In her novel The Philosopher’s Pupil, Iris Murdoch writes of her character George McCaffrey in this way:
Every human being is different, more absolutely different and peculiar than we can goad ourselves into conceiving; and our persistent desire to depict human lives as dramas leads us to see ‘in the same light’ events which may have multiple interpretations and causes. Of course a man may be ‘cured’ (consoled, encouraged, improved, shaken, returned to effective activity, and so forth and so on) by a concocted story of his own life, but that is another matter. (And such stories may be on offer from doctors, priests, teachers, influential friends and relations, or may be self-invented or derived from literature.) We are in fact far more randomly made, more full of rough contingent rubble, than art or vulgar psycho-analysis lead us to imagine. The language of sin may be more appropriate than that of science and as likely to ‘cure’. The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone’s life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick or a self-destroying or even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge. There was some deep (so deep that one wants to call it ‘original’, whatever that means) wound in George’s soul into which every tiniest slight or setback poured its gall. Pride and vanity and venomous hurt feelings obscured his sun. He saw the world as a conspiracy against him, and himself as a victim of cosmic injustice.58
The ‘rough contingent rubble’ is a striking phrase for the unplumbable mass of contradictions which may surface in every man, and it must be clear to any reader who has come this far that Nilsen was himself one such contradictory jumble. The language of sin may single out the constituent element which made him evil. St Augustine thought that evil was a perverseness of the will, and certainly Nilsen was at his most evil when his will was strongest, enabling him to show appalling indifference to others when in the grip of a semi-conscious fantasy. At other times his will was healthy, his altruism intact. That the evil was episodic points to a struggle between opposing forces with, if you like, the power of satanic influence winning through when the personality was at its weakest; hence the huge upsurge of will and strength when diabolic possession took hold. The ‘devil’ must act quickly since the power of good will reassert itself within moments and drive out the evil forces which have taken advantage of weakness. When the murderer is in the throes of his act, it is as if he were momentarily inhabited by a power stronger than himself. Nilsen has said he was amazed at his strength at such times, and the evidence of survivors (Carl Stottor, Paul Nobbs) is uncannily in tune with this metaphysical version of events; Nilsen was, they said, gentle, pleasant, concerned, both before and after his murderous attack. That he now says this was all part of the pretence and guile necessary to heighten the thrill that he needed is insufficient answer. The devil is cunning or he is nothing. Had the judge asked the witnesses whether Nilsen seemed to them to be momentarily possessed by an alien force, they would have found it difficult to say no. In fact, they did tell defending counsel that he appeared to behave out of character, like someone else.
The principle of dualism, that our moral natures are equally divided, is centuries old, and persists in everyday speech. Manichaeism held that evil was positive, and resided in matter, whereas good, equally positive, resided in spirit. St Augustine refuted the teachings of Manichaeus, but still thought that evil was a separate power which operated without the volition of the individual. ‘It is not we ourselves that sin’, he wrote, ‘but some other nature (what, I know not) sins in us.’59 More than fifteen hundred years later, Iris Murdoch has one of her characters say, ‘How can another person steal one’s consciousness, how is it possible? Can good and evil change places?’60 Dennis Nilsen’s prison journal is replete with dualist or Manichaean undertones. ‘We either make good angels or very bad devils.’61 ‘Man comes apart when he doesn’t listen to his god at the crucial times of his life … I ignored my demons for years, they sprung out and destroyed me.’62 After his arrest, he began for a short period to call himself Moksheim instead of Nilsen as if in hopeful recognition that the devil of ‘Nilsen’ was exorcised, commenting ruefully that though ‘Nilsen’ was dead, there was no provision in law for his continued animation.63 He maintains that the energy with which he threw himself into work at the Jobcentre was not a front, but just as genuine as the ‘other’ self which killed: ‘This total principled moral purity in its extremes balanced up all the sickening evil of my private world.’64 It is important for the neat antithesis of this dualistic view of the world that Nilsen be an essentially moral man. The devil has no victory if there is no good to conquer and an amoral soul (if such a thing be possible) is arid ground. Nilsen consistently reiterates that he has no moral excuse, that he is still tied to a moral code,65 which would seem to indicate that he was prime material for satanic forces. According to this reading of events, the moral code, instilled in him by his grandfather Andrew Whyte, needed to be demolished not once, but repeatedly, by ‘killing’ Andrew Whyte time and time again. Each death was but a transient victory for the ‘demons’.
