Why do (some) nature writers lie?
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Like many of you, I’ve been fascinated by the alleged revelations about The Salt Path’s author, “Raynor Winn”, which were published in the Observer on Sunday. For anyone who hasn’t yet read the exposé, the gist is this: The Salt Path tells the ‘real-life’ story of Raynor and Moth Winn, who lose their forever home in Wales when a friend’s business, in which they’d supportively invested, collapses, and they discover they are ‘liable to make payment towards those debts’. In the same week, Moth receives a terminal diagnosis of a neurological condition, which is probably, says a consultant, corticobasal degeneration. Homeless and despairing, the couple resort to walking and wild camping along the length of the South West Coast Path, a long distance footpath of 630 miles, from Minehead in Somerset, along the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, to Poole Harbour in Dorset. By the end of the walk, they are sadder and wiser people, having come face-to-face with the stigma attached to homelessness and the unkindness of some strangers. However, their bodies and relationship are stronger, they’ve experienced moments of intense reality and great beauty, and Moth’s condition appears to have disappeared. The Winns’ narrative of loss and recovery, told in simple and ‘unflinchingly honest’ prose, gripped readers worldwide and sold over two million copies. Many saw in The Salt Path an inspiring model of the natural world’s ability to heal, and Moth became an unofficial ambassador for PSPA, a UK charity dedicated to supporting those with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy and Corticobasal Degeneration.
HOWEVER. What the Observer’s investigative reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou has uncovered is that (a) Raynor and Moth Winn are actually Sally and Tim Walker; (b) they didn’t lose their house by trying to support an old friend’s business, but because Sally allegedly embezzled over £60K from a previous employer, was found out, borrowed £100K from one of Moth’s relatives to pay back the employer via a lawyer, and had their home repossessed when that relative’s business went bust and the money was needed to repay creditors; (c) Sally and Moth’s decision to hike the South West Coast Path may have been driven by an attempt to evade prosecution and/or creditors; (d) Sally and Moth weren’t homeless at all, but allegedly owned a second home and land in France, where they could have stayed instead of wild camping in Cornwall; (e) it is highly unlikely that Moth suffers from corticobasal degeneration as, according to Sally’s descriptions, he was diagnosed 18 years ago and his symptoms come and go and sometimes even reverse, whereas the usual life expectancy is around six years and there is no hope of reversal. Apparently there are further revelations to come about the Walkers, and online commentators are speculating that they didn’t actually hike the path - apparently many of their descriptions of the topography are incorrect - and noticing that Sally Walker’s income does not seem to be registered at Companies House. Not so much The Salt Path, then, as the Take It With a Pinch of Salt Path (thanks to an anon poster on Mumsnet for that one!).
I’m fascinated by this story, partly because I’m fascinated by all alleged liars and the question of why they lie; and partly because it rings bells, reminding me of a strikingly similar story from a century ago, in which another female writer also gained fame through a fake ‘nature cure’ narrative. I think that the comparison between the two women’s stories is useful, not just because of what it suggests about why certain people might fabricate narratives of recovery from illness via strenuous immersion in the natural world, but also because of what it might reveal about the traits of the writers - the investigative journalists and the biographers - who dissect those lies.
An Earlier ‘Adventuress’: Lizzie Le Blond
In my book In Her Nature, I interweave my own experiences of long-distance running and grief with a biographical storyline about one of the first women to become famous for such a recovery narrative: the now-mostly-forgotten late-nineteenth-century mountaineer Lizzie Le Blond.
As she told it in her autobiography, Day In, Day Out, Lizzie contracted tuberculosis in her early twenties, and in 1881 was sent to Switzerland by her doctor for a ‘change of air’. She wasn’t impressed by Interlaken, but, once she’d moved on to higher-altitude Chamonix, Lizzie swiftly experienced how, in her words, ‘the fresh mountain air seemed to put new life into me.’ Her condition apparently improved so quickly that she started mountaineering, climbing to the Grands Mulets hut, a mountain refuge 3,000m up the north side of Mont Blanc. She was from a well-known Anglo-Irish aristocratic family, and she had recently married the British army officer, hot-air balloonist, travel-writer and Conservative politician Fred Burnaby, so she attracted some public attention. Numerous British journalists reported in wonderment that Lizzie, ‘who left England in such bad health a short time ago, is almost, if not completely, recovered’.
