’Tis the season to unwind!
Time to close the laptop, toss aside the statistic-laden journal articles, dispense with the well-thumbed DSM and look for some lighter reading to engage the mind more pleasurably over the holiday season.
Here are some suggestions, admittedly subjective but all entertaining and engaging with something to offer.
The Dead and ‘Circe’ by James Joyce
Anything by the greatest modernist writer of the 20th century can be intimidating to new readers, but these two examples demonstrate his mastery.
The Dead, the closing story (actually a novella) of his collection of stories Dubliners, is a superb demonstration of how forgotten incidents in a past life can come back to haunt one. It climaxes in the closing three paragraphs, surely among the greatest ever endings to a story.
Ulysses will always take a while to process, but for the beginner the Circe chapter is an enthralling start. It is based on the section in The Odessey where the sorceress Circe transforms men into pigs.
The chapter reads like a theatrical script and we see every aspect of psychotic behaviour, including identity confusion, disorientation, grandiosity and gender changing.
Amid the panoply of weird characters who come and go is “massive whoremistress” Bella Cohen, a truly Rabelaisian entity, who wants to send her son to Oxford. Leopold Bloom, in typical fashion, stumbles through it, ending up with a frightening vision of his dead son Rudy. An exhilarating read for any psychiatrist who wants to see how a master writer would portray such experiences.
Into that darkness by Gitta Sereny
Far too many perpetuators of the Holocaust were able to get away from their horrendous crimes.
Franz Stangl was a police officer in Austria before he joined the T4 euthanasia program and then ran the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps, responsible for at least a million deaths.
Using the Nazi ratline, he ended up in Brazil, working under his own name for years before the German government was reluctantly prodded into extraditing him and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Gitta Sereny, who has form in investigating Holocaust crimes – she brought Albert Speer as close as anyone to admitting his knowledge of the death camps – had a series of interviews with Stangl in jail. While deliberately written in an unsensational way, step-by-step she leads Stangl to face the horrendous nature of his crimes.
After finally admitting his guilt, he dies of a heart attack. This may be a rare example of a genocidal monster being brought to face his crimes.
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh was the finest prose writer of his day. By 1957, age, health and drug use (chloral, bromides and amphetamines well diluted with alcohol) were catching up with him. To overcome the problems, Waugh took a sea trip to Ceylon, having obtained a fresh supply of bromide from his doctor.
The events that followed were described in his short novella, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, his most autobiographical work.
The Pinfold character develops a full-blown psychosis with paranoid delusions, hallucinations and thought insertion. Tormented to his limits, he leaves the ship after three days and, after going from Cairo to Ceylon, returns home.
His doctor confirms that he has a simple case of bromide poisoning, a diagnosis confirmed by a psychiatrist and physician. Waugh, dissatisfied with the material assessment, sees it instead as a spiritual challenge to his faith which he had overcome.
The evidence shows that Waugh did not change his ways, continuing to use bromide, chloral, paraldehyde, barbiturates and alcohol. This is a superb description of a drug-induced psychosis that even manages to include some funny parts, Waugh being Waugh.
The Inimitable Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
PG Wodehouse must rate as the finest comic writer of the 20th century and the hapless Bertie Wooster, ever accompanied by the suave Jeeves, is his finest character.
There are so many books to choose from, but this must be close to the best. It features psychiatrist Sir Roderick Glossop, father of the lovely but mad Honoria, convinced that Bertie is incurably insane.
It is said that Glossop was based on the charismatic (and dangerous) William Sargant, but, no matter, the book will always leave you laughing as well as admiring Wodehouse’s use of language.
Who else told us of that state of mind he called “gruntled”?
GASCOYNE by Stanley Crawford
GASCOYNE (always written in upper case), the protagonist, is a wheeler-dealer who owns gas stations, supermarkets, real estate, housing estates, banks, and a secret zoological warfare research facility. In addition, selling dud vehicles to the government, running hookers and managing the drug trade keep the meter ticking over. We don’t have characters like that now, do we?
GASCOYNE eats, sleeps and does business in his car, leaving it only when he must. He spends his time zooming along the highways and freeways of a large Southern Californian city bearing a remarkable resemblance to Los Angeles.
