Awe in the presence of ordinary things

A.N. Wilson

BOUND UPON A COURSE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY by John Stewart Collis The Alastair Press, £12.95, pp.217 John Stewart Collis died on 2 March 1984, the age of the century. A few weeks before he did so, when he had already been diagnosed as having inoperable cancer, he told me that he thought that he might be able to defy death itself; that he saw no reason, in principle, why, with sufficient willpower, a man could not make himself live. It was a strange idea; perhaps it was less an idea than an expression of his superabundant energy — imaginative and physical. He was playing tennis and swim- ming up to the last summer of his life, and working vigorously in the garden. He drank deep, and smoked moderately, and never seemed to be remotely affected by either habit. His mind was always on the move. He despised old people who said that they were bored. If they were bored, he claimed, it was their own fault, for not having trained themselves to read and think and appreciate things earlier in their lives. Possibly true, but a merciless judgment all the same.

Re-reading his autobiography, repub- lished after 20 years, I am struck by how merciless he is about himself too. He does not wallow in self-flagellating passages of penitence; but he is merciless. In order to matriculate at Oxford, he cheated in an exam. He tells 'us so, and adds that it was the most sensible thing he ever did in his life. He begs money from George Bernard Shaw, about whom he wrote an enthusias- tic, but not very good book. Many writers who knew Shaw sponged off him. Not many would have recorded they had in so matter of fact a way. His relationship with his mother was painful in the extreme. Col- lis was an unloved twin; his mother doted on his twin brother and scorned and dis- regarded him. On her death-bed, he would not be reconciled. As he visited her sick- bed he feared the reconciliation scene:

And sure enough one day I found her preparing to try for this. 'There is something I want to say to you', she began. I looked alarmed: 'here goes', I said to myself. 'There is something I must say to you', she began again. But I would not yield. I would not soft- en. I would not depart from my resolve. I did

not let her continue, but, bending over the bed, lightly and swiftly stroked her cheek, and said, 'It doesn't matter, mother, say nothing.' She did not try again, and I think she was relieved . . .

There is something moving and honest about that.

In the course of writing his autobiogra- phy, Collis lost his first wife, Eirene, who had been a pioneer in the treatment of cerebral palsy. He says almost nothing about the marriage, except to convey that it had been unrelievedly unhappy. (He and Eirene married having known one another for a week). When, very dramatically, she interrupts the drama of his memoir by dying, he is hardly able to break his silence. But he wrote:

She always managed to get me wrong, and I made no effort to make her get me right, for I did not know my own heart, I did not know that when the time came I would not be able to bear her non-existence.

Such candour disturbs. Richard Ingrams, in his rather sketchy memoir of the man, says that Collis was not clever, and quotes with approval the judgment of Ruth Pitter that he was like a 'village idiot'. Having re- read this book, and dipped back into my own favourites among the Collis oeuvre, The Triumph of the Tree, The Worm Forgives the Plough and Living with a Stranger, I would rather question this judg- ment. True, he was not a logician; but he had two rare qualities of mind, honesty and patience. In his works of what he called `synthesis', he had the patience to find out about what the rest of us would call sci- ence; but he was able to see how extraordi- nary facts were. He once said to me — and I am sure that it is in one of his books, but I can't find it — that children thought that there was something magical about getting a rabbit out of a hat. When we grew up, we

realised that there was something magical about getting a rabbit out of a rabbit. He loved to quote Goethe's saying that 'Awe is the highest thing in man.' Collis felt awe, as most of us do, when looking at a mountain or a sunset. But he was also capable of making us see why we should feel awe in the presence of supposedly `ordinary' things such as a potato or a piece of coal:

It amuses me to logically pursue what it actu- ally is. Having first made clear just how the Carboniferous Forests sank, often one on top of another, I should conclude: 'We take a piece of coal in our hands, a black stone. It is carbon, it is sunshine shaped into a solid. It is a piece of the sun itself we hold, the blazing ball itself turned into the dirty darkness of that rock. It may be very cold, freezing to the touch on a winter's day, yet still it is the ancient furnace that we finger, it is heat made cold, a frozen burning beam. We do not doubt this for a minute. We know how to change it back again. We put a piece of its own element in touch with it —its own essence, flame — and in a few minutes the box flies open and the trebly millioned years imprisoned sun streams out, and the ran- somed rays that fell upon the ferns fall on us today.'

