Robyn Creswell
The Book of Travels by Ḥannā Diyāb, edited by Johannes Stephan and translated from the Arabic by Elias Muhanna
The Book of Travels by Ḥannā Diyāb, edited by Johannes Stephan, translated from the Arabic by Elias Muhanna, and with a foreword by Yasmine Seale and an afterword by Paolo Lemos Horta. New York University Press, 2 volumes, 668 pp., $50.00
On March 17, 1709, Antoine Galland, the French translator of The Thousand and One Nights, wrote in his diary of meeting in Paris a certain “Hanna,” “a Maronite from Aleppo,” who spoke French, Provençal, and Turkish in addition to his native Arabic. A week later Galland met “Monsieur Hanna” again and heard him tell “several very beautiful Arabic stories,” which he promised to write down and send to Galland. For the Frenchman, it was a lucky break. The seventh volume of his translation had been published in 1706, but at that point Galland essentially ran out of stories. He worked from a fifteenthcentury Arabic manuscript, sent by a friend in Syria, but the original broke off many nights short of a thousand and one (a number Galland seems to have taken literally). In May and June 1709 Hanna gave Galland sixteen new stories, including some of the collection’s longest and most beloved tales, such as “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” Now Galland had all the nights he needed. Les Mille et Une Nuits swelled to twelve volumes and soon became one of the most celebrated texts in French literature. Scholars have known for some time about the origin of these “orphan tales,” as they are often called, but the figure of the Maronite from Aleppo remained shadowy. Who was he, what was he doing in the Paris of Louis XIV, and where did he get the stories he told Galland? (In all but one case—that of “The Ebony Horse”—there are no written Arabic originals for them.) Also, what happened to him afterward? The last glimpse of him in Galland’s journal comes from the fall of 1709, where we learn that his family name is “Diab” and that he is now in Marseille, possibly waiting for a ship home. The chances of learning more about a solitary Syrian who passed through Paris and Marseille three hundred years ago may seem slim, but then scholars got a lucky break of their own.
In 1993 the Arabist Jérôme Lentin discovered a manuscript in the Vatican Library deposited by Paul Sbath, a priest from Aleppo, in 1928. Because the codex was missing its first folios, Sbath had cataloged his text as anonymous, but in fact the last page contained a note, dated 1766, identifying the author as “Antun Yusuf Hanna Diyab.” The manuscript, written in a rough and ready Syrian vernacular—similar in many respects to the Arabic of the Nights—is Diyab’s own account, dictated at the end of his life, of his travels around the Mediterranean between 1706 and 1710, including an extended description of his stay in Paris as a young man. A French translation of Diyab’s memoir was published in 2015,1 and we now have The Book of Travels, a skillful English version translated by Elias Muhanna, along with a careful en face edition of the original Arabic. Diyab’s account of his storytelling sessions with Galland is tantalizingly brief. He never calls the Frenchman by name, identifying him only as “an old man” with a position in the royal library, who was also translating The Thousand and One Nights:
He would ask me to help him with things he didn’t understand, and I’d explain them to him.
The book was missing some “Nights,” so I told him a few stories I knew and he used them to round out his work. He was very appreciative, and promised that if I ever needed anything, he would do his utmost to grant it.
Diyab doesn’t pretend that the stories he told Galland were actually tales from the Nights (a collection with rather porous boundaries, in any case), and he clearly had no idea, when he composed his memoir in 1766, that Galland’s translation had sparked a vogue for “Oriental tales” that transformed European letters.
Readers hoping to learn exactly what transpired between Galland and his Aleppan informant will be disappointed by Diyab’s casual report. He says nothing about the tales he recited, neither their contents nor their provenance. But The Book of Travels casts a strong albeit indirect light on these questions by showcasing Diyab’s peculiar talents as a storyteller. And it raises other, equally intriguing questions about the relation between autobiography and fiction, between real-life
adventures and the marvels of makebelieve. For Diyab’s meeting with Galland was only one in a sequence of improbable encounters. During his journey to Paris and back, Diyab was captured by pirates, slept in the Valley of Lions in Tunisia, survived the Great Frost of 1709, met the Sun King at Versailles, and passed himself off as a French doctor in the wilds of Anatolia. Scheherazade, storyteller of the Nights, ends each performance with the promise of even more amazing tales to come, and The Book of Travels measures up to her example.
