Solitude

by Anthony Storr

However, not every isolated person, even if gifted, turns either to fiction or to the animal kingdom. Nor can difficulties in making relationships necessarily be attributed to adverse circumstances in childhood. As we saw in the previous chapter, people differ, not only in their family backgrounds, but also in inherited temperament. There are those who, however much affection they received as children, never succeed in making close relationships. There are those who compensate for comparative absence of interpersonal relationships by pursuing wealth, rather than by creating fiction. It would be naive to think that the creative activities of man can be subsumed under a single heading. Nevertheless, as these examples show, the gifts which enable a person to become a writer can be set in motion by loss and isolation. We can begin to understand why Simenon, in an interview for the Paris Review, said: ‘Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.’20

  In the same interview Simenon reveals that, as a young boy, he became acutely aware that complete communication between two people was impossible. He says that this gave him such a sense of solitude, of loneliness, that he would almost scream. It was no doubt this sense of loneliness which fostered his remarkable capacity for inventing stories. It may also be held responsible for his compulsive pursuit of women.

  The writers whom we have discussed in this chapter, with the possible exception of P. G. Wodehouse, were unhappy in childhood and had good reason to be so. How far did they continue to be unhappy throughout their lives? Did their early experience prevent them from making the kind of relationships with others which bring happiness? If so, did the exercise of their imaginative gifts bring them happiness of another kind?

  These are not easy questions to answer. Edward Lear was prone to severe depression throughout his life, and, in spite of being beloved by many people, seems to have remained emotionally isolated.

  Trollope also remained vulnerable to depression, and worked compulsively to stave off melancholy. On the other hand, he made a marriage which he claimed was happy, and which seems to have been so. His middle-aged love for Kate Field in no way contradicts this. He was a sensitive man who strove to conceal his feelings behind a bluff persona, but he made many friends, and, as an adult, could certainly not be called isolated. The fame which his novels brought him compensated to a large extent for his early experience of feeling despised and rejected.

  Kipling’s relationships seem to have been somewhat less intimate than Trollope’s, although his passion for privacy makes it difficult to be sure. What is certain is that he had considerable charm, and that this brought him many enduring friendships which were important to him. His marriage gave him security; his fame supported his self-esteem. But, like Trollope, Kipling remained prone to depression, and, so Angus Wilson believes, was plagued by a fear of mental breakdown which made him shy away from introspection. What he attempted in his writing was an art based on external observation, owing as little as possible to self-examination. Angus Wilson concludes that it is this evasion of introspection which prevents Kipling from being amongst the first rank of writers, but which also accounts for his tackling themes which no other writer has undertaken.

  Of the writers discussed in this chapter, I think it probable that Saki remained the most isolated. His unhappy childhood had made it difficult for him to form intimate relationships, a difficulty which was compounded by his homosexuality, which was then a crime, and not widely acknowledged or regarded as acceptable in society. His writing brought him some recognition in his lifetime, but its limitations, its exclusion of love, its irony, and its cruelty, precluded Saki from enjoying the fame granted to writers with wider human sympathies.

  From his own letters, it appears that the happiest period of his life was during the First World War. At the beginning of the war, Saki was forty-three. His health had not been good, but, in spite of this, he managed to enlist as a private in King Edward’s Horse. His letters indicate that he regarded the war as a romantic adventure, enjoyed the male companionship which it afforded, and, perhaps because he did not much care whether or not he survived, relished the danger of nocturnal expeditions to lay mines. Saki was killed by a sniper’s bullet on 14 November 1916.

  Of the work of the writers discussed so far, that of Wodehouse comes closest to fitting Freud’s view of phantasy as primarily escapist. Wodehouse’s relationships with other human beings seem to have remained upon a relatively superficial level. The hub around which his life revolved was certainly not intímate attachments, but his work. However, his pleasure in creating his imaginary world, his ingenuity, his verbal skill, and his worldly success, seem to have brought him a kind of happiness which many might envy.

  Beatrix Potter, even before she married, succeeded in finding happiness. Provided that she could escape from her oppressive family, and live by herself in the farm which she had bought in the Lake District, country pursuits and her writing made her content. No doubt her marriage brought her even greater fulfilment; but there is no reason to doubt her biographer’s opinion that the eight years before her marriage were also a happy time. This was the period when she was able to enjoy the solitary possession of Hill Top Farm and also the period during which she was at her best as a writer.

  The idea that the development of imagination and invention in these writers began as compensation for the absence or severance of intimate attachments carries with it the implication that such development is second best; a poor substitute for the close, loving relationships which they should have enjoyed. In early childhood, this is probably the case. Nothing can entirely compensate for the absence of intimate attachments in the very young.

