To the River Read online

  To the River was chosen as a Book of The Year in the Independent, the Financial Times, the Scotsman and the Evening Standard.

  ‘This is Laing’s first book and, without wanting to sound gushing ‒ the watery metaphor bug is catching ‒ her writing at its sublime best reminds me of Richard Mabey’s nature prose and the poetry of Alice Oswald. Like these two, and John Clare before them, Laing seems to lack a layer of skin, rendering her susceptible to the smallest vibrations of the natural world as well as to the frailties of the human psyche’ Jane Wheatley, The Times

  ‘A lingeringly lyrical account of walking the length of the Ouse River – haunted by the shade of Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in its waters . . . Olivia Laing [is] a new and thoughtful voice in the tradition of W.G. Sebald. I confidently expect it to be listed in this year’s favourite books’ Joan Bakewell, Telegraph

  ‘Arrestingly beautiful . . . This is an uplifting book, which not only develops into a work of considerable richness, but . . . expresses its message of hope with increasing lyricism and uncluttered simplicity’ Juliette Nicholson, Evening Standard

  ‘Of Olivia Laing's prose, we could simply say that words have a way with her and that her delight in language is at one with her absorption in the living world’ Laura Marcus, TLS

  ‘The river becomes the thinnest of wire coat-hangers on which almost anything can be hung. The result is a meditation, a drifting sequence of thoughts on time and change, on loss, love and meaning, on hell and happiness, geology and evolution, science and poetry’ Adam Nicolson, Spectator

  ‘To The River is a gentle, wise and riddling book. Its prose, like the river it describes, flows intricately, unpredictably and often beautifully, carrying the fascinated reader onwards’ Robert Macfarlane

  ‘A beautifully written meditation on landscape and the effect on it, benign and destructive, of generations of human beings. It is Woolf, however, who haunts the narrative. Her suicide by drowning in the Ouse in 1941 is a constant presence in the book, and Laing deftly unpicks the conflicting attitudes in the writer’s work towards rivers and the sea. For Woolf and Laing, water is at the same time enchanting and dangerous, full of the sirens who sing sailors to their doom. In this richly descriptive book, Laing succeeds superbly in delineating our often fraught, but nevertheless enduring relationship with water’ Sunday Times

  ‘Olivia Laing's debut, To The River, has a Sebaldian edge to it that lifts it out of memoir and biography into something far more tantalising and suggestive’ Guardian

  ‘The writing, at its best, is wonderfully allusive and precise . . . The book's subject and structure fuse pleasingly, weaving and meandering, changing pace and tone, pooling into biographical, mythical or historical backwaters before picking up the thread of Laing's riparian journey again. We find our happiness on this Earth, or not at all, and the Ouse, tricked from its course, poisoned and abstracted, flows implacably on. It's a bigger, deeper river on paper now, and we might say Laing has put it on the map; but allowed to slip free of our grid references feels truer, and more affirmative’ Observer

  ‘To the River is a gentle, wise, observant book, both sparkling and mysterious. In fluid, meditative prose that maintains a quality of heightened awareness throughout many meanderings, Laing describes not just what she sees but the parallel narratives of her inner life . . . Laing's writing ‒ sometimes clear, sometimes shifting and oblique, always appropriate to the tale she's telling ‒ is a joy . . . Laing has a gift for conjuring the loveliness of the countryside and the creatures that inhabit it, and in her hands the changing land and riverscape are imbued with wonder and filled with stories’ Metro

  ‘A haul of gems’ Boyd Tonkin, Books of the Year, Independent

  ‘To the River is a constant delight: dreamy and lyrical, meditative and wry; a fluid braid of mythology, memoir and biography . . . A beautiful ‒ and beautifully written ‒ book, every bit as enchanting as its watery subject’ The Lady

  TO THE RIVER

  A Journey Beneath the Surface

  OLIVIA LAING

  This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2011

  I

  Copyright © Olivia Laing, 2011

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.tv

  For permission acknowledgements, please see here

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84767 792 1

  eISBN 978 0 85786 065 1

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  Map of the Ouse copyright © Helen Macdonald, 2011

  For my parents and my sister,

  and in memory of my grandfather,

  Arthur Laing

  All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

  Ecclesiastes 1:7–9

  CONTENTS

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  I CLEARING OUT

  II AT THE SOURCE

  III GOING UNDER

  IV WAKE

  V IN THE FLOOD

  VI THE LADY VANISHES

  VII BEDE'S SPARROW

  VIII SALVAGE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Map of the River Ouse, by Helen Macdonald

  The River Ouse. Photograph by the author.

  Gideon Algernon Mantell, by William Turner Davey, published by L. Buck, after Pierre Athasie Théodore Senties, and John Jabez Edwin Mayall. Mezzotint, circa 1850. Copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  Upper Hell, by C. W. Scott-Giles, from Hell, book one of Dante’s Divine Comedy, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers and first published by Penguin in 1949.

  Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, circa 1231.