The following year, Lizzie returned to Chamonix and stayed throughout the winter, making what the Alpine Journal admiringly called an ‘unparalleled series of winter ascents [which] will form one of the most brilliant chapters in the history of winter mountaineering’. She started writing about her travels in the Alps and promoting the health benefits of high altitude mountaineering, in books such as The High Alps in Winter and High Life and Towers of Silence. By the late 1890s, Lizzie had become a celebrity, designated ‘probably the most widely known’ female climber in the English-speaking world, and she was a staple in women’s and girls’ magazines as a writer, a photographer and as a role-model in ‘achiev[ing] distinction in work for the public good’ (as one journalist reported).
Throughout her career, Lizzie worked hard to construct and maintain her image as an aspirational figure: a high society socialite with a permissive, Bohemian bent and, in her words, ‘the right to a Hanoverian title of nobility’. Her writings stress her elite connections to royal families throughout Europe, and her famous, eccentric, posh friends, who included the novelists Arthur Conan Doyle and E.F. Benson, the Hon. Violet Gibson (who tried to assassinate Mussolini), Countess Marie Larisch (whom T.S. Eliot quoted in The Waste Land, proclaiming ‘in the mountains, there you feel free’) and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Lizzie was also heavily invested in being known as a consumptive at a time when tuberculosis was ‘considered to be hereditary and almost incurable’, in her words, and when it was being romanticised as a sign of feminine fragility and heightened delicacy. Lizzie fashioned herself into a living embodiment of the curative effects of Alpine landscapes and sports, and of the compatibility of glamorous femininity with world-class athletic competitiveness. (As well as being one of the best Alpinists in the world, she was also an international-class tennis player, figure skater and cyclist, and one of the first sports photographers and videographers). She repeatedly advised her readers that she ‘heartily desired for the invalids who go in search of health and strength’ to go to the Swiss Alps, and to derive ‘a benefit as great, from the pure, bracing air, as has been obtained by the author.’
The problem was that many of the characteristics on which Lizzie built her reputation were not entirely true.
As a life-writer, I usually begin my research into a subject by compiling a timeline of events in their lives, from accounts in published texts such as autobiographies or Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entries. Then I seek to verify those dates and events by locating the primary documents, such as birth certificates and so on. Researching Lizzie’s life, I immediately ran into problems. Her accounts of precisely when she started mountaineering were inconsistent and self-contradictory. More importantly, there was no real evidence that she had ever suffered from active tuberculosis. In fact, the evidence pointed in the opposite direction, considering that within a few months of apparently being desperately unwell, she was scaling Europe’s highest mountains - an unlikely achievement for a consumptive on death’s door. And as I probed further into her life narrative, the more inconsistencies, contradictions, omissions, secrets and lies I discovered.
After years of tracking down sources, I found that the truth that lay beneath Lizzie’s stories of aristocratic glitz and miraculous recovery from tuberculosis was far sadder and more complicated than the straightforward and optimistic tales of cure and success that she preferred to tell. She did, indeed, have famous aristocratic relatives: she was the cousin of William Cavendish-Bentinck, the sixth Duke of Portland, and her step-cousin was the artist, patron and literary hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell. But what Lizzie left out of her accounts was that her family had been devastated by serious mental illness. Lizzie’s paternal aunt had died by suicide while in the terrible grip of postpartum psychosis at the age of just twenty-two, and Lizzie’s father had died when she was aged eleven, probably also through self-inflicted means, after suffering a catastrophic breakdown and stopping eating and dying from ‘nervous exhaustion’. None of this was ever mentioned in public, and, as a suicide, Lizzie’s aunt was denied a headstone at her burial plot. Despite Lizzie’s father’s cause of death, journalists nevertheless insisted on reporting, falsely, that he had been ‘in the prime of life’.
