Keep Clear

by Tom Cutler

  Some people know only the austere Asperger’s stereotype — the strangely dressed geeky man who won’t shut up about his special interest, except at parties where he closes down entirely, or the badly behaved boy who will not look you in the eye and has infantile tantrums if he can’t get his way. But there is no such thing as a typical Asperger: people are affected in different ways and to varying degrees. Every person with Asperger’s syndrome is in some way different from every other person with it, each with his or her own assortment of traits. In fact, people with this syndrome are more different from each other than are typical people in the general population. It can look so unlikely that the self-assured, piano-playing, beautifully turned-out toastmaster who remembers the name of every guest at the Mansion House dinner can truly share the same condition as the cheerful chatterbox with fluorescent hair who is an expert on bees, or the absent-minded, scruffy-bearded, apprehensive, pedantic engineering student who eats nothing but egg sandwiches. But thrust unexpectedly into an informal group of chatting people they will reveal themselves to be fellow travellers, all at sea, their dependable moorings cut.

  Asperger’s learn in a different way and seem to deal with information to do with emotions and social situations by using a process quite at odds with that of the typical population. It is as if their user’s manual is printed in Thracian, so they have to learn the social game intellectually and by imitation. It can be a struggle for them to make it through the day, simply because of their problems getting to grips with the mysteries of other people. Often they feel that others do not understand them. Even when they form firm relationships there is frequently a strange remoteness at their core. Dr Watson tells us that Sherlock Holmes ‘loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul [and] remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books …’

  At parties, which are a special kind of torture for them, Aspergers may stand alone in their odd outfit or attach themselves, limpet-like, to a friendly-looking person. Often they will dodge social situations altogether and do a bit of computer programming or catalogue their music downloads at home instead. They will be used to the complaint, ‘Why do you never let your hair down?’

  They are also said to lack a sense of humour, but this is quite untrue. Many are highly amusing people: some are great raconteurs, others are wits, while still others make their living as stand-up comedians. Their idea of what is funny can, all the same, strike people as bizarre, or objectionable.

  The film director Alfred Hitchcock was renowned for his peculiar taste in humour, practical jokes, and racy stories. Though he was generally known as Mr Hitchcock he reputedly urged some people to address him by his foreshortened nickname. ‘Call me Hitch,’ he would say, ‘Hold the cock.’

  I have always admired and enjoyed Hitchcock’s films, and I had recently read that he showed signs of Asperger’s syndrome. When I went to my books about the great director and re-watched some of his television interviews I began to smile at the number of suggestively autistic qualities in the man.

  The signs were there from childhood. By the age of eight he had ridden the entire length of every bus line in London, and if that doesn’t tip you off about his autistic tendencies then you have no soul. By fifteen he had got a job as a draftsman in an engineering firm. Engineering is a trade that crops up repeatedly in the families of Aspergers. It is the application of mathematical and scientific rules to the design, analysis, and operation of structures, machines, or systems; a system being a combination of things that are working together as parts of an interconnecting network. Systems and systemising, not necessarily mechanical, are a speciality of the autistic mind. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen gives filmmaking as a good example of a system.

  Hitchcock was well known to the television-watching public for his show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and to cinemagoers for his walk-on appearances in his own films. In interviews he was often oddly unsmiling. His gaze could be peculiarly oblique, and when answering queries he frequently looked away. Some people found him alarmingly aloof and off-putting. His deportment was passive, accompanied by a quiet, peculiarly monotonous speech style in which he delivered concrete, sometimes pedantic, answers to interviewers’ questions.

  He lived by unbending rules, a classic Asperger trait, whether in filmmaking, manners, or dining — another of his enthusiasms. As part of his rigidity, Hitchcock insisted on reading the London Times in Hollywood. He always dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and black tie, his wardrobe containing many suits of identical funereal style. When shooting The Man Who Knew Too Much under the intense heat of the Moroccan sun his only concession to the sweltering atmosphere was to discard his jacket. I understand this sort of behaviour entirely. People often say to me, ‘Aren’t you hot in that outfit?!’ as I sit awkwardly on the beach in my three-piece corduroy suit.

