Driving Home, page 19
The biblical text magnifies the paradoxical strength of the sands. It focuses attention on the shoreline, and fills it with meaning. Nowhere else do the power and goodness of the Creator appear so clearly as on the beach that still bears the imprint of his finger. This most astonishing miracle is constantly being fulfilled. For the Christian, the threatening wave is merely a reminder of misfortune and the Fall. The line where it breaks arouses astonishment, and fosters admiration and thanksgiving. For the Christian, the curve of the wave in the presence of divine omnipotence, as it becomes calm and ebbs away, evokes a gesture of respect.
Corbin’s beachgoers all treat the shore as a source of important knowledge: they take themselves to the water’s edge in order to learn—about God, then about ancient history and modern fortifications, then about the “primordial” characters who make their livings from the sea. In the Romantic period, they went to the beach to gain self-knowledge. Even the ritual of therapeutic sea bathing (which began to be touted as a cure-all in the 1670s) was for most people a terrifying educational experience. An attendant was employed to force the bather’s head below the waves:
Brutal immersion head first in water at a temperature of 12 to 14 degrees brings about an intense shock. This practice was part of the technique for toughening the patient, as Michel Foucault once described it. It is reminiscent of tempering steel. The process acts on the diaphragm, considered the seat of sensibility … this was a means of toughening young girls who suffered from dangerously pale complexions; it got them accustomed to being exposed to the elements, and prepared them for the emotions and pains of puberty, as well as the sufferings of childbirth.
The history of the coast (at least since the early eighteenth century) is inseparable from the history of tourism. Corbin tracks the Grand Tourists, accompanied by their tutors, on their pilgrimage to the shores of the Mediterranean, where they tramped around the designated classical ruins, sketched the military architecture of the major harbors, and sought out the vantage points (these were listed in guidebooks) that would put them, as it were, in front of the easel supporting a painting by Claude Lorrain or Salvator Rosa. They went to see what had been seen many times before, and whose meaning had been already firmly established by better minds than their own—and they went in groups, for the lone traveler is inevitably at a disadvantage when what he seeks is essentially public knowledge. Corbin locates the beginning of industrialized mass tourism in the neoclassical “picturesque code,” and identifies the Romantic insistence on solitary adventure and solitary sensation as, in part, a turning away in disgust from the upper-class coach-party trips of the previous age.
The visit to the lonely shore became an exercise in self-discovery and self-expression. “The ocean’s vastness became a metaphor for the individual’s fate, and made of the beach a fine line marked by the rhythms of the water, which were in turn driven by the lunar cycle; treading this line became an invitation to reassess one’s life.” The problem with this kind of private communion with the deep lay in communicating the intensity of one’s experience to one’s fellows. Byron (“And I have loved thee, Ocean!”) used his pen; less talented folk used their bodies. “Unprecedented ways of standing or posturing on the beach or of sitting or lying on the sand were the signs of this deepening of the quest.” So the prized solitude of the Romantic traveler was not so solitary after all.
From late in the seventeenth century to early in the nineteenth, the attractions of the beach steadily accumulated, and Corbin makes an amusing inventory of things that drew tourists to the sea some twenty years before the generation of Byron, Shelley, and Heine came on the scene and swept all before them:
A look at the popular journals devoted to the world of the sea and published during the last forty years of the [eighteenth] century shows the fascination exerted by the shore and the powerful evocativeness of this theatre of the void criss-cross with shadows: it was a kaleidoscope that juggled composite mosaics and created fleeting series of characters, stony men who had not changed since the times of the bards and the Druids, virgin priestesses of Belenus, strong-blooded barbarians whose ferocity satisfied readers’ sadistic sides, heroic rescuers, anxious women gathering the sea’s manna on the strand and the rocks and awaiting the fishermen’s return, and the moving spectacle of young girls questioning the sea-gulls about the destiny of their beloved. All these polysemous figures nourished the contemplation and reverie that filled tourists’ souls and which had already been refreshed by the legends collected from the shore-hauler’s mouth or from the old fisherman. In short, the quality of the place, at the meeting-point of sea, sky, and land, facilitated the mingling of images and an additional feeling of travelling through time and space. It was a springboard for the imagination, producing a body of literature and painting whose richness between 1810 and 1840 exceeded that of rustic imagery.
