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WRITING MADNESS
By Patrick McGrath
Cagliari 2015
I’ve come to the conclusion, recently, that the fiction I’ve been
writing for the last 25 years or so has been all about madness. So
what I’d like to do tonight is talk about what pushed me in this
direction, and also about the work of other writers who took madness
as their subject, and who influenced my own work. So this is a talk
called Writing Madness.
A psychiatrist introduced me to ideas of madness when I was eight
years old. He was my father. For twenty-five years he was medical
superintendent
of
hospital
London,
near
Broadmoor
once
Hospital,
called
a
top-security
Broadmoor
Criminal
mental
Lunatic
Asylum. I’ve never suffered from schizophrenia, but as a young boy
I
learned
much
about
the
illness
from
him.
I
say
“illness.”
Schizophrenia is now thought to be a cluster of related symptoms
rather than a single unified pathology; a syndrome, not an illness.
It was once believed to involve a split personality, but my father
explained to me that the schizophrenic was more properly regarded
as
having
a
shattered
personality.
It
may
have
been
that
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conversation, and the dramatic image of the shattered personality,
that set me on course for writing madness.
My early reading was largely horror fiction. I devoured the
stories of Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James and Sheridan LeFanu, and
later Ambrose Bierce and Edgar Allan Poe, who aroused in me an
enduring taste for gothic literature. I later came to the conclusion
that with Poe a pivotal moment in the history of the gothic
occurred, when a genre that had been identified largely with
supernatural phenomena turned toward psychological dysfunction, and
discovered in the disintegrating mind a vein of black gold. For
with Poe it became the special talent and function of gothic fiction
to
expose
nightmares
the
and
workings
of
phantoms,
the
of
unconscious
sublimation,
mind.
A
world
regression
of
and
displacement, of doppelgangers and other monsters of the Id was
extensively mapped for more than a century before Freud organized
the material in a theoretical format, and wrote madness from within
a scientific paradigm. Psychoanalytic theory and the case studies
underpinning it are the continuation by other means of the gothic
novel.
What is a gothic novel? I coedited a fiction anthology that came
out in 1991 called The New Gothic. It contained stories by writers
who seemed to me be working in the gothic vein, with gothic themes,
if not with gothic furniture, by which I mean thunderstorms and
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ruins and clanking chains and the rest. We included writers like
Jamaica Kincaid and Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Straub and Martin Amis,
William Vollman and Lynne Tillman, all of whom, as I say, employed
gothic
themes
in
their
work.
These
themes
I
identified
as
transgression and decay. I suggested that if transgression and decay
were foregrounded in the work, it counted as New Gothic.
Later I came to realize that a third term had to be introduced
into this black trinity, and this was madness. Intuitively we
glimpse the relation between transgression and decay and madness,
and I was interested to read recently the English painter Julian
Bell say of an exhibition in Paris called The Angel of the Odd:
Dark Romanticism from Goya to Max Ernst, that the central fear
around which Dark Romanticism revolves, which is neither that of
death or evil, nor the supernatural, is rather that of madness-—
the fear that the subject is incoherent, the “I” is ungovernably
“other” … Enlightenment reason was inherently inclined to tug away
at its own underpinnings… push the theme of reason hard enough and
you end up digging at reason’s roots in the psyche, and beneath it
in the organism and in existence per se…”
I associate Poe most strongly with this turn toward madness in
our literature. In his tales of horror Poe gave us a fine collection
of neurotics, paranoids and psychopaths, and in particular I think
of the demented narrators of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black
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Cat,” and also of Roderick Usher and William Wilson. But I don’t
believe any one of Poe’s characters is quite as chillingly mad as
Montresor, who narrates “The Cask of Amontillado.”
Montresor’s account of his soured friendship with a man named
Fortunato opens, in the first line of the story, with a threat.
“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could,
but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.” What a wealth of
pathology is revealed in these words!--for it soon becomes clear
that the “thousand injuries” Montresor mentions are less harmful to
him than the “insult” he claims to have suffered.
What are they then, these thousand injuries? Are they slights?
Innuendoes, perhaps, hints and whispers? As the tale unfolds, with
growing unease we begin to understand that it’s on account of these
slights, and the insult that follows, that Montresor has bricked up
his friend in the vaults of a crumbling Venetian palazzo, and left
him there to die. This is writing madness of a very high order.
