Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Valerie Nieman writes about In The Lonely Backwater, published by Fitzroy Books.
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The Naturalist: Linnaeus and In the Lonely Backwater
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
~ Zora Neale Hurston
They’re all gone, now.
I searched my unruly bookshelves twice, despite knowing that I’d passed my Golden Guides along to friends’ children, to nephews and nieces. Perhaps that small volume Acadia National Park and the Nearby Coast of Maine had escaped the purge of two moves in a single year, but no. It’s all to the best, as they need to learn about trees and fish and fossils, though kids have such resources online now. I relied on books my parents bought at my constant wheedling, the contents of a small-town library, and Scholastic book fairs. Enough to start the fires of curiosity and lead to lifelong passions for science and reading and writing.
Did those little nature guides start me on the path to writing In the Lonely Backwater?
Yes, I think so. As the twig is bent, so is the tree inclined.
In my latest novel, narrator Maggie has a naturalist’s eye and room to wander in the wild, but it’s the discovery of 200-year-old book by “The Prince of Botanists,” Linnaeus, that changes her life.
She comes by a portion of his Tour in Lapland following a break-in at a historic church, and is transfixed by a description of wild adventure and the mistaken idea that the young writer was female (Carolus Linnaeus being the first full name she finds in her researches.) No matter, she develops a science crush on a long-dead botanist, and his approach to organization that changed science helps Maggie learn to shape and control her chaotic world.
The book she finds was an English translation of excerpts from Lachesis Lapponicus, done by James Edward Smith and published in 1811. Early in the writing, I knew that I needed to see, touch, experience this book as Maggie would have. I located a copy at the University of North Carolina Libraries. The book, its pages deeply foxed, was handed to me along with gloves and a pencil and a stern injunction against the use of pens lest a stray ink mark occur.
I sat in a cubicle and read. And took notes, now at the West Virginia University archives, in my terrible journalist’s scrawl. I reproduced his rough sketches with ones of my own, even less comely.
The book is now available as a facsimile online at the Internet Archive, complete right from the introduction complaining that Linnaeus wrote what was effectively his diary in Swedish rather than the scientific standard Latin. No need for white gloves.
Linnaeus was 25 years old when he set off to the north, traveling light, living among the Sámi or Lapps whom he celebrated for their ability to adapt to the landscape and use its resources, from reindeer to moss. He favorably compared their simple and healthy lifestyle to that of Swedish villagers, clerics, and schoolmasters. At the same time, he was describing the plants, animals, and minerals for both scientific investigation and exploitation by others. It was a groundbreaking work, illuminating the ecology and the ethnography of a place that, while far from unexplored, was neither well known nor easy to traverse.
The diary was not published during his lifetime, but Linnaeus drew upon his observations for the groundbreaking works of taxonomy that would follow, such as Flora lapponica and the two-volume Species Plantarum. His system of binomial nomenclature and the nesting of kingdom/phylum/class/order/family/genus/species allowed scientists the world over to communicate accurately about their observations. Names for living things had been a confusing mess, deeply local, based on folklore and external similarities. For instance, the American robin is a thrush and related to the Old World’s blackbird, but was given that name because its red breast resembled that of the European robin, which is in the flycatcher family.
Maggie’s fascination with taxonomy leads her to categorize the people in and around the marina, but she has a more difficult time placing herself. Her body image is problematic, her family shattered, her sexuality an open question. At one point she says she’s “a creature like a bear or raccoon, I can live lots of ways.”
“The Father of Modern Taxonomy,” lauded throughout the learned community of his time and of whom Rousseau said he knew “no greater man on earth,” has come under scrutiny in recent years. His writings were among those that informed Enlightenment discussion of the “noble savage,” and the breakdown of living things into categories would come to underpin racism.
Linnaeus originally categorized all humans simply as Homo sapiens with four “versions” or taxons, denoted by color. He is not known to have used the word race, and wrote that “[God] created one human, as the Holy Scripture teaches” in many forms, “but that who with a sane mind would be so frivolous as to call these distinct species?” By the 1758 edition of Systema naturae, he would under the influence of prevailing thought recast his ideas to separate humans into six varieties based on physical attributes, but adding behavior, forms of clothing and government, and the medieval system of humors.
A team of researchers now is working to place his journey in the context of 18th-century exploration, exploitation, and colonialization. They’ve faced their own difficult journeys because of Covid-19, but continue the project. You can learn more at “Knowledge in Transit: Linnaeus’s Laplandic Journey, 1732”.
I would encounter Linnaeus throughout school and college, and read about him as a character in stories and novels, before he arrived in the writing of In the Lonely Backwater.
As it happened, I never became the scientist that my early interest might have indicated. The enthusiasm remained, but the written word would become my passion. Pulled toward reading science fiction and watching nature documentaries as a teenager, I later incorporated the natural sciences in my writing — in my previous novel, To the Bones, the geology of the Pittsburgh coal seam is a central issue for the plot.
So those nature guides with their bright illustrations shaped my view of the world from the start. Rocks and Minerals, Butterflies and Moths, Stars, Insects, Seashores — I can still see them, though they’ve left my shelves. Those childhood books introduced me to the idea that the world was a book to be opened, and read.
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