Asylum. Ii

I

EARLY in February, after I had been in the asylum¹ about six weeks, the doctors decided that the initial stages of my cure had progressed sufficiently to shift me along to Hall Two, where the patients had greater liberty and responsibility. I went reluctantly. I was sure I should n’t like it, and for some weeks I sulked.

Hall Two was less of a prison, but it was also less of a kindergarten. While we were all locked in as scrupulously as before, the windows were not barred. They merely had heavy screens. We were supposed to have passed the point where we might break windows or smash furniture. We were no longer continually watched. The tempo was entirely different. We no longer had female nurses, and were no longer pampered as interesting invalids. The atmosphere was a queer combination of fraternity house and military barracks.

I loathed everything in this new hall for the first few weeks. Instead of the lazy, easy, quiet (except when somebody began weeping, howling like a wolf, or seeing his dead grandfather) lobby down in Hall Four, where we could loll about in big stuffed armchairs or sprawl on couches with pretty nurses to wait on us, we were forced to sit up and wait on ourselves. The smoking room here was a stiff game-room, with a pool table in the middle, a radio, card tables, chess and checker tables, no couches, no armchairs or easy-chairs at all, nothing but straight-backed hard chairs which we believed were designed to be as stiff and uncomfortable as possible. Nevertheless, this was the room in which we congregated. At the other end of the lobby was a cheerless, formal ‘library’ which had armchairs and couches, — the long corridors had big couches, too, — but since we were not allowed to lie on the couches, and were not permitted to smoke in the library, both were usually empty.

In our bedrooms we had a little more latitude and considerably more responsibility than in Hall Four. We had writing tables, stationery, reading lamps; and nearly all our private clothing and belongings were restored to us. We could not have pocketknives, matches, or razors, but when we entered this hall our wrist watches, fountain pens, extra belts, our books, clothing, and knickknacks, were given back to us. We had to keep all our clothes and belongings in order, make out our own laundry lists, keep our bureau drawers and wardrobes neat. Instead of enjoying the greater liberty, I resented it. I had got used to having Miss Pine do everything for me just as my mother used to when I was six, including picking up after me and telling me when to put on a different shirt or another tie.

What I liked least at first was my fellow patients. They were too normal. They were nearly well, or getting well. They lived, talked, and deported themselves more or less as I imagine they always had on the outside, so that the social atmosphere was radically different from that of the hall below. Here there was, if not exactly snobbery, the beginning of selection and the forming of groups, cliques. Down below, there had been the basic, leveling camaraderie of common upset or misfortune. We had been like a heterogeneous group in a bombarded dugout or war hospital. When men lie in adjacent beds with machine-gun bullets through their gizzards, they find other things in common than having been to Harvard or to Philadelphia to hear Stokowski. Nobody in Hall Four had given a hoot that Wethered was in the Social Register and Ryder in the firemen’s union. But here in Two we were all aware of such things, not nastily aware of them, but aware — as people are on the outside.

There were only seventeen patients in Hall Two when I was transferred there, yet they were split into groups. There was a group of five or six intellectuals who played contract together and wanted to listen to symphonies and chamber music on the radio. There was a group of business men, two of them Jewish, who played pool and pinochle and preferred listening to Eddie Cantor or Ed Wynn. There were three or four youths whom everybody was kind to but did not include, and two or three oldsters who moped or read. They were all decent enough to me, and I could have grouped as I pleased — not because I was a fellow unfortunate, a fellow inmate, but because I had written a couple of books and had a name which appeared occasionally in the newspapers. Well, I did n’t like this. I did n’t feel that I was a person who had written a couple of books. I felt that I was a patient locked up where I ought to be, except that I ought still to be down in Hall Four, so 1 sulked for a couple of weeks, and wished I were back downstairs.

II

Thus I became a routine, polite, if slightly surly patient in Hall Two. I avoided the recreation room except when I went in to smoke. I moped, read long, old books like David Copperfield and Clarissa Harlowe in the empty, cheerless library, was depressed, and knew that if I were outside, or in an ordinary sanitarium where attendants could be bribed to bring in whiskey, I should be drinking like a fish again.

