APPENDIX: ‘A FAST REWIND THROUGH 400 YEARS OF THE ENGLISH MALADY’
It is worth attention that the English have more songs and ballads on the subject of madness than any of their neighbours. Whether it is that we are more liable to this calamity than other nations, or whether our native gloominess hath peculiarly recommended subjects of this cast to our writers, the fact is incontestable.
– Bishop Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)
This book seeks to provide a context – aesthetic and narrative – for a remarkable series of albums, and for something of a golden age in English rock. As such, I feel compelled to demonstrate that the ‘sudden’ fascination for insanity from the English rock fraternity was nothing of the sort. Although the new minstrels of the Swinging Sixties remained largely unaware of the venerable tradition they were perpetuating, this very English obsession with the oddball point of view ran deep through English society’s seams – and its songs. Hence, Bishop Percy’s famous observation (above), offered in the most important song collection of the eighteenth century.
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) sought to cover every element of song made popular over a quarter of a millennia, and he evidently thought he should provide a fair cross-sample of ‘songs and ballads on the subject of madness’. In fact, Percy published a mere six-song sample from England’s plentiful canon of craziness, even omitting the oldest and finest example of the form, the Jacobethan ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’, a.k.a. ‘From the Hagg and Hungry Goblin’, as well as the superior broadside, Through Moorfields and to Bedlam I went (‘Your cruel base actions cause me to complain / for the loss of my dear has distracted my brain’).
Back in Jacobethan times, there were no ‘shrinks’, just physicians; hence why, for Shakespeare’s English audiences, his portrayal of mortal guilt driving someone mad in Macbeth would have seemed entirely plausible; Hamlet’s Ophelia succumbing to the madness of love was almost a cliché. The Jacobethans’ world picture still held on to the idea that man had his humours, of which melancholy was the commonest (the most comprehensive anthology of English songs from this period was itself called Pills to Purge Melancholy).
In such a world do we find Tom o’ Bedlam, the central figure in an English song-tradition dating back four centuries. That tradition is all the more remarkable because, even in the early seventeenth century, ‘Mad Tom’ songs were invariably written and sung in the first person, as if ‘fashioned out of [his] own brain’. That original ‘Mad Tom’ song, ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’ – already in wide circulation when first put down in Giks Earle’s 1615 commonplace book – presents a fascinating insight into the olde English view of the madman. Using the first person, Loving Mad Tom casts himself as a poet who displays knowledge and powers well beyond the man of Reason:
I know more than Apollo,
For oft, when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at bloody wars
In the wounded welkin weeping.
Such was the appeal of ‘Loving Mad Tom’ in the Jacobethan age that any number of literary figures felt inspired to make themselves Mad Tom for a day, crafting literary rifacimentos based around his lore. Leaving aside Robert Graves’ unproven attribution of ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’ to Shakespeare (the article in question appears in The Common Asphodel), one or more other variants were also attributed to Francis Thompson and William Basse, while Bishop Corbet (‘The Distracted Puritan’, 1634) and Sir Francis Wortley (‘Mad Tom a Bedlam’s desire of peace’, 1648) wrote satirical songs about Puritans and Parliamentarians respectively from the vantage point of ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’, as the madman witnessing a world turned upside down. The tradition was so strong that it prompted comment as late as 1824, with Isaac D’Israeli, father of Benjamin, including the following anecdote in his enduringly popular Curiosities of Literature:
An itinerant lunatic, chanting wild ditties, fancifully attired, gay with the simplicity of childhood, yet often moaning with the sorrows of a troubled man, a mixture of character at once grotesque and plaintive, became an interesting object to poetical minds . . . Poems composed in the character of a Tom o’ Bedlam appear to have formed a fashionable class of poetry among the wits; they seem to have held together their poetical contests, and some of these writers became celebrated for their successful efforts.