Hanna
Diyab was the youngest of three brothers from a Maronite family with links to the textile trade. Aleppo was home to several French and Venetian firms with agents across the region, and it was in this polyglot milieu that Diyab got his start. In 1706, while still in his late teens, he entered the monastery of St. Elisha in Lebanon’s remote Qadisha Valley. This is when his memoir begins. Though Diyab admired the monks’ piety, he decided he wasn’t meant to be an ascetic and soon returned to Aleppo. His old employer refused to take him back, however, and Diyab found himself “in dire straits.” A young Christian unfit for the church and rejected by the merchants didn’t have many good options. (Diyab never mentions a father; presumably his was dead.) He reluctantly decided to head back to St. Elisha.
It was at this point in early 1707 that Diyab met Paul Lucas, a Frenchman carrying a royal edict that authorized him to purchase old coins and manuscripts on behalf of Louis XIV. Lucas was impressed by Diyab’s abilities as
a translator—the dragoman was another traditional Levantine profession, of course—and asked where he was headed. “I was too embarrassed to tell him the real story,” Diyab writes,
so I merely said I was on a voyage to explore the world. This was a ruse meant to throw him off the scent, but as a result, he was convinced that I was indeed setting off on a voyage. Such was God’s plan!
This first meeting, with its mixture of bluffing and providence, set the tone for their future relationship. Diyab and Lucas spent the next two and a half years together, crisscrossing the Mediterranean with visits to Cyprus, Egypt, Tunisia, Italy, and finally France.
At the turn of the eighteenth century, French Orientalism was in its infancy. The institutionalized study of the Near East—the imperial moment analyzed in Edward Said’s Orientalism—was still a century or so away. During the reign of Louis XIV, and especially under the watch of his powerful minister of state, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, royal patronage helped found schools for language training and encouraged the collection of Eastern manuscripts and medallions for the Bibliotèque du roi (predecessor of today’s Bibliotèque nationale). But the main imperative was to gather items that would magnify the splendor of the king. There was little attempt to establish independent institutions of learning, and personal connections trumped scholarly merit. The work was often carried out by royal collectors—glorified treasurehunters, really—who purchased (or stole) books, coins, inscriptions, and even animals on behalf of the
court. Galland performed such services for the king before settling in Paris, and Lucas, a protégé of the royal librarian Abbé Bignon, was in the same line of work. The missions required subterfuge of various kinds. Lucas posed as a doctor in search of rare herbs, since being recognized as a coin collector— or a mummy smuggler, which he was also—might have raised prices. Lucas’s relation to Diyab was hardly more transparent. At their first meeting, Lucas promised to obtain a sinecure for him in the royal library; in return, Diyab negotiated deals with coin sellers and served as a middleman with local rulers. But it isn’t clear that Lucas ever intended to fulfill his end of the bargain. Diyab’s memoir of his Mediterranean adventures is a mixture of clear-eyed observation and wide-eyed innocence, nicely captured by Muhanna’s lucid yet folksy English version. Diyab’s accounts of the consuls’ dealings with beys and walis show a shrewd appreciation for diplomacy, and his story of smuggling tobacco into Corsica is a plausible piece of derring-do (he stuffed the packs inside a mattress). But the most memorable episodes are his evocations of wondrous sights—a Tower of Skulls and the inside of the Bardo palace in Tunis, an opera in Paris—and especially his hairsbreadth escapes from waterspouts, shipwreck, and angry peasants. Throughout The Book of Travels, realistic details are suffused with a sense of the marvelous. The greatest wonder is Versailles itself, “a palace unequaled in any part of the world,” Diyab writes in remembrance, “decorated...with all sorts of indescribable gardens, parks, and promenades.” For their audience with the Sun King, Lucas instructs Diyab to put on his most colorful Eastern costume: a long tunic, baggy pants, silver-plated dagger, and a calpac, or hat, made of marten fur. To complete the tableau, Diyab was presented along with a caged pair of jerboas—highjumping desert rodents brought from Egypt—fit for the royal menagerie. Diyab and the jerboas were then served up for the private delectation of princes and princesses, who peeked under his tunic and fingered his dagger.
Lucas’s stage-managing of Diyab’s appearance at court casts doubt on his promise of a royal position; one doesn’t introduce a possible future librarian as a curio. The winter of 1708–1709, which Diyab spent in Lucas’s Parisian apartments, was the coldest in five hundred years. Priests had to thaw the sacramental wine, and the ice of the Seine was thick enough for carriage rides. Diyab nearly froze to death going to the barbershop. In the spring, he met Galland and helped him “round out his work.” According to Diyab, the translator then pledged to help get him appointed as a royal collector abroad—possibly a ruse to clear the way for Galland’s own advancement at court. Whatever the truth, Diyab finally grew weary of waiting for Frenchmen to fulfill their promises. He took a stagecoach to Marseille and caught a boat back east.
