Blotted Out In The Black: Elizabeth Bowen and Rural Darkness
On an image of nightly encounter, ambivalent nightwalkers and Irish republicans, and a friend's take on the anti-anthropocentrism of rural darkness
Point of view: you’re a young Anglo-Irish aristocrat called Lois, going for an evening stroll in the grounds of your ancestral seat. You’re enjoying the solitude, the darkness, and can’t yet bring yourself to go inside. You turn down a grassy path into the shrubbery garden, whose darkness always scared you as a child. Then, to your horror, you realise you’re not alone. Someone – a man in a trench-coat – is walking through the garden:
The trench-coat rustled across the path ahead to the swing of a steady walker. She stood by the holly immovable, blotted out in the black, and there passed within reach of her hand, with the rise and fall of a stride, some resolute profile powerful as a thought. In gratitude for its fleshness she felt prompted to make some contact; not to be known of seemed like a doom of extinction…
Despite the impulse towards contact, to escape the walker’s (non-)place of detached observation, Lois decides to stay hidden. She lets the man pass by and heads home, where she pictures her family ‘drawing up closer to one another, tricked by the half-revelation of lamplight’. Best to be on the safe side.
Bowen’s Darkness
This is from Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929). Bowen was an Anglo-Irish novelist whose own ancestral seat, Bowen’s Court in north Cork, is the model for the ‘big house’ belonging to Lois’s parents. Bowen’s fiction moves between the Irish countryside and the English city and suburb. She’s a great writer but under-read, because the presence of posh people having parties blinds a lot of readers to her psychological perceptiveness, her daring style, and the poetic reach of her imagination. (Jane Austen is also full of posh people having parties, and no one minds; it’s a strange quirk that we find cultural remoteness easier to redeem the greater the historical distance.)
Bowen’s has a soft spot for the night. Like all nocturnal souls she sees much more in it than danger. One of her most successful novels, The Death of the Heart (1938) tells the story of a teenage girl, Portia, marooned by her illegitimacy. Portia’s childhood was spent with her mother, wandering between European hotels. She has fond memories of summer nights in the Swiss mountains, staying in a pension above Lucerne, she and her mother walking ‘arm-in-arm in the dark, up the steep zigzag… hearing the night rain sough down through the pines’. Night for Bowen is peaceful as well as foreboding; it provides a refuge for those misplaced in society, who arrive and leave ‘before the season’.
Republic of the Night
‘It must be because of Ireland’, thinks Lois as she watches the man in the trench-coat pass, ‘that he was in such a hurry’. She speculates that he’s come ‘down from the mountains, making a short cut through their demesne’. It’s 1920, and the Irish War of Independence has begun. IRA men are camping out in the mountains; some of them are the sons of tenant farmers who have surreally cordial relations with Lois’s parents. The British Army has a garrison nearby, and English soldiers come to the house to play tennis, their presence tolerated by Lois’s mother, Lady Naylor, though with an edge of snobbery: English people are always talking about their insides, she thinks. Lois fancies one of the soldiers, but about the conflict she hasn’t made up her mind. She’s tempted to call to the trespasser with a republican slogan. She knows that his attachment to Ireland differs from her own, that his aspirations will ultimately imperil her family. But her fear is mixed with excitement, not with hatred.
What Bowen is doing in this nocturnal encounter – one of the most thrilling I’ve read – is, I think, rehabilitating the figure of the nightwalker. A venerable collective prejudice towards those who wander at night becomes, here, a more ambivalent mixture of fear and attraction. As Matthew Beaumont shows in his excellent Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (2015), a social stigma with at least medieval origins surrounding nocturnal activity endured long into modernity, beyond the advent of electric light. A ‘nightwalker’ was once a euphemism for a prostitute, and even in the nineteenth century the strange logic of contamination that underpins this designation – as if night is not just the setting for the supposedly heinous act, but part and parcel of it – persisted, and perhaps persists today. Those who walk at night are sometimes up to no good. But they are also setting themselves free, and this ambivalence also characterises the revolution to which the trench-coated man has committed himself: a hopeful and lofty cause, accomplished through acts of terrible violence. Bowen borrows from the nightwalker’s stigma, but only lightly; her mysterious man has more glamour than villainy.
Rods, Cones and the Rural Night
We forget the overwhelming darkness of the rural night: the total absence of any artificial light; the initial shock of a world without contour; the absence of navigable paths; the seemingly total silence actually composed of strange, non-human noise. Lois’s fear and excitement have something to do with the thrill of immersing oneself in this rural night. But we don’t talk about it enough, perhaps because most of the people who think and write about the night are interested, like Beaumont, in the nocturnal city.
My friend Persis, an audio producer for the FT, wrote her Masters dissertation on experiences of rural darkness. As part of an investigation into (night)walking as a possible methodology, she asked volunteers to record their experiences of walking at night without a torch. I was one of the volunteers, and had a very enjoyable and only slightly terrifying time wandering through the Rivelin Valley in darkest Derbyshire in the small hours of a summer’s night.
Persis was arguing that this nightwalking method – and nightwalking in general – can challenge ways of relating to nature and landscape which are modern and anthropocentric. If this is true, it can be traced to the ways our eyes perceive. There are two photoreceptors in a human retina: rods and cones. Rods are far more sensitive to shape and movement than cones, but don’t process colour. At night, we perceive only with the rod receptors: we don’t see in colour, but we are very sensitive to shape and movement. After we let our eyes acclimatise, the world becomes three-dimensional, a series of moving forms rather than a set of individuated figures. At night the line between figure and ground, signal and noise, dissolves.
To look at night, then, is to experience a way of being in the world which doesn’t elevate vision into tyrannical hegemony over the other senses. Your eyes can judge where someone is, but to know who they are, you have to ask them. This is also, I think, a move away from abstraction. We don’t process colour at night, but the world is nevertheless headily and perhaps overwhelmingly material to us. It feels significant that it’s very difficult to take photographs in the deep darkness of the rural night, or at least the kind of photographs we normally take – so compulsively and so often that we begin to look at the world as potential raw material for more photographs, in which the colours are neatly and inoffensively distributed, the subjects to the fore and the worldly matter safely relegated, like stage scenery, to the back. We look at these photographs on screens full of artificial colour, which further distances us from the actual, real world. If Lois were standing there in the shrubbery garden in 2024, maybe she’d slide out her smartphone. But she’d be hard pressed to take a picture of the revolutionary in his trench-coat: she’d have to record his steps on the grass, his steady breathing, as he walked by.