Dear Reader,
Greetings from the Berkshires, where as my sister puts it, we have been tuning into TreeTV. Not to mention the fabelhaft line-up at Tanglewood which can be enjoyed safely from its storied lawn.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I am rapidly filling a shelf with books published by the independent press Little Toller. Little Toller is based in the Dorset countryside of southern England. Founders Adrian Cooper and Gracie Barnett began in 2008 by publishing neglected classics of English rural and nature writing. Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside was one of their early titles and remains a stalwart of their list. More recently they have built out a line of new non-fiction books. Last year, they had a massive success with Dara Macanulty’s Diary of a Young Naturalist, which won the Wainwright Prize for British Nature Writing.
Little Toller have recently issued a beautiful new hardback edition of Nature Cure (2005), which is currently out of print in the US. This is the first entry in their new Richard Mabey Library, a suite of four Mabey classics to be re-published in honor of Mabey’s 80th birthday this year. These books are beautifully designed and printed in Cornwall, with jackets by artist Michael Kirkman. Each includes a new foreword by the author. US readers may order direct from Little Toller’s website (which also includes e-book versions of many of their excellent titles) or through your local bookseller with some lead time. In conjunction with the release of this new edition, BBC4 have rebroadcast Mabey’s 2005 reading from the book for BBC Sounds.
Review
Nature Cure
Richard Mabey
Little Toller, 2021
229 pages
£18.00
In May of 1828, Sir Walter Scott wrote the following in his journal.
“I found all of my family well excepting the poor pale Johnnie; and he is really a thing to break one’s heart by looking at—yet he is better. The rest are in high kelter . . .”
Kilter (or, alternatively, kelter) is a perfect and mysterious word. No one knows where it came from. It means “good condition, order, state of health or spirits,” and we use it mostly in the negative, as in an 1862 letter from the American poet James Russell Lowell: “I must rest awhile. My brain is out of kilter.” When we are out of kilter, something is missing or amiss. Something needs attending, mending.
Around the turn of our century, the British naturalist Richard Mabey found a baby swift trapped in a French attic. The wee bird had fallen out of the nest and didn’t know what to do. Mabey and his friends threw it from the window to give it a chance to fledge, a chance at life.
It was just six weeks old, and having its maiden flight and first experience of another species all in the same moment.
But whatever its emotions, they were overtaken by instinct and natural bravura. It went into a downward slide, winnowing furiously, skimmed so close to the road that we all gasped, and then flew up strongly towards the south-east.
Not long after, Mabey slid into a deep and incapacitating depression, “a thing to break one’s heart by looking at it.” The experience ramified for him upon later reflection.
In a strange and ironic turn-about, I had become the incomprehensible creature adrift in some insubstantial medium, out of kilter with the rest of creation. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but maybe that is the way our whole species is moving.
How true. It is incomprehensible that our species would foul our own nest, this planet, to the current extent. We are adrift in the insubstantial medium of the Internet, whirling in endless eddies of social media. We are out of kilter with the rest of creation. Readers have been counting on Richard Mabey for this kind of probing prescience for half a century. In 1972 he wrote Food for Free, a handbook for foragers. His 1973 masterpiece The Unofficial Countryside, woke readers up to the fact that nature was and is teeming in our urban and post-industrial wilds. As writer Iain Sinclair put it “Mabey logs the tough fecundity of the margin.” Mabey made the now fashionable case for “outlaw plants” and wild verges in Weeds over a decade ago.
So this is a book that explores healing on multiple levels: personal, community, species, ecosystem, biosphere. Nature Cure’s wonderful chapter titles, full of literary and historical resonance, give a hint at Mabey’s prescriptions: Flitting, Lair, Commonplaces, The Naming of Parts, Fancy Work. The Wild Card. Practices that help him recover from his depression include letting go of the past and making peace, creating a new home and falling in love, celebrating places and traditions held in common (not privately owned), becoming intimate with his new landscape, rediscovering the necessary hilarity of play, and redefining the wild so that everyday life can partake in it: “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” as Dylan Thomas had it.
We would do well individually and collectively to engage in all of the above, but reducing this book to its structure and gist does it a grave disservice. Words cavort on its pages, which are endlessly rich with incident, observation and turn of phrase. In the beloved Chiltern woodlands of his childhood he is “clotted with rootedness.” His new home in marshy East Anglia captivates with “its remoteness, its insidious wetness, the sweeps of ling and gorse.” Anyone who has suffered from depression will appreciate the tiny, thrilling signs of its retreat: “I wrote a postcard. I noticed the smell of broad beans.” Increasingly absorbed with the richness of life in his new community, the distraction of TV news loses its savor.
. . . I wondered with the kind of self-satisfaction only available to someone who has learned to make bread in middle age, what on earth the misdemeanours of royal butlers and the erratic movements of the Dow Jones Index has to do with me. I was feeling close to the marrow of things.
