Driving Home, page 36
Tobey—like Morris Graves, who took on Oregon—accepted a commission to paint Washington for a United States series that was funded from 1946 to 1949 by the Container Corporation of America. Graves’s Oregon is a delicate, feathery, Japanese-looking study of Northwestern evergreens. Tobey’s Washington is an intensely busy Indian-inspired pictographic puzzle, like the totemic heraldry on a Kwakiutl painted chest. It’s a labyrinth of interlocking rectangles, each one packed with images and symbols, on a ground as luminously gray as a Seattle sky. Inside the rectangles are dozens of ovoids or “eye shapes”—the basic building blocks of Northwest coast Native American design. As with a Kwakiutl chest, the painting demands to be “read” by the viewer, and, as with the chest, some of its meanings readily disclose themselves whereas others appear to be deeply secretive and private. One sees immediately the salmon, the Pike Place Market scene, the seascape with a sailboat, the tribal masks, but the larger code is not so easily cracked. On one level the painting resolves into a game of Can You Spot the killer whale? canoes? logs? mountains? the Indian bird-rattle? Skagit Valley tulips? the artist in his studio? the oyster? clams? On another it’s a palimpsest—writing-on-writing, some legible and strongly foregrounded, some faint and obscure, with the whole composition giving the impression of infinitely recessive depth. More than any other painting in the Container Corporation series, Washington succeeds in condensing an entire American state—its nature, industry, and recreations—into a square of paperboard; and it does so by summoning the aid of the state’s aboriginal inhabitants, whose art informs the whole conception of the piece.
It was Tobey who nagged at Emily Carr, a British Columbian painter, to get the Indian-folklore material out of her pictures. After training in Paris, where she fell for the work of Derain and the Fauvists, and after a long spell in an English mental hospital, where she filled an aviary with British songbirds, hoping to import them to Vancouver Island, Carr traveled through coastal British Columbia, painting Indian canoes, house posts, and totem poles in the forest. In 1930, when he was forty and she was fifty-nine, Tobey appointed himself Carr’s mentor and critic, advising her to drop the Indian subjects and follow his lead into greater abstraction. The famously spiky Carr was not a natural follower. “Clever but his work has no soul,” she remarked of Tobey in her journal (published posthumously as Hundreds and Thousands [1966]).
Though Tobey’s opinion of her work rankled, it evidently made its mark, because the canoes and totem poles began to disappear from Carr’s canvases, allowing the turbulent shapes of the forest itself to emerge as her great subject. Before, she had concentrated on re-creating, in two dimensions, the swooping curves and expressive distortions of carved figures like Raven and Thunderbird. After about 1930, the foliage of the fir forest and its undergrowth of bracken, blackberry, and salal became for her a kind of painted sculpture in its own right. Every leaf and twig looks chiseled, in Indian house-post style, and Carr’s forest is thick with fortuitous visual echoes of the mythological creatures who dominated her earlier paintings—especially Dzonogwa, the female Kwakiutl child-stealer; Raven; and Eagle. This is animistic nature—a realm of gross and copious fecundity, where powerful half-seen beings live in the shadows.
In her journal Carr took a dim view of people who “stay outside [the forest] and talk about its beauty.”
Nobody goes there. Why? Few have anything to go for. The loneliness repels them, the density, the unsafe hidden footing, the dank smells, the great quiet, the mystery, the general mix-up (tangle, growth, what may be hidden there), the insect life. They are repelled by the awful solemnity of the age-old trees, with the wisdom of all their years of growth looking down upon you, making you feel perfectly infinitesimal—their overpowering weight, their groanings and creekings [sic], mutterings and sighings—the rot and decay of the old ones—the toadstools and slugs …
If this passage seems to be at least as much about the dank and smelly mystery of sex as about trees, so do Carr’s paintings—though the explicit sexuality of her forest is far from being its only signification. In August 1937 she wrote of an unfinished picture of the woods, “It all depends on the sweep and swirl and I have not got it yet.” In her best paintings the forest is literally a whirlpool of meanings, in a state of constant dissolution and recombination. Sex is to be found there, but so are worship, peaceful refuge, fear, revulsion, beauty, power, and pathos. It’s a complex and accommodating place, which answers equally to, say, George Vancouver’s desolation and the Romantic sense of wonder. It seems as close as any white artist or writer has ever come to the Indian version of the Northwest forest as it appears in the native stories collected by Franz Boas and other early anthropologists.
