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I am fascinated by what we know and what we are learning about the mind in turmoil, and the power of art to salve it. My guests this evening are famed for mighty works and mental struggles.
We gather in front of my house between the beck and the woods. Excellent Swiss Fendant is not to everyone’s taste, as I expected, but the evening is perfect, the air as soft as the slow bright sky.
Lord Byron, who swings between bingeing and fasting, asks for a soda water. He turns to watch a man surging through the meadow, hands raking the tall silver grasses. “An artist? He looks . . . ”
“He looks like van Gogh,” says Dervla Murphy. She laughs as van Gogh advances, his gaze lifted to the tumbling jackdaws and the luminous clouds.
Murphy, the most fearless travel writer of all time, clinks her Guinness against Byron’s water glass. “Tell me about that Napoleonic coach of yours,” she says. “How does it go on bad roads? And what was Ottoman Albania like? When I was there, the main danger was child brigands . . . ”
My friend Femi Oyebode, the renowned (and very much alive) psychiatrist and co-host of this party and our radio programmes about psychiatry, is delightedly at home among the guests, all of us familiar with various kinds of madness (in Murphy’s case, only the madness of dire places). “This could only be normal in Hebden Bridge!” says Oyebode, who used to live in the area. “How does it feel to be back?” he asks Sylvia Plath, who has lifted her face to the last of the sun.
“Better than it was to be here then,” says Plath, whose physical remains are buried in a nearby village. “Though I liked this lane. And the names — Hardcastle Crags . . . ”
“You did!” Oyebode exclaims. A poet himself, he quotes her lines about a night walk here:
. . . the dairy herds
Knelt in the meadow mute as boulders;
Sheep drowsed stoneward in their tussocks of wool . . .
“And you had birds wearing granite ruffs! Was that a projection of how you were feeling or were you drawing out the soul of the place?”
“These Pennines could fill any soul with stones,” Plath says.
“I woke in a granite ruff to most of my life’s mornings,” Byron remarks, admiringly.
We begin with asparagus, which undercooks perfectly, shining with butter and a-gloop with melting cheddar. Van Gogh comes in from the meadow, greets everyone and washes his hands. Now we pile in, eating with our fingers from the one dish. It must be this that brings out such fellow feeling, a patchwork family glow that surrounds us like the dusk outside.
Murphy loves asking questions as much as she hates answering them. She gets van Gogh to compare the qualities of northern and southern light.
“Sunrise over Provence!” he cries, as prosecco fish pie yields ruby tomatoes, pink Dublin Bay prawns, smoked haddock and meaty hake. My guests are laughing and the pie has worked.
Byron abandons his diet for the night. Now he wants Riesling and Murphy more Guinness, which she presses on Plath: “Build you up!”
Oyebode tells Plath how much readers, sufferers and psychiatry owe her for mapping the precipices of the mind. “Your work gives extraordinary understanding,” he says. “You enlarge our capacity for compassion and self-compassion.”
“The unacknowledged psychiatrists of the world?” she teases.
“I’d exchange all my bleeding physicians for any poet,” says Byron. “Except Wordsworth.”
“And mine,” says Plath with feeling.
Van Gogh and I compare mental hospitals. A garden and a view, we agree, were the best treatments we had. “And quetiapine,” Oyebode adds, with a firm look. He is always quick to remind me that medication has its place.
“My life was mad by a mad world’s standards,” Murphy says, “and it was the only kind of sense to me.”
Byron suggests we take the Napoleonic coach up to Heptonstall to toast poetry at Plath’s grave. Her resting place is a shrine of pilgrimage now for quiet thousands. We jump in.
“What did you feel in the field, earlier?” I ask van Gogh. He replies with my favourite line in all his writing, one that expresses the soul of this one-night family, the power that pulled the four departed through life’s heart-fires to defeat death by creation.
“I felt the love of many things!” van Gogh whoops, and our horses are flying now.
Horatio Clare is the author of “Heavy Light: A Journey through Madness, Mania and Healing” (Vintage). “The Traveller’s Guide to Mental Health” will be published by Penguin next year
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