LANDSCAPES
Tonight,
I am thinking a lot about landscapes.
It
has come about because I have recently read the ultimate landscape novel
‘Wuthering Heights’. The landscape, or the setting, is of course the moors
surrounding the Bronte Parsonage near Haworth, in Lancashire. I don’t have the
book with me, but some of the vocabulary I am left with in my memory is craggy,
rocky, heather, black frost, fleecy cloud, abundant rain, temporary brooks,
shadows and sunshine, transient mist, wintry drifts, primroses & crocuses, impassable
roads, and so on. It is a tough environment which suited only the toughest of
people. And Emily Bronte must have been one of the toughest young women who
ever lived. The novel is extraordinary for its power, cruelty, violence and menace.
It paints a visceral world of loneliness, imprisonment, and despair, as well as
other gothic elements like madness, imprisonment, the supernatural and
mysticism.
It must have been thrilling for EJB to apply
her imaginative world to such a ‘fantastic’ and surreal story, dark and
foreboding, although in the case of Heathcliff and Cathy, and younger Cathy and
Edgar, her father, full of romantic love and filial bonding as well. My
impression of EJB is that of someone who could be ruthless like her characters,
hard-nosed and wilfully independent and determined and capable of cruelty.
Filled from top to toe with the ‘romantic imagination’ but understanding of the
uncompromising tenor of her times and the people who inhabited remote areas of
the wild countryside in the nineteenth century.
The
landscape of D H Lawrence’s childhood never left him. He grew up in Eastwood,
Nottingham, semi-rural with a fairly short distance to town (Nottingham) but
also enclosed by woods and country paths and farms and wild nature. His
landscape crept into novels his whole life, from the beginnings with ‘The White
Peacock’ and ‘Sons & Lovers’, to latter works such as ‘The Rainbow’ and
‘’The Lost Girl’. Despite the fact that he spent a good deal of his fertile
writing career living abroad in places like Australia, New Mexico and Italy,
Lawrence also came back to the world of his childhood in his latter books like
‘The Virgin & The Gypsy’ and ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. Just like a venture
into Bronte territory is manna from heaven for me, it is similar with the
Lawrence world of Eastwood, Moorgreen Reservoir, Cossal (Cossethay in ‘The
Rainbow’).
Lawrence’s
favourite place of his childhood was Hagg’s Farm, where he would walk several
miles to visit the Chambers family, all of the Chambers family who were a
second family, and in particular the love of his youth, Jessie Chambers (Miriam
in ‘Sons & Lovers’) who he might have married but for the fact as he later
said ‘she would have destroyed (my) genius’ (not a feminist-friendly
afterthought). Lawrence wrote Jessie’s brother a letter near the end of his
life about the joy of visiting The Haggs, which never left him. He called it
‘the countryside of my heart’. The closest, perhaps, to experiencing these
feelings of joy and comfort and landscape again were probably whilst living in
New Mexico with his wife and friends, baking bread, writing novels, riding
horses, visiting ancient places like Guadalajara…
Katherine
Mansfield came to hate New Zealand, her birthplace, as enclosed, smothering,
provincial. As an adolescent she had a taste of life in London, and on return
she had a miserable period in Wellington with her parents where she felt
listless and angry. She was the archetypal bored young adult in her
restlessness and feelings of confinement and restlessness. On her return to
Queens College London, she blossomed in an environment more conducive to her
study of music, imagination and literature, in particular Oscar Wilde and other
so-called ‘decadents’.
This is not to say that NZ did not feature in
her writing as she grew to become a highly talented and revered writer of short
stories. We see Wellington and its environs crop up in stories like ‘The Voyage’
and ‘At The Bay’ and ‘Prelude’ and ‘The Garden Party’. These are some of her
best stories. It is just that when we think of Katherine Mansfield, we
sometimes forget she is from New Zealand because she embraced Europe and
everything it had to offer in the 1920’s so wholeheartedly, and never seemed to
entertain thoughts of ever going back there.
Landscapes
feed writers’ imaginations. I doubt that Virginia Woolf would ever have said
that Katherine Mansfield was the only writer she was jealous of if KM had have
stayed in NZ all her life. Lawrence’s books and stories and poems and plays are
much more vivid and varied for having the thirst to travel and experience life
in some of its extremities on his so-called ‘savage pilgrimage’ to far flung
places in Europe, America and Australia. As for EJB, who lived until only 30,
what might she have created had she travelled more, and lived on the continent
or the US or some island for a period of time. When she died it is said that she
was busy with a second novel. It is difficult to imagine Emily Bronte attached
to anywhere other than her beloved moors that seem such an intrinsic part of
her psyche and her life. And I want to go back there and search for Cathy and
Heathcliff.