Dr. Paschall, who was puzzled and annoyed by the metamorphosis in my behavior, came up one day to see what he could get out of me in a private conversation. He invited confidence, and I tried to give it to him.

I said: ‘I’m bored. You think I’m bored from being locked up, now that the novelty has worn off. You tell me the trouble with drunks is that they always get bored by the restraint and think they’re cured and want to go home when all they’ve done is get over their headaches. But I don’t think I’m cured, and I wasn’t ever bored in Hall Four. I liked it. Now I’m bored in this hall. The patients bore me. They talk about Wall Street and Walter Lippmann, or Culbertson or golf. They play contract and billiards and ping-pong. I did n’t come here to play contract and talk about the stock market. I used to do things like that when I was a Rotarian in Atlanta. But I don’t like them any more. It’s like being sick in a club or a frat house.’

Paschall lighted a cigarette and answered : —

‘I think I begin to see what it’s all about; but, for a man past fortyfive, you seem to have the emotional reactions, if not the mind, of a child. You miss your little playmates. You miss the fun and irresponsibility of Hall Four. You miss the comedy and occasional excitement. It was high time we moved you from that hall. You need to take us and yourself more seriously. The patients who bore you up here are all right. The trouble’s with you. You played contract downstairs where they redouble seven no trumps and lead the queen of hippogriffs, but up here, where they play real contract, you refuse to play. And there’s big news coming every day from Washington. It would n’t hurt you to read Walter Lippmann and talk with your fellow patients about the New Deal. Don’t sneer! I mean it. It’s your country. You may get out of here some day and go back to work. . . .

‘By the way,’ he continued, ‘your friends Hauser and Spike will be moving up in a couple of days, and you won’t be so lonesome.’

III

‘Everything,’ says Epictetus, ‘has two handles: one by which it can be carried, and one by which it cannot.’ I took hold now by the other handle, and carried on. Spike was transferred as promised, and a week or so later Johnny Reiss and Hauser came along. We began to have a fairly good time.

Then early in March, one afternoon at twilight when I had been deprived of drink for about three months, rather suddenly I developed a new set of symptoms, perhaps entered a new phase of gradual cure. It was snowing outside the big windows; it was peaceful and warm inside. I was listening to muted Seigfried and Valhalla motifs — symphonic Rheingold excerpts coming from Carnegie Hall, tuned low on the radio (this may have been the fortuitous trigger) — when I began to find myself interiorly illumined with a sort of mystical exaltation, strangely like that which comes sometimes from prolonged drinking when the whiskey is good and one drinks a lot of it without becoming violent or sick.

All of a sudden I found it wonderful, strange, and beautiful to be sober, and the feeling produced a curious sensitiveness which was astonishingly like the flashes a drunken man gets on the rare occasions when drunkenness seems golden and divine. It was as if a veil, or scum, or film had been stripped from all things visual and auditory, or as if the world had been suddenly diffused with a soft, unearthly, revealing light. I was sitting close to the radio, and was almost afraid to lift my head or move, for fear it all would fade. The colors in the carpet at my feet were abnormally vivid and made a harmony of their own.

At this moment the superintendent of the hall came and stood in the doorway, looking in as he did from time to time. I had often seen him thus, a fat-faced, fussy, spying, prying, pompously masculine old maid. I saw him now, benevolent, kindly, and solicitous. He was my father and mother. He would n’t let me hurt myself or let anything hurt me. He was there to protect us, watch over us, and be kind to us.

Four or five fellow patients were scattered round the big room. I looked at their faces. They too were diffused with kindly, human light — even the face of one I had disliked, now wondering why, for he was now my brother. Some minutes had passed, but the illusion still persisted. It had not flashed, fleeting. It was still there. I took stock of it. I realized that it was wonderful and at the same time slightly maudlin. I got up and shook myself, and walked over to the window. But the big bare trees against the white snow in the falling darkness seemed of an unearthly, almost holy beauty. The thing still persisted. I felt mildness and goodness and childlike wonder within myself.

