Lake District knowledge

On one of the Ordnance Survey maps which covers the Lake District, there is a single tree symbol placed in the middle of what is otherwise a large and featureless grassy area. Reference to the map's key reveals that the symbol indicates a wood or forest.  But there is no forest or wood at this particular point; there is just a single tree, the only one for miles around.  Clearly some cartographer was so moved by this vision of the solitary tree that he or she cast professional restraint aside and commemorated the fact with the spurious symbol.

The Lake District commonly inspires such acts of affection. It must surely be one of the most cherished natural areas in the country, possibly the world.  What sets it apart from all the other great parks or open spaces, the mighty Yosemites and soaring Alps, is the sheer density of named and recognisable features within it.

The Lake District is small, certainly compared to its international equivalents. And yet by some miracle of sympathy, the whole scale of perception has been reduced in proportion.  Whereas the unsurpassable Himalayas form a huge jagged sea of peaks, some barely named or known, the Lake District has been notated down to the tiniest outcrop of rock, the slightest bump of contour, the merest trickle from a tarn.  The Lake District is thus perhaps the most knowable and known landscape on earth.

Returning there is like visiting an old friend.  Every feature is immediately familiar; gazing across a valley at the close-cropped grass blanketing the soft curves of the hills, and seeing the fine mesh of intersecting streams is like scrutinising a loved face with all its subtle contours and minutely-etched lines.

This natural tendency to anthropomorphism is made easier by the scale of the place.  However grand and sublime the vistas may be, they never lose touch with the human.  In a day you can walk from one end of the Lakes to the other, or climb several of its loftiest peaks. In a day you can sample all its delights; the shimmering tarns hidden away on the hip of a mountain; the dizzying drops of the sheer scree-falls; the velvet-like valley floors; the labyrinths of frothing streams as they cut through the rocks; the huge distant glimmers of the great lakes themselves, reflecting back the rounded lines of the hills in their infinite autumnal gradations of browns and purples and greens.

No wonder then that the area has inspired so many. The Romantics may have been the first to articulate its wild beauty, but for millennia people were hymning it in their own way. The very names which are sprinkled prodigally across the hills are a paean and a tribute to its glory: Bassenthwaite, Skiddaw, Glaramara.  It is like some forgotten ancient language; the Lake District is its greatest poem, one which is sung by walking it, a poem such as another timeless people, the Aborigines, sing as they walk their own world into existence. And walking that poem today it is clear that the language is prelapsarian, that the Lake District is a tiny Eden.  Could it be that the solitary, miraculous tree marked in the middle of this land by an inspired cartographer is in fact an apple-tree?

(2.8.87)

Index

The Golden Gate

Originally all novels were in verse.  Except that they used to be called epics: the Iliad, the Aeneid.  The introduction of writing weakened the oral tradition which lay at the root of these works, and allowed the form to be watered down by prose.  Prose was also simpler to write, and better suited to the years following the fall of the Roman Empire when civilisation itself was enfeebled and precarious.

The verse novel made a come-back in the later Middle Ages, when a new spirit of poetry was in the air.  If Dante’s Commedia is backward-looking in its inclusiveness, its attempt to explain everything and assign it its place in an ordered universe, there were many other works which were more modern, and paradoxically truer to their hidden ancient roots.  Works such as Le Roman de la Rose, all the Arthurian poetic cycles, and the new epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso.

Later still, this poetry became merely the heightened form of prose, and produced glittering Augustan gems like Pope’s Essay on Man, or Swift’s diatribes.  It took the passion of the Romantics, heirs to the medieval story-tellers in verse, to marry verse and narrative once more.  The prime examples are probably Byron’s Don Juan, and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

And so the cycle goes on.  After falling into decades of neglect, the verse novel has burst upon the scene once more.  Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate is a tale for our times, an everyday story of yuppies in San Francisco as they battle with the tricky years of their twenties.  If nothing else, the book is a remarkable tour-de-force.  Using Pushkin’s verse form,  Seth manages to produce smooth-running lines which rarely seem short-breathed despite their unusual tetrameter length.  Equally the rhyme scheme is never obtrusive, and there are some masterly matches worthy of Byron.

And yet there is something not quite right about the enterprise.  It would be too easy to lay this at the door of Mr Seth’s English.  He wield a formidable vocabulary with an assurance that passes beyond dictionary definitions.  His dodgem skill at careering round the corners of short lines and awkward rhymes is exemplary.  The problem lies deeper, and has to do with overall pace and structure.

Certain forms require a certain breadth of approach.  It is no accident that Wagner’s operas are monster: he was attempting the largest of themes, and needed space to accommodate them.  Similarly, it is instructive to note that Byron’s Don Juan is conceived on the largest scale.  Seth’s work is not.  A lot happens – these are, after all, yuppies; many characters are introduced, and rounded sketches attempted.  But there is jut not enough space.  This problem is exacerbated by the fine but totally unbalancing sermon in chapter seven.

Having mastered the form so fluently, and writing compellingly about issues which affect even non-yuppies, Seth should have had the courage to write at the length they deserved.  In the end, the book’s worst fault is that there is not enough of it; some fault.

(27.8.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - Pushkin’s “What if?”

Index