Incidentally, it is interesting to note that the Greek word ‘demon’ originally meant ‘divine being or god’, an etymological curiosity which harks back to the primitive conception of supernatural beings. God and devil were originally one, in language if not in Christian theology. For some early peoples, a supernatural being was at the same time both good and evil, and it is only later in cultural development that a distinction is made between the two, ascribing one quality to one force and one to another. The distinction first appears in the Old Testament. (Similarly, the French words ‘dieu’ and ‘diable’ have the same root.) When men like Nilsen talk of themselves as both angels and devils united in one, they are reverting to a pre-cultural idea of supernature which lies deeper than linguistic tradition.fn5
We should remember just how often the lives and utterances of multiple murderers conform to the dualist pattern. The rapist Edward Paisnel terrorised the Isle of Jersey for eleven years until his arrest in 1971, throughout which time he was known as Uncle Ted to dozens of children, for whom he regularly played Santa Claus every Christmas; he was a kind-hearted man who genuinely loved children, and who (he thought) was periodically possessed by a vicious demon. Ed Gein, of Plainfield, Wisconsin, universally popular and a most reliable baby-sitter, killed a number of women, and ate parts of their corpses. Mack Edwards killed children for seventeen years until he gave himself up in Los Angeles in 1970, declaring that the demon had left him. We have already seen, in the article by Dr Brittain, that mass murderers habitually speak of opposing forces battling within them, and another study quotes a murderer as saying, ‘It was as if I was watching myself do it. I knew I was doing it, but somehow it didn’t seem like me.’66 Theodore (‘Ted’) Bundy killed at least twenty young women in the United States of America between 1974 and 1978. He has never admitted the crimes, but in talking to his biographers he agreed to speculate on the possible frame of mind of a hypothetical murderer; he felt comfortable in the third person singular. Bundy claimed that the killer was inhabited by an ‘entity’ which acted of its own volition: ‘this entity inside him was not capable of being controlled any longer’. When Bundy was sentenced to death, he addressed the court with these words: ‘I cannot accept the sentence, because it is not a sentence to me … it is a sentence to someone else who is not standing here today.’67In Dostoievsky’s A Raw Youth, Versilov says, ‘I am split mentally and horribly afraid of it. It is as if you have your own double standing next to you.’ Now listen to Dennis Nilsen:
I always covered up for that ‘inner me’ that I loved … He just acted and I had to solve all his problems in the cool light of day. I could not turn him in without also destroying myself. In the end he lost. He still lies dormant within me. Will time destroy him? Or was he only lost temporarily? When I was on my high, Bleep would become sometimes frightened. She was only a simple dog but even she could see that it was not
the real Des Nilsen … She would go off to a quiet corner and hide. She would greet me the next morning as though I had been away … dogs know when your mind has been changed in a drastic way.68
The idea that ‘I’ should have to cope with the effects of ‘his’ acts offers a potent image of the personification of evil, which has often been treated in literature. But it is not, I think, a literary device so much as a groping for language which will convey the feeling of possession rather than the idea of it. For the idea must, in any rational sense, be an absurdity; yet it is none the less powerfully experienced and can only find expression in the concept of an alter ego. Marie Corelli devoted the whole of her best novel to the theme, in The Sorrows of Satan, wherein the hero, Tempest, is corrupted by a man called Rimânez, who Corelli lets us know is the devil disguised in mortal form. The twist in her tale is that the devil is heart-broken whenever men succumb to his temptation, for each evil act takes him further away from the love of God; he yearns to return to God but is cursed in having perpetually to tempt men to his bidding in the full knowledge that they must resist him in order to redeem him. It is an uphill struggle, says Corelli, as man is incurably weak. The Manichaean theme which underlies her novel is apparent in a much earlier poem:
God said: ‘I will create
A world in the air!’
Satan heard and answered:
‘I too will be there!’
God said: ‘I will make of Man
A creature supreme!’
Satan answered: ‘I will destroy
Thy splendid dream!’
God said: ‘I will ordain
That thou shalt no longer be!’
Satan answered: ‘Thou canst not, Lord,
For I am part of Thee!’69
One of the most persuasive depictions of evil in literature is James Hogg’s masterpiece, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, written in 1824. Appropriately for us, it is a Scottish work set in Scotland, and imbued with the strict doctrines which surrounded Nilsen in infancy. The central character, Robert Wringhim, is educated in Calvinist determinism and rejoices to be among God’s elect, until he meets a stranger under whose influence he commits a number of murders. The stranger assures him that the elect can do no wrong. He is, of course, the devil. Does he exist outside Wringhim, does he become Wringhim, or is he the personification of part of Wringhim’s own self? The novel is a perfection of ambiguity, reflecting the impenetrable indecision of every man who contemplates such matters. The first half tells Wringhim’s story in the third person; the second allows Wringhim his own account of what happened to him.
On the very first page of this account, we are reminded of Colin Wilson’s ‘outsider’ and the psychiatrists’ portrayal of the habitual murderer as a ‘loner’, who feels isolated from the rest of mankind. Wringhim tells us, ‘I was born an outcast in the world, in which I was destined to play so conspicuous a part.’ His moral education established for him clear discernment of right and wrong, but with the added penalty of a sense of unworthiness; whatever sins he repented, there would always be mountains more to overcome. ‘I saw with the intensity of juvenile grief, that there was no hope for me.’ (There are grounds for suspecting that the Whyte grandparents in their piety had a similar effect upon Nilsen, who despaired of ever living up to their expectations of him.) Wringhim was accused when young of having a disposition tainted with deceit. (Afraid of being found wanting, Nilsen learned to conceal himself in tight privacy.)