GASCOYNE drives a 12-year-old Nash on the verge of breaking down, but, no worries, he has a whole lot full of used cars he can draw on. Driving, for most people, is the perfect expression of the human-machine interaction, and Crawford, as few writers do (James Jones was another), understands the interaction between driver and car, that multi-signal fronto-parieto-occipital synchronicity that connects the eyes, the feet, the hands, the pedals, the wheel and the tyres in a perfect concatenation of motion.
Traffic is a constant obsession. Every light is seen as a potential enemy that must be overcome by being in the right lane at the right speed and time. His contempt for other drivers is overweening and utterly inspiring. Clear them out the way is the only thing he knows, for which he has an air horn that can be heard 10 miles away on a clear windless night:
“I’ve got to be careful when I use it because people just sort of shrivel up and die when they hear it and there’s no telling what they’ll do, some slam on their brakes right there and others run right off the road and some try to open the door and jump out, no telling what.”
GASCOYNE’s profit motive is irrepressible. His motto is if it doesn’t pay, it ought not to exist. He doesn’t miss a trick. Every business he owns is accessible by car, if not drive-in.
Each housing development revolves around his 24-hour supermarkets, bottle shops, burger joints and restaurants. Magnets in the floor direct the supermarket trolleys into the expensive aisles; the diners run a flourishing side trade in drugs to keep the kids happy.
His view of humanity is a mirror of the corporate ethos that has come to dominate our times, only expressed with a good deal more honesty.
“If you don’t keep people working like dogs they’ll behave like rabbits and monkeys. You’ve got to keep them inside little boxes with their work and throw away the key for eight hours every day and then chase them out of the box as soon as you can after their time is up, give them fringe benefits like pastel toilet paper and maybe a Christmas party to make them feel grateful but otherwise if you give them an inch they’ll start breaking up the place and develop loose morals.”
The éminence grise that runs the city, GASCOYNE has police, politicians, editors, television and radio stations answer to him.
At least they used to follow his behest, but now something is wrong. It starts with the murder of crime boss Roughah.
GASCOYNE tries to get to the bottom of the defenestration, encountering a range of bizarre characters including the lascivious Nadine, a man making love in a tree sloth uniform and a baffled war veteran who has an octopus tentacle curling out of his ear that requires regular feeding with peanuts to keep it under control. His whining girlfriend Marg is sent on a mission to the mountains to investigate the murder but instead dallies with cowboy types she meets along the way.
GASCOYNE turns to Police Commissioner O’Mallollolly, supposedly in his pay (the warped spelling of names, as well as the use of upper case is a Crawford feature, suggesting a more than passing interest in semiotics), stating, “I just want to know who did it.”
O’Mallollolly responds, “As they say, it doesn’t really matter because it was either you or me”.
Nadine, the unrepentant widow, is hardly coy. GASCOYNE asks: “Now do you know anybody that likes to dress up like a giant tree sloth?”
Her response: “No, I’d say everybody I know would like to do that at some time or other.”
Later he comes back to her: “You’re lying again, Nadine.” “Yes. I am.” “Well?” “I have my reasons.” “Name one.” “Sometimes I just like to lie, that’s all.”
GASCOYNE is trying to find a murderer, but his empire is unravelling. Crawford does chaos beautifully, but, best of all, it is side-splittingly funny. If the ending is inevitable, Gascoyne is undeterred and soon finds a desert location to set up his new operation.
Go to any metropolis and look at the crowded freeways, jampacked with citizens and their kids, phones rammed on their ears, every turnoff feeding the vehicles to supermarkets, service stations, burger joints and video stores to milk them of their money. I have seen the future, and it works, depending on how you look at it. Whatever the virtues of the car, phone and drive-in world that most of us inhabit, half a century ago Stanley Crawford nailed it like no other. And above the petrol, cement, tarmac and rubber nightmare, there is GASCOYNE, always cruising, ever connected, never stopping – the perfect 21st century success story.
Read this book, be amazed at its prescience, but, mostly, laugh your head off and keep laughing. GASCOYNE has no shame, and in his venal honesty we can forgive him anything. Come to think of it, since the recent presidential election … but that’s another story.
