Writing on the Wall (26 page)

In general, landscape, where found at all in the recent Western novel, tends to be exotic, tropical, or sub-tropical, Mexican, North African, Central African, Greek-islandish, Capricious, and this of course reflects average contemporary experience, for which the outdoors is strictly a vacation area, pictured in travel brochures and airline advertising. Already the safaris and duck-hunts of Hemingway had less in common with the hunts of Turgenev and Tolstoy—or with Lawrence’s “The Fox”—than with the present-day escape industry, in which seasonal expatriates and fashion models, following the sun, look for unspoiled corners of the earth to despoil. Even his early fishing-stories, set in the North Woods, struck a mannered and self-conscious note; compare
Huckleberry Finn.
What betrays the bad faith of Hemingway is the invariable intrusion of the social into a natural context: hierarchies, exclusions, competitive brio. He is concerned with behavior, which he confuses with action and conduct. Among his American followers,
anti
-social behavior may be inserted in the outdoors, with incongruous effects; consider the skin-diving hero of James Jones’s
Go to the Widow-Maker
(the title is from Kipling) masturbating, in his snorkel, in a deep-sea cave.

But to understand the disappearance of what might be called the normal outdoors—sunsets, birds, trees, fields, pastures, waterfalls—from the contemporary novel, it is important to recall that it was not always an important presence. The great explosion of Nature into fiction occurred in the nineteenth century. Early in the century descriptive writing had abounded not in prose but in the verse of the Romantic poets, though actually, in England, the
plein air
movement of poets and poetry had begun in the Age of Classicism. It coincided with the Industrial Revolution (begun circa 1750), that is, with the erosion of the countryside by the dark satanic mills. Thomson’s
The Seasons
is usually given as the demarcation point, following Wordsworth’s claim that between
Paradise Lost
and
The Seasons
(about sixty years), English poetry, with two exceptions, does not contain “a single new image of external nature and scarcely presents a familiar one that seems to be drawn directly from experience and worked on by imagination.” In fact the Romantic poets may have represented the last spurt of an impulse found in Thomson, Cowper, Collins, Akenside, even Crabbe, not to mention Blake sitting naked with his wife in his garden. Still we see Nature-worship less in Blake’s tiger or Collins’ weak-eyed bat than in the effusions of their successors. Hymns to Mont Blanc, “Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree...on a desolate part of the shore commanding a beautiful Prospect.” Wordsworth had the habit of leaving his verses behind him, to be reabsorbed by Nature in her metabolic process, as though his bardic utterance were some sort of organic material: “Written with a Slate Pencil upon a Stone, the largest of a Heap lying near a deserted Quarry.” He kept copies, however, which went in the normal way to the printer.

As everyone knows, the Romantic poets were fond of the common wild flower—the celandine, oxlip, field daisy, snowdrop—of autumn leaves, larks, and cuckoos, that is, of Nature in its most ordinary and minute particulars. But the words “desolate,” “deserted” point to the true Romantic taste in the outdoors, a taste you do not find in the previous generation, mostly stay-at-homes. For Wordsworth and his circle, the “little unpretending rill,” the “Brook! whose society the Poet seeks,” the field of yellow daffodils, but even more kindling to fancy, lakes, mountains, lonely shores—what used to be known as “scenery.”

Scenery, a word seldom used nowadays, could be defined as Nature arranged in purple passages for the traveler. In principle, you have to travel to find scenery, which was the only kind of Nature Byron responded to; Shelley too had a liking for Promethean vantage-points of a sort not found in rural England. But Wordsworth and his friends accepted the ethical task of showing that scenery was also distributed democratically, in small units, in your own back yard; the lesser celandine should produce the same moments of exaltation, of communion with the infinite as a mountain pass or the roaring ocean. This is the burden of Coleridge’s beautiful poem “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,” where he regrets that owing to an injury he cannot accompany his friends to a waterfall and wild dell where the adder’s tongue and mountain ash grow but comforts himself for the loss by seeing “good” in the humble-bee and the bean-flower and ivy of his own domestic bower, shaded by lime and walnut. More prosily, Wordsworth actually wrote a poem to the “Spade of a Friend (an Agriculturalist). Composed while we were labouring together in his Pleasure-ground.”

