Landscapes of the Mind: Worlds of Sense and Metaphor 9781487579548

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LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND

OTHER BOOKS BY

J. DOUGLAS PORTEOUS The Company Town of Goole (1969) Canal Ports (1977) Environment &- Behavior (1977) The Modernization of Easter Island (1981) The Mells (1988) Degrees of Freedom (1988) Planned to Death (1989)

J.

DOUGLAS PORTEOUS

Landscapes of the Mind WORLDS OF SENSE AND METAPHOR

University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 1990

Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Reprinted in 2018

ISBN 0-8020-5857-4 ISBN 978-1-4875-8070-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Porteous, J. Douglas (John Douglas), 1943Landscapes of the mind Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8020-5857-4 1. Landscape. 2. Geographical perception. 3. Senses and sensation. 4. Landscape in literature. 5. Greene, Graham, 1904- Criticism and interpretation. 6. Lowry, Malcolm, 1909-1957 -Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

GF50.P671990

304.2'3

C89-090749-8

Jacket illustration: Homby watercolour by Anne Popperwell (from the author's collection)

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

For all at Haggis Farm

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Preface xiii 1 Landscapes 3 I SENSUOUS WORLDS

2 Smellscape 21 3 Soundscape 47 II LANDSCAPES OF METAPHOR

4 Bodyscape 69 5 Inscape 87 6 Homescape 107 7 Escape 127

8 Childscape 145 9 Deathscape 175 10 Otherscapes 195 References 205 Index 223

Acknowledgments

A large number of people have offered encouragement for the ideas set forth in this book. Those who kindly expressed interest or brought books and other materials to my attention represent a very mixed bag, including geographers, historians, psychologists, economists, physiologists, psychiatrists, resource managers, chemists, librarians, editors, acoustics experts, architects, literary critics, farmers, fishermen, painters, and poets, among them: Mike Barton, Morris Berman, Earle Birney, Daniel Cappon, the late Richard Coe, R.I.K. Davidson, Virgil Duff, Gary Dunbar, Heinz Dyck, Trygg Engen, Priscilla Ewbank, Donald Hamilton Fraser, Pierre Gloor, Ann Gosse, Jon Guy, Rudi Hartmann, Bob Hay, Barbara Hodgins, Leslie Joy, Herb Kariel, Mona Kawano, Peter Keller, Kevin Key, Howard Lee, David Lowenthal, Rita Marks, Bruce McDougall, Enoch Moyo, Steve Nagy, Linda Neigel, Victoria Nowell, Carol Porteous, Nina Redding, Jim Rotton, Rana P.B. Singh, Barry Smith, Sandra Smith, Chris Spenser, Imre Sutton, Barry Truax, Brian Turnbull, Nicholas Vance, Charles Wysocki, members of my Environmental Aesthetics class and of the Satuma Island Thinktank, and several anonymous reviewers. Regarding individual chapters, Jane Mastin did the field-work for 'Soundscape' (chapter 3), and Gavin Porteous inspired 'Childscape' (chapter 8). I have also received much inspiration and comfort from Boat Pass and Mount Warburton Pike (Satuma Island); Com Island (Nicaragua); the Holy Mountain of Athos (Greece); the three-breasted Paps ofJura, in the Inner Hebrides; from my eyes, ears, and nose; from the proprietors and patrons of Gwen's Diner; and from cheerful old Luigi Boccherini and strident Bob Marley. Barbara Hodgins provided a safe haven in the urban wilderness of Victoria when I had, perforce, to venture in from Satuma Island. My work would be impossible without the superb and never-failing assistance of the staff of the Geography department at the University of Victoria. Typing and word-processing were in the capable and careful

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hands of Vicky Barath, Paola Bell, and Jennifer Hobson-Roy. The evocative drawings and maps are by artist-cartographer Ole Heggen. I am also grateful to the University of Victoria for providing me with a study leave, during which this book was conceived. Parts of chapters 2, 3 and 4, 5 and 9 were previously published, respectively, in Progress in Hwnan Geography (vol. 9 [London: Edward Arnold, 1985), 356-78), The Journal of Architectural and Planning Research (vol. 2, 1985: 169-86), and The Canadian Geographer (vol. 30, 1986: 2-12 and 123-31; vol. 31, 1987: 34-43). My thanks to the editors of these journals for permission to adapt this material. Finally, I must thank my good fortune, the University of Victoria, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for research and travel grants that facilitated the writing of this book and, incidentally, permitted my visits to several parts of Greeneland. I have also, quite unintentionally, experienced as a resident the major Lowryan landscapes of northern England, Oxbridge, Cuernavaca, and a cabin on the British Columbia coast. I was happy to replace the tequila bottle on Lowry's grave in Ripe, Sussex, in 1984. Saturna Island, oc 1989

We are far more out of touch with even the nearest approaches of the infinite reaches of inner space than we now are with the reaches of outer space .. . What would happen if some of us then started to see, hear, touch, smell, taste things? R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (1967)

In the sensuous, highly libidinous individual, all appetites are sharp, the senses keen ... Too often, however, society, social position, or our reaction to our environment get in the way ... Daniel Cappon, Eating, Loving and Dying (1973)

Geography is the foundation of all ... Geographical writing .. . ought to be much better than it is, with more emphasis on generalization and philosophical meaning. James A. Michener, in Social Education (1970)

Preface

Never ... was any generation of men intent upon the pursuit of happiness more advantageously placed to attain it who yet, with seeming deliberation, took the opposite course - towards chaos, not order, towards breakdown, not stability, towards death, destruction and darkness, not life, creativity and light. Malcolm Muggeridge They say nothing. They consume. But it's got to be a mess because it's so fucking dull. Punks, of their parents, in Anthony Burgess's 1985

T.S. Eliot's strictures were too mild. Wasteland civilization is now reaching rock-bottom, for the powers that control our lives cannot afford to believe that small is beautiful or that less is more. We live enmeshed in a cretinous popular culture that, through omnipresent 'media,' urges Homo sapiens, now known collectively as 'consumers,' to surround themselves with ever more of the jtmk that they are assured constitutes the good things in life. Those who demur are impaled by the swift arrow of progress, which is regarded as inevitable even though its seemingly inexorable forward regress increasingly appears to be dangerous not only to human health but also to the very existence of the planet. Scientists don't help much, most of them being caught up in the military-industrial system and/or afflicted with a kind of intellectual anorexia that prevents their exploration of holistic or humanistic views. Like the characters in Samuel Beckett's plays, we are lost amid a vast landscape of quantifiable matter, we believe in the authority of statistics, our world-view has been radically altered by the mechanic muse, and we increasingly live second-hand lives, for life seems to be what appears on screens. Despite the bleakness of certain of its sections, this book is about hope for the future. Yet, unless our future is to be merely one of amiable mediocrity in an ever more precarious world, we must take a pitiless look at the current human condition in the Western cultural realm.

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Preface

Urbanized humanity is increasingly divorced from primary experience, especially the sensuous freedom and the exploration of inner, mental landscapes that characterize childhood. The psychiatrist R.D. Laing believed that human beings have become so 'self-brutalized, banalized, and stultified' that they are unaware of their own debasement. In societies built on competition for basic goods, it is difficult to love others, difficult, even, to love oneself. Man is now so powerful that, in Freud's words, he has become 'a kind of prosthetic God.' Yet mental illness thrives, and only the very dull seem happy. We are, at root, alienated, and thus estranged from our authentic possibilities. In particular, we are increasingly alienated from our sensual and imaginative possibilities. We are alienated, too, from a world we collectively have too much power over, a world we universally confront only in a visual way. For vision is the most detached of the senses; its end result is 'landscape,' something we stand back to view. Vision encourages objectivity in a world that cries out for involvement, empathy, and the deeper meaningfulness that comes with a heightening, as in children and other animals, of the non-visual senses. And we are alienated from ourselves as well as from others. Giddy with entertainment, sated with consumer goods, and planned to death, we devote little time to exploring the paysage interieur, the convoluted, intricate, and always rewarding landscape of our minds. The way we live now is unhealthy, wasteful, dehumanizing, and, ultimately, absurd. We can change it at the public level, as Green parties recognize, by adopting alternative technologies and life-styles in pursuit of right livelihood and a green geography. But the key to such a transformation is personal change at the private level, and to encourage such change we need a back-to-basics movement that will result in the necessary revolution in consciousness and a new awareness of our sensual and spiritual selves. The ultimate goal, then, is the re-enchantment of the world and the redemption of mankind from an ultimately self- and world-effacing way of life. The more modest goal of this book is to open up the possibilities of that mysterious terrain known as the landscape of the mind, that is, to explore some of the basic sensual and existential characteristics of the human condition. Although we have a foothold on outer space, the most important journey of all is the one we seem most loath to embark upon, the exploration of the inner space that lies within ourselves. Those who seem to agree include: Berman, M. 1986. The Reenchantmentofthe World. New York: Bantam

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Bunyard, P., and F. Morgan-Grenville, eds. 1987. The Green Alternative: A Guide to Good Living. London: Methuen Burgess, A. 1980. 1985. London: Arrow Hoff, B. 1983. The Tao of Pooh. New York: Penguin Kenner, H . 1986. The Mechanic Muse. New York: Oxford University Press Laing, RD. 1967. The Politics of Experience. Hannondsworth: Penguin Lapham, L. 1989. 'The Old School,' Harper's magazine, April: 10-13 Lopez, B. 1986. Arctic Dreams. New York: Scribner's Tuan, Y.-F. 1986. The Good Life. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press Updike, J. 1986. Roger's Version. New York: Knopf

LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND

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Landscapes

How do people imagine the landscapes they find themselves in? ... It is easy to underestimate the power of ... association with the land ... with the span of it in memory and imagination ... For some people, what they are is not finished at the skin, but continues with the reach of the senses out into the land. Barry Lopez

Geography is, above all, the study of landscape, and a striving to be at home in our physical and social landscapes is one of the chief ingredients in our constitutionally sanctioned pursuit of happiness. In all senses, landscape reflects where we're at. We are all familiar, perhaps too familiar, with landscapes. We live in them, travel through them, employ architects and planners to change them, admire them as works of nature or art, hang them on our walls. Landscapes are a given. So much so, apparently, that the very word landscape has superseded the previously overused situation in mediaspeak; we are asked, for example, to visualize the effects of an event upon the existing 'political landscape' (Seager 1981). Novelists employ metaphoric landscapes. While Lawrence Durrell speaks of 'landscapes of the heart,' Lesley Blanch rhapsodizes on her 'landscapes of the heart's desire.' While environmentalists strive to protect tangible landscapes, poets, artists, and novelists preserve, restore, and express our landscapes of the mind. The common sense

The literature of landscape is enormous, and cannot be summarized here. For a history of the concept of landscape, and how it has evolved from post-Renaissance Dutch realist and Italian idealist modes to become our prevailing blandscape, one could hardly do better than peruse Lowenthal (1964, 1968, 1975) and Relph (1981). For the transfor-

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mation of tangible landscapes into art, one still begins with Kenneth Clark (1956). What I wish to emphasize here is that, when we consider landscape, we are almost always concerned with a visual construct. Landscape is something we look at or imagine as a visual metaphor. Although we may attach the suffix scape to a whole pack of disparate nouns, so that we may talk of townscapes or, in a painterly way, speak of van Gogh's wheatscapes, L.S. Lowry's seascapes, and the skyscapes of Canadian prairie painters, or even the dreamscapes of Freud, in all cases we are dealing wholly with the sense of sight, whether actual or imagined. Sight is the common sense, the dominant sensory mode; in humans, it yields more than 80 per cent of our knowledge of the external world. In order to comprehend the fundamental importance of sight in the Western world, we have only to consider its major language metaphors. I am a camera, believe perhaps that the camera cannot lie, and look for eyewitnesses, for justice must be seen to be done. After revelations, our eyes are opened. We press our points of view on our political representatives, whom we expect to have foresight, rather than hindsight, and vision, rather than visions. Politicians, in turn, are careful of their images on television. Above all, seeing is believing, and 'I see' means 'I understand.' It is commonly believed that sight leads to insight (Pocock 1981) and that the geographer's 'eye for country' should result in discerning observations about landscapes. Landscape, whether in the physical environment or in the form of a painting, does not exist without an observer. Although the land exists, 'the scape is a projection of human consciousness, an image received' (Erlich 1987). Mentally or physically, we frame the view, and our appreciation depends on our frame of mind. At one time, in the confident late eighteenth century, we felt quite able to categorize landscapes as picturesque, beautiful, or sublime. Whereas the beautiful was soft, rounded, gentle, and feminine, and the sublime harsh, masculine, and forbidding, the word picturesque, as applied to landscapes, meant literally 'like a picture,' that is, well-composed. Yet, even with our overwhelming emphasis on seeing, it is not clear that we see very well. The art of 'concentrated looking' (Berger 1987) is not well developed; we see very little of our world, for we are habituated to it and willing to concentrate only on extraordinary 'spectacles' (Debord 1977). So insensitive are we now that our everyday environments have become a visual nightmare that only a few have the sensitivity to rail against. For visual splendour we drive out to national parks to view the landscape, which we see only from carefully managed,

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prescribed viewpoints. Death Valley thus becomes merely Dante's View or Zabriskie Point. Vision distances us from the landscape; it is easy to be disengaged. Such is not the case for other sensory modes, particularly smell and touch. Yet, except for hearing, these other senses are increasingly neglected in urban civilization. While visual landscapes have been analysed to death, non-visual sensory modes have been paid little attention in studies of 'landscape appreciation.' And metaphorical landscapes are almost wholly the domain of novelists and poets. It is the task of this chapter to introduce these sensuous and metaphorical landscapes of the mind, and thus lay the groW1dwork for the progression of interconnected essays that follows. Sensuous worlds Europeans ... have moved in the direction of the visual. In the Middle Ages, Europeans still lived for the most part in a traditional world that rewarded the senses - that was inchoate, colorful, and warmly human. From the sixteenth century onward, however, the world was shifting toward a cooler, larger, more deliberately conceived and precisely delineated order. Yi-Fu Tuan

In a sensory version of Gresham's Law, vision drives out the other senses. It is the ideal sense for an intellectualized, information-crazed species that has withdrawn from many areas of direct sensation. Go outside, and close your eyes. Immediately the lids fall on darkness, a cacophony is released. Gradually, one may be able to distinguish ambient smells and even tastes, especially near the sea. Touch becomes important both for orientation and for sensuous pleasure. Mobility, the kinaesthetic sense, is severely curtailed. Open the eyes again, and welcome relief from one kind of sensory deprivation is paid for by an immediate loss of acuity in most of the other senses. As Freud noted half a century ago in Civilization and Its Discontents, man is a visual creature who 'visualizes' even in imagination, and has extended his visual capacities enormously by means of telescope and microscope. Few such extensions of the other senses have become available. Indeed, we have been extremely selective in adhering to what John Updike (1986, 150) calls 'this terrible binding contract with eyeballs, nostril hairs, ear bones, and edible gray brain cells.' Other animals, of course, have taken different routes. We have all become familiar with the extraordinary sensory capaci-

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ties of insects. Male moths of certain species can trace the alluring scent of the female from a distance of seven or more miles. For a dog, the nose opens up the world. Even in terms of sound and light, other beings are capable of perceiving far beyond the extremes of our meagre spectra. Bats hear what we cannot, insects follow visual nectar guides that we cannot see. The dances of bees communicate very specific information. In an otherwise indifferent book, Rivlin and Gravelle (1984) sensitively explore the sensory worlds of lizards, snakes, owls, and even bacteria. We perceive little of the world: 'an entire angelic conversation transpires invisibly all around us' (Updike 1986, 232). Environmental aestheticians, who perhaps ought to know better, are almost wholly concerned with the visual qualities of landscape (Porteous 1982). Notwithstanding the holistic nature of environmental experience, few researchers have attempted to interpret it in a holistic manner. Concentration on the non-visual senses is also rare. Few have investigated soundscape, and hardly any have chosen to encounter smellscape or the tactile-kinaesthetic qualities of environment. Taste remains a metaphor. The fact that more than 80 per cent of our sensory input is visual does not invalidate the need to explore the other sensory qualities of environment. The tactile sense is fundamental and immediate. Skin is the largest sensory organ; we are always 'in touch.' In sensory-deprivation experiments (Porteous 1977), it is possible to reduce smell, taste, hearing, and sight to minimal or even zero levels, but some tactile sense always remains, for without it we cannot survive. Indeed, while seeing appears to be believing, we often require corroboration through physical handling, as did Doubting Thomas. Smell, like hearing, provides us with useful information about the characteristics of our environment. It is especially important in this regard among young children and the blind. Smell is of special value in detecting what is natural, real, or authentic. Tuan (1982, 119) notes that manufactured objects do not successfully imitate nature if they do not 'exude nature's characteristically complex fragrance.' Unlike touch, however, smell does not seem to be of great value in structuring space. Sound is more useful in this regard, for it is frequently directional, and sources can more readily be ascertained because of our sinaurality. Hearing greatly enhances our perception of environment because it is a multidimensional sense, sounds being evaluated on magnitude, clarity, aesthetic, relaxation, familiarity, and mood dimensions (Miller 1978). Sound is omnipresent in the environment; it fills all space and tends spherically to envelop the hearer. Two important characteristics distinguish the non-visual from the

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visual senses. First, the non-visual senses are much more proximate than is vision. While vision is involved with what is 'out there' (try looking at the end of your nose), the other senses tend to be more concerned with life at close quarters. At these close quarters, all the senses operate to produce 'not just a picture but a circumambient world pulsating with life' (Tuan 1982, 118). At the middle distance, touch, taste, and smell drop 'out of the picture' and we are left with what could be a movie screen. At an even greater distance, sound is often overwhelmed, and we are left with an animated, but curiously lifeless, picture world. Vision is the intellectual sense. It structures the universe for us, but only 'out there' and 'in front.' It is a cool, detached sense, and sight alone is insufficient for a true involvement of self with world. In sharp contrast, the non-visual worlds surround the sensor, even penetrate the body, and have far greater power to stir the emotions. These hot, emotional senses are highly arousing, filling the self with feelings of pleasure, nostalgia, revulsion, and affection. Smell, in particular, arouses emotions strongly and rapidly because olfactory signals plug directly into the brain's limbic system, the core of emotions and memory, crossing far fewer synapses than do signals emanating from other senses. Above all, smell and the other non-visual senses are deeply bound up with the experience of pleasure. The pleasures of food, love-making, and pets are impossible to imagine without the non-visual senses. Thus it is that smell, sound, touch, and taste are of vital importance for the achievement and maintenance of a person's sense of well-being. In this book, smellscape and soundscape will be investigated in detail. For contrast, and to emphasize the complementarity between positivist and humanist methodologies, smellscape is mainly investigated phenomenologically, while soundscape receives both a humanistic and a traditional scientific treatment. These two sensescapes are more readily conceptualized in 'scape terms than are touchscape and tastescape. The latter is to some extent subsumed in the idea of smellscape, while touchscape perhaps more properly belongs with bodyscape (chapter 4 ). This connecting function of the bodyscape chapter indicates, of course, the artificial, but heuristically necessary, distinction between these 'sensuous worlds' and the 'landscapes of metaphor' to which I now tum.

Landscapes of metaphor Perhaps the most fascinating terrae incognitae of all are those that lie within the hearts and minds of men. John Kirtland Wright

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One does not have to venture far into the realms of literature, psychiatry, or the more prescient evocations of landscape to find an extraordinarily insistent emphasis on the importance of the paysage interieur, the landscape of the mind. Samuel Beckett's plays are pure evocations of this interior landscape. The psychiatrist R. D. Laing invites us to explore inner space. And Barry Lopez (1986) in Arctic Dreams , one of the outstanding landscape meditations of our time, asks the question: 'How do people imagine the landscapes they find themselves in?' (p. xxvii). Seeking to comprehend a region rich in metaphor, Lopez notes that 'to inquire into the intricacies of an unknown landscape is to provoke thoughts about one's own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory' (p. 247). He believes, with the Inuit, that a spiritual landscape coexists with the physical landscape, that the very order of language 'derives from the mind's intercourse with the landscape' (p. 278). It is the mind's deeper intercourse with the landscape that is the subject of the second, and larger, part of this book. Among scientists, only a few geographers appear to have tried to come to tenns with this emotive, almost mystical relationship between mankind and landscape. In his famous essay of 1947, 'Terrae Incognitae - The Place of Imagination in Georgraphy,' J.K. Wright argued that it is not so much what we perceive but how we feel about what we perceive that is crucial to an understanding of our behaviour and ourselves. After Wright, a humanistic approach to geography was kept alive by Lowenthal (1961) and Tuan (1974), both of whom were concerned to explore the man:environment relationship in tenns of ideas. J.W. Watson (1968, 11) explains this emphasis on inner worlds of meaning thus: 'Not all geography derives from the earth itself; some of it springs from our idea of the earth. This geography within the mind can at times be the effective geography to which men adjust and thus be more important than the supposedly real geography of the earth. Man has the peculiar aptitude of being able to live by notions of reality which may be more real than reality itself.' Nevertheless, this thoughtful, penetrating approach to human understanding in geography was suppressed for many years by the power of the simplistic theoretico-quantitative movement that dominated the subject from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. Humanistic geography, as the movement became known, lurked underground, to flower in the late 1970s (Ley and Samuels 1978). More imaginative geographers roundly criticized the prevailing positiveness for suppressing subjectivity, overlooking intentionality, and emphasiz-

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ing human passivity. The theoretical constructs associated with positivistic modes of research were also criticized for their avoidance of any discussion of experiential relationships with environment. Tuan (1977, 1978) felt that mainstream geography severely neglected the internal aspects of human consciousness, the sensations and perceptions that contribute to experience and by which a person makes sense of his environment. Rather than denying the value of positivistic approaches, however, humanistic geographers generally insist that their approaches are complementary, rather than alternatives, to the mainstream. One of the approaches of humanistic geography involves the critical assessment of imaginative literature for its insights into the relationship between inner and outer landscapes. This approach is of vital importance to our understanding of ourselves, for while much literature seems particularist and place-specific (Pocock 1981), it almost always, on perusal, comes to reveal the universal within the particular. The test of validity, always, is the question: 'Is this true for me?' Within the field of imaginative literature, the novel is of paramount interest to geographers (Porteous 1985). Most attention has been given to the regional novel, an eminently nineteenth-century form wherein is depicted a world of roots, place, and home, a largely rural world where change comes slowly. For Western man, in contrast, the twentieth century is pre-eminently one of urban life; placeless, constantly in flux, future-shocked perhaps, a world whose inhabitants are frequently rootless and often, in the sense of community membership, homeless too. Consider the vast growth of 'community studies' in the social sciences and the ideological importance of 'neighbourhood' in urban planning. These are reactions to loss. Twentieth-century reality is one of angst, anomie, and alienation to which, pace T.S. Eliot, most of us prefer to be only partly awake. Regional novelists of rural persuasion continued to be active well into the twentieth century; one thinks of Mary Webb or Winifred Holtby. Yet theirs is already a world of nostalgia. Even in the nineteenth-century rural regional novel, a feeling of rootlessness was becoming apparent (Middleton 1981). Late-nineteenth-century French novelists and poets, such as Zola and Baudelaire, reflect a growing urban rootlessness, squalor, and despair. It is in this tradition that the British novelists who came to maturity between the two world wars operate. I am thinking especially of Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Malcolm Lowry, Graham Greene, and a host of lesser novelists who express the feeling that there is something badly, perhaps fatally, wrong with the urban civilization that had been built upon the corpses of

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Landscapes

the lost generations of the Industrial Revolution and of the First World War. In exploring the relationship between paysage interieur and perceived landscape, I have investigated a wide variety of literature, as may be seen in the chapters 'Smellscape,' 'Bodyscape,' and 'Childscape.' My chief interest, however, is in the writings of Malcolm Lowry and Graham Greene, and it is the work of these two authors that I investigate in depth in the chapters 'Homescape' and 'Escape' (mainly Greene) and, in a far more sombre mood, 'lnscape' and 'Deathscape' (mainly Lowry). Lowry and Greene have only rarely been considered together, and then chiefly in the context of their fictionalization of the landscapes of Mexico (Veitch 1975). This point is significant, for both these writers whose sensibilities were established between the two world wars belong to a literary genre that might best be described as that of 'the exiled Englishman.' Both Fussell (1980) and Gurr (1981) have written at length on exile, which is further discussed below in the chapters 'Homescape' and 'Escape.' It suffices to note here that these exiled English writers have a nwnber of common and salient characteristics: a fixation on the notion of home; a concern for rootedness and rootlessness; the inevitable outsider's view of alien landscapes; a fascination with cities (positive for Greene, negative for Lowry); and a distaste for twentiethcentury civilization (Porteous 1985). It is because I share some of these concerns that I have chosen to concentrate almost half of this book on interpretations of Lowry and Greene. These interpretations tend to downplay literary theory not only because of its current state of extreme disarray on the issue of 'how we situate ourselves' in reference to literary texts (Graff 1987) but also because a heavy concentration on the minutiae of literary conventions would seriously impede my argument, which must give primacy to landscape rather than to literature. Nevertheless, the reader should be aware that Lowry and Greene are modernists both in method (cinematic techniques, for example) and in their prevailing mood of disenchantment, which amounted, in Lowry's case, to a revulsion towards the present. This context has obviously shaped the way Lowry and Greene express their perceptions of the world. Yet each has his own voice. In this connection, narratology attempts to distinguish between author, narrator, and characters. In the case of Lowry and Greene, however, I argue that these distinctions are often difficult to make. Many critics have noted that Lowryan protagonists appear to be the author's alter egos. Moreover, much of Lowry's later work is reflexive metafiction in which

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autobiographical concerns assume ever greater significance. In true autobiography, of course, author, narrator, and protagonist are identical (Finney 1985), but Lowry clearly blurred the narratological categories in creating his 'reflexive sequence [of] autobiographically-based fiction' (Binns 1984, 84). The case for a high degree of author-narrator congruence is less easy to make for Greene. In discussing his technique with Evelyn Waugh, however, Greene (1981, 263) remarks: 'With a writer of your genius and insight I would not attempt to hide behind the time-old gag that an author can never be identified with his characters ... I suppose the points where an author is in agreement with his characters lends what force or warmth there is to the expression. At the same time I think one can say that a parallel must not be drawn all down the line.' Elsewhere in the same book he is more definite about the parallels between life and landscape. In describing fetid Lagos, he concedes: 'Greeneland perhaps: I can only say it is the land in which I have passed most of my life' (p. 99). Perhaps the best case is made by Bayley (1989), who agrees with other critics that Greene's personal world-view, as depicted in autobiographies, travel books, and interviews, is faithfully reproduced in every novel. Bayley states that Greene 'brings his own vision of reality into his novels as a literary device.' He finds this 'naive' and 'child-like' and stresses his disapproval of the fact that all Greene's works exemplify 'the bedrock of Greene's own nature.' For my purposes, however, the demonstrable link between author and the prevailing world-view expressed in the narrative is exactly what I would wish. Ultimately, I have chosen these authors not simply because they best represent what I want to say, which I believe they do, but also because I enjoy them. It thus seems sensible, at this point, to introduce them to the reader.

Graham Greene You do not flee from what happens to you, but from yourself. From days that are always the same. From routine. From boredom. Greene, interviewed in Frankfurter Allgemeine

Greene is one of the milder exponents of the general twentieth-century feeling of Weltschmerz. His vision is not apocalyptic as were those of Huxley and Orwell, the one envisioning a future hell of soulless luxury, the other a brutal totalitarian world, both involving the denial of any

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sense of individual freedom. He has many affinities with Lowry, as we shall see, although the sense of an omnipresent private hell is much less apparent in Greene. Yet, Greene has managed to create a landscape of the mind that reflects a persistent and insidious aspect of modem life. Hidden behind the luxurious fa~ades of the West, expressed overtly in colonies and Third World totalitarian regimes, symbolized by both· skyscraper and slum, lies the landscape of the mind known as Greeneland, a seedy region of furtive dealings, where war is humdrum and peace always uneasy. Landscapes are of varying value to the novelist. He may create wholly imaginary landscapes whose terrain, climate, and life forms are essential for the working out of the plot. Such are the worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien or Frank Herbert's Dune series. Landscapes may be expressly used for symbolic purposes, where specific places may be identified with the stages of life's journey or where archetypal symbols such as sea and forest are used to convey meaning. This is the world of Malcolm Lowry. Or landscapes may be used more generally, to reflect the novelist's perception of the human condition, so that the reader remains unsure whether environments create or condition the characters, whether the congruence between character and landscape is symbiotic, causal, or coincidental. Most writers use all of these modes; it is the balance that is important. Greene overwhelmingly chooses the third mode, a Greeneland in which seedy protagonists inhabit seedy regions. Greene (1904-) takes the psychiatric or Jesuitical view that, in childhood, we come to a cognition of the world that persistently shapes our future lives. Future experiences are moulded by this world-view, and cannot erase or efface it. The title of the first volume of his autobiography, A Sort of Life (1971), gives us a clue to his feelings about the world. Born into a pious suburban family with literary connections, he felt a need to escape, even in childhood; the second volume of his autobiography is aptly entitled Ways of Escape (1981). Certain aspects of Greene's childhood become themes that appear and reappear in the novels. These are: a preoccupation with pain, violence, cruelty, and humiliation; a positive view of fear, danger, adventure, and change; a restless boredom of immense and soul-destroying proportions; a preoccupation with hopelessness, failure, and despair; and the use of travel to dull the existential terror brought about by his contemplation of the futility of his own life, in particular, and of the human condition, in general. Throughout his early childhood, Greene was the victim of many petty hwniliations, especially of the kind inflicted by the naturally cruel school bully. These humiliations lodged in his subconscious to be released

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13

suddenly, like time capsules, as recall and recognition mechanisms operated in later life. One period of school life is seen as 'a hundred and four weeks of monotony, humiliation, and mental pain' (Life, 88). At school, Greene felt he had 'entered a savage country of strange customs and inexplicable cruelties' (Life, 74), a primitive region in which, for the first time, he experienced the alien feeling of the outsider and the terror of being a hunted creature. Yet, time and again in his later life, he was to travel to backward parts of the world in search of some of the primitive qualities experienced in childhood. Injustice is endemic in the life of the child, and is magnified in the child's eyes because of his inability to change the world or remonstrate with adults. Injustice is a common theme in Greene's early novels, notably It's a Battlefield (1934). Books depicting treachery, cruelty, and suffering attracted Greene, as they do many small boys. Childish games that involved an element of fear were preferred; 'from terror one escapes screaming, but fear has an odd seduction' (Life , 31). Here is a fundamental difference between Greene and Lowry, for Lowry ventured down from the plateaux of fear to plumb the terrors of the abyss. A taste for the mildly macabre emerged early; Greene writes that 'the first thing I remember is sitting in a pram ... with a dead dog lying·at my feet' (Life 17). Hopelessness and failure were also experienced early in life. Greene found that failure can sometimes have its rewards, while, like Lowry, he discovered that success always has a dark side. Indeed, the first page of the childhood autobiography reminds the reader of the long period of failure that Greene experienced after the publication of his first novel in 1929. 'Failure too is a kind of death: the furniture sold, the drawers emptied, the removal van waiting like a hearse in the lane' (Life, 11). This is a foretaste of Greeneland. The novels and travel books fall into three periods (Kurismootil 1982). The first, roughly 1930 to 1936, includes such novels as Stamboul Train (Orient Express), It's a Battlefield, England Made Me, A Gun for Sale, and the Liberian travel book Journey without Maps. The background is world-wide economic depression followed by the rise of Nazism. The motifs include boredom, betrayal, a mild Marxism on occasion, a sense of injustice, and an urgent, though hopeless, desire to reorder society. The middle phase, roughly 1937 to 1951, includes most of the more famous 'religious' novels, Brighton Rock, The PowerandtheGlory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, with A Burnt-out Case appearing as a postscript a decade later. These deal with such basic questions as the nature of evil, the role of suffering, the difficulties of

14

Landscapes

religious faith, the impossibilities of human relationships. The third period, which begins in the early 1950s and still continues, reverts to the earliest phase in content, though not in tone. Here, the cruelties and absurdities of civilized life are recorded faithfully, but 'the tone grows steadily mellower with each book until ... there is a deep acceptance of life, and a tolerance of those maladies that cannot be overcome' (Kurismootil 1982, 10). To know all is to forgive all. Indeed, this period includes Greene's rather sad comedies. Malcolm Lowry A day of sunlight and swallows ... And saw the fireman, by the fiddley, wave. And laughed. And went on digging my own grave. Lowry, from 'Hostage'

Alcoholic and manic-depressive, infantile, orally fixated, sexually insecure, narcissistic, generally inept, and possibly a suicide, Malcolm Lowry (1909-57) was also a literary genius. Although he published only two novels during his lifetime, the second, Under the Volcano, is a masterpiece. His whole opus has much to say to students of the landscapes of the mind. Malcolm Lowry's childhood was spent in a wealthy suburban setting on the Cheshire side of the Liverpool conurbation. His father was a successful businessman, a stem, low-church teetotaller, a very threatening super-ego; Lowry went in fear of authority all his life. He had an ambivalent feeling for his mother, who at one point rejected him and who often left with her husband on business trips. Sent to boardingschool at age seven, he remained thus institutionalized until escaping to sea between school and university. Lowry was a loner; in Mexico he prayed to the Virgen de la Soledad, 'the Virgin for those who have nobody them with.' He was a heavy drinker from his teens, a spinner of tales from school magazine onwards, an anxious neurotic since his early alienation from the deeply Calvinistic austerity of his family home. All his life he rejected authority but craved dependence, a difficult psychic balancing act, hardly conducive to serenity. Lowry's undergraduate novel, Ultramarine (1933), was based on experiences in 1927-8 as a deck-hand en route to the Far East. During his time at Cambridge, he visited novelist Nordahl Grieg in Norway and conceived the novel In Ballast to the White Sea, which was unfortunately destroyed by fire while still in manuscript. After Cambridge he visited

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15

France and Spain, married, and, in 1935, travelled to New York. There, already an alcoholic, he was admitted to the psychiatric wing of the Bellevue Hospital, an experience that later figured in the novella Lunar Caustic (1968). Lowry then tried scriptwriting in California. A failure in Hollywood, he removed to Mexico, where his eighteen-month stay in Cuernavaca provided material for his masterwork, Under the Volcano (1947). Abandoned by his wife, thrown out of Mexico for drunken excesses, he met his second wife in Los Angeles and retired with her to a squatter's shack at Dollarton, on the north shore of Burrard Inlet, opposite the city of Vancouver. Here they lived from 1940 to 1954, and Dollarton figures, as Eridanus, in all the post-Ultramarine novels. Dollarton became the home-base for a succession of trips: to Ontario (1944); Mexico (1945-6), from which he was again expelled; Haiti, New York, Ontario again (1946-7); and France and Italy (1947-9). All these journeys figured in the four novel-travelogues, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1961), Dark as the Grave Wherein My FriendlsLaid(196B), OctoberFeny toGabriola (1970), andLaMordida (unfinished, unpublished). In 1954 Lowry, forced to leave Dollarton, travelled to Italy in an unsuccessful search for an alternative home-place, underwent psychiatric treatment in London, and settled, in 1956, in the village of Ripe in Sussex. His demise there a year later was recorded as 'death by misadventure,' the latter word being an inadvertently accurate judgment on the whole of Lowry's life. The reader of the six published novels is immediately struck by certain themes that recur throughout. Lowry's novels are autobiographical to the highest degree. His only material was his own experiences, his own feelings, his own journeyings, his own anguish. In every work the protagonist is Lowry himself, with only the slightest changes of detail; indeed, in at least one short story the author slips from 'Sigbj0rn Wilderness,' the protagonist, to 'I' and back again. Many of Lowry's characters bear Norwegian or Celtic names; to Lowry these peripheral nations were breeders of strong, heroic, troubled seafarers, a role he took on early in life. The theme of the sea, unfettered, open, clean, but often violent, runs through most of his works. On land, if a seashore is not available, volcanoes are preferred. Volcanoes and storms at sea fascinated Lowry. His own character involved a good deal of suppressed violence, and he displayed bouts of high energy and indiscipline followed by passive quiescence, a characteristic he shared with both volcanoes and the sea. His identification with landscape features is not unexpected; a psychiat-

16

Landscapes

ric examination suggested that Lowry was unable to distinguish fully between himself and his environment. Further, all the novels are journey novels - whether actual, physical journeys across landscape or seascape, or interior journeys through the landscapes of the mind. Frequently, they may be read as both. Indeed, Lowry conceived his whole opus as 'The Voyage That Never Ends,' with a Dantesque cast in that Ultramarine and Lunar Caustic were seen as Purgatorio, Under the Volcano and Dark as the Grave as Inferno, and Hear Us O Lord and October Ferry as Paradiso. Within the journey theme, the concepts of home and homelessness recur. The traveller is frequently unhappy in his journeying; he seeks a place that he may call home. Once found, however, home can be threatened by outside forces, and the now-settled traveller fears its loss. Throughout this repeated dialectic of journey and home, Lowry and his protagonists appear as existential outsiders, achieving a brief insiderhood only in the squatters' settlement at Dollarton. With respect to his life in Dollarton, perhaps it is worthwhile here to emphasize the Canadian-ness of Malcolm Lowry. Breit and Lowry (1965) have noted that 'the most important novel ever written in Canada is a novel about Mexico [Under the Volcano] written by an Englishman in exile' and that Canada was Lowry's 'last stand.' Mexican Volcano is ultimately pessimistic, and a reading of this novel alone has frequently coloured Canadian literary views of Lowry; But, when we read his poems about Burrard Inlet and his Canadian novellas and stories, we realize that Lowry 'is not in fact writing about Canada as a transient outsider. He is writing about it as a man who over fifteen years lived himself into the environment that centred upon his fragile home where the Pacific tides lapped and sucked under the floor-boards, and who identified himself with that environment' (Woodcock 1965, 5). Perhaps some of the Canadian antipathy towards immigrant Lowry is explained by the unflattering fact that 'it was really landscape more than culture that influenced him in Canada' (New 1971, 131). In this sense Lowry is a geographer's novelist, in general, and a Canadian geographer's novelist, in particular. It is in Canada, and particularly in British Columbia, that wilderness and city come into very close juxtaposition. Whereas nature appalled Graham Greene, cities appalled Malcolm Lowry. For him, hell was indeed a city, perhaps not like London, but certainly in the guise of Oaxaca or Vancouver. In his hatred of the urban scene, Lowry himself coined the word 'deathscape.' Yet, Lowry insisted on wandering off to cities, especially foreign ones. In his work the home: away theme

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17

appears as forcefully as in Greene, but without the latter's detachment. For Lowry's intense identification with landscapes results in their becoming 'inscapes,' regions of the soul. Landscapes of the mind

This book, then, will explore the possibilities of otherscapes. First, by investigating the nature of smell and sound, it will map the co-ordinates of smellscape and soundscape. Plunging beyond the world of the senses, I then enter the shadow realm of a half-dozen metaphorical landscapes. Choosing these six metaphorical landscapes of the mind was not difficult. As we seem naturally to conceptualize in terms of polarities, the six 'scapes fall naturally into three such pairs. The antinomies I have chosen seem to me the most basic to the human condition. Bodyscape: inscape, as an entity, reflects our chief existential distinction, that between self and non-self. Here we are dealing with the hoary mind:body problem. The most significant geographical distinction for humans is between home and away. Like body and mind, which operate together to constitute the person, the home:away, or homescape: escape, dialectic reflects the two basic conditions for animal being, movement and rest. Finally, the childscape:deathscape antinomy considers the fundamental progression of human beings from life to death, from child to adult, and, for humanity at large, from rural surroundings to an urbanized world. We are dealing, then, both with sensuous capacities of which we know very little and with metaphorical landscapes that mirror the basic polarities of human existence. The book's argument follows a basic progression. Early chapters are more scientific and psychological in tone, and have clear implications for urban and regional planning. Later chapters build upon these findings in investigating the interior of the human mind in relation to the external environment. Concepts such as smellscape and soundscape are developed and utilized again and again in later, multisensory chapters. They accumulate naturally in 'Bodyscape' and, from this point, the progression is from body to mindscapes. These later chapters touch on some awkward questions about the human condition in the late-twentieth-century Western world. My aim is to raise, rather than answer these questions, for finding answers is also the task of the reader. My goal at this point is to add to the reader's burden of awareness, to provide a counterweight for the unbearable lightness of being.

Smellscape

2

They haven't got no noses The fallen sons of Eve ... And Quoodle here discloses All things that Quoodle can, They haven't got no noses, They haven't got no noses, And goodness only knowses The Noselessness of Man.

