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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

The Writer's Ward

  
  

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tracypanzer
17:18 / 06.08.01
Here's something on Sylvia Plath: http://www.salon.com/books/wire/2001/08/06/plath_pills/index.html
Says that she took the wrong anti-depressant drugs and they drove her to suicide. That's what her husband thought at least. Interesting article.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
20:24 / 06.08.01
John Clare, Kit Smart, (possibly) Blake, Savage...

Pessoa's first experience of writing under another personality (or heteronym, which I believe is the technical term) was on 8 March, 1914, when he wrote thirty poems 'in a kind of trance whose nature I cannot define'. He said it was 'the appearance of someone in me, to whom I at once gave the name "Alberto Caeiro"...' after which he had a spectral version of Caeiro's disciples Ricardo Reis and Alvaros de Campos. He was aware of the process as a kind of psychological anomaly... my source says that 'At times, according to one of his critics, it actually drove him mad.'
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
09:22 / 07.08.01
From this page, a list of writers and poets - probably not too up-to-date - who suffered bipolar disorder (schizophrenia as was).
quote:Writers: Hans Christian Andersen, Honore de Balzac, James Barrie, Arthur Benson (H), E.F. Benson, James Boswell, William Faulkner (H), F. Scott Fitzgerald (H), Lewis Grassic Gibbon (SA), Nikolai Gogl, Maxim Gorky (SA), Kenneth Graham, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway (H, S), Hermann Hesse (H, SA), Henrik Ibsen, William Inge (H, S), Henry James, William James, Charles Lamb (H), Malcolm Lowry (H, S), John Bunyan, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Joseph Conrad (SA), Charles Dickens, Isak Dinesen (SA), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Eugene O'Neill (H, SA), Francis Parkman, John Ruskin (H), Mary Shelley, Jean Stafford (H), Robert Louis Stevenson, August Strindberg, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Tennessee Williams (H), Mary Wollstonecraft (SA), Virginia Woolf (H, S), Emile Zola

Poets: Antonin Artaud (H), Konstantin Batyushkov (H, SA), Charles Baudelaire (SA), Thomas Lovell Beddoes (S), John Berryman (H, S), William Blake, Aleksandr Blok, Barcroft Boake (S), Louis Bogan (H), Rupert Brooke, Robert Burns, George Gordon Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Paul Celan (S), Thomas Chatterton (S), John Clare (H), Harley Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Collins (H), William Cowper (H, SA), Hart Crane (S), George Darley, John Davidson (S), Emily Dickinson, Ernest Dowson, T.S. Eliot (H), Sergey Esenin (S), Robert Fergusson (H), Afanasy Fet (SA), Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, Edward FitzGerald, John Gould Fletcher (S), Gustaf Froding (SA, H), Oliver Goldsmith, Adam Lindsay Gordon (S), Thomas Gray, Nikolai Gumilyov (SA), Robert Stephen Hawker, Friedrich Holderlin (H), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Victor Hugo, Randal Jarrell (H, S), Samuel Johnson, John Keats, Henry Kendall (H), Velimir Khlebnikov (H), Heinrich Von Kleist (S), Walter Savage Landor, Nikolaus Lenau (H), J.M.R. Lenz (SA), Mikhail Lermontov, Vachel Lindsay (S), James Russell Lowell, Robert Lowell (H), Hugh MacDiarmid (H), Louis MacNeice, Osip Mandelstam (H, SA), James Clarence Mangan, Vladimir Mayakovsky (S), Edna St. Vincent Millay (H), Alfred de Musset, Gerard de Nerval (H, S), Boris Pasternak (H), Cesare Pavese (S), Sylvia Plath (H, S), Edgar Allan Poe (SA), Ezra Pound (H), Alexander Pushkin, Laura Riding (SA), Theodore Roethke (H), Delmore Schwartz (H), Anne Sexton (H, S), Percy Bysshe Shelley (SA), Christopher Smart (H), Torquato Tasso (H), Sara Teasdale (H, S), Alfred, Lord tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Edward thomas, Francis Thompson, George Trakl (H, S), Marina Tsvetayeva (S), Walt Whitman

KEY:
H = Asylum or psychiatric hospital
S = Suicide
SA = Suicide attempt
Hmm.

