Distance and Memory

'Distance and memory, darkness and light: what a cheerleader they've found in Peter Davidson.'

A few years ago, David Thomson wrote a book called Nairn In Darkness And Light.
Its title alone would surely appeal to Peter Davidson whose bailiwick lies to the south-east of Nairn, near enough to commute to Aberdeen, at whose university he is a professor of art history.
He lives in a large house which in summer is camouflaged by trees and which in winter is enveloped in snow. To the south lies Bennachie, the highest hill in the area, and near an outcrop of larches. Such roads as there are test even those with satellite navigation.
Hereabouts people are few and when the days shorten and darkness falls, and fires must stay lit, the tendency is towards melancholy, a word, like light, which Davidson is drawn to as smoke is to a lum. Distance And Memory is to literature what Schubert's Die Winterreise is to music. As such, it demands to be read slowly, contemplatively, like poetry, savoured like a dram of precious malt, until your mood changes and you begin to appreciate Davidson's lyrical, erudite and discursive style.
He traces the first printed mention of his patch to two millennia ago, to Tacitus's account of Agricola's battle against the Caledonians. Roman scouts, notes Davidson, found 'great silence, solitary hills, and the distant smoke of burning houses'. Here, later, was an enclave of Episcopalianism. 'There were lairds who were famous fiddlers and professors' daughters celebrated for their repertory of ballads,' remarks Davidson.
From the window at which he writes he can see the bothy where a century previously Gavin Greig collected those same ballads. This was Stuart country, its inhabitants unswerving in their dedication to the cause, 'which led to disastrous expropriations, banishments and retributions in the wake of the two Jacobite risings of the 18th century'.
Evolving like a long poem, Davidson's book follows the seasons if not the calendar. For him, what governs change is not dates but finely calibrated shifts in the atmosphere, variations in temperature, the budding of leaves, the appearance and disappearance of birds, the comings and goings of friends. Time marches on remorselessly, and it is this which gives Davidson's reflections their amber glow, that sense of the wick melting and embers cooling.
Though he travels widely, from Spain to Orkney, it is to the north he is drawn and of which he wrote beautifully and originally in a previous book, The Idea Of North. Davidson's north is different from that of English writers, to whom it means anywhere above Watford. 'The north,' he writes, 'is a place of simultaneous scarcity and abundance'.
It is a part of the planet that is often inhospitable to human beings. The folk of the north are hunter-gatherers rather than agriculturalists. As the year wears on and the leaves drop, Davidson and his wife Janey, a spectral presence, find themselves alone but for a few near neighbours. The dinner parties end and the heavy curtains are brought out from storage. The nights are drawing in and as the long, enervating months of winter drag on 'the black dog' of depression demands grooming.
This, then, is no sentimental portrait. Rather it is an attempt to interpret a landscape by looking intently, reading intelligently and conversing constantly. To Davidson old maps bring the past alive, each revision evidence that change is remorseless. As a historian he knows the importance of names and boundaries, contours and kirkyards. Though hospitable and convivial – he likes to sing and dance – he is never happier than when taking leave of a party. Auden and Buchan are frequently mentioned, their poems and novels embedded in his soul.
He looks at Henry Raeburn's wonderful portrait of Sir John and Lady Clerk and sees a couple 'beautiful together in gesture'. Raeburn's palette – like that of Davidson's contemporaries Frances Walker, Tim Brennan and James Morrison – is that of the quintessential northern artist, typified in The Skating Minister, with its pewter sky, frozen loch and that telling slash of red binding on the skates. 'Winter Scotland,' writes Davidson, 'is defined in the colours of her 18th-century painters.'
This is surely true. But what of summer, the true smell of which Davidson believes is to be found in mown grass? Distance And Memory devotes few pages to it, perhaps because it is so fleeting. It seems almost to be over before it begins and, before you know it, there is need for rugs to cover the knees and fires to be lit in the evening. The light is going fast and the southward exodus begins, leaving the north to its shivering inhabitants. It feels like a desertion, abandonment, forcing one once again to confront solitude.
