I bought Eugène Guillevic’s Carnac 15 or so years ago. God knows why. I’ve always liked austere covers, and perhaps that’s the reason I picked up this slim book of poetry, with its simple font and moody engraving. I’d have been attracted by the translator, too. John Montague was the sort of poet who illustrated his collections with 16th-century woodcuts and blotchy photographs of sculptures unearthed from Fermanagh bogs. He appreciated the eloquence of old things. Anyone he thought worthy of translation probably did as well.
Carnac is a longish poem named after the Breton coastal town where Guillevic spent his early years. Over 3,000 megaliths stud the surrounding countryside, arranged in lines and circles, the remnants of a thriving and adaptable stone-raising culture. The earliest signs of settled human habitation in the region may date to 5,700 BC, while the first stones seem to have been raised 1,000 years later. This was Guillevic’s inheritance as a small boy in the 1910s, a policeman’s son who stared out to sea and played among ancient stones. “One is amidst the unknown, surrounded by mystery,” he wrote later. “One is in the sacred.”
As a child, Guillevic noticed something strange. He was living in a country called France, yet hardly anyone spoke French. This was the language of school, where a sentence in Breton would earn you the same punishment as spitting on the floor. Nevertheless, one word of the region’s indigenous language would stick: menhir, literally a “long stone.” Menhirs were more than words for him, of course. His family lived on the second floor of a house, and there were no public parks nearby. So he played among the stones at Ménec — according to his mother, that was where he learned to walk. Though he moved to Alsace at the age of 12, where he was shocked by the soft landscape of forested hills, Guillevic never really left Carnac.
He studied mathematics and took a job in the tax office in Paris. When the war came, he joined the resistance and became a communist. Montague described the mature Guillevic as “smallish, thick-set, raucous-voiced, with the craggy dome of an intelligent simian, and a sudden smile which lit the beard and large glinting glasses.” He seems to have been happy enough in the capital, but the menhirs followed him. They recur in his poetry like a first love. Sources of wonder, melancholy, and laughter. He gave them strange powers of movement and surprise. The stones of Carnac were not static monuments to be measured and studied. They were unruly, even horny. In his first collection, Terraqué (1942), we find megaliths up to no good when the sun goes down: “The menhirs come and go at night / And nibble one another.”
This isn’t a bad time to read about megaliths. Stone-fanciers seem to be enjoying a solstice moment. Social media accounts dedicated to henges, dolmens, passage tombs, geoglyphs and peculiar mounds are springing up everywhere. The excellent Weird Walk, a zine dedicated to “wanderings and wonderings from the British Isles,” is full of articles on old stones, cheese-lore, and instances of the uncanny in Midsomer Murders. More broadly, there seems to be a growing appetite for folk traditions and local legends, whether in the form of light-hearted BBC documentaries or the books of Francis Young.
Naturally, stone circles have always been objects of intense curiosity. John Aubrey showed an enthusiastic Charles II around Avebury in 1663. We can date written analysis of Britain’s ancient monuments from the publication of William Camden’s Britannia in 1586, but interest in the subject surely extends much further back; even the most incurious Wiltshire serfs must have glanced up at Stonehenge from time to time and wondered what the hell it was all about.
“Even the most incurious Wiltshire serfs must have glanced up at Stonehenge from time to time and wondered what the hell it was all about.”
Guillevic was no Aubrey or Camden. He did not want to explain the stones of Brittany. He wanted to live among them. Carnac was published in 1961. Guillevic viewed it as a collection of 150 short poems, but all those little pebbles form a single cairn. It is a sea poem, a stone poem: “From the sea to the menhirs / From the menhirs to the sea / The same road, two contrary winds / With the one from the sea / Full of the other’s murder.” The sea, formless and jealous, is a sinister presence. It resents the old stones, perhaps for their solidity, perhaps for their suggestion of order, perhaps because they were erected by creatures who chose to walk rather than swim. For the sea, perhaps, there could be no greater insult.
The poem’s charm and power rest on such musings. Guillevic proudly claimed to be “a man from prehistory,” and Carnac is a tongue-in-cheek experiment in Stone Age thought. The same subjects are returned to over and over again. Menhirs, sun, sea, and rock pools are poked at and sniffed, sometimes even tasted. They are examined from every angle. What are they? What do they want? At one point Guillevic mocks up a mythological system, relating a daily battle between sun and surf. Elsewhere, he muses on the significance of moorland, the nature of seaweed.
“I believed in answers from stone,” he wrote. The stones are at the heart of it all. Guillevic never tackled their mystery head-on. He had no interest in reducing the menhirs of Carnac to mere archaeology. He offered up playful theories coloured by his own eccentric, deeply felt understanding of the region. The sea threatened humans with madness; the stones were there to protect them. Or the circles and lines of shaped rock were a Neolithic Genesis, a record of Creation: “Something happened at Carnac / A long time ago. / Something which matters / And you say, light…”
In his autobiography, Vivre en Poésie (1980), Guillevic compared the Carnac of his childhood to its modern incarnation. The results were not favourable. “Now,” he wrote, “Carnac is ruined by all the villas and tourism and petrol pumps. But there is something left of it…” That something was “Carnac-préhistoire”, which he regarded as his home. For Guillevic, this was not necessarily in the past. This was a place, after all, “Somehow far from everything / Which proceeds beneath time.” Holiday homes and petrol stations can’t compete with that.
This is the appeal of old stones. My own local dolmen, which crouches within an earthwork ring on the southern edge of Belfast, is no match for the alignments of Carnac in age or scale. But it too seems immune to passing indignities. Last summer there was talk of temporarily closing the place due to the prodigious amount of dog shit left by careless visitors. And I once saw a young man climb onto the stones, standing at the highest point of the sloping quoit in tracksuit and glaring white trainers, laughing down at his girlfriend. I was disgusted, but I also knew that it didn’t matter, not really. This dolmen had seen worse. Stripped of its earthen mound, excavated and robbed, its first name forgotten. The stones sat in shroomy indifference, just as they have since 2,700 BC, and will do long after those white trainers are regarded as an antique mode of dress.
If the number of stone-lovers is quietly on the rise, I suspect this is at the root of it. Lichen aside, not much sticks to a megalith. Philosophy and politics start to look like small, cramped things next to them. Their original function is largely lost, and this is a great part of their power. You can only use menhirs as Guillevic did, as dreaming machines. A lesser poet might have written about his own childhood in Carnac. But he knew that the stones gave him an opportunity to go deeper and wider. Carnac is not a record of little Eugène’s childhood — it is about the childhood of our whole species. From the old stones come touch, fear, form. As Guillevic wrote: “From the middle of the menhirs / the world appears.”
