The Tree

By John Fowles and Barry Lopez

The classic meditation on creativity and the natural world

“For years I have carried this book. . . with me on travels to reread, ponder, envy. In prose of classic gravity, precision, and delicacy, Fowles addresses matters of final importance.” —W. S. Merwin, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“The Tree is the fullest and finest exploration I’ve ever read of how the useless delights to be discovered in nature can ripen into the practice of art.” —Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift

First published a generation ago, The Tree is renowned English novelist John Fowles's provocative meditation on the connection between the natural world and human creativity, and a powerful argument against taming the wild. 

In it, Fowles recounts his own childhood in England and describes how he rebelled against his Edwardian father’s obsession with the “quantifiable yield” of well-pruned fruit trees and came to prize instead the messy, purposeless beauty of nature left to its wildest.

The Tree is an inspiring, even life-changing book, one that reaffirms our connection to nature and reminds us of the pleasure of getting lost, the merits of having no plan, and the wisdom of following one’s nose wherever it may lead—in life as much as in art.

This special 30th anniversary edition includes an introduction by Barry Lopez.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 28, 2010
• ISBN: 9780062029416

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Barry Lopez

Several times while reading this book-length essay on human perceptions of the natural world, I had to get up and walk away from it. Its thought was as stimulating as I could stand. Charged with introducing the book to other readers, I distrust this feeling. What if the thought here fits this mind too well, and order, clarity, and tone—the necessary bridges that bring these contents to other readers—are perceived to exist where they do not? The reader is then recommended a book which, without the same predilection, he or she might find dull or impenetrable.

John Fowles’s graceful language, his ability to render anecdote to illustrate abstraction—in short, his ability to tell an entertaining story—makes these concerns moot. I feel no qualm in saying Fowles has set his teeth neatly in one of the central issues of our time—our distance, real and imagined, from the natural world.

Fowles’s elevated and precise prose, his almost surgical skill at teasing out the internal structure of a complex emotion or idea, and the ease with which he carries his considerable erudition may be familiar to readers of his other work—The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Magus, Daniel Martin, and so on. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, among other things, is a kind of meditation on choice, on a particular facet of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Indeed, Darwin and a wild wood called Ware Commons (which this book considers in passing) are protagonists of a sort in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles has written—here, in fact—that the key to his fiction lies in his relationship with the natural world. This connection is elegant enough to almost defy conversation, but subtle, fundamental relationships are part of what Fowles is pursuing in this essay.

Who defines the natural world for us? Who decides the names of things? Who countenances and rank-orders our experience with mountains and rivers, and proceeds to define the right type of relationship for us to have with nature? Are we all to make some sort of effort to be what we are not—Zen contemplatives, traditional shamans, esteemed naturalists—to understand nature only in these ways? That we are too often handed others’ impressions of the natural world against which to judge our own is another of Fowles’s concerns here.

And how do we conceive of the natural world? As having a nonhuman purpose? As being therapeutic or beautiful and enriching and therefore useful? Do we unconsciously honor a systematized understanding of nature or any of the hundred different lexicons applied to its elements (recalling Edward Abbey’s dictum: "What is that, madam? What it is, no one knows; but men call it Artemesia tridentata.")? Are we convinced that unless we acquire evidence—photographs, journal entries, picked and pressed flowers, sound recordings, pocketed stones—we haven’t actually been intimate with nature?

Perhaps every one of us has felt such doubts and tried to thread a private, intelligent way through them, if for no other reason than that we have become innately suspicious of nature as it is popularly promoted in books and films today. In order to protect nature from exploitation we’ve ended up turning it into a consumer item, a repelling notion.

The validity of an individual’s unarticulated experience with the natural world is what Fowles is trying to underscore here. We live at a time in which it is hard to find an unmanipulated landscape, to locate what the British writer Jay Griffiths calls nature without an audience. The enrichment and the encouragement of a relationship with nature that might come to us through a variety of secondary sources—Bashō?’s haibun travel sketches; Pissarro’s Poplars, Eragny; Sibelius’s The Swan of Tuonela—are reactions we nevertheless sometimes call into question. Even with sources like these, where is the dependable authority? We’re aware, too, that a way of knowing that, in Fowles’s words, leaves very little public trace, is apt not only to go unrespected but to be made the object of someone else’s uninvited consolation.

Fowles was a man of considerable and deft intellect, and one of his sharpest tools of illumination here is paradox. It is just like him to both abjure, say, a film about the Arctic as distancing one from the actual experience of being there and to say how enriching the film is. The key to this paradox is the distinction Fowles makes between art and science. There is not the space here to elucidate, which is perhaps the coward’s way out on this, but some paradoxes are forever unresolvable and therefore, like koans, provoking and valuable. The best books about nature, like this one, drive you back out there, to the inchoate, the chaotic, the unresolvable.

Fowles picks the wood as a focus for his thought for several reasons: what he calls its explorability; the social nature of trees, as well as the way they warp time, or rather create a variety of times; for the wood’s enclosedness; and for its uncapturability—here Fowles is again with his genial sense of paradox. Nowhere [but in the woods], he writes, are the two great contemporary modes of reproducing reality, the word and the camera, more at a loss … [the woods] defeat view-finder, drawing paper, canvas, they cannot be framed; and words are as futile, hopelessly too laborious and used to capture reality. But he gives us words and reveals the woods; if some intelligence one day looks back at us, it may determine it was not tool making that set us apart, or even our sense of irony, which allows us to live with paradox, but our capacity for metaphor—the way in these pages Fowles communicates the ineffable, reveals the uncapturable.

