Landscapes of the Mind

Worlds of Sense and Metaphor

J. DOUGLAS PORTEOUS
LANDSCAPES
OF THE MIND
OTHER BOOKS BY
J. DOUGLAS PORTEOUS

The Company Town of Goole (1969)

Canal Ports (1977)
Environment &- Behavior (1977)
The Modernization of Easter Island (1981)
The Mells (1988)
Degrees of Freedom (1988)
Planned to Death (1989)
 J. DOUGLAS PORTEOUS

Landscapes of the Mind

WORLDS OF SENSE
AND METAPHOR

University of Toronto Press

Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 1990
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
Reprinted in 2018
ISBN 0-8020-5857-4
ISBN 978-1-4875-8070-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Porteous, J. Douglas (John Douglas), 1943-

Landscapes of the mind
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8020-5857-4
1. Landscape. 2. Geographical perception.
3. Senses and sensation. 4. Landscape in
literature. 5. Greene, Graham, 1904- -
Criticism and interpretation. 6. Lowry, Malcolm,
1909-1957 -Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
GF50.P671990 304.2'3 C89-090749-8

Jacket illustration: Homby watercolour

by Anne Popperwell (from the author's collection)

This book has been published with the help of a grant

from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities,
using funds provided by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
For all at Haggis Farm
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Preface xiii

1 Landscapes 3

I SENSUOUS WORLDS

2 Smellscape 21
3 Soundscape 47

II LANDSCAPES OF METAPHOR

4 Bodyscape 69
5 Inscape 87
6 Homescape 107
7 Escape 127
8 Childscape 145
9 Deathscape 175

10 Otherscapes 195

References 205
Index 223
Acknowledgments

A large number of people have offered encouragement for the ideas set
forth in this book. Those who kindly expressed interest or brought books
and other materials to my attention represent a very mixed bag,
including geographers, historians, psychologists, economists, physiolo-
gists, psychiatrists, resource managers, chemists, librarians, editors,
acoustics experts, architects, literary critics, farmers, fishermen, paint-
ers, and poets, among them: Mike Barton, Morris Berman, Earle
Birney, Daniel Cappon, the late Richard Coe, R.I.K. Davidson, Virgil
Duff, Gary Dunbar, Heinz Dyck, Trygg Engen, Priscilla Ewbank,
Donald Hamilton Fraser, Pierre Gloor, Ann Gosse, Jon Guy, Rudi
Hartmann, Bob Hay, Barbara Hodgins, Leslie Joy, Herb Kariel, Mona
Kawano, Peter Keller, Kevin Key, Howard Lee, David Lowenthal, Rita
Marks, Bruce McDougall, Enoch Moyo, Steve Nagy, Linda Neigel,
Victoria Nowell, Carol Porteous, Nina Redding, Jim Rotton, Rana P.B.
Singh, Barry Smith, Sandra Smith, Chris Spenser, Imre Sutton, Barry
Truax, Brian Turnbull, Nicholas Vance, Charles Wysocki, members of
my Environmental Aesthetics class and of the Satuma Island Thinktank,
and several anonymous reviewers. Regarding individual chapters, Jane
Mastin did the field-work for 'Soundscape' (chapter 3), and Gavin
Porteous inspired 'Childscape' (chapter 8).
I have also received much inspiration and comfort from Boat Pass
and Mount Warburton Pike (Satuma Island); Com Island (Nicaragua);
the Holy Mountain of Athos (Greece); the three-breasted Paps ofJura,
in the Inner Hebrides; from my eyes, ears, and nose; from the
proprietors and patrons of Gwen's Diner; and from cheerful old Luigi
Boccherini and strident Bob Marley. Barbara Hodgins provided a safe
haven in the urban wilderness of Victoria when I had, perforce, to
venture in from Satuma Island.
My work would be impossible without the superb and never-failing
assistance of the staff of the Geography department at the University of
Victoria. Typing and word-processing were in the capable and careful
X Acknowledgments

hands of Vicky Barath, Paola Bell, and Jennifer Hobson-Roy. The

evocative drawings and maps are by artist-cartographer Ole Heggen. I
am also grateful to the University of Victoria for providing me with a
study leave, during which this book was conceived. Parts of chapters 2, 3
and 4, 5 and 9 were previously published, respectively, in Progress in
Hwnan Geography (vol. 9 [London: Edward Arnold, 1985), 356-78),
The Journal of Architectural and Planning Research (vol. 2, 1985:
169-86), and The Canadian Geographer (vol. 30, 1986: 2-12 and
123-31; vol. 31, 1987: 34-43). My thanks to the editors of these journals
for permission to adapt this material.
Finally, I must thank my good fortune, the University of Victoria, and
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for
research and travel grants that facilitated the writing of this book and,
incidentally, permitted my visits to several parts of Greeneland. I have
also, quite unintentionally, experienced as a resident the major Low-
ryan landscapes of northern England, Oxbridge, Cuernavaca, and a
cabin on the British Columbia coast. I was happy to replace the tequila
bottle on Lowry's grave in Ripe, Sussex, in 1984.

Saturna Island, oc 1989

We are far more out of touch with even the nearest approaches of
the infinite reaches of inner space than we now are with the reaches of
outer space .. . What would happen if some of us then started to see,
hear, touch, smell, taste things?
R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (1967)

In the sensuous, highly libidinous individual, all appetites are sharp,

the senses keen ... Too often, however, society, social position, or our
reaction to our environment get in the way ...
Daniel Cappon, Eating, Loving and Dying (1973)

Geography is the foundation of all ... Geographical writing .. . ought to

be much better than it is, with more emphasis on generalization and
philosophical meaning.
James A. Michener, in Social Education (1970)
 Preface

Never ... was any generation of men intent upon the pursuit of happiness more
advantageously placed to attain it who yet, with seeming deliberation, took
the opposite course - towards chaos, not order, towards breakdown, not sta-
bility, towards death, destruction and darkness, not life, creativity and light.
Malcolm Muggeridge
They say nothing. They consume. But it's got to be a mess because it's so
fucking dull.
Punks, of their parents, in Anthony Burgess's 1985

T.S. Eliot's strictures were too mild. Wasteland civilization is now

reaching rock-bottom, for the powers that control our lives cannot afford
to believe that small is beautiful or that less is more. We live enmeshed in
a cretinous popular culture that, through omnipresent 'media,' urges
Homo sapiens, now known collectively as 'consumers,' to surround
themselves with ever more of the jtmk that they are assured constitutes
the good things in life. Those who demur are impaled by the swift arrow
of progress, which is regarded as inevitable even though its seemingly
inexorable forward regress increasingly appears to be dangerous not
only to human health but also to the very existence of the planet.
Scientists don't help much, most of them being caught up in the
military-industrial system and/or afflicted with a kind of intellectual
anorexia that prevents their exploration of holistic or humanistic views.
Like the characters in Samuel Beckett's plays, we are lost amid a vast
landscape of quantifiable matter, we believe in the authority of
statistics, our world-view has been radically altered by the mechanic
muse, and we increasingly live second-hand lives, for life seems to be
what appears on screens.
Despite the bleakness of certain of its sections, this book is about hope
for the future. Yet, unless our future is to be merely one of amiable
mediocrity in an ever more precarious world, we must take a pitiless
look at the current human condition in the Western cultural realm.
xiv Preface

Urbanized humanity is increasingly divorced from primary experi-

ence, especially the sensuous freedom and the exploration of inner,
mental landscapes that characterize childhood. The psychiatrist R.D.
Laing believed that human beings have become so 'self-brutalized,
banalized, and stultified' that they are unaware of their own debase-
ment. In societies built on competition for basic goods, it is difficult to
love others, difficult, even, to love oneself. Man is now so powerful that,
in Freud's words, he has become 'a kind of prosthetic God.' Yet mental
illness thrives, and only the very dull seem happy.
We are, at root, alienated, and thus estranged from our authentic
possibilities. In particular, we are increasingly alienated from our
sensual and imaginative possibilities. We are alienated, too, from a
world we collectively have too much power over, a world we universally
confront only in a visual way. For vision is the most detached of the
senses; its end result is 'landscape,' something we stand back to view.
Vision encourages objectivity in a world that cries out for involvement,
empathy, and the deeper meaningfulness that comes with a heighten-
ing, as in children and other animals, of the non-visual senses. And we
are alienated from ourselves as well as from others. Giddy with
entertainment, sated with consumer goods, and planned to death, we
devote little time to exploring the paysage interieur, the convoluted,
intricate, and always rewarding landscape of our minds.
The way we live now is unhealthy, wasteful, dehumanizing, and,
ultimately, absurd. We can change it at the public level, as Green parties
recognize, by adopting alternative technologies and life-styles in pursuit
of right livelihood and a green geography. But the key to such a
transformation is personal change at the private level, and to encourage
such change we need a back-to-basics movement that will result in the
necessary revolution in consciousness and a new awareness of our
sensual and spiritual selves.
The ultimate goal, then, is the re-enchantment of the world and the
redemption of mankind from an ultimately self- and world-effacing way
of life. The more modest goal of this book is to open up the possibilities of
that mysterious terrain known as the landscape of the mind, that is, to
explore some of the basic sensual and existential characteristics of the
human condition. Although we have a foothold on outer space, the most
important journey of all is the one we seem most loath to embark upon,
the exploration of the inner space that lies within ourselves.
Those who seem to agree include:

Berman, M. 1986. The Reenchantmentofthe World. New York: Bantam

Preface xv

Bunyard, P., and F. Morgan-Grenville, eds. 1987. The Green Alterna-

tive: A Guide to Good Living. London: Methuen
Burgess, A. 1980. 1985. London: Arrow
Hoff, B. 1983. The Tao of Pooh. New York: Penguin
Kenner, H . 1986. The Mechanic Muse. New York: Oxford University
Press
Laing, RD. 1967. The Politics of Experience. Hannondsworth: Penguin
Lapham, L. 1989. 'The Old School,' Harper's magazine, April: 10-13
Lopez, B. 1986. Arctic Dreams. New York: Scribner's
Tuan, Y.-F. 1986. The Good Life. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press
Updike, J. 1986. Roger's Version. New York: Knopf
LANDSCAPES
OF THE MIND
1 Landscapes

How do people imagine the landscapes they find themselves in? ... It is easy
to underestimate the power of ... association with the land ... with the
span of it in memory and imagination ... For some people, what they are
is not finished at the skin, but continues with the reach of the senses out
into the land.
Barry Lopez

Geography is, above all, the study of landscape, and a striving to be at

home in our physical and social landscapes is one of the chief ingredients
in our constitutionally sanctioned pursuit of happiness. In all senses,
landscape reflects where we're at.
We are all familiar, perhaps too familiar, with landscapes. We live in
them, travel through them, employ architects and planners to change
them, admire them as works of nature or art, hang them on our walls.
Landscapes are a given. So much so, apparently, that the very word
landscape has superseded the previously overused situation in media-
speak; we are asked, for example, to visualize the effects of an event upon
the existing 'political landscape' (Seager 1981). Novelists employ
metaphoric landscapes. While Lawrence Durrell speaks of 'landscapes
of the heart,' Lesley Blanch rhapsodizes on her 'landscapes of the
heart's desire.' While environmentalists strive to protect tangible
landscapes, poets, artists, and novelists preserve, restore, and express
our landscapes of the mind.

The common sense

The literature of landscape is enormous, and cannot be summarized

here. For a history of the concept of landscape, and how it has evolved
from post-Renaissance Dutch realist and Italian idealist modes to
become our prevailing blandscape, one could hardly do better than
peruse Lowenthal (1964, 1968, 1975) and Relph (1981). For the transfor-
4 Landscapes

mation of tangible landscapes into art, one still begins with Kenneth
Clark (1956).
What I wish to emphasize here is that, when we consider landscape,
we are almost always concerned with a visual construct. Landscape is
something we look at or imagine as a visual metaphor. Although we may
attach the suffix scape to a whole pack of disparate nouns, so that we
may talk of townscapes or, in a painterly way, speak of van Gogh's
wheatscapes, L.S. Lowry's seascapes, and the skyscapes of Canadian
prairie painters, or even the dreamscapes of Freud, in all cases we are
dealing wholly with the sense of sight, whether actual or imagined.
Sight is the common sense, the dominant sensory mode; in humans,
it yields more than 80 per cent of our knowledge of the external world.
In order to comprehend the fundamental importance of sight in the
Western world, we have only to consider its major language metaphors.
I am a camera, believe perhaps that the camera cannot lie, and look for
eyewitnesses, for justice must be seen to be done. After revelations, our
eyes are opened. We press our points of view on our political
representatives, whom we expect to have foresight, rather than hind-
sight, and vision, rather than visions. Politicians, in turn, are careful of
their images on television. Above all, seeing is believing, and 'I see'
means 'I understand.' It is commonly believed that sight leads to insight
(Pocock 1981) and that the geographer's 'eye for country' should result in
discerning observations about landscapes.
Landscape, whether in the physical environment or in the form of a
painting, does not exist without an observer. Although the land exists,
'the scape is a projection of human consciousness, an image received'
(Erlich 1987). Mentally or physically, we frame the view, and our
appreciation depends on our frame of mind. At one time, in the confident
late eighteenth century, we felt quite able to categorize landscapes as
picturesque, beautiful, or sublime. Whereas the beautiful was soft,
rounded, gentle, and feminine, and the sublime harsh, masculine, and
forbidding, the word picturesque, as applied to landscapes, meant
literally 'like a picture,' that is, well-composed.
Yet, even with our overwhelming emphasis on seeing, it is not clear
that we see very well. The art of 'concentrated looking' (Berger 1987) is
not well developed; we see very little of our world, for we are habituated
to it and willing to concentrate only on extraordinary 'spectacles'
(Debord 1977). So insensitive are we now that our everyday environ-
ments have become a visual nightmare that only a few have the
sensitivity to rail against. For visual splendour we drive out to national
parks to view the landscape, which we see only from carefully managed,
Landscapes 5

prescribed viewpoints. Death Valley thus becomes merely Dante's View

or Zabriskie Point.
Vision distances us from the landscape; it is easy to be disengaged.
Such is not the case for other sensory modes, particularly smell and
touch. Yet, except for hearing, these other senses are increasingly
neglected in urban civilization. While visual landscapes have been
analysed to death, non-visual sensory modes have been paid little
attention in studies of 'landscape appreciation.' And metaphorical
landscapes are almost wholly the domain of novelists and poets. It is the
task of this chapter to introduce these sensuous and metaphorical
landscapes of the mind, and thus lay the groW1dwork for the progression
of interconnected essays that follows.

Sensuous worlds

Europeans ... have moved in the direction of the visual. In the Middle Ages,
Europeans still lived for the most part in a traditional world that rewarded the
senses - that was inchoate, colorful, and warmly human. From the sixteenth
century onward, however, the world was shifting toward a cooler, larger, more
deliberately conceived and precisely delineated order.
Yi-Fu Tuan

In a sensory version of Gresham's Law, vision drives out the other

senses. It is the ideal sense for an intellectualized, information-crazed
species that has withdrawn from many areas of direct sensation. Go
outside, and close your eyes. Immediately the lids fall on darkness, a
cacophony is released. Gradually, one may be able to distinguish
ambient smells and even tastes, especially near the sea. Touch becomes
important both for orientation and for sensuous pleasure. Mobility, the
kinaesthetic sense, is severely curtailed. Open the eyes again, and
welcome relief from one kind of sensory deprivation is paid for by an
immediate loss of acuity in most of the other senses.
As Freud noted half a century ago in Civilization and Its Discontents,
man is a visual creature who 'visualizes' even in imagination, and has
extended his visual capacities enormously by means of telescope and
microscope. Few such extensions of the other senses have become
available. Indeed, we have been extremely selective in adhering to what
John Updike (1986, 150) calls 'this terrible binding contract with
eyeballs, nostril hairs, ear bones, and edible gray brain cells.' Other
animals, of course, have taken different routes.
We have all become familiar with the extraordinary sensory capaci-
6 Landscapes

ties of insects. Male moths of certain species can trace the alluring scent
of the female from a distance of seven or more miles. For a dog, the nose
opens up the world. Even in terms of sound and light, other beings are
capable of perceiving far beyond the extremes of our meagre spectra.
Bats hear what we cannot, insects follow visual nectar guides that we
cannot see. The dances of bees communicate very specific information.
In an otherwise indifferent book, Rivlin and Gravelle (1984) sensitively
explore the sensory worlds of lizards, snakes, owls, and even bacteria.
We perceive little of the world: 'an entire angelic conversation transpires
invisibly all around us' (Updike 1986, 232).
Environmental aestheticians, who perhaps ought to know better, are
almost wholly concerned with the visual qualities of landscape (Porteous
1982). Notwithstanding the holistic nature of environmental experience,
few researchers have attempted to interpret it in a holistic manner.
Concentration on the non-visual senses is also rare. Few have investi-
gated soundscape, and hardly any have chosen to encounter smellscape
or the tactile-kinaesthetic qualities of environment. Taste remains a
metaphor. The fact that more than 80 per cent of our sensory input is
visual does not invalidate the need to explore the other sensory qualities
of environment.
The tactile sense is fundamental and immediate. Skin is the largest
sensory organ; we are always 'in touch.' In sensory-deprivation
experiments (Porteous 1977), it is possible to reduce smell, taste,
hearing, and sight to minimal or even zero levels, but some tactile sense
always remains, for without it we cannot survive. Indeed, while seeing
appears to be believing, we often require corroboration through physical
handling, as did Doubting Thomas.
Smell, like hearing, provides us with useful information about the
characteristics of our environment. It is especially important in this
regard among young children and the blind. Smell is of special value in
detecting what is natural, real, or authentic. Tuan (1982, 119) notes that
manufactured objects do not successfully imitate nature if they do not
'exude nature's characteristically complex fragrance.' Unlike touch,
however, smell does not seem to be of great value in structuring space.
Sound is more useful in this regard, for it is frequently directional, and
sources can more readily be ascertained because of our sinaurality.
Hearing greatly enhances our perception of environment because it is a
multidimensional sense, sounds being evaluated on magnitude, clarity,
aesthetic, relaxation, familiarity, and mood dimensions (Miller 1978).
Sound is omnipresent in the environment; it fills all space and tends
spherically to envelop the hearer.
Two important characteristics distinguish the non-visual from the
Landscapes 7

visual senses. First, the non-visual senses are much more proximate
than is vision. While vision is involved with what is 'out there' (try
looking at the end of your nose), the other senses tend to be more
concerned with life at close quarters. At these close quarters, all the
senses operate to produce 'not just a picture but a circumambient world
pulsating with life' (Tuan 1982, 118). At the middle distance, touch,
taste, and smell drop 'out of the picture' and we are left with what could
be a movie screen. At an even greater distance, sound is often
overwhelmed, and we are left with an animated, but curiously lifeless,
picture world.
Vision is the intellectual sense. It structures the universe for us, but
only 'out there' and 'in front.' It is a cool, detached sense, and sight alone
is insufficient for a true involvement of self with world. In sharp contrast,
the non-visual worlds surround the sensor, even penetrate the body, and
have far greater power to stir the emotions. These hot, emotional senses
are highly arousing, filling the self with feelings of pleasure, nostalgia,
revulsion, and affection. Smell, in particular, arouses emotions strongly
and rapidly because olfactory signals plug directly into the brain's limbic
system, the core of emotions and memory, crossing far fewer synapses
than do signals emanating from other senses. Above all, smell and the
other non-visual senses are deeply bound up with the experience of
pleasure. The pleasures of food, love-making, and pets are impossible to
imagine without the non-visual senses. Thus it is that smell, sound,
touch, and taste are of vital importance for the achievement and
maintenance of a person's sense of well-being.
In this book, smellscape and soundscape will be investigated in detail.
For contrast, and to emphasize the complementarity between positivist
and humanist methodologies, smellscape is mainly investigated phe-
nomenologically, while soundscape receives both a humanistic and a
traditional scientific treatment. These two sensescapes are more readily
conceptualized in 'scape terms than are touchscape and tastescape. The
latter is to some extent subsumed in the idea of smellscape, while
touchscape perhaps more properly belongs with bodyscape (chapter 4 ).
This connecting function of the bodyscape chapter indicates, of course,
the artificial, but heuristically necessary, distinction between these
'sensuous worlds' and the 'landscapes of metaphor' to which I now tum.

Landscapes of metaphor

Perhaps the most fascinating terrae incognitae of all are those that lie within
the hearts and minds of men.
John Kirtland Wright
8 Landscapes

One does not have to venture far into the realms of literature,
psychiatry, or the more prescient evocations of landscape to find an
extraordinarily insistent emphasis on the importance of the paysage
interieur, the landscape of the mind. Samuel Beckett's plays are pure
evocations of this interior landscape. The psychiatrist R. D. Laing invites
us to explore inner space. And Barry Lopez (1986) in Arctic Dreams , one
of the outstanding landscape meditations of our time, asks the question:
'How do people imagine the landscapes they find themselves in?' (p.
xxvii). Seeking to comprehend a region rich in metaphor, Lopez notes
that 'to inquire into the intricacies of an unknown landscape is to
provoke thoughts about one's own interior landscape, and the familiar
landscapes of memory' (p. 247). He believes, with the Inuit, that a
spiritual landscape coexists with the physical landscape, that the very
order of language 'derives from the mind's intercourse with the
landscape' (p. 278).
It is the mind's deeper intercourse with the landscape that is the
subject of the second, and larger, part of this book. Among scientists,
only a few geographers appear to have tried to come to tenns with this
emotive, almost mystical relationship between mankind and landscape.
In his famous essay of 1947, 'Terrae Incognitae - The Place of
Imagination in Georgraphy,' J.K. Wright argued that it is not so much
what we perceive but how we feel about what we perceive that is crucial
to an understanding of our behaviour and ourselves.
After Wright, a humanistic approach to geography was kept alive by
Lowenthal (1961) and Tuan (1974), both of whom were concerned to
explore the man:environment relationship in tenns of ideas. J.W.
Watson (1968, 11) explains this emphasis on inner worlds of meaning
thus: 'Not all geography derives from the earth itself; some of it springs
from our idea of the earth. This geography within the mind can at times
be the effective geography to which men adjust and thus be more
important than the supposedly real geography of the earth. Man has the
peculiar aptitude of being able to live by notions of reality which may be
more real than reality itself.' Nevertheless, this thoughtful, penetrating
approach to human understanding in geography was suppressed for
many years by the power of the simplistic theoretico-quantitative
movement that dominated the subject from the mid-1950s to the
mid-1970s.
Humanistic geography, as the movement became known, lurked
underground, to flower in the late 1970s (Ley and Samuels 1978). More
imaginative geographers roundly criticized the prevailing positiveness
for suppressing subjectivity, overlooking intentionality, and emphasiz-
Landscapes 9

ing human passivity. The theoretical constructs associated with positiv-

istic modes of research were also criticized for their avoidance of any
discussion of experiential relationships with environment. Tuan (1977,
1978) felt that mainstream geography severely neglected the internal
aspects of human consciousness, the sensations and perceptions that
contribute to experience and by which a person makes sense of his
environment. Rather than denying the value of positivistic approaches,
however, humanistic geographers generally insist that their approaches
are complementary, rather than alternatives, to the mainstream.
One of the approaches of humanistic geography involves the critical
assessment of imaginative literature for its insights into the relationship
between inner and outer landscapes. This approach is of vital impor-
tance to our understanding of ourselves, for while much literature seems
particularist and place-specific (Pocock 1981), it almost always, on
perusal, comes to reveal the universal within the particular. The test of
validity, always, is the question: 'Is this true for me?'
Within the field of imaginative literature, the novel is of paramount
interest to geographers (Porteous 1985). Most attention has been given
to the regional novel, an eminently nineteenth-century form wherein is
depicted a world of roots, place, and home, a largely rural world where
change comes slowly. For Western man, in contrast, the twentieth
century is pre-eminently one of urban life; placeless, constantly in flux,
future-shocked perhaps, a world whose inhabitants are frequently
rootless and often, in the sense of community membership, homeless
too. Consider the vast growth of 'community studies' in the social
sciences and the ideological importance of 'neighbourhood' in urban
planning. These are reactions to loss. Twentieth-century reality is one of
angst, anomie, and alienation to which, pace T.S. Eliot, most of us
prefer to be only partly awake.
Regional novelists of rural persuasion continued to be active well into
the twentieth century; one thinks of Mary Webb or Winifred Holtby. Yet
theirs is already a world of nostalgia. Even in the nineteenth-century
rural regional novel, a feeling of rootlessness was becoming apparent
(Middleton 1981). Late-nineteenth-century French novelists and poets,
such as Zola and Baudelaire, reflect a growing urban rootlessness,
squalor, and despair. It is in this tradition that the British novelists who
came to maturity between the two world wars operate. I am thinking
especially of Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, D.H. Lawrence, George
Orwell, Malcolm Lowry, Graham Greene, and a host of lesser novelists
who express the feeling that there is something badly, perhaps fatally,
wrong with the urban civilization that had been built upon the corpses of
10 Landscapes

the lost generations of the Industrial Revolution and of the First World
War.
In exploring the relationship between paysage interieur and perceived
landscape, I have investigated a wide variety of literature, as may be
seen in the chapters 'Smellscape,' 'Bodyscape,' and 'Childscape.' My
chief interest, however, is in the writings of Malcolm Lowry and Graham
Greene, and it is the work of these two authors that I investigate in depth
in the chapters 'Homescape' and 'Escape' (mainly Greene) and, in a far
more sombre mood, 'lnscape' and 'Deathscape' (mainly Lowry).
Lowry and Greene have only rarely been considered together, and
then chiefly in the context of their fictionalization of the landscapes of
Mexico (Veitch 1975). This point is significant, for both these writers
whose sensibilities were established between the two world wars belong
to a literary genre that might best be described as that of 'the exiled
Englishman.' Both Fussell (1980) and Gurr (1981) have written at length
on exile, which is further discussed below in the chapters 'Homescape'
and 'Escape.' It suffices to note here that these exiled English writers
have a nwnber of common and salient characteristics: a fixation on the
notion of home; a concern for rootedness and rootlessness; the
inevitable outsider's view of alien landscapes; a fascination with cities
(positive for Greene, negative for Lowry); and a distaste for twentieth-
century civilization (Porteous 1985).
It is because I share some of these concerns that I have chosen to
concentrate almost half of this book on interpretations of Lowry and
Greene. These interpretations tend to downplay literary theory not only
because of its current state of extreme disarray on the issue of 'how we
situate ourselves' in reference to literary texts (Graff 1987) but also
because a heavy concentration on the minutiae of literary conventions
would seriously impede my argument, which must give primacy to
landscape rather than to literature. Nevertheless, the reader should be
aware that Lowry and Greene are modernists both in method (cinematic
techniques, for example) and in their prevailing mood of disenchant-
ment, which amounted, in Lowry's case, to a revulsion towards the
present.
This context has obviously shaped the way Lowry and Greene express
their perceptions of the world. Yet each has his own voice. In this
connection, narratology attempts to distinguish between author, narra-
tor, and characters. In the case of Lowry and Greene, however, I argue
that these distinctions are often difficult to make. Many critics have
noted that Lowryan protagonists appear to be the author's alter egos.
Moreover, much of Lowry's later work is reflexive metafiction in which
Landscapes 11

autobiographical concerns assume ever greater significance. In true

autobiography, of course, author, narrator, and protagonist are identi-
cal (Finney 1985), but Lowry clearly blurred the narratological catego-
ries in creating his 'reflexive sequence [of] autobiographically-based
fiction' (Binns 1984, 84).
The case for a high degree of author-narrator congruence is less easy
to make for Greene. In discussing his technique with Evelyn Waugh,
however, Greene (1981, 263) remarks: 'With a writer of your genius and
insight I would not attempt to hide behind the time-old gag that an
author can never be identified with his characters ... I suppose the points
where an author is in agreement with his characters lends what force or
warmth there is to the expression. At the same time I think one can say
that a parallel must not be drawn all down the line.'
Elsewhere in the same book he is more definite about the parallels
between life and landscape. In describing fetid Lagos, he concedes:
'Greeneland perhaps: I can only say it is the land in which I have passed
most of my life' (p. 99).
Perhaps the best case is made by Bayley (1989), who agrees with other
critics that Greene's personal world-view, as depicted in autobiogra-
phies, travel books, and interviews, is faithfully reproduced in every
novel. Bayley states that Greene 'brings his own vision of reality into his
novels as a literary device.' He finds this 'naive' and 'child-like' and
stresses his disapproval of the fact that all Greene's works exemplify 'the
bedrock of Greene's own nature.' For my purposes, however, the
demonstrable link between author and the prevailing world-view
expressed in the narrative is exactly what I would wish.
Ultimately, I have chosen these authors not simply because they best
represent what I want to say, which I believe they do, but also because I
enjoy them. It thus seems sensible, at this point, to introduce them to the
reader.

Graham Greene

You do not flee from what happens to you, but from yourself. From days that
are always the same. From routine. From boredom.
Greene, interviewed in Frankfurter Allgemeine

Greene is one of the milder exponents of the general twentieth-century

feeling of Weltschmerz. His vision is not apocalyptic as were those of
Huxley and Orwell, the one envisioning a future hell of soulless luxury,
the other a brutal totalitarian world, both involving the denial of any
12 Landscapes

sense of individual freedom. He has many affinities with Lowry, as we

shall see, although the sense of an omnipresent private hell is much less
apparent in Greene. Yet, Greene has managed to create a landscape of
the mind that reflects a persistent and insidious aspect of modem life.
Hidden behind the luxurious fa~ades of the West, expressed overtly in
colonies and Third World totalitarian regimes, symbolized by both·
skyscraper and slum, lies the landscape of the mind known as
Greeneland, a seedy region of furtive dealings, where war is humdrum
and peace always uneasy.
Landscapes are of varying value to the novelist. He may create wholly
imaginary landscapes whose terrain, climate, and life forms are
essential for the working out of the plot. Such are the worlds of J.R.R.
Tolkien or Frank Herbert's Dune series. Landscapes may be expressly
used for symbolic purposes, where specific places may be identified
with the stages of life's journey or where archetypal symbols such as sea
and forest are used to convey meaning. This is the world of Malcolm
Lowry. Or landscapes may be used more generally, to reflect the
novelist's perception of the human condition, so that the reader remains
unsure whether environments create or condition the characters,
whether the congruence between character and landscape is symbiotic,
causal, or coincidental. Most writers use all of these modes; it is the
balance that is important. Greene overwhelmingly chooses the third
mode, a Greeneland in which seedy protagonists inhabit seedy regions.
Greene (1904-) takes the psychiatric or Jesuitical view that, in
childhood, we come to a cognition of the world that persistently shapes
our future lives. Future experiences are moulded by this world-view, and
cannot erase or efface it. The title of the first volume of his autobiogra-
phy, A Sort of Life (1971), gives us a clue to his feelings about the world.
Born into a pious suburban family with literary connections, he felt a
need to escape, even in childhood; the second volume of his autobiogra-
phy is aptly entitled Ways of Escape (1981). Certain aspects of Greene's
childhood become themes that appear and reappear in the novels. These
are: a preoccupation with pain, violence, cruelty, and humiliation; a
positive view of fear, danger, adventure, and change; a restless boredom
of immense and soul-destroying proportions; a preoccupation with
hopelessness, failure, and despair; and the use of travel to dull the
existential terror brought about by his contemplation of the futility of his
own life, in particular, and of the human condition, in general.
Throughout his early childhood, Greene was the victim of many petty
hwniliations, especially of the kind inflicted by the naturally cruel school
bully. These humiliations lodged in his subconscious to be released
Landscapes 13

suddenly, like time capsules, as recall and recognition mechanisms

operated in later life. One period of school life is seen as 'a hundred and
four weeks of monotony, humiliation, and mental pain' (Life, 88). At
school, Greene felt he had 'entered a savage country of strange customs
and inexplicable cruelties' (Life, 74), a primitive region in which, for the
first time, he experienced the alien feeling of the outsider and the terror
of being a hunted creature. Yet, time and again in his later life, he was to
travel to backward parts of the world in search of some of the primitive
qualities experienced in childhood.
Injustice is endemic in the life of the child, and is magnified in the
child's eyes because of his inability to change the world or remonstrate
with adults. Injustice is a common theme in Greene's early novels,
notably It's a Battlefield (1934). Books depicting treachery, cruelty, and
suffering attracted Greene, as they do many small boys. Childish games
that involved an element of fear were preferred; 'from terror one escapes
screaming, but fear has an odd seduction' (Life , 31). Here is a
fundamental difference between Greene and Lowry, for Lowry ventured
down from the plateaux of fear to plumb the terrors of the abyss. A taste
for the mildly macabre emerged early; Greene writes that 'the first thing I
remember is sitting in a pram ... with a dead dog lying·at my feet' (Life
17).
Hopelessness and failure were also experienced early in life. Greene
found that failure can sometimes have its rewards, while, like Lowry, he
discovered that success always has a dark side. Indeed, the first page of
the childhood autobiography reminds the reader of the long period of
failure that Greene experienced after the publication of his first novel in
1929. 'Failure too is a kind of death: the furniture sold, the drawers
emptied, the removal van waiting like a hearse in the lane' (Life, 11).
This is a foretaste of Greeneland.
The novels and travel books fall into three periods (Kurismootil 1982).
The first, roughly 1930 to 1936, includes such novels as Stamboul Train
(Orient Express), It's a Battlefield, England Made Me, A Gun for Sale,
and the Liberian travel book Journey without Maps. The background is
world-wide economic depression followed by the rise of Nazism. The
motifs include boredom, betrayal, a mild Marxism on occasion, a sense
of injustice, and an urgent, though hopeless, desire to reorder society.
The middle phase, roughly 1937 to 1951, includes most of the more
famous 'religious' novels, Brighton Rock, The PowerandtheGlory, The
Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, with A Burnt-out Case
appearing as a postscript a decade later. These deal with such basic
questions as the nature of evil, the role of suffering, the difficulties of
14 Landscapes

religious faith, the impossibilities of human relationships. The third

period, which begins in the early 1950s and still continues, reverts to the
earliest phase in content, though not in tone. Here, the cruelties and
absurdities of civilized life are recorded faithfully, but 'the tone grows
steadily mellower with each book until ... there is a deep acceptance of
life, and a tolerance of those maladies that cannot be overcome'
(Kurismootil 1982, 10). To know all is to forgive all. Indeed, this period
includes Greene's rather sad comedies.

Malcolm Lowry

A day of sunlight and swallows ...

And saw the fireman, by the fiddley, wave.
And laughed. And went on digging my own grave.
Lowry, from 'Hostage'

Alcoholic and manic-depressive, infantile, orally fixated, sexually

insecure, narcissistic, generally inept, and possibly a suicide, Malcolm
Lowry (1909-57) was also a literary genius. Although he published only
two novels during his lifetime, the second, Under the Volcano, is a
masterpiece. His whole opus has much to say to students of the
landscapes of the mind.
Malcolm Lowry's childhood was spent in a wealthy suburban setting
on the Cheshire side of the Liverpool conurbation. His father was a
successful businessman, a stem, low-church teetotaller, a very threaten-
ing super-ego; Lowry went in fear of authority all his life. He had an
ambivalent feeling for his mother, who at one point rejected him and
who often left with her husband on business trips. Sent to boarding-
school at age seven, he remained thus institutionalized until escaping to
sea between school and university. Lowry was a loner; in Mexico he
prayed to the Virgen de la Soledad, 'the Virgin for those who have
nobody them with.' He was a heavy drinker from his teens, a spinner of
tales from school magazine onwards, an anxious neurotic since his early
alienation from the deeply Calvinistic austerity of his family home. All
his life he rejected authority but craved dependence, a difficult psychic
balancing act, hardly conducive to serenity.
Lowry's undergraduate novel, Ultramarine (1933), was based on
experiences in 1927-8 as a deck-hand en route to the Far East. During
his time at Cambridge, he visited novelist Nordahl Grieg in Norway and
conceived the novel In Ballast to the White Sea, which was unfortunate-
ly destroyed by fire while still in manuscript. After Cambridge he visited
Landscapes 15

France and Spain, married, and, in 1935, travelled to New York. There,
already an alcoholic, he was admitted to the psychiatric wing of the
Bellevue Hospital, an experience that later figured in the novella Lunar
Caustic (1968). Lowry then tried scriptwriting in California. A failure in
Hollywood, he removed to Mexico, where his eighteen-month stay in
Cuernavaca provided material for his masterwork, Under the Volcano
(1947). Abandoned by his wife, thrown out of Mexico for drunken
excesses, he met his second wife in Los Angeles and retired with her to a
squatter's shack at Dollarton, on the north shore of Burrard Inlet,
opposite the city of Vancouver. Here they lived from 1940 to 1954, and
Dollarton figures, as Eridanus, in all the post-Ultramarine novels.
Dollarton became the home-base for a succession of trips: to Ontario
(1944); Mexico (1945-6), from which he was again expelled; Haiti, New
York, Ontario again (1946-7); and France and Italy (1947-9). All these
journeys figured in the four novel-travelogues, Hear Us O Lord from
Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1961), Dark as the Grave Wherein My
FriendlsLaid(196B), OctoberFeny toGabriola (1970), andLaMordida
(unfinished, unpublished).
In 1954 Lowry, forced to leave Dollarton, travelled to Italy in an
unsuccessful search for an alternative home-place, underwent psychiat-
ric treatment in London, and settled, in 1956, in the village of Ripe in
Sussex. His demise there a year later was recorded as 'death by
misadventure,' the latter word being an inadvertently accurate judg-
ment on the whole of Lowry's life.
The reader of the six published novels is immediately struck by certain
themes that recur throughout. Lowry's novels are autobiographical to
the highest degree. His only material was his own experiences, his own
feelings, his own journeyings, his own anguish. In every work the
protagonist is Lowry himself, with only the slightest changes of detail;
indeed, in at least one short story the author slips from 'Sigbj0rn
Wilderness,' the protagonist, to 'I' and back again. Many of Lowry's
characters bear Norwegian or Celtic names; to Lowry these peripheral
nations were breeders of strong, heroic, troubled seafarers, a role he
took on early in life.
The theme of the sea, unfettered, open, clean, but often violent, runs
through most of his works. On land, if a seashore is not available,
volcanoes are preferred. Volcanoes and storms at sea fascinated Lowry.
His own character involved a good deal of suppressed violence, and he
displayed bouts of high energy and indiscipline followed by passive
quiescence, a characteristic he shared with both volcanoes and the sea.
His identification with landscape features is not unexpected; a psychiat-
16 Landscapes

ric examination suggested that Lowry was unable to distinguish fully

between himself and his environment.
Further, all the novels are journey novels - whether actual, physical
journeys across landscape or seascape, or interior journeys through the
landscapes of the mind. Frequently, they may be read as both. Indeed,
Lowry conceived his whole opus as 'The Voyage That Never Ends,' with
a Dantesque cast in that Ultramarine and Lunar Caustic were seen as
Purgatorio, Under the Volcano and Dark as the Grave as Inferno, and
Hear Us O Lord and October Ferry as Paradiso. Within the journey
theme, the concepts of home and homelessness recur. The traveller is
frequently unhappy in his journeying; he seeks a place that he may call
home. Once found, however, home can be threatened by outside forces,
and the now-settled traveller fears its loss. Throughout this repeated
dialectic of journey and home, Lowry and his protagonists appear as
existential outsiders, achieving a brief insiderhood only in the squatters'
settlement at Dollarton.
With respect to his life in Dollarton, perhaps it is worthwhile here to
emphasize the Canadian-ness of Malcolm Lowry. Breit and Lowry
(1965) have noted that 'the most important novel ever written in Canada
is a novel about Mexico [Under the Volcano] written by an Englishman
in exile' and that Canada was Lowry's 'last stand.' Mexican Volcano is
ultimately pessimistic, and a reading of this novel alone has frequently
coloured Canadian literary views of Lowry; But, when we read his
poems about Burrard Inlet and his Canadian novellas and stories, we
realize that Lowry 'is not in fact writing about Canada as a transient
outsider. He is writing about it as a man who over fifteen years lived
himself into the environment that centred upon his fragile home where
the Pacific tides lapped and sucked under the floor-boards, and who
identified himself with that environment' (Woodcock 1965, 5). Perhaps
some of the Canadian antipathy towards immigrant Lowry is ex-
plained by the unflattering fact that 'it was really landscape more than
culture that influenced him in Canada' (New 1971, 131). In this sense
Lowry is a geographer's novelist, in general, and a Canadian geogra-
pher's novelist, in particular.
It is in Canada, and particularly in British Columbia, that wilderness
and city come into very close juxtaposition. Whereas nature appalled
Graham Greene, cities appalled Malcolm Lowry. For him, hell was
indeed a city, perhaps not like London, but certainly in the guise of
Oaxaca or Vancouver. In his hatred of the urban scene, Lowry himself
coined the word 'deathscape.' Yet, Lowry insisted on wandering off to
cities, especially foreign ones. In his work the home: away theme
Landscapes 17

appears as forcefully as in Greene, but without the latter's detachment.

For Lowry's intense identification with landscapes results in their
becoming 'inscapes,' regions of the soul.

Landscapes of the mind

This book, then, will explore the possibilities of otherscapes. First, by

investigating the nature of smell and sound, it will map the co-ordinates
of smellscape and soundscape. Plunging beyond the world of the senses,
I then enter the shadow realm of a half-dozen metaphorical landscapes.
Choosing these six metaphorical landscapes of the mind was not
difficult. As we seem naturally to conceptualize in terms of polarities, the
six 'scapes fall naturally into three such pairs. The antinomies I have
chosen seem to me the most basic to the human condition. Bodyscape:
inscape, as an entity, reflects our chief existential distinction, that
between self and non-self. Here we are dealing with the hoary
mind:body problem. The most significant geographical distinction for
humans is between home and away. Like body and mind, which operate
together to constitute the person, the home:away, or homescape:
escape, dialectic reflects the two basic conditions for animal being,
movement and rest. Finally, the childscape:deathscape antinomy con-
siders the fundamental progression of human beings from life to death,
from child to adult, and, for humanity at large, from rural surroundings
to an urbanized world.
We are dealing, then, both with sensuous capacities of which we know
very little and with metaphorical landscapes that mirror the basic
polarities of human existence. The book's argument follows a basic
progression. Early chapters are more scientific and psychological in
tone, and have clear implications for urban and regional planning. Later
chapters build upon these findings in investigating the interior of the
human mind in relation to the external environment. Concepts such as
smellscape and soundscape are developed and utilized again and again
in later, multisensory chapters. They accumulate naturally in 'Body-
scape' and, from this point, the progression is from body to mindscapes.
These later chapters touch on some awkward questions about the
human condition in the late-twentieth-century Western world. My aim is
to raise, rather than answer these questions, for finding answers is also
the task of the reader. My goal at this point is to add to the reader's
burden of awareness, to provide a counterweight for the unbearable
lightness of being.
I SENSUOUS
WORLDS
2 Smellscape

They haven't got no noses

The fallen sons of Eve ...
And Quoodle here discloses
All things that Quoodle can,
They haven't got no noses,
They haven't got no noses,
And goodness only knowses
The Noselessness of Man.
Quoodle, in G.K. Chesterton's The Flying Inn

Who among us has not witnessed the impatient dog-walker tugging the
leash of a rooted, sniffing animal, shouting, 'Come on, there's nothing
there,' and thereby acknowledging the dog's ineffable superiority in the
matter of smell? Dogs live in a world of scents:

The brilliant smell of water,

The brave smell of a stone,
The smell of dew and thunder,
The old bones buried under .. .
(Chesterton 1958, 163)

We cannot appreciated Quoodle' s celebration. Most of us are likely to

perceive only the unearthed old bones, and such smells are rarely
enjoyed by humans.

The sense of smell

The human sense of smell may once have been keen. It is likely that
aboriginal groups, such as Australians and the Ksan, use their sense of
smell to an extent not much different from that of animals (Lowenstein
1966, 173). But the general reduction in size of the huge hominid snout
has been accompanied by the atrophy of olfaction. Up to 90 per cent of
22 Sensuous Worlds

our perceptual intake is visual, and much of the rest is auditory and
tactile (Porteous 1977, 1982). Unlike many other animals, we rely on
shape and colour for distinguishing objects and inhabit a smell-poor
sensory environment.
Yet, smell is immensely meaningful to humans. Combined with
gustatory sensations, it is responsible for flavour in foods. It is an
efficient warning device against contamination. There may be an
olfactory component in sexual attraction, and a human pheromone has
been isolated ('ATTRACT GIRLS! Our pheromone female attractant
spray makes men desirable, attractive, virtually irresistible to women!
Guaranteed!'). This importance in the matter of food, disease, and sex
suggests a basic species-survival function for smell. However, West-
erners seem keen to eliminate their personal smells, replacing their
erased bodily secretions with perfumes derived from, or created as
surrogates for, the bodily secretions of other mammals.
Further, smell is an important sense in that it is primarily a very basic,
emotional, arousing sense, unlike vision and sound, which tend to
involve cognition. Certain smells are, therefore, deeply meaningful to
individuals. The smell of a certain institutional soap may carry a person
back to the purgatory of boarding-school. A particular floral fragrance
reminds one of a lost love. A gust of odour from a spice emporium may
waft one back, in memory, to Calcutta. And above all, as we shall see,
smells can be memory releasers for the reconstruction of one's
childhood.
Except in the realms of neurophysiology and psychology, little
research has been done on smell. Checking through the planning
literature on urban aesthetics from the early 1950s to 1984, I find
considerable lip-service has been paid to the obvious notion that the
urban environment is a multisensory experience. We are enjoined to
study smell, sound, and taste. But this, inevitably, is simply an initial
ploy, to be followed by a discussion of merely visual aesthetics. The
landscape-assessment literature is worse, for here the issue is almost
always 'visual quality' and practitioners continue to visualize framed
landscapes in neo-picturesque terms.
A number of environmental psychologists have given passing mention
to the subject of smell. Among geographers, only Tuan has devoted even
a few pages to olfaction (1977, 10-13; 1982, 125-6). Bunge and Bordessa
(1975) give smell two paragraphs in their description of a Toronto
neighbourhood. Environmental smells seem to elicit few remarks from
observers in North American cities, but appear to be more important to
children and urban Mexicans (Rapoport 1977).
Smellscape 23

Environmental aestheticians have called for a more thorough investi-

gation of the environmental aspects of the non-visual senses (Porteous
1982). This chapter will, therefore, pioneer the exploration of the
landscape of smell, beginning with an overview of recent findings in
psychology. Using the triad person-time-space as an organizing frame-
work, I will investigate smell as a fimction of person, of place, and of
time. Considerable attention will be paid to the role of smell in memory
and childhood, and to the possible applications of smellscape studies.

Psychological bases

Olfactory research in psychology has progressed remarkably since

William James (1893, 69) asserted that nothing was known of the
chemical senses. Speculation about smell can, of course, be traced back
to classical Greece, but modern scientific study began with Zwaarde-
maker in 1895 (Boring 1942).
There remains much confusion concerning a basic classification
of odours. Categories range from a minimum of four to a maxi-
mum of forty-four, but the mode is close to the magic number seven, plus
or minus two. In 1756, Linnaeus suggested seven classes: aromatic,
fragrant, ambrosial (musky), alliaceous (garlicky), hircine (goaty), foul,
and nauseating. Note that four of these categories are defined hedonical-
ly. Two hundred years and much research later, Amoore (1970) also
decided upon seven classes, considerably congruent with the Linnaean
system: ethereal, floral, musky, pepperminty, camphoraceous, pun-
gent, and putrid. By analogy with the colour spectrum, it is claimed that
all scents are combinations of two or more of these primary odours or of
their many subclasses.
Boring (1942, 437) suggested that, in the 1940s, the study of smell was
at the same scientific level as that of sight and hearing in 1750! Thanks to
recent work in Scandinavia and the United States, the gap has now been
reduced, although much remains to be learned about odour stimuli,
acuity, coding, and memory. Some of the more important findings,
largely based on Engen (1982), are presented here.
The concept of adaptation is vital. The perceived intensity of a smell
declines rapidly after one has been exposed to it for some time. Not that
the smell disappears, but the perceiver becomes habituated to it, as, in
Aesop's fable, the tanner gradually learned to ignore the stench of
tanning hides. In everyday terms, one's house has a characteristic smell
readily perceived by visitors but apparent to the occupant only after
having been away from home for some time. This habituation effect is
24 Sensuous Worlds

crucial to humanistic studies, for it will be apparent in later discussions

that almost all literary descriptions of smells (with the important
exception of childhood memories, which are distanced in time rather
than space) are the work of non-residents. Thus, in the humanistic study
of smellscapes, as elsewhere, the insider:outsider antinomy (Relph
1976) is a crucial one.
A second important feature relates to the psychology of hedonics. Of
the estimated 400,000 existing odorous compounds, Hamanzu (1969)
estimates that only 20 per cent are regarded as pleasant by humans.
Further, there appears to be a strong tendency to judge unfamiliar smells
as unpleasant; this finding relates to the concept of habituation. A
matrix with pleasant/unpleasant and familiar/unfamiliar dimensions
would yield an overwhelmingly high incidence of odours in the polarized
familiar/pleasant and unfamiliar/unpleasant cells. This dichotomy re-
lates to the alerting, warning, function of smell, and provides some
support for the importance of the insider (familiar):outsider (unfamiliar)
antinomy in smell perception.
Vast individual and group differences in the sensory response to smell
are a third major finding (Gilbert and Wysocki 1987). Although all
persons are likely to judge an unfamiliar smell as unpleasant, the same
smell may be familiar and pleasant to one individual but unfamiliar and
unpleasant to another person. This experience is a common one for
outsiders, such as tourists, inner-city visitors to farms, and urban
newcomers to country living. Industrial occupation is also an important
factor. Besides the distinctive odour of coastal fish-packing, the Western
Canadian smellscape contains both 'sweet' and 'sour' regions, product,
respectively, of timber processing and natural-gas drilling. The rotten-
egg smell of gas can drift for scores of miles, and occasionally envelops
the cities of Calgary and Edmonton. Although such smellscapes may be
offensive to city dwellers, modem Canadian folklore includes the
pulp-mill worker who tells the offended middle-class environmentalist
that the sulphite odour of his plant 'smells of money,' a variation of the
old Yorkshire saying, 'Where there's muck there's brass.'
Further, odour tolerances and preferences appear to be age-related.
Children are much more tolerant of basic body smells, such as of sweat
and faeces, than are adults. Few smell preferences are innate (Engen
1979); most are learned, which shows the importance of cultural
adaption and insideness. There is, in fact, little evidence that universally
pleasant or unpleasant smells exist, unless the almost universal adult
dislike of the faeces odour can be so considered. However, generalized
preferences, at least among Westerners, appear to favour natural
Smellscape 25

scents, from flowers, fruits, and vegetables (Montcrieff 1966). Recent

world smell surveys (Gilbert and Wysocki 1987; Radford 1989) suggest
banana as the most, and natural gas as the least preferred smells on the
global scale. Inexplicable regional differences, however, are apparent.
Generalized dislikes tend to include many chemical and synthetic
smells, especially those emitted by chemical factories, food-processing
plants, refineries, garbage dumps, and most of all, engines, especially
diesel engines. Given such generalized preferences, it is unfortunate that
the majority of mankind in industrial societies is confined to urban areas
dominated by machinekind.
Finally, psychological research indicates that olfaction seems to
stimulate emotional or motivational arousal (Engen 1982, 129), whereas
visual experience is much more likely to involve thought and cognition.
Vision clearly distances us from the object. We frame 'views' in pictures
and camera lenses; the likelihood of an intellectual response is
considerable. By contrast, smells environ. They penetrate the body and
permeate the immediate environment, and thus one's response is much
more likely to involve strong affect.
Useful concepts derivable from psychological research, then, include
habituation, major individual differences, age-related preferences,
generalized dislike of urban and industrial odours, strong emotional
reactions to smell, and a general negative view of environmental smells.
Unfortunately, psychophysical and psychological researchers tend to
dismiss non-laboratory work as 'subjective,' 'descriptive,' 'non-
explanatory,' or 'anecdotal' (Engen 1982). That there have been very
few naturalistic field studies of odour perception is a severe restriction
on our understanding of the phenomenon. It is my contention, however,
that humanistic studies, if coupled with scientific work, can significantly
enrich our understanding of olfaction.

