Distance and Memory E-Book

Peter Davidson

• Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This is a book about remoteness: a memoir of places observed in solitude, of the texture of life through the quiet course of the seasons in the far north of Scotland. It is a book grounded in the singularity of one place - a house in northern Aberdeenshire - and threaded through with an unshowy commitment to the lost and the forgotten. In these painterly essays Davidson reflects on art, place, history and landscape. Distance and Memory is his testament to the cold, clear beauty of the north.

Leseprobe

PETER DAVIDSON

Distance and Memory

For Andrew Biswell

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword by Robert Macfarlane

PROLOGUE

The Green Evenings

Secret Hills

SPRING

Orkney

Northern Waters

Spar Boxes, Northern England

SUMMER

Summer in the North

The Rich Boys of Bygdøy and other fragments of a summer

A Northward Journey and a Summer Storm

HARVEST

Bringing Home a Portrait by Cosmo Alexander

Painting Northern Scotland

The Food of the North (with Jane Stevenson)

THE BACK END OF THE YEAR

Visits in Autumn

A Letter from Copenhagen

The Grim Consolations of the North

The Aesthetics of Remoteness and the North

WINTER

Winter in the North

EPILOGUE

The Snow over Madrid

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Peter Davidson from Carcanet

Copyright

Foreword

In the lucid air of certain regions of the far north, light is able to move through the atmosphere unhindered by particles of dust or pollution. The photons proceed without being scattered – save by the molecules of air itself – and the optical consequence is that faraway objects appear close at hand. The lichen patterns on a boulder may be discerned from several hundred yards; a seal basking on a floe seems within reach of touch. In such places, under such circumstances, telescopy occurs, such that – in a seeming paradox – distance makes possible miracles of scrutiny, and remoteness becomes a form of clarification.

Peter Davidson’s prose enables a similar phenomenon. Again and again, in the pages that follow, looking from afar – from future to past, from exile to homeland, from mountaintop down at lowlands, from island back at mainland – results not in vision’s diffusion, but in its sharpening. Distance, here, throughout, is reconfigured as proximity.

Peter lives in what he calls a ‘removed and exceptional part of Scotland’: the wedge of land that is bounded to its south by the mountains of the Cairngorms, to its north by the waters of the Moray Firth, and which stretches eastwards to meet the North Sea between Aberdeen and Peterhead. A few miles from his house rises the five-toothed peak of Bennachie, on the slopes of which Agricola’s auxiliaries fought and defeated the Caledonians – the northernmost Roman action during the centuries of occupation. Further west are the Ruthven Barracks, that lonely outpost (a Camp Bastion of its day) built by Hanoverian soldiers after the Jacobite rising of 1715. His latitude is a frontier latitude, then: around and beyond him issue the true ‘northlands’, whose cultures and landscapes have inspired his poetry, essays, scholarship and dreams for more than thirty years.

It is an ‘exceptional part’ of Scotland in that it has excepted itself from many of the conventions of British history and geography. Beaker inhumation, as Peter points out, is thought to have been practised there for two centuries longer than anywhere else in Europe. Catholicism thrived and simmered there after the Reformation; loyalty to the House of Stuart persisted after the Revolution of 1688. A dissident region, then: not renegade, exactly, but fond of being able to mind its own business. A territory of shadows, secrets, sequesterments, discretion and absence. Like the landscape out of which they chiefly arise, these essays are bound together by a tight matrix of qualities (reticence, allusiveness, unshowiness); by a repertoire of tones (elegiac, desirous, heterodox); by a cluster of repeating tropes (shadows, gleams, light-fall, ice, cusps, thresholds); and by a palette of colours (the green-gold of summer, the silvers and blues of winter, the bronzes of autumn). Peter writes, we might say, in a northern vernacular, exactly responsive to its region, in which the specifics of terrain and weather are internalised as a kind of grammar. It is a style fine in its granulation, subtle in its shading, and stricken throughout by a gentle melancholy.

