Landmarks (24 page)

Reading of Hawkes lying down on the ‘hard ground’ near the top
of Primrose Hill, I think of Nan Shepherd lying down on the granite of the Cairngorm summits: another woman for whom ‘flesh’ and ‘bones’ were means to thought, and for whom, just as the mountain
‘does not come to an end with its rock and its soil’
, so the body does not come to an end with its skin.
‘There I lie on the plateau
,’ writes Shepherd near the end of
The Living Mountain
:

under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow – the total mountain.

Shepherd’s ‘total’ is of course totally distinct from the ‘total’ of ‘totalizing’ or ‘totalitarian’. Her mountain, like Hawkes’s ‘earth’, is ‘total’ insofar as it exceeds the possibility of our capacity ever to know it entirely.

Hawkes’s prose also recalls the opening of Jefferies’
The Story of My Heart
, in which he lies on the
‘sweet short turf
’ of a Wiltshire hill in high summer – warmed by ‘the great sun’, ‘rapt and carried away’. He senses himself ‘absorbed into the being or existence of the universe’, and senses ‘down deep into the earth under and high above into the sky and farther still to the sun and stars … losing thus my separateness of being’. ‘Full to the brim of the wondrous past,’ he concludes, ‘I felt the wondrous present.’ Hawkes inverts Jefferies’ terms. Full to the brim of the wondrous present, she feels the wondrous past. And where he is abolished, she is extended.
‘I imagine
,’ she writes later in
A Land
, ‘that I can feel all the particles of the universe nourishing my consciousness just as my consciousness informs all the particles of the universe.’

Those who suspected Hawkes of solipsism were guilty of misreading: she in fact offers an account of selfhood in which, molecularly and emotionally,
‘every being is united
both inwardly and outwardly with the beginning of life in time and with the simplest forms of contemporary life’. The ‘individual’ (from the Latin
individuus
, meaning ‘indivisible’) is not unique but soluble, particulate, fluid. Her book is dedicated to proving that
‘inside this delicate membrane
of my skin, this outline of an individual, I carry the whole history of life’; she is merely one of the outcrops or features of the ‘land’.
‘Consciousness must surely be traced back to the rocks,’
she argues.
A Land
should be read, she suggests at its close, as
‘the simple reaction
of a consciousness exposed at a particular point in time and space. I display its arguments, its posturings, as imprints of a moment of being as specific and as limited as the imprint of its body left by a herring in Cretaceous slime.’ Her book is itself a geological formation, no more or less extraordinary than a fossil or a pebble.

To Hawkes, stone did not only prompt thought – it constituted it. Our
‘affinity with rock
’ was so profound that she understood us to be mineral-memoried, stone-sensed. Often in
A Land
she writes geologically of the mind’s structures: thoughts are ‘rocks … silently forming’, memory is ‘the Blue Lias’ of the fossil-filled strata around Lyme Regis. She admires Henry Moore because while
‘Rodin pursued the idea
of conscious, spiritual man emerging from the rock’, ‘Moore sees him rather as always a part of it’. Admittedly, the sections of
A Land
in which Hawkes advances her thesis of collective consciousness – she would later, under Priestley’s influence, read widely in Jung, whose complete works formed part of their shared library – have dated least well. Partly because no one writing today
would think of proposing such a grand unified theory of existence, and partly because Hawkes becomes most breathless and least careful when she is expounding these complex ideas.
‘It is hardly possible
to express in prose,’ she reflects, ‘the extraordinary awareness of the unity of past and present, of mind and matter, of man and man’s origin which these thoughts bring to me.’ True enough.

