Then to Saint Fillian’s blessed well, Whose spring can frenzied dreams dispel And the crazed brain restore. Marmion by Sir Walter Scott
“One of the rules of a tragic time is that real enemies must never meet in open combat.”
These are the words of Samson Shillitoe, the irrepressible, deeply flawed, mad(?) poet and anti-hero of the novel A Fine Madness by Elliott Baker.
This utterance is directed at one Dr. Oliver Wren, a handsome, brilliant, and jaded psychiatrist who stands in counterposition to our scoundrel-in-chief. The story is set in a 1960s New York City.
Shillitoe is discovered camping out uninvited in Wren's office late at night, listening to his recordings regarding his clients while drinking the shrink’s 20-year-old brandy.
“Someone was sitting in his chair, with his big feet on his desk, drinking his brandy and listening to his voice.”
After confronting the intruder, Wren is incredulous when the poet rebuffs his more than reasonable offer to come under his care in lieu of involving the police.
“I don’t think we’re enemies,” said Wren quietly.
You don’t? You who protect what is while I envision what can be? You who find sickness where I find the fierce abstraction of desire? You who make a profit out of human misery while I command the moon and make melodies in a warehouse of gutturals? And you don’t think we’re enemies!
To be clear, Shillitoe is a drunk who physically abuses his live-in girlfriend, Rhoda, the one noble character in the novel. He dodges child support payments to his ex-wife. He insults or mocks just about everyone and everything he encounters. He does not take the laws of God or man seriously, at all. And yet, through Baker's dazzling and genuinely hilarious prose, you come to root for the bastard. It’s important to note that Baker goes out of his way to demonstrate that women find his particular brand of verbally vivacious toxic masculinity irresistible.
The Mad Poet archetype, for all its many flaws, has always held a certain attraction. There are many examples, Lord Byron (“mad, bad, and dangerous to know”) comes to mind, although the 20th century in particular may beat out the others centuries for the sheer scope of “case studies.”
To name only Americans: John Berryman (jumped off a bridge), Hart Crane (jumped into the Gulf of Mexico), Robert Lowell (extreme bouts of mania), Sylvia Plath (head in an oven), Ezra Pound (insane asylum), are well known, and we might extend the list considerably if, frankly, it wasn’t so damn depressing.
Perhaps in part because of this, in the decades just following WWII, one current of such attraction evolved into an unspoken assumption that psychological suffering somehow equated to artistic authenticity. Whereas the counterculture simultaneously adopted the quintessential Romantic “mad” poet Blake as a model for their myriad prophetic projects—Ginsburg did this explicitly, while Timothy Leary and the lesser prophets of the age took up Blake’s rhetorical style, that is, his combativeness and pose of righteous indignation. Leary believed that recognizing the human, and in particular the human brain, as a biological machine was the key to unlocking freedom. Outside of his more flamboyant public persona, his advocacy of LSD use was couched in terms of altering human hardware/software, and thinking of oneself as a “metaprogrammer.”
This same rough Mad Poet archetype has greatly contributed to the allure of our most widely recognized American poet, Poe, and while poets have largely fallen out of fashion, the fascination with madness has only gained potency since the publication of A Fine Madness in 1964 (and a middling 1966 film adaptation starring Sean Connery in 1966).
It is not controversial to say that “mental health”, or the lack thereof, has in many quarters not just become chic, but a sign of practical transcendence. The mentally unwell are exempt from certain judgements, rules, etc., and in fact receive a certain hard-to-define ordination.
After all, it is the Mad Poet’s cousin, the Jester, who the King keeps close at hand for counsel. In dark times, it’s only the untrustworthy wit who can be trusted by the highest authority. When the world has gone mad, who can you trust except the sincere madman?
Robert Rentoul Reed, Jr. notes just this in his book Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage, citing the titular character in John Marston’s play Antonio’s Revenge as illustrative:
By wisdom's heart, there is no essence mortal That I can envy but a plump-cheek'd fool: O, he hath a patent of immunities Confirmed by custom, seal'd by policy, As large as spacious thought.
And indeed today, when every man, woman and child is king, queen and crown prince of the universe, do we not also gaze upon the “mentally disordered” with a form of hushed reverence? Do not our teens, pre-teen and 20 and 30-something-year-old teens press and scramble to pick up diagnoses as children pick up so many pretty rocks on the woodland path?
And why not? They seem to act as particularly potent talismans, “patents of immunity” if you will, warding off the discomforts and responsibilities of our pillowed and dehistoricized age.
The mad are “neurodivergent,” which, if we are honest, sounds cool, almost X-Man-esque. This is not to downplay the insanity-inducing environs confronting us; again, one can understand taking on these various neurodivergent pseudo-holy identities as an imminently practical solution, particularly when acknowledging the utter paucity of attractive identities offered by the older generations.
So. Pardon me, I only need a moment…
A quick recap:
The Jacobeans gave the fool a privileged tongue.
