Desk Notes No.19

Cheltenham Literature Festival and The Great White Silence

Oct 29, 2023

Dear friends,

I’ve never understood the concept of a spring clean. When the sun is beginning to shine again and the flowers pop, I want to be outside enjoying them. Instead it’s these days, when the dark and damp are creeping in, that I feel the urge to make things cosy; to tidy and to fettle; to nest and roost. To feel prepared. Not just for the festive season, which accelerates towards us with surprising stealth, but for the approaching new year. I need it to dawn with clarity, without pressure or haste.

I wonder if this might be an instinctive feeling that, on some level, we all share. Alongside its religious connections to Passover, the concept of the ‘spring clean’ has also been connected to the Persian new year, which begins on the first day of spring. Then there’s the Japanese tradition of ōsōji, or ‘big clean’ which takes place in December to cleanse the home of the year’s accumulated impurities and welcome the Shinto deity of the new year.

My own preparations extend to the outdoors where nature’s rhythm invites my tidying instincts. The ‘back end’ of the year is the perfect time for splitting and transplanting perennials, giving them plenty of days to root before the onset of warm weather. Autumn is also the time for cutting back last year’s growth, planting trees and setting bulbs. This October I decided to take up a large piece of lawn, allowing me to move two raised beds to a sunnier, south-facing spot. I’ve planted 200 tulip bulbs here, their faded pinks and jewel tones giving me something exciting to look forward to in April and May. A small bistro table (a summer sale bargain) awaits the sun’s return. I already have plans to sit among the veggies next summer, watching the bees do their work. With these jobs done, I can relax and let the dark nights envelop me.

In this edition of Desk Notes you’ll find the things I’ve been thinking about in October.

Places - Cheltenham Literature Festival, 6-15 October 2023

Pictures - The Frozen Continent, an exhibition at The Wilson, Cheltenham until 18 February 2024; and The Great White Silence (1924) directed by Herbert G. Ponting, available in the UK on BFI Player

Places

Cheltenham Literature Festival, 6-15 October 2023

The arrival of Cheltenham’s Literature Festival usually heralds the arrival of Autumn. This year it was unseasonably warm, hot in fact. Book lovers wandered around in their shirt sleeves, lazed on lawns, sipped iced coffee by the fountain. Sitting among the geometric flowerbeds, time seemed to slow down, giving me chance to reflect on my own writing practice. A panel discussion between Substack’s Farrah Storr, The Mill’s Joshi Hermann, and Emma Gannon of The Hyphen, inspired me to think about the future of this newsletter and the new places we might go. Look out for more about this in December.

With more than 900 writers speaking at the festival, it’s difficult not to feel inspired. This year, the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction chose the festival to announce its shortlist for 2023. Last Year’s winner, Katherine Rundell, was at the Town Hall to speak about her experience of winning with John Donne biography Super-Infinite. The event was recorded as a podcast — you can listen to it on the Baillie Gifford website.

A particular highlight for me was hearing the curators of the recent Rossettis exhibition (which I wrote about here) speak about the siblings’ life and work. Everything from their experience growing up part of the “precarious middle class,” to the influence of painter-poet William Blake, and the home for fallen women where Christina worked. Female sexuality and its nineteenth century hazards were placed at the centre of their oeuvre. In particular, the panellists were keen to reshape the debate about Elizabeth Siddal’s life, going beyond her renown as Dante’s muse and, later, his wife. Her imagination, her own artistic experimentation with poses, body language and emotion — particularly her depiction of kisses and arguments — were presented as a key influence on Dante’s own work. 175 years after the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, female agency is finally soaking up our attention.

Later that day, a talk about female spiritual art, Radical Spirits, saw art critic Jennifer Higgie and historian Catriona McAra make the case for women’s art to be taken more seriously. Defining spiritual art as “art inspired by a different realm,” Higgie and McAra helped the audience to ‘read’ the strange, dreamlike images of Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) and Samantha Sweeting. Much of the negative subtext about female spiritualists remains deeply connected to Victorian attitudes. A time when women protected themselves from accusations of insanity and hysteria — labels which could see them detained in an asylum — by keeping their activity behind closed doors. The panel’s admission that a patriarchal, academic community has derided the study of female spiritual art as “fay,” is shocking then, but not surprising. Biased institutional archiving and purchasing decisions followed, contributing to the absence of female spiritual artists on university syllabuses. Perhaps most poignantly, Higgie expressed sorrow that groundbreaking artists like Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) are only now beginning to receive the recognition they deserve — when many of them are no longer able to benefit from it. Higgie’s book, The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World, will find a place on my Christmas list.