Diyab’s travelogue includes many episodes that echo the stories he told Galland—a fact that tends to confirm his authorship while raising additional questions. As scholars have noted, the discovery of the magic ring and lamp in “Aladdin” repeats a scene from The
Book of Travels in which Lucas pays a goatherd to enter a tomb and the man emerges with “a large, plain ring” as well as a lamp “similar to those used by the butter merchants.” The splendor of Aladdin’s palace, studded with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, recalls Diyab’s descriptions of the princesses’ quarters at Versailles. And the genie’s magic trick of transporting the whole palace from China to North Africa seems very like the scene changes Diyab saw at the opera (possibly a production of Marin Marais’s Sémélé):
Everything else that had been onstage flew up too, and vanished in the blink of an eye! In its place appeared a palace as splendid as the palace of the king of France, complete with towering columns, pavilions, salons, crystal windows, and other beautiful features.
“And what if Hanna is Aladdin?” The question, posed by Bernard Heyberger in his superb introduction to the French edition of Diyab’s memoir, is worth pondering. Both begin as fatherless young men at loose ends. Aladdin has failed to learn any trade (his mother calls him “lazy”) and spends his days carousing with neighborhood ruffians. Then a mysterious foreigner shows up—an evil wizard, in the case of “Aladdin,” who pretends to be the young man’s uncle—and promises great things in exchange for a little help hunting for treasure. With the aid of the genie of the lamp, Aladdin installs himself in a fabulous palace and marries the sultan’s daughter. Both “Aladdin” and The Book of Travels are effectively coming-of-age stories, but the fairy tale transforms the frustrations of the travelogue into a series of wish fulfillments. In an afterword to the new English edition, Paulo Lemos Horta, a scholar of the Nights, writes:
The tales Diyāb gave Galland are not “orphan tales,” as defined by the absence of an Arabic manuscript source, but rather “Diyāb’s tales,” the work of a gifted and curious young man who continued to exercise his narrative skills throughout his life.
There can be little doubt at this point that Diyab should be credited as the author of “Aladdin,” “Ali Baba,” and the other stories Galland translated (without ever publicly acknowledging their source). Diyab is likely to have heard versions of “Aladdin” from the café storytellers of Aleppo, but this takes nothing away from his achievement: storytelling is an inherently collaborative art. Especially in view of the tales’ later influence, recognizing Diyab as their creator is a significant act of historical reparation. It would be a shame, however, if Diyab’s place in history were dependent on his encounter with Galland. And one shouldn’t overstate the attractiveness of “Aladdin” simply because of its global fame. Is it too late to suggest that the story is wildly overrated? It is marred by anti-Semitism (Aladdin is cheated several times by a greedy Jewish merchant, a trope that also crops up in The Book of Travels), and it isn’t nearly as sophisticated, in its use of narrative or its representation of human psychology, as Nights stories such as “The Hunchback’s Tale” or “The Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies.”
Its success, which dates from the beginning of the nineteenth century, is at least partly owing to its obsession with spectacles of wealth and its rags-toriches narrative—both nicely suited to the tastes of industrial capitalism.
Diyab’s meeting with Galland and his audience with Louis XIV are set pieces that stage an encounter between East and West, with all its stylized self-presentations and tragicomic misunderstandings. But these scenes are not typical of The Book of Travels. The cultural and geographical categories of Diyab’s memoir are usually much less rigid. For most of his travelogue, Diyab doesn’t convey a sense of being in truly foreign territory. In Cyprus, Corsica, Marseille, and Paris, he meets fellow Maronites and Aleppans, some very well placed, engaged in trade and administration. The sharper divisions are between urban and nonurban people—it is among the Bedouin of North Africa that Diyab feels most deeply estranged—and also between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox sects. In France, it’s only during his stay at Versailles that Diyab is made to feel culturally other. Exoticism is an elite taste. In any case, Diyab expresses no resentment at being treated as a curiosity. He too is curious: when the princesses peer at him, he peers back. Some of the things he sees abroad strike him as obviously superior to things back home. Diyab is impressed by the orderly spectacle of military parades in Livorno and the efficiency of Parisian hospitals. (This stress on “organization”—Diyab’s word is nizam—is a commonplace of later Arab travel writing on Europe.) But there is no sense of cultural inferiority—or indeed of “culture” as a coherent category at all. Diyab’s Mediterranean is full of people living far from home, speaking many languages, trying on identities for size, then discarding them and trying on new ones as the occasion (or emergency) requires. Diyab’s first encounter with Lucas is exemplary in just this sense: he becomes a world traveler by pretending that he already is one. Most Arab travelogues of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were written by diplomats, scholars, or pilgrims. These authors were representative figures in various ways—they often belonged to prominent families—and almost always wrote in an erudite register of Arabic, studded with well-chosen citations of classical poetry. Their accounts were written for educated peers or for the patrons who funded their travels. Diyab was not on a mission, he didn’t come from a notable family, and he doesn’t address his readers in formal tones. But he clearly felt that his personal story was worth telling.
