An
i n t e rv i e w w i t h
robert Macfarlane
W
ith his three highly acclaimed and award-winning
books, Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places and
The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane has rapidly
become one of the UK’s most influential writers about
landscape and the natural world, and one of a group of
British writers who have inspired a new critical and popular
interest in the ‘nature writing’ tradition. We were delighted
when he agreed to take the time to talk to us about his own
work in the context of that tradition.
Sharon Blackie: It has always seemed to me that British ‘nature
writing’ (much more so than the American equivalent, say) is
a very gentlemanly tradition. And yet of course there are a few
wonderful exceptions whose work you’ve championed – Nan
Shepherd, Jacquetta Hawkes – as well as Kathleen Jamie and the
inimitable Jay Griffiths. Is this your impression?
Robert Macfarlane: ‘Male’, maybe, rather than ‘gentlemanly’…
But yes, this is broadly true, especially in comparison with
the North American tradition (Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa
Cather, Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Terry Tempest
Williams, Rebecca Solnit etc.). Though the discrepancy
here is perhaps not as stark as you suggest. To the names
you mention I might add (among living writers) Pauline
Stainer, Esther Woolfson, Sara Maitland, Linda Cracknell,
Melanie Challenger, as well as a new novelist called Melissa
Harrison (see her forthcoming Clay), and Helen Macdonald
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– austringer, ornithologist, historian of science, poet,
essayist and memoirist – whose Shaler’s Fish (Etruscan Press)
is one of the best volumes of modern poetry I know, and
whose forthcoming H Is For Hawk will, among its other
achievements, sharpen and focus questions of gender and
(writing about) nature. Turning to other tones and forms,
I think also of such influential figures as Fay Godwin and
Marion Shoard, or (casting back) Octavia Hill.
SB: Do you think there are any interesting or significant differences
in the ways in which women approach the natural world and
writing about it, compared to men?
RM: Nan Shepherd might help here, in terms of clarifying
how a charismatically masculine genre (mountaineering
writing) can be brilliantly revised – though I am unconvinced
that her revisions are optimally understood in terms of
gender. As I note in my introductory essay to the reissue of
The Living Mountain:
“Most works of mountaineering literature have been
written by men, and most male mountaineers are
focussed on the summit: a mountain expedition being
qualified by the success or failure of ascent. But to
aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb
a mountain, nor is a narrative of siege and assault the
only way to write about one. Shepherd’s book is best
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thought of, perhaps, not as a work of mountaineering
literature but one of mountain literature. Early on, she
confesses that as a young woman she had been prone
to a ‘lust’ for ‘the tang of height’, and had approached
the Cairngorms egocentrically, apprising them for their
‘effect upon me’. She ‘made always for the summits’.
The Living Mountain relates how, over time, she learnt
to go into the hills aimlessly, ‘merely to be with the
mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but
to be with him’. … Circumambulation has replaced
summit-fever; plateau has substituted for peak.”
SB: I run the risk of over-simplifying, but in the contemporary UK
‘nature writing’ tradition we seem to specialise in writing about
wildlife more than place. And when we do now write about place
(perhaps in contrast to older works) it is very often about passing
through a place – especially walking – something arguably close
to travel writing – rather than about rootedness in a place. Do
you agree that we’re lacking much new writing about this sense of
place (except maybe in fiction …) and if so, what do you think the
contributing factors are?
RM: I’m glad you asked this, as I had noticed EarthLines’
editorial stance on these matters emerging in earlier issues,
and had started to formulate my disagreements with it.
On the question of ‘lack’: no, is the answer. To my mind
the most important writer at work in the broad field of
topographics/ landscape/ nature writing is Tim Robinson,
the unclassifiable mathematician-cartographer-deep
topo-grapher-cultural historian-philosopher, whose chronic
and vast studies of what he calls the ‘ABC of earth wonders’
(the Aran Islands, the Burren, Connemara), among his
many other extraordinary books, are profound explorations
of the multiple traces and difficulties of ‘rootedness’. John
McGahern’s magnificent late novel, That They May Face
The Rising Sun, searches out the benefits and the costs of
rootedness as contrasted with mobility. Adam Thorpe’s
brilliant Ulverton, twenty years old next year, does likewise.
Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain was walked into
being, and although it is about a single area, that area is
enormous and, in Shepherd’s account of it, eventually
unfathomable (it cannot be ‘known fully’). W G Sebald’s
The Rings of Saturn, surely one of the major literary works
of the past twenty years, is about the extreme volatility of
‘place’, though it proves unable entirely to dispose with the
category. Roger Deakin was a superb annotator of both
dwelling (in the Suffolk farmhouse and meadows where
he spent forty years) and travelling (Wildwood ranges across
many countries and cultures, though there could hardly be
a book more concerned with roots); Richard Mabey also.
SB: And yet … it’s not at all a criticism, merely an observation, but
your own books seem to me to fall very much into this category I’m
describing, a focus on passing through places rather than rootedness
in place. Nevertheless, you’ve quoted Kavanagh on parochialism:
“To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience.
In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not
width.” And you’ve written about the beautiful Gaelic concept of
duchthas, which occupies the ground somewhere between ‘place
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of one’s birth’ and ‘heredity, spirit or blood’. But I see little of those
concepts reflected in your own work.
RM: Well, I think I have shifted, over the past decade or
so, a considerable distance from Kavanagh. The Old Ways is
explicitly and continuously about landscape as a dynamically
shaping experience, constantly making and unmaking the
subject, rather than as either a static back-cloth to existence,
or a retreat-space in which shelter from the contemporary
might be taken, or as a warm bath run to the brim with
nostalgia. It’s for these reasons that the book keeps on the
move – because it is about motion, and about mobility
and displacement as constituent conditions of modernity,
though also (and I hope carefully) about what might still
valuably be learned from those who know their places
‘intimately’, plumbing ‘depth’ as well as gauging ‘width’.
Its chief character, as it were, is Edward Thomas, who
represents the convergence of the book’s many paths, and
whose life I re-tell in the penultimate chapter as a kind of
‘bio-geography’. I write specifically about ‘Thomas’s doublelonging for travel and rest, movement and settlement’, and
about how the tree (immovable) and the bird (migrant) are
among the two most distinctive presences in his writings,
and the root (delving downwards) and the step (moving
onwards) its two chief metaphors for our relations with the
world. ‘It is hard to make anything like a truce between these
two incompatible desires’, Thomas wrote in 1909 – though
it might have been 2009 – ‘the one for going on and on over
the earth, the other that would settle for ever in one place,
as in a grave and have nothing to do with change’.
These ‘incompatible desires’ also animate brilliant
recent work in contemporary anthropology (Tim Ingold),
cultural geography (Hayden Lorimer, John Wylie, Caitlin
de Silvey), literary criticism (John Kerrigan) and cultural
history (Patrick Wright, Patrick Keiller), all of which is,
to my mind rightly, sceptical of holding hard to any ideal
of ‘dwelling’ in a context of late-modernity, and much of
which finds the basis for an updated environmental ethics
not in dwelling but in ‘habitation’.
SB: I’ve heard arguments that ‘nature writing’ (sorry for the
quotes; I find the term difficult but can’t find one I like any
better! – ‘ecoliterature’ can be a bit stodgy …) is at a minimum
simply irrelevant in an age of ecological crisis. That it’s little more
than nostalgia for an old way of life that’s on its way out. That
it needs to be more radical. What’s your perspective on that? Are
we all just fiddling while Rome burns?
RM: No. Literature and art can be powerful catalysts of
change – and change is surely needed. But the outcomes
of art do not reduce to premeditated deliverables, and
are necessarily hard to articulate or to measure. I know
that my outlook and behaviour have been shaped in many
ways by the literature I have read, though I would find
it hard to list those ways and their origins on the page.
There are plenty of means by which ‘nature writing’ (ugh)
or ecoliterature (ugh-ugh) can fail: description can lapse
into the gathering of lustrous particulars; argument can
harden into the hopelessly hortatory, etc. But the quickest
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way to bring about its failure is to task it in advance with
too great a responsibility.
SB: I’m interested in your thoughts about the future of British
nature writing. In a 2003 Guardian article you spoke about a
British nature writing ‘renaissance’. You also said in a 2004
online interview that some of the most interesting and exciting
inventiveness is going on in this genre. Has it lived up to its
promise? Are there are recent books/ emerging writers that/ who
you especially admire? What if anything do you think is still
lacking in the genre … or in what ways do you think it might
usefully develop?
