In the literature of discovery and description of the new landscape, his is among the very best. The ancestral time line for this canon begins with the Journals of Christopher Columbus, then on to the Travels of William Bartram, then to the Journals of Lewis and Clark, then to Joseph Dalton Hooker’s Himalayan Journals, finally to Frank Kingdon Ward’s accounts of his journeys to China and Tibet. This is my own view. When I think of the pleasurable disturbances to be had from reading these books: Columbus’s fear and anxiety as he came to realize that he was looking at a geography he had not imagined and was often at a loss to describe; Bartram’s Quaker belief helping him to carefully manage the wild joy that he must have felt as he saw much of the same natural world his father had seen, and yet to render it with words so new that he inspired poets; the journals of (Meriwether) Lewis and (William) Clark, a stark example of the American contradiction, for it is an individual narrative of events that has made possible a national consciousness; and then there is Hooker, whose account of his adventures in the Himalayas is a fraught rendering of the way the British colonial enterprise worked in places that were far away and on the people who dwelled in these faraway places.
Within Frank Kingdon Ward’s prose is Columbus’s verbal fumbling, Bartram’s self-consciousness, Lewis and Clark’s innocent and guilty violations, and Hooker’s implicit divine recklessness. How could it not be so? The world Kingdon Ward inherited had been made tame, had been subdued by these narratives. Whether he read them or not, the world he knew, its geography, its peoples, had been made familiar through them.
There is a book in existence, another collection of his writings, though it is no longer in print (he wrote so much that it seems as if the best way to present him to a new set of readers is through a collection), and in it are his many startling observations of the places he had been and the people he had seen. On the book’s jacket is an author photograph that is unequaled in the history of author’s photographs. It is a portrait of a Bhutanese porter carrying a suitcase. The porter is carrying the suitcase in the way that people from that part of the world carry physical burdens. The whole load is wrapped up and then tied with a broad piece of cloth hanging like a belt, and then this broad piece of cloth, instead of being anchored around the body of the person, is strung around the forehead, and the weight of the burden is borne completely on the bearer’s forehead. The suitcase that this porter is carrying looks ordinary enough, like one any Englishman and privileged subject of the British Empire would carry. But on its side is the name of its owner. And in this case, the owner is Frank Kingdon Ward. The name is in small capital letters on the side of the suitcase, and the suitcase is resting on the back of the Bhutanese man. The picture is tightly cropped, so that at first the viewer will look closely at the man with his shiny, bobbed hair framing his finely chiseled, high-cheekboned face. But then the name of the owner of the suitcase, in small, discreet lettering, comes to dominate the whole picture: F. Kingdon Ward.
If there is a better writer about the garden than he, I do not know who that would be. The garden Kingdon Ward wrote about was in the wilderness. This Eden—or Paradise, as he called it—had been cast out for such a long time that no one even knew some of what was growing in it. Is there a mention of a blue poppy in any literature before Kingdon Ward found and wrote about it? And to open a book of his, any one of them, and to read of glaciers, rivers, cliffs, cols, screes, passes, mountains, is to realize that you are reading a description of a garden, a garden made by a god.
This collection, so well chosen and splendidly introduced by Tom Christopher, is a joyous event. Readers who are already familiar with Kingdon Ward’s work will renew that feeling of amazement and awe when reading again his descriptions of finding a now favorite garden treasure and his descriptions of a still-unfamiliar landscape. To the new reader, how envious I am of you. To see someone in charge of a world from which could come a sentence like this: “I noticed a lot of Meconopsis speciosa lower down, but somehow the wind rattling amongst the dead haulms gave me a momentary distaste for botany.” Every word in that sentence, including the conjunction, makes me shudder with the special excitement that comes from reading.
What a gargantuan personality he is in the world of the garden. When I first read him, I was only newly familiar with that fabled plant the blue poppy, Meconopsis betonicifolia. Not only that, but many of the things I had growing in my own garden (many of them turned out to be things Kingdon Ward had encountered in his travels) were so unfamiliar to me that I did not even know they had such a thing as a natural habitat. But because of him, through reading him, came the desire to see the things I had been growing in my garden (it was from him I came to know some of the things I had growing in my garden in the first place) in their natural habitat. It was because of reading him that I came to want to be associated with the adventure of seed collecting. I have now gone to some of the same places (or nearby some of the same places) he writes about in this collection. When I do this, I have him in mind. When I return from these places, I read what he has written with these places in my mind. Like the great originator that he was, he is best known through his words as they appear on the page.
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JAMAICA KINCAID was born in St. Johns, Antigua. Her most recent books include the novel Mr. Potter and My Garden (Book). She teaches at Harvard University and lives with her two children in Vermont.