It’s also a good early example of the unreliable narrator at
work. For having drawn us into Montresor’s paranoia with his very
first sentence, Poe will not let us escape. Like poor Fortunato we
too are walled up in a suffocating structure from which only death—or the end of the story-—can release us. Until that moment we are
imprisoned in a logic that is entirely sound, but for the fact that
it’s erected on a false, mad premise.
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My own first serious attempt to practise the black art of writing
madness properly began with a novel that bore some faint echoes of
Poe. It was intended to be the simple tale of a London plumber who
murders his wife so he can move his mistress, a prostitute, into
his house. I hit on the idea that the plumber’s little boy should
narrate the novel. I then decided that the boy would remember these
events as an adult, but that what he recalls is not what happened.
It then dawned on me that my narrator was not merely unreliable, he
was psychotic. He suffered from schizophrenia.
This is when the problem of writing madness first announced
itself to me loud and clear. Fictional narrative and psychotic
illness would seem to be mutually exclusive entities. My plumber’s
son
didn’t
possess
the
chilling
intellectual
rigour
of
Poe’s
Montresor, but he was no less insane, a disorganized creature whose
thoughts jumped and drifted at the whim of the world around him and
the apparently random associations sparked in his untidy brain.
Nicknamed “Spider” by his mother-—before her untimely death--his
unmedicated mind was an incoherent construct of irrationality,
hallucination and bodily delusion.
The novel, however, as I then understood the form-—it was my
second--demands a kind of swelling narrative progress grounded in
causality that ultimately offers a clear design. The task became to
render the wildly fluctuant chaos of psychosis within the ordered
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frame of the narrative, without either misrepresenting the illness
or obscuring the clear movement of the story.
Now, closely imagined accounts of madness in literature are more
rare than you might think, outside of Poe; as I discovered when I
began to look for precedents. What instances there were of writing
madness, at least in the 19th century, tended to be gothic. “Wieland”
is an outstandingly bleak early American novel involving murder
followed by suicide. Written by Charles Brockden Brown, it was
published in 1798 and narrated not by the madman himself, but his
sister. It depicts a pathology all too familiar to us today,
“voices” instructing a confused man to make a fatal strike against
his own family.
While “Wieland” had some bearing on Spider’s tale, more useful
for my purposes was a short story written almost a century later,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The author was
a feminist, a philosopher, a socialist and activist, and she was
inspired to write the story after undergoing what in late-19th
century America was called the “rest cure.” This was a treatment
prescribed for women diagnosed as hysterical, and was invented by
Silas Weir Mitchell, a distinguished Philadelphia neurologist.
By her own account Charlotte Perkins Gilman became so desperate,
deprived
for
three
months
of
books,
work
and
other
forms
of
stimulation, that she saved her sanity only by resuming her writing;
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her story was intended to convince Silas Weir Mitchell of the error
of his ways. It’s narrated by a woman whose physician husband won’t
let her leave her bedroom, where it’s intended that she recover
from
her
“temporary
nervous
depression-—a
slight
hysterical
tendency.”
She starts to go mad.
Of particular interest to me was the precision with which
Gilman’s narrator depicts the stages of her own breakdown. She’s
unaware throughout that what she’s describing is a rapid descent
into psychosis, one that involves a bizarre cluster of delusions
narrowly focused on the yellow wallpaper in the bedroom that’s
become her prison. Without question there’s method in her madness,
and each stage of the descent follows with an inexorable logic from
what came before. And as with Poe’s Montresor, it all makes sense-but for the initial mad premise.
I imagined my own character, Spider, descending into madness
also by stages, and under the controlling influence of a flawed
assumption. I imagined him returning to the East London neighborhood
where he’d grown up, a threadbare, mumbling man who in his lonely
wanderings finds his eyes drawn irresistibly to the looming circular
structure of a gasworks, a not uncommon sight in that part of the
city. And it fills him with horror. I also imagined that many years
earlier his mother had come home late from the pub, then passed out
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in the kitchen and died from gas inhalation. The reader won’t learn
of this for some time, however.
One night, as Spider sits in his shabby room at the top of a
local boarding house, he detects an unpleasant odor. He realizes
it’s coming from himself, and it smells like gas. He tears open his
clothing and yes, there can be no doubt of it-—gas!
