Landscape and Memory. - book reviews

National Review, July 31, 1995 by Eric Gibson

FEEL LIKE hugging a tree? Want to take the family to Yellowstone National Park this summer, or idle with them in a Roman piazza admiring the play of water in a Bernini fountain? What impels us to do such things, and what kind of satisfaction do we expect from them? These are among the questions Simon Schama poses, and answers brilliantly, in his new book, which might better have been called Landscape into Memory. Mr. Schama's is no ordinary study of landscape or of nature. He is out to examine not so much landscape per se -- whether topography or art -- as the idea of landscape. He is interested in how man has shaped and interpreted the land and what forces, be they conscious or unconscious, have conditioned his approaches. In other words, Schama wants nothing less than to strip away the layers of myth that have grown up around certain parts of the natural world and even the idea of nature itself. He describes his process as an ``excavation,'' one aiming to delve ``below our conventional sight-level to recover the veins of myth and memory that lie beneath the surface.'' It is an apt metaphor.

Reading the book one has the feeling of reaching far into the past, beyond history and into the most inchoate zones of our collective psyche. It is a steady but relentless uncovering, like peeling away the layers of an onion or, well, counting the rings inside a tree.

(It is impossible to discuss a book of this kind without resorting to nature metaphors -- proof, maybe, of Schama's point about the firm grip of landscape on our imaginations.) The questions Mr. Schama poses are fundamental ones, so much so that it is easy to see why no one has troubled to look into them before -- one often misses what is right in front of one's nose. Art historian Barbara Novak's 1978 Nature and Culture, about nineteenth-century American landscape painting, is one of the few exceptions. And there have been a number of fictional treatments of the subject, notably Andrei Konchalovsky's lyrical cinematic epic Siberiade (released here in the early 1980s), which traced the hundred-year history of one small corner of the then Soviet Union. In keeping with the character of his subject, what Schama has written is no tidy, linear history. On the contrary, it is hard to think of a recent book that has drawn on such a vast store of material, or that ranges so widely in its intellectual and geographical scope. Mr. Schama trains his gaze on Poland, England, the American West, ancient and Baroque Rome, and the forest of Fontainebleau, among other places. Masterpieces of high art such as the paintings of the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich keep company with kitsch icons such as Mount Rushmore. Disciplines as varied as art history, military history, botany, and physics are used to disclose the particular truths the author is after. We learn about everything from the origins of Americans' sanctification of the West to such small items as the etymology of words such as ``landscape'' and ``forest'' and idioms such as ``caught red-handed,'' or the particular kind of wood the English navy needed for the curved portion of a hull during the sixteenth century. And can there be a recent work of non-fiction that boasts such a varied and lively cast of characters? It runs from Hermann Goering to Sir Walter Raleigh, and from Ansel Adams to Henry Hastings, the seventeenth-century Englishman who entertained his guests in a room that had been built in the hollow of an oak; his house ``was filled with an inconceivable number of hunting, pointing, and retrieving dogs,'' and on the walls there hung ``two seasons' worth of fox-skins with the occasional polecat pelt mixed in among them.''

What is perhaps Mr. Schama's most powerful idea comes at the very beginning of the book. ``Although we are accustomed to separate nature and human perception into two realms, they are, in fact, indivisible,'' he writes. ``Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.'' In other words, that lovely view you admire, that trek you take, isn't ``natural'' but is, on some level -- possibly many -- a construct.

Does this mean that it is all phony, that everything ``natural'' is just a Disney concoction of fakery and fantasy? No. Schama is simply arguing that man has been shaping the land since time began, and that even if we could, at this point, encounter an ``untouched'' patch of earth, our response to it would itself be anything but virgin. Schama's tracing of the impact of man and mind on nature makes for the best reading in the book. Consider the American West. We take for granted our present-day veneration of the redwoods, sequoias, and other such natural wonders. Yet when America's early settlers didn't regard woods and forests as simply barbaric, writes Mr. Schama, they took the Puritan view that equated forests with pagan darkness and profanity. Hence when the sequoias were discovered in the nineteenth-century, their majesty was not, to say the least, immediately apparent. They were regarded as freaks of nature and treated accordingly; famously, one tree was felled and planed into a bowling alley, the stump used as a dance floor. It was only the gathering notion that anything so big must have been around since time began (that is, since the birth of Christ) -- coupled with the corollary idea that by allowing such vast witnesses to flourish in America, God had signaled it as His chosen land -- that transformed them from oddities to votaries.