‘Have you seen The Brontës of Haworth? The 1970s Christopher Fry five-part series, I think for ITV?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I mean, it’s really clunky. It’s not aged very well, but in a way it’s a more faithful depiction of their lives. It doesn’t demonise Branwell. We see him first as a bright young thing, full of creative potential, before the descent into alcoholism. And the portrayal of Emily in that is more normalised. And I think what Sally is doing is responding to The Brontës of Haworth.’
‘I spoke to her about The Brontës of Haworth, and she said it was too sanitised. She said they didn’t have dirty fingernails. They spoke with posh accents. She said it was way too clean.’
‘And all of that is true.’
‘And she wanted to get away from that BBC thing of, we are here to inform and educate. She wanted to work against that whole tradition. And I really like To Walk Invisible.’
I agree with Sarah. To Walk Invisible is an accomplished piece of work. Sarah explains that Sally wanted to show what it was like to live with an alcoholic. I think she succeeded in doing this. But the inevitable outcome of her success is to portray Branwell as unstable and mentally disturbed.
‘He comes across as a complete nut in To Walk Invisible,’ Sarah says.
‘He does, and this is why I think in some way Michael Kitchen’s portrayal [In The Brontës of Haworth] is a more dignified depiction. You see him as a witty, socially functioning character first. In Sally’s film, we only see him at the end. By focusing on that dissipation, and not seeing Branwell the aspiring artist, or Branwell the aspiring poet, it overemphasises his pathology.’
‘It just shows him as a loser. As a failure.’
What does come across is that this is a man with a broken heart. I remember that feeling of being dumped. Your first love. I was twenty-two. We’d been together two years, and when it ended, I was bereft. I felt like my teeth had been kicked in and my guts ripped out. I had nothing left. I turned to drink and drugs. I lay on the floor and stared at the ceiling listening to Joy Division records. I took a scalpel and carved her name in my torso. I tell Sarah about this: ‘I went a bit crazy.’
‘It can do that to you. And, of course, Branwell never really had Lydia. She was never his. And I wonder how well he really read the situation.’
Sarah is talking about Lydia Robinson, who Branwell had an affair with at Thorpe Green. It has been suggested, since Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte, that Branwell’s feelings for Lydia were not reciprocated with the same intensity. That for her the affair was just a bit of fun.
‘He was still so young, wasn’t he? I mean this was 1845. He was only in his twenties.’
‘I do wonder sometimes just how much he was in touch with reality. Those mad letters he wrote, like the one to Wordsworth.’
We walk in silence for a short time. It seems to me that so many myth-busting exercises simply lead to more myths springing up, Hydra-like.
As we continue along the path, we have to dodge patches of mud. We pass back gardens with trampolines, collecting shallow puddles of rainwater and autumn leaves. The sight of these trampolines saddens me somehow. They were probably only used a few times before becoming the elephant on the lawn. They’ll stay put, getting in the way until the families finally relent and either take them to the tip or sell them for tuppence on eBay. It seems perverse to seek exercise in this way, when you are surrounded by the majestic vale of Luddenden Dean, with the expansive Midgley and Warley moors above. Jumping up and down in one spot, going nowhere, cannot compete with the myriad footpaths that crisscross fell and dell. It’s no surprise really that Branwell neglected his duties, with all this beautiful countryside surrounding him.
The path takes us further into the woods, rising above Roebuck Beck to our left. The water flows fast here. It is early November, and the leaves are turning red, gold, bronze and yellow. Wolfie chases squirrels that are busy caching nuts for the winter. Alongside our path is a wrought-iron water pipe that must have been laid when the mill was in operation. It’s a chunky, solid piece of engineering. Where the path has washed away, the amateur funambulist can tightrope over the ravines, using this pipe. To our right is the exposed face of the reddish rock. It juts out in angular shelves of granite. The leaves are falling, and the path is strewn with a copper-and-green carpet. There’s been a lot of rain, and the path is a soft bog in places. We’re approached by an anxious-looking border terrier, clearly searching for whomever he has come with. He runs back and forth, panting. We can hear someone call him in the distance.
