The life class model in Newlyn was nothing like the ones I’d come across back home in London. His body bore the marks of a life lived hard – his arms strong and sinewy, his face cross-hatched by wrinkles, his back and biceps scribbled all over with dark blue tattoos. I wanted to believe he had once been a fisherman, but he did not speak to us so I never found out. As we sipped tea there, in the bare studio room of Newlyn Art School up the top of Old Paul Hill, he stood in silence facing the large wooden windows, from where he could have seen the whole of Mount’s Bay yawning out in both directions, if only the black night sky had not covered the view.
When he posed for us, he did not curve his body self-consciously across some chaise longue but looked at us head on, legs apart, arms outstretched as if to say: Here I am! Observing me as I sketched the man’s outline – messily, hungrily, at breakneck speed, rubbing out lines, starting again, failing once more to capture his shape – the art teacher came over and asked me to put down my pencil. When drawing a body, she explained, do not look at the limbs themselves, the shapes and positions you expect the human form to assume, but instead at ‘the negative space around them’ – the triangles inside the crook of each arm, the crescent that emerges on the other side of where the waist slopes inwards. By following this method the figure will materialise on the paper of its own accord, not how you imagine it ought to appear, but how it really is: the flesh-and-blood person standing before the row of canvases.
I took a breath and relaxed. This was new; there was another way of looking at things.
It was not until I started drawing that I recognised the way I attempt to take the world in. When I sketch, I want the whole image to appear at once; I push the pencil hard against the paper until it is all but blunt, desperately trying to commit whatever is before me to the page. It is the way I speak, too, bloating each sentence out with as many exhaustive pieces of information as I can to ensure my poor audience does not miss a single moment of what I am trying to conjure.
That bare-boned man, built of so many negative spaces and unresolved marks and shadings, contained in his being all that I was yet to understand about Newlyn. What I had failed to see is that a place is alive; it too is flesh and blood standing before you, arms outstretched, mouth open, ready to call out: Here I am! – if only you would pause for a moment to listen.
John Steinbeck articulates the life of places better than any other writer I know, especially in his novella Cannery Row. I first read it on the advice of a good friend from Lelant, a village on the north Cornwall coast where the female line of my family has lived for generations. Since returning to London, it is this book that has found itself most frequently in my backpack as I commute, batted like a mouse in a cat’s paws from one end of the city to the other to tutor children. I show each child the prologue to Cannery Row on our first English session together. I show it to them because I want them to know that there are writers who aren’t afraid of admitting the near impossibility of transforming landscapes and people into writing, but who try anyway. I show it to them to remind myself of that same truth as I work on my own writing.
‘Cannery Row in Monterey in California,’ Steinbeck tells us, ‘is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream …’ In one breath, he gives us the heavy, industrial percussion of a working fishing village which teems with life, and stinks and grates.
‘That doesn’t mean anything! How can a place be a stink?’ interrupts one ten-year-old tutee.
It couldn’t be, I tell her, if that were all Steinbeck had written of Cannery Row. Each of these sensations is necessary to the others – the way the light hits the warehouse buildings at different hours, the way the sounds intensify at dawn and fade away at dusk each day in time with the work beginning and ending, the potent stench of fish as it arrives into the factories off the boats, how it feels to stand right in the middle of a place where all these sights and sounds and smells occur together. What it means is that a place is every sense pricked, every sense activated at once.
Next, Steinbeck tells us of the strange, hushed magic left behind each evening, which is nostalgic, which is but a dream once more come the next morning. In this brief description of the workers who daily descend on Cannery Row he teaches us how places are nourished by those who gather in them, whose own multiple, contradictory parts render them just as complex and cosmic as the places themselves.
‘How,’ the book’s narrator finally asks, ‘can the poem and the stink and the grating noise – the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream – be set down alive?’ He answers his own question immediately through a scientific analogy – a nod to Steinbeck’s closest friend in California, Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist and the inspiration for Doc, the principal character in Cannery Row. Since ‘a marine flat worm breaks and falls apart when you try to catch it whole’, you must instead ‘let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water.’ So too, in the telling of place, he advises, can you only ‘open the page’ and hope ‘the stories crawl in by themselves.’ After reading Cannery Row, I am mindful to greet each part of Newlyn as it finds me, letting it rush into me as the waves do against the ragged Cornish cliffs that stand before the Atlantic like custodians of the land, marking them, softening them, reshaping their boundaries with each rising swell.
A year on from my time in Cornwall, I have only the scruffy brown sugar-paper life drawings from that night at the art school to remember the unknown Cornishman by. More than any of the hundreds of photographs or diary entries or recordings I made during my time in Newlyn, it is these drawings that best capture, not just the town, but my relationship to the place, and the chiaroscuro shades it revealed while I found myself in the midst of all that living.