by Tom Cutler
Nevertheless, being a ‘published author’ opened doors, and an editor called Dan, who worked for one of the big publishers, asked to meet me. Book publishing in London had long since ceased to be a club of gentlemen in superb suits reclining in smoke-filled Bloomsbury offices; Dan was based at an American-style headquarters near an uncommonly hideous flyover on the western fringe of the city. I reported to a receptionist in a foyer decorated with spiky plants in acrylic tanks full of pebbles. Looking up into the atrium I counted floor after floor of pale green frosted-glass offices. The atmosphere put me on edge. I don’t know whether this was my Aspergic sensory sensitivities rebelling against the fingernails-down-blackboard interior design, or just the normal revulsion of a person with a taste for the shapes of nature and a sense of proportion.
Dan bounced into reception to meet me. I immediately took to his naughty-schoolboy energy.
‘I want you to write a book,’ he said.
‘Oh? What book?’ I asked.
‘A humorous, spoofy how-to book for boys, covering every subject under the sun.’
‘From how to light a fire to how to light a fart?’
‘You’ve got it!’ said Dan.
The ‘target reader’ was not really boys, but anybody from sixteen up who liked to laugh. I knew at once I could do it. Dan told me to go away and come up with two hundred ideas for suitable subjects, which I did. We met again a week later and I brought out my pages-long roll call of subjects, among which were flags, languages, maps, music, Morse code, rain gauges, semaphore, the Beaufort wind scale, palindromes, the manufacture of concrete, human anatomy, the Fibonacci series, gardening, orders of magnitude, and aircraft tail insignia. Dan approved. These were subjects of interest to me and I enjoyed being funny about them. Examining the list now I notice that they are stereotypically autistic: systems all.
We were joined by a man who wanted to talk about how to market the book, with no budget.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘first things first: who do you know?’
‘Nobody,’ I said. ‘I am the worst connected author you will ever meet.’
211 Things a Bright Boy Can Do was brought out in good time for the Christmas shopping jamboree. On the day of publication Dan rang me. ‘Do you know your book’s number fifteen on the Amazon bestsellers list?’ Over the next three months it climbed the rankings, peaking at number one, where it stayed for a while. Everyone, including me, was astonished. Walking down Piccadilly I saw it filling a huge bookshop window.
Everyone loves a success. A production company got in touch and wanted to use me to front a proposed television show. ‘We haven’t had a “mad professor” for ages,’ they said. We filmed some stuff and they pitched the idea but as is so often the case nothing came of it. I was asked to appear on Loose Ends, and I remembered listening to the show all those years ago in the kitchen of the house opposite the woods. I could hardly believe I was now on it. The book was sold to many foreign countries. It did well in America, and a producer on David Letterman’s famous show wanted me as an interviewee: a Big Deal. I was all ready to be flown out, when the writers went on strike and the programme was taken off the air for a couple of months. The slot gone, I missed my chance to show off in front of the biggest audience yet, but consoled myself with Steve Martin’s remark that you had to do the show half a dozen times before people realised they had seen you.
211 Things became a bestseller in Germany and sold spectacularly well in France. The country where it did best per head of population was, curiously, Finland. Nobody could quite understand why. I knew that all this positive attention would go away again, which kept my feet on the ground but disabled me from enjoying it.
Still, the money meant I could now try to write for a living without the need to keep chasing the mortgage. I was attracted by the idea of the isolated author, beavering away untroubled by the stress of office chat around the water cooler. It looked like the perfect job for me, though I didn’t yet understand that it was my Aspergers that really made it so suitable.
Why does anyone decide to write a book? The writing racket is about as glamorous as any other glamorous profession — that is to say, not at all glamorous. And only rarely will the money feed a family. George Orwell described writing as ‘a horrible, exhausting struggle’ that no one would undertake unless driven by some demon, ‘whom one can neither resist nor understand’.
The author of narrative non-fiction must, as E. B. White suggested, ‘take his trousers off without showing his genitals’, and to be any good he or she must possess, like the genius, an infinite capacity for taking pains, which is certainly one of the Asperger’s strengths. Jean Anouilh put it in a nutshell: ‘The object of art is to give life a shape’, and I think this best explains what is going on. The Asperger and non-Asperger writer alike can make sense on the page of all the unpredictable chaos of real life, over which they otherwise have no control.
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said that only when he wrote did he feel well. When I am writing, I do not feel well, exactly, just less anxious. Like Sherlock Holmes relieving the tension with his seven-per-cent solution of cocaine, writing is my drug. The actress and writer Emma Thompson described writers as fundamentally inconsolable, and compared writing to cutting yourself purposefully: ‘It’s letting something out, and suddenly you’re released from this inner pain.’ I agree with that absolutely.
From my first book on I continued to write sequestered in my garret. For days on end I might see nobody, and sometimes I became a bit unhinged. A few of my titles turned into bestsellers but none equalled the success of the how-to book for boys. Though I wanted to write I did not want to be well connected on the literary scene, or go to parties and press the flesh. When invited to these jamborees I go because I feel I ought to, but though I long to fit in I always manage to put my foot in it.
