Nature Writing
It’s not at every conference that you get to go birding with your heroes. This summer, I
found myself in Norfolk, peering over corn fields at dusk, looking for cranes with
Richard Maybe and Mark Cocker. They wrote the textbooks I have at home about British
birds and flora. When they pronounced a bird to be a marsh harrier, there could be no
doubt about it. Later that week, Mark used the eyes at the back of his head to spot one of
the most elusive of marshland birds, the bittern. Camouflaged against swaying reeds, it
took the rest of us less-attuned writers an age to see it. Some very distinguished poets
never located it at all.
We were in Norwich at the New Writing Partnership’s Human: Nature symposium to
discuss the opposition between nature and culture. In the very first session two apparent
camps emerged. American travel writer Gretel Ehrlich (author of This Cold Heaven and
A Match to the Heart) gave an account of living with the Inuit, with an implicit plea for
action against the global warming which is destroying their landscape. Her seeming
idealization of the Noble Savage drew protests from some participants, who recalled the
fascist history of such ideology in Europe. The Eastern Europeans, in particular, bristled.
What they heard was a call to political propaganda, a pressure from which they’d
painfully disentangled themselves. For them, writers had to be the servants of nothing but
their work. The distinction between evil culture and virtuous nature, which was to haunt
the week, began.
So-called “nature writers” take their authority from fact and an intimate knowledge of
their subject. “Literary writers” bow primarily to the dictates of artistic form. These
categories are, of course, crudely drawn and not mutually exclusive. It’s impossible to
conceive of a literary writer whose work wouldn’t be fatally marred by factual inaccuracy
nor of a nature writer who could sustain our interest for long without writing well. JA
Baker’s The Peregrine is not only an accurate account of following a raptor, it’s an
unparalleled account of one man’s obsession with the world outside himself. It can be
read psychologically as creative denial of cancer from which, it seems, Baker was
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suffering. The crux of the issue here is: how can literary writers become advocates for the
natural world without being drawn into the propagandizing which undermines the artistic
credibility which earns them attention?
Out in the Norfolk fields, our birding party wanted cranes. There were none to be seen.
Gretel Ehrlich spotted a barn owl. As we searched, Mark Cocker confessed, “I don’t
know what they do.” He does, of course, but what Mark meant was “specifically at
7.30pm on a Tuesday evening threatening rain.” Then we gave up and went to the pub.
It’s a writer’s job to know what language does under all atmospheric conditions and to
have a fair sense of where to find a suggestive line when all the shops are shut and the
phones are down. The writer isn’t so much listening to the world as to language’s
commentary upon it.
Writers have to know when to be quiet and humble enough to let the unexpected come to
them. If you conceive of language as an entirely willed cultural construct, then you miss
its “otherness”. In poetry, for example, metrical rhythm works as a tap root to the
unconscious. In his contribution to the symposium, Richard Maybe sketched a kind of
writing which would place the environment, not the writer’s ego, centre-frame. Rather
than describe a place, who not write, say, the “mind of a mountain”? Writers should let a
landscape take possession of them, rather than occupying it. Any good writer already
does this. The aim is to imagine yourself into being half-human, half-mountain.
Maybe suggested that the use of metaphor is partly responsible for the way literary
writers egotistically co-opt a landscape for their own emotional uses. Pathetic fallacy, he
seemed to suggest, was only a hair’s breadth away from environmental exploitation. Man
is, however, fundamentally a metaphor-making creature and is unable to think without
images. One of the ways figurative language works is by switching between the literal
and the metaphorical in ways more felicitous than even the writer could have known.
Take the tenth-century Welsh poet Taliesin or, more accurately, those who wrote using
the sixth-century poet’s name. He declares: “I was born in the region of the summer
stars.” The poet is a shape-shifter and embodies himself in various animals until he
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discovers “I am a cell.” This can be read as Celtic hyperbole but, given that our bodies
are made from the remains of exploding stars, it’s also a statement of fact. Even the
earliest oral poetry may have had a scientific function. Florence and Kenneth Wood
speculated that the Iliad, as well as being a story about the siege of Troy, is a
comprehensive record of the ancients’ knowledge of the skies, a mnemonic for the
movements of the stars. So, without taking astronomy as an explicit subject, the poem is
ecological to its core. Its plot is intimately related to the constellations.
Part of a writer’s lifetime work is expanding his or her sympathies, sight and voice, so as
to be able to pronounce the broadest possible “we”. Walt Whitman made an ecstatic song
and dance about this growth, but it’s in poetry from the very beginning. Take Raferty, a
blind versifier wandering around South Galway. He wrote some verses criticizing an old
thorn bush that had given him inadequate shelter from a storm and, in reply, the bush
recited the entire history of Ireland from the Deluge to the Battle of the Boyne. Australian
poet Les Murray has written wonderful poems pressing language into the service of
animals in Translations from the Natural World. Elsewhere, he imagines the collective
voice of a herd of cows, using “me” as a collective pronoun to striking stylistic and
substantial effect, knocking the human “I” from its centrist pedestal.
This stepping out of the human persona in a poem – however histrionic – does push
poetry towards the avant-garde. Abstraction is a subject and style which is increasingly
interesting to Les Murray. But, in the context of writing about the environment, this
aesthetic can be deadly accurate. Take, for example, a poem published by the eighteenthcentury poet John Clare, “Transcription of a Nightingale’s Song”, which starts:
Chee chew chee chew chee
chew – cheer cheer cheer
chew chew chew chee
- up cheer up cheer up
tweet tweet tweet jug jug jug
This is a wonderful poem to read aloud, even if you’ve never heard a nightingale sing.
Mark Cocker played me some recordings, so I know that the pauses should be quite long
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in between verses. Although the sounds in the poem are entirely those of the bird, the
sensibility which noted them down is human. So here we have the record of a creature
called a man-bird, they are co-authors.
The so-called resurgence in Nature writing (though it seems to me never to have gone out
of fashion) was given a platform recently in an issue of Granta. What was striking about
“The New Nature Writing” was how, well, old it was. A number of pieces applied the
methods of natural history writing to urban settings but, stylistically, the canon looks
overwhelmingly conservative. Given that the logical thrust of a love of nature is a desire
to promote its preservation, might it be that nature writers are reluctant to risk that a less
familiar style might precipitate a change of sensibility? Conservatism, as in leaving the
wilderness alone, isn’t the only way of protecting nature. Human language is key, not
only because it’s an extension of the natural world, but because, when used at full stretch,
it has the capacity to change social perception and, potentially, behaviour. In a poem of
mine, “What’s in a Name?” I consider the effect of losing the Welsh word for ‘magpie’
(but this could apply to any language). At first sight, nature is indifferent but, in another
way, there is a direct result:
Magpies’ fear of men
lessened, as we’d lost one means
(the word pioden) of keeping track
of terrorist birds out in the back.
Those who speak the older languages of the British Isles have to be careful of a subtle
form of chauvinism with regard to nature writing. I was asked for a bilingual libretto on
environmental issues a few years ago for Welsh National Opera’s award-winning MAX
department. My dilemma was this. When making animals speak Welsh, was I suggesting
that Welsh-language culture is intrinsically closer to nature than the English? Is its carbon
footprint per capita any smaller? Chronologically, Welsh does have a longer relationship
with the west than the Saxon, but it has no prior claim to being more “natural.” Language
doesn’t reside in a landscape, which can be hostile to it. If you’re out of breath from
ploughing or shearing a sheep, panting, not chatting, is the best response.
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The big unconscious assumption behind most so-called “Nature Writing” is nature-good,
humans-bad. Going to sea in a small boat a few years ago taught me that, unless I’m very
careful and well-equipped, the sea, without even noticing, will kill me. Seamanship is the
practical art of simply staying alive. Nowhere is our double standard about nature more
visible than in our attitude to our own bodies. This is the arena of our most intimate
relationship with the environment. Illness is a test case in our anthropomorphizing of the
natural world. If you want to praise the natural world, it’s illogical to pick and choose
parts you like (meadowsweet) and others you don’t (mosquitoes, which are hard to love).
I tried to figure this out in a poem about cancer, “Some Common Invaders”:
If I speak for the sedges
and for ferns,
or upland lichens,
do I have to praise
Japanese Knotweed?
Cancer is just as natural a life form as the nightingale, but which of us could have a Jainlike attitude towards it in our own bodies? My husband has non-Hodgkin lymphoma and
my view of doctors was transformed when I took him once, very unwell in about six
different ways, into our hospital’s haematology unit. A rather surly registrar didn’t
indulge in the sweet talk which is currently considered necessary but, when my husband
took off his shirt, lit up at the sight of his rash. “Ah! Herpetic lesions!” he said warmly,
greeting an old friend, much as Mark Cocker might say with delight, “Ah! A crane!”
Raymond Tallis, a gerontologist, has written eloquently about the inhumanity of the body
and untreated disease. He’s scornful of those who are suspicious of modern medical
interventions, reminding us that a “conservation” of the natural body condemns us to
brute suffering. It’s only very recently that we haven’t been routinely at the mercy of
infections. We’ve blotted out their cruelty very quickly. We’ve also forgotten that, in its
very origins, medicine was part of the study of nature. Here is the first Treatise Regimen
from the Hippocratic writings in the fourth and fifth centuries BC:
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I maintain that he who intends to write correctly concerning the regimen
of man must first know and discern the nature of man in general, that is,
to know from what things he is originally composed, and discern by what
parts he is controlled.
This leads to teachings on biology, the influence of the stars on health and how
geographical location and the weather affects one’s wellbeing, a pretty good education in
ecology, I’d say. Medical language is nature writing without the emotion. Like nautical
vocabulary, it can only do its job if it’s stripped of ambiguity and imprecision. Confusion
in such a context can and does kill. The most interesting piece in the Granta “New
Nature Writing” issue to me was poet Kathleen Jamie’s “Pathologies: A Startling Tour of
Our Bodies.” She looked inwards, through the microscope and the autopsy, to what’s
happening to the body when it goes wrong. As she comments acerbically, nature isn’t “all
primroses and dolphins.”
Regarding illness as a legitimate manifestation of nature gives us a way of by-passing the
distinction between “me here” and “nature there”. I’m conservative in relation to the
external environment but interventionist in relation to indigestion or worse. Given that
pollution “out there” may well lead us to experiencing the world as disease in the future,
illness offers us a model of how to formulate modes of action towards the coming
environmental difficulties. Much of the heat in the prospect of human extermination
comes, I’m sure, from our denial of our own personal deaths. A self-inflicted demise
might be giving us the illusion of more control over events, but even if the environment
collapses, mortality rates, for all our medical advances, still stand at 100%
If I’m ill with natural life, what are the possible stages of a response to such a disease?
Much was said at the symposium about our apparent paralysis in the face of looming
atmospheric catastrophe. First, I want a cure. Next, if I can’t be healed completely, I
might choose to see an intractable disease as an opportunity for a change of values. I only
hope that not too many people on the planet would rather die than modify their patterns
of consumption. If internal adaptation fails to improve my physical fate, I might want to
broaden my definition of health to include parts of the disease, thus enabling me to
function, if not painlessly, at least whole-heartedly.
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Finally, if my condition is terminal – and that is our common fate – I might put all my
energy into living as well as possible within sight of my own death. And this is where we
all become naturalists of ourselves. It strikes me that some of the best things I’ve ever
done are walks, recorded nowhere but on my body. Artist and cartographer Tim
Robinson describes such an outing in his latest book, Connemara: Listening to the Wind.
He has been crossing Erisberg bog and is granted an insight into the world without
himself as an observer:
Sometimes I come back from such a walk with my head so empty it seems not
a single thought or observation has passed through it all day, and I feel I
have truly seen things as they are when I’m not there to see them.
That’s nature writing of a high moral order, both by the authority of subject and of style.
Gwyneth Lewis
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