Just as far as Sylvia Plath goes: there's a great book called The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm - I recall that that's an interesting look at the problems involved with getting biographical information straight, and where the rights for her work reside: my reading of it was some years ago, but if I remember rightly, Ted Hughes comes off as a bit of a deadshit. Didn't one of his other wives commit suicide too?
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
09:27 / 07.08.01
Yes, Assia Wevill - she killed their daughter as well.

That list seems quite hefty - what did they base it on?
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
09:33 / 07.08.01
Again, from the page: quote:The following list is drawn from Kay Jamison's Touched With Fire; Manic-Depressive Ilness and the Artistic Temperament

In Appendix B: Writers, Artists, and Composers with Probable Cyclothymia, Major Depression, or Manic-Depressive Illness.

"This is meant to be an illustrative rather than a comprehensive list; for systematic studies, see text. Most of the writers, composers, and artists are American, British, European, Irish, or Russian; all are deceased . . . Many if not most of these writers, artists, and composers had other major problems as well, such as medical illnesses, alcoholism or drug addiction, or exceptionally difficult life circumstances. They are listed here as having suffered from a mood disorder because their mood symptoms redated their other conditions, because the nature and course of their mood and behavior symptoms were consistent with a diagnosis of an independently existing affective illness, and/or because their family histories of depression, manic-depressive illness, and suicide--coupled with their own symptoms--were sufficiently strong to warrant their inclusion."

I think there's probably some on there that have had bipolar inferred from their behaviour which may not be the case. In many circumstances, alcoholism et al could be the cause for the suicide attempts, not necessarily the personality disorder...
 
 
Frances Farmer
09:34 / 07.08.01
Frances Farmer was an extremely talented actress, diagnosed with manic-depressive illness (amongst other things). Naturally, they later withdrew their diagnosis after accusations of terrible abuse in the nuthouse they locked her in. I think the amphetamines had something to do with the whole ordeal.

Does that count?

[ 07-08-2001: Message edited by: Frances ]
 
 
Jackie Susann
09:34 / 07.08.01
quote:Originally posted by grant:



Funny ha-ha, or funny peculiar?

Funny in the, appropriate subject to snidely make fun of in a throwaway thread, sort of a way.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
09:34 / 07.08.01
According to someone I know, Strong Imagination by Daniel Nettle is a good study on mental illness and creativity. It's reviewed here.

Anybody read it, and able to comment?
 
 
grant
14:30 / 07.08.01
quote:Originally posted by Jackie Nothing Special:
Funny in the, appropriate subject to snidely make fun of in a throwaway thread, sort of a way.

Who's making fun of them?

Here's the point of the thread, as stated in the first post: quote:because we might figure out something about how culture is created by its own margins.

I want to know, first, whether there's something quantifiable to the widely-held concept of (to use your own words) "artistic craziness" (sexy or otherwise) and second, how it is that the excluded, unhealthy and abnormal wind up as the architects of mainstream culture.

Might also be worth noting that my grandfather died in a German sanitorium for his "antisocial tendencies." Personally, based on my grandmother's writings, I don't think he's what we'd call mentally ill nowadays, but they certainly deemed him as such at the time in which he lived.
 
 
grant
14:37 / 07.08.01
quote:Originally posted by Rothkoid:
According to someone I know, Strong Imagination by Daniel Nettle is a good study on mental illness and creativity. It's reviewed here.
Anybody read it, and able to comment?


I haven't read the book, but I think the review's first paragraph points up a big problem already raised here:
quote:W H Auden claimed that he had never experienced a single day of depression: "I've always found existence enjoyable. Even when one is hurt and has to bellow, still one is fundamentally happy to be able to." It's one of the least appealing things he ever said, and probably quite untrue: if everything was such fun, why did he make so much use of pills (uppers and downers) and conduct his life according to an obsessive daily routine?


There's this urge - even here - to sort of retro-diagnose artists as a little nutty. What's with that? Why do we want to consign gifted people to the writer's ward?

The reviewer gets into this a little here:

quote:[Nettle] cites an early 19th-century Bedlam patient, "Mr Matthews" (no first name recorded), who was convinced he was being persecuted by a whole nest of enemies. Equipped with superbly colourful names - such as Sir Archy, the Middle Man and the Glove Woman - they were (he believed) manipulating his mind at a distance by "pneumatic chemistry". A century and a half later, Evelyn Waugh had a similarly vivid hallucination, recorded in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, one of few books in which an entirely sane author depicts a very real personal experience of madness.