Smellscape

The concept of smellscape suggests that, like visual impressions, smells

may be spatially ordered or place-related. It is clear, however, that any
conceptualization of smellscape must recognize that the perceived
smellscape will be non-continuous, fragmentary in space and episodic in
time, and limited by the height of our noses from the ground, where
smells tend to linger. Only rarely will we find examples of smell
isopleths, as in Spencer's The Salt Line (1984) where a character
remarks: 'There's a place along the road where you can smell the Gulf ...
You could draw the line of that salt smell on the map.'
26 Sensuous Worlds

Smellscape, moreover, cannot be considered apart from the other

senses. Many smells provide little information about the location of their
source in space. Yet it is common experience that smells are not
randomly distributed, but are located with reference to source, air
currents, and direction and distance from source. In combination with
vision and tactility, smell and the other apparently 'non-spatial' senses
provide considerable enrichment of our sense of space and the character
of place. We are all familiar with the fact that places may be character-
ized individually, or even typed, by smell, from the smell of India, of
Mexico, of the London of a generation ago during a 'pea-souper,' of Los
Angeles today during a smog alert, to hospitals and the smoking section
at the rear of a passenger airplane.
A major problem in studying the non-visual sensory landscape is the
general lack of an appropriate vocabulary. Anglo-Saxonically, I incline
to 'smellscape' and 'smell' rather than 'odourscape' and 'odour.'
Synonyms for smell are rarely positive (fragrance), often neutral (odour,
scent), and frequently negative (stink, stench, reek, pong, hum), while
particularly bad smells may be adjectivalized as 'noisome,' an apparently
auditory term. The metaphoric load carried by smell is ambivalent. We
may be in bad odour, and thus unlikely to achieve the odour of sanctity. I
smell a rat and sniff it out, savouring the sweet smell of success. Further,
individual smells are often difficult to describe or name, even though
instantly recognizable. This verbalization difficulty is known as the
'tip-of-the-nose' problem (Lawless and Engen 1977).
A basic spatial vocabulary can be derived from soundscape studies
(Schafer 1977). Soundscapes consist of sound events, some of which are
soundmarks (compare landmarks). Similarly, smellscapes will involve
smell events and smellmarks. 'Eyewitness' is replaced by 'earwitness'
and 'nosewitness.' Visual evidence becomes hearsay and nosesay. The
heightening of visual perception becomes ear-cleaning and nose-
training.
Surveys and mapping of smellscape may perhaps be performed via
smellwalks (compare soundwalks, and the Lynchean 'walk around
the block'). Environmental assessment of smells can be undertaken by
questionnaire and interview surveys of the general population, or
by teams of highly sensitized, nose-trained experts. A World Smellscape
Project might match the former World Soundscape Project (Truax 1978),
but would find great difficulty with recording. Historical research, in
particular, must rely on nosewitness (compare oral history), but it is
likely that insiders may not be the best witnesses because of habituation.
Recent soundscape work, for example, has cast doubt on the World
Smellscape 27

Soundscape Project's use of elderly residents of a locality as expert

earwitnesses (Porteous and Mastin 1985). The value of the elderly as
respondents is also reduced by the general decline in sensitivity,
discrimination, and recognition of sounds, smells, and tastes with
advancing age (Colavita 1978; Schiffman 1979).
One alternative is to explore the depiction of smell, both spatially and
temporally, in literature. The use of odour in literature emphasizes that,
while one may stand outside a visual landscape and judge it artistically,
as one does a painting, one is immersed in smellscape; it is immediately
evocative, emotional, and meaningful. Literature, largely British and
twentieth-century, provides ample data for the discussion of smells of
persons and landscapes in space and through time.

The smell of persons

Personal smells vary according to race, ethnicity, culture, age, sex, and
class. North Americans attempt to banish personal smells and secre-
tions, and prefer floral perfumes, whereas, in the East, 'perfumes are
heavy, intriguing, sleepy and mildly intoxicating' (Montcrieff 1966, 297).
Early-twentieth-century British writers were astounded by the use of
patchouli in the Balkans; until recently, Continentals were far less
averse to male perfumery than were the abstemious British (Lowenstein
1966). The milky smell of babies is often liked, whereas the smell of old
people or the sick is avoided. An odour of sanctity pervades the corpse of
a saint. No war novel is complete without reference to the sweet stench
of bloated human remains.
The Viet Cong were reputedly able to scent American troops by their
cheesy odour, product of a high consumption of milk derivatives.
Similarly, the Japanese once knew Europeans as bata-kusai ('stinks of
butter'). Europeans and Americans make reciprocal claims. It may no
longer be appropriate to mention the highly differentiated smells of the
basic human racial groups. In a less anxious age, however, Graham
Greene recalls the smell of his Liberian carriers during a trek through the
bush: 'it wasn't an unpleasant smell, sweet or sour, it was bitter, and
reminded me of a breakfast food I had as a child ... something vigorous
and body-building which I disliked. The bitter taint was mixed with the
rich plummy smell of the kola nuts .. . with an occasional flower scent one
couldn't trace in the thick untidy greenery. All the smells were drawn
out, as the heat increased' (Greene 1971a, 78). It is significant that
Greene records these smells on the first day of the trek; thereafter his
record of smells is non-existent.
28 Sensuous Worlds

The northern races have their own peculiar odours. Maclean (1964,
54) records inter-war Russian peasants as 'gnarled beings whose drab,
ragged, sweat-soaked clothes exhaled a sour odour of corruption.'
Nwnerous childhood reminiscences of English rural life record the
strong, wild, acrid smell of gipsies, a compound of body, food, and
woodsmoke. Irish labourers were also singled out. Kitchen (1963, 44)
came across a group of Irish farm workers boiling potatoes: 'The
potatoes smelled good, but the Irishmen didn't.' Less judgmental was
Alison Uttley, who was proffered 'a penny with the Irishmen's smell all
over it, which she kept in a little box, safe with its penetrating odour, to
remind her of them when they were far away' (Uttley 1931, 201).
These may be class smells, for the social classes were, until a
generation or two ago, readily distinguished by smell. Labouring
peoples' work was dirty and promoted sweating, yet their sanitary
arrangements prevented complete cleanliness. Conversely, the well-off
sweated less and could wash more. Little wonder, then, that the working
classes were long noted for their offensive smell, from Shakespeare's
crowds in their sweaty nightcaps to Huxley's (1977, 55) painfully
sensitive Denis: 'how unpleasant the crowd smelt! He lit a cigarette. The
smell of cows was preferable.' George Orwell's forays into the foreign
fields of Burma, Spain, and working-class northern England resulted in
writings rich in smells. Sensitive to the prevailing inter-war notion
among the elite that the working classes stank, he nevertheless painfully
recorded their odoriferous peculiarities, to the intense discomfiture of
bourgeois communists.
Within the mass of 'great unwashed,' of course, some individuals
smell much more rankly than others. The limits of tolerance are met in
Roberts's Ragged Schooling (1976, 40) in the persons of the homeless
outcast Ignatius and the 'two girls who lived behind the fish frier's you
could smell ... at a distance of six feet.' As a schoolboy, H.E. Bates
(1969, 42) was especially indignant at being made to 'sit next to a boy
who stinks.' This smell event remained strong in his memory: 'the
peculiar acrid stench of the unwashed lingers in my nostrils.' I can
confirm the importance of similar episodes, my rural childhood being
well-stocked with poor children, Irishmen, and gipsies, whose smells,
however, seemed much less important than their interesting selves.
Kitchen's unpleasant encounter with Irishmen was redeemed by a girl
who smelled of violets (Kitchen 1963, 159). In Lolita (Nabokov 1959),
Hwnbert Hwnbert smells little except his nymphet, a compound of
cheap perfumes with the occasional 'hot breath of popcorn.' Tereza
Batista's men are distinguished by their smell, from the dry woodsy
Smellscape 29

aroma of the doctor to the salty sea-smell of Januario's chest (Amado

1977}. Amado's most famous novel is Gabriela: Clove and Cinnamon
(1978}, the title outlining the heroine's chief physical characteristics, her
smell and her colour. Aldous Huxley, wishing to acknowledge distaste
for one of his characters, names him Mercaptan, ethyl mercaptan being
the smell of the sktmk (Huxley 1948}. More intimately, and pleasantly,
Charles Kingsley, author and priest, writes to his wife that his 'hands are
perfumed with [your1 delicious limbs, and I cannot wash off the scent'
(Chitty 1974, 82}. Would that he could, given recent attempts by forensic
scientists to develop odourprints along the lines of fingerprints and
voiceprints.

Smell in space and place

People are identified with place, and thus become components of a

general smellscape. Some smellscapes are large; world geographical
regions can be defined inter alia by intersubjective odour impressions.
Almost invariably, for the reasons already noted, odorous descriptions
are the work of outsiders.
No account oflndia, from Kipling to the recent popular novels of M. M.
Kaye and the accounts of Geoffrey Moorhouse and the Naipauls, fails to
invoke the peculiar smell of that subcontinent, half-corrupt, half-
aromatic, a mixture of dung, sweat, heat, dust, rotting vegetation, and
spices. The intimate relationship between smell and the exotic, between
smell and primeval urges, is exemplified by Kipling's joyous celebration
of India's 'heat and smells and oils and spices and puffs of temple incense
and sweat and darkness and dirt and lust and cruelty' (Fitzgerald 1983}.
Africa is equally well-served. Native African writers, such as Ngugi
wa Thiong'o, rarely supply significant smell descriptions, unless refer-
ring to the impact of the city upon a rural African. White visitors,
however, associate certain smells with the continent, as when Greene
(Atkins 1966, 67), smelling the smoke drifting over the sea from
Freetown, Sierra Leone, exclaims that 'it will always be to me the smell
of Africa.'
White Africans, however, are aware of greater detail than a simple
capsule odour. Entering a 'native slum, ' the white is overcome by visual,
auditory, and odorific sensations, especially the stench of 'urine and
dung and rotting meat' (Ruark 1964, 97). Indian bazaars in Nairobi, in
particular, are redolent of the Orient: 'The howling, reeking bazaars,
where every smell known to the East was mingled in one magnificent
ripe stink of rotting fruit and dust and dung and curry powder and wet
30 Sensuous Worlds

plaster and no plumbing and ancient filthy habits' (p. 97). It is notable
that the same author never conjures up the smell of white Africa, and
rarely goes beyond sound and visual impressions when dealing with
blacks, except when black African meets white and scents a contrast:
'Today he wanted to play nigger. Today he had a great deal of thinking to
do, and he did not want to do it permeated by the white smell -the smell
of the white man, the white man's food and drink and clothing, the
greasy stink of the white man's petrol fumes and belching diesel
exhausts. He wanted to do his thinking surrounded by the smells with
which he had grown up, the comfortable smells of wood smoke and the
acrid reek of goats and the old greasy odour of the hut in which the food
was cooked and children born and goats kept at night for safety' (p. 149).
The smell of the internal-combustion engine has become normal in the
cities of the Third World, as in the North. For Malcolm Lowry (1972,
115), the Mexico City of the 1930s was chiefly noise and smell, and the
smell was a compound of old and new, organic and inorganic, 'the
familiar smell ... of gasoline, excrement, and oranges.'
The occupation of the Falkland Islands by Argentine troops in 1982
heightened the contrast between Latin American and British cultures.
Returning to windy Stanley after the restoration of British control,
Ian Strange (1983) noted that the soundscape had radically changed
because of the introduction of many more telephone lines. But smell-
scape changes were more important: 'To me the most striking feature
was the smell of the town, a smell of a distinct nature I had noted
on weekend evenings during a stay on the outskirts of Buenos Aires:
a smell of wood smoke mixed with barbecued meat and seasoned
sunflower-seed oil. Although not unpleasant, the wood smoke was alien
to this little town, and it brought home yet another feature that
demonstrated yet again how different the two cultures are at an
individual level' (p. 32).
The Third World, then, has its distinctive smell regions. One may
distinguish Cuernavaca from Cairo, from Calcutta, from Canton by the
nose alone. The urban-industrial world, however, is not immune to
regionalization by olfaction. Here the great divide is East and West,
First and Second worlds, Capitalist and Communist. Anthony Burgess
(1963) has characterized the smell 'of the essential Russia (an Edward-
ian smell, really, to match the furniture): tobacco, spirits, port-type
wine, fried butter, leather, metal polish' (p. 159) but few visitors to
Russia have analysed so clearly the inescapable indigenous odour of
that country as the Scot Fitzroy Maclean, who becomes aware of it, as
did Greene in Liberia or Sierra Leone, immediately upon entering the
Smellscape 31

country. His first perceptions, naturally, are visual; but, almost

simultaneously,

it was then I first noticed the smell, the smell which, for the next two and a half
years, was to form an inescapable background to my life. It was not quite like
anything that I had ever smelt before, a composite aroma compounded of
various ingredient odours inextricably mingled one with another. There was
always, so travellers in Imperial Russia tell me, an old Russian smell made up
from the scent of black bread and sheepskin and vodka and unwashed hu-
manity. Now to these were added the modem smells of petrol and disinfectant
and the clinging, cloying odour of Soviet soap. The resulting, slightly musty
flavor pervades the whole country, penetrating every nook and cranny, from
the Kremlin to the remotest hovel in Siberia. Since leaving Russia, I have smelt
it once or twice again, for Russians in sufficiently large numbers seem to
carry it with them abroad, and each time with that special power of evocation
which smells possess, it has brought back with startling vividness the memories
of those years. (Maclean 1964, 11)

Yet Maclean later notes, on penetrating Soviet Central Asia, that the
cold musty smell of Russia diminishes as the ambience becomes warmer
and more 'Eastern-smelling' (p. 68).
Maclean fails to mention boiled cabbage in this passage. Yet it is
notable that many Western writers, wishing to evoke everyday life in
totalitarian regimes, resort to the boiled-cabbage smell. Boiled cabbage
lingers pungently in the corridors and canteens of Orwell's 1984 (1954).
It persists in numerous prison novels. It surfaces in schools, and is used
as a reliable indicator of the hopeless, monotonous self-imprisonment of
lonely people in boarding-houses; Huxley (1978, 10), for example,
laments the despair associated with institutional 'crambe repetita.'
Continents, countries, regions, neighbourhoods (especially 'ethnic'
ones), and houses have their particular smellscapes. I can recall, for
example, the exotic smells oflndia; the wild-herb scents of rural Greece;
the peculiar odour of Humberside mud; the smells of horse, sea, and
grass on Easter Island; Italian pasta and aniseed in Boston's North End;
Arab and Chinese food in its South End; the cedar kindling and dried
alder in my woodshed.
The urban-rural distinction is clearly identifiable through the nostrils.
In urban areas, as already noted, individual smell events are as figure to
a ground of omnipresent vehicle vapours, dimly perceived because of
habituation. Individual cities, even urban types, may be distinguished by
smell. Pulp-mill towns, colliery towns, leather-working towns, chemical
32 Sensuous Worlds

towns, smelting towns, each has its particular type of smell. The small
town of Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, home of three breweries, can be
distinguished afar by the rich, thick smell of brewing. Nearby Knotting-
ley has an equally rich, biting scent of creosote and tar. A local saying
on the Monterey Peninsula once characterized three major towns as
Carmel-by-the-sea, Pacific-Grove-by-God (originally a religious re-
treat), and Monterey-by-the-smell. But change is constant: on returning
to Cannery Row in the early 1960s John Steinbeck was met by the scent of
tourists rather than by the sickening stench of fish (Hartman 1986).
In heavy industrial centres bad smells were associated with pollution.
Until well after the Second World War, every small English town had its
gasworks, where coal was gasified for the supply of the town. It was a
sweet, sickly, and ultimately poisonous smell. Roberts tells of the
'noxious vapours' that bourgeois environmentalists claimed had killed a
Salford wood early this century. Less concerned with trees than human
health, he retorts: 'These same "noxious vapours" we ourselves
breathed in concentrated form: our own streets stood immediately under
the gasworks in the path of the prevailing winds. Sometimes the air stank
abominably for days on end. But very few questioned the right of
industry to ruin our health and environment in pursuit of profit. The poor
were expendable' (Roberts 1976, 133). Not only expendable, but also
invisible and unsmellable. It is not by accident that the West Ends of
English cities were located upwind of the East Ends, where lived 'the
great unwashed.'
Judging by accounts such as Roberts's, most urban smells were
evaluated negatively. Some individuals, such as Roberts's father, 'used
to damn the odours endemic to [the] neighbourhood' (p. 39), but, in
general, the working classes had to adapt to noxious fumes while the
well-off moved to suburbs or countryside.
In contrast, accounts of country life, even among the poor, are far
more positive with regard to smellscape. Analysis of Beckwith's (1973)
autobiography suggests that, while most urban smells are negatively
rated, almost all rural smells are regarded as positive. The cottages of
the poor were, of course, the scene of bad odours resulting from
inadequate sanitation. Cottage life was idealized by the Victorian
middle classes, armed with sketchbooks; Punch, however, had a
different view, at once satirizing middle-class visual perceptions and
pointing out the grim reality of another sensory modality:

The cottage homt!s of England

Alas! How strong they smell.
Smellscape 33

There's fever in the cesspool,

And sewage in the well.
(Woodforde 1969, 5)

There was, of course, but 'country children and their parents [were)
supposed to be accustomed to strong smells' (Hom 1976, 58).
Moreover, smelly cottages could soon be left behind for the more
positive smellscapes of farm and field. At the farm was 'the sweet smell
of the cows and the ringing of the milk against the zinc pail' (Ashby 1961,
168). In the fields, 'the faint weedy smell ... from the river' and, again,
'the sweet animal smell of cows' (Huxley 1978, 118). In farmhouses, 'the
kitchen had the warm, half-buttery, half-milky smell in which was also
mingled the odour of cows and cow manure. There was also about the
entire house an ancient and church-like smell, strong with woodsmoke
and dampness' (Bates 1969, 166). On the coast, 'the smell of the sea, of
seaweed drying in the sun, of plaice being fried for breakfast, of
horse-dung and the whiff of vinegar from whelk-stalls' (p. 72). But, on the
road, 'a pile of soddened dung always steamed on the air, the ammoniac
sting of it powerful enough to kill even the aroma of baking' (p. 70).
Early-twentieth-century rural smellscapes, then, were redolent with
the odours of animals, notably horses and cows. That vegetation was
also important in the smellscape will be seen below in 'Smellscape in
time.' Late-twentieth-century rural places, now well-supplied with
pre-packaged food, with high rates of automobile usage, and with
factory farming, have lost their distinctive odoriferous character.
Indeed, the massing of animals in production-line industrialized agricul-
ture has become a major source of rural smell pollution.
Whether urban or rural, smells identify places in the lived-world, as is
especially apparent in H.E. Bates's Vanished World (1969). Bates was
repelled by the local boot factory, with its 'stench of leather and gaslight'
(p. 36), and hardly more pleased by long waits in the barber's, where 'the
smell of shag, after two or three hours, had the power to move
mountains' (p. 37). Much more preferable was the bakery: 'There was
always a great heavenly warmth about it, together with the even
heavenlier fragrance of new-baked bread' (p. 70). Indeed, in a few pages
Bates provided us with a complete smellscape, not of a house and
garden, as Proust did, but of the significant components of a small
agrarian town.
Finally, early-twentieth-century travel was associated with smells one
is unlikely to perceive today. The town child was delighted with the
sensuous quality of a horse-brake: 'the gleaming brass and neatsfoot oil
34 Sensuous Worlds

of the harness, the odours of horse-flesh and horse droppings, the

summer dust, the harsh crunch of metal wheel rims on the rough stones
of the road' (Bates 1969, 32). In contrast, a rural farm labourer is pleased
with the new bus service in the 1930s, but still has much regret for the
sensuous quality of former travel modes: 'In one thing would the
carrier's cart beat the modem bus, and that was in the variety of smells.
There was tarpaulin over all. Then came leather, then apples and
cow-cake, with occasionally a calf or a crate of chickens' (Kitchen 1963,
92). Speed and convenience have clearly been paid for in terms of
odoriferous pleasure. Bates's (1969, 85) reaction is clear when he speaks
of the advent of the 'horseless carriage stinking of oil and petrol.'

Smellscape in time

There appears to be no general history of environmental smells. Social

historians of Britain give but passing mention to ambient odours. Yet it is
clear that any future historian of the smellscape would have to include:
the medieval ripeness of houses, persons, and foods; the characteristic
smells of 'occupational' streets in pre-modem towns, from Bristol's Mille
Street to York's Shambles, where one would have encountered the raw
reek of butchery and blood; the changes in country scents that came with
the planting of many miles of thorn hedges during Enclosure; the animal
odours of cities before the development of long-distance milk transport
and mechanical intra-urban conveyances, and the like.
The development of empire was clearly responsible for the diffusion of
exotic smells into traditional smellscapes. I think of the 'British' smells of
the Indian subcontinent: railways; the English flowers of Indian
hill-stations; the characteristic smells of drains, Christian churches, and
hollyhocks in Rangoon. The process was a two-way one; Victorian
gardeners radically altered English smellscapes by importing and
acclimatizing hundreds of alien species of flowering plants. In the
present century, the growing homogenization of the world smellscape,
under the pressure of American-style 'sanitization' in housing, clothing,
and food packaging and display, is a process worthy of study.
Perhaps the most striking change, still possibly accessible to oral
historians, is the fairly recent adaptation of huge urban populations to a
basic 'keynote' smell compounded by metal and oil products. On the
more positive side, late-twentieth-century pollution legislation has
considerably reduced our opportunity to experience the formerly charac-
teristic odour of British cities, compounded of coal fires, industrial
processes, and smog.
Smellscape 35

In this chapter, however, I am chiefly concerned with smells that may

be personally experienced on a cyclical basis, smells that recur daily,
weekly, seasonally, or annually. Smells vary both from day to day and
throughout the day. Frosty or dewy mornings are especially conducive to
smell generation. At daybreak and at dusk, smells are especially
apparent. Weather conditions are important, for rainstorms may stir up
'a rich smell of elder flower, hemlock, and dogroses' (Kitchen 1963, 24).
The landscape smells clean after rain.
The first half of the twentieth century was noted for its weekly smell
events. Domestic economy required wash day and baking day. Wash
day occurred on Mondays, and children were fascinated by its smells of
heat and moisture, to be followed by 'the hot smell of iron on calico'
(Ashby 1961, 109). Baking day was even more odorous, when 'the house
smelt rich and sweet of cakes and buttermilk scones and hot jams' and
'men and boys came in to enjoy the orgy of heat and scent and promise'
(pp. 209 and 215).
Smells are also indicative and evocative of seasonal change. English
villages sixty years ago abounded in seasonal odours. In early summer,
at haymaking time, 'always the air in June seems to have been clotted
with the intoxication of mown grass, or May blossom, of moon-daisies
dying along the paling swathes ... the air full of the scent of it, mixed with
the fragrance of honeysuckle and meadowsweet and an occasionaly
pungent pong as the horse broke wind' (Bates 1969, 53, 86). Few rural
accounts fail to mention the smellfulness of haymaking, when 'all the air
is full of scent and hazy mists' (Kitchen 1963, 152). By late summer,
'down in the hollows, hovering in the crisp night air, drifted a most
appetizing smell of herrings being fried for a late meal .. . the warm night
was sometimes fragrant with the scent of cut grass; and about this
season too, the pungent odour of shallots lying out in the garden to ripen
off came in soft whiffs across the hedges' (Bourne 1912, 11). This is a
blend of both season-specific and idiosyncratic smells, whereas, for fall,
there is only one indicator smell: 'raking and burning weeds, the slow
blue smoke and pungent smell of which is perhaps the most autwnnal of
autwnnal things' (Horn 1976, 71).
Even in winter, when the sense of smell may be deadened by cold,
Kitchen appreciates the healthy 'heady smell' of farm manure and 'the
sweet smell of tobacco on a frosty morning' (1963, 222). Indoors,
throughout the winter, store-rooms 'smelled of apples, ripe and
sweating and laid out ... for keeping' (Bates 1969, 96). And, in spring,
one returned to 'the smell of new-turned earth, the free life and the fresh
air' (Kitchen 1963, 129).
36 Sensuous Worlds

The seasons of rural Portugal are equally explicitly identified by

non-visual cues. 'The mountain changes its scents and sounds through-
out the year' (Jenkins 1979). In spring, the strong smell of eucalyptus fails
to mask the wild rosemary or the strong apricot smell of chanterelles.
The early summer scent of wild lavender on upper slopes and orange and
lemon at lower elevations gives way to a general smell of heated earth in
late summer, followed by the 'most delicious smell of all ... the sweet
freshness of the first autumn rains' (p. 21).
Annual and occasional events are also recognizable by their associat-
ed smells. One recalls the musty smell of church, the deep smell of
graveyard earth at a funeral, and the grave release of the rich-smelling
'ham tea' that followed. Or the crisp smell of new clothes at Whitsun-
tide, the rich animal smell of a new pair of shoes actually soled with
leather, or the 'Flower Show ... the most scented day of all the summer'
(Ashby 1961, 202). Irish country fairs are reported perhaps most
realistically: 'The pleasant smell of fresh dung, the warm smell of
animals, and old clothes, and tobacco smoke' (O'Brien 1963, 129).
The loss of formerly familiar smells is also a measure of the passage of
time, of modernization and change. Many palaeotechnic smells will
rarely be smelled again. Few of us bake our own bread now. I well
remember the sudden advent of soft, wrapped, sliced, steam-baked
bread during my childhood in the 1940s. As if cognizant of their imminent
deprivation, perceptive village children would mock (to the tune of
'Knees Up, Mother Brown'):

Jackson's shop-bought bread

It stinks just like lead -
No bloody wonder, farts like thunder,
Jackson's shop-bought bread.

As in other areas of life, modernization drives out sensory quality.

Factory bread merely exemplifies the growing modem tendency
towards homogenization and placelessness (Relph 1976). As early as the
tum of the century, there was considerable concern that civilization's
tendency to eliminate odours would have deleterious effect on human
sexuality and aesthetic life in general (Engen 1982). Aldous Huxley,
always avant garde, expressed this in novelistic terms. An English
couple enter an Italian store, 'filled with a violent smell of goat's milk
cheese, pickled tunny, tomato preserve and highly flavoured sausage.'
The lady chokes, reaching for her Parma violets. The shopkeeper
retorts: "'I forestieri sono troppo delicati. "He's quite right," said Mr.
Smellscape 37

Cardon. "We are. In the end, I believe, we shall come to sacrifice

everything, to comfort and cleanliness. Personally, I always have the
greatest suspicion of your perfectly hygienic and well-padded Utopias.
As for this particular stink," he sniffed the air, positively with relish, "I
don't really know what you have to object to it. It's wholesome, it's
natural, it's tremendously historical. The shops of the Etruscan grocers,
you may be sure, smelt just as this does"' (Huxley 1978, 190). Relph's
fear of placelessness is expressed mainly in visual terms. He may be sure
that the world-wide homogeneity of faceless glass buildings will be
matched by continuous Muzak and wholesale deodorization. The
American motel bathroom, 'sanitized for your protection,' is the
antiseptic symbol of sensuous death. Because all environmental smells
cannot be pleasant, we will have none at all.
Smell and memory
In environmental aesthetics, the intuitive discoveries of humanists or
writers are often con.firmed, perhaps centuries later, by experiment
(Porteous 1982). Nowhere is this truer than in what is now described, by
psychologists, as 'the Proustian hypothesis of odor memory' (Engen
1982, 98). The adult Proust is irresistibly reminded of the beloved
Combray of his childhood by the taste and smell of petites madeleines.
He generalizes this effect as: 'But when from a long-distant past nothing
subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and
scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more
unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of
things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting
and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear
unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the
vast structure of recollection' (Proust 1970, 36). Recent psychological
experiments (Engen and Ross 1973; Engen 1977) have con.firmed that,
while we may distinguish between smells with only 20 per cent accuracy,
we are able to remember these smells with almost the same degree of
accuracy up to a year later. In contrast, visual recognition shows an
almost 100 per cent accuracy within minutes of the original test, but this
accuracy rapidly falls off with time. According to Engen (1982, 107-8),
'our data clearly support the observations of so many writers, as well as
individual experiences [that] time seems to play no role in odor
memory.' It is suggested that olfactory receptors are plugged directly
into the brain's limbic system, the seat of emotion, and that this direct
connection between smell and emotion had strategic evolutionary value
for our ancestors (Gloor 1978).
38 Sensuous Worlds

So significant was Proust's suggestion that many subsequent writers

have used his smell-generated flashback technique. As early as 1925,
Huxley uses the smell of an Italian bay-leaf to take a character back
through years of time to the bay rum of a London hairdresser (1978, 46).
T.S. Eliot (1974, 23, 28) explicitly links smell with reminiscence in his
world-weary urban evocations of 'female smells in shuttered rooms,'
'smells of steaks in passageways,' 'And cigarettes in corridors/And
cocktail smells in bars.' Less obviously mannered is Maclean's (1964,
523) meeting with Soviet forces in Yugoslavia: 'in a flash I was back in the
Soviet Union: the taste ... the stuffiness .. . the cold .. . and, above all, the
smell: that indefinable composite aroma of petrol, sheepskin, and
vodka, black bread and cabbage soup [there it is!], Soviet scent and
unwashed human bodies.' Similarly, Graham Greene (1971b, 77) admits
that 'smell to me is far more evocative than sound or even sight,'
although his autobiographies, unlike his novels and travel accounts, are
not notably smellful. Perhaps the most compelling odoriferous descrip-
tion in Greene is his vivid memory of the contrasting smellscapes on
either side of the green baize door that divided an alien institutional
school from a beloved home (his father was a headmaster): 'There
would be a slight smell of iodine from matron's room, of damp towels
from the changing rooms, of ink everywhere. Shut the door behind you
again, and the world smelled differently: books and fruit and eau-de-
Cologne' (Greene 1947, 13).
It is less likely that Flora Thompson, an English village postmistress,
had read Proust, although she may have encountered similar notions in
Kipling or Victor Hugo. Nevertheless, one of her characters 'had smelled
a beanfield in bloom. The scent had so vividly brought back to her the
bean rows by the beehives in her father's garden that she had felt an
irresistible longing to see her old home. She no longer had anyone
belonging to her living in Restharrow and had not herself been there for
twenty-four years, but the impulse was so strong it had to be obeyed'
(1948, 10). The 'beanflower's boon' was a common feature of memories
of Victorian rural summers. More apposite, perhaps, in an era of war
and tourist travel, are the musings of James A. Michener (1974, 413):
'But in human beings it is the sense of smell . . . least regarded of the
senses ... which is most powerful in evoking memories; so that now if I
smell burnt chicory I am in Fiji, if I smell clean ocean fish, I'm in the
Tahiti market. Or a whiff of burnt sulphur can pitch me back into the
sugar factories of Queensland.'
Most of the early-twentieth-century reminiscences noted earlier are
products of this sharp, emotion-laden memory we have for smell. Smell
Smellscape 39

seems especially important in childhood, and adults tend to associate

childhood and the childhood home with certain smells. Charles Kings-
ley, confessing to an insatiable Heimweh, frequently mentions olfactory
sensations: 'the very smell is a fragrance from the fairy gardens of
childhood' (Chitty 1974). Jung (1965) tells us that one of his first
memories is that of being aware of the 'characteristic smell of milk ... It
was the moment when, so to speak, I became conscious of smelling. This
memory . . . goes very far back.' And on his first visit to Tunis,
archetypically, he felt that the landscape smelled of blood, of perennial
soakings from Carthage to the French occupation.
It would not be difficult to fill volumes with examples of childhood
smells remembered vividly thirty to sixty years later. Three incredibly
smellful childhood autobiographies, for example, are those of the
English Helen Forrester (1974), the Australian Barbara Hanrahan
(1973 ), whose book is tellingly entitled The Scent ofEucalyptus, and the
incomparably French Colette (1976). Instead, however, I have taken four
autobiographies at random from my shelves (three of English males who
were children during the First World War and one of an Irish female
whose childhood occurred during the Second World War) and have
content-analysed them (see table 1).
Although all were country or small-town children with a strong
predilection for hay, flowers, and grass smells, and a distaste for musty
rooms, considerable differences are apparent. Males find animal smells,
including dung, especially attractive but fail to record food smells. Edna
O'Brien is far more sexually conscious and more concerned with the
smells of food, drink, and cosmetics. The two rural males, raised in the
pre-automobile era, are appalled by car-exhaust smells and city odours
generally. By mid-century even Irish country girls have habituated to the
automobile.
Olfactory memory, however, is a very personal matter. B.B.'s
predilection for tar and sheepwash is not necessarily shared by others.
According to this writer, 'adults often forget how children are affected by
smells, their sense of smell is so much keener, more akin to a wild
animal's' (1978, 91). To illustrate that an urban child's keen olfactory
sense can bring equal richness to an autobiography, I have analysed the
odour content ofJohn Raynor's (1973) account of his London childhood.
Raynor was an exceptionally sensitive child. His book is filled with
sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations; it is extremely sensu-
ous reading. The following list gives only the barest account of those
smells that were sufficiently important in Raynor's childhood to be
remembered in detail thirty years later.
TABLE 1: Smell content of four British autobiographies

Affect B.B. (male) Bates (male) Greene (male) O'Brien (female)

Positive 1 hay, flowers, hay, flowers, blossom, leaves, grass, hedge hay, flowers, leafsmoke,
(neutral, grass, wood woodsmoke turf, greenhouse
bracketed) 2 sheep dung horse dung, cow dung horse animals and dung at
(mice, dead horseflesh, cows, country fair (mice)
flies, pigeon horse fart
dung)
3 herbs fresh bread, frying apples frying bacon, roast meat,
fish, vinegar, apples hot mince pies, tangerines,
spices, apple jelly, cider,
wine, whisky
4 mud damp earth clay (dust)
5 tar, sheepwash floor polish, incense, cigarettes (paraffin,
oil lamps detergent, coal dust, floor polish, chalk,
(paraffin, bookshop hair oil)
mothballs)
6 blacks' sweat, soap, skin, perfume
perfume, eau-de-
Cologne

Negative 1 rats rats

2 dry rot dust mustiness stale, musty rooms, dust
3 automobile, automobiles, gas,
London leather factory,
greasepaint
4 tobacco smoke, tobacco smoke, stale porter
'strong drink'
5 breakfast cereal, school cabbage, bad meat
cornmeal
6 dirty children changing rooms, old socks
urine, farts
Smellscape 41

1 of plants - gardens, magnolia, honeysuckle, bracken, woods, bonfires

of leaves, meadowsweet, flowers generally (not hay);
2 offood - nuts, particularly 'the deeply sensuous pleasure' of almonds;
toast and Patum Peperium; coffee and frying bacon; aromatic poultry
stuffing;
3 of buildings - the Army and Navy Stores, Westminster Abbey,
the Sunday drawing-room smell, must and cobwebs, stone and dust,
chintzes and other stuffs, a 'cool, damp-smelling stone building,'
cold stone, a dormitory, each room in the house with its own par-
ticular smell;
4 of people and animals - a horse-rug, father's pipe, tobacco, and
shaving soap, mother's store-cupboard (rich and sweet), father's
store-cupboard (nails and leather);
5 miscellaneous - earth, butterfly-collection preservatives, plasticine,
jewellery, magazines on bookshelves, a pub, trains, an imagined
alligator, ghosts smelled and heard but never seen.
There are at least fifty distinct smells in a little over two hundred pages,
a rich experience indeed.
Raynor goes farther than Proust, suggesting that emotive reactions to
smell may not merely be idiosyncratic, but perhaps archetypical
memories in the Jungian mode: 'Suddenly on the wind was borne the
smell of the tannery. I stood, transfixed, dropping my flowers, turning
green and white, gripped by ... a horror so primitive that it could only
have been a racial memory; a horror quite outside the bounds of thought
or control; something that struck deep inside my body ... Nothing could
induce me to play on the common again [to encounter] the smell that was
like the inarticulate agony, the frenzied terror of all the animals that
have every suffered ... at man's intolerably callous hands' (1973, 22).
Less controversially, Raynor is sure that the perceptions of children are
so much sharper than those of adults. By adulthood, 'one has learnt too
much cerebrally to put unquestioning trust in the primitive intuition and
the incontrovertible knowledge that are an essential part of childhood'
(p. 59).
Childhood, then, is a special time when the most primitive senses are
open to all sensation, before we have been carefully taught 'four legs
good, two legs bad.' Again, psychological experiments confirm intuition.
There is some research support for the notions that small children are
not necessarily offended by 'foul' odours, such as those of faeces, and
that the rating of a smell as 'unpleasant' is a direct function of age among
children aged seven and under (Engen 1982, 131-2).
Very little work, however, has been done on the importance accorded
TABLE 2: Smell events per text page, x 100

Fictionalized Fictional
Autobiographies autobiographies biographies

B.B. Greene Raynor O'Brien Proust Aldington Huxley

Bogarde
(male) (male) (female) (male) (male) (male) Mean
Age-group (male) (male)

16 n/a 0 n/a (13)

0-7 n/a 6 16 29
33 30 50 102 (41)
8-14 28 36 27 21
0 27 7 10 96 (22)
15-21 8 20 6
0 16 9 0 101 (18)
Over 21 4 8 4

Proust (1970), Raynor (1973)

SOURCES: Aldington (1965), B.B. (1978), Bogarde (1977, 1978), Huxley (1955), O'Brien (1963, 1964),
Smellscape 43

to smell through the human life-cycle. From the evidence cited above,
both humanistic and psychological, we might hypothesize that, with age,
environmental smells become less noticeable and, when noticed in adult-
hood, are usually rated as unpleasant. From my reading of numerous
autobiographies, I suggest that a sharp break in smell perception or
odour memory occurs around the time of puberty. Both the Kitchen and
Bates autobiographies cited above, for example, show a sharp decline
in the recollection of environmental smells after age fifteen or so.
To briefly test this proposition, I took at random eight twentieth-
century works: four autobiographies, two autobiographies rendered in
fictional terms, and two fictional biographies. Using the significant
age-breaks of seven, fourteen, and twenty-one, supported by, among
others, Piaget and Freud, I then made frequency counts of smell-events
and related these to pages of text. The results are shown in table 2.
Although both conceptually and operationally crude, this exercise
does suggest, first, that the richest period of odour sensation lies
between the beginning of autonomous environmental exploration at
about age seven and the onset of puberty, and second, that the
importance of smell declines on the attainment of adulthood. It is also
noticeable that, once their subjects have attained adulthood, these
autobiographies increasingly record only female perfumes or the occa-
sional obvious stink. Only a massive study of autobiographies or
longitudinal empirical testing could confirm these hypotheses.

Applications

Whereas zoning regulations have only recently come to grips with the
notion of visual pollution, both the legal concept of 'nuisance' and
general urban zoning laws have long recognized smell as a problem.
Noxious land-uses, such as chemical factories, glue plants, and slaugh-
terhouses, must be adequately segregated from residential and commer-
cial areas. Celebrated cases of nuisance include the foul smell of the
Thames in London's Houses of Parliament and the olfactory aggression
of a pulp mill on the sister institution in Ottawa. On the positive side,
tactile museums for the blind have been matched by the construction of
odoriferous gardens for the visually handicapped. Properly designed,
such a garden can provide rich olfactory sensations, give directional
information, and confirm the passage of the seasons. Commercially,
odour is an important tool in marketing (Mitchell et al. 1964). The
flavour/fragrance industry is involved in most commercial products and
ancient treatments such as aromatherapy are being revived in an age of
44 Sensuous Worlds

holistic medicine. Invisible scent markers are being developed to

discourage art theft (Vincent 1989).
Environmental odour, however, has generally been considered only
as a negative problem. Just as soundscape is dominated by noise
research, so the investigation of smellscapes is almost wholly devoted to
odour pollution. A considerable amount of applied research in Scandi-
navia has dealt with olfactory evaluations of indoor-air quality (Berg-
lund and Lindvall 1979). Traffic smells have aroused considerable
interest (Lindvall 1973). Since the late 1960s, a series of international
clean air congresses have dealt with problems of theory, measurement,
and application. The trend appears to be away from mechanical
'artificial noses' towards the use of public evaluation and olfactometry.
Indeed, Engen (1982, 13 7) considers that 'the human nose may in fact be
a better indicator than physical or chemical analysis of pollutant
concentrations, especially when the data are obtained by investigators
trained in psychophysics.' Such an investigator is the aptly named James
Rotton, whose work in both laboratory and real world suggests that
malodorous pollution may impair task performance and help trigger
aggressive behaviour, family violence, and psychiatric emergencies
(Rotton 1979, 1983, 1984, 1985).
About half of all complaints about air pollution involve smells. In
Sweden complaints about odours range from 27 per cent of rural
interviewees to up to 78 per cent in urban areas. Smell-control
technology includes odour dilution through heightening emission stacks
and the use of scrubbers or combustion. Masking by the introduction of
pleasant smells may be effective. Although still largely an urban issue,
smell problems are increasing in rural areas. With the introduction of
factory farming the noxious smell of animal manure has become a major
rural problem. In Britain, officers of the Institute of Environmental
Health investigated 3,600 reported nuisances in 1981, 50 per cent more
than in 1975. Of these complaints, 59 per cent concerned pigs, 27 per cent
poultry, and 14 per cent cattle units. In terms of operations, 27 per cent of
the incidents involved animal housing, 29 per cent the storage of
manure, and 44 per cent the spreading of manures (Whitlock 1982).
At the household level, smell-masking devices and air fresheners are
being replaced by electrostatic air cleaners. Salubrious smells can be
programmed into the air-conditioning systems of buildings. This,
together with Muzak and 'white noise,' is yet another step in the
regression of urban-industrial civilizations towards total asepsis. As
Whewell (1982, 19) remarks, 'I don't abhor household smells. I like
them, and so do most of my friends.'
Smellscape 45

On the positive side, it is clear that there is some public interest in the
preservation or resynthesis of historic ambiences. To take only two
recent examples, the new Viking Museum in York tries to re-create the
smells (fish, leather, earth) of tenth-century Jorvik, while the smell of the
Glasgow underground (subway) system was so addictive that 'people
in the city have come up with ideas for recreating the smell ... the search
to synthesize the whiff of the past goes on. And the idea of preser-
vation takes on a whole new dimension' (quoted in Goodey and Menzies
1977, 2).
Further, recent research has shown that respondents can readily be
trained to improve their skills in the identification and differentiation of
smells (Engen 1982). The gap between perfumers, wine-tasters, and the
general public could, it seems, be narrowed by environmental education
(nose training). The French Institute of Taste has already begun to
organize taste and smell consciousness-raising classes in schools
(Boddaert 1989). Preliminary results suggest that the students enjoy
greatly improved sensorial relationships with food, readily become
more discriminating than most adults, broaden their sensibilities
generally, and even become less resistant to reading Proust!
This is one of the most hopeful results from the psychological research
on smell. For to retain a rich, placeful world, individuals must come to
appreciate the sensuous complexity of their environments. Smells are an
important, though neglected, part of our perceived sensescape. Life in
future blandscapes will be severely impoverished if negative smells are
annihilated and little effort made to promote pleasant environmental
odours. The smellscape is an emotive environment, not an intellectual
one, and as such, should be cherished. Asked what they missed during
their record-making 211 days in space in 1982, Soviet cosmonauts
replied: 'the smell of flowers, the city noises, city smells' (Berezovoy
1983).
3 Soundscape

Space gardening and recordings of bird songs ... helped two Soviet spacemen
to cope with their record-setting 211 days in space
The Guardian, 7 January 1983

Although we are chiefly visual beings, sound, like smell, may be more
primary than we suspect. After all, God spoke, calling the world into
being, and only then saw that it was good. In traditional societies sound
may still be of prime importance. According to McLuhan (1960, 207),
'until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space, where the Eskimo
now lives: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind,
the world of emotion, primordial intuition.' In other words, a world very
much like that of smellscape.

Soundscape

The Inuit to which McLuhan referred were studied in depth by Carpenter

(1973), who speaks of the continued importance to them of auditory
space: 'I know of no example of an Eskimo describing space primarily in
visual terms' (p. 36). Similarly, Bruce Chatwin's (1987) recent foray
among the aborigines of Australia suggests that their 'songlines,' which
relate back to their ancestral Dreamtime, encompass the continent and
act as both wayfinders and a means of understanding mythic history. For
the ancestors, in the Dreamtime, first conceived of the land and then, as
did the Christian god, sang it into existence. An ancestral song is both
a map and a direction-finder; an aborigine on traditional 'walkabout'
would follow a songline, along which he or she would find both sacred
sites and others who shared the same ancestral Dreamtime: 'In theory
at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There
was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been
sung. One should perhaps visualize the songlines as a spaghetti of Iliads
and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every "episode" [or
48 Sensuous Worlds

sacred site] was readable in terms of geology' (p. 13 ). Little wonder that
aborigines battle the earth-movers of white Australians who have no
conception of how the ancestors sang the world into existence.
In Western societies, aural culture was paramount long after the
development of printing. Schafer (1986) notes the variety of cultures that
organized their settlements in such a way that news could pass quickly
from habitation to habitation. The first white settlers along Canada's St
Lawrence laid out narrow river-front farms with all the dwellings at one
end, in part so that families could easily shout warnings to each other in
the event of a threat from displaced Indians. When the Indians had been
crushed, large square fields, as in Upper Canada, became the norm.
By the twentieth century, however, a chiefly visual culture had
emerged in the Western world, transformed first by mass print and then
by video media. Except in certain applications, such as body scenting
and popular music, this has resulted in the diminishing importance of the
non-visual senses. Indeed, with the rapid urbanization of the world's
population, far more attention is being given to noise than to environ-
mental sound.

Noise and the soundscape

Interest in the sonic environment has, until recently, been highly

specialized and problem-specific. Research has concentrated almost
entirely upon a single aspect of sound, the concept of noise or 'unwanted
sound.' Interest in noise arose in the late nineteenth century, when it
was first recognized as an occupational hazard (Barr 1886), but research
output has grown exponentially in the last two decades.
Noise studies are fundamentally concerned with sound measurement
and the development of statistical procedures capable of examining
physical and psychological effects. The result has been a profusion of
indices specifying intensities that are permissible or desirable in airport
or freeway zones, in the industrial work-space, or in bedrooms,
libraries, or residential areas. A great deal of money and energy has
been expended on such research but the results usually go unheeded.
This situation is often attributed to operational problems associated
with the application of these research findings, as exemplified in the
failure to enforce municipal noise by-laws (Jones 1980).
Yet the negative aspects of sound, although central to the noise study,
represent only one area of concern when analysing soundscapes. The
true soundscape study examines the entire continuum of sound,
including both negative and positive qualities, and thereby includes both
Soundscape 49

wanted and unwanted sounds. The sonic environment is not treated as

an object that can be reduced to a single measurement or group of
measurements. Instead, it is taken to comprise a vast array of stimuli,
each representing a wealth of information capable of providing a variety
of environmental experiences. The soundscape is considered a phenom-
enon with perceptual content; it is not wholly reducible to a series of
physically measured parameters. This is the essential difference be-
tween the noise study and the soundscape study. Noise studies 'isolate
sound from the way hwnan beings understand it. In any of these
measuring systems, no matter how sophisticated, one sound is treated
similar to any other sound. In other words, any such device or system
treats sound as a signal to be processed, instead of information to be
understood' (Truax 1978, vi-vii). Clearly, the soundscape study aims to
reintroduce the primacy of the hwnan element. This goal may be
realized through an understanding of the physical presence of the
soundscape, the perceptual processing of the sound input, and the
relationship between the two.
The study of soundscape, as opposed to noisescape, has been very
fragmented. Typically, noise research focuses upon downtown urban
environments, traffic corridors, or major installations such as factories,
airports, and mining operations. Soundscape studies, while attempting
to deal with all sounds, also investigate ordinary, everyday landscapes,
which include rural and wilderness areas (Kariel 1980) as well as the
urban scene. All told, however, the soundscape literature is infinitesimal
in comparison with the output of acoustical engineers and noise
scientists. Soundscape has no journal or other apparatus, whereas noise
studies have a sturdy scholarly and technical apparatus. Noise, of
course, is a problem, attracts money, and is far easier to conceptualize
and measure than is sound.
Whereas the visual sense may be restricted at both close and far
distances, the sonic environment can extend from the most inti-
mate distances (the sound of one's own bodily functions) to the
farthest distances at which sense data can be perceived (remote thunder,
explosions, or war). The difference between visual and auditory space is
again brought out by Carpenter's (1973) study of the Inuit: 'Auditory
space has no favoured focus. It is a sphere without fixed boundaries,
space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing. It is not
pictorial space, boxed-in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own
dimensions moment by moment. It has no fixed boundaries; it is
indifferent to background. The eye focuses, pinpoints, abstracts, locat-
ing each object in physical space, against a background; the ear,
50 Sensuous Worlds

however, favours a sound from any direction' (p. 36). In other words,
while the visual environment is restricted, the sonic environment is
universal.
This concept of the universality of the soundscape was developed over
half a century ago by the Finnish geographer Grano (1929). Following
Grano, Ohlson (1976) and others have divided the anthropocentric sonic
landscape into an immediate soundscape (20-200 m from the receiver)
and a distant soundscape (15-20 km from the receiver). The term
soundscape applies, specifically, to the sonic environment of the
receiver of a sound; the receiver is at the centre of the sonic landscape. It
contrasts with the term soundfield, the sonic environment of a sound
source, which is central. Social scientists are naturally more interested
in soundscapes, a user-definition of landscape, than in soundfields, a
technical definition. In more general terms, the word soundscape is
used, as an analogy to landscape, to denote the overall sonic environ-
ment of a designated area, from a room to a region.
Grano's pioneering sound work concentrated upon the immediate
environment in an agricultural soundscape. His descriptions are illus-
trated by cartographical representations of experienced acoustic sensa-
tions of human activity, birdsong, and grazing cattle on the island of
Valosaari, in eastern Finland. Later Finnish work demonstrates how
animal sounds have given way to mechanical sounds in the agrarian
landscape, although the ringing of church bells remains a traditional
feature (Ohlson 1976).
It would not be difficult to follow the pattern of the previous chapter
and use literary evidence to extend Grano's work and attest to the
importance of soundscape to persons, across space, in place, and in
time. It is quite clear that individuals have singular voiceprints, that
summer is 'open season' on the sensitive ear, and that soundscapes have
evolved and changed through different eras. For example, whereas a
Christian parish in Europe was once defined by the soundreach of its
church bells, and Cockneys derived their identity from being born within
the sound of Bow bells, communities and urban neighbourhoods were,
by the nineteenth century, more likely to be defined by the reach of the
factory whistle. Today's wider community finds its expression in local
radio stations, whose spoken references to the world beyond the
immediate vicinity are usually few and far between. At a wider scale,
Schafer (1986, 6) notes the existence of a powerful 'sacred noise' in all
societies, and bitterly remarks, 'Today's pluralistic society has thrown
up numerous recent contenders for the Sacred Noise, among them the
aviation industry, the pop music industry, and the police. Here, at least,
Soundscape 51

are three nuclei of social power, all of whom are permitted to celebrate
their uncensored presence with deafening weaponry.' In comparison
with these dominant sounds, religious sounds have become of little
importance, although recent changes in British cities such as Biiming-
ham, where Muslims have erected loudspeaker-equipped minarets,
have caused religious rivalry in sonic terms.
Besides persons and eras, it is also patently clear that places can
readily be identified and understood in terms of soundscape (Pocock
1989). While it must be recognized that soundscapes are more non-
continuous, fragmentary in space, and episodic in time than are visual
landscapes, they are nevertheless important in making up the multi-
sensory character of place. The British Columbia painter Emily Carr, for
example, attuned herself with the places she painted, and learned those
places not only in a painterly but also in a sonic fashion: 'I don't know the
song of this place. It doesn't quite know its own tune. It starts with a deep
full note on the mighty cedars . . . and ends up a little squeak of nut
bushes. Under the cedars you sense the Indian and brave, fine spiritual
things. Among the nut bushes are picnickers with shrieking children .. .
And there are wood waggons and gravel waggons blatantly snorting in
and out cutting up the rude natural roads, smelling and snorting like evil
monsters among the cedars' (1978, 56).
Equally, townscape sounds may be characteristic. While Naipaul's
(1985, 258) Bombay soundscape, 'every transistor turned to full volume,
every car horn blaring, every voice raised to a shout,' may be true of
much of the Third World, Brink's (1984, 17) Cape Town is place-specific:

Occasionally one could hear something from the streets outside, but only very
vaguely: a rumbling truck, a car hooting angrily ... , the sputtering of a
motor-cycle. These sounds recalled others which were more eloquently, more
distinctly Capetonian, richer in texture, more subtle in meaning: The chat-
tering of the flower sellers in Adderley Street; a Salvation Army band on the
Parade ... ; the earsplitting voices of newspaper vendors at the entrance to
the Gardens; the hoarse complaints of the foghorn at Mouille Point like a sick
ox lowing in the distance; children playing among fruit carts and jumbled
shops in District Six or high up against the mottled slope of Signal Hill, the
cannon booming at noon and the pigeons flying up with the harpsichord sound
of their whirring wings; ship's-horns grunting bluntly in the harbour; the entire
grey totality of sound from the city far below . . . Kloof Nek.

