The Voice That Thunders, page 22
It is particularly important when I am drawing on the enormous energies provided by a “high” in order to sustain a piece of work; so that, when I finish, or pause, if the rebound of a “low” were to meet the remains of a “high”, I could distract, or adjust, my emotions by having a fragment of “normality” to refer to. The end of a book, and the end of a lecture, are the times of greatest need. So much for me. Now, is there anything I can say about this chameleon madness that is of general use? I shall try. First, let me speak to the family.
The most important hurdle to be crossed before any progress can be made is for the family, and particularly the sufferer, to acknowledge the illness and to seek, and follow, medical advice. Then, do not let the sufferer (despite my example) give up on the treatment without your fighting, and do report the matter. It is almost diagnostic that a manic-depressive, once the agony is mediated, will react with a feeling of omnipotent well-being, and insist that a cure has taken place. There is no cure.
Never, at any time or under any stress, lose patience and say something to the effect of: “Why don’t you pull yourself together?” Learn, and keep before you, so that you will recognise why you cannot even begin to realise what the other is experiencing, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ lines from his poem “No worst, there is none”:
. . . mind has mountains; cliffs of fall,
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.
Hold them cheap, may who ne’er hung there. He is saying, because he knew, that only the manic-depressive can truly understand the manic-depressive. Accept that you cannot feel what the other feels; that your sympathy will, no matter how great, be taken to the edge of breaking. It is here that sympathy and empathy must be most clearly differentiated between, and here you cannot empathise.
Remember that everyone in the equation will be touched by it, and do not hesitate to go for help on your own account. It may be a unique event for you, but it will not be for the doctor.
There is a paradox that is so easy to miss that I must stress it here. I may have spent a disproportionate time on the experience of depression, because it is then that the individual is in most pain, which is hard for the family to stand by and watch in a feeling of helplessness. But there is a worse helplessness for the family, and that, strangely, is the “high”, not the “low”, since the sufferer is so energetic, so persuasive and persuaded, that there is no appealing to reason, and the family, in self-defence, must close ranks, or, inevitably, be ground down.
Contrariwise, if there is reason and it can be appealed to, then everyone may share in the excitement, because the “high” could have produced something new, good, and true. It is all a matter of balance.
To the manic-depressive, I would say: don’t try to deceive yourself, nor feel sorry for yourself. Apply what I have said to the family to your point of view. Stick with the treatment. Devise your own defensive and diagnostic measures, the equivalent of my dinosaur footprints, if you are able. Listen to your family, even if you have to preface what they say with: “they don’t know what they’re talking about, but I’m big enough to humour them”. Then keep your word, and humour them. You are not alone. You have worth. You are loved. There is help.
Let me end by taking a longer perspective. It is an interesting question whether, from a Darwinian point of view, manic-depressives evolved, and, if so, why; and an even more interesting question why they are not extinct. Our son, who is a postgraduate biologist, has suggested, in what he would call a “coffee-time” idea, that an answer may lie in the fact that we are still savannah apes. Since a significant proportion of manic-depressives have creative minds, and are dominant when “high”, evolution would select for them, because they would be likely to have made their innovative contribution, and to have bred, before their condition became fatal.
If you have seen the film 2001, you will remember the ape picking up a bone and looking at it, this way, then that way; turning his head, this way, then that way. His eyes light up as he sees the connection. He is the inventor of the first tool. In a moment of elation, he throws the bone into the air. As it revolves it becomes a space vessel. We may have seen the first manic-depressive. And if he has reproduced before this moment it is biologically acceptable for him to die now.
It is frequently observed that innovators have been manic-depressive. A common retort, and one that applies to me, is that innovators do not “think”. They create by “seeing” involuntarily, and only then refine the creation by thought. For me, a novel is a series of connections which have always existed, but which no one else has seen.
The fortunate manic-depressive, in this way, invents a device that benefits humanity, discovers a cure (perhaps, one day, for manic-depression, should that be desirable), or creates a work of art. The unfortunate manic-depressive “sees” as does the fortunate; but it is not a true connection, and there is not available, in the degree of insanity, the logic to think out not the refinement but the absurdity. The connection then is more likely to be: “I shall buy two hundred lawnmowers, and shall have solved the problem of global warming.”
The differences are so slight. If you alone can see the “truth”, you need good friends who understand that you have “knowledge that is sad to have to know”.
The worst case I have come across is that of an American psychiatrist, who was so successful in his accurate, intuitive and non-rational insights, that a special faculty was set up for his work. Shortly afterwards, he became ill, and was diagnosed as manic-depressive. How, then, could he himself trust his intuitive genius? And how were the admiring colleagues who had gathered around this great man to react to his hunches in the future?
I am only a writer, a maker of dreams. You can dismiss me and no harm is done. If I were your lawyer, or your bank manager, it would have been imprudent of me to have spoken today.