A waterfall flows into the beck: ‘a pure spring of water, which issuing in a crystal rill, tinkles down to a rivulet in the vale’, as Patrick Brontë put it. The path is a raised ledge that has been banked up to support the pipe. We break away from it as we pass over a wooden bridge and then tiptoe stepping stones that take us over another tributary stream. Above us, a huge gritstone tor casts the path into shadow. I like to come here in the spring when the floor is covered as far as the eye can see in the verdant green of wild garlic, or bearlick to give it its folk name. I prefer this name, as it evokes a time when our wooded vales were home to large furry mammals. The young tender leaves make great pesto. The scent in the spring is sharp, sweet and spicy. Now it’s earthy and musty. This is also a good spot for tree creepers and nuthatches.
We stop by a fallen oak and sit in the nest of its branches. We drink strong black coffee from a flask, sweetened with red rum. ‘You’ve just been interviewing Adam Nagaitis, right? What did Adam say about playing Branwell?’
‘It was remarkable talking to Adam about Branwell. And his passion for Branwell as a writer, artist and brother became really obvious through our discussions. In a BBC interview Adam had given shortly after To Walk Invisible aired in the UK, he said he had all kinds of ideas about what Branwell suffered from, but that part of the discussion was either cut or the interviewer didn’t ask him to expand on his theories. And this was very frustrating for me, so I decided I would try to contact him myself. For Adam, Branwell was likely ADHD or bipolar.’
‘Isn’t there a danger in retrodiagnoses?’
Sarah agrees that this can be dodgy territory. But she says that there is compelling evidence that Branwell did likely suffer from mental illness, the symptoms of which he tried to alleviate through alcohol and opium. She explains that one of the things Adam said that struck her most of all was what Branwell’s biggest problem in life was: ‘He continued to fail himself.’
He was certainly aware that he had already failed others and was coping with that in very self-destructive ways, but he couldn’t cope with waking up every day knowing that he was continuing to fail himself. Sarah goes on to explain that this is how Adam approached Branwell’s character, really working to internalise this sense of disappointing oneself.
We finish our coffee and walk out of the wood towards Luddenden village, making our way through narrow snickets and oddly cobbled roads, past incongruous new-built houses with white PVC windows. An Amazon Prime delivery man trudges up a driveway clutching an enormous cardboard package. It’s Sunday afternoon, and there’s no rest for the wicked. We cross Halifax Lane, past the old corn mill. I think about the mill workers who completed twelve- and thirteen-hour shifts but at least had Sundays off. At one time, all corn grown in the manor of Warley was ground here. The lord of the manor owned the ‘Grist Soke’ – the compulsory right to grind. All that is left of it now is the old grindstone, which is mounted in a frame of stone. A pea-gravel path winds to the left of this grindstone, and then down steep steps, past the river that once fed the mill.
Luddenden village is a picturesque place, crammed with weavers’ cottages with big windows to let light into the workplace. The village is dominated by an incongruously large church, and to the side of this the river has been dammed, cascading white froth. The water was taken in through a goit – a small artificial channel – to create the speed needed for grinding.
As we climb
up the hill, we approach the white pebble-dashed Lord Nelson pub, the same pub Branwell Brontë drank in when he was clerk-in-charge at Luddenden Foot Station. It’s a seventeenth-century tavern, with many of the original features. Branwell lodged a little further up the hill. We stand at the bar and order two White Witch ales. We sit down at an old oak table, scratched and scarred with time. There are books about Branwell on the shelves above us. The pub was built in 1634 and was called the Black Swan until the Battle of Trafalgar. Lord Nelson was a hero of Branwell’s. In the autumn of 1841, Branwell wrote a poem about him. It tells the story of Nelson from his childhood to his death at Trafalgar. Juliet Barker makes the point that Nelson too was a parsonage child and had lost his mother at an early age. It is tempting to wonder whether Branwell sat at this table composing it. He would have certainly thought about him under this roof.
