Landmarks (23 page)

I first met Jacquetta Hawkes’s name as the author of an approving quotation on the cover of Clarence Ellis’s
The Pebbles on the Beach
(1954). ‘Mr Ellis writes simply and well about the natural processes which compose, shape and transport pebbles … he is a most excellent guide,’ said Hawkes – and she was right. Ellis’s was the book that we took as a family when we went treasure-hunting for stones on the coasts of Britain: wandering bent at the waist, eyes peeled for rough orbs of agate, quartz prisms, purple jasper and elusive amber, hard to tell in its unpolished form from the flints among which it usually lay. I pored over Ellis’s book as a child, especially the colour plates that carried glossy close-up photographs of stones –
‘fragment of gabbro
’, ‘ovoid of quartz-veined grit’ – arrayed on sand. I appreciated the calm teacherliness with which he approached his subject from first principles
(‘What is a pebble?
’ ‘How have raised beaches come about?’) and the hint of moral duty with which he infused the study of geology (‘We paid some attention to sandstone in the last chapter, but we must examine it more closely’). I prized the insider tips he offered: that serpentine discloses its identity by means of its
‘wax-like lustre
’, or that if you break a quartzite pebble ‘into two pieces and strike one against the other in darkness’ there will be an ‘orange-coloured flash’ and a ‘difficult to describe’ smell.

Ellis also broke open the language of stones for me. He struck
names against roots to produce flashes and smells:
‘Gneiss (pronounced “nice”
) is a word of German origin, derived from an Old High German verb
gneistan
, “to sparkle”. In sunshine, especially after rain, it certainly does sparkle, as it is a highly crystalline rock.’ ‘Schist (pronounced “shist”) is derived from a Greek word
schistos
, meaning “easily split”.’ I began to collect stone-words as well as stones: the axe-knock syllables of
quartz
,
jet
,
chert
,
onyx
and
agate
, the classical complexities of
carnelian
and
citrine
. Ellis clearly loved language for its capacity to grade and sort perception, but also for the poetry it carried. As an ordinary-looking pebble could be sliced and polished to reveal dazzling patterns, so could a word. Ellis taught me
swash
,
backwash
and
fetch
as the terms necessary to help understand
‘the rudiments of wave action
… upon the movement, the shaping and the smoothing of pebbles’; he noted
swales
and
fulls
as being respectively the ridges and hollows of shingle formation on the seaward-side of long shingle banks. He gave me
crinoid
and
calyx
,
piriform
,
foliation
and
xenoliths
: the last denoting those stones that have been transported by glacial action far from their origin, often identifiable by the striations (Latin
stria
, ‘a groove’) that showed where they had been scraped along by a glacier while
‘frozen into its underside’
.

About the only sentence of his book that I didn’t understand was its third:
‘Collectors of pebbles are rare.’
Really? For as long as I could remember, my parents and I had picked things up as we walked. Surfaces in our house were covered in shells, pebbles, twists of driftwood from rivers and sea. We weren’t the only ones. Everyone I knew seemed to gather pebbles, and line them up on window ledges and mantelpieces, performing a humdrum rite of happiness and memory-making.
Spot, stoop, hold in the hand, slip in the pocket
: a kind of karmic kleptomania. In their Cairngorms house my
grandparents kept special stones in glass bowls that they filled with water to keep the stones shining. They even constructed a makeshift
Wunderkammer
: a wall-mounted cabinet, the white-wood compartments of which held a pine cone, a rupee, cowries, a dried shepherd’s purse, a geographic cone-snail shell with its map-like patterns, and polished pebbles of chalcedony and onyx.

Ellis helped turn me into a petrophile; he also helped turn me into a logophile, and when he wrote of nineteenth-century pebble-hunters who
‘combed the beaches
with painstaking zeal … and compiled glittering collections’, he might have been describing my own subsequent dictionary-fossicking and word-list-making.
‘All I know is that
at the very early stage of a book’s development,’ wrote Vladimir Nabokov, ‘I get this urge to gather bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles.’ Like Nabokov, I am a pebble-eater and a straw-gatherer: my own books have begun as gleaned images, single words and fragment-phrases, scribbled onto file cards or jotted in journals. They have also emerged from actual stones, gathered while walking. These stones – among them a heart-sized stone of blue basalt from Ynys Enlli, an eyeball of quartz taken from the black peat of Rannoch Moor, a pierced flint from Chesil Bank (
Chesil
from the Old English
ceosol
or
cisel
, meaning ‘shingle’), a clutch of fossilized polyps from the Palestinian West Bank, a rounded boulder of zebra-striped gneiss from the Isle of Harris – have served as triggers when I have begun to write: a means of summoning back memories of a landscape at the instant of finding (the scents and temperatures of the air, the nature of the light, the ambient sounds). Each stone is a souvenir in the old sense of the word; collection spurs recollection.