Quoodle, in G.K. Chesterton's The Flying Inn

Who among us has not witnessed the impatient dog-walker tugging the leash of a rooted, sniffing animal, shouting, 'Come on, there's nothing there,' and thereby acknowledging the dog's ineffable superiority in the matter of smell? Dogs live in a world of scents: The brilliant smell of water, The brave smell of a stone, The smell of dew and thunder, The old bones buried under .. . (Chesterton 1958, 163)

We cannot appreciated Quoodle' s celebration. Most of us are likely to perceive only the unearthed old bones, and such smells are rarely enjoyed by humans.

The sense of smell The human sense of smell may once have been keen. It is likely that aboriginal groups, such as Australians and the Ksan, use their sense of smell to an extent not much different from that of animals (Lowenstein 1966, 173). But the general reduction in size of the huge hominid snout has been accompanied by the atrophy of olfaction. Up to 90 per cent of

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Sensuous Worlds

our perceptual intake is visual, and much of the rest is auditory and tactile (Porteous 1977, 1982). Unlike many other animals, we rely on shape and colour for distinguishing objects and inhabit a smell-poor sensory environment. Yet, smell is immensely meaningful to humans. Combined with gustatory sensations, it is responsible for flavour in foods. It is an efficient warning device against contamination. There may be an olfactory component in sexual attraction, and a human pheromone has been isolated ('ATTRACT GIRLS! Our pheromone female attractant spray makes men desirable, attractive, virtually irresistible to women! Guaranteed!'). This importance in the matter of food, disease, and sex suggests a basic species-survival function for smell. However, Westerners seem keen to eliminate their personal smells, replacing their erased bodily secretions with perfumes derived from, or created as surrogates for, the bodily secretions of other mammals. Further, smell is an important sense in that it is primarily a very basic, emotional, arousing sense, unlike vision and sound, which tend to involve cognition. Certain smells are, therefore, deeply meaningful to individuals. The smell of a certain institutional soap may carry a person back to the purgatory of boarding-school. A particular floral fragrance reminds one of a lost love. A gust of odour from a spice emporium may waft one back, in memory, to Calcutta. And above all, as we shall see, smells can be memory releasers for the reconstruction of one's childhood. Except in the realms of neurophysiology and psychology, little research has been done on smell. Checking through the planning literature on urban aesthetics from the early 1950s to 1984, I find considerable lip-service has been paid to the obvious notion that the urban environment is a multisensory experience. We are enjoined to study smell, sound, and taste. But this, inevitably, is simply an initial ploy, to be followed by a discussion of merely visual aesthetics. The landscape-assessment literature is worse, for here the issue is almost always 'visual quality' and practitioners continue to visualize framed landscapes in neo-picturesque terms. A number of environmental psychologists have given passing mention to the subject of smell. Among geographers, only Tuan has devoted even a few pages to olfaction (1977, 10-13; 1982, 125-6). Bunge and Bordessa (1975) give smell two paragraphs in their description of a Toronto neighbourhood. Environmental smells seem to elicit few remarks from observers in North American cities, but appear to be more important to children and urban Mexicans (Rapoport 1977).

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Environmental aestheticians have called for a more thorough investigation of the environmental aspects of the non-visual senses (Porteous 1982). This chapter will, therefore, pioneer the exploration of the landscape of smell, beginning with an overview of recent findings in psychology. Using the triad person-time-space as an organizing framework, I will investigate smell as a fimction of person, of place, and of time. Considerable attention will be paid to the role of smell in memory and childhood, and to the possible applications of smellscape studies.

Psychological bases Olfactory research in psychology has progressed remarkably since William James (1893, 69) asserted that nothing was known of the chemical senses. Speculation about smell can, of course, be traced back to classical Greece, but modern scientific study began with Zwaardemaker in 1895 (Boring 1942). There remains much confusion concerning a basic classification of odours. Categories range from a minimum of four to a maximum of forty-four, but the mode is close to the magic number seven, plus or minus two. In 1756, Linnaeus suggested seven classes: aromatic, fragrant, ambrosial (musky), alliaceous (garlicky), hircine (goaty), foul, and nauseating. Note that four of these categories are defined hedonically. Two hundred years and much research later, Amoore (1970) also decided upon seven classes, considerably congruent with the Linnaean system: ethereal, floral, musky, pepperminty, camphoraceous, pungent, and putrid. By analogy with the colour spectrum, it is claimed that all scents are combinations of two or more of these primary odours or of their many subclasses. Boring (1942, 437) suggested that, in the 1940s, the study of smell was at the same scientific level as that of sight and hearing in 1750! Thanks to recent work in Scandinavia and the United States, the gap has now been reduced, although much remains to be learned about odour stimuli, acuity, coding, and memory. Some of the more important findings, largely based on Engen (1982), are presented here. The concept of adaptation is vital. The perceived intensity of a smell declines rapidly after one has been exposed to it for some time. Not that the smell disappears, but the perceiver becomes habituated to it, as, in Aesop's fable, the tanner gradually learned to ignore the stench of tanning hides. In everyday terms, one's house has a characteristic smell readily perceived by visitors but apparent to the occupant only after having been away from home for some time. This habituation effect is

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crucial to humanistic studies, for it will be apparent in later discussions that almost all literary descriptions of smells (with the important exception of childhood memories, which are distanced in time rather than space) are the work of non-residents. Thus, in the humanistic study of smellscapes, as elsewhere, the insider:outsider antinomy (Relph 1976) is a crucial one. A second important feature relates to the psychology of hedonics. Of the estimated 400,000 existing odorous compounds, Hamanzu (1969) estimates that only 20 per cent are regarded as pleasant by humans. Further, there appears to be a strong tendency to judge unfamiliar smells as unpleasant; this finding relates to the concept of habituation. A matrix with pleasant/unpleasant and familiar/unfamiliar dimensions would yield an overwhelmingly high incidence of odours in the polarized familiar/pleasant and unfamiliar/unpleasant cells. This dichotomy relates to the alerting, warning, function of smell, and provides some support for the importance of the insider (familiar):outsider (unfamiliar) antinomy in smell perception. Vast individual and group differences in the sensory response to smell are a third major finding (Gilbert and Wysocki 1987). Although all persons are likely to judge an unfamiliar smell as unpleasant, the same smell may be familiar and pleasant to one individual but unfamiliar and unpleasant to another person. This experience is a common one for outsiders, such as tourists, inner-city visitors to farms, and urban newcomers to country living. Industrial occupation is also an important factor. Besides the distinctive odour of coastal fish-packing, the Western Canadian smellscape contains both 'sweet' and 'sour' regions, product, respectively, of timber processing and natural-gas drilling. The rottenegg smell of gas can drift for scores of miles, and occasionally envelops the cities of Calgary and Edmonton. Although such smellscapes may be offensive to city dwellers, modem Canadian folklore includes the pulp-mill worker who tells the offended middle-class environmentalist that the sulphite odour of his plant 'smells of money,' a variation of the old Yorkshire saying, 'Where there's muck there's brass.' Further, odour tolerances and preferences appear to be age-related. Children are much more tolerant of basic body smells, such as of sweat and faeces, than are adults. Few smell preferences are innate (Engen 1979); most are learned, which shows the importance of cultural adaption and insideness. There is, in fact, little evidence that universally pleasant or unpleasant smells exist, unless the almost universal adult dislike of the faeces odour can be so considered. However, generalized preferences, at least among Westerners, appear to favour natural

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25

scents, from flowers, fruits, and vegetables (Montcrieff 1966). Recent world smell surveys (Gilbert and Wysocki 1987; Radford 1989) suggest banana as the most, and natural gas as the least preferred smells on the global scale. Inexplicable regional differences, however, are apparent. Generalized dislikes tend to include many chemical and synthetic smells, especially those emitted by chemical factories, food-processing plants, refineries, garbage dumps, and most of all, engines, especially diesel engines. Given such generalized preferences, it is unfortunate that the majority of mankind in industrial societies is confined to urban areas dominated by machinekind. Finally, psychological research indicates that olfaction seems to stimulate emotional or motivational arousal (Engen 1982, 129), whereas visual experience is much more likely to involve thought and cognition. Vision clearly distances us from the object. We frame 'views' in pictures and camera lenses; the likelihood of an intellectual response is considerable. By contrast, smells environ. They penetrate the body and permeate the immediate environment, and thus one's response is much more likely to involve strong affect. Useful concepts derivable from psychological research, then, include habituation, major individual differences, age-related preferences, generalized dislike of urban and industrial odours, strong emotional reactions to smell, and a general negative view of environmental smells. Unfortunately, psychophysical and psychological researchers tend to dismiss non-laboratory work as 'subjective,' 'descriptive,' 'nonexplanatory,' or 'anecdotal' (Engen 1982). That there have been very few naturalistic field studies of odour perception is a severe restriction on our understanding of the phenomenon. It is my contention, however, that humanistic studies, if coupled with scientific work, can significantly enrich our understanding of olfaction.

Smellscape The concept of smellscape suggests that, like visual impressions, smells may be spatially ordered or place-related. It is clear, however, that any conceptualization of smellscape must recognize that the perceived smellscape will be non-continuous, fragmentary in space and episodic in time, and limited by the height of our noses from the ground, where smells tend to linger. Only rarely will we find examples of smell isopleths, as in Spencer's The Salt Line (1984) where a character remarks: 'There's a place along the road where you can smell the Gulf ... You could draw the line of that salt smell on the map.'

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Sensuous Worlds

Smellscape, moreover, cannot be considered apart from the other senses. Many smells provide little information about the location of their source in space. Yet it is common experience that smells are not randomly distributed, but are located with reference to source, air currents, and direction and distance from source. In combination with vision and tactility, smell and the other apparently 'non-spatial' senses provide considerable enrichment of our sense of space and the character of place. We are all familiar with the fact that places may be characterized individually, or even typed, by smell, from the smell of India, of Mexico, of the London of a generation ago during a 'pea-souper,' of Los Angeles today during a smog alert, to hospitals and the smoking section at the rear of a passenger airplane. A major problem in studying the non-visual sensory landscape is the general lack of an appropriate vocabulary. Anglo-Saxonically, I incline to 'smellscape' and 'smell' rather than 'odourscape' and 'odour.' Synonyms for smell are rarely positive (fragrance), often neutral (odour, scent), and frequently negative (stink, stench, reek, pong, hum), while particularly bad smells may be adjectivalized as 'noisome,' an apparently auditory term. The metaphoric load carried by smell is ambivalent. We may be in bad odour, and thus unlikely to achieve the odour of sanctity. I smell a rat and sniff it out, savouring the sweet smell of success. Further, individual smells are often difficult to describe or name, even though instantly recognizable. This verbalization difficulty is known as the 'tip-of-the-nose' problem (Lawless and Engen 1977). A basic spatial vocabulary can be derived from soundscape studies (Schafer 1977). Soundscapes consist of sound events, some of which are soundmarks (compare landmarks). Similarly, smellscapes will involve smell events and smellmarks. 'Eyewitness' is replaced by 'earwitness' and 'nosewitness.' Visual evidence becomes hearsay and nosesay. The heightening of visual perception becomes ear-cleaning and nosetraining. Surveys and mapping of smellscape may perhaps be performed via smellwalks (compare soundwalks, and the Lynchean 'walk around the block'). Environmental assessment of smells can be undertaken by questionnaire and interview surveys of the general population, or by teams of highly sensitized, nose-trained experts. A World Smellscape Project might match the former World Soundscape Project (Truax 1978), but would find great difficulty with recording. Historical research, in particular, must rely on nosewitness (compare oral history), but it is likely that insiders may not be the best witnesses because of habituation. Recent soundscape work, for example, has cast doubt on the World

Smellscape

27

Soundscape Project's use of elderly residents of a locality as expert earwitnesses (Porteous and Mastin 1985). The value of the elderly as respondents is also reduced by the general decline in sensitivity, discrimination, and recognition of sounds, smells, and tastes with advancing age (Colavita 1978; Schiffman 1979). One alternative is to explore the depiction of smell, both spatially and temporally, in literature. The use of odour in literature emphasizes that, while one may stand outside a visual landscape and judge it artistically, as one does a painting, one is immersed in smellscape; it is immediately evocative, emotional, and meaningful. Literature, largely British and twentieth-century, provides ample data for the discussion of smells of persons and landscapes in space and through time. The smell of persons

Personal smells vary according to race, ethnicity, culture, age, sex, and class. North Americans attempt to banish personal smells and secretions, and prefer floral perfumes, whereas, in the East, 'perfumes are heavy, intriguing, sleepy and mildly intoxicating' (Montcrieff 1966, 297). Early-twentieth-century British writers were astounded by the use of patchouli in the Balkans; until recently, Continentals were far less averse to male perfumery than were the abstemious British (Lowenstein 1966). The milky smell of babies is often liked, whereas the smell of old people or the sick is avoided. An odour of sanctity pervades the corpse of a saint. No war novel is complete without reference to the sweet stench of bloated human remains. The Viet Cong were reputedly able to scent American troops by their cheesy odour, product of a high consumption of milk derivatives. Similarly, the Japanese once knew Europeans as bata-kusai ('stinks of butter'). Europeans and Americans make reciprocal claims. It may no longer be appropriate to mention the highly differentiated smells of the basic human racial groups. In a less anxious age, however, Graham Greene recalls the smell of his Liberian carriers during a trek through the bush: 'it wasn't an unpleasant smell, sweet or sour, it was bitter, and reminded me of a breakfast food I had as a child ... something vigorous and body-building which I disliked. The bitter taint was mixed with the rich plummy smell of the kola nuts .. . with an occasional flower scent one couldn't trace in the thick untidy greenery. All the smells were drawn out, as the heat increased' (Greene 1971a, 78). It is significant that Greene records these smells on the first day of the trek; thereafter his record of smells is non-existent.

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The northern races have their own peculiar odours. Maclean (1964, 54) records inter-war Russian peasants as 'gnarled beings whose drab, ragged, sweat-soaked clothes exhaled a sour odour of corruption.' Nwnerous childhood reminiscences of English rural life record the strong, wild, acrid smell of gipsies, a compound of body, food, and woodsmoke. Irish labourers were also singled out. Kitchen (1963, 44) came across a group of Irish farm workers boiling potatoes: 'The potatoes smelled good, but the Irishmen didn't.' Less judgmental was Alison Uttley, who was proffered 'a penny with the Irishmen's smell all over it, which she kept in a little box, safe with its penetrating odour, to remind her of them when they were far away' (Uttley 1931, 201). These may be class smells, for the social classes were, until a generation or two ago, readily distinguished by smell. Labouring peoples' work was dirty and promoted sweating, yet their sanitary arrangements prevented complete cleanliness. Conversely, the well-off sweated less and could wash more. Little wonder, then, that the working classes were long noted for their offensive smell, from Shakespeare's crowds in their sweaty nightcaps to Huxley's (1977, 55) painfully sensitive Denis: 'how unpleasant the crowd smelt! He lit a cigarette. The smell of cows was preferable.' George Orwell's forays into the foreign fields of Burma, Spain, and working-class northern England resulted in writings rich in smells. Sensitive to the prevailing inter-war notion among the elite that the working classes stank, he nevertheless painfully recorded their odoriferous peculiarities, to the intense discomfiture of bourgeois communists. Within the mass of 'great unwashed,' of course, some individuals smell much more rankly than others. The limits of tolerance are met in Roberts's Ragged Schooling (1976, 40) in the persons of the homeless outcast Ignatius and the 'two girls who lived behind the fish frier's you could smell ... at a distance of six feet.' As a schoolboy, H.E. Bates (1969, 42) was especially indignant at being made to 'sit next to a boy who stinks.' This smell event remained strong in his memory: 'the peculiar acrid stench of the unwashed lingers in my nostrils.' I can confirm the importance of similar episodes, my rural childhood being well-stocked with poor children, Irishmen, and gipsies, whose smells, however, seemed much less important than their interesting selves. Kitchen's unpleasant encounter with Irishmen was redeemed by a girl who smelled of violets (Kitchen 1963, 159). In Lolita (Nabokov 1959), Hwnbert Hwnbert smells little except his nymphet, a compound of cheap perfumes with the occasional 'hot breath of popcorn.' Tereza Batista's men are distinguished by their smell, from the dry woodsy

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29

aroma of the doctor to the salty sea-smell of Januario's chest (Amado 1977}. Amado's most famous novel is Gabriela: Clove and Cinnamon (1978}, the title outlining the heroine's chief physical characteristics, her smell and her colour. Aldous Huxley, wishing to acknowledge distaste for one of his characters, names him Mercaptan, ethyl mercaptan being the smell of the sktmk (Huxley 1948}. More intimately, and pleasantly, Charles Kingsley, author and priest, writes to his wife that his 'hands are perfumed with [your1 delicious limbs, and I cannot wash off the scent' (Chitty 1974, 82}. Would that he could, given recent attempts by forensic scientists to develop odourprints along the lines of fingerprints and voiceprints.

Smell in space and place People are identified with place, and thus become components of a general smellscape. Some smellscapes are large; world geographical regions can be defined inter alia by intersubjective odour impressions. Almost invariably, for the reasons already noted, odorous descriptions are the work of outsiders. No account oflndia, from Kipling to the recent popular novels of M. M. Kaye and the accounts of Geoffrey Moorhouse and the Naipauls, fails to invoke the peculiar smell of that subcontinent, half-corrupt, halfaromatic, a mixture of dung, sweat, heat, dust, rotting vegetation, and spices. The intimate relationship between smell and the exotic, between smell and primeval urges, is exemplified by Kipling's joyous celebration of India's 'heat and smells and oils and spices and puffs of temple incense and sweat and darkness and dirt and lust and cruelty' (Fitzgerald 1983}. Africa is equally well-served. Native African writers, such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, rarely supply significant smell descriptions, unless referring to the impact of the city upon a rural African. White visitors, however, associate certain smells with the continent, as when Greene (Atkins 1966, 67), smelling the smoke drifting over the sea from Freetown, Sierra Leone, exclaims that 'it will always be to me the smell of Africa.' White Africans, however, are aware of greater detail than a simple capsule odour. Entering a 'native slum, ' the white is overcome by visual, auditory, and odorific sensations, especially the stench of 'urine and dung and rotting meat' (Ruark 1964, 97). Indian bazaars in Nairobi, in particular, are redolent of the Orient: 'The howling, reeking bazaars, where every smell known to the East was mingled in one magnificent ripe stink of rotting fruit and dust and dung and curry powder and wet

30

Sensuous Worlds

plaster and no plumbing and ancient filthy habits' (p. 97). It is notable that the same author never conjures up the smell of white Africa, and rarely goes beyond sound and visual impressions when dealing with blacks, except when black African meets white and scents a contrast: 'Today he wanted to play nigger. Today he had a great deal of thinking to do, and he did not want to do it permeated by the white smell -the smell of the white man, the white man's food and drink and clothing, the greasy stink of the white man's petrol fumes and belching diesel exhausts. He wanted to do his thinking surrounded by the smells with which he had grown up, the comfortable smells of wood smoke and the acrid reek of goats and the old greasy odour of the hut in which the food was cooked and children born and goats kept at night for safety' (p. 149). The smell of the internal-combustion engine has become normal in the cities of the Third World, as in the North. For Malcolm Lowry (1972, 115), the Mexico City of the 1930s was chiefly noise and smell, and the smell was a compound of old and new, organic and inorganic, 'the familiar smell ... of gasoline, excrement, and oranges.' The occupation of the Falkland Islands by Argentine troops in 1982 heightened the contrast between Latin American and British cultures. Returning to windy Stanley after the restoration of British control, Ian Strange (1983) noted that the soundscape had radically changed because of the introduction of many more telephone lines. But smellscape changes were more important: 'To me the most striking feature was the smell of the town, a smell of a distinct nature I had noted on weekend evenings during a stay on the outskirts of Buenos Aires: a smell of wood smoke mixed with barbecued meat and seasoned sunflower-seed oil. Although not unpleasant, the wood smoke was alien to this little town, and it brought home yet another feature that demonstrated yet again how different the two cultures are at an individual level' (p. 32). The Third World, then, has its distinctive smell regions. One may distinguish Cuernavaca from Cairo, from Calcutta, from Canton by the nose alone. The urban-industrial world, however, is not immune to regionalization by olfaction. Here the great divide is East and West, First and Second worlds, Capitalist and Communist. Anthony Burgess (1963) has characterized the smell 'of the essential Russia (an Edwardian smell, really, to match the furniture): tobacco, spirits, port-type wine, fried butter, leather, metal polish' (p. 159) but few visitors to Russia have analysed so clearly the inescapable indigenous odour of that country as the Scot Fitzroy Maclean, who becomes aware of it, as did Greene in Liberia or Sierra Leone, immediately upon entering the

Smellscape

31

country. His first perceptions, naturally, are visual; but, almost simultaneously, it was then I first noticed the smell, the smell which, for the next two and a half years, was to form an inescapable background to my life. It was not quite like anything that I had ever smelt before, a composite aroma compounded of various ingredient odours inextricably mingled one with another. There was always, so travellers in Imperial Russia tell me, an old Russian smell made up from the scent of black bread and sheepskin and vodka and unwashed humanity. Now to these were added the modem smells of petrol and disinfectant and the clinging, cloying odour of Soviet soap. The resulting, slightly musty flavor pervades the whole country, penetrating every nook and cranny, from the Kremlin to the remotest hovel in Siberia. Since leaving Russia, I have smelt it once or twice again, for Russians in sufficiently large numbers seem to carry it with them abroad, and each time with that special power of evocation which smells possess, it has brought back with startling vividness the memories of those years. (Maclean 1964, 11)

Yet Maclean later notes, on penetrating Soviet Central Asia, that the cold musty smell of Russia diminishes as the ambience becomes warmer and more 'Eastern-smelling' (p. 68). Maclean fails to mention boiled cabbage in this passage. Yet it is notable that many Western writers, wishing to evoke everyday life in totalitarian regimes, resort to the boiled-cabbage smell. Boiled cabbage lingers pungently in the corridors and canteens of Orwell's 1984 (1954). It persists in numerous prison novels. It surfaces in schools, and is used as a reliable indicator of the hopeless, monotonous self-imprisonment of lonely people in boarding-houses; Huxley (1978, 10), for example, laments the despair associated with institutional 'crambe repetita.' Continents, countries, regions, neighbourhoods (especially 'ethnic' ones), and houses have their particular smellscapes. I can recall, for example, the exotic smells oflndia; the wild-herb scents of rural Greece; the peculiar odour of Humberside mud; the smells of horse, sea, and grass on Easter Island; Italian pasta and aniseed in Boston's North End; Arab and Chinese food in its South End; the cedar kindling and dried alder in my woodshed. The urban-rural distinction is clearly identifiable through the nostrils. In urban areas, as already noted, individual smell events are as figure to a ground of omnipresent vehicle vapours, dimly perceived because of habituation. Individual cities, even urban types, may be distinguished by smell. Pulp-mill towns, colliery towns, leather-working towns, chemical

32

Sensuous Worlds

towns, smelting towns, each has its particular type of smell. The small town of Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, home of three breweries, can be distinguished afar by the rich, thick smell of brewing. Nearby Knottingley has an equally rich, biting scent of creosote and tar. A local saying on the Monterey Peninsula once characterized three major towns as Carmel-by-the-sea, Pacific-Grove-by-God (originally a religious retreat), and Monterey-by-the-smell. But change is constant: on returning to Cannery Row in the early 1960s John Steinbeck was met by the scent of tourists rather than by the sickening stench of fish (Hartman 1986). In heavy industrial centres bad smells were associated with pollution. Until well after the Second World War, every small English town had its gasworks, where coal was gasified for the supply of the town. It was a sweet, sickly, and ultimately poisonous smell. Roberts tells of the 'noxious vapours' that bourgeois environmentalists claimed had killed a Salford wood early this century. Less concerned with trees than human health, he retorts: 'These same "noxious vapours" we ourselves breathed in concentrated form: our own streets stood immediately under the gasworks in the path of the prevailing winds. Sometimes the air stank abominably for days on end. But very few questioned the right of industry to ruin our health and environment in pursuit of profit. The poor were expendable' (Roberts 1976, 133). Not only expendable, but also invisible and unsmellable. It is not by accident that the West Ends of English cities were located upwind of the East Ends, where lived 'the great unwashed.' Judging by accounts such as Roberts's, most urban smells were evaluated negatively. Some individuals, such as Roberts's father, 'used to damn the odours endemic to [the] neighbourhood' (p. 39), but, in general, the working classes had to adapt to noxious fumes while the well-off moved to suburbs or countryside. In contrast, accounts of country life, even among the poor, are far more positive with regard to smellscape. Analysis of Beckwith's (1973) autobiography suggests that, while most urban smells are negatively rated, almost all rural smells are regarded as positive. The cottages of the poor were, of course, the scene of bad odours resulting from inadequate sanitation. Cottage life was idealized by the Victorian middle classes, armed with sketchbooks; Punch, however, had a different view, at once satirizing middle-class visual perceptions and pointing out the grim reality of another sensory modality: The cottage homt!s of England Alas! How strong they smell.

Smellscape There's fever in the cesspool, And sewage in the well.

33

(Woodforde 1969, 5)

There was, of course, but 'country children and their parents [were) supposed to be accustomed to strong smells' (Hom 1976, 58). Moreover, smelly cottages could soon be left behind for the more positive smellscapes of farm and field. At the farm was 'the sweet smell of the cows and the ringing of the milk against the zinc pail' (Ashby 1961, 168). In the fields, 'the faint weedy smell ... from the river' and, again, 'the sweet animal smell of cows' (Huxley 1978, 118). In farmhouses, 'the kitchen had the warm, half-buttery, half-milky smell in which was also mingled the odour of cows and cow manure. There was also about the entire house an ancient and church-like smell, strong with woodsmoke and dampness' (Bates 1969, 166). On the coast, 'the smell of the sea, of seaweed drying in the sun, of plaice being fried for breakfast, of horse-dung and the whiff of vinegar from whelk-stalls' (p. 72). But, on the road, 'a pile of soddened dung always steamed on the air, the ammoniac sting of it powerful enough to kill even the aroma of baking' (p. 70). Early-twentieth-century rural smellscapes, then, were redolent with the odours of animals, notably horses and cows. That vegetation was also important in the smellscape will be seen below in 'Smellscape in time.' Late-twentieth-century rural places, now well-supplied with pre-packaged food, with high rates of automobile usage, and with factory farming, have lost their distinctive odoriferous character. Indeed, the massing of animals in production-line industrialized agriculture has become a major source of rural smell pollution. Whether urban or rural, smells identify places in the lived-world, as is especially apparent in H.E. Bates's Vanished World (1969). Bates was repelled by the local boot factory, with its 'stench of leather and gaslight' (p. 36), and hardly more pleased by long waits in the barber's, where 'the smell of shag, after two or three hours, had the power to move mountains' (p. 37). Much more preferable was the bakery: 'There was always a great heavenly warmth about it, together with the even heavenlier fragrance of new-baked bread' (p. 70). Indeed, in a few pages Bates provided us with a complete smellscape, not of a house and garden, as Proust did, but of the significant components of a small agrarian town. Finally, early-twentieth-century travel was associated with smells one is unlikely to perceive today. The town child was delighted with the sensuous quality of a horse-brake: 'the gleaming brass and neatsfoot oil

34

Sensuous Worlds

of the harness, the odours of horse-flesh and horse droppings, the summer dust, the harsh crunch of metal wheel rims on the rough stones of the road' (Bates 1969, 32). In contrast, a rural farm labourer is pleased with the new bus service in the 1930s, but still has much regret for the sensuous quality of former travel modes: 'In one thing would the carrier's cart beat the modem bus, and that was in the variety of smells. There was tarpaulin over all. Then came leather, then apples and cow-cake, with occasionally a calf or a crate of chickens' (Kitchen 1963, 92). Speed and convenience have clearly been paid for in terms of odoriferous pleasure. Bates's (1969, 85) reaction is clear when he speaks of the advent of the 'horseless carriage stinking of oil and petrol.'

Smellscape in time There appears to be no general history of environmental smells. Social historians of Britain give but passing mention to ambient odours. Yet it is clear that any future historian of the smellscape would have to include: the medieval ripeness of houses, persons, and foods; the characteristic smells of 'occupational' streets in pre-modem towns, from Bristol's Mille Street to York's Shambles, where one would have encountered the raw reek of butchery and blood; the changes in country scents that came with the planting of many miles of thorn hedges during Enclosure; the animal odours of cities before the development of long-distance milk transport and mechanical intra-urban conveyances, and the like. The development of empire was clearly responsible for the diffusion of exotic smells into traditional smellscapes. I think of the 'British' smells of the Indian subcontinent: railways; the English flowers of Indian hill-stations; the characteristic smells of drains, Christian churches, and hollyhocks in Rangoon. The process was a two-way one; Victorian gardeners radically altered English smellscapes by importing and acclimatizing hundreds of alien species of flowering plants. In the present century, the growing homogenization of the world smellscape, under the pressure of American-style 'sanitization' in housing, clothing, and food packaging and display, is a process worthy of study. Perhaps the most striking change, still possibly accessible to oral historians, is the fairly recent adaptation of huge urban populations to a basic 'keynote' smell compounded by metal and oil products. On the more positive side, late-twentieth-century pollution legislation has considerably reduced our opportunity to experience the formerly characteristic odour of British cities, compounded of coal fires, industrial processes, and smog.

Smellscape

35

In this chapter, however, I am chiefly concerned with smells that may be personally experienced on a cyclical basis, smells that recur daily, weekly, seasonally, or annually. Smells vary both from day to day and throughout the day. Frosty or dewy mornings are especially conducive to smell generation. At daybreak and at dusk, smells are especially apparent. Weather conditions are important, for rainstorms may stir up 'a rich smell of elder flower, hemlock, and dogroses' (Kitchen 1963, 24). The landscape smells clean after rain. The first half of the twentieth century was noted for its weekly smell events. Domestic economy required wash day and baking day. Wash day occurred on Mondays, and children were fascinated by its smells of heat and moisture, to be followed by 'the hot smell of iron on calico' (Ashby 1961, 109). Baking day was even more odorous, when 'the house smelt rich and sweet of cakes and buttermilk scones and hot jams' and 'men and boys came in to enjoy the orgy of heat and scent and promise' (pp. 209 and 215). Smells are also indicative and evocative of seasonal change. English villages sixty years ago abounded in seasonal odours. In early summer, at haymaking time, 'always the air in June seems to have been clotted with the intoxication of mown grass, or May blossom, of moon-daisies dying along the paling swathes ... the air full of the scent of it, mixed with the fragrance of honeysuckle and meadowsweet and an occasionaly pungent pong as the horse broke wind' (Bates 1969, 53, 86). Few rural accounts fail to mention the smellfulness of haymaking, when 'all the air is full of scent and hazy mists' (Kitchen 1963, 152). By late summer, 'down in the hollows, hovering in the crisp night air, drifted a most appetizing smell of herrings being fried for a late meal .. . the warm night was sometimes fragrant with the scent of cut grass; and about this season too, the pungent odour of shallots lying out in the garden to ripen off came in soft whiffs across the hedges' (Bourne 1912, 11). This is a blend of both season-specific and idiosyncratic smells, whereas, for fall, there is only one indicator smell: 'raking and burning weeds, the slow blue smoke and pungent smell of which is perhaps the most autwnnal of autwnnal things' (Horn 1976, 71). Even in winter, when the sense of smell may be deadened by cold, Kitchen appreciates the healthy 'heady smell' of farm manure and 'the sweet smell of tobacco on a frosty morning' (1963, 222). Indoors, throughout the winter, store-rooms 'smelled of apples, ripe and sweating and laid out ... for keeping' (Bates 1969, 96). And, in spring, one returned to 'the smell of new-turned earth, the free life and the fresh air' (Kitchen 1963, 129).

Sensuous Worlds

36

The seasons of rural Portugal are equally explicitly identified by non-visual cues. 'The mountain changes its scents and sounds throughout the year' (Jenkins 1979). In spring, the strong smell of eucalyptus fails to mask the wild rosemary or the strong apricot smell of chanterelles. The early summer scent of wild lavender on upper slopes and orange and lemon at lower elevations gives way to a general smell of heated earth in late summer, followed by the 'most delicious smell of all ... the sweet freshness of the first autumn rains' (p. 21). Annual and occasional events are also recognizable by their associated smells. One recalls the musty smell of church, the deep smell of graveyard earth at a funeral, and the grave release of the rich-smelling 'ham tea' that followed. Or the crisp smell of new clothes at Whitsuntide, the rich animal smell of a new pair of shoes actually soled with leather, or the 'Flower Show ... the most scented day of all the summer' (Ashby 1961, 202). Irish country fairs are reported perhaps most realistically: 'The pleasant smell of fresh dung, the warm smell of animals, and old clothes, and tobacco smoke' (O'Brien 1963, 129). The loss of formerly familiar smells is also a measure of the passage of time, of modernization and change. Many palaeotechnic smells will rarely be smelled again. Few of us bake our own bread now. I well remember the sudden advent of soft, wrapped, sliced, steam-baked bread during my childhood in the 1940s. As if cognizant of their imminent deprivation, perceptive village children would mock (to the tune of 'Knees Up, Mother Brown'): Jackson's shop-bought bread It stinks just like lead No bloody wonder, farts like thunder, Jackson's shop-bought bread.

As in other areas of life, modernization drives out sensory quality. Factory bread merely exemplifies the growing modem tendency towards homogenization and placelessness (Relph 1976). As early as the tum of the century, there was considerable concern that civilization's tendency to eliminate odours would have deleterious effect on human sexuality and aesthetic life in general (Engen 1982). Aldous Huxley, always avant garde, expressed this in novelistic terms. An English couple enter an Italian store, 'filled with a violent smell of goat's milk cheese, pickled tunny, tomato preserve and highly flavoured sausage.' The lady chokes, reaching for her Parma violets. The shopkeeper retorts: "'I forestieri sono troppo delicati. "He's quite right," said Mr.

Smellscape

37

Cardon. "We are. In the end, I believe, we shall come to sacrifice everything, to comfort and cleanliness. Personally, I always have the greatest suspicion of your perfectly hygienic and well-padded Utopias. As for this particular stink," he sniffed the air, positively with relish, "I don't really know what you have to object to it. It's wholesome, it's natural, it's tremendously historical. The shops of the Etruscan grocers, you may be sure, smelt just as this does"' (Huxley 1978, 190). Relph's fear of placelessness is expressed mainly in visual terms. He may be sure that the world-wide homogeneity of faceless glass buildings will be matched by continuous Muzak and wholesale deodorization. The American motel bathroom, 'sanitized for your protection,' is the antiseptic symbol of sensuous death. Because all environmental smells cannot be pleasant, we will have none at all. Smell and memory

In environmental aesthetics, the intuitive discoveries of humanists or writers are often con.firmed, perhaps centuries later, by experiment (Porteous 1982). Nowhere is this truer than in what is now described, by psychologists, as 'the Proustian hypothesis of odor memory' (Engen 1982, 98). The adult Proust is irresistibly reminded of the beloved Combray of his childhood by the taste and smell of petites madeleines. He generalizes this effect as: 'But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection' (Proust 1970, 36). Recent psychological experiments (Engen and Ross 1973; Engen 1977) have con.firmed that, while we may distinguish between smells with only 20 per cent accuracy, we are able to remember these smells with almost the same degree of accuracy up to a year later. In contrast, visual recognition shows an almost 100 per cent accuracy within minutes of the original test, but this accuracy rapidly falls off with time. According to Engen (1982, 107-8), 'our data clearly support the observations of so many writers, as well as individual experiences [that] time seems to play no role in odor memory.' It is suggested that olfactory receptors are plugged directly into the brain's limbic system, the seat of emotion, and that this direct connection between smell and emotion had strategic evolutionary value for our ancestors (Gloor 1978).

38

Sensuous Worlds

So significant was Proust's suggestion that many subsequent writers have used his smell-generated flashback technique. As early as 1925, Huxley uses the smell of an Italian bay-leaf to take a character back through years of time to the bay rum of a London hairdresser (1978, 46). T.S. Eliot (1974, 23, 28) explicitly links smell with reminiscence in his world-weary urban evocations of 'female smells in shuttered rooms,' 'smells of steaks in passageways,' 'And cigarettes in corridors/And cocktail smells in bars.' Less obviously mannered is Maclean's (1964, 523) meeting with Soviet forces in Yugoslavia: 'in a flash I was back in the Soviet Union: the taste ... the stuffiness .. . the cold .. . and, above all, the smell: that indefinable composite aroma of petrol, sheepskin, and vodka, black bread and cabbage soup [there it is!], Soviet scent and unwashed human bodies.' Similarly, Graham Greene (1971b, 77) admits that 'smell to me is far more evocative than sound or even sight,' although his autobiographies, unlike his novels and travel accounts, are not notably smellful. Perhaps the most compelling odoriferous description in Greene is his vivid memory of the contrasting smellscapes on either side of the green baize door that divided an alien institutional school from a beloved home (his father was a headmaster): 'There would be a slight smell of iodine from matron's room, of damp towels from the changing rooms, of ink everywhere. Shut the door behind you again, and the world smelled differently: books and fruit and eau-deCologne' (Greene 1947, 13). It is less likely that Flora Thompson, an English village postmistress, had read Proust, although she may have encountered similar notions in Kipling or Victor Hugo. Nevertheless, one of her characters 'had smelled a beanfield in bloom. The scent had so vividly brought back to her the bean rows by the beehives in her father's garden that she had felt an irresistible longing to see her old home. She no longer had anyone belonging to her living in Restharrow and had not herself been there for twenty-four years, but the impulse was so strong it had to be obeyed' (1948, 10). The 'beanflower's boon' was a common feature of memories of Victorian rural summers. More apposite, perhaps, in an era of war and tourist travel, are the musings of James A. Michener (1974, 413): 'But in human beings it is the sense of smell . . . least regarded of the senses ... which is most powerful in evoking memories; so that now if I smell burnt chicory I am in Fiji, if I smell clean ocean fish, I'm in the Tahiti market. Or a whiff of burnt sulphur can pitch me back into the sugar factories of Queensland.' Most of the early-twentieth-century reminiscences noted earlier are products of this sharp, emotion-laden memory we have for smell. Smell

Smellscape

39

seems especially important in childhood, and adults tend to associate childhood and the childhood home with certain smells. Charles Kingsley, confessing to an insatiable Heimweh, frequently mentions olfactory sensations: 'the very smell is a fragrance from the fairy gardens of childhood' (Chitty 1974). Jung (1965) tells us that one of his first memories is that of being aware of the 'characteristic smell of milk ... It was the moment when, so to speak, I became conscious of smelling. This memory . . . goes very far back.' And on his first visit to Tunis, archetypically, he felt that the landscape smelled of blood, of perennial soakings from Carthage to the French occupation. It would not be difficult to fill volumes with examples of childhood smells remembered vividly thirty to sixty years later. Three incredibly smellful childhood autobiographies, for example, are those of the English Helen Forrester (1974), the Australian Barbara Hanrahan (1973 ), whose book is tellingly entitled The Scent ofEucalyptus, and the incomparably French Colette (1976). Instead, however, I have taken four autobiographies at random from my shelves (three of English males who were children during the First World War and one of an Irish female whose childhood occurred during the Second World War) and have content-analysed them (see table 1). Although all were country or small-town children with a strong predilection for hay, flowers, and grass smells, and a distaste for musty rooms, considerable differences are apparent. Males find animal smells, including dung, especially attractive but fail to record food smells. Edna O'Brien is far more sexually conscious and more concerned with the smells of food, drink, and cosmetics. The two rural males, raised in the pre-automobile era, are appalled by car-exhaust smells and city odours generally. By mid-century even Irish country girls have habituated to the automobile. Olfactory memory, however, is a very personal matter. B.B.'s predilection for tar and sheepwash is not necessarily shared by others. According to this writer, 'adults often forget how children are affected by smells, their sense of smell is so much keener, more akin to a wild animal's' (1978, 91). To illustrate that an urban child's keen olfactory sense can bring equal richness to an autobiography, I have analysed the odour content ofJohn Raynor's (1973) account of his London childhood. Raynor was an exceptionally sensitive child. His book is filled with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations; it is extremely sensuous reading. The following list gives only the barest account of those smells that were sufficiently important in Raynor's childhood to be remembered in detail thirty years later.

