All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  Yet it seems no one has yet attempted to draw an indelible line connecting the drugs and madness of the era to the music that emerged out of it. Not even the ever-readable Mikal Gilmore, whose collected ‘writings on the 1960s and its discontents’, published in 2008 as Stories Done, he prefaced with the following observation: ‘The commonality of the role of drugs and alcohol in these stories could hardly be coincidental, and though that trait . . . wasn’t what attracted me to those stories . . . what drew me was something else. Almost every person . . . suffered from depression at various times and in varying degrees.’ Despite this common concern, however, Mikal’s book and mine only cross paths when discussing Syd Barrett, though his accounts of the troubles that plagued ex-Beatles George Harrison and John Lennon might have convinced me to find room for them if the subject matter of (in)sanity had spilled over into their songs more overtly. But then, Lennon never seems to have doubted his sanity as much as his genius.

  Likewise, Jenny Diski’s highly personal 140-page contribution to Profile Books’ Big Ideas series, The Sixties (2009), devotes two of its six sections to drugs (‘Altering Realities’) and madness (‘Changing Our Minds’) respectively, while namechecking the music enjoyed by that era’s willing outcasts at every opportunity. Diski also contrasts her generation’s experience with those of today’s ‘kids [who] take Es and party . . . they even call it “loved up”, but it doesn’t seem to have any other cultural aspect attached to it. No books or art, and the music is [just] too mechanical.’ But Diski never connects the dots that, joined together, illustrate how the most cogent of populist ‘art-forms’ turned her generation’s inner confusion and rampant experimentation into Art.

  And that is surely a key difference. For in the years 1971–73, a period when English rock dominated the airwaves, band after band, songwriter after songwriter produced fully conceived works from either side of what was almost a communal nervous breakdown, a psychic aftershock in the collective unconscious of this sceptred isle. In this period, the finest songwriters from this fervent scene produced their defining works. And among these notable notches would be Ray Davies’ Muswell Hillbillies, Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, David Bowie’s twinset Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (an album made in the shadow cast by erstwhile leader Syd Barrett’s collapse into secret songs of silence) and Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia – every one of which, directly or indirectly, took as its central theme ‘the subject of madness’. How they got there – and, in most cases, got out alive (just about) – is the nub of our story.

  (ii)

  Outside a lunatic asylum one day

  a gunner was picking up stones;

  Up popped a lunatic and said to him,

  Good morning Gunner Jones,

  How much a week do you get for doing that?

  Fifteen bob, I cried.

  He looked at me with a look of glee, and this is what he cried:

  Come inside, you silly bugger, come inside – World War II marching song.

  What is an authentic madman?

  It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honour.

  So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses.

  – Antonin Artaud: Van Gogh, The Man Suicided by Society, 1947

  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked . . .

  – Allen Ginsberg, Howl, August 1955

  R.D. Laing’s other major contribution to countercultural confusion in 1967 was co-organizing the Dialectics of Liberation ‘conference’ that summer at London’s Roundhouse. The seeds of this particular confluence of movers and shakers had been sown in the aftermath of the Second World War, as the English asylums seemed less keen on locking up high-strung poets – especially if female – letting the likes of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath take their own lives instead. Meanwhile, the French saw fit to release their self-proclaimed ‘authentic madman’, essayist Antonin Artaud, in 1946, after nine years of being shuttled from asylum to asylum. The American asylums, though, quickly took up the slack, starting the same year with the internment of Ezra Pound, who had been found to be of unsound mind when facing charges of treason for broadcasting pro-fascist views on Italian radio.2 Once again, the question of who was mad and who was sane was back on the front-burner of pop culture.

