Henry Williamson and the Lives of Animals
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Henry Williamson and the Lives of Animals Submitted by Peter John Bunten to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English In May 2018 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signature: …………………………………………………Peter John Bunten. Abstract The nature writings of Henry Williamson deserve revaluation. The qualities of Williamson’s work have never been fully acknowledged, in part because of the disproportionate attention given to the flawed and uneven novel sequence A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951–1969). His controversial involvement with extreme right-wing politics has also adversely affected his reputation. This thesis will suggest that Williamson’s nature writings, in particular his animal biographies – Tarka the Otter (1927), Salar the Salmon (1935) and The Phasian Bird (1948) – represent his greatest literary achievement, and that these three major works merit a prominent place in any critical survey of the development of the twentieth-century English novel. Williamson’s use of the novel form to represent the lives of animals involves the complex task of conveying the experience and consciousness of non-human subjects. The degree to which this necessarily leads to an anthropomorphic approach will be addressed. In addition, it will be argued that his writings represent an early, and often ground-breaking, example of how narrative fiction can draw attention to environmental issues. His treatment of these issues also illustrates one of the ways that elements of fascist ideology influence his nature writing. Williamson’s narratives are characterised by a complex combination of realism and allegory, through which the lives of animals and humans are shown to be interconnected. Hunting functions in his work as an important means of exploring this connection; his development of an allegorical relationship between hunting and war establishes parallels between the experiences of hunted animals and soldiers on the battlefield. This study will chart his development as an animal biographer. The approach will be chronological. It will first identify those features of his early sketches and short stories that established the foundations for his later novels and then explore in detail the narratives of Tarka, Salar and The Phasian Bird. It will closely examine the drafts and source materials held in the Henry Williamson Archive Collection at the University of Exeter. Such a detailed examination of his work has never been carried out before; the intention is to establish the significance of Henry Williamson’s contribution to nature writing and to literature more generally. Contents Introduction......................................................................................................... 1 1. Early Sketches and Short Stories ................................................................. 24 2. Tarka the Otter: Sources and Openings ....................................................... 66 3. Tarka and the Significance of the Hunt ...................................................... 114 4. From Tarka to Salar ................................................................................... 163 5. Salar: Rivers, Fish and Fishing ................................................................... 197 6. Later Works: The Phasian Bird and The Scandaroon ................................ 240 Conclusion...................................................................................................... 271 Appendix 1. First Page of Draft Version of Tarka the Otter ............................ 278 Appendix 2. Frontispiece to The Illustrated Salar the Salmon ........................ 279 Appendix 3. Chronological List of Works by Henry Williamson ...................... 280 Bibliography .................................................................................................... 283 Abbreviations Books by Henry Williamson referred to in this thesis, with date of first publication These are given in chronological order. After the first reference to any one of these texts is made in the thesis, it is referred to by the abbreviated form given below. When reference is made to a specific edition, this is indicated by the given date. The Lone Swallows (Collins) (1922) LS The Peregrine’s Saga (Collins) (1923) PS The Old Stag (Putnam) (1926) OS Tarka the Otter (1927) TO Devon Holiday (1931) DH Tarka the Otter (illustrated) (1932) TOI The Lone Swallows (Putnam) (1933) LSP The Gold Falcon (1933) GF The Peregrine’s Saga (Putnam) (1934) PSP The Linhay on the Downs (1934) LOD Salar the Salmon (1935) SS Goodbye West Country (1937) GWC The Children of Shallowford (1939) COS The Story of a Norfolk Farm (1941) SNF The Old Stag (illustrated) (1946) OSI The Phasian Bird (1948) PB Tales of Moorland and Estuary (1950) TME A Clear Water Stream (1958) CWS The Henry Williamson Animal Saga (1960) HWAS The Phoenix Generation (1965) PG Collected Nature Stories (1970) CNS The Scandaroon (1972) SC Textual Annotations Manuscripts are transcribed according to the following conventions: deletion <handwritten interlineation to transcript> [editorial comment] 1 Introduction My own bond with Henry Williamson was made through that book. I was about eleven years old when I found it, and for the next year I read little else. I count it one of the great pieces of good fortune in my life. It entered into me and gave shape and words to my world, as no book has ever done since. I recognised even then, I suppose, that it is something of a holy book, a soul-book, written with the life blood of an unusual poet.1 Ted Hughes, in his address at the Memorial Service at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, on 1 December 1977, thus describes the impact of Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter. He characterises Williamson’s writing as that of ‘an unusual poet’ and the book as ‘a holy book’, and he attests to its ability to give ‘shape’ to his world. These comments help to convey something of the complexity of Williamson’s work, a complexity revealed in its form, its language and its effects. The business of this thesis will be an exploration of this complexity. Ted Hughes is only one of a long list of writers who have declared a debt to Williamson, alongside such worthies as Richard Adams, Kenneth Allsop, Rachel Carson, Miriam Darlington and Robert Macfarlane. All have explored the intricate relationship between humans and the natural environment, a relationship that Williamson described in Goodbye West Country (1937) as ‘natural man on his natural earth: the highest philosophical truth’ (GWC 13). The importance of Williamson’s position within nature writing can also be demonstrated by tracing his literary descent from the essayists, poets and novelists on whom he drew for example and inspiration: Izaak Walton, John Clare, Gilbert White, Richard Jefferies (especially), W. H. Hudson and Edward 1 Ted Hughes, Henry Williamson: A Tribute (London: Rainbow Press, 1979), p. 2. 2 Thomas. Williamson occupies a place within a very English tradition but, as we shall see, his work may also be productively associated with such American writers as Henry David Thoreau, Ernest Thompson Seton and Jack London. These literary connections will support three central arguments of this thesis: firstly, that Williamson deserves to be regarded as a crucial figure in the developing concern for the environment during the last hundred years, namely the understanding of the fragility of the ecosystem that has generated the considerable current interest in ecologically directed nature writing; secondly, that his novels and short stories show that imaginative literature is able effectively to convey this ecocritical response to the natural world; and thirdly, that Williamson continually explored the possibilities of narrative in pursuit of his intention to represent in an original way the other that is the non-human animal.2 That the genre of nature writing has a contemporary significance seems hard to dispute. In his foreword to The Green Studies Reader, Jonathan Bate argues that ‘the relationship between nature and culture is the key intellectual problem of the twenty-first century’.3 Yet there is much debate about what ‘nature’ is or how it might be seen. Raymond Williams considered that ‘nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language’. He argued that there are three areas of meaning of the word: ‘(i) the essential quality and character of something; (ii) the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both; (iii) the material world itself, taken as including or not including human 2 Williamson at times found his literary ambitions hard to reconcile with his nature studies. In a letter to the artist C. F. Tunnicliffe, in response to some criticisms by his publisher, he bitterly stated, ‘I’m not a novelist; merely a naturalist’ (Henry Williamson Collection, University of Exeter, EUL/MS/126). The argument of this thesis will be that Williamson was very much a novelist, one whose most productive subject was the natural world. 3 Jonathan Bate, ‘Foreword’, in The Green Studies Reader, ed. Laurence Coupe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000), p. xvii. 3 beings’.4 Kate Soper has also distinguished between three