artificial space, which the human visitors cannot enter: Nothing surrounds them except their own lethargy or hyperactivity. They have nothing to act upon—except, briefly, supplied food and—very occasionally—a supplied mate. (Hence their perennial actions become marginal actions without an object.) Lastly, their dependence and isolation have so conditioned their responses that they treat any event which takes place around them—usually it is in front of them, where the public is—as marginal. (pp. 23–4)

T. wants to rescue the animals from that condition, and in so doing rescue himself, since his intuition is that what has been done to these animals resembles what consumerism, pervasively, is doing to the consumers. Berger observes that the zoo animals ‘have become utterly dependent on their keepers’: What was central to their interest has been replaced by a passive waiting for a series of arbitrary outside interventions. The events they perceive occurring around them have become as illusory in terms of their natural responses, as the painted prairies.27

T. observes this too, in his nocturnal adventures:

Berger, About Looking, p. 23. Ibid.

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In the wild, he thought, there would be almost no waiting. Waiting was what happened to you when you lost control, when events were out of your hands or your freedom was taken from you; but in the wild there would always be trying. In the wild there must be trying and trying, he thought, and no waiting at all. (p.165)

Visiting the animals is a hopeless, surreptitious gesture towards restoring the context for their lives, the purpose that Berger says they lack; reintegrating them into circuits outside which they are stranded anomalies. The wan hope is that this way he will reintegrate himself, by beginning to redeem the whole system from the guilt of its exclusion of these creatures. But the experience, each time, is lonely, melancholy and unconnected with anything. He particularly seeks out ‘ghost species’. An elderly wolf in a small zoo is the first creature he visits in this way. Alone at night in the Bronx Zoo, he hears a Sumatran rhinoceros give a profound sigh. He also visits a species of pupfish that is only found in one rocky pool in Nevada. Since long before the Roman Empire they have lived in this pool, only a few yards across, feeding on a species of algae that is the only other form of life in the pool. The deep aquifer that feeds their pool has been contaminated by radioactivity from a test-site, but this will take 10,000 years to reach them. A yearning like T.’s—projected onto such an unlikely and distant creature— seems to be a yearning evaded even as it is expressed. He projects the fulfilment of his alienated yearnings onto this tiny fish, and the other doomed creatures, rendered inert and impassive by their isolation. Alienation’s projection of authenticity onto creatures and things outside the circle of normal exchange is here taken to a kind of dead-end—literally dead-end—absurdity; an impossibility of reciprocation and renewal. This is after the end of his only attempt at finding intimacy after his wife’s death—an abortive sexual relationship with a partially paralysed woman who rejects him when she perceives that he is regarding her, too, as a source of possible authenticity and reawakening because of her marginality. At the end T. goes on a wilderness expedition in Central America, and when his guide suddenly dies, he finds himself alone in the jungle. This is an ambiguous predicament that seems at once to be his final, best chance of authentic life and a culmination of the lonely alienation that has always been his fate. Only then, when he has lost his boat and it is beginning to seem unlikely that he will manage to walk out of the forest, does an animal come to lie beside him. Its action seems to be a sign that he has crossed a line for good, and cannot cross back into the human social world. As novels of wilderness retreat often do, How the Dead Dream ends with the question of return urgent but unanswered. T. will either die in the wilderness or emerge as a returning prophet. Both outcomes are possible, but perhaps what is most significant is that the novel seems to see no way of dramatizing and exploring the latter possibility. Millet’s novel has a melancholy and uncompromising tone very similar to Berger’s. To imagine events, or a political movement, that might rescue T. from his alienation, we would need to draw on the Marxist and environmentalist traditions together.

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Chapter 2

Was Coleridge Green? Seamus Perry

It seems that Coleridge invented the word ‘greenery’, which appears for the first time in ‘Kubla Khan’: the neologism might already imply his ambiguous significance as an ecological thinker.1 OED glosses his inaugural usage fairly neutrally as ‘green foliage or vegetation; verdure’ (§1); but the more developed sense that the dictionary records as occurring only later in the century, ‘where plants are reared, kept, or exhibited’ (§3), seems at least incipient in Coleridge’s use too. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. (ll.1–11)2

James McCusick impressively describes the opening lines as ‘evoking a moment of absolute origin’;3 but in fact the act of creation does not seem wholly ex nihilo: there was ancient woodland there before Kubla got to work. A pre-existing Xanadu has been taken in hand and made to contribute to a cultivated effect: its ‘greenery’ is not quite ‘green’, then; perhaps it is, rather, one of those things that happens to the green when you conscript it to human purposes. 1 The neologism is pointed out by, among others, J.C.C. Mays in his edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works (3 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), vol. 1, p. 513, n. 11; and by John Worthen, The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 28. 2 Quotations from poems are taken from S.T. Coleridge, Poems, Everyman’s Library, ed. John Beer (London: J.M. Dent, 1999). 3 James C. McCusick, ‘“Kubla Khan” and the Theory of the Earth’; in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 134–51 (p. 144).

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When, some 18 months later, Coleridge toured Germany, he used his new word again, this time in his notebook, no doubt with ‘Kubla Khan’ somewhere in mind in this entry especially, since it so strikingly recasts several of the poem’s elements (enchanting woods, a walled space, a river running):4 a long and ugly village, but a pretty church—took a guide as we got out of the Village / ascended a Hill, the Woods appeared before, enchanting in their Spring verdure / entered the wood, thro’a beautiful path—& now all was rich with evening Light & the Moon rose—& the nightingales sang. Came to a square piece of Greenery of perhaps 16 Acres, completely walled on all four sides by the Beeches—again entered the wood—came out of it into a beautiful plain with a very rapid river running thro’ it, Mountains on one side, in the distance & close by us the skirt of the green wood—enchanting red lights in the West & the River illuminated by them—5

The enclosed green space here is not literally the work of man; but you could say that the way Coleridge perceives it as ‘greenery’ nevertheless is. The passage is a superb piece of his notebook prose; but an ecological critic might object that, figuratively speaking, the elements of the German landscape have been set to a picturesque purpose in a way analogous to the literal incorporation of ancient woodland within the perimeter wall that the Khan commanded in his pleasure grounds: the natural scene has become transformed by Coleridge’s magical gaze into something enchanted and (in the OED’s word) ‘exhibited’. It is a principle central to much ecological criticism that one should mistrust such ‘aestheticizing approaches to nature’: for they, no less than man’s more palpable interventions within the natural world, constitute an expression of that ‘instrumental rationality’ towards the environment which is the main object of ecocritical attention.6 Such an ‘instrumental stance’ is, as Charles Taylor says, something that comes down from the eighteenth century; but, as Taylor also says, the eighteenth century bequeathed quite a different attitude towards nature as well, a contrary turn of mind that might be exemplified by Walpole’s charming description of Blenheim Palace within Vanbrugh’s park as ‘one of the ugliest places in England; a giant’s castle, who had laid waste all the country round him’.7 Versions of these The word ‘greenery’ appears three times in the Notebook entries about the German tour, ‘each time’ (as McCusick says) ‘to designate a symmetrical (and perhaps magical or sacred) clearing in the forest’: Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 43. 5 The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn et al. (5 vols, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957–2002), vol. 1, p. 410. Further references to Notebooks will be given in parentheses in the text. 6 Kate Soper, What is Nature? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 150. 7 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 384. Walpole’s phrase comes in his letter to Conway (6 October 1785), cited by William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930; 3rd ed., 1953), p. 130. 4

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antithetical attitudes towards untouched nature get into ‘Kubla Khan’; and one of the places where the existence of such contradictory feelings comes most sharply into focus is in the first word of the second verse: ‘But’. The word enacts a striking pivot from the cultivated imagery of the first verse to the wild and unpopulated landscape without the Khan’s wall, the subject of the second. Controlled beauty gives way to sublime disorderliness: But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! (ll.12–16)

The syntax feels as though it makes sense though it is actually perplexing since what is being organized into antithesis by the ‘But’ is nothing discursive but rather a couple of landscapes: as though to say, ‘Brighton Pavilion—But Northumbria!’ The feeling of sense arises because implicit in the ‘But oh!’ is a value-judgment, something like ‘you thought what the Khan was doing was impressive; but, really, wait till you see what’s going on the other side of the wall’. The division between the verses suggests the sort of distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ that a lot of green criticism turns upon: the marvel of the thing is partly that, having set out apparently siding so emphatically with an aesthetic triumph won over natural obstacles, the poem comes to feel by the midpoint as though it adheres to a quite contrary set of values. For as the second verse proceeds, sinuously extending itself in a long paragraph of excited convolution and apostrophe, its ‘tumult’ begins to overpower the orderly charm of the opening verse; and the vivid natural energy of its elements, ‘with ceaseless turmoil seething’, establishes a mysterious complicity with the ‘Ancestral voices’ that threaten to overthrow Kubla’s dainty accomplishment, which has come to feel more and more precarious. The Khan, says John Beer, ‘has temporarily imposed his will upon nature, but untamed forces still exist which can in a moment destroy the fragile pattern of order, security and pleasure which he has set up’;8 and so the poem nicely anticipates, in a figurative sort of way, the dialectic memorably caught in a phrase of Adorno and Horkheimer: ‘The very spirit that dominates nature repeatedly vindicates the superiority of nature in competition’.9 The Khan is not much like the ghastly giant of Blenheim Palace for what he does is genuinely impressive in a way: he was, as Coleridge wrote some time after in the notebook, ‘the greatest Prince in Peoples, Cities, & Kingdoms that ever was in the World’ (Notebooks, 1: 1840). But it is not self-evident that being so great a prince is simply admirable; and I do not think it misleading to detect an edge of moral opprobrium behind the descriptions of ‘girdl[ing]’ and ‘enfolding’ a landscape that innocently pre-existed Ibid., p. 233. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John

8 9

Cumming (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 57.

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his spectacular piece of estate management. Kubla’s kind of power, in Beer’s words, ‘is the manifestation of daemonic powers’: that is, he is both magnificent and awful, in the way that Coleridge thought Napoleon at once a great genius and a tyrannical monster, similarly drawn to ‘impress himself upon the world’.10 Coleridge would later theorize the quality of mind possessed by those who ‘must impress their preconceptions on the world without’: he called it ‘commanding genius’. In ‘tranquil times’ commanding geniuses, such as the Khan, ‘are formed to exhibit a perfect poem in palace or temple or landscape garden’; but in times of war they show themselves for what they really are, just as Napoleon did: oppressive and cruel, they betray in the stark conditions of war the violence that, in a more implicit fashion, had always characterized their dealings with natural things external to them.11 Young Coleridge’s faith in the superiority of nature was down to more than a genteel Walpolian naturalism. Inspired by the Unitarianism he had absorbed from Priestley and others, his early writings dwell with programmatic purpose on the theme of wonder, investing natural objects with the perpetual promise of religious epiphany. The vision towards which, say, ‘Frost at Midnight’ moves is a kind of spiritualized environmentalism, which the poem discovers by imagining for little Hartley Coleridge the wild antithesis to his father’s own, blighted, urban upbringing: For I was reared In the great city, pent ’mid cloisters dim, And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself. (ll.51–62)

Little Hartley is de-materialized and de-individualized into the liberation of a breeze. The poem sets two models of education one against the another, the first— Coleridge’s own—a matter of stern constraint, loneliness and urban ugliness, the other of what Wordsworth would call ‘natural piety’, the sense of, as Jonathan Bate puts it, ‘fragile, beautiful, necessary ecological wholeness’.12 John Beer, Coleridge the Visionary (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), pp. 226, 228. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate (2 vols, Princeton:

10 11

Princeton University Press, 1983), vol. 1, p. 32. Beer quotes the passage: Coleridge the Visionary, p. 228. 12 Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000), p. 112.

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Revelation is democratized: the uniqueness of Christ’s divinity is redistributed throughout the whole of creation, with deity no longer localized in a person but held in common among the things of nature. This universal dispersal of deity is like the common sharing of property that characterizes the visionary communism of Coleridge’s early politics: the two ideas combine to form what he hailed exuberantly at one point in the notebook as ‘The great federal Republic of the Universe’ (Notebooks, 1: 1073).Without such a ubiquitous republican spirit, The moral world’s cohesion, we become An Anarchy of Spirits! Toy-bewitched, Made blind by lusts, disherited of soul, No common centre Man, no common sire Knoweth! A sordid solitary thing, Mid countless brethren with a lonely heart Through courts and cities the smooth savage roams Feeling himself, his own low self the whole; When he by sacred sympathy might make The whole one Self! Self, that no alien knows! Self, far diffused as Fancy’s wing can travel! Self, spreading still! Oblivious of its own, Yet all of all possessing! This is Faith! This the Messiah’s destined victory! (ll.145–58)

The attractions of abolishing selfhood have been rediscovered by proponents of ‘ecosophy’ for whom supposedly autonomous organisms are in fact, as Arne Naess memorably put it, ‘knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations’. The analogies between Coleridge’s universal republic of self-oblivion and what ‘deep ecology’ calls ‘Biospheric egalitarianism’ are not hard to spot, even if the language of theism woven through Coleridge’s environmental spiritualism is largely alien to the modern proponents of the view.13 Coleridge’s rejection of an anarchy of individual self-assertion shares with Arne Naess’s a kinship with the thought of Spinoza, although (and just like Naess’s writings) it heroically widens its ambitions from a Spinozistic ‘comprehensive structure of a self that comprises all human beings’ to include ‘the deep identification … of individuals with all life forms’: both turn on the ethical conviction that in ‘identifying with greater wholes, we partake in the creation and maintenance of this whole’.14 Or, as Coleridge puts it: ‘’Tis the sublime of man, | Our noontide majesty, to know ourselves | Parts and proportions of one wond’rous whole! | This fraternises man, this constitutes | Our charities and bearings’.15 Arne Naess, ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement’, Inquiry 16 (1973): pp. 95–100 (p. 95). Cf. Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological Nuclear Age (London: SCM, 1987). 14 Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, trans. David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 85, 173. 15 ‘Religious Musings’, Poetical Works, vol. 2, pp. 126–30. 13

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The ethics created by this fraternity were both testing and fascinating, and not always pursued in a spirit of deep solemnity. ‘I call even my Cat Sister in the Fraternity of universal Nature’, he whoops: ‘Owls I respect & Jack Asses I love’.16 But he was not, as Shelley was, a vegetarian;17 but when his cottage was overrun by mice he flinched at setting traps. ‘’Tis as if you said, “Here is a bit of toasted cheese; come little mice! I invite you!” when, oh, foul breach of the rites of hospitality! I mean to assassinate my too credulous guests!’ (Letters, 1: 322): that makes him sound like a Macbeth who had decided not to kill Duncan after all. That came in a letter; but he was also, characteristically, reckless enough to try out such thoughts in print. He tendentiously courted ridicule in ‘To a Young Ass’, hailing a miserable donkey as a ‘brother’, an expression of fraternity that duly earned him Gillray’s satirical attention; but as well as being jokey the poem is genuinely part of an effort to work out what a proper relationship with natural creatures should be, given a belief in their common participation, with man, within the single encompassing life of God. The central, finely troubled meditation upon these themes is, of course, ‘The Ancient Mariner’, a study in ‘ecological transgression’ (as well as other things besides) cast as the story of a hospitality betrayed.18 The poem’s moral is evidently bigger and more complicated than ‘don’t shoot albatrosses’;19 but, then again, a truth not unlike that must have some place within a total sense of the work. For the Mariner to come to bless the watersnakes is a matter of environmental realization: what had seemed, aesthetically, a sheerly disgusting spectacle (‘slimy things’) is transformed suddenly into a startling confrontation with the reality of creatureliness (‘happy living things’). The experience brilliantly eludes the habitual categories of apprehension with which the Mariner’s education has equipped him: ‘The snakes are absolutely other to him, like beings of another planet’, as Empson rightly says20—or, rather, like fellow beings of the one planet, but seen with the estranging vividness of a fresh pair of eyes. Elements of young Coleridge’s ecological cast of mind persist through to his mature thinking in a variety of guises. His notions of literary form, for example, recognizably grow from his youthful vision of the mutually sustaining interdependence of parts and wholes within a living whole; and his cultural politics, while they move markedly from the leftist utopianism of the 1790s, nevertheless retain a quasi-ecological emphasis upon the properly organic character of a good 16 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (6 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–1971), vol. 1, p. 121. Further references to Letters will be given in parentheses in the text. 17 The complexity of the situation is evoked by William Empson, ‘“The Ancient Mariner”’, in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), pp. 297–319, 300–302. 18 The phrase is James McCusick’s: Green Writing, p. 44. 19 Cf. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 159. 20 Empson, ‘“Ancient Mariner”’, p. 311.

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society. Coleridge’s writings are in this respect a bridge between Burke, on the one hand, and Arnold and Ruskin, on the other, and constitute one of the most powerful of all the great nineteenth-century attacks upon modernity as atomistic and heedlessly individualistic, the realm of instrumental reason (or, as Coleridge would call it, the ‘understanding’). ‘“[Y]ou appear to consider that society is an aggregation of individuals!”’ Coleridge once told Harriet Martineau, as she recalled in her memoirs. ‘I replied that I certainly did: whereupon he went off on one of the several metaphysical interpretations which may be put upon the manysided fact of an organised human society, subject to natural laws in virtue of its aggregate character and organisation together’.21 In other respects, however, the tendency of Coleridge’s thought is manifestly a matter of abandoning ‘nature’ as a criterion of the good. His later antipathy can assume some startling forms: ‘alas! alas! that Nature is a wary wily longbreathed old Witch, tough-lived as a Turtle and divisible as the Polyp, repullulative in a thousand Snips and Cuttings, integra et in toto! She is sure to get the better of Lady MIND in the long run, and to take her revenge too—’ (Letters, 5: 497). That is plainly not the language of ecocriticism; and nor is the related phrase that Maurice remembered old Coleridge uttering in the course of a conversation with Buckland. Professor Buckland was evidently remembering the sort of things that Coleridge used to say in his most beautiful poems, and it is hard to say that he has misconstrued their meaning entirely. [A] professor in conversation with Coleridge used the word Nature in a way which roused Coleridge to exclaim, ‘Why do you say Nature, when you mean God?’ On Dr Buckland answering, ‘I think it more reverent; but you think both words have the same meaning, do you not?’ Coleridge indignantly rejoined: ‘I think God and Nature the same! I think Nature is the devil in a strait-waistcoat.’22

(This was the Buckland, I guess, who programmatically ate his way through the animal kingdom, a story which might comically exemplify an ‘instrumental’ attitude towards nature.23) Many of Coleridge’s great literary writings rework the same spirit of anti-naturalism when describing the titanic psychology of the great artist—of Milton, for example, whose poetry is said to exemplify the modern spirit in its ‘under consciousness of a sinful nature, a fleeting away of external things,

21 Quoted in S.T. Coleridge: Interviews and Recollections, ed. Seamus Perry (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2000), p. 284. 22 Edward Strachey, ‘Recollections of Frederick Denison Maurice’; quoted in S.T. Coleridge: Interviews and Recollections, p. 251. I make a guess at why the devil is wearing a waistcoat in ‘Coleridge, Catholicism, and the Devil in a Strait Waistcoat’; Notes and Queries, NS 49 (2002): pp. 25–8. 23 Noël Annan, The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses (London: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 36. Only the mole was disgusting.

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the mind or subject greater than the object’.24 Like the commanding Khan, the poetic genius works to tame and improve a pre-existing unruliness and to make art of it: poets are, as Coleridge writes magnificently in the notebook, as though anticipating the Complete Poems of Wallace Stevens, ‘Gods of Love who tame the Chaos’ (Notebooks, 2: 2355). ‘Chaos’ is not a polite word: his idealist aesthetics, which emphasize the organizing powers of the creative intelligence, frequently convey a disdain, even an antagonism, towards any claims on the creative intelligence that might be made by the unaesthetic, ‘inanimate cold world’ in itself (‘Dejection: An Ode’, l.51). The chaos that genius comes to refine into art is that world; and the obvious ecocritical counter-position would be that there is nothing about it that needs improving in the first place: ‘We do not need to organize socalled chaos’, says Gary Snyder.25 The notion that the world one inhabits and comprehends is never anything but a human production—or at least that (as William James says) ‘you can’t weed out the human contribution’—is deeply contrary to the emotive epistemological realism that underwrites most ecological consciousness.26 For many environmental philosophers, in David Cooper’s words, ‘the “human world” thesis is deeply implicated with a comportment towards the natural world which they decry’:27 for there is, or so it is alleged, but a short step from the failure to perceive ‘things-inthemselves’, as opposed to ‘things-for-us’, to treating things as merely ‘thingsfor-us’.28 The attack on ‘the arrogance of humanism’ borrows a Kantian language: ‘things-in-themselves’ are what Kant rules forever from our acquaintance.29 In the English tradition, it is Coleridge who offers one of the most quotable encapsulations of the thesis that ‘we are responsible for the world’: ‘we receive but what we give, | And in our life alone does Nature live’ (‘Dejection: An Ode’, ll.47–8), a startling inversion of his earlier position, as it might seem, but a thought which even the great nature poems of the 1790s could be seen to articulate.30 ‘Landscape has … become for Coleridge no longer an object of rational or even 24 Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, ed. R.A. Foakes (2 vols, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), vol. 2, pp. 427–8. 25 A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1995); excerpted in The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 130. 26 Pragmatism; in The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (19 vols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975–88), vol. 1, p. 122. 27 David E. Cooper, The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 16. 28 Cf. Patrick D. Murphy, Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); excerpted in Green Studies Reader, p. 194. 29 The phrase is the title of a book by David W. Ehrenfeld: see Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 22. 30 Cooper, Measure of Things, p. 58, where Coleridge’s lines are quoted.

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aesthetic contemplation, but rather a mode of consciousness’, writes Anne Mellor, plausibly enough, of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’.31 And, to bring things around in a circle, among the modes of consciousness within which one might live could be numbered ‘nature’ itself. That is, I suppose, what Alan Liu had in mind when he bracingly announced in his book about Wordsworth, ‘There is no nature’, a view he characterized as the outcome of a ‘Berkleian argument’: really, ‘nature is the name under which we use the nonhuman to validate the human’.32 Liu’s book, though hardly a work of ecocriticism, nevertheless anticipated the view expressed by several later ecocritics that the idea of ‘nature’ is itself a big part of the problem, a mark of the divisive separation of human and nonhuman which created the conditions for environmental disaster in the first place: ‘by setting up nature as an object “over there” … it re-establishes the very separation it seeks to abolish’.33 But it would be wrong for me to leave Coleridge as a spokesman of idealist eco-villainy, his youthful leftist environmentalism forsaken for the anthropocentric arrogance of philosophical humanism. For Coleridge’s idealism is, in David Bromwich’s choice phrase, a ‘special and ambivalent version of idealism’, one in which the mind ‘grants a distinct role, in the drama of creation, to the existence outside the mind of all its potential objects, which it may in a manner survey before it decides to confer on them a new interest’.34 ‘The very spirit that dominates nature repeatedly vindicates the superiority of nature in competition’, as I have already quoted Adorno and Horkheimer saying; and Coleridge has his own sense of that perpetual and unending ‘competition’, as in a wonderful late letter in which he describes at length how ‘the Mind and Nature are, as it were, two rival Artists, both potent Magicians, and engaged, like the King’s Daughter and the rebel Genie in the Arabian Nights’ Enternts., in sharp conflict of Conjuration’ (Letters, 5: 496). In that account of the fight, Nature turns out to win the battle, ostensibly to Coleridge’s dismay; but the feelings in the letter are more complicated than implacable woe.35 Nature frequently makes such tenacious reappearances in Coleridge, as though his writing repeatedly discovers some element importantly resistant to the triumphant sway of the human mind; and in this his formative ambiguities are, perhaps, representative of a larger pattern of implicit resistance that complicates nineteenth Anne K. Mellor, ‘Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” and the Categories of English Landscape’, Studies in Romanticism 18 (1979): pp. 253–70 (pp. 265– 6). The place of nature in the poem is emphasized more fully in the balanced account of the poem given by Raimonda Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 52–3. 32 Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 38. 33 Morton, Ecology without Nature, p. 125. 34 David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 238, 237. 35 I am touching here on ground covered in my Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 36–8. 31

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century idealism. You find it a little later, in full dress, in Wagner, who though certainly not as erudite as Coleridge was nevertheless well-read in philosophy, and who fell on Schopenhauer as a way of addressing the imponderables within ‘Kant’s doctrine of the ideality of the world’.36 In his Wotan, a failing God whose world is on the brink of returning to a state of pre-existing chaos, Wagner embodies his feelings of tragic ambivalence about the sovereignty of the creative artist and the stifling authority of the idealist mind. Grievous disgrace! My heart is sick at finding itself in all I ever created. The other, whom I so yearn for, the other can never be. The Free by himself must be fostered; bondsmen are all I can breed.37

It is the song of the fretful consciousness, yearning for something other than itself; and a similar kind of yearning for a given world without the mind, often cast as a kind of homesickness, continues to feature in the thought of the older Coleridge, though no doubt less flamboyantly than it does in The Ring. ‘[I]t is an instinct of my nature to pass out of myself, and to exist in the form of others’ (Notebooks, 5: 6487), he wrote in a late notebook, describing the positive evasion of the ego’s constraints that Wotan despairs of attaining, but which a certain brand of ecological writing casts as a moral imperative: Aldo Leopold tells his readers to think ‘like a mountain’.38 Such self-obliteration was at times something for Coleridge noisily to deplore as an absence of inner power, but it was by no means always that; and the full Coleridgean picture that emerges is so compelling partly because it is so mixed. ‘I cannot but think, that this mode of belying the lovely countenance of Things & red-ochring the rose, must be injurious to the moral tact both of the authors & their admirers’, he remarks on one occasion to the notebook (Notebooks, 2: 2625); but it is not hard to find Coleridge sounding the quite contradictory note, according to which value came from the interpolation of natural objects within a distinctly human world: ‘Who has not seen a Rose, or a sprig of Jasmine, of Myrtle, & &c &c—But behold these same flowers in a posy or flowerpot, painted by a man of genius—or assorted by the hand of a woman of fine Taste & instinctive sense of Beauty?’ (Notebooks, 3: 4016). He writes beautifully in many places about the organizing and improving powers of the mind; but he also writes, in his poem ‘The Wagner’s own phrase from the autobiography, which is quoted and discussed in Bryan Magee, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), p. 136. 37 Richard Wagner, Die Walküre, trans. and comm. Rudolph Sabor (London: Phaidon, 1997), p. 95. 38 See Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, pp. 104–5. 36

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Blossoming of the Solitary Date Tree’ for example, about the value of things to be cherished and attended to and revered for themselves: Science and song; delight in little things, The buoyant child surviving in the man; Fields, forests, ancient mountains, ocean, sky, With all their voices— (ll.52–5)

The great account of genius in Biographia (originally published in The Friend) similarly identifies as a ‘prime merit’ that it ‘represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence’ (Biographia, 1: 81). Seeing something other than yourself, freshly, makes you feel whole again: it is a striking anticipation of the sort of epistemological humility that David Cooper has associated with the stance of ‘contemplative wonder … that environmentalists often call for’.39 Even if it were the case that, in some sense, ‘nature’ is an ideal construction, nevertheless, as Kate Soper cogently maintains, one can accept the point while still appreciating ‘the independent existence of the reality itself’, an ‘extra-discursive reality’ the whole point of which is its capacity to exceed the grasp of ‘culture’, as the water snakes do the conscious mind of the Mariner.40 Coleridge does not win his way to some inclusive and coherent statement that resolves the antimonies about nature with which he begins; but then the lasting significance of his work for ecological thinkers might lie, rather, in the mere fact that nature had so persistent and momentous a role to play throughout the many complicated movements of his career at all: he would never have dissented from T.S. Eliot’s observation ‘that a wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is inevitable doom’.41

Cooper, Measure of Things, p. 141. Soper, What is Nature?, p. 152. 41 T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, and Other Writings, intro. David L. 39

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Chapter 3

‘Wastes of corn’: Changes in Rural Land Use in Wordsworth’s Early Poetry Helena Kelly

That William Wordsworth is an ‘ecological’ poet has become almost a critical commonplace of recent years.1 His movement from youthful radicalism to conservatism is also generally accepted. This paper seeks to combine and complicate these two aspects by reading some of Wordsworth’s early work in the ecologically and politically fraught context of the enclosure movement. In ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’, ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’, ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ and ‘The Ruined Cottage’, Wordsworth explores the pressures which are forcing agricultural change and the cost of that change—both in terms of individual hardship and the loss of the old way of interacting with the land. The scale and scope of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century enclosure bears repeating. Between 1795 and 1815 more than 3,000,000 acres of wastes, commons and heaths were enclosed.2 This figure equates to just under 5,000 square miles, an area about one-tenth the size of England, and it has been calculated that Parliament must have been passing enclosure acts at the rate of one a week.3 Enclosure led to a wholesale reshaping of a landscape, and by removing access to common land and waste might effectively halve the incomes of local labouring families who had relied on those spaces for fuel, food and small-scale enterprise.4 Though the programme of enclosure was energetically promoted by the quangolike Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement, there was much debate over its moral and economic repercussions, and the associated rhetoric can be seen spilling over into much literature of the period. Robert Southey, for example, returns to the 1 Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991); Helen Regueiro and Frances Ferguson (eds), The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 2 A.H. John, ‘Farming in Wartime: 1793–1815’, in E.L. Jones and G.E. Mingay (eds), Land, Labour and Population in the Industrial Revolution: Essays Presented to J.D. Chambers (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), pp. 28–47 (p. 30). 3 Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 23. 4 Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 63.

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topic throughout his life. For a poet of the countryside with a political conscience, enclosure served to connect a number of themes. For Wordsworth, though, it also held more personal connotations. In 1795 William and his sister Dorothy moved together to Racedown Lodge, on the edge of the tiny hamlet of Birdsmoorgate, not far from Chard. Dorothy described the situation of the house in a letter of November 1795: We can see the sea 150 or 200 yards from the door, and at a little distance have a very extensive view terminated by the sea seen through different openings of the unequal hills. We have not the warmth and luxuriance of Devonshire though there is no want either of wood or cultivation, but the trees appear to suffer from the sea blasts. We have hills which seen from a distance almost take the character of mountains, some cultivated nearly to their summits, others in their wild state covered with furze and broom. These delight me the most as they remind me of our native wilds.5

Much of Dorsetshire had been enclosed early, during the Tudor period. Of what had remained unenclosed, some was left undisturbed well into the nineteenth century, and the rest was divided up in a fairly desultory fashion throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, none of it in the vicinity of Racedown at the time the Wordsworths lived there. Yet the countryside around Racedown, as traced out by Dorothy, is characterized both by divisions, and by what seems to her a curious lack of them. On the one hand there is, she explains, ‘a little brook which runs at the distance of one field from us’ and ‘divides us from Devonshire’, on the other, she records that ‘in some of our walks we go through orchards without any other enclosure or security than as a common field’. Dorothy also noted the extreme poverty of the area; ‘the peasants are miserably poor; their cottages are shapeless structures (I may almost say) of wood and clay— indeed they are not at all beyond what might be expected in savage life’. William, too, asserted that the ‘country people’ around Racedown were ‘wretchedly poor; ignorant and overwhelmed with every vice that usually attends ignorance in that class, viz—lying and picking and stealing &c &c’.6 ‘Picking’ is often used as a near-synonym for stealing but has the more particular meaning of removing fruit, flowers or wood. Dorothy and William were the children of a man who, among other roles, had been a steward or land agent to Sir James Lowther, later Earl of Lonsdale.7 James Lowther was, according to Johnston, the ‘most powerful, feared, and hated aristocrat’ in the area, and was popularly known as ‘Jimmy Grasp Letter to Mrs John Marshall, 30 November 1795: Dorothy Wordsworth and William Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt et al. (8 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967–1993), vol. 1, p.161.  6 Letter to William Matthews, 24 October 1795, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Letters, vol. 1, p. 154. 7 Joanne Dann, ‘Some Notes on the Relationship between the Wordsworth and Lowther Families’, Wordsworth Circle 11 (1980): pp. 80–82. 5

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All’.8 Johnston suggests that though John Wordsworth collected rents his role was more that of a ‘political business agent, or nonstop campaign manager’ (22–3). John Wordsworth, however, was also a landowner in his own right, one who, as Johnston points out, owned a ‘seventy-acre farm at Stockbridge’, crofts, barns, and ‘gates’ on the High Moor which ‘controlled livestock’s access to pasture’ (25). The passages above are the reactions one might expect from the offspring of a land agent and budding landowner, coloured by early contact with eyes that looked appraisingly at properties, and a mind alert to tenants who might need to be weeded out when leases next came up for renewal, or the landlord evinced a desire to see them gone. It is perhaps hardly surprising that, living at Racedown, seeing division and distinction everywhere—between the sea and the land, between cultivation and ‘wild’ waste or down, between Devonshire and Dorsetshire, imagined and real—William’s thoughts should also have come to rest on boundaries, on borders and on the shaping of space.  In addition to having a father who was an enthusiastic proponent of the new agricultural order, Wordsworth’s childhood was played out in scenes of heavy enclosure. Cumberland and Westmoreland were reshaped by enclosure from the Tudor period far into the nineteenth century, but between 1770 (the year William Wordsworth was born) and 1800 enclosure activity was particularly active in two areas: the environs of Penrith, where the young William spent much of his time,9 and around Brampton and Appleby, which was Lowther land.10 William must have seen some of the Penrith enclosures himself, given the amount of time he spent with his maternal grandparents and presumably heard about others. Lowther was, after all, a member of the Board of Agriculture, indicating an enthusiasm for enclosure and improvement.11 There would inevitably have been local criticism of Lowther’s land-management style—this was, after all, a man who ejected 400 tenants from Inglewood Forest in a fit of pique 12—and the care with which the subject of enclosure was approached by Lowther’s eventual heir may be some indication of the depth of resentment in the area.13 Dann suggests that it was John Wordsworth who carried out the ejectments in Inglewood Forest, 14 but even if this is incorrect he worked for an encloser and sought himself to profit from the changes in local land use by investing in the gates which restricted free access to land. John Wordsworth was also, of course, Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1998), p. 19. 9 Ibid., p. 32. 10 See Roger J.P. Kain, John Chapman and Richard R. Oliver (eds), The Enclosure Maps of England and Wales, 1595–1918: A Cartographic Analysis and Electronic Catalogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 11 Board of Agriculture, List of the members (London, 1796), p. 6. 12 See Dann, ‘Some Notes’, and Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, p. 28 ff. 13 William Wordsworth to Lord Lonsdale, 21 January 1825, Letters, vol. 4, p. 305. 14 Dann, ‘Some Notes’, pp. 80–81. 8

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a victim of Lowther’s greed. Having lent almost £5,000 to his employer without any reliable security, he contracted an illness after spending a night in the open and died without reclaiming the money.15 Lowther refused to pay and the debt was only finally settled by Lowther’s heir in 1803.16 Here, I suggest, we can see the origin of William Wordsworth’s deeply contradictory attitude to enclosure. In 1793, after himself spending the night alone and without shelter, William wrote a poem in which one great act of persecution sees three generations of a family slowly but surely destroyed—‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’. The figure of a female vagrant, who has lost both husband and children, also appears in ‘An Evening Walk’ of 1793 (ll.241ff.) and is a clear borrowing from Langhorne.17 What is different about her presentation in the early Salisbury Plain poems is the detail of the persecution suffered by her father, which sparks off her family’s descent into penury. This initial act of injustice begins a cascade of misfortune through the generations, just as James Lowther’s greed had robbed John Wordsworth’s estate, beggared his children, and now prevented William from providing for his own baby daughter by Annette Vallon. The parallel is readily apparent. But John Wordsworth had also been a willing servant and—on a small scale—imitator of Lowther. ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ was composed alongside the Lyrical Ballads version of ‘The Female Vagrant’ in which enclosure is more clearly identified as the root cause of the family’s misfortune, and its inclusion of a scene in which a father attacks his own child perhaps serves as some sort of expiation for the criticism which Wordsworth heaps on the character of the encloser elsewhere. In the late eighteenth century, Salisbury Plain served as the archetypal site of enclosure. Its status as enclosed land remained close to the forefront of public consciousness well into the 1810s and 1820s and it is as enclosed land that it features in Southey’s Letters from England and Austen’s Northanger Abbey.18 The story of the genesis of ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ is well known. It was written in response to an incident which befell the poet in the summer of 1793. Together with a friend, William Calvert, he was travelling across the plain, on a touring holiday, when their carriage developed problems. They agreed to part company, with the friend taking the horse to ride on into Wales, and Wordsworth choosing to continue on foot across the plain. Little can be divined of his real experience other than the bald outline mentioned above but soon afterwards he produced the first of a series of poems about Salisbury Plain, ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’.19 Duncan Wu, Wordsworth: An Inner Life (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), p. 1. 16 Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, p. 782. 17 John Langhorne, The country justice. A poem. By one of His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the county of Somerset. Part the first (London, 1774), vol. 1, p. 18. 18 See Helena Kelly, ‘Enclosure in Austen’, Persuasions Online 30/2 (2010), no pagination. 19 In a letter written the next year, Wordsworth describes the poem as having been ‘written last summer’; letter to William Mathews, 23 May 1794, Letters, vol. 1, p. 120 15

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The poem begins with a preamble or proem on the lot of the ‘savage’ (l.3), suggesting that despite the harsh conditions under which he ekes out his subsistence, he is happier than those in more advanced societies whose misfortune is thrown into relief by the luxury which others enjoy. Without ‘Affluence’ (l.24) there can be no sense of ‘Penury’ (l.27). A society based on property is, according to the poet, a zero-sum equation where what is to the advantage of some must necessarily be to the disadvantage of others and where ‘many thousands weep | Beset with foes more fierce than e’er assail | The savage without home in winter’s keenest gale’ (ll.34–6). These first stanzas may have reminded Wordsworth’s contemporaries of William Godwin’s views on the ills which might be avoided by holding property in common: a people among whom equality reigned, would possess everything they wanted, where they possessed the means of subsistence. Why should they pursue additional wealth or territory? These would lose their value the moment they became the property of all. No man can cultivate more than a certain portion of land.20

Johnston suggests they are a paraphrase of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality,21 but they also bear a distinct similarity to the beginning of a sermon by Richard Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff. Originally preached ‘before the Stewards of the Westminster Dispensary’ in April 1785, Watson’s sermon ‘on the wisdom and goodness of God in having made both rich and poor’ had been published earlier in 1793, with an appendix arguing its increased relevance in the context of the French Revolution and unrest in England, it being now more important than ever that the populace should accept that ‘equality of men ... does not exist in equality of property’.22 In it, Watson evades the question of how the concept of property arose (‘it would be foreign to the purpose of this meeting to enter into a disquisition concerning the origin of property’) and, in contrast to Wordsworth, suggests that property exists everywhere: it is a state of things which has taken place in every age and country of which we have any account: even the savage inhabitants of the uncultivated parts of the world, who derive their support from the casual success of the chace, have their separate districts for hunting; and an infringement of that species of property is one of the chief causes of their barbarous hostilities. (1: 448–9)

20 William Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its influence on General Virtue and Happiness (2 vols, Dublin, 1793), vol. 2, p. 66. Further references to the volume and page of this edition are given in parentheses. 21 Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, p. 350. 22 Richard Watson (Bishop of Llandaff), A sermon preached before the Stewards of the Westminster dispensary at their anniversary meeting, in Charlotte-Street chapel, April 1785 (2 vols, London, 1815) , vol. 1, p. 481. Further references to volume and page of this text are given in parentheses.

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It is, he goes on to claim, property which introduces social disparities—‘a division of mankind into two classes, one possessing more, the other possessing less, or nothing at all’ (1: 449)—and the burden of his sermon is to explain why these disparities are just and good. In order to do so he falls back on Locke and the labour theory of property: God gave the earth to be a means of support to the whole human race; and we have all of us a right to be maintained by what it produces: but he never meaned that the idle should live upon the labour of the industrious, or that the flagitious should eat the bread of the righteous: he hath therefore permitted a state of property to be everywhere introduced; that the industrious might enjoy the rewards of their diligence and that those who would not work, might feel the punishment of their laziness. (1: 450)

We know for a fact that Wordsworth was familiar with Watson’s sermon, since he wrote, though refrained from publishing, a Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff which responded to it. The Letter, though short, attacks Llandaff’s argument on a variety of fronts, one being enclosure.23 Wordsworth proposes abolishing primogeniture ‘and indeed all that monopolising system of legislation whose baleful influence is shewn in the depopulation of the country and in the necessity which reduces the sad relicks to owe their very existence to the ostentatious bounty of their oppressors’— surely a reference to enclosure, to the abolishing of commoning, and to a resulting increase in poor rates.24 He also employs a slightly perplexing metaphor, in which ‘the open field of a republic’ is opposed to ‘the shade of a monarchy’.25 The open field is obvious enough, and may be a nod towards More’s Utopia, in which land is farmed collectively, but the reference to ‘shade’ is less transparent.26 It may, however, be aimed directly at the bishop. Watson was a Westmoreland man, born in Heversham, and in 1788 he bought an estate at Windermere. There, he explained, he occupied himself, ‘principally in building farm-houses, blasting rocks, enclosing wastes, in making bad land good, in planting larches’.27 In 1793 he became one of the first members of the newly founded Board of Agriculture and his Miscellaneous tracts on religious, political, and agricultural subjects includes a ‘Response to the General View of the Agriculture of the County of Westmoreland’, and an essay ‘On Planting and Waste Lands’. In the latter of these he describes some of the improvements which he had made near his Windermere estate; the purchase, on its enclosure, of ‘the land called Wansfell, on which I made a plantation of Wordsworth and Thomas Paine both use the somewhat unusual word ‘agrarian’, the latter in the title of his 1796–7 Agrarian Justice. They may both be taking the word from Godwin, who writes of ‘agrarian laws’ in Political Justice (see vol. 2, p. 418, for example), but it seems more probable that all three writers are drawing on James Harrington. 24 William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. 1, p. 43. 25 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 35. 26 Godwin also cites More’s Utopia in Political Justice (vol. 2, p. 339, footnote). 27 See his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. 23

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48,000 larches near Ambleside’ and for which he had ‘received a gold medal, in 1789, from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts & c.’.28 Perhaps, writing in response to Llandaff’s efforts at justifying and even eulogizing the inequality of property, Wordsworth could not resist a fling at Watson’s own enclosure activity.  ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ offers a flat contradiction of Watson’s bland vision of an ordered, fair, just country in which ‘the provision which is made for the poor … is so liberal, as, in the opinion of some, to discourage industry’.29 Wordsworth presents a picture of a world destroyed, in pieces. There are abandoned buildings scattered on the plain, a signpost that points nowhere (l.109), lone and lonely figures. It is not merely that society does not function—there is no society. The landscape resists overview, the spire of Salisbury Cathedral vanishing, and the traveller being cautioned against looking in a particular direction lest he gaze on horrors. This is ‘Sarum’s plain’ (l.38, l.549), a construction which contains within it the kernel of the poem’s larger themes; it is land which belongs to the corrupt and grasping established order. Salisbury was the location, notoriously, of a rotten borough—Old Sarum—as well as a vast enclosure, and in the poem it is also the place where the theft of property and power from the people is made manifest. As the traveller moves further away from Salisbury, a tiny figure silhouetted against a louring sky ‘red with stormy fire’ (l.37), the environment becomes increasingly unfamiliar and unnatural. It is, paradoxically, the increase in arable exploitation of the plain that makes it inhuman, as the very evidence of human productivity is transformed into or revealed as something alien; boundless ‘wastes of corn’ (l.44) and ‘huge piles of corn stack’ (l.48) that in the landscape of nightmare become strangely akin not only to the ‘brow sublime’ (l.80), the ‘mountain-pile’ (l.82) of the henge with its threatened ‘great flame’ (l.94) and ‘gigantic bones’ (l.97) but to the ‘huge plain’ (l.62) itself. They fit. The phrase ‘wastes of corn’ (l.44) is, I suggest, key in setting up this sense of paradox. Wordsworth plays on the two meanings of the word ‘waste’: the corn will feed the hungry multitudes, provide them with a biblical staple and yet, despite the fruitfulness of the new agriculture, the change from legal ‘waste’—poor scrubland common to all—to productive crops has created a waste of another kind, an unoccupied space, an unpeopled desert, a profusion which destroys its own purpose. ‘A Night’ effects a deliberate separation from the pastoral. When the traveller glances around at the plain he sees a bleak, unproductive, empty space:  No shade was there, no meads of pleasant green, No brook to wet his lips or soothe his ear, Huge piles of corn-stack here and there were seen But thence no smoke upwreathed his sight to cheer; And see the homeward shepherd dim appear 28 Richard Watson (Bishop of Llandaff), Miscellaneous tracts on religious, political, and agricultural subjects (2 vols, London, 1815), vol. 2, pp. 396–7. 29 William Wordsworth, The Salisbury Plain Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 483.

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Ecology and the Literature of the British Left / Kelly Far off—He stops his feeble voice to strain No sound replies but winds that whistling near Sweep the thin grass and passing, wildly plain; Or desert lark that pours on high a wasted strain. (ll.46–54) 

The shade, the meads and the brook are pastoral topoi; the horizon of the pastoral world is traditionally the homely cottage with its thin evening plume of smoke; the pastoral voice is generally static, reclining in the shade of a tree, not moving. The pastoral, in fact, is metapoetically disappearing into the distance and the void—‘the homeward shepherd’ appears ‘dim’ and ‘far-off’—the pastoral reed is replaced by the sounds of the wind whistling and keening aimlessly through the sparse scrubby grass and the traveller’s ‘feeble’ voice is, like that of the ‘desert lark’, wasted on the air, the sound of one hand clapping because there is no one to hear it. The words ‘plain’ (l.53) and ‘wasted’ (l.54) recall the previous stanza, directing the reader back to ‘Sarum’s plain’ (l.38) and the ‘wastes of corn’ (l.44). It is enclosure that makes the pastoral mode impossible; the ‘plain’ is the site of grief, of plaining, and the ‘wastes of corn’ are a wasteful use of land that was once more productive waste, offering no support or comfort to the poor.30 The one man who seems to be employed on the plain is as impecunious as either of the wanderers, ‘his hungry meal too scant for dog that meal to share’ (l.171). The plain, in its current enclosed state, makes all thought of charity impossible. Where was once ‘a lonely Spital’, built by ‘kind’ and ‘pious’ hands (ll.122–3), offering protection and shelter, there remain only ‘walls’(l.126) and tales of murder (ll.145–53). Neither the traveller nor the female vagrant ever seems to think that they might glean among the corn, though there is nothing in the text to indicate that it is inedibly unripe, and the Bible insists that the corners of the field should be left for the widow and the stranger.  Stranger though she is, the tale told by the female vagrant elides regional difference. Now a wanderer on ‘Sarum’s plain’, she was once ‘the prime of Keswick’s plain’ (l.206), and her story centres on the tragedy of enclosure. Some commentators suggest that the ‘oppression’ (l.257) which falls on the female vagrant’s father remains vague and ill-defined in ‘A Night’, but I doubt whether Wordsworth’s contemporaries would have read into it anything other than enclosure.31 The woman’s childhood home is clearly a pre-enclosure idyll, with a garden sufficiently large to be ‘stored with peas and mint and thyme’ 30 Wordsworth returns to this play on ‘waste’ and ‘wastage’ later in the poem, asking, ‘How many at Oppression’s portal places | Receive the scanty dole she cannot waste, | And bless, as she has taught, her hand benign?’ (ll.436–8). 31 The woman’s father seems to have supported himself primarily by fishing (ll.228–9, l.234) before he was forced from his home. Lowther’s involvement with Inglewood Forest began with a dispute over a fishery and ended with evictions effected by Wordsworth’s father, a story which may perhaps appear here in compressed form: His little range of water was denied; Even to the bed where his old body lay His all was seized; and weeping side by side Turned out on the cold winds, alone we wandered wide. (ll.258–61)

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(l.236). The ‘hen’s rich nest with long grass overgrown’ (l.240) and the ‘hazel copse with teeming clusters brown’ (l.242) index traditional uses of the common land; the family chickens nest on the scrubby waste, where there are also natural resources, nuts and fruit which can be picked to supplement the family’s diet. She is an industrious cottage worker who keeps her spinning wheel, symbolic of productive rural womanhood, ‘humming’ busily (l.247). Given the echoes between the boundaries of the plain (the spire of the cathedral, the hill over which the couple vanish) and those of this lost home (‘the steeple-tower’ ‘peering above the trees’ which they see ‘from the last hill-top’) (ll.263–5), it would appear that we are intended to read the vast emptiness of Salisbury Plain as reflecting what has happened to the female vagrant’s home. Geographically separate areas are made alike; all enclosure is productive of this emptiness. At the end of the poem comes what looks like a return to pastoral, when the traveller and the female vagrant look down from a hill onto a ‘pleasant scene’, complete with a ‘winding brook | Babbling through groves and lawns and meads of green’, a ‘smoking cottage’, a ‘linnet’ trilling ‘amorous’ and thus implicitly productive and regenerative ‘lays’, and, as definite confirmation, the genre markers of ‘scattered herds’ and a ‘merry milkmaid’ (ll.407–13). This is no true return, though. There is, after all, only one cottage (l.410) and only one milkmaid (l.414). The owners of the cottage must be the owners of the herd, people who have worked hard and been rewarded with an increase of property, people of whom Watson would have approved. This scene is in fact almost a parody of pro-enclosure propaganda, revealing it as being as unreal as the pastoral. The ostensible return to pastoral order is not convincing, and is not intended to be so. Wordsworth ends ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ with an exhortation to the ‘Heroes of Truth’ to ‘pursue your march, uptear | Th’Oppressor’s dungeon from its deepest base’ (ll.541–2). Such radical optimism is absent from the revision of the poem, ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’. I propose to read ‘Adventures’ alongside the poem ‘The Female Vagrant’ from the Lyrical Ballads.32 The manuscript copy of ‘Adventures’ (MS 2, in Gill’s edition) does not in fact include the female vagrant’s story, but Wordsworth must have worked on MS 2 and the Lyrical Ballads version of ‘The Female Vagrant’ at roughly the same time. Together, the two present a gloomier, grimmer picture, one in which Wordsworth seems both more angry about enclosure and what it represents and less convinced of the possibility of change. The poem begins with two acts of human kindness being done to the old soldier, but from there the tone darkens, and the poem ends with a hanging. The plain is again located as the site of unproductive enclosure with the word ‘waste’ (l.45) being pointedly juxtaposed to ‘dreary corn-fields stretch’d as without bound’ (l.53), and the dismissal of the pastoral is expressed in an almost identical stanza (ll.55–63). Then the history of the sailor is sketched in with quick, brutal strokes—the press-gang, war and 32 Note that Gill interpolates ‘The Female Vagrant’ into his reading text of ‘Adventures’, and that, for ease of reference, I follow his lineation throughout.

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the refusal to grant him his share of the spoils of war, robbery and murder—and two stanzas later the poet brings us up against a gibbet, ‘a human body that in irons swang’ (l.115). In ‘The Female Vagrant’, by contrast, the woman’s story is expanded. One of the major additions is a passage which makes it impossible to ignore that enclosure is the prime cause of evil which drives her and her father from their home: There rose a mansion proud our woods among, And cottage after cottage owned its sway, No joy to see a neighbouring horse, or stray Through pastures not his own, the master took; My father dared his greedy wish gainsay; He loved his old hereditary nook And ill could I the thought of such sad parting brook. (ll.300–306) 

When she recovers at last from the illness to which she succumbs after the loss of her husband and children, she finds shelter and companionship with a group of gypsies: The lanes I sought, and as the sun retired, Came, where beneath the trees a faggot blazed; The wild brood saw me weep, my fate enquired, And gave me food, and rest, more welcome, more desired. (ll.501–4)

These people are, as Wordsworth has the woman insist, in a ventriloquization of Godwin’s theories, ‘the rude earth’s tenants’ (l.506) who maintain that ‘all belonged to all’ (l.509). Avoiding agricultural labour, they have avoided likewise being affected by the tide of agricultural change, ‘no plough their sinews strained; on grating road | No wain they drove, and yet, the yellow sheaf | In every vale for their delight was stowed: | For them, in nature’s meads, the milky udder flowed’ (ll.510–13). John Williams suggests that the appearance of the gypsies is a return to pastoral picturesque and there is certainly a prelapsarian element to this section of the poem.33 For the female vagrant life with the gypsies at first seems to offer a recapitulation of her own pre-enclosure, commoning youth but she balks at their easy acceptance of what she considers theft—‘ill it suited me ... | ... midnight theft to hatch’ (ll.523–4). Leaving them, she lives ‘upon the mercy of the fields’ and ‘often’ uses them for her ‘bed’ (l.546). She also reproaches herself for her forays into theft, and despite the necessity under which she operated, considers it an ‘abuse’ of her ‘inner self’ (l.547), the one experience from amongst all her horrific store which ‘afflicts [her] peace with keenest ruth’ (l.546). This insistence on guilt is shared by the ‘Adventures’, which includes a scene in which a father has beaten his small son nearly senseless as punishment for a small act of disobedience (ll.613ff.), and ends with a scene of general depravity in which 33 John Williams, Wordsworth: Romantic Poetry and Revolution Politics (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1977), p. 24.

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‘dissolute men’ position their ‘festive booths’ underneath the sailor’s hanging body, ‘idle thousands’ throng, and ‘fathers’ bring ‘women and children’ to view the fair and with it the corpse in the gibbet (ll.821–4).  It is probable that Wordsworth completed at least some of the revisions to ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ while he was living at Racedown.34 Racedown, I suggested above, was a site which encouraged thoughts of enclosure and land usage. It also, if the majority of Wordsworth’s biographers are to be believed, formed the backdrop to a period of depression and disillusionment during which Wordsworth experienced what, in Book 11 of the Prelude, he was to describe as, ‘the crisis of that long disease | … the soul’s last and lowest ebb’ (ll.306–7).35 He was, ‘depressed’, ‘bewildered’ (l.321), ‘bedimmed and changed’ (l.342), ‘endlessly perplexed | With impulse, motive, right and wrong, the ground | Of obligation’ until he ‘yielded up moral questions in despair’ (ll.298–305). There are obvious causes. William’s experience of revolutionary France, the Terror and its aftermath, his fear for his former lover Annette and for their child, the tyrannical measures which the Pitt government had introduced, anxiety for his own safety in the face of them, these together might be sufficient to bring him to a depth of uncertainty where he could be sure of nothing. But we know from Dorothy’s description of Racedown that the area was reminiscent of the scenes of her Cumbrian childhood, and it is also undeniable that much of the poetry which William produced there, or which was inspired by his time there, is preoccupied with questions of land ownership, of rural change and of enclosure.  Godwin, to whose ideas Wordsworth repeatedly returns in his Racedown poetry, was, very much in favour of the notion that land ought to belong— indeed did belong—collectively to the people, and that the prevailing system of property ownership possessed no real validity whatsoever.36 Wordsworth seems to have continued to place a good deal of reliance on Godwin during this period, intellectually, at least. Godwin recommends that all ideas should be debated, as the sole route to truth and progress: indeed, if there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind. ... all that is requisite in these discussions is unlimited speculation, and a sufficient variety of systems and opinions ... when

‘... since I came to Racedown I have made alterations and additions so material as that it may be looked on almost as another work’: William Wordsworth, Letter to Francis Wrangham, 20 November 1795, cited in Gill, The Salisbury Plain Poems, p. 7. 35 William Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. W.J.B. Owen, The Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 36 ‘To whom does any article of property, suppose a loaf of bread, justly belong? To him who most wants it, or to whom the possession of it will be most beneficial. Here are six men famished with hunger, and the loaf is, absolutely considered, capable of satisfying the cravings of them all … the laws of different countries dispose of property in a thousand different ways, but there can be but one way which is most conformable to reason’; Political Justice, vol. 2, pp. 325–6. 34

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we are once persuaded that nothing is too sacred to be brought to the touchstone of examination, science will advance with rapid strides.37

In the Prelude Wordsworth describes how he attempted to do this, ‘dragging all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds, | Like culprits to the bar’ (11, ll.294–5). I suggest that this is what he attempts in ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, a trial between warring systems of property in which Godwin’s ideas are opposed to those of John Wordsworth. According to Butler and Green, the poem was composed not at Racedown but at Alfoxden, in 1798 (59).38 The action is however explicitly located in ‘Dorsetshire’ (l.29) rather than Devon, where Alfoxden is to be found, so I feel justified in considering it essentially a Racedown text. ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ centres on a moment of frozen stillness, the figures of the two title characters static against an icy winter backdrop, an image so vivid as to be the poetic equivalent of kabuki or a tableau vivant. We see the aged Goody Blake kneeling on her scattered bundle of sticks, one arm held by Harry, who looms menacingly over her, the other arm raised to heaven. Schoenfield suggests that ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ is structured around those sticks, a trial ‘between two theories of property: the Burkean classical liberal theory to which Harry Gill consciously clings; and a more abstract, naturalized theory, the roots of which are at once in Godwinian utilitarianism and in the mediaeval (and possibly mythic) common law that provided for common property’.39 Godwin often glances towards the language of the enclosure debate, as he does early in the first volume of Political Justice, protesting against further rises in ‘the inequality of property’, a phrase which appears to be a reference to the increasing rate at which common and wastelands were being enclosed. Cut off from the resources of commoning, ‘vast numbers … are deprived of almost every accommodation that can render life tolerable or secure. The utmost industry scarcely suffices for their support’(1: 32). Godwin does not entertain for one moment the idea that enclosure might benefit the poor by increasing harvests or creating work. For him enclosure appears as another weapon in the armoury of class warfare; ‘the rich are ... perpetually reducing oppression into a system, and depriving the poor of that little commonage of nature as it were, which might otherwise have remained to them’ (1: 35–6). Of more specific application to the poem is a passage from the second volume of the Political Justice, to the effect that, ‘our animal wants have long since been defined, and are stated to consist of food, clothing and shelter. If justice have any meaning, nothing can be more iniquitous, than for one man to possess superfluities, where there is a human being in existence that is not adequately supplied with these’ (2: 326). Ibid., vol. 1, p. 53. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James

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Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 59. 39 Mark Schoenfield, The Professional Wordsworth: Law, Labor and the Poet’s Contract (Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 103.

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Burney criticized the poem because he deemed Goody Blake’s actions an unjustifiable infringement of property rights no matter how pitiable her situation: The hardest heart must be softened into pity for the poor old woman;—and yet, if all the poor are to help themselves, and supply their wants from the possessions of their neighbours, what imaginary wants and real anarchy would it not create? Goody Blake should have been relieved out of the two millions annually allowed by the state to the poor of this country, not by the plunder of an individual.40

Burney, like Watson, of whose sermon this passage is distinctly reminiscent, glosses over the fact that the custom of people in the countryside helping themselves to natural resources, to wood, to pasture, to turf, had been not merely tolerated by the establishment but early incorporated into a quasi-legal framework by being given an Anglo-Norman nomenclature, so that words like ‘piscary’, ‘turbary’, ‘estovers’ and so on, appear in manorial records from the early medieval period.41 Wood, in particular, was the subject of a bewildering variety of rights and quasi-rights, including plough-bote, wood-bote, and the right to a certain amount of wood on the marriage of an eldest child. Moreover, there was a widely held belief that any wood which was lying on the ground, and any which could be knocked or pulled off the tree was free to be taken for fuel.42 This is referred to in the seventh stanza of the poem; ‘joy for her when e’er in winter | The winds at night had made a rout, | And scattered many a lusty splinter, | And many a rotten bough about’ (ll.49–52). Significantly, Goody Blake will only presume to ‘pull’ wood from the ‘hedge of Harry Gill’ (l.64). This hedge is ‘old’ (l.60) and, Wordsworth is careful to inform us, borders a field which contains ‘a rick of barley’ and ‘stubble-land’. Harry, we know, is ‘a drover’, a man who drives cattle for a living, suggesting that the barley field is not his, and that the hedge runs between his pasture and neighbouring arable land. Goody Blake does not try any of the other three sides of the barley field—she concentrates on just the one. It seems entirely plausible that the hedge used to mark the division between farmland and the pasturage which could be used by all the villagers. The use of the word ‘pull’, rather than ‘break’, indicates that Goody Blake is obeying the commoning traditions which did not permit substantial damage to trees or hedges, again supporting the assumption that the hedge is the sole remnant of the scrubby woods and shrubs which once grew on the manorial waste, a resource which Goody Blake had once been permitted to use. Goody Blake is ‘old and poor’, ‘ill-fed’ and ‘thinly-clad’ (ll.21–2), a virtuous old countrywoman who still operates on the assumptions and traditions which have prevailed during the greater part of her life.  Harry’s anxiety, though, is presumably motivated by the concern that if Goody Blake takes too much snapwood, his animals may escape into the neighbouring Monthly Review (unsigned) 29 (May 1799): pp. 206–7. Christopher Jessel, The Law of the Manor (Chichester: Barry Rose Law Publishers,

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1998), p. 165. 42 Ibid., p. 194.

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barley field, and that he will be liable for any damage they might do. The hedge cannot continue to be both border and resource, and thus it serves as a locus for the irreconcilability of the new and old systems of land usage. Men like Harry are necessary for the economic prosperity of the country; though, as Schoenfield points out, Harry is not fully integrated into the local economy,43 he is implicated in the wider economy both as a drover and as a consumer of excess goods—‘of waistcoats’, the poet tells us, ‘Harry has no lack, | good duffle grey and flannel fine; | he has a blanket on his back | and coats enough to smother nine’ (ll.5– 8). It is true that Goody Blake makes very little money from her spinning, but without excessive consumers like Harry Gill, it is probable she might make nothing at all. As is well known, the poem draws on a medical case described in Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia.44 The commoning references, though, are the poet’s own. Wordsworth encourages us to diagnose Harry’s constant shivering as a psychosomatic expression of class guilt; a guilt which should, he suggests, be more productively channelled to encourage the ‘farmers’ addressed in the last stanza to devise a more effective system of support than the poor rates for those left behind by the tide of economic and agricultural change. But though the poem directs the reader to find Harry guilty, it may also indicate that he is a victim of the imperatives of property ownership, compelled to wait in the cold for Goody Blake, and compelled to rebuke her for her actions. ‘The Ruined Cottage’, another poem of the Racedown period,45 presents a less positive view of pre-enclosure commoning customs. The narrator of the poem, having ‘toiled’ across ‘a bare wide Common’ (MS. D, l.19), empty save for ‘a group of trees | Which midway in that level stood alone’ finds that they have grown up around ‘a ruined house, four naked walls | That stared upon each other’ (ll.27–32). Here, again, are signs of depopulation. For the narrator the common is not a resource in constant use, but the backdrop to a ‘tranquil ruin’ (l.218), a place to stop and hear a sad story in the ‘slant and mellow radiance’ of ‘the sun declining’. There is only sadness in the poem, no anger. The image of the ruined cottage might even be part of a pro-enclosure argument, indicating that the uncontrolled, uncultivated spaces of common and waste threaten to overwhelm the garden, symbol of order and productivity, for the destruction of the garden and the cottage is clearly connected to sheep, an example of what is sometimes referred to as ‘the tragedy of the commons’. Having left Margaret tearful but determined, ‘busy with her garden tools’ (l.283), the pedlar recalls returning to find the garden overgrown with ‘unprofitable bindweed’, the rose ‘bent down to earth’, and the Schoenfield, Professional Wordsworth, p. 103. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, the laws of organic life (2 vols, London: J. Johnson,

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1794), vol. 2, p. 359. 45 According to what Wordsworth told Isabella Fenwick in his old age, the poem was ‘indebted to observations made in Dorsetshire & afterwards at Alfoxden in Somersetshire’. William Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ed. James Butler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 3.