There is no doubt that Romanticism, as practiced by this circle, was a social doctrine—a protest against industrialism and the reification of man by technology. In “The Excursion” (1814) Wordsworth declaims against the pollution of the countryside by the manufactories. A bell of doom rings out over the afternoon fields calling children and women, men and boys to work the night shift of the cotton mill; yet the poet is under no illusion that rural toil, as he observes it, is much better. He has gone beyond the whistling farm-boy of
The Seasons
running happily behind the plow. For Wordsworth, “Our life is turned Out of her course, wherever man is made An offering, or a sacrifice, a tool Or implement, a passive thing employed as a brute mean.” This is an echo of Kant, and in the poet’s criticism of industry, he foreshadows Tolstoy: “A bondage lurking under the shape of good—Arts in themselves beneficent and kind But all too fondly followed and too far—.” In this poem, he is also worried by the population explosion. The balance of Nature, such as he had known it in his boyhood, is being undone by industry, by the robotization of the farm laborer, and by demographic increase. The only remedy he perceives is universal education plus migration to the colonies; he fastened his hopes for England on the Empire...As for the poet himself, opting out was the sole resource. The Romantic protest forlornly anticipated the hippie movement by more than a hundred and fifty years: Coleridge’s and De Quincey’s opium, the colony of friends in the Lake Country, where Coleridge, city-bred, rejoices that his child will grow up by “lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags of ancient mountain...”

This savage scenery, which was associated with a sense of freedom, also revealed itself to the Romantic painters. Nature painting, as such, came in with the Romantic movement: peaks, cliffs, caverns, storms at sea. Landscape had entered painting in the Renaissance, as a background to a portrait or as the sympathetic setting of a sacred event—a Nativity or Baptism or Transfiguration. Snow-covered distant peaks, appropriately, were first seen in the Swiss painters of the Renaissance,
e.g.,
Hans Fries. And before the Romantic period there was the landscape painting of Poussin, classical in design but tinged with Romantic feeling; there were Claude Lorrain, Cuyp, Ruysdael, Gainsborough, Richard Wilson...

Roughly speaking, the pre-Romantics saw Nature in her ordered aspect, as the classic
rus
of the Eclogues and Georgics, while the Romantics saw it as wild, insubordinate, elemental. The classic
rus,
whose goddess was Pomona, was a celebration of the
routines
of Nature, the calendar of agriculture. It is the same classic
rus
you find in a great deal of pre-Romantic verse, above all in Crabbe and in Thomson’s
The Seasons.
The classic
rus
is the harbinger of Romantic Nature, both in poetry and in painting. It is the barn swallow preceding a great flight of eagles. Or the market cart as a Trojan horse out of which would spring the wild horses of Gericault and Delacroix.

Yet this distinction, which would admit into the
rus
the hunters in Breughel’s snowy scene, has a hard time with Claude, on the one hand, and Ruysdael, on the other. Another difference, perhaps more significant, is that in Romantic painting for the first time (or almost, leaving out the animal painters) you find landscape with no people in it. No gods or goddesses, no peasants, no picnickers. Just empty Nature, clouds, trees, waves, rock, waterfalls. Here Ruysdael must be counted as the great precursor; those lonely brown woodlands traversed by mysterious roads, like the arteries of some unknown life-system, appear at first glance utterly uninhabited, and the tiny figures that can usually be descried at second glance were put in by an assistant, to satisfy seventeenth-century convention: Ruysdael, it seems, did not know how to paint the human form. In his forest landscapes, aside from some tawny vegetable-like cottages, the ribbony roads leading nowhere were the sole allusion he was capable of making to man’s presence in the universe. The painter was alone with Nature. This did not occur again for more than a century.

Solitude marks the change, just as in poetry. The Romantic poet, wrapped in a cloak, contemplating the sea, the mountains, the desert, was the unique spectator: Shelley on the Euganean Hills far from the “polluted multitude.” And something of the sort seized the novel a little later in the century. The characters were held offstage, while the author communed with Nature, penning a description of the setting and the accompanying weather. A nineteenth-century novel frequently opened with a panorama of the region, which eventually narrowed to pick out a single small figure crossing the poetic space. Think of Cooper’s
The Prairie
or the wonderful aerial perspective of the first chapter of Manzoni’s
I Promessi Sposi,
with the “camera” swooping down to focus on Don Abbondio. Or Egdon Heath and the reddleman. Or the “questionable” sound of the weaver’s loom coming from a stone cottage at the start of
Silas Marner,
not far from a deserted stone-pit.