RM: Well, I still see non-fiction, whatever that is (and far
beyond the perimeter of nature writing, whatever that is), as
being at least as tonally creative and formally experimental
as fiction. Far from being shackled into immobility by its
relation to fact, non-fiction today seems to me startlingly
innovative. Look at the essays of John Jeremiah Sullivan,
Rebecca Solnit, Barry Lopez, David Foster Wallace or Geoff
Dyer, for example. Or the reportage of Katherine Boo, John
McPhee or William T. Vollmann, or the travelogues of
William Dalrymple or Iain Sinclair: all intricately patterned
and structurally versatile. Or, of course, J. A. Baker’s The
Peregrine and Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, about which
I have said more than enough elsewhere. I have learned
much myself as a writer – at the levels of the image, sentence
and chapter – from the techniques of novelists and shortstoryists, as well as lyric poets (Peter Larkin, Geoffrey Hill,
Pauline Stainer), but find myself increasingly looking to
non-fiction for formal inspiration and adventure.
To answer your question more directly – I no longer
think of ‘nature writing’, really, and certainly not of it as a
‘genre’. As soon as a form (or set of preoccupations or hopes
or anxieties, which condense as literature), is imagined as
a ‘genre’, it is dead in the water – or rapidly deliquesces to
kitsch.
As to recent books or emerging writers, well I’ve named
plenty of names already, so I’ll restrict myself to two more:
Caspar Henderson’s recent The Book of Barely Imagined
Beings is a marvellously inventive, witty and ethically serious
compendium-grimoire-spell book-dream vision, whose
many virtues I can neither evoke nor exhaust here.
And M John Harrison, best known I guess as one of
the restless fathers of modern sci-fi, and surely among the
most brilliant writers at work today. To read his Light, or
Empty Space, or Climbers, or is to find a novelist doing what
fiction morally must: using its form to carry out the kinds
of thinking and exploration that would be possible in no
other form. His subjects are loneliness, beauty, modernity,
loss, estrangement, ‘space’, intimacy: he is drastically –
frighteningly – insightful about aspects of the ways we
relate to one another and to the world’s surfaces, colours
and places.
SB: I’m always delighted to see you mention Cormac McCarthy’s
Blood Meridian among your favourite books. (As an aside,
reading The Crossing in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy was
largely responsible for the abruptness of our move to Lewis from
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the mainland three years ago … but that’s a long story!) What is
it that you admire about McCarthy? Blood Meridian is often
dismissed as mindlessly violent (largely I suspect by people who
either haven’t read it properly, or who have a very strange notion
of human nature …) What do you see in that book, and maybe in
McCarthy’s work in general, that we can learn from?
RM: Aha! Thank you. And I am always pleased to meet
another McCarthyite (not that we are an exclusive club).
And I do want to hear that long story of yours one day! The
‘mindless violence’ objection is, as you suggest, mindless.
The optical democracy of the novel’s narrative, which
equalises all signs and happenings throughout its course,
is as mindful a decision as could be imagined in literary
terms. One of the consequences of that technical choice is
the enactment (born out by the epigraph and the epilogue,
that together pincer the novel’s body) of the extreme
difficulty of successfully managing moral choice, either over
the course of an individual’s lifetime or over the course of
the history of a species. But I find this an ethical challenge
rather than a surrender. The Road – Blood Meridian’s ashgrey, burnt-out, eye-dimmed sibling and opposite – is also,
of course, no aimless revelry in the bleak and calamitous,
but rather uses the counter-factual mode both to appal and
to rally: as activist a text as one could wish for, but devoid
of any hint of agitprop.
SB: You’ve talked about Mountains of the Mind, The Wild
Places, and The Old Ways as a kind of trilogy. What’s next?
RM: A book called Underland, about subterranea,
underworlds, claustrophilia, burial, limestone and the
baroque. A book of essays, some new and still to be written,
some already published (including the long introduction
to The Living Mountain, and ‘The Counter-Desecration
Phrasebook’, an essay on which I know you have touched in
the past). A monograph study of Anglo-American writing
about landscape, nature and optics from Emerson in 1836
(the floating transparent eyeball) to McCarthy’s The Road
in 2006 (the father ‘glassing’ the broken terrain ahead with
his binoculars). This past year I’ve also thoroughly enjoyed
collaborating with jazz musicians, artists, sculptors, and
photographers, so I’ll wait to see what other collaborative
projects emerge. I also plan to become further involved
with various policy reforms in the fields of access and
conservation. r
Robert Macfarlane won the Guardian First Book
Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday
Times Young Writer of the Year Award for his first book,
Mountains of the Mind (2003). His second, The Wild Places
(2007), was similarly celebrated, winning three prizes and
being shortlisted for six more. Both books were adapted for
television by the BBC. The Old Ways was published in 2012.
Robert is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
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