He Wanted the Moon

More Advanced Praise for

HE WANTED THE MOON

“
He Wanted the Moon
does for mental illness what
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
did for the science of cancer: at once reveal suffering and heal it through knowledge. By allowing her father to be heard, Mimi Baird gives voices to all Americans silenced by mental illness down the decades. A miraculous story told in a miracle of a book.”

—A
MITY
S
HLAES
, author of
Coolidge
and
The Forgotten Man

“
He Wanted the Moon
details the horrendous treatment commonly given to patients at a time when there was no known way ameliorating the dangerous and self-destructive behavior that often characterizes manic-depression. This is a fascinating and informative book that I would highly recommend.”

—D
R
. E
LLIOT
V
ALENSTEIN
, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan and author of
Blaming the Brain

“Mimi Baird’s short book about her father’s long struggle with mental illness is a tale within a tale. She longed to know why he had simply disappeared one day from her life, and what she found was his own vivid account of watching himself slide into darkness. Mimi has performed a quiet miracle, giving life back to a man everyone wanted to forget.”

—T
HOMAS
P
OWERS
, Pulitzer-Prize winner and author of
The Killing of Crazy Horse

(
photograph credit fm.1
)

Copyright © 2015 by Mimi Baird

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,

an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

a division of Random House LLC,

a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

C
ROWN
and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Permission credits can be found on
this page
and
this page
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baird, Mimi.

He wanted the moon : the madness and medical genius of Dr. Perry Baird, and his daughter’s quest to know him / Mimi Baird; with Eve Claxton.

          pages cm

1. Baird, Perry—Mental health. 2. Manic-depressive persons—United States—Biography. 3. Manic-depressive illness—United States—History. 4. Physicians—United States—Biography. I. Claxton, Eve. II. Title.

RC516.B34     2015

616.89′50092—dc23

[B]                    2014012743

ISBN 978-0-8041-3747-8

eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3748-5

Jacket design by Elena Giavaldi

Jacket photographs all courtesy of the author

v3.1

To my two children

J
AKE AND
M
EG

the pearls of my life

Author’s Note

This book is the culmination of many years collecting and assembling materials relating to my father, Dr. Perry Cossart Baird Jr. (Throughout this book, for brevity’s sake, we refer to him as Dr. Perry Baird.)

Included here is my father’s original manuscript from 1944, as well as excerpts from his medical records and from letters he wrote and received.

Readers should be aware that we have edited his manuscript—and the other original materials—in order to improve readability. Any amendments made were in the interests of consistency and clarity. In some places, spellings, tenses, and usage have changed and a word or two added for intelligibility. We have not used brackets to indicate these changes.

My father’s writing work was repeatedly interrupted by his illness, and his original manuscript includes more than one draft in some sections (as well as passages unrelated to his stay at Westborough). We have distilled or trimmed the text in these instances for the sake of concision. We have not used ellipses to indicate where lines have been deleted.

Throughout, we have been mindful to preserve the tone and meaning—and sometimes lack of clear meaning due to my father’s mental state—of the original writing. No names have been changed; no characters or events have been invented; no full sentences have been added.

Our goal has been to fulfill my father’s wish: “to complete the job in the right way.”

With Earth’s first Clay they did the Last Man knead

And there of the Last Harvest sow’d the Seed

And the first Morning of Creation wrote

What the Last Dawn of Reckoning Shall read.

Yesterday, This Day’s Madness did Prepare;

To-Morrow’s Silence, Triumph, or Despair:

Drink! For you know not whence you came, or why:

Drink! For you know not why you go, nor where.

—The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Epigraph

Part I: Echoes from a Dungeon Cell

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Part II: Echoes Down the Years

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgments

Photograph Credits

Source Credits

About the Authors

PART I
ECHOES FROM A
DUNGEON CELL

PROLOGUE

It was the spring of 1994 when I returned from work to find the package containing my father’s manuscript on my doorstep. I was fifty-six years old and I’d been waiting for some word of him for most of my life.

I was a six-year-old child when he stopped coming home. My mother refused to say where he had gone, except to tell me that he was “ill” and “away.” That same year of 1944, she filed for a divorce and quickly remarried, closing the chapter of her life that included my father. I was never taken to visit him growing up; his name was rarely mentioned in our house. Since childhood, I had been informed in fleeting comments that he suffered from manic depression. I had seen him again only once, very briefly, before his death in 1959.

The late-afternoon light cast long, sharp shadows across my entranceway and the box on the step. For decades my father’s manuscript had been kept in an old briefcase in the garage of a family member in Texas, all but forgotten. I had only recently learned of its existence.

I picked up the carton and carefully brought it inside. I knew so little about my father, Perry Baird—only that he had been a doctor with a successful practice in Boston in his heyday. Yet I could vividly recall his presence in my early years: the gleaming white coat he wore at his offices, the sight of him at the Chestnut Hill train station where my mother took me to greet him, returning from his day’s work. After he disappeared, I felt the pain of a child who misses a parent, a feeling that had never completely left me.

My hands trembling slightly, I took a knife and made a slit along the packing tape on top of the carton. Opening the flaps, I peered inside, glimpsing handwriting on the top sheaf. Cautiously—as if my father’s words might bite—I took a piece of the paper between my thumb and forefinger. It was creamy and slightly translucent, of the onionskin kind used for making carbon copies in the days of the typewriter. I could see that it was covered in many lines of penciled script.

I quickly put the page back and closed the carton. After fifty years of silence, it was going to take me a little while to work up the courage to hear from him again.

Some days later, I reopened the box, this time pulling out a handful of pages, then another. Soon, the stack on my kitchen counter was over a foot high. I attempted to read my father’s words, but it was impossible to connect the sentences on one page with the next. Further investigation revealed that the papers had been shuffled out of order. After much searching, I located what appeared to be a title written in bold strokes: “Echoes from a Dungeon Cell.”

It took many months to restore the manuscript to some semblance of order. As I rearranged the pages, I realized that these were my father’s memoirs. For the first time, I learned what had happened to him all those years ago. He had not vanished (as I had sometimes suspected as a child). He had not left us. He had been removed against his will to Westborough State Hospital, a psychiatric institution just outside Boston, where he had written about his experiences on the papers I held in my hands. My father was afflicted with a severe mental illness during a period before any effective treatment existed, many years before the advent of modern psychiatric medications. Like hundreds of thousands of mentally ill patients at that time, he was a victim of both his disease and the stigma surrounding it. He was shut away, institutionalized, his family advised to try to forget him, an edict my mother did her best to follow.

The arrival of the manuscript in my life marked the beginning of a long journey to know my father. Along with the other traces I have found of him—in letters, his published articles, his medical records, and photographs—I was able to discover not only a father, but a writer and a scientist, a man whose insights were extraordinarily advanced for his times.