‘The old guy fixing the roof. The fat kid delivering the groceries.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I know.’ She frowned sadly. ‘It’s never with anyone nice.’
Literature and madness
Saul’s affliction, his variant of dementia, was officially listed as a ‘mental illness’ – provoking great disgust among health professionals (mainly because it complicates the stigma). But Alzheimer’s does have an organic cause, distinguishing it from neurosis (which is inorganic and doesn’t involve a ‘radical’ loss of touch with reality). Like schizophrenia and like manic depression, Alzheimer’s (like religion) tends to involve a passionate belief in things that aren’t there.
Psychologists can do practically nothing with organic insanity (except give it drugs); and writers – perhaps not entirely noncoincidentally – can’t do much with it either. Neuroses, compulsions, repressions, and especially obsessions are the bread and butter, the meat and drink, of fiction. But it may be that organic insanity – like dreams, like religion, like sex – is fundamentally impervious to literary art.*7 Among writers there is one great exception – indeed, we might as well call him the Great Exception, the Singularity. As Matthew Arnold announces in the first line of his short poem, ‘Shakespeare’: ‘Others abide our question. Thou art free.’
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‘Internally, in itself, madness is an artistic desert. Nothing of any general interest can be said about it. But the effect it has on the world outside it can be very interesting indeed. It has no other valid literary use. [The subject of my book] was just how well or, mostly, how badly writers have described madness.*8
‘Shakespeare got it right. Lear, of course. Cerebral atherosclerosis, a senile organic disease of the brain. Periods of mania followed by amnesia. Rational episodes marked by great dread of the renewed onset of mania. That way madness lies – let me shun that – no more of that.
‘Perhaps even more striking – Ophelia. In fact it’s such a good description that this subdivision of schizophrenia is known as the Ophelia Syndrome even to those many psychiatrists who have never seen or read the play. It’s very thoroughly set up – young girl of meek disposition, no mother, no sister, the brother she depends on not available, lover apparently gone mad, mad enough anyway to kill her father. Entirely characteristic that a girl with her kind of upbringing should go round spouting little giggling harmless obscenities when mad.
‘The play’s full of interesting remarks about madness. Polonius. You remember he has a chat with Hamlet, the fishmonger conversation, and is made a fool of – the very model of a dialogue between stupid questioner and clever madman as seen by that, er, that unusual person R. D. Laing. Polonius says, I will take my leave of you, my lord. And Hamlet says, You cannot take from me anything I would more willingly part withal, except my life, except my life.
‘Very clever, very droll. But actually Hamlet’s only pretending to be mad, isn’t he. Polonius gets halfway to the point. How pregnant sometimes his replies are, he says, a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of – as it happens, a remarkably twentieth-century view. Hamlet in general very cleverly behaves in a way that people who’ve never seen a madman, a madman fresh and unmedicated, expect a madman to behave.
‘In my view, though, Polonius is a rather underrated fellow. Earlier in the same scene he comes up with a very good definition of madness, not a complete definition, but an essential part of it, excluding north-north-west madness. He says, To define true madness, what is it but to be nothing else but mad?’*9
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Saul was never close to that, not remotely (though Iris was close by the end). In any case the tragic hero Saul resembled during this phase of his was of course Othello. Wild imaginings (‘Goats and monkeys!’), but imaginings skilfully conjured up by a third party – Iago. And Saul’s Iago was an Iago of the mind.
Why does Iago destroy Othello, what is his ‘motive’? He has none. He invents grievances (Othello has thwarted my rise to the officer class, Othello has slept with my wife), but these are flimsy pretexts. He is like Claggart in Billy Budd (a very conscious iteration of the theme of motiveless malice). Iago allows us a brief glimpse of the truth when he talks, not about Othello, but about the bland prettyboy Cassio: ‘He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly.’ And this is why Claggart destroys Billy, the Handsome Sailor. The two destroyers are vandals; they vandalise beautiful souls.
And dementia is the vandal within. You cannot reason with it or distract it or soften it. All you can do is hate it. In Othello the most telling verdict on Iago belongs not to the Moor or to Desdemona or even to the keenly perceptive Emilia. It belongs to the well-gulled fop, Roderigo. These are his last words, addressed to the murderer crouching over him with the blade: ‘O, damned Iago. O, inhuman dog.’
And that’s what I say to Dr Alois Alzheimer.
O, damned Alois. O, inhuman dog.
’Tis the god Hercules
The night before we left he gave us an aural pen portrait of John Berryman. In 1972 Saul wrote a farewell address to John Berryman and the words were still in him (though when I later reread ‘John Berryman’ I found that the dinner-table version included many newly
