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A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight #12
The Phoenix Generation
Phillip and Lucy have now been married for some years, but Phillip is restless, forever seeking the pure love that he felt for his first wife. Drawn to his secretary Felicity because of her close resemblance to Barley, he holds back. Will Phillip ever be entirely hers, Lucy wonders? When the three of them move to Monachorum House, whose land abuts a trout stream, so that Phillip can observe the fish for his next book, the web of love and affection between them becomes increasingly entangled. Still obsessed by memories of the First World War, Phillip decides to revisit the Western Front with his friend Piers. At Ypres and other battlefields, scenes of the past rise before him, while at home political tensions rise and he finds himself dreading another war.
- GenresFiction
Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
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About the author
Henry Williamson
154 books55 followersHenry William Williamson was an English soldier, naturalist, farmer and ruralist writer known for his natural history and social history novels, as well as for his fascist sympathies. He won the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 with his book Tarka the Otter.
Henry Williamson is best known for a tetralogy of four novels which consists of The Beautiful Years (1921), Dandelion Days (1922), The Dream of Fair Women (1924) and The Pathway (1928). These novels are collectively known as The Flax of Dream and they follow the life of Willie Maddison from boyhood to adulthood in a rapidly changing world.
Henry Williamson is best known for a tetralogy of four novels which consists of The Beautiful Years (1921), Dandelion Days (1922), The Dream of Fair Women (1924) and The Pathway (1928). These novels are collectively known as The Flax of Dream and they follow the life of Willie Maddison from boyhood to adulthood in a rapidly changing world.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 27, 2019
Spanning the entire 1930s, this novel paints the tragedy
Of Europe dragged to a second abyss; the British, drained by apathy,
Fail to heed the call of Mosley’s blackshirts - their undoing,
For the war they ‘won’ was really the cause of their nation’s future ruin.
Of Europe dragged to a second abyss; the British, drained by apathy,
Fail to heed the call of Mosley’s blackshirts - their undoing,
For the war they ‘won’ was really the cause of their nation’s future ruin.
September 15, 2019
The Phoenix Generation is the twelfth volume in an astonishing sequence of novels by the naturalist Henry Williamson, collectively entitled ‘A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight.’ However, it is also the first in a lesser sequence that I have dubbed ‘The Lucifer Quartet’ since, in addition to being a semi-autobiographical account of the life of Phillip Maddison, Williamson’s alter-ego, in the years leading up to, during and following the Second World War, these final four novels in the Chronicle are haunted by the mythical figure of Lucifer, whom HW sees as being embodied in Adolf Hitler as both Prince of Darkness and Light Bringer.
The symbolic significance of Lucifer is first explained to Phillip by a lay friar called Bro. Laurence, who interjects quietly when a furious row threatens to erupt during a dinner party to which they have both been invited, on the eve of war. Phillip is trying to resist attempts to goad him for his well-known opposition to another conflict with Germany when a Polish emigrée denounces Hitler as the Anti-Christ, the Devil and a modern Lucifer; to which Phillip responds: ‘Lucifer is the light-bringer.’
On one level, Phillip is simply describing the etymology of the name, from the Latin (equivalent to the Greek phosphor); but Bro. Laurence takes it to a deeper spiritual level: God has two sons: the elder is the arrogant Lucifer, who wants to usurp the place of the Father in his haste to create a better world immediately; the younger is Kristos (Christ) whose love and compassion is all-embracing: ‘And love will prevail,’ the Father says to Lucifer, ‘when deep, dreadful night has absorbed all your light, my son.’
The idea that Lucifer and Christ are the two sons of God can be traced back at least to what is known as the ‘monarchian’ strand of medieval dualist heresy. One variation of monarchianism, whereby Jesus was ‘adopted’ as the Son of God at his baptism, was revived in the twentieth century by the philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who identified the ‘luciferic’ temptation as the desire to hasten the spiritualisation of the world. Williamson will reflect this tendency on a mundane level, when he buys a farm in Norfolk, seeing himself as a Hare whose impatient idealism sets him at odds with the tortoise-like locals; but he also sees his struggle against the recalcitrant Bad Lands as a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosmic struggle of the Second World War.
But whose side is Phillip really on?