The Pacific Northwest is now entangled in a rancorous quarrel about landscape: “Wise Use” has become a sly euphemism for chainsaw liberation; farmers rally to protest the reintroduction of wolves into the mountains; salmon-first conservationists plan on dynamiting the hydroelectric dams about which Woody Guthrie used to sing.
Here’s a contemporary Pacific Northwest landscape: on the Olympic Peninsula the carcass of a northern spotted owl was found nailed to a fencepost. The bird had been expertly shot with a high-powered small-calibre rifle. Beside it was pinned a typewritten note, or caption: “If you think your parks and wildernesses don’t have enough of these suckers, plant this one.” The anonymous artist left behind two beer cans, a Band-Aid, and a spent match.
This stretch of land has been so fought over, painted and repainted, laden with partisan and contradictory meanings, that it tends to invite the response of a tired postmodern shrug. A recent New Yorker cartoon by David Sipress shows a vacationing couple standing beside their RV atop a dizzy precipice, from which they’re looking down at the usual natural amenities of the Pacific Northwest—fir trees, mountains, waterfalls, winding trails. The man, in baggy tartan shorts and wraparound sunglasses, is saying to the woman, “So this is the famous environment everyone’s so hyped up about?”
It’s “the famous environment” that the Portland artist Michael Brophy depicts with sardonic cool in People’s View. At the turn of the twenty-first century Brophy has achieved the ambition of every nineteenth-century Romantic painter: he has voided the land of its people. Not even a solitary Indian disturbs his denuded Northwest, with its lonely geology, water, and dark-green vegetation—though field lines and bridges survive, and the hills have been largely shorn of their timber. Nature (or what little is now left of it) has become a prettily lit stage set, from which the audience has been divorced by a proscenium arch. In the immediate foreground of the picture the spectators are assembled, their backs to the painter—a dense crowd of urban types in Birkenstocks and earth-toned leisurewear from Eddie Bauer. We’re in there too, dutifully gazing at this empty spectacle, this picture of a picture, which is what the Pacific Northwest has become. We’re in exactly the same position as the people who look at the sea in Robert Frost’s poem:
They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?
Atlantic Monthly, March 2001
* In the eighteenth century, when the landscapes of Claude Lorrain were hugely admired in England, no tour of a great country estate was complete without a Claude glass: a gilt frame with an ornate handle, containing sometimes a tinted mirror, sometimes a pane of clear glass. From selected viewpoints along the route, the finest vistas of the estate were inspected with the Claude glass—living landscapes, in which (as in the paintings that figure in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books) the sheep and deer could be seen to move.
The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst
MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS after Donald Crowhurst stepped to his death in the Atlantic, somewhere between the Caribbean and the coast of North Africa, he is enjoying a busy new life as a mythological figure. Between 1990 and 2001 the Crowhurst story inspired a novel by Robert Stone (Outerbridge Reach); a one-man opera (Ravenshead by Stephen Mackey and Rinde Eckert); an art installation (Disappearance at Sea) by Tacita Dean that was shortlisted for the Turner Prize; a multimedia performance piece (Jet Lag) by Jessica Chalmers; a stage play (Pelican) by Chris Van Strander; along with a radio documentary, a projected movie, and a play for BBC Television. Of all the competitors, living and dead, who sailed in the 1968 Golden Globe race for the first nonstop solo circumnavigation, it is, ironically, Crowhurst, the cheat, who has won the most secure place in the pantheon of heroes; his sufferings have fired the world’s imagination and made him perhaps the most famous amateur sailor who ever put to sea in a small boat.
