Going Crazy in England
ROSENTHAL, RAYMOND
WRITERS & WRITING Going Crazy in England By Raymond Rosenthal John gale, an English journalist, has turned away from reporting such public madnesses as the Algerian war and the attempted...
...But we do not see either shape, especially the demon-and this may be the chief message of Gale's book: Insanity is a frozen demon which never reveals itself to the daylit, unobsessed consciousness...
...An Arab mother tells him the remark of a French soldier when she pleaded with him for the return of her arrested son...
...So far everything has seemed real, consistent...
...WRITERS & WRITING Going Crazy in England By Raymond Rosenthal John gale, an English journalist, has turned away from reporting such public madnesses as the Algerian war and the attempted seizure of Suez to "cover" his own private encounter with insanity...
...when I am depressed I am not much over five feet ten inches When I am manic my beard and finger nails grow faster...
...the soldier said, "I'll shoot your whole family like mine was shot by the Germans...
...Five men follow him into a bar...
...The French have been annoyed by his articles on Algeria...
...It is strange, even jolting to see the neutral, distancing techniques of expert journalism applied to so intimate a matter...
...A proper stamp of the foot did not jar the skull or drop the arches: it produced a singing click like that of a good iron shot at golf and a louder, more plocking sound than a stamp that was badly timed and harmful...
...I saw evil then, and knew it...
...Terrible things happen almost immediately...
...On our first night at the depot there was a loud air raid...
...And he reports this quietly, as usual...
...I started hanging for a minute each day from a branch of the rowan tree by our garden gate...
...his mother is tender but uncommunicative...
...Yet Gale's autobiography Clean Young Englishman (Coward-McCann, 192 pp., $4.00...
...Afterward I would pick up James, then aged five or six, and make him hang there for a bit, too, so that my own performance looked entirely normal to passers-by...
...There he starts going with a girl named Jill, a dancer, and lands a job on a newspaper as a general reporter...
...Selfishness is the emotional disease that young Americans suffer from, an ingrained selfishness that is devoid of dignity...
...It seemed," he comments, "that there was some power at work outside the control of human beings...
...Joanna did not like her nose being touched, and frightened herself with enormous farts...
...After the War, which takes him to Palestine, he returns home...
...These may partly be inherent in the subject...
...He visits the Lockheed factory, sees the Electra production lines and feels that something is wrong with the plane-it looks "humpbacked, even lumpish.' In Chicago, the buildings of Mies Van der Rohe strike him as sinister, "like the hives of insects.' The cars on the highways also look like insects...
...When I am manic I am close to six feet tall...
...but then he has an odd, fuzzy feeling in his feet, gets the idea that "they" have put something in his coffee and rushes back to England in a cold frenzy...
...Then he goes to Paris and enrolls in the Sorbonne, lives on soup, black pudding and boiled eggs, keeps a notebook, takes a trip to Italy, and heads back to England, as he says, "none the wiser...
...Gale would have been a puzzle to D. H. Lawrence...
...He is feeling ill and depressed...
...Electricity is God...
...One shape was "visual, musical, sensual, and the way of all life the synthesis of that lost insect and animal paradise from where we all came...
...two Grenadier corporals hanged themselves with their braces...
...I saw men descended from animals: there were pig men, rat men, snake men Gale always reports, never analyzes-he leaves that to the reader...
...But he likes the Army...
...You've got a job now...
...He panics and calls the British Embassy...
...His humor is quick, understated, and gleams out on every page while never calling attention to itself...
...He does not feel representative or symbolic of anything beyond himself, and yet his poised assurance, his willingness to tell us the most damaging things about himself, betoken a sense of ease that must come from social acceptance...
...I was a timid, cold virgin, and I loved no one but myself...
...All night there were bright magnesium fires from incendiary bombs...
...Their accounts are usually extended metaphors, extremely suggestive but not the experience itself described in the down-to-earth, explicit fashion one uses to describe the effects of sea sickness or the extraction of a tooth...
...I am what they like to call a manic depressive," he says abruptly...
...Madness is a time of perception, of reality...
...A blissful rural childhood is sensuously recalled-"the tangy scent of a dog-fox,' "the waterfall on the river (frozen) like the melted wax of massive candles," "the charred, bitter-sweet, sinister smell of a burning haystack...
...When the mad go sane there is a beneficent forgetfulness that helps them stay sane...
...His infant daughter, who is still both an object and an animal, receives just as many thoughtful, lingering words of description as his own image in the mirror...
...His father is kind but frightening...
...He also likes the meditative joys of polishing his leather...