One of the consistent marvels of these essays is the attentiveness to place they exhibit. Insofar as remoteness brings undisturbedness, it encourages observance – both in the devotional sense of regular habits adhered to, and in the phenological sense of recording natural details. Distance and Memory is structured seasonally, so that to read the book from start to end is to experience a year’s turn of atmospheres and fluxing light. Paragraph after paragraph practises a kind of bejewelled notation, born of long acquaintance and repeated seeing: in May there is ‘a pencil-stripe of light beyond the pine trees on the northern horizon, the reflection of the brightness over Sutherland, relentless daylight over Norway’; a June evening brings ‘green silence’; on October afternoons ‘bright kingdoms… open in the Cairngorms’; ‘brilliant depths of the frost and the returning cold’ signal winter’s ascent. Such observations may seem like jottings, but on examination they turn out to be images of intricate facetting. Of a lake-shore in Scandinavia: ‘A little stone jetty in still water: water like pewter, extraordinary water.’ The extreme stillness of the sentence is in part a function of its verblessness, but is due also to the reflection of water within itself (‘water: water’), an effect doubled again as the word ‘pewter’ catches and returns – with just a ripple – the word ‘water’. Peter writes in the course of this book of numerous artists and writers – Frances Walker, Cosmo Alexander and Eric Ravilious among them – whom he admires: he shares with them all a technical ability to caress the familiar into uncommon lustre, and to catch at the fleeting and strange.

Ravilious ‘noticed everything’, writes Peter appreciatively; the same might be said of him. Ravilious saw ‘the gradations of rust and soot on a tar-engine put away for the winter’. Peter notices the ‘[f]ine gradations’ that ‘mark this turn of the year to spring: the glass of the lake rising a little with the snow melt; steel drifts of ice on water like mercury. The first wood-anemones on the scrubbed table which runs the length of the room.’ The ‘rising’ ‘glass’ of the lake suggests first a thermometric change, the temperature-creep of the coming spring; but it is also – and firstmost – ‘glass’ as water-surface, rising in level as the snowmelt joins the winter water. ‘Mercury’ draws us back into the thermometer, but is at once an image of the ice’s hard silver gleam. The intricacy of language here is a version of the intricacy of the handover of winter to spring – overlapped and shifting. Such careful slivering-out (the ability to discriminate without finicking) is one of the signatures of Peter’s style and sensibility. It results in a lyricism delicate in its structures as an ash-frail.

There is, unmistakably, a curatorial impulse to this fascination with the observed instant. Peter’s prose aspires, as he puts it, ‘to capture the moment, lost and yet preserved forever’. His sentences devote themselves to the record of volatile subjects (textures of weather, tones of colour, a fall of light ‘which dies even as the hand attempts to catch its likeness’), and they do so in foreknowledge of the failure of their task. Two words recur dozens of times in the course of Distance and Memory: ‘stillness’ and ‘fugacity’. The relationship between the fixed and the fugitive is at the book’s intellectual core, and at the source of its melancholy. Each of Peter’s sentences acts as what Thomas Browne in Urne Burialle – his great 1658 meditation on corruption, pristination and retrieval – beautifully calls a ‘conservatorie’. Yet none of these conservatories is quite reliable, none fully sealed. All leak a little light. All are vulnerable to what Peter piercingly calls ‘the predatory loss that shadows all human pleasure’. Walking the coast of Arctic Finland,

[we] came suddenly onto basalt rocks bordering the Baltic, with the dazzling track of the sun coming straight through the sandbar which sheltered the bay. A young man was swimming there, quietly and alone, swimming breaststroke with barely a ripple – until he moved out of the shadowed waters and his tow-fair head vanished in an instant into the brilliance of the high sun on the sea.

Here, the completion of the scene is also its annihilation: the swimmer cannot stay still, however tranquil his motion, and must move on from the shadows and into the irradiating ‘high sun’, which both illuminates and disappears him.

The unit of this book, then, is the lyric image (devoted to preservation but conscious of perishability); its larger structure might be understood as a kind of Wunderkammer, seeking vainly to gather and organise extraordinary artefacts. When I first visited Peter at his high-halled, white-walled, hunkered-down house in the fold of valley at Turriff, he took me up to a south-facing room thick with summer light, and there opened the two pale-blue wooden doors of the cabinet of curiosities that he had made there, and explained to me the origins of the objects he had gathered to fill it. For the individual compartments of the cabinet held remarkable things, among them the round black mirror of an eighteenth-century Claude glass; a little dog modelled in unfired clay, Babylonian in origin, ‘impossibly old’; a sixteenth-century armourer’s trial piece of a long face framed by a helmet in the form of a wolf’s head with open jaws (a disquieting image of man-wolf or wolf-man); an engraved brass box of seventeenth-century Low Countries manufacture, which once held one of the straws on which fell drops of the blood of the Jesuit Henry Garnet, executed in London on 3rd May 1606, bloodstains which were said to have formed a likeness of his face; a slice of marble from a quarry near Bristol, in which the veinery had by geological chance formed into a perfect facsimile of a sad Victorian landscape of misty ploughlands at evening… Yes, Peter’s preoccupation with Wunderkammers is temperamental as well as art-historical, and his essays – ‘The Rich Boys of Bygdøy and other fragments of a summer’ – are themselves versions of these curatorial cabinets, shot through with sadness (for the fragment always grieves for its whole).