Each sound is precisely located. Their totality makes up the characteris-

tic soundscape of Cape Town for Brink's protagonist.
52 Sensuous Worlds

Whole regions may equally well be identified by sound, from the

mechanical cacophony of the modern metropolis to the primarily natural
sounds of desert and ice-cap. Lopez's Arctic Dreams (1986) is an
auditory feast, and he notes (p. 137) that one of the two great bodily
changes one has to make in the Arctic is 'a rearrangement of [the] senses
to suit a world that is largely acoustical, not visual or olfactory, in its
stimulations.'
Putting this experiential work into psychological perspective, we find a
considerable body of research that deals both with the deleterious effects
of noise on performance and attention (Kavaler 1975) and, in more
positive terms, with the positive effects of music on human behaviour.
Music's ability to soothe the savage breast has long been recognized by
musicologists, and empirical studies have demonstrated the entrancing
power of repetitive music, the enhancing effects of sedative music on
concentration, and of music in general as a stimulant of right-
hemisphere dominance among non-professional listeners (Jeanrenaud
and Bishop 1984). These authors also show how meditative music can
induce 'introvert' states of creativity among extroverts, and similar
mood-adaptation applications are evident in the frequent use of white
noise in offices, the sale of sleep-inducing 'rain' and 'water' records, the
maddening proliferation of bland piped music in public places, and the
use of background music to induce 'feeding frenzy' among supermarket
shoppers (Killiman 1982). We also find both scientists (Kavaler 1975)
and novelists (Brink 1984) suggesting that sound, as well as the more
Proustian smell and taste, can be important in releasing deep-seated
memories.
But to continue in this vein would perhaps try the reader's patience.
For the reader would be better served by perusing the historical, spatial,
technical, and design reflections of Schafer's Tuning of the World
(1977a), supplemented by Truax's Acoustic Communication (1984 ). This
chapter will, instead, deal briefly with the development of soundscape
studies and then launch into a research case study as an example of what
might be done in a subject far more academically advanced than is
smellscape. I will then discuss implications for spatial design and human
enjoyment.

Soundscape studies

Although noise studies have shown continuous development, except for

isolated instances and a fair number of studies of birdsong and insect
sounds, the concept of soundscape re-emerged only with Southworth's
S0W1dscape 53

(1969) pioneering study of the sonic environment of Boston. Interest in

soundscapes was revived as part of a growing dissatisfaction with the
quality of urban environments and a growing concern for the plight of
handicapped persons in modern society. Of newly deaf persons, it was
noted that 'all of them felt a poignant loss of background sounds,
especially of nature, which had been almost unnoticed before deafness'
(Southworth 1969, 51). Moreover, it is difficult for blind persons to grasp
a sense of events, of the flow of time, without a background sonic
ambience. Southworth's work strongly suggested the need for sonic
planning and design.
A more sustained contribution emerged from the now-defunct World
Soundscape Project (wsP) inaugurated by the environmental musician
Schafer (Langlois 1974). By involving musicians as well as social
scientists, the aim was to mesh artistic and scientific perspectives so as
to 'discover principles and develop techniques by which the social,
psychological, and aesthetic quality of the acoustic environment or
soundscape may be improved' (Truax 1978, 126). A fairly solid theoreti-
cal foundation has been laid by Schafer and Truax. Schafer (1977a)
provides a firm rationale for soundscape study; develops analytical
techniques, including a vocabulary; emphasizes the applicability of the
work in environmental management; and works towards a comprehen-
sive theory of acoustic design. Truax (1978) supplements Schafer by
providing a terminological dictionary with an emphasis on the relation-
ships between soundscape and noise research.
Despite this substantial theoretical background, empirical sound-
scape research has been limited, with few major studies to date. The
Vancouver Soundscape (Schafer 1978) summarizes the characteristics
and informational value of soundscape components, illustrating the
threat posed by rising noise levels to the continued existence of certain
key soundscape elements. Five Village Soundscapes (Schafer 1977b)
examines the soundscapes of five very different villages in much greater
detail. It becomes immediately apparent that most rural soundscapes
are radically changing with the increasing number of technological
sounds. Such sounds tend to be 'flatline' sounds, with uniform patterns
of little interest. The changes identified with the introduction or increase
of technological sounds appear to be associated with 'a degeneracy in
the variety and complexity of community sounds and a breakdown in the
balance of forces that once organized the community' (Schafer 1977b,
79-80).
The most important feature associated with the rise in proportion of
technological sounds was a loss in soundscape complexity. Residents
54 Sensuous Worlds

identified this loss in terms of an absence of certain sounds that they had
previously used to gain information about their environment. Sound-
scape is clearly a definite element in the individual's perception of
environment. The deterioration of soundscape suggests the need for
more research, improved research techniques, and an increased concern
with applicability and soundscape amelioration.
Development is, however, hindered by the lack of an established
methodology. The first requirement of any study is information on the
actual elements that make up a soundscape, some form of notation that
will provide the same overall information as cartography or photogra-
phy. A variety of techniques has been tried, with sound values weighted
generally according to the criteria of individuality, numerousness, or
dominance.
The dynamic nature of soundscape is a further major problem. Since
sounds lack permanence (and only recently have agencies begun to
prepare catalogues of sounds with facilities for sound preservation)
historical accounts (earwitness) have to be relied upon for descriptions
of past soundscapes. With the use of sound-recording equipment, the
problem becomes one of analysis. As with noise measurements, the
physical properties of sound (time and frequency of occurrence, intensi-
ty, duration) are stressed.
Conceptual issues involve the problem of finding a useful means of
cataloguing sound events. Sounds are generally classified according to
sound origin, which has operational and spatial advantages, although
detail may be lost as a result of grouping. Categories of sound events are
often further grouped into three classes (Schafer 1977a; Truax 1978).
Keynote sounds are ubiquitous referents, the equivalent of 'ground' in
the figure-ground relationship of visual perception. The two other terms
are analogous to the figure. Signals are defined as sounds that constitute
acoustic warning devices (e.g., sirens), while soundmarks are the sonic
counterparts of landmarks. Whether a sound is figure or ground is
determined by individual perceptions.
Listening is the chief research tool; the receptor may be mechanical or
human. The features of what may be termed an objective analysis of
soundscape may be ascertained by means of tape-recorders and
sound-level meters, and by trained listeners who have undergone what
Schafer (1977a) calls 'earcleaning.' Machines store or monitor, provid-
ing information on the general sonic environment, but the sensitized
listener is required for the identification of discrete sound events. A
subjective analysis of soundscape requires the use of social-science
techniques such as questionnaires. A carefully structured research
Soundscape 55

design involving listening, recording, monitoring, and survey techniques

is necessary to provide not only a descriptive analysis but also an
indication of the meaning and value of the soundscape. Such a design is
used in the following empirical study, the primary objective of which is to
describe and explain the soundscape of an urban neighbourhood. Other
goals are: to test the validity of the techniques used by the World
Soundscape Project; to develop a method capabie of comparing both
objective and subjective views of the soundscape; and to increase
awareness of the soundscape concept.

The study

Previous soundscape studies have dealt with either rural areas or the
metropolis as a whole. Studies at the scale of the urban neighbourhood,
where most of us actually live, are conspicuous by their absence. Yet it is
at this scale that the urbanite, outside working hours, is most exposed to
the soundscape. Neighbourhood-scale studies should also allow greater
depth of analysis. This feature is particularly relevant, given the
extremely localized nature of most sounds, and because of the general
wsP assumption that personal familiarity with sounds will be a function
of exposure rate and proximity to sound source. An ethical stance,
moreover, involves a concern with how people, in their own environ-
ments, evaluate sounds; inperts are more important than experts.
The soundscape chosen for analysis was the neighbourhood of South
Fairfield, located on the south coast of Vancouver Island, British
Columbia, about one mile from the central business district of the city of
Victoria. Although the area is an inner-city residential community,
which may be reflective of the general urban soundscape, its relative
closeness to the major city park at Beacon Hill and the coast of the Strait
o{Juan de Fuca ensures that the area offers a mixture of both unique and
general sounds. Knowledge of the community was deemed important; I
had lived in the neighbourhood for ten years and my colleague, for six
months at the time of the study (1980).
South Fairfield was built at the tum of the century, but has recently
been gentrified, a process involving the invasion of middle-class
professionals seeking to upgrade single-family dwellings close to the
business core (Porteous 1979). About two-thirds of the dwellings are
owner-occupied single-family houses. Only the northern boundary of the
study area is not adjacent to parkland.
The authors' living experience in the area suggests that the keynote
sound is likely to be road traffic with the addition of seaplanes, which
56 Sensuous Worlds

land at the Inner Harbour nearby. Signals include ferry whistles and
sirens. Soundmarks that enrich South Fairfield, in the authors' estima-
tion, include fog-horns, church bells, the bells of a carillon tower
downtown, and the peacocks, swnrner jazz festivals, sports events, and
weekly bagpipe practices held in Beacon Hill Park.
Two complementary methods, objective and subjective analysis,
were developed. Listening, taping, and sound-pressure-level (SPL)
monitoring were used to examine the temporal and spatial variations in
the South Fairfield soundscape. While these mechanical recordings were
being made, my colleague, a trained listener, concentrated on sensitized
listening to the soundscape, transcribing relevant information onto wsr
soundwalk sheets. The goal of this process was to produce a permanent
record of the soundscape, the sensitized listening supplementing this
record with a more identifiable catalogue of immediate events.
The spatial sampling framework involved monitoring at the central
points of twenty-one hexagons whose radius was determined by average
'earshot' distance (Westerkamp 1974; Truax 1978). The temporal
sampling framework involved a monitoring schedule designed to cover
each location at a different time each day, time of day being a significant
variable in noise studies (Stevens, Rosenblith, and Bolt 1955). For the
subjective analysis, a questionnaire was developed to generate a
qualitative assessment of the soundscape, including an indication of the
range of recognized sounds and residents' evaluation of these sounds via
a community sound list. The elements included in this list were the
fifty-five sound sources identified by the objective analysis, plus eleven
additional sounds thought to be prominent by the authors.

Objective analysis

Fortunately for this analysis, variations in sound type did not appear to
be influenced by either time or day of the week. In addition, there was a
strong tendency for all monitor locations to have fairly simple sound
profiles. The average number of sounds machine-recorded (8.6) repre-
sents under 8 per cent of the total range of sounds swnrnarized by the
trained listener on the soundwalk sheets, which immediately under-
scores the problems of undertaking sound research in a strictly
mechanical manner. The most distinctive feature of the sound list is the
magnitude of the range of values. At the upper limit are car traffic
sounds, the only sound found to be ubiquitous. Nearby automobile
sounds were recorded 757 times; the only other sounds heard more than
50 times were distant urban traffic (92), footsteps (88), small songbirds
Soundscape 57

(56), and bicycles (51). Only the first three of these, plus car sounds, were
heard at more than half of the monitoring points. Additional common
sounds, heard at more than one-third of the stations, were pets, voices,
and seaplanes. These sounds reflect most closely the general character-
istics of the soundscape. Most of the 66 sounds included in the list were
heard rarely and 75 per cent were heard at fewer than 25 per cent of the
monitor positions.
For the purposes of generalization the range of sound types was
reduced to a more manageable size by means of the wsP classification
system (Truax 1978), which involves six categories of sound: natural;
human (vocal); motor; activity; indicator; and neighbour. Most of these
categories are self-explanatory. Activity sounds relate to non-motorized
human activities other than the collage of localized sounds emanating
from neighbours; indicator sounds are chiefly signals. Statistical analy-
sis indicated a strong positive association between SPL and frequency of
motor sounds, while there was a tendency for the frequency of all other
sound types to decrease with increasing SPL. The strong positive
association between SPL and motor sounds is obvious to any urban
resident and has been repeatedly confirmed in traffic-noise studies.
The spatial pattern of sound-level measurements identified high SPL
positions along the study-area periphery, declining towards the interior,
away from the more heavily used streets. In order to regionalize this
soundscape, cluster analysis was performed on the monitor location
sound frequencies using the six sound groups as variables. Spatially, the
cluster analysis indicated the existence of three soundscape regions in
South Fairfield. A peripheral zone, along the major coastal road,
experienced a high frequency but a low variety of sounds. This area was
dominated by motor sound and had the highest SPL values. Region two
was a transitional region, where high-frequency, largely motor-related
sound was matched by high sound variety. Region three was mainly an
interior region. Here a high variety of sounds was coupled with low
frequency; one might, therefore, hypothesize this to be the area with the
highest resident-preference scores.

Subjective analysis

The initial concern of the questionnaire was to gain an understanding

of residents' general impressions of soundscape nature and quality.
Slightly more than 66 per cent of the respondents felt that South Fairfield
was either 'quiet' or 'very quiet'; fewer than 7 per cent felt that the area
was noisy; and none felt that it was 'very noisy.' Moreover, more than 45
58 Sensuous Worlds

per cent of respondents indicated that they had not experienced any
change in neighbourhood sound quality during their residence in the
area. When change was identified, it was usually restricted to a single
source. Increasing traffic noise was the most frequently mentioned
change, followed by responses relating to home reconstruction and the
increasing number of young families with children and pets, all of which
have resulted from the gentrification process.
More respondents identified sources of unwanted change (71 per cent)
than wanted change (45 per cent). Again, traffic, population structure,
and land-use changes were the chief culprits. There was much less
consensus about the types of changes residents might prefer to hear.
Interestingly, although residents identified traffic sound as the major
source of sound-quality change, they did not stress the need to
implement methods of traffic-sound reduction. More than two-thirds of
respondents indicated no preference for changes in sound quality. The
remainder were interested in the reduction of rental zoning and the
rerouting of buses and coastguard helicopters.
The community sound list was used to provide data on respondents'
recognition of sounds in the area in and around their homes. The sounds
heard by the highest percentage of respondents were mainly the keynote
sounds identified during the objective analysis. Specifically, sounds
reported by more than 90 per cent of residents included cars; pets; small
songbirds and seagulls; and police, fire, and ambulance sirens. Voices,
wind in the trees, breezes and storms, motorcycles, crows, vehicle
doors, and seaplanes were reported by more than 80 per cent of
respondents. These most-heard sounds included both natural and motor
sounds. A few figure sounds exhibited reasonably high rates of
recognition. The most significant group included electro-acoustical
warning devices, such as ambulance, fire, and police sirens. Sound
events were heard less frequently although at least 70 per cent of the
respondents indicated that they heard jazz concerts, pipe-band practic-
es, or peacocks from the park. Far lower numbers heard South Fairfield's
supposedly characteristic soundmarks: church bells (64 per cent);
carillon bells (48 per cent); and fog-horns (29 per cent). An additional
group of figure sounds sharing these low rates of reportage was made up
of sounds associated with the activities of neighbours. The pattern of
these results is significant as it indicates that respondents were more
aware of the components of the ground of the soundscape than of the
figure sounds. In other words, aside from the sound signals, sounds
meant to be consciously listened to were less often perceived by the
respondents.
Soundscape 59

To check for patterns among respondents, several statistical tests were

conducted to match sound frequency with household characteristics.
No significant relationships were found between sound frequency and
household size, duration of house occupancy, or duration of residence in
the city of Victoria. Nevertheless, the negative relationship between
sound frequency and both measures of residence duration suggests that
lengthier residence may be associated with awareness of fewer sounds.
A cross-tabulation of sound frequency by years of residence confirmed
this habituation trend, which conflicts with the wsP's use of long-term
residents of an area as expert earwitnesses. Other cross-tabulations
revealed few significant patterns, although a suggestion emerged that
older residents generally heard fewer sounds. This had no relationship,
however, to self-reports of hearing impairment.
Rating scales were used to provide a measure of affect. Respondents
gave most positive ratings to birdsong, carillon bells, water sounds,
hang-gliders, church bells, wind in the trees, fog-horns, and peacocks.
Disliked sounds included vehicle brakes; trucks; construction equip-
ment; motorcycles; vehicle horns; police, ambulance, and fire sirens;
and shouting. In general then, respondents liked natural sounds but
disliked hearing the omnipresent keynote motor sounds. However, there
was considerable lack of agreement on the rating of sounds. It is,
therefore, suggested that the separation of positively from negatively
perceived soundscape components is likely to prove extremely difficult.
Spatially, residents in the study-area interior heard the greatest
number of sounds, and these same respondents gave the most negative
ratings of recognized sounds. This is the low frequency-high variety
region, where one might have expected the most positive ratings
because of low motor noise, low sound levels, and the greater frequency
of other sound groups. Clearly, the residents identified a different sound
profile, in terms of meaning, from the one obtained by the objective
analysis. The correspondence of high sound recognition with a slightly
negative mean sound rating suggests that the residents of this interior
region may have been more aware of their soundscape quality (because
of low motor sounds and low sound levels) and were, therefore, more
sensitive to the nature of soundscape components.
Finally, the information residents received from this soundscape was
investigated in terms of their recall of informational sounds, the possible
interference of such sounds with everyday life, and recall of sounds
associated with seasonal change. Two-thirds of the respondents listed
two informational sounds, and almost half listed four. Indicator sounds
were most frequently noted, especially sirens indicating danger in the
60 Sensuous Worlds

neighbourhood and fog-horns indicating danger at sea. Natural sounds

(birds, wind) were frequently mentioned as sources of weather informa-
tion. Motor sounds provided information about time of day (buses) and
season (motor sounds increase in summer). Well over half the respon-
dents heard sounds that interfered with their sleep, while more than 30
per cent suffered sound interference with conversation and more than 20
per cent with radio or television listening. Cars, buses, motorcycles, and
planes were the most common sources of interierence. Sirens were the
only indicator sounds mentioned with any frequency. Birds, especially
seagulls, were the only natural sound sources identified as interierence,
mainly related to problems of sleep.
Seasonal variation in the soundscape was widely recognized. Winter
was associated with the sounds of wind, storms, and sea. Fog-horns
were linked with fall and winter. Activity sounds and neighbour sounds
dominated the response for swnmer, with birds the most frequently
mentioned natural sound. Clearly, summer sounds provide much
information about the activities of one's neighbours. Traffic-related
sounds were rarely mentioned; if noted, respondents referred to 'louder'
motor sounds in summer. In general, however, motor sounds are not
perceived to have a marked seasonal aspect.

Study conclusions

The researchers' initial impressions regarding the diversity of sound-

scape components characterizing the study area were supported in
both the subjective and objective stages of the research design.
Numerous sound types were identified during both research stages but,
for individual cases, whether respondents or monitor positions, few
different sound types were actually recorded. For the objective analysis
this meant that there was little similarity between monitor positions in
terms of the sounds characterizing the twenty-one sampling locations.
The sound of car traffic was the only ubiquitous sound in South Fairiield.
There was also a great deal of variety in the types of sounds identified
on the questionnaires, although the respondents as a whole reported
hearing more sounds than were identified during the objective analysis.
Cars and other motor- and traffic-related sounds were frequently heard
but natural and indicator sounds were also important.
Description of soundscape composition as well as generalization
about perceived soundscape components were complicated by problems
associated with the design of a classification system for sounds. The
subjective analysis revealed that sound type could not easily be
Soundscape 61

classified because of the wide range in individual perceptions. The

problems of designing meaningful systems of classification were also
made apparent during the objective analysis, for a reliability test failed
to give support to the wsP's conceptually formed groups.
Our understanding of the relationships between sounds and the
perceptions of these sounds clearly requires further analysi~. This is an
area worthy of further research as it far surpasses simple SPL in the level
of understanding of the soundscape that is achieved. The objective-
subjective approach emphasizes the value of understanding soundscape
through an investigation of its individual elements, rather than by
treating it as a single measurable object, as is done in noise studies.
Examination of the soundscape would benefit from a better under-
standing of the figure-ground relationship of sounds. Previous studies
have indicated that motor sounds are the major contributor to the
ambience of urban soundscapes and that they function primarily as
ground sounds. This study indicated that motor sounds had the most
obvious relationship to sound level, but these sounds did not always
serve as the frame against which other sounds were perceived. During
the objective analysis there was some evidence of masking by motor
sounds but such sounds appeared to be sufficiently intermittent to allow
softer sounds to be heard or recorded. Similarly, questionnaire respon-
dents noted changes in the soundscape's motor-sound content and they
also associated particular information with the hearing of these sounds.
These results indicate that the most frequently heard element of the
soundscape can function as both a figure and a ground component.
The high motor-sound content identified with the South Fairfield
soundscape served to re-emphasize this aspect of the urban environ-
ment. Motor sounds were among the most negatively perceived sounds
in the community sound list. Generally, 'we complain more often about
traffic noise than any other noise in our cities' (Cottrell 1980, 9). Despite
agreement between both objective and subjective analyses on this score,
it is significant that there were considerable differences between the
'objective soundscape' (the expert's view) and the 'subjective sound-
scape' (the inpert's view). This is nowhere more clearly seen than in
respondents' low evaluation of the low frequency-high variety region,
which, on the basis of the objective analysis, would have been predicted
to be the most positively evaluated.
Change was not a well-recognized aspect of the soundscape. When
change was identified, it was associated with an increase in the density
of residential development, and it appears that rising sound levels may
eventually mask important information sounds. Such change appears to
62 Sensuous Worlds

have a generally negative effect on soundscape. Since an increasing

proportion of the world's population is becoming concentrated in urban
areas (50 per cent estimated by 2000 AD), the effect of urban develop-
ment on this aspect of the environment demands consideration. It will be
important for planners and practitioners to have an understanding of the
nature of soundscape so they can better assess the impacts of their
actions on the quality of the urban soundscape and how this relates to
the quality of life for urban residents.

Implications

Sound is of immense importance to human beings. Research by my

students has clearly indicated that city dwellers are readily able to
distinguish between pleasant and unpleasant sounds (Kawano 1981;
Mastin 1982). Moreover, city residents are differentially able to avoid
unpleasant sounds by retiring to sonically up-market areas. A detailed
analysis of real-estate values in Victoria, British Columbia, in relation to
soundscape, demonstrated the following relationships: the higher the
real-estate value, the lower the average sound level; sounds perceived
as pleasant, such as birdsong, were more frequent in soundscapes of
high real-estate value, whereas unpleasant sounds, such as those of
vehicles, had the opposite distribution; a similar relationship held even
at the level of birdsong itself, for small songbirds were more frequent in
areas of high value, while low-value areas were more likely to be
inhabited by crows (Lee 1987). It is ironic to note that wealthier citizens
are far more likely to complain about noise (Kavaler 1975).
Noise and its suppression has become a planning and industrial issue
recently, in view of the numerous studies that demonstrate the deleteri-
ous effects of unwanted sound. High or sustained noise levels, for
example, have been found to have extremely deleterious effects on
animals, including the usual stress-related impairment of adrenal,
thyroid, and gonadal glands, as well as psychological effects such as
increased timidity and decreased sociability. Sutton (1986) reports that
off-road vehicle use in the Mojave Desert has significantly reduced
animal populations. For example, kangaroo rats suffer hearing impair-
ment and fail to anticipate the approach of predators, while toads are
induced to emerge from aestivation by the thunder-like sound of dune
buggies and consequently die from the intense heat of summer.
For human beings, the soundscape becomes increasingly noisy with
time. Evidence ranges from the anecdotal to the scientific. As an
example of the former, we have Sutton's (1986) poignant story:
Soundscape 63

I wonder how many people seek out a location for a home in terms of the
quality of the soundscape? I first chose ... a location that perpetuated the
sounds of birds, but, alas, within a few years a freeway took the semi-wild
adjacency to my home and now we must tolerate this change. Later, when
plumbing problems developed on my property, I had to tear out two quite
mature trees that housed hundreds of birds, a loss that has not been over-
come ... I came out of the lower East Side of Manhattan, but I appreciate
nature in a way that a New Yorker cannot because of the background noise
of transportation, especially subways.

This personal evidence supplements studies such as that of Price (1972)

which estimated that the 'noise climate' of Vancouver showed an
increase of 10 decibels over sixteen years. Such data give rise to the
commonly held notion that sound levels rise about half a decibel per year
in North American cities.
The word noise is related to 'nausea.' Hence the need to reduce its
impact, for various noise studies indicate that intense and sustained
noise levels may induce excessive fatigue, irritability, violence, gradual
reduction in sex drive, and a general deterioration in social relation-
ships. During the 1970s many countries and cities passed legislation
against noise, such as the u.s. Noise Control Act of 1972 and Chicago's
sssHHICAGO campaign. Noise by-laws are the most obvious planning
application, but while it is notable that many noise by-laws have been
enacted, enforcement is almost nil because of measurement problems
and the low priority given to the noise problem by both authorities and
citizens.
The latter is a crucial issue. Urban man increasingly inhabits an
environment of sensory overload emphasized by his predilection for
noisy technological junk. In sensory terms, this same environment is
actually an environment of privation. Visual blight, the smell and taste
of smog, and the masking effect of keynote city sounds increasingly
deprive the urbanite of high-quality visual, aural, and odoriferous
experiences. Despite our demonstrated need for sensory complexity
(Fiske and Maddi 1961), sensory privation is the price we have paid for
the advantages of urban living in the twentieth century.
In order to exemplify this problem of urban privation, here is an
earwitness account of one afternoon on the small isolated island, lying
midway between Vancouver and Seattle, on which this book was
written. One must contrast this account with one's knowledge of the
urban soundscape, which is characterized by a low, continuous roaring
boom, largely derived from motor traffic, and which effectively masks
64 Sensuous Worlds

individual natural and human sounds. The urban soundscape is, par
excellence, one of low fidelity. In contrast, the rural or wilderness
soundscape is characterized by high fidelity. The context or keynote is
not motor sound, but silence. Consequently, each individual sound can
be heard separately and distinctly, and fully appreciated for its existen-
tial soundness:

Satuma Island: Sunday, 30 January 1983. High-pressure weather: warm,

windless, bright, clear. On top of the mountain, in a coniferous forest-pasture
landscape, I hear the cough and croak of ravens, the piteous whickering of
bald-headed eagles, the hoot of pheasant, the cluck of robins, the myriad pip-
ings and tweetings of what ornithologists call l.g.b.'s (little grey birds). From
a neighbour island come domestic sounds: cattle bellowing, sheep bleating,
geese cackling, with the occasional sharp bark of a dog. From over fifty feet
away, I can both smell the rich scent and hear the rasping bite of feeding feral
goats. The only non-natural sounds are occasional ferry hooters, an infre-
quent jet whining off to Japan or Hawaii, and the dull persistent drone, almost
a keynote sound Wlfortunately, of light airplanes in which businessmen
propel themselves between Victoria, Vancouver, and Seattle. I sniff; the goats
freeze, then run.
On the way down the mountain I hear the purling of a mountain stream; a
deer crashes into the salal (it is hunting season). Thirteen hundred feet
below, en kayak in the middle of a mile-wide bay, non-natural sounds have
almost disappeared. Eagles witter, small birds sing, there is the patter of
feet as ducks take off from the water. Mallard whistle overhead, and the silence
of the cormorant's flight is almost audible. Herons croak. There's a sudden
riffle behind the kayak, followed by whiskery snorts and snuffles. A great bull
harbour seal is regarding me from about fifteen feet. I am suddenly sur-
rounded by about forty seals, rising and flopping, tails smacking, and snorting,
while away on the outlying skerries their relatives yap, howl, bark, and roar.
Ten feet to starboard, a slurp of bubbles announces an otter. Still swimming, it
disposes of a newly caught fish with a sound of hard, cold crunching.
I load the kayak on the Volkswagen roof. The car engine starts like a curse.

ff the above earwitness report seems lyrical, it is because the fundamen-

tals of soundscape are essentially qualitative. The value and meaning of
soundscape, to the individual, is ultimately not measurable by machine
or by social-science tests.
Yet such scientific work, coupled with sensitive qualitative studies, is
essential if we are ever to have an urban soundscape that pleases the
ear. Our current noise by-laws aim to suppress unwanted sound, thus,
Soundscape 65

at least implicitly, allowing wanted, pleasant sounds to re-emerge from

the urban cacophony. In contrast, soundscapers would build on a
reduction in noise generated by noise-suppression by-laws, were these
effective, to emphasize existing pleasant sounds and generate new ones.
This positive aspect of practical soundscape work has been paid little
attention, despite Southworth's (1969) emphasis on 'sonic delight,' the
Parisian Paysage sonore urbain (Scheer 1979) projects, and the attempts
of musicians such as Maryanne Amacher to 'create scenarios to enhance
perceptual "geographies" among mind, body, and environment' (Hight
1981). Shafer (1977) and Truax (1984}, as well as Southworth and the
Paris team, have indicated innumerable ways in which the sonic
environment might be improved for the average citizen as well as for the
visually handicapped. The need for such ameliorative work is para-
mount. As Truax asserts (Langlois 1974, 49) in relation to the World
Soundscape Project: 'Our broadest and most ambitious aim . . . is to
redesign the soundscape of the world. Our modest aim is to show
individuals how to listen on a daily basis [and] we want to alert people to
the fact that if we don't do something about this soon, then we, or our
children, are going to go deaf.'
II LANDSCA PES
OF METAPH OR
4 Bodyscape

If we regard the Earth as an individual, and those geographic regions .. . as

representing organs, tissues, and cells, we perhaps get nearest to a useful
comparison.
A.J. Herbertson

Few geographers of today would be willing to accept, with Herbertson,

that the organismic analogy between landscape and the human body can
be a useful scientific tool. Speaking from a rigorous scientific standpoint,
Stoddart (1967, 520) concluded that this idea of an analogical relation-
ship between body and landscape was merely 'a metaphor of dubious
value.'
One of the roles of humanistic geography, however, is to explore such
metaphors. Although Wright (1947) tried to stimulate an interest in
'geographic imagination' a generation ago, it is only recently that
geographers have developed a strong interest in language and imagina-
tive literature and, especially, in metaphor (Livingstone and Harrison
1980, 1981; Mills 1982; Sitwell 1981; Tuan 1978). Mills accepts the view
that all thought may be, at base, metaphorical, and that language
develops by way of metaphor, and goes on to outline 'central metaphors'
that are basic to our understanding of the world. Western central
metaphors, growing out of everyday experience, are the medieval book
of nature, Renaissance microcosmism, and the modern mechanist
world-view.
Although the Renaissance microcosmic view purports to be a two-way
vision, it is, in fact, rather one-sided. The emphasis appears to be on the
body as a model for the universe; the reverse relationship is neglected. In
this chapter, in contrast, I hope to demonstrate: that this body:world,
microcosm:macrocosm metaphor needs greater elucidation at the scale
of oody: landscape, where oody components are metaphorically matched
in detail with landscape features; that the metaphor is, in fact, an
interacting system, whereby landscape is seen as body but, also, body is
70 Landscapes of Metaphor

regarded as landscape, that the body in question, in male-dominant

cultures, is very often the female body, and that the culmination of 'body
as landscape' is pomotopia; and that, although no longer part of a
dominant world-view, the metaphor has continued in use, at least in
imaginative literature, well into the machine-age twentieth century.

Body metaphor

The cosmological relationships between body and universe have been

explored by Tuan (1974, 1978) and Glacken (1967). Since classical times,
at least, and in many cultures, the earth has been regarded as female,
fertile if properly propitiated, but barren, like a wasteland, if incorrectly
dealt with. Father Sky provides semen in the form of rain. Mother Mary,
to give just one example, is impregnated from on high. Mother Earth,
lowly, graceful, but with all the frailties of woman, is complemented by
the male skygod, high, clean, pure. Recognizing the power as well as the
nurturing capacity of our native heaths, we divide the earth's surface
into fatherlands and motherlands.
Operationally, in our transactions with the cosmos, 'the body's
integrity is the foundation for our sense of order and wholeness' (Tuan
1979, 87). It is our basic orientation referent. The notions of front: back,
left: right, top: bottom, and inside:outside are first learned in terms of the
body and then applied to the wider milieu, from our treatment of front
and back in house design and management to the Christian conception
of the ordering of sheep and goats at the Last Judgment. The correspon-
dence between bodily orifices and the doors and windows of houses is
very close. Both can be closed and entrance monitored. Violation occurs
as rape or breaking-and-entering. Top and bottom are equally powerful
signifiers. In some cultures the head is sacred and cannot be touched. As
the head organizes the bodily hierarchy of limbs and organs, so human
organizations are controlled by headmen. Douglas (1973) sees the
human body as a 'natural symbol' for the social body or body politic.
Moving from orientation in space to orientation in time, we find that
bodily rhythms are responsible for much of our original sense of time.
Evidence of the passage of time is provided by heartbeat and breathing
rate, which may readily be used as measuring devices. The growth and
progressive decay of the body reflect the irreversibility of time, and these
changes also reflect the seasonal cycle of nature. Our approximately
twenty-four-hour biological clocks meshed fairly well with diurnal
rhythms until the popularity of rapid intercontinental travel.
Body space is another area of inquiry, this time at the micro scale.
Bodyscape 71

Here the body is seen as a nested set of integuments: inner self, skin and
hair, cosmetics, clothes (Goffman 1971). In this sense the body becomes
a personal landscape to enhance. Landscape design is possible through
cosmetics or tattooing. Clothes, a more frequently used design mecha-
nism, are manipulated to accentuate some surficial features and to hide
others. Clothed bodies are often more alluring than naked ones, just as
an intimate, vegetated landscape usually appeals more than the naked
expanses of moorland or desert, which apparently reveal all at a glance.
Beyond the readily manipulated layers of skin and clothing lies the less
well-defined defensible zone of personal space (Sommer 1969), which
may be enlarged to the size of a room or dwelling. At this territorial level,
the body corresponds once more with the house. The environmental
explorer Harbison (1977), the psychiatrist Jung (1969), the poet Neruda
(1978), the phenomenologist Bachelard (1964) would all agree with the
prophet Gibran (1976, 31) that 'your house is your larger body.'
From this concept it is but a short step to the use of the human body,
first as a fundamental measuring device (the foot, for example), then as a
fundamental design module. From the layout of the Dogon village in the
shape of a body, an archetype for semioticians, through Leonardo da
Vinci's famous schema of man as the measure of all things, to Le
Corbusier's body-based modulor and his organic layout of Chandigahr,
the human body has been considered a basic unit or model for the design
of human settlements. Moreover, within the built environment, parts of
the human body have frequently surfaced as architectural forms.
Mouth-like openings into buildings spring to mind. Consider also the
Victorian obsession with the phallus in the form of factory chimneys,
dockside bollards, and, more appropriate yet, water-towers.
Body and landscape are as one in yet another form of built
environment, that of the work of art. Nudes are a kind of fleshly
landscape. It is notable that the huge sculptures by Henry Moore and
Barbara Hepworth mirror the stern Yorkshire landscapes that the
artists knew as children. Along British coasts and in limestone country,
one finds ovoid holes worn by nature as precisely in the living rock as in
the openings of a Hepworth or a Moore. And it is significant that these
sculptural forms have now become, in their turn, a referent for landscape
appreciation. Edward Abbey, that acerbic lone explorer of American
deserts, sees in the Arches National Monument 'a sculptured landscape
... earth in the nude' in Moore-like terms (1971, 187).
The emphasis of this chapter, however, is not on the cosmological, or
the body as art-form, or on the importance of the body in design. My
interest, rather, is in the body as a complex of components that
72 Landscapes of Metaphor

metaphorically correspond with the component-complex that is the

natural landscape. The sources are drawn largely from the literature of
Western, male-dominated societies.

A conceptual framework

Conceptually, the variety of body:earth metaphors outlined above can

be integrated via the geographer's traditional concern with the man-
environment theme, involving a two-way transactional interrelation-
ship. One theme that is deeply embedded in human history is the belief
that man is a bringer of order to the apparent chaos that is the natural
world. According to Mircea Eliade (1959) man must 'cosmicize' the
earth, that is, bring cognitive order to it, before it can be settled. Glacken
(1967) has noted the importance, since classical times, of the notion that
man is controller of the earth. Teilhard de Chardin (1965) has put
forward the concept of the noosphere, whereby the planet is conceived of
as subject to the directive capacity of the human mind.
One familiar method of directing or controlling the external environ-
ment is the act of naming. Mapless travellers are often disturbed by their
inability to discover the 'correct' names for the landscape features they
encounter (Abbey 1971 ). Naming is a powerful act. By naming landscape
features, butterflies, persons, we in part possess them and simulta-
neously exorcise their chthonic magical powers (Porteous 1977, 24).
Nature, disturbing or fearsome, can be humanized by applying familiar
terms to it (Clark 1956, 23). Geographers have thoroughly considered
place-names, the specific variant of landscape naming. But, as with
personal names (Porteous 1982), geographers have paid little attention
to generic landscape naming.
The labelling of common landscape features in generic terms often
involves the use of metaphor. One of the more common means of
environmental labelling involves use of body elements. Both body and
landscape are universals of experience, but we experience body, both
our own and that of the mother, before we experience landscape. Only
after several developmental stages does the infant begin to distinguish
itself from the general milieu, and only in childhood can mobile
exploration of this external environment begin. To explore is a natural
drive. Although we continue to make discoveries about our bodies
throughout life, from childhood onward most of our attention is focused
elsewhere.
Although organism and environment are logically inseparable, we
tend to make operational distinctions between them. The implication is
Bodyscape 73

that one of the most fundamental geographic dialectics is between the

self, manifested corporeally in the body, and the non-self, manifested in
the 'environment.' These are the two basic landscapes that confront us.
Little wonder, then, that our environmental and body vocabularies
contain many common elements, and that the one may be a metaphori-
cal referent to the other.
There are always two terms in a metaphor. These are the meta-
phrand, the thing to be described, and the metaphier, the thing or rela-
tion used to elucidate it (Janes 1976). A known metaphier is used to give
meaning to a less-known metaphrand. The human body is an amazingly
rich metaphier. We speak of the face of a clock or a cliff; the eye of a
needle, a storm, a potato; the teeth of combs and cogs; the lips of jugs,
the tongues of shoes; the spines of books; the legs of a trip. Chairs have
both arms and legs. Plumbers and carpenters are familiar with the
tongues of joints, the male and female parts of a joint, and elbow joints.
The head is particularly generative, for we are familiar with the heads of
armies and academic departments, tables and beds, and nails. A page
has both head and foot.
Environmental terms may also be used for human artefacts or
conditions. This page may be called a leaf. The four principal elements -
earth, air, fire, and water - were also the four basic 'humours' that
together, according to medieval theory, made up the human personality.
We use modem technological terms as metaphiers for that little-known
metaphrand, the brain, which has successively been likened to a battery,
a telephone exchange, and a computer.
It is the purpose of this chapter to explore the linkage between body
and landscape in terms of metaphor. This intimate interdigitation of
meaning will be analysed by considering, first, the landscape as body,
and then the body as landscape. The inescapable sexual nature of much
of the body:landscape connection is given separate consideration.

Landscape as body

In the earliest human encounters with the landscape, it may have been
useful both practically and magically to invest landscape features with
names derived from the human body. Anthropomorphism is an almost
universal feature among Homo sapiens. English poetry from the
Renaissance to the nineteenth century is replete with anthropomorphic
earth metaphor. In one poem alone Sir John Davies (1569-1626)
provides a model much-used then and later: the earth has a waist (girt by
the sea), a broad breast, and blue veins (rivers), while hills become 'The
74 Landscapes of Metaphor

Earth's great duggs' (Davies 1956, 45). We encounter the ocean also as a
boundless bosom.
The earth as a whole may be seen as a body of unidentified sex, a
recumbent giant. This body's structure can readily be understood by
applying descriptors based on the landscape we know best, the human
body. The skin of the earth is a common concept. Elastic, the skin allows
for change and growth of the body within. Erosion and weathering are
important agents of change; skin flakes away and is replaced from
beneath. A failure to come to terms with weathering and temporality,
whether of human skin or the earth's surface, is responsible for both the
current rash of cosmetic surgery and sundry misguided suggestions that
we could, by various forms of plastification, preserve essentially
temporary geological features for generations of tourists to come.
Desiccated, cracked, and peeled, the skin also suffers ravages from
within. Volcanoes, in particular, and mountains, in general, were
regarded as warts, boils, pox, and other unsightly excrescences before
the modem period of mountain adulation (Nicholson 1959). The earth's
skin may be pocked by craters; erosion or overgrazing may leave sores.
And it can certainly be diseased. Herman Melville, passing through the
wilderness ofJudaea in 1857, spoke of 'whitish mildew pervading whole
tracts of landscape - bleached - leprosy - encrustation of curses - old
cheese - bones of rocks - crunched, gnawed, mumbled - mere refuse
and rubbish of creation' (Bellow 1976, 16).
In balmier climes, however, the recumbent giant is primarily shaggy,
sporting cosmetic decoration in the form of vegetation likened to hair
(Tuan 1979, 27). Forests form a thick hirsute covering; grasslands are a
light down. The landscape may be 'clothed' with verdure or snow.
Ravaged by time, the same landscape may lose its vegetation and
become bald. Round bare mountains resemble bald pates. Snow-
capped, forested mountains are seen as frozen giants, bald but bearded.
Hirsute or bare, the skin of the earth is supported by a framework of
bones, muscle, and blood. D.H. Lawrence speaks of hills 'rippling away,
like muscle,' and Whitman (1979, 49), too, relishes 'broad muscular fields.'
Landscapes may be fat or lean. Fat landscapes, beloved of eighteenth-
century agricultural improvers and by peasants everywhere, are rich,
productive, agrarian. Lean landscapes, in contrast, expose the under-
lying structure. Bones are close to the skin, and may break through.
The idea of the earth as a carcass is common. Ridges stand out like
the rib-cage of a dead beast. Bare chalk or limestone brings to mind
discarded bones from which all nourishment has long since been derived.
Long bones lie close beneath long sweeps of hillside. Vertebrae notch the
Bodyscape 75

outlines of eroded desert ridges. But the type of bone is rarely specified.
It is enough that the bones are there - we do not wish to know too much.
Deserts are the epitome of lean, bony landscapes. Patrick White's
evocation of the Australian outback is built upon the bareness of the
earth's skin, through which the bones may readily be discerned: 'There
are certain landscapes in which you can see the bones of the earth. And
this was one. You could touch your own bones, which is to come a little
closer to the truth' (1971, 63). The Greek cellist Moraitis feels at home
there: 'You see, I am a peasant. I am very conscious of the shape of the
country. I come from the Peloponnese. It is rich, fat, purple country, but
underneath you can feel the bones ... Greece, you see, is a bare country.
It is all bones' (pp. 112-13). White's characters celebrate a landscape of
bones lacking the flesh of soil and hair of vegetation. They are suspicious
of luxuriant, continuous vegetation cover, where a landscape may be
said to be clothed. Placed in a room full of furniture, Moraitis exclaims: 'I
cannot live in such a room. I require naked rooms, bare' (p.112).
Bony landscapes, however, are not universally admired. In the Lord
of the Rings, Gollum, a riverside creature like most humanoids, finds a
ridged, bony landscape to be actively hostile:

The cold bare lands

They bites our hands,
They gnaws our feet.
The rocks and stones
Are like old bones
All bare of meat ...
(Tolkien 1965, 287)

Muscles and bones are sustained by the circulatory system. Water is

the earth's blood, and, by its means, nutrients are carried throughout
the body. A comparison between hydrological and circulatory systems
was often drawn in early-modem times. Proponents of inland navigation
in 1665, for example, drew the attention of the English public with the
assertion that 'this Island is incomparably furnished with pleasant
Rivers, like Veins in the Natural Body, which convey Blood into all the
Parts, whereby the Whole is nourished and made useful' (Anonymous
1665). Physiological analogies between body and landscape are still
common. It is not unusual among urban geographers, for example, to
speak of the anatomy of a metropolis, together with its circulation
(transportation system), its nervous system (communications), and its
metabolism.
76 Landscapes of Metaphor

Furthermore, landscapes appear to age, as does the body. Vigorous

young fold mountains contrast with the sluggish senescence of peneplains
or anastomosing rivers in the deltaic stage. The seven ages of man are
repeated in the erosion of the landscape. Davis (1909) deliberately chose
his powerful, symbolic terminology. The essence of his erosion cycle,
with young, mature, and old-age stages, remains in the mind long after
we have intellectually discarded the Davisian conceptual framework.
As an ageing, living being, the earth naturally performs vital functions.
It exhales through vents and orifices in the form of vapours, fumes , and
mists. The earth breathes, in Coleridge's unforgettable line, 'in short thick
pants.' It heaves, often violently, in the form of landslides and earth-
quakes. It swallows living creatures; northern English mothers warn their
children of Jenny Green teeth, an earth spirit who entices children below
the waters of ponds. And from the bowels of the earth, volcanoes spew
lava. The Ringbearer was appalled by the desolation that lay before
Mordor: 'Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on
rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds,
sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their
entrails upon the lands about' (Tolkien 1965, 302).
It is but a short leap beyond anthropomorphism to the pathetic fallacy.
This literary device involves empathy between man and nature to such a
degree that the joys and sorrows of man are reflected in nature, while
nature itself assumes human emotional attributes. Popular among the
Romantic poets and ridiculed by Ruskin, the pathetic fallacy neverthe-
less has deep roots. The psalms are particularly replete with landscapes
that, with great beauty and economy of expression, are made to reflect
human feelings. Mountains skip like rams, and little hills like young
sheep; the sea saw this, and fled; the valleys shall stand so thick with
com that they shall laugh and sing. Only with its stylization in
eighteenth-century verse - where hills frown; waves roar, moan, and
fret; and gardens smile amid the slumb'ring land - did the pathetic
fallacy lose its impact. Yet, when the prophet is asked to speak of
clothes, he replies: 'Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare
feet and the winds long to play with your hair' (Gibran 1976, 36).
From the body as a whole, we come to a consideration of its individual
parts as referents for landscape features. So common are these usages
that they are no longer considered metaphorical. We speak of an arm of
the sea; a neck of land; the mouth of a river, cavern, or crater; the face of
Europe, ·the face of the earth. Such usage is common in European
languages. A headland, for example, may be a nez (France) ness
(Scandinavia), or a ness, neb, naze, or nose in Britain. Easter Island is
Bodyscape 77

the navel of the world, el ombligo del mundo, and so on. Pools are eyes,
and fields are fanged with flints (Gibbons 1938).
Mountains and related land-forms are especially favoured, bringing
to mind, once again, the concept of mountain as giant being. Mountains
have crests, shoulders, flanks , feet. Their caverns and craters have
mouths; the latter also possess lips. Between mountains we find the
heads of passes, and on mountainsides are the heads of valleys; the
rivers within them terminate in mouths. We may climb the brow of a hill,
the spine of a ridge, the tail of a drumlin, a volcanic neck, a headland.
Mountains may be clothed or bearded with forest.
All these terms are sexually neutral, although originally maleness
may have been implicit. Wherever sex is specified in metaphor,
however, it is almost invariably the female body that becomes meta-
phier. The vision of a landscape as a female body is a common literary
theme. Charles Kingsley, for example, found chalk downlands to be
'beautiful . . . with their enormous sheets of spotless turf, those grand
curves and swells, as if the great goddess-mother Hertha had laid herself
down among the hills to sleep, her Titan limbs wrapped in a veil of
silvery green' (quoted in Chitty 1974, 90).
Although the usage declined during the twentieth century, it was still
common in the 1920s and 1930s, when a pretentious Aldous Huxley
character speaks of 'curves ... those little valleys had the lines of a cup
moulded round a woman's breast; they seemed the dinted imprints of
some huge divine body that had rested on these hills' (1977, 7). More
generally, Aldington (1968, 45) speaks of 'the sweet, breast-round, soft
English country.' Indeed, so common became the use of female-body
imagery in landscape description that Stella Gibbons's satire on the
bucolic genre, Cold Comfort Farm (1938), routinely views the earth as a
great, brown, outstretched woman and pokes fun at outworn cliches
such as the stem of a young sapling as phallus or buds as nipples.
Orifices and concavities are notable landscape and body features. A
common psychiatric interpretation of dreams involves equating lakes
with the womb, caves with the vagina (Hadfield 1954). In common
English usage, attractive locations are physiognomic 'beauty spots' on
the face of the earth. But it is the breast that seems to have captured the
imagination of those male travellers whose task it was to place names
upon a newly discovered landscape. The breast is a basic symbol of
comfort as well as a prominent secondary sexual characteristic of
especial attraction to the American male (Roth 1972; Rudofsky 1971).
Charles Darwin's grandfather extolled the delights that the baby derives
from contact with the breast, experiences that remain embedded in the
78 Landscapes of Metaphor

mind, for 'in our maturer years, when an object of vision is presented to
us which bears any similitude to the form of the female bosom ... we feel
a general glow of delight which seems to influence all our senses; and if
the object be not too large we experience an attraction to embrace it with
our lips' (quoted in Rudofsky 1971, 44). The importance of the breast
may be seen in cave paintings (Tuan 1979, 47), Jungian interpretations of
the symbolism of pottery ware, and the value of fountains as symbols of
life and fertility.
If the breast-like object is too big to engulf, we can at least name it with
a specific mammarian term. Twin conical peaks, domes, and pointed
hills have been compared the world over to breasts. Consider the Grand
Tetons or, less obvious but more interesting, the three upstanding
quartzite cones that form the Paps of}ura, on the Inner Hebridean island
of that name. Two South African hills, known as Sannie's Tits, are a
recurrent landscape referent in Michener's The Covenant (1980). Before
mountains were considered sublime or beautiful, they were 'Earth's
Dugs,' or the 'barren breasts' of Milton's L'Allegro (Nicholson 1959).
The multitude of soft rounded hills, overlaid with round burial mounds,
that make up parts of the Wessex chalkland called to Hardy's (1981)
mind the fecund image of Diana Multimammia. Appleton's (1978)
poetry betrays a preference for pointed peaks. Walt Whitman's (1982,
173) evocation of the sea stresses its traditional femininity, its bound-
less, rounded undulations, its waves 'lifting up their necks' above the
'limitless heaving breast.'

Body as landscape

So old is our usage of body imagery for landscape features that the terms
have been appropriated by our environmental vocabulary, and are no
longer thought of as metaphor. The use of landscape as a metaphier for
the human body, in contrast, is more contrived, more obviously a
literary device, and therefore more vivid. Novelists, of course, may go to
extremes in their search for effect, as when one heroine is made to
describe her pubic hair as 'spreading over her thighs like urban blight'
(Simon 1980). Landscape as body is clearly an anthropomorphism. As
yet we have no technical term for body as landscape, although
'geomorphism' suggests itself. Moreover, the ensuing discussion of
metaphor should not blind us to the fact that, to very small children and
pets, adult bodies are actual landscapes.
Theological imagery and religious poetry suggest that the body is
merely earth, dust, ashes, clay. The Old Testament and religious poetry
Bodyscape 79

are replete with images of both human transience and our oneness with
the earth, for all flesh is as grass and we are merely human clay. The use
of embalming and coffins, then, must be acts of bad faith. In medical
atlases, the human body has its geography. As in a landscape, some
features of the human body, and in particular of the face, immediately
catch our attention. In The Aunt's Story (1971) White deals tellingly with
the geography of the face: 'In the left temple, in the yellow skin, there
was a long blue vein. She had to look at this vein. For the moment it was
the most significant detail of geography' (p. 86).
Many of the bodily descriptors used as landscape terms are matched by
landscape terminology used in describing the human body. Man moun-
tain, like his geological counterpart, has crest, shoulders, flanks, feet.
Breasts are soft, rounded hillocks. The belly is a smooth rolling downland,
giving way to the tangled shrubbery of the significantly named mons
veneris, which in tum guards a secret cave. As in the earth itself, seed
is implanted and the fruit of the womb brought forth. Veins and arteries
are rivers; orifices and passages are tunnels; hirsuteness recalls shaggy
mountains, thickets, or fine carpets of grass. Muscles may stand out like
hillocks; the bald man's head is an unredeemable desert. Like a mountain,
one's head may be in the clouds, but one's feet may be of clay. There is
all the difference between living high on the hog or subsisting on sowbelly.
And one can use simile and metaphor to express other levels of truth:

Man's like the earth, his hair like grass is grown

His veins the rivers are, his heart the stone.
(Wit's Recreations 1640, quoted in Greene 1947, 7)

The sinuous, curvilinear line of beauty fits the body, especially that
of the female, as well as natural and even man-made landscapes. Again,
it is the female body that attracts most attention. In the unsettling novel
Silence (Kennaway 1977, 52), the injured protagonist gains power from
contact with 'the mountains and the forests of the great feline body' of his
female protector and tormentor. Similarly, the passionate, political
love-poetry of the contemporary Nicaraguan poet Gioconda Belli
identifies the female body with a terrain that Neruda called 'Land as slim
as a whip/ hot as torture' (Rushdie 1987, 42):

Rivers run through me

mountains bore into my body
and the geography of this country
begins forming in me
80 Landscapes of Metaphor

turning me into lakes, chasms, ravines,

earth for serving love
opening like a furrow
filling me with a longing to live
to see it free, beautiful
I want to explode with love ...

This is truly volcanic.

