‘Where do you get the booze from, Max?’ I asked.
‘I have my lines of supply,’ he said mysteriously.
‘Go on,’ I said.
He hesitated, but then decided I was an ally or at least not a squealer, and said, ‘Let’s just say some of the natives around here aren’t entirely unfriendly.’
I thought of the lads in the car and the ones who partied outside the boundary wall. I could see they might have an ambivalent attitude towards the inmates of the Kincaid Clinic. They might consider them contemptible nutters, they might spray graffiti on the outer wall, but they might also take a certain delight in supplying them with booze, and who knew what else?
Max and I joined Sita at the table and I sipped my whisky. It felt wicked, and certainly subversive, to be drinking in the afternoon in a mental hospital with two of the patients, though Max and Sita treated the occasion casually enough.
Max said, ‘I suppose you want me to tell you why I’m here.’
I said I did. I thought it would save time.
‘I’m remodelling my consciousness through alcohol. It’s a kind of auto-psychosurgery if you like.’
‘Yes?’
‘I imbibe alcohol. I annihilate some brain tissue, create a few cellular modifications, remould some cortex, incinerate a few circuits and synapses, strew some litter on the mesocorticolimbic pathway. Sounds a little crazy perhaps, but I know what I’m doing.’
‘Does Kincaid know what you’re doing?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Max, ‘He thinks I’m depressed. He thinks I’m using booze as self-medication.’
‘And he thinks that’s all right?
‘So long as I keep away from those nasty old images he’s happy as a sand boy.’
Suddenly Max leapt to his feet and started viciously stamping the floor. At first I thought he was having a fit, but no, there was method here. A spider was scuttling through the sawdust, a real spider, not some alcohol-induced hallucination, I was pleased to see. Max stamped the spider to death and carried on stamping long after the creature was reduced to a black smear. It was manic and alarming but Sita sat through it unmoved. Perhaps she was used to it.
‘I feel better for that,’ said Max. ‘I hate spiders. It’s not a phobia or anything. I just hate them.’
‘How long have you been doing this consciousness-remodelling of yours, Max?’ I asked.
‘Years,’ he said. ‘And years.’
‘Is it working?’
‘I still need a lot more data,’ he said and poured us both another drink. ‘Do you think I should write about it?’
‘If it’s what you want to write about.’
‘What else do I have? Aren’t you supposed to write about what you know? And what else do I know about?’
I was going to say I wasn’t absolutely sure people should only write about what they know, since most people know so little, when I became aware that Sita was pointing at something on the floor. I looked and saw, with some amazement, that as a result of Max’s stamping, the sawdust had been shuffled around, and by chance had formed itself into a human profile, one that looked quite passably like Kincaid. We all stared and sniggered childishly before Sita got up and very decorously brushed away the face with the hem of her sari.
18
And then there was the patients’ writing. I was prepared for this to get better under our ‘new deal’. I thought that maybe the previous awfulness had come about because they felt too constrained or pressured. True, they didn’t seem to have paid very much attention to the two titles Kincaid and I had given them, but there might still have been some sense of being told what to do, and perhaps that had inhibited them. Maybe they had things they really wanted to say that could only be said in their own ways and in their own time.
But I was also prepared for the writing to become worse. I was ready for the patients’ outpourings to be even more mad and maddening, to be even fuller of irrelevance and banality. By the mid-seventies the notion of ‘letting it all hang out’ hadn’t been utterly discredited but it had already started to sound as much a recipe for disaster as for liberation.
In either case, whether the writing was better or worse, I was also expecting, and certainly hoping for, a drop in output. There had been something frantic about the production in those first two weeks, and I thought that was probably because the patients were trying too hard. Perhaps they’d been determined to impress me, or more likely, writing was a novelty for them and they’d thrown themselves into it with the energy that can accompany any new fad. Now that some of the novelty had worn off they’d surely settle down and write less.
Wrong. It wouldn’t be true to say that nothing changed at all, that the writing went on exactly as before; for one thing, I didn’t get the Saturday-morning knock followed by the bulk delivery. Instead the writing came to me piecemeal. I’d find a couple of dozen sheets of typescript left outside my hut, or I’d go into the library and find a densely typed sheaf of paper waiting for me. Nobody ever gave me their work directly, never put it straight into my hand, and I had to accept this since no doubt it was done to preserve their precious anonymity. But apart from the method of delivery it was pretty much business as before.
The writing was all basically, intrinsically, amazingly, more of the same. It seemed to be neither better nor worse, neither freer nor more inhibited, neither more nor less psychologically revealing. It was just the same. So there were more spiritual ramblings, more confessions, more sex and violence, more amazing facts. There was another account of a football match – Bolton Wanderers 0, Notts Forest 0 – a real nail-biter apparently; another fairly accurate retelling of a well-known work of literature: Macbeth, in this case. There was stuff that looked like experimental prose. There was a tale of bitter, unrequited, ungrammatical love. There was a piece about the glory and wonder of trees; there was a day in the life of a candle. There were also more anagrams – one of which revealed that ‘Kincaid’ was an anagram of ‘acid ink’, and if I’d been on acid that might have seemed wonderfully significant, but I wasn’t, so it didn’t.
