The Mask of Sanity

by Hervey Cleckley

  If true and full sadistic tendencies are combined with the psychopath’s lack of compunction, a formidable menace to others is likely to emerge. Let us consider Neville G. C. Heath, who within a period of three weeks committed two of the most gruesome sexual murders and mutilations ever to be reported.

  According to reliable evidence, some of which was brought out at his trial, this man followed an extremely irresponsible career for many years. On several occasions he was court-martialed and discharged from the military service. Forgeries, thefts, housebreaking, impersonation of an officer, fraud, and many elaborate episodes of swindling brought him repeatedly to the attention of the police. The history available about this handsome, intelligent, attractive and carefree antisocial figure prior to his two sadistic murders strongly indicates the typical psychopath.61

  His record as a charmer among the ladies is difficult to match. Many intelligent, lovely, and wealthy girls apparently succumbed to his quickly irresistible wooing and, with rapture and pride, considered themselves engaged to him until he disappeared after ingeniously borrowing or otherwise obtaining large sums of money from their families. He was regularly able to convince not only the girls but also their families that he was a man of great distinction and tremendous financial resources. One report indicates that while on a sea voyage he seduced a young Hungarian beauty and also her similarly enticing and voluptuous mother. After the mother and daughter discovered that he had been alternating his sexual attentions between them, with convincing vows of eternal fidelity to both, they maintained a fierce and idealistic loyalty to Heath and each sought diligently to obtain financial advantages for him through intercession with the husband (of the older) and father (of the younger), who had not, because of urgent and important business responsibilities, been able to accompany them on the voyage. This is apparently a typical example of Heath’s ability to impress others, including very learned and intelligent people, with his appearance of profound sincerity and of innumerable other virtues and remarkable abilities and achievements.135

  The sexually perverse murders carried out by this handsome, athletic young man of idealistic and intensely virile appearance were acts of memorable brutality and horror. Each of the two young women tortured and killed by Heath within a period of three weeks was cruelly butchered. The sexually sadistic quality of Heath’s behavior on these two occasions is made plain by the nature of the mutilations. A nipple was bitten entirely from one girl’s breast. Much of the breast itself had been chewed and mangled to bloody pulp. With the other girl this had almost been accomplished. At the autopsy both showed that some instrument, perhaps a poker, had been thrust with violence into the vagina, rupturing it and damaging the abdominal viscera. In one of the victims the poker had apparently been driven far up into the abdominal cavity and twisted about with great violence. One body had been lashed severely by a heavy, metal-tipped whip. The nude bodies were found covered with clotted blood. The abdomen of one woman had been ripped open so extensively that the intestines emerged and spread sickeningly over the area about her body. One deep gash started below the genital organs and extended up into the breast. Heath is described as being extremely calm and poised after these deeds and entirely free of remorse. After the first murder he spoke with great interest about accounts of it in the newspapers, expressed opinions about how the gruesome wounds might have been inflicted, and even communicated with the police, offering to help them discover the murderer.

  The victims were tightly bound and gagged. Points brought out at the autopsies indicate that Heath wanted the women to remain alive as long as possible to experience the agony resulting from his vicious torture and that he seemed to relish the butchery particularly while the victims still remained conscious and capable of feeling it. Apparently he also found perverse sexual satisfaction in continuing after death the gruesome and protracted mutilation of the bodies.61,135

  Those who devoutly believe that the psychopath carries out crimes because of an inner, unconscious sense of guilt and a need (also unconscious) to seek punishment in persistent efforts to gain expiation might say that Heath’s getting in touch with the police and offering them advice after the first butchery and murder, and his making himself conspicuous at the scene of the first crime, afford proof of their assumptions. It appears to me, however, that such an argument ignores the peculiar and astonishing callousness of psychopaths and also ignores the fact that they appear to take a positive and boastful delight in showing off in the midst of their uninviting, destructive, and antisocial achievements. They often seem to relish this as an exhibition of their prowess. I think it much more likely that such a man as Heath would want to savor the afterglow of his perverse and sadistic crime, to exult in his success, and to flaunt his ability to hoodwink the police than that he would be unconsciously seeking punishment in order to ease a conscience which was causing him great remorse of which he remained unaware.

  38. The Erratic Man of Genius

  Rather curiously, one might at first think, many persons widely recognized as geniuses have been placed by various writers in the classification of psychopathic personality.128,131,156 The vagueness and plasticity of the term as it was for so long officially used seem still to promote it’s being stretched in practice to cover nearly any type of abnormal behavior imaginable, and the literal or etymologic connotation is, of course, no less all embracing.

  It is true that a number of celebrities presented in school books as ornaments of our civilization are credited with isolated acts that would do justice to the cases discussed in this book. Some of the great figures in history, literature, philosophy, and art are said even to have behaved continually in abnormal patterns.

