Steve Jones, Darwin's Island

This book proved to be an ideal follow-up to reading Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. It covers the research Darwin carried out after he returned after five years on the expedition: he never left the UK again. Jones seems to have read all of Darwin’s many other books, including, it would appear, his several books on barnacles. To have an expert on present-day genetics taking Darwin’s work seriously and describing its relevance – what’s not to like? 

It was an interesting idea to base this book, not about the Origin or Voyage of the Beagle, but on the Darwin books that most people haven’t read: the books Darwin wrote about biology from his back garden, no fewer than eleven titles (and some of them in multiple volumes). Darwin could never be accused o not being sufficiently productive.   

It turns out I am reading the fourth book in a series by Jones. The first was Almost Like a Whale (1999), a modern retelling of The Origin of Species, followed by Y: The Descent of Men (2002), based on Descent of Man (1871). The third volume was Coral: A Pessimist In Paradise (2008), describing Darwin's work on coral reefs. 

As you can see from the titles of Jones’ other books, descriptive titles are not his speciality. What does this book cover? The serendipitous chapter titles mean we have to guess what each chapter is about. For the assistance of future readers, here is my look-up table for the chapter headings – giving a further indication of Darwin’s vast range of interests:

Chapter One	The Queen’s Orang-Utan	The Descent of Man
Two	The Green Tyrannosaurs	Insectivorous Plants
Three	Shock and Awe	The Expression of the Emotions in Man and other Animals
Four	The Triumph of the Well-bred	Orchids and The Effects of Cross and Self- fertilisation the Vegetable Kingdom The Different Forms of Flowers
Five	The Domestic Ape	The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication
Six	The Thinking Plant	The Movement  … of Climbing Plants (1875), The Power of Movement in Plants (1880) [covering hops and other climbing plants]
Seven	A Perfect Fowl	Books on Barnacles (four volumes)
Eight	Where the Bee sniffs	Orchids (1862)
Nine	The Worms Crawl In	The Formation of Vegetable Mould

Clearly Jones has fluency as a writer. I got the impression this book could have been twice as long without the author drawing breath. Many of the insights were startling and fascinating. Yet, although the book was a terrifically entertaining read, it had limitations. Firstly, the book contained no references. Secondly, and linked to the first, it makes some assertions that even to my less-scientific mind look very questionable. And without references, I am forced to challenge what Mr Jones states. In fact, some of the things he says are so alarming that I would not reprint the book as it stands. 

These assertions typically appear when Jones brings his argument up to the present day.  For example, describing present-day Kent, formerly a centre of oyster and salmon fishing: 

Bucolic pursuits have been replaced by that invaluable product, “services”, which account for three-quarters of the country’s contribution to the nation’s wealth … The flow of people, power and cash has carved up the county’s landscape with motorways, rail links and webs of power lines.” [p299] 

Where did all this come from? What does it have to do with evolution? Is Jones a closet rural-England protector? Why complain about services, when they represent such a large proportion of the UK’s wealth? 

At several points in the book, the author’s casual tone makes it not quite clear what he is intending – and I don’t like some of the implications. For example, on page 137: 

For both plants and animals, sex usually involves another party. Almost always, he or she must choose … from a pool of potential mates. This calls for hard decisions. Some are obvious: whites tend to marry whites, and blacks, black…All this means that for any man or woman the number of possible partners is far smaller than it might be. 

Is Jones saying (I hope not) that for whites to marry blacks is not possible? I don’t think he means that, but that is what his phrasing implies. Other infelicitous phrasing includes:

The belief that the children of cousins are bound to be unfit … still fuels a jaundiced view of the joys of sex within the household. [p119] 

I find this kind of misplaced humour very uncomfortable. Is he suggesting as a good Darwinian that incest is not advisable on biological grounds? Or is he dismissing the incest taboo as a kind of harmless social prejudice?

It is where Jones brings the argument up to the present day that I feel most uncomfortable. 

Minor issues

Firstly, inevitably, the book is already out of date. Although Jones writes perceptively about the obesity crisis in the West, in other areas he seems to be curiously unaware. 

For the most part, Jones writes fluently, but I noticed what looked like a reach for the thesaurus, for example referring to Darwin as a savant: “The savant’s attraction to earthworms ‘[p264]. 

So, in conclusion, a great read, particularly the chapters on earthworms and on insectivorous plants, but at its weakest when the argument is extended to present-day humanity.  

 

 

 

Sussex Landscape at Pallant House (March 2023)

 

Eric Ravilious, Chalk Paths, 1935

What a brilliant idea to assemble an exhibition of Sussex-related works of art, particularly in a Sussex gallery. There have been exhibitions of individual Sussex artists, but, the Pallant would have us believe, there doesn’t seem ever to have been a show about Sussex landscape art. 