Waugh's delusions were brought on by drugs, and had little to do with his real mental state. But Nettle argues that, generally speaking, living on the edge of psychosis is a creative malady - for creative people. On the other hand, he admits that it merely brings misery to most individuals, who cannot express their anguish through art.


(bold mine)

And the conclusion:
quote:the answer to his main question has already been suggested at the beginning of the book: that psychotic genes are still in our make-up because we need the imagination and creativity that are one of their spin-offs.

Don't know if I buy that. Seems like an easy, defensive rationale: "Well, I'm not very creative but, you know, those 'creative types' are all mad anyway."

[ 07-08-2001: Message edited by: grant ]
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
15:28 / 07.08.01
D'y think it cuts both ways, though? Artists could rely on the "touched by the muse!" take on things every bit as much as non-artists could use the "they're all bonkers anyway" card, couldn't they? I do disagree with the idea of mental illness being more special for "creative" types than those who aren't - surely it's just because those mentioned so far are _famous_ that it's considered that they've used their problem in a more creative way than anyone else?
 
 
Jack Fear
18:01 / 07.08.01
I'm with grant on this one--because creativity, like religion, is a challenge. Because once you admit (even to yourself) that you are a talented, creative being, the question becomes "Well, then--what are you going to do with that creativity?"

And that's more repsonsibility than most people are ready to handle.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
19:36 / 07.08.01
quote:Originally posted by Jack Fear:
And that's more repsonsibility than most people are ready to handle.
Come on - it's producing a piece of work, not strapping on a grenade launcher. It just sounds a bit stupid (to me) to suggest that creativity is some sort of heavenly attribute, or to say that people who haven't chosen to dedicate their lives to the creation of art (of any kind) are of some lesser creative worth than anyone else. People who spend more time creating work as the focus of their life will, probably, produce a better quality of output. It's pointless to say that all creative artifacts are equal, but that doesn't devalue the impulses felt by those who haven't made it the centre of their life.

Case in point: I write. I write professionally, too, but not in a novels-n-stuff kind of way as I would like to. Like most creative people I've come across, I don't feel that the creativity is necessarily some kind of lightning-bolt from above, nor is it some grail-like thing that I'm the keeper of. I don't think it's much like the grandstanding rave-up you give it, Jack; lots of creative people do feel, after all, that their stuff is just shit...
 
 
grant
13:19 / 08.08.01
quote:Originally posted by Rothkoid:
D'y think it cuts both ways, though? Artists could rely on the "touched by the muse!" take on things every bit as much as non-artists could use the "they're all bonkers anyway" card, couldn't they?

Yeah, definitely. The "capital-W Writers" used to really annoy me in college. The cultivators of alcoholism and creators of eccentric scenes, many of whom never actually seemed to get much writing done.
It's the preconception on both sides that seems, well, counterproductive.

quote: I do disagree with the idea of mental illness being more special for "creative" types than those who aren't - surely it's just because those mentioned so far are _famous_ that it's considered that they've used their problem in a more creative way than anyone else?

Yes, I can see that. I have a hunch, though, that part of what's going on is a labelling function where if someone is a talented, creative person there's a socially-constructed urge to find the madness. And since madness is fairly elastic in definition, it's easy enough to consign someone into that category.
I'm far from convinced of this, though.

I can also buy the idea that there's this tiny, arbitrarily defined little cell-reality that’s the sane-mainstream-mundane world, and that there’s all this unseen, viscous stuff outside it which gets processed as either “madness” or “creatively touched” or “divinely inspired” – and that that outside not only defines the difference between sane/mundane and insane/divine, but also somehow creates the difference, actually assembles the materials that little cell-reality is made of.

I'd like to know how it does that. How the cell gets generated from that unseen protoplasmic crazystuff.
 
 
grant
13:27 / 08.08.01
And yeah, Jack's got a point too - the "mad writer" construction can be used counterproductively as a defense against actually doing anything.
And social boundaries do have a solidity to them. But they're much more membranous than we like to think.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
21:46 / 08.08.01
Good points, grant, thanks. The Cult of the Writer (or the affectation of such, moreso) is a problem, I think. There's still a very romantic image attached to being someone who's creative, despite my experience of it not necessarily being so. How did this develop, I wonder - is it an offshoot of the troubadour/wandering storyteller, or has it sprung from somewhere else? And is the suggestion of madness merely a handy way of saying that particular people are allowed to explore things that everyperson isn't? Say, would Bret Easton Ellis have been considered mad, or somewhat deranged for American Psycho's exploration of extreme sadism and sexual violence, when in fact he might've merely testing the limits of acceptability in literature, or cashing in on a shock dollar?