I said, ‘I might as well be drunk.’ Instead of being pleased, I shook myself again and fought it, as one fights the waves of alcoholic intoxication. I went out to the lavatory to wash my face for supper.

At supper, I scarcely noticed my companions. I was absorbed, not knowing whether to be pleased or not, with a further phase of what I began to think might be an authentic ‘mystical illumination,’ if it were n’t just a maudlin neurasthenia caused by the complete stoppage of the alcohol in which my system had been soaked. The new phase was that dry, fresh bread, a piece of boiled potato, even the water, — but particularly a scrap of plain, unbuttered bread, — had a taste that was ridiculously delicious, heavenly. There was a breaded chop in tomato sauce, which I am usually fond of, and I cut a mouthful anticipating that, since dry bread suddenly tasted like ambrosia, this now would taste better than any banquet a starving man had ever dreamed of. But I had guessed wrong. It seemed too highly seasoned — a mixed gamut of savors, too sharply flavored.

I said: ‘Spike, was there too much salt and pepper on your chop, or does the tomato sauce seem sharp?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s all right. I just put a little more salt on it.’

So I knew that its seeming too highly seasoned was a part of the weird state I was in. I got the same reaction with the salad dressing, but some leaves of lettuce with no dressing were as good to me as they would have been to a rabbit. And I still felt good and happy, though slightly scornful and puzzled about it.

I repeat that it was wonderful. I hoped I was drunk on sobriety. They had said it would take at least three months to get my alcohol-soaked tissues, nerves, organs, and senses unpickled. I hoped it was that. I hoped I was seeing clear because I had been ‘purified.’ But I suspected that such an implied state of grace was too good to be true. To be drunk on sobriety would be turning earth into heaven, myself into a sort of saint, which, in a bad world with a brute like myself in it, was a reductio ad absurdum. More likely some inherent neurasthenia, long drowned in gin, was now asserting itself. More likely I was ‘elated,’ which is a pleasant, agreeable term in common parlance, but means something not nearly so nice in technical psychiatric jargon.

But since it was so pleasant, as well as puzzling, I decided to let it ride — that is, to stop trying to rationalize it, stop trying to throw it off, let it lull me along to see where it led.

IV

As I lay in bed with the lights out, a feeling came over me about the place I was in, about the institution. Since it was an emotional state rather than a process of reasoning, I may not now be able to describe it in reasoned words. But it was as if I felt some of the following things, rather than catalogued or thought them: —

‘I am in a safe sanctuary, surrounded by protections, by kindly companions, by devoted servants who give me all things that are good for me and protect me from things that would hurt me. Wise and kindly superiors who wish me well watch over all this with benign power. All this is bestowed on me by day and by night, is “given” me, requiring no effort, no payment, money, or responsibility. My pockets are empty. I have no money here. I need none. Here all things are free as salvation. I am saved. No more fear and struggle. I am safe in the arms of—’

It was precisely at this point of feeling, at this point in letting things ride, that my thinking mind insisted on shaking itself, sharpening the focus, impatient and suspicious: —

‘Safe in the arms of what?’

Safe in the arms of the psychiatrists? God forbid! Safe in the arms of my mother? Yes, I thought, it had felt a little like that, like having been badly hurt and being safe, soothed, protected, in my mother’s arms. But an old hymn tune had suggested another angle. I suddenly realized that in the factual history of my whole clinical case there had been a strong parallel — a striking analogy, at any rate — to the mystical process of salvation as doctrinally outlined by the Christian Church. At a given moment I had ‘repented,’ in considerable fear and terror. I had known I was ‘damned’ and wanted to be ‘saved.’ I had known that my own strength, my own will, could no longer save me. At the last I had begged, screamed, pleaded to be ‘saved.’ I had been willing to ‘abase’ myself, to relinquish myself, my life, my will, my body, into hands stronger than my own. I was through, and I knew it, so far as any effort to save myself was concerned. I was stripped down, naked, to one thing, which was the one and only thing the Church Fathers doctrinally recommend — the desire for salvation.