For me, in practice, Sussex art means the Sussex landscape, and specifically, the South Downs, and the floodplains, both of which appear from this exhibition to have been celebrated for the most part from the end of the 19th century. There is no particular Sussex type of individual, no school of Sussex painters, as there was a Norwich school. You cannot imagine an exhibition of, say, Cambridgeshire landscape. While there are a few works in this show with a building or person as the main focus, the focus in this show is, quite rightly, on that amazing Downs scenery: the haunting lines of trackways, and the meandering rivers, and the cliffs. It’s all slightly unreal, to someone who does not live in Sussex; there are even, as you travel along railway line going back to London,  what appear to be castles in the landscape (Amberley), and meandering river channels along the flood plains. 

Now, while I love the Downs landscapes of Ravilious, I become perhaps greedy. I want to know more about it: why is this landscape so stark? It appears to show little sign of intensive agriculture, although the Downs landscape is apparently the result of intensive sheep grazing over centuries. Human created it may be, but it looks much more natural than the intensive cultivation of fields below the hills. Where buildings are shown, they are typically flint, as if a flint building somehow represents this natural landscape more than, say, brick or more elegantly cut stone. There is an essay on flint in the catalogue. 

Learning more about the Sussex landscape

There is one map of Sussex, a wartime piece by Women’s Institutes, which perhaps inadvertently reveals more about the landscape than the exhibition intends. The map celebrates the increase in agricultural land during World War II – without revealing that this resulted in the destruction of much of the grass landscape. Nothing else in the exhibition seems to celebrate agriculture. Sheep, where they appear, are simply background objects in the landscape. There is a pull towards tradition, which is revealed in the catalogue, for example quoting poor poems by Hilaire Belloc and Rudyard Kipling.

Constable, Cornfield near Brighton (engraving)

What seems to be remarkable is that capturing the specific quality of the Sussex landscape seems to have emerged so late. The curators provide the evidence, although they don’t seem to notice what they provide There is almost no indication of any specific attention paid to the Sussex landscape before about 1900. Although the exhibition includes token works by Turner, Blake and Constable, only Constable could be said to have responded specifically to the Sussex landscape. Turner at Petworth, and his view of the Chichester Canal, is not distinctively a Sussex view – Turner outrageously puts the sun in the wrong place in his depiction of Chichester Canal, and doesn’t appear to notice the South Downs. Apart from Constable, who created a few sketches on Brighton Downs, the first artist in this show to capture the bare outlines of the Downs seems to have been William Nicholson. 

William Nicholson, Cliffs at Rottingdean, 1910

Nonetheless, the show, attempting to be include as many Sussex artists as they can find, find space for painters such as Robert Bevan, a fine painter, certainly born in Sussex, but showing little evidence of the local landscape. Other outliers that have little connection with the theme are some of the surrealist works (Nash is the exception here, managing to create surrealist-tinged works with some awareness of the haunting quality of Sussex landscape). There is a nude photo by Bill Brandt, which has nothing to do with the theme. Many of the woodcuts seem to be more about woodcut-land than specifically about Sussex. Sadly, to my untrained eye, many woodcut landscapes end up looking like each other. 

Preserving the environment

The exhibition dutifully nods to the need to preserve the landscape, but the handful of contemporary works in the exhibition don’t really say a lot for protecting the landscape. Andy Goldsworthy includes a few flint pieces, with white stripes on them to denote chalk, and these rough stones do suggest the raw quality of the chalk and flint landscape – although they would be better without any intervention. Sadly, the piece of assembled discarded field fencing does not  suggest Sussex at all. 

What, then, are the highlights of this show? Too many to show here. For me, and probably for many others, it is the Ravilious Chalk Paths, 1935; the John Piper Beach and Star Fish, Robert Tavener’s Cuckmere Valley, 1966, and Jeremy Gardner’s Solar, Seven Sisters, 2019. But to sum up the exhibition in a single image, it has to be Edwin Smith’s photo of flint buildings and walls, 1961. 

Edwin Smith, Peggy Angus' House, 1961

Islanders, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

 

The exhibition starts with a boat: a stunning bronze model from around 1000 BCE, found in Sardinia. Does the catalogue help? “The side columns and the central mast probably represent stylized versions of Nuragic towers … the boat is a powerful reminder that the characteristic Nuragic structures were not only visible throughout the island but also a powerful cultural symbol”. Here is a reference to the best-known prehistoric remains from Sardinia, the temple-like nuraghei, but the assumption seems to be that you knew what these were already. And if you look them up, the Nuraghi don’t look like this boat. The curator’s introduction states “[this boat] provides a unique example of the importance of the seafaring, trade and communication that the large islands of the Mediterranean developed in the Bronze Age and beyond, and the way these practices are symbolically reflected in the creation of material culture.” The boat certainly looks unique, but I don’t think the description captures the sheer magic of the object. And how is it unique? It’s not the only prehistoric representation of a boat. But it does have the features of a mythical creature, and that might be worth exploring. 