Loss steeps his language. The five verse couplets that stand as epigraph to the book, and that were set to music by the composer Paul Mealor, are among the purest expressions of melancholy that I know: late-medieval in their tones, northern in their geography, and altogether heart-breaking. The rhyme words are held in the double-bind of the couplet, joined yet separated, yearning towards one another across their narrow and unbridgeable gap. Melancholy differs from grief in its chronic nature: it is an ache not a wound, it lies deeper down, is longer-lasting, is lived with rather than died of. We might perhaps imagine melancholy hydrologically, as a kind of groundwater – seeping darkly onwards, occasionally surfacing as depression or anguish. Distance and Memory is, unquestionably, the work of a man for whom melancholy has been an enduring companion. When in an early essay Peter writes that a ‘black dog flickers in and out of the shadows at the edge of the lawns’, this is at once a Labrador and a metaphor. His writing has the power to strike its readers with sorrow also, which is among the reasons why, although these essays emerge out of the impulse to account for art, they are art themselves.

‘I gathered them together’, notes Peter of the process of arranging the chapters. ‘We have gathered things about us which are of the place where we live’, he remarks of the contents of his house and valley. So many images in this astonishing book are of gathering: gathering last things, lost things, late lustres. The ‘moony silver’ of a ‘double-handed silver cup’ on a table ‘gathers the reflections of the garden and the summer and the bright sky into itself’. A bend in the stream ‘breaks forward into the sunlight and the water draws the light into itself’. High tarns among peat and bracken ‘hold the dimming sky’, ‘last light hangs reflected in mirrors inside the house’, a ‘pale yacht steers through the long dusk to far islands in the archipelago’. The act of ‘gleaning’ (with its shimmer of gleaming) occurs again and again: a fossicking after the final items of value. The gleaning begins, in fact, as soon as the book begins, for the closing couplet of the opening five-versed lyric gathers beautifully into itself all the things that have vanished in the preceding verses – a gathering that is both a refusal of time’s claims, and a dark counting of losses:

Snow, falcon, blackbird, water, rose and tower:

Faded, flown, taken, frozen, fallen, gone.

Robert Macfarlane, March 2013

The falcon flown, far in the starving air

So many lost, this long, half-secret war.

The regiments like snow all overborne

The boat rowed far from the cold shore, long gone.

O blackbird taken in the fowler’s snare

He is now far who will return no more.

The burn is frozen and the bird is flown

The rose is withered and the tower is down.

Snow, falcon, blackbird, water, rose and tower:

Faded, flown, taken, frozen, fallen, gone.

PROLOGUE

The Green Evenings

This book was begun snowbound at midwinter and finished in the long green evenings of a rainy summer. It began with a search through the miscellaneous pocket notebooks of thirty years for those half pages and flyleaves where I’d jotted down notations of the fall of light on a particular day, of words spoken or overheard that had seemed worth recording. Many of these notations are about places – if I could draw they might have been sketches. As I gathered them together, a common intention began to emerge, an attempt to capture the moment, lost and yet preserved forever, joined with a growing awareness of the paradoxes that surround that loss and preservation.

I also came to see patterns of interest that had remained constant for thirty years and more: in the distinctiveness of places, in gardens and rooms as extensions (or memorials) of their inhabitants. In the variety of ways of looking at landscape and townscape, particularly in the quotidian records made by regional painters all over Europe in the earlier nineteenth century. This particular interest focuses on the Norwich painter John Sell Cotman, on his daily topographical work and on his unconventional records of wild and deserted grounds. An early and lasting fascination has been with what might be called cultural persistence – in modes of speech, in the shops of old-fashioned bakers and ironmongers, in the political and religious differences of the dissident corners of upland Britain. Perspectives and geographies have always been subjects of interest, especially unconventional perspectives – Britain viewed from the sea roads of the old north, which draw Edinburgh closer to Rotterdam than to London, which position the northernmost shires of Scotland in their ancient alignment as the south land of the Scandinavian north. Partly on account of the past of my own family, I am fascinated by that shadowy Britain which is recollected from exile in Europe; as by the Scottish or English islands within the continent – colleges in Rome, communities of wine shippers in Jerez or Cádiz. This double focus leads to an awareness of all those complex aesthetic phenomena over the centuries which could be summarised as attempts to recreate the south in the north: painted rooms, triumphal arches in rainy parks. But the most constant factor of all has been a lifelong attentiveness to place, and to the change and flux of light and season, especially, but not exclusively, in the north.