Everything we know about Crowhurst comes from one book, and it is the narrative brilliance of The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst that has given his story its extraordinary posthumous energy. Though Ron Hall and Nicholas Tomalin were working on assignment for the London Sunday Times (the chief sponsor of the Golden Globe race), their book magnificently transcends its journalistic origins. The two were perfectly matched. Hall was and is a redoubtable investigative journalist; Tomalin, who was killed by a sniper’s bullet on the Golan Heights in 1973, when he was reporting the Yom Kippur War, was a lavishly talented writer. (His shocking and funny essay, “The General Goes Zapping Charlie Kong,” survives in anthologies as one of the handful of great dispatches from the Vietnam War.) Hall was the sleuth, Tomalin the stylist, and between them they created a book which has at once the memorable shape and pattern of a work of fiction and the abundant hard detail of a work of unimpeachable fact. I’ve been reading The Strange Last Voyage at least once a year for more than twenty years, and with each further reading, the Crowhurst story deepens and darkens, gaining in power as the world it records slides farther into the past. I often find myself quibbling with Hall and Tomalin’s judgments, as the book generously encourages one to do, for it renders Crowhurst in three solid dimensions—as ambiguous, and sometimes baffling, on the page as he clearly was in life.
“You couldn’t tell what was going on inside of him,” complained a Teignmouth local in the Lifeboat Inn after Crowhurst’s death. From infancy (his mother had intended him to be a girl), Donald Crowhurst had reason to mask his feelings. His family was precariously positioned in the English class system: Donald was twelve when the Crowhursts moved in 1947 from British India to a genteel village outside Reading in Berkshire, where they attempted to sustain upper-middle-class pretensions on a manual laborer’s wage. “Putting on appearances” is the chilly English phrase for that painful and very English predicament, and Donald, an only child, learned early to put on appearances. He was clever, brave, intense, and burdened with self-consciousness. University might have liberated him intellectually, but his father died suddenly when Donald was sixteen, and he had to make do with a course in electrical engineering at a technical college, funded by the Royal Air Force, in which he was eventually commissioned as a trainee pilot officer.
Watching the young Crowhurst as he emerges in the book, one sees a fragile, histrionic personality engaged in an often frantic search for a role and a voice. He does nothing by halves, throwing himself completely into the role of the moment, whether it be the keen student, the boisterous gang leader, the jaunty young officer, the rejected lover, the devoted husband and father, the tireless promoter, the Bridgwater town councilor, the brilliant entrepreneur. A friend said of him that he was “the most vivid and real person I have ever met,” and there’s an element of hyperreality about Crowhurst when he’s on form; an air of larger-than-life theatrical performance.
Tomalin and Hall are inclined to detect a streak of innate insincerity in this—a gap between the “real” Crowhurst and the roles he played. On the evidence they present, I disagree. So long as other people gave Crowhurst his cue, he wholeheartedly became the character they expected him to be. If they looked to him for leadership, he’d be their leader; if they looked to him for an original idea, he would instantly come up with it. But he needed social conventions as a train needs rails. He was most himself when he was living up to the expectations of his friends and family.
In the summer of 1968, several weeks before he left to sail around the world, Crowhurst drafted a letter to his wife, to be opened in the event of his death at sea. The letter sheds a great deal of light on his essential character. It is a touching document—heartfelt, eloquent, dignified, and admirably sane. It is also powerfully reminiscent of another famous letter—one familiar to every English schoolboy of Crowhurst’s generation—written by Robert Falcon Scott to his wife when Captain Scott lay dying in Antarctica. The conscious dignity of tone, the stiff upper lip in the face of death, the instructions on how to bring up the children, all have their ghostly counterparts in the Scott letter. If Crowhurst had to die, he meant to do so, like Scott, with valor. The details in the letter are Crowhurst’s own, but its rhetorical élan is pastiche-Scott. He wasn’t being insincere. He was a man who instinctively looked to models and heroes for guidance as to how best to be himself; and shaping his letter in the mold of Scott’s, he was being pure Donald Crowhurst.
In 1967, he was urgently in need of a model and a hero. His business—manufacturing a cheap handheld radio direction finder (RDF) that he named the Navicator—was failing, and he felt stifled by small-town life in Bridgwater. For the last eight years, his chief escape had been sailing, in Pot of Gold, his blue twenty-foot sloop, on day-trips along the Bristol Channel coast. So on Sunday, May 28, when Francis Chichester made his triumphal entry into Plymouth aboard Gipsy Moth IV after sailing around the world, Crowhurst (who was out on Bridgwater Bay that day, just ninety miles from the admiring crowds, gunfire, and dipped ensigns that met Gipsy Moth’s arrival) saw in him a providential new hero—and a new life for himself.