When Corbin takes leave of his subject, in 1840, railway lines run from London and Paris to the beach resorts. The shiplike architecture of the new coastal town is in place, with its passenger-deck promenades and its line of boardinghouses and hotels fused into a single white superstructure above the sea. The modern seaside—the product of a complex braid of ideas going back some two hundred years—is under way.
It is with high hopes that one opens John Stilgoe’s study of the American coastal edge, Alongshore. Stilgoe, a professor of landscape history at Harvard, has a good track record. He has published three substantial books on the impact that Americans have made on their environment, and his last one, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939, dealt with the ambiguous margin between the city and the country in a way that might have been a rehearsal for dealing with the even more ambiguous margin between the land and the sea. In Alongshore he sensibly focuses on his own home stretch of shoreline—and he is extraordinarily lucky to live where he does. The twenty miles of coast between Gurnet Point and Strawberry Point on Massachusetts Bay is a fascinating configuration of water, sand, architecture, and salt marsh. Between the towns of Cohasset to the north and Duxbury to the south lies a maze of shoals and bars, gluey mud, sandspits, dog’s-leg channels where the tide runs fast and dangerously, brackish creeks, beaches, dunes, and lagoonlike pools of sheltered water. Local industries range from tourism and fishing to national security and the drug trade. It would be hard to find on a world atlas a better place to write about as a test-case sample of seaside life.
In his introduction, Stilgoe announces Alongshore as a “personal book”—which means, unfortunately, that he has put aside the lucid expository prose of his earlier work and set up shop as an unbuttoned stylist. His writing here seesaws between the sonorous and the whimsical. He describes himself as “the barefoot historian,” though when he was a fully dressed historian his prose was far plainer than it is in Alongshore. He likes to rummage at leisure through his dictionaries, searching for antique and dialect words like “marge,” “glim,” “dipsey,” “guzzle,” which he then proceeds to work to death. “Gunk-hole” (a small, muddy anchorage) is already a threadbare old favorite of the boating magazines; Stilgoe makes a great fuss over his discovery of it, equips it with a deeply suspect etymology, and uses it, on average, once every eighty-five words for the next ten pages. When he writes of “explorers and mariners gunkholing their way [from Europe] to America,” he robs the poor word of what little meaning it has left: the explorers and mariners might as well be said to have found their way to America on pogo sticks.
The prevailing tone of Alongshore is well caught in a sentence that deals ostensibly with the sale of thrillers in beach resorts:
How tourists can be pleased to learn that among the locals lurk drug smugglers, thieves, and murderers remains a deep unreached by dipsey lead, something the barefoot historian ponders frequently between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
The pompous syntax, showy alliteration, the drollery, pipe-sucking and disabling self-consciousness are the stylistic signature of the book: Stilgoe loves language, but handles it with such clumsiness that it’s not to be trusted in his keeping.
Some of the merits of his previous books survive here. He has developed a useful scattershot approach for targeting slippery and elusive subjects. Short, copiously illustrated chapters on topics that bear more or less indirectly on the main theme seem arbitrarily assembled until you realize that the center is being defined by its periphery. If Stilgoe were to draw a man, he’d start with the hands and the feet. So in Alongshore there are chapters on swimsuits, piracy, coastal defenses, boat design, the rise of the outboard motor, quicksands, the color chartreuse, and so on. Here Stilgoe is inland, there he’s out at sea; as he moves around his subject, crossing and recrossing it, the line of the coast gradually emerges, though the resulting picture is a lot more blurred here than were his portraits of the suburbs in Borderland and of the railroad communities in Metropolitan Corridor.
