Asylum (34 page)

The Straffens sent their regrets, apparently Jack’s health is
not good, but Max came, and so did Brenda. Max had changed dramatically even in the few weeks since I’d seen him in Cledwyn. He was more than ever like an old man, thin, stooped, with skin like paper. He clung to his mother for support. She was strong, as I’d expected she would be; Brenda is good at tragedy. Afterward I gave them a glass of sherry in my office. If Max was conscious of the poignancy and irony of his presence in my office, the superintendent’s office, that day, he didn’t show it. Brenda surprised me by resorting to unctuous platitudes. She murmured that she hoped that Stella was at peace now. I nodded and turned away, slightly disgusted at her vulgarity. Max clearly had not told her of our marriage plans.

I have not retired as I planned to. I still have work to do. Edgar remains on the top ward in the Refractory Block. No appreciable improvement in his attitude yet, he remains hostile and uncooperative, but that will change, already I sense him weakening; he must know that I am all he has now. I have not told him that Stella is dead, for I am eager to hear his side of the story first. There are many questions still to be answered. Max, for one, is still convinced that his clothes were not stolen on impulse, as Stella said, but that she gave them to Edgar, in other words that she was acting against us even then, and knew he intended to escape.

On reflection, Edgar will hear of her death whatever I do; if he hasn’t already. This is a large institution, and people talk. His suffering will be acute, and we will have to be vigilant. Like me, like all of us who knew her, he responded strongly to Stella’s beauty, but he went deeper than the rest of us, he idealized her and then had to struggle against the chaos of his own passions when the image he’d created could no longer be sustained. I think perhaps it’s what he was unconsciously trying to get at in his last sculpture, despite his claim to be engaged in an attempt to overthrow habit and convention in seeing, to be working against certainty. I feel for those two poor disordered souls, trapped here these last weeks, twisting in their private hells,
each aching for the other. I have known more than a few of these destructive affairs, and they all come to this, or something like this, in the end.

I have resumed my habit of returning to the office in the evening. The police were most accommodating, and I now possess all the drawings he made of her in the studio, and also the sketch done in the vegetable garden. They are curiously tentative in outline and feature, and as a result have a sort of softness to the eye, what the Italians call
morbidezza
. I also have the head. I have had it fired and cast in black bronze. I keep it in a drawer in my desk. He worked so obsessively at it, those last days before he left Horsey Street, and he so worked it
down
, that it became slender and tiny in the end. It is a thin, beautiful, tiny, anguished head now, no bigger than my hand; but it is her. I often take it out, over the course of the day, and admire it. So you see, I do have my Stella after all.

And I still, of course, have him.

READING GROUP GUIDE

1. Stella thinks Edgar “was guilty of a crime of passion; and passion, in essence, was good, surely?” [p. 17]. “With Stella it was always the heart, the language of the heart” [p. 29]. Peter Cleave classifies Stella as a romantic. Is Stella a romantic? If so, what does her subsequent behavior indicate about romanticism?

2. “As a psychiatrist I wasn’t in the business of moral judgments” [p. 21], Peter says, and he later tells Stella, “It’s only when we feel pain, or the prospect of it, that we start to make distinctions between right and wrong” [p. 148]. Is Peter correct? What does he reveal about himself in making this statement?

3. Peter believes that Stella’s behavior is linked to a desire to hurt Max. “Perhaps that’s the whole point about infidelity, I suggested, not that one has sex but that by doing so one puts at risk someone else’s happiness?” [p. 34]. How much of Stella’s behavior springs from hostility and hate? To what degree is passionate, romantic love inspired by hate or aggression?

4. “Most of us are dying of chronic neglect!” Stella says [p. 48], referring to wives in general and herself in particular. Is Max really neglectful of Stella? What makes her believe that she is being neglected and taken for granted?

