Memoirs of a Schizophrenic

...But a tension and guilt resulted that made him miserable and twisted his values...

...Or that just as what he saw as their betrayal had sparked his illness, a reconciliation might have helped him to health...

...He loved his girlfriend, Virginia, for the same reason, "because there was clearly so much wrong with our relationship, so much to improve that the prospect of arrival was an incredibly long shot...

...The youth culture Mark identified with, its demands and expectations, is another aspect of his life whose full significance appears to have escaped him...

...Given his appealing candor, it is especially disappointing that he is so blind about its roots...

...He developed a rivalry with his father...

...As incisive and sensitive self-analysis, however, it falls quite flat...

...Mark's place was "usurped," he says, by the eldest of the three, who "tormented' him throughout his adolescence...

...His accounts of schizophrenic fantasies are filled with imagery of family and of symbiosis, but nowhere does he come to articulate terms with the obvious implications of this...

...At times, he seems to feel it was a purely physiological condition: "It was probably genetic...

...During his sickness the contest was expressed full blown...

...The fantasies intensified: "I remember coming out of a long blank during which I had made love to every living thing, ingested gallons of every poison known to man, and called the devil's bluff in a game of seven card stud my dead grandfather was congratulating me on winning...

...Eden Express, his autobiography of a psychosis dressed in patched blue jeans and a work shirt, compellingly captures the idiom, manners and mood of a moment in the history of a generation...

...His worst fear, he notes, was that when the exalted revolution came he "would remain a guarded little wart in the corner oozing bile and giving off putrid smells...

...Suddenly his view of the world became mysteriously entranced, informed by beauty and love...

...Vonnegut finished college in 1969, at the crest of the countercultural wave...

...Vonnegut has successfully described the enormous complexity and pain of the experience of schizophrenia...

...After his third drug-supported recovery, Mark Vonnegut left the farm: It seemed that "virtue was no longer compulsory...

...If someone wanted to see me suffer, how much more could they want...

...It was biochemical...

...Mark responded that his father was not a good enough writer to describe the experience...

...Along with his girlfriend and a few others, he headed for the Northwest, bought land and sought to plant the seeds of an alternative civilization...

...It intrudes on his book as well, pushing Eden Express from description to inadequate interpretation...

...Through most of the early days," Vonnegut writes, "I walked around with a giddy coolness bubbling inside, as if we were pulling off some elegant jewel heist...

...He believed that Virginia had died in the great California earthquake, that the bomb was about to explode, but "of all the awful news my father's suicide hit me hardest...

...Nonetheless, throughout the narrative he does deposit bits and pieces of his life that together shed a more coherent, if unconscious, light on his illness...

...Vonnegut never recognizes how deeply his attitudes and behavior were bound up with his relationship to his father and to Virginia...

...Full of virtue and brown rice, their first winter went easily and their thoughts were millennial: "a fair amount of our lives were tied up with hypothetical situations—the revolution, ecological disaster, the Last Judgment, the breakdown of Western civilization, Armageddon...

...This competition may explain Mark's determination to write Eden Express: He could now describe a fantasy actually experienced and thereby outdo his father's mere literary imagination...

...At the beginning of the book he hints at it, telling us he has always wanted to become "a good storyteller...

...It might have something to do with adrenalin metabolism...

...His father answered, "Mark, you're probably right...

...I was the toughest bastard who had ever lived and my forefathers were proud of me...

...He had majored in religious studies at college and had even thought about becoming a minister, because the depth of unhappiness and injustice in the world seemed unending...

...The question that is not answered, much less posed, concerns the shape of his sanity...

...There were dietary adjustments I could make that might help...

...His understanding would appear to be that schizophrenia makes you fragile and therefore you suffer, while vitamins make you strong and therefore you thrive...

...Down from 155 to about 125 pounds, deaf, dumb and blind, convulsing in my own puke, shit and piss...

...Dope wasn't such a good idea for someone like me.' Any contribution of events or people to his illness or recovery—which he attributes to Thorazine and megavitamins —is ignored...

...Two personal disasters triggered Vonnegut's psychosis: his learning that his father had separated from his mother, and Virginia's taking a second lover...

...I couldn't begin to write what you're living, not even begin...

...Reviewed by David Lipset Mark Vonnegut, the novelist's eldest son, suffered three schizophrenic episodes while trying to start a commune in the semi-wilds of British Columbia...

...He hallucinated a conversation that had Kurt Vonnegut suggesting he was writing the "script" of his son's schizophrenia...

...Somehow, this just won't do...

...Unfortunately, Vonnegut's psychosis intruded upon his idylls...

...He returned to the competitive East, fell in love again, and applied to medical school...

...His parents' attention was spread thin, as might be expected, and Mark's craving for the love he felt he had not received was translated into competitiveness...

...Serenity soon turned to mortification and agony...

...Vonnegut never quite knows what to make of his schizophrenia...

...Though possessive and contentious, he tried to be a good, pacific, cooperative, communitarian hippie...

...It was curable...

...He looked in the mirror and saw what he had always wanted to see, "authenticity, a wiseness, an utter lack of games...

...When he was a boy, Mark's aunt and uncle died, and three "cousin brothers" came to live with his family...