The Gale of the World
Page 43
“Weep no more, old soldier,” she whispered, but her tears, too, were flowing. Then they were smiling and walking hand in hand down the shore.
“You remember Blake’s lines—‘When the stars threw down their spears/Watering Heaven with their tears—’ I know now what that old poet meant. And you have brought love to me, and to my sister—love which dissolves arrogance and hatred—love by which one can see all things as the sun sees them; without shadows.” He held up his arms, crying, “O my friends! My friends in ancient sunlight!”
1964–1968
Devon.
L’ ENVOI
Edward Garnett, literary advisor to Galsworthy and Conrad, friend of many writers including Hardy, Hudson, and D. H. Lawrence—a critic of classic sensibility and wide range of scholarship—said to the author one summer day in 1928 on the shore of the estuary of the Two Rivers in North Devon what was seldom to be forgotten.
“A written page may be life; but the test must be, Is it art? A writer may transcribe an actual happening with what is called ‘realism’, yet his work remain comparatively unconvincing. Whereas what is transmuted by the Imagination will convey the spirit of reality, and read as life itself.”
Forty years have passed since those words were spoken by the White House, the marshman’s cottage on the sea-wall where Garnett was staying for a holiday. He held in his hand a set of galley proofs of a novel called The Pathway which had taken nearly four years to begin, continue, and complete.
“‘True but imaginary’, in Conrad’s words,” he went on, waving the long strips of printed paper. “You have brought it off, my dear fellow!”
*
The final sentence of The Gale of the World was written at 4.20 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, 11 February 1968, in a cottage near the harbour of Ilfracombe in North Devon. The whole novel, from the opening sentence on The Chains of Exmoor to the final scene on the bouldered, wreck-strewn shore of Lynmouth after the great storm which swept some of the characters to their deaths, had been imagined. As with The Pathway (the story of Phillip’s cousin Willie) The Gale had slowly formed itself, with all the characters imagined upon the paper before one, during long days shut away from summer suns, and short dull days comforted before the open hearth of a hilltop hut; and, at times of concern, in the silence of sleepless nights.
William Blake wrote, ‘What is now achieved was once only imagined’. All things of the visible world are by their material forms archaic; whereas the Imagination is the spirit of evolution to higher forms. All men and women of good will who hold to their being by this spirit know the greater love which streams from ‘the fostering hand of the Creator’.
At 4.20 p.m. on that Sunday afternoon in February 1968 I got up from my writing table overcome by emotion, crying out words of grief and amazement while walking aimlessly about the rooms of the cottage empty except for myself, disturbed by feelings of a lost freedom which also had been a tyranny during the two decades now closed behind one. For A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, of which The Gale is the ultimate and climactical volume, was ended. During those years one had been visited by fear of failure at all levels, together with exaltation which at times arose to a point of feeling oneself to be in glow, to be in levitation—a necromancer raising from the ashes of consumed Time remembered friendships and places—a sunlit lane in Kent, the spokes of my bicycle humming—a dawn sky above the Wiltshire downs—a trout stream on Exmoor, where the dipper flew from rock to rock—a battlefield under Messines Hill in 1914; the more terrible desolations of Picardy and Artois in later years —the comradeship of young volunteers like myself marching through the white-dusty lanes of Surrey and Sussex in that sweltering August when war suddenly obliterated the old feelings (it seemed, then) for ever.
Backwards in Time to revisit the first Christmas tree in the new house in Wakenham, while the polyphone played Over the Waves, and the face of a mother was happy as she lit the little candles: the same face, thin with pain, dying of cancer in a nursing home.
A thousand scenes from Time regained! Innumerable joys and sorrows, the best and the worst of oneself: in that moment of 11 February 1968 all were swept away as débris of the Imagination.
The fairest things have fleetest end:
Their scent survives their close,
But the rose’s scent is bitterness
To him that loved the rose!
Bitterness, dear Francis Thompson? Ah no! Behind the tears were love and gratitude that one had been born in England, that one had been privileged to experience hardship that had burned away the selfish dross of oneself, and thereby, perhaps, made one worthy of an attempt to speak for those who had not come back from the Western Front.
*
The flame of the taper falters. We have come to wax end, our chronicle with it.
1949–1968 H.W.
About the Author
Henry Williamson (1895–1977) was a prolific writer best known for Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. He wrote much of else of quality including The Wet Flanders Plain, The Flax of Dream tetralogy and the fifteen-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, all of which are being reissued in Faber Finds.
His politics were unfortunate, naively and misguidedly right-wing. In truth, he was a Romantic. The critic George Painter famously said of him, ‘He stands at the end of the line of Blake, Shelley and Jefferies: he is last classic and the last romantic.’
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2011
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Henry Williamson, 1969
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ISBN 978–0–571–27969–2