There is a verse by Michael Riviere, commemorating three beautiful women on grey horses riding through the sunlight of ‘an October … many years ago’, and lamenting the absence of a painter to capture that instant,

… as we look back

Into moments framed out of time in Tuscany or Holland.1

This book is a set of memorials and notations, of attempts to frame moments from recollected time, ‘out of time’.

My student years were spent travelling between Scotland and England. Therefore, they were spent in a fruitful tension between the sort of landscape in which I now live – coastal farmland within sight of the high hills – and the levels and willows of East Anglia. Remembering an essence of England when in Scotland: the Yorkshire towns on the Great North Road, sidelong sunlight of the first week of October falling across laid brick through prisms of blue air, the George Inn at Easingwold. Memories now locked into Ackermann prints, into English provincial music of the eighteenth century, Avison and Shield.

Two vignettes summarise the England which I inhabited in my student days. A summer day of drenching, obliterating rain, driving with a Kentish friend to East Sutton Park to transcribe the Filmer family epitaphs in the church. The hammering storm on the leads of the roof. We drove back up an overshadowed lane, dimmed further by the rain, against a silvery, failing light. A place and season for a haunting, said my friend, as if there had been a hunting accident long ago, and we might come at any corner upon shuffling men carrying the broken body of the squire’s only son.

And one Sunday evening in Cambridge, another friend rang asking if he could come and sing. Summer vacation, the town quiet, almost deserted. A lamp on the fortepiano. Purcell and Thomas Campion. The Purcell ‘Evening Hymn’ is extraordinary, sung quietly in a lamplit attic room like that, with the river at the end of the garden reflecting the streetlamps on the other side, and with nobody to hear it.

In England I would remember the east coast of Scotland, days like the day of an autumn visit with my father to Foulis Easter near Dundee. It grew mistier as the afternoon wore on. The village has a fine site on a roll of red-earthed upland with a view down to the Tay. There was a good decrepit tower house, inhabited as tenements, and beside it, a steep valley with a burn. The church was dank and unremarkable, but we got in to see the sixteenth-century paintings: the Crucifixion, a jester in the crowd at the foot of the cross; Our Lord on the rainbow, coming to judgement, the paint almost worn away. These have the faded remnant of a great, crude force, but the real wonder is their surviving at all. The north bank of the Tay is more of a dark corner than people think. We returned the key, with thick mist rising off the ploughed fields, passing a handsome young man who was kicking a football against the castle wall by the church. There was only one name on the war memorial, Captain the Master of Kinnaird.

That cold afternoon echoes across thirty years to a recent visit to the painted chapel at the top of the steep bank at Gwydir, and to the castle in the river valley below, with its austere, almost-empty rooms, dark and still and rich and splendid. A verdure tapestry, an oak coffer, a portrait. A great wood fire smouldering on its archaeology of ash. A fine view across a dark room through leaded windows to a sunlit garden, with an alley of great topiary yews and the spray of a fountain flashing its brilliants in distant sunlight. The master of the house appeared in pale trousers and a blue-striped shirt, deftly rescued a swallow from the upper hall, and steered it to an open window. He offered an urbane ‘Good afternoon’ and vanished into the shadows of his wonderful home, not through any visible or obvious door. And the woodsmoke under the hanging woods and the strangeness of the beauty created by the backwoods princes who built that house.

As strange as a moment of a spring evening in Florence, walking back on Shrove Tuesday from dinner in the Borgo Santa Croce. An apparition of three genuinely elegant and sinister maskers for the Carnival, slender young men in black suits with beautifully made beast masks, like the head of the beast in Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête. In an instant, they vanished into the mild night and the darkened basement bars.

This moment finding its echo eight years later in an apparition and vanishing in arctic Finland – but this was a moment which was an enigma of the light, as that had been of the darkness. Oulu in high summer, wooden houses on islands, birch trees, the Baltic lapping at beaches of dark pebbles, the smell of flowering rowans and Stockholm tar. Bright water at the end of every lane. My friend had talked, as we strolled through the wood, about the sea frozen at midwinter and walking out to the islands. Further north you could drive on it, hike or drive to Sweden. We came suddenly onto basalt rocks bordering the Baltic, with the dazzling track of the sun coming straight through the sandbar which sheltered the bay. A young man was swimming there, quietly and alone, swimming breaststroke with barely a ripple – until he moved out of the shadowed waters and his tow-fair head vanished in an instant into the brilliance of the high sun on the sea.

