Some readers may be aware of the Observer’s literary scoop last summer: Chloe Hadjimatheou’s exposé, that is, about The Salt Path by Raynor Winn. Published in 2018, this memoir tells a tale of homelessness and a walk along the South West Coast Path, with the walk becoming a miracle cure for Winn’s husband’s terminal illness. The Salt Path was much lauded at the time by many, including the judges of certain literary prizes. Last summer, however, the Observer raised some awkward questions about the book’s factual basis, alleging that Winn had stolen from her employer (leading to the loss of her home), and that reports of her husband’s illness had been greatly exaggerated.
Anyone who missed the news about the Winns, who were also the subject of a film adaptation of The Salt Path released last year, had plenty of opportunities to catch up. The Observer was not slow to follow up with items such as “Raynor Winn won’t talk to us. But here’s what she said about our story”, “TheSalt Path author’s next book delayed by publisher Penguin” and “What did the publisher actually know?” Erica Wagner, an Observer columnist, plodded sententiously into action with “Memoirs that stir our emotions and seek our sympathy should tell the truth”. But why leave it at that? The same newspaper carried a reminder of the story last month – “‘Don’t look for the money. I’ve taken it all’: Salt Path author Raynor Winn’s ‘confession’ that she stole from her family” – and has now released a podcast called The Walkers: The real ‘Salt Path’.
Perhaps all of this activity is intended to make up for the fact that until relatively recently – February 23 last year, indeed – the Observer could uncritically describe The Salt Path as a “moving memoir of resilience and survival”. Penguin, meanwhile, is due to release Raynor Winn’s next book, On Winter Hill, in October. According to the publisher’s website, this memoir is set in the aftermath of a “turbulent year”.
When we reported, in the previous issue of the TLS, that there had been some trouble in the antipodean world of books, our attention was firmly on Melbourne. Anything Melbourne can do, apparently, Adelaide can do worse.
In dropping from its programme the pro-Palestinian novelist and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, as it imprudently did a few weeks ago, Adelaide writers’ week prompted more than seventy of Abdel-Fattah’s fellow speakers (Percival Everett, Michelle de Kretser, Helen Garner and Zadie Smith among them) to cancel their own scheduled appearances. Much mud has been slung, in all directions; writers’ week was cancelled; and the board has resigned. Abdel-Fattah, meanwhile, has received an apology and an invitation to speak in Adelaide next year. Following the Fossil Free Books protests in the UK, here is further warning to festival organizers everywhere to think carefully about who they platform – and then deplatform.
Michael Bracewell has just stepped away from his typewriter – or so the scene pictured above would seem to suggest – in the middle of writing his short book Souvenir: London 1979–1986. Published in 2021, Bracewell’s “dream memoir”, as one reviewer called it, nostalgically evokes the spirit of the pre-digital age through art, books, films, music – not to mention the place to which it all, in one sense or another, belonged. “We were each the city and a map of the city; with buildings and locales as events and acts and tempers – streets and districts as dialogue and characters …”
Yes, you had to be there. Whether you were or not, though, there is still a little time to catch a free exhibition inspired by Souvenir, curated by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, that runs at the Fitzrovia Chapel in Pearson Square until February 8. It is here that this old Olympia may be spotted amid stacks of period-appropriate paperbacks, not to mention that dictaphone, an ashtray and bottles of glass both clear and green. Dominating the chapel – a Gothic revival job formerly enmeshed in the Middlesex Hospital – is Sarah Nicolls’s inside-out piano, installed before the altar. This turns out be an exhibition to be heard as much as to be seen: the air is filled with the sound of this unconventional instrument, accompanying recorded readings from Souvenir by the actor Paul Kaye, who studied at Harrow School of Art during the period that the book covers.
Souvenir the exhibition is the first in a trilogy of such experiments curated by the same duo in the same venue. Miseris Succurrere Disco is due to follow in March; and Middlesex Hospital Blues in October.
Correspondence. Benjamin Friedman writes from New York to note on a “macabre connection”. Last year we had reason to mention A. A. Milne (December 12), shortly before moving on to another subject: Charlie Watts’s activities as a book collector. As Mr Friedman points out, the author of the Winnie-the-Pooh books had as a country home, for over thirty years, Cotchford Farm in East Sussex; Milne died there in 1956. Cotchford was purchased in 1968 by the Rolling Stones’ guitarist Brian Jones, “who himself died there the following year, drowning in the swimming pool at the age of 27” – a “subsequently mythologized” subject that in turn came up when we previously mentioned Watts (October 31). Now all we need to know is if Cotchford ever saw one Stone visiting another for a chat about first editions.
We owe a debt to The Language-Lover’s Lexipedia by Joshua Blackburn for its list of obsolete and eccentric-sounding jobs – among them, that of the knocker-upper (December 26). Dated by Blackburn to the nineteenth century, the role survived, according to Andrew Currie, at his “all-male university hall of residence in the 1970s”. “It was common to ask a friend to knock you up in the morning”, Mr Currie writes, “much to the amusement of students from America, where it was slang for getting somebody pregnant.”
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