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Huts
a
J. H. Prynne
a
Gonville & Caius College , Cambridge
Published online: 10 Nov 2008.

To cite this article: J. H. Prynne (2008) Huts, Textual Practice, 22:4, 613-633, DOI:
10.1080/09502360802457392

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 Textual Practice 22(4), 2008, 613– 633

J. H. Prynne
Huts
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The English Poet William Collins assembled a sequence of odes in the

pindaric fashion for publication in 1746 under the title Odes on Several
Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects. The title-page (which gives the date as
1747, though the volume actually appeared in December of the previous
year) was adorned with a quite distinctive engraved device, even if not orig-
inal in this use: within an oval chaplet of leaves and flowers, of which part is
laurel and part fruits of the woods and fields, and all surmounted by the
twin face-masks of joy and sorrow, is set a pair of musical instruments
(see Figure 1). Uppermost is a classical lyre, signalling the composure
and equipoise of Apollo; and beneath can be seen a set of panpipes,
signal of panic urgency and ungoverned passion. It can be assumed that
the lyre’s superimposed control over the disorder of more primitive
arousal is deliberate, but that this also recognises the tension in the ode
format, between an overall due reconciliation and the dangerous excite-
ments of risk-taking. It’s possible that the device was placed here by his pub-
lisher, Andrew Millar, who had also used it on the title-page of Thomson’s
Seasons, also of 1746; but Collins well understood the force of such counter-
measures, since his ‘Ode to Pity’ and the following ‘Ode to Fear’ stand
in overt relation to his projected translation and ‘large commentary’ on
Aristotle’s Poetics, even though the Aristotle project never materialised.
The finest poem in this book, by general agreement, is the ‘Ode to
Evening’, probably composed in summer–autumn 1746, and in this
pensive narrative surview of the poet’s task in achieving the composure
of poetic composition, the speaker requests the guidance of Eve, his allego-
rical leading spirit, to find the best station from which to view the subtle
imaginative transitions of a darkening landscape:

Or if chill blustring Winds, or driving Rain,

Prevent my willing Feet, be mine the Hut,
That from the Mountain’s Side,
Views Wilds, and swelling Floods,
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2008 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09502360802457392
 Textual Practice

And Hamlets brown, and dim-discover’d Spires,

And hears their simple Bell, and marks o’er all
Thy Dewy Fingers draw
The gradual dusky Veil.1
(Odes, 1747, p. 38)

I have lived with this delicate and deeply judged invocation for many
years, and the chosen vantage of the upland hut, as finally where the
poet will draw together his view and his thoughts, marks an unexpected
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Figure 1. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge

University Library

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 J.H. Prynne Huts

decision to opt for so temporary and insubstantial a resting-place as this

hut. None of Collins’s editors offers any comment about it. What is this
emplacement, what is the motive for it and what presence lies subtended
behind the prospect which opens out from the panorama across its
threshold? Why is it a hut and indeed what exactly should the reader
bring to mind and into thought and imagination? We may understand
well enough that the eighteenth-century civil poet is comfortable with a
reposeful interior, snug glass windows and a warm fire in winter
weather; and yet here the preference for repose is disturbed, by a
muse who steps out of the comfort zone and calls on the poet to
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follow her.
The word hut is fairly obscure, with unsettled etymology and of quite
late appearance. We get an idea of what Collins may have been thinking of
from a note which he supplied to his later and incomplete poem ‘An Ode
on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland’, where he
glosses the phrase ‘the shepherd’s shiel’ with the explanation ‘A Kind of
Hut built ev’ry summer for the convenience of milking the Cattle’; this
note was expanded in 1788 to read ‘A kind of hut, built for a summer habi-
tation to the herdsmen, when the cattle are sent to graze in distant pas-
tures’.2 So, Collins is thinking of a temporary shelter, somewhat far
removed from settled homesteads, associated with the seasonal migration
which proceeds from the confined lowlands of plains and valleys to the
higher and more exposed elevations. Here this kind of opportune refuge
does not have glazed windows and full enclosure of living-space, but is
instead open to the prospect all around, so as to watch over animals; and
as the summer evening draws in, the darkening sky compounds a recurrent,
ambiguous twilight. By autumn, such a place is deserted. The hut contains
no writing-desk and well-stocked larder, and so as a site of repose it is
equivocal: when the climate turns hostile, the hut is a marginally safe
haven which connects very closely to the threatened invasion of cold and
wet from the wild outside, and this is the vantage that the poet must
summon courage to occupy, the distance from a settled and socialised
habituation.
Hut in English is recorded first in the seventeenth century, probably
from French hutte which is only a little earlier, cognate with Middle
High German hütte, Old High German hutta, huttea, perhaps from Old
Teutonic  hudja with connection from roots meaning to hide, protect,
conceal. Thus the word has a High German ancestry, which OED 2 con-
jecture may be originally a word of the camp. As its principal meaning
OED 2 gives: ‘A dwelling of ruder and meaner construction and
(usually) smaller size than a house, often of branches, turf or mud, such
as is inhabited in primitive societies, or constructed for temporary use by
shepherds, workmen, or travellers’. The idea of temporary shelter, at a