TABLE 1: Smell content of four British autobiographies Bates (male)

Greene (male)

O'Brien (female)

1 hay, flowers, grass, wood 2 sheep dung (mice, dead flies, pigeon dung) 3 herbs

hay, flowers, blossom, woodsmoke horse dung, cow dung horseflesh, cows, horse fart

leaves, grass, hedge

hay, flowers, leafsmoke, turf, greenhouse animals and dung at country fair (mice)

4 mud 5 tar, sheepwash oil lamps (paraffin, mothballs) 6

damp earth

1 rats 2 dry rot 3 automobile, London

rats dust automobiles, gas, leather factory, greasepaint tobacco smoke, 'strong drink'

B.B. (male)

Affect Positive (neutral, bracketed)

Negative

4

fresh bread, frying fish, vinegar, apples

apples

floor polish, detergent, coal dust, bookshop

5 6

horse

dirty children

frying bacon, roast meat, hot mince pies, tangerines, spices, apple jelly, cider, wine, whisky clay (dust) incense, cigarettes (paraffin, floor polish, chalk, hair oil)

blacks' sweat, perfume, eau-deCologne

soap, skin, perfume

mustiness

stale, musty rooms, dust

tobacco smoke, stale porter breakfast cereal, cornmeal changing rooms, urine, farts

school cabbage, bad meat old socks

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1 of plants - gardens, magnolia, honeysuckle, bracken, woods, bonfires of leaves, meadowsweet, flowers generally (not hay); 2 offood - nuts, particularly 'the deeply sensuous pleasure' of almonds; toast and Patum Peperium; coffee and frying bacon; aromatic poultry stuffing; 3 of buildings - the Army and Navy Stores, Westminster Abbey, the Sunday drawing-room smell, must and cobwebs, stone and dust, chintzes and other stuffs, a 'cool, damp-smelling stone building,' cold stone, a dormitory, each room in the house with its own particular smell; 4 of people and animals - a horse-rug, father's pipe, tobacco, and shaving soap, mother's store-cupboard (rich and sweet), father's store-cupboard (nails and leather); 5 miscellaneous - earth, butterfly-collection preservatives, plasticine, jewellery, magazines on bookshelves, a pub, trains, an imagined alligator, ghosts smelled and heard but never seen. There are at least fifty distinct smells in a little over two hundred pages, a rich experience indeed. Raynor goes farther than Proust, suggesting that emotive reactions to smell may not merely be idiosyncratic, but perhaps archetypical memories in the Jungian mode: 'Suddenly on the wind was borne the smell of the tannery. I stood, transfixed, dropping my flowers, turning green and white, gripped by ... a horror so primitive that it could only have been a racial memory; a horror quite outside the bounds of thought or control; something that struck deep inside my body ... Nothing could induce me to play on the common again [to encounter] the smell that was like the inarticulate agony, the frenzied terror of all the animals that have every suffered ... at man's intolerably callous hands' (1973, 22). Less controversially, Raynor is sure that the perceptions of children are so much sharper than those of adults. By adulthood, 'one has learnt too much cerebrally to put unquestioning trust in the primitive intuition and the incontrovertible knowledge that are an essential part of childhood' (p. 59). Childhood, then, is a special time when the most primitive senses are open to all sensation, before we have been carefully taught 'four legs good, two legs bad.' Again, psychological experiments confirm intuition. There is some research support for the notions that small children are not necessarily offended by 'foul' odours, such as those of faeces, and that the rating of a smell as 'unpleasant' is a direct function of age among children aged seven and under (Engen 1982, 131-2). Very little work, however, has been done on the importance accorded

TABLE 2: Smell events per text page, x 100

Fictionalized autobiographies

Autobiographies

Fictional biographies

Age-group

Bogarde (male)

B.B. (male)

Greene (male)

Raynor (male)

O'Brien (female)

Proust (male)

Aldington (male)

Huxley (male)

0-7 8-14 15-21 Over 21

n/a 28 8 4

6 36 20 8

16 27 6 4

29 21 0 0

16 33 27 16

n/a 30 7 9

0 50 10 0

n/a 102 96 101

SOURCES:

Proust (1970), Raynor (1973) Aldington (1965), B.B. (1978), Bogarde (1977, 1978), Huxley (1955), O'Brien (1963, 1964),

Mean (13)

(41) (22) (18)

Smellscape

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to smell through the human life-cycle. From the evidence cited above, both humanistic and psychological, we might hypothesize that, with age, environmental smells become less noticeable and, when noticed in adulthood, are usually rated as unpleasant. From my reading of numerous autobiographies, I suggest that a sharp break in smell perception or odour memory occurs around the time of puberty. Both the Kitchen and Bates autobiographies cited above, for example, show a sharp decline in the recollection of environmental smells after age fifteen or so. To briefly test this proposition, I took at random eight twentiethcentury works: four autobiographies, two autobiographies rendered in fictional terms, and two fictional biographies. Using the significant age-breaks of seven, fourteen, and twenty-one, supported by, among others, Piaget and Freud, I then made frequency counts of smell-events and related these to pages of text. The results are shown in table 2. Although both conceptually and operationally crude, this exercise does suggest, first, that the richest period of odour sensation lies between the beginning of autonomous environmental exploration at about age seven and the onset of puberty, and second, that the importance of smell declines on the attainment of adulthood. It is also noticeable that, once their subjects have attained adulthood, these autobiographies increasingly record only female perfumes or the occasional obvious stink. Only a massive study of autobiographies or longitudinal empirical testing could confirm these hypotheses. Applications

Whereas zoning regulations have only recently come to grips with the notion of visual pollution, both the legal concept of 'nuisance' and general urban zoning laws have long recognized smell as a problem. Noxious land-uses, such as chemical factories, glue plants, and slaughterhouses, must be adequately segregated from residential and commercial areas. Celebrated cases of nuisance include the foul smell of the Thames in London's Houses of Parliament and the olfactory aggression of a pulp mill on the sister institution in Ottawa. On the positive side, tactile museums for the blind have been matched by the construction of odoriferous gardens for the visually handicapped. Properly designed, such a garden can provide rich olfactory sensations, give directional information, and confirm the passage of the seasons. Commercially, odour is an important tool in marketing (Mitchell et al. 1964). The flavour/fragrance industry is involved in most commercial products and ancient treatments such as aromatherapy are being revived in an age of

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holistic medicine. Invisible scent markers are being developed to discourage art theft (Vincent 1989). Environmental odour, however, has generally been considered only as a negative problem. Just as soundscape is dominated by noise research, so the investigation of smellscapes is almost wholly devoted to odour pollution. A considerable amount of applied research in Scandinavia has dealt with olfactory evaluations of indoor-air quality (Berglund and Lindvall 1979). Traffic smells have aroused considerable interest (Lindvall 1973). Since the late 1960s, a series of international clean air congresses have dealt with problems of theory, measurement, and application. The trend appears to be away from mechanical 'artificial noses' towards the use of public evaluation and olfactometry. Indeed, Engen (1982, 13 7) considers that 'the human nose may in fact be a better indicator than physical or chemical analysis of pollutant concentrations, especially when the data are obtained by investigators trained in psychophysics.' Such an investigator is the aptly named James Rotton, whose work in both laboratory and real world suggests that malodorous pollution may impair task performance and help trigger aggressive behaviour, family violence, and psychiatric emergencies (Rotton 1979, 1983, 1984, 1985). About half of all complaints about air pollution involve smells. In Sweden complaints about odours range from 27 per cent of rural interviewees to up to 78 per cent in urban areas. Smell-control technology includes odour dilution through heightening emission stacks and the use of scrubbers or combustion. Masking by the introduction of pleasant smells may be effective. Although still largely an urban issue, smell problems are increasing in rural areas. With the introduction of factory farming the noxious smell of animal manure has become a major rural problem. In Britain, officers of the Institute of Environmental Health investigated 3,600 reported nuisances in 1981, 50 per cent more than in 1975. Of these complaints, 59 per cent concerned pigs, 27 per cent poultry, and 14 per cent cattle units. In terms of operations, 27 per cent of the incidents involved animal housing, 29 per cent the storage of manure, and 44 per cent the spreading of manures (Whitlock 1982). At the household level, smell-masking devices and air fresheners are being replaced by electrostatic air cleaners. Salubrious smells can be programmed into the air-conditioning systems of buildings. This, together with Muzak and 'white noise,' is yet another step in the regression of urban-industrial civilizations towards total asepsis. As Whewell (1982, 19) remarks, 'I don't abhor household smells. I like them, and so do most of my friends.'

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On the positive side, it is clear that there is some public interest in the preservation or resynthesis of historic ambiences. To take only two recent examples, the new Viking Museum in York tries to re-create the smells (fish, leather, earth) of tenth-century Jorvik, while the smell of the Glasgow underground (subway) system was so addictive that 'people in the city have come up with ideas for recreating the smell ... the search to synthesize the whiff of the past goes on. And the idea of preservation takes on a whole new dimension' (quoted in Goodey and Menzies 1977, 2). Further, recent research has shown that respondents can readily be trained to improve their skills in the identification and differentiation of smells (Engen 1982). The gap between perfumers, wine-tasters, and the general public could, it seems, be narrowed by environmental education (nose training). The French Institute of Taste has already begun to organize taste and smell consciousness-raising classes in schools (Boddaert 1989). Preliminary results suggest that the students enjoy greatly improved sensorial relationships with food, readily become more discriminating than most adults, broaden their sensibilities generally, and even become less resistant to reading Proust! This is one of the most hopeful results from the psychological research on smell. For to retain a rich, placeful world, individuals must come to appreciate the sensuous complexity of their environments. Smells are an important, though neglected, part of our perceived sensescape. Life in future blandscapes will be severely impoverished if negative smells are annihilated and little effort made to promote pleasant environmental odours. The smellscape is an emotive environment, not an intellectual one, and as such, should be cherished. Asked what they missed during their record-making 211 days in space in 1982, Soviet cosmonauts replied: 'the smell of flowers, the city noises, city smells' (Berezovoy 1983).

3

Soundscape

Space gardening and recordings of bird songs ... helped two Soviet spacemen to cope with their record-setting 211 days in space The Guardian, 7 January 1983

Although we are chiefly visual beings, sound, like smell, may be more primary than we suspect. After all, God spoke, calling the world into being, and only then saw that it was good. In traditional societies sound may still be of prime importance. According to McLuhan (1960, 207), 'until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space, where the Eskimo now lives: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition.' In other words, a world very much like that of smellscape.

Soundscape The Inuit to which McLuhan referred were studied in depth by Carpenter (1973), who speaks of the continued importance to them of auditory space: 'I know of no example of an Eskimo describing space primarily in visual terms' (p. 36). Similarly, Bruce Chatwin's (1987) recent foray among the aborigines of Australia suggests that their 'songlines,' which relate back to their ancestral Dreamtime, encompass the continent and act as both wayfinders and a means of understanding mythic history. For the ancestors, in the Dreamtime, first conceived of the land and then, as did the Christian god, sang it into existence. An ancestral song is both a map and a direction-finder; an aborigine on traditional 'walkabout' would follow a songline, along which he or she would find both sacred sites and others who shared the same ancestral Dreamtime: 'In theory at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualize the songlines as a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every "episode" [or

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sacred site] was readable in terms of geology' (p. 13 ). Little wonder that aborigines battle the earth-movers of white Australians who have no conception of how the ancestors sang the world into existence. In Western societies, aural culture was paramount long after the development of printing. Schafer (1986) notes the variety of cultures that organized their settlements in such a way that news could pass quickly from habitation to habitation. The first white settlers along Canada's St Lawrence laid out narrow river-front farms with all the dwellings at one end, in part so that families could easily shout warnings to each other in the event of a threat from displaced Indians. When the Indians had been crushed, large square fields, as in Upper Canada, became the norm. By the twentieth century, however, a chiefly visual culture had emerged in the Western world, transformed first by mass print and then by video media. Except in certain applications, such as body scenting and popular music, this has resulted in the diminishing importance of the non-visual senses. Indeed, with the rapid urbanization of the world's population, far more attention is being given to noise than to environmental sound. Noise and the soundscape Interest in the sonic environment has, until recently, been highly specialized and problem-specific. Research has concentrated almost entirely upon a single aspect of sound, the concept of noise or 'unwanted sound.' Interest in noise arose in the late nineteenth century, when it was first recognized as an occupational hazard (Barr 1886), but research output has grown exponentially in the last two decades. Noise studies are fundamentally concerned with sound measurement and the development of statistical procedures capable of examining physical and psychological effects. The result has been a profusion of indices specifying intensities that are permissible or desirable in airport or freeway zones, in the industrial work-space, or in bedrooms, libraries, or residential areas. A great deal of money and energy has been expended on such research but the results usually go unheeded. This situation is often attributed to operational problems associated with the application of these research findings, as exemplified in the failure to enforce municipal noise by-laws (Jones 1980). Yet the negative aspects of sound, although central to the noise study, represent only one area of concern when analysing soundscapes. The true soundscape study examines the entire continuum of sound, including both negative and positive qualities, and thereby includes both

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wanted and unwanted sounds. The sonic environment is not treated as an object that can be reduced to a single measurement or group of measurements. Instead, it is taken to comprise a vast array of stimuli, each representing a wealth of information capable of providing a variety of environmental experiences. The soundscape is considered a phenomenon with perceptual content; it is not wholly reducible to a series of physically measured parameters. This is the essential difference between the noise study and the soundscape study. Noise studies 'isolate sound from the way hwnan beings understand it. In any of these measuring systems, no matter how sophisticated, one sound is treated similar to any other sound. In other words, any such device or system treats sound as a signal to be processed, instead of information to be understood' (Truax 1978, vi-vii). Clearly, the soundscape study aims to reintroduce the primacy of the hwnan element. This goal may be realized through an understanding of the physical presence of the soundscape, the perceptual processing of the sound input, and the relationship between the two. The study of soundscape, as opposed to noisescape, has been very fragmented. Typically, noise research focuses upon downtown urban environments, traffic corridors, or major installations such as factories, airports, and mining operations. Soundscape studies, while attempting to deal with all sounds, also investigate ordinary, everyday landscapes, which include rural and wilderness areas (Kariel 1980) as well as the urban scene. All told, however, the soundscape literature is infinitesimal in comparison with the output of acoustical engineers and noise scientists. Soundscape has no journal or other apparatus, whereas noise studies have a sturdy scholarly and technical apparatus. Noise, of course, is a problem, attracts money, and is far easier to conceptualize and measure than is sound. Whereas the visual sense may be restricted at both close and far distances, the sonic environment can extend from the most intimate distances (the sound of one's own bodily functions) to the farthest distances at which sense data can be perceived (remote thunder, explosions, or war). The difference between visual and auditory space is again brought out by Carpenter's (1973) study of the Inuit: 'Auditory space has no favoured focus. It is a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing. It is not pictorial space, boxed-in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment. It has no fixed boundaries; it is indifferent to background. The eye focuses, pinpoints, abstracts, locating each object in physical space, against a background; the ear,

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however, favours a sound from any direction' (p. 36). In other words, while the visual environment is restricted, the sonic environment is universal. This concept of the universality of the soundscape was developed over half a century ago by the Finnish geographer Grano (1929). Following Grano, Ohlson (1976) and others have divided the anthropocentric sonic landscape into an immediate soundscape (20-200 m from the receiver) and a distant soundscape (15-20 km from the receiver). The term soundscape applies, specifically, to the sonic environment of the receiver of a sound; the receiver is at the centre of the sonic landscape. It contrasts with the term soundfield, the sonic environment of a sound source, which is central. Social scientists are naturally more interested in soundscapes, a user-definition of landscape, than in soundfields, a technical definition. In more general terms, the word soundscape is used, as an analogy to landscape, to denote the overall sonic environment of a designated area, from a room to a region. Grano's pioneering sound work concentrated upon the immediate environment in an agricultural soundscape. His descriptions are illustrated by cartographical representations of experienced acoustic sensations of human activity, birdsong, and grazing cattle on the island of Valosaari, in eastern Finland. Later Finnish work demonstrates how animal sounds have given way to mechanical sounds in the agrarian landscape, although the ringing of church bells remains a traditional feature (Ohlson 1976). It would not be difficult to follow the pattern of the previous chapter and use literary evidence to extend Grano's work and attest to the importance of soundscape to persons, across space, in place, and in time. It is quite clear that individuals have singular voiceprints, that summer is 'open season' on the sensitive ear, and that soundscapes have evolved and changed through different eras. For example, whereas a Christian parish in Europe was once defined by the soundreach of its church bells, and Cockneys derived their identity from being born within the sound of Bow bells, communities and urban neighbourhoods were, by the nineteenth century, more likely to be defined by the reach of the factory whistle. Today's wider community finds its expression in local radio stations, whose spoken references to the world beyond the immediate vicinity are usually few and far between. At a wider scale, Schafer (1986, 6) notes the existence of a powerful 'sacred noise' in all societies, and bitterly remarks, 'Today's pluralistic society has thrown up numerous recent contenders for the Sacred Noise, among them the aviation industry, the pop music industry, and the police. Here, at least,

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are three nuclei of social power, all of whom are permitted to celebrate their uncensored presence with deafening weaponry.' In comparison with these dominant sounds, religious sounds have become of little importance, although recent changes in British cities such as Biimingham, where Muslims have erected loudspeaker-equipped minarets, have caused religious rivalry in sonic terms. Besides persons and eras, it is also patently clear that places can readily be identified and understood in terms of soundscape (Pocock 1989). While it must be recognized that soundscapes are more noncontinuous, fragmentary in space, and episodic in time than are visual landscapes, they are nevertheless important in making up the multisensory character of place. The British Columbia painter Emily Carr, for example, attuned herself with the places she painted, and learned those places not only in a painterly but also in a sonic fashion: 'I don't know the song of this place. It doesn't quite know its own tune. It starts with a deep full note on the mighty cedars . . . and ends up a little squeak of nut bushes. Under the cedars you sense the Indian and brave, fine spiritual things. Among the nut bushes are picnickers with shrieking children .. . And there are wood waggons and gravel waggons blatantly snorting in and out cutting up the rude natural roads, smelling and snorting like evil monsters among the cedars' (1978, 56). Equally, townscape sounds may be characteristic. While Naipaul's (1985, 258) Bombay soundscape, 'every transistor turned to full volume, every car horn blaring, every voice raised to a shout,' may be true of much of the Third World, Brink's (1984, 17) Cape Town is place-specific: Occasionally one could hear something from the streets outside, but only very vaguely: a rumbling truck, a car hooting angrily ... , the sputtering of a motor-cycle. These sounds recalled others which were more eloquently, more distinctly Capetonian, richer in texture, more subtle in meaning: The chattering of the flower sellers in Adderley Street; a Salvation Army band on the Parade ... ; the earsplitting voices of newspaper vendors at the entrance to the Gardens; the hoarse complaints of the foghorn at Mouille Point like a sick ox lowing in the distance; children playing among fruit carts and jumbled shops in District Six or high up against the mottled slope of Signal Hill, the cannon booming at noon and the pigeons flying up with the harpsichord sound of their whirring wings; ship's-horns grunting bluntly in the harbour; the entire grey totality of sound from the city far below . . . Kloof Nek.

Each sound is precisely located. Their totality makes up the characteristic soundscape of Cape Town for Brink's protagonist.

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Whole regions may equally well be identified by sound, from the mechanical cacophony of the modern metropolis to the primarily natural sounds of desert and ice-cap. Lopez's Arctic Dreams (1986) is an auditory feast, and he notes (p. 137) that one of the two great bodily changes one has to make in the Arctic is 'a rearrangement of [the] senses to suit a world that is largely acoustical, not visual or olfactory, in its stimulations.' Putting this experiential work into psychological perspective, we find a considerable body of research that deals both with the deleterious effects of noise on performance and attention (Kavaler 1975) and, in more positive terms, with the positive effects of music on human behaviour. Music's ability to soothe the savage breast has long been recognized by musicologists, and empirical studies have demonstrated the entrancing power of repetitive music, the enhancing effects of sedative music on concentration, and of music in general as a stimulant of righthemisphere dominance among non-professional listeners (Jeanrenaud and Bishop 1984). These authors also show how meditative music can induce 'introvert' states of creativity among extroverts, and similar mood-adaptation applications are evident in the frequent use of white noise in offices, the sale of sleep-inducing 'rain' and 'water' records, the maddening proliferation of bland piped music in public places, and the use of background music to induce 'feeding frenzy' among supermarket shoppers (Killiman 1982). We also find both scientists (Kavaler 1975) and novelists (Brink 1984) suggesting that sound, as well as the more Proustian smell and taste, can be important in releasing deep-seated memories. But to continue in this vein would perhaps try the reader's patience. For the reader would be better served by perusing the historical, spatial, technical, and design reflections of Schafer's Tuning of the World (1977a), supplemented by Truax's Acoustic Communication (1984 ). This chapter will, instead, deal briefly with the development of soundscape studies and then launch into a research case study as an example of what might be done in a subject far more academically advanced than is smellscape. I will then discuss implications for spatial design and human enjoyment. Soundscape studies Although noise studies have shown continuous development, except for isolated instances and a fair number of studies of birdsong and insect sounds, the concept of soundscape re-emerged only with Southworth's

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(1969) pioneering study of the sonic environment of Boston. Interest in soundscapes was revived as part of a growing dissatisfaction with the quality of urban environments and a growing concern for the plight of handicapped persons in modern society. Of newly deaf persons, it was noted that 'all of them felt a poignant loss of background sounds, especially of nature, which had been almost unnoticed before deafness' (Southworth 1969, 51). Moreover, it is difficult for blind persons to grasp a sense of events, of the flow of time, without a background sonic ambience. Southworth's work strongly suggested the need for sonic planning and design. A more sustained contribution emerged from the now-defunct World Soundscape Project (wsP) inaugurated by the environmental musician Schafer (Langlois 1974). By involving musicians as well as social scientists, the aim was to mesh artistic and scientific perspectives so as to 'discover principles and develop techniques by which the social, psychological, and aesthetic quality of the acoustic environment or soundscape may be improved' (Truax 1978, 126). A fairly solid theoretical foundation has been laid by Schafer and Truax. Schafer (1977a) provides a firm rationale for soundscape study; develops analytical techniques, including a vocabulary; emphasizes the applicability of the work in environmental management; and works towards a comprehensive theory of acoustic design. Truax (1978) supplements Schafer by providing a terminological dictionary with an emphasis on the relationships between soundscape and noise research. Despite this substantial theoretical background, empirical soundscape research has been limited, with few major studies to date. The Vancouver Soundscape (Schafer 1978) summarizes the characteristics and informational value of soundscape components, illustrating the threat posed by rising noise levels to the continued existence of certain key soundscape elements. Five Village Soundscapes (Schafer 1977b) examines the soundscapes of five very different villages in much greater detail. It becomes immediately apparent that most rural soundscapes are radically changing with the increasing number of technological sounds. Such sounds tend to be 'flatline' sounds, with uniform patterns of little interest. The changes identified with the introduction or increase of technological sounds appear to be associated with 'a degeneracy in the variety and complexity of community sounds and a breakdown in the balance of forces that once organized the community' (Schafer 1977b, 79-80). The most important feature associated with the rise in proportion of technological sounds was a loss in soundscape complexity. Residents

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identified this loss in terms of an absence of certain sounds that they had previously used to gain information about their environment. Soundscape is clearly a definite element in the individual's perception of environment. The deterioration of soundscape suggests the need for more research, improved research techniques, and an increased concern with applicability and soundscape amelioration. Development is, however, hindered by the lack of an established methodology. The first requirement of any study is information on the actual elements that make up a soundscape, some form of notation that will provide the same overall information as cartography or photography. A variety of techniques has been tried, with sound values weighted generally according to the criteria of individuality, numerousness, or dominance. The dynamic nature of soundscape is a further major problem. Since sounds lack permanence (and only recently have agencies begun to prepare catalogues of sounds with facilities for sound preservation) historical accounts (earwitness) have to be relied upon for descriptions of past soundscapes. With the use of sound-recording equipment, the problem becomes one of analysis. As with noise measurements, the physical properties of sound (time and frequency of occurrence, intensity, duration) are stressed. Conceptual issues involve the problem of finding a useful means of cataloguing sound events. Sounds are generally classified according to sound origin, which has operational and spatial advantages, although detail may be lost as a result of grouping. Categories of sound events are often further grouped into three classes (Schafer 1977a; Truax 1978). Keynote sounds are ubiquitous referents, the equivalent of 'ground' in the figure-ground relationship of visual perception. The two other terms are analogous to the figure. Signals are defined as sounds that constitute acoustic warning devices (e.g., sirens), while soundmarks are the sonic counterparts of landmarks. Whether a sound is figure or ground is determined by individual perceptions. Listening is the chief research tool; the receptor may be mechanical or human. The features of what may be termed an objective analysis of soundscape may be ascertained by means of tape-recorders and sound-level meters, and by trained listeners who have undergone what Schafer (1977a) calls 'earcleaning.' Machines store or monitor, providing information on the general sonic environment, but the sensitized listener is required for the identification of discrete sound events. A subjective analysis of soundscape requires the use of social-science techniques such as questionnaires. A carefully structured research

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design involving listening, recording, monitoring, and survey techniques is necessary to provide not only a descriptive analysis but also an indication of the meaning and value of the soundscape. Such a design is used in the following empirical study, the primary objective of which is to describe and explain the soundscape of an urban neighbourhood. Other goals are: to test the validity of the techniques used by the World Soundscape Project; to develop a method capabie of comparing both objective and subjective views of the soundscape; and to increase awareness of the soundscape concept.

The study Previous soundscape studies have dealt with either rural areas or the metropolis as a whole. Studies at the scale of the urban neighbourhood, where most of us actually live, are conspicuous by their absence. Yet it is at this scale that the urbanite, outside working hours, is most exposed to the soundscape. Neighbourhood-scale studies should also allow greater depth of analysis. This feature is particularly relevant, given the extremely localized nature of most sounds, and because of the general wsP assumption that personal familiarity with sounds will be a function of exposure rate and proximity to sound source. An ethical stance, moreover, involves a concern with how people, in their own environments, evaluate sounds; inperts are more important than experts. The soundscape chosen for analysis was the neighbourhood of South Fairfield, located on the south coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, about one mile from the central business district of the city of Victoria. Although the area is an inner-city residential community, which may be reflective of the general urban soundscape, its relative closeness to the major city park at Beacon Hill and the coast of the Strait o{Juan de Fuca ensures that the area offers a mixture of both unique and general sounds. Knowledge of the community was deemed important; I had lived in the neighbourhood for ten years and my colleague, for six months at the time of the study (1980). South Fairfield was built at the tum of the century, but has recently been gentrified, a process involving the invasion of middle-class professionals seeking to upgrade single-family dwellings close to the business core (Porteous 1979). About two-thirds of the dwellings are owner-occupied single-family houses. Only the northern boundary of the study area is not adjacent to parkland. The authors' living experience in the area suggests that the keynote sound is likely to be road traffic with the addition of seaplanes, which

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land at the Inner Harbour nearby. Signals include ferry whistles and sirens. Soundmarks that enrich South Fairfield, in the authors' estimation, include fog-horns, church bells, the bells of a carillon tower downtown, and the peacocks, swnrner jazz festivals, sports events, and weekly bagpipe practices held in Beacon Hill Park. Two complementary methods, objective and subjective analysis, were developed. Listening, taping, and sound-pressure-level (SPL) monitoring were used to examine the temporal and spatial variations in the South Fairfield soundscape. While these mechanical recordings were being made, my colleague, a trained listener, concentrated on sensitized listening to the soundscape, transcribing relevant information onto wsr soundwalk sheets. The goal of this process was to produce a permanent record of the soundscape, the sensitized listening supplementing this record with a more identifiable catalogue of immediate events. The spatial sampling framework involved monitoring at the central points of twenty-one hexagons whose radius was determined by average 'earshot' distance (Westerkamp 1974; Truax 1978). The temporal sampling framework involved a monitoring schedule designed to cover each location at a different time each day, time of day being a significant variable in noise studies (Stevens, Rosenblith, and Bolt 1955). For the subjective analysis, a questionnaire was developed to generate a qualitative assessment of the soundscape, including an indication of the range of recognized sounds and residents' evaluation of these sounds via a community sound list. The elements included in this list were the fifty-five sound sources identified by the objective analysis, plus eleven additional sounds thought to be prominent by the authors. Objective analysis

Fortunately for this analysis, variations in sound type did not appear to be influenced by either time or day of the week. In addition, there was a strong tendency for all monitor locations to have fairly simple sound profiles. The average number of sounds machine-recorded (8.6) represents under 8 per cent of the total range of sounds swnrnarized by the trained listener on the soundwalk sheets, which immediately underscores the problems of undertaking sound research in a strictly mechanical manner. The most distinctive feature of the sound list is the magnitude of the range of values. At the upper limit are car traffic sounds, the only sound found to be ubiquitous. Nearby automobile sounds were recorded 757 times; the only other sounds heard more than 50 times were distant urban traffic (92), footsteps (88), small songbirds

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(56), and bicycles (51). Only the first three of these, plus car sounds, were heard at more than half of the monitoring points. Additional common sounds, heard at more than one-third of the stations, were pets, voices, and seaplanes. These sounds reflect most closely the general characteristics of the soundscape. Most of the 66 sounds included in the list were heard rarely and 75 per cent were heard at fewer than 25 per cent of the monitor positions. For the purposes of generalization the range of sound types was reduced to a more manageable size by means of the wsP classification system (Truax 1978), which involves six categories of sound: natural; human (vocal); motor; activity; indicator; and neighbour. Most of these categories are self-explanatory. Activity sounds relate to non-motorized human activities other than the collage of localized sounds emanating from neighbours; indicator sounds are chiefly signals. Statistical analysis indicated a strong positive association between SPL and frequency of motor sounds, while there was a tendency for the frequency of all other sound types to decrease with increasing SPL. The strong positive association between SPL and motor sounds is obvious to any urban resident and has been repeatedly confirmed in traffic-noise studies. The spatial pattern of sound-level measurements identified high SPL positions along the study-area periphery, declining towards the interior, away from the more heavily used streets. In order to regionalize this soundscape, cluster analysis was performed on the monitor location sound frequencies using the six sound groups as variables. Spatially, the cluster analysis indicated the existence of three soundscape regions in South Fairfield. A peripheral zone, along the major coastal road, experienced a high frequency but a low variety of sounds. This area was dominated by motor sound and had the highest SPL values. Region two was a transitional region, where high-frequency, largely motor-related sound was matched by high sound variety. Region three was mainly an interior region. Here a high variety of sounds was coupled with low frequency; one might, therefore, hypothesize this to be the area with the highest resident-preference scores. Subjective analysis The initial concern of the questionnaire was to gain an understanding of residents' general impressions of soundscape nature and quality. Slightly more than 66 per cent of the respondents felt that South Fairfield was either 'quiet' or 'very quiet'; fewer than 7 per cent felt that the area was noisy; and none felt that it was 'very noisy.' Moreover, more than 45

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per cent of respondents indicated that they had not experienced any change in neighbourhood sound quality during their residence in the area. When change was identified, it was usually restricted to a single source. Increasing traffic noise was the most frequently mentioned change, followed by responses relating to home reconstruction and the increasing number of young families with children and pets, all of which have resulted from the gentrification process. More respondents identified sources of unwanted change (71 per cent) than wanted change (45 per cent). Again, traffic, population structure, and land-use changes were the chief culprits. There was much less consensus about the types of changes residents might prefer to hear. Interestingly, although residents identified traffic sound as the major source of sound-quality change, they did not stress the need to implement methods of traffic-sound reduction. More than two-thirds of respondents indicated no preference for changes in sound quality. The remainder were interested in the reduction of rental zoning and the rerouting of buses and coastguard helicopters. The community sound list was used to provide data on respondents' recognition of sounds in the area in and around their homes. The sounds heard by the highest percentage of respondents were mainly the keynote sounds identified during the objective analysis. Specifically, sounds reported by more than 90 per cent of residents included cars; pets; small songbirds and seagulls; and police, fire, and ambulance sirens. Voices, wind in the trees, breezes and storms, motorcycles, crows, vehicle doors, and seaplanes were reported by more than 80 per cent of respondents. These most-heard sounds included both natural and motor sounds. A few figure sounds exhibited reasonably high rates of recognition. The most significant group included electro-acoustical warning devices, such as ambulance, fire, and police sirens. Sound events were heard less frequently although at least 70 per cent of the respondents indicated that they heard jazz concerts, pipe-band practices, or peacocks from the park. Far lower numbers heard South Fairfield's supposedly characteristic soundmarks: church bells (64 per cent); carillon bells (48 per cent); and fog-horns (29 per cent). An additional group of figure sounds sharing these low rates of reportage was made up of sounds associated with the activities of neighbours. The pattern of these results is significant as it indicates that respondents were more aware of the components of the ground of the soundscape than of the figure sounds. In other words, aside from the sound signals, sounds meant to be consciously listened to were less often perceived by the respondents.

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To check for patterns among respondents, several statistical tests were conducted to match sound frequency with household characteristics. No significant relationships were found between sound frequency and household size, duration of house occupancy, or duration of residence in the city of Victoria. Nevertheless, the negative relationship between sound frequency and both measures of residence duration suggests that lengthier residence may be associated with awareness of fewer sounds. A cross-tabulation of sound frequency by years of residence confirmed this habituation trend, which conflicts with the wsP's use of long-term residents of an area as expert earwitnesses. Other cross-tabulations revealed few significant patterns, although a suggestion emerged that older residents generally heard fewer sounds. This had no relationship, however, to self-reports of hearing impairment. Rating scales were used to provide a measure of affect. Respondents gave most positive ratings to birdsong, carillon bells, water sounds, hang-gliders, church bells, wind in the trees, fog-horns, and peacocks. Disliked sounds included vehicle brakes; trucks; construction equipment; motorcycles; vehicle horns; police, ambulance, and fire sirens; and shouting. In general then, respondents liked natural sounds but disliked hearing the omnipresent keynote motor sounds. However, there was considerable lack of agreement on the rating of sounds. It is, therefore, suggested that the separation of positively from negatively perceived soundscape components is likely to prove extremely difficult. Spatially, residents in the study-area interior heard the greatest number of sounds, and these same respondents gave the most negative ratings of recognized sounds. This is the low frequency-high variety region, where one might have expected the most positive ratings because of low motor noise, low sound levels, and the greater frequency of other sound groups. Clearly, the residents identified a different sound profile, in terms of meaning, from the one obtained by the objective analysis. The correspondence of high sound recognition with a slightly negative mean sound rating suggests that the residents of this interior region may have been more aware of their soundscape quality (because of low motor sounds and low sound levels) and were, therefore, more sensitive to the nature of soundscape components. Finally, the information residents received from this soundscape was investigated in terms of their recall of informational sounds, the possible interference of such sounds with everyday life, and recall of sounds associated with seasonal change. Two-thirds of the respondents listed two informational sounds, and almost half listed four. Indicator sounds were most frequently noted, especially sirens indicating danger in the

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neighbourhood and fog-horns indicating danger at sea. Natural sounds (birds, wind) were frequently mentioned as sources of weather information. Motor sounds provided information about time of day (buses) and season (motor sounds increase in summer). Well over half the respondents heard sounds that interfered with their sleep, while more than 30 per cent suffered sound interference with conversation and more than 20 per cent with radio or television listening. Cars, buses, motorcycles, and planes were the most common sources of interierence. Sirens were the only indicator sounds mentioned with any frequency. Birds, especially seagulls, were the only natural sound sources identified as interierence, mainly related to problems of sleep. Seasonal variation in the soundscape was widely recognized. Winter was associated with the sounds of wind, storms, and sea. Fog-horns were linked with fall and winter. Activity sounds and neighbour sounds dominated the response for swnmer, with birds the most frequently mentioned natural sound. Clearly, summer sounds provide much information about the activities of one's neighbours. Traffic-related sounds were rarely mentioned; if noted, respondents referred to 'louder' motor sounds in summer. In general, however, motor sounds are not perceived to have a marked seasonal aspect.

Study conclusions The researchers' initial impressions regarding the diversity of soundscape components characterizing the study area were supported in both the subjective and objective stages of the research design. Numerous sound types were identified during both research stages but, for individual cases, whether respondents or monitor positions, few different sound types were actually recorded. For the objective analysis this meant that there was little similarity between monitor positions in terms of the sounds characterizing the twenty-one sampling locations. The sound of car traffic was the only ubiquitous sound in South Fairiield. There was also a great deal of variety in the types of sounds identified on the questionnaires, although the respondents as a whole reported hearing more sounds than were identified during the objective analysis. Cars and other motor- and traffic-related sounds were frequently heard but natural and indicator sounds were also important. Description of soundscape composition as well as generalization about perceived soundscape components were complicated by problems associated with the design of a classification system for sounds. The subjective analysis revealed that sound type could not easily be

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classified because of the wide range in individual perceptions. The problems of designing meaningful systems of classification were also made apparent during the objective analysis, for a reliability test failed to give support to the wsP's conceptually formed groups. Our understanding of the relationships between sounds and the perceptions of these sounds clearly requires further analysi~. This is an area worthy of further research as it far surpasses simple SPL in the level of understanding of the soundscape that is achieved. The objectivesubjective approach emphasizes the value of understanding soundscape through an investigation of its individual elements, rather than by treating it as a single measurable object, as is done in noise studies. Examination of the soundscape would benefit from a better understanding of the figure-ground relationship of sounds. Previous studies have indicated that motor sounds are the major contributor to the ambience of urban soundscapes and that they function primarily as ground sounds. This study indicated that motor sounds had the most obvious relationship to sound level, but these sounds did not always serve as the frame against which other sounds were perceived. During the objective analysis there was some evidence of masking by motor sounds but such sounds appeared to be sufficiently intermittent to allow softer sounds to be heard or recorded. Similarly, questionnaire respondents noted changes in the soundscape's motor-sound content and they also associated particular information with the hearing of these sounds. These results indicate that the most frequently heard element of the soundscape can function as both a figure and a ground component. The high motor-sound content identified with the South Fairfield soundscape served to re-emphasize this aspect of the urban environment. Motor sounds were among the most negatively perceived sounds in the community sound list. Generally, 'we complain more often about traffic noise than any other noise in our cities' (Cottrell 1980, 9). Despite agreement between both objective and subjective analyses on this score, it is significant that there were considerable differences between the 'objective soundscape' (the expert's view) and the 'subjective soundscape' (the inpert's view). This is nowhere more clearly seen than in respondents' low evaluation of the low frequency-high variety region, which, on the basis of the objective analysis, would have been predicted to be the most positively evaluated. Change was not a well-recognized aspect of the soundscape. When change was identified, it was associated with an increase in the density of residential development, and it appears that rising sound levels may eventually mask important information sounds. Such change appears to

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have a generally negative effect on soundscape. Since an increasing proportion of the world's population is becoming concentrated in urban areas (50 per cent estimated by 2000 AD), the effect of urban development on this aspect of the environment demands consideration. It will be important for planners and practitioners to have an understanding of the nature of soundscape so they can better assess the impacts of their actions on the quality of the urban soundscape and how this relates to the quality of life for urban residents.

Implications Sound is of immense importance to human beings. Research by my students has clearly indicated that city dwellers are readily able to distinguish between pleasant and unpleasant sounds (Kawano 1981; Mastin 1982). Moreover, city residents are differentially able to avoid unpleasant sounds by retiring to sonically up-market areas. A detailed analysis of real-estate values in Victoria, British Columbia, in relation to soundscape, demonstrated the following relationships: the higher the real-estate value, the lower the average sound level; sounds perceived as pleasant, such as birdsong, were more frequent in soundscapes of high real-estate value, whereas unpleasant sounds, such as those of vehicles, had the opposite distribution; a similar relationship held even at the level of birdsong itself, for small songbirds were more frequent in areas of high value, while low-value areas were more likely to be inhabited by crows (Lee 1987). It is ironic to note that wealthier citizens are far more likely to complain about noise (Kavaler 1975). Noise and its suppression has become a planning and industrial issue recently, in view of the numerous studies that demonstrate the deleterious effects of unwanted sound. High or sustained noise levels, for example, have been found to have extremely deleterious effects on animals, including the usual stress-related impairment of adrenal, thyroid, and gonadal glands, as well as psychological effects such as increased timidity and decreased sociability. Sutton (1986) reports that off-road vehicle use in the Mojave Desert has significantly reduced animal populations. For example, kangaroo rats suffer hearing impairment and fail to anticipate the approach of predators, while toads are induced to emerge from aestivation by the thunder-like sound of dune buggies and consequently die from the intense heat of summer. For human beings, the soundscape becomes increasingly noisy with time. Evidence ranges from the anecdotal to the scientific. As an example of the former, we have Sutton's (1986) poignant story:

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I wonder how many people seek out a location for a home in terms of the quality of the soundscape? I first chose ... a location that perpetuated the sounds of birds, but, alas, within a few years a freeway took the semi-wild adjacency to my home and now we must tolerate this change. Later, when plumbing problems developed on my property, I had to tear out two quite mature trees that housed hundreds of birds, a loss that has not been overcome ... I came out of the lower East Side of Manhattan, but I appreciate nature in a way that a New Yorker cannot because of the background noise of transportation, especially subways.