  The concept of genius as a type of madness is particularly associated with Lombroso, who, in 1888, with The Man of Genius, advanced his familiar hypothesis that genius is a degenerative psychosis, a sort of “Moral insanity” which may at times take the form of other mental disorders but which preserves certain distinguishing characteristics.186

  Grasset,99 following a similar line of thought, gives some striking examples. Tolstoi is said to have lashed himself with ropes and to have fallen a considerable distance while attempting to fly before he became preoccupied with wondering seriously whether to abandon civilization for a primitive life in the desert. Jean Jacques Rousseau’s many false starts as medical student, clockmaker, theologian, painter, servant, musician, and botanist are noted, as well as his curious letter addressed to God Almighty which he placed under the altar of Notre Dame. Rousseau’s expressed repugnance toward the normal sex act is also noted. Schopenhauer’s peculiarities, long famous, are reviewed by Grasset. His abnormal attitude of esthetic distaste toward woman, his morbid suspiciousness which led him to write even trivial notes in dead languages, and his occasional assaults on unsuspecting bystanders who he fancied were talking about him all suggest a deep-seated maladjustment.

  Unusual and apparently irrational behavior has indeed been so commonly reported in the lives of those acclaimed as great artists and thinkers that there is a popular tendency to regard it as the rule rather than the exception. Vincent Van Gogh’s career is a familiar example. His justly celebrated exploit in cutting off his own ear and sending it to a prostitute of Arles is one of many.230

  Richard Wagner, according to some of his biographers140 manifested an utter disregard for the feelings and the rights of others, a petty vanity, and sometimes a callousness almost worthy of the psychopath. Nordau228 has indeed said that Wagner is accused of having “a greater degree of degeneracy than all the other degenerates heretofore seen put together!”

  Jonathan Swift, in his poem The Lady’s Dressing Room and in other writings, manifests an attitude so basically distorted that it is difficult not to believe he was a very ill man psychiatrically. In an interesting discussion of life-rejecting attitudes and their relation to obsessive disorder, Straus270 makes clear something that is probably not only pertinent to that syndrome but also to other psychiatric condition
s. The basic emotional judgment expressed by Swift might, if it were an unconscious stratum in the psychopath, play an important part in his clinical manifestations. The life of this learned, conscientious and brilliant man does not, however, show behavioral features that would in any way suggest his being classed in our group, nor do the other celebrated figures mentioned above, despite these reports of eccentricity and of various psychiatric manifestations.

  Is it not pertinent here to ask ourselves again, what is a genius? In the dictionary, among other definitions, we find, “a man endowed with transcendent ability.” Shall we conclude that the authentic genius will demonstrate more than ordinary wisdom in the conduct of his life? Or should we consider his books or his music or his statuary apart from his personal acts? Shall we say that his creative productions furnish the evidence of superior wisdom or of essential greatness that he may have failed to display in his role as a husband, father, friend, or citizen?

  It seems reasonable to argue that we should gratefully accept the work of the poet and artist for what positive qualities we find in the work, itself, and that we can ignore altogether if we choose the life of the man who produced it. May there not be truth and beauty quite genuine in the creative artist’s experience but which he cannot apply consistently in the conduct of his own life? It seems reasonable to believe that this is likely.

  On the other hand, if the productions of the artist, the poems, novels, or paintings themselves, reflect gruesomely distorted or perverse appraisals of life, is it not natural for us, when we recognize this, to feel distaste? If malignantly perverse attitudes are presented, disguised, or partly disguised, as verities enshrined by art, it seems reasonable to believe that the unwary may be seriously confused or misled. Such qualities in art might justifiably be recognized and proclaimed as pathologic.

  Throughout Europe and America, Paul Verlaine is acclaimed as an important figure in world literature. In our colleges and universities young people are encouraged to admire his works and to recognize him as a rare and wonderful spirit, towering above the level of common humanity. The sordid folly, the senseless and distasteful misconduct, parasitism, indolence, depravity, and irresponsible squandering reported as habitual of Verlaine might make it difficult for some, despite his established reputation as a poet, to believe he was a man of superior qualities and sensibilities.243,287,297 Others may assume that this man’s unprovoked and truly murderous assaults on a close friend and also on Arthur Rimbaud, his favorite homosexual intimate, and on his mother arose from the turbulent passions of a great creative artist. Could such acts and the general conduct of his life be related to callousness, perversity, and a deficiency of basic human reactions? It has been said that “probably the greatest misfortune ever to befall Paul Verlaine in his tragedy-riddled career was the fact that he was sentenced to only two years in jail—instead of life imprisonment—for the attempted murder of Arthur Rimbaud.”297 These two years have been judged by some as the least miserable and humiliating, the most nearly normal years of his adult life.

  For centuries moralists have sometimes condemned the artist’s life as licentious, as given over to sensual delights, to violent and exquisite but unconventional erotic pursuits and consummations. Others have argued, often indignantly, that the creative genius is exempt from our ordinary standards of behavior, that his mighty passions justly sweep aside ethical barriers suitable for lesser men, and that his vast spiritual fulfillments and accomplishments not only excuse but even sanctify conduct that in others might be classed as irresponsible or even criminal.197 The immature and the naive often picture those who choose the bohemian life as virile standard bearers of youth, gallant rebels against puritanical restrictions, strong men who claim a rich and lusty fulfillment of what Eros demands.