Generally, in a novel, the convergence on a single figure or group of figures in a bare unpopulated landscape foreshadows a grim outcome, for the novel is a social medium; the poet may be led to inspired musings by an encounter with a leech-gatherer, but such a meeting in the first chapter of a novel would symbolize doom. Nature, whether man-ordered (Horace’s Sabine farm) or pure and undefiled, like the Muses’ spring, has always figured in literature as the opposite of Society. The town is the moral wilderness, if it is only a village or hamlet, but this moral wilderness is the novel’s stamping-ground, and indeed there is a territorial imperative that appears to call country-bred heroes and heroines to the town in order to complete their novelistic destiny: Emma Bovary, Julien Sorel, Tess, Pip, Jude, Renzo in
I Promessi Sposi.

In parenthesis, it ought to be said that in modern times the old opposition between country and city, virtue and vice, still holds but with the difference that farmland and pasture and orchard are no longer equated with Nature in her purging, purifying aspect. This is particularly true in America, where “the great outdoors” is by convention limited to the West, the Southwest, the North Woods—ranch country, Hemingway country, rattlesnake country, bear country, ABM country. This notion, which has belligerent moralistic overtones, identifies Nature with bigness. When Senator Joe McCarthy was preparing for his great crusade against “Communists-in-government,” he did not retire to the Wisconsin dairyland to replenish his forces by contact with Mother Earth. He went west to Arizona, where he found “real Americans without any synthetic sheen on them.” This ranch life, doubtless based on a frozen-food locker, was Joe McCarthy’s version of Romantic pastoral.

It is possibly no accident that Romanticism in politics and literature originated, with Rousseau, in Switzerland—the home of “scenery.” Rousseau’s natural man, alienated by institutions from his true self, is of course a fictive creature, like McCarthy’s “real Americans,” viewed as the salt of the earth, non-iodized. Yet if the reality of this fiction is accepted, if man-made institutions are regarded as a conspiracy against Nature or against man’s natural goodness incorporated in the nation, then obviously the tall timber or the desert is a better school for re-education than the farm. But if, on the contrary, country life with its routines is looked on as a repository of precious traditions, stored like preserves in the buttery, the farm, with its dependencies of woodland, grist-mill, carpentry-shop, and so on, becomes the point of contact between man and animals, man and the seasons, man and the vegetable and aqueous worlds. That is how Tolstoy saw it, opposing what was false to what was natural, in human behavior as well as in medicine, art, law, and farm methods, and the natural, for Tolstoy, included a great deal that had been learned, over centuries, and that it would be unnatural to forget, as people in society are wont to do. Thus civilization is an organic accumulation or compost, to which the common people, that is, the peasantry, have more ready access than the bureaucrat or the worldling, both of whom may appear as boors or primitives in comparison to the God-fearing rustic. The earmarks of the natural are not always apparent to logic (serfdom, an “historical” institution, was an unnatural state of affairs,
i.e.,
evil, whereas the village commune, another long-standing institution, was natural and good), but common sense, more prevalent among simple people than among the educated, was the faculty, almost like an animal instinct, by which the truth could be recognized. The characteristic, in fact, of truth for Tolstoy was its recognizability; the truth (compare Socrates) is what we have “always” known. Hence truth and Nature are the same; both are
there,
at once outside man and in his heart.

This view, which is easily confused with the doctrines of Romantic politics since both oppose Society in its urban forms, does not assume, however, a natural goodness in man or in Nature either; rather the reverse, as can be seen from Tolstoy’s picture of war as a blind force unaccountably sweeping the world and moving bodies of armed men back and forth across the map slaying and killing, like the destructive sexual passions, which rise and subside. War is a truth, seemingly permanent, which cannot be explained away by historians seeking proximate causes, which, if not present, would have obviated this or that conflict.