Is the creator/consumer divide merely an easy form of naming? People who write books must be special! So we must give them something special - madness, divine inspiration, whatever - to explain their output.

I'd love to know how that permeable societal membrane works. Any more clues? Is it retroactive cult-of-personality stuff mapped onto anyone who picks up a pen with original thought? Are the puffy-shirted poets and garret-bound scribblers still governing how we perceive things? Not every writer becomes Papa Hemingway and blows their head off - yet there seems to be a predilection to think of it as a probability for most, isn't there?

Just wondering, too - where would a thread on the definition/dissection of creativity be best-placed? In The Creation? I feel that pinning down - or at least exploring in its own right - what being creative is would be a good thing.
 
 
Myfi
17:11 / 09.08.01
I know, he's still alive, but Michael Marshall Smith would be locked up if he wasn't do bloody marvellous

BTW, IMHO you don't have to be mad to write, but it helps.

Who have I stolen that quote from? It's not even a quote, it's just obvious fact
 
 
Myfi
17:21 / 09.08.01
Rothkoid, please don't post your stuff next to mine as it makes me look stupid Having said that I manage it fairly well by myself too.

I have often wondered about the line between what is acceptable thought/words for a writer/normal person. For example some of my stuff is absolutely horrid and I can't even talk about it to most of the people I know, so why do I write it? Writing horrid stuff is a buzz for me, is it just because it's so 'naughty'?

I do know if I acted like the stuff I write about was acceptable I'd get into big trouble. But isn't that why people read, to get out of the norm into another place, where it's different/a bit strange?

I feel like when I'm writing/being 'creative' that's when I'm truly me, the me that hides away most of the time. So perhaps it's just the internal child having it's say.

Gotta go
 
 
grant
19:33 / 09.08.01
quote:Originally posted by Rothkoid:
Is the creator/consumer divide merely an easy form of naming? People who write books must be special! So we must give them something special - madness, divine inspiration, whatever - to explain their output.

Namedropping: I knew Ernest Hemingway's younger brother, Leicester. Great man. He died the same way. No one but his family and friends really know about it though. He wrote plenty, too. Not bad stuff, the little I've read.
But he never grabbed the public eye, yeah? He was "one of us" - and I think in some ways, that might be what killed him. His daughter, Hilary, wrote a play called... "A Candle in the Darkness" I think, about that - being consistently outshone by Ernest.

quote:
I'd love to know how that permeable societal membrane works. Any more clues? Is it retroactive cult-of-personality stuff mapped onto anyone who picks up a pen with original thought? Are the puffy-shirted poets and garret-bound scribblers still governing how we perceive things? Not every writer becomes Papa Hemingway and blows their head off - yet there seems to be a predilection to think of it as a probability for most, isn't there?

I have no clue how that thing works, but I think it's related to shamanic journeying into dreamtime/the underworld or whatever.

What I want to know is is there really a predilection or do we just think there's a predilection? Is it mapped retroactively? What about Melville? Shakespeare?

quote:Just wondering, too - where would a thread on the definition/dissection of creativity be best-placed? In The Creation? I feel that pinning down - or at least exploring in its own right - what being creative is would be a good thing.


This is seeming a bit Head-Shoppy, innit.
 
 
Myfi
22:24 / 11.08.01
OK, well I asked my friend who is an 'artist' about his opinion on why it's acceptable for artists to broach subjects which are off limits to the civilised masses. He said it's all a matter of intellectual snobbery, the artists tend to place themselves in a higher class to the majority of Joe Public, and it is assumed that artists have the responsibility to handle such subjects as murder, rape whatever whereas a regular person might not stop at discussion/contemplation and be unable to stop themselves from acting upon these thoughts.

It does remind me of something Neil Gaiman said about writer's responsibility, it was something sensible like 'If you feel that you have written responsibly then that's good enough'.

