Writers with a Weather Eye

Many of us wish for the magical brightness of snow at this time of year but for writers it is less a decorative feature than an actor in their stories.

In his ‘Discourse on the Weather’ (1758) Dr. Johnson (whom we met last time out, with the Gonzos) comments on his fellow-Englishmen’s propensity to talk about the weather. His remarks could just as well apply to we Irish.

Our first greetings are usually accompanied by a comment on the weather, the day can be ‘grand’, ‘soft’ or ‘dull’, or, as an elderly gentleman would say to me when we crossed paths on cold mornings, ‘That’s a hardy one’. My grandmother complained of rain giving her the ‘heebie jeebies’. When the sun shines general hysteria breaks out and everyone sheds layers of clothes, even in winter.

For writers weather is an inexhaustible resource. We all learnt in school about ‘pathetic fallacy’ as a poetic device, ascribing human emotions or behaviour to inanimate objects, usually those found in nature. Flip this around and it could be seen as a reflex of ancient animism, when our ancestors believed that everything had a soul.

Nowadays, we are arriving at a new appreciation of the natural world, as we destroy it. We know, for example, that trees send warning signals from the moment someone steps into a forest, and that brainless slime mould can replicate the Tokyo subway system.

Dr. Johnson’s essay was prescient in many respects. While decrying the theory of weather as an explainer of human behaviour, he did think it more worthy of attention than talking about oneself, writing that:

The weather is a nobler and more interesting subject; it is the present state of the skies, and of the earth, on which plenty and famine are suspended, on which millions depend for the necessaries of life.

He had no truck, however, with the theory that our moods and mental capacity fluctuate with the seasons:

. . . to fill the world with accounts of intellects subject to ebb and flow, of one genius that awakened in the spring, and another that ripened in the autumn, of one mind expanded in the summer, and of another concentrated in the winter, is no less dangerous than to tell children of bugbears and goblins.

Today we talk of seasonal affective disorder and people who suffer from depression are said to be vulnerable to the ‘turn of the leaf’. For writers, too, the weather is more than a backdrop or a decorative amplification of a character’s or poet’s mood. It is an active participant in the drama of the story.

Photo by Dahlia E. Akhaine on Unsplash

Samuel Beckett was an admirer of his near namesake, Samuel Johnson, to the point of attempting to write a play based on the good doctor’s life. And he shared some of his curmudgeonliness. In Beckett’s novel Watt, the narrator regrets ‘everything’, and launches into a catalogue of memories, specifically of ‘the poor old lousy old earth . . . An excrement.’ and the endless cycling of its seasons:

. . . and of course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your heart the slush and every fourth year the February débâcle and the endless April showers and the crocuses and then the whole bloody business starting all over again. And if I could begin it all over again, knowing what I know now, the result would be the same.

Watt is absorbed into the natural cycle. The rich detail he recalls, ‘the apples falling and the children walking in the dead leaves’, bespeaks affection, despite himself while the lyrical rhythm of the passage gives a poignant lie to his curses. Try as he might, he cannot deny his attachment to the lousy old earth and its weather.

Beckett learnt from another master, too, James Joyce. Last week I saw an extraordinary ‘immersive’ dramatization of his story ‘The Dead’.[1] We stood in the hall as the guests blew in from the snowy outdoors, sat at the table while Gabriel Conroy delivered his somewhat pompous speech, and toasted the Misses Morkan.

Last, we sat in the bedroom where Gretta and Gabriel lay athwart the bed, she exhausted by the memory of her grief, he stunned by the discovery of her passionate love, and regretting his own complacent vanity. Then came the final beautiful and heart-rending passage spoken by the actor playing Gabriel (Marty Rea), as snowflakes drifted down from the canopy of the fourposter bed:

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling on the dark mutinous Shannon waves. . . . His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

The story is set on 6th January, the Catholic Feast of the Epiphany. Joyce preferred to call his stories ‘epiphanies’, meaning a manifestation or moment of insight. In ‘The Dead’ Gabriel is forced to recognize his arrogance and thus relinquish it. Snowfall transforms the landscape and here it dramatizes Gabriel’s transformation. He vows to go west and discover his own country, as Molly Ivors and Gretta had urged him to do.

Photo by E Vos on Unsplash

Dr. Johnson prescribed the Stoic philosophy, ‘to make man unshaken by calamity, and unelated by success, incorruptible by pleasure and invulnerable by pain’, which sounds like a recipe for inertia. We are compounded of the wind, the rain, the sun and the snow, and, while we are not weather vanes to be spun around by every passing breeze or shower, we cannot ignore their impact on our lives, whether that means taking an umbrella when we go out, or rejoicing in the sunshine. So it is with writers, their characters and personae interact with the weather and, as a figurative presence, it becomes another prompt for action or reflection.

I leave you with ‘The Snow Queen’ by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, written in Irish, this translation is by the poet Medbh McGuckian:

Sorrow’s blanket knits up over my soul
as a mantelpiece of grime builds up on the fireplace,
each day adding its own speck of dust,
till you wake one morning to find you can’t budge. 

Or as snow piles up on the flat roof
just outside the bedroom window. 
The white flakes put their heads together
until you look up and discover the Snow Queen

smiling over, beckoning with you to come with her
to the bitterly cold halls of her palace
at the North Pole. In the centre of which 
the Lake of Reason is frozen to solid marble. 

I sit myself down at this icebound shore
as if to weep by the waters of Babylon,
but it’s not tears that drop from me 
but lines of poetry chilled by the frost.

As for you, snowy love, with your dark lashes,
your high cheekbones, and glossy hair, 
your body as sensuous as silk shirts
in the shops, if you could hug me warm

with your tears, or if I even had a phone number
to give you a buzz and pour out my troubles to you,
long and sweet, to hear your gorgeous orgasmic
answering voice say, ‘The force be with you baby!’

(from The Water Horse, 1999)

As the next edition of What’s the Story?! would fall due on 24^th December and I’m sure you will have better things to be doing for the holidays I will postpone it until 7^th January – the day after the Feast of the Epiphany. Until then, I wish you all a happy holiday season, whether in snow, rain or shine.

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[1] The production was by ANU and Landmark Productions, at the Museum of Literature of Ireland, MoLI, which is located in Newman House, where Joyce attended university.

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If you have time over the next couple of weeks do share your thoughts on snow and other weather in literature.