What is it about the weather? It seems when we’re not talking about it, we’re listening to reports on it, worrying about the future of it, planning holidays around it … Everyone knows that temperature and light are British preoccupations. The Scottish poet and New Yorker writer Alastair Reid famously left his home town of St Andrews because of a comment about the weather: remarking on a fine summer’s day he was told: “Well, we’ll pay for it later.” I remember receiving a similar response in a post office in Perthshire: “Aye, a little too airy, though.”
That’s the kind of phrase another Scottish writer, Peter Davidson, would have fallen upon. The Last of the Light is both a celebration of and inquiry into the significance of temperature and skies, especially at this time of year, when we are in the twilight of the seasons, when “the same feeling of belatedness can come from the lighted world itself moving away”. In chapters such as “English Melancholy”, “Cities of the Evening” and “About Shadows and Gardens”, Davidson shows how the last desperate holding of the light that marks autumn might be both an aesthetic theme – a way of looking at the array of paintings and poetry and music he gathers here, from Dickens to Tiepolo, William Lawes to James Pryde – and a reflection of a way of life, of thinking about a Britain now so perma-brightened by the shine of global capitalism that we may have forgotten it was ever any other way. “As time passes, my student years in the 1970s begin to look like the last, fading decade of a sensibility of twilight … ,” he writes, “ … the last glimmering of a way of seeing.”
For Davidson, weather is never just the background to the event, it is integral to it. Light is the atmosphere in which we live and breathe and make our works of art. In ways that are particular to us, he is saying, in end-of-empire Britain, in a northern climate, with a northern cast of mind, twilight is a perfect metaphor by which we may understand the things we love. When we learned, in this country, to replace the sun-soaked palette of the Mediterranean with our own pale colours for landscapes and portraits, turning from a bright, classical vision to a darker, romantic one more suited to the gloaming, we found a different sensibility residing within our art. The slow leaching of light from our heavens remind us who we really are. Of a little-known artist of the 18th century, Thomas Kerrich, a sketcher of skies and moons, Davidson writes: “The imitation of the long-admired Claudian afternoon light, or of the curt, purple twilights of the south have ended, to be replaced by a depiction … based on observation rather than idealisation … of northern native places.”
As in his earlier books, The Idea of North and Distance and Memory, and his meticulously put-together collection of baroque-styled poems The Palace of Oblivion, Davidson takes us to places that are vast and lovely as well as somehow underlit and shadowy, where a kind of emptiness and uncertainty prevails. Of his childhood in a Spain under Franco’s rule, this, another kind of twilight: “Sweetness of jasmine, syrup in the mouth; black Havana tobacco, fog in the throat … A memory of roaming the villa and gardens, bored and apprehensive and alone … And under everything ran the stress of season and evening and weather and history.”
The word “meditation” seems useful in describing the genre Davidson has created for himself, one that defies the boundaries of reportage or memoir or nature or essay writing, even. The author wants to write deeper in to a theme for his own reasons, using his own observations to help him see. His sentences appear to have the same magical qualities as the light that is his subject, caught between chien et loup, as the French call this time in-between day and night: shape-shifting, entrancing, sometimes haunting. Evoking the work of printmaker FL Griggs, who came to prominence around the time of the devastations of the first world war, Davidson describes “twilight as the medium that crosses the aching disjunctions of then and now. Evening light softens and moulds the ruins, smoothes or mellows the losses of violence and time.” It is as if the very words we are reading are both transforming and fading reality in front of our eyes; beauty known, beauty lost, beauty forgotten.
Certainly, taking an aesthetic view of the world is not as common now as it once was, and Davidson’s turning over of the meanings of lesser-known poets’ lines or his close examination of the brushstrokes of Whistler’s nocturnes feels risky when publishing wants the big story that sells. Chapter upon chapter about the failing of light is hardly the stuff of headlines. Risky, too, is Davidson’s gentle insistence on an old “shadowy” way of living that was pre‑Reformation and ancient in its sensibilities and practices – an outlook largely at odds with a media that regards the Catholic church as having quite enough of its own shadows.
This kind of idiosyncrasy is the heart of all Davidson’ s writing, though. His output over the years has been modest and he has held on to the subjects that interest him, disregarding fashion and “relevance”. He loves the lost, the fading, the “fugitive” as Robert Macfarlane, in his Landmarks, quoted Davidson’s word back to him. Here exactly is the tone and spirit of this book, ideas illuminated on the pages – and in illustrations and colour plates – which encourage our eyesight to become acute in the way it is at the end of the day, seeing everything so clearly before it falls back into shadow, for now “one last hour, one hour more”.
For more than 20 years professor of art history at the University of Aberdeen, now fellow of the University of Oxford’s Campion Hall, where he is curating a large body of work long in storage, Davidson is so attuned to the processes of making a painting, of its composition and use of pigments and application of linseed and thinners and oils, that his writing is a kind of painting in itself. He uses a fine brush to give us images of our world – of people and trees and houses in the last of the light, our edges tipped with gold and the whole underpainted with dark – “painting the moment as though in a moment”, he writes, … “darkness and autumn held at bay”.
• Kirsty Gunn’s My Katherine Mansfield Project, about home, identity and writing, is published by Notting Hill. To order The Last of the Light for £16 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