Sadly, the exhibition doesn’t go in that direction. The catalogue refers to a documentary, asking people on the Greek island  of Siphnos about what it means to be an islander (although there is nothing from Siphnos in this show).   

That seems to sum up the exhibition as a whole. Islanders was an enjoyable, well displayed, but one that raised more questions than answers. To be honest, my knowledge of which of the ancient civilizations of Sardinia, Crete and Cyprus came first is not very secure – and it’s no better after this exhibition. The display was thematic, and although many of the pieces were exquisite or tantalising, or both, the exhibition didn’t set out to place all these pieces in context. 

So, for example, in the exhibition itself there was a timeline – but only of fragments of pottery, not for the exhibition as a whole. There was nothing to tell you when each civilization started or ended. It was revealing, after leaving the exhibition, to visit the Fitzwilliam Cyprus gallery, just a few hundred metres from this exhibition, and from which several of the exhibition objects had been removed, to find that the captions in the museum’s permanent collection were more informative, with helpful panels outlining the major phases of Cypriot prehistory. It would have been very simple to replicate that information in the exhibition.

So many questions left unanswered! Why these three Mediterranean islands, Sardinia, Crete and Cyprus, and not others? Why not Sicily, in the middle of them? There was, most likely a project that led to this exhibition, but it wasn’t apparent to me from looking around the exhibition what the project involved. The Fitzwilliam website page for this exhibition stated: “Both the exhibition and research project, together with corresponding public engagement actions and outputs, aim to elucidate what defines island identities in the Mediterranean.” Well, there’s precious little sign of that in this exhibition. 

Is this show about artistic quality, or about the civilizations involved? If the show is archaeological, it could of course be a bit of both, but the purpose, at least, should be stated. The catalogue contains entries for less than a  third of the objects in the exhibition, as far as I can see. 

Is the show about the interaction of islands? I remember a wonderful book, Art of the Islands: Celtic, Pictish, Anglo–Saxon and Viking Visual Culture, c.450–1050, by Michelle Brown, which pulled together art of the period that is usually treated separately. So much of the art was in common between England, Scotland, Ireland, and Scandinavia, that it made sense to look at the art together. Was the same technique applied to this show, and, specifically, to Sardinia? I seem to remember a caption that stated although there were plenty of objects found in Sardinia that had clearly been traded from other islands in the Mediterranean, there was little evidence of genuine mingling of cultures. 

The exhibition was unequal in coverage. It looked to me as if the majority of objects were from Cyprus, which matched the substantial holdings in the Fitzwilliam of Cypriot art, with less from Sardinia, and I noticed very little art from Crete. Of the objects illustrated in the catalogue, 31 were found in Cyprus, 14 in Sardinia, and 11 in Crete. The larger pieces tended to be from Cyprus, so these objects were more noticeable. The exhibition was in no way a rounded coverage of any of these islands’ prehistory. 

When I turned to the catalogue, the essays included one about “compost … a tool and a philosophical instrument that functions like an open-format performative lens toward knowledge production that shakes up pre-established, anthropocentric hierarchies and undermines language as a preconceived form of signification and, therefore, power.” This text precedes a timeline, which I finally discovered buried in the catalogue after all the essays. However, this timeline equates common names such as “Bronze Age” as the same for each of the three islands, even though it states that the Bronze Age began in 3000 BCE for Crete, in 1800 BCE for Sardinia, and 2500 BCE for Cyprus. Not, in other words, very helpful. 

Finally, and unexplained, there were ravishing colour photos on the walls of the rooms showing Mediterranean views. They were enough to make you want to book your holiday immediately, but they appeared to have little connection with the exhibition. I thought these photos were just to set the scene (it wasn’t even clear what the photos were about  - one caption listing all the photos appears just before the exit), like the sea sounds you could hear as you entered the exhibition.   

So I am left with memories of several strange, evocative figures. What were they for? What did they represent? These are the things that will remain with me; not the compost. 

Cezanne at the Tate Modern

 

Mont Ste-Victoire (Philadelphia)

I left this exhibition more confused by Cezanne than when I went in. Here is an artist who, by reputation, is central to the development of modern art. Although born in 1839, Cezanne was revered by several of the most significant painters of the 20th century, including Matisse. I was expecting to be bowled over; but I felt what I was looking at was a handful of great works, alongside a lot of unsatisfactory pieces. 

