The Twilight Hour

My mother died last year. Aged 94, she went without pain, fear or regret. The loss was ours, not hers: the loss of that protective sense of the generation that stands between us and our own ending; the loss, too, of that indefinable ease bred by a lifetime of familiarity with a shared past.

Thinking about her as I walked across flat fields in February, towards the end of day, I watched the darkness settle across the fields, leaving, faraway, a single bright patch of gold, an unattainable kingdom created by the low rays of the sinking sun. Twilight – the subject of Peter Davidson’s meditative and beautiful book The Last of the Light (2015) – is the moment when nature seems to embrace and enfold us within herself. The ache of bereavement adjusts and resolves itself into acceptance: an understanding that twilight is itself a resignation, a dying of the day, from which renewal arises. Many of the favourite books so wonderfully evoked and reclaimed in Slightly Foxed have previously been subjected to a lifetime of affectionate rereading. But I had never heard of Peter Davidson until the friend with whom I was out on that February stroll chose to send me this singular book. Since then, I have tracked down and devoured three other similarly poetic works by the same author. All seem to have been written while Davidson was living in what he calls ‘a remote and exceptional part of Scotland’ – just north of the Cairngorms in the Eastern Highlands. This is where he stands at the opening of The Last of the Light, ‘on shadowed slopes, on the bare shoulder of the hill, outside the old boundaries of Empire, on the far margin of Europe’. Davidson’s book offers us a series of intense, lyrical and surprisingly moving meditations on landscapes, buildings and mythical settings, as seen at the close of day through the eyes of painters and writers. The Last of the Light is a spellbinding exploration of that haunted moment of transition, either on some particular evening or in the history of the civilizations through which Davidson effortlessly roams. Again and again we find ourselves confronting the familiar with fresh eyes, noticing the tiny but significant details that he brings to the fore and quickens into life. The engravings of Samuel Palmer provide a fine example of his method. Briefly, he tells the story of the Victorian artist’s sad life: a wretched marriage; the loss of a beloved eldest son. Nine years before his death in 1881, Palmer found solace in illustrating Virgil’s Eclogues. Davidson describes these drawings as ‘his last place of retreat from a hostile present’. ‘The Homeward Star’ – Palmer’s representation of Virgil’s celebrated account of the approach of dusk – looks back for comfort and inspiration, Davidson suggests, to happier times when a sturdy young artist went wandering through summer fields all evening long. Years later, recognizing how much of the world of his youth had vanished, Palmer recast Virgil’s hospitable little homes as industrial chimney-stacks, reminders of a business-like age in which the artist was never at ease. Behind them, heavy woods cluster beneath the blackly medieval peaks of Virgil’s shadow-shrouded mountains. Melancholy hovers, as if with folded wings. But Davidson gently draws our attention upwards – to a sky palely brightened by Palmer’s beloved motifs of an evening star and a sleeping crescent moon – and then downward again, to where an almost invisible group of shepherds has gathered to chat around a simply laid table. Light glows down upon this tiny rustic party from the interior of a woodland cabin, their refuge from the night. Davidson points to a similar group in ‘The Bellman’, Palmer’s 1879 illustration for Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’. Here, the sinister, long-coated figure of the bell-ringer stalks the dusky street of an Italianate village. To one side sits another merry little group of evening diners. Sadness and reassurance mingle in the twilight, evoking in another of Davidson’s apt quotations what the art historian Erwin Panofsky called ‘the feeling of evening silently settling over the world’. Occasionally, Davidson steps forward to introduce his own experiences of what Parisians call ‘the blue hour’, that blink-and-it’s-gone moment in the evening when – before our light-polluting cities banished such distinctions – Nabokov could record the merging of a

gradual and dual blue As night unites the viewer with the view.

