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- Herausgeber: Honno Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
One is in everything. One lives throughout the universe and beyond... One of the most remarkable women writers of the mid-twentieth century, Margiad Evans is a key post-modern Welsh author in the English language. Written as a series of nature journals, Margiad Evans' Autobiography (1943), is an extraordinary experiment in what she called 'earth writing'. It explores in delicate and precise detail the writer's intensely-felt, even mystical relationship with the natural world. From 1941, she lived in a farmworker's cottage, Potacre, on the summit of a hill above Llangarron and in sight of the Welsh mountains. A meditation on the difficulty of translating the reality of the 'now' into words, Autobiography traces a spiritual journey towards understanding the profound connection between all living things.
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY
MARGIAD EVANS
With an introduction by Diana Wallace
Welsh Women’s Classics
CONTENTS
Introduction
DIANA WALLACE
‘this autobiography is the record of my gravest (that is happiest) inner existence’
This extraordinary book is not an autobiography in the sense that we usually understand the word. Although it is closely concerned with identity, place and time, it gives us very little of the information we usually expect from traditional life writing. Rather, as Margiad Evans herself indicates, it is an intimate account of a writer’s inner life which is also an experiment in what she calls ‘earth writing’. Written as a series of nature journals or essays, it explores in delicate and precise detail Evans’s intensely-felt, even mystical, relationship with the natural world. It also wrestles with the problem of language – how to find the words to convey experiences which are physical, sensory and immediate. A meditation on the difficulty of translating the reality of the ‘now’ into words, Autobiography traces a spiritual journey towards an understanding of the profound connection between all living things.
While Autobiography is an intensely personal book, it gives us very few facts to anchor the text in the external life of the woman writing it. If this is not a conventional autobiography, it is not a traditional journal or nature diary either. The opening sentence of the first section, ‘A Little Journal of Being Alone’, locates us in the season – ‘Midwinter and all dulled but the wind and the stars’ (p. 5) – but gives us no more detail of year or place. The second section, ‘The Winter Journal’, gives us a little more: ‘Christmas, 1939. Brookend’. But where is Brookend? The dates of this section run until 22 March 1940. But then the third section is an essay enigmatically entitled ‘The Ninth Month is the First’ which considers the mysterious process of germination as seeds hidden in the soft red earth wait ready to burst into life. Of the thirteen sections, four are ‘journals’ or diaries, edited sections from Evans’s journals written between 1939 and 1943. While the arrangement is roughly chronological, the journals are thematically organised so ‘Journals at Dawn’, in the centre of the book, starts again in 1939 and includes extracts from 1940 and 1941. ‘Little Nature Diary’, on the other hand, is dated from 30 April to 13 July but gives no year (although internal evidence locates it in 1941). The other sections are more formal essays such as ‘Before the Snow’, ‘The Field’ or ‘Beet Hoeing’, which are sometimes related to the journals, and meditate on particular themes.
Far from recollecting an entire life span, the period covered by the book is just three or four years – from January 1939 to 1942. These are, of course, the early years of the war but there are only a couple of glancing references to this. There is no obvious narrative of events structuring the text. Instead, the sometimes fragmentary sections capture with immediacy and precision the sensory impressions of what are often short or fleeting moments of time. One essay, ‘The Autobiography of an Afternoon’, focuses in on just a few hours and is, Evans tells us, the ‘story of what was around and within me that afternoon’ (p. 143). As she lies on the hillside, she looks with careful and exact attention at what is around her: the gorse bloom, the minute creatures in the grass, an oak leaf with ‘exactly the grain and surface of calf-skin when it is stretched over the boards of an old book’ (p. 144), the pupa she finds when she splits open a stalk of bracken. She listens too – to the sound of the stream pouring over a rock, to ‘the delicate wheezing cries of the wrens’ (p. 147), and ‘the slight swinging of the twig tips as oak and hazel touched’ (p. 147). As her senses wander they receive impressions which lead her to insights into the continuity and connectedness between herself and the external world: ‘One is in everything. One lives throughout the universe and beyond […] All existences merge, even physically. Things more than resemble one another, they are more than kin, they are one manifestation’ (p.148). These insights come from a form of stillness and a particular quality of open attention: in the following essay this is expressed in the voice of the rain as, ‘“Look, listen, open”’ (p. 157).