This personal evidence supplements studies such as that of Price (1972) which estimated that the 'noise climate' of Vancouver showed an increase of 10 decibels over sixteen years. Such data give rise to the commonly held notion that sound levels rise about half a decibel per year in North American cities. The word noise is related to 'nausea.' Hence the need to reduce its impact, for various noise studies indicate that intense and sustained noise levels may induce excessive fatigue, irritability, violence, gradual reduction in sex drive, and a general deterioration in social relationships. During the 1970s many countries and cities passed legislation against noise, such as the u.s. Noise Control Act of 1972 and Chicago's sssHHICAGO campaign. Noise by-laws are the most obvious planning application, but while it is notable that many noise by-laws have been enacted, enforcement is almost nil because of measurement problems and the low priority given to the noise problem by both authorities and citizens. The latter is a crucial issue. Urban man increasingly inhabits an environment of sensory overload emphasized by his predilection for noisy technological junk. In sensory terms, this same environment is actually an environment of privation. Visual blight, the smell and taste of smog, and the masking effect of keynote city sounds increasingly deprive the urbanite of high-quality visual, aural, and odoriferous experiences. Despite our demonstrated need for sensory complexity (Fiske and Maddi 1961), sensory privation is the price we have paid for the advantages of urban living in the twentieth century. In order to exemplify this problem of urban privation, here is an earwitness account of one afternoon on the small isolated island, lying midway between Vancouver and Seattle, on which this book was written. One must contrast this account with one's knowledge of the urban soundscape, which is characterized by a low, continuous roaring boom, largely derived from motor traffic, and which effectively masks

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individual natural and human sounds. The urban soundscape is, par excellence, one of low fidelity. In contrast, the rural or wilderness soundscape is characterized by high fidelity. The context or keynote is not motor sound, but silence. Consequently, each individual sound can be heard separately and distinctly, and fully appreciated for its existential soundness: Satuma Island: Sunday, 30 January 1983. High-pressure weather: warm, windless, bright, clear. On top of the mountain, in a coniferous forest-pasture landscape, I hear the cough and croak of ravens, the piteous whickering of bald-headed eagles, the hoot of pheasant, the cluck of robins, the myriad pipings and tweetings of what ornithologists call l.g.b.'s (little grey birds). From a neighbour island come domestic sounds: cattle bellowing, sheep bleating, geese cackling, with the occasional sharp bark of a dog. From over fifty feet away, I can both smell the rich scent and hear the rasping bite of feeding feral goats. The only non-natural sounds are occasional ferry hooters, an infrequent jet whining off to Japan or Hawaii, and the dull persistent drone, almost a keynote sound Wlfortunately, of light airplanes in which businessmen propel themselves between Victoria, Vancouver, and Seattle. I sniff; the goats freeze, then run. On the way down the mountain I hear the purling of a mountain stream; a deer crashes into the salal (it is hunting season). Thirteen hundred feet below, en kayak in the middle of a mile-wide bay, non-natural sounds have almost disappeared. Eagles witter, small birds sing, there is the patter of feet as ducks take off from the water. Mallard whistle overhead, and the silence of the cormorant's flight is almost audible. Herons croak. There's a sudden riffle behind the kayak, followed by whiskery snorts and snuffles. A great bull harbour seal is regarding me from about fifteen feet. I am suddenly surrounded by about forty seals, rising and flopping, tails smacking, and snorting, while away on the outlying skerries their relatives yap, howl, bark, and roar. Ten feet to starboard, a slurp of bubbles announces an otter. Still swimming, it disposes of a newly caught fish with a sound of hard, cold crunching. I load the kayak on the Volkswagen roof. The car engine starts like a curse.

ff the above earwitness report seems lyrical, it is because the fundamentals of soundscape are essentially qualitative. The value and meaning of soundscape, to the individual, is ultimately not measurable by machine or by social-science tests. Yet such scientific work, coupled with sensitive qualitative studies, is essential if we are ever to have an urban soundscape that pleases the ear. Our current noise by-laws aim to suppress unwanted sound, thus,

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at least implicitly, allowing wanted, pleasant sounds to re-emerge from the urban cacophony. In contrast, soundscapers would build on a reduction in noise generated by noise-suppression by-laws, were these effective, to emphasize existing pleasant sounds and generate new ones. This positive aspect of practical soundscape work has been paid little attention, despite Southworth's (1969) emphasis on 'sonic delight,' the Parisian Paysage sonore urbain (Scheer 1979) projects, and the attempts of musicians such as Maryanne Amacher to 'create scenarios to enhance perceptual "geographies" among mind, body, and environment' (Hight 1981). Shafer (1977) and Truax (1984}, as well as Southworth and the Paris team, have indicated innumerable ways in which the sonic environment might be improved for the average citizen as well as for the visually handicapped. The need for such ameliorative work is paramount. As Truax asserts (Langlois 1974, 49) in relation to the World Soundscape Project: 'Our broadest and most ambitious aim . . . is to redesign the soundscape of the world. Our modest aim is to show individuals how to listen on a daily basis [and] we want to alert people to the fact that if we don't do something about this soon, then we, or our children, are going to go deaf.'

4

Bodyscape

If we regard the Earth as an individual, and those geographic regions .. . as representing organs, tissues, and cells, we perhaps get nearest to a useful comparison. A.J. Herbertson

Few geographers of today would be willing to accept, with Herbertson, that the organismic analogy between landscape and the human body can be a useful scientific tool. Speaking from a rigorous scientific standpoint, Stoddart (1967, 520) concluded that this idea of an analogical relationship between body and landscape was merely 'a metaphor of dubious value.' One of the roles of humanistic geography, however, is to explore such metaphors. Although Wright (1947) tried to stimulate an interest in 'geographic imagination' a generation ago, it is only recently that geographers have developed a strong interest in language and imaginative literature and, especially, in metaphor (Livingstone and Harrison 1980, 1981; Mills 1982; Sitwell 1981; Tuan 1978). Mills accepts the view that all thought may be, at base, metaphorical, and that language develops by way of metaphor, and goes on to outline 'central metaphors' that are basic to our understanding of the world. Western central metaphors, growing out of everyday experience, are the medieval book of nature, Renaissance microcosmism, and the modern mechanist world-view. Although the Renaissance microcosmic view purports to be a two-way vision, it is, in fact, rather one-sided. The emphasis appears to be on the body as a model for the universe; the reverse relationship is neglected. In this chapter, in contrast, I hope to demonstrate: that this body:world, microcosm:macrocosm metaphor needs greater elucidation at the scale of oody: landscape, where oody components are metaphorically matched in detail with landscape features; that the metaphor is, in fact, an interacting system, whereby landscape is seen as body but, also, body is

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regarded as landscape, that the body in question, in male-dominant cultures, is very often the female body, and that the culmination of 'body as landscape' is pomotopia; and that, although no longer part of a dominant world-view, the metaphor has continued in use, at least in imaginative literature, well into the machine-age twentieth century.

Body metaphor The cosmological relationships between body and universe have been explored by Tuan (1974, 1978) and Glacken (1967). Since classical times, at least, and in many cultures, the earth has been regarded as female, fertile if properly propitiated, but barren, like a wasteland, if incorrectly dealt with. Father Sky provides semen in the form of rain. Mother Mary, to give just one example, is impregnated from on high. Mother Earth, lowly, graceful, but with all the frailties of woman, is complemented by the male skygod, high, clean, pure. Recognizing the power as well as the nurturing capacity of our native heaths, we divide the earth's surface into fatherlands and motherlands. Operationally, in our transactions with the cosmos, 'the body's integrity is the foundation for our sense of order and wholeness' (Tuan 1979, 87). It is our basic orientation referent. The notions of front: back, left: right, top: bottom, and inside:outside are first learned in terms of the body and then applied to the wider milieu, from our treatment of front and back in house design and management to the Christian conception of the ordering of sheep and goats at the Last Judgment. The correspondence between bodily orifices and the doors and windows of houses is very close. Both can be closed and entrance monitored. Violation occurs as rape or breaking-and-entering. Top and bottom are equally powerful signifiers. In some cultures the head is sacred and cannot be touched. As the head organizes the bodily hierarchy of limbs and organs, so human organizations are controlled by headmen. Douglas (1973) sees the human body as a 'natural symbol' for the social body or body politic. Moving from orientation in space to orientation in time, we find that bodily rhythms are responsible for much of our original sense of time. Evidence of the passage of time is provided by heartbeat and breathing rate, which may readily be used as measuring devices. The growth and progressive decay of the body reflect the irreversibility of time, and these changes also reflect the seasonal cycle of nature. Our approximately twenty-four-hour biological clocks meshed fairly well with diurnal rhythms until the popularity of rapid intercontinental travel. Body space is another area of inquiry, this time at the micro scale.

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Here the body is seen as a nested set of integuments: inner self, skin and hair, cosmetics, clothes (Goffman 1971). In this sense the body becomes a personal landscape to enhance. Landscape design is possible through cosmetics or tattooing. Clothes, a more frequently used design mechanism, are manipulated to accentuate some surficial features and to hide others. Clothed bodies are often more alluring than naked ones, just as an intimate, vegetated landscape usually appeals more than the naked expanses of moorland or desert, which apparently reveal all at a glance. Beyond the readily manipulated layers of skin and clothing lies the less well-defined defensible zone of personal space (Sommer 1969), which may be enlarged to the size of a room or dwelling. At this territorial level, the body corresponds once more with the house. The environmental explorer Harbison (1977), the psychiatrist Jung (1969), the poet Neruda (1978), the phenomenologist Bachelard (1964) would all agree with the prophet Gibran (1976, 31) that 'your house is your larger body.' From this concept it is but a short step to the use of the human body, first as a fundamental measuring device (the foot, for example), then as a fundamental design module. From the layout of the Dogon village in the shape of a body, an archetype for semioticians, through Leonardo da Vinci's famous schema of man as the measure of all things, to Le Corbusier's body-based modulor and his organic layout of Chandigahr, the human body has been considered a basic unit or model for the design of human settlements. Moreover, within the built environment, parts of the human body have frequently surfaced as architectural forms. Mouth-like openings into buildings spring to mind. Consider also the Victorian obsession with the phallus in the form of factory chimneys, dockside bollards, and, more appropriate yet, water-towers. Body and landscape are as one in yet another form of built environment, that of the work of art. Nudes are a kind of fleshly landscape. It is notable that the huge sculptures by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth mirror the stern Yorkshire landscapes that the artists knew as children. Along British coasts and in limestone country, one finds ovoid holes worn by nature as precisely in the living rock as in the openings of a Hepworth or a Moore. And it is significant that these sculptural forms have now become, in their turn, a referent for landscape appreciation. Edward Abbey, that acerbic lone explorer of American deserts, sees in the Arches National Monument 'a sculptured landscape ... earth in the nude' in Moore-like terms (1971, 187). The emphasis of this chapter, however, is not on the cosmological, or the body as art-form, or on the importance of the body in design. My interest, rather, is in the body as a complex of components that

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metaphorically correspond with the component-complex that is the natural landscape. The sources are drawn largely from the literature of Western, male-dominated societies.

A conceptual framework Conceptually, the variety of body:earth metaphors outlined above can be integrated via the geographer's traditional concern with the manenvironment theme, involving a two-way transactional interrelationship. One theme that is deeply embedded in human history is the belief that man is a bringer of order to the apparent chaos that is the natural world. According to Mircea Eliade (1959) man must 'cosmicize' the earth, that is, bring cognitive order to it, before it can be settled. Glacken (1967) has noted the importance, since classical times, of the notion that man is controller of the earth. Teilhard de Chardin (1965) has put forward the concept of the noosphere, whereby the planet is conceived of as subject to the directive capacity of the human mind. One familiar method of directing or controlling the external environment is the act of naming. Mapless travellers are often disturbed by their inability to discover the 'correct' names for the landscape features they encounter (Abbey 1971 ). Naming is a powerful act. By naming landscape features, butterflies, persons, we in part possess them and simultaneously exorcise their chthonic magical powers (Porteous 1977, 24). Nature, disturbing or fearsome, can be humanized by applying familiar terms to it (Clark 1956, 23). Geographers have thoroughly considered place-names, the specific variant of landscape naming. But, as with personal names (Porteous 1982), geographers have paid little attention to generic landscape naming. The labelling of common landscape features in generic terms often involves the use of metaphor. One of the more common means of environmental labelling involves use of body elements. Both body and landscape are universals of experience, but we experience body, both our own and that of the mother, before we experience landscape. Only after several developmental stages does the infant begin to distinguish itself from the general milieu, and only in childhood can mobile exploration of this external environment begin. To explore is a natural drive. Although we continue to make discoveries about our bodies throughout life, from childhood onward most of our attention is focused elsewhere. Although organism and environment are logically inseparable, we tend to make operational distinctions between them. The implication is

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that one of the most fundamental geographic dialectics is between the self, manifested corporeally in the body, and the non-self, manifested in the 'environment.' These are the two basic landscapes that confront us. Little wonder, then, that our environmental and body vocabularies contain many common elements, and that the one may be a metaphorical referent to the other. There are always two terms in a metaphor. These are the metaphrand, the thing to be described, and the metaphier, the thing or relation used to elucidate it (Janes 1976). A known metaphier is used to give meaning to a less-known metaphrand. The human body is an amazingly rich metaphier. We speak of the face of a clock or a cliff; the eye of a needle, a storm, a potato; the teeth of combs and cogs; the lips of jugs, the tongues of shoes; the spines of books; the legs of a trip. Chairs have both arms and legs. Plumbers and carpenters are familiar with the tongues of joints, the male and female parts of a joint, and elbow joints. The head is particularly generative, for we are familiar with the heads of armies and academic departments, tables and beds, and nails. A page has both head and foot. Environmental terms may also be used for human artefacts or conditions. This page may be called a leaf. The four principal elements earth, air, fire, and water - were also the four basic 'humours' that together, according to medieval theory, made up the human personality. We use modem technological terms as metaphiers for that little-known metaphrand, the brain, which has successively been likened to a battery, a telephone exchange, and a computer. It is the purpose of this chapter to explore the linkage between body and landscape in terms of metaphor. This intimate interdigitation of meaning will be analysed by considering, first, the landscape as body, and then the body as landscape. The inescapable sexual nature of much of the body:landscape connection is given separate consideration. Landscape as body

In the earliest human encounters with the landscape, it may have been useful both practically and magically to invest landscape features with names derived from the human body. Anthropomorphism is an almost universal feature among Homo sapiens. English poetry from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century is replete with anthropomorphic earth metaphor. In one poem alone Sir John Davies (1569-1626) provides a model much-used then and later: the earth has a waist (girt by the sea), a broad breast, and blue veins (rivers), while hills become 'The

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Earth's great duggs' (Davies 1956, 45). We encounter the ocean also as a boundless bosom. The earth as a whole may be seen as a body of unidentified sex, a recumbent giant. This body's structure can readily be understood by applying descriptors based on the landscape we know best, the human body. The skin of the earth is a common concept. Elastic, the skin allows for change and growth of the body within. Erosion and weathering are important agents of change; skin flakes away and is replaced from beneath. A failure to come to terms with weathering and temporality, whether of human skin or the earth's surface, is responsible for both the current rash of cosmetic surgery and sundry misguided suggestions that we could, by various forms of plastification, preserve essentially temporary geological features for generations of tourists to come. Desiccated, cracked, and peeled, the skin also suffers ravages from within. Volcanoes, in particular, and mountains, in general, were regarded as warts, boils, pox, and other unsightly excrescences before the modem period of mountain adulation (Nicholson 1959). The earth's skin may be pocked by craters; erosion or overgrazing may leave sores. And it can certainly be diseased. Herman Melville, passing through the wilderness ofJudaea in 1857, spoke of 'whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape - bleached - leprosy - encrustation of curses - old cheese - bones of rocks - crunched, gnawed, mumbled - mere refuse and rubbish of creation' (Bellow 1976, 16). In balmier climes, however, the recumbent giant is primarily shaggy, sporting cosmetic decoration in the form of vegetation likened to hair (Tuan 1979, 27). Forests form a thick hirsute covering; grasslands are a light down. The landscape may be 'clothed' with verdure or snow. Ravaged by time, the same landscape may lose its vegetation and become bald. Round bare mountains resemble bald pates. Snowcapped, forested mountains are seen as frozen giants, bald but bearded. Hirsute or bare, the skin of the earth is supported by a framework of bones, muscle, and blood. D.H. Lawrence speaks of hills 'rippling away, like muscle,' and Whitman (1979, 49), too, relishes 'broad muscular fields.' Landscapes may be fat or lean. Fat landscapes, beloved of eighteenthcentury agricultural improvers and by peasants everywhere, are rich, productive, agrarian. Lean landscapes, in contrast, expose the underlying structure. Bones are close to the skin, and may break through. The idea of the earth as a carcass is common. Ridges stand out like the rib-cage of a dead beast. Bare chalk or limestone brings to mind discarded bones from which all nourishment has long since been derived. Long bones lie close beneath long sweeps of hillside. Vertebrae notch the

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outlines of eroded desert ridges. But the type of bone is rarely specified. It is enough that the bones are there - we do not wish to know too much. Deserts are the epitome of lean, bony landscapes. Patrick White's evocation of the Australian outback is built upon the bareness of the earth's skin, through which the bones may readily be discerned: 'There are certain landscapes in which you can see the bones of the earth. And this was one. You could touch your own bones, which is to come a little closer to the truth' (1971, 63). The Greek cellist Moraitis feels at home there: 'You see, I am a peasant. I am very conscious of the shape of the country. I come from the Peloponnese. It is rich, fat, purple country, but underneath you can feel the bones ... Greece, you see, is a bare country. It is all bones' (pp. 112-13). White's characters celebrate a landscape of bones lacking the flesh of soil and hair of vegetation. They are suspicious of luxuriant, continuous vegetation cover, where a landscape may be said to be clothed. Placed in a room full of furniture, Moraitis exclaims: 'I cannot live in such a room. I require naked rooms, bare' (p.112). Bony landscapes, however, are not universally admired. In the Lord of the Rings, Gollum, a riverside creature like most humanoids, finds a ridged, bony landscape to be actively hostile: The cold bare lands They bites our hands, They gnaws our feet. The rocks and stones Are like old bones All bare of meat ... (Tolkien 1965, 287)

Muscles and bones are sustained by the circulatory system. Water is the earth's blood, and, by its means, nutrients are carried throughout the body. A comparison between hydrological and circulatory systems was often drawn in early-modem times. Proponents of inland navigation in 1665, for example, drew the attention of the English public with the assertion that 'this Island is incomparably furnished with pleasant Rivers, like Veins in the Natural Body, which convey Blood into all the Parts, whereby the Whole is nourished and made useful' (Anonymous 1665). Physiological analogies between body and landscape are still common. It is not unusual among urban geographers, for example, to speak of the anatomy of a metropolis, together with its circulation (transportation system), its nervous system (communications), and its metabolism.

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Furthermore, landscapes appear to age, as does the body. Vigorous young fold mountains contrast with the sluggish senescence of peneplains or anastomosing rivers in the deltaic stage. The seven ages of man are repeated in the erosion of the landscape. Davis (1909) deliberately chose his powerful, symbolic terminology. The essence of his erosion cycle, with young, mature, and old-age stages, remains in the mind long after we have intellectually discarded the Davisian conceptual framework. As an ageing, living being, the earth naturally performs vital functions. It exhales through vents and orifices in the form of vapours, fumes , and mists. The earth breathes, in Coleridge's unforgettable line, 'in short thick pants.' It heaves, often violently, in the form of landslides and earthquakes. It swallows living creatures; northern English mothers warn their children of Jenny Green teeth, an earth spirit who entices children below the waters of ponds. And from the bowels of the earth, volcanoes spew lava. The Ringbearer was appalled by the desolation that lay before Mordor: 'Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about' (Tolkien 1965, 302). It is but a short leap beyond anthropomorphism to the pathetic fallacy. This literary device involves empathy between man and nature to such a degree that the joys and sorrows of man are reflected in nature, while nature itself assumes human emotional attributes. Popular among the Romantic poets and ridiculed by Ruskin, the pathetic fallacy nevertheless has deep roots. The psalms are particularly replete with landscapes that, with great beauty and economy of expression, are made to reflect human feelings. Mountains skip like rams, and little hills like young sheep; the sea saw this, and fled; the valleys shall stand so thick with com that they shall laugh and sing. Only with its stylization in eighteenth-century verse - where hills frown; waves roar, moan, and fret; and gardens smile amid the slumb'ring land - did the pathetic fallacy lose its impact. Yet, when the prophet is asked to speak of clothes, he replies: 'Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair' (Gibran 1976, 36). From the body as a whole, we come to a consideration of its individual parts as referents for landscape features. So common are these usages that they are no longer considered metaphorical. We speak of an arm of the sea; a neck of land; the mouth of a river, cavern, or crater; the face of Europe, ·the face of the earth. Such usage is common in European languages. A headland, for example, may be a nez (France) ness (Scandinavia), or a ness, neb, naze, or nose in Britain. Easter Island is

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the navel of the world, el ombligo del mundo, and so on. Pools are eyes, and fields are fanged with flints (Gibbons 1938). Mountains and related land-forms are especially favoured, bringing to mind, once again, the concept of mountain as giant being. Mountains have crests, shoulders, flanks , feet. Their caverns and craters have mouths; the latter also possess lips. Between mountains we find the heads of passes, and on mountainsides are the heads of valleys; the rivers within them terminate in mouths. We may climb the brow of a hill, the spine of a ridge, the tail of a drumlin, a volcanic neck, a headland. Mountains may be clothed or bearded with forest. All these terms are sexually neutral, although originally maleness may have been implicit. Wherever sex is specified in metaphor, however, it is almost invariably the female body that becomes metaphier. The vision of a landscape as a female body is a common literary theme. Charles Kingsley, for example, found chalk downlands to be 'beautiful . . . with their enormous sheets of spotless turf, those grand curves and swells, as if the great goddess-mother Hertha had laid herself down among the hills to sleep, her Titan limbs wrapped in a veil of silvery green' (quoted in Chitty 1974, 90). Although the usage declined during the twentieth century, it was still common in the 1920s and 1930s, when a pretentious Aldous Huxley character speaks of 'curves ... those little valleys had the lines of a cup moulded round a woman's breast; they seemed the dinted imprints of some huge divine body that had rested on these hills' (1977, 7). More generally, Aldington (1968, 45) speaks of 'the sweet, breast-round, soft English country.' Indeed, so common became the use of female-body imagery in landscape description that Stella Gibbons's satire on the bucolic genre, Cold Comfort Farm (1938), routinely views the earth as a great, brown, outstretched woman and pokes fun at outworn cliches such as the stem of a young sapling as phallus or buds as nipples. Orifices and concavities are notable landscape and body features. A common psychiatric interpretation of dreams involves equating lakes with the womb, caves with the vagina (Hadfield 1954). In common English usage, attractive locations are physiognomic 'beauty spots' on the face of the earth. But it is the breast that seems to have captured the imagination of those male travellers whose task it was to place names upon a newly discovered landscape. The breast is a basic symbol of comfort as well as a prominent secondary sexual characteristic of especial attraction to the American male (Roth 1972; Rudofsky 1971). Charles Darwin's grandfather extolled the delights that the baby derives from contact with the breast, experiences that remain embedded in the

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mind, for 'in our maturer years, when an object of vision is presented to us which bears any similitude to the form of the female bosom ... we feel a general glow of delight which seems to influence all our senses; and if the object be not too large we experience an attraction to embrace it with our lips' (quoted in Rudofsky 1971, 44). The importance of the breast may be seen in cave paintings (Tuan 1979, 47), Jungian interpretations of the symbolism of pottery ware, and the value of fountains as symbols of life and fertility. If the breast-like object is too big to engulf, we can at least name it with a specific mammarian term. Twin conical peaks, domes, and pointed hills have been compared the world over to breasts. Consider the Grand Tetons or, less obvious but more interesting, the three upstanding quartzite cones that form the Paps of}ura, on the Inner Hebridean island of that name. Two South African hills, known as Sannie's Tits, are a recurrent landscape referent in Michener's The Covenant (1980). Before mountains were considered sublime or beautiful, they were 'Earth's Dugs,' or the 'barren breasts' of Milton's L'Allegro (Nicholson 1959). The multitude of soft rounded hills, overlaid with round burial mounds, that make up parts of the Wessex chalkland called to Hardy's (1981) mind the fecund image of Diana Multimammia. Appleton's (1978) poetry betrays a preference for pointed peaks. Walt Whitman's (1982, 173) evocation of the sea stresses its traditional femininity, its boundless, rounded undulations, its waves 'lifting up their necks' above the 'limitless heaving breast.'

Body as landscape So old is our usage of body imagery for landscape features that the terms have been appropriated by our environmental vocabulary, and are no longer thought of as metaphor. The use of landscape as a metaphier for the human body, in contrast, is more contrived, more obviously a literary device, and therefore more vivid. Novelists, of course, may go to extremes in their search for effect, as when one heroine is made to describe her pubic hair as 'spreading over her thighs like urban blight' (Simon 1980). Landscape as body is clearly an anthropomorphism. As yet we have no technical term for body as landscape, although 'geomorphism' suggests itself. Moreover, the ensuing discussion of metaphor should not blind us to the fact that, to very small children and pets, adult bodies are actual landscapes. Theological imagery and religious poetry suggest that the body is merely earth, dust, ashes, clay. The Old Testament and religious poetry

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are replete with images of both human transience and our oneness with the earth, for all flesh is as grass and we are merely human clay. The use of embalming and coffins, then, must be acts of bad faith. In medical atlases, the human body has its geography. As in a landscape, some features of the human body, and in particular of the face, immediately catch our attention. In The Aunt's Story (1971) White deals tellingly with the geography of the face: 'In the left temple, in the yellow skin, there was a long blue vein. She had to look at this vein. For the moment it was the most significant detail of geography' (p. 86). Many of the bodily descriptors used as landscape terms are matched by landscape terminology used in describing the human body. Man mountain, like his geological counterpart, has crest, shoulders, flanks, feet. Breasts are soft, rounded hillocks. The belly is a smooth rolling downland, giving way to the tangled shrubbery of the significantly named mons veneris, which in tum guards a secret cave. As in the earth itself, seed is implanted and the fruit of the womb brought forth. Veins and arteries are rivers; orifices and passages are tunnels; hirsuteness recalls shaggy mountains, thickets, or fine carpets of grass. Muscles may stand out like hillocks; the bald man's head is an unredeemable desert. Like a mountain, one's head may be in the clouds, but one's feet may be of clay. There is all the difference between living high on the hog or subsisting on sowbelly. And one can use simile and metaphor to express other levels of truth: Man's like the earth, his hair like grass is grown His veins the rivers are, his heart the stone. (Wit's Recreations 1640, quoted in Greene 1947, 7)

The sinuous, curvilinear line of beauty fits the body, especially that of the female, as well as natural and even man-made landscapes. Again, it is the female body that attracts most attention. In the unsettling novel Silence (Kennaway 1977, 52), the injured protagonist gains power from contact with 'the mountains and the forests of the great feline body' of his female protector and tormentor. Similarly, the passionate, political love-poetry of the contemporary Nicaraguan poet Gioconda Belli identifies the female body with a terrain that Neruda called 'Land as slim as a whip/ hot as torture' (Rushdie 1987, 42): Rivers run through me mountains bore into my body and the geography of this country begins forming in me

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80 turning me into lakes, chasms, ravines, earth for serving love opening like a furrow filling me with a longing to live to see it free, beautiful I want to explode with love ...

This is truly volcanic. It is here the lover becomes geographer, for the metaphor of exploration is used freely with regard to the landscape of the human body. Donne likened his own body to a 'flat map.' Over three centuries later the image remains in use, as when Lee (1962, 206) likens his 'exploration of Jo's spread body' to 'a solitary studying of maps.' The exploration of the female body, usually by hand, has become a cliche of light fiction. Here, fingers form an expedition to penetrate unknown territory. Explorers, usually male, wish to discover, describe, and possess. The territorial analogy is profound. Such exploration became a powerful metaphor, especially after the expansion of horizons known as the Age of Discovery. John Donne (1956, 88) mirrors the age in his description of his mistress's body as: My America, my New Found Land, My Kingdom, safliest when with one man manned.

In Shakespeare's Henry VIII, the King, clasping a fair lady, 'hath all the Indies in his arms.' Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1977, 315) provides a typically lyrical evocation of the female body as a world ripe for discovery. Abdullah, the one-legged former freedom-fighter, apostrophizes the magnificent barmaid, Wanja: 'for him now, a woman was truly another world: with its own contours, valleys, rivers, steep and slow climbs and descents, and above all, movement of secret springs of life. Which explorer, despite the boasts of men, could claim to have touched every comer of the world and drunk of every stream in her? Let others stay with their worlds: flat, grey, without contours, unexpected turns, or surprises - so predictable. A Woman was a world, the world.' Such a world, once explored, may be plundered or occupied. One can have sovereignty over it, a metaphor common in literature (Barth 1960). Shakespeare's Tarquin sees Lucrece's breasts as 'a pair of maiden worlds unconquered.' And in such a landscape, of course, one can become lost. Finally, Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors (Act 111, Scene 2) provides

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us with one example of the use of landscape metaphor as crude comedy. Dromio is describing, to Antipholus, the kitchen wench he fears will become his wife: o: .. . she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her. In what part of her body stands Ireland? o : Marry, sir, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs. A: Where Scotland? D: I found it by the barrenness; hard in the pahn of her hand. A:

Where Spain? Faith, I saw it not; but I felt it hot in her breath. A: Where America, the Indies? o : Oh, sir, upon her nose, all o'er embellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires ... A: Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands? o : Oh, sir, I did not look so low ... A:

D:

From Shakespearean bawdy, it is but a short step to pomotopia.

Pomotopia Whether landscape is described in body terms, or body as landscape, sexual imagery is a persistent theme. Until recently almost all literature was male-produced and much was male-oriented. There is a long tradition in literature of likening the earth to a recumbent goddess. Long interfluves are her flanks; conical hills, her breasts; caves and grottoes, her secret orifices. The forest is her hair; the soil, her flesh; the grass, her skin. Her feet are in the river; her head, in the mountains. As a female, Mother Earth gives off scents and secretions, many attractive to men. Some cultures make obeisance before performing the generative functions of ploughing or planting. 'Advanced' technological cultures, more careless in their primary productivity, are accused of the rape of the earth. Breasts are the most prominent of secondary sexual characteristics. As has been noted above, they occur often as named features of the landscape. The very 'softest' pornography, as in British daily newspapers, for example, emphasizes breasts. Brien's Domes ofFortune (1979) presents a photographic celebration of the breast, interspersed with short prose poems in which the amazing variety of breasts is described in terms redolent of architectural jargon. Breasts are cupolas, geodesic domes, and the like. There is considerable 'body as landscape' imagery.

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The female body is 'uncharted territory' dominated by 'hillocks' and 'foothills'; one is taken on a tour 'in an English landscape of a Pennine walk - from the promontory of the chin along the ridge of the throat, over the spur of the larynx, and then up the gradual slope of the breasts to the crests of its viewpoint peak at the nipple, looking down the curving steepness to the belly plateau below' (p. 40). 'Harder' pornography deals, however, with primary sexual characteristics. According to Freud, 'the genitals have never really been considered beautiful,' but novelists such as Philip Roth and John Updike would disagree, and Rudofsky notes that 'sexually neutral parts are ignored in love lyrics as well as the arts' (1971, 54). Since the Song of Solomon, female sexuality has been celebrated in landscape metaphor and built form, where beauty may be less important than the experience of power. Caves are obvious landscape referents for the vulva. In literature, caves and grottoes are symbols of secrecy and arcane knowledge. They are unavailable to all, but within them one may be safe. But not always, as is shown in Malcolm Lowry's 'Through the Panama' novella (1961), where the archetypical vagina dentata is resurrected. In survival terms, a cave provides both prospect and refuge (Appleton 1975). The private burrow or labyrinthine cave is a commonplace in literature, an ambivalent image with both positive (Baggins's Bag End in Tolkien) and negative (the Minotaur) aspects. Whatever the valency, caves are symbols of a return to the womb. The man-made equivalent is the grotto, or even the maze, although the latter is also symbolic of a sacrificial heap of spilled intestines (Bord 1976). One of the most eloquent examples of this mode of thinking is the penchant for grottoes in eighteenth-century landscape gardening. In constructing his garden at Twickenham, Pope may have had in mind the classical locus amoenus, in which a cave, a spring, and a grove figured prominently (Mack 1969). Pope extended a small cave into a complex grotto into which he retired to write and contemplate. From the shrubby entrance there was a fine prospect of the Thames, but Pope was able to close this entrance, pass along a tunnel, and conceal himself in the chamber within. The analogy with the (re)penetration of pubic hair, vulva, vagina, and womb is overwhelming. Pope eventually caused streams to flow through the grotto in a 'perpetual rill,' a sexual secretion as well as a soothing amniotic fluid. The return-to-the-womb interpretation is probably correct in Pope's case, for the poet, lonely, small in stature, and lacking advancement because of his religion, was also abnormally close to his mother. Within the same Twickenham garden he erected an (phallic?) obelisk

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in memory of his mother, and the smooth orderliness of the garden as a whole could be viewed from the top of a suggestively rougher 'Mount ... covered with Bushes and Trees of a wilder Growth, and more confused Order, rising as it were out of the Clefts of Rocks, and Heaps of ... mossy Stones' (Mack 1969, 56). Pubic hair as moss is a commonplace of late pre-industrial soft pornography. It appears that we can look much closer to home than Dogon villages for sexual expression in the landscape. But this is gentle stuff. In Victorian Britain the blanket sexual suppression that supposedly clothed the 'limbs' of pianos was matched by an overt expression of sexuality in phallic chimneys and water-towers and covert expression in a considerable underground literature of 'hard' pornography (Marcus 1967). In this self-suppressed literature, meant only for the eyes of intimates, there were no holds barred to explicit description of sexual characteristics or acts. Yet, such was the force of a lengthy tradition, even this hardest of pornography made much use of eighteenth-century 'body as landscape' imagery. Breast hills, mouth caverns, mossy mounts, dark caves, and deep valleys were brought into play as descriptors for the usually supine female body. And it is in this literature, indeed, that the 'body as landscape' genre reaches its climax, where the whole body becomes landscape. Analysis of the genre enables Marcus to construct an epitome of nineteenth-century pornography's landscape: body obsession, which he terms pomotopia. In terms of co-ordinates, pornotopia is both timeless and placeless. At the level of the surface world, however, it is always bedtime, and nature is represented from the eye-level view, as a supine female form veiled only in poetic allusion: In the middle distance there looms a large irregular shape. On the horizon swell two immense snowy white hillocks; these are capped by great, pink, and as it were prehensile peaks or tips - as if the rosy-fingered dawn itself were playing just behind them. The landscape then undulates gently down to a broad, smooth, swelling plain, its soft rolling cuives broken only in the lower center by a small volcanic crater or omphalos. Farther down, the scene narrows and changes in perspective. Off to the right and left jut two smooth snowy ridges. Between them, at their point of juncture, is a dark wood - we are now at the middle of our journey. This dark wood - sometimes it is called a thicket - is triangular in shape. It is also like a cedarn cover, and in its midst is a dark romantic chasm. In this chasm the wonders of nature abound. From its top there depends a large, pink, stalactite, which changes shape, size, and color in accord with the movement of the tides below and within. Within the chasm ... there are caverns measureless to

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man, grottoes, hennits' caves, underground streams - a whole internal and subterranean landscape. The climate is warm but wet. Thunderstorms are frequent in this region, as are tremors and quakings of the earth. The walls of the cavern often heave and contract in rhythmic violence, and when they do the salty streams that run through it double their flow. The whole place is dark yet visible. lbis is the center of the earth and the home of man. (Marcus 1967, 274)

Here humour, poetic allusion, and landscape unite to provide, perhaps unbeknown to Marcus, a microcosmic parody of the geographer's definition of geography. Although the landscape:body metaphor continued in use until well after the First World War, by the mid-twentieth century it had been quietly dropped. Gibbons's (1938) parody may have been influential here but, in general, twentieth-century literature is less interested in place, home, and roots than in placelessness, homelessness, rootlessness, and the post-Freudian investigation in depth of the human psyche. Since the 1950s, both literature and pornography have enjoyed a period of relatively free expression. The ensuing directness (or crudity, if you prefer) has ensured the demise of any non-camp usage of the relatively gentle landscape:body metaphor. In contrast with the metaphor's mainstream position in the eighteenth century, its modern English usage is both sparse and incidental. One looks in vain in Henry Miller. The metaphor still survives, however, in Romance-language novels, most notably in those of the florid Jorge Amado, where we still find characters who explore 'the wet well of her womb and the narrow ravine between the cliffs of her buttocks' (1977, 211). Interpretation

Why is the interchangeable landscape: body metaphor so common, and why is the female body so frequently the object? Only the first question has an apolitical answer. The human body is the first landscape we encounter and explore. It is likely that we carry the cognitive imagery in our heads as well as the actuality of our own bodies as we approach the external environment. Landscape is our second major encounter. For both practical and magical reasons, the application of notions of the self to the environment of non-self makes sense. In this way we humanize our environment, reduce its primeval unknownness and terror, make it ours. The second question requires a careful answer in an age of female liberation. Except for early Celtic myths and some evidence of non-

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Western cultures from anthropology, males have been dominant in most societies. This is especially so in the world-dominant societies of Euramerica, where artists, writers, explorers, the givers of names, have been predominantly male. Traditionally, and with a basis in biology, the male is active, the female passive; the male orgasm is critical for species survival, the female orgasm less so (Deshusses 1982). Sexual differences in humans are often more marked than in many animal species, and especially so in economic activity. Men hunt, women gather and nurse; men deal with the large-scale landscape, women with the intimate locale, the bosom of the family. Power, indeed, appears to be a male monopoly. Thus, the male, pre-eminently the explorer and journeyman, has also predominated as namer of landscape features, his preference being for either neutral terms or elements drawn from the female body, most notably the breast. Taboos clearly operate, for few landscape features bear nomenclature relating to primary sexual characteristics. In Abbey's (1971, 255) resounding list of American desert features named by pioneers, 'The Bishop's Prick' stands alone, flanked by the more acceptable 'Queen Anne's Bottom' and 'Mollie's Nipple.' Males are the major metaphor-creators. Their territory is not only the land, but the female body. And landscape and female body are, mystically, one. The earth is Mother. Women are closer to home, the locale, the earth. As Wilden (1980) has demonstrated in his consideration of exploitation in Canadian society, the male:female nexus is not correctly expressed in horizontal type. By analogy with 'lower race' and 'lower class,' women have been considered the 'lower sex, ' and the traditional power relationship, expressed as: man ) male ( f female c · environment clearly places the female closer to the earth. This attitude of dominance, over landscape as over female, is a major factor in industrial civilization's malaise. According to Baudelaire, we live in a forest of symbols. One of the prime symbolic relationships is that between the human body and the natural landscape, and the interchangeable body:land metaphor is itself an important metaphor of an actual symbiosis. It is likely that body was first used as metaphier for landscape, and that, through the feedback process, the more contrived reverse relationship appeared. In both cases the traditional view of the body: land relationship as one of microcosm:macrocosm is confirmed and enriched. The relationship between mind and land is a somewhat different, but related, issue.

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0, the mind, the mind has mountains,

cliffs of fall,

Frightful, sheer, no man fathomed ...

