The Tree

John Fowles
Vintage

In this series of moving recollections involving both his childhood and his work as a mature artist, John Fowles explains the impact of nature on his life and the dangers inherent in our traditional urge to categorise, to tame and ultimately to possess the landscape. This acquisitive drive leads to alienation and an antagonism to the apparent disorder and randomness of the natural world.
For John Fowles the tree is the best analogue of prose fiction, symbolising the wild side of our psyche, and he stresses the importance in art of the unpredictable, the unaccountable and the intuitive.
This fascinating text gives a unique insight into the author and offers the key to a true understanding of the inspiration for his work. 

The other month when I was waxing lyrical to anyone who'd stand still long enough about Mythago Wood various people took to recommending books to me about trees.  Of them all the one that caught my attention was John ('French Lieutenant's Woman') Fowles' 'The Tree', an examination and a meditation on the relationship between nature and creativity.

At the offset we can see the book as a memoir as Fowles relates his father's predilection for exerting rigid control over his prized fruit trees fully embracing the Victorian ethos of categorisation and control.  Exacting an obsessive level of toil out of both himself, the plants and the literal fruits of his labours.

For Fowles the younger though it was a war time evacuation to Devon that finally affirmed his own relationship with nature which for him came to be characterised by "space, wildness, woods" and, as he roamed, by the pleasures of discovery.  It's to this that he attributes is own chaotic creativity.  In the very 'treeness' of a tree he finds his definition of creativity that like nature it is unquantifiable and indescribable and the true nature of both can be found by casting off the chains of "usefulness" and - to use an en vogue phrase - rewilding.

At its end Fowles relates a visit to the ancient forest of Wistman's Wood on Dartmoor where, in the embrace of the oaks, he finds a true connection and a loss of distinction between himself and what we have come to other as the 'natural world'.

I found this book not only a revelation but also an affirmation.  I share Fowles' understanding and love of the chaotic in nature although I will admit to a guilty pleasure in mythologising of, particularly, the older and wilder green places.  For me nature is at it's truest when left free of human interference.  For instance when I first visited Glastonbury town I was assailed by endless evocations of "the calm", "the peace", "the tranquillity" and "the spirituality" of Chalice Well Gardens but when I got there I discovered essentially a formal garden, nature trapped and pruned, all very pretty but caged inside pathways and borders; an English country garden with pixie statues and crystals.  It seemed to me the very antithesis of the natural that I found in parts of the mountains surrounding the Welsh valley where I grew up, along the coast on which I now live and also in the anarchic sprawl that I, like Fowles before me, actively - or perhaps more accurately, passively - encourage my garden to exist in.

Like Fowles, for me freedom lies in an escape from the restrictions of limitations and categories and his passionate embrace of the chaotic as the truly natural is an idea I feel very much at home in.

Buy it here - The Tree

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