The principal delight of Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins is the quality of its prose. A mild intoxicant, euphonious, enumerative, lulling and lyrical, enriched with a sweetmeat vocabulary, it is elegantly fastidious without becoming mannered or purple, full of incantatory evocations of glorious and inglorious pasts. Macaulay said of her writing that she was interested in “the style, the mere English, the cadences”. If her secret intention was to re-enchant a grey, post-war Britain and “the smothering, runagate, unlovely present” still, in 1954, in moral and physical ruin, then this transient redemption was to be achieved with the bewitching, conjurational powers of language: her writing, as of contemplated ruins, “thrills like music in the blood”.
Macaulay declares that “the human race is and always has been ruin-minded”, and she catalogues the symptoms and manifestations of this “illness and passion” for architectural ruin and shows how our relationship with the “magnificent debris of great shattered cities” has metamorphosed across time. Sprawling, labyrinthine, charmingly digressive, Pleasure of Ruins is a cultural history comprising philosophy, poetry, history, aesthetics, art history, travelogue, memoir, and literary history, a wide-ranging “examination of our pleasure in ruins, its history, their discoverers and visitors”.
One of her dictums is that “ruin pleasure must be at one remove, veiled by the mind’s imaginings”, enriched and augmented by nature and setting. “A good setting”, Macaulay writes, “is, to the average viewer, a good deal more important than interesting architecture; these need some background knowledge; for the pleasures of a picturesque setting, only a simple sense of beauty is needed”. The “simple sense of beauty” is satisfied by the interplay of ruins with rampant flora and fauna, achieved by leaving well alone.
The eccentric antiquarian was the progenitor of the professional archaeologist, the metamorphosis from one to the other seamless, and enough of a recognisable British type as to be satirised as early as 1628 by John Earle in his Microcosmographie. This shift from antiquarianism to archaeology, the “turn from the artist’s and poet’s dream” to “an archaeologist’s clean delight” is a motif that runs throughout the book, for whilst architectural knowledge is increased by denuding the ruins' settings, by clearing and cleaning, this process ruins, for Macaulay and other Romantics, the ruins.
For Macaulay, contemporary ruins – and for her this must have meant the bombed-out cities of post-war Europe – did not quite cut it: they “have an air of painful futility that incurs anger, an anger less often roused by the no less criminal and futile catastrophes of the past. The destructive brutality is the same; but usually the long years, the swathing ivy and the thrusting trees, the extreme beauty which the conditions of ruin can create, muffle the anger and vexation”.
Though she was an intrepid traveller and hopeless ruin-botherer Macaulay could not possibly have seen all the places she describes. Her favourite place in the world was actually the old Reading Room of the British Library: she visited ruins most frequently in her imagination. In one sense then the book is travelogue of the mind, a paean to armchair and daydream. Macaulay often digresses novelistically, and the book is partly constructed from transcribed daydreams, triggered by the descriptions, imaginings, and musings of those that came before her, and by books of drawings, prints and paintings.
Figures who haunt the pages of The Pleasure of Ruins include Dickens, D’Annunzio, Diderot, Baedecker, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Goethe, William Beckford, the reliably preposterous Shelley, Byron, Stendhal, and a host of lesser-known figures from the almost-certainly-mad Dr Pococke to the doughty Mrs Colonel William Hunter Blain. The first chapter discusses the building of artificial ruins, at its height during the eighteenth century, and mostly an English habit, but one that, like ruin-fancying itself, goes back to pre-Classical times. Sometimes the tone is mocking and satirical, as ruin-gazing and ruin-copying both attracted their fair share of eccentrics, obsessives and out-and-out loons, addicted to the “delicious melancholy” of ruins.