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herb border ‘straggled out into the paths’ (ll.314–20). He notices also that the door to the cottage is marked, ‘with dull red stains discoloured and stuck o’er | With tufts and hairs of wool, as if the sheep | That feed upon the commons thither came | Familiarly and found a couching place’ (ll.332–5). This is towards the end of summer, near harvest time, since the wheat is ‘yellow’ (l.299). When the pedlar returns again at the end of winter, ‘ere on its sunny bank the primrose flower | Had chronicled the earliest day of spring’ (ll.395–6), he finds Margaret’s garden not merely overgrown and neglected, but destroyed, trodden down by the sheep: The earth was hard,  With weeds defaced and knots of withered grass; No ridges there appeared of clear black mould, No winter greenness: of her herbs and flowers It seemed the better part were gnawed away Or trampled on the earth; a chain of straw Which had been twisted round the tender stem Of a young apple-tree lay at its root; The bark was nibbled round by truant sheep. (ll.414–22)

After the Racedown period, we find little reference to the debates about enclosure that appear to drive the two early Salisbury Plain poems, ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ and ‘The Ruined Cottage’. After 1803, notably, we find none at all. Once Jimmy-Grasp-All’s heir had agreed to return the money owed to John Wordsworth’s children, William’s anxieties about the morality of enclosure seem to have dissipated. Returned finally to the scenes of his childhood, the ‘red’ of his youthful political ideas seeped away into the green, enclosed landscape of the Lakes.

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Chapter 4

John Clare’s Weeds Mina Gorji

& weeds that bloomed in summers hours I thought they should be reckoned flowers They made a garden free for all & so I loved them great & small1

John Clare has been claimed both by the Reds and the Greens. Celebrated by Raymond Williams as the last of the peasant poets,2 his verse has been hailed as ‘one of the inaugurating moments of ecological consciousness in English literature’.3 In many ways a conservative in the tradition of Cobbett, he lamented the modernization of farming methods and the resulting ‘extinction of an entire way of life in harmony with the natural cycle of the day, season, and year’.4 And yet he was also a visionary, ahead of his time, whose verse registers ‘a scepticism as to the orthodoxy that economic growth and material production are the be-all and end-all of human society’, and a deep respect for the natural world; a writer who ‘shared many of the insights of the modern “green movement”’, and whose writing ‘anticipates ecocentric ethics’.5 Clare was distinguished as a lover of nature ‘in her humblest attire’. As a contemporary noted, ‘the sight of a simple weed seems to him a source of delight’.6 ‘The Progress of Rhyme’, John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period:1822–1837, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), vol. 3, p. 495, ll.85–8. Where the text of the poem was printed in Clare’s lifetime, I have used that edition, otherwise I have used the Oxford text, as here. 2 Merryn and Raymond Williams (eds), John Clare: Selected Poetry and Prose (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 4. Williams goes on to note, ‘Like them, he insisted that man did not own the earth and is not entitled to do whatever he likes with it’, p. 212. 3 James C. McCusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 79. 4 Ibid., p. 78. 5 Bridget Keegan, British Labouring-Class Poetry, 1730–1837 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 149. For discussions of the vital relationship between red and green, see Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1999); Raymond Williams, ‘Socialism and Ecology’, in Resources of Hope, ed. Robin Gable (London: Verso, 1989), and his earlier The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973). 6 Elizabeth Kent, Flora Domestica, or the Portable Flower Garden: With Directions for the Treatment of Plants in Pots (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1823), p. xxii. 1

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He was a poet who, in the words of his first editor John Taylor, loved ‘generally despised objects’,7 creatures considered vermin by his neighbours, badgers and moles, a mouse running with young ones hanging at her teats. He ‘found delight in scenes which no other poet has thought of celebrating. “The swampy falls of pasture ground, and rushy spreading greens … weed-beds wild and rank”’:8 SWAMPS of wild rush-beds, and sloughs’ squashy traces, Grounds of rough fallows with thistle and weed, Flats and low vallies of kingcups and daisies, Sweetest of subjects are ye for my reed: Ye commons left free in the rude rags of nature, Ye brown heaths be-clothed in furze as ye be, My wild eye in rapture adores every feature, Ye are dear as this heart in my bosom to me.9

What might be seen as rebarbative (‘thistles’ and ‘furze’, ‘weeds’, ‘rags’, ‘squashy traces’) are celebrated as ‘sweetest of subjects’—‘sweetest’ because they represent wild freedom—freedom from human control and domination, but also imaginative freedom; it was in such wild, weedy places that Clare’s imagination thrived. This essay assesses the significance of weeds in Clare’s poetry and describes how they are central to his imaginative and ecological concerns. It considers the literary significance of weeds in his writings, examining how they challenged systems of classification and value. It explores how Clare’s social, literary and ecological preoccupations became tangled and expressed in the figure of the weed. Why might this ‘peasant poet’ and amateur naturalist have been drawn to these unsung, unclassified plants? What did they represent in his writing? How might weeds illuminate our thinking about the interrelationship between social hierarchies and environmental concerns? The essay describes how his weeds challenge assumptions about the value of cultivation—social, agricultural, and also literary. It considers how Clare’s poetry is shaped by a deep social and ecological awareness and argues that his celebration of weeds registers, in intricate ways, an imaginative preoccupation with ‘the red and the green’. The term ‘weed’ is a cultural rather than a botanical description. Any plant could be a weed—but certain kinds of plants tend to be defined as weeds according to custom: nettles, brambles, dandelions, thistles and daisies rather than roses and lilies. One sense of weed, current in Clare’s lifetime, is ‘A herbaceous plant not valued for use or beauty, growing wild and rank, and regarded as cumbering the ground or hindering the growth of superior vegetation’ (OED, 1a). Cowper, whom

7 John Taylor, Introduction to John Clare, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1820), p. xxii. 8 Ibid., p. xxi. 9 John Clare, ‘Song’, The Village Minstrel and Other Poems (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1821), vol. 1, pp. 105–6, ll.1–8.

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Clare admired, expressed this common and prevailing attitude toward weeds in Book III of The Task: All hate the rank society of weeds, Noisome, and ever greedy to exhaust Th’ impoverish’d earth; an over-bearing race, That, like the multitude made faction-mad, Disturb good order, and degrade true worth.10

Weeds disturb the order of the garden, exhaust the soil—their disruptive influence is likened to the mob. Weeds resist cultivation and improvement, interrupting man’s effort to subdue nature for his own gain. And yet although weeds and thorns were traditionally seen as a legacy of the Fall, part of the primal curse, for Clare, the wild and weedy landscape was Edenic. Crabbe, like Clare, loved the unsung flora of marshland and swamp, but in The Village he too condemned weeds as disruptive and defiant: Rank weeds, that every art and care defy, Reign o’er the land and rob the blighted rye: There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar, And to the ragged infant threaten war.11

In these lines weeds symbolize devastation; for Clare they represented freedom and the triumph of nature. He turns to weeds again and again in his writing. Richard Mabey, whose recent study of weeds has given considerable space to Clare’s poems, has noted his characteristic attention to these unsung and oft-reviled plants, to the ragwort, the shepherds purse, the bramble, daisy, thistle and poppy. He suggests that ‘what gives many of Clare’s weed poems their intense charge is that they are elegies, memorials to a floral landscape that had been violated’,12 a lost Eden. One such poem is ‘Remembrances’ in which he recalls the common land and its fauna before it was ploughed up: Where bramble bushes grew & the daisy gemmed in dew & the hills of silken grass like to cushions to the view Where we threw the pismire crumbs when we’d nothing else to do All leveled like a desert by the never weary plough13

The Task, bk. III, ll.670–74: The Poetical Works of William Cowper, ed. H.S. Milford, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), p. 178. 11 George Crabbe, The Village, ll.67–70: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. N. Dalrymple-Champneys and A. Pollard (3 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), vol. 1, p. 159. 12 Richard Mabey, Weeds: How vagabond plants gatecrashed civilisation and changed the way we think about nature (London: Profile, 2010), p. 124. 13 Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 4, p. 132, ll.45–8. 10

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Like Burns, whom he admired, Clare mourns the fate of those weeds that have fallen victim to the plough. But where Burns stops to lament the fate of one mountain daisy, accidentally turned down, for Clare the plough was also a metonym for agricultural improvement. In these lines and elsewhere we see Clare bitterly opposing the modernizing agricultural practice of enclosure.14 In 1809, when Clare was only 16 years old, an Act of Parliament was passed for the enclosure of Helpston and its four surrounding parishes which resulted in a profound transformation of the landscape and the destruction of the hedgerows, streams and commons which provided habitats for many wild creatures. Enclosure destroyed fragile ecosystems and it also disrupted ancient social spaces and customs, all, Clare believed, for the sake of productivity and economic gain. He protested against the new intensive farming methods aimed at maximizing profit at the expense of social and environmental concerns in a number of poems. Open fields were divided between private landowners and fenced off, old trees cut down, roads and drainage ditches were straightened, and the common heathland with its rich plant life was ploughed up, including many weeds. These lines from ‘The Village Minstrel’ (1821) express his anger most eloquently: There once were springs, when daisies’ silver studs Like sheets of snow on every pasture spread; There once were summers, when the crow-flower buds Like golden sunbeams brightest lustre shed; And trees grew once that shelter’d Lubin’s head; There once were brooks sweet whimpering down the vale: The brooks no more—kingcup and daisy fled; Their last fallen tree the naked moors bewail, And scarce a bush is left to tell the mournful tale.15

This is a poem describing the aftermath of the most significant social and environmental transformation Clare encountered in his lifetime. But Clare’s weed poems are not all elegiac—many celebrate the enduring tenacity of weeds that survive and thrive. Clare’s love of weeds is part of a wider interest in wild landscapes that find shape in his writing. He worked the land, and yet he came to love the uncultivated landscape, ‘scenes where man hath never trod’.16 He ploughed fields and threshed and laboured, but he also valued those things that resisted man’s efforts to subdue nature. In Clare’s writing, weeds represent something crucial to the poetic as well as the ecological imagination; they are not cultivated but grow accidentally. As For an examination of the cultural impact of enclosure in the eighteenth century, see Rachel Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 15 Village Minstrel, vol. 1, p. 48, ll.811–19. 16 ‘I Am’, The Later Poems of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), vol. 1, p. 397, l.123. 14

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such they symbolize an idea of poetry which goes beyond cultivation and polish and which accommodates randomness, accident—what we might term a messy, rude poetic.17 ‘Wildness’, he exclaims in ‘Cowper Green’, ‘is my suiting scene’: Where uncheck’d the brambles spread; Where the thistle meets the sight, With its down-head, cotton-white; And the nettle, keen to view, And hemlock with its gloomy hue; Where the henbane too finds room For its sickly-stinking bloom; And full many a nameless weed, Neglected, left to run to seed, Seen but with disgust by those Who judge a blossom by the nose.18

Again and again Clare celebrates the uncultivated, the unpolished, the unimproved and neglected in the landscape—swamps, broken fences, weeds. In doing so he distinguished himself from other labourer poets, such as Stephen Duck and Robert Bloomfield, who sang the labours of cultivation. He was thus writing against the grain of Georgic poetry, which celebrated rural labour and improvement, but also against expectations of what a rural poet might describe. His resistance to the forms and ideology of improvement speaks to red and green in various and subtly interconnected ways. This love of the uncultivated was part of a larger cultural drift, one which Keith Thomas has described in Man and the Natural World: ‘The progress of cultivation had fostered a taste for weeds, mountains and unsubdued nature’.19 Weeds were part of this turn to the unsubdued and wild—they appear and signify a transgression of this division—as Richard Mabey has recently shown—when the wild invades the cultivated. And yet this was particularly poignant and significant for Clare, who in many ways embodied the uncultivated entering the realms of the cultivated, the peasant appearing in the polite world of print. Indeed, he makes the analogy explicitly in an early poem. ‘Address to an Insignificant Flower Obscurely Blooming in a Lonely Wild’ (1820), in which he likens himself to a ‘weedling wild’.20

See Mina Gorji, ‘John Clare and the Poetics of Mess’, Moveable Type, sh/graduate/ issue/5/html/Mina_Gorji.htm, and John Clare and the Place of Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008). 18 Village Minstrel, vol. 1, pp. 112–13, ll.60–70. 19 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (London: Allen Lane, 1984), p. 301. 20 For a discussion of Clare’s flower poetry and its intertextual richness, see Gorji, John Clare and the Place of Poetry, Chapter 2. 17

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This celebration of weeds is part of a wider appreciation of the wild and neglected in Clare’s writing. Rather than celebrating the well-kept and artfully ordered landscape, Clare celebrates the art of neglect: The bank with brambles over spread & little molehills round about it Was more to me then laurel shades With paths & gravel finely clouted 21

The unkempt is privileged over the well-ordered and genteel garden with its laurel trees and fine pathways. He develops this preference in a number of poems: There is a wild & beautiful neglect About the fields that so delights & cheers Where nature her own feelings to effect Is left at her own silent work for years The simplest thing thrown in our way delights From the wild careless feature that it wears The very road that wanders out of sight Crooked & free is pleasant to behold & such the very weeds left free to flower Corn poppys red & carlock gleaming gold That makes the corn field shine in summers hour 22

Here the words ‘gold’ and ‘shine’ confer value unexpectedly on plants often seen as a blight. As well as redirecting these terms of praise on lowly subjects, in these lines Clare also reclaims words often seen as pejorative: in his poetic lexicon, ‘careless’ and ‘crooked’ are positive aesthetic terms. It is the ‘wild careless feature’ that delights, as in the following lines from ‘Shadows of Taste’: He loves each desolate neglected spot That seems in labours hurry left forgot The warped & punished trunk of stunted oak Freed from its bonds but by the thunder stroke As crampt by straggling ribs of ivy sere 23

Here ‘warped’ and ‘punished’ are positive aesthetic features, and although they seem to depend on neglect, ‘in labours hurry left forgot’, they were in fact recognizable attributes of an established aesthetic in the early nineteenth century: the picturesque.

‘Decay a Ballad’, Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 4, p. 114, ll.11–14. ‘Pleasant Spots’, Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 4, p. 299, ll.1–11. 23 Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 3, pp. 308–9, ll.141–5. 21

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Clare’s love of weeds can itself be understood in relation to this taste for the picturesque in art and poetry of the period. Weeds appear as part of a picturesque scene depicted and celebrated in the following lines by Richard Payne Knight: But here again, ye rural nymphs, oppose Nature’s and Art’s confederated foes! Break their fell scythes, that would these beauties shave, And sink their iron rollers in the wave! Your favourite plants, and native haunts protect, In wild obscurity, and rude neglect; Or teach proud man his labour to employ To form and decorate, and not destroy; Teach him to place, and not remove the stone On yonder bank, with moss and fern o’ergrown; To cherish, not mow down, the weeds that creep Along the shore, or overhang the steep; To break, not level, the slow-rising ground, And guard, not cut, the fern that shades it round. But let not still the o’erbearing pride of taste Turn fertile districts to a forest’s waste:24

This poem exemplifies a taste for the picturesque developing in the early part of the nineteenth century and with which Clare was familiar. Knight was one of several, including William Gilpin and Uvedale Price, who formulated ideas of the picturesque. In eighteenth-century aesthetic theory it was distinguished from the beautiful by its ruggedness and irregularity. Christopher Hussey points out (in a book first published in 1927 but influential today) that Dutch art established that certain objects were suitable for description, although not beautiful or sublime, such as ‘gnarled trees, sandy banks, water and windmills, rough heaths, rustic bridges, stumpy logs, ruts, hovels, unkempt persons and shaggy animals’.25 Clare’s poems are full of such subjects; his love of weeds might also be seen in context of this picturesque aesthetic.26 As David Trotter has explained, there was, for Price, ‘a particular affinity between productive decays and the socially low or marginal’;27 weeds too were associated with the socially marginal. Clare makes this explicit in a number of poems where he draws on words which have currency as terms of social description to discuss weeds—‘humble’, ‘persecuted’, ‘ragged’, ‘tattered’, ‘low’. One R.P. Knight, The Landscape: A Didactic Poem in Three Books, 2nd ed. (London: G. Nicol, 1795), p. 409, ll.186ff. 25 David Trotter, ‘Naturalism’s phobic picturesque’, Critical Quarterly 51 (2009): pp. 33–58. 26 He was friends with a number of painters in the picturesque tradition, including De Wint, and developed the picturesque aesthetic in a number of poems. See Tim Brownlow, John Clare and Picturesque Landscape (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 27 Trotter, ‘Naturalism’s phobic picturesque’, p. 38. 24

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example, as we shall see, was ‘The Ragwort’. Trotter goes on to explain that for Price, ‘The picturesque … is to be found above all among the “wandering tribes of gypsies and beggars” who ‘bear a close analogy to the wild forester and worn out cart-horse, and again to old mills, hovels, and other inanimate objects of the same kind’.28 Weeds might offer another example, and one which is developed in Clare’s writing in distinctive ways. For Clare this association between the socially humble and the picturesque subject was of course particularly significant—he was himself considered a picturesque object—a peasant poet dressed in ragged clothes and illfitting hobnail boots, who was, to his dismay, often the subject of genteel attention. Writing about weeds, the peasant poet reclaimed the picturesque as subject. Price aimed to ‘justify and promote a high taste for low objects’,29 and for some, this taste was itself a measure of refinement and high social status. In this context, celebrating waste and weeds can be seen as a mark of high taste.30 Something of this is evident in the following lines from a note by Wordsworth. Wordsworth admired weeds such as poor robin, a wild geranium, but noted that not everybody shared his tastes: Strangely do the tastes of men differ according to their employment and habits of life. “What a nice well would that be,” said a labouring man to me one day, “if all that rubbish was cleared off.” The “rubbish” was some of the most beautiful mosses & lichens & ferns, & other wild growths, as could possibly be seen. Defend us from the tyranny of trimness & neatness showing itself in this way! Chatterton says of freedom— “Upon her head wild weeds were spread;” and depend upon it if “the marvellous boy” had undertaken to give Flora a garland, he would have preferred what we are apt to call weeds to garden-flowers. True taste has an eye for both. Weeds have been called flowers out of place. I fear the place most people would assign to them is too limited. Let them come near to our abodes, as surely they may without impropriety or disorder.31

Wordsworth suggests that good taste was determined by a man’s occupation. He implies here that the love of weeds and mess was the preserve of the cultivated man of taste, not the lowly labourer, whose occupation precluded him from loving what he must tidy up. Clare was both labourer and a lover of weeds. He knew the hard task of weeding and yet he loved weeds and celebrated them in is writing: Each morning, now, the weeders meet To cut the thistle from the wheat,

Ibid. Ibid., p. 39. 30 For a rich and lively discussion of the significance of waste and scatology in 28 29

eighteenth-century art and writing, see Sophie Gee, Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 31 The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2003), p. 75.

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And ruin, in the sunny hours, Full many a wild weed with its flowers; — Corn-poppies, that in crimson dwell, Call’d “Head-achs”, from their sickly smell; And charlocks, yellow as the sun, That o’er the May-fields quickly run; And “Iron-weed,” content to share The meanest spot that Spring can spare—32

In these lines from The Shepherd’s Calendar, naming dignifies the weeds. Clare draws attention to the common names for plants such as ‘head-achs’ and ‘Ironweed’, and naming each weed, he gives it value. Clare is not writing about weeds simply as a farm labourer, paid to uproot them from the fields, but also as a poet alive to their beauty, and to the beauty of the uncultivated. It is perhaps aptly ironic that, writing a sonnet to Wordsworth, he thinks of weeds. Doing so, he is celebrating Wordsworth’s shared affection for these common vagabond plants, and also using the weed as a figure for literary value that transcends fashionable taste: WORDSWORTH I love; his books are like the fields, Not filled with flowers, but works of human kind; The pleasant weed a fragrant pleasure yields, The briar and broomwood shaken by the wind, The thorn and bramble o’er the water shoot A finer flower than gardens e’er give birth, The aged huntsman grubbing up the root— I love them all as tenants of the earth: Where genius is, there often die the seeds; What critics throw away I love the more; I love to stoop and look among the weeds, To find a flower I never knew before: WORDSWORTH, go on—a greater poet be, Merit will live, though parties disagree! 33

Clare’s sonnet gives us a view of Wordsworth at odds with received understanding. And yet when Clare was writing this sonnet, in the asylum in Northampton, he still believed that Wordsworth was a neglected, marginalized figure. Clare is attempting to redeem him in these lines, claiming him as a weed, a finer flower than those found in cultivated gardens. Perhaps the most triumphant and sustained example of Clare’s celebration of weeds occurs in his sonnet ‘The Ragwort’, written in 1832:

32 John Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar with Village Stories and Other Poems (London: John Taylor, 1827), p. 47. 33 ‘To Wordsworth’, The Later Poems of John Clare, vol. 1, p. 25.

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Ragwort thou humble flower with tattered leaves I love to see thee come & litter gold What time the summer binds her russet sheaves Decking rude spots in beautys manifold That without thee were dreary to behold Sun burnt & bare—the meadow bank the baulk That leads a waggonway through mellow fields Rich with the tints that harvests plenty yields Browns of all hues—& every where I walk Thy waste of shining blossoms richly shields The sun tanned sward in splendid hues that burn So bright & glaring that the very light Of the rich sunshine doth to paleness turn & seems but very shadows in thy sight34

This witty poem questions our assumptions about what is beautiful: this is no elegant garden, but a sunburnt plain, a wasteland, and this is no lily, but a weed with tattered leaves, one which was poisonous to livestock and reviled by farmers. But here Clare is challenging assumptions that the ragwort was a weed, a plant without beauty and value, and celebrating it as a flower. Rather than a blemish, it beautifies the landscape. The poem is also challenging other forms of classification. The language of social distinction bears on his description of the flower: it is a ‘humble’ flower with ‘tattered’ leaves, a ‘ragged’ ‘ragwort’, and these words convey a sense of poverty which chimes with the sense of ‘litter’ (used as a verb here) as refuse, rubbish, garbage, trash, something without value. But Clare surprises us with the word ‘gold’: it sits unexpectedly next to ‘litter’. This is the kind of dialogic dissonance characteristic of many of Clare’s finest poems: words sit in awkward relation, drawing attention to competing values and systems of classification. ‘Gold’ is part of a semantic field of words associated with high value threaded through the sonnet. It chimes with ‘rich’—which with its variant ‘richly’, is repeated four times: ‘richly shields’, ‘rich with the tints’, ‘rich sunshine’. These two competing vocabularies, associated with poverty and wealth, concentrate in and put pressure on the word ‘waste’ in the tenth line. As so often in Clare, arguments are focused into key words: ‘waste’ stands out for attention. It is underlined by a run of t sounds spreading from ‘ragwort’ through ‘tattered ... litter ... burnt’—which carry a sense of the rebarbative, and this sound run encourages us to interpret ‘waste’ according to its predominant sense, ‘worthless’. This sense is drawn out by inference as well, since ragworts tend to grow in waste ground or wilderness. But in this case the word is being used in another, now obsolete, sense— meaning ‘abundance’ (OED, 5f). This doubleness focuses a larger argument about value—that waste might carry value, that what might appear to be worthless is rich, that wilderness, uncultivated ground is valuable—in terms of beauty rather Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 4, pp. 324–5.

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than of ‘use’. Here is a green poem, then, a celebration of wild landscape, with its ‘rude’ spots and an uncultivated flower. But it could also be interpreted as a red poem, one which challenges the alignment between social hierarchy and value; the humble, low and ragged—social as well as aesthetic subjects—were to be celebrated rather than reviled. By making a claim that the ragwort, usually despised as weed, is beautiful, Clare is questioning how we conventionally define beauty. Here, the language of waste and value is being reworked—doing so he is recalling a historical literary discourse. Thinking about value and waste, Clare was drawing on Shakespeare’s sonnets, which were among his favourite poems: he turned to them again and again over the course of his writing life. In September 1824 he mentions that he was reading Shakespeare’s sonnets which were ‘great favourites’.35 Clare’s sonnet isn’t Shakespearean in form—it is, appropriately enough, a form that resists classification: an odd, idiosyncratic arrangement with couplets placed in the centre. But his poem draws on language and cadences from Shakespeare. And, like Shakespeare’s sonnets, it is alive with what Helen Vendler has termed a ‘drama of linguistic action’.36 The ‘tattered leaves’ in Clare’s first line recalls the ‘tattered weed of small worth held’ in Shakespeare’s second sonnet: When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field, Then our proud livery, so gazed on now, Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held:37

This is a sonnet questioning beauty: Shakespeare’s metaphorical fields, scored by age, are reified and softened in Clare to ‘mellow fields’, the trenches turn to meadow banks and baulks. Shakespeare’s ‘tattered weed of small worth held’ is transplanted as a ragwort in Clare’s poem—the ragwort, with its ‘tattered’ leaves, is to many, especially to farmers, a plant of small worth held—but Clare is challenging this classification, and celebrating the ragwort as a flower of great beauty. Flowers are often used as a symbol for poetry: ‘poesy’ is a kind of ‘posey’ and ‘anthology’ comes from the Greek gathering of flowers. The ragwort stands as a symbol of Clare’s own uncultivated poetic: he was not learned, rich or cultivated and genteel. Weeds provide an emblem for a dominant critical account of Clare’s place in the literary order of things—there is a prevailing image of Clare as an uncouth, uncultivated poet consigned to the social and literary margins. In his time, Clare often encouraged this analogy, likening himself to a ‘weedling wild’ in John Clare, The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 177. 36 Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 4. 37 William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, With a New Commentary by David West (London: Duckworth Overlook, 2007), p. 20. 35

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a number of poems, such as ‘Address to an Insignificant Flower’. Making a claim for the value of the tattered, wild humble ragwort, Clare is arguing that beauty should not be confined to the genteel and rich, but open to all. Contemporary critics were alive to this levelling tendency in his writing: ‘there is no aristocracy of beauty’ in Clare, ‘but the stag and the hog, the weed and the flower, find an equal place in his verse’.38 This levelling speaks to both the red and the green in subtle ways. ‘The Ragwort’ is a celebration of waste and neglect, and of how productive they can be—not economically, but culturally and imaginatively. The poem is an eloquent testimony to Clare’s quarrel with improvement. At a time when productivity, gain and profit were increasingly valued in society, and farming methods were being developed to maximize profits at the expense of local communities, environments and wildlife, Clare’s celebration of weeds is a powerful indictment of this limited view of the world. The triumph of the weed in Clare’s work also represents an ecological vision, of a world in which man is not at the centre. This is perhaps most beautifully expressed in the concluding lines to his great elegiac poem ‘The Flitting’. In this elegy for a lost home, this poem about displacement, it is perhaps fitting that the weed, a plant often defined as essentially ‘out of place’, should triumph: Time looks on pomp with careless moods Or killing apathys disdain —So where old marble citys stood Poor persecuted weeds remain She feels a love for little things That very few can feel beside & still the grass eternal springs Where castles stood & grandeur died 39

After all the palaces have fallen, the meek shall inherit the earth; the weeds and the grass are what shall endure. This is both profoundly green and deeply red— the humble, little, persecuted shall triumph over the mighty. Here is a triumphant vision of a world in which nature has reclaimed the land—one which Edward Thomas, a great admirer of Clare, returns to in his writing: I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the graves, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers—as an 38 Monthly Review 91 (March 1820), in Mark Storey (ed.), John Clare: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1995 [1978]), p. 75. See also Mark Storey, ‘Clare and the Critics’, in Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips and Geoffrey Summerfield (eds), John Clare in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 36–7; and Douglas Chambers, ‘“A love for every simple weed”: Clare, botany and the poetic language of lost Eden’, ibid., p. 244. 39 Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 3, pp. 488–9, ll.209–16

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unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero. I like to see the preliminaries of this toil where Nature tries her hand at mossing the factory roof, rusting the deserted railway metals, sowing grass over the deserted platforms and flowers of rose-bay on ruinous hearths and walls. It is a real satisfaction to see the long narrowing wedge of irises that runs alongside and between the rails of the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway almost into the heart of London.40

Clare’s was a different terrain with different soil, weeds and foliage, and he was writing when the railways and factories were only just arriving. And yet he can still imagine the time when the grass will triumph over the vanity of man. Clare’s weeds represent an alternative value system, one that is especially significant today. They speak to us now at a time when our cultural values are being undermined once again by the idea of financial gain, where culture is harnessed to profit and economic growth. For Clare weeds are beautiful, and part of their beauty consists in being outside the system of productivity and profit. They are stubborn reminders of other ways of seeing the world. In one sense perhaps they are a symbol of poetry, art for art’s sake, but more than this, they represent an idea of art that is not socially confined and an ecology that is not anthropocentric; they are an acknowledgement of a more enduring order of things.

40 Edward Thomas, The South Country, Everyman’s Library (London: J.M. Dent, 1909), pp. 98–9.

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Chapter 5

John Clare & … & … & … Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizome Simon Kövesi

If he delivers a clarion call at the beginnings of green thought, the outlines of John Clare’s politics cannot so straightforwardly be coloured red, though many of his most significant promoters have wanted to do exactly that. It is true that Clare honed sharp resentments against the corruption of entrenched social hierarchies, capitalist greed, self-righteous elitism and individualistic self-promotion. But equally he was nervous about ‘radical’ movements which peppered—and sometimes disrupted—rural and national affairs. If the poet’s role had been broadly idealized in the eighteenth century as that of a gentleman pursuing a literary hobby ideally in the care of a good patron, by the 1820s it was transforming into a professional career, much to the distaste of anyone with eighteenth-century tastes, and a patron’s wealth, such as Byron. Clare was therefore unfortunate in being in continual and desperate need of financial assistance at a time when patronage was becoming unfashionable. A relatively threadbare form of patronage is what he received; as many critics have suggested, perhaps its limitation was designed to keep his genius loci fixed in its original social and geographical place. Nevertheless, while Clare resented the genuflecting and pandering central to the process of courting power, the necessary moderation and qualification of his precarious political subjectivity must have given some steer to the politics of his poetic voice overall. Even if Clare is determined to satirize all manner of corrupting social ills from what we today might want to call a ‘left’ position, he also writes solidly celebratory poems about king and country, military victory and heroes,1 which—while they might seem formulaic and relatively hollow in comparison to other elements of his work which attract more serious critical treatment—at least must be included in an assessment of his

1 For four indicative examples, see ‘Waterloo’, Early Poems of John Clare, 1804– 1822, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and Margaret Grainger (2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), vol. 1, pp. 208–11; ‘Sonnet’ (‘England with pride I name thee…’), Early Poems of John Clare, vol. 2, p. 599; ‘Nelson & the Nile’, John Clare: Poems of the Middle Period, 1822–1837, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson (5 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1996–2003), vol. 4, pp. 100–104; ‘On Seeing the Bust of Princess Victoria by Behnes’, John Clare: Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 4, pp. 160–61.

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political colour. There is indeed evidence to support Richard Heath’s notorious characterization of Clare in his survey The English Peasant of 1893: With a love for his native scenes, capable of being developed into the intensest patriotism, with a love of old customs and old institutions—in fact, a Conservative by nature—he is driven to cry— O England! boasted land of liberty2

This conservative reading of Clare at the end of the nineteenth century was by no means dominant subsequent to Heath’s claim. The relatively apolitical approaches of scholar-poets and editors such as Arthur Symons, Edmund Blunden and Geoffrey Grigson was gradually replaced in the 1960s to 1980s by a more openly leftist accommodation of Clare’s work (notably by Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson). An illustrative example of the ways Clare was constructed in this recent Marxist past arises in Edward Bond’s play The Fool.3 With some justification firing his dramatic licence, Bond places a lusty young Clare near the centre of Littleport in 1816—a logical move as Clare’s village of Helpston lies only about 40 miles northwest of Littleport. This Cambridgeshire village is chosen as the locale because it saw the start of violent hunger riots in 1816. In Bond’s play, Clare watches his friends’ disorganized agitation and despairing aggression in the face of a fiercely guarded social hierarchy. He crumbles into insanity in the face of their deportation and hanging. Bond’s Clare is fired up by this radicalism and made mad both by its failure and his untrammelled recourse to sins of the flesh. The Fool is structured upon class, and the unfairness in the distribution of wealth, food and land. Other than an extended polemic about enclosure, and the odd moment of entranced fly- and moon-staring, Clare as a committed natural historian and poet of green life hardly has any presence at all in this play. In broad terms, this was the Clare of the early 1970s, before John Barrell’s ground-breaking study made the wider understanding of the poet far more contextually and aesthetically complex. Since Barrell, important responses to Clare from the likes of John Lucas and Roger Sales have continued to claim Clare for a loosely left-leaning agenda,4 though all are much more attuned than Bond’s play to Clare as a poet, as a master of language and literature, and as a natural and cultural historian. There have been

2 Richard Heath, The English Peasant (1893), extracted in Mark Storey (ed.), John Clare: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 294. 3 Edward Bond, The Fool; and, We Come to the River (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976). 4 See, for example, John Lucas, England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry, 1688–1900 (London: Hogarth Press, 1990), pp. 135–60; John Lucas, John Clare (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994); Roger Sales, John Clare: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).

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more centrist and conservative takes on Clare, most usefully by Paul Dawson,5 though the dominant critical current reads Clare as having a more politically nuanced and multifarious set of mobile positions—Zachary Leader and Alan Vardy’s work is central here.6 Yet it remains unsurprising that Clare is a central part of Jonathan Bate’s determination to switch the colour of our general literary critical lens from red to green, which was followed up purposefully with his influential biography, and a selection of Clare’s work.7 Since Bate’s Romantic Ecology, Romantic-period ecocriticism has maintained that the relationship between red and green could be less oppositional. For Karl Kroeber, green politics does not have to replace red, but can work symbiotically. Adopting an unashamedly Romantic critical position in his attack on high theory and new historicism, Kroeber sees critical oppositionalism as being the unfortunate and politicized product of a cold war mindset. For Kroeber, history and nature, historicizing criticism and aesthetic green readings, should go hand in hand in the pursuit of a complicating and energizing understanding of the literature of the natural world. This process, he claims, would enable ‘us to interact in a responsible manner with our environment’.8 Kroeber’s idealizing version of Romanticism is uncritically canonical, and so ignores Clare. Nevertheless he is provocative. His critique of entrenched oppositionist critical positions should give us pause when considering the critical world of Clare studies, which, as I have discussed elsewhere,9 is coping with its own—often tacit—legacy of embattled critical positions and politically informed editorial approaches. Clare himself, of course, made no reference to the set of opposing British political wings we now deploy freely—blue, red or green—and which for him, as a political spectrum running left to right, would only recently have developed out of the model of the National Assembly in Paris. He was consistently resistant to any large-scale political affiliation. In 1830, for example, in a political poem where the central resistance is to ‘self interest’, ‘cant’, sycophancy and hypocrisy, Clare writes,

5 P.M.S. Dawson, ‘John Clare—Radical?’, John Clare Society Journal 11 (1992): pp. 17–27, and ‘Common Sense or Radicalism? Some Reflections on Clare’s Politics’, Romanticism 2/1 (1996): pp. 81–97. 6 Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 206–61. Alan Vardy, John Clare, Politics and Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). 7 Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 8–9; John Clare: A Biography (London: Picador, 2003); ‘I Am’: The Selected Poetry of John Clare (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). 8 Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 21. 9 Simon Kövesi, ‘Beyond the Language Wars: Towards a Green Edition of John Clare’, John Clare Society Journal 26 (2007): pp. 61–75. See also Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship.

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This sort of cynicism about all political agitation is a constant in Clare’s works when politics surface explicitly, so the discerning of a codified set of rigid commitments from him is a project to be treated with caution. Yet, we can say that as a natural historian, and a nostalgic elegist for times past and worlds lost, there was plenty he wanted to conserve, and lots of cultural as well as natural forms he thought might be, or were already, lost forever without active efforts of conservation. But as a working-class critic of human activity and social structure, there was much he would like to have changed, and much he thought should change. Not radically, not violently, and ostensibly not at the macro-level of the state; still, the sheer amount and tenor of protest in Clare’s work overall means we have at least to accept him broadly as an agitator for progress and change. As evidence of Clare’s radicalism, many critics have turned to the famous response of Clare’s patron—the Tory Lord Radstock—who bridled at what he called Clare’s ‘radical Slang’.11 In a comprehensive account of Radstock, Roger Sales surmises that the patron ‘combined his obsessive crusade against radicalism with philanthropic concern for the poor’, but was also ‘a bully and an interfering busybody’.12 On balance, it is a testament to the precarious line that Clare and his liberally minded publisher John Taylor walked, that Radstock did not withdraw his patronage, but maintained a supportive interest until he died in 1825, an interest that was to be materially and socially significant for Clare, which Sales admits. Clare’s publications were censored at the behest of Radstock, but the relationship carried on, and Clare continued as a publishing poet. Clare’s political lubricity can be summarized by the following symptomatic example: one of the stanzas of ‘The Village Minstrel’ Radstock objected to in the 1820s is the same one quoted by Richard Heath above, in support of his claim in the 1890s that Clare was conservative. If nothing else definitive emerges from the ‘radical slang’ episode, it is at least apparent that—in conjunction with his risk-taking editors—Clare played a pretty sophisticated political game. He might well have been ‘neither wig nor tory’, but in the turbulent 1820s he did little to trouble either camp. This strategy kept his options as open as they could be, given the severe strictures of his social position. 10 ‘Familiar Epistle to a Friend’, Poems of the Middle Period, 1822–1837, vol. 4, pp. 508–17 (p. 509). 11 Bate, John Clare, pp. 218–9. 12 Sales, John Clare, pp. 51–9 (pp. 53 and 56).

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However, the social limits on Clare did not simply carry through in an unaltered fashion into the deep structures of his verse. Of course, many critics before now have implied that Clare’s politics rest not just in what he says, but how he says it. The most radical Clare is in fact embedded in the latent structures of his poetry—and this root-level politicization is almost anarchic in its levelling of hierarchies—and squarely ‘green’ (in our contemporary sense) in its purposeful rendering of de-centred interconnection. This essay will suggest that Clare’s levelling connections—applied to human life and natural life without recourse to the staple division of man from nature—is indeed radical, because it posits a root-level sociality between all subjects and bodies in the material world: radical stems from the Latin radix, the roots of a plant, the origin, base or source. This essay will contend that society, for Clare, does not imply the workings of a world of humanity alone—but is always about rootedness, interconnection, intra-species relation, and the dynamic processing of mutualities. There is nothing particularly new in finding such structures in his work. For John Barrell, Clare’s vision delivers a natural simultaneity and resists the ordered linearity of eighteenth-century landscape art and poetry. Clare resists existing models through connectivity, and at the grammatical level Barrell tracks a resistance to syntactical subordination, enabling Clare to deliver a scene all at once, with no element necessarily taking precedence. To Barrell, this structural framework reflects Clare’s ‘open-field sense of space’,13 which resists the clipped linearity of post-enclosure landscape. In an open-field landscape, the ‘field would thus present itself to the observer as a scene of continuous and simultaneous activity, carried on in all parts of the field yet visible “at a glance”, and in which almost the entire village was engaged.’14 For Barrell, Clare’s engagement with locality, with the tight Helpston environs, is also a resistance to the ‘ideology of enclosure, which sought to de-localize, to take away the individuality of a place’.15 Barrell’s interlocking reading of Clare’s resistance to existing aesthetic models, grammatical subordination and the parceling lines of enclosure is accepted widely as the most significant reading of Clare in the modern era. The approach of the present essay is similarly to locate meaning through the structure of Clare’s work, and to extend Barrell’s establishment of the relation between land and line, by pursuing a green social connectivity. The establishing of connection and coordination between man and nature; the narrowing of the space between definitions of culture and nature, man and environment; the resisting of anthropocentrism and subordination of the natural world to man’s needs—all of these ongoing intentions are central to the ethical promise of ecocriticism. They feed into the following reading of a Clare

13 John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1972), p. 103. 14 Ibid., p. 105. 15 Ibid., p. 120.

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sonnet. The reading is methodologically driven by Deleuze and Guattari’s model of interconnectivity that is the ‘rhizome’. The following title-less poem is one of many sonnets written between 1832 and 1837, when Clare was living with his family at Northborough, a village under 4 miles’ walk from Helpston. The text is a ‘primitivist’ transcription from manuscript, and so retains the lack of punctuation and indentation, and retains Clare’s ampersands, which I think are significant. The shepherds almost wonder where they dwell & the old dog for his night journey stares The path leads somewhere but they cannot tell & neighbour meets with neighbour unawares The maiden passes close beside her cow & wonders on & think her far away The ploughman goes unseen behind his plough & seems to loose his horses half the day The lazy mist creeps on in journey slow The maidens shout & wonder where they go So dull & dark are the november days The lazy mist high up the evening curled & now the morn quite hides in smokey haze The place we occupy seems all the world16

There is no introduction, no slow ramp up, no scene-setting: the scene here is immediate, or rather the occupants of the scene determine where we are immediately, and they are the pluralized ‘shepherds’. The certainty implied by the introductory definite article, which defines a group noun ‘shepherds’, has given way by the next and third word ‘almost’ to an effect of uncertainty and indeterminacy. The first line then begs a question: what is it to almost wonder? The first line is a complete sentence, as so many of Clare’s sonnet lines are (it is no coincidence that he parodied enjambment in Wordsworth17). Therefore a connective bridge, the innocent, often ignored, ampersand begins the following sentence. Next we are given a singular ‘old dog’ on a ‘night journey’, which implies that the setting overall is in the darkness of night. We do not know why, or at what, the dog is ‘staring’. The third line does not resolve the mystery: ‘they’ must be the shepherds and the dog, and they are lost. Shepherds and dog have been formed into an alliance by perplexity, and by this third line things are becoming a little spooky, worrying, unstable and more indeterminate. The fourth line adds to the indeterminacy in a moment of strangeness quite typical of the poet. Clare, developing a mode redolent of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Poems of the Middle Period, 1822 –1837, vol. 5, p. 268. See also John Clare: Northborough Sonnets, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson (Ashington and Manchester: Carcanet, 1995), p. 67. 17 See ‘Sonnet after the Manner of X X X X X’, John Clare: Poems of the Middle Period, 1822–1837, vol. 2, p. 7. 16

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Ballads, is a poet of strange, defamiliarizing and discombobulating encounters. Here, however, there is no ‘I’: no ostensible subject position to be perplexed. Instead we have half-encounters between people and animals who do, and then almost do not, know each other. The fourth line is introduced with yet another ‘&’. Another two figures are introduced in the fifth and sixth lines: the maiden and the cow, in close proximity, but the maiden (though possibly the cow), ‘wonders on’. This is the second instance of ‘wonder’ so far. The maiden thinks that the cow, or herself, is ‘far away’. Wondering (meaning surprise, astonishment, or marvel) carries with it the activity of ‘wandering’—and this poem is particularly directed towards sauntering, uncertain direction, roaming and rambling or, as the OED has it, moving ‘hither and thither without fixed course or certain aim; to be in motion without control or direction; to roam, ramble, go idly or restlessly about; to have no fixed abode or station’. This is an overall effect brought about by this poem: it makes many elements, usually rooted in work and diurnal procedure, nomadic, loosened from locale, freed from determinism. Space, time of day, relation, purpose—all seem troubled and vexed, mystified and perplexed. The ghostly train of characters in the scene is trailed by the ploughman who is ‘unseen’—and so a driverless plough half appears. The second repetition of ‘plough’ in the same line, but now without the attached ‘man’, is exactly what seems to have happened—the man has been mysteriously dissolved away from his plough. The word ‘seems’ following an ampersand in the eighth line adds to the developing mystification of perception. In this same line, the doubling of the meaning of ‘lose’ through the given ‘loose’ is central to the meaning of the poem: all of these characters, human and animal alike, have lost their way, and have had their grip on their locations, directions and associations loosened—both relaxed and troubled, perplexed and released—by whatever agent is doing the mystification; the agent of disarray is yet to reveal itself. The personified agent—the magically mystifying mist—enters late, in the ninth line. Ecolinguistic theory suggests that modern discourse—especially scientific— does not readily allow natural elements to take a subject position, nor are they allowed much independent agency. Nature is acted upon, and does not act itself; if it has a voice, it is often passive; and when nature is given verbs they are often nominalized (processes are recoded into nouns).18 By contrast Clare repeatedly allows natural elements to take centre stage, and rather than being the stage upon which human subjects speak, instead nature forms separate dramatis personae. At times Clare allows a natural locality to actively voice a whole poem, most

18 See, for example, Andrew Goatly, ‘Green Grammar and Grammatical Metaphor, or Language and Myth of Power, or Metaphors We Die By’, in Alwin Fill and Peter Mühlhäusler (eds), The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Environment (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), pp. 203–25. See also Mary Kahn, ‘The Passive Voice of Science: Language Abuse in the Wildlife Profession’, in Fill and Mühlhäusler (eds), The Ecolinguistics Reader, pp. 241–4.

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famously in the extended prosopopoeia of ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’.19 On the one hand, in ‘The shepherds almost wonder …’, the mist is a natural agent of the unnatural. Nature also has the power to mystify everything, even itself. The process and progress of the diurnal rural world here is contingent upon so many stabilities, such an interrelated set of assumed sureties, that the removal of one—in this instance full daylight—perplexes and retards the usual movement and affiliations of all natural things. All the conjoining &s that structure the poem are at full stretch—are high tensile; in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms the ampersand is a ‘tensor’.20 Each unit, each noun phrase, is threatened with breaking away into individualizing fragmentation. All the little elements in this huge scene are troubled by their own loose lostness, lost looseness—yet they are also always intertwined and interrelated, affiliated in life and labour. The final four lines of the sonnet broaden the perspective out into a reflective, more omniscient position— the anonymous eye opens out to a veiled horizon. The mist’s laziness is reiterated in these final lines. This mist is nature without work, without the coercion and pressure of husbandry and labour. Softly dominant here is the flocculent ease of a natural occurrence which defamiliarizes everything, relaxes and merges every relation, every bond, every purpose. The final four lines, with long open vowel sounds, slow down to the quietly triumphant closing line which is the crux of this odd sonnet. This is a poem about place, about role and function, about occupation and veneration for the natural. But it is also a poem which is indeterminate even in its final, gentle assertion. Its closing effect is the assertion of a positive representation of location, suggesting that this location, this situation is indeed everywhere, and that everyone is similarly levelled everywhere in relation to their natural relations. This is a poem which dislocates location, turns location into the process of wondering and wandering. It turns relation into consideration, turns surety into reflection. Clare’s characteristic ‘sense of place’ becomes a loosened, enlightened sense of everywhere. Although the language of the poem could be described as being predominantly ‘standard’, actually at the key moment expressing both the loosening, and the possible almost losing, of relation, it doubles up, uses relaxed, unforced wordplay in a fully nonstandard, unfixed manner. It is important to point out that ‘loose’ is not simply Clare’s poor spelling of ‘lose’ that editors should correct: animals are often made ‘loose’ from reins or plough in Clare: an example appears in the

Poems of the Middle Period, 1822–1837, vol. 5, pp. 105–14. ‘The tensor effects a kind of transitivization of the phrase, causing the last term to

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react upon the preceding term, back through the entire chain … . An expression as simple as and … can play the role of tensor for all of language.’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 110.

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following line from the political poem ‘Hue & Cry’: ‘Till the farmer in fear loosed the team from his plough …’.21 ‘The shepherds almost wonder …’ suggests that Clare can be seen to have a ‘rhizomatic’ conception of experience. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome is a metaphor loosely based on the botanical term first used in 1845 and defined botanically as ‘a prostrate or subterranean root-like stem emitting roots and usually producing leaves at its apex; a rootstock’ (OED). The rhizomic plant can reproduce vegetatively, as well as sexually—that is it can clone itself. Crucially for Deleuze and Guattari, it can spread and reproduce underground as well as above ground. As Felicity J. Colman puts it, the Deleuze and Guattari rhizome describes the connections that occur between the most disparate and the most similar of objects, places and people. ... the rhizome is a concept that maps a process of networked, relational and transversal thought ... . Ordered lineages of bodies and ideas that trace their originary and individual bases are considered as forms of ‘aborescent thought’, and this metaphor of a tree-like structure that orders epistemologies and forms historical frames and homogeneous schemata, is invoked by Deleuze and Guattari to describe everything that rhizomatic thought is not.22

The rhizome is a model of relation that is outwith fixed power structures, that works between and through determined systems, that multiplies and levels, that works on planes that intersect, and forms conjunctions, rather than asserting systems of hierarchy, deference, coercion, or censure. But the more specific link that substantiates the relevance of Deleuze and Guattari to Clare appears in their own definition of the rhizome. This includes an idealization of coordination through the conjunctive ‘and’ as follows: A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and... and... and...’ This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be.’ Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation—all imply a false conception of voyage and movement (a conception

‘The Hue & Cry: A Tale of the Times’, Poems of the Middle Period, 1822–1837, vol. 4, pp. 518–43 (p. 520, l.45). 22 Felicity J. Colman, ‘Rhizome’, in Adrian Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 231–3 (p. 231). For wider considerations of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to ecocritical thought, see Bernd Herzogenrath (ed.), Deleuze│Guattari & Ecology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), and Bernd Herzogenrath (ed.), An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze│Guattari (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). See also Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. and ed. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London and New York: Continuum, 2000). 21

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that is methodical, pedagogical, initiatory, symbolic...). [But there is] another way of travelling and moving: proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing. American literature, and already English literature, manifest this rhizomatic direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move between things, establish a logic of the and, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings. ... Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.23

In dialogue with Claire Parnet, Deleuze offers another relevant definition of the rhizome, in contrast to the dominant model of the tree: You set about opposing the rhizome to trees. And trees are not a metaphor at all, but an image of thought, a functioning, a whole apparatus that is planted in thought in order to make it go in a straight line and produce the famous correct ideas. There are all kinds of characteristics in the tree: there is a point of origin, seed or centre; it is a binary machine or principle of dichotomy, with its perpetually divided and reproduced branchings, its points of arborescence; it is an axis of rotation which organizes things in a circle, and the circles round the centre; it is a structure, a system of points and positions which fix all of the possible within a grid, a hierarchical system or transmission of orders, with a central instance and recapitulative memory; it has a future and a past, roots and a peak, a whole history, an evolution, a development; it can be cut up by cuts which are said to be significant in so far as they follow its aborescences, its branchings, its concentricities, its moments of development. Now, there is no doubt that trees are planted in our heads: the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, etc. The whole world demands roots. Power is always arborescent … . There are multiplicities which constantly go beyond binary machines and do not let themselves be dichotomized. There are centres everywhere, like multiplicities of black holes which do not let themselves be agglomerated. There are lines which do not amount to the path of a point, which break free from structure—lines of flight, becomings, without future or past, without memory, which resist the binary machine—woman-becoming which is neither man nor woman, animalbecoming which is neither beast nor man. Non-parallel evolutions, which do not proceed by differentiation, but which leap from one line to another, between completely heterogeneous beings; cracks, imperceptible ruptures, which break the lines even if they resume elsewhere, leaping over significant breaks … . The rhizome is all this. Thinking in things, among things—this is producing a rhizome and not a root, producing the line and not the point.24

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 27–8. Authors’ italicized emphases. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara

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Habberjam (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), pp. 25–6.

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The route into the use of Deleuze and Guattari to help unlock Clare’s eco-aesthetic starts via their positivistic presentation of ‘and’. Use of this conjunction has been a pitfall in Clare’s reception. In an otherwise positive appreciation, Robert Lynd says Clare’s ‘poetry is largely a list of things he loves’. With more distaste, Edmund Gosse reads Clare’s ‘redundant flow of verses … Clare wrote with inexhaustible fluency’.25 This perceived lack of control and narrative ordering, and the tendency of Clare to list, means that Zachary Leader thinks that the editorial interventions of John Taylor in the 1820s are fully supportable. Leader’s argument has authoritative balance, but I would like to argue that Clare’s manuscript ampersands—and his uses of polysyndeton overall—have an effect more central to his project than merely restricting poetic impact or leading to ‘Clare’s sameness’—Leader’s characterization of this general tendency in his work.26 For a specific example, let’s turn again to the ampersands in ‘The shepherds almost wonder …’ sonnet. There are eight ampersands across the 14 lines. There are a few other nonstandard linguistic features here, but the use of the ampersand, much more commonly used in Clare’s manuscript than ‘and’, is key. To abbreviate the word ‘and’ to the logogram and ligature ‘&’ symbolizes the present-tense immediacy of Clare’s response to, and construction of, the indeterminacy of this misty scene, a scene muffled by the wonder and blurred boundaries of a levelling nature. The ampersand is an icon of conjunction, rather than a word; yes it is shorthand, but it is also an intensifying scriptive device. As Jan Tschichold puts it, the ‘ampersand is always a particularly intimate merging of letters in which part of one letter either runs on into the next, or simultaneously forms it.’27 The ampersand is a conjunction conjoined. To overlook its significance in earlier literary usage, might also be a mistake, according to Alan Loney: ‘Early modernist poets did however use the ampersand as a deliberate intervention in the smooth reading process. The intention was precisely to interrupt the flow, slow the reading down, and bring attention to bear on the means by which meaning is conveyed’.28 Clare’s predominant use of the ampersand when representing the natural shows affinity with the rhizome in terms of its coordinated, levelled, planar, anti-hierarchical shape. It also attests to a world view which is fluid, de-centred, in flux and always in the process of becoming. Such coordination of relation between things does not merely establish an ecocentric interconnectedness, as deep ecologists might have it. It also creates relations of being between objects 25 Robert Lynd, ‘Review of Poems, Chiefly from Manuscript’, Nation xxviii (22 January 1921): pp. 581–2, in Storey (ed.), The Critical Heritage, pp. 340–43 (p. 342). Edmund Gosse, ‘Review of Poems, Chiefly from Manuscript’, Sunday Times, 23 January 1921, p. 5, in Storey (ed.), The Critical Heritage, pp. 343–6 (p. 344). 26 Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship, pp. 244–52. 27 Jan Tschichold, The Ampersand: Its Origin and Development, trans. Frederick Plaat (London: Woudhuysen, 1957), p. 5. 28 Alan Loney, & The Ampersand (Wellington: Black Light, 1990), no pagination; Loney’s emphasis.

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and subjects. It destabilizes and problematizes not just object / subject relations, but also subject / object definitions. This sonnet enacts not just a programme of ecological interconnectivity but decentralizes and mist-ifies each constituent part, blending, liquefying and making an amalgam of the whole scene as it does so. While it maintains boundaries of activity through relations of husbandry which do not suggest a complete rejection of capital-driven farming—this is not a misanthropic poem at all—each relation becomes as significant as each node on the chain of relationship. The fraught issue of relationship in this sonnet throws light upon the dependence each constituent part of the rural scene has upon the other components: interconnectedness is revealed to be the site of secure meaning for each of the component parts. Indeed, each component part only becomes aware of its state and status through the slight disabling of the familiar connections it habitually relies upon with other entities of the dynamic, yet hesitant, scene. Each body is shown to be not meaningfully a separable component: that is, it cannot maintain its relational identity without a continual process of becoming something other than itself. It relies for its meaning on becoming other things, not just on coordination with many things, but on a continual movement of being towards those things. All of the constituents lose subject positions and of necessity enter machinic processes of the rural, without which form, function and secure identity might be lost. Identity in this poem is relation, is connection, is fluidity, and is inherently reliant on the social. There is no separation between man and nature here, no reliance on binary opposition or fixed position, or position of judgement or power for man. There is no anthropomorphism any more than there is a becominganimal and a becoming-mist that promises to enchant all the elements of the scene. As I have said above, it has been a persistent criticism of Clare’s verse that he has a tendency to list, that his descriptions never seem to be progressing, seem to lack order or coherent direction. This is an aspect of his verse, I should point out, that even his most positive supporters concede to—and some celebrate.29 But the idea of progress, of ordering structure, of direction—all emerge from a capitalist imperative and an anthropomorphizing drive that takes the shape of narrative order, an imperative to narrate, an impulse to make sense of, to resolve, to show explicit apprehension, and progress towards rather than becoming among. Clare’s narrative strategies are the product of a becoming-animal,30 to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology for ongoing processes which deny fixed subject positions, In summarizing the reception of this aspect of Clare, Zachary Leader quotes the publisher James Hessey’s editorializing letter to Clare of 1824: ‘Clare, he complains, once again describes “the Morning & the Noon & the Evening & the Summer & the Winter, & the Sheep & Cattle & Poultry & Pigs & Milking Maid & Foddering Boys … the world will now expect something more than these; let them come in incidentally, but they must be subordinate to higher objects’. It is significant that Hessey’s desire for subordination is prompted by his parodying of Clare’s ampersand-coordinated lists. Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship, p. 247. See also Storey (ed.), The Critical Heritage, p. 195. 30 For an extended discussion of ‘becoming-animal’, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 265–78. 29

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which are always becomings and never happenings, and which are forever shifting, never still, never resolved, never done, never completed. At times Clare’s language structures, the resistance to grammatical, compositional, presentational and poetical standards, the reliance on a polysyndeton of anaphoric ampersands, the seemingly arbitrary disordering of multiple subjects, his resistance to the ordering first-person subject—and his resistance to (or inability to work with) John Taylor’s dictum to philosophize—combine to suggest that he is deliberately avoiding poetry’s human drive because the subject he seeks is not centred on the human. Man is not excluded—far from it—but man is a part of a set of dynamic processes rather than apart and in charge; man is a link in a chain of &s rather than the wielder of the hammer or the anvil that made the chain: he is as frail and fragile, as readily thrown, and as harmoniously drawn, as the animals and crops he tends to and works with, as the women who work alongside him. And woman is as decentralized as man, in this poem. This sonnet articulates Clare’s green grammar not through the odd deviant spelling, or through sole focus on one animal or plant, but because it reaches for the complex and levelling map that is at the heart of current ecological theories: interrelationships between—coordination among. It grapples with a rhizomatic interdependency theory of green structure all of his own and local seeing, but with a final line which opens it into global and current relevance. The locality of the last line is exactly the place where so many ecological thinkers argue the green revolution must begin: locally, in small communities, in the place we occupy. And although the verb ‘occupy’ can indeed suggest possession and territory, the ‘we’ cannot be solely human, because the logic of the poem’s community is human and animal, agricultural and natural, perceptual and material. Each element, each body, assembled and disassembled here, is no more and no less significant or central than the others around it. Indeed the focus becomes not the bodies, but the links between. The ampersands join hands in the mist, as nature levels all. And strictly speaking, while everything seems almost to interrelate, Clare’s vision here cannot be said to be organicist: no unified tree fixes the scene as a maypole around which the minor players dance; the generative idea of this scene—the wandering wonder of it—rests in its restlessness, its lack of settlement, its nomadic and de-centred and fundamentally planar shape. Any attempt to grasp, to pin down, to order and codify, is shaken off by the deviant doubleness of a lost looseness. The rural plural here is not a single organic entity but a diverse set of lines criss-crossing in and among one another. This world is not separable, not classifiable: it is neither human, nor animal, nor vegetable. It is all of these together and none of them alone. The radical resistance here is not just to classifying order, but also to simplifying union, the excessively simplistic idea that, ideally, we are all one. Each body is worryingly, perhaps enticingly, separable—the poem’s activity precisely threatens that separation—the separation from routine and predictability, but also from reliability, from conscious comprehension of the material world. The mist moves among the bodies arousing an awareness of ecological and existential fragility. The thick soup of November mist and the darkness it brings serve to

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remind each body of its reliance upon other bodies, while illustrating the delicate nature of tumbling sets of reliances and relations. November mist conveys this through silence, through an inarticulate, ungraspable pervasiveness. The mist itself becomes the medium through which all bodies are reminded of their dependency, while at the same time it is illustrative that they are indeed on the same plane: all are mystified, so all are levelled. The poem is a supremely sophisticated statement of social ecology because it is a flattened vision, with the moisture in the air acting as a medium of linkage, of interdependency, of rhizomatic relations. The poem presents social ecosystem in action. Here, Clare’s vision is green, & it is red.

Chapter 6

Graeco-Roman Pastoral and Social Class in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Bothie and Thomas Hardy’s Under The Greenwood Tree Stephen Harrison

Introduction This chapter interprets the Red and Green of the volume’s subtitle in terms of the politics of class conflict against the background of a rural, naturally regulated and ecologically attractive environment. Both the texts examined here, Clough’s The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) and Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), use literary elements derived from the Graeco-Roman pastoral tradition in narratives set in the idyllic countryside, and engage with issues of social class and wealth in the context of marriage. In Clough’s poem, formal allusions to Virgil’s Eclogues generate a fantastic pastoral world in which the novelistic plot can develop, but the marriage can only operate outside bourgeois society through the expedient of the final emigration of the mixed-class couple. In Hardy’s novel, both the work’s formal framework and its play with class and marriage owe something to the Greek pastoral tradition in the form of the Greek novel Daphnis and Chloe from the second century CE. There, the two protagonists finally rejoin the elite to which they belong by birth but from which they had been diverted by being brought up as peasants, while Hardy’s heroine Fancy Day, after being tempted to join the elite classes by marriage, eventually weds Dick Dewy, who like her seeks to rise in the world from a relatively modest rustic background. Arthur Hugh Clough, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich1 (hereafter Bothie) describes the adventures of a group of Oxford undergraduates on a summer reading party in the Scottish Highlands, supervised by Adam, their Tutor. The plot is clearly based on Clough’s experiences in running such reading parties in 1846 and 1847 as a Fellow and tutor Originally ‘Toper-na-Fuosich’ in 1848, but later changed by Clough for the second 1862 edition, followed here, after discovering that the original title had an obscene overtone in Gaelic—cf. F.L .Mulhauser (ed.), The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 593–4. 1

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at Oriel College, Oxford, a post from which he had just resigned owing to religious doubts,2 but also has romantic novelistic elements in its key action, in which the undergraduate Philip Hewson marries the Highland peasant girl Elspie Mackaye and emigrates with her to a new life in New Zealand. This issue of social class is united with a more overtly political element in the characterization of Philip, who on first appearance is presented (I.125–9) as Philip Hewson a poet, Hewson a radical hot, hating lords and scorning ladies, Silent mostly, but often reviling in fire and fury Feudal tenures, mercantile lords, competition and bishops, Liveries, armorial bearings, amongst other matters the Game-laws …

and is later said to be a Chartist (II.18). Clough himself had liberal sympathies, and some months before writing the Bothie in late 1848 had been an at least partly enthusiastic witness of the revolution in Paris and its consequences.3 The Bothie’s principal engagement with classical literature is through its clear character as a mock-heroic work, with its innovatory use of the English hexameter to match the metre of Greek and Roman epic, and it contains a good deal of Homeric pastiche and parody.4 But the poem’s only overt statement on its own genre also points to a further model, the Hellenistic Greek pastoral poet Theocritus and his Idylls: Mighty one, o Muse of great Epos, and Idyll the playful and tender, Be it recounted in song, ere we part, and thou fly to thy Pindus, (Pindus is it, O Muse, or Etna, or even Ben-Nevis?), Be it recounted in song, O Muse of the Epos and Idyll, Who gave what at the wedding, the gifts and fair gratulations. (IX.139–43)

Though Theocritus is named, perhaps because of the general Victorian preference for Greek over Roman literature,5 Clough’s own paratextual material for this poem points the reader firmly to the pastoral Eclogues of Virgil, for which Theocritus served as prime literary model; Virgil, unlike Theocritus, could be assumed to be part of normal reading for an elite audience of the time.6 The Bothie’s subtitle, ‘A 2 For this period in Clough’s life, see Anthony Kenny, Arthur Hugh Clough: A Poet’s Life (London: Continuum 2005), pp. 110–50. 3 Ibid., pp. 127–30. 4 On the Homeric aspects see Kenny, Arthur Hugh Clough, pp. 145–6, Stephen Harrison, ‘Some Victorian Versions of Greco-Roman Epic’ in Christopher Stray (ed.), Remaking the Classics (London: Duckworth, 2007), pp. 21–36. 5 See, for example, Frank M. Turner, ‘Why the Greeks and not the Romans in Victorian Britain?’, in G.W. Clarke (ed.), Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 61–82. 6 For some helpful analysis (summarized and sometimes supplemented in this and the next paragraph), see Thomas A. Hayward, ‘The Latin Epigraphs in The Bothie of Toberna-Vuolich’, Victorian Poetry 21 (1983): pp. 145–55.