Kay Jamison, however, now Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, having established her position as world authority on manic-depression, sits at her desk, takes up her pen, and writes An Unquiet Mind: a Memoir of Moods and Madness (Knopf, New York, 1995; Picador, London, 1996), which is a detailed and uncompromising account of her life-long dialogue with her own experience of relentless manic-depression. It is the bravest, and the most hopeful, document that I have ever read.
It made me, after sixteen years, dare to put on that record of “Serenade for Tenor and Horn”, and to listen.
* * *
1 This lecture was delivered at an event organised by Stockport Health Care for World Mental Health Day at Stockport on 5 December 1996.
16
The Voice that Thunders
THE END OF a book tends to write itself. What I have to do is to sit, breathe and make the marks on the paper. Then, with exponential speed, it is: last page, last paragraph, last sentence, last line, last letter; full stop.1
I placed the full stop of Strandloper, looked at my watch, and wrote: “14.30. Tuesday. 25 April. 1995.” Then I went back to the full stop, and thought: Why didn’t I put just that in the first place? What I had undergone had all been in order to reach a full stop. The point was the point.
I had set off for it by deciding to do something useful on a hot day. I had brought up from the files a box I use for newspaper cuttings that I keep in case any of them should provoke an idea in the future, and started to cull the redundant. I chid myself for having amassed so much dross for my magpie mind. Then I stopped, and read and re-read an item from the Congleton Chronicle, our local newspaper, of November 1977. I must have read the article before, otherwise it would not have been in the box, yet I had no memory of it, while now it burnt my brain.
It was a brief article, recording the story of a twenty-year-old bricklayer, William Buckley, from my neighbouring hamlet of Marton, who had been transported for life to New Holland in 1803, had escaped into the bush, survived, and had lived for thirty-two years as an Aborigine before joining a party of prospecting Englishmen in order to prevent their massacre, as a result of which he was given a free pardon. The article was headed: “The Wild Man of Marton”. I looked at my watch, and noted: “14.30. Tuesday. 21 June. 1983. William Buckley”.
So it began. Why had something, presented as amusing and trivial, taken up precisely four thousand, three hundred and twenty-six days of my life and produced a novel at an average rate of 14.1 words a day, or approximately 0.5875 words an hour? There are two answers. The first is that it had been the most rewarding and demanding period of my life so far. The second is that I had no choice. I did not even have to defend myself by hiding behind Hazlitt’s statement that: “If a man leaves behind him any work which is a model of its kind, we have no right to ask whether he could do anything else, or how he did it, or how long he was about it.”
I am going to try to communicate something of this experience, despite Hazlitt.
The first question that has to be asked may be phrased as: why subject oneself to the ordeal of constructing a work of fiction? The answer is that the world is messy, and the truth hard to find in its tangled thickets. Truth is best found by the writer’s taking the facts, pruning them, and then arranging what is left into the simplest possible pattern. This necessitates a degree of fabrication, which presents us with the paradox that the writer has to manipulate the facts in order to make what is essential clear and true. At its most extreme, reality can be expressed in art most accurately as myth. And, as I progressed into Strandloper, I became aware that the historical William Buckley’s life matched the elements of the mythic Quest.
There was no altruism in what I was doing. Writers, at the point of writing, in the preparation for writing, in the act of writing, are the most selfish of beings. They have no social concern. Only their obsession matters, and you interrupt a writer then at your peril.
So a better question is: what makes some people, regardless of cost to themselves and others, write at all? Subjectively, it is merely something that has to be done. Plato set poets, of which he was one, at the top of his hit list, against the day when he could establish his ideal state. And the world authority in her field. the American psychiatrist, Kay Redfield Jamison, has made the grotesque discovery, in her surveys of writers, and of creativity in the arts, the military professions and those of business, that some 50 per cent of the significant innovators suffer from a lethal psychosis, lethal because of its 50 per cent suicide risk, which is largely ignored by society since its occurrence in the general public is not more than 1 per cent.
The last impression I want to make is one of angst or gloom. The brain is too clever for that. The main drive is what C. S. Lewis cunningly calls “joy”, and it is in finding that “joy” that the brain is at its most clever.
I am happiest when engaged in establishing and pursuing research.
In order to make sense, it is time for me to say a little of how I write: not how to write: just how I write. I’ll use Strandloper, since it’s the nearest to my experience.
I count as my main asset the combination of an academic’s and a magpie’s mind that sees, finds or makes connections and patterns where others do not. Also essential to creativity is the ability to doodle mentally and to play.
I read a newspaper cutting about a curious fellow from Marton. I know instantly that I am pregnant with his story. I look at the story, and make a list of primary subjects that I shall have to know about in great detail before I can begin; and they will each consist of separate fibres, as in a rope, which will unwind and have to be followed in their turn, as I progress. The fibres will have fibres.
Here is the academic at work. I must learn all there is to be known. I grow a bibliography. I read and read, and take notes, books of notes. And this is the joy that leads me on. I am learning what I did not know, and unlike purely academic work, the subjects appear not to be linked. For instance: mediaeval English stained glass; the system of convict transport in the nineteenth century; neurological disturbance of the optic nerve and its cultural significance. And that is only a fraction. The magpie is gratified by the collecting; and the writer is enthralled as the unconnected themes begin to converge, apparently of their own accord (although I am aware of the more mundane theory of selective perception) and for me it is the convergence, an elegant and natural simplicity of resolution, that hidden union, which has always been waiting: the numinous as a book.
