The Frayed Atlantic Edge, page 31
For Graham and his contemporaries in Cornwall, the sense of loss that resulted from war was compounded by an awareness of the passing of coastal lifeways. Graham drank – prodigiously – in old Cornish pubs, as he had in Greenock. Breaking into song at the drop of a hat he made Cornish friends (and enemies) quickly, and was soon invited out to sea in search of herring. Not yet knowing his Greenock heritage, the fishermen he worked with were surprised at this poet’s accomplished sea legs. He insisted that the long nights in pubs on the harbour were, in fact, his work. On such occasions, ‘the muse herself is drunk’ and the ‘shapes of language … spill round our ears’. He committed the cadences ‘of drinking and affection’ to notebooks ‘so that later I might explore the mechanics of their memorableness and vitality’. The poet must, Graham insisted, build an organic rhetoric to charge up the formal elements of poetry until its energy is amassed and released like a breaking wave.
Obsessed with ‘disturbances to language’, Graham lived among people whose whole lexicon was sinking to oblivion. His response was expressed through mixed metaphors of animal and water: ‘the language is a changing creature continually being killed off, added to and changed like a river over its changing speakers’. The Cornish artist Andrew Lanyon made a series of scrapbooks – evocations of Cornish life in image and prose – several of which are now held in the Cornish Studies Centre at Redruth.4 These are the most revealing and poetic descriptions imaginable of the world into which Graham entered. Lanyon’s father, the artist Peter Lanyon, was a friend of Graham born in the same year, and Andrew characterised their world in terms of a shift in maritime life: they awoke ‘to a world in love with coal and observed the dying flame of sail’. The wars had spurred massive development of seafaring technologies and one unforeseen effect of this was a dramatic linguistic watershed. The words of Cornish boatbuilding, pilchard fishing and sea craft spilled round Graham’s ears but are alien to ours.
Lanyon argued that the written collections of folklorists who descended on Cornwall en masse in the twentieth century are a limited form of salvage. He took the example of ‘Horensheboree’: the syllables fishermen sounded as they dragged a boat across the shore and the noise used to co-ordinate a tug-of-war (it is, the dialect collector might say, a kind of Cornish ‘ready steady go’). From the folklorists’ collections the syllabic tangle remains mysterious:
we can only assume its rhythm and guess where the essential pause might occur. In fact the ‘ee’ followed the rest after a second or two delay, before the next heave … The power of the native version lies partly in where the sounds are made – deep in the throat, near to the ground. ‘Ready steady go’ is suddenly too sporty and dislocated from reality, elevated into the stiff upper lip of competitiveness rather than the chanting of togetherness.
For all its artifice and refraction of reality, poetry like Graham’s could convey rhythms and cadence of seafaring that prose could not.
The communal traditions such language was tied to occurred on exceptional scales. When pilchards arrived in summer, thousands of men and women wielded three-ton nets that each stretched a quarter of a mile round the shoals. Almost a billion of these fish were transported annually from the four main Cornish ports during the eighteenth-century heyday of the phenomenon. I was surprised to learn that – after being piled into five-feet-high salted walls that wound like glinting rivers through every Cornish harbour – most were shipped to Italy. In the same era, tin and copper mines were extended deep under the Atlantic. Miners worked the cavernous galleries to the sound of thunderous rumbling as ocean undertows dragged huge boulders along the seabed. In the face of storms, Graham wrote, ‘the stones roll out to shelter in the sea’. Many alluvial tin mines operated only in the winter because they required fast-flowing streams to operate, so miners were freed to either fish or smuggle through the summer. Smuggling and wrecking became perennial, if subsequently exaggerated, associations of the coast: the sea could seem to wash things clean of ownership even while import duties were ever more widely policed. When good fortune aligned for all these industries, the wealth that poured in could be extravagant. But none were stable nor consistent and a single decade of dearth could have an impact on Cornish culture as great as a century of plenty.