But that seems to suit Davidson, who carries his comfortable mood of melancholy with him like hand luggage. It is, he says, 'one of the pleasures of the north, the appreciation of that which is beautiful even as it changes or disappears ...'
There are many such passages in this quite wonderful book, which one would like to quote, such is the poise of the prose and the intensity of the thought and the grace with which it is expressed. Distance and memory, darkness and light: what a cheerleader they've found in Peter Davidson.
A moving meditation on northern landscape and culture fascinates Stuart Kelly.
This is one of those gloriously unclassifiable books; part nature writing and part art history, part essay and part memoir, part meditation and part investigation. What binds these disparate forms into a harmonious whole is the idea of the northern. Davidson, a Professor in the Art History Department at the University of Aberdeen, is both sustained and surprised by his supposedly ‘remote’ Aberdeenshire home, and uses its history, landscape and traditions to unsettle Scotland’s usual geographical dichotomies, elegantly pointing out in passing how the norths of Sutherland and Sunderland are somebody else’s south. The northern nature of his Aberdeenshire is typified thus: ‘The Sacrament was given to the dying on the field of Culloden in whisky and oatmeal, of sheer necessity. That single haunting fact is one of the keys to the nature and memory of this northern place.’ The combination of baroque, secret Catholicism and a hard edge honed on scarcity is what illuminates Davidson’s elegiac and intriguing volume.
The architecture of Davidson’s book follows the year, but even in this he stresses the difference of the north. There are not four seasons, but five: a lenten spring of drawing out, a summer of darkless nights, the hairst, or harvest, the ‘back end of the year’ and finally winter. This kind of scrupulous noticing runs through the collection; and it unites how Davidson writes about the natural world with how he examines cultural artefacts. ‘Minutiae of change in the year’, Davidson writes, ‘becomes crucial subjects for northern painting: there may be only four days in a year when birch trees are in pale green leaf with a cloud of their pollen hanging above them in the air’.
Davidson describes nature in terms of culture and vice versa. In, for example, ‘Winter in the North’ he describes ‘the washed brightness of the end of October falls on umber and viridian in the valleys, white pencilling on the high slopes above’, segueing seamlessly into a discussion of Raeburn’s ‘colder palette: the slate-grey and silver-grey of wintry Scotland, and – always low in the afternoon sky – a gash of his distinctive yellow’. Similarly, there is a beautiful and compact precision in the description of ‘a little stone jetty in still water: water like pewter, extraordinary water’.
Distance And Memory features a constellation of northern artists 
and writers: George Mackay Brown, the Counter-reformation painter Cosmo Alexander, W H Auden, Eric Ravilious, Atkinson Grimshaw, Schubert’s Winterreise, and the Icelandic sagas.
One of the most interesting pieces is a discussion of spar boxes, a form of art naif or arte povera from the Pennines in which cabinets are turned into weird grottoes with local minerals: fluorspar, quartz, galena, hematite, specularite. These indigenous Wunderkammer provide the starting point for an impressively wide-ranging essay encompassing Bede’s theory that the stars are frozen, the work of Tim Brennan, Claude glasses, an unrealised project to film W H Auden’s Paid On Both Sides. The joy of collections such as these is the way in which the author’s mind leaps from subject to subject, neither meandering nor syllogistic.
This is, in one respect, a curious book for me to review. It is a well known fact that you cannot play six degrees of separation in the world of Scottish culture – everybody is connected to everyone else by far fewer links – but it is nonetheless odd to read a book which features two people whom I know (or knew). The essay ‘Northern Waters’ concerns the work of the artist and curator Pat Law, whose work includes drawings made from lava dust and glacial water, installations commemorating lighthouses and the songs of fishwives, and most recently an ongoing work inspired by a journey around Svalbard. She also happens to be our neighbour, and we spent a glorious summer afternoon discussing Lavinia Greenlaw’s reworking of William Morris’s Icelandic expedition. I can only concur with Davidson in marvelling at how Pat ‘brings our the intrinsic poetry and melancholy of navigation’, and how in her hyperborean imagination the mundane (ropes, sails, jetsam) and the fantastical (the Isles of the Blessed, the dragons of the sagas) are combined.
