EarthLines 11Issue 4

With his three highly acclaimed and award-winning books, Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places and The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane has rapidly become one of the UKs most influential writers about landscape and the natural world, and one of a group of British writers who have inspired a new critical and popular interest in the nature writing tradition. We were delighted when he agreed to take the time to talk to us about his own work in the context of that tradition.

Sharon Blackie: It has always seemed to me that British nature writing (much more so than the American equivalent, say) is a very gentlemanly tradition. And yet of course there are a few wonderful exceptions whose work youve championed Nan Shepherd, Jacquetta Hawkes as well as Kathleen Jamie and the inimitable Jay Griffiths. Is this your impression?

Robert Macfarlane: Male, maybe, rather than gentlemanly But yes, this is broadly true, especially in comparison with the North American tradition (Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Terry Tempest Williams, Rebecca Solnit etc.). Though the discrepancy here is perhaps not as stark as you suggest. To the names you mention I might add (among living writers) Pauline Stainer, Esther Woolfson, Sara Maitland, Linda Cracknell, Melanie Challenger, as well as a new novelist called Melissa Harrison (see her forthcoming Clay), and Helen Macdonald

austringer, ornithologist, historian of science, poet, essayist and memoirist whose Shalers Fish (Etruscan Press) is one of the best volumes of modern poetry I know, and whose forthcoming H Is For Hawk will, among its other achievements, sharpen and focus questions of gender and (writing about) nature. Turning to other tones and forms, I think also of such influential figures as Fay Godwin and Marion Shoard, or (casting back) Octavia Hill.

SB: Do you think there are any interesting or significant differences in the ways in which women approach the natural world and writing about it, compared to men?

RM: Nan Shepherd might help here, in terms of clarifying how a charismatically masculine genre (mountaineering writing) can be brilliantly revised though I am unconvinced that her revisions are optimally understood in terms of gender. As I note in my introductory essay to the reissue of The Living Mountain:

Most works of mountaineering literature have been written by men, and most male mountaineers are focussed on the summit: a mountain expedition being qualified by the success or failure of ascent. But to aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain, nor is a narrative of siege and assault the only way to write about one. Shepherds book is best

An i n t e rv i e w w i t h

robert Macfarlane

12 EarthLines February 2013

thought of, perhaps, not as a work of mountaineering literature but one of mountain literature. Early on, she confesses that as a young woman she had been prone to a lust for the tang of height, and had approached the Cairngorms egocentrically, apprising them for their effect upon me. She made always for the summits. The Living Mountain relates how, over time, she learnt to go into the hills aimlessly, merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him. Circumambulation has replaced summit-fever; plateau has substituted for peak.

SB: I run the risk of over-simplifying, but in the contemporary UK nature writing tradition we seem to specialise in writing about wildlife more than place. And when we do now write about place (perhaps in contrast to older works) it is very often about passing through a place especially walking something arguably close to travel writing rather than about rootedness in a place. Do you agree that were lacking much new writing about this sense of place (except maybe in fiction ) and if so, what do you think the contributing factors are? RM: Im glad you asked this, as I had noticed EarthLines editorial stance on these matters emerging in earlier issues, and had started to formulate my disagreements with it.

On the question of lack: no, is the answer. To my mind the most important writer at work in the broad field of topographics/ landscape/ nature writing is Tim Robinson, the unclassifiable mathematician-cartographer-deep topo-grapher-cultural historian-philosopher, whose chronic and vast studies of what he calls the ABC of earth wonders (the Aran Islands, the Burren, Connemara), among his many other extraordinary books, are profound explorations of the multiple traces and difficulties of rootedness. John McGaherns magnificent late novel, That They May Face The Rising Sun, searches out the benefits and the costs of rootedness as contrasted with mobility. Adam Thorpes brilliant Ulverton, twenty years old next year, does likewise. Nan Shepherds The Living Mountain was walked into being, and although it is about a single area, that area is enormous and, in Shepherds account of it, eventually unfathomable (it cannot be known fully). W G Sebalds The Rings of Saturn, surely one of the major literary works of the past twenty years, is about the extreme volatility of place, though it proves unable entirely to dispose with the category. Roger Deakin was a superb annotator of both dwelling (in the Suffolk farmhouse and meadows where he spent forty years) and travelling (Wildwood ranges across many countries and cultures, though there could hardly be a book more concerned with roots); Richard Mabey also.