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distance from settlement, promotes the dual suggestion of field: both

pasturage for livestock, and also the field of military deployment, of
rapid advance or retreat and overnight encampments. Sense 1(b) in
OED 2 is: ‘A wooden structure for the temporary housing of troops’.
Those of my generation who can remember being conscripted
for National Service will surely recall being assigned to camp huts
for training and manifest discomforts; I used to sleep in rolled-up
newspaper, in effort to keep out the fierce winds that blew in under the
floorboards.
The concept of improvised shelter, early in the history of developed
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human dwelling or outside the fully built environment, varies in overall

assignment of value as the word primitive also does. There is a long
thread of exotic speculation about the construction of Adam’s first house
in Paradise, with general agreement that it must have been a hut, there
immune from danger or serious wretchedness, as a kind of gazebo or
even well-equipped mobile home. Joseph Rykwert in his erudite treatise
On Adam’s House in Paradise (1972) collects up the sometimes extraordi-
nary evidence, including for instance an engraved reconstruction after
Vitruvius Teutsch (Nemlich des aller namhafftigsten von hocherfarnesten
Römischen Architecti und Kunstreichen Werck oder Bawmeisters Marci
Vitruuii Pollionis Zehen Bücher von der Architectur und kunstlichem
Bawen . . . [Nurnberg, 1548], fol. LXIIr ) of the building of the primitive
hut, from boughs and foliage stripped from a wooded landscape, by robust
(‘primitive’) men totally unclothed (see Figure 2).3
And outside the history of building there were hut-sightings from
remote communities: the revolutionary anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin
developed his view of early human social organisations in his Mutual
Aid, published in 1902, and based on his extensive field researches in
Siberia he too is interested in the simplest dwellings and the ethos of
their occupation. Kropotkin, who was offered the Cambridge Chair in
Geography (which he wisely declined), wrote from eyewitness knowledge
of the village communities of the Mongol Buryates, especially those of
the Kudinsk Steppe on the upper Lena, and he describes thus the enclo-
sures of huts which comprised village settlements: ‘As to the destitute
man who has no family, he takes his meal in the huts of his congeners;
he enters a hut, takes – by right, not for charity – his seat by the fire,
and shares the meal which is always scrupulously divided into equal
parts; he sleeps where he has taken his evening meal’.4 This passage too
has been in my mind over many years and it’s not the first time that I
have made public allusion to it. But the village communities which he
also describes, of the berber Kabyles in Algeria and Tunisia, guarded
their enclosures by ‘towers erected for protection from robbers’; which is
also part of the hut-idea as linked to defence against hostile incursion

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 J.H. Prynne Huts
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Figure 2. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge

University Library

and violence, a theme we shall revisit in course of this overview of the hut
theme now underway.
I have mentioned that the word itself is not early in usage history.
What is to be found as vocabulary in English for the simplest human dwell-
ings prior to the seventeenth century? The term that springs forward is
hovel, known from two centuries earlier but also of obscure etymology.
OED 2 outlines its sense thus: ‘A shed used as a human habitation; a
rude or miserable dwelling-place; a wretched cabin’. The structure in the
mind’s eye must be of a small scale since the -el affix has to be diminutive,

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and the wretchedly confined shelter which swims now into the reader’s
memory must be located out on the stormy heath of King Lear. Kent
describes it first:

Gracious my Lord, hard by here is a houell,

Some friendship will it lend you gainst the tempest,
Repose you there, whilst I to this hard house,
More hard then is the stones whereof tis rais’d,
Which euen but now demanding after me,
Denide me to come in, returne and force
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Their scanted courtesie.5

(III.iii.60–6)

This hovel is ‘hard by’ but is not hard, because not of stone like certain
supposedly-human hearts, not defended by palisades of ingratitude; but
thus also it is weakly defended against the storm raging against it.
Lear in disturbed mind, marked with lurid flashes of insight, accepts the
invitation to rude shelter:

Come on, my boy, how dost my boy, art cold?

I am cold my self, where is this straw my fellow?
The art of our necessities is strange
That can make vile things precious, come your houell.
(III.iii.68–71, with disturbed lineation
and punctuation, vild for vile)

We are out on an unnamed heath at this stage of the narrative, essentially

beyond the remit of civil occupation, where language itself is under
pressure of profound disorder; as Lear muses:

When the mind’s free,

The bodies delicate, this tempest in my mind
Doth from my sences take all feeling else
Saue what beats there . . .
(III.iv.11–14)

These exchanges take place (as we say) ‘before a hovel’, out then from which
issues Edgar disguised as a madman, as poor Tom, his language seemingly
even more deranged: ‘Bless thee from whirlwinds, star-blasting, and
taking!’ Or as Lear exclaims:

Is man no more but this, consider him well, thou owest the worm no
silke, the beast no hide, the sheepe no wooll, the cat no perfume,

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 J.H. Prynne Huts

her’s three ons are sophisticated, thou art the thing it selfe, vnac-
comodated man, is no more but such a poore bare forked Animall
as thou art . . .
(III.iv.106–114)

All the while, ‘storm still’, without and within.