My reader will understand that for this disturbed and fragile
man, gas has an awful significance. But why? That night Spider takes
the sheets of yellowing newspaper that line the clothes drawers in
his room and ties them around his torso with sticking plaster and
string. When he’s bound in newspaper from neck to groin he puts his
clothes on, all his clothes, the better to suppress the appalling
smell.
Later he will come to believe that he stinks of gas because he’s
going bad inside. His organs are shriveling and rotting, starting
to disappear-—and so it goes on. By this point I hope my reader is
seeing Spider not as a monster of unreason, nor even a mere sorry
instance of common abject lunacy. No, I want the reader to be
decoding Spider’s torment, understanding that the belief that one
stinks of gas must be connected to a profound conviction of one’s
own badness, one’s guilt. It sounds like very crazy stuff, and so
it is. But no psychiatrist who’s treated schizophrenia will be
surprised by these florid somatic delusions.
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While researching schizophrenia for this book I came upon a
phrase in R.D. Laing’s “The Divided Self,” perhaps the best account
of
schizophrenia
ever
written,
that
provided
the
key
to
understanding the character I was trying to bring to life on the
page. The schizophrenic, said Laing, is “dying of thirst in a world
of wet.” I saw a man living in a London neighborhood but so isolated,
so profoundly separate that he’s unable to make a human connection
and know love, or even friendship, or even the simple warmth to be
had from common daily interaction with others. He’s dying of thirst
in a world of wet, and for a writer of madness like myself, this
was a priceless insight.
&
The novel of madness in the 20th century is often characterized by
a kind of naturalism that’s absent in the more stylized gothic or
romantic fiction of the earlier period. It marks a shift away from
the gothic, although it tends to follow Charlotte Perkins Gilman in
her focus on the disturbed woman at the mercy of a man, whether a
doctor, a husband, or just men in general. Three outstanding novels
of madness, all written within a 10-year period, 1961 to 1971, and
all by women, explore the theme of madness in often excruciating
detail. In “The Bell Jar,” Sylvia Plath’s novel of mental breakdown,
a young woman becomes alienated from all that is familiar to her,
and drifts rather than plunges into madness, growing increasingly
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isolated, and subject to bizarrely skewed perceptions. At one point
she glimpses in her friend’s mouth an evil spirit, a dybbuk, that
has invaded her body, and speaks through her. Later the young woman
attempts suicide and is hospitalized. “I felt as if I were sitting
in the window of an enormous department store,” she writes. “The
figures around me weren’t people, but shop dummies, painted to
resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life.”
She continues to think constantly about suicide. Will she slit
her wrists, she wonders. Will she drown in the sea? She undergoes
her first bout of electric shock therapy: “... and with each flash
a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the
sap fly out of me like a split plant.” The horror of insanity, and
of the methods used to treat it, is rendered all the more vivid for
being described with such sharp clinical lucidity. In the end it’s
the simple image of the bell jar that most perfectly expresses the
hellish experience this suffocating woman is going through: “...
wherever I sat... I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar,
stewing in my own sour air.”
Sylvia Plath’s story was mirrored with cruel precision in the
facts of her own brief life. When the book came out in England,
where she was then living, she was in a bad way. Her marriage to
the poet Ted Hughes had collapsed. She had no money. She was living
in a bare flat with her two small children during the coldest winter
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in a hundred years, and all three were sick with the flu. The bell
jar again descended, as she always feared it would, and she sank
into a profound depression. She killed herself by means of gas on
February 11, 1963. She was thirty years old.
A contemporary of Sylvia Plath’s was the New Zealand writer Janet
Frame,
whose
novel
“Faces
in
the
Water”
gives
an
even
more
terrifying picture of psychiatric incarceration and electric shock
therapy.
The
novel
takes
place
entirely
in
a
women’s
mental
institution, and of all the horrors of the place, the narrator finds
herself “dreading more and more the sound of the trolley and the
stifled screams as it moved from room to room, nearer and nearer.
And suddenly the brightness of Ward Seven seemed to burst into a
glare
of
camouflage
chaotic
the
vegetation,
movements
of
as
if
it
deadly
existed
now
reptiles
and
merely
to
poisonous
insects...” The trolley contains the equipment required for the
administration of electric shock therapy.