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Geographers have long studied imaginative literature in the form of the regional novel, but the emphasis has generally been on the place-related novels of the nineteenth century (Pocock 1981b; Porteous 1985a). Very little work has been attempted on the rootless, placeless, homeless modem novels of alienation that developed after 1914 (Middleton 1981; Seamon 1981). And most attention has been paid to the relationships between the landscape depicted in the novel and the landscape from which it was derived. Geographers, although keen to uncover 'the capes and bays geographies of the mind' of the historical imagery genre (Chambers 1982), have so far tended to ignore the inscape, the metaphorical terrain of the mind. Inscape

The term inscape is derived from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who originally meant it to refer to the inner beauty of natural forms as they reveal themselves to the observer (Hopkins 1948). The concept was later extended to embrace the notion of the observer's mental landscape. The notion has been introduced at least once in geography (Dansereau 1973), but was only briefly considered. It is not a new idea. Milton had suggested that 'the mind has its own place, and in itself can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heaven' (Woodcock 1978 ). The concept was basic to the French symbolists Rimbaud and Baudelaire, who were exploring the paysage interieur long before Jung and Freud. The notion of landscapes of the mind has had common currency in literature and art since the late nineteenth century. For geographers, its

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interest lies in the way it allows us to go beyond the initial study of the correspondences between literary and 'real' landscapes, to the investigation of correspondences between landscapes and hwnan personality. Studies of inscape may enrich our understanding not only of landscapes, landscape types, and literature, but also of ourselves, by comparing and contrasting our experiences with those of the artist. If our goal is to understand and experience the world, rather than merely gather knowledge about it, then the inscape/landscape correspondence, believes Lawrence Durrell, may be an important source of intuition (Aileen 1976}. The Yorkshire sculptor Henry Moore is a prime example of the artist who matches inscape with landscape, translates the result into sculpted form, and thus enriches us all. Methodologically, literary geographers may investigate inscapes via the dialectics of existential phenomenology (Tuan 1974, 1977}. Some of the more useful antinomies are home:away and insider:outsider (Porteous 1985a}; the combinations home/insider and away/outsider are particularly powerlul experiences, and may, in Dantesque terms, approximate Paradiso and Inferno, with uncertain areas such as Purgatorio in between. Such a eutopic:dystopic polarity is readily apparent in the novels of Malcolm Lowry. Except for a semi-permanent residence in the coastal wilderness near Vancouver during the period 1940-54, Lowry was a homeless wanderer for most of his life, and through his protagonists conveys his feelings of himself as a latter-day Ahab, Ancient Mariner, or Wandering Jew. Besides British Colwnbia, the landscape that most impressed Lowry was that of interior Mexico, and it is the contrast between coastal British Colwnbia (Paradiso} and interior Mexico (Inferno} that will be pursued here. My second Lowry essay (chapter 8} will explicate Lowry's view of North America in general as Purgatorio or Deathscape. Although Lowry's work can be interpreted at the political, magical, and religious levels (Day 1973}, it is on Day's 'earthbound, landscape' level that this interpretation concentrates. It is against eutopic and dystopic landscapes, composed of sea and land, coast and interior, garden and house, forest and path, mountain and cavern, that the Lowryan characters act out their theatre. Traditional work in hwnanist geography has dealt with changing cultural attitudes to basic landscape elements such as mountains, caves, water, forests, gardens (Tuan 1974, 1977}. It is clear from other analyses that mountains (Nicholson 1959} and the mountains, waters, caves, and forests that make up wilderness (Nash 1967} are fundamental features of both our actual and our

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imaginative terrain (Porteous 1985b). Paths humanize forests for poets from Dante to Robert Frost. Seashore and interior, although not studied in depth by geographers, are basic global units of experience for land-bound species (Blomberg 1982). Garden and house are commonly looked upon as home-places, the essential roots of our being (Bachelard 1969). My interest here is in the way in which such elements, common to both British Columbia and Mexico, are used differentially in a symbolic way, to indicate human experience and feeling, and how, synthesized as landscapes, they become identified with Lowry's mind. Sea and land

Sea:land is the ultimate antinomy in physical geography. The two are complementary; they interpenetrate. Yet, human beings are likely to be placed on the one and, with few exceptions, become placeless voyagers upon the other. Lowry's fascination with the sea had deep roots. He fantasized his shipowning grandfather as a swashbuckling sea captain. His father was a bemedalled life-saver. Lowry, himself an excellent swimmer, grew up close to the Irish Sea and to the great shipping lanes that focused upon Liverpool. His youthful reading included the wandering seafarer tales of Conrad, Melville, O'Neill, and Jack London. His more immediate literary mentors were Nordahl Grieg and Conrad Aiken, both known for their sea novels. Almost all Lowry's novels contain a sea-borne theme. Ultramarine (1974) is a young-man-finds-himself-at-sea novel fairly typical of the age. The protagonist Dana (taken from Dana's Two Years Before the Mast?) is a 'toff' who goes to sea to confront existential extremes and, through suffering them, to find himself. His ship, significantly, is named the Oedipus Tyrranus. From the landlubber's viewpoint, the unrestricted placelessness of the sea and the irresponsible adventures in short-stay ports seem enviably romantic. But the tyro quickly discovers that life at sea is, ultimately, boring. The work is hard and the deck-hand is too tired to contemplate the beauties of sea and sky. Ultramarine lacks purple passages. Moreover, port life is disappointing - 'how alike all these harbours were' (p. 145) - and consists largely of drunken binges, pointless conversations, and encounters with raddled whores. Ultimately, sailors are happiest when they are going home, yet on land they are homeless and must compensate in alcoholic excess: drunk is the sailor, home from the sea. Nevertheless, we can grasp Lowry's early positive feelings for the sea,

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especially in his evocation of ocean life while in some squalid Far Eastern port. 'O God, 0 God, if sea life were only always like that! If it were only the open sea, and the wind racing through the blood, the sea, and the stars forever!' (Lowry 1974, 77). It is the sea wind that stirs Lowry, 'The wind! The wind! The cold clean scourge of the ocean' (p. 66). And, on reaching home, there is the ever-present urge to set sail once more: 'To sail into an unknown spring, or receive one's baptism on storms' promontory, where the solitary albatross heels over in the gale, and at last to come to land. To know the earth under one's foot and go, in wild delight, ways where there is water ... to return again over the ocean ... at last again to be outward bound, always outward, always onward' (p. 185). This evocation of the spell of the sea must stir even the most inveterate landlubber. Yet, Lawry's most vivid evocations in Ultramarine are not of the sea itself, but of the filthy, odorous reality of shipboard life. Throughout the voyage Dana's gaze is not outward at the sea, or upward at the sky, but downward into the hold, the crew's quarters, the O'Neill-like inferno of the engine-room (p. 158), a 'maelstrom of noise, of tangled motion, of shining steel . . . where the red and gold of the furnaces mottled the reeking deck, and the tremulous roar of the cage's fires dominated a sibilant, continual sputter of steam. The Oedipus Tyrranus 's firemen ... half naked, gritty and black with coal, and pasty with ashes, came and went in blazing light, and in the gloom; flaming nightmares, firelit demons. The furnace doors opened, and scorpions leapt out, spirals of gas spun and reeled.' In this frightening vision Lowry has caught his first glimpse of the abyss, the inferno, into which he and the protagonist of Volcano must descend in order to seek salvation. This single voyage proved a turning-point in Lawry's life. From thence he perfected the role of the rough, drunken sailor among his university and literary acquaintance. With the publication of Ultramarine he could pose as the doomed sailor of genius. The swaggering Norwegian persona he adopted at this time (a kind of Joycean 'Scandiknavery') led Lowry to lie under tables with a bottle to re-create the feelings of life at sea. All the remaining books have explicit or submerged sea themes. They are replete with the resounding names of ships, the exotic names of ports. In Under the Volcano(1963)both the Consul, the protagonist, and his half-brother (both aspects of Lowry) have been seafarers. The sea-borne ambience, clean, sleek, silent, of their memories and wishes clashes sharply with the arid, maddening hell of interior Mexico, where the sea can appear only in metaphor, as when one hears 'a soft

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wind-blown surge of music, from which skimmed a spray of gabbling, that seemed not so much to break against as to be thumping the walls and towers of the outskirts; then with a moan it would be sucked back into the distance' (p. 17). Again, in Lunar Caustic (1968), the inmates peer through the windows of New York's misnamed Bellevue asylum at the freedom of a waterway with ferry and motorboats. Yet they identify chiefly with a wrecked coal barge, 'sunken, abandoned, open, hull cracked, bollards adrift, tiller smashed' (p. 12), going nowhere. The chief character, Bill Plantagenet, sees himself as a ship. Later, writing in despair from Mexico, Lowry described himself as a sinking ship. The titles In Ballast and October Ferry to Gabriola (1970) are further indication of this love affair with the sea. A chapter in the latter, 'The Tides of Eridanus,' lovingly evokes Lowry's feelings for the calm: menacing, flowing:ebbing, etemal:transient, silent:clamorous sea on or by which he spent the greater part of his life. Doomed to live somewhere on land, he chooses a wartime squatter's shack at Eridanus (his name for Dollarton) where, though 'whole cities, countries be wiped out, . Eridanus, with its eternal fishermen and net-festooned cabins bordering the inlet ... whose ceaseless wandering yet ordered motions were like eternity, looked ... somehow transported straight to heaven. Eridanus was' (p. 79). Hear Us O Lordfrom Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1969) is made up of seven short stories or 'meditations.' The first, 'The Bravest Boat,' begins with a recurrent Lowry image, 'a day of spindrift and blowing sea foam' (p. 11). In hostile Vancouver, Sigurd Storlesen seeks comfort by Stanley Park's Lost Lagoon. Renamed Sigbj0m Wilderness, he leaves for Europe on a freighter. Throughout, Wilderness considers himself as the Ancient Mariner, complete with albatross. The passage, 'Through the Panama, ' is replete with the sexual imagery of land-locked water. Wilderness's dream of the vagina dentata is matched by the passage through the canal, whose locks snap shut around the ship, and whose banks bear a dense, fetid tropical forest. Reborn, Wilderness finds a severe Atlantic storm exhilarating in comparison with the canal passage, and is able to come to some form of self-realization. After an unsuccessful European tour, the writer and his wife return to Eridanus, girt by mountains, fronted by the sea, a tidal, boat-bedecked, gull-encrusted, belled and fog-homed, surfed and driftwood-laden Dylan Thomas-ish nautical place inhabited year-round only by beached sailors, Celts and Scandinavians all. The novel ends in rain: 'And the rain itself was water from the sea, as my wife first taught me, raised to heaven by the sun, transformed

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into clouds, and falling again into the sea. While within the inlet itself the tides and currents in that sea returned, became remote, and becoming remote, like that which is called the Tao, returned again as we ourselves had done ... Three rainbows went up as rockets across the bay: one for the cat .. . Laughing we stooped down and drank' (p. 286}. That the sea may be the transforming agent in the life of a protagonist is a literary cliche. But, in Lowry, the sea is more than merely symbolic. It has an omnipresent, magical quality. Lowryan characters sail over it, live beside it, listen to it, dream of it. They need the sea. In Lowry, the sea is always positive. It challenges, but never harms. It aids protagonists in their search for self-realization. In Lowry's words, the sea is 'on the side of life.' In contrast, land is, at best, ambivalent. Gardens are cool and inviting, or, like the Borda Gardens of Cuernavaca, may be corrupt and menacing. Forests are sheltering; they surround and nurture the cabin at Eridanus. Best of all, forests lay between Eridanus and the city, and it was the forest and its paths, impenetrable by automobile, that kept civilization at bay. But forests may also be menacing, harbouring wild beasts and tangled roots, which actually seem to conspire in the downfall of the traveller. Roads lead to exhilarating or devastating experiences. In particular, paths in forests are used self-consciously by Lowry as a symbol of the unfathomable ambivalence of life on land. Volcano is Lowry' s land novel. The landscape of Cuernavaca is richly symbolic, a 'forest of symbols' in the words of Baudelaire. The idea of water is there, in memories, in wishes, in Cuernavaca's myriad swimming-pools. But little rain falls; fountains and even bathroom showers run dry. If the sea to Lowry is on the side oflife, in Cuernavaca it is far off; the liquids encountered by the Consul are invariably alcoholic. The Borda Gardens, luxuriant retreat of Maximilian and Carlotta, are stagnant, ruined, obscenely rotting. A forest girds Cuernavaca, but far from providing shade and coolness, it is the scene of darkness, ruin, and confusion. Through it run paths that lead only to perdition, a far cry from the idyllic British Columbian 'Forest Path to the Spring,' the final story in

Hear Us O Lord.

Lowry was clearly no happier with life in an inland situation than with life on the ocean wave. The ideal compromise was a littoral way of life: Resurgent sorrow is a sea in the cave OfthemindAbandon it! .. . take a trip to the upper shore. Lave

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Yourself in sand; gather poppies; brave The fringe of things, denying that inner chasm .. . (from 'Whirlpool')

Coast and interior

Lowry was born near the port of Liverpool, England; the sea was in his blood. All his novels abound in sea imagery. Titles are significant. Of the six published novels, Ultramarine records a youthful voyage, October Ferry to Gabriola describes a trip to an island across 'the beer-dark sea,' Hear Us O Lordfrom Heaven Thy Dwelling Place is drawn from a Manx fisherman's hymn and contains the piece 'The Bravest Boat' and the novella 'Through the Panama.' The original title for Lunar Caustic was 'Swinging the Maelstrom.' In Ballast to the White Sea and The Lighthouse Invites the Storm were never published. Only Under the Volcano, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend ls Laid (1969), and the unpublished La Mordida have no titular reference to the sea; these are the interior, Mexican, land novels. Nevertheless, the projected Lowryan opus, had it been completed, would have been entitled, in reference to life's journey, The Voyage That Never Ends. In contrasting the British Columbia shore-based eutopia with the interior Mexican dystopia, Hear Us O Lord and October Ferry are major sources for Lowry's B.C. experience; Dark as the Grave and Under the Volcano for Mexico. From 1940 to 1954 Lowry achieved a degree of existential insideness (Relph 1976) for the first time as a squatter on the beach at Dollarton, located on the northern side of Burrard Inlet, facing Vancouver. Here Lowry came to terms with a shore-based amphibian life, for he had earlier tried the sailor's life and found it wanting. Sailors, significantly, are only happy when they are going home (Ultramarine). Lawry's positive view of the sea at Dollarton, which he typically renamed Eridanus after both the constellation and the sunken ss Eridanus, of Liverpool, is inextricably linked with his feelings for the home-place that he and his wife developed after a decade of homeless wandering. Lawry's adjustment to rootedness in place was not easy. Acutely conscious of his lengthy voyage as a deck-hand a decade before, he wrote: 'Nothing is more irritating and sorrowful to a man who has followed the sea than the sound of the ocean pounding mercilessly and stupidly on a beach. But here in the inlet there was neither sea nor river, but something compounded of both, in eternal movement, and eternal flux and change, as mysterious and multiform in its notion and being,

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and in the mind as the mind flowed with it, as was that other Eridanus, the constellation in the heavens, the starry river in the sky' (Hear Us 236). Here we grasp one of Lowry's chief delights in the shore, the mystery of the external flux of waters. For Lowry, 'at the brief period of high tide before the ebb, it was like what I have learned the Chinese call the Tao . . . something so still, so changeless, and yet reaching everywhere, and in no danger of being exhausted' (Hear Us 236). It was not only the mystic qualities of 'the great tides and currents in their flux and flow' (Hear Us 235) that fascinated Lowry. The shore brought also a sense of life, of natural abundance. Lowry's protagonists are immersed in the detail of existential things; they do not see seabirds, but 'mallards and buffleheads and scaups, goldeneyes and cackling black coots with carved ivory bills' (Hear Us 12). They revel in the freedom of sea creatures, as when seeing, 'from the top of the steps between the wheelbarrow and Jaqueline's watering can, a sudden view of cavorting whales' (Fen-y 181). Even the more dubious denizens of the sea are, like Lowry, mellowed by being beached. On the beach one finds 'the grotesque macabre fruit of the sea, with its exhilarating iodine smell, nightmarish bulbs of kelp ... seawrack like demons, or the discarded casements of evil spirits that had been cleansed.' And the evidence of man's destructive wastefulness, 'boots, a clock, tom fishing nets, demolished wheelhouse, a smashed wheel' (Hear Us 24), is redeemed by the sea's irrepressible life-force. The post-storm feeling of 'death and destruction and barrenness' was only an appearance, for beneath the flotsam existed 'a stirring and stretching of life, a seething of spring' (p. 25). Similarly, when Lowryan characters learn to cope with the beach, rocks that were once perceived as obstacles become, to the insider, symbols of permanence and changelessness, 'presences themselves, standing round like Renan's immutable witnesses that have no death.' Understanding more, the beach dwellers discover that 'it is only at night that this great world of the windrow and tide-flats really wakes up' and they are delighted to discover the 'little shellfish called Chinese Hats that only walked at night' (Hear Us 237). There are, of course, more sombre tones, notably in winter 'when there seemed no life or colour left ... and the inlet looked like the Styx itself, black water, black mountains, low black clouds' (Hear Us 254). The tyro beach dwellers lived in constant fear, in winter, of their shack being swept away by storms, which provoked 'elemental despair,' when they would 'lose all hope for terror at the noise, the rending branches, the tumult of the sea, the sound of ruination' (p. 255).

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Surviving these storms was akin to surviving storms at sea. It is a literary cliche that the sea tests a man (this is rarely a woman's world) and allows him the fulfilment of a victory not over the elements but, more important, over his own fears. Thus, the Lowryan hero discovers 'the pride that one had survived, the sense of life, the fear of death' and becomes 'seized somehow with an exuberance so great that I wanted to dive swiftly into that brimming sea' (Hear Us 256). Of the six characteristics Blomberg (1982) finds common to coastal literature, Lowry's work strongly supports at least three, the sense of life, of mystery and spirituality, of energy and conflict. There is some feeling of time and timelessness, and of the sea's imperviousness to man's actions, but very little sense of space and distance, for Lowry had felt this more poignantly while actually at sea. What Lowry does provide, besides a sense of 'beauty never remaining two minutes the same' (Ferry 80), is a suggestion of the utility of the sea and the co-operative friendliness of those who live by and from it. For Lowry, fishermen and coast squatters, often beached sailors, are noble characters, typically with Celtic or Scandinavian names, for these were seafaring races dear to the heart of one brought up on the sea novels of Joseph Conrad, Nordahl Grieg, and Conrad Aiken. Seen through the eyes of these insiders, the sea becomes a giver, providing, besides seafood, two-by-fours and planks for building, materials for a pier, driftwood for burning, even the gift of a ladder among the rest of the 'gay salvage' (p. 86). The greatest sea gift, however, was the gift of grace, the building up in its protagonists of 'a complete faith in their environment, without that environment ever seeming too secure' (Ferry 79). And in the short story 'The Bravest Boat' (Hear Us), it is the sea that brings the lovers together. The sea challenges, bores, terrifies man, but never, for Lowry, brings ultimate harm, for as we have learned, the sea 'is on the side of life.' Water courses other than the sea are rarely mentioned in Lowry's seashore novels. By contrast, the Mexican novels centre on the city of Cuernavaca, with no fewer than four hundred swimming-pools 'filled with the water that ceaselessly pours down from the mountains' (Volcano 9). This swiftly running water is alien to Lowry, whose real concern is with a sea impossibly far away from this interior zone. In Volcano the sea appears only as a memory and a desire. Two of the four major characters are ex-seafarers with salt memories, and the chief character, the Consul, dreams of paradise as a little shack in British Columbia 'between the forest and the sea with a pier going down to the

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water over rough stones, you know, covered with barnacles and sea urchins and starfish' (Volcano 126). Otherwise, the sea appears only in metaphor, as 'sprays of gabbling' and a 'surge of music . . . breaking against the walls' (p. 17). The Consul remembers the moon's dry Sea of Tranquility (p. 128) and water mirages are discussed (p. 280). Otherwise, water in Cuernavaca seems a benediction withheld. It is the end of the rainy season, but although thunder-clouds appear, rain rarely falls. In the swimming-pools the water is restricted, dead; elsewhere it is confined within a travel folder under the heading 'Hydrography' (Volcano 297). The Consul stands beneath a shower, but no water emerges. A dried-up fountain, choked with leaves, is a recurrent image (pp. 116, 239). The Consul, damned and alcoholic, recollects a refrain from Marvell, 'Might a soul bathe there and be clean and slake its drought?' (Day 1973, 305). For the tormented Consul, the cleansing, revivifying fountain of literature cannot be experienced. In his Cuernavaca, water is not the important liquid, nor are images of 'rivers of blood.' The only liquid that appears with any frequency in Volcano is alcohol: whisky, gin, rum, anise, pulque, tequila, mescal. And far from the sea, in a seemingly arid environment, the alcoholic Consul, Lawry's alter ego, drinks himself to his doom.

Garden and house The garden, since Genesis and the Koran, has been a symbol of both earthly and future delight. Gardens have traditionally been places of privacy and retirement, where one may leave the troubles of the outer world and come to terms with the eternal cyclic round of growth. Gardens are symbols of regeneration and care. Cuernavaca is a city of gardens, but they are hidden behind high walls, the domains of others from the point of view of the outsider. The public gardens of Cuernavaca, as depicted in Volcano, are universally neglected (Volcano 116). The new botanical garden is full of 'small black ugly birds, yet too long, something like monstrous insects, something like crows ... shatterers of the twilight hour' (p. 19). The famed Borda Gardens are overrun, derelict, rotting. Amusement gardens are dominated by the Ferris wheel, for the Consul the wheel of life and death. Public gardens contain the notice 'Le gusta este jardfn, que es suyo? Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!' This the Consul, significantly, mistranslates as the Kafkaesque: 'You like this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy!' a forefiguring of Lowry's future expulsion from Eden.

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In Volcano, the only positive garden imagery is contained in the Consul's memories of Granada (p. 239). The Consul's own garden, around the rented house in Calle Humboldt, is as unkempt and overrun as Cuernavaca's public gardens, full of rank, hostile growth reminiscent of Browning's Childe Roland. His garden is full of 'tall exotic plants, livid and crepuscular . . . perishing on every hand from unnecessary thirst, staggering ... to maintain ... a collective desolate fecundity' (p. 86). The Consul's neglect of his garden symbolizes the dereliction of his mind. Even the agricultural landscape is not garden-like, as was, for example, that of Britain or the French bocage that Lowry knew. Instead, 'the fields were full of stones; there was a row of dead trees. An abandoned plough, silhouetted against the sky, raised its arms to heaven in mute supplication' (Volcano 15). In sharp contrast, Eridanus has few gardens, except around the neighbouring lighthouses where 'efforts at gardens had been made, and among the rocks ... roses [were] blooming in defiance of the spray' (Ferry 249). Eridanus needs no garden, for in its combination of sustaining forest and sea, it is itself a garden. For Lowry it is the Garden of Eden, for it is here, within this compact between man and nature, that the existential outsider finally achieves insideness. Inevitably, it is from this Eden that Lowry is expelled. With the spread of urban development and the threat of eviction, the Lowrys must leave. If Hear Us O Lord rejects travel and celebrates home, October Ferry celebrates home but grieves for its loss. It is the log of the search for another haven, somewhere 'where you can have a garden' (Ferry 200). The novel is filled with the imagery of expulsion, to which Lowryan protagonists react more violently than do their neighbours, 'the older fishermen who, long used to evil, grieved, shrugged their shoulders and went on living till disaster drove them out, because they knew that was what it was to exist' (p. 292). Everywhere the Llewelyns (Lowrys) see houses condemned, people 'penniless, shoeless, homeless' (p. 227), 'as if the whole world were beginning to fear eviction' (p. 229). Another Eridanus was not to be found. Suburbia and development creep up until the squatter's shack is only 'an oasis of unspoiled wilderness in the midst of an abomination of desolation' (Ferry 168). The Llewelyns go into exile once more, as did Lowry in 1954, his grief for the loss of his Canadian Eden being a probable factor in his death three years later (Day 1973). Eridanus was a cottage in a wilderness Eden. The house in the garden is archetypically a refuge, the expression of a human need for privacy and permanence. The hand-built house at Eridanus is permanent, despite the elements, its permanence seemingly guaranteed by 'the very

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immediacy of the eternities by which they were surrounded and nursed; antiquity of mountains, forest, and sea, conspired on every hand to reassure and protect them' (Ferry 79). It is private, cut off from civilization by the forest, and doubly private after Labour Day when the 'summer people' depart 'as if swept away by the great wash of the returning fishermen's craft ... reaching within the bay ... with the successive thunder of rollers' (Hear Us 223). The house at Eridanus was, moreover, almost sentient. At high tide, with the great logs 'banging underneath with a chewing breaking ruinous sound' the house cries 'Vous qui passez, ayez pitie.' This shack, to the Lowryan protagonists, was a 'shrine of ... integrity and independence' (Hear Us 247). It was the ideal home-place: 'Where else could you find the freedom, the privacy, the absolute privacy, and yet when you needed it, the friendliness, not too far, not too near, where else find all man's simple needs so simply satisfied? It was unique' (Ferry 197). The house rented in Cuemavaca had no such charm. The warm comforting message that home usually provides is inverted here. Corruption is implicit in the French chateau that turns out to be a brewery, with its 'dried-up fountain below some broken steps, its basin filled with twigs and leaves' (Volcano 116). It becomes explicit in the ruins of the palace once inhabited by the ill-fated Maximilian and Carlotta. Once the scene of gaiety and joy, the palace exhibits only 'broken pink pillars ... the pool, covered with green scum, its steps tom away and hanging by one rotting clamp .. . the shattered evil-smelling chapel, overgrown with weeds, the crumbling walls, splashed with urine, on which scorpions lurked - wrecked entablature, sad archivolt, slippery stones covered with excreta - this place, where love had once brooded, seemed part of a nightmare' (p. 20). Forests and paths

Unlike the garden and the house, the forest has no archetypically positive image in literature. Indeed, as we shall see in chapter 8, 'Childscape,' the forest is one of the primordial elements, a landscape of fear that provides garden and house with their raison d'etre. At best, forests are ambivalent, brooding, grim(m) places, as in Teutonic fairy tales full of unknown dangers, and yet the refuge of good forces, such as, for example, Badger in The Wind in the Willows, the elves of Tolkien, and owls generally. The forest that surrounds Cuemavaca in Volcano has no redeeming qualities. It is explicitly the selva oscura nel mezzo di nostra vita of which Dante speaks in Inferno. Through this forest Hugh (his half-

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brother) and Yvonne (his wife) trail the demented Consul through vegetation 'savage, harsh, and dense,' through tall trees and undergrowth, past huge cacti 'bending with the wind, in a slow multitudinous heaving, an inhuman crackling of scales and spines.' The undergrowth obstructs, 'the mobile trees were not sober' (Volcano 332), there are nightmare visions. And even though soft rain at last falls and 'a sweetly clean smell rose from the woods,' (p. 334 ), it is at this moment that Yvonne falls into the path of a runaway horse. This archetypically demonic image of the forest contrasts sharply with the eutopic coastal forest of British Columbia that we have already briefly glimpsed. Here, like the sea, the forest provides and nurtures; one can be in harmony with it. The squatters' shacks on its edge stand 'in defiance of eternity .. . with their weathered sidings as much part of the natural surroundings as a Shinto temple is of the Japanese landscape' (Hear Us 233 ). Below the swaying 'mastheads of the trees' are sources of wonder, fawns, kinglets, cougar, the stuff of poetry: '"See the frost on the fallen leaves, it's like a sumptuous brocade." "The chickadees are chiming like a windbell." "Look at that bit of moss, it's a miniature tropical forest of palm trees." "How do I know the cascara from the alder trees? Because the alders have eyes"' (p. 250). In short, the Eridanus forest has the same eternal, life-sustaining qualities that are typically associated with the sea, so that the Lowryan hero 'became susceptible to these moods and changes and currents of nature . . . its ceaseless rotting into humus of its falling leaves and buds . . . and burgeoning toward life' (p. 249). Forests are not generally pathless. Forest paths are Lowryan symbols for the human decisions that lead to travel or staying home, whether remaining in the realm of the known or departing for adventure, hoping perhaps for joy but knowing that dystopia may be likely. Lowry was well aware of the preternatural ambiguity of forest paths: 'for not only folklore but poetry abounds with symbolic stories about them: paths that divide and become two paths, paths that lead to a golden kingdom, paths that lead to death, or life, paths that not merely divide but become the twenty-one paths that lead back to Eden' (Hear Us 272). In his lyric novella 'The Forest Path to the Spring,' Lowry celebrates the path that connects his beach home to the life-sustaining mountain spring. The daily use of this path, through tall trees and 'snowberry and thimbleberry and shallon bushes' with glimpses of sea and mountains, provides an 'incommunicable experience' for the Lowryan hero (p. 273 ). Here, he comes face to face with nature, in the shape of a cougar, and facing this challenge, becomes at one with the forest. In the Mexican dystopia, however, paths take one not to life-

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sustaining water, but to life-destroying alcohol at the El Farolito (Little Lighthouse} cantina. In the last scenes of Volcano the three protagonists follow not a straight, clean, bright path towards a known goal, but narrow, dark paths that twist and tum and double back on themselves, with only a dubious goal in view. These are the labyrinthine paths of death, and it is on just such a path, her way blocked by a deadfall, that Yvonne falls from a dark slippery log to her death beneath the riderless horse. In the broader sense, paths represent travel. Again, they are ambiguous, for travel both leads us away from and returns us to home. Lowry, a homeless world traveller before and after his fourteen years in Dollarton, had the urge to travel even from the edenic Eridanus. Yet the counter-urge to return is always there. The Lowryan protagonist quickly regrets leaving Eridanus and is soon afflicted with homesickness for forest, beach, and sea. In the following passage a Lowryan alter ego, the significantly named Sigbj0m Wilderness (non-civilized Scandinavian seafarer} laments the mass of small humiliations that beset the traveller. Why did people travel? God knows Sigbj0m hated it all over again. Travel to him was an extension of every anxiety, which man tried to get rid of by having a quiet home. A continual fever, an endless telephone alann, perpetual heart attack ... a prodigious prolonged jumping conniption. Is my passport in order? How shall I prevent being robbed? How can I get my papers out of my pocket in this position? Without dropping half my money? But it's too dark to see ... How much do I have to tip some hateful pimply bastard for confusing and embarrassing and distressing me? .. . It is going into hell, inviting it, going from the society of people you are not quite sure like you, among people who you know for certain despise you ... travel is a neurosis. (Grave 64)

And with the expulsion from his Eridanus-Eden, Lowry is thrust again into this neurotic world of travelling, a world I shall explore more fully in chapter 7, 'Escape.'

Mountains and caverns In Lowry's land-based novels, it is mountains and their polar opposite, deep ravines and caverns, that stand out as symbolic landscape elements. Delphic oracles and Romantic chasms notwithstanding, in literature the symbolic value of caverns has often been a negative one; they are the abode of demons, from Dante's Malebolge through

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Tolkien's Balrog to contemporary 'Dungeons and Dragons.' In terms of the human journey towards redemption, the deep cavern symbolizes the abyss. Gods, in contrast, inhabit mountain tops. The literary theme of salvation attained by ascent of the magic mountain is well known. Mountains, in short, are sacred, pure, positive, salvation-bringing, convex, a pointer to heaven. To Lowry, at least, the cavern is profane, foul, negative, concave, the mouth of hell. These are powerful symbols, product both of Lowry's literary education and his years of travel. Besides the sea, and especially storms at sea, Lowry was enamoured of mountains, especially volcanoes. His travels took him to Popocatepetl, Ixtaccihuatl, Vesuvius, Etna, and Stromboli, where he spent a week marvelling at eruptions and burnt-out villages. His protagonists in Eridanus are encamped before the coast mountains, although these form only a dramatic sheltering background, changeless like sea and forest, and like them, appropriated: 'Beyond, going toward the spring, through the trees, range beyond range, crowded the mountains, snowpeaked for most of the year. At dusk they were violet, and frequently they looked on fire, the white fire of mist. Sometimes .. . this mist looked like a huge family wash, the property of Titans, hanging out to dry between the folds of their lower hills' (Hear Us 216). Moreover, although one could see the chimneys of Vancouver from some parts of Dollarton, this unpleasant view of civilization was redeemed by occasional glimpses of Mount Hood or Mount Baker, 'the white American volcano rising above' (Feny 218). Yet the American volcanoes are part of a cordillera that connects Dollarton with Cuernavaca. And in Cuernavaca we are dealing less with the salvation of mountains than with the damnation of caverns. In Volcano mountain imagery abounds. The Consul was raised in Kashmir, his wife in Hawaii. Their positive memories are of Karakoram, Mauna Loa, and the Hindu Kush. The Himalayas, especially, provide 'light, light, light' and a 'certainty of brightness' (Volcano 129). But 'the pure cone of old Popo' and 'the jagged peaks of Ixtaccihuatl' are separated from Cuernavaca not merely by plains and forests and 'a barrier of murk,' but by pitfalls in the shape of Cuernavaca' s fifty-seven cantinas and, above all, by the barranca. It is the barranca, the deep, omnipresent ravine, and the myriad cantina-caverns that dominate Lowry's Cuernavaca landscape and compel the Consul's wanderings. The deep fetid crevasse snakes through the town, almost sentient, waiting for the Consul, and with the beckoning cantinas, is an outward and visible sign of the alcoholic Consul's tormented inner landscape. The barranca is everywhere, in the

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centre of town, at the foot of the Consul's garden, yawning below the cantina El Farolito. Bridges across the barranca do not defuse its brooding malevolence: 'It was too dark to see bottom, but: here was finality indeed ... [Cuemavaca] was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was awaiting for you round the comer. Donnitory for vultures and city Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country' (Volcano 21). The cantinas are man-made environments of evil. Some, like La Sepultura, are ominously named, but the worst, the Consul's 'paradise of despair' is a positive Lowryan image inverted. The lighthouse, El Farolito, is not a beacon to guide the weary to safe haven but a symbolic entrance to the underworld. Lying directly at the foot of Popocatepetl, it is not aspiringly vertical, like a lighthouse, but consists of a labyrinth of 'little rooms, each smaller and darker than the last, opening one into the other, the last and darkest of all being no larger than a cell' in which a befouled dwarf squats on the lavatory. To enter El Farolito is to enter the mouth of hell, to penetrate under the volcano. Lawry's inscape

As Volcano's protagonist dies, on the evening of the Day of the Dead, all the elements of Lowry's landscape symbolism are brought together. Crawling through dark forest paths, along which stumble his halfbrother and doomed wife, the Consul reaches the ironic beacon of hope, El Farolito. He penetrates beneath the volcano, to be tormented and shot by Cuemavaca's Jefe de Jardineros, the Head Gardener. As he dies, he dreams of Kashmir 'lying in the meadows near running water among violets and trefoil, the Himalayas beyond' (Volcano 374). All the mountain peaks he has known pass through his mind (like the peaks of his life), and finally the greatest peak experience of all presents itself. He climbs Popocatepetl, the magic mountain whose ascent brings redemption and peace. But the mountain crumbles and 'suddenly there was nothing there: no peaks, no life, no climb' (p. 375). Bullets catapult the Consul into the forested barranca. And in one of the most telling last lines of any modem novel, the Consul's damnation is confirmed: 'someone threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.' Here is synthesis; for the separate consideration of forests and paths, seashore and interior, mountains and caverns, garden and house, can be justified only for the purpose of analysis. We are dealing with two regional landscapes, the Mexican city region (Cuemavaca) and the

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British Columbian wilderness (Dollarton). For the geographer, these Lowryan landscapes may have value at several levels. One could appreciate Lowry's descriptive word-painting, analyse the correspondences between the actual landscapes and their fictionalized versions, and the like (Pocock 1981b). But Lowry's work enables us to go beyond the actual landscapes to encounter, first, the landscape of symbol and, subsequently, the landscape of the mind. In Lowry's British Columbia, forests are benign, the house is in harmony with its environment, mountains protect, caverns are absent, the sea provides, all is a garden. In Mexico the sea is absent, water scarce but liquor plentiful, houses crumble, gardens rot, forests are dark and act sentiently against the traveller, paths are labyrinthine, mountains suggest a salvation that cannot be grasped, and, below all, omnipresent caverns yawn. The Lowryan landscape is a forest of symbols, but the meaning of any one symbol is ambivalent. This ambivalence relates to the significance of the two landscapes for Lowry. The essence of the contrasting landscapes of British Columbia and Mexico is the tension between home and away, insideness and outsideness, Paradiso and Inferno. Life at Eridanus is not far short of what has now become a wilderness cliche. Here the author, a homeless outsider elsewhere, achieves some level ,of insideness, albeit in an outcast, squatters' community from which he is at last expelled. Further, in this setting of mountain, forest, and sea he is able to unlearn his sailor ways, come to understand and love the seashore wilderness and, by loving, appropriate it. Here he makes contact with the real substance of things: 'here are, at last, no empty abstractions, no frenzied need to symbolize, no whirling cerebral chaos. Here is only a quiet, green world on the edge of the life-bringing sea, where the Lowryan man may protect his fragile self, love his wife, and deal reverently and perhaps a little humorously with the things that surround him' (Day 1973, 418). But in the landscapes of Under the Volcano this Eden is mocked. Here the mountain is unattainable, the fountain dry and choked, the land sterile, the garden rank. In Volcano the edenic images are inverted and corrupted. Here is Paradise Lost, and in Lowry there is no Paradise Regained. At this level, beyond symbol, we are dealing not with Mexico or British Columbia, but with Lowry's mental landscape, Gerard Manley Hopkins's (1948) inscape where 'the mind has mountains.' Here, expressed on paper as Eridanus and Cuernavaca, home confronts abroad, safety confronts adventure, a landscape that can be appropriated contrasts with a landscape sans merci. Ultimately, Lowry's life and work are one. His protagonists acted out

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his own travels, beliefs, and feelings. Almost nowhere else do we find such congruence between an author and his art. Like so many travellers, Lowry used his journeys to map the terra incognita of his own mind. His tormented and deeply divided mind, forever oscillating between elation and despair, redemption and salvation, vested its own distinctive qualities in the landscapes he encountered. These landscapes thus became not merely a backdrop for his life but part of his personality, expressed as the personalities of his characters. In Lawry's mind, as in the Consul's, Eridanus and Cuemavaca are constantly in tension, or at war, and Cuemavaca is ultimately triumphant. The landscapes of Lawry's novels, then, are not merely real or even imagined landscapes, products of his mind; they have, in a sense, become his mind. Implications

The complex relationship between landscape and the human mind varies from utilitarian data-gathering, at one extreme, to identification at the other. Meinig's (1979) ten 'views' oflandscape are not exhaustive, for he fails to consider the notion discussed in this chapter, that mind and landscape interpenetrate and become almost interchangeable, that landscape imprints on mind, that landscape, as it were, becomes self. Pocock (1981a) comes close to this position in his assertion that 'place may be considered as people and people as place.' This inseparability of subject and object, this blurring of landscape and mind, this identification of land with personality, may appear to be on the edge of schizophrenia. Schizophrenics typically have trouble separating themselves from their environments. But, in a world where participation is increasingly reduced to spectatorhood (Debord 1977), and where the geography of apocalypse is already being written (Deshusses 1982), 'alternative' psychiatry, notably the work of Szasz, Laing, Reich, and Castaneda, suggests that a 'participatory' role in the man-nature relationship may be more sane than the current 'mastery' world-view, which although having deep roots, has permeated Western civilization chiefly since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century (Berman 1984). Here psychiatry, biography, ecology, and geography meet in Heidegger's notion of environmental humility (Relph 1981). The transition to this participatory mode of man-nature experience, says Berman, may be dangerous for the individual, and was indeed destructive in Lowry' s case. Yet, it may prove to be an essential process in the breaking down of the alienation from both nature and our own being that is characteristic of the human condition in modem Western society.

6

Homescape

The idea of home as a base, a source of identity ... has grown powerfully in the last century or so. This sense of home is the goal of all the voyages of self-discovery which have become the characteristic shape of modem literature. Andrew Gurr

In the last decade a number of social scientists from disciplines such as urban design, psychology, and geography have focused attention upon the concept of home. Home has many meanings, at many scales (Hayward 1975). It is the human's territorial core, providing stimulation, security, and identity (Porteous 1976). It is a symbol of the self (Cooper 1974). From an experiential point of view, geographical space can be fundamentally divided into home and non-home (Tuan 1974). Home is that place where we are most secure, where we can drop personas and become ourselves. Home is not wholly positive, however. It can, in its security, its routine, its well-knownness, become a prison. Hence, geographers have pointed out that a fundamental dialectic in human life is home:journey, what traditional geographers referred to as man moving and man at rest (Tuan 1974; Porteous 1976). This is a false dialectic. The true antinomy, I believe, is between home and 'away' (or 'abroad,' in its archaic sense). For the home:journey polarity does not take into account the possibility that there may be no return home, that exile may occur. Journey is the movement that links home and away; the latter may be temporary or permanent. This chapter, and the one that follows, together explore the linked concepts of home: journey: away largely through an analysis of the novels and travel journals of Graham Greene, although some comparison with Malcolm Lowry and other writers is included. This chapter begins with a general exploration of Greeneland as context for what follows.