The Romantics turned the “mad” poet into a prophet, secular (Byron, Shelley) or otherwise (Wordsworth, Blake).
The twentieth century transformed suffering into artistic authenticity, lending itself to moral grandstanding.
The twenty-first century increasingly turns diagnosis (poetic “spells,” if you will allow) into a powerful identity.
Reed notes that it is the malcontent, the madman who is most often the mouthpiece of the author’s true thoughts and feelings. And indeed Baker’s joy is almost palpable as his self-taught madman Shillitoe excoriates psychiatry, literary society, landlords, middle class “kulchur sniffers” and the poor.
Through a series of twists and turns, our poet finds himself under the care of Wren at his facility, Para Park. With the police looking for him, Shillitoe is convinced by his “enemy” that he will remain undisturbed at the facility long enough that he can finally finish his manuscript.
Naturally, Wren’s wife, Lydia, ends up visiting Para Park. Inevitably, the discontented, culturally curious wife of the good doctor stumbles upon our poet scribbling away in the “bathing room.” Soon after, Wren ends up stumbling upon them…intimately engaged in her education.
The consummate professional, Wren, of whom we were told earlier is a competent fighter, does not beat the scoundrel. He slips away before they notice his presence. He determines upon reflection that his restrain was solely due to Shillitoe being his charge. Within the course of the same afternoon, at a board meeting, Wren casts the deciding vote in favor of introducing psychosurgery at Para Park, a notion he was previously against.
Of course, it is determined that Shillitoe will be the first recipient of this new medical boon, thus confirming our poet’s initial assessment regarding the real relationship between Poet and Psychiatrist. Wren gets a piece of the poet’s brain, literally.
Wren’s “impartiality” results in involuntary psychosurgery. The mechanism—the poet’s brain—is defective, and must needs correction.
It is this impartiality in the name of care that opens up interesting and disturbing speculation.
A better known anti-hero, Tony Soprano of HBO show The Sopranos shoots another uncomfortable dart into the Mental Health Industry. The well-intentioned psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Melfi treats mob boss Tony, but understandably struggles with the ethical questions raised in helping a violent psychopath better “function” in his day-to-day dealings. It’s only in the penultimate season that Melfi cuts off Tony’s treatment after grappling with the obvious ethical quandaries. Better late than never.
The final season of The Sopranos ended in 2007, just before the mental health industry took on an almost explicitly religious fervor in the 2010s.
To his credit, Reed speaks highly of a truly religious institution in his book, published in 1952:
…in England, the rank and file of the Christian medieval church had for centuries constituted what was perhaps the greatest single humanitarian organization that the Western world has known.
In this enterprise, “the understanding and the care of the mentally ill” was considered “an essential and necessary part of the holy man’s training.”
He singles out a 13th century English friar, Bartholomew de Glanville for his “touchingly humane” treatments: “refreshing entertainment and comfort; removal from the original environment of the patient’s insanity; and lastly, music and occupation.”
Indeed, in A Fine Madness, Para Park does not lack for any of these things. There is, however, one key difference in approach, which we will arrive at shortly. First, we must look at another medieval method of mental correction—bowssening.
Here is Reed:
In later medieval times, “bowssening”—that is, immersing the patient in a well—became one of the most popular treatments of the insane. The patient, we are told, was first doused, then bound and left overnight upon the cold floor of the chapel or, if no chapel was convenient, upon an outdoor altar. This procedure, as a rule, was repeated several times until either the devil was forcibly washed out or hope of effecting the cure was abandoned.
The poet I most associate with the waters is Hart Crane. I am no New Critic, mind you, biography must intrude.
Here the same poet speaks:
“One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.”
In the Christian life, the man, woman, child, undergoes baptism, drowns, and is returned to life and life abundant. He or she participates in the death and resurrection of the God-Man. The “mechanism” cannot be quantified.
Had Crane first been dipped in some holy well and left, bound and shivering, upon a chapel floor, would he have still leapt into the sea?
The treatment may have failed.
Still, it is worth asking whether the medieval custodians of the wells understood something modern psychiatry has no interest in investigating, indeed, would consider a type of pathology? The medieval churchman could not imagine that a man was identical with his brain. Their remedies were, by today’s medical standards, crude, cruel, and obviously ineffective. But they addressed the human sufferer as a soul, not a mechanism.
In the final chapter of A Fine Madness, our poet is leaving NYC on a plane with Rhoda, mind apparently intact, trying to finish his long poem.
Shilllitoe finished reading the second part of the poem and went on to the third.
Men marry what they do not fear (percentages and pimpled brides) touch, fail, multiply to fractions that communicate like fence posts in Montana snow- drifts hiding contact. frozen. forgetting what they mark and why- ... Then the fourth part of the poem broke free, its wild wind carrying him higher and higher. And the words, like hard-brined fists of fire, beat back at the sun.