‘My grandmother had a great interest in biblical history,’ says Peter, ‘and also on the theological thinking typical of the 19th century Anglican church.’
Jefferies, Emerson, Barrie’s courage: I am struck by these philosophical, spiritual and theological interests in a writer so pragmatic and analytical. The metaphysical musings of these writers clearly appealed to Edith. And yet Edith does not seem to have been tempted to follow any of them down the path of spiritual revelation through nature in her own work, even though it is such a common theme in so much nature writing. There is nothing I have read that is in the slightest bit transcendent in Edith’s work. It’s possible that the conventional and private rituals of faith, of prayer and church, fulfilled this need, but Peter tells me that she did not go to church after falling out with the minister at St John’s in Blackburn. Edith’s public writing was firmly grounded and material, robustly optimistic and positive, and yet her private reading suggests some need for solace, guidance or consolation. I cannot help but wonder what private discomfort in her life might have required that salve.
Some people write to get to know themselves better. But maybe some people write to get away from themselves.
‘Who knows what this urge is all about,’ asks writer Anne Lamott, ‘to appear somewhere outside yourself, instead of feeling stuck inside your muddled but stroboscopic mind, peering out like a little undersea animal – a spiny blenny, for instance – from inside your tiny cave?’
She thinks writing is a powerful antidote to narcissism, to being obsessed with ourselves, to our own ‘colorectal theology’ as she calls it – which offers hope to no-one.
A cloud of tiny blue butterflies hovers around the young acacias on top of the hill. We planted the acacias from tubestock a few years ago and they still require careful attention. They are vulnerable to drought, the blunderings of kangaroos, the depredations of insects, all of which wage warfare on the smallest, weakest trees, stripping them to bare stumps until changing seasons bring a fresh spurt of growth.
I frown at the butterflies, flirting flashes of lilac-blue, and inspect a tree more closely. Large ants march up and down on illicit business, their forelegs threatening at my approach. They emerge from a neat caldera of pebbles at the base of the tree. The butterflies and the ants are connected. Lycaenid butterflies – Nabokov’s blues – often live in complicated concert with their ant attendants.
A third of all butterflies are lycaenids – blues, coppers, hair-streaks, harvesters and azures. And they are known for their often complex associations with particular ants, plants and parasites. The caterpillars secrete sweet ‘honeydew’ from their glands, which is milked by the ants, who then defend the caterpillars from predators. Some ants shepherd the caterpillars into their nest below ground to form their chrysalis. Other caterpillars have turned carnivore, eating ant larvae instead of leaves. It is just the sort of story Edith would have found fascinating.
When Vladimir Nabokov fled the Russian revolution in 1941, he harboured a lifelong love of lepidoptery. He studied zoology and comparative languages at Cambridge, emigrated to America, volunteered to curate the lepidoptery collection at the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology and revised the systematics of New World Lycaenid butterflies, particularly those of the largest Polyommatus ‘blues’. He proposed that these blue butterflies had arrived in the New World from Europe in successive waves, each giving rise to particular groups. At the same time Nabokov was also employed at Wellesley College as a lecturer in comparative languages, and wrote novels. Lolita, his first and most famous English-language novel, was composed while on a summer butterfly-collecting trip across the western states.
Some claim that Nabokov’s science stimulated his writing, or that his writing stimulated his science. Steven J. Gould suggested instead that they are both manifestations of the same thing: that all of Nabokov’s work, whether literary or biological, was stimulated by his love of detail, contemplation and symmetry. Nabokov himself is often said to have expressed it more controversially.
‘A writer should have the precision of a poet,’ he declared, ‘and the imagination of a scientist.’
Not everyone favoured the famed Russian writer who ‘dabbled’ in science. Some dismissed him as an amateur. In the shadow of Nabokov’s overwhelming literary legacy, his lepidopteran theory lay on the periphery of scientific thinking. But old scientific papers never die. They are always retrievable, connected through a web of systematic referencing and a punctilious obligation to acknowledge predecessors in the history of ideas. When Nabokov’s theory was retrieved and exposed to twenty-first-century technology, DNA analysis proved his theory right.
‘Our results show that Nabokov’s inferences based on morphological characters (primarily of the male genitalia) were uncannily correct,’ the authors concluded.
Nabokov would surely have been delighted.
‘The pleasures and rewards of literary inspirations are nothing,’ he once wrote, ‘beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.’
I am often told that scientists can’t write. I don’t know what that means. Science, like any academic discipline, is as much a literary art as it is a creative act. All academics are writers of a highly specialised, stylised and structured writing intended for a very particular audience, even if not of great mass appeal. Academics generally do not write in an engaging, readable style. They don’t need to. Their audience will dig through the most complex impenetrable prose to find the jewel of an idea within. They are ‘high-motivation readers’. To write for the general public is to write for a low-motivation audience. An audience that will flick the page, drop the book, click to the next screen at the slightest hint of boredom. Both approaches take