~

Ellis’s
The Pebbles on the Beach
was the stone-book of my childhood; Jacquetta Hawkes’s
A Land
(1951) that of my twenties.
‘I have used the findings
of the two sciences of geology and archaeology,’ Hawkes declares at the opening of
A Land
, ‘for purposes altogether unscientific.’ So – candidly, audaciously – starts her strange book, a deep-time dream of 4 billion years of earth-history, whose ‘purposes’ are to demonstrate that we are all
‘creatures of the land’
, substantively produced by the terrain on which we live, and to advance a synthetic cosmogony of consciousness, culture and geology. Passionate and personal,
A Land
became a best-seller upon publication in May 1951 and remains one of the defining British books of the post-war decade. It reads now, sixty years on, like a missing link in the tradition of British writing about landscape, but also as prophetic of contemporary environmental attitudes and anxieties. It feels both a period piece – as of its year as the Festival of Britain, the Austin A30 and
The Goon Show
– and Delphically out-of-time in its ecstatic holism.
‘The image I have sought to evoke
,’ Hawkes declares in her Preface, ‘is of an entity, the land of Britain, in which past and present, nature, man and art appear all in one piece.’

Hawkes knew she had written an unclassifiable work. It is, she observed in 1953,
‘an uncommon type of book
, one very difficult to place in any of our recognized categories’. The difficulty of ‘placing’ it arises in part because it dons and discards its disguises with such rapidity. It appears, at different points, to be a short history of Planet England; a Cretaceous cosmi-comedy; a patriotic hymn of love to Terra Britannica; a neo-Romantic vision of the countryside as a vast and inadvertent work of land art; a speculative account of human identity as chthonic in origin and collective in nature; a homily aimed at rousing us from spiritual torpor; a lusty pagan lullaby of longing; and a jeremiad against centralization, industrialization and
our severance from the ‘land’. It is all of these things at times, and none of them for long. Its tonal range is vast. There are echoes of the saga, shades of the epic, and tassels of the New Age. It is tagged throughout with poetry (Wordsworth, Hardy, Lawrence, Norman Nicholson). It is flamboyant enough that I can imagine it re-performed as a rock opera. It brinks at times on the bonkers. Hawkes disarmingly refers to the book as a memoir, but if so it is one in which she investigates her past with reference to the whole of planetary history. It is a work of back-to-nature writing that advocates a return not just to the soil but right down to the core. In its obsession with clear and firm forms,
A Land
reads like Roger Fry on rocks; in its preoccupation with synchronicities, like Gurdjieff on geology; and in its fascination with the particularities of stone, like Adrian Stokes on acid. Its politics are occasionally troubling, but mostly animated by a federate vision of the nation as a union of loosely linked locales. It is not a jumble, exactly, for out of its contradictions arise its charisma. It is not wise, exactly, but its intensity approaches the visionary.

A Land
’s apparent solipsism and its disciplinary waywardness dismayed academic specialists when it was published, especially pure archaeologists, who reacted to Hawkes’s projection of self into her prose either with foot-shuffling embarrassment or with intellectual aggression. But such responses misunderstood Hawkes’s ambitions. Harold Nicolson, whose rave review of
A Land
in the
Observer
helped turn the book into a best-seller, knew straight away what he was dealing with.
‘There is
,’ he noted with awe, ‘a weird beauty in this prophetic book … it is written with a passion of love and hate.’ H. J. Massingham compared Hawkes’s prose to that of Donne’s sermons, possessing
‘something of their imaginative range
, their recondite knowledge, their passion of exploration, their visionary sense of integration’.
A Land
was, he concluded, ‘a germinal book and may well herald a change in cultural orientation that bitter experience has made tragically overdue’.

