Words on the West Wind: Selected Essays from The Adelphi, 1924-1950: Henry Williamson Collections, #8

By Henry Williamson

The Adelphi was an English literary journal founded by John Middleton Murry and published between 1922 and 1955. Noted contributors included Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, H. E Bates, and Henry Williamson. For a brief period – three issues only, beginning with the October-December 1948 issue – Henry Williamson took over the editorship from Middleton Murry, before handing the magazine on to George Godwin. However, Williamson's first contribution to the magazine was in September 1924, with a short essay (included here), 'The Doom of the Peregrine Falcon'. Also selected for inclusion are a number of important essays – for example, 'The Lost Legions' and 'Notes of a 'Prentice Hand' – together with 'A Note on Tarka the Otter' (which includes the original ending to that classic of nature writing) and Williamson's five editorial pieces which have the overall title of 'Words on the West Wind'.
The distinguished Cornish poet, Charles Causley, is also represented here, with his 'Man into Fox', an insightful essay on the importance to him of Henry Williamson's writing.
Williamson championed many young writers, and none more so than James Farrar, who served in the RAF during the Second World War and was killed in 1944, aged just 20. A talented writer but unpublished at his death, Farrar left behind poems and prose of a high quality. Williamson published several pieces by Farrar in The Adelphi, which are included here – 'Hayfield' and 'Atlantic Coast', and other fragments. Williamson both edited and wrote the introduction to the collected works of Farrar, The Unreturning Spring, first published in 1950.
Anne Williamson contributes an introduction to this collection, 'The West Wind Blows Again' providing the background to Williamson's involvement with The Adelphi, while Richard Williamson, Henry's son, waxes lyrical on 'That Damned Motorcar' (HW's temperamental Aston Martin, which plays its part in Williamson's editorials).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Henry Williamson
• Release date: Jun 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781873507490

Henry Williamson

The writer Henry Williamson was born in London in 1895. Naturalist, soldier, journalist, farmer, motor enthusiast and author of over fifty books, his descriptions of nature and the First World War have been highly praised for their accuracy. He is best known as the author of Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1928 and was filmed in 1977. By one of those extraordinary coincidences, Henry Williamson died while the crew were actually filming the death scene of Tarka. His writing falls into clear groups: 1) Nature writings, of which Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon are the most well known, but which also include, amongst many others, The Peregrine's Saga, The Old Stag and The Phasian Bird. 2) Henry Williamson served throughout the First World War.The Wet Flanders Plain, A Patriot's Progress, and no less than five books of the 15-volume Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (How Dear is Life, A Fox Under My Cloak, The Golden Virgin, Love and the Loveless and A Test to Destruction) cover the reality of the years 1914–1918, both in England and on the Western Front. 3) A further grouping concerns the social history aspect of his work in the 'Village' books (The Village Book and The Labouring Life), the four-volume Flax of Dream and the volumes of the Chronicle. But all of these groups can be found in any of his books. Some readers are only interested in a particular aspect of his writing, but to truly understand Henry Williamson's achievement it is necessary to take account of all of his books, for their extent reflects his complex character. The whole of life, the human, animal and plant worlds, can be found within his writings. He was a man of difficult temperament but he had a depth of talent that he used to the full. The Henry Williamson Society was founded in 1980, and has published a number of collections of Williamson's journalism, which are now being published as e-books.

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This collection first published 2000

E-book edition 2013

Smashwords edition

The Henry Williamson Society

14 Nether Grove

Longstanton

Cambs

The Henry Williamson Society gratefully acknowledges the following copyright permissions: The Henry Williamson Literary Estate for the use of the material by Henry Williamson; David Higham Associates for the use of Man into Fox by Charles Causley; and the Literary Estate of James Farrar for the use of Hayfield and Atlantic Coast.

The West Wind Blows Again © Anne Williamson 2000

‘That Damned Motorcar’ © Richard Williamson 2000

ISBN 978-1-873507-49-0 (EPUB)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders.

WORDS ON THE WEST WIND

CONTENTS:

The West Wind Blows Again - ANNE WILLIAMSON

The Doom of the Peregrine Falcon - HENRY WILLIAMSON

Birth of the Phasian Bird - HENRY WILLIAMSON

‘The Lost Legions’ - HENRY WILLIAMSON

Hayfield - JAMES FARRAR

Atlantic Coast - JAMES FARRAR

Report on the Richard Jefferies Centenary - HENRY WILLIAMSON

A Note on Tarka the Otter - HENRY WILLIAMSON

Man into Fox - CHARLES CAUSLEY

Notes of a ’Prentice Hand - HENRY WILLIAMSON

Words on the West Wind -  HENRY WILLIAMSON

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

‘That Damned Motorcar’ - RICHARD WILLIAMSON

The West Wind Blows Again: an introduction

ANNE WILLIAMSON

IN this latest collection of Henry Williamson’s fugacious journalistic writings to be published by The Henry Williamson Society, John Gregory has chosen to present a selection of material from The Adelphi, the prestigious journal founded by John Middleton Murry in June 1923 which, exhausted by the struggle (particularly financial) to keep it going and in poor health, he handed over to Henry Williamson in May 1948. Henry’s association with The Adelphi and with Murry himself has been fully documented in my essay ‘Millennium Revelations’.¹ We learn from Henry’s first editorial when he took over the journal in 1948 that he sought it ‘eagerly’, having earlier read Murry’s ‘The Lost Legions’ in a copy of The Athenæum in a ‘London library’ in January 1920, that first difficult winter after his demobilisation. In 1923 Henry Williamson was struggling to make his name: the first two volumes of The Flax of Dream were published, The Beautiful Years (1921) and Dandelion Days (1922), and also The Lone Swallows (1922). The Peregrine’s Saga (November 1923) was imminent.