This agreement that the only shelter to be found is squalid and
wretched sorts with the usage and tenor of the word, and from the view-
point of a royal dwelling with many rooms and comforts the prospect
seems harsh. Alexander Leggatt in his review of the play’s performance
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history makes this comment:

When in the play Lear addresses the ‘poor naked wretches’ they are
an idea in the mind. In Kotzintsev’s film [1970, in Russian] they are
right there with him, packed into a dark hovel where they have taken
refuge from the storm, a scene drawn from Dostoevsky’s description
of people packed into a prison wash-house in Notes from the House
of the Dead.6

The word hovel is uncommon in Shakespeare and is always associated

with wretchedness and the outcast state; there are no huts in Shakespeare
because the word had not by then been introduced. But Kropotkin’s
huts were not wretched like this because their idealised simplicity was
not threatened by social exclusion. Was it ever so with hovels? Consider
this passage from the English translation of a neo-Latin work, the trans-
lation published in 1555:

Yea, that thou maiest further, my (reader) learne to discerne, how men
haue in these daies amended the rude simplicitie of the first worlde,
from Adam to the floud and many yeres after, when men liued skater-
yng on the earthe, without knowledge of Money, or what coigne
ment, or Merchauntes trade: no maner of exchange but one good
tourne for another[,] When no man claimed aught for his severalle,
but lande and water ware as commune to al, as Ayer and Skie.
When thei gaped not for honour, ne hunted after richesse, but eche
man contented with a litle, passed his daies in the wild field, under
the open heauen, the couerte of some shadowie Tree, or slender
houeile [hovel], with suche companion or companions as seemed
them good, their diere babes and childres about them.7

This translated work bears the English title, The Fardle of facions, conteining
the auncinte maners, customes, and Lawes, of the peoples enhabiting the two
partes of the earth, called Affrike and Asie (London, 1555), translated

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from the neo-Latin of Iohannes Boemus by William Waterman, and if this

account reminds the modern reader somewhat of William Morris we
should remember that while Kropotkin was in London, writing Mutual
Aid, he was in close acquaintance with Morris and there was reciprocal
influence between them. In this very early usage for the word hovel there
is no sign of squalour or wretchedness, and we are close once again to
Adam’s first shelter in the garden not yet darkened by transgression and
punishment.
It’s hardly possible to determine exactly what kind of structure
Shakespeare had in his mind’s eye for his hovel, though the misery of pas-
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sional abjection associated with it is clear enough. Since a heath is not

pasture but barren waste, this lonely and isolated cabin can hardly have
been a shiel or shepherd’s hut such as described by Collins, nor yet the
later ruined cottage described as Margaret’s chill dwelling in Wordsworth’s
poem. It is hard even to attempt to visualise this hovel because of the fierce
psychic interference which blisters against it from all sides; unaccommo-
dated man is bare to the elements and by sheer force of circumstance
these primal players of basic human reality belong outside, not or not
yet within any kind of shelter however rude. The association not with
elemental sufficiency but with poverty and deprivation has also become
embedded; James Thomson describes the prototype ‘sad barbarian’ and
his plight:

With Winter charg’d, let the mix’d Tempest fly,

Hail, Rain, and Snow, the bitter-breathing Frost:
Then to the Shelter of the Hut he fled;
And the wild Season, sordid, pin’d away.
For Home he had not . . .8

Samuel Johnson quotes from another part of his work in his Dictionary of
1755 to support his definition of hut as ‘a poor cottage’:

Sore pierc’d by wintry Winds,

How many shrink into the sordid Hut
Of cheerless Poverty.9

Johnson’s Dictionary entry for hovel (which he explains as a diminutive) gives

it as 1. ‘A shed open on the sides, and covered overhead’, and 2. ‘A mean
habitation; a cottage’; and for the verb-form he calls King Lear in evidence,
as of course he would. He recorded having seen wretched hovels during his
Highland tour, and in his celebrated review of Soame Jenyns he cites the tart
comment of Peter Shaw (from A New Practice of Physic, 1726) that ‘the hand
which cannot build a hovel may demolish a temple’10 – a counter-link

620
 J.H. Prynne Huts

between the grandest and most lowly edifice-typology which we shall have
cause to remember, a little further on.
It is time to ponder some issues. If man’s first simplicity can be ima-
gined as endowed with the passion and truth of rightfulness, then the first
dwelling provides a station for humanity within the ambit of a natural
and spiritual emplacement. But as human society evolves defences against
a nature from which it has become estranged, these early encampments
were seen as temporary and progressively more inadequate to the work of
enhanced consciousness which is the human task, if not its paramount
destiny. And while these issues shift their ground, the huts themselves
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hold their flimsy or marginal positions, and it is huts rather than issues
which are the prime focus on this occasion, even if beach huts and Pizza
Huts crowd the current view. Why does William Collins feel so drawn,
by the guiding figure of Eve, to search out his mountain hut, at the very
verge of wild nature and the diminished prospect of small human commu-
nities spread out below him, ‘dim-discover’d’ because twilight makes the
detail hard to discern, as the mind hovers and turns inward and finds alle-
gory latent everywhere within the darkening natural order? He does need to
go there, because what is close to nature can only be recognised through the
form of what distances it from human knowledge. And so, whose hut is this?
We may extend our search into another marginal world, where shelter
and extremity form a partnership in outlandish territorial challenge. In the
summer of 1981 the English writer and mountaineer David Brett made a
solo upper-pitched traverse of the Alps, and wrote the narrative of this
journey in a fine book titled High Level: The Alps from End to End (1983),
worthy of comparison with Edward Whymper’s classic Scrambles Among
the Alps of 1871.11 Planning this trip, made hazardous by solitude, required
alert consultation of the alpine maps and particularly of the locations of
mountain refuges and huts along the chosen way. Alpine huts are a distinct
institution very well known to climbers and high-walkers; there are huts
large and small, grand and primitive, in Scotland and Wales as well as all
the way across the French, Italian, Swiss and Austrian mountains. The
climbing huts on Mount Fuji are said to be especially spartan. Some of
the well-established European huts are now substantial buildings with
many facilities and comforts; I have visited one myself, many years ago,
the Edelhütte, below the Ahornspitz in the Austrian Tirol, and here is one
as Breet describes it, in the Lepontine stage of his excursion:

