Bedlam (40 page)

Ideas, interviews & features

G
REG
H
OLLINGSHEAD
grew up in Woodbridge, Ontario. He attended the University of Toronto Schools and the University of Toronto, graduating with a B.A. in English in 1968. His work was first published in
T.O. Now
(House of Anansi, 1968), an anthology of young Toronto poets edited by Dennis Lee.

After travelling in Europe and North Africa, Hollingshead returned to the University of Toronto to do an M.A. in English. From 1970 to 1975 he lived in England—in London and Surrey—where he completed a Ph.D. at the University of London on George Berkeley, the eighteenth-century philosopher.

Since 1976 Hollingshead has published more than five dozen stories and essays in magazines and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. His first book,
Famous Players
(Coach House), a story collection edited by Matt Cohen, appeared in 1982. His second and third books—the story collection
White Buick
(Oolichan) and the novel
Spin Dry
(Mosaic)—both appeared in 1992. (
Spin Dry
will be reissued as a Harper
Perennial
paperback in 2006.) His fourth book and third story collection,
The Roaring Girl
(Somerville House), edited by Patrick Crean, won the 1995 Governor General’s
Award for Fiction.
The Roaring Girl
was also published in England, the U.S., Germany, and China.

In 1998 Hollingshead published his second novel,
The Healer
(A Phyllis Bruce Book/HarperCollins), the first book to appear simultaneously under the Harper-Flamingo imprint in Canada, England and the U.S.
The Healer was
shortlisted for the 1998 Giller Prize and won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
The Healer and The Roaring Girl
were reissued as Harper
Perennial
paperbacks in 2004. Also appearing in 2004 was Greg’s third novel,
Bedlam
(A Phyllis Bruce Book/HarperCollins).
Bedlam
has been shortlisted for the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, the Grant MacEwan Award, the Georges Bugnet Award, and the City of Edmonton Book Prize.

Hollingshead divides his time between Edmonton, where he is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta; Banff, Alberta, where he directs the writing programs at the Banff Centre; and a lake in Algonquin Park in Ontario, where he chops wood and writes. He is married to Rosa Spricer, a psychologist in private practice. They have one son, David.

Can you talk about the inspiration for the novel and describe how you used historical sources to write
Bedlam?
What challenges do such sources raise? Was there anything that surprised you when you conducted your research?

The original inspiration for
Bedlam
was a book called
The Faber Book of Madness,
a collection of writings by and about the mad, edited by the British medical historian Roy Porter. In it, Porter includes excerpts from
Illustrations of Madness,
by the apothecary of Bethlem Hospital, John Haslam. The
Illustrations
is Haslam’s account of his patient James Tilly Matthews’ delusional system. I was struck by two things: first, the vivid, homely quality of Matthews’ system, and second, the vivid, homely quality of Haslam’s writing. My main historical sources, once I began work, were Porter’s full edition of
Illustrations of Madness;
Jonathan Andrews et al.’s
History of Bethlem Hospital;
a number of contemporary accounts of life inside Bethlem, along with John Perceval’s nineteenth-century account of his incarceration for insanity; records from the Bethlem Archive; British parliamentary reports on madhouses, etc. The main challenge is not getting lost in detail, or letting the research
take precedence in the actual telling. What most surprised me was how thorough a picture can be got of how it was at that place at that time when you combine the documentation from enough sources.

The novel details the struggles over the treatment of lunatics in the eighteenth century. In general, what were the various schools of thought?

In the late eighteenth century, madness was generally considered a result of a disease of the brain for which treatment was mainly, like today, depletory, but instead of sedation the methods used were purges, vomits, bleeding, blistering, poor diet, and unheated cells. This was the philosophy and treatment at Bethlem, a public hospital. At the same time, practitioners were beginning to set up private madhouses, to cater to middle-class families who could afford to have their mentally ill members put away. Such practitioners, often frauds, promised novel, humane “cures,” but these tended to be administered in secret and could include treatments like surprise ice-baths, electric shock, and powerful blasts of water. Meanwhile, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, owing in part to the influence of Lockean psychology, madness came to be seen as a disorder of ideas as a result of unfortunate experiences, and a kinder, more humane, religiously rather than medically
based, treatment of the mad came into fashion, as at the Quaker William Tuke’s The Retreat, at York.

You have written about the fact that you use a language in
Bedlam
that you describe as “eighteenth century”. How did you create such a language? How does your approach differ from other novelists who draw on history: for example, a writer such as Sarah Waters?