The point cannot be reached by the academic element, which is a drudge. There comes a moment when all has been read. The intellect then has to be suppressed, because I can’t “think” something into being. That is the job of the subconscious. It shows, and tells, so that I “see”, and “dream”, and “hear”, and “find”. I am the sophisticated word processor and the first reader. Thereafter the intellect is freed to edit what the subconscious has written.
Before I say more of William Buckley, I should put the culling of the files into perspective. It was the Summer Solstice of 1983. The last piece of original work that I had written, The Stone Book Quartet, was finished in the summer of 1977. Six years had gone by in silence. There had been nothing to add. “When may we expect the next novel?” said my publisher of the day. “When it’s ready,” I said, and got on with not writing.
Fortunately for my nervous system, I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of “writer’s block”. I was more inclined to think of it as “writer’s impatience”, and to follow Arthur Koestler’s dictum: “Soak; and wait.” With The Stone Book Quartet, I had emptied my well, and nothing could be done until the water table was restored. And that is where I was at the Summer Solstice of 1983, until 2.30 p.m., when the well became a gusher.
My first problem was to find William Buckley. (He was said to have been born in 1780, and brought up by his grandfather.) I searched the decayed parish registers. There was no record of him. Then a voice, which many writers learn to heed, said: “Bishop’s Transcripts”. At the period in question, and for centuries before that, the priest of a parish was obliged not only to keep his registers but each year to make a copy and to send it to the Bishop’s Palace. By the end of the eighteenth century, the provision of a Bishop’s Transcript had become patchy. One nearby incumbent of Marton kept the actual registers themselves in a bag by his chair, the easier to light his pipe with the spills that he made from them. So, as I sat in the County Record Office in Chester, contemplating the pile of uncatalogued sheets that the archivist had brought from the vaults, I was not optimistic.
The baptisms of the Transcript were there for 1782. They were identical to those of the register, with one additional entry. “William, son of Eliza Buckley, March 31st.” And, in the margin, in another hand, “Illigitim”. The County Record Office reeled, as I involuntarily yelled: “Oh, William!”
The next part was easy, now that the clew was in my hand. Eliza was the teenage daughter of Jonathan Buckley, and she had an older brother William, after whom to name a son. The following day I was in the John Rylands Library of Manchester University, which holds the archive of the Marton estate. Within minutes I had identified Jonathan Buckley’s farm, such as it was (one acre, three roods and thirty perches of bits of scattered land) from the rent books and maps, and the subsequent change of the house into a school.
I had to see inside the house, to feel where William had grown up, to stand in the room from which he had gone out to spend thirty-two years as an Aborigine. I stooped under the beams. William had been measured at 6 feet 5 ⅞ inches tall in 1835. The headroom in the transport ship in which he had spent six months chained in darkness, with no sight of the sun, had been 5 feet 7 inches, below the beams. By the end of it all, I felt that I knew the inside of William Buckley very well, simply by inference from what I found he had experienced.
But still I had to look into Buckley eyes. I had identified his closest living relative, Arthur Buckley. I was warned that he was old, ill, reclusive, depressed and bad tempered. I went to the house at Fiddler’s Elbow, where he had been born and lived all his life. I knocked on the door. Silence. I was about to knock again when I heard a slow and distant shuffling. The shuffling came closer. I felt my adrenaline pumping. Any moment now I was going to be as near as it was possible to be to William Buckley. I was going to see into the gene pool.
There was a drawing of bolts, the door opened an inch. I made out a blue eye behind thick lenses, and a spike of uncombed silver hair. That was all.
Then I did a stupid thing. I entered on a preamble.
“Mr Buckley?”
Grunt.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I wonder if you could spare me a few minutes. I’d like to talk to you.”
“I don’t think so,” said a toneless voice, and the door began to close.
Desperate, I said: “My name’s Alan Garner.” I had been going to say, “I’m a writer, and I’m working on a book about your family,” or something like that. The door was pulled wide, and Arthur Buckley said, “You’re Colin’s lad! Come in! Come in! I know more about Garners than you do!” And I had come in order to know more about Buckleys than he did.
He beckoned me into the kitchen with his head. He walked with difficulty and never let go of his trousers. “Sit thi down. Tek thi bacca.” He welcomed me formally, and eased himself into the only armchair. I fetched a stool from the table. He was agitated with pleasure, and I looked into an alert William Buckley as he told me how in the Twenties and Thirties, he had, with his family and mine, made up the local brass band. It had been the centre of his life. Along the length of the mantelpiece were curled and time-coloured photographs of the band in uniform, with their instruments, fat Big Bill Garner in the middle, holding his baton.
Arthur Buckley talked obsessively, reliving the great days; but I noticed that, even sitting, he kept one hand on his trousers. I asked him what was wrong.