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Long-Vacation Pastoral’ points to the pastoral genre, while its initial Latin epigraphs (for which no sources are given) are largely taken from Virgil’s Eclogues: Nunc formosissimus annus, ‘now is the year most fair’ (=Virgil Ecl.3.57) and Ite meae felix quondam pecus, ite camenae, ‘go, my Muses, a fortunate herd once’ (= Virgil Ecl.1.74 with Clough’s camenae, ‘Muses’, replacing the capellae, ‘she-goats’ of the original). The genre of Virgilian pastoral is also suggested by the work’s overall form, containing nine sections of 100–300 lines each, close to Virgil’s 10 Eclogue poems of c.100 lines each, by its idyllic ‘Arcadian’ Highland scenery and colourful rustics, matching the scenarios of the Eclogues, and by the shared metre of the hexameter, uncommon and difficult in English.7 Each of the nine sections has an (untranslated and unreferenced) epigraph from a Latin poet. Those of the last three sections do not come from Virgil, but reflect the plot of the poem through allusions to other well-known Roman verse texts of the first century BC: sections VII and VIII use lines from Catullus 62, an epithalamium, matching the narrative content as we move towards the marriage of Philip and Elspie, while Section IX employs a quotation from Horace Epode 16, in which the poet envisages fantastic emigration as the only (impossible) solution to Rome’s problems, pointing to the coming emigration of the newlyweds at the end of the poem as the only (possible) solution to their class inequality in Victorian bourgeois society.8 The other sections all have epigraphs from Virgilian pastoral (and in one case the Georgics); their contexts in the Virgilian originals and characterization of Clough’s narratives have been noted, and I give only a summary here. The epigraph to Section I comes not from Virgil’s pastoral Eclogues but from his didactic Georgics, but nevertheless evokes the same world of the idyllic countryside. Socii cratera coronant (Georgics 2.528), ‘they crown the mixingbowl in fellowship’, comes from the final sequence in Georgics 2, which looks to praise the rustic life, and describes a festival in the country; in Clough’s poem it reflects the subject matter of the Highland games and the following dinner, a similar celebratory symposium. In Section II the epigraph et certamen erat Corydon cum Thyrside magnum (Eclogue 7.16), ‘and there was a great contest, Corydon against Thyrsis) suggests how the poetic contest of the shepherds Thrysis and Corydon (Eclogue 7) is turned into an undergraduate intellectual discussion between Hewson and the more conventional members of the party on the question of marriage, with Hewson advocating companionate, working, artisan marriage (looking forward to the work’s ending). In Section III the epigraph namque canebat uti (Eclogue 6.31), ‘for he sang how …’ refers to the beginning of Silenus’ extended song, embedded in a brief narrative scenario of Silenus encountered by two shepherd For Clough’s hexameters, cf. Joseph Patrick Phelan, ‘Radical Metre: The English Hexameter in Clough’s Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich’, Review of English Studies 50 (1999): pp. 166–187; Yopie Prins, ‘Victorian Meters’, in Joseph Bristow (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 100–106. Clough’s poem represented his reaction to Longfellow’s use of the hexameter in his romantic narrative poem Evangeline (1847): see Patrick Scott (ed.), A.H. Clough, The Bothie (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1976), pp. 6–7. 8 See Hayward, ‘The Latin Epigraphs’, pp. 153–5. 7

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boys, which summarizes erotic and metamorphic themes from Hellenistic poetry. This is mirrored by the content of the book: at their favourite bathing-place the undergraduates find Audley and Lindsay, ‘the Piper’, returned from their journey. The Piper tells of their travels and of Philip Hewson’s erotic interest in Katie, a farmer’s daughter; this is an inset narrative of amatory colour, just like the song of Silenus. The book ends with Hope catching sight of the beautiful Elspie, daughter of David Mackaye, the tenant of the ‘Bothie’. The fourth section’s epigraph ut vidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error (Eclogue 8.41), ‘how I saw, how I perished, how evil delusion bore me away’, is a classic expression of love at first sight, but also from a Virgilian context where the speaker remembers helping his beloved gather apples. This is clearly relevant to Philip’s (doomed) passion for the rustic Katie and his help to her in her domestic work (III.131ff). Philip decides to leave Katie rather than corrupt her rustic modesty and goes to stay with an aristocratic family, dance with ladies and hunt (all against his previously expressed principles). That of the fifth section, putavi/ stultus ego huic nostrae similem (Eclogue 1.19–20), ‘I thought in my foolishness that it was a city similar to this of ours’, refers to a shepherd’s surprise at Rome being so different from his local city. This reflects the plot again, where Philip writes from the aristocratic Castle to the Tutor in a humble cottage (the greater and the lesser city) of his feelings for Lady Maria, and of the conflict between this and his socialism; we also have Hobbes’s mocking letter to Philip. Philip writes again to say he is ‘conquered’ and will see them all in Oxford. Hobbes’s letter, teasing Philip for ‘selling out’, ironically echoes the Eclogues’ earliest mention of love: ‘Teachest the woods to re-echo thy game-killing incantations, | Teachest thy verse to exalt Amaryllis, a Countess’s daughter’ (V.106–7) recalls Eclogue 1.5 formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas (a shepherd in love, ‘you teach the woods to re-echo the name of fair Amaryllis’). The sixth book’s epigraph ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnin (Eclogue 8.68), ‘lead Daphnis home from the city, my songs’, evokes and transforms its Virgilian context of a woman drawing her lover home from the city by magic means: Philip is indeed drawn back by songs (Clough’s, not magic) from the sophisticated world of the Castle to the Arcadian world of the humble Bothie, a hut by the side of a loch, and the reading party is about to break up and return ‘home’ for term-time at Oxford. It emerges that Philip has been ‘conquered’ indeed, but by Elspie at the Bothie, not by Lady Maria at the Castle. The Tutor accepts his attachment to the virtuous peasant-girl. These overt allusions are supported by the overall style of the poem. One key element there is repetition of words and phrases, especially at the beginning of successive lines. The repetition of words at the beginning of successive lines is an element used in the ballad-poetry of Scott, which might naturally influence a poem with a Scottish setting,9 but some more extensive examples of repetition in the Bothie can be argued to derive from the elaborate ‘singing’ style of the For example, The Lay of The Last Minstrel (1805), Canto I.xiv (three line-initial repetitions of ‘From’ in four lines), Canto III.i (three successive line-initial repetitions of ‘And’), or Marmion (1808), Canto V.xviii (three successive line-initial repetitions of ‘And many a’). 9

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Eclogues, full of repetition and verbal juggling. Take two examples from the Virgilian work—5.51–2: nos tamen haec quocumque modo tibi nostra uicissim dicemus, Daphnimque tuum tollemus ad astra; Daphnim ad astra feremus: amauit nos quoque Daphnis. [But we will sing these words of ours to you in some way or other, And raise your Daphnis high to the stars, Raise Daphnis high to the stars: Daphnis loved us too.]

and 8.48–50: saeuus Amor docuit natorum sanguine matrem commaculare manus; crudelis tu quoque, mater: crudelis mater magis, an puer improbus ille? improbus ille puer; crudelis tu quoque, mater. [Cruel Love taught a mother (i.e., Medea) to stain her hands With her sons’ blood—you were cruel too, mother. More cruel the mother, or that wicked boy? Wicked was the boy, but you were cruel too, mother.]

Something of the same jingling is found in, for example, Bothie II.30–31: Take off your coat to it, Philip, cried Lindsay, outside in the garden, Take off your coat to it, Philip.

Or Bothie II.235–46: And a silence ensued, and the Tutor himself continued, Airlie remains, I presume, he continued, and Hobbes and Hewson. Answer was made him by Philip, the poet, the eloquent speaker: Airlie remains, I presume, was the answer, and Hobbes, peradventure; Tarry let Airlie May-fairly, and Hobbes, brief-kilted hero, Tarry let Hobbes in kilt, and Airlie ‘abide in his breeches;’ Tarry let these, and read, four Pindars apiece an’ it like them! Weary of reading am I, and weary of walks prescribed us; Weary of Ethic and Logic, of Rhetoric yet more weary, Eager to range over heather unfettered of gillie and marquis, I will away with the rest, and bury my dismal classics.

or Bothie IV.3–9: Here was it writ, how Philip possessed undoubtedly had been, Deeply, entirely possessed by the charm of the maiden of Rannoch; Deeply as never before! how sweet and bewitching he felt her Seen still before him at work, in the garden, the byre, the kitchen; How it was beautiful to him to stoop at her side in the shearing, Binding uncouthly the ears that fell from her dexterous sickle, Building uncouthly the stooks, which she laid by her sickle to straighten.

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These repetitions are unlike anything in Homer or mock-epic, where repetition is more formulaic and less self-conscious, and are surely meant to evoke the peculiar style of the Eclogues. Thus Clough uses Virgilian pastoral form, allusion and style in the Bothie to articulate a narrative which discusses issues of social class and politics through the figure of the radical undergraduate Philip Hewson and his decision to marry a working-class (but educated) Highland lass. This Virgilian poetic colour seems to be matched by a clear appreciation of the political content of the Eclogues. Though Clough himself (as we have seen) evokes the Idylls of Theocritus, these Greek poems, which combine pastorals with other hexameter types, do not confront divisive social or political issues, and their only substantive engagement with contemporary politics is an encomium of the king Ptolemy II (Idyll 17). In Virgil’s Eclogues the opposite is true. The initial motivation for these poems is quite likely to have been the poet’s protest against the land-confiscations in Italy of 41 BC, carried out to settle the soldiers of the future Augustus and Antony after their civil war victory at Philippi the previous year. Though it is hard to be sure, the evidence seems to suggest that Virgil himself lost his ancestral land near Mantua, and that he may have been compensated by a land-gift elsewhere, perhaps in Campania; in the Eclogues themselves, certainly, the peasant characters express both the sorrows of expulsion and the joys of retaining their land through the favour of the ‘young man’ (who must be the future Augustus).10 This conflict with apparently arbitrary laws relating to the use of land and their enforcement is perhaps picked up in the Bothie by Philip’s objections in principle to (and violations in practice of) the strict game laws which prevent free hunting on the estates of the rich, something of a theme in the poem (I.128, III.95–8). But the Bothie’s political engagement (like that of the Eclogues) is limited. It does not allude to the Highland Clearances, still proceeding in 1848, by which small crofters such as Elspie Mackaye’s father David were driven off their land by landlords wishing to replace them by herds of sheep,11 or to the Scottish Potato Famine of c.1846–57;12 these issues could have been represented within the frame of Virgilian imitation. It is possible that Clough’s poem alludes indirectly to these major issues; the solution to the twin problems of expulsion and starvation for poor Highlanders was often emigration, and the romantic emigration of Philip and Elspie may be a rose-tinted reflection of harder political and economic realities, just as the stylized debates about land and exile in the Virgil’s Eclogues render only indirectly and in etiolated form a major agrarian upheaval in the Italian peninsula. The final picture of Clough’s poem presents Philip in New Zealand working on the land with his increasing family (IX.196–200): 10 For this plausible reconstruction, see Jasper Griffin, Virgil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 23–4. 11 See Eric Richards, The Highland Clearances (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2000). 12 See T.M. Devine and Willie Orr, The Great Highland Famine (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988).

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There he hewed, and dug; subdued the earth and his spirit; There he built him a home; there Elspie bare him his children, David and Bella; perhaps ere this too an Elspie or Adam; There hath he farmstead and land, and fields of corn and flax fields; And the Antipodes too have a Bothie of Tober-na-vuolich.

Here several Virgilian elements are combined. Philip’s role as smallholder strongly recalls that of the hands-on small farmer described in the Georgics, the more realistic counterpart of the minor landholders described in the Eclogues. Philip’s hewing of wood (playing on his surname Hewson) and subduing of the earth echoes the emphasis in the Georgics on the hard physical effort of the farmer who is said to ‘subdue the fields’ (Georg.1.125 ‘subigebant arva coloni’, [‘the farmers subdued the fields’]). In the same climax to the second book of the Georgics quoted as the epigraph to Section I of the Bothie, we find the fortunate farmer surrounded by his progeny, just like Philip here (Georg.2.523 ‘dulces pendent circum oscula nati’, [‘his sweet children hang around his kisses’]). The location at the ends of the earth also provides a neat reversal of Virgil’s treatment of the land-confiscations in the Eclogues. At Eclogue 1.64–6 Moeris, a smallholder dispossessed of his land in the confiscations, envisages in his despair going to the ends of the Roman world: At nos hinc alii sitientis ibimus Afros, pars Scythiam et rapidum cretae veniemus Oaxen et penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos. [But some of us will have to go from here to the thirsty Africans, Others will come to Scythia and to the Oxus which snatches up chalk, And right to the Britons, sundered from us by the whole world.]

What is seen as a counsel of despair in the face of arbitrary political action in the pastoral world of the Eclogues becomes in the Bothie a solution to the equally oppressive social problem of mixed-class marriage,13 and is wittily reversed to produce emigration from rather than to Britain. Labouring on his smallholding in New Zealand, Philip not only plays the role of the ideal Virgilian small farmer but also shows that the individual can in fact achieve independence of the forces of conservative convention, a neat combination of the Red and the Green. Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree Hardy’s second published novel (hereafter UTGT) describes the love of Dick Dewy, son of the local carrier of Mellstock, for Fancy Day, the new schoolmistress in the village. After a number of vicissitudes, Fancy resists her other two suitors, a rich local farmer and the vicar who is in charge of her school, to marry Dick, who becomes a partner in his father’s business. The elements of rural idyll, class 13 Though it is also a conveniently topical plot device to solve similar problems at the end of contemporary novels—for example, Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) or Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50).

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mobility and pastoral love story in Hardy’s plot clearly point to a use of the Greek second-century novel Daphnis and Chloe (D&C). D&C narrates the story of how two children, abandoned by their elite families in the same idyllic part of rural Lesbos, grow up as peasant herdsmen to love each other, escape other partners and further dangers to their union, discover the nature of sex and their true identities and marry at the novel’s climax. It has been persuasively argued that Hardy read D&C, probably in translation, and the basic resemblances between the two novels have been observed;14 here I would like to present a more detailed account of their intertextualities and to bring out the elements of class tension in both idyllic, rustic novels—the Red and the Green. The two novels share some overall frameworks. The most obvious architectural feature in D&C is its division into four books, each of which relates primarily to a particular time of year and its appropriate agricultural tasks: spring/summer in Book 1, autumn in Book 2; winter/spring in Book 3, and summer/autumn in Book 4. This seems to be closely mapped in UTGT, which similarly takes place over the space of a year and is again divided into four main sections corresponding to the seasons: ‘Part the First: Winter’, ‘Part the Second: Spring’, ‘Part the Third: Summer’, and ‘Part the Fourth: Autumn’, with a brief epilogue in ‘Part the Fifth: Conclusion’, which narrates the wedding of Fancy and Dick in the following June. Both texts are also conceived in some sense as pictorial: the narrative of D&C is famously introduced in a separate, brief prologue as the ekphrasis or formal literary description of a complex picture in a temple in Lesbos which seems to contain all the key elements of the novel’s plot,15 while UTGT is described in its original subtitle as ‘A Rural Painting of the Dutch School’, and has been clearly shown to relate to particular kinds of Dutch painting.16 Particular moments of proximity between D&C and UTGT are found in two scenes between Fancy and one or more of her suitors. In UTGT Part 3, Chapter 3, ‘A Confession’, Fancy confesses to Dick that she was the object of an informal proposal of marriage from the rich local farmer Frederic Shiner. Shiner’s speaking name already suggests a parallel with an unsuccessful suitor of Chloe from D&C called Lampis (derived from the verb ‘shine’ in Greek, lampein),17 a cowherd who presents Chloe’s father with gifts to gain support as his potential son-in-law (D&C 4.7).18 In Hardy’s scene Shiner engages Fancy’s interest in catching a bullfinch, promising to show her how to do it using birdlime, and then confronts her with his own erotic interest (the symbolism of capturing a pretty bird is clear): this in See Paul Turner, The Life of Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 30–31 and Richard F .Hardin, Love in a Green Shade: Idyllic Romances Ancient and Modern (Lincoln.: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 165–6. 15 See conveniently J.R. Morgan, Longus: Daphnis and Chloe (Oxford: Aris and Philips/Oxbow, 2004), pp.144–8. 16 Cf. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Art and the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 125–52. 17 Morgan, Daphnis and Chloe, p. 227. 18 Lampis later briefly abducts Chloe (4.28–9) but then ends up playing the flute at her marriage to Daphnis (4.38). 14

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effect combines the role of Lampis as unwelcome, wealthier suitor with another scene from D&C (3.6), where Daphnis deliberately goes bird-hunting near Chloe’s house and deliberates with himself whether to call on her with the excuse of being in the area, but decides against it. Daphnis’ creditable modesty is to be contrasted with the more devious behaviour of Shiner. In UTGT Part 4, Chapter 2, ‘Honey-taking, and afterwards’, we find Shiner and Fancy together again, this time with Dick present. As the three of them taste Fancy’s father’s honeycomb, Fancy is stung on the mouth by a bee and there is a comic contest between her rival suitors to minister to her: Suddenly a faint cry from Fancy caused them to gaze at her. ‘What’s the matter, dear?’ said Dick. ‘It is nothing, but O-o! a bee has stung the inside of my lip! He was in one of the cells I was eating!’ ‘We must keep down the swelling, or it may be serious!’ said Shiner, stepping up and kneeling beside her. ‘Let me see it.’ ‘No, no!’ ‘Just let me see it,’ said Dick, kneeling on the other side: and after some hesitation she pressed down her lip with one finger to show the place. ‘O, I hope ’twill soon be better! I don’t mind a sting in ordinary places, but it is so bad upon your lip,’ she added with tears in her eyes, and writhing a little from the pain. Shiner held the light above his head and pushed his face close to Fancy’s, as if the lip had been shown exclusively to himself, upon which Dick pushed closer, as if Shiner were not there at all. ‘It is swelling,’ said Dick to her right aspect. ‘It isn’t swelling,’ said Shiner to her left aspect. ‘Is it dangerous on the lip?’ cried Fancy. ‘I know it is dangerous on the tongue.’ ‘O no, not dangerous!’ answered Dick. ‘Rather dangerous,’ had answered Shiner simultaneously. ‘I must try to bear it!’ said Fancy, turning again to the hives. ‘Hartshorn-and-oil is a good thing to put to it, Miss Day,’ said Shiner with great concern. ‘Sweet-oil-and-hartshorn I’ve found to be a good thing to cure stings, Miss Day,’ said Dick with greater concern. ‘We have some mixed indoors; would you kindly run and get it for me?’ she said.

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This scene echoes two elements in D&C. First, the interaction of lovers via an incident with an insect perhaps recalls the moment when Chloe is startled by a cicada which gets into her dress and is retrieved by Daphnis (1.27). Second, the role of the bee and honeycomb recalls a monologue by Daphnis from the same book of the novel, where he reflects on the first kiss just given him by Chloe (D&C 1.17; here I cite from the 1657 translation by George Thornley, very likely read by Hardy): Whither, in the name of the Nymphs, will that kisse of Chloe drive me? Her lips are softer than Roses, and sweeter than the honeycombs of the Launs, and Meadowes; but her kisse stings like a Bee.19

Thus UTGT plays on the etymology of the name of one of D&C’s characters, and cleverly rewrites one of its incidents by combining elements from an incident and a monologue. The politics of class is clearly a central element in both novels. Daphnis and Chloe are born into the elite, are temporarily displaced into peasant poverty and are finally reclaimed for elite status,20 while Fancy and Dick are both upwardly mobile members of the working class who rise to the lower middle-class level: Fancy’s education and status as schoolteacher is matched by Dick’s final status as a respectable tradesman in partnership with his father in the family transport business. In D&C the couple move in parallel from lower to higher social status; in UTGT the same thing happens in a less extreme way, though Fancy seems at first to have higher social status than Dick and at one point is offered the chance to join the elite. In both novels, the issues of class, marriage and money are most fully brought out through the protagonists’ families. In D&C 3.25, Dryas, Chloe’s adoptive peasant father, knowing that she really belongs to the elite, thinks the apparent peasant Daphnis is not good enough for her; this problem is solved at D&C 3.29– 30, when Daphnis gives Dryas 3,000 drachmas which the kindly Nymphs have helped him to find, and thus becomes an acceptable suitor. In the same context, at D&C 3.30, Lamon, Daphnis’ adoptive father, knowing that he is really elite, thinks the apparent peasant Chloe is not good enough for him either, though this does not prevent their union. In Book 4 all is revealed, and Chloe’s real elite father gives Dryas 3,000 drachmas, while Lampon is given half the estate and freed from slavery along with his wife (4.33). The class mobility of Daphnis and Chloe is thus extended (at least partially) to their adoptive parents, but the class tensions around marriage are clearly visible. Parents, wealth and class play a similar role in UTGT. Fairly early on we hear the rumour that Fancy’s father, Geoffrey Day, has made money in his business as 19 Daphnis and Chloe, trans. George Thornley (Waltham Saint Lawrence: Golden Cockerel Press, 1923 [1657]), p. 23. 20 Though they are depicted as still keeping flocks at the end of the novel, those flocks are now large and their own property (4.39).

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an agent, but that Fancy, though she stands to inherit, has not been brought up to idleness: ‘Well, he’ve made a pound or two, and I suppose the maid will have it since there’s nobody else. But ‘tis rather sharp upon her if she’s born to fortune to bring her up as if not born for it, and letting her work so hard.’ (Pt. 2, Ch. 5)

This looks relatively egalitarian, but in Part 4, Chapter 2, we find that Geoffrey thinks Dick is not good enough for Fancy and refuses his proposal of marriage, since he has been saving money, investing in Fancy’s education, and making her earn her way in order to be equal to any gentleman both financially and culturally: ‘That if any gentleman who sees her to be his equal in polish, should want to marry her, and she want to marry him, he shan’t be superior to her in pocket. Now do ye think after this that ye be good enough for her?’

Geoffrey has another candidate for son-in-law: in Part 3, Chapter 4, we have heard that he has allowed Shiner to pay his addresses to Fancy, just as Chloe’s father at least passively entertains the idea of Lampis courting Chloe (see above), and it takes Fancy’s stratagem of making herself ill by not eating to reconcile him to Dick as her future husband (Pt. 4, Ch. 3–4). Dick himself, however, is not without advantages, obtained through his own father’s just valuing of his talents. In Part 2, Chapter 8, his father notes that Dick had been sent to an especially good school, ‘so good ‘twas hardly fair to the other children’, and in the course of the novel he rises to partnership in his father’s business, thus matching the social status of Geoffrey Day. In UTGT there is of course a third lover, who combines Shiner’s prosperity with the high education and prestige of the gentlemanly status which neither Dick nor Shiner can claim, the Rev Arthur Maybold, the vicar of the parish where Fancy is schoolmistress and organist. As an elite character Maybold parallels the landowners who appear in Book 4 of D&C, though there they provide the real parents of Chloe rather than a lover for her from the elite level. In Part 3, Chapter 6, Fancy briefly accepts Maybold’s marriage proposal which offers her a life of middle-class comfort (‘you shall have anything, Fancy, anything to make you happy—pony-carriage, flowers, birds, pleasant society’), though she is informally engaged to marry Dick the next summer (Pt. 3, Ch. 4), but then swiftly reconsiders and refuses his tempting offer. Maybold, showing Arthurian chivalry true to his name, allows her to withdraw her assent once he learns of her understanding with Dick. Neatly, this occurs in an accidental meeting between Dick himself and Maybold, in which Dick presents Maybold with a printed business card advertising the firm of ‘Dewy and Son’; thus Maybold is shown that Dick is ‘worthy’ of Fancy in social terms now that he has risen to partnership with his father. Finally, the two novels end with erotic secrets between the two sets of married protagonists. In D&C 3.15–19 Daphnis is innocently inveigled into sex by the experienced and socially higher woman Lycaenion (a city-born concubine of

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a free farmer: 3.15) without Chloe’s knowledge, and this de facto infidelity is kept from her when they are married—this is the end of the novel in Thornley’s translation (4.40): But Daphnis and Chloe lying naked together, began to clip, and kisse, and twine, and strive with one another, sleeping no more then birds of the night; and Daphnis now did the Trick that his Mistris Lycænium had taught him in the thicket. And Chloe then first knew, that those things that were done in the Wood, were only the sweetest Sports of Shepherds.21

In just the same way, Fancy’s acceptance and rejection of Maybold, in effect momentary infidelity, is kept secret from Dick, though Maybold himself had urged disclosure: ‘Tell him everything. It is best. He will forgive you’ (Pt. 4, Ch. 6); just like D&C, UTGT ends with an allusion to an indiscretion of one spouse not disclosed to the other—‘she [Fancy] … thought of a secret she would never tell’ (Pt. 5, Ch. 2). Though UTGT contains very little in the way of larger politics, it clearly matches D&C in exploring the smaller politics of class, wealth and marriage, against a similar background of a seasonal idyllic rustic existence in nature. Conclusion This chapter has endeavoured to show how the reception of classical texts can contribute to the interpretation of Victorian texts dealing with ‘political’ issues of social class and wealth in a rustic setting. Both the Bothie and UTGT employ idyllic literary frameworks recognizably derived from classical works of pastoral colour to present plots of rustic romantic colour accompanied by interesting class tensions. In Clough’s poem the class mismatch, possible in the fantasy world of the pastoral Highlands, is too strong to be tolerated in ‘real’ society and emigration is the only solution; in Hardy’s novel the class division is finally only apparent, and the couple move into a more or less socially even marriage. Though each work can be read without its classical underpinning, that substructure would have been appreciated by much of its original readership, and helps to bring out the relationship between the ‘red’ and the ‘green’ in these two densely textured literary works.

Daphnis and Chloe, trans. Thornley, p. 108.

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Chapter 7

Landscape, Labour and History in Later Nineteenth-Century Writing John Rignall

It is commonplace to observe that the English landscape seen beyond the haha of a typical country house belonging to the gentry, or in the pages of a Jane Austen novel, elides the presence of labour. Austen’s Donwell Abbey in Emma (1816) is a classic example. Mr Knightley’s estate, unaffected by the fashionable improvements of landscape gardeners like Humphrey Repton—with ‘its abundance of timber in rows and avenues, which neither extravagance nor fashion had rooted up’1—and apparently innocent of the energetic enclosures such as were conducted by Austen’s relatives the Leighs, presents to the eyes of Emma and her friends a placid and untroubling sight. The only hint of work is the presence of Robert Martin’s farm, but a hint that is attenuated by the distance that lends enchantment to the view and by the assimilation of the farm to the picturesque: ‘at the bottom of this bank, favourably placed and sheltered, rose the Abbey-Mill farm, with meadows in front, and the river making a close and handsome curve around it’ (p. 325). No stables, byres, or dunghills accost the eye or assail the senses. The protection afforded by the lie of the land points to the social protection provided to his tenant farmer by the wise and benign landowner that is Mr Knightley. There is a whole culture—‘English verdure, English culture, English comfort’ (p. 325)— implied in this landscape; and the conjunction of verdure and culture could be taken to suggest the ‘green’ dimension of the scene. The sheltered farm, with the river curving around it, presents an harmonious accommodation of the human within the natural, and implies an equilibrium and interdependence that could be described as ecological. That is the green view: but the sceptical red one would have a different focus. If this is an ecological vision (at least in embryo) it is one predicated upon an assumption of stable and harmoniously hierarchical social relationships and a form of agriculture that seemingly excludes enclosure and exploitation, drudgery and sweated labour. It also excludes history. History is implied in the very name of the house, and perhaps in its ‘rambling and irregular’ (p. 323) form, but the process, involving dissolution and dispossession, by which the onetime Abbey could be transformed 1 Jane Austen, Emma, World’s Classics, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 323. Further page references to this edition will be given in parentheses in the text.

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into a gentleman’s residence is never referred to: ‘It was just what it ought to be, and it looked what it was’ (p. 323). It would take a novelist with the ability to see time in space, like Jane Austen’s contemporary Walter Scott, to bear witness to the struggles of an often violent past that are here elided. Scott himself does precisely this in the Dedicatory Epistle to Ivanhoe (1819), when he has Laurence Templeton comment on the history implied in the typical English landscape, a history that remains unseen by the smugly unknowing contemporary inhabitant. An English reader who has never seen the Highlands of Scotland, or who has ‘wandered through those desolate regions in the course of a summer tour’, will be ‘fully prepared to believe the strangest things that could be told him of a people wild and extravagant enough to be attached to scenery so extraordinary’: But the same worthy person, when placed in his own snug parlour, and surrounded by all the comforts of an Englishman’s fireside, is not half so much disposed to believe that his own ancestors led a very different life from himself; that the shattered tower, which now forms a vista from his window, once held a baron who would have hung him up at his own door without any form of trial; that the hinds, by whom his little pet farm is managed, a few centuries ago would have been his slaves; and that the complete influence of feudal tyranny once extended over the neighbouring village, where the attorney is now a man of more importance than the lord of the manor.2

And in his scenic descriptions, such as that of Sherwood Forest at the beginning of Ivanhoe, with its oaks that could have witnessed the passage of Roman soldiers and its standing stones left by the Druids, Scott can quietly suggest the historical sedimentation of the English landscape and draw attention to the long continuity of human presence and activity, if not directly to the violence and oppression referred to in the Dedicatory Epistle. To turn to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, one can find in a novelist who learnt from Scott, George Eliot, a view of the English landscape which, unlike Jane Austen’s, incorporates an awareness of both history and labour while retaining something of the harmony of the Donwell Abbey scene. This is the case in a well-known passage in her last work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), where the crabbed bachelor Such looks back to the midland landscape in which he grew up. What he describes is of course the world of the author’s own upbringing, retrieved from memory and reflected upon in the last years of her life: Our national life is like that scenery which I early learned to love, not subject to great convulsions, but easily showing more or less delicate (sometimes melancholy) effects from minor changes. Hence our midland plains have never lost their familiar expression and conservative spirit for me; yet at every other mile, since I first looked on them, some sign of world-wide change, some new direction of human labour has wrought itself into what one may call the speech of the landscape—in contrast with those grander and vaster regions of the earth which keep an indifferent aspect in the presence of men’s toil and devices. What

Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1860), vol. 1, p. 21.

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does it signify that a lilliputian train passes over a viaduct amidst the abysses of the Apennines, or that a caravan laden with a nation’s offerings creeps across the unresting sameness of the desert, or that a petty cloud of steam sweeps for an instant over the face of an Egyptian colossus immovably submitting to its slow burial beneath the sand? But our woodlands and pastures, our hedgeparted cornfields and meadows, our bits of high common where we used to plant the windmills, our quiet little rivers here and there fit to turn a mill-wheel, our villages along the old coach-roads, are all easily alterable lineaments that seem to make the face of our Motherland sympathetic with the laborious lives of her children. She does not take their ploughs and wagons contemptuously, but rather makes every hovel and every sheepfold, every railed bridge or fallen treetrunk an agreeably noticeable incident; not a speck in the midst of unmeasured vastness, but a piece of our social history in pictorial writing.3

This is again a landscape that represents a whole culture, including this time both labour and history, but a history seen in explicitly conservative terms. One measure of its conservatism is the way in which, in creating the persona of Such, George Eliot has altered the more interesting elements of her own past. The daughter of an artisan turned land agent, marginalized by both gender and class, is refigured as the son of a Church of England clergyman and thus placed at the centre of the rural establishment. Seen from this perspective, not much different from the perspective of Emma Woodhouse and her friends, the scene presents the harmonious interaction and interdependence of the land and its inhabitants, of man and nature. Railed bridge and fallen tree-trunk, the man-made and the natural, are interchangeable details of the whole. There is here another instance of a form of ecological balance, and a more inclusive one than Jane Austen’s. Labour and laborious lives are acknowledged but they strike no discordant note and become part of the speech of the landscape; and the image of the land as a mother sympathetic to those who work it, lays those laborious lives to rest, so to speak, on the bosom of Nature. The emblems of agricultural work, ploughs, wagons and sheepfolds, do not disturb the harmony of the scene but are aesthetically integrated as interesting details of the whole. History is also acknowledged, though in a particular way. The historical vision here is conservative, though more specifically, despite its implied Toryism, it is Whig: a view of English history as uniquely blessed in its pattern of steady evolution over the centuries up to the pinnacle of the Victorian present. It recalls Macaulay, not Marx. This is an artful composition whose constructedness can be illumined by a comparison. The world of George Eliot’s childhood looked very different to another pair of eyes, those of William Cobbett, who passed that way in 1820, when the novelist was still in her cradle. This is how he saw Coventry and its surrounding landscape: Coventry ... is a city containing about twenty thousand souls, and the business in which is, principally, Watch-making and Ribbon-weaving. It is in the County of 3 George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, ed. Nancy Henry (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), pp. 24–5.

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Warwick, and is within a few miles of the centre of England. The land all around it, for many many miles, is very rich indeed. It is like garden ground. Much of it is in grass; and the cattle and sheep are generally very fine and fat. Nature and art appear to have exhausted their joint stock upon the land and cattle in this part of England; and yet, good God! what a miserable race of human beings! what a ragged, squalid, woe-worn assemblage of creatures! The poor wretches toil for their masters and for the Tax-eaters. Enough is left them, and barely enough, to sustain life; and thus debility becomes a habit with them.4

The bond between laborious lives and maternal Nature, between working people and motherland is riven: what is striking is discrepancy, not harmony, and the discrepancy between rich, well-tended land and impoverished and immiserated inhabitants raises questions about ownership and equality, property and class that are not broached in the George Eliot passage. In the light of this comparison, the Theophrastan retrospect, which comes in a chapter entitled ‘Looking Backward’, begins to look like a backward-looking myth, a nostalgic idealization of a preindustrial, pre-railway England, with its villages along the old coach roads, of a world touched up to conceal its disturbing juxtapositions, a world now lost to the metropolitan modernity in which Theophrastus Such and his creator live. This artful and meaningful composition raises a general question about literary landscape: to what extent does it ever yield insight into the social and political phenomena that are central to the interests of a social historian of the left? As Stephen Daniels has put it, ‘Landscape ... does not easily accommodate notions of power and conflict, indeed it tends to dissolve or conceal them’,5 which is precisely what the passage from Theophrastus Such so signally does. The tendency of literary landscape to conform to the aesthetic principles of pictorial and painterly composition, to notions of harmonious integration, makes it all too easy to read in terms of the equilibrium between man and nature, of the kind of interdependence that invites the epithet ecological. George Eliot’s trick, or art, is to have included labour and history in such a scene of interdependence without creating discord and to have made it stand for the national life. It presents itself as an image of a whole culture, and in this respect it suggests a contrast with a theoretical model or concept from a more radical and more modern source, Theodor Adorno’s concept of a cultural landscape, or culturescape, as one translator has put it. What characterizes Adorno’s Kulturlandschaften, is that ‘they bear the imprint of history as expression and of historical continuity as form. They dynamically integrate these elements in ways similar to artistic production’.6 The landscapes he has in mind are actual rather than literary, and more townscapes than landscapes, but Cobbett’s Political Register, 25 March 1820, vol. 36 (London: William Benbow, 1820), p. 83. I am indebted to Margaret Harris for this reference: ‘The George Eliot Centenary of 1919’, George Eliot Review 38 (2007): pp. 32–48 (p.36). 5 Stephen Daniels, ‘Marxism, Culture and the Duplicity of Landscape’, in Richard Peet and Nigel Thrift (eds), New Models in Geography, vol. 2 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 196. 6 T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 95. 4

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the elements of history as expression and continuity, and of artistic integration, are certainly shared by George Eliot’s composition of the midland landscape in Theophrastus. The difference lies in the kind of history that is being expressed. In Adorno’s Kulturlandschaften what commands aesthetic attention ... is the manner in which they give expression to past historical suffering. ... Resembling historical ruins even when its buildings are still intact, the ‘Kulturlandschaft’ is an animated wailful lament, whereas elsewhere laments have fallen into complete silence.7

For Adorno the anodyne conservation practised by what one might call the cultural heritage industry is redeemed by the eloquent traces of historical suffering that are inadvertently being preserved. Scott’s shattered tower can still be heard to speak of feudal oppression and its victims. Such speech is not the speech of the landscape of which Theophrastus writes. But is Adorno’s kind of radical understanding of the past inevitably elided in any landscape that conveys the interdependence of man and nature? Can an ecological vision accommodate a sense of history as conflict and suffering, exploitation and oppression? The two kinds of understanding can obviously coexist in the same mind, as is clearly the case with two notable writers of the landscape in the later nineteenth century, Richard Jefferies and Thomas Hardy. Both have an intimate knowledge of the land in the southwest of England, are sensitive to the traces of the past that it bears and have some understanding of the arduous lives of those who work it. In 1883 both were invited to contribute articles to Longman’s Magazine on the life of the agricultural labourer in their respective native counties, and although the accuracy and understanding of these surveys may be open to question, they at least reveal a readiness to address the economic reality of rural life and the changes wrought by social developments and the advent of the agricultural depression. Hardy sets out to dismantle the stereotype of the labourer as ‘Hodge ... a degraded being of uncouth manner and aspect, stolid understanding and snail-like movement’,8 and, aware of the readership he is addressing, argues that a London visitor would find after six months in a agricultural community that Hodge would have become ‘disintegrated into a number of dissimilar fellow creatures, men of many minds, infinite in difference ... each of whom walks in his own way the road to dusty death’.9 The mind of the novelist seeks to get beneath the surface, pointing out, for instance, that true poverty often gives the appearance of ‘scrupulous neatness’ and how the women’s work of haymaking is ‘quite a science, though it appears the easiest thing in the world to toss hay about in the sun’.10 Both he and Jefferies measure the changes in agricultural workers’ conditions in recent years and maintain that their lives, which involve putting their labour up for hire every Ibid., pp. 95– 6. Thomas Hardy, ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’, Longman’s Magazine 2/9 (July 1883):

7 8

pp. 252–69 (p. 252). 9 Ibid., p. 254. 10 Ibid., pp. 237, 267.

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Candlemas, have become increasingly restless and nomadic and are lived under the constant shadow of an impoverished old age. Jefferies, comparing the present with 1872, when he had written three letters to the Times on the subject of the Wiltshire farm-labourer,11 registers some improvements in education and housing, but deplores the absence of a settled population and the insecurity consequent on letting and living by the year. Maintaining that a ‘race for ever trembling on the verge of the workhouse cannot progress and lay up for itself any saving against old age’,12 he concludes his article with an eloquent plea for granting security of tenure to the agricultural workforce and thereby creating a sturdy and independent breed of men, ‘men standing upright in the face of all, without one particle of servility; paying their rates and paying their rents’.13 Despite worthy intentions and gestures of sympathy, both writers are closer in outlook to their metropolitan readership than to the agricultural workers they are writing about, and the accuracy of their portrayal is open to question.14 In particular they assume the essential docility of the agricultural workforce and ignore the bitterness of class antagonism and the depth of the anger and resentment felt by the labourers towards their employers.15 It is true that Hardy writes admiringly of Joseph Arch and his success in raising agricultural wages,16 and Jefferies, while maintaining that labouring men increasingly think only of work and wages, attributes this not to self-interest but to their involvement in an economic system over which they have no control: ‘they are driven rather than go of their own movement. The world pushes hard on their heels and they must go on like the rest’.17 But neither writer could be termed a political radical, and there is an element of condescension and aestheticizing distance in their treatment of the labourer in these articles.18 Nevertheless, the essays for Longman’s Magazine are significant for acknowledging the central presence of the labourer in rural life, and it is that presence that makes itself felt in both writers’ rendering of the landscape. Jefferies reflects at different times on nature as an ecological system, on labour and its human costs, and on history. The three come together in a short essay, ‘The Old Mill’, which first appeared in The Graphic in 1878 and whose subject is a watermill situated in the landscape of the Downs. ‘This great weatherbeaten building’, which ‘stands at the mouth of one of those curious, winding, Brian Taylor, Richard Jefferies (Boston: Twayne, 1982), p. 14. Richard Jefferies, ‘The Wiltshire Labourer’, Longman’s Magazine 3/13 (November

11

12

1883): pp. 52–65 (p. 60). 13 Ibid., p. 63. 14 See K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), ch. 8, pp. 374–410, for a trenchant critique of Hardy’s understanding of the agricultural labourer, and by implication Jefferies’s. 15 Ibid., pp. 383–6. 16 Hardy, ‘Dorsetshire Labourer’, p. 265. 17 Jefferies, ‘Wiltshire Labourer’, p. 55. 18 See Roger Ebbatson, Hardy: The Margin of the Unexpressed, ch. 6, pp. 129–53, for an analysis of ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’ along these lines.

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narrow “bottoms”, or deep valleys ... so characteristic of the chalk formation’,19 is mentioned in the Domesday Book, and Jefferies recounts its history as it comes into the possession of a Norman earl whose ‘crushing despotism’ prevented his serfs from having their corn ground by anyone else and included ‘the right of gallows’ to hang any wretch who offended him (p. 38). Its present walls were built by an Abbott and within them ‘the grain was ground to feed the Crusaders, for the men who fought in the bitter wars of the Roses, for Cavalier and Roundhead, and so down to our own time’ (p. 38). Historical continuity is then supplemented by a natural one as Jefferies turns his attention to the mill pool and the processes of nature that support it, presenting an ecological vision of the natural world and its store of energy: The still pool there which drives the wheel may be but a common pond in the eyes of the waggoner who comes for the sacks of flour, and yet in that pool there is a mystery which has baffled all the efforts of our philosophers and men of science, and that is—the storage of force. In every drop of water force is stored up waiting till man comes to use it; now no mechanic has yet succeeded in constructing a strong room in which to lock up the energy of the sun, and tides, and the rolling world like this. If they could, all the steam-engines and inventions of the age would fall into insignificance beside it. The dew and the rain on the downs up yonder sink into the chalk, and presently ooze out—filtered to crystal clearness—at the head of the narrow valley, where the grass is vivid green and the water-cress flourishes. These dew and rain drops drive the mill, and they have first been lifted up to the hill-top by the sun, and so it is really a sun-mill, and the same planet which ripens the grain grinds it for man’s use. (pp. 38–9)

The man-made mill is seen as part of a larger system of nature whose mysterious power inspires a strikingly prophetic insight into the potential for green energy. In ‘The Old Mill’ a grasp of the often violent and blood-red past is allied with a glimpse of a possible green future. Jefferies’s responsiveness to nature is marked by a striking power of observation, and it also commonly involves that connection of the detail to the whole that can be seen in ‘The Old Mill’ and in this passage from a late essay ‘On the Downs’ (1883): Stoop and touch the earth, and receive its influence; touch the flower and feel its life; face the wind, and have its meaning; let the sunlight fall on the open hand as if you could hold it. Something may be grasped from them all, invisible yet strong. It is the sense of a wider existence—wider and higher.20

‘The Old Mill’, in Richard Jefferies, Landscape & Labour, ed. John Pearson (Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker Press, 1979), pp. 36–40 (p. 36). Further page references to this essay are given in parentheses in the text. 20 ‘On the Downs’, Jeffries’ England: Nature Essays by Richard Jefferies, ed. Samuel J. Looker (London: Constable, 1937), pp. 119–26 (pp. 121–2). 19

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Combining what is immediately to hand with a wider existence, this looks rather like an injunction to act locally and think globally, even if the shift from wider to higher at the end suggests a slide towards the mysticism that is most fully expressed in another of his works of the same period, The Story of My Heart (1883). But Jefferies’s drift towards the mystical is usually checked by close observation of what is before his eyes, one consequence of which is that he does not recoil from the reality of contemporary agricultural life, including its modern machinery. In ‘Notes on Landscape Painting’ in The Life of the Fields (1884), he deplores the neglect of recent developments in agriculture by ‘some who depict country scenes on canvas’ and who, fearful of impairing the pastoral scene, ‘seem to proceed upon the assumption that steam-plough and reaping machine do not exist, that the landscape contains nothing but what it did a hundred years ago’.21 His stance is anti-pastoral and, maintaining that ‘our sympathy is ... with the things of our own time’ (p. 164), he stresses nature’s ability to absorb the new: As the furrow smoothes and brightens the share, as the mist eats away the sharpness of the iron angles, so, in a larger manner, the machines sent forth to conquer the soil are conquered by it, become a part of it, and as natural as the old, old scythe and reaping hook. (p. 151)

Thus the modern reaping machine is absorbed into the landscape, its red blades aesthetically integrated into an ageless ‘green’ scene of man and nature working interdependently to complete the harvest: Red arms, not unlike a travelling windmill on a small scale, sweep the corn as it is cut and leave it spread on the ground. The bright red fans, the white jacket of the man driving, the brown and iron-grey horses, and yellow wheat are toned— melted together at their edges—with warm sunlight. The machine is lost in the corn, and nothing is visible but the colours, and the fact that it is the reaping, the time of harvest, dear to man these how many thousand years! There is nothing new in it; it is all old as the hills. (p. 154)

The general point here is that ‘the earth has a way of absorbing things that are placed upon it’ (p. 151), and this has implications for landscape’s relationship to the past. In another essay from The Life of the Fields, ‘A Roman Brook’, the crossing point of a stream that was the site of a Roman encampment and has yielded coins and pottery shards, is also the place where a human skeleton is found, creating an elegiac contrast with the sunlit scene of nature’s bounty: ‘by the side of the living water ... near to its gentle sound, and the sparkle of sunshine on it, had lain this sorrowful thing’.22 That sorrowful thing cast up by the earth has analogies with the suffering figures of the labourers who, in Jefferies late writings such as his last essay ‘Hours of Spring’ (1886), are cast off by the 21 Richard Jefferies, ‘Notes on Landscape Painting’, The Life of the Fields, ed. Samuel J. Looker (London and Redhill: Lutterworth Press, 1947), pp. 151–64 (p. 163). Further page references to this essay will be given in parentheses in the text. 22 ‘A Roman Brook’, Life of the Fields, pp. 53–8 (p. 58).

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system of agricultural employment: the labouring man who comes to the door at the end of a long winter to ask if he could try to dig the garden since, after two months without work, he was starving; or another aged man , ‘white as the snow through which he walked’, who comes regularly once a week, living on charity and in outhouses rather than go into the workhouse; or the old man of over 90, with ‘the fixed stare, the animal-like eye, of extreme age’, being borne on a cart away from the old home he has had to leave on the death of his son.23 The human cost of the tended landscape is here spelt out by individual illustrations of ‘a race for ever trembling on the verge of the workhouse’;24 and in an earlier work, The Gamekeeper at Home (1878), Jefferies does the same with the past suffering that underlies the beauty of the countryside. The parkland associated with peace and pleasure has also been the site of disinterred skeletons, ‘close beneath the surface, and in their confused arrangement presenting every sign of hasty interment, as if after battle’, prompting a general reflection that turns the landscape into something like Adorno’s Kulturlandschaft: It is strange to think of, yet it is true enough, that, as beautiful as the country is, with its green meadows and graceful trees, its streams and forests and peaceful homesteads, it would be difficult to find an acre of ground that has not been stained by blood. A melancholy reflection this, that carries the mind backwards, while the thrush sings on the bough, through the nameless skirmishes of the Civil War, the cruel assassinations of the rival Roses, down to the axes of the Saxons and the ghastly wounds they made. Everywhere under the flowers are the dead.25

The earth has a way of absorbing everything placed upon it, including historical conflicts and their victims, but at the same time of giving up its ghosts to the alert and questioning mind which is as sensitive to the painful traces of the past as it is to the benign processes of nature. As a figure in a novel of the same period, Pauline in The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane (1887), puts it: ‘Men will not remember, but there is a memory in the world which forgets nothing’.26 The landscape, the earth itself may, Jefferies implies, be the repository of this larger memory. To turn to the other notable composer of literary landscape in the late nineteenth century, Thomas Hardy, certain of his landscapes might seem at first sight to resist memory and history, like Egdon Heath, ‘whose surface had never been stirred to a finger’s depth, save by scratching of rabbits, since brushed by the earliest tribes’.27 But even timeless Egdon appears in the Domesday Book, and it has in its ‘The Hours of Spring’, Jefferies’ England, pp. 3–20 (pp. 10, 11, 18). See note 12 above. 25 Richard Jefferies, The Gamekeeper at Home (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 23

24

1978), p. 52. 26 ‘Mark Rutherford’, The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971), p. 226. 27 The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge (London and New York: Macmillan/St Martin’s Press, 1966), p. 330.

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very appearance a suggestive affinity with man: ‘perfectly accordant with man’s nature’, it is ‘like man, slighted and enduring’.28 That last phrase is readable in social terms, not just existential—not like all mankind, but like a particular type of labouring man or woman, the slighted but enduring figures of the furze-cutters whose rights to cut are affirmed in the Domesday Book. The labourers are implied in the landscape, a point made explicit in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) when Tess is shown walking to Flintcomb-Ash: a figure which is part of the landscape; a fieldwoman pure and simple, in winter guise: a grey serge cape, a red woollen cravat, a stuff skirt covered by a whiteybrown rough wrapper, and buff leather gloves. Every thread of that old attire has become faded and thin under the stroke of rain-drops, the burn of sunbeams, and the stress of winds.29

The human figure is worked on by wind and weather like the land itself. And the same equation is graphically illustrated in an incidental figure like the labourer Haymoss at the beginning of Two on a Tower (1882): seen ‘as a dark spot on an area of brown ... a moving figure, whom it was difficult to distinguish from the earth he trod as the caterpillar from his leaf, by reason of the excellent match between his clothes and the clods’.30 The analogy with the caterpillar points up the incorporation of the figure in a larger ecological system. Labour is an intrinsic part of the landscape in Hardy, and in a certain sense so, too, is the history of labouring lives. In that well-known passage at the beginning of Jude the Obscure (1895) when the boy Jude, standing in the meanly utilitarian field with its harrow-lines like the channellings in a piece of new corduroy (another merging of labourer’s dress and the earth itself), is unaware of what the narrator can sense. The harrow-lines may seem to deprive the field of all history beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of songs from ancient harvest days, of spoken words and of sturdy deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to a woman at whose voice he trembled by the next seed-time after fulfilling them in the church adjoining.31

The Return of the Native, Penguin Classics, ed. Tony Slade (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 11. 29 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, World’s Classics, ed. Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 272. 30 Two on a Tower, World’s Classics, ed. Suleiman M. Ahmad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 13. 31 Jude the Obscure, World’s Classics, ed. Patricia Ingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 8–9. 28

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This is not quite Adorno’s ‘wailful lament’, an expression of history as suffering, but something more mixed and modulated. And in a way more radical, not reducing the past to suffering and oppression alone but acknowledging the varied collective existence of a whole class of anonymous unrecorded lives that rest in unvisited tombs. There is a whole system of relationships here in the echoes and associations of every clod and stone, a kind of ecological system in which seed-time and harvest link man and nature as, at the same time, seasons of the agricultural year and phases of human life and feeling: a system that extends, so to speak, downwards on a vertical axis into the past. And the imaginative effort on the part of the writer to bring these echoes to the ear and these buried associations to the surface resembles, in a loose sense, the labourer’s work with the spade. That willingness to disinter the lives of the unknown is the measure of Hardy’s radicalism, and it informs of course his historical fictions such as The Trumpet Major (1880) and ‘The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion’ (1890). Landscape, labour and history are brought together in the scene from Jude in Hardy’s distinctive way. The earth bears the imprint of labour and history, even though the latter is only discernible to the acute consciousness of the writer. That consciousness is at work, too, in ‘A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork’ (1893), where the narrator’s ascent of Maiden Castle takes place in a storm that acts as a natural echo of stormings past. There are of course visible signs of the past here in the humps and hollows of the earthwork, but of the people who went out from here to do battle with the Roman legions under Vespasian, ‘not a page, not a stone, has preserved their fame’.32 The peopled past is only accessible through attention to the sounds of the scene: Acoustic perceptions multiply to-night. We can almost hear the stream of years that have borne these deeds away from us. Strange articulations seem to float on the air from that point, the gateway, where the animation in past times must frequently have concentrated itself at hours of coming and going, and general excitement. There arises an ineradicable fancy that they are human voices. (p. 321)

Then attention is seized by something close at hand: ‘the gradual elevation of a small mound of earth’. It is a mole, whose excavations seem to mimic those of the writer himself: As the fine earth lifts and lifts and falls loosely aside fragments of burnt clay roll out of it –clay that once formed part of cups or other vessels used by the inhabitants of the fortress. (p. 321)

It is observant attention to the workings of the natural world—the same kind of attention that can be seen, for instance, in Hardy’s careful distinguishing between 32 ‘A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork’, Life’s Little Ironies and A Changed Man, ed. F.B. Pinion (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 317–26 (p. 321). Further page references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text.

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twilight at evening and twilight in the morning in Tess, or the different effects of different strengths of the winds on the grasses of Norcombe Hill in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)—that is involved in disinterring the anonymously peopled past. The very sound of the grasses in the wind may, on another occasion, seem to carry an echo of the past: At night, when I walk across the lonely place, it is impossible to avoid hearing, amid the scourings of the wind over the grass-bents and thistles, the old trumpet and bugle calls, the rattle of the halters.33

The act of attention of a mind closely responsive to the natural world is what brings the buried past back to consciousness. The ecological and the historical are not here opposed, for the land and the lives of those who have acted or worked upon it, are made present in the same imaginative process. Hardy’s comments in his autobiography on landscape painting, written in 1887, have an interesting bearing on his own practice of writing the landscape: After looking at the landscape ascribed to Bonington in our drawing-room I feel that Nature is played out as a Beauty, but not as a Mystery. I don’t want to see landscapes, i.e., scenic paintings of them, because I don’t want to see the original realities—as optical effects, that is. I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings.34

His own attentiveness to the echoes of the past can be understood as one expression of the mystery that lies deeper than mere optical effects, and yet however fanciful these imaginings may seem to be, they are striking not for their abstract quality but rather for their concrete connection to the natural world, to the very sound of the wind in the grasses in the passage from ‘The Melancholy Hussar’. It is the same kind of concreteness—not the abstract imaginings of a mystical kind in which he sometimes indulges—that also marks Jefferies’s finest writing about the countryside. In both writers it is their close observation of the natural world that can bring to life at the same time and in the same process the life and labour that have gone into the making of the landscape. They may not be politically radical, but in responding with acute sensitivity to the workings of the green world of nature, they tap the red vein of toil and travail that has bled into the land.

33 ‘The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion’, Wessex Tales, World’s Classics, ed. Kathryn R. King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 39. 34 Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1962), p. 185.

Chapter 8

Fallen Nature: Ruskin’s Political Apocalypse Dinah Birch

Ruskin was not in any simple sense a socialist thinker. In Fors Clavigera (1871– 84), his series of 96 polemical letters ‘to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain’, he makes a firm declaration: I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school;—Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s. I name these two out of the numberless great Tory writers, because they were my own two masters. I had Walter Scott’s novels, and the Iliad (Pope’s translation), for constant reading when I was a child, on week-days: on Sunday, their effect was tempered by Robinson Crusoe and the Pilgrim’s Progress; my mother having it deeply in her heart to make an evangelical clergyman of me. Fortunately, I had an aunt more evangelical than my mother; and my aunt gave me cold mutton for Sunday’s dinner, which— as I much preferred it hot—greatly diminished the influence of the Pilgrim’s Progress; and the end of the matter was, that I got all the noble imaginative teaching of Defoe and Bunyan, and yet—am not an evangelical clergyman.1

It is startling, then, to discover that a few weeks earlier, in the letter of July 1871 in the same series, Ruskin had asserted, just as firmly, that ‘I am myself a Communist of the old school—reddest also of the red’ (27: 116). The contradiction is deliberately provocative, part of Ruskin’s wish to tease and unsettle his readers throughout Fors Clavigera. But it also reflects his refusal to be categorized within the conventions of political affiliation. He preferred to define his allegiances in terms of traditions that he believed had older and deeper claims on his loyalty. Tory or Communist, he is ‘of the old school’, consistent in his antagonism to modern patterns of thought. This hostility might seem to disqualify Ruskin from any serious role within the early development of the British labour movement. Nevertheless, when the campaigning journalist W.T. Stead conducted a famous survey in 1906 to discover which writers and books had influenced the new generation of Labour and ‘Lib-Lab’ MPs, the author named most often was John John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera , Letter 10 (October 1871), The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols, London: George Allen, 1903–12), vol. 27, p. 167. Subsequent references to this edition will be indicated by volume and page numbers in the text. 1

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Ruskin.2 Only the Bible rivalled Ruskin in prominence in the MPs’ responses. These two major influences were connected, for Ruskin’s Christian and biblical roots made his work attractive to a movement that was energized by biblically formed religious dissent. Stead’s article underlines the point in recording John Bunyan’s biblical allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), mentioned halfsardonically in Ruskin’s account of his childhood, among the books that figured frequently in the MPs’ lists.3 Ruskin’s impact on the British left helped to initiate an association between socialist work towards social and political reform and an awareness of the natural environment. His thinking on these matters was defined by a sustained and intimate engagement with the Bible. The celebration of contemporary landscape painting that launched Ruskin’s career rests on a sense of religious duty: To handle the brush freely, and to paint grass and weeds with accuracy enough to satisfy the eye, are accomplishments which a year or two’s practice will give any man; but to trace among the grass and weeds those mysteries of invention and combination, by which nature appeals to the intellect—to render the delicate fissure, and descending curve, and undulating shadow of the mouldering soil, with gentle and fine finger, like the touch of the rain itself—to find even in all that appears most trifling or contemptible, fresh evidence of the constant working of the Divine power ‘for glory and for beauty,’ and to teach it and proclaim it to the unthinking and the unregarding—this, as it is the peculiar province and faculty of the master-mind, so it is the peculiar duty which is demanded of it by the Deity. (3: 483)

This resounding sentence appears in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), the book that made Ruskin’s name as an interpreter of nature’s divinity for the ‘unthinking and the unregarding’. It reveals the principles that lay behind much of his early writing. As Ruskin sees them, nature’s truths are not only to be found in impressive mountains and cataracts encountered by daring travellers, but in the unassuming beauty of ‘grass and weeds’, available to anyone who cares to look for them. Natural ‘mysteries of invention and combination’ make their appeal to the intellect, rather than exclusively to the emotions or the aesthetic sense, and they require the exercise of active thought. Their representation must recognize imperfection and mortality, suggested by the ‘fissure, and descending curve, and undulating shadow of the mouldering soil’. Ruskin’s argument is a synthesis of Romantic and evangelical impulses. Nature as an expression of God’s benevolence is only to be fully understood by the exceptional ‘master-mind’, the Romantic genius who combines a Wordsworthian breadth of sympathy with the zeal of the W.T. Stead, ‘The Labour Party and the Books That Helped to Make It’, Review of Reviews 33 (June 1906): pp. 568–82. See Lawrence Goldman, ‘Ruskin, Oxford and the British Labour Movement 1880–1914’, in Dinah Birch (ed.), Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 57–86. 3 Goldman, ‘Ruskin’, p. 58. 2

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preacher. The heroic ‘master-mind’ of Modern Painters is J.M.W. Turner, but what Ruskin has to say also defines his own radical critical ambitions. His distinctively personal passion for clouds and stones and leaves was accompanied by the sense of a compelling duty towards his largely Protestant middle-class audience, a new generation of serious readers who were looking for deeper dimensions of meaning in their lives. This fusion of Romantic and evangelical thought in Ruskin’s work was the product of an unusually intense education. His Scottish father was a capable, wellread man, an amateur actor and painter in his youth, and an ardent admirer of Romantic literature, especially the poetry and fiction of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. Finding himself living in a suburban house in South London, bound to his exacting business as a wine merchant in the City, much of John James Ruskin’s thwarted hunger for a broader cultural life was channelled into his ambitions for his son—a boy who would be free of the office, destined to achieve the greatness that would compensate his father for the necessary constraints of his commercial labours. Ruskin’s staunchly evangelical mother Margaret Ruskin, who had given birth to her only child late in life, was just as convinced that young John was a boy of extraordinary gifts, but she took it for granted that his life as a committed Christian would weigh equally with his triumphs as a writer.4 These parental aspirations created tensions in Ruskin’s life that were not easily resolved, but they also gave him an unquenchable belief in his vocation. Throughout his early years, Ruskin tried to make his readers see the world as a sacred text, full of benign significance. Trained by his mother in the daily disciplines of reading the Bible,5 which as a young man he ‘reverenced, as transcending all thought, and ordaining all conduct’ (35: 40), Ruskin read the phenomena of nature with the same kind of meticulous attention. Within what C. Stephen Finley has described as the concept of ‘nature’s covenant’, Ruskin ‘accommodates romantic nature to the covenant theology of the Reformed tradition’.6 In the second volume of Modern Painters (1846), the point is made with simple force: ‘It is not possible for a Christian man to walk across so much as a rood of the natural earth with mind unagitated and rightly poised, without receiving strength and hope from some stone, flower, leaf or sound, nor without a sense of dew falling upon him out of the sky’ (4: 215–6). Ruskin’s confidence in the benevolent communion between humanity and nature did not last. In his middle age, he understood things differently: ‘everything 4 Tim Hilton gives a shrewd and sympathetic account of Ruskin’s relations with his parents in John Ruskin: The Early Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985). 5 For a fuller analysis of Ruskin’s biblical education, see Dinah Birch, ‘Ruskin and the Bible’, in Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts and Christopher Rowland (eds), The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 525–35. 6 C. Stephen Finley, Nature’s Covenant: Figures of Landscape in Ruskin (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1992), p. 28.

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that has happened to me … is little in comparison to the crushing and depressing effect on me, of what I learn day by day as I work on, of the cruelty and ghastliness of the Nature I used to think so divine’ (37: 154). His early religious and Romantic assurance darkened into a state of mourning for an earth that has felt the wound of human sin, and shared in a universal fall from grace. But this is not, I would argue, just the story of an ageing man’s disillusionment. Ruskin constructs a political narrative, in the broadest sense, out of the story of a fallen world. Lamentation is not enough. Nature is from first to last a moral phenomenon, as Ruskin understands it, and as such its degradation is a human responsibility. His uncompromising insistence that the natural and the human cannot be divided, regardless of whether the connection is comforting or painful, is what has chiefly resonated among the radical thinkers who have been influenced, and continue to be influenced, by Ruskin’s writings on the environment. This association left its mark on the early formation of ecological literary criticism. Jonathan Bate, speaking of his pioneering study Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, published in 1991, affirms that one of the aims of his book was to highlight Ruskin’s claim that the fundamental material basis of political economy is not money, labour and production, but ‘pure air, water and earth’.7 Late-twentieth-century developments in ecological theory are not synonymous with the history of socialism, and they are often distant from Ruskin’s fundamental premises. Nevertheless, Ruskin’s work becomes a significant interface between the Christian and Romantic understanding of nature that prevailed in the nineteenth century, and its developing legacies in contemporary environmentalism. As the evangelical Christianity of Ruskin’s youth, like his belief in the benevolence of nature, faltered, it might be supposed that biblical models would become less relevant to his social thought. In fact, despite the humanism of his middle years, Ruskin never abandoned his early habit of biblical study or his reverence for biblical texts. The title of this essay refers to his political vision of nature as an ‘apocalypse’. As Michael Wheeler has shown, the idea of the apocalypse is persistently central to Ruskin’s thought, and it survived his loss of faith. His sense of the term, however, differs radically from our contemporary usage.8 The word has now generally come to mean final destruction, the end of all things in a storm of violence brought about by human sin. As such, it is a concept that commonly turns up in environmental writing, as campaigners present us with the grim evidence of what we are doing to the contaminated earth, and what the Jonathan Bate, letter (12 September 1992), London Review of Books 13/17 (1992). See Michael Wheeler, ‘Environment and Apocalypse’, in Michael Wheeler (ed.),

7 8

Ruskin and Environment: The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 165–86; the point is also developed in Wheeler’s Ruskin’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Jonathan Roberts shows the importance of the concept in Wordsworth’s thought, and in recent critical approaches to Wordsworth’s Romanticism, in ‘Wordsworth’s Apocalypse’, Literature and Theology 20/ 4 (2006): pp. 61–78. I am grateful to Dr Roberts for his helpful comments on an early draft of this chapter.