By far the longest chapter, The Stupendous Past, deals with Levantine, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Ruins, and it is in particular the ruins of ancient Greece and Rome and their colonies that set her imagination and language afire. She describes a Coliseum very different from the one visitors have seen since the late nineteenth century, one “embellished with trees and creepers and ivies, with dense and variegated flora”. The scene that faced the Romantics she writes, “was delicious … more delicious than today … sheer ruin-pleasure was drunk in intoxicating draughts.”
The stories she tells are also ones of “long centuries of apathy, destruction and greed”. Successive Popes, for example, sold marble and stone from the Coliseum by the thousands of ton (a single contractor carried away 2599 cart loads of stone from it in just nine months). Renaissance Rome was built in large part with the stones of Classical Rome, which became one enormous quarry, with most of the marble ending up in lime kilns, whilst Medieval Seville was built with the stones of the ancient Roman city of Italica. This chapter also contains gorgeous descriptions of ruins and their reception in Egypt, Cyprus and the “fairy tale cities of Persia – Shiraz, Kazvin, Ishfahan, that shine through the centuries like golden fruit”.
Later chapters deal with ruined temples and churches, “the age-old sequence of buildings standing on the same sites, in the same sacred thickets, through who knows how many centuries of strange, wild cults”. The dissolution of the monasteries and ruined abbeys is given surprisingly little attention, attesting perhaps merely to Macaulay’s own biases and exotic aesthetic tastes, and the treatment of castles is also nugatory. Pleasures and Palaces consists largely of a sustained linguistic aria on Hadrian’s villa, where “palatial life on its most imposing scale” was lived.
Ghostly Streets treats of abandoned cities and towns – Pompei, Ostia, Herculaneum, Nifa, Galeria, and the cities of colonial Portugal and Spain, and the many abandoned cities of India, “vanished, ruined and decaying … in various stages of decadence and all-but disappeared”. She tells tales of invasion, colonisation and massacre, but stories too of plagues, earthquakes, volcanoes and malaria“ which, she writes, “must be counted among the ruin-fancier’s friend, for it gives him the gradual and gentle ruin of abandonment and decay; the desolation of an undamaged city slowly at last whole and empty and silent, collapsing slowly piece by piece to earth”. The looting over the ages she describes has been stupendous, the thievish young Queen of Naples having treasures carted away from Pompei – itself the subject of a brilliant, poetic excursus from Macaulay – by the donkey-train full.
Contemplating ruins can be salutary in another way, one with which Macaulay’s book does not concern itself, which is not the ruination of former grandeur, but the slow disintegration into redemptive beauty of the unprepossessing, humble or downright ugly, what has rusted crumbled, peeled, become overgrown, strained or bent, gnawed by time and graced and abraded by the elements.
To contemplate these more modest ruins, as with those that are the result of industrial and agricultural decline, one does not have to travel. These are the kinds of ruins I remember from my den-building childhood - broken-down sheds, abandoned trackside railwaymen’s huts, the remains of closed-down rural railway stations, and the many air raid shelters become truants’ hideouts and teenage coitoriums. In some English cities bomb ruins were playgrounds for daredevil scallywags right into the early 80s.
The internet, even more than malaria, is now the ruin-fancier’s friend, and there are many sites where you can see the world’s ghost towns, abandoned military installations and research stations, in fact any ruin and most artistic responses to those ruins throughout history. John Piper was the last real ruin artist, but we have had more than a century of ruin photography, some of it very beautiful, such as Camilo Jose Vegera’s photo-book American Ruins, the gorgeous Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre (which is perhaps a record of the beginnings of the slow disintegration of another empire), and Robert Polidori’s photographs of Chernobyl in Zones of Exclusion.
Ruins, especially those overgrown and reclaimed by nature, have another source of appeal, at once utopic and nihilistic - the sense they give us of the world without and after us. An attraction more of Thanatos than Eros, it is the unconscious will to bring the world to an end, our craving for catastrophe, perhaps the same unconscious urge that has created all ruins. Ruins prefigure our destiny; when we gaze on them, we contemplate at the same time our destructiveness and our freedom from it, the void that we create and are.
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