  However, what began as compensation for deprivation became a rewarding way of life. All these writers were successful, in spite of the emotional scars they bore. With the possible exceptions of Saki and Lear, all made relationships which, although varying in intensity and closeness, were at least as satisfying as many of those made by people who had not suffered similar childhood deprivations. What began as compensation ended as a way of life which is as valid as any other, and more interesting than most. Even if their intimate attachments were not the hub around which their lives revolved, there is no reason to suppose that these lives were unfulfilled.

  9

  Bereavement, Depression and Repair

  Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.’

  Graham Greene

  ‘But seriously I wonder whether for a person like myself whose most intense moments were those of depression a cure that destroys the depression may not destroy the intensity – a desperate remedy.’

  Edward Thomas

  In the preceding chapter, we concluded that some writers are impelled to develop their imaginative capacities as a compensation for the absence of, or severance of, intimate relationships with parents. In this chapter, I want to pursue the idea that imagination is able to do more than create compensatory castles in the air, or retreats from unhappiness. Creative imagination, as the quotation from Graham Greene given above suggests, can exercise a healing function. By creating a new unity in a poem or other work of art, the artist is attempting to restore a lost unity, or to find a new unity, within the inner world of the psyche, as well as producing work which has a real existence in the external world. In Chapter 5, reference was made to the fact that people who realize their creative potential are constantly bridging the gap between the world of external reality and the inner world of the psyche. In Winnicott’s phrase, ‘creative apperception’ is what makes individuals feel that life is worth living; and those who are gifted are perhaps more able than most to repair loss in symbolic fashion. The human mind seems so constructed that a new balance or restoration within the subjective, imaginative world is felt as if it were a change for the better in the external world, and vice versa. In thus linking objective and subjective, we are approaching the limits of human under
standing; but I believe that the secrets of human creative adaptation are to be found at just those limits. The hunger of imagination which drives men to seek new understanding and new connections in the external world is, at the same time, a hunger for integration and unity within.

  Of the writers whose lives were examined in the last chapter, Saki was least able to overcome the traumata of his early childhood. He was also the only one of these particular writers to be permanently deprived of his mother by her death when he was only two years old. In this chapter, I want to examine the relation between creativity and depression. Since bereavement, and specifically early bereavement, is not only a precipitant of depression at the time, but seems often to predispose the sufferer to react to any later losses with particular severity, the complex relation between bereavement, depression and creative achievement will be outlined.

  Although separation from both parents is a traumatic event for any young child, we may suppose that, so long as the child knows that they are still alive, he will continue to entertain hopes of being reunited with them. Unless belief in an afterlife prevails, a child who has lost a parent by death can have no such hope. The arbitrary nature of such a deprivation, its unfairness and its inexplicability, are likely to make the world seem an unpredictable, unsafe place over which the child can exert no influence. It is not surprising that loss of a parent in early childhood has often been linked with the development of emotional problems in later life. More especially, parental death has been thought to increase the risk of suffering from episodes of severe depression.

  Whether or not early bereavement can by itself produce liability to later depression is a matter of dispute. The effects of such bereavement vary; and, although there is no doubt that early bereavement is traumatic, it may be that it only acts as a trigger for depression in those who are already genetically predisposed.

  This supposition is supported by a paper in which the authors compared a group of psychiatric patients who had experienced the death of a parent in childhood with a larger group of psychiatric patients who had suffered no such bereavement. What they concluded was that early loss of a parent affected the severity of later mental illness without determining its type. That is, such a loss was not specifically associated with the development of depression, schizophrenia or other forms of mental illness, but was associated with greater severity of symptoms when the patients were first admitted to hospital.

  However, the patients who had experienced childhood bereavement did show greater difficulty in achieving mature, adult attachments.

  They also formed intense, unstable interpersonal relationships and complained of chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom.1

  This latter finding suggests that some, at any rate, of the patients who had suffered early bereavement were chronically depressed, since, as we have seen, complaints of feelings of emptiness are a common feature of depression.

  George Brown and Tirril Harris, in their study of depression in working-class women, concluded that, if a woman had experienced the death of her mother before the age of eleven, she was more likely to respond to subsequent losses by developing severe depression. We have already postulated that self-esteem depends upon ‘building-in’ or incorporating a sense of being unequivocally loved for oneself. Since a mother is, in childhood, the most important source of unequivocal love, it is natural enough that her disappearance should interfere with, or prevent, the incorporation of love, and hence make self-esteem more difficult to attain or preserve.2

  However, other research workers have questioned whether it is the actual death of the mother which increases vulnerability to depression in later life. A recent study claimed that, in a series of depressed patients of varying types, there was no evidence that parental death before the age of fifteen was a crucial factor.3 On the other hand, the authors do suggest that lack of a warm relationship with parents in childhood may be an important predisposing factor contributing to the subsequent development of depression in adults, and this fits well with the supposition that absence of built-in self-esteem causes vulnerability to depression. A child cannot incorporate a sense of being loved from a parent who is dead; but neither can he from a parent who is rejecting, absent for long periods, or so disturbed as to be incapable of a warm relationship.

