The Rose
In 1958 painter Jay DeFeo (1929–1989), then twenty-nine, began what would become The Rose. At roughly eleven feet by eight feet, eleven inches thick, and more than two thousand pounds, the work consumed DeFeo for eight years. She labored endlessly and repetitively, a Beat-era Penelope scraping away layers of paint only to add more (an astounding eight inches thick in places). Although DeFeo created thousands of other works, it was The Rose “that came to dominate her oeuvre and reputation,” wrote museum curator Marla Prather of the Whitney Museum (the painting’s home since 1995) in a foreword to the 2003 book Jay DeFeo and The Rose, “never seeming to leave her in psychic peace.”
She was powerless to resist its call, as novelist and former journalist Martha Sherrill described in her essay in the 2003 volume: “The process of its magnificent accretion seemed to consume her. It was as though the work exerted a strange magnetism, pulling everything toward it—people, paint, needles from the Christmas tree in DeFeo’s studio, and the artist herself—refusing to let go. . . . People joked that the work would be finished only when the artist herself died, and a myth grew up around them, DeFeo and The Rose: a religion, a relationship, a compulsion. . . .” In one 1959 letter, DeFeo said of the torment that came from her compulsion to work on the painting, “I want the struggle, as painful as it can sometimes become,” for its absence would be infinitely worse. The painting became the white whale to her Ahab, the monster to her Dr. Frankenstein.
The Rose was eventually transported to the Pasadena Art Museum in 1965 (after a slab of plaster and molding were gouged out of DeFeo’s building on Fillmore Street near San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district so it could be removed from her upper-floor apartment). Even then DeFeo was compelled to make changes. She felt “a sense of obsession,” then-curator James Demetrion said, and spent three more months on the painting before she would allow it to be shown to the public.
And the work itself? At once classical, rococo, and baroque, it is a sea of “hacked and carved” layers of paint nearly sculptural in their depth, depicting a sort of starburst (volcano? womb? philosopher’s stone? the eponymous flower?) from which a myriad of lines radiate—or, perhaps, to which they are drawn from the farthest reaches of the universe, as if DeFeo were depicting the mesmerizing, omnipotent, appalling, magical pull that compelled her indentured servitude, “a victim in the hurricane pulled toward the eye,” as Davis put it. Thomas Hoving included it in his 1997 book Greatest Works of Art of Western Civilization. When the Whitney hauls it out of storage to put it on view in temporary exhibits, the task requires eight handlers the better part of a day to remove it from its protective steel cage and transport it with an immense gantry, a truck, a forklift, and numerous dollies.
DeFeo and Lombardi were in illustrious company. Over the course of 444 days in Arles, France, spanning 1888 and 1889, Vincent van Gogh created some two hundred oil paintings, including such famous canvases as those depicting sunflowers and fishing boats, as well as more than one hundred drawings and watercolors—which works out to a new work every thirty-six hours. As Harvard neurologist Shahram Khoshbin told the Los Angeles Times in 1985, “When you look at those paintings and realize that each one was done in a day, you realize that it takes tremendous compulsion for someone to do that.”
No less than visual art, the written word has spurred compulsions to create and to have. Four of the greatest novelists of nineteenth-century Europe—Dickens and Balzac, Trollope and Zola—were also the most prolific, though that word doesn’t do justice to their output. The quantity of journalism and literature, criticism and letters they produced was staggering, their work habits compulsive to the point of monomania, their writing sessions interrupted by almost nothing but the need to eat and sleep. Line up the Complete Dickens or the Complete Balzac beside the Complete Shakespeare and you will see that the nineteenth-century writers make their sixteenth-century predecessor look like a weekend scribbler. Rejecting the habit of earlier writers of taking quill to paper when the muse (or creditors) called them, these novelists engaged in marathons of writing. Trollope wrote forty-seven novels plus sixteen other books.II Balzac invented more than three thousand fictional characters and produced more than a hundred plays, stories, and novels, writing at his desk for fifteen to eighteen hours a day.
On Zola’s mantel was the inscription nulla dies sine linea—no day without a sentence. Indeed. He wrote thirty-seven novels, ten other books, and piles upon piles of criticism, letters, and journalism. But it was because he sat for interviews with a committee of some fifteen doctors that we have evidence that the marathon writing was driven by anxiety and thus qualifies as compulsive. After questioning Zola about his writing habits and state of mind, the medics concluded that he had such a passion for “order” that “it sometimes reaches a morbid stage, for it provokes a certain suffering in cases of disorder,” as Arthur MacDonald recounted in his 1898 book, Émile Zola: A Study of His Personality, with Illustrations. The term obsessive-compulsive disorder did not exist in Zola’s time. But Zola’s “suffering in cases of disorder” seemed to drive him to battle the forces of disorder by imposing structure on an unruly world through fiction—where the creator is free to corral his characters and their world however he likes—as well as through criticism and journalism, where the power of analysis and reporting can impose order on chaos. Zola’s driving emotion was fear, MacDonald asserted, and he “accomplishes certain things from fear” of what would happen “if he should not. . . . The intellectual sentiment that causes Zola to work is not a pleasure, but the necessity of accomplishing the task he has imposed upon himself.”
