Can't Just Stop

by Sharon Begley

  The lord looked prescient when, in an 1809 poem, Dr. John Ferriar of Manchester Lunatic Hospital asked, “What wild desires, / what torments seize / The hapless man who feels the book disease.” It was a “tyrant passion,” he warned, bringing an “anxious toil.” The poem took the form of an epistle to Ferriar’s friend Richard Heber (1773–1833), which was only appropriate. Heber was renowned for filling eight homes in four countries with what amounted to nearly 150,000 bound volumes plus thousands more pamphlets, the whole estimated (by one Paris bookseller at the time) to number as many as 300,000 individual works.

  The year 1809 was a propitious one for bibliomania, for that was also when the English bibliographer and minister Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776–1847) published The Bibliomania. Subtitled Book-Madness; containing some account of the History, Symptoms, and Cure of This Fatal Disease, it described “the madness of book-collecting” in unambiguously medical terms. The resulting collections, warned British writer (and father of a future prime minister) Isaac Disraeli (1766–1848), were “madhouses of the human mind.” Bibliomania “has never raged more violently than in the present day,” Disraeli observed in Curiosities of Literature, as some of the most respected men of the age were overtaken by a compulsion to acquire for display in their grand homes first editions; vellum editions; limited editions; large-page editions; and editions with uncut pages, silk linings, gold bands, tinted leather, “Etruscan bindings,” and other symbols of erudition, taste, and wealth.

  Few bibliomaniacs of the Victorian era left behind explanations for their mad passion, with the fortunate (for us) exception of Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872). The illegitimate son of a textile magnate and a servant girl, Thomas was bitten by the bibliomania bug as a boy, acquiring just over one hundred books by age six. “All his pocket-money was spent in books,” reported Britain’s Dictionary of National Biography in 1896. “The main business of his life” (made possible by a hefty inheritance, though he was constantly in danger of blowing through it) was “the collection of rare manuscripts of all ages, countries, languages, and subjects.” Phillipps termed his compulsion “the old Mania of Book-buying,” and traveled the continent for collections to purchase: “chronicles, cartularies, household books of kings, queens, and nobles”; a collection of 1,300 Italian manuscripts here, 900 volumes of papers from the French Revolution there, as well as 500 or so “oriental manuscripts,” and illuminated manuscripts originally created for kings, popes, and Medicis. At his death, scholars estimated, Phillipps had amassed some 60,000 manuscripts, as well as thousands of bound books, deeds, legal documents, Babylonian cylinder seals, maps, genealogical charts, letters, and drawings—twice the number of volumes as in the library of Cambridge University, and a fair start toward his goal of having, as he put it in a letter three years before his death, “ONE COPY OF EVERY BOOK IN THE WORLD!” It was sufficient, at any rate, that when he moved his collection from Middle Hill, his estate in Worcestershire, to Thirlestaine House in Cheltenham, it required a battalion of 230 horses, 160 movers, and 103 wagonloads to transport, psychoanalyst and art historian Werner Muensterberger (1913–2011) recounted in his 1994 book Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives.

  When an official of the British Museum visited Phillipps in his later years, he saw a house where rooms were stuffed with large boxes of manuscripts, books, documents, and other treasures from years of accumulating. “Every room is filled with heaps of papers, MSS, books, charters, packages & other things,” the Museum’s Sir Frederic Madden wrote, lying “under your feet, piled upon tables, beds, chairs, ladder &c.&c. and in every room, piles of huge boxes, up to the ceiling.” Writing to invite Jared Sparks, the president of Harvard University, to visit him at Thirlestaine House, Phillipps warned that “the Drawing Room is the only room we live in & three Bed Rooms for ourselves and our friends.” He wrote to another friend, there “is no room to dine in except in the Housekeeper’s Room!”