This is a very fine old hospice of the ancient Alpine type, established
long before there were mountaineers and skiers; it was built for
travelers between the north and south, since it is near the summit of
the broad and low San Giacomo pass, which in turn is linked with
the Nufenen and St. Gotthard passes. Anyone wanting to get to the

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Como valleys from Eastern Switzerland would pass this way in the
olden days. The building there is now an Italian Alpine Club hut,
full of very dark wood panelling, old photographs, ski-racks and
decorated wooden fittings. There were plenty of people there, since
it was at the head of the road out of the Formazzo valley and an excel-
lent walking centre. I found myself in conversation with a Dutchman,
who was waiting there for friends who had been climbing in the
Basodino group on the other side of the valley. I bought myself a
large plateful of pasta and several glasses of lemon tea.12
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To be noted here is that, unlike the hut in ‘Ode to Evening’, this

way-station structure is elaborate and staffed, and functioning quasi-
commercially; but it is nonetheless a hut because it is for temporary use
and shelter, in a remote and marginal location; and we may note that the
margin is also linguistic, because of the international aspect of speech
usage and human encounters there, which aspect is not accidental, owing
to the intersections of idiolect territories. It does seem that, just as for
Adam the issue of primal human speech in the original garden has been a
hot speculative topic, so there may be a thus far unexplained closeness of
huts to language borders and edges, to the locale for Collins where prose
reality shades into the domain of the poetic muse, to the contest of storm
and whirling speech at the threshold of Lear’s hovel. The huts at Bletchley
Park (Station X) where the Enigma code was broken were in idiom precisely
those of a military-type camp, plain single storey constructions within a tight
security enclosure; subsequent celebrity has turned them into a heritage
attraction for touristic visits, just as the Tang Dynasty Chinese poet Du
Fu’s rural hut outside Chengdu, focus of his poverty and isolation, is now
a major theme park with gift shop where I bought a good modern edition
of his poems. Henry Thoreau’s experimental self-built hut beside Walden
Pond was likewise the site of an intense focus on the link between nature
and language, on one man’s choice and stamina to dwell there and
become the conduit for the power of this link. Gustav Mahler’s three succes-
sive composing huts functioned in the same way.
The link also continued to ride across a separation of estrangement
and disturbance, as was the case on Lear’s exposed heath. Here may be
called in evidence a fragmentary composition by Wordsworth which,
because it is little-known and was re-discovered comparatively recently
(first published in 1940) I shall quote in extenso from the opening
section (in fact the major part):

I crossed the dreary moor

In the clear moonlight: when I reached the hut
I entered in, but all was still and dark,

622
 J.H. Prynne Huts

Only within the ruin I beheld

At a small distance, on the dusky ground
A broken pane which glittered in the moon
And seemed akin to life. There is a mood
A settled temper of the heart, when grief
Becomes an instinct, fastening on all things
That promise food, doth like a sucking babe
Create it where it is not. From this time
That speck of glass was dearer to my soul
Than was the moon in heaven. Another time
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The winds of Autumn drove me o’er the heath

One gloomy evening: by the storm compelled
The poor man’s horse that feeds along the lanes
Had hither come among these fractured walls
To weather out the night; and as I passed
While restlessly he turned from the fierce wind
And from the open sky, I heard, within,
The iron links with which his feet were clogged
Mix their dull clanking with the heavy noise
Of falling rain. I started from the spot
And heard the sound still following in the wind.13
(Hayden, Poems, I, pp. 256–7)

This gothick récit is pretty much evidently a re-working of the Lear

experience, and bears the title ‘Incipient Madness’. The disorder of
emotion and object-relation is manifest in the damaged parody of the
imagination’s creative power, for here the ardency of wish-fulfilment is
powerless to satisfy a famished craving, even that as elemental as in a
babe sucking at the breast. Composed probably in March–June 1797
this has clear links also with ‘The Ruined Cottage’, already mentioned.
There are at least two, and probably several, repeated, visits to this hut,
and on the first occasion described here a vividly transitional object, the glit-
tering sliver of glass, commands an urgent, displaced attachment; latterly, it
is the sound heard from within the hut that fixed the attention and haunted
its aftermath: the clanking manacles of seemingly an escaped convict. This
hut is a place of fear and oppression, but the narrator makes these visits as if
compelled by a poetic vocation to do so. It is a more extreme recourse than
the guidance which took the author of the ‘Ode to Evening’ to his moun-
tain hut; and yet there is maybe a relation in both between the idea of
elemental refuge and human speech at the wellspring of poetic origin.
We are dealing here with cultural screening and projection, across a
threshold of transitional signifiers that is specifically important for the