I should have been an excellent candidate for the mourner’s bench had my trouble been a soul rotten with sin instead of a system rotten with whiskey, and maybe being in that stripped state had made me a more hopeful candidate than most for the different brand of salvation purveyed by the doctors and psychiatrists.

I am including all this now, as a part of the reportorial record of what happens to a drunkard who seeks serious modern scientific, medical-psychiatric aid to be cured, because I am convinced that it is all a part of what any man who has been a hard drinker for years must go through to come out of it. It is no joke. It involves going through strange stages, some pleasant, some painful. It cannot be done in a few weeks or a couple of months. I am not judging by my own case alone. There are plenty of authoritative statistics.

This present stage, which came after I had been deprived of drink for some three months, and which continued for several days, was strange but pleasant. For instance, when I awoke the next morning, I was glad to be awake, and I was glad to put on my shirt. Some readers will know what that means, and some not. For as long as I could remember, I had been awaking in the morning not caring whether I put on my shirt or not.

I told Paschall all about this new phase, and he did n’t like it any too well. He felt that there was some hidden cowardice in it. He was afraid I was turning chameleon, becoming institutionalized, too grateful and dependent on imprisonment; afraid I was still in love with the womb or the grave, and liked being locked up as a substitute for being dead. In short, he thought it meant that I was afraid to face life.

He wound up by telling me that I should probably go through a period of depression next, and not to worry too much about it when it came. That, he said, would be the ‘hang-over.’ But all the rest of that week the pleasant glow persisted from day to day. I still woke up every morning glad to put on my shirt, and found a mild, spontaneous delight in all things. I had previously begun to like things pretty well, but this was different. For instance, working in the shop, making a new chair — up to this time I had made myself like it, but now I took spontaneous pleasure in it, in the tools, in the grain and texture of the seasoned oak under the fine edge of the plane or chisel.

It was the following Monday that a little accident occurred in the carpenter shop. It had no serious consequences except that it, or rather the consequences it threatened to have, put an end to my maudlin, elated moonings. I pressed down too hard with the drawknife on a curved piece of chair back I was shaping. It flew out of the vise and gashed me above the eye — a harmless little gash, but in a conspicuous place, and naturally it was a bit bloody. When it was detected I came very near being railroaded out of the carpenter shop, into the basket-weaving department with the doddering old gentlemen and suicidal patients.

My most faithful visitor says that when she brought me grapes that Wednesday she was more worried than at any time since the first few weeks. She said I looked depressed, nervous, unhappy. She says I told her that I was being persecuted, that the whole atmosphere of the place was petty, that I was sick of it, and that, as for being cured, I had made no progress whatever.

V

A favorite thesis among us patients, when we were out of humor, was that all psychiatrists are ‘nuts.’ For example, Paschall now assured me that I was doing much better, improving, because I felt, awful! Since I loathed the place, was angry again at everybody, had the blues, and was convinced the three months’ treatment had done me no good at all, he was sure I was getting better! He had a hard time convincing me of this.

He insisted, however, that the paradox was true, that it would have been unwholesome if I had remained in love with life in the institution. The hospital already had a queer little group of ‘trusties,’ less than half a dozen, who could get their discharge papers and walk out free any day they liked, but who probably would never go. They were happy here, no longer ‘mentally disturbed,’ but they had lost the courage, or the wish, to face the world outside. One was an elderly commercial artist who worked regularly at his drawing board and sold his stuff through a New York agent. Another was a former laundryman who had been here nine years now, by his own volition, after the doctors had pronounced him cured; he worked in the asylum, submitting to all the restrictions, including being locked up every night, because he preferred it to living on his own responsibility outside.

Less pleasant still was the case of Mr. Drummond, a silk merchant who had crashed in 1929, and gone to pieces. He had been put together again, but his wife, who had once had five servants, a box at the opera, and three cars, now peddled embroidery to her former friends, because her once-rich husband had n’t the courage to go out and begin life again as a poor man. Monastery, prison, hospital, nursery — it sheltered us from the hard, stormy world.