Written with ardour and supercharged with sensitivity,
A Land
often finds itself on the edge of melodrama. Hawkes was aware that she had
‘just
… escape[d] disaster’ in terms of her style, but felt too that the risks had been necessary. The history of the earth
‘has to be told in words
’, she notes early, and ‘the senses must be fed’. This was the challenge she set herself: to administer
‘a continual whipping
of the vitality’ in order ‘to keep the words as true expressions of consciousness, to prevent them from turning into some dead march of the intellect’. Mostly, she laid on the lash with panache, succeeding in bringing prehistory alive. She brought the distant past and the living present into vibrant contact: the Old Red Sandstone of Herefordshire has
‘the glow of desert suns
’ invested in its grain; the little island of Ailsa Craig, formerly the plug of a volcano, is now a gannetry in which ‘pale-eyed birds press their warm feathers against the once boiling granite’. As her biographer Christine Finn nicely puts it, to Hawkes:

the [Neanderthal] skeleton
, lying asprawl on the slopes of Mount Carmel, was a human being not so dissimilar to those excavating it. The rooms at Skara Brae were still alive with Neolithic voices. The Lascaux cave paintings anticipated a Palaeolithic hunter returning to complete another image. The marks left by antler-picks in Grimes Graves were fresh with chalk-dust.

Hawkes’s book is filled with odd rhymes and elective affinities: she explains how
‘Jurassic water snails
’ helped ‘medieval Christians to praise their God’, how ammonites influenced the plate armour of fifteenth-century knights, and why the hypertrophied antler of an early species of deer offers a precise analogy with twentieth-century western European consciousness. She possessed the synecdochic imagination of the gifted archaeologist, able to reconstruct whole beings from relict parts, and the sharp sight of the crime-scene investigator, able to attribute complex cause to simple sign.

Hawkes was one of the writers – the quarryman-devout Hugh Miller was another, and John Ruskin a third – who taught me to see through geological eyes, and gave me trilobite-sight, as it were: the urge to read a landscape backwards and perceive something of the violent earth-history that has brought it to its present appearance. I do not know my eras and epochs in order, I would be pressed to distinguish dolerite from rhyolite in the field, and the real geologists I know are rightly in contempt of my ignorance, but I am nevertheless consistently excited by the drama of deep time. In the Scottish Highlands, I find it easy for thousands or millions of years to fall away in a glance. Out on the prow of one of the rock buttresses that lean over the great valley of Lairig Ghru, I can envisage some version of the glen as it was in the Pleistocene: filled with creased grey glacial ice that surges slowly northwards, leaving raw pink granite where its blue belly and flanks scour the rock. But it took Hawkes to help me see southern England icily:

Stand at Moreton-in-the-Marsh
, in that sweet, mild, agricultural country of the Cotswolds, and imagine it as the meeting place of two gigantic glaciers, one thrusting eastward from Wales, the other advancing against it from the Midlands. Or stand where the traffic roars down Finchley Road and see it instead filled by the ragged tip of the most southerly of the glaciers: from desolation to desolation.

~

The oddest contradiction of
A Land
is between its island patriotism and its planetary holism. On the one hand, Hawkes compelled her readers to imagine themselves in ways which make mockery of the idea of individual beings, let alone of nations. Seen from the perspective of the Cretaceous, the notion of the nation seems ridiculous, and fighting for a ‘country’ as ludicrous as going to war on behalf of a raindrop. She writes sardonically of
‘our composed Britain’
, and her (now outdated) geological maps show the migrations and divisions of the world’s land masses over billions of years. She seems less a ‘European’ – as she at one point proclaims herself to be – and more an inhabitant of the supercontinent of Gondwanaland. Again and again she reminds us of the extreme contingency of human existence: volcanoes
‘speak of insecurity
’, are reminders of ‘our participation in process’. The idea of the individual is ‘a fiction’, and we are part of a group of fictional individuals who by chance happen to inhabit ‘that small part of the earth’s crust known to us as the British Isles’.