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part-surrender of voluntary control implicated in the practices of the

Romantic imagination. It is not to be the constructions of art and regulat-
ory tradition that give shape to formless powers, but encounter with the
unprotected real world, open and without accommodation, and unvoiced.
All this in huts, with dual aspect of benign and hostile shelter, human life
simple and serene or under ominous threat. The engraved device of over-
laid modalities placed on the title-page of the 1747 [1746] Odes of Collins
acts as a reminder of the Apollonian and Dionysian contrast centrally
recognised by Nietzsche, and we may recall, as later again we also shall,
that the lyre is uppermost over the pan-pipes but by no means obliterating
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or unvoicing them.
The scene now shifts rapidly forward in time, to a mountain hut or
Berghütte in the mountains of the Schwarzwald or Black Forest in
Germany, somewhat to the south of a woodland terrain to which I
made a Wanderschaft pilgrimage during my schooldays. From photo-
graphs it can be seen that this box-like cabin, set in a forest clearing on a
sloping mountain-side, offers a profile of the classic hut in overall
square-block shape, built of wood and with overhanging eaves to give pro-
tection from the elements. Like Du Fu’s hut this summer dwelling is not in
fact primitive, having three rooms even if no piped running water and orig-
inally no electricity or telephone; but the location invites the stereotype of
pure air and pure Geist, fresh spring water from the uplands, invigorating
and elemental, as also round about the similar hut by Walden Pond. Situ-
ated close to the village of Todtnauberg this is Martin Heidegger’s summer
refuge and writing-hut, and it is here on 25 July 1967 that the Romanian-
German poet Paul Celan after deep hesitancy accepted the invitation to
make a visit.14 It is a celebrated moment because Celan through most of
his writing life had been deeply close to the thought and writing of Heideg-
ger, but they had never seriously met together, face to face (just a few social
encounters). Celan is deep in trouble of mind and feeling, indeed receiving
psychiatric treatment; and Heidegger is laying (or attempting to lay) many
ghosts of his past self and its questionable deeds and utterances. There
seems to be much to answer for, and some made link or bond here
would have been a somewhat remarkable outcome.
That much assuredly did not quite happen. Celan has left a poem
(‘Todtnauberg’, the title like a map-reference, first collected in Lichtzwang,
1970) which describes the encounter at the Berghütte, unsurprisingly
fraught with enigma and equivocation but also direct to its task of
questionings. Here it is first in its German original:

Arnika, Augentrost, der

Trunk aus dem Brunnen mit dem
Sternwürfel drauf,

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 J.H. Prynne Huts

in der
Hütte,
Die in das Buch
– wessen Namen nahms auf
vor dem meinen? –,
die in dies Buch
geschriebene Zeile von
einer Hoffnung, heute,
auf eines Denkenden
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kommendes
Wort
im Herzen,
Waldwasen, uneingeebnet,
Orchis und Orchis, einzeln,
Krudes, später, im Fahren,
deutlich,
der uns fährt, der Mensch,
der’s mit anhört,
die halb-
beschrittenen Knüppel-
pfade im Hochmoor,
Feuchtes,
viel.15

The setting is clear enough, we are in the mountain hut of the title’s
location, the two men meet at last: poet and survivor of the death-camp era,
and the philosopher of exalted metaphysical abstraction who has a dark,
Nazi past. It was specifically here, as the poet and scholar Pierre Joris
reminds us in a close interrogation of this poem (‘Translation at the
Mountain of Death’, http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/joris/todtnau
berg.html), that in 1933 Heidegger ran his political indoctrination ses-
sions, and the dress code was SA or SS service uniform (Sharr, pp. 57,
119).16 The meeting with Celan lasts somewhat over three hours and
there are no other witnesses, since the driver has to leave once they
arrive. Is there a way through, to find a mode of speaking and remembering
that can discover a thread of reconciliation or acceptance, can some heart-
words be said which might bring this about? We are surrounded on this
idyllic mountain meadow with the rustic herbs of cured wounds and
hurts: Arnica for deep bruises, Eyebright for trouble with seeing and for
clarity of vision. Here is the text in Michael Hamburger’s translation,

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used here because it’s most easily available to English readers (there are
many other versions):

Arnica, eyebright, the

draft from the well with the
starred die above it,
in the
hut,
the line
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– whose name did the book

register before mine? –,
the line inscribed
in that book about
a hope, today,
of a thinking man’s
coming
word
in the heart,
woodland sward, unleveled,
orchid and orchid, single,
coarse stuff, later, clear
in passing,
he who drives us, the man,
who listens in,
the half-
trodden wretched
tracks through the high moors,
dampness,
much.17

