http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/10/the-tortured-genius-just-can-t-help-it-or-why-scott-and-zelda-went-mad.html
Creative types can’t stop
thinking, can’t stop second guessing and revising, and aren’t much fun
to be around. But new studies show it’s not like they have a choice.
Knowing
his wife was upset with him for spending more time with his typewriter
than with her, F. Scott Fitzgerald hatched a plan. He wasn’t proud of
many of his short stories (he only included 46 of his 181 short stories
in his published collections), but he knew that in order to win back his
wife he’d have to whip up something quickly. Working from 7 a.m. to 2
a.m., he churned out “The Camel’s Back” for The Saturday Evening Post for a fee of $500. That very morning, he bought Zelda a gift with the money he had made.
suppose that of all the stories I have ever written this one cost me
the least travail and perhaps gave me the most amusement,” he commented
in the first edition of Tales of the Jazz Age. “As to the labor
involved, it was written during one day in the city of New Orleans, with
the express purpose of buying a platinum and diamond wristwatch which
cost six hundred dollars.”
This was in 1920, and Zelda’s
frustrations could still be assuaged with a well-timed gift. (After all,
it was only after Scott had the money and prestige from publishing
This Side of Paradise that
she agreed to marry him earlier that year.) It wasn’t long though until
Zelda had grown so fed up with Scott’s drinking and self-isolation that
she lashed out, cheating on him with a French naval aviator while Scott
was working on
The Great Gatsby in the South of France. From
then on, their marriage devolved into arguments and a devastating
cocktail of debt, drink, and manic depression.
“Zelda’s spending
sprees, her ‘passionate love of life’ and intense social relationships,
her melancholic response to disappointment and the relatively late onset
of her illness (she was born in 1900) point toward a mood disorder, as
does the alternation between frank psychosis and a sparkling,
provocative personality,” noted a 1996 article in
The New York Times Magazine that asked “
How Crazy Was Zelda?”
The
Fitzgeralds are perhaps the best—or at least the most
intriguing—example of writers whose talents, when mixed with depression
and vices (like alcohol and spending sprees), burned brightly then
collapsed calamitously.
But of course, it’s not just the
Fitzgeralds who battled depression and led lives that eventually spun
out of their control. Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath,
Emily Dickinson, Stephen King, Anne Rice, David Foster Wallace, and even
J.K. Rowling are just a few of the writers who have been struck by the
illness that Hemingway once referred to as “The Artist’s Reward.”
The
common theory for why writers are often depressed is rather basic:
writers think a lot and people who think a lot tend to be unhappy. Add
to that long periods of isolation and the high levels of narcissism that
draws someone to a career like writing, and it seems obvious why they
might not be the happiest bunch.
A
study conducted at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop found that 80
percent of the residents displayed some form of depression.
Dig
a little deeper though, and some interesting findings reveal
themselves—findings not just about the neuroscience of writerly
depression, but about why Hemingway was so awful to Hadley, why Scott
and Zelda drove each other mad, and why writers, by and large, are not
only depressed people but also awful lovers.
A few months back, Andreas Fink at the University of Graz in Austria
found
a relationship between the ability to come up with an idea and the
inability to suppress the precuneus while thinking. The precuneus is the
area of the brain that shows the highest levels of activation during
times of rest and has been linked to self-consciousness and memory
retrieval. It is an indicator of how much one ruminates or ponders
oneself and one’s experiences.
For most people, this area of the
brain only lights up at restful times when one is not focusing on work
or even daily tasks. For writers and creatives, however, it seems to be
constantly activated. Fink’s hypothesis is that the most creative people
are continually making associations between the external world and
their internal experiences and memories. They cannot focus on one thing
quite like the average person. Essentially, their stream of ideas is
always running—the tap does not shut off—and, as a result, creative
people show schizophrenic, borderline manic-depressive tendencies.
Really, that’s no hyperbole. Fink found that this inability to suppress
the precuneus is seen most dominantly in two types of people: creatives
and psychosis patients.
What’s perhaps most interesting is that this flood of thoughts and introspection is apparently vital to creative success. In
Touched with Fire,
a touchstone book on the relationship between “madness and creativity,”
Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatry professor at Johns Hopkins, reported
that successful individuals were eight times more likely as “regular
people” to suffer from a serious depressive illness.
If you think
about it though, this “mad success” makes sense. Great writing requires
original thinking and clever reorganization of varied experiences and
thoughts. Whether it’s Adam Gopnik’s
first piece for
The New Yorker that
related Italian Renaissance art with the Montréal Expos or Fitzgerald
trailblazing the “Jazz Age” with his combination of Princeton poems and
socioeconomic class sensibilities in
This Side of Paradise, a
writer’s job is to reshape a hodgepodge of old ideas into brand new
ones. By letting in as much information as possible, the brains of
writers and artists can trawl through their abundance of odd thoughts
and turn them into original, cohesive products.
