What can be more ordinary than my voice — wind through my branches, sap gurgling in my wood? Trees cover the earth, as common as stones! Inventors and poets scour their own minds for sparks of life, but Rotha perceived vitality in natural bodies. She knew life was a force no inventor can create, and even now her knowledge remains visible yet unseen, just as the word real indwells the word realm. But invention! Progress! Machines to counterfeit myself, Sycamore, and other trees. Bee-sized apparitions to mimic bee work, humming and whirring ever faster, louder than Rotha’s undersong of wind in wood, of fluttering wing, of hue atremble in corolla. Common life will become uncommon. The ordinary will slip underground from whence it once flourished. Not dead, you understand, but in waiting.
Undersong is a fictionalised biography of Dorothy “Rotha” Wordsworth — sister of, and evidently, mostly uncredited collaborator with the poet William Wordsworth (apparently performing the same function for family friend Samuel Coleridge) — and while I do tend to like these kinds of books that right the historical record by bringing women out of the shadows, I had a hard time figuring out just how much of this was meant to be accurate. Narrated by a fictional handyman, James Dixon, who came to serve the family when he was seventeen and Rotha forty-five, author Kathleen Winter also includes passages from the point-of-view of a Sycamore tree (as I opened with) and passages from Rotha’s diaries (which are more impressions of nature than a record of her life). As even Wikipedia points out the famous lines that William Wordsworth lifted from his sister’s writings for his own use, this seems an important story to tell, but ultimately, I felt I knew James Dixon very well by the end of this, but Rotha? Not so much. Still, an intriguing story, and with Winter's reliably excellent writing on display, this was a very fine read. Rounding down to three stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
As Undersong opens, Rotha has just passed away at eighty-three and her loyal servant James begins to tell the story of their nearly four decade relationship:
My mam, says James, always told me this: When someone you care about dies, you can tell their story to the bees and they’ll keep it, like. Even if everyone else forgets. Bees’ll hold onto it for you, then once you’re dead yourself they’ll scatter it abroad with the pollen so the world never really forgets. That person stays alive and the world hasn’t lost them, and you haven’t lost them either. What about it? Do ye reckon Mam’s right? He reaches his hand forth and five bees alight on it. Only in our world does James possess anything now. So we denizens of the garden do what we always do for those who acknowledge us the way he and Rotha have done. We eloquesce in the realm of light, wind and water — and with our earthen bodies we listen.
James remembers first being struck by the sight of Rotha and her strange crow of a brother when he was a little boy — in all the years since I saw Rotha Wordsworth that very first time when I was five, I never met the glimmer in anyone except her — and goes on to describe how, recently returned from the Battle of Waterloo, he was hired by William as a gardener/handyman/someone to keep an eye on the melancholy Rotha so that William can be free to write. James and Rotha go on rambles through the Lake District (although she would rather be with her beloved brother as in the old days), and after Rotha writes her impressions of what she sees in her diaries, William would have James (with Rotha’s permission) read passages out for him to assess and borrow from:
— Nothing in the woods is whiter than the snow of blackberry blossoms on the dark green leaves, & the leaves are dry as bones under the few raindrops that sit on them like tiny crystal balls —
Keep going. Write that one down.
— & water sparkles among the reeds, its voice a flute in the undersong of wind, thrush and reed — lights in the grass — & the lake glimmers through the lilac leaves — skeletons of the lilac flowers stand on the treetop, brittly swaying — a strong wind blew the lilac leaves so they became folded hearts — half-hearted, & it tore the skin off the lake revealing glittering silver blood — like ripped metal — the sound of the wind went hollowly around the hills like a soft-headed stick scribing a spiral on cymbals—
Yes, write it down! We’ll have all that.
(According to James’ account, Rotha explains that William is terribly near-sighted and has a poor sense of smell so she saw it as her duty to experience the world of the senses on his behalf.) As I said above, we learn a lot about James’ life and family (including the younger sister who ruined her body working at the mills in Manchester since childhood), and as devoted and selfless as he is in service to the Wordsworths, Winter continually underlines the class divide that prevents Rotha and William from seeing or treating James as a person; if this is meant to be a proper biography of Rotha, it doesn’t provoke much empathy for her. Near the end of Undersong, James fulfills a promise to Rotha: to destroy the private “red diaries” which recorded her actual feelings, but which William was decidedly uninterested in reading. James recites from these secret diaries to the bees:
The first shock was realizing I was no longer one of the boys. The second shock came after Wm & Sam stopped including me, & after Quincey also found a wife — what is it about their finding wives that made me obsolete? The second shock was that, No, I had never been one of them. Not in our youth & not in our age. What had I been? They loved my thoughts, it is true, but did not hear me utter them. Rather, they imagined that my ideas had flown to them from the same invisible wind that flows to all men, & that my ideas counted among their discoveries.
I suppose it is the remove of having Rotha’s story told by a servant and the trees that kept me from really connecting with her experience and that just makes me question Winter's intention with this format. As an overall concept, however, this was very interesting and I am happy to have learned as much as I did about the Wordsworths.