It had been a heaven and haven for me because I had been drenched and drowning, but what if I should never dare to go out in the rain again? I guessed, morosely, that Paschall was right, and when next we talked I told him so. He ended by pretty well proving that there was a streak of coward, quitter, in me somewhere; tired and frightened, I had run back to mamma. A padded cell, hospital, nursery, the grave — all different names, he said, for mother’s protecting arms. ‘By the way,’ he asked casually, ‘did you ever consider suicide as a solution?’

‘No,’ I told him truly, ‘but when I passed cemeteries I often thought how peaceful and beautiful they were, and was sometimes in love with the idea of being dead.’

‘All fear,’ he said, ‘all based on fear. You probably drank because you were afraid of something. You probably became a drunkard because there was something you were afraid to face sober.’

It made me angry, but we had a long talk about it. Then out popped another pretty notion of his: to wit, that I was still unconsciously afraid of something — something other than whiskey — and that my ‘mystical illumination’ had been a wish trick toward ‘escape by imprisonment’; that is, a wish to give up and stay here always.

This made me even more angry. But I decided, after Paschall had left, that instead of getting mad about it I would think it over. One of the advantages in being locked up for a long stretch is that, despite workshops and gymnasium, it gives you plenty of time to think.

VI

I want to set down briefly some of the things I thought, not because I consider myself a unique or especially interesting individual, but because, on the contrary, I may be a quite common, or flourishing, weedy-garden variety of the white-collared, educated drunkard — and a legitimate general interest may lie in that.

My first thoughts were physiological. 1 thought about how I had enjoyed believing that I was the victim of some glandular, stomach, or nervous craving for alcohol. Three months of incarceration, during which I had been given no medicine or drugs whatever, had already exploded that theory. It had been a false excuse. Once finished with my prolonged hang-over and jitters, I had never felt any physiological craving at all. I slept well and ate well. My nerves had been shot to pieces by the liquor, and I had perhaps been forced to increase the doses, but now that I drank no liquor at all my nerves were all right. So much for that.

Why, then, with a nice home, easy living, money in the bank, an agreeable occupation, and good friends, had I become a drunkard at all?

Paschall insisted it had been because I was afraid of something. Very well. Afraid of what?

Presently — not suddenly, but slowly, not liking it — I knew.

I was afraid I was n’t good enough — always had been afraid, but maybe in youth I believed age would remedy it. Now I was middle-aged and afraid I’d never be good enough.

I imagine this is a fairly common ailment, a fairly common worry, a fairly common fear. My trade happens to be that of a writer, but I suspect all trades are pretty much the same. A man hopes to do well at his trade, and doesn’t do as well as he has hoped; after blaming other things, he begins to doubt his own ability, begins to be afraid he hasn’t ‘got it.’ I don’t see why this should n’t be the same in all trades, and I doubt whether seeming success, relative real success or failure, has much bearing on it. I know middleaged grocery clerks on small salaries in little stores who are competent, cheerful, self-reliant. They have no fear that they are not good enough, because they are good enough — very good at what they are satisfied to do. But I wonder whether many a little banker is afraid he is n’t good enough when he thinks of Morgan. I wonder what Rudy Vallee thinks when he thinks of Toscanini. I wonder what Toscanini thinks when he thinks of Beethoven. Maybe Toscanini thinks, ‘I’m a little brass monkey with a baton; I would give my soul to suffer and write a great symphony.’ Of course, probably he does n’t. But I don’t see how success helps if one has the neurasthenic temperament.

What I was afraid of was that I was n’t good enough, and, cowardly neurasthenic or not, I was about ready to admit that this was why I had tried to drown myself in alcohol. Good enough for precisely what? Well, it was n’t complicated, and I am not ashamed to admit it, for it was not too pretentious. It did not involve wanting to be Shakespeare or Joyce. What I wanted more than anything was simply to be a good writer, and what I was afraid of was that I should never be anything, at most, but a good reporter.