It’s not a
surprise then that Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino, and the most wildly
creative writers of our generation have such bizarre ideas: they cannot
stop thinking, and whether pleasant or macabre, their thoughts (that can
turn into masterpieces like
The Nightmare Before Christmas and
Pulp Fiction) are constantly flowing through their minds.
Although
this stream of introspection and association allows for creative ideas,
the downside is that people with “ruminative tendencies” are
significantly more likely to become depressed, according (
PDF)
to the late Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema. Constant reflection
takes a toll. Writing, editing, and revising also requires are near
obsession with self-criticism, the
leading quality for depressed patients.
In
fact, a study conducted by Nancy Andreasen at the prestigious Iowa
Writers’ Workshop found that 80 percent of the residents displayed some
form of depression.
“One of the most important qualities [of
depression] is persistence,” said Andreasen. “Successful writers are
like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll
stick with it until it’s right.”
While Fitzgerald liked to boast of his raw talent that allowed him to come up with clever stories for the
Post or
The Smart Set in
mere hours, biographers have noted that he spent months poring over
drafts—a perfectionist making revision after revision. For better or for
worse, creativity and focus are inextricably linked. As Andreasen said,
“This type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering. If
you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”
This
mishmash of unremitting rumination and self-criticism means that writers
are always working. Even quotidian life is a writerly task. In an
interview with
The Paris Review,
Joyce Carol Oates said, “[I] observe the qualities of people,
overhearing snatches of conversations, noting people’s appearances,
their clothes, and so forth. Walking and driving a car are part of my
life as a writer, really.”
Now, for just a second, put aside the recent news that journalism/writing was ranked as the sixth most narcissistic job by
Forbes.
And don’t think about the fact that writing is not only a lonely job,
but it is also one that can turn a pleasant walk or a drive into a form
of work. Instead, focus on how writing is about being able to create and
control a world.
For what is writing, but an amalgamation of our thoughts and experiences finished off with a wax and a shine?
This
need for control often translates to real life too, and it comes at the
expense of the feelings and wishes of nearly everyone around them.
Writers are often such terrible lovers because they treat real people as
characters, malleable and at their authorial will.
When Charles
Dickens was 24 (and allegedly a virgin), he married Catherine Hogarth,
then 21. Almost immediately after they married, he became infatuated
with Mary, her younger sister (so much so that she would later become
the basis for Little Nell in
The Old Curiosity Shoppe)
. Mary
died shortly thereafter, which proved a devastating blow for Charles,
and for the rest of their marriage Catherine futility tried to live up
to her sister. After 22 years and 10 children with Catherine, Charles
met Nelly Ternan, a young actress, and deciding that he was quite tired
of his wife, tossed her aside in favor of this new mistress.
Like
so many authors, from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Ezra Pound to V.S. Naipaul,
Dickens wasn’t much of a good person. In fact, he was a rather terrible
person and had history not bowed at the beauty of his fiction, he would
have been remembered poorly.
Writers can be rather awful people,
and their blend of depression, isolation, and desire to control not only
their own characters but the “characters” of their real lives has been a
relationship-killer for centuries.
(As for the other
relationship-destroyer—writers’ infamous penchant for alcohol—Gopnik
postulates, “Writing is work in which the balance necessary to a sane
life of physical and symbolic work has been wrested right out of plumb,
or proportion, and alcohol is (wrongly) believed to rebalance it.”)
Trying
to balance vice, borderline mental illness, and a disregard for the
real world in favor of fictitious ones is perhaps a noble but
Sisyphusian act for many writers. Try as they might, the greatest
creatives in history have too much neuroscience working against them,
too many ideas fluttering around their minds.
It would be cliché
to quote Jack Kerouac in saying, “The only people for me are the mad
ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved”—and
yet it is a platitude for a reason. The most fascinating people in
history, the ones who make a difference, who create, might be depressed,
perhaps miserable romantics, yet they have contributed more to society
than many of them ever knew.
In fact, Fitzgerald died thinking he
was a failure. He was in Hollywood doing “hack work” while his wife was
in a Swiss sanitarium, and he often felt as though he were holding the
ashes of his life in his hands. Only 44 years old but looking weathered
and much older, he sat in his armchair listening to Beethoven,
scribbling in the Princeton
Alumni Weekly and munching on a
Hershey Bar. It was a wintery morning in 1940, and as if propelled by a
ghost, he leapt from his chair, grasped at the mantle piece, and
collapsed on the floor. He died from a heart attack.
Zelda was too
ill to make it to her husband’s funeral, but only a few months before,
she had written to Scott with surprising lucidity, “I love you
anyway—even if there isn’t any me or any love or even any life—I love
you.”
She knew that they were mad, that their creativity and vice
and entirely unique perspective on the world would be both their
greatest high and their most agonizing low. To the letter, she added,
“Nothing could have survived our life.”