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consequences may be. Ruskin understood the word differently. For him, as for other Victorians trained in a Christian tradition, an apocalypse was an uncovering, or revelation.9 In the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation, St John of Patmos describes a mystic vision of God’s judgement. The corrupt old dispensation will be swept away by his wrath, to be replaced by a transfigured heaven and earth: 1. And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. 2. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. 4. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. 5. And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.10 John’s Revelation has plenty to say about destruction, but for the righteous it ends with joy. This is what Ruskin, who knew every syllable of these verses, understood by apocalypse. A central reason for his enduring influence among generations of followers is that he preaches hope alongside despair, and points to courses of action that might translate divine judgement into an earthly benediction. His apocalypse looks forward, demands commitment, urges change. When Ruskin began this apocalyptic story with the first volume of Modern Painters, he was 24 years old, and unknown. The book appeared anonymously, as the work of ‘A Graduate of Oxford’. Carefully produced and far from cheap, it was funded by his wealthy father. Those are not circumstances that promise a literary success. Nevertheless, the book made an immediate stir. No one had encountered anything comparable with its intoxicating fusion of religious and Romantic passion, as Ruskin’s defence of the art of the landscape painter J.M.W. Turner unfolded into an extended exposition of natural truth. Responses were divided. Conservative readers were on the whole affronted, rightly perceiving that Ruskin’s aesthetic arguments denied the power of the cultural establishment— especially the Royal Academy, as arbiter of taste—and gave it instead to the individual reader. We are required to look at nature as independent witnesses, rather than passively accepting the bland and generalized versions of landscape handed down by Joshua Reynolds, or Aristotle, or any other sanctioned authority. Just as Protestant reformers had urged the faithful to read the Bible for themselves, 9 The word derives from the Greek άποκάλυψις, an uncovering—άπό, from, καλύπτειν, to cover. 10 Revelation 21:1–5. The reference here (and throughout this chapter) is to the King James version of the Bible.

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guided by the interpretative sermons of their pastors, so Ruskin was encouraging his audience to read nature for themselves, directed by his exegetical critical prose. More progressive readers saw the point, and gave the book a warm welcome. They were particularly impressed by passages like the one below, where Ruskin describes Turner’s approach to painting the sky. Here Ruskin is not concerned with aerial dramas of storm, lightning or rainbow, but a peaceful blue sky, of the kind that anyone might observe on a fine day. A wash of smooth blue paint, and the job is done—or so the unthinking and unregarding reader might suppose. Not so, says Ruskin, insisting that we should look again, and think again. A clear sky makes its own appeal to the intellect, if we give it the chance: Let us begin then with the simple open blue of the sky … the sky is to be considered as a transparent blue liquid, in which, at various elevations, clouds are suspended, those clouds being themselves only particular visible spaces of a substance with which the whole mass of this liquid is more or less impregnated. Now, we all know this perfectly well, and yet we so far forget it in practice, that we little notice the constant connection kept up by nature between her blue and her clouds; and we are not offended by the constant habit of the old masters, of considering the blue sky as totally distinct in its nature, and far separated from the vapours which float in it. With them, cloud is cloud, and blue is blue, and no kind of connection between them is ever hinted at. The sky is thought of as a clear, high, material dome, the clouds as separate bodies suspended beneath it; and in consequence, however delicate and exquisitely removed in tone their skies may be, you always look at them, not through them … if you look intensely at the pure blue of a serene sky, you will see that there is a variety and fulness in its very repose. It is not flat dead colour, but a deep, quivering, transparent body of penetrable air, in which you trace or imagine short falling spots of deceiving light, and dim shades, faint veiled vestiges of dark vapour; and it is this trembling transparency which our great modern master has especially aimed at and given. His blue is never laid on in smooth coats, but in breaking, mingling, melting hues, a quarter of an inch of which, cut off from all the rest of the picture, is still spacious, still infinite and immeasurable in depth. It is a painting of the air, something into which you can see, through the parts which are near you, into those which are far off; something which has no surface and through which we can plunge far and farther, and without stay or end, into the profundity of space;—whereas, with all the old landscape painters except Claude, you may indeed go a long way before you come to the sky, but you will strike hard against it at last. (3: 347)

This is what Ruskin has in mind when he claims, in the same volume, that Turner has ‘brought down and laid open to the world another apocalypse of Heaven’ (3: 363)—not that Turner describes the annihilation of the world, but that he uncovers its infinitely changeful meaning. Ruskin wonders at our habitual indifference to what the sky has to teach: It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend

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to her … there is not a moment of any day of our lives, when nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. (3: 343)

Ruskin’s evangelical convictions as a young man included the serene conviction that the purpose of creation was the service of humanity, and that the two are indissolubly connected, just as the blue and the clouds of the sky cannot be separated. His insistence that the truths of nature were available to all, not just those with access to the peculiar beauties of wild or secluded landscapes, was especially appealing to those with socialist inclinations. Anyone, no matter how poor or unschooled, could look at grass, or weeds, or the sky. One of the points that contemporary environmentalists habitually make about our global assaults on the natural world is that we have destroyed the independence of nature, and made nature subject to humanity. Bill McKibben, among the most persuasive of American campaigners against the policies and behaviour that are leading to climate change, made such a claim in his first book, The End of Nature, published in 1989: The idea of nature will not survive the new global position—the carbon dioxide and the CFCs and the like … . We have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.11

That is not at all how Ruskin saw the matter. For him, nature’s meaning was entirely dependent on humanity, and had been from the first. Though it was not dictated by mankind, it had been laid down by God explicitly for our instruction and benefit. It could speak of blessing or cursing, according to our moral identity and consequent behaviour. It was the business of teachers, or preachers, like Turner or like Ruskin himself, to expound the meaning of nature for readers who needed to be taught how to see what was in front of them. On her first reading of Modern Painters, Charlotte Brontё remarked that the book ‘seems to give me eyes’.12 The book was for her a revelation, a benevolent uncovering of nature and art. That was Ruskin’s intention. As Ruskin aged, and continued to look at what lay around him, he saw more and more evidence of carelessness and vice in the changing relations between humanity and nature. Such evils were nothing new, in the eyes of a man steeped Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 54. Charlotte Brontё, letter to W.S. Williams (31 July 1848), The Letters of Charlotte

11

12

Brontё, ed. Margaret Smith (3 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995–2004), vol. 2, p. 94.

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in the traditions of evangelicalism, a theological tradition that had always been inclined to emphasize the depravity of human nature. But industrial development and capitalist greed had led to damage on a scale previously impossible. The science of political economy, which ought to govern and educate human rapacity, was making matters worse. In Fors Clavigera, Ruskin is forthright on the matter. It is the business of the political economists to regulate the essentially useful things of the Earth. First among these are ‘Pure Air, Water, and Earth.’ Ruskin continues, Heaven gives you the main elements of these. You can destroy them at your pleasure, or increase, almost without limit, the available quantities of them. You can vitiate the air by your manner of life, and of death, to any extent. You might easily vitiate it so as to bring such a pestilence on the globe as would end all of you. You, or your fellows, German and French, are at present busy in vitiating it to the best of your power in every direction; chiefly at this moment with corpses, and animal and vegetable ruin in war: changing men, horses, and garden-stuff into noxious gas. But everywhere, and all day long, you are vitiating it with foul chemical exhalations; and the horrible nests, which you call towns, are little more than laboratories for the distillation into heaven of venomous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia from decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata from purulent disease. On the other hand, your power of purifying the air, by dealing properly and swiftly with all substances in corruption; by absolutely forbidding noxious manufactures; and by planting in all soils the trees which cleanse and invigorate earth and atmosphere,—is literally infinite. You might make every breath of air you draw, food. Secondly, your power over the rain and river-waters of the earth is infinite. You can bring rain where you will, by planting wisely and tending carefully;— drought where you will, by ravage of woods and neglect of the soil. You might have the rivers of England as pure as the crystal of the rock; beautiful in falls, in lakes, in living pools; so full of fish that you might take them out with your hands instead of nets. Or you may do always as you have done now, turn every river of England into a common sewer, so that you cannot so much as baptize an English baby but with filth, unless you hold its face out in the rain; and even that falls dirty’ (27: 91–2).

Passages like these are what have led to Ruskin being called the first environmentalist.13 They were what his admirer William Morris had in mind, in giving his lecture (chaired by Ruskin) on ‘Art under Plutocracy’ in University College, Oxford in 1883: To keep the air pure and the rivers clean, to take some pains to keep the meadows and tillage as pleasant as reasonable use will allow them to be; to allow peaceable citizens freedom to wander where they will, so they do no harm 13 This remains a widely held view. The architect Peter Davey, for instance, describes Ruskin as ‘one of the first people to be an environmentalist in the modern sense’: Peter Davey, ‘The Eighth Lamp’, Architectural Review 203 (1998): pp: 63–8 (p. 68).

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to garden or cornfield; nay, even to leave here and there some piece of waste or mountain sacredly free from fence or tillage as a memory of man’s struggles with nature in his early days; is it too much to ask of civilization to be so far thoughtful of man’s pleasure and rest, and to help so far as this her children to whom she has most often set such heavy tasks of grinding labour? Surely not an unreasonable asking. But not a whit of it shall we get under the present system of society. That loss of the instinct for beauty which has involved us in the loss of popular art is also busy in depriving us of the only compensation possible for that loss, by surely and not slowly destroying the beauty of the very face of the earth. Not only have whole counties of England, and the heavens that hang over them, disappeared beneath a crust of unutterable grime, but the disease which, to a visitor coming from the times of art, reason and order, would seem to be a love of dirt and ugliness for its own sake, spreads all over the country.14

William Morris’s arguments here and elsewhere in his writings are among the means by which Ruskin’s thinking found its way into the foundations of socialism. Yet Morris’s response to the despoliation of nature is fundamentally different from Ruskin’s argument. Despite his intensely aesthetic sensibility, Ruskin did not share Morris’s conviction that the destruction of beauty was the worst consequence of a polluted environment. His interpretation of the political implications of the fall of nature is broader, and it returns to the biblical premises of his early understanding of the dynamic relation between nature and humanity. The contamination of humanity, a stain of which nature’s disgrace is the inevitable expression, is his deepest concern. Ruskin’s observations on the fall of nature in Fors Clavigera are not confined to his bitter disgust at what has happened to the soil, or the air, or the water. What matters more is what is being done to men. The passage was published in May 1871, at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, one of the ruinous events which drove him to begin Fors Clavigera. ‘The reason for all wars, and for the necessity of national defences, is that the majority of persons, high and low, in all European nations are Thieves, and, in their hearts, greedy of their neighbours’ lands, goods and fame’ (27: 126). When Ruskin talks about ‘changing men, horses and gardenmatter into noxious gas’, he intends his readers to remember the battlefields of Europe. The issues here are not only natural, aesthetic, or scientific. They are also moral, and human. In Ruskin’s mind, there is no final distinction between those categories. Like the clouds and the air, they are connected, each part of the same visible body of truth. This becomes still clearer in what might be read as Ruskin’s most apocalyptic text, The Storm-cloud of the Nineteenth Century, two lectures delivered at the London Institution in 1884. Here Ruskin makes the pioneering point that selfish human behaviour is changing the sky, and the weather, and not for the better. In

14 William Morris, ‘Art under Plutocracy’, The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris (24 vols, New York: Russel & Russel, 1966), vol. 22, p. 179.

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the first of the lectures, his description of the storm cloud has all the precision and clarity of his youthful writing, with none of the joyful exuberance: For the sky is covered with gray cloud;—not rain-cloud, but a dry black veil, which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused in mist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible, yet without any substance, or wreathing, or color of its own. And everywhere the leaves of the trees are shaking fitfully, as they do before a thunder-storm; only not violently, but enough to show the passing to and fro of a strange, bitter, blighting wind.

This sounds like industrial pollution, which was real enough as an English phenomenon in the 1880s. But Ruskin sees more than the emissions of factories among the clouds. It was in the spring of 1871 that he first noted the darkened skies: It looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke; very possibly it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneys in a square of two miles on every side of me. But mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men’s souls—such of them as are not gone yet where they have to go, and may be flitting hither and thither, doubting, themselves, of the fittest place for them. (34: 33)

Ruskin is recalling the dead soldiers of the Franco-Prussian War, as he did in Fors Clavigera; a conflict which he saw as a culmination of the competitive hunger for dominance and gain which he identified as the real plague of Europe. Ruskin has not lost his belief that the meaning of these texts in the sky is moral, though it is no longer simply benevolent. Nor has he lost his conviction that his ‘unthinking’ and ‘unregarding’ readers must be helped to interpret them. The ‘storm-cloud’ is a contemporary manifestation of the furnace smoke of the Revelation of St John, created by industry and war, blotting out the clear skies that Turner had recorded with such faithful exactness: And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.15

Just as he did as an evangelical Christian writing in praise of Turner’s work, Ruskin calls on the wisdom ‘of old time’ to unfold this bleak dimension of nature’s biblical meaning: Blanched Sun,—blighted grass,—blinded man.—If, in conclusion, you ask me for any conceivable cause or meaning of these things—I can tell you none, according to your modern beliefs; but I can tell you what meaning it would have borne to the men of old time. Remember, for the last twenty years, England, and all foreign nations, either tempting her, or following her, have blasphemed the

Revelation 9:2.

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name of God deliberately and openly; and have done iniquity by proclamation, every man doing as much injustice to his brother as it is in his power to do. Of states in such moral gloom every seer of old predicted the physical gloom, saying, ‘The light shall be darkened in the heavens thereof, and the stars shall withdraw their shining.’16 … What is best to be done, do you ask me? The answer is plain. Whether you can affect the signs of the sky or not, you can the signs of the times. Whether you can bring the sun back or not, you can assuredly bring back your own cheerfulness, and your own honesty. You may not be able to say to the winds, ‘Peace; be still,’ but you can cease from the insolence of your own lips, and the troubling of your own passions. And all that it would be extremely well to do, even though the day were coming when the sun should be as darkness, and the moon as blood. But, the paths of rectitude and piety once regained, who shall say that the promise of old time would not be found to hold for us also?—‘Bring ye all the tithes into my storehouse, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord God, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it’.17 (34: 40–41)

This peroration, steeped with reference to biblical authority, is representative of Ruskin’s late work in its condemnation of modern transgression. The Revelation of St John provides a framework of meaning, but the apocalyptic narrative that underlies Ruskin’s reading of nature is not confined to the New Testament. It is located within a broader genre of apocalyptic writings. The final biblical reference of this lecture is to the book of Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament in Christian Bibles. Malachi’s promise of blessing is accompanied by a stark warning of the consequences of sin: And I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against false swearers, and against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his right, and fear not me, saith the LORD of hosts.18

The language of condemnation, celebration and prophecy that Ruskin employs in his later writings is embedded in the concerns with social justice that he had first encountered in the Bible. That he was no longer an evangelical Christian did not mean that he abandoned the traditions of the sermon, with its strategy of the detailed exegesis of an authoritative text, though the texts he interprets are not confined to scripture. He thought himself to be ‘quite as capable of preaching on the beauty of the creation, of which I know something, as of preaching on the beauty of a system of salvation of which I know nothing’ (3: 666). Ruskin is not Joel 2:10. Malachi 3:10. 18 Malachi 3:5. 16 17

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speaking for himself in his urgent appeals for reform, nor is he primarily concerned with the defence of a degraded environment. He is giving a voice to a moral order that is unchangeably reflected in the beauty of nature, or in its fearfulness. The energy of Ruskin’s response to nature, and his exceptional capacity to find words for its beauty, means that his presence in environmental thought has sometimes been misread. The wish to preserve an uncontaminated natural world, with a purity that is separate and distinct from human activity, played no part in his thinking. Formed by his biblical studies, Ruskin saw both nature and humanity in terms of an apocalyptic narrative of retribution and redemption. Despite their roots in biblical nonconformism, British socialists were only sporadically sympathetic to these obdurate values, often giving a higher priority to the requirements of industrial development than to a dynamic relation between nature and humanity. The tendency of recent environmentalism, on the other hand, has been to deny the special claims of humanity altogether. Speaking of his theory of ‘Gaia’, James Lovelock notes his abandonment of ‘the humanist Christian belief in the good of mankind as the only thing that mattered’.19 In his middle age, Ruskin would have sympathized with Lovelock’s point, as he mocked his own early confidence that the changeful beauty of the sky ‘is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure’: At least, I thought so, when I was four-and-twenty. At five-and-fifty, I fancy that it is just possible there may be other creatures in the universe to be pleased, or,—it may be,—displeased, by the weather. (3: 343)

Nevertheless, for Ruskin it remains the case that the good of mankind and the good of nature can never be separated. His insistence on an ideal of wholeness, in which economic concerns combine with aesthetic, moral, intellectual, spiritual and practical imperatives, is more than a detail of cultural history. This essential interconnectedness is what he wants us to see. ‘Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think; but thousands can think for one who can see’, he remarked in Modern Painters (5: 333). The ability to look at the natural world, and think about what it means, matters more than ever. Ruskin reminds us that our lives depend on it.

19 Lovelock makes the point in a new preface to his seminal work on ‘Gaia’, published in 2000; see James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. ix.

Chapter 9

William Morris and the Garden City Anna Vaninskaya

Virtually no treatment of the Garden City movement, and, by extension, of early-twentieth-century British town planning, omits to mention the influence of William Morris. After all, he had anticipated the movement’s calls for the marriage of town and country, for the reversal of the process of rural depopulation and urban overcrowding, for the provision of homes with garden plots in a healthy working environment located in the bosom of nature. Raymond Unwin, the architect of Letchworth and Hampstead Garden Suburb, was inspired by Morris in his youth, became the Secretary of the Manchester Branch of the Socialist League, and contributed articles to Morris’s paper The Commonweal. The material aspects of his and his partner Barry Parker’s aesthetic owed a lot to the Arts and Crafts style indelibly associated with Morris’s name.1 But can Morris really be considered the patron saint of the Garden City? He died two years before Ebenezer Howard’s ToMorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), better known as Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902),2 was published, and he figures neither in that book, nor in the secondary literature dealing with Howard’s acknowledged antecedents.3 The movement, though indisputably rooted in the Victorian period, did not take off in practice until the twentieth century, and there is no way of ascertaining what Morris’s reaction would have been. But the association is too familiar not to deserve a second look, and though any conclusions must remain at the level of speculation, there are still valuable insights to be gleaned from an analysis of the circumstantial evidence. The phenomenon of the Garden City represented a union of three contradictory aspects: Howard’s inspirational vision, the business reality, and what came to be known as the ‘spirit of the place’. The impulse behind the vision was a familiar one in the period, for Howard was a typical social reformer in favour of class 1 See Mervyn Miller, Raymond Unwin: Garden Cities and Town Planning (London: Leicester University Press, 1992). 2 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (Eastbourne: Attic Books, 1985). 3 See Standish Meacham, Regaining Paradise: Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement (London: Yale University Press, 1999). For the opposite view, see Florence Boos, ‘News from Nowhere and “Garden Cities”: Morris’s Utopia and Nineteenth-Century Town-Design’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 7 (Fall 1998): pp. 5–27. See also Dennis Hardy, Utopian England: Community Experiments 1900–1945 (London: E & FN Spon, 2000).

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harmony, an ideal also espoused by Henrietta Barnett (founder of Hampstead Garden Suburb) and Raymond Unwin, who aspired to an ‘intermingling of [the] classes’.4 Morris, as a Marxist, had little sympathy for such ideals; he advocated class war and scoffed at high-minded paternalism and middle-class meddling of the Toynbee Hall variety. Although Howard proposed common ownership of the land for the benefit of the whole community, that community was strictly circumscribed; the Garden City remained an ‘experiment’, not an attempt at the structural transformation of society. In answer to the question ‘how is this change to be effected?’ Howard replied, ‘By the force of example, that is, by setting up a better system’ within the existing one.5 A decade earlier, in response to the same question, Morris had pointed to the class struggle leading to a communist millennium. Howard, however, was not interested in revolution. ‘Granted the success of the initial experiment’, he posited, ‘and there must inevitably arise a widespread demand for an extension of methods so healthy and so advantageous … there will [then] be no great difficulty in acquiring the necessary Parliamentary powers to purchase the land and carry out the necessary works step by step’.6 Morris would have begged to differ. His opinion of earlier ‘experiments in association’, schemes to ‘regenerate Society’ by ‘precept and example’ which were supposed to ‘win their way to general adoption by men’s perception of their inherent reasonableness’, was dismissive, and he subscribed to the standard Marxist critique of utopian socialism. Robert Owen’s many initiatives—from New Lanark to New Harmony—were admirable and useful, Morris wrote, but they disregarded the class war and the political side of things. True communism depended on workers taking hold of ‘political power’, and Morris had little time for anything which did not teach them the political agency that was necessary for the overthrow of capitalism, and for Parliament least of all.7 Howard, for all his reformist goals, had to raise money from conservative investors and woo manufacturers to relocate to the newly built town. His scheme was not only a self-confessed ‘experiment’, it did not even have the distinction of being a socialist one, like the Owenite communities of the earlier nineteenth century. The predecessors of Letchworth Garden City were the industrial villages of Saltaire, Port Sunlight and Bourneville, founded by paternalist factory owners like Lever and Cadbury who also invested in Howard’s idea; and Howard strenuously dissociated his plan from the available ‘communistic’ and ‘socialistic’ alternatives.8 He attacked both H.M. Hyndman’s (the head of the Social Democratic Federation) and Robert Blatchford’s (the leader of the Clarion movement) conceptions of reform for being inconsistent and impractical. Their preferred methods for the 6 7

Quoted in Meacham, Regaining Paradise, p. 108. Howard, Garden Cities, p. 99. Ibid., pp. 101, 109. William Morris and E.B. Bax, Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893), pp. 206–7, 217. 8 See Howard, Garden Cities, ch. 9. 4 5

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depopulation of overcrowded and unsanitary cities, and the curbing of coal pollution by developing water power and electricity were wrongheaded.9 Cleaner energy and migration from the city to the country were Howard’s goals as well, but nationalization, expropriation, and equitable distribution of existing wealth were not the way to achieve them—the creation of a ‘“respectable” joint-stock company’ and the construction of ‘One small Garden City … as a working model’ were.10 As Florence Boos puts it, ‘Morris’s revolutionary-apocalyptic view of contemporary society and condemnation of Fabian gradualism precluded the sorts of tidy calculations that endeared [Garden Cities of] To-morrow to philanthropic capitalists’.11 Nothing that is known of Morris’s views in his last years indicates that he would have approved of a capitalist-sponsored project to ‘palliate’ the living conditions of a small portion of the London working class. The directors of the Garden City Company, once it was created, found that they had to distance themselves even from some of Howard’s own proposals (such as communal housing) which ran the risk of appearing too extremist. They wanted to make Letchworth ‘a successful enterprise’, and, unlike its originator, had few aims beyond that. ‘By the end of Letchworth’s first decade, Howard’s vision had been all but swallowed up in the need to reassure investors’, for despite the high-profile presence of socialists among the pioneering residents of Letchworth and in the membership of the Garden City Association, the project was a private finance initiative, only made possible by investments from major capitalists like Cadbury, Lever and Harmsworth.12 In any case, the reality of Letchworth hardly resembled Howard’s blueprint. Rents were high—for no one had abolished the laws of the free market for the Garden City’s sole benefit; classes were still stratified, both economically and geographically; and cultural divisions exacerbated the social ones. To the working class’s chagrin, the town lacked both music halls and pubs, even though Howard himself had warned against this in his book. But if alcohol and entertainment were scarce, another familiar proletarian pastime was in full supply: there was no shortage of strikes for higher wages. Industrial relations in Letchworth before the First World War differed little from the rest the country, the beneficent influence of arts and crafts workshops (including bookbinding, weaving, and pottery) notwithstanding. The striking engineers and builders did, however, receive support from some middle-class citizens, mostly those enthusiastic socialists first attracted to the city by its promise of a utopian experiment and a vision of the future, by advertisements of ‘a place of “plain living” where “high thinking” shall Ibid., p. 96. Boos, ‘News from Nowhere and “Garden Cities”’, p. 20; Howard, Garden Cities,

9

10

p. 121.

Boos, ‘News from Nowhere and “Garden Cities”’, p. 12. Meacham, Regaining Paradise, pp. 121–2. One may note in parentheses that the

11

12

subsequent takeover of town planning by the state would not have seemed a welcome change to a committed enemy of Fabianism like Morris.

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be done’.13 Though ‘their hopes for [Letchworth] were repeatedly thwarted by a [profit-minded] directorship’, the socialists still managed to assert them, rather loudly, in their lifestyle.14 That lifestyle entered the popular culture of the time, not least through the middle-class inhabitants’ self-publicity, and it is here that the confusion over Morris’s paternity becomes most extreme. The typical citizen of Edwardian Letchworth was a (self-described) sandalwearer in rational dress, a vegetarian, teetotaller, and member of the Theosophical Society, interested in crafts, folk dancing, and the open air. ‘Over his mantelpiece was a large photo of Madame Blavatsky and on his library shelves were Isis Unveiled and the works of William Morris, H.G. Wells, and Tolstoy’.15 The local newspaper published cartoons of ‘Letchworth Cranks’, ridiculing both the cranks in question and the potential respectable settlers who, having first clapped their eyes on the town’s aborigines, would exclaim, ‘Suffragists, Freelovers, Socialists! This is no place for me’.16 Such associations outlasted the Edwardian period. One of the most familiar linkages of the Garden City lifestyle with a Morrisian brand of socialism was forged by George Orwell several decades after Letchworth’s foundation, in his anti-crank tirades in The Road to Wigan Pier and Coming Up for Air. Unlike the self-mocking inhabitants, Orwell did not have his tongue in his cheek when he wrote about ‘the outer-suburban creeping Jesus, a hangover from the William Morris period, but still surprisingly common, who … proposes to level the working class “up” … by means of hygiene, fruit-juice, birth-control, poetry, etc’.17 In Wigan Pier, the appearance of two socialists attending an Independent Labour Party summer school in Letchworth creates ‘a mild stir of horror on top of the bus’. One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got onto it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple.

This was rational dress with a vengeance. To ‘an ordinary man’, wrote Orwell— ostensibly of his neighbour on the bus—‘a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist 15 16 17

Quoted in Meacham, Regaining Paradise, p. 143. Meacham, Regaining Paradise, p. 127. Quoted in Hardy, Utopian England, p. 69. Quoted in Meacham, Regaining Paradise, p. 142. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, in Peter Davison (ed.), The Complete Works of George Orwell (20 vols, London: Secker & Warburg, 1986–1998), vol. 5, p. 150. For more on Orwell’s (and Chesterton’s) attitude to cranks see Anna Vaninskaya, ‘The Political Middlebrow from Chesterton to Orwell’, in Kate Macdonald (ed.), The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880–1950: What Mr Miniver Read (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 162–76. 13 14

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meant a crank’, and both, one may add, meant the Garden City.18 The equivalencies had long been established in the public mind: in 1908, The New Age, itself a mouthpiece of cranky socialism, asked rhetorically, ‘Must Socialists Be Cranks?’: Desiring to give some illustrations of the crankiness of Socialists, I scarcely know where to begin. Instances crowd in upon me. The day is past, I suppose, when it was generally believed that all Socialists were vegetarians and wore Jaeger boots. But now an even crankier set of crazes is in vogue. First, there are the sex cranks … . So I end as I began by asking the question: Are all these fads and fancies I have mentioned necessary to Socialism?19

Orwell’s answer three decades later was a resounding no. If only every sandalwearing ‘vegetarian, teetotaller and creeping Jesus [could be] sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!’ he exclaimed, ‘But that, I am afraid, is not going to happen’.20 The common man narrator of Coming Up for Air reacts to the inhabitants of a new suburb of ‘arty-looking’ ‘sham-Tudor’ houses exactly like the fictional respectable settler of the Edwardian period. ‘I knew the type’: ‘They’re always either healthfood cranks or else they have something to do with the Boy Scouts—in either case they’re great ones for Nature and the open air’, ‘Vegetarianism, simple life, poetry … roll in the dew before breakfast’, not to mention nudism, plaster gnomes, fairies, and psychic research. One of these sandal-wearers defines his colony’s mission as a determination ‘to enrich the countryside instead of defiling it … and there [aren’t] any public houses on the estate’, he enthuses: ‘They talk of their Garden Cities. But we call Upper Binfield the Woodland City’. Orwell’s protagonist duly pictures an ‘awful gang of food-cranks and spook-hunters and simple-lifers with £1,000 a year’.21 The irony, as far as he is concerned, is that these affluent protogreens cut down the trees and turn the pond into a rubbish-dump to accommodate their fashionable lifestyle. In his letters, and speaking in his own person, Orwell could be even more vicious: ‘so many of them are the sort of eunuch type with a vegetarian smell who go about spreading sweetness and light and have at the back of their minds a vision of the working class all T.T., well washed behind the ears, readers of Edward Carpenter or some other pious sodomite and talking with B.B.C. accents’.22 Reviewing Havelock Ellis’s autobiography, he wrote, ‘It was one of those queer marriages [Ellis’s wife was lesbian] that were possible at a time

Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier, in Davison (ed.), Complete Works, vol. 5, pp. 161–2. H. Hamilton Fyfe, ‘Must Socialists Be Cranks?’, New Age, 5 November 1908,

18 19

p. 26.

Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier, in Davison (ed.), Complete Works, vol. 5, p. 207. Orwell, Coming Up for Air, in Davison (ed.), Complete Works, vol. 7, pp. 225–8. 22 Orwell, ‘Letter to Jack Common’, in Davison (ed.), Complete Works, vol. 10, 20 21

p. 471.

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when Socialism, vegetarianism, New Thought, feminism, homespun garments and the wearing of beads were all vaguely interconnected’.23 That time was not the 1960s but the 1890s and 1900s, and contemporary observers such as H.G. Wells in his satire of the progressive London milieu in Ann Veronica (1909) noted the prevailing zeitgeist in virtually the same terms as Orwell. Of course, as far as Orwell was concerned, Wells’s own utopia was just as bad: ‘a hygienic garden suburb infested by naked schoolmarms’.24 And give or take a schoolmarm or two, Wells did endorse the ‘vigorous development of the attempts that are already being made, in Garden Cities, garden suburbs, and the like, to re-house the mass of our population in a more civilised and more agreeable manner’.25 Although the level of invective varied, the stereotype cropped up again and again. G.K. Chesterton was another writer who liked to crack jokes at the expense of the vegetarians, teetotallers, sandal wearers, Theosophists, Morrisian socialists and ‘high thinking and plain living’ artistic types who inhabited Letchworth and the original Victorian garden suburb of Bedford Park where he courted his wife in the 1890s.26 Indeed, it is not too surprising that the caricature first took root amid the cultural anxieties of the late-Victorian period, before becoming popularly associated with a particular residential site. Nearly half a century before Orwell, H.M. Hyndman feared lest the socialist movement should evolve into a ‘depository of old cranks, humanitarians, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists and antivaccinationists, arty-crafties and all the rest of them’.27 Even the Fabians started out as the Fellowship of the New Life, whose membership would later be strongly represented in Letchworth. The picture that emerges from such accounts, and many others like them, is uniform in its details, and the figure of William Morris, though not always named, lurks inevitably in the background. He is a patron saint, along with Tolstoy and Edward Carpenter, of the Garden City’s socialist contingent, sprinkling benediction on the merry hosts of be-sandaled cranks. But looked at through the other end of the telescope, and in the light of his own surviving pronouncements, Morris resembles nothing so much as a precursor of Orwell. He showed little enthusiasm for Temperance Hotels beloved by his teetotal comrades, refused to be converted to vegetarianism, and praised wine to G.B. Shaw’s face. He was suspicious of Orwell, ‘Review of My Life: The Autobiography of Havelock Ellis’, in Davison (ed.), Complete Works, vol. 12, p. 155. 24 Orwell, ‘Can Socialists Be Happy?’, in Davison (ed.), Complete Works, vol. 16, p. 40. 25 H.G. Wells, An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters (London: Cassell, 1914), p. 64. 26 Bedford Park was built in the 1870s, and may be seen as a prototype of Orwell’s Upper Binfield, complete with eccentric inhabitants interested in fairies (it was home for a time to W.B. Yeats). 27 Quoted in Stephen Winsten, Salt and His Circle (London: Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., 1951), p. 64, apparently from a letter to Shaw after visiting the Salts at Tilford in the 1880s. But there is no attribution, and the biography as a whole has been deemed untrustworthy. 23

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Tolstoyan New Lifers and contemptuous, at least at first, of C.R. Ashbee’s retreat into apolitical arty-craftiness. Despite his own unconventional clothing and deep sympathy with Carpenter, he was merely amused by earnest young ladies who went into the ‘woods in a shift and sandals, to cultivate [their] soul and straighten [their] toes’.28 ‘Simplicity in life is good, most good, so long as it is voluntary’, he pointed out, ‘but surely there is enough involuntary simplification of life. To live poorly is no remedy against poverty but a necessity of it. If our whole system were to become vegetarian altogether the poor would be forced to live on vegetarian cag-mag, while the rich lived on vegetarian dainties.’29 Orwell’s affluent Upper Binfield immediately springs to mind. May Morris, writing in 1914, asserted that ‘The latter-day simple-lifers, who spend their time in grinding corn for their bread, and catching rain from the roof for their drinking-water were a little after his day; and he could not foresee the indiscretions to be committed in his own name by muddlers whose antics certainly do not follow [his] teaching.’30 Her words probably referred less to the smock-wearing, health-food-eating caricature of suburban and semi-industrial Letchworth in its early days, than to the more bohemian back-to-the-land communes of the same period—Whiteway, Clousden Hill and Norton anarchist colonies—which modelled themselves on Carpenter’s Millthorpe, or on the writings of Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Ruskin. Many commune residents eventually moved to Letchworth: George Adams, Carpenter’s partner and maker of sandals, was one of the better known. But whichever form of Simple Life his daughter may have had in mind, Morris was explicitly absolved from all association with it. His devotion to revolutionary Marxism as a political movement was incompatible with the cranky lifestyle socialism of commune and Garden City alike. This distrust has been theorized, by David Pepper among others, as an expression of a fundamental ideological rift between the ‘red’ and the ‘green’. In his book Ecosocialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice, Pepper distinguishes between different strains of ecological thinking, as well as many types of socialism and anarchism, but the salient red/green distinction cuts across this diversity. The green model operates at the level of ‘the attitudes and lifestyle of the individual, whose development and self-knowledge is sacrosanct’. Social change is accomplished by ‘bypassing the state’, and capitalism is undermined by ‘prefigurations of the desired society’, ‘alternative communities’ which set an example of ‘preferable lifestyles’. The red model, on the other hand, subsumes all the collectivist movements for economic change willing to engage with the existing system—via conventional politics, the labour struggle, or even revolution—instead of avoiding

28 ‘Introduction’, in May Morris (ed.), The Collected Works of William Morris (24 vols, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910–15), vol. 22, p. xxiv. 29 Quoted in Winsten, Salt and His Circle, p. 94. 30 ‘Introduction’, in Morris (ed.), Collected Works, vol. 22, p. xxiv.

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it by retreating to utopian experimental communities.31 Lifestyle choice versus political movement: that, in a nutshell, is the difference between the ideology of the Letchworth citizen and Morris’s more orthodox socialism. Although the green paradigm, most faithfully embodied in the modern eco-village, was not developed with the Garden City in mind (and Howard could hardly be accused of attempting to bypass the state), the rhetorical similarities are worth dwelling upon nonetheless. For just as Orwell had updated the stereotypes of the 1900s for the use of the late 1930s, and Jan Marsh in Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England brought out the correspondences between the 1890s and the 1960s and ’70s, twenty-first-century observers can now consider the historical continuities behind ‘New Age’ environmentalism, with its rural ‘small-is-beautiful philosophy’, ‘earth-bonding’ and simple life.32 Modern ‘low impact’ settlements fit perfectly into Pepper’s lifestyle model, and practical endeavours such as ‘That Roundhouse’ and the ‘Low Impact Woodland Home’, associated with an initiative for Wales’s first self-built ecovillage, are typical.33 In terms of rhetoric, arguments, and end product, the material on their websites is almost indistinguishable from the output of the back-to-theland movement of more than 100 years before. The vision of a ‘yeomanry of free landowning citizens’, and ‘a simpler way of life … in harmony with the earth’; the intention to ‘reverse the flow of people from the land to the cities’; the methods of human waste disposal; the focus on the poisonous substances in our everyday surroundings, organic produce, community schools, and self-sufficient sustainable agriculture; the wish to break the national dependence on imported food; and on the social side, the cooperation of like-minded equals; the desire to alleviate the deprivation of the poor ‘underclass’ in their deteriorating homes, giving them land to grow food and contact with nature ... :34 all of this may as well have been taken verbatim from the pamphlets written at the turn of the twentieth century, including Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow. Only the increased focus on conservation and awareness of global warming are new. Numerous features of twenty-firstcentury groups like the Steward Community, whose original members met through environmental and social justice campaigns and established a sustainable woodland cooperative,35 would have been instantly recognizable to crank-sniffers like Orwell and May Morris. 31 David Pepper, Eco-socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 199, 206. 32 Jan Marsh, Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England from 1880 to 1914 (London: Quartet Books, 1982), p. 93; Pepper, Eco-socialism, p. 200. 33 That Roundhouse, http://www.thatroundhouse.info/; A Low Impact Woodland Home, http://www.simondale.net/house/index.htm; and Lammas, http://www.lammas.org. uk/. Catching rainwater from the roof is still, May Morris would have been delighted to note, a priority. 34 Permaculture Land, http://www.thatroundhouse.info/permacultureland.htm. 35 Steward Community Woodland, http://www.stewardwood.org/.

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But though they are revealing, such analogies can only take one so far. Unlike the back-to-the-land communes of yesteryear, most modern intentional communities of the low impact variety are red neither in the conventional sense (declared socialist), nor in Pepper’s specific theoretical one. In Morris’s time, the political dimension was more pronounced. Even if one chose not to engage with politics explicitly, one had to, like Howard, acknowledge its existence, for the Garden City lifestyle was not the only one on offer. Socialists wishing to participate in communal arrangements with a distinctive nature-orientated ethos could pick from a number of alternatives. Voluntary cooperative associations of various kinds were a trademark of the early labour movement, and Robert Blatchford’s Clarion Fellowship was particularly well known for providing nature-based activities with an element of ‘direct action’. The Clarion cycling clubs engaged in socialist propaganda; the Cinderella project took children from the slums into the countryside; and there were swimming clubs, field clubs, rambling clubs, and summer camps for co-operative holidays. The field clubs were meant ‘to diffuse a love and knowledge of the animal and plant life of the fields’, to ‘support the work of protecting animals and birds, and preserving the commons and footpaths’, and on one occasion ‘William Morris himself gave a “forest chat” following some open-air singing’.36 Residential country clubhouses or ‘experimental co-operative cottage[s]’ were established all over England, inspired by Morris’s Guest Houses in News from Nowhere, while the camps supplied ‘comradeship and fresh air’.37 It is not for nothing that Blatchford was associated with the creation of a living socialist culture: the Clarion Fellowship provided its working and lower-middleclass adherents with a lifestyle above all else.38 Despite his friendly engagement, Morris did not himself subscribe to the Clarion lifestyle. But he did famously envision a constructive alternative, an ultimate utopian goal for the process of working-class political organization and socialist revolution, an environmentally aware end-state which one can finally compare with the ‘green’ ideal of the Garden City.39 News from Nowhere is the salient text in this regard, although Morris made hundreds of pronouncements on nature, pollution, and the spoliation of the 36 Quoted in Denis Pye, Fellowship is Life: The National Clarion Cycling Club, 1895–1995 (Bolton: Clarion Publishing, 1995), p. 50. 37 Ibid., pp. 42–3. 38 Typically, Blatchford’s utopia The Sorcery Shop (1907) offered more in the way of natural description than suggestions for practical transformation. For Blatchford and the Clarion lifestyle, see Anna Vaninskaya, William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 186–91. 39 For a detailed treatment of this subject, see Boos, ‘News from Nowhere and “Garden Cities”’. See also Pepper, Eco-socialism; Stephen Coleman and Paddy O’Sullivan, William Morris and News from Nowhere: A Vision for Our Time (Bideford: Green Books, 1990); and Derek Wall, Green History: A Reader in Environmental Literature, Philosophy, and Politics (London: Routledge, 1994).

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countryside in his lectures and articles, and his final public address in 1896 was at a meeting of the Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising. He often proclaimed his ‘deep love of the earth and the life on it’, or as the beautiful Ellen says in News from Nowhere, ‘O me! O me! How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it’.40 The narrator’s guide Dick has an instinctual, almost pagan identification with and participation in the processes of nature; and Claire, another citizen of utopia, condemns nineteenth-century people for thinking of nature, animate and inanimate, as something separate from themselves, ‘something outside them’ which they try to make their slave.41 The ideal relationship between the human and natural environments is a balanced one, though it is unlikely to be attained before the arrival of socialism, and is in fact contingent upon it. There is little interest in rural scenes entirely devoid of human activity: the relationship is one of mutual reinforcement. For despite his frequently voiced desire to clear the slums and manufacturing districts off the face of the land, Morris never called for complete deurbanization. ‘Town and country are generally put in a kind of contrast’, he admitted, but he had great misgivings as to ‘how far that contrast is desirable or necessary, or whether it may not be possible in the long run to make the town a part of the country and the country a part of the towns’. Both are necessary to a full life—the excitement of ‘human intercourse’ where large bodies of men gather together as much as the pleasure and beauty of nature.42 More than once Morris spoke of the need to do ‘away with all antagonism between town and country, and all tendency for the one to suck the life out of the other’.43 In Nowhere after the revolution, ‘People flocked into the country villages … . The town invaded the country; but the invaders … became country people … so that the difference between the town and country grew less’, and the country was ‘vivified by the thought and briskness of town-bred folk’.44 In most of its lineaments, this vision closely anticipated Ebenezer Howard’s concept of the ‘Town-Country magnet’. The object of the Garden City, Howard wrote, was ‘to raise the standard of health and comfort of all true workers of whatever grade—the means by which these objects are to be achieved being a healthy, natural, and economic combination of town and country life, and this 40 Morris, ‘How I Became a Socialist’, in May Morris (ed.), Collected Works, vol. 23, p. 280; Morris, News from Nowhere, vol. 16, p. 202. 41 Ibid., vol. 16, p. 179. 42 Quoted in J.W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris (2 vols, London: Longmans, Green, 1901), vol. 2, p. 301. 43 Morris and Bax, Growth, p. 316. 44 Morris, News from Nowhere, in Morris (ed.), Collected Works, vol. 16, pp. 71–2. For a more detailed consideration of the role of nature and the countryside in Morris’s conception of socialism, see Anna Vaninskaya, ‘The Bugle of Justice: The Romantic Socialism of William Morris and George Orwell’, Contemporary Justice Review 8/1 (2005): pp. 7–23.

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on land owned by the municipality’.45 The London slums would be razed and replaced by parks, and the whole city would be transformed along the lines of News from Nowhere. ‘Elsewhere the town is invading the country: here the country must invade the town’, Howard explained, echoing Morris uncannily.46 ‘All the advantages of the most energetic and active town life, with all the beauty and delight of the country, may be secured in perfect combination’ in the Garden City, which would draw people from the overcrowded centres ‘to the bosom of our kindly mother earth’. ‘Town and country must be married.’47 Or, as Morris put it, also resorting to the matrimonial metaphor: I wish ‘neither the towns to be appendages of the country, nor the country of the town; I want the town to be impregnated with the beauty of the country, and the country with the intelligence and vivid life of the town’. The two must be each other’s ‘fellows’ and ‘helpmates’: a symptomatic Morrisian transference of the vocabulary of ideal social relations to the external material world.48 When turned from dream to reality this aspiration would issue in a communally held landscape of beautiful houses among gardens: recognizably the landscape of Nowhere, and a purer version of what had already existed, according to Morris’s ‘Town and Country’ lecture, in the lost England of the Middle Ages. ‘The towns of the Middle Ages, in this country at least, were a part of the countrysides where they stood.’49 It was not only Morris’s utopian blueprint that read in parts like a prospectus for the first Garden City. As commentators including Pepper and Boos have pointed out, decentralist socialism shared a lot of common ground with anarchocommunism, and Morris’s thought was barely distinguishable from that of his friend Peter Kropotkin when it came to decentralization, smallness of scale, and the blurring of town and country.50 Both fixed ‘on the commune … as the basic social/ economic units of the ideal society’, and it was in their geography and landscape, their ‘spatial as well as social form’ that the congruence between Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories, and Workshops (1898), Morris’s Nowhere, and the schemes of Howard was most clearly discernible.51 As Pepper summarizes it, ‘everyone can enjoy the advantages of the countryside and nature along with the advantages of urban life. Communes and small villages are the common rural form. Cities are reorganized into community neighbourhoods and “greened”’.52 But for all the similarities—local administration and production; small-scale and self-managed industry, dispersed rather than concentrated, like the population, 47 48 49 50 45

46

p. 177.

Howard, Garden Cities, p. 14. Ibid., p. 118. Ibid., pp. 8–9, 11. Quoted in Mackail, Life of William Morris, pp. 305, 304. Quoted in Mackail, Life of William Morris, p. 303. Boos, ‘News from Nowhere and “Garden Cities”’, pp. 6–10; Pepper, Eco-socialism,

Pepper, Eco-socialism, p. 176. Ibid., p. 178.

51 52

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and self-sufficient rather than global; cooperative and integrated agriculture and craftwork; federated communities—the differences cannot be wished away. Howard may have ventriloquized Morris when he wrote that modern cities were ‘ulcers on the very face of our beautiful island … the best which a society largely based on selfishness and rapacity could construct, but they are in the nature of things entirely unadapted for a society in which the social side of our nature is demanding a larger share of recognition’.53 But Morris never proposed that they be replaced by scientifically planned ‘semi-municipal’ town-clusters, complete with philanthropic institutions and capitalist farming.54 Nor did he share Howard’s environmental insensitivity: ‘There is’, Howard assumed, ‘one form of material wealth which is most permanent and abiding’, not ‘fugitive and prone to decay’. ‘The planet on which we live has lasted for millions of years. … The earth for all practical purposes may be regarded as abiding for ever … [and] the reformer should first consider how best the earth may be used in the service of man.’55 The irony of the founder of the Garden City movement endorsing so nonchalantly the exploitation of natural resources, the ‘material wealth’ of the earth, is not lost on the modern reader. The citizens of Morris’s Nowhere, though they may dress like Letchworth’s more extreme inhabitants, never speak like this. The cranks of Orwell’s Upper Binfield do. As Florence Boos observes, ‘Only Morris, and to a lesser extent Kropotkin, understood the threat of worldwide environmental degradation’.56 Howard was certainly not ‘red’—at any rate, his penny-pinching ‘semimunicipal’ proposals did not match his high-flown utopian rhetoric—and his ‘green’ was of a rather pale shade by twenty-first-century standards. Morris was more radical in both respects; and even if his portrait of the end-state was in many respects an anticipation of Howard’s, his conception of the process of change placed him in a different league altogether. To cast him as the patron saint of the Garden City is as historically justifiable as to call Marx the forefather of modern social democracy.

55 56 53

54

Howard, Garden Cities, pp. 108–9. See ibid., p. 60, and ch. 1, ‘The Town-Country Magnet’ and ch. 12, ‘Social Cities’. Ibid., pp. 95, 98. Boos, ‘News from Nowhere and “Garden Cities”’, p. 25.

Chapter 10

H.G. Wells, Fabianism and the ‘Shape of Things to Come’ John Sloan

In 2004, a pamphlet marking the Fabian Society’s 120th birthday, expressed satisfaction that early Fabians such as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb ‘would find much that was recognizable’ in the contributions of present-day Fabians to the great problems facing the modern world. Chief among these pressing issues was ‘making environmentalism central to mainstream politics and creating an effective internationalism which can hold power to account in a global age’.1 Subsequent initiatives by Fabian socialists and Labour governments to assign science and research the twin tasks of economic growth and tackling climate change certainly fit well with the optimistic aims and ambitions of the early Fabians to apply technology to social planning and reconstruction ‘in accordance with the highest moral possibilities’.2 Furthermore, their arguments for the management of global capitalism and increased cooperation and communication look back to the formative role of science, communication and the ‘abolition of distance’ in H.G. Wells’s utopian ‘new world order’.3 Although keen critical attention to ‘green’ issues in literature and politics is a noticeable phenomenon of recent times, H.G. Wells’s passionate commitment to environmental issues has in fact long been recognized. Jack Williamson, in his 1973 study, identified ecology and biology as Wells’s ‘lenses into time’.4 Williamson offered a reading of Wells as a spokesman for science whose faith in scientific culture clashed both with his perception of man’s biological limits and with the conservative rural attachments of his early life. That same year Raymond Williams dismissed the idea of Wells’s conservative rural nostalgia when he wrote that ‘Wells, more clearly than anyone before him, saw the connection between the 1 Sundar Katwala, ‘Introduction’, in Ellie Levenson, Guy Lodge and Greg Rosen (eds), Fabian Thinkers: 120 Years of Progressive Thought (London: Fabian Society, 2004), p. 5. 2 Ibid., p .1. 3 H.G. Wells, The Fate of Homo Sapiens: An unemotional Statement of the Things that are happening to him now, and of immediate Possibilities confronting him (London: Secker and Warburg, 1939), p. 85. 4 Jack Williamson, H.G. Wells: Critic of Progress (Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1973), p. 6.

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ruling power of the city and the ruling power of the country-houses’.5 For Williams, Wells’s solution to the aggressive development and inefficiency of nineteenthcentury capitalism lay not in ‘retrospective innocence’ or William Morris–style idylls, but in ‘what Wells calls “human ecology”: a new collective consciousness, scientific and social, which is capable of taking control of the environment in a total way and directing it to human achievement’.6 Appreciation of the originality of Wells’s environmentalist agenda has not always been positive. To many earlier critics, Wells’s scientific scenarios for planetary health suggested totalitarian state power and disregard for local loyalties and allegiances. At the height of the Second World War, in spirited defence of patriotism and pluck as the characteristics of English-speaking peoples which alone could defeat Hitler, George Orwell attacked Wells as an outmoded prophet whose scientific fantasies of a planned and ordered state were already visible in Nazi Germany: The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is fighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to accept this. It would contradict the world view on which his own works are based. The war-lords and the witch-doctors must fail, and the common-sense World-State, as seen by a nineteenth-century Liberal whose heart does not leap at the sound of bugles, must triumph.7

Generally, the twentieth century was more persuaded by anti-utopian narratives such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Orwell’s own Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The corrective scepticism which shapes these works is rightly linked by critics to the historical rise of totalitarian regimes, although such scepticism shares noticeable continuities too with earlier, nineteenth-century resistances to utilitarian, man-made institutions. Tellingly, Huxley prefaces Brave New World with a passage from Nicholas Berdyaev, the Christian philosopher and interpreter of Dostoevsky’s nineteenth-century protest against scientific humanism. The epigraph, from Berdyaev’s The End of Our Time (1933), concludes, towards utopias we are moving. But it is possible that a new age is already beginning, in which cultured and intelligent people will dream of ways to avoid ideal states, and get back to a society that is less ‘perfect’ and more free.8

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Frogmore, St Alban’s: Paladin, 1973), p. 277. 6 Ibid., p. 329. 7 George Orwell, ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’, The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison (20 vols, London: Secker and Warburg, 1986–1998), vol. 12, p. 539. 8 Quoted in Mark R. Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the AntiUtopians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 83. 5

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Given the pervasive hostility in the West to imposed utopias, it is hardly surprising that critical approval of Wells since the 1960s has tended to highlight the perceived dystopian and pessimistic aspects of his work—hence the preference for his early scientific romances over his later writings. Even Peter Morton’s informed and subtle account of shifting interpretations of Darwinian biology by scientists and writers in the nineteenth century, is unable to resist the general perception of a shift from pessimism to optimism in Wells’s later writings. Commenting on Wells’s 1902 lecture ‘The Discovery of the Future’, for example, he writes, ‘By this time the cosmic heat death itself, which he says “of all such nightmares is the most insistently convincing”, has no paralysing effect on Well’s imagination: he suddenly reverses with a brisk “and yet one doesn’t believe it.”’9 The biological approach also leads him to reject the idea of Wells’s writings as an expression of his class fears and hatred on the grounds that, in tales such as The Time Machine and ‘A Story of the Days to Come’, ‘every class is vanquished by biology’s blind working’.10 The argument of the present chapter is that neither the claims for Wells as naïve optimist nor the counter-claims for him as wise pessimist fully do justice to the consistency or the challenging complications of his coupling of socialism and ecology—the red and the green. Wells himself came to believe that his first major success, The Time Machine (1895), was probably enjoyed by ‘quite a lot of people’ for whom it had ‘no sort of relation whatever to normal existence’.11 Wells’s early romances can be interpreted as futuristic allegorical dramatizations of specific contemporary anxieties: the degenerative effects of hedonistic aestheticism in The Time Machine, for example. But the context of his remark on the reception of The Time Machine—his 1939 work on the importance of ‘ecological science’ and a ‘conscious world citizen’ to The Fate of Homo Sapiens—suggests that he saw the contemporary relevance of his early romances not in their representation of unconscious fears and dilemmas but in their ecological warning. Of course, this was the view Wells came to nearly half a century later. But even in his earliest scientific articles, written at the time he was drafting The Time Machine, Wells consistently qualified the premise of cosmic determinism with the contrary claims of human initiative and intervention.12 In other words, rather than Wells’s belief in science being called into question by the ironic ‘Swiftian’ vision of his early romances, as Bernard Bergonzi has argued,13 Wells’s belief in science lies at the heart of his early writings. Peter Morton, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination 1860–1900 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), p. 113. 10 Ibid., p. 105. 11 Wells, Fate of Homo Sapiens, pp. 83–4. 12 See Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes (eds), H.G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). 13 Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961). 9

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The ‘Time Machine’ itself is a metaphor for the far-seeing, scientific eye: it serves as a corrective to the anthropocentric dream of the permanence and centrality of everyday human life. The Time Traveller provides a cheerless prognosis of the fate of civilization, a pessimism amplified by his ‘Further Vision’ of the dying sun and a world of ‘intensely green vegetation’ from which all traces of human life have vanished: ‘It was the same rich green that one sees on forest moss or on the lichen in caves: plants which like these grow in a perpetual twilight’.14 Wells provides a fictional representation of the physicist Lord Kelvin’s then widely accepted scientific calculations ‘that inhabitants of the earth can not continue to enjoy the light and heat essential to their life for many million years longer’.15 But that is not the whole story. Framing the Time Traveller’s story is the first-person narrator who, in the Epilogue, rejects the Time Traveller’s jaundiced view of humankind: ‘He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end’.16 In the Time Traveller’s ‘further vision’, we find an anticipation of that black apocalypse of some modern-day deep ecologists who would seem to prefer a world without human beings at all.17 By contrast, Wells’s narrator imagines more hopefully a nearer age ‘in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our time answered and its wearisome problems solved’.18 This is the keynote of all of Wells’s writing. For Wells, as for many present-day ‘greens’, scientific eschatology serves not as a sign of the coming end, but as a wake-up call to preventative and constructive action. The pattern is repeated in The War of the Worlds (1898), whose final lesson is the need for human responsibility towards nature and the abandonment of narrowly national and individual interests for the greater benefit of the human race: We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding-place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space. It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal of mankind.19

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005),

14

p. 82.

Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), ‘On the Age of the Sun’s Heat’, Macmillan’s Magazine 5 (5 March 1862): pp. 388–93; in Popular Lectures and Addresses, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1891), p. 375. 16 Wells, Time Machine, p. 91. 17 See Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 106. 18 Wells, Time Machine, p. 91. 19 H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 178–9. 15

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This call for collective responsibility is arguably also the point of the negative portraits of the scientist in Wells’s early romances. From the Faustian ambitions of Dr Moreau in The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) to the ridiculous and hopelessly chaotic Besington in The Food of the Gods (1904), Wells’s target is not science itself, nor his own romantic identification with the ‘scientist-magician’, as Bergonzi argues,20 but the unforeseen and potentially catastrophic consequences of unregulated and unethical experiment in an age of scientific and technological possibilities. Unregulated existence is also the directing theme of Wells’s great ‘Condition of England’ novel, Tono-Bungay (1909). It is one of the paradoxes of Wells’s fiction that its claims for a necessary reordering of social and intellectual life should find compelling artistic expression in what he called ‘the lax freedom of form, the rambling discursiveness, the right to roam of the earlier English novel’.21 He believed that this method best mirrored the complicated and constant readjustments that modern civilization required. It is tempting to equate Wells’s method with Joseph Carroll’s tentatively Darwinian reflection that writers of fiction ‘present us not simply with social and moral agents acting out plots but rather with human organisms intricately enmeshed in their environments’,22 providing it does not encourage a pessimistic reading of a fixed and limited human nature of the type which Wells consciously opposed. In Tono-Bungay, for instance, its hero, George Ponderovo fails to bring his socialist instincts and scientific interests into meaningful and productive relation. His distractions are in part the wasteful blunderings of romantic love, a recurrent Wellsian theme. But George’s drift is also seen as symptomatic of an absence of an intellectual culture sufficiently independent of traditional alliances to rank and power. Wells has George explain, with pre-Gramscian prescience, the legacy of traditionalism in England and the place of the great house (the Bladesover of the novel): Grasp firmly that England was all Bladesover two hundred years ago; that it has had Reform Acts indeed, and suchlike changes of formula, but no essential revolution since then; that all that is modern and different has come in as a thing intruded or as a gloss upon this predominant formula, either impertinently or apologetically; and you will perceive at once the reasonableness, the necessity, of that snobbishness which is the distinctive quality of English thought. Everyone who is not actually in the shadow of a Bladesover is as it were perpetually seeking after lost orientations. We have never broken with our tradition, never even symbolically hewed it to pieces, as the French did in quivering fact in the Terror. 23

Bergonzi, Early H.G. Wells, p. 120. H.G. Wells, ‘The Contemporary Novel’, in An Englishman Looks at the World:

20 21

Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters (London: Cassell, 1914), p. 153. 22 Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature and Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 100. 23 H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 26.

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Tono-Bungay dramatizes Wells’s conception of the perennial problem facing civilization which he describes elsewhere as, ‘What to do with our sons’.24 George’s failure is society’s failure to impose an organic intellectual life adequate to the modern world. What Wells called the ‘World Brain’ is shown here to be sacrificed to the ‘dollar hunt’.25 It is not only that George is reduced to an amateurish outof-touch boffin in his corrugated workshop above Lady Grove estate, dependent for money for his scientific experiments on aerial navigation on the sale of his racketeering uncle’s fake miracle medicine. More corrosively, George is driven to propping up the ailing business to fund his own scientific research, when he undertakes the morally and environmentally disastrous expedition to steal the deposits of ‘quap’, a dangerous radioactive substance, from Mordet Island. On George’s return to Lady Grove with news of the impending financial crash, and the inevitable end to their attempts to design and build a gas-propelled airship, his dedicated assistant Cothope protests with a poignantly comic mixture of English deference and defiance:

‘How’s Lord Roberts β?’

Cothope lifted his eyebrows. ‘I’ve had to refrain,’ he said. ‘But he’s looking very handsome.’ ‘Gods!’ I said, ‘I’d like to get him up just once before we smash. You read the papers? You know we’re going to smash?’ ‘Oh! I read the papers. It’s scandalous, sir, such work as ours should depend on things like that. ‘You and I ought to be under the State, sir, if you’ll excuse me—’ ‘Nothing to excuse,’ I said. ‘I’ve always been a Socialist—of a sort—in theory. Let’s go and have a look at him. How is he? Deflated?’ ‘Just about quarter full. The last oil glaze of yours holds the gas something beautiful. He’s not lost a cubic metre a week….’

Cothope returned to Socialism, as we went towards the sheds.

‘Glad to think you’re a Socialist, sir,’ he said, ‘it’s the only civilized state. I been a Socialist some years—off the Clarion. It’s a rotten scramble, this world. It takes the things we make and invent and it plays the silly fool with ’em. We scientific people, we’ll have to take things over and stop all this financing and advertisement and that. It’s too silly. It’s a noosance. Look at us!’26

For all his socialist dreams of reforming the world, George ends up as a builder of destroyers, an arms-dealer, lionized by the press as a champion of Empire, Wells, Fate of Homo Sapiens, p. 41. Ibid., p. 276. 26 Wells, Tono-Bungay, p. 346. 24 25

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but in reality unable to resist the tide of trade and money-making and happy to sell to the highest bidder. Not everyone has found the ending sufficiently ironic. Nevertheless, it is clear that the whole force of George’s retrospective memoir is its ironic recognition of the need for collective intellectual leadership against the false gentility and wastefulness of English national life. In his idea of an enlightened, intellectual elite—the ‘Samurai’ fictionalized in A Modern Utopia (1905)— Wells sought an alternative to the aristocratic spirit of segregated, ‘out-of-theway colleges’ where learning did little to address the problems facing the modern world.27 ‘So far from lighting the world’, he wrote of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Oxford, Cambridge, and other world-famous universities, ‘the skies are so overcast that these starry constellations seem scarcely to be shining’.28 Shaw mocked Wells’s idea of the Samurai for already existing in the English gentleman, ‘who is sent to Oxford where he undergoes most of Mr Wells’s discipline, including a cold bath and a daily shave’.29 But Shaw and the Fabians shared with Wells the idea of an intellectual vanguard whose goal was the reorganization of society along collective, socialist lines. Where they differed was in the means by which this could be implemented and achieved. Wells’s revolutionary essay, ‘This Misery of Boots’ (1905), which he read to the Fabian Society in January 1906, called for a decisive break with the past, and for an immediate end to servility and all the miseries of ordinary people’s lives—from poor footwear to ‘the results of poor, bad, unwise food, of badly managed eyes and ears and teeth!’30 Its concluding section headed ‘Socialism means Revolution’ mocked Shaw and the Fabians for the ineffectualness of their programme of reform: You cannot change the world, and at the same time not change the world. You will find Socialists about, or at any rate men calling themselves Socialists, who will pretend that this is not so, who will assure you that some little odd jobbing about municipal gas and water is Socialism and back-stairs intervention between Conservative and Liberal the way to the millennium. You might as well call a gas jet in the lobby of a meeting-house, the glory of God in Heaven.31

Wells paid little heed to Shaw’s blunt response urging him to tread carefully: ‘You must study people’s corns when you go clog-dancing’.32 In New Worlds for Old, written in 1908, the year he resigned from the Fabian Society, he continued to criticize the Fabian style of ‘Administrative Socialism’ for its H.G. Wells, The Salvaging of Civilization (London: Cassell, 1921), p. 181. Wells, Fate of Homo Sapiens, pp. 279–80. 29 Quoted in Roslynn D. Haynes, H.G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future—The Influence 27 28

of Science on His Thought (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 99. 30 H.G. Wells, This Misery of Boots (London: ILP Guild of Youth, 1925), p. 4. 31 Ibid., p. 13. 32 J. Percy Smith (ed.), Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), p. 30.