  It took until 1955 for Archibald MacLeish and Ernest Hemingway – confident that the danger had passed, and in tandem with T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost – to begin pushing the US attorney general to quash Pound’s indictment for treason. In the same year, an excerpt from a first novel by ex-fighter-pilot Joseph Heller in New World Writing #7 – included in the same issue as a similar-length extract from another unpublished novel, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road – reinvigorated the whole debate as to who might be sane, and who mad. It even gave a name to this mental bind, the (short-lived) ‘Catch-18’. Six years (and four digits) later, the world of Catch-22 held a mirror upside down to the whole crazy idea of war, becoming a catchword and a publishing phenomenon, inspiring a series of rave reviews with titles such as ‘The Logic of Survival in a Lunatic World’, ‘A Deadly Serious Lunacy’ and ‘Under Mad Gods’, as it became the must-read novel of the early 1960s.

  In addition to Catch-22’s first appearance (of sorts), 1955 saw the birth of the madness they christened rock & roll; and from the initial hysterical press coverage one would be inclined to think an entire generation had lost its collective marbles. It also saw the composition of a poem written for the committed, what the poet himself called ‘a gesture of wild solidarity, a message into the asylum’. The poem signalled another turning of history’s page, and an entirely new conception of the madman in postwar pop culture.

  The poem, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl – part of which was written after a peyote-fuelled trek through downtown San Francisco in the company of Peter Orlovsky – took much of its form from the poem of an eighteenth-century inmate of the English asylums, Kit Smart’s ‘Jubilate Agno’. Making its first public appearance in print in 1956, Howl was addressed by former asylum inmate Ginsberg to current inmate Carl Solomon, committed to a Californian institution for his ‘protest against the verbal, the rational and the acceptable [by a form of] neo-dada clowning’, for which he was ‘deposited in a nut factory where I was shocked into a renunciation of all my reading’.

  One of the first people Ginsberg sent the finished poem to was Ezra Pound, who responded by writing to Ginsberg’s mentor, William Carlos Williams, suggesting he learn ‘the value of time to those who want to read something that will tell ’em wot they don’t know’. There were subtexts going on here that the cantankerous Pound wholly failed to recognise.

  As Ginsberg himself admitted in the thirtieth-anniversary facsimile edition of his landmark poem, ‘I’d used Mr Solomon’s return to the asylum as occasion of a masque on my feelings towards my mother, in itself an ambiguous situation since I had signed the papers giving permission for her lobotomy a few years before.’ Three years later, he directly addressed his mother Naomi’s madness and the resultant cross-generational misery in the second of his epic ‘hymns to the mad’, the unsparing Kaddish:

  On what wards – I walked there later, oft – old catatonic ladies, grey as cloud or ash or walls – sit crooning over floorspace – Chairs – and the wrinkled hags acreep, accusing – begging my 13-year-old mercy –

  ‘Take me home’ – I went alone sometimes looking for the lost Naomi, taking Shock – and I’d say, ‘No, you’re crazy Mama

  – Trust the Drs.’ – . . .

  Eleven years after Howl’s now-hallowed appearance, Ginsberg would be a key guest at the fortnight-long Dialectics of Liberation ‘conference’ in London. In the intervening years he had become, along with Dr Timothy Leary, the perceived spokesman of the pro-hallucinogenic movement
– such as it was – even penning a series of poems that embraced LSD’s inspirational attributes, notably ‘Lysergic Acid’: ‘It is a multiple million eyed monster / it is hidden in all its elephants and selves / it hummeth in the electric typewriter / it is electrically connected to itself, [as] if it hath wires.’

  The Dialectics of Liberation – perhaps the defining moment in the counterculture’s decade-long flirtation with ‘outsider’ status as a raison d’être – had been arranged by R.D. Laing and his fellow ‘anti-psychiatrists’ to air common concerns. In the decade since Howl, an entire intellectual caucus of sorts had sprung up from the root belief that societal notions of madness remained a moveable feast, and that the relationship between art and madness was such that it was hard to know where one ended and the other began. And such views were fast infecting the body artistic.