It is here the lover becomes geographer, for the metaphor of explora-
tion is used freely with regard to the landscape of the human body.
Donne likened his own body to a 'flat map.' Over three centuries later
the image remains in use, as when Lee (1962, 206) likens his 'exploration
of Jo's spread body' to 'a solitary studying of maps.' The exploration of
the female body, usually by hand, has become a cliche of light fiction.
Here, fingers form an expedition to penetrate unknown territory.
Explorers, usually male, wish to discover, describe, and possess. The
territorial analogy is profound.
Such exploration became a powerful metaphor, especially after the
expansion of horizons known as the Age of Discovery. John Donne
(1956, 88) mirrors the age in his description of his mistress's body as:

My America, my New Found Land,

My Kingdom, safliest when with one man manned.

In Shakespeare's Henry VIII, the King, clasping a fair lady, 'hath all the
Indies in his arms.'
Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1977, 315) provides a typically lyrical evocation of
the female body as a world ripe for discovery. Abdullah, the one-legged
former freedom-fighter, apostrophizes the magnificent barmaid, Wanja:
'for him now, a woman was truly another world: with its own contours,
valleys, rivers, steep and slow climbs and descents, and above all,
movement of secret springs of life. Which explorer, despite the boasts of
men, could claim to have touched every comer of the world and drunk of
every stream in her? Let others stay with their worlds: flat, grey, without
contours, unexpected turns, or surprises - so predictable. A Woman
was a world, the world.' Such a world, once explored, may be plundered
or occupied. One can have sovereignty over it, a metaphor common in
literature (Barth 1960). Shakespeare's Tarquin sees Lucrece's breasts as
'a pair of maiden worlds unconquered.' And in such a landscape, of
course, one can become lost.
Finally, Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors (Act 111, Scene 2) provides
Bodyscape 81

us with one example of the use of landscape metaphor as crude comedy.

Dromio is describing, to Antipholus, the kitchen wench he fears will
become his wife:

o: .. . she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her.

A: In what part of her body stands Ireland?
o : Marry, sir, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs.
A: Where Scotland?
D: I found it by the barrenness; hard in the pahn of her hand.

A: Where Spain?
D: Faith, I saw it not; but I felt it hot in her breath.
A: Where America, the Indies?
o : Oh, sir, upon her nose, all o'er embellished with rubies, carbuncles,
sapphires ...
A: Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?
o : Oh, sir, I did not look so low ...

From Shakespearean bawdy, it is but a short step to pomotopia.

Pomotopia

Whether landscape is described in body terms, or body as landscape,

sexual imagery is a persistent theme. Until recently almost all literature
was male-produced and much was male-oriented. There is a long tradi-
tion in literature of likening the earth to a recumbent goddess. Long inter-
fluves are her flanks; conical hills, her breasts; caves and grottoes, her
secret orifices. The forest is her hair; the soil, her flesh; the grass, her skin.
Her feet are in the river; her head, in the mountains. As a female, Mother
Earth gives off scents and secretions, many attractive to men. Some cul-
tures make obeisance before performing the generative functions of
ploughing or planting. 'Advanced' technological cultures, more careless
in their primary productivity, are accused of the rape of the earth.
Breasts are the most prominent of secondary sexual characteristics.
As has been noted above, they occur often as named features of the
landscape. The very 'softest' pornography, as in British daily newspa-
pers, for example, emphasizes breasts. Brien's Domes ofFortune (1979)
presents a photographic celebration of the breast, interspersed with
short prose poems in which the amazing variety of breasts is described in
terms redolent of architectural jargon. Breasts are cupolas, geodesic
domes, and the like. There is considerable 'body as landscape' imagery.
82 Landscapes of Metaphor

The female body is 'uncharted territory' dominated by 'hillocks' and

'foothills'; one is taken on a tour 'in an English landscape of a Pennine
walk - from the promontory of the chin along the ridge of the throat, over
the spur of the larynx, and then up the gradual slope of the breasts to the
crests of its viewpoint peak at the nipple, looking down the curving
steepness to the belly plateau below' (p. 40).
'Harder' pornography deals, however, with primary sexual character-
istics. According to Freud, 'the genitals have never really been consid-
ered beautiful,' but novelists such as Philip Roth and John Updike would
disagree, and Rudofsky notes that 'sexually neutral parts are ignored in
love lyrics as well as the arts' (1971, 54). Since the Song of Solomon,
female sexuality has been celebrated in landscape metaphor and built
form, where beauty may be less important than the experience of power.
Caves are obvious landscape referents for the vulva. In literature,
caves and grottoes are symbols of secrecy and arcane knowledge. They
are unavailable to all, but within them one may be safe. But not always,
as is shown in Malcolm Lowry's 'Through the Panama' novella (1961),
where the archetypical vagina dentata is resurrected. In survival terms,
a cave provides both prospect and refuge (Appleton 1975). The private
burrow or labyrinthine cave is a commonplace in literature, an am-
bivalent image with both positive (Baggins's Bag End in Tolkien) and
negative (the Minotaur) aspects. Whatever the valency, caves are
symbols of a return to the womb. The man-made equivalent is the
grotto, or even the maze, although the latter is also symbolic of a
sacrificial heap of spilled intestines (Bord 1976).
One of the most eloquent examples of this mode of thinking is the
penchant for grottoes in eighteenth-century landscape gardening. In
constructing his garden at Twickenham, Pope may have had in mind the
classical locus amoenus, in which a cave, a spring, and a grove figured
prominently (Mack 1969). Pope extended a small cave into a complex
grotto into which he retired to write and contemplate. From the shrubby
entrance there was a fine prospect of the Thames, but Pope was able to
close this entrance, pass along a tunnel, and conceal himself in the
chamber within.
The analogy with the (re)penetration of pubic hair, vulva, vagina, and
womb is overwhelming. Pope eventually caused streams to flow through
the grotto in a 'perpetual rill,' a sexual secretion as well as a soothing
amniotic fluid. The return-to-the-womb interpretation is probably correct
in Pope's case, for the poet, lonely, small in stature, and lacking advance-
ment because of his religion, was also abnormally close to his mother.
Within the same Twickenham garden he erected an (phallic?) obelisk
Bodyscape 83

in memory of his mother, and the smooth orderliness of the garden as a

whole could be viewed from the top of a suggestively rougher 'Mount ...
covered with Bushes and Trees of a wilder Growth, and more confused
Order, rising as it were out of the Clefts of Rocks, and Heaps of ... mossy
Stones' (Mack 1969, 56). Pubic hair as moss is a commonplace of late
pre-industrial soft pornography. It appears that we can look much closer
to home than Dogon villages for sexual expression in the landscape.
But this is gentle stuff. In Victorian Britain the blanket sexual
suppression that supposedly clothed the 'limbs' of pianos was matched
by an overt expression of sexuality in phallic chimneys and water-towers
and covert expression in a considerable underground literature of 'hard'
pornography (Marcus 1967).
In this self-suppressed literature, meant only for the eyes of intimates,
there were no holds barred to explicit description of sexual characteris-
tics or acts. Yet, such was the force of a lengthy tradition, even this
hardest of pornography made much use of eighteenth-century 'body as
landscape' imagery. Breast hills, mouth caverns, mossy mounts, dark
caves, and deep valleys were brought into play as descriptors for the
usually supine female body. And it is in this literature, indeed, that the
'body as landscape' genre reaches its climax, where the whole body
becomes landscape. Analysis of the genre enables Marcus to construct
an epitome of nineteenth-century pornography's landscape: body obses-
sion, which he terms pomotopia. In terms of co-ordinates, pornotopia is
both timeless and placeless. At the level of the surface world, however, it
is always bedtime, and nature is represented from the eye-level view, as
a supine female form veiled only in poetic allusion:

In the middle distance there looms a large irregular shape. On the horizon
swell two immense snowy white hillocks; these are capped by great, pink,
and as it were prehensile peaks or tips - as if the rosy-fingered dawn itself
were playing just behind them. The landscape then undulates gently down
to a broad, smooth, swelling plain, its soft rolling cuives broken only in the
lower center by a small volcanic crater or omphalos. Farther down, the
scene narrows and changes in perspective. Off to the right and left jut two
smooth snowy ridges. Between them, at their point of juncture, is a dark
wood - we are now at the middle of our journey. This dark wood - some-
times it is called a thicket - is triangular in shape. It is also like a cedarn
cover, and in its midst is a dark romantic chasm. In this chasm the wonders
of nature abound. From its top there depends a large, pink, stalactite, which
changes shape, size, and color in accord with the movement of the tides
below and within. Within the chasm ... there are caverns measureless to
84 Landscapes of Metaphor

man, grottoes, hennits' caves, underground streams - a whole internal and

subterranean landscape. The climate is warm but wet. Thunderstorms
are frequent in this region, as are tremors and quakings of the earth. The
walls of the cavern often heave and contract in rhythmic violence, and
when they do the salty streams that run through it double their flow. The
whole place is dark yet visible. lbis is the center of the earth and the
home of man. (Marcus 1967, 274)

Here humour, poetic allusion, and landscape unite to provide, perhaps

unbeknown to Marcus, a microcosmic parody of the geographer's
definition of geography.
Although the landscape:body metaphor continued in use until well
after the First World War, by the mid-twentieth century it had been
quietly dropped. Gibbons's (1938) parody may have been influential
here but, in general, twentieth-century literature is less interested in
place, home, and roots than in placelessness, homelessness, rootless-
ness, and the post-Freudian investigation in depth of the human psyche.
Since the 1950s, both literature and pornography have enjoyed a period
of relatively free expression. The ensuing directness (or crudity, if you
prefer) has ensured the demise of any non-camp usage of the relatively
gentle landscape:body metaphor.
In contrast with the metaphor's mainstream position in the eighteenth
century, its modern English usage is both sparse and incidental. One
looks in vain in Henry Miller. The metaphor still survives, however, in
Romance-language novels, most notably in those of the florid Jorge
Amado, where we still find characters who explore 'the wet well of her
womb and the narrow ravine between the cliffs of her buttocks' (1977, 211).

Interpretation

Why is the interchangeable landscape: body metaphor so common, and

why is the female body so frequently the object? Only the first question
has an apolitical answer.
The human body is the first landscape we encounter and explore. It is
likely that we carry the cognitive imagery in our heads as well as the
actuality of our own bodies as we approach the external environment.
Landscape is our second major encounter. For both practical and
magical reasons, the application of notions of the self to the environment
of non-self makes sense. In this way we humanize our environment,
reduce its primeval unknownness and terror, make it ours.
The second question requires a careful answer in an age of female
liberation. Except for early Celtic myths and some evidence of non-
Bodyscape 85

Western cultures from anthropology, males have been dominant in most

societies. This is especially so in the world-dominant societies of
Euramerica, where artists, writers, explorers, the givers of names, have
been predominantly male. Traditionally, and with a basis in biology, the
male is active, the female passive; the male orgasm is critical for species
survival, the female orgasm less so (Deshusses 1982). Sexual differences
in humans are often more marked than in many animal species, and
especially so in economic activity. Men hunt, women gather and nurse;
men deal with the large-scale landscape, women with the intimate
locale, the bosom of the family. Power, indeed, appears to be a male
monopoly.
Thus, the male, pre-eminently the explorer and journeyman, has also
predominated as namer of landscape features, his preference being for
either neutral terms or elements drawn from the female body, most
notably the breast. Taboos clearly operate, for few landscape features
bear nomenclature relating to primary sexual characteristics. In Abbey's
(1971, 255) resounding list of American desert features named by
pioneers, 'The Bishop's Prick' stands alone, flanked by the more
acceptable 'Queen Anne's Bottom' and 'Mollie's Nipple.'
Males are the major metaphor-creators. Their territory is not only the
land, but the female body. And landscape and female body are,
mystically, one. The earth is Mother. Women are closer to home, the
locale, the earth. As Wilden (1980) has demonstrated in his consider-
ation of exploitation in Canadian society, the male:female nexus is not
correctly expressed in horizontal type. By analogy with 'lower race' and
'lower class,' women have been considered the 'lower sex, ' and the
traditional power relationship, expressed as:
male ( f man )
female c · environment
clearly places the female closer to the earth. This attitude of dominance,
over landscape as over female, is a major factor in industrial civiliza-
tion's malaise.
According to Baudelaire, we live in a forest of symbols. One of the
prime symbolic relationships is that between the human body and the
natural landscape, and the interchangeable body:land metaphor is itself
an important metaphor of an actual symbiosis. It is likely that body was
first used as metaphier for landscape, and that, through the feedback
process, the more contrived reverse relationship appeared. In both
cases the traditional view of the body: land relationship as one of
microcosm:macrocosm is confirmed and enriched. The relationship
between mind and land is a somewhat different, but related, issue.
5 Inscape

0, the mind, the mind has mountains,

cliffs of fall,
Frightful, sheer, no man fathomed ...
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Geographers have long studied imaginative literature in the form of the

regional novel, but the emphasis has generally been on the place-related
novels of the nineteenth century (Pocock 1981b; Porteous 1985a). Very
little work has been attempted on the rootless, placeless, homeless
modem novels of alienation that developed after 1914 (Middleton 1981;
Seamon 1981). And most attention has been paid to the relationships
between the landscape depicted in the novel and the landscape from
which it was derived. Geographers, although keen to uncover 'the capes
and bays geographies of the mind' of the historical imagery genre
(Chambers 1982), have so far tended to ignore the inscape, the
metaphorical terrain of the mind.

Inscape

The term inscape is derived from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who
originally meant it to refer to the inner beauty of natural forms as they
reveal themselves to the observer (Hopkins 1948). The concept was later
extended to embrace the notion of the observer's mental landscape. The
notion has been introduced at least once in geography (Dansereau
1973), but was only briefly considered. It is not a new idea. Milton had
suggested that 'the mind has its own place, and in itself can make a
heav'n of hell, a hell of heaven' (Woodcock 1978 ). The concept was basic
to the French symbolists Rimbaud and Baudelaire, who were exploring
the paysage interieur long before Jung and Freud.
The notion of landscapes of the mind has had common currency in
literature and art since the late nineteenth century. For geographers, its
88 Landscapes of Metaphor

interest lies in the way it allows us to go beyond the initial study of the
correspondences between literary and 'real' landscapes, to the investi-
gation of correspondences between landscapes and hwnan personality.
Studies of inscape may enrich our understanding not only of landscapes,
landscape types, and literature, but also of ourselves, by comparing and
contrasting our experiences with those of the artist. If our goal is to
understand and experience the world, rather than merely gather
knowledge about it, then the inscape/landscape correspondence, be-
lieves Lawrence Durrell, may be an important source of intuition (Aileen
1976}. The Yorkshire sculptor Henry Moore is a prime example of the
artist who matches inscape with landscape, translates the result into
sculpted form, and thus enriches us all.
Methodologically, literary geographers may investigate inscapes via
the dialectics of existential phenomenology (Tuan 1974, 1977}. Some of
the more useful antinomies are home:away and insider:outsider (Por-
teous 1985a}; the combinations home/insider and away/outsider are
particularly powerlul experiences, and may, in Dantesque terms,
approximate Paradiso and Inferno, with uncertain areas such as
Purgatorio in between. Such a eutopic:dystopic polarity is readily
apparent in the novels of Malcolm Lowry.
Except for a semi-permanent residence in the coastal wilderness near
Vancouver during the period 1940-54, Lowry was a homeless wanderer
for most of his life, and through his protagonists conveys his feelings of
himself as a latter-day Ahab, Ancient Mariner, or Wandering Jew.
Besides British Colwnbia, the landscape that most impressed Lowry
was that of interior Mexico, and it is the contrast between coastal British
Colwnbia (Paradiso} and interior Mexico (Inferno} that will be pursued
here. My second Lowry essay (chapter 8} will explicate Lowry's view of
North America in general as Purgatorio or Deathscape. Although
Lowry's work can be interpreted at the political, magical, and religious
levels (Day 1973}, it is on Day's 'earthbound, landscape' level that this
interpretation concentrates.
It is against eutopic and dystopic landscapes, composed of sea and
land, coast and interior, garden and house, forest and path, mountain
and cavern, that the Lowryan characters act out their theatre. Tradition-
al work in hwnanist geography has dealt with changing cultural
attitudes to basic landscape elements such as mountains, caves, water,
forests, gardens (Tuan 1974, 1977}.
It is clear from other analyses that mountains (Nicholson 1959} and
the mountains, waters, caves, and forests that make up wilderness
(Nash 1967} are fundamental features of both our actual and our
Inscape 89

imaginative terrain (Porteous 1985b). Paths humanize forests for poets

from Dante to Robert Frost. Seashore and interior, although not studied
in depth by geographers, are basic global units of experience for
land-bound species (Blomberg 1982). Garden and house are commonly
looked upon as home-places, the essential roots of our being (Bachelard
1969). My interest here is in the way in which such elements, common to
both British Columbia and Mexico, are used differentially in a symbolic
way, to indicate human experience and feeling, and how, synthesized as
landscapes, they become identified with Lowry's mind.

Sea and land

Sea:land is the ultimate antinomy in physical geography. The two are

complementary; they interpenetrate. Yet, human beings are likely to be
placed on the one and, with few exceptions, become placeless voyagers
upon the other.
Lowry's fascination with the sea had deep roots. He fantasized his
shipowning grandfather as a swashbuckling sea captain. His father was
a bemedalled life-saver. Lowry, himself an excellent swimmer, grew up
close to the Irish Sea and to the great shipping lanes that focused upon
Liverpool. His youthful reading included the wandering seafarer tales of
Conrad, Melville, O'Neill, and Jack London. His more immediate
literary mentors were Nordahl Grieg and Conrad Aiken, both known for
their sea novels.
Almost all Lowry's novels contain a sea-borne theme. Ultramarine
(1974) is a young-man-finds-himself-at-sea novel fairly typical of the age.
The protagonist Dana (taken from Dana's Two Years Before the Mast?)
is a 'toff' who goes to sea to confront existential extremes and, through
suffering them, to find himself. His ship, significantly, is named the
Oedipus Tyrranus. From the landlubber's viewpoint, the unrestricted
placelessness of the sea and the irresponsible adventures in short-stay
ports seem enviably romantic. But the tyro quickly discovers that life at
sea is, ultimately, boring. The work is hard and the deck-hand is too
tired to contemplate the beauties of sea and sky. Ultramarine lacks
purple passages. Moreover, port life is disappointing - 'how alike all
these harbours were' (p. 145) - and consists largely of drunken binges,
pointless conversations, and encounters with raddled whores. Ultimate-
ly, sailors are happiest when they are going home, yet on land they are
homeless and must compensate in alcoholic excess: drunk is the sailor,
home from the sea.
Nevertheless, we can grasp Lowry's early positive feelings for the sea,
90 Landscapes of Metaphor

especially in his evocation of ocean life while in some squalid Far

Eastern port. 'O God, 0 God, if sea life were only always like that! If it
were only the open sea, and the wind racing through the blood, the sea,
and the stars forever!' (Lowry 1974, 77). It is the sea wind that stirs
Lowry, 'The wind! The wind! The cold clean scourge of the ocean'
(p. 66). And, on reaching home, there is the ever-present urge to set sail
once more: 'To sail into an unknown spring, or receive one's baptism on
storms' promontory, where the solitary albatross heels over in the gale,
and at last to come to land. To know the earth under one's foot and go, in
wild delight, ways where there is water ... to return again over the ocean
... at last again to be outward bound, always outward, always onward'
(p. 185). This evocation of the spell of the sea must stir even the most
inveterate landlubber.
Yet, Lawry's most vivid evocations in Ultramarine are not of the sea
itself, but of the filthy, odorous reality of shipboard life. Throughout the
voyage Dana's gaze is not outward at the sea, or upward at the sky, but
downward into the hold, the crew's quarters, the O'Neill-like inferno of
the engine-room (p. 158), a 'maelstrom of noise, of tangled motion,
of shining steel . . . where the red and gold of the furnaces mottled the
reeking deck, and the tremulous roar of the cage's fires dominated a
sibilant, continual sputter of steam. The Oedipus Tyrranus 's firemen ...
half naked, gritty and black with coal, and pasty with ashes, came and
went in blazing light, and in the gloom; flaming nightmares, firelit
demons. The furnace doors opened, and scorpions leapt out, spirals of
gas spun and reeled.' In this frightening vision Lowry has caught his first
glimpse of the abyss, the inferno, into which he and the protagonist of
Volcano must descend in order to seek salvation.
This single voyage proved a turning-point in Lawry's life. From thence
he perfected the role of the rough, drunken sailor among his university
and literary acquaintance. With the publication of Ultramarine he could
pose as the doomed sailor of genius. The swaggering Norwegian
persona he adopted at this time (a kind of Joycean 'Scandiknavery') led
Lowry to lie under tables with a bottle to re-create the feelings of life at
sea.
All the remaining books have explicit or submerged sea themes. They
are replete with the resounding names of ships, the exotic names of
ports. In Under the Volcano(1963)both the Consul, the protagonist, and
his half-brother (both aspects of Lowry) have been seafarers. The
sea-borne ambience, clean, sleek, silent, of their memories and wishes
clashes sharply with the arid, maddening hell of interior Mexico, where
the sea can appear only in metaphor, as when one hears 'a soft
Inscape 91

wind-blown surge of music, from which skimmed a spray of gabbling,

that seemed not so much to break against as to be thumping the walls
and towers of the outskirts; then with a moan it would be sucked back
into the distance' (p. 17).
Again, in Lunar Caustic (1968), the inmates peer through the windows
of New York's misnamed Bellevue asylum at the freedom of a waterway
with ferry and motorboats. Yet they identify chiefly with a wrecked coal
barge, 'sunken, abandoned, open, hull cracked, bollards adrift, tiller
smashed' (p. 12), going nowhere. The chief character, Bill Plantagenet,
sees himself as a ship. Later, writing in despair from Mexico, Lowry
described himself as a sinking ship.
The titles In Ballast and October Ferry to Gabriola (1970) are further
indication of this love affair with the sea. A chapter in the latter, 'The
Tides of Eridanus,' lovingly evokes Lowry's feelings for the calm: menac-
ing, flowing:ebbing, etemal:transient, silent:clamorous sea on or by
which he spent the greater part of his life. Doomed to live somewhere on
land, he chooses a wartime squatter's shack at Eridanus (his name for
Dollarton) where, though 'whole cities, countries be wiped out, .
Eridanus, with its eternal fishermen and net-festooned cabins bordering
the inlet ... whose ceaseless wandering yet ordered motions were like
eternity, looked ... somehow transported straight to heaven. Eridanus
was' (p. 79).
Hear Us O Lordfrom Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1969) is made up of
seven short stories or 'meditations.' The first, 'The Bravest Boat,' begins
with a recurrent Lowry image, 'a day of spindrift and blowing sea foam'
(p. 11). In hostile Vancouver, Sigurd Storlesen seeks comfort by Stanley
Park's Lost Lagoon. Renamed Sigbj0m Wilderness, he leaves for Europe
on a freighter. Throughout, Wilderness considers himself as the Ancient
Mariner, complete with albatross. The passage, 'Through the Panama, '
is replete with the sexual imagery of land-locked water. Wilderness's
dream of the vagina dentata is matched by the passage through the
canal, whose locks snap shut around the ship, and whose banks bear a
dense, fetid tropical forest. Reborn, Wilderness finds a severe Atlantic
storm exhilarating in comparison with the canal passage, and is able to
come to some form of self-realization. After an unsuccessful European
tour, the writer and his wife return to Eridanus, girt by mountains,
fronted by the sea, a tidal, boat-bedecked, gull-encrusted, belled and
fog-homed, surfed and driftwood-laden Dylan Thomas-ish nautical
place inhabited year-round only by beached sailors, Celts and Scandina-
vians all. The novel ends in rain: 'And the rain itself was water from the
sea, as my wife first taught me, raised to heaven by the sun, transformed
92 Landscapes of Metaphor

into clouds, and falling again into the sea. While within the inlet itself the
tides and currents in that sea returned, became remote, and becoming
remote, like that which is called the Tao, returned again as we ourselves
had done ... Three rainbows went up as rockets across the bay: one for
the cat .. . Laughing we stooped down and drank' (p. 286}.
That the sea may be the transforming agent in the life of a protagonist
is a literary cliche. But, in Lowry, the sea is more than merely symbolic.
It has an omnipresent, magical quality. Lowryan characters sail over it,
live beside it, listen to it, dream of it. They need the sea. In Lowry, the
sea is always positive. It challenges, but never harms. It aids protago-
nists in their search for self-realization. In Lowry's words, the sea is 'on
the side of life.'
In contrast, land is, at best, ambivalent. Gardens are cool and
inviting, or, like the Borda Gardens of Cuernavaca, may be corrupt and
menacing. Forests are sheltering; they surround and nurture the cabin at
Eridanus. Best of all, forests lay between Eridanus and the city, and it
was the forest and its paths, impenetrable by automobile, that kept
civilization at bay. But forests may also be menacing, harbouring wild
beasts and tangled roots, which actually seem to conspire in the
downfall of the traveller. Roads lead to exhilarating or devastating
experiences. In particular, paths in forests are used self-consciously by
Lowry as a symbol of the unfathomable ambivalence of life on land.
Volcano is Lowry' s land novel. The landscape of Cuernavaca is richly
symbolic, a 'forest of symbols' in the words of Baudelaire. The idea of
water is there, in memories, in wishes, in Cuernavaca's myriad
swimming-pools. But little rain falls; fountains and even bathroom
showers run dry. If the sea to Lowry is on the side oflife, in Cuernavaca it
is far off; the liquids encountered by the Consul are invariably alcoholic.
The Borda Gardens, luxuriant retreat of Maximilian and Carlotta, are
stagnant, ruined, obscenely rotting. A forest girds Cuernavaca, but far
from providing shade and coolness, it is the scene of darkness, ruin, and
confusion. Through it run paths that lead only to perdition, a far cry from
the idyllic British Columbian 'Forest Path to the Spring,' the final story in
Hear Us O Lord.
Lowry was clearly no happier with life in an inland situation than
with life on the ocean wave. The ideal compromise was a littoral way of
life:

Resurgent sorrow is a sea in the cave

Ofthemind-
Abandon it! .. . take a trip to the upper shore. Lave
Inscape 93

Yourself in sand; gather poppies; brave

The fringe of things, denying that inner chasm .. .
(from 'Whirlpool')

Coast and interior

Lowry was born near the port of Liverpool, England; the sea was in his
blood. All his novels abound in sea imagery. Titles are significant. Of the
six published novels, Ultramarine records a youthful voyage, October
Ferry to Gabriola describes a trip to an island across 'the beer-dark sea,'
Hear Us O Lordfrom Heaven Thy Dwelling Place is drawn from a Manx
fisherman's hymn and contains the piece 'The Bravest Boat' and the
novella 'Through the Panama.' The original title for Lunar Caustic was
'Swinging the Maelstrom.' In Ballast to the White Sea and The
Lighthouse Invites the Storm were never published. Only Under the
Volcano, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend ls Laid (1969), and the
unpublished La Mordida have no titular reference to the sea; these are
the interior, Mexican, land novels. Nevertheless, the projected Lowryan
opus, had it been completed, would have been entitled, in reference to
life's journey, The Voyage That Never Ends.
In contrasting the British Columbia shore-based eutopia with the
interior Mexican dystopia, Hear Us O Lord and October Ferry are
major sources for Lowry's B.C. experience; Dark as the Grave and
Under the Volcano for Mexico. From 1940 to 1954 Lowry achieved a
degree of existential insideness (Relph 1976) for the first time as a
squatter on the beach at Dollarton, located on the northern side of
Burrard Inlet, facing Vancouver. Here Lowry came to terms with a
shore-based amphibian life, for he had earlier tried the sailor's life and
found it wanting. Sailors, significantly, are only happy when they are
going home (Ultramarine). Lawry's positive view of the sea at Dollar-
ton, which he typically renamed Eridanus after both the constellation
and the sunken ss Eridanus, of Liverpool, is inextricably linked with his
feelings for the home-place that he and his wife developed after a decade
of homeless wandering.
Lawry's adjustment to rootedness in place was not easy. Acutely
conscious of his lengthy voyage as a deck-hand a decade before, he
wrote: 'Nothing is more irritating and sorrowful to a man who has
followed the sea than the sound of the ocean pounding mercilessly and
stupidly on a beach. But here in the inlet there was neither sea nor river,
but something compounded of both, in eternal movement, and eternal
flux and change, as mysterious and multiform in its notion and being,
94 Landscapes of Metaphor

and in the mind as the mind flowed with it, as was that other Eridanus,
the constellation in the heavens, the starry river in the sky' (Hear Us
236). Here we grasp one of Lowry's chief delights in the shore, the
mystery of the external flux of waters. For Lowry, 'at the brief period of
high tide before the ebb, it was like what I have learned the Chinese call
the Tao . . . something so still, so changeless, and yet reaching
everywhere, and in no danger of being exhausted' (Hear Us 236). It was
not only the mystic qualities of 'the great tides and currents in their flux
and flow' (Hear Us 235) that fascinated Lowry. The shore brought also a
sense of life, of natural abundance. Lowry's protagonists are immersed
in the detail of existential things; they do not see seabirds, but 'mallards
and buffleheads and scaups, goldeneyes and cackling black coots with
carved ivory bills' (Hear Us 12). They revel in the freedom of sea
creatures, as when seeing, 'from the top of the steps between the
wheelbarrow and Jaqueline's watering can, a sudden view of cavorting
whales' (Fen-y 181).
Even the more dubious denizens of the sea are, like Lowry, mellowed
by being beached. On the beach one finds 'the grotesque macabre fruit of
the sea, with its exhilarating iodine smell, nightmarish bulbs of kelp ...
seawrack like demons, or the discarded casements of evil spirits that had
been cleansed.' And the evidence of man's destructive wastefulness,
'boots, a clock, tom fishing nets, demolished wheelhouse, a smashed
wheel' (Hear Us 24), is redeemed by the sea's irrepressible life-force.
The post-storm feeling of 'death and destruction and barrenness' was
only an appearance, for beneath the flotsam existed 'a stirring and
stretching of life, a seething of spring' (p. 25).
Similarly, when Lowryan characters learn to cope with the beach,
rocks that were once perceived as obstacles become, to the insider,
symbols of permanence and changelessness, 'presences themselves,
standing round like Renan's immutable witnesses that have no death.'
Understanding more, the beach dwellers discover that 'it is only at night
that this great world of the windrow and tide-flats really wakes up' and
they are delighted to discover the 'little shellfish called Chinese Hats
that only walked at night' (Hear Us 237).
There are, of course, more sombre tones, notably in winter 'when
there seemed no life or colour left ... and the inlet looked like the Styx
itself, black water, black mountains, low black clouds' (Hear Us 254).
The tyro beach dwellers lived in constant fear, in winter, of their shack
being swept away by storms, which provoked 'elemental despair,' when
they would 'lose all hope for terror at the noise, the rending branches,
the tumult of the sea, the sound of ruination' (p. 255).
lnscape 95

Surviving these storms was akin to surviving storms at sea. It is a

literary cliche that the sea tests a man (this is rarely a woman's world)
and allows him the fulfilment of a victory not over the elements but, more
important, over his own fears. Thus, the Lowryan hero discovers 'the
pride that one had survived, the sense of life, the fear of death' and
becomes 'seized somehow with an exuberance so great that I wanted to
dive swiftly into that brimming sea' (Hear Us 256).
Of the six characteristics Blomberg (1982) finds common to coastal
literature, Lowry's work strongly supports at least three, the sense of
life, of mystery and spirituality, of energy and conflict. There is some
feeling of time and timelessness, and of the sea's imperviousness to
man's actions, but very little sense of space and distance, for Lowry had
felt this more poignantly while actually at sea.
What Lowry does provide, besides a sense of 'beauty never remaining
two minutes the same' (Ferry 80), is a suggestion of the utility of the sea
and the co-operative friendliness of those who live by and from it. For
Lowry, fishermen and coast squatters, often beached sailors, are noble
characters, typically with Celtic or Scandinavian names, for these were
seafaring races dear to the heart of one brought up on the sea novels of
Joseph Conrad, Nordahl Grieg, and Conrad Aiken. Seen through the
eyes of these insiders, the sea becomes a giver, providing, besides
seafood, two-by-fours and planks for building, materials for a pier,
driftwood for burning, even the gift of a ladder among the rest of the 'gay
salvage' (p. 86).
The greatest sea gift, however, was the gift of grace, the building up in
its protagonists of 'a complete faith in their environment, without that
environment ever seeming too secure' (Ferry 79). And in the short story
'The Bravest Boat' (Hear Us), it is the sea that brings the lovers
together. The sea challenges, bores, terrifies man, but never, for Lowry,
brings ultimate harm, for as we have learned, the sea 'is on the side of
life.'
Water courses other than the sea are rarely mentioned in Lowry's
seashore novels. By contrast, the Mexican novels centre on the city of
Cuernavaca, with no fewer than four hundred swimming-pools 'filled
with the water that ceaselessly pours down from the mountains'
(Volcano 9). This swiftly running water is alien to Lowry, whose real
concern is with a sea impossibly far away from this interior zone.
In Volcano the sea appears only as a memory and a desire. Two of the
four major characters are ex-seafarers with salt memories, and the chief
character, the Consul, dreams of paradise as a little shack in British
Columbia 'between the forest and the sea with a pier going down to the
96 Landscapes of Metaphor

water over rough stones, you know, covered with barnacles and sea
urchins and starfish' (Volcano 126). Otherwise, the sea appears only in
metaphor, as 'sprays of gabbling' and a 'surge of music . . . breaking
against the walls' (p. 17). The Consul remembers the moon's dry Sea of
Tranquility (p. 128) and water mirages are discussed (p. 280).
Otherwise, water in Cuernavaca seems a benediction withheld. It is
the end of the rainy season, but although thunder-clouds appear, rain
rarely falls. In the swimming-pools the water is restricted, dead;
elsewhere it is confined within a travel folder under the heading
'Hydrography' (Volcano 297). The Consul stands beneath a shower, but
no water emerges. A dried-up fountain, choked with leaves, is a
recurrent image (pp. 116, 239). The Consul, damned and alcoholic,
recollects a refrain from Marvell, 'Might a soul bathe there and be clean
and slake its drought?' (Day 1973, 305).
For the tormented Consul, the cleansing, revivifying fountain of
literature cannot be experienced. In his Cuernavaca, water is not the
important liquid, nor are images of 'rivers of blood.' The only liquid that
appears with any frequency in Volcano is alcohol: whisky, gin, rum,
anise, pulque, tequila, mescal. And far from the sea, in a seemingly arid
environment, the alcoholic Consul, Lawry's alter ego, drinks himself to
his doom.

Garden and house

The garden, since Genesis and the Koran, has been a symbol of both
earthly and future delight. Gardens have traditionally been places of
privacy and retirement, where one may leave the troubles of the outer
world and come to terms with the eternal cyclic round of growth.
Gardens are symbols of regeneration and care.
Cuernavaca is a city of gardens, but they are hidden behind high walls,
the domains of others from the point of view of the outsider. The public
gardens of Cuernavaca, as depicted in Volcano, are universally
neglected (Volcano 116). The new botanical garden is full of 'small black
ugly birds, yet too long, something like monstrous insects, something
like crows ... shatterers of the twilight hour' (p. 19). The famed Borda
Gardens are overrun, derelict, rotting. Amusement gardens are domi-
nated by the Ferris wheel, for the Consul the wheel of life and death.
Public gardens contain the notice 'Le gusta este jardfn, que es suyo?
Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!' This the Consul, significantly,
mistranslates as the Kafkaesque: 'You like this garden? Why is it yours?
We evict those who destroy!' a forefiguring of Lowry's future expulsion
from Eden.
Inscape 97

In Volcano, the only positive garden imagery is contained in the

Consul's memories of Granada (p. 239). The Consul's own garden,
around the rented house in Calle Humboldt, is as unkempt and overrun
as Cuernavaca's public gardens, full of rank, hostile growth reminiscent
of Browning's Childe Roland. His garden is full of 'tall exotic plants, livid
and crepuscular . . . perishing on every hand from unnecessary thirst,
staggering ... to maintain ... a collective desolate fecundity' (p. 86). The
Consul's neglect of his garden symbolizes the dereliction of his mind.
Even the agricultural landscape is not garden-like, as was, for
example, that of Britain or the French bocage that Lowry knew. Instead,
'the fields were full of stones; there was a row of dead trees. An
abandoned plough, silhouetted against the sky, raised its arms to
heaven in mute supplication' (Volcano 15). In sharp contrast, Eridanus
has few gardens, except around the neighbouring lighthouses where
'efforts at gardens had been made, and among the rocks ... roses [were]
blooming in defiance of the spray' (Ferry 249). Eridanus needs no
garden, for in its combination of sustaining forest and sea, it is itself a
garden. For Lowry it is the Garden of Eden, for it is here, within this
compact between man and nature, that the existential outsider finally
achieves insideness.
Inevitably, it is from this Eden that Lowry is expelled. With the spread
of urban development and the threat of eviction, the Lowrys must leave.
If Hear Us O Lord rejects travel and celebrates home, October Ferry
celebrates home but grieves for its loss. It is the log of the search for
another haven, somewhere 'where you can have a garden' (Ferry 200).
The novel is filled with the imagery of expulsion, to which Lowryan
protagonists react more violently than do their neighbours, 'the older
fishermen who, long used to evil, grieved, shrugged their shoulders and
went on living till disaster drove them out, because they knew that was
what it was to exist' (p. 292). Everywhere the Llewelyns (Lowrys) see
houses condemned, people 'penniless, shoeless, homeless' (p. 227), 'as
if the whole world were beginning to fear eviction' (p. 229).
Another Eridanus was not to be found. Suburbia and development
creep up until the squatter's shack is only 'an oasis of unspoiled
wilderness in the midst of an abomination of desolation' (Ferry 168). The
Llewelyns go into exile once more, as did Lowry in 1954, his grief for the
loss of his Canadian Eden being a probable factor in his death three
years later (Day 1973).
Eridanus was a cottage in a wilderness Eden. The house in the garden
is archetypically a refuge, the expression of a human need for privacy
and permanence. The hand-built house at Eridanus is permanent,
despite the elements, its permanence seemingly guaranteed by 'the very
98 Landscapes of Metaphor

immediacy of the eternities by which they were surrounded and nursed;

antiquity of mountains, forest, and sea, conspired on every hand to
reassure and protect them' (Ferry 79). It is private, cut off from
civilization by the forest, and doubly private after Labour Day when the
'summer people' depart 'as if swept away by the great wash of the
returning fishermen's craft ... reaching within the bay ... with the
successive thunder of rollers' (Hear Us 223).
The house at Eridanus was, moreover, almost sentient. At high tide,
with the great logs 'banging underneath with a chewing breaking ruinous
sound' the house cries 'Vous qui passez, ayez pitie.' This shack, to the
Lowryan protagonists, was a 'shrine of ... integrity and independence'
(Hear Us 247). It was the ideal home-place: 'Where else could you find
the freedom, the privacy, the absolute privacy, and yet when you needed
it, the friendliness, not too far, not too near, where else find all man's
simple needs so simply satisfied? It was unique' (Ferry 197).
The house rented in Cuemavaca had no such charm. The warm
comforting message that home usually provides is inverted here.
Corruption is implicit in the French chateau that turns out to be a
brewery, with its 'dried-up fountain below some broken steps, its basin
filled with twigs and leaves' (Volcano 116). It becomes explicit in the
ruins of the palace once inhabited by the ill-fated Maximilian and
Carlotta. Once the scene of gaiety and joy, the palace exhibits only
'broken pink pillars ... the pool, covered with green scum, its steps tom
away and hanging by one rotting clamp .. . the shattered evil-smelling
chapel, overgrown with weeds, the crumbling walls, splashed with
urine, on which scorpions lurked - wrecked entablature, sad archivolt,
slippery stones covered with excreta - this place, where love had once
brooded, seemed part of a nightmare' (p. 20).

Forests and paths

Unlike the garden and the house, the forest has no archetypically
positive image in literature. Indeed, as we shall see in chapter 8,
'Childscape,' the forest is one of the primordial elements, a landscape of
fear that provides garden and house with their raison d'etre. At best,
forests are ambivalent, brooding, grim(m) places, as in Teutonic fairy
tales full of unknown dangers, and yet the refuge of good forces, such as,
for example, Badger in The Wind in the Willows, the elves of Tolkien,
and owls generally.
The forest that surrounds Cuemavaca in Volcano has no redeeming
qualities. It is explicitly the selva oscura nel mezzo di nostra vita of
which Dante speaks in Inferno. Through this forest Hugh (his half-
lnscape 99

brother) and Yvonne (his wife) trail the demented Consul through
vegetation 'savage, harsh, and dense,' through tall trees and under-
growth, past huge cacti 'bending with the wind, in a slow multitudinous
heaving, an inhuman crackling of scales and spines.' The undergrowth
obstructs, 'the mobile trees were not sober' (Volcano 332), there are
nightmare visions. And even though soft rain at last falls and 'a sweetly
clean smell rose from the woods,' (p. 334 ), it is at this moment that
Yvonne falls into the path of a runaway horse.
This archetypically demonic image of the forest contrasts sharply with
the eutopic coastal forest of British Columbia that we have already
briefly glimpsed. Here, like the sea, the forest provides and nurtures;
one can be in harmony with it. The squatters' shacks on its edge stand 'in
defiance of eternity .. . with their weathered sidings as much part of the
natural surroundings as a Shinto temple is of the Japanese landscape'
(Hear Us 233 ). Below the swaying 'mastheads of the trees' are sources of
wonder, fawns, kinglets, cougar, the stuff of poetry: '"See the frost on the
fallen leaves, it's like a sumptuous brocade." "The chickadees are
chiming like a windbell." "Look at that bit of moss, it's a miniature
tropical forest of palm trees." "How do I know the cascara from the alder
trees? Because the alders have eyes"' (p. 250). In short, the Eridanus
forest has the same eternal, life-sustaining qualities that are typically
associated with the sea, so that the Lowryan hero 'became susceptible
to these moods and changes and currents of nature . . . its ceaseless
rotting into humus of its falling leaves and buds . . . and burgeoning
toward life' (p. 249).
Forests are not generally pathless. Forest paths are Lowryan symbols
for the human decisions that lead to travel or staying home, whether
remaining in the realm of the known or departing for adventure, hoping
perhaps for joy but knowing that dystopia may be likely. Lowry was well
aware of the preternatural ambiguity of forest paths: 'for not only
folklore but poetry abounds with symbolic stories about them: paths that
divide and become two paths, paths that lead to a golden kingdom,
paths that lead to death, or life, paths that not merely divide but become
the twenty-one paths that lead back to Eden' (Hear Us 272). In his lyric
novella 'The Forest Path to the Spring,' Lowry celebrates the path that
connects his beach home to the life-sustaining mountain spring. The
daily use of this path, through tall trees and 'snowberry and thimble-
berry and shallon bushes' with glimpses of sea and mountains, provides
an 'incommunicable experience' for the Lowryan hero (p. 273 ). Here, he
comes face to face with nature, in the shape of a cougar, and facing this
challenge, becomes at one with the forest.
In the Mexican dystopia, however, paths take one not to life-
100 Landscapes of Metaphor

sustaining water, but to life-destroying alcohol at the El Farolito (Little

Lighthouse} cantina. In the last scenes of Volcano the three protagonists
follow not a straight, clean, bright path towards a known goal, but
narrow, dark paths that twist and tum and double back on themselves,
with only a dubious goal in view. These are the labyrinthine paths of
death, and it is on just such a path, her way blocked by a deadfall, that
Yvonne falls from a dark slippery log to her death beneath the riderless
horse.
In the broader sense, paths represent travel. Again, they are am-
biguous, for travel both leads us away from and returns us to home.
Lowry, a homeless world traveller before and after his fourteen years in
Dollarton, had the urge to travel even from the edenic Eridanus. Yet the
counter-urge to return is always there. The Lowryan protagonist quickly
regrets leaving Eridanus and is soon afflicted with homesickness for
forest, beach, and sea. In the following passage a Lowryan alter ego, the
significantly named Sigbj0m Wilderness (non-civilized Scandinavian
seafarer} laments the mass of small humiliations that beset the traveller.

Why did people travel? God knows Sigbj0m hated it all over again. Travel
to him was an extension of every anxiety, which man tried to get rid of by
having a quiet home. A continual fever, an endless telephone alann,
perpetual heart attack ... a prodigious prolonged jumping conniption. Is
my passport in order? How shall I prevent being robbed? How can I get
my papers out of my pocket in this position? Without dropping half my
money? But it's too dark to see ... How much do I have to tip some
hateful pimply bastard for confusing and embarrassing and distressing
me? .. . It is going into hell, inviting it, going from the society of people
you are not quite sure like you, among people who you know for certain
despise you ... travel is a neurosis. (Grave 64)

And with the expulsion from his Eridanus-Eden, Lowry is thrust again
into this neurotic world of travelling, a world I shall explore more fully in
chapter 7, 'Escape.'

Mountains and caverns

In Lowry's land-based novels, it is mountains and their polar opposite,

deep ravines and caverns, that stand out as symbolic landscape
elements. Delphic oracles and Romantic chasms notwithstanding, in
literature the symbolic value of caverns has often been a negative one;
they are the abode of demons, from Dante's Malebolge through
lnscape 101

Tolkien's Balrog to contemporary 'Dungeons and Dragons.' In terms of

the human journey towards redemption, the deep cavern symbolizes the
abyss. Gods, in contrast, inhabit mountain tops. The literary theme of
salvation attained by ascent of the magic mountain is well known.
Mountains, in short, are sacred, pure, positive, salvation-bringing,
convex, a pointer to heaven. To Lowry, at least, the cavern is profane,
foul, negative, concave, the mouth of hell.
These are powerful symbols, product both of Lowry's literary
education and his years of travel. Besides the sea, and especially storms
at sea, Lowry was enamoured of mountains, especially volcanoes. His
travels took him to Popocatepetl, Ixtaccihuatl, Vesuvius, Etna, and
Stromboli, where he spent a week marvelling at eruptions and burnt-out
villages. His protagonists in Eridanus are encamped before the coast
mountains, although these form only a dramatic sheltering background,
changeless like sea and forest, and like them, appropriated: 'Beyond,
going toward the spring, through the trees, range beyond range,
crowded the mountains, snowpeaked for most of the year. At dusk they
were violet, and frequently they looked on fire, the white fire of mist.
Sometimes .. . this mist looked like a huge family wash, the property of
Titans, hanging out to dry between the folds of their lower hills' (Hear
Us 216). Moreover, although one could see the chimneys of Vancouver
from some parts of Dollarton, this unpleasant view of civilization was
redeemed by occasional glimpses of Mount Hood or Mount Baker, 'the
white American volcano rising above' (Feny 218).
Yet the American volcanoes are part of a cordillera that connects
Dollarton with Cuernavaca. And in Cuernavaca we are dealing less with
the salvation of mountains than with the damnation of caverns. In
Volcano mountain imagery abounds. The Consul was raised in Kash-
mir, his wife in Hawaii. Their positive memories are of Karakoram,
Mauna Loa, and the Hindu Kush. The Himalayas, especially, provide
'light, light, light' and a 'certainty of brightness' (Volcano 129). But 'the
pure cone of old Popo' and 'the jagged peaks of Ixtaccihuatl' are
separated from Cuernavaca not merely by plains and forests and 'a
barrier of murk,' but by pitfalls in the shape of Cuernavaca' s fifty-seven
cantinas and, above all, by the barranca.
It is the barranca, the deep, omnipresent ravine, and the myriad
cantina-caverns that dominate Lowry's Cuernavaca landscape and
compel the Consul's wanderings. The deep fetid crevasse snakes
through the town, almost sentient, waiting for the Consul, and with the
beckoning cantinas, is an outward and visible sign of the alcoholic
Consul's tormented inner landscape. The barranca is everywhere, in the
102 Landscapes of Metaphor

centre of town, at the foot of the Consul's garden, yawning below the
cantina El Farolito. Bridges across the barranca do not defuse its
brooding malevolence: 'It was too dark to see bottom, but: here was
finality indeed ... [Cuemavaca] was like the times in this respect,
wherever you turned the abyss was awaiting for you round the comer.
Donnitory for vultures and city Moloch! When Christ was being
crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all
through this country' (Volcano 21).
The cantinas are man-made environments of evil. Some, like La
Sepultura, are ominously named, but the worst, the Consul's 'paradise
of despair' is a positive Lowryan image inverted. The lighthouse, El
Farolito, is not a beacon to guide the weary to safe haven but a symbolic
entrance to the underworld. Lying directly at the foot of Popocatepetl, it
is not aspiringly vertical, like a lighthouse, but consists of a labyrinth of
'little rooms, each smaller and darker than the last, opening one into the
other, the last and darkest of all being no larger than a cell' in which a
befouled dwarf squats on the lavatory. To enter El Farolito is to enter the
mouth of hell, to penetrate under the volcano.

Lawry's inscape

As Volcano's protagonist dies, on the evening of the Day of the Dead, all
the elements of Lowry's landscape symbolism are brought together.
Crawling through dark forest paths, along which stumble his half-
brother and doomed wife, the Consul reaches the ironic beacon of hope,
El Farolito. He penetrates beneath the volcano, to be tormented and
shot by Cuemavaca's Jefe de Jardineros, the Head Gardener. As he dies,
he dreams of Kashmir 'lying in the meadows near running water among
violets and trefoil, the Himalayas beyond' (Volcano 374). All the
mountain peaks he has known pass through his mind (like the peaks of
his life), and finally the greatest peak experience of all presents itself. He
climbs Popocatepetl, the magic mountain whose ascent brings redemp-
tion and peace. But the mountain crumbles and 'suddenly there was
nothing there: no peaks, no life, no climb' (p. 375). Bullets catapult the
Consul into the forested barranca. And in one of the most telling last
lines of any modem novel, the Consul's damnation is confirmed:
'someone threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.'
Here is synthesis; for the separate consideration of forests and paths,
seashore and interior, mountains and caverns, garden and house, can
be justified only for the purpose of analysis. We are dealing with two
regional landscapes, the Mexican city region (Cuemavaca) and the
Inscape 103

British Columbian wilderness (Dollarton). For the geographer, these

Lowryan landscapes may have value at several levels. One could
appreciate Lowry's descriptive word-painting, analyse the correspon-
dences between the actual landscapes and their fictionalized versions,
and the like (Pocock 1981b). But Lowry's work enables us to go beyond
the actual landscapes to encounter, first, the landscape of symbol and,
subsequently, the landscape of the mind.
In Lowry's British Columbia, forests are benign, the house is in
harmony with its environment, mountains protect, caverns are absent,
the sea provides, all is a garden. In Mexico the sea is absent, water
scarce but liquor plentiful, houses crumble, gardens rot, forests are dark
and act sentiently against the traveller, paths are labyrinthine, moun-
tains suggest a salvation that cannot be grasped, and, below all,
omnipresent caverns yawn. The Lowryan landscape is a forest of
symbols, but the meaning of any one symbol is ambivalent.
This ambivalence relates to the significance of the two landscapes for
Lowry. The essence of the contrasting landscapes of British Columbia
and Mexico is the tension between home and away, insideness and
outsideness, Paradiso and Inferno. Life at Eridanus is not far short of
what has now become a wilderness cliche. Here the author, a homeless
outsider elsewhere, achieves some level ,of insideness, albeit in an
outcast, squatters' community from which he is at last expelled. Further,
in this setting of mountain, forest, and sea he is able to unlearn his sailor
ways, come to understand and love the seashore wilderness and, by
loving, appropriate it. Here he makes contact with the real substance of
things: 'here are, at last, no empty abstractions, no frenzied need to
symbolize, no whirling cerebral chaos. Here is only a quiet, green world
on the edge of the life-bringing sea, where the Lowryan man may protect
his fragile self, love his wife, and deal reverently and perhaps a little
humorously with the things that surround him' (Day 1973, 418).
But in the landscapes of Under the Volcano this Eden is mocked. Here
the mountain is unattainable, the fountain dry and choked, the land sterile,
the garden rank. In Volcano the edenic images are inverted and cor-
rupted. Here is Paradise Lost, and in Lowry there is no Paradise Regained.
At this level, beyond symbol, we are dealing not with Mexico or
British Columbia, but with Lowry's mental landscape, Gerard Manley
Hopkins's (1948) inscape where 'the mind has mountains.' Here, expres-
sed on paper as Eridanus and Cuernavaca, home confronts abroad,
safety confronts adventure, a landscape that can be appropriated
contrasts with a landscape sans merci.
Ultimately, Lowry's life and work are one. His protagonists acted out
104 Landscapes of Metaphor

his own travels, beliefs, and feelings. Almost nowhere else do we find
such congruence between an author and his art. Like so many travellers,
Lowry used his journeys to map the terra incognita of his own mind. His
tormented and deeply divided mind, forever oscillating between elation
and despair, redemption and salvation, vested its own distinctive
qualities in the landscapes he encountered. These landscapes thus
became not merely a backdrop for his life but part of his personality,
expressed as the personalities of his characters. In Lawry's mind, as in
the Consul's, Eridanus and Cuemavaca are constantly in tension, or at
war, and Cuemavaca is ultimately triumphant. The landscapes of
Lawry's novels, then, are not merely real or even imagined landscapes,
products of his mind; they have, in a sense, become his mind.