Memory is important here too: the afternoon holds layers of recollection. Evans remembers going down to the brook for water that morning and watching a pair of chaffinches playing around the bank and then an adder coming down to the stream. ‘I love the viper,’ she writes, by which she means that she is ‘intensely interested’ in him: ‘He is marvellous, salutary, innocent and bright, without a slur. I admire him with all my being’ (p. 152). Her attentiveness to natural things enables her to encompass even something she has previously feared. The short grass stitched with tiny flowers on the hilltop reminds her of her sister Sian, and their ‘dear significant spots’ (p. 153) in childhood. The joy which Evans feels simply sitting on the grass, looking and listening, is profound and precious: ‘There’s nothing,’ she writes, ‘I would not give to retain this which is all the meaning in life to me’ (p. 154). This book, then, is a spiritual autobiography, an account of Evans’s ‘gravest (that is happiest) inner existence’ (p. 216) which is sustained and nurtured by her attention to, and engagement, with the external natural world.
Becoming ‘Margiad Evans’
For the external ‘facts’ of Margiad Evans’s life we have to look elsewhere. Evans was, as Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan says, ‘one of the finest prose writers in English this century.’1 In her lifetime, she published four striking and innovative novels – Country Dance (1932), The Wooden Doctor (1933), Turf or Stone (1934) and Creed (1936) – a collection of short stories, two autobiographical volumes, Autobiography and A Ray of Darkness (1952), and two collections of poetry. Today she is little known outside Wales and that fact may be attributed to her gender, the fact that she lived mainly in Herefordshire rather than in London, her affiliation with ‘Anglo-Welsh’ writers, and the unconventional nature of her writing. While her work is often experimental in its form and its attention to language, it does not sit easily in the traditional English Modernist canon. More recently, the work of scholars like Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, Moira Dearnley and the generosity of Evans’s nephew, Jim Pratt, have made available a great deal of valuable critical and biographical material and this gives us a context within which to understand the remarkable achievement of Evans’s writing.2
‘Margiad Evans’ was the pen-name adopted by Peggy Eileen Whistler. An English-born writer, she chose a Welsh pen-name, inspired by family connections, which signalled her affinity with the Welsh Border country where she chose to live. Born in Uxbridge on 17 March 1909, she was the second of the four children of Godfrey Whistler and Katherine Wood. While Godfrey Whistler’s family was of Oxfordshire origin, it was his mother, Ann Evans, who was believed to be of Welsh extraction and this provided the surname for her grand-daughter’s nom du plume. (Margiad is a Welsh form of Margaret, for which Peggy is a common diminutive or pet-name.) Katherine Wood, a gifted musician, was of Yorkshire origin with some Irish blood. From London, the family moved to Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire. Godfrey Whistler, however, was an alcoholic and, after he resigned from his job as an insurance clerk in 1918, the family faced a period of uncertainty with no permanent home. The marriage disintegrated into bitterness. In her autobiographical novel, The Wooden Doctor, Evans graphically describes the terrible damage done to family life by a father who was ‘an habitual and incurable drunkard’: ‘We sharpened our claws in one another’s flesh. Our home among the quiet fields became a cage of savagery.’3 In Evans’s novels sexual relationships, particularly marriage, tend to be places of conflict, often violent and damaging, sometimes fatally.
It was during this early period of familial upheaval (and perhaps because of it) that the nine-year-old Peggy Whistler fell in love with the Border country around Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire. Her father took her to stay with his sister Annie and her husband on their farm, Benhall, on the banks of the Wye to the north-west of Ross. Many years afterwards she described the intense emotions which overcame her when walking with her father by the river:
After some moments he turned away, expecting me to follow him. I did not. He called. I still looked at the river, and some powerful emotion began to rise in me, some desperate adoration. He called again. I turned away and followed him, but when he looked down…he saw me in a passion of tears. With consternation he stooped, coaxed. What was the matter? All I could sob was: ‘Oh don’t, don’t take me away from this place.’4
Two years later in 1920, Peggy and her younger sister Nancy (called Sian in Evans’s work) spent a year living with their aunt and uncle at Benhall. Set in a mixed dairy and arable farm of around 300 acres, Benhall’s Georgian farmhouse sits on a slight rise overlooking the river at the end of a lane shaded by tall trees. The sisters were able to run wild in the pastures and by the wide river. In Autobiography, Evans recalls the names of the fields: ‘Sian, do you remember – how dearly do you remember – the Mountain, Meredyth’s Field, Katy’s Meadow, the Bank, the Gap?’ (p. 153). The ‘wide high field’ they called ‘the Mountain’, she writes, ‘was and is the axis of the world to me’ (p. 125). This year was, she also recalled, a period when she felt loved and valued by her aunt in particular.
