A Gale Called Maria

I first learned about the concept of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ when I was doing my A levels three decades ago. The furious winds that tore through Wuthering Heights – or across the playing fields of my school in Sheffield – were not actually furious, our teacher helpfully explained, because they were inanimate and so could not be given human characteristics. We diligently took note of the fact that weather was often described in this way, and trusted that if we successfully identified this during our summer exams we could expect to gain some valuable additional marks. As with so much at school, I never entirely understood the significance of the phrase, but it stuck with me. And it came to mind again when I read George R. Stewart’s extraordinary novel Storm (1941) for the first time.

As its title suggests, Stewart’s novel tells the story of a January storm in around 1940 (the date is never given). The storm is traced from its origins in an area of low pressure somewhere in the western Pacific, through its ominous acceleration as it races towards North America, to its breaking over the California coast, the Rockies and the Great Plains, and its final dissipation into new weather systems somewhere around Boston and New York. Each of its twelve chapters is devoted to a single day and traces both the formation of the storm itself and its escalating impact on the lives of dozens of individuals who are affected by it. The cumulative effect of these interwoven stories is extraordinary. In the novel’s most grandiose moments, its narrator provides a near-omniscient view almost inconceivable in its geographical scale:

Far around the great circle, a third of the world away, this storm had taken shape. It was a part – and not a small part – of a vast and complex system of atmospheric forces covering the hemisphere. No longer was it a young storm racing its thousand miles a day. Now, powerful and sedate in maturity, it moved with the steady, sure pace of majesty. Along a line of hundreds of miles, its rain belt pressed upon the coast.

More frequently, the stages of the story are told from a distinctly human perspective. It is a junior meteorologist working in San Francisco who first identifies the embryonic storm on Day 1 by piecing together terse air-pressure reports from ships across the Pacific; it is he who notes the small eye-shaped depression north of the Philippines which will build into something much bigger. His story is intertwined with that of other weathermen – a station chief who is conscious of the implications of a rain forecast for the daily lives of half of America, and a retired head of the bureau who can never quite let go of his old-fashioned approach to the job (or his fading memories of the weather at President Grant’s inauguration in 1869). As the novel progresses, the cast expands to include professionals who spring into action when the storm hits – teams who strive to keep the mountain passes clear of snow or repair telephone cables brought down by wind and rain – but also countless other individuals whose lives are to be bound up in the storm. This rich cast includes a retired soldier responsible for managing flood control in the Sacramento valley, the pilot of a routine flight from Salt Lake City to the West Coast, and various passengers on a Streamliner train that is heading to California from Chicago. It is the young meteorologist who first names the storm ‘Maria’ and hence charges this grand weather system with a personality. (Significantly, the book was written long before the naming of storms became commonplace: it is possible that Stewart’s work helped popularize this practice.) Though he is the principal human focus of the novel, we are left in no doubt that the storm is the true protagonist, and its animal qualities are explored at length:

As a man is conceived in the fierce onset of opposing natures, so also a storm begins in the clash of the dry cold air from the north and the moist air from the south. Like a person, a storm is the focus of activities, continuing and varying through a longer or shorter period of time, having a birth, youth, maturity, old age, and death. It moves; in a sense, it reproduces its kind, and even takes in food, exhausts its energy, and casts out the waste.

The steady development and transformation of the storm each day are among the most gripping elements of each chapter, even if the sheer scale of what is being described is sometimes difficult to comprehend: cold fronts run from the Great Lakes to Utah and Arizona, and are met by storm systems spiralling out of the Gulf of Mexico; Maria herself brings a downpour to San Francisco and snow in the Sierra Nevada, while normally wet Seattle is unseasonably dry. All of this is related in a way that is both accessible and authoritative. Stewart was a Professor of English Literature at UC Berkeley and evidently prided himself on investigating the unlikeliest topics. His short introduction to Storm describes his immersion in works of meteorology but also a period of compulsive storm-chasing in the mountains near his California home, and of extended friendship with the men of the California Highway Patrol, who were to serve as models for some of the characters in his great work. He is best known now for his post-apocalyptic novel Earth Abides, but his many other publications are equally fascinating. They include a fictional account of a forest fire, a historical study of the ill-fated Donner Party of 1846–7 in which a group of migrants on the Oregon trail suffered through a particularly bleak winter, and works of local history on the Californian mountains and the eccentric placenames of the American West. Much of this learning resurfaces in the pages of Storm. Towards the end of the story, for example, when the heaviest rainfall has ended but the rivers of the Sierra Nevada are overwhelmed by the run-off, he delights in recalling a symphony of names:

