Driving Home Read online

  [The line] is beautiful because ulterioris, the word of their banishment, is long, and so shows that they have been waiting a long time; and because the repeated vowel-sound (the moan of helpless sorrow) in oris amore connects the two words as if of their own natures, and makes desire belong necessarily to the unattainable. This I think quite true, but it is no use deducing from it Tennyson’s simple and laborious cult of onomatopoeia.

  In territory more familiar to me than Latin poetry, Empson brought his inspired common sense to bear on poems that I knew by heart, yet had never properly read. Keats’s “No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist …” took on a startling new life when Empson gruffly pointed out that it “tells you that somebody, or some force in the poet’s mind, must have wanted to go to Lethe very much, if it took four negatives in the first line to stop them.” Of course! It was obvious—but it took Empson to bring the obvious to light.

  In what has become the single most famous passage in Seven Types of Ambiguity, he anatomized the fourth line of Shakespeare’s 73rd Sonnet, which begins:

  That time of year thou mayst in me behold

  When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

  Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

  Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

  Of the comparison between the lover in the autumn of his life and those bare ruined choirs, Empson wrote that “There is no pun, no double syntax, or dubiety of feeling.”

  But because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved into knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallised out of the likeness of a forest, and coloured with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because they are now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of winter, because the cold and Narcissistic charm suggested by choir-boys suits well with Shakespeare’s feeling for the object of the Sonnets, and for various sociological and historical reasons (the protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of Puritanism), which it would be hard now to trace out in their proportions; these reasons, and many more relating the simile to its place in the Sonnet, must all combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind. Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

  The temporary bus conductor read this paragraph over and over again, ravished by its intelligence and simplicity. Of course! again. After all, Shakespeare was born in 1564, barely twenty years after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, whose fresh ruins were scattered around the landscape, as raw and brutal as the bomb sites of my own childhood. The totalitarian vandalism of the mad king, as he tried to erase Catholicism from the land, was in plain view, and echoes of the sweet birds’ singing still remained in the ears of the elderly when Shakespeare wrote his sonnet. The jostle of meanings that Empson exposed in the line made me giddy with a sense of extraordinary discovery—not only of the deeper implications of Sonnet 73, but also of what reading, real reading, might be if one could only learn how. If a new passenger got on the bus then, I doubt that I gave her a chance to pay for her ticket.

  The first lesson Empson taught was to drastically slow down; to read at the level of the word, the phrase, the line; to listen, savor, question, ponder, think. This was easy because his own writing enforced it. A single paragraph in Seven Types of Ambiguity was like a street closely punctuated with traffic-calming speed bumps: you had to study the relationship between one sentence and the next—and often one clause and the next—to see the logic that connected them, and if I tried to read them in my usual skimming style, I instantly lost the thread.

  The second, more general lesson required one to greatly enlarge one’s understanding of what writing is and does—all writing, not just poetry. Empson illustrated his arguments with sentences from novels, book titles, newspaper headlines that had caught his eye, and so forth. On this, he was inexplicit except by inference, but as a fisherman, I saw it in angling terms. Every piece of writing was like a pond, sunlit, overhung by willows, with clustering water lilies, and, perhaps, the rippling circle made by a fish rising to snatch a dying fly. This much could be seen and appreciated by any passing hiker. But the true life of the pond lay below the surface, in deep water where only the attentive and experienced eye would detect the suspended cloud of midge larvae, the submarine shadow of the cruising pike, the exploding shoal of bug-eyed small fry. It was with the subaquatic life of literature that Empson—a scientist by early inclination, whose interest in science is a recurrent feature of his writing—was concerned.

  Beneath the clean line of type on the page lay the muddy depths of the living and changing language, a world of stubborn historic associations, swarming puns, suggestive likenesses and connections (as between trees and carved choir stalls), meanings that were in a continuous process of evolution and decay, sometimes enriching the word in print, but as often subverting it. (Spare a thought for Coleridge when he penned the line in “Kubla Khan,” “As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing.” Writing in 1797, he wasn’t to know that, very shortly after his death in 1834, pants would become a popular abbreviation for pantaloons, and by 1884 a word for men’s drawers.)

