The Orkney visionary poet, Edwin Muir, subscribed to the image of childhood enfolded in the work of Thomas Traherne, Henry Vaughan and Wordsworth - that there is a time of prelapsarian innocence when the world is seen whole, holy, when the differentiation between self and environment, I and world has not become fixed, me in here in my bag of skin, it out there, that, however, beautiful and necessary, is yet not mine. We come, said Wordsworth, bearing clouds of glory and for Traherne all the world is my possession, as it is of every other immersed soul, until that is the vision fades. Inevitably for Wordsworth, provisionally for Traherne believing, as he did, it could be recovered anew.
Muir owed this commitment to his own magical childhood on Orkney, growing up on a succession of rented farms as the youngest child. It is a world memorably and beautifully evoked in his "Autobiography'' that I have been re-reading. As Peter Butter points out in his introduction, this vision is not incompatible with the socio-economic challenges (and changes) attendant on farming in Orkney in the late nineteenth century, for Muir's vision is of another order, a child's ordering, in a world in which they live and move, actually loved and known. It can only be tested against its quality of imaginative truth, tested on one's own experience and for me it rings wholly true. I too recall before I discovered my 'self' and its attendant concerns and guiltiness a world that sang of Eden, where the light of the dawn was my light coming to greet me and the stillness of an evening at the garden's end was our, communal stillness of wallflower, crumbling brick wall and snuffling, exploring hedgehog.
Muir's world, however, unlike mine, was embedded in a traditional order - changing yes - but at a stately pace that allowed change to be assimilated rather than to be disruptive; and, though this world had shifted, on a personal level, with Muir's growing sense of being someone other, developing a separating ego, it was shattered as a coherent world by his family's move to Glasgow when Muir was fourteen. A change driven by the exaction of a bad landlord and his brothers' restlessness with their farming life. 'Getting on' was a potent lure, then as now.
It was a shattering because within two years both his parents and all three of his brothers were dead and Muir was effectively alone as a sixteen year old clerk with an uncertain future.
Thus, you have moved from the evocative, celebratory prose describing childhood and Orkney to the somber tones of commemoration - and striking descriptions of what it meant to be cast adrift, always looking back over your shoulder - at a sustaining past that is no more and the creeping prospect of falling further into the slums for which Glasgow was justly notorious.
Muir finds his way forward, slowly, he describes the education of an autodidact reading all he could find and being borne on, not always happily, by what he finds most notably Nietzsche. Nietzsche was both helpful in sustaining a superiority in his isolated self and equally unhelpful for precisely the same reason!
There were ultimately three 'handmaidens' of his release. The first was Socialism for its bearing a trace of his original communion and bearing a prospect of hope in , and struggle for, a meaningful future for all without distinction.
The second was A. R. Orage, the brilliant, mercurial editor of the foremost literary journal of the day, 'The New Age' who nurtured Muir's first writing and subsequently employed him as an editor and found him a gifted psychoanalyst to help him process the cumulative distress of years. Interestingly, the psychoanalyst in question was Maurice Nicoll to better known subsequently as one of the foremost interpreters of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, an allegiance and a task he would share with Orage.
The third, and most important, was finding Willa Anderson and making him his wife; and, together growing a resolutely happy and satisfying marriage. In finding Willa, and her willingness to often sacrifice her aspirations as an artist in favor of her husband's, her committed feminism notwithstanding, he found a remarkable treasure of inestimable price. Willa's own memoir, 'Belonging' is a beautiful and necessary counterpoint to Muir's accounting for as the extrovert to his introvert, she provides resonant clothing detail to what Muir describes as an inner experience.
At the heart of the book is Muir's attempt to describe the relationship between what he called the story, our unfolding time bound life, and the fable, the archetypal patterning that underlies and is a shaping force of meaning in everyone's life. Our story we can know, the fable we can only catch intimations of it, parts of it, in the oft repeated pattern of human life. For Muir, paradise, the Fall and the long journey back from darkness into light are those parts of the Fable that are most resonant and relevant to him. As is his commitment to our immortality, human beings are only fully understood as immortal beings, he writes, for only then do they step beyond time's weaving to be fulfilled as persons. Without this they would be stray make-pieces of necessity, interchangeable accidents, and in his witnessing of both the rise of Hitler and the fall of Czechoslovakia to Communism is only too aware of where such thinking, imagining leads.
Finally, the book is saturated in dreams. Muir, to borrow my friend's, Thetis Blacker's, phrase was a 'very great dreamer' probably because as Thetis went onto say (of someone else), he was a purer person than many. The dreams were an integral part of his life, they became matter for poems and are often quite extraordinary especially the waking visions that accompanied his analysis. One of which has, at its end, Willa and Edwin, be winged like angels holding hands and flying towards a dancing sun. As they ascend, the two inner wings of each of them falls away and in mutual interdependence, they ascend lovingly. It was both an apt image as they were then embarking on their married life together and prophetic of that very life together.
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