He raises many good questions, but answers them in a weirdly offbeam way. Alongshore begins with a fierce assault on the word seascape. “Seascape cannot properly designate the subject of this book, for all that its cousin landscape proves useful in designating land shaped by people for their own needs and in classifying certain sorts of pictures or views. The whole concept of seascape reeks of lubberly bias.” The dictionaries are consulted (Webster’s, Century, the 1891 Adeline’s Art Dictionary), and Stilgoe concludes that seascape was a mid-nineteenth-century British neologism, a pretentious word for a pretentious object—a picture of the sea drawn by a non-seagoer from a stable perch ashore. Thackeray is brought in as a witness: in “A Shabby Genteel Story” a Cockney dauber named Andrea Fitch is found on the cliff at Margate, blathering about “yonder tempestuous hocean in one of its hangry moods” as he sketches “a land or a sea-scape” (the hyphen is a Stilgoe addition to Thackeray’s original text). “In a few sentences, Thackeray ridicules the ostentation of seascape.”
That is nonsense. The word was not a neologism in the mid-nineteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary (which doesn’t seem to have a place on Stilgoe’s shelf) cites the Hull Advertiser, 1799: “One of the most eminent marine painters has painted sea-skips.” In “A Shabby Genteel Story,” Thackeray ridicules the person of the painter but has nothing whatever to say about either the word “seascape” or the genre it denotes.
Yet the appearance of the word in English, somewhere toward the end of the eighteenth century, was an important event in the evolving history of the coast, and Stilgoe is right to draw attention to it. “Marine painting” meant pictures of ships and harbors. In the work of the Van de Veldes and Dominic Serres, for instance, the water itself is a secondary element in the composition and often looks as stiff as if it were molded in plaster of paris. As Alain Corbin demonstrates, the sea was becoming increasingly interesting during the course of the century as a subject in its own right. A new word was needed to distinguish between marine paintings and paintings whose main focus was on the turbulent water, the translucence of a cresting wave—paintings in which ships, if they were present at all, were there to be overwhelmed by the greater majesty of the sea, like Turner’s The Shipwreck (1805).
The OED’s second meaning is from A Guide to Watering Places (1806), which commends a hotel with “a fine sea-scape from a terrace in the garden.” As the Grand Tourists had used to view harbors from a scenic overlook through a Claude glass, and so turn them into living paintings, now, nearly a hundred years later, the sea itself had become a legitimate object of mental picture-making. Seascapes—both as canvases and as views from the terrace—were all the rage, and the pursuit of seascape, even before the word was coined, had begun to drive fishermen, boatbuilders, and other traditional shore dwellers from their old quarters, as the leisure industries seized hold of the best beaches. In Sanditon (1817), Jane Austen registered the dramatic change in value of waterfront property, from worthless desert to prime real estate. Bournemouth, which began life in 1810, was, like Sanditon, a town built around a seascape.
Why does Stilgoe so detest the word? Any serious reckoning with “seascape” would lead one to the fact that the coast has been importantly shaped by the tourist industry for the last two hundred and fifty years. Alongshore might usefully have considered the question of how far the development of the American seaside kept in step with its British and European counterparts; but Stilgoe’s earliest substantial reference is to Thoreau’s beachcombing in Cape Cod (1865), which is altogether too late for this purpose. According to the Encyclopedia Americana, Newport, Rhode Island, became a beach resort in the years immediately following the War of Independence, when it lost its strategic value as a naval station—which would make it younger than Scarborough and a few years older than Brighton. Stilgoe, though, seems in this book to be a historian with little interest in history, and his disregard for the past enables him to invent it at his convenience.
Like so many other writers about the coast, he affects a tone of routine threnody and his book takes the form of a lament for yesteryear—for lost crafts and industries, lost places, lost people. It’s always the conceit of such writers that the golden age of the beach existed within living memory and that its fall from grace has happened as a result of very recent industrial, social, or bureaucratic upheavals. Since 1800, the beach has been a place for children, and everybody likes to think that his or her own childhood belonged to a larger age of innocence. So Edmund Gosse in 1907 conjured the glory of the Devonshire rock pools of his boyhood, only to reveal that no one would ever see them again as he had seen them.