Greeneland The concept of Greeneland emerged about the time of the Second World

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War, and has been used repeatedly by critics since the 1950s to describe the archetypal landscape of the mind of the Greeneian oeuvre. It is a mental landscape of boredom, failure, distrust, betrayal, and despair, reflected in a physical landscape of run-down city streets, squalid buildings, livid advertising signs, lonely bed-sitting rooms, tom curtains, dirty collars, stained beds covered with crumbs. In its exotic form it involves the soft decay of tropical buildings, the omnipresent vulture and other animal forms of memento mori, sick, diseased, hopeless, native inhabitants, impossible social and political conditions, Europeans sweating in unhappy exile far from home. The inhabitants of Greeneland are often of dubious character and of uncertain loyalties. Tormented by religious doubt or social and political dilemmas, they frequently end their careers in premature death, the only real solution to their problems. The operative descriptor for Greeneland is 'seedy.' The term is redolent of the 1930s. Indeed, it appears most prominently in Journey without Maps (1976). Greene is describing Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, a very down-at-heel city in 1935: 'There seemed to be a seediness about the place you couldn't get to the same extent elsewhere, and seediness has a very deep appeal: even the seediness of civilization, of the sky-signs in Leicester Square, the "tarts" in Bond Street, the smell of cooking greens off Tottenham Court Road, the motor salesman in Great Portland Street' (p. 19). Since the Second World War few critics of Greene's work have resisted the temptation to use this quotation (Mesnet 1954, 9; Atkins 1966, 60; Kurismootil 1982, 16). Greene has loudly protested this discovery of metaphoric Greeneland (1981, 60): Some critics have referred to a strange violent 'seedy' region of the mind (why did I ever popularize that last adjective?) which they call Greeneland, and I have sometimes wondered whether they go round the world blinkered. 'This is lndo-China,' I want to exclaim, 'this is Mexico, this is Sierra Leone, carefully and accurately described. I have been a newspaper correspondent as well as a novelist. I assure you that the dead child lay in the ditch in just that attitude. In the canal at Phat Diem the bodies stuck out of the water ... ' But I know that argument is useless. They won't believe the world they haven't noticed is like that.

This protest is not wholly valid. Indeed, much of the world is like that. If we care to look for them, we can readily find signs of seediness: car ashtrays emptied in wet parking lots; urine marks on walls and doors;

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stained bedcovers dirty with the crumbs of sausage rolls (Brighton Rock); whisky-priests with children, even wives (The Power and the Glory); Wlfortunates with'harelips (A GunforSale); rats in the bathtub and vultures on metal roofs (the Mexican and West African novels and travel books); dead dogs; stinking bodies on forgotten battlefields; lepers in the Congo (A Bumt-out Case), Louisiana, or Easter Island; jiggers under the toe; the humiliation of bowel operations. One could go on. This, Greene says, is what life is like. He is depicting, faithfully, his lived experience. Greeneland, then, is an almost perpetual view of the underside of life. Stones are not only turned, but the crawling things that lie beneath are described in microscopic detail and with relish. Although the earliest, largely suppressed, novels were in the Romantic tradition, Greene quickly moved on to realism. Yet, his realism ignores the kindly act, the fresh wind, the bowl of flowers, in favour of an instance of betrayal, a chamber-pot, a flushing toilet. Greene's eyes are always open for the ageing prostitute; the cheap brothel; the dark, violent, criminal side of life. His moral melodramas, therefore, considerably simplify reality (Hynes 1973) and his realism has been termed 'sordidism' (Atkins 1966, 37). This intensely negative view of civilization was a common literary view after the First World War. The word most commonly used, then and now, to describe the dull inanition of a technologized society was 'wasteland,' a scene of compromised values, lost hopes, and pointless pastimes (the latter a most significant word). T. S. Eliot was Wasteland's Jeremiah (Eliot 1974), and Eliot, like Greene, Waugh, and many others, sought a solution in religion. The wasteland deluxe has continued, through Huxley's Brave New World, into the soulless utopia of Skinner's Walden Two and beyond. Wasteland utopias may provide all material comforts, but deny their inhabitants important freedoms, the right to be unhappy and the right to rebel (Porteous 1977). It is curious that Greene rarely depicts a landscape of beauty or even neutrality. Beauty appears to have been left behind with childhood. As a child Greene had felt a sense of harmonious, fertile, nature, 'a small green countryside, where the fruit trees grew and the rabbits munched' (Lawless Roads, 13). But even this idyll was tempered by the omnipresent school, 'with ink-stained nibbled desks insufficiently warmed by one cast-iron stove, a changing-room smelling of sweat and stale clothes, stone stairs, worn by generations of feet, leading to a dormitory divided by pitch-pine partitions that gave inadequate privacy- no moment of the night was free from noise, a cough, a snore, a fart' (Life 74).

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Later, Greene develops a love of the Chiltern landscape, which has remained with him throughout life. Yet the beauty of this landscape is enhanced, for Greene, because of its proximity to the vulgar, tawdry, prosperous metropolis of London (Life 110). It is as if beauty can be appreciated only when it is threatened or matched by some closely proximate ugliness. But the ugliness of Greeneland is social and political as well as physical. For Greeneland is, more often than not, a country organized for and by powerful forces beyond the control or even ken of the individual citizen. It may be a quiet colony run by harsh, bewildered Britons, as in The Heart of the Matter. It may be a colony undergoing the bloody process of liberation (The Quiet American). A totalitarian dictatorship may be in power, with an omnipresent paramilitary police force (The Power and the Glory) or the even more menacing tontons macoutes (The Comedians). Or it may be merely the hopeless Circumlocution Office of the English novels, a place where ordinary mortals are ground under by the slow, relentless turning of bureaucratic millstones. Everywhere there are spies, confidential agents, racketeers, pimps, and guns for sale. Joy, happiness, liberty, freedom, and self-expression are not, therefore, qualities we can expect to find in Greeneland. Indeed, we may find active violence, as in the spy melodramas and in the recurrent theme of the hunters and the hunted. Or there may be only passive violence, often apparently self-inflicted, where characters live hopeless, futile, meaningless, bitter, frustrated, dreary lives in sordid, squalorous surroundings, only rousing themselves from torpor to commit unimaginable moral crimes of hatred, disloyalty, and betrayal. There is not a total sense of unrelieved and inevitable doom, as in Lawry's Under the Volcano, but there is a sense that doom is a distinct possibility. Characters are on the run, self-confessed failures, prone to despair, often in both physical and mental pain, sometimes physically deformed. There is an atmosphere of conflict. This may be a seemingly cosmic physical conflict, as in war or insurrection, or a more passive conflict, as between the individual and bureaucracy. Catholics, Protestants, and pagans evince conflicting values, there are deep internal conflicts of the mind, sin and evil are mulled over relentlessly. The whisky-priest in The Power and the Glory is such a character of conflict. His way of life conflicts with his creed. His perpetuation of the sacraments in an atheist state conflicts with the political regime, with the people's fears, with his need to survive. Good sense conflicts with compassion as he returns, with his Judas, over the border from safety to certain death. Private and

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public misery are the stuff of life. One lives on the dangerous edge of things; 'it's a battlefield.' It's a Battlefield uses the social unrest of the 1930s as background. Orient Express is set against the Depression. Capitalist monopolies dominate England Made Me, racecourse murders and gangland life are the scenes of Brighton Rock, war scares are in the background of A Gun for Sale, religious persecution in The Power and the Glory, political kidnappings in The Honorary Consul. Above all, from Rumour at Nightfall through The End of the Affair and The Quiet American, to The Human Factor, Greene expresses both war and the cold world of spies and 'security' as ordinary, everyday, lived experience. War, cold or hot, is a normal twentieth-century activity. Civilian murderer and bomber pilot loosing Spender's 'seeds of killing ... on cells of sleep' are both oridnary men-in-the-street. In The Ministry of Fear, Greeneland finds expression on the ground in a bombing raid heard from a urinal. In the air, the bomber pilot is simply going through his normal eight-hour day. It is here that dream and reality, the mundane and the fantastic, meet and fuse in the inscape known as Greeneland. In the same novel the world appears to be controlled by them. 'They,' of course, are Heidegger's (1977) das Man. Whether actual manipulators or merely accepted social pressures, das Man ensures that we act inauthentically, bowing to the will of others. Moreover, although we may not wish to remain in such a situation, there are, ultimately, no 'ways of escape.' Pinkie cannot escape Brighton, Scobie cannot leave the 'Coast,' the whisky-priest is called back to the Godless State. For one reason or another they are doomed to endure, or die, in a shabby, lawless world suffused by existential angst. Some characters, such as the inevitable prostitute with a ravaged face, are denied hope as a condition of their being. For others, hope is usually ambiguous. There is rarely a completely happy ending. Even in The Confidential Agent, where the protagonist escapes from his hunters with the woman he loves, happiness is only conditional. Whence emerged this ultra-seedy view of life? Greene himself points towards home as a key to his world-view. Childhood home

As I noted in chapter 1, Greene believes that the environment of one's childhood is all-important in the shaping of one's attitudes to life. Deterministically, the child is father of the man (A Sense of Reality 1968). Parents, schools, books are formative influences. Architecture is

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important. In Greene's childhood his negative urban viewpoint was already apparent: 'From the croquet lawn, from the raspbeny canes, from the greenhouse and the tennis lawn you could always see dominatingly - the great spare Victorian buildings of garish brick: they looked down like skyscrapers on a small green countryside' (Lawless Roads 13). This point is made repeatedly in the novels. Greene's characters are, as it were, creatures of their environment, made by it, subordinate to it, illustrative of it. We are told, in Brighton Rock (p. 37), that 'man is made by the places in which he lives.' This form of environmental determinism explains why so many of Greene's characters cannot escape from their intolerable situations. Thoroughly dominated by their environment in both space and time, they are unable to distance themselves and take a more objective view (Mesnet 1954, 36). They are, like starfish stranded in a drying pool a half-inch from low-tide mark, utterly unable to assess their environmental context. As is true of those in Kafkaland, characters in Greeneland have no control over events or environment. But environment does not merely control character. It also permits its fuller realization. Home environments, especially domestic interiors, are metaphoric expressions of character. Recent geographical investigations of 'home' have explored this concept (Cooper 1974; Porteous 1976). Kahlil Gibran (1976, 31) reminds us that 'your house is your larger body.' Thus, the environment is used as a setting to display a character's individuality and personality. Lear's rage, for example, has a wild storm for background. The policeman's widow in It's a Battlefield (1934, 142) is ineffectual: 'Milly noticed everywhere the signs of a fussing and incompetent woman, a woman who drives dust from one room to settle in another, who buys Danish eggs for economy and leaves the gas burning.' In contrast, the Private Secretary's environment is distinguished by 'a silver casket, a volume of Voltaire exquisitely bound, a self-portrait by an advanced and fashionable Czechoslovakian' (p. 4 ). Mr Tench, the hopeless, exiled dentist in the sweating Mexican port, is readily established by his domestic interiors: 'a dining room where two rocking-chairs stood on either side of a bare table: an oil lamp, some copies of old American papers, a cupboard ... The dentist's operating room ... a drill which worked with a pedal, a dentist's chair gaudy in bright red plush, a glass cupboard in which instruments were dustily jumbled. A forceps stood in a cup, a broken spirit lamp was pushed into a comer, and gags of cotton-wool lay on all the shelves' (The Power and the Glory 12). Krogh, the powerful capitalist in England Made Me

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(1970), expresses himself in 'five floors of steel and glass, the fountain splashing beneath the concealed lights .. . his own initials .. . E. K. - the same initials endlessly repeated formed the design of the deep carpet E.K. in the waiting rooms; E.K. in the boardroom; E.K. in the restaurants; the building was studded with his intitials' (p. 37). Yet even Krogh, safely enwombed in a cube of glass and steel, is troubled by das Man, for the modernistic sculpture he has commissioned for the courtyard fountain is unintelligible to him; 'he had pandered to a fashion he did not understand' (p. 34). There is a cyclic element at work here. Greene's characters are conditioned by their childhood environments. They then go on to express their personalities in environments they themselves create. And all these environments are aspects of the wasteland. An investigation of Greene's childhood home might thus be worthwhile. For most of us, home has meaning at several scales. In Greene's case, we move from a particular house and garden, through the small town of Berkhamsted, to Greater London, which Greene, along with many of his contemporaries, knew as Metroland. England is the next scalar level, but England does not seem to have meant a great deal to Greene. England, for Greene, is Metroland. Like many Londoners, he ventured very little to north or west, and except for a few months as a tutor in Derbyshire and journalist in Nottingham, his experience of nonMetroland Britain is fleeting. The Metroland attitude is clear: 'no one goes to Liverpool for pleasure' (Journey 21). In the beginning home was a middle-class boarding-school environment in the Chiltern Hills on the northern edge of Metroland. Specifically, home was Berkhamsted School, where his father was headmaster. Built of Tudor and modem red brick, and looking like Keble College, the school was 'an immense building with small windows,' its towers, 'like skyscrapers,' dwarfing the gardens below (Roads 13). School, for Greene, meant loneliness, lack of privacy, fear, hate, and lawlessness. On the other side of the green baize door between school proper and the headmaster's residence lay home. The maternal atmosphere of home, however, could always be reduced to 'schoolness' by the appearance of Greene's father in uniform, gowned and mortar-boarded. Greene lived on a border between two worlds. He grew up to relish the excitement of frontiers and the thrill of setting foot in new lands. Like so many of his bourgeois contemporaries, he also grew up to dislike uniforms, conformity, officialdom, order, decency, manliness, loyalty, and all the other Establishment virtues so carefully inculcated by English public schools of the period before the First World War.

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Greene describes his home, the school, and the little town of Berkhamsted in terms of his 'personal map.' On this map the far-off common loomed like the 'spaces of a map empty as Africa, ' a place where one could meet Jack-of-the-Green, the mumming remnant of old English rustic customs, which curiously foreshadowed Greene's experience of dancing devils in Liberia (Life 14). Berkhamsted's wide, two-mile High Street, as in most English towns, was sharply divided socially. Greene's was the posh end, with public school, Norman church, and half-timbered buildings. At the far end was the Crooked Billet, an old inn of sinister character; this part of the town had 'an atmosphere of standing outside the pale: a region of danger where nightmare might easily become reality' (Life 25). Already the young child was learning the most important English lesson, that of the moral, social, and physical divide between 'we' and 'they' that underlies the persistent class system. Scene of many a drowning, the Grand Junction Canal was a more immediate danger, but even here the peril was enhanced by the 'menace of insulting words from strange brutal canal workers with blackened faces like miners, with their gypsy wives and ragged children' (Life 16). Seventeen Greenes lived in Berkhamsted, and 'even the geography of the little town was influenced by these two big families of Greenes' (p. 14), one of which ran the public school, the other mysteriously rich through foreign enterprise. This dosed, tight, genteel atmosphere soon paled for the young Greene. Yet, he is convinced that this environment shaped his whole future: 'everything one was to become must have been there, for better or worse. One's future might have been prophesied from the shape of the houses as from the lines of the hand: one's evasions and deceits took their form from those other sly faces and from the hiding places in the garden, on the Common, in the hedgerows. Here in Berkhamsted was the first mold of which the shape was to be endlessly reproduced' (Life 15). Indeed, the sharp divides between school and home, between middle-class and lower-class Berkhamsted, between life on land and life on the canal, were frontiers that endlessly reproduced themselves in both novels and life. In the fiction there is a persistent interest in crossing borders, in the excitement of being an outsider on the 'other side.' Greene returned to Berkhamsted in his mid-twenties. Again he asserts that 'people are made by places' (Roads 16). If so, Berkhamsted made Greene wish to remake himself, to cast off its dear Establishment certainties and seek the darker side of life he had glimpsed at the 'wrong end' of the town: 'I called this "home" .. but it had no real hold. Smoke

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waved behind the Tudor Cafe and showed the 8:52 was in. You couldn't live in a place like this - it was somewhere to which you returned for sleep and rissoles by the 6:50 or the 7:25; people had lived here once and died with their feet crossed to show they had returned from a crusade, but now .. .' (Roads 16). Now Berkhamsted had become part of Greeneland, shallow, shabby, subordinary, immensely sad in its drab gentility. There is typical Greeneland detail: 'In a shabby little shop there were second-hand copies of London Life - articles about high heels and corsets and long hair' (Roads 17). The town was rapidly expanding as a commuter dormitory for London. 'Boards marking desirable building lots dripped on the short grass, and the skeletons of harrows lay unburied in the wet stubble,' while 'little boxes for litter put up by the National Trust had a dainty and doily effect, and in the inn the radio played continuously' (Roads 17, 18). Already in the 1930s London had overwhelmed and subverted Berkhamsted. Its fields now grew crops of small houses in which slept frayed London commuters living second-hand, inauthentic lives. Greene had learned that great lesson so poignantly taught in Orwell's Coming Up for Air (1939), that you can't go home again. This is true not only for one's childhood home, but for every subsequent home; there is always a feeling of uncertainty: 'One can go back to one's own home after a year's absence and immediately the door closes as if one has never been away. Or one can go back after a few hours and everything is so changed that one is a stranger' (Ministry of Fear 235). Home as Metro/and

For Greene as a young man home became Metroland, in which he wrote his first novels, was a sub-editor on The Times, and reviewed books and films for magazines from 1926 to 1935. London was the centre of power and culture. Short-visioned, like most Londoners, he felt London was England. Brighton and the Home Counties were mere seaside and rural extensions. The North, that great unexplored region, began in the northern suburbs of Oxbridge. Before dealing with Greene's interpretation of London, it is useful to indicate his feeling for Nottingham, for his only lengthy experience of British provincial life was a three-month sojourn as a reporter there, and this only because no Metroland newspaper would take an apprentice at that time. The city was friendly towards him, although he lived 'in a grim grey row with a grim grey name,' where his landlady 'was a thin complaining widow' who provided tinned salmon for high tea every

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night. Green fed this to his dog, which was invariably sick on the carpet (Life 163). Here, in Nottingham, are some of the first stirrings of that landscape of the mind that has become known as Greeneland: a landscape and people shabby, hopeless, decayed. Here, the unemployed lace girls 'would sleep with you in return for a high tea' (Life 160). Here, there was rain, fog, misery. The physical landscape is drab and blighted - dark cinemas, a blackened castle, parks in which 'when you touched the leaves, they left soot on the fingers' (Life 163). As a final touch there is even a 'boots' at the inn; to Greene, Nottingham was in a time-warp, its Metroland equivalent being Dickensian London. Above all, Nottingham 'was the focal point of failure, a place undisturbed by ambition, a place to be resigned to, a home from home' (Life 160), a place where carol singers, ignorantly genteel, reword the old carol 'Mark my footsteps well, my page' (Gun 60). A decade later Nottingham reappears as Nottwich in the thriller A GunforSale (1974), and Greene's first impressions are relived: There was no dawn that day in Nottwich. Fog lay over the city like a night sky with no stars .. . The first tram crawled out of its shed and took the steel track down towards the market. An old piece of newspaper blew up against the door of the Royal Theatre and flattened out. In the streets on the outskirts of Nottwich nearest the pits an old man plodded by with a pole tapping at the windows ... Along the line a signal lamp winked green in the dark day and the lit carriages drew slowly in past the cemetery, the glue factory, over the wide tidy cementlined river. (Gun 40)

Three years later Nottingham had dwindled to a snapshot: 'riding in trams in winter past the Gothic hotel, the super-cinema, the sooty newspaper office where one worked at night, passing the single professional prostitute trying to keep the circulation going under the blue and powdered skin' (Roads 15). Unlike Alan Sillitoe's homely Nottingham, the Southerner Greene's Nottwich was drab and dead, but it signified the squalor that was Greeneland. The hopeless ageing prostitute and that discarded paper blowing through empty streets were to be used again and again in the later novels as symbols of abandonment. 'Nottingham and London ... these cities represented the world to me' (Life 213). But London's Metroland seediness was preferable to the powerless, forgotten degradation of the midland city. Having glimpsed Greeneland in Nottwich, Greene is determined to recapture it in London, where all but one of his later English novels are set. It is a

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curious and partial vision, filled with ineffectual failures: the Hindu doctor, 'symbol of the shabby, the inefficient, and possibly the illegal; (Life, 187); an unfrocked clergyman (Gun); 'the soap-box orators ... in the bitter cold at Marble Arch . . . and all down the road the cad cars waited for the right easy girls, and the blackmailers kept an eye open on the grass where the deeds of darkness were quietly and unsatisfactorily accomplished' (The Confidential Agent 136). Above all gleam the cold, uncompromising, glittering office blocks. Such vignettes are common. They establish environments that are in sympathy with the dubious characters who populate Greeneland. Indeed, when Greene is trying to establish a method for describing a city in The Lawless Roads, we are prepared for a less-than-neutral description of London: How to describe a city? ... one can present only a simplified plan, talcing a house here, a park there as symbols of the whole. If I were trying to describe London to a foreigner, I might take Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, the Strand and Fleet Street, the grim wastes of Queen Victoria Street and Tottenham Court Road, villages like Chelsea and Clapham and Highgate struggling for individual existence, Great Portland Street because of the secondhand cars and the jaded genial men with old school ties, Paddington for the vicious hotels ... and how much would remain left out, the Bloomsbury square with its inexpensive vice and its homesick Indians and its sense of rainy nostalgia, the docks .. . ? (Roads 65)

Note how rapidly the well-imaged tourist mental map degenerates into the landscape of Greeneland, London's underside. It's a Battlefield (1934) is the first London novel, one of political riots, communist cells, politically motivated judicial executions; a mirror of the age. It is set in 'a wilderness of trams and second-hand clothes shops and public lavatories and evening institutes' where the young factory girls 'stood in queues for the cheapest seats at the cinemas and through the dust and dark and degradation they giggled and chattered like birds'

(p. 15).

Here the submerged classes engage in mindless labour in a match factory: 'The hundred and fifty girls in the machine room worked with the regularity of a blood beat; a hand to the left, a hand to the right, the pressure of a foot; a damp box flew out, turned in the air, and fell on the moving stair. It was impossible to hear ... because of the noise of the machines' (Battlefield 31-2). Greene ensures we understand that the spatial arrangement of the factory, where improved skill results in

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moving from Block A to B and then to c, and mistakes are punished by the reverse, is identical with 'the geography of the prison': 'That's Block A. The new prisoners all go there. If they behave themselves, they get shifted ... to Block B. Block c .. . that's the highest grade. Of course if there's any complaint against them, they get shifted down. It's just like a school' (Battlefield 18-19). Classified and graded from childhood, we must fit the slots engineered for us or perish. Imprisonment is an ever-present threat in Greeneland. As an undergraduate at the Oxford Appointments Board, Greene writes: 'I was hemmed in by a choice of jails in which to serve my life imprisonment' (Life 147). Other characters, like Rowe in The Ministry of Fear or the child in The Fallen Idol, look at life through railings. One of the many small cruelties that abound in Greeneland occurs in Minty's room in Stockholm, where he repeatedly pens a spider inside his toothglass: 'The hunting teasing instinct woke in Minty's brain .. . he took the glass and caught the spider, broke the thread when it began to climb, and deftly ... had it imprisoned again on the marble beside the wash basin. The spider had lost a second leg; it sat in a small puddle of cocoa. Patience, Minty thought .. . you may outlive me' (England Made Me 113). It was in London that Greene came to realize the loneliness and homelessness that affect so many of the inhabitants of dingy bed-sitters in Metroland. Rowe lives in two rooms in Mrs Purvis's house. Everything in those rooms belongs to her. 'The ugly armchair, the table covered with a thick woollen cloth, the fem in the window-all were Mrs. Purvis's, and the radio was hired. Only the packet of cigarettes on the mantelpiece belonged to Rowe, and the toothbrush and the shaving tackle in the bedroom (the soap was Mrs Purvis's)' (The Ministry of Fear 22). Rowe dreamed constantly of his quiet Cambridgeshire boyhood, only to be brought back repeatedly to the London Blitz. Homeless, he loses even Mrs Purvis's when he is caught in an air-raid. In a dream, he begs to go home (to Cambridgeshire), but a policeman ushers him into an air-raid shelter, saying, with authority: 'This is home. There isn't anywhere else at all.' On the way to the shelter is the Greenelandian coup de grace: Row sees 'a urinal where a rat bled to death in the slate trough' (Ministry 72). As I have shown elsewhere (Porteous 1976), 'homes' (in the sense of nursing homes and old folks' homes) are at best euphemistic and always essentially unhomelike. Amnesic, in a nursing home, Rowe describes Poole's room: 'The tap dripped into a fixed basin and a sponge-bag dangled from a bed-post. A used tin which had once held lobster paste now held old razor blades. The place was as comfortless as a transit

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camp' (Ministry 146). Later, hiding from his enemies and sure that 'a room, like a dog, takes on some of the character of its master' (Ministry 174), Rowe imagines what a 'guilty room' might look like; anonymous, 'a lonely room; everything had been bought at a standard store' (Ministry 209). Rowe longs for a 'world of homes and children' and we are relieved when, like Smike in Nicholas N ickleby, he finds a sort of home in another person. The same homeless Greeneland atmosphere permeates The End of the Affair (1975), an account of a middle-class love affair. Sarah's living-room reflects her character: 'a haphazard living-room where nothing matched, nothing was period or planned, where everything seemed to belong to that very week because nothing was ever allowed to remain as a token of past taste or past sentiment' (Affair 13). The protagonist Bendrix lived on the wrong side of the Common, in a bed-sitting room full of 'the relics of other people's furniture ... if one is lonely one prefers discomfort' (Affair 7). And as with Rowe and so many other characters, Greene uses a cartographic image to express their rootlessness. Bendrix, ostensibly at home, exclaims: 'I am lost in a strange region: I have no map' (Affair 50). These anxieties may find temporary relief on the gaudy front at Brighton, London's exotic shore and yet another facet of Greeneland. Here the crowds are grimly determined on enjoyment (Brighton Rock 6): 'They had stood all the way from Victoria in crowded carriages, they would have to wait in queues for lunch, at midnight half asleep they would rock back in trains an hour late to the cramped streets and the closed pubs and the weary walk home. With immense labour and immense patience they extricated from the long day the grain of pleasure.' For these day-trippers, Brighton is merely a seaside version of Metroland, where the sea is 'poison-green.' Brighton, of course, has its permanent residents, and, as 'man is made by the place in which he lives' (Brighton Rock 37), it is no surprise to find the gay, tawdry life of the pleasure city is appreciated by Ida: 'It's homely .. . it's what I like.' Ida is a remorseless optimist who believes in Life, which is 'sunlight on brass bedposts, ruby port, the leap of the heart when the outsider you have backed passes the post' (Brighton Rock 36). Yet, Brighton is also the scene of racecourse murders, gangland thugs, a corrupted child gangster who graduates from school dividers to the razor. Pinkie, product of the slums, is a terrifying creation. But these are the grosser Greeneland images. Equally as telling is the seafront, where everyone is out for 'a bit of fun.' Here Greene's usual deadpan cinematic technique comes into play. An image of threat, a

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mounted policeman, passes. Nearby, 'a man stood by the kerb selling objects on a tray; he had lost the whole of one side of the body: leg, an arm and shoulder; and the beautiful horse as it paced by turned its head aside delicately like a dowager. "Shoelaces," the man said hopelessly' (Brighton Rock 12). Even in this atmosphere of homely fun, the stock symbols of Greeneland cannot be ignored. The persistent use of these symbols to create the effect of seediness and hopelessness became so automatic that Atkins (1966, 71) dismisses Greene's Nineteen Stories as 'Metroland stories with the familiar Greeneland atmosphere.' For Greene, all is Greeneland, and nowhere is really home. Home in Malcolm Lowry Blue mountains with snow and blue cold rough water, A wild sky full of stars at rising And Venus and the gibbous moon at sunrise, Gulls following a motorboat against the wind, Trees with their branches rooted in air Sitting in the sun at noon with the furiously Smoking shadow of the shack chimney Eagles drive downwind in one, Terns blow backward, A new kind of tobacco at eleven, And my love returning on the four o'clock bus - My God, why have you given this to us? (from 'Happiness')

Lowry is often regarded, usually by those who have read only Under the Volcano, as a morbid writer of dark tendencies. He is also seen as the archetypal wanderer, yet another son of man with nowhere to lay his head. Although these features will be investigated in detail in the 'Escape' and 'Deathscape' chapters, here I will concentrate upon the other side of Lowry, his need for home. This desire to invest one's emotions in a home-place is far deeper in Lowry than in Greene. While both reject parental homes and England, only Lowry has expressed in graphic terms the joys of creating a home elsewhere. Life is a ceaseless journey home. Lowry's life, like that of his protagonists, was the ceaseless quest of the homeless for a home-place. London, Paris, Spain, Mexico, New York, Los Angeles, and least of all Liverpool, none of these could be home for Lowry. For a while home was

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personified in the novelist Conrad Aileen, mentor and father-figure to Lowry. But it was only with the unexpected trip to Vancouver that Lowry found, in Dollarton, a place he could call home. Throughout his letters and his travelogue-novels after 1940 Dollarton ('Eridanus') is called 'home.' In Europe in the late 1940s Lowry is hospitalized, alcoholic, insane. Back in the rickety beach shack in the squatters' settlement of Eridanus he recovers remarkably. The simple life of virtue envisioned by the Consul in Volcano was realized by Lowry in the 1940s. Across the water lay the ever-present evils of Enochvilleport (Vancouver), but in Eridanus the enclosing forest kept out civilization, one's neighbours were rustic fishermen, one took 'The Forest Path to the Spring' for water, one met cougars in the forest and spoke to them. Lowry was acutely sensible of the landscape of Eridanus, of its diurnal and seasonal rhythms. Summer was, of course, idyllic, but even 'the wintry landscape could be beautiful on these rare short days of sunlight and frost flowers, with crystal casing on the slender branches of birches and vineleaved maples, diamond drops on the tassels of spruces, and the bright frosted foliage of the evergreens' (Hear Us 253). And Eridanus was a settlement of the forest, and of the water; it was a natural, organic growth: 'everything in Eridanus ... seemed made out of everything else, without the necessity of making anyone else suffer for its possession: the roofs were of hand-split cedar shakes, the piles of pine, the boats of cedar and vine-leaved maple. Cedar and fir went up in chimneys and the smoke went back to heaven' (p. 248). There was no hatred, no one locked his door, no one spoke meanly. The neighbours' 'little cabins were shrines of their own integrity and independence.' Here above all, one could forget civilization and get back to the existential reality of the things themselves: rocks, water, trees, wind, stars. Yet, even here Lowry felt sometimes a vague unease, an urge to become a travelling man, even a sailor, once again. And this despite his experiential knowledge of the falsity of the sailor's life, where the engine's rhythm sings 'You'll soon be home,' - and yet, stepping on shore, he finds himself homeless. For the sailor, indeed, home life was 'reduced to a hip-bath with your wife on the kitchen mat every eighteen months, that was the sea' (Volcano 171). Three novel-travelogues depict the destructive point:counterpoint of home:journey, eutopia:dystopia, Paradiso:purgatorio, Eden:civilization, Eridanus:not-Eridanus that became that dialectic of Lowry's life during the period 1940-54. Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid (1972) recounts a return journey from Canada to Mexico, from

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eutopia to dystopia, with recurrent reflections on the purgatory that is travel (p. 94) and constant wishes to return to the paradise that is Eridanus. Sigbj0rn regularly reflects on home, 'the little new stillunfinished house below, the cedar tree, the foreshortened pier, their boat hoisted up and overturned on the platform for safety during their absence' (p. 81), a home that the Wildernesses themselves had built (p. 55). Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1969) is an elegantly structured epitome of the chief Lowryan themes. In the first stories the protagonist sadly leaves Dollarton and passes through the Panama. The three central tales, set in Italy, depict the reflections of the thinking tourist. In Pompeii the character Fairhaven (which is what he is seeking) looks without seeing, reflects upon 'the malice of travelers, even the sense of tragedy that must come over them sometimes at their lack of relation to their environment' (p. 177). The tourist is always inauthentic, the traveller often so: 'The traveler has worked long hours and exchanged good money for this. And what is this? This, pre-eminently, is where you don't belong ... and behind you, thousands of miles away, it is as if you could hear your own real life plunging to its doom' (p. 177). Real life, of course, is lived on Dollarton beach. The last two stories in the novel, and in particular the novella 'The Forest Path to the Spring,' are a paean of praise for home, for Eridanus. The complete structure, then, is the familiar one of withdrawal and return, and the withdrawal, as in Lunar Caustic (1968), is usually a journey into purgatory. October FeTTy to Gabriola (1970), a rather poor novel in a literary sense, is none the less one of the most valuable for its clear exposition of the recurrent Lowryan themes. The notions of home, journey, exile, and the quest for a new home are present throughout. This is a novel of Paradise Lost. The Llewelyns, 'like love and wisdom, had no home' (p. 5). Homes bum down around them. They are evicted, 'evicted out of exile' even (p. 4 ). They consider the homes of others, for many of whom 'home from home' is merely the men's side of that truly awful institution, the Canadian beer parlour (p. 43). Post-war newspapers ironically speak of 'Work to the Workers, Homes to the Homeless' (p. 46). Llewelyn is looking for a place that says 'not "I am yours," but "You are mine"' (p. 51). The Llewelyns are about to be evicted from their squatter's shack at Eridanus. They celebrate the winds and tides of their home. Although the shack seemed impermanent, 'antiquity of mountains, forest, and sea, conspired on every hand to reassure and protect them, as with the

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qualities of their own seeming permanence' (p. 79). Between the cabin and the Llewelyns was 'a complete symbiosis. They didn't live in it ... they wore it like a shell' (p. 80). But it was 'back to nature, yet not all the way. Rousseau with a battery radio' (p. 154). Suburbia creeps towards Eridanus. The Rosslyn Park Real Estate and Development Company is erecting the suburb of Dark Rosslyn with 'Scenic view lots. Approved for National Housing Loans. Cash or Terms' (Hear Us 204). Dollarton has become, for Lowry, Dolorton. His safe haven is threatened. The Dollarton squatters' shacks, embodiment of' an indefinable goodness, even greatness,' are to be swept away by a tide of progress. 'A suburban dementia launched itself at them' (Hear Us 206); it was as if 'they want to tum this whole place into a vast bloody great Black Country, a Lancashire .. . of the Pacific Northwest' (Feny 201). It was time to go. And in 1954, their Eridanus reduced to a tiny oasis of forest surrounded by suburbs and oil refineries, the Lowrys decided to leave. The Lowrys (the Wildernesses, the Llewelyns) were evicted not by legal order but by civilization and progress. At Vancouver Airport, Lowry cried, 'I'm afraid to leave. I'm afraid we'll never come back' (Day 1973, 423 ). Expelled from his Eden, the Wandering Jew nursed memories of Eridanus and especially of the rickety pier that he himself had built. 'To me ... childish though it may seem, there is the pier, which we built, which I cannot imagine myself living without,' he wrote from Sussex. That the pier had been swept away by storms was kept from Lowry for some time. On hearing of its fate he was 'broken-hearted,' and died the following year.

Beyond Greene/and Despite Greene's denials, 'Greeneland' does appear to be a valid conception of his landscape of the mind expressed in the novels and travel journals. Greeneland, however, must not be imagined as a landscape peculiar to Greene. It was an mindscape shared by many writers of the 1920s and 1930s, from the mystically religious T. S. Eliot to the alcoholic Malcolm Lowry. To press this universal aspect of Greeneland, I will make a brief comparison with the world of Lowry. This author, too, feels marred by childhood experience. His escape is not to religion but to alcohol. Physical escape from England is effected by a life of wandering. Lowry has a recurrent feeling of failure, or fear of failure. Both authors were conditioned by Conrad and Baudelaire; both were friends of the adventurer novelist, the Norwegian Nordahl Grieg.

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Both travel obsessively, yet record the boredom of travelling. Both yearn for a settled home, but fail to find complete satisfaction. Both reflect, in their novels, lives of desperation, despair, and doom. Their protagonists reflect on life but fail to resolve its contraditions, except in death. They seem controlled by environments and external events. And discreetly in the background, das Man is lurking. In the 1990s Graham Greene may be coming to the end of a more than sixty-year career as a writer. It would be reasonable to expect that Greeneland, that early-twentieth-century landscape of the mind, might die with him. But this would be to assume that Greeneland is merely the creation of a single mind or a single era, an imaginary landscape fundamentally unconnected with reality. This is patently not the case. Greene, in his arguments against Greeneland, is correct in his claim to have faithfully recorded what he saw. He saw the underside of modem life, a seedy world inhabited by the homeless and unhappy, where even success means failure. This is a world vision that had its roots in the late nineteenth century and still flourishes today. Greeneland is alive and well in the novels of numerous contemporary writers. Consider V. S. Naipaul. This Trinidadian of Indian origin describes a world of general malaise that envelops England and the home island alike. Take a single novel, The Mimic Men (1%7), which contrasts life in London and Isabella (Trinidad). In London the Trinidadian student is a forgotten man, an exile, the transient inhabitant of rundown hotels, 'idling on a meagre income in a suburban terrace' (p. 9). Aware of his failures, he mixes with hopeless Maltese immigrants who live in basement rooms of unparalleled sordidness: 'bills and calendars and empty cigarette packets; clothes on the bed and the lino and the baby's crib; old newspapers; a sewingmachine dusty with shredded cloth' with views of 'the small back garden, usually black .. . the bare plane tree, the high brick wall' (p. 4). His view of London is the backside view of the traveller by train: 'the backs of sooty houses, tumbledown sheds, Victorian working-class tenements whose gardens, long abandoned, had . . . been turned into Caribbean backyards' (p. 9). The English lower-middle classes he meets are imprisoned in meaningless jobs. There is an atmosphere of sexual prurience, a recourse to jaded prostitutes, a series of unsatisfying, furtive affairs in dingy rooms. An urge to escape is expressed in exotic travel or long car or train journeys, movement for the sake of movement. Returning to his Caribbean home island of Isabella, the protagonist rapidly becomes a successful real-estate developer. But success has its problems. Life again becomes boring and meaningless; there is a deep,

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unassuaged longing for the certainties of childhood. Domestic interiors, rich and poor, are assessed for the facts they reveal about their owners. Dreams of utopia, the aristocratic rural life of a cocoa planter, are dashed by the garish vulgarity of a derivative technological society. An alien in London, the protagonist finds that he has become an outsider in his own country. Homeless and rootless, he speaks of his 'geographical sense, that feeling of having been flung off the world' (p. 69). There are no certainties in security: 'a man, passionate for security, works and saves for a lifetime and is lucky at the end to have ten thousand pounds. Another, placid with the knowledge of his own imminent extinction, makes half a million dollars in ten years' (p. 60). Indeed, the only certainty is uncertainty, and the devastating likelihood that each man is an island, entire unto himself. Like Greene, Lowry, and many other twentieth-century writers, Naipaul is aware of the growing personal isolation that comes with permanent residence in modem neo-technological cities: 'How right our Aryan ancestors were to create gods. We seek sex, and are left with two private bodies on a stained bed. The larger erotic dream, the god, has eluded us ... It is with cities as it is with sex. We seek the physical city and find only a conglomeration of private cells. In the city as nowhere else we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains; it is the god of the city we pursue, in vain' (p. 18). In Naipaul's hopeless vision, alike in drab London or exotic Trinidad, Greeneland rules O.K. Deathscape in the shape of the city, as we shall see, looms large. And, if this is 'home,' should we not try to escape?

I

7

Escape

I tell you, life would be unendurable If you were wide awake .. . Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Both Lowry and Greene were wide awake to the difficulties of their childhood homes, and to the harsh realities of the literary life in Western cities between the wars. Home was, then, unendurable, and a boredomgenerated taste for fear could best be assuaged by travel. Lawry's novel titles provide us with something of a key to his character and his restlessness. More plainly, we find Greene's childhood autobiography sourly entitled A Sort of Life (1971) to be followed by the adult Greene's Ways of Escape (1981).

Joumeying in Greene Boredom, contracted as an adolescent, grew as Greene felt increasingly imprisoned by the safe tedium of the civilized life of home, school, Oxford, and a sub-editorship at The Times. 'Boredom seemed to swell like a balloon inside the head; it became a pressure inside the skull: sometimes I feared I would lose my reason' (Life 120). Psychoanalysed as a suicidal adolescent, Greene later became almost pathologically bored with ordinary life and correspondingly anxious to experience danger and fear. Boredom produced the well-known undergraduate Russian-roulette episode, experiments in riding dangerous horses over jumps, a visit to the dentist for the extraction of a perfectly good tooth,

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an attempt to get a vacation job as a spy for Weimar Germany. According to Greene, boredom was partially responsible for his first instruction in the Roman Catholic faith, for 'it would kill the time' (Life 165). Escape seemed to be the answer. Like his near contemporary, the historian Cobb (1975), Greene escaped from school through crosscountry running. Later, he was able to reduce boredom and generate fear in himself by travel. He may be attributing too much to boredom and too little to other desires when he states (Life 133): A kind of Russian roulette remained too a factor in my later life, so that without previous experience of Africa I went on an absurd and reckless trek through Liberia; it was fear of boredom which took me to Tabasco during the religious prosecution, to a leproserie in the Congo, to the Kikuyu reserve during the Mau-Mau insurrection, to the emergency in Malaya and to the French war in Vietnam. There, in those last three regions of clandestine war, the fear of ambush served me first as effectively as the revolver .. . in the lifelong war against boredom.