There was one do at which I saw Doris Lessing and a lot of other well-known faces. People chatted, smiled, mixed, worked the room, networked, struck up new contacts, while I stood alone. The quiz show host Nicholas Parsons was there I seem to recall, dressed in a blazer like a deck chair. When Just A Minute had been one of my special interests I would have been overawed.
There is a cliché that we are all different, but, looking round at other people at the publisher’s party, they all seemed the same. I was the different one.
As I stood there in my Aspergic shutdown I became aware of a middle-aged woman heading towards me. I gripped the stem of my wine glass in apprehension.
‘And what is your name?’ she said, giving me a headmistress smile.
‘Tom,’ I said.
‘Tom what?’
This annoyed me. She seemed to be fishing for information with which to place me somewhere on a scale of usefulness or importance.
‘Oh, it won’t mean anything to you,’ I said.
She gave me a look I could not decipher, and, with the air of Narcissus gazing into the pool, announced her own name. It was one with which I was familiar. ‘Well that means something to me,’ I said. At once a sheet of ice formed on the woman’s face and she rotated her body sharply to the right, disappearing through a doorway with what used to be called ‘hauteur’. Was I behaving like Enoch Powell talking to Kingsley Amis at that party?
Later, I upset one of the marketing people by criticising the snow effects in one of her favourite films, Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), which contains a long shot of a snow-covered field using the old standby, a white sheet. Unhappily, I explained, the wrinkled edge doesn’t reach the corner of the field, ending in a clearly visible border of summer-green grass, thus blowing the whole illusion, like a magician accidentally flashing the card he is trying to conceal in his hand. I explained that another thing that always annoyed me was falling snow in animated films that moves sideways with the camera as it pans. The marketing woman said nothing but gave me a look of scorn.
I was homed in on b
y a man whose face I recognised because he had presented some cookery programmes on the television. He was genial, and wanted to know what I wrote.
‘Humour,’ I said.
‘Oh I love jokes. Tell me a joke.’
I explained that jokes are the enemy of humour but he didn’t understand. I wished I were a boy again, lying alone in the dark under the twinkling Christmas tree, looking up through the boughs and savouring the perfume of the pine.
*
We moved from the house near the park into the house where I am writing this, in the old port further up the coast. When it rained I could feel the cold drops hit the bald circle of skin in the middle of my scalp, a broken tooth at the back of my mouth had been replaced by a bridge, and now and again my knee would ache wearily. It’s always later than you think.
One morning, I was looking down from my office into the street, where fractal feathers were icing the bonnets of the cars, when the phone rang. It was a person from the past with the news that Katy, my girlfriend from all those years ago, had been climbing a hill when she had fallen down dead, leaving behind a child, a husband, and a career as a professor of English. I squinted back down the time-stained passage of the decades, and at the end, standing in the hoop of light, I could just make out the tiny figure of myself. Beside me was the shadow of my art teacher Miss Legge, who had been hit by the hurtling lorry. Beside her I could see Bill Bradshaw, who had died in bed in his twenties, and the dark frame of the man with the prayer book who had lain in front of the quietly departing train. But after all this time, and the battened-down loss of the years, what did I feel about Katy? Complete detachment. This special interest had faded.
*
Not far from the site of the toyshop where Bob Hoskins had got shirty with me all those years ago are the headquarters of the National Autistic Society. I had decided to visit them to find out about their hopes and plans. As usual I was forty minutes early. The weather was boiling and the pavement radiated a shimmering heat, so I dropped into an air-conditioned pub for a glass of fizzy water.
The place was cool and dark, decorated with rough planking and iron pipes set off for some reason by old ladies’ lampshades. Standing against an incongruous wall of Alhambra-style geometric tiles was a black pub piano covered in white capital letters spelling out the words of some pop hit. Fixed above this tone-deaf interior a snaking mass of exposed air conditioning ceiling conduits made the place look unfinished. Two large television screens, their colours saturated to the maximum, were relaying a football match to semicircles of men in T-shirts, who groaned whenever their team fumbled the ball. All at once a goal was scored and a deafening roar went up. A baby started to cry. I knew how it felt, so I swallowed my water and left.
At the society’s office I buzzed the door and was let in by a receptionist, who asked me to wait. Signs on the walls pointed to meeting rooms named after planets and behind a chair a dropped sheet of paper was sticking out at a bothersome angle.
I had arranged to see a man named Chris, who soon appeared. He took me out to a café with a twelve-foot mural of a stark-naked woman sporting breasts like balloons. I decided to sit sideways on to this distraction. We tried between us to start with some social conversation. Chris told me he was good at languages, and was just learning Icelandic. I don’t recall what I said. Then we got down to business.
According to the NAS, while almost everybody has heard of autism, few really understand the condition in a meaningful way. The focus over the next few years, Chris told me, will continue to be on improving public understanding, as well as bettering autistic lives. His job is to help businesses that run theatres and other public spaces to improve their understanding of, and approach to, autistic people, who for decades have been shushed, stared at, or asked to leave.