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Anything written by Dostoyevsky should be approached with trepidation but, compared to The Brothers Karamazov or Crime and Punishment, this is a pushover (and even easier as an audiobook). Prince Myshkin, impoverished minor aristocrat, is a simple character, positively shining in his moral purity and surrounded by a dubious bunch of characters with their own agendas but failing to corrupt him. Well described are the ecstatic nature of his seizures, something the author would have known all too well from his own ictal experiences. Not for nothing do so many leading prophetic figures have similar experiences. Make this your Dostoyevsky book to impress friends.
The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness by Susannah Cahalan
This book arose from a misconception.
The author had a psychotic episode caused by anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, found in less than 5% of cases and barely known to most psychiatrists.
Being diagnosed and treated by a neurologist did not leave her with great affection for psychiatrists.
Having written a book about her psychotic experience, she set out to deify the man who had such an influence on DSM-111, namely David Rosenhan with his famous paper On Being Sane in Insane Places. Karl Popper’s rule of unpredicted consequences kicked in, and she discovered that it was a total con-job, described by Andrew Scull as the scientific fraud of the 20th century.
Now it is clear why Rosenhan did not write the book that was commissioned and took a lower profile than expected. Interestingly, one who was unconvinced from the start was no less than Robert Spitzer, who went on to play such a leading role in DSM-111.
All credit to Cahalan for not backtracking on a discovery that no one expected. The damage by Rosenhan had been done, but it is still quoted in psychology and social work courses so it is important to learn the truth of his appalling misconception.
The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s by Brendon Piers
Wars, instability, insurrection, dictators … these are depressing times. But it’s happened before. It was the 1930s that led us into the horrors of the Second World War and there is no better way to see how this unfolded than Piers’ masterpiece.
From the Depression until the invasion of Poland, he systematically covers the issues and the characters that emerged.
No one should forget that it was the fall of the great empires in World War 1 that allowed obscure marginal individuals like Hitler and Stalin to emerge.
Piers writes with style, and there is much in this work to make one look at our current circumstances and see what lies ahead.
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The author is a semiologist (the science of signs and their meanings), something that usually makes the empirically minded run for the hills.
However, while he still engages in these activities, he has given us a book that runs centuries ahead to the world’s greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes.
It is set in 1327 at a Benedictine abbey in Italy where a series of deaths occur in a tense setting of dogma dispute. William of Baskerville, a friar with question marks over his reputation for insisting on the importance of reason, accompanied by his novice, Adso of Melk, is sent to investigate.
What follows is not just a superb murder mystery that could challenge Conan Doyle, Simenon or Christie, but a discussion of how dogma can warp, distort or even kill.
Riveting stuff, and it made a great movie with Sean Connery at his best. Not to be missed.
The Fox and the Flies: The World of Joe Silver, racketeer and psychopath by Charles van Onselen
Between 1881 and 1914 occurred the second greatest transmigration of people in history, namely the escape of 2.5 million Jews from persecution in Eastern Europe to the New World.
Fault lines inevitably occurred and white slavery – the coercion of young Jewish women into prostitution by criminal gangs – was a prominent problem.
Here, Joe Silver – one of his many aliases – strode the Atlantic zone like few others. London, New York, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Windhoek, Valparaiso, Buenos Aires, Brussels and Paris; the list goes on.
Silver and his gangs were a prelude to the mafia, using cheap steamship travel and coded telegraph messages. He turned his hand to theft, prison was an occupational hazard, and informing the police when convenient also helped.
What made Silver different was not just his violence, but extreme misogyny, capacity for deception and brutal manipulation. He used his own daughter as a prostitute.
At the end of his life, riddled with syphilis, he went back home to Poland, was captured by the Austrians and executed just before the war ended. And, to add a frisson, the author makes an interesting case that he could have been Jack the Ripper.
A riveting read by any standards and tells us much about the Atlantic world at the turn of the 20th century. It will be difficult to find a better description of a true psychopath than Silver.
These books may not appeal to all, but there is enough to provide some pleasant contemplation and distraction from everyday issues. So, happy reading!
Robert M Kaplan is a forensic psychiatrist, writer and historian. He distracts himself with reviews of books and films, always maintaining a stance against Austrian yodelers.
