The Songs of the Maniacs: Four Books on Madness and Creativity

Kristine Somerville

The Missouri Review, Volume 35, Number 1, Spring 2012, pp. 190-199(Article)

Published by University of MissouriDOI: 10.1353/mis.2012.0004

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The Songs of the ManiacsFour Books on Madness and Creativity

Kristine Somerville

D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb, Manic Depression and Creativity, Prometheus Books, 1998, 230 pp., $24 (paper).

Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Free Press, 1996, 384 pp., $16 (paper).

Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004, 320 pp., $15 (paper).

Richard M. Berlin, Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment and the Creative Process, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, 200 pp., $24.

An anecdote that has become part of poet Theodore Roethke’s legend concerns his first mental breakdown in 1935, when he was a young professor at Michigan State. He struck his students as a rare teacher who talked to them without condescension about the problems of their lives and how to tackle their inner conflicts through poetry. Meanwhile he was going crazy. He was forgoing sleep to work on his teaching, taking midnight walks to build stamina and going for long periods of time without food. In order to keep functioning, he was dosing himself with whiskey, coffee and aspi-rin by the handful. He recalled nine years later to friends that suddenly he started feeling good, almost magical. While walking in the woods, he felt as if he had entered into the life of everything around him—grass, trees, even a rabbit. As he was passing a diner he suddenly felt that he knew what

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it was like to be a lion. He went inside and asked the counterman for a raw steak. Eating it standing in the middle of lunch-hour rush, he noticed the expressions of the customers and began to realize that perhaps his behavior was a little strange. Shortly afterward, he was committed to a sanitarium. Psychiatrists diagnosed him as manic-depressive neurotic. His brief teach-ing career at Michigan State was over.

Recounting the fantastic moments of unreason in artists’ lives, we tend to assume that they are troubled and haunted by madness. The belief that cre-ativity and mental illness are intertwined is widely held. For artists, the level of intensity necessary to create something fresh and new can often feel like a type of insanity, yet does mental illness exist at a vastly disproportionate rate among them? Is there an overlap between mental illness and the artistic temperament? If so, why? Several books from the fields of psychiatry and neuropsychology have attempted to answer these questions, while artists from past and present have offered their own varied insights.

In Manic Depression and Creativity, D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb claim that some of the greatest works of art would be inconceivable without the intense levels of energy, passion and daring that come from states of manic creativity. The authors narrow their discussion to manic depression and note that mental illness has been destigmatized overall. “The manic-depressive is not an alien from outer space, he is one of us,” Hershman and Lieb write.

Philosophers of antiquity such as Aristotle, Socrates and Plato all sup-posed that most extraordinary individuals are melancholic and that no invention comes unless the artist is out of his senses, yet Judeo-Christian tradition provided Western civilization with the tenacious belief that the mentally ill were possessed by the devil. Enlightenment theorists argued that mental illness was as natural as physical illness and that reason could provide people with every conceivable benefit, including cures for psycho-logical infirmities.

The Romantics repudiated the Enlightenment’s overemphasis on reason in favor of emotion. To them, logic played a limited role in human affairs. They believed artistic genius to be the highest calling and the arts the noblest. Fits of inspiration were sometimes hardly distinguishable from episodes of mania or hallucinations. The French novelist George Sand proclaimed,

“Between genius and madness there is often not the thickness of a hair.” Like the thinkers of antiquity, the Romantics linked genius and creativity with wide-ranging, powerful emotions and expanded imaginations. The artist became a vessel of special revelation who suffers for rare ability and

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insights. Some might have argued that their exceptionality also conveniently allowed them latitude to behave as they wanted and escape the strictures of social convention.

Hershman and Lieb extend many Romantic notions as they profile the turbu-lent lives of Newton, Beethoven, Dickens and Van Gogh and the significant role that they believe manic depression played in their careers. Dickens would not have completed such a considerable and successful body of work without manic-induced hyperactivity. Beethoven would not have been able to achieve such emotional range and intensity in his music without extreme and extraor-dinary periods of mania. All the men they profile undertook monumental challenges regardless of risk to fame and fortune, and the authors suggest that it was in part due to a mania-fed fearlessness.

Mild mania makes artists fecund without confusing them. When Dickens found himself in this state he felt he was the ideal version of him-self: joyful, energetic, intelligent and creative. But few artists have control over their moods, and what control they do have often comes from self-med-icating with tobacco, alcohol, drugs and—in some cases—copious exercise. Dickens, Beethoven and Van Gogh all took frequent, obsessive, quite long walks.

