Bleached Bone and Living Wood

Not a story directly about Jacquetta Hawkes, yet I think there are echoes of her interests.  Dr Christine Finn recently broadcast about a house transformed into a work of art.   The poet Wilfred Owen wrote his last letter to his family  in the cellar of a forester’s house in Ors in Northern France on 31 October 1918.  He was killed on the 4th.  The house is now a tribute to Owen’s life and poetry.  For pictures and more, see the Radio 4 page about the broadcast, which is currently available on the iPlayer.

 

A Land: An Object

A Land (1951) is the fusion of poetry and geology that is Jacquetta Hawkes’ best-known and most quintessential publication.  The book, and later responses to it, regularly feature on this blog.  Jacquetta believed that understanding the past and nature, how civilisation developed, was essential to human well-being, even survival.  This book expresses these ideas in a stunning new way, and resonates with activists, artists and academics to this day.

The title, in its various published and unpublished forms, is this week’s Object in the 100 Objects online exhibition at the University of Bradford.

Jacquetta circa 1951

“Out of the weald, the secret weald”

The latest online newsletter from the Society of Antiquaries (SALON) includes details of Dr Christine Finn’s 2010 events celebrating Jacquetta Hawkes.  In particular, Jacquetta will be well represented at this year’s Ilkley Literature Festival, including an exhibition  based on the Jacquetta Hawkes Archive, more details nearer the time.

The newsletter also includes Linda Hall on Puck’s Song by Rudyard Kipling:

“a brilliant evocation of landscape archaeology (although it rather falls apart in the last verse!) and should be compulsory reading for all budding archaeologists! But first it should be read aloud to all primary school children to arouse their interest and excitement in this country’s past”.

Jacquetta Hawkes shared the intense feeling for the meaning of landscape shown by Kipling in this poem (one of my own favourites).  I vaguely recall her mentioning the poem somewhere, so will try to track the reference down.

“The White Goddess from Cambridge”

Jacquetta Hawkes and Robert Graves, Mallorca, September 1950

“The White Goddess from Cambridge: Jacquetta Hawkes and Robert Graves” will be the title of a lecture by Dr Christine Finn, biographer of Jacquetta Hawkes and Writer-Fellow at the University of Bradford.  The lecture will be part of the 10th International Robert Graves Conference, which is held 6-10 July 2010 in Mallorca, Spain, where Graves lived from 1929 until his death.

Jacquetta and Robert Graves were in contact from the 1940s.  Both poets, both fascinated by myth and the classical world, they would have had much to discuss.  In 1950, after lecturing to the International Archaeology Congress, she visited him and his family in Deya, Mallorca.  She took her son Nicolas with her.  The Jacquetta Hawkes Archive includes a letter from Graves to Jacquetta about the practicalities of the visit, taxis and so on.  Dr Finn will be retracing their journey as much as possible on her way to the conference.

Past, Present, Man, Nature: 3. “That great force of life”

Past, Present, Man, Nature: celebrating Jacquetta Hawkes.

An online exhibit by Alison Cullingford, Special Collections Librarian, University of Bradford.

Intro | Credits | Previous | Next

3. “That great force of life”

Jacquetta's ID card

World War II changed everything.  Both Christopher and Jacquetta joined the civil service, though they continued to publish on archaeological topics. Jacquetta was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1940. Jacquetta began in the Ministry of Post-War Reconstruction, moving later to the Ministry of Education.  She seems to have found the work congenial, remarking that it brought her “immense interest, amusement and some understanding of the higher bureaucracy”.

At the same time, she was drawn to poetry.  Her surviving notebooks delightfully juxtapose notes of formal civil service meetings and drafts of poems.  Nature, the past and “things” continued to inspire her: poem titles include “On Staring at a Celtic Ornament”, “Rooks”, “The Seal”, “Kuban”, “Pear and Cherry”, “A Glass”.  Her poems are also a moving testament to love found and lost, with poet and critic Walter Turner, who died suddenly in 1946.  “Symbols and speculations” (1949) was her only published volume of poetry.  Afterwards, she turned to other forms of creative expression.

Man in time folder and typescripts

“Man in Time”, shown here in typescript, is perhaps her greatest poem, describing a mystical, ecstatic experience she had at Mount Carmel watching a caravan of camels.  It gives the reader a flavour of the way Jacquetta felt about the past and the present: “As I stood by the cave whose walls had known / How that great force of life, how love, had formed / Men, women, music and the skeleton.”