When Wringhim first encounters the stranger, he is struck by the fact that he looks exactly like himself, and he is drawn to him by ‘the force of enchantment’. The stranger tells him that by looking at a person attentively he can ‘by degrees assume his likeness, and by assuming his likeness I attain to the possession of his most secret thoughts.’ The two become inseparable, the stranger gradually gaining an ascendancy over Wringhim which he is powerless to resist. ‘I generally conceived myself to be two people,’ yet friends remarked that ‘instead of being deranged in my intellect, they had never heard my conversation manifest so much energy or sublimity of conception.’ The conviction that he was two persons grew stronger, and eventually oppressive.
When I was by myself, I breathed freer, and my step was lighter; but when he approached, a pang went to my heart, and, in his company, I moved and acted as if under a load that I could hardly endure … We were identified with one another, as it were, and the power was not in me to separate myself from him.
The murders are committed, and the reader is left in some doubt as to whether the murderer is Wringhim himself (as other people think), or the weird stranger pretending to be Wringhim, or indeed whether Wringhim has externalised his evil and invented the stranger to exculpate himself. Perhaps he even imagines him. The two have a conversation on the matter. ‘Is it true’, asks Wringhim, ‘that I have two souls, which take possession of my bodily frame by turns, the one being all unconscious of what the other performs?’ The stranger answers at first elliptically. ‘Your supposition may be true in effect,’ he says, and continues, ‘We all are subjected to two distinct natures in the same person.’ One could hardly imagine a more bald exposition of the case for dualism.70
It remains to point out that Wringhim is eventually driven to such despair by the strain of the struggle within him that he yearns for death, ‘wishing myself a worm, or a moth, that I might be crushed and at rest’. But Satan has one last triumph to accomplish, one last sin to instil, when his prey admits to ‘a certain pride of heart in being supposed the perpetrator of the unnatural crimes laid to my charge’. Pride reaches its apogee when Wringhim exults at the thought that his own confessions will be printed and published. All this is recognisable in Nilsen, who also has looked forward to death, who also has felt some satisfaction in the contemplation of his notoriety, and who also has been anxious that the present book be written and published.
Nilsen departs from the fictional Wringhim in his conscious knowledge of the deeds of his ‘double’, thereby providing, perhaps, a still more suitable vehicle for satanic power. Just as Satan must have something substantial to corrupt, and therefore needs a moral man to work upon, so must the moral sense be kept alive, in order to exacerbate the corruption. The murderer must retain a knowledge of right and wrong, must know that what he has done is wrong, or the devil will be emasculated. It would be pointless for the murderer to be unaware of the evil of his deeds, or they might never have occurred. Remorse and repentance would likewise dissipate the devilish influence – Satan would have wasted his time. What fulfils his design, and finally demolishes the good, is the evil-doer’s active desire for punishment, for in being punished he accedes to the power of Satan and implicitly celebrates his success. The reader knows how frequently in the course of this narrative Nilsen has declared his need for punishment, even for public vengeance. We have come full circle since the remark listed on page xi, and can better appreciate its import: ‘I have now a guilt and punishment complex. I deserve everything that a court can throw at me.’71 The devil has won.
It was perhaps folly to entitle this chapter ‘Answers’. Men like Nilsen elude classification, their unfathomable depravity resists conclusive analysis. They remind us, depressingly, of the essential unknowability of the human mind. They are themselves aware of their uniqueness, and look upon attempts by the rest of us to distil their characters into a shape that we can apprehend with something like amused disdain. Theodore Bundy said that society wanted to believe it could identify evil or bad people, but that there were no stereotypes; Nilsen has written scornfully of the desire to perceive him as a ‘type’. There are selfish reasons for this attitude; if Nilsen could be categorised, he would lose some of his ability to excite interest, which depends almost entirely upon his being enigmatic. At the same time, one must reluctantly concede that he and Bundy are right. We may scurry around looking for answers, but we will not find a single one which closes all the questions. The ‘rough contingent rubble’ is always there to m
ake us stumble.
For these reasons, I have avoided using the word ‘psychopath’ which seems to me to be a passe partout noun dragged in to apply to any criminal whose motives are inaccessible. Its connotation is so wide as to be useless. Doctors admit that it is employed too freely, and furthermore point out that it is virtually undiagnosable. So-called psychopaths can be to the expert as well as to the casual observer perfectly normal people who are so adept at concealing their disturbance that they can live among us undetected for years. A man has to be called a psychopath before the symptoms of his condition stand out in relief or slot into place; the label usually precedes the diagnosis. By this yardstick, we are all potential psychopaths, yet it is only those of us who do something vicious and inexplicable who earn the label. In other words, the term applies to the deed, not to the condition. Before his arrest, no one would have thought of calling Dennis Nilsen a psychopath. And what does one call a psychopath who commits no psychopathic act?fn6
Killing For Company Page 32
