Solitude_A Return to the Self
Page 16
The creatively gifted who suffer bereavement, or who experience severe depression for other reasons, can go further than this. As I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, they are often able to use their talents in what can be described as a process of repair or re-creation. This process is an effort to come to terms with loss in which pain is accepted, rather than an attempt to deny loss or to escape from it. Graham Greene, who admits to a manic-depressive temperament and a recurrent need to escape from periods of depression, is right in supposing that writing or composing or painting can be a form of therapy, although this is certainly not their only function. Moreover, this is a form of therapy which does not require any therapist other than the sufferer himself.
We have seen that creative people are used to solitude, and we have explored some of the reasons for this. Instead of seeking friends in whom to confide, or counsellors to whom to tell their troubles, they use their gifts to come to terms with, and to make sense of, their sufferings. Once a work is completed, it can be shared with others; but the initial response to depression is to turn inward rather than outward.
The creative act is one way of overcoming the state of helplessness which, as we have seen, is so important a part of the depressive state. It is a coping mechanism; a way of exercising control, as well as a way of expressing emotion. In fact, the act of expressing emotion itself gives the sufferer some sense of mastery, even if he or she is not particularly gifted. Psychotherapists, especially those trained in the school of Jung, often suggest to their patients that, when feeling overwhelmed by rage or despair, they should attempt to paint or to draw their feelings, or at least write down what they are experiencing. Many patients go through periods of especial stress in which they feel so much at the mercy of their emotions that they fear being unable to tolerate the waiting period between psychotherapeutic sessions. If they can be persuaded to express their feelings in one way or another when alone, they usually lose the sense of being overwhelmed and regain some measure of control.
Tennyson may be cited as one well-known example of a gifted person using his talent as a way of coping with loss. Tennyson began to write In Memoriam, his response to the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, within a few days of his first hearing of it. In Memoriam was to engross Tennyson intermittently over a period of nearly seventeen years. It was not originally designed for publication, although, when it finally appeared, it was enormously successful.
Hallam had been engaged to the poet’s sister, Emily. He had also been Tennyson’s closest friend at Cambridge, where both had been members of the exclusive society, the Apostles. Their friendship was intimate and passionate, but neither overtly nor covertly homosexual. Pre-Freudian generations were more fortunate than our own in being able freely to admit ‘love’ for a member of the same sex, or of the opposite sex, without the implication that all love is necessarily sexual in origin. Hallam died, totally unexpectedly, on 15 September 1833 in Vienna. The cause of death was probably a subarachnoid haemorrhage; that is, a form of stroke due to vascular malformation or aneurysm of the arteries supplying the brain. He was twenty-three years old.
Unlike Emily, Alfred did not visibly sink under the weight of Hallam’s death, although he probably felt it as deeply and it certainly affected him long after she had recovered from it. He kept up the motions of normal daily life, but he had lost his most important anchor to reality. His one remaining resort was to poetry, used as a narcotic for an existence made temporarily meaningless.8
Robert Bernard Martin’s use of the term ‘narcotic’ probably originates from Tennyson’s own reference to ‘dull narcotics’ in In Memoriam.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.9
It is probably true that any kind of work can serve to diminish the immediate pain of loss. Robert Burton, in his address to the reader which opens The Anatomy of Melancholy, writes:
I write of melancholy, being busy to avoid melancholy. There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, ‘no better cure than business,’ as Rhasis holds.10
But the exercise of creating poetry does more than anaesthetize the sufferer. It can also restore meaning to life, and a sense of being able to cope. According to Professor Martin, Tennyson not only wrote In Memoriam as a direct consequence of his loss, but also a number of other poems which are among his best. Professor Martin cites ‘Ulysses’, ‘Tiresias’, ‘Morte d’Arthur’, ‘On a Mourner’, ‘St Simeon Stylites’ and ‘O that ‘twere possible’ from Maud, as originating in this way, and specifically refers to their ‘therapeutic effect’ upon their author, which happily indicates that he realizes that something more than a numbing action is involved.
Tennyson provides a particularly striking example of how genetic endowment interacts with circumstances to produce depression. Tennyson’s paternal grandfather was an unstable man, subject to alternating fits of rage and maudlin self-pity. His instability may have been partly related to the fact that he lost his mother when he was five years old. Of his four children, the elder two were girls. Elizabeth, the eldest, was normally cheerful, but ‘her health was never a match for her spirits and when she was ill, she sometimes suffered from depression’. Mary, the second child, ‘was gloomily and almost spitefully Calvinistic, sadly rejoicing that she was one of the elect, and trying to regret her own family’s certain damnation’.11
The next child, the poet’s father, George Clayton Tennyson, was a severely disturbed clergyman, who not only suffered from recurrent depression, but also from epilepsy, and from addiction to alcohol and laudanum. The fourth child, Charles, was more stable than the others, but was afflicted with epilepsy, from which one of his sons also suffered.