  Self-esteem is not only connected with feeling lovable, but also with feeling competent. Depressive personalities, in the face of adversities like divorce or loss by death of a spouse, not only suffer the loss of someone who provided self-esteem by proffering love and care, but also often feel helpless at trying to cope with life alone, at least initially. Brown and Harris write:

  It is certainly not unlikely that loss of mother before eleven may have an enduring influence on a woman’s sense of self-esteem, giving her an ongoing sense of insecurity and feelings of incompetence in controlling the good things of the world.

  The authors continue:

  Until a child is about eleven the main means of controlling the world is likely to be the mother. Thereafter, the child is more likely to exert control directly and independently. The earlier the mother is lost, the more the child is likely to be set back in his or her learning of mastery of the environment; and a sense of mastery is probably an essential component of optimism. Thus, loss of mother before eleven may well permanently lower a woman’s feeling of mastery and self-esteem and hence act as a vulnerability factor by interfering with the way she deals with loss in adulthood.4

  Another factor linking early loss of a parent with subsequent liability to depression is also connected with feelings of lack of mastery. Some patients who have suffered early bereavement continue to look for the lost parent, and are liable to marry husbands or wives who represent the parent and to whom the patient can turn. Birtchnell found that women who had lost their mothers before the age of ten were significantly more dependent, or, to use Bowlby’s terminology, more anxiously attached, than women who had not.5

  Dependency and a feeling of incompetence, of being unable to cope, are closely connected. Helplessness marches hand in hand with hopelessness in many cases of depression. In Chapter 4, reference was made to Bettelheim’s observation that the prisoners in concentration camps who were the first to the were those who had given up any attempt at independent decision-making, and who therefore felt completely helpless in the hands of their persecutors.

  Marrying a parent-figure reinforces the sense of being unable to cope. If there is always someone to turn to, someone who will proffer advice and make decisions, the dependent person does not learn competence. The loss of a spouse is more likely to aggravate feelings of helplessness in those who have been particularly dependent upon their spouses than in those who have not. In some instances, the sense of helplessness persists. In others, the bereaved husband or wife, because there is no longer someone to turn to, discovers previously unrealized powers of coping. We have all seen individuals who appear to have taken on a new lease of life after losing a husband or wife; and this is not always because the marriage was unhappy.

  Research indicates that undesirable changes in a person’s life like death of a spouse, divorce, loss of a job, personal injury, or a prison sentence are correlated with subsequent illness to a significant extent if they are perceived by the subject as uncontrollable. It has also been shown that people who feel that their lives are mainly controlled by external forces suffer more from illness in response to stressful events than do those who have a strong sense of control over their lives.6

  There is general agreement that loss in the present may awaken feelings of loss in the past. This is especially so if the emotions aroused by the original loss have not been completely ‘worked through’– a phenomenon referred to in Chapter 3. In cases in which the process of mourning has not been completed, subsequent losses are likely to produce worse effects. It was suggested earlier that the child who had been separated from its parents might retain some hope of being reunited with them, but that the child who had lost a parent by death was de
prived of any possibility of consolation. This suggestion implies that death of a parent is likely to have a worse effect on subsequent mental health than separation.

  Brown and Harris have produced evidence which goes some way to supporting this hypothesis. They discovered that states of depression in women who had lost a parent by death were more severe, more likely to be diagnosed as psychotic; whereas the types of depression afflicting women who had suffered loss by separation were more likely to be labelled neurotic.

  Brown and Harris suppose that someone who has suffered loss by death, when faced with subsequent loss of any kind, is more likely to react to current loss as if it was inevitably irreversible. This may explain some cases in which the loss or failure which acts as a trigger for severe depression seems trivial compared with the reaction which it provokes.7 For example, an adolescent who has previously lost a parent may become profoundly and inappropriately depressed after failing an examination.

  Another factor determining susceptibility may be the importance attached to interpersonal relationships as a source of self-esteem. Young children, unless they are prodigies, will not have had sufficient time to develop the interests and skills which might enhance their sense of competence. As we shall see, those who can tum to creative work have an advantage over those whose self-esteem depends entirely upon close relationships.

  Writing and other creative activities can be ways of actively coping with loss, whether this be the loss of current bereavement or the feeling of loss and emptiness which accompanies severe depression originating from other causes. In Chapter 7, it was suggested that a person who was vulnerable to recurrent depression could, if he possessed talent, express in creative work aspects of his true self which he found difficult to manifest in social life. In Chapter 8, we saw that some writers, because of early separation or later isolation and unhappiness, created phantasy worlds into which they could retreat. These are not the only functions which creative work can serve.