The decades around 1900 saw many forms of dearth. The last ‘native speaker’ of the Cornish language died in 1891. The pilchard fishing reached the end of its long decline, and the last ‘Huers’ posted on hills to watch for shoals were retired in 1922. Harbours suffered neglect: St Agnes crumbled into the sea in 1916 and was never restored. The period has even been labelled ‘the Great Paralysis’ by one leading scholar of modern Cornwall.
At the same time, however, cultural self-consciousness was growing. Attempts to revive Cornish began around 1900. Gorsedh Kernow, a tradition of bardic festivals mirroring the Welsh Gorsedd, was founded in 1928 and was running strong during Graham’s Cornwall years, even if still a Welsh-driven statement of pan-Celtic identity rather than something independently Cornish. After the end of the language as a widespread vernacular, linguistic culture remained not just distinctive but enormously varied. According to Andrew Lanyon, a dialect line splits even the small Penwith Peninsula as if a ‘different people lived either side of the spine’. Vowels, like the weathered rock, he says, were eroded more on the seaward side perhaps by the influence of Breton and Irish. The language was thus full of ‘Nuggets of Norse and alluvial Erse’ as ‘the great rolling gait of the seafaring mother tongue swallows small fry without a hiccup’. This was the fragmentation and flux in which Graham began to interrogate the crises of self and society that the wake of two wars entailed.
Every word of the Cornish masterpiece that is The Nightfishing is metaphor. The Nightfishing lays not just a single journey on the line, but a whole life, an entire civilisation, and the condition, universal to humans, of being constrained by the very language that permits expression. The central question the poem poses concerns the elusive nature of the self – the detachment of every person from their inner being. But the questions it posed for me as I travelled were why the Atlantic was so powerful an expression of this theme and why this use of the ocean should issue from Cornwall. Though interwar British modernism was run through with coastal influences, these were largely the stuff of sheltered North Sea or Irish Sea resorts (Margate, Aldeburgh, Swanage or Morecambe); they were rarely the less hospitable Atlantic.
On the evening of the day I entered Graham country I reached St Ives. The pretty streets were heaving with people and the narrow passageways of the old Sloop Inn almost impassable. I settled in a corner where I could watch the evening pass. Families sat playing board games amid arrays of bottles and glasses that made each table like a chess set. This town was where Graham came to meet people who wished to be ‘isolated together’, and it was in the work of Peter Lanyon, one of his companions in mutual isolation, that I felt the answer to my questions could be found.
The principle of being ‘isolated together’ is telling of St Ives’ history. The only real harbour in north-west Cornwall, the town has long been integrated with the other outposts of the Atlantic edge. This sheltered inlet linked Wales, Brittany, Iberia, the Channel Islands and Ireland (so that it is said to have been the first place in Britain to receive Guinness). Latin, French, English and Cornish were spoken by medieval Ivesians, while Welsh, Breton and Portuguese have also been staples of its streets. The sea saints came to this region too, scattering chapels across the peninsula and linking the literate cultures of Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and the Hebrides.
But this was a place transformed in 1870 by the arrival of the Great Western Railway. Suddenly, a town of working fishermen and women became a shard of metropolis lodged in the coastline – a champagne cocktail spilled in the Atlantic. Perspective shifted from vistas on a vast Atlantic world, to inward-looking Englishness. The railway’s ethos fostered an essentially imperial relationship between centre and periphery, encouraging an image of Cornwall as different, primitive and exotic. The great photographers of the age – names like Preston, Frith, Valentine and Moody – visited and sold their wares in the metropolis. St Ives had two cinemas in an era when film going was a distinctively urban pursuit (no town in the world of St Ives’ size could say the same). The young Virginia Woolf and others of her set arrived for holidays. Woolf watched dolphins pass from the harbour and the image of ‘a fin passing far out’ became a strange cryptic motif that runs through her writing. Her memory of St Ives inflected her characters’ experience of London, the sound of tube trains passing becoming a regular rumbling of ocean waves. For Thomas Hardy, who arrived in Cornwall the very year the railway opened, this coastline stood for aspects of English identity that smug metropolitans dangerously chose to repress. The whole structure of his Cornish stories, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and ‘A Mere Interlude’ (1885), is underlain by weird new temporalities. Everything is ancient: vegetables and flowers from the Scilly Isles are unloaded at Cornish ports just ‘as in the time of the Phoenicians’. But his plots would be impossible without the rapid rail travel between London and Penzance that compressed into a few hours what had till 1870 been a week’s journey. Tourism is the only industry he seems to notice.