George Clayton Tennyson had twelve children, of whom the poet, Alfred, was the fourth. The first child died in infancy. Of Alfred’s ten surviving brothers and sisters, one spent nearly all his life in a mental institution, and was described as dying from exhaustion following mania. Another brother ‘suffered from some form of mental illness nearly as incapacitating, a third was an opium addict, a fourth was severely alcoholic, and of the rest of the large family each had at least one bad mental breakdown in a long life’.12
Septimus Tennyson, one of the poet’s brothers, was recurrently admitted to Dr Matthew Allen’s asylum at High Beech, where the poet John Clare was also a patient. Alfred Tennyson himself stayed there, but it is not clear whether or not he was a patient. There is no doubt that he suffered from recurrent periods of depression throughout his life. He was also a heavy smoker and drinker. In a later passage, Professor Martin makes another reference to the role which poetry played in alleviating Tennyson’s depression and hypochondria.
In creating the harmonies and the symbolic order of the poems, he was able to perceive momentarily some kind of unity and wholeness that was applicable to his own life, and so it remained for him until his death.13
This perceptive, important statement about the role of creativity in the lives of the distraught goes far beyond Professor Martin’s previous reference to poetry as a narcotic. The search for order, for unity, for wholeness is, I believe, a motivating force of signal importance in the lives of men and women of every variety of temperament. The hunger of imagination is active in every human being to some degree. But the greater the disharmony within, the sharper the spur to seek harmony, or, if one has the gifts, to create harmony. This is why Edward Thomas, in the remark quoted as one of the epigraphs to this chapter, questions whether ridding himself of depression might not also rid him of the intensity which drove him to write.
Another example of a creative response to loss is furnished by Felix Mendelssohn. His elder sister, Fanny, was almost as gifted a musician as he was himself. They were so devoted to each other that family friends used to say jokingly that they ought to marry. Fanny died suddenly, at the age of forty-one, on 14 May 1847. Although Mendelssohn had m
arried ten years earlier, he was so shattered by the news of his sister’s death that he fainted when he read the letter announcing it, and seems never to have recovered from his loss. When he was well enough to travel, Mendelssohn and his family went to Switzerland for a holiday. It was here that he composed his last completed work of chamber music, the Quartet in F minor (Op. 80), which was meant as a memorial to Fanny. It is variously described as passionate, as being his most deeply felt work of chamber music, and as possibly heralding a new phase in Mendelssohn’s development as a composer. However, fate did not allow Mendelssohn time to complete his mourning. The composer himself died, only a few months later, on 4 November 1847. Both brother and sister probably died of subarachnoid haemorrhage, the same form of stroke which had killed Arthur Hallam thirteen years earlier.
These are two examples of creative responses to loss in adult life. There are also many examples of creative responses to losses which occurred in early childhood.
Andrew Brink, who is both a Professor of English and an Associate Member of the Department of Psychiatry at McMaster University, has written two books applying object-relations theory to the composition of poetry: the first, Loss and Symbolic Repair,14 the second, Creativity as Repair.15 The first book is a study of the poets Cowper, Donne, Traherne, Keats, and Plath. The second is a sequel to the first, taking into account a wider range of studies connected with the same subject.
Another literary scholar approaching poetry from the same point of view is David Aberbach, author of Loss and Separation in Bialik and Wordsworth,16 At the Handles of the Lock,17 and other papers and books concerned with the same subject. Both authors profess views which deserve detailed exposition which would be inappropriate in this context, but I have drawn on their work and gladly acknowledge my debt to them.
One of the poets studied by Brink is William Cowper, who is also the subject of a biography by David Cecil, The Stricken Deer.18 Cowper is a particularly good example of a poet whose work is closely related with loss of the mother in early childhood. He was also a manic-depressive. As I indicated earlier, 1 do not accept early bereavement as a cause of manic-depressive psychosis per se, but I do incline to the view that such bereavement is likely to make manifest any genetic predisposition to this disorder, and to increase the severity of attacks when they occur.
Cowper was born in 1731, the son of a clergyman. His mother’s family was connected with that of the poet John Donne. (It is interesting to record that Donne suffered from depression; that he lost his father when he was four; that he was tempted by the desire to commit suicide whenever he felt afflicted; and that he wrote the first English defence of suicide, Biathanatos. Did Donne’s family and Cowper’s family share a genetic predisposition which early parental loss made actual?)
Cowper’s early childhood seems to have been idyllic, and his relationship to his mother particularly close. But when he was nearly six years old, she died, and his world was shattered. He himself wrote:
What peaceful hours I once enjoy’d!
How sweet their mem’ry still!
But they have left an aching void,
The world can never fill.19
His mother remained for him an idealized figure. Forty-seven years after her death he wrote to a friend:
I can truely say that not a week passes (perhaps I might with equal veracity say a day) in which I do not think of her.20
Six years later still, in 1790, he wrote a poem On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture Out of Norfolk’ which Brink describes as being among his most affecting. He hung the portrait in his bedroom so that it should be the last thing which he saw at night and the first when he woke in the morning. In the poem, Cowper writes of how the portrait has brought back his early loss, but has also stimulated his imagination to bring him temporary comfort; a revealing instance of how the creative act both expresses loss, and also helps the sufferer to overcome it.