This time at Benhall came to represent for Evans an idyllic, lost Eden to which she returns in her writing as a period of intense sensory perception. ‘Everything happened to me when I was a child,’ she writes in Autobiography, ‘and though all the vestiges of my childhood are gone out of the world, what was deepest in me then is my depth still’ (p. 215). Like Freud, she recognises the formative role of childhood in making the adult: ‘Being a child is the most important thing that ever happens to us’ (p. 228). But, like Wordsworth, she puts the child’s response to the natural world at the centre of that early experience. ‘Wordsworth’s verses are the earth,’ she asserts on the opening pages of Autobiography, ‘he was the poet who turned with thanks to his dear friend the earth’ (p. 6). More than this, Evans emphasises the healing capacity of memories of childhood, arguing that they constitute an ‘immortal hospital for every kind of misery, physical and mental’.5
In 1921, the Whistler family moved to Lavender Cottage in Bridstowe, just west of Ross. It was a short walk across the fields and past St Bridget’s church to Benhall. Peggy attended Ross High School and then, later, spent a period at Cours Saint-Denis school in Loches, France, which is fictionalised in The Wooden Doctor. After her schooldays, she worked in various posts, including as a governess and a housekeeper. More importantly she began to build a career, initially as an artist, providing the illustrations for a collection of fairy tales, Tales from the Panchatantram, in 1930, and then as a writer.
Her first short novel, Country Dance, was published in 1932 under the pen-name ‘Margiad Evans’ with striking illustrations by ‘Peggy Whistler’. The duality of identity represented by this authorial split was also an important theme in the novel. Framed by an introduction and end note in the voice of ‘Margiad Evans’, it is presented as the journal of Ann Goodman, a young girl of mixed English and Welsh parentage. It tells of Ann’s life on the border between England and Wales and her courtship by two suitors, the English shepherd, Gabriel Ford and the Welsh farmer, Evan ap Evans. Like the dance of the title, the action moves back and forwards across the border and Ann is depicted as representing ‘the entire history of the border […] that history which belongs to all border lands and tells of incessant warfare.’6 Much of the novel was written while Evans was staying on Coch-y-bûg farm, near Pontllyfni in Caernarfonshire, during the summer of 1930, and she included a Welsh epigraph, place names and Welsh phrases in her novel.
Although Country Dance is, in fact, the only one of Evans’s novels to be set even partially in Wales, it brought her an enabling and valued association with Welsh writers. Country Dance was republished in Faber’s anthology, Welsh Short Stories, in 1937, and she published stories in The Welsh Review. She developed important connections with the Welsh writer and scholar Gwyn Jones and, later, the Welsh language writer Kate Roberts. Despite her choice of pen-name, Evans was clear about her own identity, writing to Gwyn Jones in 1946:
I’m not Welsh: I never posed as Welsh and it rather annoys me when R[obert] H[erring] advertises me among the Welsh short stories because I am the border – a very different thing. The English side of the border too. I don’t speak fretfully: you know how I honour the Welsh writers.7
It was living in the Border country, with its scattering of Welsh place names and within sight of the Welsh mountains, which inspired some of Evans’s most evocative and assured writing.
Between 1932 and 1935 Evans wrote three more novels, sustained financially by her father’s pension, and returning to Lavender Cottage in between other activities. But at the end of 1935 Godfrey Whistler died, Lavender Cottage was sold, and her mother moved to 17 Brookend in Ross-on-Wye. Evans, with her sisters and the daughter of her publisher, ran a guest house, Springherne, on Bull’s Hill, Walford-on-Wye, from 1936-39. When that closed, Evans took a series of temporary jobs, returning in between to her mother at Brookend. She was contracted to Blackwell for another novel, The Widower or The Widower’s Tale, but found herself unable to finish it. In 1938 she had met Michael Williams – the ‘M —’ of Autobiography, described there as ‘the dear companion of my faulty nature and physique’ (p. 52) – whom she would marry in October 1940. His Welsh-speaking parents were from Pembrokeshire and Evans records his talk of the ‘Pembroke Aunts and Uncles’: ‘I get glimpses of a sea tribe, their weight on the waters. Even the aunts with one foot afloat…’ (p. 124). After her initial emphasis on the ‘happiness of being alone’ (p. 5), ‘The Winter Journal’ recounts their companionable walks in the countryside around Ross. The final text of Autobiography is dedicated to ‘my husband’.