One is thankful for a gifted writer in the midst of thoughts so easily mismanaged. Like good philosophy, Fowles is in search of good argument, but because he is a storyteller we do not labor to follow him. He writes engagingly, as if he were conversing—but without hesitations or false beginnings. And his own renewal with the wild, the refuge of the unconscious, he makes accessible to us. As with any good novel, there is structure, direction, and tension. The principal tension, a chord struck again and again, is the

Reviews for The Tree

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a collection of some sixty photographs from Frank Horvat's series "Portraits of Trees", accompanied on the facing pages by an essay by Fowles in which he reflects on the ways he and Horvat and other creative artists engage with nature in general and trees in particular, and how impoverished we are when we only see nature in a reductive, scientific, utilitarian way. It's sometimes quite difficult to focus on his quite abstract arguments when you have Horvat's gorgeous images leaping out at you from the opposite page, but it's worth it: there's more to it than holistic seventies tree-hugging. It is quite amusing the way Fowles insists on the complexity and interelatedness of the forest whilst Horvat is doing everything he can to sterilise and isolate his specimens. You sense that his ideal tree is the one standing by itself in a snowy French field where there is no clear distinction to be seen in the background between earth and sky, whereas Fowles imagines himself in the densely wooded dells of the Undercliff at Lyme Regis. Of course, that's an oversimplification, Horvat admits a few groupings of trees and Fowles also talks about his father's immaculately pruned fruit trees, but they don't seem to have a huge amount in common.

[michael5rimmer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fowles confounded my expectations: of the 101 pages in my edition, perhaps 12 are given over to a description of woodland and trees, and those twelve provide him with further material to ponder the relationship between people, as individuals and as societies, and nature. Starting with a meditation on the differences between his own and his father's views of nature, Fowles takes in art, science, religion, and the essential ineffability of existence.

[jphamilton-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This would be the third nature-based book out of the last four I've read. The Tree is a special book in that it is a 2010 reissue of a 1979 essay by the late, great novelist, John Fowles. It's a short work in which Fowles is exploring where nature fits into modern man's life, as well as its role in the inspiration of all manner and form of man's art.. His father had always kept a neat, orderly, heavily-pruned orchard and garden. John's much lighter hand on his own land made a strong impression on him. "I think I truly horrified him only once in my life, which was when, soon after coming into possession, I first took him around my present exceedingly unkempt, unmanaged and unmanageable garden."

[vpfluke · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a remarkable book with some wonderful views of trees. Frank Horvat is the photgrapher and this book evolved from a major exhibition in Nantes, France. There is a romantic sense to these trees and their setting. The commentaries by John Fowles are a paean to the artistry of Horvat. Some of the striking photgraphs for me were a line up plane trees in Var, France in the late winter looking almost like a Jackson Pollack painting in monocolor; a beech forest where the beeches are so close they do not have their typical full branches, maples and conifers in Vermont, a wind-swept pine in Corsica (the cover photo), poplar and willos in Jura in the early winter, a muted beech (faux de verzy) in Champagne, an organ pipe cactus in Arizona.

[sarah1e · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

 The Tree defies summary. My attempts to pull out a meaninful passage would eventually result in transcription of the entire work. I did not expect that one of the slimmest books on my shelf would be so enlightening, or so dense. I will keep this book forever, and read it again and again. There is so much I missed, and much more that I can learn from it.

[blacksheepdances · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the 30th anniversary edition of John Fowles legendary essay about trees. Or rather, what trees mean in a greater sense than just the biological. At first, I expected this to be similar to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring-both were written decades ago. However, this slim text is more of a set of questions rather than answers. In fact, despite the title, it could be said that trees are just the smallest portion of his purpose."Do we feel that unless we create evidence-photographs, journal entries, picked and pressed flowers, tape recordings, pocketed stones-we haven't actually been intimate with nature?"Fowles was known for writing The French Lieutenant's Woman as well as other fiction titles. Here, in this book, he discusses via anecdotes the relationship between humans and nature, and the juxtaposition between nature on its own and our experience of nature. First, the introduction by Barry Lopez comfortably sets the scene, and hints that this is no simple environmental manifesto. And never does Fowles lecture about how people should view nature; rather, he talks about what nature may or may not mean in a larger sense.For example, he talks about his childhood home where his father cultivated small garden and fruit trees. Nothing was out of place, and while it was in the city, his father managed to tame anything unruly from the garden. Clearly it was his goal to conquer the plot of land. He was the victor over it. Yet his son, Fowles, purchases property that is larger, but by no means tame. Fowles neither cultivates or cuts back, he sees no point in amending the soil, pruning the trees, and to the horror of his father, the parcel of land is wild. Is it a moral battle over who conquers the natural world? Is it nature if you've directed its every movement? Fowles doesn't presume to answer, he just asks.In a further irony, which tells a great deal about his father, Fowles recalls how his father could walk for miles in the city, yet would only hike a few hundred meters in the countryside. The untame pastoral scene frightened him or inhibited him, likely because of its chaos. Thus, Fowles discusses chaos in nature, and how the most lovely of scenes is never the most natural. He also makes a valid point that our modern society, with three decades of hindsight added since this was written, has used film and photography to 'show' nature, making the interaction with it less urgent. How often do people seek it out? Is putting a pot of daisies on the patio nature or decor? Do we travel to faraway places to imbibe unique cocktails or are we willing to hike in a forest for no other purpose than to look? Again, he gives no condescending or judgmental answer, he just asks thought provoking questions. Since the last few years have produced epic and beautiful DVD collections for large screen televisions, like Planet Earth, does nature seem to be something we order up on the Netflix queue or purchase at Costco? It should be noted that this is not a nature 'journal', nor a guide to trees. There are no photos or etchings to illustrate it, and that's appropriate in that Fowles doesn't feel a photograph can replicate nature satisfactorily. I enjoyed this very much, and wish that Fowles would have spent a bit more time discussing his own experiences, as well as suggested ideas for conservation and preservation.