The Salt Path scandal has killed the middle-class fantasy of escapism

Telegraph

3 days ago

Authenticity is the enemy of art – and yet our hunger for it has been allowed to cloud almost every corner of creativity. You see it in the proliferation of TV dramas 'based on a true story'; in the expectation for actors to have 'lived experience' of the roles in which they are cast; and in the rise of autofiction (novels constructed from the facts of the author's own life) and memoir.
In this age of fake news, and mistrusted politicians, I can understand why people might seek something 'real' in the films they watch and the books that they read. Yet while great art should speak universal truths, it must also be free from a slavish adherence to hard facts. As Mark Twain once wrote: 'Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.'
Then, last weekend, came an exposé in The Observer which claimed that several aspects of The Salt Path – Raynor Winn's best-selling 2018 account of her and her husband Moth's 630-mile trek along the South West Coast Path – were, in fact, fabricated. The story made headlines around the world. Winn has responded to the allegations, on behalf of herself and Moth, stating: 'The Observer article is highly misleading. We are taking legal advice and won't be making any further comment at this time. The Salt Path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey.' Yesterday, she published a statement on her own website, addressing The Observer's claims more comprehensively and including scans of her husband's medical records.
I am sure there are a few readers of The Salt Path who will be unperturbed by the media storm. They bought it to enjoy its account of our coastal communities, the vivid descriptions of romantic and rugged landscapes. To read the book, it could be argued, is to commune with England's soil and its soul.
But to do so, is to ignore a bigger problem: The Salt Path is sold on certain truths – that Moth was diagnosed with a terminal brain condition and that the couple were left homeless after a bad business deal, for example – which are now being called into question. It's hard to believe The Salt Path would have achieved the same success (selling two million copies, winning awards and being made into a popular film) had the protagonists been plucked from Winn's imagination.
The book is also, to use a modern cliché, a tale of triumph over adversity, which is now the order of the day for us mawkish Brits. 'If we hadn't done this there'd always have been things we wouldn't have known,' Winn writes, 'a part of ourselves we wouldn't have found, resilience we didn't know we had.'
This isn't quite psychobabble, but there is an element of solipsism which is linked to the burgeoning cult of the individual. What Terence Rattigan once called the 'English disease' – by which he meant our reputation for emotional restraint – suddenly feels an awfully long way away.
And here's the thing: the more emotionally truthful we purport to be, the more inauthentic we actually sound, often because we resort to clichés when talking about our feelings. I am in a good place right now; I am living my best life; destitution is my superpower.
Yet while The Salt Path's success is built on modern sensibilities, it is also peddling a middle-class fantasy which feels quite retro. In turning their backs on the rat race, Raynor and Moth do not seem so different from Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal rearing hens in The Good Life (and, indeed, the Winns's previous existence in Wales sounds like a model of self-sufficiency).
What's more, while the Winns's quest is generically spiritual, proper pilgrimages have provided a cultural talking point for centuries. In literature, we tend to think of two medieval works in particular – Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland, which both combine the idea of an actual physical journey with an internal religious experience. Indeed, in some ways, you can trace a link between the social interaction of Chaucer's pilgrims and the exchanges between the Winns and the people they encounter on their trek. Yet while both authors highlight the importance of community, in The Salt Path that is ultimately supplanted by the need for self-discovery.
If you want to explore the idea of the pilgrimage in more recent literature, there are far better examples than The Salt Path. I would recommend Graham Swift's 1996 Booker Prize-winner Last Orders which owes a debt to Chaucer but recalibrates the story as a tale of fractured male friendships in which three war veterans travel from London to Margate to scatter the ashes of Jack Dodds, the first of the gang to die. This isn't a sentimental 'journey' through picturesque locations; the stop-off points include the unlovely environs of New Cross and Dartford, and its power lies in the stubborn emotional inarticulacy of its ageing protagonists.
Cinema offers equally rich examples: of course the road movie is often a kind of pilgrimage, even one with as tragic an end as Thelma and Louise, in which two women find their freedom on the open road. My personal favourite, The Straight Story, considers the 240-mile pilgrimage of an old man, Alvin Straight, through Wisconsin and Iowa, as he attempts reconciliation with his ailing brother. Like The Salt Path, the film (directed by David Lynch in 1999) is based on a true story, but it is also unyielding to any sort of sentimentality and all the more powerful for it.
We don't yet know about the future of The Salt Path – what the scandal will mean for Raynor Winn, her publisher, or her future book sales. But if the controversy serves finally to spoil the middle-class appetite for 'real' stories, and leaves readers hungry instead for something of greater substance than this sort of mid-brow lite-lit that does nothing to push literature forward, we will all be the better for it. As far as I'm concerned, authenticity can take a hike.