  Empson’s preternaturally sensitive ear and eye for the deep-water workings of the language enabled him to share with his readers a myriad subtleties, shades of meaning, richnesses, in lines they might otherwise have skated over, in ignorance of this buried treasure. He was equally alert to how language so often betrays the writer, revealing what is really at the back of his mind when trying to assert its opposite. (In Some Versions of Pastoral, Empson unmasked the complacent and reactionary political conservatism that lies just beneath the surface of Gray’s “Elegy,” and in Milton’s God, he demonstrated how, in the course of writing Paradise Lost, Milton came to detest the God whose ways he was devoutly trying to justify to Man.)

  Seven Types made it clear that I’d been a casual day-tripper on the beach of literature and that my supposed skill at reading was so primitive and rudimentary that it had never progressed much beyond primary-school level. Embarrassment mixed with wonder when I faced up to the fact that Empson’s astounding book had been written when he was twenty-two, and had begun as an undergraduate essay written for his Cambridge supervisor, I. A. Richards.

  Cats may look at kings. It was certainly possible to learn from Empson—“Kill Your Speed,” as the traffic signs say. But it would be fatal to attempt to mimic his precocious scholarship, his eccentric brilliance, or his quirky and quick-witted, table-talking prose style. After my Empson summer on the buses, my reading measurably improved, with my own fortnightly essays for my tutor coming back to me with Alphas at the end instead of the Betas, plus and minus, that had been standard in my first year. Had I been at all religious, I might have lit candles in Empson’s honor (something that would have greatly annoyed him, for he was a militant atheist). Since then, I’ve made a living out of reading, one way or another. For reading, of the kind that Empson preached and practiced, doesn’t stop at books, but goes on to make the larger world legible.

  Trying to understand the habitat in which we live requires an ability to read it—and not just in a loose metaphorical sense. Every inhabited landscape is a palimpsest, its original parchment nearly blackened with the cross-hatching of successive generations of authors, claiming this place as their own and imposing their designs on it, as if their temporary interpretations would stand forever. Later overwriting has obscured all but a few, incompletely erased fragments of the earliest entries on the land, but one can still pick out a phrase here, a word there, and see how the most recently dried layer of scribble is already being partially effaced by fresh ink. From the embanked, bulletpath road through the valley—relic of Roman occupation—to the new fifty-turbine windfarm on the hill, every feature of the landscape belongs to an identifiable phase of sensibility, politics, and language.

  We’re in England, let’s say, on the same hill as the windfarm. In the far distance is the gray smudge of a cathedral city whose housing developments have spread untidily beyond its 1960s ring road, and whose office parks contain dozens of small companies in the “knowledge-based industries.” The course of a narrow, crooked river, marked by a double line of trees, diagonally connects the city to the village at the foot of the hill. This village lost its post office in the 1990s, and its only surviving commercial enterprise, besides the pub and the shop selling “gifts and country antiques,” is a Shell station-cum-minimart. Old farmworkers’ cottages, built from the nearest and cheapest materials to hand—rocks, pieces of old timber, plaster made from mud—and roofed with bundles of wheatstraw or reeds from the local swamp, have long been prized as weekenders’ second homes. These people, who dearly love ancient brick windmills with skeletal sails, but not their modern descendants, mounted the Stop the Turbines campaign of 2001, and continue to grouse vengefully over their defeat. Sixty or so permanent residents live on “the estate” of semidetached council houses, which is itself semidetached from the village on the main road. The fifteenth-century church gets half a page in Pevsner’s The Buildings of England but has been locked against vandals for years, though a communion service, said, not sung, is held there on the fourth Sunday of every month, and it’s still used for weddings and funerals (after which the corpses are transported by undertaker-led motorcades to the crematorium on the city’s edge).