  But why? He was “instigated,” Phillipps wrote around 1837 in the preface to a catalogue of his collection, “by reading various accounts of the destruction of valuable manuscripts.” His “chief desire” in accumulating what became England’s, and probably the world’s, most extensive collection of written works owned by a single individual came “from witnessing the unceasing destruction” of volumes by scavengers who cared nothing for the words themselves but only for the books’ inlays of gold and other precious metals.

  Phillipps’s compulsion to collect other written works, such as deeds and charters, was also born of a fraught anxiety. It derived, he wrote, from his despair upon witnessing the destruction of such documents “in the shops of glue-makers and tailors” who extracted fiber from the paper. Were it not for his mad dash through Europe scooping up everything he could find, Phillipps seemed to believe, there would result a literary cataclysm akin to the fiery destruction of the library at Alexandria. He described his manuscripts as “a never failing solace in every trouble,” as clear an admission as one can imagine that the books kept anxiety at bay.

  A third goad to Phillipps’s compulsive book collecting was that, as an illegitimate child, he felt deracinated in a way that only books could salve. In particular, his anxiety about his identity and roots, a curse of many illegitimate children, drove a preoccupation with origins and antecedents. As a result he gobbled up deeds, church records, and gravestone inscriptions. “His life work was effectively the outcome of his anxiety about his foggy past,” Muensterberger argued.

  Training his psychoanalyst’s eye on Phillipps from the distance of a century, Muensterberger diagnosed “a kind of persistence behind which seems to lie a compulsive preoccupation, and like all compulsive action is molded by irrational impulses.” (“Irrational” seems harsh; kinder to say Phillipps was smothering his many anxieties—that a book or document would be lost or destroyed were he not to acquire it.) Collections like Phillipps’s “serve as a powerful help in keeping anxiety or uncertainty under control,” Muensterberger argued. “Collecting is much more than the simple experience of pleasure . . . [serving instead as] a way of dealing with the dread of renewed anxiety.”

  Muensterberger was hardly alone in diagnosing anxiety at the root of at least some book collectors’ behavior. The compulsive acquisition of books “relieves anxiety,” Norman Weiner wrote in 1966 in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly. As with the relief most compulsions bring, however, it was only temporary: the bibliomaniac is compelled to “set out on another quest for a great book as soon as his anxiety returns,” Weiner noted. Phillipps’s anxiety that unique works would, without his intercession, be lost to the world certainly did not abate permanently after any acquisition . . . nor, it seemed, after 150,000.

  While armchair psychoanalysis is always dicey, especially when the patient has been dead for a century, that’s about as close as researchers have come to studying compulsive book buying. The phenomenon has “largely been ignored by psychoanalysts,” Weiner wrote. Little has changed in the ensuing half century. The DSM has never recognized bibliomania as a formal disorder, and it is not a manifestation of, say, obsessive-compulsive disorder. One of OCD’s defining features is that the compulsion feels ego-dystonic. Bibliomania, to the contrary, feels like a perfectly harmonious expression of one’s deepest desires.

  Harmony notwithstanding, as Phillipps got on in years, he grew almost frantic about the disposition of his collection, trying without success to interest Britain’s national library in purchasing it. Bitter about the world’s apparent indifference to his life’s work, he stipulated in his will that his books remain forever at Thirlestaine House, not a single volume sold off or donated. After a chancery court ruled that impossible, largely because Phillipps’s monetary estate was inadequate to provide for the maintenance of his collection, his trove was dispersed to national libraries, private archives, and the nascent collections of the likes of J. Paul Getty and Henry Huntington. It took nearly fifty years to sell the bulk of Phillipps’s horde, Nicholas Basbanes recounted in
his 1995 book A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books, and in 1929, thirty thousand manuscripts, documents, and books were still packed in crates and boxes at Thirlestaine House. They were still being sold, piecemeal and in vast lots, in the 1990s.

  What was a burden for Phillipps and his heirs, as for the bibliomanes who preceded him, can arguably be seen as a boon for history. Much that would otherwise have been lost or destroyed was salvaged thanks to a compulsiveness and the anxiety that drove it. It would not be the last reminder of the good that compulsive behavior can do.