The streams poured out from all those creeks and canyons named by the Forty-Niners – in hope and despair and ridicule, now in flat matter-of-factness, now in flamboyant fancy. From Deer Creek and Otter Creek, from Bear Creek and Grizzly Creek, from Jaybird Creek and Redbird Creek. From Alder Creek and Willow Creek, and Lichen Creek and Brush Creek; from Granite Creek and Slab Creek and Slate Creek. From Indian Creek and Dutch Creek and Irish Creek. From Pilot Creek and Whaler Creek, and Soldier Creek and Sailor Creek . . . From Devil’s Creek and Humbug Creek and Shirt-tail Creek; from Hangtown Creek and Robbers’ Creek and One-eye Creek. Out of them all and a hundred more the water came foaming.

But the true genius of Storm comes in the management of this story in all its different perspectives simultaneously. Though the storm is captured in the words of the omniscient narrator and given a personality as Maria on the maps of the young meteorologist, it also appears as a simple irritation in the eyes of the countless millions of inhabitants over which it sweeps: Although the individual man went on stolidly about his usual tasks, he in most cases resented this sudden change in his environment and considered it essentially local. His attitude of mind was primitive, as if he felt that some angry storm god had overwhelmed his own city and district for no better reason than a spiteful whim. He did not realize that the wind that blew upon his own cheek was part of a planetary system. Rain in San Francisco, sun in Sitka, sub-zero weather in Calgary, a norther in Tampico, an east wind in Boston . . . This integration of the human and the planetary is developed most effectively through a handful of stories that the reader can trace through each chapter, often from unlikely beginnings, with no clear sense of what the eventual significance of any given episode will be. Over several days for example, we witness a wild boar snuffling fussily in its hunting ground, never quite knowing how its story will intersect with the others we are tracing across this wide world. It is only through a series of tragic coincidences that the fate of the boar will be bound up with those of the Streamliner passengers as that train surges relentlessly westward. At another point, we witness an old tree boll fall in a forest. As it slowly slides down the mountain - side, bringing earth and rocks with it, it severs the telephone cables that connect the country. Like the fabled butterfly fluttering its wings, the effects are dramatic:

A man in Boise was delayed fifteen minutes in getting a call through to Sacramento and lost a prospective job. A girl in Omaha was prevented from talking to her mother in Honolulu before she went into the operating-room, not to return alive.

Perhaps most moving is the story of two young lovers who are returning home from California across the snow-bound mountains. Then the narrative turns its focus elsewhere – to an aeroplane which struggles to make an emergency landing, to workers keeping the train tracks clear – and the couple drop out of sight. We are left wondering if their story will be resolved. But occasional hints are dropped: the families of the couple start a search, and rescue teams scour the countryside, but the storm grinds relentlessly on. Amidst this human activity, a coyote leaves its den in search of food, and in so doing provides the only direct connection between all the different strands that have spread out across the storm-swept continent:

He came to a remembered place where he had scented some - thing strange beneath the snow . . . He nuzzled about. The depth of snow was greater than it had been before, and so the scent was fainter. And yet that night he had not killed, and now the saliva began to drool at the corners of his mouth. But mingled with the pleasant smell were others which made him suspicious and wary. He went prudently on his way, remembering the spot for future nights.

It was Ruskin who originally coined the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ to illuminate his discussion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, when nature and culture often came together in the works of the Lakeland poets or the Brontës. The term was not intended pejoratively, and Ruskin often delighted in the application of unusual human characteristics to the weather, even if he warned against its overuse. Alas, he died in 1900, so never had the opportunity to read Storm, but it would surely have delighted him.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 81 © Andy Merrills 2023