  Copyright © Hulton Archive/Getty Images

  The reconstructed skull of ‘Piltdown Man’, circa 1950.

  Copyright © Popperphoto/Getty Images.

  Virginia Woolf. Copyright © Press Association

  Leonard Woolf, first published alongside ‘Do We Read Better Books in Wartime’ in the Picture Post, 1944. Copyright © Felix Man and Kurt Jutton/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

  Lieutenant Ackery’s Crash. Copyright © Henry Ross Alderson/climb-out.co.uk.

  TO THE RIVER

  I

  CLEARING OUT

  I AM HAUNTED BY WATERS. It may be that I’m too dry in myself, too English, or it may be simply that I’m susceptible to beauty, but I do not feel truly at ease on this earth unless there’s a river nearby. ‘When it hurts,’ wrote the Polish poet Czeslaw Miłosz, ‘we return to the banks of certain rivers,’ and I take comfort in his words, for there’s a river I’ve returned to over and again, in sickness and in health, in grief, in desolation and in joy.

  I first came to the Ouse one June evening a decade back. I was with a boyfriend long since relinquished, and we drove from Brighton, leaving my car in the field at Barcombe Mills and walking north against the current as the last few fishermen swung their lures in hope of pike or bass. The thickening air was full of the scent of meadowsweet and if I looked closely I could make out a scurf of petals drifting idly along the bank. The river ran brimful at the edge of an open field, and as the sun dropped its smell became more notice
able: that cold green reek by which wild water betrays its presence. I stooped to dip a hand and as I did so I remembered Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the Ouse, though why or when I didn’t know.

  For a while I used to swim with a group of friends at South-ease, near where her body was found. I’d enter the swift water in trepidation that gave way to ecstasy, tugged by a current that threatened to tumble me beneath the surface and bowl me clean to the sea. The river passed in that region through a chalk valley ridged by the Downs, and the chalk seeped into the water and turned it the milky green of sea glass, full of little shafts of imprisoned light. You couldn’t see the bottom; you could barely make out your own limbs, and perhaps it was this opacity which made it seem as though the river was the bearer of secrets: that beneath its surface something lay concealed.

  It wasn’t morbidity that drew me to that dangerous place but rather the pleasure of abandoning myself to something vastly beyond my control. I was pulled to the Ouse as a magnet is pulled to metal, returning on summer nights and during the short winter days to repeat some walks, some swims through turning seasons until they amassed the weight of ritual. I’d come to that corner of Sussex idly and with no intention of staying long, but it seems to me now that the river cast a lure, that it caught me on the fly and held me heart-stopped there. And when things began to falter in my own life, it was the Ouse to which I turned.

  In the spring of 2009 I became caught up in one of those minor crises that periodically afflict a life, when the scaffolding that sustains us seems destined to collapse. I lost a job by accident, and then, through sheer carelessness, I lost the man I loved. He was from Yorkshire and one of the skirmishes in our long battle concerned territory, namely where in the country we would make our home. I couldn’t relinquish Sussex and nor could he quite edge himself from the hills and moors to which he had, after all, only just returned.

  After Matthew left I lost the knack of sleeping. Brighton seemed unsettled and at night it was very bright. The hospital over the road had recently been abandoned and I’d look up sometimes from my work to see a gang of boys breaking windows or setting fires in the yard where ambulances once parked. At periodic intervals throughout the day I felt that I was drowning, and it was all I could do not to fling myself to the ground and wail like a child. These feelings of panic, which in more sober moments I knew were temporary and would soon pass, were somehow intensified by the loveliness of that April. The trees were flaring into life: first the chestnut with its upraised candles and then the elm and beech. Amid this wash of green the cherry began to flower and within days the streets were filled with a flush of blossom that clogged the drains and papered the windscreens of parked cars.

  The shift in season was intoxicating, and it was then that the idea of walking the river locked hold of me. I wanted to clear out, in all senses of the phrase, and I felt somewhere deep inside me that the river was where I needed to be. I began to buy maps compulsively, though I’ve always been map-shy. Some I pinned to my wall; one, a geological chart of the underlying ground, was so beautiful I kept it by my bed. What I had in mind was a survey or sounding, a way of catching and logging what a little patch of England looked like one midsummer week at the beginning of the twenty-first century. That’s what I told people, anyway. The truth was less easy to explain. I wanted somehow to get beneath the surface of the daily world, as a sleeper shrugs off the ordinary air and crests towards dreams.

  A river passing through a landscape catches the world and gives it back redoubled: a shifting, glinting world more mysterious than the one we customarily inhabit. Rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads, and there’s hardly an age I can think of that’s not associated with its own great waterway. The lands of the Middle East have dried to tinder now, but once they were fertile, fed by the fruitful Euphrates and the Tigris, from which rose flowering Sumer and Babylonia. The riches of Ancient Egypt stemmed from the Nile, which was believed to mark the causeway between life and death, and which was twinned in the heavens by the spill of stars we now call the Milky Way. The Indus Valley, the Yellow River: these are the places where civilisations began, fed by sweet waters that in their flooding enriched the land. The art of writing was independently born in these four regions and I do not think it a coincidence that the advent of the written word was nourished by river water.

