Indian Summer Notebook

by Henry Williamson

  He was a young man of great charm, who had built for himself a bogus background during the war. Some of his letters in the mess had been addressed to Capt. the Honble. Charles Y----; we thought at the time he had written them to himself.

  I remember him returning from draft leave once with a gift of pheasants for the MO (he had been returned to duty from his red-tab job in 1918, after a severe comb-out following the vast losses of Third Ypres). He went sick, after giving the birds to the reserve battalion doctor, saying they were from his ‘place in the country’. He got off the draft.

  A year or two later, I read in a newspaper that the charming Captain Y---- was one of a gang of cardsharpers and gamblers taken in a West End ‘haunt’. There were several other charges, all from living on his wits. With a little more sincerity this pre-war bank clerk might have made a name for himself as an actor. He went to prison for two years.

  Gradually we were absorbed into the post-war. The battlefields were cleared up. Tens of thousands of Poles and Italians filled in the craters with long-handled shovels; tens of thousands of tons of rusty dud shells and fragments of steel were collected into dumps.

  We used to say during the war that it would take a hundred years to clear up the Somme battlefields; actually it was done in little more than half a hundred months. As for the human souls that once trudged there, in sweat and terror, in cold and mud and in heat and choking dust, they, too, became in time indistinguishable from the civilian world of which they had once been so derisive.

  Once a year we met at a regimental dinner, and spoke, in odd sentences, almost in shyness, of our vanished world of comradeship. Every year the dinner was more sparsely attended; until one day a circular came from the honorary secretary of the Old Comrades Association, saying that it was decided to discontinue the yearly meeting.

  So it came about that I left London and went to live in a cottage in Devon by myself, to meditate and to write the truth as I saw it, to clarify what we fought and died for – a new vision of the world. As the years went on I saw that vision receding, and the shadows stealing forth again towards those who had not been born when I was a soldier of 1914-18.

  Is the vision lost? Somehow I think that the new post-war generation, when its authentic voice is heard, will join in comradeship with those who went before.

  Contribution to Strand Magazine

  September, 1945

  Richard Jefferies

  Richard Jefferies was a poor man who in moments of inspiration believed himself to be a prophetic thinker and writer of the world. The world did not think so. He was born in 1848, and he died in 1887, aged thirty-eight years. During the later part of his life he was ill as well as poor; and two years before his death, he lived in perpetual agony. Some doctors thought his illness was imaginary, that he was a hypochondriac, that the wasting away of his body and the perpetual pains he suffered were due to hysteria. Actually he suffered from tuberculosis of the lungs and intestines, and the intestines were ulcerated as well. Also he had fistula, which is a most torturing thing. All during his life he was working: and the theme of his work was the creation of, the burning hope for, a better, truer, more sunlit world of men.

  Richard Jefferies was the son of a Wiltshire farmer. He was a genius, a visionary whose thought and feeling were wide as the human world, prophet of an age not yet come into being – the age of sun, of harmony. He was derided in his father’s house, upbraided for idleness and stupidity; considered ‘looney’ by the neighbours. Since a man can truly be friends with his peers only, Jefferies was friendless to his life’s end.

  During his boyhood and youth he lived at Coate Farm, in the parish of Chisledon, near Swindon. The farm lay under the chalk downs. Behind the farmhouse were trees, and then a broad sheet of water, with reeds and rushes and wildfowl, and two islets near the shore. Pike lived in there, with roach and rudd and perch, and other fish. From his boyhood memories of this place the best boys’ book in England was written; Bevis: the Story of a Boy.

  After his death, there was some controversy about whether or no he died a Christian. His life’s work was indignantly attacked in the Girls’ Own Paper. This was stupid; and it was wicked. Stupidity is the same thing as wickedness, or the devil, to this modern age of half-sun. It was wicked because it denied and persecuted the truth of heaven. During his lifetime Jefferies had to fight against much un-understanding; and it wore him to an early death.