Implications

The complex relationship between landscape and the human mind

varies from utilitarian data-gathering, at one extreme, to identification
at the other. Meinig's (1979) ten 'views' oflandscape are not exhaustive,
for he fails to consider the notion discussed in this chapter, that mind and
landscape interpenetrate and become almost interchangeable, that
landscape imprints on mind, that landscape, as it were, becomes self.
Pocock (1981a) comes close to this position in his assertion that 'place
may be considered as people and people as place.'
This inseparability of subject and object, this blurring of landscape
and mind, this identification of land with personality, may appear to be
on the edge of schizophrenia. Schizophrenics typically have trouble
separating themselves from their environments. But, in a world where
participation is increasingly reduced to spectatorhood (Debord 1977),
and where the geography of apocalypse is already being written
(Deshusses 1982), 'alternative' psychiatry, notably the work of Szasz,
Laing, Reich, and Castaneda, suggests that a 'participatory' role in the
man-nature relationship may be more sane than the current 'mastery'
world-view, which although having deep roots, has permeated Western
civilization chiefly since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth
century (Berman 1984). Here psychiatry, biography, ecology, and geog-
raphy meet in Heidegger's notion of environmental humility (Relph 1981).
The transition to this participatory mode of man-nature experience, says
Berman, may be dangerous for the individual, and was indeed destructive
in Lowry' s case. Yet, it may prove to be an essential process in the break-
ing down of the alienation from both nature and our own being that is
characteristic of the human condition in modem Western society.
6 Homescape

The idea of home as a base, a source of identity ... has grown powerfully in the
last century or so. This sense of home is the goal of all the voyages of
self-discovery which have become the characteristic shape of modem literature.
Andrew Gurr

In the last decade a number of social scientists from disciplines such as

urban design, psychology, and geography have focused attention upon
the concept of home. Home has many meanings, at many scales
(Hayward 1975). It is the human's territorial core, providing stimula-
tion, security, and identity (Porteous 1976). It is a symbol of the self
(Cooper 1974). From an experiential point of view, geographical space
can be fundamentally divided into home and non-home (Tuan 1974).
Home is that place where we are most secure, where we can drop
personas and become ourselves.
Home is not wholly positive, however. It can, in its security, its
routine, its well-knownness, become a prison. Hence, geographers have
pointed out that a fundamental dialectic in human life is home:journey,
what traditional geographers referred to as man moving and man at rest
(Tuan 1974; Porteous 1976). This is a false dialectic. The true antinomy, I
believe, is between home and 'away' (or 'abroad,' in its archaic sense).
For the home:journey polarity does not take into account the possibility
that there may be no return home, that exile may occur. Journey is the
movement that links home and away; the latter may be temporary or
permanent. This chapter, and the one that follows, together explore the
linked concepts of home: journey: away largely through an analysis of the
novels and travel journals of Graham Greene, although some comparison
with Malcolm Lowry and other writers is included. This chapter begins
with a general exploration of Greeneland as context for what follows.
Greeneland
The concept of Greeneland emerged about the time of the Second World
108 Landscapes of Metaphor

War, and has been used repeatedly by critics since the 1950s to describe
the archetypal landscape of the mind of the Greeneian oeuvre. It is a
mental landscape of boredom, failure, distrust, betrayal, and despair,
reflected in a physical landscape of run-down city streets, squalid
buildings, livid advertising signs, lonely bed-sitting rooms, tom curtains,
dirty collars, stained beds covered with crumbs. In its exotic form it
involves the soft decay of tropical buildings, the omnipresent vulture and
other animal forms of memento mori, sick, diseased, hopeless, native
inhabitants, impossible social and political conditions, Europeans
sweating in unhappy exile far from home. The inhabitants of Greeneland
are often of dubious character and of uncertain loyalties. Tormented by
religious doubt or social and political dilemmas, they frequently end
their careers in premature death, the only real solution to their
problems.
The operative descriptor for Greeneland is 'seedy.' The term is
redolent of the 1930s. Indeed, it appears most prominently in Journey
without Maps (1976). Greene is describing Monrovia, the capital of
Liberia, a very down-at-heel city in 1935: 'There seemed to be a
seediness about the place you couldn't get to the same extent elsewhere,
and seediness has a very deep appeal: even the seediness of civilization,
of the sky-signs in Leicester Square, the "tarts" in Bond Street, the smell
of cooking greens off Tottenham Court Road, the motor salesman in
Great Portland Street' (p. 19). Since the Second World War few critics of
Greene's work have resisted the temptation to use this quotation
(Mesnet 1954, 9; Atkins 1966, 60; Kurismootil 1982, 16).
Greene has loudly protested this discovery of metaphoric Greeneland
(1981, 60):

Some critics have referred to a strange violent 'seedy' region of the mind (why
did I ever popularize that last adjective?) which they call Greeneland, and I
have sometimes wondered whether they go round the world blinkered. 'This is
lndo-China,' I want to exclaim, 'this is Mexico, this is Sierra Leone, carefully
and accurately described. I have been a newspaper correspondent as well as a
novelist. I assure you that the dead child lay in the ditch in just that attitude. In
the canal at Phat Diem the bodies stuck out of the water ... ' But I know that
argument is useless. They won't believe the world they haven't noticed is like
that.

This protest is not wholly valid. Indeed, much of the world is like that. If
we care to look for them, we can readily find signs of seediness: car
ashtrays emptied in wet parking lots; urine marks on walls and doors;
Hom escape 109

stained bedcovers dirty with the crumbs of sausage rolls (Brighton

Rock); whisky-priests with children, even wives (The Power and the
Glory); Wlfortunates with'harelips (A GunforSale); rats in the bathtub
and vultures on metal roofs (the Mexican and West African novels and
travel books); dead dogs; stinking bodies on forgotten battlefields;
lepers in the Congo (A Bumt-out Case), Louisiana, or Easter Island;
jiggers under the toe; the humiliation of bowel operations. One could go
on. This, Greene says, is what life is like. He is depicting, faithfully, his
lived experience.
Greeneland, then, is an almost perpetual view of the underside of life.
Stones are not only turned, but the crawling things that lie beneath are
described in microscopic detail and with relish. Although the earliest,
largely suppressed, novels were in the Romantic tradition, Greene
quickly moved on to realism. Yet, his realism ignores the kindly act, the
fresh wind, the bowl of flowers, in favour of an instance of betrayal, a
chamber-pot, a flushing toilet. Greene's eyes are always open for the
ageing prostitute; the cheap brothel; the dark, violent, criminal side of
life. His moral melodramas, therefore, considerably simplify reality
(Hynes 1973) and his realism has been termed 'sordidism' (Atkins 1966,
37).
This intensely negative view of civilization was a common literary
view after the First World War. The word most commonly used, then
and now, to describe the dull inanition of a technologized society was
'wasteland,' a scene of compromised values, lost hopes, and pointless
pastimes (the latter a most significant word). T. S. Eliot was Wasteland's
Jeremiah (Eliot 1974), and Eliot, like Greene, Waugh, and many others,
sought a solution in religion. The wasteland deluxe has continued,
through Huxley's Brave New World, into the soulless utopia of Skinner's
Walden Two and beyond. Wasteland utopias may provide all material
comforts, but deny their inhabitants important freedoms, the right to be
unhappy and the right to rebel (Porteous 1977).
It is curious that Greene rarely depicts a landscape of beauty or even
neutrality. Beauty appears to have been left behind with childhood. As a
child Greene had felt a sense of harmonious, fertile, nature, 'a small
green countryside, where the fruit trees grew and the rabbits munched'
(Lawless Roads, 13). But even this idyll was tempered by the omni-
present school, 'with ink-stained nibbled desks insufficiently warmed by
one cast-iron stove, a changing-room smelling of sweat and stale clothes,
stone stairs, worn by generations of feet, leading to a dormitory divided
by pitch-pine partitions that gave inadequate privacy- no moment of the
night was free from noise, a cough, a snore, a fart' (Life 74).
110 Landscapes of Metaphor

Later, Greene develops a love of the Chiltern landscape, which has

remained with him throughout life. Yet the beauty of this landscape is
enhanced, for Greene, because of its proximity to the vulgar, tawdry,
prosperous metropolis of London (Life 110). It is as if beauty can be
appreciated only when it is threatened or matched by some closely
proximate ugliness.
But the ugliness of Greeneland is social and political as well as
physical. For Greeneland is, more often than not, a country organized
for and by powerful forces beyond the control or even ken of the
individual citizen. It may be a quiet colony run by harsh, bewildered
Britons, as in The Heart of the Matter. It may be a colony undergoing the
bloody process of liberation (The Quiet American). A totalitarian
dictatorship may be in power, with an omnipresent paramilitary police
force (The Power and the Glory) or the even more menacing tontons
macoutes (The Comedians). Or it may be merely the hopeless Circumlo-
cution Office of the English novels, a place where ordinary mortals are
ground under by the slow, relentless turning of bureaucratic millstones.
Everywhere there are spies, confidential agents, racketeers, pimps, and
guns for sale.
Joy, happiness, liberty, freedom, and self-expression are not, there-
fore, qualities we can expect to find in Greeneland. Indeed, we may find
active violence, as in the spy melodramas and in the recurrent theme of
the hunters and the hunted. Or there may be only passive violence, often
apparently self-inflicted, where characters live hopeless, futile, mean-
ingless, bitter, frustrated, dreary lives in sordid, squalorous surround-
ings, only rousing themselves from torpor to commit unimaginable
moral crimes of hatred, disloyalty, and betrayal. There is not a total
sense of unrelieved and inevitable doom, as in Lawry's Under the
Volcano, but there is a sense that doom is a distinct possibility.
Characters are on the run, self-confessed failures, prone to despair,
often in both physical and mental pain, sometimes physically deformed.
There is an atmosphere of conflict. This may be a seemingly cosmic
physical conflict, as in war or insurrection, or a more passive conflict, as
between the individual and bureaucracy. Catholics, Protestants, and
pagans evince conflicting values, there are deep internal conflicts of the
mind, sin and evil are mulled over relentlessly. The whisky-priest in The
Power and the Glory is such a character of conflict. His way of life
conflicts with his creed. His perpetuation of the sacraments in an atheist
state conflicts with the political regime, with the people's fears, with his
need to survive. Good sense conflicts with compassion as he returns,
with his Judas, over the border from safety to certain death. Private and
Hom escape 111

public misery are the stuff of life. One lives on the dangerous edge of
things; 'it's a battlefield.'
It's a Battlefield uses the social unrest of the 1930s as background.
Orient Express is set against the Depression. Capitalist monopolies
dominate England Made Me, racecourse murders and gangland life are
the scenes of Brighton Rock, war scares are in the background of A Gun
for Sale, religious persecution in The Power and the Glory, political
kidnappings in The Honorary Consul. Above all, from Rumour at
Nightfall through The End of the Affair and The Quiet American, to The
Human Factor, Greene expresses both war and the cold world of spies
and 'security' as ordinary, everyday, lived experience. War, cold or hot,
is a normal twentieth-century activity. Civilian murderer and bomber
pilot loosing Spender's 'seeds of killing ... on cells of sleep' are both
oridnary men-in-the-street. In The Ministry of Fear, Greeneland finds
expression on the ground in a bombing raid heard from a urinal. In the
air, the bomber pilot is simply going through his normal eight-hour day.
It is here that dream and reality, the mundane and the fantastic, meet
and fuse in the inscape known as Greeneland.
In the same novel the world appears to be controlled by them. 'They,'
of course, are Heidegger's (1977) das Man. Whether actual manipula-
tors or merely accepted social pressures, das Man ensures that we act
inauthentically, bowing to the will of others. Moreover, although we
may not wish to remain in such a situation, there are, ultimately, no
'ways of escape.' Pinkie cannot escape Brighton, Scobie cannot leave the
'Coast,' the whisky-priest is called back to the Godless State. For one
reason or another they are doomed to endure, or die, in a shabby,
lawless world suffused by existential angst. Some characters, such as
the inevitable prostitute with a ravaged face, are denied hope as a
condition of their being. For others, hope is usually ambiguous. There is
rarely a completely happy ending. Even in The Confidential Agent,
where the protagonist escapes from his hunters with the woman he
loves, happiness is only conditional.
Whence emerged this ultra-seedy view of life? Greene himself points
towards home as a key to his world-view.

Childhood home

As I noted in chapter 1, Greene believes that the environment of one's

childhood is all-important in the shaping of one's attitudes to life.
Deterministically, the child is father of the man (A Sense of Reality
1968). Parents, schools, books are formative influences. Architecture is
112 Landscapes of Metaphor

important. In Greene's childhood his negative urban viewpoint was

already apparent: 'From the croquet lawn, from the raspbeny canes,
from the greenhouse and the tennis lawn you could always see -
dominatingly - the great spare Victorian buildings of garish brick: they
looked down like skyscrapers on a small green countryside' (Lawless
Roads 13).
This point is made repeatedly in the novels. Greene's characters are,
as it were, creatures of their environment, made by it, subordinate to it,
illustrative of it. We are told, in Brighton Rock (p. 37), that 'man is made
by the places in which he lives.' This form of environmental determinism
explains why so many of Greene's characters cannot escape from their
intolerable situations. Thoroughly dominated by their environment in
both space and time, they are unable to distance themselves and take a
more objective view (Mesnet 1954, 36). They are, like starfish stranded
in a drying pool a half-inch from low-tide mark, utterly unable to assess
their environmental context. As is true of those in Kafkaland, characters
in Greeneland have no control over events or environment.
But environment does not merely control character. It also permits its
fuller realization. Home environments, especially domestic interiors,
are metaphoric expressions of character. Recent geographical investiga-
tions of 'home' have explored this concept (Cooper 1974; Porteous 1976).
Kahlil Gibran (1976, 31) reminds us that 'your house is your larger body.'
Thus, the environment is used as a setting to display a character's
individuality and personality. Lear's rage, for example, has a wild storm
for background.
The policeman's widow in It's a Battlefield (1934, 142) is ineffectual:
'Milly noticed everywhere the signs of a fussing and incompetent
woman, a woman who drives dust from one room to settle in another,
who buys Danish eggs for economy and leaves the gas burning.' In
contrast, the Private Secretary's environment is distinguished by 'a silver
casket, a volume of Voltaire exquisitely bound, a self-portrait by an
advanced and fashionable Czechoslovakian' (p. 4 ). Mr Tench, the
hopeless, exiled dentist in the sweating Mexican port, is readily
established by his domestic interiors: 'a dining room where two
rocking-chairs stood on either side of a bare table: an oil lamp, some
copies of old American papers, a cupboard ... The dentist's operating
room ... a drill which worked with a pedal, a dentist's chair gaudy in
bright red plush, a glass cupboard in which instruments were dustily
jumbled. A forceps stood in a cup, a broken spirit lamp was pushed into a
comer, and gags of cotton-wool lay on all the shelves' (The Power and
the Glory 12). Krogh, the powerful capitalist in England Made Me
Homescape 113

(1970), expresses himself in 'five floors of steel and glass, the fountain
splashing beneath the concealed lights .. . his own initials .. . E. K. - the
same initials endlessly repeated formed the design of the deep carpet -
E.K. in the waiting rooms; E.K. in the boardroom; E.K. in the
restaurants; the building was studded with his intitials' (p. 37). Yet even
Krogh, safely enwombed in a cube of glass and steel, is troubled by das
Man, for the modernistic sculpture he has commissioned for the
courtyard fountain is unintelligible to him; 'he had pandered to a fashion
he did not understand' (p. 34).
There is a cyclic element at work here. Greene's characters are
conditioned by their childhood environments. They then go on to express
their personalities in environments they themselves create. And all these
environments are aspects of the wasteland. An investigation of Greene's
childhood home might thus be worthwhile.
For most of us, home has meaning at several scales. In Greene's case,
we move from a particular house and garden, through the small town of
Berkhamsted, to Greater London, which Greene, along with many of his
contemporaries, knew as Metroland. England is the next scalar level,
but England does not seem to have meant a great deal to Greene.
England, for Greene, is Metroland. Like many Londoners, he ventured
very little to north or west, and except for a few months as a tutor in
Derbyshire and journalist in Nottingham, his experience of non-
Metroland Britain is fleeting. The Metroland attitude is clear: 'no one
goes to Liverpool for pleasure' (Journey 21).
In the beginning home was a middle-class boarding-school environ-
ment in the Chiltern Hills on the northern edge of Metroland. Specifically,
home was Berkhamsted School, where his father was headmaster. Built
of Tudor and modem red brick, and looking like Keble College, the
school was 'an immense building with small windows,' its towers, 'like
skyscrapers,' dwarfing the gardens below (Roads 13). School, for
Greene, meant loneliness, lack of privacy, fear, hate, and lawlessness.
On the other side of the green baize door between school proper and
the headmaster's residence lay home. The maternal atmosphere of
home, however, could always be reduced to 'schoolness' by the
appearance of Greene's father in uniform, gowned and mortar-boarded.
Greene lived on a border between two worlds. He grew up to relish the
excitement of frontiers and the thrill of setting foot in new lands. Like so
many of his bourgeois contemporaries, he also grew up to dislike
uniforms, conformity, officialdom, order, decency, manliness, loyalty,
and all the other Establishment virtues so carefully inculcated by English
public schools of the period before the First World War.
114 Landscapes of Metaphor

Greene describes his home, the school, and the little town of
Berkhamsted in terms of his 'personal map.' On this map the far-off
common loomed like the 'spaces of a map empty as Africa, ' a place
where one could meet Jack-of-the-Green, the mumming remnant of old
English rustic customs, which curiously foreshadowed Greene's experi-
ence of dancing devils in Liberia (Life 14).
Berkhamsted's wide, two-mile High Street, as in most English towns,
was sharply divided socially. Greene's was the posh end, with public
school, Norman church, and half-timbered buildings. At the far end was
the Crooked Billet, an old inn of sinister character; this part of the town
had 'an atmosphere of standing outside the pale: a region of danger
where nightmare might easily become reality' (Life 25). Already the
young child was learning the most important English lesson, that of the
moral, social, and physical divide between 'we' and 'they' that underlies
the persistent class system. Scene of many a drowning, the Grand
Junction Canal was a more immediate danger, but even here the peril
was enhanced by the 'menace of insulting words from strange brutal
canal workers with blackened faces like miners, with their gypsy wives
and ragged children' (Life 16).
Seventeen Greenes lived in Berkhamsted, and 'even the geography of
the little town was influenced by these two big families of Greenes'
(p. 14), one of which ran the public school, the other mysteriously rich
through foreign enterprise. This dosed, tight, genteel atmosphere soon
paled for the young Greene. Yet, he is convinced that this environment
shaped his whole future: 'everything one was to become must have been
there, for better or worse. One's future might have been prophesied from
the shape of the houses as from the lines of the hand: one's evasions and
deceits took their form from those other sly faces and from the hiding
places in the garden, on the Common, in the hedgerows. Here in
Berkhamsted was the first mold of which the shape was to be endlessly
reproduced' (Life 15). Indeed, the sharp divides between school and
home, between middle-class and lower-class Berkhamsted, between life
on land and life on the canal, were frontiers that endlessly reproduced
themselves in both novels and life. In the fiction there is a persistent
interest in crossing borders, in the excitement of being an outsider on the
'other side.'
Greene returned to Berkhamsted in his mid-twenties. Again he asserts
that 'people are made by places' (Roads 16). If so, Berkhamsted made
Greene wish to remake himself, to cast off its dear Establishment
certainties and seek the darker side of life he had glimpsed at the 'wrong
end' of the town: 'I called this "home" .. but it had no real hold. Smoke
Hom escape 115

waved behind the Tudor Cafe and showed the 8:52 was in. You couldn't
live in a place like this - it was somewhere to which you returned for
sleep and rissoles by the 6:50 or the 7:25; people had lived here once and
died with their feet crossed to show they had returned from a crusade,
but now .. .' (Roads 16). Now Berkhamsted had become part of
Greeneland, shallow, shabby, subordinary, immensely sad in its drab
gentility. There is typical Greeneland detail: 'In a shabby little shop
there were second-hand copies of London Life - articles about high heels
and corsets and long hair' (Roads 17).
The town was rapidly expanding as a commuter dormitory for
London. 'Boards marking desirable building lots dripped on the short
grass, and the skeletons of harrows lay unburied in the wet stubble,'
while 'little boxes for litter put up by the National Trust had a dainty and
doily effect, and in the inn the radio played continuously' (Roads 17, 18).
Already in the 1930s London had overwhelmed and subverted Berkham-
sted. Its fields now grew crops of small houses in which slept frayed
London commuters living second-hand, inauthentic lives. Greene had
learned that great lesson so poignantly taught in Orwell's Coming Up for
Air (1939), that you can't go home again. This is true not only for one's
childhood home, but for every subsequent home; there is always a
feeling of uncertainty: 'One can go back to one's own home after a year's
absence and immediately the door closes as if one has never been away.
Or one can go back after a few hours and everything is so changed that
one is a stranger' (Ministry of Fear 235).

Home as Metro/and

For Greene as a young man home became Metroland, in which he wrote

his first novels, was a sub-editor on The Times, and reviewed books and
films for magazines from 1926 to 1935. London was the centre of power
and culture. Short-visioned, like most Londoners, he felt London was
England. Brighton and the Home Counties were mere seaside and rural
extensions. The North, that great unexplored region, began in the
northern suburbs of Oxbridge.
Before dealing with Greene's interpretation of London, it is useful to
indicate his feeling for Nottingham, for his only lengthy experience of
British provincial life was a three-month sojourn as a reporter there, and
this only because no Metroland newspaper would take an apprentice at
that time. The city was friendly towards him, although he lived 'in a grim
grey row with a grim grey name,' where his landlady 'was a thin
complaining widow' who provided tinned salmon for high tea every
116 Landscapes of Metaphor

night. Green fed this to his dog, which was invariably sick on the carpet
(Life 163).
Here, in Nottingham, are some of the first stirrings of that landscape
of the mind that has become known as Greeneland: a landscape and
people shabby, hopeless, decayed. Here, the unemployed lace girls
'would sleep with you in return for a high tea' (Life 160). Here, there was
rain, fog, misery. The physical landscape is drab and blighted - dark
cinemas, a blackened castle, parks in which 'when you touched the
leaves, they left soot on the fingers' (Life 163). As a final touch there is
even a 'boots' at the inn; to Greene, Nottingham was in a time-warp, its
Metroland equivalent being Dickensian London. Above all, Nottingham
'was the focal point of failure, a place undisturbed by ambition, a place
to be resigned to, a home from home' (Life 160), a place where carol
singers, ignorantly genteel, reword the old carol 'Mark my footsteps
well, my page' (Gun 60).
A decade later Nottingham reappears as Nottwich in the thriller A
GunforSale (1974), and Greene's first impressions are relived:

There was no dawn that day in Nottwich. Fog lay over the city like a night
sky with no stars .. . The first tram crawled out of its shed and took the steel
track down towards the market. An old piece of newspaper blew up against
the door of the Royal Theatre and flattened out. In the streets on the outskirts
of Nottwich nearest the pits an old man plodded by with a pole tapping at
the windows ... Along the line a signal lamp winked green in the dark day and
the lit carriages drew slowly in past the cemetery, the glue factory, over the
wide tidy cementlined river. (Gun 40)

Three years later Nottingham had dwindled to a snapshot: 'riding in

trams in winter past the Gothic hotel, the super-cinema, the sooty
newspaper office where one worked at night, passing the single
professional prostitute trying to keep the circulation going under the blue
and powdered skin' (Roads 15). Unlike Alan Sillitoe's homely Notting-
ham, the Southerner Greene's Nottwich was drab and dead, but it
signified the squalor that was Greeneland. The hopeless ageing
prostitute and that discarded paper blowing through empty streets were
to be used again and again in the later novels as symbols of abandonment.
'Nottingham and London ... these cities represented the world to me'
(Life 213). But London's Metroland seediness was preferable to the
powerless, forgotten degradation of the midland city. Having glimpsed
Greeneland in Nottwich, Greene is determined to recapture it in
London, where all but one of his later English novels are set. It is a
Homescape 117

curious and partial vision, filled with ineffectual failures: the Hindu
doctor, 'symbol of the shabby, the inefficient, and possibly the illegal;
(Life, 187); an unfrocked clergyman (Gun); 'the soap-box orators ... in
the bitter cold at Marble Arch . . . and all down the road the cad cars
waited for the right easy girls, and the blackmailers kept an eye open on
the grass where the deeds of darkness were quietly and unsatisfactorily
accomplished' (The Confidential Agent 136). Above all gleam the cold,
uncompromising, glittering office blocks.
Such vignettes are common. They establish environments that are in
sympathy with the dubious characters who populate Greeneland.
Indeed, when Greene is trying to establish a method for describing a city
in The Lawless Roads, we are prepared for a less-than-neutral
description of London:

How to describe a city? ... one can present only a simplified plan, talcing a
house here, a park there as symbols of the whole. If I were trying to describe
London to a foreigner, I might take Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus,
the Strand and Fleet Street, the grim wastes of Queen Victoria Street and
Tottenham Court Road, villages like Chelsea and Clapham and Highgate
struggling for individual existence, Great Portland Street because of the second-
hand cars and the jaded genial men with old school ties, Paddington for the
vicious hotels ... and how much would remain left out, the Bloomsbury square
with its inexpensive vice and its homesick Indians and its sense of rainy
nostalgia, the docks .. . ? (Roads 65)

Note how rapidly the well-imaged tourist mental map degenerates into
the landscape of Greeneland, London's underside.
It's a Battlefield (1934) is the first London novel, one of political riots,
communist cells, politically motivated judicial executions; a mirror of
the age. It is set in 'a wilderness of trams and second-hand clothes shops
and public lavatories and evening institutes' where the young factory
girls 'stood in queues for the cheapest seats at the cinemas and through
the dust and dark and degradation they giggled and chattered like birds'
(p. 15).
Here the submerged classes engage in mindless labour in a match
factory: 'The hundred and fifty girls in the machine room worked with the
regularity of a blood beat; a hand to the left, a hand to the right, the
pressure of a foot; a damp box flew out, turned in the air, and fell on the
moving stair. It was impossible to hear ... because of the noise of the
machines' (Battlefield 31-2). Greene ensures we understand that the
spatial arrangement of the factory, where improved skill results in
118 Landscapes of Metaphor

moving from Block A to B and then to c, and mistakes are punished by the
reverse, is identical with 'the geography of the prison': 'That's Block A.
The new prisoners all go there. If they behave themselves, they get
shifted ... to Block B. Block c .. . that's the highest grade. Of course if
there's any complaint against them, they get shifted down. It's just like a
school' (Battlefield 18-19). Classified and graded from childhood, we
must fit the slots engineered for us or perish.
Imprisonment is an ever-present threat in Greeneland. As an under-
graduate at the Oxford Appointments Board, Greene writes: 'I was
hemmed in by a choice of jails in which to serve my life imprisonment'
(Life 147). Other characters, like Rowe in The Ministry of Fear or the
child in The Fallen Idol, look at life through railings. One of the many
small cruelties that abound in Greeneland occurs in Minty's room in
Stockholm, where he repeatedly pens a spider inside his toothglass: 'The
hunting teasing instinct woke in Minty's brain .. . he took the glass and
caught the spider, broke the thread when it began to climb, and deftly ...
had it imprisoned again on the marble beside the wash basin. The spider
had lost a second leg; it sat in a small puddle of cocoa. Patience, Minty
thought .. . you may outlive me' (England Made Me 113).
It was in London that Greene came to realize the loneliness and
homelessness that affect so many of the inhabitants of dingy bed-sitters
in Metroland. Rowe lives in two rooms in Mrs Purvis's house.
Everything in those rooms belongs to her. 'The ugly armchair, the table
covered with a thick woollen cloth, the fem in the window-all were Mrs.
Purvis's, and the radio was hired. Only the packet of cigarettes on the
mantelpiece belonged to Rowe, and the toothbrush and the shaving
tackle in the bedroom (the soap was Mrs Purvis's)' (The Ministry of Fear
22). Rowe dreamed constantly of his quiet Cambridgeshire boyhood,
only to be brought back repeatedly to the London Blitz. Homeless, he
loses even Mrs Purvis's when he is caught in an air-raid. In a dream, he
begs to go home (to Cambridgeshire), but a policeman ushers him into
an air-raid shelter, saying, with authority: 'This is home. There isn't
anywhere else at all.' On the way to the shelter is the Greenelandian
coup de grace: Row sees 'a urinal where a rat bled to death in the slate
trough' (Ministry 72).
As I have shown elsewhere (Porteous 1976), 'homes' (in the sense of
nursing homes and old folks' homes) are at best euphemistic and always
essentially unhomelike. Amnesic, in a nursing home, Rowe describes
Poole's room: 'The tap dripped into a fixed basin and a sponge-bag
dangled from a bed-post. A used tin which had once held lobster paste
now held old razor blades. The place was as comfortless as a transit
Hom escape 119

camp' (Ministry 146). Later, hiding from his enemies and sure that 'a
room, like a dog, takes on some of the character of its master' (Ministry
174), Rowe imagines what a 'guilty room' might look like; anonymous, 'a
lonely room; everything had been bought at a standard store' (Ministry
209). Rowe longs for a 'world of homes and children' and we are relieved
when, like Smike in Nicholas N ickleby, he finds a sort of home in another
person.
The same homeless Greeneland atmosphere permeates The End of
the Affair (1975), an account of a middle-class love affair. Sarah's
living-room reflects her character: 'a haphazard living-room where
nothing matched, nothing was period or planned, where everything
seemed to belong to that very week because nothing was ever allowed to
remain as a token of past taste or past sentiment' (Affair 13). The
protagonist Bendrix lived on the wrong side of the Common, in a
bed-sitting room full of 'the relics of other people's furniture ... if one is
lonely one prefers discomfort' (Affair 7). And as with Rowe and so many
other characters, Greene uses a cartographic image to express their
rootlessness. Bendrix, ostensibly at home, exclaims: 'I am lost in a
strange region: I have no map' (Affair 50).
These anxieties may find temporary relief on the gaudy front at
Brighton, London's exotic shore and yet another facet of Greeneland.
Here the crowds are grimly determined on enjoyment (Brighton Rock 6):
'They had stood all the way from Victoria in crowded carriages, they
would have to wait in queues for lunch, at midnight half asleep they
would rock back in trains an hour late to the cramped streets and the
closed pubs and the weary walk home. With immense labour and
immense patience they extricated from the long day the grain of
pleasure.' For these day-trippers, Brighton is merely a seaside version of
Metroland, where the sea is 'poison-green.'
Brighton, of course, has its permanent residents, and, as 'man is made
by the place in which he lives' (Brighton Rock 37), it is no surprise to find
the gay, tawdry life of the pleasure city is appreciated by Ida: 'It's homely
.. . it's what I like.' Ida is a remorseless optimist who believes in Life,
which is 'sunlight on brass bedposts, ruby port, the leap of the heart
when the outsider you have backed passes the post' (Brighton Rock 36).
Yet, Brighton is also the scene of racecourse murders, gangland thugs, a
corrupted child gangster who graduates from school dividers to the
razor. Pinkie, product of the slums, is a terrifying creation.
But these are the grosser Greeneland images. Equally as telling is the
seafront, where everyone is out for 'a bit of fun.' Here Greene's usual
deadpan cinematic technique comes into play. An image of threat, a
120 Landscapes of Metaphor

mounted policeman, passes. Nearby, 'a man stood by the kerb selling
objects on a tray; he had lost the whole of one side of the body: leg, an
arm and shoulder; and the beautiful horse as it paced by turned its head
aside delicately like a dowager. "Shoelaces," the man said hopelessly'
(Brighton Rock 12).
Even in this atmosphere of homely fun, the stock symbols of
Greeneland cannot be ignored. The persistent use of these symbols to
create the effect of seediness and hopelessness became so automatic
that Atkins (1966, 71) dismisses Greene's Nineteen Stories as 'Metro-
land stories with the familiar Greeneland atmosphere.' For Greene, all
is Greeneland, and nowhere is really home.

Home in Malcolm Lowry

Blue mountains with snow and blue cold rough water,

A wild sky full of stars at rising
And Venus and the gibbous moon at sunrise,
Gulls following a motorboat against the wind,
Trees with their branches rooted in air -
Sitting in the sun at noon with the furiously
Smoking shadow of the shack chimney -
Eagles drive downwind in one,
Terns blow backward,
A new kind of tobacco at eleven,
And my love returning on the four o'clock bus
- My God, why have you given this to us?
(from 'Happiness')

Lowry is often regarded, usually by those who have read only Under the
Volcano, as a morbid writer of dark tendencies. He is also seen as the
archetypal wanderer, yet another son of man with nowhere to lay his
head. Although these features will be investigated in detail in the
'Escape' and 'Deathscape' chapters, here I will concentrate upon the
other side of Lowry, his need for home. This desire to invest one's
emotions in a home-place is far deeper in Lowry than in Greene. While
both reject parental homes and England, only Lowry has expressed in
graphic terms the joys of creating a home elsewhere.
Life is a ceaseless journey home. Lowry's life, like that of his
protagonists, was the ceaseless quest of the homeless for a home-place.
London, Paris, Spain, Mexico, New York, Los Angeles, and least of all
Liverpool, none of these could be home for Lowry. For a while home was
Homescape 121

personified in the novelist Conrad Aileen, mentor and father-figure to

Lowry. But it was only with the unexpected trip to Vancouver that Lowry
found, in Dollarton, a place he could call home. Throughout his letters
and his travelogue-novels after 1940 Dollarton ('Eridanus') is called
'home.' In Europe in the late 1940s Lowry is hospitalized, alcoholic,
insane. Back in the rickety beach shack in the squatters' settlement of
Eridanus he recovers remarkably.
The simple life of virtue envisioned by the Consul in Volcano was
realized by Lowry in the 1940s. Across the water lay the ever-present
evils of Enochvilleport (Vancouver), but in Eridanus the enclosing forest
kept out civilization, one's neighbours were rustic fishermen, one took
'The Forest Path to the Spring' for water, one met cougars in the forest
and spoke to them. Lowry was acutely sensible of the landscape of
Eridanus, of its diurnal and seasonal rhythms. Summer was, of course,
idyllic, but even 'the wintry landscape could be beautiful on these rare
short days of sunlight and frost flowers, with crystal casing on the
slender branches of birches and vineleaved maples, diamond drops on
the tassels of spruces, and the bright frosted foliage of the evergreens'
(Hear Us 253). And Eridanus was a settlement of the forest, and of the
water; it was a natural, organic growth: 'everything in Eridanus ...
seemed made out of everything else, without the necessity of making
anyone else suffer for its possession: the roofs were of hand-split cedar
shakes, the piles of pine, the boats of cedar and vine-leaved maple.
Cedar and fir went up in chimneys and the smoke went back to heaven'
(p. 248). There was no hatred, no one locked his door, no one spoke
meanly. The neighbours' 'little cabins were shrines of their own integrity
and independence.' Here above all, one could forget civilization and get
back to the existential reality of the things themselves: rocks, water,
trees, wind, stars.
Yet, even here Lowry felt sometimes a vague unease, an urge to
become a travelling man, even a sailor, once again. And this despite his
experiential knowledge of the falsity of the sailor's life, where the
engine's rhythm sings 'You'll soon be home,' - and yet, stepping on
shore, he finds himself homeless. For the sailor, indeed, home life was
'reduced to a hip-bath with your wife on the kitchen mat every eighteen
months, that was the sea' (Volcano 171).
Three novel-travelogues depict the destructive point:counterpoint of
home:journey, eutopia:dystopia, Paradiso:purgatorio, Eden:civiliza-
tion, Eridanus:not-Eridanus that became that dialectic of Lowry's life
during the period 1940-54. Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is
Laid (1972) recounts a return journey from Canada to Mexico, from
122 Landscapes of Metaphor

eutopia to dystopia, with recurrent reflections on the purgatory that is

travel (p. 94) and constant wishes to return to the paradise that is
Eridanus. Sigbj0rn regularly reflects on home, 'the little new still-
unfinished house below, the cedar tree, the foreshortened pier, their
boat hoisted up and overturned on the platform for safety during their
absence' (p. 81), a home that the Wildernesses themselves had built
(p. 55).
Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1969) is an
elegantly structured epitome of the chief Lowryan themes. In the first
stories the protagonist sadly leaves Dollarton and passes through the
Panama. The three central tales, set in Italy, depict the reflections of the
thinking tourist. In Pompeii the character Fairhaven (which is what he is
seeking) looks without seeing, reflects upon 'the malice of travelers, even
the sense of tragedy that must come over them sometimes at their lack of
relation to their environment' (p. 177).
The tourist is always inauthentic, the traveller often so: 'The traveler
has worked long hours and exchanged good money for this. And what is
this? This, pre-eminently, is where you don't belong ... and behind you,
thousands of miles away, it is as if you could hear your own real life
plunging to its doom' (p. 177). Real life, of course, is lived on Dollarton
beach. The last two stories in the novel, and in particular the novella
'The Forest Path to the Spring,' are a paean of praise for home, for
Eridanus. The complete structure, then, is the familiar one of withdrawal
and return, and the withdrawal, as in Lunar Caustic (1968), is usually a
journey into purgatory.
October FeTTy to Gabriola (1970), a rather poor novel in a literary
sense, is none the less one of the most valuable for its clear exposition of
the recurrent Lowryan themes. The notions of home, journey, exile, and
the quest for a new home are present throughout. This is a novel of
Paradise Lost. The Llewelyns, 'like love and wisdom, had no home' (p.
5). Homes bum down around them. They are evicted, 'evicted out of
exile' even (p. 4 ). They consider the homes of others, for many of whom
'home from home' is merely the men's side of that truly awful institution,
the Canadian beer parlour (p. 43). Post-war newspapers ironically
speak of 'Work to the Workers, Homes to the Homeless' (p. 46).
Llewelyn is looking for a place that says 'not "I am yours," but "You are
mine"' (p. 51).
The Llewelyns are about to be evicted from their squatter's shack at
Eridanus. They celebrate the winds and tides of their home. Although
the shack seemed impermanent, 'antiquity of mountains, forest, and
sea, conspired on every hand to reassure and protect them, as with the
Homescape 123

qualities of their own seeming permanence' (p. 79). Between the cabin
and the Llewelyns was 'a complete symbiosis. They didn't live in it ...
they wore it like a shell' (p. 80).
But it was 'back to nature, yet not all the way. Rousseau with a battery
radio' (p. 154). Suburbia creeps towards Eridanus. The Rosslyn Park
Real Estate and Development Company is erecting the suburb of Dark
Rosslyn with 'Scenic view lots. Approved for National Housing Loans.
Cash or Terms' (Hear Us 204). Dollarton has become, for Lowry,
Dolorton. His safe haven is threatened. The Dollarton squatters'
shacks, embodiment of' an indefinable goodness, even greatness,' are to
be swept away by a tide of progress. 'A suburban dementia launched
itself at them' (Hear Us 206); it was as if 'they want to tum this whole
place into a vast bloody great Black Country, a Lancashire .. . of the
Pacific Northwest' (Feny 201). It was time to go. And in 1954, their
Eridanus reduced to a tiny oasis of forest surrounded by suburbs and oil
refineries, the Lowrys decided to leave.
The Lowrys (the Wildernesses, the Llewelyns) were evicted not by
legal order but by civilization and progress. At Vancouver Airport,
Lowry cried, 'I'm afraid to leave. I'm afraid we'll never come back' (Day
1973, 423 ). Expelled from his Eden, the Wandering Jew nursed memories
of Eridanus and especially of the rickety pier that he himself had built.
'To me ... childish though it may seem, there is the pier, which we built,
which I cannot imagine myself living without,' he wrote from Sussex.
That the pier had been swept away by storms was kept from Lowry for
some time. On hearing of its fate he was 'broken-hearted,' and died the
following year.

Beyond Greene/and

Despite Greene's denials, 'Greeneland' does appear to be a valid

conception of his landscape of the mind expressed in the novels and
travel journals. Greeneland, however, must not be imagined as a
landscape peculiar to Greene. It was an mindscape shared by many
writers of the 1920s and 1930s, from the mystically religious T. S. Eliot to
the alcoholic Malcolm Lowry. To press this universal aspect of
Greeneland, I will make a brief comparison with the world of Lowry.
This author, too, feels marred by childhood experience. His escape is
not to religion but to alcohol. Physical escape from England is effected by
a life of wandering. Lowry has a recurrent feeling of failure, or fear of
failure. Both authors were conditioned by Conrad and Baudelaire; both
were friends of the adventurer novelist, the Norwegian Nordahl Grieg.
124 Landscapes of Metaphor

Both travel obsessively, yet record the boredom of travelling. Both yearn
for a settled home, but fail to find complete satisfaction. Both reflect, in
their novels, lives of desperation, despair, and doom. Their protagonists
reflect on life but fail to resolve its contraditions, except in death. They
seem controlled by environments and external events. And discreetly in
the background, das Man is lurking.
In the 1990s Graham Greene may be coming to the end of a more than
sixty-year career as a writer. It would be reasonable to expect that
Greeneland, that early-twentieth-century landscape of the mind, might
die with him. But this would be to assume that Greeneland is merely the
creation of a single mind or a single era, an imaginary landscape
fundamentally unconnected with reality. This is patently not the case.
Greene, in his arguments against Greeneland, is correct in his claim to
have faithfully recorded what he saw. He saw the underside of modem
life, a seedy world inhabited by the homeless and unhappy, where even
success means failure.
This is a world vision that had its roots in the late nineteenth century
and still flourishes today. Greeneland is alive and well in the novels of
numerous contemporary writers. Consider V. S. Naipaul. This Trini-
dadian of Indian origin describes a world of general malaise that
envelops England and the home island alike. Take a single novel, The
Mimic Men (1%7), which contrasts life in London and Isabella (Trinidad).
In London the Trinidadian student is a forgotten man, an exile, the
transient inhabitant of rundown hotels, 'idling on a meagre income in a
suburban terrace' (p. 9). Aware of his failures, he mixes with hopeless
Maltese immigrants who live in basement rooms of unparalleled
sordidness: 'bills and calendars and empty cigarette packets; clothes on
the bed and the lino and the baby's crib; old newspapers; a sewing-
machine dusty with shredded cloth' with views of 'the small back garden,
usually black .. . the bare plane tree, the high brick wall' (p. 4). His view
of London is the backside view of the traveller by train: 'the backs of
sooty houses, tumbledown sheds, Victorian working-class tenements
whose gardens, long abandoned, had . . . been turned into Caribbean
backyards' (p. 9). The English lower-middle classes he meets are
imprisoned in meaningless jobs. There is an atmosphere of sexual
prurience, a recourse to jaded prostitutes, a series of unsatisfying,
furtive affairs in dingy rooms. An urge to escape is expressed in exotic
travel or long car or train journeys, movement for the sake of movement.
Returning to his Caribbean home island of Isabella, the protagonist
rapidly becomes a successful real-estate developer. But success has its
problems. Life again becomes boring and meaningless; there is a deep,
Homescape 125

unassuaged longing for the certainties of childhood. Domestic interiors,

rich and poor, are assessed for the facts they reveal about their owners.
Dreams of utopia, the aristocratic rural life of a cocoa planter, are
dashed by the garish vulgarity of a derivative technological society. An
alien in London, the protagonist finds that he has become an outsider in
his own country. Homeless and rootless, he speaks of his 'geographical
sense, that feeling of having been flung off the world' (p. 69).
There are no certainties in security: 'a man, passionate for security,
works and saves for a lifetime and is lucky at the end to have ten
thousand pounds. Another, placid with the knowledge of his own
imminent extinction, makes half a million dollars in ten years' (p. 60).
Indeed, the only certainty is uncertainty, and the devastating likelihood
that each man is an island, entire unto himself. Like Greene, Lowry, and
many other twentieth-century writers, Naipaul is aware of the growing
personal isolation that comes with permanent residence in modem
neo-technological cities: 'How right our Aryan ancestors were to create
gods. We seek sex, and are left with two private bodies on a stained bed.
The larger erotic dream, the god, has eluded us ... It is with cities as it is
with sex. We seek the physical city and find only a conglomeration of
private cells. In the city as nowhere else we are reminded that we are
individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains; it is the god of the city
we pursue, in vain' (p. 18). In Naipaul's hopeless vision, alike in drab
London or exotic Trinidad, Greeneland rules O.K. Deathscape in the
shape of the city, as we shall see, looms large. And, if this is 'home,'
should we not try to escape?
I
 7 Escape

I tell you, life would be unendurable

If you were wide awake .. .
T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.
T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Both Lowry and Greene were wide awake to the difficulties of their
childhood homes, and to the harsh realities of the literary life in Western
cities between the wars. Home was, then, unendurable, and a boredom-
generated taste for fear could best be assuaged by travel. Lawry's novel
titles provide us with something of a key to his character and his
restlessness. More plainly, we find Greene's childhood autobiography
sourly entitled A Sort of Life (1971) to be followed by the adult Greene's
Ways of Escape (1981).

Joumeying in Greene
Boredom, contracted as an adolescent, grew as Greene felt increasingly
imprisoned by the safe tedium of the civilized life of home, school,
Oxford, and a sub-editorship at The Times. 'Boredom seemed to swell
like a balloon inside the head; it became a pressure inside the skull:
sometimes I feared I would lose my reason' (Life 120). Psychoanalysed
as a suicidal adolescent, Greene later became almost pathologically
bored with ordinary life and correspondingly anxious to experience
danger and fear. Boredom produced the well-known undergraduate
Russian-roulette episode, experiments in riding dangerous horses over
jumps, a visit to the dentist for the extraction of a perfectly good tooth,
128 Landscapes of Metaphor

an attempt to get a vacation job as a spy for Weimar Germany. According

to Greene, boredom was partially responsible for his first instruction in
the Roman Catholic faith, for 'it would kill the time' (Life 165).
Escape seemed to be the answer. Like his near contemporary, the
historian Cobb (1975), Greene escaped from school through cross-
country running. Later, he was able to reduce boredom and generate
fear in himself by travel. He may be attributing too much to boredom and
too little to other desires when he states (Life 133):

A kind of Russian roulette remained too a factor in my later life, so that without
previous experience of Africa I went on an absurd and reckless trek through
Liberia; it was fear of boredom which took me to Tabasco during the religious
prosecution, to a leproserie in the Congo, to the Kikuyu reserve during the
Mau-Mau insurrection, to the emergency in Malaya and to the French war in
Vietnam. There, in those last three regions of clandestine war, the fear of
ambush served me first as effectively as the revolver .. . in the lifelong war
against boredom.

Boredom may be the reverse of the coin whose face is adventure; an

early book was entitled The Name of Action.
It is already apparent that Greene is a geographer's novelist.
Throughout a long and still continuing career, Greene has travelled
through much of the southern cone of Latin America, through Central
America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, through both West and East
Africa, Eastern Europe, and Southeast and East Asia. His exotic world
is that of the less-known, less-imageable regions: the pre-independence
Congo; pre-revolutionary Cuba; Haiti; Sierra Leone; Liberia; the
Caribbean coastline of Mexico. It is notable that his travels to less
obscure places, the war zones of Kenya, Malaya, and Vietnam, and the
Communist East, resulted in far fewer novels and travel books. Greene
seems to have been looking not for the flashy, vivid, spectacular, and
well-known, which he recorded as a journalist, but for the obscure, the
covert, the backwaters where the flotsam of humanity washes up. This,
again, is Greeneland.
An interest in geography and travel came early to Greene. Until the
age of six he lived in a house that possessed an extra piece of garden
across the road. In summer he would cross that road to play in the
garden, 'with the exciting sense of travelling abroad.' Bushes screened
off both road and house, 'which might have been a hundred miles away.
It was my first experience of foreign travel' (Life 20). One senses the
child's small world and the fear and curiosity involved in making this first
trip beyond parental control.
Escape 129

Greene's urge to travel was whetted further in that macho pre-

pubertal period when books on war, adventure, and exploration are in
vogue with boys. Like many of his generation, Greene devoured books
on Antarctic exploration (still ongoing at the time), and his favourite
novelists included Conrad, Henty, Rider Haggard, and many long-
forgotten authors of the simplistic grown-up-public-schoolboy type.
Such books are replete with the penetrations of jungles and deserts, lost
·treasures or secret documents, lost explorers or regiments, exotic
cultures, deeds of bravery and treachery, and sufferings of incredible
magnitude bravely borne by Britons who never whimper as do such
lesser breeds as the omnipresent dago. These influences are very real
and were still apparent in the juvenile literature of my own childhood in
the early 1950s. Greene is hardly exaggerating in opining that 'so much
of the future lies on the shelves' (Life 55).
These childhood and adolescent experiences were replayed later in
both life and novels. Greene has been a wartime intelligence officer and
foreign correspondent as well as a novelist; his penchant for leaving the
well-trodden tourist track to penetrate the seamy side of foreign regions
has led him to be considered as a spy by some governments. His novels
are set either in London and Western Europe or in some exotic tropical
backwater. They are replete with hunters and hunted, spies and
officials, fear and terror, pain and humiliation, inexplicable small
cruelties. Many protagonists are Catholic, and almost all experience
that well-known inner conflict between the higher and lower selves.
They inhabit regions where savage or despairing acts punctuate long
periods of acute boredom. The novels are often melodramatic, but then,
as Greene would say, so is life.
Further, Greene's constant use of the symbol of the corrupted child
suggests a further reason for travel, a distaste for the 'civilized' world
that actively promotes such corruption, or is at best indifferent to it. This
crime of indifference he imputes to civilization as a whole (Atkins 1966,
115). Both the skyscraper and the slum are constraints upon individual
freedom and creativity. Whether chromium-plated or squalorous, to be
at home in civilization is to be in a cage. Greene travels not merely
because of irremediable boredom, but 'to escape claustrophobia'
(Atkins 1966, 184). For him, Metroland has become Eliot's 'Unreal City'
filled with 'hollow men' (Eliot 1974).
A travelling obsession was not peculiar to Greene. A general feeling of
uncertainty, of the 'unrightness' of progress, had emerged with Tenny-
son and Hardy. For Arnold, modems were 'wandering between two
worlds, one dead/ The other powerless to be born. ' The First World War
demonstrated that, beneath a thin glossy veneer, the civilized world was
130 Landscapes of Metaphor

fundamentally barbaric. In the 1920s Yeats pronounced: 'Things fall

apart.' Into this anguished world emerged Waugh, Orwell, Lowry,
Auden, Spender, Greene.
Their solutions were various; some turned to religion, others to
Marxism. Most, rejecting outworn Britain, travelled abroad. All had
read Flecker; there was still some romance elsewhere, perhaps in
Timbuktu, Zanzibar, or Samarkand. The list of British literary travellers
between the wars is a long one. Fussell (1980) makes the point that,
unlike Victorian travellers, the inter-war wanderers were embittered by
hatred towards their mother country and sought salvation in the alien
and exotic.
Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1983) was the model for much of this
exploration of exotic lands. Here Mr Kurtz, a civilized westerner,
penetrates to the savage centre of the Congo jungle only to encounter
inscape, a terrifying vision of the darkness within himself. For Eliot,
Kurtz symbolizes the dark heart of the twentieth century. Lowry,
Greene, and others felt the same need to explore their own inner
darkness against the sympathetic background of primitive regions.
The perceived corruption at home, at the heart of civilization, was
thus a major motive for travel. Whether an actual secular period or
merely the inevitable loss of childhood, a golden age had gone. Rough
living among primitive people, coping with daily necessities, dealing
with rats and cockroaches, such a life 'seemed to satisfy temporarily the
sense of nostalgia for something lost: it seemed to represent a stage
further back' (Journey 19).
Greene especially was attracted by the inexplicable 'quality of
darkness' that is Africa (Journey 19-20). He distrusts civilization: 'my
journey represented a distrust of any future based on what we are ...
Today our world seems particularly susceptible to brutality ... halfcastes
fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers ... when one sees to
what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration
have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can
from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray'
(Journey 20-1). Just as Greeneland foreshadows the working-class
'kitchen sink' drama of the 1950s, so Greene's journeyings were echoed
in the youth travel and commune-building of the 1960s.
Like Kripalsingh in Naipaul's Mimic Men (1967), who methodically
destroys crate after crate of Coca-Cola, Greene is fleeing a modem life
that has perverted civilization from 'being' to 'having.' His counterpart
today would be fleeing Hamburger Helper and processed cheese slices,
video games and cablevision, all the goods that provide the unreflecting
Escape 131

masses with large quantities of low-quality experience. To Greene in the

1930s, the modem experience was summed up in the newly popular
game of Monopoly: 'The object ... of owning property is to collect rent .. .
Rentals are greatly increased by the erection of houses and hotels .. .
property will be sold to the highest bidder ... Players may land in gaol'
(Roads 17).
There are, of course, other motives for Greene's obsessional journey-
ing. As a child he was fascinated by the concept of the map. Throughout
the novels, characters who are mentally disoriented look for a meta-
phorical map. A Sort of Life begins with a 'personal map.' The title
Journey without Maps expresses the letting go of civilization that was
Greene's goal. Journeys are also important for their own sake, and for
the satisfaction of curiosity. They must be planned, and Greene echoes
Aldous Huxley in his short disquisition on 'what books to take on a
journey' (Roads 128). Significantly he took Burton's Anatomy of
Melancholy to West Africa, to 'match the mood.'
Then there is movement for movement's sake. Greene's novels are
filled with characters who are perpetually on the move, whether across
cities, as in The Third Man; between cities, as in A Gun for Sale and A
Confidential Agent; through countries, as in Stamboul Train; or through
jungles, as in The Power and the Glory. Pursuit is a common theme.
Hunter follows hunted on foot, through sewers, by public transporta-
tion. From the first novel, The Man Within (1929), we are introduced to
the protagonist as coward and fugitive. And just as the expectations of
fugitives are small, so Greene does not really expect to find an answer to
the problem of a dying civilization through exotic travel. Before leaving
for Mexico in 1938 he muses: 'Did I really expect to find there what I
hadn't found here?' Back comes the negative response: '"Why this is
hell," Mephistopheles told Faust, "nor am I out of it"' (Roads 17).
Perhaps deepest of all the motives for travel was the search for a Lost
Childhood (1951), the title of one of Greene's volumes of essays.
Childhood cannot be recaptured physiologically, but it may be recap-
tured spiritually. To do this, according to Greene, one must strip away
the unnecessary trappings of civilization, and return to the simple
certainties of daily life. In a world increasingly complex and apparently
out of control, such a revelation may more easily be encountered in
backward regions less corrupted by civilization.
To enter such regions, of course, one inevitably has to cross borders.
Whereas Malcolm Lowry hated the lengthy hassles involved in border
crossings, frontier zones and border lines have always fascinated
Greene. As an adolescent, his love of the rural Chiltern Hills was
132 Landscapes of Metaphor

enhanced because they were close to expanding London: 'They had the
excitement of a frontier' (Life 110). Even as a child of six, the separation
of his family home's two gardens generated a frontier image: 'I used to
think of the two gardens as representing England and France with the
Channel in between' (Life 20).
His earliest fragment of autobiography, in The Lawless Roads (1947),
begins with two countries 'lying side by side.' This is the most profound
frontier, the 'green baize door' separating school from home. John
Raynor (1973) has described the same phenomenon at Westminster
School. On the one side lay school, which for Greene was associated
with 'violence, cruelty, evil ... lavatories without locks,' a Rilkean world
of torment or a Piranesi prison. On the other, lay tranquillity, freedom,
solitude, the quiet croquet-lawn, the munching rabbit. The school/home
descriptions are replete with emotive terminology: 'border,' 'alien
ground,' 'frontier guards.' The emotive, chemical senses are important
to children, and it is not, therefore, surprising that the lands on either
side of the green baize door, as noted in chapter 2, 'Smellscape,' were
readily identified by smell.
The above is from the Prologue to The Lawless Roads. Chapter 1,
entitled 'The Border,' and dealing ostensibly with the crossing from
Texas to Mexico (also considered in an unfinished novel, The Other Side
of the Border), allows the adult Greene to express his feelings about
transitions: 'The border means more than a customs house, a passport
officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different;
life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been
stamped and you find yourself speechless among the moneychangers ...
The atmosphere of the border - it is like starting over again; there is
something about it like a good confession: poised for a few happy
moments between sin and sin' (p. 23). Like school, where 'it was like a
breach of neutrality' to encounter his gowned and mortar-boarded
father on the home side of the green baize door, borders are places of
divided loyalties, of indecision, of emotional vacillation, of the ever-
present possibility of disloyalty and betrayal.
Small wonder that borders and frontier zones figure prominently in
the Greeneian oeuvre. In Journey without Maps he crosses into hostile
Vichy French territory; strange travellers, perhaps spies, cross and
recross the boundary. In The Power and the Glory the whisky-priest
glimpses the safe, peaceful life that lies on the far side of the border. He
escapes to this haven, but is impelled to recross the border to meet his
doom. In Orient Express the train crosses frontier after frontier, each
one more dangerous than the last, until the final one proves deadly. The
Escape 133

second volwne of Greene's autobiography, Ways of Escape, tells of his

own recurrent crossing and recrossing of borders, of escapes and
deportations.
Greeneland, indeed, is a frontier zone of the mind, whose inhabitants,
of divided loyalty and deep inner conflicts, cross and recross from
heaven to hell, from good to evil. Borders, of the mind or physically real,
are Greene's homeland. 'How can life on a border be other than restless'
he asks (Lawless Roads 13 ). Unlike Lowry, who went in perpetual fear of
authority in the shape of customs officers and passport officials, Greene
relished the danger and incertitude of frontiers. A minor authority
himself, as journalist, novelist, and government official, he enjoyed
scoring off the Establishment by making unauthorized border crossings.
He particularly enjoyed his role as a special constable during the
General Strike of 1926, and later relished the London Blitz, for both gave
him 'the exciting sense of living on a frontier, close to violence' (Life 77).