‘What do you think of Branwell as a poet? How does he compare, say, to the Romantic poets he was so clearly in awe of?’
‘Branwell was the most ambitious poet of the four of them. Emily is lauded as the Brontë poet, but I think people need to remember they had different ambitions. Emily seems to have written poetry for herself, with no intention of publishing. Branwell, on the other hand, desperately wanted recognition, and his desire to publish his poetry is strongly linked to his sense of acquiring a public identity. I think Branwell’s poetry is brilliant and hugely overlooked – as is Emily’s – but he’s also a bit of a wannabe. I think he sought recognition in a way that his attempts at writing Byronic and Shelleyan poems are suggestive of his attempts to identify with the figure of the Romantic poet more than anything. I’m not implying he wasn’t an accomplished Romantic poet in his own right, but my impressions are he seems equally to have aligned himself with the image of the Romantic poet.’
It’s worth emphasising just how young Branwell was when his first poem was published: still in his early twenties. He must have given his sisters the idea that being a published poet was possible. And tangible. He wrote a poem called ‘At Luddenden Church’. I point out of the window to the village church that inspired the poem. It looks out of place, too big for such a small settlement, like it’s been plucked from a city and plonked down here. I take out the poem and we read it together. In it, he writes about ‘the darkly shadowed hour’ that he ‘must meet at last’, and about joining the ‘silent dead’.
‘He’s anticipating his own end,’ I say. ‘He’s obsessed with death.’
‘I assume he was wandering round the graveyard. It’s so close to where we are now. And the graveyard is in the shadow of this huge edifice. But it is still odd that surrounded by this beauty and majesty, he is thinking about his death. To be so morbidly fixated.’
I think about Branwell sitting here with his friend Joseph Leyland, drinking and talking about how they were going to shake up the world, as every young artist does. Like Branwell, Leyland died an early death, although he achieved some success as a sculptor first. Like Branwell, Leyland was attracted to the dark side. One of his best-known and regarded works is a statue of Lucifer. He was six years older than Branwell and already achieving accolades during this period. His statue of Spartacus was displayed at the Manchester Exhibition of 1832. It gained a great deal of attention, people saying it was the most striking work on display. And yet, like Branwell, his talent was largely squandered, and he died an alcoholic’s death three years after Branwell.
Above the pub was the first members’ library in the region. Leyland was a member but not Branwell. It was expensive to join. But they would have no doubt talked about the books in the collection.
At this time, Branwell’s star seemed to be rising. We look at another poem published in the pages of the Halifax Guardian, this one from 14 May 1842: ‘On Peaceful Death and Painful Life’. It’s typical Branwell. He asks the reader why we feel sorry for the ‘happy dead’. And he asks us instead to mourn the ‘dead alive’. ‘Whose life departs before his death has come’. For it is ‘he who feels the worm that never dies, / The real death and darkness of a tomb!’
‘It has a similar tone to Wuthering Heights. That’s what strikes me most,’ Sarah says.
‘Yes, that fetishisation of the corpse that goes on in Wuthering Heights is going on in his poetry.’
Sarah goes to the bar to get some more drinks. My mind flips back to the last time I was here. I was with the poet Gaia Holmes, interviewing her about her new book of poetry Where the Road Runs Out. Like Branwell, she was home educated, and like Branwell she lived for some time in this area. In fact, she out-Branwelled Branwell: she didn’t just live next to a church; she lived in a church. We were talking about her new book but inevitably the conversation turned to Branwell. She wasn’t a massive fan of his work, but she liked ‘Heaven and Earth’. She pointed out the painterly qualities, the way he evoked the Calder Valley with its smoke, silent marshes and moorland greys. Her conclusion, though, was that his poems ‘linger darkly’. When Sarah comes back, I tell her about this encounter.
‘I’ve been rereading a lot of his poetry. And I’ve grown to like it. But I think Gaia nails it with that phrase “linger darkly”. Do you agree?’
‘There is something troublingly dark in his work. And I wonder, even then, in 1841, whether he felt doomed.’