Of all the doleful ditties on ditzy dames and the cunningly crazed beggar, it was the songs of Tom o’ Bedlam and his equally cracked paramour, Mad Maudlin, that throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were most prone to collection and imitation. In an age when the third-person narrative ballad dominated the broadside charts, these ‘Tom and Maud’ songs stand apart, both in their general excellence and the blustering way that Tom boasts of his powers. Whether he is ‘play[ing] at bowls with the sun and moon / And win[ning] them in the eclipses’, or ‘pluck[ing] the rainbow from the skies / And ‘splic[ing] both ends together’, as he is in ‘Mad Tom’ – or claiming, I’ll bark against the Dog-star / And crow away the Morning; / I’ll chase the Moon, ’till it be Noon / And I’ll make her leave her Horning’, as he does in ‘Loving Mad Tom’ – he always presents himself as the archetypal Holy Fool, the seer-madman writ large.
And in these bragging ballads, reference is invariably made to Tom’s equally crazed companion, ‘Merry Mad Maud’. ‘Loving Mad Tom’s chorus describes how the pair are bound together in their mutual madness: ‘I will find Bonny Maud, Merry Mad Maud / And seek what e’er betides here / Yet I will love, beneath or above / That dirty Earth that hides her.’ By the middle of the seventeenth century, Merry Mad Maud had developed her own repertoire, including ‘Mad Maudlin is Come’, where she searches high and low ‘for my hungrie mad Tom’, while the subject matter of the better-known ‘To find my Tom of Bedlam’ is equally questing: ‘To find my Tom of Bedlam, Ten thousand Years I’ll Travel; / Mad Maudlin goes with dirty Toes to save her Shoes from Gravel.’ This song also carries a burden that celebrates the inmates of England’s most famous asylum, known to most folk as Bedlam: ‘Yet will I sing Bonny Boys, bonny Mad Boys, Bedlam Boys are Bonny / They still go bare and live by the Air, and want no Drink, nor Money.’
Mad Tom would retain a powerful hold on the English across the centuries. He is that paradigmatic figure, the wise fool, whose presence can even be felt – unconsciously, for sure – in a number of 1960s songs revelling in English eccentricity, whether it is John Entwistle’s ‘Whisky Man’ (on The Who’s A Quick One), Paul McCartney’s ‘A Fool on the Hill’, Roy Wood’s ‘I Can Hear the Grass Grow’, Jeff Lynne’s ‘The Lady Who Said She Could Fly’ (on Idle Race’s The Birthday Party), Syd Barrett’s own ‘Arnold Layne’, or the character ‘Mad John’, who crops up twice on 1968 collections: one, as the seer who knows all on Small Faces’ Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake; the other, Donovan’s ‘Mad Tom’s Escape’, based on the true story of a friend who escaped from an asylum, and his subsequent adventures. All are beholden to the original Bedlamite fool.
Sadly, with the Restoration, much of the colour went out of English popular song; and though there would be a number of latterday Bedlamite ballads, such as ‘Bess of Bedlam’ and ‘Bedlam City, or The Maiden’s Lamentation’, in the popular imagination the link between madness and reason had been sundered. For the next two centuries, the dialogue would be conducted from the asylum, sometimes by the doctors, but often as not by its more poetic patients. Michel Foucault, in his radical history, Madness and Civilization, would even go on to suggest a causal link with the expansion of the asylums themselves:
‘The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue . . . between madness and reason.’ In the same influential volume, Foucault reiterates Spurzheim’s nineteenth-century view that ‘madness, “more frequent in England than anywhere else”, is merely the penalty of the liberty that reigns there . . . Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.’
Nor was the stigma of a spell in Bedlam
any great handicap to social advancement. In fact, from at least the middle part of the seventeenth century, the English seemed particularly keen to lock up its more artistic brethren, the better that they may pursue their mad muse. For the medical profession, at least, the line between the artist and the certifiable had always been a thin one, a point of view gloriously satirized as early as 1671 by James Carkesse, perhaps the first notable English poet to find a way to trade on his spell in ‘Bedlam’, publishing a collection of poems on his release in 1678, under the title, Lucida intervalla: containing divers miscellaneous poems, written at Finsbury and Bethlem by the doctors patient extraordinary:
Doctor, this Puzzling Riddle pray explain;
Others your Physick cures, but I complain
It works with me the clean contrary way,
And makes me Poet, who are Mad they say.