Journeying in Lowry

How did all this begin and why am I here

at this arc of bar with its cracked brown paint,
papegaai, mezcal, hennessey, cerveza,
two slimed spittoons, no company but fear:
fear of light, of the spring, of the complaint
of birds and buses flying to far places ...
(from 'No Company But Fear')

For much of his life Malcolm Lowry was of no fixed abode; in his own
words he resided at Hotel Nada. Even his fourteen-year residence in
Dollarton was broken by long journeys. Significantly, and tragically, he
called his whole opus 'The Voyage That Never Ends.' For Lowry was a
lifetime fugitive, running from his childhood home, from Europe, from
Mexico, finally from Dollarton, and always from himself. That life is a
journey is a well-worn cliche; Lowry's life was a journey both in reality
and metaphor, across real landscapes and within his own mind.
Lowry's schoolboy stories were often set on trains; his jazz preferences
included 'Going Places' and 'Doing Things.' Like other middle-class
youths, he was allowed a Wanderjahr in Europe, and the stories he
wrote at that time reflect a taste for the exotic. His early life in Paris and
London was one of seedy, cheerless apartments, littered with bottles,
and with no pretence of permanence. Indeed, in both London and New
York, he was often so disoriented that he was unable to remember where
134 Landscapes of Metaphor

he lived. The walks he took were pub crawls. Paranoid, he often felt
trailed by unknown followers. He frequently indulged in long wandering
monologues that always failed to reach a goal. He speaks, Joyce-like, of
his 'tooloose-Lowrytrek.'
Lowry's life of wandering is an extreme case of the attack of
wanderlust experienced by literary British youth between the wars.
Compared with more pragmatic Americans, 'Britons, confined to a
small island, romantically cherish the act and art of journeying for its
own sake' (Fussell 1980). Fussell suggests that the outburst of travel
fever after the First World War was less a case of curiosity than of a blind
urge to flee England. D. H. Lawrence and, later, Graham Greene may be
cases in point.
Lowry fled England deliberately, but with few plans. Typically, his
central and most formative journeys, to Mexico (1936) and Vancouver
(1939), were unplanned. Almost penniless in Los Angeles, Lowry felt
Mexico would be cheaper. Flung out of Mexico, and misinformed that a
U.S. visa could be renewed only outside the country, he went to
Vancouver. In contrast, the less important early voyages were deliber-
ate adventures, and the later expeditions from Dollarton were either
searches for a new home or sad attempts to relive the past. Even Lowry' s
manuscripts were wanderers; they passed from publisher to publisher
by journeys as complex as those described within them.
By middle age this peripatetic Briton had visited the Far East, much of
Western Europe and North America, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
Wherever possible he went by sea. His initial description of Port au
Prince, Haiti, from the sea is a typical traveller's vision- everything seen
in terms of somewhere else (Lowry 1972, 6): 'strangely beautiful houses
of pointed roofs and of seemingly Norwegian design, church spires here
and there rise vaguely in the sun giving it a look of Tewkesbury, while to
the right mist lay in pockets of rolling mysterious mountains like
Oaxaca.' Like all travellers, too, he learns that return journeying is
dangerous. Places, whether loved or hated, have always changed by the
time the traveller, himself also changed, returns.
'The Voyage That Never Ends' was Lowry's framework for a great
novel-sequence that was to depict 'The Ordeal of Sigbj0rn Wilderness.'
Most of the novels depict journeys, usually voyages. Only Lunar Caustic
and Under the Volcano are physically anchored in a single place. Yet,
Lowry was nothing if not an introspective novelist. All the novels,
without exception, depict psychic journeys, interior journeys from a
state of chaos to one of stability in life or death. The interior journey is
expressed symbolically as physical journeying, whether actual, as in
Escape 135

most of the novels (even Volcano, where most of the wandering takes
place in one locale), or in terms of journeys of memory or wish, as in
Volcano and Lunar Caustic.
It is the psychic journeying of Lowry that is the more important. Lowry
saw himself as Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, as Ulysses, as Ahab, as
the Ancient Mariner, or as one of the many lonely, doomed wanderers of
literature. His voyage into the public psychiatric ward depicted in Lunar
Caustic (and which he later claimed to be a deliberate 'pilgrimage') was
a psychic journey meant to cleanse his soul and provide regeneration,
explicitly on the lines of Rimbaud's Saison en enfer.
In the psychiatric ward, drying out, he meets his persona face-to-face
(the inmate Kalowsky = the Wandering Jew) and experiences the
omnipresent existential reality of confinement. It is Bellevue Hospital,
after all; the views from its windows are all-important contact with the
outside world. Within, the summer heat oppresses; across the river lie
the Ice Palace and the Jack Frost Sugar Works. Ships pass by. If coming
into port, the inmates let out a cry of hope, partly a shriek, 'partly a
cheer'; if heading out to sea, the response is dull silence, 'as if all hope
were heading out with the tide.' Throughout, the rotting hulks of coal
barges reflect the beached, stranded, hopeless madmen who gaze
blankly down upon them.
In Ballast, Hear Us OLord, Dark as the Grave, and October Ferry are
explicitly journey novels, where the journey mirrors the mind's wander-
ings. Yet Volcano , on the surface Lawry's place novel par excellence, is
in fact the story of a psychic journey that ends in madness, death, and
damnation. It is, first of all, a novel of exiles, drawn together in a place
that is not merely unsympathetic, but actively hostile. The Consul's
inner voice tries to soothe him by telling him he is 'only lost, only
homeless,' as if this were not one of the most terrifying of existential
conditions. And, in Volcano, the landscape is dynamic; volcanoes
brood, barrancas snake through the countryside, forests participate in
human destruction. The whole novel is dynamic; it is a wheel, in
constant motion, symbolized by Cuernavaca's carnival Ferris wheel on
which the Consul is racked and humiliated. In Lowry nothing is static;
motion is of the essence.
'Life is a journey, a passage with no return .. . the pilgrim is the man
who . . . becomes in reality the traveller that everyone is symbolically'
(Day 1973, 409). Lowry saw his own journey, as reflected in his novels,
as Dantesque, with periods of Purgatorio, Paradiso, and Inferno.
Paradiso is clearly Eridanus (Dollarton), 'the simple life in British
Columbia, which the Consul can dream of but never attain, and an Eden
136 Landscapes of Metaphor

from which Lowry was finally expelled. Purgatorio is the psychiatric

hospital of Lunar Caustic, symbol of North America. Above all, it is a
place of no motion and no hope. For Lowry, the life of the Wandering
Jew, through it may lead eventually to hell, is better than the stasis of
purgatory.
So we are left with Inferno, the abyss that Lowry first glimpsed on
board ship in Ultramarine. The abyss is everywhere, even at sea, for
Lowry frequently uses the maelstrom as metaphor. It is in Oaxaca, the
City of Dreadful Night, and in Cuernavaca it is in the rotting gardens, in
the fetid garbage-laden barrancas, in the deep, dark caverns of its
cantinas. A majestic setting is of no avail; the barrancas lie at the foot of
the volcano.
As described in Under the Volcano Cuernavaca's landscape is a taut
amalgam of psychic-journey symbols. Popocatepetl is one of those magic
mountains the ascent of which brings grace. Mountains are positive
symbols for the Consul and his wife, whose respective childhoods were
spent in Kashmir and Hawaii; the simple life among the mountains of
British Columbia is their dream. But the Consul never climbs the sacred
mountain. Instead, he is irresistibly attracted to the caverns that lie
under the volcano, the dark cantinas and the deep barrancas that crack
apart the town of Cuernavaca. Throughout the novel the cantinas and
the barrancas, one of the latter at the bottom of Lawry's garden in Calle
Humboldt, wait, almost sentient, for their prey.
In the last scenes, all the characters lose their way in the Dantesque
metaphoric forest surrounding Cuernavaca:

Ne! mezzo de! cammin di nostra vita

me ritrovai per una selva oscura
che la diritta via erra smaritta ... (Day 1973, 306)

In this forest the Consul's brother lies hopelessly drunk; the Consul's
wife is trampled to death by a horse. Yet, the Consul crawls through, he
sees 'The Lighthouse in the Storm'; but the lighthouse is El Farolito, the
infamous cantina whose dark labyrinthine passages lead under the
volcano.
In the last scene, as the Consul, drunk, dies from a gratuitous pistol
bullet, he reflects on his native Kashmiri mountains, dreams of climbing
the volcano Popocatepetl, but falls screaming into the deep barranca.
'Someone threw a dead dog after him down the ravine'; psychic
journey's end.
Escape 137

Exile

Many journeys end with a return to the place of origin. Others, however,
may result in the wanderer fetching up more or less permanently in an
alien locale that, whether voluntarily or not, becomes a place of exile.
Curiously, Greene's major travels have been limited to the tropical
Third World. Within this sprawling region, he has shown little interest in
prominent countries with ancient civilizations, such as India or China.
Instead, seeking uncivilized simplicities, he has sought out the stagnant
backwaters of the tropical world, where European life has only a
marginal purchase.
The two most significant journeys were to West Africa (1935) and
Mexico (1938), for in these places Greene travelled in nineteenth-century
style, penetrating the fetid swamps and backlands on foot, by mule, with
bearers and guides. Both Liberia and the 'godless state' of Tabasco were
uncomfortable, hot, sweaty, enervating, dangerous. Military, police,
lawless natives, and vile animal life constantly threatened the traveller.
There are few pets in English Greeneland, but the tropical version is
replete with vultures on the roof, rats in the bath, the detonation of
cockroaches against walls, the buzzing of mosquitoes and flies. It is a
world reminiscent of that in Lowry's Undertite Volcano (1947). Even the
later travels, undertaken in a more sophisticated manner, were made to
places in Asia or Latin America that threatened danger in the form of
outright war or insurrection. These were Greene's 'ways of escape.' A
survey of landscape and inhabitants, however, suggests that the escape
from the wasteland of Metroland is merely an escape to a tropical
counterpart, a wasteland region of seediness, decay, and above all,
exiles.
The scene is readily set. If we seek the city in exotic Greeneland, it is to
corrupt Saigon, Mexico City, or Havana that we must look. Consider
Greene's view of Havana: 'I enjoyed the louche atmosphere of Batista's
city ... I came there ... for the sake of the Floridita restaurant (famous for
daiquiris and Morro crabs), for the brothel life, the roulette in every
hotel, the fruit-machines spilling out jackpots of silver dollars, the
Shanghai Theatre where for one dollar twenty-five cents one could see a
nude cabaret of extreme obscenity with the bluest of blue films in the
intervals' (Ways of Escape 184). This is the background to that sad
comedy Our Man in Havana.
In Indochina, again, the spell was cast by the elegant whores, Chinese
gambling and opium houses, and 'above all by that feeling of exhilara-
138 Landscapes of Metaphor

tion which a measure of danger brings to the visitor with a return ticket:
the restaurants wired against grenades, the watchtowers striding along
the roads of the southern delta' (Escape 121). This is, in tum, the
background for The Quiet American (1955), with its peaceful images of
water-buffaloes trudging through the paddy-fields broken suddenly by
the sight of the bodies of children lying at awkward angles in a ditch.
Vietnam provides a glimpse of rural Greeneland. The end of the line of
civilization is reached in Vientiane, Laos, a town with only 'two real
streets, one European restaurant, a club, the usual grubby market
where apart from food there is only the debris of civilization - withered
tubes of toothpaste, shop-soiled soaps, pots and pans from the Bon
Marche. Fishes were small and expensive and covered with flies'
(Escape 133).
But the archetypical tropical Greeneland lies in Mexico and West
Africa. In the Tabasco of The Power and the Glory (1962), we encounter
only ruined churches, polluted streams, intense heat, swamps, children
with bellies swollen from eating earth and by worms, dead children
buried like dogs, vultures awaiting carrion. On the West African 'Coast'
of The Heart of the Matter (1962) there are the same vultures, the same
swamps, the same worms, malaria, and flies , with the addition of yellow
fever. We rapidly come to the conclusion that Greene has carried
Greeneland, as an inscape, with him to these exotic shores. The
landscapes he perceives in these backwaters are tropical versions of the
icy Greeneland he has so tellingly depicted in Metroland.
The theme of exile is overwhelming. All the chief characters in The
Power and the Glory, native and non-native alike, are in some sense
abandoned. Mr Tench, the dentist, inhabits a land too hot for sex or
religion. To him home means England, stained glass, a Tudor rose, the
'Laughing Cavalier.' As for his 'home' in Tabasco:

Home: it was a phrase one used to meari four walls behind which one
slept. There had never been a home . . . Home lay like a picture postcard
on a pile of other postcards: shuffle the pack and you had Nottingham,
a Metroland birthplace .. . Mr. Tench's father had been a dentist too - his
first memory was finding a cast in a wastepaper basket - the rough,
toothless gaping mouth ... There is always one moment in childhood
when the door opens and lets the future in. The hot wet river port and
the vultures lay in the wastepaper basket, and he picked them out. (p. 11)

Tench exemplifies Greene's deterministic theories: his exile to Tabasco

was predestined.
Escape 139

The over-zealous lieutenant who hunts the whisky-priest is an

abandoned soul, for, because of his monomania, he is unable to
communicate with his fellows. The married priest Father Jose, an object
of ridicule, feels that his sin blankets 'the whole abandoned star' (p. 30).
Captain Fellowes on the plantation feels completely alone; his wife has
abandoned him, and life, for an inturned neuroticism that sees the whole
of external life as a threat. Their daughter Coral is spiritually abandoned
by her parents to a lonely life without companions. The whisky-priest
himself is increasingly unwelcome anywhere, for his presence brings
severe repercussions on those who harbour him. Even the normal pro-
gressions of daily life are abandoned: 'time stopped like a clock' (p. 74).
Tabasco is an abandoned state, a physical, religious, and moral
backwater. A local merchant realizes: 'The extent of their abandonment
- the ten hours downriver to the port, the forty-two hours in the Gulf to
Veracruz - that was one way out. To the north the swamps petering out
against the mountains which divided them from the next state. And on
the other side no roads - only mule-tracks and an occasional unreliable
plane: Indian villages and the huts of herds: two hundred miles away the
Pacific' (p. 28). On land, vultures wait stoically for the great heat to
provide them with carrion. Out to sea, 'the sharks looked after the
carrion on that side' (p. 7). The only sense of freedom from entrapment is
on board the little coastal steamer that occasionally visits the port.
Counterparts of Mr Tench inhabit the West African 'Coast' of The
Heart of the Matter. Here disgruntled exiles from Britain encounter
half-civilized blacks from the interior to their mutual frustration.
Scobie's room is as homeless as Mr Tench's: 'a table, two kitchen chairs,
a cupboard, some rusty handcuffs hanging on a nail, like an old hat, a
filing cabinet: to a stranger it would have appeared a bare uncomfort-
able room but to Scobie it was home' (p. 15). The effect of the enervating
climate is to turn the European into a species of hospital patient:
'periodically certain patients were sent home, yellow and nervy, and
others took their place' (p. 14). The law courts and police station stand,
as in Tabasco, as symbols of justice, but again 'the idea was only one
room deep. On the dark narrow passage behind, in the charge room and
the cells, Scobie could always detect the odour of human meanness and
injustice' (p. 15). Greeneland had been transferred, by Britons, from
Metroland to the 'Coast.'
In Journey without Maps (1971), the travel-journal mode permits
greater explicitness. The journey into the interior was, for Greene, a
journey back to the purity, benign or savage, of childhood. Even the
white presence in the interior seemed benign, for Sunday-afternoon tea
140 Landscapes of Metaphor

with missionaries in the heat of Bolahun 'was very like tea in an English
cathedral town: it was gentle, decent, child-like and unselfish, it didn't
even know it was courageous' (p. 83). Yet, a return to the coast is a
return to 'The Seedy Level,' reinforcing Greene's 'sense of disappoint-
ment with what man had made out of the primitive, what he had made
out of childhood' (p. 244 ). In the interior 'the sense of taste was finer, the
sense of pleasure keener, the sense of terror purer and deeper' (p. 225):
life was authentic. Back on the coast there is iced beer and radio
programs from England 'and after all it is home, in the sense that we
have been taught to know home, where we will soon forget the finer
taste, the finer pleasure, the finer terror on which we might have built'
(p. 226). Here again, the sense of home, for Greene, becomes an
entrapment.
Yet, for most expatriates, the 'Coast' was an alien land of exile in
which home, as in Indian hill stations, had to be re-created. Freetown,
Sierra Leone, was 'an English capital city,' with 'the Anglican cathedral,
laterite bricks and tin with a square tower, a Norman church built in the
nineteenth century' in a landscape of fetid swamp. Here the expatriates
lived turgid, fatuous lives enlivened only by fashionable weddings, the
governor general's garden party, the All-Comers Tennis Competition,
and the Play and Dance of the Ladies of the National Congress of British
West Africa. The aim is to reproduce England, support memory, and
avert homesickness. The social atmosphere, like the climate, is stifling,
but the expatriates defend it: 'If you are English, they would argue, you
will feel at home here: if you don't like it you are not English' (pp. 38-44 ).
The tug of home on the exile inevitably leads to sadness, discontent, 'a
feeling for respectability and a sense of fairness withering in the heat' (p.
44). In A Burnt-out Case (1963), however, the journeying protagonist is
not a colonial expatriate but an architect who, having experienced
'bum-out' in career, marriage, and life generally, is seeking the opposite
of home, an 'empty place' that holds no memories. In his journey into the
Congolese interior, however, Querry finds that 'in an unfamiliar region
it is always necessary for the stranger to begin at once to reconstruct the
familiar, with a photograph perhaps, or a row of books if they are all that
he has brought with him from the past ... And, so from the first morning
he set himself to build a routine, the familiar within the unfamiliar. It was
the condition of survival' (p. 26). At journey's end, moreover, irony is
piled on irony, for Querry, soon to die, is immediately confronted by a
native who categorically states that 'one should die in one's own village
if it is possible' (p. 33).
Even in less exotic locales, the exiled make their appearance. England
Escape 141

Made Me (1970) is set in civilized Stockholm, but the runaway Anthony

and the remittance man, Minty, are homeless exiles, doomed to a world
that becomes 'little more than a series of workhouses strung across the
globe - Shanghai, Aden, Singapore ... Stockholm' (p. 55). Greene is
pointing out, repeatedly, the inauthenticity of existence away from
home, while at the same time reminding us that home is stifling to the
spirit and must be escaped. Hence, the thoughtful existential being in the
twentieth century is essentially a homeless exile. It is notable that
Greene, after a lifetime of journeying, finally abandoned Metroland in
favour of Antibes.

Conclusions

Home and journey are fundamental geographic poles of existence.

Lowry's contribution, in life as in work, lies in taking these conditions to
their extremes. Lowry and his protagonists are rarely at rest. Home is
ideal, but journey is real. His work is that of an existential outsider who,
briefly admitted to a form of insideness, is nevertheless eventually cast
out.
Home is often equated with self. Yet, with Lowry, the identification
with home becomes so extreme that survival without land, shack, and
pier is fundamentally impaired. This, again, was clear to Lowry himself.
In October Ferry Llewelyn's wife and father-in-law refer to his attach-
ment to Eridanus as 'insane' and 'pathological. ' To which Llewelyn can
only agree, yet stating: 'not to be attached . . . would be more
pathological still' (p. 199). Less intense, but equally real attachments to
home are felt by many individuals and groups. Yet, politicians, planners,
and developers, unheeding of the humanist planning research that
began a generation ago in Boston's West End, neither know nor care
that grieving for a lost home may be fatal (Porteous 1977).
Lowry' s work also brings into focus the two types of journeying, of
body and of mind, the former often symbolic of the latter. Despite the
recent trend towards a consideration of process, geographers still tend
to take a static view of the world. Space and place are emphasized; when
considered, journeys are always considered as place-related, rarely as
events in themselves. We are slow to consider life-journeys, or the
long-term journeying of drop-outs, exiles, and expeditionaries, prefer-
ring to concentrate on commuters and tourists (who, in the geography of
tourism, seem to exist only to be managed).
Journeys of life, inner psychic journeys, allegorical journeys, these are
not explored. And, in our emphasis on at-homeness, rootedness, and
142 Landscapes of Metaphor

place we are missing a great deal of the point of even nineteenth-century

regional novels. As for the modem mid-twentieth-century novel, it
reflects not only the growing placelessness of our civilization, but also
the inevitable sense of loss that placelessness generates. In Greene,
moreover, we are confronted by the inevitable place-loss, itself a kind of
self-loss, which comes from our loss of childhood.
Home, in Greeneland, is a lonely, grubby prison inhabited by corrupt
failures. Escape is essential. Journeys are necessary in order to discover
primitive roots. Exile is likely, and even in exile one is surrounded by
those who re-create home, and one may, like Querry, be doomed to
re-create the familiar oneself.
If home is supposedly our territorial core, a symbol of the self, a
personally controlled space that provides security, stimulation, and
identity for the occupant, then Greene presents us with some terrifying
images of twentieth-century homelessness. It is significant that in most
of his books the protagonists either dwell in single rooms, as in almost all
the 'entertainments' set in England, or are expatriates. Many of them
spend much of their time journeying; there is a persistent restlessness.
Some have abandoned home, but others actively seek some alternative
place of refuge. Many are trapped in hopeless exile. Even natives of a
country may feel uprooted and abandoned.
Literary critics have dealt in depth with Greene's depiction of the
problems of faith, evil, and sin, his cinematic technique, his interest in
childhood innocence, and his concern for seedy characters in seedy
environments. Few have alluded to the persistent related themes of
home, journey, and exile. Yet, these concepts underlie the whole oeuvre
and are a basic foundation of life in Greeneland. Nicholas Nickleby
speaks of home as 'the place where ... those I love are gathered together'
(Dickens 1968, 149). It is profoundly disturbing to tum over the stone and
discover the underside of life where such a concept has atrophied.
Even for those who remember home, the memory is fatally flawed.
Like Mr Tench's rosy view of a vanished England, in Mexico Greene's
homesickness was for a vanished England conjured up by reading
Trollope. 'But it wasn't real: this was real - the high empty room and the
tiled and swarming floor and the heat and the sour river smell' (Lawless
Roads 130). Coupled with Greene's emphasis on childhood innocence
and the hopeful journeys back to the primitive, this image irresistibly
draws us to the conclusion that home, for Graham Greene, existed only
in childhood. And if childhood is our only real home, then home is, for all
of us, irretrievably lost. We are inevitably exiled from it by age and
change.
Escape 143

I could have ended on this dramatic and rather negative note. But
more can be said. It is generally agreed that 'you can't go home again,'
often because 'home,' as we shall rediscover in the next chapter,
'Childscape,' is really our childhood home. Yet, home tugs throughout
our adult lives. AJan Sillitoe (1968, 41) suggests that 'the greatest instinct
is to go home again, the unacknowledged urge of the deracinated, the
exiles- even then it isn't admitted. The only true soul is the gypsy's, and
he takes home and family with him wherever he drifts.' Mary Renault
(1968, 313), equally perceptive, feels that adults are somewhat compen-
sated for the loss of childhood home by 'the sensation of coming home
again which is one of the more stable by-products of physical love.' And,
as I will explain in the next chapter, the technique of environmental
autobiography gives us an opportunity to revisit home, if only in
memory.
8 Childscape

Childhood is not a thing which dries up as soon as it has finished its cycle. It is
not a memory. It is the most living of treasures, and continues to enrich us
without our knowing it .. . Woe to the man who cannot remember his
childhood ... he is dead as soon as it leaves him.
Franz Hellen

When St Paul, on becoming a man, put away childish things, it is to be

hoped that he retained some childlike qualities, as his master would
have wished. Childhood is not so easily dismissed; most of us have had
one. Psychiatrists, Jesuits, and educationalists, as well as Graham
Greene and Malcolm Lowry, agree that our childhood years are the
most formative in terms of character development.
This vital importance of childhood, in that the child is, indeed, the
father of the man, became apparent in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries to thinkers as varied as Rousseau, Wordsworth,
and Dr Arnold of Rugby. Indeed, it may be said that the Western concept
of childhood was invented at this time. Although this view is now
beginning to be critically reassessed, the prevailing orthodoxy in that
branch of history known as the history of the family is that, until the last
two hundred years, persons over seven or eight years of age were treated
as small adults, and worked and were punished as such. It is clear that
childhood as a major theme in literature came with Rousseau, Words-
worth, Blake, and their generation.
Following them, in the mid to late nineteenth century, myriad laws
emerged that restricted childhood employment and devolved responsi-
bility for health care, education, and discipline from the individual family
to the state. The child's value as a labour unit fell steadily until, by the
early twentieth century, children were becoming economically 'useless'
but emotionally 'priceless' (Zelizer 1985). By the mid-twentieth century
childhood had become regarded as everyone's birthright. Further, and
quite erroneously, childhood has come to be seen as a biological
146 Landscapes of Metaphor

category rather than the cultural product that it is. As a result,

'childhood' has grown lengthier and lengthier in terms of years, the
concept of adolescence has had to be invented, and the burden of
dependency upon parents has correspondingly grown. With the mid-
twentieth century came the period Sommerville (1982) calls 'the glorifi-
cation of the child,' a period when European visitors to the United States
were amazed to find parents meekly obeying their children.

The disappearance of childhood?

This period has now passed, and we appear to be poised on the edge of
'the standardization of childhood.' Indeed, a series of recent works,
including Postman's The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), Winn's
Children without Childhood (1982), and Suransky's The Erosion of
Childhood (1986), suggest that the death of childhood has already
begun, and that we are already well on the way to a neo-medieval
concept of the child, once again, as a small adult. At the root of this
change lie the states and processes recognized and named by
nineteenth-century social scientists and social critics - the alienation,
rootlessness, anomie, and angst that come with urban-industrial
civilization or what Carlyle called the 'demon of Mechanism.' In this
sense the death of childhood was heralded almost as soon as it was
invented; indeed, Postman claims that childhood began to decline with
the inventions of Samuel Morse, the progenitor of modem electronic-
communication systems.
Postman goes on to claim that the electronic media, and especially
television in its concern with a symbolic world of graphics rather than
words, ·have destroyed several hundred years of 'book culture,' which
alone was capable of separating the worlds of child and adult. Television
watching requires no skills, it does not make complex demands on mind
or behaviour, it does not segregate its audience; it is 'the iotal disclosure
medium' that unlocks adult secrets and presents them to three-year-
olds. The result of media culture is the 'adultified child' and the
'childified' adult: 'With a few exceptions, adults on television do not take
their work seriously (if they work at all), they do not nurture children,
they have no politics, practice no religion, represent no tradition, have
no foresight or serious plans, have no extended conversations, and in no
circumstances allude to anything that is not familiar to an eight-year-old
person' (Postman 1982, 127). We might also note the development of
adult clothing styles for children, of youthful styles for adults, and of the
growing consumption of junk food by the immature of all ages. Literacy
Childscape 147

declines, yet television gives children answers to questions they have not
yet even formulated. Wonder and curiosity die. Cynicism and arrogance
grow, and with them the erosion of childhood.
This is a startling indictment of the stupidity and immaturity of
twentieth-century adults. It is borne out by independent analyses by
Suransky (1986), who in addition blames the early institutionalization of
children in day-care centres; by Dally (1983 ), who documents the decline
in mothering consequent upon such institutionalization; and by Winn
(1982), who indicts the feminist movement and ignorant popularizations
of psychiatric concepts as well as television, 'the plug-in drug.' The
declining importance of organized religion and growing feelings of adult
defeatism and powerlessness may also be important factors in the
development of the anti-child society since the 1960s.
Whatever the causes, it is quite clear that, after about age ten,
modem Western children are increasingly likely to become sharp,
sophisticated, street-wise, profane, cynical, sexually knowledgeable
manikins who see no irony whatever in 'Born to Shop' bumper stickers.
Any resemblance to children of the last hundred years or so vanishes
with the growing penetrability of the adult world.
One might predict, then, that if childhood is disappearing, so will
childscape. Indeed, but the concept remains worth investigating for a
number of reasons, including the possibility that the present trend can be
reversed. Besides being of intrinsic interest, especially to those of us
over forty who may have had blessedly 'old-fashioned' childhoods, it is
becoming increasingly clear that the remembrance of things past, and of
childhood in particular, is of crucial importance to the well-being of the
elderly. Graham Greene's lament for a lost childhood (1951) is more com-
mon than we might think. And both geographer Rowles's (1978) and oral
historian Blythe's interviews with the elderly reveal that 'it is the actual
geography of boyhood and girlhood which the old long for' (Blythe 1980,
41). According to Vischer (1966), for many old people youth has consti-
tuted their one great experience. Regression is the sine qua non of ageing.
With this justification behind me, I will now explore the notion of
childscape in terms of the 'real' childscape, as perceived by the senses,
and the imaginary 'scapes of children's literature. Subjective autobio-
graphical accounts will then be contrasted with the more objective
investigations of developmental geographers.

The sensual child

It is often claimed, no doubt with considerable justification, that the

148 Landscapes of Metaphor

senses of children are much sharper than are those of adults. It is certain
that children have not yet developed the moral and perceptual filters that
so often render the adult's world a dull blandscape. The child pays
attention to everything, he lets in all of the 'blooming, buzzing confusion'
that is his environment. More obviously, the child is much closer to the
ground, where the non-visual senses, and especially smell, are of
paramount importance.
So close to the ground, indeed, is the child that a special, almost
erotic, joy is gained from contact with the earth itself. Sigrid Undset, a
Norwegian novelist, recalls the 'kind of orgiastic joy' with which she
crawled along the ground as a child: 'The mould is brown and loose and
warmed by the sun, lovely to fill your hands with. The child lets it run
through her fingers on to her bare calves and white socks, making them
grey. Wild with delight she pours and pours, as fast as she can' (Gay
1986, 273). During an earthquake, Gretel Erlich (1987, 25) 'lay down. To
feel the ground move in this way was to learn what "ground" means in all
senses of the word: ground as primary place, as movement, as the
foundation of what is knowable.' Psychiatrists and culture historians
have suggested that the child's identification with both animate and
inanimate nature is a valuable survival from 'primitive' ways of seeing
the world.
Contact with the earth was Undset's first memory. There is consider-
able evidence that early memories often involve the non-visual rather
than the visual senses. Hart's (1979) first memory is of the 'domino-like
sound of dozens of shunting train trucks.' It was only later that he began
to assemble a store of visual images. Kinaesthesia and touch appear to
be of almost equal importance; children are active and mobile: 'I knew
well the location of each stretch of concrete sidewalk in the surrounding
streets as well as their relative merits as smooth surfaces; the horrible
corrugated surface of the road made rollerskating on it something akin to
pneumatic drill work' (p. 486). Active play in busy, swampy fields was
also important until local authorities 'improved' these by flattening,
draining, and devegetating them to create the kind of placeless
'recreation environment' that children everywhere disdain.
As noted in chapter 2, 'Smellscape,' smells are powerful memory
releasers, and Hart clearly remembers the smells of carpet, greenhouse
cucumbers, newly watered plants, and 'the more subtle comforting
smell of soil itself.' A favourite field was for 'rolling, running, chasing,
lying on your back and watching the clouds, wrestling, rounders, soccer.
But most of all, it meant grass, glorious fresh-cut grass, grass to build
with, grass to throw, and grass to bury your nose in, breathing in that
Childscape 149

incomparably beautiful smell' (p. 491). Smells, mostly unpleasant (urine,

vennin, rancid diapers, over-used bathrooms, wet beds, dirty damp
clothes, poor food), peivade the autobiography of Helen Forrester
(1974), but she is also moved to recall the soundscape of the port of
Liverpool. Similarly, C.S. Lewis (1977, 14) thinks of himself as 'a product
of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics
explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and
the noise of wind under the tiles.' He is well aware of the view for which
his parents chose his childhood home in Belfast, yet 'the sound of a
steamer's horn at night still conjures up my whole boyhood' (p. 15).
Clearly, in childhood we are dealing with a multisensory experience,
where the non-visual senses have a much greater importance than is
ever recognized in the blandscapes of adulthood. Adults stand high off
the ground, yet spend much of their time sitting, and peiversely control
their sensory input. Children do not. The sheer multisensory joy of
childhood experience may be retained into adulthood only by the more
creative among us, but we can surely feel C.S. Lewis's (1977, 25) joy in
being alive as he rides the ferry to England: 'Clop-clop-clop-clop .. . we
are in a four-wheeler rattling over the uneven squaresets of the Belfast
streets through the dan1p twilight . . . on board, a certain agreeable
excitement steals over me. I like the reflected port and starboard lights in
the oily water, the rattle of the winches, the wann smell from the engine
room ... I feel the throb of the screws underneath me ... and there is a
taste of salt on one's lips.' Though later a Christian apologist, Lewis was
no ascetic in childhood; there are environmental, sensuous connotations,
as well as religious, in his book's title, Surprised by Joy.
Children do not censor experience. The great writers on childhood,
Twain, Dickens, Jefferies, Blake, instinctively understood this. It is only
with institutionalized education and long experience of living life at
second hand, as through the media, for example, that children come to
accept the blandly factual Hard Times of Dickens's Gradgrind, where
the maivellous being that is a horse becomes 'Quadruped. Graminiver-
ous. Forty teeth.'

Imaginative experience

All childhood experience, of course, is not of the earth, earthy. Fantasy,

the life of the mind, is also of great importance. For most very young
Western children, however, fantasy has been captured and encapsulat-
ed in children's literature, and most notably in the nursery rhyme and the
fairy tale. Bettelheim (1976) suggests that fairy stories are valuable in
150 Landscapes of Metaphor

their facilitation of the child's development of an understanding of his

feelings, and in particular in their capacity to reveal evil in a form that
permits children to integrate it without trauma. Fairy tales are also
interesting for their possible role in shaping environmental attitudes.
Children brought up without fairy tales feel the loss. Edmund Gosse
(1973, 23), for example, seems to have suffered a kind of Gradgrind
childhood: 'I was told about missionaries, but never about pirates; I
was familiar with humming-birds, but I had never heard of fairies. Jack
the Giant-Killer, Rumpelstiltskin and Robin Hood were not of my
acquaintance, and though I understand about wolves, Little Red Riding
Hood was a stranger even by name.' Gosse remarks gently: 'I can but
think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from
my outlook upon facts.' He had to work out for himself the fact that
Homo sapiens was something more than 'a featherless plantigrade
vertebrate.' Fairy tales, long before Grimm and Anderson, were our
common heritage, and survive today in myriad books, films, tapes, and
even, vestigially, in the lyrics of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
From Victorian moral tales to the American problem novel of today,
children's literature ('Kidlit' to the trade) has been extensively analysed
from the points of view of historical development, literary quality,
sociopolitical content, and psychosexual imagery. As a result, we have
learned much about adults' changing conceptions of childhood, for
children rarely produce their own literature. The environments por-
trayed in this literature have received less attention. Yet, environment
is not merely the setting for action but an integral part of mood
conveyance and plot development. Imagination, fantasy, curiosity, and
understanding are fulfilled and enhanced through the depiction of
settings that range from the commonplace to the exotic. The underlying
attitudes of the adult writers are made concrete in the environmental
messages they choose to pass on to their public.
The environmental messages that young children absorb are essen-
tially stereotypes. Adults feel the need to avoid ambiguity and complexity
when writing for children. Hence, only the simplest of basic landscape
features are to be found, and human relationships with them are
correspondingly unsubtle. The messages of the text are heavily rein-
forced by illustrations, with which most kidlit is well endowed.
One of the major stereotypes is the familiar adult preoccupation with
the difference between city and countryside. Recent work by geogra-
phers (Hart and Chawla 1980) suggests that children do not spontane-
ously make the distinction between 'natural' and 'artificial' that seems
necessary to the adult conception of the urban: rural antinomy. Yet, the
Childscape 151

tradition in children's literature has been to glorify the pastoral scene

and be, at best, rather ambiguous about the urban. Countless books of
fairy-tales, folk-tales, nursery rhymes, and the like portray an ideal
landscape of farmland interspersed with small woods, dotted with
pleasant villages, and threaded by islanded rivers. Cows graze in peace.
God's in his heaven, etc.
In sharp contrast, cities are most frequently ignored. When recog-
nized they may, as in Oz, be the locus of control of a rather ambiguous
central power. Their inhabitants, as in Hamelin, are often pinched,
greedy, and mean. Thus, we thoroughly absorb the message conveyed
by the Aesopian fable of the wholesome country mouse and the
corrupted town mouse. Only town architecture, chiefly consisting of tall
half-timbered buildings with steeply pitched roofs, fronting narrow
winding streets, provides some relief. It is significant that, as so often
occurs in Germany, the castle (with its handsome prince) stands outside
the town, on a romantic cliff.
It is not difficult to understand this bias. As will be demonstrated in the
next chapter, cities have been viewed negatively in our culture for
several hundred years. The folk-tales on which many stories are based,
of course, emerged in European rural settings. Children are fond of
animal stories and fantasy creatures such as giants, trolls, fairies, and
the like, all of which are, by tradition or habitat selection, naturally
denizens of rural areas. Only very rarely, as with Paddington Bear and
the French stories of Babar the elephant, do we find animals enjoying
city life.
More usually, children's books set in cities involve animals only in the
home or at the zoo. And the London landscape of, for example,
Christopher Robin or Mary Poppins consists mainly of St Paul's,
Buckingham Palace, the zoo, shops, monuments, and similar sites. Only
with the rise of the 'new realism' during the 1960s did familiar
townscapes begin to appear with any regularity in kidlit. The books of
Richard Scarry and television series such as 'Sesame Street' and 'The
Electric Company' have brought urban street life to the fore in the last
two decades. But, even here, the emphasis is most often on downtown,
on transportation modes, or on exotic inner cities and ghettos. Most
North American children now live in some form of suburbia, but we have
yet to see a genre that takes for its habitual background the setting of
urban sprawl, freeways, shopping centres, low-rise development, and
open-plan subdivisions. It is not difficult to conclude that cities, in
general, and suburbia, in particular, are seen by authors as either
unsuitable for children or perhaps simply banal. We might also note, in
152 Landscapes of Metaphor

passing, the likelihood that high levels of creativity are not nurtured in
suburbia. In my extensive reading of the autobiographies of creative
people, I find that most of them were fortunate enough to have been
raised in other than suburban settings.
This ambivalence towards the city coexists in kidlit with a marked
preference for the 'middle landscape' of countryside and a general
distaste for wilderness. In Tolkien, for example, the Good Lands are
fertile rural areas, whereas cities are ambivalent, and mountains,
deserts, and above all, forests are symbolic landscapes of terror and
doom (Porteous 1975). Only recently have 'environmentalist' children's
books attempted to reverse a long-standing horror of forests that seems
to have persisted since medieval times. As in medieval imagery, so even
in modem children's stories there is danger lurking 'deep in the dark
woods.' The chief source appears to be the Teutonic tales collected by
the Grimms, in which forests are dark, silent, menacing, enchanted, and
dangerous, the scene of hunting, vengeance, starvation, wild beasts,
wilder people, and utter disorientation. For, in the forest, as in the city, it
is all too easy to become lost. Whether we are dealing with Tom Sawyer,
The Wind in the Willows, Namia, Middle-Earth, or the endless visions
of Grimmland to be fowid in Disney and modem kidlit, forests remain
grim(m) and woodcutters may be heroes.
Young children, apparently, do not spontaneously express apprecia-
tion of scenery (Tuan 1974; Hart 1979). If their minds tend towards a
tabula rasa on this front at least, one can only speculate on the
difficulties to be overcome by the ecology movement and the Green
parties in inculcating a love of trees in a population whose predilection
for hamburgers is directly connected to the demise of Central and
Southern American rain forests.
Clearly, kidlit teaches that things go better in the country, as in
Charlotte's Web, or in gardens, as in The Secret Garden. It is in these
settings, perforce, that children expect to encounter animals. Since
Aesop, animal stories have entertained children. Even the new realism,
as in Watership Down, retains a rural setting, itself threatened by
suburban development. Children are much more actively and spontane-
ously interested in animals than in plants, yet our positive attitude
towards animals is relatively recent (Thomas 1983). Despite Descartes
and behavioural psychology, animals very clearly express feelings and
needs, to which children can easily respond. It is therefore easy for
didactic religiomanes, such as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, to use
non-human animals as allegorical figures in the endless saga of good and
evil. Unfortunately, and especially sadly for readers of Beatrix Potter,
Childscape 153

the result can be a zoophilist sentimentality which is to the advantage of

neither human nor non-human species.
When the rural idyll palls, the child is transported not to the city but to
some exotic setting. From Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Oz to
modem space fiction, the exotic is a setting of utmost importance in
kidlit. King Solomon's Mines, Treasure Island, and Edward Lear's
nonsense lands archetypally provide us with something rich and strange
located in a far-off place. Again, one can only speculate on the linkages
between the exoticism of children's literature and the images through
which we are sold the modem fantasies of foreign tourism. Graham
Greene, for one, might see a strong connection.
Quite clearly, in the study of environment in children's literature the
surface has not yet been scratched. We know next to nothing about the
long-term effects on their recipients of the environment images purveyed
in children's books. Ambiguous cities, evil forests, anthropomorphic
animals; these are hardly a good grounding for the concerned citizen of a
depleting spaceship earth.
We do know that early childhood impressions are important in
shaping character. Many writers, and in particular Graham Greene
(1951), insist that the books read or known in childhood have had a
profound influence on their attitudes and life-styles. It is quite likely that
children's literature promotes conformity and suppresses individuality
(Turner 1964) and G.K. Chesterton was insistent that a child would be
better to make mud pies than to read Alice (Hinckle 1970). Yet, in a very
useful paper on children's concern for environment (Hart and Chawla
1980), we find no consideration of children's literature as a mode of
indoctrination. Most voters and decision-makers have been exposed
to the environmental biases of kidlit. It is time we investigated how
important this inculcation might be.

The subjective: childhood autobiography

One method of tapping the feelings of childhood is to study the memories

of childhood set down by adults in their autobiographies. There are
many assumptions here, especially the assumptions of accuracy and
selectivity, as well as profound problems of reliability and validity (Coe
1984b). Nevertheless, the genre can provide useful insights.
Autobiography is a recent innovation in the literary scene. Like the
painter's self-portrait, it emerged after the Renaissance had brought to
Western man a renewed awareness of human individuality. The
autobiography of childhood emerged even later, becoming a distinctive
154 Landscapes of Metaphor

literary genre only with the establishment of childhood as a cultural

phenomenon in the early nineteenth century. And only in the late
twentieth century have critics begun to explore the nature and meaning
of childhood autobiography.
Assessment of childhood autobiography ranges from the meagre, as in
Mallon's (1985) study of diaries, in which childhood is a recurrent subject,
to the more obviously profound, as when Cockshut (1984) finds
childhood to be 'the most important time of all' in the formation of
personality. Most interesting, perhaps, is Edith Cobb's (1959, 1977)
theory of creativity, which she terms 'the ecology of imagination.'
According to Cobb, adult creativity emerges directly from one's child-
hood sense of self and world. The ecology of imagination springs from a
special perceptual relationship to the physical environment that univer-
sally characterizes middle childhood. In her review of about three
hundred volumes of autobiography from the sixteenth to the twentieth
centuries, Cobb (1977, 23) finds that adult inspiration derives chiefly
from childhood experience, and asserts that the child 'is part of a
universal aesthetic logic in nature's formative processes.'
The universal hallmark of childhood is the sense of wonder aroused
by the meeting of body, mind, and environment. Baudelaire, who
defined genius as 'childhood recoverable at will,' would have agreed.
Yet, if creative genius is natural to childhood, as Cobb suggests, we are
given no explanation of why it is retained by only a minority of adults. A
number of educators, of course, most notably Ivan Illich, would suggest
that the institutionalization of children in schools is sufficient to stifle any
latent creative urges.
The environments that are of interest to us here are those that endure
in memory. Such environments may have been important in shaping the
child's sense of self. If, as Olney (1972) suggests, autobiography is
metaphor, a means of understanding one's own mind and personality,
then it would follow that objects discovered early in life should have
primacy in forming metaphors of the self (Chawla 1980). One thinks of
G.K. Chesterton's assertion that his whole life was guided by his
childhood view of a toy theatre, with turreted castle, handsome prince,
and windowed damsel awaiting rescue. Some authors have recognized
the importance of this integration of landscape into the personality.
Gusdorf (1980, 37), for example, suggests that landscape is essentially
evocative for the autobiographer, assists him to structure the metaphor-
ic terrain in which his life is lived, and gives life its ultimate shape, 'so
that landscape is truly, in Ariel's phrase, "a state of the soul."' We are
back, of course, to Inscape.
Childscape 155

Cobb's theory has been both criticized and elaborated. Raymond

Williams (1973) agrees with Schachtel (1959) that childhood is associat-
ed with a delighted immersion in sensory perception, while adults
become dulled by habit. Williams takes issue, however, with the
development of myths of childhood paradise, exemplified perhaps most
extremely by J.M. Barrie's dictum that the age of two is 'the beginni.Iig of
the end.' Furthering the city: country dichotomy that emerged in my
discussion of children's literature, Williams notes that the childhood
paradise myth emerges chiefly from an era of rural autobiographies, a
view only strengthened by the recent emergence of autobiography from
old working-class 'urban villages.' In both cases the rural village or the
old, tight-knit city neighbourhood stands for natural ways, an under-
standable social life, in sharp contrast with the 'non-place urban realm'
of adulthood, characterized by speed, progress, technology, develop-
ment, and modernization. Williams concludes that this is not merely the
inevitable change from childhood innocence to adult experience, but a
more profound change of consciousness that disregards the old, slow,
familiar, and accepted ways of life and substitutes the modem modes of
detached, externally oriented, users and consumers. One ceases being
and embraces having. In this sense the looking back to a different way of
life, within living memory, is an exercise in nostalgia that partially
validates the widely accepted notion that life was once more natural and
wholesome.
Chawla (1980) rigorously tested Cobb's theories with a sampling of
thirty-eight autobiographies. She rejects Cobb's notion that a height-
ened awareness and sense of relationship with the outer world is a
universal experience of childhood. Indeed, one-fifth of her autobiogra-
phers revealed nothing but detachment, rejection, and other 'adult'
modes of being. However, she found that the heightened awareness of
which Cobb speaks was almost universally characteristic of persons
deeply involved in the arts and the humanities, whereas people involved
in the physical sciences, committed to abstraction, either omitted their
childhood environments altogether or spoke of them with detachment or
rejection. My own research suggests that the autobiographies of
political and business leaders tend similarly to neglect or dismiss
childhood experience in favour of lengthy discussions of mastery and
control of both people and environment. The implications of this finding
for the survival of humanity are profound. There is beginning to develop,
in Western consciousness, a deep unease concerning the role of business
and science in shaping the future.
Chawla concluded that, while a transcendental relationship with
156 Landscapes of Metaphor

environment was not universal in childhood, yet in most cases 'environ-

ment played an important part in the equation of self identity' (p. 102).
As Cobb had suggested, environmental memories helped integrate a
sense of the physical and social world with a sense of self. Those who
remembered transcendental identification with environment, however,
were not necessarily more creative as adults. Rather, they were able to
perceive a sense of continuity between childhood and adulthood,
between self and human life in general, and between self and nature, a
personality trait that functions as 'a reservoir of calm and strength
within the self.'
Coe (1984a, 1984b) has studied about six hundred autobiographies,
all of them by those creative in the arts and humanities. Indeed, Coe
insists that childhood autobiography is a poet's form of expression. He
accepts the notion that reminiscences of childhood deal with another
country remote from adulthood, and that such memories can be
recorded only in the poetic language of that land. While Coe notes the
systematic differences in culture that emerge in French, English, and
Russian childhoods, he clearly supports Cobb and Chawla in their
notion that, for artists, poets, and humanists in general, a positive
involvement with childhood environment is often basic to later creativi-
ty. He agrees with the psychiatrist Eric Berne that the senses have a
different quality for children than for adults, that the senses in one's
early years are more aesthetic than intellectual, and that socialization
results, for most, in the loss of any capacity to be poets, painters, or
musicians.
Children live in an irrational world; we ask too much when we plead
with them to 'be reasonable.' Indeed, Rousseau, like Baudelaire, argued
that the very stuff of poetry is encapsulated in the sheer irrationality of
children, their reliance on instinct, sensual awareness, and fantasy.
Contemporary philosophers have noted that any science of human
behaviour that excludes the irrational is by definition unscientific,
because it excludes some of the evidence. And again and again, as we
have seen in an earlier chapter, much of the irrationality and sensuous
awareness of the child world seems to come via the sense of smell.
C. S. Lewis (1977) was convinced of the importance of childhood in the
development of personality and creativity: 'I never read an autobiogra-
phy in which the parts devoted to the earlier years were not far the most
interesting' (p. 7). Oral history accounts also confirm the notion that
childhood is a separate world. The Opies' Lore and Language of
Schoolchildren (1959) readily confirms the extraordinary persistence
among children, and completely independent of adults, of terms and
Childscape 157

customs which go back up to five hundred years. And Thompson's 'The

War with Adults' (1975) forcefully demonstrates that the two countries of
childhood and adulthood are frequently in conflict. Oral history,
however, unlike autobiography, is induced recollection. Because of the
involvement of an investigator in its production, it leads us naturally to
more objective means of encountering childscape.