Zola’s passion for order, and the anxiety that engulfed him when he contemplated the consequences of not writing, were only the beginning of the sources of distress, the committee of physicians found. He was also a victim of “the doubting mania.” A form of OCD, doubting mania manifested itself as anxiety that he would not be capable of writing—something he reacted to by, essentially, never ceasing to write, almost like a tightrope walker who knows that if he stops he will plunge to his death. Zola’s medical team identified other manifestations of OCD, including a compulsion to count. “When in the street, he counts the gas-jets, the number of doors, and especially the number of hacks,” MacDonald reported. “In his home, he counts the steps on the staircases, the different things on his bureau.” MacDonald wondered whether the writer’s compulsion to write and other mental quirks “has given rise to the intellectual ability” and accomplishments that Zola achieved. “Pathological facts have been such constant concomitants of great talent and genius,” he concluded, “that the relation . . . suggests the idea of cause and effect.”
Of all the nineteenth-century novelists, however, it was Dostoyevsky who saw most clearly into the tortured wellspring of his output. Asking rhetorically what the purpose of his writing was, he answered himself (in Notes from the Underground): “I shall perhaps obtain actual relief from writing,” he speculated. For instance, a distant memory “came vividly to my mind a few days ago, and has remained haunting me,” he recalled, adding that “I must get rid of it somehow.” The only avenue of relief he could imagine was “to write it down.”
Today, Dostoyevsky, like Zola, would be a candidate for hypergraphia, the compulsive or overwhelming urge to write. The usual evidence for it is the quantity of the writing, but the more interesting aspect is the overpowering need to write, a need as compelling and as anxiety-provoking as any OCD patient’s compulsion to wash or check or count or straighten.
The “Incurable Writing Disease”
When Alice Flaherty’s twin boys died soon after they were born prematurely in 1998, the Harvard Medical School neurologist felt as if the abyss of grief that sucked her in would never let her out. But after a bit more than a week, she felt something else entirely: an overwhelming need to write, and write, and write, to put every idea she had on paper, to channel the flood of ideas crashing like waves against her brain into the printed word. Before t
hen, she had been a prolific writer, taking such copious notes when she was doing her medical residency that she was able to turn them into a neurology textbook. After her sons died, however, “It was as if someone had thrown a switch. Everything seemed so full of importance, I had to write it all down and preserve it,” she told Psychology Today in 2007.
Feeling powerless against the drive to write, she scribbled notes on her forearm while stuck in traffic. She scrawled random thoughts on Post-its when she woke up in the middle of the night. She could do nothing else for four months. Even odder, when her twin girls were born a year later and lived (despite also being premature), Flaherty was again consumed with an overpowering compulsion to write down all that she felt and thought. One result was her 2004 book, The Midnight Disease, about both writing (the neurobiology of creativity) and not writing (causes of writer’s block), with a brief tour of hypergraphia like her own: an unstoppable compulsion to write, and to write in vast, copious, Dostoyevskian quantity. “Something in me was pressing to get out, if only myself escaping myself,” Flaherty wrote. “Words fled from my head like rats from a sinking ship,” and “the rats could not get out fast enough.”
Poet Tina Kelley describes a palpable sensation of discomfort and fidgety restlessness that besieges her if too many days pass without writing. “When I’m working through any sort of drama in my life, my first impulse is to write about it in my journal, just to get it out, and then to write a poem about it again, to get it out of my system,” she told me. “I’ve always felt writing is curative.” At the start of each day, she “has to” write down what happened yesterday, a compulsion which, if resisted or ignored or even set aside due to the press of other things “or just because life is crazy,” grows into a physical unease, she said. Kelley has written two books of poetry—Precise and The Gospel of Galore—and, since it’s hard to keep the wolf from the door on a poet’s income, spent many years as a reporter for the New York Times. Her time there coincided with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. From September 15, 2001, to September 10, 2002, the paper ran more than 2,500 “portraits of grief,” impressionistic mini-profiles of those who lost their lives that day. Kelly wrote 121 of them. In that case, too, she was driven by the unbearable weight of imagining not memorializing the victims with a deft detail or two—the fireman who wore the only size 15 boots in the department, the financial worker who as a child cut the grass by attaching a self-propelling mower to a cinder block and watching with satisfaction as it went round and round. “It would have been such a disservice not to do them,” Kelley said. Her compulsion can be quieted only by giving in to it, so she writes, and writes, and writes.
The compulsion to write has probably existed since the Babylonians first took a stylus to clay. In the fifth century B.C., Hippocrates knew it as “the sacred disease,” while Juvenal, the Roman poet of the early second century A.D., described what he called “the incurable writing disease.” Although Zola’s version of it drew the attention of his era’s men of science, the compulsion to write has been largely overlooked by more recent researchers.