  There is a mystery about rivers that draws us to them, for they rise from hidden places and travel by routes that are not always tomorrow where they might be today. Unlike a lake or sea, a river has a destination and there is something about the certainty with which it travels that makes it very soothing, particularly for those who’ve lost faith with where they’re headed.

  The Ouse seemed to me then to be composed of two elements. On the one hand it was the thing itself: a river forty-two miles long that rose in a copse of oak and hazel not far from Haywards Heath, dashing in quick gills and riffles through the ancient forests of the Weald, traversing the Downs at Lewes and entering the oil-streaked Channel at Newhaven, where the ferries cross over to France. Such waterways are ten a penny in these islands. I dare say there is one that runs near you – a pretty, middling river that winds through towns and fields alike, neither pristinely wild nor reliably tame. The days of watermills and salterns may have passed, but the Ouse remains a working river after the fashion of our times, feeding a brace of reservoirs and carrying the outfall from a dozen sewage works. Sometimes, swimming at Isfield, you pass through clotted tracts of bubbles; sometimes a crop of waterweed blooms as luxuriant as an orchard with the fertiliser that’s washed from the wheat.

  But a river moves through time as well as space. Rivers have shaped our world; they carry with them, as Joseph Conrad had it, ‘the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires’. Their presence has always lured people, and so they bear like litter the cast-off relics of the past. The Ouse is not a major waterway. It has intersected with the wider currents of history only once or twice; when Virginia Woolf drowned there in 1941 and again, centuries earlier, when the Battle of Lewes was fought upon its banks. Nonetheless, its relationship with man can be traced back thousands of years before the birth of Christ, to when Neolithic settlers first started to cut down the forests and cultivate crops by the river’s edge. The ages that followed left more palpable traces: Saxon villages; a Norman castle;Tudor sewage works; Georgian embankments and sluices designed to relieve the river’s tendency to overflow, though even these elaborate modifications failed to prevent the Ouse from rising up and cataclysmically flooding the town of Lewes in the early years of our own millennium.

  At times, it feels as if the past is very near. On certain evenings, when the sun has dropped and the air is turning blue, when barn owls float above the meadow grass and a pared-down moon breaches the treeline, a mist will sometimes lift from the surface of the river. It is then that the strangeness of water becomes apparent. The earth hoards its treasures and what is buried there remains until it’s disinterred by spade or plough, but a river is more shifty, relinquishing its possessions haphazardly and without regard to the landlocked chronology historians hold so dear. A history compiled by way of water is by its nature quick and fluid, full of submerged life and capable, as I would discover, of flooding unexpectedly into the present.

  That spring I was reading Woolf obsessively, for she shared my preoccupation with water and its metaphors. Over the years Virginia Woolf has gained a reputation as a doleful writer, a bloodless neurasthenic, or again as a spiteful, rarefied creature, the doyenne of airless Bloomsbury chat. I suspect the people who hold this view of not having read her diaries, for they are filled with humour and an infectious love for the natural world.

  Virginia first came to the Ouse in 1912, renting a house set high above the marshes. She spent the first night of her marriage to Leonard Woolf there and later stayed at the house to recover from her third in a succession of serious breakdowns. In 1919, sane again, she switched to the other side of the river, buyin
g a cold bluish cottage beneath Rodmell’s church tower. It was very primitive when they first arrived, with no hot water and a dank earth closet furnished with a cane chair above a bucket. But Leonard and Virginia both loved Monks House, and its peace and isolation proved conducive to work. Much of Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Between the Acts was written there, along with hundreds of reviews, short stories and essays.

  She was acutely sensitive to landscape, and her impressions of this chalky, watery valley pervade her work. Her solitary, often daily, excursions seem to have formed an essential part of the writing process. During the Asham breakdown, when she was banned from the over-stimulations of either walking or writing, she confided longingly to her diary:

  What wouldn’t I give to be coming through Firle woods, the brain laid up in sweet lavender, so sane & cool, & ripe for the morrow’s task. How I should notice everything, the phrase for it coming the moment after & fitting like a glove; & then on the dusty road, as I ground my pedals, so my story would begin telling itself; & then the sun would be done, & home, & some bout of poetry after dinner, half read, half lived, as if the flesh were dissolved & through it the flowers burst red & white.

  ‘As if the flesh were dissolved’ is a characteristic phrase. Woolf’s metaphors for the process of writing, for entering the dream world in which she thrived, are fluid: she writes of plunging, flooding,going under, being submerged. This desire to enter the depths is what drew me to her, for though she eventually foundered, for a time it seemed she possessed, like some freedivers, a gift for descending beneath the surface of the world. As I sat in my hot little room I began to feel like an apprentice escape artist studying Houdini. I wanted to know how the trick was mastered, and I wanted to know how those effortless plunges turned into a vanishing act of a far more sinister sort.