The digressions are worth the price of the book. The introduction of wild Konik horses into a Norfolk marsh prompts a reverie about Stone Age cave paintings in France. There’s a perfect rant about nature documentaries that ropes in Colette and her hatred of zoos. A disquisition on the moats of East Anglia finds the author swimming in one with Roger Deakin and “shoals of lady writers bobbing among the duckweed and dragonflies.” Kites (a kind of hawk) are reintroduced to England where they exult in “a wilful, gratuitous relishing of the wind.” And there are loads of great words, new to me. The fendlanders have a marsh version of snowshoes called pawts. A blonk is “a parcel of rough weather.” A pochard is a kind of duck. A small bit of wildland is called a muddle.
And then there is the guardian angel of Nature Cure: the poet John Clare, who also suffered from mental illness and was finally, miserably incarcerated in an asylum, denied his countryside. (One doctor said his condition was aggravated by “years addicted to poetical prosing.”) Clare, too, made his way east to the fenlands, and Richard Mabey lovingly twines a garland of Clare’s singular hymns to the natural world into the text. What makes Clare such an important character in this book is that as for Mabey, the personal was political. The great public tragedy of Clare’s life was the brutal Enclosures policies of 18th and 19th century Britain. Lands that had been held in common by communities for centuries were appropriated to private land ownership. People were dispossessed and impoverished. Equilibriums were disrupted and ecosystems were destroyed. Souls suffered and endured. In his poem “Flitting” Clare wrote:
I dwell on trifles like a child
I feel as ill becomes a man
And still my thoughts like weedlings wild
Grow up to blossom where they can.
“Like weedlings wild/Grow up to blossom where they can” reinforces one of the central distinctions in Mabey’s thinking, between wilderness and wildness. Wilderness should be left to itself. Wildness should be welcomed into our lives in the places where we live. Restoring the rights of humans to roam the landscape would be an interesting place to start. No Tresspassing signs are an all too common obstacle for those of us hoping to become intimate with the places we love and want to know better.
That is the benediction of the wild, to see opportunity in the briefest of openings.
For those of us who care about and are involved in conservation efforts, Mabey’s discussion of environmental stewardship is, again, prophetic and completely essential.
Mainstream environmentalism is unashamedly utilitarian and human-centered. . . . However well-meaning, it allows back those authoritarian reflexes that are the root cause of the very ecological crises custodianship is trying to cure. . . .Above all, perhaps, it subtly reframes the object in need of custody as the non-human world, when perhaps it should be ourselves.
Shelves full of books have been written and marketed in recent years about nature’s healing powers for human health. Some of them are very good, but we need to be careful. No amount of forest bathing or wild swimming is going to prevent 3 degrees of global warming, any more than it will cure a case of Alzheimer’s disease. As Mabey clarifies in the new foreword to this special edition, “Nature played a minor role in my recovery, which was chiefly the result of love and friendship.” The first order of crisis we confront is a crisis of humanity. Love, good faith, caring, and collective action — along with plenty of fresh air — these might get us back into kilter and restore us to better health, a chance at life.
Other Voices, Other Forms
East Anglia was the home for composer Benjamin Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears. Together they founded the Aldeburgh Music Festival which is now just one of many arts programs hosted by their foundation at Snape Maltings. During lockdown, British composer Alex Groves was Composer in Residence at Snape Maltings and created a new composition out of sounds he recorded in the landscape around the River Iken. Groves cites sculptor Barbara Hepworth and composer John Luther Adams (a dear friend of Barry Lopez) as key influences. Two recent works from this series are A Single Form and Curved Form No. 11. You can hear from Groves and see him gathering sound materials in the wild in this video.
Poem of the Week
Many, many writers have been inspired by John Clare, including John Ashbery who wrote this wonderful poem “For John Clare.” But let’s hear from the bard himself. This is an excerpt about nature’s music from “Summer Images.”
For Your Reading Radar
Devi Lockwood’s first book, 1,001 Voices on Climate Change, is coming out on August 24th from Tiller Press. After college, Lockwood traveled the world, mostly on a bicycle, to ask people for their stories about how climate change is affecting their lives. Lockwood has also created a map with audio bulletins from her project.
For Your Calendar
The Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival is hosting a panel called How On Earth? Land and Our Future featuring Mark Bittman, Elizabeth Kolbert, Simon Winchester, and Glenn Roberts on August 6th at 11:00 AM Eastern time. Roberts is a pioneer in seed preservation and the founder of Anson Mills.
Bookstore of the Week
Notwithstanding a burgeoning list of titles, and the challenges of Brexit and the global pandemic, Little Toller also managed to open a bookshop in the last year in the village of Beaminster Newton.
The other compelling attraction in Beaminster is the Stokewater Meadow Donkey Walking operation. That’s right, you can rent some donkeys and walk around with them. Or even take them on a picnic. Sign me up.
See you next week. xo Nicie
'fabelhaft' ?? diary of a young naturalist is published by milkweed editions i think atleast in the US / lovely post / i enjoyed it