But I have to say I wouldn’t, on the basis of this show, call Cezanne a master. Throughout his career, he created poor paintings. He did not appear ever to master drawing the human figure, and he never mastered the ability to create a flattering portrait. The images of his family members would not, I think, win him any prizes. Critics call his work classical (for example, Meyer Schapiro), but I see no evidence of classical drawing or composition in his works. When he paints bathers, he includes (for the men) their underpants, which are less than flattering. He was, according to the catalogue, so shy that he never hired any models but painted from photographs and from the antique (although there is little sign of it). For many years, he tried his best not to reveal to his father that he had a long-term partner and child. His very early works are surprising for their amateurish depictions of wild events, looking very much like the fantasies of an adolescent. Most artists would be grateful for such works to be forgotten – yet some of Cezanne’s late works show this wild streak re-emerging.

An early painting, Dejeuner sur l'herbe, no less

The exhibition was thematic rather than chronological, so we were presented with a room full of views of St Estaque, then a room of bathers. Presented in this way, the many treatments of the same theme were not so inspiring. I almost thought that if you try 25 treatments of the same theme, then one or two of them will be successful. It certainly brought out the way that, once Cezanne had fixed on a style, he stuck with it. His palette of strong colours   - a deep orange/red for the land, bright blue for the sea – varied little through his career. 

Example of Cezanne's drawing skills

What is astonishing is how this painter, who couldn’t draw, could create a handful of stunning images where the landscape, and the bodies, appear to become part of the landscape; an uncanny achievement, alongside so many mundane images:

The Bathers (National Gallery)

But for each masterpiece, there are several pictures where the drawing is poor, the composition is poor, and the result is embarrassing. Is this the work of the same painter?

Five Bathers

The bathers bring to mind the example of Picasso: Cezanne has none of the effortless skill of Picasso, who could in a few lines suggest classical form – or cubist analysis, as he chose. 

Of course, if you want to see Cezanne as a precursor of cubism, there are several views of Mt Ste-Victoire, some of them magnificent. Among them are some where the landscape is so familiar that Cezanne seems to say “you know what I am depicting, I only need to suggest it” – and proceeds almost (but not quite) to abandon representation. Nonetheless, none of his works can be called abstract. 

Cezanne the artist is not helped by the critical apparatus around the works on display. The captions read more like hagiography than criticism. One caption described how Cezanne created an outline, and then added the colour “one brushstroke at a time”. It  is difficult to imagine any artist proceeding otherwise. Contemporary artists seem to have been invited to comment on Cezanne’s work, and many of their comments seem utterly irrelevant. One comment, placed alongside a picture of trees in an unmanaged landscape, begins “I wonder what this landscape would have looked like to us without colonisation?” Unfortunately, the curators are equally guilty of attempting to demonstrate Cezanne’s liberal credentials by displaying just three works: “In Scipio we look at the possible influence of abolitionism on Cezanne, while The Eternal Feminine addresses imagery from the popular press, and The Conversation subtly hints at Cezanne’s political views”. It’s all so pat; I would want far more evidence of Cezanne’s attitudes to be convinced by any of this. The curators seem to believe that credibility about the works is demonstrated by the picture having been owned by a later painter: Cezanne is “the artist’s artist”. So captions frequently state “owned by Picasso”, or “owned by Henry Moore”. 

Certainly this was an exhibition worth seeing; but my view remains that Cezanne is a very uneven painter. He might have changed the course of art history, but he was anything but a painter of effortless talent. 

The Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology

 

The Museum of Classical Archaeology: almost as crowded as a store room

Why is the Cast collection at Cambridge called the Museum of Classical Archaeology? That seems the first confusion as you enter the building. One thing you will notice when you enter, is that this is not a place for euphemism: let’s call a cast a cast. It doesn’t look like an archaeological museum: there is not a trowel in site, and this collection was created for students of art history. Not one of the objects on display was ever excavated. No, they are all copies, and let’s not be coy about it  - and the truth is, it doesn’t make any difference. Surrounded as you are by the proliferation of representations of the nude human body in this relatively small space compels you to think about what it all means. 

How can a gallery of copies can have such a powerful effect. Of all the artistic genres, landscapes, still lifes, abstract canvases, even portraits are all very fine, but they simply don’t have the impact of representations of the naked human form. Most, if not all, of the works on show here are studies of the human body, and mostly naked. And not just any old body: the majority of the studies are of idealized male and female nudes, displayed at or near life size, and in close proximity to the viewer. As a visitor, I found myself turning away from one naked figure to find myself facing the genitals of another one. The experience is quite overwhelming. Was it the same for the first audience for these sculptures? John Boardman, in his Greek Sculpture (1985), blithely states that the ancient Greeks were used to it, that it had no special significance: “in Greek art … the nude could carry no special “artistic” connotation, nor could it  exclusively designate a special class, such as hero or god.” [p238]. Well, I simply don’t believe it. It certainly has an effect for us today; we still don’t believe (with some few exceptions) in nudity in the media, on beaches, or in public. 