The objective: naturalistic enquiry

Just as I dealt with smellscape phenomenologically and soundscape

more scientifically, so childscape may be investigated in a more
objective manner than via the study of autobiographies. I intend to
ignore Piaget and the developmental psychologists; their work is well
known. Less well known than it should be is the work of a small band of
geographers, environmental psychologists, and architects who have
attempted to define the shape of childscape through observation, partici-
pant observation, depth interviews, and other means of naturalistic
enquiry. As with the elderly, the usual quantitative tools of questionair-
ing social science rarely work well with children.
The configuration of childscape emerges from an amalgam of autobio-
graphical research, mental-map exercises, and observation of children's
behaviour in their normal environmental settings. 'This feeling for the
world of childhood as a fragmented map . . . with certain details
luminously clear, while the intervening areas remain obscure or blank,
and all the lands beyond a faceless and frightening terra incognita' (Coe
1984b, 128) is not only common in research involving the above methods,
but may be confirmed by examining the mental maps of one's own
children or the child-oriented novels of A. A. Milne, Arthur Ransome, or
J.R.R. Tolkien.
Very few children learn their local geography as did the unfortunate
Edmund Gosse, whose father stood him up on prominent objects and
charted all other objects within view. Rat!ler, children learn incremen-
tally by adding known places and routeways to a normally domicentric
mental chart.
Home is invariably the centre. A child has little or no control over its
environment. Home is the one place where some little control may be
appropriated, so that at-easeness, the freedom to be, emerges (Seamon
1979). As the child develops, and horizons of reach (Buttimer 1980)
extend, home remains the territorial core (Porteous 1976). The neces-
sary sense of adventure gained by venturing from home is supported by
knowledge that the home remains intact and the ways back to it are
158 Landscapes of Metaphor

known. Chawla 0980), considering both the domain of physical and

social space and the domain of thought and imagination, takes up the
notion of 'centredness' to explain how, in artists, the horizons of thought
and imagination appear to coincide with lived and remembered space.
For most of us, the two overlap to differing degrees, but for some
scientists, it appears, the two are disjoint and lack synchrony.
Beyond home lies the world, which is a compound construct of the
imaginative and the actual activity space. Denis Wood has spent many
hours watching children play, and has recorded the elaborate processes
of imitative learning and imaginative construction that go on (Gould
1985, 254). Even very small children appear to be able to re-create a
world, in dirt or snow or sand, at their own scale, a world they can then
look down into and manipulate. Little wonder that geographers have
found that quite young children are able to understand both maps and
air photographs. Some of these 'natural skills' appear to be lost during
early school years and have to be painstakingly relearned.
In a long project dealing with somewhat older schoolchildren, Hart
(1979) studied the experience of place of the child residents of a small
New England town. Direct observation of behaviour, depth interviews,
some formal tests, and other techniques were used to gain knowledge of
the gradual expansion of the spatial worlds of the children. Hart was
able to isolate four themes in the children's involvement with space.
The first, 'spatial activity,' involves mobility in the physical setting.
Three distinct zones of successively larger parentally defined range are
discernible: 'free range'; 'range with permission'; and 'range with other
children.' Parents define the outer limits of these zones, often with traffic
in mind, but within the zones the routes children habitually take are
often unrelated to the paths taken by adults. Children cross both private
and public property lines with some degree of impunity. Although range
expands as children grow older, the dualism between home-centred
protectiveness and the need to explore and escape is particularly clear in
the obvious gender differences. At all ages, girls are more restricted by
parental fiat and are kept closer to home both to avoid obvious dangers
and to permit their socialization into domesticity. All children, however,
seem to enjoy roaming after age eight or so, and in many cases (as with
the elderly and many travellers) the journey is often the purpose of the
trip.
Spatial activity is likely to lead to 'place knowledge.' Such knowledge
is usually limited to places directly experienced; places seen in the media
or spoken about by adults are 'lost in space.' Even pre-school children
are able to produce home-centred landscape models that are map-like,
Childscape 159

but as they grow up children are increasingly able to incorporate new

elements (school, church, shopping centre) some distance from home.
Children clearly learn their environment better if they move through it on
their own feet or wheels, rather than in the parental car or school bus.
This conforms with expected tenets of mental mapping (Porteous 1977).
Again, because of their more liberated spatial range, the place knowl-
edge of boys is more detailed than that of girls.
The third theme, that of 'place use, ' is important for the insights Hart
brings to our knowledge of child development. One of the most favoured
environments is the small patch of dirt or waste ground, liberally
provided with flexible landscape elements (soil, sand, vegetation) and
loose parts (wood, stones, etc. ) for building. Children delight in the
construction of houses, forts , and dens, role socialization a la Erik
Erikson ensuring that, while boys concentrate on structural details, girls
favour internal decoration. This finding strongly supports the intuitively
derived concept of the English adventure playground or environmental
'workyard,' a concept not popular in North America because of an adult,
puritan preoccupation with tidyness. Playground planners would also
do well to note Hart's finding that a good deal of a child's play seems to
consist of being quietly alone, resting, watching, or dabbling in sand or
water. Obviously, there is a strong seasonal rhythm in New England
play, a rhythm that might be less pronounced in Southern California.
As the child grows and ventures farther from home, awareness
progresses from a disconnected knowledge of home and local spaces,
through the development of pathway-linked cognitive structures for
orienting places, to the sophistication of a map-like perspective of space.
Within this childscape, places gradually assume uses, names, and
values that, together, evoke a rich landscape of childhood.
The importance of 'place values' and feelings is a final major theme.
To children, as to adults, places are not equally valued. Home is basic,
but beyond home we encounter a rich landscape of activity niches in
which places replete with dangerous possibilities seem to hold greatest
value. Rivers and lakes, often forbidden places before about eight years
of age, are most highly valued. The joy of danger is obvious to the child, if
not to the adult. I spent much of my early youth clambering on muddy
jetties over a dangerous river and saw one of my childhood companions
drown in such a game. Children generally enjoy danger and risk, though
this risk-taking behaviour is usually sublimated in adulthood, except for
the unregenerate, such as Greene. Along with rivers and lakes, the other
most-valued places, such as quarries, woods, ponds, and construction
sites, are all replete with danger. Children clearly agree with both
160 Landscapes of Metaphor

Graham Greene and Robert Browning who, in 'Bishop Blougram's

Apology,' asserted that 'our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.'
Children also appear to conform to Appleton's (1975) ethological
notion of 'prospect and refuge' in their preference for environments that
afford both. Hiding and lookout places are of great importance in play, a
fact worthy of note by those who plan the sterile wastelands of municipal
playgrounds. Gender differences reappear in the greater predilection of
girls for home and interior spaces within the home. It is perhaps
significant that very few children appear to evaluate any place in terms of
purely aesthetic qualities. The notion of 'scenery' has to be inclucated in
youth.
It is also significant that the fear of being lost is important to children,
and that, of all landscape features, forests and woods have the most
marked limiting influence on the extent and configuration of children's
ranges. Grimmland is clearly alive and well; we are not out of the wood
yet. But, within their ranges, children clearly appropriate space and
transform it into places via the process of naming. The childscape is both
personal to the child and in part collectively recognizable to all
neighbourhood children through naming. It is needless to say that
children's names for landscape features rarely reflect the names used by
adults or those enshrined in maps. The importance of naming, danger,
and other themes noted above will be further brought out in the personal
example that follows.

Scenes from my childscape

When I think about the life of any human being there are always three ques-
tions to which I want to know the answer. First, who and of what kind were
his family ... secondly, what was his social class or group ... and thirdly, what
was his physical home?
Margaret Cole (1949, 126)

Few scientists, and hardly any geographers, have attempted to find out
what childhood experiences coloured their sensibilities. Perhaps the
most evocative is Cragg's (1982) brief 'family geography.' In answering
the questions posed by Cole I shall state briefly that my family were
working-class East Yorkshire people who resided at the post office,
which my mother ran, in a small hamlet of two hundred inhabitants
called Howdendyke. As a child I could not know that my mother's very
rare family name had been extant in that neighbourhood since 1295. I
was aware, however, that I lived in a large extended family network, and
Childscape 161

that I knew every person in the village by name. My childscape was very
personal. A few elements of this 'physical home' follow, and may serve
as a test of some of the general notions expressed in earlier sections.
First, to set the scene, it is as if the late 1940s and early 1950s in
Howdendyke were the 'days before' everything. They were the days
before street lighting; we groped about, used the moon, took a flashlight.
The days before sewage systems and water closets; to use 'the can' was
not a euphemism. The days before the British working classes took to
cars; we walked, we ran, we biked, hitched lifts in trucks. The days
before paid holidays; we never went very far from home. The days of a
six-day working week; when did we last see our fathers? The days before
television; whatever did we do with ourselves?
And above all, the days before electricity. The days before the
washing-machine; red-armed women using tubs and washboards,
possers, dollies. The days before clothes-driers; a winter kitchen full of
steaming clothes, drying on the clothes-horse before the coal fire,
absorbing the only heat available to keep us warm. The days before
central heating; you huddled to the single coal fire, front roasting, back
freezing, capillaries bursting and discolouring in women's legs. The days
before hot-water heaters and baths; what the back-fire boiler couldn't
heat came from the kettle on the copper and you bathed laboriously on
Fridays in a tin tub before the fire. The days before refrigerators;
shopping every day. The days before the electric stove; food cooked in
the coal oven (which was warm enough when the cat got out) or directly
on the coal fire. There is a fine art in boiling and frying over live coals.
And toasting, too, is a dangerous enterprise.
I came to North America in riotous 1968 at age twenty-four. At
twenty-five I first turned on a television set (I had often turned them off)
and learned to drive a car (car-driving was not a puberty rite in the days
before, when there were haystacks aplenty). In North America I found
that the normal household goods of my recent childhood were 'an-
tiques,' 'collectibles,' or museum pieces -fish-knives, flat-irons, paraffin
lamps, stone hot-water bottles, iron bedsteads, jugs and bowls, and
washstands. When 'progress' came to Howdendyke in the late 1950s, we
threw all this old stuff into the river; these were the days before 'ecology.'
Thirty-five years ago; a generation. The days before.
Two landscape features stand out in my memory. One is the riverside
Chemical Works, which produced agricultural fertilizer and was known
locally as 'T'Chemics.' The other is Howdendyke Post Office, my
childhood home. The former provided adventure; the latter, security;
these are the twin poles of a child's life.
162 Landscapes of Metaphor

T'Chemics reared a tall black chimney, streaked with white, above the
village. You could see it from any angle. It was our dreaming spire.
Below it huddled the low factory buildings, fronting the river, and
around the works spread village and fields. 'Ouse Chemical Works' it
said on a board near the office, but to us it was T'Chemics.
Uncle George worked at T'Chemics. No one else in the family did. But
nearly everyone in the village worked there. Every morning T'Chemics'
whistle blew, every lunch-time twice, and again at knocking-off time at
night. You could set your watch by those whistles, if you had a watch.
Most of the raw materials for T'Chemics came upriver by barge.
Three jetties lunged from the river front of the factory into the Ouse, and
all vessels tied up at one of these. Big cranes with grabs hauled up fine
white powders, which sometimes spread in a light, penetrating dust all
over the village. This was at First Jetty, relatively new and made of
concrete.
Second Jetty had two storeys; the men at T'Chemics called it 'Tay
Bridge.' Pulleys from the top storey let down huge wicker baskets that
were hauled up again, full of rough raw materials. The baskets were
made of willow, and held together with rope. They were like potato-
baskets, the kind you used for tatie-picking, but bigger. Eventually they
wore and broke, cascading a cargo of heavy materials among the
shovellers in the ship's hold below. Discarded baskets were slung into
the river, to rot away in the mud. Long after baskets were abandoned in
favour of cranes and metal grabs, you could see them poking out of the
mud at low tide, for all the world like strange, stranded, seabirds' nests.
Third Jetty was different again. It had a little railway whose tracks
looped at the end of the jetty. Small rail wagons were filled from the
barges and carried materials into the works. We liked to play on this
miniature railway, and when a train of empty tubs was left unattended
on the line, it was our joy to clamber from tub to tub and even to
uncouple the tubs from each other and push them around the track. This
led to much cursing and complaining to mothers by the workmen. 'Keep
away from that third jetty,' cried the mothers. 'It ain't safe.' 'It's
dangerous,' said Mother. 'You could be crushed between those wagons.'
But we liked third jetty best, because, at low tides, barges would tie up
there before going farther upriver. Some of these barges carried peanuts
to the oil-crushing factories at Selby, miles upstream. When such a barge
put in, youths converged. Bargemen were besieged.
'Hey mister. Any monkey-nuts?'
'Gi'us some monkey-nuts, mister.'
'Have you any spare?'
'Mister, gi'us a few.'
Childscape 163

Sometimes a sack of unshelled peanuts was heaved up from below. We

fell upon its contents with ferocity. At other times we would be asked,
rudely, why we couldn't get enough monkey-nuts at home. Others told
us to bugger off. One bargee would shout: 'Monkey-nuts? Ain't got none.
Monkey ain't been laying this week.'
But even more fascinating than the monkey-nuts were the bones.
Huge barge-loads of partially crushed bones were shipped into T'Chem-
ics, there to be further ground into fertilizer. They were probably animal
bones, but tales were spread of human bones dug up from the
battlefields of Flanders and brought over from Indian famines.
If you were very careful, you could creep into T'Chemics, past the
millmen at their 'drinkings,' and clamber into the metal hoppers below
the crushing machinery. Each hopper was as big as a fair-sized room,
and as deep. Crushed powdered bones, a fine grey dust, fell in a steady
stream from a central chute into each hopper. You had to wait until a
hopper was almost full before venturing in, because you had to be able to
reach the rim in order to get out again. And you had to stay near the edge
and avoid slowly sinking into the powder, which lay ten feet deep below
you.
Treading powder, anxiously avoiding the steady fall from the over-
head chute, our shoes filling with gritty particles, our eyes smarting, our
hair and skin itching, we searched for bones. Sometimes small bones
miraculously survived the crushers and fell with the powder into the
hoppers. They seemed mostly to be teeth. Honour was satisfied when
each member of the group could show two or three teeth. Bone searching
was rather an ordeal, but, once it had been suggested, no one would
back out of the adventure. Thankfully we heaved ourselves out of the
hoppers, crept past the millmen yawning in their oil-stained overalls,
and felt the fresh river air on our faces. Shaking ourselves free of the
clinging dust, beating each other's sweaters and trousers, we went home
with our trophies. The fertilizer ate small holes in our clothes, which our
mothers put down to moths.
T'Chemics was full of white powdery dust. It made you cough and
prickled at your skin. It also covered the outsides of the factory buildings,
and on windy days it blew across the village and women hastily took in
their washing. It collected on window-panes and sifted through doors
and cracks. Women complained:
'We can't never keep nowt clean in this village.'
'It's tillage. It's good for you. Makes you grow,' said the men. And,
with a finality that could not be refuted: 'Where there's muck there's
brass.' With all that muck we should have been rich.
Apart from the factory, our village had two streets of houses. One ran
164 Landscapes of Metaphor

in from the nearby town, originally to the ferry that used to ply from the
landing near our house. This road was known as Ferry Road, but
become North Street as it approached the river. We played cricket in the
middle of it, moving our wickets of old bricks only when the occasional
vehicle came through. The other street ran along the river bank fronting
T'Chemics.
The two streets ran at right angles to each other, and met at the village
post office on the river bank. Our shop and post office was thus the focus
of the village. Nearby was The Square, an open space fronted on one
side by old houses, on the others by the river, the Jubilee Hall, and the
village's only pub, The Ouse Chemical Works Working Men's Club and
Institute. Workmen passing on their way to both Club and T'Chemics
called in the shop for cigarettes. During working hours womenfolk came
in for postal orders, biscuits, tea, stamps, flour, and patent medicines.
Every day the mail was dropped here at seven in the morning and then
delivered throughout the village.
You could tell it had been an old shop. A directory mentioned the post
office in 1879, and old Johnny Fleming, its proprietor, left draught-
excluding souvenirs in the form of shirts stuffed in cracks and newspapers
pasted to walls, all neatly covered with wallpaper. Under the shop's
front window stood two huge wooden flour bins, now full of junk, lidded
over, and covered with piles of biscuits, tins of crisps, packets of tea.
The back wall of the shop was a mass of narrow shelves and tiny
wooden drawers. None of these drawers held anything of value, and
some were stuck shut by repeated paintings. The shelves supported
packets of tea, biscuits, bottles of soft drinks, large and small, and
packets offlour. Lyons's tea came in several qualities, distinguishable by
the colour of the packet. The teabag had not been invented; when my
mother first saw one, she thought it was a convenient method of
measuring out tea leaves for the pot. Smith's Crisps came in greaseproof
paper packets, packed in airtight cubic tins. Each packet contained salt
in a twist of blue paper; it was often damp.
Over the empty drawers hung cardboard placards on which small
glass bottles were secured by means of elastic. These were patent
medicines; people swore by them, and probably at them too. Parkin-
son's Pills, of Burnley, were clearly able to restore almost the dead to
life. Each type of pill was good not for a single ailment only, but for two.
'Liver and Kidney' pills jostled with 'Head and Stomach' and other dual
reminders of the human interior. All were whitish-grey in colour and
sugar-coated. But if you sucked off the sugar, they were universally foul
within. 'The wuss they taste, the better they are,' said the old folks.
Childscape 165

Cigarettes reposed on a shelf behind the counter. Their variety

reflected individual tastes; Capstan Full Strength, for example, was kept
for a single customer only. Most had romantic, old-fashioned names:
'Player's Weights,' 'Navy Cut,' 'Wild Woodbine,' 'Robin,' 'Passing
Clouds.' The cheaper ones were sold in open packets of five, but some
people asked Mother to break even these packets so that they could
purchase one or two cigarettes at a time. In time you learned what
individuals preferred, and they had only to ask for 'ten cigs' for you to
unerringly pick the correct packet from the shelf.
The counter was a massive affair of wood, about ten feet long, four or
more feet high, and several feet wide. On the house side, it was full of
drawers and recesses in which Dad kept his tools and Mother kept
string, paper bags, and sundry oddments. Most of the Post Office items,
and the till, were in a capacious central drawer. Some drawers were
empty and remained so for years. We discovered that they were open at
the rear to the large central recess in the counter quite by accident. A
long-unopened drawer one day began to squeak and was hurriedly
opened to reveal the cat and a litter of newborn kittens.
The shop and the post office were supposed to operate separately. For
shop goods people paid irregularly. When I served in the shop some
customers were more inclined to pay cash. Others simply asked me to
'put it on t'bill' or 'chalk it up.' Perhaps half the village had 'tick,' for no
small shopkeeper in a rural village could afford to operate without such a
credit system. On Fridays wives rolled up to pay off their bills of the
previous week. By Monday all their money had gone and they were 'on
tick' again. Mother had no regular account books, but kept records on
the backs of envelopes, on pieces of scrap paper, on old cigarette
packets. All these were thrust into a counter drawer and pulled out for
totting up on Fridays.
The post office could not officially give 'tick'; it was subject to sudden
audits on the part of the central postal authorities. So people had to pay
on the spot for their stamps, dog licences, television licences, and postal
orders. Pensioners came on 'pension day' for old-age, disability, and
war-service pensions. At one time elderly people were even given
coupons for tobacco.
Mother was the village scribe. She had left school at fourteen, like
most people of her age, but was superbly literate, mainly through
self-study. Some villagers, in contrast, were either illiterate or unable to
put pen to paper effectively. Many official fonns had therefore to be
referred to Mother. Hardly a day went by without someone bringing in a
form for her to complete. In this way she gained a lively appreciation of
166 Landscapes of Metaphor

people's lives and circumstances, which appeared only to increase her

tolerance.
Some were apparently unable to complete even their football-pool
coupons. These were diligently completed, under direction, by Mother,
and the postal order written, the materi,d inserted in the envelope, the
stamp licked and affixed. In time some villagers came to regard this as
normal post-office service.
'Why don't you pay for the postal order, as well?' I would ask in
exasperation.
'Not many need it doing,' said Mother. 'Some are old and some are
daft.'
Few people in the village had telephones, perhaps a half-dozen at
most. The rest of the population had to rely on a tall red public-telephone
kiosk that stood eccentrically at the far end of the village from the post
office. Many people would not walk so far, and some simply could not
master the technique of using a public telephone, with all those
forbidding knobs, dials, and A and B buttons. This led to a heavy demand
for use of the post-office telephone, which was supposed to be used for
official business only, except for a limited number of 'private calls.'
Good nature usually prevailed. Calls had to be placed through the
operator as a 'private call' and the phone then transferred to the
suppliant. You could speak forever on a local call for fourpence (my
record with one girl-friend was two and one-quarter hours). But this
sometimes led to a customer abusing the privilege by spending half an
hour on the wrong side of the counter.
Time, however, did not seem important to us. Clock hours were not
often referred to, even by adults. Time for work and time for school were
the points around which our lives revolved. There were also: time for
dinner; time for tea; opening time; and time for bed. All these were daily
times.
Most other times were weekly times, such as pay-day, and time to pay
off 'tick.' Travelling retailers came once a week at a regular hour. Shitty
Billy Austwick brought produce by horse and cart from his nearby farm.
And on Fridays came the fishman from Hull, the butcherman on
Tuesdays, the green-grocerman on Wednesdays. Twice a week came
the van from Rambla Bakeries of Beverley, piloted, naturally, by the
Ramblaman. At one time we were even visited by an evil-smelling
mobile fish-and-chip shop from far-off York, although this remarkable
phenomenon (fish-and-chipman) did not last long. But, for children,
Sunday was the important day, for after lunch there came the ice-cream
man.
Childscape 167

If the ice-cream man was late we could watch for him along the river.
From our backyard wall, which ran along the inner side of the river bank,
you could stand and look for several miles downriver, along the curving
bank. A dark brown or shiny silver river, a blue and white sky, and in
between the lush green of trees, farms, and high river bank. Against this
green background, the white dot of the ice-cream van could be spied two
or more miles away, near Skelton Bridge, and we could enjoy the
anticipation as it crept along the river-bank road with frequent stops for
customers. After the ice-cream man had gone, Sundays always seemed a
little flatter.
You could also watch for the bus coming along the same road. Even
though the Lincolnshire Road Car Company's buses were deep green,
you could distinguish them as a moving green object against a static
verdant background. You had to watch for the buses. They were not
always on time and sometimes a driver would miss out our village
altogether. But mostly they came right into the village and turned round
in North Street about fifty yards from the post office. Then you could
travel to Howden (two miles) or even to Goole, five miles away, across
the river, a foreign place in a different county where people used different
words for things and kids called 'goodies' 'spice.'
The buses came on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, and
Saturday evenings. If you missed one, or on other days, you had to walk
or bike. No one had a car. A few had motorbikes. No one went very far.
Mother and Father visited my grandparents in York, but most people
were content to visit Howden or Goole once a week, with occasional
trips to Hull. To get to York you took a taxi two miles to Howden (no
morning buses), then a bus ten miles to Selby, then a second bus fifteen
miles to York. The twenty-five mile journey took about two hours each
way, for these were country buses with frequent stops. But York was
worth it. Where else had castles, walls, battlements, tall church towers,
and narrow windy streets. Besides, I had been born there, in the Purey
Cust Nursing Home adjacent to York Minster. And you can't be more
Yorkshire than that.
Not only did we have relatively few contacts with the outside world,
we were also poorly supplied in terms of modem conveniences. Public
utilities were a long time reaching Howdendyke. In our village in the
1940s, a few houses, including our own, had gas lighting. Most had
'tilley lamps,' and our shop did a brisk trade in paraffin (kerosene).
People brought their own containers, and we measured out the
paraffin in gallons and half-gallons. Serving paraffin was a nuisance. It
meant you had to leave the customer alone in the shop while you went
168 Landscapes of Metaphor

down to the coalhouse in the backyard. Consequently, I was often called

upon to serve the paraffin while Mother kept the customer company in
the shop. The paraffin reposed in a five-foot-high metal container. One
day the cat fell in and drowned. When the drum was half-empty and I
had to lean right in to scoop up the liquid I often feared the same fate.
Below half-empty I could not reach, until I learned to tip and swivel the
heavy drum. The whole business was dirty and smelly. I was glad when
electricity came.
I was not the only one. One old lady became deeply enamoured of the
electricity system. Naked lamp bulbs were hung from her cottage ceilings
during the installation period, and blazed all day and night for several
days thereafter. Finally, while delivering the mail, Mother approached
her and tactfully asked how she liked the new electric light. 'Ee, I do like
that "lectric,"' she replied. 'It saves a right lot of messing about with
them tilley lamps. And doesn't it last a long time?'
Everyone used coal as the main source of heat. The coalman came
weekly, and coal was rationed. Life was cold during strikes or if the
coalman didn't come. Those with small houses were lucky. A coal fire
and range in one room could readily heat that room to roasting point and
take the chill off the adjacent room and the two bedrooms above. But our
house had six rooms beside the shop, and a coal fire was regularly lit
only in one, although one other downstairs room and one bedroom had
fireplaces. Back-fire boilers provided hot water in some houses, such as
ours, but never much and never dependably.
Going to bed in winter was an agony, but a normal, regular agony.
Bedrooms were freezing, sometimes damp. Blankets and eiderdowns
were piled on in geological layers; hot-water bottles or a wrapped hot
brick were de rigeur. We must have held the world record for speedy
undressing, donning pajamas, and leaping into a very cold bed. You
soon warmed up the bed by body heat, but any exposed skin surface was
liable to go blue with cold. Yet it was impossible to cover everything
without smothering. An ear and nose had to be left exposed as the
temperature plummeted. Luckily we had not heard of central heating
and so envied no one. This was life.
Yet, the child's life was clearly not lived wholly indoors. The
'Childscape' map illustrates the fully appropriated world of my child-
hood self, aged ten (1953, Coronation Year). Map nomenclature is
important here. Children shared with adults a very personal set of
geographic names that had no counterparts on official maps (Fuchs
1989). Names such as the 'Cricket Field' and 'Kissing Gate' established
clearly demarcated functional zones. 'Shitty Billy's Farm' and 'Whel-
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170 Landscapes of Metaphor

drake's Comer' seemed immutable at the time, but are clearly limited
temporally. 'Bent Tree' (for swinging from) and 'Conker Tree' (for ritual
fighting) were child-generated names, while 'Uncle Roi's Orchard' and
'Uncle George's Orchard' are clearly personal.
From the child's viewpoint, the village had all the benefits of
industrial, rural, and maritime activities. Play sites, besides the jetties
and factory previously mentioned, were innumerable. River, village,
and fields provided three differing zones, in each of which the child could
live on Browning's 'dangerous edge of things.' Risk and danger were
readily available, for trhere was danger from drowning, from factory
operations, from angry farmers, from irate orchard owners, from bulls,
and from straying too far and getting lost. Indeed, the whole neighbour-
hood could be looked upon as a kind of 'assault course' for child
commandos of both sexes. Crawling across the Fallen Tree over a deep
dyke, swinging on ropes from the Bent Tree, damming streams, wading
in river mud, infiltrating factory and shipyard, playing 'follow the leader'
along the spars of jetties above deep river whirlpools or along the
narrow concrete walls between sewage farm filter-beds, chasing cart-
horses and taunting bulls, wading into ponds for frogspawn, all these
provided close contact with both nature and the adult world in the
context of, to a child at least, acceptable risk.
While it is true that childhood autobiographers tend to regard
childhood as edenic (Finney 1985; Porteous 1989), we can readily
contrast this ease of interpenetrability of home and adult work-place and
locus of play within the everyday environment with the situation of the
modem child. Late-twentieth-century children tend to live in cities
divided into sharply separated land uses, thus necessitating much
automobile travel. They are anchored to home by the pull both of
electronic 'home entertainment systems' and of parental fears of
dangerous streets. Play, often supervised, takes place in designated
areas, and 'adventure playgrounds' seem a poor substitute for the
everyday landscape. There is little acquaintance with the parental
work-place, and even neighbourhood residents may remain unknown.
In short, if my 1940s childhood seems physically tough, I believe
childhoods of the late twentieth century to be psychologically tougher.
As Phyllis Theroux (1987, 117) remarks, somewhat tongue-in-cheek: 'the
world in which we were raised invariably seems like Tom Sawyer's
Hannibal, Missouri, compared to the beer-bottle-strewn parking lot
that our children must traverse.' More seriously, she notes that 'the
assault upon a modem-day child's mind and heart from almost every
quarter of life can be overwhelming.'
Childscape 171

It is clear from this account and from the mapped evidence that
Howdendyke provided me with what I believe children need, namely a
strong sense of place and of family, an understandable social and
economic context, roots, freedom to roam, more than adequate
experience of danger, a sense of security, and a blessed freedom from
'the media.' A good childhood, and one almost impossible to experience
now. I describe it further in Porteous (1989).

Implications for environmental planning

Even the small amount of research to date on childscape suggests

unmistakably that the environments experienced in childhood have
considerable influence upon socialization, self-concept, and the devel-
opment of environmental competence. Hart (1979) concludes that
practical, environmentally learned skills are, however, discouraged in
schools, where verbal skills are promoted instead. In consequence,
children are equipped to perform well in the world as it is, but rarely
become adults capable of competently transforming what is.
The need, in a democracy, to encourage such creative, transforming
abilities in children suggests that current planning philosophies with
regard to children are quite wrong. Cunent thinking still clings to the
outworn notion that children need very specific places to learn and play
in and special equipment with which to play. But, with the briefest
reflection or observation, the reader will realize that children regard the
whole environment as a play area; just as they do not censor sensuous
experience, so they do not rigidly divide space, as in an adult land-use
plan. Hence we note how little playgrounds are used, and how much
children prefer streets, fields, and waste lots where imagination can run
riot (Opie and Opie 1969; Ellison 1989). One cannot dig, build, or design
in the average playpark; children are compelled to use only what is
there, usually fixed, immobile equipment that stifles creativity.
Above all, children want to make their own places, to give order and
meaning to an environment by modifying it. The important features to
children - ponds, brooks, patches of dirt, scrubby wastelands of bushes
and trees, tall unmanicured grass - are just those features conspicuously
absent in suburbia. Yet, suburbia, by all accounts, is chiefly chosen by its
adult residents as 'a good place to bring up children'! Clearly, we will not
plan in a truly child-friendly, ecological way unless we first talk to
children and then plan in terms of their categories rather than ours. This
seems obvious; hardly anyone does it.
One reason for our neglect of children, as of most other groups without
172 Landscapes of Metaphor

power, is our belief that we already know what is good for them
(Porteous 1971, 1977, 1988). Yet, our beliefs in what should be may be
heavily coloured by biases derived, inter alia, from our own childhood.
Colin Ward (1975) is well aware that architects are often concerned with
realizing private dreams generated in childhood. An effective method of
revealing such biases, so that they may then be transcended, is
environmental autobiography. This technique, pioneered by Clare
Cooper Marcus (1972, 1978) and Florence Ladd (1977), encourages
designers to reconstruct their residential history, explore their childhood
homes, and assess how far their experience of the physical and social
constraints of home and neighbourhood has influenced their design
values and intentions.
If, as Spivack (1973, 49) suggests, 'we are trapped, behaviorally,
physically and conceptually, in our houses,' such exercises, carefully
conducted by psychologists, may act as a way to break out of archetypal
constraints, transcend the burden of the past, and develop some
sensitivity towards the needs of user clients. You are where you have
lived, indeed, and the house may be a symbol of the self (Cooper Marcus
1972) but by realizing that you can go home again, you may at once
discover some of the roots of self-identity and be able to appreciate the
very different histories, and hence values and needs, of others. Such a
design sensitivity in architects and planners would be of inestimable
benefit to powerless groups such as children.
'Except ye be as little children,' warned Jesus of Nazareth. Could we
but bring ourselves to (re)develop a child's-eye view of the world, and
translate some of what we learn into designed landscape, we might well
be striking a blow against heedless, destructive 'progress,' and for a
joyous 're-enchantment of the world' (Berman 1984 ).

Conclusions

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:
So it was when my life began;
So it is now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old .. .
The child is father of the Man .. .
William Wordsworth

Childhood is profoundly an otherscape. As adults, we have difficulty in

entering the childscapes of our children, though we may recall our own.
Childscape 173

In either case we see but as through a glass, darkly. One can easily
counter Wordsworth's hopes for retaining his childhood sensitivity into
old age by citing his own sad discoveries of sensory impairment as well
as those of modem gerontologists (Colavita 1978).
We have learned something, however. We at least have some inkling,
a dawning awareness, that late-twentieth-century urban civilization is
not necessarily the best of eras in which to raise children. The American
dream is of small-town conviviality amid picket fences; the American
reality, too easily imposed on the rest of the world, is of slick
consumerism that turns even small children into media addicts whose
ground of being appears to be 'I consume; therefore I am.' The
development of suburbia and parks suggests a deep-seated if misdirected
need to bring up children in some surrogate for the nostalgic rural
life-style that is embedded deep in our Western consciousness and that
some of us can even remember. The recent counter-urbanization trend,
with its electronic cottages, has yet fully to set in.
We have learned also that children need to fantasize, to imagine, to be
close to living things, to experience danger. Here, the English-style
adventure playground comes into its own. To adults it is an untidy
wasteland of junk; to children the profusion of 'loose parts' is a
cornucopia of possibilities limited only by the wildest of imaginations.
And we have learned, I hope, not to be too neat and prim. How many
children have lamented as the municipal mowers cut down the tall grass
of small parks and waste lots to conform with utterly boring adult
notions of neatness and environmental propriety. The politicians, the
planners, and the parents, of course, seem to have little or no ability to
imagine or recall the joys of life 'when the grass was taller' (Coe 1984b).
But beyond the realm of practical planning we have also surely
learned that childhood is a secret garden wherein our innermost beings
are germinated and nourished. We are where we lived; we are what we
have read. For the creative, it seems, the secret garden can be re-entered
at will, and it smells of joy. Most of us, however, are content, with St
Paul, to put away childish things, to embrace the dubious joys of
rationality, and hence to close the door of the secret garden forever. If
childhood autobiography tells us anything, it is that to understand
ourselves, our minds, our feelings, we may have to take the journey back
to childscape. The inner strength that derives from such journeyings may
be just what we need to survive the urban deathscape that industrial
civilization hath wrought.
9 Deathscape

Beneath the Malebolge lies Hastings Street

The province of the pimp upon his beat,
Where each in his little world of drugs or crime
Moves helplessly or, hopeful, begs a dime
Wherewith to purchase half a pint of piss -
Although he will be cheated, even in this ...
Malcolm Lowry, 'Christ Walks in This Infernal District Too'

Sensitive persons are generally not enamoured of twentieth-century

urban-industrial landscapes. Townscapes, in particular, have come
under considerable attack on aesthetic and even moral grounds.
Although a few theorists believe that we can learn from Las Vegas
(Venturi, Brown, and Izenour 1972) and that our limbic system requires
the chaotic sensory stimulation manifest in such townscapes (Smith
1977), the general impression of modem townscapes appears to be a
topophobic one. For many the city is a landscape of fear (Tuan 1979).
Architectural and planning critics, such as Nairn (1965) and McHarg
(1969), have little good to say about the American urban-industrial
landscape; Blake (1964) calls it 'God's own junkyard.' Within the field of
environmental aesthetics (Porteous 1982), landscape critics have sug-
gested that modem techniques in architecture, planning, and land-use
generally have resulted in the creation of visually dull blandscapes,
which in tum generate a growing feeling of placelessness (Relph 1976).
Debord (1977) speaks of a general 'banalization' of landscapes and
values. In terms of the existential insider:outsider antinomy, it would
seem that the city is quintessentially the place of the outsider.
As is often the case, however, it is the writers of imaginative literature
who have come to grips most closely with both process and product of
the technological environment that has become our taken-for-granted
world. T.S. Eliot (1980) uses disturbing images to suggest that we
increasingly live in a moral and physical wasteland of uncertain values.
176 Landscapes of Metaphor

Malcolm Lowry coined the term 'deathscape' to describe this aesthetic

and ethical wasteland. The concept suggests that beneath the unpleas-
ant reality of the modem city lies a fundamental failure of human values.
This chapter explores the development of Lowry's thinking about
cities and civilization, culminating in the concept of deathscape. It
necessarily begins with a brief introduction to the image of the city
through history.

The city in history

A city is not simply a large settlement defined in political, social,

economic, or even geographical terms. The idea of cityness is of
paramount importance in both modem and modernizing societies, for it
influences patterns of migration, communications, and everyday living.
Among intellectuals, cities have not had a good press. The intellectual
seems always to have been against the city (White and White 1962); a
plethora of popular works of the 'sick city' variety appeared in the 1960s.
The bulk of North American, Australasian, and some European
populations. voting with their feet, have fled cities to that rural-urban
amalgam, often the worst of both worlds, known as the suburb. Ellul
(1970) believes that a negative view of the city begins as far back as the
Old Testament's Genesis, that is, roughly from the time cities first
emerged about 8,000 years BP.
Indeed, much evidence can be adduced to support the concept of an
early and persistent urban topophobia. Cities emerged after the
expulsion from Eden. It is significant that Cain, the first murderer, was
also the first city builder, while his victim-brother, Abel, a prefiguration
of Christ, built none. This 'mark of Cain' on the city remained important
into the nineteenth century. Poets were keen to remind their readers that
'God the first garden made, and the first city, Cain,' and the more
palpably false 'God made the country and man made the town' (Cowper
1956). Yet, it was only with the almost total urbanization, and the
resulting literacy, of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that a mass
anti-city feeling emerged and gained expression in suburbia.
The country:city antinomy was never one-sided, however (Williams
1973). There are periods when city life was regarded as the ideal, with
the corollary that rural life was considered barbaric. Early metropoli
were often regarded as centres of the world; to reject the city was to be
peripheral, an outsider, beyond the pale. Ancient cities were often
religious centres, the places where gods and people could meet.
Classical Greece made much of a quality of life that could be supported
Deathscape 177

only in cities. In medieval towns the urban artisan had a relatively

privileged position, compared with his brother back on the demesne.
Even labourers could take advantage of the belief that 'city air makes
men free.' Finally, cities have often been viewed as models of extrater-
restrial reality; there have always been holy cities, of which Jerusalem is
perhaps the Western prototype.
More often, views of the city were ambivalent, and the love:hate
balance has changed considerably throughout history. Even in the first
cities, pyramids and temples were symbols of centralized organization,
power, and control, as are the skyscapers of modem transnational
banks and business corporations. As early as St Augustine we find
earthly cities regarded as based on love of self, whereas the City of God
was the enshrinement of love of God. Medieval cities, formless and
irregular within the defining wall, contrasted with the order and
regularity of the celestial city. It is notable that concepts of the ideal city,
revived in Renaissance Italy, involved a degree of order and symmetry
rarely seen in the cities of the day.
This utopian ideal, continued through the garden-city theories of
Ebenezer Howard to the new towns of today, suggests that although
cities may appear to be necessary, nay, even preferred environments,
their deficiencies are rather gross and demand radical solutions. Yet,
common linguistic usage suggests the triumph of the city, at least in
terms of pride, status, and sophistication. Rural folk, bucolic rustics,
peasants, bumpkins, are scorned by city people, urbane, polite,
civilized, and cosmopolitan.

Lowry and cities

Briefly recapitulating, with an emphasis on urban experience, we note

that Malcolm Lowry was born in a well-off, exurban environment on the
Cheshire bank of Merseyside. Between public school and Cambridge he
spent a year as a deck-hand, sailing to and from the Far East. This
experience gave him a lasting love of the sea and was recounted in
Ultramarine. As a youth he visited or lived in Bonn, Cambridge, Oslo,
London, and Paris (1928-33), followed by a year in New York. Here,
already an alcoholic, he entered a psychiatric hospital, emerging with
material for the novella Lunar Caustic. For almost two years (1936-8),
he lived in Mexico, his traumatic life in Cuemavaca forming the basis for
his masterpiece, Under the Volcano. He also visited Mexico City and
Oaxaca, spending Christmas in jail in the latter. By that time he was
divorced and alcoholic; his life was in shreds. Remarried, he migrated to
178 Landscapes of Metaphor

British Colwnbia, where, in 1940, he moved into a squatter's shack on

the beach at Dollarton, on Burrard Inlet across from the city of
Vancouver.
Until 1940 Lowry had been a homeless, rootless, wanderer. In
Dollarton, however, the search for a home-place that had been so much
a part of Lowry' s life up to age thirty was temporarily rewarded. For the
period 1940-54 Lowry, an existential outsider from childhood, became
at last an insider of sorts, inhabiting a hand-built shack between forest
and sea, living 'on the land, ' as he put it, with fishermen and other
squatters for neighbours. Settling is a prerequisite for creativity, and on
this piece of 'unreal estate' Lowry produced the many drafts of most of
his works. Dollarton, which Lowry renamed Eridanus, became home,
roots, and ideal place for this exiled novelist.
Travelling still had a strong hold on Lowry. Of the fourteen years in
Eridanus, he spent nearly three travelling. Trips to Eastern Canada are
relived in part of October Ferry to Gabriola. A return journey to Mexico,
which ended in Lawry's deportation therefrom, is recounted in Dark as
the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid. A later, fifteen-month journey to
Europe, appears in Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place.
All three novel-travelogues deal with life at Eridanus, which also figures
briefly in Under the Volcano. The third and last period of Lawry's life
began in 1954, at age forty-five when, dispossessed of his squatter's Eden,
he again became a homeless wanderer in Europe. Grieving for his lost
home probably played a considerable part in his death in England in 1957.
Lowry's life and work are one. His early novels, sea-oriented, are mild
and diffuse in their critique of the city, but the later ones, written while
living in a wilderness setting in close juxtaposition to Vancouver,
contain concentrated and considered judgments. From Ultramarine to
October Ferry, in fact, the six novels form almost a logical progression
from an initial mild antipathy to a final outright hatred of cities.
Throughout this consideration of the novel series, aptly entitled by
Lowry 'The Voyage That Never Ends,' I will stress the notion of
adaptation. Clearly, hwnan beings are able to adapt to all manner of
deleterious situations, as experimental psychologists have shown. But
adaptation has its penalties (Wohlwill 1966). Lowry begins by adapting
fairly easily to the notion of the city as placeless, but is finally incapable
of coping with the spread of the deathscapes spawned by this Leviathan.

The placelessness of cities

Ethan Llewelyn, Lowry's protagonist in October Ferry, was presented,

Deathscape 179

as a child, with a beautiful toy model of Moscow, a 'magic bulbar city'

(Feny 8). Thereafter, 'how beautiful for years to him was the word
"city," the carilloning word "city" in the Christmas hymn ... the
tumultuous angel-winged city that was Bunyan's celestial city; beautiful
that was, until he "saw" a city - it was London - for the first time, sullen,
in fog, and bloodshot as if with the fires of hell' (p. 8). This piece is from
Lowry' s later years; there is no record whether such an event occurred in
his own childhood.
On the contrary, it appears that as a youthful graduate Lowry was
rather neutral in his feelings about cities. Years in Cambridge, London,
Paris, and Rome reappear but little in his fiction. Companions note that
he was stirred to interest only by Venice (Day 1973). For the youthful
Lowry was in love with sea. Ultramarine is less a celebration of life at
sea than a youthful encounter with the existential terrors of sea life, a
young-man-goes-to-sea-to,find-himself novel, a type common until the
1930s. Lawry's ship, significantly the Oedipus Tyrranus, does put in at
various Far Eastern ports. To the Lowryan protagonist these ports are
merely a succession of bars and brothels (the latter soon to be
'abwhored' in favour of 'bawd and lodging'). To the sailor, then, 'how
alike all these harbours were! - all the ports were the same to him; they
were not towns, but congested, weedy rivers in which lifeless men
flowed together and apart - just dust, the torrid brightness of roads, the
everlasting swinging of the double doors of taverns' (Ultramarine 146).
Only rarely does Lowry record feelings about European cities, although
we do learn that 'Cambridge was the sea reversed,' where one lived in a
'disgusting smell of marmalade and old boots . . . in a hovel near the
station yard' (Volcano 180). Even in Mexico, where descriptions of
urban scenes are common, Lowry notes that 'the names were the only
beautiful things, for the towns were all the same' (Grave 209).
This feeling of a rather squalid, seedy, sameness, an atmosphere that
also emerges from the contemporary novels of Graham Greene, was
carried over to that modem equivalent of the seaport, the appropriately
termed airport (aerodromes were somewhat different). As early as 1945
Lowry was expressing the common modem perception that all airports
look alike. In Vancouver, Los Angeles, Mexico, the airport provides the
same peculiar view of the attendant city, 'a few distant factory chimneys,
a few shacks and huts,' in all a 'desolate Gogolian landscape' (Grave
84).
Placelessness was already on the march. Sailors and air passengers
are typical existential outsiders, and to well-travelled outsiders the
similarities between places soon come to outweigh the differences.
180 Landscapes of Metaphor

Adaptation is relatively simple; visits are often short and may have
specific goals. It is possible to reduce a city to its major attraction, as
Paris may become the Eiffel Tower or the Beaubourg, London the Tower
or the Barbican. To Lowry, at this stage, it appears that cities were little
more than concentrations of pubs, bars, and cantinas, high-order
central places for a young drinker gradually turning alcoholic.

Cities and sensory overload

Despite the complexity of both his life and his writings, typified by the
multilayered symbolism of Volcano, Lowry preferred environmental
simplicity. The sea, in his early life, and the coastal forest wilderness, in
middle age, were his preferred environments. Here one could deal with
the existential things themselves in the context of a small group of
like-minded people, compared with the anonymous hubbub and artifici-
ality of the city.
One of Lowry's undiagnosed problems, seemingly very common
today, was an inability to cope with the complexity of modem cities.
Man is a very adaptable creature and apparently prefers complexity and
ambiguity (Rapaport and Kantor 1967). But the line between stimulus-
seeking and sensory overload is a fine one, and it is probable that
everyday city life takes its toll on even the most urbanized (Porteous
1977). For those who cannot adapt, or who have low adaptation levels,
stimulus overload can be deleterious both physiologically and
psychologically.
Lowry was extemely sensitive to city noise and fearful of crowds and
traffic. In Rome the 'unique golden quality of the Roman sunlight' is
forgotten in Cosnahan's fear of being pushed by crowds beneath
'screaming jammed trolley-buses' (Hear Us 128). He finds the Piazza
Venezia to be 'an inferno with twelve different kinds of buses coming at
you from every direction, and swarms of motor-scooters hurtling at you.'
In such a context, one can see the Colosseum only as 'the Albert Hall in a
dentist's nightmare' (p. 129).
Mexico City 'seemed much the same, smells, noise ... with which went
the same invitation to get out of it as soon as possible' (Grave 89).
However, as anyone who has moved from the mechanical cacophony of
a Third World city to the organic din of a Third World country town will
know, all towns are noisy. The small town of Cuernavaca is able to keep
Lowry awake all night, thus furnishing chapter Six of Dark as the Grave.
Pariah dogs bark and howl, drunkards carouse, jukeboxes and radios,
as throughout Latin America, are turned up full blast, cocks begin to
Deathscape 181

crow at 8:00 p.m. and continue until dawn, beetles tick interminably in
the roof, and there is even the 'whickering of sleepless vultures seeking
warmth on the roofs, and of those smaller birds, even worse, apparently
practising to be vultures' (p. 130). For the Lowrys, 'the city is of night, but
not of sleep' (p. 132).
Further, Mexican hotels provide overload in the shape of constant
irritations and insoluble problems. Normally noisy and poorly appoint-
ed (Grave 236), they are typified by the Hotel Comada's neon light,
which partially fails, to read 'Hotel Nada' (p. 90). Bathroom arrange-
ments are torture ('a shower nozzle placed directly over the toilet seat'
(p. 95), and things simply do not work.
Yet, even Mexican cities are to be preferred to those of industrial
societies, for at least they retain something of the organic in their flow of
life. The noises of Mexican cities are, after all, the noises of people and
creatures, not the 'rending tumult of American cities, the noise of the
unbandaging of great giants in agony' ( Volcano 41 ). Mexican city streets
may be 'hot,' 'tortuous,' and 'broken,' but compare well with the
mechanistic gridirons of American cities ( Volcano 9; Grave 248 ). Lowry
finds a 'certain air of desolate splendour' in Cuemavaca (Volcano 9),
dreams that Villahermosa might possibly live up to its name (Grave
255), and has good memories of Yautepec, 'undiscovered by tourists ...
the fountain ... in the little square, the fresnos, the huge white butterflies
drifting like flowers of the wind, the sparkling little stream and the view
of Popo like a dream' (Grave 209).
Ambiguous and exotic, Mexican cities are ultimately a negative
experience for Lowry. A few places, at best, have good memories.
Elsewhere there may be a feeling of melancholy, of dark streets and bells
that remind the protagonist of Cambridge (Grave 109). Worse, his
aesthetic sensibilities are assaulted by Mexico City's 'ghastly ginger-
bread suburban-broken landscape' (p. 111). Worse still, Mexican cities
are dark and sinister, laden with doom. At worst, there is Oaxaca, a
fearful place of jail and humiliation (p. 98), Lowry's 'City of Dreadful
Night.' 'Oaxaca, there is no sadder word' (Volcano 41).
One can readily adapt to aesthetic ugliness, and, even, eventually, to
sensory overload. For the outsider, however, it is easier to escape.
When viewed from a distance, Cuemavaca may have an air of 'peace
and sweetness' ( Volcano 10), but this is a mirage. Once he is involved in
the city, Lowry's urge is to go home, to leave before becoming
entrapped. The Consul in Volcano can leave only through death; his cry
is: 'If I could only get out' (p. 89). .
Outside the city there is 'a feeling of space and emptiness' (Volcano
182 Landscapes of Metaphor

23), reminiscent of the sea. It is during his second escape from nemesis in
Oaxaca that Lowry gives us his only significant view of rural country-
sides, with their 'rich green fields, a sense of fruitfulness ... with adobe
houses growing out of the very soil' (Grave 266). But there is nothing of
the peasant in Lowry. The rural scene is a welcome contrast to the city,
but for Lowry the organic is best expressed in the wildernesses of forest
and sea, where human agency has left much less of an impression.