  The affinity of Jefferies with Jesus of Nazareth is patent in nearly all his work. If Francis of Assisi is a little brother of the birds, Jefferies of Wiltshire is a little brother of Jesus, of the sun, of clarity, of all things fine and natural and designed and efficient. Jefferies saw with paradise-clearness.

  The century that slew him passed away, and still he remained insufficiently esteemed. The following is typical. Thirty-three years after his death, when I was a reporter in Fleet Street, I was talking to an old literary gentleman about Jefferies. It was in Carmelite House, then the home of Lord Northcliffe’s newspapers. It was a wearing life, for men of sensibility. The old chap was a special writer for an evening paper; he was a scholar whose writings were famous to a small circle only, and to first-edition collectors. He was always violently bitter about the British public. ‘Don’t try and write for a living; keep pigs,’ was his immediate reply to the young aspirant who approached him timidly in the little room, always lit by artificial light, where he worked. He waved hand and arm in a sweep of derision of the whole building. Then he began rolling Latin verse off his tongue. His tie was always askew around his tall 1890 collar. Red-faced, big-headed, he looked like a monk with his long white bobbed hair almost touching the shoulders of his cloak. I felt it a privilege to hear this famous writer talk like that. I had bought some of his books, but had dipped into them only, and never finished them. The famous prose seldom stood out of the pages. One day, meeting him again in the corridor, I dared to ask if he liked the works of Richard Jefferies. ‘Jefferies? A mere cataloguer of sights and sounds,’ he replied, and had nothing more to say, and I knew then what I had suspected, that he had not that something that marks out a writer of genius from the writer who is scholarly, pretentious, literary, whose work is a gilt of borrowed gold, imitation of poetic vision. (This was probably youthful intolerance: for he was a passionate writer.) When I saw him coming along a passage, I used to turn away and hide. He had called my Jefferies a ‘mere cataloguer’.

  During the sixteen years that passed since the advice to keep pigs (advice which I am ready to take now) I collected various opinions of Jefferies by other writers, with the intention of quoting them in a book on his work, to show why those derogatory or disprizing remarks were merely an indication of a lack in the writers themselves: such lack going hand-in-hand with their non-success as writers with the general public. But it is not worth doing.

  The works of D.H. Lawrence, another writer who has much in common with Jefferies, contain many portraits of his detractors or non-appreciators, all of them arising from Lawrence’s own tortured sensibility. Such writing is a mistake. It is not truly creative. The writer should shine on his characters with the serenity of the sun.

  Jefferies was born two, perhaps three, generations before his time. In May 1925, nearly forty years after his death, I made a journey to his birthplace, and stared at the farmhouse where he had been born, at the gable window from which he had looked when writing his first pages. I walked round the broad or lake, and thought how much smaller it was than in Bevis. It had been made into a public bathing-place, with huts and rails and diving boards; but the fish were still there. There was talk of turning the farmhouse into a Jefferies museum, for a memorial. Soon nothing, I thought, would be left of the place as he knew it, except in those pages of his which glowed and shone with ancient sunlight. While I was musing thus, standing in the roadway before the farm, an old woman came out of a small cot of tarred wood, obviously the work of a labouring man, and scrutinised me. The little black house stood under a hawthorn, then in pink b
lossom. ‘Come to see the house where Loony Dick was born, have ye?’ she enquired. We talked for some time. She was remarkable for her vivacity and straight way of looking at things. Years before the War she had adopted a foundling or waif from the Union or workhouse; raised him as her own child, found him a job when grown up; and then the war came, and killed him. What she could not make up her mind about at the moment, she told me, was whether or no to adopt another ‘chiel’. There were plenty of ’m about, she declared, since the soldiers had gone. Was she too old, did I think? I said surely not, that she had many years to live. Don’t ye be too sure, she said, and defied me to guess her age. Sixty? I said. ‘Git out,’ she replied, ‘I knew Loony Dick as a boy, didn’t I tell ’ee just now? Moony Dick, some called him. A lazy loppet, he was, too. A proper atheist. Lots of folks asks me if I have read those books. Why should I read them? I know it all as well as he. He can’t tell me anything new. I’ve had to work all my life. Why should I read in books what most folks knows already?’