The lacunae, open line-gaps, between the brief strophic units, translate
with surprising differences, mostly because of different sentence-order of
words in the two languages. James K. Lyon is the most recent scholar to
scrutinise this moment and its cryptic record, with exceptional thorough-
ness.18 The driver has given his account of the upward journey, the conver-
sation which he heard in the car, full of painful silence and of Celan’s
probing about Heidegger’s Nazi past and involvements with the Third
Reich. Heidegger in accord with perfect German bourgeois convention
kept a guest book, and in it Celan wrote: ‘Ins Hüttenbuch, mit dem
Blick auf den Brunnenstern, mit einer Hoffnung auf ein kommendes

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 J.H. Prynne Huts

Wort im Herzen. Am 25. Juli 1967/Paul Celan’, which Lyon translates as:
‘In the cabin book, with a view of the star on the well, in the hope of a
coming word in the heart. July 25, 1967/Paul Celan’.19
In later report given by Celan in letters it seems that the two did have a
long and very explicit conversation. Lyon’s summing-up is emphatically
direct and confident: ‘There is not a shred of documented biographical evi-
dence from their entire time together to suggest that Celan condemned
Heidegger, felt hostility towards him, or was disappointed with him. In
fact the opposite seems true. Later attempts to portray this as a failed
encounter and an enormous disappointment for Celan are based on
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considerations that arose more than a week after the visit’.20

We may add to this interpretation the cultural pressure of reasons to
conclude that the encounter must have failed: that the Schuldfrage or Ques-
tion of Guilt demanded that there should be no surrender and no compro-
mise, the poet shall have clean hands, which is also why the recent
revelations about the role of Christa Wolf in the STASI era of East
Germany came as such a jolt to liberal conscience. But my theme is huts
and I want to maintain the focus upon this locality, chosen as a deliberately
primal meeting-point, where what is allowed to be remembered and what
may be said and admitted from the heart on both sides is most deeply in
question. What is the nature of the place that these two men are in,
away from the apparatus of official history and institutions, how could
the difference between poetic and philosophic vocation permit or induce
the usage of a language between them?
I do contend that this exceptionally vivid question, for the historical
frame of Western modernity itself, is a recognisable aspect of the larger
theme that I have been tracing in outline. William Collins accepted the
guidance of Eve, his beloved tutelary deity, to take up a brief and
intense station in the upland hut, so far from comfort and accustomed pro-
vision, because it was to be for that moment the most intense possibility for
poetic language itself to issue in composition, to guide his thoughts and
feelings by means of the language that could comprise their prosody
(‘numbers’) and inspiration. This is what Collins desired above all, and
would take risks for, even if the hut could not be his for more than a
brief excursion, because his normal world could not by definition
include any hut that he could occupy except for such visitation as this.
Vocation and visitation belong together and the connecting link is
language.
It is time to turn to a recurrent theme in Heidegger which left its mark
on the thought of Celan and maybe also on some deep features of his com-
posing practice. As is well-known enough, Heidegger’s conception of
primal metaphysics is bound up with a poetic understanding of early
Greek and subsequent language usage, and it is this element that attracted

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Celan to intense study of Heidegger’s work over a wide range and for many
years. For example, ‘ursprüngliches Sprechen’ (‘primordial speaking’)
emerges as a recurrent concern in Celan’s reading notes on Heidegger’s
Was Heisst Denken (What is Called Thinking) first published in 1954.
And during his intense reading in 1953 of Holzwege (Wrong Paths), first
published in 1950,21 which I recall myself studying with great ardency
more than forty years ago, Celan encountered and marked up a primal
idea stated thus: ‘Die Sprache ist der Bezirk [templum], d.h. das Haus
des Seins. . .[der] Tempel des Seins’ (‘Language is the domain
(templum), viz. the house of Being. . .[the] temple of Being’).22 Concern-
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ing this theme shared between Heidegger and Celan, Lyon writes:

In these passages Heidegger either mentions briefly or expands on his

assertion that humans dwell in a house of language. This metaphoric
‘house’ provides shelter, for by dwelling therein, humans are closest
to, and in a sense protected by, ‘the truth of Being’ (der Wahrheit des
Seins). Repeatedly in his writings after this period Heidegger would
use this image of language as a house or shelter for humankind,
though the trope was not original with him.23

Let us press the question of this poetical dwelling and the house of
language that is man’s shelter. The grammar doesn’t tell us whether the
house contains and is pervaded by language, or whether it’s constructed
of language as its very frame and covering. Certainly, Heidegger’s moun-
tain hut contained almost no books, only his mind and firewood and
copious supplies of writing paper.24 What kind of houses qualify, what
are the characteristic and definingly necessary features, and how long can
human-kind bear to dwell thus intensively within such a charged environ-
ment? I believe that the place for Lear and Collins and Wordsworth as I
have cited these figures all found the vital threshold within the primal
hut, the simple first place of human habitation reduced to the most
elemental scale, even if Du Fu and Thoreau took a lot of books to their
hide-outs and the climber David Brett was able to purchase a plateful of
heartwarming pasta in his alpine hut at San Giacomo. As Rykwert
phrased it, ‘Adam’s hut was a model of the world’s meaning’.25
But if this simple connection of man to nature can be idyllic and
deeply communal as Kropotkin reported, what of the alienation and vio-
lence described in Lear’s business with the hovel, and Wordsworth’s inci-
pient madness, where the truth of being is transferred by desperate cathexis
to a broken window-pane? The notion of a ‘temple of being’ lifts the idea
to a plane of spiritual elevation, endows it with serenity and closeness to the
domain of the Gods, as indeed was the character of Heidegger’s readings of
Hölderlin. It would be stubborn and crass to dispute the truth of creative

