David Craig’s novel The Unbroken Harp is just out from Whittles.
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Vol. 19 No. 14 · 17 July 1997
pages 27-28 | 3718 words
The Wildest, Highest Places
David Craig
- John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings edited by Terry Gifford
Baton Wicks, 912 pp, £20.00, November 1996, ISBN 1 898573 07 7
When John Muir, the son of an emigrant from East Lothian to southern Wisconsin, was 16, in 1855, his father lowered him daily down a well shaft on their new farm at Hickory Hill. John cut with chisel and hammer through fine-grained sandstone until he struck ‘a fine, hearty gush of water’. By then he had dinted his way through eighty feet of rock, working alone from dawn till dark. When he was overcome with choke-damp at the start of work one day, he was hauled up unconscious – and resumed after a day or two once water had been thrown down the shaft ‘to absorb the gas’ and a bundle of brushwood had been dropped on a rope ‘to carry down pure air and stir up the poison’. This was only the most spectacular, and symbolically oppressive, of the Herculean ordeals which ingrained in Muir an extraordinary hardihood and helped to make him the finest field naturalist and most eloquent wilderness writer of his age. As eldest son he did most of the ploughing and stump-digging on the family’s virgin land and split a hundred fencing rails a day from their knotty oak timber: ‘I was proud of my skill and tried to believe that I was as tough as the timber I mauled, though this and other heavy jobs stunted my growth and earned for me the title “runt of the family”.’
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 17 · 4 September 1997
From Terry Gifford
David Craig, in his otherwise careful review of my edition of John Muir: The Life and Letters and Other Writings (LRB, 17 July), takes Muir’s reservations about Ruskin at face value. In this he follows Muir’s loyal literary executor, Bade, his biographer Frederick Turner and the usually sceptical critic Michael Cohen. In fact, Muir misrepresents Ruskin in his three references to him in Bade’s selection of the letters. Ruskin’s views are notoriously contradictory, but Muir seems to be referring to Modern Painters IV when he says that Ruskin believes that ‘Nature is the joint work of God and the devil.’ To Muir ‘Mountain Gloom’ is an oxymoron. But Ruskin’s observation of ‘gloom’ in the mountains is actually located in human culture. In that chapter Ruskin moves from considering natural destructive forces, to perceived gloom, to the popular ‘love of horror’, to Catholicism, evil, the blameless suffering of a cab-horse and to moral choice. He makes the point that ‘it is not an evil inherent in the hills themselves.’ Muir’s reaction to an upbringing of morbid Protestantism blinds him to Ruskin’s critique of morbid Catholicism.
Like Muir, Ruskin saw nature as a counterbalance of dynamic forces. Some of Ruskin’s sentences might almost be Muir’s: ‘As we pass beneath the hills which have been shaken by earthquake and torn by convulsion, we find that periods of perfect repose succeed those of destruction.’ But Ruskin saw that choices of good or evil were open to those who had management of the hills, as in the flooding of Yosemite National Park’s Hetch Hetchy valley to provide water for San Francisco, the lost battle which hung over Muir’s last years. What Ruskin addressed anthropocentrically, and Muir biocentrically, was the dilemma of human influence and responsibility for the earth.
Muir read some volumes of Ruskin at least twice and was closer to Ruskin’s thinking than he liked his correspondents to perceive. It was Ruskin, following Carlyle, who wrote: ‘God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail.’ Muir’s development of the National Park idea surely springs from this source.
Terry Gifford
Bretton Hall College
