Dark, Salt, Clear
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LINES THROUGH ROCK
Almost all that I initially discovered of Cornwall’s geology was first narrated to me by Roger on the rocky beach between Penzance and Newlyn, and then expanded upon through my own research. For the Wherry Mine, see Arthur Russel, ‘The Wherry Mine, Penzance, its history and its mineral productions’, The Mineralogical Magazine, Vol. 28, no. 205 (1949). For Walter Benjamin, see ‘On the Concept of History’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 4: 1938–1940, eds H. Eiland, M. W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1942, 2006). For Joan Didion, see The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005, 2006). This is a book which, in the past, I have given to friends experiencing bereavement: I never know what to say in these circumstances – words do not seem to exist for it – but Didion comes the closest to expressing how loss redraws the landscape of one’s life.
WILD BEASTS
The majority of what I learnt about the various types of boats and methods of fishing came first hand from the fishermen of Newlyn. Lawrence ‘Larry’ Hartwell, in particular, is an invaluable source of information on all things boats and fish: though retired from his fishing days, he rises before the sun most mornings to watch the boats come in and the catch unloaded at Newlyn market. The Falmouth Maritime Museum and its archives is another excellent resource. For Elizabeth Bishop, see ‘At the Fishhouses’, in The Complete Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969). My thanks go to Andrew, a close friend, for letting me borrow his copy when I returned to Newlyn a second time (and my apologies for still not having given it back). For South Pier’s foundation stone celebration, see The Cornishman, 2 July 1885. For Mike ‘Butts’ Buttery, see the Newlyn Archive for his catalogue of boats, and Mousehole: a Documented History (Redruth: Palores Publications, 2012). For ‘Newlyn fishermen have quite often counted over fifty large trawlers’, see The Cornishman, 1963. For the wondyrchoum, see Pet. 51, Edward III, 1376–77 quoted in J. W. Collins, ‘The Beam-Trawling Fishery of Great Britain, with notes of beam trawling in other European countries’, in Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission (1887).
FISH THROUGH FINGERS
For Walter Benjamin, see ‘The Storyteller’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 3: 1935–1938, eds Eiland and Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1936, 2006).
MISWAYS
For Woolf, see her diary of August 1905 in A Passionate Apprentice. For Daphne du Maurier, see Vanishing Cornwall (London: Virago, 1967, 2012). My mother keeps a copy of Vanishing Cornwall at home, its jacket bleached out and ripped in places. For the purpose of her book, du Maurier and her son motored around the whole of the Cornish coast, stopping off at each ancient stone formation, well and ‘secret place’. The Gerard Manley Hopkins is quoted in Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, The Lost Words (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2017). For the rescue of a boy drowning off Newlyn, see The Cornishman, 1927.
FISH WITHIN FISH
Fishing legislation in Europe is not only intensely complex, it also shifts as frequently as fish populations do across the seas. Much of my knowledge about the industry comes from fishermen and experts based in Cornwall, supplemented by various newspaper and journal articles. For Epeli Hau’Ofa, see ‘Our Sea of Islands’, in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, eds Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, Epeli Hau’Ofa (Suva, Fiji: the University of the South Pacific School of Social and Economic Development, in association with Beake House, 1993). Hau’Ofa rejects the deliberate lines drawn around the world by Western explorers and map-makers who conceive of Polynesia and Micronesia as tiny, isolated islands in a faraway sea. When the sea-faring peoples of Oceania consider their world, he writes, they do not think only of the islands, but ‘the surrounding ocean as far as they could traverse and exploit it, the underworld with its fire-controlling and earth-shaking denizens and the heavens above with their hierarchies of powerful gods and named stars and constellations that people could count on to guide their way across the seas’ – a sea of islands. Though Cornwall is a county in the UK and not a continent, I found Hau’Ofa’s image of a land that does not end with the land but extends out into the waters a powerful tool with which to consider Newlyn and Cornwall more generally. For Garrett Hardin, see ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, in Science, Vol. 162, no. 2859 (1968). For Elizabeth Bishop, see ‘The Fish’, in The Complete Poems. For Joseph Conrad, see The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’.