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 J.H. Prynne Huts

power in the felt presence of imagination, raising up the adept into a zone
of shining poetic fulfillment as language itself glows with inner radiance, its
intrinsic knowledge of primal being.
But also not to be forgotten is the theme of deprivation and violence
and psychic disorder, of crushing poverty and exclusion from the ordered
domains of humankind. If this theme is endemic to the thinking in cultural
history about real huts and actual hovels, being no metaphor but con-
ditions of specific livelihood and of the often isolated individuals or
exiled and stranded populations that struggle to survive in them, what
light shall this sub-theme shed upon the question of language and dwelling
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within its so-called special place? At this stage we must shift ground once
again, to the early history of huts as based in rapid military advance in field
warfare, to provide shelter for an invading army where the likely circum-
stance is that the enemy and the invading force are divided by language
as well as by culture and military purpose. By this evidence the hut-place
is not idyllic but is the site of alienation and its social costs. And as for
Heidegger’s upgrading of the hut or house to ‘the temple of Being’,
recall the comment of Peter Shaw as cited by Johnson, that ‘the hand
which cannot build a hovel may demolish a temple’; maybe they both
were thinking of the history of Jerusalem.
Consider now the characteristic profile of the prototype early modern
hut: timber-framed and clad with light planks or other local materials, to
provide basic shelter, to allow outward watchfulness (originally of grazing
animals), in distant or non-social locations, often at language-margins,
with a low-raked roof and window-spaces and one door, not a dwelling
and not set up for family life but estranged from it and its domestic
values. The very ikon of temporary or intruded fabrication, often dark,
an intense feature in relation to landscape and territory. Where in the
mental imagery of modern life have we seen such structures?
Raised up on wooden gantry supports, these are the watchtowers
of divisive and punitive regimes which for instance separated the two
Germanies and patrolled the perimeters of the final-solution camps
during the Third Reich. Some of these Wachtürme or Beobachtungstürme
(observation towers) were substantial and permanent constructions; but
also familiar in visual memory are the hut-like chambers raised up to
vantage and occupied by guards with orders to shoot on sight and to kill
when any outlawed human movement occurred. These are also the huts
of our recent era, of the Stalag and the Stalinist deportations and death-
camps, the shanty-settlements of desperate refugee populations and casual-
ties of war fallen out of the ideal human inclusiveness that Waterman and
Kropotkin recorded: Adam’s innocent accommodation within the garden
of first nature. We should recall, too, that one set of the huts accounted for
by Kropotkin already had a distinct military purpose and function.

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 Textual Practice

Figures for refugees from persecution and genocidal conflict, human

detritus innocent of wrong-doing but in the wrong place at the wrong
time, demonstrate the huge size of this alternative population across the
globe. The hut-configuration is everywhere, in temporary prisons and
internment camps and militarised frontier posts. On Thursday 20
December 2007 the London Times published an already familiar photo-
graph in stark black-on-white profile of an armed surveillance post, raised
up against the wired perimeter fencing at the entry to Camp Delta of the
detention facility at Guantánamo Bay; and this is unmistakably another
prototype hut-structure, not unlike the raised watchtowers at the Birkenau
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death-camp (see Figure 3). Here in these examples, isolated and solitary
estrangement has been replaced by an institutionalised alternative, to
repress one social practice by forced imposition of another. But though
the historical and political framework has changed, these are still huts,
just as much as the innocent simplicities of beach huts and sheds on allot-
ments and tree-houses for kids. There is no gain but only untruth to be
accomplished by selecting only the huts that we like and approve of, or
by idealising the base-idea so that it can be lifted beyond history and
into metaphysics.
The house of language is not innocent, and is no temple. The inten-
sities of poetic encounter, of imagination and deep insight into spiritual
reality and poetic truth, carry with them all the fierce contradiction of
what human language is and does. There is no protection or even