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‘excessive conservatism towards existing machinery’.33 He favoured conversion and reconstruction over faith in gradual economic change. It was a knowledge that Shaw would come to later in recognizing the failure of the hope of extended franchise ‘to complete the democratic structure’.34 The logical weakness in the Fabian Society’s attempt to bring about a revolutionary change to the capitalist system, while disbelieving in revolution, remains a feature of English intellectual life today, even on the Left. Indeed, it is not irrelevant to consider how Wells’s critique applies today to the Left’s response to ‘green socialism’, which is, in some respects, only Wells’s ‘human ecology’ by a different name. Raymond Williams, as indicated earlier, was perhaps the first to recognize that Wells’s ecological solution to the aggressive development and waste of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century capitalism offered something new and more radical than Morris-style idylls of ‘retrospective innocence’.35 Yet his personal response to ‘ecological socialism’, in his essay ‘The Challenge of the New Social Movements’, was to urge caution with respect to any change in the ‘habitual uses of resources’ which people ‘assume and expect’.36 As elsewhere in his writings, Williams speaks with the authority of the type of Welsh workingclass community that he knew as a boy, when he writes: It is no use simply saying to South Wales miners that all around them is an ecological disaster. They already know. They live in it. They have lived in it for generations. They carry it in their lungs. It happens now that coal might be one of the more desirable energy alternatives, although the costs of that kind of mining can never be forgotten. But you cannot just say to people who have committed their lives and communities to certain kinds of production that this has got to be changed. You can’t just say: ‘Come out of the harmful industries, come out of the dangerous industries, let us do something better.’ Everything has to be done by negotiation, by equitable negotiation, and it will have to be taken steadily along the way.37

‘Steadily along the way’: it has a ring of gradualism about it, although it has to be said that Williams recognizes only too well that the long-held socialist belief that poverty will eventually be abolished by increased production has proved a false hope. There is no doubt that necessity and suffering draw communities together in a spirit of endurance. Nor is there any doubt that communities will fight for the industries they depend on for survival. But what Williams does, without intending H.G. Wells, New Worlds for Old (London: Constable, 1908), p. 267. Quoted in Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (London: Chatto & Windus,

33 34

1958), p. 184. 35 Williams, Country and City, p. 277. 36 Raymond Williams, ‘The Challenge of the New Social Movements’ (1982), in Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, ed. Robin Gable (London: Verso, 1989), p. 222. 37 Ibid., p. 220.

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to, is to generalize, even sentimentalize that heroic gesture in a way that passes over the bitterness and resentments of individuals against the very necessities that have governed, and sometimes ruined their lives and their family’s lives. The knowledge ‘they carry … in their lungs’ is not just the chronic emphysema or black lung disease that has been the price of economic survival, but for some the scandalous ignorance in which they were kept about their health on the grounds that they had families to support. It is precisely this kind of anger and bitterness, not some abstract idealism that compels all of Wells’s writings. At 13, as Wells documents in his autobiography, he was apprenticed as a draper’s assistant and spent some months ill-fed and overworked in a damp, poorly lit sweatshop. It was his equivalent to Dickens’s ‘blacking factory’ experience. Like Dickens, his bitterness was not only against his squalid, unhealthy surroundings, but against the low expectations which had consigned him to servitude. In later adolescence, he finally absconded from a draper’s emporium in Southsea, and tramped the 17 miles to the grand seventeenthcentury house of Uppark where his mother was housekeeper, to insist that she find the money to pay for his education. He described himself in his autobiography as ‘very much like a hunted rabbit that turns at last and bites’.38 George Ponderevo’s response in Tono-Bungay to the squalor and waste of industrial civilization is charged with Well’s own painful and bitter emotions. His dismay at the degradation of the Stour Valley above the town, ‘all horrible with cement works and foully smoking chimneys and rows of workmen’s cottages, minute, ugly, uncomfortable, and grimy’, extends to blackened colliers unloading coal at the riverside: When I saw the colliers unloading, watched the workers in the hold filling up silly little sacks and the succession of blackened, half-naked men that ran to and fro with these along a plank over a thirty-foot drop into filth and mud, I was first seized with admiration of their courage and toughness and then, ‘But after all, why—?’ and the stupid ugliness of all this waste of muscle and endurance came home to me. Among other things it obviously wasted and deteriorated the coal. 39

Notice how Wells flirts with the heroic idea of the ‘courage and toughness’ of working-class toil, only to reject it. As Wells recognized, Ruskin and Morris imagined a return to an idealized, preindustrial order in which there was ‘equal participation in labour’.40 Fabian Socialists, like the Webbs, sought the bureaucratic improvement of working conditions. By contrast, Wells’s hope was for a rational social reorganization in which the labouring and servile classes, and with them the wasteful domination of nature and human nature, would be abolished:

38 H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866) (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934), p. 157. 39 Wells, Tono-Bungay, pp. 47–8 40 Wells, A Modern Utopia, ed. Gregory Claeys and Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 72.

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now that the new conditions physical science is bringing about, not only dispense with man as a source of energy but supply the hope that all routine work may be made automatic, it is becoming conceivable that presently there may be no need for anyone to toil habitually at all; that a labouring class … will become unnecessary to the world of men.41

Wells’s position is in fact remarkably close to that of Wilde in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, though without Wilde’s mix of Hegelian idealism and Nietzschean individualism. Indeed, where Wells encountered these elements in Shaw and the socialists, he dismissed them as ‘brilliant, nonsensical, unappetising things’.42 Like Shaw, Wells had little hope of the mass of mankind acting of their own accord. In The Salvaging of Civilization, he wrote, The generality of men and women, so far as their natural disposition goes, are scarcely more capable of apprehending and consciously serving the human future than a van load of well-fed rabbits would be of grasping the fact that their van was running smoothly and steadily down an inclined plane to the sea.43

Evidently not all rabbits turn and bite. Like Shaw, Wells subscribed to the idea of an intellectual aristocracy. Yet, as John Reed has pointed out, ‘Whereas Shaw set himself above the humanity around him in order to instruct it, Wells insisted that he was qualified to lecture his fellow man because he was one with them’.44 Accounts of Wells’s quarrel with the Fabian Society have rightly emphasized his personal irascibility and political naïveté. Wells, as Shaw was quick to point out to him, lacked ‘the committee habit: that is … the habit of the human political animal’. ‘We have all been through the Dickens blacking factory’, Shaw wrote, ‘… but the world wants from men of genius what they have divined as well as what they have gone through’.45 In addition, Wells’s scandalous sexual life did nothing to endear him to the Old Gang. It has until now been the general view that Wells’s resignation (in effect, expulsion) from the Fabian Society damaged him both as a political force, and as a writer and artist. To W. Warren Wagar, Wells’s idea of an ‘Open Conspiracy’, an elite class of industrialists, scientists and engineers, ‘might have taken deeper roots if someone more politic and patient than Wells had conceived it’;46 while Kenneth Young spoke for many when he concluded that, ‘The Fabians were cleverer than the more impatient Wells. They saw that their aims could better be achieved by gradually infiltrating the media, by backstairs 43 44 41

Ibid., p. 73 Wells, Misery of Boots, p. 14. Wells, Salvaging of Civilization, p. 18. John R. Reed, The Natural History of H.G. Wells (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1982), p. 7. 45 Smith, Shaw and Wells, p. 39. 46 W. Warren Wagar, H.G. Wells and the World State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 201. 42

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influence on politicians, industrialists, and students, by a quiet, evasive sapping’.47 For long, Wells’s later propagandist writings urging a unified World State seemed hostile to human freedom, out of touch with everyday social and political realities, and also ‘poorer in literary merit’.48 That view may be changing. One sees the beginnings of a more favourable reading of Wells’s ideas. John S. Partington’s recent study of Wells’s political ideas, for example, argues that aspects of Wells’s ‘word-state policies’ appear ‘more significant and perhaps more realistic’ in the light of changing attitudes in recent decades ‘towards global cooperation and state regulation’.49 Although there has always been a grudging acknowledgment that some of Wells’s prophecies were remarkably accurate, in reality his predictions, or hopes, were just as often wrong. In his late novel, The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution (1933), Wells correctly predicts the ‘Second World War’, but he also chooses Bazra as the place for the great global conferences that will pave the way for the foundation of the modern ‘World-State’ between 1878 and 2059. Wells’s culminating vision is of a world free of nationalism, racial prejudice, and the ‘quasi-universal religious and cultural systems, Christianity, Jewry, Islam, Buddhism and so forth, which right up to the close of the twentieth century were still in active competition with the Modern State movement for the direction of the individual life and the control of human affairs’.50 Islam, we learn, ‘went more readily than Christianity because its school education was weaker’, and orthodox Jews have ceased to be preoccupied ‘with a dream called Zionism, a dream of a fantastic independent state all of their own in Palestine’. The Shape of Things to Come celebrates ‘the complete solidarity of mankind’ and with it ‘the disappearance of the last shadows of dislike and distrust between varied cults, races, and language groups’. 51 What we might find valuable in Wells is not that he offers an accurate picture of the shape of things to come, or a blueprint of a perfect or a better world, but that like other utopian writers from Plato through to Thomas More, Swift and Samuel Butler, he de-familiarizes human arrangements and social relations, calling the seemingly natural, immutable order of things into question. That is not to overlook either his propagandist aims, his confident claims to truth or his impatience with traditional aesthetic values. Wells’s famous falling out with Henry James in 1914 is evidence of his impatience with the collusive attachment of the aesthetic producer with past and present rather than with the future. In The Shape of Things to Come, he dismisses early-twentieth-century literature as ‘pervaded by a nagging hostility Kenneth Young, H.G. Wells (Harlow: Longman, 1974), p. 44. Haynes, Wells: Discoverer of the Future, p. 88. 49 John S. Partington, Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H.G. Wells 47 48

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 10. 50 H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 396. 51 Ibid., pp. 397–9.

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to new things, by lamentations for imaginary lost loyalties and vanished virtues’.52 In his literary screenplay, Things to Come (1935), based on The Shape of Things to Come, and made into a Cameron Menzies film in 1936, the final battle for the soul of the human race is fought out between Oswald Cabal, the head of the world council, who stands for the ‘doers’, and the reactionary artist-poet Theotocopulos, who leads the final futile revolt against the triumphant new scientific world order. One of the characters, a scientific worker, says sarcastically of those who listen to Theotocopulos: ‘They want Romance! They want flags back. They want all the nice human things. … They want the Dear Old World of the Past—and an end to all this wicked Science!’ 53 Wells’s rejection of traditional aesthetic ideals is also found in The Salvaging of Civilization where the idea of a new canonical ‘Bible of Civilization’ to replace the old religious Bible assigns classical literature and many classic works of literature a place in the Apocrypha.54 Wells is something of a Stalinist in both his literary totalitarianism and in his advocacy of a unitary social order. Yet his belief in the conditional nature and necessary limits of individual freedom also allowed for privacy and freedom from intrusion,55 as well as for diversity and democratic direction from below,56 not, of course, of the kind that would call the governing order of scientific ecology into question—that remains sacred—but in deciding its implementation. The emphasis of Wells’s utopian writings is on creative and continual adjustment over fixed culture, an imagined ethical evolutionary process in which local cultures and allegiances have a vital role to play in shaping the new world order.57 The Fabian pamphlet celebrating 120 years of Fabian socialism, which I quoted earlier, began by wondering what exactly Wells, Shaw and the first Fabians would make of the modern world. One suspects that Wells at least might be sceptical of the claims by governments and politicians of every party and nationality that ‘We’re all environmentalists nowadays’. In his novel In the Days of the Comet (1906), written at the time of his closest association with the Fabians, Wells directed his irony against the annexation of socialism by all and sundry when he has the rich landowner’s son, the university educated Edward Verrall announce, ‘We’re all socialists nowadays’.58 Many of the issues Wells singled out for urgent collective global action in his essay ‘The Impudence of Flags: Our Power, Resources, and My Elephants, Whales and Gorillas’—from the ‘proper distribution of the world’s staple productions’ to ‘the need of protecting whales from ourselves, and ourselves from bacteria’—remain at the mercy of uncontrolled capitalism and of what Wells Ibid., p. 318. H.G. Wells, Things to Come: A Film Story Based on the Material Contained in His

52 53

History of the Future ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ (London: Cresset Press, 1935), p. 126. 54 Wells, Salvaging of Civilization, p. 119. 55 Wells, Modern Utopia, p. 36. 56 Wells, New Worlds for Old, p. 205. 57 See Partington, Building Cosmopolis, pp. 126–45. 58 H.G. Wells, In the Days of the Comet (London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 67.

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disparaged as the ‘scrambling insufficiency of mere flag rule’.59 If Wells’s Time Machine were to transport him to the present day, he might be cheered by the status of science today and the efforts at global cooperation. Equally, his response to the present shape of things might well be that of the narrator of his A Modern Utopia, who on his return to the dirt and disorder of the London of his day, catches a glimpse of the day’s newspaper headlines:

MASSACRE IN ODESSA DISCOVERY OF HUMAN REMAINS AT CHERTSEY … THE BIRTHDAY HONOURS—FULL LIST,

and utters an exasperated, ‘Dear old familiar world!’60

H.G. Wells, A Year of Prophecying (London: T.F. Unwin, 1924), pp. 238–9. Wells, Modern Utopia, p. 239.

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Chapter 11

Guardianship and Fellowship: Radicalism and the Ecological Imagination 1880–1940 William Greenslade

From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneous societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].1

I In this chapter I want to examine the extent to which radical and socialist politics of the late nineteenth century were infused by ecological ideas, in which guardianship, rather than mastery of the earth, was fused with a radical cultural politics, giving radical and in particular socialist thought a distinctive colouring. The subsequent occluding of the radical ecological imagination in the decades after the First World War is bound up with a redirecting of political energy away from whole-life socialism and towards the pursuit of incremental political and economic objectives in a climate constrained by economic conditions which fail to provide the very material objectives to which labourism had committed itself in its accommodation of capitalism. In this story of the quest for ever-increasing affluence and full employment, which continues at least until 1973, the year of the global oil crisis, questions about the relations of production are effaced in the interests of the continual remaking of capitalism: only when this consensus begins to break down in the last decades of the twentieth century are those late-nineteenth-century voices of opposition to the capitalist modernizing taken seriously, once again. I also want to suggest, more briefly, how selected literary works by E.M. Forster and Sylvia Townsend Warner exhibit efforts of the ecological imagination in which 1 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 911, cited in John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (NewYork: Monthly Review Press, 2000), p. 164.

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social relations are re-imagined against the grain, offering the possibilities of new transactions between the human and the category of the natural, attributable to an access of the ecological imagination. These fictions offer ways out of or beyond problems to which the prevailing cultural politics seems oblivious, or which it is unable to comprehend: the categories of a diffused guardianship and fellowship are, I think, at the heart of this process of re-imagining. II ‘The period of 1870–1900’, writes Regenia Gagnier, ‘was the most fecund period of environmentalism in Western history before 1970’.2 Evidence of this flourishing of ecological energy in Britain is not difficult to find. Gagnier herself enumerates a number of examples, such as the Edinburgh Environment Society (1884), the Selborne Society for the Preservation of Birds, Plants and Pleasant Places (1886), the Society for the Protection of Birds (1889), the Anti-Vivisection Society (1875).3 To these one might add the Commons Preservation Society, founded in 1865 to preserve open spaces,4 and the Kyrle Society, founded in the late 1870s with the aim of beautifying the environment. It urged open spaces for the working class, and waged campaigns against the ‘Smoke Nuisance’.5 Recurring issues sound throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century—the ransacking of the earth, the desecration of the natural and manmade environment, the exploitation of animals, the implications of conspicuous consumption. But it was the land question, urgently and widely debated, which provided much of the early impetus for the remarkable upsurge of politicoecological thinking amongst the radically minded. The agricultural and industrial depression from the mid-1870s, the problem of absentee landlordism in Ireland, together with growing hostility to the disproportionate monopolistic power and political influence exerted by landowners whose income, as J.S. Mill had put it, ‘constantly tends to increase, without any exertion or sacrifice on the part of the

Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010), p. 153; see also Regenia Gagnier and Martin Delvaux, ‘Towards a Global Ecology of the Fin de Siècle’, Blackwell Literature Compass 3/3 (2006): pp. 572–87. 3 Gagnier, Individualism, p. 152. 4 See Peter C. Gould, Early Green Politics: Back to Nature, Back to the Land, and Socialism in Britain, 1860–1900 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1988), pp 89–91. 5 Ibid., p. 91; Mark Bevir, ‘British Socialism and American Romanticism’, English Historical Review 110 (1995): pp. 878–901 (p. 893); Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (London: Verso, 2008), pp. 129–30. Socialist interest in the ‘Smoke Nuisance’ came from Edward Carpenter, who wrote about ‘The Smoke Plague and its Remedy’ in Macmillan’s Magazine in July 1890. 2

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owners,’6 all set the conditions for the ready audiences for Henry George’s lectures on land reform in the early 1880s and his Progress and Poverty first published in 1879.7 Reviewing the state of political life in England in 1884, Engels noted that George’s role was likely to be ‘meteoric’, because the land question ‘is of importance traditionally [in Britain], and also … on account of the vast extent of big landed property’. But, he added presciently, ‘in the long run attention will not be concentrated on this point alone in the foremost industrial country in the world’.8 Both Marx and Engels opposed George’s key reforming idea— that landlords should pay a tax on their rents to the state. But on one issue, the bankruptcy of Malthusian economics, they doubtless sensed an ally. George’s book was quite clear about Malthus for whom ‘poverty is due to the pressure on population against subsistence’ so that ‘poverty, want, and starvation are ... not chargeable either to individual greed or to social maladjustments … [but] … the inevitable results of universal laws’.9 Such was the impact of George’s forthright exposure of the defects of such ‘universal laws’, that radical liberals and secularists, alike, moved in significant numbers down the road to socialism; Max Beer estimated that four-fifths of the socialist leaders of Great Britain ‘had passed through the school of Henry George’.10 For Marx and the socialists who came after him, the land question was informed by a vision of a double exploitation in which the relationship between the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of labour were fused: ‘[a]ll progress in capitalist agriculture’, Marx had written, ‘is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. … Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker’.11 The work of the chemist, Justus von Liebig, fed into Marx’s political-ecological critique of capitalist agriculture, condensed in the idea of a ‘metabolic rift’ which had been widened through ‘the growth of large-scale agriculture and long-distance trade’.12 In the Introduction to the 1862 edition of his Organic Chemistry in its J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, ed. W.J. Ashley (London: Longmans Green & Co, 1923), p. 818. 7 Gould, Early Green Politics, p. 60. 8 Letter to A. Bebel, 18 January 1884, in Marx/Engels Selected Correspondence, 3rd rev. ed., ed. S.W .Ryazanskaya (Moscow, 1975), p. 346. 9 Henry George, Progress and Poverty (London: Dent, 1911), pp. 75, 73. 10 See Martin Crick, The History of the Social Democratic Federation (Keele: Ryburn Press, 1994), p. 19. 11 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, pp. 637–8, cited by Foster, Marx’s Ecology, p. 156. 12 John Bellamy Foster, ‘Marx’s Ecology in Historical Perspective’, International Socialism Journal 96 (2002): http://pubs.socialistrevieindex.org.uk/isj96/foster.htm. 6

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Application to Agriculture and Physiology, Liebig had denounced methods of British agriculture as a ‘robbery system’ under which productivity could only be maintained by the importing of nutriments—guano from Peru and bones from Europe, the soil not, of course, replenished from which they had been taken.13 As Foster points out, Marx’s analysis of the metabolic rift extended to embrace issues of central ecological importance: ‘deforestation, desertification, climate change, the elimination of deer from the forests, the commodification of species, pollution, industrial wastes, toxic contamination, recycling, the exhaustion of coal mines, disease, overpopulation …’.14 Re-establishing a virtuous nutrient cycle was the aim of the late-Victorian physician and horticulturalist George Vivian Poore, no particular follower of Marx or other contemporary ecologically minded radicals. In his Essays on Rural Hygiene (1893), he deplored the installation of water-based sanitation systems in towns and cities, arguing for a ‘Rule of Return’, founded on the example of Oriental cultivation where ‘soils had been kept fertile for centuries through replenishment with biological wastes’:15 human waste would be harnessed for replenishing the earth via the earth closet so that in theory a ‘unit area of earth’ could produce all the ‘potatoes and vegetables which the healthy appetites of the family require’.16 Poore’s work appears to have attracted little interest in the inter-war period, only coming to the attention of John Middleton Murry (by his own account) in 1938. Something very similar to Poore’s self-sustaining domestic polity had been sounded through the simple-life socialism of Edward Carpenter. ‘[K]eep at least one little spot of earth clean’, he urged in 1886, aim to ‘produce clean and unadulterated food, to cultivate decent and healthful conditions for the workers, and useful products for the public’.17 Carpenter’s simplification of life ethic carried a moral, economic and political purpose, with both a green and a red colouring, so that his ecological commitment to the guardianship of the earth was bound up with the socialist aim of ‘ensuring some independence from the labour of others’.18 Such a vision gave a point to individual actions and practical determinations, embodied in the simple life polity of his communal home at Milnthorpe, developed out of his experience of a Ruskinite communal farm.19

Ibid. Ibid. 15 Philip Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 13

14

2001), p. 19. 16 J. Middleton Murry, ‘Review of J.W .Scott, Barter’, Adelphi 14/7 (1938): pp. 222–3. 17 Edward Carpenter, ‘Does it Pay?’ (1886), England’s Ideal and Other Papers on Social Subjects (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1887), pp. 121–8 (p .124); see Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter, p. 95. 18 Sheila Rowbotham, ‘In Search of Carpenter’, Dreams and Dilemmas: Collected Writings (London: Virago, 1983), pp. 239–56 (p. 247). 19 Ibid., p. 88.

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The principle of guardianship would be sustained by education, bringing man ‘into relation with the world around him’, enabling him ‘to derive pleasure and to draw sustenance from a thousand common things, which bring neither joy nor nourishment to his more enclosed and imprisoned brother … in the field, in the street, in the workshop, he sees a thousand things of interest’.20 As Rowbotham suggests, this kind of socialism stressed the possibilities of ‘inner transformation which meant change in the here and now’.21 The kind of ‘socialized infrastructure of socialism’ that Morris, Carpenter and others were in favour of, suggests Regenia Gagnier, offered a ‘basis on which individuals could freely develop’ and constitutes ‘the essence of fin de siècle socialism … distinctive for its freedoms and toleration, and its aesthetic choices …’.22 III The Fellowship of the New Life, founded in 1882, of which Carpenter was a member, was informed by the American Romanticism of Emerson and Thoreau and the immanentism of Unitarianism which saw ‘God as present throughout the world, realizing his divine purpose through natural processes’.23 The religious and ethical idealism which flowed from this fusion found expression in an idea of fellowship which embraced human and animal life alike and was therefore opposed to cruelty to both. Anti-vivisection, animal rights and vegetarianism were amongst the causes logically taken up by radicals, inspired by figures such as Henry Salt, a friend of Carpenter. Among the pamphlets issued by the Humanitarian League, which Salt founded in 1891, were ‘Animal’s Rights’; ‘Food and Fashion: Some Thoughts on What we Eat and What we Wear’ and ‘The Fate of the Fur Seal’. By abstaining from meat, argued a pamphlet ‘On Vegetarianism’ (published by Humane Review in January 1901), the balance of the species will be maintained: ‘[w]e will so deal with the part of the earth which belongs to us, as to make it as pleasant as possible, not only for ourselves, but also for the beasts of our household’. And in a comment which is only explicable against the background of imperial domination and the exploitation of natural resources overseas, it argued for the re-inhabiting of the local: ‘our share of responsibility in the transformation of the existing order of things does not extend beyond ourselves and our immediate neighbourhood. If we do but little, this little will at least be our work’.24 The defence of animal rights and prevention of cruelty to beasts and birds, coupled with concerns about the exploitation of natural resources, were frequently placed in a broader context by socialists who pointed out the disparities between 22 23 24

Carpenter, ‘England’s Ideal’ (1884), England’s Ideal (7th ed., 1919), pp. 1–23 (p. 18). Rowbotham, ‘In Search of Carpenter’, p. 255. Gagnier, Individualism, p. 151. Bevir, ‘British Socialism’, p. 879. Elisée Reclus, ‘On Vegetarianism’, Humane Review (January 1901), rpt. In Humanitarian Essays II (nd). 20

21

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wealth and poverty in Britain and the unthinking consumption by the rich and powerful. Carpenter argued against the conventional wisdom that ‘the more educated we became the more we should require for our support’. ‘If decently conducted’, education ‘does not turn a man into a creature of blind wants, a prey to ever fresh thirsts and desires’.25 The ‘blind wants’ propelling a society addicted to the overproduction and consumption of inessential material goods whilst needs for basic amenities went unmet, prompted deep unease amongst radicals of the period. In ‘Democracy and Diamonds’ (1891), the socialist writer, Grant Allen, attacked ostentatious signs of contemporary conspicuous consumption such as the wearing of jewelry by the wealthy, arguing not only that the expenditure involved was a ‘barbaric’ use of money, but reminding his readers of what else was at stake: the double exploitation of the earth for diamonds and the labour power required to mine them.26 These issues were there to be addressed by scientific authorities, too. ‘No man with any love of nature in his soul’, wrote the eminent naturalist, W.H. Hudson, in 1893, ‘can see a woman decorated with dead birds, or their wings, or nuptial plumes without a feeling of repugnance for the wearer, however beautiful or charming she may be’.27 Hudson indicted the ‘bestiality of the plumage trade as a whole and the cruelty of the hunters and callousness of the feather brokers in particular’ and gave momentum to a sustained campaign against the trade in exotic plumage which finally ended in 1922.28 Opposition to the conspicuous consumption of game on private land and estates could be attacked with differing emphases. The Humanitarian League developed opposition to blood sports in defence of animal rights; Shaw, Carpenter and Salt each ‘advocated the rights of animals as sentient beings’.29 But these arguments could easily be widened to articulate a more comprehensive exposure of the politics of land ownership. John Connell was both a member of the Humanitarian League and a leading figure in the ILP, who memorably argued that the game laws constituted ‘a tribute paid by the over-worked and over-taxed people of England to the Lords of the Bread—to the predatory classes that have appropriated the Land and depopulated the hills and valleys, to increase their own selfish pleasures’.30 Carpenter, ‘England’s Ideal’, p. 18. See William Greenslade & Terence Rodgers, ‘Resituating Grant Allen: Writing,

25 26

Radicalism and Modernity’, in W. Greenslade and T. Rodgers (eds), Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 1–22 (p. 15). 27 The Times, 17 October 1893, cited by R.J. Moore-Colyer, ‘Feathered Women and Persecuted Birds: The Struggle against the Plumage Trade, c1860–1922’, Rural History 13/2 (2000): pp. 57–63 (p. 60). 28 Ibid., p. 60. 29 Michael Tichelar, ‘Putting Animals into Politics: The Labour Party and Hunting in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, Rural History 17/2 (2006): pp. 213–34 (p. 217). 30 John Connell, The Truth About the Game Laws (London: Humanitarian League, 1898), p. vii, cited by Tichelar, ‘Putting Animals into Politics’, p. 217.

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Condemnation of the decadent pursuits of the landowning classes at the expense of working people and their culture was hardly new, but, infused by an ecological as well as a class politics, it resonated again at the end of the nineteenth century. Some of these perspectives come into focus in Grant Allen’s ‘hill-top’ satire, The British Barbarians (1895), in which a time-travelling anthropologist from the twenty-fifth century arrives in the Home Counties to confront examples of the irrational customs of the English, including the ‘unjust and irrational taboo’ and ‘strange hallucination’ of private property and its laws of trespass against which he asserts the ‘common human right to walk freely over the earth’.31 When Allen himself raised a petition in 1891, urging the reprieve of three men charged with the murder of a gamekeeper, and signed by Morris, among others, he was contesting both the sanctity of private property and class tyranny exercised by large landowners.32 IV While, in the short term, George’s impact was to make socialist converts out of radical liberals or positivists and to raise the level of consciousness of economic deprivation in the country, the cause of land reform lost ground steadily through the period to 1914, disappearing as a major issue after 1918. While the Labour Party campaigned before 1914 for public ownership of land, with calls from the left of the party for re-nationalization as late as the mid-1940s,33 the issue was never to be reignited. The gradual effacing of issues taken up by radicals and socialists of the fin de siècle and the marginalization of the tradition of new-life socialism for at least 50 years after 1918, was, perhaps inevitably, bound up with the changing priorities within labour politics and the labour movement. These were themselves a reflection of the dominance in the cultural imaginary of narratives of scientific and technological advance and the imperatives of material growth and prosperity. New-life socialism as a ‘religion’, a ‘way of life’, most obviously identified with the Fellowship of the New Life and later in the Independent Labour Party (founded in 1893), was, from the start, at odds with its later embodiment in the struggles of the labour movement, trades unionism, municipal administration and parliamentary representation, following the formation of the Labour Representation Committee and the Labour Party. H.M. Hyndman of the Social Democratic Federation was notably indifferent to the new-life interest in the recalibration of human relations which so galvanized new-life socialists; the SDF had such a ‘strange disregard of the religious, moral and aesthetic sentiments of the people’, according to the 31 Grant Allen, The British Barbarians: A Hill-Top Novel (London: John Lane, 1895), pp. 77, 71, 79. 32 Greenslade and Rodgers, ‘Resituating Grant Allen’, pp. 14–5. 33 Michael Tichelar, ‘The Scott Report and the Labour Party: the Protection of the Countryside during the Second World War’, Rural History 15/2 (2004): pp. 167–87 (p. 175).

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ILP leader and follower of Morris, John Bruce Glasier.34 A year after the founding of the Fellowship of the New Life, some members had left to join the Fabians with Shaw, who had begun to travel down the Fabian road, claiming later, rather unfairly, that while the Fabian faction wanted ‘to organize the docks’, those who remained in the Fellowship wished ‘to sit among the dandelions’—the Fabians evidently having little time for the uplifting language of ‘fellowship’.35 Tensions had surfaced following the publication of Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889).36 For the Fabian, Sidney Webb, ‘the perfect and fitting development of each individual is not necessarily the utmost and highest cultivation of his own personality, but the filling, in the best possible way, of his humble function in the great social machine’.37 The view of socialism as a ‘complete theory of human life … including a distinct system of religion, ethics, and conduct’, as Morris put it, faced in quite a different direction.38 For Webb, the question for socialism had become whether actions tended to contribute to the efficiency of the State, and Shaw went on to expose what he saw as the lack of reality in Morris’s politics, such as his prescriptions for the poor: ‘[t]hey do not want the simple life, nor the esthetic life’, he wrote in 1906, ‘what they do dislike and despise … is poverty’.39 But other socialists had felt differently. By the end of the First World War, the Fellowship member, Percival Chubb, noted that British socialism no longer struggled at what he termed ‘the religious frontier’.40 Joseph Clayton, an early ILP leader argued, in 1926, that socialism as ‘a cause, a new order of society to be set up’ had died.41 Shaw’s observation in 1928 (addressed to the ‘Intelligent Woman’) that the Webbs had ‘cured Fabianism of the romantic amateurishness which had made the older Socialist agitations negligible and ridiculous’,42 was symptomatic of that wider turn against the libertarian/ utopian impulse which resulted in the belittling of the so-called ethical tradition of new-life socialism. Crick, The History of the Social-Democratic Federation, p. 89. Kevin Manton, ‘The Fellowship of the New Life’, British Journal of the History of

34 35

Political Thought 24/2 (2003): pp. 282–304, pp. 282, 304. 36 Ibid., p. 303. 37 Sidney Webb, ‘Historic’, in G.B. Shaw (ed.), Fabian Essays in Socialism (London: Fabian Society, 1889), p. 58. 38 E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 2nd ed. (London: Merlin Press, 1977), p. 548. 39 G.B. Shaw, Preface to Major Barbara, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, vol. 3 (London: Bodley Head, 1971), p. 29. For further discussion of this fissure within socialist thinking, see William Greenslade, ‘Socialism and Radicalism’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 73–90 (pp. 82–4). 40 Manton, ‘The Fellowship of the New Life’, p. 303. 41 Ibid., pp. 303–4. 42 G.B. Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Fascism (2 vols, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1937), vol. 2, p. 465.

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Orwell’s loathing of those new-life socialists, still active in the 1930s, principally through the ILP, is notorious. He speaks of that ‘dreary tribe of highminded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of “progress” like bluebottles to a dead cat’; the ‘mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” … draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Naturecure” quack, pacifist, and feminist in England’.43 To the ILP members of the 1930s, the influence of the sandal-wearing Edward Carpenter appears sufficiently robust to make it worthwhile for Orwell to launch such displays of ‘proletarian manliness’,44 but the fact was that from the high point of his influence as a libertarian socialist visionary at the outbreak of the First World War, the politics for which Carpenter stood had become steadily marginalized through the 1920s. In a book of essays written to commemorate him, shortly after his death, E.M. Forster suggested that the labour movement had ‘advanced by committee meetings and statistics towards a State-owned factory attached to State-supervised recreation grounds. Edward’s heart beat no warmer at such joys. He felt no enthusiasm over municipal baths and municipally provided bathingdrawers’.45 Writing at a moment of renewed interest in new-life socialism in the late 1970s, Sheila Rowbotham asked what had become of ‘their concern to transform all aspects of relationships, and the preoccupation with living the new life in the present as well as the future’.46 In her 2008 biography of Carpenter, she gave her own cogent reply: ‘[m]ass unemployment, the rise of fascism, the murky compromises of Labour in power and the growing significance of the Communist Party … with its strategic approach to means’ all helped to date Carpenter’s ‘utopian connection of the personal and political, body and spirit, creative work and union with nature’.47 ‘The ideas about alternative forms of work and consumption so central to Carpenter’s socialism’, she suggests, ‘were being overridden by the mass production which made cheap goods possible for working-people. Efficient productivity and more things seemed to make sense to socialists struggling against the depression’.48 There was no shortage of ecologically informed ideological positions and opinion staked out during the inter-war period, from Christian Sociology to the Distributism of Chesterton and Belloc and Guild Socialism of A.R. Orage and A.J. Penty, from the Biodynamic Cultivation of Rudolf Steiner to the New English 43 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962 [1937]), pp. 160, 152. 44 Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter, p. 442. 45 E.M. Forster, in Gilbert Beith (ed.), Edward Carpenter: An Appreciation (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931), p. 78. 46 Rowbotham, ‘In Search of Carpenter’, p. 254. 47 Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter, p. 442. 48 Ibid.

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Weekly and its links through Philip Mairet with T.S. Eliot, from the Kinship in Husbandry of Rolf Gardiner and Viscount Lymington to the scientific nutritionist work of John Boyd Orr.49 Tolstoyan communities initiated at of the turn of the century were joined by communards of all kinds—communist, Quaker, pacificist, Anglican, Catholic, anthroposophical.50 For the most part, ecological commitment in this period was expressed, less as a positive programme of fellowship, unity and connection between the individual and class, or between classes and between nations, than as part of a defensive rearguard reaction against precisely the modernizing, municipal face of the state that Forster had pithily identified as antipathetic to new-life socialism. Ecological concerns were now voiced by writers and groups who were themselves disenchanted with urban modernity but who embraced an anti-statist ecology of small-scale production, designed to keep in touch with older organic ways of life—all too congenial, in some cases, to men and women of the political right. Sustainable agriculture, attention to humus and manure and the replenishing of the soil, the revival of rural community, the cause of brown bread, reopened flour mills—these calls for an organic Englishness which sound through the 1930s and into the 1940s, culminating in the formation of the Soil Association in 1946,51 derived principally from a romantic conservatism directed against the onward tide of mass production, based upon the need for cheap food, increased access to material goods—the basis of the politics of consumption (which so troubled the visionary Carpenter in the 1880s and 1890s) and to which both labourism and mainstream conservatism became wedded. The prolific writer on country affairs, H.J. Massingham, emerges as a figure symptomatic of a wider inter-war hostility to modernity which had become identified with state and municipal planning, with the interests of city dwellers and so with the politics of labour and socialism. His long campaign against mass production in agriculture, founded on a diagnosis of man’s divorce from the land, is sustained by a politics which, in its privileging of organic relations, leaves capitalist relations intact. Massingham and other members of the inter-war organic movement were unable to reconcile the pursuit of wholemeal bread with the pursuit of social equality. Instead of a fellowship based on the acceptance of equality and brotherhood, there was now, in David Matless’s phrase, a ‘locally-rooted universalism’.52 Earlier in the century, Massingham had actively campaigned against the plumage trade, based, as he later put it, on a ‘predatory and acquisitive’

Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England (London: Longman, 1979), pp. 215–16; Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement, pp. 242–53. 50 Hardy, Alternative Communities, pp. 42–3, 170, 215–16; Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 100. 51 Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century, p. 112; Conford, Origins of the Organic Movement, pp. 88–9. 52 David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), p. 129. 49

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‘human relation to nature’.53 But now in the late 1930s he is making common cause with the conservative historian and prolific essayist Sir Arthur Bryant, with the jingoistic anti-Semite Viscount Lymington and with the iconoclastic Gardiner, who developed organic farming on his Dorset estate.54 V The pursuit of an essential Englishness became a powerful force in the inter-war period: following the trauma of the 1914–18 war, it expressed disappointment with the present, nostalgia for the past. The burgeoning of domestic tourism, a growing fondness for ‘discovering England’ in a context of a rejuvenated enthusiasm for nonindustrial life, spliced with pastoral idealism, prompted an anthropological turn—to the detailed exploration of habits and customs of the nation, instanced in the documentary film movement and innovations in ‘Mass-Observation’.55 For F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, mourning the loss of an organic way of life, in 1933, it was ‘important to insist on what has been lost lest it should be forgotten; for the memory of the old order must be the chief incitement towards a new, if we are ever to have one’.56 But in this reverence for the ‘old order’, it was easy to ignore the resistance that the fin-de-siècle radicals themselves had offered to forms of modernization which they themselves deplored. What is striking about these inter-war developments is an absence of the controversies of the period about the inevitable questions of power raised by the relationship of ownership to guardianship, questions in circulation before 1914, but now silent. The ‘arts and crafts’ culture of the late nineteenth century was buoyant, but ‘divested of its critical edge … a creative flourish confined to small highly priced workshops or passed on in a diluted form into the schools as “handicrafts”’.57 Such a turn to Anglocentrism, Patrick Wright’s ‘deep England’, which reached a peak at the end of the 1930s, was predicated upon a ‘displacement of class antagonism by social affiliation to place’,58 a development which Jed Esty See Edward Abelson (ed.), A Mirror of England; An Anthology of the Writings of H.J. Massingham (Bideford: Green Books, 1988), p. 20. 54 Gardiner, who had profound but complex Anglo-German sympathies, hosted meetings of youth groups and encouraged the revival of traditional customs and sports, but was not smitten, as was Lymington, with the racial theory of the Third Reich; Matless, Landscape and Englishness, p. 122. 55 Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 42. 56 F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and the Environment (1933), in Laurence Coupe (ed.), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 73–6 (p. 76). 57 Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter, pp. 442–3. 58 Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985); Esty, A Shrinking Island, p. 49. 53

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argues coincides with the waning influence of narratives of empire in the 1930s, generative of ‘the shrinking island nation’ of ‘imperial contraction’.59 Taking Forster’s story ‘The Other Side of the Hedge’ as his starting point, Esty suggests that Forster’s original symbolic geography of circle and road expresses a dynamic tension between a centripetal ‘static embrace of ahistorical belonging’ rooted in the sacred spaces of an insular, pastoral nation, and that of the expansive British state, figured in the road ‘as the location of constantly expanding and entropic culture’. Indeed Forster’s narratives ‘require … the coexistence of British hegemony and Anglocentric idealism’.60 When the world-state contracts in the inter-war period, the bounded pastoral zone becomes detached from its position of creative tension with the road outside the hedge: Forster’s subsequent literary output which includes his pageants, ‘Abinger Pageant’ and England’s Pleasant Land, express, by comparison to his earlier Edwardian work, a tension-free, universalizing celebration of English native traditions.61 The symbolic geographies of representation, such as in the hidden, pagan spaces of Forster’s Edwardian fiction, are worth noting in their performance of ideological tensions, predicated on a diffused ecological awareness. In Forster’s liminal spaces, guardianship of the old pagan kind is prepared to battle it out with simpler, more insidious kinds of ownership. The dell outside Cambridge, or the sacred pagan space of Cadbury Rings in The Longest Journey, speak both of repression and the promise of new beginnings. They allow both for the meeting and exposure of the limits of compromised problematic identities, expressed in the recurring pattern of accommodation and resistance in Rickie Elliot’s relationship with Agnes Pembroke, or the botched attempts of Rickie’s failed guardian Mrs Failing, against whom is placed the nonpossessive claims on him of his halfbrother, Stephen Wonham. The guardianship by Ruth Wilcox of a regressive spirit, anterior to the urgent, alienated modernity represented by the family in which she has to make her way, is embodied in her own fugitive and resistant pastoralizing of Howards End, a spirit guarded and sustained by Miss Avery and eventually Margaret Schlegel. At the end the pastoral spectacle of haymaking offers an image not simply of interclass inheritance, but of communal, nonpossessive ownership, intended to face away from the Wilcoxes’ Darwinian obsession with the dividend payable out of narrow interest and family advantage, even as the ‘red rust’ creeps towards the countryside from the metropolis.62 In his ethical reading of human relations in his fiction, Forster draws on what we might term an ecological economy derived from new-life socialism: his handling of personal relations is powerfully infused by their principles of guardianship and fellowship which galvanized the followers of new-life socialism. A disinterested 61 62 59

60

Ibid., pp. 14, 16. Ibid., pp. 24, 25. Ibid., pp. 49, 79–85. E.M. Forster, Howards End (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000 [1910]), p. 289.

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understanding of the needs of others or the ability to give more than to take, in personal relations is a characteristic of several of Forster’s exponent figures: Stewart Ansell, Stephen Wonham in The Longest Journey, the Emersons in A Room with a View, Margaret Schlegel in Howards End. These are opposed to characters who short-circuit that economy, by taking more than they give, draining the energy of others—Agnes and Herbert Pembroke, Cecil Vyse and Charles Wilcox. Through the whole-life ethic of this socialism, the ecologically based concept of respect for the earth can be extended to embrace a view of relationships in which the energies of guardianship rather than possessive ownership supervene. Sylvia Townsend Warner develops Forster’s ecological ethics in her novel, Lolly Willowes (1926). Laura discovers new resources of selfhood in place. Sloughing off the life in which she has been appropriated and assimilated as a loveable old maid, ‘Lolly’, in her brother’s dull London home, finds in a Chilterns village (far from a rural idyll, this) a chance to liberate her ‘secret self’; her revisionary way of inhabiting place allows her to re-imagine the nature of belonging. The discovery in the village of a culture of witch-worship offers membership and affiliation (and with the terrible ‘other’), rather than any narrow appropriation of space. This is matched by her jettisoning her map and guide book to the Chilterns into a ‘disused well’.63 Proceeding out of the village via an alley which ‘soon changed to an untidy lane’, to a ‘cinder-track’ and thence to a ‘small enclosure, full of cypresses, yews, clipped junipers and weeping willows’, Laura affiliates herself at the end of the novel with the devil (a Pan descendant), assimilating his otherness.64 With his pursuit of her complete, she ‘could sleep where she pleased’, feeling his ‘undesiring and unjudging gaze’ on her, his ‘satisfied but profoundly indifferent ownership’.65 Possessive ownership is embodied, to Laura’s dismay, by the appropriating attitude of her nephew, Titus, who is ‘burgeoned with projects’ to improve village life, bringing, as Matless notes, ‘a Batsfordian eye’ to the village of Greta Mop.66 ‘Ecology’, says Lyotard, is the ‘discourse of the secluded’.67 Lolly Willowes is one example of the fugitive re-emergence of the ecological principal of guardianship which is mounted in a period in which the radical ecological energy of whole-life socialism has begun to become a marginal, not to say fugitive, presence in British culture.

65 66 67

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes (London: Virago, 1995 [1926]), p. 128. Ibid., pp. 225–6. Ibid., p. 247. Ibid., p. 159; Matless, Landscape and Englishness, p. 87. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Ecology as Discourse of the Secluded’, in Coupe (ed.), The Green Studies Reader, pp. 135–8. 63

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Chapter 12

Felled Trees—Fallen Soldiers H. Gustav Klaus

There are times when talking about trees almost amounts to a crime since it implies silence about so many evil deeds, writes Bertolt Brecht in his poem from the mid1930s ‘An die Nachgeborenen’ (‘To Those Born Later’).1 I am not going to invert this dictum, as a deep ecologist might be tempted to do. It is enough to observe that by the grace of late birth large parts of Western and Central Europe have since lived and are living in politically less sinister, if environmentally probably more perilous times. In any case, the juxtaposition of ‘trees’ and ‘soldiers’ in my title should dispel any doubts about a possible indulgence in Waldseligkeit,2 that beatific mood induced by the peace of the forest. Rather I would like to trace a motif running through a number of poems and novels that deal with or touch on the First World War. This motif assumes a correlation between the violence done to nature and man at the moment when, in Sir Edward Grey’s memorable phrase, the lamps were going out all over Europe. From the start, therefore, the topic brings together the human and the nonhuman living world, if paradoxically only in and through death. This doesn’t make discussion of the anthropocentric or ecocentric pull of a text superfluous, but it inevitably invites reflection on a shared fate: the cutting short of life processes by brutal action. The issue is, of course, complicated by the fact that man is simultaneously victim and perpetrator of the violence unleashed by war. However, soldiers can never stand for the whole human species. Bitter divisions separated not only the nations that went to war, for acrimony existed also within those societies, to the point where many courageous people refused to take part in the slaughter. Why did a sizeable number of writers suddenly, and independently, arrive at the notion of a corresponding agony of tree and soldier? Some reasons can be advanced. The Great War was not exclusively fought by professional armies but by millions of volunteers and conscripts, including soldier poets and artists. See John Willett’s translation of the poem in Bertolt Brecht, Bad Time for Poetry: Was it? Is it? 125 Poems and Songs (London: Methuen, 1995), p. 136. 2 A term used by Paul Goetsch in his admirable survey of felled trees (minus the soldiers) in poetry, ‘Der gefällte Baum in der englischen, amerikanischen und anglokanadischen Literatur’, in Jürgen Schlaeger (ed.), Anglistentag 1983 Konstanz (Gießen: Hoffmann, 1984), pp. 309–44 (p. 309). Goetsch draws heavily on Ruth Alston Cresswell’s Spirit of the Trees: An Anthology of Poetry inspired by Trees (Abbotsbury: Society of the Men of the Trees, 1947). 1

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It harnessed large sections of the civilian, especially female population to the war effort. The casualty figures in this unexpectedly protracted conflict were staggering, but the environmental destruction also became visible, as photographs, newsreels and paintings brought home images of the scorched earth, the mud craters and tree stumps. It was a war of attrition, draining not only the human but also the natural resources of each participant country and, directly pertinent to one variant of my theme, leading in Britain to a fivefold increase in the use of domestic timber.3 Before 1914, 93 percent of the timber had been imported, but by the end of 1916 the blockade of the British Isles by U-boat action was so effective that the native woodlands, meagre as they were, had to be plundered. Exact figures are not available, but as one regional history puts it, ‘With the war demand and this reduction of supplies from abroad the Scottish woods were exploited to the utmost and far beyond what should have been normal’.4 Laments about the felling of trees were not new. Famous examples in English poetry include at one end Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1622), in which the Forest of Arden is lent a voice, at the other Gerald Manley Hopkins’s ‘Binsey Poplars’ (1879), with its mesmerising sound effects created by dense alliteration and repetition, assonance and consonance. But as far as I have been able to establish, none of the poems in this long tradition posits an association between death in battle and felled trees in the countryside, except marginally some Restoration and Classicist poems, which celebrate the strong English oak as an emblem and guarantor of the nation’s naval power.5 Again, in The Iliad, one of the earliest war epics, slain warriors are frequently likened to hewn-down trees. But identifying war as a common source of destruction of both soldiers and trees appears to be a modern viewpoint. Arguably its first major artistic manifestation can be found, not in literature, but in Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra (c. 1820), especially plates 37 and 39 with its mutilated and dismembered naked bodies hanging from tree stumps. Fifty years later, John Ruskin came close to it when in Letter V of Fors Clavigera he warned of the ‘pestilence on the globe’, and referring to the Franco-Prussian War saw the air vitiated ‘chiefly at this moment with corpses, and animal and vegetable ruin in war: changing men, horses, and garden-stuff into noxious gas’.6 D.B. Henderson-Howat, ‘Great Britain’, in Long-Term Historical Changes in the Forest Resource: Case Studies of Finland, France, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, The Netherlands, Sweden and the USA, UNECE/FAO Publications (1996), reference ECE/ TIM/SP/10; http://www.unece.org/trade/timber/tc-publ.htm. 4 Mark L. Anderson, A History of Scottish Forestry (2 vols, London: Nelson, 1967), vol. 2, p. 437. 5 I am thinking of lines 385–8 of Alexander Pope’s ‘Windsor-Forest’ (1713), or of Anne Finch’s, the Countess of Winchilsea’s, ‘Upon the Hurricane’, published in the same year, but written in 1704. 6 John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (3 vols, Orpington: George Allen, 1896), vol. 1, pp. 97–8. I owe the pointer to The Iliad to Stephen Harrison and to the passage in Fors Clavigera to Dinah Birch, both contributors to the present book. 3

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In English poetry, however, it is not until the First World War, in the verses of some soldier poets, that the connection between a battlefield and a tree-lined field is consciously made. Such is the case in Edward Thomas’s ‘As the team’s headbrass’ (1916), in which the speaker sits on a ‘fallen elm’ watching a ploughman at work and at each turn of the horses exchanging a few words with him. The word ‘fallen’ in the third line introduces an ominous note into the peaceful rural scene. And it does not take long for the broken conversation to reach the topic of ‘war’ (l.9). Throughout the longer second stanza, death is in the air, as the conversation continually shifts from ploughed field to battlefield and back; for the farm-labourer mentions that one of his mates got killed in France and the shortage of labour accounts for the as yet unmoved tree. Also his question ‘“Have you been out?”’ suggests that the speaker is in uniform, or at least fit for service. But the strongest link between human and nonhuman death is forged by the farmworker’s remark that his mate was killed ‘“back in March | The very night of the blizzard, too.”’ The blizzard, that is, that felled the elm. At the same time, the personal pronouns in ‘“they killed him”’ emphasise the human actors in warfare. Sitting on the corpse of the tree, hearing about a death in France, the speaker pictures himself losing a limb or his life.7 In their anthology Poetry of the Great War, Dominic Hibberd and John Onions have rightly included Thomas’s poem in a section headed ‘Christ and Nature’.8 The association of naturally caused destruction and man-instigated horrors presupposes a higher agency that rules over all parts of Creation. The fallen tree, in touch with the speaker, functions as a symbol of man fallen from divine grace.9 In retrospect already the casual-sounding lines ‘say or ask a word, | About the weather, next about the war’ are preparing the ground for the junction of natural and human contingencies. A full interpretation of the poem would have to attend to the lovers’ brief appearance and the sexual imagery of the ploughshare cutting the soil, and might argue that the violence and death are balanced by the promise of love and fertility. ‘As the team’s head-brass’ was composed in England in May 1916 before Thomas had seen action. By this time Edmund Blunden was already in the line. His poems from the trenches do not proceed ruminatively, but nor do they confront us, Owen-like, with the grim details of mortar or gas attacks. Blunden rather registers, appalled and perplexed, what men, their habitations and their natural habitat alike have to endure in the battle zone from a war machine that makes no difference between any of them. Hence the opening of ‘Festubert: The Old German Line’, written in the same month of May 1916: Quoted from Edward Thomas, The Collected Poems, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 325–7. 8 Dominic Hibberd and John Onions (eds), Poetry of the Great War (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 89–108. 9 I follow Jon Stallworthy’s reading of the poem in his Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War (London: Constable & Robinson, 2002), p. 137. 7

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Sparse mists of moonlight hurt our eyes With gouged and scourged uncertainties Of soul and soil in agonies. 10

To speak of ‘soul’ and ‘soil’ in one breath is not meant to play down human suffering but to let living nature partake of the compassion. ‘La Quinque Rue’ similarly opens under moonlight but goes on to identify particular features of the illuminated landscape: O road in dizzy moonlight bleak and blue, With forlorn effigies of farms besprawled, With trees bitterly bare or snapped in two, Why riddle me thus—attracted and appalled? For surely now the grounds both left and right Are tilled ... 11

Trees ‘snapped in two’, splintered, charred, seen on countless photos, became part of the archetypal imagery of the Great War. Paul Nash in his painting Void of War (1918) presents them, as he often does, without human figures. Blunden managed to survive the war, but, like Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves or Ivor Gurney, was deeply disturbed for years after. Whenever he evokes the ‘green places’ (‘1916 seen from 1921’), for which he cared so much, in his post-war poetry, they appear irremediably tainted by ‘those brute guns’ in France (‘Vlamertinghe: Passing the Chateau, July 1917’). A line from the often anthologized ‘1916 seen from 1921’ brilliantly and succinctly expresses this sentiment: ‘the charred stub outspeaks the living tree’.12 Moonlit or sunlit, the natural landscape has lost its consoling power: I saw the sunlit vale, and the pastoral fairy-tale; The sweet and bitter scent of the may drifted by; And never have I seen such a bright bewildering green, But it looked like a lie, Like a kindly meant lie. (‘The Sunlit Vale’)13

In Margaret Postgate’s ‘Afterwards’ (1918), written immediately after the armistice, the speaker cannot enjoy the peace either, much as it was longed for and imagined in idyllic terms during the fighting. The poem brings a civilian and female perspective to bear on the war, at once intensely personal and concerned with the wider world:

Quoted from The Poems of Edmund Blunden (London: Cobdon-Sanderson, 1930),

10

p. 8.

Ibid., p. 173. Ibid., pp. 163, 152, 163. 13 Ibid., p. 328. 11

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The people that were resigned said to me —Peace will come and you will lie Under the larches up in Sheer, Sleeping, And eating strawberries and cream and cakes – O cakes, O cakes, O cakes, from Fuller’s! And quite forgetting there’s a train to town, Plotting in an afternoon the new curves for the world.

But when peace came, nothing was as before: … And lying in Sheer I look round at the corpses of the larches Whom they slew to make pit-props For mining the coal for the great armies. And think, a pit-prop cannot move in the wind, Nor have red manes hanging in spring from its branches, And sap making the warm air sweet. Though you planted it out on the hill again it would be dead.

It is as if the speaker was totally given over to the fate of the larches. But the language of battle (‘corpses’, the archaic ‘slew’) applied to humans’ dealings with the trees and their personification prepares us for more. The line ‘Though you planted it out on the hill again it would be dead’ has a sense of finality, which is subsequently transferred to the beloved: And if these years have made you into a pit-prop, To carry the twisting galleries of the world’s reconstruction (Where you may thank God, I suppose That they set you the sole stay of a nasty corner) What use is it to you? What use To have your body lying here In Sheer, underneath the larches?14

Rupert Brooke’s ‘corner … | That is forever England’ has turned ‘nasty’. But loss and grief also call into question the political project for the post-war world elaborated together. ‘Afterwards’ is the penultimate poem in a collection in which the war features prominently. In an earlier, less personal poem, the sight of ‘The Falling Leaves’ (1915) of autumn had led Postgate to think of the ‘gallant multitude | Which now all withering lay …| on the Flemish clay’.15 Clearly the duration and conduct of the conflict plus her work for the Fabian (subsequently Labour) Research Department since 1916, which had brought her in touch with the socialist movement, have sharpened the author’s political vision in the later poem, though there is no hint Margaret Postgate’s Poems (London: Allen & Unwin, 1918), pp. 35–6. Ibid., p. 34.

14 15

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at her brother Raymond Postgate’s or her future husband G.D.H. Cole’s refusal to serve in the war.16 Postgate’s evocation of the falling leaves and, to a lesser extent, of the massacred larches serves ultimately to prompt a realization of the brutality of war. By contrast, Ivor Gurney’s ‘Possessions’ (c. 1920-–22) appears almost as an ecocentric piece par excellence: Sand has the ants, clay ferny weeds for play But what shall please the wind now the trees are away War took on Witcombe steep? It breathes there, and wonders at old night roarings; October time at all lights, and the new clearings For memory are like to weep. It was right for the beeches to stand over Witcombe reaches, Until the wind roared and softened and died to sleep.17

The sense of loss, of an irreparable breach in nature, is here more strongly marked than in ‘Afterwards’. But the most instructive comparison is with the second version of ‘Possessions’ (c. 1925), in which the gentle opening with its interplay of animate and inanimate things has given way to the crude ‘France has Victory, England yet firm shall stay’. Lines 2 to 5 are identical, except for the punctuation. But thereafter Gurney, dispensing with the beautiful original ending, has added four new lines, the first of which reads, ‘War need not cut down trees, three hundred miles over seas’.18 This refusal to accept the martial logic of the despoliation stated the obvious: why should a war fought on foreign soil ravage the English countryside? However, the interesting word here is the cautious auxiliary ‘need not’, as opposed to the firm ‘must not’ that we shall encounter in a moment. Is the implication, not surprising in an ex-soldier, that the war had to be fought? Is there something of the warrior spirit here that also informs Gurney’s ‘Felling a Tree’, a violent poem, full of military vocabulary, even if the ash-tree in that poem is not hacked down for military purposes but will serve as ‘fuel for the bright kitchen’?19

For Postgate’s own account of her politicization and the shock caused by her brother’s imprisonment, see her autobiography Growing Up into Revolution (London: Longmans, 1949), p. 58, published under the name Margaret Cole. 17 Ivor Gurney, Collected Poems, ed. P.J. Kavanagh, rev. and corrected ed. (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004), p. 106. 18 Ibid., p. 107. One can only nod to Kavanagh’s statement: ‘1925 must have been an unusually bad year, for he [Gurney] went back to old poems and tried to rewrite them. It is a period from which an editor would like to rescue him’ (p. xxxiv). See also his comments pp. 361, 367, 370. 19 Ibid., p. 254. Before I turn to fiction for the remainder of the essay, I should point out that among other poems touching on my theme, but not treated here, is Rose Macaulay’s ‘Farmer’s Boy’ in her collection Three Days (London: Constable, 1919), p. 41. 16

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‘Men must not cut down trees’ is war veteran Septimus Warren Smith’s urgent and uncompromising message from the dead in Mrs Dalloway (1925).20 Virginia Woolf’s novel, although set in 1923, is replete with references to the war. Even before Septimus appears on the scene, we hear of ‘orphans, widows’ and ‘men without occupation’ (p. 23). The war literally hangs over London as ‘the sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd’ (p. 23). Peace may have come—the plane writes advertisements in the sky—but the sound brings back memories of zeppelins and other enemy aircraft. Public commemorations of the war are also inserted in the novel: Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising gratitude, fidelity, love of England. (p. 57)

The boy-soldiers pass ‘the exalted statues’ of Nelson, Gordon and Havelock (p. 58), as a slightly amused Peter Walsh observes, and are heading for the ‘empty tomb’ (p. 57), that is the Cenotaph unveiled on Armistice Day 1920. So overwhelming was the shadow of the war for Woolf while she was working on Mrs Dalloway that she had the first draft begin with a similar procession of the sons of fallen officers. But the boys’ march in the final version should not only be read as an act of remembrance; it also augurs ill for the future: a new generation is being trained for the next mass slaughter. The war is certainly not over for Septimus, who in immunizing himself in the trenches against its horror has lost the ability to feel and connect. What he is denied in human society—the ability to feel, to communicate, to work, to procreate, to enjoy beauty—his deranged mind’s eye now finds in nature, especially in trees and birds. For Septimus ‘trees are alive’ (pp. 26, 75), they are in constant movement, ‘rising and falling’ (p. 26), waving and brandishing. And he does not only perceive them beckoning to him, he can feel their leaves ‘by millions of fibres’ connecting ‘with his own body’ (p. 26), taking root in him. Shortly before he leaps to his death to escape from the clutches of Dr Bradshaw, and therefore from a prisonlike asylum existence that does not deserve to be called ‘life’, Rezia, his wife, appears to him as ‘a flowering tree’ (p. 163). This vision completes the ‘miracle’, the ‘triumph’ (p. 164) of the vegetative world. The trees, the birds and the sun have become a sanctuary for beauty, truth and reason—all of which are in exile from the human world, fugitives from ‘human cruelty’ (p. 155). It is bitterly ironical that a victim of the folly of war should demand their protection—and consider demanding it from the politicians. It is no less bitterly ironical that it is left to a man without feeling to proclaim ‘universal love’ (p. 75), for the only love Septimus is left with is love of nature. But the ‘universal’ is surely to be taken literally, so that by synecdoche the admonition ‘Men must not cut down trees’ encompasses all living things. Septimus has revelations and believes 20 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973 [1925]), p. 28. Subsequent page references are inserted in the text.

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‘There is a God’ (p. 28), but his religion is rather that of a divinely animated nature. Alienated from human life, he is drawn to the biological processes of other organic creatures. Thus the madman chooses his own sane therapy: unmediated contact with ‘nature’, even if it is only the trees and birds in Regent’s Park. Another war casualty, equally sterile, if intellectually still vibrant and possessed by a social will, Sir Clifford in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) evokes little sympathy since he is from the start portrayed as a very class-conscious figure, representative of the class held responsible for dragging the country into the war. ‘Sir Geoffrey, Clifford’s father, was intensely ridiculous, chopping down his trees and weeding men out of his colliery, to shove them into the war; and himself being so safe and patriotic; but also, spending more money on his country than he’d got’.21 Initially, his two sons find this ‘determined patriotism’ ridiculous, but by 1916 the ‘flippant young laughed no more’ (p. 11). The elder brother gets killed, Clifford, the younger, is unable to produce an heir. But the physical debility caused by the war is only superimposed on a sterility that Lawrence diagnoses in a ruling class which has brought disaster to all of society. ‘Cataclysm’ is one of the first words of the novel, and ‘there’s black days coming’ its refrain. Mellors, who keeps uttering these words in his dark moods, is in one sense a class renegade. Born into a mining family, he had won a scholarship to a grammar school and risen to the rank of a lieutenant in the war. He can speak Standard English if he wants to. He has no faith left in the industrial working classes; their degradation appears to him complete. Yet he is also an army renegade and in electing to become a gamekeeper has turned his back on any middle-class career. Living in the wood properly defines his position outside society. At the same time, it affords him closeness to nature and physical labour, his two basic needs. The love between Connie and Mellors can only flourish in this retreat. As in Edward Thomas’s poem the lovers seek refuge in the forest. But even before their first lovemaking, Connie’s sexual stirring is mirrored by the awakening of nature, the rare use of her formal first name suggesting her coming into full womanhood: ‘Constance sat down with her back to a young pine-tree, that swayed against her with curious life, elastic and powerful rising up. The erect alive thing, with its top in the sun!’ (p. 86). This passage is usually read as a foreboding of the woman’s entering the ‘phallic consciousness’, but it is also an indictment of the felling of the trees for trench-building with which the novel began. In a later scene Connie and Clifford in his powered wheelchair wander through the wood and while she is once again responding with every fibre of her body to the sprouting freshness around her, Clifford in his crassness can only remark: ‘What is quite so lovely as an English spring!’ Which prompts Connie’s angry reflection, ‘as if even the spring bloomed by act of Parliament. An English spring! Why not an Irish one, or Jewish!’ (p. 184). Clifford’s Englishness marks him as a worthy successor of Sir Geoffrey, who had ‘stood for England and Lloyd George, 21 D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires (London: Penguin, 2006 [1928]), pp. 10–11. Subsequent page references are inserted into the text.

