Gracefully Insane (36 page)

This book journey began at Stanford University, where I held a Knight Fellowship in journalism during the 1996/1997 academic year. Professor Diane Middlebrook encouraged me to pursue my book idea and introduced me to the writer Linda Gray Sexton, daughter of poet Anne Sexton. Linda jump-started my book by granting me access to the archives of her mother’s McLean poetry seminar at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. I had never worked in a university archive before, and the staff there—Cathy Henderson, Barbara Smith-LaBorde—and my landlady, the photographer Martha Campbell—made it a wonderful experience. Librarians and archivists are indeed the unacknowledged legislators of the universe, and I have many to thank: Karen Kukil, the curator of the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College; Stephen Jones and Diane Ducharme at Yale University’s Beinecke Library; Lee Grady, Lisa Hinzman, and Geraldine Strey, who work with the McCormick Collection at the Wisconsin State Historical Society; Daniel Greenebaum, Rebecca Cape, and Saundra Taylor at Indiana University’s Lilly Library; and Andrew Harrison at Johns Hopkins’ Alan
Mason Chesney Medical Archives. I also received valuable research help from MIT’s Liz Andrews, from Liz Locke, Charles Beveridge, Sylvia Nasar, Kathy McCabe, Dr. Richard Patterson, Richard Wolfe, Douglas Starr, Paul Alexander, Dr. Ronald Pies, Caroline Smedwig, Charles Mc-Laughlin, Sarah Payne Stuart, Betsy Lameyer, Hilda Golden, Elizabeth Padjen, Armond Fields, and Margery Resnick.

Every manuscript needs friends, and this one had many. Dr. Robert Coles, who interned at McLean, was an enthusiastic supporter and printed an excerpt in his magazine,
DoubleTake.
My friends David Warsh, Mark Feeney, and Joseph Finder never flagged in their enthusiasm for this project. Margo Howard provided some helpful contacts. Ellen Ratner became a key collaborator, as did Dr. Harold Williams. Dr. Merton Kahne, Paul Roazen, Peter Davison, Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, Terry Bragg, Mark Lee, and my wife Kirsten Lundberg all read portions of the manuscript and made important suggestions for improvement.

Geoffrey Shandler bought this book for PublicAffairs and kept his enthusiasm for the project even after he left the house. As a young student, PublicAffairs publisher and CEO Peter Osnos visited McLean with one of his professors and understands well Diane Middlebrook’s observation that “McLean [has] always held an odd glamour as the hospital of choice for the occasionally mad artists of Boston.” Lisa Kaufman did the actual work of editing the manuscript and hand-holding an occasionally tetchy author; she performed magnificently. My longtime friend and literary agent Michael Carlisle stayed with this project through thick and through thin.

To all: Thank you. And thank you to my family, Kirsten, Michael, Eric, and Christopher, because you are my wellspring of sanity and happiness.

“Waking in the Blue” from
Selected Poems by Robert Lowell.
Copyright © 1976 by Robert Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

The definitive source for accurate information on McLean history is Silvia Sutton’s
Crossroads in Psychiatry: A History of the McLean Hospital,
published in 1986 by the American Psychiatric Press. It is engagingly written and extremely informative. Sutton’s research backstops much of my writing about the early years of the hospital. I owe a great debt to Sutton’s official history and to three general histories of psychiatry that I consulted frequently: Edward Shorter’s
A History of Psychiatry
(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997); Albert Deutsch’s
The Mentally Ill in America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1949); and
The History of Psychiatry,
by Franz G. Alexander and Sheldon Selesnick (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).

Rob Perkins’s memoir is
Talking to Angels
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). My information about the Taylor family comes from press clips (see the Notes on Sources for Chapter 10) and my interviews. The primary accounts of Robert Lowell’s stays at McLean are the biographies by Ian
Hamilton (
Robert Lowell
[New York: Random House, 1982]) and Paul Mariani (
Lost Puritan
(New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1994). Sylvia Nasar’s biography of John Forbes Nash,
A Beautiful Mind
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998) has a chapter on his stay at McLean. Ray Charles discusses his arrest and experiences at McLean in his autobiography
Brother Ray
(New York: Dial Press, 1978). Copies of the Olmsted letters are in the McLean archives and are included in
The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981-1992). The famous quote “... confound them!” is to be found in Laura Wood Roper’s biography
FLO
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

This chapter relies heavily on Sutton and on Nina Little’s
Early Years of the McLean Hospital
(Boston: Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, 1972). The William Folsom diaries appear in Little’s book. Charles Beveridge and David Schuyler describe the Olmsted-Vaux asylum work in the introduction to
Creating Central Park,
volume 3 of
The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted.