SB: And yet its not at all a criticism, merely an observation, but your own books seem to me to fall very much into this category Im describing, a focus on passing through places rather than rootedness in place. Nevertheless, youve quoted Kavanagh on parochialism: To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetimes experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. And youve written about the beautiful Gaelic concept of duchthas, which occupies the ground somewhere between place

of ones birth and heredity, spirit or blood. But I see little of those concepts reflected in your own work.

RM: Well, I think I have shifted, over the past decade or so, a considerable distance from Kavanagh. The Old Ways is explicitly and continuously about landscape as a dynamically shaping experience, constantly making and unmaking the subject, rather than as either a static back-cloth to existence, or a retreat-space in which shelter from the contemporary might be taken, or as a warm bath run to the brim with nostalgia. Its for these reasons that the book keeps on the move because it is about motion, and about mobility and displacement as constituent conditions of modernity, though also (and I hope carefully) about what might still valuably be learned from those who know their places intimately, plumbing depth as well as gauging width. Its chief character, as it were, is Edward Thomas, who represents the convergence of the books many paths, and whose life I re-tell in the penultimate chapter as a kind of bio-geography. I write specifically about Thomass double-longing for travel and rest, movement and settlement, and about how the tree (immovable) and the bird (migrant) are among the two most distinctive presences in his writings, and the root (delving downwards) and the step (moving onwards) its two chief metaphors for our relations with the world. It is hard to make anything like a truce between these two incompatible desires, Thomas wrote in 1909 though it might have been 2009 the one for going on and on over the earth, the other that would settle for ever in one place, as in a grave and have nothing to do with change.

These incompatible desires also animate brilliant recent work in contemporary anthropology (Tim Ingold), cultural geography (Hayden Lorimer, John Wylie, Caitlin de Silvey), literary criticism (John Kerrigan) and cultural history (Patrick Wright, Patrick Keiller), all of which is, to my mind rightly, sceptical of holding hard to any ideal of dwelling in a context of late-modernity, and much of which finds the basis for an updated environmental ethics not in dwelling but in habitation.

SB: Ive heard arguments that nature writing (sorry for the quotes; I find the term difficult but cant find one I like any better! ecoliterature can be a bit stodgy ) is at a minimum simply irrelevant in an age of ecological crisis. That its little more than nostalgia for an old way of life thats on its way out. That it needs to be more radical. Whats your perspective on that? Are we all just fiddling while Rome burns?

RM: No. Literature and art can be powerful catalysts of change and change is surely needed. But the outcomes of art do not reduce to premeditated deliverables, and are necessarily hard to articulate or to measure. I know that my outlook and behaviour have been shaped in many ways by the literature I have read, though I would find it hard to list those ways and their origins on the page. There are plenty of means by which nature writing (ugh) or ecoliterature (ugh-ugh) can fail: description can lapse into the gathering of lustrous particulars; argument can harden into the hopelessly hortatory, etc. But the quickest

EarthLines 13Issue 4

way to bring about its failure is to task it in advance with too great a responsibility.

SB: Im interested in your thoughts about the future of British nature writing. In a 2003 Guardian article you spoke about a British nature writing renaissance. You also said in a 2004 online interview that some of the most interesting and exciting inventiveness is going on in this genre. Has it lived up to its promise? Are there are recent books/ emerging writers that/ who you especially admire? What if anything do you think is still lacking in the genre or in what ways do you think it might usefully develop?

