From pillar to post
Nicholas Harman
IN RUINS by Christopher Woodward Chatto, £12.99, pp. 280, ISBN 070116896X With youth and beauty gone I had given up hope of inspiring poems. But only last year I got one, and the book it appeared in won a fat prize, so it must be good. Michael Langley (in The Weather in Japan, Cape) began his stanza: 'I wish I could introduce you to this friend of mine/ Who is rebuilding an old flax mill as a ruin.' I had not told Langley that the main reason for the reconstruction, at a very moderate fee, was to prevent coping stones
falling on the bullocks.
Mr Woodward prefers his ruins not rank with nettles and Stinking Billy like mine, but embowered in the wild marjoram and rosemary of the Mediterranean, unreconstructed, unvisited by experts or archaeologists or anyone but himself. But to the ruins he most detests his narrative (such as it is) constantly returns — the sun-blasted, coach-tour-haunted relics of the Roman Forum, where the taste for crumbling antiquity was officially inaugurated in 1462, when Pope Pius II decreed an end to the recycling of ancient stones, 'to preserve their exemplary frailty'.
A century later the renaissance had wavered north to these islands, and Francis Bacon took as his title the earldom of Verulam, claiming the territory not of a thriving town but of the spreading ruins where now St Albans neatly stands. Respect for antiquity had become the mark of a culture which wished to show off, or to invent, grand antecedents. These days ruinloving has dwindled into a symptom of upmarket nostalgia. Piranesi's drawings of ancient Rome match the piped Vivaldi in the lobbies of hotels whose pretensions would otherwise fail to match their prices, and a pile of crumbling stones can jack up the asking price for a rural property.
Woodward passes over such practical considerations to focus on the aesthetic and the literary. England and Italy are his stamping-grounds, and every ruin in the Michelin vaut le voyage. (It's a good job he didn't visit India, for then there would be no end to his book.) He describes a ruin, locates a literary reference to it, and passes on through more Byron or Dickens or Chateaubriand to another ruin. If you are mad keen on ruins this compare-andcontrast approach is good stuff; it would have been even better in the late 18th century, when Englishmen spent their nouvelles rich esses on building brand-new ones. Mr Woodward found a council sign on a Gothic folly near Abingdon reading: 'THESE ARE NOT REAL RUINS'.
Kenneth (Lord) Clark, who taught a later generation all about civilisation, said at the height of the Blitz, 'Bomb damage is in itself picturesque.' That may seem hardhearted, but falls well short of Hitler's official Theorie von Ruinwert. After Mussolini had taken him round the detritus of ancient Rome, the madman ordered his architects to eschew modern materials, declaring that steel and ferro-concrete are too perishable to make ruins worthy of the Third Reich, as its Roman predecessor was worthy of the Forum. If you want a conclusive anti-ruin argument, that is surely it. The people who design the admired airports and art galleries and opera houses of our times have at least the frankness to reckon durability as accountants do, with structures that, like their capital cost, can be written off in 70 years.
Woodward knows good writing when he sees it. On a visit to the weird 20th-century ruins of Orford Ness, he pays due homage to the miraculous serendipity of W. G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn. In Sicily he visited what is left of the palaces of the princes of Lampedusa, the last of whom wrote that marvellous novel The Leopard. (When I was there many years ago, rows of policemen, pistols beside their typewriters, were at work beneath the immense, crumbling stucco leopard on the barrel-vault at Palma di Montechiaro.) But in face of transitory glory he fails to work up the appropriate dark introspection, offering instead the sunny cheer of a young man newly married. He has much to look forward to, and ruins don't lead anywhere but backward. Nor does this book, despite the elegance of its prose and the breadth (greater, perhaps, than the depth) of its erudition.
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