  (After his death, a relative wrote of Jefferies as a boy, ‘Dick was of a masterful temperament, and though less strong than several of us in a bodily sense, his force of will was such that we had to succumb to whatever plans he chose to dictate, never choosing to be second even in the most trivial thing . . .’)

  All the strain and desperation in much of Jefferies’ writings, and his sickness and premature death, can be traced to the human surroundings of his childhood, youth, and early manhood. Those who called him, to his face, Loony Dick, or Lazy Loppet, who laughed at his aspirations and derided his early efforts to be a writer, were to him so narrow and warped and ruined that he could say nothing to them. The poor boy with the instincts of an aristocrat shut himself away from them; he lived in books and wandered on the downs, spreading himself in the air and grass and sky until he was recharged with vitality and hope, and made eager once again for a fuller, a happier life for all the warped and ruined human minds he saw about him in both the slums of Swindon and his own hamlet.

  After he had left school, the young Jefferies, a mixture indolence and sharp imperiousness, got a job on a local paper, the North Wilts Herald. At night he wrote novels and romances in the seclusion of the gable room, which had a pear tree trained against the outer wall. Caesar Borgia, or the King of Crime; Verses on the Exile of the Prince Imperial; Fortune, or the Art of Success (he sent this to Disraeli, who returned it with a tactfully insincere letter); Only a Girl – how he worked, burning candle after candle beyond midnight and into dawn.

  Work on a country newspaper is good training for a young writer. There is not the hurried pressure and thwarting of nervous energy as in supplying small and often silly news stories for Fleet Street newspapers; there is no perpetual callousing and humiliation of feelings, no distortion of truth in the manufacture of ‘news’. A country newspaper is usually tactful, kindly, and its detail truthful. The meticulous gathering of names and facts of the little things of country life – the more names the better for the circulation of the newspaper – may be dull at times; but it is not degrading. And the young Jefferies was fortunate in having a sympathetic editor who believed that his young reporter had a distinct talent for writing.

  His second editor’s belief was justified when, at the age of twenty-four, Jefferies wrote a long letter to The Times in London; and The Times printed it in full, several thousand words, about the Wiltshire labourer. It was read and discussed in Swindon; the writer became a local figure. His chance! He found himself, suddenly, to be an authority in agriculture.

  Imagine the tall, loose-limbed young man striding home from Swindon, paler than usual, the large blue eyes in the softly brown bearded face almost lifeless in the reaction of excitement, entering his father’s house with an added lassitude of his drooping mouth and narrow shoulders, to stand about, silently, almost dully, and say casually, ‘My letter’s in.’ ‘What letter, Dick?’ asks his mother, ironing on the kitchen table. ‘In the paper.’ ‘The Standard? It’s early this week, isn’t it?’ ‘No, not that. I mean The Times’. His mother glances at it, and puts it down, while her son waits like a hawk for what she will not say. She says she is too busy just now, but will read it later; and he goes up into his room beside the cheese loft, and flops down in his chair, and feels more desperately than ever the awful deadness and dullness of house life and ‘civilised’ people. They will never understand. After supper he has violent indigestion, and cannot write a word of the new novel.

  But he has begun. One day they will know what their son is.

  In those days, before compulsory schooling taught nearly everyone to read, there were in England newspapers and periodicals which were written almost entirely by knowledgeable, or professional, writers. Among them were Fraser’s Magazine, The New Quarterly, The Standard, The Graphic, The Pall Mall Gazette, The Fortnightly, The Gentleman’s Magazine, Longman’s Magazine, The National Review, The English Illustrated Magazine, and others. The editors of these papers and magazines, attracted by the letter in The Times, began to ask for and to print Jefferies’ essays. A London evening newspaper, The Pall Mall Gazette, published a series of his articles, anonymously, under the title of The Gamekeeper at Home, or, Sketches of Natural History and Rural Life; and then another series, Wild Life in a Southern County. When these were reprinted in book form, the author was acclaimed as a writer in the class of White of Selbourne, and a public of discriminating sportsmen and country people began to look out for everything he wrote.