RM: Well, I still see non-fiction, whatever that is (and far beyond the perimeter of nature writing, whatever that is), as being at least as tonally creative and formally experimental as fiction. Far from being shackled into immobility by its relation to fact, non-fiction today seems to me startlingly innovative. Look at the essays of John Jeremiah Sullivan, Rebecca Solnit, Barry Lopez, David Foster Wallace or Geoff Dyer, for example. Or the reportage of Katherine Boo, John McPhee or William T. Vollmann, or the travelogues of William Dalrymple or Iain Sinclair: all intricately patterned and structurally versatile. Or, of course, J. A. Bakers The Peregrine and Shepherds The Living Mountain, about which I have said more than enough elsewhere. I have learned much myself as a writer at the levels of the image, sentence and chapter from the techniques of novelists and short-storyists, as well as lyric poets (Peter Larkin, Geoffrey Hill, Pauline Stainer), but find myself increasingly looking to non-fiction for formal inspiration and adventure.

To answer your question more directly I no longer think of nature writing, really, and certainly not of it as a genre. As soon as a form (or set of preoccupations or hopes or anxieties, which condense as literature), is imagined as a genre, it is dead in the water or rapidly deliquesces to kitsch.

As to recent books or emerging writers, well Ive named plenty of names already, so Ill restrict myself to two more: Caspar Hendersons recent The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is a marvellously inventive, witty and ethically serious compendium-grimoire-spell book-dream vision, whose many virtues I can neither evoke nor exhaust here.

And M John Harrison, best known I guess as one of the restless fathers of modern sci-fi, and surely among the most brilliant writers at work today. To read his Light, or Empty Space, or Climbers, or is to find a novelist doing what fiction morally must: using its form to carry out the kinds of thinking and exploration that would be possible in no other form. His subjects are loneliness, beauty, modernity, loss, estrangement, space, intimacy: he is drastically frighteningly insightful about aspects of the ways we relate to one another and to the worlds surfaces, colours and places.

SB: Im always delighted to see you mention Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian among your favourite books. (As an aside, reading The Crossing in McCarthys Border Trilogy was largely responsible for the abruptness of our move to Lewis from

RobERt MacFaRLanE won the Guardian First book award, the Somerset Maugham award, and the Sunday times Young Writer of the Year award for his first book, Mountains of the Mind (2003). His second, The Wild Places (2007), was similarly celebrated, winning three prizes and being shortlisted for six more. both books were adapted for television by the bbc. The Old Ways was published in 2012. Robert is a Fellow of Emmanuel college, cambridge.

the mainland three years ago but thats a long story!) What is it that you admire about McCarthy? Blood Meridian is often dismissed as mindlessly violent (largely I suspect by people who either havent read it properly, or who have a very strange notion of human nature ) What do you see in that book, and maybe in McCarthys work in general, that we can learn from?

RM: Aha! Thank you. And I am always pleased to meet another McCarthyite (not that we are an exclusive club). And I do want to hear that long story of yours one day! The mindless violence objection is, as you suggest, mindless. The optical democracy of the novels narrative, which equalises all signs and happenings throughout its course, is as mindful a decision as could be imagined in literary terms. One of the consequences of that technical choice is the enactment (born out by the epigraph and the epilogue, that together pincer the novels body) of the extreme difficulty of successfully managing moral choice, either over the course of an individuals lifetime or over the course of the history of a species. But I find this an ethical challenge rather than a surrender. The Road Blood Meridians ash-grey, burnt-out, eye-dimmed sibling and opposite is also, of course, no aimless revelry in the bleak and calamitous, but rather uses the counter-factual mode both to appal and to rally: as activist a text as one could wish for, but devoid of any hint of agitprop. SB: Youve talked about Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, and The Old Ways as a kind of trilogy. Whats next? RM: A book called Underland, about subterranea, underworlds, claustrophilia, burial, limestone and the baroque. A book of essays, some new and still to be written, some already published (including the long introduction to The Living Mountain, and The Counter-Desecration Phrasebook, an essay on which I know you have touched in the past). A monograph study of Anglo-American writing about landscape, nature and optics from Emerson in 1836 (the floating transparent eyeball) to McCarthys The Road in 2006 (the father glassing the broken terrain ahead with his binoculars). This past year Ive also thoroughly enjoyed collaborating with jazz musicians, artists, sculptors, and photographers, so Ill wait to see what other collaborative projects emerge. I also plan to become further involved with various policy reforms in the fields of access and conservation. r