Recalling one such evening in August at his Scottish home, he describes the protracted enjoyment of sitting with guests in a dusk-mantled garden. Candles glimmer in the grass. The house lights brighten as the sky loses its first evening brilliance. Walking with his wife towards the shadowed trees and the river beyond, he turns with a moment’s wistfulness to look back at their younger, oblivious guests, ‘to where they sit under the firefly lanterns in the last of the light. We are hearing the fall of water they cannot yet hear.’ This poignant sense of the fugitive moment and the coming to an end of things haunts Davidson’s strange and magical book. Intelligence, unexpected insights, and the recognition that he is always writing about more than the transient delight of a long summer evening, succeed in holding melancholy at bay. Moving from Palmer’s wistful minor key to a thundering major chord, Davidson suggests that Europe has been living in an era of twilight ever since the passing of the great civilizations from which it was born.

Through the centuries, European culture has, to some degree, felt itself to be an after-culture, a broken culture of shadow and echo. All times after the lost, bright world of Greece and Rome are ‘twilight’ . . . The age of gold declines to our age of iron, and exile and shadow are the undersong of our histories. Our own age too can be readily seen as a spoiled and darkening one, littered with a tidewrack of falling monuments to the hopes of post-war Europe.

He shares Palmer’s view of twilight as a refuge from an unfriendly present, mourning the fact that our present way of life has almost succeeded in extinguishing the subtle hues of each day’s transition into night. Twilight brings a moment that has, over the centuries, been celebrated by artists, poets and naturalists. Davidson’s natural affinity is with writers such as Ruskin and Gerard Manley Hopkins who anxiously recorded the dramatic effects of a changing climate upon the evening sky. To Davidson, the whole of the nineteenth century lies enfolded within the exquisitely coffined sadness that descends at dusk. His descriptions repeatedly remind us of the ‘melancholy, belated lives’ evoked by John Atkinson Grimshaw’s sepia and gold paintings of city evenings. The pollution-obsessed Ruskin noticed in them only ‘the smoke-drifts that blanch the sunlight’, and Davidson shares his distress. One entire page of his book is devoted to the image of a carefully preserved glass bottle in which, like mud, a puddle of the dense black rain that fell across Lancashire in 1884 has been sealed up for close on a century and a half. Exploring the dark side of twilight, Davidson takes as an example the painter James Pryde (‘the Edgar Allan Poe of Painting’), master of haunted rooms and scenes of violence. Pryde’s rooms lie buried in darkness, lit only by ‘a small spillage of illumination – thus the moment of depiction is always a twilight moment’. Davidson quotes G. K. Chesterton’s marvellous description of the hour when darkness descends upon the London inhabited by his amiable detective, Father Brown: ‘that thrilling mood and moment, when the eyes of a great city, like the eyes of a cat, begin to flame in the dark’. More ghostly evocations he finds in a letter from William Maxwell, describing for his friend Sylvia Townsend Warner the moment on an Irish country evening when it is possible to register an ‘almost darkness that is still a kind of light’ as a moment in which ‘the supernatural is not at all improbable’. Warner knew just what he meant. Davidson cites the moment when Lolly Willowes, the eponymous heroine of one of Warner’s most beguiling novels, strays from a comfortable fireside to seek out the excitements of a deserted countryside at twilight. ‘Looking into the well, she watched the reflected sky grow dimmer, and when she raised her eyes the gathering darkness of the landscape surprised her. The time had come.’

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Caspar David Friedrich’s wonderful painting of The Evening Star; Robert Louis Stevenson’s enraptured first glimpse of his future wife through a lamplit window at dusk; the ‘unconsoled twilight’ in which Sebald’s great novel Austerlitz gradually approaches its conclusion; the hours of patient preparation invested in Sargent’s glorious painting of children lighting lanterns in a riverside garden, captured at the moment when the flowers and faces of Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose are about to be touched by evening’s first shadows; the unexpected link between that famous image and Edwin Drood’s Mr Crisparkle, lilting out the Victorian ballad from which Sargent took his haunting title – Davidson offers us moments of discovery and startling connection on almost every page. The Last of the Light transforms the subject of twilight into a constantly rewarding study of art and history, entwined with observations of the seasonal changes to an abiding Scottish landscape. That barren landscape perfectly mirrors the implicit sadness in Davidson’s book, that moment when – as with each bright day – ‘the year hurries down towards the dark’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 63 © Miranda Seymour 2019