On the other hand,
A Land
was triumphantly the story of ‘Great Britain’. It was published in the damp summer of the Festival of Britain, that great post-war carnival of backslapping and chin-upping, with its well-intentioned rhetoric of ‘the land’ and ‘the people’, its mobilizing of a
‘blessed heritage of farmers
, sailors, poets, bravely advancing into the age of radar and jet propulsion’. On London’s South Bank, the Skylon pointed its space-age finger skywards above the Dome of Discovery, and the Oyster Creek Branch Railway clattered up and down on its tiny track near the Telekinema. The festival’s aim was to provoke recovery and promote progress in a war-battered nation. It was a rebuke to ruin, a tonic for the nation, and the regenerative patriotism of the festival, to which Hawkes was a key advisor, rings out often in
A Land
: there in her insistence that Britain become self-sufficient again agriculturally, there in her vaunting of
‘regional difference
’, and there most audibly in her declaration that ‘[t]he people of this island should put their hearts, their hands, and all the spare energy which science has given them into the restoration of their country’. The dream-tour that ends the book – taking the reader over the South Downs, across the East Anglian wheat-bowl, up through West Riding and the Yorkshire Moors, which sniffs the Pennines
‘for a faint but palpable
tang of wildness’, and then passes on up to the ‘mountain regions’ – concludes with (of course) a close-up of the long line of chalk cliffs: Britain’s Cretaceous bastion, its white shield raised against invaders, its symbol of pride and of insularity.

So the ‘land’ of the book’s title is in part the same ‘land’ that Arthur is fighting for in T. H. White’s
The Book of Merlyn
, an allegory for the wartime defence of England:
‘the land under him
’, which he loves ‘with a fierce longing’. And it is a similar ‘land’ to the one that J. B. Priestley invoked in his wartime radio broadcasts: the
‘sense of community
’ and the ‘feeling of deep continuity’ that he experienced out in the ‘English hills and fields’, alongside ‘ploughman and parson, shepherd and clerk’.

The patriotism of
A Land
leads to some awkward moments: there are queasy-making allusions to
‘the racial stock’
of Britain, which
feel especially odd given Hawkes’s demonstration elsewhere in the book of what nonsense the ideas of ‘stock’ and ‘race’ seem when viewed from a prehistoric perspective. One can see why Henry Williamson, the troubled author of
Tarka the Otter
, might have written Hawkes the fan letter he did, composed in his writing hut in Georgeham, north Devon. For while the book would certainly have appealed to the pacifist Williamson of the 1910s and 1920s – who was longing for a theory of human identity that might transcend nationalism and dissolve war – aspects of it would also have spoken to the Williamson of the 1930s to 1950s: admirer of the Hitler Youth, member of the British Union of Fascists, regular contributor to the Mosley-sponsored periodical
The European
, for whom engagement with the land had curdled into a version of
Blut und Boden
belonging.

Williamson wrote to Hawkes in February 1952, having had to wait
‘for months
’ to get hold of a copy of
A Land
due to its popularity. He read it, he told her, ‘during a fortnight of pre-midnights by the copper oil lamp of this hut’, and reacted with ‘enthusiasm and delight & indeed wonder’ to her ‘sentences, paragraphs and chapters’. Flattering to the point of unctuousness, he acclaimed it a ‘perfect book’: ‘You indeed have married poetry with science, and … revealed what wonder there is in the seed of the poppy and the luminous seed of the Milky Way.’ He thought that both the Lawrences (T. E. and D. H.) would have ‘loved’
A Land
, before bowing and scraping his way backwards out of the letter: ‘Is this presumption on the part of a minor “nature writer”? … You surely have had such praise and fame that I feel I must not obtrude upon your consciousness any further, having rendered my tribute unto Caesar, Yours faithfully, Henry Williamson.’

It is a muddled and uneasy letter, but Williamson was right to settle on ‘wonder’ as both the source of the book’s energies, and its
effect upon him. Hawkes was enthused by the earth’s past in the original Greek sense of the word (
entheos
, meaning ‘divinely inspired, rapt, in ecstasy’) and her enthusiasm leapt and arced from page to reader. She esteemed Moore for choosing to sculpt in Liassic-era ‘Hornton’ stone,
‘a rock
… full of fossils, all of which make their statement when exposed by his chisel’, rather than in ‘the white silence of marble’. In this way, she wrote, he allowed ‘stone to speak’.

So did Hawkes. Nabokov, in his novel
Transparent Things
, reflects on the temporal vertigo that can come from the contemplation of the earth’s substance.
‘When we concentrate on
a material object,’ he wrote, ‘whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object,’ such that we become ‘not of the now’. Hawkes knew how to become not of the now – how to break the surface tension of the world, and sink into the deep-time dream-life of debris.