This doesn’t mean that Diyab is an individualist in the usual sense of the term: he doesn’t believe in the dignity of the common person or the inherent interest of anyone’s inner life. Instead, he composed a memoir because he was clearly singled out by God for an amazing life, full of astonishing events. The only explanation for how he survived his many trials—from pirates and bandits to waterspouts and the Great Frost—is that God was looking after him in particular. In retrospect, we can see that Diyab’s failure to become a monk, his apparently accidental meeting with Lucas, and even the unfulfilled promises of Galland were all signs of Providence. Each of Diyab’s escapes, detours, and setbacks were, as he says, part of “God’s plan.”
Although it has the shape of a travelogue, The Book of Travels is more deeply structured by the Arabic genre of al-faraj ba‘d al-shidda, or “deliverance after distress.” In this type of tale, release from hardship is understood as a sign of God’s favor or forgiveness.2 The narrative pattern is common to hagiographic literature, a genre familiar to Diyab, as well as the Nights. Deliverance is a leitmotif in the story of Sinbad, for example, whose serial shipwrecks always turn out for the best: “I escaped from drowning only by the grace of God,” the inveterate traveler says in his fifth voyage, “for he provided me with a plank of wood on which I floated and saved myself.” When Aladdin finds himself buried alive in a cave, wearing a ring whose power he doesn’t yet know, he offers up a prayer...and inadvertently rubs the metal, which brings forth the jinn. In Diyab’s case, as in Aladdin’s, the hero does precious little to deserve his lucky break. Neither are models of piety or even hard work. But unmerited salvation is also the measure of grace (as well as its inscrutability). Even ordinary people can have amazing stories to tell.
The final chapter of Diyab’s memoir, an account of his trip back home through Izmir, Istanbul, and Anatolia, has the feel of a backpacker’s ramble, where one never knows what might happen next. Diyab works odd jobs, sponges off wealthier or better-connected travelers, stays at cheap guest houses, and gets into a knife fight. He pretends to be “a Frankish doctor,” hoping the disguise will ease his travels through rough country. (Europeans didn’t have to pay the usual Ottoman tolls levied on Christians.) He speaks French, after all, and learned a few tricks from his years on the road with Lucas.
All goes well until Diyab’s caravan runs into the entourage of an imperial chamberlain; they ask “the doctor” to see a young man in his charge, the nephew of a powerful pasha, suffering from a high fever. Diyab’s improvised cure of mashed-up pears and tamarinds seems to work—another lucky break—but when the chamberlain asks him to share a pipe, the risks of roleplaying become real. Learning that Diyab is from Aleppo, the chamberlain marvels at the coincidence. He used to be a customs officer there, and he knew all the local merchant families:
“My best friend of all was a fellow named khawājah Rimbaud, who used to speak Turkish. I used to visit him often, and sample some of his flavored liqueur. As I recall, he had a warehouseman named Anṭūn who’d fetch it for me.” At this, my blood ran cold. For
I thought he’d recognized me and seen through my lie, as khawājah Rimbaud had been my master and that of my brother Anṭūn. And it was I who used to bring him the aromatic liqueur and put myself at his service! It seemed, however, that he didn’t recognize me after all, as I was a twelve-year-old boy at the time.
It is a scene worthy of the Nights: a traveler in disguise, an amazing coincidence—foreshadowed by Diyab’s previous encounters with Aleppans abroad—and then an equally amazing escape. The chamberlain’s failure to recognize Diyab is yet another case of deliverance from distress, but it also suggests, more subtly, that Diyab has changed: he’s no longer the servant boy he once was. The Book of Travels is indeed a coming-of-age tale, and it evokes, with peculiar charm, that time of life when one’s identity is still (dangerously) up for grabs.
For Diyab, that time ended when he returned to Aleppo. One of his older brothers found him a place at their uncle’s shop, and Diyab spent the next twenty-two years as a cloth merchant. A 1740 census of Maronites living in Aleppo registers him as the head of a twelve-person household, six males and six females. Diyab seems to have enjoyed his new life. Although he once planned to become a monk, “It’s perfectly evident to me now that God Most High—may He be praised—had called me to a life of marriage.”