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as his forebears had stood for England and St. George’ (p. 11). And the text firmly connects the two passages when they approach ‘the open place where the trees had been felled’ (p. 184) Lawrence was important to Lewis Grassic Gibbon, not because Connie is a ‘Scotch’ woman and the Celts generally are viewed with suspicion by Clifford and his cronies, but because here (and in Hardy) he found a model with which to structure the development of Chris, the heroine of Sunset Song (1932), by reference to the natural rhythms of the land. The novel is a lament for a dying species, the small peasantry. Throughout the nineteenth century the Scottish countryside had become depopulated, and this exodus had gone hand in hand with the encroachment of pastures on cultivated land. Gibbon suggests, in contradistinction to the findings of agrarian historians,22 that the First World War accelerated and completed this process. He also portrays the women as victims of the war. Chris sees her husband turned into a brute in the army, eventually finds herself widowed and finally robbed of her lover. Here is how a crofter turned soldier becomes aware, on the first morning of his leave, that something is wrong in the familiar environment. A longer passage can best convey the wonderful flavour of Gibbon’s writing: Chae sat up in his bed to reach for his pipe when he looked from the window and gave a great roar; and he louped from his bed in his sark so that Kirsty came running and crying What is’t? Is’t a wound? But she found Chae standing by the window then, cursing himself black in the face he was, and he asked how long had this been going? So Mistress Strachan looked out the way he looked and she saw it was only the long bit wood that ran by the Peesie’s Knapp that vexed him, it was nearly down the whole stretch of it, now. It made a gey difference to the lookout faith! but fine for Kinraddie the woodmen had been, they’d lodged at the Knapp and paid high for their board. But Chae cried out To hell with their board, the bastards, they’re ruining my land, do you hear! And he pulled on his trousers and boots and would fair have run over the park and been at them; but Kirsty caught at his sark and held him back and cried Have you fair gone mad with the killing of Germans? And he asked her hadn’t she got eyes in her head, the fool, not telling him before that the wood was cut? It would lay the whole Knapp open to the northeast now, and was fair the end of living here. And Mistress Strachan answered up that she wasn’t a fool, and they’d be no worse than the other folk, would they? all the woods in Kinraddie were due to come down. Chae shouted What, others? and went out to look; and when he came back he didn’t shout at all.23

Chae is downcast because he senses that the disappearance of the woods does not just impoverish the land but seals the fate of a whole way of independent working 22 See Ian Carter, ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon and the Peasantry’, History Workshop Journal 6 (1979): pp. 169–85. 23 Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song (London: Pan, 1973 [1932]), pp. 198–9.

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and living on it. His is not a sentimental view of the natural landscape, but a practical attitude based on handed-down wisdom and the exigencies of cultivating the soil in harsh weather conditions. And he flies into a rage again when he learns that the timber was needed for ‘aeroplanes and such-like things’ and that ‘the Government would replant all the trees when the War was won’: That would console him a bloody lot, sure, if he’d the chance of living two hundred years and seeing the woods grow up as some shelter for beast and man: but he doubted he’d not last so long. Then the factor said they must all do their bit at a sacrifice, and Chae asked And what sacrifices have you made, tell me, you scrawny wee mucker?24

As a socialist, Chae resents how swiftly and blindly some crofters have responded to the rise in food prices during the war and transformed their holdings into small capitalist enterprises by producing chickens and pigs for the market. In Gibbon’s scheme of things, it is entirely fitting that the war which has dealt the death-blow to the peasantry should also destroy Chae and other attractive characters that represent the old mode of subsistence and modest commodity production based entirely on family labour. At the unveiling ceremony for a war memorial the minister delivers their epitaph: ‘these were the Last of the Peasants, the last of the Old Scots folk. … their parks and their steadings are a desolation where the sheep are pastured … the crofter has gone’.25 And the tune played by the piper in honour of the fallen is ‘The Flowers of the Forest’, a lament for the dead of the Battle of Flodden, with its refrain ‘The flowers of the forest are a’ wede away’. The mourning might well include the woods themselves. In Sunset Song we follow the assault of a Forestry Corps on the Scottish woodlands from a distance; in The World His Pillow (1933) by James Barke, another ‘son of the soil’, we get a close-up through the eyes of a sensitive adolescent, the autobiographical protagonist of this Bildungsroman: The first tree was about to go over. The men had withdrawn the saw and were hammering a couple of wedges into the slit. Presently there was a warning crack. The great fir wavered, hung for a moment at a perilous angle, then with a sickening splintering and crashing, smashed itself down into the undergrowth. The arms it fell on snapped and splintered, burying themselves into the soft leaves and pine needles under the weight of the body. In its descent, the branches of a neighbouring tree had come in the way: they had been torn off like twigs. The lumbermen laughed: the officer smiled.

Ibid., pp. 199–200. It should be said that an afforestation programme was set in train after the installation of the Forestry Commission in 1919. But the rationale behind it was strategic rather than environmental, namely to reduce reliance on imported timber in the next military conflict. 25 Ibid., p. 252. 24

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Duncan had watched the scene with a growing sense of pain and horror. It was worse than watching a pig being stuck. At least a pig squealed and struggled for life. But how patiently a tree submitted to murder. If the trees could scream, thought Duncan, even God in heaven would be driven mad.

As the tree fell, Duncan felt himself tremble at the knees. He felt sick.26

The military precision with which the Canadian lumberjacks launch their ‘offensive’ (p. 178) against the firs, commanded by an officer on horseback, will print itself indelibly on Duncan’s mind. Interestingly, in watching this ‘desecration’ (thus the chapter title) he reaches exactly the opposite conclusion of Septimus Warren Smith: Man murdered his way through the animal kingdom and no one protested. But now he had set on the trees and was hacking them to bits. Men had come thousands of miles to settle in Balcreggan and desecrate it; and yet every one was glad to see them come. They were not branded as murderers: they were hailed as heroes. But for every tree that was felled in Balcreggan, a man would fall in France. That was the foulest joke in history. … There is no God, thought Duncan. He made us and deserted us. And the world is governed by fools and cheats, and liars. (p. 181)

No point in alerting such rulers, as mad Septimus thinks it his mission to do. Barke’s acute environmental antennae did not endear the author to some quarters of the Left. A reviewer of The World His Pillow sneered in the Glasgow Socialist Star, ‘Think of it—depopulating the forests of wood. Trees—mushrooms and cobwebs—fungus in a beer cellar—shed a tear for them and you have a soul!’27 Such criticism did not let Barke rest. In his autobiography (1940) he returned to the incident: I am well aware that my reactions to the felling of the Tullialan Forest will appear the most sentimental drivelling to many worthy people whose penny in the slot reactions to their environment is one of the sad things about humanity. … But the useless massacre of the trees did more to open my eyes to the savage anarchy of modern society and the overwhelming ghastliness of modern war than any theoretical formulations. … A tree takes a long time to grow. But it can beautify the earth for a hundred years. No man has the right to cut them down wantonly or selfishly, or without taking steps to replace their loss.28

James Barke, The World His Pillow (London: Collins, 1933), p. 179. Subsequent page references are inserted into the text. 27 Quoted from Barke’s autobiography, The Green Hills Far Away (London: Collins, 1940), p. 268. 28 Ibid., pp. 268–9. More on the author in H. Gustav Klaus, ‘James Barke’, in Andy Croft (ed.), A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain (London: Pluto, 1998), pp. 7–27. 26

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This green statement comes from the reddest of all the writers considered here. It should make us think twice about the assumption that the literature of the Left between the wars was insensitive to environmental issues, or that whatever green ideas circulated were derived from Ruskin and Morris. Barke owes them to his roots. Nomen est omen. Born Bark, without the ‘e’, into a family of agricultural workers who were made redundant after the war, the author experienced the migration to the city as a deep shock, after having lived a life close to nature in his early years. So while it is true that ecological considerations ranked low, if at all on the socialist agenda of the thirties, and that unemployment, the rise of Fascism and the threat of war appeared far more pressing problems, there were dissenting voices such as Barke’s for whom consciousness-raising about the havoc wreaked upon the natural environment was part of the struggle. Nor did Grassic Gibbon settle in Welwyn Garden City for nothing, once he had left Scotland. What I would call a twin ethic of respect for the human and the vegetative world informs most of the works discussed here. It is derived from the insight that man and tree share a common wrong inflicted on them by war. Anti-militarism is a principal source of this sentiment, it guided the minds of several writers, but it is not the only spring. However, it certainly fed the feverish activities and restless brain of another writer on the left, not usually associated with a green awareness, the maverick anarchist Guy Aldred, who was incarcerated several times for his implacable opposition to the Great War. While kept in detention in 1918 awaiting his fourth court martial, he wrote in an article entitled ‘Militarism and Woodland’, I have normally small taste for the countryside. Still I know, somewhat, the joy of roaming through the woodlands. From the detention room window I can vision the despoliation which has been made of the country by militarism. Woodland has been turned not into useful residential district but into dreary gravelled sanded stony waste: the trees have given place to dull and ugly huts: and the vision which woodland might have rendered poetical and have matured, the barrenness of soulless hut life has destroyed. Where birds should sing, only guns boom. Where men should love, males only lust … From this window I watch the soldiers and the girls go by. Sex attraction parades its vitality with impudence rather than with dignity. And though with some cases, there may be real tender feeling between the parties, in many, if not most, a conscious vulgarity obtrudes itself. Militarism destroys the woodland and degrades the mystery of life. It vulgarises and prostitutes all that it touches.29

We are not a long way from Lawrence’s position here, except that militarism for Lawrence spelt only one aspect of the more general forces of death inherent in capitalist industrialism.

Guy A. Aldred, ‘Militarism and Woodland’, The Spur 5/5 (1918): p. 203.

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Chapter 13

Marxist Cricket? Some Versions of Pastoral in the Poetry of the Thirties Valentine Cunningham

Left-wing green consciousness in and around mid-twentieth-century English writing—the green-mindedness of the politically red—can be summed up as pastoral mindedness. Left-wing pastoral is at first sight a great oddity. Weren’t green consciousness, green vision, green living the prerogative of the Right? But no, they were not. Pastoralism was a dominant strain of modern leftist thinking, living and aesthetic. And what looks at first odder still is that this unexpected leftist proclivity was so strongly nourished on the texts, visions, feelings of classical pastoralism—the genre, the mode, conventionally thought of as sustaining cultural nostalgias, conservative yearnings, backward traditionalisms: another conventional relationship that was undermined in the twentieth century by the keen radicalism of many English, Irish (and colonial) classicists. The left-wing classicist is a notable feature of twentieth-century cultural ideological life. So many prominent English left-wing writers were steeped in Greek and Latin language and literature at their public schools and also by studying the classics as undergraduates; a good number of them went on to teach the classics at schools and universities, and, what’s more, to translate and comment on classical literature. Including, naturally enough, classical pastoral texts. A pastoral literature which manifestly infiltrates and inflects their leftward leaning thought and writings. The conventional opposition in the matter of green—green politics, green ethics, green aesthetics—has twentieth-century Left and Right drawn up firmly as a towncountry polarity. Retrogressive green country-mindedness (literal pastoralism) on the Right; red utopian urbanism (pastoral only in its political idyllicism) on the Left. On the Left, utopian hopes focused in Modernismus and Mechanismus. A vision for the great good place as a futurist, constructivist city: a mechanized urban world; the world of Our Ford, as Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) has it. The world Fordized—pervasively planned, efficient, hard-edged, speeded up, built over, all concrete and steel, electrified. Its key images the pylon carrying the new electric current, as from the generator at the Dniepestroi Dam, and the streamlined train, the streamlined residence, the record-breaking aeroplane. Agriculture is a necessity in this world, of course, but only as mechanized, or to be mechanized. Henry Ford’s Russian factory builds tractors for the modernization of Soviet agriculture. The Kulaks are killed off to the sound of Ford tractor-engines. In Britain

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being a socialist meant not admiring peasants either, or at least being axiomatically hostile to the old rural hierarchies that kept the peasant in his place, and to the hegemony of squire and landlord and the Church of England’s parish clergyman, and to touching your cap to and making way for the mounted fox-hunting gentry. (In the Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War survey of 1937, the leftist cinéaste Ivor Montagu said he opposed Franco because ‘Fox-hunters, people who shoot down birds, dukes, bankers like’ him.) Masters of hounds were prime enemies of the People. Good socialists trespassed. The class enemy owned the green and the greenery. Leftist aesthetic was Audenesque in the sense of Auden’s professedly not caring for the popular ruralist works of Richard Jefferies or the Wiltshire Downs he wrote about, but preferring instead the industrialized landscapes of the Midlands and the North of England (this in Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, 1936).1 To be sure, Socialism offered an idyllic vision of the future, a pastoral future—the hopedfor pastoral of the future, beyond present social and economic chaos and mess and the lives these disorders blighted—but this was pastoral in inverted commas, pastoral as allegorical, a metaphor for a reality not literally pastoral. A greening of the future, as it were, that was not green according to old reactionary, bourgeois, landlordist social formations, dreamings and desirings. And, of course, dramatically opposed to this, was old-fashioned ruralism, antiurban traditionalism, nostalgias for pre-industrialism, to be revived where these were not still persisting. This was the slow, hierarchical world of the English village, the world so many soldiers returning from the mechanized horrors of modern warfare, the Great War, wanted to find or recreate: the countryside of Richard Jefferies, the ruralism yearned for by old soldiers Henry Williamson and Edmund Blunden, J.R.R. Tolkien and H.V. Morton.2 What was searched for in practice as well as the imagination was a mythic green world where you lived at one with nature and the animals and birds, in tune with the cycle of the seasons, in your simple cottage, close to the village pub and an ancient church and the village green, where you played or watched cricket on idyllic summer afternoons. The village green: a literal as well as metaphorical location. In Search of England was the title of H.V. Morton’s 1927 collection of newspaper articles extolling this ancient English way of life. This England was the only ‘real England’, as the Scottish old soldier in A.G. Macdonell’s England their England (1932) was made to say on his journey of trying to make sense of the English, and on the subject of the English love of village cricket. The country and countryside celebrated as Cricket Country in 1944 by Edmund Blunden. England as symptomatized by village cricket: place of country values, slow, messy, amateurish, a companionable social ordinariness uncontaminated by any disturbing theory about class division Auden’s thirties poems are collected, with some prose, in The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977). 2 Quite a lot of the ruralist detail here is plundered—though with a different spin put on it—from the countryside section of the ‘Going Over’ chapter of my British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 228–40. 1

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which would drive a wedge between squire and blacksmith batting on the same village team. An old Englishness—sometimes derided as Olde Englishnesse, for its dodgily tuneful folk-singing, revived Morris Dancing, corn-dolly aspects. Rural Englishness on the plan of the pleasant bits of Thomas Hardy; of the opening shots of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), and Mary Webb’s Precious Bane (1924); of the world of the Shell Guides, whose first editor was John Betjeman; of the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England (founded 1926)—with its vigorous campaigns against overhead electricity cable, sky-writing and ribbon development; of the old peasant Somerset of rightwing Anglican monarchist poet T.S. Eliot’s ancestors, celebrated in the ‘East Coker’ section of his Four Quartets (1940). A conservative dream-world (it was no accident that Precious Bane was admired and promoted by Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin). Conservative indeed, for here was a world view celebrating the earth, the soil, which did indeed tip over into the fascistic cult of Blood and Soil. It was also no accident that Lawrence developed strong fascistic leanings; or that Henry Williamson became a pillar of the British Union of Fascists and, after Oswald Mosley’s wife, Mosley’s longest-lasting advocate; or that T.S. Eliot should have sympathized so greatly with the Southern Agrarians of the USA. How shocking it is when you go to the literary place where that lovely pastoral celebration of country people in East Coker, Eliot’s ancestral English place, has its roots and find them mired in the repressive shacklings of Tudor Church and State. Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth Mirth of those long since under earth Nourishing the corn. Keeping time, Keeping the rhythm in their dancing As in their living in the living seasons The time of the seasons and the constellations The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.

These superficially attractive country celebrants—‘Holding eche other by the hand or the arm | Which betokeneth concorde’ as they dance in this ‘association of man and woman’, ‘signifying matrimonie’—are lifted verbatim from Section XXI of Book I of Eliot’s Tudor ancestor Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke of the Governour (1531), which theorizes dancing as a sign system presenting marriage as a ‘necessarye’ mechanism of sexual, gender and social ordering, control, repression, a means of keeping women subordinated, men in domestic and social authority, and dangerous male sexual desire (‘appetiting’) in order.3 Eliot’s poem was harking 3 T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, second of the Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1944), lines 23–46. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke of the Governour = The Book Named the

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back to traditional Anglican ruralism as a repository of wisdom for personal and social redemption along rigidly controlled lines. ‘What is fundamentally wrong is the urbanization of mind’: thus Eliot in his Criterion magazine, house journal of the modern rightwing ruralists, in praise of Viscount Lymington’s panicky elegy for agriculture, Famine in England (1938)—a book immediately reissued by The Right Book Club (the Left Book club’s conservative rival).4 The direction being taken in such green writing was precisely where the Norwegian Knut Hamsun, author of the famous The Growth of the Soil (1917/1920), was headed. Calling a war-weary world back to the soil would notoriously lead to Hamsun’s instinctive siding with the Nazi invaders of his country in the Second World War. What the rightwing twenties and thirties ruralists lamented—their threnody, or elegy for rural England—was that Modernismus, mechanized modernity, the world of the anti-conservative modernizers, had taken over. Which meant an end of pastoral—in every sense, literal and metaphorical—for the country, the countryside, and the people in it, their ethnicity, their sanity and sanctity, their utter selfhood, their very being. ‘We are mechanically introverted, unable to see the world about us, unable to cope with our hands, even unable to cope with ourselves’.5 Thus the Stowe schoolmaster T.H. White, a characteristically rightwing ruralist and soon to be famous mediaevalizing novelist, in England Have My Bones (1936), his book about himself as a countryman and hunting, shooting, fishing writer in a woefully urbanized, urbanizing England and Scotland. The leftist modernizers whom White holds responsible for this modern decline need to get back to country living, pursuits, selfhood. ‘I should like to have the salvation of all communists’ (p. 226). He would start with teaching Communists how to light a fire; after that they would graduate to learning ‘to know the wind’ (p. 228), to fish, to work on the land, to ‘distinguish birds by their note’ (p. 230), to go into the village pub, to hunt and shoot. ‘How safe would Karl Marx have been, I wonder, walking in a line of guns’ (p. 228). ‘It will be funny when England is all a factory, when the farms, too, are milk factories. … We shall lose rural employment. We shall lose the stubble for partridges’ (p. 321). ‘One doesn’t know how to feel. The pendulum has swung: the world is a machine or a factory’ (pp. 321–2). And the Communist, and his modernizing ilk, are to blame. In White’s socialism-baiting satire Earth Stopped, or Mr Marx’s Sporting Tour (1934), Communist Party member John Marx is a terrible urbanist, quite unfitted for country ways. He’s no good on a horse. Full humanity demands he learn to ride and to give up his aversion to village inns; and ‘as he grows acquainted with country life’ he does indeed learn ‘to be human’.6 Governor, ed. S.E. Lehmberg, Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1907; new ed., 1962), bk. I, section XXI, ‘Wherefore in the good order of dancing a man and a woman do dance together’, pp. 77–8. 4 T.S. Eliot, ‘A Commentary’, Criterion (October 1938), p. 60. 5 T.H. White, England Have My Bones (London: Collins, 1952 [1936]), p. 225. Further page references to this edition are given in the text. 6 T.H. White, Earth Stopped, or Mr Marx’s Sporting Tour (London: Collins, 1934), p. 176.

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Here, clamantly advertised, was the stereotyped opposition: the divergence of Left and Right as a matter of green difference. But, of course, this received polarity is much too simple and clear-cut. For what’s striking about thirties writing is that a very similar elegiac tune about the countryside, about the state and fate of England’s green, was being loudly played on the Left. Sing us no more idylls, no more pastorals No more epics of the English earth.

That’s leftist Louis MacNeice, the Oxford (and Birmingham and London) classicist, a onetime lecturer in Greek, who knew all about ancient singing of idyll, in his Autumn Journal (1939), section XVIII.7 He would like to be singing idylls and making pastoral poetry but he cannot because the material is diminishing: The country is a dwindling annexe to the factory Squalid as an after-birth.

He was brought up on Virgil’s Eclogues, but he can only produce anti-pastoral now, poems on the Eclogue model, but ironic pastorals, pastorals celebrating pastoral loss—as his ‘Eclogue for Christmas’, ‘Eclogue by a Five-Barred Gate’, and ‘Eclogue from Iceland’. Characteristically, in his dialogue poem ‘Eclogue between the Motherless’ there’s ‘honeyed music’ (ancient pastoral is often a singing about bees and their honey), but this is coming from a Wurlitzer organ in a Gaiety Theatre/Cinema. The poem’s ‘soil’ is ‘stale’. ‘In the country they are still hunting’, but ‘Greyness is on the fields’—fields ‘Hazed with factory dust’. Men still work pastorally, but in an exploited, that is mock-pastoral, fashion: And so today at Grimsby men whose lives Are warped in Arctic trawlers load and unload The shining tons of fish to keep the lords Of the happy market happy with cigars and cars.

(T.S. Eliot liked this material very much—‘quite the best you have done’—and he became MacNeice’s publisher.) ‘It’s no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums’: that’s MacNeice again, in ‘Bagpipe Music’. He’d like to be inside that ruralist country cottage dream but it’s no longer on. ‘Pindar is Dead’ strikes the regular dyspeptic note of these late-pastoral poems. It notes that there’s still a surviving plenitude of, as it were, country items and outdoor pursuits—hiking, climbing, swimming, horse-riding, vegetables and flowers for Easter, but Pindar, with his wreaths for heroes, and all that the Pindaresque ruralizing classics stood for, is dead: dead because these country matters are all now mock- or pseudo-ruralisms, contained

7 All my MacNeice quotations are from Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (London: Faber & Faber, 2007).

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and constrained as they are by massive contemporary urbanization and modern market forces: There are flowers in all the markets— Pindar is dead— Daffodils, tulips, and forced roses New potatoes and green peas for Easter Wreaths of moss and primrose for the churches But no wreaths for runners, whether of olive or laurel— Pindar is dead and that’s no matter.

And in the matter of the depletions of the green, such voices from the Left chime in rather a lot with the voices of the Right. Take Auden and Isherwood bemoaning rural loss in the ‘English village of Pressan’ in the Opening Chorus of their Brechtian cabaret piece The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935): I see barns falling, fences broken, Pasture not ploughland, weeds not wheat. The great houses remain but only half are inhabited, Dusty the gunrooms and the stable clocks stationary. Some have been turned into prep schools where the diet is in the hands of an experienced matron, Others into club-houses for the golf-bore and the top-hole. Those who sang in the inns at evening have departed; they saw hope in another country, Their children have entered the service of the suburban areas; they have become typists, mannequins and factory operatives; they desired a different rhythm of life.8

Arrestingly, as Edward Mendelson’s Early Auden (1981) informs us, much of the wording of this Opening Chorus is taken straight from Anthony Collett’s The Changing Face of England (1926), reissued in The Travellers’ Library in 1932, a very conservative, even fascistic, set of grumbles about the decline of England and Englishness. The native ‘frontiersman’ and ‘sea-rover’ are dying off as the blond Anglo-Saxon type of Englishman is replaced in English cities by a new race of dark, alien racial types—who sound, in fact, very Jewish (in rightwing stereotype, the usual urban socialism-fodder). Which is not to say that this leftist ruralism is contaminated with the fascism of the other side; far from it: this is not National Socialism, but national socialism, socialism of and for the nation. But it is a threnody for loss of the green world utterly mindful of the conventional political opposition that in practice it is undoing. ‘[T]hey saw their hope in another country’ is how at this time Auden and Co expressed the revolutionary aesthetic hope—the journey into ‘new country’ (as famously advertised in Michael 8 Opening ‘Chorus’ of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, The Dog Beneath the Skin, or Where is Francis? (London: Faber & Faber, 1968 [1935]), p. 12.

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Roberts’s Hogarth Press New Country anthology in 1933). These country folk of The Dog have abandoned the country for urban and suburban office, shop and factory. They’ve exchanged the good old world for the bad new one—where live and work the modernist urbanite and suburbanite, and, of course, those dark aliens and lefties. They’ve done what Anthony Collett and his rightwing kind not only deplore but expect of the Left. But they’ve done it in what are, for Collett and his kind, the ironic lefty terms of going into ‘another country’. Which is Auden and Isherwood’s way of announcing their leftist refusal of the Right’s monopolizing of countryside consciousness and life, of green perspective and prerogative. Their Left is not to be thought of as rejoicing in the decline of rural England; they’re as committed to country and literal pastoralia as to ‘new country’ and the urbanized ‘pastoral’ of utopian socialist desire. As was George Orwell, that classically educated Old Etonian: a huge case of leftist anxiety and regret over the lost pastorals of England unperturbed by sharing a rhetoric and tropes with his political adversaries, in fact rather triumphing in this commonality. Orwell certainly craved pastoral in the politicized and metaphorical sense, and in a measure found it in the miners’ cottages of the north of England (in The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937) and in revolutionary Barcelona (as in the opening pages of Homage to Catalonia,1938). But he also wanted quite literal pastoral— to live, as he put it repeatedly, ventre à terre. And he wrote repeatedly and despondently about the near-impossibility of pastoral in modern Britain, about the awful de-greening of the modern. To be sure, the sadly repressed spinster Dorothy, clergyman’s daughter of The Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), finds happiness (as Orwell himself had done) down in Kent, among the cockney hop-pickers, in the fragrant smell of the hops and the wood-smoke, nesting in straw, getting drunk, having sex, joining in the carnivalesque celebrations of the hop-picking season, bodily exchanges in the hop-bins and so forth (rather reminiscent of the Spanish sherry-grape treading rituals scene which William Empson rhapsodizes about in the opening chapter on ‘Proletarian Literature’ in his Some Versions of Pastoral: A Study of the Pastoral Form in Literature, 1935). But this is during Dorothy’s curious mental breakdown. Her villeggiatura, her pastoral time off, is terribly short-lived, before petit-bourgeois, English churchified existence reclaims her. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Gordon Comstock and his girlfriend have a day out in the country beyond Thornton Common, seeking, and in a measure finding, pastoral joy. ‘She waded through a bed of drifted beech-leaves that rustled about her, knee-deep, like a weightless red-gold sea’.9 And so on. But their dream of rural bliss is horribly shattered when they find a traditional country pub has been suburbanized for its neighbouring stockbrokers’ pleasure and its raised prices break Comstock’s purse. Not dissimilarly, in Coming Up for Air (1939), George Bowling goes out to Lower Binfield, where Orwell himself had once sprawled happily and restfully, out on the tramp in Down and Out in Paris and 9 George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962 [1936]), p. 137.

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London (1933), the air ‘like sweet-briar’.10 But Lower Binfield’s atmosphere is sweet no longer. The beech woods around Binfield House, the towpath by the weir, are in decay. The horse trough in the marketplace has gone. Binfield House is a lunatic asylum. New houses have sprung up; so has a gramophone works; and there’s an unmissable nudist colony nearby. Nudists, so-called naturists: for Orwell, the very name a blasphemy against true nature and the natural; naturism a modern unnaturalism, perverse parody of the natural. Here are the multiplied and multiplying modern offences against nature, against the countryside, against the green; a terrible suburbanizing: and patently as offensive to the English Left as to the English Right. A ruralist United Front, so to say, that was widely evinced. In, for instance, Britain and the Beast (1937), that potent collection of protests against the spread of ‘town rash’, the outreach into the green of industrial and mechanical man, the ribbon developments of housing spurting along arterial roads, especially the Great West Road out of London, ultimate spearhead of the suburbanizing menace. The visible Mark of the modern Beast—the ‘Beast’ of the book’s title comes straight out of the repertoire of apocalyptic evils and evildoers in the Bible’s book of Revelation—was the concreting over of the fields, by houses, factories and especially by the ubiquitous aerodromes. The volume was edited by Clough Williams-Ellis, the architect, one of the founders of the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England, but also a public leftist—if not actually a Communist, certainly a loud admirer of the Soviet Union and all its would-be utopian doings.11 (His wife the poet Amabel Williams-Ellis was a Communist, and a main contributor to Communist Party aesthetic work, especially in her work on the staff of Left Review.) And his contributors, so united in their bewailing, were indeed a politically mixed lot, with several prominent conservative ruralists, but with a revealingly strong presence of pronounced liberals and of leftists like their editor. Of course there was S.P.B. Mais, loud conservative crusader against the suburbanization of the countryside: great friend of Henry Williamson, renowned author of the rural-lamenting BBC talks collected as This Unknown Island (1932)—one of its chapters was, of course ‘The Mary Webb Country’; the countryside fan famous for organizing mass rambles on the South Downs and, of course, for his campaign to keep the Southwick, Sussex, village cricket club, of which he was president, playing on their village green against the wishes of the local council (he was evicted from his house for refusing to pay his council rates). And there was A.G. Street, the high Tory fox-hunting farmer and novelist, author of the autobiographical countryman manifesto Farmer’s Glory (1932). And G.M. Trevelyan, the aristocratic historian conservationist, once a paid-up Liberal but by George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (Harmondsworth: Penguin Modern Classics, 1966 [1933]), Ch. 35, pp. 172, 177. 11 The Britain and the Beast collection was Williams-Ellis’s follow-up to his England and the Octopus (London: Dent, 1928), sponsored by the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England. 10

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now a convinced Baldwinite Tory. But there was also the left-liberal novelist E.M. Forster whose Howards End (1910) could be thought of inter alia as a lament over suburbanization, repeating his novel’s glum notes; and the Fabian socialist and libertarian Greekist (Balliol classicist) philosopher C.E.M. Joad, renowned leftist crusader for the countryside—famous rambler and trespasser (author of A Charter for Ramblers, 1934), and not incidentally an avid fox-hunter. The Bolshevikhating, Mussolini- and Hitler-fancying Chief Scout Lord Baden-Powell praised the message of Britain and the Beast: how terribly different England was from Nazi Germany (litter louts are unknown in Hitler’s Reich!). But so, enthusiastically, did Communist Party poet (and Classicist) C. Day Lewis. ‘Socialism alone’, he concluded in his review (in Left Review, August 1937), could rescue England from the Beast.12 ‘We Marxists declare that the English tradition has passed into our hands’.13 (The editor of Left Review at the time was the fraught urbanistcountryman poet Randall Swingler.14) Day Lewis’s review was keeping up the tone of his ‘Letter to a Young Revolutionary’—the opening contribution to the New Country anthology, where he looked around Britain and pondered how it might be saved from modern decline: The country at last. And a poor enough outlook it is. Stunted crops, derelict barns, mills deserted to rats, good land given over to sheep and golfers. Somebody has run away. In the rectory the rector is reading Jeans or practising string tricks for the next village entertainment. Listen to the children, as we walk past the school, chanting in unison the kings of England and the capitals of Europe, their birthright of natural wisdom exchanged for a mess of knowledge. And the parents? The backbone of the country? The marrow seems to have been drained off. Can these dry bones live? Can they live on the tinned foods, cheap cigarettes, votes, synthetic pearls, jazz records and standardised clothing which the town gives them back, as a ‘civilised’ trader gives savages beads for gold? They damn well can’t, and you know it. And it’s up to you, if you want to see the country sound again, to put its heart back in the right place, even though it means what the progress-mongers call ‘putting the clock back’. You must break up the superficial vision of the motorist and restore the slow, instinctive, absorbent vision of the countryman. Not exile mind, intellectual consciousness; but stop it trespassing in other fields. The land must be a land of milk and honey, of crops and cattle, not a string of hotels and ‘beauty spots’. Can your revolution do something about all this? If not, I’ve no use for it.15

C. Day Lewis, ‘The Face of the Land’, Left Review 3/7 (August 1937): pp. 423–6 (p. 426). 13 Ibid., p. 423. 14 For Swingler’s anguish, see Andy Croft, Comrade Heart: A Life of Randall Swingler (London and New York: Manchester University Press , 2003). 15 C. Day Lewis, ‘Letter to a Young Revolutionary’, in Michael Roberts (ed.), New Country: Prose and Poetry by the Authors of ‘New Signatures’ (London: Hogarth Press, 1933), pp. 25–42 (p. 40). 12

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In just such a neo-ruralist tone, Michael Roberts in his editor’s Preface to New Country, warned people who ‘stand for the accepted order’: remember the Union Jack, the British Grenadiers, and cricket are not your private property. They are ours. Your proper emblem is a balance sheet. You’re a fool if you think your system will give you cricket much longer. Haven’t you realised? Cricket doesn’t pay. If you want cricket you’d better join us.16

Cricket, village cricket certainly, at the core, then, of the reclaimed leftist green. Cricket, like the countryside it stood for in these polemics, claimed and reclaimed, as the literal essence of leftist pastoral. In his review of Blunden’s Cricket Country in April 1944, George Orwell resists the idea that cricket, like the countryside, is the prerogative of the Right and the rich. Cricket has had a bad left-wing press: It has been labelled the sport of Blimps. It has been vaguely associated with top-hats, school prize-days, fox-hunting, and the poems of Sir Henry Newbolt. It has been denounced by left-wing writers, who imagine erroneously that it is played chiefly by the rich.

Not so, Orwell says, at least not the village cricket that is the heart of Blunden’s ‘true cricketer’ enthusiasms and nostalgias. ‘The test of a true cricketer is that he shall prefer village cricket to “good” cricket’. Village cricket, good because ‘socially binding’, ‘leads to a good deal of social mixing’. It’s not snobbish, unlike golf, the suburbanite’s craze. It annihilates class distinctions. In other words it’s idyllic, its aura and effect a social pastoral—like those northern miners’ cottages in The Road to Wigan Pier, or like Orwell’s POUM militia in Spain. [I]t is obvious that all his [Blunden’s] friendliest memories are of village cricket; and not even cricket at the country-house level, where white trousers are almost universal and a pad on each leg is de rigueur, but the informal village game, where everyone plays in braces, where the blacksmith is liable to be called away in mid-innings on an urgent job, and sometimes, about the time when the light begins to fail, a ball driven for four kills a rabbit on the boundary.

(Which is no doubt good for someone’s country stew-pot.) Cricket is the lovely acme of difference from the modern world of speed-up and the urban. Because it’s the ‘game which needs green fields and abundant spare time’ it is hostile to ‘the increasing hurry and urbanization of life’. And village cricket is peacetime personified, the enactment of true peace, a substitute for war, and an end, too, to class warfare. It’s what the Revolution was supposed to effect (Blunden’s book is ‘a useful reminder that peace means something more than a temporary stoppage of the guns’).17 Roberts (ed.), New Country, p. 13. George Orwell, ‘Review of Cricket Country by Edmund Blunden’, in Collected

16 17

Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell & Ian Angus, vol. 3, As I Please, 1943–45 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), pp. 47–50.

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What leftist Orwell was thus commending rightist Blunden for celebrating was precisely a potent emblem of the leftist pastoral imaginings of the pair of poetic friends and allies, C. Day Lewis and Rex Warner. Both of them classicists— pupils of Maurice Bowra at Wadham College, Oxford—and Marxists. Both of them pastoralists in every sense: dealers in pastoral literature, their own and the Classical sort they’d grown up on, which they turned avidly into English. Pastoral writings that were the generic literary marker of their political pastoralism—a generic proclivity which reflected not only the shape of their political imaginings and desires but also their own practical living as denizens of the countryside. They lived their pastoral talk. And, naturally enough, they were both of them keen village cricketers. Men, evidently, after Orwell’s own heart; and also, and undoingly for the conventional opposition between green and red, after Edmund Blunden’s too. It’s no accident that Rex Warner’s socialist allegory, The Aerodrome (1941), a sort of left-wing Kafkaesque nightmare, should be constructed as a defence of village life, of village values—threatened by their fascistic neighbour, an aerodrome commanded by a rightwing dictatorial Air Vice-Marshall. The novel’s aeroplanes, main emblem of futurist techno Modernismus and Mechanismus, are the essence of fascistic power. (These bird machines are grotesque parodies of the lovely and majestic natural birds that keen bird-watcher Warner wrote so many of his poems about.) And the novel’s aerodrome, necessary home and power-base of fascistic machine and airman, is the massive concrete object and target of so much anti-suburbanizing rhetoric on both left and right. The aerodrome, its personnel, its machines, its ethos, are the absolute opposite of the pastoralism to be found in Virgil’s Georgics which the classicizing leftists promoted as a model for life and art. Virgil: the Roman inheritor of Theocritus’s Greek Idylls, which were translated, for their part, by Australian poet and Communist-to-be, Jack Lindsay in 1930: translations featured, arrestingly, in that wartime anthology From the Greek, edited by Maurice Bowra and T.H. Higham and published by Oxford’s Clarendon Press in 1943, one more of the literary boosters to the war-effort against Fascism, in which, of course, Blunden’s Cricket Country and Warner’s Aerodrome were playing their part; as was, indeed, Day Lewis’s translation of the Georgics, published by Jonathan Cape in 1940. According to Day Lewis’s Foreword to his translation, Virgil’s Georgics (after which, of course, the English Georgian poets took their label) pointed the way to a post–Second World War English future in which the urbanized modern world would be made possible for humans redeemed by being ruralized, married to the village, the green way of life. A marriage of the conventionally opposed pair, Left and Right, the green with the red. The marriage which, it’s clear Day Lewis is thinking, closely reflected the spirit and practical life, the politics and ideology, of socialist writers like himself and Rex Warner: The fascination of the Georgics for many generations of Englishmen is not difficult to explain. A century of urban civilization has not yet materially modified the instinct of a people once devoted to agriculture and stock-breeding, to the

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chase, to landscape gardening, to a practical love of Nature. No poem yet written has touched these subjects with more expert knowledge or more tenderness than the Georgics. In our love of domestic animals, in the millions of suburban and cottage gardens, we may see the depth and tenacity of our roots in earth to-day. It may, indeed, happen that this war, together with the spread of electrical power, will result in a decentralization of industry and the establishment of a new ruralurban civilization working through smaller social units. The factory in the fields need not remain a dream of poets and planners: it has more to commend it than the allotment in the slums.18

Day Lewis’s Georgics came with ‘Dedicatory Stanzas’ to his poetic comrade Stephen Spender—both of them by now quondam Communists, but both of them still on the Left (‘We’re red, it seems’, as the opening Stanza puts it). The Stanzas name Virgil ‘for good luck’, the luck Day Lewis hopes will attend left-wing poets who follow Virgil’s pastoralist example in cultivating their garden as Virgil did and cultivating gardens, that is, pastoral being and doing, in their verse, as Virgil did in his Eclogues and his Georgics. ‘But chiefly dear’, he tells Spender, what Virgil stands for is his version of a pastoral utopia (one cast in very biblical millennialist terms) such as a socialist can well appreciate: … his gift to understand Earth’s intricate, ordered heart, and for a vision That saw beyond an imperial day the hand Of man no longer armed against his fellow But all for vine and cattle, fruit and fallow, Subduing with love’s positive force the land.19

The historical situation which is the ancient poet’s concern and dilemma in the Georgics is startlingly proleptic of the 1940s: For Right and Wrong are confused here, there’s so much war in the world, Evil has so many faces, the plough so little Honour, the labourers are taken, the fields untended, And the curving sickle is beaten into the sword that yields not. There the East is in arms, here Germany marches: Neighbour cities, breaking their treaties, attack each other: The wicked War-god runs amok through all the world.20

What the poet is to do in such awful circumstances is become a gardener, a horticulturalist, a tiller of the earth, a cultivator of trees—fruit trees, olives and vines—and to write poems about them, that is to practise pastoral literature. ‘Nature is catholic in the propagation of trees’, but she needs human help. The Georgics of Virgil, trans. C. Day Lewis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1940), p. 7. Ibid., p. 10. 20 Ibid., p. 31, bk. I, ll.505–11. 18 19

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So come, you countrymen, learn the correct training of each In its kind, domesticate wild fruits by your cultivation, And let not the earth be lazy! It’s good to plant with vines Ismarus, and to clothe in olives Mount Taburnus.21 (Book II, ll.36–9)

And Virgil is ample with practical advice on how to do this cultivating, about how you might plant suckers ‘in trenches’, and so forth. What’s more—and this is a marvel—if you take a saw to the trunk of An olive, a root will come pushing out from the dry wood. Often again we observe the boughs of one tree change Without harm into another’s—grafted apples growing On a pear, and stony cherries reddening upon a plum tree.22

And this is not only good practical horticultural advice (and there’s lots and lots of it) but is, in effect, a practical example of how to make pastoral poems. They’re like this. Virgil appeals to his implied reader, his ‘friend’ to join in his gardening work—‘And you, be at hand, and help me complete the task I’ve begun’. It’s an appeal also for poetic companions and continuators. And Day Lewis’s translation is a direct response to that appeal. And Virgil’s Englished, Lewisized appeal reaches out to the translation’s readers, who include fellow ‘red’ poets, like the Spender of the ‘Dedicatory Stanzas’. The message is imitate Virgil in your living and writing; cultivate your garden, your field; and cultivate a poetic of the garden and field. ‘I lived on country matters’, Day Lewis tells Spender in stanza 4 of the Dedicatory poem. It’s the only stratagem for now. Red Georgianism is the only way for life and art. Red pastoralism, the pastoralism of reds—radicals, communists, the people as such. Marxist cricket. The Earth Compels, as the title of MacNeice’s 1938 volume of poems had it. ‘Let’s All Go to the Country—It’s Ours’ exhorted the Daily Worker (8 April 1939).23 The paper busily promoted the activities of the Communist Progressive Rambling Club and ‘United Front rambles’. This was evangelizing in the voice of Professor Joad, the adviser of ramblers, enemy of gamekeepers, gates and fences, loud protagonist of ‘the interest of the people in the English countryside and their consequent claim upon it’: ‘more important than the interest and claim of farmers, landowners or sportsmen’. The ‘Mass Trespass’ organised on Kinder Scout in Derbyshire, Sunday 24 April 1932, to demonstrate the rights of ramblers to access private land, was one great promotion of this leftist pastoral vision.24 And such pastoralism was widely endorsed in leftist letters. 23 24 21

Ibid., p. 36, bk. II, ll.35–8. Ibid., p. 36, bk. II, ll.30–34. Daily Worker, 8 April 1939. I contributed to the National Trust’s 1982 appeal to purchase Kinder Scout for the nation, with combative irony, ‘In memory of the mass trespass, 24 April 1932’: a memorial accepted, I thought, through not too greatly gritted teeth! 22

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It was promoted in much of the period’s ‘proletarian’ fiction—in the stories of H.E. Bates; in communist Ralph Bates’s novel about Republican Spain’s olive growers, The Olive Field (1936);25 in Grassic Gibbon’s novels about Scottish rurality. All part of the great wave of radically disposed thirties rural texts and narratives, documentaries for the page and the cinema screen. Pastoral texts like the Blasket Islander Maurice O’Sullivan’s memoir Twenty Years A-Growing, translated by Birmingham Classics Professor George Thomson, member of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain, with the help of Moya Llewellyn Davies (Irish Republican, veteran of IRA and Irish independence struggles), and published in the Oxford University Press’s World’s Classics series in 1933 with an introduction by (perhaps not incidentally, one-time Cambridge classicist) E.M. Forster. It was Forster whose wartime BBC broadcast talk on the eighteenth-century poet of Suffolk working-class life, George Crabbe, published in the Listener, caught the attention of left-liberal Benjamin Britten—who’d worked with Auden as composer on Grierson’s GPO Film Unit documentary films—incited his return from the USA to wartime Britain and inspired his Peter Grimes (1945), essentially an opera of proletarian life, with libretto done, aptly enough, by the communist poet William Plomer. Here was a corner of the great red documentary, proletarian, pastoral web of the time. William Empson recognized, in that opening chapter on ‘Proletarian Literature’ in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), that the ‘proletarian’ art and fiction of the twenties and thirties were essentially pastoral. ‘Proletarian literature usually has a suggestion of pastoral’. ‘I think good proletarian art is usually Covert Pastoral’. Most proletarian art left him dissatisfied, he said, with the great exception of Grierson’s documentary-film classic Drifters, about North Sea herring fishermen. ‘Drifters gave very vividly the feeling of actually living on a herring trawler and (by the beauty of shapes of water and net and fish, and subtleties of timing and so forth) what I should call a pastoral feeling about the dignity of that form of labour’.26 If the great test for politics hereabouts is what it does for ordinary life, ordinary people, precisely the working man/working woman who is the great subject of proletarian fiction and art, the subject (in Empson’s terms) of modern pastoral, it could be said that a test for any leftist art would be the pastoral test. What is done with it, and in it, as pastoral. By the same token, then, pastoral, in both its literal and metaphorical sense, would be the test for a leftist politics. Which is, evidently, what George Orwell came to think, and not least in Animal Farm (1945), that allegory of left politics as pastoralism gone wrong. A critique which depends for its force on the large contemporary discussion about the possibilities for modern pastoral. Where, you might wonder, does Boxer, Orwell’s equine figure of a stalwart old-fashioned socialist come from? One place is Edmund Blunden. Orwell seems 25 See Valentine Cunningham, ‘Introduction’, Ralph Bates, The Olive Field (London: Hogarth Press, 1986). 26 William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral: A Study of the Pastoral Form in Literature (Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1966), pp. 13, 14.

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to have taken the name ‘Boxer’ from one of the horses in Edmund Blunden’s The Face of England, his English Heritage volume of 1932, in the chapter entitled ‘Pastoral no Fable’. Pastoral no fable? Orwell’s anger in Animal Farm is directed at the way socialist pastoral had indeed proved a fable in the Soviet Union and what it stood for. But Boxer stands for an acknowledgment of real substance in the socialist green; it’s not just a broken fable, for all its desperate troubles in modern Soviet practice. An acknowledgment, too, of the force of Blunden’s continuing (and rightwing) faith that pastoral was indeed a truth, a fact, and was so for being founded in his village-cricketer vision—for all that vision’s troubles in modern urbanizing practice. Blunden’s chapter ‘An Ancient Holiday’ in The Face of England vigorously offers the village cricket green as pastoral’s still living stage. Orwell clearly supported that. And so, characteristically of this movement of opinion, did J.C. Squire—the onetime Georgian poet and formidable amateur cricketer, captain of the famously boozy village-green eleven The Invalids (lovingly ribbed as such in A.G. Macdonell’s England their England—a book actually dedicated to Squire)—who naturally thought well of Blunden’s The Face of England. And Squire was not only a renowned ruralist but a profoundly lab-lib writer—a onetime Member of the Social Democratic Federation, an old Fabian, former literary editor of the New Statesman and founder-editor of the liberal-leftist London Mercury. Blunden’s The Face of England ‘might well’, Squire said, ‘have been dedicated to the Council for the Preservation of Rural England’. The traditionalist, anti-utopian CPRE as yet another counsellor, then, for the preservation of a red, or reddish, pastoral England? Another member of the Marxist cricket team? Up to a point— though also to the point in these considerations is that the Georgian leftist cricketer Squire also flirted with Mussolini-style Fascism and was one of the early devotees of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

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Chapter 14

Eco-anarchism, the New Left and Romanticism James Radcliffe

This chapter explores the ideas that were prevalent in the early stages of the contemporary green movement, their links with the counter-culture of the 1970s and the New Left of the 1960s,1 and will refer to a number of writings from that period. In particular, it considers the way in which the concept of humanity’s alienation from nature led to a search for an alternative tradition to the Enlightenment and the modernist agenda associated with the development of the scientific method. This was a period of fertile thinking around the link between science and nature, industrialization and economic growth, with major figures associated with a collectivist and anti-state approach grouped under the heading of ‘eco-anarchism’. The combination of a concern with technological choices and psychological analysis saw the alienation of humanity from the rest of nature as the internal consequence of industrialization. Green theorists have seen humanity’s relationship to nature and, in particular, the condition of alienation as central to the problem of environmental decay. Alienation has a long history that can be traced back to the Judeo-Christian conception of being alienated from God (or having ‘fallen from Grace’). More particularly the discovery of the early manuscripts of Marx raised alienation to a central role in the thinking of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. It was seen to reveal a more humanistic side of Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s effects than his studies of the economic workings of society. More particularly, István Mészáros saw alienation from nature as one of the four main aspects of the Marxian concept, along with alienation from the self, from his ‘species-being’ and alienation from other men.2 These ideas helped to influence the development of the New Left of the 1960s, especially as contemporary thinkers interpreted them. For example, Herbert Marcuse contended that capitalism, in order to survive, develops ‘needs’ in people which it fulfils in order to tie individuals to their society and to give them a stake in it.3 Alienation was also perceived in the sexual sphere where society had fought Nigel Young, An Infantile Disorder? (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin, 1970), p. 14. 3 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (London: Sphere, 1968), p. 22. 1 2

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hard to suppress the expression of sexual desires, resulting in the impulse to break sexual taboos as an expression of rebellion.4 For Erich Fromm this tendency is manifested in a change from what he termed the ‘being mode’ to the ‘having mode’ of existence, where humanity expresses itself through possessions, and perceives values as material objects rather than as active elements in a person’s life. Fromm stated that in the ‘having mode’ happiness is found ‘in one’s superiority over others, in one’s power and in the last analysis, in one’s capacity to conquer, rob, kill’.5 It was in this sense that Murray Bookchin stated that The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man. ... Just as men are converted into commodities, so every aspect of nature is converted into a commodity, a resource to be manufactured and mechanised wantonly.6

Marcuse also noted a ‘concrete link between the liberation of man and that of nature’.7 He argued that in a liberated society a new science might emerge which would be based on a holistic rather than a reductionist view of nature. Theodore Roszak considered that this was the root cause of what he termed the ‘failed experiment’ of industrialism in which environmental degradation was ‘the outward mirror of our inner condition, for many the first discernible symptom of advanced disease within’.8 Unlike Marcuse, Roszak saw that the development of a new environmentally aware science needed a spiritual aspect to counter the dualism inherent in the scientific method. While some commentators have contended that the link often made between deep ecology and spiritual conversion (in which the ecological crisis can only be overcome by a complete healing of the alienation between humanity and nature) is fatally flawed and runs the risk of divorcing itself from the need to discover practical solutions,9 others have seen a transformation in ideas as the way in which conversion can take place: ‘human beings can see themselves as outside nature, whence they can observe it, dominate it and exploit it; or by contrast, they can feel themselves to be an integral part of nature’.10 By attacking the problem at this basic level of consciousness, the aim was to undermine the paradigm upon which the present industrial system was based. The major area for attack was that of the scientific method and logical positivism which required the separation of values from cognitive knowledge. As Henryk Skolimowski put it, ‘Science, by 6 7

Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? (London: Sphere, 1979), p. 85. Ibid, p. 86. Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (London: Wildwood House, 1974), p. 63. Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1972), p. 61. 8 Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (London: Faber, 1972), p. xxiii. 9 John Barry, Rethinking Green Politics (London: Sage, 1999). 10 James Robertson, The Sane Alternative (London: James Robertson, 1978) p. 79. 4

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virtue of its own methods and concepts has projected and promoted a universe in which the domination of nature has remained linked to the domination of man’.11 Thus modern science was profoundly anti-democratic, providing a technology for domination of the natural world and humanity. The effectiveness of technology in its application of science disguised the social relations that were acting behind it. In the anarchist writings of Paul Goodman, scientific method, in its positivist sense, was an expression of alienated thought, and the result was the continued domination of man by man, and of nature by man through its resulting technologies.12 Up to a point there was agreement between Marcuse, Goodman and Skolimowski, in that they all attacked positivism on the grounds that it attempted to remove ethical values from scientific inquiry. Ivan Illich also saw science and technology as an expression of alienated consciousness insofar as they existed in a world conceived in terms of instrumentalism, and therefore domination.13 This encouraged a political structure which promoted anti-democratic forms of decision making in which the choice of technology was determined by the political structure reinforcing the dominant class relations and the power of capital.14 Therefore the choice of soft energy paths and technologies more suited to small-scale production which was both less exploitative and more ecologically sound became part of the debate.15 However, there was a growing perception that the answer lay much deeper in the culture and that any solution involved the replacement of the logical positivist conception of inquiry by ecologically sound values to guide the scientific enterprise. For Etienne Balibar, logical positivism was a method of ‘knowing’ or investigation which based itself upon the ability to examine phenomena in order to promote ‘the needs and advances of knowledge’ against the ‘residue of feeling, of pathology’.16 Roszak considered that this was a narrowing of the concept of what humanity and nature were and it was inadequate in its attempt to promote knowledge because of its restricted view of the procedures of investigation. He thus proposed the acceptance of what he termed the ‘Old Gnosis’ of mysticism, irrationalism and emotion:

Henryk Skolimowski, Ecological Humanism (London, 1976), p. 136. Paul Goodman, People or Personnel and Like a Conquered Province (New York:

11

12

Vintage Press, 1968), p. 316. 13 Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity (London: Marion Boyars, 1974) and Tools for Conviviality (London: Fontana, 1976). 14 David Dickson, Alternative Technology (London: Fontana, 1974). 15 Amory Lovins, Soft Energy Paths (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). 16 Etienne Balibar, ‘Irrationalism and Marxism’, New Left Review 107 (1978): pp. 47–77.

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It is a visionary style of knowledge, not a theological one; its proper language is myth and ritual; its foundation is rapture, not faith and doctrine; and its experience of nature is one of living communion.17

Roszak contended that the treatment of the world as an object resulted in the final conception of the earth as productive material that can only result in waste. Because it was without an element of the sacred, it had no other value than that which was man-made and therefore no other end than as a waste product.18 The alternative sacred world-view was a feature of past or ‘primitive’ cultures, and it was part of an historical aspect of alienation that involved a search for the true nature of humanity. Where this alienation emerged from is important for an appreciation of why Roszak turned to Blake in his attack on Newton and the scientific revolution. John Passmore considered that the essential historical turning point was the interpretation of the place of nature in Christianity held by such writers as Bacon and Descartes: It found expression in a metaphysics, for which man is the sole finite agent and nature a vast system of machines for man to use and modify as he pleases. This is the metaphysics the ecologists are particularly, and rightly, rejecting.19

Passmore argued that this was not the whole of the Western tradition, which is one of remarkable diversity, but was linked to the introduction of mystical elements into the attempt to solve ecological problems. René Dubos found the key to the problem in the two major monastic perspectives of ‘Franciscan Conservatism’ and ‘Benedictine Stewardship’.20 The difference was between a passive (Franciscan) and an active (Benedictine) philosophy. Franciscan conservatism was the worship of nature and an absolute identification with it. Benedictine stewardship, however, was an active principle of management and improvement. These traditions were important in the development of Western culture, but it was the transmission of the idea of stewardship that had shaped the landscapes of Europe. This could lead in two directions, either that of stewardship as in Dubos, or the total surrender to nature, such as Edward Goldsmith’s ‘paraprimitivism’ or ‘tribal’ ecology which contained many repressive elements. School leavers will be conscripted into a ‘Restoration Corps’ ... followed by conscription into a Defence Corps. Goldsmith’s attitudes towards women are also repressive ... . The theme of woman as child-rearer and servant is strong in Goldsmith’s references to the social position of women.21

19 20 21

Roszak, Wasteland, p. 118. Ibid, pp. 125–8. John Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature (London: Duckworth, 1974), p. 27. René Dubos, A God Within (London: Sphere, 1976). Al Bradshaw, ‘Looking Back to the Future’, The Ecologist Quarterly (Winter 1978): pp. 336–53. 17 18

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The political result of stewardship, on the other hand, has a relationship to the utopian socialist and anarchist ideas of the nineteenth century. The anarchists were commonly ethical naturalists ... . Usually they studied nature in the nineteenth century positivist style of science, hopeful that it would yield moral as well as empirical truth. Not one European anarchist felt he searched in vain ... . Nature contained a standard which prescribed what was good.22

Roszak’s desire was to broaden this approach to the world, our way of knowing the world, and to place science within a framework which would end its predominance. Positivist science was perceived as a reflection of alienated thought, and a division of labour had built up to inhibit understanding between different branches of science as well as between scientists and lay people. Ecology was felt to be the answer to bridge this gap. Roszak developed the idea of ‘person/planet’, which was linked to the evolutionary idea that humanity was the ‘leading edge’ of a single organic whole in the process of transcendence to a new spirituality. He believed that ‘within the next generation there will emerge a well-developed body of ecological theory that illuminates this subtle interrelationship and gives enough political force to displace the inherited ideologies of industrial society’.23 Ecology as a science was an aid to understanding nature and humanity’s place in it, in order to replace the instrumentalism that treated both humanity and nature as objects. By acting on and inquiring into the world from a standpoint of interdependence we can, he hoped, end the confrontation with the world as something artificial or alien, and with others as strangers. While Roszak considered the traditions of non-Western cultures, including that of Native Americans, he sought to highlight the alternative tradition to the scientific method, positivism and the Newtonian world view contained within Romanticism. He rejected the idea that Western ethical traditions were ‘inadequate when the problems at hand include non-human entities’.24 He was certainly not alone in identifying such a tradition. Isaiah Berlin was a notable commentator on the alternatives to the mainstream tradition: Opposition to the central ideas of the French Enlightenment and of its allies and disciples in other European countries is as old as the movement itself. The proclamation of the autonomy of reason and the methods of the natural sciences, based on observation as the sole reliable method of knowledge, and the consequent rejection of the authority of revelation, sacred writings and their accepted interpreters, tradition, prescription, and every form of non-rational and transcendent source of knowledge, was naturally opposed by the and religious

R.B. Fowler, ‘The Anarchist Tradition in Political Thought’, Western Political Quarterly 27 (1974): pp. 738–52. 23 Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 1979), p. xxx. 24 Chris Cuomo, ‘Towards Thoughtful Eco-feminist Action’, in Karen J. Warren (ed.), Ecological Feminist Philosophers (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 47. 22

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thinkers of many persuasions. ... More formidable was the relativist and sceptical tradition that went back to the ancient world.25

Berlin saw that philosophers such as Schelling viewed humanity’s relationship with nature as beyond the analytical capacity of the natural sciences and could only be understood in a nonrational way by poets and philosophers. This relationship was evident in the development of the Romantic movement. At the heart of Roszak’s most perceptive work, Where the Wasteland Ends, is a discussion of three key figures from the Romantic period: Blake, Wordsworth and Goethe. He identifies them as figures who can present an alternative vision to the scientific world view established by Descartes, Newton and—for Roszak a particular demon—Francis Bacon. It is the rejection of the role of the imagination and the part it plays in the development of scientific ideas as well as the arts that is critical for Roszak and a key failing of the scientific world view. He therefore presents a critique of the ‘cult of reason’ embodied in the development of the scientific method and notes Bacon’s rejection of poetry: And the trouble with poetry? It is, says Bacon, one of ‘the diseases or corruptions of theory’—for it is ‘unrestrained by laws’ and ‘extremely licentious’; it indulges in ‘unnatural mixtures’ and ‘feigns’ unrealities. That is why poetry only enjoys ‘high esteem in the most ignorant ages and among the most barbarous people, whilst other kinds of learning were excluded’. In short, poetry is the activity of weak-minded primitives. The contrast with Romantic values could not be more marked.26

In condemning poetry, Bacon condemns his own understanding of the world. Roszak is particularly concerned with an interpretation of Blake in which the central figures in his prophetic books, Urizen, Luvah, Los and Tharmas—the four Zoas—are identified as key to an understanding of Blake’s whole world-view. The most important of these in Roszak’s critique of science and his interpretation of Blake appears to be that of Urizen. Here the Greek root is identified as meaning to limit and restrict while the vocal expression of the word is that of ‘Your Reason’. In this way Roszak contends that Urizen embodies a horror of the scientific world view, and quotes Blake as follows: Lo, a shadow of horror is risen In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific, Self-clos’d, all-repelling: what Demon Hath form’d this abominable void, This soul-shudd’ring vacuum?—Some said ‘It is Urizen.’27

Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind (London: Pimlico Press, 1998), p. 243. Roszak, Wasteland, p. 298. 27 Ibid., p. 299; William Blake, The [First] Book of Urizen, ch. 1, ll.1–6, in The 25 26

Complete Poems, ed. Alicia Ostriker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 242.

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However, he argues that Blake presents Urizen as a fallen state of being, since science and reason were once also creative activities. It is the corruption of reason into the narrowness of the Newtonian and Baconian vision of the world which is the problem for both Blake and Roszak. Indeed, it is also related to the fallen Satan and the brute power associated with the modern industrializing state of Blake’s England of dark satanic mills. So while Roszak can see in the figure of Albion the universal man and the human soul, which is the battleground for the four Zoas, Albion can also be seen as the England of Blake and the battle between the industrialization of the towns and the green lands of a lost world. Urizen is also linked to Newton, and the god of science is Newton’s heavenly watchmaker, ‘the giver of moral laws’. Roszak contends that for Blake humanity needs to have a religion to worship and if it is not to be Christ then is has to be Satan, which for Roszak means ‘the worship of science: idolatry’.28 This is also manifested in the technological developments emerging out of science. In this way, the social and political order created by contemporary science and technology is linked by Blake to another key figure of the English Enlightenment, John Locke. Urizen is also the Zoa of physical power. That is his trump card ... architect of vast geometric structures, imperial cities: master of the “Mundane Shell”, genius of the machines: “the Loom of Locke ... the Waterwheels of Newton”.29

The linking of what Roszak terms scientific-industrial values to social injustice and despotism lies at the heart of Blake’s critique of the work of Urizen. Luvah, on the other hand, is love and spontaneous vitality, which is only sketchily drawn by Blake because of the overriding power of Urizen, which suppresses such emotions. Of the other Zoas, Los is of particular resonance as the loss or suppression of the feminine: ... no more the Masculine mingles With the feminine, but the Sublime is shut out from the Pathos In howling torment, to build stone walls of separation 30

This suppression of the feminine therefore results in the conflict between the sexes exhibited in contemporary society, which goes along with class division as part of the repressive nature of the industrialized world. The concern with urbanization and industrialization was a key element of this critique and for Roszak is an ‘old lost cause’ with which he wishes to ally himself: ‘Since Rousseau to the Romantics, hostility towards the artificial environment has run through our culture like a soft, lyrical counterpoint to the swelling cacophony of the machine’.31 Roszak, Wasteland, p. 300. Ibid., p. 301. 30 Ibid., p. 307; William Blake, Jerusalem, ch. 4, plate 90, ll.10–12, The Complete 28

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Poems, p. 829. 31 Roszak, Wasteland, p. 13.

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Roszak therefore sees Blake’s political radicalism as part of a complete critique of the ‘reigning Reality Principle’ which results in a ‘benevolent despotism of elitist expertise’. In this technocracy the idolatry of science and reason is central, and it inspires Blake’s fierce attack on its principal approach to ‘knowing’, which Roszak sees as suppressing all other approaches to understanding the world.32 The case of Wordsworth is different. Here there is no fiery assault on the originators of the scientific method, but an appraisal which seeks to place scientific knowledge in its proper place, as just one kind of ‘knowing’. In Wordsworth, Roszak sees a poet who brings to his understanding of the natural world an approach which is ‘a quality of awareness, not a methodological procedure’.33 For Wordsworth the only way of knowing is through the senses and therefore there is a visionary power which Roszak identifies as the sacramental vision at the heart of his own conception of understanding the world. This sacramental vision is one of wonder, which is an end in itself. For Roszak such sacramental art does not lead on to anything else, since that state of visionary bliss is itself the supreme goal. Consequently, he contends that Wordsworth places science in a relationship with art which presents its true role, in contrast to the position it has held as the one source of truth from Bacon up to the present, alienated world. In Wordsworth, the knowledge of ‘spiritual presences’ precedes research and analysis: Science then Shall be a precious visitant; and then, And only then, be worthy of her name: For then her heart shall kindle; her dull eye, Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang Chained to its object in brute slavery.34

The sensitivity that Roszak identifies in Wordsworth is also one which Blake found infuriating. Roszak points out that Blake was antagonistic towards Wordsworth since, for Blake, the natural world contained no spiritual value—a point taken up more recently by Keith Sagar: Blake’s note was right. It soon became clear that what Wordsworth was worshipping was not nature. Though he continued to use the word, its meaning drifting further and further from the green earth and the world perceived by the senses until it reached a private meaning which specifically excluded these.35

Ibid., p. 413. Ibid., p. 319. 34 Ibid., pp. 324–5; William Wordsworth, The Excursion, bk. 4, ll.1251–6, in The 32

33

Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (2 vols, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), vol. 2, p. 155. 35 Keith Sagar, Literature and the Crime against Nature: from Homer to Hughes (London: Chaucer Press, 2005), p. 147.

