Talking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival last week about the richly dialectical relationship between literature and landscapes - a panel born from the British Library's London Festival 2012 exhibition, 'Writing Britain' -, it was clear that (even in landlocked Cheltenham) there is an especial fascination with creative responses to the seaside and seascapes.
Our Writing Britain exhibition had suggested ways that the landscapes of Britain permeate and influence our great works of literature, focussing on six 'thematic snapshots': the writing of our cities and suburbs, our rural and wild places, and what we termed Waterlands. During questions at Cheltenham, the audience picked up strongly on the latter theme, one questioner reminding us that Britain was not only (as I had foolishly claimed in my introduction) AN island... but equally encompasses groups of smaller islands.
It is clear that the history of Britain has to a large extent been determined and nourished by its waterways, lakes, and surrounding seas. British literature has been no less powerfully shaped by images of these Waterlands: the cycles of rebirth and renewal driven by descriptions of rivers, or the possibilities for transgression or transition in seaside spaces.
It is these liminal coastal sites - perfectly fragile, impenetrably wild - that I continue to find endlessly fascinating, and reassuringly overpowering.
Of course, a huge part of the attraction of the seaside stems from the coastal carnivalesque: from what Philip Larkin affectionately half-remembered as the 'miniature gaiety of seasides' in his poem 'To the Sea' (a literary tradition that stretches back to Jane Austen's two final novels, Persuasion and the unfinished Sanditon), to seedier seaside romps on Graham Greene's (or, for that matter, Patrick Hamilton's) Brighton Piers.
However, before holiday-makers ('beside [themselves] with glee') would 'stroll upon the Prom, Prom, Prom', poet Matthew Arnold had heard 'a grating roar' at Dover Beach, heralding the 'eternal note of sadness' of lonely coastal sites. The empty non-space, 'where the sea meets the moon-blanched land', that Arnold evokes in 'Dover Beach' in the early 1850s, still mercilessly pits the smallness of man against the vast openness of the oceans; mercilessly, yet hypnotically and irresistibly too, I find.
Arnold had posited love as the only way to illuminate the otherwise 'darkling plain' of human existence, an image I thought of this weekend when visiting the new Pace London exhibition of 'Dark Painting and Seascapes' that pairs eight acrylic 'Dark Paintings' by Mark Rothko with eight gelatin silver prints by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Sugimoto has been creating seascapes for decades, and for this show displays contemporary photographs of bodies of water - from the Bay of Sagami to Arnold's English Channel -, each structured by a stark horizontal line dividing sea and sky. The black and grey of the divided photographs echo and comment on Rothko's so-called 'Dark Paintings' - two rectangles of mostly black and grey - with which they alternate in the gallery space. Although the titles of Sugimoto's photographs reference topographically distinct places, they evoke what the artist calls 'internal seascapes' that (like Rothko's paintings, and indeed many literary descriptions of coastlines) push the viewer towards the limits of consciousness and perception.
At their most affecting, Sugimoto's photographs offer a series of brief moments on the threshold between sea and sky: a patch of light, a whisper of breaking wave; a littoral (and liminal) luminosity that transfixes... before it disappears. For all the 'grating roar' of the advancing and retreating waves, it is this fragile impermanence of seaside spaces that I find most captivating.
In the session following our talk at the Cheltenham Festival, Robert MacFarlane did battle with the thunder and rain (magnified to an Arnold-like roar under the canvas venue) to recount stories of wild walking along The Old Ways. One of these disused, traditional paths that MacFarlane followed is called The Broomway, a public right of way across mudflats off the Essex coast: 'a path that is no path', claimed and covered by the tides.
Hearing about (and now incited/excited to walk) the invisible trajectory of the tidal Broomway reminded me of the sole manuscript of Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach', which we have in the British Library's collections of literary manuscripts (Ashley MS 17)- dated to around 1851. Only the first twenty-eight lightly pencilled lines are extant in Arnold's manuscript, though they are so faintly written as to be now barely visible. At times, you lose the verbal flow altogether, tugged along through the handwritten text only by the under-current of the poem we know so well today. Pencil footprints in the sand, fleeting like the light between sea and sky in Sugimoto's photographs. A delicate physical artefact, but whose emotional power still roars across the 'naked shingles of the world'.