The material on Emerson and on Jones Very comes from John McAleer’s biography of Emerson (
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter
[Boston: Little, Brown, 1984]), which has a chapter on Very, and from Edwin Gittleman’s biography of Very,
Jones Very: The Effective Years
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).

A family member shared John Warren’s medical record with me. Douglas Starr published a fascinating account of the ether controversy in the
Boston Globe,
November 26, 2000. On this subject, I also consulted Richard Patterson’s “Dr. Charles Thomas Jackson’s Aphasia,”
Journal of Medical Biography
, 1997. Details on the Hooper and Adams families are available in Otto Friedrich’s
Clover
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979) and in Ernest Samuels’s
Henry Adams
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1989).

My account of William James’s possible McLean sojourn derives
from the cited interviews and from Linda Simon’s
Genuine Reality: A Life of William James
(New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1998).

Henry Hurd’s article was published in the April 1898 issue of the
American Journal of Insanity;
Dr. Thomas Bond gave me his grandfather’s unpublished memoir, “The Private World of McLean Hospital.”

There is a very useful Stanley McCormick Archive at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison, containing many of his medical records. T.C. Boyle’s novel
Riven Rock
(New York: Viking, 1998) is a fictionalized version of Stanley’s plight. Armond Fields very generously shared his unpublished manuscript about Katharine McCormick, and MIT professor Margery Resnick also gave me her work on Katharine. Some McCormick family anecdotes come from Gilbert Harrison’s
A Timeless Affair: The Life of Anita Blaine McCormick
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), a biography of Stanley’s philanthropically minded sister. The description of the art room and of “Julia Bowen’s” life are in the McLean archives. The Myerson-Boyle paper is in the McLean archives. The daughter of “Priscilla Jenkins” shared her mother’s McLean case file with me.

A key text on this subject is Elliot Valenstein’s 1986 book
Great and Desperate Cures
(New York: Basic Books).The description of Henry Cotton’s work comes from the Edward Shorter history. The Talbott-Tillotson paper on hypothermia was published in the April 1941 issue of
Diseases of the Nervous System.
Freud’s use of electroshock is reported in the Alexander and Selesnick history. “Total push” was described by Tillotson and Myerson in “Theory and Principles of the ‘Total Push’ Method in the Treatment of Chronic Schizophrenia,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
, March 1931. Frank W. Kimball’s “Hope for Tired Minds” appeared in the December 1946 and January 1947 issues of
Hygeia: The Health Magazine.

Walter Freeman’s hijinks are well documented in Valenstein. The
complete history of lobotomies at McLean is Jack Pressman’s
Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Sutton discusses Boston’s belated acceptance of Freud in her book. The story of James J. Putnam, Stanley Hall, and Freud’s Clark University lectures is recounted in Paul Roazen’s
Freud and His Followers
(New York: Knopf, 1975) and also in Ronald Clark’s
Freud: The Man and the Cause
(New York: Random House, 1980).

There are two key sources for the tale of Dr. Horace Frink: Silas L. Warner’s “Freud’s Analysis of Horace Frink, M.D.: A Previously Unexplained Therapeutic Disaster,”
Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis,
1994, and Lavinia Edmunds’s “His Master’s Choice,”
Johns Hopkins Magazine,
April 1988. This article drew upon an archive donated to Johns Hopkins by Dr. Frink’s daughter, Helen Frink Kraft, who confirmed a few details of her father’s life in a letter to me.