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However, for Roszak it is not necessarily the place of nature itself in Wordsworth that is important, but rather the way nature is perceived and the way of knowing, the sacramental vision with its juxtaposition to the scientific method and its approach to factual explanation. In Wordsworth what is recaptured is the insightfulness of childhood rather than a harking back to a pantheism or paganism. Roszak argues that Wordsworth sought his vision from within his subconscious rather than through the study of earlier religious writings, so much so that it led him to apologize for any perceived Christian heresy in his worship of nature. If this be error, and another faith Find easier access to the pious mind, Yet were I grossly destitute of all Those human sentiments that make this earth dear, if I should fail with grateful voice To speak to you, ye mountains, and ye lakes And sounding cataracts, ye mists and winds ...36

For Wordsworth, as for Coleridge, the need to end the enmity between humanity and nature is central to his vision of the natural world. With Goethe, Roszak has a problem, in that he cannot be classed as a Romantic poet and has further been identified as a polymath for whom scientific understanding played a central role in his life and writings. However, it is here that Roszak presents his most interesting analysis of the nature of science, and his ideas chime with green critics of the scientific method and with those linked to the anti-vivisection and animal rights movements. Goethe, Roszak argues, had an approach to scientific exploration which was at odds with the reductionist and positivist traits linked to the modern scientific method. In particular, he was uncomfortable using some modern technologies in the belief that they distorted the reality of nature: The instruments betokened for Goethe man’s increasingly alienated stance over against nature—and aggressiveness that follows therefrom. ‘It is’, he remarked, ‘a calamity that the use of the experiment has severed nature from man, so that he is content to understand nature merely through what artificial instruments reveal, and by so doing restricts her achievements’.37

Goethe here emerges as a model for understanding the limitations of the scientific method. The debate about what can be seen through the dissection of living material raises the issue of whether the act of dissection is damaging to the subject of the research, and therefore both distorts and invalidates the results. For Roszak, Goethe reveals that the experiment with scientific instruments tells us more about 36 Roszak, Wasteland, p. 325; William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), bk. 2, ll.419– 25, in The Prelude: A Parallel Text, ed. J.C. Maxwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 97. 37 Roszak, Wasteland, p. 330.

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the process than it does about nature. More particularly, it tells us about the ability to manipulate nature in a Baconian sense, rather than to understand it. For Goethe, nature rewards patient curiosity rather than aggressive intervention or probing, and such curiosity involves becoming a part of the subject for study rather than an objective researcher. Goethe’s approach to nature did, however, lead him down blind alleys and the outright rejection of Newton’s research into optics and light was especially revealing. Here Roszak notes that Goethe’s attack on Newton was ‘much too shrill’, and he quotes ‘Murky Law’: Friends, leave behind that darkened room Where light of day is much abused, And, bent low by crooked thoughts and gloom, Our sight is anguished and confused. The superstitious gullible Have been with us quite long enough; Your teacher has but filled you full With spectral, mad, delusive stuff.38

For Goethe the approach adopted by Newton and the development of the scientific method through experimentation was a denial of what was perceived through the senses, but more especially through the soul. It is here that Roszak sees a connection between Goethe, Blake and Wordsworth, the sacramental vision noted earlier. Through this approach to the investigation of nature, a process closer to meditation on the object is evident, and in this process the senses are intensified and the viewer becomes one with the subject of speculation. The sensuous imagination yields joy and poetry; its discovers meaning ... but little power. And that is only what comes of moving with the grain. Which requires much trust, much love. As it turns out, too much for the likes of most of us moderns.39

Perhaps the key element of Roszak’s thinking on science and the lessons from the Romantic poets is the relationship between the proper role of science and the way that it is used to manipulate nature through the exercise of power. For him this extends into the exertion of power over other human beings so that he is in line with those other New Left thinkers and eco-anarchists who consider that the relationship of humanity to nature is a reflection of the relationships between

Ibid., pp. 336–7: this is a translation (author unknown) of Goethe’s ‘Freunde, flieht die dunkle Kammer’ from ‘Zahme Xenien VI’, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, 2nd ed., ed. Ernst Beutler (Zürich and Stuttgart: Artemis Verlag, 1961), Gedichte I, p. 664. 39 Roszak, Wasteland, p. 345. 38

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humans themselves. To repeat the quotation from Bookchin, ‘the notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man’.40 Consequently, it is of no surprise that Roszak looks to the early Wordsworth, the supporter of the French Revolution and contemporary of Shelley and William Godwin, the first English anarchist. Nor is it surprising that Blake is identified as the main strand of Romantic ideals throughout his work and is central to his ideas concerning a sacramental vision and his belief in the need to move away from a more secular trend associated with science and urbanization. He also identifies the communitarian and anarchist elements of monastic and other religious traditions with this perspective: The monastic orders within every religious tradition have been assertions of the anarchist instincts. So too the pietist communitarians of the late middle ages, the evangelical sects of the Reformation (especially among the “Everlasting Gospellers” of England—Blake’s tradition).41

For Roszak, the crucial element in his research into the works of the Romantic poets is the search for a change in consciousness and a ‘way of knowing’ that can move us away from a scientific elitism which provides the technology for a repressive social and political structure. Roszak saw the development of smallscale communities which are the foundation of a Visionary Commonwealth as the way forward toward a dismantling of urban, industrial society: Here are the people living out real solutions, people who have integrated the great ethical issues of the time into their very eating habits. Here is the brave, radical break with urban-industrialism that promises … new ecology, a new democracy, a new vitality of spirit.42

The pursuit of a left of centre environmentalism within the history of English literature is not surprising given the wider debates within the green movement. The problem is one of potential conflicts between technological solutions and changes in consciousness, between global solutions and local action, and between authoritarian and communitarian politics.43 There is also a division between those seeking alternatives to the dominant Western ideology of market capitalism within Eastern philosophies and native traditions, and those who see science as the solution as well as the problem. The potential danger evident in a great deal of ecological or environmentalist writing is that it unthinkingly rejects Western concepts and culture by attaching blame to it for environmental damage, while embracing non-Western cultures 42 43

Bookchin, Anarchism, p. 63. Roszak, Wasteland, p. 425. Ibid., p. 444. See James Radcliffe, Green Politics: Dictatorship or Democracy? (London: Macmillan, 2000). 40 41

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in a half-digested way, simply because they are non-Western. David Pepper has shown how the urge to identify with ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional’ societies can lead into problem areas or indeed political culs-de-sac. While ecological anarchists such as Roszak saw small-scale traditional societies as possessing a spiritual understanding in their relationship with nature, these societies have significant drawbacks, although some authors, such as John Young, see these as virtues. For example, Pepper argues that Young is at pains to stress that millions in poor countries have that spiritual confidence which deep ecologists seek, yet have very different priorities. Particular people (families) come first, then dead and future kin, then other species, and, lastly, ecosystems.44

In addition, Young rejects the social ecology of eco-anarchists such as Bookchin in areas such as patriarchy. While Bookchin opposed patriarchy and supported equality and social liberation, Young argues that patriarchy ‘has been part of many cultures which have for a long time achieved a high degree of “harmony” with nature’.45 For Young, therefore, experiments with equality and open families are not to be undertaken, as there is no evidence that they will be ecologically sound. The priorities are tradition and harmony with nature even if this results in strong hierarchical and patriarchal societies. For Pepper, therefore, the problem associated with the deep ecology perspective is that it romanticizes traditional societies and is consequently profoundly conservative in its social message: It is hard to see how it differs from Goldsmith’s constant appeals for a return to ‘traditional’ societies, by which he once held up the oppressive Indian caste system as ecologically desirable, or from deep ecology’s call to the ‘minority tradition’—a confusing conflation of native American cultures, Taoism, and ‘some Buddhist communities’ with the 1930s Spanish anarchists and the 1871 Paris commune.46

Such an approach could significantly conflict with more socially radical concepts such as Pepper’s own social ecology or Roszak’s aim of a transcendental/sacred communitarianism. The pursuit of such ideas within the Western tradition led Roszak to identify with the Romantic poets and their critique of science. As Dryzek argues, The natural relationships stressed by green romantics are, quite simply, natural relationships. At any rate, all green romantics believe that there does exist a natural order. Whatever its balance of competition and cooperation, this order is

David Pepper, Eco-socialism (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 167. John Young, Post-environmentalism (London: Belhaven Press, 1990), p. 167. 46 Pepper, Eco-socialism, pp. 168–9. 44 45

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an egalitarian one (the deep ecologists’ biocentric equality), in which there is no hierarchy, and certainly not a hierarchy which puts humans on top of everything else.47

Much of the debate on how we can overcome the alienation of humanity from nature has been centred on the tradition of an ethical debate and efforts to try and overcome human alienation by including the rest of the natural world. However, some would argue that such a debate is irrelevant even when it rejects the Western rationalist tradition. Rather a metaphysical or spiritual awareness of nature is required, one which goes beyond such rational debate. Andrew Dobson has noted how this has affected the movement and how it has encouraged a belief in the relationship between ecology and lifestyle.48 It is the rejection of the idea that change should be limited to the formal political arena that is central to this perspective and why Roszak sees the issue of an alternative cosmology as being central to the demand for a new relationship with nature and at the heart of the Romantic poets’ critique of science. However, Dobson also points out that this approach is the result of problems associated with change through conventional means, given the size of the crisis. The general point behind the religious approach is that the changes that need to take place are too profound to be dealt with in the political arena, and that the proper territory for action is the psyche rather than the parliamentary chamber. This approach takes seriously the point ... that political opposition to radical green change would be massive—and sidesteps it.49

For Rudolf Bahro, the spiritual side of the equation was indeed much more significant than the economic and political when considering appropriate levels of change.50 This was also reflected in the work of E.F. Schumacher, who referred directly to the spiritual needs of human beings to relocate themselves within nature.51 The Buddhist economics of Schumacher was of significance for the development of a new approach to the environment. However, these perspectives do not always carry with them the radical communitarianism of Roszak and Bookchin. For example, Mark Wallace saw the spiritual dimension as the most appropriate approach towards overcoming differences within the environmental movement itself.52 He discussed the J.S. Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 164. 48 Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought (London: Routledge, 1995). 49 Dobson, Thought, p. 136. 50 Rudolf Bahro, Building the Green Movement (London/Baltimore: GMP Publishers, 1986). 51 E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful (London: Sphere/Abacus, 1974). 52 Mark J. Wallace, ‘Environmental Justice, Neopreservationsim and Sustainable Spirituality’, in R.S. Gottlieb, The Ecological Community (London: Routledge, 1997). 47

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differences between ‘antitoxics’ and ‘preservationists’. The antitoxics were concerned with the environmental health of human communities by opposing dumping and pollution, arguing that they were for protecting humans, not ‘birds and bees’. Preservationists, on the other hand, were frequently associated with a misanthropic disregard for human well-being, associating themselves with wilderness as the ‘only reality’. Wallace argued that by developing an ecological spirituality these two groups could be mediated. To uphold, therefore, the integrity of the whole is to experience the holy or sacred through living a life of communal healing and well-being. My suggestion is that sustainable religion enables a mediation between antitoxics and conservationists by explicating the common spiritual-holistic philosophy that is implied by the beliefs and actions characteristic of both movements.53

Wallace was arguing here from an evangelical position in which he saw his role and that of others as what he termed a ‘priestly’ function, whereby activists within both movements come to accept this common spiritual perspective to enable them to maintain a struggle which may well have significant setbacks. The problems associated with the development of an ecological ethic are numerous. In the first instance, the aim of developing such an ethic from within the tradition of Western ethical thought is open to criticism because that tradition has been dominated by an approach which centred on humanity’s responsibilities, rights and duties with little reference to the wider natural world. Secondly, much ecological thinking began from a fundamental critique of the traditions of rational thought emerging from the Enlightenment, and as a consequence a number of theorists tended to reject the use of rationalist debate over ethics as a valid process. The appeal of a more spiritual connection to nature is therefore attractive to many people and the identification with Wordsworth’s nature poetry provides a sentimental route to this relationship for many. The language of Blake is linked to a radical critique of science and industrialization but in a way that incorporates myth and mysticism and challenges the normal perspectives of the vast majority in their thinking about the world. As Roszak puts it, ‘The stronger the mystical sensibility, the stronger the longing for anarchist brotherhood and sisterhood’.54 Phrases like these show Roszak writing in terms which are inspiring to some, but a clear challenge to the many. His writing often adopts the mythical and mystical verve and dynamic of Blake or an Old Testament prophet in a way which can be viewed as thrilling, but can easily present to secular minds a metaphysical world which is as alienating in its own way as Blake was in his time.

Ibid., p. 304. Roszak, Wasteland, p. 425.

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Chapter 15

A Huge Lacuna vis-à-vis the Peasants: Red and Green in John Berger’s Trilogy Into Their Labours Christian Schmitt-Kilb

Introduction John Berger was born in London in 1926. He has worked as a painter, art critic, essayist and writer of fiction and is well known for his Marxist-socialist convictions, which are tangible in all of his artistic, theoretical and literary output. Throughout his life, he has refused and still refuses to regard the realm of art as separate from the modes of its production and reception or from politics in general. Always interested in the social relevance of the artist’s preoccupation, Berger explained his turn from painting to writing in the early 1950s with the belief that ‘painting pictures seemed a not direct enough way to stop the world’s annihilation by nuclear war. The printed word was a little more effective’.1 In 1958, though, his publisher refused to print his first novel because of its pro-communist tendencies. As a form of protest, he left England to live in various European countries finally to settle, in the early 1970s, in a small mountain village in the French Alps. His growing disillusionment with the London art world and the fact that contemporary art seemed to follow a different route than the social realism he favoured in theory and practice may also have contributed to his decision. He gained notoriety when he received the Booker Price for his novel G. in 1972 and donated half the prize money to the Black Panther movement, thus protesting against the exploitation of the Caribbean by the prize-giving corporation Booker McConnell. There is a recurrent theme in John Berger’s work which may be identified as an interest in the human and nonhuman gaze. It finds its expression in several titles of his essayistic oeuvre, among them Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing (1960), The Look of Things (1972), Ways of Seeing (1972), About Looking (1980) and ‘Why Look at Animals?’ (2009). Looking, seeing, gazing: these are key concepts in Berger’s analysis of art, painting and photography; it is fascinating to see how he broadens the meaning of these terms to make them pivotal to narrative as well. Another Way of Telling, written in collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr, 1 Ralf Hertel, ‘John Berger’, in C.A. Malcolm and D. Malcolm (eds), Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 319: British and Irish Short-Fiction Writers, 1945–2000 (Farmington Hills: Gale Cengage Learning, 2006), p. 27.

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is an example of Berger’s exploration of new ways of narrating and representing reality by combining text and picture, thus making the visual part of the narrative experience. Also with regard to politics on a grand scale, Berger makes frequent use of visual metaphors. In an essay published in 2003, he asks, ‘How to continue without a plausible vision of the future? Why have we lost any view of what is beyond a lifetime?’2 Two decades earlier, he had started to rekindle that vision in himself and others by looking closely at peasant life. A view which transcends a lifetime is what he finds and admires in the village community he writes about in Into Their Labours. The trilogy is the outcome of the author’s literary preoccupation in the late 1970s and all through the 1980s. Triggered by his move to France, Berger began to explore everyday life in the mountain community and to document ‘a way of life, a way of looking at the world which in many ways is disappearing’.3 The three volumes trace the way of the European peasant from the village to the urban metropolis in three stages: from the peasant struggle for survival in the French countryside (Pig Earth, 1979) via the changed circumstances of the peasantry as a result of the arrival of industrialism in the village (Once in Europa, 1983), to the emigration of the peasant to the imaginary city of Troy and his succeeding proleterianization there (Lilac and Flag, 1990).4 Berger mourns not so much the peasant world we have lost but rather the peasant perspective, the above quoted ‘way of looking at the world’, which is disappearing as well. This perspective needs to be preserved, or at least witnessed and documented, not in order to satisfy nostalgic urges, but because it may possibly entail answers to the most urgent questions the world faces today. Berger fears that the ‘threat of historical elimination of the peasant view of the world’ implies the elimination of certain critical forms of historical thinking. Moreover, this perspective is bound up with certain key issues in green thinking and environmentalism today such as sustainability, consumerism, globalization and so on. Thus even though it would be misleading to present the author of the trilogy as a green rather than a red thinker, it is necessary to draw attention to the nexus of ecology, class-consciousness and Berger’s original multi-voiced form to negotiate these issues in the texts. Into Their Labours has provoked the most diverse responses from critics all across the political and theoretical spectrum. Those from the left were particularly intrigued to note that a like-minded author has turned his attention towards the peasantry. Terry Eagleton, in reviewing Pig Earth, the first volume, complained John Berger, ‘Written in the Night: The Pain of Living in the Present World’, Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition), February 2003. 3 John Berger and Teodor Shanin, ‘Can Peasant Society Survive?’, The Listener, 21 June 1979, p. 847. 4 John Berger, Pig Earth (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1979); Once in Europa (London: Bloomsbury, 1983); Lilac and Flag (New York: Pantheon, 1990). 2

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about ‘the rift between the complex speculations of the theoretical “Afterword” and the graphic immediacies of the stories themselves’, which led him to the conclusion that ‘there is no way in which the Berger who writes the “Afterword” can be the Marcel of whom he writes’.5 More recently, Charity Scribner read the trilogy from a leftist feminist perspective as a text which deals in post-socialist nostalgia ‘about agricultural and industrial labour in France’. Berger fails to see, she claimed, ‘that no worker can afford a nostalgia trip back to the industrial utopia’.6 Moreover, she blamed Berger for delivering a version of gendered essentialism in his depiction of male and female characters which supposedly leads him to idealize woman as the site of memory and mourning at the cost of removing her from the public sphere of work. Geoff Dyer, on the other hand, supposes that ‘Into Their Labours will come to be regarded as one of Berger’s major literary achievements and one of the most important works of our time’,7 while Kiernan Ryan supported the claim that Berger is at his fictional best with Pig Earth and argued that as opposed to his earlier novels, Berger here provided utopian hope in the form of ‘faith in the intransigent desire and power of the human community finally to realize itself in history’.8 Fred Pfeil, on the other hand, was disappointed with Berger’s intellectual-political development. The socialist Berger who used to serve Pfeil as ‘model of the committed writer I wanted to become’, had unfortunately been superseded by an anti-modernist whose search for authenticity, for ‘unproblematic modes of Being and Truth’ tends ‘in practice to support a politics of reaction’.9 To sum it up, left critics of Into Their Labours have pinpointed the following questions as central: does Berger’s move to the French village and his succeeding literary preoccupation with peasants and peasant life mark a political turn away from his earlier socialist convictions? Is he amongst the ranks of those leftists who suffered a post-1968 disillusionment which in his case triggered the retreat to the country and his own private version of nostalgic and escapist pastoralism? Or is his trilogy to be read as an expression of recovered hope, after the matterof-fact hopelessness which dominated his previous novels? Has the preoccupation with the French peasants provided Berger with a perspective that bears a utopian socialist potential? Or has it merely turned him into a nostalgic reactionary? As will be made clear, the author of this essay believes that Geoff Dyer is right, when, in his perceptive 1986 study of Berger, he states that ‘his [Berger’s] belief in Terry Eagleton, ‘A Kind of Fiction’, New Statesman, 15 June 1979, p. 876. Charity Scribner, ‘Second World, Second Sex and Literature on the European Left’,

5 6

Comparative Literature 55/3 (2003): pp. 217–28 (pp. 219–20). 7 Geoff Dyer, Ways of Telling: The World of John Berger (London: Pluto Press, 1986), p. 118. 8 Kiernan Ryan, ‘Socialist Fiction and the Education of Desire: Mervyn Jones, Raymond Williams and John Berger’, in H. Gustav Klaus (ed.), The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), pp. 166–85 (p. 184). 9 Fred Pfeil, ‘Silvershades: John Berger and What’s Left’, Triquarterly 88 (1993): pp. 230–45 (pp. 230, 237, 239).

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socialism animates every line of his work’. Berger’s aesthetics can be properly appreciated only against the backdrop of a moral imperative which is today fuelled by red as well as green convictions. There is indeed a sense of nostalgia tangible in various passages, although Berger himself strongly disputes this.10 Eager to point out the inherent value of an organic community, Berger does not always steer clear of undifferentiated verdicts on urban life. While Raymond Williams summons the admirer of any presumably organic society (which, as he writes, ‘has always gone’) not to overlook ‘the penury, the petty tyranny, the disease and mortality, the ignorance and frustrated intelligence which were also among its ingredients’, Berger tends to disregard that warning at least in the third volume, Lilac and Flag.11 Nevertheless, Into Their Labours is not only a chronicle of peasant life but also a chronicle of the dehumanization and desocialization which accompany the development from a ‘sensate relationship to work and a subsequent estrangement of labour through proletarianization’.12 Teodor Shanin, sociologist and expert on peasant societies, concedes that ‘the only way to understand why different political systems have occurred in different parts of the modern world is to consider the way peasants disappeared differently in different parts of the world’.13 In the light of this claim, Berger’s three volumes can be read as a contribution to the understanding of social and political change and to the character of post-peasant society today. Contexts: ‘An Explanation’ and ‘Historical Afterword’ Ever since pastoral literature was made a literary genre by the Greek poet Theocritus, it has been fashionable to pit authentic and natural life in the country against the corruption and alienation of life in the city. Right from the beginning, Berger’s Pig Earth confronts that tradition by negating any attempt at easy idealization or romanticization of country life. The book starts with ‘A Question of Place’, a three-and-a-half pages long detailed and dispassionate account of the slaughter of a cow—a first impressive instance of an unsparing gaze: The son pushes a spring through the hole in the skull into the cow’s brain. It goes in nearly twenty centimetres. He agitates it to be sure that all the animal’s muscles will relax, and pulls it out.14

‘[D]uring the years that I’ve been thinking about this ... I have absolutely refused to accept the idea that what I’m doing is at all nostalgic. If it was, it wouldn’t be worth doing’; Berger and Shanin, ‘Can Peasant Society Survive?’, p. 847. 11 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 252–3. 12 Peter Hitchcock, ‘“Work has the Smell of Vinegar”: Sensing Class in John Berger’s Trilogy’, Modern Fiction Studies 17/1 (2001): pp. 12–42 (p. 15). 13 Berger and Shanin, ‘Can Peasant Society Survive?’, p. 847. 14 Berger, Pig Earth, p. 2. 10

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After the description of the process of slaughtering, the economic relation of peasant to animal is moved into the foreground: The peasant checks the reading on the meter. He has agreed to nine francs a kilo. He gets nothing for the tongue, the liver, the hooves, the head, the offal. The parts which are sold to the urban poor, the rural poor receive no payment for.15

This opening entails a double message: Berger’s country is not the home of the cute animals (and human-animal relationship) of Disney industries, and neither is the country a blessed refuge from capitalism. Following the in medias res shock of the first chapter, Berger provides a context to what follows, entitled ‘An Explanation’. The author here acknowledges the distinction between his work as a writer and the work of those he writes about. Joseph McMahon has reflected upon Berger’s attitude to the dilemma, well known to the writer of socialist fiction, that there is a gap (of experience and knowledge) between the author as intellectual and the objects of his description. Berger, McMahon explains, hopes that the author’s knowledge can serve to situate his characters’ experiences against a wider, more illuminating background: The writer can serve as an intermediary; … he becomes the explicator and in some cases the intercessor; the presentation becomes a plea for a particular program; yet the plea can emerge only if the writer assumes and maintains that modicum of modesty that is the best possible control on distortions that may result from his own subjectivity.16

I believe that in Into Their Labours, Berger’s modesty expresses itself in a narrative organization which rejects the straight story of classic realism and the playfulness and self-reflexivity of postmodernist writing in equal measure. Instead, Berger presents the reader with protocols of his fragmented perception, which are bound together by the hope that they may implant ‘in the reader’s mind the notion that what has been narrated offers a description of conditions so intolerable as to demand change’.17 Berger also considers his writing to be a continual ‘struggle to give meaning to experience’, which is a valuable form of production not in its own right but as a contribution to the village’s portrait of itself and thus a confirmation of its existence. In a passage on Vincent van Gogh, he describes how the Dutch painter approaches reality through work ‘precisely because reality itself was a form of production’. Berger admires van Gogh’s capacity to ‘imitate the active existence—

Ibid., p. 4. Joseph McMahon, ‘Marxist Fictions: The Novels of John Berger’, Contemporary

15 16

Literature 23/2 (1982): p. 205. 17 Ibid., p. 207.

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the labour of being—of what they depict’.18 This is the quintessence of Berger’s aesthetic, this is what he attempts in Pig Earth and the following two volumes. ‘An Explanation’ and the epilogic ‘Historical Afterword’ provide a contextual frame19 for the stories and poems which make up the bulk of Pig Earth, a necessary foil to a deeper understanding of the stories and vice versa in order that both fiction and theory realize their explanatory, poetical and political potential. Being until recently ‘an economy within an economy’ has enabled the peasant class to survive. In the ‘Afterword’ Berger points out that unlike any other working and exploited class, the peasantry has always supported itself, which made it to some degree a class apart. Berger admits that this did not make them a culture independent from the dominant one, but ‘the priorities and values of the peasant (their strategy for survival) were embedded in a tradition which outlasted any tradition in the rest of society’.20 He draws a picture of peasant culture based on protagonists who imagine paradise as a return to a life that is not handicapped by having a surplus taken from him before the struggle for survival can even begin. With ideals located in the past and a determination to hand on their skills and techniques to their children, survival is first and foremost guaranteed through work. Recognizing a world of scarcity as given, work is a constant ingredient of the peasant’s utopia, a state which is not imagined as a world of plenty established by science and the advancement of knowledge. The utopian moment lies in the idea of just sharing of what the work produces. Even though paradise is located in the past, peasant thinking is future-oriented. This becomes obvious in the act of planting a tree or of milking a cow. The future bears many risks, the most likely of which used to be hunger, and the best way to counter these risks is the continuation of the path which the survivors from the past have taken. Thus Berger repeatedly emphasizes the difference between the logic governing the peasant’s culture of survival on the one hand, and the bourgeoiscapitalist (consumerist) as well as the socialist (revolutionary) cultures of progress on the other. Both revolutionary and consumerist ideologies assume that the future offers ever larger hopes, both are thus forward-looking. What gives meaning to the life of the worker, Berger writes, is either ‘the revolutionary hope of transforming it, or money … to be spent in his “true life” as a consumer’.21 The peasant, on the other hand, realizes that both right and left supporters of progress envisage the

John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 74. 19 A frame rather than, as Stefan Welz suggests, a programme because the stories themselves frequently undermine the theoretical claims made in the nonfiction parts; Stefan Welz, Ways of Seeing—Limits of Telling: Sehen und Erzählen in den Romanen John Bergers (Eggingen: Edition Isele, 1996), p. 187. 20 Berger, Pig Earth, p. 197. 21 Ibid., p. 205. 18

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disappearance of the kind of life on which his culture of survival has been based for as long as he remembers. This is the point at which worker and peasant part company, the point which makes general alliances between workers and peasants almost impossible. There is a scene at the very end of the second volume in which the peasant Bruno on a visiting trip to Venice meets Marietta who tries to convince him of the Marxist cause: How do they vote in your village? For the right. And you? I vote for anyone who promises to raise the price of milk. That isn’t good for the workers. Milk is all we have to sell. ... You are wrong to think only about the price of milk. She comes, he told himself, from this place of water and islands, where there is no earth at all. The fact is peasants will disappear, she continued, the future lies elsewhere. I’d cut off my right hand rather than work in a factory.22

‘There is’, Berger explains elsewhere, ‘a huge, huge lacuna in Marxist theory visà-vis the countryside and peasants ... perhaps one of the only, really fundamental points where there is almost total agreement between Marxism and bourgeois economics, or capitalist economics rather, is that in the name of progress peasants have to be eliminated’.23 The peasant perspective has, pace Berger, always been essentially based on ideas which have become enormously popular in recent years in the context of environmentalism: continuity and sustainability. ‘Ideas’ is a misleading term, though, as ecological convictions are here quite the opposite of an ideological or political stance. They are elements of a perspective founded in a way of life which is based on the notions of experienced continuity and careful treatment of (living) resources. Berger, Once in Europa, pp. 156–7. Berger during a symposium on peasants and countrymen in literature. Kathleen

22 23

Parkinson and Martin Priestman (eds), Peasants and Countrymen in Literature: A Symposium Organised by the English Department of the Roehampton Institute in February 1981 (London: Roehampton Institute, 1982), p. 15.

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Berger attempts to approximate the anti-consumerist perspective of the peasant with his own means as a writer. He rejects the pressures of the literary market in what he considers to be his labour, his contribution to the village’s writing of itself. In Geoff Dyer’s words, Berger’s aesthetics sees ‘art [as] part of the labour of producing the world’.24 Not only did it take him 15 years to complete the trilogy, a horror for the market-oriented publisher; its narrative form also defies easy consumption. The language of Pig Earth is simple and sensuous, but the almost photographic take on isolated scenes (the birth of a calf in ‘A Calf Remembered’, the insemination of a goat in ‘The Great Whiteness’, the search for an underground pipe in ‘An Independent Woman’ or the slaughter of a pig in ‘The Wind Howls Too’) and the characters involved disturb our conventions of reading perhaps more than certain aesthetic-literary experiments to which we have grown accustomed in recent decades. Berger’s witnessing is a form of preservation of that perspective by trying to adopt the way in which the peasant makes sense of his surroundings and render it in textual form. Commenting on a series of photos later published in the volume Another Way of Telling,25 Berger explains, ‘We hope to be able to make appearances, things which are seen and which are not ever fully translatable into words, eloquent in their own right’.26 What Berger tries to achieve in Pig Earth is to make use of a form which represents as realistically as possible reality not only as perceived by the writer but also by the objects of his investigation: the peasant and his world, animals, landscape, trees. This stance may sound hopelessly naïve. Berger’s seriousness, though, his conception of the writer’s work and his stylistic asceticism lead to a kind of pruned prose which succeeds in slowing down the process of reading and perception and rendering, if not the true, then at least a representation of the peasant and peasant life which makes the reader feel close to the stories’ characters.27 The integration of the animal perspective into his narrative is part of the program of the trilogy. He does so without sentimentality and portrays the relationship between peasant and animal as almost incompatible with the one most of us are familiar with. We are accustomed to see each animal either as part of a species, as raw material processed like a manufactured commodity, or we grant one concrete exemplar a sentimental individuality which is hardly its due. The peasant, on the other hand, owns a ‘pre-modern sensibility’28 in which fondness 26 27

Dyer, Ways of Telling, p. 141. John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling (New York: Pantheon, 1982). Berger in Parkinson and Priestman, Peasants and Countrymen, p. 5. This may point the way to the meaning of the trilogy’s rather cryptic biblical title, Into Their Labours. The context (St John 4:38, King James Bible) reads as follows: ‘I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours’. The peasants continue the working traditions of their forefathers; Berger as witness and writer enters into their labours and reaps their produce by re-creating their reality by means of his literary art. 28 Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 139. 24 25

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and slaughter are not contradictory. In his essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’, Berger points out that ‘a peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the statements in that sentence are connected by an and not by a but’.29 The marginalization of the animal and its successive reification are consequences of the industrialization which removed most animals (and the meat production process) from everyday life (with the result that a substantial number of meat eaters have no idea whatsoever about the ingredients of their daily burger). In former times, the look we directed at animals was returned and a process of recognition of likeness and difference set in. With the marginalization of animals and their reduction to raw material, family pets, Disney characters, or the objects of spectacle (as in wildlife films), the fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them.30

For Berger, this alienating process parallels the one by which men have been reduced to isolated and consuming units. Volumes 2 and 3 of the trilogy are concerned with this process. One of many examples for the peasant’s integrated sensibility is the slaughterhouse scene which I have already mentioned. Berger meticulously describes the transformation of cow into meat (which significantly begins with the blindfolding of the cow so that it can no longer see), while the owner of the cow, watching the scenario, reveals bits and pieces of his personal relationship with that particular animal and explains why it needed to be slaughtered right now. It seems impossible, the reader senses, that this peasant will eat his meat in the same fashion as the average consumer. This is not because he is more compassionate but because he knows the cow’s origin, destination and everything in between. Intimate knowledge is his antidote to consumerism. Readings: ‘The Value of Money’ and Once in Europa Amongst Berger’s strongest pieces of prose are two stories which may serve to flesh out what has been said so far; both stories fictionally rework many of the theoretical points mentioned above. ‘The Value of Money’ focuses on 63-year-old Marcel whose two sons won’t take over the farm after him. Edouard, the younger one, brings home a tractor one day with the brand name ‘The Liberator’, the existence of which his father refuses 29 John Berger, ‘Why Look at Animals?’, in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 3–28, p. 7. The essay was first published in 1977, while Berger was working on Pig Earth. 30 Ibid., p. 16.

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to acknowledge. The hard physical work from which the tractor supposedly liberates the farmer is the very essence of Marcel’s being, both in the sense that he cannot conceive of his life without it and that it connects him with his ancestors. When he is imprisoned for kidnapping two tax inspectors who want to make him pay for the gnôle (apple schnapps) he has produced (‘Do you know what this means? It means I’m going to have to pay for my own produce!’31), he looks at his hands ‘which lay idle and heavy in his lap. What has been taken away from me, he said, is the habit of working’.32 ‘Working is a way of preserving the knowledge my sons are losing. I dig the holes … to show my father and his father that the knowledge they handed down has not yet been abandoned’.33 ‘The Liberator’ shares the semantic field with the contemporary ‘setting free’ (for sacking). Marcel intuitively knows that and thus has his own theory about machines: They make sure we know the machines exist. From then onwards working without one is harder. Not having the machine makes the father look oldfashioned to the son, makes the husband look mean to his wife, makes one neighbour look poor to the next. After he has lived a while with not having the machines, they offer him a loan to buy a tractor. A good cow gives 2,500 litres of milk a year. Ten cows give 25,000 litres a year. The price he receives for all that milk during the whole year is the price of a tractor. This is why he needs a loan. When he has bought the tractor, they say: Now to use the tractor fully you need the machines to go with it, we can lend you the money to buy the machines, and you can pay us back month by month. Without these machines, you are not making proper use of your tractor! And so he buys a machine, and then another, and he falls deeper and deeper into debt. Eventually he is forced to sell out. Which is what they planned in Paris … from the very beginning! Everywhere in the world men go hungry, yet a peasant who works without a tractor is unworthy of his country’s agriculture!34

For Marcel, the tractor is more than a symbol for the long-term destruction of social and family bonds. It interrupts the tradition—he is the last in a long line of peasants—and thus symbolizes the loss of working skills together with the loss of a particular sense of time and history.35 Moreover, he highlights the link between the arrival of machines in the country, the loss of independence of the farmer, the functioning of the capitalist market and the pitfalls of consumer society. 33 34 35

Berger, Pig Earth, p. 92. Ibid., p. 101 Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., pp. 81–2. A variation of the theme is provided by Seamus Heaney in his poem ‘Digging’, in which the speaker sits at the window, looks down upon his father digging potatoes, his grandfather digging peat, and talks about the fact that he has got no ‘spade to follow men like them’. Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 3. Heaney, in opposition to Berger, adopts the perspective of the writer who breaks with the tradition, while Berger makes the last survivor the focalizer of his story. 31 32

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Instinctively, he mistrusts the promise of ever-increasing consumption, output and growth. When his wife blames him for being ungrateful and emphasizes that ‘he [Edouard] bought it out of his savings’, Marcel replies, ‘He bought it because he can’t help buying’.36 The first half of the story is based on the confrontations between father and son, about the tractor, about the son selling soap on the market with tricks his father considers fraud, about a wooden press which Marcel still uses to press his apples while Edouard suggests to sell it to a bank or hotel ‘as décor’.37 The second half tells about the visit of the tax inspectors and Marcel’s decision to teach them a lesson. After providing them with gnôle and six sheep as companions to keep them warm,38 he wants to talk to them about justice. They keep on asking how much money he demands for their release, want to teach Marcel the value of money and consider him mad when he demands a tax to be paid for their worrying, suffering, shivering and pain. Marcel’s most desperate moment comes when he realizes that his lesson must fail because of the utter incompatibility of world views. Marcel’s confrontation with the tax inspectors leads him to concede that ‘[i]t ends in defeat because you can only take revenge on those who are your own. Those two up there belong to another time. They are our prisoners and yet no revenge is possible. They would never know what we were avenging’.39 While at first glance, the two parts of the story seem only loosely connected by the fact that Marcel features as focalizer in both of them, there is indeed more interrelatedness than that. The common denominator is work and its value on the one hand, resistance to the capitalization of agriculture on the other. The tractor as liberator, as a symbol for progress and the conquest of nature, made to facilitate the hard work on the field, is also regarded as a major element in the disappearance of people like Marcel. The work of his own hands is devalued and disrespected. The son wants to replace the mare with a tractor, the press with a grinder, the tax inspectors want him to pay for his own produce. The concentration on the longterm consequences of the tractor (to make human labour redundant, to promote consumerism, to deepen the alienation amongst families and between animal and man) together with the ancient habit of expropriating the peasant of a substantial part of his surplus produce makes the strength of the story ‘The Value of Money’. It demonstrates the nexus between all these aspects against the backdrop of a form Berger, Pig Earth, p. 77. To which his father replies, ‘The world has left the earth behind it’. While the son is

36 37

enthusiastic about ‘a dealer in A ... who’d give half a million for it’, the father’s response is ‘What would he do with it?’ (Pig Earth, p. 86). The father is interested in the use value of the press, while for the son, exchange value is all that counts. 38 In accordance with Berger’s notion of the pre-modern and the modern eye contact between animals and men in the essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’, the proximity of sheep and tax inspectors does not produce mutual recognition of likeness and difference. Quite the opposite: ‘The fact that they were herded so closely together with these animals made their isolation sharper’: Pig Earth, p. 98. 39 Ibid., p. 100.

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of thinking which may be called, in reference to Fernand Braudel, the history of the longue durée. While Pig Earth documents life in the village, the stories in Once in Europa are mostly love stories under the sign of industrialism and urbanization. The longest story, which gave the volume its title, is narrated by Odile Blanc from a bird’s eye view: at the moment of narration, she hang-glides together with her son over the valley and the village where she has spent all her life. Looking down, she remembers her life and writes its story on the ‘page of the world below’.40 Her country is now dominated by a huge factory which has played a major role in Odile’s life. The factory has invaded the space of the farmers and now surrounds her father’s home, who until his end refuses to sell his land. Odile has a different attitude towards the factory than her father. She has grown up in the presence of peasantry and industry. The noise of the river Giffre and the siren of the factory are the first sounds she remembers. The river is part of both worlds as it symbolizes the transformation of the old world into the new.41 Odile learns at school that its water produces the electricity which in turn provides the power for the factory where manganese and molybdenum are won. Thus it partakes of nature as well as of nature’s conquest. But for Odile, the factory is not only the invasive viper as it is seen by her father. It is also the place where she meets men, falls in love and mourns for Stepan, the Russian worker whose child she bears and who is killed in the factory. Although Odile is confronted with and lives in both worlds, her sense of place remains that of the peasant. When Stepan asks her where she would like to live— London, Milan, Oslo, Rotterdam, Glasgow—and explains that with his hands he can work everywhere, she reacts with a panic because of the unnaturalness of the idea of moving, and runs away: ‘It had never occurred to me before that somebody could choose where to live’.42 The story juxtaposes the essence and rhythms of peasant work and industrial work. The rhythm of work of the peasant is ‘in a much greater state of flux than the rationalized and regulatory time’ of the industrial worker. ‘There was only one law in the factory that counted: that the ten furnaces be tapped the required number of times every twenty-four hours, and that the castings conform to standard when chemically analyzed’.43 There is no night and day, there are no seasons which govern the rhythm of work. Odile has grown up with the notion that land and Berger, Once in Europa, p. 95. The description of the river is another example of Berger’s refusal to romanticize

40 41

nature. ‘At school, we learned to draw a map of the valley with the river coloured in blue. It was never blue. Sometimes the Giffre was the colour of bran, sometimes it was grey as a mole, sometimes it was milky, and occasionally but very rarely, as rare as the siren for accidents, it was transparent, and you could see every stone on its bed’: Once in Europa, pp. 92–3. 42 Ibid., p. 121. 43 Ibid., p. 124.

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animals have to be treated so that they will continue to contribute to man’s survival. The factory, on the other hand, covers the ground she once walked upon with heaps of dust: ‘There is nothing more dead in the world than this dirt left over after burning at two thousand centigrade’.44 Her imagery though still stems from the animal world—‘I saw the dust. It was the colour of a cow’s liver … dried liver, pulverised into dust’.45 The second man in Odile’s life is Michel, a communist worker in the factory who has lost both his legs in an accident at work. He now runs a small shop together with Odile. Michel keeps on talking about the pollution the factory causes, about the danger for the forest and the cattle and about the unbearable working conditions in the factory, about change and progress. ‘Things can’t go on as they are’,46 is his credo. Odile admires his strength but she is unable to follow his line of thought: Things do go on, I replied, every day, every hour. People work, people go home to eat, feed the cat, watch TV, go to bed, make jam, mend radios, take baths, it all goes on all the while—till one day each of us dies. And that’s what you’re waiting for! he said.

I’m not waiting for anything.47

It is not defeatism, though, which is at the heart of Odile’s matter-of-fact world view, but the remnants of her peasant perspective which make her suspicious of any inflated concept of progress and change.48 Conclusion Marcel’s son Edouard in ‘The Value of Money’ and Michel in ‘Once in Europa’ may be read as personifications of Berger’s two ‘cultures of progress. … At their most heroic these hopes [which the future offers] dwarf Death (La Rivoluzzione o la Morte!). At their most trivial they ignore it (consumerism)’.49 Berger’s focus on the peasant culture of survival in the trilogy is not to be read as the proposal of a third way. It would be naïve, indeed, to argue for a turning back of the historical wheel, which Berger, well-versed in and until today supportive of the materialist conception of history, is not. 46 47 48 44

Ibid., p. 130. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., pp. 146–7. It has to be conceded that Berger here indeed indulges in the gendered essentialism which Charity Scribner (see above) criticizes. The story rather woodcut-like juxtaposes the sterility of the factory to the idea of woman as the site of renewal, fecundity and wisdom. 49 Berger, Pig Earth, p. 204. 45

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But even though he is far from idealizing the peasantry and claims that ‘[i]n a just world [it] would no longer exist’, the confrontation of the peasant ‘culture of survival’ to the capitalist (and socialist) ‘cultures of progress’ leads him to speak up in favour of the first, not least for political reasons. Berger’s politics in Into Their Labours is not to be grasped, I would argue, in traditional socialist concepts, which Kiernan Ryan claims when he writes, What finally crystallises out of these stories is a bracing vision of the collective strength and endurance in work and love of people living together, and of the communal impulse to push through and beyond all the particular divisions, frustrations and defeats: to survive. Survival, in fact, in Berger’s view, is the essential wisdom which the peasant experience can, and perhaps must, teach us in our struggle to defend and develop socialism.50

Along with Geoff Dyer I would rather read his trilogy as an offshoot of the ‘developing movement of green socialism, of a drift away from the ideal of conquest of nature to one of reconciliation with it’.51 Emphasizing that productivity does not necessarily reduce scarcity and the dissemination of knowledge does not in itself promote democracy, Berger’s appreciation of the peasant’s suspicion of progress might indeed, in Greg Garrard’s words, ‘suggest an avenue as yet inadequately explored in ecocriticism, in which environmental critique meets the postcolonial politics of resistance to economic globalization’.52 If one looks at the likely future course of world history, envisaging either the further extension and consolidation of corporate capitalism in all its brutalism, or a prolonged, uneven struggle waged against it, a struggle whose victory is not certain, the peasant experience of survival may well be better adapted to this long and harsh perspective than the continually reformed, disappointed, impatient progressive hope of an ultimate victory.53

Berger does not keep quiet about the oppressive socioeconomic relations which produce the peasantry as a class. What stands out in his engagement with the life of the peasant, though, is his adamant insistence on the major importance of the human being. The fascination of the stories is due to the depiction of beauty, harshness, the potential richness of human life within the context of human relations whose centre is man in his emotional and spiritual wholeness.54 Even an abstract notion such as the loss of a particular way of historical thinking is here measured to suit the individual. If this makes Berger an essentialist, so be it. But this is also the source for the books’ critical, political and environmentalist edge. 52 53 54 50 51

Ryan, ‘Socialist Fiction’, p. 184. Dyer, Ways of Telling, p. 125. Garrard, Ecocriticism, p. 118. Berger, Pig Earth, pp. 212–3. Cf. Welz, Ways of Seeing, p. 197.

Chapter 16

Green Links: Ecosocialism and Contemporary Scottish Writing Graeme Macdonald

A decent golf swing requires good balance and a solid, effective stance. Equally useful is canny positional sense, involving an ability to strike in accordance with both natural and artificial environmental conditions. Assessing where to aim and when to hit the sweet spot demands awareness of the certainties and weaknesses of terrain. For good golfers, a discriminating eye anticipates approaching or hidden hazards. Responsible players respect the ‘natural’ threats a good golf course must provide. The sport thrives on such avoidance, having done so since its modern inception in Renaissance Scotland, where it was played around natural obstacles on the commons.1 From then on, golf has increasingly problematized nature in its profligate and increasingly uncommon use of natural ‘sweet spots’. From fairway to greener-than-green green, a golfer’s vision focuses necessarily on the cultivated middle ground. A player cannot let the wild demons of uncultured grasslands, hardy perennials or dune slacks encroach upon vision or thought. The successful golfer evades unsculpted hedgerows and undeveloped lochsides, to achieve a round of economy and efficiency. This deliberate avoidance of natural hazards symbolizes the divergent green aspirations of golfers and those environmentalists and ecologists concerned with the sustainability of this globally popular pursuit. Golf creates artificial risks by incorporating, circumventing and altering the natural world. As courses continue to spread across the world, groups campaigning against the wider environmental impact of golf’s intensifying and poorly regulated relations with corporate capital argue that the development of the sport creates even larger ‘off-course’ natural hazards, as a matter of course. The history of golf is characterized by the redevelopment of the commons into exclusive territory. This has accelerated exponentially in the last 20 years. Corporate expansion in the globalizing age has sought maximum profit from lucrative, commoditized forms of leisure and tourism, operating on a world scale. Such growth has caused fierce controversy globally, borne by the sport’s pressures 1 China—experiencing a controversial boom in gated golf course developments— might dispute Scotland’s claim to be the ‘home of golf’. Some Chinese argue that a version of the game existed in China 500 years previous to Scotland’s ‘invention’. See Guillaume Giroir, ‘Gated golf communities in China’, in Fulong Wu (ed.), China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Urbanism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), pp. 235–55.

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on zoning, land and water in vulnerable territories throughout the world.2 Golf’s social exclusivity is also problematic. ‘The inherently snobbish game is golf’, wrote George Orwell, ‘which causes whole stretches of countryside to be turned into carefully guarded class preserves’.3 In its expansionist mode, where many course developments service a powerful and cosmopolitan class of high-paying elites, Orwell’s description of golf in England has become globally salient. All these concerns have extended into the realms of social ecology, environmental science, human rights and political geography, exposing the ecological determinations of local government and its role in regulating the penetrating reach of late, globalized capitalism into local and national territories. Such a context has registered a significant and politicized cultural resistance to issues that reach far beyond sport, as this chapter’s analysis of Scottish eco-literature demonstrates. If the private production and capitalization of exclusive territory is the aim and the measure of the architecture of global golf, then Scotland is exemplary. As the self-styled and aggressively marketed ‘home of golf’, the country has been subject to several high-profile developments that demonstrate the late twentiethcentury transition in the Scottish economy to services, and the relentless pursuit of tourism as a key ‘internationalizing’ industry. These projects have not been without controversy, as might be expected in a nation where a history of rural landscape development has been accompanied by emotive cultural and political issues of clearance and dispossession. Enclosure is the central concern here, finding an apt metaphor in the prosecution of the game itself, for the corralling of space is the golfer’s objective; the ambition to make that wee synthetic ball invisible; swallowed by the hole in the green. No golfer, however, manages to keep out of the rough. At some point, negotiation of unsettled and unsettling natural space— territory an early John Burnside poem names ‘the hinterland’—confronts not only those who play this sport but also those affected by its aggressive development of the ‘natural’ and economic landscape within and beyond its boundaries. A ‘hinterland’ is often understood as an area surrounding but also somehow beyond social forms of activity; posited as open, untouched wilderness. (The untamed landscape, it must be emphasized, is a key feature in the marketing of the most exclusive courses worldwide. Golf trades on the pleasures of ‘externalized nature’, and any course is dependent on a disingenuous binary between ‘wild’ and ‘tamed’ landscape features.) Modern environmentalism has shown this notion of wilderness to be idealistic at best, by demonstrating that even actually untouched There is a considerable interdisciplinary literature on the problems of golf courses worldwide. See, for example, Richard P. Hiskes, ‘Missing the Green: Golf Course Ecology, Environmental Justice and the Local “Fulfillment” of the Human Right to Water’, Human Rights Quarterly 32 (2010): pp. 326–41; John Barton, ‘How Green is Golf?’, Golf Digest, May 2008; E. Robbins, ‘Golf War Syndrome: How playing eighteen holes endangers the earth’, http://www.utne.com/atc/15atcgolf.html. 3 George Orwell, ‘Review of Cricket Country by Edmund Blunden’, in George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, vol. 3, As I Please, 1943–1946, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (4 vols, Boston: Nonpareil, 2005 [1968]), pp. 47–50 (p. 49). 2

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wildernesses are in various ways ‘touched’ by human activity—from local/regional forms of development and conservation to biospheric and global geo-economic systems. This critique is significant for a leftist environmentalism that seeks to reconsider orthodox notions of nature, and argues that the structural features and conditions of capitalism must be considered as a dominant form of ecology that affects all others. In this view, capitalism must be conceived as being as embroiled in debates over local and global forms of management, protection, conservation and correction as much as those in more identifiably ‘green’ areas that define the ‘natural’ areas of the world.4 There is considerable dovetailing, therefore, between those critical of capitalism’s unbalanced ecology and campaigns for environmental justice. It is here where creative writing has proved a prominent connecting force, and later on in this chapter I will argue that Scottish eco-literature exemplifies such a meeting of ‘red’ and green’ perspectives. ‘Green’ cultural responses to the golfing debate establish its connection to wider Scottish—and global—ecological concerns. National Scottish traditions of communalism and egalitarianism have been tested by the discussion, which has involved prominent cultural commentators from the editor of the Scottish Review of Books to notable writers, musicians, journalists and academics, who have unified in dissenting to the damage to social and natural ecologies wrought by various course development plans. A robust debate between such cultural figures and ‘green’ politicians, business interests, civil, and fiscal agencies has offered various ecological (and some might say nonecological) positions.5 In a polemic published in the Guardian newspaper, Burnside outlined the natural devastation and economic exploitation wrought by what he termed ‘the ugly, brutal moonscape of corporate golf’ on ecologically sensitive coastal territory.6 Presenting an alarming litany detailing multifarious golf course pesticides, fertilizers and herbicides and their threat to both humans and local natural fauna (largely unknown to the majority who come into contact with them), the essay is characteristic of Scottish eco-literature in citing the resonant and emotive legacy of clearance; outlining the human and environmental costs of Scotland’s modern history of land consolidation by the related forces of agribusiness, leisure and absentee landlordism. Railing against an imperialist history of short-term, profitmotivated mismanagement of Scottish rural and urban spaces, Burnside, among the most prominent of contemporary British eco-writers, condemns the classic moves of capitalist accumulation in the global leisure industry. Integral to this argument is the suggestion that this is the latest stage in a longer history of the 4 See, for example, David Harvey, ‘What’s Green and Makes the Environment Go Round?’, in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds), The Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 327–55; Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (London: Verso, 2010 [1984]). 5 The most public and controversial development has been the Trump Corporation’s development of a new links course with luxury holiday village, hotels, and a residential zone on an ecologically sensitive dune site in coastal Aberdeenshire. This has met with fierce resistance from a variety of sources. 6 John Burnside, ‘Bunkered by Mr Big’, Guardian, 28 July 2001.

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commercial creation of a romantic and ‘perfect’ Scottish landscape, ripe for play and open for business. The construction of natural (often as national) authenticity helps sell Scotland’s global role as the ‘home’ of golf, image-tinged with abstract local petitions towards pride in the landscape. Recalling the sport’s original, democratic sense of communal play and environmental responsibility, Burnside’s essay astutely plugs into the representative and environmental anxieties of a young Parliament concerned with long-term modes of political and ecological sustainability. It also links Scottish developments with global examples of commons dispossession and labour exploitation. The close appeals to the ‘real’ or virtual sense of Scotland’s political autonomy underline the importance of its cultural ability not to be seduced by the offerings of ‘corporateland’: The fact that large swathes of our landscape are once again being reshaped and violated to create a playground for rich outsiders should set alarm bells ringing for everyone in this supposedly autonomous region. This new trend in land use is not in the interests of the majority of Scots, or of our natural heritage. If we really have shed our feudal trappings, and become an independent country, then we require a legislature that protects the people, and the environmental diversity of Scotland, rather than allowing our already threatened dwelling place to become the ‘home of corporate golf’. In fact, in a world where ordinary people are working, in exciting and imaginative ways, to find a humane and ecologically sound alternative to Corporateland, we can surely do better than allowing ourselves to become the servants of its favourite pastime.7

The close relations between Burnside’s political interventions and his creative work epitomize the solid seam of ecological concern running through the most noted works of the last hundred years in Scottish writing. This has only begun to be properly theorized and documented by critics,8 and what remains critically understated is the left orientation of Scottish eco-culture, one that has consistently sought to reveal—and critique—unseen connections between capital, nature, and space. These are internationalist connections made through local and planetary outlooks. The left direction of contemporary Scottish eco-literature is not solely about ‘saving’ or ‘reclaiming’ Scottish sovereign territory in the name of a romanticized political vision of the Scottish landscape—a position that several writers of the Scottish Renaissance movement could be accused of promoting. Ibid. Burnside’s views are echoed by those who see the international commodification of sport and the aggressive promotion of a new, internationalized leisure economy as an indication of the structured inequalities at the centre of globalization. See for example, Toby Miller, Geoffrey Lawrence, Jim Mackay and David Rowe, ‘Modifying the Sign: Sport and Globalization’, Social Text 17/3 (1999): pp. 15–33. 8 The most comprehensive to date is Louisa Gairn’s Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). See also Gairn’s ‘Clearing Space: Kathleen Jamie and Ecology’, in Berthold Schoene (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 236–44. 7

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It is, rather, about a reconsideration of the way the relations between capital and ecology are always intertwined, a point often subsumed in the softer forms of landscape-worship that motor some mainstream ecological (and ecocritical) arguments. For example, several critics have focused on the spiritualist bent in Burnside’s representation of natural territory, pondering the significance of the frequent instances where characters find themselves alone in such ‘nonplaces’ as the above mentioned ‘hinterland’. Such ground is often sacralized, in Burnside and nature writing in general; what appears a mundane place, proximate but largely unnoticed to human dwelling is frequently described as a space of solace and transformation. For Rory Watson, the representation of the sacred in Burnside’s depiction of the human experience of nature offers ‘a language for understanding the numinous nature of the ordinary’.9 But what appears hallowed territory can also be unsettling. Readings like Watson’s, while legitimate, tend to privilege Romanticist and philosophically contemplative features in Burnside’s depiction of the relations between humans and ‘nature’, but work to de-realize the work’s materialist inclination. David Harvey insists capitalism should be seen as a kind of ecosystem in itself, where ‘flows of money and of commodities and the transformative actions of human beings (in the building of intricate ways of urban living, for example) have to be understood as fundamentally ecological processes’.10 In this view, to be ecocritical is to be critical of capitalism’s ‘natural’ excesses: its structured unevenness, its tendency towards various forms of crisis, including eco-disaster. This chapter will highlight such an ‘eco-Marxist’ strand in Scottish writing, revealing how lines between common sense, communal, and corporate notions of nature expose various uneven ecologies within the historical material world. The lines between these categories are often blurred, bringing a politically productive dialectical tension discernible across a range of modern Scottish literature. In ecocritical terms, this might be seen as stemming from a Marxist tradition that makes explicit capital’s endless production (and inevitable exploitation) of nature: how capital’s acquisition and enclosure of natural space and its subsequent resource extraction ‘helps’ propagate capitalist modes of accumulation. In this context the unsettled psychology and physical displacement that many Scottish literary characters experience in natural spaces might either be attributed to, or be displaced by, attention to a process of material unsettlement in the production history of Scottish landscape development. The ‘crazy golf’ that ‘continues along the coastline | for miles’ in Burnside’s poem ‘Adolescence’, embodies this process.11 ‘Crazy Golf’ is linked to ‘the quicksand of measures’, a phrasing suggesting the entanglement of natural and monetary economies of movement and scale that characterizes Harvey’s notion of left ecology. ‘Nature’ is often imaged as a kind of active revenant in Burnside’s work; haunting or reclaiming territory lost or violently reshaped by human modes of 9 Roderick Watson, The Literature of Scotland: The Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave, 2007), p. 321. 10 Harvey, ‘What’s Green?’, p. 331. 11 John Burnside, ‘Adolescence’, Common Knowledge (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991), p. 58.

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production that seem uninterested in biodiversity or conservation. ‘Lost’ imagines fog curling round and obscuring human habitats, ‘like a tourist, filling up | corners, measuring spaces’. It draws attention to a myopic appropriation of ‘hinterland’, one that fixes it to exclusive and expropriating forms of agribusiness and capitalintensive forms of leisure; that drives to enclose and develop public territory, making constant incursions into disputed, limited spaces across the world. This process exists ‘behind our practised blindness, where we keep | private forests, mountains, shifting sands | on lucid, instinct maps of holy ground | we render to the fog when we are found’.12 The ‘shifting sands’ of ‘Lost’ suggests the natural rhythm of tides and winds, nature’s territorial gains and losses over time. Yet in its disturbing echoes of the way in which landscape and territory can be materially ‘shifted’—sold, moved and reshaped as ‘natural capital’ for business and profit— the phrase tacks in another, more politicized direction.13 This is about raised and razing beaches. In marketing and privatizing the commons—for Burnside, ‘holy ground’—golf and the golfing industry encapsulate modern Scottish writing’s politicizing of green issues, and its attempt to de-fog the ‘coverage’ of land speculation and the uneven development of natural resources. The private ownership, corporate development and ecologically disputed management of Scotland’s landscape and the forging of an effective ecocritical stance in Scottish culture have always had broader political ramifications, particularly on the nationalist question. This has intensified in the devolutionary period. The Scottish Parliament—and the Scottish National Party—have vigorously promoted a green direction for Scotland’s environmental and economic future. Inevitable contradictions between capital and conservation have surfaced and the writing analysed below illuminates them. An ecocritical literature provides a novel approach to the close, often fraught, relations between culture and politics in Scotland, especially in perennial debates over nation and state. It also animates discussion concerning Scotland’s present and future participation— whether independently or as part of the UK State—in economic and cultural forms of globalization. Scottish eco-literature must therefore be seen as devolutionary, not only in its historical connections and differences with UK literature and politics but in its movements within and across local/national/global networks. That the global ecocritical movement has grown roughly continuous with the devolutionary momentum in Scottish culture ensures that ecocritical insistence on the vital connection between local and planetary perspectives pressurizes (though, crucially, does not necessarily displace) nation-centric concerns with territory and polity. It is logical, then, that these texts highlight ways in which multinational, ‘extra-Scottish’ interests leverage degrees of Scottish autonomy and dictate relations between transnational forms of capital and local state institutions. They John Burnside, ‘Lost’, The Hoop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988), p. 48. ‘Natural Capital’, as George Monbiot remarks, is the term an ‘ecologically aware’

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big business now uses to measure nature’s ‘stock’, in an ‘approach that reduces the biosphere to a subsidiary of the economy [and] Nature is turned into a business plan’. See ‘A Ghost Agreement’, posted 1 November 2010, http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/11/01/aghost-agreement/.