In January 1941 the newly-married couple moved into Potacre, a semi-detached farmworker’s cottage, set in a field on the summit of a hill above Llangarron, to the west of Ross. The house was basic – it had a cold tap and an Elsan (chemical) toilet – but it had a vegetable garden and views across to the Welsh mountains. Its openness to the elements thrilled her: ‘The cottage wedges into the south-west emptiness, the sky comes pouring over, the wind shreds the shadow of the lilac bush’ (p. 112). Having not written since she married, she picked up her pen again. Living on this ‘inhabited hill’ (p. 112) set in the typically Herefordshire landscape of rolling hills and winding streams, patch-worked with small fields and coppiced woodlands, was to inspire some of Evans’s best writing. Much of her time was taken up with either the work needed to keep the house and garden going or manual labour on local farms, as recorded in ‘Beet Hoeing’. As she told the critic Derek Savage: ‘The joys of Autobiography were snatched moments from the type of life lived by any poor woman without help. If you notice you will see that many of the things witnessed in it were seen while fetching water, mending a sheet or a shirt etc.’8 But physical work outdoors in itself enabled her writing through creating, she felt, a ‘oneness’ (p. 167), between her body and soul.
Another important element was her relationship with her husband which brought a new psychological stability. Early in their relationship she associated him with the solitude she craved: he ‘in some strange way resembles solitude,’ she writes, ‘he is a part of myself […] at some moments […] we are blended in our surroundings, more than brother and sister, nearer than lovers, deeper and more unconscious than our separate selves….’ (p. 108). When she was visited by R- (Ruth Farr), with whom she had an earlier rather ambivalent relationship, she reflected that ‘Living with M- has let me find myself entirely, let me go back, never I hope to be lost again, in that blind crowding’ (p. 120). While Michael Williams shared and enabled Evans’s life at Potacre, she was also alone for much of the time while he was either working on a farm or, later, away on active service in the Navy. Most of the writing she did took the form of journals, letters or short stories. Autobiography was stitched together from the journals partly because she found herself unable to finish her novel.
‘Earth writing’
In one sense, none of this biographical information really matters in relation to Autobiography. The book exists on its own terms as quite simply an outstanding example of nature writing. It is in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Richard Jefferies, two important touchstones for Evans, but it makes something completely new of those confluences. Like Thoreau, Evans values solitude and celebrates the experience of living simply and deliberately in close touch with nature but there is none of the slightly sanctimonious tone which mars parts of Walden (1854). Rather she invokes Thoreau ‘sitting in his doorway watching the summer rain’ (p. 168) and similarly smiles at her own good fortune. Her detailed descriptions of the transformative effects of the rain, of the frozen Wye ‘knotted and bound’ into ‘wonder-whirls’ of ice (p. 35), or of a disturbed ants’ nest recall similar passage in Walden. But while, for instance, Thoreau describes a violent and deadly ‘war between two races of ants’, the ‘red republicans’ and the ‘black imperialists’,9 Evans records the frantic efforts of the female ants to hide their eggs and nymphs. This is a collective and altruistic task: ‘not one ant tried to escape alone, to save her own life’, Evans asserts (p. 186). The strikingly domestic simile she uses to express their relative proportions – the nymphs are ‘as double-bed bolsters to smallish-sized landladies’ (p. 187) – offers us a natural world which is female and co-operative rather than a bloody battleground.