But then comes an extraordinary variation on the theme. Jean
Rhys was a writer whose work was widely read in the 1930s, but who’d
so completely disappeared from sight that she was thought by many
to have died. But she had one last book in her, “Wide Sargasso Sea,”
and in it she takes Charlotte Bronte’s great gothic novel “Jane
Eyre” and tells the story, not of Jane, but of Mr. Rochester’s mad
wife, Bertha, who’s locked in an attic of his great house. Jean
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Rhys imagines Bertha’s early life, when she lived in Jamaica as
Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress. Torn from that life, and
carried off by a man she has come to hate to a cold and distant
land, she goes mad; and in her madness destroys her husband’s house.
Charlotte
Bronte’s
novel
is
thus
turned
on
its
head,
as
our
attention shifts from Jane’s tribulations to an understanding of
the madwoman imprisoned in the attic, of what she has suffered, and
why she burns down the great house, destroying herself in the
process.
I hadn’t read Wide Sargasso Sea when I wrote my own novel of a
persecuted woman some 25 years after Jean Rhys. It’s called Asylum—Follia, in Italy--and curiously my father inspired the novel, and
not merely by enabling me to grow up on the grounds of a large
psychiatric hospital. I’d been casting around for an idea for a
while, and I remembered an incident from my childhood, something
unresolved, a story without a proper ending, and lacking in any
real depth of detail, remarkable not for what had happened but for
what had not. I remember I entered a room where adults were talking
and at once they fell silent. Whatever was going on was not for my
ears. But nothing will more reliably provoke a child’s curiosity
than being told, in effect, that there’s a secret, and that he’s
not
to
be
let
in
on
it.
This
occurred
in
the
Medical
Superintendent’s house, a large red-brick Victorian villa which
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stood a hundred yards from the Main Gate of Broadmoor. And as I
say, my father was the superintendent.
The secret was this. An illicit relationship had been discovered
between a doctor’s wife and a patient. Broadmoor doctors were
forensic psychiatrists, and the patients, many of them, criminal
offenders who’d been found not guilty by reason of insanity. I
believe the patient in question lost his parole privileges as a
result of the incident, meaning he was confined within the walls of
the hospital and could no longer work on the grounds. Later the
doctor’s wife left the hospital with her husband and family, one of
whom was a boy my own age and a particular friend of mine.
This fragile and certainly flawed scrap of narrative was all I
had, but it gave me the germ of Asylum. I would set it in 1959,
when it happened. It was a time I remembered as clearly as I remember
anything of my childhood. I had not yet been sent away to boarding
school, and the long summers in the fields and forest around the
hospital were the best of times in this small boy’s secure and
untroubled life so far. I knew the look of Broadmoor as it then
was, the feel of the place and its people, and I was confident I
could bring it to life on the page.
Now I had a story. It would be about the wife. I gave her a name,
Stella Raphael. She came alive, I could see her at once. An
attractive, sophisticated woman, she missed her life in London and
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was bored not only with the members and wives of the senior staff
common room, but also with her husband. He’s called Max Raphael.
Stella and Max have a child, Charlie, aged ten, and him I knew very
well indeed, for he was me. His parents were not mine, but in his
fascination with toads, and watery places, and football, and the
parole patients who came out every day to look after the grounds of
the estate, and whom he treated as benign uncles, this was me. A
plump, toothy, precocious child, he was in love with his mother but
eager for conversation with his father about all manner of things.
I was soon plotting his downfall.
But first, Stella Raphael. It was then about ten minutes before
feminism properly arrived in the south of England. In the late
Fifties the opportunities for a wife and mother in a rural hospital
community were not plentiful. I wanted her to have few outlets, and
an unfulfilling marriage, also a ripe disdain for the social
possibilities
on
offer.
Only
the
deputy
superintendent
amuses
Stella. He is Peter Cleave, a worldly, cultivated older man,
unmarried, and committed to his own private pleasures. One of Peter
Cleave’s patients is Edgar Stark, a sculptor, who works in the
Raphaels’ garden.
I remember the ease with which the early part of the story was
written. It’s very rare. I counted it as a good sign, in retrospect,
although at the time it made me uneasy. Stella at once recognizes
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in Edgar Stark a kindred spirit, like herself incarcerated unjustly
in this place of rigid constraint and numbing routine. The sexual
affair begins. It is a thing of recklessness and passion. The lovers
form an unholy alliance, and it was clear to me what must happen
next. With Stella’s help Edgar escapes from the asylum and flees to
London.