The Phoenix Generation opens on general election night in May 1929, as the charismatic Labour MP Hereward Birkin (“a bit of a bolshy” despite his being born with “a golden spoon in his mouth”) is re-elected to his Birmingham constituency; while his wife, Lady Georgiana, takes a Staffordshire seat from the Tories. Phillip feels like cheering the Labour victory as he thinks about all the unemployed ex-soldiers who are now “breaking their hearts on the dole.” Instead he drinks too much, throws up and spends a loveless night with his secretary Felicity, who puts his inability to “make love” before having penetrative sex down to the lack of affection in his childhood. The intertwined political and emotional themes of the book are already established by the end of the first chapter.
As Phillip struggles to establish a new home for himself and his extended family in a cottage in Devon, where he can work on his books, he hears that Birkin has resigned from the government because the Labour leadership is too timid to implement the radical measures that Phillip agrees are what is necessary to kick-start the economy, put people back to work and revive farming, which has been all but destroyed by cheap foreign food imports. From then on he watches with admiration the progress of Birkin’s Imperial Socialist Party; and is equally impressed by Hitler’s Germany, when an actor friend takes him there for a visit (in a chapter entitled ‘Hakenkreuze,’ a reference to the ‘crooked cross’ or swastika) in 1935. A young Nazi Party member greets him as an ex-service man: ‘You, like our Führer, are a phoenix from the flame and steel of those days!’
Phillip, like HW himself, honestly believes that the old soldiers (like Hitler, Birkin and himself) can prevent another European war: They will rise like the phoenix from the ashes of WWI to renew the world through radical socialist policies rooted in the land, the nation and the empire: at its heart, a Greater Britain (Make Britain Great Again?) protected from the international Money Power by “a ring fence of sterling” (hence Birkin’s Imperial Socialism, for which read Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists). It is not racism but his love of the land (“the beauty of the country”) that leads Phillip/HW to embrace Birkin/Mosley’s vision of an economically left-wing alternative to Bolshevism (on one hand) and Labour’s timidity (on the other): When an anti-Semite attempts to ingratiate himself with Phillip, he is dismissed as a “crank.”
As well as providing us with important insights into how a well-loved writer of nature books could end up being called Tarka the Rotter (one wag described his writing about the countryside as Springwatch with Hitler!), The Phoenix Generation is a powerful, confessional work: the laying-bare of a tortured soul trying to learn how to love.
(I was reminded of the words from John Lennon’s ‘How’ – how to give love when love is something you’ve never had? – and found myself wondering what Williamson made of Lennon. HW, an early eco-warrior, marched against the Vietnam War in the Sixties and reportedly had a high opinion of the Incredible String Band!)
There are of course some great descriptions of the natural world; and the occasional longueurs are counteracted by some psychologically powerful set-pieces: These include a moving attempt at reconciliation between father and son, as they take a walk along a route much loved by Phillip’s grandfather, who considered it to be an extension of a Roman road. Thus the three generations are linked emotionally and symbolically, as father and son walk “a little apart along this myth of a Roman road, sometimes a wide and cambered paleness, a ghostliness as of grass itself weary of time, pale with the sunshine of nearly two millennia of a dwarf-yellow-star” – the ancient sunlight of the Chronicle’s title.
Another memorable, multi-layered scene occurs in the chapter entitled ‘Vale’ (Latin for ‘Farewell’), in which Phillip writes to his dying mother: ‘There is a paradise, and all true artists work to the glory of its existence, even if they do not always believe with conventional or organised faith.’ Is this HW’s artistic credo? The myth of Paradise Lost may be at the heart of HW’s spiritual journey, as it was for Wordsworth: for both, the way to regain Paradise was through the artistic imagination: “He spoke to his mother in imagination, begging her to ... allow the spirit of truth, of true understanding and compassion, to come between them.” But the ambiguity of this last phrase – for what has always “come between them” is her habit of “distorting the truth through fear” – is resolved when he allows her to hold on to her own truth, her faith in her recovery, for it is born of what she embodies, “unselfishness itself. God in heaven, she would need no purgatory, her life had been a pure flame of the most gentle courage.”
It is this image of pure, or purifying, flame, which takes on a life of its own when the Crystal Palace, that great symbol of nineteenth century technology, is destroyed by (purgatorial?) fire. It is witnessed by Phillip’s father, whose life is now “nothing but consuming memories”, for to see that tribute to the Victorian era in which he came to manhood consumed by fire is to witness the passing of an age. It is Valhalla on fire, Wagner’s Götterdämmerung: and that conflagration foreshadows the greater one to come: “But how did the opera end? Valhalla of the Gods in flames, the world drowning as the Rhine overflowed to sweep all away. Was it the wave of death prophesied by D.H. Lawrence, the honorary soldier of the Western Front”...