In relation to Jefferies, Evans’s title echoes his The Story of My Heart: My Autobiography (1883), which had been reprinted in 1923 with woodcuts by Ethelbert White. Rather than an account of the ‘petty events of life’, Jefferies explained, his book ‘might have been called an Autobiography of a Soul or Thought.’10 Like Thoreau, Jefferies rejects the pull of social status and material possessions, and his accounts of going out into the fields or woods (Jefferies calls these ‘daily pilgrimages’11), often to a particular hill or tree, as part of a journey towards a sense of spiritual connectedness, what he calls ‘soul-life’,12 offered another model for Evans. Her nature mysticism, however, is grounded in a greater sense of the specificity of place – it is always rooted in her own milltir sqwâr (square mile) around Ross-on-Wye and Llangarron – and leads her through a desire to be ‘united with Nature’ (p. 200) to an awareness of the divine.
While it clearly draws on the traditions of Wordsworth, Thoreau and Jefferies, Autobiography is perhaps unique in its place in this tradition because it is by a woman and nature writing has been, and still is, as Kathleen Jamie has pointed out, dominated by men.13 In that sense it is useful to set Evans alongside Dorothy Wordsworth and Nan Shepherd (whose The Living Mountain was written mainly during the final years of the Second World War but not published until 1977), or, today, against the work of Olivia Laing, Helen MacDonald, the American writer Annie Dillard, and Jamie herself. Evans’s letter about witnessing nature in ‘snatched moments from the type of life lived by any poor woman without help’ resonates, for instance, with Jamie’s comment that ‘Between the laundry and the fetching the kids from school, that’s how birds enter my life.’14 Like Jamie, too, Evans is unwilling to claim expertise: ‘I’m not a naturalist or a scholar in leaves and birds,’ she writes, ‘but something is there which makes me stand quite still and look’ (p. 66). It is that quality of attention, the ability to ‘look, listen, open’, which distinguishes her work.
Primarily, Evans is a writer and her concern with the problem of language, with how to express the reality of the ‘now’ in words, runs through Autobiography. Jefferies notes that ‘One of the greatest difficulties I have encountered is the lack of words to express ideas’,15 but Evans offers an extended meditation on this problem of how to get the air and the light and the earth ‘into the paper’ (p. 90). At the same time she is fascinated by local dialect words for rural work: ‘glatting’ (p. 114) for mending a gap, or ‘brent’ (p. 166) for a hundred yards hoed. It is the intensity of this interest in language which separates her from earlier writers and marks her as a Modernist. As in many Modernist texts, time and place are stretched or contracted in Autobiography so that they convey subjective experience. But Evans’s struggle with words anticipates postmodernist theories of language as always self-referential rather than connected to the material world. ‘Writing is explaining,’ she writes, and ‘it is nearly always impossible for me to explain’ (p. 59). She ‘wants words’ – words for colour, space and time, words which ‘will not bend the thought’ (p. 28). This exactitude is what she aspires to.
Above all, her concern is how to write her connection with the earth. The section ‘Before the Snow’ is, as Moira Dearnley rightly notes, not just a piece of descriptive nature writing, it is ‘an account of the creative process of writing’.16 Wrestling with the difficulty of capturing the ‘now of it’ Evans argues that:
All good, true and loving earth writing must be done first out of doors, either spontaneously in the brain or roughly and livingly with the hand, then afterwards, as swiftly translated to permanent wording as may be. […] The only chance is swiftness and intensity of feeling. Or else, as fallen snow obliterates all movement and knowledge, time lightens the impression and the precious secrets discovered are hidden moment by moment. (pp. 73-4)
This is the opposite of Wordsworth’s ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ as the origin of poetry.17 For Evans the sensory immediacy of ‘now’ is obliterated by time, as snow obliterates the details of a landscape. Thus she turns to ‘Notes or daily journals’ because they offer, she believes, the ‘most lucent form of writing one’s thoughts in earth’ (p. 74). The metaphors she uses – ‘explaining’, ‘translation’ – shift and as she progresses in her spiritual journey her concern is more with ‘testifying’, or ‘recording’. What does the word ‘earth’ mean to her she asks: ‘Life, the world, the beginning. Yes, and the giving back of the force that flows to me out of wild existence. God?’ (p. 127). As a child she had a sense of ‘it’ as a spirit out of doors and, having regained that knowledge at Potacre, she wants to ‘testify’, to put on record her joy in ‘life and earth’ (p. 128). The paradox of this book is that by confronting the difficulty of language she is able to bring together the inner and the outer, to close the split between body and soul, and produce this vibrant, living ‘record’ of her existence.
