Obscure melancholia — artful outsiders in the West of England
The Cobb at Lyme Regis is a long, snaking seawall, a stone rampart protecting a small harbour and its town — there has been a wall here since the 14th century, but it was made famous by the writer John Fowles, who lived in the town until his death in 2005.
Fowles, an English essayist and novelist, was the natural successor to Thomas Hardy, one of the great 19th century English authors, who wrote, tragically, of the effect of industrialisation on the agricultural poor, and the end of their way of life.
His heroine Tess is hanged after she is captured at Stonehenge for killing her abusive, wealthy cousin who seduces her and takes her virginity.
I guess you could say he was the English Steinbeck.
I had studied Tess Of The D’urbevilles and Jude the Obscure at school, loved the John Schlesinger film of Far From The Madding Crowd with Julie Christie and was delighted to discover that Fowles, whom I eventually did my university thesis on, had caught the mood of Hardy.
At 18, I was given a copy of his book The Magus, which twisted and turned its anti-hero Nicholas Urfe under the watchful tutelage of the magician of the title, Conchis (conscious), on a small Greek island, where Urfe is teaching at an English public school.
For a lost teenager, at the onset of a wild drinking career, Urfe’s outsider, his estrangement from love and relationship, was something that spoke to something deep inside of me.
If you have ever seen the film The Game, where Michael Douglas is put through a series of mind-bending experience in order to shake him awake, you will know the central idea behind The Magus — to teach someone how to love, how to live, often by nefarious means.
I probably didn’t know back then that I was similarly frozen, yet in seeing myself so clearly, something within me began its slow unthawing.
And so I poured through John Fowles’ other works, never quite identifying in the same way. But when Meryl Streep stands alone at the end of a rain-swept seawall, The Cobb, looking out for her lost lover in the film of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, I felt a certain empathy.
The book’s narrator tells us she is suffering from what the Victorians called obscure melancholia, which despite the fact that melancholia was an ancient Greek term, its prefix ‘obscure’ meant that no-one really knew what was wrong with her.
Some might say her character, Sarah Woodruff, was depressed, others that she was love sick, yet like Urfe she is another outsider, judged by an hypocritical society for an illicit liaison with the eponymous French Lieutenant.
As both book and novel go on it becomes clear she is nobody’s fool and would rather live her own authentic life as an outsider than find acceptance within a culture that can never understand her, and whose values she abhors.
You might say she is a Victorian feminist slash femme fatale, a woman most men would fear and never fully understand.
By the time I got to university, my drinking, aided by a new degree of financial freedom, swelled exponentially.
Between bouts, I studied Marxist critical theory — the perfect antidote to my wealthy soul-dead family — feminism and fiction, the black experience in fiction and more of Fowles and Hardy.
When I moved to the West Country myself and followed what felt like my own literary lineage I wrote this poem, Two Dorset Men:
They strode out together from the pages of their books
Those two West Country men, bound by belonging and lineage
And, above all, loyalty to the softly folding land they loved.
I walk this same earth, and lie under its trees, reading now
As I look back, I can see I was always heading west
Drawn here, as if a fate spread out before me, calling.
And I remember those stories from my youth and
How the land climbed inside me under that greenwood tree,
On Gabriel Oak’s frown, in Tess’s date with destiny amid the dolmens.
‘Tess, Tess!’ I called out to her, watching the ground grow flatter, harder as she walked east, knowing it was a sign of things to come
In my mind, somehow, flat lands almost always being badlands.
But she did not hear, and although she haunted me and
Whispered in the wind as Cathy did to Heathcliff
I forgot the West Country for a short while and went on my way.
Then at 18, on my birthday, a girl I hardly knew gave me a book
‘You must have it,’ she said, with an urgency only hinted at by hindsight pressing The Magus into the palm of an outstretched hand.
Not long after, perhaps months, perhaps a few years, she died
As if our two beings colluded in a drama outside of time
Within a soulscape where writers and readers existed apart from their creations.
As the tale transfixed me, I felt the two men reach out to one another
Across the century, over the Dorset fields, across the Wiltshire plains
Into the heart of my own unfolding young life, again calling to me.
It took a French Lieutenant’s Woman to cast them together in time…
I realised then how a land and its people formed one living thing, walking the pages of the books of those men, the one foreshadow and mentor to the other.
I too, now, am a Dorset man and this a hymn of gratitude to the two women too whose endings were my beginning, one here, one there, revealing the brutal, beautiful coalescing of land and people, nature and fate that makes up both this life and that.
I am unsure why I am thinking of these things today. Perhaps because I feel challenged to abandon my perennial role of outsider, to come in out of the cold, to be warmed by another’s fire, yet I doubt my capacity and wonder if I am destined to be like Nicholas Urfe or Sarah Woodruff, in life but really somewhere else — obscurely melancholy.
Perhaps I like it. Perhaps I have long forgotten how to belong and no longer know how. For there is something about the soul’s exile that lends itself to art.
I may drive down to The Cobb soon — it is only an hour from here - look out to sea and let the wind and rain batter me, soak my feet, clear something from my system, and begin again.
copyright simon heathcote