I look around the room. It’s busy with Sunday-afternoon drinkers. An odd combination of young trendies and older farmer types. A young woman, dressing down in matching jacket and Ugg boots, stands at the bar with a black pug on a pink leash. An old bloke in a flat cap and waxed jacket sits opposite us. I suppose this reflects the changing face of Luddenden village.
I tell Sarah that I want to return to Sally’s portrayal of the Brontës. I’m intrigued by the original inclusion of the last shot of Branwell’s statue. I ask her why she thinks Sally wanted to end the film in that way.
‘I don’t know. It would completely change everything. The film is subtitled “The Brontë Sisters”, which I find troubling, because it is equally about him. There would have been something very mournful and regrettable if she would have been able to do that.’
I’m really glad the film doesn’t end with that image. And I’m really glad that statue has been burnt down. I think it would have been a mistake. Such a bad statue.
‘Do you want to see the script?’
Sarah finds the script on her phone and shows me the final direction:
EXT. ROCHDALE CANAL, SOWERBY BRIDGE. DAY. A badly decayed fifteen-inch-tall wooden statue labelled ‘BRANWELL BRONTË 1817–1848’ stands at the side of the canal. One of the eyes is hollow, both his hands have rotted away, and down by his crotch the Sowerby Bridge piss-heads have put an empty Budweiser bottle, amongst other modern-day debris around the dank little picnic site.
Sarah leaves to catch a train, and I make my way home. I call into the village off-licence. As I exit, a man in a red cagoul shuffles his feet and tells me he just needs fifty pence to put towards a tin of beer. I don’t quite know why I do it, but I double back and return with a four pack of Tennents Super Strength. The man’s eyes light up as I hand it to him. None of the ‘piss-heads’ I know would be seen dead with a bottle of Budweiser.
8
‘And Here’s to You, Mrs Robinson’
It’s mid November, and I’m here in Great Ouseburn in North Yorkshire. I’ve just driven through Little Ouseburn, and there doesn’t seem that much between them. They are both linear villages built along one prominent road, each with a church and a pub with a boarded-up ‘To Let’ sign outside. The people of Little Ouseburn must live in a constant state of inferiority to Great Ouseburn. And the people of Great Ouseburn must live in a constant state of superiority over their diminutively named neighbours.
Wolfie and I are walking towards the River Ouse. Everything is flat around here, which must have been a shock to both Anne and Branwell, having been immersed, really from birth, in a rugged landscape, characterised by folds and corrugated undulations, by gorges that tear deep scars into the hills, by ro
ck formations that jut out and spill across the moors, by miles of barren nothingness and empty fells that stretch out as far as the eye can see.
Anne arrived in May 1840 to take up the position of governess with the Robinsons of Thorpe Green Hall, just up the road from here – it was to form the basis of Horton Lodge in Agnes Grey, her first novel. She was there for five years, the longest period of paid employment of any of the siblings. Mr Robinson was lord of the manor of Little Ouseburn. He had shooting rights over nearly two thousand acres of land. Anne must have thought she was doing Branwell a favour when she secured a job for him as private tutor to Edmund, the Robinsons’ son, in 1843. And initially this was probably the case. He lasted more than two years, longer than he did in any of his other paid posts, before his affair with Mrs Robinson forced his return to Haworth, where he would decline into alcoholism and sketch a premonition of his own death: a shaky drawing of his own corpse being visited by the grim reaper in the form of a cock-snooking skeleton.
Everything round Haworth is up and down. Everything here is flat and green. The leaves are turning gold, and a red kite soars low in the sky looking for carrion, the remnants of a fox kill or a roadside accident: a badger, a hedgehog, a rabbit, spatchcocked by an SUV.
There’s not a lot here. It must have seemed a million miles from Haworth, with its bustling main street, busy mills and nonconformist chapels stuffed with sinners praying for salvation; its pubs and drunks and licentiousness; its apothecary and laudanum guzzlers; its middens overspilling with stinking offal and excrement; its overpopulated houses; and its rancid corpse water.
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