As Sane as Anybody

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even can enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

--Macaulay: On Mitford's History of Greece

Must a poet be mad? Doctors, many of whom are sane, doubt it. The British Royal College of Physicians, in a clinically solemn discussion of the creative mind, recently came to the conclusion that writers are not as crazy as they like to think they are.

The "clinician" who presented most of the data was Harold Nicolson, urbane British author, onetime diplomat and M.P. To nail the "popular fallacy" that creative writers are prone to be sickly, psychopathic, and "doomed to an untimely death," Nicolson examined the health and lives of Britain's literary great. "Since of all writers poets are . . . the most 'creative,' I . . . concentrate my observations upon the behavior and temperament of poets." Some of his findings:

P: Of 32 outstanding poets (14th-19th Centuries), only two were "demonstrably" insane. The two: Cowper, who most of his life was subject to fits of melancholia and suicidal mania; and Swift, whose mind gave way in the last three years of his life.

P: As a group, the 32 poets were remarkably hardy: ten lived to be over 70; only four died before 40. Of these four, Shelley was drowned and Marlowe killed in a tavern brawl, Keats died (at 26) of tuberculosis, and Byron of an unspecified disease (from his symptoms, diagnosticians now suspect typhoid or malaria).

P: Among creative writers, a couple of "borderline cases" cropped up. Samuel Johnson had hallucinations and delusions (e.g., he believed that eating an apple would make him drunk). When he felt his "madness" coming on, Johnson had his housekeeper lock him in his room and sometimes beat him. Southey, a highly nervous type, had a breakdown at 70.

Alluring Strangeness. Nicolson admits that all great writers have been the least bit peculiar, at that. Germany's Schiller whetted his inspiration by keeping rotten apples in his writing table drawer. Charlotte Bronte often mooned about the house for months without being able to put pen to paper. Milton could write only between October and March; Balzac, Byron, Dostoevsky and Conrad, only at night.

Most famed neurotic of all was Shelley. A brooding hypochondriac (Nicolson says flatly: "All creative writers are hypochondriacs . . . all creative writers are nervous"), Shelley was long obsessed with the conviction that he had tuberculosis. Once, overcome by the thought that he had caught elephantiasis from a lady with thick legs, he fell on the floor and writhed with an imagined attack of the disease. On another occasion he had a hallucination that he had seen a baby rise from the sea and clap its hands at him. But Nicolson insists that Shelley was "on the whole" sane: "After all, even Goethe (who assuredly was a man of the most Olympian calm and sanity) once met himself riding along a road on horseback."

Dull Norm. Poets, says Nicolson, seem crazy to themselves and others because they possess a "special nervous sensibility." This not only makes them extraordinarily receptive to inspiration, but the intervals between inspirations afflict them with a neurotic sense of "loneliness . . . failure and pathetic incompetence." When inspired, "almost all creative writers have at some moments of their lives been panic-stricken by the conviction that their imagination was getting the better of their reason. . . . The God visits them, not amicably, but in a flash of flame and fire." In Shakespeare's phrase: "Such tricks hath strong imagination."

But Nicolson, no poet himself, suggests that the main reason why poets are considered madder than other people is that they like to display their eccentricities: "All writers, and especially all poets, feel it dull to be thought completely normal."

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