The coda to Diyab’s memoir drives this point home with a satisfying flourish. A year after his return to Aleppo, Diyab learns that Lucas is staying with the French consul. He has managed to secure for himself the appointment that was promised to Diyab and is back to his usual tricks, handing out medical advice and looking for old coins. Diyab bears him no ill will, however. He even accompanies Lucas to explore a local cave. But Diyab’s heart isn’t in treasure hunting. He seems at last to know who he is and closes his account, once and for all, with the wily Frenchman:
Climbing up to the vineyard known as al-Qulayʿah, we had lunch and spent the rest of the day there. When evening came, each went on his way. This is the end of my story, and of my wanderings.
this world, a “commoner” is a farmer who has rights to graze on the common land, ceded long ago by feudal aristocrats. A “gimmer” is a ewe lamb; “fog” is “the sweet regrowth after cropping that we use for the lambs that are weaned.” He drills us in the fine points of an eminent Lake District breed, the Herdwick, hardy in winter, crafty, tough, and “hefted” to the place, “taught their sense of belonging by their mothers as lambs.” Potter bred them at Hill Top, stipulating that the National Trust continue to stock her farms with the “pure Herdwick breed.” A hefted sheep knows its mountainside much the way a salmon knows its stream; it can traverse rocky slopes and find shelter from the storm.
From the beginning, James was taken under the wing of his paternal grandfather, William Hugh Rebanks, who had “only one yellow tooth,” with which he could “clean the meat off a lamb chop...like a jackal.” While clashing with his taciturn father, he worshiped his granddad:
From my first memories until his dying day, I thought the sun shone out of his backside .... He was the king of his own world, like a biblical patriarch. He doffed his cap to no man. No one told him what to do. He lived a modest life but was proud and free and independent, with a presence that said he belonged in this place in the world. My first memories are of him, and knowing I wanted to be just like him someday.
Literate if unlettered, his peasant grandfather, he says, had probably never read Wordsworth. He had a single book in his home, and “it was about horse ailments.” Except for a tractor and bits of other machinery, W. H. Rebanks hewed to the old ways and knew bygone names for everything from moles (“mowdies”) to ewes (“yows”). It was from this man that Rebanks absorbed a kind of nobility that had nothing to do with class. “We owned the earth,” he learned. “We’d been here forever. And we always would be.” At the age of eight he began learning how to rebuild stone walls and an endless series of other duties: “Worming lambs. Moving sheep between fields. Running sheep through the footbath. Laying hedges (only in months with an ‘R’ in them, or the sap will not run and the hedge will die). Hanging gates.”
Among his lessons in shepherding, Rebanks weaves a darker, personal story of his other education. At the local comprehensive, a nonselective state school, he grew to despise the teachers’ attitude of casual indifference toward those, like himself, deemed not intelligent, not destined for the world of higher education, the children of “farmworkers, joiners, brickies, electricians, and hairdressers.”
He joined in the general hooliganism, telling “our dumbfounded headmaster” that the institution was a violation of “human rights.” It was at school that he first heard of Wordsworth, astonished that the teachers valued the Lake District in a way “completely alien to my family,” as a romantic “playground for an itinerant band of climbers, poets, walkers, and daydreamers.” Resenting the notion that “the story of our landscape wasn’t about us,” he quit before the legal age of sixteen to work on the farm.
But by the mid-1990s, modern farms were ballooning in scale, and after half a dozen years of hard labor trying to hold to tradition, Rebanks could see that his family was barely breaking even. At the same time, he was stung by a growing realization that educated people “mattered” in a way he did not. He was beginning to feel the influence of his other grandfather, who died before he was born, a grammar school teacher who left a small library that included W. H. Hudson’s classic A Shepherd’s Life, a reminiscence in the naturalist tradition about a nineteenthcentury shepherd, a life steeped in old ballads and tales of poachers, beloved sheepdogs, foxes, adders, and talented rat-killing cats. Reading it was a revelation to someone who had believed that “books were always about other people, other places, other lives. This book, in all its glory, was about us.” It would, of course, prove the precursor to his own.
At twenty-one, after a bitter argument with his father “about a tup he bought,” Rebanks was ready to return to school. Taking night classes for two years, he prepared for his A levels, “on a mission” to prove to himself that he could do it. Helen, the girl he was dating, helped him learn legible handwriting to take the tests, and although he claims he never hankered after a university education, he decided to apply to Oxford. He was accepted to that school’s Magdalen College, realizing that being “a bit northern and weird was my greatest strength” and separated him from the general run of Oxbridge sophisticates. He eventually took a double first in history.