Early on with
Bedlam
I decided that I wanted it to be the language, rather than passages of description or other kinds of researched information, that would convey a realistic sense of the times. Most historical fiction nowadays plays anachronistically with diction and idiom. For example, Sheri Holman in
The Dress Lodger
(2000) says of a nineteeth-century Sunderland barman who sweetens his wine with lead,
He knows he stands a chance of poisoning half his clientele, but most drink beer, so he doesn’t sweat it.
Historical fiction by writers such as Sarah Waters, Emma Donoghue, and Sheri Holman has a comic-romp, pastiche quality to it. But I wanted something more likely: not so eighteenth century that it would put readers off, but eighteenth century enough so that they would never think, That doesn’t sound very eighteenth century. So
what I did was an original impression of an eighteenth-century style. When I was doing my doctorate in eighteenth-century thought at the University of London in the early 1970s I spent five years in the British Library reading eighteenth-century poetry and nonfiction prose. After that I spent twenty years teaching eighteenth-century literature. So my linguistic fund was this twenty-five years of reading eighteenth-century poetry and prose. But I didn’t do the style consciously, because then it would have gone dead. Instead I felt my way through it, letting that unconscious store of eighteenth-century syntax shape the sentences. I also used the dated examples of usage in the complete Oxford English Dictionary, as well Eric Partridge’s
Dictionary of Historical Slang,
to ensure that I didn’t use diction or idioms that postdated the time my characters were speaking or writing.

Telling an historical novel from three points of view—James Tilly Matthews, John Haslam and Margaret Matthews—is ambitious, yet it succeeds brilliantly. What gave you this idea and what challenges did you face in creating three distinct voices?

Because I was uneasy with the whole idea of historical fiction, on account of the many challenges and pitfalls, my original idea was to tell a story that somehow combined the eighteenth- and the twenty-first century.
But every idea I had seemed too artificial, seemed to draw attention to itself. Then I tried to write it as an eighteenth-century story but in the third person, with a narrator, as Peter Carey does in
Jack Maggs
(1997). But I couldn’t get the narrator’s voice not to sound stilted. Because his only function was to translate the eighteenth century for the twenty-first, he had no character, was merely a device. Finally I realized that my only way into the story was by telling it from the points of view of the three main characters, in other words as three first-person accounts. I already knew that, like an actor, I can enter into character, at least far enough so that I’m not distracted by how they’re speaking but can simply hear them in my mind. At first I was daunted by the prospect of creating not only one first-person eighteenth-century voice but three. Fortunately, from the historical record, all three were strong, intelligent, interesting characters, and once I got going there were no problems (for me, anyway) about distinguishing their voices. Each voice came easily and sounded very different in my mind from the others.

Letters provide an important dramatic element in
Bedlam.
Can you describe what you were trying to achieve by creating the letters between Matthews and his wife?

The letters are my attempt to address two problems arising from the fact that
Bedlam
tells a true story. One was that for much of the novel, though their relationship is centrally important, Margaret and James are kept apart by his imprisonment in the hospital. The other was that I needed some variation of scene, not only from the hospital but from the streets of London. I knew this would be provided to some extent by the account of the evenings at Kitchiner’s and the trip to Hampstead Heath, and that more relief would come at the end, with the trip to Fox’s in rural Hackney, but I wanted more, and something more recurrent, and that was given to me when I learned that Margaret Matthews went to Jamaica after the failure of her last, habeas corpus attempt to get her husband out. I think that Jamaica makes a nice exotic counterpoint to Bedlam, and also that the slavery theme offers an ironic commentary on the treatment of the mad. Of course, very few of the letters in
Bedlam
are ever delivered, but like Matthews’ life exist in a limbo of confiscation, and so they also serve as an image of callously censored love.

Many of your characters—Haslam, Alavoine—are both appealing and repelling. Yet you seem in the end to have some fondness for them. Can you talk about how you tried to balance both good and evil in such characters?

I think we’re all a ready mixture of both elements, in generous quantities. I find it more interesting working with “evil” characters, as long as they have, or come into, sufficient self-knowledge to have a moral sense of themselves. That way the reader has an opportunity to develop a sympathy and even a fondness for them, because most of us most of the time feel very alone as we mull over our various failures and inadequacies. To put this another way, one thing to be learned from Shakespeare or Chekhov is the importance of the artist’s taking every character on his or her own terms. It’s not politically correct these days to say it, but what a writer must do is inhabit other skins. That’s the only way, with a story, for it not to reduce in the end to a simplistic message.

What are you reading at the moment and who are some of your favourite authors?

Right now I’m reading
Roadside Picnic
by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. I just finished Solzhenitsyn’s
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
and Miriam Toews’
A Complicated Kindness.
Some favourite authors: Sterne, Emily Brontë, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Burroughs, Cormac McCarthy, Carver, Munro, Pynchon.

John Haslam,
Illustrations of Madness.
Ed. Roy Porter. 1810; London and New York 1988.

• Haslam’s case history of James Matthews in a fully annotated modern edition.

Mike Jay,
The Air Loom Gang.
London 2003.

• A nonfiction account of James Matthews’ career in its historical context, with emphasis on the French years.

Andrew Scull et al.
Masters of Bedlam.
Princeton 1996.

• On a number of English mad-doctors, with a chapter on John Haslam.

Jonathan Andrews et al.
The History of Bethlem.
London 1997.

• The comprehensive history of Bethlem Hospital.

Roy Porter,
Mind-Forg’d Manacles.
Cambridge 1987.

• On eighteenth-century madness and its treatment. Just about anything by Roy Porter—he published more than seventy books, on madness, medicine, and social history—is worth reading.

Erving Goffman,
Asylums.
New York 1961.

• A classic study of the modern asylum as an institution.

D.L. Rosenhan, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,”
Science
179:250-58. 1973.