By any reasonable standards it was all absolutely dreadful; not uniformly dreadful, I suppose – some bits must have been better than others – but after I’d read a certain amount of this stuff my notions of good and bad, of better and worse, became extremely fogged. It felt as though I was dealing with the worst kind of slush pile (not that I had any personal experience of slush piles), and as such my first inclination was to reject it all.
And yet, perhaps because I couldn’t reject it, because rejecting it would have been as inappropriate as it would have been meaningless, I found myself slowly coming, not to like it exactly but at least to tolerate it. And as more and more writing arrived every day, I came to appreciate that there was something irreducible about it. It was what it was, and that gave it a certain stature and dignity.
So I started to accept it, to welcome it en masse. I started looking forward to each new delivery, each new instalment. It wasn’t like looking forward to the next episode of a serial, or following the adventures of a set of characters and wanting to know what happens next; it was more like looking forward to the morning newspaper. By definition you never know precisely what’s going to be in the paper, but at the same time you have certain realistic expectations which are, by and large, fulfilled. The patients’ writing ceased to surprise me, yet became an essential part of my routine, of my daily life.
Then I began to develop a curious fondness for it, although I could see that fondness was in some ways irrelevant too. Regardless of how I felt about the writing, regardless of its qualities, I still had an obligation to deal with it, to talk to the patients about it, to do something with them and for them. In a perfect world I might have preferred to sit them down individually and have one-to-one tutorials with them. I saw myself playing the part of the groovy young academic: hip, approachable, willing to talk about rock lyrics; that sort of thing. But, inevitably, this wasn’t possible. Since nobody would
own up to having written any particular piece of work, group discussions were the only option.
We would congregate in the lecture room, I’d select a piece of the patients’ writing more or less at random, then choose someone to read it. The law of averages suggested that once in a while somebody must have ended up reading a piece they’d actually written, but nobody ever admitted it. Raymond, Charity and Charles Manning were probably the best of the readers, whatever ‘best’ meant in this context. Byron, for all his poetical looks, was surprisingly poor. Carla, predictably, was completely hopeless. She was quite incapable of reading what was put in front of her, and sometimes just made it up as she went along, which sounds like it might have been interesting but it never actually was. And Sita, of course, never read anything at all. I asked her to, gently and without pressurising her, but she just stared at me silently with those big, dark eyes and said nothing.
Once a piece had been read aloud, we’d talk about it in a very detached, abstract, practical criticism, I. A. Richards sort of way. We’d discuss what we thought the author ‘was trying to say’, how the language was used, how the metaphors and imagery worked, if they worked, and if not why not. Then we’d talk about how the piece might be improved, how it could be tightened up or made more effective. We talked about structure. We talked about vocabulary and register and sometimes about the origins of words. This makes it all sound rather serious and literary and highbrow, but you have to remember we were in a lunatic asylum.
We were in the lecture room, in our circle of chairs, and I handed Maureen a text and asked her to read it out. She wasn’t keen at first – they never were – but the piece didn’t seem to present any particular problems. She read that the zip fastener was invented in 1893 by W. L. Judson of Chicago, that St Albans is named after St Alban, that Tallulah Bankhead’s father was a congressman and her grandfather was a senator, that Baron Georges-Euge`ne Haussmann rebuilt Paris in the 1860s, that peach melba was named after Dame Nelly Melba, the Australian Nightingale, that the Norwegians get rid of rats using slices of white bread coated with lye and syrup, that Chesterfield Football Club is nicknamed the Spire-ites, that Benjamin Franklin invented the rocking chair, that only seven of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime, that at any given moment there are eighteen hundred thunderstorms taking place in the earth’s atmosphere, that underground ice-houses were known in China as early as 1100 bc. And much more in similar vein.
When Maureen got to the end of the piece she sat down and I said, ‘Well, what do we all think of that?’
‘It’s crap,’ said Anders.
‘No, it’s not crap,’ said Raymond judiciously. ‘But it’s not great.’
‘I wouldn’t give it more than five,’ said Charles Manning.
‘I wouldn’t give it more than a hundred billion,’ said Carla.
‘I like it,’ said Cook.
Several others agreed that they also liked it.
‘Yes, I liked it too,’ said Maureen. ‘I enjoyed reading it, especially the football reference.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I suppose that could be one reason for liking a piece of writing, that it relates to our own interests and obsessions. What other reasons might we have for liking it?’
‘I don’t know what it means to like or dislike a piece of literature.’ It was Byron talking. ‘We don’t judge literary texts. They judge us.’
This put a bit of a damper on proceedings, until Anders said, ‘I liked it because it was fuckin’ funny.’
‘You just said you didn’t like it!’ Cook protested quietly.
‘I said it was crap. I didn’t say I didn’t like it. There’s a time and a place for crap.’
‘What did you find funny about it?’ I asked.
Anders shrugged and Raymond leapt in with, ‘It’s funny because it’s so true.’
‘But is it all true?’ Charles Manning asked. ‘I’m not sure I believe there are eighteen hundred thunderstorms going on at any given moment.’