Yes, of course it is over-written; yes, with a persistence which came to irritate me dur- ing this re-reading of Bound Upon a Course, he split his infinitives. But, wow! I wish I could write like that; at least I can read it and recapture that sense of wonder which Collis, either in his prose or in his person, was always able to awaken in me.

The books for which he will always be famous — gathered together in a single volume as The Worm Forgives the Plough are suffused with this sense of surprise and awe at the nature of things. They are also an invaluable, and humorous, record of agricultural life in England before 1944, when the combine harvester changed `I don't know what hit me. I just woke up one morning and it was goodbye Picasso – hello Monet!' everything. The revolution which occurred in agriculture between 1944 and the pre- sent day has, says Collis,

altered the character of the scene more than between the days of Chaucer and 1944 . . . The labourers do not remain on the field. They have been exchanged for metal . The fields are empty. There is a harvest, and there is hay; but there is no harvesting, and no haymaking; and as for a 'harvest supper' amidst general gaiety and songs, even if such an idea occurred to a modern farmer there would be no one to attend such a celebration Collis was a man, as I have said, of great physical energy and strength. Outside the pages of Tolstoy, I know of no better description of physical work — what it is like to inhabit a body which is toiling with every muscle — than his accounts of ploughing. You might choose to sneer at some of the `philosophising'. True, he had some rum heroes, such as Havelock Ellis and the surely completely bogus Teilhard de Chardin. Yet, in spite of reading these authors with such admiration, Collis had not swallowed them whole. He felt released from doctrine and theology as a young man when he left his theological college after only a term. Thereafter he was a loner as far as creeds were in question. Like many Irish writers, he is better at writing in nega- tive terms about metaphysics than in advancing a very plausible 'philosophy' of his own.

I will never forget [he writes towards the end of Bound Upon a Course] during the flying- bomb period of the war, which was devastat- ing and frightening in England, a very well-known bishop prayed over the radio to the Almighty for protection, adding 'especial- ly in Southern England', asking God, in fact, to be so kind as to keep an eye on things between, say, Middlesex and Bournemouth.

On the other hand, although he despised dogma, Collis was a deeply religious man, whose receptivity to beauty, to nature and to the mystery of things was intense. He had the rare gift, in life as well as in his books, of communicating this feeling with- out embarrassment — either to himself or to his listeners. I remember his saying in life what I read again in this book:

I hold it downright despicable for anyone to say that there is no sense in this life if there is not another one to follow. What greed! What ingratitude! This earth is a heavenly place, we could ask for nothing better in heaven.

I never knew Collis well, but I developed a great affection for him in the couple of years or so of our friendship. I still miss him. On New Year's Day, this year, I found myself wanting to commune with him, and I drove down to Surrey. I had the most vivid recollection of his funeral on 8 March 1984, and of where his body had been buried beside the church; but when I reached the place, in driving rain, I searched in vain for the grave.

Perhaps it is there, and I missed it; per- haps his burying place is unmarked. If so, there would be a sort of appropriateness in that, as I felt afterwards, walking up Juniper Hill, and realising that Collis, if it makes sense to speak of his survival, is not lying in Abinger churchyard, but, 'rolled round in Earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees'. But he also survives in his books. Since he had little of the suc- cess with them that he deserved, and since that success came too late, it is not surpris- ing that he felt bitter about literary reputa- tion.

The funny thing is — a judgment which he would have found incomprehensible, but it is true — he is a far more interesting writer than so many of his heroes — Shaw, Havelock Ellis, Walt Whitman et al. He was sui generis. He complained that in the London Library his books were classified under such a variety of heads: Agriculture, Forestry, Physics, Botany, Chemistry and Water. As well as, he could have added, Literature and Biography. But that was the nature of the man: you could not classify him. He was an aesthete who was never happier than when working as a labourer or playing tennis; he was a poet whose muse led him not to write verse but to read chemistry, he was wholly a countryman in demeanour and outlook, and yet he had lived his entire life (except for when follow- ing the plough) either in towns or in the most suburban of dwellings.

Collis was Irish. This made him under- standably wary of Englishmen. The first time he ever met me, he said, 'You can't be English. No Englishman would ever have written that sentence you wrote in last week's Spectator.' He went on to quote what I had said. He was being deliberately flattering because he thought that other- wise I should not ask him to write reviews — a grotesque misreading of things, since I was only too happy to print anything he wrote. But he really meant it: he thought that if you wrote anything arresting or interesting you could not really be English. He was very reassured when I told him that I was not purely English, and that there was Manx in my veins. 'That would account for it. You'll never mellow! I've never mellowed!'

Nor he did.