BOOKS Richard Jefferies

By HENRY WILLIAMSON

RICHARD JEFFERIES, who died in 1887, was one of those men who are born with an extra-sensory awareness of the wild or natural world, and the strange feeling of joy which this brings in youth when one is alone in the sunshine of wild places.

This sharp, nervous, semi-automatic aware- ness is natural to wild creatures, particularly to birds which migrate and find their way back across deserts, seas, through mountain passes and past forests and lakes to the very place of their birth and breeding. A young cuckoo, flying alone by stages south from the Midlands to the Chan- nel in August, will find its way to Africa and, if alive the following spring, will make its way back alone to the hedge or meadow or heath of its first month of life.

This feeling, known today as super-sensory perception, is akin to William Blake's 'enlarged and numerous senses' of the poet, to whom comes, in moments of inspiration, the very essence of truth and beauty, to be recorded and reinforced by the poet's technique with words. A. E. Housman has told how, when the sensation for a poem came to him, perhaps when he was shaving, the skin of his face became hard, and he was liable to cut himself if he continued.

Such a man, or woman, usually attracts disciples, inspires affection and love; and Samuel J. Looker was one such for the works of Jefferies. He himself was not a poet, nor was he a born writer; but from his 'early youth in the 'nineties, in the deep Essex countryside,' he became obsessed after reading Richard Jefferies's Story of My Heart, the main scenes of which are laid on the Wiltshire downs. Here is Jefferies:

There were grass-grown tumuli on the hills to which of old I used to walk, sit down at the foot of one of them, and think. Some warrior had been interred there in the ante- historic times. The sun of the summer morning shone on the dome of sward, and the air came softly up from the wheat below, the tips of the grasses swayed as it passed sighing faintly, it ceased, and the bees hummed by to the thyme and heathbells. I became absorbed in the glory of the day, the sunshine, the sweet air, the yellowing corn turning from its sappy green to summer's noon of gold, the lark's song like a waterfall In the sky. I felt at that moment that I was like the spirit of the man whose body was interred in the tumulus; I could understand and feel his existence the same as my own. . . .

For more than half a century, Looker's life was devoted to the art and mystery of the dead writer. And now, ironically, his biography of Jefferies appears a few months after his own death—completed by another hand.* There have been other biographies of Jefferies, who was the son of a smallholder near Swindon. He was born in 1848, and died of the effects of hysteria, according to the doctors. For the last four years of his life he suffered great pain. This drove him to Harley Street. The specialists dismissed his illness as imaginary, despite the fact that his body was thin and wasted, and he had scarcely strength to walk.

* RICHARD JEFFERIES : MAN OF THE FIELDS. A Biography and 4etters. By Samuel J. Looker and Crichton Porteous. (John Baker, 45s.) Sir Walter Besant, when Jefferies died, rushed out his Eulogy of Richard Jefferies in 'forty-eight hours,' the money going to the widow and two small children to help them continue a bare existence. Henry S. Salt, who declared that homo sapiens should be horn° rapier's, wrote a short book on Jefferies, classing him, with reservations, with Rousseau. Edward Thomas published his short biography in 1909.

W. H. Hudson wrote Nature and Downland in the cottage, at Goring-on-Sea, where Jefferies had died some years previously. There' Hudson saw a starving tramp, with the face of Jefferies, warped to misery, passing down the lane to the sea, and saying hesitantly, `Can you spare a copper?' This meeting evoked that famous pas- sage of grief and love for the 'cruel fate' of Jefferies, whom Hudson had never met in the flesh.

This new biography puts everything in. During all his adult life, Samuel J. Looker searched for manuscripts of Jefferies. He visited sale-ropms, bookshops, and the dead writer's relations; and by the 1940s was in a position to publish the following volumes, containing journalistic material which had never previously been re- printed, and new matter from diaries, notebooks and unfinished manuscripts:

1941, The Nature Diaries and Notebooks of Richard Jefferies. Edited with an introduc- tion by Samuel J. Looker.

1944, Jefferies' Countryside. Nature Essays by Richard Jefferies. Edited with an introduc- tion and notes by Samuel J. Looker. Richard Jefferies' London. Edited with an introduction and notes by Samuel J. Looker.

1946, The Spring of the Year and Other Essays, by Richard Jefferies. Edited with an intro- duction and notes by Samuel J. Looker.

1946, Richard Jefferies, A Tribute by Various Writers. Edited by Samuel J. Looker.

1947; The Story of My Heart. Edited with the first draft of the author's (now printed for the first time) with an introduction and notes by Samuel J. Looker.

1948, The Old House at Coate and Other Hitherto Unpublished Esssays by Richard Jefferies. Edited with an introduction and notes by Samuel J. Looker.

1948, The True Richard Jefferies. By Samuel J. Looker. An examination of the misunder- standings of Malcolm Elwin in The Essen- tial Richard Jefferies.'

The Jefferles Companion. Selected and ar- ranged by Samuel J. Looker.