In the melancholy ‘Visits in Autumn’, Davidson recounts a visit to the scholar Elsie Duncan-Jones, an expert on Marvell, Eliot and much more, whom I knew some 20 years ago. Davidson captures her mischievous sharpness and rightly laments she never wrote more autobiography. I vividly remember her, with a Benson and Hedges cigarette turned to a teetering but intact column of ash, talking about the sheer shock of reading Eliot’s Prufrock And Other Observations on publication: ‘I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled – that’s not poetry, I thought’. It was a salutary lesson to a young critic that anything genuinely ground-breaking might be met at first, and even by the brightest, with misunderstanding.
Distance And Memory is a sophisticated and intense pleasure: cerebral but not academic, moving but never sentimental, detailed without being pernickety. Like the works it examines and the landscapes it describes, it has an indelible, lingering quality.
A moving meditation on northern landscape and culture.

This is one of those gloriously unclassifiable books; part nature writing and part art history, part essay and part investigation. What binds these disparate forms into a harmonious whole is the idea of the northern. Davidson, a Professor in the Art History Department at the University of Aberdeen, is both sustained and surprised by his supposedly 'remote' Aberdeenshire home, and uses its history, landscape and traditions to unsettle Scotland's usual geographical dichotomies, elegantly pointing out in passing how the norths of Sunderland are somebody else's south. The northern nature of this Aberdeenshire is typified thus: 'The Sacrament was given to the dying on the field of Culloden in whisky and oatmeal, of sheer necessity. That single haunting fact is one of the keys to the nature and memory of this northern place.' The combination of baroque, secret Catholicism and a hard edge hone on scarcity is what illuminated Davidson's elegiac and intriguing volume.
The architecture of Davidson's book follows the year, but even in this he stressed the difference of the north. There are not four seasons, but five: a lenten spring of drawing out, a summer of darkless nights, the hairst, or harvest, the 'back end of the year' and finally winter. This kind of scrupulous noticing runs through the collection; and it unites how Davidson writes about the natural world with how he examines cultural artefacts. 'Minutiae of change in the year', Davidson writes, 'becomes crucial subjects for northern painting: there may be only four days in a year when birch trees are in pale green leaf with a cloud of their pollen hanging above them in the air.'
Davidson describes nature in terms of culture and vice versa. In, for example, 'Winter in the North' he describes 'the washed brightness of the end of October falls on umber and viridian in the valleys, white pencilling on the high slopes above', segueing seamlessly into a discussion of Raeburn's 'colder palette: the slate-grey and silver-grey of wintry Scotland, and - always low in the afternoon sky - a gash of his distinctive yellow'. Similarly, there is a beautiful and compact precision in the description of 'a little stone jetty in still water: water like pewter, extraordinary water'.
Distance And Memory features a constellation of northern artists and writers: George Mackay Brown, the Counter-reformation painter Cosmo Alexander, W H Auden, Eric Ravilious, Atkinson Grimshaw, Schubert's Winterreise, and the Icelandic sagas.
One of the most interesting pieces is a discussion of spar boxes, a form of art naif or arte povera from the Pennines in which cabinets are turned into weird grottoes with local minerals: fluorspar, quartz, galena, hematite, specularite. These indigenous Wunderkammer provide the starting point for an impressively wide-ranging essay encompassing Bede's theory that the stars are frozen, the work of Tim Brennan, Claude Glasses, an unrealised project to film W H Auden's Paid On Both Sides. The joy of collections such as these is the way in which the author's mind leaps from subject to subject, neither meandering nor syllogistic.
This is, in one respects, a curious book for me to review. It is a well known fact that you cannot play six degrees of separation in the world of Scottish culture - everybody is connected to everyone else by far fewer links - but is nonetheless odd to read a book which features two people whom I know (or knew). The essay '...