  Although everyone associated with the nascent ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement was at the Roundhouse – along with the usual ragbag of counter-revolutionaries from that season’s Judean People’s Front – one thinker not in attendance was French social historian Michel Foucault, though his ideas certainly informed this much-hyped event. Foucault’s Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961) – better known by the snappier title given its 1964 English translation, Madness and Civilization – was, in that fine Marxist tradition, a philosophical work passing itself off as social history.

  In his preface, Foucault postulated the idea that madness and reason had once enjoyed a far closer co-relationship than in the modern world, and decided something important had been lost: ‘We must try to return, in history, to that zero point in the course of madness at which madness is an undifferentiated experience, a not yet divided experience of division itself . . . Modern man no longer communicates with the madman, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of [mental] disease.’ After a further 300 pages concerning France’s institutional response to its own ship of fools, he reached the conclusion: ‘Where there is a work of art, there is no madness.’

  Such a view was taken very seriously by those who followed in Foucault’s footsteps. It was the artist-madman who validated, or was seen to validate, a lot of the work being conducted in Britain by R.D. Laing and David Cooper. In fact, it was Laing who was directly responsible for the English-language publication of Foucault’s work in his extra-curricular role as reader for the Tavistock Press. (‘I put out feelers . . . and got the manuscript of Madness and Civilization . . . It was one of the books that I would consider to be a really major book, [but] his name was totally unknown in English.’) Published in an abridged form in 1967, the translated appearance of Foucault’s work coincided with an outpouring of essays and articles from Laing, Cooper and co. In fact, it was Cooper – the lesser light, but the greater proselytizer – who was given the opportunity to connect Foucault’s work to his own, writing an introduction to the Tavistock edition of Madness and Civilization:

  Foucault makes it quite clear that the invention of madness as a disease is in fact nothing less than a peculiar disease of our civilization. We choose to conjure up this disease in order to evade a certain moment of our own existence – the moment of disturbance, of penetrating vision into the depths of ourselves, that we prefer to externalize into others. Others are elected to live out the chaos that we refuse to confront in ourselves . . . People do not in fact go mad, but are driven mad by others who are driven into the position of driving them mad by . . . social pressures.

  Cooper, who had cemented his association with Laing as early as 1964, co-authoring Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy (1964), was keen to codify their joint cause and ride the greater notoriety of Laing. For now, Laing was happy to go along with him. But Cooper went further than Laing ever would – tainting him by association – making outlandish claims such as: ‘Madness . . . is not “in” a person, but in a system of relationships in which the labelled “patient” participates: schizophrenia, if it means anything, is a more or less characteristic mode of disturbed group behaviour. There are no schizophrenics.’

  If Laing went to some pains to bring elements of the psychiatric establishment along on this journey – albeit largely without result – David Cooper was fully prepared to mount the barricades. In 1967 he published his provocative handbook for (what he hoped was) this new movement, Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry. From his ‘private psychiatric practice in Harley Street’, he was already claiming his principal concern was ‘to develop an existential psychiatry in Britain and to elaborate principles to overcome . . . [the] compartmentalization of the human sciences’. Calling schizophrenics ‘the strangled poets of our age’, Cooper thought it was ‘about time that we, who would be healers, took our hands off their throats’.

  Like Laing, Cooper had come to believe that normality was ‘at an opposite pole not only to madness but also to sanity’, and that ‘very few manage to slip through the state of inertia or arrest represented by alienated, statistical normality and progress to some extent on the way to sanity’. And so, in July 1967, he helped Laing co-organize the Dialectics of Liberation, two-week conflab between pot-smokers, psychiatrists, poets, potential terrorists and peaceniks; or, as Cooper characterized them in the introduction to his book of the conference, ‘this curious pastiche of eminent scholars and political activists’. The whole event was, as 1960s chronicler Barry Miles has commented, ‘a very sixties idea – the concept was to get together all of the different factions involved in the liberation struggle and have a good talk about it’. There was even a musical component, Mick Farren’s Social Deviants.