VII

Admitting this fear, why had I tried to drown it in the particular period from 1932 to 1933? Because I had reached middle age? Or because ‘nothing fails like success’ — by which I merely mean that my waiting, whether good, bad, or mediocre, had been published by good publishers, had made a quantity of money, and that prosperity is poison to some people? These things had been elements in it, but they had not been the main thing. The main thing had been the cowardice which had come to a head in 1932 and 1933 because I had been caught in a trap. I had made and baited and walked into the trap myself. It had consisted of perfect — for me — surroundings and conditions under which to live and work, plus ample material of the precise sort I wanted, assembled and waiting to be worked on. I had good contacts, no rush, no money worries, good health, and good intentions. There had been time, opportunity, material, to do my best. There had been no loophole for subsequent alibis, no place to run away to, because I was already where I wanted to be — and instead of doing my best I took to drink and did practically nothing. I had been afraid to do my best for fear my best would not be good enough.

A man stalls, loafs, procrastinates, sits in cafés, fails to throw all his best energy into a piece of work. He cannot bring himself to put ‘everything’ into it, to ‘do his damnedest,’ as the saying goes. Accused or self-accused of being lazy, he confesses — to laziness. But he does n’t confess that he is afraid of destroying forever the illusion that he may some day ring the bell.

I knew now that I had always been afraid of a showdown. I saw that I had been running away all my life. I had been variously listed and publicized as an ‘explorer,’ ‘traveler,’ ‘adventurer,’ but I had always been merely a frightened man running away — from something. It had begun a quarter of a century before, soon after I had quit college. At twenty-one I had been city editor of the Augusta (Georgia) Chronicle, had stood it for six months, and thrown it up to be a tramp in Southern Europe. Returning in a few years, I had been established on the Atlanta Journal, and later with a partnership interest in an advertising agency and a directorship in the then new Atlanta Rotary Club. In 1915, I had chucked it all and run away again. I had run away to war like the Spoon River soldier, not caring who won it, caring little indeed, since we were then neutral, which side I joined. I had come back, a little gassed but not badly, and started farming in Georgia; I ran away from that as soon as I had cleared the land and planted the first crop. When the crop came up, if it ever did, I was working for City Editor Phillips of the New York Times, as a reporter at $27.50 a week. In 1924, making more money than I needed in soft jobs with the syndicates, I got sick of it, met an Arab, and ran away into the Arabian desert, where I joined a tribe and got along so well that its sheikh offered me an oasis village on the edge of Transjordania, together with a hundred men and a couple of wives, including his niece. I ran away again, and this time kept running, all over the map, for miles and years (with books as byproducts of my circlings), until I got caught in a trap of my own devising where I had to sit down and face myself, and do my utmost. I had been so unwilling and afraid to do it that I had tried to drown myself in liquor. I had been forced at last to stop running and sit down with myself; and it had landed me — by the back door, since I did not even have the excuse of being insane — in this place.

Well, I thought, I had plenty of time to face myself now, and if I wanted to come out and survive I had to take stock of whatever I was and get the courage to face it without trying to drown the image in drink again. I had to stop running away from myself, I had to stop hiding from myself, I had to stop drowning myself in gin. Whatever I had was all I had, and if I was n’t a hopeless coward I had to do my best with it. It all made me sick. I loathed people who thought or talked about themselves or others in such copybook, cabbage-patch jargon. I did n’t think I had ever thought in such terms before. Well, maybe I needed a good dose of homely, banal, moral twaddle to balance me. God knows I had swung far enough in other directions.

When I told all this, and more, to Paschall, he agreed that we had probably arrived at the reason behind my prolonged heavy drinking and smashup. Knowing it, he warned me, did n’t mean I was cured of it, or free of it. He said the popular notion that twists, complexes, neurasthenic quirks, could be got rid of by merely trotting them out into the daylight was all poppycock, psychoanalytic superstition. He hoped I might be happier now that I knew and admitted what was basically the matter with me, but he said the main thing they hoped to do was simply to break me permanently from the habit of using alcohol as a psychic painkiller, as an anæsthetic, as a coward’s refuge; and he hoped to goodness I’d reconcile myself to remaining locked up long enough to do that, for he believed it could be done; and he remarked that, even if it did n’t make me any happier, it would at any rate be something.