One of the Tyrant Slayers, Roman copy of a lost Greek original

Of course, as Caroline Vout, director of the Museum, points out, in her in her Classical Art: A Life History for Antiquity to the Present (2018), our present-day thinking about these works is very much a construct of our modern attitudes. But to create a historiography of Greek art is hardly a novelty. Take any major historical or cultural event or individual, and you can trace dramatic changes in attitudes over time. What the French Revolution means to us has varied in the 250 years or so since the event, and continues to change. What makes the Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology particularly interesting is that it presents the case for Classical art, as it were, full on. Much more vividly than, say, the Fitzwilliam Museum or other art gallery, it proudly presents just one group of objects and demands that you respond to that sole genre: “what do you think of all this?” In that sense, it doesn’t matter that this is a museum full of copies. The “originals”, as Vout points out, were often not themselves the originals. We all know about how most of what we call Greek sculpture is a Roman copy of a lost original, but Vout discovers even more. She points out that the two life-size sculptures known as the Tyrannicides, themselves Roman copies of Greek originals, are actually copies of another Greek original. It’s like a Russian doll  - as you examine it closely, you find there is another one beneath, and another, and another. None of them has a claim to be the original. But what does that matter? I was in Athens at the National Museum a few months ago, and the impression of the originals was very like the impression of these copies I saw this week. Our human response, in other words, is not attuned to originals versus copies. In fact, as far as bodies go, we can celebrate beautiful bodies, and any number of them. 

As many people have pointed out, the astonishing thing about Greek art is that the sculpture in front of us may have lost a limb or two, or even, sometimes, the head, and yet we respond to its power. The body alone is capable of conveying meaning. The Belvedere Torso is a case in point: 

Belvedere Torso, Rome, Vatican Museums

So, we have established that this is not the art of individual facial expressions – the faces of the men and women are not, for the most part, the memorable part of the object (the faces are idealized, except for some Roman portrait sculpture, which probably achieves its immediacy by using death masks of the subject). No, the Cast museum is for the most part an art of idealized, generalized bodies. 

What kind of bodies? Going back to Kenneth Clark’s famous distinction between the naked and the nude: 

The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word "nude," on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed. [Clark, The Nude, 1956] 

That reads like an attitude from that last century; and while the name of Winckelmann crops up in many discussions about Classic art, he was in turn limited to his 18th-century idea of the beautiful, and we today we have no difficulty in dismissing most drama of the Enlightenment era as insufferably sentimental, while retaining our admiration for other forms of 18th-century literature. Yet, surprisingly, Winckelmann has a much more visceral response to these ideal nudes.

Apollo Belvedere

In gazing upon this masterpiece of art, I forget all else, and I myself adopt an elevated stance, in order to be worthy of gazing upon it. My chest seems to expand with veneration and to heave like those I have seen swollen as if by the spirit of prophecy, and I feel myself transported to Delos and to the Lycian groves, places Apollo honoured with his presence—for my figure seems to take on life and movement, like Pygmalion’s beauty. [Winckelmann, The History of the Art of Antiquity, p332]

This is a very sensuous description, and much more revealing than Clark’s rather frigid response. The Classical nude was frequently nothing if not erotic. 

Kenneth Clark, in his The Nude (1956), apologises for covering both classical and post-classical art when he is not  a specialist in both. I’m a specialist in neither, but the Cambridge MCA seems to present in concise form some of the key principles of Western art history. For many centuries this represented the ideal of beauty, and still today, the muscular male nudes look remarkably like the desirable (to some) but very atypical males that appear in some gay magazines: exceptionally muscular. There is clearly much sexual stereotyping going on here. 

The art historians carefully present the progress of Classical art from kouros to Hellenistic, but let’s leave that aside for the moment. Can we enter the gallery and view this collection of Classical sculpture without an art historical background? Can we try simply to describe what we see without the assumptions and cultural baggage that we bring with us when we visit an art gallery? It might be useful to try to summarize what this collection comprises, and take advantage of it being a crème de la crème selection from all the major European collections of classical sculpture:

• Greek art is mostly about the male nude
• It is an art, for the most part, of the body, rather than the face
• There appear to be two kinds of male beauty: the muscular hero, like Apollo, and the youthful adolescent type, much less muscular, and often called Narcissus

Narcissus

• Female nudes are much less common than male nudes. When they occur, they are of two types: a more passive posture than males (the various types of Venus), or the woman of action, such as the Nike of Paionios

Nike, by Paionios

• The males have genitals displayed, although smaller than in real life. The males usually show evidence of pubic hair, but the females show no hair and have no visible genitalia
• To my mind the Greek nude, whether male or female, is frequently very erotic; it is not just, as Clark describes, without embarrassment, but nudity celebrated (which hardly ever occurs again until the Renaissance) 

And how does this collection compare with art of later periods or in other regions?