He never stopped yearning to return to the farm, waking up among the “dreaming spires” disoriented by “empty days” with no animals to tend. But the experience transformed him, instilling confidence and a gift for class code-switching. “When I left Oxford I was bulletproof,” he writes, no longer intimidated by “posh” people. His degree led him to outside opportunities, including a part-time job as an expert adviser to UNESCO on sustainable tourism, which required travel to farming communities around the world. His newfound self-assurance eased the bad blood with his father, and he returned home invigorated. He and Helen married and began a family.
In the early months of 2001, however, a catastrophic epidemic of infectious foot-and-mouth disease broke out across the UK. To contain it, the government required the destruction of more than six million cows, pigs, and sheep. Cumbria was the center of the outbreak:
They came to collect our sheep at lambing time. We loaded pregnant ewes into the wagons. The few lambs that had been born were loaded as well. I have never done anything that felt so wrong, so against everything I was ever taught to do.
A police sniper shot their cattle in the fields. His father couldn’t bear to watch and went in the house. Cleaning up afterward, Rebanks wrote, “I felt dirty and ashamed,” and when the last wagon stacked with corpses left the premises, “I went into the barn, away from everyone, sat down in the shadows, held my head in my hands, and sobbed big fat dusty tears.”
In two hours, sixty years’ work had been destroyed. Their flock, many of them “descendants of the good ewes my grandfather had bought in the 1940s,” represented decades of care and attention to breeding. No one who reads this book, whatever their dietary practices or beliefs, can come away without an understanding that, outside of factories, most farmers treasure their livestock, or that Rebanks, like all good shepherds, loves his sheep, individually and collectively. He describes one from happier days dubbed “the Queen of the Flock,” an animal with “a sense of her own importance.” When visitors were brought to admire the fields, she would pose for them, “standing like a statue.” The epidemic serves as a segue to his next book:
The choice for our wider society is not whether we farm, but how we farm. Do we want a countryside that is entirely shaped by industrial-scale cheap food production with some little islands of wilderness dotted in amongst it, or do we, in at least some places, also value the traditional landscape as shaped by traditional family farms?
Pastoral Song, published as English Pastoral in the UK, compels us to grapple with that question, and it is, if anything, even more urgent and eloquent than its predecessor.
An international best seller, The Shepherd’s Life brought Rebanks a fame intensified by his popular Twitter account, @herdyshepherd1, which has more than 150,000 followers. The online audience has grown accustomed to glimpses of his four children, skilled shepherds all, and the keen pack of border collies perched on the back of a “quad,” an all-terrain vehicle used to navigate fields. On Twitter, he has documented the lambing season in graphic detail, confronting many a city dweller or suburbanite with the afterbirth of actual farming life, although last summer he refrained from depicting the fate of two highly photogenic pigs, dubbed Dua Lipa and Billie Eilish by his daughters, after a season in which the swine were seen joyously munching apples and having their backs scratched. He has not hesitated, however, to relocate them to the dinner plate.
Rebanks has been profiled in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and his rise was not without controversy. In 2018, shortly after agreeing to join a government review of England’s national parks, he resigned when critics opposed the presence of a shepherd on the panel. He and his consulting work on the Lake District’s World Heritage bid were attacked by The Guardian’s gadfly columnist and TED talker George Monbiot, who denounced the area as a “sheep museum” where “woolly maggots” grazed in a “slow-burning ecological disaster.” Rebanks has what Wordsworth might have termed “powerful feelings” on such charges, but in Pastoral Song he has a more important task: a wide-ranging defense of traditional farming grounded in history and biology. He begins by contemplating the foundational soil-building component of all agriculture, which is to say, shit. His opening parable on manure begins as “streaks of white seagull shit splatter like milk down onto the soil,” a sign of its fertility. “Where there was muck there was money,” he says of his grandfather’s view, and the microbial health of soil, its renewal through a restoration of the age-old interconnection between livestock and crops, is his theme.
He retraces his indoctrination into the lowliest of farming jobs, the midwinter work of shoveling muck behind the cows in the barns. His grandfather treated the black bounty like gold:
He piled up a giant mountainous midden of straw and muck across the yard. He brushed around it each day so that it was neat and tidy. Its steep sides and its brushed back edges showed that he cared about his work. It gently steamed and was the only place that wasn’t being buried in snow, as it generated so much heat that the snow simply melted. He thought that pride in your work, no matter how modest the task, was the mark of a good man, so he mucked the cows out as if he was being judged on it every day.
