Solitude_A Return to the Self

by Anthony Storr

  He that attends to his interior self,

  That has a heart, and keeps it; has a mind

  That hungers and supplies it; and who seeks

  A social, not a dissipated life;

  Has business; feels himself engag’d t’achieve

  No unimportant, though a silent, task.27

  Cowper is not alone amongst poets in having suffered bereavement and recurrent episodes of severe depression. We note above that John Donne lost his father when he was four, and that he was also recurrently suicidal. William Collins, Samuel Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, John Berryman, Louis MacNeice, and Sylvia Plath all lost a parent before they reached the age of twelve, and all suffered well-attested periods of depression. Coleridge was addicted to opium; Poe was intermittently alcoholic, used laudanum, and may have been dependent on it; MacNeice was an alcoholic, and both Berryman and Plath committed suicide.

  To this list of early bereaved and recurrently depressed poets may be added Michelangelo. It is sometimes forgotten that, as well as painting pictures and creating some of the greatest sculptures in the world, Michelangelo wrote some three hundred poems. Michelangelo’s mother died when he was six. As his sonnets demonstrate, he suffered severely from depression throughout his life. Michelangelo’s homosexual preference is well-attested. His self-punitive asceticism may have contributed to his depression. It is worth noting that, of his mother’s five sons, only one married.

  In some of these examples, the genetic contribution to depression is obvious. Parental suicide is one cause of early bereavement. John Berryman’s father shot himself when his son was eleven; the poet himself committed suicide on 7 January 1972, at the age of fifty-seven, by throwing himself from a bridge over the Mississippi.

  Louis MacNeice’s mother developed a severe form of agitated depression when the future poet was five-and-a-half years old. She was admitted to a nursing home in August 1913, and her children never saw her again. She died whilst in hospital in December 1914. Louis MacNeice’s sister thought that he was haunted to the end of his life by the memory of his mother walking up and down the garden path in tears. Like many other gifted people prone to depression. Louis MacNeice became an alcoholic.

  There are also examples of poets who experienced early bereavement, but who did not, or who are not known to have, suffered from attacks of depression which were so obviously severe as to be labelled mental illness. These poets include John Keats, Thomas Traherne, William Wordsworth, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Lord Byron.

  Stephen Spender records in his autobiography that his mother was a semi-invalid whose ill-health overshadowed his childhood. She was also an unstable hysteric, given to violent scenes and dramatic gestures. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that, although he was only twelve when his mother died, Spender writes:

  If I felt the death of my mother at all, it was as the lightening of a burden and as a stimulating excitement.28

  In considering bereavement and depression, it is important to remember that even loss of a mother is not always a tragedy!

  Byron was certainly unstable, in the sense that he exhibited extreme mood-swings. In Chapter 3, we noted that Keats was preoccupied with death. This is hardly surprising. Keats lost his father when he was eight, his mother when he was fourteen; one brother when he was six, another brother when he was twenty-three. His maternal grandfather thed when he was nine; his maternal grandmother when he was nineteen. An uncle died when he was thirteen. He wrote in a letter:

  I have never known any unalloy’d Happiness for many days together: the death or sickness of someone has always spoilt my hours.29

  Perhaps the families of these poets lacked the genetic predisposition to depression which we postulated as being activated by, or combining with, parental loss to produce severe attacks. Nevertheless, loss often produces definable themes in their poetry.

  Wordsworth lost his mother when he was eight, his father when he was thirteen. The Zionist poet Chaim Bialik lost his father when he was seven. Both suffered the break-up of their families. In his paper comparing their work, David Aberbach writes:

  The effects of loss and family disruption are reflected in many of the salient characteristics in the poetry of Wordsworth and Bialik: the haunting presences and objects, sometimes obviously a parent or a parent-figure; the yearning for a lost paradise; the emphasis upon feeding; the motif of union with Nature; the general mood of isolation, desertion, depression, guilt; and, finally the hostility. The chief ‘Romantic’ quality of their poetry – the exploration of the self – can be seen as an attempt to buttress the self made weak by childhood loss and consequent emotional instability.30

  Thomas Traherne’s mother died when he was in about his fourth year. It is uncertain whether or not his father died too, but Traherne and his brother were fostered by relatives, and so effectively lost both parents. Traherne’s idealization of Nature and of childhood is seen in similar terms by Andrew Brink, as a reaching out for a bliss that never was. Although Traherne is usually adjudged a poet of happiness and divine love, Brink points out that he also recorded moments of dread and horror. He concludes that

  Traherne’s verse and prose give a doctrine of regeneration, of self-change from an unsatisfactory state of life to another better one.31

  Brink also demonstrates Traherne’s dependence upon external objects to achieve the blissful sense of unity for which he is seeking.

  Remarkable in Traherne’s art is its ceaseless reaching out to desired objects, natural objects invitingly presented to the sense in unlimited quantity. Desire for fusion with objects, an ever-renewing impulse to acquire them for the mind’s satisfaction, appears in almost everything he wrote … The most ordinary sky or tree can move Traherne’s spirit to rapture, when he is reathed for this transport.32

  I am inclined to link this, as Brink does, with a lack of ‘good objects’ within the psyche: a failure, in early childhood, to incorporate the mother’s love and thus ensure a continuing source of self-esteem from within.

  Boethius, to whose work we referred in Chapter 4, personifies Philosophy as a woman who brings him wisdom from on high. She is at pains to point out to the philosopher that dependence upon external objects for happiness is fraught with risk and illusion. After exposing the emptiness of wealth and delight in precious stones, she goes on to say:

  Perhaps, again, you find pleasure in the beauty of the countryside. Creation is indeed very beautiful, and the countryside a beautiful part of creation. In the same way we are sometimes delighted by the appearance of the sea when it’s very calm and look up with wonder at the sky, the stars, the moon and the sun. However, not one of these has anything to do with you, and you daren’t take credit for the splendour of any of them … You are in fact enraptured with empty joys, embracing blessings that are alien to you as if they were your own … From all this it is obvious that not one of those things which you count among your blessings is in fact any blessing of yours at all … It seems as if you feel a lack of any blessing of your own inside you, which is driving you to seek your blessings in things separate and external.33

  The ostensibly modern psycho-analytic notion of introjecting ‘good objects’ or ‘blessings’ was evidently perfectly familiar in the sixth century AD. In the light of Philosophy’s observations, Wordsworth’s and Traherne’s enraptured worship of Nature takes on a rather different aspect from that of simple pleasure.

  As noted already, predisposition to depression and early bereavement are independent variables, although when the former is present, the latter reinforces the tendency to depression and its severity. Early bereavement is certainly common amongst writers, but severe episodes of clinically definable depression, whether or not alternating with mania, are also frequently found in writers without early bereavement as an antecedent. In addition to those already mentioned, poets who suffered from recurrent episodes of depression include Christopher Smart, John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz,
Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell. Of these poets, Smart, Clare, Sexton, Crane, Roethke, Schwartz, Jarrell, and Lowell all received treatment for depression. Smart and Clare were admitted to ‘madhouses’; Lowell was frequently admitted to psychiatric hospitals for periods of mania as well as for depression. Crane, Jarrell, and Sexton all committed suicide.

  Few objective studies exist, and those that do are necessarily based on small numbers. But Andreasen and Canter, in 1974, investigated a group of writers at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. The writers interviewed had a much greater prevalence of affective illness (i.e. of severe recurrent depression or of manic-depressive illness) than did a matched control group: 67 per cent compared with 13 per cent. Of fifteen writers, nine had seen a psychiatrist, eight had been treated with drugs or with psychotherapy, and four had been admitted to hospital. Two had suffered from both mania and depression, whilst eight had suffered from recurrent depression only. Six had symptoms of alcoholism. One committed suicide two years after the study was completed. The importance of the genetic factor is attested by the fact that, amongst the relatives of the writers, 21 per cent had a definable psychiatric disorder, usually depression, whereas only 4 per cent of the relatives of the controls were similarly categorized.34

  In a recent study of forty-seven British writers and artists, selected for eminence by their having won major awards or prizes, Jamison found that 38 per cent had been treated for affective illness. Poets were particularly subject to severe mood-swings, and no less than half the sample studied had been treated with drugs as out-patients, or admitted to hospital for treatment with anti-depressants, electroconvulsive therapy, or lithium.35

  A person in the throes of mania or deep depression is usually unable to produce work of any value. Restlessness, inability to concentrate, the rapid ‘flight of ideas’ in mania make sustained work impossible. Retardation of thought processes, feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, the belief that nothing is worthwhile undertaking, the conviction that anything which is produced will be valueless, all serve to prevent the severely depressed person from being creative.

  Yet liability to these disorders is particularly common in creative writers. This apparent paradox can be resolved if we accept that this liability acts as a goad, prodding the potential victim into undertaking the solitary, difficult, painful, and often unrewarding work of exploring his own depths and recording what he finds there. As long as he is able to do this, he may escape being overwhelmed. The evidence suggests that, whilst many creative people may be more disturbed than the average person, they are also equipped with greater resources which help them to overcome their conflicts and problems. Psychiatrists experienced in treating creative people know that it is only when their creative powers are paralyzed that they seek help.

  We have seen that the extraverted person who tends to lose himself because of over-adaptation to others may be able to recover, and express, his true self in solitude. We have also seen that the man or woman whose development has been impaired by early separation and isolation can find solace in the use of the imagination.

  We can now go a step further, and understand that the creative process can be a way of protecting the individual against being overwhelmed by depression; a means of regaining a sense of mastery in those who have lost it, and, to a varying extent, a way of repairing the self damaged by bereavement or by the loss of confidence in human relationships which accompanies depression from whatever cause.