It was at around this time in the writing of the book that
serendipity occurred. On a visit home, browsing through my father’s
bookshelves,
I
found
a
slim
volume
about
a
rare
psychiatric
disorder. It was called Morbid Jealousy and Murder. I devoured it
at once. And by pure chance that book gave me all I needed both to
establish Edgar Stark’s pathology, and to suggest the gravity of
the danger Stella faced. This man was violent, and it was against
women that his violence had been directed in the past. I saw all
this, and I saw redemption. I saw a scene on Southwark Bridge, the
lovers reunited, and their future, although far from easy, assured.
For did they not love?
In the early stages of a book a novelist may imagine a hundred
endings to his story but rarely does any one of them survive. Lovers
on Southwark Bridge, a smoky sunset, this was all a wishful dream.
For where can they go? By leaving her family and joining Edgar
Stark, Stella has put herself not only beyond the bounds of her
marriage and her community, but also beyond the law. But there is
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nothing beyond the law, there is nowhere to go. Edgar of course had
long been beyond the law. Edgar had murdered. Now they were in
hiding. It was surely only a matter of time-—
A major decision would soon have to be taken. I was writing the
novel first-person, from Stella’s point of view. I continued to do
so, eager to discover by means of intense imaginative identification
all I could about this bold heart. But I became aware that I must
soon take the story away from her. The novel couldn’t allow her
full dominion over the meaning of her experience. To Stella the
world was well lost for love, but that world contained a child and
I needed another voice, a dissident voice, telling her she was
wrong, that the world was not well lost for love, that we bear
responsibilities to others and that we transgress at our mortal
peril. I’d realized whose voice it had to be. Everything I had
assiduously uncovered within Stella’s mind and soul would have to
be put at the disposal of this man, and the reader would have to
take sides. It was Peter Cleave, the psychiatrist.
I’d hatched a careful plan in regard to my research for Asylum.
I had of course my own memories of Broadmoor, and in addition there
were mysterious movements of serendipity, but my intention had
always been this. I would rough out the book in first draft and get
the story down on paper. I would then go into deep conference with
my
father.
I
looked
forward
to
another
richly
pleasurable
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collaboration with the master. But I’d left it too late. My father
was ill. He wasn’t strong enough to give me the benefit of his vast
experience in the ways of asylums. Late one autumn morning, in my
wife’s house in London, I finished the first draft of the book and
then drove down to Berkshire. I missed him by an hour.
&
Ten days later I returned to London and resumed work on the novel
that I would now have to finish by myself. The work went quickly.
Peter Cleave proved a most suitable narrator for Stella’s story. He
had
access
to
her
account
of
the
affair,
and
a
psychiatric
understanding of the man Edgar Stark. His view of what Stella
regarded as a love for which the world was worth losing was more
prosaic than hers. He saw not love but something else, a kind of
madness. It took me a long time to get the ending right.
&
I remember being with my father once at dusk crossing a yard inside
Broadmoor. I was eight or nine years old. A scream came from a high
window in Block Six. Even now the words “Block Six” put a chill up
my spine. It was where the most disturbed male patients were housed.
New admissions went into Block Six, if they presented any risk-—
men who had in most cases committed grievous acts of violence while
psychotic. But it wasn’t a scream of wild fury I heard that evening,
it was a scream of the most wretched misery. I looked up at my
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father. “Poor John,” he said, and I understood that he understood
what his patient was suffering. This is what writing madness must
try
to
express,
I
believe,
empathy
and
compassion
for
the
existential limits to which men and women can be driven by mental
illness.
I think it was the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who described the
speech of schizophrenics as “language without discourse.” This is
a useful formulation, but for the novelist it’s not enough. A
discourse-—a coherent story-—must be discernible within even the
wildest ramblings of an insane narrator, like Poe’s Montresor, or
Jean Rhys’s Bertha Rochester
Technically it’s a highly demanding form of fiction to write.
But
it’s
not
without
rules
and
structure.
Madness
is
never
arbitrary, never random in its manifestations, or its causes. The
reader who’s been successfully enlisted as a kind of psychiatric
detective will find herself engaged, in novels like these, with
minds as rich in complexity as any in our literature. That such
minds operate largely blind to their own dysfunction only compounds
their terrifying unpredictability.
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