There was nothing to suggest that Lizzie ever suffered from tuberculosis, but there was plenty of evidence that she herself seems to have experienced something like a breakdown after the birth of her first and only child, Harry, in 1880. Perhaps she suffered a terrifying episode of postpartum psychosis, as her late aunt had done. By early 1881, Lizzie was so unhappy that she felt that she had no choice but to abruptly and, in the end, permanently, leave her months-old baby and husband (who, it has been suggested, had ‘more than a dash of brutality’ and a ‘persistent recklessness [which] must have made [Lizzie] unhappy’ and ‘rendered her life quite intolerable’). When Lizzie fled Fred and Harry and forged a new life in the mountains, the story that she was seeking a ‘rest cure’ for consumption was likely a way of making her unorthodox departure more palatable to society than a narrative about mental breakdowns, suicide and abuse would have been. Lizzie’s account of being in search of recovery was almost certainly true, but what was being concealed was the true condition from which she was recovering.
There were many other inconsistencies, contradictions and omissions in Lizzie’s account of her life and, as a writer, she was fascinated by other liars too.1 She wrote about the case of ‘the Hon. Eva Fox-Strangways’, a young woman who arrived in St Moritz in 1897, bearing letters of introduction from a number of Lizzie’s own friends back in England. As an aristocrat, ‘Eva’ was given credit by hotels, restaurants and shops across St Moritz, and she withdrew a large amount of cash from a bank, on the basis of a cheque. She fled before her cheque bounced, and moved on to London, then Australia, New York and Canada, where she similarly lived off credit on the basis of forged letters of introduction. She was finally found by the police, living in a Canadian boarding house under the name ‘Margaret Sinclair’, and holding the manuscript of a novel she was writing, called Adventures of a Woman in Search of Happiness. It was discovered that she was really called Henrietta Strangway, had been born in a public house in Bridport, had won a scholarship and attended Girton College at the University of Cambridge, after which she cut herself off from her family and changed her name. When interviewed by the police, she spoke contemptuously about ‘the crowd of wealthy snobs who took me to their bosoms just because they believed that my father was an English earl.’ After serving a year in prison, she resumed her frauds, but was quickly discovered and died by suicide. Writing about ‘Eva’s’ lies, Lizzie termed her an ‘adventuress’ - evoking the word’s meaning as swindler or fraud - and commented, ‘I can never understand how it is that…there are people who for years together choose to live on an ammunition dump knowing that sooner or later it must explode.’ She must have been aware that the same could be said of herself, and that she too was also, in multiple respects, an ‘adventuress’.
Why do some people lie? And why do other people try to catch them out?
Some of the secrets that Lizzie and Sally Walker allegedly share are similar. They both seem to have relied upon spurious stories of physical illness cured by nature as covers for the more complicated reasons behind their decisions to hike and climb. Both women use the tropes of physical illness and cure to justify the value of their adventures, and to present their decisions to lead unconventional lives in morally simple terms. By claiming that mountaineering cured Lizzie’s terminal illness, and that long-distance hiking cured Moth’s degenerative neurological condition, both authors consciously evaded any closer moral scrutiny of the reasons behind their departures from home.
IMV The Salt Path would have been a much more interesting book had its author told the alleged truth about her allegedly fraudulent behaviour and used the journey to come to terms with her own culpability, rather than using it to cement her narcissistic entitlement and immunity from criticism. Lizzie’s writing would have been ground-breaking if she had written about postpartum psychosis, intimate partner abuse, and her despair at the suffocatingly limited lives of married women in late-nineteenth-century England, and had shown how mountaineering had given her new freedom, independence and strength in the wake of these lived experiences. Today, I think it’s likely that many of us, myself included, might feel that Lizzie’s desire to conceal her family’s history of serious mental illness was much less blameworthy than Walker’s alleged desire to conceal her criminality - but there is still a similar dynamic behind both authors’ secrecy. Writing truthful texts would would have required their authors to open themselves up to potential public criticism and, for different reasons, neither felt able to do so, and so chose instead to gloss over the reasons for their departures from conventional existence.
I’ve written quite a bit recently about the gendered psychology of male secrecy, and I’m conscious that, in the cases of Sally Walker and Lizzie Le Blond, I’m dealing with lies and secrets committed by women. In those earlier articles, I described how, statistically, men’s secrets tend to revolve around perpetrating harm, whereas women’s secrets are more often concerned with being harmed. I also wrote about how living secret lives can be the behaviour of men who, in childhood, were denied certain things that patriarchal society later told the adult men that they were entitled to; and how this dangerous combination of formative denial and subsequent entitled gratification could lead some men to pursue that gratification with a sense of shame, and in secret, rather than openly. As this suggests, lying often goes hand-in-hand with entitlement. Lying is a way in which a person might achieve satisfaction of controversial or illicit desires, without having to face the consequences of doing so in plain sight. Lying is also a performance of entitlement and power, in that, as psychotherapist Evan Imber-Black wrote, ‘those with power over others…often assume they have the right to conceal information.’ Lying is a manifestation of liars’ belief that they have rightful control over the question of who knows what.