But it was painters who were soon the most famous St Ives phenomenon. They recreated picturesque and rustic harbour sights and rushed them for sale to the city. Scenes of traditional life were gathering new meanings amid twin perceptions that the quality of urban life was in decline and that urban life in general was physically and morally corrupting of its subjects. Artists brought visitors in their wake: the seascape painter Borlase Smart, for instance, designed posters to advertise the Great Western Railway to escapist London crowds.
In this era, when artists still painted with nineteenth-century assumptions concerning what reality was and how it should be represented, the relationships between artists and fishing community were friendly and mutually supportive. There were only occasional clashes, such as the time an artist was thrown in the harbour for painting on a Sunday. But Peter Lanyon was a misfit in this scene. Born in St Ives, he might seem a natural bridge between the two populations: an insider to the fishing community where other artists were outside observers. But embracing elements of abstraction – ‘blobs and smears’ as some locals saw it – he instead contributed to the end of the uneasy alliance. The fisher community’s respect for artists had been built on the idea that they were skilled craftspeople representing the town, realistically, to the outside world; they couldn’t see themselves, nor any technical craft, reflected back from modernist abstractions.
Lanyon grew up in the wealthier part of St Ives (upalong), on the hill above the harbour (downalong). Atlantic rollers that hit the coast were dispersed, by the time they reached upalong, into pointillist mist that coated windowpanes and abstracted the seascape below. In the nursery, his sister would begin to tell stories that Peter would subvert, filling them ‘with storm clouds’. ‘He was’, she said, ‘always one to side with the wind.’ People and landscapes were similarly subverted in his paintings, everything generalised from an initial specific vision. A place or person was painted over and over till any specificity was just suggestion, and human bodies could be headlands or headlands bodies. Black lines weave round his paintings. They are ‘beachcombed’, in his words, from the black nets that lined the St Ives harbour. The key to understanding his artistic project is that lines like these do not concern space so much as time: they are temporal elements to guide the eye round the canvas, analogous to the eye following a wave as it rises and unfurls. Smooth curves lead vision smoothly and swiftly, but tangles and complexities are obstructions like reefs in water.
Lanyon was formed by war more directly than Graham. It was his immersion in combat, and in the Libyan desert where he fought, that turned him from a figurative artist into something new. He insisted that revelations of wartime technological genocide posed a challenge that demanded from the artist perspectives other than the urban; he began to identify the new toughness war and its aftermath instilled in him with the hard granite of his home. Where other modernists made technology their subject, Lanyon pursued similarly radical objectives through materials such as sea cliffs that were interpreted by others as timeless and permanent. Post-war people were strangers to the familiar, he said, and if art focused only on superficial elements of radical change it would neglect the human transformation underlying them. Who now could truly believe, he asked, that cities or technologies were solutions? Writing to a German critic he insisted that ‘it is in the bare places like West Cornwall … that many artists will find an answer for their times’.5
Not just the bare rock, but the physical and spiritual challenge of the indifferent ocean drove his quest for post-war meaning. It was when watching waves break outside Tripoli that Lanyon had become obsessed with the question of how to represent movement on a static sheet of paper. The art historian Rosalind Krauss has referred to the sea as a special kind of medium for modernism because of ‘its opening onto a visual plenitude that is somehow heightened and pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening into nothing’.6 In similar vein, Lanyon wrote that ‘the effort to understand and to live with and to adjust to vastness calls out an equal depth in our own psyche creating anxiety enough to trigger off a rescue operation’.