After it was all over, people would say that Crowhurst was laughably inexperienced; a weekend sailor who should never have been allowed to take part in the Golden Globe race. Yet many successful circumnavigators have started their voyages with no more firsthand acquaintance with ocean sailing than Crowhurst. The Bristol Channel, with its fierce tides and wide-open exposure to unforecast southwesterly gales, is a tough training ground for anyone in a twenty-foot boat; and Crowhurst impressed those who sailed with him as a competent if sometimes slapdash seaman—as he impressed several prominent figures in the sailing world, including the yacht designer Angus Primrose. With a good head for math, he quickly became a first-rate navigator. (It is a real tribute to his skill that he was able to work out celestial sights backwards, from wholly fictional positions—something far beyond the ability of most honest navigators.) He was a persuasive salesman of himself and his project, an important qualification in the dawning age of commercial sponsorship.
To the design and fitting out of his trimaran, Crowhurst brought a sackful of radical new ideas, including an automatic inflatable self-righting system and a novel method for fastening the chainplates so his rigging could take the strains imposed on it by the Southern Ocean. The heart of Teignmouth Electron was to be its computer, taking messages from electronic sensors distributed through the boat from the masthead to the bilges. Writing in 1970, Tomalin and Hall couldn’t suppress a knowing chuckle at Crowhurst’s vision of a computerized sailing vessel. The idea struck them as plainly dotty. Thirty years later, in the light of such developments as Jim Clark’s cyberyacht Hyperion (the dubious heroine of Michael Lewis’s book The New New Thing), it’s tempting to see Crowhurst as a lonely prophet of the impending digital future—just as his Piver-designed, Victress-class trimaran was a lumbering early forerunner of the thirty-knot-plus carbon-fiber multihulls to come.
But time was against him in more senses than one. By the rules of the race, Crowhurst had to sail by the end of October 1968. He did not find sponsorship until late in May, when at last a boatbuilding firm in Norfolk was given the go-ahead to start construction. Teignmouth Electron was thrown together in a blinding hurry. It wasn’t rigged and ready to sail until October second. Its famous computer remained a tangle of disconnections. The delivery trip from Norfolk to Devon turned into a two-week nightmare. When Teignmouth Electron finally crossed the bar of its home port, Crowhurst had just sixteen days in which to prepare himself and his boat for a voyage around the world. There was hardly any point of resemblance between Crowhurst’s original conception of a high-tech sailing machine and the lackluster reality of the hastily assembled trimaran with its trailing wires and its piggish refusal to go to windward.
He could not now withdraw from the race. It was characteristic of Crowhurst that he was ruled by financial and social obligations. He sailed west from Teignmouth like someone who marries the wrong person because the wedding invitations have been sent and the church has been booked: he could not face the storm that would ensue if he pulled out before it was too late.
It’s hard now to reconstruct the total isolation of the solo ocean sailor in the late 1960s. As I write, four separate around-the-world races are in progress, one of them the single-handed Vendée Globe. E-mails, faxes, videos, satellite phone calls, and audio broadcasts stream between the sailors and the land. Even in the wilds of the Southern Ocean, the yachts have never truly left society behind. I know what the competitors had for breakfast this morning; I can monitor their sleep patterns and eavesdrop on their thoughts. By means of an Argos beacon on each boat, every tack and jibe is seen at race headquarters, and its exact position on the globe, to within a hundred feet or less, is constantly monitored. These single-handers can hardly break wind without it becoming news on the shore.
When Donald Crowhurst left Teignmouth, he sailed into a void of a kind that no longer exists except in the far reaches of outer space. Like most of his fellow competitors in the Golden Globe he carried an MF radio (Bernard Moitessier, who hated all things electrical, declined to take one on the grounds that it would violate his precious solitude); but radio communication, patched through shore stations, was always intermittent, brief, riddled with interference, and necessarily formal in its tone and content. Radio certainly didn’t restore the sailor to the ambit of society; rather, it served only to remind him of his awful loneliness on the deep.