The downside is of course inevitable states of depression and the accom-panying fallow periods. Dickens wrote to a friend during a bout of writer’s block, “Men have been chained to hideous walls and other strange anchors but few have known such suffering and bitterness at one time or other as those who have been bound to Pens.” During depressive periods these artists exhibited varying combinations of hair-trigger temper, irritability, paranoia, egomania and overwhelming disorganization that made main-taining domestic relations challenging. All of them paid a high price for the primacy of their work-driven habits. They were more able to achieve disci-pline and order in their art than in their lives. All were trapped in what Van Gogh called “the dumb fury of work.”

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Manic Depression and CreativityD. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb.

Prometheus Books, 1998, 230 pp., $24 (paper).

Assigning pathologies to deceased artists, which the field calls “life-study investigations,” is tricky business. Though Hershman and Lieb admit that their pro-files look backward to a time when the label “manic depression” did not exist and that case histories constructed from let-ters, journals and testimonies of friends and relatives are often unreliable and incomplete evidence at best, they apply

their diagnoses nevertheless. They also may overestimate the role of manic depression in the production of art and its inseparability from illumination. They come close to extolling the illness as a transcendent state and focus too exclusively on a limited number of male artists.

Whether they were manic-depressive or not, these men’s lives were domi-nated by struggles to control their mood disorders, and the depiction of their failures and successes make fascinating reading.

In Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, opens her book with Lord Byron’s remark about himself and his fellow poets: “We of the craft are all crazy.” Like Hershman and Lieb’s, her work explores the relationship between manic-depressive illness and the artistic temperament; she also believes that the illness conveys certain creative advantages. She says that she sees an “asso-ciation” between the artistic and manic-depressive temperaments, not an

“overlap,” but the distinction is hard to discern once she moves into her evi-dence: the accounts of artists, musicians and writers who have suffered from severe mood disorders.

Like Hershman and Lieb, Jamison sees a correlation between extreme emotional states and the creative process. She offers the same caveat that of course talent and training must be present for the production of art, as well as quieter periods of control, discipline and reasoned thought. Similarly she lines up historical precedents for her beliefs. She starts with antiquity, then mostly skips over the Enlightenment to get to the Romantics and

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Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic TemperamentKay Redfield Jamison. Free Press, 1996, 384 pp., $16 (paper).

Byron’s description of the existence of the “awful chaos” that poets must live with. She has combed through the biographies of artists for their accounts of mood disorders and wisely gives them room to speak for themselves. Writers such as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, A. Alvarez and William Styron could be quite discerning in their accounts of manic episodes. Like Theodore Roethke’s, their stories are naturally compelling,

Where Hershman and Lieb are content to offer retrospective diagnoses, Jamison moves beyond what she calls “case-history studies of psychopathol-ogy” in favor of “accumulating, and surprisingly consistent, recent evidence suggesting that it is manic-depressive illness and its related temperaments that are most closely allied to creativity in the arts.” She begins her dis-cussion of modern studies of living writers and artists with Dr. Nancy Andreasen’s now famous 1987 Iowa Writers’ Workshop Study. According to Jamison, Andreasen and her colleagues at the University of Iowa were the first to undertake scientific diagnostic inquiries into the relationship between creativity and psychopathology in living writers. They interviewed thirty writers, a relatively small sample, from the renowned workshop and learned that 80 percent of their subjects met the formal diagnostic crite-ria for a major mood disorder. In 1988 at the University of Tennessee, Dr. Hagop Akiskal interviewed twenty award-winning European artists and reported that 50 percent of them had suffered from a major depressive epi-sode. Inspired by their findings, while on sabbatical at St. George’s Medical School in London and the University of Oxford, Jamison studied forty-seven British writers and artists. She asked them detailed questions about the history of their treatment for mental illness and learned that 38 percent had sought help for mood disorders. All of these studies seem to rely heav-ily on “extensive psychiatric interviews” of small sample sizes, while none of them shows how these numbers match up to other competitive, rigorous professions and disciplines, making it difficult to appreciate the uniqueness and extremity of their reported percentages.