The very act of setting these days down is an attempt to frame them ‘out of time’, a parallel similitude to that offered by the painters of daily life. In painting, the apparent preservation of the instant seems (but only seems) to defeat time itself. Thus a painter in the early modern Netherlands apparently captures forever the likeness of a shabby horseman, as he turns in his saddle in a hollow between the sand dunes of the Dutch coast in the falling light of an early autumn evening in the 1640s. His momentary gesture could still be seen on the wall of the gallery at Haarlem, and time itself seems set at defiance by the depiction of the moment.2 Of course it is an illusion of an illusion, manufactured in many hours in the studio.

This illusion of the capture of the moment, lost and yet preserved forever, is the purpose of this book, a late, prose echo of the haunting painted similitudes of the minor Dutch or Norwich painters. We can still see the extended hand of the shabby rider, as I can try to notate these long green and grey evenings in a remote house, the light dimming imperceptibly in the shadow of old trees at the top of an overcast, stillborn summer, now going over into August.

The southern sky changed from overshadowed grey to cobalt half an hour ago, and the moon is rising while, to the north, the horizon still shows rags of cold azure behind the larch trees. But as I write, light and time and summer are unstill, and the instant has passed into memory even as it is described.

1 Michael Riviere, ‘Rippon’, Selected Poems (South Burlingham: Mandeville Press, 1999), f.10v.

2 This rider in a landscape is a haunting memory of a painting of the school of Philips Wouwerman (1619–1668) seen when it was on loan to the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem in 1991. It is one of a tightly related group of paintings by Wouwerman and his studio, including The Grey in the Rijksmuseum, Horse and Dismounted Rider in Leipzig, and, especially, Rider’s Resting Place in Antwerp, all of which show ragged horsemen in landscapes, mostly those formed by the sand dunes of the west coast of the Netherlands. They seem to capture the shuffling homeward travel of a defeated and broken cavalry: the lower ranks of the Eighty Years’ War seen from far behind the lines.

Secret Hills

Vastum ubique silentium, secreti colles, fumantia procul tecta.

The first description of the landscape around the sheltered valley which enfolds this house was written nearly two millennia ago, fixed and identified by the form of a great hill. As soon as you emerge onto the slope above the little plantation of larches and thorn trees, west of the house and the water which gives it its name, foothills and ridges rise on the horizon, with the notched back of Bennachie filling the cold sky to the south.

On its lower slopes, Agricola’s auxiliaries fought the Caledonians. The mountain name which Tacitus Latinised as Graupius seems cognate with Celtic words for comb, describing the five blunt teeth of the ridge which you see against the sky today. So it was somewhere in the broad valley to the west of here that Tacitus imagined, for the first time in European literature, the northlands in their remoteness as a fitting place for a hero’s death. At the end of the speech put into Agricola’s mouth before the battle, he says that it would be no ignoble fate to die in ipso terrarum ac naturae fine: at this, the end of nature and the world. The defeated Caledonians vanished into their forests and the night; and when the Romans sent scouts out at daybreak they found great silence, solitary hills, and the distant smoke of burning houses. The phrase secreti colles is rich and haunting, especially as the constellation of developing meanings of secretus accommodates so much of the subsequent history of this removed and exceptional part of Scotland.

This northern corner is still comparatively remote: there are no motorways north of Dundee, and the population is sparse. It is less visited than the Central Belt or the Highlands, cut off by the rampart of the Cairngorms, set apart by its own language and weather – in all these senses it is secret. (The early modern tripartite division of Scotland seems still valid: Lowland; Highland-and-Island – insulae acmontes is an ancient phrase; and this region, the North.) Having remained dissident from the rest of Scotland and Britain all through the years of political and religious hostility which began at the Reformation, this northern quadrant has remained secret in the sense of solving its problems internally, with a marked reluctance to involve the authorities in Edinburgh or London.

In the centuries when religion inevitably defined everything in Scotland, the majority of the northern population were Episcopalians, following a moderate reformation which retained much Catholic tradition, much in accord with the Lutherans of Scandinavia. A small but influential minority remained Roman Catholics throughout, secret (or at least discreet) at home and at ease abroad in the courts and armies of continental Europe. Neither of these groups expended any energy in policing an extensive and vigorous popular culture of dance music and traditional song – rather the contrary. There were lairds who were famous fiddlers and professors’ daughters celebrated for their repertory of ballads. So there also survived, well into the twentieth century (and it is far from dead yet) a genuine continuity of traditional and popular song, a culture which became to some degree secret at the turn of the twentieth century, as one branch of it became the especial possession of male farm workers. The window of the room where I am writing this looks out over a bothy where Gavin Greig collected some of these ballads a century ago. Beyond the bothy are the steep fields of Barnyards Farm, whose intractability is commemorated forever in the still-remembered song ‘The Barnyards of Delgaty’.