In our contemporary digitised world, in which any of us can start to investigate a person’s birth, death, and marriage certificates, their property ownership, and their business dealings, simply by searching various online databases, it takes a particularly wild form of entitled confidence to, in Lizzie’s words, ‘choose to live on an ammunition dump knowing that sooner or later it must explode.’ I suspect that a liar who misrepresents their own perpetration of fraud back-to-front, as having been defrauded, must, to a certain extent, believe the myth of their own blamelessness. I suspect that many such liars are so energetically invested in the idea of their own righteous invincibility, that they do not ever countenance the prospect that the ammunition dump of lies will ever explode in their faces. And I suspect that the people who are most likely to painstakingly search for the evidence that locates the buried ammunition - the investigative reporters, professional and amateur detectives, and life-writers - have themselves been on the receiving end of similar narcissistic denials of culpability from harmful people in their own personal lives. I suspect that, when such investigators are pursuing their searches for the rock-solid evidence that will spotlight the lies told by charismatic narcissists, they are doing so fuelled by a deep-seated fantasy that, one day, they might be similarly able to prove the mendacity of their own abusers.
Perhaps the strangest and most resounding silence surrounded her second husband. Lizzie’s first husband, Fred Burnaby, died in January 1885, and in March 1886, Lizzie was said to have married again, at the British embassy in Berne (although the British embassy has no record of the marriage taking place). The man whom she apparently married was not one of the posh Bohemian playboys to whom she otherwise gravitated in resorts such as St Moritz, but a short, sensitive university maths lecturer called John Main, who did not like mountaineering, and was in Switzerland to recover from ‘severe strain’ and ‘broken down’ nerves, and was planning ‘a series of scientific observations of how ice behaved when put under tensional stress’. John Main came from a family of working-class publicans, brewers and spirit merchants in Portsmouth, who were largely the cause of his mental turmoil. He had grown up alongside his cousin Clarissa, who, when John was a young man, was raped by their maternal uncle. Horrified, John had tried to help and protect Clarissa, by arranging for a new life in America for her and her aunt (who was Clarissa’s guardian), living with John’s paternal uncle, who resided in New York City. However, the poor women were once again victimised: John’s paternal uncle turned out to be a violent abuser who expected the women to become domestic slaves, and the uncle’s son raped Clarissa, who became pregnant.
When Lizzie and John married in March 1886, the situation with his family in America seemed stable for the time being. Clarissa and her aunt had managed to escape the uncle’s house, and were running a guest house on their own. However, nineteen months later, in November 1887, John suddenly left Lizzie for good, boarded a steamer to New York, and, with Clarissa and their aunt, moved to Denver, Colorado, to begin a new life, all living together again. John and Lizzie permanently separated. A fake story circulated that he had left her because of his health, and was ‘acting on the urgent advice of his doctors’. Lizzie stopped calling herself ‘Mrs John Main’, destroyed all photographs of him, and, when she came to write her autobiography, she made not a single mention of him - despite the fact that she was most famous in the years when she was known as ‘Mrs Main’. In 1892, John died of complications relating to scarlet fever and Lizzie refused to take receipt of the items he’d bequeathed to her. Her silence regarding her second marriage was likely born of numerous factors: sadness and grief, the indignity of being dumped, and the incompatibility of John’s squalid family circumstances with the image of opulence and vigour she was cultivating in her professional life.
Lizzie I find wholly admirable given the stigma attached to mental illness. Her incredible sporting feats were real I think? Living outside stifling expectations was incredibly tough. What happened to poor Henry though?
I have a copy of the book of her photographs which were given to the Engadine Archive in Samedan, CH. The brief biography echoes the conventional story but there seems no doubt of her mountaineering exploits, supported by the remarkable photographs she took.