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also influence various concepts of territoriality. In doing so, they reveal occasional spasms of political and economic insularity. If eco-literature must be local it cannot be parochial. Neither can it afford to be purely textual in its literariness. A key question, therefore, underlying any analysis of culture’s role in Scottish green politics is how a devolved and green Scottish writing balances its discernibly leftist orientations with the political economy not only of specifically Scottish environmentalism but also a wider UK one, at a time when global perspectives— in culture and ecology, and also in finance and real estate—are irresistible. Prominent Scottish texts from the last 40 years advance the environmental consciousness visible throughout a twentieth-century Scottish literature galvanized by recognizably leftist forms of resistance to capital exploitation and the causes of ecological despoliation. The damaging power of large corporations and North Atlanticist neo-liberal economic policies are shown in later, ‘climate-change-era’ work as not solely limited to Scotland’s social and natural environment. Landmark novels like George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe (1972) and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) register the corrosive effect that an aggressive and imperialist militaryindustrial complex has had, not only in initiating processes of modern clearance and dispossession on vulnerable local communities but also increasing environmental waste, pollution and biohazards on an accretive, global scale. These novels reflect and anticipate contemporary—and possible future—conflicts apparent in the resource industry. Together with works such as James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late (1994) and Translated Accounts (2001), and Burnside’s own novels Living Nowhere (2003) and Glister (2008), they form a cluster of texts imagining scenarios where individuals and groups of limited political power confront the social and economic causes of ecological disaster and environmental ruin. Such writing (also recognizable in work by writers such as Irvine Welsh, A.L. Kennedy, Alan Warner, Iain Banks and Ken Macleod) registers the damage late capitalism and excessive consumerism has produced in local sectors of Scottish society. This work, which has been acclaimed as among the most aesthetically ambitious writing in English since the 1980s, is propelled by an unashamedly leftist position critical of conventional British (and often Scottish) political, socioeconomic and cultural structures. It also engages with the traumatic and challenging effects of globalized capitalism: in the extra-national power of multinational corporations and uneven capital flows; in forced movements of migrant labour and the creation of new refugee populations; in the unregulated growth of the new world megalopolises; in solidifying class inequalities and implementing new pressures on the domestic appropriations and qualifications of language, landscape, home, religion, nationality and citizenship. Less commented upon, yet very apparent in this devolutionary literature, however, are its ecological and environmental commitments—and these are very much connected to these glocalized issues. Since Hugh MacDiarmid’s evocations of ‘History’s hazelraw’ in his first ‘Synthetic Scots’ poems of the 1920s, there has been a crucial political relation between naturalism and materialism in Scottish culture. The Scottish modernists of the first half of the twentieth century consisted of a group of openly leftist and

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internationalist writers motivated by varying degrees of nationalism, republicanism and socialism. A green re-reading of this writing sees an ecopoetics of landscape and territory that is consciously ecopolitical, connecting inequalities in land and resource use with campaigns for national independence and anti-capitalism. This writing registers painful urban transition. It rails against inegalitarian land ownership and the mismanagement of specifically regional environmental and social ecologies (land grabs, exhaustion of fish stocks, tenant clearance, etc.). The privatized commodification of Scottish territory and its uneasy relations with British and foreign modes of administration is a recurring feature of a largely rural Scottish modernism. It reaches its apotheosis with Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe, an novel of apocalypse wrought by oil-driven modernity in the northern Orkney islands. Published two years after oil was struck in the North Sea in 1970 and just prior to its drilled extraction in 1974, Greenvoe bridges the earlier green concerns in Scottish modernism with contemporary anxieties about an expanded multinational capitalism’s effects on vulnerable space and peripheral place. Relating the accelerated eviction, evacuation, and eventual ‘death’ of the fictional island ‘Hellya’ on the Orkney archipelago, the narrative details a period of five days in which the island is taken over by a sinister organization the locals call ‘Black Star’. Hellya is blasted, reshaped and eventually sealed off, becoming a moribund territory. ‘Black Star’ is a cipher for the oil industry and the international military-industrial complex—heavily invested by US interests—whose presence in Scotland, especially in the vacant and strategically ‘useful’ rural areas has been a source of dispute since 1945. Many studies of Greenvoe elicit a type of ‘deep ecology’ resident in the novel’s preoccupation with ethnicity, myth and spiritualism. An historical ‘saga’ narrative of island imperialism, Edenic fall and the disappearance of organic community inspires cultural nationalist interpretations. Such readings downplay Greenvoe’s ecosocialism, fashioned, among other features, by the novel’s formal modernism; especially its use of multiple narrators and focalizers. A community that still in many places relies on a system of commodity exchange is violently—and for the most part unwillingly—wrested into the industrial mode of capitalist production. A ‘red’ ecocritical reading reveals an early literary petition for ‘glocal’ social and ecological equality and responsibility. Contemporaneous with the Occidental Company’s terminalization of the small Orkney island of Flotta; with the threat of corporate uranium mining, and shadowed by military biochemical experiments that rendered ‘dead’ the Scottish island of Gruinard, Greenvoe reads in places like a Scottish Silent Spring. Its concerns with the hegemonic control of ‘marginal’ spaces by state-backed multinational corporations are balanced by its imagining the possibility of alternative communal patterns of green living and creativity, supplemented by frequent ruminations on equal energy consumption and responsible animal husbandry.14 The novel’s ending presents a remarkable parallel with recent island community buyout movements, reasserting cooperative ownership and motivated by ecological thinking. See, for example, Alastair McIntosh’s Soil and Soul: People Versus Corporate Power (London: Arum, 2001). 14

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The narrative uses an effective proleptic mode of ironic inevitability. Readers, unlike most characters, know something bad is coming to the island yet are unclear as to the impending scale and the speed. The abrupt manner of the events of the last chapter prove a shocking break from the reflective prose of the rest of the novel; maximizing the shock of the ensuing ecological disaster that affects all animal, human, sea and plantlife. Natural and social ecologies quickly collapse. Resistance seems futile. The violent switch from low-level agricultural lifestyles to large-scale industrial labour changes the ancient landscape with devastating speed. The tone maximizes the shock: The cone of Korsfea was shorn off. The loch of Warston was drained; red-throated divers and eiders and swans had to seek other waters. Hellya was probed and tunnelled to the roots. The island began to be full of noises—a roar and a clangour from morning to night. A thin shifting veil of dust hung between the island and the sun. The sea birds made wider and wider circuits about the cliffs. Rabbits dug new warrens at the very edge of the crags. There was pollution in the sea. Bert Kerston hauled his creels in the rocky sheltered bay beyond the Taing, and four of the seven lobsters were inert. … He noted that on this particular day the burn, as far as he could see, was all khaki coloured scum, and the filth fumed out over the water of the bay for half a mile and more. A haddock floated on the surface, belly up. He turned for home.15

Digging and drilling are no longer just farming terms in the new and devastating international energy economy that Mackay Brown’s novel attempts to challenge. The ‘Green’ in Greenvoe becomes significant as the Black Star project reshapes the island—eating up farmland, poisoning water sources, killing lobsters and fish: ‘the sea was rotten, dead haddocks drifting through the sound’.16 Alienated forms of temporary industrial labour replace an obsolete fishing industry. The ransacking of the island’s ‘roots’ corrupts all forms of its biological life but multiple narrative foci counterpoint total erasure of social memory and story; the tunnelling and boring of Black Star are paralleled by the historical ‘digging’ of the subsistence fisherman, writer and Marxist, ‘the Skarf’, the novel’s heroic failure. The Skarf’s sunken fate symbolizes the difficult challenge of left intellectual and active resistance against corporate land appropriation and labour exploitation. His socialism is drowned out but not without lingering influence, as the novel concludes in a future island reclaimed from ‘the project’. The closing words of Greenvoe’s penultimate section, especially the phrase ‘seedless island’, are countered by a return to a communal harvest. The vital ritual of sowing and planting for a more sustainable future is a feature of the last section’s gesture to environmental justice: the descendants of the island’s cleared community return and reinstall ‘the word’. This is not, as has George Mackay Brown, Greenvoe (Harlow: Longman, 1977 [1972]), p. 223. Ibid., pp. 241–2.

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been suggested, a form of pre-capitalist pastoral nostalgia. It’s unclear whether the novel ends advocating a progressive or mythic-return future; an uncertainty that lends a political agency to an ecologically speculative reading. The preventable element of Greenvoe’s disaster the novel deliberately leaves ambivalent, for present and future readers to engage with. Greenvoe’s blend of realism and myth, pastoral and apocalypse, with antiimperialist politics proved heavily influential in Scottish culture, with plays such as John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973) and films like Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983) exploring familiar themes of Highland decline and dispossession within a history of Anglo-American imperialism. Always involved are patterns of iniquitous land seizure and capital accumulation by dispossession, accompanied by the threat of environmental catastrophe. The latter phenomenon constitutes a recognizable sub-genre of Scottish literature since Greenvoe, especially in the dystopian mode that Imre Szeman has identified as ‘eco-apocalypse’; driven by a bleak vision of the dark future of capitalist modernity. Compelled by a pedagogic discourse, this is ‘a genre of disaster designed to modify behaviour and transform the social’.17 Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), generally regarded as the most crucial novel of the late twentieth-century revival in Scottish literature, fits this description perfectly. Lanark’s nationalist and socialist politics are well recorded, as is its experimental realist/fantasy form. Its eco-apocalyptic credentials are less commented upon. Lanark, the main protagonist of the fantasy sections of the novel’s dual narrative, is driven by the creative possibility of a radically different Scottish environment. His quest typifies the novel’s futurity politics—a keystone of green philosophy. Gray’s is a symptom-led novel, offering an apparently dystopian vision of the crisisridden future of unregulated capitalism, where powerful and corrupt corporations hiding behind the technocratic guise of humane social and environmental projects, manage a drastically uneven system of later capitalism. In Lanark, Scotland has become a corporate state run entirely by various networked international oligarchies. Weak humans literally provide the main source of subsistence, as well as energy, in a dark, decaying and poisoned world. Time is commoditized and can literally be bought from the Quantum Company—by way of private health care and insurance. Companies with names like ‘Nullity Green’ offer ‘Therms boosts’ for those that can afford it—vital energy unevenly distributed and harvested from the drained bodies of the poor. Lanark’s home world of ‘Unthank’ presents a hellish projection of a Glasgow-to-come, but very recognizable is a present-day, ‘pre-makeover’ Glasgow experiencing the first neo-liberal shockwaves of early Thatcherism. It is a world of hidden poisons and pollutants, where regional conflict over access to mineral resources and food shortages affect local populaces. In such a manner, Lanark’s eco-apocalyptic vision, like all effective allegories, challenges 17 Imre Szeman, ‘System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster’, South Atlantic Quarterly 106/ 4 (2007): pp. 805–23 (p. 816). Elements in the science fiction of Iain Banks and Ken Macleod also fit this description.

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readers to consider both the extent of its exaggeration of the present and also the inevitability of what is to come, should that present condition not somehow be resisted and ultimately changed. Ecological and apocalyptic threats—engineered biohazards, pollutant spillage and resource waste—are common throughout this future world, but the novel makes the proximity of this ‘fantasy’ to free-market Thatcherism very clear. Informal collusions between government agencies and big-business interests are revealed to Lanark as he journeys through an increasingly chaotic, disaster-prone world, refusing to disavow the potential planetary benefits an international form of localism might provide. The privatization of natural resources such as water—and even air—establish this 1981 novel’s prescience, in its speculations of future resource grabs. Some have seen in Lanark an exaggerated sense of Glasgow’s decline, though when retrospectively envisioned its recurrent images of the unequal class and regional dispersion of health and industrial decay remain salient. The novel also registers (and thus perhaps anticipates) some of the ‘red’ criticism levelled at neo-liberal ‘green’ initiatives serving to expand capitalism by ‘greenwashing’ it. In Lanark, this is evinced by the manner in which corporate power harnesses technological developments to colonize consciousness. A series of image deceits— in ubiquitous consumer advertising and government policy—serve to depoliticize the populace. Corporate claims for their resourceful management of the world are in fact revealed as a form of environmental irresponsibility, an example of what Harvey calls ‘ecological modernization’, where capital eager to prove itself ‘green’ fails to check the ongoing causes of pollution and carbon overproduction in the very logic of capitalism’s endless push for enclosure, profit and growth.18 The government of future Glasgow masks its policies of overproduction and its prosecution of war for the resources of other regions in what is starkly revealed to Lanark as an ecologically spent and democratically exhausted world. Citizen awareness is reduced by technological sclerosis, satirically illustrated by Lanark’s first experience of a ‘mohome’, where atomized residents literally live in domestically fitted cars that provide a disingenuous green projection of the world on their windscreen (an aspersion to the eco-paradox inherent in the ubiquitous use of the natural landscape in car advertising). Lanark shut the door and leaned back with a feeling of relief. Sunlight streamed in through the windows and the car seemed to be thrusting slowly forward through a shrubbery of rosebushes. Green leaves and heavy white blossoms brushed across the windscreen and past the windows of the doors. He saw golden-brown bees working in the hearts of the roses and heard the drowsy humming, the rustle of leaves, some distant bird calls. Mrs Macfee took a small can from a shelf and pressed the top. A fine mist smelling like roses came out. She sighed and leaned back with closed eyes saying, ‘I don’t need to see it. The sound and scent are good enough for me’. …

See Harvey, ‘What’s Green?’

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The roses parted before the windscreen and the car, with a sound of gurgling water, floated like a yacht onto a circular lake surrounded by hills sloping up from the water’s edge and clothed from base to summit in a drapery of the most gorgeous flower blossoms, scarcely a green leaf visible among the sea of odorous and fluctuating colour. The lake was of great depth but so transparent that the bottom, which seemed to be a mass of small round pearly pebbles, was distinctly visible whenever the eye allowed itself not to see, far down in the inverted heaven, the duplicate blooming of the hills. The whole impression was of richness, warmth, colour, quietness, softness and delicacy. … Macfee shouted ‘Sentimental rot!’ and violently twisted a switch. The interior became part of a sharp red convertible speeding down a multilane freeway under a dazzling sun. A swarm of dots grew visible in the heat haze ahead. The dots became a pack of motorcyclists. The car accelerated … .19

In Unthank, individuals alienated from each other take refuge in simulations of a green utopia. This ‘inverted heaven’ is, however, sharply transformed into a ‘reality’ image of auto-hell, signifying planetary levels of violence and death caused by hydrocarbonized modes of living. Lanark, as this passage exemplifies, is a novel that poses dialectical challenges, by tasking its readers to connect the realistic and speculative realms. Will the ‘real’ world of Glasgow/Scotland sow such a monstrous ecocidal future? The novel’s obsession with ascertaining a clear and sustainable vision of the world is not solely to do with exposing capitalism’s projections of a false ‘techno-utopia’ but also with being wary of the damage caused by ongoing forms of capitalist imperialism, damage the majority of the populace cannot directly (or perhaps refuse to) see. The social system that will trigger environmental apocalypse is everywhere in Lanark but hardly ever witnessed, or resisted by the general public. Gray has consistently been critical of the deleterious effects of local municipal corruption and UK state economic policy on his home city through the three convulsive neo-liberal decades since Lanark’s publication. The damage to social as well as natural ecologies by the retraction of state welfare, the collapse of heavy industry and the corporate makeover of Glasgow are preoccupations of contemporary Glaswegian writing. The urban modernism of Gray’s friend and contemporary James Kelman might appear unlikely in the context of this chapter, but its green credentials can be easily established. They demonstrate the connection of red and green in struggles for occupational (and environmental) health and safety, struggles that have been identified as belonging to larger movements for environmental justice.20 Many of Kelman’s stories are set on and around the toxic wastegrounds of defunct heavy industry. Themes of urban mismanagement and class victimization abound in this work which, like Gray’s, came into prominence in the Thatcherite 1980s, a volatile era of transition for the West of Scotland Alasdair Gray, Lanark (London: Paladin, 1987 [1981]), pp. 446-7. See, for example, Joan Martínez-Alier, ‘“Environmental Justice” (Local and

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Global)’, in Jameson and Miyoshi, The Cultures of Globalization, p. 322.

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working class. During this time of an unevenly spread British deindustrialization, Raymond Williams was arguing that anyone interested in the relation between socialism and ecology needed to confront the potentially contrary relation between green arguments for clean air and working-class poverty. Since at least the time of the Industrial Revolution, industrialism has had fraught relations with the concept of environmentalism; not only as the negative effects of an unhealthy environment manifest in the landscape and the physical bodies of a workforce but also because of the opportunities for labour that arise from the very industrial growth that pollutes locales as well as the wider biosphere. As Williams notes, Welsh miners don’t need to be told of the need for a cleaner, coal-free future, they carry the deleterious effects of industrial insecurity and poor labour conditions in their lungs and in their living conditions.21 What does a miner do in a cleaner world without mines? To work in a ‘clean’ industry may be notionally healthier but perhaps no less disempowering, if the labour experience remains problematic. Yet, as Williams astutely noted, the solution cannot be a call for endless increases to production; a call that has been—and continues to be—made by some socialists. Such contradictions haunt a left environmentalism and have been a crucial feature in a strand of Scottish literature that imagines ways to confront them. A recurring concern with depleted breath and poor air quality born from industrial and meteorological conditions has motivated the politics of form and representation in Glaswegian writing. This reveals a form of class-bound environmental degradation. In work by writers like Jeff Torrington, Tom Leonard and Kelman can be detected a fascination with class aspirations: social, linguistic, and physical.22 Shortness of breath, the depletion of voice and restriction of airways are afflictions that form a pneumatological connection between this writing and an entire thematic history of the degradation of the working-class voice in literature and in politics. Similar connections between the polluted working-class body and the toxic industrial environment have been carried on in Burnside’s work, most notably in his novels Living Nowhere (2003) and Glister (2008). The former depicts 21 Raymond Williams’, Socialism and Ecology’, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, ed. Robin Gable (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 210–26. Williams reminds us in the same chapter of the ‘significant’ damage to the earth made by preindustrial agricultural development and warns that ‘we shall get nowhere in thinking about these problems if we think that it is only the distinctive forms of modern industrial production that represent the problems of living well and sensibly on the earth’ (p. 212). The real concern is for ‘uncontrolled commercial exploitation’. 22 An important background to Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late (1994) is his year of voluntary work for victims of asbestosis in Glasgow: see his ‘A Brief Note on the War Being Waged by the State Against the Victims of Asbestos’, in Some Recent Attacks: Essays Personal and Political (Stirling: AK Press, 1992), pp. 59–63, and ‘Scottish Law and a Victim of Asbestos’ and ‘Justice Is Not Money’, in “And the Judges Said . . .” (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 194–203; pp. 204–16. Tom Leonard has written on the importance of breath in the history of poetic voice: see his Intimate Voices (1984) and ‘The Common Breath’, Edinburgh Review 126 (2009). See also Jeff Torrington’s novel Swing, Hammer, Swing! (1993).

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the transition from heavy manufacturing in Britain from the 1970s to the present, through the effect it has on generations of families of Scottish and East European ‘migrants’ working in the steelworks in the town of Corby in Northamptonshire. So inured are the inhabitants of ‘industrial-era’ Corby to the ash and ore flakes that whirl around the town from the coke smelters of the aluminium plant, they have to look twice to confirm when ‘real’ snow is falling. The burning smell of the plant’s waste is pervasive; visual confirmation of environmental despoliation is such that it is virtually accepted as natural. Pollution enters lungs and throats discreetly, literally shading the skin of Tommy, the ex-miner from Fife who has moved his family from the exhausted coal resources of Scotland to the Midlands. Ominously, Tommy works in ‘by-products’, a job that metaphorically denotes expendability and literally petrifies him over a long-term period. At the beginning of Living Nowhere, real snow does fall, covering the industrial dirt that usually encompasses bus shelters, smears windowsills and coats washing lines. The snow occasions temporary relief from the monotony of its artificial other. Through this irony Burnside’s novel demonstrates how social and environmental ecologies become difficult to disentangle. The fight against scum trails exuded into the air round-the-clock by the plant’s chimneys becomes ironic when the closure of the plant leads to cleaner air but social fragmentation. The dilemmas for the plant’s workers and their families—many of whom feel security in the dust that the filth on their windowsills symbolizes—exemplifies the red/green paradox noted by Williams. Differences between ecological and economic arguments about the unsustainability of ‘sustainable development’ have always confronted a ‘redgreen’ position. It is challenged in the historical context of Burnside’s novel by the 1980s flight of multinational capital, decreasing production and intensifying labour discipline. Corby’s air becomes cleaner but the town is impoverished. Jobs in an emergent service-sector economy offer straitened wages and depleted labour rights, as several characters discover. This is a superficially sanitized capitalism, bearing similar modes of exploitation. It also brings hidden environmental and social costs. As they are throughout Burnside’s work, people, especially those subject to forced patterns of migration, are forced to confront new modes of ‘dwelling’ in spatial, material and ecological terms. The opening of Living Nowhere recalls Dickens or Lawrence in its description of a contemporary Coketown; a halogenlit bubble of suburbs and roundabouts dominated by ‘The Works’. Alina, on an acid trip, is drawn to the solace and wonder of the countryside. Her wilful ingestion of an artificial substance is made ironic within a narrative that examines how unregulated modes of industrial production induce involuntary forms of consumption, contaminating both individual and societal body. An ‘unnatural’ psychosomatic escape leads to Alina’s sudden shock at being ‘outside’ the corrosive world of town and works. ‘Why was she outside?’ she asks herself. ‘It didn’t matter’ is her answer: All that mattered was that she could imagine somewhere outside this smoky poisoned town: light, empty woods; deer crossing a country road in the dusk. … People who had lived here all their lives, men who had been at The Works for twenty years and more, women whose children had been born and grown up in

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the glare of the furnaces, would talk about going home for the holidays, or going home when they retired, or failing that, arranging for their bodies to be taken back to Dunfermline, or Cracow, or Paisley, so they could at least be buried in some other place. All their lives they had lived and breathed The Works; their bodies were steeped in a miasma of steel and carbon and ore; all their stories had to do with the Corporation, or the unions, or what happened in the blast furnaces. That was the irony of it all: after a few months, there was no doubting that they belonged to this place; their bodies were drenched in the stink of coke and ammonia and that lingering undertow, part-carbon, part-iron, that was everywhere—in the soil and the water, on the air, in the fabric of clothes and curtains and bedsheets, in the flesh of the living and the bones of the dead. They belonged to The Works, it had claimed them, and no matter how much they talked about those other places, this was their home.23

‘Home’ is and is not capitalism. In Corby, the ‘natural’ world beyond the walls and concrete flyovers of council estates and suburbia is experienced as a sheer surprise in its apparent persistence and its amazing proximity. This, again, is Burnside’s hinterland—a world seemingly beyond industry eventually realized as a necessity; a still available bolthole from the ‘suburb of hell’ wherein the characters are imprisoned. For Louisa Gairn this demonstrates a recurring fascination in Burnside with ‘liminal’ spaces.24 The concept of liminality, however, dematerializes such mooted ‘non-places’ of lived modernity. The inhabitants of Corby might experience their situation as relatively peripheral to the wider world, but the novel establishes their centrality to at least two global systems: industrial capitalism and ecosystem. The manner in which a mode of economic organization takes precedence over ‘natural’ or balanced modes of dwelling described by ecological theory need to be made more explicit here as it does throughout Burnside’s formidable body of work. The ‘non-place’ is a ‘lived’, even a produced place within a specific mode of production. The claim this environmentally alienated, socially damaged, but nevertheless predominant ‘Works’ life has on past and future generations is to be realized in order to reconceptualize an alternative mode of habitation. The subtext is that people must live somewhere; how and where they live is determined by their location and their position within a wider biospheric and economic structure. If Living Nowhere’s central preoccupation is with conceiving a progressive concept of dwelling within contemporary life, then the recovery of ‘nature’ and its position as not ‘outside’ but within the built environment—and by extension the social structure—is crucial to this theme. The importance of the conjoining of the natural with the social is revealed in the relations between Tommy and his son, Francis, who experience late reconciliation in the virtue of green living: growing plants and fostering gardens. Most of their life encapsulates the social and biological violence caused by unchecked industrialism. They begin (literally) to dig and plant and in doing so create a sense of rootedness in a natural world squeezed (but not totally overcome) by concrete John Burnside, Living Nowhere (London: Vintage, 2004), pp. 13-4. Gairn, Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature, p. 174.

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and steel. This seems to defy the standard narrative of neo-liberal globalization, where forms of territoriality recede from being the organizing principle of social and cultural life. Francis is briefly swept up within this narrative as a cosmopolitan citizen in his global work for US tech companies, but the idea of living nowhere proves ultimately unsatisfactory. His and Alina’s narratives repeatedly bring realization of the proximity of the natural world which industry both uses and makes alien: Odd to think that, just a mile away, at the foot of the hill, the country lay still and clean, untouched by the poisons their bodies were absorbing, even now, as they walked homeward. Alina thought of the green hedges, the soft new foliage of hawthorn and whitebeam, the daffodils that grew in the public gardens just miles from The Works. They were so clean, so soft. Nothing within the bounds of the town was as clean and soft as that new foliage. And now, looking back from here, she saw that the town was nothing really. It was The Works and not much else: Corby Steel Works, like a huge animal drowsing in the dark, breathing men and fire, crouched on its own miasma of smoke and dust, surrounded on all sides by the estates where its attendants lived, like the peasants in some medieval barony, their huts pitched in rings around the great castle. Someone had said once that Corby was nothing more than an industrial estate with a roundabout in the middle; but it was worse than that, because the architects who had built that estate had decided to leave patches of green between the houses, narrow strips of dusty woods, mysterious angles and recesses of greenery and brackish water, wide headlands of trees and shrubs where birds sang in the early morning, odd squares of grass where children played football, or where one tree stood, like the crabbed oak tree near Francis’s house, the one they had climbed once, stoned on dope, convinced that an angel, or a demon, lived in its gnarled, grey branches. These patches of greenery were supposed to make the town more attractive to the workers, but they mostly had the opposite effect, reminding everyone of what had been there before The Works arrived. If you walked out of town a short distance, past Kingswood school, say, you found remnants of ancient forest, the dusty ghosts of what had once been clear ponds and rivers full of carp or pike, occasional clumps of wildflowers in woodland clearings, their blossoms impossibly blue, or gold, or blood-red.25

The feudal metaphor is here deliberately overstated, to pose questions about how class position might determine uneven levels of exposure to environmental risk. Glister develops this socio-spatial discrimination. It again relates a seemingly dystopian world, reminiscent of the ‘post-industrial’ Scottish central belt but transferable to many other zones of the planet. The novel is set around a derelict chemical plant, with the surrounding region split into two class zones, ‘Innertown’ and ‘Outertown’, separated—not coincidentally—by ‘the former golf course, conveniently situated so as to divide the good people in the nice houses from the ghosts and ruffians of the Innertown’.26 Burnside, Living Nowhere, p. 19. John Burnside, Glister (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 61.

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Glister registers an environmental imperialism in its contrast of Innertown (‘a ghetto for poisoned, cast off workers’) and Outertown’s ‘ranch-style villas with wide, miraculously green lawns and hedges’.27 The uneven formation of zones of privilege and their ecological irresponsibility features strongly in other areas of Burnside’s work, especially in the form of the suburb. Suggestive as they are of middle-class comfort and ex-urban sustainability, the archetypal living spaces of ‘developed’ countries are attacked as the opposite of communalism. ‘Miraculously green’ they are not. As idealized constituencies of comfortable dwelling in contemporary living, suburban spaces provide room to contemplate thresholds between the natural and the social demanded by green living. Whether the classic pastoral ethos of a green and pleasant England extends its reach to suburbia is made questionable in Burnside’s evocation of it as an ‘invented place whose | only purpose is avoidance’.28 The suburb appears an unreal world that ‘always has an abstracted quality’; one that struggles to reconcile the luxury and security of consumer-led lifestyles with the contemporary demand for ecological sustainability and equality. Consider this excerpt from a sequence of prose poems entitled ‘Suburbs’: In the late afternoon, the people indoors; catspaws of light on the honeydew leaves, sprinklers surging and hissing on deserted lawns. A mile away the abandoned railway station is buried in grapevine and cherry laurel, already half-surrendered to the woods, like a temple to some forgotten god; a half mile in the other direction, stone crosses and angels stand wrapped in graveyard lichens, lithe muscle snakes in ivy, water drips all evening from a rusting tap; this is another form of the same greenness, quieter, more familiar, but what makes it beautiful is what makes it dangerous, like the spirit of the fish pool which flares out and taints our children.29

The title of the collection housing ‘Suburbs’ is Common Knowledge. Its epigraph from Marx epitomizes repeated provocations in Burnside’s work to consider the consequences of the constant production of nature, especially in human incursion into the natural environment.30 These are not always on the spectacular scale of felling kilometres of rainforest or building new golf courses. The poem above presents disquietude over the effects of the unseen, the unknown and the unfamiliar, especially in their relation with the ‘more familiar’: the microstructures of the everyday. It reflects on restriction and recession: the withdrawal of time and light is connected with the withdrawal of the human—and human conscience— 29 30 27

Ibid., p. 61. Burnside, ‘Suburbs’, Common Knowledge, pp. 37–48 (p. 41). Ibid., p. 44. ‘It is common knowledge that the forest echoes back what you shout into it’. Karl Marx, Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843–44). 28

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from the ‘natural’ scene. Abandonment—desertion—here seems to gesture towards irresponsibility, deliberately highlighting a movement from the forms of communality and spiritual and collective responsibility that green living demands (the car replaces the train in the post-war period of course, rendering the train station obsolete). The resurgence of resilient plants of the natural world, clinging onto and obscuring the material records of human forms of organization and commemoration, seems to suggest a regenerative capability in nature, though of course the poem’s theme of avoidance warns of complacency. There are also hints about mineral waste, made ‘dangerous’ by the knowledge that sprinkler systems have become politicized technology of late. Images of rusting taps and deserted lawns evoke waste and drought wrought from the abuse and corrosion of public natural resource for the pursuit of the manicured lawns of privilege and leisure. This returns to the problem of the incompatibility of sustainability with profit that began this chapter: encapsulated here is the avoidance of universal responsibility towards the ‘common’ place. Here the ‘green’ is the doctored lawn made private and sequestered at an expense beyond the private. ‘What makes it beautiful | is what makes it dangerous’, a nod to the destructive qualities of nature as it returns the expenses of human wastefulness by warming and climate change. What can be meant by the broken line ‘another form of the same | greenness’ here—other than the reminder that green itself (a word liberally used throughout Burnside’s oeuvre) is a term for debate and slippage? It is a ‘greenness’ used in the creation of artificially produced green worlds—worlds made ‘dangerous’ by meaningless modes of selfish human desire and forms of unsustainable dwelling. This kind of ‘greenness’, one that comes out of and is placed outwith the commonplace, ‘taints our children’. This is turned into a wider concern earlier in the sequence: For this reason, the last true rituals only happen here: the inhabitants of the suburb are compelled by an attention to detail that was once religious and is now quite meaningless. The suburb has its own patterns, arrangements of bottles on front steps and scraped ice on driveways, enactments of chores and duties, conversations at gates and hedges, sweeping and binding movements, arcane calculations of cost and distance. All this activity is intended to make it appear real—a commonplace—but its people cannot evade the thought, like the thought which sometimes comes in dreams, that nothing is solid at all, and the suburb is no more substantial than a mirage in a blizzard, or the shimmering waves off an exit road where spilled petrol evaporates in the sun.31

This evokes a disquieting world where evaporation becomes significant. Absence, loss, degradation and corrosion—human, animal and vegetable—are felt throughout Burnside. This is usually accompanied by an insistence on the need to Burnside, ‘Suburbs’, p. 43.

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contemplate our understanding of ‘natural’ modes of existence, if only to remind us of the fragility of the world we assume to be ‘real’. This is fashioned by the posing of interpretive enigmas. What is ‘common knowledge’ for example? How much does the suburban resident know about the wider costs of his upkeep of his lawn—his private green—as much as he does about the loss of the commons and ‘other forms of greeness’ beyond the front steps and gates? The connection between driveway and driving range is made apparent here in the relation between private interest and environmental loss. ‘Commonplaces’ are the spaces that exist beyond conversations engaged, as the poem suggests, at artificial limits—hedges and gates. Questions form about what kinds of common resources will persist to sustain such private comfort and who will harness and control their output and equal distribution. What are these small, incidental economies, referred to here as ‘arcane calculations of cost and distance’? They seem to infer the inevitable costs of economies of scale—and, albeit speculatively, are related to planetary time. This section of the sequence uses semantics of melt and evaporation to broaden the view. In such a scalar context the poem ponders how long humanity has to go to ‘the exit road’. In this purview, the suburb—as anti-social living space—is ‘no more substantial than a mirage’ within the longer process of biospheric loss to which it contributes. Evaporation and corrosion between two spheres is a persistent theme in Burnside, often conveyed by the careless but inevitable meeting of ‘incompatible’ elements (the image, for example, of petrol evaporating in the sun) representing the natural and the artificial. The refined chemical and the organic world are merged, and the reader is challenged as to how to deal with that mix—in poem and object. It becomes clear that a happy equilibrium cannot avoid political settlement. This also follows for the relation between literature and world. Burnside has argued that an ecologically-grounded poetry (and eco-criticism) … can step into the public sphere and still retain its subtleties and complexities and, at the same time, that politics is, or should be, an attempt to work, through language as well as action, towards a delineation of justice and the necessary diversity that goes with it.32

The sophisticated linguistic ecology of Burnside’s work offers a challenge to think beyond simple binaries such as wild/tamed, poetry/politics, red/green. The uncanny presence of the green world’s persistence and intrusion in the built environment (the word ‘green’ itself reappears, like unexpected shoots, in various poems) is, as I have argued in this chapter, an urgent theme that resounds across Scottish writing.33 A poem from The Hoop, simply entitled ‘Green’, encapsulates the Scottish literary connection between nature, culture and left politics. John Burnside, ‘Poetic Justice’, in ‘Book Blog’, Guardian, 26 October 2006. The sudden appearances of the natural in the ‘built’ world can jolt our awareness

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of our relationship with nature and our location within it. This is common in Scottish ecowriting and the most notable contemporary example is the poet Kathleen Jamie’s Findings (London, 2005).

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Green Take it as a guide, this thread of river weed: its smell, its feel. Moving inward through the labyrinth, follow, where it breaks and is resumed beneath a stone in whited leaves of grass or on the fen road, where a watersplash decides your course. For something draws you in: you find the centre of the mazy grain and start afresh. The shaping of a world is in your hands. You have to make it green.34

Initial reading of this poem suggests a charting of the obscure, untouched directions of a river and its fauna, but a closer analysis reveals a concern with human decisions about natural and unnatural courses, and thus with the active shaping of locations and worlds. The indirect use of the second person pronoun, often as an appeal, establishes a common imperative in making decisions about which ‘green’ direction to take. The closing entreaty about creating a future ‘world’ green is not as wide-eyed pastoral as it might initially appear. The irony here is that the ‘you’ this poem addresses might easily be attributed to a golf-course developer as much as an environmental activist. The dual reading alerts the reader to duplicitous definitions: ‘green’ means something different to developer and ecologist. Given this interpretation, a green reading, like the construction of a green policy or the (re)shaping of landscape, is never without politics or conflict. The nature of ‘green’, the poem in its verbal activism and eco-imperatives makes clear, is always part of a social ecology, an equation that echoes throughout Burnside’s fiction and poetry. In Scottish eco-literature generally, one can follow a similar thread: a fascination with the location of the shifting boundary (for Burnside a ‘membrane’) between the natural and the social, the concrete and the abstract. The way in which this boundary is found, mapped, and produced intends to cross another: that between cultural production and material environments. The crude spinning of a green ‘thread’ by corporate and capital-led interests forces writers and ecologists (like golfers) to hone their stance and take up strategic positions. Culture in this context clearly has much to offer at a moment in the history of the planet when we find ourselves in the rough, having to chart appropriate methods of extraction. The example of Scottish ecowriting suggests that to make the future green we have to shade it red.

Burnside, ‘Green’, The Hoop, p. 74.

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Lucas, John, England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry, 1688–1900 (London: Hogarth Press, 1990). ———, John Clare (Plymouth: Northcote House and The British Council, 1994). Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘Ecology as Discourse of the Secluded’, in Laurence Coupe (ed.), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2000), pp.135–8. Mabey, Richard, Weeds: How vagabond plants gatecrashed civilisation and changed the way we think about nature (London: Profile Books, 2010). MacFague, Sallie, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological Nuclear Age (London: SCM, 1987). McIntosh, Alastair, Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power (London: Arum, 2001). Mackail, J.W., The Life of William Morris (2 vols, London: Longmans, Green, 1901). McKibben, Bill, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989). McKusick, James, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St Martin’s Press/Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). McMahon, Joseph, ‘Marxist Fictions: The Novels of John Berger’, Contemporary Literature 23/2 (1982): pp. 202–24. Magee, Bryan, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002). Manton, Kevin, ‘The Fellowship of the New Life’, British Journal of the History of Political Thought 24/2 (2003): pp. 282–304. Marsh, Jan, Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England from 1880 to 1914 (London: Quartet Books, 1982). Martínez-Alier, Joan, ‘“Environmental Justice” (Local and Global)’, in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds), The Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 312–26. Matless, David, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). Meacham, Standish, Regaining Paradise: Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement (London: Yale University Press, 1999). Mellor, Anne K., ‘Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” and the Categories of English Landscape’, Studies in Romanticism 18 (1979): pp. 253–70. Mészáros, István, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin, 1970). Miller, Mervyn, Raymond Unwin: Garden Cities and Town Planning (London: Leicester University Press, 1992). Miller, Toby, Geoffrey Lawrence, Jim Mackay and David Rowe, ‘Modifying the Sign: Sport and Globalization’, Social Text 17/3 (1999): pp. 15–33. Modiano, Raimonda, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985). Monbiot, George, ‘A Ghost Agreement’, posted 1 November 2010, http://www. monbiot.com/archives/2010/11/01/a-ghost-agreement/.

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Moore-Colyer, R.J., ‘Feathered Women and Persecuted Birds: The Struggle against the Plumage Trade, c1860–1922’, Rural History 11/1 (2000): pp. 57–63. Morgan, J.R., Longus: Daphnis and Chloe (Oxford: Aris and Philips/Oxbow, 2004). Morton, Peter, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination 1860– 1900 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984). Morton, Timothy, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2010). ———, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Naess, Arne, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, trans. David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ———, ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement’, Inquiry 16 (1973): pp. 95–100. Olaniyan, Tejumola, and Ato Quayson (eds), African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). Parkinson, Kathleen, and Martin Priestman (eds), Peasants and Countrymen in Literature: A Symposium Organised by the English Department of the Roehampton Institute in February 1981 (London: Roehampton Institute of Higher Education, 1982). Partington, John S., Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H.G. Wells (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Passmore, John, Man’s Responsibility for Nature (London: Duckworth, 1974). Pepper, David, Eco-socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice (London: Routledge, 1993). Perry, Ruth, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Perry, Seamus, ‘Coleridge, Catholicism, and the Devil in a Strait Waistcoat’, Notes and Queries NS 49 (2002): pp. 25–8. ———, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). Pfeil, Fred, ‘Silvershades: John Berger and What’s Left’, Triquarterly 88 (1993): pp. 230–45. Phelan, Joseph Patrick, ‘Radical Metre: The English Hexameter in Clough’s Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich’, Review of English Studies 50 (1999): pp. 166–87. Prins, Yopie, ‘Victorian Meters’, in Joseph Bristow (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 100–106. Pye, Denis, Fellowship is Life: The National Clarion Cycling Club, 1895–1995 (Bolton: Clarion Publishing, 1995). Radcliffe, James, Green Politics: Dictatorship or Democracy? (London: Macmillan, 2000). Reed, John R., The Natural History of H.G. Wells (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1982). Richards, Eric, The Highland Clearances (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2000).

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Index Abram, David 27, 28, 29 The Spell of the Sensuous 27 Adams, George 131 ‘Against Nature’ (Channel 4 Programme) 20 Adorno, Theodor W. 12, 35, 41, 104–5, 109, 111 Dialectic of Enlightenment 35 Aldred, Guy A. 176 ‘Militarism and Woodland’ 176 alienation 7, 10, 14, 25, 193–206 Allen, Grant 156–7 The British Barbarians 157 ‘Democracy and Diamonds’ 156 anarchism / Anarchists 2, 4–5, 7, 14, 131, 176, 193, 195, 197, 202, 203, 206 Antony, Mark 94 Arch, Joseph 106 Aristotle 117 Arnold, Matthew 39 Ashbee, C.R. 131 Auden, W.H. 178, 182, 183, 190 The Dog Beneath the Skin 182 ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ 178 Augustus, Emperor 94 Austen, Jane 48, 101–3 Emma 101–3 Northanger Abbey 48 Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War 178 Bacon, Francis 196, 198, 199, 202 Baden-Powell, Lord 185 Bahro, Rudolf 205 Baldwin, Stanley 179 Balibar, Etienne 195 Banks, Iain 227 Barke, James 10, 14, 174–6 The World his Pillow 14, 174–6 Barnett, Henrietta 126 Barrell, John 76, 79 Bate, Jonathan 10, 18–19, 25, 36, 77, 116 Romantic Ecology 10, 18, 77

Bates, H.E. 190 Bates, Ralph 190 The Olive Field 190 Beer, John 35–6 Beer, Max 153 Belloc, Hilaire 159 Beniak, Lubos̆ 18 Berdyaev, Nicolas 138 The End of Our Time 138 Berger, John 4, 10, 14–15, 25–6, 30–31, 207–20 About Looking 10, 25, 207 Another Way of Telling 207–8, 214 G. 207 ‘Images from a Peasant Woman’s Memory’ 4 Into their Labours 14–15, 207–20 Lilac and Flag 208, 210 The Look of Things 207 Once in Europa 208, 215, 218–19 Permanent Red 207 Pig Earth 208–19 Ways of Seeing 207 ‘Why Look at Animals?’ 10, 25, 26, 207, 215 Bergonzi, Bernard 139 Berkeley, George 41 Berlin, Isaiah 197–8 Betjeman, John 179 Bhopal disaster 18 Bible 12, 114–24, 148, 206 Birch, Dinah vii, 12, 166n6 Blake, William 1. 14, 196, 198–200, 202, 206 The Book of Urizen 198–9 Jerusalem 199 Blatchford, Robert 126, 133 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, Madame 128 Bloomfield, Robert 65 Blunden, Edmund 14, 76, 167–8, 178–9, 186–7, 191 Cricket Country 178–9, 186–7

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The Face of England 191 ‘Festubert: The Old German Line’ 167 ‘La Quinque Rue’ 168 ‘1916 seen from 1921’ 168 ‘The Sunlit Vale’ 168 ‘Vlamertinghe: Passing the Château, July 1917’ 168 Bond, Edward 76 The Fool 76 Bookchin, Murray 14, 194, 203, 204, 205 Boos, Florence 127, 135, 136 Bowra, Maurice 187 From the Greek 187 Braudel, Fernand 218 Brecht, Bertolt 165, 182 ‘An die Nachgeborenen’ 165 Britten, Benjamin 190 Peter Grimes 190 Bromwich, David 41 Brontë, Charlotte 119 Brooke, Rupert 169 Brown, George Mackay 15, 227, 228–30 Greenvoe 15, 227, 228–30 Bryant, Sir Arthur 161 Buckland, Professor 39 Bunyan, John 113, 114 The Pilgrim’s Progress 113, 114 Burke, Edmund 39, 56 Burney, Charles 57 Burns, Robert 1, 64 Burnside, John 15, 222, 223–7, 233–40 ‘Adolescence’ 225 ‘Bunkered by Mr Big’ 223–4 Common Knowledge 237 Glister 227, 233, 236–7 ‘Green’ 239–40 The Hoop 239 Living Nowhere 227, 233–6 ‘Lost’ 226 ‘Suburbs’ 237–9 Butler, James 56 Butler, Samuel 147 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 75, 115, 178 Cadbury, George and Richard 126 Calvert, William 48 Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England 179, 184, 191

capitalism 4, 9, 10, 14, 15, 17, 24, 25–6, 27, 28, 86, 120, 126, 144, 151, 153, 174, 176, 193, 203, 212, 216, 217, 221–40 Carpenter, Edward 13, 129, 130, 131, 154, 155–6, 159, 160 Carroll, Joseph 141 Catullus 91 Caute, David 2–3 The Left in Europe since 1789 2–3 Chartism / Chartists 1, 3 Chartist Land Plan 6 Chesterton, G.K. 130, 159 Chomsky, Noam 26, 27 Chubb, Percival 158 Clare, John 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 61–73, 75–88 ‘Address to an Insignificant Flower’ 65, 72 ‘Cowper Green’ 65 ‘Decay a Ballad’ 66 ‘Familiar Epistle to a Friend’ 77–8 ‘The Flitting’ 72 ‘The Hue & Cry’ 83 ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’ 82 ‘Pleasant Spots’ 66 ‘The Progress of Rhyme’ 61 ‘The Ragwort’ 11, 68, 69–72 ‘Remembrances’ 63–4 ‘Shadows of Taste’ 66 ‘The shepherds almost wonder where they dwell’ 80–88 The Shepherd’s Calendar 68–9 ‘Song’ 62 ‘The Village Minstrel’ 64, 78 ‘To Wordsworth’ 69 Clarion movement 126, 133 Clayton, Joseph 158 climate change 18, 20, 24, 238 Clough, Arthur Hugh 12, 89–95, 100 The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich 12, 89–95, 100 Cobbett, William 61, 103–4 Cole, G.D.H. 170 Coleridge, Hartley 36 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1, 10–11, 33–43, 201 Biographia Literaria 43 ‘The Blossoming of the Solitary Date Tree’ 43

Index ‘Dejection’ 40 ‘Kubla Khan’ 10, 33–6, 40 ‘Frost at Midnight’ 10, 36 Letters 38, 41 ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’ 41 Notebooks 34–5, 37, 40, 42 ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ 10, 38, 43 Collett, Anthony 182, 183 The Changing Face of England 182 Colman, Felicity J. 83 Commonweal 125 Commune of Paris 204 communism / Communists 2, 4, 19, 20, 113, 126, 159, 160, 180, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 207, 212 Connell, John 156 Cooper, David 40, 43 Cowper, William 62–3 The Task 63 Crabbe, George 63, 190 The Village 63 Criterion 180 Cunningham, Valentine vii, 12, 14 Daphnis and Chloë 12, 89, 96–100 Daily Worker 189 Daniels, Stephen 104 Dann, Joanne 47 Darwin, Charles 5, 139, 141 Darwin, Erasmus 58 Zoonomia 58 Davies, Moya Llewellyn 190 Dawson, Paul 77 Day Lewis, C. 14, 185, 187–9 ‘Dedicatory Stanzas’ (to Georgics translation) 188–9 ‘Letter to a Young Revoutionary’ 185 trans. Georgics 187–9 deep ecology 24, 37, 165 Defoe, Daniel 113 Robinson Crusoe 113 Deleuze, Gilles 11, 75, 80, 82–7 DeLillo, Don 26 Descartes, René 196, 198 Dickens, Charles 145, 146, 234 Dobson, Andrew 205 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich 138

261

Drayton, Michael 166 Poly-Olbion 166 Dryzek, J.S. 204–5 Dubos, René 196 Duck, Stephen 65 Durkin, Martin 20 Dyer, Geoff 209–10, 214, 220 Eagleton, Terry 208–9 ecocriticism 9, 10, 17–31, 226, 239 Eliot, George 12, 102–5 Impressions of Theophrastus Such 102–5 Eliot, T.S. 43, 160, 179–80, 181 Four Quartets 179–80 Ellis, Henry Havelock 129 Elyot, Sir Thomas 179 The Boke of the Governour 179 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 155 Empson, William 14, 38, 183, 190 Some Versions of Pastoral 14, 183, 190 enclosure 11, 45–59, 64, 79, 101 Engels, Friedrich 2, 3–4, 6, 7, 24, 153 Dialectics of Nature 3–4 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 2 English Revolution (1649) 1 Environmental Justice movement 18, 23 Esty, Jed 161–2 Fabian Essays in Socialism 158 Fabians / Fabian Society 7, 13, 137–49, 158, 169, 185, 191 Fellowship of the New Life 13, 155, 157–8 Fennell, Alfred 1 ‘The Red Flag’ 1 Finley, C. Stephen 115 ‘The Flowers of the Forest’ 174 Ford, Henry 177 Forster, E.M. 10, 13, 151–2, 159, 160, 162–3, 185, 190 ‘Abinger Pageant’ 162 England’s Pleasant Land 162 Howard’s End 162, 163, 185 The Longest Journey 162, 163 ‘The Other Side of the Hedge’ 162 A Room with a View 163 Forsyth, Bill 230 Local Hero 230

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Foster, John Bellamy 24, 154 Marx’s Ecology 24 Foucault, Michel 21 Franco Bahamonde, Francisco 178 French Revolution (1789) 1, 3, 49, 55, 203 French Revolution (1848) 1, 3, 90 Fromm, Erich 194 Gagnier, Regina 152, 155 Gairn, Louisa 235 Garden City movement 13, 125–36 Gardiner, Rolf 160, 161 Garrard, Greg 22, 220 Geddes, Patrick 5–6 City Development 5–6 George, Henry 153, 157 Progress and Poverty 153 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic 10, 14, 173–4, 176, 190 Sunset Song 14, 173–4 Gill, Stephen 53 Gillray, Thomas 38 Gilpin, William 67 Glasgow Socialist Star 175 Glasier, John Bruce 158 global warming 18, 20, 24, 238 Godwin, William 11, 49, 54, 55–6, 203 Political Justice 56 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 14, 198, 201–2 ‘Freunde, flieht die dunkle Kammer’ 202 Gogh, Vincent van 211–12 Goldsmith, Edward 196, 204 Goodman, Paul 14, 195 Gorji, Mina vii, 11 Gosse, Edmund 85 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de 166 Los desastres de la Guerra 166 Gramsci, Antonio 22, 141 Graphic 106 Graves, Robert 168 Gray, Alasdair 15, 227, 230–32 Lanark 15, 227, 230–32 ‘The Great Global-Warming Swindle’ 20 Green, Karen 56 Greenslade, William vii, 13 Grey, Sir Edward 165 Grierson, John 190

Drifters 190 Grigson, Geoffrey 76 Guardian 223 Guattari, Félix 11, 75, 80, 82–7 Guha, Ramachandra 6, 23 Gurney, Ivor 14, 168, 170 ‘Felling a Tree’ 170 ‘Possessions’ 170 Haeckel, Ernst 3 Generelle Morphologie der Organismen 3 Hamsun, Knut 180 The Growth of the Soil 180 Hardy, Thomas 10, 12, 89, 95–100, 105–6, 109–12, 173, 179 ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’ 105–6 Far from the Madding Crowd 112 Jude the Obscure 110–111 ‘The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion’ 111–12 Tess of the d’Urbervilles 110, 112 The Trumpet Major 111 ‘A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork’ 111 Two on a Tower 110 Under the Greenwood Tree 12, 89, 95–100 Harmsworth, Alfred Lord 127 Harrison, Stephen vii, 12, 166n6 Harvey, David 20–21, 23, 25, 225 Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference 20–21 Heaney, Seamus 216n35 Heath, Richard 76, 78 The English Peasant 76 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 146 Hiaasen, Carl 26 Hibberd, Dominic 167 Poetry of the Great War 167 Higham, T.H. 187 Hitler, Adolf 138, 185 Homer 90, 113 The Iliad 113, 166 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 166 ‘Binsey Poplars’ 166 Horace 91 Epode 91 Horkheimer, Max 35, 41 Dialectic of Enlightenment 35

Index Howard, Ebenezer 13, 125–7, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136 Garden Cities of To-Morrow 13, 125, 127, 132 Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform 125 Hudson, W.H. 156 Huggan, Graham 23 Postcolonial Ecocriticism 23 Hulme, Mike 20 Humane Review 155 Humanitarian League 155–6 Hussey, Christopher 67 Hustler 26 Huxley, Aldous 138, 177 Brave New World 138, 177 Huxley, T.H. 5 Hyndman, H.M. 126, 130, 157 Illich, Ivan 195 Independent Labour Party 13, 156, 158, 159 industrialism 7, 8, 14, 15, 20, 25, 122, 176, 193, 199, 233 Isherwood, Christopher 182, 183 The Dog Beneath the Skin 182 ISLE 26 James, Henry 147 James, William 40 Jamie, Kathleen 239n33 Findings 239n33 Jefferies, Richard 10, 12, 105–9, 112, 178 The Gamekeeper at Home 109 ‘Hours of Spring’ 108–9 The Life of the Fields 108 ‘Notes on Landscape Painting’ 108 ‘The Old Mill’ 106–7 ‘On the Downs’ 107–8 The Story of My Heart 108 ‘A Roman Brook’ 108 ‘The Wiltshire Labourer’ 105–6 Joad, C.E.M. 185, 189 A Charter for Ramblers 185 Johnston, Kenneth R. 46–7, 49 Kafka, Franz Kelvin, Lord (William Thomson) 140 Kant, Immanuel 40, 42 Kelly, Helena vii, 11

263

Kelman, James 15, 227, 232–3 How late it was how late 227 Translated Accounts 227 Kennedy, A.L. 227 Kerridge, Richard viii, 10 Klaus, H. Gustav viii, 13–14 Kövesi, Simon viii, 11 Knight, Richard Payne 67 The Landscape 67 Kroeber, Karl 77 Kropotkin, Peter 5–6, 7, 131, 135, 136 La Conquête du pain 5 Fields, Factories and Workshops 135 Modern Science and Anarchism 5n13 Mutual Aid as a Law of Nature and a Factor of Evolution 5 Labour Party 14, 113, 128, 137, 143, 151, 157, 159, 160, 169, 172–3, 176, 179, 234 Lawrence, D.H. 14, 172–3, 176, 179, 234 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 14, 172–3 The Rainbow 179 Leader, Zachary 77, 85 Leavis, F.R. 161 Left Review 184, 185 Leonard, Tom 233 Lever, William Hesketh 127 Liebig, Justus von 153–4 Organic Chemistry and its Application to Agriculture and Physiology 153–4 Lindsay, Jack 187 Listener 190 Liu, Alan 41 Living Marxism 20 Llandaff, Bishop of: see Watson, Richard Lloyd George, David 128 Locke, John 50, 199 London Mercury 191 Loney, Alan 85 Longman’s Magazine 105 Love Canal case 18 Lovelock, James 24, 124 The Revenge of Gaia 24, 124 Lowther, Sir James 11, 46–8, 59 Lucas, John 76 Lymington, Viscount 160, 161, 180 Famine in England 180 Lynd, Robert 85 Lyotard, Jean-François 163

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Mabey, Richard 63, 65 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 103 MacDiarmid, Hugh 227 Macdonald, Graeme viii, 10, 15 Macdonell, A.G. 178, 191 England their England 178, 191 McGrath, John 230 The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil 230 McKibben, Bill 119 The End of Nature 119 McKusick, James 33, 61n3 Macleod, Ken 227 McMahon, Joseph 211 MacNeice, Louis 14, 181–2, 189 Autumn Journal 181 ‘Bagpipe Music’ 181 The Earth Compels 189 ‘Eclogue between the Motherless’ 181 ‘Eclogue by a Five-Barred Gate’ 181 ‘Eclogue for Christmas’ 181 ‘Eclogue from Iceland’ 181 ‘Pindar is Dead’ 181–2 Mairet, Philip 160 Mais, S.P.B. 184 The Unknown Island 184 Malraux, André 1, 9 Malthus, Thomas Robert 153 Marcuse, Herbert 193, 195 Marsh, Jan 132 Back to the Land 132 Martineau, Harriet 39 Martínez-Alier, Juan 6n16, 23 Marx, Karl 3–4, 6, 13, 14, 24, 103, 136, 151, 153–4, 180, 193, 237 Capital 3 Marxism / Marxists 2, 3–4, 7, 10, 13, 15, 18–22, 24, 25–6, 31, 126, 185, 187, 207, 213, 225, 229 Massey, Gerald 1 ‘The Red Banner’ 1 Massingham, H.J. 160–61 Matless, David 160 Maurice, F.D. 39 Mellor, Anne K. 41 Mendelson, Edward 182 Early Auden 182 Mészáros, István 193 Mill, J.S. 152–3

Millet, Lydia 10, 26–31 ‘Die, Baby Harp Seal!’ 26 George Bush, Dark Prince of Love 26 How the Dead Dream 10, 26–31 Infant Monkey Love 26, 27 Milton, John 39–40 Mohr, Jean 207 Another Way of Telling 207–8, 214 ‘Images from a Peasant Woman’s Memory’ 4 Montagu, Ivor 178 More, Thomas 50, 147 Utopia 50 Morris, May 131, 132 Morris, William 7, 10, 12–13, 120–21, 125–36, 137, 138, 143, 144, 145, 155, 157, 158, 176 ‘Art under Plutocracy’ 120–21 News from Nowhere 7, 13, 133–5 Morton, H.V. 178 In Search of England 178 Morton, Peter 139 Morton, Timothy 21 Mosley, Oswald 179, 191 Mumford, Lewis 6 Murdoch, Iris 2 The Red and the Green 2 Murry, John Middleton 154 Mussolini, Benito 185, 191 Naess, Arne 37 Napoleon Bonaparte 36 Nash, Paul 168 Void of War 168 Neo-Malthusians 5 New Age 129 New English Weekly 159–60 New Statesman 191 Newbolt, Henry 186 Newton, Isaac 196, 197, 198, 199, 202 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 146 Onions, John 167 Poetry of the Great War 167 Orage, A.R. 159 Orr, John Boyd 160 Orwell, George 13, 14, 128–32, 136, 138, 159, 183–4, 186–7, 190–91, 222 Animal Farm 190–91

Index The Clergyman’s Daughter 183 Coming Up for Air 128–9, 183–4 Down and Out in Paris and London 183–4 Homage to Catalonia 183 Keep the Aspidistra Flying 183 Nineteen Eighty-Four 138 The Road to Wigan Pier 128, 183, 186 O’Sullivan, Maurice 190 Twenty Years A-Growing 190 Owen, Robert 126 Owen, Wilfred 167 Owenism / Owenites 2, 126 Paine, Thomas 50 Parker, Barry 125 Parnet, Claire 84 Partington, John S. 147 Passmore, John 196 pastoral 11–12, 14, 51–4, 89, 91, 177–91, 209, 210 Penty, A.J. 159 Pepper, David 131–2, 133, 135, 204 Ecosocialism 131–2 Perry, Seamus viii, 10–11 Pfeil, Fred 209 Pindar 181–2 Pitt, William 55 Plato 147 Plomer, William 190 Podolinsky, Serge 4 Poore, George Vivian 154 Essays on Rural Hygiene 154 Pope, Alexander 113 Postgate, Margaret 14, 168–70 ‘Afterwards’ 168–9, 170 ‘Falling Leaves’ 169–70 Postgate, Raymond 170 Price, Uvedale 67–8 Priestley, Joseph 36 Radcliffe, James viii, 8, 14 Radstock, Lord 78 Reclus, Elisée 5–6 ‘The Great Kinship’ 5 Red Republican 1 Reed, John 146 Repton, Humphrey 101 Reynolds, Joshua 117

265

Rignall, John ix, 12 Roberts, Michael 182–3, 186 New Country 183, 186 Robisch, S.K. 26–7 Romanticism 1, 7, 8, 10, 14, 18, 25, 114–17, 155, 193, 197–206, 225 Ross, Andrew 19–20, 22 Roszak, Theodore 8, 14, 194–206 Where the Wasteland Ends 14, 198–203, 206 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 49, 199 Discourse on Inequality 49 Rowbotham, Sheila 155, 159 Ruskin, John 5, 10, 12, 39, 113–24, 131, 145, 154, 166, 176 Fors Clavigera 12, 113, 120, 121, 166 Modern Painters 12, 114–15, 117, 119, 124 The Storm-cloud of the Nineteenth Century 12, 121–4 Ruskin, John James 115 Ruskin, Margaret 115 ‘Rutherford, Mark’ The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane 109 Ryan, Kiernan 209, 220 Sagar, Keith 200 Sales, Roger 76, 78 Salt, Henry 155–6 Sassoon, Siegfried 168 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 198 Schmitt-Kilb, Christian ix, 4n9, 14–15 Schoenfield, Mark 56, 58 Schopenhauer, Arthur 42 Schumacher, E.F. 205 Scott, Walter 92, 102, 105, 113, 115 Ivanhoe 102 Scottish National Party 226 Scottish Review of Books 223 Scribner, Charity 209 Shakespeare, William 71 Sonnets 71 Shanin, Teodor 210 Shaw, G.B. 130, 137, 143, 146, 148, 156, 158 Fabian Essays in Socialism 158 Shell Guides 179 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 38, 203 Silent Spring (Rachel Carson) 228

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Ecology and the Literature of the British Left

Skolimowski, Henryk 194–5 Slaymaker, William 20 Sloan, John ix, 13 Snyder, Gary 40 Social Darwinism 5 Social Democratic Federation 126, 157–8, 191 Social Democracy / Social Democrats 2, 4, 19, 24, 136, socialism / Socialists 2, 4, 6, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 24, 113, 116, 119, 121, 124, 127–33, 137, 142, 145, 148, 151, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 163, 174, 176, 178, 182, 183, 185, 187, 191, 197, 207, 209, 212, 220, 221, 228, 229, 233 Socialist League 125 Soil Association 160 Soper, Kate 34n6, 43 Southey, Robert 45–6, 48 Letters from England 48 Spence, Thomas 6 Spender, Stephen 14, 188, 189 Spinoza, Baruch 37 Squire, J.C. 191 St John of Patmos 117, 122 Stalin, Joseph 148 Stead, W.T. 113–14 Steiner, Rudolf 159 Stevens, Wallace 40 Complete Poems 40 Street, A.G. 184 Farmer’s Glory 184 Swift, Jonathan 139, 147 Swingler, Randall 185 Symons, Arthur 76 syndicalism / Syndicalists 2 Szeman, Imre 230 Taylor, Charles 34 Taylor, John 62, 78, 85, 87 Theocritus 90, 94, 187, 210 Idylls 90, 94, 187 Theosophical Society / Theosophists 128, 130 Thomas, Edward 10, 14, 25, 72–3, 167, 172 ‘As the team’s head-brass’ 167 The South Country 72–3 Thomas, Keith 65 Man and the Natural World 65

Thompson, Denys 161 Thompson, E.P. 76 Thomson, George 190 Thoreau, Henry David 155 Thornley, George 98 Tiffin, Helen 23 Postcolonial Ecocriticism 23 Times 106 Tolkien, J.R.R. 178 Tolstoy, Lev 7, 128, 130, 131, 160 Torrington, Jeff 233 Traveller’s Library 182 Trevelyan, G.M. 184–5 Trotter, David 67–8 Tschichold, Jan 85 Turner, J.M.W. 115, 117–18, 122 Unwin, Raymond 125, 126 Vallon, Annette 48, 55, Vaninskaya, Anna ix, 7n17, 12–13 Vardy, Alan 77 Vendler, Helen 71 Virgil 12, 14, 89, 90–95, 181, 187–9 Eclogues 12, 89, 90–95, 181, 188 Georgics 14, 91, 95, 187–9 Wagar, W. Warren 146 Wagner, Richard 42 The Ring of the Nibelungen 42 Wallace, Mark J. 205–6 Walpole, Horace 34, 36 Warner, Alan 227 Warner, Rex 14, 187 The Aerodrome 187 Warner, Sylvia Townsend 13, 151–2, 163 Lolly Willowes 13, 163 Watson, Richard, Bishop of Llandaff 49–51, 53, 57 Miscellaneous tracts on religious, political and agricultural subjects 50 ‘On Planting and Waste Lands’ 50 ‘Response to the General View of the Agriculture’ 50 ‘Sermon preached before the Stewards of the Westminster Dispensary’ 49–50 Watson, Rory 225 Webb, Beatrice 137, 145, 158

Index Webb, Mary 179, 184 Precious Bane 179 Webb, Sidney 137, 145, 158 Wells, H.G. 10, 13, 128, 130, 137–49 Ann Veronica 130 ‘The Discovery of the Future’ 139 he Fate of Homo Sapiens 139 The Food of the Gods 141 ‘The Impudence of Flags’ 148–9 In the Days of the Comet 148 The Island of Dr Moreau 141 ‘This Misery of Boots’ 143 A Modern Utopia 143, 149 New Worlds for Old 143–4 The Salvaging of Civilization 146, 148 The Shape of Things to Come 147–8 ‘A Story of the Days to Come’ 139 Things to Come 148 The Time Machine 139–41 Tono-Bungay 141–3, 145 The War of the Worlds 13, 140 Welsh, Irvine 227 Wheeler, Michael 116 White, T.H. 180 Earth Stopped, or Mr Marx’s Sporting Tour 180 England Have My Bones 180 Wilde, Oscar 146 ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ 146 Williams, John 54 Williams, Raymond 8–9, 21, 61, 76, 137–8, 144–5, 210, 233, 234 ‘The Challenge of the New Social Movements’ 144–5 The Country and the City 8–9

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‘Ideas of Nature’ 8 ‘Socialism and Ecology’ 8–9, 233 Towards 2000 9 Williams-Ellis, Amabel 184 Williams-Ellis, Clough 184 Britain and the Beast 184, 185 Williamson, Henry 178, 179, 184 This Unknown Island 184 Williamson, Jack 137 Woolf, Virginia 14, 171–2 Mrs Dalloway 14, 171–2, 175 Wordsworth, Dorothy 11, 46, 55 Wordsworth, John 11, 46–8, 56, 59 Wordsworth, William 1, 2, 10, 11, 14, 36, 41, 45–59, 68–9, 80–81, 114, 198, 200–201, 202, 203, 206 ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ 45, 48, 53–5 ‘An Evening Walk’ 48 The Excursion 200 ‘The Female Vagrant’ 48, 53–4 ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ 45, 56–8 Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff 50 Lyrical Ballads 48, 53, 80–81 ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ 45, 48–53 The Prelude 55, 56, 201 ‘The Ruined Cottage’ 11, 45, 58–9 World War I 6, 10, 13–14, 151, 158, 159, 165–76, 178 World War II 14, 138, 147, 187 Wright, Patrick 161 Young, John 204 Young, Kenneth 146