I am thinking, and writing, a lot about place at the moment – geographical location, borders, and the relationship between where we are and who we are. As a tangent from this, I’ve been musing about whether, or how, where we are affects what we write. There are a few obvious connections; for example could Wuthering Heights have been conceived of and written anywhere other than the bleak uplands of the Brontë’s Haworth, or would Persuasion have been as persuasive in its evocation of the social banalities of Bath had not Jane Austen herself experienced the particular torment of the old maid in that context. But is it a general principle, I have been asking myself, that our location influences us as writers?
In the late spring of last year I tagged along with my wife on a study trip to north Cornwall, that enigmatic stretch of coastline between Bude and the Hartland peninsula where Cornwall becomes Devon, notorious for shipwrecks and (possibly apocryphal) tales of wreckers. It is less remote and unknown these days than when I first visited a couple of decades ago, and honeypots like Boscastle are now gridlocked, but off season, with the sea fog swirling round you, it can still feel like you’re standing at the edge of the world. It’s mainly vertiginous cliffs along here, with the South West Coast Path providing access on foot to places that tourists can’t drive to. My wife having finished at the museum, we went exploring.
Intrigued by the eccentricities of its nineteenth-century vicar, the Reverend Robert Hawker, we went to Morwenstow. The steep churchyard was knee-deep in wildflowers, framing the replica figurehead of the Caledonia which marks the burial of several of its sailors who drowned when she was shipwrecked on that treacherous coast in 1842. It is a kind of marker, too, for Parson Hawker’s affinity with the sea – he habitually wore a knitted fisherman’s gansey, was involved in a number of rescues, and took great pains to ensure the decent burial of shipwrecked sailors.
Hawker has other claims to fame. He was a poet, and as a young man published ‘The Song of the Western Men’ (more commonly known as ‘Trelawney’) which is the de facto national anthem of Cornwall. And he was the instigator of the modern Harvest Festival, celebrated in churches all over the world, and which was a re-imagining of the medieval practice of Lammas or First Fruits.
His eccentricities are well, although not perhaps always reliably, recorded, and include wearing random and colourful garb such as a poncho made from a yellow horse blanket; bringing his cats to church services (and excommunicating one of them for mousing on a Sunday!) and keeping a pet pig. He was also almost certainly addicted to laudanum – tincture of opium in alcohol – and this arguably fuelled both his eccentricity and his poetry.
Much of Hawker’s poetry was written in his hut, set into the cliff face a mile or so from the church, constructed from driftwood and roofed with turf. It is now the smallest property in the care of the National Trust, its planks incised with graffiti and worn to a smooth, mellow patina. It would be easy to think of it merely as a den, a playhouse, or a man-cave, but we were lucky enough to have the place to ourselves and time to pause and try to see it through Hawker’s eyes. The stable door opens onto infinity – the Atlantic, the sky, the sea mist. The view is as unlimited as the human imagination. What does looking out on infinity do to a person? To a writer? Does it stretch the boundaries of the mind, of the possible?
Sixty miles to the north across the Bristol Channel is another shrine to a dead poet – Dylan Thomas’ writing shed at Laugharne. Decades apart, two men gazing out on infinity and writing poetry. Infinity + alcohol = Thomas. Infinity + opium = Hawker.
Maybe it’s not just the window on infinity, or even the stimulants, that are significant here. Maybe it’s the access to a place to write, uninterrupted by the demands of other, domestic roles. Jane Austen famously wrote her entire oeuvre at a little side table, using a writing box which had been a present from her father. Her father couldn’t give her a space to write, or financial independence, but he could give her a writing box, a microcosm of the writer’s world which she could take with her wherever she went. Virginia Woolf wrote an entire book about A Room of One’s Own, in which her analysis was that women writers were handicapped by the lack of their own space in a domestic context. Neither Hawker in his hut, nor Thomas in his shed, had that problem. Both had the luxury of private space – physical space, and headspace away from the demands of domesticity. And, as a bonus, those private spaces had a window on infinity.
I started this by musing on the relationship between where we are and who we are, and whether, or how, where we are affects what we write. Perhaps it’s less that a place affects who we are and what we write, but rather that where we are affects what we see from there. Writers, including Alfred Lord Tennyson and Charles Kingsley, were inspired by Hawker’s hut. Thousands of literature students and aspiring writers make the pilgrimage to Thomas’ shed. Maybe the inspiration lies, not in looking into the writer’s space, but looking out of it – seeing what they saw, especially when that is infinity. Alcohol and laudanum are optional.
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