But educating the public is like trying to push a train up a mountain. There have been some small practical improvements in recent years, with, for example, the introduction of ‘autism-friendly’ performances in theatres and cinemas, ‘quieter hours’ in supermarkets, and special training for airport staff. High-profile initiatives have included the introduction of a female character with autism into the UK television soap opera Hollyoaks, and Sesame Street’s autistic puppet, Julia. All the same, the media’s wide but not very deep coverage of the condition can sometimes look like a bandwagon-jumping exercise and one could be forgiven for viewing such novelties with scepticism. Have the production companies involved, I wonder, changed their recruitment and employment practices to make things easier for autistic interviewees and workers? Have they made efforts to hire autistics to play non-autistic roles? Media executives should rend their hearts and not their garments.
But hope is a sturdy shrub and Chris is confident of a better future for autistic people. He says that the technological innovations such as smartphones are an ‘anxiety lifesaver’, and it is true that the development of IT and email communication has been good for autistic employees and bosses alike. If employers can make allowances they will find, perhaps for the first time, the singular contributions that a few bright and quirky corkscrew thinkers can make to success. Autistic employees are not only conscientious and industrious in their chosen work, many are also creative and extremely original. They say what they mean and mean what they say, insist on high quality, are focused, painstaking, and rule conscious, and have an extremely fine eye for detail. They are also dependable, punctual, honest, and loyal. Just so long as everyone remembers that they do not like to be bombarded with information, other people, or endless demands, and that they like to know in detail what’s next, exactly where they need to be, and precisely what it is they are expected to do. A few minor adjustments and a bit of insight are all it takes from the boss.
Autistics see the world differently and feel everything more intensely than typical people, they react in unusual ways to things that most people either enjoy or take in their stride. But it is a broad spectrum and the more subtle types, like me, can be hard to spot. What people often see is an intelligent, articulate person, perhaps rather aloof, who uses grammar precisely and has a quiver full of apt words ready for his bow. How can such a person possibly be autistic? The answer is that still waters run deep, and an extensive vocabulary and good intelligence may mask real underlying problems, making it seem as though we are working at a much higher level than we are. What people often do not see in Aspergers, sometimes because it is so well camouflaged, is the confusion and dismay caused by the frequently inhospitable world: the constant self-monitoring, the anxiety, the botched social approaches and muffed relationships, the anguish, the exhaustion, the silent rage, and the deep dark cave of loneliness. Appearances can be deceptive and we can be easily overlooked, or dismissed with the term ‘high functioning’, as if our problems are accordingly ‘mild’. It is sometimes only when an Asperger is seen in a social situation for the first time that others begin to understand just what a stranger in his own country he really is.
Autistic people die younger than average people. At the severe end of the continuum the cause is not autism itself but epilepsy, drowning, and injury. At the ‘high-functioning’ end it is suicide. Simon Baron-Cohen reports that two thirds of Aspergers in his clinic say they have felt suicidal, and one third have felt so bad that they have tried it. His university also found that twelve per cent of all those who deliberately end their lives are definitely or probably autistic. Ending your own life, or trying to, is not a sign that you are functioning well, it is a sign that, maybe despite appearances, you are functioning extremely poorly, that something is very seriously wrong.
Estimates vary for the prevalence of autism in the general population according to the way the numbers are counted. A figure of one in sixty-eight is commonly quoted in the USA, and more than one in a hundred in the UK. Research from King’s College London and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm shows that children are twice as likely as normal to be diagnosed with autism if they have an auti
stic cousin, and ten times more likely if they have a brother or sister with the condition. Having more than one autistic sibling appears to make it likelier still. Whatever the actual numbers, the family connection is clear and parents with an autistic child who are planning further children should be alert.
With the broadening of diagnoses, many people have sought to find something or someone to blame for what they mistake for a modern epidemic. But the recent discovery that there are many autistic adults struggling on through life without a diagnosis or any support makes it clear that the rise in numbers of children with autism is not a sign of a newly prevalent condition in need of a novel environmental cause.
I recently read of a research scientist, whose blushes I will spare, who published a graph showing a rise in childhood autism between 1994 and 2009 exactly matching the increased use, over that same period, of the weed killer glyphosate. Her argument looked persuasive: the climbing glyphosate line on her graph closely in sync with the line showing the increasing rate of autism. That was until I saw another graph, made by a different scientist to show how easy it is to confuse random correlation with real cause and effect. Covering a similar period, this graph showed the same very close match between the rise in autism diagnoses and the increased consumption of organic food. The increase in autism diagnoses, the rise in glyphosate use, and the growing popularity of organic food are indeed linked — but by nothing more than coincidence.
Thankfully science has now extinguished many delusions about autism, such as that refrigerator mothers or the MMR jab are the cause, though there are still pockets of credulity here and there, where unquestioning people continue to point their finger. The seemingly wilful misunderstanding of the way science works has a lot to answer for.