  Hitch was impeccably polite, if cool, and insisted on the same decorum from others. Lateness he would not put up with. He loathed conflict, and on the few occasions when an actor flared up, he fled the set. ‘I am shy, you know,’ he told Fletcher Markle in 1964. ‘I’m not very gregarious. I don’t mix with a lot of people …’ Actress Linden Travers explained: ‘He wasn’t the sort of person that everybody could go up and chat to … He was quite … remote and self-contained.’ Nonetheless, his longtime colleague Norman Lloyd remarked that for a man with ‘so definite a point of view and so definite a personality’ he was ‘most respectful of other points of view’. This openness to hearing conflicting opinions is typical.

  Though he could be intermittently playful, Alfred Hitchcock was didactically earnest about his overriding special interest — filmmaking. To him, the pre-production engineering of the film was the interesting bit. Shooting he found tiresome.

  He propounded a system of rules for constructing a story, which he had acquired from his English screenwriter Eliot Stannard. These rules created constant anticipation and suspense that kept the audience wanting to know ‘what happens next?’ He would spend months building the suspense architecture of his stories, and when he had finished, would make a shot-by-shot map of the film on storyboards, the ultimate visual planning system.

  Hitch took some of his stories from popular novels. But though he admitted to reading a great deal he said that he never read fiction for pleasure. The tendency of those with Asperger’s syndrome to prefer non-fiction to fiction has been much discussed. One idea is that they lack understanding of social relationships, so that novels do not generally attract them, preferring instead the more ‘lawful’ world of facts and figures. Hitchcock certainly wrote a lot of fiction, but that is a different thing entirely. Indeed, some critics have complained that in his films the interpersonal relationships are abnormally contrived and peculiar.

  Hitchcock had a highly anxious dread of authority, and he funnelled this into his films. Norman Lloyd remarked that, ‘The anxiety is what has made him one of the major artists of the twentieth century.’ Hitch explained that he enjoyed playing the audience like a musical instrument. ‘I don’t care about content at all,’ he said. ‘The film can be about anything you like so long as I’m making that audience react in a certain way to whatever I put on the screen.’ For a person who finds social situations hard to control or even understand, this method of regulating other people in a predictable way, through a system of cinematic rules, is greatly pleasing, rather as a conjuring trick is to a magician.

  It is not unusual for Aspergers, who may seem aloof and indifferent, to form unusually strong attachments to certain preferred people: they might be girlfriends or boyfriends, or new friends. These powerful attachments are sometimes one-way, and it is not surprising that this can unsettle people. The problem in Hitchcock’s case was that he became attached in this highly focused way to beautiful icy blondes, in the Grace Kelly mould, over whom he became uncomfortably proprietorial. He oversaw the design of their wardrobes and exerted control over their private lives. Tippi Hedren, who la
ter accused Hitchcock of making unwanted advances, broke off her personal and working relationship with him, at great professional cost, though others, including Grace Kelly, managed to keep him as a friend.

  Hitchcock’s directness — often perceived no doubt as bluntness — might be what made him so good with children, who are often the same way themselves. Actress Veronica Cartwright, who sixteen years later was to do a lot of screaming and whimpering in Alien (1979), remembered Hitchcock interviewing her in his office for the part of the young girl Cathy Brenner in his film The Birds (1963). He decided, in typical Asperger style, to talk to the twelve-year-old about one of his enthusiasms — wine. He told her about the best wine distributor in Bristol, the town of her birth, and recommended particularly good vintages. ‘These things of course I’ve applied in later years,’ Cartwright remembered, ‘but at the time … I thought, what an odd conversation.’

