Fiction: Branwell,subtitled A Novel of the Brontë Brother, recreates the world of the brother of Charlotte, Emily and Anne.
Many have speculated on what demons led this cosseted, talented young man into drink and drugs, and death at the age of 31. The American novelist and poet, Douglas A Martin, goes beyond speculation into an imaginative evocation of his subject's life, using biographical facts to create an uncomfortable but convincing fictional world.
The method will be familiar to readers of Colm Tóibín's Booker prize-shortlisted The Master, a fictional portrait of Henry James. In both cases, even though the narrative is in the third person, it is written chiefly from the viewpoint of its subject. But while Henry James led a distinguished, well-documented life, Branwell was, by any standards, a failure: failed artist, failed poet, and sacked as a railway clerk and tutor (twice). The facts of Henry James's life are well known, those of Branwell Brontë's more obscure. While this method of writing blurs the lines between biography and fiction, Branwell is closer to poetic fiction than biography.
Martin's sure touch and admirable restraint is evident from the opening description of the famous parsonage: "Sheep came right up to the house to graze, and the rooms upstairs overlooked the graves of the churchyard. From the kitchen you could see, at the back of the house, moors."
It is all the scene-setting needed for the final destination of schoolteacher and parson Patrick Brontë, who had emigrated from Co Down, aged 43. Branwell is the third child, born after Maria, Elizabeth and Charlotte, before Emily and Anne. His mother, Maria (née Branwell), dies when he is four, his sisters Maria and Elizabeth shortly after.
He and Charlotte wrote The Chronicles of Angria, inspired by his toy soldiers. While the girls were sent away to school at Cowan Bridge (immortalised in Jane Eyre), Branwell was educated at home. He sought company in the local pub, where his talk amused the men. He discovered alcohol and laudanum, read De Quincey and Shelley, and sent poems to Wordsworth, but decided to be a painter. An apprenticeship with a portrait painter in Leeds was the first of many failed ventures.
One of the most memorable scenes is his meeting with Hartley Coleridge, the son of the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (and another "small and frail, strange but gifted man"), at Hartley's lakeside cottage at Ambleside. Hartley sees talent in Branwell, but due to his own vagueness, they never meet again.
Less convincing is a homoerotic element, which comes to the fore in the course of Branwell's last tutoring job, the implication being that he has debauched his young charge, and introduced him to the "stud groom". Did he also have an affair with his charge's mother? Maybe, but given the ethos in which Branwell was raised, maybe not.
The prose keeps pace with Branwell's degeneration, losing coherence (but not poetic power) as he loses his mind. He dies in the arms of his elderly, ailing father, in his mother's deathbed. His death is followed by Anne's (of consumption), Emily's (of a cold caught at Anne's funeral), and Charlotte's, in childbirth, a year after her marriage.
Martin has evocatively captured the sad parameters of Branwell's world, revealing the pattern of his self-destructive path through life in a way that is painful but also memorable.
Alannah Hopkin is a writer
Branwell By Douglas A Martin Brandon, 212pp. €14.99