Bog Myrtle & Peat

Henry Williamson was one of those Tommies who spontaneously crossed the front lines and fraternised with Fritz for a few hours on Christmas Day, 1914. He didn’t take part in the legendary football match which was played on no-man’s-land, but he did chat with German soldiers and was struck by their determined belief that God was on their side. Unsurprisingly, those conversations baffled him – because Williamson knew that God marched with the British army.

That experience of life in the trenches would follow him for the rest of his life, and Williamson would go on to write two cycles of semi-autobiographical novels which attempted to reconcile the confusions and contradictions of the First World War. These novels have not aged well, and they don’t contain much to interest a modern reader. Instead, Williamson is remembered for his extraordinarily sensitive and evocative nature writing, which reached a peak of acuity in the 1928 book Tarka the Otter. 

I didn’t read Tarka as a child. Copies of the book were pushed in my direction by several friends and family members, but I wasn’t much of a reader in those days. I came back to it in my late twenties on the cusp of a wave of enthusiasm for Ted Hughes, who lies behind many of my curiosities. Hughes had nothing but praise for Tarka, and it’s reckoned that he learned the entire book by heart. So I turned back to Williamson, even though Tarka seemed to embody a style of old-fashioned nature-writing which had always turned my stomach. Because for God’s sake, the animals have names! – and I have next-to-no patience for cuteness and anthropomorphism. But trusting Ted, I pushed on.

Of course I loved Tarka. Williamson’s language and tone is rooted in the spirit of his age, and at times it’s uncomfortably frilly – but his essential truths overcome any tiny qualms of vocabulary and context. His descriptive writing is blisteringly acute, and even when you fall to skimming through turgid swathes of resplendent verbosity, the eye is suddenly arrested by the perfect rendition of specifics – the movement of bats beneath a summer bridge, or the nod and sup of horses drinking. Williamson was the ultimate observer, and the music and detail of his writing is rich enough to overturn any complaint.

But against a backdrop of modern nature writing that is preoccupied with ecological grief, Williamson stands out like a sore thumb. He rarely makes a moral judgement, and his world is patterned with nuance and ambivalence. Williamson has a profound emotional connection with otters, but Tarka is a book about otter hunting – and it’s nothing like a polemic against a sport which killed thousands of the creatures. His hunting simply “is what it is”; he makes no specific criticism or defence of the activity. Digging into various biographies and criticism of Williamson’s work in recent weeks, it seems clear that he was a stubborn, irascible and prickly man. He was full of contradictions and unfinished lines, and for modern readers, it’s also hard to make peace with the realisation that he was an enthusiastic Nazi.

Exploring the origin and expression of his fascism is interesting because it’s essentially an echo of that Christmas day in 1914 when Williamson’s eyes were opened to the greater brotherhood of man. And following the First World War, he carried a wider sense of despair at the world’s direction of travel. It was a feeling echoed by many of his comrades who had served in the trenches, and it was replayed all across Europe by young people who had given so much in victory or defeat and still felt equally as though everybody had lost. 

Sensitive, fretful and ambitious, Williamson was desperate to ensure that all wars should cease and a new order should prevail. Rooted to nature and wildlife from an early age, Tarka is the work of a writer who was becoming immersed in universal commonalities; in man’s innate connectedness to the world around him. And from that heightened awareness of landscape and the romantic immediacy of sunlight and stone, Williamson found it easy to understand narratives of people and places. Like JRR Tolkein, he looked upon an industrialised post-war England and recoiled from its filth as the vector of death and destruction. And like Tolkein, Williamson escaped from the grit and pollution into older mythologies. He believed in the soil as the only moral source of wealth, and his plans for universal peace depended upon restarting our relationship with nature. But while Tolkein sublimated these ideas into a new mythology of England, Williamson was stuck on ambitions for political reorganisation. 

He visited Germany and was thrilled by Hitler, who he saw as a visionary peace-bringer. He became friends with Oswald Moseley and painted a BUF lightning bolt on the door of his car. He said and wrote some horrible things, but his material support for British fascism also expressed itself in directions I had not foreseen. Williamson produced a number of articles which espoused environmental concerns linked to the ideology of “Blood and Soil”. He used fascist magazines and newsletters to rail against pollution and the hunting of migrant birds; the commodification of food which damaged agriculture and the environment. Time and again, he championed wildlife and promoted a form of egalitarian agrarianism that we’d recognise from the thinking of left wing environmentalists today. And as these polemics tended increasingly towards eco-activism, we sometimes catch glimpses of a man striking a nail on its head. But if he was correct in identifying certain problems, the solutions he proposed could not have been more wrong – and it’s bizarre to find such clarity and hope couched in the unforgivable context of National Socialist propaganda.

Following similar strands of idealism and philosophy, several British writers and thinkers shared Williamson’s enthusiasm for Naziism in its embryonic form – and almost all rejected fascism when it was finally and irrefutably revealed as monstrous. But while Williamson distanced himself from fascism during the war and after it, his repudiation was never quite enough – and his later remarks always left room for ambiguity. The extent of his involvement in Naziism remains controversial – and understanding that he was a difficult man who was capable of great nastiness, it’s also hard to disentangle politics from personality. In his failure to reject fascism, it’s tempting wonder if he was simply too stubborn to back down, too self-righteous to concede defeat – and potentially too naïve to understand how wrong he was. 

In a world of “cancellation”, Williamson has got off quite lightly in recent years. If children are less familiar with Tarka these days, it’s only because times and literary fashions change – and if we remember Williamson as a Nazi at all, it’s often with little more than a curled lip or an accusation of idiocy. But the overlap and interplay between conservation and fascism is interesting, because the danger of political ideologies is not that they will implant entirely new evils into our heads – fascism was not a surge of filth which arose unannounced in the world – it was the accumulated strength of distortion; a grossly misaligned response to soft and fallible human concerns, some of which had their root in reason. We shouldn’t forgive Henry Williamson, but there’s value in trying to understand him.

Picture: Henry Williamson visits war graves in France in the 1920s