The hospital of Bethlem – along with a network of other private asylums – continued to be a popular stopping-off point for many of England’s finest wordsmiths over the next two centuries. Carkesse’s contemporary, Nathaniel Lee, was another poet who found himself incarcerated by those who questioned his sanity, as he challenged theirs. Unfortunately, as he pithily observed: ‘They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.’ Lee, who would be dead by 1692 of a drunken fit after five years spent in Bedlam, and not yet forty, seems to have learnt a little too much about dissipation and excess from time in the company of the Earl of Rochester. It is questionable whether he was ever genuinely unhinged.
‘Kit’ Smart, a favourite poet of Samuel Johnson (and later Allen Ginsberg), spent the years 1757–63 at St Luke’s Hospital for the insane, during which he composed perhaps his two most famous works, ‘Jubilate Agno’ and ‘A Song to David’. And just as St Luke’s was letting Smart go, Nathaniel Cotton’s equally infamous asylum in St Alban’s was committing another devout poet, William Cowper, after a third suicide attempt. Here he wrote the memorably unhinged ‘Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portions’, before securing his release, though he later confessed a secret longing to William Blake: ‘O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? I will never rest till I am so.’
Blake himself was viewed by a number of contemporaries as being quite mad, in a harmless kind of way; and though most would dispute such a view now, R.D. Laing in The Divided Self suggested that ‘the Prophetic Books of William Blake’ should be studied by psychologists ‘not to elucidate Blake’s psycho-pathology, but in order to learn from him what, somehow, he knew about in a most intimate fashion, while remaining sane’.
By an accident of history, Blake was just the wrong side of the Romantic divide. For after the Romantic poets, the romantic ideal of the madman-seer again took hold of the popular imagination. The Romantics themselves were convinced that such a fate awaited some, if not all of them. As Wordsworth wrote in 1802: ‘We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.’ And, though it was the besotted Lady Caroline Lamb who penned the actual line, Byron fully lived up to the epithet, ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know.’ Unfortunately, Byron’s wife soon became convinced that this was literally true and began to keep a detailed record of his moods and speech, even inviting a physician to their home to assess her husband’s state of mind.
Although Byron never actually lived long enough to sink into ‘despondency and madness’ (unlike his wife), one poet who followed in his footsteps did, and in doing so, at times became convinced that he was none other than Byron himself. English poetry’s pre-eminent post-Romantic casualty was the self-taught ‘Peasant Poet’ John Clare (1793–1864), who first came to prominence in 1820 with two well-received collections, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and The Village Minstrel. He would eventually enter Epping Forest’s High Beach Asylum in 1837, suffering from delusions; coincidentally, this was at the same time that Alfred Lord Tennyson was a brief guest of Matthew Allen, the doctor who was treating Clare. Grieving for his recently deceased friend, Arthur Hallam, Tennyson was never committed to High Beach, but his brother, Edward, had been committed to an asylum in 1833, never to emerge.
Clare had voluntarily committed himself to Dr Allen’s care, staying at High Beach from 1837 through 1841, suffering from the delusion that he was (interchangeably) Robert Burns, Lord Byron or the less poetic Lord Nelson. He eventually discharged himself, walking all the way from Epping to Northborough – recalling the experience in his fractured glass self-portrait, ‘Journey Out of Essex, or John Clare’s Escape from the Madhouse’, with its instantly memorable opening couplet: ‘I am lying with my head / Over the edge of the world.’