Figure 3. Reproduced by kind permission of Reuters/Joe Skipper

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 J.H. Prynne Huts

temporary shelter from these forms of knowledge that is worth even a

moment’s considered preference, even for poets or philosophers with
poetic missions. Because the primal hut strips away a host of circumstantial
appurtenances and qualifications, it does represent an elemental form, a
kind of sweat-lodge; but it is confederate with deep ethical problematics,
and not somehow a purifying solution to them. Yet the hut presents
always a possible aspiration towards innocence, residual or potential, and
towards transformation, so that a cynical report would be equally in
error. Poets worth the attention of serious readers are not traffickers in illu-
sions however star-bright, and entering by choice rather than necessity into
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a hut implies choosing the correct moment to come out again. Even
Wordsworth manages to do this, in the poem I have cited. The house of
language is a primal hut, is stark and is also necessary, and not permanent.
Let us return in conclusion to William Collins and his Odes. The title-
page presents the device I have described, with Apollo placed over the
forces of panic excitement and disorder, but with the panpipes still extre-
mely visible underneath the lyre. The poet in his ‘Ode to Evening’ chooses
the wild and heathy Scene, and if the weather turns so fierce as to preclude
extensive walking, then shall he enter a modest hut from which to gather
up, into a full purview, the spread of human communities within the
natural landscape below. For this intense moment, guided always by the
muse-like power of Eve, he is stationed within the house of language
itself, at its most intense and radiant with understanding. Yet this hut is
crude and primitive, fit only for herdsmen and only as temporary refuge,
culturally the site of extreme impoverishment. Does Collins know this?
Yes he does. Does he abridge the deep latent contradiction here? No, I
believe he does not. It is a risk to go there, but a poet must take such
risks, with open eyes and with the support of language itself, its poetic
measures and orderings and control of episodic visitation, even of posses-
sion. Paul Celan’s poem ‘Hüttenfenster’ (which I prefer to translate literally
as ‘Hut-window’), from Die Niemandsrose of 1963, shows that he under-
stands this better than Heidegger; but then he is a poet and has more com-
plicated links with language and reality than ever a philosopher can attain.
Why finally does the engraved device show the lyre laid over the
pan-pipes, and not the other way about or the two set side by side? This
I believe is in major part because Collins as poet has no alternative but to
adhere to this priority. For him it totally must be possible that some
version of order does and will prevail over alienation and despair,
because otherwise his prosody will collapse, his vocation as poet sliding
into final ruin. He must believe this. Almost he does believe this. His
Huts are not immune to this ruin but are a focal part of it, as is language
itself. As readers we do know, finally, that ruin and part-ruin lie about us
on all sides, and so do the poets. It is needful and also better, finally, that

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this be most fully known. The poets are how we know this, are how we may
dwell not somewhere else but where we are.

Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge

Acknowledgements

Thanks and acknowledgement are due to the University of Sussex, where

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this discourse was first presented.

Notes

1 William Collins, Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects (London:

A. Millar, 1747), p. 38; Noel Douglas Replica edition, London, 1926; there
was also a Scolar Press facsimile edition, (Menston, 1969).
2 Collins, The Works, ed. Richard Wendorf and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 57, 169.
3 Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The idea of the primitive hut in
architectural history (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972).
4 Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid; A Factor of Evolution (rev.ed.. London: William
Heinemann, 1904), pp. 139 – 40.
5 M. William Shak-speare: His True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of
King LEAR and his threee Daughters. . . (Printed for Nathaniel Butter,
London, 1608) [‘Pied Bull Quarto’, Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles Number
1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, reprinted 1964), III. iii. 60 –6. Further references
to this edition will be given in the text. In Q1 these lines are set as prose.
6 Alexander Leggatt, ‘King Lear’: Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear (2nd ed.,
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 82– 3.
7 Iohannes Boemus, The Fardle of facions, conteining the auncinte maners, cus-
tomes, and Lawes, of the peoples enhabiting the two partes of the earth, called
Affrike and Asie, trans. William Waterman (London, 1555), sigs Aiv –Aiir.
8 James Thomson, The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1981), p. 146 (Autumn, 1730).
9 Ibid., p. 219 (Winter, 1726).
10 Samuel Johnson, Review of Soame Jenyns, ‘A Free Inquiry into the Nature and
Origin of Evil. . .’, The Literary Magazine: Or Universal Review, Vol.II
(London, 1757), reproduced facsimile in Richard B. Schwartz, Samuel
Johnson and the Problem of Evil (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1975), Appendix III (pp. 99– 112). Peter Shaw is cited, though not
identified by name, on p. 1112.
11 David Brett, High Level: The Alps from End to End (London: Gollancz, 1983);
Edward Whymper, Scrambles among the Alps in 1860 – 69 (London: John
Murray, 1871).

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 J.H. Prynne Huts

12 Brett, High Level, p. 89.

13 John O. Hayden, ed., Williams Wordsworth: The Poems (2 vols, Harmonds-
worth: Penguin Books, 1981), I, pp. 256– 7.
14 See especially Adam Sharr, Heidegger’s Hut (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006) which contains many photographs.
15 Paul Celan, ‘Todtnauberg’, in Lichtzwang (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1970), pp. 29– 30.
16 Pierre Joris, ‘Translation at the Mountain of Death’, http://wings.buffalo.edu/
epc/authors/joris/todtnauberg.html. See also Sharr, Heidegger’s Hut, pp. 57,
119.
17 Paul Celan: Poems; A Bilingual Edition, trans. Michael Hamburger
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(New York: Persea Books, 1980), p. 241.

18 James K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger; An Unresolved Conversation,
1951 – 1970 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2006).
19 Ibid., p. 165.
20 Ibid., p. 169. This may not be the last word about the matter.
21 Martin Heidegger, Holwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950). Lyon
translates the title as Wrong Paths, while the most recent English translation
gives Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
22 Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger, p. 32.
23 Ibid., pp. 32– 3.
24 Scharr, Heidegger’s Hut, pp. 59, 62.
25 Rykwwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise, p. 190.

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