Hawkes later attributed that ‘passion’ to the flux of her emotional life at the time of writing.
A Land
was composed between the spring of 1949 and the autumn of 1950. Her marriage to her first husband, the archaeologist Christopher Hawkes, was breaking up; she had recently met the man who was to become her second husband, the writer and broadcaster J. B. Priestley; and she had three years previously lost to sudden death her lover, the poet and music critic Walter Turner, to whom she had been devoted. By her own account, she was at a
‘highly emotional pitch
’, which expressed itself as a ‘vital energy’ in the prose.
A Land
, she later recalled, came ‘directly out of my being’: ‘Wars can stir up personal lives to revolutionary effect … life took hold of me, and quite suddenly, my imagination was opened and my sensibility roused.’ She sat down to write out of a wish to contribute something ‘to our understanding of being and the overwhelming beauty and mystery of its manifestations’.

The book was an eccentric move for her to make in terms of its register. Hawkes had from
‘an absurdly tender age
’ wanted to become an archaeologist. Born in Cambridge in 1910, her childhood home was located on the site of both a Roman road and an Anglo-Saxon cemetery. She grew up in an ‘extraordinarily reserved’ family, who were ‘as silent as trees in our emotional lives’, but intellectually dedicated (her father was a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins). At nine, she wrote an essay declaring that she would be an archaeologist; at eighteen she was duly admitted to Cambridge University to read archaeology, graduated with a first-class degree and travelled to Palestine – then under the British Mandate – to take part in the excavation of a
Palaeolithic-era cave dwelling on Mount Carmel. In 1933 she married Hawkes, then an Assistant Keeper at the British Museum, later to become Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford, and for the next seven years she worked as an independent archaeological researcher, writing
‘only the most severely technical
of articles and books’. But the upheavals of the Second World War and her love affair with Turner caused Hawkes to become distrustful of academic archaeology’s distrust of the imagination. She decided to use her ‘scientific archaeology’ for ‘more imaginative purposes’. The success of
A Land
launched her as a public intellectual, and she remained well known for the rest of her long life as a broadcaster, writer and culture broker.

In person, Hawkes was a distinctive mixture of austerity and ardour. Priestley, early in their acquaintance, described her as
‘ice without and fire within
’. ‘Mostly, people apprehended the ice,’ remembered her son, Nicolas. She spoke slowly and deliberately; ‘daunting’ was a word often used of her by those who did not know her well. But Hawkes was also transgressive. Aged sixteen, she founded a ‘Trespassers Society’, dedicated to the disregard on foot of private property. While an undergraduate, she organized what was then the first ever rugby-football match between teams from the all-female Girton and Newnham colleges. The university proctors resisted, she pushed, they yielded – but insisted that the match be held at dawn. Despite the early kick-off, several hundred male spectators turned up. She was bisexual throughout the 1930s, wrote a controversial and sexually frank memoir in the 1970s, was friends with Henry Moore, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland, and visited Robert Graves in Mallorca to sit in swimsuits upon the beach and discuss Graves’s theory of the White Goddess mother-myth. She was someone for whom the feeling human body was the first principle of the thinking human mind, and who – as her son put it – had a ‘great capacity for physical response not only to people, but also to nature and the land’.

~

It is with a feeling human body that the first chapter of
A Land
begins:
‘When I have been working
late on a summer night, I like to go out and lie on the patch of grass in our back garden … this hard ground presses my flesh against my bones and makes me agreeably conscious of my body.’ From that patch of grass – on Primrose Hill in north London – Hawkes sends her mind out journeying. Her mind moves downwards, as if the soil were continuous with her skin, through humus and topsoil, into the London clay and the sedimentary bedrocks, formed during the Palaeogene between 34 and 56 million years ago, at the bottom of oceans. Her mind also moves upwards, as if the air were continuous with her skin, through the
‘fine silhouettes of the leaves
immediately overhead’, past the ‘black lines of neighbouring chimney pots’ and upwards at last to ‘stray among the stars’. And her mind also moves sidewards, across ‘the huge city spreading for miles on all sides’, along ‘the railways, roads and canals rayed out towards all the extremities of Britain’. It is a brilliantly managed scene, quaquaversal in its geometries, simultaneously expanding present space and deepening past time. It also allows her to return to the book’s true origin (and implicitly her own), the birth of the earth: ‘I must begin with a white-hot young earth dropping into its place like a fly into an unseen four-dimensional cobweb, caught up in a delicate tissue of forces where it assumed its own inevitable place, following the only path, the only orbit that was open to it.’