  He was married now, to the daughter of a neighbouring farmer, and had a son. After the wedding the young couple had lived at Coate Farm, but soon found that life there was not possible; the ideas of the old people smothered the inspiration of the young author. So they took rooms in Swindon. Then, to be nearer editors, they moved to the suburbs of London, first to Sydenham and then to Surbiton. He worked every day; and the work of this period was always on a high level – informative and of the authentic countryside. Sometimes it was inclined to be static; for he had to write every day to support wife and family. It was then that other lesser writers began to use the label ‘cataloguer’.

  Most young writers who have had a sudden success ease up for a while, and thereby lose their form. Not so Jefferies. He wrote as before, novels and essays. In a recent critical appreciation of Jefferies, by a living writer who is also a Wiltshire man, I was shocked to read the opinion that all the Jefferies’ novels could be ‘thrown into the wastepaper basket’. But there are some beautiful things in the novels, even in the very early ones, when Jefferies was writing of scenes or incidents he had observed. Most of the early novels have scenes and characters based on what he had read in boyhood and youth; novels based on the fictional idiom of the day, and therefore blind or conventional writing. But among the novels are the exquisite Greene Ferne Farm, and The Dewy Morn, and Amaryllis at the Fair, one of the most lovely calm and balanced novels of country life and people in our literature. There is a naturalness, a bloom on Amaryllis which is not to be found in any of the novels of Hardy or the books of Hudson; and Hardy in the authenticity and detail of his country scenes is in the very rare first class with Shakespeare.

  What is meant by the term ‘very rare first class’? Let me try and explain this as a thing occurring in certain men and women; and why it occurs. This is only what one man thinks, remember; it may be true only in part, or it may be wholly wrong. Nevertheless, it may indicate why the lives of so many men of genius are tragic. This is my belief:–

  The base or foundation of a first-class talent is eyesight. The man who sees more, who perceives quicker than his fellows, is of larger intelligence only by reason of that superior sight. Some people, educated unnaturally, seldom see for themselves; they don’t know why things happen in the way they do: that every effect has a cause. An observant person is never stupid. Wisdom is the essence of observation.

  The first-class writer always has first-class eyes. Often he is solitary from his companions in youth because they do not see so quickly or
so widely as he does; and therefore do not think so quickly, or so plainly; and tend to ridicule what to them is not usual or ordinary.

  It is as wretched for a slow-seeing person to be with a quick-seeing person, after the fact of difference has been established, as it is for the quick one to be with the slow one. Jefferies knew no one like himself, so he kept by himself. The derision and smallness of his fellows sealed him away from them; he was forced into solitude, where his enlarged and numerous faculties watched the actions of other life – clouds, grass, birds, fish, and natural men. He began to perceive why things happened; and reacted violently from conventional religion because it did not perceive how things happened. He judged religion by its ordinary exponents: the unintelligent mediocrity, men with minds spoiled in early life. In his lonely meditations on the downs he thought about the people in the houses and fields below and wondered how their lives could be made happier. In such solitude it was inevitable that he should strain to perceive or discover the meaning of life: to strain after that meaning, to try and force his thought through space to a definite meaning.

  Later, the sight-records of what he had seen in those early days were used for reproduction on paper.

  In the world of men speech came before writing: sound of words before sight of words. The first-rate writer always has a fine ear. He may be deaf in later life: but when young he must have heard acutely, as well as have seen, unconsciously to prepare the quality and substance of his writing. He writes by ear, balancing his sentences, sometimes automatically, but usually deliberately, for their inner music, which is the essence of life. It is an alchemic process, a spirit arising from a blend of transmuted sight-records and ear-records.

  If you consider a moment, sight is responsible for almost all of the human world as it is today. So is sight the foundation of nearly all literature. (Mr Robert Graves, himself a fine, austere poet, once declared that Keats had an unusually developed sense of taste – ‘And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon’.)