This sense of the viewer’s disorienting immersion in earth and water was crucial to Lanyon’s art, suggested perhaps by St Ives artists’ outside view of the worlds they painted and his own zealously felt sense of Cornish insider status. A sufferer of vertigo, he would run to a clifftop and aim to recreate in paint the experience of the shocking edge rather than to represent the view below. Like a cubist he painted in ways that evaded the singular viewpoint, aiming to see things as if from many angles. All is deconstructed. There is, it is often said, only air and never sky in his paintings, and only rock, never cliffs. Yet somehow – to me at least – the formulations usually used for Lanyon’s elements don’t fit his seas. They are always ocean, never water, in part because it is their massed movements that matter to him: there is spray, foam, wave and, as in the painting Headland (1948), the shimmer of light on oceanic expanse. Given how much is written about Lanyon it’s strange how little is written about his sea. His modes of transport on land and in the air – from motorbiking to gliding – have been subject to intense scrutiny, yet boats are rarely mentioned among his methods, despite his frequent seafaring and the number of his famous paintings, such as Godrevy Lighthouse (1949) or Silent Coast (1957), that specify boat-bound perspectives or watery movement. It is perhaps precisely because the sea is unique among his elements that Lanyon scholarship has so stubbornly refused to mention it.
The results of Lanyon’s method were described by many viewers as abstract but by Lanyon as landscape. Abstraction, he insisted was merely a tool for rendering land and sea as experiences not as objects. Some critics sided with the fishermen in dismissing Lanyon’s work as meaningless. But John Berger, the great scourge of abstract art, was convinced of the constructive and embodied nature of Lanyon’s project:
he searches for something which includes a sailor’s knowledge of the coastline, a poacher’s knowledge of the cover, a miner’s knowledge of the seams, a surveyor’s knowledge of the contours, a native’s knowledge of the local ghosts, a painter’s knowledge of the light.
This life in a no man’s land between figurative and abstract art might perhaps explain why his seas are different: water is, in its real state, already more abstract, less concrete and more transitory, than land. Perhaps this is why modernists from Woolf to Graham to Maxwell Davies were so eager to embrace it. Lanyon’s abstraction is no more than a wave that flows across reality. As the undertow draws back, familiar elements of boat, cliff, seabird or human appear, though still refracted by the veil of sea that thinly covers them.
By 1950, when Graham and Lanyon would drink together in St Ives, they were each as obsessed as the other by the question of boundaries between self and world. Lanyon’s painting interrogates edges and his prose is littered with phrases that muddy distinctions between landscape elements and human bodies: ‘I would not be surprised if all my painting now will be done on an edge – where the land meets the sea where flesh touches at the lips’; ‘I like to paint places where solids and fluids come together, such as the meeting of sea and cliff, of wind and rock, of human body and water.’ In most artists it would be safe to assume that quotes like these referred to multiple paintings in different genres, but for Lanyon each quote could describe a single brushstroke. His nudes, in his words, evoke ‘the sensation of oneself against impossible weather … it is information about certain sensuous qualities that I’m after … transformed to an understanding of landscape’. These nudes are as likely to make visual reference to Cornish headlands as to particular parts of a human body, just as there are suggestions of human form in his landscapes: an echo of the body is ‘something a viewer subliminally responds to and seems to take part in’. Indeed, even Lanyon’s demonstrative painting practice muddied these human/landscape divides, swift sweeps of a heavily loaded brush across canvas were fitting metaphors for the fluid forces of nature meeting cliffs. The point was that the human body and its environment are bound into a single structure. The body defines its own boundaries through movement in the landscape and every perception of the external world is linked to a bodily reaction which generates new perceptions: ‘if bodily space and external space form a practical system … it is clearly in action that the spatiality of our body is brought into being’. In these ways the painting, operating in all four dimensions, is as much an act of self-definition against the immensities of ocean as is The Nightfishing.
Rosalind Krauss speaks of the sea as a medium of modernism ‘because of its perfect isolation, its detachment from the social’. But this is not Lanyon’s Atlantic, nor Graham’s, since the point for both of them was to humanise seas: to see them as layered with social events and activity. They presented landscape visions that were no longer stripped of centuries of occupants but that achieved their meanings through use. As he moved along the coastline, painting his responses to what he saw and felt, Lanyon considered lives lost in sea disasters and mining catastrophes (such as the occasion in 1919 when the ‘man engine’ in the Levant mine collapsed, killing thirty-one):