  * * *

  I. In fact, getting rid of things can open up space for more acquiring.

  II. That leaves out pathological gambling, drinking, and drug abuse, which are addictions with, in some cases, an overlay of impulse-control disorder.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Compelled to Do Good

  A FEW DAYS AFTER COMEDIAN Joan Rivers died in the summer of 2014, the owner of a Manhattan cafe where she had performed the night before the diagnostic procedure that sent her into respiratory arrest spoke to a reporter about Rivers’s astonishing drive. Steve Olsen, owner of the West Bank Cafe, told the New York Daily News that he had recently asked Rivers why, at age eighty-one, she still did so many stand-up gigs, not to mention reality shows, talk shows, online shows, and award show red-carpets. “She said because it kept her alive,” Olsen recounted. And as the television networks combed through their archives for Rivers clips to show during their retrospectives on her life and career, at least two showed the same footage: an interview she did a few years before her death in which she was asked, for the umpteenth time, why she never stops working. Rivers took out one of those old-fashioned spiral-bound day planners and flipped the pages to a month far in the future, on which all thirty day boxes were empty. That, right there, she said, pointing emphatically, is her greatest fear: that no one will invite her to perform, that her fans will forget her, that she will be professionally dead while there is still a breath in her body and a crackle of electricity in her brain. And so she worked as compulsively as a kid trying to break into the business.

  The compulsion to do good in the world, even if the good is merely bringing laughter to a few dozen well-lubricated customers in a dark Times Square club, emanates from as many sources as a river of snowmelt water: the joy of seeing one’s work make an impact, as when a young teacher’s students become the first in their African villages to learn to read; the pride a composer feels when the world premier of her opera lights up the audience’s faces; the fist-pumping glow one competitor feels after vanquishing all others on the playing field of sport, business, or academia. If the do-gooding takes the form of volunteering, or choosing an occupation because it offers the opportunity to help others, it can be driven by the sense of connectedness that comes from being involved in a community of like-minded people, and the satisfaction of being perceived as a “good person.” “Actually seeing that your efforts made a tangible difference seemed to predict volunteer longevity,” Carol Sansone, chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Utah, who has studied people who volunteer for local AIDS groups and struggling schools, told me. The extreme do-gooders profiled in Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2016 book Strangers Drowning were driven by a sense of duty (often religiously inspired) so powerful they were willing to put themselves and their children at mortal risk in order to help people they had never met, such as by adopting a couple dozen children or founding a leper colony in a panther-filled forest.

  But the pull of these positive emotions is mirrored, in some people, by the push of negative ones. A 1984 analysis of extreme do-gooders found they were driven by “compulsivity” often stemming from “identification with the victim,” psychologist Nancy McWilliams wrote in the journal Psychoanalytic Psychology. Rather than being drawn to act by duty or the warm-glow effect, compulsive do-gooders are moved by the repulsive force of anxiety. Filled with a palpable sense of itchy, jumpy, brain-racing, muscle-clenching, throat-gripping, can’t-sit-still angst at the very thought of not volunteering, creating, excelling, donating a kidney, or otherwise acting in a way that does the world good, they feel compelled to actions that, directly or indirectly, benefit the rest of us. It’s just that those benefits are not the motivating force: quelling anxiety is. If in so doing they also bring smiles to an audience, well, then we who benefit from their compulsions can be thankful.

  That’s why Joan Rivers’s compulsion to perform is part of this chapter rather than that on the workaholism of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The OCPD-fueled drive to work comes from the anxiety that no one will do a job as competently as you will, and of believing that any slacking off or lowering of standards will allow intolerable mistakes and sloppiness to seep into a world already awash in the imperfection and disorder you are desperately trying to keep at bay (cf. Liza Jane’s refusal to wipe the hard drive of a busted computer). A compulsion like Rivers’s is different. Its genesis lies in an anxiety more existential. This anxiety is the kind that comes from contemplating one’s own mortality, or the existence of suffering in the world, or the presence of evil . . . and saying, not on my watch.