If the Garden of Eden had been situated in Devonshire, Adam and Eve, stepping lightly down to bathe in the rainbow-coloured spray, would have seen the identical sights that we now saw—the great prawns gliding like transparent launches, anthea waving in the twilight its thick white waxen tentacles, and the fronds of the dulse faintly streaming on the water, like huge red banners in some reverted atmosphere.
All this is long over, and done with. The ring of living beauty drawn about our shores was a very thin and fragile one. It had existed all those centuries solely in consequence of the indifference, the blissful ignorance of man. These rock-basins, fringed by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellucid as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms of life—they exist no longer, they are all profaned, and emptied, and vulgarized. An army of “collectors” has passed over them, and ravaged every corner of them. The fairy paradise has been violated, the exquisite product of centuries of natural selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning, idle-minded curiosity.
The collectors (who, as it happens, earn a good, plain, well-researched passage in Alongshore) came and went. In 1950, when I was seven, I vacationed with my parents on the same stretch of the south Devon coast and saw rock pools just as startlingly clear, as populous, as magical, as any described by Gosse in the golden age ca. 1856—same prawns, same anthea, same dulse, same corallines, same pellucidity. (They’re all gone now, of course.)
Stilgoe, born in 1949, seems too young for his heavy-lidded Tiresian style, but he would have one believe that the 1960s marked the beginning of the end of the old, idyllic coast. Embedded in the chapter titled “Harbors” is an age-of-innocence description, only marginally flyspecked with professional landscape-history jargon, of a harbor as Stilgoe himself might remember seeing it at age seven:
Right next to the water … stood a densely packed concatenation of spaces and structures and vessels, a concatenation enlivened from late spring through early autumn by furious activity, for even in midsummer wooden boats rumbled up marine railways for repair and repainting, especially for the bottom repainting that helped fast boats win races. The ring of land jammed with cradled boats all winter marked the visual high-tide zone, a zone in from the actual high-tide limit but in which vessels occupied space comfortably, almost ‘naturally.’ Crowded, active, and instantaneously announcing itself as the boating edge of the land, the harbor collar attracted everyone from boys building or repairing a rowboat to fishermen examining a hauled-out trawler to tourists savoring a salty scene. And then, in the 1960s, the collar frayed …
People of all ages and classes—fishermen, yachtsmen, boys, and tourists—are interlocking elements in this scene of idealized social harmony. But the picture begs a lot of questions. Why are the marine railways occupied by racing yachts, while the trawler appears only to have been beached? Why are there so many yachts in sight and only one fishing boat? What are the fishermen saying about the yachtsmen, and vice versa? What is everyone saying about the tourists? What Stilgoe portrays, quite unwittingly, is a battleground of competing class and economic interests, where the recreational boating industry has driven commercial fishing into a corner of a harbor to which the fishermen no doubt feel historically entitled. The “collar,” as Stilgoe fondly calls it, might reasonably be perceived by some of the people in his picture as a noose.
The “Harbors” chapter is a fair example both of Stilgoe’s general method and of the note of false elegy that pervades the book. It begins with a nostalgic salute to the builders of wooden boats and to the continuous maintenance work needed to keep them afloat. All the boats mentioned are, significantly, pleasure craft—sailboats, skiffs, and small motor cruisers. The chapter goes on to note, sadly, the triumph of fiberglass over wood in the evil 1960s. (In a memorable insult delivered by an older technology to its newfangled successor, the great wooden boat designer L. Francis Herreshoff once likened fiberglass to “frozen snot.”) The “plastic” boats required less maintenance, so there was less work for the traditional boatyards; and as the new craft became lighter and lighter in weight, the old marine railways were torn up to be replaced by Travelifts. Many boatyards went out of business or were swept off the foreshore by yacht marinas. Now—according to Stilgoe—the marinas themselves are under threat, for “boatyards and marinas are worth more as vacant lots suitable for condominium development than as operating businesses.”
