Veterinarian, barrister, expeditioner and nature author Charles Foster talks to us about his book 'Being a Beast', one of this year's chosen Wild Reads titles, and how he lived life as a badger for six weeks as part of his research.
Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, a qualified veterinarian, teaches medical law and ethics, and is a practicing barrister. He has taken part in expeditions all over the world, from racing across the Algerian Sahara to skiing to the North Pole, and has written books on law, philosophy, natural history, anthropology, archaeology, travel, evolutionary biology and theology. His publications include The Screaming Sky, which was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, Being Human, and most recently, Cry of the Wild.
His 2016 publication Being a Beast was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing and has been selected for the 2024 Wild Reads collection.
Wild Reads is a project to encourage readers and wildlife-lovers to explore and celebrate the connection between the natural world and the written word, brought to you by Suffolk Libraries and our partners, Suffolk Wildlife Trust. Wild Reads features a variety of creative writing and arts workshops, each crafted to explore and celebrate the natural environment.
Sorry to begin truculently, but I don’t like the expression ‘natural world’. The American philosopher and naturalist David Abram rightly says that there are only relatively un-wild places. We’d know, if we saw it properly, that an inner-city shopping mall is a natural place, full of uncontrolled and uncontrollable wildness – just like our skins and our guts. So my first introduction to the natural world was my first sensation as an embryo or foetus. And my first introduction to the natural world outside my mother was, presumably, the blindingly bright clinical lights and the antiseptic smell of the hospital.
But my first memory is of a tawny owl blinking at me outside my bedroom window. I grew up on the edge of Sheffield, where howling wilderness met privet hedges, and like all children I wasn’t a biped for quite a while, and crawled around with my nose and eyes and mouth at the level of rabbits and hedgehogs, smelling and seeing and eating the world more intensely than I’ve done since. I was more part of it than I am now. I had more of a relationship with it. And then as I grew up and away from the ground I started, like everyone else, to substitute my ideas about the world for the world itself. That wasn’t a good trade. And I watched birds and mammals, and wrote nature diaries, and stuffed roadkill and had dead birds suspended on a thread over my bed, and pickled bird brains in formalin and went to holding them, hoping that the birds’ knowledge would seep into me. It didn’t.
Yes, we had pets: the usual. Mice, hamsters, rabbits. And people brought injured and orphaned things to us in cardboard boxes: hedgehogs, crows, foxes and blackbirds, and I tried to put them back together again. And I dissected things in the garden shed and began to think that if I knew how to take things apart I understood them. That was a bad, bad mistake.
In hospital after I’d smashed up my leg in the sea. The man in the bed next to me thought that the walls seethed with snakes, and before I was screwed together again, every time I moved I felt the grating of the bone ends. I was reading Winnie the Pooh.
I’m a great believer in old-fashioned notebooks and pens. Thoughts flow down a pen in a way that they don’t into a computer keyboard. But I never write anything down when I’m actually watching. Writing and watching require completely different types of attention. And – up to a point – I think that if a thought or observation isn’t powerful enough to survive the journey back from the wood or the seashore or the mountain to the desk where the notebook lives, it probably doesn’t deserve a place in a book. So: I watch, compose a draft in my head, probably staring into the middle distance, and then transcribe the draft onto the laptop.
It didn’t happen like that. The manuscript was complete by the time my agent pitched it to publishers. There was a gratifying amount of interest in the book and not, I like to think, because it was thought to be weird and sensationalist. I hope and believe that the interest reflected a sense that many of us have of solidarity with the non-human world, and a consequent interest in how close our relationship with non-humans can be. Can we really know what it is like to be a fox? Increasingly, as people read the book, they realised that the book is not really about worm-eating or trying to catch fish with your teeth, or manically criss-crossing continents, chasing the swifts, but about how accessible otherness generally is. Can I really know what it is like to be anything other than Charles Foster? If I can, I’m likely to feel less lonely: less frustratingly locked up in the echo chamber of my own skull. Trying to enter the world of a fox is good training for trying to enter the worlds of your best friends and your worst enemies. And therefore a good training in empathy. My publishers understood that.
Killer whales, rabbits, gannets, eels and mayflies, all of which I’ve written about in Cry of the Wild. And seals, which I’m writing about at the moment.
It made me cold, nauseated, thinner, smellier, and all the more convinced that relationships are really the only things worth working at. I missed red wine, waves, Greece and, far more than anything else, my family.
Cry of the Wild is a collection of short stories about eight species: five mammals (including that very, very interesting mammal, the human, about whom I’ve written in Being a Human), a bird, a fish and an insect. It tries to let the reader feel what it’s like for these animals to live alongside us – under siege. The story form is essential. We’re little, local stories ourselves, and we are only really convinced by other little, local stories. We can’t feel what we should about grand, terrifying notions like climate change and mass extinction. All the scary graphs in the world won’t convince like one tale of the fate of the frog in the pond at the end of the road.
There’s a dazzling array of brilliant nature writers currently at work. Many are my friends. It would be invidious to name one. I go back again and again to Richard Jefferies and the American Transcendentalists, but if I had to choose a book, it would be Kathleen Raine’s The Lion’s Mouth (1977). It’s the final volume of her autobiography, and isn’t usually thought of as a nature book. It’s mostly an account of her tempestuous relationship with Gavin Maxwell. Raine was a major poet and a considerable scholar of the classical worlds and of the religions of the East, and her scholarship and artistry and unusual type of attention make her poised but passionate descriptions of landscape and wildness – particularly in the west Highlands of Scotland – shimmer with a luminescence I’ve not met in any other writing.
I’d love to be a long-distance lorry driver.
I’m missing part of a digit on my left hand. I was on a ski expedition to the North Pole, and when I took off my glove I found that the end of a finger was rock solid. It was frozen meat. A few months later, on a blazing summer day, I was fiddling round with the black, necrotic finger tip and it just snapped off. I’ve still got it in a box somewhere in the house.
