Across the Territories Kenneth White Polygon (UK) ISBN 1904598145 paper, 256 pages £10

The Wanderer and his Charts Kenneth White Polygon (UK) ISBN 1904598153 paper, 256 pages £10

For years it has baffled and frustrated me that Kenneth White’s work was more readily available in French from French publishers, than in English from any English-language publisher. He seems never to have had a Canadian distributer, and only one of his books had an American edition (Blue North published misleadingly as “a novel” in 1984; republished later in Scotland as The Blue Road) which is now long out of print on this continent. As I recall it was a review of that book in The Globe and Mail — the reviewer making a favorable comparison between White’s account of his hitch-hiking exploration of Labrador, and Jack Kerouac’s wandering — which intrigued me enough to track down a reading copy in the library, and later, to purchase one used through ABE.com.

White was born in Glasgow in 1936, studying languages and philosophy at university there and later in Munich and Paris. The biographical note prefacing Across the Territories states that “he was first published in London in the mid-sixties but broke with the British scene in 1967, settling in the Pyrenees, where he lived in concentrated silence for a while before beginning to publish again, this time in Paris”.

Living “in concentrated silence” in the Pyrenees — I’m not sure exactly what that means but the prospect appeals to me, conjuring up images of Buddhist hermit-monks retreating from the dusty plains of ancient China to contemplate the void and write their gnomic poems; I pictured White perched throughout the 70s in a cork-lined hermitage on some granitic bluff with a view out on chestnut trees, living a monastic, scholarly sort of life surrounded by shelves of esoteric volumes published in Arabic and Spanish, Latin, French and Greek.

The writing that came out of that early expatriate period in the Pyrenees — poems and essays, translated from English for French publication — helped White to build a following among French readers, the French having long had a fondness for philosophical rebel-writers, regardless of their origins. Following a period teaching at the Sorbonne (where he held the chair of Twentieth Century Poetics from 1983 to 1996) White lives now in a “stony building” on the north coast of Brittany with his French-born wife Marie-Claude, who translates his writings for their French publication.

Beginning in 1989 White’s work has been given a more substantial airing to English readers, thanks to a pair of Scottish publishers: first from Mainstream Publishing in Edinburgh, who have published attractive hardcover editions of White’s poetry, as well as several volumes of his “waybooks”. My own exposure to White’s work continued with those Mainstream titles, and when they were exhausted I was left to browse disconsolately through a bibliography of the French titles, trying to imagine what might be contained within the pages of L’Esprit nomade, Les limbes incandescents, Les rives du silence and others.

Fortunately Polygon (also based in Edinburgh) has continued where Mainstream left off, and have now published five books by White, including the two titles noted here.

If there is one central image which threads through the body of Kenneth White’s work it is that of the “intellectual nomad” (White noting “the term used, in passing, by Spengler, in his Decline of the West”):

an intellectual on the borders, a writer at the limits, moving fast over the territories, working at something outside the properties and the proprieties and that has no ‘rooted’ name.

In addition to “intellectual nomad” White styles himself “an encyclopedic mahayana Scotist”, a “Hyperborean Caledonian from beyond the frontiers of philosophy”, a “nomadic geopoetician” (all from the essay “The Big Andalusian Trip” in Across the Territories) and “a pilgrim of the void” (in the so-titled book) and while there seems a touch of self-aggrandisement here, there is also, I think, a sincere attempt to systematize and organize the gleanings of a lifetime of extensive reading and pondering the imponderables.

The “waybooks” were — and are — my personal favorites of White’s published works: The Blue Road, Travels in the Drifting Dawn, and Pilgrim of the Void. White coined the term (and he shows a continuing enthusiasm for neologisms) for those of his books which document his vagabond explorations of what might be described as the margins of the planet. He is a thoughtful, observant wanderer, and the waybooks are as far from most modern travel books as can be imagined, being much closer to the Japanese haibun: Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North is the model which comes first to mind. There is what you might call “an Eastern aesthetic” to White’s writing style: images and episodes dabbed onto the page like a watercolour brush charged with colour, with broader cosmic connections allusively suggested, rather than baldly stated. Here’s a illustrative passage from the preface to The Blue Road that might give you an idea:

But what’s a ‘blue road’? I hear somebody asking?

I’m not too sure about that myself. There’s the blue of the big sky, of course, there’s the blue of the river, the mighty St Lawrence, and, later on, there’s the blue of the ice. But all those notions, along with a few others I can think of, while they talk to my senses and my imagination, still don’t exhaust the depths of that ‘blue’.

So it’s something mystic then?

I wouldn’t want to get involved in palaver about that word at this juncture (there’s something a whole lot fresher calling us out), but if I let my mind dwell for a moment on this kind of vocabulary, I recall that in some of the old traditions they talk of the itinerant mystic, and they say that if a man caught up in ‘Western exile’ wants to find his ‘Orient’, he has to go through a passage North.

Maybe the blue road is that passage North, among the blues of the silent Labrador.

Maybe the idea is to go as far as possible — to the end of yourself — till you get into a territory where time turns into space, where things appear in all their nakedness and the wind blows anonymously.

Maybe.

Anyway, I wanted to get our there, up there, and see.