  Between the village and the city are fields, vastly enlarged since mechanized farming came in after the Second World War, mostly arable (wheat, barley, oilseed rape), with one big dairy farm, a member of an
organic milk cooperative that is under contract to Dairy Crest PLC. The redundant farmhouses, stripped of all their surrounding land except pony-sized paddocks, are owned by commuters. The tree-shrouded Georgian hall in the middle distance is now a combined hotel, restaurant, golf club, and health spa. Twin lines of pylons, erected in the 1930s, carry high-voltage cables across the landscape, a flight hazard back in wartime when the Americans ran an airfield here. After that was decommissioned, its runway drainage systems left it too barren for agriculture. Following a brief period as a refugee camp, it became a motor-racing circuit, then a truck maintenance center, and is now in the early stages of deciduous broadleaf afforestation.

  These are just a few of the changes to the landscape on which the ink is still drying, on the uppermost layer of the palimpsest. Beneath them, the ink color alters slowly from blue or black to sepia, and the handwriting to copperplate, then italic, then Gothic black letter, as it registers how use and ownership of this stretch of land has been continuously contested. The windfarm dispute, in which the quarrel spread to include the district council, a multinational power company, a farm corporation, the Ministry of Defence, English Nature, the National Farmers’ Union, and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, echoed, in a minor key, the great battles of the past—from the hopeless fight put up by landless peasant farmers in villages against landowners at the time of the enclosure acts, to the long war between the church, the crown, the landed aristocracy, and the wool merchants. In our collective rural nostalgia, we like to think of the countryside as settled and placid, not as the scene of perpetual conflict involving class, power, and money, but there’s hardly a feature of any real landscape that doesn’t stand for somebody’s triumph, concession, or defeat.

  Landscape historians can read the palimpsest more skillfully than I, but any attempt to see it like this helps to negate the brain-curdling effects of degraded Late Romanticism, which still shapes the way in which most of us instinctively think about landscape and place. In Britain, it’s led to the cult of the antique-picturesque, in the United States to the parallel cult of “pristine” wilderness. Devotees of both practice a highly selective, self-induced blindness, canceling from their view, and all claims to their sympathy, anything that intrudes on their preconceived pictures of how landscape ought to be. This sort of mental bulldozing tends to bring real bulldozers in its wake, in fits of Cromwellian zeal to erase whatever offends the eye and taste of the temporary beholder. Better by far to learn to value the landscape for its long accumulation of contradictions and ambiguities—an accumulation to which we’re constantly adding by our presence here.

  I moved from London to Seattle on impulse, for casual and disreputable reasons. I met someone … the usual story. A writer’s working life is dangerously easy to transport from one place to another, and in 1990 I thought that possession of a fax machine would be enough to bridge the inconvenient distance between the two cities. As for anxiety about displacement and culture shock, I had none: I cockily thought America was my oyster. I’d taught its literature at two British universities and was about to begin the last chapter of my second book of American travels. I confidently began to make myself at home in my new surroundings in the only way I knew how, by reading them. More than a year went by before it began to dawn on me that I was floundering out of my depth.

  The first time I went sailing on Puget Sound—with a copy of Vancouver’s account of his 1792 voyage through these parts open, facedown, on the cockpit seat—I was taking in the landscape of low, built-over hills, rising fir forest, and mountains white with glacial ice and snow in June when I glanced at the electronic depth-sounder. It showed a steady 11 feet of water, though we were more than a mile from the shore and I’d seen no shallows when I’d checked our course against the chart. I immediately brought the boat’s head through the wind, sails clattering, and started back in the direction from which we’d come. From 11 feet, the digital readout went to 10, 9.6, and abruptly down to 6.0—giving us just eighteen inches of clearance between the keel and the sea floor. Starting to panic, I grabbed the chart and guessed at our most likely position, a patch of white paper (a reassuring sign, since shallows are colored blue or tan) marked with three-figure numbers: 114, 125, 103 … and this in fathoms, not feet. The water beneath the boat was as deep as it is at the abrupt cliff-edge of the Continental Shelf.