He was soon committed again, this time to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, though he was generally free to roam the town and write his poems, which continued to usher forth right up to his death in 1864. Although he had long ago been forgotten by most subscribers to the early ‘rural’ collections that afforded him the public stamp of poet, the ‘post-madness’ poems were finally given their due in James Reeves’ influential Selected Poems of John Clare (1954). By the 1960s, not only was Clare’s reputation in the ascendant but his asylum years were generating real academic interest, while Reeves’ collection soon found its way into Syd Barrett’s library.
The Victorians were nothing if not broad-minded about the kind of artist they felt could benefit from the care and attention that a well-kept asylum could offer. Another Victorian defined in terms of the madman-seer was Richard Dadd. A painter of quite extraordinary intricacy and breathtaking detail, Dadd had barely begun to develop an original reputation when, in 1842, he experienced a catastrophic mental breakdown. By the following August, believing that he was being pursued by the devil, he stabbed his father to death, convinced he was the devil in disguise. Committed to Bethlem Asylum, Dadd continued to paint works that exhibited, in the words of one visitor, ‘all the power, fancy and judgement for which his works were eminent previous to his insanity’. His masterpiece, self-consciously entitled The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, took him nine years to complete, and was accompanied by an impenetrable twenty-four-page guide to its meaning, in Dadd’s jagged handwriting. These notes were appropriately entitled ‘Elimination of a Picture & Its Subject’.
The fairy spirit also lived in John Ruskin, not a painter himself, but a social commentator and art critic of some standing, who in his 1884 lecture, ‘Fairy Land’, would pen the first important definition of the goals of fantasy literature. By then, he had been subject to delusions and a serious nervous breakdown after the love of his life, Rose la Touche, died in 1875, aged just twenty-seven. Ruskin, a friend of Lewis Carroll’s, had been enamoured of Rose since they met when she was just ten, and in later life proposed to her continuously (in an 1886 letter to his physician, John Simon, Ruskin candidly admitted, ‘I like my girls from ten to sixteen – allowing of seventeen or eighteen as long as they’re not in love with anybody but me’). During his prolonged derangement, he wrote a letter in which he claimed that Rose’s spirit had instructed him to marry a girl who was visiting at the time. His mania passed, though not before writing to Thomas Carlyle claiming: ‘It was utterly wonderful to . . . go so heartily and headily mad . . . [after] priding myself on my peculiar sanity.’
Meanwhile, another late Victorian painter, Louis Wain, who had enjoyed a long and lucrative vogue as ‘the man who drew cats’, due to his series of illustrations of anthropomorphized moggies, developed a persecution complex in his early sixties. It fully manifested itself in 1924, when he claimed the flickering of the cinema screen had robbed the electricity from his sisters’ brains. He wandered the streets at night, and would sporadically rearrange furniture within the family house, while spending long periods locked in his room writing gibberish. Initially committed to a pauper ward of Springfield Mental Hospital in Tooting in June 1924, Wain was finally transferred to the Bethlem Asylum the following year, where he had his own room and was supplied with art materials, resulting in a number of
serious exhibitions of his work. The many drawings and watercolours he produced in his last years were widely regarded as manifestations of schizophrenia – a view now strongly challenged.
By the time of Wain’s committal, the network of private asylums was starting to be replaced by institutions funded by the public purse, partly as a consequence of the number of shell-shocked ex-soldiers returning from the war. But there was still time for a young Virginia Woolf to spend time in one (and for her half-sister Laura to live and die in one). After the death of her father in 1904, and elder brother Thoby in 1906, Woolf started to hear the voices of the dead urging her to do the impossible, and in 1910 spent six weeks in a sanatorium in Burley, to which she also returned in 1913. The experience only drove her to attempt suicide. For the remainder of her life she made ‘the lava of madness’ her muse, writing in 1930 of how ‘it shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does’.
But it also drove her to fits of despair so intense she contemplated ending her life – which, in the end, she did. Her unbearably poignant final note to her husband in March 1941 perfectly articulates the chronic depressive’s sense of powerlessness when facing inner demons: ‘I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do . . . Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.’
BIBLIOGRAPHY & SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY
1. General Reference Material
(i) The music scene:
All the Madmen Page 35