Boredom may be the reverse of the coin whose face is adventure; an early book was entitled The Name of Action. It is already apparent that Greene is a geographer's novelist. Throughout a long and still continuing career, Greene has travelled through much of the southern cone of Latin America, through Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, through both West and East Africa, Eastern Europe, and Southeast and East Asia. His exotic world is that of the less-known, less-imageable regions: the pre-independence Congo; pre-revolutionary Cuba; Haiti; Sierra Leone; Liberia; the Caribbean coastline of Mexico. It is notable that his travels to less obscure places, the war zones of Kenya, Malaya, and Vietnam, and the Communist East, resulted in far fewer novels and travel books. Greene seems to have been looking not for the flashy, vivid, spectacular, and well-known, which he recorded as a journalist, but for the obscure, the covert, the backwaters where the flotsam of humanity washes up. This, again, is Greeneland. An interest in geography and travel came early to Greene. Until the age of six he lived in a house that possessed an extra piece of garden across the road. In summer he would cross that road to play in the garden, 'with the exciting sense of travelling abroad.' Bushes screened off both road and house, 'which might have been a hundred miles away. It was my first experience of foreign travel' (Life 20). One senses the child's small world and the fear and curiosity involved in making this first trip beyond parental control.

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Greene's urge to travel was whetted further in that macho prepubertal period when books on war, adventure, and exploration are in vogue with boys. Like many of his generation, Greene devoured books on Antarctic exploration (still ongoing at the time), and his favourite novelists included Conrad, Henty, Rider Haggard, and many longforgotten authors of the simplistic grown-up-public-schoolboy type. Such books are replete with the penetrations of jungles and deserts, lost ·treasures or secret documents, lost explorers or regiments, exotic cultures, deeds of bravery and treachery, and sufferings of incredible magnitude bravely borne by Britons who never whimper as do such lesser breeds as the omnipresent dago. These influences are very real and were still apparent in the juvenile literature of my own childhood in the early 1950s. Greene is hardly exaggerating in opining that 'so much of the future lies on the shelves' (Life 55). These childhood and adolescent experiences were replayed later in both life and novels. Greene has been a wartime intelligence officer and foreign correspondent as well as a novelist; his penchant for leaving the well-trodden tourist track to penetrate the seamy side of foreign regions has led him to be considered as a spy by some governments. His novels are set either in London and Western Europe or in some exotic tropical backwater. They are replete with hunters and hunted, spies and officials, fear and terror, pain and humiliation, inexplicable small cruelties. Many protagonists are Catholic, and almost all experience that well-known inner conflict between the higher and lower selves. They inhabit regions where savage or despairing acts punctuate long periods of acute boredom. The novels are often melodramatic, but then, as Greene would say, so is life. Further, Greene's constant use of the symbol of the corrupted child suggests a further reason for travel, a distaste for the 'civilized' world that actively promotes such corruption, or is at best indifferent to it. This crime of indifference he imputes to civilization as a whole (Atkins 1966, 115). Both the skyscraper and the slum are constraints upon individual freedom and creativity. Whether chromium-plated or squalorous, to be at home in civilization is to be in a cage. Greene travels not merely because of irremediable boredom, but 'to escape claustrophobia' (Atkins 1966, 184). For him, Metroland has become Eliot's 'Unreal City' filled with 'hollow men' (Eliot 1974). A travelling obsession was not peculiar to Greene. A general feeling of uncertainty, of the 'unrightness' of progress, had emerged with Tennyson and Hardy. For Arnold, modems were 'wandering between two worlds, one dead/ The other powerless to be born. ' The First World War demonstrated that, beneath a thin glossy veneer, the civilized world was

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fundamentally barbaric. In the 1920s Yeats pronounced: 'Things fall apart.' Into this anguished world emerged Waugh, Orwell, Lowry, Auden, Spender, Greene. Their solutions were various; some turned to religion, others to Marxism. Most, rejecting outworn Britain, travelled abroad. All had read Flecker; there was still some romance elsewhere, perhaps in Timbuktu, Zanzibar, or Samarkand. The list of British literary travellers between the wars is a long one. Fussell (1980) makes the point that, unlike Victorian travellers, the inter-war wanderers were embittered by hatred towards their mother country and sought salvation in the alien and exotic. Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1983) was the model for much of this exploration of exotic lands. Here Mr Kurtz, a civilized westerner, penetrates to the savage centre of the Congo jungle only to encounter inscape, a terrifying vision of the darkness within himself. For Eliot, Kurtz symbolizes the dark heart of the twentieth century. Lowry, Greene, and others felt the same need to explore their own inner darkness against the sympathetic background of primitive regions. The perceived corruption at home, at the heart of civilization, was thus a major motive for travel. Whether an actual secular period or merely the inevitable loss of childhood, a golden age had gone. Rough living among primitive people, coping with daily necessities, dealing with rats and cockroaches, such a life 'seemed to satisfy temporarily the sense of nostalgia for something lost: it seemed to represent a stage further back' (Journey 19). Greene especially was attracted by the inexplicable 'quality of darkness' that is Africa (Journey 19-20). He distrusts civilization: 'my journey represented a distrust of any future based on what we are ... Today our world seems particularly susceptible to brutality ... halfcastes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers ... when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray' (Journey 20-1). Just as Greeneland foreshadows the working-class 'kitchen sink' drama of the 1950s, so Greene's journeyings were echoed in the youth travel and commune-building of the 1960s. Like Kripalsingh in Naipaul's Mimic Men (1967), who methodically destroys crate after crate of Coca-Cola, Greene is fleeing a modem life that has perverted civilization from 'being' to 'having.' His counterpart today would be fleeing Hamburger Helper and processed cheese slices, video games and cablevision, all the goods that provide the unreflecting

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masses with large quantities of low-quality experience. To Greene in the 1930s, the modem experience was summed up in the newly popular game of Monopoly: 'The object ... of owning property is to collect rent .. . Rentals are greatly increased by the erection of houses and hotels .. . property will be sold to the highest bidder ... Players may land in gaol' (Roads 17). There are, of course, other motives for Greene's obsessional journeying. As a child he was fascinated by the concept of the map. Throughout the novels, characters who are mentally disoriented look for a metaphorical map. A Sort of Life begins with a 'personal map.' The title Journey without Maps expresses the letting go of civilization that was Greene's goal. Journeys are also important for their own sake, and for the satisfaction of curiosity. They must be planned, and Greene echoes Aldous Huxley in his short disquisition on 'what books to take on a journey' (Roads 128). Significantly he took Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy to West Africa, to 'match the mood.' Then there is movement for movement's sake. Greene's novels are filled with characters who are perpetually on the move, whether across cities, as in The Third Man; between cities, as in A Gun for Sale and A Confidential Agent; through countries, as in Stamboul Train; or through jungles, as in The Power and the Glory. Pursuit is a common theme. Hunter follows hunted on foot, through sewers, by public transportation. From the first novel, The Man Within (1929), we are introduced to the protagonist as coward and fugitive. And just as the expectations of fugitives are small, so Greene does not really expect to find an answer to the problem of a dying civilization through exotic travel. Before leaving for Mexico in 1938 he muses: 'Did I really expect to find there what I hadn't found here?' Back comes the negative response: '"Why this is hell," Mephistopheles told Faust, "nor am I out of it"' (Roads 17). Perhaps deepest of all the motives for travel was the search for a Lost Childhood (1951), the title of one of Greene's volumes of essays. Childhood cannot be recaptured physiologically, but it may be recaptured spiritually. To do this, according to Greene, one must strip away the unnecessary trappings of civilization, and return to the simple certainties of daily life. In a world increasingly complex and apparently out of control, such a revelation may more easily be encountered in backward regions less corrupted by civilization. To enter such regions, of course, one inevitably has to cross borders. Whereas Malcolm Lowry hated the lengthy hassles involved in border crossings, frontier zones and border lines have always fascinated Greene. As an adolescent, his love of the rural Chiltern Hills was

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enhanced because they were close to expanding London: 'They had the excitement of a frontier' (Life 110). Even as a child of six, the separation of his family home's two gardens generated a frontier image: 'I used to think of the two gardens as representing England and France with the Channel in between' (Life 20). His earliest fragment of autobiography, in The Lawless Roads (1947), begins with two countries 'lying side by side.' This is the most profound frontier, the 'green baize door' separating school from home. John Raynor (1973) has described the same phenomenon at Westminster School. On the one side lay school, which for Greene was associated with 'violence, cruelty, evil ... lavatories without locks,' a Rilkean world of torment or a Piranesi prison. On the other, lay tranquillity, freedom, solitude, the quiet croquet-lawn, the munching rabbit. The school/home descriptions are replete with emotive terminology: 'border,' 'alien ground,' 'frontier guards.' The emotive, chemical senses are important to children, and it is not, therefore, surprising that the lands on either side of the green baize door, as noted in chapter 2, 'Smellscape,' were readily identified by smell. The above is from the Prologue to The Lawless Roads. Chapter 1, entitled 'The Border,' and dealing ostensibly with the crossing from Texas to Mexico (also considered in an unfinished novel, The Other Side of the Border), allows the adult Greene to express his feelings about transitions: 'The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped and you find yourself speechless among the moneychangers ... The atmosphere of the border - it is like starting over again; there is something about it like a good confession: poised for a few happy moments between sin and sin' (p. 23). Like school, where 'it was like a breach of neutrality' to encounter his gowned and mortar-boarded father on the home side of the green baize door, borders are places of divided loyalties, of indecision, of emotional vacillation, of the everpresent possibility of disloyalty and betrayal. Small wonder that borders and frontier zones figure prominently in the Greeneian oeuvre. In Journey without Maps he crosses into hostile Vichy French territory; strange travellers, perhaps spies, cross and recross the boundary. In The Power and the Glory the whisky-priest glimpses the safe, peaceful life that lies on the far side of the border. He escapes to this haven, but is impelled to recross the border to meet his doom. In Orient Express the train crosses frontier after frontier, each one more dangerous than the last, until the final one proves deadly. The

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second volwne of Greene's autobiography, Ways of Escape, tells of his own recurrent crossing and recrossing of borders, of escapes and deportations. Greeneland, indeed, is a frontier zone of the mind, whose inhabitants, of divided loyalty and deep inner conflicts, cross and recross from heaven to hell, from good to evil. Borders, of the mind or physically real, are Greene's homeland. 'How can life on a border be other than restless' he asks (Lawless Roads 13 ). Unlike Lowry, who went in perpetual fear of authority in the shape of customs officers and passport officials, Greene relished the danger and incertitude of frontiers. A minor authority himself, as journalist, novelist, and government official, he enjoyed scoring off the Establishment by making unauthorized border crossings. He particularly enjoyed his role as a special constable during the General Strike of 1926, and later relished the London Blitz, for both gave him 'the exciting sense of living on a frontier, close to violence' (Life 77). Journeying in Lowry How did all this begin and why am I here at this arc of bar with its cracked brown paint, papegaai, mezcal, hennessey, cerveza, two slimed spittoons, no company but fear: fear of light, of the spring, of the complaint of birds and buses flying to far places ... (from 'No Company But Fear')

For much of his life Malcolm Lowry was of no fixed abode; in his own words he resided at Hotel Nada. Even his fourteen-year residence in Dollarton was broken by long journeys. Significantly, and tragically, he called his whole opus 'The Voyage That Never Ends.' For Lowry was a lifetime fugitive, running from his childhood home, from Europe, from Mexico, finally from Dollarton, and always from himself. That life is a journey is a well-worn cliche; Lowry's life was a journey both in reality and metaphor, across real landscapes and within his own mind. Lowry's schoolboy stories were often set on trains; his jazz preferences included 'Going Places' and 'Doing Things.' Like other middle-class youths, he was allowed a Wanderjahr in Europe, and the stories he wrote at that time reflect a taste for the exotic. His early life in Paris and London was one of seedy, cheerless apartments, littered with bottles, and with no pretence of permanence. Indeed, in both London and New York, he was often so disoriented that he was unable to remember where

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he lived. The walks he took were pub crawls. Paranoid, he often felt trailed by unknown followers. He frequently indulged in long wandering monologues that always failed to reach a goal. He speaks, Joyce-like, of his 'tooloose-Lowrytrek.' Lowry's life of wandering is an extreme case of the attack of wanderlust experienced by literary British youth between the wars. Compared with more pragmatic Americans, 'Britons, confined to a small island, romantically cherish the act and art of journeying for its own sake' (Fussell 1980). Fussell suggests that the outburst of travel fever after the First World War was less a case of curiosity than of a blind urge to flee England. D. H. Lawrence and, later, Graham Greene may be cases in point. Lowry fled England deliberately, but with few plans. Typically, his central and most formative journeys, to Mexico (1936) and Vancouver (1939), were unplanned. Almost penniless in Los Angeles, Lowry felt Mexico would be cheaper. Flung out of Mexico, and misinformed that a U.S. visa could be renewed only outside the country, he went to Vancouver. In contrast, the less important early voyages were deliberate adventures, and the later expeditions from Dollarton were either searches for a new home or sad attempts to relive the past. Even Lowry' s manuscripts were wanderers; they passed from publisher to publisher by journeys as complex as those described within them. By middle age this peripatetic Briton had visited the Far East, much of Western Europe and North America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Wherever possible he went by sea. His initial description of Port au Prince, Haiti, from the sea is a typical traveller's vision- everything seen in terms of somewhere else (Lowry 1972, 6): 'strangely beautiful houses of pointed roofs and of seemingly Norwegian design, church spires here and there rise vaguely in the sun giving it a look of Tewkesbury, while to the right mist lay in pockets of rolling mysterious mountains like Oaxaca.' Like all travellers, too, he learns that return journeying is dangerous. Places, whether loved or hated, have always changed by the time the traveller, himself also changed, returns. 'The Voyage That Never Ends' was Lowry's framework for a great novel-sequence that was to depict 'The Ordeal of Sigbj0rn Wilderness.' Most of the novels depict journeys, usually voyages. Only Lunar Caustic and Under the Volcano are physically anchored in a single place. Yet, Lowry was nothing if not an introspective novelist. All the novels, without exception, depict psychic journeys, interior journeys from a state of chaos to one of stability in life or death. The interior journey is expressed symbolically as physical journeying, whether actual, as in

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most of the novels (even Volcano, where most of the wandering takes place in one locale), or in terms of journeys of memory or wish, as in Volcano and Lunar Caustic. It is the psychic journeying of Lowry that is the more important. Lowry saw himself as Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, as Ulysses, as Ahab, as the Ancient Mariner, or as one of the many lonely, doomed wanderers of literature. His voyage into the public psychiatric ward depicted in Lunar Caustic (and which he later claimed to be a deliberate 'pilgrimage') was a psychic journey meant to cleanse his soul and provide regeneration, explicitly on the lines of Rimbaud's Saison en enfer. In the psychiatric ward, drying out, he meets his persona face-to-face (the inmate Kalowsky = the Wandering Jew) and experiences the omnipresent existential reality of confinement. It is Bellevue Hospital, after all; the views from its windows are all-important contact with the outside world. Within, the summer heat oppresses; across the river lie the Ice Palace and the Jack Frost Sugar Works. Ships pass by. If coming into port, the inmates let out a cry of hope, partly a shriek, 'partly a cheer'; if heading out to sea, the response is dull silence, 'as if all hope were heading out with the tide.' Throughout, the rotting hulks of coal barges reflect the beached, stranded, hopeless madmen who gaze blankly down upon them. In Ballast, Hear Us OLord, Dark as the Grave, and October Ferry are explicitly journey novels, where the journey mirrors the mind's wanderings. Yet Volcano , on the surface Lawry's place novel par excellence, is in fact the story of a psychic journey that ends in madness, death, and damnation. It is, first of all, a novel of exiles, drawn together in a place that is not merely unsympathetic, but actively hostile. The Consul's inner voice tries to soothe him by telling him he is 'only lost, only homeless,' as if this were not one of the most terrifying of existential conditions. And, in Volcano, the landscape is dynamic; volcanoes brood, barrancas snake through the countryside, forests participate in human destruction. The whole novel is dynamic; it is a wheel, in constant motion, symbolized by Cuernavaca's carnival Ferris wheel on which the Consul is racked and humiliated. In Lowry nothing is static; motion is of the essence. 'Life is a journey, a passage with no return .. . the pilgrim is the man who . . . becomes in reality the traveller that everyone is symbolically' (Day 1973, 409). Lowry saw his own journey, as reflected in his novels, as Dantesque, with periods of Purgatorio, Paradiso, and Inferno. Paradiso is clearly Eridanus (Dollarton), 'the simple life in British Columbia, which the Consul can dream of but never attain, and an Eden

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from which Lowry was finally expelled. Purgatorio is the psychiatric hospital of Lunar Caustic, symbol of North America. Above all, it is a place of no motion and no hope. For Lowry, the life of the Wandering Jew, through it may lead eventually to hell, is better than the stasis of purgatory. So we are left with Inferno, the abyss that Lowry first glimpsed on board ship in Ultramarine. The abyss is everywhere, even at sea, for Lowry frequently uses the maelstrom as metaphor. It is in Oaxaca, the City of Dreadful Night, and in Cuernavaca it is in the rotting gardens, in the fetid garbage-laden barrancas, in the deep, dark caverns of its cantinas. A majestic setting is of no avail; the barrancas lie at the foot of the volcano. As described in Under the Volcano Cuernavaca's landscape is a taut amalgam of psychic-journey symbols. Popocatepetl is one of those magic mountains the ascent of which brings grace. Mountains are positive symbols for the Consul and his wife, whose respective childhoods were spent in Kashmir and Hawaii; the simple life among the mountains of British Columbia is their dream. But the Consul never climbs the sacred mountain. Instead, he is irresistibly attracted to the caverns that lie under the volcano, the dark cantinas and the deep barrancas that crack apart the town of Cuernavaca. Throughout the novel the cantinas and the barrancas, one of the latter at the bottom of Lawry's garden in Calle Humboldt, wait, almost sentient, for their prey. In the last scenes, all the characters lose their way in the Dantesque metaphoric forest surrounding Cuernavaca: Ne! mezzo de! cammin di nostra vita me ritrovai per una selva oscura che la diritta via erra smaritta ...

(Day 1973, 306)

In this forest the Consul's brother lies hopelessly drunk; the Consul's wife is trampled to death by a horse. Yet, the Consul crawls through, he sees 'The Lighthouse in the Storm'; but the lighthouse is El Farolito, the infamous cantina whose dark labyrinthine passages lead under the volcano. In the last scene, as the Consul, drunk, dies from a gratuitous pistol bullet, he reflects on his native Kashmiri mountains, dreams of climbing the volcano Popocatepetl, but falls screaming into the deep barranca. 'Someone threw a dead dog after him down the ravine'; psychic journey's end.

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Exile

Many journeys end with a return to the place of origin. Others, however, may result in the wanderer fetching up more or less permanently in an alien locale that, whether voluntarily or not, becomes a place of exile. Curiously, Greene's major travels have been limited to the tropical Third World. Within this sprawling region, he has shown little interest in prominent countries with ancient civilizations, such as India or China. Instead, seeking uncivilized simplicities, he has sought out the stagnant backwaters of the tropical world, where European life has only a marginal purchase. The two most significant journeys were to West Africa (1935) and Mexico (1938), for in these places Greene travelled in nineteenth-century style, penetrating the fetid swamps and backlands on foot, by mule, with bearers and guides. Both Liberia and the 'godless state' of Tabasco were uncomfortable, hot, sweaty, enervating, dangerous. Military, police, lawless natives, and vile animal life constantly threatened the traveller. There are few pets in English Greeneland, but the tropical version is replete with vultures on the roof, rats in the bath, the detonation of cockroaches against walls, the buzzing of mosquitoes and flies. It is a world reminiscent of that in Lowry's Undertite Volcano (1947). Even the later travels, undertaken in a more sophisticated manner, were made to places in Asia or Latin America that threatened danger in the form of outright war or insurrection. These were Greene's 'ways of escape.' A survey of landscape and inhabitants, however, suggests that the escape from the wasteland of Metroland is merely an escape to a tropical counterpart, a wasteland region of seediness, decay, and above all, exiles. The scene is readily set. If we seek the city in exotic Greeneland, it is to corrupt Saigon, Mexico City, or Havana that we must look. Consider Greene's view of Havana: 'I enjoyed the louche atmosphere of Batista's city ... I came there ... for the sake of the Floridita restaurant (famous for daiquiris and Morro crabs), for the brothel life, the roulette in every hotel, the fruit-machines spilling out jackpots of silver dollars, the Shanghai Theatre where for one dollar twenty-five cents one could see a nude cabaret of extreme obscenity with the bluest of blue films in the intervals' (Ways of Escape 184). This is the background to that sad comedy Our Man in Havana. In Indochina, again, the spell was cast by the elegant whores, Chinese gambling and opium houses, and 'above all by that feeling of exhilara-

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tion which a measure of danger brings to the visitor with a return ticket: the restaurants wired against grenades, the watchtowers striding along the roads of the southern delta' (Escape 121). This is, in tum, the background for The Quiet American (1955), with its peaceful images of water-buffaloes trudging through the paddy-fields broken suddenly by the sight of the bodies of children lying at awkward angles in a ditch. Vietnam provides a glimpse of rural Greeneland. The end of the line of civilization is reached in Vientiane, Laos, a town with only 'two real streets, one European restaurant, a club, the usual grubby market where apart from food there is only the debris of civilization - withered tubes of toothpaste, shop-soiled soaps, pots and pans from the Bon Marche. Fishes were small and expensive and covered with flies' (Escape 133). But the archetypical tropical Greeneland lies in Mexico and West Africa. In the Tabasco of The Power and the Glory (1962), we encounter only ruined churches, polluted streams, intense heat, swamps, children with bellies swollen from eating earth and by worms, dead children buried like dogs, vultures awaiting carrion. On the West African 'Coast' of The Heart of the Matter (1962) there are the same vultures, the same swamps, the same worms, malaria, and flies , with the addition of yellow fever. We rapidly come to the conclusion that Greene has carried Greeneland, as an inscape, with him to these exotic shores. The landscapes he perceives in these backwaters are tropical versions of the icy Greeneland he has so tellingly depicted in Metroland. The theme of exile is overwhelming. All the chief characters in The Power and the Glory, native and non-native alike, are in some sense abandoned. Mr Tench, the dentist, inhabits a land too hot for sex or religion. To him home means England, stained glass, a Tudor rose, the 'Laughing Cavalier.' As for his 'home' in Tabasco: Home: it was a phrase one used to meari four walls behind which one slept. There had never been a home . . . Home lay like a picture postcard on a pile of other postcards: shuffle the pack and you had Nottingham, a Metroland birthplace .. . Mr. Tench's father had been a dentist too - his first memory was finding a cast in a wastepaper basket - the rough, toothless gaping mouth ... There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. The hot wet river port and the vultures lay in the wastepaper basket, and he picked them out. (p. 11)

Tench exemplifies Greene's deterministic theories: his exile to Tabasco was predestined.

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The over-zealous lieutenant who hunts the whisky-priest is an abandoned soul, for, because of his monomania, he is unable to communicate with his fellows. The married priest Father Jose, an object of ridicule, feels that his sin blankets 'the whole abandoned star' (p. 30). Captain Fellowes on the plantation feels completely alone; his wife has abandoned him, and life, for an inturned neuroticism that sees the whole of external life as a threat. Their daughter Coral is spiritually abandoned by her parents to a lonely life without companions. The whisky-priest himself is increasingly unwelcome anywhere, for his presence brings severe repercussions on those who harbour him. Even the normal progressions of daily life are abandoned: 'time stopped like a clock' (p. 74). Tabasco is an abandoned state, a physical, religious, and moral backwater. A local merchant realizes: 'The extent of their abandonment - the ten hours downriver to the port, the forty-two hours in the Gulf to Veracruz - that was one way out. To the north the swamps petering out against the mountains which divided them from the next state. And on the other side no roads - only mule-tracks and an occasional unreliable plane: Indian villages and the huts of herds: two hundred miles away the Pacific' (p. 28). On land, vultures wait stoically for the great heat to provide them with carrion. Out to sea, 'the sharks looked after the carrion on that side' (p. 7). The only sense of freedom from entrapment is on board the little coastal steamer that occasionally visits the port. Counterparts of Mr Tench inhabit the West African 'Coast' of The Heart of the Matter. Here disgruntled exiles from Britain encounter half-civilized blacks from the interior to their mutual frustration. Scobie's room is as homeless as Mr Tench's: 'a table, two kitchen chairs, a cupboard, some rusty handcuffs hanging on a nail, like an old hat, a filing cabinet: to a stranger it would have appeared a bare uncomfortable room but to Scobie it was home' (p. 15). The effect of the enervating climate is to turn the European into a species of hospital patient: 'periodically certain patients were sent home, yellow and nervy, and others took their place' (p. 14). The law courts and police station stand, as in Tabasco, as symbols of justice, but again 'the idea was only one room deep. On the dark narrow passage behind, in the charge room and the cells, Scobie could always detect the odour of human meanness and injustice' (p. 15). Greeneland had been transferred, by Britons, from Metroland to the 'Coast.' In Journey without Maps (1971), the travel-journal mode permits greater explicitness. The journey into the interior was, for Greene, a journey back to the purity, benign or savage, of childhood. Even the white presence in the interior seemed benign, for Sunday-afternoon tea

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with missionaries in the heat of Bolahun 'was very like tea in an English cathedral town: it was gentle, decent, child-like and unselfish, it didn't even know it was courageous' (p. 83). Yet, a return to the coast is a return to 'The Seedy Level,' reinforcing Greene's 'sense of disappointment with what man had made out of the primitive, what he had made out of childhood' (p. 244 ). In the interior 'the sense of taste was finer, the sense of pleasure keener, the sense of terror purer and deeper' (p. 225): life was authentic. Back on the coast there is iced beer and radio programs from England 'and after all it is home, in the sense that we have been taught to know home, where we will soon forget the finer taste, the finer pleasure, the finer terror on which we might have built' (p. 226). Here again, the sense of home, for Greene, becomes an entrapment. Yet, for most expatriates, the 'Coast' was an alien land of exile in which home, as in Indian hill stations, had to be re-created. Freetown, Sierra Leone, was 'an English capital city,' with 'the Anglican cathedral, laterite bricks and tin with a square tower, a Norman church built in the nineteenth century' in a landscape of fetid swamp. Here the expatriates lived turgid, fatuous lives enlivened only by fashionable weddings, the governor general's garden party, the All-Comers Tennis Competition, and the Play and Dance of the Ladies of the National Congress of British West Africa. The aim is to reproduce England, support memory, and avert homesickness. The social atmosphere, like the climate, is stifling, but the expatriates defend it: 'If you are English, they would argue, you will feel at home here: if you don't like it you are not English' (pp. 38-44 ). The tug of home on the exile inevitably leads to sadness, discontent, 'a feeling for respectability and a sense of fairness withering in the heat' (p. 44). In A Burnt-out Case (1963), however, the journeying protagonist is not a colonial expatriate but an architect who, having experienced 'bum-out' in career, marriage, and life generally, is seeking the opposite of home, an 'empty place' that holds no memories. In his journey into the Congolese interior, however, Querry finds that 'in an unfamiliar region it is always necessary for the stranger to begin at once to reconstruct the familiar, with a photograph perhaps, or a row of books if they are all that he has brought with him from the past ... And, so from the first morning he set himself to build a routine, the familiar within the unfamiliar. It was the condition of survival' (p. 26). At journey's end, moreover, irony is piled on irony, for Querry, soon to die, is immediately confronted by a native who categorically states that 'one should die in one's own village if it is possible' (p. 33). Even in less exotic locales, the exiled make their appearance. England

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Made Me (1970) is set in civilized Stockholm, but the runaway Anthony

and the remittance man, Minty, are homeless exiles, doomed to a world that becomes 'little more than a series of workhouses strung across the globe - Shanghai, Aden, Singapore ... Stockholm' (p. 55). Greene is pointing out, repeatedly, the inauthenticity of existence away from home, while at the same time reminding us that home is stifling to the spirit and must be escaped. Hence, the thoughtful existential being in the twentieth century is essentially a homeless exile. It is notable that Greene, after a lifetime of journeying, finally abandoned Metroland in favour of Antibes.

Conclusions Home and journey are fundamental geographic poles of existence. Lowry's contribution, in life as in work, lies in taking these conditions to their extremes. Lowry and his protagonists are rarely at rest. Home is ideal, but journey is real. His work is that of an existential outsider who, briefly admitted to a form of insideness, is nevertheless eventually cast out. Home is often equated with self. Yet, with Lowry, the identification with home becomes so extreme that survival without land, shack, and pier is fundamentally impaired. This, again, was clear to Lowry himself. In October Ferry Llewelyn's wife and father-in-law refer to his attachment to Eridanus as 'insane' and 'pathological. ' To which Llewelyn can only agree, yet stating: 'not to be attached . . . would be more pathological still' (p. 199). Less intense, but equally real attachments to home are felt by many individuals and groups. Yet, politicians, planners, and developers, unheeding of the humanist planning research that began a generation ago in Boston's West End, neither know nor care that grieving for a lost home may be fatal (Porteous 1977). Lowry' s work also brings into focus the two types of journeying, of body and of mind, the former often symbolic of the latter. Despite the recent trend towards a consideration of process, geographers still tend to take a static view of the world. Space and place are emphasized; when considered, journeys are always considered as place-related, rarely as events in themselves. We are slow to consider life-journeys, or the long-term journeying of drop-outs, exiles, and expeditionaries, preferring to concentrate on commuters and tourists (who, in the geography of tourism, seem to exist only to be managed). Journeys of life, inner psychic journeys, allegorical journeys, these are not explored. And, in our emphasis on at-homeness, rootedness, and

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place we are missing a great deal of the point of even nineteenth-century regional novels. As for the modem mid-twentieth-century novel, it reflects not only the growing placelessness of our civilization, but also the inevitable sense of loss that placelessness generates. In Greene, moreover, we are confronted by the inevitable place-loss, itself a kind of self-loss, which comes from our loss of childhood. Home, in Greeneland, is a lonely, grubby prison inhabited by corrupt failures. Escape is essential. Journeys are necessary in order to discover primitive roots. Exile is likely, and even in exile one is surrounded by those who re-create home, and one may, like Querry, be doomed to re-create the familiar oneself. If home is supposedly our territorial core, a symbol of the self, a personally controlled space that provides security, stimulation, and identity for the occupant, then Greene presents us with some terrifying images of twentieth-century homelessness. It is significant that in most of his books the protagonists either dwell in single rooms, as in almost all the 'entertainments' set in England, or are expatriates. Many of them spend much of their time journeying; there is a persistent restlessness. Some have abandoned home, but others actively seek some alternative place of refuge. Many are trapped in hopeless exile. Even natives of a country may feel uprooted and abandoned. Literary critics have dealt in depth with Greene's depiction of the problems of faith, evil, and sin, his cinematic technique, his interest in childhood innocence, and his concern for seedy characters in seedy environments. Few have alluded to the persistent related themes of home, journey, and exile. Yet, these concepts underlie the whole oeuvre and are a basic foundation of life in Greeneland. Nicholas Nickleby speaks of home as 'the place where ... those I love are gathered together' (Dickens 1968, 149). It is profoundly disturbing to tum over the stone and discover the underside of life where such a concept has atrophied. Even for those who remember home, the memory is fatally flawed. Like Mr Tench's rosy view of a vanished England, in Mexico Greene's homesickness was for a vanished England conjured up by reading Trollope. 'But it wasn't real: this was real - the high empty room and the tiled and swarming floor and the heat and the sour river smell' (Lawless Roads 130). Coupled with Greene's emphasis on childhood innocence and the hopeful journeys back to the primitive, this image irresistibly draws us to the conclusion that home, for Graham Greene, existed only in childhood. And if childhood is our only real home, then home is, for all of us, irretrievably lost. We are inevitably exiled from it by age and change.

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I could have ended on this dramatic and rather negative note. But more can be said. It is generally agreed that 'you can't go home again,' often because 'home,' as we shall rediscover in the next chapter, 'Childscape,' is really our childhood home. Yet, home tugs throughout our adult lives. AJan Sillitoe (1968, 41) suggests that 'the greatest instinct is to go home again, the unacknowledged urge of the deracinated, the exiles- even then it isn't admitted. The only true soul is the gypsy's, and he takes home and family with him wherever he drifts.' Mary Renault (1968, 313), equally perceptive, feels that adults are somewhat compensated for the loss of childhood home by 'the sensation of coming home again which is one of the more stable by-products of physical love.' And, as I will explain in the next chapter, the technique of environmental autobiography gives us an opportunity to revisit home, if only in memory.

8

Childscape

Childhood is not a thing which dries up as soon as it has finished its cycle. It is not a memory. It is the most living of treasures, and continues to enrich us without our knowing it .. . Woe to the man who cannot remember his childhood ... he is dead as soon as it leaves him. Franz Hellen

When St Paul, on becoming a man, put away childish things, it is to be hoped that he retained some childlike qualities, as his master would have wished. Childhood is not so easily dismissed; most of us have had one. Psychiatrists, Jesuits, and educationalists, as well as Graham Greene and Malcolm Lowry, agree that our childhood years are the most formative in terms of character development. This vital importance of childhood, in that the child is, indeed, the father of the man, became apparent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to thinkers as varied as Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Dr Arnold of Rugby. Indeed, it may be said that the Western concept of childhood was invented at this time. Although this view is now beginning to be critically reassessed, the prevailing orthodoxy in that branch of history known as the history of the family is that, until the last two hundred years, persons over seven or eight years of age were treated as small adults, and worked and were punished as such. It is clear that childhood as a major theme in literature came with Rousseau, Wordsworth, Blake, and their generation. Following them, in the mid to late nineteenth century, myriad laws emerged that restricted childhood employment and devolved responsibility for health care, education, and discipline from the individual family to the state. The child's value as a labour unit fell steadily until, by the early twentieth century, children were becoming economically 'useless' but emotionally 'priceless' (Zelizer 1985). By the mid-twentieth century childhood had become regarded as everyone's birthright. Further, and quite erroneously, childhood has come to be seen as a biological

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category rather than the cultural product that it is. As a result, 'childhood' has grown lengthier and lengthier in terms of years, the concept of adolescence has had to be invented, and the burden of dependency upon parents has correspondingly grown. With the midtwentieth century came the period Sommerville (1982) calls 'the glorification of the child,' a period when European visitors to the United States were amazed to find parents meekly obeying their children. The disappearance of childhood? This period has now passed, and we appear to be poised on the edge of 'the standardization of childhood.' Indeed, a series of recent works, including Postman's The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), Winn's Children without Childhood (1982), and Suransky's The Erosion of Childhood (1986), suggest that the death of childhood has already begun, and that we are already well on the way to a neo-medieval concept of the child, once again, as a small adult. At the root of this change lie the states and processes recognized and named by nineteenth-century social scientists and social critics - the alienation, rootlessness, anomie, and angst that come with urban-industrial civilization or what Carlyle called the 'demon of Mechanism.' In this sense the death of childhood was heralded almost as soon as it was invented; indeed, Postman claims that childhood began to decline with the inventions of Samuel Morse, the progenitor of modem electroniccommunication systems. Postman goes on to claim that the electronic media, and especially television in its concern with a symbolic world of graphics rather than words, ·have destroyed several hundred years of 'book culture,' which alone was capable of separating the worlds of child and adult. Television watching requires no skills, it does not make complex demands on mind or behaviour, it does not segregate its audience; it is 'the iotal disclosure medium' that unlocks adult secrets and presents them to three-yearolds. The result of media culture is the 'adultified child' and the 'childified' adult: 'With a few exceptions, adults on television do not take their work seriously (if they work at all), they do not nurture children, they have no politics, practice no religion, represent no tradition, have no foresight or serious plans, have no extended conversations, and in no circumstances allude to anything that is not familiar to an eight-year-old person' (Postman 1982, 127). We might also note the development of adult clothing styles for children, of youthful styles for adults, and of the growing consumption of junk food by the immature of all ages. Literacy

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declines, yet television gives children answers to questions they have not yet even formulated. Wonder and curiosity die. Cynicism and arrogance grow, and with them the erosion of childhood. This is a startling indictment of the stupidity and immaturity of twentieth-century adults. It is borne out by independent analyses by Suransky (1986), who in addition blames the early institutionalization of children in day-care centres; by Dally (1983 ), who documents the decline in mothering consequent upon such institutionalization; and by Winn (1982), who indicts the feminist movement and ignorant popularizations of psychiatric concepts as well as television, 'the plug-in drug.' The declining importance of organized religion and growing feelings of adult defeatism and powerlessness may also be important factors in the development of the anti-child society since the 1960s. Whatever the causes, it is quite clear that, after about age ten, modem Western children are increasingly likely to become sharp, sophisticated, street-wise, profane, cynical, sexually knowledgeable manikins who see no irony whatever in 'Born to Shop' bumper stickers. Any resemblance to children of the last hundred years or so vanishes with the growing penetrability of the adult world. One might predict, then, that if childhood is disappearing, so will childscape. Indeed, but the concept remains worth investigating for a number of reasons, including the possibility that the present trend can be reversed. Besides being of intrinsic interest, especially to those of us over forty who may have had blessedly 'old-fashioned' childhoods, it is becoming increasingly clear that the remembrance of things past, and of childhood in particular, is of crucial importance to the well-being of the elderly. Graham Greene's lament for a lost childhood (1951) is more common than we might think. And both geographer Rowles's (1978) and oral historian Blythe's interviews with the elderly reveal that 'it is the actual geography of boyhood and girlhood which the old long for' (Blythe 1980, 41). According to Vischer (1966), for many old people youth has constituted their one great experience. Regression is the sine qua non of ageing. With this justification behind me, I will now explore the notion of childscape in terms of the 'real' childscape, as perceived by the senses, and the imaginary 'scapes of children's literature. Subjective autobiographical accounts will then be contrasted with the more objective investigations of developmental geographers. The sensual child

It is often claimed, no doubt with considerable justification, that the

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senses of children are much sharper than are those of adults. It is certain that children have not yet developed the moral and perceptual filters that so often render the adult's world a dull blandscape. The child pays attention to everything, he lets in all of the 'blooming, buzzing confusion' that is his environment. More obviously, the child is much closer to the ground, where the non-visual senses, and especially smell, are of paramount importance. So close to the ground, indeed, is the child that a special, almost erotic, joy is gained from contact with the earth itself. Sigrid Undset, a Norwegian novelist, recalls the 'kind of orgiastic joy' with which she crawled along the ground as a child: 'The mould is brown and loose and warmed by the sun, lovely to fill your hands with. The child lets it run through her fingers on to her bare calves and white socks, making them grey. Wild with delight she pours and pours, as fast as she can' (Gay 1986, 273). During an earthquake, Gretel Erlich (1987, 25) 'lay down. To feel the ground move in this way was to learn what "ground" means in all senses of the word: ground as primary place, as movement, as the foundation of what is knowable.' Psychiatrists and culture historians have suggested that the child's identification with both animate and inanimate nature is a valuable survival from 'primitive' ways of seeing the world. Contact with the earth was Undset's first memory. There is considerable evidence that early memories often involve the non-visual rather than the visual senses. Hart's (1979) first memory is of the 'domino-like sound of dozens of shunting train trucks.' It was only later that he began to assemble a store of visual images. Kinaesthesia and touch appear to be of almost equal importance; children are active and mobile: 'I knew well the location of each stretch of concrete sidewalk in the surrounding streets as well as their relative merits as smooth surfaces; the horrible corrugated surface of the road made rollerskating on it something akin to pneumatic drill work' (p. 486). Active play in busy, swampy fields was also important until local authorities 'improved' these by flattening, draining, and devegetating them to create the kind of placeless 'recreation environment' that children everywhere disdain. As noted in chapter 2, 'Smellscape,' smells are powerful memory releasers, and Hart clearly remembers the smells of carpet, greenhouse cucumbers, newly watered plants, and 'the more subtle comforting smell of soil itself.' A favourite field was for 'rolling, running, chasing, lying on your back and watching the clouds, wrestling, rounders, soccer. But most of all, it meant grass, glorious fresh-cut grass, grass to build with, grass to throw, and grass to bury your nose in, breathing in that

