From mourning into morning
Euan Cameron
TO TRAVEL HOPEFULLY: JOURNAL OF A DEATH NOT FORETOLD by Christopher Rush Profile, £15.99, pp. 264, ISBN 1861977085 ✆ £13.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Grief hangs like a pall over the opening section of Christopher Rush’s account of how he came to make a journey in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson. A 49year-old Edinburgh schoolmaster and writer, his life disintegrated in 1993 when his beloved wife Patricia died suddenly from breast cancer after 25 years of marriage, and this book is at once a memorial to her and a story of his own catharsis and reemergence into the life of the living.
In the first 80 pages Rush describes the onset of ‘the obscenity of cancer’ and its effects on his poor wife’s ailing body in such painfully forthright detail that anyone of a squeamish disposition is likely to wince in horror. After Patricia’s death, Rush was plunged into a nightmare of despair and loneliness when only the presence of his two children and his wide-ranging knowledge of literature provided him with a degree of comfort. Indeed, his ‘hopelessly book-anchored brain’ at times makes him sound like some walking thesaurus of literary quotations and allusions, as he rages at the dying of the light. Benumbed with pain, he churns out fragments from Blake, Shakespeare (Lear is his counsellor), Dickens, Auden and Larkin within the space of two or three pages, only rescuing himself from mawkishness and self-indulgence by the poetry and sensitivity of much of his own prose.
After a year’s raw and bitter mourning, in which his pessimism and gloom know no bounds, Rush forms the notion of following his hero, RLS, on an exact re-enactment of the journey he made over 100 years ago and which he described in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. His purpose is to ‘reclaim my sanity’ after his bereavement, and his preparations for his trip are meticulous, to the extent of making a preliminary journey to Le Monastier (the starting point of RLS’s journey) in order to purchase a donkey from a local farmer and even attempting to procure Bologna sausage — in tins, à la Stevenson! — from Valvona & Crolla in Edinburgh. Hitherto, Rush had always shared the belief of another of his literary heroes, his friend George Mackay Brown, that the best travel should be done in the mind. It seems that this was the first time he had ever left these shores, for he approaches the wilds of provincial France with even more apprehension than the much younger RLS.
Stevenson was 27 when he set off with his donkey Modestine on the arduous, rambling, 12-day trek over the mountainous area of southern central France that stretches from Le Monastier down to StJean-du-Gard. Rush was 20 years older, but he identified in every conceivable way with the master. The two men were both Scots, citizens of Edinburgh, writers; they were both endeavouring to ‘reconnect’ with themselves, and they were also lovesick, pining for the women they loved — in Stevenson’s case, the American Fanny Osbourne, thoughts of whom rarely left him while he was away from her. The journey is a gruelling one (as this reviewer can attest, having completed it — as have countless others over the years — in 1978, though he admits to losing patience with his donkey and returning it to its owner after a mere two days!) and, like the frail RLS, Rush has to endure much foul weather and some perilous scrapes as he interweaves careful descriptions of his adventures with those of his hero. Though tempted to give up on several occasions, he presses on and is ultimately rewarded.
The Trappist monastery of Notre Dame des Neiges — the halfway point of the route — which RLS had ‘rarely approached with more hearty terror ... this is what it is to have had a Protestant education’, provided a turning point for both men. For RLS the ‘holy cheerfulness’ displayed by the silent order of monks slowly warmed his Calvinist soul and allayed his suspicion of ‘papish’ practices; in spite of himself, he was moved by the ‘stern simplicity’ he witnessed that ‘spoke directly to the heart’. Rush arrived there ‘sick in body and soul’ and left it a changed and reinvigorated man. Touched by the hospitality of his hosts and impressed by his fellow guests who quoted Pascal and Unamuno at him, he declares the monastery to have been his ‘salvation’. RLS found his inner self in the Cévennes, and the experience was crucial to his development as a writer and as a man; he committed himself to pursuing Fanny Osbourne and shook off his Edinburgh upbringing for the first time in his life. For Rush the journey, however strenuous, brought about healing and recovery from his great loss, and produced this brave and graceful book.
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