And, while that face renews my filial grief,
Fancy shall weave a charm for my relief –
Shall steep me in Elvsian reverie,
A momentary dream, that thou art she.
Cowper ends his poem with this verse:
And, while the wings of fancy still are free,
And I can view this mimic shew of thee,
Time has but half succeeded in his theft –
Thyself remov’d, thy power to soothe me left.21
After his mother’s death, Cowper was sent away to a boarding school at which he was ferociously bullied. He was so frightened of his chief tormentor that he said he only recognized him by his buckled shoes, since he did not dare to look him in the face. Later, he was sent to Westminster School, which was agreeably less traumatic. In 1752, at the age of twenty-one, he took up residence in the Middle Temple. Within a few months he suffered his first severe episode of depression. In 1763, he had another attack. One terrifying poem vividly illustrates a phenomenon referred to in Chapter 7; the degree to which hostility is turned inward against the self during episodes of depression.
LINES WRITTEN DURING A PERIOD OF INSANITY
Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,
Scarce can endure delay of execution,
Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my Soul in a moment.
Damn’d below Judas: more abhorr’d than he was,
Who for a few pence sold his holy Master.
Twice betrayed Jesus me, the last delinquent, Deems the profanest.
Man disavows, and Deity disowns me:
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore hell keeps her ever hungry mouths all Bolted against me.22
Feeling as he did about himself when depressed, it is small wonder that he tried to poison himself with laudanum and then to hang himself, albeit unsuccessfully. He had an attack of mania when he was thirty-two. His manic episodes were accompanied by religious ecstasies; transcendent moments of reconciliation, forgiveness, and joy. He tried to make up for the loss of his mother by turning to God. In his Olney Hymn beginning ‘Hark my soul! it is the LORD,’ Jesus says:
Can a woman’s tender care
Cease, towards the child she bare?
Yes, she may forgetful be,
Yet will I remember thee.23
He also found consolation in the contemplation of Nature, but even this failed him when he became severely depressed.
This glassy stream, that spreading pine,
Those alders quiv’ring to the breeze,
Might soothe a soul less hurt than mine
And please, if any thing could please.
But fix’d unalterable care
Foregoes not what she feels within,
Shows the same sadness ev’ry where,
And slights the season and the’scene.24
The experience of being able to recognize beauty intellectually whilst being unable to appreciate it emotionally is a characteristic feature of depression. Coleridge expresses exactly the same deprivation in ‘Dejection: An Ode’.
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars;
Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!25
At an earlier point in this chapter, reference was made to the tendency of those who have been bereaved in early life to look for the lost parent in those to whom they become attached. Cowper formed dependent attachments to a series of women, but never married, probably because he feared that his original bereavement might be repeated. For many years, Cowper was cared for by an older married woman, Mrs Unwin. After she was widowed, marriage was agreed upon, but, during 1772–3, Cowper suffered another episode of depression in which he expressed the delusion that everyone hated him, including Mrs Unw
in. This effectively prevented the marriage from taking place.
Subsequent attacks of depression followed the loss, by death or removal, of other friends upon whom Cowper depended. In 1787, for example, he was depressed from January to June, following the death of a male friend with whom he constantly corresponded, and the removal elsewhere of a valued female friend. However, when he was at his most productive as a poet, he seems to have experienced quite long periods of optimism.
Cowper also provides a striking example of how feelings of helplessness accompany recurrent attacks of depression, perhaps especially when depression is linked with childhood bereavement of the mother, as Brown and Harris noted in the study to which we have frequently referred. In his biography of Cowper, David Cecil points out that
One of the strongest forces against Cowper’s recovery had been his fatalistic submission to evil; and this had been encouraged by his habit of life. For years his whole existence had perforce been one of inert and idle submission to circumstances.26
But, at times when Cowper found that he could write, he overcame his sense of helplessness, his belief that he could do nothing to combat forces of evil which, when depressed, he perceived as uncontrollable. One of his women friends, Lady Austen, constantly urged him to undertake new projects. Encouraging the depressed person to do something is a hazardous enterprise. It requires a delicate balance between being sympathetic and being robust. Too much sympathy may reinforce the depressed person’s belief in his helplessness and hopelessness. Too much active encouragement makes the depressed person feel that no one understands the depths of his despair.
Lady Austen seems to have struck exactly the right note. When she suggested that Cowper should try blank verse, he responded by saying that he had no subject. ’Write about the sofa,’ said Lady Austen; and so he did. The poem became The Task, several thousand lines long, in which Cowper poured out all that he felt about the human condition. He recognized the therapeutic effect which writing this long poem had upon him.