Neurologist Alice W. Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block and the Creative Brain similarly explores the complex relation-ship between creative work and bipolar emotions. She too draws on examples from the arts but also gives considerable time to her own battle with mental illness. After the deaths of her twins, she alternately suffered from episodes of both compulsive writing and writer’s block. She wonders “what wire in my brain snapped. Whatever it was, it dragged me away from a happy career as a scientist toward an impractical compulsion to write.” Flaherty asks the question “Can any good come from casting such a medical eye on the world

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of writing?” While conceding that assign-ing pathologies to artists posthumously can be imprecise, she believes that bring-ing neuroscience to bear on writers’ own accounts of their creative processes can lead to interesting conclusions, particu-larly when dealing with hypergraphia and writer’s block.

In her preliminary discussion of the obsessive impulse to write, Flaherty notes that “temporal lobe epilepsy is the best understood cause of hypergraphia, although not the only one.” She offers a list of writers—Dostoevsky, Tennyson, Poe, Swinburne, Byron, de Maupassant, Molière, Dante—who are thought to have suffered from the illness. While epilepsy does not always create talented writers, it does often trigger a drive to write. There is also growing evidence that what happens in the temporal lobe is important to creativity in driven writers without epilepsy.

Epilepsy is not the only illness that causes prolific writing, and psychi-atrists disagree with neurologists about whether it is even a major cause. Flaherty explains that at first glance manic depression and epilepsy are widely different disorders; one is psychiatric with mood swings, while the other is neurological with seizures. On closer inspection, a great deal of overlap is apparent in both symptoms and treatment. They share so many characteristics that modern clinicians struggle to make a clear diagnosis of such deceased writers as Poe and Byron, who have been diagnosed both ways.

In many ways answering why a person writes helps explain why they are unhappy, Flaherty believes. Her own loss and trauma and the resulting mania allows her to hypothesize that creative writing is an abstracted ver-sion of the biological urge to openly express sorrow and anger. When writing after the death of her children, she recognized that there was something she still needed: “I cry out because some primitive part of me believes that when you cry out, someone warm and helpful comes.” She explains that like

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The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block,

and the Creative BrainAlice W. Flaherty. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004, 320 pp., $15 (paper).

many writers, she doesn’t write to forget but to remember and gain insight into the internal conflicts that fuel her suffering. The goal is to gain relief and a sympathetic audience. One might even forget sadness in uttering it. She feels that a need for self-expression that derives from painful desire might begin to explain the link between art, eccentricity and mental illness.

Flaherty turns to antiquity for an early proposed link between creativity and madness and reminds us that the Greeks expected poets to receive their ideas in a frenzied state. Plato believed that the sane had no business writing poetry. “He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration, in the belief that craftsman-ship alone suffices, will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.” She too is enchanted with the overwrought Romantics. But wisely she asks whether some artists are work-ing within a received set of conventions that may encourage them to sound more unstable than they actually are, engaging in role-playing that perpetu-ates the link between art and mania.

Thought, memory, emotion and sensation all result from the constant dance of nerve impulses within the brain. And still the brain remains a durable mystery. Flaherty finally acknowledges that the understanding of mental disorders in general is still primitive in comparison to what we know about the body, but the work is promising in what it may teach us about creativity.

In Poets on Prozac, psychiatrist Richard M. Berlin assembles sixteen essays by poets that address the questions that recur in his practice: “Does a person have to be crazy to make good art?” and “Will the treatment of the illness result in creative sterility?” Berlin focuses on poets because he believes that among artists they have the highest incidence of psychiatric disorders.

While his foreword outlines some very familiar arguments about the relationship between psychiatric illness and creativity, the stories that

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Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment and the Creative Process

Richard M. Berlin. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, 200 pp., $24.

poets share from the front lines of mental illness are genuinely interesting. Many of them believe that rather than fueling their work, their struggles with mental illness, mostly depression, have been crippling. Several of the essays depict the poets’ struggles before finding the correct psychiatric treat-ment and cocktail of medication, a challenge all its own. Most at some point found themselves so crippled by their illness that daily life was difficult and creativity impossible. Several explain that in deep depression, intellectual processes are impaired. The capacity to generate ideas is diminished. They become pessimistic and overly critical about the work that they do complete, and motivation can disappear completely.