  Cooper, there in all his pomp, took the opportunity to reiterate a now-familiar mantra: ‘Schizophrenia is a half-compelled, half-chosen retreat from the precariously and artificially stabilized level of highly differentiated experience that passes as sane in our culture.’ Carried away by what he saw as the event’s import, he announced at the end of proceedings, in a talk entitled ‘Beyond Words’, that: ‘This was really the founding event of the Antiuniversity of London which now functions full-time, carrying over the spirit of the Congress in what may be a permanent form.’

  It didn’t, and it wasn’t. As with many a hare-brained activity conceived during the Summer of Love, the conference was not a new beginning, but the beginning of the end for the ‘anti-psychiatry movement’. For Laing, at least, the Dialectics of Liberation proved a turning point, but not in a good way. Rather, as he quickly realized: ‘From the point of view of . . . something gelling, it was, in fact, a total fiasco. I was about the only one who could stand all the different sorts of people that were there . . . I mean, most people came along entirely in their own shell to propagate their own propaganda of their particular point of view.’ He had even come face to face with some people who thought that putting acid into the general water supply was a good idea – and perhaps the solitary achievement of the conference was convincing said folk that it wasn’t.

  It took another invited speaker, anthropologist Gregory Bateson, to cast a necessary caveat at Blake’s philosophical dictum that the road of excess may lead to the palace of wisdom, already appropriated as an endorsement for copious consumption of mind-altering substances. Bateson alone told the assembled few: ‘It is characteristic of the 1960s that a large number of people are looking to the psychedelic drugs for some sort of wisdom or some sort of enlargement of consciousness, and I think this symptom of our epoch probably arises as an attempt to compensate for our excessive purposiveness. But I am not sure that wisdom can be got that way.’ In the end, he decided he’d rather study dolphins, retreating to Hawaii’s Oceanic Institute.

  Meanwhile, to Laing’s eternal chagrin, he had now become perceived in populist terms as an advocate of psychedelic drugs, when all he really wanted was for people to expand their horizons intellectually. As the TV director Jo Durden-Smith, who attended the conference in the company of Miles, later said, ‘Laing was misinterpreted and misused [so much that] he became, or his attitude towards madness
became, a sort of hooray attitude, with not very much thought put into it at all.’ By 1969, even the British Journal of Psychiatry willingly ran a lengthy attack by three distinguished psychiatrists on ‘Laing’s models of madness’, who all but accused him of advocating LSD as a treatment for schizophrenia: ‘Although Laing does not use the term [psychedelic] in this book . . . it is obvious that he thinks that schizophrenics may have, sometimes have, and ought to have the same kind of experiences that normal individuals seek when they take mind-expanding drugs.’

  It was a vantage for which the psychiatric community had very little time. In the big wide world, though, Laing’s handbook for ‘bright young schizophrenics’ – as the BJoP article sarcastically portrayed his 1967 volume, The Politics of Experience – was certainly making its influence felt. Syd Barrett’s friend David Gale – who also claims he tried to get the songwriter to visit Laing – delineated Laing’s readers thus: ‘[He] – inadvertently, I think – heroised the idea of madness. And hippies made of it what they wanted. The ones that read books made Laing’s . . . into what they wanted to hear.’

  While the Floyd turned to Laing in the hour of their leader’s weakness, the counterculture continued to paint any ‘straights’ as the ones needing psychiatric ‘evaluation’. Any generational awareness that there might be an underlying proclivity among English poets and lyricists for ‘despondency and madness’, which could be triggered by powerful medicines, would have to await the end of the Sixties’ all-night fancy-dress party.

  It would be April 1970 before English singer-songwriter David Bowie encapsulated the Laing position perfectly in a song written for and about his half-brother Terry, a recently diagnosed schizophrenic. Destined to provide the thematic hub to his first hard-rock album, The Man Who Sold the World, the song was called ‘All the Madmen’. It signalled the start of an era when songs directly addressed the damage (being) done to eccentrics, and the end to a time when poking fun at them was a bloodless sport for English songwriters: