On Modern Nature

It was sitting in the bookcase for ages, unread. It was a birthday present, according to a scrawled note on the inside cover, from 1992.

I don't know why I picked it up and began to read it a few weeks ago - but I found I had had a wonderful book, unopened, for years. The book is formed from Jarman's journal for the years 1989 and 1990. He was writing them with an intent to publish, and the entries are astonishingly well crafted.

The blurb on the back reads:

Six years ago Derek Jarman, the brilliant and controversial film-maker, discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the bleak coast of Dungeness, where he also wrote these extraordinarily candid journals. Looking back over his childhood, coming out in the '60s and his career in films, Modern Nature is at once a volume of autobiography, a lament for a lost generation and a celebration of gay sexuality.

This doesn't quite capture the experience of reading the book - or not for me. It dramatically undersells it. He writes and includes poems, quotes from Pliny and Culpepper, and looks back in detail at the great gardens he has known and lived in. As a serious gardner, he notices the weather; as an artist his descriptions of the the weather at Dungeness are brilliant.

You can dip in anywhere and find something wonderful. Chosen at random:

Sitting in Prospect Cottage at night in a storm (Feb 24, 1989)

Time is scattered, the past and future, the future past and present. Whole lives are erased from the book by the great dictator, the screech of the pen across the page, your name, Prophesy, your name! The wind circles the empty hearth casting a pall of dust, the candles fizzes. Who called this up? Did I?

Now throughout the world stand windblown halls, frost-covered ruined buildings, the wine halls crumble, kings lie dead, deprived of pleasure, all the steadfast band dead by the wall.

March 1st, 1989

The roses, particularly the rugosas, which have broken bud, have been badly scorched by the continuous wind. An inventory of the garden shows me all else survives. The sea kale struggles on and the sea peas have germinated; so have a few self-sown nasturtiums and calendula. Parsley and poppies are thriving and the irises are a good nine inches high - quite startling in the shingle. The rabbits continually gnaw the fennel to the ground, but seem to leave everything else alone. The wallflowers, though, have been mauled by slugs.

Took four lavendar cuttings.

Planted saxifrage.

Somehow he ties together a diverse range of subjects and references - as the blurb hints. Botanical erudition and practical gardening; reminiscences about his family life as a boy; 'Swinging London' and a demanding, challenging approach to the avant-garde (he remains throughout the experimental artist); Life in London and Dungeness; politics, and particularly gay politics; filming The Garden; his love/hate relationship with film and the film establishment; the iniquities of the Press; HIV/AIDS and the death of friends; rather restrained stories of gay sex.

Some of it is less successful. From the day after the second of the two entries above:

The Pansy
Viola tricolor, heartsease, tickle-my-fancy, love-in-idleness, or herb trinity. The juice of it on sleeping eyelids will make a man or woman dote upon the next live creature they see, if you would have midsummer's dreams. A strong tea made of the leaves will cure a broken heart; for our pansy is strongly aphrodisiac, its name, pensee, I think of you. If it leads you astray, don't worry: the herbal says it cures the clap: for 'it is a Saturnine plant of a cold slimy viscous nature... an excellent cure for venereal disorder.'
In the old days pansies were virgin white, until cupid fired his arrow and turned them the colours of the rainbow.
Of one thing you must beware: picking a pansy in the first light of dawn, particularly if it is spotted with dew, will surely bring the death of a loved one.
Was the pansy pinned to us, its velvety nineteenth century showiness the texture of Oscar's flamboyant and floppy clothes? As Ficino says, the gardens of Adonis are cultivated for the sake of flowers not fruits - now what about those fruits? Pansies, before you smile, are also the flower of the Trinity. Don't be such a lemon.

The latter part of the journal also records his continuing illnesses, hospitalisations and incapacity. There are gaps when he doesn't write at all, and the garden seems to fade away. It is very moving in its clinical detail and asuterity. Yet there are still moments of wit and humour - such as when he imagines the celebratory concert he will give at the Royal Albert Hall when Margaret Thatcher finally meets her downfall.

Derek Jarman died a few years later in 1994, four months after the release of Blue - a movie I haven't seen for years, but which along with Jubilee became my favourite of his films.

I wish I'd read this earlier.

What else might be lurking in the bookshelves?