5. Discussing Edgar’s condition, paranoia, with Stella, Jack says “we don’t really know how to treat them. Because we don’t really understand what they are.” [p. 72] Is he talking about his patients, she wondered, or women? Why does Stella think this at this time? What is the cause of her anger? Is Stella resentful at being a woman in a male community?

6. What is Stella’s reaction when Jack tells her that Edgar had decapitated his wife and taken her eyes out? What does this reaction say about her, her motivations, her state of mind?

7. The action of Asylum takes place over the course of exactly one year. Why does the author present the story in this way? How do the seasons, and the change of seasons, affect Stella’s thoughts and emotions?

8. What can you deduce about Max’s feelings for Stella from the way the story is told? Does he act from love, from hate, from a mixture of the two? Do you find Max a sympathetic character, or do you agree with Stella that he is cold and sexually indifferent to her?

9. Stella tells Peter that during the early days of their romance she and Edgar experienced “a breakdown of their separate egos, a falling away of personality, a sense of identity, a sense that they were essence to essence…” [p. 78]. Do you believe that Edgar experienced this in the same way?

10. We see Brenda principally from Stella’s point of view. Is she actually as unpleasant a character as Stella finds her to be? What purpose does she serve in helping to understand Stella?

11. How does Stella define the term “freedom”? When she claims to be seeking freedom, what does she mean? Is the sort of freedom she craves really possible? Does she ever find it?

12. How would you characterize the relationship between Stella and Charlie, and how does it change during the course of the novel? Does she behave as a typical mother? How does her erratic behavior toward Charlie in Wales illuminate the deterioration of her psyche?

13. “Was she really so blind to the danger she had placed herself in?” Peter asks himself. “Had she learned nothing from living among psychiatrists?” [p. 95]. What do you think: is she really blind, or does she choose to be so? Or does she willingly court danger, and if so, to what end? In her dealings with Edgar, do you find that Stella deliberately provokes him to violence?

14. What motivates Nick, very much at his own risk, to shelter Edgar from the law and, ultimately, to shelter Stella from Edgar? Do you believe that he enjoys the element of danger that his actions provoke? Do you think that he loves Stella? Or that it is Edgar he loves

15. Why does Max take Stella back after her return from London, and why does she decide to stay with him? Why does Max decline to tell Stella that Edgar might have made his way to Wales [pp. 184-85]?

16. Why does Stella allow Charlie to drown? Might his death be beneficial to achieving her desires? Does she really imagine that it is Edgar she sees sinking beneath the waves? Does Peter believe her when she makes this claim, or does he imply that she is lying?

17. “You had to explain it. . . either she was a monster or she was mad” [p. 202]. Peter decides to believe in her madness: “a classic Medea complex” [p. 211]; Max adopts a more theological outlook, positing the reality of good and evil: “She should be in prison” [p. 228]. Which man do you agree with? Is Stella evil, or merely misguided?

18. Edgar “idealized” Stella, Peter claims, “and then had to struggle against the chaos of his own passions when the image he’d created could no longer be sustained. I think perhaps it’s what he was unconsciously trying to get at in his last sculpture, despite his claim to be engaged in an attempt to overthrow habit and convention in seeing” [p. 253]. Do you find this connection between Edgar’s art and his feelings to be a plausible one?

19. As the novel progresses, Peter reveals more and more of his character, his will, and his motivations to the reader. Just how un-ambitious or ambitious is he? What are his real feelings toward Stella? What are his feelings toward Edgar? How far has he succeeded in manipulating the action, and the characters? What does the last sentence of the novel suggest?

20. Why do you think McGrath has chosen “Asylum” as the title for his book? What are the two meanings of the word, and are they connected or contradictory? At home with Max, Stella thinks of the asylum as a prison; frightened and penniless in London, she remembers it as a “misty mental realm where the sun always shone and order prevailed…a castle keep on a rocky ridge, and within its walls security and plenty” [p. 117]. In your opinion, what is the real character of the asylum?

PATRICK MCGRATH

Patrick McGrath lives with his wife, Maria Aitken, in New York and London.

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