Thus preserved, the manure was then spread on the fields, restoring fertility. Every task on the farm was dedicated to regeneration: young James once earned a stern side-eye when he complained about pulling turnips in the bitter cold, learning that they were “good sheep feed,” the rows also serving as “a refuge and a larder for wild things when the other fields were cold and bare .... Hares and part ridges and countless other small birds seemed to find food and shelter among them.”
The work was his early lesson in the interdependence of wild and domestic creatures, but Rebanks soon saw the breaking of that chain. He began to sense the financial pressures weighing on his father and to face the fact that, economically, “everything was wrong with our farm.” When his grandfather died, his father returned from the solicitor with the sickening news that they were near bankruptcy and some land must be relinquished. In a desperate effort to save what remained, the family was soon tempted by “shop-bought” fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, while neighbors, likewise, frantically enlarged old fields and eradicated barns in the rush to modernize and expand everything.
Rebanks traces the revolution in man-made chemicals back to its origins early in the twentieth century, when the German chemist Fritz Haber “unpicked nature’s lock” on fertility by artificially fixing atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen. (Haber’s work, which won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1918, also enabled the invention of chemical weapons.) In previous centuries, fixing nitrogen in soil was a glacially slow process, accomplished chiefly by resting fields or planting nitrogen-boosting crops such as clover, which were then trampled into the soil by cattle or sheep as they grazed,
killing weeds and enriching exhausted earth in a process called the “golden hoof.” After Haber, nobody wanted the golden hoof; they wanted the golden chemicals.
By the postwar 1950s, after years when hunger stalked the globe, the “great simplification” had begun, Rebanks writes—a “stripping away” as farmers “shed layers of rotation.” Possessed by “a kind of arms race” of intensification, farmers rid themselves of everything superfluous: horses, pigs, turkeys, and hens, as well as the crops that supported them—oats, turnips, and barley. But the simplification created new life the way Dr. Frankenstein did, setting monsters loose upon the land. Rebanks and his father began supplying artificial high-protein feed to their cows, who instead of producing solid waste began squirting “jets of slurry out of their rears” that had to be prevented from oozing down out of the barn and into the streams and rivers, polluting as it went.
“I understood now that my grandfather had fussed over the muck from his cows because it was an important part of the nutrient cycle of the farm,” Rebanks writes. “The new farming had taken two mutually beneficial things—grazing animals and fertilizing fields—and separated them to create two massive industrial-scale problems in separate places.” Farms grew in size but were emptied of skilled workers, leading to despair, suicide, and the fracturing of communities.
He himself underwent a violent reindoctrination, first into the new ways and then back to the old. At the age of twenty, he took a job for a few months in Australia, driving a tractor across a “deep red Martian landscape” at night, when the air was cooler. Astounded by the inhuman scale of monoculture and farming intensification, he saw “tens of thousands of sheep ranched in fields bigger than our entire farm.” He returned to the Lake District filled with shame at his family’s broken-down operation, “embarrassed” that they “hadn’t managed to keep up. We were too small, too old-fashioned, too conservative, too poor, and now, probably, too late to find a place in this brave new world.” The old ways his grandfather taught seemed “prehistoric.”
But industrialized farming made for horrific sights, as when one of the heifers drowned in a neighboring dairy farm’s slurry pit. Rebanks sprayed pesticides on thistles and nettles, damaging weeds that are inedible to sheep and had once taken days to clear out by hand. “We were heading for the future,” he recalls, yet soon after, he revisited a robin’s nest caught in the spray, finding the chicks “dead in the nest, cold bundles of pink skin and bone and scruffy feather stubs. I knew this was my fault. A tiny voice inside me had said it was wrong.” Again, he says, “I felt ashamed.”
Over the years, he and his family witnessed the vanishing of other birds that had once thrived in their fields, the corncrake and the curlew. Fields had become a “killing zone for their chicks,” the intensified edge-to-edge mowing destroying nests. Seagulls no longer followed the plow, the worms having been killed off by the toxic slurry. The Rebankses’ epiphany about “what the new farming was doing to the land” came upon the death of a farming neighbor, Henry, who had rejected all the newfangled products. A soil analyst, sent to test Henry’s fields to determine how much artificial fertilizer or lime would be needed to get it up to “efficient production,” reported that the soil was “some of the best he had ever tested.” Down at the pub, the farmers mulled the irony of the “revelation.” Another shock to Rebanks was Carson’s Silent Spring: reading it as a young man, decades after it was first published, he felt he had “woken up from a long coma.”