  Once again, it is important to emphasize that depression is part of the experience of every human being. There is no hard and fast line to be drawn between depression of the kind which we all experience in response to loss, and the kind of depression which is labelled a psychiatric illness and which requires psychiatric treatment. Depression varies enormously in depth and severity, but not in its essential nature.

  Men and women of genius have at their command talents which loss may mobilize and which manifest themselves in work of lasting interest. The music, the poems, the paintings or other works which loss has inspired may bring increased understanding and solace to others who have suffered similar pangs.

  But this does not mean that ordinary men and women who are not so talented have no inner resources, or no imaginative powers. Nor is it implied that the creative response is exclusively set in motion by loss, only that it may be so. Poems are not substitutes for people. Those who write as if they were, and this includes some of the writers quoted in this chapter, do less than justice to the imaginative capacities of the human race. The creative response to loss is only one example of the use of the imagination. Only those who exalt human relationships to an ideal position in the hierarchy of human values could think that creativity was no more than a substitute for such relationships.

  10

  The Search for Coherence

  ‘It is good that I did not let myself be influenced.’

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  In the last two chapters, we were principally concerned with creative individuals whose work was partly derived from loss or separation. Spurred by depression, they strove to create imaginary worlds, to compensate for what was missing in their lives, to repair the damage they had suffered, to restore to themselves a sense of worth and competence. Because of their primary concern with interpersonal relationships, and their struggle to restore, through their work, something which was felt to be missing, many of these individuals could be described as predominantly extraverted, although often driven in upon themselves to a greater extent than extraverted individuals like to be. To use Howard Gardner’s terms, we supposed that such individuals were dramatists rather than patterners. When they retreated into solitude to pursue their creative quests, an element of wishing to restore some blissful union with another person, or with Nature as a surrogate person, was a frequent component of their work.

  The exceptions, or partial exceptions, to this generalization are Saki, who was discussed in Chapter 8, and Kafka, some of whose characteristics were outlined at the end of Chapter 7. Both were story-tellers, but their stories are hardly at all concerned with intimate human relationships, and neither man established any prolonged intimate relationship in reality.

  However, Saki’s diary suggests that, damaged though he might have been by his early bereavement and by his childhood experiences, he did engage in a good many sexual encounters with the young men or boys whom he preferred. Although Saki cannot possibly be regarded as predominandy extraverted, there was an extraverted side to his character, manifested in his social life in London, his liking for the fashionable society which he mocked, and his enjoyment of life in barracks before departing for the horrors of the Western Front.

  Although he was loved and respected by his friends, Kafka was pathologically introverted: schizoid, as most psychiatrists would label him. He had a few brief sexual encounters, but he contrived that his deepest emotional involvements were almost entirely confined to an exchange of letters. It was only during the last year of his life that he was able to tolerate actually living with a woman.

  In this chapter I want to examine some instances of creative individuals whose principal concern was not primarily with human relationships, but with the search for coherence and sense. Such individuals correspond with the people described as introverts by Jung; as convergers by Hudson; as patterners by Gardner; and, when obviously abnormal or disturbed, as schizoid by psychiatrists.

  As we have seen, nearly all kinds of creative people, in adult life, show some avoidance of others, some need of solitude. But the individuals I have in mind go further than this. They may, at a superficial level, appear to have better relationships with people than is true of some of the poets mentioned in Chapter 9. But this is often because, unlike the extraverts, and also unlike the type of schizoid personality represented by Kafka, they have learned to relinquish a need for intimacy. They are not so disturbed when relationships go wrong because, for them, the meaning of life is less bound up with intimate relationships than it i
s in the case of most people.

  Let us for a moment assume that the individuals to whom I have just referred showed ‘avoidance behaviour’ as infants, and let us accept that avoidance behaviour is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioural disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships. Moreover, such a person would be likely to feel the need to protect the inner world in which this search for meaning and order was going on from interference by others because other people would be perceived as posing a threat. Ideas are sensitive plants which wilt if exposed to premature scrutiny.

  In an earlier book, I stressed the need for interpersonal relationships in the maturing of personality. A chapter entitled ‘The Relativity of Personality’ emphasized the fact that personality is a relative concept.

  If by personality we mean a man’s ‘distinctive personal character’ we are obliged to recognize that we can only conceive of such an entity in terms of contrasting it with other personal characters.1

  I went on to write:

  One cannot even begin to be conscious of oneself as a separate individual without another person with whom to compare oneself. A man in isolation is a collective man, a man without individuality. People often express the idea that they are most themselves when they are alone; and creative artists especially may believe that it is in the ivory tower of the solitary expression of their art that their innermost being finds its completion. They forget that art is communication, and that, implicitly or explicitly, the work which they produce in solitude is aimed at somebody.2