But even as the war that he had hoped the Phoenix Generation could prevent becomes inevitable, Phillip sees in that fast-approaching Twilight of the Gods a mythic clash between Life and Civilisation in which he can at last (as if heir to D.H. Lawrence) find his true artistic role: “Life is big business, fornication, and death. Civilisation is ... the sterilising of truth ... Civilisation is world-citizenship and freedom from tradition, based on rootless eternal wandering in the mind that had nothing to lose and everything to gain including the whole world ... A new era of life was beginning: he must be its historian.”
And this is precisely what he becomes when he publishes, in 1951, the first volume of his Chronicle.
The symbolic significance of Lucifer is first explained to Phillip by a lay friar called Bro. Laurence, who interjects quietly when a furious row threatens to erupt during a dinner party to which they have both been invited, on the eve of war. Phillip is trying to resist attempts to goad him for his well-known opposition to another conflict with Germany when a Polish emigrée denounces Hitler as the Anti-Christ, the Devil and a modern Lucifer; to which Phillip responds: ‘Lucifer is the light-bringer.’
On one level, Phillip is simply describing the etymology of the name, from the Latin (equivalent to the Greek phosphor); but Bro. Laurence takes it to a deeper spiritual level: God has two sons: the elder is the arrogant Lucifer, who wants to usurp the place of the Father in his haste to create a better world immediately; the younger is Kristos (Christ) whose love and compassion is all-embracing: ‘And love will prevail,’ the Father says to Lucifer, ‘when deep, dreadful night has absorbed all your light, my son.’
The idea that Lucifer and Christ are the two sons of God can be traced back at least to what is known as the ‘monarchian’ strand of medieval dualist heresy. One variation of monarchianism, whereby Jesus was ‘adopted’ as the Son of God at his baptism, was revived in the twentieth century by the philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who identified the ‘luciferic’ temptation as the desire to hasten the spiritualisation of the world. Williamson will reflect this tendency on a mundane level, when he buys a farm in Norfolk, seeing himself as a Hare whose impatient idealism sets him at odds with the tortoise-like locals; but he also sees his struggle against the recalcitrant Bad Lands as a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosmic struggle of the Second World War.
But whose side is Phillip really on?
The Phoenix Generation opens on general election night in May 1929, as the charismatic Labour MP Hereward Birkin (“a bit of a bolshy” despite his being born with “a golden spoon in his mouth”) is re-elected to his Birmingham constituency; while his wife, Lady Georgiana, takes a Staffordshire seat from the Tories. Phillip feels like cheering the Labour victory as he thinks about all the unemployed ex-soldiers who are now “breaking their hearts on the dole.” Instead he drinks too much, throws up and spends a loveless night with his secretary Felicity, who puts his inability to “make love” before having penetrative sex down to the lack of affection in his childhood. The intertwined political and emotional themes of the book are already established by the end of the first chapter.
As Phillip struggles to establish a new home for himself and his extended family in a cottage in Devon, where he can work on his books, he hears that Birkin has resigned from the government because the Labour leadership is too timid to implement the radical measures that Phillip agrees are what is necessary to kick-start the economy, put people back to work and revive farming, which has been all but destroyed by cheap foreign food imports. From then on he watches with admiration the progress of Birkin’s Imperial Socialist Party; and is equally impressed by Hitler’s Germany, when an actor friend takes him there for a visit (in a chapter entitled ‘Hakenkreuze,’ a reference to the ‘crooked cross’ or swastika) in 1935. A young Nazi Party member greets him as an ex-service man: ‘You, like our Führer, are a phoenix from the flame and steel of those days!’
Phillip, like HW himself, honestly believes that the old soldiers (like Hitler, Birkin and himself) can prevent another European war: They will rise like the phoenix from the ashes of WWI to renew the world through radical socialist policies rooted in the land, the nation and the empire: at its heart, a Greater Britain (Make Britain Great Again?) protected from the international Money Power by “a ring fence of sterling” (hence Birkin’s Imperial Socialism, for which read Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists). It is not racism but his love of the land (“the beauty of the country”) that leads Phillip/HW to embrace Birkin/Mosley’s vision of an economically left-wing alternative to Bolshevism (on one hand) and Labour’s timidity (on the other): When an anti-Semite attempts to ingratiate himself with Phillip, he is dismissed as a “crank.”