  For behaviors that even cynics acknowledge are not uncommon, generosity, altruism, volunteering, and other forms of doing good have gotten remarkably little attention from scientists. Studies of what compels some people to be unusually giving or selfless, or to act in other ways that benefit humankind, are rare. A notable exception is research into one of the most extraordinary forms of altruism: donating a kidney to a stranger.

  Giving Away Part of Yourself

  It is one thing to register to donate your organs upon death, which about 45 percent of Americans do, or to donate blood, which about 5 percent of those eligible do. It is quite another to donate a kidney, especially to a stranger, a process called nondirected donation. Barely two thousand such “altruistic” kidney donations have ever been made in the United States. Even though every healthy person has a spare kidney, donation is an extraordinarily selfless act: donors receive no payment (just their medical bills are covered), they undergo extensive pre-op medical and psychological testing, they often have to travel out of state for the procedure, they can suffer postsurgical pain during a weeks-long recovery period, and for their trouble they often meet skepticism and even hostility from family and friends (ranging from How could you jeopardize yourself, and thus our family, for a stranger? to So you think you’re better than everyone else because you gave away a kidney?).

  The phenomenon puzzled scientists, too. According to core tenets of evolutionary biology, humans undertake altruistic acts for, paradoxically, selfish reasons: to earn a chit that can be exchanged for a reciprocal favor later, to help a relative who shares some of your DNA, or to enhance your reputation in a way that will be adaptive in the eyes of natural selection. In this case, altruism is pseudoaltruism, a view that prevailed from Freud until the late twentieth century. Donating a kidney to a stranger was regarded as so psychologically unbalanced that it was illegal in Great Britain until 2006, and regarded as a sign of psychopathology in the United States until late in the twentieth century.

  More recent research has been kinder. In a 2014 study, psychologists invited nineteen people who had donated a kidney to a stranger to have their brains imaged. Along with twenty nondonors, serving as controls, they underwent both structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which measures brain structures, and functional MRI (fMRI), which assesses brain activity during specific tasks—in this case, looking at eighty images, one at a time for a couple of seconds, of faces with fearful, angry, or neutral expressions. Structural MRI showed that the donors’ right amygdala, which processes the sense of fear, was about 8 percent larger than the controls’, Abigail Marsh of Georgetown University and her colleagues reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Functional MRI found that the same structure showed significantly greater activation when the volunteers looked at faces with fearful expressions,
evidence of heightened sensitivity to that expression. These findings jibed with previous research suggesting that the biological basis for altruistic behavior lies in the brain’s sensitivity to others’ distress, and that facial expressions of fear are powerful elicitors of compassion. People who are extremely sensitive to these cues “may be unusually motivated to respond altruistically to others,” Marsh concluded. “My guess is, you need the amygdala to understand someone else’s fearfulness or distress, and to represent it in the brain. People who are very altruistic are very sensitive to others’ fear or distress. Seeing it in others makes them feel it themselves.” They understand at a visceral, emotional level what being afraid feels like.

  That made my ears prick up. Extraordinary altruists epitomize the cliché “I feel your pain.” They pick up on others’ fearfulness and distress to the point of feeling it themselves, thanks to the amygdala’s double role of perceiving those feelings in other people and generating the felt sense of them in oneself. Marsh learned one more thing: “I always ask donors why they did what they did,” she told me. “Many people said it was a quick decision, that they hadn’t known you can donate a kidney while you’re alive, and when they found out, their reaction was, Oh wow, I can actually do this. It’s almost instantaneous: I have to help. That suggests it’s an emotional more than a rational decision,” as the fMRI results suggest: people do not methodically calculate the risks and benefits of donating a kidney and then reach a dispassionate conclusion. Instead, they feel distress akin to anxiety, one they can alleviate only through an extraordinary act.