  The depth-sounder was lost. Programmed to accurately read down to fifty fathoms, or 300 feet, it was hunting for the bottom and, failing to find it, was seizing on false echoes and familiarities—drifting kelp fronds? shoaling salmon? plankton?—in a vain effort to regain its footing in the world and make itself at home again.

  Its owner was doing much the same. On one level, my new city and its hinterland felt deceptively homely. Their similar latitude gave them the angular light and lingering evenings I was used to. Their damp marine weather, blowing in from the southwest, came from the right direction. When the mountains are hidden under a low sky, one might almost imagine oneself to be in Britain.

  At first glance, too, the palimpsest appeared to be a lot more easily legible, with many fewer layers of script running at cross-purposes to one another. The first white settlers had arrived here in 1851, and were of the same generation as my great-great-grandfather. Between Henry Yesler, who in 1852 saw the fortune to be made from cutting down the stands of gigantic Douglas firs on the neighboring hills and feeding them to his steam mill, and the founders of Microsoft, Starbucks, and Amazon was a stretch of time little longer than one old person’s range of memory. There must have been people around in 1960 who could remember Yesler (d. 1892) from their teens and had bounced the infant Bill Gates (b. 1955) on their arthritic knees. After living here for twenty years, I’ve already experienced at first hand one-eighth of Seattle’s history since the whites drove the Indians from their tribal land and forced them into a reservation on the far side of Puget Sound.

  What I saw on arrival was a disorderly free-for-all: tract housing and industrial parks swarming over farmland, farms established on logged-over forest, loggers shaving mountainsides bare of trees, dead and dying mill towns, environmental organizations litigating to save what was left of nature, and in every direction barbed-wire fences marking out the fronts between the contending armies. The acrimony between city and rural hinterland was coming to a boil, with urban-based conservation groups like the Sierra Club and liberal politicians confronting the newly formed Wise Use coalition of free-marketeers, property owners, timber and mining interests, farmers, and the construction industries.

  I’m still a trespasser on this battlefield of old resentments and fresh indignations, whose inequities glare more obviously than they do from any landscape I can think of in Western Europe. It’s a hard place in which to feel at home. From its designated “wilderness areas” (themselves the result of much human ingenuity, conflict, legislation, and policing) to the latest crop of shopping malls and condo blocks sprouting from behind screens of trees, it feels provisional and volatile, as if its entire character might drastically alter with the next shift in the political or economic wind.

  For an English-born reader, America is written in a language deceptively similar to one’s own and therefore full of pitfalls. The word nature, for instance, means something different here, and so do community, class, friend, tradition, home. (Think of the implications beneath the surface of the peculiarly American phrase “He makes his home in …”). These I’ve learned to recognize, but the longer I stay here the more conscious I am of nuances to which I must still remain deaf. The altered meanings and deep-water associations of American English, as it has parted company from its parent language for over four hundred years, reflect an experience of the world that has been every bit as different as that between, say, the Germans and the French, but in this case the words are identical in form and so the difference is largely lost to sight.

  Reading an American novel, I can usually persuade myself that I’m a native speaker of the language in which it’s written. But reading a western landscape, or an American political campaign, I hanker for a dictionary that would explain the difference between nature and nature, home and home, and chart their separate paths of evolution from their common roots. Talking with Americans, I still battle with the static interference, as on a bad long-distance line, caused by the buildup of slight differences of definition and assumption between our two national vocabularies. My grasp of American is a thousand times better than my lousy French, but there are sometimes moments at Seattle dinner parties that remind me of trying to follow street directions offered by a voluble stranger in a Calais bar-tabac.