Having said that it is my opinion that creativity, coming from the childish area of the mind would be mostly reckless and irresponsible, but then maybe reckless responsibility is what being a grown up is all about.
 
 
Whisky Priestess
15:38 / 16.08.01
God this is interesting - took me long enough to find it, alas. This is all very relevant (especially Rothkoid's astute obsertvations on being/not being a keeper of the grail) to the FanFiction thread in teh Head Shop. After nine pages we've pretty much got down to "Why are writers so fucking special?"

I've known three professional writers personally and the common ground is that they can all get very precious about their work, because as professionals, their work is regarded as precious, and paid for by others. They are actually among the saner people i have known but there is certainly a sense of "I don't know how I do it so I must be very careful to guard it." Which is sensible, but a little irritating when sometimes you feel like muttering "Have you ever tried taking your head out of your arse?"
 
 
Whisky Priestess
15:39 / 16.08.01
ooh! Mervyn Peake: depression and died of Parkinson's and encephalitis. Beat dat.
 
 
A Bigger Boat
17:56 / 16.08.01
The job description of being a writer really sucks:
OK, chappy, here's an industry that's ridiculously difficult to make headway in, let alone make a living at. I'm gonna give you all these little characters and story ideas and plots and subplots that'll just pop into your head when your on the bus/faling asleep/ nowhere near a pen and paper, and i'm going to make these mini revelations the most addictive thing in your personality. You'll want to pursue these addictions and so will start the long trek into frustration and poverty.
You will have to hold down a shittly little job to buy food, but will have no interest in advancing within that job cos it's not what you want to do.
Soon thirty will start to loom.
Oh, and by the way, you'll have to spend most of your time locked away alone in a room staring at a monitor and most of what you write will be shite.

Why can't we let them be a little special? Believe me, they envy normality, whatever that is.
 
 
Whisky Priestess
19:42 / 19.08.01
Touched with a non-specific imaginative blessing/curse as they are, the poor darlings. I expect they sit up in their garrets, gazing down at us mortal folk, just wishing that they could be ordinary. Please baby, my heart's bleeding here, somebody get a towel.

I should add that I reserve most of my envious bile for those who are able to support themselves by writing - those who have in fact made a living out of it. The poor bastards who are stacking shelves by days and writing novels by night have my total sympathy.

What annoys me is that simply because they are not financially rewarded for their work, it is seen as inherently less valuable. They are not "proper" writers, and so they are given less leeway to be precious about their work.

So respect for people's chosen vocation is only ever earned when that person has made a material success of it. This is what I find bad.
 
 
A Bigger Boat
16:09 / 22.08.01
quote:I should add that I reserve most of my envious bile for those who are able to support themselves by writing - those who have in fact made a living out of it. The poor bastards who are stacking shelves by days and writing novels by night have my total sympathy.

So respect for people's chosen vocation is only ever earned when that person has made a material success of it. This is what I find bad.[/QB]

So whilst any writer is eeking out an existance going slowly suicidal they have both thumbs up from your camp?
Pity the poor bastard if his/her dreams ever come true then.
 
 
Mystery Gypt
16:56 / 22.08.01
Artaud: megolamania, schizphrenia.

Stood in Dublin claiming to hold the staff of St. Patrick and challenged anyone to fight him for it.

Sent amazing spells and curses on paper through the mail to Hitler and other stars of his time.
 
 
Ria
15:23 / 23.08.01
I found out yesterday that the muralist Diego Rivera experimented with cannibalism as recorded in his autobiography as well as decipting Mesoamericans doing same. consider my mind opened.
 
 
Whisky Priestess
07:47 / 31.08.01
quote:Originally posted by Parliament of Fools:


So whilst any writer is eeking out an existance going slowly suicidal they have both thumbs up from your camp?
Pity the poor bastard if his/her dreams ever come true then.

If their dreams come true they won't need my thumbs up. Or perhaps they will, but in a different way.

If I ever make a go of it I will try so hard not to become precious and pretentious about my stuff that you will be able to see the veins bulge on my forehead.
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
12:57 / 31.08.01
But that's half the fun. Oh, dear.

And what other way can you possibly give someone thum..

Good Lord.
 
 
Rage
05:02 / 03.09.01
"They label us insane, but we're the true sane ones." -social conversational cliche
 
  

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