• Non-Western art only rarely, if ever, celebrates the individual nude figure. 
• From the Renaissance to the 20th century, the most common nude representation has been the female nude
• Nonetheless, whether the nude is male or female, the prevailing type in Western art has been, at least until the late 19th century, based on Greek attitudes to the beautiful. 

I can’t claim to have any explanation of this strange set of characteristics. Certainly, it would take a book or two to try to explain them all, but in the meantime, let’s just celebrate that this cast collection has opened its doors and presented the sculptures so we can examine and ponder. There are a lot of questions to answer, but at least those questions are clearly presented in this small building. 

Feliu Elias, a 20th century artist

 

Elias, Tools, 1935

This show, at MNAC (the National Museum of Catalonian Art), Barcelona, was a real revelation. Here was a painter and caricaturist who rather vociferously turned his back on the artistic movements of his time (he was painting in the first decades of the 20th century) yet convinces the viewer from the sheer force and energy of his works, both cartoons and paintings: all are executed with an intensity and immediacy. Remarkably, for his ‘serious’ painting, he manages to achieve this both with portraits as well as with still lifes. 

Still lifes

Let’s start with still-lifes: a genre where, you would think, every possible approach in a realistic style has already been done. Yet Elias succeeds by choosing the most mundane objects - alarm clocks, books and saucepans, yet invests them with a respect that captures your attention. You feel that depicting such objects with such care compels you to take the objects and their depiction seriously. A picture of fruit, or tools for interior decorating, becomes in some way intense.

Caricature

Elias, Antonio Gaudi

Yet Elias (working under the pseudonym “Apa”) can at the same time create wonderfully vivid caricatures. In these works he is not pulling any punches. It would appear from his rather feisty relations with his contemporaries that his uncompromising views extended to his conversations. Clearly, from his depiction of Gaudi, Elias was not a wholly committed convert to Gaudi’s vision. 

Portraits

Elias, portrait of his son, 1915

Remarkably, for an age where photography would appear to have removed all the need for a painted depiction, Elias proves us wrong and presents the ambition, and the innocence, of his children. Similarly, his portraits of his peers present the person in their public persona, how they would like to be seen:

Elias, portrait of Francesc Pujols, 1920 

The males are excellent, but unfortunately, his female nudes display exaggerated curves in a male-gaze style that makes them very dated.  

Finally, his depictions of individuals in a domestic or work setting is remarkably evocative. 

Elias, La Galeria, 1928

What was Elias’ aesthetic, his view of painting? It’s difficult to relate what he says to his own work. “Real painting doesn’t exist since Turner and the impressionists”, he stated, yet his work bears little or no sign of impressionism. He is disdainful of cubism and is always very representational. Yet with painting as sincere and powerful as this, who cares? 

On looking at some of the details, the realism is not quite photographic; you notice, for example in the still life of 1933, objects are not correctly in perspective. More interesting, the patten of the wood table surface seems to be slightly melting in the reflections of the objects placed on it. This is a very sophisticated realism: 

Elias, The Apples, 1943

Who was Elias?

How can this artist be at the same time intensely serious, highly political, and yet fully capable of caricature? He seems to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time at several points in his life. Arrested for offending the Spanish government in 1911, he fled to Paris, and was awarded by the French Government for his satirical cartoons in support of the Allies. In the 1930s, he fled Francoist Spain, first in 1937, then again in 1938, only to be sent to a concentration camp when the Germans take over France in 1939. Several of the late still lifes date from this period, when he must have been under the utmost stress: which makes all the more remarkable these works of intense calm and repose, perhaps only possible through art. 

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways

 

From the praise lavished on Robert Macfarlane by the critics, I expected this book to be something extraordinary. “Outstanding”, “magnificent”, “utterly beautiful”, “sets the imagination tingling” are words from the paperback edition (published 2012). 

The book

This is an account of several walks (or boat trips) that the author made. At the same time, it is an anthology of writing about walking. The book includes references to many of literature’s well-known walkers, including Rousseau, Wordsworth, Clare, Borrow – it’s no surprise that the bibliography cites the anthology The Vintage Book of Walking. But it is not just a set of references to well-known walkers and nature writers. 