‘I’ll be honest in telling you that the main thing now is time,’ he added, ‘just a matter of patience and sticking it out. Don’t fool yourself that you’re cured yet, and don’t expect any sudden miracles. They don’t occur in cases like yours.’

VIII

By late April the scene in our park had changed. Buds were bursting, robins came, swings and benches were repainted, and the outdoor squad began to work on the tennis courts. By early May our tempo and routine changed, too. The object seemed to be to keep us out of doors as much as possible among the blossoms, babbling brooks, and butterflies. They turned us all outdoors — all the halls, including the wild ones — and, while we were kept more or less in hall groups under surveillance of our own attendants, a certain amount of fraternizing was permitted, even encouraged. Thus in time I made new friends, and queer ones.

I mean nothing callous, heartless, or inconsiderate in saying that when our various halls began to mingle and play together outdoors we ‘entertained each other.’ Aside from mingling more in actual games and sports — tennis, croquet, pitching horseshoes, ninepins — we learned more about each other’s idiosyncrasies, saw each other at the same time more intimately yet with wider scope, occasionally found ourselves shocked, pitying, sympathizing, but much more frequently amused. All of us being part of it, companion unfortunates in similar case though for a wide dissimilarity of reasons, we laughed at each other when things were funny, enjoyed each other’s antics and delusions without embarrassment or shame.

For example, when a patient named Schriver mistook the gardener’s collie for a bloodhound and concluded that a whole pack of them was hidden in the basement to chase us if we got past the fences, which he believed were charged with high-voltage electricity, I’m afraid we did n’t say, ‘Poor fellow, what a pity!’ We added masked machine guns in the tower, and played with the bloodhound idea for a week. But Spike and I and the nearly cured patients of the convalescent villas — those of us not subject to hallucinations — were not the only ones who saw occasional humor in other men’s delusions. We were sometimes mildly amused by the delicatessen merchant who believed he was Napoleon Bonaparte, but the man who found it uproariously funny was the one who was sure he himself was Napoleon.²

Patients who believed they were somebody else — generally characters from history — had been rare in Halls Four and Two, but now we became acquainted with a number of them. There were three Napoleons, one Julius Cæsar, a Unitarian minister who had switched sexes and believed he was Blavatsky, an artillery major who thought he was a little girl, and a movie director who was Pontius Pilate. There was an elderly gentleman we saw less of who believed he was a rooster, and a little chap who said ‘Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle.’ He thought he was the bell inside a telephone.

How continuous the delusions were, or how intermittent, or to what extent some of the patients who had them knew they were delusions, it was difficult to judge. The gentleman who thought he was a rooster, for instance, played an excellent game of tennis, kept score accurately, but crowed when he made a particularly good shot.

I want to defend myself, at this point, against a charge which I am sure my mother, for one, would make against me if she were still alive: to wit, that it is heartless and unkind to be amused, to laugh at anything a demented person does or says, and that it is in even worse taste to make copy of it afterward. I have thought about this. My defense is that a good nine tenths of the patients I describe, including some of the ‘wildest’ ones with the most fantastic hallucinations, have already gone out of that institution, or will go out, cured and sane. Most forms of mental derangement lost their element of hushed shame and horror-pity when modern psychiatry proved them curable, and showed them to be no more to be ashamed of than having been physically smashed up in a motor accident. This being true, I may add that a good deal of what goes on in such an institution is funny, de facto, whether it ought to be or not, and that any picture which leaves it out would be sentimental buncombe.

I never got over the strangeness of being invited to play tennis and croquet or stroll picking dogwood blossoms with paranoiacs, schizophrenics, and dementia præcox cases who less than a generation ago would have been fed through the bars.

In the comparatively short seven months I stayed in the asylum I saw some of them come out of it, as demonridden men ‘came out of it’ in the miracles by Galilee. My hat is off to the psychiatrists. It was a place of miracles as well as a sanctuary. It impressed me so deeply that I remember being surprised that there seemed to be one kind of miracle they could not perform. I don’t think they could ever change the essential nature of the patients. A likable person remains likable even in insanity, and a crazy Armenian is still an Armenian when he walks out cured. I remember that this rather surprised me. I had confidently imagined that the Armenian would be transformed into a Bavarian. It distressed me that certain mean and irritable crazy men in the back halls were still mean and irritable when they moved, cured, to the villas. It made me know I should always be a neurasthenic man, a frequently unhappy man afraid of life, even if they cured me of being a drunken man.

IX

In June, seeing me more cheerful, better coördinated, the doctors moved me from Hall Two into one of the convalescent ‘villas,’ and from that time on I was practically as free, within the confines of the park, as I should have been in a summer hotel or colony. I liked it so well — including being sober, going to bed never befuddled, and never awaking in the morning with a hang-over — that I felt as a matter of pleasure preference that when I got out I’d probably live generally sober, no matter how worried or depressed I became concerning work which would n’t come right. There were plenty of good writers. Too many, maybe. I could go on trying to do my best, and if I never got to be one of the good ones it would be a purely private misfortune. I’d doubtless find something new to worry about, something new to run away from — but I had dragged this out and taken it to pieces and looked at it, and, though it made me sad, I did n’t think I’d be afraid of it any more.

But should I be afraid of whiskey when I got out? Ought I to be afraid of it? Ought I to let it alone entirely? I did n’t know, and I soon discovered that the doctors did n’t know either. I discovered not only that the doctors in this institution did n’t know, but that nobody seemed to know. One tiny gloomy group of doctors stick to the old Latin dictum, ‘Once a drunkard always a drunkard.’ Another group amend it thus: ‘Once a drunkard always a drunkard — or a teetotaler.’ Still another group, equally didactic and distinguished, believe that both these dictums are pure nonsense — that it is possible, though difficult, to cure a drunkard, and that if he is cured he can drink again without danger. Hyman, for example, is sure that chronic alcoholism, whether among intellectuals or among illiterate bums on the Bowery, is ‘always a symptom of some other underlying psychic disorder.’

Because of all this it seemed to me, and I said so to my doctors, that to go out and never be able to touch a cocktail, glass of wine, or highball again would be a poor sort of cure, if it could indeed be termed a cure at all. I said that I still hoped to be really ‘cured,’ cured so well that I should be able to take a highball with my friends. They were extremely dubious. They invited me cordially to remain in the villa another six months under renewed voluntary commitment, and said that at the end of that time they might have an opinion. I cordially accepted. I liked it there, and I was enjoying not drinking.

It was my friends on the outside who became dubious in their turn about my remaining in an institution for so long a period. Conferences were held, and the loyal, hardboiled friend who had first had the bright idea of locking me up in an asylum came forward with another suggestion that met everybody’s approval, including mine. They were to give me a clean discharge, turn me loose as cured, but I was to agree of my own volition, as an experiment, to go six full additional months without touching a drop of alcohol in any form. Did that mean wine and beer? Yes, it meant everything.

So one day, in early summer, I waved good-bye to my asylum. I went to the country. I continued to play tennis and golf, continued to work at my writing, and continued to worry that I could n’t write better. Friends drank at the golf club, friends drank at the house where I lived and in the town where we frequently went to the movies. In August I went fishing down in Maine, returned, and started writing and worrying again. The Armenian was still an Armenian. There was nothing anybody could do about that.

I have n’t a very good memory for dates, and the six months elapsed without my noting it. Except for wishing that I might drink beer on a few exceptionally hot occasions in midsummer, I had n’t thought much about it one way or another. I had some new things to worry about, and I had got out of the habit of drinking. A fortnight or so after the six months had elapsed somebody brought out a bottle of Spanish sherry. It occurred to me that this would be a good thing to try first, after so long an abstinence. I had a glass and liked it very much; it brought a pleasant glow. We were soon at dinner. It did n’t occur to me to want more of it.

Months have now passed since I first took that experimental drink, and I still drink rarely. I don’t think I worry much about it. I have other worries. But I am less unhappy than I used to be when I tried to drown them. I seem to be cured of drunkenness, which is as may be.