As well as providing us with important insights into how a well-loved writer of nature books could end up being called Tarka the Rotter (one wag described his writing about the countryside as Springwatch with Hitler!), The Phoenix Generation is a powerful, confessional work: the laying-bare of a tortured soul trying to learn how to love.
(I was reminded of the words from John Lennon’s ‘How’ – how to give love when love is something you’ve never had? – and found myself wondering what Williamson made of Lennon. HW, an early eco-warrior, marched against the Vietnam War in the Sixties and reportedly had a high opinion of the Incredible String Band!)
There are of course some great descriptions of the natural world; and the occasional longueurs are counteracted by some psychologically powerful set-pieces: These include a moving attempt at reconciliation between father and son, as they take a walk along a route much loved by Phillip’s grandfather, who considered it to be an extension of a Roman road. Thus the three generations are linked emotionally and symbolically, as father and son walk “a little apart along this myth of a Roman road, sometimes a wide and cambered paleness, a ghostliness as of grass itself weary of time, pale with the sunshine of nearly two millennia of a dwarf-yellow-star” – the ancient sunlight of the Chronicle’s title.
Another memorable, multi-layered scene occurs in the chapter entitled ‘Vale’ (Latin for ‘Farewell’), in which Phillip writes to his dying mother: ‘There is a paradise, and all true artists work to the glory of its existence, even if they do not always believe with conventional or organised faith.’ Is this HW’s artistic credo? The myth of Paradise Lost may be at the heart of HW’s spiritual journey, as it was for Wordsworth: for both, the way to regain Paradise was through the artistic imagination: “He spoke to his mother in imagination, begging her to ... allow the spirit of truth, of true understanding and compassion, to come between them.” But the ambiguity of this last phrase – for what has always “come between them” is her habit of “distorting the truth through fear” – is resolved when he allows her to hold on to her own truth, her faith in her recovery, for it is born of what she embodies, “unselfishness itself. God in heaven, she would need no purgatory, her life had been a pure flame of the most gentle courage.”
It is this image of pure, or purifying, flame, which takes on a life of its own when the Crystal Palace, that great symbol of nineteenth century technology, is destroyed by (purgatorial?) fire. It is witnessed by Phillip’s father, whose life is now “nothing but consuming memories”, for to see that tribute to the Victorian era in which he came to manhood consumed by fire is to witness the passing of an age. It is Valhalla on fire, Wagner’s Götterdämmerung: and that conflagration foreshadows the greater one to come: “But how did the opera end? Valhalla of the Gods in flames, the world drowning as the Rhine overflowed to sweep all away. Was it the wave of death prophesied by D.H. Lawrence, the honorary soldier of the Western Front”...
But even as the war that he had hoped the Phoenix Generation could prevent becomes inevitable, Phillip sees in that fast-approaching Twilight of the Gods a mythic clash between Life and Civilisation in which he can at last (as if heir to D.H. Lawrence) find his true artistic role: “Life is big business, fornication, and death. Civilisation is ... the sterilising of truth ... Civilisation is world-citizenship and freedom from tradition, based on rootless eternal wandering in the mind that had nothing to lose and everything to gain including the whole world ... A new era of life was beginning: he must be its historian.”
And this is precisely what he becomes when he publishes, in 1951, the first volume of his Chronicle.
July 30, 2022
This review contains spoilers
The 12th novel in the 'Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight' series of novels is the story of Phillip Maddison and his attempts to find a balance between his dual careers as farmer and writer.
I finished reading the book with a feeling of "So, what?"
The main problem for me is the character of Maddison, who is beyond irritating.
He has sex with virtually every woman he meets. He gets one of them pregnant. His wife accepts the news as though he has just told her he had gone out to buy a newspaper.
As with the previous novel in the series 'The Power of the Dead' there is a lot of 'padding'.
The 12th novel in the 'Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight' series of novels is the story of Phillip Maddison and his attempts to find a balance between his dual careers as farmer and writer.
I finished reading the book with a feeling of "So, what?"
The main problem for me is the character of Maddison, who is beyond irritating.
He has sex with virtually every woman he meets. He gets one of them pregnant. His wife accepts the news as though he has just told her he had gone out to buy a newspaper.
As with the previous novel in the series 'The Power of the Dead' there is a lot of 'padding'.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews