Reading for landscape May 23, 2009
Posted by Jenny in literature, memoir.Tags: George Eliot, Mayor of Casterbridge, R.D. Blackmore, Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy, Wessex
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I wrote the following post back in February, and I decided I didn’t like it, but I saved it as a draft. I took another look at it today, and I think maybe it isn’t so bad. The odd thing is, since experiencing the upheaval that I described March 24, I have been absolutely, utterly unable to read. I know it will come back eventually.
Last month, after I finished reading R.D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, I was in a mood to keep reading about the moors of southwest England, so I turned to Thomas Hardy. His fictionalized Wessex overlaps with Exmoor. I read Mayor of Casterbridge and I’m nearly finished now with Return of the Native. They both have transported me to the villages and the strange customs of people out on the wild, wind-blasted heath.
I’ve always loved books, but there have been certain times in my life when I have been especially intent in my reading. I’m not counting college—I read a lot then, but it was assigned, not freely chosen—but there was one time in my early 20s when I read all I could get my hands on (mainly European and South American authors), and another time when I was around 30 (I read Proust. Yep, Proust). Then not again until my long spell of pneumonia in 2004, when I read nothing but military history (it’s hard to explain). Now I seem to be reading nineteenth-century English writers.
I’m not a literary sort of reader. I wasn’t an English major in college, I don’t keep up with the gossip of the book world, I don’t enjoy reading literary criticism. I’ve looked at literary blogs, and I’m not interested, and I’m pretty sure they’re not interested in me, either. What it comes down to is that I read like a child, for the simple magical purpose of living in another world. Like a child, I feel forlorn when I finish a book and I have to leave that world.
Many years ago I read Middlemarch by George Eliot and decided it might be the best novel I’d ever read. Since it fits with the nineteenth-century English theme, I picked up my old copy of it the other day and thought that might be the next thing, to re-read it. I skimmed through the first couple of chapters. The idealistic Dorothea Brooke, spurning the attentions of a handsome young man to bury herself in a marriage to the hideous Casaubon! The whole psychology of it—the characters—the turns of fate—done so perfectly!
But I won’t re-read it after all, I’ve decided. Why not? Because it has no landscape. It takes place entirely indoors. For whatever reason, right now, I can’t read a book that has no landscape. I must, I absolutely must, have some sky over my head as I read.
"The Reader" by Fragonard
Place: Exmoor. Time: 17th century. January 29, 2009
Posted by Jenny in literature, nature, travel, Uncategorized.Tags: English footpaths, Exmoor, Lorna Doone, Monmouth Rebellion, R.D. Blackmore, Walter Scott
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If your knowledge of literature is good, you will immediately suspect from the words above that I have been reading the novel Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore. Yes, it is true. I have been living on the wild, windswept heath of Exmoor, loitering by the fireplace in the cottage of the Ridd family, galloping on my faithful steed along roads frequented by highwaymen, and venturing up the roaring cascades of a hidden stream to visit the forbidden lair of the Doone clan.
The book was more of a favorite of my grandmother than my mother. Grandma Johnstone had one of the old-fashioned three-volume editions. She was not in a hurry to finish a book. She loved the leisurely setting of a scene in Sir Walter Scott, the tale that begins with a small figure making his way across a highland glen, or over a pass between precipitous crags, or through whatever mist-swirling, moss-festooned place Scott might have invented. Blackmore was a bit later than Scott, writing Lorna in 1869. But they were cut from the same cloth. Their books were meant to be lived in for a while, as one sat in the parlor in the evening turning the pages, admiring the illustrations, lost in the romance and intrigue.
I would like to visit Exmoor someday. It takes its name from the River Exe, and many other streams and rivers flow through it. Most of it is now a national park. Exmoor has the advantage of not being on the way to anywhere else, unless perhaps you are going from South Wales to Cornwall. The area has only small villages. Herds of red deer and wild ponies wander the moors. The coastline is embroidered with waterfalls and ravines. There is said to be a “Beast of Exmoor,” southwest England’s answer to Sasquatch, that makes mysterious nocturnal attacks on livestock. Exmoor boasts many species of heather, some obscure lichens and mosses, a high-elevation beech forest, and something called a whitebeam tree. It is possible to walk many miles along the system of public footpaths that are such a wonderful feature of England.
Blackmore was writing about a time 200 years earlier than his own, the period of the Monmouth Rebellion, also known as the “Pitchfork Rebellion,” against the rule of the papist James II. It was a harsh time. The bodies of criminals were hung from gibbets as a warning along the highways. Lives were short and often curtailed by violence. Some of the passages in Lorna are written in a dialect as impenetrable to me as Uncle Remus would be to a reader in England. But part of the enjoyment for me is to learn about those lives, the schools that were attended, the food and beverages that were served (the venison and the ale), the conversation that was had in a tavern, the gathering of the villagers, both men and women, to do the work of the harvest. The plot of Lorna is pure rhinestones and moonbeams, but the setting is very real. Probably not much had changed in Exmoor between 1685 and 1869.
It’s fun just to read the captions to the illustrations. (You can find an illustrated version of Lorna if you go to the Project Gutenberg website.) “I was grieved to see a disdainful smile spread upon his sallow countenance.” “For, lo! I stood at the foot of a long pale slide of water.” “As snug a little house blinked on me, as ever I saw or wished to see.” “We happened upon a great coach and six horses labouring very heavily.” Ah, wonderful!
Endless streams and forests 