  When Hitch was asked what he might have liked to have done if he hadn’t made films, he replied, ‘I think it might have been amusing to have been a criminal lawyer.’ This is an ideal job for a person with Asperger’s syndrome. It has a firm, unambiguous, systemised structure of unchanging predictability, sameness, rules — not to say laws — and non-social, non-reciprocal communication, with more than a dash of performance thrown in — something in which Hitchcock admitted to taking a ‘hammy’ pleasure.

  *

  Like law, mathematics is a structured system, and the Autism Research Centre found more autism diagnoses in maths students than they did in those studying the humanities. In the other sciences they discovered more autistic traits, though not more autism.

  Most Aspergers have a mathematical ability that falls in the usual range, somewhere along the typical bell curve. A few, though, are uncommonly gifted, appearing well outside the average, at the extreme high-performance end, while others find the subject unusually difficult.

  I myself find numbers tricky and mathematics very difficult, though this is balanced, I suppose, by my knack for words. It is an example, I guess, of ‘uneven skill development’, the tendency for autistics to have deep troughs and high peaks in their abilities.

  The variations in severity and the great variety of ways in which Asperger’s characteristics are intermingled can make it hard to identify the condition in, say, a member of your family. You cannot tell that someone has Asperger’s by looking at him or her, and there is a tendency for people to reject the idea that someone who is bright and articulate, if a bit strange, can be suffering significant problems every day. For this reason, Britain’s National Autistic Society calls Asperger’s syndrome a ‘hidden disability’.

  Until quite recently, Asperger’s had simply gone unidentified and un-understood; now, more and more people are being spotted, if sometimes rather late in life. In the past they would commonly have been regarded as mere nutcases, misfits, or eccentrics, no doubt having wondered for years what was going on, and why they felt so lost.

  Take Matthew Robinson, second Baron Rokeby (1713–1800), a wealthy English eccentric of the old school.

  An impossibly shy man, Robinson led the life of a hermit, and had probably always been odd. Though polite, he seemed to have what one contemporary described as ‘too much of the phlegm of the philosopher for him to appear amiable’. Many men shunned him for his strangeness, and women were said to find him uncanny. He disliked company and his rare visitors found themselves obliged to sit for hours, shifting from one aching buttock to the other, as he recited long poems of excruciating dullness, unaware of his guests’ deep boredom.

  As a young man, Robinson travelled abroad to see the sights, and it was upon his return from the German spa town of Aachen that he became an obsessive fan of baths, bathing, and water in general, drinking pint after pint of the stuff all day for years.

  When he inherited the family estate in 1746, he arranged for a hut to be built on the nearby beach at Hythe and made lonely trips to the ocean every day to swim, heedless of the English weather. He had drinking taps put into the ground at regular points along the way, and when he spent too long in the water, as he often did, his manservant would drag him unconscious onto dry land.

  Having converted his greenhouse into a bath, which was supplied by a spring, he would lie in it for hours, his unfashionably long silver beard spreading over the surface like pondweed. All his meals were taken in this bath, his unchanging diet consisting of beef tea, venison, and water.

  Lord Rokeby held strong idiosyncratic convictions, supporting freedom of religion, thought, behaviour, trade, and animals, and though he kept human visitors at bay, he allowed horses, bulls, cows, sheep, goats, and dogs to wander freely over his estate, and liked to march about before sunrise, dressed up in a farmer’s outfit.

  He lived to be eighty-seven, spending much of his life alone, drinking water in the bath. He died in 1800, having never married.

  Good old English eccentricity is one thing, but Rokeby’s insistence on sameness, his monomania, his peculiar tastes in food, his strong and unusual personal convictions, his favouring animals over people, and his solitariness and social oddity, look very much like attributes of autism. He was, of course, never given an Asperger’s diagnosis because there was no such thing to be had. These days, fortunately, Aspergers are increasingly getting support — if they need and want it.