That began to change in the 1970s. In a seminal paper, Boston neurologists Stephen Waxman and Norman Geschwind linked hypergraphia in seven epilepsy patients to a veritable lighting storm in their temporal lobes. That electrical activity triggered the patients’ seizures, but it also seemed to compel them to write. One woman who was twenty-four at the time of the study had, since age fifteen, “spent at least several hours per day writing things down,” carrying “several tablets of writing paper with her at all times,” the physicians reported in the journal Neurology in 1974. Her stated reason was “to be sure of what I do,” and to that end she compulsively recorded “what she had done in the preceding few hours,” including seizures and hallucinations. But she also made voluminous lists, including of the records in her collection, songs her father played on the harmonica, items of furniture in her apartment, and likes and dislikes. She recounted “having written at least several hundred times the words of a song she had learned at seventeen,” the researchers reported, “using whatever was available (scraps of paper, napkins). . . . She also reported sometimes feeling compelled to write a word over and over or to copy, once or several times, the printed labels on items she purchased.”
Another patient with epilepsy compulsively typed out day-by-day accounts of his experiences, though like most products of hypergraphia the entries fell somewhat short of literary merit. “It was cool last night so I opened the windows and left the air conditioner off. I had a very bad night. I was awake about every two hours. I hung three pictures today on screws I put in the wall. It made me so weak I had to lay down. I slept for two hours.” The need to capture every moment, lest it flee into the black hole of memory, and to be understood by whoever his readers might be—including his later self—is almost palpable on the page, as with the frequent use of parenthetical expressions to ensure his meaning is not lost: “On weekends (Sat. and Sun.) I don’t go walking.” “There is a compulsive quality to much of the written material we have examined,” Waxman and Geschwind wrote with the understatement typical of scientific papers.
Neurologists traced the hypergraphia to the source of the patients’ epileptic seizures: the brain’s temporal lobes. Their location just behind the ears makes sense for structures that process auditory input, including in the language-comprehending structure called Wernicke’s area. But they also have extensive connections with the limbic region, which processes and generates emotions. That, Geschwind argued, was likely one source of his patients’ hypergraphia: a deepening of the emotional responses so that they feel more, and more profoundly, than people in whom the limbic system is not being regularly hypercharged by the electrical storms of the temporal lobes. “It is speculated,” Geschwind wrote, “that these behavioral alterations [including compulsive writing] are the result of an intermittent spike focus in the temporal lobe that leads to an alteration in the responsiveness of the limbic system.” Or, stripped of medical jargon, in the throes of emotions as sharp as a bayonet—the result of intense limbic-system activity triggered by a temporal lobe seizure—you feel compelled to put words on paper (or screen), an outpouring that feels as if it is the only release from the suffering of unrequited love or tragic loss, of exile, war, or injustice. “Since all events become charged with importance,” Geschwind concluded, “the patients frequently resort to recording them in written form at great length and in highly charged language.” And sometimes in both language and image: in addition to producing three hundred works of art in 444 days, Van Gogh also feverishly penned more than two hundred letters of at least six pages each over the same period, describing the events of each day. He, too, had epilepsy.
When compulsive writing is not paired with a Dostoyevskian talent, you get the Boston recluse Arthur Crew Inman (1895–1963). The son of a wealthy Atlanta family whose fortune was made in cotton trading and manufacturing, Inman suffered a nervous breakdown after two years at Haverford College and dropped out. Living on family money, he eventually moved to Boston, where he wrote what became a 155-volume, handwritten diary of more than 17 million words. (A two-volume, 1,661-page version, The Inman Diary: A Public and Private Confession, was published by Harvard University Press in 1985, which called it with admirable understatement “one of the great literary curiosities of our age.”) It included not only his own history and that of his country and adopted city, and seemingly every thought he ever had about politics, revolution, nightmares, and compulsions, but also the histories of the young women he hired as “talkers” to sit for hours in his darkened apartment and tell him the stories of their lives.
Libby Smith, an editor of The Inman Diary who spent seven years reading the original, helped Inman fill out a questionnaire designed to identify personality and behavioral quirks. He scored high in “compulsive attention to detail,” manifested in his drive to make lists and adhere to a strict schedule; “deepening of all emotions,” “grandiosity,” and “sense of p
ersonal destiny.” Together, they reflect (or produce) an emotionally toxic stew of anxiety that could be dissipated only by pouring every thought, observation, feeling, and sensation onto the page. Inman diagnosed himself this way: “I live in a box where the camera shutter is out of order and the filter doesn’t work and the film is oversensitive, and whatever that is beautiful or lovely by rights registers painfully or askew. . . . The simplest factors of existence, sunlight and sound, uneven surfaces, moderate distances, transgress my ineffective barriers and raid the very inner keep of my broken fortifications, so that there exists no sanctuary or fastness to which I can withdraw my sensitivity, neither awake nor asleep.”
* * *
I. The names refer to players in the Whitewater scandal that engulfed the Clintons during Bill Clinton’s first term in office.
II. His mother, Frances Trollope, wrote 114 novels from age fifty to seventy-six, so perhaps the compulsion to write ran in the family.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Compulsive Brain
THE FORTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD South Korean man had been in fine health all his life, when one day he suffered a medical catastrophe: an aneurysm had formed in a blood vessel connecting two critical brain arteries, and it ruptured. In most such cases the victim becomes partially blind, stripped of peripheral vision. For this gentleman, the consequences were somewhat odder.
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