Pictures

The Frozen Continent, an exhibition at The Wilson, Cheltenham, until 18 February 2024

The Great White Silence (1924) directed by Herbert G. Ponting, available in the UK on BFI Player

Also in Cheltenham (until February 2024) is an exhibition exploring the life and work of scientist, artist and polar explorer Edward Adrian Wilson, after whom the town’s gallery is named. Wilson was one of the four men with whom Captain Scott reached the South Pole in January 1912. Seventy-one days later, Scott, Wilson and Henry Bowers died in their tent just eleven miles from their next supply depot. The exhibition reveals Wilson’s life-long interest in the natural world, which led him to join Scott’s team as the Chief of Scientific Staff at a time when imperialism was at its peak. In 1900, Wilson had himself written that:

“A nation should be judged on exactly the same ground as the individual. As a nation we have the vilest of sins which everyone extols as the glories of imperialism. One day all this part of our history will be looked upon in the proper light.”

Wilson visited Antarctica for the first time in July 1901, on his return he championed the protection of penguins, “having witnessed the barbaric practice of boiling them for oil.” He is described by the curators as a passionate man concerned, “about the impact of human exploration and development on nature, becoming an early climate activist.” A quote from David Attenborough lines the gallery’s walls:

“Edward Wilson was one of the most admirable of men. An expert naturalist, an intrepid explorer, modest and in the end, heroic. He was also an accomplished artist whose watercolours painted in expeditions with Captain Scott are not only scientifically accurate but uniquely evocative.”

Visitors can see many of these sketches on display, along with Wilson’s sketchbook, artist tools and objects from his time with Scott. The fateful expedition was captured by pioneering filmmaker Herbert Ponting. Initially used for newsreels, Ponting re-edited his footage in 1924 to create a feature-length film, The Great White Silence. In one charming clip Wilson can be seen inside the tent with three of the Polar Party, Scott, Bowers, and Edgar Evans. They change their footwear, cook and eat a meal of dried beef soup ‘Pemmican Hoosh’, before quickly getting into their reindeer-hide sleeping bags. Wilson is the last to get his head down, busy scribbling in his notepad.

The film was restored by the BFI in 2011 and a new score created by Simon Fisher Turner. It’s one of my very favourite archive films. Ponting has an extraordinary eye for framing the landscape. Icebergs fill his square shots, a thin strip of sky above and sea below; they loom over the audience, make us feel terrified and insignificant. Shapes and patterns draw Ponting’s eye — the icy Aladdin’s Cave, the Matterhornberg, Jack Frost’s Castle. Artificially toned in blue, purple and yellow, the film feels both real and unreal; whispers of eerie science fiction. Ponting left detailed instructions for laboratories about the way his black and white footage should be tinted and toned. Ponting, “was very keen on using colour not in a realistic way but to emphasise mood,” explains Heather Stewart, the BFI’s former Cultural Programme Director, in her introduction to the restoration’s premier.

Footage of Ponting suspended over the side of the ship, Terra Nova, or standing stock-still while recording on the ice, reveal he was as determined as he was pioneering. In one piece of footage we see him removing the giant fur mittens designed to protect his hands from frostbite — all so he can have better control over his photographic equipment. Replicas of these mittens, along with the many other layers of clothing used by the explorers are on display at the Wilson, where visitors are able to handle them.

There’s a strong link between the work of Ponting and Wilson. While Wilson made detailed records of the things he saw, collecting geological samples and making sketches, Ponting captured many of these animals and their behaviours on film for the very first time. Seals, skua gulls, Adélie penguins, whose natural comedy is drawn out with whimsical title cards: “A discussion on the fixed question ‘Do shrimps make good mothers?’… ends in heated difference of opinion.” Ponting cuts to nesting penguins squarking with renewed energy. Mating is treated not from a scientific angle but with the gentle comedy of contemporary romance, the male penguins giving their sweethearts, “the glad eye.”

What Ponting manages to create here is really rather remarkable: the excitement and anticipation of the journey across the sea, the hopeful establishment of winter quarters, the awe of natural wonders. Somehow Ponting makes us forget, momentarily, the oncoming tragedy. When it arrives we are even more deeply moved. Reconstructing the expedition with maps and models (Ponting was not part of the final Polar Party), and entries from Scott’s diary, it is the isolation, the barrenness of the shots and the haunting quality of words that move me tears.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this month’s issue and what you’ve been doing this October. Let me know in the comments.

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