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Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

Out of his shell

Roger Deakin, edited by Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker
Hamish Hamilton, 309pp, £20,

Adam Nicolson

Wednesday, 12th November 2008

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, by Roger Deakin, edited by Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker

The writer, Robert Macfarlane, said of his friend, Roger Deakin, that everything Deakin had ever said tended ‘towards diffidence, an abrogation of the self’. It was a fierce verdict. Not a denial of the self or even a suppression of it but an abrogation, an annulment or cancellation of who he was. Macfarlane meant it as no criticism. He loved and even revered Deakin and Deakin, by his own account, replied, quoting Keats that ‘We should rather be the flower than the bee’, that the recipient, the quietist, whose governing quality was an alert passivity, was the man of virtue.

This collection from Deakin’s notebooks over the last six years of his life — he died in 2006 — is a tribute to that frame of mind. It is a book palpably written in the quiet, irritated only by the disruptions to quiet, by the modern destruction of beautiful things that had been there a long time. It is a life almost without drama, but filled with a miniaturist examination of the beetles and moths that wander across his page, of the birds singing in the garden of his Suffolk house, of the animals rubbing against the sheds he had scattered across his small group of fields, where he slept and wrote, making journeys around the corners of his private world.

Deakin had more of a life than this — he was often in London and abroad, he did his emails — but that outer shell is shucked off here, whether by him or his editors you can’t tell, so that you are left with the inner, neither entirely happy nor unhappy and sometimes slightly lonely life of a man in his Suffolk farmhouse. It feels like a kind of nakedness. ‘The thing that falls out of a walnut shell,’ he wrote one autumn, ‘is like a brain’, and that is the impression this book gives too.