Stuff like that can fire your imagination if you’re the slightest bit inclined; it’s the kind of writing which can actually impel a reader into action, rousting him out of his comfortable armchair between the turning of two pages and setting him off on his own vagabond road. In fact it’s the kind of impetus which many have found in Kerouac himself, although Kerouac’s was a more feverish excitement, in contrast to White’s cooler enthusiasms. And there is much in White’s philosophy (or perhaps “philosophies” plural, since he has stitched together bits from a wide variety of disciplines and sources) that would appeal to anyone who has come to his writing by way of the Beats, or via Blaise Cendrars, or through poets from the long tradition of Buddhist hermits and wanderers: Li Po and Han Shan primary among them.

Of the two books reviewed here, Across the Territories comes closest to White’s earlier waybooks in form and content. Describing eleven excursions which range through territories “from Orkney to Rangiroa” these personal travel essays are not travelogue: they do not recommend restaurants or hotels; they do not suggest a means of travel — unless an inquiring mind, open eyes, and a poet’s sensibilities are means of travelling.

These travels often overlap with earlier paths followed by those whom White sees as his forbears, and the list of these is long as well as broad in scope. While visiting Norway White namechecks “Francesco Negri, a Franciscan priest of [17th century] Ravenna” and “Olav Magnus, the last Catholic archbishop of Sweden”; at the start of a visit to Denmark he notes that “it was because of Saxo Grammaticus that I decided to go to Helsingør”; in Morrocco he sits at a café in Oujda “reading a French translation of Averroës’ Decisive Treatise (Fasl al-magal); and in Andalusia he imagines a statue of the eleventh-century “Hebrew poet and Arab philosopher” Salomon Ibn Gabirol hopping down from its pedestal to accompany him on his wanderings. While White prefers to travel solo, he always brings a host of literary travel companions along as companions and guides.

The Wanderer and his Charts is subtitled “Essays on Cultural Renewal”, and in the preface White notes that the first section of the book

lays out the theory of intellectual nomadism, as I began to conceive it in Glasgow, engrossed there in multiple investigations of the latter stages of Western metaphysics and the farther reaches of poetics with, as examples alongside me, the itineraries of Nietzsche, Rimbaud and Ezra Pound. […]

The texts, written at various times whenever I felt the need to get my bearings, are essays, that is, as I see the form, attempts at fast, clear, cogent thinking. Live thought is erratic and erotic in its nature, full of tentative exploration and existential energy, and the essay-form proceeds by a series of intellectual sensations and logical leaps. Poetic thought is more dynamic than philosophy. I have worn my pants out on the benches of philosophy in Scotland, Germany and France, but the first philosopher who meant anything to me, Friedrich Nietzsche, announced a new type of philosopher, the artist-philosopher (the poet-thinker, thinker-poet) trying to evolve in a space that had largely been left out when official philosophy began. [..] What this book presents are fields of vagrant thought with maybe, here and there, something of what Kant calls ‘vagabond beauty’.

As White admits at one point, he’s “always delighted in the reading of old geographers and explorers. You feel in their texts the first tentative steps, see the earliest visions, register the initial astonishment at the appearance of the world in all its phenomenal strangeness”. Strabo; Pomponius Mela; Ptolemy; Festus Avienus; Herodotus; Élisée Reclus; Le Lannou; Sebastian El Cano; Champlain.

One essay — “The High Line” — explore’s Robert Louis Stevenson’s state of mind while travelling, primarily by delving into Stevenson’s marvellous Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes in which White finds evidence that Stevenson, a fellow Scot, was also, in his fashion, a geopoet.

As you read through these essays you sense a lineage emerging — a philosophical, a poetic lineage — which White has carved from the raw material of existing texts and scattered references. Gathering a caravanserie of kindred spirits just so that he would have someone to share amazements with.

In “An Outline of Geopoetics”, the essay which concludes The Wanderer and his Charts, Kenneth White gives a brief introduction to “geopoetics”, a term he’s coined which identifies a field of study he defines, somewhat loosely, as being

more than ‘poetry concerned with the environment’, more than literature with some sort of geographical content. […] Geopoetics is concerned, fundamentally, with a relationship to the earth and with the opening of a world. […] Its concern is not territorial power-mongering among States, but the state of the human being in the universe, the relationship between human being and the planet Earth, presence in the world.¹

If the essays in The Wanderer and his Charts ramble somewhat, it is perhaps because they have so much ground to cover, and what they lack in formal structure they make up in the flashes of light which they provide down a range of widely diverging intellectual paths.

In 1998 or thereabouts, emboldened by a misplaced feeling of capability, I wrote to Kenneth White saying that I felt it was time his books had a proper airing in North America, and suggesting that I might be of help. I forget exactly how I’d worded that initial letter but he wrote me back with enthusiasm, and as the correspondence progressed I found it more and more difficult to contradict the impression that I seemed accidently to have left: that I was in fact a proper publisher with proper financial resources which I was more than willing to sink into the venture. Eventually, and to my shame, I let the correspondence lapse, and North American readers are no closer to having local access to White’s writing than they were before.

Fortunately it is now a relatively simple matter to order foreign-published books via the Internet: Amazon.co.uk lists the Polygon titles reviewed here, and those of the Mainstream titles which are still in print; Amazon.fr can easily supply any of the many Kenneth White books which are available in French or bilingual editions.

• • •

¹ Those inspired to further explorations of geopoetics are directed to the (French-language) website of the International Institute of Geopoetics, an organization which Kenneth White founded in 1989.