‘Yes,’ Cook agreed, ‘and I’m not sure about Benjamin Franklin and the rocking chair.’
‘Does it matter whether or not it’s true?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘Maybe that’s the point, maybe that’s the joke,’ I suggested.
They looked at me baffled, and in truth I couldn’t see where that line of thought was taking me, but then Byron pitched in at full strength.
‘I think Gregory is talking about indeterminacy here,’ he said. ‘Unreliable narrators, the lie that tells the truth.’
‘Would you like to say more about that?’ I asked, knowing that he would.
‘What I think the narrator is trying to do in the piece is set up a dichotomy between the created world and the observed world, between fact and fiction. The language is unemotive and yet the things described are dramatic and resonant. It tells us that the world consists of zips as well as saints, of lightning as well as peach melbas. There’s an oscillation between the banal and the numinous; and perhaps the point is that there is no opposition here. Not only can poetry be made out of anything, poetry already exists in everything; there’s no such thing as an unsuitable subject for art.’
‘You’ve said a mouthful,’ said Max, stirring out of his alcoholic doze.
‘It’s heavy,’ said Charity.
‘So is he right?’ Cook asked. ‘Is that really what it’s about?’
I was tempted to say, don’t ask me, ask the person who wrote it, but I’d said things like that before and it had never got me anywhere. So I said, ‘If that’s what Byron gets out of it, then that’s what’s in it.’
‘What I get out of it is the desire to get naked and dance like a dervish,’ said Charity.
‘You’d get that out of reading Exchange and Mart,’ Maureen said.
‘What I get out of it is the desire to pull some fucker’s head off,’ said Anders. ‘That’s only a personal interpretation, obviously.’
‘I get the desire to pull my own head off,’ said Carla.
And so on.
I had no doubt that the patients were often toying with me, playing up their own madness, to see if I was capable of coping with it and, somewhat to my surprise, I soon found that I was. I wouldn’t swear that I developed a new persona exactly, but I certainly found a means of not giving too much of myself away. I stopped being frightened of Anders. I stopped being disturbed when Charity tore her clothes off, just as I stopped being made to feel uncomfortable by Sita’s ominous silence. I ignored the silliness that Carla demonstrated, just as I ignored Max’s drunkenness and Raymond’s increasingly ornate use of make-up and his tendency to wear odd items of women’s jewellery. I dealt with what they gave me to deal with.
Sometimes we talked more generally about writing, although it soon became apparent that the more general the topic, the more room there was for madness and idiocy. On one occasion Carla asked me, ‘How long is a short story?’
‘How long is a piece of string?’ I replied, foolishly as it turned out.
‘Two foot six,’ she replied with great certainty.
‘No,’ I said gently. ‘I mean, yes, all right, some pieces of string are two foot six, but the point I’m making is that stories, like pieces of string, can be any length you like.’
Carla ploughed her finger-ends down her cheeks, giving the subject far more intense consideration than I thought it deserved.
‘No,’ she said, sounding troubled, ‘a piece of string can’t be any length. It can’t be a million miles long, for instance, because no string factory would ever be able to manufacture it, and no lorry would ever be able to transport it, and just imagine the size of the ball it would make, and what shop would ever stock it and who’d ever buy it, and—’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I accept that a piece of string couldn’t be a million miles long.’
‘And it couldn’t be a millionth of a millimetre long either, because—’
‘I get your drift,’ I said.
‘
So you were wrong when you said a piece of string could be any length. So you were probably wrong when you said a short story could be any length.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I was wrong.’
‘So how long is a short story?’
‘Two hundred and fifty words,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Carla. ‘I think you’re wrong about that as well.’
That was one of my amazingly naive attempts to get the patients to write at shorter length. I thought that if I could get each of them to write, say, just two hundred and fifty, or five hundred or even just a thousand words a week, life would be much easier for all of us. But it didn’t work, not at all, not in the least. The words continued to come as thick and fast as ever: scores of pages every day, a thousand or more every week. It was overwhelming, but in a way I had to admire it.
Kincaid still had me writing regular reports on what was being produced. I did my best to make it sound interesting or significant, and I’d occasionally quote a good line or phrase that had somehow crept in. I didn’t offer any opinions about the mental health of the writers, I thought that was Kincaid’s business, not mine. I also occasionally suggested in the reports that the best way for him to find out what was being written was for him to actually read some of the damn stuff, but he was always too busy or too grand or something. He said he trusted me.
My relations with Kincaid were never easy, but we found a way of rubbing along together, or at least of leaving each other alone. And he could still surprise me with small acts of understanding, and even concern. On one occasion he said he’d been worrying that he hadn’t seen me write anything ‘creative’ since I’d arrived at the clinic. He hoped that working with the patients wasn’t affecting my ‘true vocation’ as he put it. I assured him that being at the clinic had absolutely nothing to do with it and I came up with some lame, but not entirely unconvincing, guff about an author needing to lie fallow from time to time. Kincaid listened with unexpected interest. Tales of the literary life fascinated him.
Bedlam Burning Page 19