...and later, his wife is a persistent shadow described obsessively in almost exactly the same words throughout the book...
...She looked very old...
...has a terse, offhand authority which commands respect even when one perceives its shortcomings and omissions...
...Animals, objects, the quirks and surprises of nature have a vivid life for Gale...
...The news bulletins on the radio are always about death and violence, "and the voices of the announcers relished the theme...
...He hears about the torture used by the French and meets some of its victims...
...and in our hut a boy called Hubert Doggart had a screaming nightmare...
...narcissism, the equivalent English disease, at least provides its victims with a social flair that may be absurdly vain but has its own etiquette, its backbone of decorum...
...so I thought when my mind was unhinged...
...Back in England he enters a hospital, gets cured by shock treatments and drugs and comes out to write this book...
...Gale, however, is not writing a novel but a wry report on his existence until now...
...When he was in the hospital recovering from his breakdown, Gale made two terracotta shapes for purposes of occupational therapy...
...but the startling, amusing, terrible thing is that this nightmarish description of America could have been written by a sane European reporter...
...He begins to feel he can save the world...
...A dislike of physical contact, an aloofness that comes out as eccentricity, a tight-lipped endurance of emotional pain-all this produces that ambivalence toward oneself that in good times makes one linger at the mirror, in bad times brood over the possibility of suicide...
...He seems to know that no one will be shocked by his confessions, so long as they are told in the prescribed, arch, humorously offhand manner...
...He has the impression that his hotel room has been made smaller...
...The English have an air...
...when I am manic it stands up electrically, catching sensations like antennae...
...He is keenly sensitive to nature, to his own instinctual life, but this does not give him a path out of his morbid self-absorption...
...Years later, when he sleeps with an oriental dancer in Cairo while covering the Suez disaster, she tells him in the morning that he's cold, very cold...
...The Observer sends him to cover the Algerian war...
...Their romance is never described, except in the most casual, oblique phrases...
...Not really...
...Like Dickens and Ring Lardner, also manic depressives, he is a natural humorist, though in the way that "a clean young Englishman" is most likely brought up to believe fitting and proper...
...a guardsman bayoneted a friend in the latrines...
...They keep their right hands in the pockets of their trenchcoats, as in a movie...
...His class-acquired nonchalance comes in handy...
...These descriptions spangle a background made up of war and the rumors of war, for, as he tells us, the War of 1914 was in his bones...
...Case history novels of insanity go wrong because they mistake the language of psychiatry, which is general and unspecific, for the language of madness, which is always unique, personal, perhaps incommunicable...
...The worst crackup occurs while on a trip to America for his paper...
...He refuses to undertake treatment and a year later decides to marry Jill...
...people, emotional relations, are sketched pretty dimly...
...Look," she said...
...When I came out of the clinic after that breakdown-it was really a break-up-I gave up yoga, believing instead that the answer to life was to stretch the spine by hanging by one's arms...
...His true emotional life begins, however, with his immersion in the madness of great public events...
...He likes the precision and rhythm of drill...
...He can't throw off the suspicion that he is being followed, but he remains sufficently in control to be sent on other assignments...
...In depression, my hair lies down...
...his mother sends him to a psychoanalyst in London, who tells him that he's in a bad way...
...On the other hand, novels which are written from the parti pris of the irrational usually seem made-up and artificial, concealing the real tortures of insanity behind a screen of "mad" words and images...
...The other shape was "dull black, the frozen incarnation of my devil...
...His mother's first cousin was killed in it as an aviator and "when they sent back his uniform, his mother, my great-aunt, said: 'Oh, I smell the smell of him in his clothes.' " Gale can unfailingly get such smells on paper...
...Either we get married, or I'm off...
...What does it matter to me what happens to your son...
...Haven't we known each other long enough...
...In Paris, on another assignment, he has his first frightening encounter with his own insanity, now inextricably intertwined with the threatening world through which he moves...
...a great distance and inhibition keeps him from touching other people's inner reality, or for that matter his own...
...In Algiers he sees a raging French mob go to work on the Arab quarter, shooting and flaying the corpses with meat hooks...
...So now this young man, who went to a posh public school, caught sharks off the English coast, and liked a few people intensely, goes into the Army in 1943...
...Madness needs a Trollope to recount it, not a Lautremont...
...She slept like a grown-up, her chin resting in the palm of her hand...
...Do writers of fiction dealing with madness, even the best, tell us more than Gale...
...they also, in the upper middle classes from which Gale comes, have an inbred narcissism...
...All this takes place in the fog of a fugue state...
Vol. 49 • June 1966 • No. 12
