'On the perimeter and fringe of war': Norman Nicholson, rural modernity and wartime

Frayn, Andrew

Abstract

The author Norman Nicholson is an exemplary writer of rural modernity, acutely conscious of the need for remote areas to remain ‘living and organic communit[ies]’ (Greater Lakeland) because of his proximity, in his lifetime home of Millom, in the industrial south-west of Cumbria, to the sanctified, sanitised tourist Lakes. In this paper I argue that his writing about wartime offers a unique, revisionary perspective on both modern/ist poetry and war poetry as a non-combatant rural poet who focuses not on contested ground overseas, but on wartime industry on the British coast. Following recent critics such as Mary Dudziak, I assert the temporal unboundedness of modern conflict, seeing the shadow of war as contiguous with interwar industrial unrest and fears of deindustrialisation. In Nicholson’s poetry the impermanence of industrial modernity is always present, the restarting of the mining of formerly closed seams a wartime devil’s bargain: ‘Every knuckle of soft ore / A bullet in a soldier’s ear’ (‘Cleator Moor’). I focus here on his writings ‘on the perimeter and fringe of war’, as he puts it in ‘Waiting for Spring, 1943’, examining works from his first collection Five Rivers (1944) and situating them among Nicholson’s wartime periodical contributions and editorial work. Here, I foreground the experience of rurality, because it is for Nicholson the natural world that underpins long histories, narratives and lives which will endure beyond the temporary vicissitudes of wartime and industrial modernity, man-made gaps and crevices becoming sites where ‘spores might penetrate and quicken’ (‘Rockferns’), those spores in turn aligned with the souls of fragmented wartime bodies. Beginning to understand the links between wartime and rural modernity contributes to the development of both these burgeoning critical discourses.

Citation

Frayn, A. (2022, October). 'On the perimeter and fringe of war': Norman Nicholson, rural modernity and wartime. Paper presented at Gardens in the Gorse: Rural Britain’s Modernist Cultures (Northern Modernism Seminar), Newcastle

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Gardens in the Gorse: Rural Britain’s Modernist Cultures (Northern Modernism Seminar)
• Conference Location: Newcastle
• Start Date: Oct 15, 2022
• End Date: Oct 15, 2022
• Deposit Date: Apr 26, 2023
• Keywords: rural modernism, wartime, Norman Nicholson, modernism, poetry
• Related Public URLs: https://northernmodernismseminar.wordpress.com/past-seminars/gardens-in-the-gorse-rural-britains-modernist-cultures/