In “Dark Gifts,” Gwyneth Lewis writes, “People who do not have depres-sion are fond of commenting that many of its victims are gifted creatively, as if this made up for the sporadic visits to one’s emotional underworld.” She goes on to explain that to write she has to feel happy and have a surplus of energy and vitality that allows her to see the vibrancy of the world. “In fact,” she says, “I have to be in a state of hyperawareness that is the direct opposite of the half-life of depression.” She quite simply sees depression as the enemy of all creative production. J. D. Smith also feels as if mental ill-ness did more to obstruct his writing than encourage it. He writes in “The Desire to Think Clearly” that “a poet in despair does not necessarily make one a poet of despair.” His unbalanced inner states have served more as an obstacle to his work than a facilitator, and he quite simply doesn’t see his illness as an interesting subject to write about.

All of the poets eventually find some relief in medication, though in “My Name Is Not Alice,” Ren Powell admits to sometimes missing the fuzzy highs and hallucinations she had during her more manic phases. Yet she understands that “without the clarity medication has afforded me, I don’t think I could write poetry.” She too sees praising depression as the source of all art as misguided.

For these poets mental illness has been marked more by withdrawal from the world than by heightened engagement in it, and finding the right treat-ment has helped them endure life. Once they began taking medication, their productivity increased. Jack Coulehan, in “In the Middle of Life’s Journey,” says of his medication, “It was an effective weed killer that leaves the grass unharmed.”

Once the illness is relieved, the creativity resurfaces and they are freed from the kind of obsessive tendencies that are humorously depicted by Andrew Hudgins in “Chemical Zen.” A self-described “rage-o-holic” with a “humming bird nervous system,” Hudgins, who had always been wary of

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medication, takes his father-in-law’s advice and seeks treatment after a hypo-chondriacal episode. He had no idea whether medication would change his work on a fundamental level. He obviously hoped that it wouldn’t. He dis-covered that it tones down his anxieties. “I simply feel calm enough to live a little longer than I would have done otherwise and more comfortably than I have lived my first fifty two years.” Though he misses the long compulsive streaks of writing, he does not miss the exhaustion and enervation.

All the poets in Berlin’s selection of essays refuse to sentimentalize their derangement; most are happy to be rid of it. More than fifty years earlier, Sylvia Plath, the contemporary patron saint of poetic madness, voiced a similar opinion; she wrote of her illness, “When you are insane, you are busy being insane—all the time. When I was crazy, that’s all I was.” The poets featured in Poets on Prozac would agree that pain in and of itself did not enhance their creative imagination but overwhelmed it.

Suffice it to say that eminent people from different competitive fields, particularly the arts, suffer from notable mood disorders, but perhaps for more mundane and obvious reasons. Work that requires creativity is stress-ful, demands a total commitment and a relentless drive toward unachievable perfection. Art takes direct, intense, motivated effort on the creator’s part and seemingly never-ending revision.

Most artists spend days and nights alone, working in an occupation that is rarely rewarded materially and socially. They face the daily obstacles of isolation, loneliness, lack of recognition and the fear that their work is not good enough and their ideas will dry up. The knowledge that an artist is dependent on his or her own level of creativity, his or her ability to find a fresh approach and insight, can be debilitating. Running out of material can be traumatic, even career-ending. Also when artists finish an involved, ambi-tious project, they can be left feeling empty. If they want to succeed, they have to muster the strength to start again, facing the blank canvas, com-puter screen, empty studio or sheet of music. All of this is reason enough to fall prey to moodiness.

Anaïs Nin said, “The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” Artists are tasked with the job of questioning a world that doesn’t seem quite right, always probing the status quo. They live with the longing to find new ways of seeing and understanding.

While turning his feelings into art gave his life value, Van Gogh’s work was often sorrow laden. Like many artists, he believed that one must feel what one creates and that for him “the drama of storm in nature, the drama of sorrow in life, is the most impressive.”

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The jury is still out on whether creative people suffer more intensely than the rest of us and whether their sorrow lapses more frequently into men-tal illness. Yet we cling to the Romantic myths of creativity, preferring the image of the artist as madman over the artisan who finds tranquillity and comfort in the regimentation of vocation. The artists’ stories that we love to read perpetuate the idea that artists are martyrs to their craft. Van Gogh said, “The more I am spent, ill, a broken pitcher, by so much more am I an artist”—and so he was.

Kristine SomervilleKristine Somerville’s visual and “Found Text” features appear regularly in the Missouri Review. Her short stories, nonfiction and prose poems have been published in a variety of magazines, includ-ing the North American Review, Passages North, Quarterly West and New Voices from the Academy of American Poets.

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