CAREWORN
For Dylan Thomas, see ‘Quite Early One Morning’, in Collected Stories (New York: New Directions, 1945, 1967, and London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014). For Simone Weil, see The Need for Roots (Abingdon: Routledge, 1949, 2001). For J. M. Synge, see The Aran Islands (Dublin: Maunsel, 1906, 1912). Much of Synge’s text takes the form of reported speech from the stories Aran islanders, told to him in pubs and out on boats. The Aran Islands continues to be one of the most brilliant, illuminating and empathetic pieces of embedded anthropological research I have encountered.
SEA-HAB
For Walter Benjamin, see the ‘Nordic Sea’ in The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness (New York: Verso, 1930, 2016).
BEATEN COPPER
For Georg Büchner, see Woyzeck, trans. Gregory Motton, (London: Nick Hern Books, 1913, 1996). For Annie Dillard, see Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1974, 2011). For the Deep Scattering Layer, see the ship’s log of the USS Jasper, quoted in ‘Blue-sea thinking: technology is transforming the relationship between people and the oceans’, in The Economist Technology Quarterly, 10 March 2018.
LOCAL
For Synge, see The Aran Islands. For Woolf, see her diary of August 1905 in A Passionate Apprentice. For Plath, see ‘Ocean 1212-W’. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, see Nature (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1836).
A FEAST OF SEABIRDS
For Pam Lomax and Ron Hogg, see Newlyn Before the Artists Came (Penzance: Shears and Hogg Publications, 2010). For Sebald, see The Rings of Saturn.
ROSEBUD
I am grateful to Michael Sagar-Fenton, who lives in Penzance, for telling me the story of the Rosebud. His book, The Rosebud and the Newlyn Clearances (Saint Agnes: Truran, 2003), is highly informative and includes the quotations from news publications published around the time of the clearances. For Richard Carew, see The Survey of Cornwall (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1602, 1978). For Polydore Vergil, see Anglica Historica, 1535. For ‘joyned-in-hands’, see Thomason Tracts, E.445, (tract 28), ‘A Letter from the Isle of Wight’, June 1648, quoted in Mark Stoyle, ‘The Dissidence of Despair: Rebellion and Identity in Early Modern Cornwall’, in Journal of British Studies, Vol. 38, no. 4, (1999).
DROPPED THINGS
For Claude Lévi-Strauss, see Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (London: Penguin Classics, 1955, 2011). For Walter Benjamin, see ‘The Storyteller’ in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 3. For Melville, see Moby Dick. For news of Marconi’s telegraph station, see ‘Daily News Reporters’, Cornish Evening Tidings, 20 February 1904. For Marianne Moore, see ‘A Graveyard’, in Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (London: Faber and Faber, 1968). For Lopez, see Arctic Dreams.
SOME OLD RESIDENTS
For ‘Some old residents of Newlyn’, see ‘Newlyn Wagonette-men’ in ‘Correspondence’, The Cornishman, 14 April 1926. For Edwin Chirgwin, see The Rustic Jottings of Edwin Chirgwin (1892–1960), Cornishman (Bodmin: John Chirgwin Jenkin, nd). For Plath see ‘Ocean 1212-W’.
GRAVEYARD
For Jack the Giant Killer, see Dinah Craik, ‘Jack the Giant-Killer’, in The Fairy Book (Gloucestershire: Echo Library, 1870, 2007). For Geoffrey of Monmouth, see Historia Regum Britanniae, (1136). For Elizabeth Bishop, see ‘On Being Alone’, in Elizabeth Bishop: Prose (London: Random House, 1929, 2014). For Marianne Moore, see ‘A Graveyard’, in Complete Poems of Marianne Moore.
STORMS DO COME
For Elizabeth Bishop, see ‘The Bight’, in The Complete Poems. For Buttery, see Mousehole: a Documented History. For Gerard Manley Hopkins, see ‘H
eaven-Haven’, in Poems and Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner, (London: Penguin Classics, 2008).
RAYMUNDO
For Sebald, see The Rings of Saturn. For Lopez, see Arctic Dreams.