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incomparably beautiful smell' (p. 491). Smells, mostly unpleasant (urine, vennin, rancid diapers, over-used bathrooms, wet beds, dirty damp clothes, poor food), peivade the autobiography of Helen Forrester (1974), but she is also moved to recall the soundscape of the port of Liverpool. Similarly, C.S. Lewis (1977, 14) thinks of himself as 'a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.' He is well aware of the view for which his parents chose his childhood home in Belfast, yet 'the sound of a steamer's horn at night still conjures up my whole boyhood' (p. 15). Clearly, in childhood we are dealing with a multisensory experience, where the non-visual senses have a much greater importance than is ever recognized in the blandscapes of adulthood. Adults stand high off the ground, yet spend much of their time sitting, and peiversely control their sensory input. Children do not. The sheer multisensory joy of childhood experience may be retained into adulthood only by the more creative among us, but we can surely feel C.S. Lewis's (1977, 25) joy in being alive as he rides the ferry to England: 'Clop-clop-clop-clop .. . we are in a four-wheeler rattling over the uneven squaresets of the Belfast streets through the dan1p twilight . . . on board, a certain agreeable excitement steals over me. I like the reflected port and starboard lights in the oily water, the rattle of the winches, the wann smell from the engine room ... I feel the throb of the screws underneath me ... and there is a taste of salt on one's lips.' Though later a Christian apologist, Lewis was no ascetic in childhood; there are environmental, sensuous connotations, as well as religious, in his book's title, Surprised by Joy. Children do not censor experience. The great writers on childhood, Twain, Dickens, Jefferies, Blake, instinctively understood this. It is only with institutionalized education and long experience of living life at second hand, as through the media, for example, that children come to accept the blandly factual Hard Times of Dickens's Gradgrind, where the maivellous being that is a horse becomes 'Quadruped. Graminiverous. Forty teeth.' Imaginative experience All childhood experience, of course, is not of the earth, earthy. Fantasy, the life of the mind, is also of great importance. For most very young Western children, however, fantasy has been captured and encapsulated in children's literature, and most notably in the nursery rhyme and the fairy tale. Bettelheim (1976) suggests that fairy stories are valuable in

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their facilitation of the child's development of an understanding of his feelings, and in particular in their capacity to reveal evil in a form that permits children to integrate it without trauma. Fairy tales are also interesting for their possible role in shaping environmental attitudes. Children brought up without fairy tales feel the loss. Edmund Gosse (1973, 23), for example, seems to have suffered a kind of Gradgrind childhood: 'I was told about missionaries, but never about pirates; I was familiar with humming-birds, but I had never heard of fairies. Jack the Giant-Killer, Rumpelstiltskin and Robin Hood were not of my acquaintance, and though I understand about wolves, Little Red Riding Hood was a stranger even by name.' Gosse remarks gently: 'I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts.' He had to work out for himself the fact that Homo sapiens was something more than 'a featherless plantigrade vertebrate.' Fairy tales, long before Grimm and Anderson, were our common heritage, and survive today in myriad books, films, tapes, and even, vestigially, in the lyrics of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. From Victorian moral tales to the American problem novel of today, children's literature ('Kidlit' to the trade) has been extensively analysed from the points of view of historical development, literary quality, sociopolitical content, and psychosexual imagery. As a result, we have learned much about adults' changing conceptions of childhood, for children rarely produce their own literature. The environments portrayed in this literature have received less attention. Yet, environment is not merely the setting for action but an integral part of mood conveyance and plot development. Imagination, fantasy, curiosity, and understanding are fulfilled and enhanced through the depiction of settings that range from the commonplace to the exotic. The underlying attitudes of the adult writers are made concrete in the environmental messages they choose to pass on to their public. The environmental messages that young children absorb are essentially stereotypes. Adults feel the need to avoid ambiguity and complexity when writing for children. Hence, only the simplest of basic landscape features are to be found, and human relationships with them are correspondingly unsubtle. The messages of the text are heavily reinforced by illustrations, with which most kidlit is well endowed. One of the major stereotypes is the familiar adult preoccupation with the difference between city and countryside. Recent work by geographers (Hart and Chawla 1980) suggests that children do not spontaneously make the distinction between 'natural' and 'artificial' that seems necessary to the adult conception of the urban: rural antinomy. Yet, the

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tradition in children's literature has been to glorify the pastoral scene and be, at best, rather ambiguous about the urban. Countless books of fairy-tales, folk-tales, nursery rhymes, and the like portray an ideal landscape of farmland interspersed with small woods, dotted with pleasant villages, and threaded by islanded rivers. Cows graze in peace. God's in his heaven, etc. In sharp contrast, cities are most frequently ignored. When recognized they may, as in Oz, be the locus of control of a rather ambiguous central power. Their inhabitants, as in Hamelin, are often pinched, greedy, and mean. Thus, we thoroughly absorb the message conveyed by the Aesopian fable of the wholesome country mouse and the corrupted town mouse. Only town architecture, chiefly consisting of tall half-timbered buildings with steeply pitched roofs, fronting narrow winding streets, provides some relief. It is significant that, as so often occurs in Germany, the castle (with its handsome prince) stands outside the town, on a romantic cliff. It is not difficult to understand this bias. As will be demonstrated in the next chapter, cities have been viewed negatively in our culture for several hundred years. The folk-tales on which many stories are based, of course, emerged in European rural settings. Children are fond of animal stories and fantasy creatures such as giants, trolls, fairies, and the like, all of which are, by tradition or habitat selection, naturally denizens of rural areas. Only very rarely, as with Paddington Bear and the French stories of Babar the elephant, do we find animals enjoying city life. More usually, children's books set in cities involve animals only in the home or at the zoo. And the London landscape of, for example, Christopher Robin or Mary Poppins consists mainly of St Paul's, Buckingham Palace, the zoo, shops, monuments, and similar sites. Only with the rise of the 'new realism' during the 1960s did familiar townscapes begin to appear with any regularity in kidlit. The books of Richard Scarry and television series such as 'Sesame Street' and 'The Electric Company' have brought urban street life to the fore in the last two decades. But, even here, the emphasis is most often on downtown, on transportation modes, or on exotic inner cities and ghettos. Most North American children now live in some form of suburbia, but we have yet to see a genre that takes for its habitual background the setting of urban sprawl, freeways, shopping centres, low-rise development, and open-plan subdivisions. It is not difficult to conclude that cities, in general, and suburbia, in particular, are seen by authors as either unsuitable for children or perhaps simply banal. We might also note, in

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passing, the likelihood that high levels of creativity are not nurtured in suburbia. In my extensive reading of the autobiographies of creative people, I find that most of them were fortunate enough to have been raised in other than suburban settings. This ambivalence towards the city coexists in kidlit with a marked preference for the 'middle landscape' of countryside and a general distaste for wilderness. In Tolkien, for example, the Good Lands are fertile rural areas, whereas cities are ambivalent, and mountains, deserts, and above all, forests are symbolic landscapes of terror and doom (Porteous 1975). Only recently have 'environmentalist' children's books attempted to reverse a long-standing horror of forests that seems to have persisted since medieval times. As in medieval imagery, so even in modem children's stories there is danger lurking 'deep in the dark woods.' The chief source appears to be the Teutonic tales collected by the Grimms, in which forests are dark, silent, menacing, enchanted, and dangerous, the scene of hunting, vengeance, starvation, wild beasts, wilder people, and utter disorientation. For, in the forest, as in the city, it is all too easy to become lost. Whether we are dealing with Tom Sawyer, The Wind in the Willows, Namia, Middle-Earth, or the endless visions of Grimmland to be fowid in Disney and modem kidlit, forests remain grim(m) and woodcutters may be heroes. Young children, apparently, do not spontaneously express appreciation of scenery (Tuan 1974; Hart 1979). If their minds tend towards a tabula rasa on this front at least, one can only speculate on the difficulties to be overcome by the ecology movement and the Green parties in inculcating a love of trees in a population whose predilection for hamburgers is directly connected to the demise of Central and Southern American rain forests. Clearly, kidlit teaches that things go better in the country, as in Charlotte's Web, or in gardens, as in The Secret Garden. It is in these settings, perforce, that children expect to encounter animals. Since Aesop, animal stories have entertained children. Even the new realism, as in Watership Down, retains a rural setting, itself threatened by suburban development. Children are much more actively and spontaneously interested in animals than in plants, yet our positive attitude towards animals is relatively recent (Thomas 1983). Despite Descartes and behavioural psychology, animals very clearly express feelings and needs, to which children can easily respond. It is therefore easy for didactic religiomanes, such as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, to use non-human animals as allegorical figures in the endless saga of good and evil. Unfortunately, and especially sadly for readers of Beatrix Potter,

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the result can be a zoophilist sentimentality which is to the advantage of neither human nor non-human species. When the rural idyll palls, the child is transported not to the city but to some exotic setting. From Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Oz to modem space fiction, the exotic is a setting of utmost importance in kidlit. King Solomon's Mines, Treasure Island, and Edward Lear's nonsense lands archetypally provide us with something rich and strange located in a far-off place. Again, one can only speculate on the linkages between the exoticism of children's literature and the images through which we are sold the modem fantasies of foreign tourism. Graham Greene, for one, might see a strong connection. Quite clearly, in the study of environment in children's literature the surface has not yet been scratched. We know next to nothing about the long-term effects on their recipients of the environment images purveyed in children's books. Ambiguous cities, evil forests, anthropomorphic animals; these are hardly a good grounding for the concerned citizen of a depleting spaceship earth. We do know that early childhood impressions are important in shaping character. Many writers, and in particular Graham Greene (1951), insist that the books read or known in childhood have had a profound influence on their attitudes and life-styles. It is quite likely that children's literature promotes conformity and suppresses individuality (Turner 1964) and G.K. Chesterton was insistent that a child would be better to make mud pies than to read Alice (Hinckle 1970). Yet, in a very useful paper on children's concern for environment (Hart and Chawla 1980), we find no consideration of children's literature as a mode of indoctrination. Most voters and decision-makers have been exposed to the environmental biases of kidlit. It is time we investigated how important this inculcation might be. The subjective: childhood autobiography One method of tapping the feelings of childhood is to study the memories of childhood set down by adults in their autobiographies. There are many assumptions here, especially the assumptions of accuracy and selectivity, as well as profound problems of reliability and validity (Coe 1984b). Nevertheless, the genre can provide useful insights. Autobiography is a recent innovation in the literary scene. Like the painter's self-portrait, it emerged after the Renaissance had brought to Western man a renewed awareness of human individuality. The autobiography of childhood emerged even later, becoming a distinctive

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literary genre only with the establishment of childhood as a cultural phenomenon in the early nineteenth century. And only in the late twentieth century have critics begun to explore the nature and meaning of childhood autobiography. Assessment of childhood autobiography ranges from the meagre, as in Mallon's (1985) study of diaries, in which childhood is a recurrent subject, to the more obviously profound, as when Cockshut (1984) finds childhood to be 'the most important time of all' in the formation of personality. Most interesting, perhaps, is Edith Cobb's (1959, 1977) theory of creativity, which she terms 'the ecology of imagination.' According to Cobb, adult creativity emerges directly from one's childhood sense of self and world. The ecology of imagination springs from a special perceptual relationship to the physical environment that universally characterizes middle childhood. In her review of about three hundred volumes of autobiography from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, Cobb (1977, 23) finds that adult inspiration derives chiefly from childhood experience, and asserts that the child 'is part of a universal aesthetic logic in nature's formative processes.' The universal hallmark of childhood is the sense of wonder aroused by the meeting of body, mind, and environment. Baudelaire, who defined genius as 'childhood recoverable at will,' would have agreed. Yet, if creative genius is natural to childhood, as Cobb suggests, we are given no explanation of why it is retained by only a minority of adults. A number of educators, of course, most notably Ivan Illich, would suggest that the institutionalization of children in schools is sufficient to stifle any latent creative urges. The environments that are of interest to us here are those that endure in memory. Such environments may have been important in shaping the child's sense of self. If, as Olney (1972) suggests, autobiography is metaphor, a means of understanding one's own mind and personality, then it would follow that objects discovered early in life should have primacy in forming metaphors of the self (Chawla 1980). One thinks of G.K. Chesterton's assertion that his whole life was guided by his childhood view of a toy theatre, with turreted castle, handsome prince, and windowed damsel awaiting rescue. Some authors have recognized the importance of this integration of landscape into the personality. Gusdorf (1980, 37), for example, suggests that landscape is essentially evocative for the autobiographer, assists him to structure the metaphoric terrain in which his life is lived, and gives life its ultimate shape, 'so that landscape is truly, in Ariel's phrase, "a state of the soul."' We are back, of course, to Inscape.

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Cobb's theory has been both criticized and elaborated. Raymond Williams (1973) agrees with Schachtel (1959) that childhood is associated with a delighted immersion in sensory perception, while adults become dulled by habit. Williams takes issue, however, with the development of myths of childhood paradise, exemplified perhaps most extremely by J.M. Barrie's dictum that the age of two is 'the beginni.Iig of the end.' Furthering the city: country dichotomy that emerged in my discussion of children's literature, Williams notes that the childhood paradise myth emerges chiefly from an era of rural autobiographies, a view only strengthened by the recent emergence of autobiography from old working-class 'urban villages.' In both cases the rural village or the old, tight-knit city neighbourhood stands for natural ways, an understandable social life, in sharp contrast with the 'non-place urban realm' of adulthood, characterized by speed, progress, technology, development, and modernization. Williams concludes that this is not merely the inevitable change from childhood innocence to adult experience, but a more profound change of consciousness that disregards the old, slow, familiar, and accepted ways of life and substitutes the modem modes of detached, externally oriented, users and consumers. One ceases being and embraces having. In this sense the looking back to a different way of life, within living memory, is an exercise in nostalgia that partially validates the widely accepted notion that life was once more natural and wholesome. Chawla (1980) rigorously tested Cobb's theories with a sampling of thirty-eight autobiographies. She rejects Cobb's notion that a heightened awareness and sense of relationship with the outer world is a universal experience of childhood. Indeed, one-fifth of her autobiographers revealed nothing but detachment, rejection, and other 'adult' modes of being. However, she found that the heightened awareness of which Cobb speaks was almost universally characteristic of persons deeply involved in the arts and the humanities, whereas people involved in the physical sciences, committed to abstraction, either omitted their childhood environments altogether or spoke of them with detachment or rejection. My own research suggests that the autobiographies of political and business leaders tend similarly to neglect or dismiss childhood experience in favour of lengthy discussions of mastery and control of both people and environment. The implications of this finding for the survival of humanity are profound. There is beginning to develop, in Western consciousness, a deep unease concerning the role of business and science in shaping the future. Chawla concluded that, while a transcendental relationship with

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environment was not universal in childhood, yet in most cases 'environment played an important part in the equation of self identity' (p. 102). As Cobb had suggested, environmental memories helped integrate a sense of the physical and social world with a sense of self. Those who remembered transcendental identification with environment, however, were not necessarily more creative as adults. Rather, they were able to perceive a sense of continuity between childhood and adulthood, between self and human life in general, and between self and nature, a personality trait that functions as 'a reservoir of calm and strength within the self.' Coe (1984a, 1984b) has studied about six hundred autobiographies, all of them by those creative in the arts and humanities. Indeed, Coe insists that childhood autobiography is a poet's form of expression. He accepts the notion that reminiscences of childhood deal with another country remote from adulthood, and that such memories can be recorded only in the poetic language of that land. While Coe notes the systematic differences in culture that emerge in French, English, and Russian childhoods, he clearly supports Cobb and Chawla in their notion that, for artists, poets, and humanists in general, a positive involvement with childhood environment is often basic to later creativity. He agrees with the psychiatrist Eric Berne that the senses have a different quality for children than for adults, that the senses in one's early years are more aesthetic than intellectual, and that socialization results, for most, in the loss of any capacity to be poets, painters, or musicians. Children live in an irrational world; we ask too much when we plead with them to 'be reasonable.' Indeed, Rousseau, like Baudelaire, argued that the very stuff of poetry is encapsulated in the sheer irrationality of children, their reliance on instinct, sensual awareness, and fantasy. Contemporary philosophers have noted that any science of human behaviour that excludes the irrational is by definition unscientific, because it excludes some of the evidence. And again and again, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, much of the irrationality and sensuous awareness of the child world seems to come via the sense of smell. C. S. Lewis (1977) was convinced of the importance of childhood in the development of personality and creativity: 'I never read an autobiography in which the parts devoted to the earlier years were not far the most interesting' (p. 7). Oral history accounts also confirm the notion that childhood is a separate world. The Opies' Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) readily confirms the extraordinary persistence among children, and completely independent of adults, of terms and

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customs which go back up to five hundred years. And Thompson's 'The War with Adults' (1975) forcefully demonstrates that the two countries of childhood and adulthood are frequently in conflict. Oral history, however, unlike autobiography, is induced recollection. Because of the involvement of an investigator in its production, it leads us naturally to more objective means of encountering childscape. The objective: naturalistic enquiry

Just as I dealt with smellscape phenomenologically and soundscape more scientifically, so childscape may be investigated in a more objective manner than via the study of autobiographies. I intend to ignore Piaget and the developmental psychologists; their work is well known. Less well known than it should be is the work of a small band of geographers, environmental psychologists, and architects who have attempted to define the shape of childscape through observation, participant observation, depth interviews, and other means of naturalistic enquiry. As with the elderly, the usual quantitative tools of questionairing social science rarely work well with children. The configuration of childscape emerges from an amalgam of autobiographical research, mental-map exercises, and observation of children's behaviour in their normal environmental settings. 'This feeling for the world of childhood as a fragmented map . . . with certain details luminously clear, while the intervening areas remain obscure or blank, and all the lands beyond a faceless and frightening terra incognita' (Coe 1984b, 128) is not only common in research involving the above methods, but may be confirmed by examining the mental maps of one's own children or the child-oriented novels of A. A. Milne, Arthur Ransome, or J.R.R. Tolkien. Very few children learn their local geography as did the unfortunate Edmund Gosse, whose father stood him up on prominent objects and charted all other objects within view. Rat!ler, children learn incrementally by adding known places and routeways to a normally domicentric mental chart. Home is invariably the centre. A child has little or no control over its environment. Home is the one place where some little control may be appropriated, so that at-easeness, the freedom to be, emerges (Seamon 1979). As the child develops, and horizons of reach (Buttimer 1980) extend, home remains the territorial core (Porteous 1976). The necessary sense of adventure gained by venturing from home is supported by knowledge that the home remains intact and the ways back to it are

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known. Chawla 0980), considering both the domain of physical and social space and the domain of thought and imagination, takes up the notion of 'centredness' to explain how, in artists, the horizons of thought and imagination appear to coincide with lived and remembered space. For most of us, the two overlap to differing degrees, but for some scientists, it appears, the two are disjoint and lack synchrony. Beyond home lies the world, which is a compound construct of the imaginative and the actual activity space. Denis Wood has spent many hours watching children play, and has recorded the elaborate processes of imitative learning and imaginative construction that go on (Gould 1985, 254). Even very small children appear to be able to re-create a world, in dirt or snow or sand, at their own scale, a world they can then look down into and manipulate. Little wonder that geographers have found that quite young children are able to understand both maps and air photographs. Some of these 'natural skills' appear to be lost during early school years and have to be painstakingly relearned. In a long project dealing with somewhat older schoolchildren, Hart (1979) studied the experience of place of the child residents of a small New England town. Direct observation of behaviour, depth interviews, some formal tests, and other techniques were used to gain knowledge of the gradual expansion of the spatial worlds of the children. Hart was able to isolate four themes in the children's involvement with space. The first, 'spatial activity,' involves mobility in the physical setting. Three distinct zones of successively larger parentally defined range are discernible: 'free range'; 'range with permission'; and 'range with other children.' Parents define the outer limits of these zones, often with traffic in mind, but within the zones the routes children habitually take are often unrelated to the paths taken by adults. Children cross both private and public property lines with some degree of impunity. Although range expands as children grow older, the dualism between home-centred protectiveness and the need to explore and escape is particularly clear in the obvious gender differences. At all ages, girls are more restricted by parental fiat and are kept closer to home both to avoid obvious dangers and to permit their socialization into domesticity. All children, however, seem to enjoy roaming after age eight or so, and in many cases (as with the elderly and many travellers) the journey is often the purpose of the trip. Spatial activity is likely to lead to 'place knowledge.' Such knowledge is usually limited to places directly experienced; places seen in the media or spoken about by adults are 'lost in space.' Even pre-school children are able to produce home-centred landscape models that are map-like,

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but as they grow up children are increasingly able to incorporate new elements (school, church, shopping centre) some distance from home. Children clearly learn their environment better if they move through it on their own feet or wheels, rather than in the parental car or school bus. This conforms with expected tenets of mental mapping (Porteous 1977). Again, because of their more liberated spatial range, the place knowledge of boys is more detailed than that of girls. The third theme, that of 'place use, ' is important for the insights Hart brings to our knowledge of child development. One of the most favoured environments is the small patch of dirt or waste ground, liberally provided with flexible landscape elements (soil, sand, vegetation) and loose parts (wood, stones, etc. ) for building. Children delight in the construction of houses, forts , and dens, role socialization a la Erik Erikson ensuring that, while boys concentrate on structural details, girls favour internal decoration. This finding strongly supports the intuitively derived concept of the English adventure playground or environmental 'workyard,' a concept not popular in North America because of an adult, puritan preoccupation with tidyness. Playground planners would also do well to note Hart's finding that a good deal of a child's play seems to consist of being quietly alone, resting, watching, or dabbling in sand or water. Obviously, there is a strong seasonal rhythm in New England play, a rhythm that might be less pronounced in Southern California. As the child grows and ventures farther from home, awareness progresses from a disconnected knowledge of home and local spaces, through the development of pathway-linked cognitive structures for orienting places, to the sophistication of a map-like perspective of space. Within this childscape, places gradually assume uses, names, and values that, together, evoke a rich landscape of childhood. The importance of 'place values' and feelings is a final major theme. To children, as to adults, places are not equally valued. Home is basic, but beyond home we encounter a rich landscape of activity niches in which places replete with dangerous possibilities seem to hold greatest value. Rivers and lakes, often forbidden places before about eight years of age, are most highly valued. The joy of danger is obvious to the child, if not to the adult. I spent much of my early youth clambering on muddy jetties over a dangerous river and saw one of my childhood companions drown in such a game. Children generally enjoy danger and risk, though this risk-taking behaviour is usually sublimated in adulthood, except for the unregenerate, such as Greene. Along with rivers and lakes, the other most-valued places, such as quarries, woods, ponds, and construction sites, are all replete with danger. Children clearly agree with both

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Graham Greene and Robert Browning who, in 'Bishop Blougram's Apology,' asserted that 'our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.' Children also appear to conform to Appleton's (1975) ethological notion of 'prospect and refuge' in their preference for environments that afford both. Hiding and lookout places are of great importance in play, a fact worthy of note by those who plan the sterile wastelands of municipal playgrounds. Gender differences reappear in the greater predilection of girls for home and interior spaces within the home. It is perhaps significant that very few children appear to evaluate any place in terms of purely aesthetic qualities. The notion of 'scenery' has to be inclucated in youth. It is also significant that the fear of being lost is important to children, and that, of all landscape features, forests and woods have the most marked limiting influence on the extent and configuration of children's ranges. Grimmland is clearly alive and well; we are not out of the wood yet. But, within their ranges, children clearly appropriate space and transform it into places via the process of naming. The childscape is both personal to the child and in part collectively recognizable to all neighbourhood children through naming. It is needless to say that children's names for landscape features rarely reflect the names used by adults or those enshrined in maps. The importance of naming, danger, and other themes noted above will be further brought out in the personal example that follows. Scenes from my childscape When I think about the life of any human being there are always three questions to which I want to know the answer. First, who and of what kind were his family ... secondly, what was his social class or group ... and thirdly, what was his physical home? Margaret Cole (1949, 126)

Few scientists, and hardly any geographers, have attempted to find out what childhood experiences coloured their sensibilities. Perhaps the most evocative is Cragg's (1982) brief 'family geography.' In answering the questions posed by Cole I shall state briefly that my family were working-class East Yorkshire people who resided at the post office, which my mother ran, in a small hamlet of two hundred inhabitants called Howdendyke. As a child I could not know that my mother's very rare family name had been extant in that neighbourhood since 1295. I was aware, however, that I lived in a large extended family network, and

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that I knew every person in the village by name. My childscape was very personal. A few elements of this 'physical home' follow, and may serve as a test of some of the general notions expressed in earlier sections. First, to set the scene, it is as if the late 1940s and early 1950s in Howdendyke were the 'days before' everything. They were the days before street lighting; we groped about, used the moon, took a flashlight. The days before sewage systems and water closets; to use 'the can' was not a euphemism. The days before the British working classes took to cars; we walked, we ran, we biked, hitched lifts in trucks. The days before paid holidays; we never went very far from home. The days of a six-day working week; when did we last see our fathers? The days before television; whatever did we do with ourselves? And above all, the days before electricity. The days before the washing-machine; red-armed women using tubs and washboards, possers, dollies. The days before clothes-driers; a winter kitchen full of steaming clothes, drying on the clothes-horse before the coal fire, absorbing the only heat available to keep us warm. The days before central heating; you huddled to the single coal fire, front roasting, back freezing, capillaries bursting and discolouring in women's legs. The days before hot-water heaters and baths; what the back-fire boiler couldn't heat came from the kettle on the copper and you bathed laboriously on Fridays in a tin tub before the fire. The days before refrigerators; shopping every day. The days before the electric stove; food cooked in the coal oven (which was warm enough when the cat got out) or directly on the coal fire. There is a fine art in boiling and frying over live coals. And toasting, too, is a dangerous enterprise. I came to North America in riotous 1968 at age twenty-four. At twenty-five I first turned on a television set (I had often turned them off) and learned to drive a car (car-driving was not a puberty rite in the days before, when there were haystacks aplenty). In North America I found that the normal household goods of my recent childhood were 'antiques,' 'collectibles,' or museum pieces -fish-knives, flat-irons, paraffin lamps, stone hot-water bottles, iron bedsteads, jugs and bowls, and washstands. When 'progress' came to Howdendyke in the late 1950s, we threw all this old stuff into the river; these were the days before 'ecology.' Thirty-five years ago; a generation. The days before. Two landscape features stand out in my memory. One is the riverside Chemical Works, which produced agricultural fertilizer and was known locally as 'T'Chemics.' The other is Howdendyke Post Office, my childhood home. The former provided adventure; the latter, security; these are the twin poles of a child's life.

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T'Chemics reared a tall black chimney, streaked with white, above the village. You could see it from any angle. It was our dreaming spire. Below it huddled the low factory buildings, fronting the river, and around the works spread village and fields. 'Ouse Chemical Works' it said on a board near the office, but to us it was T'Chemics. Uncle George worked at T'Chemics. No one else in the family did. But nearly everyone in the village worked there. Every morning T'Chemics' whistle blew, every lunch-time twice, and again at knocking-off time at night. You could set your watch by those whistles, if you had a watch. Most of the raw materials for T'Chemics came upriver by barge. Three jetties lunged from the river front of the factory into the Ouse, and all vessels tied up at one of these. Big cranes with grabs hauled up fine white powders, which sometimes spread in a light, penetrating dust all over the village. This was at First Jetty, relatively new and made of concrete. Second Jetty had two storeys; the men at T'Chemics called it 'Tay Bridge.' Pulleys from the top storey let down huge wicker baskets that were hauled up again, full of rough raw materials. The baskets were made of willow, and held together with rope. They were like potatobaskets, the kind you used for tatie-picking, but bigger. Eventually they wore and broke, cascading a cargo of heavy materials among the shovellers in the ship's hold below. Discarded baskets were slung into the river, to rot away in the mud. Long after baskets were abandoned in favour of cranes and metal grabs, you could see them poking out of the mud at low tide, for all the world like strange, stranded, seabirds' nests. Third Jetty was different again. It had a little railway whose tracks looped at the end of the jetty. Small rail wagons were filled from the barges and carried materials into the works. We liked to play on this miniature railway, and when a train of empty tubs was left unattended on the line, it was our joy to clamber from tub to tub and even to uncouple the tubs from each other and push them around the track. This led to much cursing and complaining to mothers by the workmen. 'Keep away from that third jetty,' cried the mothers. 'It ain't safe.' 'It's dangerous,' said Mother. 'You could be crushed between those wagons.' But we liked third jetty best, because, at low tides, barges would tie up there before going farther upriver. Some of these barges carried peanuts to the oil-crushing factories at Selby, miles upstream. When such a barge put in, youths converged. Bargemen were besieged. 'Hey mister. Any monkey-nuts?' 'Gi'us some monkey-nuts, mister.' 'Have you any spare?' 'Mister, gi'us a few.'

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Sometimes a sack of unshelled peanuts was heaved up from below. We fell upon its contents with ferocity. At other times we would be asked, rudely, why we couldn't get enough monkey-nuts at home. Others told us to bugger off. One bargee would shout: 'Monkey-nuts? Ain't got none. Monkey ain't been laying this week.' But even more fascinating than the monkey-nuts were the bones. Huge barge-loads of partially crushed bones were shipped into T'Chemics, there to be further ground into fertilizer. They were probably animal bones, but tales were spread of human bones dug up from the battlefields of Flanders and brought over from Indian famines. If you were very careful, you could creep into T'Chemics, past the millmen at their 'drinkings,' and clamber into the metal hoppers below the crushing machinery. Each hopper was as big as a fair-sized room, and as deep. Crushed powdered bones, a fine grey dust, fell in a steady stream from a central chute into each hopper. You had to wait until a hopper was almost full before venturing in, because you had to be able to reach the rim in order to get out again. And you had to stay near the edge and avoid slowly sinking into the powder, which lay ten feet deep below you. Treading powder, anxiously avoiding the steady fall from the overhead chute, our shoes filling with gritty particles, our eyes smarting, our hair and skin itching, we searched for bones. Sometimes small bones miraculously survived the crushers and fell with the powder into the hoppers. They seemed mostly to be teeth. Honour was satisfied when each member of the group could show two or three teeth. Bone searching was rather an ordeal, but, once it had been suggested, no one would back out of the adventure. Thankfully we heaved ourselves out of the hoppers, crept past the millmen yawning in their oil-stained overalls, and felt the fresh river air on our faces. Shaking ourselves free of the clinging dust, beating each other's sweaters and trousers, we went home with our trophies. The fertilizer ate small holes in our clothes, which our mothers put down to moths. T'Chemics was full of white powdery dust. It made you cough and prickled at your skin. It also covered the outsides of the factory buildings, and on windy days it blew across the village and women hastily took in their washing. It collected on window-panes and sifted through doors and cracks. Women complained: 'We can't never keep nowt clean in this village.' 'It's tillage. It's good for you. Makes you grow,' said the men. And, with a finality that could not be refuted: 'Where there's muck there's brass.' With all that muck we should have been rich. Apart from the factory, our village had two streets of houses. One ran

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in from the nearby town, originally to the ferry that used to ply from the landing near our house. This road was known as Ferry Road, but become North Street as it approached the river. We played cricket in the middle of it, moving our wickets of old bricks only when the occasional vehicle came through. The other street ran along the river bank fronting T'Chemics. The two streets ran at right angles to each other, and met at the village post office on the river bank. Our shop and post office was thus the focus of the village. Nearby was The Square, an open space fronted on one side by old houses, on the others by the river, the Jubilee Hall, and the village's only pub, The Ouse Chemical Works Working Men's Club and Institute. Workmen passing on their way to both Club and T'Chemics called in the shop for cigarettes. During working hours womenfolk came in for postal orders, biscuits, tea, stamps, flour, and patent medicines. Every day the mail was dropped here at seven in the morning and then delivered throughout the village. You could tell it had been an old shop. A directory mentioned the post office in 1879, and old Johnny Fleming, its proprietor, left draughtexcluding souvenirs in the form of shirts stuffed in cracks and newspapers pasted to walls, all neatly covered with wallpaper. Under the shop's front window stood two huge wooden flour bins, now full of junk, lidded over, and covered with piles of biscuits, tins of crisps, packets of tea. The back wall of the shop was a mass of narrow shelves and tiny wooden drawers. None of these drawers held anything of value, and some were stuck shut by repeated paintings. The shelves supported packets of tea, biscuits, bottles of soft drinks, large and small, and packets offlour. Lyons's tea came in several qualities, distinguishable by the colour of the packet. The teabag had not been invented; when my mother first saw one, she thought it was a convenient method of measuring out tea leaves for the pot. Smith's Crisps came in greaseproof paper packets, packed in airtight cubic tins. Each packet contained salt in a twist of blue paper; it was often damp. Over the empty drawers hung cardboard placards on which small glass bottles were secured by means of elastic. These were patent medicines; people swore by them, and probably at them too. Parkinson's Pills, of Burnley, were clearly able to restore almost the dead to life. Each type of pill was good not for a single ailment only, but for two. 'Liver and Kidney' pills jostled with 'Head and Stomach' and other dual reminders of the human interior. All were whitish-grey in colour and sugar-coated. But if you sucked off the sugar, they were universally foul within. 'The wuss they taste, the better they are,' said the old folks.

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Cigarettes reposed on a shelf behind the counter. Their variety reflected individual tastes; Capstan Full Strength, for example, was kept for a single customer only. Most had romantic, old-fashioned names: 'Player's Weights,' 'Navy Cut,' 'Wild Woodbine,' 'Robin,' 'Passing Clouds.' The cheaper ones were sold in open packets of five, but some people asked Mother to break even these packets so that they could purchase one or two cigarettes at a time. In time you learned what individuals preferred, and they had only to ask for 'ten cigs' for you to unerringly pick the correct packet from the shelf. The counter was a massive affair of wood, about ten feet long, four or more feet high, and several feet wide. On the house side, it was full of drawers and recesses in which Dad kept his tools and Mother kept string, paper bags, and sundry oddments. Most of the Post Office items, and the till, were in a capacious central drawer. Some drawers were empty and remained so for years. We discovered that they were open at the rear to the large central recess in the counter quite by accident. A long-unopened drawer one day began to squeak and was hurriedly opened to reveal the cat and a litter of newborn kittens. The shop and the post office were supposed to operate separately. For shop goods people paid irregularly. When I served in the shop some customers were more inclined to pay cash. Others simply asked me to 'put it on t'bill' or 'chalk it up.' Perhaps half the village had 'tick,' for no small shopkeeper in a rural village could afford to operate without such a credit system. On Fridays wives rolled up to pay off their bills of the previous week. By Monday all their money had gone and they were 'on tick' again. Mother had no regular account books, but kept records on the backs of envelopes, on pieces of scrap paper, on old cigarette packets. All these were thrust into a counter drawer and pulled out for totting up on Fridays. The post office could not officially give 'tick'; it was subject to sudden audits on the part of the central postal authorities. So people had to pay on the spot for their stamps, dog licences, television licences, and postal orders. Pensioners came on 'pension day' for old-age, disability, and war-service pensions. At one time elderly people were even given coupons for tobacco. Mother was the village scribe. She had left school at fourteen, like most people of her age, but was superbly literate, mainly through self-study. Some villagers, in contrast, were either illiterate or unable to put pen to paper effectively. Many official fonns had therefore to be referred to Mother. Hardly a day went by without someone bringing in a form for her to complete. In this way she gained a lively appreciation of

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people's lives and circumstances, which appeared only to increase her tolerance. Some were apparently unable to complete even their football-pool coupons. These were diligently completed, under direction, by Mother, and the postal order written, the materi,d inserted in the envelope, the stamp licked and affixed. In time some villagers came to regard this as normal post-office service. 'Why don't you pay for the postal order, as well?' I would ask in exasperation. 'Not many need it doing,' said Mother. 'Some are old and some are daft.' Few people in the village had telephones, perhaps a half-dozen at most. The rest of the population had to rely on a tall red public-telephone kiosk that stood eccentrically at the far end of the village from the post office. Many people would not walk so far, and some simply could not master the technique of using a public telephone, with all those forbidding knobs, dials, and A and B buttons. This led to a heavy demand for use of the post-office telephone, which was supposed to be used for official business only, except for a limited number of 'private calls.' Good nature usually prevailed. Calls had to be placed through the operator as a 'private call' and the phone then transferred to the suppliant. You could speak forever on a local call for fourpence (my record with one girl-friend was two and one-quarter hours). But this sometimes led to a customer abusing the privilege by spending half an hour on the wrong side of the counter. Time, however, did not seem important to us. Clock hours were not often referred to, even by adults. Time for work and time for school were the points around which our lives revolved. There were also: time for dinner; time for tea; opening time; and time for bed. All these were daily times. Most other times were weekly times, such as pay-day, and time to pay off 'tick.' Travelling retailers came once a week at a regular hour. Shitty Billy Austwick brought produce by horse and cart from his nearby farm. And on Fridays came the fishman from Hull, the butcherman on Tuesdays, the green-grocerman on Wednesdays. Twice a week came the van from Rambla Bakeries of Beverley, piloted, naturally, by the Ramblaman. At one time we were even visited by an evil-smelling mobile fish-and-chip shop from far-off York, although this remarkable phenomenon (fish-and-chipman) did not last long. But, for children, Sunday was the important day, for after lunch there came the ice-cream man.

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If the ice-cream man was late we could watch for him along the river. From our backyard wall, which ran along the inner side of the river bank, you could stand and look for several miles downriver, along the curving bank. A dark brown or shiny silver river, a blue and white sky, and in between the lush green of trees, farms, and high river bank. Against this green background, the white dot of the ice-cream van could be spied two or more miles away, near Skelton Bridge, and we could enjoy the anticipation as it crept along the river-bank road with frequent stops for customers. After the ice-cream man had gone, Sundays always seemed a little flatter. You could also watch for the bus coming along the same road. Even though the Lincolnshire Road Car Company's buses were deep green, you could distinguish them as a moving green object against a static verdant background. You had to watch for the buses. They were not always on time and sometimes a driver would miss out our village altogether. But mostly they came right into the village and turned round in North Street about fifty yards from the post office. Then you could travel to Howden (two miles) or even to Goole, five miles away, across the river, a foreign place in a different county where people used different words for things and kids called 'goodies' 'spice.' The buses came on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, and Saturday evenings. If you missed one, or on other days, you had to walk or bike. No one had a car. A few had motorbikes. No one went very far. Mother and Father visited my grandparents in York, but most people were content to visit Howden or Goole once a week, with occasional trips to Hull. To get to York you took a taxi two miles to Howden (no morning buses), then a bus ten miles to Selby, then a second bus fifteen miles to York. The twenty-five mile journey took about two hours each way, for these were country buses with frequent stops. But York was worth it. Where else had castles, walls, battlements, tall church towers, and narrow windy streets. Besides, I had been born there, in the Purey Cust Nursing Home adjacent to York Minster. And you can't be more Yorkshire than that. Not only did we have relatively few contacts with the outside world, we were also poorly supplied in terms of modem conveniences. Public utilities were a long time reaching Howdendyke. In our village in the 1940s, a few houses, including our own, had gas lighting. Most had 'tilley lamps,' and our shop did a brisk trade in paraffin (kerosene). People brought their own containers, and we measured out the paraffin in gallons and half-gallons. Serving paraffin was a nuisance. It meant you had to leave the customer alone in the shop while you went

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down to the coalhouse in the backyard. Consequently, I was often called upon to serve the paraffin while Mother kept the customer company in the shop. The paraffin reposed in a five-foot-high metal container. One day the cat fell in and drowned. When the drum was half-empty and I had to lean right in to scoop up the liquid I often feared the same fate. Below half-empty I could not reach, until I learned to tip and swivel the heavy drum. The whole business was dirty and smelly. I was glad when electricity came. I was not the only one. One old lady became deeply enamoured of the electricity system. Naked lamp bulbs were hung from her cottage ceilings during the installation period, and blazed all day and night for several days thereafter. Finally, while delivering the mail, Mother approached her and tactfully asked how she liked the new electric light. 'Ee, I do like that "lectric,"' she replied. 'It saves a right lot of messing about with them tilley lamps. And doesn't it last a long time?' Everyone used coal as the main source of heat. The coalman came weekly, and coal was rationed. Life was cold during strikes or if the coalman didn't come. Those with small houses were lucky. A coal fire and range in one room could readily heat that room to roasting point and take the chill off the adjacent room and the two bedrooms above. But our house had six rooms beside the shop, and a coal fire was regularly lit only in one, although one other downstairs room and one bedroom had fireplaces. Back-fire boilers provided hot water in some houses, such as ours, but never much and never dependably. Going to bed in winter was an agony, but a normal, regular agony. Bedrooms were freezing, sometimes damp. Blankets and eiderdowns were piled on in geological layers; hot-water bottles or a wrapped hot brick were de rigeur. We must have held the world record for speedy undressing, donning pajamas, and leaping into a very cold bed. You soon warmed up the bed by body heat, but any exposed skin surface was liable to go blue with cold. Yet it was impossible to cover everything without smothering. An ear and nose had to be left exposed as the temperature plummeted. Luckily we had not heard of central heating and so envied no one. This was life. Yet, the child's life was clearly not lived wholly indoors. The 'Childscape' map illustrates the fully appropriated world of my childhood self, aged ten (1953, Coronation Year). Map nomenclature is important here. Children shared with adults a very personal set of geographic names that had no counterparts on official maps (Fuchs 1989). Names such as the 'Cricket Field' and 'Kissing Gate' established clearly demarcated functional zones. 'Shitty Billy's Farm' and 'Whel-

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