  It is popularly believed also that the genius is neglected or, through outrageous injustice, even condemned by his contemporaries because they are too stupid to understand him and to recognize his superior wisdom and spiritual values. According to legend, subsequent generations at last catch on or wake up and come to see that the creative artist was right and the surrounding social group stupidly wrong. Those who do not in retrospect justify and romantically glorify the poet’s or musician’s actual conduct often conclude that his productions show that he understood or felt more profoundly than ordinary men the issues of human life and that his lofty and magnificent being reveals itself to us through his cantos, his odes, or his symphonies.

  We find in Thomas Mann’s appraisal of Dostoevski viewpoints not entirely the same as those just mentioned.197 It is plain that he regards the venerated Russian novelist as profoundly disordered, as perhaps chief among “the great sinners and the damned, the sufferers of holy disease … I am,” Mann says, “filled with awe, with profound, mystic, silence-enjoining awe, in the presence of the religious greatness of the damned, in the presence of genius of disease and the disease of genius, of the type of the afflicted and the possessed, in whom saint and criminal are one.”197 Mann feels that Dostoevski was personally preoccupied with fantasies of bestial brutality such as the rape of a girl child he described in Stavrogin’s Confession. “Apparently this infamous crime constantly occupied the author’s moral imagination.”197

  Mann apparently does not regard Dostoevski as great despite his disease or as redeemed by art from what he finds in “the criminal depths of the author’s own conscience.” To the contrary he identifies disease and genius, saying:197

  the disease bears fruits that are more important and more beneficial to life and its development than any medically approved normality. The truth is that life has never been able to do without the morbid, and probably no adage is more inane than the one which says that “only disease can come from the diseased.” Life is not prudish and it is probably safe to say that life prefers creative, genius—bestowing disease a thousand times over to prosaic health; prefers disease, surmounting obstacles proudly on horseback, boldly leaping from peak to peak, to lounging, pedestrian healthfulness. Life is not finical and never thinks of making a moral distinction between health and infirmity. It seizes the bold product of disease, consumes and digests it, and as soon as it is assimilated, it is health. An entire horde, a generation of open-minded, healthy lads pounces upon the work of diseased genius, genialized by disease, admires and praises it, raises it to the skies, perpetuates it, transmutes it, and bequeathes it to civilization, which does not live on the home-baked bread of health alone. They all swear by the name of the great invalid, thanks to whose madness they no longer need to be mad. Their healthfulness feeds upon his madness and in them he will become healthy.

  In other words, certain attainments of the soul and the intellect are impossible without disease, without insanity, without spiritual crime, and the great invalids are crucified victims, sacrificed to humanity and its advancement, to the broadening of its feeling and knowledge—in short, to its more sublime health … They force us to re-evaluate the concepts of “disease” and “health,” the relation of sickness and life, they teach us to be cautious in our approach to the idea of disease, for we are too prone always to give it a biological minus sign.

  Mario Praz, in his well-known work The Romantic Agony, makes this comment about the French decadents:243

  [They] found or thought they found in the novels of Dostoevski a sadism which had become more mystical and more subtle, no longer limited to the grossness of physical torture but penetrating like a worm-hole into all moral phenomena … they found also a thirst for the impossible, and impotence elevated to the height of a mystical ecstasy … In Sade and in the sadists of the “frenetique” type of Romanticism it is the integrity of the body which is assaulted and destroyed, whereas in Dostoevski one has the feeling … of the “intimacy of the soul brutally and insolently violated.” [pp. 336–337]

  Unlike Thomas Mann, Praz does not express a belief in any mystical value superior to that of health in such reactions or claim that they save subsequent generations from madness. He does, however, pr
esent much evidence to support his argument that in the work of many important literary figures generally regarded as geniuses it is the pathology itself that has won admiration and been acclaimed as beauty or wisdom. He offers many examples of the influence of the Marquis de Sade, and of his tastes, in the writings of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Swinburne, Flaubert, Gautier, Huysmans, and others too numerous to mention here.

  The rapt attention which Praz demonstrates in the literary productions of this large group for literal algolagnia is complicated by many nuances of perversion. Truly corrupt and appalling depravities of taste and impulse are expressed, some passing beyond the antisocial or the unnatural and well deserving to be called antibiologic. Sexual inversion sometimes overreaches itself into rapturous praise and lustful yearning for such tragic monstrosities as those exemplified by the literal hermaphrodite. Pain, disfigurement, torture, putrefaction, disgrace, ennui, death, profanation, and nearly all things detestable to sane men are, according to the argument by Mario Praz, esthetically invoked, equivocally identified as love or glory, and treated with perverse veneration. Through the sensibilities of these famous decadents, woman is enthusiastically perceived as an overpowering, murderous vampire, man as a furtive and gelded weakling. Necrophilia and coprophilia apparently have attractions for at least a few of the group presented by Praz. In some of their writings delight is expressed not merely in things naturally disgusting, but in disgust itself.243