The inorganic city

As we have noted, Lowry prefers Mexican cities to North American and

European ones because they are, to some extent, organic - 'the burros,
the flowers, the tortillas, the little pigs, the Indian women - how
different from Vancouver' (Grave 86 ). The familiar smell of Mexico City,
'of gasoline, excrement and oranges' (p. 115), contrasts favourably with
the 'disgusting smell' of city buses in Vancouver (Hear Us 215). Neither,
however, compares with the smells of the coast and forest, ' the smell of
salt, pines, and evening smoke' (Ferry 181 ), or, in the evening outside the
squatter's shack, 'the rich damp earth, myrtle and the first wild
crabapple and wild cherry blossoms, all the wild scents of spring,
mingled with the smell of the sea and from the beach the salt smells, and
the rasping iodine smell of seaweed' (Hear Us 262).
Cities are distant from nature (Tuan 1978). Nature is discounted in the
city. Lowry celebrates wild nature from his retreat only a few miles from
Vancouver, where he and his wife live in a hand-built shack surrounded
by forest and sea, row their boat, fetch water from the spring, lie awake
on winter nights in fear of high tides and storms, meet cougars and less
fearsome forest denizens face to face, and, like the Ancient Mariner,
come to 'reverence all things that God made and loveth' (Hear Us 98).
As I noted briefly in the 'Inscape' chapter, here one can build one's house
from materials salvaged from sea or forest, a house that seems an
organic part of the forest (p. 199). This is the simple life, of which the
Consul, trapped in Cuemavaca, and doomed to penetrate 'under the
Volcano,' dreams. The whole of the novella 'The Forest Path to the
Spring' (Hear Us) is a paean of praise to this life-style. At Eridanus,
Lowry had become an insider in an almost changeless, timeless world,
'a region where such words as spring, water, houses, trees, vines,
laurels, mountains, wolves, bay, roses, beach, islands, forest, tides and
deer and snow and fire, had realized their true being, or had their source'
(Hear Us 284).
From Eridanus, Vancouver could not be seen, but an oil-refinery
Deathscape 183

complex was visible, and grew over the years. At first viewed only in
aesthetic tenns, the refinery eventually becomes a threat to Eridanus.
With 'the assault of unique oil-smells,' the growth of oil-slicks, and its
constant flare-off, Shelko becomes a 'livid flickering City of Dis' (Ferry
159). Above the refinery, a coarse cerise neon sign, one letter burnt out,
reads 'HELL.' As the refinery grows, it provides a frame for views of
Mount Baker and Mount Hood, one of which appears, ironically, 'very
clear and beautiful, halfway up in the air over the middle of the Shell Oil
Refinery, very clear and beautiful and just like an American ice-cream
cone, or an advertisement for one, being served on high at a perpetual
soda fountain, perpetual reminder of the high standard of living
pertaining below in the State of Washington, with the highest suicide
rate in the Union' (p. 170).
Beyond Shelko lay Vancouver, of which Lowry has only one positive
statement to make, regarding the availability of books from the city
library (Grave 78 ). Otherwise, the inorganic, disorganized nature of
cities was, for Lowry, typified by the city of Vancouver. In the first story
in Hear Us O Lord Lowry's protagonist, about to escape by sea,
provides a devastating comment on what he is escaping from, a city
symbolically renamed Enochvilleport, after the son of Cain, and:

composed of dilapidated half-sky-scrapers, at different levels, some with

all kinds of scrap iron, even broken airplanes, on their roofs, others being
moldy stock exchange buildings, new beer parlours crawling with verminous
light even in mid-afternoon and resembling gigantic emerald-lit public
lavatories for both sexes ... totem pole factories, drapers' shops with the best
Scotch tweeds and opium dens in the basement ... cerise conflagrations of
cinemas, modem apartment buildings, and other soulless behemoths ...
numerous sawmills relentlessly smoking and champing away like demons,
Molochs fed by whole mountainsides of forests that never grew again, or by
trees that made way for grinning regiments of villas in the background of 'our
expanding and fair city,' mills that shook the very earth with their tumult, filling
the windy air with their sound as of a wailing and gnashing of teeth ... all these
curious achievements of man, together creating 'the jewel of the Pacific.' (Hear
Us 14, 15)

This is a truly apocalyptic vision, the destruction by human agency of the

beauty of 'a harbour more spectacular than Rio de Janeiro and San
Francisco put together' (p. 15). Deep within this urban jungle, Lowry
sees 'occasional lovely dark ivyclad old houses that seemed weeping, cut
off from all light, on their knees' (p. 14 ). The organic, the human scale, is
184 Landscapes of Metaphor

already beginning to fall prey to the monolithic sameness perpetrated by

nruve imitators of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe.
Adaptation to the wilderness did not come easy to Lowry, but
adaptation to urban life was impossible. A brief stay in a Vancouver
apartment house is recounted in October Feny. Here, Lowry witnessed
the first moves towards the destruction of the old West End to make
what is now one of the highest-density clusters of apartment towers in
the Western world. A self-righteous clean-up campaign relieves inner
Vancouver of trees and 'poor old steamboat Gothic buildings' (p. 177),
which, today, a more enlightened city government might be struggling to
preserve and rehabilitate. 'Poor old Vancouver!' thinks Ethan Llewelyn,
as bulldozers uproot trees and house wreckers torture a house to pieces
'bit by bit . . . almost as if they meant to eat it,' with a 'calamitous
wrenching sound' (p. 187). The replacements are 'fake modern buildings,
... soulless Behemoths in the shape of hideous new apartment buildings,
yet more deathscapes of the future' (p. 177). The only pleasant views in
Vancouver are the vistas, between buildings, of the surrounding
mountains.
Urban people, too, proved threatening to Lowry. In a cold-war
atmosphere already fuelled by a wholesale wartime internment of
Japanese Canadians, Lowry becomes almost paranoid when faced with
neighbours who, heeding the invective of local newspapers, report to the
police anyone who exhibits not only 'dangerous un-Canadian leftward
tendencies' but also 'personal eccentricities in any form' (Feny 186).
Telephones, juvenile delinquents, 'mephitic blasts of steam heat,'
tyrannical janitors, a local interdiction against the feeding of seagulls
'always remembered at the last moment, and the beak beating against
the window' (p. 179), and the omnipresent drunks and policemen, all
these contrived to make Lowry's life in Vancouver, at best, an existence,
at worst, hell on earth. Even the elements are changed, for 'the first thing
that happens in a city is that the weather dies in the soul, though people
may talk of nothing else' (p. 183 ).
On reflection, however, and having once again escaped, Lowry
realizes that it was not urban people he hated, 'but the ugliness they
made in the image of their own ignorant contempt for the earth' (Hear
Us 248). The city is, at best, banal, 'surrogates in Harrogate' (Volcano
83). More profoundly, it is the scene of mechanistic disorganization, a
'mechanic calamity' (Caustic 69), where change is ceaseless (Grave 57),
and where humankind is wholly dominated by machinekind. As part of
his adaptation to wilderness living, however, the dystopia of the city
seems necessary to Lowry. As a protagonist notes, 'without an
Deathscape 185

occasional plunge into civilization, they wouldn't have enjoyed what

they had so much' (Grave 55). Thus the traveller appreciates home.

The city as symbol of evil

Mexican, European, or North American cities in the Lowry canon are

universally generators of images of filth, corruption, and evil. Rome is as
cruel as it is beautiful (Hear Us 129). Ancient dead cities such as Monte
Alban and Pompeii are at best sad, lugubrious. At Mitla, no birds sing
(Grave 251 ). A seaborne Lowryan protagonist is deceived by urban Jews
who have more sense than to go to sea (Volcano 93). In American cities
of the 1930s, people live in cellars below the stockyards, amid 'the reek of
the porterhouse of tomorrow' (p. 91 ): the city as abattoir. In Cuernavaca
and other Mexican towns there is an endless parade of human and
animal deformity: dwarfs, emaciated pariah dogs, drunks wallowing in
urine and vomit, legless beggars, a blind woman carrying a dead dog
being beaten by a drunk, scenes of cruelty and bestiality (Grave 116).
In Oaxaca, Lowry undergoes experiences that will haunt him all his
life: Christmas in jail; two fawns dragged screaming to be butchered in
the hotel kitchen; a vulture perching on his washbasin. All is corruption
and rottenness, like the malevolent landscape that confronted Brown-
ing's Childe Roland before the dark tower. In Cuernavaca, the Borda
Gardens, the apparent French chateau turned brewery, the palace of
Maximilian and Carlotta are at least melancholy, at most horrifying in
their messages of dereliction, corruption, and decay. Empty, dead
fountains, choked with leaves, are a recurrent theme. Cuernavaca, with
all the ingredients of an earthly paradise (Volcano 16), and so regarded
today by many indigenes and expatriates, is to Lowry a place of doom.
Cuernavaca, indeed, was sinister, for 'wherever you turned the abyss
was waiting for you round the corner' (p. 21).
The abyss was the omnipresent barranca, 'vast, threatening, gloomy,
dark, frightening: the terrific drop, the darkness below' (Grave 125).
Then, as now, garbage is flung into the barranca. It is into the barranca
that the Consul, Lowry's alter ego, falls to his death in Volcano, to be
followed by a carelessly flung dead dog. But the initial entrance to the
barranca, to the underworld inferno, is via the mouth of hell, symbolized
by one of the fifty-seven cantinas of Cuernavaca. Through this portal the
Consul penetrates, 'under the volcano' of Popocatepetl, as, under Etna,
to the Tartarus of the ancients.
For Lowry, cities become both symbols and generators of mental
distress. He spent a whole year (1934-5) in New York, but it is his
186 Landscapes of Metaphor

ten-day stay in the public Psychiatric Wing of Bellevue Hospital that he

records for us in Lunar Caustic. In this novella William Plantagenet,
who thinks he is a ship, enters the hospital to be treated for alcoholic
dementia. Lowry's retreat to Bellevue was probably caused, in part, by
his inability to cope with life in the metropolis. To Lowry, New York was
the epitome of what had already become 'the drunken madly revolving
world,' later to reappear in Volcano, a place of arrivals, departures, and
loss, of 'drama and existential fury' in which it is difficult 'to get on the
right side of one's despair.'
Lunar Caustic depicts a city of extreme complexity, impossible to
understand. Even to a seaman 'the wharves were complicated by an
extraordinary arrangement of wind-chutes, foghorns and ventilators,
whose purpose was undiscoverable,' a meaningless landscape of 'squat
towers' and 'the leaning vaporous geometry of cranes and angled church
steeples' (Caustic 12). Vignettes of its citizens appear: 'arrogant
bearded derelicts' who 'cringe over spittoons'; 'a terrible old woman,
whose black veil only partly conceals her ravaged face' (p. 10).
In the psychiatric wing no one speaks of home (Caustic 23), for the
insane know, better than the sane, that cities are the resort of the
rootless. Lowry was already beginning to formulate the view, later
espoused by radical psychiatrists such as Laing and Szasz, that madness
may be a coping mechanism, a signal of a desire to be reborn from a
world that is itself insane. Plantagenet asks: 'if the doctor ever asked
himself what point there was in adjusting poor lunatics to a mischievous
world over which merely more subtle lunatics exerted almost supreme
hegemony, where neurotic behavior was the rule, and there was nothing
but hypocrisy to answer the flames of evil, which might be the flames of
Judgement, which were already scorching nearer and nearer' (p. 37).
Already, in his mid-twenties, Lowry is espousing the jaundiced view of
civilization that erupts devastatingly in his later works. The horror, for
Lowry, is of the everyday vision, in modem city life, of 'man's
uncomplaining acceptance of his own degeneration' (p. 54 ).
Cities, like mental hospitals, are harmful to mental health. From this
point on, Lowry uses city images as a shorthand, as symbols of despair,
destruction, and death. In Dark as the Grave he twice compares his
tormented soul to a ravaged stricken town. And throughout the later
works, whenever Lowry requires an image to indicate degradation or
despair, he swnmons up city images, especially images of the northern
English cities from which he fled to the New World.
Hear Us O Lord is replete with such metaphor. At their mildest, a
dirty, smoke-belching ship is seen as 'some seagoing Manchester' (p. 50).
Deathscape 187

Poignantly, a protagonist sees 'the beautiful old cobbled streets and

ancient houses of Douglas,' Isle of Man, destroyed 'to make a Liverpool
holiday' (p. 131). More profound in feeling is Lawry's despair that, in an
urban society, 'so terrible and foreign to the earth has this world become
that a child may be born in its Liverpools and never find a single person
... who will think it worthwhile pointing out to him the simple beauty' of
landscape and weather (p. 241).
Deep in his being, Lowry knows that drunkards cannot escape the
world, for alcohol is only temporarily the traditional 'quickest way out of
Manchester.' Eventually the drunkard wakes to find, in a haunting
image, 'looming, the frightful Pontefract of day' (Hear Us 42). On seeing
his wilderness haven destroyed, Ethan Llewelyn cries: 'They want to
turn this whole place into a vast bloody great Black Country, a
Lancashire ... of the Pacific North-west' (Ferry 201). And Lawry's vision
of the future in the late 1930s, like Orwell's and Greene's, is one of
'people stumbling through debris littering dark streets, hurrying thou-
sands seeking shelter in bomb-tom darkness' (Volcano 157), their future
a ruined world 'like some ravaged glass factory town in Lancashire'
(Grave 86).
The city, as emphasized by the mutilated oil-company neon sign, is
'HELL.' Anyone who 'had every really been in hell must have given
Enochvilleport [Vancouver] a nod of recognition' (Hear Us 15). It is a
prison to which one can never adapt, but from which one must flee back
to the wilderness cabin (p. 254). But the city, symbol of evil, is dynamic.
Retreat from its clutches is at best a reprieve (Ferry 325). As the
protagonist of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman discovers, you can
retreat from the city only so far, and when you stop, the city will engulf
you.

The city as predator

The city is a predator. Ultimately, for Lowry, it is not merely placeless,

unaesthetic, sensorily overloaded, inorganic, or metaphorically evil in a
static way. The city, rather, is actively evil, a killer, a creator of
'deathscapes.' All three novels based in Eridanus, Hear Us O Lord,
Dark as the Grave, and October Ferry, contain this disturbing word. As
active killers on a catastrophic scale, cities are sources of danger to their
environs, as when a burning river of oil threatens Eridanus after a
refinery explosion (Hear Us 196). Oil slicks are a more permanent
threat, with their destruction of life and 'archetypal malodor' (p. 228).
The city is also topophobic, a landscape of fear, a killer of the soul.
188 Landscapes of Metaphor

Fear of the city and its depredations grows throughout the later Lowryan
novel sequence. In Dark as the Grave there is a single experience of it,
the fear that when the Lowrys return from Mexico they would find their
squatter's shack on government land had been destroyed in favour of
'auto camps of the better class' (Grave 51). The fear continues in Hear
Us O Lord, where a newspaper report of an industrial boom in British
Columbia is juxtaposed with a report of the sudden withering of a
thousand-acre forest; 'foresters are unable to explain it, but the Indians
say the trees died of fear but they are not in agreement about what
caused the fright' (Hear Us 179). Lowry infers the fear of civilization.
Fear becomes paramount in October FeTT)I when developers and
government proceed to evict the Eridanus squatters in favour of
subdivisions and industry. The Llewelyns, now exiles, seek a new
home-place, but are bewildered by ugly hoardings, the unpleasant city of
Nanaimo, crass real-estate advertisements, and modem 'ugly, stan-
dardized houses .. . crowded together in an exact row as though dropped
there by a conveyer belt' (FeTT)I 229).
City people hate, fear, and envy the squatters. The squatter settle-
ment and its forest environs are wasted on the squatters, who do not pay
taxes, who lower the dignity of the city (Hear Us 276), who live in a rat's
nest of vice and crime, whose land should be a public park (Grave 64)
and whose shacks 'like malignant sea-growths should be put to the
torch' (Hear Us 238). 'Squatters! The government's been trying to get rid
of them for years ... cut down all those trees, open it up to the public, put
it on the map' (p. 227). Already parts of Eridanus had become 'a
suburban dementia' behind which 'was still the dark forest, waiting, one
hoped, for revenge' (p. 207). The Rosslyn Park Real Estate and
Development Company ('Enquire Here, Scenic View Lots') attracts
urbanites in cars, bringing 'an all but continuous uproar,' drives away
wildlife, and produces a 'big new schoolhouse, a great concrete block of
mnemonic anguish,' amidst 'a hideous slash of felled trees, bare broken
ugly land crossed by dusty roads and dotted with new ugly houses where
only a few years ago rested the beautiful forest that they had loved'
(pp. 202-7).
From the city as predator there is no escape, for Lowry realizes at last
that it is civilization that is the enemy: 'Canada was indeed a pretty large
country to despoil. But her legends, nearly all her most valuable and
heroic history of spoilation ... the conquering of wilderness ... was part
of[man's] own process of self-determination ... progress was the enemy,
it was not making man more happy and secure. Ruination and
vulgarization had become a habit' (Hear Us 205). In the face of urban
Deathscape 189

philistinism and greed Lowry capitulates, anticipating Lyn White in his

vision of the future as 'a picture of Progress in the form of Jesus Christ
driving a locomotive across a virgin forest' (FeTT)I 202).

Civilization: creator of deathscapes

Civilization is the creator of deathscapes (Hear Us 279). Ultimately,

Lowry indicts machine civilization for its greedy, remorseless devasta-
tion of the natural, the organic. Unfortunately for Canada, this
indictment, although meant to be general, is expressed by Lowryan
protagonists wholly in Canadian terms. Canada, to Lowry in the 1940s,
could still be redeemed; unlike Europe, or even the United States, its
wilderness landscapes still remained relatively untouched.
Some of the criticism sets the scene for an understanding of Canadian
philistinism. Typical of Lowry, the milder deathscape scenes are
alcoholic in tone. Sexual segregation in drinking establishments is
simply one of the 'fatuous prohibitions' of this dour, rather Scottish
nation. Canadian beer parlours, in their 'ghastly malevolence ...
summed up in that one genteel and funereal substantive,' are 'the largest
and ugliest drinking establishments on earth' (Ferry 43), further
expression of a dull, dour, prevailing Presbyterianism. Vancouver,
source of ultimate misery to Lowry, can from the distance of Mexico be
seen almost light-heartedly as having 'a sort of Pango Pango quality
mingled with sausage and mash and generally a rather Puritan
atmosphere. Everyone fast asleep and when you prick them a Union Jack
flows out. But no one in a certain sense lives there. They merely as it
were pass through. Mine the country and quit. Blast the land to pieces,
knock down the trees and send them rolling down Burrard Inlet' (Hear
Us 125).
But, once engaged in the Vancouver scene, Lowry was compelled to
acknowledge both the despair, degradation, and meanness he perceived
in everyday urban life and the desperate dilemma in which British
Columbians, with a natural wilderness on their doorstep, find them-
selves trapped: 'Vancouver, Canada, where man, having turned his back
on nature, and having no heritage of beauty else, and no faith in a civili-
zation where God has become an American washing machine, or a car
he refuses even to drive properly - and not possessing the American elan
which arises from a faith in the very art of taming nature herself, because
America having run out of a supply of nature to tame is turning on
Canada, so that Canada feels herself at bay, while a Canadian might be
described as a conservationist divided against himself' (Hear Us 95). As
190 Landscapes of Metaphor

he later obseives, 'British Columbia is not styled s.c. for nothing' (FeTT)!
171). The heart of the matter is that post-war Canadians had become
arrant modernizers, creators of placeless deathscapes, destroyers of
wildness in pursuit of profit. And the cruel truth was that 'Canada's
beauty was in that wildness ... It was the only originality it had' (p. 188).
Canadian despoliation, of course, is largely a reflection of American
vulgarity, drive, and profiteering. Canadian deathscapes merely echo
the 'barren deathscapes of Los Angeles' (Grave 36, 42). The end result is
total urbanization and the divorce of man from his natural surroundings.
Although never mentioning television, Lowry had a clear vision of the
electronic future, a world where 'it was as if they had exchanged sunlight
on water for photographs of sunlight on water, cool commotion of
blowing grasses and pennyroyal, or reeds and rippling water [or]
migrating birds, for the tragic incidental music that always accompanies
documentaries involving blowing grasses, rippling waters and migrating
birds, and soon they would not be able to have told the difference' (FeTT)!
192). Lowry's metaphor for this National Geographic of the soul is
revelatory, archetypal, and apocalyptic; deathscape is 'the abomination
of desolation sitting in the holy place' (Hear Us 198).

Implications

Like many of us, Lowry was allergic to modem urban civilization. His
work is one example of a prevalent twentieth-century genre which
exhibits the malaise of modem life. Orwell expresses it well in his novel
of the suburbanite who finds, on his return, that his childhood
home-place has been destroyed, and that he is henceforth doomed to
suburbia, a life where 'everything [is] slick and streamlined, everything
made out of something else' (Orwell 1939). In an urban world dominated
by machinekind, everyone is ultimately an outsider.
Lowry is nothing if not a symbolist. His work is allegorical and
symbolic on the lines of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. The city is merely one
of Lowry's chthonic symbols, but it is one of his more compelling ones.
An active menacing predator, the city robs man of any opportunity to live
a natural life. In its relentless, juggernaut-like generation of placeless-
ness and its celebration of rootlessness, the city epitomizes a greedy,
philistine, technological age. Rootless and homeless, the eternal exis-
tential outsider, the Lowryan protagonist flees to the wilderness to
escape the city, only to be evicted, by a relentless civilization, from this
retreat.
The city breeds alienation, anomie, and angst. A placeless, banal
Deathscape 191

blandscape, the city is ultimately topophobic, a symbol of our worst

fears for the future. In the novels of Lowry, the pro-city:anti-city balance
swings decisively against city life. If the Eridanus shack is Eden, the city
is likely to be the major scene of life after the expulsion. There is,
moreover, a Dantesque strain in Lowry's work, with New York in Lunar
Caustic as Purgatorio, and Cuernavaca, in Volcano, as Inferno.
Paradiso, obviously Eridanus, is lost, never to be regained. Here the
Lowryan protagonist becomes Everyman.
In terms of humanist geography, Lowry's work has a number of
implications. It has become normal to look at landscapes in terms of
antinomies or dialectics, such as city: countryside in Britain and city: wil-
derness in Canada. Tuan (1974) specifically provides us with a city: coun-
try: wilderness model for understanding landscape and life. But such
models are essentially static, whereas the relationship of city, country-
side, and wilderness is always a dynamic one. In Lowry's case the
linkage, for the individual, is by means of the journey.
More profoundly, the use of polarities such as city:wilderness is
erroneous and reactionary in terms of power relationships. Wilden
(1980) has demonstrated how the use of such dialectics as white:black
and capital:labour obscures the reality of the relationship between the
antagonists. For 'lock-out' is generally more powerful than 'strike,' and
'nigger' a more powerful epithet than 'honky.' A more truthful diagram-
matic rendering of these relationships would place the dominant group
clearly over the subordinate, as:
adult white d capital
child ' black ' an labour '
and, in the case of the urban Leviathan:
city
countryside
wilderness
Finally, Lowry's work is valuable in that it brings to our attention the
ethical dimension of landscape character. As Relph (1981) has shown,
sensitive persons may rail at the aesthetic nightmare that characterizes
the 'urban strip' on the fringes of North American cities, but utterly fail to
appreciate the barbaric treatment of living creatures that supports the
garish fast-food outlets so prevalent in this environment. Lowry asks
who is responsible for the tasteless urban scene and for the wreckage of
the natural environment around it (Feny 217). The Pogo comic strip
192 Landscapes of Metaphor

supplied the existentialist answer decades ago: 'we have met the enemy,
and he is us.' Perhaps, in the long run, we get the environments we
deserve?

Now there is an empty beach and beside it a park with picnic tables and
tannac access; the sea air stinks with car exhaust. And the city that ignored
him plans to cement a bronze plaque in his memory to the brick wall of the
new civic craphouse.
Earle Birney (Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry 1962)
on Vancouver's belated tribute to Canada's greatest novelist
10 Otherscapes

Our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that
will never be.
Rene Dubos
You have to change not only the setup but the whole concept.
Mick Jagger
They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change
them yourself.
Andy Warhol

There are, of course, other landscapes of the mind. Except for brief
mentions in 'Bodyscape' and 'Smellscape,' respectively, touchscape and
tastescape (Brillat-Savarin 1949) remain unexplored, although anthro-
pologists (French, naturally) have recently been noting marked differ-
ences in taste sensitivity across the globe (Gordon 1987). In particular,
sensitivity to sweetness among primitive groups appears to be related to
environment. The Gieli pygmies, who are surrounded by an abundance
of sweet fruits, are insensitive to sweetness in comparison with the
Bantu of the nearby savannah. The Inuit, however, have a very
fine-tuned sense of saltiness, an important survival mechanism for a
people with a diet already high in sodium chloride. Throughout the
world, women seem more taste- and smell-sensitive than men, which
may help account for their predilection, in division-of-labour terms, for
fruit-gathering and cooking. And, metaphorically speaking, women also
seem to have more taste than do men.
Considering the landscape of metaphor, many 'scapes remain for our
investigation. Following Dante, Aldous Huxley, and innumerable theo-
logians, and going beyond Lowry, we might chart the landscapes of heaven
and hell. One could trek, along with Freud and Jung, into dreamscape.
And far beyond human understanding, where God is totaliter a liter, the
wholly Other, lies Godscape, surely the ultimate in otherscapes.
196 Otherscapes

More immediately gratifying might be an exploration of sexscape,

ranging from deeper penetration of bodyscape and pornotopia to
land-use studies of the sex-related districts of cities and, perhaps, an
attempt to classify landscapes psychiatrically as oral, anal, and genital.
Oral landscapes might include those of base appetite where the
immature consume childhood foods well into adulthood, the fast-food
strips of major cities. These connect with genital landscapes, the
pulsing, throbbing, beating landscapes of transportation so beloved by
Walt Whitman and Victorian railway travellers. Here are warmth,
speed, motion, lubrication, and even penis-shaped sports cars. Anal
landscapes, of course, are par excellence those of financial districts, the
cold, uptight, undemonstrative, modernist bank towers where, deep in
unfathomable vaults, our assets are retained.

Sensuous worlds

Although, I hope, I have helped bring about a renewed awareness of

smellscape and soundscape, it is clear that all of the senses are involved
in our appreciation of the world. We live in a multisensory world, an
allscape.
A male might best appreciate this by making the difficult journey to the
remote monasteries of the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos, in northern
Greece. One approaches a monastery by walking over miles of mule
tracks in a Mediterranean maquis landscape, over hills, across water-
courses, down cliffs, across beaches, past grazing wild tortoises and
wayside shrines. Walking, as John Updike (1986) so clearly indicates,
exposes the traveller to a very different experience than the equivalent
travel by automobile. Arriving, the traveller senses the centredness of
the monastery, the many layers of space one must penetrate from
profane Greece to the holy of holies behind the altar of the katholikon.
Once in church, his senses are aroused by the Orthodox order of service
in this most sensuous of Christian religions. Candles glimmer, the
colours of frescos glow, the unaccompanied chant fills the air after the
dull boom of the simandron, the scent of incense perfumes the nostrils,
the service climaxes with a taste of bread.
Persons of either sex might sensitize themselves not by withdrawing
into such a highly sensuous monastery but by leaving the city and
exposing themselves to the relative sensory deprivation of a long sea
voyage or a trip through dense forest. The Sandinistas of Nicaragua, a
group of insurgents far more literate than their White House enemies
(Rushdie 1987), found the jungles of northern Nicaragua difficult to cope
Otherscapes 197

with in terms of sensory deprivation. Omar Cabezas (1985, 84) describes

in detail how the city-bred guerrilla going to the mountain was forced to
shed his urban sensescapes one by one. Vision is foreshortened, endless
jungle becomes monotonous, colours disappear. Urban sounds and
tastes are no longer available: 'a year without tasting sugar; you
gradually resign yourself.' Yet, in time, a new sensuous relationship
with the environment emerged. Touchscape, man's intimate contact
with the earth, became all important. Hearing sharpened, and sense of
smell became much more acute. Eventually identification with the
environment became such that 'we were tree trunks, snakes, wild boars,
fleet as deer, fierce as mountain lions in heat' (p. 85).
Opening ourselves up to such environmental experiences is difficult,
but even moderate exposure can be infinitely rewarding. For improving
our listening, Schafer (1977) recommends and explains 'earcleaning,'
and many sensuous exercises while blindfolded could prove beneficial in
raising our non-visual senses to a higher degree of proficiency. Sound,
including ultrasound, has value in medical terms, and there may also be
therapeutic value in aromatherapy and even colour therapy. Daniel
Cappon (1973), in association with McLuhan, theorized that the
average urban person's sensory inputs were completely ill-balanced,
and developed the Cappon-Banks Sensory Quotient test to index the
order of dominance of the senses in an individual or group. Given an
appreciation of one's sensory distortions, one might then attempt to
rectify the imbalance.
Above all, accentuating our appreciation of the non-visual senses
could well act to improve our chances of experiencing sensory epipha-
nies, those glorious Proustian/Joycean accidents of smell, sound, or
taste that open up the gulfs of memory in the landscapes of the mind.

Landscapes of metaphor

The sensuous worlds of smell, sound, taste, and touch, as well as the
visual sense, are closely integrated with the paysage interieur of our
minds. Indeed, as we know from our investigation of smellscape, the
sense of smell has direct input into the limbic system, the older, emotive,
animal brain.
From these sources arise intuition, fantasy, magic, imagination, and
play. Yet, we have increasingly been socialized to disregard or even
anathematize these sources of enlightenment and pleasure. The scien-
tization of society is, in part, responsible for our increasing distrust of
our intuitions, experiences, and personal judgments. Ordinary experi-
198 Otherscapes

ence, folk wisdom, and the senses seem at a discount in the scientized
world so tellingly satirized by Shepherd Mead (1974, 187): 'Psycholo-
gists discovered that if a person put out his hand and you pricked it with a
pin, the person would pull his hand back. If you told students this, they
would laugh. But if you called the person a subject, and the pin-prick a
stimulus, or even an aversive stimulus, and the pulling back of the hand
a reaction, then the student wouldn't laugh; they would solemnly write
down the words.' The world has come to a pretty pass when well-
meaning social scientists 'rediscover poverty' only through scrutinizing
government statistics (Dean 1986). Little wonder that the poet Auden
was moved to issue the commandment: 'Thou shalt not commit a social
science.'
Despite the recent humanistic revolutions in psychology, sociology,
and geography, society continues, as yet, to revere technical science and
remains sceptical of the insights to be derived from poetry, introspec-
tion, free association, and other 'unscientific' forms of knowing. This is
ill-advised. It is not that the humanist calls for the overthrow of science,
rather that more subjective modes of understanding and expression, like
the liberation of smell and sound vis-a-vis vision, should be given greater
consideration.
In this connection, I have called for a complementary, alternative,
mode of social-science expression that, unlike the cold science into
which we are socialized, has the power to move us while at the same
time expressing some level of understanding of the world (Porteous
1986a). Other social scientists have argued likewise (see Porteous 1984).
So, at the trivial risk of losing my reputation as a hard-nosed scientist, I
append two of my minor efforts in this direction. The first, a cartoon,
and black humour indeed, is from an imaginary World Atlas of Eating
Disorders. The second, a poem, expresses my ambivalent reaction to
visiting a refugee camp in Bangladesh. It is my contention that literary
and artistic expression, whether ours or that of others, is essential in
helping us to experience the world around us in a richer, more authentic
way.

The good life

Living well is not merely the best revenge, it is our right and our duty.
Living well, of course, demands an integration of the sensory experience
of sensuous worlds with the inner states of the landscapes of metaphor.
Above all, it requires the achievement of a state of balance. We need to
improve the current imbalance in our sensory modaHties, to moderate
200 Otherscapes

BANGLADESH

Wouldn't you just like to beat those swollen little drums?

Break off a drumstick (for they come attached),
Beat out your fear on Oxfam, Christian Aid.
Why do they stare so?
Later, on the way
Back to the Intercontinental, crossing yet another river
With half-inch freeboard, fret about
Your zoom and passport. Could you, do you think,
In a worst-case scenario, cling to the slick bamboo
Of one of those great rearing fishtowers?
And are there crocodiles?
At least, before the crunch,
You would be still enough to see the land
Flagged out, from mud to sky, like a new sari,
In black and green and gold.

our current overemphasis on vision that distances us, and ultimately

alienates us, from our surroundings. We need to achieve a holistic
balance between body and mind and, in particular, to cease treating
landscapes, as well as women, as objects for, as Lopez (1986, 398) puts
it, 'seduction, domestication, domination, and control.' Life today
increasingly cheats and short-changes our senses. A rediscovery of the
non-visual senses, and in particular smell, which puts us in closer touch
with environment and with others, could be a step forward in this
direction. The non-visual senses encourage us to be involved, and being
involved, we may come to care.
A further issue concerns freedom, which can only exist when
limitations themselves are recognized. Human existence, stripped
as in Samuel Beckett's plays, is a dialectic consisting of the two
conditions of mobility and immobility. We tend to associate freedom
with movement, with travel, whereas Beckett's message appears to
be that freedom is achievable only in one's own mind (Kenner 1962).
Although travel may not confer freedom, especially when it is viewed
merely as escape, it may for some become an intellectual or artistic
passion. We may hope, perhaps, that travel might render the tourist a
Otherscapes 201

little more liberal in outlook. It certainly allows the discerning

traveller to verify, or otherwise, the material he is fed by the media.
But the Western world is a package tourist civilization, and it sends
out scientists to make scientific assessments of little-known areas.
Neither of these approaches is sufficient; indeed, both tourists and
scientists are likely to take their mental prisons with them, thus
confirming G.K. Chesterton's dictum that travel narrows the mind. By
becoming Baedeker or Fodor sightseers and star-gazers and by
looking through the equally narrow spectrum of the scientist, we fail to
understand other places or peoples, though we may come to possess
and control them.
In discussing the increasing trend towards satellite-generated data
produced by remote sensing, I have (Porteous 1986b) advocated a
return, by both travellers and scientists, to a 'ground-truthing' mode
of exploration which I call 'intimate sensing': 'Remote sensing is
clean, cold, detached, easy. Intimate sensing, especially in the Third
World, is complex, difficult, and often filthy. The world is found to be
untidy rather than neat. But intimate sensing is rich, warm, involved
. . . and the rewards involve dimensions other than the intellectual'
(p. 251). More sparely, Lopez (1986, 228) insists that we have an
obligation to approach landscapes not merely scientifically or as
superficial tourists, but 'with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude
of regard.'
Life, however, is largely spent at home, a concept that may have
originated, according to Lewis Mumford and Reynolds Price (Johnson
1982), as a religious place sacred to our dead. Civilization, indeed,
has been described as a sense of permanence (Pocock 1981) and in
psychiatric symbology house and body are equated. When young, we
may have to escape from home, from what Johnson calls 'the viper
embrace of the family,' and it is certain that only by travelling do we
really come to appreciate home (Browning's 'O to be in England';
Kipling's 'What do they know of England who only England know?').
Wherever we settle, however, we have a need to feel at home. In an
increasingly mobile society, a 'luggage civilization,' at-homeness is a
feeling difficult to come by. I was brought up, as you may remember
from chapter 8, 'Childscape,' in an extended family in a remote
village. At times I feel adrift and, in comparison with my early life, my
adult roots will always be adventitious. It is here that the rapid recent
rise to prominence of the search for 'roots' comes into play, reinforcing
our need to know who we are and where we came from, as well as the
need to stay put. Genealogy and family history, once despised, have
202 Otherscapes

even become acceptable academic disciplines (Tuan 1980; Porteous

1982) and the investigation of 'sense of place' a minor academic and
literary growth industry (Eyles 1985). All the more important, it would
seem, in a civilization that insists on planning us to death and, in the
process, often destroys our physical homes, and thus our sense of
identity, 'in the national interest' (Porteous 1989).
We need a feeling of at-homeness, of course, not only with regard to
our house, neighbourhood, or country, but also, according to philoso-
phers of the environment, with the earth as a whole. How shall we
achieve this? Certainly, to continue to build what Lowry calls
deathscapes, to increasingly crowd into ever-larger urban agglomera-
tions, will only further detach Homo sapiens, so-called, actually from
roots but also from both a sensuous and a spiritual appreciation of the
ecological underpinnings of our life on earth.
Deathscape, of course, might seem to be our inevitable punish-
ment, given a non-Freudian interpretation of the basic Oedipal myth,
where Oedipus first kills god (his father) and then rapes the earth (his
mother).
In the long run, to avoid deathscape, whether it come by nuclear
devastation or ecological disaster, we need to leaven our over-
scientized culture with a more intersubjectively loving relationship
with the earth. We need, in short, to rediscover that feeling of oneness
with the land which 'primitive' societies seem to have retained
wherever they have been allowed, that feeling of person/world
wholeness, of existential being-in-the-world, which the inhabitants of
childscape seem to know before they become irrevocably socialized
into a consumer society in which we pay others to live interesting lives
for us.
We need, perhaps, a return to a more unashamedly romantic
approach to landscape. In writing their appalling hymns:

So may we thy sorrows share

And from earthly joys abstain;
Fasting with unceasing prayer
Glad with thee to suffer pain ...

the Victorians sought to perpetuate a Christian tradition of denial,

which, paradoxically, permitted wholesale exploitation of the earth for
man's sublunary benefit. But, before the Victorians, came the Roman-
tics who, despite their excesses, had a genuine feeling for the sacredness
of earth, the joys of the senses, and the achievement of balance and
Otherscapes 203

integration between self and earth, between art and sciences, between
sensuous worlds and landscapes of metaphor.
Wordsworth was happy to encounter 'sensations sweet .. . of all the
mighty world of eye and ear' and was 'well pleased to recognize I In
nature and the language of the sense I The anchor of my purest
thoughts.' He finds himself 'surprised by joy,' relives childhood's
'splendour in the grass,' and cultivates 'that inward eye / Which is the
bliss of solitude.' Keats, meanwhile, urges us to 'Ever Jet the Fancy
roam' and to 'Open wide the mind's cage-door.' And while Wordsworth
warns that 'the world is too much with us / Getting and spending we lay
waste our powers,' Shelley, in 'Ozymandias,' points to the perils of
civilized progress based on too much 'getting.' The message, clearly, is
to let Creation and creativity come together through contemplation.
Not a very twentieth-century message! Today it is fashionable to
deride the Romantics as being, well, too romantic. But it is significant
that those who would direct our attention to what they call 'the real
world' usually speak only of its harsh, cruel, and negative characteris-
tics, as if living therein were a life sentence with no remission. In the
image of the film My Dinner with Andre, the human race has built itself a
prison and is manning it simultaneously as both guard and prisoner.
Breaking out is hard to do. Yet, there are avenues of escape, and since
the 1960s many volumes have been written to promulgate and publicize
particular routes of regeneration. There is no shortage of alternative
self-education systems (Ferguson 1981), alternative economic and
political systems (Bunyard and Morgan-Grenville 1987), alternative
philosophies such as Deep Ecology and Gaia (Lovelock 1979), and even
alternative religions (de Bono 1977; Milne 1982). Since Teilhard de
Chardin, geologians are a commonplace, and their conceptualization of
universal interconnectedness, as expressed Jong ago in Francis Thomp-
son's lines 'Thou canst not stir a flower/ Without troubling of a star,' is
beginning to be accepted by avant-garde physicists (Young 1986).
It is probable that the current dis-ease of civilization with its myriad
discontents may be cured only by the general acceptance of the
alternatives proposed by these creative malcontents. Briefly, we need to
espouse 'being' rather than 'having,' become conservers rather than
consumers, revere the organic as well as the inorganic, become nature's
insiders rather than 'natural aliens' (Evernden 1985), and eschew the
'mind-forged manacles' of finite games in favour of playing the only
infinite game (Carse 1986). Is this likely?
We do not know how to measure deep content. Driven by the arrow of
desire known as Progress, sold 'life-styles' that are patently inauthentic,
204 Otherscapes

bewildered by a proliferation of advice on, in Janis Ian's words, 'how to

be / And what to see while you are being,' more and more people are
likely to spiral down from potential creativity and self-actualization
(Maslow 1968) to the depths of aliention and anomie. Leaming is health,
but children continue to enter schools as butterflies and wind up in
cocoons. We have yet to act upon our growing recognition of the value of
the right-brain (Ornstein 1975).
Perhaps we could start by taking a leaf from the non-book of those we
choose to call 'primitive' peoples, who appear to define affluence not as
money and goods but as a state of health and cultural integrity. Health is
not the absence of disease, it is the active enjoyment of all our capacities,
including fantasy and the neglected non-visual senses. Cultural integrity
involves not the static preservation of existing modes of expression, but
the continuous evolution of our personal, as well as collective, imagina-
tive response to the world. This life of the mind is quite as important as
the world of the senses. Indeed, Tuan (1986, 2), the only geographer so
far to attempt to define the good life, believes, with Wordsworth, that 'a
world imaginatively appropriated can seem more real than one with
which our senses are directly engaged.' The issue, as usual, is the
achievement of balance.
My immediate goal in writing this book is not to espouse any
particular philosophy or solution to the problems of urban-industrial
civilization, although I naturally incline towards 'Green' politics and
philosophy. I hope only that I have, in the words of the gentle musician
John Cage, helped 'to wake people up from the lives they were merely
drifting through.' This book is only one of the multitude of small steps
that will have to be taken to help change lives at a personal level, so that
an eventual transformation of global consciousness may result.
Further steps, I feel, will probably involve a personal and collective
rediscovery of childscape, a genuine 'going home again' that might result
in such a global re-enchantment that all of us, not merely William Blake,
would be able to reject the blandishments of our crass civilization and
come:

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower.
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Abbey, Edward (environmentalist)
71-2, 84
adaptation to environment 23-4,
178, 180-1, 184, 187-8
adjustment of lunatics to a lunatic
world 186
Aesop (fabulist) 151-2
airports all look the same 179
Alice in Wonderland 153
alternative modes of being 203
Amado, Jorge (novelist) 28-9, 84
animals 21, 39-41, 99, 152-3, 182
184-5
Appleton, Jay (geographer) 78, 160
Athos, Mount (The Holy Mountain)
196
autobiography 13, 152-7; of artists
vs non-artists 152, 155-6; of child-
hood 153-7; environmental 143; in
fictional form 10-11, 178; and
smellscape 28, 32-5, 37-43
Bangladesh 198, 200
Beatles, the (rock group) 150
Beckett, Samuel (playwright) xiii, 200
being vs having 155, 202
Bettelheim, Bruno (psychiatrist)
149-50
Birney, Earle (poet) 192
Blake, William (poet, artist,
visionary) 145, 149, 204
Index
body, human: analogous with land-
scape 69-70; in art 71; and clothes
71; female 77-84; as landscape
78-85; landscape as 73-8; and
metaphor 70-3; and naming of
landscape features 73-4; and
orientation, 70; orifices of 70-1; as
pomotopia 81-4; and time 70; as
world microcosm 69. See also
breasts
breasts 73-4, 77-8, 81-3
Browning, Robert (poet) 97, 160
Cage, John (composer) 204
Cambridge 179, 181
Canada: beer parlours in 189; and
philistinism 189-90; and en-
vironmentalism 189; landscape
and beauty expunged 189-90;
natural beauty its only originality
190; smellscape of 24; soundscape
of 53, 55-61. See also Lowry;
Vancouver
Chawla, Louise (psychologist) 153-6,
158
Chesterton, G.K. (novelist) 21, 153,
201
childhood: of the author 147, 159,
160-71; autobiographies of
153-7, 170; and books 13, 111,
129, 149-53; changing nature of
224
145-7, 153-4; and childscape
145-9, 202-4; disappearance
of 146-7; and the elderly 147;
geography of 147-53, 157-60,
168-70; of Graham Greene 38, 109
111-15, 128-9, 131,142,145,153,
160; as 'home' 142-3, 157-9, 164-6,
172; imagination in 149-53; labour
value of 145; and learning 149-50;
and children's literature 149-53;
and play 148, 158-60, 162-3, 170;
and risk, danger 159-60, 162-3;
smellscape of 27, 38-42, 148-9,
173; sensual nature of 147-9; in
suburbia 12, 151; and television
146-7, 151; transcendental rela-
tionship with environment in
147-9, 155-6; and urban life
150-3, 173
city, cities: breed alienation 190;
Cain, first maker of 176; celestial
176-7; vs countryside 176-7, 182,
184, 191; vs countryside in children's
literature 150-3; environment
wrecked by 187-92; and human
degeneracy 184, 186-7; image of in
history 176-7; inorganic nature of
182-4; in Lawry's novels 176-92;
and nature 182-4, 187; negative
views of 108-9, 112, 124-5, 151,
175, 177-90; placelessness of
178-80; as predator 187-9; sensory
overload in 180-2, 186; St Augus-
tine's view of 177; symbolic of evil
185-7; and urban development 97,
187-9; visual ugliness of 175, 184,
188; and wilderness 189-91. See
also civilization; Greene; Lowry;
suburbia
civilization, modem Western: allergy
to 190; creates deathscapes
Index
189-90; critique of xiii-xiv, 109,
212, 129-31, 146-7, 173,185,
201-4; destroys nature 188-91;
withers forest 188
Cobb, Edith (childhood autobiog-
raphy specialist) 154-6
Coe, Richard (childhood auto-
biography specialist) 153-7, 173
Conrad, Joseph (novelist) 123,
129-30
Dante (poet) 88, 98, 100, 103, 121,
135-6, 191, 195
das Man, Heidegger's concept of
111, 113, 124
deathscape 175-6, 187-91, 202
Dickens, Charles (novelist) 142, 149
Donne, John (poet) 80
Eliot, T.S. (poet) xiii, 38, 108, 123,
127, 129, 175
environmental autobiography 143
Erlich, Gretel (essayist) 4, 148
exile 137-42
fairy tales, fantasy 98, 149-53
forests 88-9, 92, 95, 98-100, 121,
160, 188
Freud, Sigmund (psychoanalyst) xiv,
4-5,82,87, 195,202
gardens 92, 96-8, 152,173
Gibbons, Stella (novelist) 77, 84
Gibran, Kahlil (poet) 71, 76, 112
good life, the 198, 200-4
Gradgrind approach to learning
149-50
Green parties, xiv 152, 204
Greene, Graham (novelist): in Berk-
hamsted 113-15; and books 111,
129; and borders 131-3; and bore-
Index
dom 127-8; on Brighton 109,
119-20; childhood of 38, 109,
111-15, 128-9, 131,142,145,147,
160; and civilization 109, 129-31;
and detenninism 112-14, 138;
creator of Greeneland 13, 107-11,
116, 119-20, 123-5, 128, 133, 137;
and home, homelessness 107,
111-15, 118,132,138,140,142; in
Liberia 108, 114, 128, 137, 139-40;
life and work 12-14; and London
110,113, 115,116-19, 129, 133;and
maps 114, 117-19, 126,131; on
Mexico 108,112,128, 137-9;
miscellaneous 9-10, 38, 79, 80,
187; on Nottingham 113, 115-16;
and politics 110-11; at school 109,
113-14, 132; in Sierra Leone 128,
138-9; on travel 123-4, 127-33,
137-8; on urban life 108-9, 112,
115-20
Grimm brothers (fairy tale compilers)
150,152,160
habituation. See adaptation
hamburger conswnption related to
ecocatastrophe 152
Hart, Roger (geographer) 148, 150,
153, 158-60, 171
hearing. See sound
home 107, 111-15, 118, 120-3, 127,
138, 140; ofauthor 164-6; centre of
child's world 157-8, 172-3; as
entrapment 107, 125, 140-2; and
homelessness 97, 118, 125, 138,
186; identification with 141; and
need for at-homeness with the
earth 202-4; and roots, genealogy
201-2. See also Greene; Lowry
Hopkins, Gerard Manley (poet) 87, 103
Howdendyke, East Yorkshire 160-71
225
Huxley, Aldous (novelist) 33, 36-7,
77, 109, 131, 195
inscape 87, 102-4
intimate sensing 201
Inuit, the 8, 46, 49-50, 195
Jenny Greenteeth (water sprite) 76
Joyce, James (novelist) 90, 134
Jung, Carl (psychoanalyst) 71, 87,
195
Kingsley, Charles (novelist) 39, 77
Laing, R.D. (psychiatrist) xi, xiv, 8,
104
Le Corbusier (arch~tect) 149, 152, 156
Liberia 108,114,128,137, 139-40
literary geography 9-11, 87-8, 141-2
London 110, 113-20, 177,180
Lopez, Barry (naturalist) 3, 52, 200-1
Lowry, Malcolm (novelist): in Cam-
bridge 179; on Canada 189-90;
and caverns 100-2; childhood of
89-93, 145, 177-9; on cities 176,
180-9; on civilization 121, 184,
187-91; on coastlines 93-6; in
Dollarton, British Colwnbia 16,
91,93, 101, 103-4, 121-3, 133,178;
and Eden 97, 99, 103, 135, 178, 191;
and exile 135, 178; on forests
98-100, 121; and gardens 96-8;
and home, homelessness 97,
122-3, 141, 178; life and work
14-17, 93, 178; in London 133, 177;
in Mexico 90, 92-3, 95-6, 99-104,
133-4, 136, 177, 179, 180-91;
miscellaneous 9, 10, 12, 82; on
mountains 100-2; in New York 91,
120, 133-8, 177; and the sea
89-96, 121, 179; and travel 100,
226
122-4, 133-6, 178, 180; and urban
development 97, 122-3; on Van-
couver 91, 93, 121, 178; as Sigbj0rn
Wilderness 91,100, 122-3, 134
Mexico 88-96,99-104, 108,112,121,
133-9, 179-91 passim. See also
Greene; Lowry
Monopoly 131
Moore, Henry (sculptor) 71, 88
mountains 88-9, 94-5, 100-2
Naipaul, V.S. (novelist) 124-5, 130
naming of landscape features 72-3,
76-7, 85, 169-70
New York 91, 120, 133-5, 177, 181,
185-6
odour, olfaction. See smell
Oedipus myth reinterpreted 202
Opie, Iona and Peter (childhood
culture specialists) 156-7, 171
Orwell, George (novelist) 9, 28, 115,
130,187, 190
Oz 151, 153
planning, environmental 42-5, 62-5,
171-3
playground planning 159-60, 171-3
pleasure, importance of 197
Pogo comic strip 191-2
Pope, Alexander (poet) 82-3
pornography, pornotopia 81-4, 137
Postman, Neil (cultural theorist) 146
progress 188-92, 203. See also
civilization
progress as Jesus Christ driving a
locomotive across a virgin forest
189
Proust, Marcel (novelist) 37-8, 45, 52
pygmies 195
Index
Quoodle, 21
Relph, Edward (geographer) 3,
191
Renault, Mary (novelist) 143
Rolling Stones, the (rock group) 150,
195
Romantics, the 202-4
St Paul 145, 173
St Paul's cathedral 151
Sandinistas (Nicaragua) 196-7
Schafer, Murray (composer) 48,
52-4, 65, 197. See also World
Soundscape Project
science, scientism xiii, 197-8, 202
sea, the 88-96, 119,121,179
sexscape 196
sexuality 73, 79-85,91, 137,150,161
Shakespeare, William (playwright)
80-1
Sierra Leone 128, 138-9
sight. See vision
Sillitoe, Alan (novelist) 116, 143
smell 6, 7, 132, 139, 197; of animals
21, 39-41; in autobiography 39-43;
in childhood 27, 38-42, 173; classi-
fication of 23; deodorization of
36-7, 44; history of 34-5; and
history of 34-5; and memory 22,
31, 37-42; and nosetraining 26,
44-5; and nosewitness 26; in outer
space 45; of persons 27-9; and
place 29-34; and planning 42-5;
preferences for 24-5; Proust on
37-8, 45; psychology of 23-5;
Raynor on 39, 41; of Russia 28,
31-2, 38; seasonality of 35-6; as
smellscape 25-7; urban vs rural
31-3; value of 22, 45; of working
classes 28
Index
social science, alternative modes of
expression in 198-200
sound: and aboriginal songlines
47-8; analysis of 56-60; of auto-
mobile traffic 51, 56-61, 63; of
birds 52, 56-9, 62, 64; and blind-
ness 53; changes in 50-1, 53-4,
57-8, 61-3; classification of 54,
57, 61; and deafness 53, 65; and
earcleaning 54; and earwitness 54;
Grano on 50; Inuit experience of
47, 49-50; keynotes 54, 55; mea-
surement problems of 54-6;
natural vs man-made 50-2, 58, 60;
as noise, 48-52, 63-5, 180-1; and
place 50-2; and planning 48-9,
52, 62-5; preferences for 49, 51-2,
59; and religion 47, 50-1; on
Saturna Island, British Columbia
63-4; Schafer on 48, 50-4, 65; and
social class 62; as soundmarks
54-5, 58; as soundscape 48-55;
urban vs rural 50, 53, 55, 61-5; in
Victoria, British Columbia 55-61;
and World Soundscape Project
26-7, 53-5, 65
suburbia 151, 171, 173, 188
taste 5-6, 195-7
television, effects of 146-7, 151,
161
Tolkien, J.R.R. (novelist) 75-6, 82,
98,101,152,157
touch 5-6, 78-80, 196-7
tourism 200-1
227
travel 100, 120, 122-4, 127-38,
141-3, 167, 200-9; British obses-
sion with 129-30, 134; in Lowry
133-6, 141, 178; and geographers
141-2; in Greene 127-33
Tuan, Yi-Fu (geographer) 8, 22, 69-
70, 78, 88,107,175,191, 202-4
Undset, Sigrid (novelist) 148
universal interconnectedness 202-4
Vancouver, British Columbia 91-3,
101, 121, 134, 178; as hell
187; compared with Mexico City
182, 189; and nature 189-90;
redevelopment of 184; sound-
scape of 53; ugliness of
183-4
Vietnam 137-8
vision xiv, 4-7, 49
where there's muck there's brass 24,
163
wilderness 88, 91, 100, 103, 117, 134,
178,182, 189-91
Williams, Raymond (cultural theorist)
155, 176
Wordsworth, William (poet) 145,
172, 203, 204
World Atlas of Eating Disorders
198-9
World Soundscape Project 26-7,
53-5, 65
York 167