In May 1950, Evans experienced an epileptic fit which heralded a new, difficult, phase in her life, notwithstanding the birth of her only child. The story of her attempt to come to terms with this disease was told in A Ray of Darkness (1952), a rare first-hand account of epilepsy, which she saw as ‘the second part of Autobiography.’18 The epilepsy, she felt, led to a sense of separation of herself from the earth that she had been able to apprehend with such intensity. Peter Wolf suggests that the signs of epilepsy were already there in Evans’s use of oxymora and her attraction to the indescribable in Autobiography which chime with the auras and fits she later experienced.19 In contrast, Steven Lovatt sees her ‘devotional commitment’ to the precise representation of her experience as a ‘moral imperative’.20 Perhaps both are true.
As Evans’s work has been brought back into print by Honno and Parthian, she has emerged as a writer with a remarkable range, a fierce honesty, and a capacity to startle and challenge her readers. Given its quality, it is surprising that Autobiography is the last of her prose works to be republished. It is perhaps only in the context of the recent up-surge in interest in nature writing and our recognition of the damage we have done to the earth through climate change that we can recognise the critical importance of her concerns and the extent of her achievement. The risk of nature writing is that language either cannot express our sense of connectedness with nature or that it is complicit in our appropriation of the natural world to our own ends. The best nature writers, as Richard Mabey has said, strive to find words ‘to bridge that divide between the otherness of nature’ and the human.21 Evans’s attempt to bridge that gap speaks to us now, vividly and urgently, of our own connectedness to the natural world and its importance to our inner and outer existence.
Notes:
1 Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, Margiad Evans (Bridgend: Seren, 1988), p.144.
2 See also Moira Dearnley, Margiad Evans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1982); and the introductions by Jim Pratt to A Ray of Darkness (1952; Dinas Powys: Honno, 2021), and The Nightingale Silencedand other late unpublished writings (Dinas Powys: Honno, 2020), as well as the collection of essays edited by Kirsti Bohata and Katie Gramich, Rediscovering Margiad Evans: Marginality, Gender and Illness (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013). Barbara Prys-Williams also offers an insightful chapter on Evans’s work in her Twentieth-Century Autobiography (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), pp.32-57.
3 Margiad Evans, The Wooden Doctor (1933; Dinas Powys: Honno, 2005), p.12
4 Margiad Evans, ‘The Immortal Hospital’ quoted in Lloyd-Morgan, p.8.
5 Ibid., p.10.
6 Margaid Evans, Country Dance (1932; London: John Calder, 1978), p.95.
7 Lloyd-Morgan, p.32.
8 Lloyd-Morgan, p. 82.
9 David Henry Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods (1854; New York and London: Signet, 1960), p.155
10 Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart: My Autobiography (1883; London: Duckworth, 1932), p.ix.
11 Jefferies, p.55.
12 Jefferies, p.80.
13 Kathleeen Jamie, ‘A Lone Enraptured Male’, London Review of Books, 30:5 (September 2007), and Patrick Barkham, ‘Interview: Kathleen Jamie: Nature writing has been colonised by white men’, The Guardian, 17 October 2019.
14 Kathleen Jamie, Findings (London: Sort of Books, 2005), p.39.
15 Jefferies, p.143.
16 Dearnley, p.32.
17 William Wordsworth, ‘Preface’, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (1800; London: Methuen University Paperbacks, 1968), p. 266.
18 Evans, Ray of Darkness, p. 65.
19 Peter Wolf, ‘Margiad Evans (1909-1958): A writer’s epileptic experiences and their reflections in her work’, Epilepsy and Behavior 102 (2020): 1-8, p.4
20 Steven Lovatt, ‘How Margiad Evans Wrote the Earth’, Land Lines Project, https://landlinesproject.wordpress.com/2020/05/11/how-margiad-evans-wrote-the-earth-by-steven-lovatt/ Accessed 9 May 2022.
21 Richard Mabey, ‘They can’t see the wood for the trees’, The Guardian, Review, 20 July 2013, p. 15.
Diana Wallace, Professor in English at the University of South Wales, is the author of Sisters and Rivals in British Women's Fiction, 1914-39 (2000), The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000 (2004), Female Gothic Histories: History, Gender and the Gothic (2013), and Christopher Meredith (2018).