Vocabulary

The book is consciously poetic: he constantly strives for artistic effect, yet the result is far less effective than W G Sebald, because Macfarlane seems to be trying so hard to write beautiful and arresting prose, rather than having something to say: or, to be more specific, because I don’t much like what the author has to say, in Macfarlane’s case.

His technique is to stop you in your tracks while reading, by choosing an unusual word, or by using a word in an unusual context. For example, on the first page, describing the tracks made by human walking, he compares natural tracks to walking on asphalt and concrete, “substances not easily impressed”. Once or twice this trick makes you think; but every time it happens, you stop and read again when you encounter an unusual word or context. The author builds up a list of similar words, pointing out how they “become a poem or rite” (just to remind us of the poetical associations): ”holloways, bostles, shuts, driftways, lichways … “ and so on. Then we have path markers: “cairns, grey wethers, sarsens, hoarstones, longstones, milestones … “ Yet after enunciating all these magic terms for natural walks, Macfarlane walks across a golf course for his first chapter: golf courses, the negation, almost the denial of landscape. Golfers are in the landscape, but do their best to ignore it. 

 Elsewhere, you feel a thesaurus has been brought into play. “Wordsworth’s … knobbly legs … were magnificent shanks” [p16]. Dorset is “webbed with paths”. Walking is also described as “tramping”, and “meandering”.  The trope of switching subject and object occurs frequently, for example “when a white object achieves perfect tuning against snow … so the object is absorbed into the snow – or, audaciously, absorbs the snow into it.” [p412]. The trick of using words to highlight polysemy is emphasised: “they exist on two planes (plains)” [p412], as if the multiple meanings enrich the text. 

Is this vocabulary intended to convey meaning, or simply a vague “poetic effect”? I can’t help feeling sometimes that the words used are less specific than Macfarlane suggests. Names of plants, animals and birds are used frequently and appear to me to be far more specific than  is possible. In Sussex, the author walks along the edge of the River Cuckmere : “my boot marks joined the tracks of heron, cormorant, gull and egret”. I don’t imagine all of those prints would be distinguishable by him. Instead, it is another example of a piling up of names. 

Walking and paths

“Paths are the habits of a landscape”. Does he mean the apparel, what a landscape wears? Does he mean the common activities carried out in the landscape? Or the parts of a landscape that are so familiar to us? None of the meanings quite fits; the narrative does not flow. But that seems to be the intention. 

“Paths connect. That is their first duty and their chief reason for being.” I don’t agree; Macfarlane’s use of paths is not to go anywhere. The use he describes is leisure walking, where you are happy to walk towards no particular destination, simply for the pleasure of the walk. The purpose of the path is for you to immerse yourself in an imaginary natural universe where plants and animals have more of a chance than in the rest of the built environment. You like it when the trees overhang and the vegetation is slightly wild. You are seeking an experience of “nature” as somehow being more authentic than the modern world we live in for most of the time. Macfarlane walks the Broomway path to Foulness Island, and when he gets there, he turns round and comes back again, partly because you aren’t allowed on Foulness without a permit, although he doesn’t mention this. Nor does he mention there is a perfectly good road to Foulness Island.

 “Paths are consensual … because without common care and common practice they disappear”. I would argue that most footpaths in England, and probably elsewhere, are anything but consensual. They may have their origin in ancient rights of way and  droveways, but the reality is that they only exist today because the authorities, often reluctantly, concede their official existence; the local interests are usually keen to remove them, to make them as unpleasant as possible, to make it clear to users that their use by the public is tolerated at best. Farmers and land-owners lock gates, make stiles impassable, and it is only rambling organisations who fight to preserve access. That is an aspect of paths that seems not to interest the author, who displays a curious innocence on this point. Not everyone loves footpaths. In Palestine, where you might get shot for walking on a path, he describes his fear – but that is a war zone, and is an exception to his typical depiction of paths. 

Perhaps the best descriptions of nature are those that don’t set out only to be descriptions. Such descriptions are like the worst kind of poetry, which sets out, within the limits of its metrical framework, to state something beautiful. Darwin describes nature very well; he is interested in what he sees, and describes it very carefully, but he is also interested in what it means; not only in how beautiful it is, but how it came to be what it is today. For me, Darwin (in The Voyage of the Beagle) conveys the magic of landscapes, as well as awakening my curiosity. He demonstrates for me that a scientific interest need not eliminate an awareness of beauty and ugliness. But my reading of The Old Ways is that it is fundamentally an exercise in the beautiful: despite references to the modern world, it is fundamentally about a mythical countryside that no longer exists, and probably never existed. 

I don’t find the people, and many of the places, mentioned by Macfarlane stir my curiosity to discover more. One figure, that of Edward Thomas, however, is central to the whole book. 

Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas is an unlikely hero to be selected by an arts professor. On the very slim evidence provided by the book, the verse is not great: 

Whatever the roads bring

To me or take from me,

They keep me company

With their pattering,

 

Crowding the solitude

Of the loops over the downs,

Hushing the roar of towns

And their brief multitude.

 

The author and his attitudes

Macfarlane is very coy about himself. There is no biography for him in the paperback edition I read (published 2013). His Wikipedia entry, and references to him on his books, state simply he is a Fellow. The website for Emmanuel College Cambridge states he is Professor of Environmental Humanities, which sounds to me unique (although Fiona Stafford, despite being a professor of literature, in The Long, Long Life of Trees has compiled what in some ways is a a similar miscellany that comprises mentions of every English and American author, it seems, who has mentioned a specific tree variety). 

I am not happy about Macfarlane's macho attitude to nature. A walk cannot simply be a walk; it has to be life-threatening in some way. His walk to Foulness Island is full of tales of how dangerous the walk is, how many people have gone missing. If it is so dangerous, why does he feel the need to walk it, especially since there is a perfectly sound road for vehicles he could use? When he walks the Icknield way, he starts by cycling frantically, falls off and breaks a rib or two. But he carries on walking. Why? Who is he trying to impress? He walks for over ten hours, damages his feet, and sleeps outdoors. Should we be impressed? Are we admiring nature or Mr Macfarlane’s exploits? On a boat trip near the Hebrides, he sails at night in a boat that has no lights. In Spain he falls asleep on a mountain ledge and then notices that vultures are hovering overhead. Is this clever? 

Only on page 363, the penultimate page of the book, do we discover that Macfarlane has children: “Suddenly I feel a tidal pull homewards, to my own children, wanting to keep them safe against harm and time.” This is rather abrupt, given that the rest of the book depicts an author alone, a man who wants to sleep outside by himself (more than once he sleeps by himself in the “wild” rather than sharing accommodation with the others in his party).  The author seems almost to admire that Thomas walked away from his own family and children in World War One when, at the age of 36, he enlisted, although he was not obliged to join the armed forces. 

Cruelty

Macfarlane describes cruelty without comment, which suggests some kind of acceptance. He seems to have no problem with the barbaric practice on the remote Scottish island of Sula Sgeir of killing gannets. Two thousand birds are killed each year, and the wings tossed aside and left on the island. From Wikipedia [“Sula Sgeir”]:   

The Sula Sgeir hunt, which would otherwise be illegal under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, receives an annual licence from the government, which allows it to continue … The Scottish SPCA describes it as "barbaric and inhumane" and believes it causes unnecessary suffering to the birds, with many taking several blows to be killed. 

Neither does Macfarlane condemn the peculiar Steve Dilworth, in the chapter Gneiss, who collects human and animal skeletons and decaying corpses. 

When he [Dilworth] was a student in art college he’d taken an air rifle into the life-drawing class, sat by an open window that overlooked a stand of trees, and shot any squirrels that appeared. [p177] 

I don’t imagine this charming activity improved the quality of his own or of his fellow students’ life drawings. 

Macfarlane and alcohol

The author makes it clear he enjoys drinking – nothing wrong with that. But there are worrying references to a culture of drinking. “Within a few minutes of arriving I was at the kitchen table with a coffee in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other.” [p171]. In the episode described above where he sees a vulture circling overhead, he continues: “I sat upright, making vigorous signs of life and freedom, and it veered away. I didn’t need any help damaging my liver.” 

Macfarlane the traditionalist

Ships are always “she”. Weights and measures are given in imperial units. There is an emphasis on British writers, artists and poets. Three-quarters of the book is set in England and Scotland; the remaining chapters are set “abroad”. 

Lack of specificity

There are so many references to places and to walks in this book, but not a single map. I start to think that the references to places, using wherever possible local names, are a tool for surrounding the subject with mystery. Macfarlane’s preference is for walks where there is no map; where you get instructions from someone you meet, who tells you vaguely where to go. It seems to be somehow more exciting when you don’t know exactly where the path is.    

For a book about paths and walking, The Old Ways is very lacking in signposts. Chapters are given a cryptic title that does not indicate their contents. Chapter 3 is “Chalk”, while Chapter 14, also set on chalk downs, is called “Flint”. Chapter 11 is “Roots”, yet is no more or less about roots than the other chapters.

Conclusion

I love walking and I love nature. Sadly, I do not recognize the nature or the attitudes described in this book. If Robert Macfarlane invited me to join him on a walk, I don’t think I would want to join him. For him, nature is there to provide danger, but to be conquered, either alone or (mostly) in the company of other males. The Old Ways seems to me to be traditionally male in its attitudes, and they are not traditions I am particularly interested to share.