To begin with The Adelphi appeared monthly, but the only early copy in HW’s archive is Volume 2, No. 4, September 1924 which contains his short contribution ‘The Doom of the Peregrine Falcon’. Its content is of course part of Henry’s thinking and writing in The Peregrine’s Saga, but the conservation aspect is here more clearly and succinctly expressed. During 1924 Henry had acted as tutor to the young Patrick Foulds and his sister. ² Patrick was to be the model for the boy in The Scandaroon (1972), the last book Henry wrote. ‘The Doom of the Peregrine Falcon’ is almost a synopsis for that book. Thus we have in 1924 the genesis of what was not to emerge until almost fifty years later – a book written with that same freshness and clarity as Henry’s earliest work.

Henry had no further personal contact with Murry until the 1940s. From that time he contributed regularly to The Adelphi. Murry’s editorials urge adherence to a ‘back to the soil’ philosophy, showing how closely he and HW thought in principle: ‘if beauty is ever to be restored to the national life it can only be by restoring the reverence for the Earth.’³ In April 1945 Henry provided a lyrical piece ‘Walk in Spring’, laden with symbolism, taking his reader out along those familiar cliffs on the Devon coast:

The spirit of the tree endures like the spirit of men, to renew hope with the sun in the sky. Here among the black and savage thorns break the blossoms of its happy morning, the all of its endurance. Nothing so innocent as the opening buds of the blackthorn; the white petal beauty is of the air, wan-travelling starlight. Delicate and coral are the stamens within the white buds of the thorn; coral the lips of the bride, virginal, sad with all the loveliness and [sic] ancient sunlight.⁴

We are then brought down to earth with familiar tales of Muggy Smith and John Kift. In the next issue Henry’s contribution was ‘Village Children of the Twenties’. One must note that at this time he was revising the Village books and thus was using material that was to hand! An advertisement for Tales of a Devon Village (and other Faber publications) appears on the back of the October 1945 issue with attendant blurb quoted from John O’London (by the critic Sir Jack Squire): Few writers hold so surely the balance between outer and inner truth; fewer so generously share their vision with their reader.

Henry chose for the early 1946 edition ‘The Sun that Shines on the Dead’⁵, material from The Wet Flanders Plain which he obviously thought as appropriate to the end of the Second World War as he had felt it had been of the First. ‘The war had brought no purification to the world. . . . What you seek is lost forever in ancient sunlight, which arises again as Truth.’ April 1946 also saw Murry printing the first contribution from James Farrar, the poignant essay ‘Hayfield’ (which is included in this work), with further items in ensuing issues. In early 1947 HW contributed a strange and difficult article ‘From A Wartime Norfolk Journal: Easter 1944’.⁶ It ranks in its tone with his ‘soliloquy’ from the tower of Georgeham church ‘Surview and Farewell’ found in The Labouring Life. Again, with the revision of the Village books so recent, that train of thought would have been in the forefront of his mind.

Charles Causley must surely be one of the most retiring and modest poets ever. Murry recognised his worth early, including four of his poems in the July 1947 issue, well before Causley’s first collections of poetry were published in 1951. His critical piece on Henry, ‘Man into Fox’ (reprinted in this work), appeared after HW had passed the journal over to George Godwin. Causley’s percipient eye takes us to the exact centre of what HW is all about.

Now to The Adelphi under Henry Williamson’s guiding hand. There are a few scribbles on his file copy of Murry’s last issue indicating some modifications to the cover that HW wished made, without altering the overall look of the journal (which has been recaptured in the design of this present volume). He also had a small flyer printed. As well as subscription details – ten shillings a year including postage – it stated: ‘The Adelphi is a quarterly magazine with a policy of reality in the resurgence of Western civilisation, based on the values of soil and work.’ – the central essence of HW’s philosophy.

The first issue under the new editor contained, apart from HW’s own contributions, the second part of an article by Herbert Read ‘Education for Peace’.⁷ ‘I believe that nothing less than a complete recasting or re-orientation of our education system can promote peace, can save mankind from annihilating wars.’ A thought very similar to HW’s own at the end of the First World War. This issue also contains a prose essay by Charles Causley of further amusing reminiscences of his naval days in Malta and three poems; Alister Kershaw, HW’s new friend, contributed three poems but also he had persuaded HW to contact Richard Aldington, who sent in a passage from his new biography of the eccentric naturalist Charles Waterton. This of course was the genesis of the friendship between these two.⁸ Other items were from various friends of HW. Maurice Renshaw, part of the Renshaw family from Instow, contributed ‘The Spate’ about fishing in a rainstorm; there is a poem by Ruth Tomalin⁹ and four poems by Edward Pine, a classics scholar and teacher and a family friend for many years.