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
‘On her dulcimer she played’
TO
MY HUSBAND
A LITTLE JOURNAL OF BEING ALONE
MIDWINTER and all dulled but the wind and the stars. The dead of the dark winter; stretching behind me the dim patch of silent days alone. The wind is a tooth in the breast … the dark suns give no light.
There was no sky – only the breathy air and a heaviness behind the trees like the dull butt of an iron bar. I watch the moribund chickens standing about on one leg with their claws crimped like a bunch of twigs. A draught that seemed to splinter the bones, ran an icy tune along the hedge and leapt with the wind, dragging after it the straws combed by the brambles out of this morning’s load. In, in, shut everything in. Oh the happiness of being alone – it’s like having only one door to yourself and that bolted and firm walls round. The taste of it is in my food, the sound in my footsteps. I enjoy it even when terrified of my own alarming presence in the welcoming void.
Down the orchard getting wood, I said, ‘That’s the smoke of my fire.’ In a moment I shall light my last candle and go to bed. I’m going to sleep on my elbow and my shadow lurches over the page. There’s a noise far away in the dark which seems to know where I am. Why do all such things recall Death?
***
Poetry has a scent. That sounds finicky, but it is true. More and more I turn to the poets for my reading, yet my appetite is spare. A line sometimes lasts me for weeks.
I was watching the wind dabbing at a dead oak leaf, butmy mind was full of the poets and their ways.
Wordsworth’s verses are the earth; he was the poet who turned with thanks to his dear friend the earth. His poetry is like the hill-side grass with here and there the bounding note of the bird above it, turning, darting, scooping the air under its wing. Burns was gnarled as a root, fluent as rock water, strong as a gale. When I read his poems I feel the coldness of his rugged hand, red from its scrub in the stream, flying over the paper, stamping it with his visions of love, and garbled pauper devils. Blake was an idiom. Byron cut his teeth on gall-stones. Keats was the sea and Shelley the starlight so secure in the skies.
***
I love the alert freedom of being alone. Anything may come and you are ready to grasp it.
When night-time bars me in
and I am sitting sewing
my fancy takes the whim
to think of snowdrops growing.
They sprinkle grudging places
with slender drops of white,
and hang their orphan faces
in narrow hoods of light.
So frail I must recall
the shoulder of the cloud,
the scratching of the squall,
the wind, the frost, the flood.
Child kindness of the year
young promise of beguilement
more tender and more dear
than old fulfilment,
how strange it is to see
and hard to understand
your silver shine like charity
in winter’s stubborn hand!
***
Happy no longer, but full of those horrible thoughts which one pushes off one’s life only to find them round one’s deathbed.
Gwendolen feared
all things that stared
lips that jeered
jaws that fleered
moons that were weird.
Gwendolen feared
the whispering string
that would not sing
but told the music
when to begin –
that Gwendolen knew,
yes, through and through.
A bird sang that. And ‘Egypt, Egypt’ sang another passionately. Their songs were so long this evening and smooth like psalms. And the air was like a church and the twilight lasted and lasted till it wore itself out on the wall. Like a door shutting. At last there was only a chink and a keyhole. The verger had gone home … the moon made me think of an insect as it crawled along the branch of the ash tree.
***
Thank God visibly for the day and the night which passed for me like one hour of contentment. Snow. It has been snowing all day without an interval in the silent bustle of flakes. There was a darkness behind the giddy pattern of the snow-dots; they fell past the open stable door, never colliding but drifting into a quiet little ridge on the stone step. And in the crooks of the trees were great lathers, soft and swollen as sleeping birds. There was so much movement with so little noise that I felt I had gone deaf. The only sounds were the farm dogs’ rough ‘Hew hough-hough’, and the splurge of a mass sliding from some woody ledge in the copse. The trees appeared to have put on flesh; their silence was softer than in frost time, with none of that tense endurance of pain. And the dark grey sheep were in the white field. I felt rather than saw the subtle birds near the ground flirting from bush to bush. Such a lovely unconscious day. I never once remembered that there was such a person as myself and that I was there chopping and sawing logs, and gathering faggots and brushwood which had to belifted from under the snow and beaten against the trees. The only assertion of existence was blood warmth and the feeling of beauty in the winter undertones of yellow and white and black and grey which made up the humanless landscape. Life ticked like a clock, fell like the snow, was folded like hands before the fire they built.
***
