The personal and the natural

One of the things that has helped to make nature writing such a vigorous and elastic genre of nonfiction is that it has been, for most of its history, something of an outlaw category, uncanonized and unclassifiable, free to borrow and infuse itself with elements from other, more established kinds. When John Elder and I co-edited the first edition of “The Norton Book of Nature Writing” in 1990, the irony of creating something of a formal definition and canon was not lost on us.

Still, when preparing the second edition a decade later, I found a survey of the more recent crop of writers discouraging. In fact it seemed that the genre, though more popular than ever, had largely reached a dead end. What had been characterized by risk-taking and a genuine exploration of human nature in the context of the natural world now seemed safe and predictable. What had reveled in new forms and unlikely elements seemed to have retreated into approved, formulaic narratives, willed and programmatic epiphanies, puritanical morality, stifling political correctness, intellectual timidity and a deadening lack of humor and genuine eroticism.

Where were the successors to Edward Abbey’s iconoclastic satire and political incorrectness, Edward Hoagland’s stylistic grace and sexual gusto, Peter Matthiessen’s physical and political temerity, Wendell Berry’s magisterial prose or Annie Dillard’s blazing excesses of thought and image? For the most part, all seemed pale or petrified imitations.

One of the few exceptions was a fairly unknown writer by the name of Trudy Dittmar, a native of New Jersey who now lives most of the year in an isolated cabin in the mountains of Wyoming. I knew her work only on the basis of two published essays. Still, I was struck by their fresh and audacious mixture of natural history, philosophy, genetics, personal narrative and dreamstuff. They gave one the sense of being in the hands of a writer with a keen intellect, a brave heart and a confident grasp of her material. Though the author was in her 50s and had not yet published a book, we included one of her essays in our anthology.

Now, with the publication of her first collection of essays, “Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky: Brushes With Nature’s Wisdom,” the promise of those first essays has been more than fulfilled. It is, in fact, the most intelligent, thoughtful, original, challenging and highly entertaining work of nature writing since Barry Lopez’s “Arctic Dreams.”

Why do I feel confident in making that rather lofty claim, especially since there are several things about the book that might suggest otherwise? One is the somewhat unfortunate title, which smacks at once of the bland and pretentious. (Dittmar tells us she considered and rejected “A Shrewd, Obscure Mercy,” which is much more intriguing.) Another is her structural device of using the concept of “linked analogies” that Herman Melville speaks of in “Moby-Dick” -- the correspondences between nature and soul -- to shape and connect the individual essays.

At first, this approach seemed to promise another fusty, warmed-over treatment of the Emersonian notion of “correspondences” between the universal and the individual, an idea worked to death in the genre, producing numerous tomes of leaden pieties. But Dittmar’s writing is anything but dull; though profoundly serious, it is full of wry humor and powerful eroticism. Moreover, Dittmar gives the idea of correspondences a fresh and contemporary incarnation, infused with searing honesty and lyric imagery. It is also genuinely modest and tentative, as the “Brushes” in the subtitle suggests.

In tracing what she calls “a vibrant field of resonances between her natural and personal experiences,” she expands the very notion of “correspondences” while avoiding the trap of pious certainties that deadens so much of this kind of writing. “Cache,” for instance, has a deceptively obvious beginning. Finding a dead deer that seemed to have hidden itself away to die, Dittmar throws anthropomorphic caution to the wind and makes some obvious parallels with the indignities of her own deteriorating body and her relationship with a wildlife biologist, in which each remained guarded and hidden from the other.

Yet she quickly goes beyond such easy correspondences to reap a harvest of insights on the sexual politics of her generation -- such as how “the wide-ranging in sex” that has characterized her own life and those of other women her age “was a kind of protective self-aggrandizement, a little like the trick of the puff adder, bloating itself almost double to blind you to the serpently disgrace of its vulnerable venomlessness.”

Much of “Fauna and Flora” is about the peeling away of the personal, and of personality, down to its naked identity on the lathe of individual relationships. Some passages, in fact, read like fine, edgy, contemporary urban fiction: “But so much that he put out felt like love to me -- intimacy, passion, solicitousness ... and I took his need for love. When his suspicion focused on me, though, he himself cheated. Betrayal was the central lesson of his life.” I thought of Gretel Ehrlich’s “The Solace of Open Spaces” and wondered what it is about Wyoming that makes women write so extraordinarily well about men.

Although the arc of the book is Dittmar’s journey to self-discovery, in which she “retreated to the cabin in isolation, for all intents and purposes leaving men behind,” she retains, and conveys, the full magic and seductive power of those earlier personal relationships. Nowhere are the personal and natural elements mingled more effectively than in the book’s concluding piece, “Men and the Blue Lights of Nature.” Here, again, she states her “correspondences” overtly in the beginning before taking them in unexpected directions.

She confesses her preference for men who are “fast and flashy,” like the cold blue lights of the night sky, and wittily develops an extended metaphor of her chosen partners as constellations: “[I]f there was always one coming up, there was also always one going down.... [E]ach of them struck me as a cluster of blue lights uniquely configured, outstanding against a drabber, more randomly arrayed foil.”

This is a clever conceit, but what takes the essay beyond cleverness and justifies the book’s claim to “brushes with wisdom” is Dittmar’s ability to examine the validity of her own analogies, recognizing that “in some ways the constellation analogy doesn’t hold,” primarily because her men proved less predictable and reliable than nature’s “blue lights.” But then she turns the image back on itself to reveal a new and unexpected correspondence: “My beaus were less like true constellations than false ones, and yet even true constellations -- being a human construct -- are in a sense false. And so, by the very fact of being like false constellations, my beaus were like true ones.” One doesn’t have to agree with such analogous writing, but it is hard not to enjoy a mind so nimble and willing to question itself.

One thing that makes “Fauna and Flora” such an original book of nature writing is that it brings in so much material that seems to have little or nothing to do with the natural world. “Wolf Show, Truman, Ersatz Moon” uses the Jim Carrey movie “The Truman Show” as a “correspondence” for her experience of watching reintroduced wolves in Yellowstone Park. If nothing else, it’s gratifying at last to see a nature writer recognize and take full advantage of one of the major sensory and cultural experiences of our age -- films -- and to link them to wider environmental issues.

In this case the issue is our culture’s reification of nature, that is, our impulse to experience nature as a “show” and the resulting inauthenticity of such experience -- and, by extension, of any experience that we have safely from a position of privilege or power. The essay suggests that what we actually desire from nature may be something much more complex, subtle, difficult and dangerous to achieve than we have yet recognized or admitted. Dittmar makes us recognize that the cat owner who keeps her pet in at night interacts more authentically with coyotes than any member of an Audubon-led dawn coyote watch. She forces us to recognize that the only basis on which we can authentically relate to wild creatures may be that of necessity and unpredictability, which, of course, negates all that our choice- and control-obsessed culture holds most dear.

The book’s most impressive essay, “Going to Rainbow,” is a profound meditation on the mystery of flesh and spirit through the prism of that seemingly simple natural phenomenon. It begins with an account of the end of one of her many combustible relationships, where she and her departing lover are described in rainbow terms: “Our bodies arched, concentric. Strident blue top and bottom. Humming red within.” From there it segues to the earliest studies of rainbows by the ancient Greek scientist Anaximenes, and then unexpectedly launches into the life of the Spanish mystic, St. Teresa of Avila. And then, as if we weren’t far enough afield, Dittmar digresses into a lengthy description of Bernini’s monumental marble sculpture of St. Teresa, which is one of the best verbal evocations of a work of visual art I have ever read. The sculpture presents the saint:

” ... swooning on a cloud, an angel standing above her grasping the shaft of an arrow that he seems just to have withdrawn. Or it may be that he’s poised to thrust it.... This thing happening to her, it’s supposed to be a good thing. But this thing is having an arrow run through her heart. This thing happening is supposed to be a heavenly thing, incorporeal. But her draperies have gone crazy wild. And the angel above her is shocking: dreamy and rapt, beatific maybe, but such an earthly boy. Such downy feathers of a swan on those wings unfurled behind him. Such lips he has. Such curls.”

The full passage is wonderfully mesmerizing and transcendentally erotic, and the way Dittmar eventually brings together all of these disparate elements is brilliant.

But what do such things have to do with nature writing? Well, everything. At its most encompassing, nature writing -- as opposed to natural history or environmental writing -- is about the nature of being alive in a corporeal and animated world that is more than human. The best nature writing, therefore, is an exploration of our relationship not only to wild animals and wilderness but also to all the physical presences -- food, art, sex, music, pain, the curve of a line, the texture of cloth, the nature of television screens, the sheen on a rock drummer’s hair -- that inform and shape consciousness, memory and sensibility, the joined nature of flesh and spirit that Dittmar calls “this confluence, this contradiction, this mystery.”

It is her broad scope of contemplation, combined with her fiercely beautiful and detailed renderings of passion, natural and human, that give Trudy Dittmar’s first but fully mature book its remarkable originality and considerable power. *