In the next issue HW began ‘Words on the West Wind’ which tells us a great deal about his thoughts at this time, as does ‘Notes of a ’Prentice Hand’, particularly on Tolstoi’s War and Peace and his own work. It is of great importance that these articles are back in print, accessible to new readers and now permanently available. The West Wind blows again.

But Henry found himself faced with a problem. Firstly, despite the fact that Ann Thomas bore the brunt of the work on The Adelphi, to a man of HW’s temperament it could only act as an irritant, a distraction from his purpose to get to grips at last with his own story of war and peace – A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Secondly, he had in the summer of 1948, almost immediately after setting up the new regime, met and fallen deeply in love with Christine Duffield who was shortly to become his second wife, to Ann’s devastation. The only solution was to get rid of The Adelphi. There are no details about how it was handed over to George Godwin other than that we know Murry was extremely upset about Henry’s action. ‘Words on the West Wind’ continued, in which we follow the honeymoon visit of Henry and Christine through France, briefly stopping at the battlefields again, and on down to the south coast and the home of Richard Aldington at Le Lavendou, and then later over the Simplon pass to contact publishers in Italy. All in the temperamental Aston-Martin: as Henry himself calls it in ‘Words on the West Wind’ – that damned motorcar.

Notes:

(The Henry Williamson Society Journal is abbreviated to HWSJ; Henry Williamson to HW; John Middleton Murry to JMM.)

1. Anne Williamson, ‘Millennium Revelations’, HWSJ, No. 35, September 1999, pp. 38-66.

2. See my biography Henry Williamson: Tarka and the Last Romantic (Sutton, 1995) p. 93 for details.

3. JMM, ‘Beauty and the Beast’, The Adelphi, Vol. 20, No. 2, Jan – March 1944, pp. 33-38.

4. HW, ‘A Walk in Spring’, The Adelphi, April – June 1945, pp. 130-134.

5. HW, ‘The Sun that Shines on the Dead’, The Adelphi, Part I, Vol. 22, No. 2, Jan – March 1946, pp. 72-79; Part II, Vol. 22, No. 3, April – June 1946, pp. 130-134.

6. HW, ‘From A Wartime Norfolk Journal: Easter 1944’, The Adelphi, Vol. 23, No. 2, Jan – March 1947, pp. 96-97. Also HWSJ, No. 36, September 2000.

7. Herbert Read, ‘Education for Peace’, The Adelphi, Part I, Vol. 24, No. 4, July – Sept 1948, pp. 193-198; Part II, Vol. 25, No. 1, Oct – Dec 1948, pp.12-16.

8. Anne Williamson, ‘The Genius of Friendship: Part II, Richard Aldington, HWSJ, No. 28, September 1993, pp. 7-21; also Alister Kershaw, ‘Henry Williamson’, ibid, pp. 24-33. Also see my biography of HW.

9. Author of many books, Ruth Tomalin contributed ‘Patriot’s Progress’ in Henry Williamson, The Man, The Writings – A Symposium, ed. Fr Brocard Sewell (Tabb House, 1980).

The Doom of the Peregrine Falcon

HENRY WILLIAMSON

IN my heart I am troubled, for foul things are done to the peregrine falcons in Devon, in this manner.

I was standing in a field near the small-gauge railway line which is laid in the valley to Lynton from Barnstaple. The rattling croak of a carrion crow in the oak-wooded coombeside made me look up. It was the familiar warning treble croak. The crow had seen a sharp fluttering speck travelling under the grey south-westerly rainclouds. I recognised a peregrine falcon. She flew at about a thousand feet, and possibly at eighty or ninety miles an hour. She bore a pigeon in her talons, which she was plucking in flight. (I knew the habits of the peregrine; the male, or tiercel, broods the young in the cliff eyrie, and the female, or falcon, hunts and plucks and skins, calls him off the ledge with her wild and wailing cry and he takes her catch in the air.)

As I watched she checked and tumbled. She spun and spiralled, like one whose brain-motors are flashing out. It was sad to see the haughty fearless one so troubled. Strychnine was twitching and torturing her neck and legs.

She fell in the long grass beside a red spire of sorrel, on her back, with hooked beak gaping and a pigeon feather stuck to the tooth of the mandible. Her yellow feet spread and clutched spasmodically; but in the full liquid brown eyes remained an untamable fierce hauteur. I was squeamish about crushing those eyes (with their Conradian steadfastness) under my heel, so I gave her water in my tobacco pouch, and she died.

Her death was the work of certain Barnstaple pigeon fanciers. Years ago, having despaired of shooting, trapping, or frightening the falcons (there are three known pairs in North Devon), these men tied poisoned rabbit-liver to the breasts of selected pigeons, but when struck these birds were usually abandoned by the falcons. The men plucked pigeon breasts, and rubbed in