The missing piece

Tennyson, Edith Wharton and Henry James all exorcised their demons through work. Margaret Drabble on how walking, talking, jigsaws - and above all writing - have helped her overcome periods of depression
Margaret Drabble writing in The Guardian, Saturday 4 April 2009

Virginia Woolf's father went in for mountaineering and public groaning, mine for gardening and a kind of tuneless humming; he also liked to walk with his dog Anna by the river Deben in Suffolk. My mother sought relief in pre-Prozac pills called Tofranil, and in novels. I take long walks and do jigsaws. (Reading doesn't do the trick so well any more, although I still read obsessively.) These are all attempts to alleviate depression.

We claim we talk much more openly now about depression than we used to, and it is true that many confessional memoirs dealing with it have been published in recent years, some good (William Styron's Darkness Visible, Gwyneth Lewis's Sunbathing in the Rain), some bad, and some exploitative, but it's hardly a new topic. Melancholia has been with us for centuries, and Hamlet was not the first to have suffered from it. Tennyson feared what he called "the black blood of the Tennysons", an inheritance of mental and physical disability and drug addiction, and exorcised his demons in the intense, hypnotic and enervating melancholia of his verse.

Some can harness it to their own purposes, and ride the waves. Sylvia Plath (pic left) rode bravely and fearlessly for a while, yet in the end went under.

We all tackle it in our own ways. I have long been a believer in the therapeutic powers of nature, and had faith that a good, long walk outdoors would always do me good. It might not cure me, but it would do me good. I agreed with the poet Robert Southey, who in his old age mildly remarked that "I am less sensible of the want of spirits when engaged in walking than at any other time and therefore spend more time out of doors than I might otherwise do".

This reasonable statement conceals a depth of stoic suffering. When he wrote it, his wife was suffering from dementia in the Retreat in York, and he was experiencing incipient memory loss and a growing inability to escape into his richly furnished inner life of reading and writing. Like the romantic man of the Lakes that he was, he went outdoors, and kept on walking.

His friend Wordsworth and Wordsworth's sister Dorothy were great walkers in their youth. Wordsworth went on walking, but poor Dorothy ended up with dementia in a wheelchair.

Read the full Drabble piece here.