VORTEX
For Joan Didion, see The Year of Magical Thinking. For Philip Pullman, see The Northern Lights, (New York: Scholastic, 1995, 2017). Pullman’s His Dark Materials series continues to teach me much about imagination and integrity as I reach my mid-twenties; there is surely no better, nor more appealing, literary invention than the daemon. For Ted Hughes, see ‘The Rock’, in Writers on Themselves.
A PASSIONATE RAGE
For Synge, see The Aran Islands.
’OME
For Gaston Bachelard, see The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, (London: Penguin Classics, 1957, 2014). For Franz Kafka, see ‘Poseidon’ in The Complete Stories (London: Vintage Classics, 1920, 1992). For Claude Lévi-Strauss, see Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (London: Penguin Classics, 1955, 2011).
FISHERMAN’S BLUES
For Synge, see The Aran Islands.
HOLLOWAYS
For Melville, see Moby Dick.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
If you want to write, it turns out you have to live at the same time. And if you decide to make a go at living, in turns out you need a lot of people to help you along the way. As such, my list of thanks would probably stretch as long as this book – longer even. But for now, here’s an abbreviated version, which I have made roughly chronological for the sake of ease.
Thank you to my mother, Zelah, for each wet and windy walk we’ve taken across Lelant beach together. Thank you to my father, Francis, for helping me through every crisis of confidence – and there were many – with tremendous patience. To my brothers, Georges and Simon. To Nick and Sara Williams for opening up their home to me and being my ballasts on the north coast. To my friends, including, but not restricted to: old friends, new friends, school friends, university friends, friends I’ve lived with, worked with, danced with, kissed, pined after, lost and laughed with; it is you who have shaped these first few, unsteady years of adulthood, and so, in a way, have shaped this book too.
Thank you to those at TLS for giving me the opportunity to write in their paper – I learnt so much from you all. I am eternally grateful to my editor Michael Fishwick for taking a chance on an unknown quantity and for supporting me every shaky step of the way. Thank you to Lilidh, Lauren, Emma and everyone else at Bloomsbury. Thank you to my brilliant agent, Cathryn Summerhayes. Thank you to my copy-editor Kate Johnson, whose thoughtful, discerning edits transformed this book and whose every phone call I look forward to immensely.
Thank you to the town of Newlyn for letting me stay a little while. Thank you to every fisherman and individual involved in the fishing industry who took the time to give me an insight into their livelihoods – Nathan, Andy, Cod, Roger, David, James, Danny, Kyle, Andrew, Stevie, Freddie, Nick, Mike and Rose, Harry, Simon, Larry, Nicky, Shane, Rob, Nocte, Mad Dick, Alan, Ben Gunn, Tony, Chris, Lucy, Elizabeth, among others. To every member of the community who made me howl with laughter in the pub and showed me it is possible to love your neighbours fiercely. Thank you to Isaac – the conversations we had about home, about identity, became the bedrock of this book. To Don, for providing Dark, Salt, Clear with its hero and for being the best skipper in the southwest. To Lofty and Denise, for whom there do not exist words enough to say thank you properly: it meant everything living with you those months. Denise, Newlyn’s Dancing Queen, I will never forget you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lamorna Ash is an education worker at the charity IntoUniversity and is a freelance writer for the Times Literary Supplement and TANK magazine. She has a degree in English from Oxford and a masters in Social and Cultural Anthropology from UCL, and has written numerous plays that have toured Edinburgh, Oxford and London. She can gut most kinds of fish, quite slowly. Dark, Salt, Clear is her first book.
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First published in Great Britain 2020
This edition published 2020
Copyright © Lamorna Ash, 2020
Lamorna Ash has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work
Text from A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 2005, Joan Didion
Text from ‘The Collected Stories of Dylan Thomas’ by Dylan Thomas © 1954, Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Text from New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore by Marianne Moore, reprinted with permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Text from Elizabeth Bishop: Prose The Centenary Edition by Elizabeth Bishop published by Chatto and Windus, reprinted with permission of The Random House Group © 2011, Elizabeth Bishop
Text from The Complete Poems by Elizabeth Bishop published by Chatto and Windus, reprinted with permission of The Random House Group © 2004, Elizabeth Bishop
Text from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, published by Vintage and reprinted by permission of the Random House Group Ltd © 2014, Barry Lopez
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-0001-1; eBook: 978-1-5266-0002-8
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