The months after Rebanks’s father’s death, in 2015, he writes, “were the hardest of my life.” He had always wanted to “be the farmer,” but the inheritance of his grandfather’s 185 acres, “too big for a hobby, too small to make much money,” left him feeling “empty [and] lost” at a time when the country itself was “divided and broken.” Moving forward, he began to pursue a kind of “utopia,” a return to his first principles.
Farmers, he has come to believe, had done “great damage,” and factory farming was “an illusion, an industrial arrogance . . . a dystopia.” The economists, he concludes, were wrong: farming can never be “a business like any other because, crucially, it takes place in a natural setting and affects the natural world directly and profoundly.” He is building on a venerable genre, exemplified by Wendell Berry’s 1980 autobiographical essay “The Making of a Marginal Farm,” a sober Thoreauvian reflection on the “restoration and healing” of his acreage in the Kentucky River Valley. But unlike Berry, a cool rhetorician, Rebanks is neither a philosopher nor a Jeffersonian agrarian idealist. A product of centuries of righteous peasant judgment, he speaks with blunt, unmatched authority.
He is also a fine writer with descriptive power and a gift for characterization. Pastoral Song is full of memorable portraits of his children, parents, and grandparents: “Grandma did her housework with an intensity that suggested something else was on her mind” (her husband’s infidelity, he suspects), while Tom, his youngest son, is “obsessed with the farm” at age two. Denied the opportunity to accompany his dad on farming rounds, the toddler “stands at the door, tears flowing down his cheeks, or shakes the garden gate in his fury, howling at the injustice of it all.” Sheepdogs drip “candles of saliva onto my legs”; cobwebs hang from barn rafters “like tangled pairs of women’s tights.” A mare giving birth stares at her side distended by the leg of a foal “as if she had swallowed a stepladder.” Pastoral Song takes up the great debate over the question of eating organic, local, or vegetarian and broadens it. Rebanks does not balk at confronting readers with the brutality of all farming, and, by extension, human existence: “We have to farm to eat, and we have to kill (or displace life, which amounts to the same thing) to farm.” It is a “cultural disaster,” he argues, that shoppers are continually worrying “about what they should eat” while missing the whole picture: “how their local landscapes should be farmed.” Consumers, he argues, must become fluent in what it takes to produce food; they should know what it costs in every sense.
He is not proposing a simpleminded return to medieval methods and knows that monoculture will not disappear, calling instead for a balance between wild and domestic. Wherever possible, he suggests, farmers should be looking for ways to achieve “no-till farming,” by drilling seeds into the ground without causing erosion and altering soil temperature, and by restoring the “golden hoof” through “mob” grazing (what bison do in the wild), in which cows and sheep graze an area briefly and evenly, trampling waste and organic matter into the ground for fertility. Both methods store carbon.
More broadly, he has railed against the UK’s post-Brexit embrace of cheap imports from the US and Australia, destined to slash profits for the homegrown to the bone. His declaration that “the field is the base layer on which our entire civilisation is built” should be tattooed on politicians’ foreheads, because the bill for our lethal synthetic infatuation is coming due as topsoil and freshwater are lost to drought and poisons concentrated in the environment. The agrochemical giant Monsanto (now absorbed by Bayer) is not a name that appears here, but it’s the grinning skull behind every sentence. Having seen for himself the “sterile” depopulated “black fields of Iowa,” Rebanks rightly calls the American model “broken,” touting instead “healthier real food systems” of urban farms and supermarkets trading with local farmers.
So long as government subsidies favor production of mass-produced cheap food, “farming for nature,” he says, “is economic suicide,” requiring small farmers to carry debt and juggle multiple jobs. Waiting for sanity to return, he hopes his upland valley may be a model for a “beautiful compromise” between tradition and advanced ecological knowledge, as he glories in the return of swallows, curlews, bees, and butterflies. He has restored his grandfather’s mixed rotational model but with a difference, guided by expertise from biologists, naturalists, and hydrologists. With volunteer assistance, he has “re-wiggled” streams to slow water and restore the floodplain, planted thousands of trees, presided over the reseeding and regrowth of two hundred species of wildflowers and grasses, rested fields, and restored hedgerows. He lends his black-and-white Belted Galloways, the cattle that replaced those shot in 2001, to neighbors to help enrich their own soil.
When, toward the end of Pastoral Song, Rebanks lifts dried cowpats in his hands and crumbles them, he finds they are “riddled with life—fat gray grubs, little black dung beetles, tiny turquoise beetles, and insect shells that sparkle in the sunshine.” This is the new English pastoral, in which the “best new sustainable ‘technologies’” are cows and sheep. These, and much else, he has in abundance. n