WRITERS AND MADNESS
15
quered by force, or taken as a gift of tenderness and pity for his
confession.
But both the satisfaction (of power) and relief (from guilt),
though they glow brightly, glow, alas, only for moments, and we
live again in the shadow of ourselves. Nothing in the world (we are
told) is a substitute for anything else, and
if
there is a point beyond
which the writer can never satisfy these urges in literature itself, then
this inability can no longer be regarded as peculiar to Swift, a defi–
ciency of
his
"case," but an essential and mortifying aspect of the
literary condition everywhere. So we come back to our point: Swift
is certainly not a modern literary man, but we only had to go deep
enough, and we have arrived at a world of impulses and motives
that we recognize as our own.
3.
The Moderns. Aytre's journey.
Despite the ancient recognition, the modern world of the crack–
up and breakdown has really become a new and almost discontinuous
phenomenon. (First the continuity; now we must do justice to the
other aspect, the discontinuity of the modern.) It is time we had an
exhaustive and statistical study of the problem, done with the grub–
bing thoroughness of a Ph.D. thesis; for the present I would only
suggest some of the main statistical categories: the madmen, those
who broke, Swift, Cowper, William Collins, Christopher Smart, Hoel–
derlin, Ruskin; figures who were not altogether normal,
if
not alto–
gether mad, like Blake; who, like Coleridge and DeQuincey, had to
salvage themselves through drugs (the Romantic equivalent of the
American Pattern) ; or who produce their writing out of a maximum
anxiety, their personal rack of torture, like Baudelaire and Eliot; and
from these on we could ramify off into all the various subtler neuroses
that have affiicted literary men. Even from this sketchy suggestion of
a list it begins to appear that the incidence of aberration, neurosis,
or outright madness is such that one really begins to doubt whether
these misfortunes are accidental to the profession of letters as such.*
*
The reader should compare, for a somewhat different view of the matter,
Mr. Lionel Trilling's "Art and Neurosis"
(PARTISAN
REVIEW,
Winter 1945). By
indicating my disagreements with Mr. Trilling's admirable essay, perhaps I may
sum up, in more scientific terms, the psychoanalytic view which lies at the base·
(perhaps a little hidden) of my own discussion.
Mr. Trilling's main point, perhaps, is that neurosis by itself will not make
anyone a great writer; a proposition with which I am in complete agreement.
I would also agree with him that there are many neurotics among business–
men and scientists (though I doubt the scientists could match the incidence
