Childhood experience and Anarchism in Herbert Read's 'The Innocent Eye'

 

Here is an excerpt from early on in Herbert Read's The Innocent Eye (1933), an autobiography covering his childhood years up until his father's death when he was ten. It comes right at the beginning of the book after he outlines the topographical features of the Yorkshire Vale he was raised in:

“Sometimes the child's mind went on living even during the darkness of night, listening to the velvet stillness of the fields. The stillness of a sleeping town, of a village, is nothing to the stillness of a remote farm; for the peace of day in such a place is so kindly that the ear is attuned to the subtlest sounds, and time is slow. If by chance a cow should low in the night it is like the abysmal cry of some hellish beast, bringing woe to the world. And who knows what hellish beasts might roam by night, for in the cave by the Church five miles away they once found the bones of many strange animals, wolves and hyenas, and even the tusks of mammoths. The night-sound that still echoes in my mind, however, is not of this kind: it is gentler and more musical – the distant sound of horse-hooves on the highroad, at first dim and uncertain, but growing louder until they more suddenly cease. To that distant sound, I realized later, I must have come into the world, for the doctor arrived on horseback at four o'clock one December morning to find me uttering my first shriek.

I think I heard those hooves again the night my father died, but of this I am not certain; perhaps I shall remember when I come to relate that event, for now the memory of those years, which end shortly after my tenth birthday, comes fitfully, when the proper associations are aroused. If only I can recover the sense and uncertainty of those innocent years, years in which we seemed not so much to live as to be lived by forces outside us, by the wind and trees and moving clouds and all the mobile engines of our expanding world – then I am convinced I shall possess a key to much that has happened to me in this other world of conscious living. The echoes of my life which I find in my early childhood are too many to be dismissed as vain coincidences; but it is perhaps my conscious life which is the echo, the only real experiences in life being those lived with a virgin sensibility – so that we only hear a tone once, only see a colour once, see, hear, touch, taste and smell everything but once, the first time. All life is an echo of our first sensations, and we build up our consciousness, our whole mental life, by variations and combinations of these elementary sensations. But it is more complicated than that, for the senses apprehend not only colours and tones and shapes, but also patterns and atmospheres, and our first discovery of these determines the larger patterns and subtler atmospheres of all our subsequent existence.”

(Read, 1963: 16-17)

In a previous post, I began to explore the romantic sensibility Read inherited from Wordsworth, one which draws a connection between memory and personal growth through poetry – reflecting consciously on our previous experiences and from them making art which outlives us and, in the process, reaching an awareness of the universal through the particular. This sensibility is fully on display here in the way Read smoothly transitions from his recollection of that very particular sensation of the “distant sound of horse-hooves” to a deeper meditation on the meaning of such memories, anticipating that they contain the very secret to understanding life. However, whatever this secret could be, Read does not relate to the reader. What is significant, as in Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey', is the association of these very personal recollections with such a secret.

As such, these personal recollections are not necessarily of Read himself as a child, but of the things that surrounded him in his childhood on a Yorkshire farm. These things are written about not just to the degree that he can recall them, but also to the degree that they caused an emotional (and imaginative) reaction in him – for instance, the lowing of the cow in the otherwise silent night becomes, in his mind, the “abysmal cry of some hellish beast”. Despite the clarity and precision of Read's prose, a style he developed from his earlier Imagist poetry, it is emotion and imagination which become the source of his recollections, emotion and imagination as conjured by the world around him. He writes, in the latter paragraph, that in childhood, “we seemed not so much to live as to be lived by forces outside us”, framing environmental circumstance as the primary (if not only) influence on his life. Landscape and place become not so much essential components of identity, something which is mutable and consciously shaped, but essential components of character.

Whilst it might sound mystical, even nostalgic, to associate such meaning with childhood, there is a lot of truth to Read's convictions that still resonate with modern readers. It is common knowledge that infant brains are, basically put, much spongier than adult brains. We are hugely shaped by our upbringing and from it we gain the various tools by which we experience and deal with the world in later life. This can be good because it results in differentiation between persons, but it can also create problems because of such differentiation. Consider the conservative mindset, for instance, which often perceives the changes it witnesses in the world as proof that things are getting worse – because it departs from the world of childhood. The world which formed them, which they cling to, becomes objective, it becomes the only measure of the world.

What I like so much about Read's work, and it's something I also find with Powys, is that such childhood worlds become personal and therefore subjective. In maturity, Read consciously reflects on the world of his childhood and reveals the extent to which it was particular to him, something which appeared to his innocent eye charged with emotion, firing the imagination and becoming the unique tools with which he can write in later life. Identity is something to be interrogated here, Read plunges back into his earliest memories to discover why he is the person that he is. That is, a person who is individual and unique, a person who possesses a personal conception and experience of the world. In this way, Read maintains the value of these childhood experiences whilst simultaneously acknowledging their particularity and thus their subjectivity.

One might think this is environmentally deterministic – one is inextricably bound to their locale – yet the way in which Read reflects on his past demonstrates that, after being “lived by” outside forces, he has begun to consciously live his own life and exercise his will. To emerge from the boundaries of circumstances and become a person capable of artistic and political agency, one must first acknowledge those boundaries and their extent – as they have affected you in childhood, as they have instilled a sense of awe, curiosity and terror, as they have traumatised you. The process of personal growth requires such reflection and from this we in turn recognise the significance of the relationship between environment and upbringing.

Furthermore, the very subjectivity this entails - differences becoming encoded in works of art and the organic transformation of culture – establishes the grounds for a true democracy in the social sphere, becoming a mosaic of perspectives which undermines the singular perspective of any one ideology. Read was a lifelong anarchist and he viewed the measure of progress as being in the greatness of the level of differentiation within society. He was an arch-individualist – yet individualism is a term which has been greatly tarnished in recent times by the devastating impact of neo-liberal ideology. We are simultaneously made to be solely responsible for our own welfare and prosperity in society, whilst any attempt to build a political movement which suggests otherwise is systematically undermined and actively repressed. This presents a problem when looking at the work of Read (and Powys too), who proclaim the absolute necessity and importance of the individual and the individual perspective to political and cultural life.

I think that the individuality championed by neo-liberalism is constituted, somewhat paradoxically, by identity. Identities splinter society into different interest groups, but in a free-market setting it becomes a method of encouraging consumption. As individuals we are free to consume and create our own unique identities based on such consumption patterns. Yet, as individuals we are not free to form social bonds aimed at changing the system itself. I wish to develop this line of thinking in a later post, but I think that this is where the differences between Read's individualism and neo-liberal individualism lie.

Works cited:

Read, H. (1963) The Contrary Experience: autobiographies by Herbert Read, London: Faber and Faber.

Image of Herbert Read stolen from: https://www.artrabbit.com/events/launch-celebration-art-in-an-electric-atmosphere-the-library-and-archive-of-herbert-read