I was in transit to Canada on the day my latest plug for – sorry, piece on – the butterfly book came out, as the Notebook page in the new Literary Review. I'd post a link, but it's paywalled (or something). The printed version was rather different from my original, so I'll post what I wrote here, just for you, dear readers...
‘BUTTERFLY, n.s. A beautiful insect, so named because it first appears in the beginning of the season for butter.’ Johnson’s charming definition answers a question that will probably never get a definitive answer – why are butterflies called butterflies? His explanation is as good as any, and better than some, such as the folk belief that witches take the form of butterflies and steal milk and butter, or the notion that butterflies are named for their excrement, which resembles butter. As butterflies don’t excrete anything, because they don’t eat anything, at least that one can be ruled out. It’s more likely that they are named for the butter-yellow Brimstone butterflies that are often the first to be seen in the spring. I have been exploring this question, among much else, in the course of writing a book, The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment, which, after a long pupation, has now been published by Saraband.
Here is another question: Why are there no butterflies (apart from a handful of generic references) in Shakespeare, a poet very alive to nature, whose work teems with animal and bird life and includes the finest flower poetry in the language? The answer is that Shakespeare lived in an age when there had been no real attempt to distinguish between different species of butterflies: a butterfly was a butterfly, a frivolous creature, and that was that. It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that people woke up to the beauty and variety of butterflies, and began to study them systematically. The leading lights of the convivial Aurelian Society, who met in a tavern in Exchange Alley until it was destroyed in a catastrophic fire, were many of them painters, print-makers and textile designers, and it was the beauty of butterflies that excited them most. This enthusiasm resulted in some strikingly beautiful books (for example Moses Harris’s The Aurelian), illustrated with exquisite coloured engravings.
That aesthetic phase was followed was the ‘golden age’ of butterfly collecting, when the archetypal figure of the man in a Norfolk jacket waving a net was born. Though widely viewed as something between a harmless eccentric and a lunatic, this net-waving collector is often a surprisingly malign figure in fiction: the murderous Jack Stapleton in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the psychopathic loner Frederick Clegg in John Fowles’s The Collector, the pair of decidedly ‘queer’ butterfly collectors in Enid Blyton’s Five Go to Billycock Hill. Even Vladimir Nabokov, great butterfly-lover though he was, portrayed an obsessive collector driven to crime in his short story ‘The Aurelian’. Women collectors, though few and far between, come out of it much better, with Eleanor Glanville, whose brutal ex-husband cited her butterfly hunting as evidence of insanity, was the subject of a historical romance (Lady of the Butterflies by Fiona Mountain), and when Margaret Fountaine’s secret diaries were edited and published in the 1980s (as Love Among the Butterflies and Butterflies and Late Loves), they caused a sensation.
In literature – with one glowing exception, which I’m coming to – butterflies have, for all their beauty and charm, been poorly served. Wordsworth’s early poem ‘To a Butterfly’ is, as ever, more about W. Wordsworth than about any butterfly. John Clare responded warmly to butterflies and wrote a couple of decent butterfly poems (‘To the Butterfly’ and ‘To an Early Butterfly’). The most interesting and distinctive of butterfly poets is Emily Dickinson – ‘The butterfly obtains’, ‘The Butterfly upon the Sky’, ‘Two Butterflies went out at Noon’ – but her butterflies can rarely be identified, and always seem to be up to something that bears little relation to the actual living organism we call a butterfly. In Specimen Days, Walt Whitman wrote excitably about a ‘butterfly good-time’, a gathering of ‘myriads of light-yellow butterflies’ in a hay field. (He also had himself photographed with what he claimed was a butterfly perched on his finger; it was in fact a cardboard cut-out attached to a ring.) In my opinion, the best butterfly poem, the closest to the living thing, was written by the American poet Janet Lewis. Called ‘The Insect’, it is too long to quote here, but well worth seeking out. Butterflies have fared better in music than in literature, the graceful movements of their flight lending themselves to musical representation, particularly by the piano, violin or cello. However, in painting, butterflies have, despite their visual beauty, been for the most part sloppily portrayed, a fact that Nabokov – yes, here he is, our glowing exception – lamented. ‘Only myopia,’ he declared in an interview, ‘condones the blurry generalisations of ignorance. In high art and pure science, detail is everything.’ And Nabokov was uniquely qualified to opine about high art and pure science, being both a great writer and a very distinguished scientific lepidopterist, who spent years researching butterfly taxonomy at Cornell. Butterflies appear frequently in his work, from his early poems to later works such as Pale Fire, where a perfectly described Red Admiral appears just as John Shade is about to die. Nabokov also wrote ecstatically about his butterfly life, as in this passage from his autobiography, Speak, Memory: ‘The highest enjoyment of timelessness … is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humouring a lucky mortal.’ It is chilling to realise that Nabokov, net in hand, stood ready to dispatch any hapless butterfly that he needed for his collections, pinching its thorax and placing it in a folded paper slip to keep it undamaged, ready to be pinned and set. Those were different times…
The great butterfly books of the eighteenth century were published as large folios and were essentially what we would now call coffee-table books, but, as collecting became more popular, demand grew for something smaller and more portable, the pocket-sized field guide. I am happy to say that my book, though it is no kind of field guide (there are enough of those), is pocket-sized, a duodecimo volume. Too many books these days are too big, not only in terms of length – many could be profitably cut by anything up to a third – but also in format. Books, like films (ninety minutes is nearly always enough), seem to have developed a kind of cultural gigantism – and this in an age of multiple distractions and shrinking attention spans. Why? Maybe someone should write a book about it. A very small one.