1957, Field and Farm Esssays Now First Collected, with Some from Mss, by Richard Jefferies. Edited with an introduction and notes by Samuel J. Looker.

I met Mr. Looker on one occasion only, at Swindon on July 19, 1948, during the Jefferies centenary celebrations. The Civic Centre was the venue, a cool and light hall with many paintings on the walls, all aspects of the Jefferies country- side. There were glass-topped stands containing his first editions and MSS. The idea of a memorial was not to be a stone effigy standing in a square, but a Field Naturalists' Club for young people. Could this be the Swindon through which the thin, bearded, long-haired, introverted youth, working as a reporter on a local paper—know- ing in loneliness that his gifts were authentic, that the `pale ray from heaven' had touched him —hurried along the streets, knowing his nick- names of `Loony Dick' and `Lazy Loppet,' and fearing derision? For Jefferies was a prophet, a seer: his most private thoughts, revealed in this present biography, show him to be nearly a cen- tury before- his time. He lived in the hopes for a fuller, better life : a community freed from the canker of poirerty, of a commercially competi- tive civilisation where the weakest went to, and died under, the wall . and periodically lost one set of chains in order to die upon the battlefields of a disunited Europe, where trade- clash was followed by bomb-crash.

' At luncheon in the Goddard Arms, on that summer day of 1948, I found myself next to Mr. Looker. I was not at all sure how this authority on Jefferies would regard the amateur efforts of myself, in the past, to extend the range of Jefferies's readers. In 1938 I had issued a brief anthology of his works, together with an edition of the superb Hodge and his Masters; and Mr. Looker, in 'his Worthing Cavalcade of 1944, had omitted, in its otherwise comprehensive records of what had been written in praise of Jefferies since his death, all reference to my book, and my other writings in praise of Jefferies. The omissions, at the time of looking over the Worthing Cavalcade, were puzzling: but later, in Mr. Looker's introduction to the Notebooks of Richard Jefferies, there was a paragraph which suggested a possible solution: Jefferies has . . . never received due recog- nition from critics and nature writers. some of whom, without acknowledgement, have them- selves climbed to success on his shoulders.

Was it perhaps a generalisation which indicated only Mr. Looker's idee Are that his hero was not properly recognised? Never received due ,recog- nition from critics and nature writers? SurelY the good shepherd had taken a glance now and again at the nine and ninety within the fold? To name but a few whose names occurred at once to my mind—Edward Garnett, Edward Thomas, E. V. Lucas, Henry S. Salt, D. H. Lawrence, Wilfrid Ewart May of Revelation'), `T. E. Lawrence,' W. H. Hudson, William Beach Thomas, J. C. Squire, A. G. Street, Adrian Bell, R. M. Lockley, Reginald Arkell, and Myself-- among others.

Of course Mr. Looker knew of the appre- ciation of these professional writer's, for only a month after writing the introduction to the Note- books he was writing another for Chronicles of the Hedges and declaring: There is no longer any doubt among reputable judges as to [Jefferies'] lasting service to Letters.

Mr. Looker was probably, like myself, a tem- peramental sort of cove. For, later on, regarding a little dubiously another of his compilations, I read this: I do not care much for the long and porten- tous lists of acknowledgements of trivialities. It has always seemed to me that such lists are 0 kind of literary snobbery. Essential help II another matter and there are four people to whom I must pay sincere tribute . . .

and then, looking about him, the good shepherd proceeds to thank several ladies and gentlemen whom he names for their parts in helping with the Notebooks.

But if I was in some sort of disfavour for doing what Mr. Looker was doing, so in his time was Edward Thomas: for, calling on Jefferies's widow in 1908, he mentioned that he had visited several people, for information, whom Mrs'

Jefferies disliked. She included Thomas in her dislike, apparently.

`She practically refuses me any help' (wrote E. T. at the time) 'and leaves important ques- tions unanswered. Her son has R. J.'s notebooks, but she will not give me his address so that might apply for them.'

And skilfully, this time. Mr. Looker makes no comment. He is after those Notebooks himself, and later they come into his possession, from the son in Canada.

Now we -have everything laid out before us. Mr. Looker has put all into the 258 pages, with the faithful help of Mr. Crichton Porteous, him- self a novelist of the countryside. The biography suffers, at tifnes, from the 'onlie begetter' being too explicit. But the book, without the form, is the result of discoveries, after continuous labour (recalling that of Mr. George D. Painter in his life of Proust), which reveal how Jefferies en- riched the life about him. Thus Jefferies's father, a fine character as lden in Amaryllis at the Fair, turns out to be only a little more appreciative of his son's writings than the father of D. H. Lawrence, who said to his son a year or two before D. H. L. died, 'What, did thee get fifty pounds for that book! And thee't never done a day's work in the't life!'. Here is James Luckett Jefferies, 'I did not see Richard's writings or take -any delight in them.'

I found it not easy to read, the form is diffuse. It is a tragic story, and one thing comes clearly from the facts of Jefferies's long and pain- ful illness. All the symptoms point to cancer, for which in those days there appears to have been no recognition, no sympathy, and no treatment.