The best short description of Scofield Thayer’s life was written by Diane Ducharme, curator of Yale’s
Dial
/Scofield Thayer Collection, and appears on the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Web site (w w w. library.yale.edu.beinecke). Nicholas Joost’s 1964 book
Scofield Thayer and the Dial
(Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press), is also a valuable source. All documents and correspondence quoted here are from the Yale collection.

Carl Liebman’s story is recounted, anonymously, in Dr. David Lynn’s “Freud’s Analysis of A.B., a Psychotic Man, 1925-1930,”
Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis
, 1993. Most of the letters from Freud, Pfister, and others, first appeared in Dr. Lynn’s article. McLean doctors shared portions of Liebman’s record with me.

As noted, Sutton’s official history recounts the Tillotson-Salot story and also gives examples of Franklin Wood’s parsimoniousness. On the personality
of Dr. Alfred Stanton, my sources are his two surviving children and the many doctors quoted here who still remember him. Willis Bower’s work is mentioned in Edward Shorter’s history. Cristina Heilner granted me permission to quote from her brother’s musical,
Close to Home
.

The suicide statistics come from Rose Coser’s book
Training in Ambiguity
(New York: The Free Press, 1979) and also from “Some Notes on Thirty Years of Suicide at McLean Hospital,” a paper presented at the hospital by Dr. George B. Lawson. Dr. Merton Kahne’s analyses were published as “Suicides in Mental Hospitals: A Study of the Effects of Personnel and Patient Turnover,”
Journal of Health and Social Behavior
, September 1968, and in “Suicide among Patients in Mental Hospitals: A Study of the Psychiatrists Who Conducted Their Psychotherapy,”
Psychiatry,
February 1968.

The famous schizophrenia study undertaken by Dr. Alfred Stanton and Dr. John Gunderson, among others, was published as “Effects of Psychotherapy,”
Schizophrenia Bulletin,
vol. 10, no. 4, 1984.

Diane Wood Middlebrook’s biography,
Anne Sexton
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991) is the definitive source for information on the poet. Sexton discussed her feelings about Sylvia Plath in “The Barfly Ought To Sing,” an essay published in the fall 1966 edition of
TriQuarterly.

Both the Hamilton and Mariani biographies describe Lowell’s stays at McLean. The Sarah Cotting anecdote is in Sarah Payne Stuart’s
My First Cousin Once Removed
(New York: HarperCollins, 1998). The Lowell letter to Elizabeth Bishop is from the Vassar College archive; the letter to Pound is from Yale’s Beinecke Library. Both are reprinted by permission of the Estate of Robert Lowell.

Several books discuss Sylvia Plath, her mental illness, and her stay at McLean: Anne Stevenson’s 1989 biography
Bitter Fame
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin), Paul Alexander’s
Rough Magic
(New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), Peter Davison’s
Half-Remembered: A Personal History
(New York: Harper and Row, 1973), Nancy H. Steiner’s
A Closer Look at Ariel
(New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1973), and Edward Butscher’s
Sylvia
Plath: Method and Madness
(New York: Seabury Press, 1976). Quotes from Plath’s journal can be found in
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962,
edited by Karen Kukil (New York: Anchor Books, 2000). Ruth Barnhouse’s letters are at the Sophia Smith Collection of Smith College and are used with permission.

The archive of the Anne Sexton poetry seminar is at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and her daughter and executor, Linda Gray Sexton, kindly granted me access to it. The Anne Sexton poetry fragment is quoted with Linda’s permission. Robert Plunkett granted me permission to quote from his sister’s poetry.

The details of Louis Shaw’s life were pieced together from the interviews cited, from his Harvard reunion books, and from two memoirs:
The Day It Rained Fish,
” by Sidney Nichols Shurcliff (A.W. Shurcliff, 1991), and
Trooper: True Stories from a Proud Tradition,
by David Moran (Boston: Quinlan Press, 1986). Louis’s lengthy and revealing will is on file in Essex County, Massachusetts.

McLean doctors shared details of the stories of the Ziegel brothers, Frank Everett, and Joan Wilkinson. Ray Charles’s drug bust is described in his autobiography, in newspaper clips, and in Michael Lydon’s
Ray Charles: Man and Music
(New York: Riverhead, 1998).