  The English aristocracy appears to have a rich historic seam of autistic crackpots running through it. This is not because the nobility are especially prone to Asperger’s syndrome, but because their money and connections mean that people want to write about them.

  Scientist–aristocrat Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) was another of these rum ducks, who in 1766 had discovered hydrogen. Vastly wealthy, Cavendish at one time had more money in the Bank of England than anyone else, and kept houses in central London as well as one in the country, at Clapham Common. It was here, in typically inventive style, that he decided to weigh the Earth in his garden shed using a piece of kit consisting of two pairs of lead balls and a fine wire. He published his phenomenally accurate result in 1798.

  But Cavendish was known as much for his oddity as for his scientific accomplishments. A character of habit and routine, he walked the same walk every day, like clockwork, dressed in a strangely outmoded suit. He was a profoundly shy man, who deplored society, had no close friends, and spoke in an odd squeaky voice only to men he knew. He was said to have built an extra staircase onto his home to avoid the discomfort of meeting his housekeeper.

  In a 2001 article in the journal Neurology, neurologist–author Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) referred to Henry Cavendish’s ‘virtual incomprehension of social behaviours and human relationships’ and proposed that he had had Asperger’s syndrome.

  Sacks himself was an interesting case. A busy neurologist who kept obsessive notebooks in and out of the office, he still made time to write books on the subject of the brain, including Awakenings (1973) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), as well as works on autism, which fascinated him. In his 2015 autobiography, On the Move, Sacks referred to his ‘self-absorption’, ‘solitude’, and ‘implicit selfishness’. ‘It has sometimes seemed to me,’ he said, ‘that I have lived at a certain distance from life.’ He believed that his profound diffidence, which he called ‘a disease’ and a lifelong impediment to his personal interactions, stemmed from a condition from which he suffered, known as ‘face blindness’ or ‘prosopagnosia’ from the Greek prosopon, ‘face’, and agnosia, ‘ignorance’. Face blindness is more common in Aspergers than in the general population and is associated with the abnormalities in a part of the brain known as the fusiform gyrus, which has also been implicated in dyslexia.

  I have a mild form of face blindness myself, and it can get me into trouble. I remember once staying at a friend’s house and, in my usual awkward way, introducing myself to another guest. ‘Yes, Tom,’ she responded, ‘we’ve met. Several times. Like yesterday at dinner.’ Th
is kind of thing is always happening to me.

  Though not very connected to people, Oliver Sacks was attached to his collection of metal ore and stones. In a highly pregnant remark, he said about his collection, ‘I want company, even if it’s inorganic.’ Late in life he revealed that he had been identified as having ‘social phobia or Asperger’s syndrome’. Though he believed that this diagnosis ‘overstated’ it, he grudgingly admitted to being ‘an honorary Asperger’. His strange demeanour and odd way of speaking do seem to suggest Asperger’s syndrome. However, he felt that some of the truly extraordinary Aspergers he had interviewed for his books were beings of a different sort. For some people, a diagnosis helps; for others, like Oliver Sacks, it doesn’t, and there is no point hanging the label on him just for decoration. This is a key point, for unless someone’s autistic characteristics are having a damaging effect on their life, which they certainly can have, a diagnosis may be of no use or interest to them. Aspergers differ from one another so markedly that one will look upon his diagnosis as the key that finally opens the gates of understanding and solace, while another will see the label as about as much use as a visa for a country he has no wish to visit. But whatever they feel, they will probably feel it strongly, as in Aspergers the emotion and purpose dials are turned up very high.

  Pinning the Asperger’s badge to any number of eccentric dead scientists and artists has become the latest seductive parlour game, but you have to watch out because to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. In 2003 mathematician Ioan James and Simon Baron-Cohen suggested that Einstein and Newton both showed classic autistic signs, though in lectures Baron-Cohen was duly cautious, admitting that biographies of the dead are a ‘fragmented source of evidence’. All the same, maybe Douglas Adams had a point when he observed: ‘If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.’